Eupocalypse Box Set

by Peri Dwyer Worrell

  They sat and folded their hands, and Ryan said, “Lord, for what we are about to receive, make us truly grateful.”

  With a chorus of amens, they tucked in. Jeremy had to admit, the seabutter was not half bad. It had some texture to it, almost a meatiness, and just a vague tarry taste which lent it almost a mesquite barbecue flavor. Lori had doctored it up with some herbs and seasonings, and in combination with the home fried potatoes, it filled him up and left him feeling contented and full as he hadn’t felt since leaving Sutokata.

  They reclined in their chairs, savoring the fullness of their tummies and the warm, rosy light of the setting sun filtering into the windows. Lori picked up a cotton shirt she was sewing, going anew over the seams sewed with polyester thread, re-stitching them with thread spun from the fur of her angora goats.

  Here in America, where clothing had been so cheap it was almost free, the cheaper all-cotton imports were the only things that had survived. Clothing was dear now, and cotton, silk, or wool thread, even more so. Many people had discovered in the early days that their “100% cotton” labeled clothing was actually cotton coated with acrylic or polyester resin—which went sticky and wet, and then fell to pieces when the machine sickness bacteria inevitably got to it.

  What everyone missed the most, though, was elastic. Underwear was just not the same.

  “So, where to now, my friend?” said Ryan.

  “Well, I used to stay with a lady up the way, Joanne Jebali. She ran a B & B. You know her?”

  “Joanne? Sure I do.”

  “She still there?”

  “Still there; lives by herself in that big old place. She’ll get a traveler now and then, but there ain’t much tourism anymore. Most of the folks who made it out here were folks with vacation homes who hightailed it out of Houston when things got ugly.”

  “Did you have lots of human animals show up, after?”

  “Yeah, we had a few.” Ryan grimaced. “Only one way out here once the ferry quit running, though. They come out here, but they don’t usually make it back out again.

  “It was quite a sight, that ferry boat sinking in the dock, all those cars and trucks on it. It’s still there. You should go take you a look if you got time. Good fishing spot, too.”

  “Not tonight,” said Jeremy.

  “Oh, no,” said Lori. “It’s getting dark soon. Coyotes out there, and a few feral dogs. No lights, and a new moon. You can just spend the night on the hammock under the house and take off first thing in the morning.”

  Your Amazon Order Has Arrived

  DD heard hoofbeats coming from the field to her right. More of them. Shit. She stared stupidly at her hand on the key. She had actually blacked out from the pain, or grayed out, for a moment when she tried to start the vehicle. The push-and-twist of the key forced her broken clavicle into just the wrong position. She was in a bad way, and if she had any choice, she wouldn’t try to drive in such a state. She tried leaning over to use her left hand on the key, swayed. She’d need to get off, start the vehicle, and get back on. Standing up seemed so difficult just now…

  The men on horseback were closer now—three of them working their way across the grassy field at an easy trot. They wore cowboy hats, and held long guns at ready resting on their pommels.

  DD got one foot down, and was struggling to swing the other one through when the first rider reached the man thrashing in the weeds.

  The rider barely grunted, “Whoa,” and the horse stopped. The gun came up, the rider aimed, and the report echoed. The man’s whimpering ceased.

  DD ceased her effort to stand up. If these riders were enemies of the men who’d attacked her, maybe they’d help her. If not, well…DD would make a last stand here. She didn’t have the ability to run again and then fight a new, fresh, new batch of opponents.

  As the first rider came up the embankment and crossed the congested ditch, DD corrected her initial impression. She had her first glimmer of real hope when she saw that the rider who’d shot the downed predator was a woman.

  Gaunt, lithe in the saddle, face deeply tanned and creased with the lines of an outdoorswoman, hair pulled into a lank ponytail, the woman looked down at DD. “You don’t look so good,” she said.

  “No shit!” DD said, then, “Sorry,” a moment later. “At least I’m still alive.”

  Another woman rode up next to the first. “And thank God! Where’re the rest of you?” Stocky, red-faced, close-cropped grey hair.

  “I’m alone,” DD said.

  “Don’t give us that!” the older woman said. “There were seven men down when we got here. You expect me to believe you took them all down yourself?”

  DD looked around, counting. “I don’t believe it myself. But I think my collarbone is broken.”

  The third woman rode up—a soft-looking dark-haired gal in her late twenties or early thirties, less poised in the saddle than the other two. She guffawed, “You think that’s bad? You should see your face!”

  “Cindy,” the senior woman cautioned.

  Cindy looked down, chastened. She absentmindedly released her horse’s reins, and the nag immediately lowered its head and snagged a mouthful of grass.

  “Do you ride?” The first woman asked.

  “A little,” DD said. “I’m not sure I can mount, though.”

  “Get off your horse, Cindy. Help her stand on the four-wheeler to mount up. You drive the vehicle to the ranch. Big Boy is gentle as a kitten, and he’ll follow the other horses. We’ll walk home nice and easy.”

  Cindy complied without question, leading her horse alongside the little vehicle and holding his head (unnecessarily; the big, calm horse was not interested in going anywhere).

  DD managed to lever herself up onto the running board with a grimace from the pain in her knee, got her left foot in the stirrup and her left hand on the pommel, and somehow swung up and over the beast’s back. With that, her strength was gone.

  Cindy walked around the vehicle, but paused. “I thought you said you were alone?”

  “I was.”

  “Who’s this, then?” She hunched down and reached for the yaller dog, who shied away and stood stiff-legged, sniffing the air and eyeing the horses suspiciously. Cindy shrugged and started the little alcohol-powered engine (Big Boy didn’t even blink) and led the way south, the white-haired woman leading, and DD plodding behind.

  The horsewoman of the group heeled her pretty, long-legged mare into a rapid-paced gaited walk, both right legs and both left legs coming forward in unison. She circled around, confirming that there were no others waiting in ambush. She cleared and slung her shotgun, then cantered to catch up.

  Well, Give ‘Em the Bird

  Birdwell tied his boots. The biofuel cells had been a huge shock. After over a century of innovation driven (or at least guided) by governmental exigency, the fact that a revolutionary technology released freely might spread like wildfire, with as much benefit as the machine sickness had caused harm, was startling. As a military man, Birdwell was an amateur student of history. The historians of the early twenty-first century had begun to expose a side of history which was different from the battles, treaties, and great leaders of Birdwell’s school days.

  He shook his head ruefully at the small collection of paper books he’d carried with him, foregoing all but the most basic kit in his personal baggage when they fled DC to make more room for books. In the long, media-free evenings since the machine sickness hit, reading scholars such as Fernand Braudel and Kirsten Wolf had gotten his mind roaming down unfamiliar tracks: visualizing the changes in peoples’ lives occasioned by the adoption of technologies like gristmills and ironsmithing, transmitted in a networked fashion along with ideas about the mind, the person’s place in relation to others, and the role of humanity in the world and the universe.

  He had already begun to suspect what those around him would not admit unless forced to (and many of them, not even then): the reset button had been pushed. The intricate structure of twenty-first century
society had been predicated on the success of command and control. Embodied first in the divine right of kings, it had then morphed by a process of tug-of-war and negotiation to encompass the aristocracy, the landowners, then the common man, then the humans held as chattel: slaves and women. No matter how political humanity tried to overcome that bias, whether by declaring hypocritically that all men were endowed with inalienable rights, or by seizing the means of production on behalf of some mythical brotherhood of humanity whose interests involved slaughtering actual humans by the hundreds of millions, the underlying structure drove the function, and the overlying function limited the structure. He blinked at the pre-dawn darkness. Always waiting for the dawn, which never came.

  Birdwell didn’t flatter himself that knowing this made him a better person, or that it made him exempt from the hypocrisy of history. He had benefited from the organizational pattern and sacrificed his humanity to its gods for decades; he could no more escape it than he could give up blinking.

  But he was old enough that ambition had lost its allure. He was smart enough that he craved new knowledge and insight more than anything else the world had to offer. And the fact that the game he’d been playing his entire life had been swapped out for a new one—as different from the old as craps was from ballet—tempted him with the prospect of delicious nourishment for his mature, developed, and yes, age-frayed mind.

  He pulled out his checklist, ticking off each item arrayed on his mattress, and then stowed them neatly in his small knapsack. He’d kept it light and minimal, knowing he had misplaced a lot of his fitness level in the months of confinement here at Site R. Even though he’d visited the gym regularly, he’d been uninspired, perhaps even depressed. At his age, the rule was “use it or lose it.”

  He’d be alone and on foot now, and facing who knew what enemies or pursuers. The most immediate of those would be his own subordinates. He left a note on the bed saying just: I have left. Please do not pursue me, above his signature. He had slipped an identical note under the door of his secretary, and clipped one to the final page of the last report he had prepared for the POTUS, lying in the messenger bag on his desk for the courier to pick up in the grey dawn.

  Which would be here very soon. Of course, he was privy to the patrol’s schedule; he had about seven minutes to get clear of the inner fence. Birdwell strode silently down the hall, punched his code into the mechanical door lock, and slipped out the door.

  Church Ladies

  DD couldn’t say how long the women rode south with her. Her vision kept graying out, and the world spun. The nausea kept creeping up on her, but she fought it, knowing if she vomited, the heaving would hurt her shoulder. She didn’t know how many times she caught herself starting to slump over to one side or the other, jerked herself upright, and rocked herself into the placid gelding’s plodding stride.

  The reins draped over her pommel were just for decoration; the horse knew the way home, and was following the other two anyway. Every now and then, her ears caught the buzz of Cindy’s four-wheeler up ahead, but after a while, she stopped being able to tell that buzz from the growing buzz inside her head.

  They left the roadbed after a while. An hour? Four hours? She didn’t know. At one point, she realized they were picking their way through swampland, and she wondered about alligators. At another point, they were on a long, straight track of pure sand, surrounded by tall, straight pine trees planted in rows like a cornfield: a paper plantation. When they finally stopped, it took her a minute or two to realize they had reached their destination.

  Cindy walked up on her left. DD’s eyes struggled to focus on the other woman. She realized she was reaching up to help her down off the horse, help she needed badly. She gently pulled the stirrup off her left foot. She leaned forward, the pommel a hard lump in her belly, kicked her right foot free of its stirrup, awakening the pain which her brain had stopped registering miles back, and swung it over.

  She nudged herself off the pommel with her left arm and slid gracelessly off the saddle. Big Boy (god bless the big placid creature) stood calmly through this inelegant dismount, not even twitching an ear when DD cried out in pain as her feet hit the ground.

  Cindy’s hands on her waist did little to cushion the impact. “Let’s get you to the clinic,” Cindy said. “Here’s Sister Greta now.”

  DD was sure now that she was hallucinating. Walking towards her, hands out to help, was…a nun? Unmistakably—from her sensible shoes to her mid-calf dress, to the neatly folded wimple covering her fading hair—this woman with the horn-rimmed glasses was the archetypal Bride of Christ, Catholic flavor.

  “She’s got a broken shoulder, Sister Greta,” cautioned Cindy.

  Sister Greta noted DD’s right arm folded over her chest and turned her hands palm up, to let DD choose the best way to be helped. “Thank you, Sister Cynthia,” said Greta to Cindy. “I think we’ve got it from here.”

  DD allowed herself to be supported by her left arm and the nun guided her to steps of the big brick building they’d stopped in front of. Well-maintained, with ivy climbing its walls and arched windows, which DD would probably have already noticed if she’d been in any condition to notice anything. She looked up, and sure enough, the end of the big building had a steeple—just barely visible now over the roof of this end of the abbey.

  DD hissed as she tried to mount the stairs with her injured knee, and Sister Greta clucked and cooed over the entire slow process. Finally, DD entered the tall wooden doors and they walked her down a nondescript institutional hallway to a room where there was, wonder of wonders, a bed with cool white sheets and a pillow.

  DD’s vision tunneled in on the need to collapse into that bed, but first, Sister Greta (who, it turned out, was an ARNP as well as a nun) had to check her out from head to toe. She stripped her in a businesslike but gentle fashion, then sat her on the bed and examined her knee, which she pronounced “probably not broken. But that collarbone definitely is.”

  She walked around behind DD and slipped one hand under her armpit and locked her hands over the ball of DD’s shoulder. A quick pull, and she met DD’s shriek of pain with a quiet, “I’m so sorry, dear. A surgeon ought to pin that, but this will have to do.”

  DD was sobbing from the pain of having the fracture set, and Sister Greta walked around the bed and poured her a glass of water, insisting she drink it. Drinking it meant she had to stop crying. “You’re not allergic to hydrocodone, are you?” She gave her a pill to wash down with it.

  Then Sister Greta slipped a hospital gown over DD’s nakedness. The nun took her left hand and helped her lie back on the pillow. Despite the pain, DD fell sound asleep before the medication could even kick in.

  Live By, Die By

  Otis sat on Mike’s back. Mike was curled on the ground in a fetal squat for that very purpose. Otis sucked on his bat, making a great show of sucking in the smoke, letting it trail out of his mouth and nose. Even though it was road kill, the others eyed him jealously.

  “Why you give me the red eye?” Otis asked Bambam. Bambam looked away. Otis didn’t need to look at the other men. He knew none of them would eye him now. He finished his cigarette and stood up. He gave Mike a light kick in his soft, flabby side. “Come on, June Bug,” he said. “Time for us to finish making jackrabbit parole.” Mike put his head down and looked up at Otis with liquid eyes, which made him smile.

  Mike stuck close by Otis on his left. Bambam stood behind him on his right, a good road dog. The other four were close behind. “Let’s drive this car out of here.”

  Otis had a woman and two little ones in Little Rock. The seven men sauntered across the grassy meadow, the final chain-link fence and its interior concentric rounds of severed razor wire fading in the distance behind them. At least they left it behind on the outside. The things they’d been through inside, the things they’d done to get there, the things done to them to make them the kind of men who wound up there: those things would be with them all day. All day and a night.


  How could they know, with senses until recently truncated by the close quarters of the cell, the common room, and the exercise yard, that they were being watched? On a rise in a copse of trees, stood five helmeted men in camouflage, holding rifles or carbines, with bandoliers and belts full of handguns and ammo, cargo pockets bulging with water bottles and compasses and firestarters and knives, a grim bunch of latter-day Boy Scouts. Two of them had armored vests on.

  Robert, the corporal heading this fire team of the Seventh Arkansas militia, sneered. “Look at the nigger scum escaping the prison. This is why we’re here, boys! Fire at will!”

  The militiamen were thrilled to comply. This was what they’d been meeting two weekends a month to prepare for, after all. No scum-of-the-earth prisoners were going to walk free on their watch!

  To say it was a massacre would be too kind. Only two of the prisoners were even fighters, and those two were street fighters, with no sense of the way sound carried over earth and grass or echoed off trees. All but one of them were armed only with weighted socks and knives liberated from the prison’s kitchen or homemade knives, some of surprising quality.

  Otis had a guard’s little leg gun tucked into the back of his pants. He instinctively drew it when the first rifle shot rang out, but he swung his arm around wildly, trying to find a target for less than five seconds before he was downed by a .300 Winchester Magnum round. He fell like a deer in his tracks.

  The militia men whooped in joy. They ran down the slope towards the men lying in the dirt, high-fiving each other in congratulations as they converged, kicking the corpses and strutting.

  Robert let them have their moment, then called them to order. “You, William: go through their pockets! Keep any weapons you find. You two, Paul and Rick, start carrying them over to that dry culvert and fling them in. Shawn, start cutting branches to toss over the bodies.” He gestured at the copse of trees nearby. The men obeyed their orders with alacrity, grinning.