His spirit had been hardened years ago—the first slash accomplished by his father’s arrest for marijuana possession and his mother’s faithless departure for the West Coast with her new man, all not long after Jacob’s eighteenth birthday. The scab on that psychic wound was soon torn open by a girl, then by a best friend who chose the illusory safety of the gangs and wound up dead after narcing on his second-best friend, who’d copped a plea because he’d had a gun. And who didn’t? But that meant his friend’s weed sale was a gun-related felony—and so, after it happened, Jacob wound up friendless.
As to the matter of Jacob’s spirit now, it was softer in the same way the fluffy cotton in the wagon was softer. The fluffy cotton in the wagon had been treated with niter. Niter was made from huge drums marked “highly flammable,” which had been humped in to the camp during the cold, cold winter the second year, After. The niter was dissolved in the drips from the rotting compost, where it was left to condense on glass. The cotton was soaked in the mixture of nitric acid and sulfuric acid.
Once it dried, it became nitrocellulose. In other words, what Jacob and the hundreds of other camp inmates were pulling down the road was a wagon full of explosives. The slightest spark could leave them all no more than flecks of greasy ash on the edges of a blackened, smoking crater.
This, then, was what they had been breaking their backs for: planting, cultivating, and harvesting the cotton for that first year. All those evacuated from New Orleans and bused to the camps, the trailer trash and Yats and ghetto denizens, the college students and their professors, the tourists and bureaucrats—all leveled and blended into a homogeneous mass of humanity wearing shapeless cotton pajamas of indeterminate color. Those faded and fell into disrepair, even as the cotton they grew was carefully ginned, sorted, and prepared to go through the stinking vats at the far end of the camp. All to make something they couldn’t eat or drink or read or listen to or wear. No, it was used to make something that would blow up. Because.
Because if the US government was going to continue to provide for them, it needed to be able to defend them. Because in the absence of plastics and electronic guidance and propulsion, the weapons scientists were starting over again with gun cotton, carefully-tamped ammunition, and metal-cased bombs scarcely more sophisticated than those worn by terrorist children in their vests, Before.
Nobody was committing suicide bombings any more—or school shootings for that matter—at least not that Jacob had heard of. But the guards shifted nervously, knowing that the nitrocellulose could be used by anyone to reload spent ammunition casings; it was literally worth its weight in gold.
The wagon jolted hard into a rut on the gravel roadbed. A note of acrid fear topped the sweat fragrance that swirled invisibly over the people. They’d all voted to make this trip, although the Agency staff had been the ones to count the votes (Jacob had no reason not to trust them, did he?). But they hadn’t realized they’d be hauling this gargantuan means of destruction, this inverse Trojan horse, holding their breaths every time it jolted.
They let their breaths out and continued moving.
Jacob’s thoughts ran in the same depressing yet comforting ruts over and over. He’d catalogued his feet, his hands, his muscles, his broken heart. The last thing was his gratitude that he was still sucking air. The epidemic that had ground through the camp in the final weeks before they’d gotten the order to march had given him more reason than ever to appreciate that.
The illness had started as a fever and a pinkish rash, and for many of them, that was the worst it ever got. But a third got the cough. If you got the cough, you still had a chance. At least half the ones who got the cough were okay—after a few weeks of honking and gasping and vomiting and turning blue all day and all night. But the other half, one in six of the camp’s residents, were added to the piles generating more and more hydrogen sulfide gas to be turned into sulfuric acid. The carrion reek permeated the entire grounds with its aroma, a fragrance that turned deceptively sweet once your nose got used to it.
At least here the crowd’s sweat was the only smell. On a signal from the trustees, the protectees slowed and the wagon dropped to a ponderous crawl, then rocked easily on its single axle and stopped. Every eye turned away from it and everyone let out a deep breath once again.
“Rest break. Latrines behind that wind-row.” Men and women trudged towards opposite ends of the row of trees. The trustees oversaw the unloading of bricks of corn, peanuts, and fruit pressed into a starchy pemmican, a quick snack to keep them marching. The sun was at least two and a half hours above the horizon, so they had a good bit more to travel before stopping to camp for the night.
Where were they going? They’d voted on moving to a camp with better supplies. The rumors said the president would be visiting the other camp, and that they had hot water there and raised chickens. That meant meat! Showers! Someone even said they had coffee, but Jacob discounted that. He’d studied; he was a smart guy. He knew the fragile supply chain that delivered coffee from distant sunny mountainsides to the green-logoed shops that once dotted the developed world’s landscapes was irretrievably broken.
He’d begun to doubt that they were going to a better place at all. He’d begun to suspect they were moving the nitrocellulose somewhere to be processed into weapons. After that, what happened to him and the human beings he traveled with, might or might not be better than what was happening so far.
He watered a tree, buttoned his trousers, and wandered to the chow line to get his pemmican.
Oh, he’d been glad to get to the camp, and he’d gone willingly. New Orleans was a terrifying maelstrom of violence in the weeks and months, After. But his momma didn’t raise any fools either. He could tell that the camps’ ostensible mission of protecting citizens and ensuring their survival was subject—as any action of the Powers that Be—to revision and repurposing to serve other ends. He accepted his food from a dead-eyed trustee and kicked a brushy hummock of grass to displace any wildlife—scorpions or such—before flinging himself onto it to eat.
He chewed only on the left side of his mouth, having recently enlisted a bunkmate to wrench out a rotting tooth on the right.
The food was gone too fast, and his youthful scaphoid stomach squealed for more. There was no more. Someone was standing near the load of nitrocellulose, clanging the pot that called them back to work hauling the wagon. Jacob rested as long as he could before the guards and trustees would notice and mark him for some near-future reprisal.
X.
Slipping the Leash
In the thin dawn light, Li stirred in his bedroll, hearing the metallic sound of spoon on cup rousting the company. In the dry North African air, dawn came quickly. The troop would be on the move before the first rays of unrelenting sunlight blasted over the eastern horizon. He threw off his cover and rose to his feet, though more slowly than the younger compatriots around him. As he bent to tie his boots (they all slept in their boots), he heard a strange rasping sound on the ground nearby.
Li’s gaze fixed on the creature just as Feng accidentally set his boot down on its knotted body. It was beige and brown, its head showing the triangular chipmunk cheeks of a viper. As Li processed the sight of the slender antennae-like projections above its eyes and thought horned viper, the serpent struck Feng’s ankle, just above the tongue of his still-open boot. Feng shrieked.
Former Li would have tried to help the man, tried to kill the snake, tried to make the situation better somehow. But this was Li now—after being imprisoned and tortured, released and kidnapped, shipwrecked and rescued, turned out alone into the desert, stabbed and left for dead.
The present-day Li finished tying his boots rapidly, feigning slowness in grasping the calamity. The others around him closed in on Feng and the snake. Poor beast. Still sluggish from the cool of the night, it stood no chance. Six or eight handgun shots rang out to signal its demise. Feng shrieked again, hopping on the other foot and trying to inspect the bite. His teammates tried to soothe hi
m, and someone ran for the medic.
Li eased to his feet and shifted his right foot behind his left, then his left again. No one reacted. He gradually backed up further away from the scrum. When the medic finally arrived, while everyone was talking at once, he used the distraction to turn tail and run towards the rising sun.
The trek so far had been austere, but tolerable. His captors treated him more like a fellow soldier than a prisoner. Few people were allowed in or out of the inner core of the Chinese military base. It held fewer than two thousand individuals, carefully quarantined to avoid contamination by the plastic corruption.
The fact that Li had not only been admitted to the base, but then allowed to leave again, made him a refreshing curiosity to these particular personnel. These were soldiers who lived in barracks settlements on its periphery, tasked with patrolling the no-man’s-land, repairing the fences, and handling the elaborate system of supply drops that fed supplies into a series of decontamination stations. They lived the confused, struggling lives of all the survivors around the globe, thrown abruptly from the twenty-first century technological world into the nineteenth century, without the skills needed to survive its conditions. Yet they saw the distant gas-powered jeeps travel the dusty roads of the base compound, and even more awe-inspiring, the drones that occasionally took off from the intact runways that formed the base’s heart.
They might have been peasants two thousand years earlier, in the fields outside the Han Emperor’s complex, the largest palace ever built. But instead of the legendary spectacle of Weiyang Palace, there was a different source of hope for the future of the Han people of China: a place where they alone had saved what everyone else had carelessly lost.
Instead of fireworks and kites symbolizing unity, and displays of martial ferocity when the Imperial armies left to fight off the Xiongnu barbarians, the drones were their symbol, soaring overhead like vultures. These drones dropped bombs to restrain incursions by resurgent Bedouins and marauding groups of Islamist guerillas who’d lived so basically that they barely missed the now extinct technology.
Of late, though, the drones always flew northeast, never northwest. The society of New Islam had crystallized like a supersaturated solution in the peoples of the western coast of the Red Sea. They did not raid, but they were not raided, either. When the Chinese had sent raiding parties against them, their raiders simply did not return. When the New Islam reached an area, it was lost to them, like a curtain had fallen over it.
Rumors were rife about their ways, so when it was learned that Li had lived among them for a time, he became quite popular. The others had plied him with stashed sweets and alcohol, attempting to ferret out what he might be able to tell them about these strange, mystical, imperious women who lived in village clusters with their children, surrounded by concentric rings of fierce single men.
Li always accepted just a taste of whatever treat was offered with gratitude that was just slightly more effusive than necessary. He always gave the same few inconsequential details about his time in Bilqis’s compound with Meala: what they wore, what they ate, how they slept. Eventually, the rest realized he would spill no more, and stopped pestering him.
Li asked himself why he did this, and he realized he felt some fealty to the New Islamists. This surprised him. He’d been horrified when the first boy received his spur and scarab. When it came down to the flash decision to leave Meala or submit himself to their ministrations, he hesitated only briefly. But now…now, the crazed energy that had driven the women to dance all night had energized an infant culture, spreading like a lightning bolt branching across the deserts of northeast Africa and Egypt.
Li had thought himself dead when his ship had crashed onto the rocks in the Red Sea storm, and when he woke, battered by the rocking waves that bumped his head against Meala’s sheltering chest, the very fact of being alive was a rebirth of who he was. Somehow, he was meant to be in this strange red-brown land with its flat-topped trees and the parched sands that met the rolling benevolence of the violent sea. He was meant to be with this woman. He had no doubt.
Every day at the base, he had awakened with a sense that he was missing someone, missing her. Every night, he had lain in his hospital bed in the dark, tucked his regret into a neat box, and tamped the lid down tight: regret at leaving her, at leaving them, and taking the mad flight into the desert that had cost him most of his blood, and almost his life, when he encountered Sheik Mohammed’s squad of mercenaries.
That had been a second time he’d been sure he was dead. He’d heard that people who woke from a coma often forgot the incident that had put them there. He’d heard they often forgot, in fact, events extending days or even months prior to the injury.
But he was not allowed that mercy. He vividly remembered the moment the knife penetrated his back, the sense of wrongness, his brain trying to make sense of the pain he felt in the skin and core muscles, his stomach lurching and cramping, his heart pumping in panic, then just fluttering, and his vision greying out, all at once. And when he had awakened, there was no Meala to save him. Things come in threes; third time’s the charm. Next time will be the last time.
He shook his head. One foot in front of the other. His captors were paralleling the coast, hugging the hills on their left, to avoid the coastal populations and avail themselves of the rocky caves for shelter each night. They were about ten kilometers from the ocean at this point. Gabal Elba was somewhere to the Northwest.
He paused, torn. Ocean? Or mountain? He yearned to go to the mountain, where he hoped to find Meala and the other women in their stronghold. But he had no food, and more importantly, only the water in the half-empty canteen at his waist. He also didn’t want to risk encountering the party he’d just escaped, who were heading the same way. If he tailed them and tried sneaking into their camp to steal food and water, chances were high that he’d end up with them again, more harshly imprisoned and suffering the effects of a beating added for his trouble.
On the other hand, while he was the only person with any knowledge of the New Islamists, he’d repeatedly let it be known that he didn’t have a lot to say on the subject. He thought they’d probably not divert their course to track him.
No, he’d head for the sea, get supplied with water and seabutter, and see if he could find out more about what the New Islamists had become before seeking them out. He’d rebounded from his injuries, and the walk so far across stretches of what used to be Eritrea and Sudan had conditioned him. He would be able to reach the shore by nightfall.
Unless I stand here like an idiot much longer. On my way, then.
XI.
Update Loading
Meala rose from evening prayer. She was facing west, the direction Gabal Elba lay, home of the goddess Isis, across the Red Sea. She crossed the few steps of wet sand left by the ebbing tide and toed the shallow waves. Her ctenophore squirmed in its case and she palmed it, felt its dryness, and let it plop into the surf, where it frisked about on its tentacles.
She sighed, savoring the glory of the sunset. She crouched to scoop her moistened mascot from the water, but retracted her head when she saw it was not alone. She had dropped a single small eight-legged creature with phosphorescent circuits glowing in its gel, and now there was a ten-legged cousin next to it. Slightly larger, and with a reading face that was more oblong and took up more of its dorsal surface, this one had entangled its legs with Meala’s communicator.
For all Meala’s stalwart bravery, she was still a teenaged girl. She felt a prurient flush as she watched what she presumed was copulation.
But soon she saw that there was something more going on, for the sinuous circuit-board-like structures within the beasts were slowly reconfiguring themselves, merging and flipping, spiraling and paddling, becoming one. Meala squatted and watched patiently, raising her head every so often to sweep the horizon around her and ensure her lieutenants were still vigilant at four and eight o’clock. After about twelve minutes, the pulsing mass within the conjoi
ned, cybernetic, aquatic animals began to unravel.
When the process was complete, the two released, and a wave pushed them a centimeter or so apart. Meala scooped up her ctenophore, hesitated, then scooped up the apparently wild cousin as well. The one in her right hand still felt dry and sticky, despite its soak in the surf; it sat lethargically in her palm. The new one, on the other hand, nestled actively into her left palm and seemed to grow brighter.
“Hello, little one,” she murmured. Her old ctenophore formed the characters for “hello,” dimly, but they dissolved and faded. The new etched the Ge’ez words Hello, little one crisply and quickly, the letters’ surface slightly raised on its screen, paused to wait for the send command, then faded.
Meala rose. “Get Abiba,” she said to the woman by the boulders to her southeast. The woman nodded and trotted towards their encampment.
You sent for me? The ten-legged creature in her hand spelled out.
“Abiba?” Abiba? Send.
Yes, my captain.
Did you breed a new type of ctenophore?
Yes, my captain. You may let the old creature return to Mother Yemaya.
Meala turned the cradle of her right hand over, rock-a-bye baby, and the eight-legged creature fell into the water.
The next message astonished her.
Meala, this is Bilqis.
How? I thought the range of the ctenophores was only a few hundred meters.
Meala’s brow was creased. Concentrating on the conversation in her hand, she missed the first few laps of the wavelets on the object forming in the shallows nearby. She heard the footstep of her sentinels approaching to her right, prompting her to look around. She was stunned to see a human form boiling up from the brine, gelatinous and filled with phosphorescent biocircuits like the ctenophores, but recognizable in form and outline as…
Eupocalypse Box Set Page 57
