Eupocalypse Box Set

by Peri Dwyer Worrell

  “No, silly! I bought this one from the general store. They grow them in tanks, and they all communicate on the same frequency as their brothers and sisters.” She sat in the chair next to him and crossed her legs thoughtfully. “Mmmm—if you’re going to compare it with technology from Before—more like old-fashioned walkie-talkies.”

  “Walkie-talkies? How limited is their range?”

  Her open hand on the tabletop still held the animal. He forced himself to extend a finger and touch it, resting his palm on her thumb hesitantly, barely making contact with the thing.

  “Well, that depends. I’ve been pumping the locals for information. Apparently, they amplify each others’ signals like wi-fi extenders, but you can’t get more than a half mile or so from the nearest one. This news is from the one in town.”

  “About eight miles away. So there must be fifteen or sixteen at least between here and there. How long do they live?”

  “They say about two to three years, but they have to be kept moist, and they can’t get too hot or too cold.”

  “That was my next question. So, they’re really alive, then?” Its tentacles wiggled indignantly in reply.

  “Yep. Kind of cute, isn’t he?” She pursed her lips at the helpless diminutive thing squirming in her palm.

  “How do you know it’s a ‘he’?” Lou rolled his eyes.

  “Because it goes on and on and on even when it’s clear you’re not interested?” She sidled up to him.

  “Misandrist!”

  “Totally.” She elbowed him lightly.

  “Well, I’m glad you have something new to divert your maternal instincts towards.” He caressed her curly hair.

  “They’re not exactly like babies, now are they? Not unless you have a fondness for cuttlefish or octopuses.”

  “Electronic octopuses, for that matter.” She drew closer to him again as they examined the creature more closely.

  “True, but they’re all the same, right?” he said.

  “I think so. Pretty much.”

  “So, wouldn’t that make them…i-tentacle?”

  She groaned and rolled her eyes. He giggled.

  “I wonder,” Esther said, “how you go about starting a new colony, on a new frequency? I asked Jason, who owns the store, but he evaded.”

  “That is the question, isn’t it? If we could start our own colony, we wouldn’t need to worry about ink for the press, among other things.”

  Gabe walked up to them at that moment. Esther smiled, but Gabe was wooden. Esther had noticed this becoming more common; Gabe was never a chatterbox, but he’d been even more taciturn than usual lately. Esther suspected he was withholding something personal, but she didn’t want to pry if he didn’t want to share.

  Gabe looked at the thing in her hands. “Oh, you got a trilobite?” He watched the news scroll for a few moments. “One of the Pickens ones, it looks like.”

  Lew said, “Yes. We were just talking about whether it’s possible to start a new colony on a different frequency and how to go about it.”

  Esther sighed. “Can’t look it up on DuckDuckGo any more, can we?”

  “No, but you could ask your old buddy Gabe, here.” Gabe grinned slyly and pointed both thumbs at himself. Lou and Esther’s eyebrows flew up.

  “What do you know that you haven’t told us, old buddy?” Lou asked.

  “Well, actually, I don’t know much about it. But at it turns out, I’ve gotten to know someone who does.”

  “Know someone?” Lou and Esther spoke at once.

  The trio were pretty isolated on the mountainside. Once it began to seem as if the newspaper was not going to start publishing again, the Highfield immigrants had stayed together in town. A few local people had been staying in the abandoned dwellings when they got here, but those few, who’d come up to the higher altitude to escape the heat of summer, had mostly returned to the valley when the nights turned chilly.

  They could count the remaining occupants on their fingers: a ranting hermit who’d built a wall of deadwood and animal bones around his cabin. A feral family of four or five or six, who dashed from hiding place to hiding place and scattered like stray cats at the first sign of anyone approaching. A thoroughly deaf older couple who serenely harvested their pumpkins and picked blackberries and sat on the porch, smoking pipes and knitting, for all the world as if the world hadn’t died and been born again. And the three of them—in a golf-course development that could have housed a hundred times as many.

  “Well, okay, I guess it’s time I told you. I’ve been keeping a secret. We have a visitor. He’s been here about two weeks, but I think it’s time you met. If you’re ready, I’ll go get him.”

  “Get who?” Esther said.

  “Who is it?” Lou asked at the same moment.

  But they were both already talking to Gabe’s receding back through the doorway. They jumped up and followed behind him as he hustled down the short path between their two cabins. Gabe entered his cabin, and the couple exchanged puzzled glances while he was inside.

  Shortly, their comrade emerged with an olive-skinned man. Esther appraised him at a trim sixty years old, gray at the temples but still with thick salt-and-pepper hair, even on top. Tall. An unusual air of gravitas.

  “Esther, Lou: this is Colonel Emilio Birdwell.”

  Birdwell and Stonegood shook hands. Esther offered her hand, and he shook it.

  “Colonel?” asked Lou.

  “Lieutenant Colonel. I was the Chief Environmental Liaison to the Executive Branch for the US Army Corps of Engineers.”

  “Interesting. I thought all the Corps’ Environmental people were civilians.”

  “Oh, you’re familiar with our work? Not many people are, er, were. God,” his hooded eyes gazed into the distance, “it seems like a lifetime ago. Hard to believe it’s been less than three years.”

  A familiar silence occurred, the unspoken beat that happened whenever anyone mentioned the machine sickness. Solitary events that transform a nation or a culture are rare: epidemics, bombings, assassinations— but how often does one transform the history of an entire planet?

  Recalling his attention to the moment, Emilio said, “But yes, my career trajectory was…somewhat unusual. Let’s just leave it at that.”

  Lou, lapsing into journalist mode, pursed his lips and seemed unprepared to leave it at that, but Birdwell spoke over him, “So, Gabe says you have a question I might be able to assist you with answering?”

  “Yes,” said Esther. “You know something about the trilobites?”

  “I’ve been hoboing about the Southeast recently. I’ve had a chance to fiddle with a few of them.”

  “I bet you have some great stories!” said Lou, journalist mode not so readily turned off.

  “Does he ever!” Gabe said

  “—I’d love to hear them! We were wondering, for example, how to grow a new trilobite colony that’s geared to a different frequency,” Esther redirected.

  “Of course you were,” Emilio smoothly picked up. “I wondered the same thing myself. Let me answer by telling you about the first time I encountered them. I was on foot and I was offered a ride by a woman named Sally carrying a heavily-laden wagon with tanks full of the things. Sally introduced them to this whole region.”

  “What happened to her?” Esther fell into easy rapport with the newcomer, her Philly accent evaporating into the bland homogenous syllables common inside the Beltway—involuntary mimicry. “But where are my manners? Come in, sit down. Let’s relax and talk.” She beckoned him to follow with a toss of her chin.

  Esther led Emilio up the walk to the cabin, the other two men in tow, and the four of them sat on the rustic wood straight-backed chairs around the dining table. Esther jumped up for a moment and plopped her molluscan charge into a shallow bowl of water.

  “In answer to your question about what became of Sally, Sally’s husband lived in Oconee. When we got there, he thanked me for accompanying his wife and strongly implied that my further pr
esence was unneeded.” He chuckled wryly. “But before that happened, I learned a great deal from her, not least of all about trilobites.”

  Lou jumped in. “So, it is possible to start a new colony on a different frequency?”

  “Yes, I saw Sally do it twice. Let me see yours?”

  She set the bowl in front of him. Everyone leaned in to look.

  “See this bulge? It’s a ripe egg sac. This is a female, and she’s about to lay eggs. You need to keep her water warm, almost bathwater warm, but not quite. You do have a way to heat water?” He looked around and saw the cabin had a small woodstove in the living room. “Good. The eggs are bigger when you keep her warm. Then you have to take her out of the container as soon as she lays the eggs and cool the water immediately. The cooling increases the hatch rate for some reason. If you can get some vinegar, Sally said that making the water more acidic helps keep you from losing them to the temperature shock, but I’m not sure if you need that so much here,” he mused. “The water hereabouts is pretty soft. We were on the piedmont, where it’s more alkaline.”

  “How long until she lays the eggs?” Esther asked over her shoulder. She promptly began to fill an iron kettle and feed the fire in the woodstove.

  “I’m guessing” he cocked his head at the ctenophore, “about three weeks. You’ll need a bigger bowl, though.” Emilio, uninvited, opened a cabinet door to look inside.

  Gabe and Lou watched the two of them prepare a maternity ward for the beast.

  Over the next three weeks, Emilio came by often to regale Lou and Esther with stories of his travels and monitor the trilobite’s progress.

  One cool autumn night, all four of them sat in the cabin’s cozy living room, watching the fire burn in the open door of the stove, Esther and Lou nestled on the loveseat, the two men flanking them in easy chairs. Eve (as they’d named the trilobite) sat in her big mixing bowl like a bizarre pet goldfish.

  Lou had just finished telling him the story of how things had gone when they’d been living near the presidential encampment. Lou was obviously proud of how they’d thwarted the tiny residual government’s attempts to strong-arm them into turning over control of the newspaper. He emphasized how he was sure they intended it for use as an instrument for political hype.

  Gabe described how the federal bunch “arrested” him and chained him to the press, since he was the only one who knew how to use it. The bitterness when he described being treated like a slave was almost palpable.

  Birdwell sighed. “I have a confession. I was with the POTUS when the machine sickness hit. I was at that encampment.”

  “So you knew about all this?” spluttered Gabe.

  “No, no, all that was after I left.” Emilio fluttered a hand in the air dismissively. “I struck out on my own months earlier. I knew it was over once I saw the biobattery technology was obviously not going to be containable—meaning people were going to have a cheap, simple, self-reproducing way to get power independently. The President and his staff were determined to maintain authority, but they had no mass communications, and no control of food or energy resources. Their multi-billion-dollar advanced armaments were all electronic, so once plastic insulation melted away, they were useless. Their supply chain relied on petroleum fuels that didn’t exist any longer. It was foolishness, delusional. I just didn’t see it ending in anything but disaster.”

  “I have no trouble believing that!” Lou said. “And it’s a good thing too, in my opinion. I’ve been writing about the inevitability of the collapse of command-and-control hierarchies in my newspapers, newsletters, blogs, and social media feeds for over forty years—and recently, back to newspapers again.” He shook his head. “But the mythology of state worship was so damn powerful: the temples and steeple of the National Mall, the totem of the Eagle, the icon of the flag, the scriptures of pledges and the rituals of elections, idols of presidents blasted into the sides of mountains. Before, I was honestly in despair that I’d see the dawn of civilized self-government in my lifetime. Every time a little spark started, they’d stomp it out.

  “Then after the machine sickness, I had more immediate concerns. I got scared for a while that the people of Highfield were going to wind up as pawns in the game of helping the old power regime re-form itself. I was afraid they’d sacrifice my grandfather’s printing press to that cause. Then things got more intense, and I was terrified they’d sacrifice me!”

  Esther smiled and patted his hand. “Highfield believed in you. You had no reason to doubt them. You know that.” She moved a little closer to him.

  “I thought they did. But then, why did they dissipate and drift away on the trip down here? We started off with hundreds, and wound up with a couple dozen.” He frowned, morose, but put his arm about her shoulders and allowed her to sink against him.

  “You know the answer to that!” She looked up at him from beneath dark lashes. “It was a long, hard road we led those people down. They almost all had relatives and friends they wanted to check on, somewhere between Pennsylvania and here. Look, you believe the best of all possible worlds comes from people being free to pursue their own self-interest, right?”

  He nodded.

  “That’s all they did.”

  She patted his knee, curled her feet up underneath her, and scooched closer to his side, but he stared straight ahead into the flickering firelight.

  XV.

  Land of Oz

  “Ozzie!” Jessica called her son, as good moms do all over the world. But Jessica’s voice was ragged and harsh. “Ozzie!”

  He froze, eyes wide—a rabbit hearing the whine of the hawk’s pinfeathers as it stalls, talons out.

  She grabbed his upper arm and yanked his elbow up, hard. Jessica slid her hand down around his wrist and pulled him along behind her as she lurched up the hill to the yurt. “Dammit! I just looked down for a minute, and you were gone. How many times do I have to tell you to STAY WHERE I TELL YOU TO?”

  She’d been asleep, and he’d been bored, so he went outside. But he couldn’t talk well enough to explain that; he was barely two.

  His eyes teared up as she jerked his arm. His other hand was pulling at his padded underpants, now wet where he’d lost control.

  She bulled her way through the tent flap, towing him behind. She sat on a wooden box and pulled him to her knee, then pushed him away abruptly as the moisture penetrated. He fell onto his hands and knees.

  “Dammit! You promised you wouldn’t pee yourself any more!”

  He was crying in earnest now, hands crossed behind his bottom, backing away. She pounced on him and yanked his pants off, scratching his hip carelessly in the process, leaving the pants caught on his moccasins. “At least it’s only pee,” she muttered.

  She squatted onto the box, turned him over her knee, and smacked his bottom. Big, dolloping tears plopped on the dusty dirt floor. He stayed quiet for one slap, two—but the third burned. He let out a yelp.

  “I’ll give you something to cry about!”

  She reached out and grabbed a flat lathing strip—raw wood pried off a crate for later re-use—and began to flog in earnest. Blossoms of purple and red sprouted on his buttocks, tiny bits of abraded skin unfurling. Screams fertilized the garden, a blackish-red sun of fear eclipsing his vision.

  Did he writhe? Did he struggle? Did he make himself rigid? It didn’t matter. Every blow that landed just created a new torment.

  When it finally stopped, she threw him face-down on the floor and put a foot behind one of his knees, pulling up to remove the left pant leg and moccasin in one yank. Then the right got the same treatment. She dropped the bundle of pants, pullup, and moccasins to the floor.

  Ozzie stood up and reeled in place, yowling out his confusion and panic, pausing only to sniffle or cough away mucus.

  Jessica staggered to the pile by the wall and started shaking out clothes, trying to find him a clean pullup and pants.

  Each item she took up was wrong: her clothes; his shirts; a pullup already soaked, begi
nning to reek of ammonia; pants, stained at the knees. She huffed in frustration and sat down heavily on the bedroll.

  She cupped the sides of her head. “Shut up! Shut up! Shut up! I can’t think! You’re giving Mommy a headache!”

  Her voice, though unkind, was familiar, and commanded a mother’s authority. As such, it soothed his crying somewhat.

  She scooped him up and hugged him to her chest, then crushed him to her and flopped down on her side. “Just a little lie down. A little rest.” The burning, fruity smell on her breath was strong.

  He twisted in her arms, his foot pinned uncomfortably. He tried to wiggle around to a more restful position, but she grasped him more closely, making him push away harder.

  She looked him in the eyes, gripping his shoulder too firmly. “Just stay still! Mommy needs a rest! It’s nap time! Can you do that for me?”

  He nodded. She relaxed her grip. He went limp in response, and managed to stay that way, breathing shallowly, until she passed out again and started snoring. Then, he eased his foot from beneath her hip, slipped from her insensate arms, and toddled to the tent flap once again.

  He stepped out the door, barefoot and bare-bottomed, wearing only a loose cotton shirt. He considered the luminous pinks and lavenders in the sunset sky insouciantly. The path to Uncle Jeremy and Aunt Gaby’s tent was not long, and Maria would be there. She was always nice. She’d take care of him.

  He rather enjoyed the breeze cooling his stinging bottom. Plodding along with determination, and smiling blithely, he wobbled past the sharp back hooves of a team of tethered mules.

  He had it clearly in his mind that Maria, Pablo, Martha, Jeremy and Gaby would be there.

  When he got to their tent, the tent itself was gone, and everything looked different than he remembered. There was no one there. “Hellooo!” he called, the word barely formed in his childish throat and mouth.

  “Helloooo!” Ozark called again, louder and more urgently. He was unexpectedly crying again.

  He put his foot down in a fire-ant mound, and the red ants swarmed up his foot and leg, incising his pudgy flesh with their burning stings. He shrieked and waved his foot in the air. He fell to the ground and screamed helplessly at the little animals imbedding their tiny poisonous stingers in his tender skin, then dropping off, dead.