Monsters of the Apocalypse (10 page)

Arian and the Indians sat around
the living room drinking October Carnegie's expensive liquor. Arian alone
fiddled with a laptop. They kept quiet and were all clearly trying to
avoid glancing out the windows at the wreckage in the distance.

"Well, the good doctor found
his motivation I'm glad to say," Jacob said as he sat down among
them. "What do we know, Arian?"

"Nothing really. A few
last communications from before the EMPC blasts. We had success getting
some of the population into bunkers and underground cities. How many is
hard to say. How many of us made it is harder to say. Beyond that…
the Islanders went out of their way to knock out all communications. No
more phones, no more web, no more TV."

"You have to be wrong,
Arian. I know October. I know the government. There's no way
they're just sitting on The Island blind."

"No, of course not.
They have drones and a satellite feed that is so heavily encrypted that with
what I have here, it could take years to figure it out. You see, what
they did was pull everyone, every specialist, every CIA hacker, NSA technician,
pulled them off everything else and put them to work encrypting this one
government satellite channel that carries all of the feeds. Drone feeds,
satellite feeds, even Nestor's feed, all on one super big, super encrypted
beam. A super feed. The Feed. It wasn't like they needed to
be doing anything else, what with the Apocalypse around the corner, so they
must have figured they'd just go with one channel and make it
impenetrable. We may never get in. I've never seen anything like
it."

"They always say that,
Arian. That's why people like me and you are so amazing. It's why
they call us things like "genius" and "prodigy".
People like us do the impossible easily."

"You may need to find
another prodigy on this one, Jacob."

"Well… that's not
good," Jacob laughed. "I don't suppose that telling you that I
believe in you would help at all?"

"No, not even a little,
Jacob. Look, there's something else. I… I seem to be having trouble
typing. My fingers are very stiff."

"Yes, I know."

"And our teeth are
longer," one of the Indians added.

"I understand."

"And we're hungry.
But, food doesn't seem to... it's not what I'm hungry for," Arian said.

Jacob nodded and walked to the
wall of windows and looked down on the city. Jacob was the one who had
smuggled The Shot to his Shadow Army. He had underestimated the cruelty of
October and the Founders and now something was happening - what had they done
to him and his men? To everyone? He scratched at the glass
absentmindedly with one of his claw-like nails, leaving a permanent cut in the
window.

"I know. We're
changing. We should be dying, maybe we are dying, but we're
changing. We'll wait another week, by then the rest of the boys should be
arriving or will have sent word or… not. Once they're here we'll go out
and figure this all out. Have faith boys, we just survived the end of the
world, stiff fingers and pointy teeth should be a piece of cake," Jacob
said with a confident tone, but in the back of his mind there was something
else.

There was a hunger and it was
growing.

The street
was in a suburb that was relatively intact, the lawns only beginning to brown
with the lack of water and sunlight.

"You're
Nestor Bravo."

Nestor
turned and looked at the man who was walking down the pathway of concrete that
led from his doorway to the street.

"You're
dead, Nestor Bravo. You walked into the nuclear winter weeks ago.
You died."

"Okay,"
Nestor shrugged, resisting the urge to draw his gun. The man stopped not
ten feet away and stared at Nestor. The man's skin was red and peeling.

"I’m a
monster, Nestor."

"Okay."

"We all
are."

The man
stared at Nestor, his eyes pink. He smiled. His canines were long
and red.

"I
killed the family next door. All of them. The children. The
wife. I did it with my teeth. Then I ate them."

Nestor
looked around the street, but saw that he and this man were alone. Again
his mind raced over to the presence of the gun, but the man seemed too sick to
be a threat of any kind.

"They
made me not human. I cannot eat or sleep. I cannot feel pain," he
held up arms fresh with razor cuts. "All I want is not to be hungry.
My wife…"

Nestor
stepped back, his hand reaching for the pistol in the back of his pants.

"What
is wrong with you?"

“You don’t
understand... the hunger.”

The man
moved closer as Nestor took aim.

“Understanding
you isn’t a pre-requisite for killing you. Stop moving.”

The man
charged at Nestor. After his first step Nestor shot the man in the
head. It took three shots, but the third went through the man's eye and
finally he fell dead.

Nestor had
no answer. He stood in the middle of the barren street, empty houses
stretching to the horizons like skeletons of a dead world. Ash rained
down on them like snow. In each breath he felt the ungodly warmth that
had permeated the atmosphere under the blanket of dirty brown clouds. No
bird called. No sirens rang. There wasn't the sound of a car engine
or plane above. No laughter of children or sprinklers beating a rhythm
into the dead suburb.

The man's
blood began to pool and spread around his head like a gory halo.

Nestor
walked down the middle of the road, his gun in his hand and didn't look back.

"Caleb,
what are you doing?!"

"Good
morning, Nicolette," he said with his eyes focused on the glowing warmth
of his computer screen.

"That computer
could explode at any moment!"

"Well…
yes. But, I just survived a nuclear holocaust, excuse me for feeling
lucky."

Nicolette
stared at him. He sighed, turned off the computer and turned to face her.

"This
is real isn't it, Caleb? They blew it all up."

"They
did," he nodded.

"How
can this have happened? How can this have happened to me?"

"You
were lucky."

"How am
I lucky?! They blew up the whole city! The whole world!" she
said throwing a pillow across the tiny room.

"But
you were in here. You survived. You were lucky."

"This
isn't lucky, Caleb, this is a disaster! Oh God, I can't handle
this."

Caleb
shrugged and drummed his fingers on the lead box, having placed the battery
back inside.

"You
know who I blame? The nerds," Caleb said as he moved towards the
bed. "Which includes me, mind you. We made it fun. For
decades now we've been lining up to watch movies about the Apocalypse.
Buying videogames based on a post-nuclear holocaust world. Once you do
that, you make something a game, a sort of laughable future - but a reality
that you've truly considered… well. Once you've allowed the unthinkable
to be thought, you've opened a very dangerous door."

He moved in
to kiss her, but she pulled away.

"Oh,
God."

"What?"
he asked watching her move to the far edge of the bed.

"I just
realized who I'm sharing a room with."

"Who?"

"An
idiot. Caleb, you're an idiot. How did I let this happen? And
why are you smiling?"

"In a
strange world, the familiar is like a warm hug."

"This
is familiar?"

"Oh
yeah, I've had this conversation so many times. Not the end of the world
thing, the idiot part."

"How
does it usually end?"

"Badly,
but, I'm feeling lucky."

Nicolette
stood up and moved towards the door.

"I… I
need to walk. I'm going to go for a walk."

Caleb
watched Nicolette walk out the door and then walked over to the desk and opened
up the lead box. He pulled out the battery inserted it into his laptop
and hit the power button. He stared at the screen for a long time before
he started to smile.

"Miho, it's okay, you can
let him in," October sighed.

"Are you sure, sir, I'll
happily tell him he has to wait, like the rest of the Founders, till the
meeting this week."

"He's not a man accustomed
to waiting, Miho. He doesn't know how to leave or be dismissed.
It's just easier to let him in, trust me. How do I look?"

"Fine, sir.
Presidential."

Sage Carnegie, the oldest member
of the Carnegie clan found his way into the room and sat down across from
October. Like his nephew, Sage was a large man, though even in his old
age he had a strength and virility that October had never been able to achieve.

"Hello, Uncle."

"You look well," the
old man tapped his finger against his knee to some unknown rhythm and
smiled. "How are things, Nephew?"

"I don't know."

"You. Don't.
Know."

"No one does. We're
waiting. These things take time. You need to get used to
that. When we destroyed the infrastructure out there, it made it slower
for us. We have drones and spies… but, it's slower now. We don't
have thousands of number crunchers sitting around the Pentagon anymore do
we?"

"No, I suppose we
don't. I hear things though, am I to believe they are all
rumors? Or am I to believe that you are simply out of the
loop?"

"What have you heard?"

"Things, Nephew. Dark
and foreboding things. I hear stories of Jacob Rothschild and Nestor
Bravo. Strange things about monsters that roam what was once our fair
country. And survivors - I hear talk of a great number of
survivors."

October shrugged.

"What can I say? Jacob
wasn't dead after all. He meddled. We had to accelerate
things. Inoculations were stopped prematurely. There seems to be
some indication that Jacob and his Shadow Army blew up planes and led people to
bunkers. And as if that's not enough, he called Nestor Bravo back from
the dead like some sort of annoying black magic incantation!"

"Calm down, boy, it seems to
me that though Jacob started a lot of things, you were quite helpful to his
cause, what with your killing people on TV and telling people our secrets while
they happily ate microwave macaroni! My concern is that the Founders will
blame you."

"But it was Jacob!
Jacob Rothschild!"

"Yes, yes, yes.
Aggravating man. I knew his father, of course. Fine man, knew
his place. Jacob, even as a boy, had a rebellious streak in him. A
rebel with a brain, a very rare and dangerous thing. As for Nestor Bravo,
there have always been men like him. Once upon a time they ruled you
know? The man who was the deadliest with a blade was the king.
Fortunately, we have evolved, even if Nestor Bravo hasn't. So then, the
last part, tell me about these foul mutants that are haunting the dreams of our
fair Islanders."

October sighed and turned to the
window behind him and looked down on the soldiers mowing the grass.

"Do you believe in monsters,
Uncle?"

"Yes I do. I prefer
for them to work for me."

They came into the city like a
curling mist.

They arrived, always at night, so
that Jacob would wake up and find more and more of his Shadow Army picking
uninterestedly at breakfast. Their stories were all the same. Death
and tragedy and hunger.

They had waited for weeks, but
today when the mist disappeared into the sunlight of a new morning and there
were no new faces, Jacob came to the conclusion that the last of his men were
now here. Some were surely spread further about the country, but until a
form of communication had been raised, they were on their own. Just like
him. Alone.

From the lofty penthouse Jacob was
able to watch the rest of the city's survivors return to their everyday lives,
or at least try to. He watched them scavenge for food and clothing and
check in on the homes of old friends and family. He envied them this
simplicity. Jacob though, had never known an everyday life before.
Until now each day had always been different than the next. Now, even
though each morning he awoke a little less recognizable, a little less himself
and a lot more a walking vessel for some unspoken hunger - a static quality had
crept into his existence of late. It didn't suit him.

He watched an old woman walk out
of her apartment, a large revolver in her hand. She shuffled down the
street, hurrying out of sight. In thirty minutes she came waddling back
with a shopping bag and a smile. It was only then that Jacob realized how
many people had done this exact same thing every day. They headed down
the same street, the same way and came back with shopping bags.

Jacob looked over at Arian who
struggled with clumsy fingers to hack into the satellite feed. The task
had done nothing other than frustrate the man's waking hours without
result. Each day as Arian's fingers grew stiffer and more claw-like, code
became more difficult to write, and the chances of Jacob getting back into
communication with his army grew smaller.

"This was not part of the
plan. You just can't plan for the Apocalypse, can you?" Jacob
laughed.

Jacob didn't expect an answer,
not from Arian or any of his men. Arian had long ago stopped answering
the questions that Jacob posed to the sky and the Indians never had. They
tolerated Jacob and ignored the truth about him. Jacob didn't ignore it;
he looked at the truth dead on. The truth was that in almost every way
that Arian or anyone else could think of, Jacob was insane. The only
exception was that he was always right and so they ignored his insanity and
followed him. They had faith in him, but it was wavering. Each day
his soldiers woke up more monstrous, their faith waivered a little more.

Time was running out for
Jacob. If Dr. Thomas or Arian didn't find something soon… Jacob would
need something else. A miracle.

Jacob looked back down the street
and tapped a long claw-like nail against his teeth.