STILLBORN APOCALYPSE
By Veronica J. Hoffman
ONE – THE STRANGER
Spires
of a waste-laid kingdom rise, black and silver flame against the night, above
the Land of Valeyria. Spires crumbling endlessly, ash by ash. Fire-scarred and broken
they still stand, testament to a culture that lies ruined under the blanket of
its own arrogance, forgotten beneath the memories of its dead.
The dead still
walk, in Valeyria where the nomads do not tread. The magic breathes as thick in
the air as the disease, and this cybergenic wasteland is the fertile stomping
ground of the exiled and the forgotten. In Valeyria fear is foolish, and the
weak perish instantly. Only the strongest have survived to brave the eternal
night under the growling tempest sky, streaked by perpetual lily white
lightening so perfect and thin that it seems cut by a razor, cut to form an
outlet for the magic in our breath.
There
are no exits. There are no entrances, either. No roads lead to Valeyria that
still stand, either smothered by smoulder and bones or severed by the fleeing
parade. We never stop to wonder, at least not anymore. We ceased after several
months to lie awake sobbing, quietly wondering why they had left us to die.
Even our tears tingled with a fire of magical electricity as they left our eyes
and dampened our skin, washing the ash away.
I
crouched next to an overturned garbage pail on the curb and struck a match. The
flame sparked and crackled, illuminating those cyber-razor patterns in the air
like the lightning. It was a sight that ceased to enthrall me after so much
time behind this prison of ruins. Even the beautiful things about Valeyria are
nothing more than the trappings of a coffin. Cupping my hands in front of my
mouth, I sucked slowly on the bitter cigar and smelled the sulfur of the flame
mixing with the smoke. It took me several moments to open my eyes
again—sometimes the smell of an Anarashu cigar was enough to make even a
Slummer feel rapturous. I knelt low against the concrete and pressed my back against
the wall. Cold brick scratched the fabric of my tattered wool coat, and I
wondered if the chill in the air was meant to ring in the new season. Soon the
cold would turn colder, and deadly. None of us knew quite what to expect—it
would be the first winter since the bomb had dropped.
A
neon sign was buzzing above my head, flickering in a sickly shade of unnatural
blue to proclaim its message: “BAR”. The eponymous bar from which I had only
recently returned for a breath, taking my leave of the fresh water springs and
festivities below ground to alight the concrete, where I was infinitely more
comfortable. It was a nice escape, to descend stairs into the excavated new
metropolis of Valeyria known as the Caverns, but the ventilation was poor and
the meandering underground labyrinths were choked with the smell of sweat and
blood, the sound of despair and squabbling and merchants being overly pushy to
passersby. I preferred life on the streets.
That,
and the fact that in my social class you only risked time in the Caverns as
frugally as you would risk your own life. We were all dying from the time-lapse
strangulation of a post-apocalyptic winter, but the nature of living itself
still demanded a tendency toward preserving one’s life as long as possible.
Aside
from the putrid blue glow of the sign, it was dark. Infinitesimally dark,
stretching down the too-wide alleyways of the ghost metropolis, darkness
flowing like a river between tall, unlit buildings, leaving its sediment of ash
and muck and shady characters. The residents of the ruins, the Slummers I
called my equals, didn’t have the power to generate their own electricity.
Where the general populous was concerned, electricity was alive in the air and
so abundant a natural resource that it defied rationing. Whatever you could
wield, you were allowed. Such were the curious ways of anarchy. The Dwellers
set themselves apart rather quickly, and took mostly to the Caverns and to the
still-standing Towers on the outskirts of our darkness. Dwellers drank the life
that was left in the grey-toned, choking veins of Valeyria, and spirited it
away with them into a hoarding abyss. Class distinctions, grudges, and hate ran
as deep as the war-born chemicals that seep through our dirt and poison us
slowly, rotting our immunities and breaking down our will to survive.
We
were magic, all, in some way, varying on levels extreme and random,
participants in the genetic lottery of Valeyria. There were names for all of
us; far-flung, fabricated names for mutations of beings that would spring up
overnight in our sewer hospitals and back alley birthing plots. We had always
been this way, at least the natives remembered, bred of the more common mystic
races while Valeyria was still a thriving, respected epicenter for magical thought.
It only stood to reason that the common folk who survived the bomb never knew
in the first place why it began.
There
were theories that we dipped our toes in like boiling water when we felt
especially adventurous. We spoke in jaded growls about the bomb as if we
resented the concept itself, while absolving the countless dead whose rotting
bodies mired and rose to form walls around the city, where no one quite knew
how they had been moved to rest. I, for one, never remembered the theories
after I played with them in my mind for a few minutes with a passing
acquaintance or a one-night employer. It was in my nature that thoughts didn’t
stick in my head for very long.
I
was 28 years old, by my best guess, as it had been six months since all concept
of time was driven from my head and replaced with rough estimates under the
tempest sky. Only six months, and I was already comfortable enough to crouch on
the scratchy concrete in clothes that hadn’t been washed in weeks, sucking on a
cigar that had cost me every penny of the money I’d made last night as a
graceless prostitute to a heartless Dweller. The cigar replaced the taste of
his come in my mouth.
Usually
I chose the most desolate areas of the city to frequent, not enjoying myself in
the large groups in the inner circle near ground zero, where mass campsites
formed territorial tent villages, hamlets of the damned that I could hardly
stand to walk past. I was one of the more industrious ones, or so I liked to
think, crossing the city on foot to find food where I could find it, and earn
money in whatever ways I could. The money, I spent in the Caverns. The food, I
ate immediately, crouching vulture-like and imposing to anyone who would
challenge me, or I hid it in the little building near the airport that I had
claimed as my own. Squatting was sensible to me, although the more
superstitious segment of the population refused to take over a dwelling in fear
of the ghosts of the dead. Dying myself, I had no reason to fear anything that
came from the afterlife.
It
was things that were living which frightened me. I could only venture to guess
that is why I stayed in the dark places and made myself a pariah. It opened me
up to danger as well as opportunity. The fact that I was alone, after all, was
the only reason The Stranger approached me in the first place.
A
scuffle of footsteps, uneven and dragging slightly, was approaching from my
right. I heard them as clear as a bell while they were still minutes away, and
I deduced from the distance that I still had time to polish off my Anarashu
cigar before setting my blistered feet to the pavement once more and heading
north toward the airport. I relished the needling heat in my nostrils as I
exhaled the smoke, and leaned against the wall trying to call upon my reserves
of energy for the long walk home. The footsteps, I kept listening to. They
became like a song in the background, a constant rhythm; first the solid
footfall of a tall, slim man, then the dragging sound of the other foot against
the gravelly, dirty curb. Thump, skkrtch. Thump, skkrtch. As louder they
became, so the shorter my cigar, so the stronger the smoke that escaped through
my nostrils and warmed my body. I cleared my throat and began to rise, ignoring
with conditioned endurance the terrible pain in the soles of my feet. I’d worn
out my only shoes days ago, and while I could have easily bought three new
pairs from the black market dealers in the Caverns for what I made on one
blowjob, one Anarashu cigar was enough joyful nostalgia to make me forget most
of the discomfort.
A
voice sliced through the air, an arrow arcing toward me before I had time to
make my escape. “Stay a little.” The Stranger said, from some distance still,
the steady thump and skkrtch his backbeat and labored breath his accompaniment.
“I’m
tired.” I lied, saying it loud enough that he would hear, though I kept my back
to him and flicked the last of my ashes to the ground. I’m sure the cherry on
my cigar had given me away; there was no other way I could have been seen in
the darkness of that alleyway.
Thump,
skkrtch. “I need…a little help.”
“I
worked last night.” I growled this time, nearly shaking in contempt of the
Dwellers I allowed to use me as a whore. Spitting out the bitter taste of the
last drag from my cigar, I stubbed out the still-burning tip on the concrete
and began to walk away.
Thump,
skkrtch, and suddenly, a stop. “Please.”
We
were all monsters who had been taught not to care for our fellow man. In my
case nearly thirty years of growing up had been erased in a moment by the bomb,
leaving only that jaded shell of cynicism burning always from the fires.
Anarchy had led us to confusion and chaos, a system of fear and
self-sufficiency that made a strange sort of sense in our strange sort of
situation. On any other night, I would not have turned around. I’d left people
to die on the streets, I’d beaten a Dweller to death during the first few days
of tantric rioting. One more was not likely to cause me any sleepless nights.
But
there was something. A squirming desperation in The Stranger’s voice that urged
me to find the corpse of hope inside of me, and expect something other than the
worst. I stopped walking and turned around on my calloused feet. “What do you
need?”
Perhaps
that was all it took; the proverbial road less traveled, though if you’d asked
me I couldn’t in my wildest dreams have imagined where it would lead.
A
silhouette, tall and slim as I had predicted, was slumped against the wall not
too far away, where The Stranger held himself up with one arm and heaved his
rattling, burdening breaths. I watched with disaffected ambivalence for a
moment, before the relative quiet was broken as his body began to droop. He
sagged against the wall and the brick caught the fabric of his jacket. It
sounded like a sandpaper symphony until he fell to the concrete, landing with a
heavy finale that suggested no encore and no power to prevent it. It stirred
me, watching that and not quite knowing. For a frozen moment I believed he was
dead, but a sound like an infant rattlesnake came from his supine body and
debunked any such theory.
It
was always easier to loot a dead body, and it was something I had done time and
time again. Not necessarily out of desperation, either. Looting was assuredly
the second most popular occupation in Valeyria, unfortunately dragging far
behind prostitution. Even as The Stranger’s body wavered some distance in front
of me with uneasy, unhealthy breath, an animal instinct had me guessing his
worth, his status, what sort of wealth he might carry on his person, and where.
My
feet moved before my mind had a chance to over-analyze the situation, and I
grunted at the aggravated pain. When I found him, The Stranger with the light
hair and the pale skin, standing out like a white-washed painting against the blackened
grit and gravel beneath him, I tried not to dwell on the appearance. We tried
not to look at faces in Valeyria, tried not to become attached to people and
the soul in their eyes. Everyone was dying too quickly, too unexpectedly, to
earn trust and respect. Lovers were enemies, mothers murdered mothers, and so
my simple pillaging of a near-dead stranger would be an inconsequential blip on
the radar of misdeeds around me.
I
knelt near him, and casually reached into the pocket of his oddly clean suit
jacket. He shifted his weight beneath me and groaned what was probably a
last-ditch effort at resisting. It sent a shiver up my spine, but I suppressed
any urge to turn back as my hand found a wallet against his still-beating
heart. I pulled it out—pungent leather stitched together with a fine satin
thread, certainly not of any local make, even before the bomb. I passed the
wallet under my nose and breathed in the scent. Leather had always been one of
the more pleasant aromas to me. It filled me up with something other than the
sulphur and urine smell of the alleyway, and gave me just enough invigoration
to forget about the elementary injustice of what I was doing.
I
pulled open the primitive clasp on the folded leather and opened it. A small
library of mismatched papers and deckled scrap notes fell to my knees, none of
which my trained eyes recognized as the color of money. I growled softly and
peeked into the pockets of the wallet, my search more desperate as I exhausted
the little thing’s hiding places. Finally, I unzipped a cleverly concealed flap
and breathed a sigh of relief as a miniature billfold tumbled down.
I
dropped it almost as soon as my eyes adjusted to its contents.
He groaned
a little louder and shifted with more strength, a weak grip with icy fingers
reaching up to clamp on my thigh. I hadn’t the presence of mind at that still
and shattering moment to push it away, as my eyes focused on the open billfold
and on the identification card of The Stranger, which I could not bring myself
to read past the obvious blur of title and sovereignty which left me focused on
one inescapable fact.
The
Stranger was not even from around here.
As
soon as my rational though returned, I glared at him and realized how blind I
must have been not to notice it before. His clothes were fresh and clean. Even
the Dwellers dressed in rags. His hair was newly washed where ours was either
greased and dreadlocked, or shaven clean. Even his soft skin and his
unblemished hands gave him away immediately. I wondered so many things and came
to no conclusions, as my mind reeled and I breathed just as desperately as he
did, touching his neck and finding a strong pulse.
“Can
you walk?” I realized how uncomfortable I sounded when I was being
conscientious.
“No.”
He answered, and his eyelashes fluttered open, revealing crystal blue eyes that
nearly angered me, they were so like the sky I’d never see again. I wondered if
his pallor was natural or simply from malnutrition. In the next moment, I
wondered if he was light enough to carry.
I
hadn’t been concerned for anything outside of myself for a long time, and I had
forgotten how exhilarating it was to dabble in the affairs of others.
I
touched his hair and almost immediately regretted it, as the golden strands
that touched my fingers took some of the soot and grime with them. My face
grimaced momentarily, and I realized that I still couldn’t force common sense.
The only thought bleating incessantly in my head was telling me to hide him, to
keep him with me at all costs. It was a sensation I usually felt only when I
happened across staples of the basest principle, survival. Money and food I
could take easily to my home by the airport and keep, but another body? A man
who couldn’t even walk? And most unbelievable of all, an outsider?
“My
name is Ontameni,” I told him, as I found my strength to be more than I had
figured it. He weighed only slightly on my muscles as I hefted him into my
arms, his legs dangling unusually limp. I felt one of the sores on my foot
break open immediately as I began to walk, but the pain I had learned to deal
with. He offered me a smile of gratitude before his head drooped in exhaustion,
which proved to be rather inoculating, “I’m going to take you somewhere safe.”
My tone was gruff and short, but I sensed somehow that he knew this was my
usual mode of expression.
“I’m
Fial.” He replied, but something told me he would always be The Stranger.
~*~
I
was a Ganie. Psychic-born, interpretively impotent but in tune with the very
divine equation of the universe itself. I dwelt not in possibility, but in
product and reality. Fact and solution were my only truths, though it can’t be
said that I escaped into adulthood without the usual tremors and traumas of
emotion and sensibility. I lost my psychic abilities early into puberty, as
most do, and for that suffered a great deal of memory loss, as well. I didn’t
remember anything about my childhood, but I could only feel ambivalence at the
thought, regardless.
I,
like all others of my race, thought in numbers and lived my personal life by a
very strict set of rules. The interior of the dilapidated building by the
airport I knew like the back of my hand. Every shadowy corner and cobwebbed crack,
where every broken eave creaked and rotting stair drooped, I knew. The building
itself wasn’t very old, but the rain for the first month of recovery had been
unforgiving, and now linoleum curled and doors were swollen and warped and
refused to close right. I had learned to love that place. I had mapped and
measured every inch, and the walls were decorated only with my chalk and
charcoal scribbling of proofs and equations that proved how high my ceilings
were, how much weight my rotting stairs could sustain without buckling,
precisely how many days and minutes it would take for the stagnant water in the
basement to cause a structural implosion and force me to find a new home sweet
home. I worked equations without thinking, sometimes in an almost possessed
state that saw my hand moving to transcribe the numbers whirling in my head,
leaving my consciousness to wonder what had transpired the next morning, when
my bathroom wall sported a sprawling proof indicating the path to be followed
by the little crack in the ceiling above the sink.
It
was how the Ganie thought, how the Ganie lived. The nearer I came to my home,
toting The Stranger Fial’s unconscious body in my arms, the more nervous I
became at the thought. I scrambled through some new figures—which room he would
inhabit, which path I would have to take each day to the door, all the
variables I had to consider with his presence in my bedraggled little building.
Even my mind, which thought in such rigid and wonderful ways every moment,
needed time to get used to this.
My
arms were numb from his weight when I walked through the loose-hanging front
door and onto the warped and uneven wooden floor of the foyer. The building had
once been someone’s home, probably, judging from the domestic furniture that
was ruined inside of it, the water-logged and musty mattress on which I slept,
the room with the baby crib that I didn’t even look at anymore.
I
found space for him in the bedroom next to mine, the little room that I rarely
entered and judged to be safe from my obsessive tension. The whole room smelled
as unappealing as the rest of the house—mildew mingling with old books, an
aroma that took some getting used to but eventually became the smell of home.
His body barely depressed the squeaking mattress, and his eyes twitched
incessantly beneath closed lids. Was he aware of what had happened? Did he even
know who he was, beyond his name? Or was he dreaming of home, wherever home was
for him? I knew anything had to be better than this, but I was irritably impatient
for him to agree or tell me otherwise.
Watching
as he slept, I found time to measure his breathing. He was human, from what I
could tell based on physiology and heart rate alone. A simple human. We hadn’t
seen many of those in some time. There was no way to tell how long I ended up
standing in front of the bed, feeling my muscles relax and listening to his
sleeping breath. I was lulled into exhaustion by the time I made it to my own
bed.
The
Stranger Fial became my secret, and I his unexpected protector. I resolved to
give myself a night’s sleep to consider my options, and upon waking I would
decide what to do with the outsider.
~*~
“Where
am I?” I was startled to hear his voice, raspy and spent as it was, address me
softly as I walked about his room. Glancing at the charcoal pencil in my hand
and the figures on the wall, I wondered how long I had been writing. A few
blinks took an eraser to the scratchwork in my mind, and I answered him without
turning around.
“Valeyria.”
He
exhaled slowly, and I heard him shift with some effort in the bed. The springs
made a ruckus about squeaking under even his slight weight, but I found a way
to accept the cacophony as I did his very presence. “I made it.”
His
tone sounded like a dying man’s delight. Immediately there were questions I
wanted to ask, though I surely didn’t know how to begin. My race was relatively
straightforward, though talented at lies and deceit. We rarely circumvented an
issue for the sake of playing mind games. I decided to take the conversation
down the obvious path. “You…traveled here?”
He
was silent for a moment, and turned his head away from me. He looked
comfortable in the bed, propping himself up against the headboard with both
hands folded gently in his lap. Delicate and frail, I was inclined immediately
to believe he was infirm.
“I
don’t know.” The Stranger whispered, curiously and with a bit of mental strain.
He looked up at me then, and I noticed with no small amount of surprise that
his sky blue eyes had turned a bright jewel green. One of his long, unscathed
fingers pointed at the outline of his legs beneath the scratchy blanket. “I…I
can’t walk. My legs don’t seem to work. All I know is that I’m supposed to be
here.”
“You
were walking last night.” I remarked without hesitation. He blinked twice, and
stared down at his legs like a child mourning a broken toy.
“Was
I.”
I
didn’t even nod to acknowledge his statement—he seemed to believe me well
enough, and The Stranger’s tone suggested already what the truth was to be. No
reaction was able to discern itself inside my head as I entertained the
possibility that the first outsider to enter Valeyria in six months didn’t even
know who he was and how he had arrived. Amnesia was not uncommon in our day and
age. I had suffered it. Magical beings of many a race and caliber came down
with bizarre mental ailments that wiped half, most, or even all of their
memories.
But
Fial was a simple human.
“Your
name is Fial, you say.” I walked nearer to the bed, and he jumped very slightly
when the floorboards creaked loudly under my weight. His face was kind and
trusting enough, but I hesitated at the thought that his attachment would grow
too much. I hadn’t counted on housing an invalid.
“I
do?”
“You
do, and it is. At least according to this,” I reached inside the pocket of the
same moth-eaten jacket I had fallen asleep in the night before, and pulled out
the satin-stitched leather wallet, “I’m sorry, I…found this on you, and I—“
With a sigh, I felt the overwhelming need to pre-empt myself before I strayed
too far from my true concern, “that is, you have to understand, we don’t get
many visitors around here. In fact, in the last six months I don’t think anyone
has traveled here, to Valeyria.”
I
prayed that the gaze I leveled at his emerald eyes might impart the importance
of my words. It seemed to do the trick, as he shrunk back slightly, his cherub
face stiffening slightly with fear. If there was one talent Ganie possessed
beyond an infinite grasp of mathematics, it was intimidation, even when the
affect was unintentional.
“Should
I not be here? I don’t understand.”
He
paused when I took a seat on the mattress. The rusting springs creaked noisily
and nearly collapsed beneath me. Fial shifted in his place to conform to the
new distribution of weight, and stared at me, apparently having lost his train
of thought.
“I’m
sorry…” he offered.
I
breathed heavily and wondered where to begin. My eyes wandered to the equation
I had scribbled on the open door, but I was so distracted by The Stranger that
I forgot what it had even meant at the time. “No need to apologize,” I mumbled
hurriedly, “but it is…unusual, to an extent I can’t really explain.” I turned
my eyes to him, and stopped an explanation on its way out of my throat,
replacing it with, “your eyes are hazel.”
He
blinked at me and looked slightly fearful again. For an obvious adult, his
mannerisms were disconcertingly childlike. He was angelic in his simplicity and
appearance, carrying a naďve beauty with him even when he shook his head and
bowed his eyebrows at me desperately. “Is that wrong?”
“They
were just green,” I turned more toward him, and he drew back with a tiny gasp,
“I’m sorry, I’m a little shocked, is all. They were just green, and last night
when I found you, they were—“
“You
found me?”
“Yes,
I found you. You collapsed on the street. You’d been limping down the alleyway
where I was sitting, and you asked me to help you.” I reached over and placed a
hand on the relief of his thigh, more for a place to rest my arm than anything
else. I was immediately shocked to feel nothing from the muscles beneath. There
wasn’t a quiver of reaction or a spasm of surprise, which would have been
guaranteed from The Stranger in his current state. It was my turn to bow my
eyebrows in desperation. The leg felt absolutely…dead.
“I
can’t walk,” he whispered, “that’s impossible.”
I
breathed out heavily through my nose, and clenched my jaw. Searching the file
cabinet of my mind, I found no possible explanation, to equation that would
adequately justify what I had seen last night. “How do you know? Your legs
might have stopped working last night.” I offered hopefully.
The
cornsilk strands of hair swept back and forth across his cheeks as he shook his
head. “No. I’ve never been able to walk. That much I do know.”
“What
else do you know about yourself? What else can you tell me?”
“I
come from a sunny place.” He said simply, and gazed out the window next to the
bed, his mouth sinking into a tepid scowl at the perpetual grey of the daytime
sky in Valeyria.
Valeyria’s
sun was somewhere above those clouds of ash, wanting to break through, but all
we saw was a dim cast of light, leaving the daytime sky with a heavy,
winter-yellow atmosphere. Fial lifted a hand to the dust-frosted glass and
touched it, shuddering with a little noise at the cold.
“Valeyria
hasn’t seen the sun in months.”
“I
can tell,” he sighed and looked over at me. The sadness in his expression
overwhelmed me, “people need the sun, to be happy and to thrive. You’re all
dying here, aren’t you?”
Without
pausing to wonder at what powers of deduction had delivered him to that
conclusion, I replied. “Yes. A bomb dropped on our city. Almost everyone died.
Those of us left…are just waiting.”
“Why?”
It
wasn’t a shocking question. We wondered often, why we prolonged the inevitable.
Logic, my dear beloved logic, advised me to end my own life and be done with
it. But something had always stopped me from that. Stopped me from even
considering it.
“Because
no one wants to leave someone else alone. Because we still have each other, I
guess.”
“Who
do you have?” He tilted his head to ask.