The Apocalypse Reader (38 page)

A matter of days before the ball dropped in Times Square and Skychum was holed up alone, blinds drawn, bottles empty. He lay on his back, dwarfed by indifference. So much for kicking the hive. The authorities hadn't even bothered to demonize him. It was clear he'd had a florid breakdown, taking it to heart and the public. Could he leave, start a clean life? Everything was strange, undead and dented. He saw again, ghosting across his ceiling, a hundred thousand Guatemalan civilians murdered by US-backed troops. He'd confirmed this afterwards, but how could he have known it before the vision? He only watched CNN. In a strong convulsion of logic, Skychum sat up.

At that moment, the phone rang. A TV guy accusing him of dereliction of banality-laughing that he had a chance to redeem himself and trumpet some bull for the masses. Skychum agreed, too inspired to protest.

It was called
The Crackpot Arena
and it gathered the cream of the foil hat crowd to shoot the rarefied breeze in the hours leading up to the turn. This interlocking perdition of pan-moronic pundits and macabre gripers was helped and hindered by forgotten medication and the pencil-breaking perfectionism of the director. One nutter would be crowned King of the Freaks at the top hour. The criteria were extremity and zero shame at the lectern. Be ridiculed or dubbed the royal target of ridicule-Skychum marvelled at the custom joinery of this conceit. And he was probably in with a chance. In the bizarre stakes, what could be more improbable than justice?

The host's eyes were like raisins and existed to generously blockade his brainlobes. As each guest surfaced from the cracker-barrel he fielded them with a patronising show of interest.

A man holding a twig spoke of the turn. 'All I can reveal,' he said, meting out his words like a bait trail, `is that it will be discouraging. And very, very costly.'

`For me?' asked the host, and the audience roared.

`For me,' said the man, and they were in the aisles.

`Make a habit of monkey antics,' declared another guest. `Pleasure employs muscles of enlightenment.' Then he led in a screaming chimp, assured everyone its name was Ramone, pushed it down a slide and said `There you go.' Skychum told him he was playing a dangerous game.

A sag-eyed old man pronounced his judgment. `The dawn of the beard was the dawn of modern civilisation.'

`In what way.'

`In that time spent growing a beard is time wasted. Now curb this strange melancholy-let us burn our legs with these matches and shout loud.'

'I ... I'm sorry ... what. . .'

And the codger was dancing a strange jig on the table, cackling from a dry throat.

`One conk on the head and he'll stop dancing,' whispered someone behind the cameras.

Another suspect was the ringmaster of the Lobster Circus, who lashed at a wagon-ring of these unresponsive creatures as though at the advancing spawn of the devil. `The time will come,' he announced, `when these mothers will be silent.' And at that he laid the whip into a lobster positioned side-on to him, breaking it in half.

A little girl read a poem:

behind answers are hoverflies
properly modest,
but they will do anything
for me

One guy made the stone-faced assertion that belching was an actual language. Another displayed a fossilised eightball of mammoth dung and said it was `simply biding its time'. Another stated merely that he had within his chest a `flaming heart' and expected this to settle or negate all other concerns.

Then it was straight in with Skychum, known to the host as a heavyhitter among those who rolled up with their lies at a moment's notice. The host's face was an emulsioned wall as he listened to the older man describe some grandiose reckoning. `Nobody's free until everyone is, right?' was the standard he reached for in reply.

`Until
someone
is.'

`Airless Martians still gasping in a town of smashed geodesics,' he stated, and gave no clue as to his question. After wringing the laughs out of Skychum's perplexed silence, he continued. `These Martians-what do they have against us?'

`Not Martians-metaversal beings in a hyperspace we are using as a skeleton cupboard. Horror past its sell-by date is dismissed with the claim that a lesson is learnt, and the sell-by interval is shortening to minutes.'

'I don't understand,' said the host with a kind of defiance.

`The media believe in resolution at all costs, and this is only human.' Once again Skychum's sepulchral style was doing the trick-there was a lot of sniggering as he scowled like a chef. 'Dismissal's easier than learning.'

'So you're calling down this evangelical carnage.'

'I'm not-'

`In simple terms, for the layman'-the eyebrows of irony flipped to such a blur they vanished-'how could all these bodies be floating out in "hyper" space?'

'Every form which has contained life has its equivalent echo in the super-etheric-if forced back into the physical, these etheric echoes will assume physical shape.'

`Woh!' shouted the host, delighted, and the audience exploded with applause-this was exactly the kind of wacko bullshit they'd come to hear. 'And why should they arrive at this particular time?'

`They have become synchronised to our culture, those who took on the task-it is appropriate, poetic!'

The audience whooped, flushed with the nut's sincerity.

'The great thing about being ignored is that you can speak the truth with impunity.'

`But I call you a fraud, Dr Skychum. These verbal manipulations cause a hairline agony in the honest man. Expressions of the grave should rival the public? I don't think so. Where's the light and shade?'

Skychum leant forward, shaking with emotion. `You slur me for one who is bitter and raging at the world. But you mustn't kick a man when he's down, and so I regard the world.' Then Ramone the chimp sprang on to his head, shrieking and flailing.

`Dr Skychum,' said the host. `If you're right,
I'm
a monkey.'

The ringmaster of the Lobster Circus was declared the winner. The man with the flaming heart died of a coronary and the man with the dung fossil threw it into the audience and stormed off. A throne shaped like the halfshells of a giant nut was set up for the crowning ceremony. Skychum felt light, relieved. He had acquitted himself with honour. He enjoyed the jelly and ice cream feast set up for the contestants backstage. Even the chimp's food-flinging antics made him smile. He approached the winner with goodwill. `Congratulations sir. Those lobsters of yours are a brutal threat to mankind.'

The winner looked mournfully up at him. `I love them,' he whispered, and was swept away backwards by the make-up crew.

At the moment of the turn, Skychum left the studio building by a side entrance, hands deep in his coatpockets. Under a slouch hat which obscured his sky, he moved off down a narrow street roofed completely by the landscape of a spacecraft's undercarriage.

During the last hour, as dullards were press-ganged onto ferris wheels and true celebrants arrested in amplified streets, hundreds of multidimensional ships had hoved near, denial-allow shields up. Uncloaking, they had appeared in the upper atmosphere like new moons. Now they hove into position over every capital city in the world, impossible to evade. Fifteen miles wide, these immense overshadow machines rumbled across the sky like a coffin lid drawing slowly shut. New York was being blotted out by a floating city whose petalled geometry was only suggested by sections visible above the canyon streets. Grey hieroglyphics on the underside were actually spires, bulkheads and structures of skyscraping size. Its central eye, a mile-wide concavity deep in shadow, settled over uptown as the hovering landscape thundered to a stop and others took up position over London, Beijing, Berlin, Nairobi, Los Angeles, Kabul, Paris, Zurich, Baghdad, Moscow, Tokyo and every other conurbation with cause to be a little edgy. One nestled low over the White House like an inverted cathedral. In the early light they were silent, unchanging fixtures. Solid and subject to the sun.

The President, hair like a dirty iceberg, slapped on a middling smile and talked about caution and opportunity. Everywhere nerves were clouded around with awe and high suspension. Traffic stopped. Fanatics partied. The old man's name was remembered if not his line-a woman held a sign aloft saying I'M A SKY CHUM. Cities waited under dumb, heavy air.

Over the White House, a screeching noise erupted. The central eye of the ship was opening. Striations like silver insect wings cracked, massive steel doors grinding downward.

The same was happening throughout the world, a silver flower opening down over Parliament, Whitehall and the dead Thames; over the Reichstag building, the World Bank, the Beijing Politburo.

The DC saucer eye was open, the bellow of its mechanism echoing away. Onlookers craned to see up inside.

For the space of two heartbeats, everything stopped. Then a tiny tear dropped out of the eye, splashing on the White House roof.

And then another, falling like a light fleck of snow.

These were corpses, these two-human corpses, followed by more in a shower which grew heavier by the moment, some crashing now through the roof, some rolling to land in the drive, bouncing to hit the lawn, bursting to paint the porticoes. And then the eye began gushing.

Everywhere the eyes were gushing. With a strange, continuous, multiphonic squall, the ragged dead rained from the sky.

Sixty-eight forgotten pensioners buried in a mass grave in 1995 were dumped over the Chicago social services. Hundreds of blacks murdered in police cells hit the roof of Scotland Yard. Thousands of slaughtered East Timorese were dumped over the Assembly buildings in Jakarta. Thousands killed in the test bombings at Hiroshima and Nagasaki began raining over the Pentagon. Thousands tortured to death showered Abuja.

Thousands of Sudanese slaves were dumped over Khartoum. The border-dwelling Khmer Rouge found themselves cemented into a milehigh gut slurry of three million Cambodians. Thousands of hill tribesmen were dropped over the Bangladeshi parliament and the World Bank, the latter now swamped irretrievably under corpses of every hue.

Berlin was almost instantly clotted, its streets packed wall to wall with victims. Beijing was swamped with tank fodder and girl babies.

The Pentagon well filled quickly to overflowing, blowing the building outward as surely as a terrorist bomb. Pearl Harbor dupes fell on Tokyo and Washington in equal share. The streets of America flooded with Japanese, Greeks, Koreans, Vietnamese, Cambodians, Indonesians, Dominicans, Libyans, Timorese, Central Americans and Americans, all beclouded in a pink mist of Dresden blood.

London was a flowing sewer-then the bodies started falling. Parliament splintered like a matchstick model. In the Strand the living ran from a rolling wall of the dead. A king tide of hole-eyed German, Indian, African, Irish and English civilians surged over and against buildings which boomed flat under the pressure. Cars were batted along, flipped and submerged. The Thames flooded its banks, displaced by cadavers.

No longer preserved by denial, they started to sludge. Carpet-bombing gore spattered the suburbs, followed by human slurry tumbling down the streets like lava. Cheap human fallout from pain ignored and war extended for profit. The first wave. So far only sixty years' worth-yet, tilling like bulldozed trash, it spread across the map like red inkblots destined to touch and merge.

Skychum had taken the 8:20 Amtrak north from Grand Central-it had a policy of not stopping for bodies. Grim, he viewed the raining horizon-dust motes in a shaft of light-and presently, quietly, he spoke.

`Many happy returns.'

THE END OF THE FUTURE

Colette Phair

I HADN'T KNOWN what time it was in two years. It was hard to wait when you didn't know how long you had. In a weird way I felt like I was on vacation. But there was work to be done.

Each of us was getting ready, adding in baby bottle drips to our modest stockpile. Plenty to look at, at least. Hooks to hold up all scraps we found, flowers and wires growing through the floor, holes pasted over with anything, metal turning into deep blue. A dull pastel as you came in, worn tile on the wall, ripped plastic shower curtain stuck to the window with army tape. And through it a calm ocean, eternity of restraint. You wouldn't have suspected the world was so close to ruin.

Two figures stood before a missing wall, real working shutters on the ground and "Pour le reve" written in the dust. Broken glass popping underfoot, walking over busted doors to get to the real one. Shovels set up for a shelter but all we had to bury ourselves in was sand. Despite some sporadic precautions, everyone knew this place wasn't going to do us much good once the end hit. So what were they doing here? Japanese on the walls and Spanish on the ceilings, communication breaking down. Jule appearing for the occasion. She only spoke English when she had to.

"You come for end of world?"

She could tell they were cool or she wouldn't be talking to them. Green in the head and on their clothes. They looked like twins, but only because everything on them matched, like twins who were still children. They were new.