Forget What You Can’t Remember
A Novel by
Teel McClanahan III
Modern Evil Press
Phoenix
ISBN: 978-1-934516-54-6
Copyright 2009 Teel McClanahan III
Some Rights Reserved.
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 171 Second Street, Suite 300, San Francisco, California, 94105, USA.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, entities and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental and beyond the intent of either the author or the publisher.
Cover image Copyright 2009 by Teel McClanahan III
Published By Modern Evil Press at Smashwords
ISBN: 978-1-934516-03-4 (paperback)
ISBN: 978-1-934516-54-6 (eBook)
– for love lost, and for love found –
The book you hold in your hands, Forget What You Can't Remember, takes place in the same storybook world as my first novel, Lost and Not Found. More of a spin-off than a direct sequel, this book does not have the same main characters, is not about someone trying to write a novel, and you don't necessarily need to read Lost and Not Found to understand it.
I have included two excerpts from Lost and Not Found containing the portions of that book relevant to this one - you can find them at the end of this book. Appendix A contains a conversation Paul had with some friends, roughly a month prior to the events of this book, about the doomsday he'd been predicting for years. Appendix B contains Lost and Not Found's description of what happened at the time Paul had predicted; a time that falls somewhere between chapter 5 and chapter 7 of this book.
I've also written a collection of short stories, each created to enrich and deepen the world of Forget What You Can't Remember by exploring its peripheral characters, settings, events and ideas individually. It's called More Lost Memories, and it paints some of the stories in this book in a totally new light (like what was going on in chapter 21, for example). I hope you enjoy them.
-Teel McClanahan III
“What do you mean we won’t have internet access?”
“Just what I said. No internet access, no phones, no communication with the outside world.”
“But how will I check my email?”
Lance shook his head, disappointed. “No email. You’re attending a zombie readiness training simulation. If zombies attack, it’s only a matter of days before civilization as we know it breaks down. Power, phones, the internet, even indoor plumbing shuts off in most cities without power, and the power grid requires constant human maintenance. Power plants will either be abandoned outright or taken over by zombies in a few days, either way. Essential services go down when the grid goes down.”
“Couldn’t I sneak my iPhone in?” Brady was looking up a coverage map on his iPhone while half-listening to Lance’s explanation, “the map shows full 3G coverage at the campsite.”
“No, you can’t just sneak your iPhone in. I know it’s sleek enough that it looks like it would fit, but even if you shoved that thing up your arse to get it up there, it wouldn’t work. Trust me. These guys know what they’re doing. They’re very serious about creating a realistic simulation, and during training they jam all frequencies that could reach the outside world. I wouldn’t be surprised if they managed to cut power to the cell tower up there just to be sure.”
“Fine. No internet, no email. Why am I doing this again?”
“You want to be ready in the event of a zombie outbreak, don’t you?”
“Well, I don’t actually think zombies are real. I just heard it was a lot of fun and wanted to try it. I love zombie movies, even the terrible ones. And frankly, I’m pretty sure I’d do better than most of the characters in the movies, and wanted to see for myself.”
“You have no idea what you’ve gotten yourself into, Brady. This group we’re going to be training with -- they aren’t doing this because they think it’s fun. They aren’t doing it because they like zombie movies. From what I can tell, not just from their website, which you must have thought was sarcastic, but from people who have actually gone up there and come back to talk about it, they consider it their duty to train enough people to survive that humanity won’t simply be wiped out. They’re building an army of survivors, people who know what to look for, how to react, how to kill and how to survive in a zombie infestation. The zombie survival handbook that everyone thinks is just a big lark?”
“Yeah, I read that one. Funny stuff.”
“This group basically wrote that thing as a serious survival guide. They’ve put it out, and subsequent books under the same pen name, to simultaneously raise funds to expand their operation and to get some of the basics of zombie survival out into the public consciousness instead of just the terrible schlock that passes as zombie films these days. This isn’t just some fun team-building weekend retreat. This is like a two-week survival training course from people who think normal survivalists are short-sighted pansies who don’t know what’s coming.”
“And you’re sure it isn’t just characters they’re playing? Like those stupid colonial days theme park places where they never drop character? Maybe they’re all just actors, pretending to believe in zombies.”
“It would be difficult to say until we’ve been through it, but ... I know how to read someone, and the few people I managed to speak to in person who had done this thing have had the fear of zombies put into them. They were living in fear, ready for zombies to pop up at any moment.”
“So they’re going to try to scare us? To scare us into believing in zombies? Sounds like a weird sort of cult. Well, except they let people leave, and the fee was very reasonable.”
“Officially, they’re a non-profit corporation. Your fees don’t do much more than cover the expenses of training you and supplying you during the training period. Most of the re-usable supplies you can take home with you, if you choose, so you have a head start on zombie preparedness. I told you, these people believe in what they’re doing. They think they’re providing a public service up there, and they aren’t trying to cash in on the recent zombie craze; they’re trying to get people trained. They started part of the recent craze with their own books, remember?”
“Yeah, yeah, I get it. My fun vacation isn’t going to be as fun as I thought it would be, and I may have signed myself up to join the world’s strangest religious cult at the same time. Is there anything else I should know?”
“Just follow the directions they sent you, bring what they listed, no more, no less, and show up on time. I’ll see you there.”
“Someone nice? I thought you said this was some sort of zombie-geek hangout male-bonding thing? You know I don’t like horror movies. Why would I want to go hang out, in the woods, with horror movie geeks?”
“Well, I thought that since you wouldn’t have much competition, you might make more of an impact. I mean, a dozen guys, alone in the woods for two weeks, and you’re the only available woman they’ve seen since they left town? They’ll be begging for a chance with you.”
“You’ll be there, too, Mary. No one can see me when you’re in the room, and you know it.”
“That’s not true, Lorraine. And it wouldn’t matter, if it were true. I’ll be stuck on the Sergeant, and he’ll be stuck on me, and no one will dare to try to steal his woman.”
“What makes you think I want to watch you throw yourself at yet another man you wouldn’t dream of spending more than a couple of months with? When are you going to think about settling down? Your biological clock must be ticking just as loud as mine, right now, and I’m not looking for some back-woods fling with a man I’ll never see again. I’m looking for the real thing.”
“You aren’t going to find it through one of those dating services you use, no matter how much time and money you funnel in to them, and no matter how many terrible dates with hopeless losers you go on. You may as well have some fun while you’re still young enough to know what the word means.”
“And you think being gang-raped by a dozen horny men in the middle of the woods for two weeks is the answer? You think that’ll be fun? Maybe you’re the one who doesn’t know what the word fun means.”
“Oh, it won’t be like that, Lorraine, and you know it. The Sergeant is tougher than those mean drill instructors they have on reality shows, and he’ll be keeping the men in line.”
“Hey, stop! You’re doing it wrong!”
“No, I’m not! I’m following the directions on the box. It said to stir first.”
“But you haven’t put the powder in, yet. First you put in the powder, then you stir, then you transfer it to the applicator bottle with the activating gel, and then you shake it.”
“I told you, I’m following the directions, and it says...” She read the instructions through for a third time, her hand still stirring, still stirring, then stopping. She put the powder in and started stirring again.
“I told you so.”
“You’re distracting me.”
“I’m not the one dying her hair because she heard some mountain-man drill instructor likes red heads. You were distracted when you came up with this idea in the first place.”
“I didn’t just hear he likes red heads, Lorraine, I heard a lot more than that and if you weren’t such a prude you’d be fighting me for a chance to go up there and even try to seduce him. Which I’m going to do. How can he resist a girl like me?”
“If you’re so irresistible, why do you need to dye your hair?”
“I don’t need to. I want to. I want to make him happy, so he’ll want to make me happy. If you know what I mean.”
“I don’t want to hear about it,” responded Lorraine with a grimace, “not now, and not afterwards. T. M. I.”
She laughed in response, checking the clock as she poured the stirred mixture into the applicator and began to shake it vigorously. “You should come along. I hear it’s almost all men that go to this thing, maybe you can meet someone nice.”
“First of all, you already said that. Second, I’ve seen how they treat women on those shows. If it’s going to be worse than that, why would I want to be involved at all? I don’t need to go to the middle of nowhere and pay hundreds of dollars to be physically and emotionally abused. If I wanted that, I could join a local gym.”
“Or a local BDSM club.” She smirked and winked.
“I told you last month, I don’t want to hear about it.”
“You’re missing out,” she replied in a sing-song way. “Where do you think I heard about the Sergeant in the first place?”
“He... He goes to that place, too?” There was both fear and scorn in her voice.
“No, but some of the men on his staff do, and one of the girls I was bound to -I can’t say who, it’s all supposed to be anonymous- was telling me about the things he did to her when she went to this thing last year. It would blow your mind.”
“Don’t want my mind blown, thank you very much. I want love. You aren’t doing a very good job of convincing me. In fact, you may be doing the opposite.”
“Well, the Sergeant is mine, and maybe certain members of his staff aren’t your cup of tea, but the other guys, the ones coming up for training will be the sort of geeks who have money, free time, and no nagging wife telling them that going to a zombie survival training camp is not allowed. Think about it. Sure, they like horror movies, but they’ve got disposable income and chances are that they’re smart. Maybe you can find a rich computer programmer to settle down with, and then you can be the one to tell him he can’t waste his time and money on silly trips like this one.”
“That wouldn’t exactly make sense, if we met at one. He’d think I was as big a geek as he was, just for being there in the first place.”
The forgotten hair dye was foaming out the end of the applicator bottle, and they both squealed a little as they remembered what they were supposed to be doing. Lorraine began applying the dark red dye to her friend’s hair carefully and methodically, as she had done many times in the long years of their friendship. Lorraine didn’t think long on the fact that the favor had never been returned, the idea cast quickly aside as she remembered that she’d never wanted to dye her hair. Brown was good enough for her. For a few moments, they sat quietly, Lorraine concentrating on the work at hand and Mary enjoying the feeling of having someone work through every inch of her beautiful, long hair with their fingers.
Finally, falling into her familiar role of giving in to every whim ‘for friendship’, Lorraine spoke. “Alright, alright, I’ll go. But not to try to find a man. I’m just going as your friend.”
“Thanks, Lorraine.” Mary didn’t say anything more. She didn’t want to admit that deep down, she was afraid of what she was getting herself into. If she actually went alone, she worried that there really might be the gang rape Lorraine had chided her about. While it wouldn’t have been her first gang rape, it certainly wasn’t something she wanted to have to repeat. Not consciously. As her head was slowly massaged from pale blond to deep red, Mary began thinking about her recent descent into kink and bondage and its possible relationship with a feeling of responsibility for what had happened to her, and with a need to punish herself, but those dark thoughts were soon replaced with the light fluffy thoughts given to her by the kind editors of COSMOPOLITAN magazine, which she flipped through while Lorraine silently worked.
“You mean we’re supposed to run the whole thing ourselves? From start to finish? Without help?”
“It’s a test. We’re supposed to start running teams through our ‘franchise’ camp out West in six weeks. We’re already booked up for months. The Sergeant needs to know we’re ready to do this on our own.”
“So he’ll be there, right? I mean, if something goes wrong...”
“Well, I’m sure he’ll be actively monitoring us, but no, as far as we’re concerned, he won’t be there. We won’t see him, we won’t hear from him, and even if something goes dreadfully wrong, he’ll probably just wait to see how we take care of it. The point is to see how we’ll handle ourselves. For all I know, the Sergeant will be out there intentionally causing little hiccups for us. Bad firing pin here, contaminated food or water there, to see how well we’ve learned from him in the last couple of years.”
“I’ve only been with the company for fourteen months.”
“You know what I meant. You also know that if we don’t meet his expectations, he’s going to give the new camp to someone else. Maybe he’ll even try to run them both himself until he’s satisfied.”
“How are we supposed to satisfy him, if he’s intentionally trying to trip us up?”
“That’s somewhat the point of the whole program, isn’t it? To be prepared for anything, to be able to survive, no matter what adverse conditions arise, no matter how bad it gets? I mean, we’re training people to live in what amounts to a post-apocalyptic world. No water, no power, grow and catch your own food, harsh living conditions, no large communities, oh, yeah, and zombies everywhere, trying to eat your flesh and convert you to their cause. There’s nothing the Sergeant will throw at us that couldn’t have happened anyway. Zombies get into your pens and turn all your livestock into flesh-eating monsters, you have to deal with that. Zombies break through your barricades, you have to find and get to another safe place, clear out the zombies, rebuild the barricade. Firing pins fail. You have to be ready for anything. Why do you think we’re all gunsmiths? You think it’s fun to make your own ammunition from scratch, or you think it’s an important survival skill in a world full of walking dead? If you take this job seriously, which the Sergeant assumes you do, you’ll do fine. If you screw this up for me, I’ll kill you myself.”
“You don’t have to beat me over the head with it, I know the game, I know how seriously he takes it. How seriously you all take it. I just want to get this thing done and get out from under that man’s thumb and into our own place.”
“Well, don’t worry too much about it, I’ve got an ace of my own to play this time. I’ve got a kinky little red head coming up in the next batch of trainees, and you know how the Sergeant goes for red heads. She should keep him pretty well occupied while we train the rest of the group as normal.”
“What makes you think he’ll fall for something like that? Or let her get away without the full training? Have you not seen how hard he is on the women who come here? He’s tougher with them than with the men.”
“If they want to survive, they’re either going to have to be that much tougher themselves, or be willing to give it up to whatever strong man says he’ll protect them. Regardless, you wouldn’t be asking me that if you’d seen what I’ve seen this woman do. What I’ve seen her have done to her... Heck, if you’d seen her half as exposed as I’ve seen her, you’d have no doubts about the Sergeant’s intentions for her during the next two weeks.”
“I also heard Paul might be joining us as well. That man is crazier than the Sergeant, with his doomsday prophecies. Even if the girl keeps the Sergeant off our backs the whole time, Paul is always a pain in the neck.”
“I’ve got that covered, too. Paul’s just looking for somewhere to hide out. He thinks the end is coming any day now, the loon, so I told him he could use the new facility, out West, if he wants to.”
“You sent him to our new camp? How are we going to get rid of him?
“I told you, he thinks the world is going to be ending within the next week or two. He’ll probably go somewhere a lot more secure than some backwoods camping facility, and if he does go there, he’s sure to return to civilization when he sees the world hasn’t ended. He’ll be long gone before we ever arrive.”
“If you say so...”
“I say so. Now, let’s go get the zombies fed before the Sergeant makes his rounds. You know how he hates them getting too hungry right before a new group of rookies comes up here.”
“Fine, but you hold the sheep this time, while I work the bone saw. I know the zombies only go for fresh brains, but I don’t need any fresh bruises, and those sheep kick hard.”
“I don’t think so. I’m the one who arranged for the red head. You hold the sheep.”
“I’ll flip you for it.”
“Fine. I’ll take heads.”
“I’d love to publish it, Paul, but this book is either too late or too early, and if it’s early it’s missing an important second half.”
“What second half?”
“The half where we look back on what actually ended up happening. Your prose is tight, your presentation is sharp, the main character is a bit of a bore, but you’re clearly using him as a tool to disseminate a lot of information about the coming Doomsday. What really works here, what made this a can’t-put-it-down book, is the way the entire thing is set up. The whole book is building up and building up, leading the reader down the road toward Doomsday, convincing the reader more and more of the imminent destruction or catastrophe and really putting them on the edge of their seat. What you’re missing is that event and what happens next. You build up and up and up, and then you stop, and we don’t know what happens next. We don’t know what particular cataclysm struck the Earth, if any, and we don’t have any sort of resolution for the characters.”
“But it hasn’t happened yet. And I know for sure that something’s coming, but I couldn’t tell you exactly what.”
“Can’t tell me, or won’t tell me? I know you’ve got some contacts pretty high up and in a lot of important places, Paul. Contacts who might have let a thing or two slip that you weren’t supposed to put down on the page, but ...” Eddie took on a whispering, conspiratorial tone and leaned in toward Paul from across his desk, “You can tell me what it is...”
Paul just shrugged, and the look on his face was impossible to read. If he knew anything, he was very good at feigning ignorance.
“Fine, keep it to yourself. Let your best friends face apocalypse on their own terms, and without any helpful advice or foreknowledge...”
“Look, if you’ve read the book, you’re as advised as I can make you.” Paul wasn’t about to fall for such an obvious guilt trip. “Now, are you saying you won’t publish my novel?”
“Not in its current state. Like I said, it isn’t coming at the right time. If I could get it on store shelves a couple of months ago, it would have been easy to sell it as-is, ending on a question mark, driving sales in a frenzy of people looking for more information about the end of the world. Six months ago, and we could have used a viral marketing campaign to make people think everything in the novel was true, and sales would have been through the roof.”
“Everything in the novel is true, Eddie.”
“Sure, but marketing takes time, and according to your book the end of the world is coming before I could even get a galley back from the printer, let alone a few thousand copies printed, bound, and in book stores. Your book is too late, as-is.”
“I know that, Eddie. I realize that publishing takes time. What I want to know is, if the world doesn’t entirely end, if there’s still civilization and a book publishing industry around in a couple of weeks, would you consider publishing it?”
“No.”
“No? Just... no? I thought you said it was sharp, compelling, a book you just couldn’t put down. Doesn’t that count for something?”
“Not as-is. I can’t sell a book where the main character is talking about an upcoming world event that’s going to occur on a date in the past, and which has no resolution. It needs an ending. At the very least, it needs a different Doomsday date.”
“The math wouldn’t work with--”
“I know, I know, the math wouldn’t work with any other day. If you hadn’t managed to make the math so interesting, I’d say no simply because my imprint doesn’t print math textbooks; we print fiction. As it stands, I need you to wait and write the second half of the book. If something happens next week, everyone’s going to know about it. Write about it, in the context of your book, and write about how your characters react to what really happened. Your book ends right before the climax, but you need an act four and an act five to round it out. Where did he go, what happened to his friends and family, how did the military react, how did the international community react, everything. Your contacts can get you the full, inside story of how things go down next week, and if you write that story as fast as you wrote this one, you’ll have a finished manuscript before the end of March. Bring that book to me, and we’ll talk.”
“That sounds reasonable, I suppose.”
“Reasonable? That’s an amazing offer, delivered to you on a silver platter, Paul. Most new authors have to go through Hell before an editor even takes a look at their work, and then it’s on the whims of the never ending slush piles lurking at every publishing house in the industry. Because you happen to be good friends with one of the top editors in the city, me, you got your book read within days of writing it.”
“One day. The last few pages are fresh off the typewriter yesterday morning.”
“And I read the whole thing last night. Fine. On the same day you finished writing it. Be grateful I even took your call.”
“You still owe me one from that weekend in--”
“You don’t have to remind me.” Eddie furrowed his brow, frowned, and reached into his desk for a couple of antacids. “And that’s not why I’m doing this. I’m offering you a book deal because I think your book has real potential. Potential to be the first comprehensive book on the subject to hit the market, and potential to be the only readable book on the subject in a sea of non-fiction and speculation. People are going to want to know what happened, they’re going to want to know why they weren’t warned, and they aren’t going to want to read through a thousand pages of dull analysis by scientists, politicians, and whoever else thinks they can cash in on human tragedy by getting a book to print while the subject is still hot in everyone’s minds.”
“So it’s all about money.”
“Of course it is, Paul. Publishing is a business, same as any other business. We select the books that we believe will make us the most profit, the fastest. It’s a craps shoot most of the time, a roll of the dice to guess what people will think is worth reading about in six months or a year, but it’s all about trying to sell books. Quality is good, when you can get it, but it doesn’t matter a whit how well written a book might be if no one wants to buy it.”
“That’s pretty cynical, Eddie. I thought you got into this business because you loved books and wanted to get more great books out there. Didn’t you tell me once that it was your dream to discover unknown gems of literature and put them before the buying public? To really reach out and find new avenues of thought and show the world that there’s more depth and beauty in words than an unending cavalcade of genre fiction could ever reveal?”
“Did I say that? Sounds like the folly of youth and inexperience to me. Depth and beauty don’t sell. Hell, pulp fiction barely sells, outside of romance, these days. Why do you think I’m heading up a sci-fi imprint? Sci-fi readers are loyal. They know where their section of the store is, and they return to it again and again. They’ll buy book after book in never-ending series by the same one or two authors, as fast as I can get the authors to churn them out. They’ll even try new, unheard-of authors if I put a pretty enough cover on it, with a blurb from one of their favorite series authors. Editing for a literary fiction imprint is like asking to be punished for doing a good job. These days even award winning literary fiction barely moves. Last year’s Pulitzer winner pulped more copies of its first print run than it sold.”
“Which one was that?”
“Exactly. You didn’t read it. You don’t even know its name. The paperback will sell better, though, if only because it’s coming out at the same time the promotion for the movie version will be hitting major markets. Not that the movie will do any good. The studio as much as said they’d only bothered to waste their money on it as Oscar bait, and that award hardly sells more than a few extra DVDs these days. People just don’t want quality. They want simplicity, repetition, purified escapism.”
“And you think my book will sell? That’s pretty low praise.”
“Would you rather I turned you down, or told you to see someone at one of our non-fiction imprints about doing a serious book on the same subject?”
“... maybe. It would seem like you were taking me more seriously.”
“How about this: You write both books, the fiction book you’ve got here, plus a proper denouement, and the non-fiction book with all the facts and figures and charts and references -again, with an account of what happens, written after the fact and with references just as deep- and I’ll find an editor who will work with us to put both books out together as companions to each other. We’ll spend half as much on promotion than we would for two unrelated books, and make twice as much money, selling the same book twice to every interested reader. You’ll have the book that people take you seriously for and the book people want to read, and a paycheck twice as big.”
“Twice the pay for twice the work? Great pitch.”
“Will you do it?”
“Sure.”
“Alright, you deliver me two completed manuscripts by the end of March, and I’ll have them on bookstore shelves by May at the latest. Keep in mind that twenty-four months is the normal lead time for fiction, so that’s going to be cutting a few corners. I’ll have to see what other titles I can bump to get yours to the printers so fast, but everyone else will still be trying to figure out what happened while you’re going to the bank with the proceeds from the answer.”
“Assuming book stores, printers, and the publishing industry and civilization generally have survived to see the end of March, it sounds like a deal.”
“A crazy one, but yes, I’ll shake on it.” They stood up and shook hands before Eddie walked Paul out of his office and toward the elevators. “I’ll have a contract drawn up and sent by courier to you on March 1st; just let me know before you disappear where you decide to hole up, so I’ll know where to have it sent.”
“Will do. And hey, it’s been really great to be able to see you again, Eddie.”
“You too, Paul.”
Paul boarded the elevator, and after the doors closed, he never saw Eddie again.
Paul hadn’t been entirely forthcoming with his friend Eddie about what he knew about what was coming. By this point in his life, Paul had become quite handy and effective at withholding knowledge even from those closest to him, without raising anyone’s suspicions. Paul only hoped that Eddie’s job and his deep immersion in fiction would be enough to save him from what was now only a couple of days away. The pretense of trying to sell the novel was only so he could get a chance to say goodbye, to see his good friend one more time before everything changed.
The novel itself had been written out of respect for the final wishes of another of Paul’s friends, who hadn’t been seen or heard from by anyone in about a week. Paul’s sources told him that his friend had been in attendance at the regular meeting of his writing group -each member was trying to write an entire novel from start to finish in the month of February- and that after some sort of argument he had walked out - and never made it home. Paul hadn’t had the time or inclination to attend any meetings, but had found that writing a novelization of his quest to track down facts about the coming cataclysm had come easy. Working only in his off hours and while traveling, Paul had managed to write the whole thing with several days to spare. From what Paul had been able to find out, his friend -whose idea it had been to try writing novels in the first place- hadn’t gotten past about halfway through either of his attempts before giving up.
Those who were in the know, when they looked at Paul’s face heard a voice saying “Come with me if you want to live,” in that dramatic way they’re always doing in disaster films. Those who happened to be at least slightly more ignorant of what was less than forty-eight hours away from the Earth couldn’t see why anyone put so much respect into the queer little man. He didn’t seem to deserve it, and by the way he spoke he seemed quite often to deserve to be committed to an asylum for the criminally deranged. Still, enough of the important people seemed to think his every word was gospel, and everything else just followed along, now.
In this case, quite literally. Paul boarded the plane with a long line of people behind him and no one but flight crew ahead of him. Paul received priority seating ahead of diplomats, politicians and industry leading CEOs without question or protest. They were only present because they believed in what he had to say. The few family members that accompanied them were well enough used to equating silence with politeness and civilized behavior that by the time they’d reached the hangar they were well beyond argument. A few were intelligent enough to recognize and mirror the anticipatory fear their loved-ones showed even as they boarded a plane they believed would allow them to escape certain doom. The mood was very somber, unusually silent, and inexplicably orderly for what amounted to a last minute emergency evacuation in the face of imminent danger. The flight was a long and silent one.
The pilot had been specially selected, same as everyone else on board, and didn’t think twice when his flight plan was changed midair, or when he was advised to turn off his plane’s transponder and to maintain radio silence until after he’d reached sight of the landing strip. The pilot was not troubled in the slightest by an approach on an air strip at least a mile and a half above the ground. The landing was as unremarkable, in a technical sense, as any he had attempted. He taxied the jet into the directed hangar. They hadn’t told him where he’d be headed, but its impossibility didn’t phase him or surprise him a whit. He simply awaited further instructions.
Paul was the first one off the plane, and again seemed to become the leader as the remaining passengers and crew followed him toward and then through the bright white rectangle of light that seemed to be a portal into another world - a long flight, a dimly lit hangar, and the brilliance of the artificial lighting on the other side of the door created a surreal experience for the tired and mostly ill-informed queue of people marching into the unknown. They were the final group to arrive before everything changed.
“Welcome to Skythia,” greeted a young-looking woman on the other side of the threshold. “Welcome to Skythia,” she repeated to each new face whose dazzled expressions could be passed off as a reaction to the change in lighting rather than to her beauty or her unusual -to them- state of dress.
“Please, follow the green way to the waiting transport vehicle,” a young-looking man directed them as they got a little further into the room. Looking in the direction indicated, Paul saw that rather than a simple green line painted on the floor directing them to their destination, the entire hallway they were to follow seemed to be lined with some sort of embedded lighting; it glowed a calming shade of emerald green, switching a section at a time to white in a pattern that indicated the correct direction of travel. It was navigational information that, being immersive, couldn’t be missed, and that through the simulation of the appropriate motion, was intuitively understood. The green way. Paul led the group down the hallway.
“Watch your step as you come aboard,” implored a young and androgynous-looking person who met them at the door of the transport vehicle they were meant to board. There was no gap between the platform and the train-car-sized vehicle, nor really a step up, but merely a slight incline in what appeared to be an unbroken path from outside to inside. “Sit wherever you please, there’s more than enough room for everyone.”
The young man and woman who had initially greeted them were the last to board, advising that “your luggage is being taken to meet you at the temporary quarters you’ll be staying in until you get settled.” Then, that “we’ve got to make a quick stop to get Paul to the mayor first, but then it’s straight to orientation for the rest of you,” and without the sensation of acceleration, they were already under way. True to their word, it was only a brief moment later the door opened again to let Paul out, and soon the sense of surety his presence had lent the other travelers began to break down. Paul, having never met most of them prior to that very week, didn’t give a second thought to them as he stepped onto a familiar-looking platform.
Rather, he was engrossed in watching what appeared to be a sort of liquid gangplank recede into the vehicle upon the closing of the door -it had certainly seemed solid enough when Paul had stepped across it- and the way the vehicle seemed to float noiselessly away without any apparent means of support or propulsion. The people inside weren’t nearly as interesting to him, in that moment. Someone behind him cleared their throat. Paul realized he was standing, slack-jawed, staring down an empty tube into darkness while ignoring whoever had come to meet him.
“Pardon me,” he said as he turned, “I’ve... I’ve never seen anything like it.”
“Sure, I understand. Most people have a similar reaction for at least a few weeks.” The man stretched out a hand in greeting, and Paul was present enough to take it and shake it. “I’m the mayor of Skythia. We’ve been expecting your arrival for a few days now, Paul.”
“I apologize for the delay, but I had a few people I wanted to say goodbye to, and a few loose ends to tie up.”
“Like that novel you’ve apparently been writing?”
“About that--”
“No need for an explanation, Paul. Anyone who was having trouble getting through the other information, the reports and predictions, should have had no trouble grasping the scope of the event by reading your book. We distributed it to all citizens the night it arrived, and you’ve already got top reviews. Not to mention quelled a lot of doubts.” The mayor began walking away from the edge of the platform, and Paul followed. “I’m taking you to our navigational center, so we can move the city to a safe location. Hopefully we’ll have time. She doesn’t move very fast, you know.”
“I’ve heard that under standard conditions, the city moves at about four miles per hour.”
“Yes, just slightly faster than we’re walking now, though the top safe speed is about twice that.”
“Not to worry, mayor...” Paul felt awkward continuing to address the man by his honorific, and paused, hoping for a more complete introduction.
“Mayor Colm O’Reiley.”
“Mayor O’Reiley,” began Paul, more confidently.
“Everyone calls me Colm, or Mayor or, if they want something, Mr. Mayor. We’re all friends, here, Paul.”
“Alright, Colm, as I was about to say, speed isn’t as much the issue right now. The issue is mostly in knowing where we are when it hits.”
“That should be no problem. We have the most advanced navigation and location identification technology in the world, and around the world. We can identify location by satellite, by subtle changes in the Earth’s magnetic field, by the positions of the stars, even in daylight, and by identification of any landmark or landscape that has ever been photographed or topographically mapped, just to name a few methods. When one option goes down, the others are more than enough, and if all else fails, we can identify where we are by knowing where we’ve been and the path we’ve followed since.”
“Sounds both elaborate and foolproof.”
“That’s the idea. Can’t have an entire city go lost or missing, can we?”
“That’s exactly what we’re going to have to do.” Paul was the first one to reach the doors of the navigation center and he continued on ahead, once again leading someone who knew little else to do but follow along with a confused and shocked look on his face.
A phone rang, and Lorraine made a sleepy groaning sound as she was half-roused from what was perhaps the most completely content and fulfilled sleep she had ever known. The phone rang a second time, and Lorraine just rolled away from the noise, burying her head in the pillow as the Sergeant grumblingly answered the phone.
“What is it now, numbnuts?” The Sergeant was practically growling into the phone, though his eyes weren’t even open yet.
“There’s been a... uhh... problem, sir,” came the voice across the wire. This call was being made on a line internal to the camp; no outside communication was allowed once training had begun.
“What’d you screw up, now? Did you feed another paying customer to a horde of zombies?” The Sergeant rubbed his eyes with his free hand.
“Nothing like that, sir. This group has been doing above average, sir, it’s not them.” The timid voice on the other end of the line was avoiding an outright declaration of what had occurred. “There’s been a bit of a snag with the uhh... With the containment of the uhh... the product. Sir.”
“What product? What are you talking about, man? Spit it out!”
“The product, sir, that was being shipped to the new facility out West, sir? There was a containment issue crossing the Rocky Mountains, sir.”
The Sergeant was now more awake than asleep, and growing increasingly frustrated with what he was hearing. “You know this line is secure. There’s no communication in or out of the facility during operations. So stop talking in code and tell me what happened before I feed you to the zombies myself.”
“That’s just it, sir. We received a transmission on a secure frequency saying that there was an accident on the road outside Denver, sir. One of our trucks turned over, sir. The city will be overrun by morning, sir.”
“Accelerate training. Wake everyone up, now, and get that group field-ready ASAP. Have what’s-his-name activate the phone tree. Let all program graduates know there’s been an outbreak, Denver is lost, and we’re looking for volunteers to attempt containment. I’ll be heading West at Noon with whoever’s on site.” The Sergeant hung up without waiting for a response. He was now one hundred percent awake. “I knew this was coming, I just never thought it would be my fault.” He lay back down next to the stunning figure of the women beside him in bed, and began running his fingers through her mousy brown locks.
Still more asleep than awake, Lorraine asked, “Who was that, Sarge?” She pressed her bare back into him, enjoying the warmth and intimacy of their flesh, of his roughness and her softness.
“Oh, just the end of the world as we know it, love.” The Sergeant wrapped an arm around her and squeezed her even closer. “Just the end of the world.”
“Plenty of time before Noon, Sarge.”
“Let’s make the best of it,” he replied, and trusting that this might be the last safe night he might ever be able to spend with this unexpected woman he had only just met but felt might be the love he’d once dreamed of, the Sergeant made sweet, passionate love to Lorraine until the sun came up on their sweat-drenched bodies.
“Ohmygodohmygodohmygod...” muttered Brady incoherently upon being woken in the middle of the night with the news.
“I can’t decide if the news is terrible, or if it’s divine providence that we happen to be in the middle of training for this very event at the exact moment we need to be ready.” Lance was taking things better than his friend, but had been getting through their training exercises more aptly, as well. “Not to mention that we’re surrounded by experts.”
“Don’t you see? This is all their fault!” Brady, forced to wake up with barely two hours’ sleep and prepare to face an onslaught of rushed -yet life or death- training to survive an apocalypse he’d just learned was real, was nearly in hysterics. “I told you we should have left as soon as we saw they had real zombies! They’re clearly insane! I mean, who keeps zombies as though they were livestock?”
“They keep them so they can train people like us how to survive in the event of an outbreak. How seriously would you take the threat of zombies if we were shooting stuffed targets for two weeks?”
“Those used to be people, Lance! How many of those zombies we’ve been using as target practice were people like us that didn’t pass the course? We’re practically murderers for going along with this! Denver is lost, and we’re complicit in the murder of millions.”
Lance was calmly getting dressed as Brady frenetically packed, unpacked, and re-packed his backpack with the same basic survival gear over and over again. “I’m sure it wasn’t intentional. Everyone here seems pretty seriously concerned about the potential disaster of a zombie outbreak. I’m sure they took every reasonable precaution to prevent something like this. We’ll probably find out it’s some drunk driver’s fault.”
“Why were they shipping truckloads of zombies cross country anyway?”
“Weren’t you paying attention? They’re starting franchises. Well, not franchises, exactly, but additional training camps. Or they were. The team training us was supposed to be running a new, second camp out West starting about a month from now. We were like their final test.” There was a strange noise coming from outside the cabin, now. At first like branches brushing against the side of the thing in the wind, then a more insistent scrabbling sound accompanied by low moans. “This class, if it did well, would have proved they were ready to operate without constant supervision by the Sergeant. Why else do you think we haven’t seen him the whole time?” Lance was ready to go, pack on his back, weapons slung, a blunt instrument in his hands.
Brady was still freaking out, now having trouble getting his guns on and selecting between a machete and a crowbar - neither of which he’d been very effective at killing zombies with, so far. “It’s that woman. She has him totally occupied.” A window pane shattered. An undead arm came reaching through, flailing into the room as though it might be able to pull someone out through the small hole the arm barely fit through. “Aaaahhh!!!” Brady was caught off guard by the sudden noise, and jumped backward without heed, practically into the grip of the zombie outside. Lance grabbed a couple of the sixteen penny nails they’d been supplied, and with the clumsy help of a flabbergasted Brady, used an eight pound sledge to secure the zombie’s arm to the inside of the wall.
“That’ll be one less we’ll have to worry about when we get out there.” Lance rapidly finished getting Brady prepped, shoved the crowbar into his hands, and moved toward the door. “You just be glad we got a few minutes’ warning, this time. In the event of an actual zombie outbreak, they’d be coming in through the doors and windows before you ever woke up.” Lance opened the door.
Three more zombies were visible in the dim light spilling out through the doorway. Lance stepped back to let the first one in; it only moaned ineffectually in his general direction, as though surprised to be invited in. The zombie took half a step forward, perhaps pushed from behind by the others, and -not wanting to have to keep waiting- Lance brought down the full weight of his sledge into the skull of the creature, crushing shattering bone into the softer matter of the thing’s brain and killing it instantly. The immediately limp body collapsed straight down, which was what Lance had intended, and he took a couple of steps back, pulling Brady with him.
“There’s really no use in complaining, now. You’ve got to admit, whether the Denver outbreak is their fault or not, that zombies are real, and we’re among a very small number of people who have any idea how to survive that fact.” The second zombie, trying to reach out for the two of them and not smart enough to bother with peripheral vision or even lifting its legs above a shamble, tripped over the body of the first zombie, dropping face-first onto the floor and writhing. The third was still having trouble negotiating the door itself. “Why don’t you try to take care of the one on the floor.” Brady began swinging -and missing- with his crowbar taking chunks out of the floor rather than the groaning, flopping undead head at his feet. Lance slid the sledge into the holster on his belt, grabbed the machete Brady had left on the bed, and made short work of the zombie stuck in the door. “And don’t talk to me about the Sergeant’s choice of women. You could have had that red head all to yourself if you’d wanted to.”
“Hardly. She was looking for a consolation prize when the Sergeant wasn’t interested, not a consolation loser.” Brady managed to get the crow bar’s hooked end into the zombie’s skull, finally killing it before it had the chance to stand back up, but found he now couldn’t manage to wrench the tool out of the monster’s head. “I uhhh...” He grunted with the effort. He put a foot on the thing’s shoulder and pulled straight up, but because of the curved end, the crowbar just turned the thing’s head around and twisted the neck disgustingly around. “I think it’s stuck.” With a sickeningly wet tearing, crunching, popping and dripping noise, the head suddenly came free of the body. Brady swung the crow bar around madly, shook it, tried to get the head off the end of it in a total panic. He screamed.
“Calm down,” intoned Lance, putting his arms out to keep from being knocked out by the bizarre spectacle his friend had turned a simple thing into. “It’s already dead, it can’t hurt you, just calm down.” When Brady finally stopped splattering black blood and zombie chunks all over their cabin, Lance calmly pulled the head off the end of Brady’s crow bar. “Okay, I can hear more coming. They probably released the entire herd, since they have free range zombies to contend with out West. Now you need to either turn that thing around or switch to this,” he said, proffering the machete. “And we need to get out there ASAP.” Brady took one look at the muck-covered end of the crow bar, the end he would have had to then use as a brain-slicked handle, and dropped it to the floor next to the pile of bodies. He took the machete. Lance didn’t leave the crow bar behind, slipping it into a loop on his pack, and led the way outside.
“Hey, isn’t that...” Brady pointed his machete at the zombie struggling with one arm trapped inside their window.
“Yeah, he was in command when we got here. One of the dangers of a job like this, I guess, is that you become part of the herd if you aren’t careful.” Lance pulled his preferred blunt weapon from his belt and pulverized the former instructor’s grey matter without a second thought.
“But if he’s here...” Brady was still stammering. He was still thinking of all the other ways he could have spent his vacation time. Brady was sure that settling down in front of his PS3 for two weeks would have been a better choice. Even mindless web surfing would have been better. “If he’s here, what happened to that red head?”
“She’s either safe, or we’re going to have to kill her. Either way, we should see her soon, and you can ask her if you would have had a chance with her.”
“I would have had a better chance with one of the internet porn stars I masturbate to,” thought Brady, as he followed Lance’s superior navigation skills in the direction that must have been back to the base camp. “Can we not talk about her, any more?”
“Whatever you say, Brady, but if the zombie outbreak isn’t contained, she may end up having been your last chance...” Lance was just chiding him, now. He knew that neither of them would have had a chance with a woman like that, even now that they were faced with the downfall of civilization. He just tried to take it all in stride, and hoped that half a day’s more training would be enough to ready him for what promised to be a lifetime’s worth of challenge. The next few days would be the most difficult, he knew, but as he easily dropped zombie after shambling zombie, lifeless to the ground as he and Brady made their way back to the base, Lance didn’t feel like he was ready for the challenges he suddenly found himself thrust into.
Brady wasn’t thinking that far ahead. Brady was just trying to recall all the faces of the porn stars he had realized he would never see naked again. Before long, he began thinking about their beautiful, naked bodies being eaten by packs of horrible, rotting zombies, and then he tried to stop thinking altogether.
“Clocks are off?”
“All timekeeping has ceased. We’ll be able to reset to accurate time when we turn navigation and communication systems back on. Random numbers have been fed into the system, so right now it’s...” Martin checked his watch against the digital readout on the wall, “Either 62:48 or 4:81, according to the clocks in this room.”
“Good thing everything’s synchronized throughout the city to a centralized control. You’re sure no one has manual timepieces?” Paul wanted to ensure everyone’s safety.
“You saw me announce the changes to everyone,” said Colm, “and most of them read your book, or the earlier reports--”
“Ninety-seven percent said they’d finished it,” read Martin, from the list of relevant statistics coming over the feed.
“Right, so they know it’s life or death that they don’t screw this up. They voted to trust your judgment for the next few days. Anyone who gets antsy not knowing the time and digs out a non-networked relic is risking suicide, and they know it, Paul.”
“Alright. So, time, taken care of. And space?” Paul looked up at the countdown clock. All the other heads in the room looked the same way.
“We’re adrift right now, and until that countdown time reaches zero. Then the randomizer we designed kicks in.” Martin was clearly uncomfortable with the idea that the entire city was simply being left to literally blow in the wind for the next several hours. There was an unmistakable questioning in his voice, and a look in his eyes like a trapped animal facing imminent danger. “All navigation and location identification systems are offline. The only thing keeping us from smashing into the side of a mountain or a city skyline is a periodic proximity detector.”
“Well, that and our altitude,” corrected another technician, whom Paul had not yet been introduced to.
“Right, in order to get a good drift, we’re pretty high up.” There was that look in Martin’s eye again, “although there’s no way of knowing exactly how high any more, since right now altitude controls are offline. It’s up to the buoyancy systems, and the margin of error on that is--”
Paul interrupted, trying to stay confident and in control. “That’s enough of a margin that we won’t know how high we are. That’s the whole idea. Which is why the city will be moving randomly about the sky for the next couple of days. And you’re sure no one will be able to see out?”
“So they can’t identify where we are by sight, yes. The atmospheric damping system is effectively opaque, now. I didn’t even know it could do that.” Colm had been surprised to look out the window and literally watch the sky disappear into a uniform field of white. The system was a sort of energy field that was used to keep extreme weather conditions or lack of atmospheric pressure from interfering with residents’ daily lives - a must for a city that spent a fair amount of time at or above cloud level, where the idea of weather was not culled from a meteorological vocabulary common to those who lived their lives on the ground. With the adjustment the techs had made, it was now a milk-white dome of light surrounding all of Skythia and giving off enough non-directional light that it seemed to be a strange sort of shadowless, endless, overcast day. “It’s remarkable.”