Mike Ashley - The Mammoth Book of Apocalyptic SF

“Well…” Mitthu does not want to give up her sympathies so easily. Besides, her husband had died when she was nine. As a lifelong child widow she had no reason to worry about being separated from her children. “Well, we’ll see it when it happens, won’t we?”

“Like the end of the world,” said Kanchi, checking out the sky. “I heard that they have taken the big Sadhu who predicted the end of the world and put him in the jail in Hanuman Dhoka. He has said that they can hang him if it doesn’t happen. Then some people say that he was performing a Shanti Horn and the fire rose so high he was burnt and had to be taken to the hospital. Who can tell what will happen?”

Eleven a.m. There is a sudden shocked silence. The whole world stands still, for once, in anticipation. Then a sudden cacophony shatters the midmorning silence: cows moo tormentedly, dogs howl long and despondently, and people scream all over the marketplace tole.

The sky is flat gunmetal grey. The sun shines brightly.

A collective sigh of relief wafts over the Valley of Kathmandu after the end of the world comes to an end.

The world may be under threat or on the brink of destruction at any moment from some cosmic or human catastrophe, and who knows how many times this may have happened in the past or the present.

You won’t find any published books by Dominic Green yet, though there are a handful of novels available at his website: http://homepage. ntlworld.com/lumfulomax/

He has been producing a stream of short fiction since 1996, mostly for the magazine Interzone, and the following story was shortlisted for the prestigious Hugo Award in 2006. He used to work in IT. He reveals the following about himself: “I was brought up in the North of England till the age of eight, and in the South of England till the age of eighteen. This has made me culturally amphibious, able to eat both black pudding and jellied eels. I also went to an English public school and Cambridge University, which has prepared me well for unemployment. I can strongly recommend it to anyone wanting to combine the thrill of standing in a dole queue with the added frisson of being thousands of pounds in debt. I write science fiction, you know.”

OVER HERE, MISTER. This is the place.” The girl tugged Mativi’s sleeve and led him down a street that was mostly poorly-patched shell holes. Delayed Action Munitions — the size of thumbnails and able to turn a man into fragments of the same dimensions -littered the ground hereabouts, designed to lie dormant for generations. Construction companies used robot tractors to fill in bomb damage, and the robots did a poor job. Granted, they were getting better — Robocongo was one of equatorial Africa’s biggest exporters. But usually the whites and the blacks-with-cash sat in control rooms a kilometre away directing robots to build the houses of the poor, and the poor then had to live in those houses not knowing whether, if they put their foot down hard on a tough domestic issue, they might also be putting it down on a DAM bomblet a metre beneath their foundations.

This street, though, hadn’t even been repaired. It was all sloped concrete, blast rubble and wrecked signs telling outsiders to KEEP OUT THIS GOVERNMENT BUILDING! FIELD CLERICAL STORES! IMPORTANT GOVERNMENT WORK HERE YOU GO BACK!

“Come on, mister,” said the pha-seuse. “You will see, and then you will have no problem paying.”

“You stand still,” commanded Mativi suddenly. “Stand right there.”

Nervously, he reached into a pocket and brought out the Noli Timere. It only worked fifty per cent of the time, based on information gathered from scientist-collaborators from all factions in the war, but fifty per cent was better than zip.

He turned the device on, on low power in case any of the more recent devices that smelled mine detector power-up were present, and swept it left and right. Nothing. He flicked it up to full power and swept again. A small stray air-dropped antipersonnel device at the north-west end of the street, but otherwise nothing.

“You see that house over there, Emily?” he said, pointing across the road. The girl nodded. “Well, you’re not to go in there. There is an explosive device in there. A big one. It’ll kill you.”

Emily shook her head firmly. “It isn’t nearly as big as the one that took Claude.”

Mativi nodded. “But you say that device is still there.”

“Has been since I was very little.

Everyone knows it’s there. The grown-ups know it’s there. They used it when the slim hit, to get rid of the bodies, so we wouldn’t get sick. Sometimes,” she said, “before the bodies were entirely dead.”

“You can’t get slim from a dead body,” said Mativi.

“That’s what you say,” said Emily. And he knew she was right. So many generously altered genomes had been flying around Africa in warheads fifteen years ago that someone could have altered HIV and turned it into an airborne, rather than blood-borne, virus — like the rickettsial haemorrhagic fever that had wiped out all of Johannesburg’s blood banks in a single day and made social pariahs of blacks all over Europe and America overnight.

The sun dropped below the horizon like a guillotine blade, and it was suddenly night, as if someone had flicked a switch in heaven. Mativi had become too used to life off the Equator, had been working on the basis that night would steal up slowly as it had in Quebec and Patagonia. But the busy equatorial night had no time for twilight. He hadn’t brought night vision goggles. Had he brought a torch?

As they walked up the street, a wind gathered, as if the landscape sensed his unease.

“You have to be careful,” said the girl, “tread only where I tread. And you have to bend down.” She nodded at Mativi’s Kinshasa Rolex. “You have to leave your watch outside.”

Why? So one of your bacheque boyfriends can steal it while I’m in there? To satisfy the girl’s insistence, he slid the watch off his wrist and set it on a brick, but picked it up again when she wasn’t looking and dropped it into his pocket.

“Where are we going?” he said.

“In there,” she pointed. Half-buried in the rubble was a concrete lintel, one end of a substantial buried structure, through which the wind was whistling.

No. Correction. Out of which the wind was whistling.

She slipped under the lintel, on which was fixed a sign saying WARNING! EXTREME PERSONAL DANGER! The room beyond had once had skylights. Now, it had ruined holes in the roof, into which the geostationary UNPEFORCONG security moon poured prisms of reflected sunlight. Thirty-five thousand, nine hundred kilometres above Mativi’s head, he and five million other Kinshasans were being watched with 5,000 cameras. This had at first seemed an outrageous intrusion on his privacy, until he’d realized that he’d have to commit a thousand murders before any of the cameras was likely to catch him in the act.

“Don’t step any closer,” said the girl. “It will take you.”

The entrance had promised an interior like any other minor military strongpoint — only just large enough to contain a couple of hammocks and a machine gun, maybe. But inside, after only a few steps down, the room was huge, the size of a factory floor. They had entered via an engineer’s inspection catwalk close to the roof. He was not sure how far down the floor was.

The wind in here was deafening. The girl had to shout. “THERE IS MORE THAN ONE IN HERE. THEY LIVE IN THE MACHINES. THE GOVERNMENT MADE THE MACHINES, BUT NOT WITH TECHNICIANS AND ELECTRICIANS. WITH SORCERY.”