Brian Steele - 4POCALYPSE - Four Tales of a Dark Future

On a warm and sunny winter day we all gathered in the old prison exercise yard, where maggot puree was given to everyone. It was mixed with water and rose hips; there were roses growing wild everywhere, and rose hips are loaded with vitamins and minerals. Watching the smaller children grimace and force that gunk down was a hoot.

It was a pleasant get together. There were artichokes and figs growing wild, and we nibbled on them with some fish that had been baked indoors, the smoke from a brick oven carefully disbursed as it was vented, so it could not be seen.

We even immunized Randall’s dog Clyde, and the gray and white cat that had adopted Renfield.

Renfield named the cat Skyhook. The cat was eating better than any of us. There were a lot of mice on Alcatraz.

I heard one of the teenagers, the girl named Annie, singing on the far side of our group. She was usually quite timid; seeing and hearing her sing so freely was a pleasant surprise. I saw Benjamin looking at her too, and saw Marisol watching Ben. Annie was coming into the kind of curves that you knew would cause a lot of heartbreak and trouble down the road. I smiled. It was good to see that some things hadn’t changed.

Annie was singing American Pie, her voice lilting and strong. For a moment I wondered if I would ever hear recorded music again, at least the stuff I like. This country had a lot of rebuilding ahead. Whatever music we had on the island existed on a few phones and MP3 players, and most of them had dead batteries and no chargers.

As I sat down on the edge of a salt-eroded wall and enjoyed Annie’s impromptu performance, a feeling of peacefulness swept over me. It had been a long time coming and might not last, but it had been earned hard and I was savoring it.

And then Rose Lubitsch had her baby.

Rose’s water broke and a moment later she was having serious contractions, as if the baby was a runaway train that was coming out right now, no matter what.

The smaller kids were taken inside and Rose was taken to the old Chapel, which was our makeshift hospital.

She was only in labor an hour. Randall assisted, after telling the Doctor he had helped deliver two other babies. I watched from the far side of the room, once again wondering who the hell Randall was and what he had done before everything fell apart. Randall was as close-lipped as ever and never talked about himself.

Dr. Anders took us aside and said the baby was underweight but should be able to survive, and she gave me a list of medications to add to the WANT list.

“That little girl has two teeth already,” Anders said, explaining that it was rare, but not unheard of.

Rose was sitting up on a bed made of crates and old mattresses. She was holding the baby close, and shifted it to one breast. The baby began to suck. Then it began to bite. Then Rose began to scream.

The Doctor took a step toward them and I held her back. I nodded to Randall, who stepped away from up, drawing the Glock that he wore constantly.

Rose staggered to her feet, dropping the baby onto the old floorboards. She shook her head and began to grin. The baby was grinning as well.

I all but dragged the Doctor out of the hospital as Randall went about his grim business.

The Doctor theorized later that Rose had not become infected when Montagne had assaulted her, yet the baby had. Somehow. Somehow.

Something in the placenta had prevented the infection, the parasites, from spreading into Rose’s body. But when the baby had been born and bit her, Rose became infected like so many others.

It was when we were digging our first graves that I realized Alcatraz could not, would not be our home. It was a safe harbor, but it was only a temporary one.

A month later, after two aborted supply runs to Sausalito and one successful one, the smiler sickness fought back once again… in a way none of us could have ever imagined.

It was an eagle-eyed and energetic little boy named Johnny Sin who saw it first, the writer in me thinking a name like that could only exist in a book. Johnny was one of only three survivors from San Francisco’s Chinatown. He was up on the water tower when he saw something floating on the bay. It was east of us, moving out to sea with the current, moving toward Alcatraz.

We had three pairs of binoculars now, one of them quite powerful. We all took turns looking at the blob, the mass, that distant dark pink something that was floating on the water.

It didn’t bob up and down on the waves, it was too big for that. It rode over the waves, bending and shifting but never coming apart.

“It’s about sixty feet across,” Randall said, handing the binoculars to Dr. Anders. “Damned if I know what it is though.”

The Doctor took a look. She lowered the binoculars and glared at me as if this was some sort of practical joke. Then she looked again.

“I see… tissue,” she said.

There was a crowd of us now, people standing near the boat dock and shielding their eyes from the midday sun as they stared into the Bay.

I looked at Randall. “Get one of the drums,” I said. I was referring to the drums of diesel fuel we had stored away, fuel that helped power the generators when there was heavy cloud cover and solar power didn’t cut it.

Randall left without a word.

I had no idea what was floating toward us and with luck it would swing north of the island on its way to the Pacific, but the Doctor looked unsettled, and scared. That was enough for me.

I began issuing assignments and was relieved by the quick response, as we had drilled for emergencies even here, on our island sanctuary. I sent some people to gather the children together in the safety of the cellblock. I had some people begin setting aside go bags.

When the dock has cleared, I asked Dr. Anders what was out there.

She took another look through the binoculars, and told me what she was seeing.

“I see a mass. A contorted, impossible mass. I see flesh, I see muscle. I see healing scar tissue. I see… “

Randall came down the ramp to the dock with a drum of diesel on a handcart. He also had a cardboard case full of glass bottles.

We had trained for this as well. We had guns, and thanks to Randall, we also had a way of making very simple explosives. The bottles contained a mixture of gasoline and diesel, ignited by a burning rag that was stopper and wick; classic Molotov cocktails.

I was thankful that it was a clear day. If the island had been socked in by fog we might not have seen the floating mass until far too late.

“It’s a biomass,” Anders said. “I see expanses of flesh. I see parts of organs, and muscle tissue, and bone arranged in a support structure—”

The Doctor stepped back abruptly, still looking through the binoculars, her mouth open in horror.

Using less powerful binoculars I also looked at that mass floating on the water and realized it had come on a fitting day. It was the end of October. Halloween.

“My God… It’s breathing, ” the Doctor said. She gave me a pleading look; make it go away.

Randall looked at it again through the third pair of binoculars. “Clever,” he said, in a matter-of-fact tone, as if the biomass which grew more disturbing as it drew closer was something he saw every day. “Whatever that is, it’s using exhaled air for propulsion.”

I looked again. Now I could see manhole sized apertures set in a ring on top of the mass. They opened in unison, and then closed, and the mass seemed to swell. The mass settled and a surge of air came out of the furthest end of the mass, leaving behind a white wake. Then the apertures opened again, repeating the cycle.

I also saw patches of what could be fur from a cat or dog. Caucasian skin. Asian and African-American skin. Plates of white bone like armor. Swatches of hair and tufts that looked like feathers. And eyes. That mass was studded with hundreds of blinking eyes.