Apocalypse Machine (27 page)

She could feel its vibrating chortle, rumbling through her chest.

The creature’s hot, wet breath burned the back of her neck and carried the scent of human blood into her nose with each inhalation.

She swatted the flat of her blade against several Kapok tree roots as she ran past. The creatures didn’t flinch at the resounding booms, but they weren’t intended to.

When she heard a pattern beat out in reply, she wondered how the others had reached her so quickly. Then she saw Rapau in the trees above, running toward her, leading the charge.

“There are four,” she cried out. “One on my left. One at my back. Two at my right.”

“We are near!” came the reply. It was Pacon, the lead hunter. And the ‘we’ he spoke of would be the rest of the hunters. All thirty-seven of them. She grinned, and when Pacon shouted, “Down!” she obeyed.

Kaba launched herself onto the leaf-littered jungle floor, just as thirty hunters sprang from the jungle ahead of her, launching arrows, spears and darts. The creatures, suddenly impaled and outnumbered, slid to a halt, barking and snapping their jaws. When the largest of them took an iron-bladed spear tip to the throat and toppled over, the others turned tail and fled back into the jungle.

Pacon offered Kaba his hand, pulling her back to her feet. They stared down at the creature together.

“What is it?” Pacon asked.

Kaba wasn’t sure. Her husband had mentioned the great monster destroying the outside world, but he had never mentioned anything like this. No matter what it was, Kaba knew better than to turn down the jungle’s offering. She grinned at Pacon and said, “Lunch.”

29

Lopez

There is nowhere more remote on planet Earth than the middle of the Pacific Ocean. So when the end of all things reared its ugly head, Captain Aurelio Lopez left San Diego behind and headed out to sea, planning to live off the ocean’s bounty and ride out the world’s end—including the massive waves rolling across the oceans. He stocked the hold with supplies, and with no loved ones to bid farewell, and no crew he trusted well enough to bring along, he struck out alone, early one morning.

While the world fell apart, he sailed northwest into the open ocean, stopping once the North American western coast, the Alaskan southern coast and Hawaiian northern coast were all equal distances away. His only company were the whales, sharks and fish that seemed drawn to the hundred-foot-long maroon hull of his fishing vessel, the
Red Sky
. It was as if they knew life on Earth was dying on a vast scale, and they were banding together, drawing comfort from each other, and from his ship, all the while eating one another.

Over a period of weeks, Lopez collected large patches of floating debris—parts of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. The floating mounds of trash, bound together by fishing nets and coils of rope and seaweed, expanded the shadow cast by the Red Sky, which in turn increased the amount of sea life taking refuge beneath it. He was securing his future by turning his ship into a floating island, all the while keeping the stern clear so he could move and steer, should the need arise.

When the first of many waves arrived, he knew he had made the right choice. It rose beneath the Red Sky, lifting the vessel and his island high into the sky. It slid over the broad, arching top of the wave and back into calmer waters. It had been like surfing over a mountain that stretched from one horizon to the other. Even from the top, several hundred feet in the air, he could see no end. The wave left as quickly as it had arrived, racing east for California. It didn’t take much imagination to know what kind of destruction the wave would unleash on the densely populated coast. The wave’s cause wasn’t a mystery, either. The monster that had risen from Iceland and stormed across Europe, had reached the Pacific, and it was headed for North America.

In the months that followed, Lopez expanded the island, binding the garbage so tight that he could walk across it. He left holes in the surface through which he could fish. He ate, and he grew his kingdom. He survived. But he had also made a tragic mistake. Every day that passed, alone under the blazing sky and star-filled nights, he grew more and more lonely.

So when the first ship—a yacht—arrived, its seven Japanese occupants nearly out of food, he welcomed them with a bright smile, feeding them and providing water from the small pond he’d built in the trash island. The sailboat was tied into the floating mass, and once again, the island grew. Since the Japanese couldn’t speak Spanish and knew only limited English, communication was reduced to hand gestures while they learned each other’s languages. The first word Lopez taught them was ‘Captain,’ and that he was it.

As more months passed, more stragglers arrived, one ship, boat and yacht at a time, each one becoming a new way station on an interconnected mass of trash and ships that could rise and fall with the waves, no matter how vast. They picked up vessels and crew from New Zealand, China, Russia, Fiji, Hawaii, and the mainland United States—all people who thought to flee to the open ocean before the waves came. Within two years, their community had grown to a hundred. They collected rain water, and syphoned it from the humid air itself. Fish were abundant. Colonies of edible seaweed grew from the fringe of the expanding six-acre garbage and boat patch, which Lopez had deemed the Red Sky Flotilla.

It seemed they would not just weather the end of the world, but they would flourish through it.

Until it found them.

The wave came first, more powerful than any they had experienced before. They lost two ships recently connected to the flotilla, but no people. Lopez realized too late the wave’s power came from the fact that the monster was headed straight for them. It arrived early the next morning, its spines cutting through the ocean like mile-high dorsal fins. And they sliced the flotilla in half, destroying ships and years of work.

Thirty-seven people were lost, some killed by the creature’s passing, some lost at sea and drowned and others consumed by the sharks that had made their home beneath the floating island.

But Lopez rallied his people. Using small boats, they brought the severed halves of the island together, closing a miles-wide gap that had formed. They fought for their homes, against the monster and the elements, and eventually, they won. Lopez was revered by the people. He married a Russian woman. He had a son.

And then, the world changed again.

Floating organic debris left in the creature’s wake clung to the flotilla’s edges, growing spindly white tendrils. They attempted to tear it away, but it spread too fast, moving beneath the water, filling in the cracks. After a year of this strange growth, the flotilla was stronger than ever, bound by living roots. New life grew up from the trash, lush, green and soft underfoot. He could almost feel it pumping out fresh oxygen. Soon, Red Sky was growing on its own, expanding miles, bulging with terrain, all of it rising and falling with the waves, and all of it kept at the Pacific’s core by the same cyclical currents that helped form the original garbage patch.

That was the beginning of a new prosperous life, and in the many years since, Red Sky had grown into a small town of three hundred forty-seven souls. They lived like a commune, with each person doing their share of the work and reaping their share of the reward. No one went hungry or starved. Crops,
actual crops
, grew on the spongy terrain, which was moist with fresh water. The white roots dangling hundreds of feet down sucked up the water and filtered out the salt, forming a small lake at the island’s core, partially submerging the original Red Sky vessel.

There had been threats to their colony in the past, rising from the ocean. Strange beasts with bulging eyes. But the sea life around them, who now called the island home, reacted to the new creatures’ arrival with territorial aggressiveness. And those too large to be chased away were trapped by the island’s roots. At first, Lopez thought the creatures, some fifty feet long, were getting trapped in the twisting system of roots the way dolphins used to find themselves coiled in his fishing nets. But then he saw it for himself, watching through a fishing hole one day. While all of the fish and sharks, and other new species of smaller ocean dwellers, swam in and around the roots, they never came into contact with them. When the larger creatures tried to swim beneath the island, the roots reacted to their touch, wrapping around the large bodies and paralyzing them, and then slowly consuming them.

The island wasn’t just growing, it was
alive
.

A new symbiotic world.

So when Lopez woke to the jarring sound of a fog horn, it took him a few confused moments to remember what the sound indicated.

It was a warning.

They were under attack.

He stumbled from his cabin below-deck on a yacht they had collected five years previous, its occupants long dead. The boat was now fully enveloped by the island, a half mile from the coast. “Stay inside,” he said to his wife and five year old son. “Don’t come out until I get you.”

The early morning sun was just over the eastern horizon, casting the sky in a violet hue. Lopez looked to the coast beyond his home. There were a dozen more vessels between them and the shore, but they were close enough that something large could pose a threat. He saw nothing there. Aside from other members of the Red Sky clan emerging from their homes, armed for a fight, he saw nothing. No threat.

If someone sounded a false alarm...

He heard shouting in the distance and headed for it. The voices came from the far side of a cargo ship. It was small by cargo ship standards, but the largest vessel on the island, and it had brought them many amenities and supplies, not to mention several tons of plastic and rubber goods that had been adapted for life at sea. Ping pong balls became fishing bobbers. Toys became bait. And tire tubes became floatation devices and buoys.

The raised voices echoed off of the metal hull, urgent and afraid.

Lopez rounded the bow, spear in hand, with a dozen men now behind him.

“Captain,” Pietro, the Russian who was on watch, shouted. “They took Harry.”

Lopez noted the crazed, fearful look in Pietro’s eyes. He had been with Lopez for eight years, and he had seen and survived some horrible things. But the man was terrified. And Harry, a large Hawaiian man, could not have been carried off by anything small. Lopez searched the land around them, looking for something still dragging the man back to the sea, but he saw nothing. He looked to the nearby fishing holes, but the water was calm.

“Where did they go?” Lopez asked.

“Go?” Pietro asked, sounding bewildered. “They have yet to leave.”

That was when Lopez noticed the pale Russian was looking
up
.

At the sky.

Lopez craned his head up and saw them right away. They looked like manta rays, with broad, undulating, fleshy wings, and sacks of flesh on their backs propelled them like breathing jets, sucking in air and then squeezing it out. There were six of the creatures, circling like vultures. And one of them held a man in its jaws, revealing the truth behind Pietro’s story and the creatures’ size—at least fifteen feet long, with a thirty foot wing span. Lopez didn’t see any limbs on the creatures, but he soon understood why. When the flying ray carrying Harry passed the shoreline, it dove down and plunged into the ocean.

“Get everyone inside!” Lopez shouted to Pietro. The Russian wasted no time climbing back into the cargo ship. He’d be safe behind its metal walls. And with its fog horn, he could signal the entire colony to stay indoors.

“The rest of you, come with me!” Spear in hand, Lopez ran out into the open.

A handful of the men followed him, less sure, but loyal. The rest remained hidden in the cargo ship’s shadow.

“Captain,” Jones said, “we can’t possibly hope to fight creatures that big.” Jones was a skinny man. A hell of a fisherman and cook, but not a fighter. He was also right.

“I don’t intend to fight them,” Lopez said, watching the skies, waiting for the creatures to notice them. “Not all of them.” He held his spear at the ready. The five-foot metal rod, tipped with a razor sharp harpoon, could slay a whale if thrown with enough force. It would work on the flying monsters, too, if he could hit one. “Aim for the first of them that comes. Wait for my signal. Then throw.”

“To what purpose?” Kai asked. He was a Korean man and one of their most skilled hunters, taking down mammalian sea creatures when the colony felt the need for red meat.

The fog horn let out three quick blasts, warning everyone to stay inside, and giving Lopez time to consider his answer.

He had a secret. He’d kept it from everyone. Mostly because he didn’t want his wife to worry, but also because he wasn’t entirely sure how the others would react. Fear of the island on which they lived helped keep everyone in order. He’d been fishing, alone, when something large and deep caught him sleeping and pulled him into the fishing hole. He had plunged thirty feet down before he’d fully understood what had been happening and let go of the rod. That was also the moment he’d become tangled in the long white tendrils dangling beneath the island. He had seen them before, from a distance when diving off a boat, but he had never been so close, and he had certainly never touched them.

The roots meant certain death.

Only, they didn’t.

Not only did the coiling tendrils not kill and consume him, they had held him in place for a moment, twisting around his body, gently, almost like a caress. The moment was almost intimate, and he’d returned the roots’ affection, rubbing his hand over the undulating vines. They then had lifted him back to the surface, sinking down again only after he was safe, back on shore.

He wasn’t certain what the colony offered the living roots—nutrients from their waste, a habitat to cling to, company—but they weren’t just carnivorous plants. They were intelligent. They were protectors. And he needed their help now.