The Apocalypse Club (6 page)

I was a quiet, well-behaved kid most of the time. The standard narrative would be that everything was humming along just fine until my parents got divorced, but that doesn’t apply because they never did. The truth is that everything wasn’t fine, but I wasn’t getting arrested.

Not until I met Max Hernandez, anyway.

Maximillian T. Hernandez was diagnosed with brain cancer when he was nine years old. His mother, a private hedge fund manager, took her son to the best paediatric oncologist that her vast commissions could provide. He was her only son, and she had gone through 14 rounds of failed IVF treatments before he came along, so she wasn’t about to give in, at least not without a long and expensive fight. The identity of his father was never known. His mother had gone to a fertility clinic that engineered the genetic traits of approximately a thousand donors – all Nobel-prize winners, Rhodes scholars, star athletes, and so on – to generate one super embryo genetically predisposed to go on to great things (she later sued the clinic into bankruptcy for failing to properly screen for potential cancer indicators).

After six months of treatments and two surgeries, Max was declared cancer-free. That, however, wasn’t the only thing he was free of.

“I was nine years old and they told me I was gonna die,” he told me when I asked him about it later. “You know what the first thing that went through my head was? Does this mean I don’t have to take any more violin lessons? No more private tutors? No more pre-qualification placement tests? Shit, I actually felt good about that. I think that’s when I knew something was up.”

Both his mother and neurosurgeon blamed his subsequent behaviour shift on the operations, which had removed a total of 22 grams in suspicious growths from his prefrontal cortex, but that wasn’t it at all. Max had stared death in the eye and it had blinked. He felt invulnerable, superhuman. He had stuck his head up over the parapet, seen what was on the other side, and decided it was a lot more interesting than the small and carefully packaged life of approval and achievement that his mother was building on his behalf.

Playing the overture from
Don Giovanni
from his own privately owned space station in orbit around Mars after completing the first successful extra-terrestrial brain transplant? Hell no. These were the tiny aspirations of desperate approval-seekers. Max had grander ideas than that. Whether it was the cancer or not, he had come to believe that the world most people saw was an elaborate sham. Nothing, he believed, happened by accident. There was no conspiracy theory too elaborate for him to accept.

Not only were the markets, the courts, the media and the political establishment rigged – everything was rigged. He wasn’t a global warming denier, he thought it was being
engineered
. Why, he didn’t know, but he had a large number of theories. He had theories about everything. All of them essentially boiled down to one man sitting in a little room pulling the hidden strings that made the world dance to his particular tune.

Max had decided he wasn’t going to dance. He was going to be the one to tear it all down. He would live off the grid, plot in the shadows, and strike when he was ready.

If he sounds like kind of a terrorist, well, I guess he sort of was. He studied weaponry and survival techniques. He invented his own martial art, which he called Death Fist. He researched revolutionaries of the past to determine the factors that had made some successful and led to others being strung up by their own followers. He built his own all-weather improvised portable shelter and tested it under the harshest conditions he could. He made elaborate lists and compiled them into a manifesto explaining how he thought the world was organized and how a small band of well-organized rebels might begin to take it down.

The thing that made Max and I friends was the fact that he was so terrible at all that stuff.

He once “borrowed” a 3D printer from his mother’s office and used it to try to make an HT-562, the standard assault rifle used by GDI assault teams, using a pirated spec that he had found online. The spec must have been faulty, however, because the printer only managed to produce something that looked like a bent sump pump before shorting out and catching fire. We returned the scorched printer to his mother’s office without her suspecting our involvement, but after that, our pirated key card stopped working and we noticed that a new security system had been installed.

As far as I could tell, “Death Fist” was almost entirely stolen from a couple of pages Max had once glanced at in
The Tao of Jeet Kune Do
. He modified some of the more athletic moves to accommodate his relatively limited flexibility, often incorporating improvised weapons, like broomstick handles and kitchen knives. His relentless practice of this “new form of superhuman combat” lasted until the day he lost his balance while showing off for a girl named Hailey McCauley and accidentally stabbed himself through the foot. I drove him to the hospital on the back of my bike, where he was given four stitches, a tetanus shot, and some reasoned advice that he studiously ignored.

He was unable to find any revolutionaries who had not been killed or become (by his measure) corrupted by their own success, so he invented one. He even went so far as to write his final assignment for his Grade 10 history research paper on Cyanix Akilla, a brilliant second-century farmer who had risen up and brought down the Roman empire more or less single-handed. The paper was so incredibly well annotated that our poor history teacher, Mr. Glomer, had actually reached out to the British Library to see if they still had their copy of
The Rise and Rise of Cyanix
, which had supposedly been released to glowing reviews by Unsworth & Sons in the fall of 1904. Although none of his sources could be independently verified, Max still got a B minus. It was a compelling paper. And his footnotes really were some of the best-organized I had ever seen.

His improvised all-weather shelter was a two-man tent to which he had attached tin foil to the roof. The purpose of the foil was twofold: he believed it would provide additional insulation (it did not), and that it would deflect the radio waves of overhead spy satellites and drones (for accuracy’s sake, I must point out that this is unknown, but doubtful). He wanted to test the functionality of the tent by using it to camp out in the field behind his house in the middle of winter. I was not receptive to this idea in theory or execution.

His manifesto was a locked binder that he carried around with him at all times, occasionally opening it up to scribble thoughts, inspirational quotes, doodles of cool weapons he planned to design, and other related miscellany, usually during social studies, which he found to be “a tedious perpetuation of cultural myths” (a phrase that he had stolen from a study of comparative religions, but that seemed to apply just as well in a different context). Our teacher, Ms. Ruthelbaum, mostly left him alone. She had a son who had died of cancer at the age of four, and, knowing Max’s history, had cut him more than the usual amount of slack.

Since I wasn’t a revolutionary or a survival nut or a conspiracy theorist, you would be completely justified in wondering why it is that Max and I got along so well.

I guess what it boils down to is that we were both different. Neither of us was sporty, super-nerdy or all that academically inclined.

By the time I met him, he had already been “administratively discharged” from five other schools. Because of his mother’s financial clout, the reasons for his dismissals were kept secret, but by the time he worked his way down to Forest Meadow Middle School, he was already something of an underground legend. Kids whispered that he had been kicked out of his last school because he was running his own private fight club out of the staff room, right under the noses of the administration and PTA. Others said he had disappeared for six months to learn counterintelligence and body-disposal techniques from the same private security firm that ran secret CIA black sites. Rumours persisted that he had appropriated millions of dollars of his mother’s money to buy up secret underground warehouses full of guns and tanks. They said he was an evil genius and that the brain cancer was just a cover to implant super-intelligent nanomachines in his brain.

I don’t know if any of that was true, but it might as well have been to him. He was medically dead for five minutes during the second surgery. Whatever it was that he had experienced during that five minutes, it had totally changed his outlook on life. It was when he described that experience to doctors that the other side of it came out. The other side of it – the side that his mother had initially kept from him – was that they had not been able to get all of the cancer. Whatever he had seen was probably just part of a tumour-induced hallucination. These, they said, were not uncommon. As the tumour grew, it would become increasingly difficult for him to tell reality from fantasy. Optimistic estimates gave him six months. A year tops. He wasn’t going to waste it preparing for a future that wasn’t coming.

I had just moved, so Max and I were the two new kids in a class otherwise populated with the usual selection of thugs, weasels, pleasers, rat finks and skids. We were both small for our age (although Max grew out of that a lot faster than I did) and our names both started with M, so we bonded more or less immediately. I didn’t make fun of or ask about the scars that made the back of his head look like it was encased by a pair of pale white brackets where the hair refused to grow back. Other kids were not so circumspect. Dwayne Hilrhab, for example. Dwayne was a skid who aspired to be a thug. His family lived in a rundown townhouse development two blocks from the school. His mother was a recovering alcoholic and his father worked for a company that painted the centre lines on roads and highways. Every day, he would grab the back of Max’s head in the coat closet and yell: “I’m gonna take yer brain out, faggot!” Every day he laughed like this was not only a joke, but the first joke ever told in the history of humanity.

After about a week of this, we were sitting down to lunch when Max distracted Dwayne by suggesting that there was a topless woman in the parking lot and then sprinkled something on Dwayne’s processed nachos. Dwayne did not come back to school the next day. Or for the next two months. When he did return, he was using a cane and accompanied by a special educational assistant who emptied the green mucous from the plastic drain that snaked into both of his ears.

“Life is simple, Mark,” Max said one day as we huddled in the playground waiting for the bell to ring. “You want to do something, you do it.”

“But what about consequences?” I asked, thinking about Dwayne. This was about a month or so later and Dwayne was just starting to get the hang of getting through the alphabet without soaking himself in drool.

Max smiled enigmatically. “There are none. Trust me, I know.”

He was wrong about that, but it was good enough for me at the time. We had just moved away from downtown to a house in the suburbs and I was bored out of my tree. Suburbs tend to be named after whatever was knocked down or bulldozed over to make room for them. That’s why you wouldn’t find any trees or non-engineered land elevations in a place called “Forest Meadow Hills.” No amphibians or water in “Bullfrog Creek.” No former movie stars living on “Louis Gossett Jnr Boulevard” (the developer was a big fan of “Iron Eagle” and got city council to pass on it by making them think the name actually belonged to an Iraq war veteran).

Max had an elaborate theory that the Weather Network was a sinister cabal with thousands of geostationary satellites in orbit that they were using to control global weather as opposed to simply reporting on it. He believed that control of the weather was the key to control of the global economy. Subtle shifts in rainfall patterns from one agricultural zone to another could send the yield and thus the price of certain commodities skyrocketing or tumbling. A flood here, a drought there, a heat wave or extended cold snap – all of them could and were being used for massive financial and political gain.

“You only believe that because of that nutjob we ran into in the woods,” I said. This was in reference to an encounter we had when hiking near a cottage my parents had rented up north. That unusual meeting, I was convinced, was what had first dropped the idea in Max’s roiling brain.

“That guy made a lot of sense,” Max said.

“That guy was carrying a spear gun he claimed was designed to deter polar bears,” I pointed out. “The closest polar bears were about two thousand miles away.”

Max, however, disagreed.

The first step in smashing the HIG/GDI hegemony and establishing a radical new world order, as Max saw it, was to blow up the local weather monitoring station, an ordinary-looking concrete bunker of a building underneath a transmission tower near an industrial park on the north end of town. It seemed like a crazy idea to me, but since it looked like the building was empty and nobody would actually be hurt (and I didn’t think we would ever actually
do
it), I went along.

For a headquarters, we used the shipping and receiving area of an abandoned electroplating factory. The company who had owned the place had relocated to Mexico ten years before and the land around the place was so contaminated with toxic runoff that nobody was legally supposed to come within 200 yards of the place. It was perfect.

We cleared away the junk and Max made a list of what we needed:

• Money
  
• Transportation
  
• Weapons
  
• Explosives
  
• Women who were committed to the cause
  

I studied the list carefully. All of the items seemed equally fanciful, but one stood out a little more than the others. “Why do we need women?”

“We are men of action, Commander Simms,” Max said. We had decided that, since we were going to be co-leading the armed wing of a revolution, it was only appropriate that we grant ourselves some sort of appropriate rank. Not wanting to create tension by positioning one of us higher than the other, we settled on calling each other “commander.” I didn’t know enough about rank to know if “commander” was anything more than a term applied to whoever happened to be in charge of a particular group or if it was an actual rank in one of the various service branches, but it didn’t really matter. It wasn’t like I had any illusions about being in charge of anything. If we did recruit another person, I would probably have been in charge of them. Unless they had an actual skill, of course, in which case, I would not. Not that we had much chance of recruiting anyone like that. “But we are also men.”