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    Surviving the Apocalypse: Dystopias and Doomsdays
    Surviving the Apocalypse: Dystopias and Doomsdays
    Surviving the Apocalypse: Dystopias and Doomsdays
    Ebook257 pages4 hours

    Surviving the Apocalypse: Dystopias and Doomsdays

    By Barry Pomeroy

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    Surviving the Apocalypse is a short story collection which attempts to plumb both the depths of human depravity and our profound ability to overcome adversity.
    Some stories feature protagonists who have endured terrifying ordeals and still retain their humanity, while others show our ingenuity when we encounter a seemingly impossible obstacle. Four of the stories from this collection feature the four riders of the apocalypse as they ride on the wings of death, while others ponder the future of our technological prowess or shift us into the age of unpolished stone.
    These are stories about people we recognize faced with impossible choices and unenviable tasks. These thought experiments in solitude and resourcefulness show us how much of what we think of as humanity can be preserved when faced with the destruction of our world.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBarry Pomeroy
    Release dateFeb 1, 2015
    ISBN9780994038197
    Surviving the Apocalypse: Dystopias and Doomsdays
    Author

    Barry Pomeroy

    Barry Pomeroy is a Canadian novelist, short story writer, academic, essayist, travel writer, and editor. He is primarily interested in science fiction, speculative science fiction, dystopian and post-apocalyptic fiction, although he has also written travelogues, poetry, book-length academic treatments, and more literary novels. His other interests range from astrophysics to materials science, from child-rearing to construction, from cognitive therapy to paleoanthropology.

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      Book preview

      Surviving the Apocalypse - Barry Pomeroy

      Surviving the Apocalypse

      Dystopias and Doomsdays

      by

      Barry Pomeroy

      © 2014 by Barry Pomeroy

      All rights reserved. Copyright under Berne Copyright Convention, Universal Copyright Convention, and Pan-American Copyright Convention. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior permission of the author, although people generally do what they please.

      For more information about my books, go to barrypomeroy.com

      Stories from Surviving the Apocalypse have appeared in the following publications.

      I Have God to Thank for Everything You, Me, & a Bit of We Anthology. Chuffed Buff Books, 2012.

      The Bicycle The Extinction Files Anthology. Alter Press, 2012.

      First at the Dump Terminal Earth Anthology. Eugene, Oregon: Pound Lit Press, 2011.

      Doc Escape Velocity. Seattle: Adventure Books, 2011.

      Breaking Out of Sleep Theaker’s Quarterly Fiction. April, 2009.

      Table of Contents

      Introduction: The Easy Answer that is the Collapse of Society

      First at the Dump

      Doc

      The Signs

      The Grid

      Fighting Sanctuary

      The Light at the End of the Tunnel

      The Break-up Virus

      While We Play

      Dark Zone Experiment

      The Bicycle

      Breaking Out of Sleep

      The Most Important Discovery

      I Have God to Thank for Everything

      Hungry for Jesus

      A Career in the Military

      The Way to Eternal Life is Death

      Word of a Mother

      The Hills Family

      The Abandoned Village

      Surviving the Apocalypse is a short story collection which attempts to plumb both the depths of human depravity and our profound ability to overcome adversity.

      Some stories feature protagonists who have endured terrifying ordeals and still retain their humanity, while others show our ingenuity when we encounter a seemingly impossible obstacle. Four of the stories from this collection feature the four riders of the apocalypse as they ride on the wings of death, while others ponder the future of our technological prowess or shift us into the age of unpolished stone.

      These are stories about people we recognize faced with impossible choices and unenviable tasks. These thought experiments in solitude and resourcefulness show us how much of what we think of as humanity can be preserved when faced with the destruction of our world.

      Introduction: The Easy Answer that is the Collapse of Society

      When confronted by the almost inevitable disaster that global warming represents, when fearful about the build-up of toxins in the environment or in their bodies, when scanning the night skies for asteroids or malign alien intelligences, many people reach out eagerly for nuclear winter. World War III is going to come, they gratefully proclaim. None of this matters. This has the advantage of refocusing their fears as well as allowing them to fantasize there is a purpose to their mundane lives that will eventually add up to meaning.

      To understand the attraction of the easy answer—and I am as susceptible as anyone else to the desire for a vast, simple, resolution to the world’s woes—we need to more closely examine our lives and what they might become if our circumstances were different. So we need not leave our couch, we use stories and film to work out the implications of this disaster or that. We can embrace the silly fantasies of apocalyptic religious doctrine or cast about in our own neighbourhood for other ethnicities to blame. These stories allow us that guilty pleasure, where shooting a person, in the form of a zombie, is encouraged, where the last woman on earth will surely not reject us, the last man.

      Part of the reason we engage in this escapism is, understandably, to avoid the mundane nature of our lives. Traditionally, and history will bear me out, life has been a struggle. Granted, the recent placid complacence of a few people in the west—which is surely a short-lived instance in the historical record—seems to give lie to that statement, but we need to merely cast our eager eye further afield. After we turned away from the leisure of hunting and gathering societies and instead chose to inflict back-breaking labour upon our descendants by scraping in the dirt and accumulating wealth for the landowners, life has been arduous. Only slowly have we learned how to make oil and other fossil fuels work for us so that we might enjoy a few hours of leisure in the evening reading novels or watching TV.

      Everything comes at a price, however. Those same novels and TV have taught us to desire a denouement that jingling change at the till cannot supply. Unable to accept that our lives will either continue on the path to which they seem destined, or worse, might come to resemble those of our ancestors and visit upon us unending labour until we die, we dream of a novelistic end to our drab existence. Even at the risk of becoming a percentage point in the ninety-nine percent of the world’s population that will die of our dream virus, or suffer from the aftermath of our nuclear war, we prefer such an end to the quotidian tedium of our increasingly long-lived lives.

      The more disastrous the catastrophe, we are pleased to contemplate, the greater the lessening of population, the more resources for everyone, less toxins sprayed into our environment, and most of all, lots of cool stuff just laying around for the taking. Life will be fast, furious, and best of all, entertaining. We won’t have to go to work, to endure the jibes of coworkers and the innuendo of the boss. When the end comes, we tell ourselves, we’ll be free.

      As we continue our drab lives, grimace at the boss’ sarcastic wit and jostle at the grocery store, we rely increasingly on these fantasies of apocalypse to make our lives endurable. With that in mind, I have collected nineteen stories that both distract and provide a textual exit from which we can revision our world and our place in it.

      First at the Dump

      It wasn’t exactly a competition, but I’d been digging at the dump ever since I had been old enough to care about making a living, and more than me said I was pretty good at it. I’d pulled up bottles with drinks still in them, and paper books that could still be read. I had a nose for it, that’s what I told people, but I didn’t tell them where I got my nose.

      A lot of people said I got my gift for finding from Snave, the creepy old bastard who took credit for bringing me up until he came down with the sickness. It wasn’t from him, that’s for sure. It wasn’t from waking up more than once a week in the dark with Snave’s cold hands on me until I was old enough to beat them away. My mother took up with Snave after my father died. I don’t remember much about my dad, but I know Snave wasn’t an improvement.

      I found the old stuff because I had a secret technique. No one had noticed, but I didn’t eat before I started digging. I would get up early, when the grey lightened a bit, then I would sneak over the dirt floor, my shoes in my hand because one of the soles had come loose and had started to make noise at inconvenient times.

      Sometimes a crow would complain I’d woken them from a nasty crow dream, but the pit was usually quiet when I got there. The pit itself is just a long trench, where the best digging is, but if you have the knack there’s other stuff to be found. If I was alone, which in the morning the chances were pretty good, I would try to ignore the plastic blowing in the wind off the sea when the day lightened. I would concentrate instead on feeling the ground. I would close my eyes and picture hollows beneath me, mentally examine the lodes of treasure, and then put them aside until a piece would catch my mental eye. That’s where I would dig. And being hungry helped.

      If things had been dry for a while, I’d go without eating for longer. Once I starved for four days until I found a huge hunk of aluminium and some cans with food in them. My father used to say, sitting on the edge of the dump pit in the old days before it was as picked over as it is now, that if you dug long enough you could find one of everything in the world. You can find anything you imagine, boy, he told me, looking into the pit and his eyes far away. There’s stuff down there that even the people who threw it out didn’t know what it was. Stuff no one has a use for, and stuff people would kill you to get.

      Like what? I asked him at the time.

      I hope you never know. I hope you’re never that good a digger, that you dig up your own death.

      My father wasn’t the best digger. He was steady and careful. My mother told me how he’d pull up a bag, and before tearing it open, like others would, he’d shake it, and then find the tie that held it closed. Many’s the time that he shook out delicate stuff someone else would have broke, my mother told me, pointing to the shelf over the fire that held things that had been precious once. As a kid I’d looked at the fragile fingers of the porcelain hand, its missing central finger obscured by the silk flower my dad had found and inserted into the stump. We had porcelain dogs and glass cups, too nice for use, until Snave broke them all drinking his rotten stump swish.

      I never really planned to be a digger like my dad. I was going to be a fisherman, like Frank. Except better. I was hoping to build a boat, like those I’d seen in pictures in the dump books. Frank knew better than me that we didn’t have enough wood on the island for a boat, and we never pulled up anything from the dump that could be used to make one, but it was a long time before I gave up my dream. Finally, I became a digger like my dad.

      I probably would’ve stayed a digger, if I wasn’t such a good finder. Or if I had eaten more, I’d probably be on the island right now, together with Lyne from two houses over and raising diggers like everyone before me. But I never even approached Lyne. I figured I needed to raise something spectacular, something that would bend even her iron dad, Mel, to my approval. Then I could sit with her on the rocks near the shore and pull her hand to mine.

      But I was a good finder, and there’s no point to lament that now, especially given how everything’s turned out.

      The thing I found was dissatisfaction. That’s what Preacher Evans called it. He’s found his way to the dump of hell, he told everyone he could force to listen to him, he was so angry about it.

      Usually we’d dig up plastic bags with what might have been food decades before, and scraps of plastic and metal that we’d look over and then either stockpile or burn. There was always lots of cardboard, and we kept any wood for Mel. He said he was going to build something, but everyone had the things they kept and wood was his. He’d made a shed out of what could be spared from building other houses, and there he kept scraps too small for burning, although my dad had teased pieces away from Mel to make into something just with a knife and some energy.

      Dad liked delicate stuff like the porcelain on our shelf and Osborne liked machines. He was going to build a machine to get us off the island, but as far as anyone saw, he just piled.

      Preacher Evans didn’t like the digging. He claimed that only god was worth digging, although he would be right in there demanding what food had been brought up and which none of us younger ones had ever tasted.

      I hadn’t really developed my own taste, and one morning, I pulled up the package.

      Everything from the dump has a look that you learn to recognize. There’s stuff that no one liked even when it was new, like an iron dog with a movable tail, or a wooden woman whose legs move apart and together again. Those items are never worn, like many of the fancier kids toys which are broken and smooth-edged with playing. Most metals are rusted into machines that I bet even the maker couldn’t recognize, and most shiny pieces of bright glass beckoning from the mud prove to be broken and dull.

      Only occasionally would we find something sealed. Tin cans contained foodstuffs that in some cases were still edible, even after the intervening years meant that such foods didn’t exist anymore. Some toys were still in unyielding plastic, soaked from ground moisture, but otherwise perfect, as though they’d been thrown away hours before, when the kids with too much to do had grown tired. Crazy Cara, as we called her, found a case of knives, thin and brittle though they were, still in a plastic and cardboard case. The lettering on the cardboard had long since faded, but every house got a knife from the Cara find.

      Although we tried not to think badly about the people who threw away what we ended up digging, it was hard sometimes, when we cried to uncover the wealth they had discarded.

      On my last day of digging I got up early, for it had been five days of finding nothing beyond a few pieces of plastic for the fire and a re-sealable bottle that I still have with me. My mother had begun to comment that I’d lost my gift, and people wiggled their knife blades at me, signifying that I was carrying bad luck and they were hoping it wouldn’t jump to them. I decided to fast. I was beginning to worry that my skills were gone and that I’d have to make do with junk like the rest of them.

      When I arrived at the pit, Cara was already there scrabbling around. I ignored her. I would have anyway, for she was prone to following if you gave her attention, and that would throw off my concentration. My mother said that Cara had been bit by the wrong bug, but I blamed her mumbling ways on her age, for Cara was the oldest amongst us after Zemro had died. She had to be over fifty, and bent over like she was dead already.

      I went away from Cara to the far side of the pit and began to feel with my feet and my head the ground beneath me. I reached under, pulled up lumps of clay and rocks and meaningless metal shapes. The gift was gone.

      I was making my third pass of the section I’d mentally staked off when Cara approached me. With my eyes closed I couldn’t see her come, but I could feel the impress of her feet on the ground. You’re digging early?

      Her voice grated like gravel in the cold air. Today is the day. I’d learned that if I was cryptic with Cara she might leave.

      The day to find nothing, Cara stomped her foot.

      The sound of her foot bounced off my mental image of the ground. As the vibration came to me, I knew I’d found it. I kept my face shut, but Cara could tell. What is it? She stamped her foot again, as if that would make me answer. Down deep, so far I could barely extend my mind’s fingers, an image came. It wasn’t flesh, which was just as well, for bodies pulled from the dump are horrifying incomplete. It was a reverberation, a thrum of tension.

      I went over to the pit and grabbed one of the shovels and went back to where a piece of plastic bag kept my place.

      You’ve smelled something, haven’t you? Cara was no more than an arm’s length away and I could smell her. You’ve found the big one.

      Sometimes at the pit, when the grey day turned sour with cold, we talked about the big one. It kept us warm, and for some of the younger kids, it gave them hope. They could summon the energy to dig, especially if they thought a toy lay at the bottom, but they hated drudgery. I never talked about the big one, although it lay buried in my dreams just like anyone else’s.

      I doubt it’s anything, I said. Bad luck followed excitement about a find, especially when it was still covered in dirt. But I’ll just do some digging, limber up my arms. I made a show of morning stiffness, but Cara’s sharp eyes weren’t fooled. She watched me dig through the brown surface layer, then the grey clay that lay a foot deep everywhere on the island, and then into the black mud that hid the treasures of the past.

      I was still digging, my muscles loosened by the pile of mud beside the hole, when the rest of the houses emptied their contents into the dump. Mel came with his daughter Lyne, and Frank limped by on his way to fish and stayed, keeping an eye on his son Eddy, who wasn’t smart and couldn’t be left alone but was a champion digger. He hopped into the hole with me until I got so deep that there was only room for one. Then I called out above, and lifted him until he could get his purchase on the sloping sides.

      Frank lowered the bucket on a yellow plastic rope that represented one of my luckier finds. I filled the bucket and hefted it to him so he could dump it out of the way. Mel and Lyne began pulling dirt away from the crater until the light could get down to me without slanting past the heap. In their excitement everyone was calling out advice, although they stopped respectfully when I asked for quiet to seek out what I’d heard. I’d received no signs since I’d started digging, but I figured the find had gone into hiding. They did that sometimes. I imagined a bottle full of sweet brown drink once, only to dig in three different spots when it became suddenly shy of the open air.

      Wait, I called up. I wasn’t above a bit of grandstanding when I had an audience. I have to smell for it.

      That’s what Snave taught him, I heard Frank say.

      Bullshit, I muttered to myself. I’d argued with them before, but each person clung to their own theories like food and drink. I wagged my head and pretended my anger was part of a complex ritual.

      Snave didn’t teach him shit. My mother had joined the others and, far over my head, she argued how I could sense hollows in the ground. His father had a bit of a nose.

      I heard Mel’s good-natured joke about my father’s face from far away as though I was drowning. I was further into the mud than I’d ever been and I felt the weight of it over me. For the first time I became a lode of an object underground myself. I stopped breathing for a moment and felt faint. You okay down there? Lyne called, and I breathed again.

      I’m fine. It’s just this is a big one. With Lyne as my audience, I couldn’t resist bragging. When I finally uncovered the package, most people were gone from the hole. In their sensitive way, they feared I’d overreached myself and, afraid of coming up empty, I was going to dig to sea water like the legend of Dan the dump digger. They had left to their own business, Frank to the sea to try his luck with fish, and Mel and Lyne to the beach to see what might have washed up. But I still had my mother, faithfully lowering buckets, and Cara, waiting like

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