Tails of the Apocalypse (33 page)

“Think about what you’re doing here, Bongse,” Vic cried out. “We cannot behave this way and expect to survive our—”

“The decision has been made, Vic,” Bongse replied coldly. “The majority agree that we have no choice.”

“What? I didn’t hear a vote! There must be an alternative to murdering them with no provocation!”

“
Enough
, Vic! It is done.”

For several long moments, no one made a sound. The pervasive quiet was eerie and uncomfortable in the wake of Bongse’s pronouncement. Finally, the silence was broken as Budgies and Bats alike took wing to do his bidding and carry out the attack. Amidst the flurry of activity, a minority began once again to argue against the Bat Elder’s final solution to the Human problem. But it was too little too late.

Paralyzed by the chaos around them, Vic and Kal, the Younglings on the council, faced a difficult choice. Should they choose to speak out further against Bongse, they could be exiled from their respective colonies. At the very least, they would likely lose their positions on the council and be shamed, with derision and scorn heaped upon them, should they choose to stay. Seeing no real chance to dissuade their species from their murderous course, Vic, Via, Kal, and Tal raced to the Human settlement to try to warn them.

But by the time the Younglings arrived the Humans were already dead. The Human elders had clearly died protecting the young as wave after wave of Bats and Budgies flew sorties over their small camp, first pelting them with sticks, stones, and shells from above before ripping them apart with beaks and claws and teeth. They’d had no chance to retreat to their cave for protection. In the end, their pitted flesh and broken bodies would lie unburied in the sun, their lives forgotten by all but the few who’d shunned the slaughter.

When it was all over, when the attack was finally halted and the victory celebration by most had begun, the Younglings made a decision regarding their future with the colonies. Vic and Via, Kal and Tal, and less than a hundred others of both species requested an audience with the council Elders.

Though he dreaded it, Vic began the conversation that would change their lives forever.

“Council Elders Bongse, Magsay, Hettie, and Max. As you know, we council Younglings were opposed, for the most part, to your decision to eradicate the Humans. We feel that, with a little more consideration and a little more time, we could have found a better alternative, some other way to ensure the safety of the colonies. We feel that you acted just as the Humans of old would have. And by doing so, you’ve proven they were not the only creatures on this planet who are selfish and greedy, malicious and murderous.

“Your actions, whether you realize it or not, have doomed these colonies to collapse. You’ve planted the seeds of hatred within your own colonists, and before long these seeds will no doubt spring forth to kill all that you see, all that you now hold dear. The very thing you were so afraid of in Humans has now taken root in our own society—and that’s your doing. You have become the very thing you so feared and despised.

“I am ashamed—I am mortified—to have witnessed your act of barbarism against the Humans. I cannot be a member of a society that sanctions such slaughter. So it’s with a heavy heart that I must hereby resign from my position on the council. Kal also offers his resignation. We, along with the others in the colonies who agree with us, will depart immediately to begin our own colonies as far away from this tragedy as possible.”

The council Elders gaped, speechless, as Vic exited the meeting chamber followed by his sister, Kal, Tal, and the Bats and Budgies who would leave with them. None, not even the firebrand Bongse, could utter a word as they left.

Max seemed sad but resigned to Vic’s words. He knew them to be true. And a similar light of understanding was dawning on the faces of Magsay and Hettie. Understanding and loss. And a deep sense of mourning.

At daybreak the next day, the hundred or so new colonists began their journey to a new land and a new life. The Budgies would fly by day and the Bats would fly by night, each group meeting at sunset and sunrise to further plan their travels until they found a suitable place to settle down and begin life anew.

I’m best known for my work as an editor who specializes in assisting independently publishing authors. I’m also known as the senior editor at Imajin Books, a small Canadian publisher, whose books are widely read and enjoyed around the world. All told, I’ve worked on more than 200 books in my career as an editor. I’m also the owner and publisher of
Auspicious Apparatus Press
, which produces quality fiction in ebook, paperback, and audiobook formats.

I’m a frequent contributor to Anne Rice’s official Facebook page and have been dubbed by Anne as a Pillar of the Page—one who frequently contributes content considered worthwhile by Anne.

I live in Davao City, Philippines, with my wife and four lovely little Budgie birds—Max, Charlie, Bleu, and Sandy. “Wings of Paradise” is my first published short story.

They told us we didn’t need to be afraid
of the Russians anymore. They told us that they were our friends. What that meant was that we neutralized each other. Mutually assured destruction. That’s not the same as friendship.

We weren’t meant to worry when they annexed the Ukraine, they said. That was just reclaiming what was already theirs. Most of the Crimea was still Russian in their hearts, if not their passports. That’s what they told us. They made excuses when the missiles first launched into Syria, a scorched-earth policy meant to burn the land and ISIS with it. Or IS or ISIL or whatever we called the terrorists back then.

Most of us just believed what we were told. The Russians were the greatest threat we’d ever faced. They were the scourge of the East. They were the root of all Evil—capital E evil, not the small stuff—but we weren’t meant to worry because our friends were on the case. Their missiles and bombs and guns would cleanse the world, and we’d line the streets and cheer when our boys came home from the front as heroes.

That’s what they told us.

Pity is, it was all a pack of lies.

I don’t remember when it all started to unravel. Maybe there wasn’t a single defining moment. We like to think of things in neat terms. We look for a tipping point, an Archduke Ferdinand moment, but sometimes life—and especially death—just aren’t that clean.

I’m part of an older generation. We were brought up knowing our enemies were big things with little names: diseases like AIDS and HIV, superflus and flesh-eating bacteria. We knew we were destroying the world with our CFCs and polluting it by burning fossil fuels. But we were selfish. We wanted to drive our Escalades and our muscle cars and didn’t give a crap about our carbon footprint. We were here, this was our world, our one life, and we’d damn well live it the way we wanted to.

And then the Russians changed everything.

It was hard to believe that some craggy-faced vodka drinker could actually do it—lean forward and press the button. But he did. It probably wasn’t how I imagine it. The end of the world seldom is.

I like to imagine him knowing exactly what he was doing, lining up some ridiculously expensive Cohiba cigar and a bottle of Stoli, a well-thumbed copy of
Das Kapital
beside them, the holy trinity for a Russian patriot. I can imagine him clipping off the end of the cigar and sucking in the smoke, puff-puff-puff, followed by a long exhalation as smoke rings drifted up in front of his face. Then he washes the taste out of his mouth with one last, perfect shot of vodka and turns to a passage in the good book that brings him comfort. Because it’s a big thing, ending the world. The act needs a certain resigned serenity to it, a certain ritual. I don’t want to think about power brokers in a nuclear bunker arguing about times to detonation, viable targets, and strategic strikes. I guess I want to believe it was a better world back then.

I know it isn’t a better world now.

I was one of the lucky few. Or the unlucky few, depending upon your perspective. I was airborne on a 747 flying from Munich to London. Going home. Only, it turned out, there was no home to go to. We watched the clouds rise like fungus from the earth, the nuclear winds battering the hull, forcing the pilot to rise higher. The shockwaves came again and again like tidal surges. Of the 418 passengers, 197 didn’t want to land. They argued it would be better to fly until the fuel ran out and hope the plane came down in the ocean because that was a fast death. That way we’d not have to watch what had happened to the world. Two hundred and twenty-one people refused to give up hope. Two hundred and twenty-one people damned everyone on Flight BA949.

We didn’t land at Heathrow like we were supposed to. The pilot took us north, banking up towards the Highlands of Scotland. We didn’t understand why he did that at first, but the Scots built their roads to function as emergency runways. So we could land on a remote strip well out of any city, away from the radiation and the sickness that threatened. We didn’t think about stuff like altitude and the cold or how tough it would be to scavenge food when our new world was frozen. We just wanted to hide from the worst of the destruction.

Of course, we’d have to go into the cities eventually. We had a full roster of passengers, some with brilliant minds, others not so sharp. There were engineers, musicians, teachers, salesmen, you name it—the entire spectrum of knowledge was represented, thousands of years at the best schools in the world amassed between us. And no one could agree how long we’d have to wait before it’d be safe to venture into what had been civilization.

As we went into that first night, it was hard to believe that the sun would still rise the next day. But it did.

Some of us didn’t make it through the first week. We’d lost fourteen people by the end of the first month. I think it was the reality of life in a post-nuclear world that killed them. All the things we’d taken for granted, those precious status symbols we’d paid over-the-top prices for because they had a glowing apple for a logo, our cell phones and laptops, all were suddenly worthless. Our social network was reduced to the faces around us. The only tweets were from the birds in the trees. The only music we made ourselves, though we didn’t have much to sing about. It was hard to believe that it was all gone; not just generations of learning, but entire civilizations’ worth of understanding. Lost to the world.

We focused on shelter at first. Gutting the hulk of the plane to make sleeping bays. We each had a blanket, which wasn’t nearly enough to see us through winter. I didn’t have many friends in the group. I’d been on the flight alone. My family was back home in Epsom, a little town just south of London. We’d lived up on the Downs in a little cluster of two hundred houses called Langley Vale. I say we; I mean my wife, Em, and our best friend, Buster, a soft-coated Irish Wheaten Terrier we’d nicknamed The Terrorist. He was nine months old when the vodka-swiller pushed the button. Buster had barely started living. I thought about trying to walk home, but six hundred miles in the fallout might as well have been six thousand.

I wasn’t sure it would even be possible.

I thought about heading to the east coast of Scotland and trying to steal a boat. The water would’ve kept me away from the worst of the radiation. But I never took that course because deep down part of me knew Epsom was only seventeen miles from London. The blast radius of a one megaton nuke was about six miles.

The Tsar Bomba, the new Russian nuke, was a hundred megaton bomb. It had a fireball radius alone of two miles, meaning there was no City of London left. The radiation circle was nearly five miles wide with an expected 90 percent mortality rate from radiation sickness in just the first month or so. The air-blast radius came in two tiers. Within eight miles of detonation, the winds were forceful enough to tear down huge concrete-and-steel structures, rendering the devastation absolute. Up to twenty-one miles from the heart of the explosion, the nuclear winds were still damaging enough to demolish most buildings. As far as fifty miles away, people would experience third-degree burns to all exposed skin. Flammable material, like clothes, would burn away. It would have been like hell on Earth.

And that was the real reason I wasn’t thinking about trying to go home. I could only pray Em and Buster hadn’t suffered.

That was an odd thing, too. Suddenly I was thinking about religion, but I wasn’t religious. I’d always been a non-believer. A lot of the survivors, though, were born again in the wake of the world’s end. They kissed the ground and thought about everything in terms of prayer and miracles.

People were getting superstitious, too.

That happens when you’re reduced to firelight. It takes you back to a more primitive existence, and with it come primitive fears. We’ve never really grown out of them as a species. They’re still there, all of those old caveman fears we thought we’d left in the Stone Age. They’re hardcoded in our DNA, just waiting for disaster to reawaken them.