ECOPOCALYPSE CH.6 - "C.D.C, A.S.A.P."

ECOPOCALYPSE CH.6 - "C.D.C., A.S.A.P." 
by James McShane

Your trip to the Centre for Disease Control Headquarters allows you time to calm yourself down and indulge in a little family bonding with your sister. You and Madge never saw eye-to-eye on many things over the years, but when she brought back her first girlfriend and introduced Suzi Ching to Mom, you stormed out of the house and wouldn’t come back until they’d both left. This incident made Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays a hornets’ nest for the next fifteen years. It’s not your fault you’re a bigot; society made you that way. You wish you could turn back time and make things right again, a-la Sam Beckett and Quantum Leap. But going by your recent experience with inventions, any time machine you built would probably result in the Nazis winning World War II and the San Francisco 49ers winning Superbowl from now until Doomsday. Neither of these possible events sit well with you. You are who you are – now deal with it.

You turn to Madge and say, “Hey, sis, remember that time you and Suzi…”

“Shut the fuck up!” Madge replies into her headphone. “I’ve not yet forgiven you for that,” she continues. “However, if you can in any way make this"—she points down below at the shit- and blood-stained streets—"better, maybe this Christmas I’ll buy you something nice.”

“I always wanted a pony,” you say wistfully.

“I was thinking more of a one-way trip to fucking Jupiter.” She turns to you. “I hear it’s nice this time of year.”

Madge has mellowed over the years, you surmise.

“Are we there yet?” you ask, changing the subject. You’re the pilot, and you know how long the journey takes, but you really want to move on from all this bitterness.

“Two minutes,” Madge replies. “I rang ahead. The president’s guy at the CDC is expecting us. You better know what you’re doing.”

“It’s like we said earlier, Madge. Whoever’s lost is gone forever. The only way I can fix this is so it never happens again. I hope this joker listens to me.”

“Who else is he going to listen to? The Ayatollah?”

You grunt in mock agreement. The sooner this finishes, the better civilisation can get going again. You will make this right.

You hope.

As you bring the helicopter down on the roof of CDCHQ, you experience a bad feeling in the pit of your stomach. There must be at least twenty CDC goons as your welcoming party. They have guns. Lots of guns. As you and Madge step out, a goon in a hazmat grabs you by the arm and throws you to the ground.

“So you’re the fucker who’s responsible for this eco-Apocalypse?”

You raise your hand and introduce yourself. “Pleasure to make your acquaintance,” you add. He slaps you across your face with a gloved palm. “I didn’t think I was this popular,” you mumble.

A voice from behind your assailant calls out. “Easy, Ernie. Let’s not give the CEO too hard a time. After all, amends must be made. Bring them down to the lab.” The new guy, who you assume must be the president’s eyes and ears in CDC, points to Madge, who is carrying the new and improved Environaut from the helicopter. He pulls you up and offers his hand.

 “Jack Sneedon, President’s Liaison, CDC.”

You both shake. “I take it you’re aware of what we have here?” you say. “With the improvements I made to the original design…”

“Yeah, I know,” he says as his colleagues move Madge and the devise into the roof elevator. “Your sister filled me in over the phone. Some shit about co-coolants. I don’t get it.” He fixes you with a steely glare. “But I’m hoping you do.”

Once more, you hope.

Down in the lab, you unpack all your equipment and prepare for a demonstration of the Environaut. You look around and see that the place is spotless. No blood. No shit. “You’ve been cooped up here all this time?” you ask. “No breaches of security? No Shithead Zombies?”

Sneedon shrugs. “One or two got through the main gate, but that’s all. Our guys are clean and good to go. What about you?”

Your head drops. “I lost my Mom and my best friend.”

“I’m sorry for your loss,” Sneedon replies curtly, “but we’ve no time for sentimentality. We can grieve our dead later – provided we don’t become one of them. Set her up and let’s see what she can do.”

The demonstration works like a charm. After thirty minutes of further testing, Sneedon and his cohorts are less agitated than they were when they met you on the roof. It didn’t stop Hazmat Man from slapping you once more, this time with feeling.

Sneedon takes out his phone. “Wake up the president!” he barks. “Tell him I have good news.” His face loses several shades of natural colour. “What the fuck?” he roars. “When the hell did that happen?” He finds a nearby chair and just about manages to flop into it. He rubs his hand over the top of his head. He appears to be sobbing. “Artie’s in charge? Holy sweet fuck!” He ends the call and looks at you.

You feel a hand at your shoulder. It’s Madge, getting all sisterly like. “What’s going on?” she asks.

“Turn on the TV,” is Sneedon’s response.

On the big screen there is a shot of the White House. The ticker at the bottom of the screen reads: “President and Vice-President invoke 25^th Amendment. Speaker of the House, Arthur Gantly becomes President of the United States. News conference to follow shortly.”

You look at Sneedon. “They must have fallen foul of…the foulness.” Now you sound like a badly written twelve volume fantasy epic.

“You got that right,” Sneedon says. “Artie is out baying for blood. Your blood.”

“What do you mean?” Madge asks before you can even formulate the question yourself.

“My man at the West Wing says China, Russia and the entire Arab nation wants your head on a platter. They’re having their own problems and the only way they can placate their citizens is to ask for your public execution.”

You gulp.
Now that your life is on the , do you:

A. Offer to turn yourself over to the bloodthirsty masses, hoping your self-sacrificial gesture will change Artie's mind?
B. Appeal to Artie directly and show him your new and improved Environaut? He's not that much of a nut, is he?
C. Do what every self-respecting person would do in a situation like this - run?

ECOPOCALYPSE CH. 5 - YOU'RE A SCIENTIST!

ECOPOCALYPSE CH.5 - YOU'RE A SCIENTIST!
 By Wayne Depriest

You’ve got one chance to get this right; one chance to turn the tide; one chance to get you and Madge and the rest of humanity out of the shithole and back to normalcy. You need an antidote and you need it fast. You’re a scientist, for shit’s sake! You made the mess, even if it was some cost-conscious, bottom line-watching asstard who made the decision to use mercury. there’s no time to use any of the normal chelating agents like DMSA or DMPS. You need something that’s gonna flush the mercury out of a person’s system in minutes, an hour at most. It’s the damn mercury vapor that’s the problem. Get the unaffected to stop breathing until the units are stabilized is the perfect answer—not realistic, but perfect.

Meanwhile, back on Planet Gonetoshit, there are hordes of shit zombies sludging through the facility. For the moment you and Madge are safe. You’ve got some favors to call in; people who owe you big time and who can get some shit done in a hurry. You need to develop an antidote for those affected, one that will reverse the manure mange—or at least halt its progression through the body.

You flip back the hood of the hazmat suit, pick up the phone and punch 9 for an outside line, an idea twisting through your head. If we can get the...

You get no dial tone. You punch 9 again. Same thing.

“How the hell do I call in favors if I can’t make a call?”

“There’s no time for that anyway,” Madge  urges. “You have to do something and you have to do it fast.”

“Even if I make an antidote, how do we get it out and dispensed? I can’t even call for FedEx.”

“You’re the scientist. Just make the antidote. We’ll worry about getting it delivered later.”

You race over to the bench and start slinging test tubes and pipettes around like you know what you’re doing. But you don’t. You’re not a chemist, for God’s sake. You’re an industrial engineer. You throw some of this in a tube, add a pinch of that, some more of whatever this is and the damn thing blows up in your face. It burns like a bastard, but your eyes seem unaffected. The bright blue cloud of vapor floats across the lab and envelopes a pile of some former lab assistant. The congealed pile of crap starts to reshape itself into something resembling a human being.

“That’s it!” screams Madge. “That’s it!”

“What the hell is it?” you scream back at her.

“You made it—don’t you know?”

“Hell no.”

“You have to make some more. Lots more.”

You spend another twenty minutes trying to duplicate the formula. Finally you get a controlled batch, one that doesn’t explode. A good thing, too. You’re about out of hair. You get it into an atomizer and start working on a bigger batch, something you can push through the ventilation system here. That will give you enough time to make more and somehow get the formula out to other labs. You can have this thing whipped by tomorrow morning and be the hero again. There’s just one problem.

It’s that damn blinking light in the corner. Madge doesn’t see it. Or doesn’t know what it means. But you do. And you realize that all the determination in the world isn’t going to change what is about to happen. That little blinking light is a security breach indicator. Normally it glows with a soft steady light. When it blinks it means that someone has entered the security zone in an unauthorized manner. There’s always a guy monitoring that light. It’s his only job. When it blinks he’s trained to respond by pushing some buttons or something that will lock down the core of the lab inside a series of sheet steel walls that might yield to a nuclear weapon. Might. Anything less is like hitting a brick wall with a toasted marshmallow.

But Mr Security Breach Guy isn’t there. Well, he is, but he’s not much use as a slush pile of chunky diarrhea overflowing the office chair. And from the way the damn light is flashing, there isn’t any time to batten down the hatches, even if you knew how to batten down anything. Which you don’t. About the only thing you can do is try to get you and Madge out before the shit storm hits. The stool zombies aren’t going to care about a cure and the little atomizer isn’t enough for the mounds of muck on the way.

Of course, by this time there is no getting out. Cameras are showing hordes of shittards scraping along the corridors on the way to the lab. Every exit is blocked by shuffling schools of shit zombies, putrid poop pods plodding toward the lab. You and Madge ain’t in deep shit yet, but it won’t be long.

You search frantically for anything that will help. Of course there isn’t anything. You and your sister are on your own. For a minute you think about throwing her to the zombies. Maybe it will give you enough time to get away. You look at her and realize she’s thinking about making you the star of the Fecal Follies.

“What the hell are we going to do?” You can’t seem to control the panic.

“Just calm down. Let me think.” Madge waves a shush hand at you like your mother did when she wanted quiet. It doesn’t work for Madge either.

“What’s there to think about? We’re dead. They’ll rip these hazmat suits off us like underwear at an orgy.”

“Spray ourselves with the formula,” Madge exclaims. “Even if they get us, we won’t turn to shit. We can fake dying and hold out until they leave.”

You take a gigantic hit from the atomizer, sucking it deep into your lungs as Madge removes her helmet and reaches for the antidote. Just as she’s squeezing the mist into her mouth you feel your lungs ignite. You have time to see Madge’s eyes widen in surprise before your lungs explode and flames engulf her face.

Oops...return to Chapter 5

 

ECOPOCALYPSE CH. 4 - I WANT MY DADDY

ECOPOCALYPSE CH. 4 - I WANT MY DADDY
By Nandy Ekle

He’s gone. Milo is gone. Your best friend’s death is like a sharp finger poking you right in the middle of your forehead. You’re sitting across from Madge and she’s just going on and on, talking about what you have to do to fix this, but all you can think about is the fact that Milo died in a stew of his own sewage.

“Hello?  Earth to Mr. Poopy President. Are you listening to me at all?”

You look up from where your eyes are fixated, staring at a brown stain under your fingernail. Where exactly had that brown stain come from? Was it from the flying fecal matter at your house as you ran away? And what about that running away thing? What kind of leader runs away from his problems?

You look up into Madge’s eyes. “What?”

“I said, what kind of a leader runs from his problem?”

A gasp blasts out of your mouth. Did she read your mind? You’re sure you thought the question up yourself; or did she plant it in your brain? Does she have psychic abilities you never knew about? And how come you never got a share of that?

“I, um . . .”

Her eyebrows are scrunched up and her mouth is posed in a pucker as if she actually expects you to say something intelligent.

The answer suddenly pierces through your consciousness. Screw it! Screw them all! Your business is tanked. Your reputation looks like the offending crap all over your house. Your best friend is dead. And now your sister demands you pay attention to her as if she were the smartest person in the world. You don’t need this. You don’t need any of it and you damn sure don’t have to put up with it.

You stand up and turn your back to her in mid-sentence.  “Go to hell,” you say as you walk toward the door.

“Get back here! We have to get this worked out!”

You run out the door and head for the stairs leading up to the roof. You need to get away just for a moment to mourn Milo, your mom, your career, your life. You need . . . fishing. Madge said your dad was on the yacht in the Pacific. You feel a sudden urge to pull on Daddy’s pant leg and beg to be hugged and rocked to sleep.

As you reach the roof you jump in the chopper and aim it toward the west, your main thought: “I want my daddy!” The sun glints off the water below you—or is it the water leaking from your eye?

Surprisingly, Dad’s boat is not far out on the sea and the size of the yacht makes it easy enough to spot. Lowering the copter to the deck you jump out of the aircraft. You see your sixty-year-old father running toward you.

“Dad!” You throw your arms out to him as you yell his name.

Instead of taking you in his arms for a comforting paternal hug, he pulls his fist back and punches you a hard one across your jaw. Rubbing your face, you look at the man who raised you. “What the?” You ask in a stunned tone.

“Get the hell off my boat, you murderer!”

“It wasn’t my fault! The lab substituted components in the formula! I didn’t do it! I swear!”

“You sold those things all over the world and got rich off people’s doody, boy. I don’t want your disease close to me. I don’t want anything to do with you again. Now get this confounded whirlybird off my boat before I throw you and your toy overboard.”

“But you’re my dad. You’re supposed to be on my side.” The man who had helped you build a Pine Derby race car for scouts when you were eight years old now looks as though he would harpoon you like a whale and gut you like a fish.

“My wife is gone, and your sister probably will be too if she keeps working with your zombies. Even the dog died. You’re no boy of mine.” He takes a couple of steps toward you. “I didn’t raise you to turn the world into sewer zombies.” 

As you stand there rubbing your jaw, your father grabs your arm, runs you to the side of the boat and pushes you over. You hit the water and the only thought in your head is that the brown stain under your fingernail will finally be washed away.

The rhythmic sound of a cello plays from somewhere in the air. Your dad looks not in your direction, but past you. He laughs and points, and you’re afraid he’s gone crazy and will jump in and drown you.

As you start to swim toward the yacht, the cello music gets louder and more intense. Then a new thought jumps into your mind as you feel something massive brush against your leg. You know that music! As the identity of the sound gels in your mind you see the circle of red around you grow larger. Suddenly your left leg is cold. LEG? What leg? You realize your left leg is missing and the blood is coming from you.

You open your mouth to scream for your daddy when the giant great white shark clamps on your other leg and pulls you under.

Oops...return to chapter 4