The Devil Squid Apocalypse Read online

  Month 2019 Volume 9 No 8

  The Devil Squid Apocalypse

  by

  Alex Acks

  Countdown:

  Because in a universe of infinite possibilities unlikely coincidences happen constantly, the end of the world and the Devil Squid pre-show staging start at the same time.

  5: The pirate battle cruiser Eminence of Yatii-et and Their Infinite Mercy of Blood enters high Earth orbit, completely undetected due to its advanced spectral reflectance field. Devil Squid frontman Cameron Jarlace, in the green room at the Blue Bird Theater, checks the time on his cell phone and gives his band the ten-minute warning. Drummer Lang Stephens starts another round of Candy Crush. Bass player Darnel Mattise, newest member of the band, nervously checks the set order again. Lead guitarist Marcy Ramos takes another long drag off her joint and wishes that her sciatica would stop fucking acting up already.

  4: The Eminence sends out a volley of thousands of neutron-plasma seekers, targeting everything in Earth orbit that shows any EM-spectrum activity. At the Blue Bird Theater, the stage manager, someone screaming unintelligibly in his earbud, pokes his head in and says apologetically, “Sorry, five more minutes.” Marcy doesn’t so much as twitch. At least thirty years older than everyone else in the band, she’s long since learned that no matter what job you’re doing, it’s always five more minutes. She can ride the hum of anticipation a little longer.

  3: The neutron-plasma seekers find their marks, clamping on like limpets—or rather a limpet-like lifeform known on the Eminence’s home world, whose name translates out to burning ass-sucker—then explode simultaneously. Humanity’s satellites go dark. In the Blue Bird Theater green room, Marcy finishes her joint. “You got another one?” Lang, in fine drummer form, asks. Marcy grins and says, “Not for you, mijo.”

  2: The Eminence sinks into the atmosphere proper, deploying a near-invisible net of metalloid filaments, like the gossamer parachute of a newly hatched spider. The high winds of the upper atmosphere whip the filaments away, distributing them across the globe. The Supreme Battle Commander of the Eminence, Txiwal Crym Hyyul-et, drums his manipulating appendage on the control panel, watching the countdown for full global coverage. And in the Blue Bird Theater, the stage manager pokes his head into the green room again and flaps his hand frantically. “Come on, come on!” The band shuffles out the door, tugging down t-shirts, tugging up torn jeans.

  1: After two more songs and an encore that no one but the band onstage wanted, Devil Squid takes the stage to a round of drunken, enthusiastic screaming. The lights blaze, fists come up throughout the auditorium, and it’s finally go time. The guys are about losing their minds with excitement and Marcy feels like she’s thirty again, all those aches and pains disappearing under the tide of adrenalin. Cameron throws back his head, Marcy and Darnel hit the first chord, and it’s perfect, the kind of thing Cameron claims is better than sex and Marcy thinks is somewhere beyond the first hill of a roller coaster since she’s never given a shit about sex. Overhead, the silver filaments shudder, boil, and explode to generate wave after wave of technology-murdering electromagnetic pulses.

  0: Below the Eminence, darkness wreathes the planet. Txiwal Crym Hyyul-et emits a scent of satisfaction and orders the next step of the standard invasion plan—business as usual. At the Blue Bird Theater, the lights go out. There are a few screams, some of mock-fright, some of real fear, as the audience slowly realizes that this is not part of the show. Lighters—but no cell phones, suddenly those are so many little glass and metal bricks—come on like the dots of stars in darkness. Unbeknownst to any of them—for the next few minutes, and then it will be too late—an airplane overhead begins a terminal dive. And for humanity, but especially for the humans of Devil Squid, everything changes.

  ~

  You work your fingers to the bone your entire goddamn life and this is what you get. First you help your mother (God rest her soul) clean apartments in gated complexes, places nicer than you’ll ever be able to afford, for cash in white envelopes. Then you clean homes without her, because she’s in the hospital with cancer and the family needs the money; after all the times Papá got arrested during protests in the sixties and seventies, no one will give him work worthy of his literature degree. Then you scrub toilets at the university for a couple of years as a late-blooming student until you graduate to swabbing out bottom-burned filter flasks for the chemistry department, because the life insurance money (your mother, always so long-sighted) covered tuition but nothing else. And when it’s done and you have that shiny degree in your hand, the one that everyone swore would change your life forever, you’re cleaning up spilled rice while you stock shelves at nights, because good high school science teachers don’t get paid jack shit in the districts that really need them the most.

  Until you’re sixty-seven and those assholes in all levels of government think the best way to teach kids is to punish teachers, and then you have no job and a pitiful excuse for severance pay, though you know you’re lucky to have even that much. Retirement is a dream for people who could save money instead of spending every penny on keeping your extended family and your less fortunate students going, so you fling job application after job application uselessly into the void. You’re well past your expiration date, the last bruised, brown banana that no one wants to pick up on the job market, your lower back is shot to hell after so many years of cleaning up other people’s messes, and it’s just you alone in your tiny, two-bedroom ranch-style house, the last thing you have left of your parents. No kids because you never wanted any, no husband or wife because you weren’t interested in sex or romance or any of that shit, no church because you always ignored Papá’s stale jokes about becoming a nun. And you’re counting the days until you have to slide into your cousin’s landscaping business, because carrying a leaf blower sounds like agony, but it’s still easier on the back than sleeping on someone’s floor because you can’t afford property tax on the house Papá killed himself over paying off.

  The logical follow up: buy weed from one of your neighbors and smoke it out on the porch, because who gives a shit about drug tests any more, and it’s a hell of a lot cheaper than whatever experimental back surgery your doctor keeps mentioning with a gleam in his eye.

  Then one day that same damn neighbor sounds like he’s torturing some innocent musical instruments to death in his backyard, and it’s so bad you can’t suck the THC into your bloodstream fast enough to not care. So you limp over to his house, kick open the rusty back gate, and tell him and his little friend who is actually holding the guitar to quiet the hell down.

  “Can’t, Marcy,” Cameron—your neighbor—says. You tell all the Anglos to call you Marcy, because it’s orders of magnitude less painful than hearing them butcher the name your parents gave you: Marcia. At your you’ve got to be shitting me, kid stare, he continues, “David left the band. We need a new guitar or we’re sunk.”

  “I didn’t know you had a band,” you say. “And if you sound like this, you’re still sunk.”

  The other kid—still clutching the electric guitar with his hips all canted forward like he thinks music emanates directly from the nuts—sneers at you. “Like you’d know punk if it fucking bit you.”

  He might be right. You’ve always more been into the rock and folk greats of the sixties and seventies, just like Papá, and music since then has passed you by. But life is shit and all the social contracts were lies, so maybe it’s time to try something new. You take a drag off your joint and smile. The nice thing about being unemployed is you don’t have to take shit off anyone. “And you wouldn’t know a major chord if it bit you in the ass, pendejo. Give me the fucking guitar.”

  The kid flips you off. But the guit
ar belongs to Cameron, and he pries the guitar out of greaseball’s hands and offers it over, though he’s got one of those condescending white boy smiles on his face as he does it.

  It’s been years since you touched a guitar, and you probably wouldn’t even try if you weren’t stoned off your ass. The fingers remember even if the callouses are decades gone, all those long hours in a hot, close garage with Papá, playing along with a radio because two shitty, cracked, thrift store guitars were the same price as a shitty thrift store TV and more fun.

  You give the guitar an experimental strum and jump at the noise it makes. Cameron and the kid smirk at each other. You take another drag off your joint, adjust the tuning slightly, and make that guitar scream.

  You fuck up the riff pretty bad. But the real point is you can recognize it as music, and so can Cameron. He grins, clapping his hands. “I never woulda fucking guessed,” he says. “You like punk rock?”

  “Always been more into igneous, myself, but I like trying new things.” No one laughs. No one ever gets your goddamn jokes.

  “No way,” the other kid says. “She’s fucking old Cameron. You think grandma can shred?”

  “You gonna fucking stop me?” you say.

  “She’s already more punk than you,” Cameron says. “Audition over.” Then he turns back to you. “You want the gig?”

  “It pay?”

  “Like shit.”

  You’re not doing anything else right now. “Sure.”

  And that’s how you end up standing on stage in that one perfect moment when the world ends.

  ~

  Everyone from the concert and the surrounding city block who survived the plane’s impact gets herded toward the foothills by floating gun platforms that look more sophisticated than any drone that’s ever appeared on the evening news. There are no loudspeakers; the gun platforms keep things moving by shooting anyone who isn’t walking fast enough or in the right direction.

  They can talk quietly as they walk. Cameron’s of the opinion that it has to be the Russians, since they have the best military out there of the people that don’t like the United States. No one else is convinced that they’d invade like this, and as Lang points out, he can’t believe that “Vlady” would invade the US without stroking one off in public.

  Cameron offers up North Korea, which no one takes seriously considering they can’t even shoot a missile straight. From there he pivots to China, at which point Marcy asks him if he’s just shopping around for brown people to blame and Cameron fires back that last time he checked, Russians are pretty damn white, and Marcy starts up about actually in the western cultural climate, Eastern Europeans have traditionally been—

  At which point Lang interrupts to offer the suggestion that it’s a right-wing coup. Darnel waves that off under the theory that there are way too many white people getting shot right now. Lang scratches the scraggly little bulldog beard and shrugs. “Yeah, but they’re white punks.”

  Darnel chews thoughtfully on his lip. “And all of this is missing the point. If it’s just that someone decided to drop the shit on Denver, why the hell haven’t we seen the army yet? We haven’t even seen a jet or a drone or whatever.”

  “Maybe there were multiple attacks?” Lang says.

  “So many that there’s been jack shit done for a major metropolitan center?” Darnel asks.

  Cameron stares at him, long and hard. Then says, “You think this is some fucking Independence Day shit, don’t you.”

  “Well, look at the writing on the platforms,” Darnel says.

  Cameron frowns. “What writing?”

  “Regular marks on the side. It’s got the patterns you’d expect in some kind of alphabet, like nothing on Earth. You get me?” Darnel says.

  “You’re saying it’s fucking aliens?” Cameron says. “I wasn’t serious when I said Independence Day. Jesus fuck.”

  “Tell me I’m wrong,” Darnel says.

  “Never known any humans who had their shit together enough to take over the whole world,” Marcy says dryly.

  “Whoa, whoa,” Lang says. “We’re missing the bigger point. When did you turn into some kind of language-ologist, Darnel?”

  “Linguist,” Darnel says, as if it pains him. “And Marcy’s not the only one who’s got expensive wallpaper in her shitter.”

  Marcy laughs, and holds out her fist for Darnel to dap. Shit feels almost normal for about five seconds. Then one of the platforms floats closer and they get their heads down and keep walking. To one side, there’s a chatter of gunfire that’s too bright to be regular bullets, even tracers, and a body hits the mud in a spray of chains and leather.

  ~

  “What the fuck is going on right now? We’re being herded like fucking sheep. What happened to all the blood and sweat and music? If society is dead and the government’s in ruins, why aren’t we celebrating? Why are we still doing what we’re told? Let’s fucking go!” Cameron the mellow dealer and laid-back band leader is gone as he hefts a rock and slings it at one of the gun platforms.

  Marcy changes course—it can’t end this way—but she can’t move fast enough and she body checks Darnel instead. Lang’s already eating dirt, because he remembers his self-preservative instinct at the damnedest times.

  The expected hail of gunfire doesn’t happen. Marcy and Darnel lift their heads from the mud. There’s a huge dent in the gray metal platform, and it looks like it’s flying a little crooked.

  Cameron grins like the sun coming out in the spring, and Marcy remembers why sometimes she loves that precious idiot like the son she never wanted to have or the little brother her mother brought into the world stillborn. She feels it like a knife through her heart, because she fucking knows what comes next.

  As Cameron picks up another rock, as the kids he’s got at his back start chanting his name, there’s a BOOM in the sky. A shockwave slams the brave and the smart alike back down into the mud.

  A teardrop of scorched metal floats in front of them for a moment, bigger than the platforms. Then it opens and oh fuck, Darnel was right. What steps—slides—squishes—whatevers—out has never been on the surface of Earth before. It’s more fucked than anything Giger could have come up with after dropping acid and looking through pictures of deep-sea vent creatures, like a jellyfish and a hagfish had a demonic hatefuck and this popped out six-hundred and sixty-six months later.

  For one perfect, horrifying moment, Cameron and the thing square off. It’s impossible to tell if the monster—alien—is looking at Cameron, but that’s how it feels. Silence except for the rattle of the breeze, the thud and rush of over-labored heartbeats.

  Cameron lifts the rock over his head. “I’ve got something for your fucking lea—”

  The alien gestures with a wave of lashing tentacles, too fast to discern. There’s a pop, a spray of bright red, and then Cameron isn’t there anymore. Everyone for a twenty-foot radius is wearing him.

  Darnel screams. So does Marcy. Lang vomits into the mud.

  Then the gun platforms start cycling up, a high-pitched whine they all know too damn well. Marcy and Darnel drag Lang up out of the muck, and there’s nothing left to do but run toward the foothills.

  ~

  You work your fingers to the bone getting the impromptu forced labor camp organized, sending the kids out to scavenge for building materials, making sure no one digs the latrine too close to either the stream or where the Jellyfuckers toss out the rations, a million other little things, and this is what you get: a motherfucking election. Except you don’t really get it, because no one bothers to fucking tell you, or Lang, or Darnel until it’s already happening. The only reason you find out is because Lang blows out the sole of one of his Chucks and you head to the rickety communal storage shelter to see if there are any spare shoes.

  And the shelter—biggest space in the camp that isn’t swarming with Jellyfuckers or drones—is packed with people. It’s mostly upper middle classers who got driven in about a week and a half ago, some subdivisi
on that weathered the initial carnage and had been hunkering down to wait things out. There’s a few of the punks scattered here and there, looking small and sheepish.

  “—and if chosen to stand, I’m in the best position to negotiate with the invaders,” the man at the front, wearing a wrinkled polo shirt and smudged khakis, says. You find it irritating that he’s not a hell of a lot dirtier. “They’ve already spoken to me, as most of you know. They do speak English. We’ll be all right if we don’t make trouble.”

  You’ve watched enough scifi movies that you’re not surprised. Earth’s been shitting out signals all over the electromagnetic spectrum for years, though now you have to wonder if the Jellyfuckers talk more like Real Housewives or football announcers.

  “Negotiate?” Lang bursts out. “Are you fucking serious?” In the weird quiet of the shelter, his voice is impossible to miss. Which is fine, because you were sure thinking the same thing. Lang’s young enough that he thinks saying it’s going to make a goddamn difference, and you love him for it most days.

  The crowd turns to look at him, uncomprehendingly.

  “Young… man,” Khaki Guy begins, “we’re in a bad position here.”

  “No shit,” Lang says. “What the fuck is this?”

  “We have to face the facts. Thanks to Frank saving his ham radio equipment—” Khaki Guy points toward an elderly white guy in a dirty flannel shirt who goes even more hunch-shouldered at the attention “—we now know that this truly is world-wide. Our military has been all but destroyed. Help isn’t coming. We have to look out for ourselves.”

  “We have been looking out for ourselves,” Lang protests. “We’ve been working our asses off getting shit organized, especially Marcy! And you’re not going to say shit to us? That’s fucked up, man.”

  You don’t know if it’s that you’re a woman, or old, or brown, or the perfect nexus of all three, but everyone suddenly looks at you like you appeared out of nowhere. You cross your arms and glare like, yeah, that’s right, I’m sure standing here. Breathing.