A Fierce & Fertile Tomorrow

By Darren Speegle

"Speegle's voice and worldview are bizarre and mesmerizing, humane and compelling, and the stories contained in this collection will fry your mind. Bleeding between horror, dark fantasy, science fiction, as well as all things heartbreaking and nerve-wracking, Speegle's stories could best be described—if it's possible to describe them at all, and I'm not sure they should be—as 'the savage cerebral' something you've not encountered much before . . . — Gary A. Braunbeck

"Elegant, sometimes intense and horrific but always finely crafted and devious in the best way, Darren Speegle's stories will delight and entertain fans of dark fantasy." – Jeff Vandermeer

"Fiendish ingenuity." – Asimov's Science Fiction

Darren is the author of eleven books, including A FIERCE AND FERTILE TOMORROW, the most recent of his eight short story collections. A previous collection A HAUNTING IN GERMANY was published by PS in 2016. His short fiction has appeared in numerous venues, including Analog Science Fiction and Fact, Clarkesworld, Best New Horror, Subterranean Magazine, The Third Alternative, Cemetery Dance Magazine, and Subterranean: Tales of Dark Fantasy. He is the co-editor (with Michael Bailey) of the anthologies ADAM'S LADDER and the upcoming PRISMS, from PS.

A widely travelled American, Darren often sets his stories in interesting places where he has lived or otherwise explored. Between gigs as a federal contractor in the Middle East, Darren resides in Thailand.

• Language: English
• Publisher: PS Publishing
• Release date: Jul 27, 2022
• ISBN: 9781786362513

Book preview

A FIERCE AND FERTILE TOMORROW

A COLLECTION BY DARREN SPEEGLE

––––––––

GAPPING

THE DAY THE QUICKEST of us died was the day the others finally started seeing things my way. It wasn’t only that Lynx was quickest; he was also youngest and most adored. Any number of superlatives made him the perfect instrument for the sort of shock treatment I’d secretly known we needed. It tore my heart in two that it had to be him, but then none of the rest of us would have had such a devastating impact. Not even Moon, who wasn’t as sharp as conditions required and always needed help of some kind.

Still, it was Lynx’s quickness, his proficiency in the sport, that most qualified him for martyrdom. It didn’t matter that he wasn’t aware he was dying for a cause. What mattered was that it was him, the ace, the one the game couldn’t beat. We’d all tried to emulate him. Hell, Rigs even changed his name to Dancer, after a move he took from Lynx. I too have my game name—Hawk. With the exception of Moon, we all think of ourselves as fleet. Swift. Agile. It’s who we are. What we do. Or at least did. Without meaning to be, Lynx was responsible for much of that. He was our idol. Our hero. The pioneer. Oh, he didn’t start the game—he was far too young at the beginning—but he made the game. He was its soul.

Why was his quickness more important than his tender years, or his razor sense of humor, or any of the other qualities that endeared him to us? The sport of gapping is about life and death, but mostly it’s about life. Quickness was life for him. It served him more times than I can count, at least twice as many times as the rest of us, though we’d been gapping twice as long as he had. To see this quickness abandon him in the end, to watch him erased from existence before our eyes, was to see our mortality in a whole new light. Not the light of terror. Fear is healthy, terror is not, and the latter was never allowed in when it came calling. The light in which our lives were suddenly cast was that of meaninglessness. Before the train took Lynx, the flame in each of us thrived on the thrill, the challenge, the chase to the other side. That was no longer possible now that our guru was gone. If we wanted to live again, we had to pursue a different path. I’d been saying it for the last two years, through the steady depletion of our numbers, but it had taken this tragedy to convince them to cross a line that wasn’t the other side of a train sheath.

But only after a last taste. A last dip in the adrenaline pool. I couldn’t have expected less. I tried for less, but less was never good enough for a gapper. For Dancer, Mariah, Ghost, Moon, and myself—the five who remained—it wasn’t going to be good enough tonight. I knew that to dare fate one last time was to attempt suicide. But my companions were persuasive. We owed it to Lynx, they said. We owed it to ourselves. A smoker did not quit smoking without relishing a last cigarette; otherwise he’d always wonder. But it was the game itself that seduced. With each fresh assault of the image of Lynx’s last moment, of his hanging there a split-second slow, staring down the sheath into the dark face of oncoming fate, I became less and less argumentative, until finally I almost let myself look forward to our last dance.

Almost.

––––––––

The Old Absinthe House—now named Jim Morrison’s Old Absinthe House in a self-indulgent tribute by its operator to two of the more wicked symbols of the Expressive Age—lay near the end of the Freedom Wing, our particular corner of Holland Underground, not a block from the A line. The A referred to Amsterdam, as H did The Hague, R Rotterdam, and so forth. But there was a whole network of subsidiary lines attached to each main line. A-1 stopped at the Freedom Wing for a reason. Before the Quarantine the wing had been a popular destination for those who longed for the pleasures of yore. The smoky cannabis cafés, the windowed Red Light cubicles with their international offerings, the humming bars and dazzling nightclubs, some of which, in the Underground, bore the names of predecessors in the City of Freedom itself—the Paradise, the Milky Way, the Escape. But those concerns lay empty or in shambles now, casualties of the seal-off that had affected everything in the vast complex of Holland Underground except the transit system, which was itself sealed, perhaps against the very thing that had led to the Quarantine.

Terrorism, as far as anyone below knew, was still alive and well upside, though the news that ran on the perpetually flashing screens lining the subterranean corridors was dated, recycled, a constant reminder of the wars above. The fact that no new information at all had flowed through the otherwise enduring electronic apparatus of the Underground in seven years, a year and a half-shy of the duration of the Quarantine, was a testament to the climate up there. To believe otherwise was to believe their exiles didn’t exist to them and they might one day simply shut it all off.

The Freedom Wing was a fragment of the whole complex, which stretched for some thirty kilometers along the coast, encompassing much of greater Amsterdam, and who knew how far in its inland reach, given that it had been built upon and built upon in the decades preceding the Quarantine. Holland Underground incorporated every logistically possible low-exhaust commercial enterprise imaginable, including an unfinished amusement park and a small zoo, a few survivors of which still prowled the labyrinth. Hence, food and other supplies had never been a problem. The gourmet shops in our sector alone supplied ample canned, dried, and other nonperishable food, while the mall that took up the entire wing that ran parallel to ours supplied everything else. Because the timer-controlled biochemical attack had occurred when the whole Holland Underground complex was still closed after an unexpected extension of its regular monthly service day—it was on the scheduled day that the culprits, in maintenance uniforms, had planted their bombs—the only ones who had been below were utility people, participants in special guided tours, and those of us who sneaked in to skate the empty corridors. The only exceptions were the hotel guests, who, while denied entrance to the complex like everyone else, had elevator access to the top, which served them well during that brief window before evacuation became impossible. So there was plenty to go around. You found your niche and you stayed there for the most part lest you run into undesirables.

Waste, too, wasn’t the issue it might have been. There were incinerators that had been taxed with corpses and spoiling food there at the beginning but had chugged through like everything else in our forsaken world. The only concern had been ventilation. It wasn’t nonexistent after the seal-off, but the system had been altered, according to the information we had still been getting from above in the early days. Its outlets were reduced to the few locations that allowed the exhaust to be captured and purged before it was released into the atmosphere—the minimum, I suppose, for our survival. So we dealt with the issue the only way we could: by removing ourselves far from the incineration area until the exhaust found its way out, or dissipated, turning into whatever exhaust does (reference the layer of residue that covered every surface that was not cleaned on a regular basis).

As to the biochemical agent, it must have had a short lifespan because within a few weeks those who were going to die were dead. There had been birth defects, but they were few, as pregnancies in general were. Morrison thought the latter, too, a side effect of the agent. I thought it environment. But no one could really say what was going on among the other gangs. For all we knew, they were eating their young. Eight and a half-years of Quarantine had produced strange realities.

This was the world we lived in. Our team of gamers. The throwback operating the Absinthe House who’d taken Morrison’s name for himself. The self-styled poets, with whom we shared not just our wing, but essentially the whole of Sector Eleven, which lay on the southeastern perimeter of the complex. The tunnel rats, as we called the roving scavengers. The scattered, settled gangs in other sectors. The rare loner, always heavily armed. There may have been a couple hundred of us left, though I’d by no means explored all of the Underground. A couple hundred mice in a maze, waiting for something that was never going to happen on its own. Sometimes I thought we were test subjects, or worse yet, amusements, and our little game with trains was nothing compared to the game our watchers were playing.

I happened to be wandering these mental corridors now as Morrison philosophized in his habitual way to my distracted companions. Though at thirty I was the oldest member of our team—we always called ourselves a team, one unit against the trains—I often found myself floating, seeing us through other eyes. When I was young, living in what sunlight found its way through the city’s towers and sky bridges, it had been God Whose eyes I was borrowing. Now they belonged to mortals. Masters. Scientists. Rich voyeurs. What I was observing right now through their twinkling gazes was a unit that had lost cohesion, had been torn apart by, yes, the death of a loved one, but also by the death of the thing that had given it purpose. If our observers were cheering for their gladiators, what must they be thinking now? That we were hopeless and they must look elsewhere for their entertainment? Or were they less concerned with the moment than we were, seeing us on the verge of a meltdown when something great was within our grasp? In the end I think there was still a divine element to the exercise for me, or at least a moral one. Would we make the right choice? When we were finished with the reckless business of tonight, would we stick to the plan and get the hell out of here? Find some weakness in the seal and crawl into the sunlight again? That was what we owed our dead. Not repeatedly raising the bid in the chase for extinction. As I’d told the team before we crossed the point of no return that the entrance to the bar symbolized, gapping was not a sport for the unfocused. Yet here we were, Morrison even now offering a toast to our madness.

Others might have thrown up the flag, he was saying. Others might have bowed their heads in defeat. But not the Freedom Wingers. Morrison’s Old Absinthe House crew. His face grew serious as he called our names out one by one, pointing at each of us in turn with his glass, which caught the light from the overheads like a miniature emerald disco ball. Ghost. Mariah. Dancer. Moon. And Hawk, you devil. May the six of you make Lynx proud tonight!

There was a cheer from the poets sprawled at their tables on the other side of the bar as they partook of their drinks along with Morrison and the six of us. Though they were our fan base, holding our sport as higher art than their own, they always sat apart, leaving us to our communion with the green goddess in our glasses, a pre-gapping ritual almost as old as the game itself. I was surprised they had even allowed themselves to disturb things with a cheer. The evening’s first taste of our beloved fiery spirit went down hard. I could see it in the faces of my companions, feel it in my scoured throat, my lurching stomach. But the heat passed quickly, the expressions of the potion’s victims returning to their former preoccupied, almost sullen states. Again, the sense wasn’t of grief for our brother, but for it. I seemed to be the only one who’d noticed that Morrison, out of habit or some Freudian hope, had said the six of us when we were five now.

Our table, a round affair with a decorative circular light in the center, rested in a corner pocket of the place; the bar stood to the left of my regular seat, which faced the entrance. We’d toasted the recently dead at this table more times than I cared to remember. We’d heard Morrison’s improvised eulogies—the latest of which was coming, I sensed with a certain dread. We’d dreamed of Europe’s last natural sanctuary, Switzerland, as addicts dream of freedom from their prisons. But Lynx hadn’t been the victim on those occasions, and Switzerland had been only talk, not a real destination. Tonight was like no other night. Our hero, now two days gone, had left an aura like that surrounding the green fairy—la fée verte, as they’d called her in the Parisian cafés where the likes of Picasso, Manet, Lautrec, and van Gogh had indulged. A vaporous thing that promised something as shapeless and mysterious as itself. It was as though with Lynx’s passing the spirit of the game had materialized in a mirror, which rightly deprived it of its luster, its mystique. Yet we were going to show it, weren’t we? We were going to laugh in its suddenly visible face.

Impulsively, my eyes drifted to the mirror on the wall opposite the bar, where Oscar Wilde’s famous quote about absinthe was etched, in verse form.

After the first glass, you see things as you wish they were.

After the second, you see things as they are not.

After the third glass you see things as they really are,

And that is the most horrible thing in the world.

How true, that. How terribly, terribly true.

Morrison, standing, hovering as always, was talking again, his long hair dancing with the ostentatious movement of his head. This must have been the introduction to the eulogy because the others were looking elsewhere, the pain already surfacing. Walls and force fields, he waxed. "Walls and force fields and sheaths, man. That’s what the world is. Doesn’t matter if you’re downside or upside, quarantined or imprisoned in the sunlight, it’s all about containment. It’s like that song from the late nineteen hundreds. Sign, sign, everywhere a sign, blocking out the scenery, breaking my mind...

Those dudes knew. They knew how it was then, they knew how it was going to be. It’s the way of society. It’s the way of the machine. The ones who make the wars. The ones who make the decisions. Walls and force fields. Barriers fucking everywhere. Keep ’em in. Keep ’em out. Keep ’em contained. Well, guess what, man. Lynx wasn’t playing. Beautiful, soaring, uninhibited soul that he was, Lynx wasn’t playing their games."

Clapping from a couple of the poets. Clapping that died away quickly, as though the hands’ owners had realized their lack of reverence in a holy moment. It hit me dully that part of our problem tonight was the absence of music. There was almost always music in the evenings, rock from the Expressive Age. Woodstock. What had Morrison been thinking, creating this stage for himself? Was it Lynx he was celebrating or his own ego? I caught myself before the anger swelled. Morrison wasn’t like that. He was a narcissist, yeah, but so the hell were we. No, this was a holy moment for him. Music would have been profane. He’d loved Lynx as much as we had loved him. The bond had been different. The blood of the sport had not run through their shared veins. But he’d adored him, even worshiped him, like we all had.

Morrison’s pause at the introduction of our legend was too long. It allowed Ghost to jump in, and she among all of us suffered little in the way of bullshit. I braced myself, uncertain exactly how she would be taking this.

Surprisingly, her voice was mild, though its content proved to have an edge. "Lynx was four years old when they quarantined us. He was on a tour in the amusement sector with his mother. He had practically no memory of the topside, but he remembered watching her die. It took days, get it? Just how did he become this warrior for the anti-barrier cause?"

Hey, Ghost, I didn’t m—

I know what you meant, Morrison. I know exactly what you meant. And I tell you, he was a victim.

But that’s what I said, Morrison said feebly.

"That is not what you said. Voice still calm, but dangerously so. I know the picture you were about to paint, of some scepter-carrying mystic conqueror. He was dealt a vicious hand and he coped. He was a victim, Morrison. An innocent. Not Joan of fucking Arc."

I could not help entering the discussion here. Ghost did that to me. She did a lot of things to me, truth be known. If you feel that way, Ghost, why are we going through with this tonight?

The calm had run its course. "Will you get off your high horse, Hawk! You’re the saint here, with your endless righteous preaching. Gapping is not about defiance or rebellion or making a point. It is about being liberated. But not from the machine. Not from barriers. We are the abandoned of the human species. Lynx was abandoned by his mother. He was abandoned by his father, who was topside when it all happened. Abandonment is more than hurt. It is loneliness, worthlessness, oblivion. Since God abandoned us too, we had to find something else. Something with the power to conjure us, to invoke us, to bring us up into life again. But even that may be overdramatizing. In the end gapping may just be an escape. I don’t know, an outlet. The poets have their poetry. Morrison has his green fairy. Gangs in other sectors have what they have. We have our gapping."

We have our gapping, Moon said, in that dreamy way of his. He’d been looking at her as she spoke, his chin lifted, his head slightly tilted, as if he were looking upon the fount of all knowledge. Or a rare work of art. She was that, I gave him silently, but she was also a pain in my ass. She could break your logic down with such ease and eloquence that you almost forgot the ground you stood on.

So would it be safe, I asked her, to say that tonight is a way of dealing with the grief we are feeling? Of coping with the pain? Of coming to terms with Lynx’s death? Never mind. I know your answer. You’ll say that’s reason enough. Listen, Switzerland is an escape too. Even if it’s an illusion, a false promised land, isn’t it better than having none at all?

There’s a promised land in gapping too, Dancer came in. Save for Moon, whose gaze had wandered to the lights behind the bar, we all looked at Dancer. His expression was flat, as though he hadn’t just uttered terrible words. None of us had any doubt that he was talking about the ultimate climax, not that peak you experienced when you were late in your flight and could see the gaps still closing, which meant you had won. Only Dancer, Ghost, and myself, and of course Lynx who’d actually faced the train, knew the feeling of that peak, however. Mariah and Moon would not look, for differing reasons. Mariah kept her vision narrow in order to remain focused on the goal, less distracted by the fear which she found next to impossible to embrace, though she thrived on it like the rest of us. Moon gapped for the rush of acceptance, not adrenaline. He was only allowed to gap with us because he would have done it on his own otherwise, and died a certain death.

Chilled by Dancer’s remark, I said to him, "So life’s not worth living now? Lynx was the central force and now that he’s gone, there’s nothing to sustain us, is that it? What the hell, Dance? That’s not you."

And it wasn’t. If Lynx had been the effortlessly elegant ace of the sport, Dancer was its hotshot, the cocky one, the one who performed death-defying tricks. That he would make such an allusion was extremely disturbing.

Ghost wasn’t having it. You’re not gapping tonight, Dancer.

"Fuck you, Ghost. I’ll gap when and where I please. Let me look at my watch here. What is it, thirteen minutes till the next train? I may decide to finish my drink, walk right out that exit and down to the sheath and step right the fuck through. Who’s going to stop me? You? Hawk? How, with the discipline speech? Ha. You’re thinking about suicide. I’m thinking about the moment you carry with you into eternity."

You’re thinking about going out in a blaze of glory! Mariah, in her first contribution to the conversation, cried. We looked at her, surprised by neither the outburst nor her embarrassed, injured expression. While she may have taken her name from some obscure song about wind, seen herself as fleet like the wind, we saw her as unpredictable and emotional, often more like a gale than a breeze—but a superficial one, one without real power. And it was no secret her adoration for Dancer, who had use for her when it suited him. His talking like this was personal for all of us, but it must have penetrated to the very core of her heart.

You saw him the other night, Dancer said, ignoring her, talking to Ghost and me. "You saw him. He was slow. He was late. Lynx was never, ever late. If anything, he had time to kill. He was so quick off the mark, the shutters were still falling when he was safely on the other side, grinning back at us."

He was referring to the windows that preceded the window being gapped. Gapping the main line, you had visual range in both directions along the tunnel. You could see the train coming as one by one—at a lightning pace, like the edges of a book’s pages being flicked by the thumb—the periodic breaks in the sheath, the gaps, blacked out with the train’s passage. The poets had come up with the shutter description, which didn’t convey it exactly from a geometric standpoint but had stuck. Dominoes would have been a better analogy, but I suppose that wasn’t artful enough.

Ghost grew dark. Face, eyes, voice as she demanded, What are you saying, Dancer? That he did it on purpose? That he died willingly?

Mariah clutched her mass of red hair, rotated the heels of her palms against the side of her skull. She whispered, You’re killing him all over again, Rigs.

Don’t call me that, Mariah, he said in an ominously restrained voice. Never call me that.

I’d had enough. As senior, if only by a couple years, I had a sort of unofficially recognized authority at times of dissidence. I used it now, hopefully, playing upon their sense of guilt. Whatever it took for this situation, which had no precedent.

All of you, shut up. If you want to honor Lynx then honor him in the spirit of unity he believed so much in. We’re his brothers and sisters, his only family in the world. He loved us. We loved him. Please let’s remember who we are.

Even as I delivered it, I ached with the obviousness, the hollowness of my little speech. It disgusted Dancer. I could see it in his face, though he said nothing. Mariah wept silently. Ghost looked at the wall, burning holes in it. Moon mooned. Morrison, he tried to find something to do with his hands, his feet, his mind as it struggled over his duty as host, looked for some way to get things back on the celebratory course he’d envisioned. It was him to finally break the silence. I’ve never heard anything so awful and pathetic and desolate come out of a person’s mouth.

The poets, I think, have prepared something.

––––––––

Having listened to the poets recite their poetry, we’d retired to our rooms to get personally ready. This too was a ritual. A half-hour to gather ourselves for the storm. For some of us this was meditation time. For others, exercise or a vid or another drink. For Ghost, it was yoga, which I admired in her and yet never would have engaged in myself for fear it would have an adverse effect of relaxing me too much, taking me off my game.

We lived separately, each of us with two of the lower-floor Red Light cubicles, which were accessed commonly by an interior corridor that allowed us to visit each other without stepping outside into the wing. Each room came equipped with a bed, a sliding curtain for its glass front, and a working sink and shower. Some of us had doubled the mattresses in one room, or simply tossed out the extra bed, leaving space in the second room for whatever odd furniture we’d found. We wanted for nothing, living-wise. The climate was controlled. We had hot and cold water, electricity. Everything worked in the Underground—everything that hadn’t been affected by conditions above, such as communications, the flow of information. When the complex had been built, it had incorporated the latest technology in its various systems. State-of-the-art stuff like the simulators found in the amusement sector. Like the sleek, silent trains piercing the darkness like bolts. But it was the quality and precision that had gone into the Underground’s construction that made all the difference. In a rare departure from its normal stance on cross-border contracting, the EU had allowed German tradecraft, as well as German engineering. As a result, our handymen among the poets were rarely called upon for more than the occasional plumbing or light issue. They simply weren’t needed.

I was sitting on my bed trying to drain off the mental clutter before tonight’s sport when the knock at my interior door came. To my surprise I found Ghost standing there, hugging herself as though in a draft. I stepped back, motioning her in, then regretted the gesture as unnecessary, as a giveaway of the discomfort I felt at seeing her. She was smiling, though. A shy sort of smile. And the flutters were still there, inside me, through all these years.

You okay? I said as she plopped down on her back on the bed.

I’m good. You?

Making it, Ghost, I said, sitting beside her, then letting myself fall back on the mattress too.

We lay in silence for a moment,