I had to find a horse, a real unmodified horse. But it was Oklahoma, after all.
The nearest town was Gilliam, Oklahoma, and nobody there knew anything about 2X15. “Nobody goes there. I think they all died or moved out a long time ago.”
I had to fully insure the horse. I was, after all, leaving to a new and unknown realm where people might keep time with knotted cords and slay one another with stone axes. I hoped that the folks of 2X15 hadn’t kept up with the ways of Babylon so they wouldn’t know that I had been modified, as at least half the world was.
I had downloaded some files on horse riding, and I setoff for the West. I had assumed that my satellite links would be active all the way there. I mean, the satellite net covers Africa and Asia and Antarctica—so I figured that Oklahoma was a sure thing.
So when the comforting voices began to fade out a few miles from the village, I was scared. I was going to be alone. I hadn’t been alone since I was seven or eight years old. I started to panic, and the horse, a chestnut gelding, felt my fear.
He galloped a little wildly, and I let out a scream. I almost fell, but grabbing the reins and concentrating on bringing the beast under control calmed me. When my horse stopped, all was quiet. I couldn’t will a message to anyone. I couldn’t ask for a map. I didn’t even know what time it was.
Have you ever not known what time it was?
Even unmodified humans have only to ask that question out loud, and something will answer—whether it is a coffee pot or their shoes.
I was in a different world. The primitive world.
This would make a great story.
I imagined billions of people downloading it.
I spurred my horse and we headed for the village of 2X15. It took me a moment to realize that the outer world was quiet as well. There were birds and insects, but no machines. As I approached the village, there were no animals. This puzzled me. I had read Rev. Waikiki’s diatribes against fast food, which any sane person would agree with now after the Burger Wars of the Twenties, but I had never seen any avocation of vegetarianism. Perhaps the cult had left the area—but how did they jam the satellite system? It could be that they had some arrangements with the folks running the system, but surely I would have found that in my researches.
When the village came in view, there was no movement on the streets, but the hanging corpses swayed in the wind.
Most light posts, trees, and flagpoles held a corpse. In other places the ropes had rotted or frayed and dumped their cargo at the base of the pole. My horse didn’t like this and whinnied with fear. I didn’t like it either, but I tied him to a tree outside of the village limits.
The road sign still stood. 2X15 No Babylon Time, No Babylon Channels Under Penalty of Death.
My first and biggest concern was that whoever had done the hangings was still around, but I saw that most of them had been hanged a long time. I immediately asked for information about corpses, and chills ran up my spine when no voice filled my head. I was truly in the Land of the Dead.
Some of the corpses were small. Children.
I walked into the town. There was a little square parking the center, overgrown and full of the oldest corpses—all mere skeletons at the base of trees, grass growing lush in their rib cages. Here is where the hangings must have started. The asphalt in the streets was rubble, and time (or some other mischievous agent) had broken many windows in the buildings.
Nothing was clearly the center of government, but there was an old post office on one side of the square. I went unhopefully, looking for some sign of what madness had over-taken the village.
The post office smelled very, very foul when I opened the doors. I realized then, that I hadn’t smelled anything from the corpses.
There wasn’t any light. I didn’t see any torches or kerosene lanterns, so I surmised that the Thirtyers had used electricity that they had generated somehow, but no one maintained the power plants any longer.
The windows were dirty, but there was enough light to see a strange statue behind the counter of an old man standing as though he were Atlas holding up the world. In front of the statue was a big book, a ledger of some sort filled with entries too cribbed to read in the dim light. I picked it up and took it outside.
They were names.
And crimes.
Randolph Riviera. Television.
Susan Las Vegas. Telephone.
Sharon Aspen. Data Download.
The first entries were written in a very legible handwriting, with dates (all thirty years too soon). But the handwriting got too large and more than a little shaky.
On the last page, I read the following.
Mary Waikiki. Vanity Search on Web 1999.
I am alone now. I can’t fight the urge to hold off my desire to speak. It is only a few months. I must be stronger. I must hold the world at bay. I must see in the Millennium.
I realized what the statue was, and I ran in.
“Rev. Cancun?” I asked.
The weird figure stirred a little.
“Can’t talk to anyone,” he said.
Than it/he tumbled forward. Suddenly my mind was filled with quiet prompts from the world-wide information system. I sent off a request for a medic, but they were too late. The Rev. Cancun had held off the world by will alone, stronger, in the end, than his flock, who had to turn to TV, and WWW, and other news. He came within two months of his 2000, and now he lives on as the most popular story of 2029.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
DON WEBB was born in 1960 in Amarillo, Texas. His works range from a St. Martin Press mystery series, to poetry, and fiction and nonfiction books on the occult. He attended Rice University and the University of Texas at Austin. Don is the poster child of literary ADHD. He’s written a rock-’n’-roll song for French radio, the I-phone App “Office Ching,” and has done game design for FASA and TSR. He’s also penned a lot of horror stories. His mom says that Don is her favorite horror writer—after Ramsey Campbell! He’s been translated into twelve languages; ten of his poems have been published in Chinese in
He lives in Austin, Texas, with his lovely wife Guiniviere and their cats Big Pig and Sascha. He cries at the sight of bluebonnets in the spring, the ending of the
Table of Contents
ALSO BY DON WEBB
DEDICATION
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
THE DIVORCE
THE ICE PALACE
SHRIMP ANARCHY
THE GAME
YOGA FOR BOLSHEVIKS
WHAT ARE BEST FRIENDS FOR?
RING OF THE RED KNIGHT
THE SYRINGE
MY HEART SHIFTING AS SAND
