Apocalypse Now Now Read online

  Contents

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  1. Raincoats and Skullduggery

  2. Skull Pressure

  3. Family Ties

  4. The Unbearable Inconvenience of Having a Heart

  5. I Think You’re Phoney and I Like You a Lot

  6. Elemental, My Dear Baxter

  7. Rattle & Hum

  8. The Zombie Horror Ninja Show

  9. Obambonation

  10. Predators

  11. Rip Off My Face and Tell Me that You Love Me

  12. Insanity Plea

  13. Ancestors

  14. Guns, Porn and Steel

  15. Assault with Intent to do Grievous Bodily Harm

  16. Apocalypse Now Now

  17. Let it Burn

  Acknowledgements

  Copyright

  ABOUT THE BOOK

  I LOVE THE SMELL OF PARALLEL DIMENSIONS IN THE MORNING

  Baxter Zevcenko’s life is pretty sweet. As the 16-year-old kingpin of the Spider, his smut-peddling schoolyard syndicate, he’s making a name for himself as an up-and-coming entrepreneur. Profits are on the rise, the other gangs are staying out of his business, and he’s going out with Esmé, the girl of his dreams.

  But when Esmé gets kidnapped, and all the clues point towards strange forces at work, things start to get seriously weird. The only man drunk enough to help is a bearded, booze-soaked, supernatural bounty hunter that goes by the name of Jackson ‘Jackie’ Ronin.

  Plunged into the increasingly bizarre landscape of Cape Town’s supernatural underworld, Baxter and Ronin team up to save Esmé. On a journey that takes them through the realms of impossibility, they must face every conceivable nightmare to get her back, including the odd brush with the Apocalypse.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Charlie Human is a denizen of South Africa’s speculative fiction scene. He has an MA in Creative Writing and lives in Cape Town. Apocalypse Now Now is his first novel.

  For Georgia and Chloé

  Now now (adv.) A common South Africanism relating to the amount of time to elapse before an event occurs. In the near future; not happening presently but to happen shortly.

  ‘THERE ARE QUESTIONS that run through your head when you find out that you’re a serial killer. “Am I more evil than Ted Bundy?” is one. “I wonder whether I’ll be on the Crime & Investigation Network?” is another. But on the whole, it’s the who, what, when and why of it that really takes up the mental bandwidth. So, here goes:

  ‘My name is Baxter Zevcenko. I am sixteen years old. I go to Westridge High School in Cape Town and I have no friends. I’ve killed people. Lots of people. Brutally. At least I hear they were people. They looked more like monsters to me. Anyway, I won’t bore you with the details. If you’re interested, look on the Internet.

  ‘People are saying that I’m satanic but this is not true. I have seen things. I saw the great Mantis God of Africa fighting a creature from the primordial depths, a billion-year war until finally the Mantis threw the writhing creature from the heavenly sky into the deepest pit. I’ve seen the past through the lens of the Eye and it wasn’t in tasteful sepia. It was etched in blood and death and filtered through a veil of tears. I’ve seen the sweating, grunting, cawing, scratching, bleeding, yelping feathered, scaled and clawed abyss beneath the city and, believe me when I tell you this, it’s not pretty –’

  ‘Baxter,’ my psychiatrist interrupts, ‘I thought we’d agreed that these delusions were counterproductive?’

  I take a breath and force the images from my mind. ‘None of that matters. There is no Mantis and there is no dark, primordial creature. There is no weapons chemist, no bounty hunter and no girlfriend to rescue. There is just me and I am sick. In the end we’re all just victims of our own perceptions, sparky. I hope you can see that.’

  ‘Good,’ my psychiatrist says as he turns off the camera. ‘I believe you’re making progress.’

  1

  RAINCOATS AND SKULLDUGGERY

  ‘CHARLIE, DELTA, NINER, that’s a big ten-four,’ Rafe growls into his CB radio. I have ten minutes before I need to make the walk to school. My parents force me to walk to school even when it rains. It’s raining. The CB hisses, crackles and squelches like the soundtrack to a horror movie about a demonically possessed computer that considers humanity a lower form of intelligence that must be eliminated.

  I’m lying in our living room on the shaggy burnt-orange rug that’s so old it’s been retro twice. Rafe, my older brother by two years, has his portable CB radio positioned strategically on the small circular glass table next to the TV. Strategic, because he’s the Sun Tzu of irritation and the CB radio rattles on the glass creating a perfect frequency of brain death. I push my long fringe away from my glasses and glare at the back of his skull.

  ‘Turn it down,’ I say. He turns his shaggy red-haired, knob-shaped head and stares at me with the knowing-eye. I feel the rage build like a dark wave inside of me.

  The knowing-eye is a weapon passed down from generation to generation in my family. My grandfather on my father’s side has it. I suspect it’s what drove my grandmother to alcoholism and sex addiction before reforming, divorcing Grandad, and joining a racist commune in the Northern Cape. That and the fact that my grandfather thinks that there are giant shape-shifting crows out to get him.

  The eye skipped a generation and now Rafe, the eldest son, has it. In a single glance it can see right through you like an X-ray, revealing your most vulnerable spots, your most sensitive secrets.

  Rafe ignores me and flips open one of his stupid South African history books. Apparently most people chilling out on the lower end of the autistic spectrum obsess about things. For Rafe it’s South African history. He has a whole library of books which he peers at constantly, as if trying to find patterns in the sprawling, blood-soaked tapestry of our colonial heritage. He’s really weird. It’s not enough that his warped mind encroaches on my waking life, but now his weird obsession with ox-wagons and Boers is infiltrating my dreams too.

  He turns to me, opens the book to a double-page spread on some long-forgotten Boer battle against the English and jabs his finger insistently at it, like he’s trying to teach a monkey to read. It’s like dangling a baby in front of a pit bull. I can’t help it. The dark wave crashes over me. Snarling with rage, I push myself up from the floor and jump onto Rafe’s back, grabbing his neck in a sleeper hold and dragging him to the floor.

  From experience I know I only have seconds to inflict as much damage as possible before my mother comes to break us up. I snarl and hiss with rage as I jackhammer my fists into his kidneys and he struggles violently. It’s not enough but at least it’s something. My mother’s footsteps pound down the stairs. We break apart and I pat Rafe good-naturedly on the back.

  ‘We’ve just been play-fighting, Mum,’ I say as she walks through into the living room.

  ‘Baxter, what the hell is wrong with you?’ she asks, peeling back the layers of my face with her straight-razor gaze. Clearly she isn’t fooled by the old play-fighting ruse.

  ‘The eye –’ I start.

  ‘You’re sixteen, for God’s sake,’ she says. ‘Do you think picking on Rafe is something a good brother does?’

  It’s rhetorical but I can’t help but point out her false assumption that I actually want to be a good brother. That goes down like playing Iron Maiden’s ‘Number of the Beast’ at Sunday school.

  The crux of the problem is that Rafe has learning difficulties and goes to a special school and, as such, is excused from mundane chores such as reason and responsibility for his actions.

  ‘I wasn�
��t picking –’ I begin.

  ‘He can’t help it,’ she whispers tersely.

  This is a losing hand and I know when to fold. My mother and I are just going to have to agree to disagree about Rafe’s cognitive capabilities. While she thinks he’s some kind of supertard who is totally oblivious to the irritation he directs at me like a laser beam, I disagree. He can help it all right. It’s just that his sole purpose on Earth is to drive me clinically insane.

  ‘Apologise,’ my mother says, arching a thin eyebrow.

  ‘Sorry,’ we both mumble and limply shake hands. I turn, grab my bag, and walk out the front door into the rain, ignoring my mother’s offer of an umbrella.

  I trudge through the downpour. It’s unfair. Rafe is the bane of my existence. He barely speaks, and when he does it’s all Boer generals, English concentration camps and San mythology. (As far as I can tell, their mythology seems to hold with the golden rule of religious practice in that it’s entirely insane. The shape-shifting mantis god fell in love with an antelope and then created the moon and a whole bunch of weird monsters because, hey, I’m a shape-shifting god, why not? Seems totally legit.) I wish my parents would just medicate him. But life is unfair; it’s like a kids’ birthday party where the mom rigs the pass-the-parcel so that a kid she likes gets the prize.

  I remember how it works. The little blonde kids with cherub faces and dial-up Internet minds (zzrrgggkkkk eeeeee zrgggkkkk) win pass-the-parcel. When I was a kid I went to hundreds of parties and I never won pass-the-parcel. That’s statistically improbable and can only point to the fact that none of the moms liked me.

  It’s because I was one of those kids that made other kids cry, a natural talent that I couldn’t help exercising. If there are two things that moms like it’s Josh Groban and kids not crying, and since Josh only puts out a new album every couple of years they tend to focus on the kids-not-crying bit.

  The sky is almost the exact grey of the diseased lung of a two-packs-a-day smoker. It makes me want a cigarette. I turn off the busy main road and make my way into the subway next to the train station, the skanky sacred secret grotto where my girlfriend Esmé and I meet to exchange smoke and saliva before school starts.

  The subway curves beneath the train line like a dirty catacomb, the chaotic graffiti like the multi-hued bones of dragons buried in the walls. I cup my hands to light a cigarette and then lean back against the wall and watch the smoke twist and curl like two giant creatures fighting. My eyes wander across the opposite wall and take in the scrawls and tags left by the school-going population that passes through this tunnel daily.

  I recognise the Inhalant Kid’s tag, a stylised spray can with ‘IK’ scrawled next to it in radiant blue. Some of his pieces along the train tracks are quite beautiful, in a warped, hallucinatory sort of way. He only really hangs out with the graf kids because they offer a steady supply of aerosol, but he’s not actually bad at it.

  ‘Tammy Laubscher gives terrible head’ is scrawled in thick black marker next to a drawing of a dick with a cross through it. By all accounts this is a completely factual statement; something about her snaggle-tooth interfering with her progress as a fella-trice. Next to that is ‘Call Ms Jones for a good time. 076 924 8724’ in red paint. Our geography teacher clearly got on the wrong side of one of the graf kids. Her real number I can confirm.

  A small, bright piece draws my attention. It’s a swollen red eye that seems to drip yellow paint from it like pus. Beneath it are scrawled five chilling words: ‘Baxter Zevcenko is a murderer.’ A cold feeling slides from the top of my head right down through my body. Fuck. Kyle must have told someone about my dreams. Guess best-friend confidentiality isn’t a ‘thing’ any more.

  I can still remember last night’s foray into my chaotic, nonsensical dreamworld clearly. The smell of the dark, dank moss in the forest was so strong, pines swaying in the wind like the priests of some ancient, lost religion. The moon was a vicious silver-bright sickle overhead and everything was still.

  I was on my BMX, easing the wheels forward and listening to their rubber tread making a crunching sound on the pine needs. Then I saw it in front of me: the huge emerald-backed mantis swaying elegantly, drunkenly in the breeze like it was performing t’ai chi. It dipped its huge inverted-pyramid head, its diaphanous, shimmering wings spread wide as it started to dance, somehow both comical and terrifying at the same time. It turned its head and looked at me with the knowing-eye, but it was terrible, like Sauron with an eye infection, dripping blood and fire into my brain. I tried to scramble away but it burned its way through my forehead.

  After that all I could see were ox-wagons burning in the night and people being massacred. These dreams always end with people being massacred. It’s like my sleeping brain is constantly set to the History Channel. If all the re-enactments were directed by Quentin Tarantino.

  ‘Hey.’ The familiar jazz-singer voice jars me from my dream recollection. Esmé saunters through the subway and slouches against the wall next to me. Her short dark hair is mussed up and a long strand hangs down across an angular cheekbone of her pixie-like face. Her green eyes are framed with dark kohl which they’ll make her take off the minute she walks into school. She smells of smoke and jasmine perfume.

  She pulls a cigarette from the pack in my hand and leans over for me to light it. Her hair falls into her face and I resist the urge to push it back. Something about the combination of the light in the subway, her smell and her closeness does something to me. Time compresses into this single point. My chest feels strange and I can’t think.

  ‘Jody Fuller was murdered,’ she says matter-of-factly. ‘On the mountain.’

  ‘Fuck,’ I say. The coldness returns, sliding down my throat like a bad oyster. Jody Fuller was a year older than me but I had kissed her once. I remember she’d tasted faintly of milk and mint.

  ‘It’s funny,’ Esmé says. ‘I hated the bitch and now I kind of miss her.’

  ‘Yeah,’ I say.

  We smoke in silence and then she flicks her butt into the gutter, pushes herself off the wall and leans across to smear a moist kiss across my lips.

  ‘Find me online later,’ she says, and then saunters away, her figure framed like a religious icon by the light pouring in through the entrance. I stay for a moment in the quiet subway. That kiss cleared the cache of an already bad day. I suck down the last of my cigarette and then push myself off the wall and head back into the rain. The rest of the walk is miserable. By the time I get to the old iron gates at the entrance of the school even my socks are wet.

  Thankfully I had the foresight to wrap the contents of my backpack in a plastic bag. Along with my lunch and my school books is a four-page manifesto that could change everything. If all hell doesn’t break loose first. I face the gates of Westridge High and wipe the rain off my glasses.

  Westridge is an imposing granite structure that has spat generations of suburban Capetonians from its iron jaws. Like all prominent high schools in the leafy Southern Suburbs we have lush school grounds, sophisticated computer labs that were out of date as soon as they were installed, a debating team, a competitive rugby team, and gangs, drugs, bulimia, depression and bullying.

  It’s an ecosystem; a microcosm of the political, economic and military forces that shape the world. Some high-school kids worry about being popular or about getting good marks. I worry about maintaining a fragile gang treaty that holds Westridge together. Horses for courses, as my dad says.

  I walk fast through the gates but then slow down again when I see Mikey Markowitz up ahead; a small banana-coloured beacon of dorkiness in his bright yellow rain jacket.

  Mikey was my best friend in junior school. He was thoughtful, kind and concerned for my well-being. By the time high school rolled around I was rethinking our friendship. It became apparent that high-school kids, or at least the ones who looked like their parents injected them with human growth hormone and then beat the joy out of them with a leather strap, could smell the weakness that Mikey secr
eted into the air. He’s a chubby, pink, blond-haired vortex of neediness that’s like shit to the big, violent flies with dyslexia that circle the school. So I made a business decision.

  If you’re climbing a mountain and the guy below you falls and starts dragging you down into a gaping, icy abyss, what do you do? You cut him loose. Well, high school is a gaping, icy abyss and I had to cut the cord that connected Mikey to me. Still, I feel a guilty twinge whenever I see him sitting alone at lunch break staring morosely at his cheese sandwich. I slow down to let Mikey gain distance. There’s no sense in dredging up the past.

  Mikey disappears into the rain and I quickly scan the groups of blue-blazered juveniles that skulk in the corners. Cold, beady eyes regard me from across the Sprawl – our name for the strip of tar playground that runs from behind the red-brick school hall to the janitor’s hut at the edge of the lowest sports field.

  The Sprawl is where everything important in the political life of Westridge happens. And important things are happening on this Monday morning. It’s a wonder the adults cannot feel it; the lines of power stretched tight across the playground crackling with energy. It’s almost pathetic to see the parentbots smile and drop their kids off into the seething ocean of chaos and fury, blissfully unaware and slightly high on expensive Italian espresso.

  I stroll across to where the other members of the Spider are huddled in our usual corner and slip in with my clique, my protective bubble in the wilderness of high-school life.

  ‘What’s up, Bax?’ Zikhona growls, shoving me affectionately with her shoulder and almost knocking me over.

  ‘The demand for our product hopefully,’ I say with a grin.

  ‘Amen, brother,’ the Inhalant Kid wheezes.

  ‘Anything new?’ I ask.

  ‘The gangs are still at each other’s throats,’ Kyle says.

  ‘They haven’t seen my plan yet,’ I say with a smug smile. That’s what it’s all about. My plan. An intricate blueprint for the future of Westridge.