She would likely be dead before the setting of the sun. As she fly-cycled through the air of Antipodia, just above the poisonous cloud that choked the surface of her home, Ngu’s thoughts turned in rhythm with her cranking arms: the cloud of death, her family gone, friends gone, coworkers gone. Who had sent the cloud? Where did it come from? What was it made of? Why did that matter?
The dark grey cloud, a couple of metres below her, waited to swallow her up like it had devoured every other life she’d ever cared about. And then she thought of him and felt guilt in her stomach for not thinking of him before—Anglor, her pet mousticke, stuck in his little cage in her apartment, choking to death as the cloud rolled in. How devastating to think that she’d never kiss Anglor’s little whiskered face again.
Everyone in Antipodia used—no! She corrected herself with sad, angry bitterness. Had used, had used, had because they were all dead now. They had used gliding pedestrian runways to commute, and wheeled buggies to travel longer distances along the small moon they called home. As part of her last year of school, Ngu had built a flying cycle machine. The rider used two of their arms to peddle, powering a small engine that pushed out a jet of air from the bank of horizontal propellers surrounding the cycle’s body and wheels. It worked beautifully, but she’d barely passed the class. Her teacher said that senior projects should be practical. Practical meant they had to support the war effort.
Her teacher was right in a way—no one seemed all that interested in her cycling machine. The Antipodians, minus her, didn’t care for heights. So, to prove to everyone how much fun it was to sail through the sky, she used her flying machine to commute to work every day.
But this morning, as she’d climbed to the roof of her five-story apartment building and launched off—instead of cycling along and waving with one of her free hands at her friends on the runways below—she saw things dropping from the sky, giant balloons, dozens and then hundreds of them, and when they hit the ground, they exploded. Within a minute, the ground up to and beyond the roof of her building—one of the tallest in Antipodia—was covered in dark grey smoke. Before the cloud became too thick, she saw her friends collapse on the runways, which continued to convey their lifeless bodies, crashing them into each other like an oblivious river carrying along and depositing driftwood.
She’d raced along, crying out fruitless warnings to those below, telling them to find higher ground.
It was too late for them. And what about her? Could she outlast the smoke? Charge the battery, rest a little, recharge again? Switch arms to keep from getting too tired?
But—did she want to survive? Everyone she knew was gone. Her entire world was gone.
Who caused the attack—the Jdons of the second moon? The Gnos of the third? The Halps of the fourth? Did it matter? Did anything matter anymore?
Until now, the war had been easy for her to ignore. It was being fought on and for Nalpodia, the birth-home from which they’d emigrated millennia ago. After the first few centuries of paying taxes to their planetary overlords, the moon-colonies had banded together and revolted, overthrowing the Nalpodian governments and devastating much of Nalpodia, their biological weapons rendering it uninhabitable. But three millennia had passed since then, and the planet was flourishing once more, habitable once more, desirable once more. Worth going to war over once more.
Three millennia in which enough people had forgotten the indiscriminate devastation caused by biological warfare, and the ban against them.
She wondered if whoever it was had targeted just Antipodia or the other moons as well. Couldn’t be just us, she thought: the use of biological weapons would be shocking enough to force a coalition between the remaining two moons. So they must have destroyed life on three other worlds to have Nalpodia all to themselves.
Was the cloud dissipating? She switched arms because her lower pair were starting to throb. Maybe the wind is blowing it away?
Maybe someone has survived. In an airtight room? Or had an air mask and enough warning to put it on?
I can’t stop, she told herself.
Maybe, she then thought, I’m the last Nalpodian alive. The war still raged on the planet, so if all but one of the moons had been choked to death, the generals and soldiers on the ground would know who was responsible for the devastation on three of the moons above.
So it occurred to her, as she cycled above the smoke-gripped world where she’d been born and grew up, the only world she’d ever cared about, the world she would’ve been satisfied to call home for the rest of her life, that if she wasn’t the last Nalpodian yet, she may be sometime soon.
I have to try, she told herself again. I can’t give up. But her heart beat so furiously in her chest and her upper arms were starting to throb now too.
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BIO: Karl El-Koura resides in Canada’s capital city with his beautiful editor-wife and their adorable tiny human.
Almost seventy of Karl’s short stories and articles have been published in magazines since 1998. In 2012 he independently published his debut novel Father John VS the Zombies, and in 2015 he published the sequel, Bishop John VS the Antichrist.
Karl holds a second-degree black belt in Okinawan Goju Ryu karate, is an avid commuter-cyclist, and works for the Canadian Federal Public Service.
Primarily a writer of fiction, Karl works in a wide variety of genres, from science fiction and horror to mainstream and detective fiction, as well as in lengths ranging from short stories to novels. Almost all of his work can be classified as theological fiction—a Christian deeply interested in the “big” questions, Karl’s stories explore issues of theology and spirituality even when he doesn’t consciously intend them to do so. For those who care to know, Karl is a Greek Orthodox Christian.
