The Apocalypse Club by Craig McLay Read Free Book Online Page B

like my uncle Lennox, who died when his parachute failed to open during a HALO exercise over the Sea of Japan. It should be noted, however that the reason it failed to open was because he left it packed under his seat. Although they weren’t able to locate his body, they think he may have taken twice the recommended dose of attention-maintaining amphetamines on the way up and was so wired that he jumped as soon as the door was opened.
    With her brother’s remains spread out over an estimated 300-square-mile search radius and a husband terrified of anything louder than an eye blink, I can hardly fault my mother for opposing the idea. I’m the youngest of three kids. The oldest is my brother Jack, who was born with an underdeveloped spinal cord and has been in a wheelchair since birth. You know the stereotype of the unstoppable and determined disabled person overcoming all obstacles to climb Everest or go into space or whatever else people with functioning limbs might consider impossible? That’s not my brother. My brother is, quite possibly, the laziest man alive. He’s in an assisted living facility where he spends all his time listening to country music, designing pornographic phone apps, and pretending to forget that pants are not an optional clothing item in the common areas. He takes his fun where he can find it. I rarely visit. We have almost nothing in common and the place is like an old age home. I’m a terrible brother.
    My sister, Gillian, is two years older than me. She’s the achiever of the family. She got her real estate licence when she was 14 and quickly became one of the top commissioned realtors in the region. It wasn’t long before she moved from selling to developing and is now the owner of one of the largest commercial real estate management companies in the country. She is something of a militant libertarian and has hired a small army of former GDI contractors to patrol her various estates. There’s a rumour floating around that every year she brings them all down to a private compound in the Central African Republic where they are broken up into teams and spend two weeks hunting the homeless people who have been caught either attempting to break in or loitering in proximity to one of her properties in a specially designed arena. I don’t see much of her, either, but I don’t feel quite so guilty about that.
    I was a quiet, well-behaved kid most of the time. The standard narrative would be that everything was humming along just fine until my parents got divorced, but that doesn’t apply because they never did. The truth is that everything wasn’t fine, but I wasn’t getting arrested.
    Not until I met Max Hernandez, anyway.
    Maximillian T. Hernandez was diagnosed with brain cancer when he was nine years old. His mother, a private hedge fund manager, took her son to the best paediatric oncologist that her vast commissions could provide. He was her only son, and she had gone through 14 rounds of failed IVF treatments before he came along, so she wasn’t about to give in, at least not without a long and expensive fight. The identity of his father was never known. His mother had gone to a fertility clinic that engineered the genetic traits of approximately a thousand donors – all Nobel-prize winners, Rhodes scholars, star athletes, and so on – to generate one super embryo genetically predisposed to go on to great things (she later sued the clinic into bankruptcy for failing to properly screen for potential cancer indicators).
    After six months of treatments and two surgeries, Max was declared cancer-free. That, however, wasn’t the only thing he was free of.
    “I was nine years old and they told me I was gonna die,” he told me when I asked him about it later. “You know what the first thing that went through my head was? Does this mean I don’t have to take any more violin lessons? No more private tutors? No more pre-qualification placement tests? Shit, I actually felt good about that.