The Book of Apex: Volume 1 of Apex Magazine by Jason Sizemore Read Free Book Online

then. The tracks
of the giant Cat twisted and shattered the skeletons as Zan charged hard into
the remaining overburden. I stumbled over to the loader, dreading the act with
every halting step. I know I could not have stopped him even if I’d wanted to.
    Zan charged into the remaining
feet of cover. Black dust boils rose in the lights, and cracks rang out as the
coal seam splintered in the petroleum-powered onslaught. Then I heard the ear
shattering ping of steel breaking. The dozer’s engine went dead and I watched
Zan leap from the cab and run around the front of the machine. I killed the
loader and climbed down, not sure if I wanted to know what had happened. As I
came around the dozer I found Zan looking down at the base of the dozer’s blade.
Two of the inch-thick steel teeth that lined the bottom of the blade were
cleanly broken off, rent back under the blade by the terrible pressure of the
Cat’s unrelenting drive.
    “What the hell did that?” I
asked. We might be able to hide the fact that we’re using up fuel, but two
teeth busted on a new dozer was going to be trouble. “Shit. We’re going to have
to weld those on before Monday or it’s going to be our ass. What did you hit?”
    Zan dusted
off the black ground the teeth had apparently struck. He spat and, using his
shirt sleeve, rubbed the spit on the patch of ground. It quickly took on a
reflective, even luminous quality like black glass.
    “What is it?” I asked.
    “It looks like obsidian, but
that would never have broken steel teeth.” He dusted around the broken steel
and withdrew a six-inch-long shard of the glassy material, sharp and
dagger-like. “I’m going to see what I can figure out about this stuff.”
    We decided to knock off. It was
four in the morning and even though we weren’t working on Sundays anymore, I
knew my wife would skin me for staying out so late. It was freezing outside and
Zan was on his motorcycle so I offered him a ride. We loaded the bike into the
back of the truck and set off down the road.
    We pulled out of the mine’s
gravel access road and out onto the deserted Highway 70. “What do you think all
that shit is?” I asked, trying to keep fear out of my voice as best I could.
    Zan’s voice was calm, reserved
in a way it had not been for days. “Do you know much about the Pennsylvanian
age?”
    “It’s full of coal. I know
that. Bowling Green is Mississippian, at Hadley Hill you climb up into
Pennsylvanian.”
    “Yeah, well back during the
Pennsylvanian age all this was a great big swamp. I mean really big. The
Appalachians were bigger than the Himalayas, and all the moisture got trapped
on this side making one giant swamp at the edge of a hot shallow sea. All that
shit died and sank and became coal, all the trees and ferns and fishes. But
something happened then. Nobody knows why, but everything died. Every fish and
fern and tree. All of it. Scientist think it was a meteor.”
    “Oh, yeah. Off the coast of
Mexico. Killed all the dinosaurs. I saw it on the Discovery Channel. That show
about the T. rex.”
    “No. That was millions of years
later. That was a meteor, and it killed like, sixty percent of the world’s
species. The extinction that I’m talking about was bigger, and they’re not
certain that it was a meteor at all. There is no evidence it was, and this
extinction took out over ninety percent of the species. The dinosaurs first
appeared a few million years later. Plants started bearing seeds, shit started
running on two legs. Everything that survived the extinction got a lot meaner
and they got meaner really fast. It was like all of a sudden a whole bunch of
pressure was put on every living thing. The ones that survived did so because
they could run, or hide, or have lots of babies.”
    “What are you saying?” I asked.
    “What if it wasn’t a meteor, or
volcanoes changing the climate that made everything die? What if it was some
new species, or old species that changed real fast and had the