He tried to address the suit.
“Hey, roaches. Are you guys full yet?”
Nothing. Or maybe they thought it rude to respond while eating.
Instead, Dean’s Fear, that nagging voice he thought he’d snuffed out by surviving the bombing, decided to chip in.
Yeah, that’s reasonable. Talk to the insects. How cracked is your mind at this point? Are you even sure you’re alive? I mean, we’re talking full-fledged nuclear war here. You absolutely should not be alive. It’s ridiculous. How do you know that you weren’t vaporized in the first blast? That’s more likely. And this is some sort of nasty purgatory that you’ll be forever condemned to, all alone, stuck in this ugly place with your ludicrous bug suit…
“Shut up.” It felt better to Dean, saying it out loud. Quieted the ugly part of his brain for a moment.
Dean was pretty sure he was alive. He couldn’t imagine a metaphysical plane where he’d feel so damn hungry.
I need to pee. There’s no way they kept urination in the afterlife.
Dean was also pretty sure that the world, or at least his continent, was getting darker and heading toward deep-sea black. It was already beyond dusk at what was probably three in the afternoon. Nuclear winter was spreading its ashy chill through the air, fed onward by black smoke and blazing nouveau-palace pyres in the distance. Fat flakes of glowing gray floated in the air.
Dean shivered and tried to move the heft of his weight into the radiant heat coming from the bodies of the cockroaches beneath him. There were tiny pores in the suit’s fabric at each point where he’d delicately sewn each roach’s thorax to the outfit. He imagined heat seeping through, but didn’t really feel it.
Dean received little comfort or consolation. But he didn’t demand those things either. The suit kept him alive here at catastrophe central and he felt guilty for wanting more.
Relax. Let the suit take the lead. Instinct will kick in. They’ve had millions of years of training. They’re ready.
But why are they eating so much? They never needed this much food before.
Dean blanched. This level of consumption was totally unnatural. He’d guessed they’d stop feeding when they finished with the toasted yellow sugar cakes in which the President had been coated.
Back when Dean had lived in the slums of DC, as he was creating the suit, he’d woken many evenings and found the creatures nibbling at the dead skin around his eyelashes and fingernails, but he’d never seen them go after new, wet meat like this. What, he wondered, had he strapped onto his body?
Maybe they’ll turn right around when they’re done with El Presidente here and they’ll keep on eating. Could you fight them off Dean? The leader of the free world couldn’t stop them. What makes you think you could? You think these roaches know you? That they give a petty shit about you and your continued existence? They’re filling up Dean. They’ll eat you slow…
“Fuck that, fuck that, fuck that.” Dean had to say this out loud, and quickly, to clear his mental slate. With nowhere to go, his Fear would flourish if he didn’t run containment.
The rolling sheet of hunger Dean had clothed himself inside just kept eating. It took in a million tiny bits of once stately matter and processed President in its guts.
Could they taste the man’s power, Dean wondered, like an Iroquois swallowing his enemy’s heart? A fool’s question, but he had little to do but think and adjust while his handcrafted cockroach suit stayed true to its sole purpose—Survival.
Here, amid the ash of the freshly destroyed capital, hunkered over an ever-thinner corpse in the shadow of a blackened obelisk, Dean’s suit was fueling up for potential famine/war/voyage. The legion of bugs sewn into the front of his suit jacket and pants clung tight to the supine body of the recently deceased world leader, forcing Dean into a sort of lover’s embrace with the man he’d once feared and despised more than any other. And there were so many mouths to feed. A multitude of mandibles denuding bone, sucking skin off of the fingers that had presumably launched the first volley of nuclear arsenal earlier that day. Cockroach jaws chewing away at the kingly lips which had once taunted foreign dignitaries and charmed the breadbasket into submission with phrases like, “HOO BOY, and good morning to you!”
Despite the largely unappetizing sounds of insect consumption beneath him, Dean felt a low grumble in his own gut.
Will they let me eat? Do they have to get their fill before I can find something for myself?
He pushed down on the cold, dirty ground with his bare hands, again regretting his oversight during the design phase. His cockroach suit, completed with the addition of blast goggles, an oxygen tank and mask, a skull-topper crash helmet, and foil-lined tan work boots, was totally lacking the crucial support that a pair of nice woolly gloves could provide. Dean cursed himself and pictured surging blast rads sneaking into his heart via his exposed fingertips. He felt gamma ray death in the grit beneath his tightly-groomed nails.
You won’t make it a day, Dean-o. You’re probably dead anyway, right? This is your hell, Dean. You’ll be here, right here, forever. You’ll keep getting hungrier and hungrier while the radiation makes you puke your guts out and you’ll feel every…last…second…
“Quiet!”
Dean shifted his legs against the tugging movements of the roaches on their prey and managed to get the toes of his boots planted firmly behind him. Now all he had to do was push up and away from the ground and hope he could break the masticating grip of the ravenous bugs.
Jaw clenched tight/teeth squeaking with stress/thin muscles pumping at max output. Still, no give. The thick cloister of bugs that covered Dean’s chest had dug deep into the corpse. Dean could tell from the stink of half-digested lobster bisque that the bugs had breached the President’s belly. Worse, the smell only made him hungrier.
Cannibal. Beast.
“Shut it shut it shut it.”
Dean readied himself again, flattening his hands, fingers wide, anxious to assert his own need to survive. He and the roaches had to learn to live together. If not in total symbiosis, then through equal shows of force—a delicate balance between Dean and his meticulously crafted attire.
They’d be a team, damn it.
Dean pushed, exhaling sharply, goggles fogging from exertion, sweat pooling at his lower back.
Come on. We can take the body with us. I just need to get some food in my belly and you greedy little fuckers can return to your meal. Just let go…
Dean pushed and felt a shift. He realized that his full-force push-up had only served to elevate him and the body stuck to him, just before he realized his shaking right hand was edging into a patch of blood-spattered Twinkie filling.
Quick as a thought Dean’s hand slid out from under his newly acquired girth, and he thudded back to the ground. The weight of the landing was enough to compress a stale breath through the lungs of the President’s body.
And Dean would swear, to his last day, that the impact of his weight on the President’s chest forced a final “HOO BOY!” from the dead man’s half-eaten lips.
It was upon hearing this final and desperate State of the Union Address that Dean allowed exhaustion, un-sated hunger, and shock to overcome him.
He rested deeply, cradled by a suit which slept in shifts and fed each of its members a royal feast.
This was the first day of the end of human existence.
2
Deep belly grumbles/acidic clenching. The light pain of an oncoming hunger headache made mostly unimportant by the stranger sensation of being in motion while in the process of waking.
Dean opened his eyes and rubbed accumulated ash from his blast goggles. The suit was moving, quickly, away from something. He couldn’t shake the God-like sensation he got when the roaches carried him across the ground.
Overlord Dean. The Great One To Which We Cling. The Mighty Passenger.
Dean would have been more amused by his invented titles had he not noticed what the suit was fleeing from.
&nbs
p; A thick bank of radioactive fog was rolling in behind them, moving in the new alien currents created by a global weather system blown topsy-turvy. The fog had a reddish tint at its edges that read cancer/mutation/organ-sloughing. Dean imagined each of the nuclear droplets must be nearly frozen inside the fog. The temperature was cold enough to sap the heat from his fingers and face. Thirty-five degrees and dropping, easy.
But the roaches could handle the sort of deep radiation that filled the fog. Were they moving in order to preserve him? Ridiculous. So they must have exhausted their food source and were just moving towards the next step. A dark place to hide. A place to nestle in and lay eggs.
Should I just let them keep leading me along? The way they’d treated their last meal… if I don’t take over now they’ll never let me eat. They’ll just keep moving and consuming. Hell, with it this dark outside, they won’t even feel a need to hide. This is their world now. I’ve got to show them I deserve a place in it.
Carefully, so as not to crush any of the suit’s communal members, he lowered his heels to the ground and then got his feet beneath him. Within seconds he was standing, lightheaded and waiting for his blood to catch up. The few Madagascar cockroaches he’d sown to his pants jostled at the disturbance and let loose with high-pitched hissing.
“Come on, you guys. Take it easy.”
Dean ignored their susurrant complaint. He respected the suit, but now it was time for the suit to respect him. He felt the roaches’ legs bicycling in the chill wind, seeking purchase, trying to stay on target wherever they’d been headed.
Maybe I should let them take over. They got me through the overpressure of the blast. They got me through the radiation, so far. They found food instantly in a dead landscape. They’re almost happy, it seems. Vibrating. Thriving. Do I have that same instinct?
I have to. No choice. Assess the situation.
Dean ignored the motions of his suit, took a few breaths from his oxygen mask to clear the chemical taste from his throat, and realized that he really should have hooked up a gas mask instead of his portable breather unit.
But he couldn’t subject himself to that level of suffering. Dean had a severe aversion to having his entire face enclosed in rubber; an extraordinarily rough time with a dominatrix in Iceland had forced him to forever swear off such devices. He could barely even tolerate the tiny respirator.
Now, though, he couldn’t help wonder about what this tainted air was already doing to his lungs. And he thanked the collective gods for whatever miracle had prevented the small oxygen tank on his back from exploding when the first bomb sent out its terrible heat-wave.
I can’t fucking believe I’m still alive.
It was quickly becoming a mantra, but a useless one which distracted him from the act of actually living.
He shook away the thought, surveyed his surroundings.
Black rubble. Fire. Ash. Nothing remotely human or animal in any direction. Whatever bombs were employed—fission/fusion/gun-triggered/dirty bombs/H-bombs—they did the job to the Nth degree. The view triggered Fear.
Last man standing, Dean-o. Look at the world you’ve inherited. All the nothing you could ever want. You’re either stuck in this till the end of time or…
“Enough. No.”
It was nighttime. Maybe. Or the sky born debris had completely blocked out the sunlight. Regardless, still-flaming buildings were the remaining source of illumination. Dean figured anything that depended on photosynthesis was torched or starving at top speed in the blackout.
He couldn’t assess his distance from the ground zero hypocenter but he guessed he was within fifty miles of an actual strike.
That’s good, Dean. Pretend you know what’s going on. Pretend you aren’t a man coated in cockroaches and that you can make sense of the world. But remember that if the world makes sense, you’re dead. Are you dead?
The black clouds above rolled over each other with super-natural momentum, colliding and setting off electrical storms which flashed wide but never struck the ground. There were few high points left to arc through.
Dean felt strangely honored as a witness. For all he knew, his were the last human eyes taking in a vision that royally outranked Mt. St. Helens or Pinatubo, and surely even went beyond what the first people to emerge from tunnel shelters at Nagasaki had seen.
Don’t drift. Think. Take action.
He ran down research, looking for a plan. He spoke the details aloud to his suit, hoped that somehow they were paying attention. Teamwork remained crucial.
“Okay, guys, here’s what we’re looking at. Assuming bombs haven’t hit every single inch of the U.S., we might be able to clear the fallout ground track by heading 30 miles past the central explosion. Rain and fog this close to the blast will jack the fallout up to intolerable levels. If we can find a safe place for now, and hole up for three to five weeks, then our travel options should open. The radiation will drop by then. Decontamination requires things we don’t have—flowing water/backhoes/man-power. We’re going to have to soak up some rads no matter what. Not that you guys are worried about that.”
No response.
Were you expecting one, Dean-o? Are you that gone?
But Dean didn’t expect any response. What he didn’t tell his Fear, what he didn’t want to say or even think, really, was that the loneliness was already making him feel sad in a way that was dangerous. Dean had never spent much time talking to people in the months just prior, but there’d been some interaction each day. The mailman. Fast food clerks. Small vestiges of human interaction. Faces that reacted. Voices that weren’t his.
Dean continued to lay out the game plan.
“We can access emergency drinking water by filtering contaminated H20 through more than ten inches of dirt. But that dirt had better be from below the topsoil, which is toxic in and of itself right now. Access to a supply of potassium iodide could mitigate some of the effects of the radiation on me, not that you guys care about that.”
He almost hoped for a response to that last part. Some sign from the roaches that they did indeed give a shit. But there was nothing.
“The top new symptoms on my watch list will be nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, cataracts, and hair loss.”
Of course, Dean’s constant exposure to the cockroaches and their profusion of pathogens meant he was often riddled with the first three symptoms, but if they got much worse than usual….
And what about the suit itself? Dean decided to skip talking to them about these details.
He’d expected the roaches sewn to him—at least the females—to survive for two hundred days or so. As long as they had food and water they’d get by. Perhaps, within that time span, the Earth would find some new equilibrium in its atmosphere and Dean could survive without his living fabric.
What the hell kind of plan is that? Did I even believe, deep down, that this suit would have actually kept me alive? Maybe it was just something to do to keep the Fear away until I died. Like old folks playing bridge.
No. Somehow I knew this would work.
And I lived. I’m living. Now I have to keep things that way.
Dean wasn’t sure how to feel about the ever-worsening nuclear winter growling around him. He dropped the roach edification because he was a bit confused on the whole issue.
Best I only speak to them in a confident tone, or not at all.
Back in the Seventies nuclear winter had been declared humankind’s endgame by Sagan and the Soviets. But in the Eighties Thompson and Schneider played that off as Cold War propaganda. So the weather was either headed towards the colder and darker spectrum, or was hitting its worst and soon to wane. Better to error on the side of Sagan and hook up some Arctic gear in case the temperature went negative. Easier to strip that stuff off if it turned out that the long-lasting dinosaur-and-human-ending nuclear winter was just a big Russian bluff.
Food. Dean’s main mission until his belly became quiet, and something he figured his pals would like to hear about.
&
nbsp; “Listen up, guys. Assuming not everything was vaporized, there should be enough in warehouses and stocks to feed the entire U.S. for sixty to ninety days. The rest of the world will be worse off. Maybe thirty three days of food before they run out.”
And will they be able to get to the U.S. at that point? Would they be coming for your food, Dean, those starving pirate citizens from small countries deemed Not Worth Bombing but still dependent on the global infrastructure for grub?
He shook off the doubts and tried to inject his voice with renewed poise.
“What about cows? There should be cows around. Somewhere. A non-irradiated bovine could supply us with food, milk or even an extra layer of leather protection.”
Not, Dean realized, that he would know how the hell to go about starting that process. He’d never touched a cow that wasn’t already sectioned and shrink-wrapped.
There was never enough time to learn the tools needed for surviving the apocalypse. Too many ways for a planet to go rotten.
Dean laid out a plan. And as plans go, it was on the lackluster end of things. The problem—he’d spent so much time thinking and chatting up the roaches that his hunger had crept full force into his brain.
Now all he and his belly could coherently put together was the following:
Get Food.
Dean asserted himself. He trekked on foot, away from the blast center and the noxious red fog bank kept rolling inland. His fingers went numb. He wished he hadn’t sewn the pockets shut on his jacket and pants, but had needed to in order to ensure every inch of his outfit was roach-ready.
His headache pushed inward, its own fog rolling through the crags of his cerebellum.
He cursed the extra weight of the oxygen tank on his back. He junked it.
He’d adapt to the new air like he’d adapted to the roaches. He’d press his limits. Couldn’t stomach that mask anyway. It conjured up flashes of too-long ball-gagged seconds at the hands of his Icelandic ex-mistress. The smell of vomit trapped between skin and rubber. A pressure behind the eyes.
Extinction Journals Page 2