“You mean they were all praying before they died?”
“Not exactly. Sort of. It’s not really prayer. It’s this state the mind goes into when it knows it’s about to die. There’s a lot of power there.”
“But it was too late?”
“From what you’ve told me, yes.”
“Shit…”
Time must have started to flow again. Dean felt the bite of hot tears in his eyes.
“Does that make you sad?”
“I guess. I get this feeling when I think about people dying. Mostly, I just feel bad that they’re so sad about it happening. And that sadness is strong. I’m afraid of it. So what I do is ignore them and just focus on staying alive. Because as long as I’m here, as long as I’m living and fighting off death, then I feel alright…I don’t ever want to feel as sad as those people.”
“But death is natural. It’s part of how your particular energy stays in existence.”
“Yeah, people always say that, but lions eating people is natural, too, and I’d chew my way through a room full of boiled shit to avoid ever ending up in the jaws of some giant cat, even for a second.”
“You still don’t understand.”
“No, you don’t understand. I’m here and I’m alive and that’s the one thing I’ve ever known for sure since I started breathing. I understand just fine.”
The creature sighed, and began to turn.
“You’re going then?”
“Of course. No reason to stay here. You’re dead already.”
“Oh, c’mon. Don’t be like that. Maybe I can learn from you. Will you at least tell me your name?”
“Had I needed a name during my time here, you would have called me Yahmuhwesu.”
“That’s a terrible name.”
“I thought so, too. It’s not my fault you’ve got an ugly language. But it would have worked. The floating horseless fire chariot wasn’t my idea either. But according to the vibrations from the hive mind, it would have been the most impressive way to appear.”
“Probably. Can I ask where you’re going?”
“Sure. I can still feel a pull here, so I’m going to look for other humans. If I find another, perhaps something will come of it. If not….”
“Well then, Yahmuhwesu, goodbye. Wish me luck.”
“Despite knowing better, I will.”
His feet lifted from the black floor of the Earth, floating just inches above.
“And by the way, Dean, I thought you might find this amusing. For a man with such a singular obsession with death, you are hugely pregnant.”
4
Pudding doesn’t taste as good on the way back up.
Dean noted this as he wiped a string of bilious chocolate drool from his lower lip and surveyed the sad pool of snack treat that sat beneath him in the charred soil.
Pregnant? What the hell is he talking about? You can’t just tell a man he’s pregnant and then disappear from existence like that. It’s too much.
Dean couldn’t fathom the idea of licking up the pudding off the ground, so he eased himself into a supine position and let the suit have at it. They deserved a little sugar. God knows what being frozen in time did to the poor things.
Dean’s body rotated slowly over the ground as the roaches took turns feeding on the regurgitated confection.
I hope they hurry up. We need to keep moving inland.
It had to be a coincidence, but as Dean had the thought he felt the bugs beneath him pick up their pace, shuffling quicker through their arcane feeding system.
Weird. I must be in shock. First I’m talking to some sort of scaly god, now I’m imagining that roaches can read my mind.
Pregnant. What could that have meant?
Then Dean realized what Yahmuhwesu was talking about.
The roaches. They’d been attached to the suit for a few weeks now. Long enough for some of them to reproduce. Especially the German ones. They didn’t even need sex to breed.
When choosing the different types of roaches for his suit, Dean had put them through a rigorous series of survival tests. The Smokybrowns and Orientals had done well, extraordinary paragons of genetics really. But the Blatella germanica was in a class of its own.
He’d cut the head off a German and watched it navigate through tubes back to its preferred spot by the baseboard molding in the corner of his bathroom.
Then he took the headless roach and put it in an airtight jar so see how long it would keep going. Ten days later the decapitated juggernaut was not only in motion, but had sprouted an egg case from its abdomen.
A week later there were thirty nymphs in the jar. They looked healthy. And full, since they’d eaten their headless mother.
Right then Dean had made the choice. His suit was going to be seventy percent German. It upped his odds. You just couldn’t kill the damn things.
Dean slid his goggles down and cleared them of deposited ash. He tilted his head forward. He lifted his right arm off of the ground, anxious to see if any of his roaches were reproducing.
Yahmuhwesu was right. Dean wasn’t just pregnant, he was completely covered in life. An egg case for almost every German. Even the ones he could have sworn were male a week ago.
Shit. That’s a lot of extra mouths to feed.
Dean gave himself a week, maybe two before they hatched.
And what if they think of you as their headless mother, Dean-o?
Shit.
He should have thought of this. New sweat surfaced in a sheen across his body. He was back to the same old agenda, the Find Food and Water routine, but now it was doubly important. He had babies to feed. Thousands of tiny new bellies to fill, along with his now empty gut.
I can’t just sit here. The clock is ticking. I’ve got to get moving. And NOW!
With that thought, quick and urgent as it came, the suit abandoned the remains of its pudding and crawled west, towards the heartland. Dean couldn’t help but acknowledge this second instance of collusion between his desires and the actions of the roaches surrounding him.
And while this fact made him strangely proud, something at the back of his mind recoiled. Because communication was a two way road, and roaches must certainly have desires of their own.
5
Time played tricks. Could be decompressing. Could be redacting. Dean had no watch, and day and night were old memories. Kid stuff. The new grown up reality was this: darkness/food/water/fire. Keep moving.
Primal shit.
Days passed. At least, what felt like days. Dean tried to calculate mileage, to figure a way to gauge time by distance traveled. It was a waste. His internal atlas was non-existent. His last score on a geography test—Mrs. Beeman’s class, 5th grade—was a D minus.
Even if the road signs weren’t blazed or shattered, Dean would barely have known where he was. Sense of place wasn’t part of his make-up. But he felt that the best plan was to keep moving inland. Pick a major road and stick with it. Keep walking.
The upside being that sleep didn’t halt his progress. When he was on the ground—snoring, twitching through his REM state—the bugs kept moving. They were relentless.
Dean was awakened once, by the sensation of his crash helmet sliding against a surface with more yield than the roadway he was used to being dragged along while resting. The roaches had veered off into a field—they’d hit farm territory just hours before—and found the crispy remains of what might have been a baby goat. Dean managed to tear off a chunk of it and sequester it to the wide top of his left boot. He’d need to wash it off before he could eat it. Couldn’t just dive in like his insectile friends. If he got desperate he guessed he could just peel away most of the outside of the meat and maw down its center. Maybe the fallout didn’t reach that deep.
The temperature seemed to have leveled out around a chilly forty-or-so degrees. It pulled the moisture from Dean’s face and hands and left his skin feeling tight and chapped. He guessed his face was stuck in a sort of permanent grimace. A charming look, h
e was certain.
Thirst was always nagging him. He made do with the occasional thin puddle of water that either hadn’t been vaporized or had resettled, and once he found a decent batch, maybe a gallon, still tucked inside a fractured chunk of irrigation pipe. With nothing to contain it in he was forced to gulp down what he could and make sure the roaches took the rest.
I could always eat some of the bugs if I got too hungry. I’m sure there’s some water in their bodies, and they’d understand. They’d be eating each other right now if my sewing job didn’t have them all in assigned seating.
But the thought felt wrong. Mutinous. They were working together now, or at least it seemed like it. He’d stopped short of giving them each names, but he felt an attachment to the bugs. They understood him. They shared his motto: Do Not Die.
No. They’d survive this together.
But why?
Dean was giving up whatever marginal hope he’d had of finding either a rich food source, other living beings, or both. When he traveled through cities, or whatever was left of them, he was able to acquire a few things. A sturdy hiking backpack from the remaining third of a ravaged outdoor store. A thick plastic bottle for water. Remnants of cloth and thin tinder wood (usually partially burnt) to make torches for lighting the way as the unnatural winter worsened. He’d edged around a still-flaming gas-tank crater and found a small fridge with three diet sodas inside. It was hideous shit but Dean knew he couldn’t afford to be picky right now. He used one of the diet sodas to clean the radiation from his stashed chunk of toasty goat meat. If the cola could remove the rust from airplane parts, it ought to be able to deal with a little nuclear waste.
It was not fine dining, nowhere near pudding-good, but Dean wolfed it down and kept moving. He couldn’t wear the backpack for fear of disturbing his suit, so he tied it to his waist with a length of twine and let it drag behind him, whether walking on foot or traveling by roach. The pack was pretty sturdy and helped him keep his motley assortment of goods in one place. And if it started to fall apart Dean figured he could use the sewing skills he’d learned constructing his outfit to fix it.
Finally—at the borders of a suburb Dean had named Humvington for its sheer numbers of blazed-out SUV frames—he made a valuable find. There, inside a half-melted tackle-box, Dean found a pair of thick gloves with leather across the palms and the finger tips cut off. It was a blessing, and for a few hours Dean felt a renewed sense of vigor. He was semi-equipped, alive, and heading places.
But the further he went the more he realized his efforts might be pointless no matter which direction he hiked. As insane as it seemed, no one else was alive.
The global imaging satellites and tiny computer chips guiding the missiles that hit America had done a flawless job. Every time Dean reached some new urban center he was confronted by fresh blast craters. Instead of clearing the radioactivity he’d tried to leave behind, he was charging into new ellipses of damage, places that would take much more than weeks to be livable again. And whenever Dean dared venture into buildings or homes in search of life he was greeted by the same thing:
Death. Unrestrained and absolute.
Exposed finger-bones pointing accusations at the sky.
Baby replicas composed of ash, mouths still open in a cry.
The bodies of a man and his dog fused together, skin and fur melded. Nobody wanted to die alone.
WWIII was less a war than it was a singular event. A final reckoning for a race sick of waiting for the next pandemic to clean things up. And since Dean never saw any sign of invasion, or even recon, he guessed that most of the other countries were now sitting in the same smoking squalor.
Each new region was the same. Crucial buildings, city centers, food stores—all dusted. He had much better chances of productive forage at the outskirts of cities, and then it was back into the blackness and the road to the next noxious burg.
It was during this seemingly timeless stretch of travel that Dean started to find them. The other ones like Dean.
He understood the zeitgeist, and how the media had allowed the entire planet to experience the same set of stimuli. So Dean shouldn’t have been so surprised that others would have tried to protect themselves like he had.
But their ideas—their suits—were so bad. Crackpot, really. At least Dean’s knowledge of entomology, passed down from his Ivy League father, had given him some viable theory to work on. And he had to assume that the President’s Twinkie suit was based on top-level Pentagon science that didn’t quite hit the right calculations. But these poor folks, they’d just been guessing.
Styrofoam man had surrounded himself with customized chunks of beverage coolers. Most of the enterprise had melted right into the guy’s skin. Hadn’t he ever tried to cook some sweet-and-sour soup leftovers in the microwave?
The cinder block guy had a better idea, but it appeared the pneumatics that were supposed to give him mobility had burned out in the first wave of fire. Dean had crawled up on the suit to check and confirmed that the man had died of heat exposure and dehydration. Without being able to move he’d spent his last days trapped inside a concrete wall, right there in the middle of the street.
The lady Dean found who was wearing two leather aprons and steel-toed work boots on each of her four appendages? He couldn’t even force that to make a lick of sense. But she appeared to have died from exposure. She was missing great swaths of her hair and was face down in a pool of black and red that was probably a portion of her lungs.
This was the response of the populace. Madness in the face of madness.
Dean found one man who was actually breathing, although it didn’t look like that’d be going on much longer. His body was laid out in a splayed X in the yard of a smoldering duplex, next to the melted pink remains of a lawn flamingo coated in gray ash. The man’s eyes had gone milky white with cataracts and the smell on the body was bad meat incarnate. But the chest was rising and falling ever so faintly.
Could be my eyes fooling me. A flashback from that bad pudding.
Dean squatted in closer to the man’s body and noticed how loose and wrinkled his face was. He’d never seen skin so rumpled, like one of those fancy dogs they put in motivational posters at work.
Dean gently pressed the middle and forefinger of his left hand against the man’s neck to check for a pulse.
It was this motion that caused the man’s face to slide off his head.
Not only that, the man changed colors. His first wrinkled face was stark white. His new face was light brown. The same cataract-coated eyes peered out at the heavy sky.
As if from the shock of losing his first face, he stopped breathing.
God damn it! I finally find someone and now they’re gone.
Dean couldn’t take it. Everyone he’d met since the bomb dropped was either dead or potentially imaginary.
Maybe it’s not too late.
Unsure of what exactly he was doing, Dean attempted to perform CPR. But his hands kept slipping from side to side and it was hard to center over the man’s chest. This man’s surface was so loose….
He must be wearing someone else’s entire skin!
Dean ripped open the man’s shirt. Dean freaked. Stitches up the center of the abdomen and chest. Industrial floss or fishing line, Dean couldn’t tell. Skin dry and puckered at the puncture points. Horror-show shit.
Dean tugged at the sutures/got a finger hold/got them to slip loose. He laid back dead white skin and uncovered brown slicked with blood and Vaseline. Tried to swipe the goop off the guy’s chest. Succeeded. Started compressions without the slippage.
Dean wished he had paddles. Wished he could just yell “Clear” and shock this guy back into the world of the living.
The compressions weren’t doing much. Dean moved north and started blowing breath into the man’s mouth, fighting back the nausea induced by the smell of lung corruption.
A hand at Dean’s forehead, pushing up and away. A moan. He was trying to speak.
“…the fuck are you doing, man? Get up off me!”
“What? Okay, just stay calm.”
“Tell me to stay calm. I’m just lying here in my yard and you think you can molest my ass. That’s fucked up, man. Fucked up. For real.”
“I wasn’t molesting you. You had stopped breathing. I was doing CPR.”
“Seriously?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, alright then. I’ve been confused. Didn’t mean to snap at you, man. I’m not feeling right. Haven’t been for a couple of days. Name’s Wendell.”
Wendell strained to raise his left hand, still coated in dead pale skin. Dean took the hand, felt slippage.
“I’m Dean. Wendell, I think you might be very sick.”
“No shit, genius. You a doctor? Part of a rescue team?”
“No. I’m just a guy.”
“Just a guy, huh? Maybe you can tell me what’s going on. I mean, I know the bombs dropped, I was ready for that, with my mojo and all… but do you know if the whole U.S. got hit? Is there someplace we could get to better than this joint?”
“I don’t know much, Wendell. I know I’ve been traveling for a couple of days and haven’t seen anything but destruction. I was starting to lose hope, but now I’ve found you and I guess that’s a good sign. Maybe there are more people like us who survived the first wave.”
“What about…hey…what about…do you know if they got our president? Is there somebody out there with rescue plans, working on rebuilding?”
Dean realized the real answer to this question might just shock Wendell right back into the grave so he opted for a simple out.
“The president’s gone. There are no plans that I know of.”
“Wish you had better news, but I can’t say I’m going to miss that stupid cracker motherfucker. Hell, I figure he’s a big part of why I’m laid out here right now.”
“Yeah…hey, you called him a ‘cracker.’ Do you hate white people? Did you think the ‘white devil’ would live through the bombing? Is that why you’re wearing this guy’s skin?”
Extinction Journals Page 4