BOTTLE FULL OF
SCORPIONS
by
John Dominick
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BOTTLE FULL OF
SCORPIONS
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AFTERWORD
1
You got to aim for the head.
I’d been hunting them for a week before I figured it out. Hit them in the back and you may do some real damage, but not enough to kill them right away. If you hit the legs, nothing happens, they just limp off.
Unless, of course, they’re in a pack. If one of them is wounded bad, the others tend to gang up on him and strip him down to the bones. Well…if they had bones, which they don’t.
They turn on their own kind so fast, it don’t take much to turn them into cannibals.
Can’t say I blame them. I might be a cannibal too…if there was anybody left to eat.
15 cans of spaghetti with meatballs. 47 cans of soup. 68 cans of vegetables – beans, peas, corn. 45 cans of fruit – pears, peaches, fruit cocktail. 23 cans of tuna fish.
God, I’d kill for an ice cream cone. Or just some bread. I ate everything that could have spoiled in the first couple of weeks. Now there’s only canned goods.
I got a little 2 burner propane stove I found in an RV, with a couple of tanks you can hook up with a rubber hose. I used to heat up my food with it, but now I think I’m gonna save the propane for winter. It’s gonna get cold out here at night.
If I make it that long.
I have about 174 liters of water to drink. A lot of it I stole out of the water reservoirs in the RV campers in the park. I say liters cause I store it in plastic cola bottles.
I already finished the last bit of cola about two weeks ago.
I actually have more liquid than 174 liters, but I didn’t want to be gross right off the bat. What the hell, though…if you and me are gonna get to know each other, I guess I better be completely honest.
I store my pee in empty soda bottles. It don’t rain out here in the desert hardly at all, and the water lines quit two months ago. I’m guessing that when everybody got killed, there wasn’t nobody to keep things running.
So I store my pee and drink it. I know it sounds perverted or something, but it’s not. I got the idea cause I read about fishermen who got stranded out in the ocean, and you can’t drink the seawater. There’s so much salt, you die of thirst because you take in more salt than your body can get rid of. So fishermen survive by drinking their own pee. It’s not perverted, it’s survival.
I mean, I dilute it first. I do about half and half. I’m not that far gone.
Not yet, anyway.
Actually, I guess the fact that I think I’m okay because I water down my own pee before I drink it actually proves I’m pretty bugfuck insane by now.
But every drop is precious.
Just like every bean is precious. Every meatball. Every piece of tuna fish. Every bullet.
I have 127 bullets left. I had three boxes of 100 each, but I got them six months ago, and I’d used a few before It happened. Then I was using ammo left and right as soon as the things came, shooting them as fast as I could. I stopped doing that when I realized that no matter how many I killed, a thousand more were gonna come take their place.
Thank God I learned how to shoot before they showed up. Now would not be a good time to waste bullets on tin cans. Or on taking a chance when one was running right at you.
I got a Henry lever action .22 long rifle. Tube fed magazine, holds 15 long rifle rounds. Pretty good scope. I’ve had it since I was 12. I’m a decent shot. I used to use it on rats and rattlesnakes. I could pick one off at 50 yards, no problem.
Believe you me, if I found a rat or a snake right now, I’d kill him and eat him so quick he wouldn’t know what hit him. But I haven’t seen a rat or a snake in four weeks.
The little bastards got every last one of them.
I woulda liked to see one of them go up against a rattler…except the rattler probably wouldn’t have had a chance.
2
I tried eating one of them once.
I was up on the concrete slab on top of the bunker when I saw it out in the desert, sort of scuttling along through the scrub brush. You can pick them out from a distance cause they’re all black. Show up real easy against the sand and dirt. Thank God they weren’t dirt color, cause then we’d have been in real trouble.
Ha ha. See, that was a joke.
There’s plenty out during the day, but they really come out at night. For every bug (that’s what I call them, bugs) you see during the day, you’ll see a hundred at night – that is, if you’re stupid enough to stay outside at night. You’d be dead in 2 minutes. That’s why I lock myself in the bunker from sundown to sunup.
Anyway, this one I’m talking about, I shot it through the middle of the body. (This was before I found out about the head shot. Now I always take the head shot.) I waited till it bled out, or at least stopped moving. Then I walked on over to take a look.
It was a big one, about a foot long and six inches across. All its nasty little legs were tucked up under it, exactly like a spider when it dies and shrivels up. The tail was still twitching a little, so I nudged it with the barrel of my rifle. It didn’t move, but I waited a few more minutes to be on the safe side. You can’t be too careful with these things.
Number one, you have to watch out for the teeth. I say to take the head shot, but they don’t really have a head. Not one like I’ve ever seen, anyway. I’ll be damned if I can find any eyes on them. What they do have are big mouths and razor-sharp teeth. It’s like somebody welded a piranha’s jaws to a humongous black widow without the little red hourglass on the belly.
So when I say the ‘head,’ I mean anywhere up front of the body. That’s where the brain seems to be, because if you hit them up there, they typically go dead right away.
Then there’s the tail. It’s like a long, thin wire with a really sharp point on it that can go through your hand quick as an ice pick.
When they’re alive, those tails whip around like the devil himself. When I close the bunker up for the night, there’s still a gap between the metal doors. They line up, thirty or forty of them on top of each other, all crawling around like a disgusting barrel of cockroaches, and they stick those tails through the gap in the doors and whip them around trying to stab something.
Their tails make this sound as they hit the metal and concrete like you’re flicking a piece of wire around. Shikka-shikka-skikka-shikka-shikka.
I don’t know how they know I’m in there, but they do. Maybe they smell me, if they have noses.
They start gathering around dark, and by the time I go to bed, that’s the noise that puts me to sleep: shikka-shikka-skikka-shikka-shikka.
That’s the noise I hear in my dreams.
And then in the morning they’re gone.
Anyway, I killed the one and dragged it back to the bunker.
The shell is like a crab, but the insides…well, the insides looked like pieces of black rubber floating around in motor oil, and were sticky as snot. I cut some of it out and cooked it on the propane burner, but it tasted like I was chewing tar and I puked up the little bit I could actually get down. Then I was sick and had the shits like a goose.
On top of that, all the little fuckers seemed to be able to smell their buddy, too. They were swarming over the outside of the bunker for 48 hours, day and night. I couldn’t leave to go to the bathroom, so the inside of the bunker smelled like tar and shit until they finally went away and I could air it out
.
After that, I leave the bodies I kill out in the desert. And I don’t eat them anymore.
I eat the canned food. 15 cans of spaghetti with meatballs. 47 cans of soup. 68 cans of vegetables, 45 of fruit, 23 of tuna fish.
174 liters of water. About 11 liters of piss.
And 127 bullets.
3
This is what my life is like.
I get up a little after daybreak. The bunker faces east, so there’s a little line of sunlight that comes in every morning to wake me up. By then the bugs are gone and I’m alone.
I call it a bunker, but to be honest, I don’t know what they used it for. It’s just been there as long as I lived in the park with Grams and Pop, about a hundred feet from the RV park. I played in the bunker all the time, pretending I was in Afghanistan or Iraq and holed up against muslims and arabs. I imagined my rifle was a machinegun, and for hand grenades I used them little green cactuses with all the thorns cut off.
I never realized that room would actually save my life someday.
It’s all concrete, about eight feet tall, ten feet wide, and maybe twenty feet long. It’s buried down in the ground, with a big cement slab for a roof. Well, it was buried – the sand and grit all blew away over the years, so now the slab actually juts up out of the ground a couple inches.
There are concrete steps that lead down from ground level to the bottom of the bunker, and there are two big iron doors that are all rusted. They’re more like grates somebody found on the ground at a construction site, but they’re heavy and you couldn’t even shoot through them with my .22. I padlock the doors from the inside so the things can’t get in at night.
I have no idea what the bunker was originally built for. If it was a bomb shelter, it was a crappy ass bomb shelter, cause it’s not even underground all the way. Woulda been good for a tornado shelter, except we don’t have no tornados out here. If it was some kind of electrical room or something, I wouldn’t know cause there ain’t any boxes for wires in there or anything. There ain’t any pipes so it can’t be for water.
Maybe it was just for storage. Some of the oldest folks in the RV park said there was a survivalist guy who used to store stuff down there for Y2K, which is when the calendar turned from 1999 to 2000 and people thought all the computers in the world were gonna die out. But it didn’t happen. That was when I was a little kid, though, so I don’t remember anything about it. I asked Grams and Pop about it. They said the bunker was already there when they moved into the RV park over 30 years ago, and they never knew what it was for either.
I keep my supplies in the back part of the bunker. The cans I stack up into a wall so there’s kind of a little room back there made out of a wall of cans. Not stacked high, mind you, just about waist high. But I keep my water back there. My bullets and gun I keep closer to the door.
I also have some things I scrounged from the trailers after It happened. I have a can opener, three or four spoons and forks, and knives. The sharpest knives I could find. I thought I might use them to kill bugs when I run out of bullets…but to be honest, I’ll probably save one last bullet for myself. I’d rather go out like that than starve to death.
There’s some twine, and scissors, and paper and mechanical pencils, which is what I’m using to write all this down in case anybody ever gets a chance to read it. I have a bunch of clothes, mostly my own.
Lots of pill bottles. Mostly just aspirin and shit. I had some pain killers and antibiotics until about a month ago. Toothpaste. Razors and shaving cream, though I ended up not using them very much. Don’t want to waste the water.
And as much toilet paper as I could find.
I got a bunch of sunblock lotion in the beginning, even though I was already pretty brown. (Farmer’s tan, but whatever.) After you spend ten hours a day out in the sun for awhile, you don’t need sunblock no more.
I have two treasures I found around the park. One is a hand cranked flashlight thing. You crank it up and it stays lit for a good three minutes. I don’t stay up too late past sundown, but I wouldn’t have a choice unless I had the hand cranker flashlight.
The other is the Playboys. I am a little embarrassed to admit this, because I don’t know who will be reading this, if anyone ever does. A man or a woman, maybe a good Christian woman, and I would be real embarrassed for you to know that. But I will be honest because I said I would.
4
I found them in Joe Merkel’s trailer about two weeks after It happened. I was going from trailer to trailer, gathering up cans in pillowcases. It was really scary, because sometimes the bugs are in the trailers during the day. Not always, but sometimes. I basically would go in, listen…and if I didn’t hear anything, I would go through real quick and take what I needed, basically whatever food they had on hand. Load it all up in the pillowcase and get the hell out. If I thought it was safe I might go through the rest of the RV real quick and see what I could scavenge.
On this occasion I found a lot of good stuff, like Twinkies and some apples and a tomato that hadn’t rotted yet. I didn’t hear anything the entire time I was in there, so I went into the bathroom to see if I could find something like antibiotics or painkillers. What I found was a thousand times better.
On the back of the toilet were three Playboy Special Editions. A Lingerie edition, and a College Girls one, and a Voluptuous Vixens one.
Jesus Christ Almighty.
I opened one, the Voluptuous Vixens one. It was dogeared and ratty along the edges. It had been opened and closed so much it was almost falling apart.
I put it back on the toilet right away. I remember I was trembling and my heart was beating fast. I was embarrassed and scared somebody would find me, cause Grams was a real strict Christian lady, and she would not let me read or see anything that was not morally pure. There was no internet in the park, though I remember it existing back then because I saw people use it on television shows we would pick up. I used to think that kids in real houses with internet were the luckiest bastards ever in the history of the world because they could look at naked women and watch people doing it any time they wanted. Me, I had to read the Song of Solomon about ‘my beloved’s breasts.’
There were no girls in the park, in fact there were no women under 50, but Mrs. Simmons two doors down was kind of pretty for an old woman. She also had really big ones and her nipples would poke through her bra and shirt a lot, so I would wait at night until I knew Grams and Pop were asleep, and I would think of Mrs. Simmons and my beloved’s breasts and touch myself under the sheets real quiet-like until I was so hard and so excited that three or four tugs and I would spurt.
I had a rag that I kept for that, because Gram washed my clothes. She found out the first time because I kept getting the sheets all covered on the insides in gunk, and the gunk would dry and leave stiff parts on the sheets. After a week of that my sheets were pretty bad off, and when Gram washed it she asked me point blank if I was playing with myself. I said no, but I guess I wasn’t very convincing because she told me not to lie and that if I played with myself I would not only go blind but I would go to Hell because Jesus didn’t love boys that played with themselves.
I tried not to play with myself for a couple of days after that, but it got to the point where I just about couldn’t walk around anymore without thinking of Mrs. Simmons’s titties and getting a boner, so instead I stole one of Pop’s rags and I used that at night. During the day I would go to the bunker and when I was sure nobody was around I would pull it out and do it real quick. Then I would pretend I was Special Forces in Iraq, and then maybe later again if I got horny I would pull it out and do it again.
So you can imagine what my reaction was when I opened up that magazine and saw more titties than I had ever seen in my life, all on one page. Not only tits and boobs, but privates, too: mostly ones that were bare as a baby’s ass, and others with a little bit of hair shaved up like a Hitler mustache, and a few with a little hair down there like a fur bikini. I got a boner in two seconds flat
standing there looking at it all.
I had seen a regular Playboy once before when I lived with my Mom in Los Angeles. I was only 8 or 9 at the time. Her boyfriend Gordon had one, and it had some naked pictures, but mostly it was articles and crap that wasn’t interesting at all. I only got to look at it for a few minutes before I had to sneak it back into his sock drawer because I could hear someone coming down the hall, and the next day it was gone. I guess I didn’t rearrange the socks exactly the way they were before.
So as I stood in Joe Merkel’s bathroom, I was happier than I had ever been in my life, but I was scared, too. I actually looked over my shoulder to check if anybody might see me. I know that’s crazy, since everybody in that trailer park but me had been dead for a week and a half, but my heart was thumping in my chest because I was terrified that Grams might suddenly come back from the dead and yell at me that I was going to go to Hell for looking at those magazines.
I actually backed out of the bathroom and was going to leave without them. I picked up my sack of food and I made it to the RV door, but I stopped right there and had a conversation with myself, just like I had a little devil on one shoulder and an angel on the other.
I was going to die a virgin. I knew that. Everyone in the park was dead, and if what we’d heard on the news before all the televisions stopped working was true, then probably every other person in the world was dead, too. Even if they weren’t, I was 90 miles out in the middle of the desert north of Los Angeles. Nobody was going to be looking for me any time soon. If they had men and women and their own end-of-the-world camps going on, nobody was going to drive way out here when they could just stay where they were and have sex all day.
So, if I was going to die a virgin, the least I could do was look at naked women when I played with myself.
I knew that I was going to Hell if I took those magazines with me, but I was going to play with myself whether I took them or not, and I was going to Hell for that anyway. Plus the whole world was pretty much like Hell right now. If Jesus wanted to punish me for playing with myself, the other people in the park must have done a lot worse things than me because a whole lot worse things had happened to them two weeks ago. Even Grams, and she was a Christian lady who probably never played with herself once in her whole entire life.
Bottle Full Of Scorpions Page 1