Praise for EXTINCTION JOURNALS

&

Jeremy Robert Johnson

“DUCK AND COVER, BITCHES! Jeremy
Robert Johnson answers the call to glory with his intimately insectoid
mini-epic of apocalypse, Extinction Journals: a trip far weirder and
more fucked up than it has any right to be. Just like these times.”—JOHN SKIPP,
author of Conscience, co-author/editor of The Scream, Mondo
Zombie, and Book of the Dead

“Extinction Journals is like a Twilight Zone
episode made without Standards & Practices telling Serling he couldn't
feature any human/insect love scenes. Move over Chris Genoa—there's a new sexy genius
in town.”—CHRIS GENOA, author of Foop!

“Johnson swirls just enough lucidity and knowing, zombie-Vonnegut
hilarity into his Bizarro fable of mutually assured delirium to make me
question my own sanity. Until science finds a cure for whatever ails this boy,
we can only hope to bask in the cool plutonium glow of his weaponized mind...and
start collecting cockroaches.”—CODY GOODFELLOW,
author of Radiant Dawn and Ravenous Dusk

“Has more weird, fresh, mandible-imprinted ideas per page
than you can poke a Twinkie at.”—21C MAGAZINE

“Equally profound and hilarious, Extinction Journals
contains not only some of the most thoughtful examinations of humanity's need
for companionship to come along in several years, but also some of the best
descriptions of loneliness and thanatophobia, the pervasive human fear of
death.”—THE PEDESTAL

“Absurd, silly, yet ultimately important. There are
overtones of Aqua Teen Hunger Force. There is a sense that Vonnegut could have
written this. It mixes the sublime and the ridiculous superbly.”—I READ ODD
BOOKS

“Johnson excels at pathology and perversity...A confirmed
weirdo and authentic writer of uncommon emotional depth who deserves to be
watched.”—CEMETERY DANCE

Extinction Journals

By Jeremy Robert Johnson

Swallowdown Press

Portland, OR

Swallowdown Press

PO Box 86810

Portland, OR 97286-0810

WWW.SWALLOWDOWNPRESS.COM

ISBN: 978-1933929019

Library of Congress Control Number: 2006902930

Extinction Journals and “The Sharp Dressed Man at the End of
the Line” copyright ©2006 Jeremy Robert Johnson.

Copyright ©2012 Swallowdown Press

Cover art copyright ©2006 Marie Peters-Rimpot

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced
or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including
photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system,
without the written consent of the publisher, except where permitted by law.

All persons in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance
that may seem to exist to actual persons living or dead is purely coincidental
or for purposes of satire or parody. This is a work of fiction.

Acknowledgements:

Thanks are due to Carlton Mellick III and Mitch
Maraude (for throwing down the gauntlet), to Chris, Cody, and John (for reading
this bugger and finding something nice to say about it), and to Jessica (for
everything, always).

To Chuck Palahniuk, Steve Vernon, Jackson Ellis, Tom
Piccirilli, and Girl on Demand at POD-dy Mouth—five very kind people who
convinced others I had stories worth hearing.

PRELUDE

“The Sharp-Dressed Man

At the End of the Line”

The following short first appeared in the collection
ANGEL DUST APOCALYPSE. This is the origin story for our “hero” Dean, and
explains how he becomes the world’s weirdest post-nuke survivor.

Some readers have indicated that they prefer the
mystery of the original opening to EXTINCTION JOURNALS. Others sent me hate
mail for not including this story in the print edition of EJ.

I’m including it here and leaving the choice of how to
start to you. If you’d like to jump right to the nuclear aftermath opening of
EXTINCTION JOURNALS, please use this helpful link.
Otherwise, please proceed for the tale of Dean’s buggy pre-war struggles.

Cheers!

p.s. Yes, I miss Twinkies too. Still in shock, really.

The Sharp-Dressed Man At the End of the Line

He was collecting roaches. They moved faster than he’d
expected. They’d be within centimeters of Dean’s fingers and suddenly speed
left or right with quarterback maneuverability. Crafty fuckers. Even more
survival driven than he gave them credit for.

Survival, Dean’s modus operandi. He
understood the cockroaches on that level. Both of them had a clearly
established Goal One:

Do Not Die.

He left out muffins. They swarmed
the muffins. Dean harvested the unsuspecting bugs by the handful.

He replaced his regular bulbs with
UV black lights, so he could see, but the roaches didn’t scatter like they
would under normal apartment light.

In between roach round-ups, he
watched television. He grimaced. He cringed. Every image on the screen was a fat,
flashing sign that read WWIII.

The news showed Conflict with a
capital C, international and senseless.

It caused Dean to sweat stress and
stink up his flop pad, the worst in all of D.C. Check the rotting floorboards,
the dripping faucets. Noise-aholic neighbor bass and baby screams as the
soundscape. Swinging bare-bulb ambience. Mildew and asbestos fighting for
airspace. Punctured pipes leaking slow into linoleum cracks. Plastered pellets
of roach shit as the common denominator.

Living cheap. Barely living.

He watched television. The
President poked angry bears with sharp sticks.

We will not relent to this Axis
of Assholes!

Take that Iraqi-Bear!

They’re hoarding weapons and
plannin’ rape missions!

Yield before us Korea-Bear!

Commie baby-killers, pure and
simple!

Oh, China-Bear, you’ll rue the day!

The President was up in the polls.
The populace—petrified and war weary, but strangely supportive, Dean included.
He’d back a bully as long as El Presidente could guarantee a win. It was that
possibility of a loss that spooked Dean to screeching simian defense levels. A
loss, at this heavily armed and nuclear point in world history, meant
Apocalypse.

Dean’s answer—Cockroach Suit.
Thousands of cockroaches hand stitched through the thorax, tightly sewn to a
Penney’s business suit bought on the cheap.

Dean’s days and nights were
occupied with the spreading of wings and the careful puncturing of his
pathogenic pals with needle and thread. He positioned them all feet-out, so
their mouths could still feed.

Dead roaches were of no use to
Dean. The live ones carried the instinct.

The instinct had kept them alive
for four hundred million years. Their bodies were natural radiation shock
absorbers. They could live for ten days after being decapitated. Dean knew that
in the event of Apocalypse, he’d be rolling with the right crew.

He knew they were training him for
war, and for suffering. He’d already borne the brunt of their bacterial
ballast. He’d coped with clostridium. He’d dealt with dysentery.

He was becoming impervious to
disease, like them.

He kept and catalogued the roaches,
separated into clusters of speedy Smokybrowns, ravenous Germans, and
over-eating Americans.

Jars upon jars of the bugs were
stored in his deep freezer. They slowed down in the chill. The cold goofed them
like opium, kept them still.

It kept them from eating each
other.

That insatiable appetite had been
the primary problem with the first cockroach suit. Dean had left it out in the
muggy tenement warmth at night, stored along with some chocolate cereal in a
microwave-sized cardboard box. When he opened the box in the morning the
cockroaches had not only eaten all the cereal, but had ravaged each other. His
carefully crafted suit had gone cannibalistic.

He bought another suit. Dean didn’t
sweat his cash flow. Daddy Dean Sr.’s estate was still kicking out cash in steady
intervals. The primary source of cash—royalties from the sale of Daddy Dean’s
Ivy League approved books on entomology.

Daddy Dean Sr. had been a big time
bug man and serious scholar until his car accident. A deer had run into the
road. Daddy Dean Sr. swerved hard with his right hand on the wheel. His left
hand gripped a cherry Slurpee with a thick red straw. Daddy Dean Sr.’s car hit
an elm tree straight on. The dependable airbag exploded and jammed the
fortified Slurpee straw straight into Daddy Dean Sr.’s left nostril and right
on through to his frontal lobe.

Dean had shown up at the scene in
time to see the cops detach the straw and blood-filled cup.

Dean had heard one cop on the
accident scene call it a “straw-botomy.”

Dean didn’t think it was funny.

Dean didn’t think a single fucking
thing was funny for quite a while, and resolved to find happiness however he
could.

For a long while that meant
spending Daddy’s textbook royalties on hallucinogens. The “straw-botomy” had
taught him that the world made no sense anyway, so he traveled the world
hunting head-trips. He tongued toads. He feasted on fungus. He inhaled
ayahuasca. A bad encounter with a sodomizing shaman and some industrial
strength desert peyote finally scared Dean straight.

Then he moved back to the states
and began his survival training.

He knew the world wanted to erase
him. He’d seen it in visions. He’d seen it in the eyes of the priapic shaman.
He saw flash frames of his own father felled by a plastic straw.

Dean moved to the slums of D.C. He
wanted to move to a place that resisted and destroyed life. He knew there were
survival secrets in the daily struggle.

He holed up and watched television.
He watched El Presidente taunting nuclear armed countries anxious to see if
they could one-up Hiroshima.

Y’all ain’t got the bomb, or
maybe y’all just ain’t got the balls to use it!

C’mon Korea-Bear, show us you got a
pair!

Dean read books about roaches. He
studied sewing and stitch types. He bought spools of thread and heat sterilized
needles.

Dean developed his cockroach suit
and watched it fail.

He cried and sucked up the sick,
musty attar of roaches when his first suit dined on itself.

He cursed himself when the second
suit crawled through a hole in the crumbling apartment drywall. Fifty seconds
to piss. That’s all he’d taken. That was all they’d needed. He heard his
roach-riddled jacket and pants skittering around in the crawlspace above his
kitchen.

Every time he failed, he felt as if
Apocalypse was seconds away. He got weak, the blood flow to his head lagged. He
thought he could hear the roar of approaching bombs overhead. He worked harder,
his hands shaking with fear.

He ignored the doubt that crept
into his skull and took up permanent residence.

Dean, don’t you know the bomb is
coming for you? You think some bugs and some cheap threads can stop a
holocaust?

He ignored the fists that pounded
on his door, the angry screams, the vulgar notes slipped through the crack of
his mail slot.

The note last Tuesday read: Mister
room 308, you are the cockroach man and ever since you came all up in here
they’ve gone crazy. My little sister has to wear cotton balls in her ears to
keep them roaches from digging into her head and laying eggs, like they did
with Brian. You ain’t right at all Mister room 308, and you ought to leave and
take your roaches with you. I see them coming out from under your front door
right now. My dad says if Brian has eggs in his brain, then you die. Go away.
Love, Maysie.

The neighbors thought Dean was bad
mojo. They threatened litigation. They threatened worse. Dean knew it was part
of the world’s plan to erase him. He kept working.

Dean actually saw the first bomb hit. He knew it was coming.

He knew from the silence. El
Presidente had gone silent for three days. No more TV broadcasts promising
patriotic retribution. No more shots on CNN of El Presidente grabbing his balls
and shouting, “Eat this, Iran!”

El Presidente was quiet because he
was hiding, somewhere, from the grief he saw coming America’s way. El
Presidente was crafty, even more survival driven than Dean had given him credit
for.

In the calm before the atomic
shit-storm, Dean finished his third cockroach suit.

It was perfect. A living tapestry
of twitching legs and chittering mandibles. Add to the threads a pair of Kroeg
blast goggles, a crash helmet, a refillable oxygen tank, and a thick pair of
foil-lined tan work boots, and Dean was suited for survival.

When the first newscaster started
crying on air, Dean geared up and walked from his apartment to the street. He
didn’t want to be inside that roach trap when the Earth started shaking.

Dean walked by apartments, heard
the crying of the tenants. They could sense the bomb was coming. Their cries
were weird and strangely complacent, the mewling of doomed animals with no
options. Baby seals, waiting for the spiked bat to spread their skulls wide.

It made Dean sad. He cried and
fogged up his goggles. He felt the suit writhing around his body, taking in his
warmth, seething. He stayed in motion.

Dean made it into the street and
turned to his left, not sure quite where to go, hoping the cockroaches’
instinct would take over soon. Then he would just lay down on his belly or his
back and let them carry him to survival, like a God.

The D.C. streets were packed with
people looking up at the sky, waiting. Dean expected chaos and conflict. No one
even gave him a second glance. They were waiting for the Big Delivery from
above.

They got it, twenty seconds later.

The flash blinded Dean, even with
the goggles and helmet on.

He crouched behind a cement stoop
and heard the most cohesive and unified scream any dying species had ever let
loose.

Then there was silence, and heat,
terrible heat.

And, of course, darkness.

The cockroaches carried Dean, like a God. He woke to dark
clouds and electrical storms and drifting gray ash. His retinas were blast
burnt, but functional.

He was alive.

That was the part he could not
comprehend.

He was fucking alive.

The roaches were too, and they were
moving quickly towards a perceived food source. Dean felt them moving, swift
and single-minded, driven by constant hunger.

His hands were cold. Nuclear winter
was just beginning and the air already approached frosty. He’d forgotten to buy
gloves. He hunched his shoulders, pulled his hands inside the living suit. He
relaxed and enjoyed the eerie quiet, and reveled in being alive. Being a
survivor.

He moved without effort through the
ash of nuclear winter. His suit surged beneath him as it crawled up onto a
sidewalk. The legion of tiny legs pushed onward as Dean zoned out on the gray
snowfall floating down from the sky.

He watched the sky darken. He saw
thick red and green clouds of nuclear dust float above him. He saw an obelisk
in the distance, stark and tarred jet black by the bomb blast.

It was the Washington Monument, just like he’d seen on T.V. There was something walking back and forth at the base of
the monument. It moved like a human, but glowed bright yellow.

Dean let the suit carry him closer,
and then stood up when he was within ten feet of the yellow shifting mass.

Dean lifted the visor of his helmet
and de-fogged his goggles. He could see clearly after that, aside from the
bright imprint of the blast that wouldn’t leave his sight.

The peripatetic figure was a man. A
man in a Twinkie suit. The thousands of Twinkies were half charred and oozing
cream filling.

The man turned to face Dean.

The man’s face was slack, and the
eyes were empty of thought or feeling. Despite this lack of emotion, El
Presidente was still the most recognizable man on Earth.

He looked at Dean and started to
weep.

Dean opened his arms, offering a
hug.

El Presidente stepped forward, and
then hesitated. It was too late. The cockroach suit was upon him, a thousand
mouths demanding to be fed.

Dean looked into El Presidente’s
eyes, caught dilated pupils, animal-level fear.

The eyes no longer promised Dean’s
destruction, as they had from the static screen of his television. The world’s
plan to erase Dean had failed; it was vaporized to dust, silt in sick
Strontium-19 winds.

The scarred sky above Dean grew
darker, the air around him even colder. Dean shivered; El Presidente screamed.

Dean reached up and warmed his
hands around El Presidente’s throat. He felt the pulse under his hands drop to
zero.

The weeping had ended, and the
feasting had begun.

1

The cockroaches took several hours to eat the President.

Of that much Dean was sure. His
buggy business suit had a severe appetite. Anything else—life/reality/desire—came
across secondary and suspect.

Although Dean was fairly
positive that World War III had begun.

Extent of the carnage—Unknown.

Nations involved—Unknown.

Survivors he was aware of—One.

There were two, originally. The
President had been alive when Dean found him out here by the base of the
Washington Monument. The guy was nearly catatonic, pacing a small circle,
slack-jawed, but breathing. Still, he never had a chance. When a man in a suit
made of cockroaches meets a man in a suit made of Twinkies—well, that’s about
as easy as subtraction gets.

As scenarios go, Dean branded this
one Capital L Lonely. He’d choked out the President as an act of mercy, to save
the man the sensation of being eaten alive. That meant that at present Dean had
not a soul to talk to.

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.

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.

“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.

His mouth tasted of the burning
tenements which flanked him, of dried cat shit under a sun-lamp. He knew he was
wasted if his thirst outgrew his hunger.

Water. Food. Now.

No one to talk to. Nothing to see
but burning buildings, gutted cracking skeleton structures that might once have
held sustenance.

Depression hit quick, ran through
Dean’s whole body like a low-grade fever that only served to slow him further
as he slogged onward.

So. You lived. What now? Why
keep going? Daddy Dean Sr.’s money doesn’t matter anymore, you little trust fund
bitch. You don’t really know how to survive. What were the odds your numb-nuts
roach suit experiment would have worked? Why do you deserve to keep going when
millions just died? You manage to survive a nuclear blast, and kill the
President, the man you thought had a personal hard-on for your death. In one
day you conquered both your greatest fears. Victory was yours, right? And now
you’ll die because you didn’t think to pack a loaf of bread and some bottled
water in that suit. You’re letting a bunch of shit-sucking insects dictate the
flow of your life.

Shall I go on?

Water. All Dean wanted was some water.
He was cold, but if he stepped closer to the smoldering buildings his lips
cracked and his thirst grew. It was a head-fucker.

You don’t have any reasons to
stay alive. The man who kept you going—the man who gave you something to fight
against—is turning into plastered pellets of roach shit all around you. What
are you going to do? Find a woman? Repopulate the Earth? You never really liked
people before. Empathized maybe, but never really felt any communal love. Women
wouldn’t talk to you before, Dean. You think you’ll be a big charmer now, Roach
Man?

One foot in front of the other. Twelve
slow, slogging miles. The edge of the city. What was the city. What
would now be referred to euphemistically as a “site.”

There—the empty field which
bordered the suburban intersection. A small tin shed. Not black. Not burning.

You’ll be like them soon. The
roaches. Just living. Thoughtless. You’ll be sterilized. Your guts will
blacken. The end of you. But they’ll breed. They’ll keep going. And you’ll be
dragged with them to the end, shoving carrion and rotten plants into your mouth
if they’ll let you.

Finally, a vision. Might be an oasis.

Dean stumbled forward and gently
crouched before the shapes which leaned against the western side of the
building. The nagging voice in his head fell away as he bent down beside the
tiny metal shed and picked up the sealed jar of water and single pre-packed cup
of chocolate pudding.

3

Pudding beats sex, big time. Of course, having had little
sex, most of it running the gamut from earnest/mediocre to awkward/ugly, Dean
found this comparison easy to make.

He tried to eat slow, to let the
tiny chocolate heavens loll on his tongue before gulping the gel down, but it
wasn’t easy.

It’s just so…goddamned…GOOD!

He nearly choked on a runny cocoa
dollop when he tried to pull a breath through his nose while swallowing. But he
held the cough. Kept the pudding in his mouth. Every little drop of it. He
licked the last bits from his unwashed fingers and ushered untold levels of
bacteria into his gut. He knew it. He just couldn’t stop himself.

Then he had to rinse it down.

Get some water in my system. Get
my head straight.

The Fear seemed to be gone, chased
away by sugar to the brain and Dean’s new sense that he was truly alive and
breathing.

Somehow I’m…here.

He unscrewed the lid of the Mason
jar, which gave a satisfying pop as its seal ruptured. He already had three
quarters of the pudding-tinted water down his throat before he remembered.

Shit. They need water too.

Dean hesitated. Felt the water
rushing through his body, his headache already distant. Those terrible voices
quieted. He thought about how much better he’d feel with the rest of that water
running down his gullet. Thought about how the suit had denied him even a hint
of food when it had access.

No, that’s not right. Maybe if I
give them water now, they’ll learn. They didn’t survive this many years without
being able to quickly adapt to new scenarios. Maybe I can establish trust.

As silly as the thought felt in his
head, it also had a weird ring of truth. Lions and hyenas learned to share in
their own brutal environment. Maybe even the bug’s cutthroat existence didn’t
have to be all or nothing.

Dean realized that hand feeding was
not an option. To apply water to each of those tiny mouths would be ridiculous even
if he had the time/energy/patience. This was never a problem before. The suit
had always fed solo, safely stored within a lock-box in Dean’s rat-trap
apartment. He wasn’t sure how to hydrate them in the present since he didn’t
dare remove the outfit. They were absorbing who knows how much radiation right
now, shielding Dean’s fragile skin and organs from invisible rays.

How would they get the water if
I wasn’t here?

With that thought, Dean walked into
the small hollow tin structure and gently poured the remaining water out on the
concrete floor. Luckily it was poorly laid and the water puddled at a concavity
in the center of the cement.

Dean eased himself onto the ground,
lying prone.

“Drink up, little guys.”

They took to it like pros, the most
robust sections of the suit contorting to the puddle first and siphoning up
their own tiny portions of liquid life.

Dean’s right arm was drinking from
the pool. He peered upward at the ramshackle lid on the structure and noticed
that it was starting to lift up, as if a wind was catching beneath it. The
hairs on his neck popped rigid.

The shack’s lid raised and slapped
back down twice, shaking the whole building.

Then it simply disappeared. No tearing
away at creaky hinges or rusty nails. The thing was just gone. Dean’s
skin ran wild over spasming muscles.

Another blast? A second volley?
Who was left to launch this one? Was New Zealand armed? Did the Maoris have
missiles, half-etched with tribal paint, striking down on U.S. soil?

No. There was no heat this time. No
terrible pressure.

The roaches had stopped drinking. They
began to crawl, frantically, out of the shed and into the open field. They did
circles, unsure of where to go, Dean riding their agitated wave.

Dean had seen this type of motion in
roaches before, prior to figuring out how to rig his apartment with UV lights. The
bugs were steeped in negative phototropism, it was a key to their continued
existence. Allowed them to function out of sight of their predators.

And what they were doing now was
exactly what they used to do when he’d arrive home and switch on the overhead
lamps.

But where was the light coming
from? All Dean could see was the steady wavering light of fires succumbing to the
increasing chill of nuclear winter.

Dean pushed off of the ground and
stood up, halting the flight of the cockroaches against his better judgment. He
had to figure out what they were running from. What if it was an airplane? Something
else? Another survivor?

Dean craned his neck and pushed his
blast goggles up into his hairline to make sure he could see as well as
possible.

It was then that Dean’s pupils
began to fluctuate in size and his stomach threatened to surrender its precious
pudding.

Because, as Dean looked skyward, he
saw a great chariot of fire and aboard that chariot, the shape of something
like a man.

Trumpets sounded, a terrible
multitude of them, a great shrieking air raid which threatened to cave Dean’s
eardrums had he not shielded them with chocolate-streaked hands.

The chariot, and the shape it
carried, headed straight for him, bearing down at top-speed. The figure in the
chariot was definitely humanoid, with a head, two arms, and a torso, but the
skin shimmered with silver and hints of the full spectrum. The thing had but
one great eye at the center of its head.

Dean felt no heat from the chariot
but noted that the roaches coating him were frantically trying to escape to
anywhere, to be free of that brilliant light.

The chariot stopped, perhaps fifty
feet from where Dean stood with his mouth agape.

Then the chariot just disappeared. Gone.
Poof. Like the top of the tin shed.

That was when Dean decided to turn
and run. Anything that can make matter disappear—majestic though it may be—was
dangerous.

“HALT!”

Dean halted. That voice—part
insect/part trumpet/part his father’s.

He turned to face the creature.

It hovered there for a moment,
where its burning chariot had stood, and then floated slowly towards the ground
before Dean.

Dean nearly lost his legs. His
teeth squeaked against each other. Sweat popped along his forehead. But he
stood strong—falling now meant the roaches would continue their frantic escape.

The shape landed just three feet
from Dean, and though it didn’t radiate heat, Dean suspected that the ground
beneath the thing would have ignited had it not already been charred clean.

Thunder rolled in the purple/black
clouds above them.

The thing stared through Dean with
its one huge eye.

Dean surveyed the creature. It
returned the same. From what Dean was seeing he could think of only a few
words.

Ergot. Mycotoxin.

Whatever was in that pudding,
it’s driven me mad. Is there grain in pudding? Could it go bad while sealed up
like that? Was the pudding full of gamma rays?

Have I finally snapped?

He remembered the rough times after
his father had passed away in a brutal deer/Slurpee straw/airbag-related auto
accident. Dean had chased a new life then, through drugs and rituals and chants
and smoke ceremonies. Instead he’d only found Fear, the same cold gut feeling
that had inspired him to build his cockroach suit.

But in all his travels, all those
long nights of the soul, chasing demons on the dirt floor of some shaman’s hut,
he’d never seen anything this wondrous.

The creature stood at the same
height as Dean, the exact same, although this felt like an illusion to induce
comfort. It had the limbs of a human, although Dean could perceive no joints. It
appeared, in fact, to be liquid, with a skin of entirely separated translucent
scales floating over the shifting eddies and rivers and storming oceans of its
surface. Each scale cycled through the spectrum, every color that Dean’s eyes
could perceive. He felt as if his brain was learning to interpret new shades
with each second, colors without names. A painter, Dean thought, would be in
tears right now.

At the center of the thing’s chest
a thin pink light shone through the scales as they whirled from torso to limb
to face to back.

The great eye regarded Dean without
any clear emotion. Human facial expressions would, Dean knew, appear petty
across this surface.

The thing emitted a low, nearly
sub-sonic noise and the roach suit dove into a comatose state. The feelers and
legs stopped their incessant clawing at the air.

Eight long tendrils of light
unfurled from the creature’s back, straightening themselves out in direct
opposition of each other, their points forming a perfect circle behind it.

Dean had been without God, without
wonder, for years since Daddy Dean Sr. had passed, but he was about to weep
when the creature spoke. It had no mouth. Rather, the voice, that voice,
appeared directly in Dean’s head asking:

“Where did everybody go?”

Dean was unsure how to respond, or
if he even should. Was this a test? What revelations were about to occur?

“Where did everybody go?”

The creature wanted a response. But
surely something this wondrous would already know the answer.

“No. I don’t know what’s going on. Something
has changed. Today was supposed to be the time of my manifestation.”

“Your manifestation? I’m sorry, I’m
just so…”

“You don’t have to use your mouth to
communicate right now. I can speak inside of your mind, but cannot see through
it as much as I need to. Please open it up to me. I’m going to emit a
frequency, and once you do the same, we’ll have an open line.”

Dean had no idea how to “emit a
frequency” but the creature began to vibrate and a low humming noise came from
its center. It rattled through Dean’s bones and he found himself humming until
his throat was producing the same tone.

“There” the thing said, “We’re in
line with each other now. I can tell from your colors that you are confused. So
much gray.”

Dean had experienced the
hucksterism of aura reading before. He began to think of ergotism and bad
pudding again. Nothing was making sense.

“I can help you,” said the thing. “First,
I’ll share my wisdom, then I’ll ask for yours. Does this sound acceptable?”

Dean nodded Yes inside of his head
and kept humming.

A thin purple lid dropped over the
creature’s color-shifting eye and it began to tremble. A lower hum rattled
through Dean’s ribcage, and he feared his heart might collapse. The pressure
continued to build and then there was a thumping sound and the creature’s
knowledge came pouring into Dean’s mind. Dean struggled against the flow and
tried to hum back questions when he was lost.

“The creatures of this planet have
called me down to unite them. They have abandoned their earliest forms of
energy transmittal, what some call religion. The disparate forms of energy
they’ve since adapted and harnessed have fractured the colors that float around
their sphere.”

“Sphere. You mean Earth?”

“Yes, you could call it that. These
new energy systems ran thick with dark currents and were quickly poisoned. Even
once noble ideas collapsed under structure and hierarchy and the presence of
the human identity. Possession. Power. Control. Life was bridled. The focus was
shifted towards the individual bits of matter that made up this sphere.”

“Bits of matter. You mean the
living things.”

“Sort of. But most of those things
stayed pure. The parts of the sphere that called themselves ‘I’ were the source
of the poison. But something inside their replicative code recognized the
sickness and began to create me.”

“So humankind’s DNA recognized that
religious systems were pulling the species further and further away from some
lifeforce which drives our existence?”

“Well, sort of. How much do you
know about super-strings? Whorls? Vortex derivatives?”

“Oh, god, nothing at all.”

“Okay, that doesn’t help. Is there
someone else around here that I can talk to? This is much easier if I can speak
in your mathematics. I mean, I know you people understand this. All I am is a
gradually amassed energy force that your being created. I don’t exist beyond
the scope of the power which already runs through your body.”

“My body?”

“Yes, your body. The infinite
spaces in between the atoms that compose you, and the matter itself.”

“I’m really lost now. Are you sure
you’re making sense? Maybe we’re humming at different frequencies or
something…hold up…no, that hum sounds about right. Listen, I’ve had a really
rough day and I think maybe I’ve eaten some bad pudding and I’m hoping you can
just amplify your powers and give me all this knowledge at once, in a way that
encapsulates it so that I fully understand.”

“That’s not how it works. Unearned
realization does nothing to shift the colors. There were supposed to be billions
of you when I arrived. The collective unconscious would have ignited, all
religions would have fallen. Time as you know it would have ceased its passage
and all human matter would have lost its identity and returned to its source,
where a new lifeform would have been created, one properly coded for continued
existence and evolution.”

“The Rapture?”

“We were going to allow you to call
it that. Your belief gave that concept power. And all the energy systems, even
those that did not espouse it, found the idea enchanting, so it would have been
very effective. Those with the slightest vibration of the old energy at their
core would have floated up and merged with me, bathed in my energy. Any others
would have softly ceased to exist, floating away in a warm surge of white
light.”

“So what now?”

“Exactly. I’m lost. I exist, and am
present, so something of the old belief must still exist. Something on this
sphere, other than you, is alive and believes that I should be.”

“So, are you going to wash me away
in soft light now?”

“No. Everything has changed. I must
adapt. Which means I need your help. Please tell me, where did everybody go?”

“They’re dead. All of them, so far
as I know. The President was still alive a while ago, but my suit ate him. It’s
really hard to explain.”

“I have nowhere else to go. Neither
do you. You may have noticed I’ve halted time.”

Dean had wondered why the roaches
were so still.

“Okay then. I’ll give it a shot.”

Dean let loose what he knew through
a series of modulated hums. He waxed as poetic as he could about the Cold War,
the Iraq wars, Sierra Leone, the fall of Russia, nuclear proliferation, his
country’s tyrannical hillbilly puppet leader, Walmart, peak oil, the internet, pandemics,
suburban sprawl, the ultimate fallibility of the President’s Twinkie suit
(although Dean admired it in theory), colonialism, plastics, uranium, fast
food, and global conflict. But when he got to the end of the story it felt like
the whole thing was a colossal waste of time because the punch line, no matter
what, was this:

…and then we killed
ourselves.

Which, Dean felt, was a terribly
down way to end his story.

The creature agreed. It shook its
beautiful mono-orbital head and retracted the long whips of light which had
extended from its back.

“So what” Dean asked, “are you
going to do now?”

“I’m not sure. Without your
species, I doubt I’ll exist much longer. I’ll probably just fade back into the
ether. The worst part is, I think I know why I was finally called down, why the
energy was strong enough to bring about a change.”

“Will I understand it if you tell
me?”

“Probably. When the bombs started
dropping, I think people forgot all of the dark systems which might once have
ruled over them. And I think, for a moment, they found their way back into the
old energies.”

“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, he 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?”

“What skin? You mean my Mojo? Oh,
no, that’s got nothin’ to do with color. I’ve had plenty of white friends and
now they’re just as dead as anybody. No, my Mojo is all about good luck. See,
my friend Peter, he lives…pardon, used to live…three blocks down from my house
and I swear he was the luckiest motherfucker I ever met. Never saw a lotto
ticket he didn’t recoup on. Lucked into not one but two boats at the
expo raffle last year. The odds were always in his favor.”

“So you skinned him?”

“Patience, man. Don’t jump ahead. You
got somewhere to be?”

“Not really, I guess.”

“What about food or drink? You got
somethin’ for me? Might as well ask since you busted in and interrupted the
flow of my story.”

“I’ve got a couple of packets of
fruit snacks and two diet sodas.”

“Diet soda? Goddamn! That gunk is
terrible for you. Full of aspartame. You know the guys that work with that
stuff have to wear biohazard suits?”

“I hadn’t heard that, Wendell. Do
you want one? It’s all I’ve got.”

“Normally I wouldn’t, but I’m
pretty parched. I’d probably still take you up on it if all you had to offer
was a bucket of cat piss.”

Dean cracked a can. That pop and
hiss of released carbonation was comforting somehow. Familiar. An old sound
from what felt like a whole different age.

He handed the can to Wendell.

“Thanks, man.” As Wendell was
bringing it towards his lips, the soda slipped from his hand and hit the ground
rolling. Dean snagged it and tipped it back upright, trying to save whatever he
could.

“See, Dean, my goddamn Mojo ain’t
worth a barbecued shit. It’s too lose. I thought Peter and I were about the
same size, but I guess he wore slimming clothes. Maybe his good luck always
made him look skinnier than he really was. Who knows?”

Dean helped Wendell tip the soda
can to his lips. He took a deep slug and winced.

“Hurts going down. Can’t be good.”

Dean didn’t offer any solace. He
was amazed this guy was talking at all.

“Okay, back to my story. The deal
is, Peter’s got more luck than sense. And his one big mistake, I guess, was
thinking he’d be lucky enough to get away with fucking my wife, Gladys. But
maybe something in his good fortune shifted. I don’t know. And this is about a
week and a half back, when the news got all crazy and the President disappeared
and nobody would answer any questions for nobody about what was going on. You
remember that feeling in the air? Like we were all dead for sure? Like it was
just a matter of time?”

Dean nodded.

“Well, I think that feeling made
some people do the things they always wanted to. So Peter, who’d always had an
eye for my wife—I mean, I’d seen him looking at her at church no less—he decided
it was his time to take a poke at her. And I caught ‘em, right in the middle of
their rutting, under the laundry line in the back yard. They were biting each
other, and…um…smacking each other. Pulling hair and shit. You could tell this
was something they’d wanted in about forever. I had a little flip-out gator
knife on my belt. And, uh, I guess I jumped right into the same pile of crazy
they’d been rolling around in. The rest I’m sure you can figure.”

Another nod from Dean.

“But the thing I should have
thought of was that things had changed. We’d entered our end-times. The
rules were different. They had to be. Otherwise Peter’s lucky streak would have
continued and I never would have known any better. So I should have figured
that all that good luck was gone, and never tried to wear it over me. I wished
this thing…” Wendell pinched at the dead face that lay next to him, a thick
fold of it in his fingers, “would protect me, but it didn’t. It wasn’t really
the Mojo I’d hoped for. It was just some dead asshole’s skin. And now…now I’m
dyin’ in it.”

There were tears in Wendell’s
cloudy blind eyes. Dean wanted to give him a hug, but the roaches hadn’t eaten
in a while, and the last time he’d wrapped his arms around someone they’d been
consumed whole. Call it a non-option.

The best Dean could do was take off
his gloves and hold the man’s hand. But not for long. This man would die soon,
and Dean didn’t want to be around for that.

So, as Wendell’s breath slowed and
he seemed to float into some layer of sleep, Dean released the man’s hand. Then
he let the roaches hit the ground and begin their steady westward crawl,
leaving all forms of bad mojo behind them.

6

Three more days—maybe four—passed. Dean and his suit made
good time. In another, less nuclear world this whole ambulatory clothing thing
might have sold great to people who wanted to conserve fuel. The ASPCA and PETA
would have complained, sure. That was what they did. But the rest of the world
didn’t give a damn about insects. Get them past their initial revulsion, make
it look pretty and clean, and you’ve got a best-seller.

During his travel Dean acquired two
loaves of rye bread, one jar pureed vegetable baby food, one scarf with the
words “Winter Fun” embroidered on it, three gallons unfiltered water in various
containers, and one overall sense of crushing ennui.

To keep busy and clear his mind he
handled a lot of the footwork himself and periodically checked his suit for
birth-signs. So far the host of egg cases adorning him remained in gestation,
but they looked darker. Soon the nymphs would be here, demanding sustenance.

He kept the “Winter Fun” scarf
wrapped—very lightly—around his face and crossed his fingers. He had to keep
breathing but guessed that the air quality around him would petrify even coal
miners.

So far, though, there were no signs
of the cellular corruption that had taken Boot Lady and Wendell to their graves.

A day ago he’d woken from his sleep
to the sound of flowing water. He’d popped up quickly enough to run down to the
river’s edge and fill the containers he’d amassed in his backpack.

Could have been the Ohio River. Could have been the Mississippi. He cursed his D minus geography skills and
wished he knew. But since then he’d been heading south, probably a few hundred
yards from the river at any time. It seemed crazy to abandon a water source,
but it also seemed crazy to stay still when they were certainly in a dead zone.
Besides, if he made it to the gulf perhaps he could find a boat and head south
to a less ravaged continent. Who would bomb Peru? Someone who hated llamas?

The clouds overhead remained black
as ever, but also seemed to emit a low luminescence that coated Dean’s path
like filthy moonlight. Maybe his sight was just adjusting.

Any longer in the dark like this
and I’ll be pure white with pink eyes, finding my way with echolocation. Interplanetary
spelunkers will find me and call me a wondrously adaptive creature. Look at how
he works in concert with the roaches which surround him!

That was the other thing bothering
Dean. When he wasn’t fighting off a sense of weary resignation and trying to
chase away the self-destructive worries that paralyzed him, he found himself
experimenting with the seemingly stronger link between his desires and the
actions of the suit.

He could make patches of the outfit
skitter faster than others. He executed circles and vertical rolls. He could
choose which group of clustered mouths would drink from his carefully-poured
puddles of water. Most disturbing, he found that if he concentrated hard enough
he could get them to twirl their feelers in clockwise or counter-clockwise
directions. The sensation that ran through his mind when this occurred wasn’t
anything he recognized. It was a thin, high-pitched buzzing and he could swear
he felt it in his bones and at the spot where skull and spine met. It made his
skin itch a bit, but it wasn’t totally unpleasant. In fact, the sensation was
seductively mind-clearing. No more doubt. No more concerns over the meaning
of being alive.

It was the feeling of being
alive, and nothing else. Existence without thought.

Dean tried not to engage in this
sort of thing too often, but there was little else to do, especially when he
took feeding breaks. No TV’s to watch. No magazines to flip through while
noshing down veggie mush on rye.

It was after one of these
enchanting culinary pit stops that Dean noticed the tiny moving lights in the
distance.

They were slight at best, damn near microscopic from this
far away, moving across his path in the direction of the river. Each of them
was uniform distance from the other and moving at a quick pace.

Dean closed the distance, slowed
slightly by the water-heavy bag he was towing.

The closer he got, the more
familiar the motions of the lights seemed. Like something from one of Daddy
Dean Sr.’s bug documentaries. They had to be glowing insects of some sort. No
other animals moved that low or that orderly.

When Dean was within inches of the
line of shuffling light he crouched down and removed his goggles to see more
clearly.

What the hell is this?

As hard as Dean focused his eyes,
all he could see were tiny sections of leaves, each with a faint sort of phosphorescence.

Then he felt the buzzing at the tip
of his spine. He honed in on it, cultivated the sensation until he picked up
its tone.

Fear. He could feel the roaches’
legs twitching a hundred yard dash through the cold, damp air.

A glow to his left. Before he could
turn his head—a voice. Female.

“Don’t move. The bugs are panicked
because you are surrounded. There are thousands of soldiers on every side you.”

“Soldiers? Where?”

“Look down.”

Dean tilted his head towards the
ground. There, aided by the glow coming from the woman, he could see them. Ants.
Big ones, thick enough to make a popping noise if stepped upon. An armada of
them, crawling over each other, maintaining a tight circle around the space he
was crouched in.

“If you reach out to touch the foragers
you will be swarmed by soldiers. This is what they do. This is all they
do. I can try to stop them but their instinct will likely rule out whatever
control I have.”

Dean believed her. There was an
earnest and concerned tone to her voice that reminded him of the time his
father warned him not to get too close to his prize bombardier beetle. He’ll
blind you without a thought, Dean.

“So what do I do now?”

“Stand up. Slowly. Then take a few
very wide steps back from the foragers’ trail. They’ll no longer perceive you
as a threat.”

Dean did as he was told. His knees
felt loose and shaky with each step he took, but soon he was ten feet from the
steadily marching troop of leaf-bearing ants and their protectors.

“Good. That was good. You got too
close.”

She sounded exasperated. How much
danger had he been in? What the hell was going on?

Dean turned to face the woman.

Holy shit…now the ants are
swarming her…they’re everywhere…

“What can I do? How should I help
you?”

Dean ran over to his back pack and
fumbled for the zipper.

I’ll get my water and douse her
with it. I’ll wash those little fuckers away.

“What are you doing?” she asked. Her
voice was now perfectly calm. Post-sex mellow. Almost amused.

“I can get them off you. Hold on
just a second…” his hands were shaking but he had a grip on the zipper now. “I’ve
got something that can save you.”

He felt her glow coming towards
him. Caught graceful strides from his periphery.

“My dear man, I’m not looking for a
savior.” The voice was confident, with a hint of laughter behind it.

Dean let go of the zipper and
looked up at her. She had a thin hand outstretched in his direction. It was
free of ants but had a coat of…something…over it. The rest of her was covered
in ants of various shapes and sizes, hundreds of thousands of them shuttling
around, touching each others’ antennae, carrying bits of shining wet plant
matter.

She was, aside from the ants,
entirely nude.

“I’m Mave,” she said. “Now you. Who
exactly the hell are you? And where did you get that fabulous suit?”

7

She had a place of her own, a tattered tarp lean-to backed
by a portion of white picket fence. Where she rested used to be the backyard garden
of some family which no longer existed.

She said she’d always wanted a
white picket fence. Corny, but true.

Dean had shaken off his initial
shock and introduced himself back at the roadway. He’d told her a very abridged
version of his own story—omitting the appearance of Yahmuhwesu, who he still
believed might have been a hallucination—as they walked back to her current
digs. She had questions along the way.

“Twinkies?” and

“Goat marinated in diet soda! That
tasted hideous, right?” and

“The guy really thought Styrofoam
would work?” and

“Did you check Wendell to see if he
wasn’t wearing a couple more layers of skin? Maybe there was a Mexican or Asian
guy deeper down?” and

“Do you know how close you just came
to being killed?”

And she smiled every time she
questioned him.

How can she be so happy at a
time like this? Isn’t she afraid the ants will get inside her mouth.

Dean knew she wasn’t. Whatever
rudimentary mental link he’d founded between himself and the roaches, she blew that
out of the water. The ants—she called them Acromyrmex or leafcutters as if the names
were interchangeable—never crossed her lips. They never scuttled into her eyes.
They did crawl through her shoulder length black hair, but didn’t mat it with
the bright fungus they were growing on her skin. And although he tried not to
look, they didn’t appear to hover around the folds of her vagina.

She walked carefully and avoided
resting her limbs against her body. Didn’t want to crush any of the Acromyrmex.
Couldn’t stand the lemony smell they made when they died.

Here, at her new garden, the ground
burst upward with miniature rolling hills.

“The rest of the colony. They can
produce a certain amount of fungus on my skin—my perspiration actually seems to
speed its growth, which was unexpected—but it really requires a more total
darkness to produce the gongylidia. That’s the key part of their harvest. The stuff
they feed to the babies.”

At the mention of the word “babies”
Dean felt a sudden need to inspect his suit. So far, so stagnant. The tiny eggs
remained whole. Thank goodness.

“Oh, that’s right.” Mave smiled,
watching him. “You’re the pregnant one! Yahmuhwesu told me about you.”

“Pardon me?”

“Yahmuhwesu. The collective
unconsciousness guy. Fiery chariot and all that… Oh, come on. Don’t make that
face. I know you know exactly who I’m talking about. He met you before he
appeared in front of Terry and me. But when he spoke with us he figured you’d
die before you ever had a chance to give birth.”

Dean tasted vomit and goat in his
mouth. This was too much all at once. His shock must have shown on his face
because Mave had furrowed her brow.

“Shit. It’s a bitch to take in this
sort of info, isn’t it? And here I am just dumping it all over you…sorry. Listen,
when he met you he taught you how to do that humming trick, right? The tonal
language. If you can lock into my tone I think we might be able to communicate
better. Something about the nature of speaking like that cuts out a lot of the
filters.”

She didn’t wait for him to respond.
She simply straightened her spine, closed her eyes, and started humming.

The sound was lullaby-beautiful. Dean
couldn’t help but move closer to it.

He started to hum in return,
closing his eyes and listening as hard as he could, trying to find the exact
range in which she was vibrating.

He hit it. They locked in. Their
eyes popped open. He took in gray pupils with flecks of gold in them. Her eyes
were gorgeous. He couldn’t look away.

Is she even human?

“Of course I’m human.”

“Oh, yeah. You’re in my thoughts
now.” He blushed, heat blooming across his face.

“And you’re in my thoughts, too. And
since we don’t have too much time, we need to start figuring things out.”

“Wait. Why don’t we have time?”

“I’ll get to that. Soon. But for
now I just need to know that we’re thinking in line with each other so we can
make the right plan.”

Thunder cracked in the dust-heap
clouds above.

“Mave, have you noticed that this
process seems to stir up the clouds?”

“Uh-huh. I wonder if lightning will
strike us if we stay like this for too long…Doesn’t matter. Stay with me here. I’ve
got a couple of things to tell you.

“First—Yahmuhwesu is real, or at
least, he’s as real as anything else on this planet. He—at least I think it’s a
he—visited you. He visited Terry and me. And I’d imagine that if anyone else
managed to live through this ridiculous nuclear fuck-up, Yahmuhwesu’s visited
them too. And I think, as far as gods go, that Yahmuhwesu is a bit on the crazy
side. Or at least, he’s confused. So he’s playing with us. I’m sure
you’ve noticed some changes in yourself recently.”

“Yeah, I have. The roaches have
been listening to me. To my thoughts. Doing what I want. And I think I’m
listening to them a smidgen too. There’s this buzzing sound at the back of my
head that I used to create by thinking at them, trying to communicate. But now
it’s just…there. It’s very quiet. And it makes me itch.”

“And, Dean, you’re not dead. You’re
not dead. Didn’t you wonder why Wendell’s lungs had ruptured but you’re
able to traipse around drinking atomic water and sleeping in ash? I think you,
and me, and Terry, we’d all be goners right now if we hadn’t been visited. Sure,
that suit may have helped you survive the blast by some ridiculous miracle, but
it can’t be only that.”

“You think Yahmuhwesu did something
to us?”

“Look at me, Dean. I wasn’t born
the world’s biggest walking anthill. This is something fresh, something I woke
to just as Yahmuhwesu disappeared. He definitely made this happen. You may have
grown up with comic books, Dean, but in real life you’ve got to know that gamma
rays toast people. They vomit until they taste their guts. It’s terrible. So if
the nuclear explosion didn’t do this, I can guarantee our vanishing deity did. There
are no other feasible answers. It’s an Occam’s Razor scenario…Do you know what
I used to do, Dean?”

“Ballet?” It wasn’t an intentional
compliment. Dean had never been that smooth. But he had noticed how strong and
sleek her legs looked. Spring-loaded.

“No, not ballet. I was never that
coordinated. I was an entomologist, just like your father. Just like Terry. And
I’d devoted my life to these ants. Acromyrmex. The leafcutters. They’re truly
beautiful creatures, easily the pinnacle of social and technological expression
in ants. That’s what I said in my papers when I was working out of U of M. Cultivated
my own nest mounds using a queen and fungi shipped up from the Guanacaste
province of Coast Rica.

“I watched that queen every day and
saw how hard she worked to grow a culture. Tending to the fungus and her eggs. Aerating
soil. Creating a whole new world on her own. It was the most incredible thing
I’d ever seen, and I felt something then, something far beyond myself. It
faded, but when I saw Yahmuhwesu appear it came back again, and fierce. And
whatever that feeling was, he filled me up with it, to the brim. Everything
seemed clearer, the interconnectedness of all life, matter, energy, everything.
He told me I had a new purpose here, among my ‘subjects.’ That was the word he
used. And when I woke up from whatever fugue I was in, I had become the new
queen.

“I could feel them in my brain. Calling
to me. Like that buzz you describe. Only it didn’t make me itch. It made me…wet.
I could feel waves rolling through my belly. I got gooseflesh. My breath ran
short. Panting. I buckled twice on the way to the lab and the nest. Because I
could hear them. They were still alive. The university’s lab was underground and
somehow intact. And they needed me. I didn’t even think of how I’d abandoned
Terry back at the shelter.”

“Wait, who is this Terry guy? You
were with him when Yahmuhwesu appeared to you?”

“Yeah, but I need to finish telling
you about these ants. I think it’s important, somehow, that you understand
them. Because they are part of me now. They have been ever since I managed to
crawl my way through the rubble and get access to the nest mound.”

She related the rest of it then,
how she’d dug down through the soil and found the existing mother queen and
swallowed her whole. How the future mother queens—fledgling tribe-bearers who
were meant to eventually carry eggs and fungal spores outward to start new nests—had
all crawled to her then, running up her legs, crawling inside of her and
resting against the walls of her uterus, triggering orgasms that left her
shaking for hours. And after that the rest of the tribe had filed out—tiny food
workers/minimas/foragers/soldiers—each finding their place on her body and immediately
starting to do their jobs however they could.

“I’m still me. Still Mave,” she
said, “but now I’m also this colony. My mind contains their hive mind.

“What I don’t understand, yet, is
what this new fungus is, or why it glows, or why it grows so goddamned fast. Even
a hint of it on the jaw of a forager will instantly attach itself to a cutting.
That’s why the fragments you saw crossing the road were already bright.

“This fungus didn’t originate with
any of the queens inside; they came to me with nothing other than their
instinct. So…I think the new fungus is coming from me. But I don’t know
how, so I’ve been holed up here to study it. Some of the ponds and riverbanks
near here have vital plant life right at the edge of the water. We need it to
really make the colony grow.”

“We?”

“Yes, I told you that I’m their
queen. I guess I’m using the royal we. And we’re the ones who need your help.”

He looked at her then, this strange
new woman and her legion of tiny ants and her gray/gold eyes. The leafcutters
were everywhere on her now, most holding little glowing slivers of plant matter
which swayed in the winds and gave her an appearance of profound life, of a majesty
that made him want to serve her despite the buzz at the base of his head that
was screaming “Run—we can survive best alone.”

“What am I supposed to do?”

“That what I’m not quite sure of. I
know that we can’t stay here much longer, though I’d like to.”

“Picket fence?”

“Yeah. That and the nest. But the
plant life here was scarce to begin with, and we’ve already processed most of
what remains in the area. Plus, I think Terry might find us.”

“Why is that bad?”

“Terry was an entomologist too,
before the bombs hit and made everyone’s job titles obsolete. That’s how I knew
him. We both worked out of the university. We were lovers in a purely pragmatic
way. We understood the need. The pheromones.

“He was renting an old house in the
suburbs south of campus. It was Cold War equipped—bomb shelter in the back
yard. We screwed down there for kicks. He wore a gas mask. We passed out holding
each other in an army cot and didn’t wake up until we felt the concussion of
the first bomb exploding. Total dumb luck that we lived.

“Then, when we crawled out a few
days later, there was a glowing god waiting for us. Terry could barely handle
the shock of all of it. He was crying one second, furious the next. Unstable. Then
Yahmuhwesu hummed his way into our heads and changed us. I haven’t seen Terry
since.

“That’s why I’m afraid. Because if
Yahmuhwesu affected Terry the same way he did with us, then right now Terry is
hunting down a hive of his own.”

“More leafcutters?”

“I wish. Terry’s bug of choice was
the Nomamyrmex, Dean. Army ants.”

“That’s bad?”

“It’s terrible. If he manages to
find a hive in nature there will be millions of them. And if his mind is as
fragile as I believe it to be then Terry will become an instrument of the hive
instead of the other way around.”

“You don’t think he could control
them?”

“I don’t think he’d even try. He
was always so clinical. His brain wasn’t equipped for this sort of metaphysical
shift. I grew up with hippies in a commune and started meditating with my
imaginary friends when I was four years old. I’ve always desired a more
mystical reality, despite my chosen field of work.

“And you, your single-minded drive
to stay alive appears to usurp any need for reality.

“But Terry, his brain probably
split in two the moment that first bomb dropped and he realized he wasn’t ever
going to have a cup of Starbucks coffee again.”

Dean wanted to laugh, for a moment,
but he saw how serious the look in Mave’s eyes was. This was dire. The
leafcutter ants that covered her were frantic, almost disorganized in their
movements.

“Dean, if Terry does unearth a
Nomamyrmex colony they’ll be starving.”

“So they’ll eat Terry?”

“If we’re lucky. But, assuming he’s
still conscious by then, they’ll know what he knows. That there is a veritable
smorgasbord waiting for them in the basement of the U of M lab. And when they
don’t find them there they’ll be able to follow our scent trail.”

“They eat leafcutters?”

“For centuries the Acromyrmex has
been the favorite food of the army ant. Particularly the queens. They’ll
sacrifice thousands of their fighters in battle to get a good chance at a fat, juicy
mother ant. They’ll drag her, still living, all the way back to their tunnels,
and then slowly pull the eggs from her body and eat them until she collapses
and dies. She is consumed last. A victory feast.”

Dean saw Mave recoil at this, felt
a scared tremor enter the cross-tuned vibrations relaying thought between the
two of them.

“Dean, I am the Acromyrmex
now. I and the colony might be all that is left of us on Earth. And if we can’t
find a way to move from this place soon, we’ll be eaten alive.”

8

The long stretch of internal communication had wiped them
out but left them wary. Exhausted, they shuffled over to the fence and agreed
to sleep in shifts before figuring out how they could travel.

Dean lay near Mave in the lean-to
for a few hours, watching the sleepless march of the ants as they moved over
her and traveled back and forth to their garden nest. She had been right about
the beauty of the creatures. While Dean admired the tenacity and strength of
the cockroach, they lacked the grace and civility and immense complexity that made
observing the leafcutter such a pleasure.

The roaches knew how to stay alive,
but for what? He tried to cut the question off in his mind, knowing the sense
of existential dread that was sure to follow any attempted answer.

Dean’s father had built up a life
for himself. He had done much more than simply “get by.” An esteemed figure in
his field. Research papers published in all the right magazines. A loving son
who helped him through his years as a young widower. But in the end a
ridiculous auto accident took his life. His papers and ideas were replaced by
newer ones which failed to credit him. His son flipped out and traveled the
world squandering the money the father had saved up for years. No, Daddy Dean
Sr. had existed for nothing. And now the last of his bloodline was surrounded
by semi-empathic roaches and trapped in a wasteland, lying next to a fungus-coated
woman with exotic ants in her womb.

Actually, Dean thought, his dad
might have been really intrigued by that last part, but it wasn’t what you necessarily
hoped for when you had a kid.

After a while Mave opened her eyes
(those eyes) and within seconds Dean allowed himself to drift into a
shallow sleep.

He dreamed—army ants marching/his
face consumed by baby roaches/Terry chewing his way through Mave’s vagina. He
woke screaming. Mave placed her hand on his forehead, the smell of her fungus
rich and almost sweet near his nose. He calmed. He caught another hour of shut
eye. This time real slumber.

But at waking the dreams still
chilled him. They lingered. From the look in her eyes, she’d somehow
shared his fear.

They hit the road within hours.

Travel time moved on the following
agenda:

Head back north, then west when the
river branches. Stay close to the water. More likely to find some sort of plant
life there. Get far enough west and Mave knew of a place where there might be
safety. A military liaison to the university had once been sweet on her and
spilled post-coital secrets to impress, including the general location of a
military stronghold they’d built out of a natural cave system.

The place was supposed to have some
degree of sustainability. Which meant flowing water and clean air. Which could
mean weapons with which a person or persons could effectively stave off an
invasion of army ants. Which might mean a self-contained bio-system that
she and Dean could adapt their insectile selves to.

Travel time was a bitch.

They tried to drag part of the
Acromyrmex nest behind them on top of her old lean-to tarp. That meant
slow-going. That meant frenzied waste workers cleaning out dead ants/collapsed
tunnels/reduced gongylidia output. That meant confused foragers hunting dead
land for any plant life at all, coming back with empty, ashy mandibles. The
fungus across Mave’s skin began to lose its luster without new plant life to
culture on. The crumbs and trash they tried to adhere to her made her look
diseased.

The new queen was upset. Dean would
hear her humming, but not in a frequency he could even try to reach. He guessed
she was calming the colony; asking them to endure. He knew the sound of her
excited his roaches. Their cerci swayed to the sound.

He watched Mave’s movements, the
sway of her hips, the way her feet seemed to keep moving without real exertion.

For some reason her beauty pitched
him double lonely. She would never have a guy like Dean, would she? He
considered running ahead, leaving the queen and her dying colony and heading west
to the Pacific by himself. She’d only slow him down, maybe even bring a horde
of ravenous ants with huge jaws his way.

He could be free. A lone wolf. He’d
finally tattoo his knuckles with his motto, four letters across each fist:

DONOTDIE

But was that all he really felt
now? He wasn’t sure. Those gray/gold eyes kept him unstable.

Maybe we could spend the rest of
our time together. Maybe we can find some place with a white picket fence and
forty acres out back for nesting.

So for now Dean kept things left
foot/right foot/repeat and followed the queen of the dying leafcutters along
the river.

9

“It’s getting warmer, don’t you think? Brighter, too.”

Mave had demanded they sit by the
river for a while to let her ants search for plant life and harvest proteins
from their collapsing nest.

Dean thought she was right about
the warmth. He hadn’t worn his “Winter Fun” scarf for the last fifteen miles or
so. He’d guessed he was heating up from exertion—dragging a backpack full of
water and a tarp full of dirt was a gut-buster—but maybe Mave was on point.

He hoped she wasn’t correct for
a few reasons:

One—Dean was sure the cold was all
that’d kept the now fantastic number of eggs on his suit from hatching. Currently
he and Mave were located nowhere near a worthy stash of baby roach food.

Two—The Nuclear Summer theory. Following
nuclear winter the ozone layer and stratosphere are effectively destroyed. UV
light would torch any remaining territory that wasn’t already turned to desert
by the lack of photosynthesis during the blackout. Anything that had a harsh
time with UV light before would really feel the burn. Genetic defects galore. Polar
ice caps would melt. Continental flooding. The greenhouse effect in fast fast
forward. Even sea life would go stagnant, except for those weird things that
live off of gas vents at the bottom of the Marianas Trench.

Three—As much as he would welcome a
bit of light, it freaked his suit out and ravaged the leafcutter’s fungus. They’d
both be in even more of a pinch with the sun blazing overhead.

However, he was enjoying the
increased sensation of warmth in the air, slight though it was. He laid back
against the gentle slope of the riverbank and watched the cancerous clouds
churn overhead. He thought, even at this distance from her, that he could smell
Mave’s fungus. It calmed him. He relaxed his neck, allowing his crash helmet to
sink its heft into the ground. His shoulders dropped.

The sound of the river water
running seaward formed a constant white noise soundtrack. He let himself float
with it, pictured himself as a drop of water, incapable of death, unknowing,
yet immensely important and powerful.

He closed his eyes and let his head
tip over in Mave’s direction.

The smell of her was sort of like
lavender mixed with fresh coffee. It invigorated as much as it soothed. Were
there spores of it, he wondered, working their way into his brain right now? He
hoped so.

She was sovereign. Let him join her
subjects, enthralled.

Two sensations:

Movement without control.

The scent of lemons and hot metal. The
smell of ruptured ants.

Dean opened his eyes, instantly
awake. He was no longer on the riverbank. The roaches were moving at full-out
speed, autonomous of his control, heading towards a nearby copse of charred
tree stumps.

A scream in the distance—explosive,
then suddenly cut off.

Mave.

Dean forced his hands and feet to
the ground, churning up hardened earth, leaving tracks. The roaches were not
stopping. Whatever they had sensed, they wanted to get as far away as possible.

Go with them, Dean! The roaches
got you this far. You can keep living.

You can survive.

Their pace never flagged. Now they
were just feet from a low hiding spot.

Another shriek. Crunching sounds
that rolled Dean’s stomach even at this distance.

You know what’s happening, Dean.
It’s Terry. He’s found you. He’s found Mave. But he wants to eat her first. A
big fat juicy mama ant. Now is your only chance to run!

The suit kept crawling, more cautious
now, looking for a way to crest the next hill without being seen by anything
down below.

Dean dug his heels in harder but
couldn’t get traction.

Shit shit shit! Mave’s dying. Stop
this. Do something.

Dean began to hum. He focused his
thoughts on the tight space at the back of his skull and tried to bring the
sound as close as he could to the buzz that flourished there.

The roaches began to slow. He let
the hum drop to a low drone at the back of his throat. The hive mind buzz
locked in.

we are scared we are scared
predator scared predator scared distance dark distance quiet scared escape
distancehidehidehidehidehideprotecthide

Dean didn’t hear actual words, but
this was the message he received in a language older than any man had ever
created. The language of survival.

It was a sound for animals. It
ensured a thriving planet. It was old and powerful and he was sure that a hint
of that audible pattern echoed inside of every atom of his body.

But it wasn’t anything Dean wanted to
listen to anymore.

There was something stronger working
through his mind now. A brighter sound at the front of his head. A siren’s
call.

Her spores really did get into
my brain.

Dean tuned into the sound. It felt
nearly as ancient as the desire to run, to live at all costs. But this sound
had a beauty to it. A nobility.

And as he found the right tone in
his throat to harmonize there was only one word at the front of his thoughts:

Fight.

He could smell her and the colony on the poison wind. Sweet
fungus. Acidic death. Adrenaline. Pain.

There was another smell in the air,
and whether he was pulling it into his mind via his own nose or the roaches
receptors he was unsure.

It was the smell of hunger. Desperation.

Dean charged toward it face first, his
own feet pushing him onward, workman’s boots rubbing his feet raw.

Go in without hesitation. Strike
first and then don’t stop until she’s safe.

He held in a roar, though it raged
at the inside of his chest. He let its energy carry him faster.

There—two hundred yards south. A
man stood over Mave. Watching her face twist in agony. Her body was covered in
moving black shapes, thick ropes of them, orderly lines of assault tearing away
at her face/belly/legs.

Nomamyrmex was on the march.

Dean screamed then, hoping the
sound would somehow distract even the bugs which were eating away at Mave.

The man—it had to be Terry—rotated
to face the sound. He looked right at Dean. One of his eyes was missing. His
nose was also absent, replaced by a jagged black triangle bisected by exposed
bone.

Despite these obvious deformities,
Dean could tell the man was smiling.

Why would he be smili…

The earth fell out from beneath
Dean and he felt something long and sharp bore through his right leg before he
even realized he wasn’t running anymore.

“We’re diggers. You cah see that ow. It ohly took us a few
hours to displace over six meters of dirt alog this ehtire perimeter. Quite
astoudeeg, really.”

Terry had approached the pit. The
noseless fuck.

“We couldit fide as mady sharp
sticks as we’d hoped for, but you do what you cad with what you’ve got, right? Guess
we’ve lucked out that you hit that particular spike as square as you did. Providess.”

Dean said nothing. What good would
rage do now? He surveyed his surroundings. Narrow dark rift marked by a million
ant trails. A chunk of fractured tree branch jammed through his upper thigh, a
few slaughtered roaches hanging from its tip. Wound not bleeding too badly. Must
have missed the femoral.

“She told us your name is Dee.”

“It’s Dean.”

“That’s what I said. I caht quite
make all the sowds I used to. I must admit that we were quite huggry on the
trip to fide the Acromyrmex. We had to eat pieces of my face. Other parts too.”

At that Terry’s remaining eye went
wide with fear. Absolute panic.

He emitted a cough, a bark of a low
tone. His eye snapped back to empty.

His human brain is still trying
to assert itself. Jesus, he’s scared. He’s so scared, the poor bastard. Those
ants are inside of his mind and they’ve been feeding on him for days.

“Listen, Terry, I know you’re in
there somewhere. I know you’re scared. I know they are hurting you and you’re
confused and the whole world seems wrong right now, but if you can push to the
front of your brain and take control you can stop this. They’re just ants.”

“Quiet!”

With that Dean noticed the black
surge cresting over the lip of the makeshift pit. Thousands—no, hundreds of
thousands of them. Thick fingertip-sized ants with bulbous split red-horned
heads, each meaty half as big as two whole leafcutters. Their jaw musculature
visible from feet away.

Pain is coming, and it will not
be brief. If nuclear fallout couldn’t kill me how long will it take these ants
to end it?

Then he heard the sound. A new
tone, from up above. Weak, but coming from Mave.

She’s still alive.

He felt, instinctively, that he
must try to match her sound.

The first wave of ants was on him. At
his earlobes. Sinking their mandibles into the roaches that covered him. Tearing
away at his fingertips. Trying to get into his fresh wound.

He cleared his throat. He pulled in
as much air as he could. Ants bit into his lower lip, sought the meat of his
tongue.

From the bottom of his lungs Dean
let out his matching tone. It found hers. The sounds merged and became a
terrible bellow.

This was a call to war. Dean felt
it in his bones.

There was a crackling noise—the
sound of thousands of dry distended roach eggs tearing open at once.

Dean’s delivery day was here. Within
seconds he was the proud father to a seething multitude. The tiny nymphs were
too small to be crushed in the huge jaws of the Nomamyrmex, over whom they
flowed heedlessly.

They washed up out of the trench, a
hungry flood with one target.

Dean stood up, shaking loose
hundreds of army ants from his frame. His right leg held. A thick cast of roach
nymphs had formed around it, bearing the weight of his broken limb.

He kept his mind focused on Terry. On
Terry’s face. Those open holes.

Roaches adore dark wet places like
that.

Terry turned to run. The nymphs
were already halfway up his legs. He made it one stride before the babies had
covered his good eye and were piling in to his blasted orbit.

Terry opened his mouth to scream
but the only sound Dean could pick up was the rustle of tiny roaches rubbing
against each other on their way down the man’s throat.

Dean looked away. He hoped they’d
kill him soon. He’d tried to focus the nymphs’ movement towards Terry’s brain
but he wasn’t sure how long it would take them to chew through to gray matter.

There was a man inside there somewhere.
Confused. Violated. Alone.

Shit.

Dean couldn’t take it anymore. His
suit helped him crawl up out of the pit and over to Terry’s twitching body.

Dean shoved one of his gloves in
his own mouth. He bit down. He made a two-fisted grab for the sharpened branch
that was rammed through his leg. Twisted left. Twisted right. Wailed through a
mouthful of wool and leather. Bit down again. Gripped tight. Pulled up and
away. Scoped the point of the stick, dripping his own blood, bits of roach
still stuck to it.

And then he swung that spear down
into Terry’s empty eye socket as hard as he possibly could.

10

This is the way Dean looked at it, much later:

One day you go to bed happy. The
next day your dad dies. In a stupid, stupid way.

And maybe you give up on the world.
Maybe the world forgets you ever existed and you’re okay with that. Because
you’re alive. Not dead. Not anywhere near that sadness again.

Things are easier alone. Nothing to
lose = no loss.

But what if you die? Isn’t
that the biggest loss of them all? You’re the only one who will ever truly know
you were even alive.

So you protect yourself, with a nod
to the esteemed Malcolm X, by any means necessary.

But Malcolm, at the moment he’d
said that, probably never guessed one of those means would be covering yourself
in nasty, nasty insects.

Probably never even came near being
a thought in his head.

His loss. Because he’s dead now. And
you, you just keep living, no matter what the world throws at you. Nuclear
weapons, crazy presidents, toxic fallout, man-made gods with nothing better to
do than alter the genetic code of the remaining humans on Earth.

Fucking army ants.

Oh, and loneliness. Lots of
loneliness. You always have to fight that one. But maybe everybody does.

At least that was a problem when
you were human.

But that’s not exactly the case
anymore, is it?

Back up.

Start again.

One day you fall asleep happy. Next
to a river under a dark sky. Then you wake up and everything has changed. Including
you. You changed so much that for the first time you actually risk your
life.

For what?

Love? It’s as good a word as any. It’ll
do.

And you’ve gone so crazy with this
feeling, call it love, that you find yourself in an absurd situation, humming
and moaning at telepathic bugs and killing brainwashed entomologists.

I know.

It sounds silly.

But it feels important at the time.
So important that you nearly die from blood loss lying there in a desolate
field next to a corpse filled with baby roaches.

Again, you fall asleep. Or perhaps
you pass out from blood loss. But you’re happy. Not totally happy, but feeling
like now maybe your life was really a life. Something more than rote
respiration for as sustained a period as possible.

Then you wake up and everything has
changed so goddamned much you think you’re in heaven.

But you’re not dead, and neither is
she. The one you love. Sure, her original right arm is missing (eaten by army
ants, you guess), but it appears that some enterprising leafcutter ants have
assembled her a new one out of radiant fungus.

These same enterprising bugs have
healed up your sundry cuts and wounds and even staved off the infection in your
leg with a Streptomyces bacteria that lives on their skin.

A woman once told you these were
the best ants on Earth. You now believe her 100%.

As great as those ants are, you might
miss your cockroaches.

“I’ve set them free,” she tells
you. “They’re up there doing what they’re meant to do. Making babies and eating
death and putting nutrients back into the soil for when the nuclear summer
passes and things can grow again.”

It’s a lot to absorb at once. Losing
your friends like that. Finding out the whole Earth has gone Death Valley for
the time being. Trying to figure out how this miraculous woman managed to drag
your nearly dead coma patient ass all the way out west to these secret caves. But
you accept it all after a while.

To fill time, to try to adjust, you
write down everything you can remember. Part of you feels like these journals
could be the last memories of the extinct species you used to consider yourself
a part of.

You might explore your new home. Filters.
Generators. Tunnels and tunnels and tunnels. You guess one of them might run
right to the center of the Earth, but you never find that particular path.

The woman you love, her favorite
place is the sustainable eco-sphere. She can even farm there, next to her ants.
But they do a pretty great job without her.

All those rooms—the ones that were
supposed to house the soldiers and U.S. officials who weren’t ready when the
bombs hit—they start filling up with the glowing fungal tufts the ants produce.
Aside from that it’s dark down there, wherever you want it to be.

One day (or night—who can tell down here?) you fall asleep
lonely. Then you wake up the next morning and the woman you love is on top of
you. She’s lifting her hips and putting you inside of her and making every
other Best Moment of Your Life seem pretty pale. And when she’s done and you’re
done you hold each other tight and watch as three luminous Acromyrmex queens
emerge from between her legs and crawl up to her belly.

Their wings dry. They
shiver/shake/touch antennae.

They take flight.

You can tell that they’re headed to
the surface—nuclear summer bound.

Their movement through the air is
heavy with theft.

This makes the woman you love cry. But
she is smiling through the tears. Beaming, really.

For she believes, as you do, that
she has just given birth to the first strange children of that terrible new
sun.

The Real End of the Line (Maybe): An Afterword

By Jeremy Robert Johnson

Sometimes when I complete a short story it doesn’t feel like
it’s really finished. Oh, sure, maybe the central conflict is resolved or there
was a pretty sentence at the end of the thing that made it feel like that story
was done, but something about the character or scenario still sticks with me. Such
was the case with my short story “The Sharp Dressed Man at the End of the Line”
from Angel Dust Apocalypse (the short also made a later appearance in
Issue #16 of Verbicide Magazine). I’d created this weird, paranoid guy with a
fantastic suit made of roaches, I had him merc the President, and then I called
it quits. But I always wondered, “What the hell would the guy do next?”

You’re holding the answer to that
question. How I got from that very economical short story to this absurd
existentialist adventure, I honestly have no idea. I do know that I listened to
only two albums during the entire process of writing the book: Bjork’s Vespertine
and DJ Dieselboy’s The Dungeonmaster’s Guide. Just those two,
alternating, over and over again. And strangely, there is a pattern in the
book, too, of moments of lightness countered by more brutal, frantic passages. I
think the soundtrack had something to do with that.

Do you need to have read the
aforementioned short story to appreciate this book? Nope. I tried as best I
could to bring in enough details from the prior piece to make this a
stand-alone tale. Would reading that story make this book a richer experience? Potentially.
Both stories are now lodged so firmly in my skull that I can’t separate them to
venture a guess.

It’s probably obvious by now that I
am utterly obsessed with the end of the world via nuclear means. It’s a fear
that—even through the writing of these stories—I can’t quite shake. If the big
time bombs really did drop it would be such a fucking mess, and such a huge
manifestation of disgusting human ego and power. I was discussing the end of
the world with a friend of mine—one who happens to be a bio-chemist and
recently invented a new virus, which although unrelated, is just really cool—and
we both agreed that a broad pandemic is a much preferred form of mass human
destruction.

Let nature take us out, if we have
to go. Bombs are so tacky.

On a different, less End Times-y
note, THANK YOU for supporting underground literature and picking up this title
from Swallowdown Press. We don’t exist without wonderful dedicated readers like
you.

I think this book marks the end of
Dean’s adventures. Things in his world have become so strange that if I ever
returned to his story I have a feeling things might turn out really, really
weird.

God forbid, right?

Portland, OR, April ‘06

About the Author

Jeremy Robert Johnson is the author of the Wonderland
Award Winning WE LIVE INSIDE YOU, the cult hit ANGEL DUST APOCALYPSE, the Stoker
Nominated novel SIREN PROMISED (w/Alan M. Clark), and the end-of-the-world
freak-out EXTINCTION JOURNALS. His fiction has been acclaimed by authors like
Jack Ketchum and Chuck Palahniuk and has appeared internationally in numerous
anthologies and magazines. In 2008 he worked with The Mars Volta to tell the
story behind their Grammy Winning album The Bedlam in Goliath. In 2010 he spoke
about weirdness and metaphor as a survival tool at the Fractal 10 conference in
Medellin, Colombia (where fellow speakers included DJ Spooky, an MIT
bio-engineer, and a doctor who explained the neurological aspirations of a
sponge). He is working on a number of new books. You’ll just have to trust him
on this.

www.jeremyrobertjohnson.com

www.swallowdownpress.com

About the Artist

Marie Peters-Rimpot, 41, was born and raised in Bretagne, France. She moved to the Netherlands when she was 22 and has lived there since as
a mother to three wonderful children and as a respected self-taught artist. Her
work is the result of a constant urge to create, whether the method is
photography, short stories, sculpture, or digital manipulations. She has been
honored to exhibit her art in Levallois Perret and Amanlys. To see more of
Marie’s work you can visit:

http://zapzoum.daportfolio.com/

WINNER OF THE 2011
WONDERLAND AWARD FOR BEST COLLECTION!

“WE LIVE INSIDE YOU
is fucking terrific.”—JACK KETCHUM

“A haunting
collection from a wildly talented author, WE LIVE INSIDE YOU is composed of
nineteen perfectly-wrought nightmares, every one of which will stay with you
long after you've finished reading.”—PETER CRAIG, author of Hot Plastic
and Blood Father, co-screenwriter of The Town

“The people populating these stories are real and vital and you WILL care,
deeply, about what becomes of them...and in JRJ's harsh universe, baaaaad
things happen. Often. Prepare thyself.”—CRAIG DAVIDSON, author of Rust and
Bone, The Fighter, and Sarah Court

“Favorite collection for 2011: WE LIVE INSIDE YOU.”—STEPHEN GRAHAM JONES,
author of The Ones That Got Away and It Came From Del Rio

Now available in a
2012 Author’s Preferred Edition. Includes a fully revised text, 20,000 words of
bonus content, and an Introduction by Stephen Graham Jones. Only $2.99 for
Kindle!

“A dazzling writer.
Seriously amazing short stories—and I love short stories. Like the best of
Tobias Wolff. While I read them, they made time stand still. That’s great.”—CHUCK
PALAHNIUK

“Johnson weaves vivid
and fascinatingly grotesque tales regarding such things as a group of extreme
body modification addicts (one of whom is pretty much made out of vegetables)
to a cockroach suit that helps its maker survive WWIII. These stories have been
given serious treatment and emerge as fantastic and often graphic scenarios
full of characters you hate to love.”—BOOKGASM

“Angel Dust
Apocalypse hits the reader in the gut and goes to work. Within these pages
the dark underbelly of the human subconscious is captured: those things that
people think about but never mention...I could not put this book down...”—RAZORCAKE

“In its most twisted
moments, Johnson’s writing is too gleeful to pigeon-hole as strictly ‘horror,’
and when he steps outside the gross-out game, he transcends most other straight
literary writers. Angel Dust Apocalypse is every bit as smart as it is
gut-churning, and every bit as moving and introspective as it is horrifying and
humorous.”—VERBICIDE