Mike Gullickson's Blog
October 9, 2014
The 1st critic review for The Northern Star: Civil War is in...
(Mike breathes a sigh of relief)
"Prepare to be afraid. Be very afraid. Because even seasoned science fiction readers well versed in stories of military conflict and cyber-futures will enjoy something different in The Northern Star: Civil War.
Mention the word 'Civil War story' and most Americans have instant visions of a historical novel; but in the case of The Northern Star: Civil War, that presupposition couldn't be further from the truth.
The story is cyberpunk through and through and at its best, is set in 2068 in a world where humans live more in cyberspace than in the reality of their ravaged, resource-depleted world, and provides a sequel to The Northern Star: The Beginning (an introduction not seen by this reviewer) which depicts such a world at violent odds with splinter groups and factions vying for power.
So far this futuristic setting seems relatively common; but let's add a mentally ill bionic soldier who is at once a hero and a killer, a mystery surrounding a town where adults are murdered and children kidnapped, and a world driven by ambition and greed carried to its nth degree of logic and you have a truly gripping sci-fi read that moves far beyond any civil war re-enactment that one could imagine.
Expect no light adventure, here. Part of what makes The Northern Star: Civil War so disturbingly compelling is that its roots are solidly implanted in events of modern times. So take greed, corporate maneuvering and political manipulation and then extrapolate them to a future world where one reluctant, rebuilt soldier finds himself adopting the strange position of protector rather than fighter.
It's a world where giant manufactured men can become Tank Majors or Tank Minors with unique high-tech battle gear designed to make them invincible, all supervised by a non-bionic who distrusts the very technology he's been assigned to oversee: "Boen may have controlled the bionics’ operations around the world, but he still didn’t trust the technology. He’d observed how, in today’s military, there was a caste system that didn’t exist before: the bionic and the soft soldier. It had created an unspoken rift between soldiers, one that superseded even rank. The Tank Majors—goliath bionics—and the Tank Minors—infantry bionics—had made flesh-and-blood men into children."
Then take trends of today, such as everyone's fascination with the Internet, and depict a world where this preoccupation of the masses has been encouraged by a few determined to control everything - then imagine what happens when the addictive switch of cyberspace is turned off: "We can’t access our money. We can’t order food. People can’t work. No games, no friends. The only thing that sorta works is the phones.”
And here you have it, in a nutshell: the crux of why the events of The Northern Star: Civil War ultimately prove so compelling. It's because they aren't unbelievable, but a logical possibility based on modern scenarios. It's because the protagonists, whether they be bionic fighter-soldiers with their own agendas and perceptions or the common man, are portrayed as well-developed individuals struggling with a world that is only half-real.
So turn to The Northern Star: Civil War for a glimpse into one possible future and a world which re-defines the meaning of sacrifice and obedience. Then prepare to be afraid; be very afraid. With its cornerstone foundations rooted in perceptions and patterns of modern times, it's military sci-fi and futuristic cyber-reality at its best." -D. Donovan, The Midwest Book Review, November Issue
The Northern Star: Civil War
"Prepare to be afraid. Be very afraid. Because even seasoned science fiction readers well versed in stories of military conflict and cyber-futures will enjoy something different in The Northern Star: Civil War.
Mention the word 'Civil War story' and most Americans have instant visions of a historical novel; but in the case of The Northern Star: Civil War, that presupposition couldn't be further from the truth.
The story is cyberpunk through and through and at its best, is set in 2068 in a world where humans live more in cyberspace than in the reality of their ravaged, resource-depleted world, and provides a sequel to The Northern Star: The Beginning (an introduction not seen by this reviewer) which depicts such a world at violent odds with splinter groups and factions vying for power.
So far this futuristic setting seems relatively common; but let's add a mentally ill bionic soldier who is at once a hero and a killer, a mystery surrounding a town where adults are murdered and children kidnapped, and a world driven by ambition and greed carried to its nth degree of logic and you have a truly gripping sci-fi read that moves far beyond any civil war re-enactment that one could imagine.
Expect no light adventure, here. Part of what makes The Northern Star: Civil War so disturbingly compelling is that its roots are solidly implanted in events of modern times. So take greed, corporate maneuvering and political manipulation and then extrapolate them to a future world where one reluctant, rebuilt soldier finds himself adopting the strange position of protector rather than fighter.
It's a world where giant manufactured men can become Tank Majors or Tank Minors with unique high-tech battle gear designed to make them invincible, all supervised by a non-bionic who distrusts the very technology he's been assigned to oversee: "Boen may have controlled the bionics’ operations around the world, but he still didn’t trust the technology. He’d observed how, in today’s military, there was a caste system that didn’t exist before: the bionic and the soft soldier. It had created an unspoken rift between soldiers, one that superseded even rank. The Tank Majors—goliath bionics—and the Tank Minors—infantry bionics—had made flesh-and-blood men into children."
Then take trends of today, such as everyone's fascination with the Internet, and depict a world where this preoccupation of the masses has been encouraged by a few determined to control everything - then imagine what happens when the addictive switch of cyberspace is turned off: "We can’t access our money. We can’t order food. People can’t work. No games, no friends. The only thing that sorta works is the phones.”
And here you have it, in a nutshell: the crux of why the events of The Northern Star: Civil War ultimately prove so compelling. It's because they aren't unbelievable, but a logical possibility based on modern scenarios. It's because the protagonists, whether they be bionic fighter-soldiers with their own agendas and perceptions or the common man, are portrayed as well-developed individuals struggling with a world that is only half-real.
So turn to The Northern Star: Civil War for a glimpse into one possible future and a world which re-defines the meaning of sacrifice and obedience. Then prepare to be afraid; be very afraid. With its cornerstone foundations rooted in perceptions and patterns of modern times, it's military sci-fi and futuristic cyber-reality at its best." -D. Donovan, The Midwest Book Review, November Issue
The Northern Star: Civil War
September 25, 2014
The 2nd Novel, May It Be Good...
That's right. I don't know if The Northern Star: Civil War is as good as the first novel. I really don't. "Can't see the forest through the trees," that kind of thing. Do I loathe that George Lucas messed with the original Star Wars? I do. Do I understand now, as the date approaches for the release of the 2nd novel? Totally.
When do you stop? When is the novel as close to what you envision as you can get? My friends/writers who helped shape the 2nd to final draft, were split: some thought it was better than the first novel, some thought it wasn't quite as good, one said "it was different, they're hard to compare."
But they aren't you, the reader, who owes me nothing and can critique with impunity and vet the work accordingly (I know it sorta rhymes).
So we shall see. The respite for me is there is nothing else I can add. When I read it, aside from wanting to tinker with descriptions that come down to "tomate-O" or "tomah-to" the story is what it is.
What do I like about it? Quite a bit. I like Raimey's state of mind. I think where he's at mentally, is where anyone would be. I like Mike Glass, and how he comes to grips with being a sociopath, and how he can't fully change because, well, he's a sociopath.
Sabot, Cynthia's bodyguard, is one of my favorite characters. And the Twins are vicious soldiers to be reckoned with.
I think the violence is appropriate. The 'have' and 'have nots' of the world are represented accurately. And the perils of our technology addiction, as it tightens around this world like a noose around a neck, is a warning: how small do we want the world to be?
It's certainly not a BAD novel....
Mike Gullickson
When do you stop? When is the novel as close to what you envision as you can get? My friends/writers who helped shape the 2nd to final draft, were split: some thought it was better than the first novel, some thought it wasn't quite as good, one said "it was different, they're hard to compare."
But they aren't you, the reader, who owes me nothing and can critique with impunity and vet the work accordingly (I know it sorta rhymes).
So we shall see. The respite for me is there is nothing else I can add. When I read it, aside from wanting to tinker with descriptions that come down to "tomate-O" or "tomah-to" the story is what it is.
What do I like about it? Quite a bit. I like Raimey's state of mind. I think where he's at mentally, is where anyone would be. I like Mike Glass, and how he comes to grips with being a sociopath, and how he can't fully change because, well, he's a sociopath.
Sabot, Cynthia's bodyguard, is one of my favorite characters. And the Twins are vicious soldiers to be reckoned with.
I think the violence is appropriate. The 'have' and 'have nots' of the world are represented accurately. And the perils of our technology addiction, as it tightens around this world like a noose around a neck, is a warning: how small do we want the world to be?
It's certainly not a BAD novel....
Mike Gullickson
January 10, 2013
"Dirt" 1_2_13 thru 1_10_13
If you are just reading, Part I consists of:
A) "Dirt" 12_6 thru 12_14
B) "Dirt" 12_15_12 thru 1_1_13
C) "Dirt" 1_2_13 thru 1_10_13
Thanks for your support!
= = =
They drove back into the city, unsure where to go. Dennis looked to Clarence – he stared vacantly out the side window. The bug bats were no longer out. It appeared that night was for the glowies.
“It’ll be ok,” Dennis reassured Clarence.
“We can’t get across the water,” Clarence replied.
Dennis found a parking garage. The exit was plugged with melted cars as people tried to flee five months before. The entrance was fine except for a motorcycle that had tried to jump, or was hit. Dennis let the tires do the work and they rocked over its remains.
Around the open aired perimeter there were melted cars, but towards the center, they were just filthy orphans. Dennis pulled the Jeep between a van and a truck and killed the engine. Its dying snort echoed around the garage. Dennis heard something shuffle somewhere above. He pictured the bug bats nestled together on the upper floors. Here, it looked fine.
Dennis reached back and got a jug of water. It was funny how with all the stress and weird landscapes, he’d forgotten to drink or eat.
“Hollywood diet, revealed.” he said. He drank from the gallon jug and offered it to Clarence. Clarence ignored him. Dennis pressed him with it. “Come on.”
Clarence acquiesced and took a big gulp. Dennis had never really looked at Clarence. It felt like they’d been together for weeks, but it’d only been three days and now, he finally looked at the man that he relied on for survival. Clarence was in his 50’s, his hair was mostly grey and he had a bald spot on the top of his head. His baggy sweatshirt couldn’t hide a gut underneath, and this was after five months of forced rationing. He had bad acne as a kid. His beard covered most of it, but Dennis could see the rippled scars on his cheeks. His hands were thick and strong from manual labor – a flat wedding band was on his left hand – but his shoulders were slumped in the way of those who are ignored. Dennis had viewed him as a survivalist, but before this he was a janitor. He just survived.
Like me.
Being so close to salvation had allowed Clarence hope. It had allowed him to think for the first day in nearly half a year that maybe he wouldn’t die horribly. He had uncaged hope like a dove and the black chasm where the bridge should have been had scared it to flight. Maybe he’d been this close to breaking the whole time. Maybe the rope had already begun to fray.
“What’s going on?” Dennis asked gently.
Clarence took a second to answer, he sucked on his lower lip. In that time something chittered a few floors overhead. They both automatically scanned the area.
“That, man. That right there. The glowies. The bridge.”
He raised his hand – it tremored. He closed it in a fist.
“I don’t want to cry in front of you.”
“We’re close.”
“Close only counts with horseshoes and hand grenades, kid. Do you know how many dead people have been ‘close?’” We can’t get across the river.”
“Why not?”
“DIDN’T YOU SEE IT? It was full of them.”
“Maybe there’s a boat, they don’t like daytime.”
“There isn’t a boat. It was stuffed with them,” Clarence said quietly.
It was. Even in the dark, Dennis had seen that the water had risen past the flood markers, displaced with squirming life.
“If we can’t get across, maybe we can signal to them. Shoot off our guns, they’re right there!”
“I just feel it, man. That’s all. I don’t want to talk about it. I’m spent.”
“That’s a bullshit attitude. We’re THERE.”
Clarence didn’t put up a fight. He pulled his hoodie over his head and closed his eyes. He just wanted to sleep. Dennis shook his head, he didn’t know what else to say. They didn’t even discuss watch. Dennis tried to stay up, but exhaustion rolled over him. At the hospital, Clarence had said how the sounds of the glowies had first frightened him and then, like circular fan, the noise became soothing. Dennis understood now. Their toots and calls and long pitched notes had a beauty to them. Even the sharp cry of something consumed. We adapt to what we are given until it kills us. We are the roaches, the Twinkies, that will survive til the end. Dennis fell asleep.
Dennis woke.
“Sally,” Clarence muttered. “Come on Sally, you’ll be ok. Come on Sally. Mom!”
It was too loud, Dennis could hear their upstairs neighbors rustle and bark. He pushed Clarence awake.
“You were talking in your sleep.”
“Sorry.”
Dennis handed him the jug. Clarence took a swig. He looked less brittle.
“Is Sally your wife?”
Clarence took a slow draw of water.
“How do you know about Sally?”
“You say her name in your sleep. You have since the beginning. Did she not make it?”
Clarence turned his head away from Dennis. “She’s dead.”
“I’m sorry, man.”
“It was tough. She went bad.” Clarence’s tone had changed. It was hitched. He put his hands up to his mouth.
“I’m sorry man,” Dennis said. “Were you in love?”
Clarence’s head snapped forward. He choked out a “I thought so at the time.”
“She loved you?”
Clarence’s shoulder shook, he had difficulty breathing. “It was hard to tell.” He finally turned and Dennis saw tears rolling down his cheeks, he smothered his mouth with his hands and Dennis realized: he was laughing.
“What?”
“Hmm?” Clarence’s couldn’t talk. He was racked with silent laughter.
“Who was Sally?!”
“Sally . . . was . . . my . . . turtle.”
“What?!”
Clarence nodded and wiped his eyes. “Ugh. I had her when I was eight. She got hit by a car.”
Clarence burst. The joy echoed around the hard walls. The dumbfounded look on Dennis’s face made him laugh harder.
“What about the wedding ring?” Dennis blurted, his face red.
Clarence looked down at it. “I was married, but we divorced a long time ago.” He held his palm up. The ring was nicked and scratched at its base. “I use it to open up beers.”
Clarence continued to laugh and Dennis joined in. Things snapped and clicked above them, but neither could help it. For once, Dennis didn’t care. And he got how Clarence had felt before. There was no respite. Something dangerous was always lurking beyond the campfire. Well screw it. Come down and get shot, motherfuckers. We got guns.
“I don’t know why you’re laughing, you’re the one dreaming about your turtle,” Dennis finally said. That got them started again.
“We’re going to die tomorrow aren’t we?” Dennis asked.
Clarence wiped his cheeks. He reached back and grabbed the bottle of McCormicks. He flipped the cap off and handed it to Dennis. Dennis drank and it filled his stomach with warmth. He passed it back.
“Yeah, probably,” Clarence said. “But hey,” he put his hand on Dennis’s shoulder. “At least I’ll finally get to see Sally.”
They roared and it felt good. The chittering squawked and wings slapped and Clarence stood up and yelled, “Fuck you! We’re right here assholes. Fuck you! And guess what! We’re going to swim in your river! M-I-S-S-I-S-S-I-P-P-I, motherfuckers!”
= = =
They had decided that earlier was better. Before dawn, hungover and less brazen, they drove out of the garage and to the river. It was going to be a beautiful day. There were no clouds in the sky, except for the ones up high that stretched like islands from some magical world. A light breeze felt good on the face.
Instead of taking the 70 to the river – it went straight to the fallen bridge – Clarence had Dennis take side streets until they reached a park along the bank.
At night the buildings looked stark and stripped. During the day, they saw that they were covered with the fuzz. They parked the Jeep.
“Don’t think about it,” Clarence said. Dennis nodded. They took the guns and left the Jeep. A pang filled Dennis’s heart. He looked back at the CJ. It was so clean amidst the wrecked cityscape and blankets of mold that covered everything man-made around it. It had survived and now they were abandoning it. He had the urge to run back and hug it, thank it. It had never run well for his father but for the last four days it had performed flawlessly. Without it they would be dead. It deserved better. But those were the thoughts of a boy and Dennis knew he could no longer think that way.
The park quickly deteriorated into muddy bank. Again, Dennis wanted to stop. He could see the mud caps that mean something slithery and unpredictable was just underneath. Clarence had new vigor, maybe he yearned for death. He took Dennis’s arm and guided them through what looked like dormant geysers. The mud sucked their feet in ankle deep.
“Keep going, keep going,” Clarence urged.
They made it to the water. They heard calls in the wind – behind them the bug bats had climbed out of their holes. They perched on the tops of buildings and spanned their wings, soaking in the first rays of the sun.
Dennis caught a glimpse of the Jeep again. Its round eyes seemed to call after them, “why are you leaving me?”
The river was a mirror, not even tickled by flies. Towards the middle, a gentle ripple pulled south. Clarence whooshed with his mouth, psyching himself up. From the bank, the other side looked a mile away.
“Let’s do it. Ok?” Clarence shook out his arms. “Slow and steady, like we’re leafs.”
“Leafs,” Dennis repeated. He was numb.
“Hey,” Clarence said quietly.
“Yeah?”
“If something happens, it was good knowing you.”
“You too.”
Dennis didn’t expect it, but Clarence hugged him. And then he was the first to wade into the river.
Five yards in, they couldn’t stand. Dennis dipped under the water for a moment – taking the guns was stupid, they were too heavy – and his feet caught under something that muscled away. Clarence saw his eyes get wide.
“Keep going,” he mouthed. They side stroked towards the center and the current dragged them south as they pushed to the other side.
Ahead of them, eels the diameter of a pencil and twice as long, swam in schools near the surface. As Dennis and Clarence approached they scattered and dove into the depths.
“Bug Bats,” Clarence said. They skimmed along the surface near the shores trolling their rear antennae in the water. Dennis saw one snag a black tube that violently squirmed as the bug bat rose into the air.
“Duck!” Clarence said. A bug bat zipped over them. Dennis heard the shick of its muscled hook cutting through the water before he dove under. When they rose, the bug bat was fifty yards ahead. Its talon found purchase and a thin, translucent tentacle rose from the river. Suddenly the water burst as a thousand more tentacles shot up, and a creature the size of a small car bobbed to the surface. The tentacles surrounded a quill of quivering teeth. It yanked the bug bat into its mouth and lazily sunk below. The other bug bats took that as their queue to fly back to shore.
They let the current take them south away from the predator anemone, and as they swam, the opposite shore slowly got more detailed.
Dennis’s heart thumped from the unseen dangers that were so real beneath his kicking feet. Clarence was ahead of him, turning his head in all directions, looking for the both of him.
I was wrong last night: the notion that Clarence was just a janitor who happened to survive. Clarence was a brave man. No doubt about it. Maybe he hadn’t been before, maybe the shots just never lined up, but the past didn’t matter and it was shitty to pigeonhole. Now, mattered. Actions mattered.
A slow warmth filled Dennis’s body. He had thought it was exertion, but both he and Clarence were swimming gently to not disturb the water. He licked his lips, his mouth was so dry.
“Clarence,” he tried to say. He noticed that he wasn’t moving forward anymore. In fact, his shoulders weren’t in the water. His vision speckled. The bank was close now. He felt so WARM. Clarence swam frantically towards him, his eyes wide. He pulled something from the water, it was black and square.
“I don’t feel so good,” Dennis whispered and then his ears rang as Clarence fired the Glock past his head. Dennis tried to roll over on his back but something held him firm. He saw that the calm water had become rippled with waves. Something long and slippery rubbed against his face. And Clarence fired and fired.
His vision went blurry, but he thought he saw something on the bank. They were just twenty yards away.
Truck.
And then the truck bloomed with light and Dennis went out completely.
Chapter 5
Dennis woke to white. He was in a recovery room. He tried to speak but something was stuffed in his mouth - he could feel it all the way down his throat. He panicked. He raised his arms and a half foot off the sheets, the bed rattled from the wrist restraints. A door slammed open and a masked nurse ran to his side.
“Calm down.” She put her hand to his chest gently. “You’re going to make it.” Dennis didn’t know what that meant. The last he remembered . . . he was rising. He remembered rising.
The nurse checked an IV drip above him. She took a needle and inserted it into a valve just underneath the saline.
“I’m going to put you back to sleep. You need your rest. You’re the talk of the base. No one’s survived a stalactite attack.”
The white room retreated down a tunnel and the world went black.
He woke up to Clarence half asleep on a foldout chair at the far wall. His right arm propped his head as he drifted up and down. Dennis cleared his throat. It was raw. The tube was out. Clarence snapped to.
“You’re up,” he said.
“What happened?” Dennis’s voice was barely a whisper. It felt as if a treble hook had been dragged up his windpipe.
“A whole lot of shit.” Clarence grabbed the chair and brought it over. A food tray was near the bed. Clarence took a cup of apple juice from it: “thirsty?”
Dennis realized he was and nodded. Clarence put the straw to his lips and the room temp juice tasted like it had come from heaven. He drained it.
“You’ve been out a week,” Clarence said.
Dennis raised his eyebrows in surprise, “a week?” he said hoarsely. His hands were no longer restrained. He rubbed his throat.
“Try not to speak too much, the doctor just pulled the tube out a few hours ago.” He continued, “Apparently the bottom of the river is one gigantic organism. The same thing is happening to the ocean. They call it a stalactite, because it’s all spikey. The Army thinks it’s a form of coral: things live in it, it has its own ecosystem. But it’s aware and alive. It has eyes,” Clarence shivered. “It eats. And it had attached to you. Thank God a patrol found us.”
“I saw a truck,” Dennis whispered.
Clarence nodded, “it had a machine gun on it. When they saw us, and then the entire riverbed rose up, they lit it up.” Clarence turned: one of his ears was bandaged. “I can barely hear out of this thing.”
“You got me to shore?”
Clarence's eyes welled. “We made it, bud. It’s a shit show, but the Army’s still around. There are people that’ve survived and they’re figuring out what the hell is going on.”
A doctor walked in. “The miracle boys wakens!” He went to a counter and put on rubber gloves. “My name’s Dr. Siever. Let’s see how you’re doing.”
= = =
Dennis had sustained nerve damage that affected his right leg. Sections of his back were packed with gauze. Other parts looked like an amateur seamstress had let the sewing machine run away.
Dennis laid on his stomach. He could feel the doctor tug out strings of old, bloody gauze from the deep wounds and stuff in the new. A localized anesthetic gave him the detached feeling of being pulled apart.
“We didn’t think you were going to make it,” Dr. Siever said. “The stalactite punctures the back with the sheer power of its suckers, and then it just,” the doctor made a slurping sound, “until nothing’s left.”
“Will I be able to walk?”
“Yeah, definitely. You may have a limp, but maybe not. We just need you to rest while your back heals. We have stitches underneath stitches, underneath stitches back there. When you came in . . .” the doctor shook his head. “In another week or two we can close the wound.”
= = =
After the doctor left, Clarence came in with a wheelchair and helped Dennis into it. Dennis had expected civilization on the other side of the curtain, but instead, at least in the infirmary, was a skeleton crew. He was the only patient. The main room was large and it felt like a morgue with dim lights that flickered – a generator – and gray linoleum that hadn’t been polished since this whole thing began. The nurse who had come in earlier sat with her legs up reading a tattered paperback. Medical supplies were packed out in the open.
“I thought there’d be more people,” Dennis said.
“There are only about fifty soldiers here,” Clarence said. “They’re stretched thin, keeping the bases running and repairing what they can. The rest are like us.”
They made their way out of the hospital wing. Signs of Fleas were everywhere: some halls were completely collapsed in. Sections of the floor was mottled and wrinkled from its corrosive attack.
They went outside onto the tarmac. Dennis breathed the fresh air. One C-130 military cargo plane was parked on a repaired, leopard-spotted runway. Soldiers in camouflage and men, women, and children dressed in civilian clothes helped unload its supplies.
A black kid, maybe twelve, ran past them. He spun on one heel: “Hey, you’re alright!” and twirled back to the plane, jogging over to help.
“That Ricky. They found him alive in the city,” Clarence said.
Dennis saw that the boy was missing most of his right arm below the elbow. “What happened to his arm?”
“He chopped it off.”
“Jeez.”
“There’s a lot of that, here. Most everyone is amazed they made it.”
They went to the plane and Clarence put on the hand brake. “I should help.”
A forklift moved heavy palates of food. There were pushcarts and wheelbarrows. Clarence said hello to the crowd and got in line. Eyes found Dennis and people nodded to him. A soldier in his forties, fit, crew cut and in camouflage, punched Clarence in the shoulder and walked over with his hand out.
“You are one lucky sonofabitch. Sergeant Reyes. Call me Eddie.”
They shook hands.
“Dennis Armstrong.”
“How are you feeling?”
“Like I was put through a cheese grater.”
“Pretty close.” Eddie leaned over to look at his back. He whistled. “I’m sure they told you, but . . . wow . . . you got the Guinness World Record. No one else has ridden a stalactite and lived.”
“Were you there?”
“Yeah.” He nodded in Clarence’s direction, who was climbing into the C-130 to help move a large pack of food. “I was on the minigun. Clarence probably already bitched about it, but he walked right in my way.”
“You shot his ear?”
Eddie had a big, crazy grin. “That dude’s tough. He was climbing towards you on that fucking thing, fucking finger holding like ‘Cliffhanger.’ It was insane.”
Dennis felt his throat tighten at the thought of Clarence risking his life for him.
“How long have you been here?” Dennis asked.
“I was station in Albuquerque, New Mexico when it went down. Got here a month after. This place was crawling with glowies. Near water it’s the worst.”
“What happened to everyone else?”
“You know. Most people got soft served. It’s the world though. It’s everywhere.”
“Is there . . . are we still the United States and stuff?”
Eddie laughed. “Not like you think. There’s no government, but the military has banded together pretty good. We’re picking up the pieces. Our ‘capital’ now, if you want to call it that, is Fort Irwin, in the Mojave Desert. Way away from water. That’s where we send survivors.”
“That’s where we’re going?”
Eddie nodded. “Yep. When that C-130 is emptied, it’s going back with you,” he gestured to the others near the plane, “and them on it. Some civilians - like Dr. Siever – we ask to stay, but for the most part, we are getting out of Dodge. We need to consolidate our manpower and resources.”
= = =
It took a few hours to unload the plane. Afterwards, aside from a few soldiers scouting the perimeter in a Humvee, everyone went in for lunch. Half the cafeteria was cordoned off with huge sheets of plastic. Through the opaque curtain, Dennis could see ghostly remains of a crumbled roof.
Despite all the reminders of what had happened to the world, the mood was light. The plane came once a month and the civilians were ready to leave. The room buzzed with laughter and relief.
Clarence pushed Dennis through the food line. Four soldiers prepared pancakes and pork and beans, an odd combination forced by supplies.
They went to a table that included Eddie, who sat with a few other soldiers. Clarence parked Dennis at the head of the table and took the bench next to him. An old man and woman sat down, too.
“We prayed for you,” the old man said. The woman smiled warmly.
“Thank you.”
Ricky appeared out of nowhere next to Dennis. “Can I sit here?”
“Sure,” Dennis replied. Ricky stood next to Clarence until he got the hint. He scooted down and gave Ricky room.
Ricky dove into his pancakes. “Are you going on the plane?” he asked in between bites.
“Yeah. You?”
Ricky nodded. “I can’t wait. I’m so tired of the glowies.” He brushed his mouth with his right arm stump and became self-conscious when Dennis’s eyes followed it. “Fleas. Dr. Siever said I did the right thing.”
“You did,” Dennis reassured.
“So what was it like riding the monster?” Ricky asked.
The rest of the table quieted down, waiting for a response.
“I don’t know. I didn’t know what was happening. I passed out. Clarence?”
Clarence slowly ate the last triangle of his pancake. “It was a bit blurry for me, too. I saw something had Dennis, but I didn’t know what. Good thing ‘cause I would’ve swam for my life, screaming.”
Everyone chuckled.
“When it raised him in the air, all the river water spilled to the side and then I was on it, running towards him. It was so big, I didn’t even think of it as an animal. The tentacles were purple and there were a ton of them. They were soft, but hard, like there were bones. Glowies were everywhere, flopping around. The ground – its back, I guess – was really lumpy . . . I twisted my ankle. To be honest, I don’t remember much else. I just remember shooting at the tentacle that had Dennis.”
He nodded to Eddie. “Then they tore – pardon my French – the shit out of it and I was dragging Dennis to shore. Without them . . .” Clarence’s disposition went dark. He was in full memory. “. . . no way. We would have been gone.”
He turned to Eddie and the soldiers next to him. “I don’t think I ever really thanked you. You saved our lives.”
The cafeteria had gone silent except for the soft gurgle of baked beans. Suddenly, the civilians clapped and cheered the soldiers around them. They got up and hugged them, thanking them all for creating a safe haven in the bowels of this alien hell.
After a few minutes, reverence returned to camaraderie.
“Are we definitely flying out tomorrow?” the old man asked. His name was Henry.
“About 0700, once the glowies are back in their holes,” Eddie replied. “Make sure to pack tonight.”
With the plane unloaded and the supplies stocked away, there was nothing left for the younger kids to do. Ricky had become Dennis’s shadow and he was teaching Dennis the finer points of Bid Whist, a card game. They were in Ricky’s room. Ricky and Dennis each held a hand, and two hands were on the floor. Ricky was showing Dennis by playing all four.
“So if we were partners, we can’t talk, but you can give clues to what you got in your hand.”
“Is it Bid 'Whilst' or 'Whist'?”
Ricky sighed. “Whist! Whist!”
They had been going over the game for forty minutes.
“Where’d you learn this?”
“My grandma. Focus. The key to the game is winning tricks, each trick is four cards.”
“Was she with you?”
Ricky shook his head. “She wasn’t my real grandma. She was my foster grandma. So, trumps cards are the suit that overshadows everything except a higher card in that suit. It guarantees winning the trick, got it?”
Dennis focused on his cards as if they could telepathically teach him the game.
“I still have no idea how to play,” Dennis finally said. “Can we play ‘Go Fish’ or something?”
“How’s the pain?” Dr. Siever watched them from a doorway.
“Have you ever played Bid Whist?” Ricky asked hopefully.
“Sorry, Rick.”
Ricky threw his arms up in mock frustration and collected the cards. He shuffled them expertly despite his handicap.
“How’s the pain?” Dr. Siever asked again. He had a dixie cup of water in his hand.
“Not too bad.” Dennis hadn’t even thought about his back. There was a numb quality to it, but nothing more.
Dr. Siever puckered his face. “Hmm.” He handed Dennis the water and pills. “Take these anyway. The pain’ll come on fast once the medication wears off.”
Dennis did.
“Stop by the infirmary tonight. I’ll change your bandages for the flight out to Fort Irwin. We won’t have time in the morning.”
“Sure. Thanks again, Dr. Siever.”
“That’s why they pay me the big bucks.” He winked at them and headed down the hall.
Ricky flipped cards Dennis’s way.
“‘Go Fish’ it is,” he said, clearly depressed with his choice of playing partner.
= = =
Dennis was on his stomach again, feeling that slick, numb, pull of sausage-sized gauze from his wounds. Clarence leaned against the wall and read the floor.
“How are you doing?” Dr. Siever asked from behind Dennis.
“Fine.”
“The pain’s been ok?”
“Yeah.”
“The whole time?”
“Yeah.”
His lower body swayed while the doctor repacked and covered the wounds. After a minute: “Do you feel this?”
Dennis felt a very vague pressure on his shoulder.
“Yes.”
“This?” Pressure on his right leg.
“Yes.”
Clarence had become interested. He moved away from the wall and disappeared behind Dennis’s line of sight.
“Here?” Dr. Siever asked. Something near his ribs.
“Stop doing that,” Clarence said with an edge in his voice.
"What's going on?" Dennis asked.
“What about here?” Dr. Siever asked. Dennis felt a light push on his left calf.
“I said stop it!” Clarence said. Dennis heard a struggle.
Dennis turned around. Dr. Siever and Clarence were on the ground, struggling. Clarence had control of the doctor’s right hand: a scalpel was in it, dripping with blood.
“Soldiers! Help!” Dr. Siever yelled. There was the squeak of boots outside the door and two soldiers burst into the room.
“We have to quarantine!” the doctor screamed. Veins on his neck stuck out. The two soldiers blew by Dennis and muscled Clarence off the doctor.
“Not him. Him!” Dr. Siever - who had been so kind - stared at Dennis like he had opened a closet to find the boogeyman. He pointed the quivering scalpel in his direction.
Dennis stared at them, dumbfounded. The scalpel pointed down to his leg.
“Look!”
The doctor had cut dime-size chunks of skin out of him. The cut on his calf congealed in soft blue and then healed purple before their eyes. The others were already healed.
= = =
Like most of the base, Dennis was now cordoned off behind a series of thick plastic sheaths. Blurry soldiers stood guard outside the room they had put him in. They were on the opposite side of the base. They kept the door open and he overheard one of the soldiers say that this part of the base was still ‘active.’
After the initial chaos, cooler minds prevailed. Soldiers dressed in hazmat suits arrived to monitor Dennis. They had him put one on. Dr. Siever, Clarence, and the two soldiers exposed, were quarantined and given chemical showers. One of the soldiers asked Dennis who else he had been in contact with. The only person he could think of was Ricky.
Dennis sat on a cot and cried. It’d been hours without any explanation of what had happened. He’d asked the guards questions, but they didn’t know. An hour earlier, he had requested water and they said they weren’t allowed to interact with him. He could hear fear in their voices. He didn’t know why.
He felt fine. He inspected the purple scars. They looked like skin, but they had a shimmer to them, like he’d seen with the loopy trees. A mirror was on a dresser – they had used an old dorm room for quarantine – and when he craned to see his back, he understood why Dr. Siever had done what he had done: in place of his pale, Anglo skin were mottled streaks of shimmering purple, a glossy port-wine stain. Most of his back was healed. The deep wound that needed gauze was still there, but even so, it was much shallower than it should have been.
He heard murmuring outside. A man in a hazmat suit, followed by another dressed the same, but shorter, entered the room. They stayed behind the plastic sheeting.
“Dennis, it’s Dr. Siever,” the tall one said. “This is Commander Jacobs. He runs the base.”
“How’s Clarence?”
“He’s fine. We’re all fine. He and I made up, too. It was stupid for me to have him in the room.”
The short, hooded figure grunted “no shit.” Dr. Siever continued.
“We’re quarantined as a precaution too, so you’re not alone.”
Dennis’s lip trembled. “Am I going to die?”
“We don’t think so. The opposite, in fact.”
Dr. Siever’s outline knelt down and he slid two photographs under the plastic sheets. “Look.”
Dennis walked over and picked up the photographs. In one, it was a photo of his back before it received medical attention. All the flesh and muscle were gone. Ribs, spine, and the meat between, were completely exposed. The date and time was watermarked into the right corner of the photo. The next photo was taken two days later. The skin was still gone, but muscle spanned his back, covering previously exposed bones, and a light film of purple covered it all. It was an impossible recovery.
“Do you see?” Commander Jacobs said. “You should be dead. But you’re not.”
Dennis cleared his throat. “How long ago was this?”
“That last photo was taken two days ago,” Dr. Siever said.
The room was quiet as Dennis soaked in that information. “What does it mean?” he finally asked.
“We can only guess and we don’t want to do that,” Commander Jacobs said. “There’s a team of scientists and doctors out west and we got orders from Mojave. They want you ASAP. You’re flying out tonight.”
“With about the others?” Dennis asked, hopefully.
“Can’t risk it. Just you.”
“But that’s not fair. They want to go.”
The Commander snorted. “We got bigger fish to fry than ‘fair’. The plane’ll be back in a month. They can wait.”
“I don’t understand,” Dennis whimpered. He was scared out of his mind. The Commander softened his tone.
“Kid, everyone’s worried about the glowies. And I get it. They saw family and friends melt in front of them, they’ve destroyed our ecosystem, killed 95% of our population, and we just learned they’re changing the air. But the glowies are not the war. They’re a weapon. The only thing we know with certainty is this: something sent all of this, and they’re coming. Fleas and the glowies are just here to get earth good and ready. Might be a year, might be thirty, but they’re coming. And if we’re not prepared, if we can’t SURVIVE, that’s it. We’re through.”
“What does that have to do with me?”
The Commander shrugged. “Probably nothing. But something’s happened to you that we haven’t seen before and so far you’re still you. Our scientists still can’t figure out how Fleas works, or what kind of DNA the glowies came from. But maybe they can understand you.”
A soldier called in that the plane was ready.
“It’s time, kid. Put on the hazmat suit.”
“So the Army’s getting ready for a war?” Dennis asked.
“We might be dead before they get here. But if we find a way to survive, you’re goddamn right. They sent one hell of a friend request, it’s the least we can do.”
END OF PART I
A) "Dirt" 12_6 thru 12_14
B) "Dirt" 12_15_12 thru 1_1_13
C) "Dirt" 1_2_13 thru 1_10_13
Thanks for your support!
= = =
They drove back into the city, unsure where to go. Dennis looked to Clarence – he stared vacantly out the side window. The bug bats were no longer out. It appeared that night was for the glowies.
“It’ll be ok,” Dennis reassured Clarence.
“We can’t get across the water,” Clarence replied.
Dennis found a parking garage. The exit was plugged with melted cars as people tried to flee five months before. The entrance was fine except for a motorcycle that had tried to jump, or was hit. Dennis let the tires do the work and they rocked over its remains.
Around the open aired perimeter there were melted cars, but towards the center, they were just filthy orphans. Dennis pulled the Jeep between a van and a truck and killed the engine. Its dying snort echoed around the garage. Dennis heard something shuffle somewhere above. He pictured the bug bats nestled together on the upper floors. Here, it looked fine.
Dennis reached back and got a jug of water. It was funny how with all the stress and weird landscapes, he’d forgotten to drink or eat.
“Hollywood diet, revealed.” he said. He drank from the gallon jug and offered it to Clarence. Clarence ignored him. Dennis pressed him with it. “Come on.”
Clarence acquiesced and took a big gulp. Dennis had never really looked at Clarence. It felt like they’d been together for weeks, but it’d only been three days and now, he finally looked at the man that he relied on for survival. Clarence was in his 50’s, his hair was mostly grey and he had a bald spot on the top of his head. His baggy sweatshirt couldn’t hide a gut underneath, and this was after five months of forced rationing. He had bad acne as a kid. His beard covered most of it, but Dennis could see the rippled scars on his cheeks. His hands were thick and strong from manual labor – a flat wedding band was on his left hand – but his shoulders were slumped in the way of those who are ignored. Dennis had viewed him as a survivalist, but before this he was a janitor. He just survived.
Like me.
Being so close to salvation had allowed Clarence hope. It had allowed him to think for the first day in nearly half a year that maybe he wouldn’t die horribly. He had uncaged hope like a dove and the black chasm where the bridge should have been had scared it to flight. Maybe he’d been this close to breaking the whole time. Maybe the rope had already begun to fray.
“What’s going on?” Dennis asked gently.
Clarence took a second to answer, he sucked on his lower lip. In that time something chittered a few floors overhead. They both automatically scanned the area.
“That, man. That right there. The glowies. The bridge.”
He raised his hand – it tremored. He closed it in a fist.
“I don’t want to cry in front of you.”
“We’re close.”
“Close only counts with horseshoes and hand grenades, kid. Do you know how many dead people have been ‘close?’” We can’t get across the river.”
“Why not?”
“DIDN’T YOU SEE IT? It was full of them.”
“Maybe there’s a boat, they don’t like daytime.”
“There isn’t a boat. It was stuffed with them,” Clarence said quietly.
It was. Even in the dark, Dennis had seen that the water had risen past the flood markers, displaced with squirming life.
“If we can’t get across, maybe we can signal to them. Shoot off our guns, they’re right there!”
“I just feel it, man. That’s all. I don’t want to talk about it. I’m spent.”
“That’s a bullshit attitude. We’re THERE.”
Clarence didn’t put up a fight. He pulled his hoodie over his head and closed his eyes. He just wanted to sleep. Dennis shook his head, he didn’t know what else to say. They didn’t even discuss watch. Dennis tried to stay up, but exhaustion rolled over him. At the hospital, Clarence had said how the sounds of the glowies had first frightened him and then, like circular fan, the noise became soothing. Dennis understood now. Their toots and calls and long pitched notes had a beauty to them. Even the sharp cry of something consumed. We adapt to what we are given until it kills us. We are the roaches, the Twinkies, that will survive til the end. Dennis fell asleep.
Dennis woke.
“Sally,” Clarence muttered. “Come on Sally, you’ll be ok. Come on Sally. Mom!”
It was too loud, Dennis could hear their upstairs neighbors rustle and bark. He pushed Clarence awake.
“You were talking in your sleep.”
“Sorry.”
Dennis handed him the jug. Clarence took a swig. He looked less brittle.
“Is Sally your wife?”
Clarence took a slow draw of water.
“How do you know about Sally?”
“You say her name in your sleep. You have since the beginning. Did she not make it?”
Clarence turned his head away from Dennis. “She’s dead.”
“I’m sorry, man.”
“It was tough. She went bad.” Clarence’s tone had changed. It was hitched. He put his hands up to his mouth.
“I’m sorry man,” Dennis said. “Were you in love?”
Clarence’s head snapped forward. He choked out a “I thought so at the time.”
“She loved you?”
Clarence’s shoulder shook, he had difficulty breathing. “It was hard to tell.” He finally turned and Dennis saw tears rolling down his cheeks, he smothered his mouth with his hands and Dennis realized: he was laughing.
“What?”
“Hmm?” Clarence’s couldn’t talk. He was racked with silent laughter.
“Who was Sally?!”
“Sally . . . was . . . my . . . turtle.”
“What?!”
Clarence nodded and wiped his eyes. “Ugh. I had her when I was eight. She got hit by a car.”
Clarence burst. The joy echoed around the hard walls. The dumbfounded look on Dennis’s face made him laugh harder.
“What about the wedding ring?” Dennis blurted, his face red.
Clarence looked down at it. “I was married, but we divorced a long time ago.” He held his palm up. The ring was nicked and scratched at its base. “I use it to open up beers.”
Clarence continued to laugh and Dennis joined in. Things snapped and clicked above them, but neither could help it. For once, Dennis didn’t care. And he got how Clarence had felt before. There was no respite. Something dangerous was always lurking beyond the campfire. Well screw it. Come down and get shot, motherfuckers. We got guns.
“I don’t know why you’re laughing, you’re the one dreaming about your turtle,” Dennis finally said. That got them started again.
“We’re going to die tomorrow aren’t we?” Dennis asked.
Clarence wiped his cheeks. He reached back and grabbed the bottle of McCormicks. He flipped the cap off and handed it to Dennis. Dennis drank and it filled his stomach with warmth. He passed it back.
“Yeah, probably,” Clarence said. “But hey,” he put his hand on Dennis’s shoulder. “At least I’ll finally get to see Sally.”
They roared and it felt good. The chittering squawked and wings slapped and Clarence stood up and yelled, “Fuck you! We’re right here assholes. Fuck you! And guess what! We’re going to swim in your river! M-I-S-S-I-S-S-I-P-P-I, motherfuckers!”
= = =
They had decided that earlier was better. Before dawn, hungover and less brazen, they drove out of the garage and to the river. It was going to be a beautiful day. There were no clouds in the sky, except for the ones up high that stretched like islands from some magical world. A light breeze felt good on the face.
Instead of taking the 70 to the river – it went straight to the fallen bridge – Clarence had Dennis take side streets until they reached a park along the bank.
At night the buildings looked stark and stripped. During the day, they saw that they were covered with the fuzz. They parked the Jeep.
“Don’t think about it,” Clarence said. Dennis nodded. They took the guns and left the Jeep. A pang filled Dennis’s heart. He looked back at the CJ. It was so clean amidst the wrecked cityscape and blankets of mold that covered everything man-made around it. It had survived and now they were abandoning it. He had the urge to run back and hug it, thank it. It had never run well for his father but for the last four days it had performed flawlessly. Without it they would be dead. It deserved better. But those were the thoughts of a boy and Dennis knew he could no longer think that way.
The park quickly deteriorated into muddy bank. Again, Dennis wanted to stop. He could see the mud caps that mean something slithery and unpredictable was just underneath. Clarence had new vigor, maybe he yearned for death. He took Dennis’s arm and guided them through what looked like dormant geysers. The mud sucked their feet in ankle deep.
“Keep going, keep going,” Clarence urged.
They made it to the water. They heard calls in the wind – behind them the bug bats had climbed out of their holes. They perched on the tops of buildings and spanned their wings, soaking in the first rays of the sun.
Dennis caught a glimpse of the Jeep again. Its round eyes seemed to call after them, “why are you leaving me?”
The river was a mirror, not even tickled by flies. Towards the middle, a gentle ripple pulled south. Clarence whooshed with his mouth, psyching himself up. From the bank, the other side looked a mile away.
“Let’s do it. Ok?” Clarence shook out his arms. “Slow and steady, like we’re leafs.”
“Leafs,” Dennis repeated. He was numb.
“Hey,” Clarence said quietly.
“Yeah?”
“If something happens, it was good knowing you.”
“You too.”
Dennis didn’t expect it, but Clarence hugged him. And then he was the first to wade into the river.
Five yards in, they couldn’t stand. Dennis dipped under the water for a moment – taking the guns was stupid, they were too heavy – and his feet caught under something that muscled away. Clarence saw his eyes get wide.
“Keep going,” he mouthed. They side stroked towards the center and the current dragged them south as they pushed to the other side.
Ahead of them, eels the diameter of a pencil and twice as long, swam in schools near the surface. As Dennis and Clarence approached they scattered and dove into the depths.
“Bug Bats,” Clarence said. They skimmed along the surface near the shores trolling their rear antennae in the water. Dennis saw one snag a black tube that violently squirmed as the bug bat rose into the air.
“Duck!” Clarence said. A bug bat zipped over them. Dennis heard the shick of its muscled hook cutting through the water before he dove under. When they rose, the bug bat was fifty yards ahead. Its talon found purchase and a thin, translucent tentacle rose from the river. Suddenly the water burst as a thousand more tentacles shot up, and a creature the size of a small car bobbed to the surface. The tentacles surrounded a quill of quivering teeth. It yanked the bug bat into its mouth and lazily sunk below. The other bug bats took that as their queue to fly back to shore.
They let the current take them south away from the predator anemone, and as they swam, the opposite shore slowly got more detailed.
Dennis’s heart thumped from the unseen dangers that were so real beneath his kicking feet. Clarence was ahead of him, turning his head in all directions, looking for the both of him.
I was wrong last night: the notion that Clarence was just a janitor who happened to survive. Clarence was a brave man. No doubt about it. Maybe he hadn’t been before, maybe the shots just never lined up, but the past didn’t matter and it was shitty to pigeonhole. Now, mattered. Actions mattered.
A slow warmth filled Dennis’s body. He had thought it was exertion, but both he and Clarence were swimming gently to not disturb the water. He licked his lips, his mouth was so dry.
“Clarence,” he tried to say. He noticed that he wasn’t moving forward anymore. In fact, his shoulders weren’t in the water. His vision speckled. The bank was close now. He felt so WARM. Clarence swam frantically towards him, his eyes wide. He pulled something from the water, it was black and square.
“I don’t feel so good,” Dennis whispered and then his ears rang as Clarence fired the Glock past his head. Dennis tried to roll over on his back but something held him firm. He saw that the calm water had become rippled with waves. Something long and slippery rubbed against his face. And Clarence fired and fired.
His vision went blurry, but he thought he saw something on the bank. They were just twenty yards away.
Truck.
And then the truck bloomed with light and Dennis went out completely.
Chapter 5
Dennis woke to white. He was in a recovery room. He tried to speak but something was stuffed in his mouth - he could feel it all the way down his throat. He panicked. He raised his arms and a half foot off the sheets, the bed rattled from the wrist restraints. A door slammed open and a masked nurse ran to his side.
“Calm down.” She put her hand to his chest gently. “You’re going to make it.” Dennis didn’t know what that meant. The last he remembered . . . he was rising. He remembered rising.
The nurse checked an IV drip above him. She took a needle and inserted it into a valve just underneath the saline.
“I’m going to put you back to sleep. You need your rest. You’re the talk of the base. No one’s survived a stalactite attack.”
The white room retreated down a tunnel and the world went black.
He woke up to Clarence half asleep on a foldout chair at the far wall. His right arm propped his head as he drifted up and down. Dennis cleared his throat. It was raw. The tube was out. Clarence snapped to.
“You’re up,” he said.
“What happened?” Dennis’s voice was barely a whisper. It felt as if a treble hook had been dragged up his windpipe.
“A whole lot of shit.” Clarence grabbed the chair and brought it over. A food tray was near the bed. Clarence took a cup of apple juice from it: “thirsty?”
Dennis realized he was and nodded. Clarence put the straw to his lips and the room temp juice tasted like it had come from heaven. He drained it.
“You’ve been out a week,” Clarence said.
Dennis raised his eyebrows in surprise, “a week?” he said hoarsely. His hands were no longer restrained. He rubbed his throat.
“Try not to speak too much, the doctor just pulled the tube out a few hours ago.” He continued, “Apparently the bottom of the river is one gigantic organism. The same thing is happening to the ocean. They call it a stalactite, because it’s all spikey. The Army thinks it’s a form of coral: things live in it, it has its own ecosystem. But it’s aware and alive. It has eyes,” Clarence shivered. “It eats. And it had attached to you. Thank God a patrol found us.”
“I saw a truck,” Dennis whispered.
Clarence nodded, “it had a machine gun on it. When they saw us, and then the entire riverbed rose up, they lit it up.” Clarence turned: one of his ears was bandaged. “I can barely hear out of this thing.”
“You got me to shore?”
Clarence's eyes welled. “We made it, bud. It’s a shit show, but the Army’s still around. There are people that’ve survived and they’re figuring out what the hell is going on.”
A doctor walked in. “The miracle boys wakens!” He went to a counter and put on rubber gloves. “My name’s Dr. Siever. Let’s see how you’re doing.”
= = =
Dennis had sustained nerve damage that affected his right leg. Sections of his back were packed with gauze. Other parts looked like an amateur seamstress had let the sewing machine run away.
Dennis laid on his stomach. He could feel the doctor tug out strings of old, bloody gauze from the deep wounds and stuff in the new. A localized anesthetic gave him the detached feeling of being pulled apart.
“We didn’t think you were going to make it,” Dr. Siever said. “The stalactite punctures the back with the sheer power of its suckers, and then it just,” the doctor made a slurping sound, “until nothing’s left.”
“Will I be able to walk?”
“Yeah, definitely. You may have a limp, but maybe not. We just need you to rest while your back heals. We have stitches underneath stitches, underneath stitches back there. When you came in . . .” the doctor shook his head. “In another week or two we can close the wound.”
= = =
After the doctor left, Clarence came in with a wheelchair and helped Dennis into it. Dennis had expected civilization on the other side of the curtain, but instead, at least in the infirmary, was a skeleton crew. He was the only patient. The main room was large and it felt like a morgue with dim lights that flickered – a generator – and gray linoleum that hadn’t been polished since this whole thing began. The nurse who had come in earlier sat with her legs up reading a tattered paperback. Medical supplies were packed out in the open.
“I thought there’d be more people,” Dennis said.
“There are only about fifty soldiers here,” Clarence said. “They’re stretched thin, keeping the bases running and repairing what they can. The rest are like us.”
They made their way out of the hospital wing. Signs of Fleas were everywhere: some halls were completely collapsed in. Sections of the floor was mottled and wrinkled from its corrosive attack.
They went outside onto the tarmac. Dennis breathed the fresh air. One C-130 military cargo plane was parked on a repaired, leopard-spotted runway. Soldiers in camouflage and men, women, and children dressed in civilian clothes helped unload its supplies.
A black kid, maybe twelve, ran past them. He spun on one heel: “Hey, you’re alright!” and twirled back to the plane, jogging over to help.
“That Ricky. They found him alive in the city,” Clarence said.
Dennis saw that the boy was missing most of his right arm below the elbow. “What happened to his arm?”
“He chopped it off.”
“Jeez.”
“There’s a lot of that, here. Most everyone is amazed they made it.”
They went to the plane and Clarence put on the hand brake. “I should help.”
A forklift moved heavy palates of food. There were pushcarts and wheelbarrows. Clarence said hello to the crowd and got in line. Eyes found Dennis and people nodded to him. A soldier in his forties, fit, crew cut and in camouflage, punched Clarence in the shoulder and walked over with his hand out.
“You are one lucky sonofabitch. Sergeant Reyes. Call me Eddie.”
They shook hands.
“Dennis Armstrong.”
“How are you feeling?”
“Like I was put through a cheese grater.”
“Pretty close.” Eddie leaned over to look at his back. He whistled. “I’m sure they told you, but . . . wow . . . you got the Guinness World Record. No one else has ridden a stalactite and lived.”
“Were you there?”
“Yeah.” He nodded in Clarence’s direction, who was climbing into the C-130 to help move a large pack of food. “I was on the minigun. Clarence probably already bitched about it, but he walked right in my way.”
“You shot his ear?”
Eddie had a big, crazy grin. “That dude’s tough. He was climbing towards you on that fucking thing, fucking finger holding like ‘Cliffhanger.’ It was insane.”
Dennis felt his throat tighten at the thought of Clarence risking his life for him.
“How long have you been here?” Dennis asked.
“I was station in Albuquerque, New Mexico when it went down. Got here a month after. This place was crawling with glowies. Near water it’s the worst.”
“What happened to everyone else?”
“You know. Most people got soft served. It’s the world though. It’s everywhere.”
“Is there . . . are we still the United States and stuff?”
Eddie laughed. “Not like you think. There’s no government, but the military has banded together pretty good. We’re picking up the pieces. Our ‘capital’ now, if you want to call it that, is Fort Irwin, in the Mojave Desert. Way away from water. That’s where we send survivors.”
“That’s where we’re going?”
Eddie nodded. “Yep. When that C-130 is emptied, it’s going back with you,” he gestured to the others near the plane, “and them on it. Some civilians - like Dr. Siever – we ask to stay, but for the most part, we are getting out of Dodge. We need to consolidate our manpower and resources.”
= = =
It took a few hours to unload the plane. Afterwards, aside from a few soldiers scouting the perimeter in a Humvee, everyone went in for lunch. Half the cafeteria was cordoned off with huge sheets of plastic. Through the opaque curtain, Dennis could see ghostly remains of a crumbled roof.
Despite all the reminders of what had happened to the world, the mood was light. The plane came once a month and the civilians were ready to leave. The room buzzed with laughter and relief.
Clarence pushed Dennis through the food line. Four soldiers prepared pancakes and pork and beans, an odd combination forced by supplies.
They went to a table that included Eddie, who sat with a few other soldiers. Clarence parked Dennis at the head of the table and took the bench next to him. An old man and woman sat down, too.
“We prayed for you,” the old man said. The woman smiled warmly.
“Thank you.”
Ricky appeared out of nowhere next to Dennis. “Can I sit here?”
“Sure,” Dennis replied. Ricky stood next to Clarence until he got the hint. He scooted down and gave Ricky room.
Ricky dove into his pancakes. “Are you going on the plane?” he asked in between bites.
“Yeah. You?”
Ricky nodded. “I can’t wait. I’m so tired of the glowies.” He brushed his mouth with his right arm stump and became self-conscious when Dennis’s eyes followed it. “Fleas. Dr. Siever said I did the right thing.”
“You did,” Dennis reassured.
“So what was it like riding the monster?” Ricky asked.
The rest of the table quieted down, waiting for a response.
“I don’t know. I didn’t know what was happening. I passed out. Clarence?”
Clarence slowly ate the last triangle of his pancake. “It was a bit blurry for me, too. I saw something had Dennis, but I didn’t know what. Good thing ‘cause I would’ve swam for my life, screaming.”
Everyone chuckled.
“When it raised him in the air, all the river water spilled to the side and then I was on it, running towards him. It was so big, I didn’t even think of it as an animal. The tentacles were purple and there were a ton of them. They were soft, but hard, like there were bones. Glowies were everywhere, flopping around. The ground – its back, I guess – was really lumpy . . . I twisted my ankle. To be honest, I don’t remember much else. I just remember shooting at the tentacle that had Dennis.”
He nodded to Eddie. “Then they tore – pardon my French – the shit out of it and I was dragging Dennis to shore. Without them . . .” Clarence’s disposition went dark. He was in full memory. “. . . no way. We would have been gone.”
He turned to Eddie and the soldiers next to him. “I don’t think I ever really thanked you. You saved our lives.”
The cafeteria had gone silent except for the soft gurgle of baked beans. Suddenly, the civilians clapped and cheered the soldiers around them. They got up and hugged them, thanking them all for creating a safe haven in the bowels of this alien hell.
After a few minutes, reverence returned to camaraderie.
“Are we definitely flying out tomorrow?” the old man asked. His name was Henry.
“About 0700, once the glowies are back in their holes,” Eddie replied. “Make sure to pack tonight.”
With the plane unloaded and the supplies stocked away, there was nothing left for the younger kids to do. Ricky had become Dennis’s shadow and he was teaching Dennis the finer points of Bid Whist, a card game. They were in Ricky’s room. Ricky and Dennis each held a hand, and two hands were on the floor. Ricky was showing Dennis by playing all four.
“So if we were partners, we can’t talk, but you can give clues to what you got in your hand.”
“Is it Bid 'Whilst' or 'Whist'?”
Ricky sighed. “Whist! Whist!”
They had been going over the game for forty minutes.
“Where’d you learn this?”
“My grandma. Focus. The key to the game is winning tricks, each trick is four cards.”
“Was she with you?”
Ricky shook his head. “She wasn’t my real grandma. She was my foster grandma. So, trumps cards are the suit that overshadows everything except a higher card in that suit. It guarantees winning the trick, got it?”
Dennis focused on his cards as if they could telepathically teach him the game.
“I still have no idea how to play,” Dennis finally said. “Can we play ‘Go Fish’ or something?”
“How’s the pain?” Dr. Siever watched them from a doorway.
“Have you ever played Bid Whist?” Ricky asked hopefully.
“Sorry, Rick.”
Ricky threw his arms up in mock frustration and collected the cards. He shuffled them expertly despite his handicap.
“How’s the pain?” Dr. Siever asked again. He had a dixie cup of water in his hand.
“Not too bad.” Dennis hadn’t even thought about his back. There was a numb quality to it, but nothing more.
Dr. Siever puckered his face. “Hmm.” He handed Dennis the water and pills. “Take these anyway. The pain’ll come on fast once the medication wears off.”
Dennis did.
“Stop by the infirmary tonight. I’ll change your bandages for the flight out to Fort Irwin. We won’t have time in the morning.”
“Sure. Thanks again, Dr. Siever.”
“That’s why they pay me the big bucks.” He winked at them and headed down the hall.
Ricky flipped cards Dennis’s way.
“‘Go Fish’ it is,” he said, clearly depressed with his choice of playing partner.
= = =
Dennis was on his stomach again, feeling that slick, numb, pull of sausage-sized gauze from his wounds. Clarence leaned against the wall and read the floor.
“How are you doing?” Dr. Siever asked from behind Dennis.
“Fine.”
“The pain’s been ok?”
“Yeah.”
“The whole time?”
“Yeah.”
His lower body swayed while the doctor repacked and covered the wounds. After a minute: “Do you feel this?”
Dennis felt a very vague pressure on his shoulder.
“Yes.”
“This?” Pressure on his right leg.
“Yes.”
Clarence had become interested. He moved away from the wall and disappeared behind Dennis’s line of sight.
“Here?” Dr. Siever asked. Something near his ribs.
“Stop doing that,” Clarence said with an edge in his voice.
"What's going on?" Dennis asked.
“What about here?” Dr. Siever asked. Dennis felt a light push on his left calf.
“I said stop it!” Clarence said. Dennis heard a struggle.
Dennis turned around. Dr. Siever and Clarence were on the ground, struggling. Clarence had control of the doctor’s right hand: a scalpel was in it, dripping with blood.
“Soldiers! Help!” Dr. Siever yelled. There was the squeak of boots outside the door and two soldiers burst into the room.
“We have to quarantine!” the doctor screamed. Veins on his neck stuck out. The two soldiers blew by Dennis and muscled Clarence off the doctor.
“Not him. Him!” Dr. Siever - who had been so kind - stared at Dennis like he had opened a closet to find the boogeyman. He pointed the quivering scalpel in his direction.
Dennis stared at them, dumbfounded. The scalpel pointed down to his leg.
“Look!”
The doctor had cut dime-size chunks of skin out of him. The cut on his calf congealed in soft blue and then healed purple before their eyes. The others were already healed.
= = =
Like most of the base, Dennis was now cordoned off behind a series of thick plastic sheaths. Blurry soldiers stood guard outside the room they had put him in. They were on the opposite side of the base. They kept the door open and he overheard one of the soldiers say that this part of the base was still ‘active.’
After the initial chaos, cooler minds prevailed. Soldiers dressed in hazmat suits arrived to monitor Dennis. They had him put one on. Dr. Siever, Clarence, and the two soldiers exposed, were quarantined and given chemical showers. One of the soldiers asked Dennis who else he had been in contact with. The only person he could think of was Ricky.
Dennis sat on a cot and cried. It’d been hours without any explanation of what had happened. He’d asked the guards questions, but they didn’t know. An hour earlier, he had requested water and they said they weren’t allowed to interact with him. He could hear fear in their voices. He didn’t know why.
He felt fine. He inspected the purple scars. They looked like skin, but they had a shimmer to them, like he’d seen with the loopy trees. A mirror was on a dresser – they had used an old dorm room for quarantine – and when he craned to see his back, he understood why Dr. Siever had done what he had done: in place of his pale, Anglo skin were mottled streaks of shimmering purple, a glossy port-wine stain. Most of his back was healed. The deep wound that needed gauze was still there, but even so, it was much shallower than it should have been.
He heard murmuring outside. A man in a hazmat suit, followed by another dressed the same, but shorter, entered the room. They stayed behind the plastic sheeting.
“Dennis, it’s Dr. Siever,” the tall one said. “This is Commander Jacobs. He runs the base.”
“How’s Clarence?”
“He’s fine. We’re all fine. He and I made up, too. It was stupid for me to have him in the room.”
The short, hooded figure grunted “no shit.” Dr. Siever continued.
“We’re quarantined as a precaution too, so you’re not alone.”
Dennis’s lip trembled. “Am I going to die?”
“We don’t think so. The opposite, in fact.”
Dr. Siever’s outline knelt down and he slid two photographs under the plastic sheets. “Look.”
Dennis walked over and picked up the photographs. In one, it was a photo of his back before it received medical attention. All the flesh and muscle were gone. Ribs, spine, and the meat between, were completely exposed. The date and time was watermarked into the right corner of the photo. The next photo was taken two days later. The skin was still gone, but muscle spanned his back, covering previously exposed bones, and a light film of purple covered it all. It was an impossible recovery.
“Do you see?” Commander Jacobs said. “You should be dead. But you’re not.”
Dennis cleared his throat. “How long ago was this?”
“That last photo was taken two days ago,” Dr. Siever said.
The room was quiet as Dennis soaked in that information. “What does it mean?” he finally asked.
“We can only guess and we don’t want to do that,” Commander Jacobs said. “There’s a team of scientists and doctors out west and we got orders from Mojave. They want you ASAP. You’re flying out tonight.”
“With about the others?” Dennis asked, hopefully.
“Can’t risk it. Just you.”
“But that’s not fair. They want to go.”
The Commander snorted. “We got bigger fish to fry than ‘fair’. The plane’ll be back in a month. They can wait.”
“I don’t understand,” Dennis whimpered. He was scared out of his mind. The Commander softened his tone.
“Kid, everyone’s worried about the glowies. And I get it. They saw family and friends melt in front of them, they’ve destroyed our ecosystem, killed 95% of our population, and we just learned they’re changing the air. But the glowies are not the war. They’re a weapon. The only thing we know with certainty is this: something sent all of this, and they’re coming. Fleas and the glowies are just here to get earth good and ready. Might be a year, might be thirty, but they’re coming. And if we’re not prepared, if we can’t SURVIVE, that’s it. We’re through.”
“What does that have to do with me?”
The Commander shrugged. “Probably nothing. But something’s happened to you that we haven’t seen before and so far you’re still you. Our scientists still can’t figure out how Fleas works, or what kind of DNA the glowies came from. But maybe they can understand you.”
A soldier called in that the plane was ready.
“It’s time, kid. Put on the hazmat suit.”
“So the Army’s getting ready for a war?” Dennis asked.
“We might be dead before they get here. But if we find a way to survive, you’re goddamn right. They sent one hell of a friend request, it’s the least we can do.”
END OF PART I
"Dirt" 1_10_13
= = =
Dennis was on his back again, feeling that slick, numb, pull of sausage-sized gauze from his wounds. Clarence leaned against the wall and read the floor.
“How are you doing?” Dr. Siever asked from behind Dennis.
“Fine.”
“The pain’s been ok?”
“Yeah.”
“The whole time?”
“Yeah.”
His lower body swayed while the doctor repacked and covered the wounds. After a minute: “Do you feel this?”
Dennis felt a very vague pressure on his shoulder.
“Yes.”
“This?” Pressure on his right leg.
“Yes.”
Clarence had become interested. He moved away from the wall and disappeared behind Dennis’s line of sight.
“Here?” Dr. Siever asked. Something near his ribs.
“Stop doing that,” Clarence said with an edge in his voice.
"What's going on?" Dennis asked.
“What about here?” Dr. Siever asked. Dennis felt a light push on his left calf.
“I said stop it!” Clarence said. Dennis heard a struggle.
Dennis turned around. Dr. Siever and Clarence were on the ground, struggling. Clarence had control of the doctor’s right hand: a scalpel was in it, dripping with blood.
“Soldiers! Help!” Dr. Siever yelled. There was the squeak of boots outside the door and two soldiers burst into the room.
“We have to quarantine!” the doctor screamed. Veins on his neck stuck out. The two soldiers blew by Dennis and muscled Clarence off the doctor.
“Not him. Him!” Dr. Siever - who had been so kind - stared at Dennis like he had opened a closet to find the boogeyman. He pointed the quivering scalpel in his direction.
Dennis stared at them, dumbfounded. The scalpel pointed down to his leg.
“Look!”
The doctor had cut dime-size chunks of skin out of him. The cut on his calf congealed in soft blue and then healed purple before their eyes. The others were already healed.
= = =
Like most of the base, Dennis was now cordoned off behind a series of thick plastic sheaths. Blurry soldiers stood guard outside the room they had put him in. They were on the opposite side of the base. They kept the door open and he overheard one of the soldiers say that this part of the base was still ‘active.’
After the initial chaos, cooler minds prevailed. Soldiers dressed in hazmat suits arrived to monitor Dennis. They had him put one on. Dr. Siever, Clarence, and the two soldiers exposed, were quarantined and given chemical showers. One of the soldiers asked Dennis who else he had been in contact with. The only person he could think of was Ricky.
Dennis sat on a cot and cried. It’d been hours without any explanation of what had happened. He’d asked the guards questions, but they didn’t know. An hour earlier, he had requested water and they said they weren’t allowed to interact with him. He could hear fear in their voices. He didn’t know why.
He felt fine. He inspected the purple scars. They looked like skin, but they had a shimmer to them, like he’d seen with the loopy trees. A mirror was on a dresser – they had used an old dorm room for quarantine – and when he craned to see his back, he understood why Dr. Siever had done what he had done: in place of his pale, Anglo skin were mottled streaks of shimmering purple, a glossy port-wine stain. Most of his back was healed. The deep wound that needed gauze was still there, but even so, it was much shallower than it should have been.
He heard murmuring outside. A man in a hazmat suit, followed by another dressed the same, but shorter, entered the room. They stayed behind the plastic sheeting.
“Dennis, it’s Dr. Siever,” the tall one said. “This is Commander Jacobs. He runs the base.”
“How’s Clarence?”
“He’s fine. We’re all fine. He and I made up, too. It was stupid for me to have him in the room.”
The short, hooded figure grunted “no shit.” Dr. Siever continued.
“We’re quarantined as a precaution too, so you’re not alone.”
Dennis’s lip trembled. “Am I going to die?”
“We don’t think so. The opposite, in fact.”
Dr. Siever’s outline knelt down and he slid two photographs under the plastic sheets. “Look.”
Dennis walked over and picked up the photographs. In one, it was a photo of his back before it received medical attention. All the flesh and muscle were gone. Ribs, spine, and the meat between, were completely exposed. The date and time was watermarked into the right corner of the photo. The next photo was taken two days later. The skin was still gone, but muscle spanned his back, covering previously exposed bones, and a light film of purple covered it all. It was an impossible recovery.
“Do you see?” Commander Jacobs said. “You should be dead. But you’re not.”
Dennis cleared his throat. “How long ago was this?”
“That last photo was taken two days ago,” Dr. Siever said.
The room was quiet as Dennis soaked in that information. “What does it mean?” he finally asked.
“We can only guess and we don’t want to do that,” Commander Jacobs said. “There’s a team of scientists and doctors out west and we got orders from Mojave. They want you ASAP. You’re flying out tonight.”
“With about the others?” Dennis asked, hopefully.
“Can’t risk it. Just you.”
“But that’s not fair. They want to go.”
The Commander snorted. “We got bigger fish to fry than ‘fair’. The plane’ll be back in a month. They can wait.”
“I don’t understand,” Dennis whimpered. He was scared out of his mind. The Commander softened his tone.
“Kid, everyone’s worried about the glowies. And I get it. They saw family and friends melt in front of them, they’ve destroyed our ecosystem, killed 95% of our population, and we just learned they’re changing the air. But the glowies are not the war. They’re a weapon. The only thing we know with certainty is this: something sent all of this, and they’re coming. Fleas and the glowies are just here to get earth good and ready. Might be a year, might be thirty, but they’re coming. And if we’re not prepared, if we can’t SURVIVE, that’s it. We’re through.”
“What does that have to do with me?”
The Commander shrugged. “Probably nothing. But something’s happened to you that we haven’t seen before and so far you’re still you. Our scientists still can’t figure out how Fleas works, or what kind of DNA the glowies came from. But maybe they can understand you.”
A soldier called in that the plane was ready.
“It’s time, kid. Put on the hazmat suit.”
“So the Army’s getting ready for a war?” Dennis asked.
“We might be dead before they get here. But if we find a way to survive, you’re goddamn right. They sent one hell of a friend request, it’s the least we can do.”
Dennis was on his back again, feeling that slick, numb, pull of sausage-sized gauze from his wounds. Clarence leaned against the wall and read the floor.
“How are you doing?” Dr. Siever asked from behind Dennis.
“Fine.”
“The pain’s been ok?”
“Yeah.”
“The whole time?”
“Yeah.”
His lower body swayed while the doctor repacked and covered the wounds. After a minute: “Do you feel this?”
Dennis felt a very vague pressure on his shoulder.
“Yes.”
“This?” Pressure on his right leg.
“Yes.”
Clarence had become interested. He moved away from the wall and disappeared behind Dennis’s line of sight.
“Here?” Dr. Siever asked. Something near his ribs.
“Stop doing that,” Clarence said with an edge in his voice.
"What's going on?" Dennis asked.
“What about here?” Dr. Siever asked. Dennis felt a light push on his left calf.
“I said stop it!” Clarence said. Dennis heard a struggle.
Dennis turned around. Dr. Siever and Clarence were on the ground, struggling. Clarence had control of the doctor’s right hand: a scalpel was in it, dripping with blood.
“Soldiers! Help!” Dr. Siever yelled. There was the squeak of boots outside the door and two soldiers burst into the room.
“We have to quarantine!” the doctor screamed. Veins on his neck stuck out. The two soldiers blew by Dennis and muscled Clarence off the doctor.
“Not him. Him!” Dr. Siever - who had been so kind - stared at Dennis like he had opened a closet to find the boogeyman. He pointed the quivering scalpel in his direction.
Dennis stared at them, dumbfounded. The scalpel pointed down to his leg.
“Look!”
The doctor had cut dime-size chunks of skin out of him. The cut on his calf congealed in soft blue and then healed purple before their eyes. The others were already healed.
= = =
Like most of the base, Dennis was now cordoned off behind a series of thick plastic sheaths. Blurry soldiers stood guard outside the room they had put him in. They were on the opposite side of the base. They kept the door open and he overheard one of the soldiers say that this part of the base was still ‘active.’
After the initial chaos, cooler minds prevailed. Soldiers dressed in hazmat suits arrived to monitor Dennis. They had him put one on. Dr. Siever, Clarence, and the two soldiers exposed, were quarantined and given chemical showers. One of the soldiers asked Dennis who else he had been in contact with. The only person he could think of was Ricky.
Dennis sat on a cot and cried. It’d been hours without any explanation of what had happened. He’d asked the guards questions, but they didn’t know. An hour earlier, he had requested water and they said they weren’t allowed to interact with him. He could hear fear in their voices. He didn’t know why.
He felt fine. He inspected the purple scars. They looked like skin, but they had a shimmer to them, like he’d seen with the loopy trees. A mirror was on a dresser – they had used an old dorm room for quarantine – and when he craned to see his back, he understood why Dr. Siever had done what he had done: in place of his pale, Anglo skin were mottled streaks of shimmering purple, a glossy port-wine stain. Most of his back was healed. The deep wound that needed gauze was still there, but even so, it was much shallower than it should have been.
He heard murmuring outside. A man in a hazmat suit, followed by another dressed the same, but shorter, entered the room. They stayed behind the plastic sheeting.
“Dennis, it’s Dr. Siever,” the tall one said. “This is Commander Jacobs. He runs the base.”
“How’s Clarence?”
“He’s fine. We’re all fine. He and I made up, too. It was stupid for me to have him in the room.”
The short, hooded figure grunted “no shit.” Dr. Siever continued.
“We’re quarantined as a precaution too, so you’re not alone.”
Dennis’s lip trembled. “Am I going to die?”
“We don’t think so. The opposite, in fact.”
Dr. Siever’s outline knelt down and he slid two photographs under the plastic sheets. “Look.”
Dennis walked over and picked up the photographs. In one, it was a photo of his back before it received medical attention. All the flesh and muscle were gone. Ribs, spine, and the meat between, were completely exposed. The date and time was watermarked into the right corner of the photo. The next photo was taken two days later. The skin was still gone, but muscle spanned his back, covering previously exposed bones, and a light film of purple covered it all. It was an impossible recovery.
“Do you see?” Commander Jacobs said. “You should be dead. But you’re not.”
Dennis cleared his throat. “How long ago was this?”
“That last photo was taken two days ago,” Dr. Siever said.
The room was quiet as Dennis soaked in that information. “What does it mean?” he finally asked.
“We can only guess and we don’t want to do that,” Commander Jacobs said. “There’s a team of scientists and doctors out west and we got orders from Mojave. They want you ASAP. You’re flying out tonight.”
“With about the others?” Dennis asked, hopefully.
“Can’t risk it. Just you.”
“But that’s not fair. They want to go.”
The Commander snorted. “We got bigger fish to fry than ‘fair’. The plane’ll be back in a month. They can wait.”
“I don’t understand,” Dennis whimpered. He was scared out of his mind. The Commander softened his tone.
“Kid, everyone’s worried about the glowies. And I get it. They saw family and friends melt in front of them, they’ve destroyed our ecosystem, killed 95% of our population, and we just learned they’re changing the air. But the glowies are not the war. They’re a weapon. The only thing we know with certainty is this: something sent all of this, and they’re coming. Fleas and the glowies are just here to get earth good and ready. Might be a year, might be thirty, but they’re coming. And if we’re not prepared, if we can’t SURVIVE, that’s it. We’re through.”
“What does that have to do with me?”
The Commander shrugged. “Probably nothing. But something’s happened to you that we haven’t seen before and so far you’re still you. Our scientists still can’t figure out how Fleas works, or what kind of DNA the glowies came from. But maybe they can understand you.”
A soldier called in that the plane was ready.
“It’s time, kid. Put on the hazmat suit.”
“So the Army’s getting ready for a war?” Dennis asked.
“We might be dead before they get here. But if we find a way to survive, you’re goddamn right. They sent one hell of a friend request, it’s the least we can do.”
January 9, 2013
"Dirt" 1_9_13
= = =
It took a few hours to unload the plane. Afterwards, aside from a few soldiers scouting the perimeter in a Humvee, everyone went in for lunch. Half the cafeteria was cordoned off with huge sheets of plastic. Through the opaque curtain, Dennis could see ghostly remains of a crumbled roof.
Despite all the reminders of what had happened to the world, the mood was light. The plane came once a month and the civilians were ready to leave. The room buzzed with laughter and relief.
Clarence pushed Dennis through the food line. Four soldiers prepared pancakes and pork and beans, an odd combination forced by supplies.
They went to a table that included Eddie, who sat with a few other soldiers. Clarence parked Dennis at the head of the table and took the bench next to him. An old man and woman sat down, too.
“We prayed for you,” the old man said. The woman smiled warmly.
“Thank you.”
Ricky appeared out of nowhere next to Dennis. “Can I sit here?”
“Sure,” Dennis replied. Ricky stood next to Clarence until he got the hint. He scooted down and gave Ricky room.
Ricky dove into his pancakes. “Are you going on the plane?” he asked in between bites.
“Yeah. You?”
Ricky nodded. “I can’t wait. I’m so tired of the glowies.” He brushed his mouth with his right arm stump and became self-conscious when Dennis’s eyes followed it. “Fleas. Dr. Siever said I did the right thing.”
“You did,” Dennis reassured.
“So what was it like riding the monster?” Ricky asked.
The rest of the table quieted down, waiting for a response.
“I don’t know. I didn’t know what was happening. I passed out. Clarence?”
Clarence slowly ate the last triangle of his pancake. “It was a bit blurry for me, too. I saw something had Dennis, but I didn’t know what. Good thing ‘cause I would’ve swam for my life, screaming.”
Everyone chuckled.
“When it raised him in the air, all the river water spilled to the side and then I was on it, running towards him. It was so big, I didn’t even think of it as an animal. The tentacles were purple and there were a ton of them. They were soft, but hard, like there were bones. Glowies were everywhere, flopping around. The ground – its back, I guess – was really lumpy . . . I twisted my ankle. To be honest, I don’t remember much else. I just remember shooting at the tentacle that had Dennis.”
He nodded to Eddie. “Then they tore – pardon my French – the shit out of it and I was dragging Dennis to shore. Without them . . .” Clarence’s disposition went dark. He was in full memory. “. . . no way. We would have been gone.”
He turned to Eddie and the soldiers next to him. “I don’t think I ever really thanked you. You saved our lives.”
The cafeteria had gone silent except for the soft gurgle of baked beans. Suddenly, the civilians clapped and cheered the soldiers around them. They got up and hugged them, thanking them all for creating a safe haven in the bowels of this alien hell.
After a few minutes, reverence returned to camaraderie.
“Are we definitely flying out tomorrow?” the old man asked. His name was Henry.
“About 0700, once the glowies are back in their holes,” Eddie replied. “Make sure to pack tonight.”
With the plane unloaded and the supplies stocked away, there was nothing left for the younger kids to do. Ricky had become Dennis’s shadow and he was teaching Dennis the finer points of Bid Whist, a card game. They were in Ricky’s room. Ricky and Dennis each held a hand, and two hands were on the floor. Ricky was showing Dennis by playing all four.
“So if we were partners, we can’t talk, but you can give clues to what you got in your hand.”
“Is it Bid 'Whilst' or 'Whist'?”
Ricky sighed. “Whist! Whist!”
They had been going over the game for forty minutes.
“Where’d you learn this?”
“My grandma. Focus. The key to the game is winning tricks, each trick is four cards.”
“Was she with you?”
Ricky shook his head. “She wasn’t my real grandma. She was my foster grandma. So, trumps cards are the suit that overshadows everything except a higher card in that suit. It guarantees winning the trick, got it?”
Dennis focused on his cards as if they could telepathically teach him the game.
“I still have no idea how to play,” Dennis finally said. “Can we play ‘Go Fish’ or something?”
“How’s the pain?” Dr. Siever watched them from a doorway.
“Have you ever played Bid Whist?” Ricky asked hopefully.
“Sorry, Rick.”
Ricky threw his arms up in mock frustration and collected the cards. He shuffled them expertly despite his handicap.
“How’s the pain?” Dr. Siever asked again. He had a dixie cup of water in his hand.
“Not too bad.” Dennis hadn’t even thought about his back. There was a numb quality to it, but nothing more.
Dr. Siever puckered his face. “Hmm.” He handed Dennis the water and pills. “Take these anyway. The pain’ll come on fast once the medication wears off.”
Dennis did.
“Stop by the infirmary tonight. I’ll change your bandages for the flight out to Fort Irwin. We won’t have time in the morning.”
“Sure. Thanks again, Dr. Siever.”
“That’s why they pay me the big bucks.” He winked at them and headed down the hall.
Ricky flipped cards Dennis’s way.
“‘Go Fish’ it is,” he said, clearly depressed with his choice of playing partner.
= = =
It took a few hours to unload the plane. Afterwards, aside from a few soldiers scouting the perimeter in a Humvee, everyone went in for lunch. Half the cafeteria was cordoned off with huge sheets of plastic. Through the opaque curtain, Dennis could see ghostly remains of a crumbled roof.
Despite all the reminders of what had happened to the world, the mood was light. The plane came once a month and the civilians were ready to leave. The room buzzed with laughter and relief.
Clarence pushed Dennis through the food line. Four soldiers prepared pancakes and pork and beans, an odd combination forced by supplies.
They went to a table that included Eddie, who sat with a few other soldiers. Clarence parked Dennis at the head of the table and took the bench next to him. An old man and woman sat down, too.
“We prayed for you,” the old man said. The woman smiled warmly.
“Thank you.”
Ricky appeared out of nowhere next to Dennis. “Can I sit here?”
“Sure,” Dennis replied. Ricky stood next to Clarence until he got the hint. He scooted down and gave Ricky room.
Ricky dove into his pancakes. “Are you going on the plane?” he asked in between bites.
“Yeah. You?”
Ricky nodded. “I can’t wait. I’m so tired of the glowies.” He brushed his mouth with his right arm stump and became self-conscious when Dennis’s eyes followed it. “Fleas. Dr. Siever said I did the right thing.”
“You did,” Dennis reassured.
“So what was it like riding the monster?” Ricky asked.
The rest of the table quieted down, waiting for a response.
“I don’t know. I didn’t know what was happening. I passed out. Clarence?”
Clarence slowly ate the last triangle of his pancake. “It was a bit blurry for me, too. I saw something had Dennis, but I didn’t know what. Good thing ‘cause I would’ve swam for my life, screaming.”
Everyone chuckled.
“When it raised him in the air, all the river water spilled to the side and then I was on it, running towards him. It was so big, I didn’t even think of it as an animal. The tentacles were purple and there were a ton of them. They were soft, but hard, like there were bones. Glowies were everywhere, flopping around. The ground – its back, I guess – was really lumpy . . . I twisted my ankle. To be honest, I don’t remember much else. I just remember shooting at the tentacle that had Dennis.”
He nodded to Eddie. “Then they tore – pardon my French – the shit out of it and I was dragging Dennis to shore. Without them . . .” Clarence’s disposition went dark. He was in full memory. “. . . no way. We would have been gone.”
He turned to Eddie and the soldiers next to him. “I don’t think I ever really thanked you. You saved our lives.”
The cafeteria had gone silent except for the soft gurgle of baked beans. Suddenly, the civilians clapped and cheered the soldiers around them. They got up and hugged them, thanking them all for creating a safe haven in the bowels of this alien hell.
After a few minutes, reverence returned to camaraderie.
“Are we definitely flying out tomorrow?” the old man asked. His name was Henry.
“About 0700, once the glowies are back in their holes,” Eddie replied. “Make sure to pack tonight.”
With the plane unloaded and the supplies stocked away, there was nothing left for the younger kids to do. Ricky had become Dennis’s shadow and he was teaching Dennis the finer points of Bid Whist, a card game. They were in Ricky’s room. Ricky and Dennis each held a hand, and two hands were on the floor. Ricky was showing Dennis by playing all four.
“So if we were partners, we can’t talk, but you can give clues to what you got in your hand.”
“Is it Bid 'Whilst' or 'Whist'?”
Ricky sighed. “Whist! Whist!”
They had been going over the game for forty minutes.
“Where’d you learn this?”
“My grandma. Focus. The key to the game is winning tricks, each trick is four cards.”
“Was she with you?”
Ricky shook his head. “She wasn’t my real grandma. She was my foster grandma. So, trumps cards are the suit that overshadows everything except a higher card in that suit. It guarantees winning the trick, got it?”
Dennis focused on his cards as if they could telepathically teach him the game.
“I still have no idea how to play,” Dennis finally said. “Can we play ‘Go Fish’ or something?”
“How’s the pain?” Dr. Siever watched them from a doorway.
“Have you ever played Bid Whist?” Ricky asked hopefully.
“Sorry, Rick.”
Ricky threw his arms up in mock frustration and collected the cards. He shuffled them expertly despite his handicap.
“How’s the pain?” Dr. Siever asked again. He had a dixie cup of water in his hand.
“Not too bad.” Dennis hadn’t even thought about his back. There was a numb quality to it, but nothing more.
Dr. Siever puckered his face. “Hmm.” He handed Dennis the water and pills. “Take these anyway. The pain’ll come on fast once the medication wears off.”
Dennis did.
“Stop by the infirmary tonight. I’ll change your bandages for the flight out to Fort Irwin. We won’t have time in the morning.”
“Sure. Thanks again, Dr. Siever.”
“That’s why they pay me the big bucks.” He winked at them and headed down the hall.
Ricky flipped cards Dennis’s way.
“‘Go Fish’ it is,” he said, clearly depressed with his choice of playing partner.
= = =
January 8, 2013
"Dirt" 1_8_13
= = =
After the doctor left, Clarence came in with a wheelchair and helped Dennis into it. Dennis had expected civilization on the other side of the curtain, but instead, at least in the infirmary, was a skeleton crew. He was the only patient. The main room was large and it felt like a morgue with dim lights that flickered – a generator – and gray linoleum that hadn’t been polished since this whole thing began. The nurse who had come in earlier sat with her legs up reading a tattered paperback. Medical supplies were packed out in the open.
“I thought there’d be more people,” Dennis said.
“There are only about fifty soldiers here,” Clarence said. “They’re stretched thin, keeping the bases running and repairing what they can. The rest are like us.”
They made their way out of the hospital wing. Signs of Fleas were everywhere: some halls were completely collapsed in. Sections of the floor was mottled and wrinkled from its corrosive attack.
They went outside onto the tarmac. Dennis breathed the fresh air. One C-130 military cargo plane was parked on a repaired, leopard-spotted runway. Soldiers in camouflage and men, women, and children dressed in civilian clothes helped unload its supplies.
A black kid, maybe twelve, ran past them. He spun on one heel: “Hey, you’re alright!” and twirled back to the plane, jogging over to help.
“That Ricky. They found him alive in the city,” Clarence said.
Dennis saw that the boy was missing most of his right arm below the elbow. “What happened to his arm?”
“He chopped it off.”
“Jeez.”
“There’s a lot of that, here. Most everyone is amazed they made it.”
They went to the plane and Clarence put on the hand brake. “I should help.”
A forklift moved heavy palates of food. There were pushcarts and wheelbarrows. Clarence said hello to the crowd and got in line. Eyes found Dennis and people nodded to him. A soldier in his forties, fit, crew cut and in camouflage, punched Clarence in the shoulder and walked over with his hand out.
“You are one lucky sonofabitch. Sergeant Reyes. Call me Eddie.”
They shook hands.
“Dennis Armstrong.”
“How are you feeling?”
“Like I was put through a cheese grater.”
“Pretty close.” Eddie leaned over to look at his back. He whistled. “I’m sure they told you, but . . . wow . . . you got the Guinness World Record. No one else has ridden a stalactite and lived.”
“Were you there?”
“Yeah.” He nodded in Clarence’s direction, who was climbing into the C-130 to help move a large pack of food. “I was on the minigun. Clarence probably already bitched about it, but he walked right in my way.”
“You shot his ear?”
Eddie had a big, crazy grin. “That dude’s tough. He was climbing towards you on that fucking thing, fucking finger holding like ‘Cliffhanger.’ It was insane.”
Dennis felt his throat tighten at the thought of Clarence risking his life for him.
“How long have you been here?” Dennis asked.
“I was station in Albuquerque, New Mexico when it went down. Got here a month after. This place was crawling with glowies. Near water it’s the worst.”
“What happened to everyone else?”
“You know. Most people got soft served. It’s the world though. It’s everywhere.”
“Is there . . . are we still the United States and stuff?”
Eddie laughed. “Not like you think. There’s no government, but the military has banded together pretty good. We’re picking up the pieces. Our ‘capital’ now, if you want to call it that, is Fort Irwin, in the Mojave Desert. Way away from water. That’s where we send survivors.”
“That’s where we’re going?”
Eddie nodded. “Yep. When that C-130 is emptied, it’s going back with you,” he gestured to the others near the plane, “and them on it. Some civilians - like Dr. Siever – we ask to stay, but for the most part, we are getting out of Dodge. We need to consolidate our manpower and resources.”
After the doctor left, Clarence came in with a wheelchair and helped Dennis into it. Dennis had expected civilization on the other side of the curtain, but instead, at least in the infirmary, was a skeleton crew. He was the only patient. The main room was large and it felt like a morgue with dim lights that flickered – a generator – and gray linoleum that hadn’t been polished since this whole thing began. The nurse who had come in earlier sat with her legs up reading a tattered paperback. Medical supplies were packed out in the open.
“I thought there’d be more people,” Dennis said.
“There are only about fifty soldiers here,” Clarence said. “They’re stretched thin, keeping the bases running and repairing what they can. The rest are like us.”
They made their way out of the hospital wing. Signs of Fleas were everywhere: some halls were completely collapsed in. Sections of the floor was mottled and wrinkled from its corrosive attack.
They went outside onto the tarmac. Dennis breathed the fresh air. One C-130 military cargo plane was parked on a repaired, leopard-spotted runway. Soldiers in camouflage and men, women, and children dressed in civilian clothes helped unload its supplies.
A black kid, maybe twelve, ran past them. He spun on one heel: “Hey, you’re alright!” and twirled back to the plane, jogging over to help.
“That Ricky. They found him alive in the city,” Clarence said.
Dennis saw that the boy was missing most of his right arm below the elbow. “What happened to his arm?”
“He chopped it off.”
“Jeez.”
“There’s a lot of that, here. Most everyone is amazed they made it.”
They went to the plane and Clarence put on the hand brake. “I should help.”
A forklift moved heavy palates of food. There were pushcarts and wheelbarrows. Clarence said hello to the crowd and got in line. Eyes found Dennis and people nodded to him. A soldier in his forties, fit, crew cut and in camouflage, punched Clarence in the shoulder and walked over with his hand out.
“You are one lucky sonofabitch. Sergeant Reyes. Call me Eddie.”
They shook hands.
“Dennis Armstrong.”
“How are you feeling?”
“Like I was put through a cheese grater.”
“Pretty close.” Eddie leaned over to look at his back. He whistled. “I’m sure they told you, but . . . wow . . . you got the Guinness World Record. No one else has ridden a stalactite and lived.”
“Were you there?”
“Yeah.” He nodded in Clarence’s direction, who was climbing into the C-130 to help move a large pack of food. “I was on the minigun. Clarence probably already bitched about it, but he walked right in my way.”
“You shot his ear?”
Eddie had a big, crazy grin. “That dude’s tough. He was climbing towards you on that fucking thing, fucking finger holding like ‘Cliffhanger.’ It was insane.”
Dennis felt his throat tighten at the thought of Clarence risking his life for him.
“How long have you been here?” Dennis asked.
“I was station in Albuquerque, New Mexico when it went down. Got here a month after. This place was crawling with glowies. Near water it’s the worst.”
“What happened to everyone else?”
“You know. Most people got soft served. It’s the world though. It’s everywhere.”
“Is there . . . are we still the United States and stuff?”
Eddie laughed. “Not like you think. There’s no government, but the military has banded together pretty good. We’re picking up the pieces. Our ‘capital’ now, if you want to call it that, is Fort Irwin, in the Mojave Desert. Way away from water. That’s where we send survivors.”
“That’s where we’re going?”
Eddie nodded. “Yep. When that C-130 is emptied, it’s going back with you,” he gestured to the others near the plane, “and them on it. Some civilians - like Dr. Siever – we ask to stay, but for the most part, we are getting out of Dodge. We need to consolidate our manpower and resources.”
January 7, 2013
"Dirt" 1_4 through 1_7_13
Chapter 5
Dennis woke to white. He was in a recovery room. He tried to speak but something was stuffed in his mouth - he could feel it all the way down his throat. He panicked. He raised his arms and a half foot off the sheets, the bed rattled from the wrist restraints. A door slammed open and a masked nurse ran to his side.
“Calm down.” She put her hand to his chest gently. “You’re going to make it.” Dennis didn’t know what that meant. The last he remembered . . . he was rising. He remembered rising.
The nurse checked an IV drip above him. She took a needle and inserted it into a valve just underneath the saline.
“I’m going to put you back to sleep. You need your rest. You’re the talk of the base. No one’s survived a stalactite attack.”
The white room retreated down a tunnel and the world went black.
He woke up to Clarence half asleep on a foldout chair at the far wall. His right arm propped his head as he drifted up and down. Dennis cleared his throat. It was raw. The tube was out. Clarence snapped to.
“You’re up,” he said.
“What happened?” Dennis’s voice was barely a whisper. It felt as if a treble hook had been dragged up his windpipe.
“A whole lot of shit.” Clarence grabbed the chair and brought it over. A food tray was near the bed. Clarence took a cup of apple juice from it: “thirsty?”
Dennis realized he was and nodded. Clarence put the straw to his lips and the room temp juice tasted like it had come from heaven. He drained it.
“You’ve been out a week,” Clarence said.
Dennis raised his eyebrows in surprise, “a week?” he said hoarsely. His hands were no longer restrained. He rubbed his throat.
“Try not to speak too much, the doctor just pulled the tube out a few hours ago.” He continued, “Apparently the bottom of the river is one gigantic organism. The same thing is happening to the ocean. They call it a stalactite, because it’s all spikey. The Army thinks it’s a form of coral: things live in it, it has its own ecosystem. But it’s aware and alive. It has eyes,” Clarence shivered. “It eats. And it had attached to you. Thank God a patrol found us.”
“I saw a truck,” Dennis whispered.
Clarence nodded, “it had a machine gun on it. When they saw us, and then the entire riverbed rose up, they lit it up.” Clarence turned: one of his ears was bandaged. “I can barely hear out of this thing.”
“You got me to shore?”
Clarence's eyes welled. “We made it, bud. It’s a shit show, but the Army’s still around. There are people that’ve survived and they’re figuring out what the hell is going on.”
A doctor walked in. “The miracle boys wakens!” He went to a counter and put on rubber gloves. “My name’s Dr. Siever. Let’s see how you’re doing.”
= = =
Dennis had sustained nerve damage that affected his right leg. Sections of his back were packed with gauze. Other parts looked like an amateur seamstress had let the sewing machine run away.
Dennis laid on his stomach. He could feel the doctor tug out strings of old, bloody gauze from the deep wounds and stuff in the new. A localized anesthetic gave him the detached feeling of being pulled apart.
“We didn’t think you were going to make it,” Dr. Siever said. “The stalactite punctures the back with the sheer power of its suckers, and then it just,” the doctor made a slurping sound, “until nothing’s left.”
“Will I be able to walk?”
“Yeah, definitely. You may have a limp, but maybe not. We just need you to rest while your back heals. We have stitches underneath stitches, underneath stitches back there. When you came in . . .” the doctor shook his head. “In another week or two we can close the wound.”
Dennis woke to white. He was in a recovery room. He tried to speak but something was stuffed in his mouth - he could feel it all the way down his throat. He panicked. He raised his arms and a half foot off the sheets, the bed rattled from the wrist restraints. A door slammed open and a masked nurse ran to his side.
“Calm down.” She put her hand to his chest gently. “You’re going to make it.” Dennis didn’t know what that meant. The last he remembered . . . he was rising. He remembered rising.
The nurse checked an IV drip above him. She took a needle and inserted it into a valve just underneath the saline.
“I’m going to put you back to sleep. You need your rest. You’re the talk of the base. No one’s survived a stalactite attack.”
The white room retreated down a tunnel and the world went black.
He woke up to Clarence half asleep on a foldout chair at the far wall. His right arm propped his head as he drifted up and down. Dennis cleared his throat. It was raw. The tube was out. Clarence snapped to.
“You’re up,” he said.
“What happened?” Dennis’s voice was barely a whisper. It felt as if a treble hook had been dragged up his windpipe.
“A whole lot of shit.” Clarence grabbed the chair and brought it over. A food tray was near the bed. Clarence took a cup of apple juice from it: “thirsty?”
Dennis realized he was and nodded. Clarence put the straw to his lips and the room temp juice tasted like it had come from heaven. He drained it.
“You’ve been out a week,” Clarence said.
Dennis raised his eyebrows in surprise, “a week?” he said hoarsely. His hands were no longer restrained. He rubbed his throat.
“Try not to speak too much, the doctor just pulled the tube out a few hours ago.” He continued, “Apparently the bottom of the river is one gigantic organism. The same thing is happening to the ocean. They call it a stalactite, because it’s all spikey. The Army thinks it’s a form of coral: things live in it, it has its own ecosystem. But it’s aware and alive. It has eyes,” Clarence shivered. “It eats. And it had attached to you. Thank God a patrol found us.”
“I saw a truck,” Dennis whispered.
Clarence nodded, “it had a machine gun on it. When they saw us, and then the entire riverbed rose up, they lit it up.” Clarence turned: one of his ears was bandaged. “I can barely hear out of this thing.”
“You got me to shore?”
Clarence's eyes welled. “We made it, bud. It’s a shit show, but the Army’s still around. There are people that’ve survived and they’re figuring out what the hell is going on.”
A doctor walked in. “The miracle boys wakens!” He went to a counter and put on rubber gloves. “My name’s Dr. Siever. Let’s see how you’re doing.”
= = =
Dennis had sustained nerve damage that affected his right leg. Sections of his back were packed with gauze. Other parts looked like an amateur seamstress had let the sewing machine run away.
Dennis laid on his stomach. He could feel the doctor tug out strings of old, bloody gauze from the deep wounds and stuff in the new. A localized anesthetic gave him the detached feeling of being pulled apart.
“We didn’t think you were going to make it,” Dr. Siever said. “The stalactite punctures the back with the sheer power of its suckers, and then it just,” the doctor made a slurping sound, “until nothing’s left.”
“Will I be able to walk?”
“Yeah, definitely. You may have a limp, but maybe not. We just need you to rest while your back heals. We have stitches underneath stitches, underneath stitches back there. When you came in . . .” the doctor shook his head. “In another week or two we can close the wound.”
January 3, 2013
"Dirt" 1_3_12
= = =
They had decided that earlier was better. Before dawn, hungover and less brazen, they drove out of the garage and to the river. It was going to be a beautiful day. There were no clouds in the sky, except for the ones up high that stretched like islands from some magical world. A light breeze felt good on the face.
Instead of taking the 70 to the river – it went straight to the fallen bridge – Clarence had Dennis take side streets until they reached a park along the bank.
At night the buildings looked stark and stripped. During the day, they saw that they were covered with the fuzz. They parked the Jeep.
“Don’t think about it,” Clarence said. Dennis nodded. They took the guns and left the Jeep. A pang filled Dennis’s heart. He looked back at the CJ. It was so clean amidst the wrecked cityscape and blankets of mold that covered everything man-made around it. It had survived and now they were abandoning it. He had the urge to run back and hug it, thank it. It had never run well for his father but for the last four days it had performed flawlessly. Without it they would be dead. It deserved better. But those were the thoughts of a boy and Dennis knew he could no longer think that way.
The park quickly deteriorated into muddy bank. Again, Dennis wanted to stop. He could see the mud caps that mean something slithery and unpredictable was just underneath. Clarence had new vigor, maybe he yearned for death. He took Dennis’s arm and guided them through what looked like dormant geysers. The mud sucked their feet in ankle deep.
“Keep going, keep going,” Clarence urged.
They made it to the water. They heard calls in the wind – behind them the bug bats had climbed out of their holes. They perched on the tops of buildings and spanned their wings, soaking in the first rays of the sun.
Dennis caught a glimpse of the Jeep again. Its round eyes seemed to call after them, “why are you leaving me?”
The river was a mirror, not even tickled by flies. Towards the middle, a gentle ripple pulled south. Clarence whooshed with his mouth, psyching himself up. From the bank, the other side looked a mile away.
“Let’s do it. Ok?” Clarence shook out his arms. “Slow and steady, like we’re leafs.”
“Leafs,” Dennis repeated. He was numb.
“Hey,” Clarence said quietly.
“Yeah?”
“If something happens, it was good knowing you.”
“You too.”
Dennis didn’t expect it, but Clarence hugged him. And then he was the first to wade into the river.
Five yards in, they couldn’t stand. Dennis dipped under the water for a moment – taking the guns was stupid, they were too heavy – and his feet caught under something that muscled away. Clarence saw his eyes get wide.
“Keep going,” he mouthed. They side stroked towards the center and the current dragged them south as they pushed to the other side.
Ahead of them, eels the diameter of a pencil and twice as long, swam in schools near the surface. As Dennis and Clarence approached they scattered and dove into the depths.
“Bug Bats,” Clarence said. They skimmed along the surface near the shores trolling their rear antennae in the water. Dennis saw one snag a black tube that violently squirmed as the bug bat rose into the air.
“Duck!” Clarence said. A bug bat zipped over them. Dennis heard the shick of its muscled hook cutting through the water before he dove under. When they rose, the bug bat was fifty yards ahead. Its talon found purchase and a thin, translucent tentacle rose from the river. Suddenly the water burst as a thousand more tentacles shot up, and a creature the size of a small car bobbed to the surface. The tentacles surrounded a quill of quivering teeth. It yanked the bug bat into its mouth and lazily sunk below. The other bug bats took that as their queue to fly back to shore.
They let the current take them south away from the predator anemone, and as they swam, the opposite shore slowly got more detailed.
Dennis’s heart thumped from the unseen dangers that were so real beneath his kicking feet. Clarence was ahead of him, turning his head in all directions, looking for the both of him.
I was wrong last night: the notion that Clarence was just a janitor who happened to survive. Clarence was a brave man. No doubt about it. Maybe he hadn’t been before, maybe the shots just never lined up, but the past didn’t matter and it was shitty to pigeonhole. Now, mattered. Actions mattered.
A slow warmth filled Dennis’s body. He had thought it was exertion, but both he and Clarence were swimming gently to not disturb the water. He licked his lips, his mouth was so dry.
“Clarence,” he tried to say. He noticed that he wasn’t moving forward anymore. In fact, his shoulders weren’t in the water. His vision speckled. The bank was close now. He felt so WARM. Clarence swam frantically towards him, his eyes wide. He pulled something from the water, it was black and square.
“I don’t feel so good,” Dennis whispered and then his ears rang as Clarence fired the Glock past his head. Dennis tried to roll over on his back but something held him firm. He saw that the calm water had become rippled with waves. Something long and slippery rubbed against his face. And Clarence fired and fired.
His vision went blurry, but he thought he saw something on the bank. They were just twenty yards away.
Truck.
And then the truck bloomed with light and Dennis went out completely.
They had decided that earlier was better. Before dawn, hungover and less brazen, they drove out of the garage and to the river. It was going to be a beautiful day. There were no clouds in the sky, except for the ones up high that stretched like islands from some magical world. A light breeze felt good on the face.
Instead of taking the 70 to the river – it went straight to the fallen bridge – Clarence had Dennis take side streets until they reached a park along the bank.
At night the buildings looked stark and stripped. During the day, they saw that they were covered with the fuzz. They parked the Jeep.
“Don’t think about it,” Clarence said. Dennis nodded. They took the guns and left the Jeep. A pang filled Dennis’s heart. He looked back at the CJ. It was so clean amidst the wrecked cityscape and blankets of mold that covered everything man-made around it. It had survived and now they were abandoning it. He had the urge to run back and hug it, thank it. It had never run well for his father but for the last four days it had performed flawlessly. Without it they would be dead. It deserved better. But those were the thoughts of a boy and Dennis knew he could no longer think that way.
The park quickly deteriorated into muddy bank. Again, Dennis wanted to stop. He could see the mud caps that mean something slithery and unpredictable was just underneath. Clarence had new vigor, maybe he yearned for death. He took Dennis’s arm and guided them through what looked like dormant geysers. The mud sucked their feet in ankle deep.
“Keep going, keep going,” Clarence urged.
They made it to the water. They heard calls in the wind – behind them the bug bats had climbed out of their holes. They perched on the tops of buildings and spanned their wings, soaking in the first rays of the sun.
Dennis caught a glimpse of the Jeep again. Its round eyes seemed to call after them, “why are you leaving me?”
The river was a mirror, not even tickled by flies. Towards the middle, a gentle ripple pulled south. Clarence whooshed with his mouth, psyching himself up. From the bank, the other side looked a mile away.
“Let’s do it. Ok?” Clarence shook out his arms. “Slow and steady, like we’re leafs.”
“Leafs,” Dennis repeated. He was numb.
“Hey,” Clarence said quietly.
“Yeah?”
“If something happens, it was good knowing you.”
“You too.”
Dennis didn’t expect it, but Clarence hugged him. And then he was the first to wade into the river.
Five yards in, they couldn’t stand. Dennis dipped under the water for a moment – taking the guns was stupid, they were too heavy – and his feet caught under something that muscled away. Clarence saw his eyes get wide.
“Keep going,” he mouthed. They side stroked towards the center and the current dragged them south as they pushed to the other side.
Ahead of them, eels the diameter of a pencil and twice as long, swam in schools near the surface. As Dennis and Clarence approached they scattered and dove into the depths.
“Bug Bats,” Clarence said. They skimmed along the surface near the shores trolling their rear antennae in the water. Dennis saw one snag a black tube that violently squirmed as the bug bat rose into the air.
“Duck!” Clarence said. A bug bat zipped over them. Dennis heard the shick of its muscled hook cutting through the water before he dove under. When they rose, the bug bat was fifty yards ahead. Its talon found purchase and a thin, translucent tentacle rose from the river. Suddenly the water burst as a thousand more tentacles shot up, and a creature the size of a small car bobbed to the surface. The tentacles surrounded a quill of quivering teeth. It yanked the bug bat into its mouth and lazily sunk below. The other bug bats took that as their queue to fly back to shore.
They let the current take them south away from the predator anemone, and as they swam, the opposite shore slowly got more detailed.
Dennis’s heart thumped from the unseen dangers that were so real beneath his kicking feet. Clarence was ahead of him, turning his head in all directions, looking for the both of him.
I was wrong last night: the notion that Clarence was just a janitor who happened to survive. Clarence was a brave man. No doubt about it. Maybe he hadn’t been before, maybe the shots just never lined up, but the past didn’t matter and it was shitty to pigeonhole. Now, mattered. Actions mattered.
A slow warmth filled Dennis’s body. He had thought it was exertion, but both he and Clarence were swimming gently to not disturb the water. He licked his lips, his mouth was so dry.
“Clarence,” he tried to say. He noticed that he wasn’t moving forward anymore. In fact, his shoulders weren’t in the water. His vision speckled. The bank was close now. He felt so WARM. Clarence swam frantically towards him, his eyes wide. He pulled something from the water, it was black and square.
“I don’t feel so good,” Dennis whispered and then his ears rang as Clarence fired the Glock past his head. Dennis tried to roll over on his back but something held him firm. He saw that the calm water had become rippled with waves. Something long and slippery rubbed against his face. And Clarence fired and fired.
His vision went blurry, but he thought he saw something on the bank. They were just twenty yards away.
Truck.
And then the truck bloomed with light and Dennis went out completely.
January 2, 2013
"Dirt" 1_2_13
= = =
They drove back into the city, unsure where to go. Dennis looked to Clarence – he stared vacantly out the side window. The bug bats were no longer out. It appeared that night was for the glowies.
“It’ll be ok,” Dennis reassured Clarence.
“We can’t get across the water,” Clarence replied.
Dennis found a parking garage. The exit was plugged with melted cars as people tried to flee five months before. The entrance was fine except for a motorcycle that had tried to jump, or was hit. Dennis let the tires do the work and they rocked over its remains.
Around the open aired perimeter there were melted cars, but towards the center, they were just filthy orphans. Dennis pulled the Jeep between a van and a truck and killed the engine. Its dying snort echoed around the garage. Dennis heard something shuffle somewhere above. He pictured the bug bats nestled together on the upper floors. Here, it looked fine.
Dennis reached back and got a jug of water. It was funny how with all the stress and weird landscapes, he’d forgotten to drink or eat.
“Hollywood diet, revealed.” he said. He drank from the gallon jug and offered it to Clarence. Clarence ignored him. Dennis pressed him with it. “Come on.”
Clarence acquiesced and took a big gulp. Dennis had never really looked at Clarence. It felt like they’d been together for weeks, but it’d only been three days and now, he finally looked at the man that he relied on for survival. Clarence was in his 50’s, his hair was mostly grey and he had a bald spot on the top of his head. His baggy sweatshirt couldn’t hide a gut underneath, and this was after five months of forced rationing. He had bad acne as a kid. His beard covered most of it, but Dennis could see the rippled scars on his cheeks. His hands were thick and strong from manual labor – a flat wedding band was on his left hand – but his shoulders were slumped in the way of those who are ignored. Dennis had viewed him as a survivalist, but before this he was a janitor. He just survived.
Like me.
Being so close to salvation had allowed Clarence hope. It had allowed him to think for the first day in nearly half a year that maybe he wouldn’t die horribly. He had uncaged hope like a dove and the black chasm where the bridge should have been had scared it to flight. Maybe he’d been this close to breaking the whole time. Maybe the rope had already begun to fray.
“What’s going on?” Dennis asked gently.
Clarence took a second to answer, he sucked on his lower lip. In that time something chittered a few floors overhead. They both automatically scanned the area.
“That, man. That right there. The glowies. The bridge.”
He raised his hand – it tremored. He closed it in a fist.
“I don’t want to cry in front of you.”
“We’re close.”
“Close only counts with horseshoes and hand grenades, kid. Do you know how many dead people have been ‘close?’” We can’t get across the river.”
“Why not?”
“DIDN’T YOU SEE IT? It was full of them.”
“Maybe there’s a boat, they don’t like daytime.”
“There isn’t a boat. It was stuffed with them,” Clarence said quietly.
It was. Even in the dark, Dennis had seen that the water had risen past the flood markers, displaced with squirming life.
“If we can’t get across, maybe we can signal to them. Shoot off our guns, they’re right there!”
“I just feel it, man. That’s all. I don’t want to talk about it. I’m spent.”
“That’s a bullshit attitude. We’re THERE.”
Clarence didn’t put up a fight. He pulled his hoodie over his head and closed his eyes. He just wanted to sleep. Dennis shook his head, he didn’t know what else to say. They didn’t even discuss watch. Dennis tried to stay up, but exhaustion rolled over him. At the hospital, Clarence had said how the sounds of the glowies had first frightened him and then, like circular fan, the noise became soothing. Dennis understood now. Their toots and calls and long pitched notes had a beauty to them. Even the sharp cry of something consumed. We adapt to what we are given until it kills us. We are the roaches, the Twinkies, that will survive til the end. Dennis fell asleep.
Dennis woke.
“Sally,” Clarence muttered. “Come on Sally, you’ll be ok. Come on Sally. Mom!”
It was too loud, Dennis could hear their upstairs neighbors rustle and bark. He pushed Clarence awake.
“You were talking in your sleep.”
“Sorry.”
Dennis handed him the jug. Clarence took a swig. He looked less brittle.
“Is Sally your wife?”
Clarence took a slow draw of water.
“How do you know about Sally?”
“You say her name in your sleep. You have since the beginning. Did she not make it?”
Clarence turned his head away from Dennis. “She’s dead.”
“I’m sorry, man.”
“It was tough. She went bad.” Clarence’s tone had changed. It was hitched. He put his hands up to his mouth.
“I’m sorry man,” Dennis said. “Were you in love?”
Clarence’s head snapped forward. He choked out a “I thought so at the time.”
“She loved you?”
Clarence’s shoulder shook, he had difficulty breathing. “It was hard to tell.” He finally turned and Dennis saw tears rolling down his cheeks, he smothered his mouth with his hands and Dennis realized: he was laughing.
“What?”
“Hmm?” Clarence’s couldn’t talk. He was racked with silent laughter.
“Who was Sally?!”
“Sally . . . was . . . my . . . turtle.”
“What?!”
Clarence nodded and wiped his eyes. “Ugh. I had her when I was eight. She got hit by a car.”
Clarence burst. The joy echoed around the hard walls. The dumbfounded look on Dennis’s face made him laugh harder.
“What about the wedding ring?” Dennis blurted, his face red.
Clarence looked down at it. “I was married, but we divorced a long time ago.” He held his palm up. The ring was nicked and scratched at its base. “I use it to open up beers.”
Clarence continued to laugh and Dennis joined in. Things snapped and clicked above them, but neither could help it. For once, Dennis didn’t care. And he got how Clarence had felt before. There was no respite. Something dangerous was always lurking beyond the campfire. Well screw it. Come down and get shot, motherfuckers. We got guns.
“I don’t know why you’re laughing, you’re the one dreaming about your turtle,” Dennis finally said. That got them started again.
“We’re going to die tomorrow aren’t we?” Dennis asked.
Clarence wiped his cheeks. He reached back and grabbed the bottle of McCormicks. He flipped the cap off and handed it to Dennis. Dennis drank and it filled his stomach with warmth. He passed it back.
“Yeah, probably,” Clarence said. “But hey,” he put his hand on Dennis’s shoulder. “At least I’ll finally get to see Sally.”
They roared and it felt good. The chittering squawked and wings slapped and Clarence stood up and yelled, “Fuck you! We’re right here assholes. Fuck you! And guess what! We’re going to swim in your river! M-I-S-S-I-S-S-I-P-P-I, motherfuckers!”
They drove back into the city, unsure where to go. Dennis looked to Clarence – he stared vacantly out the side window. The bug bats were no longer out. It appeared that night was for the glowies.
“It’ll be ok,” Dennis reassured Clarence.
“We can’t get across the water,” Clarence replied.
Dennis found a parking garage. The exit was plugged with melted cars as people tried to flee five months before. The entrance was fine except for a motorcycle that had tried to jump, or was hit. Dennis let the tires do the work and they rocked over its remains.
Around the open aired perimeter there were melted cars, but towards the center, they were just filthy orphans. Dennis pulled the Jeep between a van and a truck and killed the engine. Its dying snort echoed around the garage. Dennis heard something shuffle somewhere above. He pictured the bug bats nestled together on the upper floors. Here, it looked fine.
Dennis reached back and got a jug of water. It was funny how with all the stress and weird landscapes, he’d forgotten to drink or eat.
“Hollywood diet, revealed.” he said. He drank from the gallon jug and offered it to Clarence. Clarence ignored him. Dennis pressed him with it. “Come on.”
Clarence acquiesced and took a big gulp. Dennis had never really looked at Clarence. It felt like they’d been together for weeks, but it’d only been three days and now, he finally looked at the man that he relied on for survival. Clarence was in his 50’s, his hair was mostly grey and he had a bald spot on the top of his head. His baggy sweatshirt couldn’t hide a gut underneath, and this was after five months of forced rationing. He had bad acne as a kid. His beard covered most of it, but Dennis could see the rippled scars on his cheeks. His hands were thick and strong from manual labor – a flat wedding band was on his left hand – but his shoulders were slumped in the way of those who are ignored. Dennis had viewed him as a survivalist, but before this he was a janitor. He just survived.
Like me.
Being so close to salvation had allowed Clarence hope. It had allowed him to think for the first day in nearly half a year that maybe he wouldn’t die horribly. He had uncaged hope like a dove and the black chasm where the bridge should have been had scared it to flight. Maybe he’d been this close to breaking the whole time. Maybe the rope had already begun to fray.
“What’s going on?” Dennis asked gently.
Clarence took a second to answer, he sucked on his lower lip. In that time something chittered a few floors overhead. They both automatically scanned the area.
“That, man. That right there. The glowies. The bridge.”
He raised his hand – it tremored. He closed it in a fist.
“I don’t want to cry in front of you.”
“We’re close.”
“Close only counts with horseshoes and hand grenades, kid. Do you know how many dead people have been ‘close?’” We can’t get across the river.”
“Why not?”
“DIDN’T YOU SEE IT? It was full of them.”
“Maybe there’s a boat, they don’t like daytime.”
“There isn’t a boat. It was stuffed with them,” Clarence said quietly.
It was. Even in the dark, Dennis had seen that the water had risen past the flood markers, displaced with squirming life.
“If we can’t get across, maybe we can signal to them. Shoot off our guns, they’re right there!”
“I just feel it, man. That’s all. I don’t want to talk about it. I’m spent.”
“That’s a bullshit attitude. We’re THERE.”
Clarence didn’t put up a fight. He pulled his hoodie over his head and closed his eyes. He just wanted to sleep. Dennis shook his head, he didn’t know what else to say. They didn’t even discuss watch. Dennis tried to stay up, but exhaustion rolled over him. At the hospital, Clarence had said how the sounds of the glowies had first frightened him and then, like circular fan, the noise became soothing. Dennis understood now. Their toots and calls and long pitched notes had a beauty to them. Even the sharp cry of something consumed. We adapt to what we are given until it kills us. We are the roaches, the Twinkies, that will survive til the end. Dennis fell asleep.
Dennis woke.
“Sally,” Clarence muttered. “Come on Sally, you’ll be ok. Come on Sally. Mom!”
It was too loud, Dennis could hear their upstairs neighbors rustle and bark. He pushed Clarence awake.
“You were talking in your sleep.”
“Sorry.”
Dennis handed him the jug. Clarence took a swig. He looked less brittle.
“Is Sally your wife?”
Clarence took a slow draw of water.
“How do you know about Sally?”
“You say her name in your sleep. You have since the beginning. Did she not make it?”
Clarence turned his head away from Dennis. “She’s dead.”
“I’m sorry, man.”
“It was tough. She went bad.” Clarence’s tone had changed. It was hitched. He put his hands up to his mouth.
“I’m sorry man,” Dennis said. “Were you in love?”
Clarence’s head snapped forward. He choked out a “I thought so at the time.”
“She loved you?”
Clarence’s shoulder shook, he had difficulty breathing. “It was hard to tell.” He finally turned and Dennis saw tears rolling down his cheeks, he smothered his mouth with his hands and Dennis realized: he was laughing.
“What?”
“Hmm?” Clarence’s couldn’t talk. He was racked with silent laughter.
“Who was Sally?!”
“Sally . . . was . . . my . . . turtle.”
“What?!”
Clarence nodded and wiped his eyes. “Ugh. I had her when I was eight. She got hit by a car.”
Clarence burst. The joy echoed around the hard walls. The dumbfounded look on Dennis’s face made him laugh harder.
“What about the wedding ring?” Dennis blurted, his face red.
Clarence looked down at it. “I was married, but we divorced a long time ago.” He held his palm up. The ring was nicked and scratched at its base. “I use it to open up beers.”
Clarence continued to laugh and Dennis joined in. Things snapped and clicked above them, but neither could help it. For once, Dennis didn’t care. And he got how Clarence had felt before. There was no respite. Something dangerous was always lurking beyond the campfire. Well screw it. Come down and get shot, motherfuckers. We got guns.
“I don’t know why you’re laughing, you’re the one dreaming about your turtle,” Dennis finally said. That got them started again.
“We’re going to die tomorrow aren’t we?” Dennis asked.
Clarence wiped his cheeks. He reached back and grabbed the bottle of McCormicks. He flipped the cap off and handed it to Dennis. Dennis drank and it filled his stomach with warmth. He passed it back.
“Yeah, probably,” Clarence said. “But hey,” he put his hand on Dennis’s shoulder. “At least I’ll finally get to see Sally.”
They roared and it felt good. The chittering squawked and wings slapped and Clarence stood up and yelled, “Fuck you! We’re right here assholes. Fuck you! And guess what! We’re going to swim in your river! M-I-S-S-I-S-S-I-P-P-I, motherfuckers!”
"Dirt" 12_15_12 thru 1_1_13
If you're just reading, start with "Dirt" 12_6 thru 12_14
= = =
Dennis winced with every footstep. Each squeak of the rubber sole sounded like a plate crashing. His heart beat in his ears. He felt each drop of sweat leave each pit and roll down his side. But he felt calm. Scared out of his mind, but calm. Focused. Like the part of his brain that would have run away screaming had been shut down. He was hunting. He and his father hunted throughout the year, turkey and deer. Deer were easy: get there before dusk, climb into a stand. Wait. Sight in. Pull the trigger. The hardest part was getting it back to the car.
Every year, his dad drank Pabst while they sat. Dennis always thought the cans looked cool. This last fall - their first morning in the blind - his dad had passed one to him.
“Just one,” his father said. It was 5:00 am. They cracked them open and Dennis drank his first beer with his dad.
Somehow with night still fighting day, the beer tasted good. Bitter, bubbly, but right. For a few hours that morning, Dennis felt like a man.
“My dad gave me my first beer,” his father said. “His father, the same. And they all said the same thing that I’m going to tell you now.”
Dennis waited for the advice that had been passed down, father-to-son, in his family for generations. His father drank his beer and regarded him, his progeny, while the forest woke around them. Finally, his father was ready.
“Dennis?”
“Yeah, dad?”
“Don’t tell your mother.”
Dennis spurt his beer. His father laughed.
Deer were easy. Turkey hunting took guile and patience. Great eyes, flighty, always a millisecond from spooked. Turkey was hunting.
Dennis moved with deliberation. Every step was cushioned with the balls of his feet and a bent knee. He steadied his breathing. He got basic. As far as he was concerned, he was hunting turkey.
At the end of the hallway the snot went in both directions. To his left, a section of roof had collapsed and the pink Fuzz had gotten through. At a glance, you’d think the pink was wall insulation. But it throbbed like a pumping vein and it dripped with a pus-like fluid. The walls it covered were bowed and chewed - it was breaking them down. The pink on the ground was soaked and the runoff had formed a pool in front of the living cotton candy. And in that pool, Dennis saw what Clarence must have shot.
The flat worm had jeans and shoes. It was six feet long, three feet wide. Dennis immediately thought of a flayed fish. You could tell the legs weren’t in use. They laid flat like ribbons - maybe even empty - but somehow conjoined with the body. Around its border and along the spine were beads. Dennis guessed when it was alive they glowed, just like he had seen at the hospital. A long black whip was attached to its head.
A line of pink had already made its way to the corpse. Dennis saw it hum and shift, ever slowly, growing over it like mold.
Four cots. Dennis swung the gun around and went the other direction. He knew where he’d find Clarence, dead or alive. Even under duress, he knew where he would go. There were two doors down this hallway: a men’s bathroom room and a women’s.
Dennis put his ear up to the men’s. He heard scrapping and a whipping sound. He steeled himself, counted to three, and kicked the door in.
Three flat worms were outside a bathroom stall. Beneath them, Dennis saw that Clarence was moving between the stalls, sliding underneath, keeping the glowing things from zeroing in on him. They moved strangely. One still had legs - they were up in it, where just the shins down were exposed. The feet were no longer human - they were webbed and mushed like pancake batter. The other two had long cilia - millipeded feet - that undulated in an asynchronous wave as they scurried back and forth, slapping their long black tongues – they were tongues – against and over the stalls. They shot them under and over, but none of them could get inside. They didn’t have arms and they bumped into each other in their single-minded focus on Clarence. They clamored over Clarence’s gun. Blood was speckled near it.
Dennis didn’t wait. He aimed at the back of one and fired. It collapsed instantly. He racked the slide and fired. Another dropped. The one with feet had turned and it whipped its tongue at him. He ducked under the cracking ligament and lost his balance. By the grace of God, he fell backward, not forward. He leveled the gun on the approaching . . . fuck, whatever . . . and fired.
It skittered back, its tongue quivered, and the tip of it opened like it wanted to say something. And then it hit the ground. One of the other flat worms swayed. Dennis racked the pump and filled it with double ought for good measure.
“You ok?” Dennis asked. Suddenly, he just wanted to nap.
“Yeah, but tell a motherfucker when you’re gonna shoot!”
Dennis looked at the stall doors. Every one of them was peppered with shot.
Clarence came out of the nearest stall, holding his left hand. Two fingers hung off, held by skin.
= = =
Clarence grabbed the rifle and they got out of there. He held his left hand to his chest, wincing. His face was gray. At the Jeep, he collapsed into the passenger seat and closed his eyes. Except for a thread of skin, the pointer and index fingers on his left hand were completely detached. Blood oozed out of them and Dennis could see bone.
“The medical supplies are in back,” Clarence hissed. His words were slurred with pain.
Dennis found a red tackle box with “First Aid,” on the side and brought it over. It was stuffed beyond its original contents. There were morphine bags, saline, IV’s, other pills with long names, and extra bandages.
“Get the gauze, get the scissors, there should be some kind of Neosporin in there.”
Dennis did.
“Roll out the gauze - like three feet - and cut it.”
Dennis did.
Clarence gripped the wrist of his injured hand. As if his left arm knew what its host was planning, it fought to stay close to his body. With great effort Clarence straightened it out. The severed fingers dangled down.
“Cut them off,” he wheezed. His body shook.
“There could be a hospital, if we got ice . . .”
“There ain’t no hospital, there ain’t no ice! Do it!”
Dennis hesitated.
“DO IT!”
Dennis leaned over and examined the wound. He took the scissors and cut through the skin. The two fingers fell to the gravel.
Clarence hitched and let out a disbelieving laugh.
“Fuck this hurts. Neosporin.” Dennis gave it to him. Clarence emptied half the tube and smeared it over his stumps. He held out his good hand and Dennis gave him the gauze. Clarence wrapped the hand expertly. He’d seen pros do it for twenty years.
“Let’s get out of here, this whole town’s dead.”
“Where?”
“The Air Force base. If anything’s up, that’d be up.”
Clarence reclined his seat and closed his eyes. Dennis drove south on 63. At the end of town, he pulled into a Shell gas station. Clarence looked asleep, but when Dennis got out to scavenge, he spoke.
“Look for booze. I need a drink.”
The Jeep was nearly full, but it barely managed two hundred miles between tanks. It couldn’t get them to St. Louis. Dennis tried the pumps. They were off. He saw the gas caps on the ground where tankers would refill the underground reservoirs. He tried to pull at the covers but they were locked. He put an ear to one and he could hear the gentle sloshing of the gas underfoot. He closed his eyes and wished for a syphon.
“Water, water, everywhere, and not a drop to drink,” ran through his head. Where had he heard that? Something from English class probably . . .
He changed his goal and looked around for extra containers. He figured at the very worst, they could crawl underneath cars along the highway, punch a hole in the tanks, and collect gas as they went.
He circled the station, shotgun ready, but nothing was around. The trees near the back lot were looped, like he had seen on the way to the Army Reserve. Up close, they were like black snakes with their heads tucked in the sand. Their strange, flat, skin tags flapped in the wind.
He went into the convenient mart. The ceiling was gone and everything on the floor was gunked and nasty. He moved counter clockwise around the perimeter. It was clear that someone had been here already. He could see footsteps and one section of fridge that looked ok, had been ransacked. A small recess at the back of the store led to the bathroom and a closet. The bathroom door was locked and a smell came from it. Something was dead in there . . . maybe someone had had enough. He opened the closet. Inside he found cleaning supplies and a 5-gallon container used as a mop bucket.
“Boom,” he said.
He didn’t discriminate. He dumped out every container and put them in the bucket.
He went around the horn until he was at the register. The tobacco displays were on the floor. Rain-soaked Skoal, Winston, and Parliament boxes littered the attendant side. The liquor cabinet was cleared as well and the glass shards intermingled with cowboy silhouettes, smoking camels, and cancer warnings. He went behind the counter, watching his step, and pushed the boxes around in case something was underneath. He heard a rattle. He flipped a box up with the shotgun muzzle. A fifth of McCormicks Whiskey, weathered but unbroken, stared up at him.
He took his spoils to the Jeep.
“I found this.”
Clarence opened one eye and saw the whiskey.
“Does it look alright?”
Dennis spun it around in his hand. It seemed fine. The labels were warped, but the bottle had no signs of Fleas.
“I think so.”
“Open it, please.”
Dennis did so. Clarence took it with his good hand and gulped some down. He winced from the burn.
“Oh man, that’s some cheap shit. Want some?” Clarence held it out.
Why not? Dennis took a swig and immediately spit it out. He started to gag. Clarence grinned.
“Never had whiskey?”
Dennis shook his head, his face puckered in disgust. Despite his pain, Clarence laughed.
“Now’s a good time to start.”
= = =
Clarence worked through half the bottle by the time they reached Macon, thirty miles south of Kirksville. They didn’t stop. The small town looked like a tornado had ripped through it. Past Macon, the two-lane highway split and became double lanes, north/south. Dennis had pictured the road clogged with the rusted remains of cars, but he’d seen too many zombie movies. Kirksville was the largest town in the area and traffic there was nil.
But a few obstacles did present themselves. At one point in a section where the roads cut through hills, a semi was jackknifed across both lanes. They had to backtrack, slog across a marshy median and take the northbound route south. At the trough, amongst the looped vegetation, Dennis swore the truck shifted as if something was underneath it. The hair stood on the back of Dennis’s neck and he almost said something, but Clarence was asleep, asking “where’s Sally?” and “she’ll be ok.” The bottle of McCormicks rolled port and starboard in his footwell.
Fleas had turned the road into black gravel. Dennis thanked his lucky stars for the Jeep. The sky was blanketed with dark clouds. Off in the distance, Dennis saw light ripple through a section of thunderheads.
“Clarence.” Dennis prodded him awake with his hand. Clarence woke up. He immediately snatched the bottle and took a swig.
“How long was I out?”
“Two hours.”
“Are we near Columbia?”
“No. Halfway, if.”
Clarence got his full bearings: “why are we driving on the wrong side of the highway?”
“South was blocked,” Dennis hitched his chin ahead of them. “Look.”
It was definitely a storm and it looked nasty. The Jeep had no roof. And even if it did, with Fleas, who knows what was in the rain?
“We need to get to an underpass. How fast are you going?”
“Thirty, the road is jacked.”
“Go faster, man.”
Dennis pushed down the gas and the needle climbed to sixty.
Five minutes later they saw the overpass ahead and beyond it, a sheet of rain fast approaching in a game of chicken. The clouds were a frenzy of lightning. The earth shook with each thunderclap. Dennis didn’t need Clarence to tell him: he pushed the pedal to the floor and the Jeep groaned as it approached seventy.
The rain could be nothing. It could be cool and clean. Or it could be poison, or seed them so they became a giant flat worm, like they had encountered at the Army Reserve. Who knew?
“Slow down, we’re going to make it!” Clarence yelled over the wind noise of the Jeep playing race car. The body of the truck moaned and shook, Dennis waited for the entire thing to blow apart like Legos.
“Seriously!” Clarence yelled again. Lightning was all around them. They were five hundred yards away. Rain droplets splattered against the window. A few turned into a torrent, Clarence changed his mind - “Keep going, keep going!”
Fifty yards out, Dennis locked the brakes. The Jeep skidded and shrieked, slowly rotating sideways. Clarence gripped the roll bar with both hands immediately yelling “SHIT!” when his injured hand protested. The wet road saved them - if it was dry, they would have flipped. The Jeep spun twice and teetered to a stop just under the overpass. Rain boomed across the bridge above them. It raced over the highway they had just been on.
“You gotta be fucking kidding me,” Clarence said between breaths. “Holy shit, I mean, come on.”
They looked at each other wide-eyed. Dennis reached his hand out and took the bottle. This time he kept it down.
The oil and engine gauges were in the red. Dennis parked the CJ against the cement support that angled up towards the bridge and turned the truck off. It snorted “thank you.”
The wind was blowing rain under the overpass. They decided to take some supplies and climb up the steep rake of cement. It appeared dry. They shared a can of pork and beans.
“How’s the hand?”
“Hurts. More, I feel stupid.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know about you, but I always thought I’d be badass in a tough situation. When I turned the corner and saw those things – they were all there, sipping at that pool of pus – I froze. Did you ever see “Ghostbusters?”
“It’s one of my favorites.”
“Fucking hilarious – when Bill Murray first sees Slimer? That was basically me. I didn’t snap out of it until one noticed me. Then I couldn’t get the safety off, then finally I fired and missed wide.”
“One of them was dead at the pool.”
“That was luck, I wasn’t aiming for it. THEN instead of running the way I came, I trapped myself in the men’s room. Retard sandwiches, man. Retard sandwiches all around. I’m lucky I got out with just a few missing fingers.”
They both looked at his misshapen lump.
“Are there . . .” Dennis cleared his throat, “any symptoms?”
“It hurts.” Clarence took a swig of McCormicks and passed it over. Dennis took another one. He didn’t think twenty-one mattered anymore.
“No, like, do you feel different?”
Clarence’s eyes widened, “Ah shit. No. You don’t think?”
“I have no idea.”
“I feel fine. It just hurts.”
“Cool.” But they were both tense.
“Fuck, man. I hope nothing happens. If it does and I can’t,” he gestured to the shotgun, “you have to, ok?”
“Yeah, man. Same goes.” Dennis thought for a second. “I bet you’re fine.”
“How do you figure?”
“I was thinking about it ever since we saw those . . . things at the hospital. Then that red fuzz, how it breaks down everything.”
Clarence waited.
“We get sick from bacteria and viruses, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Fleas didn’t make us sick, it killed us. It killed EVERYTHING it touched.”
“And it did it nasty,” Clarence added.
“Yeah! It came out of nowhere and destroyed everything. But now there are aliens and plants look weird and how? Everything it killed, changed. You said the bodies disappeared from the ER. And now there are alien things everywhere.”
“So it broke us down and used it.”
“In biology class we talked about the origin of Earth. How the first life came from primordial soup.”
“I remember that. So Fleas made everything it touched primordial soup.”
Dennis nodded. “It makes sense, right? It came from space and what can travel through space? Not much. It’s tough. So they design something they sent ahead. It kills everything by breaking it down, and then it uses it. The news said it was a huge molecule, they thought it was an act of war, and it was, but not from the Middle East, or anything. There are a ton of movies about this . . . remember “Red Planet?”
Clarence shook his head.
“It was ok. Val Kilmer was in it. The whole thing was that we were terraforming Mars for humans. I think in that, we sent algae or something, to get more oxygen in the air, but the thing is, if you could, wouldn’t you send everything that made sense? It would be more efficient, right?”
Clarence nodded and took another swig. He passed it over and Dennis did the same. They heard that leathery ripping sound. Clarence checked his watch: it was only 3:00 pm. Out in a field, two columns slowly rose and as they did, that stretching sound continued. Each stalk was fifty feet all. A bulb formed at the end. Further away, more stalks rose. The ground vibrated near them. A pair of stalks rose right near the overpass. The bulbs at the end blinked. They were eyes.
= = =
The stalks came from underneath the soil and suddenly the air was clumped with dirt as the creatures shook themselves like a wet dog and slithered out. When they first emerged, they were black, but then their bodies lit up along the sides. Lines of white light ran up the stalks.
“They’re snails,” Dennis whispered.
The skin on the bulbs peeled back. A thick bed of bony filaments, each taller than a man, grew out of it. They twitched and vibrated with violence.
“They’re not snails,” Clarence corrected. Without a word, they shimmied further up the ramp.
The one nearest to them bent its stalks, stretching, maybe waking up. Then the antennae fully extended upward and arced down, hammering into the earth. The creature used the stalks to move, dragging it along the ground in jerky lunges. As it did, the body rose out of the field until the mouth was completely clear of its underground bed: it was eating the soil. The stalks and the front of the creature were thick and muscular. The mouth was the entire width of its body. The rest of the creature looked like a dragging blanket. Over the next hour, the tillers expanded in size as they gorged, bloating with their meal until the stalks struggled to move them forward.
There were dozens of them and they sat in the fields like grounded submarines. Their lights blinked in a synchronous pattern – never at the same time - and they groaned, like a fat man who’d eaten way too much at the buffet.
Night came and other creatures rose from the soil. Dennis recognized some. In the shadow of the giant tillers, even the rays looked small until one got so close it almost came in. The cilia balls moved around the field, chasing the jellyfish. Something as long as a bus moved like an inchworm, but it was too far away to see. A fixed sheet of glowing dots seemed to rise and fall with the wind. Jellyfish would leave the ground and glide to it only to vanish.
The tillers had been quiet for hours and now they called out. The creatures around them moved away and the stalks dug at the ground in front of their gluttoned frames. They wormed their way back under the soil until it was just their antennae. The ripping sound filled the air and those shrunk out of sight, too.
CHAPTER 4
It was a long night and they slept in shifts, but nothing bothered them. For Dennis, he felt like he was in some bizzaro afterlife. Strange glowing shapes would roll, ripple and float beneath them. Some would attack the others, some were the size of the Jeep, some flecks of light rode the breeze.
At no time did the creatures acknowledge their human interlopers. They just went about their routine. In many ways, it reminded Dennis of an ecosystem that lived in the ocean coral.
After three hours, he nudged Clarence awake from his cries for Sally.
“Anything?” Clarence rubbed his face with his hands.
“Just . . .” Dennis waved a hand at the strange after party before them. Dennis fell asleep.
It felt like minutes later when Clarence woke him up. But when Dennis checked his watch, he’d been asleep four hours.
“Okay?”
“Yep.”
Clarence rolled over and was out. Dennis thought about what they’d find in St. Louis. If the Air Force base was gone, then they were fucked. He couldn’t see where else they would go. He wondered if the alien population was worse in St. Louis. There were more people, but the aliens didn’t seem to like buildings, concrete, man-made stuff.
What do I know? he thought. He came out to this: it’d only been a few days. He wasn’t an expert.
Maybe Fleas didn’t hit everything. Maybe Mexico was fine, or somewhere overseas. Maybe it was just the U.S.
But that didn’t make sense. No, Dennis was convinced this was global. Unless it was a fluke - a meteor that happened to have these things. Then it was just bad luck, wrong place, wrong time. His mind raced over theories based on conjecture.
A few hours later, the horizon went from black to a dull grey and the glowing horde disappeared into the fields. The sun rose and turned everything pink.
“Sally, I’m sorry, Sally,” Clarence said. His face was contorted. Dennis shook his shoulder and his eyes popped open.
“It’s morning,” Dennis said.
Clarence jolted up, still a bit lost in sleep. After a second, he slapped his hands together, it echoed along the metal ceiling. “Let’s get to the base.”
Both of their hearts nearly stopped when Dennis tried the Jeep. It ground and whirled, then a few lights ignited on the dash. Dennis took the key out of the ignition, looked at Clarence, who – Dennis was pretty sure – was praying, and tried again. It hiccupped to life. Visible relief washed over their faces.
“Less than half a tank,” Dennis said.
“Let’s deal with it later,” Clarence replied.
They drove south until they hit the 70 highway. They took it east towards St. Louis. From the on ramp, they could see Columbia to the west. The city looked like melted candles.
“It looks bad,” Clarence said. It was a series of hills instead of buildings, a mountain range one-tenths scale.
Dennis followed it in his rearview mirror wondering how anyone could have survived. Maybe Kirksville got lucky.
= = =
The 70 was the same slog as 63. Slow, every straight line a blessing. Now Clarence and Dennis could recognize the signs of occupation. It became their Slug Bug. They’d try to out do the other by pointing out where a creature was or a plant had changed.
The trees were obvious, they looked like yarn loops. Tillers were easy too: the soil they slept underneath had a slight grade to it and berms of – they assumed tiller shit – followed their path like bread crumbs.
The mounds of tiller shit were occupied too. That was a different guessing game. Some of the holes were big, some were small.
“Definitely the squids, they could suck their bodies in,” Clarence said as they passed a mound near the highway. It was honeycombed with holes capped with soil. Some of the older mounds had plants on them that weren’t a terraform. They were crystalline, and grew in ninety-degree joints. They weren’t from around here.
Halfway to St. Louis, the Jeep was near empty. They stopped in a crop of cars.
“Keep it running,” Clarence said. Dennis nodded and they left the Jeep while it popped and clacked, sounding ill.
Dennis spotted a lifted Dodge Ram. “It should be easy to get to the tank.”
Clarence nodded. He had a tire iron with a flat edge on one side and Dennis carried the 5-gallon bucket.
Clarence pressed the center of the tank with the iron. His eyes followed down to the road. “Here,” he pointed.
Dennis put the bucket there.
After ten minutes of stabbing it, the tank finally gave. When Clarence pulled the metal bar from the hole, wormy nodules tumbled out of it and squirmed on the ground. Dennis and Clarence both jumped back. The writhing mass grew. They were albino white, the length of a finger, and like all the other creatures, they blinked with light. The sun roasted them and they skittled along the pavement, steaming.
From then on, they hit the tanks and listened as if they were choosing cantaloupe. If gas knocked back and forth, it was good to go. If it sounded solid, they passed.
It was hard work. Both Dennis and Clarence were exhausted from hammering at the tanks. Their shoulders and arms ached. They were five in and the Jeep was only half full. To add insult to injury, they had no good way to pour the gas into the tank, so they would spill and watch the soil leech up their hard-earned reward.
They took a break.
Clarence inspected his injured hand: the brown scabby crust on the wrap had bloomed red again.
“We don’t have enough, right?” Clarence asked. Dennis shook his head.
Clarence stood up and climbed on top of a car. He looked around. There was a bunch of trees a quarter mile ahead. A semi was nose first in them.
“That,” he said. Dennis climbed the car and looked. “If those tanks are even a bit full, we’re good.”
“Or a hundred pounds of alien maggots will come out.”
Clarence jumped down. “Yeah, but we can’t keep doing this. I don’t have much left.”
Dennis understood: he was in the same boat. The fact was, they were near-starving and they just spent two hours expending almost everything they had.
“It’s out in a field right up against the loopie stuff,” Dennis said.
Clarence nodded, “yeah.” He looked at the Jeep. Blue smoke puttered from its tailpipe. “Do you have a name for her?”
His dad did.
“Jamie, like “Jamie the Jeep.””
“My dad always said it was good to name your cars.”
Dennis followed Clarence back to Jamie. Clarence put his hand on Jamie’s hood and rubbed it.
“Jamie, please, PLEASE don’t strand us out there.”
The CJ purred and popped.
They got in and they weaved through the cars. At the edge of the road, Dennis stopped, got out, and locked the hubs. Closer to the semi, it seemed further away. Berms surrounded it. The trees and brush it had crashed through were only so in hindsight. Clarence, Dennis, and Jamie the Jeep rolled out onto an alien landscape. It just happened to be on earth.
= = =
“Careful,” Clarence said. The ground was not like normal soil. It had a spongy quality and as the treads of the Jeep rolled over it, a liquid seeped out only to suck back in as the weight transferred forward.
Far away, the semi looked untouched. Up close, that wasn’t the case. The loopy trees had binded through the front of it. The strange fans covered the semi cab like barnacles.
“Maybe we shouldn’t,” Dennis said.
“Got to,” Clarence muttered. He gripped the roll cage as if they were climbing a steep grade. They were on a stretch of road where there was no obvious shelter. Before they had reached the crop of cars, they had traversed wide swaths of missing highway the tillers had dragged themselves through. They couldn’t be caught in the open at night. They needed the fuel. They had to get to St. Louis.
The berms were active. The holes quivered, the caps bubbled, strange noises gurgled from their recesses. A long berm – a tiller – lay parallel to the trees. As the CJ slowly made its way, both Dennis and Clarence could feel the creature sleep. The earth had a Jell-O quality to it and the trees nearest the long berm swayed left and right as the tiller dreamed.
It felt longer, but within minutes they were at the trailer. The ground was sponge all around them. The loop trees had a snotty sheen.
“Get up right next to the cab,” Clarence said. “I don’t want to touch the ground if I don’t have to.”
Dennis steered the Jeep within inches of the side and the CJ idled slowly towards the front.
“Shit, a little to the left,” Clarence instructed. Dennis didn’t ask why, he just did so. They were next to the gas tank. Clarence opened the door and after a second, kicked it with his foot. It sloshed with fuel. He leaned over, stretching far.
“Fuck,” Clarence said.
“What?”
Clarence pulled himself back into the Jeep. He looked defeated.
“The fuel cap needs a key,” he said.
“No.” Dennis stood up and Clarence showed him. The gas cap had a keyhole in its center.
A berm farted as if saying “surprise!”
They both looked up at the cab. It was scabbed over and shivering with the fans. The driver side window was milky but they could see that the roof had held.
“I don’t know if I can get up there,” Clarence said. He emphasized with his injured hand. It was a short climb.
“The keys are in there, aren’t they?” Dennis responded.
“If Fleas didn’t melt them.”
They were quiet for a moment. The ground gurgled with indigestion.
“Ok, switch spots,” Dennis said. He and Clarence slid past each other. Instead of sitting down, Dennis climbed over the roll bar onto the front of the Jeep.
Another bout of flatulence hit a berm and an acrid smell – ammonia – filled the air. The fans on the cab fluttered in response and shifted their position. Dennis froze. Finally: “Clarence, if something happens, shoot me, ok?”
Clarence pulled out one of the Glocks. “They’re just plants. You’ll be fine.” But he didn’t sound sure.
Dennis moved to the side of the hood, nearest the semi’s running boards. He tentatively stuck a leg out. He was at least a foot away from touching it. He gritted his teeth and looked at the ground. What he saw was discouraging: a faint, white smoke rose from where the tires touched the ground.
He measured the door handle and the running board. On a silent three-count he pushed off and grabbed the handle with his left hand. His body slapped into fans and they fluttered against his clothes like butterflies, breaking off and falling to the ground. He fought the creepiness and focused. He planted his feet on the running board and slid them through the fans to get right of the door, feeling them stretch and snap away as their base was sheered from the rotting steel.
The door was unlocked. A fan was attached to a metal handhold a trucker would use to heave themselves into the cab. Dennis plucked the fan off the rail and felt it vibrate in his hand. He let it go and his whole body shivered. He opened the door.
Something long and slithery, like a fresh oyster, fell out onto him. It smothered his scream. He barely held on with his right hand as he struggled to pull off the oily tarp that covered his face and upper body. His left hand dug through it – it wasn’t completely solid – but finally the struggle and gravity slunk it off his face and it fell into a limp mass at his feet.
Dennis threw up. His body racked from nausea, and the slime that covered him smelled like the stewed stomach of road kill. What lay rumpled at his feet was a rotting flat worm. It had been trapped in the cab.
“Are you ok?!” Clarence asked.
Dennis continued to puke. It soaked into the spongy ground that shook in delight.
“Am I ok? Am I ok?” he asked. He remembered the movie Robocop when a bad guy got doused with toxic waste. He pictured his body melting.
“You’re fine. Keep going,” Clarence urged.
Even with his stomach cramped, he worked his way into the cab. He found a piece of cloth and wiped the gook from his eyes and face. The driver seat and the floor beneath it were melted and deformed. The upholstery was shredded – Dennis remembered the flat worms strange tongue – and the windows were scored with a thousand scratches. The flat worm had been born, and had died, here.
The keys were in the ignition. He pulled them out and inspected them. They all looked fine. He looked behind and saw that it was a sleeper cab. He quickly found a tool kit. In that tool kit he found a pair of three foot long tubes and a cylindrical squeeze bulb with holes on opposites ends. A siphon.
= = =
Dennis scrounged around the rest of the cab. It was filthy with wrappers, dirty clothes, porno mags, a bottle of Jergens, and the nuisances of life away from the base: a photo of a young woman and man smiling. The man held the small brunette from behind, his head resting on her shoulder. She wore white, he a tux. The photo was yellow, small, curled at the edges and taped to the wall. Next to it was a larger and more recent photo of the same man with a teenage girl up on his shoulder. The happiness captured in that photo acted like a light in the room. She was clearly struggling to get down, her long twisted hair falling in front of her face, her smile wide and full of teeth. The man was older, fatter, with a thick, black beard, but his mouth was in an ‘o’ and his eyes sparkled. This was the rug that held the room together. It was clear this had been this man’s purpose.
And he slopped to the ground like a string of spit, Dennis’s mind offered. Now he’s in your nostrils.
Dennis crimped his eyes closed and pushed away those dark thoughts. He got what they needed, he searched one last time. He looked at that happy photo and for a moment it was he and his parents, but that went away too. It was a man and a girl he would never know, caught in a millisecond of time where there was no weight to the world.
Dennis moved back to the front of the cab and opened the door. He stared at bare earth where the Jeep should have been. The tire imprints were still visible in the sponge. Little white worms squirmed from the porous surface.
“Dennis!” Clarence called from his left. Clarence had reversed to the back of the trailer.
“What’s going on?!”
Clarence flinched and waved his hand downward: keep it quiet. “Those maggots were eating into the tread” he stage whispered.
“I got a siphon!”
Clarence nodded with enthusiasm. “Great. Get the fuel open and the siphon in, I’ll drive up. We need to go.” Clarence looked past Dennis to the trees.
Dennis unlocked the gas cap and assembled the siphon. Clarence did a three point turnabout and reversed slowly.
Dennis looked at the maggots. Around them, really on all the soil, was that clear liquid he had seen at the Armory. A berm nearest to them emitted that same clear liquid. The spongy surface masked it, but it was leaking down into the dried snot forest.
“Let’s do it.” Clarence had the Jeep next to the semi. Dennis took off the Jeep’s gas cap and put the syphon tube in. After a few squeezes of the bulb, he felt the fuel pulse through.
“There’s something in those trees,” Clarence said.
“What?”
Clarence pointed. The loopy trees and the tall bush made it hard to see even a few feet in.
“Through those two loops,” Clarence directed. Dennis saw: towards the middle of the trees, something was hanging from one of the larger loops. They reminded Dennis of stuffed grape leaves: densely wrapped, green, oily. Two of them hung from the top of the tree loop. Beneath them was a large mound that had completely covered the loop’s base. It was red and textured like the inside of a pomegranate. His eyes adjusted to the shiny, snot forest, and Dennis saw that the red, uni hill and the two hanging things above it were surrounded by a pool of the clear liquid.
A knocking sound came from one of the hanging pods. The stuffed grape 'leaves’ weren’t leaves. They were wings. It rustled and swayed slightly before settling down.
Fuel sloshed out of the CJ. It was topped.
“Let’s get out of here,” Clarence said. They couldn’t take their eyes off the hanging pods. Dennis thought they were about five feet long. Two. A pair. Beneath them a nest of red dots that – it could have been the light – seemed to move. And unlike everything else they’ve encountered, seemed to care little that there was sunlight.
As they drove away, Dennis thought the loops made a little more sense: they were dream catchers designed to trap the worst nightmares and bring them to life.
= = =
There were fewer and fewer cars as they approached St. Louis. Whale-length berms were everywhere, more prevalent than before. While the fields had been eradicated by the tillers and turned into wavy lumps that other creatures could call home, any clump of trees remained untouched, circumvented, loopy and scaly, doing their own thing.
“What were those things?” Dennis asked. They had been on the road for thirty minutes and the whole time, he had expected to look back and find those winged creatures pursuing.
“When you jumped onto the semi, that’s when I saw them,” Clarence said. “It looked like a flag was in the middle of the trees and then I saw it wrap back up into its cocoon.”
“What’d they look like?”
“Buggie. Brown. It was hanging by its jaws. Its belly was tucked into it.”
“So they’re bigger than they look?”
“Yeah.”
Dennis shook his head. “We got lucky.”
“If we get to the base, we got lucky. And if people are at the base and they know what the hell is going on and a way out, we got lucky. Right now, we’re just alive. For those bug bats, I think that stuff below was their nest or something.”
They drove for hours. There were open sections of road where they got up to sixty, and other sections with just remnants of highway, like a dusty trail, populated with the gurgling berms where the speedometer barely touched five.
Clarence checked Dennis’s watch: 5:45 pm. He looked up to the sun. “We got an hour.”
“We’re close,” Dennis said. He had made this trip a thousand times with his father. A few miles back, they had passed the skeletal remains of a Cracker Barrel he and his dad would eat at.
Twenty minutes later, they saw the St. Louis skyline. It was of teeth worn and poorly cared for, collapsed and broken. The city looked tilted and it took Dennis a minute to push through the optical illusion.
“Everything near the river is gone,” he said. It was as if a biblical flood had come down the Missouri and taken half the buildings with it.
“Please let the Air Force base still be there,” Clarence said, praying to the sky.
Looking up did not help. Flapping silhouettes were framed by pink sky and splintered skyscrapers. Dennis’s immediately assumed pigeons – they were everywhere in St. Louis.
Clarence had already reached back for the shotgun and assault rifle. The flocks flying from building to building, perching on top like watchful gargoyles, flowing like dandelion seeds in the turbulent air, weren’t the “flying rats,” his dad liked to say. It was the things they had seen hanging from the tree. Two, quiet and resting, had sent chills down the back of Dennis’s spine. St. Louis was infested with thousands.
The Jeep bucked when its tires found broken asphalt, possibly protected from Fleas by everything else above it.
“Where is the base?” Dennis asked.
“I don’t know,” Clarence responded.
“You don’t know?!”
A shadow slipped over them. They looked up and watched as a winged creature flew past. Dennis saw it clearly: it had broad, rectangular wings that seemed to be made of a thousand thick hairs. Its abdomen was tear dropped and made of white flesh that had never seen the sun. Attached to it were long antennae that pointed backwards – they were nearly ten feet long – and ended in curled barbs. They hung beneath the creature like trolling lures. The rest of it was brown and hardened, half the length of its soft underbelly. Its eyes were underneath it, yellow and searching. An eight-hooked maw was its mouth. It continued to circle down towards them.
“What the hell are we going to do?!” Dennis croaked. The sound of his voice, furthered the fear.
Clarence took the safety off the shotgun and checked the chamber to make sure it was loaded.
“Get us out of the open,” he said. He kept his eyes on the bug bat. It continued to follow them, but without any obvious aggression. If it had been a dolphin, it would have been cute.
Dennis didn’t know where to turn or whether to take an underpass or stay up top. He couldn’t imagine what could be in a tunnel, so he forced himself to ignore the bug bats that trailed them. They were now in the misshapen city.
“Duck!” Clarence grabbed Dennis’s head as a barb singed past them and clipped the roll cage. A thick knuckle on its end slashed the barb into the metal bar and the flying beast quickly released leaving it cleaved and the steel raw.
“Well, now we know what that does . . .” Clarence let out a crazy laugh.
The sun winked goodbye. They could hear the flapping wings around them. They heard the far off ripping of leather as the tillers on the borders woke and went about their duty.
Suddenly, thick white beams of light filled the air ahead of them.
“What are those?” Dennis asked. It looked like something used at a movie premiere, but amped up a thousand times.
“The things are going to it!” Clarence said. The bug bats rose into the sky and flew ahead over and through the splintered remains of the city. A chatter filled the air.
“Did you hear that?!” Clarence slapped Dennis on the shoulder. Again a burst of hard sounds. “Machine guns! Fucking machine guns!”
Dennis drove through the city streets, always towards the white columns past the city. Gunfire filled the air in controlled bursts. Ahead, revealed by the light, bug bats burst from lead and whirled towards earth.
“We’re going to make it!” Clarence was rocking in his seat, the whole CJ shook with him. He started to cry. “We’re going to make it!”
Dennis got back on the 70 and they broke through to the edge of the city. The columns of light greeted them a dozen miles away. The entire base glowed like an LED. Dennis slowed to a stop. Clarence’s cries of relief turned into sobs.
“Why? God, why?!” he screamed.
The bridge that would take them across the Mississippi - and to safety - was gone. A hundred yards out, two broken pylons reached out of the water like severed fingers. The water glowed and swirled around them. Everything glowed. Up and down the Mississippi, on the banks, and as far as they eye could see, was an orgy of life so thick it choked the water. It made what they had seen so far infinitesimal, inconsequential, anecdotal. Dennis and Clarence had seen the by-product of what Fleas had been sent to do. Its side effect. A million glowing, pulsing, creatures of different shapes, and sizes, and properties, dragged themselves up the riverbanks or kept to the water as either predator or prey.
Fleas was for the water. Dennis recalled so clearly what he had learned in his eighth grade science class: seventy percent. Seventy percent of the earth’s surface was covered in water. Water was what NASA always looked for. Whenever the Hubble or a probe discovered something newsworthy, it was always about proper environmental conditions of some far off planet, and water.
Why wouldn’t an alien care about the same?
= = =
Dennis winced with every footstep. Each squeak of the rubber sole sounded like a plate crashing. His heart beat in his ears. He felt each drop of sweat leave each pit and roll down his side. But he felt calm. Scared out of his mind, but calm. Focused. Like the part of his brain that would have run away screaming had been shut down. He was hunting. He and his father hunted throughout the year, turkey and deer. Deer were easy: get there before dusk, climb into a stand. Wait. Sight in. Pull the trigger. The hardest part was getting it back to the car.
Every year, his dad drank Pabst while they sat. Dennis always thought the cans looked cool. This last fall - their first morning in the blind - his dad had passed one to him.
“Just one,” his father said. It was 5:00 am. They cracked them open and Dennis drank his first beer with his dad.
Somehow with night still fighting day, the beer tasted good. Bitter, bubbly, but right. For a few hours that morning, Dennis felt like a man.
“My dad gave me my first beer,” his father said. “His father, the same. And they all said the same thing that I’m going to tell you now.”
Dennis waited for the advice that had been passed down, father-to-son, in his family for generations. His father drank his beer and regarded him, his progeny, while the forest woke around them. Finally, his father was ready.
“Dennis?”
“Yeah, dad?”
“Don’t tell your mother.”
Dennis spurt his beer. His father laughed.
Deer were easy. Turkey hunting took guile and patience. Great eyes, flighty, always a millisecond from spooked. Turkey was hunting.
Dennis moved with deliberation. Every step was cushioned with the balls of his feet and a bent knee. He steadied his breathing. He got basic. As far as he was concerned, he was hunting turkey.
At the end of the hallway the snot went in both directions. To his left, a section of roof had collapsed and the pink Fuzz had gotten through. At a glance, you’d think the pink was wall insulation. But it throbbed like a pumping vein and it dripped with a pus-like fluid. The walls it covered were bowed and chewed - it was breaking them down. The pink on the ground was soaked and the runoff had formed a pool in front of the living cotton candy. And in that pool, Dennis saw what Clarence must have shot.
The flat worm had jeans and shoes. It was six feet long, three feet wide. Dennis immediately thought of a flayed fish. You could tell the legs weren’t in use. They laid flat like ribbons - maybe even empty - but somehow conjoined with the body. Around its border and along the spine were beads. Dennis guessed when it was alive they glowed, just like he had seen at the hospital. A long black whip was attached to its head.
A line of pink had already made its way to the corpse. Dennis saw it hum and shift, ever slowly, growing over it like mold.
Four cots. Dennis swung the gun around and went the other direction. He knew where he’d find Clarence, dead or alive. Even under duress, he knew where he would go. There were two doors down this hallway: a men’s bathroom room and a women’s.
Dennis put his ear up to the men’s. He heard scrapping and a whipping sound. He steeled himself, counted to three, and kicked the door in.
Three flat worms were outside a bathroom stall. Beneath them, Dennis saw that Clarence was moving between the stalls, sliding underneath, keeping the glowing things from zeroing in on him. They moved strangely. One still had legs - they were up in it, where just the shins down were exposed. The feet were no longer human - they were webbed and mushed like pancake batter. The other two had long cilia - millipeded feet - that undulated in an asynchronous wave as they scurried back and forth, slapping their long black tongues – they were tongues – against and over the stalls. They shot them under and over, but none of them could get inside. They didn’t have arms and they bumped into each other in their single-minded focus on Clarence. They clamored over Clarence’s gun. Blood was speckled near it.
Dennis didn’t wait. He aimed at the back of one and fired. It collapsed instantly. He racked the slide and fired. Another dropped. The one with feet had turned and it whipped its tongue at him. He ducked under the cracking ligament and lost his balance. By the grace of God, he fell backward, not forward. He leveled the gun on the approaching . . . fuck, whatever . . . and fired.
It skittered back, its tongue quivered, and the tip of it opened like it wanted to say something. And then it hit the ground. One of the other flat worms swayed. Dennis racked the pump and filled it with double ought for good measure.
“You ok?” Dennis asked. Suddenly, he just wanted to nap.
“Yeah, but tell a motherfucker when you’re gonna shoot!”
Dennis looked at the stall doors. Every one of them was peppered with shot.
Clarence came out of the nearest stall, holding his left hand. Two fingers hung off, held by skin.
= = =
Clarence grabbed the rifle and they got out of there. He held his left hand to his chest, wincing. His face was gray. At the Jeep, he collapsed into the passenger seat and closed his eyes. Except for a thread of skin, the pointer and index fingers on his left hand were completely detached. Blood oozed out of them and Dennis could see bone.
“The medical supplies are in back,” Clarence hissed. His words were slurred with pain.
Dennis found a red tackle box with “First Aid,” on the side and brought it over. It was stuffed beyond its original contents. There were morphine bags, saline, IV’s, other pills with long names, and extra bandages.
“Get the gauze, get the scissors, there should be some kind of Neosporin in there.”
Dennis did.
“Roll out the gauze - like three feet - and cut it.”
Dennis did.
Clarence gripped the wrist of his injured hand. As if his left arm knew what its host was planning, it fought to stay close to his body. With great effort Clarence straightened it out. The severed fingers dangled down.
“Cut them off,” he wheezed. His body shook.
“There could be a hospital, if we got ice . . .”
“There ain’t no hospital, there ain’t no ice! Do it!”
Dennis hesitated.
“DO IT!”
Dennis leaned over and examined the wound. He took the scissors and cut through the skin. The two fingers fell to the gravel.
Clarence hitched and let out a disbelieving laugh.
“Fuck this hurts. Neosporin.” Dennis gave it to him. Clarence emptied half the tube and smeared it over his stumps. He held out his good hand and Dennis gave him the gauze. Clarence wrapped the hand expertly. He’d seen pros do it for twenty years.
“Let’s get out of here, this whole town’s dead.”
“Where?”
“The Air Force base. If anything’s up, that’d be up.”
Clarence reclined his seat and closed his eyes. Dennis drove south on 63. At the end of town, he pulled into a Shell gas station. Clarence looked asleep, but when Dennis got out to scavenge, he spoke.
“Look for booze. I need a drink.”
The Jeep was nearly full, but it barely managed two hundred miles between tanks. It couldn’t get them to St. Louis. Dennis tried the pumps. They were off. He saw the gas caps on the ground where tankers would refill the underground reservoirs. He tried to pull at the covers but they were locked. He put an ear to one and he could hear the gentle sloshing of the gas underfoot. He closed his eyes and wished for a syphon.
“Water, water, everywhere, and not a drop to drink,” ran through his head. Where had he heard that? Something from English class probably . . .
He changed his goal and looked around for extra containers. He figured at the very worst, they could crawl underneath cars along the highway, punch a hole in the tanks, and collect gas as they went.
He circled the station, shotgun ready, but nothing was around. The trees near the back lot were looped, like he had seen on the way to the Army Reserve. Up close, they were like black snakes with their heads tucked in the sand. Their strange, flat, skin tags flapped in the wind.
He went into the convenient mart. The ceiling was gone and everything on the floor was gunked and nasty. He moved counter clockwise around the perimeter. It was clear that someone had been here already. He could see footsteps and one section of fridge that looked ok, had been ransacked. A small recess at the back of the store led to the bathroom and a closet. The bathroom door was locked and a smell came from it. Something was dead in there . . . maybe someone had had enough. He opened the closet. Inside he found cleaning supplies and a 5-gallon container used as a mop bucket.
“Boom,” he said.
He didn’t discriminate. He dumped out every container and put them in the bucket.
He went around the horn until he was at the register. The tobacco displays were on the floor. Rain-soaked Skoal, Winston, and Parliament boxes littered the attendant side. The liquor cabinet was cleared as well and the glass shards intermingled with cowboy silhouettes, smoking camels, and cancer warnings. He went behind the counter, watching his step, and pushed the boxes around in case something was underneath. He heard a rattle. He flipped a box up with the shotgun muzzle. A fifth of McCormicks Whiskey, weathered but unbroken, stared up at him.
He took his spoils to the Jeep.
“I found this.”
Clarence opened one eye and saw the whiskey.
“Does it look alright?”
Dennis spun it around in his hand. It seemed fine. The labels were warped, but the bottle had no signs of Fleas.
“I think so.”
“Open it, please.”
Dennis did so. Clarence took it with his good hand and gulped some down. He winced from the burn.
“Oh man, that’s some cheap shit. Want some?” Clarence held it out.
Why not? Dennis took a swig and immediately spit it out. He started to gag. Clarence grinned.
“Never had whiskey?”
Dennis shook his head, his face puckered in disgust. Despite his pain, Clarence laughed.
“Now’s a good time to start.”
= = =
Clarence worked through half the bottle by the time they reached Macon, thirty miles south of Kirksville. They didn’t stop. The small town looked like a tornado had ripped through it. Past Macon, the two-lane highway split and became double lanes, north/south. Dennis had pictured the road clogged with the rusted remains of cars, but he’d seen too many zombie movies. Kirksville was the largest town in the area and traffic there was nil.
But a few obstacles did present themselves. At one point in a section where the roads cut through hills, a semi was jackknifed across both lanes. They had to backtrack, slog across a marshy median and take the northbound route south. At the trough, amongst the looped vegetation, Dennis swore the truck shifted as if something was underneath it. The hair stood on the back of Dennis’s neck and he almost said something, but Clarence was asleep, asking “where’s Sally?” and “she’ll be ok.” The bottle of McCormicks rolled port and starboard in his footwell.
Fleas had turned the road into black gravel. Dennis thanked his lucky stars for the Jeep. The sky was blanketed with dark clouds. Off in the distance, Dennis saw light ripple through a section of thunderheads.
“Clarence.” Dennis prodded him awake with his hand. Clarence woke up. He immediately snatched the bottle and took a swig.
“How long was I out?”
“Two hours.”
“Are we near Columbia?”
“No. Halfway, if.”
Clarence got his full bearings: “why are we driving on the wrong side of the highway?”
“South was blocked,” Dennis hitched his chin ahead of them. “Look.”
It was definitely a storm and it looked nasty. The Jeep had no roof. And even if it did, with Fleas, who knows what was in the rain?
“We need to get to an underpass. How fast are you going?”
“Thirty, the road is jacked.”
“Go faster, man.”
Dennis pushed down the gas and the needle climbed to sixty.
Five minutes later they saw the overpass ahead and beyond it, a sheet of rain fast approaching in a game of chicken. The clouds were a frenzy of lightning. The earth shook with each thunderclap. Dennis didn’t need Clarence to tell him: he pushed the pedal to the floor and the Jeep groaned as it approached seventy.
The rain could be nothing. It could be cool and clean. Or it could be poison, or seed them so they became a giant flat worm, like they had encountered at the Army Reserve. Who knew?
“Slow down, we’re going to make it!” Clarence yelled over the wind noise of the Jeep playing race car. The body of the truck moaned and shook, Dennis waited for the entire thing to blow apart like Legos.
“Seriously!” Clarence yelled again. Lightning was all around them. They were five hundred yards away. Rain droplets splattered against the window. A few turned into a torrent, Clarence changed his mind - “Keep going, keep going!”
Fifty yards out, Dennis locked the brakes. The Jeep skidded and shrieked, slowly rotating sideways. Clarence gripped the roll bar with both hands immediately yelling “SHIT!” when his injured hand protested. The wet road saved them - if it was dry, they would have flipped. The Jeep spun twice and teetered to a stop just under the overpass. Rain boomed across the bridge above them. It raced over the highway they had just been on.
“You gotta be fucking kidding me,” Clarence said between breaths. “Holy shit, I mean, come on.”
They looked at each other wide-eyed. Dennis reached his hand out and took the bottle. This time he kept it down.
The oil and engine gauges were in the red. Dennis parked the CJ against the cement support that angled up towards the bridge and turned the truck off. It snorted “thank you.”
The wind was blowing rain under the overpass. They decided to take some supplies and climb up the steep rake of cement. It appeared dry. They shared a can of pork and beans.
“How’s the hand?”
“Hurts. More, I feel stupid.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know about you, but I always thought I’d be badass in a tough situation. When I turned the corner and saw those things – they were all there, sipping at that pool of pus – I froze. Did you ever see “Ghostbusters?”
“It’s one of my favorites.”
“Fucking hilarious – when Bill Murray first sees Slimer? That was basically me. I didn’t snap out of it until one noticed me. Then I couldn’t get the safety off, then finally I fired and missed wide.”
“One of them was dead at the pool.”
“That was luck, I wasn’t aiming for it. THEN instead of running the way I came, I trapped myself in the men’s room. Retard sandwiches, man. Retard sandwiches all around. I’m lucky I got out with just a few missing fingers.”
They both looked at his misshapen lump.
“Are there . . .” Dennis cleared his throat, “any symptoms?”
“It hurts.” Clarence took a swig of McCormicks and passed it over. Dennis took another one. He didn’t think twenty-one mattered anymore.
“No, like, do you feel different?”
Clarence’s eyes widened, “Ah shit. No. You don’t think?”
“I have no idea.”
“I feel fine. It just hurts.”
“Cool.” But they were both tense.
“Fuck, man. I hope nothing happens. If it does and I can’t,” he gestured to the shotgun, “you have to, ok?”
“Yeah, man. Same goes.” Dennis thought for a second. “I bet you’re fine.”
“How do you figure?”
“I was thinking about it ever since we saw those . . . things at the hospital. Then that red fuzz, how it breaks down everything.”
Clarence waited.
“We get sick from bacteria and viruses, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Fleas didn’t make us sick, it killed us. It killed EVERYTHING it touched.”
“And it did it nasty,” Clarence added.
“Yeah! It came out of nowhere and destroyed everything. But now there are aliens and plants look weird and how? Everything it killed, changed. You said the bodies disappeared from the ER. And now there are alien things everywhere.”
“So it broke us down and used it.”
“In biology class we talked about the origin of Earth. How the first life came from primordial soup.”
“I remember that. So Fleas made everything it touched primordial soup.”
Dennis nodded. “It makes sense, right? It came from space and what can travel through space? Not much. It’s tough. So they design something they sent ahead. It kills everything by breaking it down, and then it uses it. The news said it was a huge molecule, they thought it was an act of war, and it was, but not from the Middle East, or anything. There are a ton of movies about this . . . remember “Red Planet?”
Clarence shook his head.
“It was ok. Val Kilmer was in it. The whole thing was that we were terraforming Mars for humans. I think in that, we sent algae or something, to get more oxygen in the air, but the thing is, if you could, wouldn’t you send everything that made sense? It would be more efficient, right?”
Clarence nodded and took another swig. He passed it over and Dennis did the same. They heard that leathery ripping sound. Clarence checked his watch: it was only 3:00 pm. Out in a field, two columns slowly rose and as they did, that stretching sound continued. Each stalk was fifty feet all. A bulb formed at the end. Further away, more stalks rose. The ground vibrated near them. A pair of stalks rose right near the overpass. The bulbs at the end blinked. They were eyes.
= = =
The stalks came from underneath the soil and suddenly the air was clumped with dirt as the creatures shook themselves like a wet dog and slithered out. When they first emerged, they were black, but then their bodies lit up along the sides. Lines of white light ran up the stalks.
“They’re snails,” Dennis whispered.
The skin on the bulbs peeled back. A thick bed of bony filaments, each taller than a man, grew out of it. They twitched and vibrated with violence.
“They’re not snails,” Clarence corrected. Without a word, they shimmied further up the ramp.
The one nearest to them bent its stalks, stretching, maybe waking up. Then the antennae fully extended upward and arced down, hammering into the earth. The creature used the stalks to move, dragging it along the ground in jerky lunges. As it did, the body rose out of the field until the mouth was completely clear of its underground bed: it was eating the soil. The stalks and the front of the creature were thick and muscular. The mouth was the entire width of its body. The rest of the creature looked like a dragging blanket. Over the next hour, the tillers expanded in size as they gorged, bloating with their meal until the stalks struggled to move them forward.
There were dozens of them and they sat in the fields like grounded submarines. Their lights blinked in a synchronous pattern – never at the same time - and they groaned, like a fat man who’d eaten way too much at the buffet.
Night came and other creatures rose from the soil. Dennis recognized some. In the shadow of the giant tillers, even the rays looked small until one got so close it almost came in. The cilia balls moved around the field, chasing the jellyfish. Something as long as a bus moved like an inchworm, but it was too far away to see. A fixed sheet of glowing dots seemed to rise and fall with the wind. Jellyfish would leave the ground and glide to it only to vanish.
The tillers had been quiet for hours and now they called out. The creatures around them moved away and the stalks dug at the ground in front of their gluttoned frames. They wormed their way back under the soil until it was just their antennae. The ripping sound filled the air and those shrunk out of sight, too.
CHAPTER 4
It was a long night and they slept in shifts, but nothing bothered them. For Dennis, he felt like he was in some bizzaro afterlife. Strange glowing shapes would roll, ripple and float beneath them. Some would attack the others, some were the size of the Jeep, some flecks of light rode the breeze.
At no time did the creatures acknowledge their human interlopers. They just went about their routine. In many ways, it reminded Dennis of an ecosystem that lived in the ocean coral.
After three hours, he nudged Clarence awake from his cries for Sally.
“Anything?” Clarence rubbed his face with his hands.
“Just . . .” Dennis waved a hand at the strange after party before them. Dennis fell asleep.
It felt like minutes later when Clarence woke him up. But when Dennis checked his watch, he’d been asleep four hours.
“Okay?”
“Yep.”
Clarence rolled over and was out. Dennis thought about what they’d find in St. Louis. If the Air Force base was gone, then they were fucked. He couldn’t see where else they would go. He wondered if the alien population was worse in St. Louis. There were more people, but the aliens didn’t seem to like buildings, concrete, man-made stuff.
What do I know? he thought. He came out to this: it’d only been a few days. He wasn’t an expert.
Maybe Fleas didn’t hit everything. Maybe Mexico was fine, or somewhere overseas. Maybe it was just the U.S.
But that didn’t make sense. No, Dennis was convinced this was global. Unless it was a fluke - a meteor that happened to have these things. Then it was just bad luck, wrong place, wrong time. His mind raced over theories based on conjecture.
A few hours later, the horizon went from black to a dull grey and the glowing horde disappeared into the fields. The sun rose and turned everything pink.
“Sally, I’m sorry, Sally,” Clarence said. His face was contorted. Dennis shook his shoulder and his eyes popped open.
“It’s morning,” Dennis said.
Clarence jolted up, still a bit lost in sleep. After a second, he slapped his hands together, it echoed along the metal ceiling. “Let’s get to the base.”
Both of their hearts nearly stopped when Dennis tried the Jeep. It ground and whirled, then a few lights ignited on the dash. Dennis took the key out of the ignition, looked at Clarence, who – Dennis was pretty sure – was praying, and tried again. It hiccupped to life. Visible relief washed over their faces.
“Less than half a tank,” Dennis said.
“Let’s deal with it later,” Clarence replied.
They drove south until they hit the 70 highway. They took it east towards St. Louis. From the on ramp, they could see Columbia to the west. The city looked like melted candles.
“It looks bad,” Clarence said. It was a series of hills instead of buildings, a mountain range one-tenths scale.
Dennis followed it in his rearview mirror wondering how anyone could have survived. Maybe Kirksville got lucky.
= = =
The 70 was the same slog as 63. Slow, every straight line a blessing. Now Clarence and Dennis could recognize the signs of occupation. It became their Slug Bug. They’d try to out do the other by pointing out where a creature was or a plant had changed.
The trees were obvious, they looked like yarn loops. Tillers were easy too: the soil they slept underneath had a slight grade to it and berms of – they assumed tiller shit – followed their path like bread crumbs.
The mounds of tiller shit were occupied too. That was a different guessing game. Some of the holes were big, some were small.
“Definitely the squids, they could suck their bodies in,” Clarence said as they passed a mound near the highway. It was honeycombed with holes capped with soil. Some of the older mounds had plants on them that weren’t a terraform. They were crystalline, and grew in ninety-degree joints. They weren’t from around here.
Halfway to St. Louis, the Jeep was near empty. They stopped in a crop of cars.
“Keep it running,” Clarence said. Dennis nodded and they left the Jeep while it popped and clacked, sounding ill.
Dennis spotted a lifted Dodge Ram. “It should be easy to get to the tank.”
Clarence nodded. He had a tire iron with a flat edge on one side and Dennis carried the 5-gallon bucket.
Clarence pressed the center of the tank with the iron. His eyes followed down to the road. “Here,” he pointed.
Dennis put the bucket there.
After ten minutes of stabbing it, the tank finally gave. When Clarence pulled the metal bar from the hole, wormy nodules tumbled out of it and squirmed on the ground. Dennis and Clarence both jumped back. The writhing mass grew. They were albino white, the length of a finger, and like all the other creatures, they blinked with light. The sun roasted them and they skittled along the pavement, steaming.
From then on, they hit the tanks and listened as if they were choosing cantaloupe. If gas knocked back and forth, it was good to go. If it sounded solid, they passed.
It was hard work. Both Dennis and Clarence were exhausted from hammering at the tanks. Their shoulders and arms ached. They were five in and the Jeep was only half full. To add insult to injury, they had no good way to pour the gas into the tank, so they would spill and watch the soil leech up their hard-earned reward.
They took a break.
Clarence inspected his injured hand: the brown scabby crust on the wrap had bloomed red again.
“We don’t have enough, right?” Clarence asked. Dennis shook his head.
Clarence stood up and climbed on top of a car. He looked around. There was a bunch of trees a quarter mile ahead. A semi was nose first in them.
“That,” he said. Dennis climbed the car and looked. “If those tanks are even a bit full, we’re good.”
“Or a hundred pounds of alien maggots will come out.”
Clarence jumped down. “Yeah, but we can’t keep doing this. I don’t have much left.”
Dennis understood: he was in the same boat. The fact was, they were near-starving and they just spent two hours expending almost everything they had.
“It’s out in a field right up against the loopie stuff,” Dennis said.
Clarence nodded, “yeah.” He looked at the Jeep. Blue smoke puttered from its tailpipe. “Do you have a name for her?”
His dad did.
“Jamie, like “Jamie the Jeep.””
“My dad always said it was good to name your cars.”
Dennis followed Clarence back to Jamie. Clarence put his hand on Jamie’s hood and rubbed it.
“Jamie, please, PLEASE don’t strand us out there.”
The CJ purred and popped.
They got in and they weaved through the cars. At the edge of the road, Dennis stopped, got out, and locked the hubs. Closer to the semi, it seemed further away. Berms surrounded it. The trees and brush it had crashed through were only so in hindsight. Clarence, Dennis, and Jamie the Jeep rolled out onto an alien landscape. It just happened to be on earth.
= = =
“Careful,” Clarence said. The ground was not like normal soil. It had a spongy quality and as the treads of the Jeep rolled over it, a liquid seeped out only to suck back in as the weight transferred forward.
Far away, the semi looked untouched. Up close, that wasn’t the case. The loopy trees had binded through the front of it. The strange fans covered the semi cab like barnacles.
“Maybe we shouldn’t,” Dennis said.
“Got to,” Clarence muttered. He gripped the roll cage as if they were climbing a steep grade. They were on a stretch of road where there was no obvious shelter. Before they had reached the crop of cars, they had traversed wide swaths of missing highway the tillers had dragged themselves through. They couldn’t be caught in the open at night. They needed the fuel. They had to get to St. Louis.
The berms were active. The holes quivered, the caps bubbled, strange noises gurgled from their recesses. A long berm – a tiller – lay parallel to the trees. As the CJ slowly made its way, both Dennis and Clarence could feel the creature sleep. The earth had a Jell-O quality to it and the trees nearest the long berm swayed left and right as the tiller dreamed.
It felt longer, but within minutes they were at the trailer. The ground was sponge all around them. The loop trees had a snotty sheen.
“Get up right next to the cab,” Clarence said. “I don’t want to touch the ground if I don’t have to.”
Dennis steered the Jeep within inches of the side and the CJ idled slowly towards the front.
“Shit, a little to the left,” Clarence instructed. Dennis didn’t ask why, he just did so. They were next to the gas tank. Clarence opened the door and after a second, kicked it with his foot. It sloshed with fuel. He leaned over, stretching far.
“Fuck,” Clarence said.
“What?”
Clarence pulled himself back into the Jeep. He looked defeated.
“The fuel cap needs a key,” he said.
“No.” Dennis stood up and Clarence showed him. The gas cap had a keyhole in its center.
A berm farted as if saying “surprise!”
They both looked up at the cab. It was scabbed over and shivering with the fans. The driver side window was milky but they could see that the roof had held.
“I don’t know if I can get up there,” Clarence said. He emphasized with his injured hand. It was a short climb.
“The keys are in there, aren’t they?” Dennis responded.
“If Fleas didn’t melt them.”
They were quiet for a moment. The ground gurgled with indigestion.
“Ok, switch spots,” Dennis said. He and Clarence slid past each other. Instead of sitting down, Dennis climbed over the roll bar onto the front of the Jeep.
Another bout of flatulence hit a berm and an acrid smell – ammonia – filled the air. The fans on the cab fluttered in response and shifted their position. Dennis froze. Finally: “Clarence, if something happens, shoot me, ok?”
Clarence pulled out one of the Glocks. “They’re just plants. You’ll be fine.” But he didn’t sound sure.
Dennis moved to the side of the hood, nearest the semi’s running boards. He tentatively stuck a leg out. He was at least a foot away from touching it. He gritted his teeth and looked at the ground. What he saw was discouraging: a faint, white smoke rose from where the tires touched the ground.
He measured the door handle and the running board. On a silent three-count he pushed off and grabbed the handle with his left hand. His body slapped into fans and they fluttered against his clothes like butterflies, breaking off and falling to the ground. He fought the creepiness and focused. He planted his feet on the running board and slid them through the fans to get right of the door, feeling them stretch and snap away as their base was sheered from the rotting steel.
The door was unlocked. A fan was attached to a metal handhold a trucker would use to heave themselves into the cab. Dennis plucked the fan off the rail and felt it vibrate in his hand. He let it go and his whole body shivered. He opened the door.
Something long and slithery, like a fresh oyster, fell out onto him. It smothered his scream. He barely held on with his right hand as he struggled to pull off the oily tarp that covered his face and upper body. His left hand dug through it – it wasn’t completely solid – but finally the struggle and gravity slunk it off his face and it fell into a limp mass at his feet.
Dennis threw up. His body racked from nausea, and the slime that covered him smelled like the stewed stomach of road kill. What lay rumpled at his feet was a rotting flat worm. It had been trapped in the cab.
“Are you ok?!” Clarence asked.
Dennis continued to puke. It soaked into the spongy ground that shook in delight.
“Am I ok? Am I ok?” he asked. He remembered the movie Robocop when a bad guy got doused with toxic waste. He pictured his body melting.
“You’re fine. Keep going,” Clarence urged.
Even with his stomach cramped, he worked his way into the cab. He found a piece of cloth and wiped the gook from his eyes and face. The driver seat and the floor beneath it were melted and deformed. The upholstery was shredded – Dennis remembered the flat worms strange tongue – and the windows were scored with a thousand scratches. The flat worm had been born, and had died, here.
The keys were in the ignition. He pulled them out and inspected them. They all looked fine. He looked behind and saw that it was a sleeper cab. He quickly found a tool kit. In that tool kit he found a pair of three foot long tubes and a cylindrical squeeze bulb with holes on opposites ends. A siphon.
= = =
Dennis scrounged around the rest of the cab. It was filthy with wrappers, dirty clothes, porno mags, a bottle of Jergens, and the nuisances of life away from the base: a photo of a young woman and man smiling. The man held the small brunette from behind, his head resting on her shoulder. She wore white, he a tux. The photo was yellow, small, curled at the edges and taped to the wall. Next to it was a larger and more recent photo of the same man with a teenage girl up on his shoulder. The happiness captured in that photo acted like a light in the room. She was clearly struggling to get down, her long twisted hair falling in front of her face, her smile wide and full of teeth. The man was older, fatter, with a thick, black beard, but his mouth was in an ‘o’ and his eyes sparkled. This was the rug that held the room together. It was clear this had been this man’s purpose.
And he slopped to the ground like a string of spit, Dennis’s mind offered. Now he’s in your nostrils.
Dennis crimped his eyes closed and pushed away those dark thoughts. He got what they needed, he searched one last time. He looked at that happy photo and for a moment it was he and his parents, but that went away too. It was a man and a girl he would never know, caught in a millisecond of time where there was no weight to the world.
Dennis moved back to the front of the cab and opened the door. He stared at bare earth where the Jeep should have been. The tire imprints were still visible in the sponge. Little white worms squirmed from the porous surface.
“Dennis!” Clarence called from his left. Clarence had reversed to the back of the trailer.
“What’s going on?!”
Clarence flinched and waved his hand downward: keep it quiet. “Those maggots were eating into the tread” he stage whispered.
“I got a siphon!”
Clarence nodded with enthusiasm. “Great. Get the fuel open and the siphon in, I’ll drive up. We need to go.” Clarence looked past Dennis to the trees.
Dennis unlocked the gas cap and assembled the siphon. Clarence did a three point turnabout and reversed slowly.
Dennis looked at the maggots. Around them, really on all the soil, was that clear liquid he had seen at the Armory. A berm nearest to them emitted that same clear liquid. The spongy surface masked it, but it was leaking down into the dried snot forest.
“Let’s do it.” Clarence had the Jeep next to the semi. Dennis took off the Jeep’s gas cap and put the syphon tube in. After a few squeezes of the bulb, he felt the fuel pulse through.
“There’s something in those trees,” Clarence said.
“What?”
Clarence pointed. The loopy trees and the tall bush made it hard to see even a few feet in.
“Through those two loops,” Clarence directed. Dennis saw: towards the middle of the trees, something was hanging from one of the larger loops. They reminded Dennis of stuffed grape leaves: densely wrapped, green, oily. Two of them hung from the top of the tree loop. Beneath them was a large mound that had completely covered the loop’s base. It was red and textured like the inside of a pomegranate. His eyes adjusted to the shiny, snot forest, and Dennis saw that the red, uni hill and the two hanging things above it were surrounded by a pool of the clear liquid.
A knocking sound came from one of the hanging pods. The stuffed grape 'leaves’ weren’t leaves. They were wings. It rustled and swayed slightly before settling down.
Fuel sloshed out of the CJ. It was topped.
“Let’s get out of here,” Clarence said. They couldn’t take their eyes off the hanging pods. Dennis thought they were about five feet long. Two. A pair. Beneath them a nest of red dots that – it could have been the light – seemed to move. And unlike everything else they’ve encountered, seemed to care little that there was sunlight.
As they drove away, Dennis thought the loops made a little more sense: they were dream catchers designed to trap the worst nightmares and bring them to life.
= = =
There were fewer and fewer cars as they approached St. Louis. Whale-length berms were everywhere, more prevalent than before. While the fields had been eradicated by the tillers and turned into wavy lumps that other creatures could call home, any clump of trees remained untouched, circumvented, loopy and scaly, doing their own thing.
“What were those things?” Dennis asked. They had been on the road for thirty minutes and the whole time, he had expected to look back and find those winged creatures pursuing.
“When you jumped onto the semi, that’s when I saw them,” Clarence said. “It looked like a flag was in the middle of the trees and then I saw it wrap back up into its cocoon.”
“What’d they look like?”
“Buggie. Brown. It was hanging by its jaws. Its belly was tucked into it.”
“So they’re bigger than they look?”
“Yeah.”
Dennis shook his head. “We got lucky.”
“If we get to the base, we got lucky. And if people are at the base and they know what the hell is going on and a way out, we got lucky. Right now, we’re just alive. For those bug bats, I think that stuff below was their nest or something.”
They drove for hours. There were open sections of road where they got up to sixty, and other sections with just remnants of highway, like a dusty trail, populated with the gurgling berms where the speedometer barely touched five.
Clarence checked Dennis’s watch: 5:45 pm. He looked up to the sun. “We got an hour.”
“We’re close,” Dennis said. He had made this trip a thousand times with his father. A few miles back, they had passed the skeletal remains of a Cracker Barrel he and his dad would eat at.
Twenty minutes later, they saw the St. Louis skyline. It was of teeth worn and poorly cared for, collapsed and broken. The city looked tilted and it took Dennis a minute to push through the optical illusion.
“Everything near the river is gone,” he said. It was as if a biblical flood had come down the Missouri and taken half the buildings with it.
“Please let the Air Force base still be there,” Clarence said, praying to the sky.
Looking up did not help. Flapping silhouettes were framed by pink sky and splintered skyscrapers. Dennis’s immediately assumed pigeons – they were everywhere in St. Louis.
Clarence had already reached back for the shotgun and assault rifle. The flocks flying from building to building, perching on top like watchful gargoyles, flowing like dandelion seeds in the turbulent air, weren’t the “flying rats,” his dad liked to say. It was the things they had seen hanging from the tree. Two, quiet and resting, had sent chills down the back of Dennis’s spine. St. Louis was infested with thousands.
The Jeep bucked when its tires found broken asphalt, possibly protected from Fleas by everything else above it.
“Where is the base?” Dennis asked.
“I don’t know,” Clarence responded.
“You don’t know?!”
A shadow slipped over them. They looked up and watched as a winged creature flew past. Dennis saw it clearly: it had broad, rectangular wings that seemed to be made of a thousand thick hairs. Its abdomen was tear dropped and made of white flesh that had never seen the sun. Attached to it were long antennae that pointed backwards – they were nearly ten feet long – and ended in curled barbs. They hung beneath the creature like trolling lures. The rest of it was brown and hardened, half the length of its soft underbelly. Its eyes were underneath it, yellow and searching. An eight-hooked maw was its mouth. It continued to circle down towards them.
“What the hell are we going to do?!” Dennis croaked. The sound of his voice, furthered the fear.
Clarence took the safety off the shotgun and checked the chamber to make sure it was loaded.
“Get us out of the open,” he said. He kept his eyes on the bug bat. It continued to follow them, but without any obvious aggression. If it had been a dolphin, it would have been cute.
Dennis didn’t know where to turn or whether to take an underpass or stay up top. He couldn’t imagine what could be in a tunnel, so he forced himself to ignore the bug bats that trailed them. They were now in the misshapen city.
“Duck!” Clarence grabbed Dennis’s head as a barb singed past them and clipped the roll cage. A thick knuckle on its end slashed the barb into the metal bar and the flying beast quickly released leaving it cleaved and the steel raw.
“Well, now we know what that does . . .” Clarence let out a crazy laugh.
The sun winked goodbye. They could hear the flapping wings around them. They heard the far off ripping of leather as the tillers on the borders woke and went about their duty.
Suddenly, thick white beams of light filled the air ahead of them.
“What are those?” Dennis asked. It looked like something used at a movie premiere, but amped up a thousand times.
“The things are going to it!” Clarence said. The bug bats rose into the sky and flew ahead over and through the splintered remains of the city. A chatter filled the air.
“Did you hear that?!” Clarence slapped Dennis on the shoulder. Again a burst of hard sounds. “Machine guns! Fucking machine guns!”
Dennis drove through the city streets, always towards the white columns past the city. Gunfire filled the air in controlled bursts. Ahead, revealed by the light, bug bats burst from lead and whirled towards earth.
“We’re going to make it!” Clarence was rocking in his seat, the whole CJ shook with him. He started to cry. “We’re going to make it!”
Dennis got back on the 70 and they broke through to the edge of the city. The columns of light greeted them a dozen miles away. The entire base glowed like an LED. Dennis slowed to a stop. Clarence’s cries of relief turned into sobs.
“Why? God, why?!” he screamed.
The bridge that would take them across the Mississippi - and to safety - was gone. A hundred yards out, two broken pylons reached out of the water like severed fingers. The water glowed and swirled around them. Everything glowed. Up and down the Mississippi, on the banks, and as far as they eye could see, was an orgy of life so thick it choked the water. It made what they had seen so far infinitesimal, inconsequential, anecdotal. Dennis and Clarence had seen the by-product of what Fleas had been sent to do. Its side effect. A million glowing, pulsing, creatures of different shapes, and sizes, and properties, dragged themselves up the riverbanks or kept to the water as either predator or prey.
Fleas was for the water. Dennis recalled so clearly what he had learned in his eighth grade science class: seventy percent. Seventy percent of the earth’s surface was covered in water. Water was what NASA always looked for. Whenever the Hubble or a probe discovered something newsworthy, it was always about proper environmental conditions of some far off planet, and water.
Why wouldn’t an alien care about the same?
