Extinction Journals

by Jeremy Robert Johnson

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

  Water. Food. Now.

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

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

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

  Shall I go on?

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

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

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

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

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

  Finally, a vision. Might be an oasis.

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

  3

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

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

  It’s just so…goddamned…GOOD!

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

  Then he had to rinse it down.

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

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

  Somehow I’m…here.

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

  Shit. They need water too.

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Dean eased himself onto the ground, lying prone.

  “Drink up, little guys.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “HALT!”

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

  He turned to face the creature.

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

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

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

  Thunder rolled in the purple/black clouds above them.

  The thing stared through Dean with its one huge eye.

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

  Ergot. Mycotoxin.

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

  Have I finally snapped?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Where did everybody go?”

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

  “Where did everybody go?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Dean nodded Yes inside of his head and kept humming.

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

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

  “Sphere. You mean Earth?”

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

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

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

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

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

  “Oh, god, nothing at all.”

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

  “My body?”

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

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

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

  “The Rapture?”

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

  “So what now?”

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

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

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

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

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

  Dean had wondered why the roaches were so still.

  “Okay then. I’ll give it a shot.”

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

  …and then we killed ourselves.

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

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

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

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

  “Will I understand it if you tell me?”

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