Extinction Journals

by Jeremy Robert Johnson

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

  “So you skinned him?”

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

  “Not really, I guess.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

  He handed the can to Wendell.

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

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

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

  “Hurts going down. Can’t be good.”

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

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

  Dean nodded.

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

  Another nod from Dean.

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

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

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

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

  6

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  What the hell is this?

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

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

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

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

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

  “Soldiers? Where?”

  “Look down.”

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

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

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

  “So what do I do now?”

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

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

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

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

  Dean turned to face the woman.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  She was, aside from the ants, entirely nude.

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

  7

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

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

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

  “Twinkies?” and

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

  “The guy really thought Styrofoam would work?” and

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

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

  And she smiled every time she questioned him.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Pardon me?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Is she even human?

  “Of course I’m human.”

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

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

  “Wait. Why don’t we have time?”

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

  Thunder cracked in the dust-heap clouds above.

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

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

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

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

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

  “You think Yahmuhwesu did something to us?”

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