Extinction Journals

by Jeremy Robert Johnson

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “We?”

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

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

  “What am I supposed to do?”

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

  “Picket fence?”

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

  “Why is that bad?”

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

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

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

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

  “More leafcutters?”

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

  “That’s bad?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “So they’ll eat Terry?”

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

  “They eat leafcutters?”

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

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

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

  8

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  They hit the road within hours.

  Travel time moved on the following agenda:

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

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

  Travel time was a bitch.

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

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

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

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

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

  DONOTDIE

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

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

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

  9

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Two sensations:

  Movement without control.

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

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

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

  Mave.

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

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

  You can survive.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Her spores really did get into my brain.

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

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

  Fight.

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

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

  It was the smell of hunger. Desperation.

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

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

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

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