Nomamyrmex was on the march.
Dean screamed then, hoping the sound would somehow distract even the bugs which were eating away at Mave.
The man—it had to be Terry—rotated to face the sound. He looked right at Dean. One of his eyes was missing. His nose was also absent, replaced by a jagged black triangle bisected by exposed bone.
Despite these obvious deformities, Dean could tell the man was smiling.
Why would he be smili…
The earth fell out from beneath Dean and he felt something long and sharp bore through his right leg before he even realized he wasn’t running anymore.
“We’re diggers. You cah see that ow. It ohly took us a few hours to displace over six meters of dirt alog this ehtire perimeter. Quite astoudeeg, really.”
Terry had approached the pit. The noseless fuck.
“We couldit fide as mady sharp sticks as we’d hoped for, but you do what you cad with what you’ve got, right? Guess we’ve lucked out that you hit that particular spike as square as you did. Providess.”
Dean said nothing. What good would rage do now? He surveyed his surroundings. Narrow dark rift marked by a million ant trails. A chunk of fractured tree branch jammed through his upper thigh, a few slaughtered roaches hanging from its tip. Wound not bleeding too badly. Must have missed the femoral.
“She told us your name is Dee.”
“It’s Dean.”
“That’s what I said. I caht quite make all the sowds I used to. I must admit that we were quite huggry on the trip to fide the Acromyrmex. We had to eat pieces of my face. Other parts too.”
At that Terry’s remaining eye went wide with fear. Absolute panic.
He emitted a cough, a bark of a low tone. His eye snapped back to empty.
His human brain is still trying to assert itself. Jesus, he’s scared. He’s so scared, the poor bastard. Those ants are inside of his mind and they’ve been feeding on him for days.
“Listen, Terry, I know you’re in there somewhere. I know you’re scared. I know they are hurting you and you’re confused and the whole world seems wrong right now, but if you can push to the front of your brain and take control you can stop this. They’re just ants.”
“Quiet!”
With that Dean noticed the black surge cresting over the lip of the makeshift pit. Thousands—no, hundreds of thousands of them. Thick fingertip-sized ants with bulbous split red-horned heads, each meaty half as big as two whole leafcutters. Their jaw musculature visible from feet away.
Pain is coming, and it will not be brief. If nuclear fallout couldn’t kill me how long will it take these ants to end it?
Then he heard the sound. A new tone, from up above. Weak, but coming from Mave.
She’s still alive.
He felt, instinctively, that he must try to match her sound.
The first wave of ants was on him. At his earlobes. Sinking their mandibles into the roaches that covered him. Tearing away at his fingertips. Trying to get into his fresh wound.
He cleared his throat. He pulled in as much air as he could. Ants bit into his lower lip, sought the meat of his tongue.
From the bottom of his lungs Dean let out his matching tone. It found hers. The sounds merged and became a terrible bellow.
This was a call to war. Dean felt it in his bones.
There was a crackling noise—the sound of thousands of dry distended roach eggs tearing open at once.
Dean’s delivery day was here. Within seconds he was the proud father to a seething multitude. The tiny nymphs were too small to be crushed in the huge jaws of the Nomamyrmex, over whom they flowed heedlessly.
They washed up out of the trench, a hungry flood with one target.
Dean stood up, shaking loose hundreds of army ants from his frame. His right leg held. A thick cast of roach nymphs had formed around it, bearing the weight of his broken limb.
He kept his mind focused on Terry. On Terry’s face. Those open holes.
Roaches adore dark wet places like that.
Terry turned to run. The nymphs were already halfway up his legs. He made it one stride before the babies had covered his good eye and were piling in to his blasted orbit.
Terry opened his mouth to scream but the only sound Dean could pick up was the rustle of tiny roaches rubbing against each other on their way down the man’s throat.
Dean looked away. He hoped they’d kill him soon. He’d tried to focus the nymphs’ movement towards Terry’s brain but he wasn’t sure how long it would take them to chew through to gray matter.
There was a man inside there somewhere. Confused. Violated. Alone.
Shit.
Dean couldn’t take it anymore. His suit helped him crawl up out of the pit and over to Terry’s twitching body.
Dean shoved one of his gloves in his own mouth. He bit down. He made a two-fisted grab for the sharpened branch that was rammed through his leg. Twisted left. Twisted right. Wailed through a mouthful of wool and leather. Bit down again. Gripped tight. Pulled up and away. Scoped the point of the stick, dripping his own blood, bits of roach still stuck to it.
And then he swung that spear down into Terry’s empty eye socket as hard as he possibly could.
10
This is the way Dean looked at it, much later:
One day you go to bed happy. The next day your dad dies. In a stupid, stupid way.
And maybe you give up on the world. Maybe the world forgets you ever existed and you’re okay with that. Because you’re alive. Not dead. Not anywhere near that sadness again.
Things are easier alone. Nothing to lose = no loss.
But what if you die? Isn’t that the biggest loss of them all? You’re the only one who will ever truly know you were even alive.
So you protect yourself, with a nod to the esteemed Malcolm X, by any means necessary.
But Malcolm, at the moment he’d said that, probably never guessed one of those means would be covering yourself in nasty, nasty insects.
Probably never even came near being a thought in his head.
His loss. Because he’s dead now. And you, you just keep living, no matter what the world throws at you. Nuclear weapons, crazy presidents, toxic fallout, man-made gods with nothing better to do than alter the genetic code of the remaining humans on Earth.
Fucking army ants.
Oh, and loneliness. Lots of loneliness. You always have to fight that one. But maybe everybody does.
At least that was a problem when you were human.
But that’s not exactly the case anymore, is it?
Back up.
Start again.
One day you fall asleep happy. Next to a river under a dark sky. Then you wake up and everything has changed. Including you. You changed so much that for the first time you actually risk your life.
For what?
Love? It’s as good a word as any. It’ll do.
And you’ve gone so crazy with this feeling, call it love, that you find yourself in an absurd situation, humming and moaning at telepathic bugs and killing brainwashed entomologists.
I know.
It sounds silly.
But it feels important at the time. So important that you nearly die from blood loss lying there in a desolate field next to a corpse filled with baby roaches.
Again, you fall asleep. Or perhaps you pass out from blood loss. But you’re happy. Not totally happy, but feeling like now maybe your life was really a life. Something more than rote respiration for as sustained a period as possible.
Then you wake up and everything has changed so goddamned much you think you’re in heaven.
But you’re not dead, and neither is she. The one you love. Sure, her original right arm is missing (eaten by army ants, you guess), but it appears that some enterprising leafcutter ants have assembled her a new one out of radiant fungus.
These same enterprising bugs have healed up your sundry cuts and wounds and even staved off the infection in your leg with a Streptomyces bacteria that l
ives on their skin.
A woman once told you these were the best ants on Earth. You now believe her 100%.
As great as those ants are, you might miss your cockroaches.
“I’ve set them free,” she tells you. “They’re up there doing what they’re meant to do. Making babies and eating death and putting nutrients back into the soil for when the nuclear summer passes and things can grow again.”
It’s a lot to absorb at once. Losing your friends like that. Finding out the whole Earth has gone Death Valley for the time being. Trying to figure out how this miraculous woman managed to drag your nearly dead coma patient ass all the way out west to these secret caves. But you accept it all after a while.
To fill time, to try to adjust, you write down everything you can remember. Part of you feels like these journals could be the last memories of the extinct species you used to consider yourself a part of.
You might explore your new home. Filters. Generators. Tunnels and tunnels and tunnels. You guess one of them might run right to the center of the Earth, but you never find that particular path.
The woman you love, her favorite place is the sustainable eco-sphere. She can even farm there, next to her ants. But they do a pretty great job without her.
All those rooms—the ones that were supposed to house the soldiers and U.S. officials who weren’t ready when the bombs hit—they start filling up with the glowing fungal tufts the ants produce. Aside from that it’s dark down there, wherever you want it to be.
One day (or night—who can tell down here?) you fall asleep lonely. Then you wake up the next morning and the woman you love is on top of you. She’s lifting her hips and putting you inside of her and making every other Best Moment of Your Life seem pretty pale. And when she’s done and you’re done you hold each other tight and watch as three luminous Acromyrmex queens emerge from between her legs and crawl up to her belly.
Their wings dry. They shiver/shake/touch antennae.
They take flight.
You can tell that they’re headed to the surface—nuclear summer bound.
Their movement through the air is heavy with theft.
This makes the woman you love cry. But she is smiling through the tears. Beaming, really.
For she believes, as you do, that she has just given birth to the first strange children of that terrible new sun.
The Real End of the Line (Maybe): An Afterword
By Jeremy Robert Johnson
Sometimes when I complete a short story it doesn’t feel like it’s really finished. Oh, sure, maybe the central conflict is resolved or there was a pretty sentence at the end of the thing that made it feel like that story was done, but something about the character or scenario still sticks with me. Such was the case with my short story “The Sharp Dressed Man at the End of the Line” from Angel Dust Apocalypse (the short also made a later appearance in Issue #16 of Verbicide Magazine). I’d created this weird, paranoid guy with a fantastic suit made of roaches, I had him merc the President, and then I called it quits. But I always wondered, “What the hell would the guy do next?”
You’re holding the answer to that question. How I got from that very economical short story to this absurd existentialist adventure, I honestly have no idea. I do know that I listened to only two albums during the entire process of writing the book: Bjork’s Vespertine and DJ Dieselboy’s The Dungeonmaster’s Guide. Just those two, alternating, over and over again. And strangely, there is a pattern in the book, too, of moments of lightness countered by more brutal, frantic passages. I think the soundtrack had something to do with that.
Do you need to have read the aforementioned short story to appreciate this book? Nope. I tried as best I could to bring in enough details from the prior piece to make this a stand-alone tale. Would reading that story make this book a richer experience? Potentially. Both stories are now lodged so firmly in my skull that I can’t separate them to venture a guess.
It’s probably obvious by now that I am utterly obsessed with the end of the world via nuclear means. It’s a fear that—even through the writing of these stories—I can’t quite shake. If the big time bombs really did drop it would be such a fucking mess, and such a huge manifestation of disgusting human ego and power. I was discussing the end of the world with a friend of mine—one who happens to be a bio-chemist and recently invented a new virus, which although unrelated, is just really cool—and we both agreed that a broad pandemic is a much preferred form of mass human destruction.
Let nature take us out, if we have to go. Bombs are so tacky.
On a different, less End Times-y note, THANK YOU for supporting underground literature and picking up this title from Swallowdown Press. We don’t exist without wonderful dedicated readers like you.
I think this book marks the end of Dean’s adventures. Things in his world have become so strange that if I ever returned to his story I have a feeling things might turn out really, really weird.
God forbid, right?
Portland, OR, April ‘06
About the Author
Jeremy Robert Johnson is the author of the Wonderland Award Winning WE LIVE INSIDE YOU, the cult hit ANGEL DUST APOCALYPSE, the Stoker Nominated novel SIREN PROMISED (w/Alan M. Clark), and the end-of-the-world freak-out EXTINCTION JOURNALS. His fiction has been acclaimed by authors like Jack Ketchum and Chuck Palahniuk and has appeared internationally in numerous anthologies and magazines. In 2008 he worked with The Mars Volta to tell the story behind their Grammy Winning album The Bedlam in Goliath. In 2010 he spoke about weirdness and metaphor as a survival tool at the Fractal 10 conference in Medellin, Colombia (where fellow speakers included DJ Spooky, an MIT bio-engineer, and a doctor who explained the neurological aspirations of a sponge). He is working on a number of new books. You’ll just have to trust him on this.
www.jeremyrobertjohnson.com
www.swallowdownpress.com
About the Artist
Marie Peters-Rimpot, 41, was born and raised in Bretagne, France. She moved to the Netherlands when she was 22 and has lived there since as a mother to three wonderful children and as a respected self-taught artist. Her work is the result of a constant urge to create, whether the method is photography, short stories, sculpture, or digital manipulations. She has been honored to exhibit her art in Levallois Perret and Amanlys. To see more of Marie’s work you can visit:
http://zapzoum.daportfolio.com/
WINNER OF THE 2011 WONDERLAND AWARD FOR BEST COLLECTION!
“WE LIVE INSIDE YOU is fucking terrific.”—JACK KETCHUM
“A haunting collection from a wildly talented author, WE LIVE INSIDE YOU is composed of nineteen perfectly-wrought nightmares, every one of which will stay with you long after you've finished reading.”—PETER CRAIG, author of Hot Plastic and Blood Father, co-screenwriter of The Town
“The people populating these stories are real and vital and you WILL care, deeply, about what becomes of them...and in JRJ's harsh universe, baaaaad things happen. Often. Prepare thyself.”—CRAIG DAVIDSON, author of Rust and Bone, The Fighter, and Sarah Court
“Favorite collection for 2011: WE LIVE INSIDE YOU.”—STEPHEN GRAHAM JONES, author of The Ones That Got Away and It Came From Del Rio
Now available in a 2012 Author’s Preferred Edition. Includes a fully revised text, 20,000 words of bonus content, and an Introduction by Stephen Graham Jones. Only $2.99 for Kindle!
“A dazzling writer. Seriously amazing short stories—and I love short stories. Like the best of Tobias Wolff. While I read them, they made time stand still. That’s great.”—CHUCK PALAHNIUK
“Johnson weaves vivid and fascinatingly grotesque tales regarding such things as a group of extreme body modification addicts (one of whom is pretty much made out of vegetables) to a cockroach suit that helps its maker survive WWIII. These stories have been given serious treatment and emerge as fantastic and often graphic scenarios full of characters you hate to love.”—BOOKGASM
“Angel Dust Apocalypse hits the reader
in the gut and goes to work. Within these pages the dark underbelly of the human subconscious is captured: those things that people think about but never mention...I could not put this book down...”—RAZORCAKE
“In its most twisted moments, Johnson’s writing is too gleeful to pigeon-hole as strictly ‘horror,’ and when he steps outside the gross-out game, he transcends most other straight literary writers. Angel Dust Apocalypse is every bit as smart as it is gut-churning, and every bit as moving and introspective as it is horrifying and humorous.”—VERBICIDE
Extinction Journals Page 7
