Slag Attack (12 page)

   
The next morning Commando begins transforming himself and making alterations to Rambo. He gives him a hammer for a right hand and a wrench for the left. He gives himself a hook for a hand. Time gets weird. It feels like it stretches out. Commando and Rambo wander around the scrap yard, drinking gasoline and stripping Cobra’s flesh from his bone. Commando searches through the washing machines and finds that most of them still have clothes in them. Like the antennas, this is another mystery. Another something he’d never noticed before. He guesses there are a lot of things he never noticed before and wonders how many of those things are really important.

   
He begins opening the trunks of the cars until he finds two pairs of shoes large enough to fit their new robot bodies.

   
He thought he would feel pain with all of this metal bolted into his flesh. But he doesn’t feel pain. He feels calm. He feels and knows he is waiting for something. He feels some sense of strange communion with Rambo he’s never felt before, even though neither one of them say a word.

   
And he feels powerful. Almost indestructible.

20.

Commando and Rambo are drinking oil out of metal goblets when the tornado sirens sound. Before the slags, they set them off at noon on the first Monday of every month and it was something Commando never got used to. He knew they were tornado sirens and he knew they were just testing them, but they made him think of nuclear war, just like the emergency broadcast tests always made him think of zombie invasions. He hasn’t heard the sirens since the first storm of slags.

   
Commando unscrews Rambo’s antenna and pours one jug of gasoline and one jug of piss down the hole. Rambo does the same for him.

   
They begin their walk to town.

   
They move quickly, their heavy feet crunching down the middle of the road.

   
The corpse mountain is even larger than it was the first time Commando saw it. The corpses extend at least four stories into the air, line the sides of the streets. Neither Commando nor Rambo sees anyone else. Commando imagines them hiding amidst the corpses in the mountain. Or they’ve built something like a hut at the center of the mountain, thinking that by surrounding themselves with death, they could keep themselves from it. Someone has lit all the buildings on fire. Once he didn’t need his right hand anymore, Commando had fastened a tube to it and stuffed it with rags. He touches the rags to the fire and lifts them to his head. He feels the fire quickly surge through his body. He does the same to Rambo. Together they begin ascending the mountain of corpses. Their instrument hands provide perfect traction against the sick gore-slicked surfaces of the decaying bodies.

   
When they reach the top they look to the horizon and see, against the gray sky, a dust cloud barreling toward them.

   
Commando thinks it could be filled with slags or could be filled with salvation.

   
The flames hollow him out and he feels himself melt into the metal he has encased himself with.

   
He hears the voice saying, “Protect,” and prepares to fight.

21.

Rambo looks at Commando, his head spouting flames, and feels alive and aware for the first time in a really long time. He can feel the slags that have eaten up his brain and the insides of his body crackling and burning. He can hear the dust cloud on the horizon whirling around itself, the grains of dirt and debris frictioning off each other. And somewhere, possibly below him, possible buried in the center of the corpse mountain, he thinks he hears singing.

All Alone At the Edge of the World

1.

Darren Welch named his lighter “Luke.”

   
He flicks the small maggot-like thing crawling up his arm onto the floor and collapses onto his knees, bending over it. The little thing is called a “slag.” He thinks it describes them pretty well. Little slug-like maggots or maggot-like slugs. Slags. The scientific community didn’t stick around long enough to give them a more proper name. It doesn’t matter much now, anyway.

   
Luke is a black Bic and Darren cringes at the thought of him running out of fluid and dying. Dying like everyone else.

   
Hunkering down over the slag, upside down and wriggling on the plank wood floor of the beach house, he sparks the lighter and touches it to the small slag. Its slimy hide blackens and he imagines its insides boiling before exploding through the casing with that weird sick stench he has become accustomed to. A cross between burnt beans and sewage. Texture-wise, he tries to think of it as a sausage. It’s even worse that he has to eat the fuckers to stay alive. Imagine that, he thinks, these things have consumed virtually everyone on the planet and now he is here, all alone at what feels like the edge of the world, eating them so he doesn’t die from starvation.

   
Quickly, without thinking about it, he grabs it between two fingers and pops it into his mouth, aiming for the back of his tongue so he doesn’t have to taste it. He chokes it down and stands up. He crosses the living room of the house and pulls a cigarette from the mantel. The room is bare. He has used all the furniture as firewood. Soon, he will have to start pulling the floorboards from the upstairs and using them as kindling. He puts the cigarette between his lips and flicks Luke again.

   
Killing the slags and lighting cigarettes are the things Luke is best at. These are just about the only things Darren has to do. Luke makes him feel like he has an accomplice. He smokes a lot. Smokes and thinks about the way things were.

   
He thinks about the way things were before and he thinks about the tent down the beach and he holds Luke in his hand, rubbing his thumb up and down the smooth plastic case.

2.

One day, life had been normal. The next day the slags had come and changed everything. Were they airborne? he wonders. He remembers them raining from the sky before scurrying after the people—into homes, into businesses, into schools—everywhere. Theories of war were immediately hatched. Terrorists, the Americans said. Others probably said the slags were a distinctly Western invention, typical of American pomposity and aggression. It only took a few days for absolutely none of that to matter. From what Darren can figure, the slags managed to burrow under one’s skin or enter through various orifices and release some kind of digestive poison, reducing one’s insides to a gray jellyish substance. The slags consumed this substance with glee.

   
Before the plague, Darren had had a wife and children back in Indiana. The children went first and Darren didn’t like to think about them because thinking about them made him sad. He knows he will never see them again unless heaven isn’t the lie he believes it to be. Thankfully, he didn’t have to watch them die, to be consumed by those hideous things. He had just checked on the two boys, playing in their room, when the storm hit. Darren had looked outside and then said to Lora, his wife, “That’s some
weeeird
fuckin rain,” thinking nothing more of it. When he went to get the boys for lunch, they were two piles of bones sitting in the midst of their toys and the room was acrawl with the slags. That quickly.

   
Lora hadn’t lasted much longer. Opening the boys’ door had released them through the house. They were upon him and he rapidly wiped them off. Returning to the living room, he saw them on Lora and then
in
Lora. Darren remembered her leaning over the kitchen sink a little later, vomiting up blood and he had put his hand on her back, as he always did when she was sick, and he could feel those things
wriggling
beneath the fabric of her shirt. And then she, too, was gone. Loose skin hanging over bones and then those things collapsing her eyes and crawling from the sockets, making holes from the inside of her skin so they could get out and move on.

   
He hadn’t known why he had been spared. He was not immune to the burrowing of the slags although they did not seem to cover him with the profusion they covered others. Still, his body was covered with scars where he had to cut inside his skin and dig them out so they didn’t chance upon a major artery. He
is
apparently immune to their poison or saliva or whatever the hell it is that wastes one’s insides. He traveled from the quiet Indiana suburb to what he is pretty sure is Maryland before finding this house on the beach and deciding he has run out of land and, really, what’s the point of pressing onward? He hasn’t seen another single soul on his journey.

   
Not after the second wave. The one that got his family.

   
The first wave was bad enough but it resulted in little more than quarantines in all the major cities and, over a several year stretch, infiltration into the mid-size cities and even smaller towns. But it was manageable. It seemed, after a while, that the humans were even winning, beating back the slags.

   
And then the second wave hit and destroyed all optimism within only a couple of days.

   
The slags had consumed the food after consuming the population. There isn’t anything left. Darren is lonely and terrified. Terrified because the slags are getting bigger. Soon, he will have to fear being mauled more than he will have to fear being poisoned. Humans, he knows, are not immune to mauling.

3.

About a half-mile down the flat, rough beach stands a red and white tent. He has always wanted to walk to the tent but he has found himself reluctant to give up on life. He reckons he should have gone when the slags were smaller and more harmless. Now he doesn’t think he will be able to get more than a tenth the distance without being taken down. He is pretty sure the slags are so hungry they are eating themselves. The good news is, with the size increase, there is an overall population decrease.

   
He stands at the north window of the house and looks toward the tent. He imagines it filled with happy people. Summer people. He imagines friends and laughter, plans hatched in youth, a whole world waiting. Anything but the waste strewn out behind him.

   
Today is the day, he tells himself. The longer he waits, the bigger and more threatening the slags will become. While the ones that make it into the house are still on the small side, the ones on the outside now resemble something that makes him think of kickballs and melons. Next week it will probably be giant pumpkins. The week after that, he will have to stop thinking about fruits and vegetables and start using adjectives—dwarfish, average, giant...

   
Yes. If he is going to the tent, it has to be soon. He doesn’t even really know why going to the tent is important. Maybe because it is the only thing besides this house breaking up the monotony of the beach. Without the tent, it would just be sand and ocean, sand and ocean—as far as the eye could see.

   
He lights another cigarette, not even remembering tossing the previous one out, and turns his attention back to the desolate gray beach. A dirty white bird swoops down toward the coarse sand. Birds are the only signs of any life besides the slags he has seen. Even as the bird swoops down, he thinks, No, you don’t want to do that. But the stupid thing touches down on the beach and a bloated slag rises from the sand, taking the bird down with surprising dexterity. The bird becomes immediately limp, the slag’s mouth clamped down over its neck, not a drop of blood escaping. Soon, two other slags scramble out of the sand nearby and scuttle toward their meal.

   
He thinks it best to move while at least some of them are distracted. He knows he will have to run just about the entire distance. He drops his cigarette to the floor and stamps on it, flicking one of the baby slags from his skin, grabbing the pistol housing a single bullet and flinging himself through the door, being careful to shut it against the creatures so he will have a place to come back to.

   
He runs as fast as he can along the beach thinking the tent must be absolutely filled with slags. It is probably like their home or something. And he is running toward it. No. It can’t be their home. He knows he doesn’t really believe that. If that were the case then what would the point of running to it be? He isn’t sure he attaches any type of divine significance to his being what may very well be the last person on earth but he wants to continue living enough to want to believe there is something in that tent.

   
Midway there, he decides maybe the tent is a doorway to some other world. A world without the slags. A world just like the one he has come from because, despite his disagreements with that world, he has found himself, more and more, thinking of it as a place of near perfection. And however fucked up it was, it seemed that humans had been the cause of most of the really major fuck-ups. But they seemed able to recover from their fuck-ups. Then the slags came. Darren would take the humans back in a heartbeat.

   
He continues to run, fighting the sand, pressing onward. The sand fills his running shoes. He hates that feeling. Wishes he had just left his shoes off completely.

   
Yes, he tells himself, the tent is a doorway to another world and those people he has imagined in there... They are people from that world. They came to the tent to have parties and wait for him. Maybe they were transported there. He can practically hear their soft laughter and smell their exotic food.