It started with the maggots. One hot Australian January morning, unlucky beachcombers had discovered millions of the fleshy nubs orgiastically crawling over each other and everything else on Newport Beach.
No one knew where they had come from, and the beach-storming maggots left without an explanation. But when they returned, it was for good. They were soon joined by hundreds of fetid whale corpses that washed into the harbour in their wake.
Milon Tusk saw the appalling footage as he was putting the final touches on The Tedious Corp’s contract with the chairman of a minor exploitable country. The story had been picked up by every news outlet – at least all the channels now playing on the many flat screens that lined the Honorable Minister [Redacted]’s otherwise mahogany office. “I need to cancel my trip to Sydney!” howled the Minister, so distracted by the horror playing out on his walls that he missed the bit in the contract that assigned control of his country’s mineral rights to Milon Tusk’s Tedious Corp.
“Don’t forget to initial here,” Tusk said nonchalantly, secretly on tenterhooks as the minister got to the heavily euphemised pages that suggested (in impeccable legalese) that a portion of his country may require extermination.
But the minister’s eyes never left CNN as he signed. One of the whale carcasses had just blown up on live TV, peppering the attractive CNN correspondent with a baker’s dozen maggots.
As Tusk’s private plane was making its way from the minor exploitable country back to California, maggots turned to flies, flies spread pestilence, and disease control centers all over the world scrambled to send their best and brightest to Sydney to investigate.
To no end, as it turned out. It was soon apparent that Sydney had only been the entry point for an unstoppable juggernaut.
After the water-dwellers were gone, the disease jumped to birds. From birds it jumped to pigs, to horses, to dogs. Nothing was immune. The horror wended its way through the creatures of the earth with no clear strategy but won every war. Zebras, frogs, lions, lemurs, all extinct in weeks. The monkeys, the apes… and then, scarcely two months after the first maggot-infested whale had exploded, it came for the humans.
Cities fell. Countries. There was no escape. People wore SARS masks. They died.
The very, very rich were able to keep death at the door longer than anyone else. They barricaded themselves in their estates. They bought technology. They hired teams of snipers to shoot every bird and fox and mouse and ant on sight.
But there’s only so much you can do about flies.
Hellish clouds buzzed all around him, and now the flamethrower was running out of propane. “God damn this thing,” Tusk spat, his eyes wild. These were really just supposed to be promotional swag for Tedious Corp. They weren’t designed to ward off the end of the world. He threw the spent machine on the ground and made a run for it.
Every sign of life around Tusk’s sprawling estate got the blowtorch treatment, but the giant fly clouds were the ones he dreaded the most. The bees were gone, the ants were gone, even the goddamn roaches were gone, but those flies were living their best life. He sprinted through the layers of netting into the first airlock, breathing a sigh of profound relief under the punishing spray of the initial decontamination shower. He was safely sealed inside the space-station calibre airlocks he’d had installed three weeks earlier.
Since then, his cook had died; his driver had succumbed; all the maids were gone. All that was left of his ex-wife was the still-smoldering husk in the tulip garden. But thanks to his stockpile of promotional flamethrowers, Tusk could still count himself among the living.
If he weren’t living through the end of days, he would have been amused at the reflection that greeted him at the first set of sliding aluminum doors into his estate. He was wearing a respirator his driver had fetched for him from the Home Depot as his last act of bravado (he had thrown it over the wall of the estate, before coughing up the last of his lungs and then his stomach). Over the mask he wore $9000 anti-bacterial, anti-microbial, reflective, polarised Dolce & Gabbana swim goggles (his ex’s – she wouldn’t mind). Every inch of the rest of his body was covered in Teflon body armor.
In the months since he had returned to California from the minor exploitable country, all the TVs had been on nonstop, tracking the horror as it spread from Sydney to China to Russia and ever westward. Now they were off – there were no more channels. There were no more radio stations. There was no more world.
He threw open the flamethrower closet, strapped himself with two shiny new models, and made his way back to the airlock to resume his hunt for the few ghastly things that clung to life seeking to spread death.
He was nearly back at the airlock when the front gate intercom buzzed.
“Milon let me in,” rasped a sweaty voice. Tusk knew that voice.
Dieter Peel.
“How do I know you’re not sick,” Tusk said. He skipped niceties and pretense, just straight to the point. And he didn’t give that directness a second thought – Peel would have asked him the same question had the roles been reversed, and Tusk knew Peel would appreciate the rational, utilitarian ethos that had guided them through their early days together in Silicon Valley.
“Of course I’m not sick,” Peel said impatiently. “I’ve drained about a hundred orphans just this week, special harvest guaranteed clean.” He paused. “I’ve brought some for you.”
Tusk grimaced. This was the one area where he and his libertarian bestie were simply not on the same page. “You can come in Dieter, but I’m gonna pass on the ah… elixir.”
“Milon,” Peel said, the impatience in his tone growing. “I didn’t come here to shack up in your fortress. I want you to come with me.”
“You want me to leave?” Tusk said. “That’s insane. I have airlocks.”
“Look,” Peel said urgently. “I can get us somewhere better. I have a place where we’ll be safe until this passes.”
“Passes,” Tusk said deliriously. “What do you mean passes. It’s the fucking end of the world, Dieter. I spend most of my days roasting flies before they can eat the air filtration units.”
“If we can get there, we’ll be safe,” Peel persisted.
Tusk leaned his head against the wall next to the intercom. Peel didn’t make such promises lightly. And “safe” sure beat waiting out his death while remembering which hallways to avoid because of the smoking dead bodies – and the increasingly intolerable barbecue stench that was penetrating even the industrial air filters.
Half an hour later he found himself speeding down the 405 in Peel’s driverless car, which had been routed to the experimental hangar.
“Is it definitely operational?” Peel was asking him urgently.
“It can get us anywhere on earth in half an hour,” Tusk said, absentmindedly reciting company propaganda. His mind was elsewhere.
“Can it get us to New Zealand?” Peel said. “Come on Milon. Talk to me.”
“Of course,” Tusk murmured, staring out of the car at the scenes of horror at the side of the road. Those fucking maggots. They just didn’t die.
As soon as they alighted at Tusk’s private landing bay at the New Zealand spaceport, an autonomous vehicle was waiting to ferry them to the destination Tusk had keyed in at Peel’s instruction. They rode in silence. The sky was a cloudless flaming orange. Their descent had been the only motion in the sky – no airplanes, no helicopters, no birds, not even insects. Just a weighty, increasingly terrorizing absence.
The road became less roadlike, more disused. After some time the vehicle approached a decrepit gate in the middle of what appeared to be wilderness. Peel pressed his tongue to his cheek in an unnatural fashion and the old, rickety gate gave way with a surprising smoothness.
The car struggled through dense forest but soon approached a second gate in a high wall, this one much more evidently concealing something that warranted military grade protection. Peel pressed his left eyeball 5 times in a kind of Morse code, and a biometric scanner appeared. Recognising its master, the AI granted entry.
Beyond the wall, a lush scene unfolded – palm trees, an ostentatious fountain, and beyond it a modernist estate that glittered under the illumination of all the lights that had come on when the walled garden was activated.
They walked into the house. A massive living room, mostly glass, looked out onto the vast expanse of Mangawhai Bay.
“It’s all glass,” Tusk muttered to himself, beginning to regret his decision. “There aren’t even any airlocks.”
Peel walked to a drinks cart and cleared his throat. After a sudden flurry of activity beneath the cart, Tusk was treated to the uncanny sight of a self assembling robot unfolding itself into its full height. “Greetings Mr. Peel,” the finished product said in a plummy British accent. “What an unexpected pleasure.”
“Whisky,” Peel rasped. “Two.”
“Oh hello Mr. Tusk. How lovely to see you here.”
“Shut up Denton. Give us the drinks and fuck off,” Peel snapped, and the robot, looking stung, nonetheless obliged before folding itself back into the floor.
The ocean view was serene and spectacular, enhanced by occasional strange green flashes in the sky above the house.
“Why do you think we’re safer here?” Tusk ventured after they had finished their drinks. “This is all glass.” He gestured up and out.
“Carbon composite.” Peel said. “You couldn’t drive a tank through the stuff. And you see those green flashes? Lasers. I have 20 thousand UAVs in diamond formation over the estate. They all carry miniaturized versions of the Airborne Laser. They keep anything and everything from breaching the perimeter. Only thing that works against the flies.”
“You had that installed so fast,” Tusk marveled. It had eaten nearly all his liquid savings to get his airlocks installed, and even then it ended up being a week too late, as the memory of the corpse of his late wife reminded him.
“I installed it when I bought the place three years ago,” Peel said. He was about to continue when suddenly the room glowed green as the laser fire above intensified. “Come on, let’s go,” he said. “I just wanted to see the outside world one last time.”
He led Tusk into an ornate library to a shelf stuffed with gilt volumes, and pushed on a golden cat statue. One wall edged artfully to the side, revealing a small cubby. A small surface backed onto a hole in the floor, out of which poked the top of a ladder. “After you,” said Peel.
When Tusk’s foot hit the first rung, LED lights sparkled to life along the walls, illuminating a shaft that went about four stories down. At the bottom, another cubby opened into a cavernous luxury bunker.
“This is the place the New Yorker wrote about last year,” Peel bragged. “Made the reporter sign an NDA.”
It was beautiful. Beyond the living room a hallway led to spacious and sumptuously decorated bedrooms each with their own en suite bathroom. Every room – including the bathrooms – had at least one floor-to-ceiling flat screen that was indistinguishable from a window on a high floor overlooking a hilly, wooded estate. The perspective changed realistically depending which room you were in. “Tested with the people who do fake nature for wound healing,” Peel said. “This scenery is proven to keep you sane and fool the mind into not developing cabin fever. And down the hall to enhance the illusion is a holodeck where you can walk around the woods. It even has phytoncide mist to placebo the body into a self healing state.”
Custom air filtration. Bespoke well. Desalination. Clean water for at least a hundred years. “Food too – for a hundred years, and I don’t mean spam. I have caviar and live chickens.“
“Who takes care of them?”
“Denton,” Peel said, as if surprised that he’d even have to explain this.
“Greetings, sir,” said Denton, unfolding from a wall. “Do you require my services?”
“Fuck off Denton,” Peel said. Denton mutely melted back into the wall.
“How were you so prepared for this?” Tusk said. “The lasers. This incredible bunker. It’s almost like you knew this was going to happen.”
“Of course I did,” Peel said. “I made it happen.”
Peel walked over to a large, gold-inlaid table pushed against a far wall. Arrayed there were several crumbling stone tablets. Peel fondled them. “Do you know what these are?”
Tusk peered closer. “They look old. The writing doesn’t look like anything I’ve ever seen. Is this Egyptian?”
“Sumerian.” Peel said. “Panopticorp got them a few years ago. Well, we used Blobby Lobby as a front for getting them out of Iraq. The Christians always suspected these tablets were out there. You know these tablets were the entire reason for the war. It took us almost 10 years to track them down. But we finally did it. We’ve been translating them ever since.”
“Here she is,” Peel said, picking one up. “This is the big one.” Beneath the ancient runes ran a single straight line. “This one here is the contract. Well, kind of a contract. Some of our translators wanted to call it an ‘incantation.’ Tomato, tomahto. It’s a contract. Look, that’s the signature line right there.”
The writing on the line stood out from the rest of the tablet: it was sharper, more recent, with familiar lines. Recogniseable even. “Is that —“ Tusk began, but Peel was too excited to let him finish. “Yep, the president himself. And me. Those are my initials right there.”
“What… was in the contract?” Tusk asked, a hideousness beginning to churn in his stomach.
“Incredible wealth,” Peel said, beads of sweat popping on his forehead. “Even you can’t imagine it.”
“Wealth?” Tusk asked. “I don’t understand.”
“So much wealth,” said Peel. His eyes started to roll back in their sockets.
“So it’s a contract,” Tusk said, trying to work out what was going on. “What does this have to do with what’s happening now.”
Peel waved his arms. “Oh you know. The translators got all nervous talking about “mineral rights”. And this symbol here – the Yalies thought that meant “cleaning”, the CMU guys said it was etymologically more similar to ‘extermination’.”
“Is that what’s been happening to us?” Tusk said, feeling a growing horror. “Did we just get exterminated?”
“No, Milon, we didn’t get exterminated,” Peel said irritably. “I’m here. You’re here. All the important people are safe.”
“Who else is left?”
“The president, obviously,” Peel said. “He brokered the whole deal. You know he’s an incredible businessman. Look, as long as we stay down here for a few years, when it’s all over we’ll be fine! We’re going to start over. It’s going to be like Eden,” Peel said.
“Years? How many years?” Tusk asked.
“I don’t know, twenty? Fifty?”
“Fifty years!” Tusk shouted, trying to figure out when Dieter Peel had lost his entire bag of marbles. “I don’t care how much caviar you have down here! We’ll be dead of old age!”
“Wrong,” Peel smirked, walking into the gleaming aluminum and marble chef’s kitchen that led off the main cavern. There, all the way at the end, was a floor-to-vaulted-ceiling laboratory grade freezer sporting hundreds of doors, accessible by a sliding chrome librarian’s ladder. “The elixir,” Peel breathed. “It’s a special formula we got from one of the tablets. I’ve been stockpiling it for years. We all have. We made a hundred years’ worth for ourselves and our guests. We made sure we had enough before we signed.”
Tusk felt the vomit rising in his throat. Was he really trapped in this baroque hell hole with this modern day vampire? Had he really conscripted himself to 50 years of taking an immortality serum in the faint hope of breathing fresh air again?
As Tusk was bent over one of the stainless steel kitchen islands, trying to come to grips with his new reality, he was interrupted by an inhuman shriek. He looked up to see Peel frantically slamming open the freezer doors, one by one. Every one was empty.
“Shoot me,” Peel rasped.
“Sir, are you absolutely sure you want to end your life?” Denton asked. “This goes against my programming to protect your life at all costs. May I please point out that I am also programmed with an array of psychoanalysis and psychotherapy subroutines.”
“Just fucking shoot me in the face when I tell you to.” Peel snarled. “And don’t fuck it up. I want to be dead.” He turned to Tusk. “Are you sure you want to stick around?”
Tusk didn’t answer. He could feel his mind starting to go, but he couldn’t bear the thought of dying down here in this artful dungeon, murdered by an obsequious AI ghost.
Several hours had passed. Denton had done a nice job cleaning up the mess, and had given Tusk some fairly effective therapy along with several cocktails.
Just as he was about to select Apocalypse Now from Peel’s library of Blu Ray discs, he was interrupted by a tremendous booming noise. He felt more than heard it.
An earthquake? His interest was only temporary and soon returned his attention to the shotgun.
Another boom followed, and then a third.
Tusk wondered if it would be too risky to leave the safety of the shelter to investigate. Then he shook his head and laughed. What, and endanger the successful completion of blowing his brains out?
He climbed back up the ladder, and unsealed the secret door into the library.
Peel’s glass fishbowl of a living room was lit up as though by colourful fireworks or an aurora.
Enormous. Something like metallic jellyfish stalking around the oceans.
Looking at the creatures made his eyes go funny, as if they existed only partially within his perceptual spectrum. If you focused directly on any one particular spot, you got the sense that they were more like the cranes that edged ports. But try to grasp the whole entity, and your focus would slide constantly leaving them in the periphery. The metallic legs seemed to multiply and shimmer in and out of existence as the things walked, which explained why his first impression had been of jellyfish.
A faint outline in the inky sky grew bigger and brighter until there, hovering above the ocean between the circle of jellyfish, was a deep, star-blocking shape.
It was the middle of the night, but judging by the inky absence of stars, whatever it was blocked out about two thirds of the sky.
Suddenly it lit up and Tusk was finally able to grasp what he was looking at. Stilts extended down and joined with the jellyfish creatures, steadying the enormous disk far above. From its belly, a nasty looking spike began to protrude. Before Tusk could fully understand what was happening, in a lightning flash something enormous shot out of the spike and punctured the earth with a devastating shriek as the earth tore away.
It was a planet sized tunneling machine.
Just as he began to succumb to what was shaping up to be a truly hysterical panic, Tusk suddenly realised he could just about make out writing on the edge of the disk.
“Elon Musk’s Multiversal Boring Company – Tunnelling through the multiverse for fun and profit!”
And in smaller, cursive font below it: “Now affiliated with Craig Venter’s Pest Control.”
“Oh fuuh-”
Image credit: The Scream, by Edvard Munch. This version, executed in 1910 in tempera on cardboard, was stolen from the Munch Museum in 2004, and recovered in 2006
this – was – awesome
thanks! glad you liked.
Liked the part of the maggots starting in Newport Beach. Seemed apropos.
Greeting from Wellington New Zealand. Not Mangawhai Bay, but still….
Brilliant!