Blurt followed the trail.
It was heavy in the gut and wide in the leg; slung-backed and thick-limbed. It crushed through cinderblocks like cinders and waded through crunchy fields of broken wires and rust alike, and it ended up in a tangle of rubble at the bottom of a death-pit filled with broken bones and dead dust.
“Hey, sis” she called down into the tiny opening at the base. “What’s going on?”
“Reading,” came the voice. It was thick with phlegm and vexatation and a mouthful of razor-sharp teeth, and it was unmistakable in any way for anyone but Blurt’s sister, Clot. “Go away.”
Thus offered her invitation, Blurt nudged her way inside the gutted basement. There was very little light, but Heloderma spectacular – or the Greater Western Gila Monstrosity – was mostly nocturnal anyways and had pretty decent night vision.
Blurt’s told her that her sister was hunched over a big pile of dead plant matter, most of which had been thrashed into pulp then lightly singed and buried.
“Books?” she said. “You found books?!”
“Oh, a lot more than that,” said Clot. “I’ve found the answer.”
“The what?”
“The answer to all of it,” said Clot, and oh boy was that smugness in her voice thick now. “I know what happened to all of the people.”
“What, you mean uncle Blue and aunt Bop out west? I thought they got eaten by a buffalo.”
“Not US people, dumbass,” said Clot. “I mean the OLD people. HUMAN people.”
That set Blurt hissing for a moment. “Wow,” she said. “Really?”
“Really.”
“All of them?”
“Think so.”
“What d’you mean ‘think’?”
“Alright smartass, you think you know it better than me, you can look at it yourself. Take a peek.”
Blurt accepted a handful of tattered pages, squinted carefully, and began.
Craig Larggcoc sneered down at the undead filling the city through eyes of purestrain chipped blue granite. Greyed flesh, senseless moans, and the meandering will of the mob filled the streets. Not a single human life remained in the city – in basically all the world. In his incredibly accurate and flawless judgment, not much had changed.
The wind was rising; the storm was brewing; the window of opportunity was slowly sliding shut. Garth was whimpering again – his shrill, trembling voice nearly drowned out by the sonorous moans of the zombie hordes – something about going back to search ‘for others.’
“There are no others, Garth,” said Craig, coolly.
Garth stared at him with watery-eyed bewilderment. “What?” he said, vacantly.
“There are no other people,” said Craig, with a sigh. “Those are just cattle. Sheep. Wannabes. Real people? Those are scarce. The shambling mess out there weren’t real even before they started trying to eat us. They always wanted to do that, deep down. They’re just finally being honest about it.”
“But… but people’s lives matter,” whinged Garth, blubbering like the hideous little rat Craig had secretly always suspected him to be.
Something clicked inside his head like the trigger weight on a Messenschole No. 92 (one of the late run models).
“Garth,” said Craig, as rock-steady as the Rockies, “what’s the difference between a clip and a magazine?”
“What?” snivelled Garth.
“Garth, listen to me,” said Craig, voice still steely-calm. “For once in your noxious, wasteful, pointless little ‘life,’ say something useful: what is the difference between a clip and a magazine?”
Garth’s knees knocked together, tick-tock; a clock counting down to inevitability. “I…I…I…don’t knooowww,” he howled senselessly, like the maddened animal he was.
Craig pulled out his gun, which was both his best friend and his lover and he had named Stacy after that no-good bitch that had dumped him in high school for some scumsucking jock named Mel who was doubtlessly dead and drooling down there with the zombies that fucking prick. Stacy was a modified Glorfengummer ’07 with an elongated, silenced barrel and an underslung grenade launcher; a laser scope; camouflage patterning; tactical mesh webbing mesh webbing; an extended magazine; a tactical grip; and a self-lubing barrel for when he was lonely.
“Dumbass,” he sneered. Then he shot him a bunch.
“So… the guns killed people?” asked Blurt.
“No, no, no,” said Clot. “Zombies. See, right at the start – they killed people. All the people. Aren’t you jealous? Mom spent years wondering, and I’ve figured it out. The whole end of humans, all in one book.”
“I mean, sure,” said Blurt. “But you’re being sort of reductive, aren’t you? This is just one book. There must’ve been at least a hundred in here back in the day. Even if not ALL of them were about what killed people, there must’ve been more than just one. Can’t we cross-reference?”
Clot was annoyed. She’d dug through the ruins of half a city block, pulled out untold ancient treasures of what very well could’ve been human knowledge, and now her obnoxious sister was naysaying all her discoveries. “Knock yourself out,” she said.
“Thanks,” said Blurt, deliberately ignoring all context, and she settled down in front of another bookcase, which she immediately began excavating with her powerful forelimbs.
I hope it takes you a hundred years, thought Clot silently. I hope all you find are those little boxes of cereal that taste like Styrofoam gone bad. I hope that
“Found one!” said Blurt.
“Like fuck you did,” said Clot.
“Nope, seriously! Look! Look! It’s a bit slim, and half of it’s fallen out, but there’s a good chunk right here, that’s all about it. Here, read it yourself.”
Blurt picked up the new book with the slow care of a bomb disposal expert and began to read.
“The new fleet’s on schedule,” said Toby.
Peter examined the microscope and saw that it was so. The second-gen nanobots were seven times more powerful than the first batch. It was all down to a childishly straightforward application of Boolean Bayes-frames, immersed in a hyperquantum shell and exposed to nanorelative particles. This unstable mix of physics and chemistry was then probed relentless by Toby with great patience and tiny tools, smaller than an atom’s sneeze. The resulting nanobots were synched to each other’s will using a deceptively simple AI routine based on that of the common cold, which allowed them to piggyback on each other using whip physics like whip scorpions. The upshot of this entire paragraph was that Toby was very smart and that the nanobots would be able to tolerate surface temperatures of over seven trillion parsecs above Kelvin, transforming the hell-surface of New Earth into perfectly tranquil custom-landscapes, adjusted to their every whim and fleeting desire. At least, once they were released into the wild using the delivery system that Peter had developed from scratch. Injected deep into the magmatic chambers of neighboring volcanoes, the ash clouds that belched death into the skies of New Earth would instead sow sweet seeds of man’s genius and innovation.
This procedure was only possible due to the sensathump, a remarkable machine that could, by belching hypersonic signals, probe the interior of the planet much as a bat might an insect in mid-air. It was a very complicated and impressive idea and it was ideas like that which had put Peter in charge of the tiny survival colony of far-thinking people living in what had once been his prudently-constructed bunker before the exploding nebula had turned Earth into New Earth. Vision, that was what separated the real men from the simps and wastes of genetic material. That and a willingness to get your hands dirty. And speaking of which…
“You’ve done frapping good work,” Peter told Toby warmly, “you’re a real trebb, you know that? Hey, stick around for a minute. As you’re well aware, our survival will require a lot of eugenics described in intense yet matter-of-fact detail, and I can’t help but make you aware that your extremely nubile daughter is
“What’s a ‘nebula’?” asked Clot.
“A kind of thing in the sky,” said Blurt. “I think. Mom had a book with pictures once.”
Clot checked the book in her claws. It didn’t have pictures, although the cover had some human’s name on it in incredibly impressive font. “Huh. So… a nebula exploded and killed everyone. That doesn’t make much sense; where’d the zombies come from?”
“The nebula?”
“That’s stupid. Zombies are people, and people are too heavy to fly unless they’re birds. Humans aren’t birds. Probably.”
Blurb thought a little harder. “Maybe the nebula exploding killed a lot of people, and then turned most of the survivors into zombies. That’d make sense.”
“That’s too complicated,” said Clot.
“Real life is usually complicated. Like, remember when we used to think buffalo were good to eat? It seemed really simple for years and years and forever and ever, then the deadwinds changed and it turned out those were just larvae. Boy were we surprised.”
“There’s more-complicated-than-you-think,” said Clot, “and then there’s complicated-to-make—you-feel-clever. And this is that.”
“Which?”
Clot smacked her sister between the eyes and heaved her stunned body across the room. It took Blurt a few minutes to right herself, which Clot spent burrowing in the bookcase.
“Huh,” she said.
“Oh?” asked Blurt, somewhat upright and very breathless. “What is it?”
“Uh. Huh,” said Clot.
“Oh, one of THOSE. Well, am I right or are you?”
“Huh,” said Clot. And she handed Blurt the book.
“It was kind of you to meet with me on such short notice,” said ‘Old’ Nick, warmly. But the coldness in his eye belied the fire in his grin.
“Anything for the Supreme Ruler of the United Nations, Mr. nataS,” said Bradley.
“Ah! You pronounced my name correctly!” said Nick. “So many of you Americans cannot do that, you know. It’s very foreign.”
“I respect the names of all peoples, American or heathen, on God’s green earth,” said Bradley. He saw Nick flinch, and could not hide his own smile.
“Ah,” he hissed as with the forked tongue of the serpent (Genesis 3:15). “It seems the game is up, Pastor Blandford. Behold! I am the Antichrist, and as you are a man your will is now mine! Believe my lies about the dating of igneous rocks using isotopic decay!”
“No I won’t,” said Bradley, nobly. “I believe in my Father, who protects me from that sort of thing. Your cunning disguises avail thee not, tempter! I name thee – ‘Old’ Nicholas Infernus Lucifermaximus nataS – by thy title true: Satan!”
At this Nick nataS roared terribly and turned into a dragon with seventeen heads and each head was wearing a whore and each whore was wearing Babylon, and he vomited up such fire and fury that the whole earth was consumed and every man and woman and child died in that Armageddon.
But Bradley Blandford believed, and so he was okay.
“Take the wheel!” he yelled, and he slapped the Antichrist, and it was the backhand of Christ Slapping Through Him (Revelations 371:0.28). The great dragon yelped in unholy agony as if every Darwinist had screamed at once and
They sat there for a little while, unmoving.
“How’s THAT fit into your theory?” asked Clot.
Blurt tried to talk, realized her tongue was hanging out of her slackened mouth, and tried again.
“So…. It was the sky explosion, which was caused by the Antichrist…dragon…thing, which made zombies,” said Blurt. “The multicausal hypothesis, we can call it? Maybe. Possibly?” She shrank back from her sister’s expression. “Look, it’s a start.”
“I think it might’ve been people,” said Clot at last. “People did it to each other.”
“What? Why?”
“Because if I had to sit around all day looking at this crap, I’d kill someone too. Books are for nerds. Come on, let’s get going. I stashed half a dead deer next to the river yesterday.”