: 5 :
PRESENTLY
Now, sitting inside the phonebooth—Phonebooth? Who even still has a fucking phonebooth? he thought distantly—at Mickey’s Pork & Porch, Jeremy was looking down at his well-polished shoes and the pressed pants he’d had Tynesha help him pick out specially for going to interviews, Jeremy wondered if he was dreaming. A week ago, the Ecophage Problem was said to be mostly over, with fewer and fewer attacks reported every day, and he’d gotten an email from Nicole Berry at the Cobb County Courthouse to appear for an interview. It had seemed like the clerkship might actually be on. He’d even started looking into Anderson, Perry & Stephenson, a law firm where a classmate of his had ended up. They gave out a $16,000 signing bonus. Jeremy had the brochure, he’d been perusing their website the last couple of nights.
This morning, he’d woken up to a text from Alysse asking him if the roads were finally clear where he was. He told her that, yes, they were, and she had suggested again that they meet. Hearing that, Jeremy had felt like he was walking on sunshine, that all was finally right. He’d told her he would meet her right after his interview at the courthouse, how does that sound? Well, that sounded just fine, it turned out, and the message came with another kiss emoji, followed by three heart emojis, followed by a second, and final, kiss emoji.
Presently, he looked out the restaurant’s huge bay window at all the people running, the flesh sloughing off of their bones in great, gray clumps, splashing to the ground. Jeremy felt one hand trembling. Only his right hand, his fidgeting hand, the hand that had given him so much trouble after he recovered from Guillain-Barre syndrome as a child. He reached into his bag, which he’d laid on the floor, and rummaged inside the pockets for his Prozac or any other SSRI he might still have in there. He came up nil.
He did see, however, his old copy of Star Wars, autographed by Alan Dean Foster, which he’d planned to give to Alysse when they met. Beside that were his DVD copies of the original trilogy, also a gift.
The restaurant smelled like ammonia and bile, the same as all the other piles of gray goo that had once been people. He felt like gagging, but he also felt like he must be dreaming.
Jeremy glanced again at the payphone on the wall beside him. It was a very old one, still had the Elcotel logo on it, probably didn’t even work, just put there for that ironic sort of throwback that modern restaurants were becoming known for. Beside the phone was the neon green sticky note, and Jeremy reread its message: HERE YOU GO, said the message in big, bold letters written in messy sharpie. FOR ALL THE GOOD IT WILL DO YOU.
Jeremy reached out to touch it. He noticed a small arrow beneath the words, scribbled quickly by the writer. The arrow pointed straight down, towards a waist-high shelf, where people could lay their personal items while they talked on the old-timey payphone. On that shelf sat a plastic Ziploc bag, and inside was a large—a very large—clear syringe. The syringe contained a clear liquid. Here you go, he thought. For all the good it will do you.
But what was it? Was it heroine? Had one of the restaurant’s employees been a secret drug dealer? Was this their last bit of stash, left here for someone to take a mid-shift hit? If so, they weren’t being very secretive about it—
Someone smacked against the window. It was a young man, screaming, face melting—
Jeremy remembered a summer working at the Boys & Girls Club, one of the cooks used to give weed to young camp counselors. Jeremy had been a new hire, and a girl named Samantha had showed him where they could go grab dime bags in what she called “dead drops,” like they were spies in some John le Carré novel. Absently, he wondered where Samantha was right at that moment. He wondered if she ever came out to her parents, or if she ever climbed El Capitan like she said she wanted—
Something hit the bay window with a loud bang, and when Jeremy looked up, he saw a woman screaming, her clothes falling all off her bones in great sludgy clumps, along with her shirt and pants, her breasts dissolving as if they were on fire but there were no flames. She looked in at him, eyes wide with all the terror of any mortal meeting their final end, unable to comprehend it, still waiting to wake up. Stunned by the horror of it, Jeremy watched as the woman fell, her blood smearing against the window in a huge arc. Her body exploded in a spray of gray flakes and fog and sludge, but her screams lived on in Jeremy’s ears.
No one was ever going to come out to their parents again, no one was ever going to climb El Capitan. Not anymore. Never again. No one would ever watch Star Wars again, not if the Ecophage had anything to say about it. No one would ever play the violin or eat at Mickey’s Pork & Porch. “Oh God,” he whispered, looking at his tremulous hand. “Oh God, oh God, oh God…God no…no, God, no, no, no…what the fuck? What in the fuck?”
Jeremy looked around for any sign that this was a nightmare, any sign at all that this could merely be delusion. But in his mind he still heard Dr. Gilmore, and the scientist on the radio the day after Gilmore walked off camera, the scientist who said this was an ELE—an extinction level event—and that the government was trying to contain panic and that maybe once upon a time they could’ve done that, but not these days, not with the Internet, not with everyone able to track Elon Musk’s private jet wherever they went.
Outside, trees that had been planted as part of the Atlanta City Council’s plans to “beautify” the city were coming apart like gray dust, sometimes pieces of their trunks would bubble strangely. Wood shouldn’t bubble, he thought. But bubble it did. He saw grass turning rust-brown, saw it sweat and bead and turn gray. It goo-ified, merging with the gray goo that had only moments ago been the screaming woman.
Extinction level event. Those had just been words. Nobody ever thought they would be around for such a thing, no one thought they’d live to witness an ELE. But Jeremy was learning quick that once you’re in it, you realize you’re a part of some rare club, VIP members only, and you are now witnessing the true and ultimate end of everything. And, if you’re anything like Jeremy Braxton, you laugh, and you weep. You do both at the same time because there would never be a Bruce Springsteen or a George Lucas or another Star Wars sequel or anyone or anything else, not ever again.
Jeremy cast around once more, looking for some sign that this wasn’t real. Again, his eyes fell on the neon green sticky note:
HERE YOU GO. FOR ALL THE GOOD IT WILL DO YOU.
This time, his eyes followed the arrow down to the plastic Ziploc bag containing the large syringe. He looked at the needle, still covered by its plastic cap. Jeremy reached down to pick it up, wondering if it was, in fact, heroin. He opened the bag, not knowing why he would even bother. He took out the syringe. It was heavier than he would’ve thought possible for a thing its size, and when he turned it over, he read the strange but familiar label that denoted danger from radiation.
The label on it read: DANGER – USE AT ONLY THE UTMOST NEED.
Jeremy laughed. He tried texting Alysse. He got no answer.
He stared out the window at nothing. Jeremy knew he was dissociating, experiencing what many people in traumatic circumstances experienced, simply separating himself from the terrible event and fading away mentally.
Outside, people were still running past the window, exploding in balls of gray gas and burnt-looking particles, either from the head down or the toes up. Someone’s dog ran by, still on its leash but missing its owner. Looked like a Collie mix. It dissolved, yelping and writhing and biting at the invisible enemy eating it, its guts spewing out onto pavement, but in no time at all, those guts also dissolved into a gray mist.
Jeremy looked over at the sticky note: HERE YOU GO, said the message on the wall. FOR ALL THE GOOD IT WILL DO YOU.
Then, without knowing what he expected to happen, he popped the plastic cap off the tip and started to inject himself. Maybe it is actually heroin. Maybe…maybe it’ll be euphoric, like Roger said back in college, before he became an addict. Maybe it’ll transport me away and I’ll just…fade. I won’t have to deal with any of this fear.
He paused. He knew he’d seen in movies and TV shows that you needed to do a little squirting action first, to get all the air bubbles out of the syringe’s needle. If an air bubble got inside you, it could cause a stroke. He was sure he’d read that. Or seen it happen on that show Orange is the New Black.
But Jeremy didn’t know how to look for a vein, not really. His forearms were decently pronounced, he worked out often enough that some of the veins stood out. He knew there was some trick junkies did with a belt, either tying it high above the elbow or close to it, he couldn’t remember which. He’d never been a junkie so he wasn’t an expert (Roger, where are you when I need you? he thought, laughing) and he didn’t exactly have all the time in the world right now, did he? So fuck it.
He used his left hand to insert the needle into his right arm, slowly, then took a deep, steadying breath. He looked out the window. The air outside was filling up with fumes, and the air in here was rank with ammonia and bile. They were in here with him. The nanites were in here, inside Mickey’s Pork & Porch, and would soon consume him as they were doing the rest of the planet. So why not give himself a little sendoff, a little bon voyage?
And if he died from an overdose? Well, then, at least he had gone out on his terms, and not screaming like the rest of them.
He slowly injected himself.
Jeremy didn’t know what he’d expected. Some immediate euphoria? A feeling of flying or floating? Pleasant hallucinations of seeing his long dead relatives, or fucking Marilyn Monroe? He leaned back in his chair and looked over at the payphone—seriously, who the fuck keeps a payphone around, even ironically, even for décor? He lifted the receiver and held it to his ear. There was no dial tone. Not surprising.
Jeremy sat there waiting for something to happen. Anything at all. He did start to feel a bit…strange. A little dizzy, perhaps. Then, his vision became yellow. Everything in front of him, the whole world, it all became suffused in yellow. But there was no euphoric feeling accompanying it, no sense of transcendence as he’d heard Roger describe it. Nothing. Not even a tingling sensation on his scalp. Just a yellow tint to everything.
That’s it? he thought, laughing.
A mosquito went buzzing past his fast, and, fast as you could blink, it dissolved into absolute dust.
The nanites were definitely in here.
Jeremy was scared. And angry. Angry because this was so unfair, and because whoever had left this syringe for him had apparently led him on. There would be no escape from the goddamn fucking Ecophage. It was going to devour the whole fucking world and he was about to suffer the same fate as those he’d just seen exploding outside of the restaurant.
Jeremy was still dissociating.
Moments ago, but what felt like an eternity, Jeremy Braxton had been driving down Cumberland Boulevard, on his way to an interview that could potentially set him up for life, the beginnings of something beautiful, and afterwards he would go and meet up with Alysse. But then a woman ran across the street, dissolving before his eyes. He’d struck her. Just a glancing blow as he’d veered around her. He’d crashed his car into the ditch outside of Mickey’s Pork & Porch, with its big wraparound porch sporting the massive grills it was apparently famous for. Or so said the sign out front. Jeremy had climbed out of his car to check to see if the woman he’d clipped was all right. That’s when he’d seen her fully turned into sludge, and the guy on the bike, who pedaled straight through the puddle that had once been a person, had twitched his head like someone had shot him in the face, then fell off his bike and immediately exploded. Jeremy had thought Oh God! because he knew what this meant. He’d seen the videos from Dhaka and Kalmar and everywhere else and he knew what was coming for him.
With nowhere else to run, Jeremy had bolted for Mickey’s, grateful that someone had left the front door open. Here he’d hidden, watching the world end from a restaurant he’d only ever heard a handful of friends mention when they pinned themselves on Foursquare or shared pics of their food on Facebook.
Mickey’s, he thought just now. I’m going to fucking die at fucking Mickey’s. Die with yellow vision and no chance of ever finding out what real heroin feels like.
He got a headache.
It only lasted a few seconds, and then it was gone, but the yellow vision remained.
Jeremy sat there for a long while, not even realizing that he’d somehow managed not to die. This, despite the fact that everything around him, including a damn mosquito, had died instantly. The sun was setting. That’s funny, he thought wanly. Sun wasn’t that low when I got here. It was then that he finally realized just how long he’d been sitting inside Mickey’s. Sitting inside Mickey’s and watching the world end.
At some point, Jeremy’s eyes drifted over to the payphone—that stupid fucking payphone—and looked once more at the neon green sticky note. He reached out on a whim, plucked it off the wall, and read it again:
HERE YOU GO, said the message on the wall. FOR ALL THE GOOD IT WILL DO YOU.
Then, he turned it over, and was surprised to find more writing there.
To whoever it may concern, it read, in teeny, tiny letters. We came close. We came very, very close to solving the Ecophage Problem. But we didn’t have enough time. We did develop something, though. Not a vaccine, Dr. Gilmore was right about that. There’s no vaccine. But we do— the writer scribbled out the word do and wrote did instead, —have our own nanites to combat them. But we couldn’t mass-produce them in time. Not enough time. So here you go. It works. You can try it out. But you’re going to be all alone, because nobody else has this. I took mine and I stopped here for something to eat on the way back to the CDC in Atlanta. I took my own injection, and I’m leaving this one here for you, whoever you are. The stuff in the syringe is mildly radioactive, you’ll be sick for a while. Maybe forever. Good luck to you. We had a good run, didn’t we?
Jeremy blinked. It looked like the person writing the note had run out of room to write. They had used every millimeter they could to squeeze every word they could onto the little sticky note. He turned it back over and reread the tiny words, feeling as though his brain had to take care to imbibe them slowly.
He turned the note over and reread the message on the front, in those big, bulky, capital letters written hastily in sharpie: HERE YOU GO. FOR ALL THE GOOD IT WILL DO YOU.
Jeremy stood waveringly to his feet, feeling like his knees had turned to water. He didn’t know if that was from the day’s shock or because of whatever they put in that syringe. He stood there for maybe ten minutes, glancing at the time on his phone. He waited to see if he would die, if he would melt or turn to dust.
Then, Jeremy picked up his bag, and stepped out of Mickey’s Pork & Porch, avoiding the gray puddles of sludge wherever he could. He stood in the parking lot, about where he’d seen the dog ripped apart and melt. He turned around slowly, and was shocked by an ungodly silence. Such awful silence. And the smell of ammonia and bile. Then, in the distance, someone screamed. They didn’t scream for very long.
All the world was yellow and he felt a bit nauseous, but he was alive. By fucking God, he was alive.
For what good it will do you, a little voice said inside his head.
He started walking.
: 6 :
Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on the original website.
The walk home was like stepping through someone else’s dream. Cars were stacked deep, some overturned or piled high, doors left flung open where the owners had presumably leapt from their moving vehicles, probably trying to avoid being eaten alive by the Ecophage. It was a long walk up Highway 92, past the Home Depot where he’d gone with his father once to pick up a new refrigerator to surprise Mom with. That had been about six months before the old man found out his wife was cheating on him, cheating on all of them, and then had come the divorce and a whole slew of therapy sessions. Jeremy had once applied for a job at that Home Depot, but never got a call back. Why hadn’t they called him back?
He walked through the Home Depot parking lot, avoiding gray puddles, hoping to find a car still running. His car was stuck in the ditch. It would probably be stuck there for all eternity, because Kenneth’s Tow Service wasn’t ever going to come out again, was it? No one was. Jeremy kept calling his mother, but he got no answer. He called Tynesha and Halen, also no answer. Arnold had called but Jeremy had just missed it, and after he called back, Arnold had never answered.
He had a feeling he would never hear from Arnold again.
A sudden chill came over him. The sun had just set, it was nighttime, and the world was turning to sludge in random spurts. Some of the grass in the yards he passed had turned to smoke and sludge, but some of it remained, as though the Ecophage had only wanted a snack and so only took a few bites. Other yards were completely wiped out, and the occasional half sludge-eaten carcass of a human or dog lay in driveways or on sidewalks.
His long walk continued. A bloody smear swept across a stop sign. A red four-door Nissan with a FOR SALE sign in its front window had two piles of gray sludge beside it, presumably all that was left of its owners. Wind chimes tinkling on someone’s porch in the distance, unseen, its song heard by no one but Jeremy Braxton. Jeremy wondered how long the wind chimes would be there, tinkling away, unheard forever.
Then, he had a terrifying new thought, one that startled him by just how unexpected it was. How many wind chimes are there in the world? How long can wind chimes stay up? When will the last wind chimes fall? When will be the last time planet Earth ever hears the sound of wind chimes? Like anyone else, he’d always thought wind chimes would be around forever, and that there would always be people and animals around to hear them.
He became hungry. His yellowed vision also became blurry for a time, he was a little nauseous, but also hungry. The kind of hunger he sometimes got whenever he was on strong antibiotics. He saw a Walmart up ahead, approached its glowing sign in the dark, avoiding the gray puddles in the parking lot and stepping inside to essentially rob the place. He stepped around the gray puddles that used to be humans and grabbed cereal bars, potato chips, a few cans of Progresso beef stew, and threw it all into his bag, along with three bottles of water.
He continued walking into the endless night, expecting to die any second.
: 7 :
There were no birds chirping, no cicadas or crickets, no dogs barking distantly in anyone’s yard. Everywhere he went, there was the runny gray liquid pouring out of someone’s former yard and into the gutter. Jeremy no longer avoided the sludge. Why should he? There was no one around to be upset with him or call him disrespectful? Besides, according to Dr. Gilmore, the gray sludge wasn’t actually a person’s remains, more like waste or feces, the consumed or useless bits left over when the Ecophage was done with you.
Jeremy could see horizons he’d never been able to before, because the trees that usually lined the roads were gone, the ground bald almost everywhere he looked. It was strange to see the world so denuded, practically all the greenery missing. He coughed at the fumes, eyes watering through the wavering clouds of dust. The Ecophage had eaten almost every tree, from the leaves and limbs right down to the damn bark and even the roots. Craters remained in the blackened soil where those trees had bubbled and exploded outward.
He tried calling Mom and Charles. Neither of them answered. He texted both of them: I love you.
He tried texting Alysse. Then he tried calling her. They’d held back on calling each other because Alysse wanted to hear Jeremy’s voice for the first time in person. But fuck it, he thought, why not just call her now, see if she even made it? He called and called, no answer.
He checked social media. A message on Facebook (which he kept an account only because some of his family could be easily found there) showed no activity from anyone in the last several hours. There were panicky videos, people sharing cell phone footage of basically what he’d seen happening outside Mickey’s, nothing new to see there.
Jeremy wrote a post saying, Hey! Anybody around? Anybody at all? But when he tried posting it, he received a message that said FACEBOOK IS EXPERIENCING TECHNICAL ISSUES, PLEASE CHECK BACK LATER.
Issues. Problem. Phenomenon. Incident. Human beings had certainly come up with several ways to describe a world-devouring superstorm of nanomachines.
He tried calling Alysse again. He called until his phone’s power was at twenty percent and it flashed a warning at him. So, to preserve it, he put it in his pocket and continued on.
On into the night.
Into the dead Earth.
The whole world smelled rank with ammonia, bile, and even sulfur now. Vaguely, Jeremy thought about this phenomenon: I wonder if this is what Hell is supposed to smell like. He kicked a Sprite can as he walked, just for something to do besides weep. And sometimes he did weep, but he also sometimes laughed. It still felt like walking through someone else’s dream.
HERE YOU GO, the note said. FOR WHAT GOOD IT WILL DO YOU. He now understood what the writer of that note had understood. There was no surviving this, not really. If the writer of that note had indeed been someone from the Centers for Disease Control down in Atlanta, and if they had in fact left that syringe there as a free Get Out of Jail Free card, it had granted him only temporary reprieve.
No one could survive in this new world, not for very long.
One foot in front of the other, Jeremy walked on. Every once in a while, he looked up at the night sky, remembering what Dr. Gilmore had said about how far the nanites had traveled to get here. Some other alien world, she said. He wondered which of those stars the nanites had originated from, if any of them. He tried to imagine that great gulf of lightyears between each star, tried to fathom just how far this Ecophage had traveled to reach Earth and undo billions of years of evolution. It was impossible to fit those distances into his mind.
One foot in front of the other.
The night deepened. It became chillier. Eventually, Jeremy became so tired of walking that he wandered into someone’s front yard, every bit of the grass gone, gray goo leaking across the entire driveway. It was a little sticky, and as he walked through it, Jeremy thought it felt almost like that time near his Uncle Colt’s house when he and his cousins had walked through the tar that someone had tried to fill a pothole with. Sticky, yet slippery it you distributed your weight unevenly.
When he stepped inside the house, he sniffed. The smell of ammonia and bile wasn’t as strong in here. It was dark, so he flipped some switches and was glad that the lights worked. He ate a meal in the kitchen, a sandwich and some BBQ Frito-Lays. He found a bedroom with a few plush pillows and freshly washed blankets that smelled of Tide, then he kicked off the shoes he’d had Tynesha help him pick out for the job interview, and crawled into bed without removing any of his clothes.
He tried calling Mom and Charles, and then Alysse one more time. When none of them answered, he took his phone charger out of his bag and plugged it into the socket beside the nightstand, plugged in his phone, then stared through his yellowed vision at a stranger’s spackled ceiling. He fell slowly into sleep, wondering if he would ever wake up again. He wished he wouldn’t.
: 8 :
You wouldn’t think that all that many fires could start all by themselves, not without any people around to start them, but you would be wrong. Ovens left cooking something when the owners had been eaten by the Ecophage, stoves left burning, or a car that had crashed into a wall or a lamppost, rupturing its fuel line and waiting for the right spark. Those fires were lit all across the globe, presumably, because the next morning when Jeremy set out with absolutely no plan, he saw columns of black smoke climbing a dark sky.
Ominous clouds had piled high on the horizon, and now moved in fast, rumbling. Angry storm clouds.
Fires were spreading. It seemed the gray-waste sludge the Ecophage left in its wake was somewhat flammable, and he saw whole streets that had caught fire, sending up such black clouds that the wind pushed it in his direction, as if it meant to choke him to death with it, and he had to jog in the opposite direction.
Here and there he found streets not so devoured, areas with splotches of greenery that had somehow survived the Feeding. Inspecting it close through his yellowy vision, Jeremy wondered if there had been something special about this grass or these trees that had spared them, or if the Ecophage was merely saving them for seconds. Ringed, he thought, looking up at the black clouds, imagining the vastness of space again, the distance the nanite swarms had traveled. Ringed like the rings of Saturn. That’s what Dr. Gilmore said. The whole fucking planet is surrounded.
Jeremy started walking north. At some point he became aware that he was heading back to his apartment, though he didn’t expect to find anyone alive there.
At one point he passed by a familiar area that had remained remarkably green. Dellinger Park was a place he used to go to read during springtime, and where, as a boy, he’d played Little League Baseball. Happy to see any greenery at all, even through his yellow-tinged vision, he went in search of any human survivors. After all, if this place still stood in pristine condition…
“Hello?” he shouted, his voice echoing across a deathly silent planet. “Anybody? Helloooo!” He jogged around the small baseball field where he’d caught his first flyball, past the third base where he’d been tagged out by Remy Spencer, who he hated but had become his best friend up through fifth grade when Remy’s dad had to move because the Army said so. “Can anybody hear me? Helloooooo!”
Jeremy Braxton’s voice carried across the lonesome field, through the stands where his mother and father had shot to their feet to cheer for him when he made his first base hit. Overhead, the dark cloud rumbled louder, and here came the rain. Jeremy had jogged around in the rain for a minute, shouting to the top of his lungs.
He took out his phone. No messages.
“Hellooooooooo!” he bellowed.
No answer.
He called everyone. He called Mom, Charles, Alysse, Arnold, Tynesha and Halen. No answer. He walked around in the rain, calling every human being in his phone. Troy who cut his hair at Dave’s Barber. He also called Dave’s Barber’s business number. He called Uncle Kevin, two ex-girlfriends, Derek who helped him study for the bar exam. He called Tammy who handled his car insurance at State Farm. He called three different college professors, both their offices and cell phones.
No answer.
He stood in the middle of Dellinger Park, in the rain, just beside the gazebo where Abby McClain had dared him to kiss her and he’d chickened out because he’d heard she had mono, which he’d later found out was a lie started by Rupert Kennison. He stood in the rain and called every single person in his contact list. Then, feeling like an absolute idiot, he thought, Wait a minute. If I’m using the phone, then someone’s working the cell towers or servers or whatever, right? So, people are alive somewhere. They gotta be, right?
Then, feeling like an even bigger idiot, Jeremy checked Google to see if it was still working. It was! He’d assumed since Facebook and other social media sites had been fucked up—
He tried Googling things:
Survivors.
Where are other survivors?
Is there a safe place from the Ecophage?
Where are people going to stay away from the Ecophage?
How to survive the Ecophage?
Military bases close to me.
Shelters close to me.
Jeremy found several threads on Reddit and other sites where people had asked the same questions, and what he noticed terrified him. In every single thread, wherever someone had given an answer to the person asking, the timestamps ended around noon or two o’clock yesterday. Questions in the comments section on Yahoo! sometimes came with two or three answers, and if the asker had then asked for further details, they got nothing. Only silence.
This began to sap the hope right out of him, because it seemed like the Ecophage had struck everyone everywhere at nearly the exact same time, devouring the Yahoo! users even as they tried to give advice on where to go. This theory seemed supported by the fact that every single one of the answers seemed to have been given in utmost haste and fear.
He looked at one entry:
BlindToph0091: I would head towards Nashville RIGHT FUCKING NOW if I were you! There’s a refugee camp past a roadblock. My cousin posted a video, they’re letting people in. Here’s the link.
Jeremy clicked on the link but it said the video had been removed. He scrolled through other comments, looking for any hint or clue of where he should run to. He stood there, not quite sobbing, but making little sighing sounds of panic. He smelled ammonia all around. The rain was pouring down harder but he didn’t notice.
Jeremy came upon several Reddit posts from someone up in Connecticut who said they were heading to limestone caves somewhere in Alabama, that the caves had been there since the Civil War, and had once been used by the Confederacy to hide munitions and even gold. It had all been emptied out, and some billionaires had tried to outfit it to be luxurious, underground, end-of-the-world panic mansions. Bunkers for billionaires.
The person writing this post went by the handle u/ClydeBoyGaga18, and, most importantly, the post had been made just two hours ago. That was well after the Ecophage attack. Jeremy had to try to remember his own Reddit name (u/JediMasterZoinks7777) and password, and after a few tries, he logged into Reddit and messaged u/ClydeBoyGaga18:
u/JediMasterZoinks7777: Where is this place? Am alive right now in Georgia. Think I’m the only one???
He didn’t expect an answer very soon. In fact, he didn’t expect an answer at all. So, he jogged around Dellinger Park some more, shouting out to anyone that could hear, occasionally calling Alysse or Mom or Tynesha or his dentist’s office. He came to a stop beside the concession stand where he and his cousin Billy Joe used to pay a couple bucks to get Fruity Icees. He paced, coughing from a sudden waft of ammonia that assailed his olfactory nerves. He slipped, looked down, and saw he was standing in a puddle. Standing in someone. A single hand and half their face remained in semi-puddle form—
A gasp got caught in his throat, and he ran back to the gazebo. In a renewed panic, Jeremy perused other social media sites, seeing most of them were “Experiencing Difficulty.”
Jeremy stared at his phone’s glowing screen, and had a sudden thought. How long can the Internet last without anyone alive to run it? That thought had never occurred to him before, but he supposed he’d better learn now while he still could. So he asked Google, and got a response in the form of an excerpt from an article written in Popular Science:
Most simulations run by experts believe that, in the case of a complete and total global catastrophe—say, something that wipes out half or more of the human race—many machines that supply power and service to communities in First World Countries will continue on for at least a few months, perhaps even years. But it is not certain which services would remain. The Internet, for instance, could last from one week to up to a year, depending on the degradation of certain power sources, back-up generators, and physical infrastructure, and would only truly fail once all the satellites in space fell from orbit. All satellites require constant course corrections, and most of those are overseen by humans here on Earth. Without human intervention, all satellites would eventually fall into a decaying orbit, plummet, and burn up in atmosphere. That would be the official end of the Internet.
So, okay, he had between a week and a year. Between a week and a year to find whoever or whatever the fuck else remained—
His phone chimed. It was an email alert; he’d set his phone to let him know of any messages he got through his Gmail account. Excitedly, he opened it up, and found a message waiting on him that said:
SOUTHERN CASTING: Find movies casting in your area! Be in a major Hollywood production as early as next week!
Fucking.
Spam?!
Jeremy damn near threw his phone across the park in frustration, but contained himself, only gripping it in a fist and screaming up at the sky. He’d once heard that up to thirty percent of the messages on the Internet were bots, just AI, and that those bots were responding to other bots. Bots talking to bots. There was a theory that said that could swell to such percentages that you might never know when you’re talking to anyone real ever again, and this was referred to as the Death of the Internet Theory, which said the Internet would eventually turn into bots posting conservative talking points and other bots responding with liberal rhetoric, and vise versa.
Something like fifteen percent of Reddit comments were already suspected to be bots. Atheist bots fighting religious bots, pro-war bots arguing against anti-war bots, all of them drawing from AI, stirring up shit in communities, starting fights between people who otherwise never would have had a bad word to say about each other.
Was that all he was left with now? Was he, Jeremy Braxton, having been bestowed a syringe filled with nanite-fighting nanomachines by some unknown hero at the CDC, was he now all alone on planet Earth with no one to talk to besides fucking bots? Was he—
Another chime from his phone. He almost didn’t even look, but decided he couldn’t chance missing something important.
And was very glad that he did, because it was an alert from Reddit, telling him that u/ClydeBoyGaga18 had responded to his comment. Jeremy clicked on it and read,
u/ClydeBoyGaga18: Hey, whoever you are! I’m damn glad to hear you made it! I am already on my way to the caves. Here’s the link to the coordinates on Google Earth. I spoke to a cousin north of me, he’s goin to meet me halfway there with his two kid sisters. I’ve told a few other gamer friends on Discord. I think pretty much most people are dead, my dude! I think they’re all fucking dead! Head to the caves. I’m drivin right now, pulled over to answer yer message, but I’m heading to the caves, siphoning gas from cars on the road as I go. Gotta go survival mode, my brother in Christ! Godspeed brother (or sister?). Hopefully I see ya when I see ya. Good luck. EDIT: The entrance to the cave may be hard to find, shoot me a message when you get there. SECOND EDIT: oh yeah, stay outta of the fuckin rain. Shit’s acid rain, maybe, I think?
Jeremy felt like one of those dandelion seeds floating on air, weightless, almost suspended in air. Someone was talking to him. Someone was actually alive out there and they were actually talking to him. Somewhere he heard wind chimes, and again thought, How long will those last? He read the last line of Clyde’s message again, then slowly stepped under the cover of the gazebo, out of the rain. Siphoning gas? Survival mode? Limestone caves in Alabama?
Lightning flashed distantly, and thunder rolled lazily across the sky. He wasn’t alone. He might be damn near alone, but he wasn’t completely alone. Not yet.
Not yet.
Jeremy clicked the link Clyde had supplied. Sure enough, the coordinates came up on Google Earth, and he was almost surprised how easy it was to zoom in, get a clear view of it, check the miles between his location and there: 383.7 miles, almost a five-hour drive. But, he had to remind himself, that’s at normal times, normal traffic conditions and traffic reports, normal non-apocalyptic travel times. The roads will be clogged, just like Highway 92, just like I’m sure I-75 and Highway 41 are.
Suddenly, his phone rang. It was Alysse.