ã€ŠThe Warsã€‹


 PART 1: The Book of Jeremy - CHAPTER 1: The Ecophage

    : 1 :

    When the end of the world came, Jeremy Braxton had just finished his 2L, his second summer of internship, at the district attorney¡¯s office in Cobb County, Georgia. He now sat in horror, staring at a message that made no sense. HERE YOU GO, said the note on the wall. FOR ALL THE GOOD IT WILL DO YOU. The message, written on a tiny neon green sticky note, had caught his attention as soon as he¡¯d entered the phonebooth. Outside on the sidewalk, beside Highway 92 and right where Interstate 75 connected, everyone was dying. In utter shock, Jeremy had just dipped inside a restaurant called Mickey¡¯s Pork & Porch. He looked away from the note someone had left on the wall, and stared instead at the cell phone in his hand. It still worked, but it wouldn¡¯t call anybody. Most devices were inoperable now, the Ecophage had seen to that.

    The restaurant was closed. At least, no one inside it was alive. The patrons lay in puddles of gray sludge, vestiges of ribcages poking out of the stuff, a few hints of skull or other bone fragments were visible in each puddle, the outlines merely suggestive of human remains. Jeremy didn¡¯t understand it. Eight weeks ago, there had been a report out of India about an ¡°unconventional attack¡± of some kind, and then someone at Freddy¡¯s Truck Stop, where Jeremy had stopped for gas, had been ranting and raving about the end of the world. The next Jeremy knew, his phone was blowing up with messages from friends, videos being shared from Myanmar and Sri Lanka, a Buddhist temple in Bhutan, a group of Christian missionaries in Maldives, all showing human beings exploding and turning into gray goop.

    That¡¯s AI, Jeremy had thought at the time. That¡¯s gotta be AI. AI-generated videos made by ChatGPT or Gopher or ChimXZ or any of the others. No way that¡¯s real. No way.

    So, he¡¯d tucked his phone back in his pocket, gotten into his silver Tacoma that was badly in need of a wash, shaking his head at how easily some people could be fooled by anything on the Internet, and headed south on I-75 to meet with Nicole Berry about a post-grad judicial clerkship. That had been weeks ago. Weeks before the end of the world was so clearly near.

    The heavyset woman, who was presently banging her head on the pavement outside, looked beyond terrified. Even as the flesh was pulled away from her bones by the unseen Ecophage, she did not break her rhythm of banging her head solidly against the pavement. Boom, boom, boom, boom. And all the while, she kept screaming.

    Jeremy looked at the neon green sticky note on the wall, and read its message: HERE YOU GO, it said in big bold letters, quickly scribbled by someone¡¯s sharpie. FOR ALL THE GOOD IT WILL DO YOU.

    He thought back to how it all came to be this way.

    : 2 :

    8 WEEKS PRIOR

    Glad to no longer have to make the commute into Atlanta for school every day, Jeremy had sipped his Starbucks and ate a bagel while he drove south, steering with his knees, getting a few honks from people as he veered into their lanes. He ignored them. In his mind, he was already working for Judge Egan Perry, a twenty-year veteran of Cobb County Courthouse, and was rewriting his Tinder profile in his mind to somehow include this new windfall. Jeremy¡¯s time in school had paid off, his sleepless nights of cramming had culminated into what his father called had ¡°A very fine thing for you.¡± High praise coming from the old man, whose idea of showing affection usually meant being present for his birthday.

    Very soon, Jeremy Braxton expected to be well on his way to a life more successful than the rest of his Gen Z contemporaries. He foresaw being in court every day, watching how law was interpreted, how legal precedents were started and cited later. He was looking forward to sharpening his legal writing skills.

    But that day, after the interview had been rescheduled, and he was sitting alone in the apartment he shared with Arnold, Tynesha and Halen, wondering where they had all gone, Jeremy would be washing clothes and sifting through reaction videos on YouTube, when he kept coming upon videos out of Bangladesh, on a street called Bangabandhu in the capital city of Dhaka¡ªJeremy had never been good with other countries and their geography, and had forgotten Dhaka was even a place. But that night, slurping ramen out of a bowl, he was all too aware of Dhaka, and the horrific videos that, according to CNN, were not AI-generated.

    The people dying on Bangabandhu Avenue in faraway Dhaka looked like horrors stepped out of a movie. It happened different for everyone. Some people melted from the head down, some started with their feet or hands, while others seemed to burst from their midsection, almost like that Alien movie, except no alien came out, just the red wet sacks of their guts. Their bodies turned pale white, then gray, even as they fell screaming and writhing to the ground, women clawing at their hijabs. One woman clutched her baby in her arms, even as the child turned to gray mulch, its bloody skull rolling out of its bundle and onto the street as someone continued to film using their cell phone.

    This isn¡¯t real, Jeremy thought. None of this is real. It was an election year and so he assumed this was China or Russia fucking with Americans again, trying to make them afraid. When Americans were afraid, they acted stupid, everybody knew that. Oldest trick in the playbook. That¡¯s what this is. Fake videos. Or exaggerated attacks to make Americans think this could happen here. Something like that, right? Like how the Border Crisis always comes back around or there¡¯s another Depression on the way.

    And yet the videos kept coming, shared across Instagram and TikTok. Some of the victims¡¯ faces were corroded quickly, as if peeled back by an invisible hand, their teeth and eye sockets clearly on display as their blood turned into a black, viscous soup that exploded out of them and quickly became a vapor. After these first stages, it was as if everybody melted in fast-forward, like they were in lava, but there was no heat, no flames, only their flesh and muscles and bones turning to gray goo.

    The details of their deaths were always a little different, but it always happened with the same frightening speed. And Jeremy watched the chilling footage, sometimes disassociating and burying himself in episodes of The Mandalorian, occasionally getting texts from family or friends, which he tried to answer in an orderly fashion, but then his thoughts weren¡¯t orderly. Indeed, alone in his cramped apartment, his disorganized mind was reeling. Nothing about these videos made any sense. Surely this had to be a hoax, some Russian or Chinese plot to scare Americans. Surely.

    Jeremy had heard the term spontaneous human combustion somewhere in school, and remembered a teacher talking about rare events when a person seemed to suddenly go up in flames without any apparent cause. He wondered if that was what this was, but somehow on a large scale.

    Yes, he told himself, cuing up his PlayStation 5 to start a new game of Jedi: Survivor. If it¡¯s not AI, then it¡¯s definitely some kind of attack that makes people combust, or whatever. But that won¡¯t happen here. Nothing ever comes to America. Remember when they said Ebola was going to run amok? And what happened? Like, three people died in all of the U.S.

    In those weeks, Jeremy, along with the rest of the world, would go into a kind of info-dump coma, learning all about nanomachines, or nanites as they were sometimes called, and he would hear the news anchors and science advisors start using the word Ecophage for the first time. He would alternate between believing it and not believing it. Some days he would totally forget about it. He would frequently alternate between being afraid of going outside his door, like he had during that first year of Covid, and then tossing all caution to the wind and going to hang out with his friends, who all had their various wild and uninformed theories about what was really going on in other parts of the world.

    It was also during this time that Jeremy began talking to a girl named Alysse on Tinder. She was a brunette, a mischievous smile in every picture, her hair done up in double buns like Princess Leia in one of them. She was a regular at DragonCon, the sci-fi convention held in Atlanta every year. Alysse was a violinist with aspirations of getting into Julliard, and who was also polyamorous and assured him that her other two boyfriends and her one girlfriend were okay with her entering into a sexual relationship with him.

    Jeremy had never been a part of such a relationship, but he was open-minded. In those weeks while the Ecophage tore through parts of Asia, and then apparently died down, the United States government would demand people stay indoors, enforcing curfews, keeping Jeremy from meeting Alysse in real life. But he bought books on Kindle that covered polyamory, to be better informed when he finally met Alysse in person.

    He also swapped book recs with her. She recommended him some classics he¡¯d never read, like Sense & Sensibility and Pride & Prejudice¡ªchick stuff, but not bad. And he had recommended the Star Wars novelization of the original 1977 film, written by Alan Dean Foster. Jeremy had been very happy to learn that Alysse was apparently a Star Wars fan like himself, though she¡¯d only ever seen the prequels.

    We can remedy that! he¡¯d texted her excitedly, while watching videos of a family being immolated in front of the Lungshan Temple in Taiwan. Jeremy had the original trilogy, not the Special Editions where George Lucas had gone in and added new footage or taken out other important bits. He had them on VHS, the only way to get the true, unaltered versions. Alysse texted back: SUPER excited to watch those! ??

    But all that was eight weeks ago, before the Ecophage made a sudden return in a small town called Kalmar, in Sweden¡ªIn fucking Sweden of all places! Who attacks Sweden?! he¡¯d thought¡ªand by that point no one was denying that it was real. Now began the question of ¡°Who is doing this to us?¡±

    Was it an escaped virus, like in that Stephen King novel where a military-made superflu kills the whole planet? Or was it a purposeful attack, something that someone in North Korea or Syria had cooked up in secret laboratories, and now had unleashed upon their enemies? Or was it the world¡¯s billionaire elite, trying to whittle down Earth¡¯s population in order to create a more perfect utopia for themselves? Could it be a naturally-occurring virus? Was that even possible? Or what about this¡ªcould it be an ancient virus that was only recently released from where it had been frozen in glaciers, dormant for millions of years, and released when the glaciers all began to melt?

    The online conversation shifted dramatically when a video appeared online from a scientist in Bangkok, and he was the first one to say that he and a team of scientists from the World Health Organization had identified the presence of nanites in the gray, gooey remains of the dead.

    In the intervening weeks between talking the pros and cons of the Star Wars prequels with Alysse, and sitting inside Mickey¡¯s Pork & Porch watching the world be eaten, Jeremy would learn a lot about how nanites could theoretically work. Scientists appearing on MSNBC and FOX News carefully explained how nanomachines made here on Earth had been able to move about in the air, flying about using little tacked-on, undulating ridges. Those undulating ridges could act like little propellers, allowing them to climb the viscosity of the air. They could literally fly.

    He¡¯d learned from one of those Neil DeGrasse Tyson types on CNN that nanomachines could, in theory, travel through space in enormous clouds, sailing through the cosmos on long journeys using solar winds, and could gather up materials along their journey and harvest the hydrogen from water wherever they found it, expelling that hydrogen to propel themselves through space. They could even dive, as one colossal cloud, towards huge planets like Jupiter in something called an ¡°Oberth maneuver,¡± picking up speed by getting close to the planet and borrowing energy and momentum from its gravitational pull, then zipping around the planet and propelling themselves even faster through interstellar space.

    But Jeremy hadn¡¯t really believed any of that. Not truly. Because no one expected to be among those to see the actual end of the world. That was something that was surely going to be reserved for others. Not him. Maybe you.

    If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.

    But not me.

    : 3 :

    Lockdowns were predicted, and lockdowns had occurred, just as they had during Covid, except this time they were regional. The U.S. government got this big idea that ¡°We¡¯re not going to make the same mistakes we did last time that nearly broke the economy, so this time there will be rolling lockdowns.¡± Certain states would be shut down for a week or two, then the neighboring states. This made no sense to Jeremy but he obeyed, as did his roommates, who he wound up cooped up with for days on end.

    They broke out the boardgames. Tynesha had a collection of new Dungeons & Dragons campaigns and she¡¯d proven herself a pretty mean Dungeon Master throughout their college years. Halen had a game called Pandemic that everybody loved, and Arnold had his Warhammer games that he shared, and together they could go all night. Movie marathons became popular. Jeremy put on the original Star Wars trilogy, and Tynesha and Halen made their special hashbrown casserole and served it to everyone during such marathons.

    Occasionally, they shared a new video out of Hong Kong or Tokyo, people dying, being eaten alive by the Invisible Enemy. Nanites, Jeremy thought, watching Luke Skywalker flip through the air with his green lightsaber and facing off against Darth Vader. He¡¯d stuffed his face with popcorn and thought, Fucking nanites. Who saw this coming?

    When his roommates inevitably fell asleep by the middle of the third movie¡ª¡°The weakest in the trilogy, in my humble opinion,¡± Arnold had said, which had started an argument¡ªJeremy would always wind up texting Alysse, asking her how she was doing, giving her updates about himself, what was going on in the apartment, which part of the Wars were his favorite.

    Late one night, while he sat sipping a beer and listening to his friends snore while Lando was flying into the heart of the Death Star alongside Nien Nunb, Jeremy received this text from Alysse: Question¡­and I don¡¯t mean anything negative by this. Why do you love these movies so much?

    Jeremy smiled, then frowned. No one had ever asked him that. They had asked him what parts he liked, which characters were his favorite and why, but never why he had liked the films so much that he¡¯d watched them countless times and could recite them the way a Swifty could recite all of Taylor Swift¡¯s songs by heart.

    I guess it¡¯s the mythology? he wrote back, as part of a lengthy text message. I mean, Luke starts off as a whiny little teenager in the first one, then a cocky, self-assured guy in the second movie, because he¡¯s been training to use the Force. But he gets his ass kicked by Vader in the end, loses his hand. But then in the third one, he¡¯s ascended to manhood. He¡¯s become a Jedi Knight, no longer whiny or cocky. He¡¯s matured. It¡¯s a true, full hero¡¯s journey. And the way he ¡°defeated¡± the Emperor without even having to throw a single punch or kill him with his lightsaber¡ªhe just counted on his father¡¯s love, to turn him back to the Light Side of the Force, to betray the Emperor and save his son.

    Jeremy had written more, damn near a treatise on his adoration for the Wars, as he and his friends had called it as children. He¡¯d waited to see how Alysse would respond to that, wondering if she¡¯d be horrified by his overzealous geekiness, or charmed by his enthusiasm and openness. After several minutes of no response, and of the message reading as only DELIVERED and not READ, he texted her again to ask if she was okay.

    Her text back was more disturbing that he¡¯d expected: The military has trucks on our street. It¡¯s weird. What¡¯s going on?

    : 4 :

    When the military vehicles started appearing on I-75 and Highway 41, and all along the other main junctions, turning vehicles around and keeping them from crossing state lines, that was when Jeremy (whose college thesis had partially included citations and research about the few times martial law had been declared in the U.S.) began to worry. When he¡¯d gotten out of his car and shouted at a soldier to explain himself, all the 19-year-old kid had to say was, ¡°They just want to contain this thing, sir. That¡¯s all. Just a precaution.¡±

    Contain it?

    Contain. It?!

    It was apparent the kid had said too much, because a large bald man carrying a rifle and wearing more stripes on his uniform came storming over and bellowed for the kid to shut the fuck up. Red-faced and furious, he¡¯d also tore into Jeremy and told him to get back in his Tacoma (which he took the time to insult by saying it needed a severe fucking wash) and get the hell out of here.

    That night, he sat alone in the apartment again. Arnold, Tynesha and Halen were all staying at their parents¡¯ houses. Things seemed to be getting very serious, and people were afraid. Jeremy¡¯s father was dead, his mother was in Montana with her new husband Frank, and she¡¯d never been much of a caller or texter anyway, so he¡¯d sat there, facing the glowing television, occasionally texting Alysse to ask her what it was like where she was.

    One of her texts said: I really want to meet soon. Can we meet? I feel like if we don¡¯t meet soon we never will.

    Skating past the potential ominous inference there, Jeremy texted back: Yes, of course. Would love to. But how?

    She texted: I don¡¯t know, but I would like to find a wait. Then she texted: *way, stupid autocorrect.

    Jeremy sent back a thumbs-up. Then he thought that was probably too impersonal and juvenile, so texted a kiss emoji and hoped that wasn¡¯t crossing a line. But when she returned the kiss emoji, some small part of his world, which had felt like it was under threat of structural collapse, suddenly had returned to it a bracing column. Stability. Or, if not stability, then at least hope. And he would certainly take some of that right now.

    The next day, the video from Yellowstone National Park went viral, and everyone saw the trees turning rust-brown, then flaking off like old burned wood. As with the human victims, there were no signs of flames, but all the trees, grass and flowers still acted as though they were on fire, even leaving behind a gray, wispy cloud. They turned gray and black, flaking off, parts of them oozing and collapsing into puddles of the same gray goo he¡¯d seen the people in Dhaka and Kalmar turn into.

    Three days later, a video from eco-protesters in the Amazon showed something similar happening to the rainforests, but because they were eco-protesters most people believed it was fake. That is, until the Brazilian government released drone footage that showed the rainforests being turned to rippling sludge. The view from five hundred feet in the air was terrifying, watching all that greenery go up in black clouds and gray goo.

    By this time, Jeremy had already forgotten about his clerkship at the courthouse. He¡¯d forgotten about everything except Alysse, who texted him every night: Just checking in on you, the first text would say, followed by them sharing Ecophage videos back and forth, occasionally discussing theories, plans for where they would go if it started happening here. Alysse said she was staying with her brothers in Atlanta, on the southside, and that her brothers believed these invisible nanite clouds were the work of alien invaders.

    Later that night, that very theory was brought up on CNN¡¯s panel discussion on the ¡°Ecophage Problem,¡± as it was being referred to. Jeremy thought that was a tad underselling it, as though the Ecophage was merely a rash that just needed a little cream applied. In any case, one of the panelists was a woman named Dr. Erin Gilmore, a consultant for Homeland Security and the National Security Agency. And Jeremy Braxton would always remember where he was when this interview aired, because when asked, for the first time ever on national television, if this threat really could be of extraterrestrial origin, Dr. Gilmore had responded calmly with, ¡°I think so. But not the way you¡¯re thinking.¡±

    ¡°What do you mean?¡± one of the CNN hosts asked.

    ¡°I mean, if someone could create this, then they could destroy us without having to go through all of this. And why destroy us when we are no threat to them? Why wipe us out in this way, which will render the planet lifeless?¡±

    One of the other hosts almost spat up her coffee, and lowered her cup. ¡°I¡¯m sorry, did you say ¡®will render the planet lifeless¡¯?¡±

    Looking like she¡¯d just realized she¡¯d misspoken (Or just being honest? Jeremy wondered), Dr. Gilmore said, ¡°What I mean to say is¡ªwouldn¡¯t they want this planet intact, rather than destroy its ecosystem? But now that we¡¯re on the subject¡­¡± She trailed off, and to Jeremy, who leaned forward on the sofa in rapt attention, Dr. Gilmore looked like a woman intensely considering just how honest she should be. ¡°We¡¯ve been calling it an Ecophage, and that is precisely what an ecophagic threat describes. It devours all biomass. Flora, fauna, all of it.¡±

    ¡°So¡­¡± said the male CNN host, who blinked a few times in apparent confusion (or despair?). He finally said, ¡°So¡­what are we looking at here, Doctor?¡±

    ¡°Satellite footage indicates this came from out-system, and heat blooms suggest there could be more on the way. That¡¯s all supposed to be classified but I¡¯m sharing it anyway. Because¡­fuck it.¡± Dr. Gilmore was talking rapidly now, and she was glancing off-screen somewhere, as if she expected to be tackled and told to shut up any second. She went on, ¡°Deep-field scanning suggests Earth may be ringed with a cloud of these nanites¡ª¡±

    ¡°Excuse me? Ringed with them? Like Saturn¡¯s rings?¡±

    ¡°Yes. That¡¯s why some countries along the equator are reporting a sort of ¡®diffusion¡¯ of sunlight. We think we are utterly surrounded by these clouds. Increased radio signals across the X-hand suggest¡­suggest they may be communicating with the rest of their cloud.¡±

    ¡°What¡ªI¡¯m sorry, Dr. Gilmore, but what exactly are you¡ª¡±

    ¡°Whoever created these nanites are long dead. And these nanites currently moving towards us are probably not even the same ones created by that alien civilization. The swarm likely began as von Neumann probes, possibly as big as factories, who knows?¡±

    ¡°Sorry, what¡¯s a¡­a von Neumann¡ª¡±

    ¡°They were self-replicating probes, possibly used for exploration, possibly for warfare. We¡¯ll never know. They were likely built millions or billions of years ago and were sent out to land on moons, asteroids, comets, probably meant to mine them for resources, using some of those resources to self-replicate¡ª¡±

    ¡°Excuse me for interrupting, Dr. Gilmore, but how do you know that¡ª¡±

    ¡°¡ªand they likely were controlled by an artificial intelligence,¡± Gilmore went on, talking faster. And¡­was that sweat on her brow? Jeremy thought it was. He was texting to Alysse: Are you WATCHING THIS SHIT ON CNN? Gilmore continued, ¡°That artificial intelligence would¡¯ve no doubt had at least some parameters for self-preservation, as mandated by its need to self-replicate. It could learn to defend, learn to evade, learn to attack, and ultimately learn to iterate upon itself. It would¡¯ve created newer, more advanced versions of itself. Each generation improving upon the previous, until at last you had the most efficient collectors. A hive-mind of nanites, likely several different clouds that spread far and wide, looking for resources.¡±

    The CNN host said, ¡°And¡­Earth is the only planet with those resources?¡±

    ¡°No, of course not,¡± she said. ¡°Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Venus, they all have valuable resources. These nanite swarms are currently moving in towards all of them, as well. Three of Jupiter¡¯s moons have been discovered to have these swarms orbiting them.¡±

    ¡°Jupiter¡¯s moons have¡ª¡±

    ¡°Yes.¡±

    ¡°So these nanites are mining our entire solar system?¡±

    ¡°Yes.¡±

    ¡°So, they¡¯re not just trying to¡­to¡­devour us,¡± said the host, struggling to even say the word. ¡°But they¡¯re devouring everything else?¡±

    ¡°Everything else in their wake, yes. Scientists have long theorized this possibility, we call it the ¡®gray goo¡¯ concept and, well¡­from the videos you¡¯ve seen, it looks like our simulations were correct. Once an ecophage like this takes over, all that¡¯s left is useless compounds, chemical waste from their eating process, nothing else useful to them.¡±

    A text had come in from Alysse: Oh my God.

    So, she was watching it. He texted her back, asking her what she was making out of all of this. Alysse didn¡¯t answer back immediately, and that had him worried. A sudden creeping terror lived in his guts, in his testicles, making him sick, as sick as he¡¯d been after eating that bad steak at Karl¡¯s Diner three years ago at Arnold¡¯s birthday dinner.

    Jeremy shot to his feet and started pacing.

    Dr. Gilmore went on, tossing out jargon like bounce-wave readings and cosmic microwave background and Oort cloud mining and a dozen other things, pointing out how the alien-made nanomachines likely took advantage of their exponential growth and devoured their creators. ¡°The nanites that are currently falling on us are descendants of those original, probably-now-obsolete probes. The ones who created them are long dead, all gobbled up. You can just about bet the bank on that.¡±

    ¡°You¡¯re¡­you¡¯re sure about that?¡± The host had gone pale. Jeremy looked into his eyes, and imagined that right at that moment, the CNN host was thinking about his children, his family, his pet cat, his everything.

    ¡°There are a few universal constants you can count on,¡± Dr. Gilmore said, and started removing the mic that was hooked to her jacket collar, getting ready to leave the interview. A tear fell from her left eye. Jeremy couldn¡¯t believe what he was seeing. ¡°And there¡¯s one universal rule that all life follows. Life must feed, and if doesn¡¯t, it dies. So, you tell me what that means, because my bosses at the Agency just don¡¯t seem to be able to get that into their fucking heads.¡±

    ¡°I¡ªer¡ªuh¡ªDr. Gilmore, is there a vaccine that we can¡ª¡±

    ¡°A vaccine?¡± she laughed mirthlessly. ¡°A vaccine for fucking nanomachines? Do you imbeciles think that¡¯s how anything works? Maybe if this country had ever picked up a fucking science book since they graduated high school, maybe we would¡¯ve had a population scientifically literate enough to understand that you can¡¯t just¡ª¡±

    The rest of her words were lost. Dr. Gilmore walked off camera, leaving Jeremy alone in his apartment again, staring at the TV, at his phone, and out the window at a clear Atlanta night sky.

    His phone chimed. A text from Alysse. It said: We need to meet soon.

 Chapter 2: Jedi Master

    : 5 :

    PRESENTLY

    Now, sitting inside the phonebooth¡ªPhonebooth? Who even still has a fucking phonebooth? he thought distantly¡ªat 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¡ªa very large¡ªclear 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¡ª

    Someone smacked against the window. It was a young man, screaming, face melting¡ª

    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 Carr¨¦ 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¡ª

    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¡ªan extinction level event¡ªand 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 ¨C 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¡ªseriously, who the fuck keeps a payphone around, even ironically, even for d¨¦cor? 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¡ªthat stupid fucking payphone¡ªand 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¡ª the writer scribbled out the word do and wrote did instead, ¡ªhave 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 :

    Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

    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¡ª

    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 <u>link</u>.

    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

    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¡ªsay, something that wipes out half or more of the human race¡ªmany 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¡ª

    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¡ª

    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 <u>link</u> 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.

 Chapter 3: When the World Ends, Where Will You Be?

    : 9 :

    He put the phone to his ear, half expecting to hear nothing but dead air. ¡°H-H-Hello?¡± He was soaking wet, shivering in Earth¡¯s last lonesome wind. ¡°Hello?¡±

    ¡°Jeremy?¡±

    ¡°Alysse?¡±

    ¡°Oh, thank God,¡± she breathed, and it sounded like she held back a sob, maybe put a hand over her mouth. It sounded like she was walking somewhere fast, not quite out of breath but harried. ¡°Um¡­well, this is awkward. This is not¡­not how I wanted our first conversation to¡­oh, God. What¡¯s happening where you are? Is everybody dead? I¡­I c-can¡¯t¡­¡±

    ¡°I¡ª¡± Jeremy¡¯s voice caught in his throat. He turned around slowly, looking out the park, the growing puddles pushing down the path where he and Peter Stanton had chased one another after a game and tossed the ball back and forth. ¡°I don¡¯t even know how to describe what I¡¯ve¡ªI slept in someone¡¯s house last night! Alysse¡­who does that? I don¡¯t even know whose house it was, I just got tired and I walked inside. Everybody and everything was dead. Just puddled out on the roads. And so I just¡ª¡±

    ¡°Where are you?¡±

    ¡°I¡¯m in Acworth. I think? I don¡¯t know. I think Dellinger Park is in Acworth? Maybe it¡¯s technically in Kennesaw¡ª¡±

    ¡°I know where that is. I can¡¯t get to you.¡±

    ¡°Where are you?¡± he asked, walking to the edge of the gazebo and taking a seat on a bench. Someone had left half a bag of spicy Cheetos there. The wind pushed wet leaves and a paper cup down the trail beside the gazebo. ¡°Where are you right now?¡±

    ¡°We¡¯re in Atlanta.¡±

    ¡°We?¡±

    ¡°My niece and I.¡±

    ¡°What about your brothers?¡±

    ¡°They, uh, they didn¡¯t make it.¡± She whispered it, probably didn¡¯t want the niece to hear.

    Jeremy¡¯s heart suddenly demanded to be heard, even if it was off-topic to say. ¡°I wanted to give you a book yesterday. I was going to give you an autographed copy of the Star Wars novelization. Remember? By Alan Dean Foster? And the VHS tapes and DVDs of the original trilogy. The OT. The Wars. I was gonna watch the Wars with you.¡±

    Alysse snorted. It wasn¡¯t a derisive snort, nor hateful or acerbic. It was the kind of snort that said, Yes, well, we all know that that was another life. We¡¯ll always have Paris. Or something like that. ¡°I can¡¯t get to you,¡± she said again.

    ¡°I¡¯m sorry?¡±

    ¡°I said I can¡¯t get to you! Roads here are all blocked. We¡¯re walking over to another interstate¡ªheading towards 285. There was a military roadblock there, hopefully there¡¯s¡­someone, I don¡¯t know. Think you could find a way to meet us?¡±

    It suddenly sounded like she had a plan, or was trying to develop one. Something in Alysse¡¯s voice struck him as resolute. It was a delicate voice, yet it held some iron. A fighter, someone who hadn¡¯t quite given up, and was looking for any reason to feel hope again. There came a metallic clang from her end, it sounded like someone had kicked over a trash can. ¡°You still want to meet?¡± he asked, astonished at his own question.

    ¡°Sure, why not?¡± It was both sarcastic and serious. ¡°What¡¯s the name of that movie? Seeking a Friend for the End of the World?¡±

    Jeremy had to search through the fog of his mind to find it. But yes, he had heard of that movie, had even seen part of it with Jess, an ex-girlfriend years back. He gave a chuckle, looking out into the rain that Clyde had said might be acidic. ¡°I don¡¯t see why not. But I¡¯ll have to, uh, find a car, siphon some gas, maybe. I don¡¯t know how far it¡ª¡±

    ¡°Do you have somewhere to go?¡± Suddenly, Alysse blurted out a laugh. ¡°Help me, Obi-Wan Kenobi, you¡¯re my only hope.¡±

    And then Jeremy did something unexpected, too. He put down the phone and leaned back on the bench and shook his head, both laughing and crying. Mostly laughing. A moment of hysteria that he knew he had to let himself ride like a wave. He put the phone back to his ear, and said, ¡°Okay, princess. Just give me an address. I¡¯ll put it in my GPS and then I¡¯ll come find you guys.¡±

    ¡°Thank you, Jeremy.¡± Her voice sounded more grateful than any other person¡¯s voice ever had. Jeremy didn¡¯t think a person could be more genuinely grateful than the two of them in that moment. ¡°Thank you. Thank you, thank you, thank you.¡±

    Jeremy suddenly realized hers was the first voice he¡¯d heard in almost two days, and that knowledge nearly stole all his hope and courage. Somehow it made him despair, made him think she would surely be dead by the Ecophage, eaten by the time he got there. Because he had been chosen by Mr. CDC and his note saying For all the good it will do you, and presumably Alysse and her niece had not. They had survived by, what, dumb luck? Only he, Jeremy Braxton, had the yellow vision, the special anti-nanite nanites in his blood. How were they going to¡ª

    ¡°Sending you my location now,¡± Alysse said. To someone else, she said, ¡°Step around that puddle. Don¡¯t look at it.¡± Then there was muffled speech for several seconds. Finally, she came back to Jeremy and said, ¡°Did you get my location?¡±

    He had. He looked at it. It was almost an hour drive, but he could make it. He would make it. ¡°I got it.¡±

    ¡°Good. But you still haven¡¯t answered my question.¡±

    ¡°What?¡±

    ¡°Do you have anywhere for us to go once you pick us up?¡±

    ¡°No,¡± he said, desultorily. ¡°No, I¡ª¡± Wait a minute. Yes, he did. But just as he¡¯d forgotten to check Google Earth for a whole day after the attack, because his mind was so fucked by all that he¡¯d seen, he had completely forgotten about the other person that had contacted him just minutes ago. ¡°Wait, yeah. Yeah, I think I do have someplace to go.¡±

    ¡°Where?¡±

    ¡°It¡¯s¡ªit¡¯s a longshot. I¡¯ve been talking to someone on Reddit, a guy heading to some limestone caves in Alabama. Supposedly they were used in the Civil War, some billionaires souped them up for end-of-the-world bunkers. He sent me the address¡ª¡±

    ¡°Underground?¡±

    ¡°What?¡±

    ¡°The caves! Are they deep underground?¡±

    ¡°I don¡¯t know. I guess so. They¡¯re caves,¡± Jeremy said, shrugging even though no one could see him. ¡°The guy didn¡¯t say just how deep.¡±

    ¡°They¡¯ll need to be deep.¡±

    ¡°Why?¡±

    ¡°Because,¡± Alysse said, sounding like she was struggling to pick something up or step over something. ¡°We were in the basement. Kayla and me, we were in the basement when we heard screaming upstairs. That¡¯s when¡ªwhen we went up and we saw what happened to my brothers. We ran back down into the basement. We would¡¯ve stayed down there but Kayla¡¯s got diabetes and needed her insulin, so I went back upstairs and¡­and I¡­I¡­I saw them.¡± She meant her brothers, what was left of them. She started sobbing.

    ¡°Alysse? It¡¯s okay. I know. I saw the same thing happening. Happening to everybody.¡±

    ¡°Oh God!¡± she sobbed. ¡°I saw¡­saw them there. I saw them and I¡­I went back downstairs. Kayla and I stayed down there until we couldn¡¯t take it anymore. There was no food down there. So we ran. All our neighbors¡­they were all dead. But then we heard barking and it was coming from one house, and when we went inside we found Mr. Timbleton¡¯s dog, still in the basement, alive. But when we let Scruffy out he ran away. So, I was thinking¡­maybe the Eco-whatever didn¡¯t find us because we were in the basement? Think maybe they don¡¯t know about underground?¡±

    Jeremy hadn¡¯t considered that. Wouldn¡¯t a superintelligent, interstellar-traveling swarm of nanomachines know about digging underground? Or maybe they didn¡¯t. Maybe they didn¡¯t want to bother with it. Who the hell knew what went on inside the hive-mind of a swarm of nanomachines that were ringed around the entire planet? ¡°Maybe that makes sense,¡± was all he said on that. ¡°Maybe going underground is good.¡±

    ¡°So, the caves,¡± she said.

    ¡°Right, the caves,¡± he said.

    And just like that, these two strangers seemed to be in agreement on something.

    ¡°Alysse?¡± he said.

    ¡°Yes, Jeremy?¡±

    ¡°I¡¯m on my way, girl. Just hold tight. Jeremy is going to steal himself a car and then he is going to siphon as much extra gas as he can get. And then he is on his way.¡±

    Her voice cracked. ¡°Oh, God, Jeremy! Thank you! Please hurry! And thank you, thank you, thank you!¡±

    : 10 :

    2 HOURS LATER

    The drive down Interstate 75 was, as Alysse had predicted, fraught with traffic, cars and eighteen-wheelers jammed together, five or six car-b-cues that had finished burning and were now smoldering, a jackknifed truck blocking an exit, a school bus for Cartersville Elementary wedged between an ice-cream truck and an Abrams tank. Jeremy saw bald patches of earth, grass missing for miles, and then abruptly he¡¯d come upon trees that had only been half eaten, and grass that appeared to be unmolested. The rain had let up, but the skies were still poxxed by black, angry-looking clouds with the occasional flash of lightning. Jeremy felt like the traveler in that old Outer Limits episode, a lone man driving on into a storm, his fate entirely unknown.

    You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

    The blue Chevy Blazer he was driving had belonged to someone named Otis Carmichael. He knew this, because the half-eaten corpse of the driver had still been partially in the driver¡¯s seat when Jeremy opened it. It had been parked at the far end of the parking lot at Dellinger Park, and the body of Otis Carmichael only existed from the waist up, his legs having dissolved and he¡¯d bled out. It looked as if ol¡¯ Otis had been trying to climb in. Half his face was also eaten, and the other half was possessed of a strange sort of rictus that Jeremy knew he would never get out of his mind.

    He¡¯d pulled the half-body of Otis Carmichael out of the driver¡¯s seat, forcing himself to get over the smell of blood and ammonia and bile¡ªit was frightening how quickly he was becoming acclimated to that smell¡ªand he used the keys that had been in Otis¡¯s hand. After cranking the Blazer, he was glad to see Otis had half a tank in her.

    He then drove into a town called Cartersville, splashing through countless puddles of congealing gray sludge, hydroplaning and jerking the wheel for control, until he came to a Texaco. He got out, tried the pumps, and was happy to see that his credit card worked perfectly. But someone still needed to start the pump. He¡¯d worked a summer at a QuikTrip and so vaguely recalled how it was done. When he opened the door to walk inside the Texaco, he saw small bits of torn clothing amid all the sludge puddles, and waded through them, no longer like a man stuck inside a dark dream, more like a survivor who had finally acclimated to his circumstances.

    He thought at the time, Was this what it was like after Hiroshima? Shell-shocked survivors just getting on with it? Picking up the pieces? Does it really not take that long to get used to the end of the world? Or maybe it was because he actually had hope in the guise of an unknown beautiful woman waiting for him in Atlanta.

    In any case, he¡¯d started the pumps, filled up the Blazer, and took all five gas cans off the shelves inside the Texaco and filled them up. He put the filled cans in the back of the Blazer and got on moving down the road. Over that hill and through that hog wallow, his father would have said. One foot in front of the other, one mile at a time, that¡¯s all you can do.

    Along the way, he¡¯d needed something to listen to. No one was reporting anything from any radio station, so he hooked his phone and charger into the Blazer¡¯s charge outlet, and turned on the most comforting thing he knew in the world: the audiobooks for the Thrawn Trilogy of Star Wars novels, read by Marc Thompson. In Jeremy¡¯s mind, there was no greater narrator of Star Wars stories anywhere, no sir.

    Jeremy still remembered how old he was when he first read the Thrawn Trilogy. It was a trilogy of books written by Timothy Zahn, a science fiction writer of no mean skill, who, in 1991, released the first official continuation of the Star Wars films. Sure, there had been some comic books and short stories before that, even a cartoon and a book or two, but the Thrawn Trilogy had actually been called ¡°The Official Continuation of the Star Wars Saga.¡± In fact, such a proclamation was written on its back cover.

    As he drove down the road, Jeremy¡¯s mind peeled back the years, trying to think of a better time¡­and yet, he couldn¡¯t help thinking of the worst days of his life. That time when he woke up and his legs wouldn¡¯t work.

    One day, when Jeremy was twelve years old, he¡¯d one day woken up without the ability to move his legs. Guillain-Barre syndrome, it was called, extremely rare, most people never fully recovered, but he had. But during that year and a half when he¡¯d been wheelchair-bound, pushed to school by his father (who often wore a brave smile that Jeremy now thought had masked shame) and then guided around the school by his teachers throughout the day, Jeremy had been left out of P.E. and most at-school games. And he¡¯d been bullied. Severely. The taunts and the name-calling had sent him crying to bed many nights.

    With nothing to do but sit and watch other kids play, he got into reading. He started by reading Star Wars novels, and he liked them so much that as soon as he got home from school each day, he played the movies over and over again, back to back. It would sometimes drive his mother and father crazy, but he couldn¡¯t help it.

    It was pure escapism. Escapism at its absolute finest, in fact. Who wouldn¡¯t want a ship like the Millennium Falcon, one that could take you anywhere you wanted to go? Just tell the navicomputer where you wanted to go, fire up the hyperdrive, and blast off into hyperspace. Into adventure!

    Around his house, his parents had started referring to Jeremy¡¯s obsession as ¡°The Wars.¡±

    ¡°Is he watching the Wars again?¡±

    ¡°He¡¯s all up in those Wars, honey, he can¡¯t hear you.¡±

    ¡°Jeremy, it¡¯s time to put the Wars on hold, dinner¡¯s ready.¡±

    ¡°Jeremy, sweetie, you have to read something else besides the Wars.¡±

    Jeremy knew the films by heart, and he¡¯d read dozens of the books, some of them several times. He even bought books that explained how the starships supposedly worked, books like The Star Wars Encyclopedia. He¡¯d read avidly about how lightsabers were constructed, the biology of Hutts, and the ¡°science¡± behind hyperspace. These were books that were put out by Lucasfilm to make the Star Wars universe seem more lived-in, more real.

    But of all the novels, Jeremy¡¯s favorites were those in the Thrawn Trilogy. The first in that series, Heir to the Empire, told the story of a cunning, blue-skinned alien Imperial, named Grand Admiral Thrawn, who came out of hiding after the Rebels had destroyed the second Death Star in Return of the Jedi. In the story, Thrawn was a devious schemer who was slowly winning back planets across the galaxy, tricking the Rebels at every turn, testing Luke, Han, Leia and Lando in ways they¡¯d never been tested before.

    The idea that a series of movies could be continued in a series of novels had fascinated him. He became obsessed with every facet of the lore¡ªwhere lightsabers got their crystals (the planet Ilum), what Obi-Wan Kenobi¡¯s homeworld was called (Stewjon, named after the comedian Jon Stewart), how the relativistic shielding worked inside a starship while it was in hyperspace, the name of Darth Maul¡¯s species (Zabrak), and on and on and on his obsession went.

    Escapism. That was all it had amounted to, and he knew it. Everyone had their thing. Some people escaped into sports, following their favorite athletes through every game. Other people obsessed over cars, or food. Several of his ex-girlfriends had obsessed over food, talking about it constantly, looking up recipes and watching reruns of Gordon Ramsey. Once upon a time, people collected baseball cards. Jeremy collected Star Wars stories.

    Jeremy drove on through gray slush, thankful whenever he saw a single tree or grassy hill. He swerved when he saw the half-eaten body of a small girl in the road. He nearly went off into a ditch. Fighting back a small panic, he tried focusing on Marc Thompson, the audiobook narrator, as he described events that happened a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away. A place where there were still heroes, events happening, people to fight for.

    Hope.

    : 11 :

    1 HOUR LATER

    Some niggling thought had started poking at the back of Jeremy¡¯s mind as he drove and reflected on all those gray puddles, as he splashed through them and the Blazer slipped and slewed through the remains of a world. And that thought was this: he¡¯d seen very few bits of clothing in the remains of the dead. Funny how that had not occurred to him before, but now that he had time to do nothing but drive and think and flip through one radio station to the next, each one broadcasting either Emergency Broadcast System messages or weird AI-sounding voices saying ¡°We are experiencing technical difficulties, we will be right back after we have this problem fixed,¡± Jeremy could at last reflect on everything he knew about the Ecophage so far.

    It became more noticeable when he saw, to his increasing dismay, that quite a few traffic signs appeared to have rusted and decayed, and several powerlines were eaten, the wood in the giant poles devoured same as most of the trees. He drove past powerlines on the road, some of them snapping with electricity, and held his breath in these moments, realizing that if he stepped out into that sludge he would be fried.

    The downed powerlines had ignited the sludge in some areas, creating a raging inferno with flames so high they aspired towards Heaven. The flames of Hell aspiring towards Heaven, he thought dejectedly, as he looked for other roads leading around these flames. Sounds almost poetic. I should write that down. Then he thought, Why? I¡¯m not a writer. And even if I was, nobody¡¯s gonna read it.

    Nobody¡¯s going to read anything ever again.

    He occasionally pulled over to call Alysse, making sure that she and Kayla were still okay, still safe. After pulling over into an Arby¡¯s parking lot, and staring at the baby carriage in the middle the road, filled with the same gray sludge that coated everything, and after he had called Alysse to check in on her and her niece, Jeremy had a strange thought, which he said aloud: ¡°I pulled over. I actually¡ªpulled¡ªover.¡± He laughed. ¡°You pulled over, Jeremy. Just like Mom told you to do before you text anyone.¡±

    Even at the end of the world, staring out at the sludgy remains of his people, even while staring out at the world through yellowed vision and wondering how he was still alive, he had remembered to pull over before texting.

    He got back on the road, turning up the volume on Marc Thompson. He was at the chapter where Luke Skywalker¡¯s X-wing had broken in mid-hyperjump, and he was forced to conduct repairs while in outer space. One of his favorite chapters. His phone chimed, and he looked to see he had an email alert. Another message from Reddit. He stopped in the middle of I-285, right between a Penske truck and a silver Toyota Carolla that had gone onto the shoulder, and down into a ditch.

    He looked at his phone and found a message from u/ClydeBoyGaga18, it was simply a question.

    u/ClydeBoyGaga18: Where you at, dawg?

    Jeremy sent back a quick reply, saying that he was on the road heading into Atlanta to pick up some friends who had somehow managed to survive. He relayed that Alysse and her niece may have survived because they¡¯d been underground at the time, and that anyone in basements at the time of the Ecophage attack might still be alive, too. After he sent the message, Jeremy ruffled through his bag, past the autographed copy of the Star Wars novelization, past the OT on VHS, and past the resum¨¦ packet he¡¯d been ready to give to the person who interviewed him for the clerkship. He rummaged past all this detritus from a previous and now obsolete life, grabbed the cereal bars and water, and had a meal.

    He happened to glance at himself in the rearview mirror. He looked like shit. Hair disheveled, his face pallid and perhaps slightly green (A side effect from the syringe¡¯s contents? he wondered), and two-day stubble. Shaving razors, he thought. I forgot to grab those when I went into Walmart. No matter, a half-eaten, sludge-covered sign up ahead said there was a Target at the next exit. He figured he could grab razors there, and some deodorant while he was at it, and some shampoo and some more food.

    A chime from his phone. Another message from Clyde.

    u/ClydeBoyGaga18: Better hurry. I¡¯ve told some other people about the limestone caves, people I know in Mississippi and Kansas. They¡¯re heading there. Apparently a few dozen people survived there, at some underground rave. An UNDERGROUND rave party inside some cave! Seems like you might be right, underground is the way to go. Even more reason to reach the limestone caves. I read online that they were built for a few hundred people and their motor homes, so there should be room, and lots of diesel-fueled engines, so that¡¯s good! Since gas goes bad pretty quickly. Plenty of room. Still, just to be safe, you¡¯d better get there fast.

    This gave Jeremy more hope than he¡¯d dare consider before, and now as he cranked the Chevy Blazer back up and headed the road, he drove with greater purpose than he¡¯d felt in ages. He turned up the audiobook, which was playing the famous Star Wars score by John Williams, even as Marc Thompson regaled the exploits of Luke Skywalker and R2-D2 evading the evil Galactic Empire.

    But along the way, Clyde¡¯s last words lingered in Jeremy¡¯s mind, nagging at him. He pulled up his phone, and said, ¡°Siri, how long before gasoline expires?¡±

    Siri answered promptly, ¡°Gasoline will usually expire between three and six months. Though, it can last longer if properly stored.¡±

    Three to six months. The entire planet had three to six months of gasoline supply, assuming they weren¡¯t making any more of it, and at this point Jeremy believed that was the safest bet anyone could ever make.

    Mankind as he¡¯d known it was basically over, and he had at most six months of gasoline left, no matter what. He looked up how long it took for diesel to expire. Turns out, that lasts a little longer, about a year, maybe a year and a half if it was kept cool, say around 70 degrees Fahrenheit, and treated with something called biocides and stabilizers. But after that year, the fuel degraded.

    After that, there would never be another automobile driving anywhere on planet Earth ever again.

    With that gloomy thought hovering over him, Jeremy felt a cold chill move through his body, reverberating through the marrow in him. As he drove into the heart of what used to be Atlanta, Jeremy tried dismissing these dark thoughts by turning up the audiobook even louder. Getting lost in those heroes and their heroic deeds. Getting lost in the Wars.

 Chapter 4: "Hows a Diabetic Supposed to Survive the End of the World?" and Other Tragedies

    : 12 :

    2 HOURS LATER

    It took far longer than he thought it would take to reach Alysse¡¯s location, the cars clogging I-285 were in worse shape than all other roads he¡¯d crossed yet. The storm clouds had almost completely subsided, but now there was a soft twilight that fell over the city of Atlanta, making the skyline look ghostly, supported by the twisted silence that accompanied the scenery. No more screaming humans, no more death, no more dogs or cats or mosquitoes. With a sudden and stark optimism that surprised him, Jeremy wondered if all of the viruses in the air had been eaten, too. Had the Ecophage literally eaten every piece of biomass it touched, save him and a few others?

    That thought actually made him laugh. The cure for the common cold. Somebody finally found it.

    Jeremy turned on his headlights. The Blazer slewed when he tried to get around another car-b-cue that had pulled onto the shoulder of the road, and the Wars were playing on his phone, and occasionally the GPS lady would speak up and offer him a shortcut. Turned out, the GPS in his phone was also directed by satellite feed, which was directed by AIs that were programmed to closely watch camera feeds from public CCTV cameras and predict traffic patterns. The cameras were feeding the public transit system¡¯s monitoring devices, updating them with ETAs based on the standstill traffic. So, surprise surprise, humanity¡¯s machines were still able to direct Jeremy towards shortcuts.

    Bots talking to bots, he thought. We¡¯re all dead, but they¡¯re still talking.

    While he was looking for his next turn onto Peachtree Industrial Boulevard, another thought suddenly occurred to Jeremy, and that was this: While everything is still working, I¡¯d better take advantage of all that I can. He thought about his money. It was technically useless¡­or was it? If everything was still working, he could, for a limited time only, buy things online and it wouldn¡¯t matter that he couldn¡¯t technically afford it. Of course, he couldn¡¯t order anything material, nothing solid, but he could buy information.

    He pulled slowly to the side of the road, hydroplaning through sludge, and quickly logged into his Audible account and began purchasing every Star Wars novel he could find in ebook form, every Stephen King and Douglas Adams book, every Neil Gaiman, Brandon Sanderson, J.R.R. Tolkien, H.P. Lovecraft, H. Beam Piper, Isaac Asimov, James Clavell and Jack London novel he could grab.

    Who cared? Not like he needed the money to pay for rent anymore. Or food.

    Or anything.

    He drove on, going against his instincts not to text and drive, downloading audiobook after audiobook before they were all gone forever. It was almost like one of those local late-night shows that sold off everything from a repossessed home. NOW, FOR A LIMITED TIME ONLY, OUR END-OF-THE-FUCKING-WORLD FIRE SALE! GET EVERYTHING ¨C LITERALLY EVERYTHING ¨C AND TAKE IT ALL HOME! BUT, ONLY SO LONG AS IT¡¯S DIGITAL!

    Jeremy was laughing again, despite everything, despite himself. He laughed because it was a going-out-of-business sale for the entire planet. HUMANITY, NOW CLOSED FOR BUSINESS! All of Earth was now, as far as he¡¯d seen, like a great big Goodwill, except even cheaper.

    ¡°Go past this light,¡± said the GPS lady. ¡°Then, at the next one, turn right onto Peachtree Industrial Boulevard.¡±

    Jeremy did that, easing his pretty new blue Blazer through a giant puddle of human sludge and having to use his windshield wipers to see.

    ¡°Your destination is on your left,¡± said the GPS lady. ¡°Thirty-eight seventeen Peachtree Industrial Boulevard.¡±

    Jeremy pulled into what looked like a wine distributor¡¯s warehouse, partially under construction. He drove through a not-yet-paved parking lot, towards the far end where a dozen or so Port-a-Johns stood, and he started honking his horn and flashing his headlights. He called Alysse on his phone.

    ¡°Hey! Is that you we hear honking?¡± she said.

    ¡°Yeah, I¡¯m here. Where are you guys?¡±

    ¡°Here!¡±

    ¡°Where?¡±

    ¡°Over here!¡±

    Suddenly, he saw a waving light. A flashlight. A woman came staggering out from behind the Port-a-Johns looking filthy from the knees down, all of it covered in chunks of the sludge. Alysse didn¡¯t look very much like her Tinder pics. Her hair was done up in a ponytail, and as Jeremy drove closer he saw that her face was smudged with dirt or mud. She wore a green backpack that looked stuffed with supplies. She waved her flashlight high in the air with her left hand, while in her right hand she was pulling along a small dark-skinned girl with braids.

    ¡°I see you!¡± Jeremy said. ¡°Holy shit, I see you!¡± He was laughing, realizing just now that he¡¯d half expected her not to exist at all, that all along Alysse had been some dude catfishing him, using a voice disguiser to talk to him over the phone maybe, or else she¡¯d somehow been an AI bot on Tinder, or a ghost, or a figment of his imagination. ¡°I see you, girl! Holy shit, I see you!¡±

    The Blazer came to a slow roll in front of the Port-a-Johns, and Jeremy climbed out almost before it had stopped. He stood there, looking at Alysse and her niece. They both stared back at him, while from the Chevy there came Marc Thompson¡¯s voice, mimicking that of Anthony Daniels¡¯s role as C-3PO.

    Jeremy took two steps, slipped in the sludge of God knows how much grass, trees, flowers and construction workers that had been present when the Ecophage attacked. Then he righted himself, crossed the distance between himself and Alysse, which had long seemed interminable and still almost did. Almost. When he reached her, he wasn¡¯t sure what he was going to do, and neither was she, it seemed.

    But once they were standing there, they embraced. It was quick, and it was warm, a little more than just cursory. She whispered something in his ear that he didn¡¯t quite catch, because a cold, ammonia-filled wind suddenly kicked up in that moment, but it sounded like she said something like ¡°Thank you¡± or maybe even ¡°I love you.¡±

    Jeremy didn¡¯t want to seem stupid for not replying, or for replying to the wrong thing, so he chose to kiss her. Just a small peck on the cheek, then he cupped her face in his hands to make sure she was real.

    Then he heard a whimper.

    Looking down at Kayla, Jeremy quickly knelt and said, ¡°Hey, you okay? You both okay?¡±

    ¡°Yeah, we are,¡± said Alysse. ¡°We think so. You?¡±

    ¡°Yeah.¡±

    ¡°Oh, God¡­oh, God, I can¡¯t believe we found someone¡­I can¡¯t believe we¡­¡±

    ¡°Listen,¡± Jeremy said, feeling awkward for cutting her off, but they had so little time. ¡°We have to go. I¡¯ve got lots of gas and we need to make some distance from¡­¡± He waved generally at the destruction all around them. He coughed from the strong odor, then cleared his throat and said, ¡°So, here¡¯s the plan. We go to the nearest Walmart or Target or wherever, we stock up on all we can, just get buggies full of food that can last. Canned soup and stuff like that. Health bars. And lots of water. Water¡¯s gonna be polluted all over the world, I¡¯m guessing.¡± All over the world, he heard himself say. All over the world. God, how it kept hitting him anew, even when he thought he was used to it.

    ¡°Yeah, yeah,¡± Alysse nodded eagerly. ¡°Yeah, we pile it in your car, then we, uh, head to¡­where was it again? Alabama? Limestone caves?¡±

    ¡°I¡¯m afraid of caves,¡± Kayla said meekly from Alysse¡¯s side. ¡°I don¡¯t want to go into the caves!¡± She looked about seven, she wore a pink shirt with a kitten on it, blue jeans, and Timberlands. Clothes, he thought suddenly. We¡¯ll need clothes for her to grow into. It was all hitting him just now, that once they went into those limestone caves they probably weren¡¯t coming back out, and there may never be any clothes manufacturers ever again. And he wanted to protect this young girl, who he¡¯d only just met. He wanted to protect them all because¡ª

    Luke Skywalker would. It was a dumb thought, but how much crazier was it than what was happening all around him?

    ¡°We¡¯ll work it all out when we get there, Kayla,¡± said Alysse. ¡°I promise, sweetie.¡±

    ¡°Who is this man, Annie?¡± Kayla said, pulling away from him.

    Jeremy smiled and said, ¡°I¡¯m Luke Skywalker, I¡¯m here to rescue.¡±

    ¡°Huh?¡±

    ¡°Nothing, it¡¯s a joke¡ªeh, bad timing? But I am here to rescue you. My name is Jeremy, Kayla. I¡¯ve got your back, but I need you both to have mine, too. Get it? Like, uh¡­like the Avengers, or the X-Men. Powerpuff Girls? We gotta back each other¡¯s play, is what I mean. We gotta help each other right now.¡±

    This story is posted elsewhere by the author. Help them out by reading the authentic version.

    Alysse knelt beside Kayla and kissed her forehead. ¡°That¡¯s right, Kay. We have to go. We have to get somewhere safe.¡±

    ¡°Why can¡¯t we go home?¡±

    ¡°Because it¡¯s not safe¡ª¡±

    ¡°I want my daddy!¡±

    ¡°Sweetie, I told you,¡± Alysse said, her voice cracking, tears welling up. ¡°Daddy¡¯s gone. We have to go somewhere safe. The things that came for your dad¡­they¡¯re still out there, sweetheart.¡± She stroked her niece¡¯s hair. Jeremy wanted all of this mess to hurry up and be settled so they could go, but he waited patiently. He was on their time now, he had to wait for them to trust him.

    From the Blazer, Marc Thompson¡¯s voice was still blaring. He waited underneath the stars, looking up at them while Alysse consoled Kayla. He wondered if they were up there. The nanites. His yellow vision had eased up enough but most things were still suffused in it. And now he was feeling a bit nauseous again, like he had right after taking the injection at Mickey¡¯s.

    Jeremy started sweating. Swaying on his feet, he leaned against the hood of the Blazer.

    ¡°Okay,¡± Alysse said. ¡°We¡¯re ready. You okay?¡±

    ¡°Yeah. But I think you¡¯d better drive. Just feeling¡­a little tired.¡±

    ¡°I can do that. You can take the passenger seat. Kayla, you need some rest. You can sleep in the back seat.¡±

    Kayla shrugged, forefinger between her lips, fretting. ¡°M¡¯kay.¡±

    ¡°All right, then,¡± Alysse said, shouldering her backpack. ¡°Let¡¯s go.¡±

    : 13 :

    4 HOURS LATER

    While Alysse drove into the night, west on I-285, Jeremy lay reclined in the passenger seat. At first, they had exchanged a few horror stories about all they¡¯d seen, but then Alysse said they shouldn¡¯t do that with Kayla in the back. Jeremy agreed and was glad not to do much talking since it seemed like he was getting a fever. His head was warm, sometimes it almost seemed hot enough to cook bacon, as Mom used to say, but then it would cool down and he would only feel a little dizzy and nauseous, sort of like he had to throw up.

    To occupy his mind, Jeremy checked out Google, looking for any more posts on any other social media sites that might indicate a safe haven for survivors. So far, nothing was popping up. Jeremy checked to see if Clyde had gotten back with him again, but so far no new updates. He then did a search on the limestone caves in Alabama, and found himself falling into a rabbit hole.

    Jesus Christ, Clyde couldn¡¯t have found a better spot to go to at the end of the world, he thought.

    The caverns underneath Silvid Valley, Alabama, were a prepper¡¯s end-of-the-world dream. They were created by the Gilberto Limestone Mining Company in the 1870s, but the company couldn¡¯t make enough money to cover the overhead, and so they went under. The Army bought the property rights, and used the caves for storage for almost a hundred years. They had temporarily been in the hands of the Confederacy, used to store munitions. The Army had put it up for bid in the 1980s, and no one made a single bid in over a decade, that was until 1992, when the Army dropped the minimum bidding price to $10.2 million. An investor by the name of Joshua Collingsworth planned for the caves to be a little private getaway for survivalists who wanted to train their survival skills, and even the wealthier ones who wanted to reserve a private room for the end of the world.

    Reading further, Jeremy learned that caves like just like those in Silvid Valley had been built in Kansas, Arkansas, and Utah, and always went belly up. Every single time. Because while money kept getting pumped into them, there always seemed to be a little problem: the end of the world kept not happening. So, money was being thrown into a sunk cost fallacy made incarnate, and eventually people just ran out of money to invest in something that obviously wasn¡¯t going to happen.

    And that¡¯s exactly what happened to Mr. Joshua Collingsworth. He built it up for a number of years, but couldn¡¯t attract enough of his fellow investors to believe in it. The article Jeremy read said the Army started renting certain spaces back from Collingsworth, storing munitions in there again, as well as MREs and other gear, even vehicles. But it didn¡¯t pay enough for Collingsworth to turn a profit. The bank finally foreclosed, the Army bought it back for a song, and the only entrance was now a nondescript loading dock nestled into the wooded hillside.

    According to another article written by a journalist in The New York Times, the United States Army was looking to sell the Silvid Valley installation again, and, at least at the time the article was printed back in 2019, it was just sitting there, fully prepped, with air-conditioners, several diesel generators, enormous bored-out stalls ready to receive RVs for the wealthy, gigantic hangars that contained missile parts, guns, vehicles, and even sonar equipment meant to be tested in an experimental submarine that was never built.

    The caverns were a hundred and fifty feet below the surface, covered a little over sixty-three acres, and had a constant natural temperature of seventy degrees. The caverns were supported against collapse by giant limestone pillars that were ten times stronger than concrete. There were even blast doors¡ªClose the blast doors! he thought, smiling to himself¡ªand those blast doors had been designed by Collingsworth to withstand a two-megaton nuclear explosion from just ten miles away.

    ¡°Jesus Christ,¡± he chuckled, pinching the bridge of his nose to try and relieve some of the pressure from his eyes. The headache was now pushing against the backs of his eyes.

    ¡°What is it?¡± said Alysse, glancing in her rearview mirror like she expected someone to be following her. What was she looking for, the police?

    ¡°The caves,¡± he said, sitting up slowly, the headache easing up a little. ¡°They¡¯re not just caves. They¡¯re not at all what I pictured.¡±

    ¡°What are they?¡±

    ¡°They¡¯re¡ªI mean, if these articles are all accurate, they¡¯re exactly what we need against¡­this.¡± He looked out at the piled remains of Atlanta racing past them. ¡°These caves have been decked out beyond belief. Jesus, it says here there are enough stalls to fit over a thousand RVs. There are MREs¡ªmeals ready to eat¡ªand those can last, like, five years, I think. If you keep them cold enough, that is.¡±

    ¡°Uh huh, that¡¯s great,¡± she said, glancing into the back seat. Alysse looked at her watch. ¡°Kayla, sweetie, wake up. It¡¯s time for you to eat something. And check your glucose, okay? Can you do that, Kay?¡±

    ¡°Mmmm, yeah,¡± the girl said, waking up groggily.

    Jeremy turned to look in the back seat, and saw Kayla rummaging in her bag until she brought out a device that looked almost like a tricorder from Star Trek. His cousin Rob had had to do this, so he knew what to expect. He saw her take out the lancet to prick her finger, then squeezed the tip of her finger to put a drop on the test strip. After a few seconds of running it through the meter, it beeped, and she held it up for both of them to see.

    The meter read: 102 mg/dl.

    ¡°Okay, that¡¯s good,¡± Alysse said. ¡°That¡¯s good, that¡¯s good. Okay, put the meter back. Eat a little something. One of the snacks we got from the store.¡±

    Jeremy looked over at Alysse. Tears were in her eyes. Is she still working through the shock? He reached over to touch her hand on the steering wheel. She gripped his fingers, gave them a squeeze, and smiled briefly at him before putting her eyes back on the road. This isn¡¯t a relationship. This isn¡¯t how relationships are supposed to start. This isn¡¯t how anything is supposed to start.

    Jeremy sifted through his brain for something, anything to say.

    He put on a smile, and looked at her. ¡°So, uh¡­you¡¯re a prequel girl, huh?¡±

    She looked over at him and laughed a little, wiping her eyes with one hand. ¡°Yeah. Yeah, I guess so.¡±

    ¡°But you never watched the OT? How is that possible?¡±

    ¡°You sound like my brothers. They were always like, ¡®Alysse, girl, how can you call yourself a true fan if you haven¡¯t watched them?¡¯ I¡¯ve seen pieces of them, I just¡­never got around to it.¡±

    Never got around to it. Jeremy wondered how many things they¡¯d all put off because they ¡°hadn¡¯t got around to it¡± and now never could? Is this what regret feels like, in real time? Like, instant regret? He wasn¡¯t sure he¡¯d ever felt instant regret before. ¡°I know what you mean. I used to say I was going to take up the guitar. Used to play the hell outta Guitar Hero. I swear, it was my calling.¡±

    ¡°Why didn¡¯t you?¡±

    ¡°Money. Time. The usual.¡±

    She nodded in complete understanding. ¡°I¡¯m guessing this puts a hold on me going to Julliard.¡±

    Jeremy smiled, but then he noticed she wasn¡¯t smiling and so he stopped. ¡°How long have you been playing the violin?¡±

    ¡°Since I was, like, six or seven?¡±

    ¡°Wow, that young?¡±

    ¡°Yeah.¡±

    Jeremy couldn¡¯t think of anything else to add. Thankfully his phone prompted him about a turn up ahead, and he said, ¡°Take a right up here.¡±

    They drove on in silence for half an hour. Eventually, Jeremy heard snoring from the back, and looked back to see Kayla, her eyes closed, lying on her side and drooling. Her body shook as the Blazer jounced and slewed.

    Jeremy looked at Alysse. ¡°Did it happen fast?¡±

    She knew immediately what he meant. ¡°Yes. We heard screaming upstairs. She and I were down in the basement, packing some of her old toys in case we needed to leave. Michael¡ªher father, my oldest brother¡ªMichael said he¡¯d heard the roads could be opening soon, and that both Florida and Georgia¡¯s governors were talking about a mass evacuation. He¡¯s got friends in the Army, they were prepping, doing training exercises in case there was a run on the banks.¡±

    Jeremy winced. ¡°On the banks?¡±

    She shrugged. ¡°Someone said people in China were panicking, storming their banks, demanding to have all their money taken out. I don¡¯t know if it was true, but apparently some people were afraid it would be like the toilet paper thing during Covid, only worse. You know, that there wouldn¡¯t be any left? And that coupled with a mass exodus from both states¡­.¡± She trailed off, shrugging. ¡°I don¡¯t know, I guess they were concerned about raiders, people toting guns like they did after Hurricane Katrina.¡±

    He nodded. ¡°So, you guys were storing some of Kayla¡¯s toys in case you had to leave, so they¡¯d be in a safe place when you got back?¡±

    ¡°Yeah, and some of our parents¡¯ old family albums were down there, so I wanted to take those with us in case¡­in case we never came back.¡±

    Jeremy nodded again, and glanced back at Kayla, making sure she was asleep. He whispered, ¡°You said over the phone that you had to leave the basement finally because she needed insulin.¡±

    Alysse nodded. ¡°That¡¯s right.¡±

    ¡°You were in the basement the whole time? That why you couldn¡¯t get my calls?¡±

    ¡°Yeah.¡±

    ¡°But you had to leave for insulin.¡±

    ¡°Yeah.¡±

    Jeremy swallowed. He wondered if he should ask this next question, and almost didn¡¯t. He looked back to check on Kayla again, making sure she was still asleep. He whispered, ¡°I¡¯ve been looking up how long gas and diesel lasts, how long the Internet can last without people. I¡­I guess I should ask¡­I mean, just so I know. How long can insulin last?¡±

    Alysse¡¯s hands gripped the steering wheel. She never took her eyes off the road. ¡°About a month,¡± she said. ¡°Maybe a couple months, if it¡¯s stored well.¡±

    ¡°And¡­which Type is she?¡±

    ¡°Type One.¡±

    Type One, he thought. The worst one. Fuck.

    Jeremy reached over to touch her hand again, and this time he gave a bigger squeeze. Tears fell down her face, and this time Jeremy understood. He understood that Alysse wasn¡¯t crying over her dead brothers, or even the death of the world, or even the fact that she¡¯d been polyamorous and surely her other lovers were all dead. She was crying because she wasn¡¯t done losing people yet.

 Chapter 5: Finding Community at the End of the World

    : 14 :

    7 HOURS LATER

    They took turns driving, stopping only twice; first at a RaceTrac, to fill up the gas tank and siphon both gasoline and diesel into gas cans, and then at a Walmart, to go in and grab several sets of clothes for both themselves and Kayla, in different sizes, for when she (or any other children that might be at Silvid Valley) grew bigger. Things you never considered when you imagined yourself at the end of the world, Jeremy thought, as he jogged morosely from aisle to aisle.

    The lights were still on in the Walmart, and there were about forty or fifty large puddles of sludge, but besides that it was quiet, empty, and they had it all to themselves. They stuffed the Blazer full of tools, Advil, Excedrin, Band-Aids, and whatever insulin was behind the counter at the pharmacy. They also grabbed antibiotics, which, according to Google, expired after two or three years (For all the good it will do you, Jeremy thought).

    They had no idea what all would be in the Silvid Valley caves once they got there, if they would be the only ones or if there would be hundreds of people. So they grabbed bread, milk, and sandwich meats, knowing that those would expire soon but they could eat those on the go, saving the canned foods for later. They scooped up sodas for Kayla¡¯s sake, in case her blood glucose plummeted.

    Jeremy scoured the electronics section. On a whim, he grabbed a dual DVD/VHS player and threw it in the passenger seat with him. They had left Walmart with the Blazer absolutely stuffed to the rafters.

    Presently, as the sun came up, Jeremy was driving. The girls were both sleeping. Alysse had dozed in the passenger seat, and Kayla was keeping warm in the back using a thermal blanket they¡¯d gotten from Walmart. Jeremy watched the sun come up alone, watched it bathe a wide-open expanse of melted landscape. Maybe every nine or ten miles he¡¯d see a patch of greenery, and once he thought he¡¯d spotted a dog walking in someone¡¯s yard, but it ran off into the woods when it saw their vehicle coming.

    He listened to Marc Thompson narrate the adventures of Princess Leia as she escaped kidnappers sent by Grand Admiral Thrawn, and listened in a detached sort of entertained state as Chewbacca came to her rescue once more. John Williams¡¯s music, so much a part of Jeremy¡¯s life growing up that it may as well have been the soundtrack of his youth, soared and carried him through.

    Yes, The Force Suite, his favorite piece of all time, was what got him through this dreary mess, where he saw the gooey remains of his world, often driving through that goo, up over hills and past the places that had once been bucolic and festive. It ought to be spring right now. But Jeremy was in a new world now, one in which spring would never return, there would never again be birdsong or alarm clocks waking him up, no last-minute dipping into Starbucks to grab a coffee and muffin before going into work.

    There were houses partially eaten, the surviving wood and furniture looking wet and gray, smoke coming out of the gaping wounds on their sides like gunshot wounds in an old Western. They came to a five-mile stretch of land where flames were on both sides of the road, a wildfire, blowing hot and angrily across the gray sludge. They kept their windows rolled up, and thankfully only Alysse ever woke up to see it. Kayla slept through this scary ordeal entirely.

    They drove through a town called Sandersville, then through Melbutte and Hargrave, and then, at last, to the outskirts of Huntsville, and into a small town called Hinderle. And here, finally, according to the GPS lady that had guided the whole way, was Silvid Valley.

    : 15 :

    Clyde had warned him in a message that the entrance to the limestone caves might be hard to find. And indeed, it was. Jeremy drove down a long dirt road, flanked by trees on one side, a devoured wasteland on the other. He took out his phone and handed it to Alysse. He gave her his password and told her to check his email. ¡°Look for one from Reddit, from a guy named Clyde. Give him my number to call me back.¡±

    ¡°Okay,¡± Alysse said quietly, as if they were in a submarine and she thought that just by speaking the enemy would be able to hear her.

    Movement in the back seat. Jeremy glanced in his rearview mirror and saw Kayla waking up. She looked around bleary-eyed, rubbing her head, fixing her hair. ¡°We there?¡±

    ¡°Almost,¡± Jeremy said. ¡°We¡¯re in the right place, I think. Haven¡¯t seen a sign yet, but¡ª¡±

    ¡°There!¡± Kayla said. ¡°I see I sign!¡± She shot forward and pointed past the windshield. Jeremy strained his eyes to see through the sun¡¯s glare, held up a hand to block it. He did indeed see a sign, high on top of a verdant green hill that had somehow remained untouched, with what appeared to be a gas tanker someone had parked, minus the truck. The tanker just sat there collecting dust.

    Jeremy slowed down. He didn¡¯t want to scare anybody who might have gotten here first. Might be like those gun-toting assholes he¡¯d heard about during Hurricane Katrina, parking their vehicles in front of a Walmart and shooting anyone that came close, thinking it was the end of the world. Rednecks did weird shit when they thought it was the end of the world, and this time it actually was.

    His phone chimed.

    ¡°Clyde just emailed you back!¡± Alysse exclaimed.

    ¡°Read it.¡±

    ¡°He says ¡®Glad you made it, partner.¡¯ Then he gives his phone number.¡±

    ¡°Call it.¡±

    It was a brief conversation. Clyde sounded about like what Jeremy had imagined, a good ol¡¯ Southern boy who was short and to the point, but was also hollering at someone in the background. In a hurried speech, he told them to come on up to the hill, the one with the tanker on it, he¡¯d be out to meet them shortly.

    When they crested the summit, they found three RVs and more than a dozen trucks, SUVs, and sports cars. Jeremy parked the Blazer next to an RV, and the three of them got out. Underneath a beautiful blue Alabama sky, they stood facing twenty or so people, men and women of all ages, children of every color and clothing style, all milling about with various versions of the same frightened gaze. They were all so wary of each other, and now they were all wary of these three newcomers.

    A man peeled away from the crowd. He was wearing overalls, half his face covered in old burn scars, bald as a billiard ball, middle-aged, smiling through a mouth missing maybe a quarter of its teeth. ¡°You Zoinks?¡± he said.

    Jeremy blinked in confusion. ¡°Huh?¡±

    ¡°The Jedi Master. Zoinks. That you?¡±

    It took a second for Jeremy to remember that had been his Reddit handle. ¡°Oh. Shit. Yeah.¡±

    ¡°May the Force be fuckin¡¯ with you, cocksucker. Welcome to Silvid Valley. Welcome to the end o¡¯ the fuckin¡¯ world. We¡¯re goddamn glad to have you!¡±

    : 16 :

    30 MINUTES LATER

    They made their way towards a hillside entrance, which had once been concealed by trees and kudzu, but some of that had been eaten away by the Ecophage, and the rest of it had been torn away by men and women who stood in the ankle-deep sludge all around the wrought-iron gate, on the other side of which was nothing but a short stretch of road going uphill, with some parts paved. Jeremy took in the serene beauty of that grassy hill, wondering how much longer it would stay that way. Just like the Internet, and gas, and the power grid, and Kayla¡¯s insulin supply, time was running out. The Ecophage meant to eat all of them.

    The path terminated halfway up the hill, where the loading dock had been built. The doors were chained closed. Perhaps not surprisingly, Clyde had himself some bolt cutters, and a simple application of those allowed them admittance. There was a twenty-foot-long, pitch-black corridor inside. Clyde had six flashlights, and distributed them to Jeremy and a few others. A short rotund guy with glasses, who looked like he¡¯d just come from an office job, had a go-ready bag of his own and pulled out three more flashlights.

    They walked to the far end of the corridor, which was cold, damp, and made of rock, with only two steel beams giving the roof support. That made Jeremy very nervous. He looked back at Alysse and Kayla. Acting on some primal instinct, Jeremy reached out to grab her hand, and Alysse looked grateful for it. She grabbed Kayla¡¯s hand with her other, and Jeremy thought the three of them probably looked like a family walking in.

    They came to the blast doors. Two-foot-thick, solid steel doors. There was a control panel on the wall. Clyde inspected it. Jeremy came up beside him to have a look. Thankfully the control panel wasn¡¯t asking for a six-digit access code or anything like that. There was a green button and a red button. The green said OPEN. Clyde looked over at him, smiling wide by the haunting glow of his flashlight. ¡°Here goes nothin¡¯!¡±

    He hit the green button. There were three loud chimes, and then the blast doors slid smoothly open. Though, he could hear rusty gears moving achingly within the walls.

    ¡°Just like that?¡± Jeremy whispered.

    ¡°Guess so.¡±

    ¡°No way,¡± Alysse gasped. ¡°It¡¯s like stepping inside a spaceship.¡±

    ¡°I imagine somewhere there¡¯s an alarm a-goin¡¯ off,¡± said Clyde, pointing to a sign that said THIS INSTALLATION PROTECTED BY DESANTO SECURITY, INC. Clyde laughed, ¡°But I bet there¡¯s no one anywhere to hear it! We best get movin¡¯. Albert, you comin¡¯?¡±

    It appeared the rotund guy with glasses was Albert, because he answered, ¡°Hell, I guess so. Nowhere else left, is there? Unless anybody knows of a Holiday Inn nearby?¡± All around him, people laughed.

    Gallows humor, Jeremy thought. At the end of the world, what else do you have? ¡°Where are you from?¡± Jeremy asked Albert as they stepped through the doors.

    ¡°Kentucky. You?¡±

    ¡°Georgia. How¡¯d you get here?¡±

    ¡°I¡¯m friends with this crazy fucker on Discord,¡± Albert said, gesturing at Clyde. ¡°Never met him before in real life, but he and I were always swapping stories about how we¡¯d fare at the end of the world. We even played a roleplaying game¡ªyou ever play roleplaying games? Like D&D? Well, we played one called It¡¯s the End of the World and We Feel Fine. An indie game. And hell, here the fuck we are, at the end of the world.¡± Albert laughed, shaking his head ruefully. ¡°The irony. The goddamn irony, man.¡±

    Jeremy heard Kayla whimper, and tried to quell the tension by saying, ¡°I¡¯m Jeremy. This is Alysse. And this little gal here is Kayla.¡±

    ¡°Well, hey there, Kayla,¡± said Albert pleasantly. ¡°Pleasure to meet you.¡±

    Kayla barely squeaked out ¡°You too¡± and then went quiet.

    A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

    Behind them, more people were arriving. Jeremy could hear people shouting at the mouth of the entrance, ¡°Over here! The entrance is over here!¡±

    At the end of the corridor was a cage elevator. Inside the elevator, they could see, were two pallets of shrink-wrapped containers. Clyde shined his light on them. ¡°Dodson¡¯s MREs,¡± he said appreciatively. ¡°The best made anywhere. And lookiee-lookiee, these packing slips say they was put here last here. Hot damn, if there were fresh supplies bein¡¯ brought here as early as last year, we ought to by-God have a good stash down below. A good fuckin¡¯ stash, indeed.¡±

    This meant nothing to Jeremy, whose only concern at the moment was Alysse and Kayla. He kept looking back at them, making sure they were okay, making sure they were real.

    ¡°Don¡¯t get ahead o¡¯ yerself, cowboy,¡± said a tall, broad-shouldered woman who stepped up. To Jeremy, it looked like she¡¯d been cornfed from the cradle. ¡°If they ain¡¯t no power, then this elevator ain¡¯t goin¡¯ nowhere.¡±

    ¡°Jedi Master?¡± Clyde said to Jeremy. ¡°Care to help me do the fuckin¡¯ honors?¡±

    At first, Jeremy didn¡¯t know what he meant, but then he saw Clyde bracing himself to open the cage doors of the elevator. Jeremy got on one side, while Clyde got on the other. Together they pried them open very easily. They stepped inside, shining their lights around. Jeremy found a control switchboard hanging from a wire. He picked it up, saw one that said POWER. He flipped it, and the rest of the lights on the switchboard lit up. On the wall, a panel lit up, detailing the areas of the Silvid Valley Underground Installation.

    In his hands, the switchboard had two big buttons that were lit up brightly: UP and DOWN.

    ¡°A¡¯ight, then,¡± Clyde said, clapping Jeremy on the shoulder like they were old buds. ¡°Let¡¯s get goin¡¯, then.¡±

    ¡°I think only a few of us should go down first,¡± Jeremy said. ¡°Just to make sure it¡¯s safe. I mean,¡± he lowered his voice so that only Clyde could hear, ¡°the elevator could get jammed, could fall. I don¡¯t know. So maybe we leave some people up here to keep hailing survivors, and just a few of us go down to check out the place.¡±

    Clyde¡¯s bottom lip curled. ¡°Good fuckin¡¯ plan. A good fuckin¡¯ plan. Hell, let¡¯s do it.¡±

    It suddenly occurred to Jeremy that this man wasn¡¯t traumatized at all. Indeed, he looked to be having the time of his life. He supposed some people flourished in chaos, or else had been waiting for the end of the world just so they didn¡¯t have to pay taxes anymore. In any case, he was glad to have someone with good cheer like Clyde. Though, he did notice the Glock 19 strapped to his right hip, and the SIG Sauer strapped to the tactical holster on Albert¡¯s left thigh.

    ¡°You¡¯re going down alone?¡± Alysse said, her voice tense.

    Jeremy looked at her. ¡°You can come if you want, but¡­¡± He glanced down at Kayla.

    Alysse understood. She nodded. ¡°No, we¡¯ll stay here. Wait for you.¡±

    He gave her hand a squeeze. Then he kissed her. Not on the cheek this time, but on the lips, and she kissed him back.

    This was, Jeremy thought later, and for the rest of his life, the weirdest first date ever.

    : 17 :

    10 MINUTES LATER

    Four of them went down the elevator: Jeremy, Clyde, Albert, and the big blonde woman who had spoken up earlier named Mathilda. They could actually see the limestone walls as they traveled down through the cage. Their flashlight beams illuminated those craggy walls. On the wall panel, there was a screen that showed numbers counting up in increments of ten. First 40, then 50, then 60. ¡°Our depth?¡± Jeremy asked. Clyde nodded quietly. It cold silence, they watched those numbers climb. When the panel read 140, the elevator slowed. The cage rattled, swayed, then rattled some more. The sound it made carried differently now. They were in total darkness, but Jeremy knew they were now at the bottom, inside the caverns.

    They shone their lights around, and found what appeared to be a front desk, and a window with a perfect circle cut into it, almost like the glass that protected the cashier at a late-night gas station. The rest of the room had the feel of a cheap dentist¡¯s waiting room, with chairs arranged around small, circular plastic tables. Each of those tables had magazines wrapped in plastic. Exactly like a waiting room, Jeremy thought, in wonderment.

    In an adjoining room, there were plastic crates, shrink-wrapped on pallets. Orange Naugahyde chairs stacked against the wall gave this room the feel of a school janitor¡¯s closet.

    ¡°We shouldn¡¯t let the doors close,¡± said Mathilda. ¡°Maybe somebody should stay here, make sure they don¡¯t close and never open again.¡±

    ¡°Let¡¯s use that desk to keep it open,¡± said Albert. ¡°What do you think?¡±

    ¡°Sounds good to me,¡± said Clyde. ¡°C¡¯mon, Jedi Master, let¡¯s put them muscles work.¡±

    They moved the large, kidney-shaped desk into the elevator doors to keep them from automatically shutting, and then they stepped into the caves.

    They moved cautiously, like blind people in a minefield. The first corridor was wide open, with scant desks here and there, a few stacks of crates with no packing slips. Mathilda produced a crowbar from her own go-ready bag (Jesus, was everybody prepared for the end of the world but me?) and pried open the top of one tote. She found a few pamphlets talking about basic survival. There were two maps along the wall that mapped out the entire facility. Jeremy took pictures of them with his phone for later reference.

    ¡°Good fuckin¡¯ idea,¡± said Clyde, and he did the same. They all did.

    Jeremy put his finger on the part of the map that said YOU ARE HERE, and followed the paths away from there. Then he found what he thought they were looking for. ¡°There it is. Let¡¯s go.¡±

    ¡°There whut is?¡± said Clyde. Jeremy showed him, and Clyde nodded excitedly. ¡°Good fuckin¡¯ idea, Jedi Master.¡±

    They came to a T-junction. Here, they looked in every direction, saw the walls of every corridor lined with stacks upon stacks of plastic totes, all shrink-wrapped. There were closed doors in every hallway, and a wide corridor that had numbered parking spots. For the RV-driving survivalists that never invested here, Jeremy thought. Man, I bet they wished they had invested now. At the end of the corridor, there was another cage elevator, but this one was much bigger than the one they¡¯d come down. ¡°This must¡¯ve been where they expected to bring their vehicles up and down,¡± Jeremy said. ¡°We can use this to bring all our cars down later.¡±

    Clyde, Albert, and Mathilda nodded.

    ¡°Look around for light switches,¡± Clyde said. ¡°Let¡¯s keep it movin¡¯, people.¡±

    Jeremy nodded, and groped along the cold stone walls. So far, he hadn¡¯t found any switches. More corridors splintered off from theirs. More doorways, more huge parking spots.

    ¡°Goddamn it, this place is a maze!¡± said Albert. ¡°Which way?¡±

    Jeremy pulled up the map on his phone, zooming in on their location. ¡°Down here,¡± he said, pointing to a hall on their left.

    Fifteen minutes of exploring yielded only more large doors, which opened easily with a push and squeaked on rusty hinges, revealing more bored-out corridors. Several doors led to more stalls, some large enough to fit several RVs. Jeremy found a couple light switches, flipped them up and down, but no lights came on. However, a couple of large bay doors had standard chains, like you¡¯d see in a hangar. When Mathilda pulled on them, they rolled up, revealing only more shrink-wrapped boxes and totes. Jeremy examined the packing slips, and found the totes were full of spare parts for something called a PILLMAN¡¯S NATURAL-11. No one in their group seemed to know what it was. One bay contained large steel drums, the sides of which had labels that warned FLAMMABLE and COMBUSTIBLE.

    ¡°Fuel,¡± Clyde said. ¡°Some diesel over here. Some of it¡¯s dated less than two months. Less than two months! Hot damn, that¡¯s sorta lucky!¡±

    ¡°Lucky,¡± Mathilda said, shaking her head. ¡°Yeah, we¡¯re real lucky, all right.¡±

    ¡°Well, ain¡¯t we? I mean, of all the people on the fuckin¡¯ planet, it¡¯s us who lived. Nobody but us. Just us! Heh!¡±

    Jeremy glanced at Mathilda and Albert, who all just shook their heads in morbid amusement. ¡°Let¡¯s keep looking.¡±

    Another ten minutes of searching, and they found a room filled with pallets of MREs, water bottles, and two small diesel-powered generators. Upon finding these, Clyde dropped the straps of his overalls and started twirling them like a stripper, squeezing his nipples and doing a sexy dance. He could not have been more comfortable being one of the last lucky fuckers left alive on Earth. Jeremy wondered again if it was shock or just how Clyde was built.

    Another large bay door opened easily, and inside they found several boxes labeled MEDICAL. They checked a few of the boxes, and found sumatriptan, odansentron, ampicillin, cephalexin, and many other bottles with labels Jeremy had never heard of it. He looked out for any sort of insulin, but of course didn¡¯t find any, as insulin expired far too quickly. That made him feel despondent, but he kept focusing on the installation map on his phone, looking for the most important room.

    ¡°This way,¡± he said.

    ¡°If you say so,¡± Clyde laughed. ¡°I¡¯m following you! Use the fuckin¡¯ Force, Luke!¡± He guffawed at his own joke, slapping his knee like he was at a comedy show.

    Down the next corridor, there were unlocked doors leading into offices that looked like they had been in various stages of preparation before the original project had been shut down. The Silvid Vally Underground Installation had been a mining operation, then an Army operation, then a luxury getaway, then a Doomsdayer¡¯s escape, and then an Army operation again, so it looked alternately convenient, inviting, sterile, warm, and coldly utilitarian.

    In every office, blue tarps and white sheets were thrown over a few computer monitors, some CPU towers, and more tables with stacks of boxes and MREs.

    ¡°Think we can get Wi-Fi down here?¡± Mathilda snorted.

    ¡°I expect whatever they had going, it never got finished,¡± Jeremy said. ¡°So, no.¡±

    ¡°I was joking.¡±

    ¡°Oh. Sorry.¡±

    They went down a set of metal stairs, through a set of double doors. Jeremy suddenly noticed Mathilda had a small pistol in her hand, and was holding it and her flashlight in the ¡°Harries Hold,¡± which he¡¯d once learned when he interviewed a detective at the Cobb County Special Investigations and Response Division, for research in a term paper. It seemed Mathilda likely had been in law enforcement or the military.

    They stepped onto wide metal scaffolding that overlooked a room filled with boilers, tall coolers and a generator the size of a small car. ¡°Bingo,¡± Jeremy said.

    ¡°Hot damn! A Jedi Master! We got ourselves a gen-U-wine Jedi fuckin¡¯ Master, boys!¡± Clyde danced a little jig again, then descended the stairs to approach the generator, which was cylindrical, extremely dusty, and covered in panels and dials. ¡°I read about this big fucker on the website! Three diesel-powered generators in one! And each one cranks out eight hundred fuckin¡¯ kilowatts apiece!¡± His hands moved over a few of the dials. To Jeremy, it didn¡¯t look like he knew what he was doing.

    It was Albert who said, ¡°Uh, anybody know how this shit works?¡±

    Mathilda shrugged. ¡°I used to work on car engines.¡±

    ¡°Not the same thing.¡±

    ¡°I know that, I¡¯m just sayin¡¯. That¡¯s about all I got.¡±

    ¡°They¡¯s a fellow up top said he was an engineering student at Georgia Tech,¡± Clyde said. He snapped his fingers at Mathilda. ¡°Matty, go fetch him, bring him down here! His name¡¯s Corey¡ªno, wait, Cody! That¡¯s his name. Cody. Go fetch Cody! Shoot that flashlight o¡¯ yers over here, Jedi Master Zoinks, I wanna get a better look at this big bastard.¡±

    Mathilda sighed and shook her head. ¡°I¡¯m not going back up by myself. I¡¯ll get fuckin¡¯ lost.¡±

    ¡°I¡¯ll come with you,¡± Jeremy said. ¡°Albert, you help Clyde with¡­with whatever. We¡¯ll be back soon.¡±

    It took twenty minutes to find their way back out, and during that time, Jeremy and Mathilda went quiet, and tense, obviously both of them wondering if they were lost. At last, they came to the elevator and removed the desk from the doors, then went up and fetched Cody Tyler, who, it turned out, was built like Chris Hemsworth and with a face like Gerard Butler but with thick glasses.

    ¡°Know anything about boilers and diesel-powered generators?¡± Jeremy asked him, before explaining what they needed from him.

    Over the next two hours, they ferried people up and down the elevator. Jeremy discovered eight more people had shown up during the time they were messing with the generators, and Alysse and Kayla were sitting in the grass, playing a game with old Pok¨¦mon cards Alysse had collected as a girl. ¡°Ya know,¡± she said when Jeremy found them, ¡°these were once worth a few hundred dollars each. Now¡­what even is a dollar?¡±

    He sat next to them for a while, and asked Kayla to teach him how to play. That seemed a good way to distract her from everything. Around the time the sun was going down, Mathilda came back up and asked for everyone to join them down below. Mathilda said, ¡°I¡¯ll stay up top, in case any stragglers show up during the night.¡±

    Jeremy nodded, and guided Alysse and Kayla into the elevator. And together, they headed down into the darkness. When he went to check on Clyde and Cody, he found that they were joined by a fellow by the name of Stewartson, who, it turned out, had been in the military and was explaining, ¡°¡ªwe had to get power up in some bad areas. Bombed-out cities, power plants that the workers abandoned because they got tired of hearing the warning sirens every day. Fallujah was a blacked-out town during the April siege.¡±

    ¡°So, you know all about these big bastards?¡± Clyde asked.

    Stewartson shrugged. ¡°Sort of. These are a bit different. A generator like this ought to be able to pump out enough energy to power four or five hundred homes for a while, especially if we watch our consumption.¡± He then located something called the primer, and then the primer set-pump, and directed Clyde, Cody and Jeremy to help him label some of the switches with tape, so he could remember what they all did, and, more importantly, so everyone else would know how to work it if something happened to him. (They were already making plans on how to survive in the event others in their group started dying.)

    They watched Stewartson pump it six times, and then the big machine started to hum, vibrating loudly, shaking the floor, the scaffolding, and then finally settling down to a low whirring noise. A few dials lit up. Stewartson went to those, consulting an instruction manual someone had found under the main station, all wrapped in plastic. He flipped something called the Main Mixture Switch. The generator roared again, shaking, then stabilized.

    Then, all went quiet. A hissing sound. Then the generator started whirring again. All at once, every single light on the control panel lit up. Then, it was just a matter of following the blinking lights. That¡¯s the way it seemed to Jeremy, anyway, who felt useless just watching.

    Suddenly, the entire room lit up. Halogen lights everywhere splashed on, bathing them in an almost blinding and heavenly aura.

    ¡°There we go!¡± Albert shouted.

    ¡°We¡¯ve got power?¡± Jeremy said.

    ¡°We¡¯ve got power,¡± said Stewartson, sighing and wiping a sweaty brow.

    Cody high-fived Jeremy. Then, they heard squealing, and when they turned around, Clyde was doing his stripper dance again, and frolicking all around the power room shouting, ¡°Praise God! Praise the fuckin¡¯ Force, Obi-Wan! We are in bidness, folks! Yessir! Praise Buddha and his fat fuckin¡¯ ass! Praise God and little baby Jesus! We! Are! In! Bidness!¡±