The basso profundo horns sounded in the distance, echoing through the jungle valleys. There was no rest from the horns any more, not even in the daylight. That the jungle was silent besides only made the trumpeting more unsettling; except for the rustle of the the wind in the upper levels of the canopy, there was no noise – no chatter of monkeys, no bellow of lizards, no call and reply of birds.
We waited for the echoes to die and our hearts to come back down from our throats before we moved, much less spoke again. We weren’t worried that they’d hear us, but still…
“Did you ever realize how much the end of the world turned out to be like the Zombie Apocalypse?” The flat-topped jackass grinning at his own wit was Mark B., Physical Education.
The brunette sitting on the rock next to him was Alex S., Sophomore English. “How do you mean?” She bit into a leathery strip of dried mango.
“Well, they’re slow, but they just keep coming and coming – they never give up, right? And they’re multiplying. And there’s that whole bit about the bio-engineering. It’s like they’re unstoppable eating machines; they won’t quit until you’re finally worn down and it’s just inevitable: you’re food.”
“Yeah, but I don’t think the snails are after our brains.” Alex was nice enough; we’d been friends for a few years. And she was half right: they weren’t particularly after our brains. The snails seem to prefer meat organs and glycerol and our skeletal system.
“No, the ‘Braaaaains’ was only in the “Return” series. That doesn’t count – even for its own basis, the “Return” series was apocryphal to Romero’s series. Zombies will eat any part of you they can get their teeth into. It’s the apocalypse, I’m telling you.”
“It’s ‘Eschaton’. ‘Apocalypse’ just means revelation.” That was me, Carla S., Biology and Chemistry. I was kind of an ass, too, so I got along with Mark even better than with Alex. “And we don’t turn into little snails when they catch us – that’s the difference. We just turn into mulch. This is more like V. Or Aliens. Or pick any one of a thousand other end-of-the-world movies.”
Mark and Alex and I were the Beauty, Brains and Brawn of what used to be Sommerville High – the Three Amigos, the ones all the students spread dirty rumors about, which only made it easier for us to deny the dirty truths mixed in with them. We’d hatched this plan pretty early on: taking the Land Cruiser down to Tierra del Fuego before North America was completely lousy with giant snails. I guess they could still be considered snails – the original genome had come from Helix aspersa – but after all of the chromosome splicing they’d been through, I think they qualified for their own species, if not their own phylum. So there we were at the end of the year, using our NCLB2 bonuses to buy the kind of supplies normally reserved for the tinfoil hat types when – and no one seemed to know how it could have happened, especially only a month after NADCOM announced they’d contained the Santos-Silva breach to BC, Washington, and northern Oregon – but flesh-eating snails the size of washing machines started showing up uninvited on the coastline of every continent but Antarctica, and a few washed up dead there. It only took a few samples and and a bit of observation to confirm that this strain had the Argentine ant replacement strings – they were organized, stratified and cooperative. I’d read rumors some of them were smart enough to play tic-tac-toe. I’m sure checkers wasn’t far behind.
I guess when you’re combining the strengths of apex species and messing with behavioral genes, it’s an easy enough mistake to stumble on the combination that marks vertebrates as food. By the time both Sydney and Johannesburg were overrun, everyone was starting to get the idea that mankind didn’t have a promising future – at least not civilized mankind. Suddenly all of the supplies we thought we’d hidden in the extra shed behind the school were in high demand, and we had to clear out early one Sunday morning to get away with anything. It was enough. We were prepared to set up a new life and repopulate the entire species if we had to. We’d had plenty of practice in the initial procedures of repopulation, the three of us.
“Shut up, all of you! You’re acting like this is a joke. We’re going to die!” That was Kris M., office administrator. She winced from the exertion of shouting at us, and with a victimized sigh she leaned back against the tree. She wasn’t part of our clique, but we’d caught her looting our shed that morning and somehow she’d guilt-tripped us into taking her with us. At first she’d insisted we go to her house and pick up her husband, too, but when she realized that there were only supplies for three of us and barely enough for four, she shut up and settled in. She was young enough to be fertile and participate in our repopulate the earth strategy, but Mark had confided in me that even such a noble goal would hardly persuade him to poke her when Alex and I were around. That had made me smile; Kris actually had a pretty good body, even if she was as sour as a green lemon. “Why aren’t we planning how to keep moving? All I need is some kind of a crutch and a splint if you guys would just look around.”
Kris had been the one driving the Land Cruiser when it flipped coming down the switchbacks last night, and her leg had been caught and crushed by the steering column. None of us were doctors, but it didn’t matter. She would have been laid up for weeks in real hospital. We were just waiting for one of us to muster up the nerve to tell her we were leaving her behind.
The horns sounded again, like a chorus of out-of-tune tubas, and this time they were closer – close enough that even before the echos died we could hear trees crashing in the distance. They’d found the Toyota, so it was only a matter of time now. As long as we were on foot they could follow our trail as easily as they would their own mucousy footprints. It was past time to go. Mark and Alex were already on their feet, and their faces were strained. If we could hear the trees crashing, the smaller ones would be closer.
“What are you doing?” Kris’ face had drained of blood. Her eyes flicked between us, widening with each movement. “No – wait!”
“I’m sorry,” I mouthed, and like the other two I slung my pack up onto my back. Mark and Alex were refusing to meet her eyes as they rifled through her bag. I thought about leaving her a pistol, but I was too worried she’d use it on me, and even with all of her cursing and screaming as we turned our backs on her I couldn’t bring myself to shoot her.
Alex hissed at me as I caught up. “What are we going to do? We won’t outpace them walking. Even if Kris buys us a head start.”
“No. But if we wait them out, they may lose our scent in their own tracks. Remember the flood at Joshua Tree?”
We each looked up into the trees.
-
We’d each picked a cradle in our own tree when the first ones appeared, crackling and crunching over the dead-leaf floor of the jungle. These scouts were small, only about the size of a cat, and they had followed our path from the Toyota as directly as if we’d painted it on the ground. Kris screamed when she saw them, cresting over a crop of rock at the base of the tree, and she screamed again when she tried to crawl and her femur crunched. They wasted no time approaching her; there was no pretense or circling or sizing her up. By the time their chemaphores were tapping up the bare skin of her leg, she was hyperventilating and flailing her feet in the dirt, but it barely slowed the first two to reach her. More and larger snails appeared up the path we left and crossed the chemical trails left by their siblings; as they did they made a bee-line to join in the glistening orgy forming on Kris. She screamed a few more times, but her cries were mostly muffled. I glanced back at Alex and immediately felt sorry for her. She didn’t have the stomach for this kind of thing.
The crash of trees was closer now; just on the other side of the rise. I could see the movement in the canopy.
In retrospect we should have moved out of eyesight and earshot of Kris before we climbed – or at least I shouldn’t have watched – but I was fascinated. There were videos on the web before it went down, but it wasn’t like seeing it in person. The first of the scouts had left the cluster of shells swarming in a mount over Kris, adding new streaks to the opalescent mucous that had begun to coat the entire basin of the clearing we’d stopped in, but as they disappeared the real monsters began to arrive: beasts with shells the size of dishwashers and refrigerators, and then two even larger than our ruined Land Cruiser. Their shells were too heavy to ride high on their backs, even if the walls were thin enough in places for the filtered sunlight to stream through and light up their inner organs; instead they scraped trails in the ground where they slumped off to one side. Then – I was wrong – those huge shells lifted high and straight, and as they fell the let out a chorused blast as loud as a ship’s foghorn. This close to them my ears rang for a minute afterward.
But the trees on the rise still moved, and finally a shell the size of our school’s short bus rose over the horizon. It was the hermatriarch; there was no mistaking it. That’s what they’d called the big ones on the boards – hermatriarchs – at least before the net went dark. They were the Queens of their small nests – a genome insert from the Argentine ants, probably – but with the added gastropod advantage that they didn’t have to waste food and attention on a drone class. It was probably a ‘channer that had coined the term hermatriarch, but it had stuck. They’d even started using those intersex pronouns – ‘hir’ and ’shi’ – but I had to draw the line somewhere.
As the huge snail began the descent into the dish of the clearing, all of its subordinate snails slithered out of the way. Even the lingerers still swarming over Kris fled to the periphery of the clearing.
I squinted my eyes to see Kris better, and I could see that beneath the thin sheet of mucous she was still moving. Somehow she’d been flipped to her back, and her head rocked slowly side to side. Her eyes stared at nothing; her mouth was agape and smeared with either her saliva or a thicker coat of the slime that covered the rest of her. She was splotched with red, and it took me a few seconds – seconds which the hermatriarch was using to close the space between them – to realize that the red was Kris’ blood. At the center of each splotch an ivory-white spike had been stapled through her clothes and into the muscle beneath. Love darts. That’s what they were called, at least before Santos-Silva had started swapping out genes.
Kris barely reacted when the hermatriarch’s cowl stretched out to envelop her lower legs; she only continued to flop her head back and forth when the great snail tugged her legs beneath it, then her hips and her abdomen. I had a brief glimpse of hundreds of thumb-sized cilia undulating beneath a glaze of mucous before the hermatriarch’s cowl sealed down around Kris’ shoulders and neck, leaving only her head open to the air. The dapples of sunlight reflected off tears streaming down Kris’ face, but if anything her expression was strangely euphoric.
I had a pretty good idea of what was going on beneath that cowl; I had downloaded wikipedia onto my phone in those last few weeks when the internet was wheezing out its last breath as a mesh of DNS-less 169-254-dot wireless peers. As curious as I was, I was just as glad to only be able so see dark shapes moving through the hermatriarch’s barely translucent body. It was a noisy, slurping, squelchy eater, and as its head moved and Kris’s body lurched beneath, I could imagine that shark-toothed radula tearing over her belly and rending it to fine ribbons, raking her intestines fleck by scrap back into the snail’s crop. Blood seeped out around Kris’ shoulder and gurgled from between her lips, and by the time the great snail withdrew, her eyes were barely fluttering. The hermatriarch trailed thick strands of almost spiderwebby mucous, but more importantly she left Kris’ abdominal cavity cored out like a Halloween pumpkin. I don’t know how Kris was still alive, but her diaphragm was spasming; I could actually see the muscle convulse and gurgle out blood.
As the hermatriarch retreated over a her own glistening footprints – now smeared red and brown and glass-bottle green – her court and retinue descended, swarming the remains of Kris’ body. They’d have her body stripped to a skeleton in an hour at most, but they wouldn’t be done with her until each and every bone was ground down into nutrients for their shells. Since I’d suppressed my initial reaction to vomit, I could watch closely again. I was fascinated to see the social hierarchy exhibited by the snails – they must have had more than just the Argentine ant genomes spliced in – their castes weren’t so well-defined. The biggest specimens had their way of course, but even the smaller stained glass snails, with their dark stripes curling along the spiral of their shells, seemed to have an order of deference not determined by who had made it to the body first. I saw snails actually withdraw and wait while others filled their crop first. I wished I could have spared the battery and storage space on my phone, I would have loved to take video-
“CARLA!” It was a furious hiss, almost like Mark had already tried more than once to get my attention. He and Alex both jabbed their fingers at my backpack, just as I glanced back to see the slow drumbeat of 6-inch chemaphores tapping over the North Face patch and into my eyeline.
“Shit shit shit!” I hissed, and I shook my back. I could feel the extra weight of the snail now, swinging with my bag, but its cilial hold was too secure. I was going to have to actually touch it – to yank it free or abandon my bag before the snail’s inexorable crawl brought it up to the bare skin on my neck. I quickly hand-jammed a few inches up where two branches had begun to split apart and twisted with my left arm to reach the outside of my bag when my eyes caught movement further down. My fatigue pants were covered with them – a dozen eight-inchers at least.. There was just that brief moment of realization, that tenth of a second where your heart stops and it feels like your blood has been replaced by fire – before I felt the muscular reflex on the other side of my pants and a searing, boring pain in my calf. I screamed, I’m pretty sure; all I knew was that even shattering my elbow on the slopes hadn’t hurt that bad. Thankfully the next few thumps into my legs just felt like impact punches; my L4-L5-S1 complex must have already cried ‘pain overload’ and shut down. But I was losing muscle tone… I felt like my bag weight a hundred pounds… I guess my hand-jam wasn’t very good, because I fell then, and I heard Mark screaming my name again – like what was I supposed to do about it now? One of my legs hooked a branch below me, and I pinwheeled the last twenty feet to the ground.
I felt the sickening crunch more than I heard it, but I’m pretty sure that wasn’t me. I’d landed in a snail orgy at the base of the tree, and bits of shell and mucous frothed up from beneath me. My ears were ringing. The backpack felt so uncomfortable beneath me – I’d probably landed funny on the campstove – but all of that discomfort was draining out of me, like a bad dye job seeping out into bathwater. I thought I could actually feel it pass into the ground and the trees and the undergrowth. But not the snails – not the snails. They were glass.
I was connected to the earth – I was a stone half-buried in the ground by more time than human civilization had seen. I tried to blink my eyes clear; it felt like a salvia trip, except all the colors were faded and washed out and the green canopy above me had unzipped to reveal a sky filled with Mucha-painted clouds. The snails were all chattering – in Portuguese, I thought, and now I wish I’d bothered to learn it. Wikipedia pulled up superimposed over the clouds, and I realized that would have made for a much more interesting interface than the all-white background. I really should suggest it to someone. The page on display explained the snail telegraph, and all of the friendly glass snails were pointing at it with their eye-stalks and going on and on in Portuguese. I remembered the page more than read it, since the letters seemed to swirl together, and suddenly I realized that the whole problem was that Benoit and Chretien only spoke French, not Portuguese. Missed opportunities!
HELLO
The voice rumbled with the depth of a canyon.
The huge head of a snail had risen over the horizon of my stomach, and with its three-foot-long eyestalks framing the disk of the sun like some incandescent incarnation of Ra, the subtle fractal pattern of its skin glowed. I knew I was in the presence of majesty. I opened my mouth to speak-
Flash! Flash Flash! New suns supernovaed and as quickly disappeared, and the majestic glass snail shattered and gushed golden ichor. With a disappointed shake of its head, the snail retreated and took with it the promise of all of the wisdom of the ages it had been about to impart.
“CARLA!” That was my name, but it came through warbled, like sunlight rippling on the bottom of a pool. “Oh my god, oh my god.” The shadows of people I had known appeared over me, but they were indistinct.
I tried to tell Mark that he needed to learn Portuguese, but he wouldn’t listen. He was too busy trying to dig my body out of the earth, but I couldn’t make him understand that I was a rock now. When his hands came away red and dripping with my blood, I knew he’d get it.
Flash Flash! went the gun in Alex’ hand, and the whole world sounded like crashing cathedral windows. I reached out my hand toward her, but now I had forgotten that I was a rock and my hands weren’t moving any more. Then Alex and Mark were stumbling back, babbling, their incoherent bodies blending with the shadows fleeing from Mucha’s clouds.
I could see shadows approaching from all around me; my friends, the glass snails, I hoped. I was starting to get so tired.