John Adams - Wastelands 2

In the world outside your room, the question now is whether to go out and fight the newest version of the worm. This one rears up and bares its teeth. It’s got seven rows of sharp: old school multiplex shit. Now it emerges, in the shadowy days at the end of everything. No one has yet seen its tail. It seems to go on forever.

Outside your windows, buildings begin to crumble, and the sidewalks ripple. You are still that loser thinking about love.

“I have to go out,” you say.

“I have to go out, too,” he replies, and you touch him with your tongue. He tastes like you. Both of you are hungry. You feel like you might explode from out of his chest, or him from yours, writhing and opening jaws, eyeless.

Outside, the worm is rising where the sunrise was. Its flesh is smooth and gray. Your building shakes as the worm moves around it, wrapping it in coils.

“Nylon support stockings,” he says.

“Slinkies,” you counter.

“William Blake.”

“Loch Ness.”

A window breaks. He stands up. You stand up, too, and walk out without looking at him again. There’s nowhere to look, in any case. It’s dark. You start climbing.

The worm makes its way through the streets, turning left and turning right, making a low sound, a slurring rasp. It’s a successful worm. The more people a worm gets, the bigger it grows. You walk out under the sky, hunting the worm as the worm hunts you. You’re just a normal person who lived through things she shouldn’t have. Your fires have gone out. You’re not especially special.

Heaven is a cloud of ash, a starless place full of low nests.

You hold your present in your hand, the pronged, sharpened fingers of your man, and below you, you see the worm, shining in the no light.

Fall into me , you think, using your old self, willing the worm to woo. It shouldn’t come to you, but it does. Hunger and love work the same way. The spells you knew as a little girl are still part of you. Once you start spelling you’re never stopping. It’s like you have an audience and a word with a million letters, and you’re going to spell it to death. It’s like you’re a champion.

The worm stretches itself and you stand on top of a building, watching it approach. It’s curious. No one comes out in the street anymore. It smells you, or tastes you in the air.

Then, movement. Now you know why the worm is coming. Your man is in the street, the purse made of your skin held out before him, and on your skin, the unsayable word.

The worm writhes toward him, following your scent, and you’re shaking, feeling a this-is-it-shithead situation, but you’re here anyway and so is he. You can see your ring, flashing on your man’s finger, his remaining hand outstretched. He throws the purse into the worm’s mouth, and it laps at it, tasting it, rasping. Its teeth are shining and white, whiter than anything you’ve seen before. They close on the purse like it’s a washrag being wrung. Now the worm’s eaten the name of god. In some places, that would be poison.

Its head turns toward you.

You teeter, teeter, and leap, an old movie move showing up in your game plan unexpectedly. You dive for its face, its open mouth, its seven rows of teeth, and they cut you as you go in. No mouth, only throat. The thing is all throat. You hold out the comb and claw your way down.

You’re going into the center of the Earth. You fall, and you fall, and all around you the stars are falling, too. The inside of the worm is the inside of the world. You claw words into its throat, and you’re covered in blood and wet, in cold dark. You’re being digested and pulsed, inside a long channel of charnel. You think about all the people this worm has eaten from the inside, and now you’re inside it, too. You’ll do the same. You’re Woolworthing the monster, cataloging it into a bin of like unnecessaries.

You’re fucking terrified. You think about your mother, whom you haven’t seen in years. You think about your umbilical cord and the way it wormtangled around your throat. You think about how you lived through that. You hold your man’s hand, the sharpened points of the fingers, and around you, the worm convulses and quivers. You stab yourself in, using the bonecomb, finger by finger, and you tear at the worm’s simplicity, bisecting it like a bad deed on a summer afternoon.

Eventually there is a larger shudder, a scream, a rasp, and you feel the worm give way.

For your sixth anniversary, you are the woman who emerged unscathed from the worm that ate the city. He’s the man who did it with you. You hold his hand in yours, and his other hand, the one made of bone, holds your hair, grown back now, into a twist on top of your head. The sky changes. The ash drifts down. You’ve given way, just as the worm did, and now, your skin, covered in words, and his body, covered in scars, are what the remaining people know to be the way that leaders look.

Beneath the streets, the worms are asunder, rotting corpses, bewildered by bones.

You met him drinking. He met you drinking your drink. Now you’re both in charge of things.

You give him a look for your sixth anniversary. He gives you the same look back.

At first, Negroes thought it funny. A disease that could make a Haitian blacker? It was the joke of the year. Everybody in our sector accusing everybody else of having it. You couldn’t display a blemish or catch some sun on the street without the jokes starting. Someone would point to a spot on your arm and say, Diablo, haitiano, que te pasó?

La Negrura they called it.

The Darkness.

These days everybody wants to know what you were doing when the world came to an end. Fools make up all sorts of vainglorious self-serving plep—but me, I tell the truth.

I was chasing a girl.

I was one of the idiots who didn’t heed any of the initial reports, who got caught way out there. What can I tell you? My head just wasn’t into any mysterious disease—not with my mom sick and all. Not with Mysty.

Motherfuckers used to say culo would be the end of us. Well, for me it really was.

In the beginning the doctor types couldn’t wrap their brains around it, either.

The infection showed up on a small boy in the relocation camps outside Port-au-Prince, in the hottest March in recorded history. The index case was only four years old, and by the time his uncle brought him in his arm looked like an enormous black pustule, so huge it had turned the boy into an appendage of the arm. In the glypts he looked terrified.

Within a month, a couple of thousand more infections were reported. Didn’t rip through the pobla like the dengues or the poxes. More of a slow leprous spread. A black mold-fungus-blast that came on like a splotch and then gradually started taking you over, tunneling right through you—though as it turned out it wasn’t a mold-fungus-blast at all. It was something else. Something new.

Everybody blamed the heat. Blamed the Calientazo. Shit, a hundred straight days over 105 degrees F. in our region alone, the planet cooking like a chimi and down to its last five trees—something berserk was bound to happen. All sorts of bizarre outbreaks already in play: diseases no one had names for, zoonotics by the pound. This one didn’t cause too much panic because it seemed to hit only the sickest of the sick, viktims who had nine kinds of ill already in them. You literally had to be falling to pieces for it to grab you.

It almost always started epidermically and then worked its way up and in. Most of the infected were immobile within a few months, the worst comatose by six. Strangest thing, though: once infected, few viktims died outright; they just seemed to linger on and on. Coral reefs might have been adios on the ocean floor, but they were alive and well on the arms and backs and heads of the infected. Black rotting rugose masses fruiting out of bodies. The medicos formed a ninety-nation consortium, flooded one another with papers and hypotheses, ran every test they could afford, but not even the military enhancers could crack it.