Brian Keene: Dead Sea

Of course, when we run out of Alka-Seltzer, we’ll have to come up with another way to hunt them. Maybe nets or nooses or something…

Shit. Who the fuck am I kidding, anyway? That doesn’t matter now.

Nothing matters.

I told Carol and the kids that we could survive a long time on birds. And we could have. With all of their natural predators either gone or dead—or living dead—there are lots of birds now. Fuck the meek. The birds have inherited the earth.

Yeah, we could have survived by eating them.

But…

Tomorrow, when the kids wake up, I’ll have to tell them that they can’t go outside anymore. I already told Carol. I waited until after Tasha and Malik had gone to sleep, so that they wouldn’t hear. When I’d finished, Carol started crying. She retreated to her room and asked to be left alone for a while. I let her go. Nothing I could have done or said would change the situation. I felt like crying, too.

Earlier this evening, when I went out to hunt some birds for tomorrow’s breakfast, things changed again for the worse. I was standing on one of the catwalks, tossing Alka-Seltzer coated with hamburger grease out onto the deck, and the birds came in to feast. Their slender gray and white bodies soared through the air and landed on the platform. They began pecking at the bait, but before any of them could eat, another bird swooped down out of the sky and crashed among them. Feathers flew into the air and the other birds squawked in surprise. I wondered what had made it land like that, and then I saw.

The bird was missing its legs and one of its eyes, but it was still moving. It ignored the bait. Instead, it attacked another seagull. Two more of them zipped toward us. The regular birds scattered. I dropped my bucket and ran across the platform, waiting to feel a razorlike beak slashing at my flesh. I didn’t, though. I made it inside.

I was damn lucky.

Hamelin’s Revenge has jumped species again, just like it did with the fish. The birds had been immune.

And now they aren’t.

We can stay inside here for a long time. As long as the generator doesn’t break down, we’ll be fine. But sooner or later we’ll run out of food and water. What happens when there’s nothing left to eat? How do we hunt or forage when all of our prey is already dead—and hunting us? If one of us died, could the rest of us eat them? Would that make us any different than those things outside?

The birds are zombies now, and there’s a hell of a lot more zombies than there are of us. Humans are a thing of the past. We’re the last of them. The last of a dying breed. We are the new dinosaurs. Our civilization ends with us. All of the things we’ve achieved are meaningless now. All of our advances. All of our stories. Heroes don’t matter anymore, and that’s okay, because I’m not a hero. I never was. I’m just a fallen archetype, based on a falsehood. What happens to a hero when he dies? He becomes a myth. But what happens to myths when there’s no one left to tell about them? Do they just fade away, as we will? I’m sure they do. I bet human history is full of forgotten myths—heroes we’ve never heard of simply because there was no on left to tell us about their exploits. Their journey—their trials and tribulations—were pointless in the end because they were forgotten. Those myths and archetypes didn’t survive.

Forget the meek. The dead have inherited the earth. They are the new breed—the planet’s new dominant species. They rule at the top of the food chain.

Back in the day, there was a rap song I used to like. The lyrics said, “Evolve or Die.” That line has taken on a new meaning for me. In order to survive, a species has to evolve. We did it when we came out of the ocean, and we did it again when we came down from the trees.

Survival instinct is a motherfucker.

But evolution is even worse.

And if we have to evolve to survive, then maybe I’ll just open the door.