Brian Keene: The Conqueror Worms

Everybody had theories. The meteorologists threw around a lot of techno-babble, and the politicians argued, and then the world leaders started pointing fingers at each other.

Here in the United States, the coastal areas went first, along with their cities. Places like San Francisco, Los Angeles, San Diego, Atlantic City, New York City, Miami, and Norfolk. Florida’s panhandle and the entire Gulf Coast were instantly wiped out as ten-story waves crashed over them, driven ashore by a massive storm swell and winds of over two hundred miles per hour. Towns like Grand Isle, New Orleans, Apalachicola, and Pensacola were gone in the blink of an eye, submerged along with the two million people living there who never got the chance to evacuate. Interstate Sixty-five, near the coast of Alabama, had been snarled in gridlock when it happened. All of those people died beneath the rushing waters, trapped inside their cars. Tornadoes ripped through the non-coastal areas, leveling trees and buildings, and then those places were flooded, too, relentlessly battered by the rains.

One time, I watched a television program about hurricanes. They said that weather researchers classified hurricanes into different categories, with a category one being just above a tropical storm and a category five being the absolute worst. Well, let me tell you, the super-storm that erupted across the planet was beyond categorization. It would have been a ten. The Federal Emergency Management Agency was unequipped to deal with the disaster, but I reckon no amount of preparation could have saved us even if they had anticipated it.

Within the space of seven days, all of the coastal cities in the United States were obliterated, and the rest of the country started flooding. And that was just the beginning. Then it got worse. The rain kept falling. Some nut in Indiana started building an ark, just like the one Noah had used, and there was a rumor that several governments had done the same, shifting their elite and powerful onto battleships and luxury liners, along with animals and plant life.

The National Guard started evacuating people before the rest of the cities farther inland disappeared beneath the waves, but there was really nowhere to go. The whole damn country was flooding. Then the waters rushed over the rest, as far as Arizona in the West, and up to the Ohio River Valley in the East. It may have gone even farther, but that was when the satellite television stopped working. Last thing I saw on the air was footage of a lake where the Mississippi River used to be. The Potomac flooded over its banks, too, and took out the nation’s capitol. The Rockies, the Appalachians, the Smokies, and a few other remote locations were supposedly still above water, just like my own mountain, but I can’t imagine life was too pleasant in those places. I wondered if there was another old man like me, trapped on his mountaintop in Colorado, waiting for the waters to rise up and swallow him.

The good old U.S. of A. was a disaster area of biblical proportions, and the rest of the world didn’t fare much better. Places like Easter Island, the Philippines, Sri Lanka, Indonesia, and Diego Garcia were gone. Not flooded, but gone. Cuba, Jamaica, and the rest of the Caribbean got wiped out in the same storm surge that destroyed the southern United States. Hawaii had been reduced to a few lonely volcano peaks. I remember watching Nova Scotia get erased live on CNN before the satellite stopped working. Asia, Europe, Africa, Australia—I don’t know what the final outcome was, but the television footage hadn’t been promising. The Himalayas and Mount Kilimanjaro were probably beachfront property by now.

And now Renick was gone. While I’d seen the damage on television, it took this to finally bring it home for me.

Because this was home.

Like everything else, Renick was gone, swallowed up by the Greenbrier River. And the river was gone, lost amid the floodwaters. Down in Lewisburg, Interstate Sixty-four was gone, and with it, the passage to my daughter’s home in Pennsylvania.

Pennsylvania was gone. New York City was gone. I’d seen that on TV, too, before the power went out. It was horrible; Manhattan buried under an impenetrable fog and water surging from sewer grates and manhole covers. Hundreds of homeless people drowned in the subway tunnels before the evacuation even started. When it was over, the National Guard and police had to patrol the streets of Manhattan by boat. I remember seeing footage of some jet skiers looting Saks Fifth Avenue, and an NYPD speedboat chasing them off. The water, black with filth and garbage, crept up to the third and fourth floors of just about every building in the city, covering everything under a layer of sludge. Worst of all were the rats. Everything that the camera flashed on swarmed with vermin. The rains had pushed them, streaming and angry, from their underground kingdom. They were hungry, and it wasn’t long before they started to eat the dead, bloated bodies floating in the streets. And when they ran out of those, they turned on the living.

The rains had forced the rats to the surface. I wondered what else the rains would force to the surface, and if these things would be hungry, too.

I took one last look at the steeple and the silo jutting up from the churning waters. I just couldn’t believe what I was seeing. Rose and I’d had a lot of good times together in that little town, times that would never come to pass again—times that had faded, just like my memories were starting to do. I was suddenly glad Rose hadn’t lived to see this. My Rose had loved her Bible, and she would no doubt have had a scripture on hand for this occasion, just as she did for everything.

In the Bible, God sent Noah a dove. I’d done what the Lord had asked me to do for over eighty years, but I didn’t get a dove. All I got that day was another nicotine fit.

Dripping wet, I climbed back into the truck. My head hurt, and I shivered while holding my hands in front of the dashboard’s heater vent.

I needed a dip.

I put the transmission in drive and returned home, soaked, depressed, with no tobacco and a banged-up truck to show for my efforts. My world—my mountaintop home—was now an island jutting up out of a brand new ocean.

That was Day Thirty. Each day got worse after that. So did the nights. They were the absolute worst. Nights in the country can make a man feel very alone. There are no streetlights or cars, and if the moon isn’t out, all you’re left with is the chorus of insects. Once the rains started, the insects died, and the moon and stars were swallowed up by storm clouds. Now, nighttime wasn’t just lonely—it was downright frightening. With no starlight and no electricity, the darkness was a powerful thing, almost solid. I’d lie in bed craving a dip, unable to see my hand in front of my face, and listen to the rain.

Izaak Walton once said the Lord has two dwellings: one in heaven, and the other in a meek and thankful heart. Well, God must have been in heaven, because the way I felt, He couldn’t have lived inside of me.

Each night, I prayed to the Lord and asked Him to let me die. I asked to be reunited with my wife.

And each night, God ignored my prayer.

The sky wept with His tears. I cried, too, but my tears were very small things when compared to those falling from the sky.

CHAPTER TWO

So—let’s get back to Day Forty-one. It’s hard to believe it was only two days ago. It feels more like two years. Like I said earlier, that’s when the earthworms invaded my carport. But something else happened on that day. That was the morning the early worm got the bird.

I reckon that’s where we better start. Trust me, I’m fixing to tell you. Everything I’ve written up to this point was just me trying to avoid talking about what really happened. But that’s not going to do us any good. And I’m afraid I might be running out of time. I need to finish this. I’ll try to make it as factual as the amount of time and notebook pages allow. As Huck Finn said in the opening chapter of Huckleberry Finn , when discussing the previous book, Tom Sawyer , “Mr. Twain wrote a little bit about me in that book, and it was mostly true, or some of it was anyhow. The truth may have been stretched a mite, but mostly it was meant to be true.”