quadrillions of whining fleas, consumed. Nanoseconds later, I understand everything there is to understand. Reduced to my “essential saltes” as it were, I’m the prime mover seed that gets sown after the heat death of the universe when the Ouroboros swallows itself and the cycle begins anew with a big bang.
Meanwhile, back on Earth in the bathroom of the shabby efficiency flat, my body teeters before the mirror. Lacking my primal ichor and animating force that fueled the quasi immortal regeneration of cells that in turn thwarted the perfect pathogen, the latent mutant gene of the Pod People activates and transmogrifies the good old human me into one of Them. Probably the last self-willed fungus standing—but not for long; this shit does indeed spread like wildfire. My former guts, ganglion, reproductive organs, and whatnot, dissolve into a thick, black stew while my former brain contracts and fossilizes to the approximate size of a walnut and adopts an entirely new set of operating principles.
Doubtless, it has a plan for the world. May it and my android wife be very happy together. I hope they remember to feed the cat.
The Men from Porlock
September, 1923
Darkness lay stone heavy as men roused, drawn from inner night by the tidal pull of blood, the weight of bones sagging outward through their flesh. Floorboards groaned beneath the men who shuffled and stamped like dray horses in the gloom of the bunkhouse. Star glow came through chinks in slat siding. Someone had lighted the stove and smoke drifted among the bunks, up to the rafters. It had rained during the night and the air was ghastly damp. Expelled breath gathered on the beams and dripped steadily; condensation oozing as from stalactites of a limestone cave. The hall reeked with the stench of a bunker: creosote and sweat, flatulence and rotten teeth and the bitter tang of ashes and singed tobacco.
Miller hunched nearly double at the long, rough-hewn pine table and ate lumpy dick and molasses for breakfast. He scooped it with a tin spoon from a tin pan blackened and scarred from a thousand fires and the abuses of a thousand spoons. When he’d done, he wiped his mustache on the sleeve of his long johns and drank black coffee from a tin cup, the last element of his rural dining set.
His hands were dirty and horned with calluses from Swede saw and felling axe. He’d broken them a few times over the years and his knuckles were swollen as walnuts. He couldn’t make a tight fist with the left hand; most mornings his fingers froze into a crab claw barely fit to manage his Willie, much less hook an axe handle. At least he was young—most of the old timers were missing fingers, or had been busted up in a hundred brutal ways—from accidents to fist-fights to year after year of the slow, deadly attrition from each swing of mattock or axe. Olsen the Swede (first among the many Swedes west of the Rockies) got his leg shattered by a chain as a kid and hopped around the camp with his broadhead axe for a crutch. His arch-rival Sven the Norwegian (first among innumerable logger Norwegians south of Norway) lost his teeth and an ear while setting chokers back in the Old World—setting chokers was dog’s work no matter what country. Even Manfred the German, known and admired for his quick reflexes, had once been tagged by an errant branch; his skull was soft in places and hairless as if he’d survived a fire, and one eye drooped much lower than the other. Lately Manny had climbed the ladder to donkey puncher. A man wasn’t likely to be injured while running a donkey; if anything went wrong he’d be mangled, mutilated and killed with a minimum of suffering.
One of the Poles, a rangy, affable fellow named Kasper, frequently asked Miller if he planned to get out before he got his head lopped off, or his legs snapped, or was cut in half by a whip-cracking choker cable, or ended up with a knife stuck in his ribs during a saloon brawl. Perhaps Miller was as pigheaded as most men his age and addicted to the security of quick money in a trade few wanted and fewer escaped?
As for himself, Kasper claimed to be cursed rather than stubborn—madness ran through his blood and yoked him to cruel labor, the wages of sin committed by an overweening ancestor in the dim prehistory of Eastern Europe. The Pole wrote