This Rotten World: A Plague of Locusts, page 1
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This Rotten World: A Plague of Locusts
This Rotten World:
A Plague of Locusts
By Jacy Morris
Copyright © Jacy Morris 2024
All Rights Reserved
Cover Illustration by Don Noble
Table of Contents
Prologue: Dawn of a Plague
Chapter 1: Operation
Chapter 2: Sniffin' Asses
Chapter 3: Socializing Cats
Chapter 4: Prospects
Chapter 5: Bent Backs
Chapter 6: Shoshoni
Chapter 7: Dangling
Chapter 8: Punishment
Chapter 9: Snow Globe Blues
Chapter 10: All My Hoes Kill
Chapter 11: Sugarplum Fairies Become Spraying Blood and Cracking Skulls
Chapter 12: Fireworks
Chapter 13: Throat Full of Razorblades
Chapter 14: Reconnaissance
Chapter 15: Batter Up
Chapter 16: Bump in the Road
Chapter 17: Cake's Gonna Take as Long as a Cake's Gonna Take
Chapter 18: Donning the Mantle
Chapter 19: Something in the Corn
Chapter 20: The Swarm
Prologue: Dawn of a Plague
The Mormon cricket, scientific name Anabrus simplex, has been known to be a real pain in the ass from time to time. To the untrained eye, they look just like your average cricket, ranging from a burnt red color to black. When the Mormon settlers, out of their element, trespassing on Native lands, settled in the Salt Lake Valley, they dutifully planted all sorts of crops. Of course, they didn't know about the crickets, and soon found themselves overrun by the voracious pests. Two weeks of a constant swarming carpet of the critters reduced their crops to nothing but cricket shit, and forever after, this unassuming insect was dubbed the "Mormon" cricket.
In modern times, the cricket has been kept in check through pesticides, through constant plowing of the land where cricket eggs lay dormant in the soil. But when the dead began to walk the earth, the farmers forgot to plow. They forgot to coat the world in carcinogenic pesticides. You can see how it might be easy to overlook such a thing when an undead human is bashing on your front door, or when Grandpa Keith has a heart attack in the middle of the night and starts feasting on Grandma. It's easy to forget under those circumstances. People forget all sorts of things when they're busy fighting for their lives.
And, with the earth's climate out of balance, the conditions were just right for breeding, for eggs to hatch, for thousands of the little critters to crawl from eggs the size of a grain of rice, their bellies rumbling inside their chitinous plating. When the dead rose, so too did the Mormon cricket, and within a matter of a few months, they appeared everywhere, endlessly marching across fields and roads, where normally they would be smashed to bits by great semi-trucks roaring down the country's freeways, turning them into goo and broken shells. But the roads are quiet now, but for the lone wanderer or the occasional convoy of survivors, wandering like crickets themselves, ready to eat whatever crosses their path.
Onward the Mormon crickets marched, munching and crunching and feeding on everything before them, not unlike the dead who walked along with them… only the dead didn't eat corn, didn't eat fields of wheat or munch on squash. They had only one thing on their minds—flesh, warm and juicy.
As the dead plodded onward, so too did the crickets, sometimes hitching a ride on their undead friends, standing on their shoulders, in their hair, in their wounds, nibbling on bits of rotten flesh, their legs chirping away, sending out messages over the air. "I got a good one over here! Not too rancid!"
The dead didn't care, didn't feel a thing. They kept wandering straight as an arrow, through fields left to rot. It was a hungry time.
Chapter 1: Operation
Ernie knew he was tough. There was no doubt about it. He'd done things that would make your average citizen throw up just from hearing about it. He'd been shot, stabbed, killed friends, lost his wife to cancer, although that last one required a different type of toughness. All those experiences clued him in to the fact he was a walking badass, someone who was unflappable and capable of getting the job done. But this… this was something else.
Ernie's tongue tasted cowhide as he clamped down with his teeth on a wooden dowel wrapped in leather. His hands gripped the metal railings of a gurney pulled from the back of a crashed ambulance. By his head, a man stood, skin brown, lips a flat slash across his broad face. With strong hands, he pressed down on Ernie's forehead to hold him still. Another man, just as large and just as emotionless, stood by his feet, hands clamped around his ankles. Off to his right stood a woman, squat and thick, but no less powerful. In her eyes, she held no sympathy for him, treated him like an animal who had tangled with a barbed wire fence and needed its wounds tended to—and why not? She was a veterinarian after all.
"I ain't no cow," Ernie had said when they'd told him who would do the operation.
"No, you're not. If you were a cow, we would just shoot you and eat you. Be thankful you're not a cow," the elderly man had said. The chief, or elder, or whatever the fuck he was, had smiled then, and Ernie knew his complaints were the things of a soft man, not the tough guy he tried to be.
You could be all sorts of tough, but when it came to someone removing the rotten remains of a punctured eyeball, shriveled and decomposing, wasn't no one in the world tough enough for that.
"What about anesthesia?" Ernie had asked.
"Anesthesia's for us," the veterinarian had said.
Ernie understood. He and the others were part-timers here, hired labor, their pay food and medicine—and their lives if they lasted long enough. Using anesthesia on him would be a waste, meant someone the tribe actually gave a shit about would have to go without down the line.
"This is gonna hurt," the vet said, a scalpel glinting in the dim light of the barn.
"Did you sterilize that thing?" he asked, trying to delay the inevitable.
"Doesn’t matter for what I'm going to do after."
Ernie wanted to throw up. Being tough was one thing, but this was something else entirely.
Without warning, the veterinarian dove at him, working fast, slicing and pulling and cutting. Ernie screamed around the bit in his mouth, tried to will himself to not jerk and spasm. This was delicate work after all. She needed to get everything, every bit of decaying matter in his eyes socket. But fuck, it hurt worse than anything he'd ever felt, with the exception of watching his wife wither away, but again, that was a different type of hurt.
He couldn't disappear physically, so he tried to vanish mentally, conjuring an image of his wife's face. With his nerves firing, with his body bucking of its own accord, he latched onto her face—her eyes, her smile, the way she had of saying his name. He imagined seeing her once more, standing in the sunshine, her favorite dress billowing around her body in the wind. Meanwhile, the vet sliced and yanked.
As the procedure dragged on, he wanted to pass out, to do that thing they did in movies where the pain became so unbearable the person couldn't take it and they drifted off to oblivion. But he was tough. In this one instance, he wished he wasn't.
It must have taken the veterinarian ten good swipes with the scalpel, then she stood back, peered down at him, a battery-operated headlamp shining into the cave where his eye had once been.
"Almost done," she said. She leaned over him again as she swiped some more, her breath stinking of stale coffee, sending hot fire into Ernie's brain, pulling screams from his ragged throat.
"There," she said. She leaned back with a satisfied smile Ernie saw through the tears in his one good eye.
"One thing left to do." The woman picked up something out of sight. He heard the sound of gas spitting through a valve, then the whoosh of a flame, followed by the hiss as she turned a knob and focused the flame so it was smaller, hotter.
"Oh, God," Ernie muttered around the leathery bit in his mouth. She leaned forward, and he felt the flames kiss his flesh. He saw the smoke rising, smelled the burning of his own meat, and yet, still he didn't pass out.
When she stepped back, the men released his head and his feet, but Ernie kept gripping the gurney.
"Will there be pain medication?" he'd asked before the operation.
"No, that's for us," the vet had said, smiling at him with perfect white teeth.
Laying on the gurney, he spit the bit out of his mouth as swear words poured forth from him. They stood and waited for him to finish, waited a long time too. When his swears dried up, the vet was there, clean gauze and tape in her hands. She packed the wound with the gauze, and taped the edges in place. Ernie's body, drenched in sweat, sang its pain in his mind.
When she stepped away from him, she handed him an orange bottle, its contents rattling inside.
"What is it?" Ernie asked. He couldn't make out the name on the label, whether it was because the print was too small for his old eye, or because a layer of tears still clouded his vision, he didn't know.
"Penicillin," the woman said.
He nodded, and the two men, large, burly, carrying themselves with a confidence that assured Ernie they knew how to fight, escorted him back to the pens.
Chapter 2: Sniffin' Asses
Jaiyama stood when the men entered, Ernie stumbling along between them. They released him, and he tottered on his shaky legs. She didn't so much as reach out a hand to steady the old man, but that was fine. Ernie wouldn't have wanted it anyway.
"Clear out," Jaiyama commanded to Clean, who lay on a mattress of straw, one arm behind his head while the other stroked the tattoo on the side of his scalp. His forearm was a mass of scabbed skin where he had been dragged across the concrete. It was recovering nicely. At Jaiyama's word, Clean sat up with a groan, the soreness in his body from tumbling out the back of a pickup truck still present in his sluggish movements.
Ernie walked like one of the dead, and for a brief moment, Jaiyama feared they had killed him and brought him back to feed upon them. He shuffled across the concrete floor of the stable to collapse in the spot Clean had vacated. A bottle of pills rolled from his hand, but he didn't seem to notice.
"You ok?" Jaiyama asked, but Ernie was too spent to reply.
"Get him some water," Jaiyama commanded, and Clean walked off without saying a word. He hadn't said much since they crashed, just kept rubbing at that tattoo on his head. It was harder to make out now. His hair was growing in, black and spiky.
Tarot came to stand beside Ernie, harrumphed, and then wandered off to her own stall. The animals who normally lived in the barn were outside, grazing, more important than any of Jaiyama and her crew to the tribe who had taken them captive. Outside, a handful of men with automatic weapons kept watch over them.
From somewhere in the stables, Jaiyama heard one of the others giving Clean a hard time.
"That's our water," a gruff voice said.
"Fuck you," Clean said, not willing to back down.
"Aw, let 'em have it," another voice said. "That old dude don't take those pills, and he dies from infection in the middle of the night, who knows what the fuck is going to happen?"
"Ask next time," the gruff voice said. Jaiyama knew who it belonged to—a massive tool, bald, his head meat rolling onto his neck, his arms thick and powerful. He was a big man, liked to throw his weight around. But his time would come. Once she figured everything out, once she knew which way the wind blew, she'd take the big man down.
The other voice, the more reasonable one, belonged to the man she had to watch out for. He didn't say much, but when he did, the others listened. From what Jaiyama had gathered, the other group of bikers had run into the same ambush Jaiyama's group had, suffered the same fate, but only after they'd lost a couple lives out there on the road.
In the mornings, the first group would be led out to the fields, where they toiled and worked the land, tending to crops, weeding, real back-breaking shit no biker in their right mind would ever sign up for. She supposed when her group was healthy, they would be out there along with them. In the meantime, the other group of bikers had come to resent Jaiyama and her crew as they recuperated in the shade of the stables. It made sense. No one likes to work while some other motherfucker is lounging around taking it easy. But her crew had to recover, had to lick their wounds, and they'd been doing so for several days now.
Clean returned, his eyes afire with violence. "Not too much longer now," Jaiyama said. Clean nodded at her, his eyes two glowing embers in the hollows of his skull. Clean bent over Ernie, a tin cup in his hands. Ernie, with the last of his strength, popped a pill in his mouth and drank a mouthful of water. Then he passed out.
"Keep watch on him," Jaiyama told Clean before she left the stall.
****
Flash, as usual, kept close to Cammy. The other group of bikers had come back salty from working in the fields, and many of them had that look in their eye, that "I'm gonna take this shit out on someone" look.
Flash cleared his throat, swallowed the crap that came up. He was on the antibiotics train now, a couple days in. His guts were shot, and whenever he took a crap, everyone cursed him out as the stench filled the barn. But there wasn't anything he could do about it. Hell, he didn't even really care. The stench of his own chili didn't bother him that much. Although, he was always embarrassed when he saw Cammy wrinkling her nose. But it was a small price to pay to know he wasn't going to have to live with a pen sticking out of his throat for the rest of his life. The wound was healing nicely, though his breath came in shallow gasps now. The veterinarian had fixed him up good. Hurt like a motherfucker, but again, a small price to pay.
But Flash's throat wasn't his biggest concern right now. His biggest concern at the moment was the big man, the loudmouth son of a bitch who kept looking in Cammy's direction. Flash was still slightly feverish, definitely shaky on his legs, but he would fight tooth and claw if that Marmaduke-looking motherfucker tried anything with her.
He sat on the floor, keeping his head low, not making direct eye contact with anyone, but not letting anyone out of his sight either. His skull throbbed where he had clanged it off the side of Ernie's ride. His shoulder ached, where he'd come to rest on it when the car had flipped upside down. It was a miracle any of them had walked away from the accident. A couple more days, and he'd be right as rain, ready to kick the shit out of anyone who stepped to them.
Flash suspected the other bikers knew this, were ready to make their move tonight. Out in the fields, they had probably put it all together, come up with a plan, marked who they'd want to take out first. Let's see, Clean first, he was the youngest, the toughest looking, and he walked like he was just waiting for someone to say the wrong word. When he'd fetched Ernie's water, Flash had thought it was going to go down then and there. But the other group of bikers must have had something else in mind. After a heated exchange, they let Clean go.
Tim would be next. If the big guy, the big drooling simp, didn't go after Clean, he'd hit Tim next. He was the healthiest male in the group, had suffered nothing more than rattled nerves and an injury to his pride. Sometimes, an injury to your pride was worse than a broken arm. At least you knew the arm would heal.
Then they'd come for Carl. Crazy motherfucker just sat in the corner mumbling to himself. Flash doubted he would even know it if one of those fucks started pounding on him. Off to Carl's right, their new member stood, his back to the other group, as if daring them to come for him. Carl almost seemed sane by comparison. Something was broken in Blackroot as evidenced by the circles around his eyes, the way he laughed too much, as if everything was just a big joke to him. That Carl and Blackroot had struck up a friendship was no big surprise. The two huddled together, whispering, their hands gesturing widely as they talked about the world, what was going on, and all that useless bullshit. Didn't matter what was going on. It didn't matter why this was happening. It just was. One problem at a time. That's what he'd learned back home in Cleveland. Man was a singular animal, capable of deep focus on one thing. Multitasking was bullshit, a scam, something losers celebrated as they did two things in the amount of time it took someone to do one… but often half as good. No, problems had to be dealt with one at a time.
Stumbling out of a bar on 49th Ave in Cleveland, he'd discovered this lesson when five thugs had surrounded him, demanded his money and his bike. They could have had the money, but he'd rather die than give up the bike. Five people—most people would have walked away. But not Flash.
