The Bog
DAY 287
As the sun settles to the ground, the sky clots with blood before scaring into the night. The Short Man marches on the forest floor, his short stature embellished by the seventy-foot tall red spruce trees that stand eerily still. Like a cockroach, he skitters around the dry leaves, stomping his foot on the soil that is starting to freeze. Back at the cabin, The Man carefully scans his shelter, his swollen, dark eyes flickering around in paranoia. An aluminum wired fence surrounds a desaturated orange log cabin. It has only one small window facing the sunset.
He was lucky today, able to find an emaciated squirrel to eat for dinner. He closes the barbed wire fence, As he stomps toward a hollow shack where he skins animals, if he can even find any still alive to skin, he stops suddenly.
In his pathetic vegetable garden, one of his tomatoes has fully ripened. It’s small, disfigured, and splotchy with yellow spots. He shifts the broken squirrel to his left hand, kneels down, and with his shaky, blood-dried hand, picks the tomato from his garden. He turns around to his wife’s grave and sits for a moment. A faint smile cracks like glass across his face.
“Hey, Bee. You wouldn’t believe what I was able to grow!” He bubbled. ” I know how much you love these disgusting things. Once the others grow I’ll make you–I’ll make you that tomato basil soup you’ve been missing. Well–maybe the basil plant died a while ago, so–it’s just the tomatoes, but that doesn’t matter. Here, have a taste of this one, for now.” His hand hangs over the rocks and pebbles and he crushes it with his hand. The tomato bloats up then bursts, spilling the tomato blood clots and seeds over the cold stones. As it feeds into the soil he places the popped tomato on the stones. He hovers there for a moment, and the rawness in his chest glows in pain, as if he’d been whipped. The pain manifests under his ribs. His heart, overwhelmed, swells with blood and his lungs drain into raisins.
The last of his aches is exorcised with his breath. Like the tomato-pasted rocks, his heart is cold and stained. He returns the broken, putrid squirrel to his right hand. He stomps to the shack and obsessively combs through the animal’s fur before he YANKS the skin off its shriveled body, GRINDS the ribs and tiny bones for the buttery marrow. He DIGS into the muscles and fat to smoke it into jerky and HARVESTS its organs into a bucket to make some crappy stew.
At nightfall he locks himself inside his cabin and hangs his rifle by the door. He removes his clothes and begins boiling them in a pot. He doesn’t have enough water to bathe himself tonight, so he must endure the layers of sweat, dirt, and animal blood that have accumulated for the past few days. In the kitchen while cooking, his stew releases an unpleasant odor. He tries relieving it with funnel cake-scented candles, but in an awful concoction it mixes with the stew and mold of the living room carpet. The resulting smells churn his head into a clogged toilet bowl.
At last his food is ready. He lumbers across the decaying wood onto the stiff carpet and sits on a sofa couch in the living room. Two feet away lies a box TV that when turned on, shows what he assumes is the burned image of Channel 8 news.
It only plays static. White and black noise dances on the screen in an inconsiderate mess. He stares endlessly into the noise. As he begins his meal, he treats himself to his favorite part of the stew: the intestines. It takes so long to clean the literal shit out of the gut, but when salted and boiled, the chewy texture tastes like steak. At least how he remembers steak used to taste .
The bone marrow also tastes pretty good. It’s like butter, but more like the taste you get when you chip your tooth and you eat some of it. He imagines eating a chunk of butter while gnawing at the bone paste. The liver tastes the worst, but is unfortunately the healthiest option for his diet. The squirrel’s heart isn’t much better. He chews fast and swallows hard, rinsing his mouth with water after every bite. He makes sure to finish every last bite before placing his bowl with the other dirty dishes on the floor by the couch. Tension returns to the Man’s face. He stares at the screen.
He watches the binary light form into a figure. The figure is having a seizure, convulsing into a knot centered around his stomach. The Man grabs his hand, offering some sort of comfort.
The figure’s palms are uncomfortably soggy and clenched surprisingly tight. The figure gags, attempting to remove the demons that live inside his stomach by sticking his fingers into the back of his mouth. A puddle of stomach acid, mucus, and saliva stains the hospital bed. In the vomit is a singular, mucus-colored egg. The Man is frightened that it is large enough to see.
The Man presses the nurse call button by the bed. At this point the figure tries to dig into his stomach, his nails breaking through skin. The staff comes in and holds the figure down. They opened his gown. Everyone could see under his red skin, his belly like a water balloon filled with worms all trying to make room for each other, to pop the balloon. The figure’s screams suddenly begin to choke. Something scrapes its way out of the balloon’s mouth. The balloon POPS and the water spills across the floor hugging the Man’s boots. But it isn’t water, or even blood. It just looks like egg yolk. A balloon filled with egg yolk and worms, flinging their bodies like centipedes at all of the shoes. The Man turns off the TV and goes to bed.
Day 294
THUNK
The cabin shakes the Man awake. The walls of the cabin flex and moan loudly. It sounds as if someone struck the house with a whip and it was bellowing in pain. The Man opens his bedroom door, peering into the living room and kitchen. He approaches the laundry room, expecting to see the morning sky through the window as he does every day, for nearly the past year.
“What…What the fuck!?”
The sky is covered in a sheet of running blood. The sun’s rays translate itself through the blood, illuminating the laundry room in a dark red. The Man could have sworn his heart is about to break through his chest. He ties his boots and takes his rifle off of safety. He can’t see anything past the gore of his window.
With each beat his heart twitches his fingers, his pulsating hand reaching out towards the door handle. He swings the door open. He can see Bee’s grave, untouched, with the now moldy tomato resting on the stones. He looks past the wire fence but sees nothing but the infinite sea of trees. He jumps down the stairs and waves his gun around, looking for something to shoot. He turns the corner.
Lying beneath the window, and resting next to his tomato garden, is the body of a mutilated deer. It is decapitated, only the base of the exposed neck left. From the fence to the window, the deer’s intestines are spilled all over the grass. Its legs are broken, some twisted off completely. Barbed wire has been sewn into the deer’s body, like a snake strangling its prey. The Man turns to the fence to see some chunks of fur that got caught on the barbed wire. The fence warps towards the cabin, as if the deer was launched like a cannon.
The Man stumbles around the cabin’s fence, looking for what threw the deer’s carcass. His molars grind against each other while he searches, but finds nothing. It was absolutely QUIET. Back at the mutilated deer, he sees yellow specks littered through the fur. He leans in. Parasitic eggs. Inside the open neck, sleeping in its open guts, and hanging in its fur, are dozens of eggs.
The Man screams, as if he is looking at his own mangled body on the floor. He quickly puts gloves on, grabs a shovel, and begins digging outside of the fence in the clearing. With every huff of his breath he spins around the hole, trying his best to stay aware of whatever is out there.
As the Man pounds the ground to death, he questions what could be out in the woods with him. It was well known that the deadliest aspect of the outbreak wasn’t people getting infected; rather, the parasite could live inside almost every mammal, bird, and reptile. Before humanity even noticed, the parasite had already migrated across multiple ecosystems throughout the world.
Sure, there was medication and countless procedures that would kill the parasites that lived in our bodies, but the animals? It would be impossible to quarantine billions, no, trillions of animals. How do we cure a whole population of birds? Or rodents that live in our cities, where we couldn’t even completely exterminate them ourselves, even if we wanted to. Humanity was destined to have a strained, slow death. It probably wouldn’t be another CENTURY until all of humanity dies out.
This might be it. This will be where the Man finally dies. It must be watching him now. It has the strength to throw a fucking deer carcass at the window, nearly destroying his fence in the process. It has more than enough strength to mutilate the Man like it did the deer. He imagines his own body, his legs twisted, stomach open, a BREEDING ground for those fucking worms. Perhaps whatever it is wouldn’t tear his head off his body. Maybe it preferred the parasites to burrow into his skull. He could feel them in his head now, tiny tentacles trying to hot wire his brain. Maybe The Man should be digging his own grave, next to Bee. He bludgeons the dirt, his palms aching red. No, The Man REFUSES to die.
“This is NOT Hell!”
Now finished, he grabs the mutilated flesh by the hind legs and begins dragging the carcass to the hole. While tugging he realizes the legs are loose on the animal’s hips, and the joints tear off right as he is passing the gate’s entrance and falls over. He gets up and tosses the legs in the hole. He pushes the carcass towards the hole, his hands burrowing into the open flesh, blood seeping through his gloves, the tiny holes by the fingertips letting in waves of flesh, filling his exposed fingernails with the animal’s waste.
While he is tugging, one of the eggs getst caught on his arm hairs. It is uncomfortably wet, the mucous membrane easily able to grab onto anything with enough texture. With his fingers, he squashes the murky, milk-yellow egg like a pimple. He cleans the stain on his once white shirt. He throws the body in the hole. Looking in, the Man notices how there aren’t any flies. He rushes back to collect the spilled organs and independent clumps of hair from the fence.
But in the exposed digestive track, thin, milky, and featureless worms sway side to side like a King Cobra. Their “heads” have small hairs and tendrils, likely smelling their new environment. They were maybe a few days old, not resilient enough to survive outside of its host for longer than a day. Holding his breath, he transports the organs. He douses the hole with lighter fluid and burns the body. He throws his shirt in the fire pit. The burning fur sears his nose. He watches the parasites shrivel up in the heat and burn away.
He locks the gate–in vain. The smell of burning flesh is overwhelming his sensitive nose, and he pukes. He is already exhausted, but he can’t stop yet. The sun is approaching the horizon.He has to finish the cleansing before night falls. He goes inside to grab a lantern, ignites it, and returns to look for any parasitic eggs that might have remained in the wood and glass. There were two eggs glued to the blood of the window, four more in the crevasse of the wood logs, seven in the grass where the body was, and four more in the garden. He crushes every egg with his fingers. One of the eggs in the garden begins hatching. A long, barely visible parasitic worm slithers towards the tomatoes. The Man EXECUTES it with his boot. He wipes as much of the blood as he can off the window.
Now that he is certain he has crushed all of the parasites, he returns to the fire pit, now smoldering, and starts shoveling the piles of dirt back. As the last whispers of light fade behind the wall of trees, The Man washes the blood off of him outside of his door. He strips himself of his clothes and tosses them towards the fence. Before he enters the cabin, he checks his boots. They are clean. He hesitantly rubs his hands through his beard to feel for any parasites but he finds none. He inspects his rifle too and finds nothing. He grabs his knife and begins severing the hair off of his head. He cuts as close to his scalp as he can, then sweeps through his hair and sees a parasitic egg. He shudders.
He walks inside the cabin, locks the door, and blocks it with an old drying machine. He looks at the window. He can still see the blood smears on the glass. There is no way he can barricade the window with furniture. He spends the next thirty minutes hammering planks into the window seal with brittle iron nails. They nearly shatter as he hammers them into the wall. He knows it won’t be enough. He barricades the laundry room entrance to the kitchen with the washing machine.
He collapses into himself, like a knot, around his stomach. He still feels the rot in his fingernails, even after washing them ten times with his last bar of orange-scented soap. His imagination tricks him into believing there are worms crawling in his beard. He has to constantly physically check himself for worms. The Man feels swelling under his ribs, and he can’t stop the pressure from rising. His back contracts with fear. He wants to shriek. To scream and cry and flail around on the floor until he loses his voice forever. He wants to hold himself back, to keep it all in. If he had hair on his head to pull out, he would have been able to contain himself.
His wails were of a man wrongly sentenced to Hell.
The hardwood floor makes him realize he never moped before. Laying sprawled out now feels worse than death. Out of breath, he grabs a flask of water, checks it before drinking all of it. The flask feels heavy in his hand, his arms now weak from the hateful digging, and his back aching
from the pulling. More than anything he feels guilty. He should have shot the deer. It would’ve been merciful. If only he knew its fate. Her prophecy will be his fate. Was she right?
The Man wobbles over to the kitchen. His stomach whines. He doesn’t have much food, but he has been saving something for a special occasion. Oatmeal. He loves oatmeal. He has his last bowl inside the food pantry. After everything, he deserves to eat the last bowl of oatmeal he’ll ever have.
The Man opens the cabinet, his guilt fading. As he reaches out to the bowl of oats, he sees the oats shift. There is something…peach… pasty, wiggling. Like a lion perched on a rock roaring for the world to hear, a more developed parasitic worm rises from the oats. It is three fingers thick, its mouth surrounded by pink hairs, and red tendrils smell the air. Its tendrils shiver, smelling its prey. Its mouth widens, revealing crumbs of oats in its suction like teeth. A terrible low screech fills the cabin.
It lunges at The Man’s face, but he is able to grab the nearly foot long worm by its tail. Its tendrils force itself inside the Man’s nostrils, carving inside of his nose. He pulls it out, drawing blood from his sinus, throwing the worm onto the ground. It slams with a thunk. The Man raises his leg to crush the worm, but the parasite slithers between a crack, right where the wall and floor intersect.
Hate. Pure hatred fills The Man’s soul.
The Man grabs his knife, prying the crack open more. He sees a glimpse of the worm slithering across the drywall. He starts stabbing the wall where he last saw the worms. He can hear it push through the installation, heading towards the living room. He turns and jumps over the washing machine to grab a hammer in the laundry room. He slams the head into the kitchen walls, ripping the wood out. Whispers of a scream cry out from his broken voice box as he pounds the walls, tearing open crevasses across the kitchen. He thinks he sees a glimpse of the worm, slithering in the living room walls.
He tears the baseboard from the wall. He shatters the floorboards apart. He opens up all of the walls in the house. He murders his sofa, ripping through its frizzled fluff. He throws everything out of the cupboard, looking for the parasite or eggs it could have laid. Drywall is scattered across the floor;wood chips are in his foot; his nose is gushing with blood. He stands, quiet for a moment, trying to listen for the worms’ pulsating movement. He hears a groan in the walls and throws his hammer right where the noise came from, caving into the wall. Nothing is there. It’s gone. It’s going to kill him in his sleep.
Fatigue and fear overwhelm him. He hasn’t eaten all day. He curses in his mind and goes to his bedroom. How am I going to stay up all night? He throws everything out of his closet, including his wife’s clothes. He can still smell her BO as he throws her shirts into the living room. He grabs one of her shirts, red with ladybugs on it, and puts it in his back pocket. He throws his bed frame out of the room. As he is removing it, he notices for the first time the floorboards are weak under his bed. He places the mattress against the door and kneels down.
He slides his knife between the floorboard and lifts. He looks in and sees a black void. He grabs his lantern and shines it through the cracks, revealing an empty basement beneath his room. He peels the floorboards off, jumps down with his rifle and lantern, and inspects this uncharted room. The floor is dirt, and the walls are jagged, cut stone. It seems like it was an abandoned renovation project. It is a very small area, and The Short Man is unable to stand up straight. The basement seems to go under only his bedroom and bathroom. He weakly hoists himself back up and brings the mattress down to cover the hole. He sits at the opposite end of the hole, holding his gun and Bee’s shirt.
He lays out his knife, water, two cans of food, and his lantern beside him. He tries to stay awake for as long as he can, staring at the hole. How could it get in the house? It is obviously much more developed and must have been a different worm than the ones that were hatched. He touches his nose, remembering how the tentacles felt trying to claw into his face. He shudders, still smelling the oats at the end of the tentacles. He feels sick.
The Man mourns his oatmeal. The thought of eating oats makes him nauseous. What a horrible fucking day. I am going to stomp that fucking worm to death for fucking with my oatmeal. The basement is so dark that the dim lantern only illuminates the hole just enough to see if anything crawls in. The Man reflects, there is something in the woods trying to kill him. No, it would have killed him already. Is it, trying to torture me? Is this some cruel punishment from God? The Man checks his chamber in his bolt action rifle. Three rounds. Is three rounds enough to put down something that can launch a deer?
I think I am going to die here. The Man begins opening canned pineapple with his knife. It’s going to kill me if I don’t get out of here in time. It might be too late. The Man opens the can, an artificial sweetener cleansing his nose. It’s funny. I used to hate canned food. If I would catch Bee cooking up some canned vegetables back at home, I would refuse to eat it. I would tell her, ‘It’s not even real! It’s fake food! It’s not even good for you.‘ The Man picks up a slice and slowly chews the fruit. It was so sweet, the sweetest thing he has eaten in a very long time. The tangy sweetness calms him down. She would just scoff at me and eat it by herself, and I would just watch her. Giving her a disapproving look. Look at me now, enjoying this pineapple as if it’s my last meal. He slurps the canned juice, he can feel the juice flow throughout his whole body, refreshing his soul. He places the empty can down. This won’t be the last thing I eat.
