The Conqueror Worms Read online

  Death. At my age, I was used to the idea. It was imminent. Some mornings, I’d wake up and be surprised I was still here. But when I thought back on my life, I wondered what it was all about. Was it worth it, all the joys and heartaches? What was the point of it all, if it only led to this—an old man drowning alone in a flooded world?

  Standing there in the downpour, I heard a flock of geese passing somewhere overhead. I craned my neck skyward, but I couldn’t see them. They were lost behind the permanent white haze that covered the earth. The fog bank started just above the treetops and continued into the heavens, blocking out the moon and stars. The disembodied honking sounded eerie and made me feel lonelier than ever. I wondered where they were going, and wished them luck on their journey.

  Satisfied that the truck was still operational, I surveyed my surroundings. A few scraggly trees were still standing here and there on the slope, and I looked down on Renick through a break in the tops of them. Or maybe I should say I looked down at where Renick used to be, because the town was gone.

  The Greenbrier River had swallowed up the entire valley. There was an ocean in the place where Renick had once been.

  Renick had stood at the base of the mountain, nestled in the valley. Beyond it was the state road to Lewisburg (that was a real road, with two lanes and a yellow dividing line down the middle). If you traveled from Renick and back the way I’d come, you would have headed up the mountain, passing a few shacks and houses, each one complete with the regulation, rusted-out car propped up on cinder blocks, and a brand new satellite dish on the roof. West Virginia had one of the highest welfare populations in the nation, but everybody had a satellite dish.

  You would have then entered Punkin’ Center, which consisted of nothing more than seven houses, the combination post office and feed store (run by my good friend Carl Seaton), and then several farms. Keep on going and you’d pass a few hunting cabins, Dave and Nancy Simmons’ place, crazy Earl Harper’s shanty, the lane that went back to my place, and then miles of West Virginia state forestland. At that point, the road narrowed to a dirt track leading up to Bald Knob. It ended at the lookout tower the rangers used to watch for forest fires in the summer, and their station underneath it.

  All of this was deserted and washed out when I made my trek down the mountain. The National Guard had cleared everybody out of Punkin’ Center a few weeks before. I stayed behind, though, even when they insisted that I leave. Oh, I guess they could have made me leave if they’d tried hard enough. It isn’t too hard to force an old man out of his home. But they didn’t. Maybe it was something in my eyes or the tone of my voice, but those young troops backed down quick. This is where I’ve lived for the last thirty years and I wasn’t leaving on account of the weather.

  I looked back down on Renick. The town was attainable from our side of the mountain only by means of a steel and concrete bridge that spanned the Greenbrier. On one side of the bridge was the road on which I was stranded. The town lay on the other side. That morning, on Day Thirty, the bridge was gone.

  It wasn’t just destroyed, mind you. The bridge was gone. It had vanished along with the rest of the world, leaving our mountain standing in the midst of a new ocean. That’s what it looked like. Either the Greenbrier had gotten very big, or the Atlantic Ocean had gotten very lost and decided to come inland for a spell. Everything was submerged—all the homes and businesses and the school. Everything except for the Presbyterian Church steeple and old Fred Laudermilk’s grain silo, jutting up from the water like lone mountaintops.

  That was when the full impact of what had happened hit me. There’d be no State Fair down in Lewisburg this year and no cornbread and bean suppers at the American Legion. The rickety yellow school bus wouldn’t be making its trip up the mountain to pick up the few kids in Punkin’ Center and old Fred Laudermilk wouldn’t be bringing in the hay this fall. Ditto for Daniel Ortel’s wacky weed crop (we all knew he grew it, but nobody said anything) and Clive Clendenon’s corn. My crazy neighbor, Earl Harper, wouldn’t have to concern himself anymore about the government conspiracy of the week, and I wouldn’t have to worry about poachers on my land this coming deer season.

  They always said this would happen because of a hole in the ozone layer. They said that greenhouse gases would melt the polar ice caps, flooding the world. But that’s not what happened at all.

  One day, a day like any other day, it just started raining and didn’t stop. It’s as simple as that. We certainly didn’t expect it. It was a rainy day, but tomorrow would bring sunshine again. But tomorrow never came. The next day, it was still raining. And the day after that. Every day brought the same forecast; rain, no matter where you lived. Except that there aren’t really days anymore—just differing shades of gray and black. I haven’t seen the sun or the moon for a long time. They’ve been reduced to silhouettes, hiding behind the clouds like muted silver dollars.

  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.”

  Keep that in mind while you read this. Because you’ll probably think I’m stretching the truth just a bit.

  But I’m not. This is what happened, and I swear it’s as true as I remember it to be.

  You see, the rain was just the beginning.

  Day Forty-one. I woke up that morning with a Roy Acuff song stuck in my head, and suffering again from nicotine withdrawal. It wasn’t as bad as on Day Thirty, when I tried to make it down to Renick, but I still felt horrible. I opened my eyes, wincing at the pain in the back of my head, right where my spine joined my skull. My jaw ached, and my mouth was dry and tasted like a baby bear cub had used it for a potty. As always, the first thing I heard was the rain drumming against the roof. It was also the last sound I’d heard before falling asleep.

  My bedroom was part of that blue world that exists between night and dawn, eerie and quiet—except for the rain. I fumbled for my watch on the nightstand, knocking over a glass of water in the process. I grunted, put on my glasses, found the watch, and focused on the tiny numbers.

  Five o’clock, as I’d known it would be.

  I’d woken up at five in the morning every day since my retirement. A life spent in the Air Force will do that to you. You get used to a routine, and nothing, not even the end of the world, can vary it. Rose used to complain about it, but there was no curing me.

  I reached for the can of tobacco out of habit, and cursed, grinding my gums when I realized it wasn’t there. I sat on the edge of the mattress, my feet on the cold floor, breath hitching in my sunken chest. I felt so helpless and alone. I looked back over my shoulder to the spot Rose had occupied next to me and I began to cry.

  After a while, I stopped and blew my nose. Then I listened for my buddy outside the window. My special friend stopped by every morning. He would cheer me up, and even though the sun couldn’t be seen through the gray skies, it was near dawn, which meant he’d soon start singing.

  I pulled back the shades and looked out upon the dreary world. My yard was nothing but muck. White mist obscured my clothesline and tool shed, and hid the trees marking where my yard ended and the miles of sprawling forest began. The only thing not concealed by the fog and drizzle was the big blue spruce outside my window and the robin’s nest cradled safe and dry within its broad needles. The robin was the only other living creature I’d seen in the last three weeks, except for a herd of deer I’d spied grazing down near the spring (and by that time, the spring was a small pond). They’d been wet and skinny and halfstarved, and I hadn’t seen them since. The same went for the horses, cows, sheep, and other livestock some of my neighbors kept. They’d been left behind when the National Guard evacuated Punkin’ Center, but I hadn’t seen any during my trip down the mountain and I hadn’t heard the cows mooing at night. Usually, their sound would have carried over the hills to me. Now there was nothing.

  I know now what probably happened to them, but I didn’t know then.

  The bird was a welcome sight. Each morning, he got me out of bed with his insistent—and very pissed off—song, crying the blues about the weather. The robin hated the rain as much as I did. He left the tree only to catch worms, and then just for a few minutes each morning. It probably sounds funny, but that bird was my only friend an
d contact since the power went out. Each morning, I looked forward to his visit. Silly, maybe, but then again, I was a silly old man. Rose would have no doubt had something to say about it, but Rose wasn’t there.

  The bird didn’t disappoint me that morning. Like clockwork, I heard the familiar titter as he woke up. His song was hesitant at first, but then it got louder and stronger and angrier. I spied a flurry of wings within the branches of the tree and then he darted out, zipping to the ground as quick as he could, hoping to nab a worm or two and then buzz back to his nest, soaked and miserable.

  “Howdy,” I croaked, my throat still dry from sleep. “Good to see you this morning. Want some coffee to go with your worms?”

  He landed on the wet, spongy ground and began to peck through the mud. He glanced over at the window, and I swear he could hear me. Maybe he looked forward to seeing me as much as I did him. With a final tilt of his head, he got back to business. I smiled, watching in simple contentment as he hopped around, looking for breakfast. Furious chirps punctuated each tiny jump. I laughed out loud. He didn’t know how good he had it. At least he didn’t have to worry about nicotine withdrawal.

  I stared closer at the bird. Something seemed wrong with his feathers. There were splotches of what looked like white fungus growing on his back and wings. I wondered what it was.

  The pickings must have been slim that morning, because he strayed farther from the tree, almost halfway to the tool shed, looking for worms. The remaining grass in the yard and the thick, rolling mist almost obscured the robin. I pushed my glasses up on my nose and squinted, trying to track him. Suddenly, he gave a triumphant whistle and leaped at something I couldn’t see.