The Conqueror Worms

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 and 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.