Mygento sold their agrochemical seed steroid under the trade name “Sorocom,” but after a year on the market, a period in which it turned most farmers who used it and most people who ate the food they produced into shambling lepers, the FDA pulled it and declared a National Health Emergency.
It was too late for twenty thousand
or so families and the counties they lived in throughout the midwest, 55,000
square miles of which––roughly the size of Iowa––was quarantined by the Army
and the National Guard. Second Amendment supporting militias who had guns to
spare and recruits eager for action helped patrol the borders of the
containment zone.
In the common vernacular of middle America, Sorocom came
to be known as “The Flayer,” and victims of its horrific side effects came to
be known as “The Flayed.”
This brief history of Sorocom is running through my head
as Rex is driving us down some unnamed access road in a wheat field, away from
a pack of the Flayed that found us hiding in Ted Johnston’s hayloft with a
dozen others.
Advertisement
Rex puts the old diesel truck into third gear. It belches
out black smoke, obscuring the rearview. Looking through the oily cloud, I see
the Flayed disappear.
But they’re still coming. They’ll never stop coming.
Rex did what he always did when he got into the truck. No
matter how many unhealthy life choices he made––junk food, whiskey, chewing
tobacco––Rex always buckled his
seatbelt.
“Where do we go?” I ask. “What do we do?”
Rex holds his side. Maybe a stitch from sprinting to the
truck. We barely made it. Rex was pulled out of the truck by one of the Flayed,
but managed to unholster his revolver and blow its head off before the others
got to him.
Advertisement
“We buy our time, Cherry,” he says. “We survive.”
I love that Rex still calls me by my pet name despite the
chaos. He started calling me Cherry shortly after we started dating, a year
before we got married. It’s a reminder that things were normal once.
Rex downshifts to pull around a hairpin turn. The wheels
of the truck skid before finding traction and the rear end fishtails in a plume
of dust.
I still wonder how we escaped the fate of so many
thousands of other families. We speculated that the chemical properties of
Sorocom that caused some peoples’ flesh to shed from their bodies were
unstable. It was as if the drug had discretion. It picked and chose its
victims, but without any logic that I could make sense of.
Staring at the ceiling at night, I often wondered if it
would have been better to be among the first wave of people who’d become
flayed. The transformation looked agonizingly painful. But I always imagined it
would have been better to get it over with, better to be spared from witnessing
the horrors of this new world.
Advertisement
Three farmhouses ago, I saw Eustice Jones’ husband Bill
became flayed before my eyes.
I mark time by “farmhouses” now. The days and weeks
started blending together not long after cellular service ceased, and I lost
track of time.
On the run, we’d occupy a farmhouse, be discovered, and
leave. Occupy a new one, get overwhelmed by the Flayed, and relocate. Each
cycle constituted one “farmhouse.” In truth, “days” and “weeks” didn’t matter
anyway, because it felt like we’d been on the run for years. I’d counted
eighteen farmhouses so far, so many that I forgot who they all belonged to.
When Bill Jones became flayed, it started with his face.
We were eating dinner, laughing and smiling and remembering the world as it
used to be. Then Bill’s face turned into a frown. Working as a part-time nurse
before the world fell, I’d seen my fair share of stroke victims. That’s what it
looked like––that Bill lost control of the muscles in his face.
Eustice, his wife, asked what was wrong. And as Bill tried
to answer, looking just as stunned as the rest of us, the skin from his face
slipped off of the muscle that gave it shape, leaving a blood-red mask. Within
seconds, the same thing had happened to the rest of his body. Within a minute,
he’d killed three of us.
Advertisement
My attention comes back to the cab of the truck, to Rex,
my last beacon of happiness and hope. He’s holding his side. His eyes are
watering––no, he’s crying.
“I love you, Cherry.”
He upshifts, fourth gear, speeding faster down the road.
The speedometer hits forty miles per hour. The truck rumbles across the
hard-packed earth.
Rex’s face changes into a frown. The same frown I saw come
across Bill Jones’ face.
“Rex, you’re scaring me.”
Advertisement
His face sags. The
stroke. His skin becomes slippery, elastic. Then it starts to fall off onto
his lap.
“Jump out of the truck Cherry,” he says, his jaw a
sickening crimson. “I’m not going to slow down, I’m going to crash it. I won’t
let it happen to me.”
He pulls up his shirt, showing me a deep gash in his side.
One of the Flayed bit him before he managed to get into
the truck.
Suddenly, everything that made Rex the man I fell in love
with, over beers in a smoky pool hall, slips away. The flesh sheds completely
from his face. Now, Rex is reduced to a grinning skull covered in shiny red
sinew. And he becomes terrifyingly aggressive like they all do. Like I’ve seen
a hundred times before.
Advertisement
Rex releases the steering wheel. He lunges for me. I close
my eyes before it happens, but hear a sharp click as Rex’s seatbelt locks him
in place. His jaws snap. He’s like a rabid dog. He pulls against the seatbelt,
but the stringent automobile safety standards keep him locked in place.
The tears come, pouring from my eyes. I remember
everything that made Rex and I happy. Even though we’d never been able to have
children––even though three pregnancies had ended in miscarriage – we’d
started a family, just the two of us. And we’d been happy.
Rex’s foot is locked against the gas pedal. The
speedometer reaches sixty. I think of trying to stall the truck, to stop it
somehow. If I jumped out at this speed, no matter how soft the field, I’d be
injured or killed. And if I happened to live, the Flayed would catch up to me,
like they always do.
Rex is still restrained by his seatbelt, struggling
ferociously against it. My hand closes around the gear shift. In his calloused,
farmer’s palm, Rex––this monster that used to be my husband––grabs my wrist and
brings my arm to his mouth. I pull away before he manages to bite it. I reach
and try to downshift again, but Rex grabs my arm, pulls it to his mouth with
extraordinary strength, and snaps just as I manage to slip out of his grasp.
In this final, vicious struggle for life, I’m reminded
that it won’t end well. None of this was ever meant to end well. There will be
no federal relief. Waiting for the government and the army is not an option,
because they are not here to help us––only to keep us contained. Only to let
all of us become flayed. We die after twenty-four hours. Once everyone’s dead
and gone, then they’ll come in to clean up the mess.
Advertisement
I wonder if God has a plan for me, or if my Christian
religiosity has been a lie I’ve told myself for thirty-three years to believe
that there is a plan, that there is meaning. That there is something, rather
than nothing.
If I live in a Godless world, one without Rex––is that
world worth living in? How many more farmhouses, now, by myself? How long until
I’m flayed? What will the change feel like as the skin falls from my face? Will
I remember who I was? Does our sanity depart as we become flayed? Are we
trapped inside a body that is not ours? Do our souls live on, or do they, too,
depart?
As these questions cross my mind, I make my decision.
Death has the final word in any scenario. Dictating how I meet it is my last
act of free will.
Rex’s foot has continued depressing the accelerator. We’re
humming along at eighty-five miles per hour.
The wheat shines in the moonlight––a translucent amber
blur.
Advertisement
I look into Rex’s eyes. I see a flicker of blue color
that made me fall in love with him. It aids my decision.
“Goodbye Rex,” I say.
I unbuckle my seatbelt. I grab the steering wheel. I close
my eyes and pull it towards me as hard as I can.
Before everything goes black, I feel the truck lift from
the ground. I open my eyes. We’re flying over the moonlit wheat field,
which––if there were still people to harvest it––would be nearly ready.
The moon fills the cab of the truck.
Advertisement
I close my eyes again. Gravity pulls the truck down to earth.
Ben Spencer lives with his wife and two beloved Boxer dogs in Washington state, where he works as a writer and content strategist for a tech company. Ben is currently at work on his second novel, a young adult horror story and homage to H.P. Lovecraft’s “The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath.”
Continuing our AI journey from last time exploring Little Red Riding Hood herself as the Big Bad Wolf… All of these are based upon the AI generated art and prompts using NightCafe and then created as posters in Canva.
How very… Phantom of the Opera predatory… this is definitely not what I had in mind. Maybe something more cutesy?
Ugh. Maybe not.
Wow, that seems like such a cop out, cropping off the head so you don’t have to depict it. And I don’t want to lose the Little Red Riding Hood reference completely.
So no surprise there, I knew that was too many references to work.
And as promised in Big Bad Poetry, we shall embark on our next AI journey, this time looking at Little Red Riding Hood. I had wanted to depict her as the Big Bad Wolf one and the same, although maybe not so big nor bad. But it just wasn’t happening quite as planned. All of these are based upon the AI generated art and prompts using NightCafe and then created as posters in Canva.
So I actually like this even better than my original vision, it is playful and even a bit serene (especially given the Sinister style). The wolf is just being a wolf. It’s quite lovely, really. But it wasn’t what I had in mind, so I revisited the idea later to see if I could get that result…
Over the river and through the wood flashed the fleet-footed Red Riding Hood on her way to her “grandmother’s” house.
When running past, who should she see but just one of the little pigs three cowering like but a tiny mouse.
“But my dear piggy, what do you fear?” Red Riding Hood asked as she slunk near, teeth hidden under a sheepish smile.
Advertisement
The nervous small pig looked up in fright and decided that Red was alright, missing the subtle clues by a mile.
“The Big Bad Wolf, that horrible beast upon the other wee pigs did feast!” the last little pig said with a squeal.
Red Riding Hood laughed with a great growl and threw back her heavy long-robed cowl, in a vast terrifying reveal.
For she was really the wolf Big Bad hidden beneath the cape that he had stolen from Red Riding Hood at point.
“And now I’ve caught you too my pretty and surely t’wouldn’t be a pity if I gobbled you up in this joint.”
Advertisement
T’was then the wee pig leapt to his feet And cried, “Big Bad Wolf, I shall defeat, for I am no ordinary swine!”
The little pig also wore sheep’s clothes spun in spells every woodland witch knows; Old Granny herself was quite divine.
“Now give me back my granddaughter’s cape, before I grab you by your ruffed nape and send you pig-squealing down the road…”
The wolf dropped the cape and ran, that cur, but Granny was swifter and hexed his fur and the wolf she turned into a toad.
Thus the moral of this story goes, when in the woods, no one really knows what sheepish sheep’s clothing is a ruse that big bad wolves and old witches use.
Advertisement
So this is actually an intro to my next AI art journey with NightCafe which developed from me not getting the results I wanted (Little Red Riding Hood herself as a wolf). Here’s a preview with Eric’s versions as he is much more literal in his prompting than I am, but where’s the fun in that? 😉
Prompts (from left to right) in Dark Fantasy style, executed Aug. 1, 2023:
Bipedal wolf in Red Riding Hood’s cloak
Bipedal wolf in Red Riding Hood’s cloak close up portrait
Bipedal wolf in red cloak close up portrait
Portrait of myself with dark makeup and crow skull headdress, backlit by the sun.