RUNNING MAN

How often do you stretch? Don’t lie to me; I know you don’t stretch every day. Most people walk around or sit at a desk with the same tight muscles day in and out. Maybe they stretch at the gym or before they play pickleball, but they’re not that active.

I wish I could be high and mighty and say I stretched before I went to work every day, but I was like all of you.

In fact, right now, as I prepped for maybe the dumbest plan I had in my entire life, the only thing I was remembering to do right or smartly, it seemed like, was fucking stretching.

Touching my toes, limbering up the hammies, side twists, the old over-the-head back crack, you name it, I was doing it in the middle of a big at like four in the morning.

All in the hopes that a killer monster would chase me and me, a loser, would outrun it.   I knew the second I had any downtime, I was going to turn into a ball of anxiety, so I tried to keep myself busy. First, we built a fire that was way bigger than just two people would need to stay warm. I specifically erected it on top of a boulder field at the center of the bog, so I could see the monster coming from any direction.

After that, I set up the guns on my run. I put them in a row, propped them up, and loaded them. There were four long guns, all of them semi-automatic sport rifles. Smith and Wesson’s best.

Sophia watched me fire a few test rounds at a grove of trees and covered her ears at the loud noises. Then, I let her squeeze off some.

“It’s so easy to aim…”

Her eyes lit up in a way that would have been pornographic for the NRA.

I thought about explaining the nuance around these weapons and the great debates and ongoing argument from my time, but I didn’t want to ruin the moment.

When she handed the rifle back to me, I just said, “Fun, right?”

And I accepted her gleeful nod.

Unfortunately, now all we could do was wait. I walked back to the fire, and she followed me. I had no idea what time it was, but it had to be nearing morning. My body ached, and for the first time, I could feel my energy dwindling to next to nothing.

“I’ll take first watch,” she offered.

“You sure you don’t want to head back and be surprised at what happens?”

Sophia laughed, and then I laughed too.

“My Dad used to say you always needed someone by your side, if for no other reason to corroborate your story.”

I took this advice in.

“My Dad let me be the weird kid out in the woods on my own. I’m not sure if he ever asked what I did during the day; he used to just say, ‘I trust you had fun.”

“Did you?”

“Yeah. My mom died when I was four. Hit by a car. Out there, among the trees, I didn’t feel alone. Did you and your old man do a lot together?”

“Until he got eaten.” She wouldn’t look at me when she said those words. And I didn’t look back at her either.

Somehow, I knew that was going to be the end of her story, but it still made me sad.

“I don’t know what happened to mine. But I know by now, he’s dead, too.”

We sat in silence for a few seconds, and let both our realities wash over us. My father had given my life in more ways than one.

Was I being stupid risking it now? No. I knew he’d approve of this, even if it wasn’t logical.

But I wished he was here to talk more. To tell me how he knew this was all about to happen and if it had anything to do with the work he did for the government.

For now, I just looked up at the stars and hoped he was looking down on me.

Then I leaned back on the rock. I could see the outline of the sun behind the tree crest, and I closed my eyes. Of course, that’s when we felt the first tremor.

I was up quickly and looked around. Just to our south, the trees were moving, and something was coming our way.

“Head to the tree line,” I was firm in my conviction. But she didn’t budge.

“What are you going to do?”

“Try to make it there right after you.”

Sophia looked back as the monster broke the trees.

“GO!”

I didn’t have to convince her more; she ran. I could tell she was way faster than me, and I regretted not trying to get her into being the bait.

Yet this was my burden to bear.

I took a deep breath, grabbed the first rifle, and turned toward the approaching monster. I eyed its head in my scope and pressed the trigger. Bullets emptied from my gun in quick succession, most of them hitting their target.

I could tell the beast was shocked by this, if not incapacitated. Its mouth opened, and it roared, then its head turned, and I saw its eyes dilate, looking at me.

That’s when it began its charge, and I realized it was time to run for my life.

The first gun’s clip was empty, so I tossed it in the muck and swung around to the second. In any other scenario, I would tell you that it's not ideal to shoot an AR-15 over your shoulder.

But in this one, I had no other choice.

My hit rate had to be far lower, but the beast was definitely after me.

That gun was out before I knew it, and I had already run past the third I left to pick up along the way. Shit. I went to double back for it, and my boot got stuck in the mud.

Ugh — That’s what I get for stopping.

I glanced around; Sophia had already made it to safety, and I was now way further behind than I thought. I gave up on the gun quickly and untied my boot, hand-yanked my leg out.

The monster was way closer than I wanted it to be now.

So close I could smell death emanating from its jaws. Freed my other foot from my other stuck boot and ran in the slime and slop.

It splashed up on me, but at least I wasn’t the only one having a hard time.

The beast slid with every step, its footing totally uneven. It left sloppy prints in the mud that you could park a Volkswagen in. But the balance is where I gained my side of the advantage.

It was more of a stumble after me than a real chase.  

This was about as fair a fight as I could get.

I dedicated my energy to running toward the fourth firearm, which I had stashed right before the cable about fifty yards from the tree line.

My chest heaved. I wasn't in the right shape to do this on a normal day, and this was a very abnormal day, to say the least.

The finish line was in sight…well, if you knew where to look. One thing I didn’t count on was that the animals’ footsteps sent waves of still water through the swamp. These waves crashed into the ditch and scattered the claymore mines away from the fall zone. They were washed under rocks and logs; some even exploded on their own.

My plan was falling apart before my very eyes.

As it turns out, monsters were much harder to kill than mice.

Luckily, I made it to the fourth gun. I had it in my hands when the claw reached out and wrapped around my ankle as I neared what I naively believed might actually be safety.

When I landed hard, the beast flipped me over and used its prehensile tongue to knock my rifle away. And its saliva trickled around me as the tongue probed the area, too.

Its head lowered toward me. The hair around its head was greasy. Its bulbous eyes rotated in its head and squinted at me. I looked at it in the face and sighed.

Failure was something I was used to. Why did I ever think this would be different?  

“Go ahead. You earned it.”

Its head reared back to strike. “Eat me, you absolute asshole.”

That’s when a volley of gunfire erupted from behind it, and Sophia stepped into the fray. She aimed the third gun I had left behind and put all her rounds into the beast’s neck.

I saw tufts of hair fly off from the repeated abuse, and its head snapped back to stop the onslaught.

In all the chaos, I was able to slip out of its claw and grab the long electric cable.

I wove in and out of the monster’s legs while it snapped and lunged at me. Thankfully, the barrage of gunfire kept it distracted when it got close to chomping me.

The beast seemed to calibrate a new offensive, turned its head to me, and used its tail to smack Sophia right in the stomach. The direct hit sent her flying.

She was in the mud and not moving; I couldn’t tell if she was alive.

The monster had turned back to me — there was something leaking from its neck; it was neon pink and ran down its fur.

Blood? Could we be that lucky? Its jowls were clicking and clacking; its bottom row of teeth was now askew.

I tried to look closer, but the monster’s stumbling had triggered some of the loose claymores. By the time one exploded and blew debris all over, the others followed.

Soon, I was in the middle of a cacophony of violent explosions as flotsam and jetsam burst in the air around my predator and me.

I dropped the power line to duck for cover, which kind of snapped backward and caught the beast’s legs, which twisted and bent.

It fell forward, face first, and hit its head on the trunk of the very large oak tree I loved.

Snap. Its neck bent all the way backward, and its head tore completely off.

Pink liquid squirted into the sky and rained down.

It was gross, but I was elated.

Sure, the mousetrap had failed, but for the first time in a very long time, I felt like I had won.  

I had blood in my eyes. I felt my forehead to see where it was coming from and found a gash running along my hairline. My ears rang, and I rolled onto all fours. I caught and stumbled forward, away from the monster and toward where I saw Sophia fall.

“Sophia! You alive?”

I tripped over some loose innards and pushed myself back up to get to Sophia.

She was on her back, and I was afraid for the worst until I heard her groan. I knelt by her head and cradled it in my hands. I brushed the hair from her face.

“You made it.”

I nodded down at her.

“Is it time for alcohol?”

I laughed, then helped her sit up.

“You saved my life twice today. I owe you everything.”

“Looks like you did a pretty good job saving mine, too.” We looked at the beast; it was motionless. Her eyes went up to the gash on my head. I bent down so she could look at it.

“Is it bad?”

“No. You’re just a bleeder. It’ll give your head a little character.”

“Great, I could use some edge.”

We smiled at each other for a long time as we fully caught our breath, then one more unexpected thing happened.

Sophia pulled my head in but tilted my chin up and kissed me. It was soft, fast, and wet. Her eyes were closed the whole time, but mine were open in a mix of surprise and arousal.

When she pulled away, I was left in disbelief.

“….Why?”

“Felt like what you do after you survive all of…that.”

Sophia was on her feet and walking over to the monster before I could address what happened. I had gone years without a woman making out with me, and now, in just a few hours, the one I had a crush on was taken hostage, and I had tasted the tongue of another that made me her captive, too. Plus, I also had the tongue of a monster press me into the grass and almost knock me out.

What the hell kind of Tuesday was this?  

Life was not turning out the way I thought, but in the grand scheme of today, a kiss, even a great one or one from a monster, was just one of many examples of how anything could happen.  

I followed her over to the monster’s body, which lay still. The grass was covered in the neon fluid. It glowed in the morning light. I bent and touched some of it.

It was viscous and smelled sweet…

“This is…the goo? This is my pink goo?!”

My words meant nothing to Sophia, but my mind was going a million miles an hour. I caught up to her and crept toward the beast.

Its hair was thick, and I actually got on top of its side and walked toward its head. The broken-off head was doing something I had never seen an animal do… It was sparking and snapping. Like its electrical current was still going. The eyes were spinning in its head like they were going haywire. The pops of sparks and jolts zapped the morning dew.

As I got to the neck, I bent down to look inside.

THUMP!

A man popped out of the chest cavity and socked me straight in the jaw. He was in a blue uniform and took off into the woods.

My body landed backward.

Sophia peppered the trees with bullets, but her gun only had a few rounds left before it sputtered.

The man kept running, out of sight. I got up and rubbed my face; I could feel a nasty bruise forming.

“What the hell is going on?” I screamed.

I looked down the neck of the beast, and inside it was a pod. I tapped its outside, and it was made of the same polymer as the hamster ball. There was a steering wheel and a chair inside too.

Sophia was quickly by my side, looking in too.

“He was in there… he was its…pilot.”

I yanked at the hair on the outside, exposing the pod and control. They immediately started to hiss and melt. We stepped back as the beast’s hair caught fire from the sparks and its body went up in flames.

“It’s…self destructing…”

We took a step back, but not before I saw a label on the inside of the monster. There was a sticker on the bottom of the pod melting away….

…it was from Bionetic Industries.

Poof! The flames popped and fizzed.

The separated head began to hum, and we took off into the tree line as it exploded behind us. The flames shot into the air, and discarded metal and rubber rained down from the heavens in fiery wet globs. It ignited some of the trees and branches, taking part of the forest with it.

We made it deep into the sea of trees before we stopped feeling the heat on our backs.

Both of us were in disbelief. “There was a guy in there. Are there guys in all of them?” Sophia’s mind was spinning in the same way mine had been when I got here.

Sophia’s questions fell to me, and I had no answers, only one big question of my own.

“Why the hell are they eating people? Are they the fucking cannibals?”

We looked at each other in horror.

But then Sophia snapped out of it before me.

“Okay—We can’t stay here. We don’t know if they’re going to come back, and whoever is behind this will most certainly want us dead”

We both stood.

“Wine cellar?” My mouth was suddenly very dry.

Then I almost forgot what I came for initially.

“Oh shit—the head.”

At that moment I knew I had nothing to show for what we did, no evidence to make sure Leslie walked free.

Sophia had her own answer for that:

“I guess we both better stay alive so we can vouch that all this happened.”

We jogged through the forest, leaving a brave new world behind us. Our hustling was worth it, because no sooner had we entered the thicket than more roars echoed over the forest. We could feel the ground shake as we ran. And in our haste, we still found time to look back to see a gigantic monster coming our way.

It had emerged from the west, appearing over the horizon, galloping on all fours.

Its body was like a buffalo, and its head like a Komodo dragon. It was galloping toward the scene of our standoff, and it seemed very angry.

I wanted to watch more than anything, but we hit the cellar and covered its entrance with branches. We dropped into the area and reveled in the blackness.

When the roars and shaking died down, our bodies relaxed.

Sophia and I looked at each other in complete confusion and wonder.

We were now maybe the only people on the planet Earth with some knowledge of what was going on, and this was just the tip of the proverbial iceberg.

It felt like the wrong time to sleep, but what other choice did we have?

Sophia conked out lying on me, and I closed my eyes until I was sure she was down. Then I shimmed away from her and went back to the golf bags.

Maybe that’s near where you found this story?

There was a pack of pencils and scorecards. I don’t know what I was doing; I just started writing.  

I have no idea what tomorrow will be like, if we can free Leslie. I had no idea if New New Haven would be there in the daylight. Or how to deal with the truly evil people I was sure were behind these piloted kaiju, and had killed billions.

But I knew I had to take the time to tell our story in case we don’t make it.

The monsters are real, and they’re us. Maybe they have been all along.

I’m sorry my handwriting is so shitty; I’m writing by glow stick light, and the blank scorecards are so small. I numbered them before I put them in the bottle, so I hope you read them in order.

The most important thing is, my name is Gus Meyer, I’m a representative of New Haven’s animal control office from one hundred years ago, and I think my Dad helped invent these giant…robot animals.

And maybe one of my clients, too.

If you can, find me; I have some more ideas on how we can kill them…

Damn…I hope I'm alive when you find me.

Good luck.

RUNNING MAN

How often do you stretch? Don’t lie to me; I know you don’t stretch every day. Most people walk around or sit at a desk with the same tight muscles day in and out. Maybe they stretch at the gym or before they play pickleball, but they’re not that active.

I wish I could be high and mighty and say I stretched before I went to work every day, but I was like all of you.

In fact, right now, as I prepped for maybe the dumbest plan I had in my entire life, the only thing I was remembering to do right or smartly, it seemed like, was fucking stretching.

Touching my toes, limbering up the hammies, side twists, the old over-the-head back crack, you name it, I was doing it in the middle of a big at like four in the morning.

All in the hopes that a killer monster would chase me and me, a loser, would outrun it.   I knew the second I had any downtime, I was going to turn into a ball of anxiety, so I tried to keep myself busy. First, we built a fire that was way bigger than just two people would need to stay warm. I specifically erected it on top of a boulder field at the center of the bog, so I could see the monster coming from any direction.

After that, I set up the guns on my run. I put them in a row, propped them up, and loaded them. There were four long guns, all of them semi-automatic sport rifles. Smith and Wesson’s best.

Sophia watched me fire a few test rounds at a grove of trees and covered her ears at the loud noises. Then, I let her squeeze off some.

“It’s so easy to aim…”

Her eyes lit up in a way that would have been pornographic for the NRA.

I thought about explaining the nuance around these weapons and the great debates and ongoing argument from my time, but I didn’t want to ruin the moment.

When she handed the rifle back to me, I just said, “Fun, right?”

And I accepted her gleeful nod.

Unfortunately, now all we could do was wait. I walked back to the fire, and she followed me. I had no idea what time it was, but it had to be nearing morning. My body ached, and for the first time, I could feel my energy dwindling to next to nothing.

“I’ll take first watch,” she offered.

“You sure you don’t want to head back and be surprised at what happens?”

Sophia laughed, and then I laughed too.

“My Dad used to say you always needed someone by your side, if for no other reason to corroborate your story.”

I took this advice in.

“My Dad let me be the weird kid out in the woods on my own. I’m not sure if he ever asked what I did during the day; he used to just say, ‘I trust you had fun.”

“Did you?”

“Yeah. My mom died when I was four. Hit by a car. Out there, among the trees, I didn’t feel alone. Did you and your old man do a lot together?”

“Until he got eaten.” She wouldn’t look at me when she said those words. And I didn’t look back at her either.

Somehow, I knew that was going to be the end of her story, but it still made me sad.

“I don’t know what happened to mine. But I know by now, he’s dead, too.”

We sat in silence for a few seconds, and let both our realities wash over us. My father had given my life in more ways than one.

Was I being stupid risking it now? No. I knew he’d approve of this, even if it wasn’t logical.

But I wished he was here to talk more. To tell me how he knew this was all about to happen and if it had anything to do with the work he did for the government.

For now, I just looked up at the stars and hoped he was looking down on me.

Then I leaned back on the rock. I could see the outline of the sun behind the tree crest, and I closed my eyes. Of course, that’s when we felt the first tremor.

I was up quickly and looked around. Just to our south, the trees were moving, and something was coming our way.

“Head to the tree line,” I was firm in my conviction. But she didn’t budge.

“What are you going to do?”

“Try to make it there right after you.”

Sophia looked back as the monster broke the trees.

“GO!”

I didn’t have to convince her more; she ran. I could tell she was way faster than me, and I regretted not trying to get her into being the bait.

Yet this was my burden to bear.

I took a deep breath, grabbed the first rifle, and turned toward the approaching monster. I eyed its head in my scope and pressed the trigger. Bullets emptied from my gun in quick succession, most of them hitting their target.

I could tell the beast was shocked by this, if not incapacitated. Its mouth opened, and it roared, then its head turned, and I saw its eyes dilate, looking at me.

That’s when it began its charge, and I realized it was time to run for my life.

The first gun’s clip was empty, so I tossed it in the muck and swung around to the second. In any other scenario, I would tell you that it's not ideal to shoot an AR-15 over your shoulder.

But in this one, I had no other choice.

My hit rate had to be far lower, but the beast was definitely after me.

That gun was out before I knew it, and I had already run past the third I left to pick up along the way. Shit. I went to double back for it, and my boot got stuck in the mud.

Ugh — That’s what I get for stopping.

I glanced around; Sophia had already made it to safety, and I was now way further behind than I thought. I gave up on the gun quickly and untied my boot, hand-yanked my leg out.

The monster was way closer than I wanted it to be now.

So close I could smell death emanating from its jaws. Freed my other foot from my other stuck boot and ran in the slime and slop.

It splashed up on me, but at least I wasn’t the only one having a hard time.

The beast slid with every step, its footing totally uneven. It left sloppy prints in the mud that you could park a Volkswagen in. But the balance is where I gained my side of the advantage.

It was more of a stumble after me than a real chase.  

This was about as fair a fight as I could get.

I dedicated my energy to running toward the fourth firearm, which I had stashed right before the cable about fifty yards from the tree line.

My chest heaved. I wasn't in the right shape to do this on a normal day, and this was a very abnormal day, to say the least.

The finish line was in sight…well, if you knew where to look. One thing I didn’t count on was that the animals’ footsteps sent waves of still water through the swamp. These waves crashed into the ditch and scattered the claymore mines away from the fall zone. They were washed under rocks and logs; some even exploded on their own.

My plan was falling apart before my very eyes.

As it turns out, monsters were much harder to kill than mice.

Luckily, I made it to the fourth gun. I had it in my hands when the claw reached out and wrapped around my ankle as I neared what I naively believed might actually be safety.

When I landed hard, the beast flipped me over and used its prehensile tongue to knock my rifle away. And its saliva trickled around me as the tongue probed the area, too.

Its head lowered toward me. The hair around its head was greasy. Its bulbous eyes rotated in its head and squinted at me. I looked at it in the face and sighed.

Failure was something I was used to. Why did I ever think this would be different?  

“Go ahead. You earned it.”

Its head reared back to strike. “Eat me, you absolute asshole.”

That’s when a volley of gunfire erupted from behind it, and Sophia stepped into the fray. She aimed the third gun I had left behind and put all her rounds into the beast’s neck.

I saw tufts of hair fly off from the repeated abuse, and its head snapped back to stop the onslaught.

In all the chaos, I was able to slip out of its claw and grab the long electric cable.

I wove in and out of the monster’s legs while it snapped and lunged at me. Thankfully, the barrage of gunfire kept it distracted when it got close to chomping me.

The beast seemed to calibrate a new offensive, turned its head to me, and used its tail to smack Sophia right in the stomach. The direct hit sent her flying.

She was in the mud and not moving; I couldn’t tell if she was alive.

The monster had turned back to me — there was something leaking from its neck; it was neon pink and ran down its fur.

Blood? Could we be that lucky? Its jowls were clicking and clacking; its bottom row of teeth was now askew.

I tried to look closer, but the monster’s stumbling had triggered some of the loose claymores. By the time one exploded and blew debris all over, the others followed.

Soon, I was in the middle of a cacophony of violent explosions as flotsam and jetsam burst in the air around my predator and me.

I dropped the power line to duck for cover, which kind of snapped backward and caught the beast’s legs, which twisted and bent.

It fell forward, face first, and hit its head on the trunk of the very large oak tree I loved.

Snap. Its neck bent all the way backward, and its head tore completely off.

Pink liquid squirted into the sky and rained down.

It was gross, but I was elated.

Sure, the mousetrap had failed, but for the first time in a very long time, I felt like I had won.  

I had blood in my eyes. I felt my forehead to see where it was coming from and found a gash running along my hairline. My ears rang, and I rolled onto all fours. I caught and stumbled forward, away from the monster and toward where I saw Sophia fall.

“Sophia! You alive?”

I tripped over some loose innards and pushed myself back up to get to Sophia.

She was on her back, and I was afraid for the worst until I heard her groan. I knelt by her head and cradled it in my hands. I brushed the hair from her face.

“You made it.”

I nodded down at her.

“Is it time for alcohol?”

I laughed, then helped her sit up.

“You saved my life twice today. I owe you everything.”

“Looks like you did a pretty good job saving mine, too.” We looked at the beast; it was motionless. Her eyes went up to the gash on my head. I bent down so she could look at it.

“Is it bad?”

“No. You’re just a bleeder. It’ll give your head a little character.”

“Great, I could use some edge.”

We smiled at each other for a long time as we fully caught our breath, then one more unexpected thing happened.

Sophia pulled my head in but tilted my chin up and kissed me. It was soft, fast, and wet. Her eyes were closed the whole time, but mine were open in a mix of surprise and arousal.

When she pulled away, I was left in disbelief.

“….Why?”

“Felt like what you do after you survive all of…that.”

Sophia was on her feet and walking over to the monster before I could address what happened. I had gone years without a woman making out with me, and now, in just a few hours, the one I had a crush on was taken hostage, and I had tasted the tongue of another that made me her captive, too. Plus, I also had the tongue of a monster press me into the grass and almost knock me out.

What the hell kind of Tuesday was this?  

Life was not turning out the way I thought, but in the grand scheme of today, a kiss, even a great one or one from a monster, was just one of many examples of how anything could happen.  

I followed her over to the monster’s body, which lay still. The grass was covered in the neon fluid. It glowed in the morning light. I bent and touched some of it.

It was viscous and smelled sweet…

“This is…the goo? This is my pink goo?!”

My words meant nothing to Sophia, but my mind was going a million miles an hour. I caught up to her and crept toward the beast.

Its hair was thick, and I actually got on top of its side and walked toward its head. The broken-off head was doing something I had never seen an animal do… It was sparking and snapping. Like its electrical current was still going. The eyes were spinning in its head like they were going haywire. The pops of sparks and jolts zapped the morning dew.

As I got to the neck, I bent down to look inside.

THUMP!

A man popped out of the chest cavity and socked me straight in the jaw. He was in a blue uniform and took off into the woods.

My body landed backward.

Sophia peppered the trees with bullets, but her gun only had a few rounds left before it sputtered.

The man kept running, out of sight. I got up and rubbed my face; I could feel a nasty bruise forming.

“What the hell is going on?” I screamed.

I looked down the neck of the beast, and inside it was a pod. I tapped its outside, and it was made of the same polymer as the hamster ball. There was a steering wheel and a chair inside too.

Sophia was quickly by my side, looking in too.

“He was in there… he was its…pilot.”

I yanked at the hair on the outside, exposing the pod and control. They immediately started to hiss and melt. We stepped back as the beast’s hair caught fire from the sparks and its body went up in flames.

“It’s…self destructing…”

We took a step back, but not before I saw a label on the inside of the monster. There was a sticker on the bottom of the pod melting away….

…it was from Bionetic Industries.

Poof! The flames popped and fizzed.

The separated head began to hum, and we took off into the tree line as it exploded behind us. The flames shot into the air, and discarded metal and rubber rained down from the heavens in fiery wet globs. It ignited some of the trees and branches, taking part of the forest with it.

We made it deep into the sea of trees before we stopped feeling the heat on our backs.

Both of us were in disbelief. “There was a guy in there. Are there guys in all of them?” Sophia’s mind was spinning in the same way mine had been when I got here.

Sophia’s questions fell to me, and I had no answers, only one big question of my own.

“Why the hell are they eating people? Are they the fucking cannibals?”

We looked at each other in horror.

But then Sophia snapped out of it before me.

“Okay—We can’t stay here. We don’t know if they’re going to come back, and whoever is behind this will most certainly want us dead”

We both stood.

“Wine cellar?” My mouth was suddenly very dry.

Then I almost forgot what I came for initially.

“Oh shit—the head.”

At that moment I knew I had nothing to show for what we did, no evidence to make sure Leslie walked free.

Sophia had her own answer for that:

“I guess we both better stay alive so we can vouch that all this happened.”

We jogged through the forest, leaving a brave new world behind us. Our hustling was worth it, because no sooner had we entered the thicket than more roars echoed over the forest. We could feel the ground shake as we ran. And in our haste, we still found time to look back to see a gigantic monster coming our way.

It had emerged from the west, appearing over the horizon, galloping on all fours.

Its body was like a buffalo, and its head like a Komodo dragon. It was galloping toward the scene of our standoff, and it seemed very angry.

I wanted to watch more than anything, but we hit the cellar and covered its entrance with branches. We dropped into the area and reveled in the blackness.

When the roars and shaking died down, our bodies relaxed.

Sophia and I looked at each other in complete confusion and wonder.

We were now maybe the only people on the planet Earth with some knowledge of what was going on, and this was just the tip of the proverbial iceberg.

It felt like the wrong time to sleep, but what other choice did we have?

Sophia conked out lying on me, and I closed my eyes until I was sure she was down. Then I shimmed away from her and went back to the golf bags.

Maybe that’s near where you found this story?

There was a pack of pencils and scorecards. I don’t know what I was doing; I just started writing.  

I have no idea what tomorrow will be like, if we can free Leslie. I had no idea if New New Haven would be there in the daylight. Or how to deal with the truly evil people I was sure were behind these piloted kaiju, and had killed billions.

But I knew I had to take the time to tell our story in case we don’t make it.

The monsters are real, and they’re us. Maybe they have been all along.

I’m sorry my handwriting is so shitty; I’m writing by glow stick light, and the blank scorecards are so small. I numbered them before I put them in the bottle, so I hope you read them in order.

The most important thing is, my name is Gus Meyer, I’m a representative of New Haven’s animal control office from one hundred years ago, and I think my Dad helped invent these giant…robot animals.

And maybe one of my clients, too.

If you can, find me; I have some more ideas on how we can kill them…

Damn…I hope I'm alive when you find me.

Good luck.

MAP QUEST

When I moved to Connecticut, my apartment was full of mice. I didn’t know that before I moved in, but the first night, I heard the scratching and scurrying, and I knew when I saw my Cheerios box torn open in the morning that I was dealing with a pest.

Mice are kinda smart, so smart they beat all the exterminators my landlord sent out, who seemed like they were half-passing the jobs anyway.

That’s when I realized that as a professional at healing animals, I should be pretty good at killing them too. These rats had to go, so I calmed down, got over all the food they had eaten and books they had chewed, and formulated a plan.

I went with the standard empty Coke bottle covered in peanut butter. You put a spindle through that and hang it over a bucket with a ramp on each side.

Our mice crawl up the ramp to get the food, walk on the bottle, it spins, and they wind up in the bucket. Some people like to put traps in the bucket to kill them. I was more humane than that.

The next morning, I woke up to a bucket full of mice. Instead of killing them myself, I brought them into the office and gave them out to the weirdos who came in with pet snakes.

People with pet snakes were always losing them, and I was always catching them.

It was a real problem.

Anyway, I tried to convince myself this monster trap was the same. I just had to be smarter than a mouse…but this time some of the mice were a hundred feet tall and supposedly breathed fire.

I was in the future, and there was no new technology; I had to fight this fight with my knowledge of the past. So I dumped out my backpack to see what I had to help me. There were glow sticks, tent poles, and one paper map of the area where I had marked most of my clients’ houses.

This was because there was shitty cell service in rural Connecticut.

But as I looked at the map…I had the first good idea of the day. And I started running.

I’m not sure I ever properly reconciled what an easy and privileged life I led before the Hamster Balls. I mean, I would drive all over the countryside, working on animals and collecting money, all via apps on my phone.

I had maps to tell me where to go, and I was constantly cashing out Venmos from yuppies who needed me to pull porcupine quills out of their pokey puppies.

Now, I was running full speed and trying to read a paper map at the same time. And I had no idea which way to turn, because there was no AI voice yelling it out to me.  

My iPhone had been set to a lady’s voice. I guess that meant I had been single too long, because I also customized her accent.

Now, I was running not only for my life, but the life of a woman who my Dad technically kidnapped and sent through time with me.

Even if it killed me, I couldn’t let her story end like this; life was already not fair, but losing existence because you had a bad date with me was just tragic.

There was no way I could let Leslie go out like that.

I let branches hit my face and stumbled over rocks and loose leaves.

Eventually, I was so gassed I had to huddle underneath a droopy weeping willow and catch my breath. I stared at the animated map in my hands. It was one of those things you sort of always had in your pack, for areas where your cell maybe didn’t reach.

I took a second to center myself and traced my finger across the map.

“You are here…”

I had a rough estimate of where we were based on the Long Wharf Pier, so I knew how to get back to that little outpost.

That meant all those mansions and most of my clients were roughly seven miles out one way, and my apartment was a few miles from there. And Dad’s place was 12 miles to the north, where the now perfectly named Sleeping Giant State Park lay.

Was that where these things came from? Was there some old Native American legend about them? Or did I miss an alien craft crash-landing?

There were so many questions that swirled in my mind.

I wish I could get on Reddit in my apartment and do a deep dive into the thread, but that world had been lost to memory.

And maybe it would never come back again.

Goddamn, my apartment — I was bummed I’d never see it again. It was so small, but it was home. Plus, I had so many things in there that were gone.

Things I thought mattered at the time, like the replica Lord of the Rings sword I got for my 11th birthday, or the countertop ice maker that kept my Dr. Peppers cold, or the vintage National Geographic compendiums I bought on eBay as a teenager that were full of some of the best wildlife photography I had ever seen…and also… incidentally…some naked tribal women.

They were fierce and had a big impression on me.

But none of that mattered. My place, my things, they were all gone.

My journey through the forest was eye-opening. I climbed in and out of those huge footprints, leaving my own behind.

As I consulted the map, I could see just how much had changed. Still, as I looked closer, I could see elements of the old roar, like the elevated highways that now were broken and had long vines hanging off them.

Or even the occasional husk of an 18-wheeler or school bus totally overgrown or flipped over.

One thing I found was that it was easy to follow where the older roads were. Even though the asphalt had crumbled, they did provide more open spaces, where there were only occasional blockages in my general direction forward.

And even then, it was easy to go around or to stay on track.

The thing that got to me was just how there was no one else as far as I could see. This place used to house a million people.

It was crazy to think about how they were all dead now. Either eaten or taken by time.

My mind immediately went to my ex…I started thinking about how I hoped she was eaten, but quickly shook that thought.

If this level of devastation took the suburbs. I couldn’t imagine the terror of the cities.

These thoughts fueled my running as the sun set around me and I sprinted toward the goal my finger kept tapping on my map…

I had to get to the Miller residence. And I hoped their gun cellar was still intact. Because if I was going to kill one of these epic monsters, I was going to need a lot of firepower.

Yes, guns seemed like cheating, but unlike the mice, I wanted something to keep the monster down when I lured it in to eat me.

I was okay tricking them into falling to their death.

For now, I was hellbent on being the one staying alive.

The funny thing about adrenaline is that it allows your body to function in ways you never could achieve on your own. I was moving at top speed for miles; my body would be wrecked tomorrow, and yet, I kept it going.

My arms and legs were pumping; I was so singularly focused that I failed to notice something was following me.

The journey was a bit treacherous, but eventually, I got to an area that opened to a bog.

Normally, I’d avoid this kind of muck, but across its slop I could see one beacon of hope in the distance. Standing above the mist was one of those giant oaks I loved so much.

Even in the coming darkness, I could see the terrain was treacherous.

But I had to cross it no matter what.

There were even bubbling puddles of mud, vast areas of what I’d call deceptively deep swamp, and jagged boulders sticking out at all sorts of sharp angles.

I had to stop running and really pick where I let my feet fall, but that oak was my birth star, and after a few minutes of intense traversing, I made it.

The oak was so beautiful I wanted to kiss it. Instead, I puked for like a solid minute or two. It had been literally years since I had run that hard. As it turns out, there was still some pink goo inside me. I watched it splash on the first floor and hoped it was the last of it.

There was too much work to be done to be sick right now.

What I desperately needed was located somewhere on this property, and I had a really dumb idea of how to get it. I had to relive the past one dumb detail from my morning at a time. I took a deep breath and stepped forward…and because I thought nothing was watching me…I pantomimed my whole interaction with Jack Miller that day.

I started by walking up a stone walkway to the driveway and pretending to sit in a quad. I said aloud, “I’m here about the cat,” and then I wandered aimlessly where the driveway would have been. The walk was long, but I eventually got to where I thought the house lay.

Some debris and bricks were my only clues, but I pantomimed opening the front door, and my bullshit conversation with Jack as I fake-entered the home, relying totally on memory.

My hands reached out to the imaginary walls. I could do this, I knew it.

I called out things like “picture frame” and “ugly tapestry” as I stepped through the home, while avoiding rocks and bushes in my way.

I swatted real cobwebs out of my way as I journeyed deep into the memory mansion.

The sun was setting now, and the crickets were deafening. The hoot of owls and other night noises rang in my ears, but I tried to shut them out to concentrate.

After a few minutes of fumbling, I touched an imaginary door and screamed, “Cellar!”

In front of me was a mossy pile of bricks. It had height and girth, but I bent to my knees and began to toss them away one by one.

This was not easy work, but it was right, and in that moment, it was all I had to go on.

I dug for what seemed like over an hour. It was pitch black now. I wiped the sweat from my brow. I went back in for another brick, and when I pulled it out, a cavern opened up below.

Coincidentally, that’s also when the lion attacked me.

It was a large female, and her mouth was aimed for my throat. She launched herself from some bushes with a snarl and glided through the air with some majesty.

I absolutely should have died, but two lucky things happened. As I jerked back in surprise, my body fell through the hole in the bricks.

And while the lion fell on top of me, her second strike was cut short by an arrow that entered the back of her skull and exited out of her eye socket.

I shrieked as warm blood spattered on my face. But I was alive.

After a moment to clean off, I rolled the cat off me and stood in the cavernous wine cellar. Sophia dropped down beside me and looked around, bow with another arrow notched.

“How did you know this was here?” I could tell Sophia was still skeptical of me. But I had nothing to hide; I was way more interested in uncovering things.  

I wiped the blood off and grabbed my pack, which had fallen in the commotion. I reached inside, even with an arrow trained on me, and pulled out an emergency glow stick.

“When are you gonna start believing I’m from the past?”

She seemed impressed I could muster such a good comeback.

“You’re better at convincing me than your girlfriend.”

Was Sophia questioning to see if I was single?

“She’s not my girlfriend.”

I couldn’t tell how this information hit Sophia, but I also had more important things to do than flirt, though it was unexpectedly okay with me. I cracked it and blew her mind as the place illuminated in orange light.

“But even if she was, you and your people shouldn’t kill her.”

“In my experience, the killers don’t talk; they just kill.”

I was relieved to hear her opinion on the world and hoped that all the talk back in the village proved her point.

We had to knock away some more cobwebs, but the subterranean level remained mostly untouched. The bottles of wine were still there. They were dusty, but the strong cellar had kept them and everything else down here relatively safe for over 100 years.

I grabbed one of the expensive golf club bags and flipped it over, emptying it out.

It would be easier to pack what I needed in there.

I made my way through all the stacks of collectibles and rich people's obsessions. In another world, this would have been great to loot. But I was there for the literal find of the century.

Sophia followed me down the narrow corridors until we got to the dusty gun case. I opened it, and it was still full. Her eyes bulged… “Are those all….”

“Yes, they’re all guns,” I told her.  “And they’re all loaded.”

She was right to be astounded; there had to be over fifty rifles alone in these glass cases. This guy was no serious collector; he didn’t have things worth money outside of their price tags.

But he had so many things. I began carefully unpacking the cabinet and placing the long guns into the golf bag. They were an easy fit. I was taking an inventory, something I could tell Jack never did by the way this thing was packed so haphazardly.

“I should take all these back to my people.” Sophia looked at me for pushback, but I didn’t have time for that.

“Yeah. Probably. Take whatever you want.” I stared her down.

“If I die doing this, maybe you can trade them for Leslie’s life. She’d be a good teacher; she can show you how to use them.”

I could see her hesitance, so I offered her free therapy: “You don’t like her because you’re cut from the same cloth, but I bet if you sat and talked you'd be good friends.”

Sophia snorted. “I don’t have many friends there.”

“What about Hector? He seemed nice.”

“He only comes out on the hunts to help me carry the animals back.”

“He’s not here now.”

“I’m not hunting you.”

“Then what are you out here doing?”

“I know what it’s like to be alone.”

The banter was back. Why was it so much easier to talk to Sophia than my ex-wife? Was it because she had saved my life from the lion? Or because I was so stressed out my anxiety didn’t have time to let me crash out over what this woman thought of me?

Would talking to Leslie have been the same in the future?

I never really got the chance to test that theory. It was then I realized I had left Sophia’s truth lingering without an answer. She smirked at me, so I gave her all I could come up with on the spot: “Well, thanks. I hope to earn your trust.”

Sophia scoffed. “Every time you get in your head you come back with some formal answer, just relax dude. Plenty of other things to pucker your butt out here. Don’t worry about me.”

“I guess I don’t intimidate you, then?” I had to ask.

“You seem like a nice person. And I haven’t met one of those in the wild in a long time.”

“Well, given where I’m from, the feeling is mutual,” and just like that, we formed a bond.

It took me a minute, but I finally found what I was looking for in the cabinet. I lifted up the claymore mines that I had seen yesterday, well, yesterday for me.

“What do those do?” Sophia was curious and not afraid to go through my stuff.

“Easy — personal space. These things are sensitive. ”

I stood up, ready to go. “That’s all you’re gonna take? Those things are huge?!”

I smirked, knowing I had finally cracked the exterior of one of these future people.

“If I survive, I’ll come back for the rest later.” She was shocked I was on the move.

“It's nighttime; we should probably make camp here.”

“No time. If I’m going to set a trap, I need to find some rope before dawn.”

I brushed Sophia’s shoulder as I headed for the exit, then I paused and came back. I went to the far wall and grabbed the first bottle of wine that ticked my fancy. And then a few more.

Sophia watched as I jammed them into the golf bag. “What are they?”

“This stuff? It's alcohol. I’ll let you try some if we make it. You're gonna love it.”

“We have alcohol, you asshole. We just make ours in… buckets.”

“This is better than that, I guarantee it.”

Sophia grunted skepticism and followed me to my impending doom.

The thought of dying felt a lot better knowing I wouldn’t be alone.

HUNTING PARTY

For the first time in a long time, I was leading, and someone else was following. It would have felt better if Leslie’s life didn’t hang in the balance.

But I was gonna take what I could get.

Aside from the lion incident, the forest was quiet at night.

The glow stick guided us through the trees. Sophia stuck close, studying my every move. I think I had appealed to her better angels. And also there had to be some sort of morbid curiosity about what kind of crazy person would think they could kill one of these huge monsters.

“Did you have a job in your time?”

I thought about how to make myself sound a lot cooler than I was, and went with “People would call me when their animals got loose.”

“I’ve read about veterinarians, ya know. We have all the James Herriot books.”

She was trying to make nice, and I was ready to accept it. But I told her the truth.

“Oh…I’m not a vet. I worked in animal control. It’s much less…classy.”

“Lucky for you, nothing seems classy anymore.”

That was actually lucky for me.

“You read a lot?”

“Jack shit else to do when you’re on lookout or listening for the beach monsters. There’s a big library in New New Haven. The books all came from a college.”

“Yale?” I wondered.

“Yeah. That’s what they called it. I guess when it all happened, the world was a shitshow for a few years. Eventually, Cara’s parents helped rebuild. They were professors; we had a lot of them at the start - intellectuals. But they got eaten faster than other survivors.  

I guess I should thank them; they moved the books over and built the walls. But after more attacks and chaos, the village and its survivors dwindled. We drew the walls in closer and closer. Now, I’m more worried about people out here than the monsters.” “Violent factions?” I wanted to know everything about this era.

“The people who are left are like the people anywhere, some good, some bad, most just trying to get by. You just try not to push them to one extreme or the other.”

It was nice to finally have a real conversation with Sophia. So I didn’t want to stop her with questions, especially since we had a couple more miles to hike.

“So, the monsters by your outpost come from the water?”

“There’s some that live in there. Swimming in the ocean. They occasionally come to the beach for an easy snack, but that was when there were more people. We like to be gone when that happens. We hooked up that listener; someone’s always on it now.”

“What do you do when they come?”

“Hide. There used to be a lot more of us, and they came all the time. Now, there’s less. We think they can sense body heat, so we try to stay all spread out. Or in our small spaces.”

I was taking so many mental notes and trying to decipher these carnivores, while also plotting how to get Leslie back.

One thing was for sure: despite Leslie’s earlier assessment of the people in that camp, they were all survivors, and had been for a generation.  

“Is there any chance we’ll see other people out this far?”

“That joke you made about the cannibals? Yeah, well, it wouldn’t be so funny if you ran into some of the people near the city. But we only see them when they need supplies.

The closest outpost I know out here is in the mountains, and they keep to themselves. Supposedly, they live in caves up there relatively unbothered.”

“But you’ve never been up there,” I questioned.

“That’s a far way to go with no one watching your back.”

“For what it’s worth, I’m glad you’re here, watching mine.”

Sophia tried to use humor to deflect real emotion.

“When you see the same fifty people your whole life, anyone new seems interesting. Maybe I wasn’t ready to be bored again just yet.” I appreciated the sentimentality, even if it was self-serving.

“Well, there’s a good chance you’re going to see me get eaten, too.”

“You wouldn’t be the first.”

I know that might be commonplace for her now, but I was still not over all the people I had seen munched mere hours before.

I decided this was a good time to figure out what I really needed to know.

“Where do the juveniles usually hunt?”

Sophia shrugged.

“Open fields, usually at dawn or dusk. They come out of the thicket parts of the forest. We think there might be a nest of them, but no one has ever gotten close and come back to tell us.”

The look on her face said she knew people who had died trying to hunt them down without her, explicitly saying that out loud.  

“The younger ones are lazy; they don’t like a chase through the trees. They stick to the open.”

I took all that info in and nodded. I had made a decision about how to attack this problem. But even though I hadn’t yet said it out loud, she was already poking holes in it.

“I’m sure you know this, but the small ones are still pretty big. No rope is going to hold them back. Our walls are more for hiding than anything else.”

“What if I told you I know where hundreds of feet of metal cable is buried?”

“Maybe you really are a time traveler.”

I laughed and beckoned for her to follow me around a bend.

We were back at the big oak tree. I stopped and gave it a hug. Then I leaned as close as I could to the ground and took some steps that I counted intently.

Sophia watched me, surely thinking I was a madman.

“What do we do now?” She probed.

“We dig again.” I got down on my hands and knees and pulled debris until I found pavement. Lucky for us, the silt had only covered about six inches of this paved area over time.

My hands were filthy and hurt from the bricks, but I found what I was looking for here almost immediately. I lifted a thick power line and showed Sophia.

“And now, we set our mousetrap.”

“Just making sure we’re still talking about monsters, yeah?”

Sophia wasn’t used to my sense of humor yet.

“Yeah, I’m a metaphor guy. I’ll explain as we work.”

I pulled the power line up and shed its burial ground. Then I backed up and yanked it toward me. Dirt and debris flew off it as it rose from beneath the surface.

The center was filled with individual metal cords, all wrapped in rubber. It felt strong, but was it going to be strong enough? I had no other options, so I proceeded with my plan.

After having the coil around my shoulder, I ran with it around the trunk of my favorite tree and set out into the bog with the other loose end.

“Do we have to do all this tonight?”

Sophia was right behind me, watching me stretch the cord outward into the open.

“Yes. We have to be ready for one of them to possibly be hunting in the morning.”

“What if they don’t show up?”

It had not crossed my mind that the monsters would take a day off. Surely their metabolism wouldn’t allow them to do that. And even as we saw the abundance of life in the forest, everything Sophia had told me meant they had to be eating a fair amount.

“Then I guess we’re screwed. And so is Leslie.”

I dragged the cord into the bog, and Sophia followed me. It was not easy going with all the extra weight. I was constantly stumbling and smacking into puddles.

Even with Sophia’s help, I couldn’t work with any haste.

“Running across this shit is nearly impossible,” she told me as she urged me to take my time.

I nodded.

“Yes. I hope that kind of evens the playing field.”

I stretched the cord about 100 yards to a boulder near the tree line. I wrapped it back around that and placed the claymores nearby in a bit of a ditch area that, hopefully, the monster would fall into and explode.

Perhaps that was wishful thinking. But it’s all I had.

I made sure to mark where the claymores were hidden with large bamboo sticks I picked from the wetlands. If this thing hit my cable, they were sure to blow.

Sophia watched me work with the explosives. She didn’t volunteer to help with this part, but I knew what I was doing, and after that lion scare, I was just happy to have her watching my back.

As we finished, I stood up and admired my trap.

“I think it’s time we made a fire and rested.”

Sophia nodded and beckoned toward the thicker trees. “You don’t want to do it out in the open; the monsters love fire.”

“Great. The fire will be our peanut butter,” I said.

Start with Part One here!

THE WAY OF THE FUTURE

What’s the worst hangover you’ve ever had? I remember visiting a buddy in Florida in college. We went to this massive house party where a bunch of rich kids were going wild.

You know the kind of party: it’s drinking, kissing, hot tubs, and a random DJ — the kind of party most people under a certain tax bracket never get to see.

For me, it was an anthropological study in how the other half gets down. And I kinda liked it.

Apparently, one of the party throwers was on My Super Sweet Sixteen, but I digress.

Anyway, I had 21 Bud Lights to try to impress them and wound up vomiting all over a Persian rug in a house that belonged to the owner of the Toronto Blue Jays.

This was like that. But worse.

I had a massive headache and was covered in goo that drained out of the hamster ball through the pentagonal opening, which had popped off.

No matter how hard I wracked, it still felt like there was goo in every orifice and in my lungs.

The world came into focus. I was in the chair, but the straps had gone lax. I wiped the flotsam from my eyes and noticed that the exterior of the ball was still opaque.

A loud, onerous sneeze got rid of the excess trash in my body.

It dropped down the inside of the ball, and I immediately became claustrophobic.

“Let me out of here!”

It was my turn to bang on the inside of the apparatus, and it sort of melted away into goo itself.

Nasty.

Soon, all the sides of the hamster ball had melted, and I was out in the open. I instinctively reached for my Glock and pulled it from my chest holster.

I checked the chamber, and we were locked and loaded.

Then I had a stark realization… “Godzilla’s not gonna feel a 9MM, dumb idiot.”

I tucked the gun away and took my first step into the foreign, overgrown wilderness I had never seen before. Gone were the rolling fields and wide-open spaces.

This was a dense forest, with trees and vines growing rampant. I unhitched myself from the seat and fell immediately on my face into a pile of mud.

My legs were not working quite yet.

I belly-crawled back to the chair and lifted the footlocker from below it with all my stuff. I grabbed my backpack from it and took out my canteen.

That was the best water I had ever had in my life.

As soon as I could feel my legs, I stood…and then immediately ducked back down as I remembered how the hell I got here.

I remained crouched as I stepped into the new world.

I’m no historian, so don’t ask me about the biggest change in a hundred years. But I have to think it probably came from 1900 to 2000, when technology soared so vastly that we got planes, cars, the internet, fast food, and boxer briefs.

Now imagine if all that went in reverse, and suddenly, we were back in the Stone Age. But like, a Stone Age where I could still see signs that there had been a civilization before it.

As I walked slowly, I could see what used to be a strip mall, mostly flattened and hollowed out; the “W” from a Walmart sign lay broken in half.

And the further I got into the forest, the more surreal it was to see McDonald’s golden arches sticking out among a group of willow trees.

Those little accents reminded me I had been here before, but not in a very long time.

I could hear birds singing, which let me know there was still nature out here. But I wasn’t sure what I wanted to see myself yet.

I scanned the thick forest; I spotted a tree I recognized ahead. It was taller, but its shape was undeniable. It was one of those large oaks that remained. And it looked like it was just on the edge of the forest, with sunlight piercing through its broad branches.

Needing the comfort of familiar branches, I jogged toward it, stopping at every large boulder or stump to listen for other footsteps.

When I got to the oak, I peered out over the landscape. The former farm fields were now a misty bog overgrown with moss and muck.

I placed one foot out there, unsure what to do….

…so I did something very dumb instead.

I yelled, “Leslie!!!!” And I waited.

Then I doubled down on my idiocy and tried again,  “LESLIE, IT’S ME, GUS, ARE YOU ALIVE?!”

I was shaking; I was so scared and confused about what had happened. The air was still, but my scream had echoed outward, and the birds had all but stopped chirping.

The sky was grey, and I had no idea what time it was, but there was some soft light.

I figured it was early morning.

Most large predators are crepuscular, meaning they hunt in low-light hours like dawn or dusk. This was not the right time to be crossing out into the unknown to look for a woman I knew could take care of herself, but my father’s words echo in my ears: “You’re going to need each other.”

So I stepped out into the open, and I hoped for the best.

The bog sloshed under my boots. I shook pink goo off my sleeves as a chill ran up my spine. My hair was slick and wet; I pushed it backward, out of my eyes.

I placed each step with care, tried to jump to steady ground, and stopped at a rock to gain sure footing. The air was cool, and my breath turned to frost.

“Leslie,” I hissed, and still heard nothing.

I got on top of a large boulder to try to look out further, and what I saw shook me. This was a killing field littered with dirty skeletons and mud.

There were no more houses to be seen. No signs of anyone alive. The roads had disappeared, and I couldn’t find pavement or power lines or anything.

The only thing that put me at ease was that I also couldn’t see any of the large monsters that had turned this place unrecognizable.

My shoulders relaxed, and I let my guard down. That’s when a lasso spun around me and yanked me off the rock and onto the mud.

I was still a little woozy from the journey, and the wind was knocked out of me.

But none of that stopped me from aiming my pistol.

Above me were a man and a woman. They were in tattered rags and homemade clothes. Faces camouflaged with mud. Hair wild.

The only thing I could think to say was, “I come in peace.”

My words seemed not to matter to them. He held the rope and started to try to hog-tie me. She judged me matter-of-factly. Softly kicking my belly.

“How’d you get so chubby out here? You got a good food supply?”

“I just like snacking.”

She spoke and moved like a cat, sly and calculated. The woman looked my age and wore a permanent scowl. He was in his 50s, and all business.

But I wasn’t in the mood to be tied up.

I waved my free hand to try to get him off me, but forgot my Glock was in it.

BANG!

My gun fired into the air, and it got everyone to just take a second to adjust.

They retreated quickly, and then I was standing up, facing them, rope still around my torso, but now both arms were free.

“These don't have a safety, so that can happen. They really should.”

The woman pointed a handmade bow and arrow at my throat. She was small and tan. He held the rope, and she moved among the trees. I had to swivel my head to keep an eye on her.

I looked at my smoking Glock and back at them.

“That’s my bad. Let’s all take a step back and introduce ourselves,” I offered.

“Aim your gun, Gus. We don’t know who these fuckers are yet.”

Leslie’s voice caused us all to turn, and I was damn happy to see her pointing her Henry rifle at these two people.

It stopped the woman with the bow, who now had to vacillate between us to decide whom to cover. The man was beside himself, shaken that they were now kinda surrounded.

“Where the hell did you two get guns?”

“Bass Pro Shop.”

My words had no effect on him. Leslie’s left them colder.

“If you want to be accurate, mine is a Henry Protector rifle, and I can shoot a squirrel’s eye at 100 yards. You don’t want to find out what this can do at close range.”

Leslie had them dead to rights, with good cover from behind a rock.

I knew my life was in danger in that moment, but I couldn’t help but feel my crush on Leslie sneaking back in. Even these strangers knew not to mess with her.

“Let go of the rope, and we’ll be on our way.”

They shared a glance; I could tell the woman didn’t want him to, but the man nodded with emphasis and dropped his end.

I unraveled myself from the lasso and shook off the pain of the fall.

“Out of curiosity, do either of you happen to know…what year it is?”

“I think they’re crazy.” The woman cocked another arrow in her bow. They looked at me like I was an insane person. And to be honest, I felt like one.

“Where did you come from?”

I got on my knees and walked toward Leslie. She had her gun up and beckoned me to join her.

“You have a lot of questions for us, but I'm telling you, we have a lot more for you.” They looked at me as I played nice.

“There are giant creatures out there eating people, so forgive me if I feel like we should be on the same side and not focusing on finishing the job for them.”

I was doing my best to calm these animals, too. And it was working.

“If we could take a break from killing each other, I feel like we have a lot to share with each other. My name is Gus, and I just woke up here.”

I dug in my pack and tossed them an apple as I put on my best smile. I knew that with any aggressive mammal, you wanted to act confident but kind. “I gave you something; now give me something back.”

The man sucked his tongue and assessed the situation. Then he relented cautiously.

“I’m Hector, and this is Sophia,” Hector returned.

“And we don’t trust you,” Sophia emphasized, with a gentle smirk that told me she was sure she could very easily kill us.

The fact washed over us, but it also left us with no choice.

So I gave them the truth right back: “Well, you two aren’t going to believe this, but we kind of were cryogenically frozen during this insane invasion of giant monsters, and we just got here and have no idea what to do. So if we were on your property, that’s on us.”

“You were there at the start?” Sophia was incredulous.

“Yeah. We’re goddamn time travelers,” Leslie told him with confidence.

APOCALYPSE WOW

I was pretty familiar with the greater pantheon of post-apocalyptic movies and TV shows. It felt like millennials like me were raised on the idea that the world was going to end in some way or another and we’d all be fighting over gasoline like Mad Max or for scraps like in The Hunger Games. Maybe, if you were lucky, you got a cool dog like Will Smith in that one movie.

Although I think that dog died in some horrific way, I would like to avoid that.

Anyway, the world Hector and Sophia led us into was not one I had imagined. It was densely forested, and there were no visible traces of what I knew from my present. We moved boulder to boulder, tree to tree. There were long vines that curled down from the canopy, and there were deep streams cascading downward, like we were on a hill.

I tried to make a mental note to get back to where we came, but it was all so hard to believe.

Gone were the McMansions and designer driveways with built-in cooling systems and bespoke fences. It was all trees and overgrown fauna as far as the eye could see.

Hector and Sophia seemed to know this pathway very well. I had wanted to ask them questions as we went, but they assured me I had to stay quiet until the forest thinned out.

Under any normal circumstances, you couldn’t stop me from talking, but these were unusual circumstances.

And I was willing to cede my control of the situation over to the people who knew how to not get eaten in these unfamiliar times.

Plus, I was keen to listen. It felt like every animal noise was present. I could definitely hear so many different kinds of bird calls and even the bray of animals I wasn’t sure were native.

Hector had us pause to watch a bunch of wild horses gallop across an open area. And he mentioned that brown bears would make their way down to eat and hibernate in these woods.

I even heard a far-away growl of what sounded like a lion.

We were only twenty miles away from where the Beardsley Zoo used to be…could their animals have gotten out and repopulated this area?

When I couldn’t resist questioning that, Sophia finally turned and offered a blunt assessment.

“Yeah, dude. A lot changed after 100 years!”

She was both sardonic and laughed with her words. I could see her demeanor rubbed Leslie the wrong way, but she scoffed at her, too.

I pressed Sophia a little further.

“Totally, but are there lions out here?”

She just shushed me again. But Hector gave it to me straight, “Lions and tigers and bears, alright?”

“Have you seen The Wizard of Oz?” I really couldn’t help myself.

Sophia couldn’t either, and turned to me, annoyed, “No. Now shut the hell up so we can make it back in one piece, my guy.”

She delivered this with a smile, and it threw me off entirely. So I obliged, and we sojourned on.

“This chick is kind of a bitch,” Leslie muttered. But I liked her.

When we finally stopped to drink from a creek that flowed into a pond, Hector scanned carefully before we emerged from the underbrush to fill our hands and sip.

“It’s clean?” I asked incredulously.

They looked at me as if I was nuts. Sophia pointed to the creek’s mouth, which was running out of a crack in a large, wet rock.

“As long as it’s coming from underground, you can drink it.”

I made that mental note and looked to Leslie, who was already on all fours, gulping it from the crack like it was. A water fountain.

“They don’t have manners in the past?”

Leslie gave Sophia the finger and kept lapping it up. I joined her. The water tasted pristine. And I used the creek’s flow to wash my face and hands.

I finally gained the courage to ask a much more pressing question…

“Aside from the bears, are there any…” — I was cut off by Leslie, who was not pussyfooting around — “…Giant fucking monsters lurking about?”

Both Sophia and Hector share a chuckle. “Get up on that rock and see for yourself.”

Hector could see we were wary, so he added: “Relax, if they were close enough to get you, they would have already gotten you.”

Leslie and I eyed the boulder where the water sprang freely. I gave her a boost, and then she pulled me up. As we stood on top of it, we could look out at the scraggly forest. The trees grew in weird clusters, between several lakes and even what looked like a few ditches.

Then, when I squinted, I suddenly understood why.

And so did Leslie.

“They’re footprints.”

“They’re really committing to this bit,” Sophia muttered under her breath.

The landscape, as far as the eye could see, was peppered with massive footprints. Some hardened into lakes, others were mud squelches, but they were clearly etched into the landscape.  

“So they’re still around,” I asked.

Hector nodded.

“We don’t see the big ones as much anymore; they went to the cities to feed, where there were more people. And they stick around them to nest. But the juveniles, they hunt these areas.”

“You can usually hear them coming, so you have plenty of time to get away. And none of them breathe fire yet.”

The whole breathing fire thing was new to me, but Leslie was non-plussed; I could see her army training kicking in right away, and she was taking in info without giving them any back.

I just wanted to find a way to make friends, so I could stop worrying about them attacking us.

“How do you kill them?” Leslie asked.

Hector and Sophia now shared a laugh I felt was too big. We were very entertaining to them.

“If you figure that out, let us know,” Hector retorted.

“In the off chance any of them get hurt, the bigger ones always eat them before we get a shot, or swoop down and pick them up and fly away,” Sophia added.

“Do they still eat…us?” Leslie was brave enough to ask what I was thinking.

“Yeah. But we try not to give them an opportunity.” Hector said through his final slurps of water.

The two of them stood up. And Leslie and I jumped down from the rock and landed in front of them. I was still creaky from the pod, and so was Leslie.

As we got up, we saw Hector leering at us, no doubt searching for weakness.

“You two really aren’t from around here, are you?”

“Technically, we are. Just from a long time ago,” I answered.

“Still going with the time traveler thing, huh?” Sophia was probing us for more, but I only had the truth to offer even if she didn’t believe it.

The two of them headed back into the underbrush, and we followed.

“Do you two live alone out here?”

They shared a look, and I could tell they didn’t want to answer.

“We have friends. Lots of them.” Sophia offered.

“It’s our day to hunt. Guess we’re bringing something else home.”

Hector’s words should have put a smile on my face, but I was watching Leslie, who showed only signs of concern.

Both of them scurried ahead, and I took a breath to follow. Leslie leaned into me.

And I wrapped my arms around her for a hug. “I know, today has been a lot; I need one too.”

But she pushed me off and whispered in my ear, “I’m not trying to hug you, I just…if it’s really 100 years in the future. We may not know what these people are like.”

“You think they’re going to be assholes,” I pondered.

“Sure. Or what if they’re like…cannibals?”

That had not occurred to me.

And suddenly, I wasn’t sure we should be following these two people.

“If that’s true, then I hope they kill us before any of the eating happens.”

Leslie shrugged and held her rifle close. “They were so surprised to see this gun; I have a feeling we could shoot our way out. So stay close.”

I was already way ahead of her. After another twenty minutes of scurrying through the thicket, we emerged onto what I can only call an old road. It was made of rubble but clearly had been asphalt at one time.

The pathway narrowed the further we went, and the rubble grew in piles. It funneled us toward a large metal gate, built from scraps of siding, iron fences, and car hoods.

It was rusted, rickety, and vast—probably twenty feet tall. There were people walking at the top on patrol. At its center was an astronomically large telescope, like one taken from an observatory.

But instead of pointing up, it pointed outward. Then it moved slowly, focusing down at us.

Hector whistled up at the gate.

“We brought outsiders. And they both have guns. Seriously.”

Leslie reached for her Henry and began to back away.

Before I could get my Glock out to react to her body’s sentiment, men popped out of hatches hidden in the rubble and grabbed us.

Sacks were thrown over our heads, and for the second time that day, I was knocked out.

THE NEW NEW

Words cannot express how shitty it is to wake up from extended hibernation one day and, like six hours later, wake up again from what was probably a low-grade concussion.

I thought I had pissed myself while unconscious, something I hadn’t done since drinking in college, and maybe once post-divorce, but we really don’t have time to harp on that time.

My pants were wet, and I wanted to know why.  

To my relief, they pulled the sack off my head, and I was facedown in the sand, the tide rolling in. Leslie was next to me, but she had found the strength to sit up and face our captors.

I groaned as I rolled over and got on my knees.

“Do you recognize where we are?” Leslie nodded behind her. I looked and could see the wooden stumps of an old pier stretching into the ocean.

“Is that…Long Wharf Pier?”

“ Yes. We had our first date at a cafe around here,” I offered.

Leslie laughed and nodded. I wondered how she classified that memory, but I didn’t have time to interrogate her on it.

“That was so long ago.”

“Literally.”

Waves lapped at our backs, and I could feel the tide shifting me in the sand.

It was late afternoon, and I finally got to see an unadulterated look at the sky. There were no clouds by the ocean, but the cold, salt water made me shiver as it crept up toward us.

It was getting deeper by the minute, and I had a feeling that was the point.

Across from us, Hector stood in front of around fifty people, all in homemade clothes and each carrying weapons. They had our packs in front of them, all sorted out on the beach.

Sophia sat off to the side. She always had that gentle smirk on her face. Like she thought everything was funny. Her ear was pressed to what looked like a huge megaphone, but it was mostly underwater. She occasionally looked over at us, but remained preoccupied.

To my right and left were huge walls, all built from discarded metal. They opened up to the beach, isolating this section to only its inhabitants.

I tried to wave, and that’s when I realized my hands were tied behind my back.

“Hi. I’m Gus. This is Leslie. I feel like I keep introducing myself, and I’m not getting much from all of you. Just wondering—you guys aren’t cannibals, are you?”

There was a murmur of horror that fell over the crowd; I had definitely offended them.

Leslie shook her head at me. “Way to ease us into the conversation.”

“I was taking a page from your book,” I hissed back at her.

An elderly woman stood next to Hector. She had long, flowing white hair and held Leslie’s Henry rifle. She examined the barrel and the trigger.

“If you want to see it work, put the metal end in your mouth.” Leslie proved my point with that quip. She was not going to win anyone with kindness, but she was also crafty enough to take a few of them with her if they were going to kill us anyway.

“We know what a gun is. We just have never seen one in person. Where’d you get it?” The old woman approached us and crouched to talk.

“It was my father’s. And it was a bitch to sight, so don’t mess it up.”

Despite being on opposite sides of the surf, Leslie and this woman were cut from the same cloth. And neither would back down.

That meant all diplomacy was up to me.

“I feel like we’re all off on the wrong foot, so maybe we could get an idea of why we’re tied up and who we’re talking to before we all jump in here.”

“We’re tied up because this whole village has fifty people in it; maybe five of them can really fight. And one of them is listening for something coming underwater. I’d venture your monsters come from the sea. And the others all seem like middle-aged scavengers, maybe small crop farmers. And this old broad spends her days reading, which is why they call her The Historian.”

Sophia cackled.

Leslie spat in her general direction, and it was immediately understood they didn’t like each other. And this adversarial relationship wouldn’t be solved today.

One of the things I always admired about Leslie is that she didn’t suffer any fools. But we were literally suffering, and I could tell her probably correct assessment of the situation had not made us any more friends.

“Yes, that’s our point of view, so tell us yours.”

This reminded me a lot of our time, when one of those rich assholes would have a dog that got loose. We had a guy who was obsessed with those Belgian dogs from John Wick that could run up walls and shit. Anyway, they were always getting out and killing someone else’s sheep.

Many a time I’d track them down just to find Leslie on the scene, screaming at the owner while I tried to play nice. The difference is I needed that owner to pay me; she just needed to make sure they heard her.

And these beach people were definitely listening.

I was doing my best to handle this, but it felt like I was between two dogs ready to snap at one another. Somehow, I was guaranteed to get bit.

The Old Woman looked from the group back to us.

“My name is Cara. Yes, I’m the historian around here. I’ve read all the books we can find, and studied all the maps. Our history is known to me. They tell me you’re time travelers. And since that’s impossible, I think you’re probably spies from a larger settlement looking to loot. One with guns. Maybe you’re the cannibals, looking for weaker encampments.”

She folded her arms crossly.

“Okay, I want to apologize for putting the whole cannibal rape thing out into the air, but we are time travelers. And I know that sounds insane, but in that pack I have a driver’s license, I have cash, so many credit cards, maybe even a parking ticket with a date on it—”

I knew this was all just flailing, but the tide was rushing in, and now I was spitting water. I finally understood the picture: Leslie and I had our hands tied to the same post, and given the steepness of the shore, we would be underwater within the hour.

“You could have crafted all that out of any of the various tombs in this forest, or maybe in the city where your people dwell.”

I was not making headway with The Historian.

“We’re not crafty people,” I tried.

“You sure? This one tried to get me up and put a gun in my mouth?” Cara kicked Leslie.

“Not crafty enough.” Leslie was not making my life easier.

“The water is coming in; I’d bet you two have only a few minutes left. So if you were going to give us a reason to keep you alive, I’d try that now.”

“How about we’re innocent people?” Leslie was using a tactic I was going to try, but it seemed like they didn’t care.

“No one alive is innocent. And we’re not looking for new members, despite your claim you can hunt and fight. We call this place Haven. It’s our home, and we’ll do whatever it takes to protect it. We’re a small group, but we’ve built it over the years. It keeps them out, and… others too.”

I just started laughing, and everyone now was staring at me, including Leslie.

“Sorry, I know this is crazy, but 100 years ago, this place was called New Haven…so you all live in New New Haven, that’s so bananas. I mean, you put that and The Wizard of Oz quote together — Like, what are the odds?”

“I said I read the maps, you idiot. We decided to shorten it. And these people have heard of The Wizard of Oz; we have the novelization in our library.” Cara was incredulous.  

I shot Sophia and Hector a look; they had played me well.

“We’re not as helpless or as stupid as you’d hoped, huh?”

“I was holding out hope you were friendly,” I shot back.

“For a few time travelers, you don’t seem to have any information that’s valuable to us. Which makes your lives disposable. ”

That’s when a powerful wave hit my back and pushed me under. Leslie and I were tossed by the surf; it was merciless until the tide rolled backward.

I was not a good swimmer, but I also didn’t want to die here. So I did whatever I could to get my head above the waves and to call out not for help, but for common ground.

Or, at least, solid footing.

“We can’t tell you how they got here, but if you untie us and give us our stuff back, we can show you how to kill them.”

A wave cut me off and pushed me under, but I got back to the surface to see the reaction.

Cara was laughing.

Even Leslie, who was sucking air into her lungs, couldn’t keep her end of the ruse up. I ignored her and pleaded with everyone assembled on the beach.  

“I’m serious. You don’t believe I’m from the past, but I am. I know where stuff was back then.  And in my time, I was a…well…I know animals. And if you free us, I’ll march back here tomorrow morning with one of their heads and prove it to you.”

Cara sucked her tongue for what felt like an eternity, when you’re only breathing every other minute because you’re submerged in water otherwise.

“Please—” was all I could get out before I was swirled around again, as my middle school bully had once again forced my head into a toilet and flushed.

Finally, I felt two hands lift me and her from the surf. Hector loomed over us with a stone knife and cut us loose. They dragged us up the beach, and we lay in front of the other inhabitants.

Sophia left her post to watch but stayed on the outskirts. I got the feeling she was a loner. I knew her body language because it was my own.

But at the moment, I concentrated on getting the salt water out of my lungs.

I was wheezing, and Leslie was wheezing next to me. We were far enough away from the waves to finally suck some air in and see the rest of the walled space.

“Just give us our stuff back, let us out, and we’ll be on our way. We don’t want to be here any more than you want us to be here.” Leslie was finally level-headed.

And so was Cara. Just not the way we needed her to be.

“We will once your friend here brings me the head of a monster. Until then, you’ll live as our prisoner. Then, the sea or whatever crawls out of it can have you.”

I watched as they dragged Leslie away from me and closed off the area for me to chase after her. My pack was shoved to me, but they didn’t return my gun.

“Any chance I could have my Glock?”

“The guns stay here,” Hector muttered as he marched me through town.

I took my time to glance at the arable farming area, small fields and makeshift homes, a mix of teepees, cabins, and other structures.

It was cozy, if not totally rustic. There was no electricity, but there were sporadic fires and a mix of scavenged former modernity and homemade accents that proved human ingenuity.

Leslie was dragged the opposite way as me by Sophia. She left me with harrowing parting words. “Just run. Whatever you do…run!”

Sophia pushed her into a building, and Leslie’s cries were cut off from my ears.

The sun was falling as they pushed me out of the gate. They gathered in the rut to look down at me. I waved up at them, still determined to kill with kindness…for now.

“One day, nightfall tomorrow, or she dies,” Cara called down to me. I looked to her right, at Hector, who gazed down at me without empathy.

But he said nothing. It was clear who was in charge here, and it wasn’t the people I had met.

My eyes scanned all over for Leslie, but I couldn’t see her, and I had no idea if she could hear me, but I wanted Leslie to hold out hope. I wanted her to know I would be back.

That despite it all, I wanted to share another piece of Juicy Fruit with her. Maybe just because in all the craziness, I had the same feeling I had a few years ago, standing on that cold street in New York after I moved out, holding my cardboard box.

I was truly alone. And unlike when I was a kid, that wasn’t sitting well with me.

“I’m coming back, Leslie. I promise! I’ll be back! I won’t leave you.”

Everyone on the top of the fence laughed at me except for Sophia, who had genuine pity on her face. No smirk in sight. But that shifted into worry pretty quickly.

That’s when I heard it, a roar in the distance. It rang through the air and signaled them to retreat.

And signaled to me that it was time to run.

Start with Part One here!

THE WAY OF THE FUTURE

What’s the worst hangover you’ve ever had? I remember visiting a buddy in Florida in college. We went to this massive house party where a bunch of rich kids were going wild.

You know the kind of party: it’s drinking, kissing, hot tubs, and a random DJ — the kind of party most people under a certain tax bracket never get to see.

For me, it was an anthropological study in how the other half gets down. And I kinda liked it.

Apparently, one of the party throwers was on My Super Sweet Sixteen, but I digress.

Anyway, I had 21 Bud Lights to try to impress them and wound up vomiting all over a Persian rug in a house that belonged to the owner of the Toronto Blue Jays.

This was like that. But worse.

I had a massive headache and was covered in goo that drained out of the hamster ball through the pentagonal opening, which had popped off.

No matter how hard I wracked, it still felt like there was goo in every orifice and in my lungs.

The world came into focus. I was in the chair, but the straps had gone lax. I wiped the flotsam from my eyes and noticed that the exterior of the ball was still opaque.

A loud, onerous sneeze got rid of the excess trash in my body.

It dropped down the inside of the ball, and I immediately became claustrophobic.

“Let me out of here!”

It was my turn to bang on the inside of the apparatus, and it sort of melted away into goo itself.

Nasty.

Soon, all the sides of the hamster ball had melted, and I was out in the open. I instinctively reached for my Glock and pulled it from my chest holster.

I checked the chamber, and we were locked and loaded.

Then I had a stark realization… “Godzilla’s not gonna feel a 9MM, dumb idiot.”

I tucked the gun away and took my first step into the foreign, overgrown wilderness I had never seen before. Gone were the rolling fields and wide-open spaces.

This was a dense forest, with trees and vines growing rampant. I unhitched myself from the seat and fell immediately on my face into a pile of mud.

My legs were not working quite yet.

I belly-crawled back to the chair and lifted the footlocker from below it with all my stuff. I grabbed my backpack from it and took out my canteen.

That was the best water I had ever had in my life.

As soon as I could feel my legs, I stood…and then immediately ducked back down as I remembered how the hell I got here.

I remained crouched as I stepped into the new world.

I’m no historian, so don’t ask me about the biggest change in a hundred years. But I have to think it probably came from 1900 to 2000, when technology soared so vastly that we got planes, cars, the internet, fast food, and boxer briefs.

Now imagine if all that went in reverse, and suddenly, we were back in the Stone Age. But like, a Stone Age where I could still see signs that there had been a civilization before it.

As I walked slowly, I could see what used to be a strip mall, mostly flattened and hollowed out; the “W” from a Walmart sign lay broken in half.

And the further I got into the forest, the more surreal it was to see McDonald’s golden arches sticking out among a group of willow trees.

Those little accents reminded me I had been here before, but not in a very long time.

I could hear birds singing, which let me know there was still nature out here. But I wasn’t sure what I wanted to see myself yet.

I scanned the thick forest; I spotted a tree I recognized ahead. It was taller, but its shape was undeniable. It was one of those large oaks that remained. And it looked like it was just on the edge of the forest, with sunlight piercing through its broad branches.

Needing the comfort of familiar branches, I jogged toward it, stopping at every large boulder or stump to listen for other footsteps.

When I got to the oak, I peered out over the landscape. The former farm fields were now a misty bog overgrown with moss and muck.

I placed one foot out there, unsure what to do….

…so I did something very dumb instead.

I yelled, “Leslie!!!!” And I waited.

Then I doubled down on my idiocy and tried again,  “LESLIE, IT’S ME, GUS, ARE YOU ALIVE?!”

I was shaking; I was so scared and confused about what had happened. The air was still, but my scream had echoed outward, and the birds had all but stopped chirping.

The sky was grey, and I had no idea what time it was, but there was some soft light.

I figured it was early morning.

Most large predators are crepuscular, meaning they hunt in low-light hours like dawn or dusk. This was not the right time to be crossing out into the unknown to look for a woman I knew could take care of herself, but my father’s words echo in my ears: “You’re going to need each other.”

So I stepped out into the open, and I hoped for the best.

The bog sloshed under my boots. I shook pink goo off my sleeves as a chill ran up my spine. My hair was slick and wet; I pushed it backward, out of my eyes.

I placed each step with care, tried to jump to steady ground, and stopped at a rock to gain sure footing. The air was cool, and my breath turned to frost.

“Leslie,” I hissed, and still heard nothing.

I got on top of a large boulder to try to look out further, and what I saw shook me. This was a killing field littered with dirty skeletons and mud.

There were no more houses to be seen. No signs of anyone alive. The roads had disappeared, and I couldn’t find pavement or power lines or anything.

The only thing that put me at ease was that I also couldn’t see any of the large monsters that had turned this place unrecognizable.

My shoulders relaxed, and I let my guard down. That’s when a lasso spun around me and yanked me off the rock and onto the mud.

I was still a little woozy from the journey, and the wind was knocked out of me.

But none of that stopped me from aiming my pistol.

Above me were a man and a woman. They were in tattered rags and homemade clothes. Faces camouflaged with mud. Hair wild.

The only thing I could think to say was, “I come in peace.”

My words seemed not to matter to them. He held the rope and started to try to hog-tie me. She judged me matter-of-factly. Softly kicking my belly.

“How’d you get so chubby out here? You got a good food supply?”

“I just like snacking.”

She spoke and moved like a cat, sly and calculated. The woman looked my age and wore a permanent scowl. He was in his 50s, and all business.

But I wasn’t in the mood to be tied up.

I waved my free hand to try to get him off me, but forgot my Glock was in it.

BANG!

My gun fired into the air, and it got everyone to just take a second to adjust.

They retreated quickly, and then I was standing up, facing them, rope still around my torso, but now both arms were free.

“These don't have a safety, so that can happen. They really should.”

The woman pointed a handmade bow and arrow at my throat. She was small and tan. He held the rope, and she moved among the trees. I had to swivel my head to keep an eye on her.

I looked at my smoking Glock and back at them.

“That’s my bad. Let’s all take a step back and introduce ourselves,” I offered.

“Aim your gun, Gus. We don’t know who these fuckers are yet.”

Leslie’s voice caused us all to turn, and I was damn happy to see her pointing her Henry rifle at these two people.

It stopped the woman with the bow, who now had to vacillate between us to decide whom to cover. The man was beside himself, shaken that they were now kinda surrounded.

“Where the hell did you two get guns?”

“Bass Pro Shop.”

My words had no effect on him. Leslie’s left them colder.

“If you want to be accurate, mine is a Henry Protector rifle, and I can shoot a squirrel’s eye at 100 yards. You don’t want to find out what this can do at close range.”

Leslie had them dead to rights, with good cover from behind a rock.

I knew my life was in danger in that moment, but I couldn’t help but feel my crush on Leslie sneaking back in. Even these strangers knew not to mess with her.

“Let go of the rope, and we’ll be on our way.”

They shared a glance; I could tell the woman didn’t want him to, but the man nodded with emphasis and dropped his end.

I unraveled myself from the lasso and shook off the pain of the fall.

“Out of curiosity, do either of you happen to know…what year it is?”

“I think they’re crazy.” The woman cocked another arrow in her bow. They looked at me like I was an insane person. And to be honest, I felt like one.

“Where did you come from?”

I got on my knees and walked toward Leslie. She had her gun up and beckoned me to join her.

“You have a lot of questions for us, but I'm telling you, we have a lot more for you.” They looked at me as I played nice.

“There are giant creatures out there eating people, so forgive me if I feel like we should be on the same side and not focusing on finishing the job for them.”

I was doing my best to calm these animals, too. And it was working.

“If we could take a break from killing each other, I feel like we have a lot to share with each other. My name is Gus, and I just woke up here.”

I dug in my pack and tossed them an apple as I put on my best smile. I knew that with any aggressive mammal, you wanted to act confident but kind. “I gave you something; now give me something back.”

The man sucked his tongue and assessed the situation. Then he relented cautiously.

“I’m Hector, and this is Sophia,” Hector returned.

“And we don’t trust you,” Sophia emphasized, with a gentle smirk that told me she was sure she could very easily kill us.

The fact washed over us, but it also left us with no choice.

So I gave them the truth right back: “Well, you two aren’t going to believe this, but we kind of were cryogenically frozen during this insane invasion of giant monsters, and we just got here and have no idea what to do. So if we were on your property, that’s on us.”

“You were there at the start?” Sophia was incredulous.

“Yeah. We’re goddamn time travelers,” Leslie told him with confidence.

APOCALYPSE WOW

I was pretty familiar with the greater pantheon of post-apocalyptic movies and TV shows. It felt like millennials like me were raised on the idea that the world was going to end in some way or another and we’d all be fighting over gasoline like Mad Max or for scraps like in The Hunger Games. Maybe, if you were lucky, you got a cool dog like Will Smith in that one movie.

Although I think that dog died in some horrific way, I would like to avoid that.

Anyway, the world Hector and Sophia led us into was not one I had imagined. It was densely forested, and there were no visible traces of what I knew from my present. We moved boulder to boulder, tree to tree. There were long vines that curled down from the canopy, and there were deep streams cascading downward, like we were on a hill.

I tried to make a mental note to get back to where we came, but it was all so hard to believe.

Gone were the McMansions and designer driveways with built-in cooling systems and bespoke fences. It was all trees and overgrown fauna as far as the eye could see.

Hector and Sophia seemed to know this pathway very well. I had wanted to ask them questions as we went, but they assured me I had to stay quiet until the forest thinned out.

Under any normal circumstances, you couldn’t stop me from talking, but these were unusual circumstances.

And I was willing to cede my control of the situation over to the people who knew how to not get eaten in these unfamiliar times.

Plus, I was keen to listen. It felt like every animal noise was present. I could definitely hear so many different kinds of bird calls and even the bray of animals I wasn’t sure were native.

Hector had us pause to watch a bunch of wild horses gallop across an open area. And he mentioned that brown bears would make their way down to eat and hibernate in these woods.

I even heard a far-away growl of what sounded like a lion.

We were only twenty miles away from where the Beardsley Zoo used to be…could their animals have gotten out and repopulated this area?

When I couldn’t resist questioning that, Sophia finally turned and offered a blunt assessment.

“Yeah, dude. A lot changed after 100 years!”

She was both sardonic and laughed with her words. I could see her demeanor rubbed Leslie the wrong way, but she scoffed at her, too.

I pressed Sophia a little further.

“Totally, but are there lions out here?”

She just shushed me again. But Hector gave it to me straight, “Lions and tigers and bears, alright?”

“Have you seen The Wizard of Oz?” I really couldn’t help myself.

Sophia couldn’t either, and turned to me, annoyed, “No. Now shut the hell up so we can make it back in one piece, my guy.”

She delivered this with a smile, and it threw me off entirely. So I obliged, and we sojourned on.

“This chick is kind of a bitch,” Leslie muttered. But I liked her.

When we finally stopped to drink from a creek that flowed into a pond, Hector scanned carefully before we emerged from the underbrush to fill our hands and sip.

“It’s clean?” I asked incredulously.

They looked at me as if I was nuts. Sophia pointed to the creek’s mouth, which was running out of a crack in a large, wet rock.

“As long as it’s coming from underground, you can drink it.”

I made that mental note and looked to Leslie, who was already on all fours, gulping it from the crack like it was. A water fountain.

“They don’t have manners in the past?”

Leslie gave Sophia the finger and kept lapping it up. I joined her. The water tasted pristine. And I used the creek’s flow to wash my face and hands.

I finally gained the courage to ask a much more pressing question…

“Aside from the bears, are there any…” — I was cut off by Leslie, who was not pussyfooting around — “…Giant fucking monsters lurking about?”

Both Sophia and Hector share a chuckle. “Get up on that rock and see for yourself.”

Hector could see we were wary, so he added: “Relax, if they were close enough to get you, they would have already gotten you.”

Leslie and I eyed the boulder where the water sprang freely. I gave her a boost, and then she pulled me up. As we stood on top of it, we could look out at the scraggly forest. The trees grew in weird clusters, between several lakes and even what looked like a few ditches.

Then, when I squinted, I suddenly understood why.

And so did Leslie.

“They’re footprints.”

“They’re really committing to this bit,” Sophia muttered under her breath.

The landscape, as far as the eye could see, was peppered with massive footprints. Some hardened into lakes, others were mud squelches, but they were clearly etched into the landscape.  

“So they’re still around,” I asked.

Hector nodded.

“We don’t see the big ones as much anymore; they went to the cities to feed, where there were more people. And they stick around them to nest. But the juveniles, they hunt these areas.”

“You can usually hear them coming, so you have plenty of time to get away. And none of them breathe fire yet.”

The whole breathing fire thing was new to me, but Leslie was non-plussed; I could see her army training kicking in right away, and she was taking in info without giving them any back.

I just wanted to find a way to make friends, so I could stop worrying about them attacking us.

“How do you kill them?” Leslie asked.

Hector and Sophia now shared a laugh I felt was too big. We were very entertaining to them.

“If you figure that out, let us know,” Hector retorted.

“In the off chance any of them get hurt, the bigger ones always eat them before we get a shot, or swoop down and pick them up and fly away,” Sophia added.

“Do they still eat…us?” Leslie was brave enough to ask what I was thinking.

“Yeah. But we try not to give them an opportunity.” Hector said through his final slurps of water.

The two of them stood up. And Leslie and I jumped down from the rock and landed in front of them. I was still creaky from the pod, and so was Leslie.

As we got up, we saw Hector leering at us, no doubt searching for weakness.

“You two really aren’t from around here, are you?”

“Technically, we are. Just from a long time ago,” I answered.

“Still going with the time traveler thing, huh?” Sophia was probing us for more, but I only had the truth to offer even if she didn’t believe it.

The two of them headed back into the underbrush, and we followed.

“Do you two live alone out here?”

They shared a look, and I could tell they didn’t want to answer.

“We have friends. Lots of them.” Sophia offered.

“It’s our day to hunt. Guess we’re bringing something else home.”

Hector’s words should have put a smile on my face, but I was watching Leslie, who showed only signs of concern.

Both of them scurried ahead, and I took a breath to follow. Leslie leaned into me.

And I wrapped my arms around her for a hug. “I know, today has been a lot; I need one too.”

But she pushed me off and whispered in my ear, “I’m not trying to hug you, I just…if it’s really 100 years in the future. We may not know what these people are like.”

“You think they’re going to be assholes,” I pondered.

“Sure. Or what if they’re like…cannibals?”

That had not occurred to me.

And suddenly, I wasn’t sure we should be following these two people.

“If that’s true, then I hope they kill us before any of the eating happens.”

Leslie shrugged and held her rifle close. “They were so surprised to see this gun; I have a feeling we could shoot our way out. So stay close.”

I was already way ahead of her. After another twenty minutes of scurrying through the thicket, we emerged onto what I can only call an old road. It was made of rubble but clearly had been asphalt at one time.

The pathway narrowed the further we went, and the rubble grew in piles. It funneled us toward a large metal gate, built from scraps of siding, iron fences, and car hoods.

It was rusted, rickety, and vast—probably twenty feet tall. There were people walking at the top on patrol. At its center was an astronomically large telescope, like one taken from an observatory.

But instead of pointing up, it pointed outward. Then it moved slowly, focusing down at us.

Hector whistled up at the gate.

“We brought outsiders. And they both have guns. Seriously.”

Leslie reached for her Henry and began to back away.

Before I could get my Glock out to react to her body’s sentiment, men popped out of hatches hidden in the rubble and grabbed us.

Sacks were thrown over our heads, and for the second time that day, I was knocked out.

THE NEW NEW

Words cannot express how shitty it is to wake up from extended hibernation one day and, like six hours later, wake up again from what was probably a low-grade concussion.

I thought I had pissed myself while unconscious, something I hadn’t done since drinking in college, and maybe once post-divorce, but we really don’t have time to harp on that time.

My pants were wet, and I wanted to know why.  

To my relief, they pulled the sack off my head, and I was facedown in the sand, the tide rolling in. Leslie was next to me, but she had found the strength to sit up and face our captors.

I groaned as I rolled over and got on my knees.

“Do you recognize where we are?” Leslie nodded behind her. I looked and could see the wooden stumps of an old pier stretching into the ocean.

“Is that…Long Wharf Pier?”

“ Yes. We had our first date at a cafe around here,” I offered.

Leslie laughed and nodded. I wondered how she classified that memory, but I didn’t have time to interrogate her on it.

“That was so long ago.”

“Literally.”

Waves lapped at our backs, and I could feel the tide shifting me in the sand.

It was late afternoon, and I finally got to see an unadulterated look at the sky. There were no clouds by the ocean, but the cold, salt water made me shiver as it crept up toward us.

It was getting deeper by the minute, and I had a feeling that was the point.

Across from us, Hector stood in front of around fifty people, all in homemade clothes and each carrying weapons. They had our packs in front of them, all sorted out on the beach.

Sophia sat off to the side. She always had that gentle smirk on her face. Like she thought everything was funny. Her ear was pressed to what looked like a huge megaphone, but it was mostly underwater. She occasionally looked over at us, but remained preoccupied.

To my right and left were huge walls, all built from discarded metal. They opened up to the beach, isolating this section to only its inhabitants.

I tried to wave, and that’s when I realized my hands were tied behind my back.

“Hi. I’m Gus. This is Leslie. I feel like I keep introducing myself, and I’m not getting much from all of you. Just wondering—you guys aren’t cannibals, are you?”

There was a murmur of horror that fell over the crowd; I had definitely offended them.

Leslie shook her head at me. “Way to ease us into the conversation.”

“I was taking a page from your book,” I hissed back at her.

An elderly woman stood next to Hector. She had long, flowing white hair and held Leslie’s Henry rifle. She examined the barrel and the trigger.

“If you want to see it work, put the metal end in your mouth.” Leslie proved my point with that quip. She was not going to win anyone with kindness, but she was also crafty enough to take a few of them with her if they were going to kill us anyway.

“We know what a gun is. We just have never seen one in person. Where’d you get it?” The old woman approached us and crouched to talk.

“It was my father’s. And it was a bitch to sight, so don’t mess it up.”

Despite being on opposite sides of the surf, Leslie and this woman were cut from the same cloth. And neither would back down.

That meant all diplomacy was up to me.

“I feel like we’re all off on the wrong foot, so maybe we could get an idea of why we’re tied up and who we’re talking to before we all jump in here.”

“We’re tied up because this whole village has fifty people in it; maybe five of them can really fight. And one of them is listening for something coming underwater. I’d venture your monsters come from the sea. And the others all seem like middle-aged scavengers, maybe small crop farmers. And this old broad spends her days reading, which is why they call her The Historian.”

Sophia cackled.

Leslie spat in her general direction, and it was immediately understood they didn’t like each other. And this adversarial relationship wouldn’t be solved today.

One of the things I always admired about Leslie is that she didn’t suffer any fools. But we were literally suffering, and I could tell her probably correct assessment of the situation had not made us any more friends.

“Yes, that’s our point of view, so tell us yours.”

This reminded me a lot of our time, when one of those rich assholes would have a dog that got loose. We had a guy who was obsessed with those Belgian dogs from John Wick that could run up walls and shit. Anyway, they were always getting out and killing someone else’s sheep.

Many a time I’d track them down just to find Leslie on the scene, screaming at the owner while I tried to play nice. The difference is I needed that owner to pay me; she just needed to make sure they heard her.

And these beach people were definitely listening.

I was doing my best to handle this, but it felt like I was between two dogs ready to snap at one another. Somehow, I was guaranteed to get bit.

The Old Woman looked from the group back to us.

“My name is Cara. Yes, I’m the historian around here. I’ve read all the books we can find, and studied all the maps. Our history is known to me. They tell me you’re time travelers. And since that’s impossible, I think you’re probably spies from a larger settlement looking to loot. One with guns. Maybe you’re the cannibals, looking for weaker encampments.”

She folded her arms crossly.

“Okay, I want to apologize for putting the whole cannibal rape thing out into the air, but we are time travelers. And I know that sounds insane, but in that pack I have a driver’s license, I have cash, so many credit cards, maybe even a parking ticket with a date on it—”

I knew this was all just flailing, but the tide was rushing in, and now I was spitting water. I finally understood the picture: Leslie and I had our hands tied to the same post, and given the steepness of the shore, we would be underwater within the hour.

“You could have crafted all that out of any of the various tombs in this forest, or maybe in the city where your people dwell.”

I was not making headway with The Historian.

“We’re not crafty people,” I tried.

“You sure? This one tried to get me up and put a gun in my mouth?” Cara kicked Leslie.

“Not crafty enough.” Leslie was not making my life easier.

“The water is coming in; I’d bet you two have only a few minutes left. So if you were going to give us a reason to keep you alive, I’d try that now.”

“How about we’re innocent people?” Leslie was using a tactic I was going to try, but it seemed like they didn’t care.

“No one alive is innocent. And we’re not looking for new members, despite your claim you can hunt and fight. We call this place Haven. It’s our home, and we’ll do whatever it takes to protect it. We’re a small group, but we’ve built it over the years. It keeps them out, and… others too.”

I just started laughing, and everyone now was staring at me, including Leslie.

“Sorry, I know this is crazy, but 100 years ago, this place was called New Haven…so you all live in New New Haven, that’s so bananas. I mean, you put that and The Wizard of Oz quote together — Like, what are the odds?”

“I said I read the maps, you idiot. We decided to shorten it. And these people have heard of The Wizard of Oz; we have the novelization in our library.” Cara was incredulous.  

I shot Sophia and Hector a look; they had played me well.

“We’re not as helpless or as stupid as you’d hoped, huh?”

“I was holding out hope you were friendly,” I shot back.

“For a few time travelers, you don’t seem to have any information that’s valuable to us. Which makes your lives disposable. ”

That’s when a powerful wave hit my back and pushed me under. Leslie and I were tossed by the surf; it was merciless until the tide rolled backward.

I was not a good swimmer, but I also didn’t want to die here. So I did whatever I could to get my head above the waves and to call out not for help, but for common ground.

Or, at least, solid footing.

“We can’t tell you how they got here, but if you untie us and give us our stuff back, we can show you how to kill them.”

A wave cut me off and pushed me under, but I got back to the surface to see the reaction.

Cara was laughing.

Even Leslie, who was sucking air into her lungs, couldn’t keep her end of the ruse up. I ignored her and pleaded with everyone assembled on the beach.  

“I’m serious. You don’t believe I’m from the past, but I am. I know where stuff was back then.  And in my time, I was a…well…I know animals. And if you free us, I’ll march back here tomorrow morning with one of their heads and prove it to you.”

Cara sucked her tongue for what felt like an eternity, when you’re only breathing every other minute because you’re submerged in water otherwise.

“Please—” was all I could get out before I was swirled around again, as my middle school bully had once again forced my head into a toilet and flushed.

Finally, I felt two hands lift me and her from the surf. Hector loomed over us with a stone knife and cut us loose. They dragged us up the beach, and we lay in front of the other inhabitants.

Sophia left her post to watch but stayed on the outskirts. I got the feeling she was a loner. I knew her body language because it was my own.

But at the moment, I concentrated on getting the salt water out of my lungs.

I was wheezing, and Leslie was wheezing next to me. We were far enough away from the waves to finally suck some air in and see the rest of the walled space.

“Just give us our stuff back, let us out, and we’ll be on our way. We don’t want to be here any more than you want us to be here.” Leslie was finally level-headed.

And so was Cara. Just not the way we needed her to be.

“We will once your friend here brings me the head of a monster. Until then, you’ll live as our prisoner. Then, the sea or whatever crawls out of it can have you.”

I watched as they dragged Leslie away from me and closed off the area for me to chase after her. My pack was shoved to me, but they didn’t return my gun.

“Any chance I could have my Glock?”

“The guns stay here,” Hector muttered as he marched me through town.

I took my time to glance at the arable farming area, small fields and makeshift homes, a mix of teepees, cabins, and other structures.

It was cozy, if not totally rustic. There was no electricity, but there were sporadic fires and a mix of scavenged former modernity and homemade accents that proved human ingenuity.

Leslie was dragged the opposite way as me by Sophia. She left me with harrowing parting words. “Just run. Whatever you do…run!”

Sophia pushed her into a building, and Leslie’s cries were cut off from my ears.

The sun was falling as they pushed me out of the gate. They gathered in the rut to look down at me. I waved up at them, still determined to kill with kindness…for now.

“One day, nightfall tomorrow, or she dies,” Cara called down to me. I looked to her right, at Hector, who gazed down at me without empathy.

But he said nothing. It was clear who was in charge here, and it wasn’t the people I had met.

My eyes scanned all over for Leslie, but I couldn’t see her, and I had no idea if she could hear me, but I wanted Leslie to hold out hope. I wanted her to know I would be back.

That despite it all, I wanted to share another piece of Juicy Fruit with her. Maybe just because in all the craziness, I had the same feeling I had a few years ago, standing on that cold street in New York after I moved out, holding my cardboard box.

I was truly alone. And unlike when I was a kid, that wasn’t sitting well with me.

“I’m coming back, Leslie. I promise! I’ll be back! I won’t leave you.”

Everyone on the top of the fence laughed at me except for Sophia, who had genuine pity on her face. No smirk in sight. But that shifted into worry pretty quickly.

That’s when I heard it, a roar in the distance. It rang through the air and signaled them to retreat.

And signaled me that it was time to run.

Let me start by telling you a truth you can’t say to most yuppies without pushback: Not all animals are created equal. I should know; I peel them off the side of the road for a living.

It’s safe to say some animals make a bigger mess than others. No one is calling me to scrape up a squirrel, and we generally let a raccoon decay out there as well.

But if you’re unlucky enough to hit a deer or a black bear and you survive, chances are you’ll see me out there with the EMTs. I’ll be the guy with the flatbed truck, shovel, and the power washer making the side of the road stain-free again.

They call it “Animal Control,” but it’s really just cleanup.

And I’ve seen it all, both dead and alive. None of it prepared me for the monsters. I guess nothing could have, which is why I am so confused about how I got here.

Why was I chosen?

How am I surviving all of this?

Let me start from the beginning.

I was there the day everything changed, 100 years ago… or was it just 24 hours?

It started on a sunny morning. My day began in the front yard of a righteous prick in yuppieville Connecticut, where money has bought these people everything their hearts desire, and they have no idea how to take care of most of it.

Jack Miller, the owner of this vast property, stood between the two giant oak trees at the foot of his half-mile-long driveway. These were old-growth forest, the only ones he didn’t cut down in order to install a stupid fountain and hedgerow out here.

Jack called me frantic, and I had answered.

“You’ve got Gus; animals are no fuss…”

I sat next to Jack in his Quad and took the long ride back to his mansion. He didn’t want my F-250 tearing up his newly paved driveway. Jack took me through the glorious house, modeled after some French castle—I wasn’t listening—and into a storm cellar.

The place reminded me of that wine storage place in that '40s Hitchcock movie my Dad and I watched a few weeks ago. You know the one. In the movie, there was like uranium hidden there.

Anyway, as we strutted past expensive bottles of wine, I heard the loud meows.

Apparently, there was a cat that was stuck between a few loose bricks.

Jack was indicative of a lot of the people who had moved to the New Haven area. He was in charge of a data center they were clearing forest space to put in.

My name was on a dozen petitions to stop him and his company, but I also needed to cover my rent and didn’t want to see his cat get hurt, so I was here to help.

As long as those checks came straight from his personal account and not Bionetic Industries, I didn’t think that made me a hypocrite.

His animals needed help, too.

The life of an Animal Control guy is not a glamorous one, even in the expensive ZIP codes, where all your clients are Wall Street bros and trophy wives who have no idea what to do with all the animals that came with the farms they decided to retreat to once they cashed out.

So I spend a lot of time advising them. And believe it or not, I have sifted through pig shit more than once looking for lost wedding bands and a TAG Heuer watch.

But at least you could charge them more. I had a ton of student loans to pay off. And the F-250 was a splurge, considering I lived in a studio apartment.

That had more to do with my divorce. You don’t want to hear about that now; suffice it to say, it got me out of New York City and out there to the country.

Somewhere I could finally be alone… well, and close to my aging father.

I followed Jack deeper through his maze of worldly goods.

The loose bricks where the feline had gotten stuck were behind one of those old gun closets, the kind you’d see in rural English hunting mansions. It was full of every kind of gun you know about, and a few only insane collectors do.

Being in the country, I was immune to most Second Amendment Stans, being that I also was strapped pretty much everywhere I went out here, with a tame Glock-17 I had for efficiency.

The times I’d used the pistol, I was putting something out of its misery.

Today, I hoped, would not be one of those days.

And I was right; it would be unlike anything I had ever experienced.

The Miller house was indicative of that, but down here, in front of this armory, I was more in shock than in awe; this was a cabinet filled with strategic urban warfare.

I even saw what I thought were Claymore mines.

Jack saw me eyeing them and smirked.

“Oh, they’re real. I know a few weapons contractors. My company has a lucrative deal with them and the government. They hooked me up.”

“What do you use them for?” I asked slowly, hoping this wasn’t some sort of elaborate blood sport I had been lured into participating in.

“I dunno. I just thought it would be cool to have them. Like in Metal Gear Solid.”

Jack’s wealth and ignorance were enticing to me, even as he spoke fluent douchebag in this place. All I could do was nod back with enthusiasm.

Someday, maybe I’d have enough money to be as big of a tool. No, that was just my ex talking.

If I knew then what I know now, I’d have handed him one of the mines and pulled the safety pin. But back then, I nodded along with his bullshit.

I was not going to start any shit; I just wanted to be on my way.

Jack just shrugged. “Guns are just kinda cool. I guess I got addicted after my wife told me no more Pokémon cards. There are so many different kinds, and each has its own experience.”

Goddamn rich people, I thought.

We shifted the cabinet a few inches so I could reach the meows. The cat was indeed back there, but was not stuck in the bricks. She was sitting with a sweet litter of kittens.

I took them out of the wall one by one, and then the scared mother cat, who hissed and scratched, but calmed as soon as I put her in a loose wine box with her kids.

“Shit… you want them?”

I wanted to tell him off, but I just nodded and told him it would cost.

Jack reached for his wallet without hesitation.

I loaded the box with a couple of golf towels I took off a few sets of clubs in the corner. As I looked around, this guy had random collections of all the most expensive things in the world, and none of them made him satisfied. I should find comfort in that, but all I got was jealous.

And a little pissed, because he didn’t want to collect the cats!

I had found homes for three of the ten before I made it back into town, and arranged for all of them to be picked up at a local retirement center. The old people there were going to bottle-feed the kittens first. And that place could use a mother cat to chase away the mice.

That’s when the call came in from my Dad. He told me I had to get to his place right away, and his voice assured me there was something going on I had to see for myself.

My Dad was the most boring guy I had ever met. I had never heard him so worked up, not even when my Mom died.

So I pressed the gas on the truck and burned half a tank speeding to his homestead.

THE HAMSTER BALL Dad lived in the middle of nowhere, just below Sleeping Giant State Park. He bought a place and moved from D.C., where I grew up, when he retired.

I never knew how to answer when people asked me what he did for a living. He was one of those guys who went to an office and never said much more than his boss was an asshole and they were making him work late that night.

It had something to do with computers, the environment, defense contractors—that’s all I had picked up in the thirty-five years I’d been on this planet.

His passions were our pets, which he filled our house with after Mom died, and which I spent all my spare time taking care of when he was stuck long hours at work.

You could say Animal Control chose me from a very young age.

I parked my truck next to another in the driveway.

That’s why I was so shocked to pull down his long driveway and see Leslie waiting for us. And damn, of course she looked really good in her green uniform and broad-brimmed hat.

She was exactly the kind of woman you’d want to meet at the end of the world.

My history with women was actually a lot like my history with animals. I enjoyed the ones with claws and teeth, even though I always wound up getting scratched and bitten.

Leslie’s line of work fit the bill there. She was a park ranger and worked part-time for the game warden. She told me the only dangerous animals in Connecticut were rich people with new hunting rifles, and that made me laugh so hard I was immediately smitten.

I ran into her a lot in my line of work, but post-divorce and living in a 600-square-foot apartment, I haven’t had the confidence to ask her out.

Even worse, I made the mistake of talking to my dad about that last week during a very sad birthday dinner he bought me. He told me he had a solution for that, and now, standing next to her in his front yard… I was worried he called her here to put the pressure on me.

The sky had darkened on my drive, like we were in store for one of those springtime showers.

As thunder crackled, we both took refuge in my Dad’s open garage.

“I knocked,” Leslie said. “Your Dad told me he was getting a big surprise ready and to wait for you out here. Got any idea what he has in store?”

I tried to respond eloquently, but all I managed was, “Your breath is really nice.”

She laughed at me openly, and I turned fuchsia this time.

Leslie dug in her pocket and took out a pack of Juicy Fruit.

“The flavor doesn’t last long, but it's my favorite.”

I tucked a piece in my jowls and felt my dry mouth dissipate. It was nice being close to her and watching the falling rain. Even the crackle of lightning felt metaphorical between us. This could have been the start of a romantic moment, but that’s when Dad’s voice cut through the air.

“It’s time.”

We turned to see my father look from us up to the sky, where clouds were circling ominously.

“It’s time you get inside the hamster balls,” Dad said, like it wasn’t the most insane thing we’d heard in our lives. He beckoned for us to enter the home.

“Sorry—the what?!” Leslie and I responded in unison.

We followed Dad into the house with all our stuff. He didn’t help us carry anything; he was too agitated. Rain pitter-pattered on the roof, and the thunder was getting louder. We could barely hear ourselves think, let alone listen to my Dad talking.

“I know you two haven’t worked out yet, but you need to get out of your own way. You can’t do this alone… trust me, I’ve tried.”

He kept going on and on about life and needing someone, the kind of rambling that made Leslie and me share a look, and made me begin to feel guilty that I had not been there enough for him.

“I’m here now, let’s focus on that and try to…”

“I invited you both because I want you to be here tomorrow, too.”

“You’re freaking me out, Dad.”

That’s when I felt all the words leave my mouth and the air leave my lungs.

Instead of seeing his rickety old couch, stained coffee table, and ottomans, the whole room had been gutted. The hardwood floors were ripped up and replaced with endless coils of wire leading to various generators around the room.

The floral wallpaper was gone, ripped to shreds, and so was the insulation and the drywall.

Instead, the electrical system was exposed on the walls, and sparks were flying.

In the middle of the room were two clear balls… just big enough for a moderately sized human to stand inside. They had chairs in their center and compartments on the floor, like footlockers.

“Get in.”

These words came out direct and forceful. It was highly unusual for the old coot.

We assumed my father was kidding, but his face said otherwise. In fact, he’d gone very pale, and his eyes were watering, as if he was about to cry.

“I don’t have time to explain, but if you both get in and pack up, I’ll try before they’re here.”

Leslie’s face showed she was as concerned as I was. But we both were having trouble formulating words.

“I’m sorry, I think we should all just take a moment to talk this out.”

Leave it to Leslie to logic through this. I would think she’d know the men in this family are just impulsive doers by now.

Dad tapped his foot, indicating there was no time for that.

“I know you think I’m crazy. I am crazy. But right now, as your father and our friend, I’m doing my best to save your lives. Where you take this from here, well, I wish I could be there to see it, but I know you’ll do well.”

“Okay, Dad, I think we should make you like a cup of tea or something. And also maybe get you away from all this electrical gear because I think it’s affecting your brain.”

Another thunder strike rattled the windows, but this one didn’t go away. It just kept shaking, like we were in the middle of an earthquake. Every time we thought it would subside, the whole world would shake again.

“August, I am your father. I have never asked anything of you. But right now, I’m telling you and this lovely woman to get in the goddamn hamster ball so I can see you both live.”

Neither of us moved until he snapped—“NOW!”

If I had known these would be my last words to him, I would have said something more meaningful. I would have told him I loved him.

I would have told him that every sacrifice he made for me as a kid, all the freedom he trusted me to have, and all the grace he gave me when I screwed up meant the world to me.

That they were a warm blanket that covered me as I mourned my mother, and that I wish I could have found a way to repay him for that.

Instead, all I mustered was “ALRIGHT! CHILL OUT!”

Leslie and I each walked to our respective balls.

“You don’t have to do this,” I told her.

“I know,” she said. “But I’m kind of scared of whatever is about to happen.”

And with that, Leslie entered the sheer casing that seemed to call to both pure senses of curiosity and adventure—and also the chance to step aside from someone you just showed all your cards to, and to be alone.

They had pentagonal entrances on the underside that we had to stoop to climb inside.

We threw our packs into the footlockers below the chairs and then strapped into the pilot chairs as Dad went around the room, turning on all the generators.

The earth was shaking more frequently now, and between the thunder and the generators, you couldn’t hear a damn thing.

Leslie looked at me through her translucent ball, and I looked back at her and shrugged. I touched the exterior, and it felt like very thick glass.

That’s when Dad’s voice hit us through a small speaker in the hamster balls.

“Don’t bother to talk back; this microphone only goes one way.”

He was wearing a headset and carried a thick metal stopper. Before I could protest, he pressed it into the opening of my ball, and it sucked shut.

Then he quickly did the same to Leslie’s ball.

Even if we wanted to get out to yell at him, the chair buckles pulled us tightly.

We both realized we had no control over what was happening.

“My work for the government—well, this is what I was in charge of all those years. I wasn’t sure what they were going to use it for, but I guess they knew this was coming. Of course they knew it was coming, what am I saying? The answers were in front of me. You can’t have one population growing as fast as ours without natural predation. You taught me that.”

There was a gust of what felt like wind, and the roof of the house ripped off. As I looked up into the sky, I saw black clouds… and something flying in them.

“They’re here.”

Rain splashed down on the hamster balls.

And the roar of an animal I had never heard before pierced through our ears. Its bellow broke the glass windows and announced an imminent threat.

Dad looked past the balls toward something we couldn’t see, then he tapped some comfort onto the balls’ thick exterior.

“Special polymer. Unbreakable. Dissolves with the right mixture of liquid chemicals in about 100 years.”

Leslie and I were not having fun with this scientific invention at that moment. And I don’t think he was either. He looked forlorn, resigned to something about to go down.

“The world is going to need you more than you know. When you get out, find each other.”

Dad backed away from the balls, toward the garage.

“It’ll work out. I know it. Just… have a nice nap.”

“The hell it will. Either get in here or get back here. Let us out!”

I was losing my cool, both scared of whatever made him afraid and overcome by the immediate feeling that I had absolutely no idea what was about to happen, but knew it would change me forever.

My Dad didn’t budge; he just blew me a kiss.

“You’re going to need each other.”

I wanted to ask for more, but a giant, scaly foot descended into the home and kicked my hamster ball through the remaining walls and into the sky.

KAIJU WORLD CUP I’m sure you want to hear about these formidable beasts, but indulge me for a moment. I played all the available sports growing up, and soccer was easily my worst. I liked anything where you could run into someone at full speed, and they frown on that in European football.

Banging into people and walls is sort of how I got out my mom’s death in a healthier fashion than some of the other choices that are available to the youth of America.

So in between my journeys out in the wilderness and school, Dad made sure I tried anything full-contact to get my energy out and to stay out of trouble.

Especially after Mom died and no one was home to look out for me.

My reward for being good and not getting into trouble? Well, aside from complete autonomy, I got to watch Godzilla movies with him at night. We’d curl up on the couch, open some sodas and chips—I was a salt and vinegar guy—and bask in the destruction.

The pizza would arrive halfway through, and we’d pause to talk to each other and recount the descriptions we saw on screen. I vividly remember teaching my Dad about how Godzilla was actually an apex predator we created through our recklessness.

He just smiled and let me rant.

To this day, I think about that when I see parents ignore their kids. My Dad embracing me as a weird little kid was one of the reasons I’m alive… for now.

But the point is, my Dad loved anything with “Kaiju” in it. You know, that fancy Japanese word for big freaking monsters that crash around cities and wreak havoc on the landscape.

That’s why I wish I could have seen his face when we saw the first one. But at that moment, I was like forty feet in the air, sailing like a soccer ball, and I only saw its face because I literally broke the low cloud surface before I fell backward.

And it was gnarly and full of teeth.

The beasts bellowed with an echo like a bullhorn.

Every bit of movement felt strained; they were not smooth but herky-jerky. Even the ones flapping in the sky felt like they were adjusting to life here.

Like the Tin Man in need of an oil can.

But I was about to see them shake the rust off in real time.

I landed hard, but the hamster ball stayed intact, and the seat's shocks provided some cushion against the impact.

Too bad my piece of Juicy Fruit was forced out of my mouth and hit the inside of the hamster ball. It stuck there in a gob of my own spit, but I had no time to wipe it off.

As I gazed out of the contraption, I saw several other enormous animals strutting across the landscape. They had to be a hundred feet, maybe two hundred.

These were different breeds than whatever kicked me.

In fact, they all looked like different animals. Some more mammalian, others reptilian, all kind of herding together, not attacking one another but scavenging for food on the ground.

Sniping and snarfing any person they could get their forked tongue or claw around.

They varied in size, from ones that were as big as a house, to ones whose heads careened up into the clouds.

Each had its own deafening voice. Their screeches and screams were so vile they would send piss down your pant leg.

The only thing that kept me from shitting myself was that my brain was going haywire. These seemed to defy most of what I knew about animals on this planet…

And that’s when I realized there was a strong possibility they weren’t from here.

Or maybe they were, and we had not seen them in a very long time.

And then I puked, because the jostling and rotation of the ball had my head actually spinning, too. The ball was gyroscoped, and it kept me upright, but I had never had a good stomach for roller coasters, and this felt like the ride from hell.

As I got my bearings, I saw Leslie’s ball speeding past me. The sides of her ball were all scratched, like something with big nails had tried to get in.

We both bumped into cars trying to escape, and pinballed until we came to a stop in someone’s front yard.

She took a second to look over, then we both looked back at my Dad’s house, which had been flattened. We saw a long, pointed tail drag over it, demolishing every window and wall.

By the time it disappeared, you couldn’t even tell there was a house there.

We sat for a moment and tried to catch our breath.

She was mumbling words to me, but I couldn’t hear anything. I could see fear in her eyes, so all I could muster was… “It’ll be okay,” which I had to mouth to her twice for her to get it.

She shook her head, “No.”

Even through the thick polymer, I understood her. And I sighed in agreement.

We took the landscape in. From this vantage point, we could see billows of smoke in the distance, and knew this was not isolated to our corner of the world.

This was everywhere, and it was really bad.

On the wooded side, tall trees were tossed into the air like they were nothing. Scars emerged in the forest; our attackers left muddy footprints the size of football fields.

The beasts had spread out over the vista, but there were more flying in the sky. They flapped leathery wings and swooped down like fighter jets, skimming the ground and gyrating away from debris.

I could see them feasting both near and far. They tossed red masses into the air or eviscerated them on the ground. They looked like they were in the buffet line.

My brain was trying to catch up with my eyes to understand what was going on, and that’s when I understood… they were eating people.

One by one, I saw them leap from tree cover, swoop down, and snatch and claw.

This was classic predation behavior, but this wasn’t the Serengeti.

It was fucking Connecticut.

Our hamster balls had stopped rolling in the front yard of some random rich couple. They were outside in their Lululemon active gear, gawking at the destruction.

They had a bunch of horses in their front yard. They were much smarter and had taken off, leaping over their fences and heading toward the woods.

If they were as smart as them, they would have followed.

But modern humans lack the foresight of wild animals.

Instead, they looked from the sky at us, then ran to the balls.

One of those giant things spotted them and swooped from the clouds. Its snout pressed the woman against my ball, wrapped its tongue around her, and then swallowed her whole.

I rocked back and forth as the man charged the beast, but he was snatched up by the claw on one of the giants and lifted into the clouds.

His screams died out as the animal flapped far away; the initial wind from its wings blew us back down the country lane, rolling at a leisurely pace.

We rolled past cars retreating and even a few people in golf carts.

A few of the flying beasts spotted us and landed atop the house to get a better look. They swooped back and forth, taking out stragglers until just our hamster balls remained in the grass.

The roof of the house these winged monsters rested on cracked and cracked under their weight.

As the attic and brick walls caved in, they jumped down and stomped across the yard, long tongues flicking at Leslie’s ball first. Our roll was too slow, and they caught up quickly.

She was screaming so loudly I could hear it through the cacophony of noise surrounding us.

One of the monsters bit down on her ball with its alligator snout.

Its teeth slid off the glass, which I had come to believe had to be some sort of indestructible polymer. The kaiju quickly gave up, but not before its tail smashed into my ball and sent me rolling down the road.

The last I saw of Leslie, a massive foot had pushed her ball deep into the mud of that front yard and rolled her into what used to be a vast koi pond.

I supposed she would be safe under the surface there, but I had no idea how we would get out of these things and how much air we’d have left, too.

My ball bounced off a John Deere someone had left behind. As I grasped around, trying to loosen the straps holding me in, I felt another rumble.

My ball skidded into a smashed Volkswagen and rested.

Perhaps the biggest of these monsters I’d seen was now walking toward me. It had feet the size of 18-wheelers, and its body drooped in long, thick fur.

You could call it sort of a woolly mammoth, but it was leaner, and its eyeballs bulged on the sides of its head and rotated quickly, assessing the situation as it lumbered.

My ball had rolled many miles from where I started. And somehow, I was back where my day began, just down the road from the Miller residence, staring at the two old oaks that remained.

For just a beat, I centered myself and took a deep breath.

That’s when a paw crunched down on one of the oak trees I so loved, but it amazingly missed the one I was now under.

The beast seemed to groan with every step.

As it passed over me, I could see some people clinging onto the fur, as well as long strands of debris caught in its hair. They were dropping and hitting the ground, likely not surviving those falls. I closed my eyes and tried to pivot as bodies fell near me and didn’t get back up.

As soon as the thumping ceased, I opened my eyes and assessed the damage.

The rain was creating incredibly sloppy conditions, and my ball had slid into a part of the destroyed road into a drainage pipe that ran underneath the other giant oak.

And these traipsing monsters left pond-sized footprints that were quickly filling with rain. I saw flash floods of debris and corpses crossing the fields, all headed toward me in this new ditch.

The water and debris hit me with a thud and lifted me and spun me around again until my ball boinked off the stone garden wall.

I was now in another ditch, and mud and grime swirled around me, covering the ball.

Just a few hours ago, I was out here helping a horse. Now I watched as animals I had never seen before marched through the field, toward the town.

They destroyed shopping centers and car parks as they went, knocking into apartment buildings and spraying fire and brimstone when necessary.

I saw a birdlike monster with a bear’s head swoop from the air, pick up a fire truck, and drop it on a church before plucking its inhabitants out and swallowing them whole.

The visceral acceptance of leaving the top of the food chain made me feel clammy.

I caught my breath and tried to wipe the condensation from inside the ball.

There was no sign of anyone out there, and no sign of Leslie. I looked the two hundred or so yards up the lane where I left her ball, but could see nothing.

I banged on the glass inside, but to my surprise, it started to turn grey. It was tinting from the inside. At first I thought this was my doing, but even the bottom I couldn’t reach was changing.

That’s when I heard the hissing. There was some sort of pink liquid filling the ball from tubes hidden in the spirals of the ball.

I looked down, but there were no leaks. This liquid was coming from inside the apparatus and rising; now it was mid-thigh, covering everything in front of me.

The interior of the ball became a computer screen with words that read: “Protective lining released” and then “Cryofreezing initiated.”

“You gotta be shitting me.”

The exterior of the ball was now rock-like and impenetrable. As the pink goop covered my face and neck, I gagged and swallowed some, but soon found I was able to breathe even though I was now completely submerged.

The goo was thick and cold. I could see it freezing solid from the bottom upward. I felt a wave of calm wash over me as the ball's exterior grew opaque, and a deep sleep whisked me away.

My last thoughts were for the world I was leaving behind, and a fear of what I would wake up to see. But nothing would have prepared me for the changes that would occur over the next 100 years. I’d just have to see it to believe it.

And even then, it would take me a while to understand...

(Part Two will post tomorrow...)

THE PRECIPICE OF THE NEW WORLD

Let me start by telling you a truth you can’t say to most yuppies without pushback: Not all animals are created equal. I should know; I peel them off the side of the road for a living.

It’s safe to say some animals make a bigger mess than others. No one is calling me to scrape up a squirrel, and we generally let a raccoon decay out there as well.

But if you’re unlucky enough to hit a deer or a black bear and you survive, chances are you’ll see me out there with the EMTs. I’ll be the guy with the flatbed truck, shovel, and the power washer making the side of the road stain-free again.

They call it “Animal Control,” but it’s really just cleanup.

And I’ve seen it all, both dead and alive. None of it prepared me for the monsters. I guess nothing could have, which is why I am so confused about how I got here.

Why was I chosen?

How am I surviving all of this?

Let me start from the beginning.

I was there the day everything changed, 100 years ago… or was it just 24 hours?

It started on a sunny morning. My day began in the front yard of a righteous prick in yuppieville Connecticut, where money has bought these people everything their hearts desire, and they have no idea how to take care of most of it.

Jack Miller, the owner of this vast property, stood between the two giant oak trees at the foot of his half-mile-long driveway. These were old-growth forest, the only ones he didn’t cut down in order to install a stupid fountain and hedgerow out here.

Jack called me frantic, and I had answered.

“You’ve got Gus; animals are no fuss…”

I sat next to Jack in his Quad and took the long ride back to his mansion. He didn’t want my F-250 tearing up his newly paved driveway. Jack took me through the glorious house, modeled after some French castle—I wasn’t listening—and into a storm cellar.

The place reminded me of that wine storage place in that '40s Hitchcock movie my Dad and I watched a few weeks ago. You know the one. In the movie, there was like uranium hidden there.

Anyway, as we strutted past expensive bottles of wine, I heard the loud meows.

Apparently, there was a cat that was stuck between a few loose bricks.

Jack was indicative of a lot of the people who had moved to the New Haven area. He was in charge of a data center they were clearing forest space to put in.

My name was on a dozen petitions to stop him and his company, but I also needed to cover my rent and didn’t want to see his cat get hurt, so I was here to help.

As long as those checks came straight from his personal account and not Bionetic Industries, I didn’t think that made me a hypocrite.

His animals needed help, too.

The life of an Animal Control guy is not a glamorous one, even in the expensive ZIP codes, where all your clients are Wall Street bros and trophy wives who have no idea what to do with all the animals that came with the farms they decided to retreat to once they cashed out.

So I spend a lot of time advising them. And believe it or not, I have sifted through pig shit more than once looking for lost wedding bands and a TAG Heuer watch.

But at least you could charge them more. I had a ton of student loans to pay off. And the F-250 was a splurge, considering I lived in a studio apartment.

That had more to do with my divorce. You don’t want to hear about that now; suffice it to say, it got me out of New York City and out there to the country.

Somewhere I could finally be alone… well, and close to my aging father.

I followed Jack deeper through his maze of worldly goods.

The loose bricks where the feline had gotten stuck were behind one of those old gun closets, the kind you’d see in rural English hunting mansions. It was full of every kind of gun you know about, and a few only insane collectors do.

Being in the country, I was immune to most Second Amendment Stans, being that I also was strapped pretty much everywhere I went out here, with a tame Glock-17 I had for efficiency.

The times I’d used the pistol, I was putting something out of its misery.

Today, I hoped, would not be one of those days.

And I was right; it would be unlike anything I had ever experienced.

The Miller house was indicative of that, but down here, in front of this armory, I was more in shock than in awe; this was a cabinet filled with strategic urban warfare.

I even saw what I thought were Claymore mines.

Jack saw me eyeing them and smirked.

“Oh, they’re real. I know a few weapons contractors. My company has a lucrative deal with them and the government. They hooked me up.”

“What do you use them for?” I asked slowly, hoping this wasn’t some sort of elaborate blood sport I had been lured into participating in.

“I dunno. I just thought it would be cool to have them. Like in Metal Gear Solid.”

Jack’s wealth and ignorance were enticing to me, even as he spoke fluent douchebag in this place. All I could do was nod back with enthusiasm.

Someday, maybe I’d have enough money to be as big of a tool. No, that was just my ex talking.

If I knew then what I know now, I’d have handed him one of the mines and pulled the safety pin. But back then, I nodded along with his bullshit.

I was not going to start any shit; I just wanted to be on my way.

Jack just shrugged. “Guns are just kinda cool. I guess I got addicted after my wife told me no more Pokémon cards. There are so many different kinds, and each has its own experience.”

Goddamn rich people, I thought.

We shifted the cabinet a few inches so I could reach the meows. The cat was indeed back there, but was not stuck in the bricks. She was sitting with a sweet litter of kittens.

I took them out of the wall one by one, and then the scared mother cat, who hissed and scratched, but calmed as soon as I put her in a loose wine box with her kids.

“Shit… you want them?”

I wanted to tell him off, but I just nodded and told him it would cost.

Jack reached for his wallet without hesitation.

I loaded the box with a couple of golf towels I took off a few sets of clubs in the corner. As I looked around, this guy had random collections of all the most expensive things in the world, and none of them made him satisfied. I should find comfort in that, but all I got was jealous.

And a little pissed, because he didn’t want to collect the cats!

I had found homes for three of the ten before I made it back into town, and arranged for all of them to be picked up at a local retirement center. The old people there were going to bottle-feed the kittens first. And that place could use a mother cat to chase away the mice.

That’s when the call came in from my Dad. He told me I had to get to his place right away, and his voice assured me there was something going on I had to see for myself.

My Dad was the most boring guy I had ever met. I had never heard him so worked up, not even when my Mom died.

So I pressed the gas on the truck and burned half a tank speeding to his homestead.

THE HAMSTER BALL

Dad lived in the middle of nowhere, just below Sleeping Giant State Park. He bought a place and moved from D.C., where I grew up, when he retired.

I never knew how to answer when people asked me what he did for a living. He was one of those guys who went to an office and never said much more than his boss was an asshole and they were making him work late that night.

It had something to do with computers, the environment, defense contractors—that’s all I had picked up in the thirty-five years I’d been on this planet.

His passions were our pets, which he filled our house with after Mom died, and which I spent all my spare time taking care of when he was stuck long hours at work.

You could say Animal Control chose me from a very young age.

I parked my truck next to another in the driveway.

That’s why I was so shocked to pull down his long driveway and see Leslie waiting for us. And damn, of course she looked really good in her green uniform and broad-brimmed hat.

She was exactly the kind of woman you’d want to meet at the end of the world.

My history with women was actually a lot like my history with animals. I enjoyed the ones with claws and teeth, even though I always wound up getting scratched and bitten.

Leslie’s line of work fit the bill there. She was a park ranger and worked part-time for the game warden. She told me the only dangerous animals in Connecticut were rich people with new hunting rifles, and that made me laugh so hard I was immediately smitten.

I ran into her a lot in my line of work, but post-divorce and living in a 600-square-foot apartment, I haven’t had the confidence to ask her out.

Even worse, I made the mistake of talking to my dad about that last week during a very sad birthday dinner he bought me. He told me he had a solution for that, and now, standing next to her in his front yard… I was worried he called her here to put the pressure on me.

The sky had darkened on my drive, like we were in store for one of those springtime showers.

As thunder crackled, we both took refuge in my Dad’s open garage.

“I knocked,” Leslie said. “Your Dad told me he was getting a big surprise ready and to wait for you out here. Got any idea what he has in store?”

I tried to respond eloquently, but all I managed was, “Your breath is really nice.”

She laughed at me openly, and I turned fuchsia this time.

Leslie dug in her pocket and took out a pack of Juicy Fruit.

“The flavor doesn’t last long, but it's my favorite.”

I tucked a piece in my jowls and felt my dry mouth dissipate. It was nice being close to her and watching the falling rain. Even the crackle of lightning felt metaphorical between us. This could have been the start of a romantic moment, but that’s when Dad’s voice cut through the air.

“It’s time.”

We turned to see my father look from us up to the sky, where clouds were circling ominously.

“It’s time you get inside the hamster balls,” Dad said, like it wasn’t the most insane thing we’d heard in our lives. He beckoned for us to enter the home.

“Sorry—the what?!” Leslie and I responded in unison.

We followed Dad into the house with all our stuff. He didn’t help us carry anything; he was too agitated. Rain pitter-pattered on the roof, and the thunder was getting louder. We could barely hear ourselves think, let alone listen to my Dad talking.

“I know you two haven’t worked out yet, but you need to get out of your own way. You can’t do this alone… trust me, I’ve tried.”

He kept going on and on about life and needing someone, the kind of rambling that made Leslie and me share a look, and made me begin to feel guilty that I had not been there enough for him.

“I’m here now, let’s focus on that and try to…”

“I invited you both because I want you to be here tomorrow, too.”

“You’re freaking me out, Dad.”

That’s when I felt all the words leave my mouth and the air leave my lungs.

Instead of seeing his rickety old couch, stained coffee table, and ottomans, the whole room had been gutted. The hardwood floors were ripped up and replaced with endless coils of wire leading to various generators around the room.

The floral wallpaper was gone, ripped to shreds, and so was the insulation and the drywall.

Instead, the electrical system was exposed on the walls, and sparks were flying.

In the middle of the room were two clear balls… just big enough for a moderately sized human to stand inside. They had chairs in their center and compartments on the floor, like footlockers.

“Get in.”

These words came out direct and forceful. It was highly unusual for the old coot.

We assumed my father was kidding, but his face said otherwise. In fact, he’d gone very pale, and his eyes were watering, as if he was about to cry.

“I don’t have time to explain, but if you both get in and pack up, I’ll try before they’re here.”

Leslie’s face showed she was as concerned as I was. But we both were having trouble formulating words.

“I’m sorry, I think we should all just take a moment to talk this out.”

Leave it to Leslie to logic through this. I would think she’d know the men in this family are just impulsive doers by now.

Dad tapped his foot, indicating there was no time for that.

“I know you think I’m crazy. I am crazy. But right now, as your father and our friend, I’m doing my best to save your lives. Where you take this from here, well, I wish I could be there to see it, but I know you’ll do well.”

“Okay, Dad, I think we should make you like a cup of tea or something. And also maybe get you away from all this electrical gear because I think it’s affecting your brain.”

Another thunder strike rattled the windows, but this one didn’t go away. It just kept shaking, like we were in the middle of an earthquake. Every time we thought it would subside, the whole world would shake again.

“August, I am your father. I have never asked anything of you. But right now, I’m telling you and this lovely woman to get in the goddamn hamster ball so I can see you both live.”

Neither of us moved until he snapped—“NOW!”

If I had known these would be my last words to him, I would have said something more meaningful. I would have told him I loved him.

I would have told him that every sacrifice he made for me as a kid, all the freedom he trusted me to have, and all the grace he gave me when I screwed up meant the world to me.

That they were a warm blanket that covered me as I mourned my mother, and that I wish I could have found a way to repay him for that.

Instead, all I mustered was “ALRIGHT! CHILL OUT!”

Leslie and I each walked to our respective balls.

“You don’t have to do this,” I told her.

“I know,” she said. “But I’m kind of scared of whatever is about to happen.”

And with that, Leslie entered the sheer casing that seemed to call to both pure senses of curiosity and adventure—and also the chance to step aside from someone you just showed all your cards to, and to be alone.

They had pentagonal entrances on the underside that we had to stoop to climb inside.

We threw our packs into the footlockers below the chairs and then strapped into the pilot chairs as Dad went around the room, turning on all the generators.

The earth was shaking more frequently now, and between the thunder and the generators, you couldn’t hear a damn thing.

Leslie looked at me through her translucent ball, and I looked back at her and shrugged. I touched the exterior, and it felt like very thick glass.

That’s when Dad’s voice hit us through a small speaker in the hamster balls.

“Don’t bother to talk back; this microphone only goes one way.”

He was wearing a headset and carried a thick metal stopper. Before I could protest, he pressed it into the opening of my ball, and it sucked shut.

Then he quickly did the same to Leslie’s ball.

Even if we wanted to get out to yell at him, the chair buckles pulled us tightly.

We both realized we had no control over what was happening.

“My work for the government—well, this is what I was in charge of all those years. I wasn’t sure what they were going to use it for, but I guess they knew this was coming. Of course they knew it was coming, what am I saying? The answers were in front of me. You can’t have one population growing as fast as ours without natural predation. You taught me that.”

There was a gust of what felt like wind, and the roof of the house ripped off. As I looked up into the sky, I saw black clouds… and something flying in them.

“They’re here.”

Rain splashed down on the hamster balls.

And the roar of an animal I had never heard before pierced through our ears. Its bellow broke the glass windows and announced an imminent threat.

Dad looked past the balls toward something we couldn’t see, then he tapped some comfort onto the balls’ thick exterior.

“Special polymer. Unbreakable. Dissolves with the right mixture of liquid chemicals in about 100 years.”

Leslie and I were not having fun with this scientific invention at that moment. And I don’t think he was either. He looked forlorn, resigned to something about to go down.

“The world is going to need you more than you know. When you get out, find each other.”

Dad backed away from the balls, toward the garage.

“It’ll work out. I know it. Just… have a nice nap.”

“The hell it will. Either get in here or get back here. Let us out!”

I was losing my cool, both scared of whatever made him afraid and overcome by the immediate feeling that I had absolutely no idea what was about to happen, but knew it would change me forever.

My Dad didn’t budge; he just blew me a kiss.

“You’re going to need each other.”

I wanted to ask for more, but a giant, scaly foot descended into the home and kicked my hamster ball through the remaining walls and into the sky.

KAIJU WORLD CUP

I’m sure you want to hear about these formidable beasts, but indulge me for a moment. I played all the available sports growing up, and soccer was easily my worst. I liked anything where you could run into someone at full speed, and they frown on that in European football.

Banging into people and walls is sort of how I got out my mom’s death in a healthier fashion than some of the other choices that are available to the youth of America.

So in between my journeys out in the wilderness and school, Dad made sure I tried anything full-contact to get my energy out and to stay out of trouble.

Especially after Mom died and no one was home to look out for me.

My reward for being good and not getting into trouble? Well, aside from complete autonomy, I got to watch Godzilla movies with him at night. We’d curl up on the couch, open some sodas and chips—I was a salt and vinegar guy—and bask in the destruction.

The pizza would arrive halfway through, and we’d pause to talk to each other and recount the descriptions we saw on screen. I vividly remember teaching my Dad about how Godzilla was actually an apex predator we created through our recklessness.

He just smiled and let me rant.

To this day, I think about that when I see parents ignore their kids. My Dad embracing me as a weird little kid was one of the reasons I’m alive… for now.

But the point is, my Dad loved anything with “Kaiju” in it. You know, that fancy Japanese word for big freaking monsters that crash around cities and wreak havoc on the landscape.

That’s why I wish I could have seen his face when we saw the first one. But at that moment, I was like forty feet in the air, sailing like a soccer ball, and I only saw its face because I literally broke the low cloud surface before I fell backward.

And it was gnarly and full of teeth.

The beasts bellowed with an echo like a bullhorn.

Every bit of movement felt strained; they were not smooth but herky-jerky. Even the ones flapping in the sky felt like they were adjusting to life here.

Like the Tin Man in need of an oil can.

But I was about to see them shake the rust off in real time.

I landed hard, but the hamster ball stayed intact, and the seat's shocks provided some cushion against the impact.

Too bad my piece of Juicy Fruit was forced out of my mouth and hit the inside of the hamster ball. It stuck there in a gob of my own spit, but I had no time to wipe it off.

As I gazed out of the contraption, I saw several other enormous animals strutting across the landscape. They had to be a hundred feet, maybe two hundred.

These were different breeds than whatever kicked me.

In fact, they all looked like different animals. Some more mammalian, others reptilian, all kind of herding together, not attacking one another but scavenging for food on the ground.

Sniping and snarfing any person they could get their forked tongue or claw around.

They varied in size, from ones that were as big as a house, to ones whose heads careened up into the clouds.

Each had its own deafening voice. Their screeches and screams were so vile they would send piss down your pant leg.

The only thing that kept me from shitting myself was that my brain was going haywire. These seemed to defy most of what I knew about animals on this planet…

And that’s when I realized there was a strong possibility they weren’t from here.

Or maybe they were, and we had not seen them in a very long time.

And then I puked, because the jostling and rotation of the ball had my head actually spinning, too. The ball was gyroscoped, and it kept me upright, but I had never had a good stomach for roller coasters, and this felt like the ride from hell.

As I got my bearings, I saw Leslie’s ball speeding past me. The sides of her ball were all scratched, like something with big nails had tried to get in.

We both bumped into cars trying to escape, and pinballed until we came to a stop in someone’s front yard.

She took a second to look over, then we both looked back at my Dad’s house, which had been flattened. We saw a long, pointed tail drag over it, demolishing every window and wall.

By the time it disappeared, you couldn’t even tell there was a house there.

We sat for a moment and tried to catch our breath.

She was mumbling words to me, but I couldn’t hear anything. I could see fear in her eyes, so all I could muster was… “It’ll be okay,” which I had to mouth to her twice for her to get it.

She shook her head, “No.”

Even through the thick polymer, I understood her. And I sighed in agreement.

We took the landscape in. From this vantage point, we could see billows of smoke in the distance, and knew this was not isolated to our corner of the world.

This was everywhere, and it was really bad.

On the wooded side, tall trees were tossed into the air like they were nothing. Scars emerged in the forest; our attackers left muddy footprints the size of football fields.

The beasts had spread out over the vista, but there were more flying in the sky. They flapped leathery wings and swooped down like fighter jets, skimming the ground and gyrating away from debris.

I could see them feasting both near and far. They tossed red masses into the air or eviscerated them on the ground. They looked like they were in the buffet line.

My brain was trying to catch up with my eyes to understand what was going on, and that’s when I understood… they were eating people.

One by one, I saw them leap from tree cover, swoop down, and snatch and claw.

This was classic predation behavior, but this wasn’t the Serengeti.

It was fucking Connecticut.

Our hamster balls had stopped rolling in the front yard of some random rich couple. They were outside in their Lululemon active gear, gawking at the destruction.

They had a bunch of horses in their front yard. They were much smarter and had taken off, leaping over their fences and heading toward the woods.

If they were as smart as them, they would have followed.

But modern humans lack the foresight of wild animals.

Instead, they looked from the sky at us, then ran to the balls.

One of those giant things spotted them and swooped from the clouds. Its snout pressed the woman against my ball, wrapped its tongue around her, and then swallowed her whole.

I rocked back and forth as the man charged the beast, but he was snatched up by the claw on one of the giants and lifted into the clouds.

His screams died out as the animal flapped far away; the initial wind from its wings blew us back down the country lane, rolling at a leisurely pace.

We rolled past cars retreating and even a few people in golf carts.

A few of the flying beasts spotted us and landed atop the house to get a better look. They swooped back and forth, taking out stragglers until just our hamster balls remained in the grass.

The roof of the house these winged monsters rested on cracked and cracked under their weight.

As the attic and brick walls caved in, they jumped down and stomped across the yard, long tongues flicking at Leslie’s ball first. Our roll was too slow, and they caught up quickly.

She was screaming so loudly I could hear it through the cacophony of noise surrounding us.

One of the monsters bit down on her ball with its alligator snout.

Its teeth slid off the glass, which I had come to believe had to be some sort of indestructible polymer. The kaiju quickly gave up, but not before its tail smashed into my ball and sent me rolling down the road.

The last I saw of Leslie, a massive foot had pushed her ball deep into the mud of that front yard and rolled her into what used to be a vast koi pond.

I supposed she would be safe under the surface there, but I had no idea how we would get out of these things and how much air we’d have left, too.

My ball bounced off a John Deere someone had left behind. As I grasped around, trying to loosen the straps holding me in, I felt another rumble.

My ball skidded into a smashed Volkswagen and rested.

Perhaps the biggest of these monsters I’d seen was now walking toward me. It had feet the size of 18-wheelers, and its body drooped in long, thick fur.

You could call it sort of a woolly mammoth, but it was leaner, and its eyeballs bulged on the sides of its head and rotated quickly, assessing the situation as it lumbered.

My ball had rolled many miles from where I started. And somehow, I was back where my day began, just down the road from the Miller residence, staring at the two old oaks that remained.

For just a beat, I centered myself and took a deep breath.

That’s when a paw crunched down on one of the oak trees I so loved, but it amazingly missed the one I was now under.

The beast seemed to groan with every step.

As it passed over me, I could see some people clinging onto the fur, as well as long strands of debris caught in its hair. They were dropping and hitting the ground, likely not surviving those falls. I closed my eyes and tried to pivot as bodies fell near me and didn’t get back up.

As soon as the thumping ceased, I opened my eyes and assessed the damage.

The rain was creating incredibly sloppy conditions, and my ball had slid into a part of the destroyed road into a drainage pipe that ran underneath the other giant oak.

And these traipsing monsters left pond-sized footprints that were quickly filling with rain. I saw flash floods of debris and corpses crossing the fields, all headed toward me in this new ditch.

The water and debris hit me with a thud and lifted me and spun me around again until my ball boinked off the stone garden wall.

I was now in another ditch, and mud and grime swirled around me, covering the ball.

Just a few hours ago, I was out here helping a horse. Now I watched as animals I had never seen before marched through the field, toward the town.

They destroyed shopping centers and car parks as they went, knocking into apartment buildings and spraying fire and brimstone when necessary.

I saw a birdlike monster with a bear’s head swoop from the air, pick up a fire truck, and drop it on a church before plucking its inhabitants out and swallowing them whole.

The visceral acceptance of leaving the top of the food chain made me feel clammy.

I caught my breath and tried to wipe the condensation from inside the ball.

There was no sign of anyone out there, and no sign of Leslie. I looked the two hundred or so yards up the lane where I left her ball, but could see nothing.

I banged on the glass inside, but to my surprise, it started to turn grey. It was tinting from the inside. At first I thought this was my doing, but even the bottom I couldn’t reach was changing.

That’s when I heard the hissing. There was some sort of pink liquid filling the ball from tubes hidden in the spirals of the ball.

I looked down, but there were no leaks. This liquid was coming from inside the apparatus and rising; now it was mid-thigh, covering everything in front of me.

The interior of the ball became a computer screen with words that read: “Protective lining released” and then “Cryofreezing initiated.”

“You gotta be shitting me.”

The exterior of the ball was now rock-like and impenetrable. As the pink goop covered my face and neck, I gagged and swallowed some, but soon found I was able to breathe even though I was now completely submerged.

The goo was thick and cold. I could see it freezing solid from the bottom upward. I felt a wave of calm wash over me as the ball's exterior grew opaque, and a deep sleep whisked me away.

My last thoughts were for the world I was leaving behind, and a fear of what I would wake up to see. But nothing would have prepared me for the changes that would occur over the next 100 years. I’d just have to see it to believe it.

And even then, it would take me a while to understand...

Hey! This is my first foray into Wattpad after writing screenplays for 15 years. This started as a short story, but I'm thinking of expanding the POV in it and working it out as a novel. How do you all find more readers to get good feedback?