"Seachange" in WyvernLit Issue Three

Another story of mine, published in WyvernLit:

Seachange

"Lure" in Oblong

Oblong published my short story, "Lure" on October 7; here's the curated link, for convenience sake! 

Lure

List Story Tres

My most recent list story; no real genre, just some low-key weirdness and pictures of abandoned buildings from the Chernobyl exclusion zone:

7 Secrets To Hosting The Best BBQ

Food, Drinks, Friends…getting these things together requires some serious planning and logistics! Here are 7 tips to help you host the summer’s best BBQ

1. Location, Location, Location!

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The new antimalarials give me sweat-soaked, screaming night terrors, so I’m often awake. Between caffeine and fear, I’ve developed a pretty good case of chronic insomnia, my brain getting fuzzier and fuzzier as I try to get by on shallow, dozing naps snatched in the early morning, or at work, or on the bus. I have a month to go on these current pills, then I can get the doctors to switch me over to another brand, preferably one of the psychologically gentler synthetic quinines that keep my neuroanatomy from turning itself inside-out each night.

But, because that’s a month away, it is nearly three in the morning and I’m awake and listening to my neighbor through the thin wall that separates our apartments. She’s creeping around, the thin wispy shuffle of socks against carpet and the creaking of floorboards in the kitchen betraying her every step. I hear her opening closets, a tinny click of the lock and the scuff of the particleboard door against the backstop.

It’s not as rude as you think; I’m not being creepy. The first time I heard her moving around was last week, while I paced my own room. Each night since, I have heard her. I try to ignore her until I hear the balcony door open, sliding aside with a hiss into the hot Florida night, followed by a cold chalky rattle that travels through the floor and wall and up my feet. There is a scrapping, a steady beat, and I go out onto my own balcony to see what it was.

2. The Fine Art of Menu Crafting

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I stand in the humidity and see an emergency rope ladder has been lowered from my neighbor’s balcony. It is fixed solidly against the jamb of her balcony door, a complex series of knots bracing the webbing to the wood and securing the nylon in place. It creaks with the weight of her body as she climbs down the four stories to the earth below. I see her reach the ground, and then lose her in the shadows as she sprints off through a cloud of mosquitoes in the rain garden. The moon is half-full and the sky is cloudy, but I’m afraid that she will see me watching her, so I go back inside and close my balcony door and listen.

Half an hour later, I hear the scrape of rope and stucco, and know she is ascending. I hear her straining up and over the ledge of her balcony, hear her breathing hard as she hauls the rope ladder back up, hear the door of her balcony slide shut, hear her run the water in her sink, hear her shuffle back to bed, hear the creak of the bed, and then hear nothing as she, presumably, sleeps.

Odd, but not unduly so, not for the four towers on the edge of Gainesville, built as offices before one of the inevitable crashes turned them into efficiencies trapped on the border between the suburbs and the swamps. I dozed after a while, and dreamt of something moving around my apartment, something long and white and empty that crawled up the walls and stared at me from the corners of the room, always behind me or just out of sight.

3. Beer, Wine, and Spirits: A Little Something For Everyone

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The next day was Tuesday, which meant it was mail day. It’s supposed to be delivered every day except Sunday, of course, but there’s no way the mailman is going to drive all the way into the swamp to drop it off every single day. Living in the towers means you get your mail of Tuesday, and that’s it.

I look forward to Mail Tuesday, because it usually gives me something to read as I fight off sleep in the early evening. I sleep a little on the hour-and-a-half bus ride out of the city, so between my nap and my mail, I might have a fighting chance tonight.

The sheaf of mail in my little box is larger, much larger and much heavier than it has been in the past. It is held together with a thick rubber band, blue and heavy like the ones they use for broccoli bunches. I wrestle the wad out of the band and find that the fecundity of mail is a result of misfiling. My neighbor’s mail has been incorrectly stuffed into my mail box.

Her name is Margaret Summers, and she receives many magazines.

I can’t correct the error by putting the mail into her box, since I don’t have the key to open any box except my own. I will have to take it to her. Upstairs, I knock on her door, but no one answers.

I lay her mail out on the bar that separates the tiny kitchen from the rest of my room, reading her magazines as I drink my beer and take my antimalarials.

“Gaia News” is a combination of Green gardening, composting tips, and survivalist conspiracies; it suggests that the New World Order will soon seize control of the major urban centers of this country, and as such I should be stockpiling heirloom tomato seeds.

“Bookmonger Monthly” is a trade publication, offering articles and analyses of current pricing and sales figures for the competitive world of bookselling. The voice of the editorial is cutthroat, the words steely, and that tone is carried throughout the publication. Bookselling is serious business.

“Hatchet World” sells hatchets, ranging from “classic” wood-handled and red-bladed fireman’s helpers to
terrifying black titanium ampersands with razor edges and tactile grips. They exhibit a dramatic range in price.

“SaucerSpot” is an amateurishly printed and assembled 24-page magazine that assembles, in list form, the major UFO sightings of the last lunar month, organized by country and date. Interspersed between the lists and brief descriptions are foully scatological jokes, typed in larger comic sans font.

“Pacon!” is a newsletter for the Esperanto-speaking community of Central Florida, as announced by the only non-Esperanto bit of text in the magazine. It has high production values and a thick section of classified ads that take up nearly half of the publication.

“The Ouroboros” is the alumni magazine for a university in California, and disguises thinly veiled requests for donations as news about the successes of its students, current and former.

4. Music and Lighting!

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It is a strange collection, and I end up reading them well into the night, eating supper over Gaia News, skimming The Ouroboros on the couch, taking SaucerSpot into the bathroom with me several times. I’m drinking tea and reading about the new particle accelerator being installed at Shaver University (thanks to the generous support of the Pickman Foundation) when I hear her stirring next door. It is nearly midnight. I will wait until the morning to return the magazines.

I fall asleep on the couch, dreaming that a small thing is moving around the room, muttering to itself. It is shapeless behind a riot of black fur. It darts from the corner to the futon and then to the bookshelves, the whole time jabbering away in a language I cannot understand. I want to get up and smash it, but I can’t move. I know that when it has finished searching the floor, it will climb up onto the futon and search my body, and I desperately do not want it to touch me.

The sounds from next door wake me up out of the dream, careful steps and opening doors and rattling and scraping. I lay on the couch, listening. It is nearly 3:30 before they stop.

In the morning, a little before 8, I put the rubber band around the magazines and go and knock on her door. She answers, bleary but awake. Her eyes are two different colors, one green and the other very bright blue. She has put many thousands of dollars into snaking, winding tattoos that run up her arms. She thanks me for getting her mail to her. As she takes the packet of magazines, I note that the tips of her fingers are stained black.

To catch the bus to work, I walk through the empty courtyard that anchors the four apartment towers. That morning, it reminds me of an Aztec plaza, abandoned and waiting for the forest to reclaim it. That night, I spend my money and my time out drinking, and do not return home until nearly dawn.

5. Univited Guests: Bugs!

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Thursday evening I stop at a camping supply store on the way home, a cavernous structure full of potted trees and fake rocks and dead-eyed trophy heads mounted on the walls. I purchase, for $79.99, mid-range binoculars. Outside of the store, I sit on a concrete bench fronting the highway for 35 minutes waiting for the next bus.

Arriving home, I walk around the back of my building before going in. I pass empty planters, deep concrete bowls algae-slick and buzzing with insects, and come around behind the tower. I walk out into the rain garden, swatting at mosquitoes. I look up, and I can see my corner apartment, the plastic folding chair leaning against the railing of my own balcony. Next door is her apartment. The blinds are drawn on the sliding glass door that leads to her balcony. The sun is going down, and the bugs are getting thick, so I go inside.

Like clockwork, the sounds begin again at three in the morning. I wait until I am sure she has climbed down her rope ladder to step outside with my new binoculars. The moon is brighter, nearly three-quarters full, and there are no clouds. The rope ladder hangs heavily off of her balcony, and I see her stepping carefully off the bottom rung below.

6. Organizing Side Dishes!

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She walks into and then out of the declivity of the rain garden, heading off across a patch of centipede grass towards a small hummock of high ground just beyond a scrubby ditch. She has a flashlight, and I watch the oval of light projected on the ground bob and weave as she navigates the dark. Through the binoculars, I can just barely make her out as a dark shape obscuring the flashlight’s beam.

She makes it to the hummock, and crouches down in front of a broad-armed pecan tree. She sets the flashlight down, and its beam illuminates her and the tree’s trunk. Hunkered down, she begins to dig, her body moving rhythmically, metal glinting in her hands. She heaps a pile of dirt up next to the hole she is excavating, reaching deeper in the soil with each scooping stab. Eventually she stops, and reaches into her pocket and leans over the hole, her arm up to the elbow in the earth. She backfills the hole quickly, patting the soil down carefully and then examining her work with the flashlight. She turns and starts walking back to the tower.

I crouch down behind the wall of my balcony. I hear her climb, hear her bring the ladder back up. I wait, holding very still, until I am sure that (if she has followed her previous pattern) she has gone to bed. I stand up and train my binoculars on the spot under the pecan tree, but see nothing.

I watch until dawn, sitting in my chair and drinking coffee and pissing in a bottle so I can keep the pecan tree in sight at all times. Nothing happens. Birds begin to call as the sun starts to warm the sky. It is a little before six in the morning when I decide to go down to the tree.

7. Frisbees for Everyone!

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I hurry down the stairs, around the building, through the rain garden, over the ditch, up the hummock, and under the pecan tree. The disturbed soil is easy to spot, churned and cleared of grass. I do not have a spade, but I have a pocket knife and the dirt is loose. I dig down, four inches, six inches, eight inches, until I find hard packed soil at the bottom on the hole. I expand outwards, left and right and towards me, moving all the loose dirt I find until I run into packed, undisturbed soil on all sides. Moisture begins to ooze into the bottom of the hole.

I sift the loose dirt through my fingers, but find nothing there. I stand up and kick the dirt back into the hole, tamping it down with my foot. There is nothing buried under the tree, she left nothing behind in the soil.

I stop in the rain garden and look up at our apartments. Hers is still and quiet. Looking closer through the binoculars I can see where using the rope ladder has abraded the stucco on her ledge. I scan over to my balcony, still looking through the binoculars. The blinds behind my sliding door have been drawn shut, and they ripple with movement. As I watch, the kitchen light goes off.

The dew has soaked through my sneakers, and I can feel my socks getting wet. I have my wallet in my pocket. How far away can I get on what I have with me, I wonder?

List Story No. 2

Here's another short piece of fiction I put up on Buzzfeed, a noirish thing with no resolution, but some pretty good public domain images of the Dust Bowl.  Enjoy!

6 Ways To Tell If A Girl Is Into You

Romance, Dating, Love…these are confusing waters for a guy! Here are six hints that let you know if she’s digging on you, or if she thinks you are a nerd!! 

1. Serious eye-contact!!

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He left the swamps and the humidity and the mosquitoes behind him as he drove out of Houston. The Packard rattled, its chassis groaning over the asphalt, turning the phone call over and over in his mind as he went north. He knew, always knew, that the call would come, just never when, could never plan for it. In some ways it was a relief to finally have received it, to have had the world finally come crashing down around his head. Now there was no waiting, only action, only consequences.

“Parker,” the voice had said when he’d answered the phone, deeper and sadder than he’d remembered, but with the same bitter rasp, the same harsh vowels. “Now, Parker, come up. It’s time.”

“It’ll take me two days to get there,” he’d answered, the phone cold against his suddenly damp palms.

“Hurry,” she had said, voice flat, dead.

He passed the turn-offs for San Marcos and Austin, saw the exit for Dallas. He stopped south of Denton to eat supper, a tiny truckers’ diner that had 10 cent sandwiches and sold bootleg whiskey by the pint. He bought two of each, wrapped the sandwiches in a napkin, and returned to the car. He pulled off into a disused side road, access to a dead or dying ranch, and had his supper in the car.
As he drifted off, he reached under his jacket and felt the butt of the gun in its holster. Coyotes yelped in the distance.

2. Watch her smile: It’s all about those pearly whites!!

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The car barely made it; the fuel gauge hovered lightly over the “E” as he rolled into Levy, OK. It was a small town, shuttered as much against wind and dust as it was against the Depression. Abandoned storefronts littered the main drag as he made his way through the center of town, most with broken windows and signs that read “CLOSED” in dusty letters yellowed with age. He hadn’t been home in a long time, but he saw past the decay and into his memories, and found Cartwright Street without any trouble.

The house was the biggest shock. It looked nothing like he had remembered it, the little picket fence gone, the yard dead and heaped with miniature dunes baffled by the dead arms of flower bushes. Frayed paint hung off the side of the house, and loose shingles rattled in the wind. He knocked on the front door, knocked on the back door, no one answered. He peered in the windows, and saw the dark interior of the house, sagging furniture in the front room, bare wooden table in the kitchen. It was empty, had been empty, for a long time. He stepped back from the window, and called her name. His voice was a lonely, croaking sound, and it shocked him to here it.

“Ain’t no one home, young feller,” answered a voice, dry and harsh as his own. It came from the neighbor’s house, itself dead or dying. Parker turned, and saw the speaker was an old man, ridiculously old and dry and wrinkled, parched and burned chestnut by the sun. The few wisps of white hair on his head trailed after the breeze, longing to follow the pale smoke of a ratty cigarette that burned in his left hand. “All gone, young feller, all gone,” he said, nodding. Parker hopped the fence and mounted the porch. As he got nearer, he saw the old man had one good eye, bright and black, and one bad eye, a milky orb that seemed to roam of its accord over the scene.

“I’m looking for someone,” Parker finally said, “a woman.” He paused, having to remember what name she went by in this town. “Mrs. Marcus.” The old man nodded again. “She lives there,” Parker pointed at the house.

“Ain’t no one lives there, son,” said the old man, knocking ash from his cigarette.

“She’s my sister,” he lied, “she asked me to come up for a visit. “Is there anywhere else she might be staying in town?”

“Ain’t no on lives here at all, son” said the old man, turning his good eye on Parker. “All left, all gone west, getting away from banks and the Wrath of God.” The old bastard’s crazy, thought Parker.

“Look buddy,” he said, leaning in over the old man in his chair. “She called me a couple days ago, told me to come on by the house.” The old man shrugged, and swiveled his head towards the house.

“Ain’t no on lives here,” he said, simply. “Levy ain’t got no one at all, no more.”

3. Is she gettin’ touchy-feely? Watch her hands, bro!!

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He left the old man on his porch. For propriety’s sake, he went around the far side of the house, out of the geezer’s line of sight, and found a window facing out over what used to be a garden. He shattered the window with his gun, the brittle crash of the glass against the den’s wooden floor shockingly loud in the silence of the neighborhood. He carefully reached his arm in, undid the lock, and climbed inside.

It was mostly empty, a few pieces of ragged furniture left behind, but little else. Dust and grit crunched under foot, the probing sandstorms always finding a way inside even in the most securely locked building. The pantry was empty, the shelves bare. There was a rusty bed frame in one of the bedrooms, but nothing else. The house was abandoned, and had been for some time.

He went out the backdoor and into the dead yard. Osage orange trees, their tight branches tall and naked, bordered the far edge of the lawn. A picnic table baked in the sun, its wood chalky and dry to the touch. His foot crushed a rotted, dusty osage orange under foot. Leaning against one of the trees was a sun-bleached doll, a child’s toy, sitting up with its eyes peeled wide. It seemed to watch him as he walked over, lifting it to examine it. He tilted it backward, prone, and the eyes closed, then tilted it forward to make the eyes open again. The doll’s head was a smooth dome dotted with tiny pin-pricks where the doll’s hair had once been.

He tossed it over the trees and out of sight before making his way back to the car.

4. Does she talk about other guys when she’s with you? There’s your big hint, bro!!

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The sky was a merciless blue as he eased his car back towards Main Street, coasting on neutral in places to save gas. The houses all looked abandoned and ready to fall apart at the next big storm. Things had gotten bad in Levy, he thought, much worse than he could have imagined. He was sweating through his shirt, and the gun in its holster rubbed against his side.

She must have called him from one of the stores in town, he figured, although he couldn’t understand why she hadn’t mentioned they’d moved from the house on Cartwright. He wasn’t sure how to find her, but he knew he had to, knew he had to fulfill the promise he’d made so many years ago. Had she left word for him at one of the stores, or in the post-office?

He didn’t have to spend much time searching because there wasn’t much to search. There was only one place left open, a little general store with nearly bare shelves and a gas pump out front. A fat man, blond and pale as a grub, slouched in a chair behind the counter. He roused himself as the echoes of the bell over the door died down.

“What can I do for you, sir?” he asked, rubbing pudgy hands into his eyes as he yawned.

“You got a phone here?”

“Sure thing, mister, there in the back,” he pointed at a booth towards the far end of the store. Parker walked over and checked that it worked.

“This the only phone in town?” he asked.

“Well, there’s the party line for in-town, but that one there is the only one that goes out.”

“Not a lot of folks in town?” Parker asked.

“No sir,” said the fat man, settling back in his chair, “no sir, we’re pretty near all cleared out. Thinking about heading out myself, actually. Where are you heading to?”

“Out west, like everyone else, I imagine,” answered Parker, flipping through the note pad in the booth. “Say, listen,” he said, strolling back to the front of the store and leaning on the counter. “That phone must get a lot of use, huh? Only one in town with long-distance, I mean?”

“Well,” said the fat man, scratching his round head, his blonde stubble so short he seemed nearly bald, “I reckon not. I mean, there ain’t many folks in town anymore, anyway, and them that are left ain’t got much outside of town they want to talk at, if you take my meaning.”

“A woman use this phone, in the past day or two?” he asked. “Brown hair, kinda tall, blue eyes. Name of Marcus, Mrs. Marcus.”

“A woman?” the fat man repeated the word. It seemed unfamiliar in his mouth, and his soft face receded into folds and wrinkles as he sounded it out again. “A woman? Can’t say as a woman used the phone lately. No sir, can’t say as a woman did at all.”

“Who else works here? Anyone else I can talk to?”

“Just me, Mister,” said the fat man, smiling. “Ain’t no one else left, just me.” Jesus Christ, thought Parker. Everyone in this town must’ve gone crazy with the wind.

“Look, gimme a dollar of gas, alright?” he asked. The fat man shook his head sadly.

“Ain’t got no gas, Mister,” he said. “Trucks ain’t been by at all, not since folks started leaving.”

Parker walked back out into the sun and sat on the steps of the store. He pulled the second pint of whiskey from his pocket, felt it burn as it went down his throat. He looked west, saw the sun sinking below the horizon. He’d have to sleep in his car again tonight.

The bell over the door rang, and the fat man bustled out and stood next to Parker. He shielded his button eyes, looking first west, then turning to look east. Evening was settling in.

“Gonna be a storm,” he said simply. Parker followed his gaze and looked east. In the descending dark, a line of deeper black hung over the horizon. “Gonna be a bad one, too,” said the fat man, before returning inside.

5. How quick does she return your calls? Reply to texts? There’s gold in them thar hills, bro!!

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He rummaged through the trunk of his car until he found the length of hose he was looking for. With that in one hand, and a gas can in the other, he walked through the town looking for cars. The first one he’d found was empty, bone-dry, but the second one had a half-gallon or so, most of which he was able to siphon off. It wasn’t enough to get him out of town in the morning, but it would be enough to get him back to the abandoned neighborhood. He had seen cars, parked against the road and up on the curbs. Might be better pickings there.

Night fell, and the town stayed dark. No street lights, of course, but there were no lights in any of the houses, not even a candle in a window. It was utterly black, and completely silent. He sat down on the rickety front porch of the house and finished his whiskey.

Dark shapes slinked through the yard, darted through the streets, short barks and whining yips muffled under a heavy, oppressive atmosphere that sank down and engulfed the town of Levy. The coyotes would watch him if he moved, their sharp noses jutting up and towards him for a moment before leading their owners along on other business.

6. Let her pick out the music while you hang out; her decision will tell you a lot, bro!!

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When it came, it came like end of the world, like the seas rising up to swallow the earth back into chaos. The coyotes knew it before he did, felt the mingling of earth and air in the approaching dust storm and fled, shadows moving through the deeper dark of the night. Parker heard it first as a moan, steady and cruel, a constant plaintive cry.

He stood up and walked to the back yard and saw it coming, a wall of darkness that rolled in off the plain, blotting out stars and the crescent of the moon as it rushed towards him. The dust storm towered over the world, and Parker felt very small.

The car was no good since the rear windows wouldn’t close anymore. The house? He ran inside, felt the house strain and creak under the wind. He had broken a window, and the sand on the floor already told him that a big storm would find ways in. He ran into the kitchen, his feet tripping over a ratty rug that bunched around his feet. He kicked it off and saw the trap door, a square with two small finger holes in it. He swung it open. The house rocked as the wind strengthened. The first hissing blasts of sand lashed the roof, caressed the sides of the house as he climbed down the ladder.

His match wrapped him in a small circle of light. The floor was dirt, hard packed and cool. He edged along, arms out as he looked for a wall. He heard the house swaying overhead, the wounded sighs of wood mingling with the background hum of the dust storm. He found the wall, cold brick dull red in the glow of the match, and walked along to the right until he found a corner. He sat down, drew his knees in close, and listed to the sound of the dust storm as it reclaimed Levy.

List Story No. 1

A while back I encountered the soul-chilling void that is buzzfeed, a terrifyingly shallow chaos of inanity and animated GIFs that represents the death of thought and culture.  Anyway, I thought the format (roughly, STUPID LIST TITLE, PUBLIC DOMAIN IMAGE #1, STUPID ENTRY #1, PUBLIC DOMAIN IMAGE #2, STUPID ENTRY #2, ad infinitum) would be kind of a fun way to post stories, little bits of weirdness that I would write fast without editing and post with goofy images (mostly from wikipedia).  Anyway, here's the first of those stories, its buzzfeed title the inane:

5 Tricks To Having The Best Spring Break Ever!!!

Spring break is a chance to cut loose, have some fun, and make some memories! Here are 5 tips for making the most of your week off!  

 

1. Gotta get with your best buds first!!

Via gwpda.org

There is the sound again, a sharp, pricking sound on the edge of hearing that bypasses my ears to echo behind my eyeballs. It whines at first, a tiny sound, but it builds to a shrieking scream that overtakes the dull roar of the trench and the battle and chaos until it fills all of us with the certainty of death. We dive for cover, dice in a craps game playing the odds since we cannot know where the shell will land. Any dive is as good as another, each a sacrament to the god of statistics, the only god that has not abandoned us. I clutch my helmet to my skull, the thin steel edge of it biting my hand as I wait for the howling to end and the fire and death to begin. Michael, the Canadian kid they’ve rotated into the squad, crouches near me, his hands digging into the mud walls of our ditch house as he shivers and prays.

It is 2014, and we have been fighting the Great War for 100 years.

2. Spring Break Means One Thing: Fun in the Sun!!

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Outside of Rouen, we are given a 24-hour foraging pass and sent off. We head east, towards the edge of Alliance trenchworks, picking our way across the scabbed-over landscape of past battles. The truck hisses to a stop on the edge of an algae-encrusted mudhole. Peter and Charlie wrap the machine in netting and canvas while Michael and I cut dead branches from the shaggy riot of an abandoned hedge. Since the day in the trench, the kid has decided that I’m good luck, that our standing up and picking our way through the shattered guts of our squadmates after the assault was a sign of divine favor. He sticks close to me now.

We drape the branches over the truck, and the Lieutenant (I cannot remember his name, they tend not to last very long so it is rarely worth it) pulls his pistol and leads the way. We hop ditches and clamber through gardens thick with the powdery ash of Blight bombs. The little village is silent, dead. The squad fans out, checking each house in turn. They’ve all been picked clean, but in the back of one little cottage Thom finds a shelter shed, the sealing pin still in place. We blow it with a grenade, and the smell that rolls out of it, decay and corruption, tells us we have found our prize.

Below, huddled in the corner under blankets, are human remains. We don’t bother checking or counting them. They’d sealed themselves in, hoping to ride out the Blight, but their water filter failed before the air cleared. They’ve left behind a pile of rations though, boxes and boxes of hard-little squares of vacuum-packed mycoproteins. We spend the rest of the day loading our packs from their stores.

We spend the day in the village, and get back to the pond near dusk. A Central Powers air drone had found the truck and bombed it to a smoking ruin. We hike the thirty miles back to the supply dump.

3. Get Your Tan Done BEFORE Heading To The Beach! Hello!!

Via gwpda.org

Desertion peaks at around 25% before they finally figure out how to fix it. In Roman times, apparently, the gravest of disciplinary actions available to the commander was decimation. 1-in-10 soldiers, drawn at random, are executed for the failures of another. The guys they pull from the line might not have done anything, might not have even known what had been done by someone else, but they count off and get pulled from the line and killed right there. They put a twist on it, though; instead of the Company getting decimated, they’d just go through the file of the missing man, find his home town, and send the Home Guard in to decimate the town. I understand there were some scaling issues, what with some guys coming from New York City and others from Podunk Iowa, but that’s what the Army Statistics Division was for. They worked out a scaling function pretty quick.

Of course there were some problems at first. Eventually, they got the Army to concede that they could only decimate towns back home when they’d convicted the deserters in military court, on account of that squad that got trapped behind enemy lines for twenty days, eventually fighting their way back to the lines after capturing a couple of hills and a battle standard. I understand that, even with their shiny medals, they were a little pissed off at finding out they’d been declared “deserters”.

4. You And Your Wingman Gotta Work Out The Strategy Before Hand, Bro!!

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Michael, the Canadian, steps on a mine outside of Württemberg. We can’t find his tags, so we just mark him down as KIA in the books. They’ve mined the whole city, but they say it’s got to be cleared so the tanks can get through, so we clear it. The detectors we’ve got don’t really work; turns out there’s barely any metal in the mines anymore, it’s all ceramics and explosives, so we end up having to improvise tapping sticks, seven or eight foot long poles, as thin as you can get them. We pick our way through like blind men, creeping through rubble, tap tap tap. You find one usually by the bony, stony clinking the pole on the mine. It reminds me of an Aunt I had, who tapped her spoon sharply against the thin china cup at each teatime, as if she were going to make a speech. I never remember her saying anything important, though.

Our tappers take too long for Command. They end up herding POWs into the streets at gun point, forcing them to run down the lanes, their bodies flung high into the air with the rest of the rubble whenever they find a mine.

5. Remember: You’re Only Young Once! Carpe the Diem, Doggs!!

Via gwpda.org

Our guns pound their trenches for days, announcing the inevitable charge through the wire and the mines. Their drones overhead drop Hebenon Gas on us day and night. It curdles the blood right in your veins, an ugly death, and of course one of the filters in my mask is on the fritz. I’m busy picking through the pockets of my most recently deceased Lieutenant looking for his spare, when the shuddering of the guns stops. The biofeedback band on my wrist buzzes the signal to me. We’re going over. We’ve got no Officer, but we have to go over the edge, or the MPs will come by and shoot us down in our own trenches for cowardice. I stand up and check my wrist band; air reads okay, so I strip my mask off and cinch up my helmet. I grab the Lieutenant’s pistol and jam it in my belt. My rifle seems heavy.

The rattling on the feedback band increases. Thirty seconds. The guns are silent, and the other side is counting down with us. They’ll have loaded the autocannons by now. Fifteen seconds, and rhythm of the alert from the band changes, slows to a steady once-per-second throb. Mortars, from a few trenches back, lob fog grenades high overhead. They land with a coughing thud a hundred yards ahead of us, their heavy smoke obscuring ground and, hypothetically, our bodies when we start the run. Of course, careful aim is not a necessary skill when firing an autocannon. Five seconds.

The siren wails, and we climb out. We’re all veterans in this end of the line, so we don’t pop up and come out running. Our ascent is careful, our heads low. Crouched, we make a run for the fog bank. If we’re lucky, we’ll fall into a shell crater or a ditch, and can wait out the battle.

Just inside the fog bank, I stumble into a line of razor wire, the blades slicing through my pants and boots and cutting deep into my legs and feet. I tumble to the ground just as the autocannons open up, a screaming hiss of electromagnetically propelled slivers of metal that tear through the men to my left and right. They keep running, their bodies unaware of their death for a half second more, before tumbling to the ground.

I crawl into a low spot, a little swale in the landscape where I can hunker down and get at my kit. The hypofoam works pretty good, staunching all but the deepest gashes in my legs, and a shot of morphine does me a world of good. I lay on my back and watch the tracers arc across the night sky, little comets offering gentle guidance to the gunners upcountry. It has been six weeks since I shipped out, and I am already an old man.

Sol Invictus

Hecate

Pulp Strainer I: The Beetle Horde, Pt. 1

THE TEXT: Pulp Strainer, No. 1: The Beetle Horde (Part 1) by Victor Rousseau, p. 8-31 in Astounding Stories n. 1, Vol. 1, 1930 (available for free here)

 SUMMARY: Members of an Antarctic expedition, following in the footsteps of a previous, failed expedition that left a member behind, discover the remains of a giant-ass beetle.  Two members, intent on discovering more giant-ass beetle bits, get caught in a storm, crash their plane, and fall into the subterranean world of the hollow earth.  There, they find primitive (but blonde) humans, giant arthropods, and a madman bent on destroying the Surface World!

PULPY GOODNESS: needlessly convoluted expository science-speak ganked completely from encyclopedias; Men of Science™; cackling mad scientist; a cave-lady; giant-ass bugs.

RACISM: Fairly subdued.  There are “primitive” people living n the hollow earth, but nothing too grim.

SEXISM: Nothing TOO awful.  Haidia is a noble savage lady that immediately falls in love with Dodd; however, she is at least a tough girl counterpart to Dodd’s more cerebral hero. 

DRAMATIS PERSONAE:

Jim Dodd – bespectacled, red-headed man of science, the Antarctic expedition’s “archaeologist” who also seems to know quite a bit about paleontology, despite the fact that the two are remarkably distinct disciplines with discrete literatures all their own.  Dodd, who quarreled heatedly in the past with Bram over the fossil record of marsupials, is a man devoted to scientific truth and the pursuit of knowledge. 

Tommy Travers – Pilot, adventurer, ex-Harvard man.  Something of a playboy back in New York, he flies airplanes for the Antarctic Expedition.  A man of action!

Haidia – sexy amazonian cave-girl from the subterranean world Dodd and Travers have discovered.  She learns English quickly, but speaks it haltingly.  Falls immediately in love with Dodd.  Naturally, she’s white and blonde.

Bram – a morphine-addled madman who vanished on a previous Antarctic expedition, known as a contentious, imperious, and exacting scientist convinced of his own genius.  He turned down a Nobel Prize (awarded him for some racist theories about the origin of “Asiatic races”) because he disagreed with the winner of the Literature category.  What you’d call an asshole.  Currently a Beetle King in the subterranean world, he plans to unleash a plague of giant coleopterans on the surface world.

OUR STORY: An expedition has been mounted to the Antarctic, seeking to pierce the snowy veil of the South so that Man, his throbbing Science unbound, can determine the exact location of the magnetic southern pole?  The reason, you ask?

It had something to do with Einstein, and something to do with terrestrial magnetism, and the variations of the south magnetic pole, and the reason therefore, and something to do with parallaxes and the precession of the equinoxes and other things, this search for the pole's exact location.

You know, fer science and shit.  Ask Einstein, nerd.  Regardless, this sort of egghead stuff doesn’t interest Tommy Travers, Adventurer!  He’s the expedition’s pilot, and he and his pal Dodd (an “archaeologist”), are flying back into camp after a hard day explorin’ the shit out of the South Pole. 

Disembarking from their plane, Travers and Dodd produce the fruits of their day’s labor for the rest of the Expedition to see: a giant-ass beetle carapace.  

Even the least scientific minded of the party gasped in amazement at what Dodd had. It resembled nothing so much as an enormous beetle. As a matter of fact, it was an insect, for it had the three sections that characterize this class, but it was merely the shell of one. Between four and five feet in height, when Dodd stood it on end, it could now be seen to consist of the hard exterior substance of some huge, unknown coleopter.

They done gone and found a big ass beetle, which, for some reason, Dodd identifies as having come from some Tertiary strata (~post dinosaurs, a period now-er-days ranging from 66 million years ago to about 2.5 million years ago).  Anyway, he’s all excited, because OF COURSE big ass bugs means that there were doubtless a whole bunch of big ass animals running around the Antarctic in the geological past.  Dodd wants to search for more, but has to overcome the disdain of the expedition’s astronomer.  People don’t give a shit about dramatic reinterpretations of life’s history on Earth, he argues; what people REALLY want are careful measurements of the heavens so people can check Einstein’s math. 

However, after a bit of discussion, Dodd and Travers convince the Head of the expedition that it’ll be worth their while to spend a little bit of time checking it out.  After all, they point out, their beetle was found near where a previous expedition had left a man behind, the Brilliant but Troubled Bram, a Scientist of Some Note.  Bram, who is an asshole and a morphine addict, had vanished into the southern icy wastes, but Dodd reckons that the beetles where what convinced the jerk to stick around while everybody else went home.  He hopes that Bram might have left some notes in a cairn (like you do), and wants to find them along with more giant-ass beetles.  Dodd even muses upon his own history with Bram; apparently he and the hop-head had a little disagreement in the literature regarding some fossils. 

They bed down for the night, and in the morning, Tommy Travers and his Science Buddy Dodd head out, after noting that the weather is looking a little rough.  SURELY that will have no impact on the story.

They buzz around a bit, but as they draw nearer their goal a tremendous storm blows up, and they lose control of the plane.  As the storm builds, the snow turns to slush, then rain and mist…it’s getting warmer!  Then, just as they start to lose control of the plane, they spot an enormous, seemingly bottomless hole in the South Pole, dun Dun DUN!

They fly into the hole, because why wouldn’t you, but they suddenly lose oxygen and crash.  Whoops!

The next chapter in the Saga begins with Tommy groggily regaining consciousness.  He finds himself laying on a heap of sand, a little ways from the wreckage of their plane.  It’s warm, too, far too warm for the arctic furs he’s got on.  Dodd is nowhere to be seen.

Looking around, Tommy is startled by something big shuffling around in the sand nearby.  He watches, horrified, as a three-foot shrimp pops its head up out of the sand, spooking the hell of Travers.  He gets to watch a giant, man-sized beetle molt its carapace.  That’s all good and well; giant arthropods are this stories “weird” component, so it’s good that we get to see em in action a little bit.  But man cannot live of giant shrimp alone; bring on the Girl!

Travers watches as a woman approaches the edge of the sand flats.  At first, he assumes that she’s wrapped in some kind of weird sarong thing, but then he realizes that she’s actually wearing her hair, which is a pretty bonkers visual, when you think about it.  She’s wrapped herself up in her blonde, Rapunzelian locks, which is crazy.  She tiptoes about the sand for a bit, then:

Suddenly, with lightning-like rapidity, her arms shot out, her hands began tunneling in the sand. With a cry of triumph she pulled out the shrimp Tommy had seen, or another like it, and, stripping it off the shell, began devouring it with evident relish.

Tommy, red-blooded New Yorker that he is, can’t help but approach her.  She looks up, and it turns out that she’s got a weird nictitating membrane over her eyes.  Subtext is that the natives are kind odd, if the live-shrimp-eating-and-hair-dress thing didn’t signal that clear enough for you.

Doubtless recognizing a Harvard man, she hops up and comes towards him, evidently blinded by the dim light of the deep valley.  She comes up close to Tommy, which lets him get a good look at her:

His outstretched hand touched hers. It was unquestionably a woman's hand he held, delicately warm, with exquisitely moulded fingers, in whose touch there seemed to be, for the girl, some tactile impression of him.

Again that membrane was drawn back from the girl's pupils for a fleeting flash. Tommy saw two eyes of intense black, their color contrasting curiously with the flaxen color of her hair and her white skin, almost the tint of an albino's. Those eyes had surveyed him, and appeared satisfied that he was one of her kind. She could not have seen very much in that almost instantaneous flash of vision. Queer, that membrane—as if she had been used to living in the dark, as if the full light of the day was unbearable!

An old guy, similarly hair-suited, creeps out to get him a shrimp, and Lady Godiva goes to join him.  That’s fine, but now it’s time for some Giant Arthropod Action again!

And in the midst of it a flood came pouring from the hole—a flood of living beetles, covering the ground in fifteen-foot leaps as they dashed at the two.

To his horror, Tommy saw Jimmy Dodd among them, wrapped in his fur coat like a mummy, and being pushed and rolled forward like a football.

For a moment Tommy hesitated, torn between his solicitude for Jim Dodd and that for the girl. Then, as the foremost of the monsters bounded to her side, he ran between them. The vicious jaws snapped within six inches of Tommy's face, with a force that would have carried away an ear, or shredded the cheek, if they had met.

So, Old Man and Cave Girl are just trying to enjoy the quivering flesh of their raw shrimp meal, when a pile of beetles charge them, mandibles clashing etc etc.  In their mad rush to eat up the Cave People, the bugs are also pushing the still unconscious form of Dodd in front of them.  Travers, like all true Harvard Graduates, knows he has to Do Something!

Dude literally punches a beetle in the noggin, like in the cover picture above, which knocks it out.  In their mad bloodlust, the other beetles turn on their stricken comrade and chomp it up, letting Travers and Dodd share a moment of “What the fuck is going on!?” before they, and the cave people, get herded up by the Beetles and pushed into a dark hole.  THEN:

Suddenly the ground seemed to fall away beneath his feet. He struggled, cried out, and felt himself descending through the air.

For a full half-minute he went downward at a speed that constricted his throat so that he could hardly draw breath. Then, just as he had nerved himself for the imminent crash, the speed of his descent was checked. In another moment he found that he was slowing to a standstill in mid-air.

He was beginning to float backward—upward. But the wall of moving shells, pushing against him, forced him on, downward, and yet apparently against the force of gravitation.

Then of a sudden Tommy was aware of a dim light all about him. His feet touched earth and grass as softly as a thistledown alighting.

He found himself seated in the same dim light upon red grass, and staring into Jimmy's face.

So, just to give it away, the valley they crashed into is connected to the Hollow Earth, and when they fall down into the subterranean depth, the centrifugal force of the Earth’s rotation lifts them back up and against the inner edge of the crust, which, of course, is entirely 100% accurate and very very sciency.

Ol’ Travers wakes up, and he and Dodd and a bunch of cave folk, including the Blonde and the Old Man, have been herded by a bunch of beetles into a little clearing, carpeted in red grass.  There’re luminous vegetables too, that lend a dim glow to the scene.  Dodd gets a chance to wax rhapsodic about deep sea color schemes and whatnot, and then drops in some completely spur of the moment hypothesizing about the origins of all the weird ass stuff they’ve seen:

"The grass is red because there's no sunlight to produce chlorophyll. The inhabitants of the deep sea are red or black, almost invariably. In the case of the humans, they've become bleached. My belief is that that man and woman we saw, and those"—he pointed to the vague forms of human beings, who moved across the grass, gathering something—"are survivors of the primitive race that still exists as the Australians. Undoubtedly one of the branches of the human stock originated in antarctica at a time when it enjoyed a tropical temperature, and was the land bridge between Australia and South America.

"And the—beetles?" asked Tommy.

"Ah, they go back to the days when nature was in a more grandiose mood!" replied the archaeologist enthusiastically. "That's the most wonderful discovery of the ages. The world will go crazy over them when we bring back the first living specimens to the zoological parks of the great cities.

Good science-ing there, Dodd.

Dodd and Travers hang with the cave folks.  They try to eat a cave apple they pick from a tree, but the Blonde Cave Lady knocks it out of their hand in disgust, and jams a shrimp down Dodd’s throat.  Their meetcute is broken up, however, by the arrival of a big ol’ Boss Beetle and his Beetle Honor Guard.  

I guess now might be a good time to reflect on Beetles, and the threats a giant one would pose.  Excepting the problems of respiration and structural integrity an giant exoskeletone-ed critter would have, are these big beetles really that menacing?  I mean, sure, swarms of things are bad, and there are apparently lots and lots of these giant beetles, but I don’t think beetles are particularly dangerous, you know?  I mean, they’ve got no stingers, no poisons or toxins.  I suppose Lady Bugs are pretty mercilessly predaceous, at least against fairly sedentary aphids and whatnot, but I don’t really think of beetles rushing around in a fury of chitin and legs, rending their prey limb from limb.  I guess these giant Beetles have just carved out a new niche for themselves as the top predators of the subterranean world.

Big ol’ King Beetle shows up, and some of his guard beetles scuttle forward and bring Dodd and Travers before their Sovereign Lord and Master who, in a shocking twist, turns out to not be a beetle at all!  In fact, it’s a man dressed as a Beetle, wearing a molted shell!

It was light enough for Tommy to see the face of the ruler of the hellish swarm. And it required all his powers of will to keep from collapsing from sheer horror at what he saw.

For, despite the close-fitting shell, the face of the beetle king was the face of a man—a white man!

Jim Dodd's shriek rang out above the shrilling of the beetle-legs, "Bram! It's you, it's you! My God, it's you, Bram!"

That’s right!  In a shocking twist you never would have seen coming from the ridiculous amounts of awkward expository dialogue preceding it, the morphine-addled nutjob Bram is apparently the ruler of the Giant Beetles!  As mentioned, he’s wearing a beetle carapace like a coat, and evidences some ability to communicate with and control the beetles.  This is all secondary, however, mere prelude to the development of the best bit of ridiculous “yank-some-words-from-an-encyclopedia” dialogue ever:

A sneering chuckle broke from Bram's lips. "Yes, it's me, James Dodd," he answered. "I'm a little surprised to see you here, Dodd, but I'm mighty glad. Still insane upon the subject of fossil monotremes, I suppose?[…]

"Yes, still insane," answered Dodd bitterly. "Insane enough to go on believing that the polyprotodontia and the dasyuridae, which includes the peramelidae, or bandicoots, and the banded ant-eaters, or myrmecobidae, are not to be found in fossil form, for the excellent reason that they were not represented before the Upper Cretaceous period.”

"You lie! You lie!" screamed Bram. "I have shown to all the world that phascalotherium, amphitherium, amblotherium, spalacotherium, and many other orders are to be found in the Upper Jurassic rocks of England, Wyoming, and other places. You—you are the man who denied the existence of the nototherium, of the marsupial lion, in pleistocene deposits! You denied that the dasyuridae can be traced back beyond the pleistocene. And you stand there and lie to me, when you are at my mercy!”

You’ll forgive the gratuitous excerptations, but that is absolutely the best thing ever.  You’ll remember that Dodd and Bram had battled it out in the literature a ways back, a tidbit dropped earlier in the story, before Travers and Dodd had fallen through the hole in the pole and watched a blonde lady eat a giant shrimp.  I mean, come on, how can you not be utterly, wonderfully charmed by that bit of insanity?  You find yourself dragged before the King of The Giant Beetles, who turns out to be a guy you know, and the first thing you do is start an argument about mammalian biostratigraphy.  And the silliness is exacerbated by the goofy combination of expert shop-talk (peramelidae) with explanatory asides (…the banded ant-eaters).  You can only hope they talk like that all the time about everything ever (“I’d appreciate a glass, an amorphous solid predominantly composed of silica, of water, or dihydrogen monoxide”).  I think that we can read something into this disagreement, but we’ll get back to that later on.

Of course, Travers thinks maybe Dodd ought not be antagonizing the insane Beetle King, and tries to get his pal to ixnay on the ientificscay isagreementday.  But Dodd will have none of it, you hear me?  NONE OF IT:

But Dodd, whose eyes were glaring, said a sublime thing: "I have given my life to science, and I will never deny my master!”

Sublime indeed.  But such are the wonders of bandicoot phylogeny to inspire such devotion.

Of course, you ain’t gonna let some punk-ass kid knock your carefully constructed phylogenetic analyses.  Bram does the obvious thing and tackles Dodd, and they wrestle while the beetles watch impassively.  Travers separates the two of them from their little nerd scrum, accidently tipping Bram over and onto his, at which point the assembled beetles freak the fuck out and rush him! 

Turns out that the beetles, like all good bugs, are pretty much robots, and they’ve got a big ol’ autonomic response to seeing one of their own on its back or injured: they gonna eat him.  They can’t help it; they’re just bugs, programmed to eat and breed.  Luckily, Travers gets Bram up and onto his feet before the beetles can rend him limb from insane limb, which stops them in their tracks.  Then Bram flicks his bic, and the light of it drives back the beetles.

So, to recap: beetles gonna eat, and they particularly while chow down on a beetle that is injured or on its back immobile, AND fire bad.

Poor ol’ Dodd got himself fucked up pretty good in the fight, however, acquiring a gash in his throat from a rock when he fell.  Bram, mollified, pops a pill (Don’t Do Drugs, Kids) and whistles up some Beetle help to bring Dodd back to his chambers for healing.  At this point, the story see fit to tell us that Bram, having just used the lighter to drive off his blood-maddened beetle guards, dropped the lighter and promptly forgot about it, allowing Travers to scoop it up.  That’s some good writing there, chief.

They flutter back to Bram’s fortress of solitude, which turns out to be a cavern, lit and warmed by rushing gouts of flame erupting from a natural petroleum spring.  The Beetles don’t like the heat or fire, and the spring is part of Bram’s power over them.  They unload the patient, Bram pops some more drugs, and brings some fruit for them to munch one while Dodd recuperates. 

Turns out that “Submundia” is facing a pretty dire food shortage, mostly as a result of the ecological dynamics of the place; the Beetles are the top of the food chain, but they go through a boom-and-bust population cycle related to the availability of their primary prey, the blonde cave folk.  The Blondies, like retirees on a cruise, refuse to eat any fruits or vegetables, preferring shrimp for their meals, which is straining their own population dynamics as well.  Turns out the beetles are due for another big hatch soon, which Bram seems pretty excited about.  Dodd rouses himself enough to ask if he can get that big blonde cave girl to be his nurse, which Bram agrees to, then everybody takes a nap.

Resting and recuperating for some time afterwards, Dodd and Travers get to know Haidia the cave Girl a little better. 

That Haidia was in love with Dodd in quite a human way was evident. To please the girl, both Dodd and Tommy had learned to eat the raw shrimps, which, being bloodless, were really no worse than oysters, and had a flavor half-way between shrimp and crawfish. To please the men, Haidia tried not to shudder when she saw them devouring the breadfruit and nectarines of which Bram always had a plentiful supply. Bram was solicitous in his inquiries for Dodd's health.

A touching scene of domesticity.

Anyway, they realize that Bram is waiting around for Dodd to get better before putting a proposition of some sort to them; as such, Dodd decides to fake paralysis, giving them more time to think up a plan of escape, although if you ask ME, I imagine he’s just hoping for more Haida-administered sponge-baths. 

Haidia even learns English, through the power of Narrative Necessity:

Her brain, which had probably developed certain faculties in different proportions from those of the upper human race, had registered every word that either of the two men had ever spoken, and remembered it. As soon as Dodd ascertained this, he began to instruct her, and, with her abnormal faculties of memory, it was not long before she could talk quite intelligently. The obstacle that had stood between them was swept away. She became one of themselves.

This lets Haidia share the history of the subterranean world with Travers and Dodd which is, of course, suitably dire and chaotic. 

Seems that the Beetle Swarms are pretty much top dogs in the Underworld, and where there are swarms there’s not much else; the beetles seem particularly fond of chowing down on blonde cave folk, so that there weren’t many humans left.  When Bram showed up and took over the Beetles, he instituted a breeding program whereby the most “prolific” people were used as cattle stock to feed the beetles.  That had averted their extinction for a while, but a new swarm was due to hatch any day now, and there ain’t anything like enough Aryan Cave People to feed these new beetles.

Then, Haidia pulls a lizard out from between her boobs.

The girl, with a shudder, put her hand to her bosom, and brought out a little bright-eyed lizard.

"The old man you saw with me, who is one of our wise elders, has told our people that these things feed upon the beetle larvae," she said. "We are putting them secretly into the nests. But what can a few lizards do against millions." She looked up. "In the earth above us, the beetle larvae extend for miles, in a solid mass," she said. "When they come out as beetles, it will be the end of all of us.”

This sounds like a job for two Ivy-League White Dudes!  They decide they gotta boogey, but there are only two ways out of Bram’s cavern apartment: flying away on a beetle, which is how they got there in the first place, or over a spooky bridge that spans the petroleum spring. 

Bram shows up, eyes mad with morphine and his love of marsupial fossils, and takes Travers and Dodd out to show him the Beetle Fields.  Miles and miles of grubs, getting hungry.  The upswing is, they’re going to hatch soon, and eat up all the remaining people in the subterranean world.

"Any day now the entire swarm will emerge," cried Bram. "How many moultings they undergo before they undergo the finished state, I do not know, but already, as you see, they are prepared for the battle of life. They emerge ravenous. That beetle will fall upon the man-herds and devour a full grown man, unless the guards destroy it."

He raised his arms with the gesture of an ancient prophet. "Woe to the human race," he cried, "the wretched ape spawn that has cast out its teachers and persecuted those who sought to raise it to higher things!”

He’s just pissed he didn’t get tenure; I hear ya man, it’s rough out there. 

 Bram goes full Mad Scientist Mode, explaining how he, Lord of the Beetles, has a plan to unleash their destructive gluttony on the Surface World, killing of the weak surface people and allowing him to remake civilization in his own image, presumably one that relies heavily on his particular pet theories about the evolutionary significance and stratigraphic occurrence of certain marsupial fossils from the Mesozoic.

In an odd twist, Bram plans to straight up kill all the humans, replacing them with beetles, but he wants Travers and Dodd to help him (for some reason), such that the continuity of Man’s Achievements can be preserved for the beetles.  Who the hell knows that means, but here’s my best guess: Bram makes some comments about the superiority of insects over humans, all that “purity of purpose” shit that Bilbo was talking about aboard the Nostromo in Alien.  I gather that Bram expects to slaughter the apes so that the Beetles will inherit the earth, eventually evolving a civilization.  That’s why he wants to preserve Humanity’s records and science, to help out the future beetles (I suppose). 

It is important to remember that Bram has been doing a LOT of drugs.  Maybe he’s just having a bad trip on a combination of Haldane and sour pills, who knows?

Dodd and he inevitably clash, first over the goddamn marsupial fossil record again, then over Man’s Place In Nature, with Dodd coming down firmly on the side of a Great Chain of Being.

“Listen to me," bawled Dodd, advancing with waving arms. "Once and for all, let me tell you that your deductions are all based upon fallacious premises. No, I will not shut up, Tom Travers! You want me to aid your damned beetles in the destruction of humanity! I tell you that your phascalotherium, amphitherium, and all the rest of them, including the marsupial lion, are degenerate developments of the age following the pleistocene. I say the whole insect world was made to fertilize the plant world, so that it should bear fruit for human food. Man is the summit of the scale of evolution, and I will never join in any infamous scheme for his destruction.”

Moving stuff indeed.

Bram sputters and gnashes his teeth, but offers the two of them an ultimatum: Join Him, OR DIE!!!  I guess he’s afraid he’ll be lonely as the only human in a Beetle World, so that’s why he’s giving them 24 hours to think it over.  They go back, and plan to make a run for it, once the Petroleum Fire Springs dies down a bit, as it does periodically.

But, because he’s bored and didn’t think to bring some books or even a crossword puzzle, Bram shows back up before they can go, spouting off more dire threats.  He’ll feed em all to the larvae, unless they swear fealty to his Empire of the Beetle.  This is yet another chance for some Dueling scientist banter that is simply the greatest thing ever produced by humans:

"Dodd, there is no personal quarrel between us," Bram went on. Again that note of pathetic pleading came into his voice. "Give up your mad ideas. Admit that the banded ant-eater, at least, existed before the pleistocene epoch, and everything can be settled. When you see what my beetles are going to do to humanity, you'll be proud to join us. Only make a beginning. You remember the point I made in my paper, about spalacotherium in the Upper Jurassic rocks. It would convince anybody but a hardened fanatic."

"I read your paper, and I saw your so-called spalacotherium, reconstructed from what you called a jaw-bone," shouted Dodd. "That so-called jaw-bone was a lump of chalk, made porous by water, and the rest was in your imagination. Do your worst, Bram, I'll never crucify truth to save my life. And I'll laugh at your spalacotherium when your beetles are eating me.”

I’m going to rotate that “Give up your mad ideas” line into my roster, I think.

Bram, having shouted about Pleistocene fossil xenarthrans, decides he’s done for the day and leaves.  Then Haidia shows up, lugging some Beetle shells which they use to disguise themselves and sneak away over the fiery bridge.  Bram discovers their clever ruse, and tries to chase after them, but the trio of escapees finds a river and use their shells as boats to get away. 

Unfortunately, they end up in a mushroom forest where they are immediately attacked by a 15-foot Praying Mantis, fulfilling its ecological niche as a Cliffhanger Predator.

THUS ENDS PART 1!  WILL THE THREE OF THEM SURVIVE!?  WILL BRAM SUCCEED IN HIS PLAN TO EXTERIMATE ALL HUMAN LIFE ON THE PLANET!?  WHEN IS THE FIRST OCCURRENCE DATUM OF MARSUIPIALS IN THE FOSSIL RECORD, AND HOW SHOULD WE INTERPRET THE TAPHONOMIC BIAS INHERENT IN THE RECORD!?

All this, and more, will be answered next time in the thrilling conclusion of THE BEETLE HORDES!