Crawl

By Terry W. Gintz

Through a series of natural and unnatural disasters the world is crumbling and atrophying into a deep abyss that mankind is helpless to contain. Godfrey recalls the events leading to this calamity with a body and mind that are barely functional but undaunted by the slowly descending finale of his species. When all hope is gone he decides to fight back and recreate the world on his own terms.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Terry W. Gintz
• Release date: Mar 21, 2012
• ISBN: 9781476357379

Terry W. Gintz

When I'm not doing anything else, I read a lot of novels. With years of experience as a poet, it's not surprising that I developed an interest in writing my own novels too. Given the multi-faceted iconoclast I am and the great affection I have for my wife it's also not surprising that the books I write are innately eccentric, robustly erotic and critically anti-establishment.Fractals have been a passion for me since around 1984 when I read Mandelbrot's The Fractal Geometry of Nature. I designed my first iterative fractal program (then called ZPlot) in 1989 on an Amiga 2000 computer.Since 2007 I have been heavily involved in lapidary or stone creations. You can view these at http://tgintz.epizy.com/ along with 3d prints I've made based on 3d fractals from my software.

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Crawl

by Terry W. Gintz

Copyright 2012 Terry W. Gintz

Smashwords Edition

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‘Be umble, Uriah,’ says father to me, ‘and you’ll get on. It was always being dinned into you and me at school; it’s what goes down best. Be umble,’ says father, ‘and you’ll do!’ And really it ain’t done bad! – Charles Dickens

Now when all the clowns that you have commissioned

Have died in battle or in vain

And you’re sick of all this repetition

Won’t you come see me, Queen Jane? – Bob Dylan

CONTENTS

Part One: The Comedown

Chapter 1-[Day One]

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6 [Day Two]

Chapter 7

Chapter 8 [Day Three]

Chapter 9 [Day Four]

Chapter 10 [Day Five]

Chapter 11 [Day Six]

Chapter 12 [Day Seven]

Part Two: The Face Off

Chapter 13 [Day One (after a billion other possible scenarios had run their courses)]

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16 [Day: Timeless]

Chapter 17 [Day Two: Epilog]

Appendix B: Deleted Scenes

Suggested References for Further Study

For B.

Part One: The Comedown

Chapter 1-[Day One]

There goes another one, Godfrey duly noted, as his toes continued to drop off. He’d lost seven so far that day and it wasn’t too unlikely to suppose he’d lose the rest of them before the day was up. Well, they weren’t good for much anyway, he figured, and it was always a pain to clip their nails. He would miss how good it felt to rub them against Amy’s bosom or bottom while she was sleeping, but that was it. The fairy toe snatcher would have her way with him, as she had with his fingernails and foreskin. All of his extremities were shrinking or peeling away ever since the universal spirit or dream catcher had decided to abandon what was left of the human race, and the other indigenous mammals, reptiles and birds had become either extinct or ghost walkers, which made it hard to concentrate on sex or anything else. It was not like he consciously measured his fingers, ears or penis. He could feel his legs and arms continuously shortening; becoming a midget wasn’t heartening, and making love satisfactorily was getting harder to accomplish when he could hardly reach first base with Amy anymore.

Godfrey looked around his nearly barren living room. All of the knickknacks he and Amy had collected on their scavenger hunts around America’s wasteland were gone, having been burned up for heat or light, or stolen by the knickknack fairies. The walls were barren except for some sketches he’d drawn directly on them. He wasn’t much of an artist, but anything to liven up the place. Lately he’d taken to sketching with crayons Amy reclining on the couch, a naked diva with just the bare essentials standing out, with well rounded tits and ass; caricatures that looked like something John Lennon might have drawn. What was more interesting was that he was beginning to find his own drawings more alluring than Amy’s body, not that it disturbed him really. Where was that woman anyway? She should have been home hours ago from her trip to the supermarket or grocery store. Oh that’s right, there is no market anymore; well maybe the corner drug store. (This was actually a shack run by two decrepit witch doctors. Amazing what they could do with some plants and a pestle and mortar.) Amy was always looking for the right skin cream, something that didn’t itch or burn; something to sooth the savage beast within. Godfrey thought to himself, I must be getting soft in the skull, worrying about a spouse who looked like death warmed over; that’s what happened when civilization went down the drain and you didn’t have any Drano to unclog it. Living totally by your own wits was exhausting to say the least, so he spread himself on the sofa loosely to muddle it all out.

Godfrey remembered when it all started, eleven years ago nearly to the day when the Gulf of Mexico became flooded with BP oil. The stench of decaying birds had spiraled out of control ever since then. In two and a half years, the contagion had spread from sea to shining sea. A colony of rats infected with swine flu fleas in 2013 rode the tide out of Baton Rouge in an apple crate down the Mississippi River and hitched a ride on an oil slick to all parts of the globe via the Gulf Stream. Their dead bodies washed ashore on every continent and started an epidemic of bubonic proportions. What started out as swine flu mutated into the worst plague mankind has ever endured, truly obscene from all angles. That was when the flesh-eating zombies first appeared and really made a dent in the human population. The more timid individuals and families barricaded themselves behind closed doors and suffered a slow starvation when their pantries ran out. The more aggressive fellows like Godfrey, when they weren’t annihilating every beastie in sight with an Uzi or a Mack truck, strode out like foot soldiers with butcher knives or machetes and carved themselves a zombie steak and ate that, after roasting it to a cinder to kill the virus or bacteria that it was infested with. [Survivor’s Rule #1: Kill or be killed, then take a lunch break.] That was when he first met her, hiding behind an abandoned BMW coupe, and looking like a frightened squirrel, half in and half out of her dress and underwear. He covered her with his Sam Spade trench coat, after examining her closely for any scratches or bites that might have been caused by a zombie. He liked what was visible of her, blonde, well-rounded and petite, with a complexion pale as freshly-carved ivory. When she looked up at him with her big blue eyes and smiled so innocently, he couldn’t resist one little kiss. Just as he was leaning over to do just that, she showed her true colors and brought forth a three foot pitch fork she’d slyly kept in back of her. Not so fast, Buster she said irately, while swiftly waving the pitchfork back and forth in front of her like a ninja’s staff, as fast and high as she could twirl it. She was five four and he was six three. I’m not exactly the helpless female you take me for. Godfrey could only stare at her more closely and toss out the obvious question, Where’d you learn that trick, bitch? My father was a ninth degree black belt from Osaka, Japan who married an Irish lass from the Derry land she lied, as smoothly as she twirled. In reality she came from old Scandinavian stock and had an affinity for all things athletic; she picked up things from martial arts movies as easily as an Asian handled chop sticks. Godfrey let her wave the pitchfork around and around until she could hardly hold it above her head, while he stood guard instead and decapitated a leprous zombie who came stalking them, and stored it’s torso in a Glad ForceFlex® trash bag. This he swung with one hand like a sack of potatoes to knock out the stuffing out of a dozen more zombies who homed in on what by then smelled like a bloody parfait. Then he scooped up the woman he would later know as Amy using his other arm and took her home. After he fed her a zombie t-bone she was his and his alone. Godfrey was quite a cook in those days, though he hardly had much time to think about it. The main game in town was harvesting the zombies, who seemed to be sprouting up everywhere. Then the insanity and sharecropping ended abruptly, almost as suddenly as it started.

It turned out that the flu virus or bacterial agent, or whatever that infernal corruption was linked to, spent itself exactly sixty days three hours and fifteen seconds after the first wave of mutations hit Tripoli, but not before decimating 98.6 percent of humankind’s population, including most of its major elected leaders and social icons. The President of the United States and his cabinet got trapped in an underground bunker and were asphyxiated due to lack of air when a sidereal earthquake caved in the ventilation shafts. Ironically at the same time the Eiffel Tower fell on the President of France and his advisers while making a beeline for the Arch de Triumph; the royal family of England fell into a bog and expired trying to escape some ruffians in Hyde Park, and the Kremlin collapsed under its own weight of conspicuous consumption while debating the evils of capitalism. All over the nihilistic world, capital buildings or presidential suites became death traps, either from zombie attacks or natural disasters like the Thornbird infestation in the imperial house of Japan or colonies of giant red ants overrunning the regal plantations of Brazil. Society’s Hollywood sweethearts weren’t spared either. Hiding behind closed doors only ensured their demise. Perhaps it was the massive scale of the devastation that made things look worse than it really was, but when it was all over, the wealth of most nations had gone down the tubes and white flags were the only flags people waved anymore. If you happened to have a sane and auspicious neighbor in the vicinity it was best to wave your flag slowly like a flowering asphodel if you wanted them to know you were friendly. It paid to be a cautious gadfly, questioning everyone else’s motives intuitively, as mistrust ran rampant as rabid dogs or raccoons, and could easily chase you up a tree, metaphorically, reeking of deceit, while arboreal plants still grew to respectable heights, that is. In other words, don’t trust anyone and you might live to see another sunrise.

The remaining dregs and misfits were so suspicious of each other, and were constantly fighting over leftovers, as there was no upper management anymore, that it took another year and a half before a new hen-pecking regime based on non-technological mutual cooperation (hippie idealism) appeared to settle things down. Oil wells were burned in effigy, and the whole auto industry ground to a standstill, along with a myriad of other smog-producing factories. Without petroleum, plastics no longer polluted the earth and insecticides were reconstituted from more healthy organic materials. Except for some arrogant fools who insisted on taking up roles for the good of society’s morals and high browed principles, it looked like the Age of Aquarius was finally upon Man. But by then it was too late to stop global warming. The polar caps started melting at an ever increasing rate, and barring divine intervention the doom of what remained of the coastal cities would have been mutually assured. What happened next was like the final epitaph of mankind being written.

After the flu/plague was finished with civilization, the disintegration of everything else began. Hoards of non-essential things like cameos, jewelry, wall paintings, silverware and bric-a-brac and even legal tender began dissolving or disappearing, and body parts started atrophying. Godfrey remembered when his finger nails began falling off, then his toe nails, and then the hair on his arms, legs and genitals. Why his hairy head was spared was a mystery he never solved, to his satisfaction anyhow. By then he was chugging down cocktails contaminated with surf and zombie sludge that no amount of filtering could strain out completely but were as addicting as the cocaine that was once contained in Coca-Cola. (The oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico continued unabated for seven years and through the sucking action of continental plates located strategically near the Gulf Stream succeeded in soiling all underground springs around the world and working itself into the heart of every fresh water river system. Water filtration plants like EBMUD had already done as much as they could to weed out the microscopic remains of zombies who’d died across the land, but there was always the question What amount of zombie crud is safe for human consumption? It was decided to let the answer ride on the rat hair theory, an amount equal to one millionth the mass of a rat hair should be safe enough, but boil all drinking water just in case.) It looked like residuals of the plague virus were at fault, at least for the retrogressing human factors, but it was more than that. Some do-it-yourself self-educated scientists noticed at first that the selective lack of cohesion that held everything together was linked to a flaw in the universal atomic structure of matter, but it was easier for most unimaginative folks to believe that God had departed for galaxies unknown and take-away fairies now infested the world. This kind of lazy thinking also led one to believe in witches and spells that caused all sorts of ills. After a while there were no critical thinkers that promoted theories based on a pseudo-scientific method, for all that did tended to vanish in a puff of smoke.

People ate with their hands when all eating utensils vaporized or melted like butter, and stove-top solar ovens became the main cooking tools when electrical wires disintegrated in walls and power plants stalled and oozed out their guts. For a while houses took on the look of Roman cathedrals, with a myriad of beeswax candles to light their insides, until the bees up and died and the candles burnt out. This could have darkened everyone’s outlook at night, except for the stars which took on the look of powerful searchlights, ten times brighter than before electric lights were throttled, and which were guaranteed to cause instant enlightenment to the brain cells of anyone crazy enough to lay spread-eagled face up on the ground without any clothing on. Perhaps they were the lucky ones, no one knew for certain, as there was nothing left of those poor souls except maybe a Rorschach shadow in the morning.

About the only amusements left besides loafing around the house and enjoying the free form arts were watching your external body parts shrivel up and fall off or taking a mud bath in areas of the shoreline where the ocean no longer reached. (The ocean had been receding about five feet a day, which seemed an impossibility since the ice caps had melted completely, but nothing was as it should be these days.) Sexual entanglements were destined to fall by the wayside, for obvious reasons, though love and blind affections never died. Artists were having a hard time finding a perfect subject to paint anymore, since bodies and landscapes varied in their deprivations, and you could no longer count on the status quo remaining static. Even the moon had taken on a progressively inhuman and cavernous leering look. About the only people who weren’t concerned about the fall of humanity were those who held up signs on every corner of town reading Repent: The End Is Near! Whether it was the last town on Earth no one knew for certain, except that it felt like it. If you tried to ride too far out of town on a man-powered vehicle, a rare bicycle or tricycle (the only transportation left since petroleum had been guzzled up by the gas fairy), you ended up in the farmer’s cactus patch with no conception of how you got there,