Ezekiel's Wheels

Most folks are joking when they talk about their work as “just another day in the salt mines”. My crew and me, we really did work in the salt mines. The Tahatchakato Salt Mine in central Kansas, to put a pin in a map. That’s where we busted our asses every day, scratching the skeletal remains of some inland sea that dissolved 325 million years ago, digging out industrial quantities of sodium chloride measured by the metric ton to be used to clear roads and streets in winter and put seasoning on the dinner table. Like the Man said, “It’s a living”.

At least, it was.

Until the world ended.

Tuesday, almost two weeks ago—like anyone’s still keeping count—was when most of the people on Earth died. The handful of us left were so lost in our own circumstances we had no idea anything bigger was going down. It took us days to realize it really was game over for everybody. Right after it happened, about twenty of us still remained. Now, it’s down to exactly one—me. I don’t look anything like Vincent Price but it’s possible I just might be The Last Man on Earth. How crazy is that?

The day Hell came knocking, Immortal Jenkins and the Co-Regency were down-shaft, some 3,000 feet underground, drilling the walls. Rex Campbell was topside with the rest of us and he couldn’t wait to see them riding back up the elevator. I suppose we were all looking forward to it, truth be told. See, Rex was sort of a professional asshole. He got on good with Immortal Jenkins (so-called because he’d survived THREE heart attacks, including the famed “widow-maker”—like the old TV commercial said about the wristwatch, Immortal could take a licking and keep on ticking). It was the Dougherty Brothers, Rufus and DeWayne, who Rex was targeting.

These were simple guys; a third-generation Tahatchakato family whose father and grandfather had spent their lives working the shafts. More than brothers, they were like Siamese twins, absent the physical connection— a single unit rather than a team. I always suspected they shared only one paycheck between them. We called them the “Co-Regency” because they were never more than inches apart. They spent every shift, every lunch and every break side-by-side. They consulted one another on the smallest of matters. Hell, they even hit the toilet in tandem. Sweet, easy-going guys, they didn’t know much else but they knew their shit about digging salt from a wall.

Rex Campbell, though—who you might remember was an asshole— loved to torment them. He called them “Doofus and ReWayne”, right to their faces, if you can feature that. Anyhow, that last day he’d outdone himself. He’d gone down shaft in front of their shift and planted a bit of junk jewelry in the wall of the mine. It was some piece-of-shit trinket; a brassy, tarnished, heart-shaped locket he’d picked up in a second-hand shop. He knew—hell, all of us did—Immortal Jenkins wouldn't fall for his prank. But Rexy couldn’t wait to see how “Doofus and ReWayne” reacted to the phenomenon of pulling a piece of modern jewelry out of the wall of a 325-million-year-old salt mine. Not to be mean-spirited, I think we were all curious to see their response. It was one of Rex’s more clever pranks.

We never found out.

The world ended first.

The power failing was our first clue. Emergency lights, dim, red lamps that ran off batteries, flickered on when the mains died and everyone chilled, waiting for the grid to get up and running again. The infrastructure was decrepit and such shit happened from time to time. Nobody gave it a second thought. Then the hours rolled on and the power didn’t come back on. People got antsy. The early runners decided the shift was done for the day and started heading home.

They were the first among us to die.

We called the things “Spider Gliders”. Later, we learned they weren’t bugs or even alive—at least not in any real sense. They were properly called “Ezekiel’s Wheels”. Even if that was bullshit—and it might have been—I suppose a biblical name IS more appropriate for something that brings about global apocalypse.

Vicious bastards, they attack like a school of microscopic, air-borne piranha. If those little monsters catch you in the open, your ass is grass. You can’t see them; only a hazy gray cloud as they swarm their victims, rendering their bodies to bone in seconds. They even take the clothing. Most of the crew of the Tahatchakato Salt Mine, my friends and co-workers, died trying to flee in those first days, never getting more than mere feet beyond the mine entrance before disappearing in a cloud of gray and red mist.

Oh, and the buzzing. The noise those things make is godawful. The screams of the dying weren’t half as bad.

As far as we knew at first, it was just a standard blackout. Roland DePesto and Dotty Noonan were among the first half dozen or so to die exiting the mine. Heading toward their cars, the group got maybe three yards across the gravel lot when the shrieking started. That buzzing, a loud electric hum, began and they just . . . dissolved, right where they were standing. The gray cloud enveloped them and they poofed, vanishing like clay skeet pigeons hit by a shotgun blast, leaving behind a fading red mist trailing in the breeze. Their skeletons fell to the ground in a nightmare IKEA Do-It-Yourself jumble of bones. It was like something from a cartoon.

All hell broke loose. People rushed from the mine straight to their doom without waiting to see what was happening. They vanished. Archie Meeks, who’d been a champion track-runner in high school and once had a shot at the Olympics, exited the Supervisor’s Trailer by the front gate. He started toward the commotion, then began screaming himself. Fast Archie got a few steps farther than most before he vanished too. We didn’t yet know what was happening, but we figured out real quick that death was waiting beyond the mine entrance, Those of us remaining thought it prudent to wait inside, hoping for rescue.

Meanwhile, surveying the scene, Rex Campbell declared he’d be damned.

I only hope he was right.

Nearly 40 hours after it all started, Immortal Jenkins and the Co-Regency emerged from the shaft. Seems the Emergency Lights had failed down there and they’d had to walk hand-over-hand along the walls in total blackness to reach the climb-out ladder. I felt bad. In all the fuss, we’d forgotten they were even down there. We caught them up on the situation and, together, we waited some more.

Nobody came.

Immortal Jenkins was a big guy. Smart too. Hell, his IQ was probably higher than his cholesterol. He spent a couple days staring at the bones in the yard, thinking. He began to speculate whether the Spider Gliders operated on some kind of cycle; a daylight/nighttime kind of thing. Like, maybe they were dormant in darkness. Days had passed and no one had come to check on us so, while none of us said it out loud, we were all starting to wonder how far this mess had spread. It was that evening, after pulling them aside and whispering to them, Rex Campbell talked the Co-Regency into walking out the mine entrance under cover of darkness—just to see what would happen, he said later.

What happened was Rufus and DeWayne died the way they’d lived; side-by-side.

Like I said, I hope Rex was right when he said he was damned.

The second week, leftover lunches in the Canteen running short and emergency batteries fading, someone finally arrived.

It was one guy.

Immortal Jenkins, Rex and me were the only ones left by the time this weird-ass, armored SUV came screaming up to the mine entrance. A man—really a kid—leaped from the vehicle. He was wearing a bulky environment suit, like he was some kind of half-assed astronaut, as he raced toward us. He stumbled over his own feet and, by instinct, Immortal Jenkins charged out to help him. Immortal, of course, began screaming.

The stranger, Greg Tyler was his name, shoved Immortal back into the mine with the rest of us.

“I was right,” he gasped. “The salt stops them.”

It didn’t stop them fast enough. Half of Immortal’s face was gone. We spread some blankets on the ground and made him as comfortable as we could.

Over coffee, while Immortal slept, whacked out on pain meds from a first aid kit, Tyler told Rex and me the world was dead. A military weapons system had gone haywire. Microscopic “nanobots”, Ezekiel’s Wheels, he called’em, detected humans and attacked, literally consuming their bodies and replicating more of themselves from the elements to continue their mission. They were intended to be used judiciously against specific targets but the programming went bonkers and they were eating everyone.

Everyone, everywhere.

The only reason we were alive was because the tiny salt crystals in the air of the mine gummed up the millions of gears, the “wheels within wheels”, inside those things. Stopped them cold. They couldn’t get in and we couldn’t get out.

That night, we learned Immortal Jenkins was as mortal as anybody when he died in his sleep.

Next morning, Tyler and I were alone in the break room. He hadn’t been coming to the mine for anything more than a rest stop. He was part of the project, he confessed. One of the designers of Ezekiel’s Wheels. He’d already traveled hundreds of miles, leap-frogging from one safe spot to another, headed for the Eisenhower Research Facility another hundred miles down the road. Along the way, he hadn’t seen another soul.

“I can stop this,” he whispered urgently to me. “If I can reach that lab, I can fix the code. Shut-em down.”

“You’re shittin’ me,” I said. “Anyway, what’s the point if everyone’s already dead?”

“There MIGHT be others—” he began. His eyes narrowed and he slammed his fist on the table, causing the spoons in our coffee cups to rattle.

“I BUILT the damn things,” he shouted. “I have to try”.

I wasn’t sure I believed him. He looked like he was about twelve years old.

“I can do it,” he whispered. “I’m the only person on Earth who can shut them down.”

I heard shoes scuffing on the floor in the hallway outside the break room. Rex Campbell. He’d been getting increasingly wiggy as the days went by and I didn’t think he could handle any more conversation with Tyler. I was right about that. Or maybe I was wrong. I don’t know. Maybe he didn’t hear enough of the discussion. Maybe he heard too much.

About two hours later, I was packing a bag of supplies for Tyler to take on the last leg of his journey. He was sleeping on a cot down the hall when I heard an inhuman shriek followed by a loud thud.

I arrived to find Rex standing over Tyler’s body, still holding the bloody fire extinguisher he’d just used to batter in Tyler’s skull.

“He caused this,” Rex whimpered. “He killed everybody in the world.”

Rex slumped forward and began to sob as I gently lifted the gore-spattered cylinder from his hands.

“No,” I told him. “He didn’t kill everybody in the world. YOU just did.”

Rex never saw it coming as I swung the heavy fire extinguisher and bashed in his own skull with the same weapon he’d just used to end human civilization.

Anyway, now, I’m the last man standing. The only one left—maybe anywhere. Top o’the world, Ma! King of all I survey.

I promise I will rule benevolently, for whatever time I have remaining.

For whatever that’s worth . . .