Page 1 of Them

The Anthropocene ended on July 5, 2022, when an over-the-road Volvo day-cab hauling a mustard-yellow shipping container swerved onto Interstate 95’s gravel shoulder, swallowing the mile 148 signage under its snarling grille.

Fishtailing, the truck made no effort to correct itself; it drifted over the northbound rumble strips and began its slow, disjointed roll down into the Maine brush. The cargo container ripped free of its restraints and led the charge, tumbling through a bevy of wild burs and ferns. It splintered several small trees along the way, finally coming to rest against a healthy white pine.

The cab followed the container’s broken path, chasing it down the highway hillside. It might’ve looked sad as it settled next to the storage container, its silver sheen torqued into flourishing braids.

Conversely, the faded yellow cargo sat unimpaired, marred only by a few scratches and even fewer dents.

The truck driver was declared dead on impact, having passed away in the lullaby of high-speed sleep. His license read Hendrick Moe, Jericho Hill, Maryland, 8/30/1987. No photo was made available to the public, but he was a paltry gentleman with a thin triangle of a jaw freckled by shadows of stubble.

Reports described Hendrick Moe as a freelancer hauling individually negotiated contracts. The truck’s footprint, as recorded by its weigh-station logs, got no more specific than its departure point somewhere in Sierra County, New Mexico, and its destination somewhere north of where it crashed in Maine. The driver apparently paid for his fuel with cash.

Police and local news made little, if anything, of the incident. Moe was, by all accounts, no more than an out-of-state trucker who’d violated the regulations of the road; someone who’d driven too long without a break, this crime revealed only by the too-little time that had passed between weigh stations and highway tollbooths along his journey.

This was the accident’s most significant note of interest: Hendrick Moe had apparently soldiered the near-forty-hour drive without a single recorded rest stop. No lunch breaks, no nap pull-offs, and a trash bag cluttered with urine-filled Gatorade bottles. He’d paused for gas and nothing else.

Stranger still, the yellow shipping container, whose doors had burst open upon impact, was found empty. Moe was a nobody in quite the hurry to get nowhere with nothing.

Yes, the weigh stations. They used to say the best way to smuggle a weapon onto an airplane was to hide it in the bottom of your carry-on and leave a bottle of water on top. TSA would find the water and be content.

Content.

We have never been content.

But the local law was, as were the local folks. Content to believe that this was no more than a minute glitch, an unfortunate accident spurred on by an impatient man. Thank God no one else had been hurt by Hendrick Moe’s foolishness. I hope other drivers learned from his careless actions. It’s always an out-of-towner, an Other from Away. Et cetera, et cetera.

But you haven’t come all this way to hear of obscure murders committed by mobile machines, obsolete heaps, those herds of silent metal monsters that now serve only as temporary shelter to the wandering minstrel. No, you’ve come to hear of real monsters and those who shuffle beneath them.

A man walked the countryside and no one followed. He moved through moon-soaked darkness, as he had for a year now, perhaps even two. Calendars, without hands to neatly cross out their boxes and usher in new months, had grown unkempt. He wore a simple self-winding watch, though he trusted its dust-choked cogs little. The hands read 3:33 a.m. Make a wish.

His denim pants were faded near white with a walking man’s wears and a scavenger’s tears, as was the tan jacket wrapped around his waist. He treaded with muscular legs that strained the thighs of too-small trousers. Boots, which would soon demand replacement, merely kept pace with the rest of the haggard man. He shouldered a frayed backpack stuffed with canned goods and bottles of water. Atop his head sat a baseball cap that had not seen the sun in a long time. A grinning skeleton wearing a crown of roses peered over the brim. The knapsack and hat were the only two pieces he hadn’t scavenged from the dead. Relics of another time.

Under that cap, an amber face. Wooden brown features tucked beneath a patchwork of tangled hair. His eyes glowered with a dull, vagrant green. Had those hazel irises possessed even a glimmer of hope, one might’ve recognized them for their youth.

From one of the sandy jacket’s many pockets, the man fished out a compass. His direction was generally north by northeast, and he found that to be close enough.

The figure beneath the waning moon sought rubble, husks of homes still standing in what used to be an American countryside. Memories left to age. Everything that remained whispered of the past. Flooded bowling alleys. Corner stores and diners burned to the dirt. Main streets as still as watercolor paintings. Highways clogged with immovable scrap. Schools with holes in the walls the size of semitrucks. Cornfields and ghosts.

Farther down the country road, the man passed two Abrams tanks. He didn’t know how he remembered their official government name. Even as a corpse, the military persisted. Uncle Sam and his scolding, pointing finger appeared in the cavities of his memory: I want YOU… for the War of the Worlds!

The armored vehicles were riddled with jagged holes, as if they’d been pecked at by a flock of massive iron birds. Winged rocs returned to reclaim the earth they once roamed. Would it have mattered? If a few more tens of thousands of young men had taken the oath to defend their good, fair country? Their fair species? If a couple more had joined the cause? No, he didn’t think so. It wouldn’t have made a difference. People built guns to kill people; they weren’t made for monsters.

The tanks and their pieces were scattered over a dirt parking lot beside the man’s paved route. The burned-out shell of a church steeple reached for the stars with charcoal fingertips. A dirty white sign with rearrangeable letters read: AT LAST! HIS WORSHIP IS AT HAND! GO IN GRACE AND MAY GRACE FALL UPON YOU!

The field was dotted with deep craters teeming with creeping grass and upturned roots. Scars healing. Scattered all around were human bones, like mice bits strewn about the nest of a great owl. The victors’ corpses were nowhere to be found, just a few piles of petrified purple droppings. How few losses had they suffered? The man wondered if they might be invincible. He had his suspicions.

A lone human skull sat perched atop a clump of sun-blasted weeds. Hollow eyes choked with daffodils watched the man walk by.

He continued past the abandoned tanks and bone-speckled fields and eventually came upon what he sought: a stone farmhouse, mostly intact, only some of its features eaten away by time and neglect. The man imagined, an indulgence he infrequently allowed himself these days, that the rock walls once shone a brilliant gray, so polished and reflective that every night the stones had communed with the moon in a lunar light show. A shack of sparkling gems along the thin horizon. The image made him feel like smiling, but his lips refused to budge. Instead, he slunk toward the soot-brick structure, thankful that he could make it out at all among the consuming weeds.

There was no message on the front door today. He had found dozens of notes on derelict porches, mostly directions: We can’t stay here, we’ll meet you at so-and-so’s, we’re running for such and such city. The saddest ones were the resignations, the goodbyes.

He used to always read them, felt that it was his responsibility to remember a stranger’s last words so that they might last a little longer. Not anymore. Too many words for one man who spoke so little.

There was one person who’d left a breadcrumb trail of messages, signing them as “Larry.” His first note was written not with paper and pen, but rather with asphalt and paint. Big yellow letters that glowed in the moonlight: DAY 12. HOPE IN GREENLAND. BOATS IN BOSTON. COME WITH ME. —LARRY

That was on a three-lane highway somewhere in northern Georgia, only a few months after emerging from his hibernation—those uncountable years of subterranean safety—into this horrid new world. Five days later, walking at his own pace, he’d found Larry’s Day 20 note scrawled on a piece of weathered cardboard taped to the back of a Silverado pickup. He thought he could eventually catch up and convince Larry, plus whatever hopeful band of survivors possibly tagged along with him, to make a stop by the shores of the Chesapeake. Perhaps they could all find hope together.

Then the trail went cold. The notes stopped. The man wondered if Larry had taken another route, or even perished in a weed-choked ditch somewhere, but three weeks later he found a tarp-covered wagon parked outside a house. There was a tattered piece of paper taped to it: