A man
drug a bed and other assorted furniture across the rubble strewn street to the
main floor of the library you are picturing in your mind currently. He smiled
and admired the architecture, this could have turned out far worse.
Sitting
on a windowsill high above the sidewalk below, the man wonders if perhaps the
MUSH virus is no longer a problem. The man walks far enough and comes to where
it stops. Buildings, cars, billboards, are all partially melted creating a
demarcation point between the world and the MUSH. Sure the MUSH creeps and
consumes but there must be an end, right?
It has
been a year since he saw the last ship and he has still seen no sign of another
living soul.
Civilization
fell within two weeks of their arrival. There are places here or there that for
some reason were not affected, tiny pockets of uninfected flesh in a sea of
leprosy.
The man
found this library a month ago. It is surrounded by ranch homes and the occasional
remnants of small business. It has been years since the man has felt the warmth
of another, but there is always lots of canned food in these ranch homes, 2
bedroom, 2 baths, Twinkies last forever, right? The blue ships took all of the
people. They looked like great boomerangs, angular and encased in blue glowing
fields shaped like the Earth’s magnetosphere. The boomerang ships dispersed the
tube ships everywhere like battleship sized aerosol cans, and all they did was
spray this grey mist. Where they sprayed everything turned to MUSH. Anything
that touched the MUSH turned to MUSH, eventually. Nothing we did mattered. The
war machine of man fell upon the invaders and they were indifferent. They just
kept spraying.
MUSH,
the ultimate weapon, was designed by its creator to do one thing, turn all organic
compounds into grey mush with the consistency of oatmeal. Any and every living
thing melted into an organic soup of grey MUSH.
The ships started coming again. It has been
exactly four years, seven months, two days, and three hours since humanity
learned from CNN that there were alien ships in orbit. Nearly five years of
perpetual dissolution. These new ships, smooth
silver orbs with a mirror finish, are hundreds of meters in diameter so that
when they swoop down from low Earth orbit to suck up the MUSH they eclipse the
sun. The silver orbs were gone soon after they have arrived, such was their
efficiency.
They
are long gone now. The mush is gone. It’s just the man and cans with mystery
contents since the paper labels were long since mushed away. The man sits
opening a can in anticipation. Pineapple!!
