It’s hard being alone all the time. Especially before the giant bugs, when most of the human population wasn’t dead, starving, or being eaten alive, when they only cared about their own lives and were indifferent to everyone else’s. Harry had initially bought the cabin to be away from people and hide out in the South Mountain Forest, and he was partially glad for it considering he didn’t have to listen to the screams of the mutilated, the thunder of the fly swarms, and the stomping of dog-sized beetles across the ground.

The wood of the cabin was dark and gray under his sore feet but needed more than a paint job. He let down his tactical backpack on the porch, wood splintering and bowing under its weight. There was a sense of home here, even with the overgrown bushes on the right and back of the cabin and weeds growing up through the planks of the porch. This had been his home a long time ago and it would have to be again. He took a final puff of his cigarette and grabbed a rusted tin can that had been sitting on the windowsill for four years. Before he dropped the cig, he noticed the gray gnat insect eggs clumped at the bottom and didn’t even flinch. The little bastards would be easy to stomp out if they hatched, being the size of gerbils when full grown and all.

As he creaked open the door, as it fell off the one hinge, Harry made a mental note of the supplies he knew were here, or had been. The bunker in the back would keep him safe during the swarms, when giant gnats traveled during high humidity and ate entire forests to the bark. He heard rumors of termite and ant swarms and shuddered to think about it. Instantly he grew sicker when he saw the webbing cocoons of insect leftovers, basketball-sized globs of white with human femurs sticking out of one of them. Human refugees he imagined, from the cities. Yuppies who couldn’t make it on their own anyways. Over education, that was the problem, teaching things in schools that didn’t matter and weren’t important, causing kids to grow up into sensitive pansies, and making them ill-prepared to survive without government intervention, tax-payer money, or their mommy’s teat. These people, whoever they were, probably deserved it and would have died anyways somewhere else. Whatever attacked them left a huge hole in the back wall, taking the back door with it, next to the kitchen.

The webbing seemed to be dusty and loose, clinging to the ceiling in three large strands all the way to the floor, which had been covered in cans, clothing, and other random junk. He swiped at one strand, knocking it down with the barrel of his bug-juice covered rifle. As the wind hit his face, bringing with it the distant scent of cinder from miles away, he saw that the door to the bunker was open. Great, thought Harry, the survivors had found his stash of food and ammo, his “bug-out bunker” as it were, a shelter he had embedded in the ground with the help of his uncles and a backhoe. Before that the cabin was an abandoned shed when Harry built it up and installed running water, the previous owner being a “mountain man” who lived like Davy Crockett…To see it in disarray like this, eroded back to being an abandoned shed in the woods, caused him to grip and pull at his tactical vest, trying to ease the suffocating loss in his chest.

Such a waste. All that work, gone like everything else…and everyone else. And now, after hiking for miles and miles with his only intent to make it here, he would have to rebuild it. He set the rifle aside against a chair and flicked open the cig pack and counted them out of habit, put the pack in his vest pocket, and rubbed his beard, remembering if he had left a few packs hiding somewhere in the cabin.

Limping along he made his way back outside and slumped into the wicker chair that surprisingly held his weight and looked over the overgrown yard and driveway which was just a crumbling rock path now. For a split second he reached for his wallet which of course wasn’t there, having the urge to see his son’s face again. Many times, he had brought Jacob up here on fishing and hunting trips. It seemed so long ago. He put his head in his hands and bit his lip as his eyes moistened. He cursed himself for being so weak, so emotional, when he knew he didn’t have time. The house needed mending if he was to stay here. There was no point in crying now. If he survived long enough there would be plenty of time later. Besides Jacob there wasn’t much of anyone he cared about back there anyways.

Harry scanned the trees, mostly along the lower edge of the bark, where most giant bug eggs were laid, at least the really big ones. There were none. Over education, he told himself again, that was the problem. Science delved into places it shouldn’t have gone. Sure, he could admit global warming was an issue, but introducing machines that would produce more oxygen for the environment, making everything hotter and unbearable, was an affront to nature. As the bugs got bigger with more and more oxygen, the swarms became larger and more devastating, the insects themselves growing larger every decade. How stupid. How dumb smart people were! To think they could play God and get away with it. It only costed billions of lives for a failed experiment that involved changing the atmosphere. Society collapsed. Entire cities were overrun with moths and beetles, mostly at night. Ants waged war over Saudi oil fields. Hordes of hornets made their homes in redwoods. Crickets and grasshoppers, the size of cars devoured the farmlands of the country. The smart people weren’t smart enough to stop them, only responding with tactics of war; explosions, poisonous gas, and gunfire.

The small radio in his upper left harness crackled with another military broadcast. The words came through like a knife. “…. evacuate…sector nine…I repeat. This is a warning…evacuate…South Mou…region and surrounding area. Estimated deployment of nuclear bombardment in seven hours. This warn….repeat every twelve minutes. Evacuate immediately.”

After all the strife, all the walking, struggling to find food and water not contaminated by bugs, and now it was going to be blown away, his house, his once glorious nature sanctuary, his memories, and the surrounding area in a five-mile radius.

He couldn’t leave. At least not yet. Even if he had the strength for another trek out of the blast zone, he might not have enough to survive another predatory attack like he did in Wayne Town when he fought the frail and groping mosquito. It was tall but its legs were barely strong enough to keep its body in a standing position as it fumbled towards him. A few knife slashes to its legs cut the mosquito down to size, where Harry pulled its malformed wings off. These giant insects were less products of natural evolution and more scientific mutants, monsters struggling to breathe and walk under their own weight. But it didn’t matter. The more there were, the less humans could coexist with them.

They had to be destroyed. The bunker had enough food and hopefully enough water to survive long enough to recoup his energy and use the radiation suit to travel north. That was if the survivors didn’t scavenge the underground shelter and leave him with nothing but batteries, empty food wrappers, and maybe even the propane canisters.

Making one more sweep of the house, which only turned up a few loose papers, torn clothes, and a few open cans of food, he picked up his rifle and made his way to the back, stepping cautiously and listening for any distant humming, which would indicate another swarm. It was perfectly quiet. He opened his cig pack again, counted, and fell backwards when his eye line met the opening of the bunker a few feet away and he saw the unfolding of giant thin legs inside the dark square hole in the ground. His backpack cushioned his fall but his cigarettes went flying as he tried to catch them. Two six-foot legs came out of the bunker first, then two more, then the face full of eyes and two hairy fangs. The legs, their shape and girth, were misshapen, almost lumpy as if a child had tried to make a spider out of papier-mâché and then that same child had thrown it down a flight of stairs, crumbled it, each segment appearing like it was squeezed clay. Even the joints were oddly shaped, more bulbous than the leg itself. Not now, he wanted to shout, not here!

Harry scrambled back, gritting his teeth in anger, as the black spider scurried forward and opened its front legs wide, arching back. But the bastard stopped short and collapsed as its roundish body got stuck in the bunker door, being too big to fit. It fell flat and tried to weakly pull itself forward, the dirt and leaves giving way under its thin-tipped legs. He rolled sideways and retrieved his rifle, firing a single shot at one of the legs, grazing the joint. A loud hissing growl came from the spider’s mouth that gave Harry enough vigor to stand and aim the semi-automatic rifle at the gaping mouth. He didn’t think spiders could make sounds but realized the sound was the thing struggling to breathe. The spider fell on its chest again and seemed to cough and gag, slowly slinking away, back into the bunker hole. It was almost pathetic, if not for the fangs that dragged across the steps as if part of its mouth was paralyzed. Those things would be deadly, if the spider could use them.

Still aiming down the sights, he approached the bunker door. As expected, it was a mess down there. No signs of food, water, or anything useful since the single room was covered in dirt, debris, and loose webbing, not livable and, as he noticed that the door was broken on its hinges, not able to survive a nuclear blast. The spider wouldn’t leave on its own but if he could kill it…he might have time to fix and clean up the bunker. Couldn’t he? So many memories…he couldn’t just leave. As the black body shifted grotesquely in the dark, he could see the webbing behind its bulbous body and the eggs contained within and saw his own past fading away. No, he thought with the tightening of his chest and throat, he would have to leave. This place, the last place on earth that he had left, would have to be abandoned…almost the same way he abandoned Jacob, in a ball of fire, letting go of his little hand, watching him fall to his death. How could he run if his feet were tied to the past? The moment had come, to walk away, to move on, to look in the mirror and not feel regret and spite.

He saw the spider in its hovel through his crosshairs, shuffling and cowering, and considered how it would die here alone, deformed, and forgotten. How its children would never hatch and how it was completely oblivious to its impending doom. He refused to be that pathetic, to be trapped in a home that would never truly be his own. The sunlight reflected off a metal cylinder in the back of the bunker. He turned towards it, took a deep breath, thought of Jacob one more time, swallowed down the anguish in his throat, and fired. The kickback knocked him off his feet and as he turned to run the heat of the explosion, along with the sudden shockwave and deafening roar, hit his back and sent his shoulder into a tree where he stopped and turned. Good riddance. He imagined himself standing inside the bunker, a grayer and older self, stuck in the past, stuck in the bunker, and finally said, “Good riddance.”