The Flucks is my (Ed) first novel and an experiment. We are independent creators, publishing chapter by chapter as a podcast and text. It’s designed to be heard. We’d love to receive your feedback so we can tell stories better.
Continue reading for Chapter 1.
Audio performance by — Music by and .
Text copyright © 2025 Ed Herrington
⚠️ Content Warning: Death, body horror, existential crisis
Slacy has seen the world rise, burn, and rebuild across nine decades. Fascism fell, fusion lit the Earth, and humanity colonized Mars. Now, alone and tired, he lies down in bed, prepared for the end. What more could life offer someone who has already lived through everything?
Music pairing: Buzz Vulture — Jan Herrington (mixed and Buzzardified by Ed Herrington)
Chapter 1 — How it started
I was ready to die.
I lay in bed, waiting for the end to come. What was there left to do? To see? In nine decades, I had seen all I needed.
I witnessed the rise and fall of fascism, the fusion energy revolution, and the end of the combustion engine. A permanent presence on the Moon, people living on Mars, and across Earth, everyone with housing and food. Hard to believe sometimes, but there we were.
I might be making it sound like a utopia, like a perfect life. Nothing was perfect, but it was good enough. The good outweighed the bad.
And I’m not going to lie—it seemed like we finally figured it out as a civilization. Unlimited energy, humans all over the solar system, and everyone with a genuine shot at opportunity, no matter their creed or color.
But I’m done with all that now. I’ve had enough of life. I thought I’d be dead already. The Flucks tried to take me, but it didn’t stick. At my age, I was used to everyone dying around me. I’d outlived most of my friends and relatives. But there was always new life—always babies being born.
That’s probably my biggest regret: never settling down and starting a family. No kids. But everyone around me had kids. I had no shortage of baby showers and weddings to attend. But that’s all done now.
Lately I got tired of watching the streams for news. It might have been from coming of age during the COVID era. Stuck inside with nothing but the internet, I would constantly be watching some news creator posting vids.
When people started getting the Flucks, the streams lit up. I’d pull up VidVid and watch the first reports. First a trickle, then a flood. Every continent, every country—one hundred percent of the world caught it. It killed so many. It should have killed me, yet here I am.
I logged on yesterday to post my last farewell. But the streams were silent. Either the VidVid algorithm had finally listened to me blocking and muting content, or nobody was posting. I figured I’d just write my last words instead.
I looked for paper and a pen, but I don’t think I’ve had either of those since… I can’t remember. Not that you’d be able to read my handwriting anyway. I haven’t written by hand since I switched to virtual school during COVID.
So, here I am, typing an eulogy of sorts for myself. I don’t think anyone is left to give me one. I survived the Flucks when pretty much no one else did, just to die of old age anyway.
If you’re reading this, then I guess there are still people—and they still read blogs. If you’re watching a vid, then someone is giving you the TL;DR and taking everything out of context. If you’re hearing this, then some AI is probably reading it to you and getting my voice completely wrong.
I’m too damn old for this shit. Farewell.
✹✹✹
I thought that was all I had left to write. I thought they were the perfect last words.
I closed my eyes, expecting the end. Finally, there it was. The tunnel of light they never shut up about.
Here it comes.
Any minute.
Almost there.
W
T
F
It swallowed me.
All sound thinned. Gentle waves sliding up the beach. Then, silence.
But the light was still there. Man, that light is bright. I raised my hand to block it. That helped—barely. My eyes adjusted. I could see the creases in my palm and the… so much blue.
As I lay there trying to make sense of the sky glaring through my fingers, I began to get warm. Hot actually. Was I having fevered hallucinations? Do you get fevers when you have a heart attack?
I sat up. There was no ocean, but there was sand. Sand in every direction. Sand under me. Dunes surrounded me. The sky was crystal clear, blinding.
A shadow passed over me.
I looked up to see buzzards circling. Vultures? Well, whatever, they say to follow buzzards because there’s usually food or water nearby. Except they were circling me. So I guess I was the food.
I glanced down, wondering what was left for them to eat. At least they wouldn’t have to tear through my clothes because I was naked.
I looked at my feet.
Wait.
I looked at my feet. I lost my left foot to diabetes five years ago—dead flesh, sawed off at the ankle, gone.
Yet here were two feet, sitting neatly at the ends of my legs. I admired them for a while. They looked nicer than I remembered, back to being mirrored twins.
My legs were trim, like they were when I was younger. And my middle, well, that’s less shriveled than it was before. I felt my head for my hair—yep—still there. Okay, so I didn’t just wake up in a pod, hairless and new, like some Matrix bullshit.
New body, no clothes…. was I in heaven?
“Hi, is this Heaven?” I shouted into the air.
No one answered, not even the buzz-vultures.
Heaven would be a surprise to me because I was squarely in the camp of ‘don’t give a damn about religion’. I thought the likelihood of heaven existing was way less than, say, the entire world catching a disease and dropping dead before I did.
So, what the hell was this? Wait. Am I in Hell?
I shouted, “Hello, am I in Hell?”.
No one answered—typical Hell. My throat was dry as the dunes around me. So, enough talking aloud.
The place fit the Hell motif. Not quite Dante’s Inferno, but it was hella hot. Nothing was happening, and the sand was burning my ass. What the hell—let’s try out these new legs.
I pushed up and realized the ground wasn’t loose sand after all. It was packed hard, split with deep cracks, like a giant waffle in negative relief. A dry lakebed, salt glimmering.
The sun blazed directly overhead, leaving nothing to steer by. Not like I knew where I was or where I was going anyway. My dark-winged companions weren’t going to help me navigate.
The dune ridges looked easier to walk. I picked one, then chose randomly from my two choices of direction and started walking.
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