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 11, start at Chapter 1, or find where you left off.
Audio performance by Anthony Michael Malec
Guest image by Jan Herrington
Music: Reprieve — a demo of something we’re working. Produced by Jan Herrington, mixed by Ed the Editor—singer and band name yet to be revealed.
Text copyright © 2025 Ed Herrington
Last time on The Flucks
As I pointed out other constellations I could name, the dog walked between us. He stared at the stars too. I remembered how Chuq named her cats after astronomers. This dog seemed like one.
“Hey there, Galileo.” I pet his head, the only place I knew was unmauled. He licked my palm, wagged his tail, then curled up next to Snackbot, enjoying the warmth radiating off its chassis.
Slacy, Snackbot, and Galileo prepare for leaving the warehouse. Just a few errands to attend to first and Slacy needs to update his blog.
Chapter 11 — I don’t feel so good
The Voltivian S524 was ready to go. I packed enough gear to charge, shelter, protect, feed, and hydrate. A little too much gear—Snackbot had to help me add a roof rack. I won’t break down the inventory list, just know I was loaded for bear—no offense to Snackbear.
I stepped back to admire the car, sparkling in the morning light coming in through the open rollup door. Yes, I washed it—that’s a must for any road trip. Snackbot walked up to the car and gave an appreciative whistle. Galileo trailed behind it and sat beside me, wagging her tail.
Galileo had healed nicely these past few weeks. We both had. I could now walk unassisted, and so could she. Yeah, you heard that right: she. Once I had a chance to look at her wounds more closely, I realized she had different hardware than I assumed. Chuq would give me shit for misgendering my dog if she were still alive.
The biopuck beeped three times. “Here, girl.” She came and stood beside me, fishhook tail up and ready to play. “Hold on, let’s take a look—stay.” I knelt down and investigated.
The shaved spots all over Galileo’s calico fur made her look like a patchwork quilt. To treat her deeper wounds, I had to shave away several areas. Her black saddleback was now spotted with short grayish fur. It would come back.
Her wounds were completely gone. I held my palm out to see that the biopuck said treatment was complete. I squeezed my fist to confirm detachment. The gel dissolved and the puck slid into my waiting hand.
“Nice, you’re all done.” I stood, tossed her a biscuit and she snapped it out of the air. “Good girl.”
I grabbed a ball from the workbench. “Sit.” I threw it out the rollup doorway, she stayed. “Get it!” She took off.
When we rescued her, she already knew sit and stay. Saying anything was enough to get her to run up. We’ve been working on a few more commands. She’s a fast learner and she’ll be safer in the field by following instructions.
She returned with the ball, sitting and wagging her tail. “Sorry, it’s time to work.” At this, her ears perked up and I held out my hand. “Give.” She dropped the ball. “Run along with Snackbot.”
Snackbot walked off to find a few last-minute items. Galileo darted ahead to hunt the aisles for mice. For me, it was time to clean up for this special day. I walked to the bathroom. At a sink, I looked in the mirror. My hair was shaggy, but it was growing on me.
When I first came back in a new body, I didn’t realize—you know, because of all the dying—that all my hair didn’t come back the same as it was before I died. Maybe a couple months’ growth on my head. But what they didn’t advertise in the Flucks brochure was that my facial hair reset.
Like when I was a young man, I could not grow a beard. I used to get carded all the time until I was able. I don’t think any liquor store clerk would believe my age today if I told them. I couldn’t stand this patchiness, so I shaved, thinking how maybe the dog could use a hair reset. Nah.
Outside the bathroom, Galileo sat and Snackbot stood like a silver sentinel. It held a palm under its vending chute as a canister rolled out, then passed it to me. I screwed the lid off, hearing the squeak of the loosening waterproof seal.
“This is perfect, thanks.”
🎵 All we are is dust in the wind 1 🎵
Honestly, I didn’t know most of the songs Snackbot played. They sounded like my mom’s music. But I got the sentiment.
“Let’s go, Galileo.” The three of us walked to where I first found the inventory tablet. Here still lay a pile of dust. I say pile, but that doesn’t really describe it. I could still see the outline of the person it once was, flattened into a two-dimensional, gray mockery of life.
I put on a zero-particulate mask, took the spray bottle hooked to my kilt, and misted the dust. Snackbot vended a canister and a brand new hand broom. I knelt down, gently sweeping the slightly muddy remains of tablet guy into a clean dustpan, then poured them into the canister. An object remained that the broom couldn’t push.
I picked up the ring between gloved finger and thumb, twisting it in the dim light coming in through the skylights. I tried to hold back tears as I thought about when I had to do this for Chuq. Her hip joint and pacemaker thudded into the can, scattering dust into my nostrils and eyes. This time, I gently lowered the ring into the canister, awakening none of the damp dust.
Snackbot vended me a box of tissues. I removed the gloves and silently took one.
As a label, I taped the worker’s ID badge to the side of the can. I didn’t know if anyone would come looking for them, but they deserved to be known. Snackbot put the can in its vending machine and we walked to the next pile. In total, we collected twelve canisters.
We walked to the rock where we rescued Galileo. Her sacrificial blood had long washed away in the rain. I put the canisters in a grid and Snackbot stacked rocks on them, topping it off with an unnatural pillar.
The cairn should stand out to anyone looking for these people. I never knew what to say at funerals, even though I’ve been to plenty in my long life, so I recited the names of each person starting with “Clint” and ending with “rest in peace”.
Now it was time to leave the warehouse. When we got to the car, I stopped at the driver’s door and faced Snackbot.
Snackbot couldn’t go with us. It weighed a literal metric half-ton. The weight would drain the car battery too quickly and its size would take up all the gear space. We would have to part ways, and we both knew it.
I pulled out the devslate. I had one last command to issue.
you have free will
I didn’t know if it would actually work. I didn’t know if I just kicked off Skynet. But it was the only thing I knew to do. I had already cracked the authentication on the devslate with the help of its AI and Snackbot. When I passed the devslate to Snackbot, it disappeared into the vending slot.
“So long, partner.” I held out my fist. Snackbot bumped it, pink eye dots flowing with water.
🎵 Don’t you, forget about me 2 🎵
“Okay.”
Well shit. Now my ‘So long, partner’ felt crass. I didn’t know what else to say, though. So I got in the car.
“C’mon Galileo, hop into GOATmobile.”
We drove away, leaving Snackbot to hunt snacks alone and fade into dreams.
✹✹✹
In the city, we searched the streets for other survivors—for anything. We found no one and no thing. Parking GOATmobile in front of a familiar building, I put on a dust mask. I had one more thing to do.
“Stay here, girl.” Galileo was nonplussed, but she stayed.
I walked behind the Scar Flucks counter and pulled a canister and small spray bottle out of Ash’s bag. I knelt down and started the dusting ritual, sweeping Ash’s remains into the canister. I went to the back room and found the phone I threw on the floor months ago. Ash might want that. I placed it and Ash’s fidget toy in the canister.
“Sorry, bud, I still need to borrow a few items.”
On my way out, I placed the canister with Ash’s name tag taped to it next to the coldbrew tap.
We drove to a park so I could test out the solar array. GOATmobile switched to all-wheel as we crossed into a grassy field. I unrolled the panels flat on the ground. We didn’t use much battery getting here, but I plugged it in, checking the charge speed, making sure my calculations were correct. It was late afternoon, so we wouldn’t get a full day’s charge anyway.
We’d stay here for the night and head off in the morning. To where, I didn’t know. GOATmobile’s touchscreen computer had some sort of satellite internet access, but no websites or search engines I tried worked. No VidVid. Then I thought of one I knew: my blog. I typed in the address, and it loaded. Well, hot damn.
I pondered this for a moment. Most of the big sites were hosted at huge data centers, many the size of the Shmamazon warehouse. My site was distributed, replicated to thousands of small devices across the globe. The big sites had redundancy in the sense that there were many data centers. But the data centers themselves were single points of failure. Easy targets if you were inclined to disable infrastructure. That depressing thought would have to wait.
I wanted to capture all my adventures so far. If no one else was alive, that didn’t matter, I wanted it for my own memory’s sake. I started a new post, then froze. The creation date at the top struck me. I had been at the warehouse for three months, and as far as I knew, had wandered the desert and other places for only a day or two. But the date of the post was six months from when I first died in my bed. That timeline didn’t make sense. Must have been some sort of error—time services were probably offline.
I loaded up my last post in another tab to remember where I left off.
I’m too damn old for this shit. Farewell.
I started typing, fingers stumbling over themselves on the touchscreen keyboard, AI correcting my mistakes. If you’re here and started at the beginning, you already know the story. Dying. The desert. The tundra. The jungle. The city. My last moments with Chuq. I wrote about Ash, Meat Guy, Shitmobile, and Clint. I wrote about my friend Snackbot and my new companion Galileo. I wrote until the sun went down, then kept writing. I clicked publish.
After my brain was dumped, I went to my site’s dashboard to see if everything was still there. I clicked on ‘Files’ where I had some data backed up. If it wasn’t there, I’d have to drive to my old house and hope to find my computer.
It was there. A directory. Chuq. Late in life she started making a digital journal. She thought I didn’t know, but I knew she wanted me to know. I didn’t look at it until after she died, when I read the first entry. It was still sitting there in my files.
I never thought of myself as a writer. But a friend of mine has been writing a silly blog for years—long after everyone else stopped doing that in favor of posting short videos. He showed me that anyone can write about anything.
He’s a bit scatterbrained, so if he can do it, then I can definitely do it. I’m not going to publish anything, I’ll just keep this file on my computer, hoping no one will ever find it—while secretly hoping everyone does.
Might as well start with the day I met that lovable doofus Slacy.
P.S. Don’t tell him I said lovable, doofus is fine.
—Charlotte
Doofus that I am, I started my hundredth re-reading, reliving our first days together, some forty years ago. I just wanted to be in my feels.
Galileo had curled up in the passenger seat, cozy on the seat warmer, snoozing. She must have done that while I was lost in the story.
I navigated out of the journal file and over to the dashboard, checking the view stats on my latest post out of habit. Of course it would be zero, just like when I normally posted. Now, though, there was good reason for it to stay zero.
✹✹✹
When the page refreshed, I noticed it for the first time—the notification bell was a distinctly different color. I had a DM.
I clicked it and read the message.
Slacy, sorry it took so long.
I re-read it a thousand times, along with the screen name.
Chuq
Author’s Notes
Okay, okay, put down your pitch forks. I didn’t bring back Chuq just because everyone fell in love with her in The Flucks — Chuq — Christmas Eve 2055, though I’m glad so many did. On October 6, 2025, I completed what was originally chapter 11. I announced it in a note after only writing chapters 1-3. That chapter 11 is now chapter 12 because the plot doesn’t always follow my wishes.
I started the chapter with the message above and Anthony Michael Malec read and recorded it. So he and I have been sitting on it for months. I’m happy to finally share it.
If you find yourself missing Snackbot, like me, you can catch up with it in The Cog.
This ends part one of The Flucks. As you can imagine, things are going to change a bit in part 2.
At the end of the audio is another surprise. A demo of a song that Jan, a singer, and I are working on. It seemed to fit. The title is Reprieve, the band name is yet to be revealed. Jan produces all the music with Logic Pro, a Yamaha keyboard, and occasional guitar. I just (poorly) mix it.
Kansas: Dust in the Wind
Simple Minds: Don’t You (Forget About Me)
