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.
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Text copyright © 2025 Ed Herrington
⚠️ Content Warning: Awkward death.
Last time on The Flucks
Slacy got some coffee and modest clothing.
While everyone seemed dead, the EV vans were still alive and well, making deliveries. This one would probably return to the warehouse after it finished its rounds. All I had to do was hitch a ride, and I’d have my pick of clothes.
It drove off. My scarf and apron flapped in the wake.
Slacy arrives at a vast warehouse in search of pants. The lights are dead, but something else is alive among the meat and silence.
Chapter 5 — Meet cute
The van drove up to a warehouse bigger than the town I grew up in. On its side were letters as tall as a bus. I still fear being sued by intellectual property owners from the grave, so let’s just say it said “Shmamazon”.
Vanny—I should have named it a long time ago—pulled up to a door that slid up at its approach, then drove in.
This is where my genius really shines because—without me even foreseeing or understanding the problem—it determined that the best way to get into this Fort Knox of E-Commerce was to hitch a ride on a vehicle authorized to enter. I let my genius do all the thinking so I don’t have to.
Vanny parked over a wireless charging pad and shut down. The power was off here, too, so it wasn’t going to eat tonight. A few other vans didn’t get the memo about the apocalypse either, because they were taking off. Probably in an endless loop to try and deliver their load until they collapsed.
The warehouse was more massive inside than it seemed outside. It’s so big—it must be fifty meters tall. A Titan could walk around in here.
In a hundred years, it would have its own ecosystem with green plants, waterfalls, and a bird flying by as I looked up. But for now, it was all metal. The metal roof had translucent panels every few feet, so enough light drifted down for me to see.
We—Vanny and I—were on the outer edge of the building. Rows of delivery vans sat over their dead charging pads. The interior of the warehouse had rows and rows, stacks and stacks, of metal columns with shelves. Each shelf stack was at least two meters wide, so there was a forklift-depth of boxes on each side.
There were millions, if not billions, of dollars of merchandise in here. Enough to jumpstart a civilization. Problem is, none of the robots that moved boxes around were powered up. None of the computer terminals came to life. Every box on the shelf was plain cardboard with only QR codes as labels. I had every item a person could purchase, but no way to find them.
I headed towards the aisle that looked pantsiest. I checked Ash’s bag to see if they had a flashlight. I should have kept the phone because even when locked out, the light would work. Thankfully, Ash comes through clutch—there was a sleek aluminum micro flashlight with a two-thousand-lumen beam. So that’s where all of Ash’s paycheck went.
Since the boxes didn’t have any identifier my eyes could read, I needed a way to cut into the boxes. Nothing in Ash’s bag. While most of this warehouse was automated, there had to be a box cutter that wasn’t attached to a robot arm somewhere in here.
I finally found one at a metal desk that looked like it was made for a human to sit and slowly die of boredom. I started hacking through every crate-sized box I found. Most of them were filled with eco-friendly kitty litter or cheap appliances that needed electricity.
I was wandering around the stacks looking for some clue of what was in the boxes when a flash of light reflected around me, followed by a sharp pop. I’ve never been in the military, but my extensive experience being a soldier in video games told me a flash-bang grenade went off in the distance.
The flash came from behind me, the sound from around a corner. I turned around and walked to the end of the aisle to see what was going on. I couldn’t see anything, but I could hear meat flopping against the concrete.
Every horror movie tells you not to walk towards that sound. So I did. I moved slowly on the balls of my feet, trying to avoid that flip-flap sound bare feet make on slick concrete. I turned the corner and saw rows of refrigerators filled with meat. This Shmamazon also appears to ship groceries. Too bad all the meat was rotten without power.
I walked closer and saw that one of the industrial refrigerators was sliced open. A perfect hole was removed from it, meat and all—like a person-sized biscuit cutter bit in and punched it out. There on the floor was the thing making all the noise. Slick with ground beef slime, the dark shape was flopping like a fish against the concrete.
It stopped flopping.
It pushed itself up on four limbs.
It fell flat with a wet slap.
It pushed itself up on four limbs again.
Then it stood.
It appeared to be a man, naked, about the same age I was now—twenty-five? Thirty? But with the chiseled physique I wish I always had. I thought about how I reappeared like a better version of my younger self after the first time I died.
The man stumbled around, like a newborn calf taking its first steps. It dragged one leg behind it like it didn’t quite know how to walk. “Oh hell no, I did not sign up to be in a zombie apocalypse!”
He looked up quickly, like a deer in headlights. My voice startled the man. He turned around and stumble-ran in the other direction. Wide, awkward, long steps like you see when people wear stilts for the first time in a Sasquatch costume, trying to fool the camera.
“Hey! Where are you going?” I shouted at him.
He kept stumbling, fell to the floor, started to crawl. “Wait up!” I called. “I just want to talk to you about your car warranty!” He didn’t seem to understand English, because that should have made him halt and laugh.
I ran towards him, feeling like I was now the super-zombie chasing a lame braindead zombie. He found his footing and took off with his unwieldy gait. Before I could reach him, he came to the corner of a shelf stack and started to climb the metal column like a tree, the shelves its branches.
It was as if he were a chimpanzee trying to reach the safety of the tree tops to evade a landlocked predator. Am I the baddie? I walked up to the stack, looking up, watching him climb at least ten meters. For being naked with no gear, he was doing a pretty good job. Climbing like an ape must be deep in our DNA—well, at least for this guy. I didn’t do so well climbing back in the jungle.
I called out again, “Hey man! Hola amigo! Bonjour mon ami! Wie geht’s?” What other greetings did I learn from pop culture? Oh—there was that show when I was a kid—”Nǐ hǎo!” He didn’t stop to greet me. My pronunciation must be off.
He slipped. I watched in slow motion as he waved his arms trying to find a branch. I stumbled back a step to avoid being hit, but tripped, falling to the ground. He landed on my legs with a crack. All my nerves cried out at once, feeling like shattered glass.
A sharp whine pierced my skull, soon drowned out by static. As the static receded, I realized the whine was coming from the man lying across my legs.
Bones poked through skin at various bloody angles, and his chest moved up and down slowly. He was looking at me, wide eyes pleading for help, almost childlike. His breathing stopped.
A flash of hot white light blinded me. Shit, did that kill me?
When the light faded, I was still lying on the polished concrete floor beside the towers of boxes. All that remained of the man was a pile of dust filling a chalk outline shaped hole.
Author’s Notes
Oh crap. Is it time to write Author’s Notes again already?
Both Chapter 4 and 5 came to me when driving home from the hardware store one night. That’s not really an exciting story.
Almost all the time, some untold part of a story is rolling around in my brain. Then it forms nearly intact and I must write it down, usually a couple chapters at a time. That’s not really an informative story.
It didn’t always use to be this way—thinking of stories. If I thought of stories, it was what I needed to solve some continuity issue in one of Jan’s stories. Since I started writing myself, Slacy won’t shut up.
It’s actually quite distracting 😅 (send help!). I listen to a lot of audiobooks, anytime my ears aren’t occupied but my hands and eyes are. Lately, I can’t focus on the audiobook because some part of the story that needs solving pops into my head.
How about you? Does writing stories distract you from consuming them?
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