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: Monotony
Last time on The Flucks
I found some pants. First, I found a first-aid kit and a proper, flexible splint to do a better patch-up job. Rolling around made it easier to cover a lot of area in the warehouse. But I could only reach stuff on the ground level.
Then I got kitted out: tactical boots and shorts (pants would have to wait on leg to heal), “CONTAINS MEAT” T-shirt, knife, weather-shield jacket—the apocalypse survivor starter kit.
Oh, and can’t forget my Scar Flucks ballcap and name tag.
Slacy found clothes, but no answers to his questions. Alone in the gargantuan warehouse, he struggles to stay sane. Good thing he’s got sarcasm to keep him company.
Chapter 7 — They see me rollin’
Putting on shorts was a bad idea.
Getting them on over the splint was easy, but taking them off proved harder. Naturally. Once I had the wheelchair, I could get around and grab the real equipment I needed to mend my leg.
I used a couple SAM splints—those are wide, flexible aluminum strips that can be formed into a rigid shape—to immobilize my entire leg and knee. The fracture was in my left shin. The bone didn’t break skin and actually seemed aligned.
The infection risk was low, but I wasn’t taking chances. I had no idea what my current immune system was like. Did I even have gut bacteria in this new body? I cleaned and sterilized the cuts daily.
I took some broad-spectrum antibiotics. I found meds central. A whole pharmacy section in the warehouse with giant bottles of everything—over and behind the counter. Pain meds were doing the heavy lifting. And I was getting nutrients from premixed protein drinks to heal faster.
When I was younger, I had been in the Civil Air Patrol. Along with map navigation and drone flying, I learned field first aid. Honestly, all those skills might be clutch for this Flucking adventure I’m having.
I had no way of knowing if the bone was healing properly. Hm, does Shmamazon sell X-ray machines? Best case, walking with crutches in a couple months. In a few more, I might be able to put weight on it. Worst case, six.
Anyway, the point is: shorts—I could not take them off over the splints without excruciating pain or risking messing up the healing process. I didn’t have many options for bathing—cold-water sink showers—so wearing the same shorts for months seemed like a bad idea. Also, taking a shit was becoming a big problem.
My genius saved the day again, though, because it came up with the perfect solution: skirts. It actually went one leap better and landed on utility kilts. Utili-kilts have a few advantages over skirts. For one, they part at the front, so I could slip into one without having to go over my broken leg.
Also, even though they finally started putting useful, deep-enough-for-phone pockets on skirts decades ago, it’s hard to beat the utility of cargo pockets and a little metal ring to hold your hammer. Oooh, I need to find a hammer.
I didn’t realize how much I enjoyed free-flowing air down there until I went from naked to shorted. Now that I’m sporting a utili-kilt, everything is easy-breezy. Plus, this dark-brown kilt looks like a leather pteruge. I got that Roman Warrior aesthetic back.
It’s been a month since I moved into the Mecca of E-commerce Sin. Ash’s lukewarmbrew ran out a couple weeks ago, even with rationing. Food and water weren’t a problem, though. There’s all this “enhanced” water—you know, those drinks with “pH” or vitamins or whatever that’s supposed to be better than spring water.
This place is stacked with energy bars, chips, nuts—all the nutrition a growing boy could want. I wanted to hack one of the offline warehouse robots to hunt snacks and follow me around, vending them on demand, playing jaunty tunes a guy could really twirl his kilt to. Dreamt that last night—damnedest thing, really got the ol’ cog1 turning. Oh well, a project for another day.
Speaking of meat, I’ve stayed away from that aisle because, man, the rotting was something awful. And there was that whole event there. I went back to look at the scooped-out hole one day. Made no fucking sense. I couldn’t stay long before the smell cranked up my gag reflex. This place was big enough that I could steer clear and find packaged and freeze-dried food instead.
I had spent the month rolling around the warehouse looking for things I could use. One of the first things I looked for was battery banks. If the inventory tablet died, even if I found power later, there’d be no way for me to log back into it. So I’ve kept it on a steady juice diet.
Being in the Kingdom of Infinite E-commerce Bliss was fun. At first. Any product I could imagine could be found with just a few taps on the tablet. Then I’d roll over, slice open a box, and bask in the spoils. I quickly found out how to limit my search to the ground-level boxes. Even limited to only one of the seventy-something levels of shelves, it was a fuck-ton of stuff to loot.
Amazingly, no zombies or other ghouls jumped out at me. Quite the opposite of every apocalypse movie I’ve watched. No more weird people materialized in the warehouse either.
Besides the tablet guy who shouldn’t have gone into work that day and mute, barely-human guy, I found a few more dust piles under neon vests. The shift manager must have been a real asshole, forcing everyone to come in sick.
Every aisle looked like the other, though: box, box—big box. I hadn’t seen outside since I got here. I was afraid if I went outside, the doors would close and I’d be cut off. But the monotony of rolling around New Box City was driving me insane. I had to get out.
But it would be months before I could walk properly again. Cruising around in a wheelchair down dusty streets didn’t seem smart. This warehouse was outside the city. Even though I grew up rural, kilometers of forest seemed more dangerous than city blocks.
What I needed was a car. Vanny no longer booted up. Nor did any of his van friends. There might be a leftover car from the employees, but first, I had to get outside. The roll-up doors somehow had power to let Vanny and me in, but without Vanny or its mates, I couldn’t command them to open to see if they still had any.
Thankfully, the roll-up doors had manual overrides. Pulling a small chain disengaged the motor that opened the door or held it closed. Once disengaged, I could lift it open manually. Well, with a lot of struggling, I could get it just high enough to wheel myself under.
✹✹✹
A crisp chill hit me as I rolled outside. The weather had cooled considerably since I went in. I didn’t really know what season it was. The tablet displayed the time but lacked a calendar function. It just showed time like “1 hour ago” or “1 month ago”. There was probably a way to show the actual date, but that’d spoil the mystery.
I looked left, then right—no cars. Shit. The employee lot was not on my side. I went back inside, grabbed a hoodie, and folded the pleats of the utili-kilt between my legs to protect the boys from catching their death. It was at least a kilometer trek to get around the building.
I could bore you with how tedious rolling beside a warehouse is—about the endless metal wall made of sameness on one side, and the endless pine trees grown of sameness on the other. But I won’t.
There were a few cars. Of course, I had no way to get into them—stupid! I should have thought about that before deciding to get my cardio in. I needed keys, apparently, so I headed back to the warehouse, passing back through the gauntlet of sameness.
Anyone with a car in the last few decades could see where this was going. I searched every dust pile for keys. As one does. Everyone has keys, but no one has keys. To unlock a car, you used some sort of biometric or your phone to gain entry. And everyone’s phone itself required some sort of biometric.
The thing about turning to dust when you die is there’s pretty much nothing bio left to metric. No one thought about survivors of Dust-pocalypse when they designed these things.
One dust pile had a for-real faux leather wallet. Since money and everything else are digitized on your phone, there’s not much reason to carry a wallet these days. But this wallet had actual printed photographs of kids, likely theirs. That wrecked me. Where were they now?
Whoever this person was, they got my blessing because in the wallet was a backup keycard. Phones were reliable enough that you didn’t really need backup keys, but this poor soul had kept one in their wallet. All the lettering on the keycard had rubbed off, so I didn’t even know what brand it was for. I rolled out to the lot.
✹✹✹
All the cars should have kept a charge. The first one was a Tesla. I would have used a fake name here, but that company has been dead almost as long as this thirty-year-old shit heap. I mean, thirty years is a long time for a car to still be usable. But it was only running on pure spite at this point.
No way. I ain’t fucking driving a Tesla. Ever.
I rolled to each door, holding the key near it. I started with the car I wanted most. The Voltivian T444—a four-door, four-motor, four-wheel-drive truck. The perfect post-apocalypse battle wagon.
No dice.
I checked each and every door and purposefully left the one at the front last—hoping, daring, pleading that this key was not for that car. But none of the others unlocked.
With no option left, I rolled up to the Tesla.
It beeped.
Fuck!
I’m rethinking my blessing for the car owner.
Author’s Notes
Shorts just didn’t feel right, you know? What better apocalypse clothing than a utili-kilt?
Is all of Slacy’s running commentary normal, or is he breaking down?
This chapter started out long, then I split some of it into the next. Then I added a whole bunch of words. Then I cut them down. Chapter 4 is still longer. I prefer to keep them around this size. It seems just small enough that “I’ll read that right now” and big enough to get the story in. What do you think?
And who would have thought Tesla would make it another 40 or so years.
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