Future Sight

SLUGS! 

 

Massive slugs were falling from where the sky had broken, and everywhere Abel Detweiler looked they were landing on cars, climbing up buildings, climbing up people and, slowly but surely, eating them. They were football sized, blueish gray, and although they fell to the earth like mortar fire, they were unharmed by the collision. The city was overrun with them, and thousands more were raining down through the broken sky. People ran screaming through the streets, fire had replaced electricity, and slug after horrible slug came cannonballing down into a city that was under siege. 

 

Able was horrified when she first saw the slugs, but to her surprise no one else seemed to mind them. That was because when Abel first saw the slugs they weren't actually there yet. She saw them before everyone else because of her special glasses. That was about a year ago. Now that the slugs had really arrived, everyone was as horrified as she was back then, but she was no longer surprised. She was seeing something new. She was looking through her glasses out the window of her final room to the slug filled streets beneath the sky that was about to break again. 

 

Abel was elderly, but not old, and still as sharp as a fork. She was in peaked physical condition, but just so. She was in excellent shape for her age, except for her eyesight. Her vision wasn't bad, but her eyes just didn't work like other eyes. She had always had peculiar ocular needs, and few doctors had been able to help her. Glasses were the only solution anyone had ever tried. Now that she was older, she needed new glasses more and more often, and fewer doctors were able to help her. It was for these reasons that she went to see an optometrist who had contacted her by mail. He guaranteed that he could help her and sent her a coupon for a free prescription. After she saw him, Abel got her special glasses the next day. 

 

When she first tried the glasses on, the slugs were there, and so she quickly took them off. The slugs disappeared. Outside, everything looked normal, but when she put the glasses back on the slugs were there, falling from the sky and wreaking havoc. They were crashing through windows and inching their way across the ground, leaving behind them a trail of neon slime that was so sticky it held people like mice in a glue trap. Abel's neighbor, Mrs. Ellinger was across the street attempting to free her dog from the slime when a slug began climbing up the back of her leg. Abel ran to her rescue. She took a running punt at a slug that wasn't there, and wound up on her ass with her glasses on the ground beside her. A totally shocked and slugless Mrs. Ellinger picked up Abel's glasses while her dog wagged his tail and licked her face. 

 

Abel returned inside to think. It didn't take her long to realize that the glasses were showing her the future, exactly one year into the future to be exact. When the glasses were on, newspaper dates jumped one year forward, and a drawer she collected birthday cards in contained warm wises for a birthday she had yet to celebrate. When she took the glasses off, the cards disappeared. Wearing her glasses was stranger still because the sound didn't match the sight. Outside, she was showed visions of chaos and destruction but heard the usual, peaceful sounds of the neighborhood. The more she looked around with the glasses on the more she was convinced that, within a year, the Earth would be invaded by giant slugs. 

 

The explanations didn't matter to her. All that mattered was what she could do about it in the meantime. She wasn't going to sit around waiting for them to arrive, so she began to do the one thing she knew to get rid of slugs: spread salt. She dumped bags and bags of salt into her yard, and spread it out to the edges. Sure enough, the slugs disappeared from her yard. From then on, it became her only goal to spread as much salt as she could in the time remaining, and she spread literal tons of it. 

 

She bought in big bags before she found out she could get it in truckloads. She spent her savings on salt, and then cashed in her bonds. Then she took out loans for more salt and ran her credit into the ground to get every last grain she could afford. By day, she'd dump salt in secluded places, like country roads and national forests. By night, she used buckets and wheel barrows to spread salt in parks and on high school football fields. She even hired trucks to dump salt in fields she lied about owning. She felt bad about it, but everywhere she put salt the slugs disappeared. She was able to spread several tons of it before the police intervened. 

 

One afternoon, as Abel was walking down the street casually placing water-soluble bags filled with salt into the planters that lined the city streets, a pair of police officers approached her. They talked with her for a few minutes, asked her some questions, and finally made a call over their radio. She begged them to believe her, but they wouldn't. She begged them to look through her glasses. One of them did but, because he didn't have Abel's unique eyesight, he couldn't see what she saw. Soon she found herself, in relatively short succession, loosely handcuffed in the back of a police car, apologetically placed in a jail cell, standing before a judge who eyed her with exasperated pity and, finally, unpacking her suitcase in a room with a roommate who introduced herself as the Virgin Mary's aunt. It was her final room. When she moved in, she saw herself through the glasses lying dead in the bed where she was unpacking her suitcase. 

 

In the months that she stayed there, Abel developed a reputation with the staff for being spiteful and difficult. She became the Salt Lady: the one who emptied the saltshaker into her pockets to sneak back to her room. The one whose dresser drawer needed to be periodically emptied of all the stolen salt. She rubbed salt into her skin until it turned red and cracked and, when the staff tried to stop her, she told them they’d be sorry when the slugs came. They didn't spend much time trying to understand her. She was just another irrational client with a crazy obsession. But, one day the sky broke open and slugs finally began falling out. On that day, everyone panicked-- except Abel. 

 

The slugs were slow, but there were millions of them, and they were unbelievably tough to kill. By curling up into a ball, they could survive the meteoric impact with Earth, so bullets and blades did little to penetrate their thick skin. Their gluey, neon slime let them climb up the sides of buildings and made removing them extremely difficult. It was mildly caustic, and it'd make a human break out in a rash. It would eventually cause buildings to collapse. They'd eat a person if given time, and their sheer numbers and sticky trail made it a difficult fate to avoid. Humans would get stuck in the slime and a group of slugs would try to climb its legs. By the time it removed one, another was halfway up, and then another, and eventually the human would trip and fall into the slime. Then, the other slugs would climb on top of it and the slime would build up and create a toxic, itchy web that trapped the human against the ground while the slugs slowly ate it alive. The lucky ones were the humans who were broken by a falling slug. 

 

Abel watched from the window of her final room scenes she'd been showed almost a year ago, now with the full effect of sound. She wasn't surprised. She wished she could have done more to warn people, but ultimately, she put all the blame for the situation on everyone that didn't believe her. It didn't matter. In the time she'd spent in her final room she'd been showed new and silent visions by the glasses. Soon the sky would open again. She had saved up a good amount of salt despite the small amounts she gave up in the decoy dresser drawer, and she only needed to last a little while longer. It wouldn't be long before she'd die one night in her sleep, and that gave her comfort. 

 

Like she knew would happen, scientists and government officials soon came to ask her questions. Of course, they'd thought of using salt to combat the slugs, but it wasn't working. Salt didn't kill the slugs, it just annoyed them, and the rain kept washing it away. Nevertheless, they had seen the areas that she had spread her salt. A year of sitting with the salt left her yard desiccated but slugless. They needed to know how she knew to prepare. But Abel was too bitter to tell them anything. They begged her for her knowledge, some insight into what was happening, but she just toyed with them. What would she know about it? She was just the crazy old Salt Lady! She was in a mental institution; how could she help the government which obviously had everything under control? She hated them for the way they had treated her. They said she had a duty to help, and she thought about that for a moment. She reached into a pillowcase hidden beneath her bed and removed a handful of salt. Then she opened her palm, blew it in their faces, and laughed until they left. 

 

She returned to her window. Abel knew the secret to the slug's destruction, but she kept it to herself. The glasses had showed it to her shortly after she moved into her final room. The humans wouldn't listen to her and there was nothing they could do about it anyway. Soon a new alien species would emerge to hunt the slugs, and although it hadn't happened yet, Abel watched the silent scenes of the creatures that would arrive in a matter of months through the lenses of her special glasses. They reminded Abel of monsters from Greek myths: giant snakes with dragonfly wings and scorpion tails, and they were about the size of a truck. With inescapable speed, they dove like falcons to grab up some slug covered human, carry it high into the air, and then let it drop. The slugs would disengage in order to roll up and prepare for impact, but before they hit the ground the snakes would dive and swallow them whole, right out of the air. This was how they hunted. All around, humans were being suddenly snatched off the ground only to return to it violently, silently, moments later. 

 

The snakes had followed the slugs to this weird new world where a new food chain was being forged with humans much closer to the bottom than they were used to. Abel knew they wouldn't stay there for long, though. She knew how smart and resourceful humans could be; how ruthless they could be in order to survive. They had no trouble killing to get ahead, and turning their backs on each other to keep what they had. Abel had no doubt that, sooner or later, the humans would find themselves back at the top of the new natural order. But maybe, she hoped, some time spent at the bottom would teach them a lesson.