By John Pipkin
We left New Orleans when the waters rose, and the crypts flooded, and alligators swam through the streets. And Memphis too, after bomb-cyclone mudslides buried the sidewalks and cemeteries, after choking heat bred blood-sucking mosquitoes as big as hummingbirds. We moved again, and everyone said there was no cause to worry. Nashville, St. Louis, Kansas City. We said it was no worse than what we had endured generations before, and at least we no longer traveled alone or in exile. Now we followed the colossal migrations, cars, trucks, buses, bicycles, people on foot carrying what they could, seeking higher ground and hibernal climes. We made preparations in the coolness of night. We wrapped our precious objets d’art, culled our shrinking libraries, filled trunks with clothes too heavy for this eternal summer, and we ordered our familiars to ready our coffins for transport.
We heard the warnings: rising temperatures, changes in the jet stream, melting glaciers, heat domes, storms too severe for us to navigate as bats. But we thought nothing could exceed the terrors we had witnessed over the centuries: wars, famines, hurricanes, droughts, tsunamis, fires, a minor Ice Age in the 1600s. Plagues beyond number. In medieval Poland, great hordes died of pestilence and were buried facedown with padlocks on their toes for protection against us. Such silly precautions, as we have no thirst for the already dead.
At first the changes were good for us. Then, as now, we learned to profit from misfortune. We had always taken refuge from the heat of day. But imagine our astonishment when the humans began doing so as well, waiting until dark to emerge from their homes, moving their day lives to night, working, eating, exercising their ridiculous pets. We could hardly believe our good fortune. How easy the hunting became! No more did we have to orchestrate invitations since we had no need to enter their sad dwellings. No longer did we have to skulk in the shadows or lure clueless victims into dim alleyways; they were already there with no natural sense for negotiating the dark. Only our familiars—bound to watch over our daily slumbers—still went to bed after sundown, while the rest of their race adopted the nocturnal habits familiar to night walkers. Such a feast was set before us! We fed without restraint. We were giddy. We grew fat.
Yet another generation passed, and the heat increased, driving more humans into the habitable zones, and we followed. Des Moines, Sioux Falls, Minneapolis-St. Paul. Crops withered and we rejoiced at the extinction of dangerous herbs: garlic and wolfsbane, rowan fruit and tuberose, mayflower and blossoming hawthorn. Even the reviled salmon coral—once feared for its terrible power to soften fangs—disappeared in the steaming oceans, and we slept more soundly for it.
Animals small and large grew soporific, panted in the torpid shade. Fargo, Grand Forks. Winnipeg. The human migrations continued, and each time we followed and sought out new homes in cool basements, wine cellars, caverns, abandoned subway stations, in derelict bomb shelters tucked beneath drought-shriveled cornfields. But eventually the heat began creeping into these underground sanctuaries too. We propped the lids of our stifling coffins with stones, and we ordered our familiars to fan us as we slept. We awoke exhausted with great thirst.
We heard the humans chatter about their next move, Greenland, a solution to their misery, months of darkness and ice. It sounded like paradise, until we understood that there would also be months of endless daylight. But if the humans fled to Greenland, we would follow.
Insects shriveled to husks. Small creatures perished, and next the larger beasts dropped where they stood. The slow collapse, so long underway, advanced with the unflinching momentum of disaster, and we mocked the starving humans and laughed as they became even easier to catch. We did not see what was coming next, until, in their absolute desperation—in the torment-accelerated mutations known only to races on the edge of extinction—the humans turned on themselves. Forever our enemies, they became our rivals, feeding on each other, hunting each other in vicious packs like wolves. Gaunt with hunger, our familiars left us to join them. We watched appalled as the humans swarmed like the zombies of their stupid fictions. We dared not approach their frenzied feeding, but afterward we emerged, cautious, to lap up what was left.
Now we take extra care when we retire. We wrap ourselves in wet shrouds, drill holes in our coffins and prop the lids for ventilation to avoid being mummified as we sleep. The unrelenting heat will do what wooden stakes and silver bullets never could, and every day the swelter increases. It is too late now to go elsewhere. We cannot travel during the day, and the ravenous humans rule the night. After sunset we sit and watch the cartwheeling stars, the darkness no longer ours alone. We wonder if we will starve or fall prey to the feral humans prowling the shadows as their dormant lupine ancestry revives. With parched tongues we lick our fangs and dream of Greenland, and we stare at each other, cadaverous, famished, and ask again and again: what has this world come to?
John Pipkin’s first novel, Woodsburner (Nan A. Talese/Doubleday) won the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, The Massachusetts Center for the Book Fiction Prize, and the Texas Institute of Letters First Novel Prize. His second novel, The Blind Astronomer’s Daughter (Bloomsbury), received glowing reviews, most notable in The New York Times Book Review, and it was named the Book of the Month for December 2016 by The Times (London). Originally from Baltimore, MD, he currently lives in Austin, TX, where he is the Director of the Undergraduate Creative Writing Program at the University of Texas at Austin, and he also teaches in the Low-Residency MFA Program at Spalding University. He is the recipient of fellowships from MacDowell, Yaddo, Dobie Paisano, and the Gullkistan, center for creativity in Iceland.