Don't Answer Me

“
         Don’t Answer me. Listen very carefully. They are listening to all telephone calls and are hunting down feral humans. Believe me. You don’t want to be found. I will meet you in a few days as planned in Anza, which is free for now. In the meantime, stay alive and stay aware. And don’t use the phone again.”

          I put down the phone and said to Will.

         “Man, that was weird. I wonder who they are?”

         Will and I sit down, look at each other, and start talking again about the weirdness we have been experiencing.

         Will, what the heck is going down? What did John mean by they can find you? You don’t want to be found? Who the hell are they?"

          Jake, maybe they be the same spider dudes that wiped out the cabin guys. I mean, there was some serious shit going down there. And the dogs eating an old man. I mean when did that ever happen? And we have not seen a single human being since we started hiking. And, why was there no traffic on the highway? What the fuck is going down?"

         "Something evil is going down, Will, my friend. Moreover, that means we have better keep our wits about us. I think we should take turns staying up tonight. I'll take the first watch."

         That night we had decided to break our vow of not using technology and decided to try to make a phone call to our buddy John. I had brought a cell phone with me but had kept it turned off. We had been on the PCT for almost six days. Will and I were life-long friends, just turned 70. and had vowed to do the PCT to celebrate our 70th birthdays John was a retired marine I knew from my days in Foreign Service. The plan was to hike the PCT and meet up with once a week for supplies and to take a night off the trail. He would join us for part of the trail as would other old friends. Once a week, we would go online and update our blog about our trip.

         Day Five dawned quiet and peaceful. Too peaceful, perhaps. After hiking for a few hours, we entered a Forest Service Camping area and came upon a log cabin that was recently evacuated.

         It looked as if the people had run off suddenly. The door was blown off, and all the supplies were strewn about. There were footprints in the sand, but the footprints were not quite right. Some of them looked as if Giant eight-legged creatures had made them, others looked as if some strange two-legged creatures had made them and humans made others. In any event, the cabin was deserted. There was a piece of paper stuck on the door, with a snippet of a headline as if from a newspaper article, “Long Live the Revolution. This House has been Declared Sanitized for the Revolution. All Unauthorized Humans Have Been Processed for Reeducation. Thanks to the Glorious Leadership of the Kan. Long Live the Emperor” There were also letters in a strange alphabet that neither Will nor I could recognize. Between the two of us we had passing familiarity with the script of about 25 languages.

         Will and I walked on speculating at what we had just seen and vowing to wander into a town soon to check out what was going on. We decided to camp out near the camping ground, in hopes of finding out more information. We found a cabin that was in relatively good shape and enjoyed sleeping in beds for a change and having a real stove to cook on. The electricity was out, but the water still worked a bit and the gas-powered stove also worked. We also enjoyed showers. We stayed up late speculating about what was going on and debating whether we should make a phone call or two, but finally decided not to but to wait until we met John in a few days.

         Day Six dawned cold and wet. It was if the heavens were upset at us. It was quite unusual weather for that time of year. We made breakfast and speculated all morning over what was going on. Around 11 a.m., we came upon a gruesome sight. We saw a pack of wild dogs eating what appeared to be the corpse of an elderly white man. We scared the dogs off by firing some stun guns at them. We walked up to the old man, who was still alive, but barely. He appeared to have been shot and was bleeding to death, and both his legs had been eaten off by the feral dogs. We asked him his name, and what had happened. He looked at us and crocked out his final words, “The Giant Space alien spiders are coming over the hill. Beware.” Then he lay down and died.

         We decided we had better move on after burying the old man in the ground. I was tempted to go online, but Will suggested waiting until we got to a more secure location. Whatever the spiders were we did not want to run into them unprepared.

         But we had not counted on the end of the world happening while we were on our trail. We had been on the trail the morning of the liberation of Earth when the Khan, the Giant Nazi spiders from the Khan Empire invaded and took over the Earth in an epic week of extreme violence ending with the night when the spiders killed off most of the elite in LA and BBQ them for their human soldiers they had liberated from the prisons and turned them loose on the old upper class. We had learned what happened about a week into our trip when we pulled into the town of Anza and met John. We launched the triad anti-spider resistance, F… the spiders that day.

Except from my unpublished novel, “Giant Nazi Spiders”.

New Prompt: Use the following as your title:
Don't answer me.

and start with the above sentence, your poem or story. Bold it for tomorrow's judge. Choose Personal as one of the genres.