Industrial Evolution

“It’s a quarter-mile wide at this point,” Jack said. “There’s a mile of open space in front of us and look at this! There’s not just one river coming in here, there’s three rivers!” After checking the instruments he squinted into the darkness. “Two more rivers come into the cavern at the other end, plus the first one coming out over here, and they all empty into a big river that keeps going down. This is really amazing, Pops!”

“Yes.” Fastbinder was thinking about it. “If the river caverns are traversable during the dryer months of the year, humans could come and go. But where are the people now?” Fastbinder’s eyes prowled the high-contrast shadows for the freakish white faces from the blurry photograph.

“Hiding, probably. Check it out!” Jack placed the spotlight beam on a white, oily patch. “Let’s get closer!” He engaged the battery dives. JED’s treads rolled down the sandy dune at the speed of a leisurely walk, in near silence. The slimy patch began to look more like a pile of slimy things, then it became something recognizable.

“Fish parts,” Fastbinder said. “Now we know what they eat.”

“Yech.”

“See the bones? They even strip off the ribs to eat. It has minerals the flesh doesn’t have. They probably consume the organs, too, for the same reason.”

“Hey, Pops, Jules Verne was right! ’Shrooms!” The rear of the hill-sized pile of fish scraps was smoothed over and fuzzy with thick mold and small copses of pale mushrooms, some of them knee high. A large quantity of them was scattered on the rock beside the hill. They looked fresh, as if someone had dropped them only minutes before.

Amid the fallen fungi were slimy, glimmering footprints.

“We must have drove the poor suckers off. But they’re not getting far.” Jack looked determined as he steered JED deeper into the cavern, following the footprints to a neighborhood of nests made from desiccated mushrooms.

“Zee two other rivers come into the cavern here, making it the coolest place in the cavern,” Fastbinder observed, feeling energized and excited now. “Very cozy, eh, Jack?”

“Oh, yeah, looks great,” Jack replied sarcastically, making his father laugh.

Then they saw them. People. Lots of pale, hideous people.

“Pops,” Jack asked when he got his voice, “what’re we gonna do with these ugly suckers? They look pretty low on the evolutionary scale.”

“They will be good for many things, Jack,” Fastbinder said, his mind spinning with new ideas as JED turned sharply around a protective outcropping and bore down on the terrified crowd of pale-skinned, white-haired people, now trapped against the back wall of the cavern system. JED blocked their escape route, and Jack Fast halted the earth drill. From a hundred feet away they observed the mob in fascination.

They were obviously albinos and they were all hideous, cadaverous creatures. They were pushing and shoving one another in terror, and one of them was wounded. Father and son saw the sudden spray of crimson, and with it the scent of fresh blood had to have wafted over the crowd.

Fast and Fastbinder witnessed their first feeding frenzy. The wounded creature—they didn’t even have time to determine if the naked thing was male or female—was swarmed and dismembered by groping hands and gnashing teeth. There was meat enough for every albino to get a mouthful. The blood-smeared, nude, filthy albinos settled into unflattering squats to eat their lunch.

“Gross!” Jack chuckled. “Guess they’ll eat anything that gets their mouth watering.”

“Survival instinct will drive them to seek out any possible variety in their diet to get rare nutrients,” Fastbinder agreed, nodding.

Jack nodded at the stacks of groceries and dripping foam coolers piled up in the rear of Jack’s Earth Drill. “We’re gonna be gods, Pops.”

“Yes, Jack, my genius progeny, they will be ours to command, and they are the answers to all our troubles.”

Jack ripped the pull-tops off all eight cans of Lil Wieners Hot Dawgs and tossed the fat rolls of Processed Meat Product across the sand. The aroma of meat fat in brine got the attention of the albinos. They threw caution to the wind and scrambled for the hot dogs like starved Boy Scouts. The Lil Wieners vanished.

The blind, degenerate humans shuffled for the open hatch of Jack’s Earth Drill.

“Now you are all very brave, I see, yes?” Jacob Fastbinder demanded. He flung Ding Dongs in every direction, creating a free-for-all. The pastries were consumed, foil wrappers and all, in a matter of seconds.

The albinos came back to Jack’s Earth Drill expectantly. No, belligerently.

“Now that we have taught them we have wonderful gifts to give, we should teach them we are powerful deliverers of death, yes?” Fastbinder asked rhetorically.

“Oh, yeah, Big Daddy!” Jack excitedly dug into a steel locker jolted to the wall.

“You have firearms?”

“Yeah, but I have something better, Pops.” Jack stood up with a red, white and blue cardboard box.

“Firecrackers. Big honkin’ firecrackers. I brought them for stability tests on sedimentary deposits.”