Savior with Expiration Date

Luna was drawing charms with menstrual blood on a mound of cans when the first vole bit through Maya's silicone breasts.

"God, God, God, God, God-" the teenage girl's screams mingled with the sound of padding flowing, "they're spawning in my uterus!"

In Luna's night-vision lenses, Maya's ribs were being gnawed out in lace patterns by the rats. These are no ordinary rodents-their eyeballs grow on spines and their incisors glow the fluorescent green of a convenience store logo. Three hours ago, these beasts had just eaten up the last of the West End's library of living people (they called refugees with knowledge spiked on their skin "human skin books").

Rule #47: All living invaders must be converted to protein.

"Light the fire." Luna shoved the gun into Maya's festering palm, "Or be their mobile maternity ward."

The young girl's blonde hair trembled. Since trading her hair for formula, her scalp had proliferated with scaly, radiated patches that were currently oozing minty mucus. As the first embers licked the tips of her hair, the rats suddenly let out an electronic synth-like whine-a melody that turned out to be an adapted version of a convenience store promotional ad.

As the flames engulfed Maya, Luna got a good look at the new tattoo on her back: a diagram of the convenience store's headquarters spelled out in pus-filled wounds, with "Luna's Birthplace" labeled in the anal position.

"Sweetness... It's the last of the birth control pills..." Maya hisses before turning into a torch, burning fat dripping into words - "They're afraid of your first blood."

The warehouse defenses are in full meltdown.

The rats spew out of the ventilation ducts like asphalt, crashing into Luna's makeshift candy barrier. Jumpers exploded inside them, and rainbow candy pigments flowed between their organs in a poisonous river. A pregnant female rat nibbled on a mound of condoms, her pups newly born with tattoos of Luna's DNA sequence.

"Sacrifice!" The East End stragglers burst through the iron gates, "They want living virgins!"

Luna's shotgun blasted the leader's kneecap. The man who had traded his daughter for canned goods was now pulling tapeworms out of his wounds for sacrifice. The swarm of rats suddenly reversed course and injected eggs into the fissures of his vocal cords - the man's pleas for mercy turned into spawning broadcasts.

"Rule number 48." She stomped on the man's skull, splattering his brains on the homemade rat pheromone map:

"Menstruation is a more reliable moat than a firewall."

Bloody moonlight penetrates the bulletproof glass.

Luna retreats to the core of the freezer, her back against the holographic projection of her mother's captivity. The rats build bridges with their corpses, their feces etching equations into the walls-the very formula for the refining of the human body at the convenience store headquarters, the last line of variables labeled with Luna's menstrual data.

"Mom, is this the new world you wanted?" She slammed the bag of refrigerated menstrual blood into the rats.

The moment the liquid touched the air, the rats began to give birth en masse. The fur of the newborn rat pups emerges with Jax's tattooed design, and they dip their tails in the blood to write on the ground, "You were the original petri dish."

Maya's charred corpse suddenly convulses.

When Luna breaks open her carbonized jaw, she finds a microchip stuck between her vocal cords. A holographic projection reveals the breeding pods of the convenience store's headquarters-thousands of embryos cloning Luna sinking in canisters, each connected to the rat colony's neuromatrix.

"Surprise?" Jax's face suddenly emerges from the screen made up of rats, "Every brother you killed..."

Tens of thousands of voles raised their right front paw in synchronization, revealing a ventral stripe branded with Cole's military registration number.

"... It's all your painkillers."

The freezer temperature plummeted.

Luna stripped off her clothes and stepped into the rats, menstrual blood forming protective totems on her skin. The voles began to melt, limp into syrup like licked lollipops. In the gooey liquid, she fished out her hysterectomy report from when she was seven years old - the signing doctor was none other than the president of the convenience store.

"Rule number 49." She shoved the report into the anus of the Rat King's corpse:

"When you become the disaster itself, you no longer need a savior."

The last wave of rats went extinct in a self-inflicted slaughter.

As dawn breaks, Luna sets up an incinerator in the center of the warehouse, where Maya's ashes mix with the rat carcasses to give off the aroma of strawberry shortcake. The survivors knelt by the ashes and inhaled them frantically, their retinas gradually emerging with the coordinates of the convenience store headquarters.

"A new faith is born." The priest's successor raised the chalice filled with rat urine, "Let us praise the womb of food!"

Luna watched as the crowd mutated out of the rat's tail after devouring the ashes and carved the last rule into her pelvis:

"Allow them to worship you, but never let them grow a womb."

A baby's clear cry came from the ventilation ducts.

She crawled three hundred meters to the sound and found a swaddling blanket on the radiation dust filter-the creature inside had Cole's eyes, Jax's tongue stud, and lips pieced together by Maya's burn scars. When the baby bites her nipple, Luna's C-section scar suddenly rips open, dropping out a metal uterus emblazoned with a convenience store logo.

"Welcome home." A third eye opens in the palm of the fetus, the holographic smile of the president swirling in its pupil.

Outside the warehouse, a new round of acid rain began to fall.

The raindrops cast crystallized idols on the ash piles-it was Luna with rats in her arms, the bases etched with prayers the survivors had gouged out with their fingernails:

"Wherever her meridian blood goes, everything is meat in a jar."

The Poetics of the Plague Deconstructed.