It was quite a mystery really: all the Poisoners
disappeared overnight. Or so it seemed to us, in our little corner of the world.
One minute they were everywhere, crashing pots and crockery around, big feet
thumping through the place – then there was nothing, just the musical hum of
all those little appliances that you could only hear when They weren’t around.
I must admit we were a bit puzzled – pleased, of course, but puzzled. Only
Great Great Grandad could remember a silence like that. He even remembered the
Awful Silence, a time when the Poisoners of the day had departed, leaving a
deadly bomb that filled the whole Domain with toxic smoke. Only the toughest
had prevailed. Then another generation of Poisoners had come and life continued
as it always had – a deadly struggle to survive in the cracks and crevices of
Their civilization.
“It will pass,” Great Great Grandad said in that
inscrutable way he had. “They disappear, but new ones always arrive to take
their place. Seize the moment!” That pronouncement really took it out of the
poor old fellow and he had to lie down for a bit, waving all his legs in the
air. But seize the moment we did, stockpiling food scraps, building new nests
and reproducing like there was no tomorrow. I had more mates than you could
shake a toothpick at and I couldn’t even begin to count the babies. Life
was wonderful back then: freed from the omnipresent threat of a poison gas
attack or a brutal crushing, we could go where we pleased and do what we wanted
– and we just wanted what we always wanted, food and sex, sex and food. They were nowhere to be seen and all the
Poisons stayed put, rusting away in the High Cupboard. No sound but the
scuffling of our myriad feet and the gentle, rhythmic hum of the power grid.
Aahh, good times!
Well, we started to get reports in from other rooms in
the Domain, and even a few snippets of news from Out There. It seemed the same
thing was happening all over: Poisoners just up and disappearing. One crazy
female from Out There even claimed she had seen the bodies of Poisoners dead in
the streets. She said the Brothers were feasting on them, that their numbers
were beyond counting. Many of the young and gullible amongst us believed her
and she gained quite a following for a while. A small group of believers even
let themselves be led Out There, on the promise of boundless rotten meat for
all to share. I’ve always been a bit of a sceptic myself. Anyway, we never saw
any of them again. Perhaps they found the Land of Plenty, perhaps not.
But good times don’t last forever. After a while some
of us started to worry about the future. Yes, there was plenty of food now, but
it was not a renewable resource: without the Poisoners, who had (unwillingly,
it’s true) shared all their produce with us, we had no way of replenishing our
supplies, and even I had to acknowledge that population growth was out of
control. I hadn’t given it a moment’s thought while I was mating with
everything in sight and having all those thousands of babies, but it turns out the Poisoners had
actually been doing us a favour with their cans of Mortein and their great
stomping feet. Keeping the numbers in balance, like. Experts calculated that
soon even the cardboard cartons would all be consumed and, without new food sources,
our days as a species were numbered.
For once, Great Great Grandad was wrong. New Poisoners
never did arrive. Explanations abounded, including a rather neat theory that,
in their quest for ever more deadly chemicals They had actually ended up poisoning
themselves! Hah, imagine, the irony of it! Well we tried everything, but we had
no traditions of production, except for babies. I am ashamed to say that, in
our desperation we did resort to cannibalism, but even that could not be
sustained. The few of us who survived decided that we had to act; we had to
venture Out There: it represented our last hope. I have to admit that, although
I was not optimistic, nor was I prepared for the devastation that confronted us
when, after a long and hungry journey, we finally gazed Out.
Nothing, as far as we could see, nothing but grey dust
and swirling clouds of burning chemical grit. Behind us in the Domain, the
strains of the last faint electrical circuits fizzled and died. We were the
last of our race, it sang, the last of the last.
