12 — Michele Corriel

To the day the sludge first began to creep into beau­ti­ful down­town Boze­man. Oh, yes, Mar­vin was there. It’s a mem­ory he’s been try­ing to sup­press for decades – the source of his night­mares and his strange addic­tion to organic bananas.

The scene was pas­toral to any­one view­ing it from afar. But up close and per­sonal, Mar­vin could sense some­thing was amiss. For one thing, there was not a sin­gle Sub­uru in all of Boze­man. They all dis­ap­peared overnight.

Some blamed the mass exo­dus of the mighty Sub­u­rus on those Vene­tians, who can never get enough good gas mileage. Some blamed it on the sud­den resur­gence of the Aztecs, who every­one thought had become extinct along with their Mayan coun­ter­parts, but that didn’t stop every­one from try­ing to chan­nel them through the quartz crys­tals that were sold all over town. What­ever it was, it was some­thing, some­thing dark and per­haps evil.

Oddly, the Boze­man Chron­i­cle reported a sud­den rise in Via­gra pre­scrip­tions and that weird hot for her cold for him stuff that was all over the air­waves (are they still called air­waves?) that day.

While every­one was busy get­ting busy, hook­ing up with their hook ups, mak­ing time with their good­times, some­thing quite dif­fer­ent was ooz­ing up from below. It started at the park­ing lot on 15th and Main, the only place where speed bumps spon­ta­neously popped up every so often. That might have been the first clue. If any­one had been pay­ing attention.

And, to Mar­vin, it was obvi­ously the cen­ter of the universe.

That day, that April Fool’s Day back in 2011, the black asphalt of the lot began to melt. At first it only swal­lowed cars and trucks. Soon stores started to fall into the muck. It was like a giant black hole had devel­oped but no one stopped eat­ing their Cold Stone ice cream long enough to notice.

The Mon­tana Depart­ment of Envi­ron­men­tal Qual­ity was closed that day, so it went undoc­u­mented. But Mar­vin had taken samples.

He still had those sam­ples with him. Right there on the diri­gi­ble. And now some­one wanted the pass­word that would deci­pher the genetic code.