In The Panic He Created

By Thomas Butler

Can’t really know how much of this you might know already, so it’s probably best to start at the beginning.  When Johnny Ray Bohn first announced his intention to free the world from the evils of fossil fuels, most people simply smiled and nodded. 

Some offered a few words of encouragement.  

Said things like “right on!” or “ain’t you sweet?” or “get ‘em, tiger!”  

Inevitably, a few folks – overly burdened as they were by their world-weary cynicism – rolled their sad, dark, baggy eyes. They’d dismissed the statement out of hand.  Just another idealist.  A pipedream.  At best, it was a fantasy, or more likely – at least in their spoiled and bitter minds – it was youthful hubris masquerading as naive altruistic ambition.

Their pessimism was not entirely without foundation.

After all, at the time of his great and noble declaration of purpose, Johnny Ray Bohn was a very precocious six years old.  

His press release – written with his very best and sharpest crayons – was hand delivered to The Welch Picayune, the largest circulation news agency in his hometown of Welch, West Virginia. 

A bastion of small town edification, the editors of the Picayune enthusiastically included Johnny Ray’s simple and straightforward statement of purpose, as a photo reproduction naturally, in their Sunday edition.   

It appeared, as part of a semi-regular feature of the Picayune, printed with several other declarative statements made by his peers, under the byline of “Oh, Those Things Kids Say.” 

“Well now, ain’t that cute?” was the general consensus.  

Some upped the ante to “adorable.” 

A few went a step further to “precious.” 

One or two went even so far as to call it “inspirational.”    

Cute enough, to be sure, for them to post it on the usual social media platforms.  

It went viral within hours.  

As one might expect, the salty scent of freshly caught content drew the trolls from all the dimmest corners of the web.  Some lobbed mean-spirited accusations.  

They bandied about snarky memes like Southpark’s “shenanigans.” 

Others blasted out paragraphs filled with chin-bearded hipster jabs like “chicanery” and “perfidy.” 

Most common were those who endlessly, mindlessly, and repeatedly told someone named Rebecca to F-off.  

A few white knights rode in to call it exploitation.  They left again just as quickly when they couldn’t find a way to profit from it.

Long story short, the self-styled “experts” of the internet declared the letter to be a fake. 

The evidence for such slanderous accusations hinged on the notion that there was simply no way that a six-year-old, raised in a dying, podunk, coal-town in West Virginia, would even know how to look up words like “reproachful” or “heinous.” 

He would certainly not use phrases such as “the depredation and despoliation of our frangible ecosystem.”

It would be like a boy in rural China reciting Shakespeare.

A girl in the slums of India dancing Swan Lake.

Even if they did it themselves, they didn’t do it on their own.  Coaching, it was deduced, had to have been involved.  So, even if it was real, it was – in reality – fake.  

Town folk who knew Johnny Ray were quick to come to his defense.  

Immediately, they took the fight to their keyboards.  They tapped away their righteously indignant counter-offensives on their tablets.  They proudly verified that Johnny Ray was both “smart as a whip,” and “sharp as a tack.” He was in fact “the brightest of bulbs” and had been “gifted by the Good Lord Himself in the brains department.”  

Unfortunately, and as one might suppose, rising to his defense with phrasings such as these did not lend to their side of the argument considerable amounts of credibility.

 Things got pretty heated online for a bit, as they are wont to do.  When people feel that special kind of safety which comes from throwing verbal jabs into cyberspace, instead of busting knuckles on each other's chins in a parking lot, they get emboldened.  When there’s no immediate consequences to their actions, they chuck out all the filters.  For a while there, it was pretty brutal.  Soon enough, though, like every other viral phenomenon, his manifesto was quickly forgotten by all.  

All, of course, ‘cept Johnny Ray Bohn.

His teachers – the list of which was enormous, and included every credentialed educator in Welch – reached the limit of what they could do for him just after his seventh birthday. So, they expanded outward.  By eight, he was the sole member of an ad hoc accelerated-education program at the University of West Virginia.  

By ten, he was attending Harvard.  

Johnny Ray’s heartfelt hatred of humanity’s dependence on petroleum had neither dulled nor diminished with time. Given his proclivities, his professors assumed he would gravitate toward engineering, and in that assumption – being fairly fart-smellos themselves – they were at least partly in the right.  

However, they were utterly flummoxed when Johnny Ray opted to enroll in Harvard’s Medical program, with an eye toward Genetic Engineering, rather than pursue the Chemical or Mechanical branches of the Hard Sciences.  

Upon his enrollment, the general assumption had been that his end goal would be the development of, say, a sustainable alternative fuel source, refinement of solar power technologies, or, given the nature of his now entirely undisputed genius, perhaps he’d even be able to tackle the problem of cold fusion.

Something, in other words, which could be patented.  

Something which could be sold.

Maybe he’d even win a Nobel along the way, and do his various alma mater’s proud.  

   “None of those would undo the damage that’s already been done,” Johnny Ray explained whenever he was asked about his choices.  When asked what would – what could – undo the damage, he refused to elaborate further.  

Instead, he completed his MD – along with two PhD’s – by the time he could drive a car.  

As one might expect, he refused to get a license to do so.  

At seventeen, when, to the surprise of all, he declared his schooling to be done, he compounded the shocking revelation by retreating to his home town of Welch – population 2,400 – and accepting the open position of Attending Physician at the Welch Community Hospital.  

“Burnout,” the people of Harvard whispered knowingly.  

“The Prodigal Son,” murmured the people of Welch gratefully.  

The rest of the country, it should be noted, failed to take any notice at all.  

In lieu of a larger salary, Johnny Ray requested space in which he may continue his work.  The elders of Welch gladly capitulated, and half of the underused maternity wing was designated as his research facility.  He was given a small operational budget, enough to keep the lights on, if just barely, and carte blanche in both the subject matter and methodology of his research.  

The birth rate of Welch had been steadily in decline for years, so no one raised much objection to the loss of space or – outside of his office hours – really took any sort of notice of his presence there.   Both sides felt they’d gained the better bargain.  The town had gained an Ivy League doctor, for the cost equivalent to the yearly running of a snowplow, and Johnny Ray had secured a sanctuary away from the helpful suggestions and prying eyes of academia.  

Everyone was happy. 

That changed, of course, with the first swarm of buggerflies.  

Lepidopterous Petroleanus appeared to have sprung forth, in great bilious gray clouds, on one particularly fine spring morning. Erupting simultaneously from both the Elkhorn and Tug Fork river valleys, the eastwardly winds carried them first to Lexington, Kentucky.  Later they spread to Nashville, Louisville, and Cincinnati.  Then onward and outward, depending whatever direction the winds happened to be blowing.

An unprecedented leap forward in evolution, this mysterious new species was discovered to feed entirely on Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbons – found plentifully in coal and oil deposits, among other naturally occurring sources – which were released by the thermal decomposition of organic matter.  

As it so happened, thermal decomposition of organic matter was precisely what occurred during the internal combustion of a car’s engine, and in this process it released Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbons in great abundance.

It did not take the clouds of L. Petroleanus to discover a rich source of nourishment could be found just below the rear bumper of most cars. 

The nickname “buggerfly” followed soon after, due to their habit of “going up the tailpipe” to get at their food source.  

The original swarms caused catastrophic traffic jams almost immediately.

In their efforts to get to the well-spring of those life-sustaining hydrocarbons,  they clogged the vehicle’s exhaust systems with their wide and fuzzy bodies and thick, heat-resistant wings.  Like a child choking on an uncut grape, the engines were unable to breathe.  No longer able to exhale, cars would stall on the interstate, on the mainstreets, the side streets, the dirt roads and in the driveways.  

When the meal ended, the buggerflies would bugger off.  

However, as soon as the engine was cranked to life once more, they came fluttering right back again.  

Once a swarm had descended upon you, it could take more than an hour to get as little as a single mile down the road.  Progress, as it were, could only be made in fitful leaps and stalls, with long and tedious pauses in between. 

Ignition keys could not be turned without calling an undulating cloud down upon the driver.  Those stuck on freeways eventually just abandoned their cars where they stood, as no tow trucks could manage to get to them without themselves being stalled out.  

Roads became enormous parking lots, at least until the snow began to fall in the northern climates.  Winter granted a short reprieve allowing abandoned vehicles to be reclaimed, and a brief return to some semblance of normalcy.  

Then the spring thaw came, and the buggerflies returned in even greater numbers than before.

The reaction was immediate.

Demand for electric vehicles skyrocketed on a global level, as the trade winds had carried the subsequent generations across both the Atlantic and Pacific.  

Quick and enthusiastic breeders, L. Petroleanus mated and laid eggs daily.  However, their life cycle encompassed eight to twelve weeks.  Limited only by their access to food, they spread exponentially.  Anywhere a breeding pair was blown soon erupted in swarms of Biblical proportions.  Even those nations who were blessed with hard winters could not base their economies on being able to move goods for merely a quarter of the year.  Permanent gridlock became global.  

At least, for a while.  

America, being the innovative nation that it is, came up with a fairly cheap solution.  It was, in its essence, a bug-zapper.  A metal-mesh cage that fitted over the exhaust, powered by the vehicle’s alternator.  Each side of the cage was angled downward so the electrocuted insects would fall clear after dying.  

It was called the Zap Drive ™ automotive exhaust protection system.  It retailed for $19.99, was available for free shipping through Amazon Prime, and it made its inventor insanely rich overnight.

Roadways became slick with buggerfly carcasses, causing countless accidents as one might imagine, but surprisingly few were upset by these fender-benders.  They were just thrilled to be out and driving once more.

Meanwhile, in Welch, a few Federal investigators had put two-and-two together.  The proximity of the outbreak, combined with the boy-genius’s loathing of fossil fuels, the only food source of this surprise leap of evolution, was just too many coincidences to be ignored. Warrant in hand, they showed up at the front desk of Welch Community Hospital intent on searching Johnny Ray Bohn’s labs.    

They were surprised, to say the least, when they were handed glasses of bubbly and escorted through the lab’s open doors.  They found themselves among a couple hundred of Welch’s finest folks, all sipping on champagne, and listening to an acceptance speech.

Johnny Ray Bohn had just been elected mayor.

It couldn’t even be called a landslide victory without doing Johnny Ray a disservice.  

After their first debate, his opponent had been so moved by Johnny Ray’s rhetoric that he had marched across the stage, shook his hand, and conceded on the spot.  Except for a few write-ins for Donald Trump, Rush Limbaugh, and even one for Richard Nixon, despite the fact that he had been dead for quite some time, Johnny Ray Bohn’s victory was nearly unanimous.  

The Feds, not particularly keen on rural politics, were not about to be dissuaded by the festivities and searched the place nonetheless, and were sorely disappointed to find that all of Johnny Ray’s research equipment had been moved out when his portion of the hospital had been converted into his political offices and public outreach programs.  

Not so much as a single test tube remained.  

They left – empty handed and slightly red-faced – with vague threats that they’d be watching and next time they’d catch him in the act.  

With the federal investigation put to bed, if such a clumsy debacle could even be called an investigation, Johnny Ray got back to work.  

He ordered all roadways to be ripped up and returned to dirt or cobblestone.  

All the roofs in the town of Welch were converted to solar panels and disconnected from the public grid.  Powerlines, poles, and transformers were removed, re-utilized, or recycled.  

From his own funds, Johnny Ray purchased a fleet of electric vehicles for the public works department, and horses or electric bicycles for all of the town's citizens.  

His pockets were plenty deep and he had ample capital to throw around, having made heaps of cash from his patented Zap Drive ™ automotive exhaust protection system.   

Away from the public eye, Johnny Ray also quietly purchased all of the defunct coal mines that surrounded Welch, where he had constructed his new research facilities below ground.  

After the gate-crashers at his victory party, he felt it would be best to keep his ongoing projects under the government radar, so to speak.

If anyone in Welch had caught wind of what he was doing, it would have been a surprising move, to be sure, but not an unwelcome one.  Certainly nothing that they would have felt the need to blow a whistle over. It was obvious to anyone who spent more than a few minutes with Johnny Ray: we were all playing checkers, while he was playing chess.  

While also finishing a cross-word-puzzle.  

While also doing Sudoku.

Mixed metaphors aside, the man was obviously smart enough to have a good reason for what he was doing, so the people of Welch pretty much stopped trying to figure out what that reason might be.  

Instead, they happily zipped around on their electric bikes, left the lights on for as long as they liked – now that they had no power bill to contend with at the end of the month – and cashed their generous paychecks from any number of the lucrative jobs that Mayor Bohn’s projects had created around town.  

For the first time anyone could remember on this side of the millennium, people actually were beginning to move into Welch.

Then, came the buttslugs.

Now, granted, the name buttslugs is both derivative and immature.  

Potty humor in its fundamental state, to be sure.  

I’ll also admit, the first time I heard a long-haul trucker complain of having to cough up a hundred and fifty dollars to have a mechanic pull a two-pound buttslug out of his exhaust pipe, the beer I’d been sipping came shooting out both nostrils.  

Limax Petroleanus, an apparent cousin of the Limax cinereoniger, also known as the Ash-Black slug – the largest air-breathing land slug in the world – seemed to have made the same evolutionary leap as Lepidopterous Petroleanus, and enjoyed a diet comprised mostly of Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbons.  

Like the buggerflies, the buttslugs also discovered that the tailpipes of petroleum fueled vehicles offered a seemingly limitless buffet, so they would slime their way inside and make themselves comfy.  They would eat and grow, and eat and grow, until they eventually got so fat that they choked their food source to death.  

However, unlike the buggerflies, the buttslugs didn’t simply leave when the meal was done.  

Terrestrial mollusks, like snails and slugs, produce a slimy mucus which helps to grease the path as they move about by contracting the tiny muscles of their foot in a wave-like motion.  The mucus excreted by the Limax Petroleanus was highly toxic to humans, extremely viscous, and it hardened as it dried.  Consequently, by the time Limax Petroleanus had gotten large enough to stall a vehicle, it had also cocooned itself in a thick, poisonous, protective shell.   

Most mechanics recommended a full-exhaust system replacement.  

Even those with the Zap Drive ™ were not immune, as the slugs could flatten and elongate their bodies to slip in around the edges.  

The response was about what you’d expect it to be.  

People started pouring salt rings around their cars at night, or putting a cap over the end of the tailpipe to keep them from getting in.  It seemed to work well enough, until the buttslugs figured out that they could slip the caps off the end, and use their dying brethren as a bridge to plop down safely on the other side of the salt.  

Folks made the rings wider, and the deadslug bridges got longer to accommodate.  

Eventually, when people got to the point of spreading an entire fifty pound bag of rock salt around their driveway or garage floor every single night, it became apparent they had to just admit defeat and try something else.

Some tried pouring slug-bait poison pellets into the muffler. 

Unfortunately, Limax cinereoniger didn’t eat them.  

Even worse, though, was when the muffler got hot the pellets began to smoke and put out a god-awful stench.  The horrible smell ended up being a good thing, though, seeing as how the fumes turned out to be just as poisonous to humans.

Only a surprisingly small number died from it.  

Like the sulphur smell that’s added to the natural gas piped into a person’s stove at home, the rancid odor wafting from the tailpipes of frustrated motorists coaxed most folks to move upwind before any lasting damage could be done.

Small miracles, right?   

So by now, some small towns had started catching on to what was happening in Welch.  The economy was growing, the air was clean, and what’s more the people were happy.  There were many towns like Welch across the nation and you better believe when they saw this miracle in West Virginia, they took note.  I even had a passing fancy that it might be enough to make one or both of my kids move home before they settled down and started churning out grandbabies I’d be too far away to see more than once a year.

No such luck, but still.  It was at least nice to see your neighbors doing well after having a hard time of it for so long.  

City work crews got busy getting rid of the blacktop roads.  People voted for bond measures to go totally solar, and offered generous incentives to themselves to give up their cars.  To the surprise of many, a lot of them did.  Heck, most of them did.  The more they saw other communities making it work, the more others started to follow suit.  

As one of the meat-puppets on the nightly news sagely opined: the paradigm had begun to shift.  

I truly believe if things had just gone on that way, in another ten or twenty years we would have had most of the world in line with Johnny Ray’s program.

Unfortunately, Johnny Ray didn’t want to wait that long.

It was around this time that I was first introduced to the man himself.  

Which is to say, he showed up at my doorstep one morning and introduced himself.  

It was the middle of January, so my to-do list was at a minimum.  A fairly heavy snowstorm had passed through and dropped another eight inches on us the day before. I had been planning to fire up a sled and ride the property to check for downed limbs or snow drifts which had a habit of knocking a break in my pasture fencing.  No real rush to do so, though, as I hadn’t kept any cattle for a few years.  

Now that it was just me rattling around the empty nest, I found it easier just to get my milk and beef from town, along with the rest of my groceries.  The kids, one of each, had grown and, like so many farm-raised kids, moved out the sticks, drawn by the allure of the metropolitan lifestyle portrayed in movies and on television.  My daughter had joined the Navy – to see the world, she’d said – and was stationed in San Diego.  My boy had left for New York, but ended up in New Jersey, a personal trainer at a gym and assistant manager for a sporting goods store.  

Once the kids were gone, my wife and I realized that we didn’t have a thing to say to each other any more.  It didn’t take long for her to decide to follow their examples.  We sold off over half the acreage, enough to account for the house, and put the proceeds into an account in just her name.  

We filed the papers ourselves, online for under $200.

We still exchanged Christmas and birthday cards.  She found her way south, all the way to the Tampa area, and worked at the gift shop at Busch Gardens.  She kept time with an animal trainer there.

I stayed put and kept time mostly with myself.  My remaining 228 acres went to growing feed.  It was more of a keepin’ busy crop than anything else, but it was what had brought Johnny Ray Bohn to my doorstep on that particular mid-winter morn.   

That year’s crop had been cut, dried, baled, and stacked neatly in all three of my barns since early September.  Once a week, I delivered a truckload to the local farm and feed, and had already finished that particular chore two days prior, and didn’t even need to start loading up the next one for three days more.  

I hadn’t actually spoken to another human being since that last delivery.  

I suppose I included all of that to explain why, on that particular morning, I invited a total stranger into my kitchen and poured him a cup of coffee without having the slightest clue what I was inviting into my life.  

His sideburns were also a factor, since I’m being totally honest here.  You just don’t see muttonchops much any more, let alone on someone who actually manages to pull it off.

“You grow grass, right?” he asked, after first taking a polite sip of coffee.

“Hay,” I corrected.  “I grow hay.”

“Which is a general term for grass, legumes, and other herbaceous plants that have been cut and dried for animal fodder,” he rattled off dismissively.  “I’ve seen your bales.  They are a pure blend of several types of grass.  You grow grass.”

“Fine fescue, perennial ryegrass, and --”

“Kentucky bluegrass,” he finished.  “And, as far as I can tell, you do so better than anyone else in the state.  Given the acreage, soil composition, and weather records, your farm has had the highest grass yield per square foot every year for the last ten years.” 

It was a strange compliment to give, but I can’t think there’s a single person on the planet that doesn’t like to hear how their hard work is appreciated by someone.

“If you say so.”

“I do,” he nodded.  “Likely longer than that, but given the rates of climate change, anything longer than a ten year longitudinal would have only added false data.”

I wasn’t sure what to say to that, so I said nothing.  In the silence he began tugging absent mindedly at hair on his cheek. First the left side, then the right, as if to balance it out.  He curled a finger around until he had a grip, and then yanked it gently downward.  He did each side three times before he seemed to grow bored and broke the silence.

“I need your help.”

“You want to start a feed farm?” I guessed.

He stared blankly at me for a moment, and then barked a few short, but powerful belly laughs.  “No,” he said, “no, no, no.  Far from it.  I do, however, have questions that I think you are best fit to answer.”

“Such as?”

“What makes grass grow?”

Looking at it now, and after so much effort to try to explain the genius of the man, a question such as that may seem like I might have oversold it a bit.  

I’ll save a bit of time and tedious exposition here to explain a couple of things that I discovered that morning about Johnny Ray Bohn.  

The first is that he is a quintessential scientist.  When approaching a new problem, he does so as a blank slate, he attempts to eliminate all assumptions or opinions, and allows the information to objectively guide him.  

The second is that his commitment to objectivity makes him ask questions.  

Lots of questions.  

Every question that he can think of. 

Including the ones that make him sound like he may have been dropped as a child, repeatedly, and perhaps even intentionally.

Over the course of what ended up being the remainder of the day, I answered every question that he posed, to the best of my ability.  Sometimes, particularly when he started to get into the various equations of the chemical compounds, and how one particular phosphate might impact certain cellular structures as various stages of growth, mitosis, and the merits of sexual reproduction versus vegetative propagation, I was a bit out of my depth.  Occasionally, he would lapse into silence, and tug thoughtfully at his sideburns.  He was, I figured out eventually, processing.  Buffering.  The finger in the facial hair was like a spinning swirly cursor on the computer.  

At lunch time, I made us sandwiches.  At dinner, a pot of chili.  

When food was placed before him, he ate it.  It didn’t slow his conversation any, nor did he seem to taste anything that went down the hatch.  

The sun had long since set by the time he stood, shook my hand, and thanked me for my time.  It had started snowing again, so I offered him a ride into town, as he had no vehicle with him that I could see.  He politely declined, saying that he needed time to process all that I had given him, and that the walk would do him good.  

I closed the door as he started out into the dark across my dooryard toward the road.

Shortly after, I checked the weather app on my phone and found the wind chill temperature was likely going to drop well below zero long before he could walk all the way into town. My conscience got the better of me and I ended up hopping in my truck and going after him.  I made the trip, to the town center and back again, twice, without ever catching sight of him.  I decided that he’d either had had a car waiting at the end of the lane, or had been picked up by someone passing by.  

Either way, I didn’t end up seeing him again for another three months.

By our next meeting, his tone had changed.

“How do I kill it?” he asked by way of greeting when I opened the door.

It was once again early morning, but today I had a list of chores as long as my arm as the Spring melt had come early and I still had over 100 acres that were in want of tilling.  Of course, before that could happen I needed to pick any rocks that had been heaved up by the freeze and thaw.  I told Johnny Ray as much, and asked if he would mind coming back toward sundown and I’d be happy to have him to dinner, where we could talk about grass to his odd little heart’s content.

I turned to politely, but firmly, shut the door in his face, when he shot out a hand and grabbed my arm with a strength beyond what I would have imagined a bony little mitt like his could be physically capable.  

“You don’t understand,” his eyes I now noticed, were rimmed in red and drawn wide with fear.  His hair, both on his face and on his head, was wild and unkempt.  He looked like he was scared nearly half to death.  

“I think it may have already gotten out.”

I considered for a moment and then opened the door wide.  I could always make up the time later in the week, if I needed, and I have to admit my curiosity was mighty piqued.  I had to know what could possibly be so frightening about grass.

Even after he told me, I still didn’t get it.  

Couldn’t get it, I guess you could say.  

Certainly, wouldn’t truly get it for another fourteen months or so.

Nope, on that particular morning in March, I was still just curious.

“Well, now,” I said, leading him once more into my kitchen, “cultural control through competitive cultivars, those with vigorous early season growth to establish a canopy, an early planting date, and narrow crop rows will stop a problem species before it has a chance to threaten your desired crop.”

I assumed, given the broad range of our previous visit, that he was now focusing on weed control, rather than maximum crop yield.  After our first encounter, I had done a bit of web sleuthing on Doctor Jonathan Raymond Bohn, discovered that I had been hosting an honest-to-goodness, dyed-in-the-wool genius at my humble kitchen table, and felt plenty smug about having been able to take him to school about something.  

That’s the thing about giving something a label, though.  

We think, if we understand the word, that we understand the thing.  

I understood that “genius” meant “really, really smart,” but that in no way prepared me for the actuality of dealing with genius.  It was pure ego for me to say something like “in the three months since he disappeared into the snowy darkness, Johnny Ray’s knowledge had surpassed my own,” when in reality it had already done so before he left that bleak January eve. 

In actuality, in the three months since he disappeared into the snowy darkness, Johnny Ray’s knowledge of grass had surpassed that of God himself.  

If it hadn’t – if God had foreseen what was coming – I feel for certain that Johnny Ray would have been smited most righteously before he ever had the chance to make the return trip.

“Cultural controls are useless,” he said dismissively.

“Well, hold on now, it’s still early in the season, and there is plenty of time-”

“No, you don’t understand, it has no competition.”

“Huh.  Well, alright then, pre-emergence–”

“I have to assume it’s already out, but I won’t know for sure until it sprouts, so focus on post-emergence.”

“Hmm,” I took a sip of coffee while I pretended to ponder the problem.  Which is to say, I pondered, but not about what herbicides were the most effective; Quinclorac 75 DF was my go to.  I had barrels of the stuff in my equipment shed.  

No, what I was trying to suss out was just what the heck could be so darned frightening about some weeds.  

Even a truly invasive species takes years to establish itself.  They could be a damned nuisance, and a costly one at that, but unless you’re already on the brink of disaster, I just couldn’t fathom getting this worked up about it.

“Quinclorac is my preferred, though –”

“Nope,” he shook his head.  “I engineered it to be tolerant of quinclorac, and glyphosate.  Also, quizalofop, fenozaprop-ethyl, fluaziofop-P, sethoxydim, elethodim, haloxyfop, and imazethapyr.”

“Well, that certainly limits what . . . wait, did I hear that right?” I asked.  “You engineered a pesticide resistant weed? Why--?”

He stood from the table, his coffee completely untouched, and began to pace the length of my kitchen counter.  

“It won’t have any impact on crops, I assure you.”

“How could it not?”

He ignored the question. Instead, he stopped pacing and held out his hand.  “Thank you, again, for your time.  I was hoping you might have an answer that I had overlooked. It was a long shot, but I had to ask.”

The last part was a little insulting, but I let it slide.  I still wanted an answer to my question.

“How could it not impact crops?”

He zipped his jacket up securely to his chin before fixing his eyes on mine.

“Because,” he sighed wearily, “it doesn’t grow in dirt.”

Before I could respond, he was already making his way to the door.  I wasn’t ready to let it go at that, so I followed right along, but had to pause at the closet in the front hall to grab my barn coat.  I flung it around myself, and followed him out into the bright sun of what was shaping up to be a glorious spring morning.  I couldn’t have been more than ten seconds behind, but Johnny Ray was already thirty paces ahead, at least.  

Had he started to run as soon as the door shut behind him, I wondered?

“Hold up a second, Dr. Bohn,” I called, but to no effect.

Whether he had run or not, I had to jog to have any hope of catching up.  The sunshine may have done in most of the snowpack left over from the winter, but it hadn’t been up long enough today to warm up the air.  I was breathing a bit heavy by the time I had him within an arm’s reach, and every gulp of air sent sharp icy pins into my throat and lungs.  I started to reach out for him, when he spun to confront me. 

“Look,” he said, holding his hands up in a gesture of placatory surrender.  “I can appreciate your curiosity, but I cannot discuss the matter any further.  If I’m wrong, it will only cause undue panic.  If I’m right, ain’t nothin’ you, or nobody else, can do to help.  I’m sorry I bothered you, but I really have to get going.  Contingency plans have to be put into place.”

I had been planning to grab hold of him – grab him by the sideburns if I needed to – and shake some answers out of him.  I really can’t say at this point what it was that changed my mind.  Maybe it was the equal parts of fear and resolve in his eyes.  Maybe it was the ominous sound of a phrase like “contingency plans.”  Maybe it was his reversion to his podunk, coal-town roots – a Harvard trained doctor using a phrase like “ain’t nothing you, or nobody else” – that sealed my lips up good. 

So, I simply nodded.  

He returned the gesture, and then walked out to the center of the road.  He stomped twice on a manhole cover, and it was immediately lifted from below.  A pair of hands in work gloves pushed the cover to the side, and then retreated.  Johnny Ray turned his back to the hole, and then stepped down to the first unseen rung of a ladder that led to the tunnel below.  A dozen new questions flooded my head, but then they were pushed aside by a thought that was so simple, so basic, that it might just have been dumb enough for him to overlook.  

 “Hey!” I called.

He paused in his descent and looked at me, but did not bother to speak.

“I thought of one other option,” I said.

Again, words seemed to be beyond him, but he did raise his eyebrows in a gesture that conveyed both impatience and curiosity.  He really was, I was beginning to understand, a smug little shit.  I found that I was relishing the chance to point out the obvious to the genius.

“Well, why don’t you just pull the darned things up by the root?”

And, of course, that’s just what he did.  

As you know by now, he was right when he said it had already gotten out.  “It” being his own version of Panicum Virgatum, sometimes known as switchgrass, but more commonly known as panic grass.  

In this case, Panic.  

It earned the capital P. 

Johnny Ray’s Panic grass, Panicum Virgatum Petroleanum, was exactly what he said it would be: an unstoppable nuisance that had zero competition, but also no negative impact on crops.  

It could do both because it was both rooted in, and it fed on, a substance called bitumen, a semi-solid form of petroleum that makes up about 95% of all commercially produced asphalt.  Bituminous asphalt can be found just about everywhere.  It’s poured and pressed to make roads and highways and airport runways, it’s made into roof shingles, it’s used in sidewalks and tennis courts, it’s used to cover pipes and wiring, it’s even used to make paint.  

It is everywhere.

Shortly after, so was the Panic.

I mean that in both the literal and the figurative.

Panic – no cute pun name for this one – was everywhere by the end of the summer.  In Welch, Johnny Ray suspended all other city operations and had every single person on his payroll out plucking every Panic sprout they could find.  He didn’t wait for the government to come knocking, either.  He sent out a video press release, stating the nature of his “discovery,” and simple directions on what and where to look for it, and that the only sure method to combat it was to pull it out by the root.  

He didn’t even give me credit for the idea.  Of course, given the eventual outcome, I suppose I’m grateful not to have my name attached to any part of it.  

Naturally, we couldn’t get it all.  People pinched, picked, and plucked until their fingers bled.  Then, the next day they taped them up and started again.  Not that it mattered.  There was just too much ground to cover.  Every major city turned green in a matter of weeks.  

Like Johnny Ray’s other gifts to humanity, Panic had been given a few tweeks on its original design.  The tallest panicum species found in nature tops out at around six feet from root to tip.  Panic towered at ten to twelve feet.  To compound the issue, as Johnny Ray had promised, it was engineered to be immune to every known herbicide.  At one point, the Army even uncrated some Agent Orange that never made the drip to Da Nang, but the Panic didn’t so much as wilt.

Fire, as you might expect, worked just fine.

The trouble was, if you set a patch of Panic on fire, whatever it was growing on tended to go up in smoke right along with it.  As it was growing on roads, roofs, bridges, and everywhere else humans tended to live together in large groups, you’d either burn all of them along with it, or leave most of the population homeless.    

By August, Johnny Ray sent out one final press release.  

At least, none has followed so far.

He advised anyone who had not already done so to flee the cities.  Anyone in North America should head north, he advised.  Everyone should pack what they could carry and start walking north immediately and not stop until they reach the permafrost.  South America should make their way by foot to the horn and sail for Antarctica. 

As for the rest of the world, he concluded, they would have to make do as best they could.  The center of the oceans would be relatively safe, he advised.  Siberia, he added, would be better.

Then, we saw him no more.  

Johnny Ray Bohn ushered the people of Welch, those who would follow him, below ground – into his underground lair, as other supervillains so loved to say – and then collapsed the entrance with dynamite.  

The next day, the rest of the mine appeared to collapse, and the whole mountain seemed to subside down into itself.

A few folks made Jim Jones and Heaven’s Gate references.  A few more generous souls allowed that it might have been an accident, or a miscalculation. Others whispered about government smart bombs, or death-rays fired from orbit.

I think Johnny Ray was smart enough to know, come spring, he didn’t want anybody to come looking for him.  

See, I’m pretty sure Johnny Ray had a pretty darn good idea of what was coming next.

When winter struck once more, the Panic got killed by the cold, just like any other grass.  It stayed right where it was, though.  Some major highways got cleared with teams of combines plowing a path.  The stalks they left behind were sharp and splintery, and tough enough to punch through all but a thick soled work boot. 

The roads were useless and completely impassable. As the Panic had spread, fewer and fewer trucks were able to make it through to the grocery stores.  Store shelves had been mostly empty since mid-August.  

The National Guard had been activated in September to set up distribution centers, MRE’s mostly, but when the snow really started to fall, people were unable to go stand in line to pick up their allotment for the week without risking frostbite.

I hoped my daughter would be okay in the relative warmth of San Diego, but I worried for my son in New Jersey.  Worrying was all I could do.  That and hope.  Even before the phones had gone, they’d stopped answering.  

The government, to their credit, didn’t give up.  Home deliveries were attempted, but they didn’t come fast enough or bring enough when they did.  The heavy thrum of the half-tracks and armored transports – the only vehicles that had engines powerful enough, treads and tires tough enough, and storage room enough to be of any use – could be heard from over a mile away.  

If it didn’t come to your neighborhood, well . . . you could still tell which houses would have food in the pantry by the end of the day.

Folks got hungry.

They got desperate.

It was a tough winter.

Spring, though, boy. I think spring was what Johnny Ray had really been afraid of.

Panic came back strong.  Cars and trucks could no longer drive at all, unless they set out overland, but they’d still be driving through the swarms.  Planes could not take off or land anywhere but open fields.  Cities became entirely clogged with Panic, to the point that people were jumping out of windows before they were entombed in an enormous green coffin.  

They tried to use helicopters to airlift people from rooftops, but since most of those had been weatherproofed with bituminous asphalt, the Panic grew there too.  Faster, actually, as it had full sunlight all day.  It didn’t take too long before the stalks were higher than people could wave.  Choppers circled until their tanks ran dry and had to head back to wherever they could land, not having found a single person among the thousands seeking rescue.

That wasn’t the worst of it, though.

No, the worst was that the buggeflies and the buttslugs hadn’t gone away.  

The cars could no longer drive, and the trains no longer rolled down the tracks.  The ships sat rusting at anchor, and the planes among fields of Panic which used to be tarmac.  All the while, the creepy’s and the crawly’s still hatched out just like before.  The swarms swirled, and the slugs slimed.  

Only now, the buffet had been closed and shuttered.

All those tasty Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbons had gone away, but they were just as hungry as the rest of us.  

Like us, they got desperate.

Which made it a tough summer, too.

As I said before, Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbons are released by the thermal decomposition of any organic matter.  It didn’t take the buggerflies too long to figure out how to get fed.  

They went for the livestock first, since they had nowhere to run.  

The McCormick’s, my closest neighbors a few miles up the road, kept a small herd.  Most had been taken for meat during that horrible winter, and I know I owe my survival during that dark time to having been on good terms with John and Sheila for as long as I can remember.  They didn’t just share with me either.  There were a dozen farms within a day’s walk of the McCormick’s, and each and everyone of them got a share every time they butchered.  

Still, even for a small herd and the legendary appetites of farmers, the McCormick farm had a couple dozen head of cattle as we headed into what, the year before would have been, the height of planting season.  I was heading over that day to see if I could map out a route for John so that we could move his cows and horses from his fields to mine, so they didn’t run out of feed by mid July.  Johnny Ray’s promise still held true, and the Panic stayed away from soil like it was lava, so my fields were clear.  I had enough residual growth to feed all he had for most of the Summer and likely into the winter.  

There was plenty of Panic to feed them as well, of course, but we all seemed to be of the same mind on that front: only if we had to.  It looked, smelled, and felt like the switchgrass we’d seen before, but just a heck of a lot taller.  

Still, it wasn’t natural, and we all knew well enough that whatever we fed the cows, we would be feeding to ourselves a few months down the line.

I was almost to John’s back fence when a cloud passed over the sun, and the world around me seemed to dim.  The sky had been clear from horizon to horizon just a few minutes before, so naturally I stopped to look.  

The buggerflies moved like a flock of sparrows, or maybe like a swarm of locusts would have been a better simile.  They turned and moved as a single entity.  As a whole, the swarm singled out a three or four year old heffer.  She had the bad luck to be the closest to the road, which was now just a long solid wall of Panic, which seemed to have been the factor that sealed her fate.  

Buggerflies poured out of the Panic and piled onto the poor girl.  Layer added on top of layer, until their thick fuzzy bodies and powdery wings blocked out any path for air to get in.  After a minute or two, the pile got a little more tightly packed toward the ground as her legs gave out from under her.  

The pile rose and fell, with her breath, for a minute or two.  When that stopped as well, I ran.  I followed the fence until I figured I was a safe enough distance from the swarm, and then hopped the top rail and made straight for John and Sheila’s front door.  They welcomed me with smiles, but those were quick to fade when they saw my face.  

“You need to see this,” was all I could think to say.  

Fortunately, it was enough.  When I turned and retraced my path back to where I’d been, John and Sheila were right behind me.

By the time we got back, a long brown stream – like a river of ropy turds – had flowed into the field.  It stretched from the Panic to the pulsating pile of buggerflies, where it seemed to be pooling.  

The buttslugs had come to do their part.  

They pushed, squelched, and prodded their way inside the pile where it met the soil, squashing their flexible bodies flat so as to slide between the earth and the buggerflies to reach the prize inside.  

For several hours, that was all the action there was to be seen.  The pile pulsed and shifted.  Slugs continued to stream in, and their added mass made the mound grow until it was taller than it had been when the heffer had still been standing.  Whether it was a chemical reaction from their slime, or just a matter of pressure and time, the mass had started to generate its own heat.  None of us were so crazy as to get close enough to feel it, but we could see the air shimmer like a mirage above the uppermost layer.
Thermal decomposition of any organic matter.

They’d found a way to stay fed.

After that day, things went downhill fast.

I parted ways with the McCormick’s that afternoon.  We promised to check in on each other sometime in the next few days, but it was the last I ever saw of them.  I tried heading back over a day or two later, but the first buggerfly landed on me before I got ten steps from my door.  I was scraping them off me before I could make it back inside.  

That was over a month ago, and I haven’t seen another person since that time.  

The swarms are constant now, but there are light days and heavy days.  Windy days are the best, as they just don’t have the mass to fight a strong gust.  A gale-force thunderstorm rolled through a few days ago, and I had the chance to get to my tornado shelter and scoop up the boxes of canned goods and bottled water I still had out there.  The pantry had been empty for over a week, so it was a nice break from what had become my usual fare.  

Turns out, buggerflies taste a bit like buttered popcorn when roasted over a candle flame.  Sure, it takes a while to make a meal when you cook just one at a time, but what the hell else do I have to do?  Besides, I’ve come to enjoy watching their papery wings singe, smolder, and smoke before bursting into flames.

It passes the time.

The other thing that passes the time is thinking of my last encounter with Johnny Ray Bohn.  I keep thinking of how we parted ways.  Thinking about the sewer.  I remember thinking, even then, that he must have connected it somehow to his mine tunnels.  Didn’t even think twice about it.  When you grow up in coal country, the idea that you are living above a labyrinth is just a normal part of everyday life.  It wasn’t too much of a stretch to imagine that a person who genetically engineered a whole new creature, and then made an insane fortune on providing the solution for the problem he’d supplied, would feel too much moral trepidation about manifesting his destiny and expanding his territory.

The news had reported that his mine, and the mountain above it had collapsed, but was that just the part that they knew about?  How large and complex had Johnny Ray’s underground kingdom become before civilization, and his mountain, came crashing down around him?

I can’t say for sure.  

At least not yet.

I’ve been watching the storm clouds gather all afternoon.  I’ve seen tornado weather all my life, and I’d lay dollars to doughnuts that a funnel cloud will be touching down somewhere nearby sometime before midnight.  Long before that happens, though, the winds will be blowing fierce enough to keep any buggerflies off my back.  As long as I watch my step, so as to not go ass-over-teakettle sliding on a buttslug, I can be down the same tunnel through which Johnny Ray descended just over a year ago.  

I think he, and maybe most of the townspeople of Welch, are still down there.  I think they are waiting.  Waiting for the rest of us to die off.  Waiting for the buggerflies and buttslugs to cleanse the Earth of all the evils of petroleum that mankind unleashed and then starve to death once it’s gone.  

I think he’s going to make good on a promise made by a six year old boy in his very best crayon.  

If he is, I’m going to find him.

Then, I’m gonna kill him.

And myself along with him, I suppose.  I own my part in this.  I didn’t know, sure, I could say that and it would be true.  Wouldn’t make a bit of difference to the dead, though.

So, when the wind picks up, I’ll try to set it right.

I’ll find him in his hidey-hole and drag him back out.  I’ll bring him back out and hold him tight, and let the swarms come and cover us both.  

I’ll squeeze him as he struggles.

And, I will listen to him scream. 

And, we can both die there together in the Panic he created.