"So you're saying there's no

   communique-tions 

  between them and us?" The question came out of a badly beaten and bloodied man's face that appeared to be on a lamp table.  The little diary with gold leaf edges had drops of blood on the few names under Calligraphy script that said, 

  Please sign in, with a line through it and underwards said REGISTER.  Someone had drawn a football and in it, written TO WIN.

     "WE FOUND IT FIRST!" Some kids had climbed through layers of place.  Under a fenced-in "compound" area, through a circus tent, around trailers, and into a ramp descending through layers of soil to a bunker in the bedrock. 

  "I'm not an IT." The head said into a crackling microphone.  "I'm STILL A M, MA, mmmmm, mammmmm, mah mah mahn.  MAN!" 

  But the warning came as yet another body fell into the heap ordered to walk the plank.  When those bodies cleared the sagging ramp board between sandy mounds, a strangely booted foot weighted an end of it to erect it and swing it away from an out.

  Pilots and stewards were waist deep in slime.  "Are they frozen?" A child asked a catatonic elderly man and woman.  "Dey are so Wyeth," said a white papersuited person framing the postcard photograph with hands made into "L"s.  A goon picked up the child by the clothing on his back and slung him like a sack of potatos onto the edge of the next hill to be climbed.

  "There's no anything where it was, Sir." He showed the latest survivors what looked like a moonscape on a grainy little TV.

  "What hit us?" A split-lipped Father from the MASH show asked us in person.  "Or did we hit them?" 

  Our mother wiped the bead of drool hanging from our stupefied father's lip and put the tissue back in her purse like it was normal.  An ordinary gesture amidst a sea of glimmering molten ground shaking sea of liquid metal.

  "Where did you come from?" The macaroni man asked a man with only part of an arm.  The MASH person pointed way up high to tree roots above the manhole cover he was standing on.

  "So it could be like the year that never was," a droning voice recorded whatever he can remember.  "I will authenticate," a computer voice said what was being typed out on stock market "ticker tape" paper.  The Cone Heads futzed with the creamy seams of stiched skin on each others' heads.  "Put him in there," they moved a severed arm's fingers to pull the "dog tag" bathtub cork chain away from the rusting bathtub drain hole.

  "To get AIR," Mellie held the gramophone conch to "the next level", contorted rebar and cinder block corner near the Lear showed at least seven layers of ground gone.