Savior with Expiration Date

"Charmin Ultra Soft," the man's swollen prostate pushed against the examining table, "I used the coordinates of the entire bunker west of the Mississippi..."

Luna's tweezers pick up the remnants of gold leaf in her feces. These fragments from a Las Vegas casino vault were currently wrapped around a three-day-old dinner - the roasted thighbone of some Resistance leader.

Rule #42: Anyone claiming to have information about the bunker must first pass a lie detector test through the digestive tract.

"You... Do you know what toilet paper means?" Rich's colon contracted under the dilator, "It's the breath of the old world! It's the last..."

He was suddenly incontinent.

Pale green scanty fecal matter splatters against the bulletproof glass as Luna activates the auto-clean system. The stream of water wreathed in excrement formed a map-an exact replica of the beetle's backstripe in the priest's stomach, but the route to the bunker had been deliberately rerouted to the center of the radiant lake.

"Three sheets." She held up a clingfilm-wrapped finger, "for the microfilm in your rectum."

The rich man wailed like a broken accordion. When Luna turns on the UV light, the fluorescent tattoo on the man's anus reveals the truth: "LOLITA'S PRIVATE STOCK" is tattooed there, the code word for Chicago's child pornography industry.

The deal is struck in the steaming heat of excrement.

As the rich man shuddered and unrolled the roll of gold-leafed toilet paper, Luna watched his tear ducts burst on the monitor. The man who had sunk a refugee boat with his yacht was currently wiping his ruptured hemorrhoid anus with a Louis Vuitton silk scarf that had his missing daughter's initials embroidered on the edge.

"Rules addendum." Luna soaked the film in bleach, "One liter of cerebrospinal fluid is required to be submitted every twenty-four hours during the bunker validation period."

The alarm suddenly hissed.

The rich man took advantage of his ass-wiping position to press a mechanism in his dentures, and the examination table instantly ejected a wire mesh.As the back of Luna's neck grazed the wire and swept over it, she glimpsed the netting smeared with the pubic hairs of her former victims-a handful of them dyed Barbie pink, belonging to the punk girl who'd come in for a tampon change the previous month.

"Bitch!" A flamethrower popped out of Rich's dildo crutch, "Do you really think I survived two years in a radiation ward by..."

His voice was interrupted by the sound of his abdomen bursting.

The nanoblades Luna had installed in the smart toilet ahead of time kicked in and the man's intestines were pumped out of his anus like Christmas lights. As his pancreas smashed into the "altar of toilet paper," the vending machine spit out an added bonus - a five-pack of wet wipes, emblazoned with a picture of his daughter's smiling face before she'd been sold into a brothel.

"The bunker code is..." The rich man's teeth crunched his tongue, "... Your mother's maiden name..."

Luna's Geiger counter suddenly rattles wildly as the body falls to the ground. She pried open the rich man's ribs and found miniature nuclear batteries embedded in the heart location, with the logo of the convenience store's headquarters etched into the surface.

The sound of a baby crying comes from the ventilation ducts.

When the bunker coordinates are entered into the navigator, the screen's blinking red dot turns out to be an exact overlap with Luna's real-time location. She kicked away the remnants of the rich man's body and found blood-stained Charmin toilet paper piled in a dark compartment under the examining table-each bearing the menstrual blood fingerprints of a different woman, the bottom one belonging to the school nurse from whom she'd been expelled in high school.

"Rule number 43." She shoved the toilet paper roll into the cannonball-modified launcher:

"Guests are permitted to die with a lie, but the last shudder of their sphincter must be recovered."

The safe pops open suddenly.

As Luna dons the rich man's virtual reality headset, 300 hours of surveillance footage washes over her retinas: her mother pinned to a canning line in a Chicago bunker, her breasts attached to fat extraction tubes, her ankles shackled to the very chains of a convenience store employee handbook.

Most chilling of all is the ninety-seventh hour, when Jax's face is suddenly pressed into the camera, his fingers dipped in his mother's breast milk as he writes on the wall:

"Sister, your canned food is delicious."

Helicopters roar from afar.

Luna swallows the rich man's diamond dentures and rushes out of the warehouse to see ten transporters bearing the logo of a convenience store airdropping containers. When the first container smashes the gas station, it's not food but radioactive cockroaches that pour out, their backs flashing the last Morse code sent by their father before he disappeared:

"To live is to be eaten."