Savior with Expiration Date

Luna was stirring her coffee with Cole's spine when the first maggot burrowed out of the can of tomato sauce.

"It's God's intestines." The priest's remains murmured in formalin. The rotting body she'd made into a taxidermy three days ago was now spewing a torrential rain of maggots from its eye sockets. The milky-white creatures wove through the air in the form of DNA strands, each link embedded with a convenience store barcode.

Rule #88: All corruption must be sold at a marked price.Luna's laser pointer slices through the tin of the can, and the maggots refract a rainbow halo in the radiant dust-they're gnawing away at the secret steel seal at the bottom of the can, an anti-counterfeiting mark forged from the ashes of condemned criminals by the convenience store's headquarters.

"Communion gone bad." The remnants of Eli's body laughed in the ventilation ducts. The nanobot-maintained half-dead doctor, his intestines dangling like a Christmas ribbon, "Shall I teach you the recipe for the maggot cocktail?"

Luna's syringe lodged into the maggot cluster. As the pale gold pus is extracted, all the electronic screens in the warehouse suddenly play the same image: mothers delivering canned goods on an assembly line, and each baby's umbilical cord attached to Luna's uterus. The scariest of all is baby #48-it's calling out for its mother in Cole's voice, its dental beds covered in tentacles of radioactive cockroaches.

"Validation time." She injects pus into a vein.

Severe pain explodes the retinas: on her sixth birthday, her father fed her chocolate sauce mixed with her brother's semen instead of cake; in the convenience store cooler, Cole used a hot-melt gun to carve the production lot number into her pelvis; the first time Jax breaks into the warehouse, he licks the bulletproof glass and says, "You and Mom both taste like borscht."

"Your corruption rate has reached 32%." The Artificial Intelligence Butler suddenly speaks up, the display pops up with an image of her colonoscopy - maggots are gnawing out the convenience store logo on the intestinal wall, "Recommend implementation of Substandard Commodity Destruction Protocol."

The alarm is drowned out by the rising and falling sound of popping cans.Luna stomps through the slime towards the shelving area and sees the foundations of her ruling empire crumbling:

Cans of green beans soaked with 49 of her brother's embryos, golden price tags floating on their skin

The surface of corn chowder knits into a mother's face film, fertilized maggots swimming in the eye sockets

The deadliest is on the Aisle 7 shelf - a can of bologna labeled "Luna's Special" pops open to reveal the father's body cut into 47 pieces, each piece of rotting flesh screaming, "Daughter, help me."

"Rule number 89." She shoved her father's head into the meat grinder, "Rotting merchandise needs to be repackaged."

As the head is turned into mincemeat and filled with enteric coating, the warehouse suddenly blares "To Alice". It's the beep of a convenience store closing before a nuclear blast, and right now it's causing all the survivors to collectively urinate.Maya crawls out of the shadows, the Y-shaped sutures on her abdomen spewing fireflies-the miniature bombs Jax implanted.

"They want you dead." The young girl's uterus falls to the ground like a moldy avocado, "Trade my body for a bottle of insecticide..."

The deal is struck in a storm of maggots.Luna transforms Maya into a humanoid flytrap, using her empty abdominal cavity to absorb the rotting gases. As the last catheter is inserted into the young girl's cervical spine, the warehouse suddenly resounds with a baby cry - from the can of bologna number 000.

"Paternity time." She cut open the can and shoved the maggots into the genetic tester.

The display exploded with a torrent of data: the maggot's mitochondrial DNA was a 99.8% match, and the so-called "corruption" was a pre-programmed degradation by the convenience store's headquarters. Even more damaging was the information on chromosome 48 - the maggots were the true "heirs" and her body was just a petri dish.

"Happy birthday, Mom." The metal lid of the can of bologna suddenly opens, revealing half of Jax's face, "You smell like a piece of expired buttercream."

Luna's period rages ahead of schedule. Menstrual blood seeps into the floor tiles activating the hidden program and the entire warehouse begins to sink towards the center of the earth. In weightlessness, cans of corruption swirl around her like planets, each spewing information maggots:

Convenience store president's will: make Luna into fertilizer for human pupae.

Mother's confessional video: volunteering to be a fat extractor

Cole's military recordings: "A sister's flavor is sweeter than doom"

"Rule #90." She swallows maggot cluster, "When the world rots, be the sweetest pus."

The radiation clouds cracked open in giant slits.

Luna is writing the New Testament on bulletproof glass with lipstick when the cleansing beam from the convenience store headquarters descends. The words, mixed with menstrual blood and maggot slime, vaporized in the glare, forming a reverse-erosion data virus-each drop of liquid replicating her genetic map, drifting like dandelions to other warehouses.

The last of the cans are melting as Jax's genitals protrude from the drain. His glans is studded with Cole's prosthetic eye, and a video of Luna's birth plays in his iris: the convenience store president implanting an embryo into a can of green beans, and the production date is the zero hour of the countdown to the end of the world.

"Dad asked me to give you your end-of-life present." He ejaculates a radioactive cockroach mixed with semen, "You're just the 48th generation of experiments..."

Luna's right hand suddenly spontaneously combusts. A hologram of the President of the Convenience Store emerges from the flames, wiping the scalpel with her childhood teddy bear, "Good daughter, time to return to the incubation chamber."

0.3 seconds before her consciousness dissipates, she activates the ultimate protocol. The warehouse floor tiles flipped piece by piece, revealing a truth that had been buried for fifty years - thousands of Luna clones soaked in embalming fluid, each attached to a mother's breast. The real body had long since rotted away, and at the moment it was nothing more than a cluster of maggots that manipulated this body.

"Rule number 91." She smiled at the roiling maggots, "When you find yourself a fake, tear up the price tag."

As the flood of corruption engulfed everything, an alarm from the convenience store headquarters rang across the planet. All survivors suddenly stop breathing as their pupils emerge as fluorescent barcodes of maggots - the true heirs of human civilization.

And Luna's final act was to insert lipstick into Jax's urethra, carving it in a spasm of near-death:

"Long live the maggots."