First Gods, Lost Animals

Sealed in a crumbling bunker while an enigmatic presence roams the outside, a group of women spend their days filming a drama about a Neanderthal family.

Las Ruinas is a bunker running on leftovers. Rooms have been sealed. Power cuts come without warning. The freezer is empty, the rice crawls with weevils, and every day the outside gets closer. This outside now belongs to the “Animas”—a presence that has taken the world back and looms threateningly over the bunker. Mom keeps the place from drifting into panic while obsessively phoning Laredo, her daughter, who has disappeared into the outside. She listens to her answering machine message, over and over, and never hears a trace.

When the bunker’s isolation becomes total, Mom decides they will all shoot a film and cast it outward as a “basket” designed to be sent out into the world to affirm their existence. In the gymnasium-turned-set, the girls and women become the cast. With mud for makeup and scavenged materials for costumes and props, they simulate a Neanderthal family crossing a prehistoric valley toward a winter refuge. The scenes are simple and physical—there is food, shelter, fear, arduous journeys. And threaded through every take there is quiet terror: a newer species is moving in behind them, bringing wolves, tools, and Homo sapiens. Soon, the boundaries between the film and the bunker waver.

First Gods, Lost Animals is a novel about extinction expressed in a film shoot—an end-of-the-world story where the question isn’t who wins, but what is held dear when everything is bound to be destroyed.