I’m sorry if this post is a bit long, but it’s probably our last before we succumb to the alien overlords and serve as incubators for a new colonizing race of beings.* It’s been five thousand years in the making, but the date was always set. The Mayans even knew to end their calendar on this day, as the Smoking Man told Scully and Mulder in the final episode of The X-Files.

Face it folks, we’re fucked. Sure, a few of us might be needed by our new alien overloads to help keep the others in line, but selling out humanity for a nicer cell in the prison is going to be crap on your karma. More than likely, you, as the rest of us, will be infected with the Black Oil, delivered by specially bred bees from Tunisia and Texas. Then, we’ll incubate into these big, green violent aliens before molting (preferably near a nuclear core) into smaller, more conventional grey aliens, who I think are supposed to run shit. Then there’s some stuff about FEMA taking over. Because it’s the shadow government. Also, there’s going to be, uh, shape-shifting bounty hunters to help control things, unless the super soldiers developed by the Syndicate — who are more or less invulnerable except to magnetite — can defend us. Or if that vaccine Mulder’s dad was working on was a success…but really what are the odds. **

Bottom line: we’re all pretty screwed and need to accept the fact that we’ll never ever have a chance to canoodle Agent Scully.

So, shit.

As we’re not experts in counter-insurgency and we’re scared of bees, I’d be lying if I said JDP is prepared to be a center of anti-alien resistance. All we can do is what we always try to do: give you some good stuff to read to make life pass by a little easier, even if “life” here refers to your last free day as a non-host for a hostile alien lifeform.***

It’s the Apocalypse so you should start with the man who literally wrote the book on it, Eirik Gumeny. If ever there was a time to read his debut novel, Exponential Apocalypse, it’s now. I mean, talk about timely, which is why it’s probably free today for Kindle. (Really, on all of these suggestions, we recommend the Kindle version, because by the time Amazon delivers a hard copy next week, the Black Oil will have made it’s way into your eye sockets — even if you have Prime Membership.)

Eirik actually wrote two books on apocalypses, so if you’re still human after you’ve finished the first one, get the second too. But if you’re saying, “I’m living the apocalypse, dumb-ass, I don’t need to read about it,” you might want to try this instead. It’s full of short stories, which makes it easy to read in-between dodging waves of bee attacks.

Next up we suggest anything by Ryan Werner because a) he totally gets the Scully thing and b) he packs a lot into very short stories and that’s handy as you only have about a day of reading left. So go get his debut short story collection, Shake Away these Constant Days, and tell us if it isn’t the best book you’ve ever read (and probably will, at least under your own sentience.)

Likewise, no one does short and amazing as well as the fantastic y.t. sumner. We recommended a whole bunch of stuff you should read by her last Australia Day, but we’d especially highlight this, this, and this. We’re holding out hope that the aliens get to Australia last, so maybe she’ll have time to crank out a few more stories before colonization is complete. But don’t chance it. Read her today before the bees start buzzing.

Graham Tugwell is another can’t miss fellow. You could spend your final day as a human reading everything he’s published in the past year and still not be finished by the time the Black Oil is worming its way up your nasal passages. We can think of no better place to start than “We Left Him with the Dragging Man.”

Then there’s Chloe Caldwell. Most of us have regrets now that armageddon is upon us and probably are thinking of all the things we’ll never get to do. (Like make Scully eggs.) Fortunately, there’s still time to live vicariously through Chloe, who did lots of things (albeit not with Gillian Anderson) and then wrote about them in a painfully honest and insightful way in her debut collection, Legs Get Led Astray. It features the amazing piece of writing, “That Was Called Love,” one the favorite things we’ve ever published.

We could go on and on with all the great writers who have passed through JDP’s pages in the past three years, so if you’ve already read all of the above, just crack open any issue. Or check out our recent list of Pushcart Nominees. Or maybe read our first or second All-Star Issue. Or possibly our current issue about suburban ninjas. Or maybe the winners of our first-ever novella contest. Or…well, you get the idea.

Frankly, JDP was built to keep your spirits up during the onset of alien colonization and we’re happy to help any way we can.

And that’s all I’ve got other than to wish you all well under our new overlords and lament, yet again, how very, very happy I could’ve made Agent Scully. If only you could fight the future.

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* We’re idiots just having fun with this. Don’t take this seriously or do anything stupid. The aliens are not colonizing today. (Probably.) Besides since no one ever adjusted for the absence of leap years when translating the Mayan Calendar into the Julian Calendar, this shit should’ve gone down like three years ago. On a related note, we wished we lived in a world where we didn’t have to tell people not to do anything stupid when we post that aliens are colonizing our planet, but, sadly, these are hardly sane times.

** Really, the mythology started to break down pretty badly after Season Five.

*** See above about us being idiots and this not really happening.