Though it wasn’t exactly that Wayne was lonely. He’d purchased a sex robot that looked like Linda Hamilton circa 1984, not yet tough, but with a lot of potential. He also had six cats and a lizard named Jacques.
Past the bedrooms was the living room. Beyond the living room were the kitchen, the mini-putt course, the virtual reality chairs, and the miles of storage. He didn’t go that far and fell into his La-Z-Boy. A remote dimmed the lights and brought down a screen from the space overhead. In some spots, the ceiling was nearly thirty-feet. Everything was smooth and white in the living area, plastic cement to fill in the grooves of the rocks.
“Ugh, dummy,” Wayne said and kicked his legs forward to get out of the chair. He had to load one of his purchases into the disc system. It would copy the movie as he watched it and save it to the hard drive. It’s why he purchased bootlegs from the Pick ‘n Save. Originally, the hard drive had thirteen thousand purchased movies and episodes of shows saved and unlocked. A great idea, but every now and then he found error messages instead of files. Most recently, Thelma and Louise and The Running Man. Somebody at the Pick ‘n Save had no qualms about downloading in high-def and burning to discs, which meant they could be saved without removing any digital rights management locks—something beyond his technological abilities.
Wayne decided on Thelma and Louise first and popped the disc into the machine. It slid back out. “Come on now.” He pushed it in again. It popped out. He put his fingers against the skinny edge and pushed gently, eyes lifted in a plea to the decorative swords he’d had mounted above the entertainment unit.
Part Two
Underground
1
Tuesday, April 29, 2019: 11:11AM
The first rattle of the ground sent bends into Wayne Thomas’ knees. It had come. He’d covered every base and was ready for everything. The apocalypse was upon him, sending its feeler tremors, about to…
The shakes grew heavier, moving like a wave lapping over the shore. Wayne was on his feet, surfing for balance. The shake increased. All over the bunker, things rattled and banged, but everything seemed sound. A knowing smile came to Wayne’s face.
“I knew it! Ain’t getting m—!”
Cut off, literally, his words became a gurgle sound. The nearest decorative samurai sword was in fact a samurai sword. He could’ve used to slice lids from bean cans, had he wanted to, but he was careful and never played with weapons; weapons are not toys. That sword was lodged in his shoulder and throat.
He’d prepped for everything only to learn prepping for everything was an impossibility.
Out of the mine, Wayne’s cabin crumbled, the foundation rising and sinking simultaneously, total ruination. The lanes onto his property sank and disappeared into shadows.
Further south, inside the Pick ‘n Save, things shook and fell. The boards of the floor swam in a belly dancer’s rhythm. Items fell, the shelving collapsed, everything tilted down the hill. Glass shattered.
Tanya ducked and fell in beneath the till counter. The nickels, dimes, quarters in their treys danced in a chaotic symphony. The old computer fell to the ground and smashed into a mess of glass and plastic.
Spread wide, Charlie had one foot against an aisle beam and the base of the till conveyor. Her groin was, at best, eighteen inches from the rolling floor. Her right hand held her from falling and her left worked as an extra layer of protection for the baby inside.
Across the storefront, Dick braced himself like a frumpy, grizzled da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man in the doorway. He was screaming words. Screaming for the men in the lot.
The back of the store caved and a chunk of the roof fell through the ceiling. The building itself began to slide and tip.
Outside, the out-of-town doctors stood dumbly for the first two seconds of the quake and then fell as they tried to make for the store’s doors. They’d rented a Chevy Silverado to come to Happy Village and were suddenly on the asphalt underneath the flipped and sliding truck. Dust and smoke pitched into the air in puffs from all angles of the crumbling asphalt.
The cement sports pad cracked and then sank in a whoosh, disappearing with the street and the Pick ‘n Save, and all the vehicles. Across the street and down a ways, the Lutheran Church remained topside, but had fallen sideways and spewed pews and drapes in a belch of glass and brick dust. The gas line beneath it was the first to meet spark and a flame erupted.
The Dairy Queen was there and gone in a blink as rocks from up on high fell and rolled, filling in everywhere that had disappeared into the unbeknownst cavern and the new fissure. Car alarms roared and dogs barked. People screamed and wailed in short, clipped cries, most coming to rest under stone too quickly to acknowledge their demise.
Over at the school, Peter West sat on a swing set and watched the school fall in on itself like a controlled demolition. He fell and crawled in reverse without looking and slid down a muddy shaft, doing back rolls and bouncing for more than thirty seconds until the earth fell away and he dropped straight for another full second and then landed in the coldest water he’d ever felt.
The trees in the forest lost their hold and tipped sideways, helping to cover the newly minted hole in the world. Beyond that, Stevie Drew held Emily Keene inside the master bedroom closet of Scout Wallace’s boat. For the three seconds they had to think about it, they thought Rob Hill was outside and firing rounds into the hull. The cracking was incredible, and then they felt their organs dance up their throat. Then they thumped and knocked heads together as the boat slipped from the trailer and started down a rockslide. When they finally hit bottom, it was as if a charge erupted, sending them flying. They clung together, each taking knocks and splinters, but surviving thanks to an unintentional Serta landing. They bounced from the strewn mattress nine feet in the air before landing on a dirty, mossy bed.
High above, crows, pigeons, and eagles watched the destruction, seeing all their perch points and shit targets fall away as the Earth shook. Some of their favorite trees they could still see down below. Then suddenly, as if sheered, a thick slab of mountainside came away and shook the world all over again—it had to be nearly a mile wide and three miles long—before coming to stop over the suddenly disappeared Happy Village.
Mostly unbothered, the birds sought trees further northeast and northwest where the destruction was minimal and already stilled. They left behind a cloud of dust and a sudden silence that was almost deafening when compared to the previous moments’ cacophony.
2
Tuesday, April 29, 2019: 11:26AM
“Mom? Mom?” Tanya was a mess of blood and dust, looking like someone had tarred and feathered her, but replaced the tar with raspberry jam and the feathers with icing sugar. “Mom?”
It had taken her a few minutes to come to terms with anything that had happened. One second the world was shaking and the next the store became a free-falling elevator and her back hit the underside of the till desk. Then thunk-thunk-thunk and everything hurt, but somehow she was okay, though bleeding from the crown of her head. She’d crawled out of the remnants of the destroyed Pick ‘n Save with her head leaking and leaned up against the soft, white stem of a broken mushroom. The mushroom was enormous and the fanned bottom emitted a glow that seemed to dull the pain and shock. She looked back to the store. Chunks of broken mushroom littered everywhere, streaming out from beneath the foundation.
After enough time past, she was able to drink in more of the scene and understand that Happy Village had collapsed into some strange cavern.
Dick was up and alive about fifty feet away. Charlie Warinka was another twenty feet away on top of that, and she was howling. She was on her back, posted on the hood of a smucked flat Mini Cooper—Laurie Douglas’ Mini Cooper, probably…only one Mini Cooper in Happy Village. It was Charlie that Tanya was going to crawl to until she saw her mother’s car smashed and crashed and its interior wearing a coat of blood. The windshield wasn’t broken and looked like a red Rorschach pattern. When she got there, the back end was gone and a
broken tree had gored through her mother’s backside, somehow forcing her guts out her mouth.
“Mom.” Tanya blubbered the name, looking at what was either an inflated tongue pressing out between the woman’s teeth or a lung. Veronica Robinfeather’s hand was plump with stubby fingers in Tanya’s own. Tanya had hands like someone else, thank God.
She got to looking around more and started to see the ruined bodies, picking out potential names for the destroyed faces. People don’t look the same after a disaster rearranges their skeletons.
“Is anybody else alive?”
Tanya cocked her head to this. It sounded like Dick and he sounded terrified.
“I need help! We need help! Charlie’s…!”
He didn’t finish and Tanya thought about Charlie’s baby and holy shit, the woman had fallen as well and what did that do to a fetus that far along? Tanya worried about herself for a few extra moments before deciding embryos were pretty well protected.
“I’m here! I’ll come! What do you need?” Tanya climbed up on rubber legs.
Dick spun when he heard her. He was next to the Mini. Charlie was in a constant grimace. “Can you find something clean?”
“Like ba—?” She stopped herself before saying baby wipes. “Like wipes or something? Rubbing alcohol maybe? You mean for Charlie, yeah?”
“Right!” Dick then began flipping bits of rubble. He didn’t look so bad. The doorway kept him protected during the crash. Knowing what to do alone made him seem more like a doctor than Tanya could’ve imagined him before.
Over the rubble and broken mushrooms, Tanya stumbled along. Rocks and dust covered everything, but she spotted the top of Don Cherry’s bald head and she knew she’d gotten into at least some of the small pharmacy section. She flipped Don’s sign shilling Cold FX and dug in the general vicinity until she found boxes of Tylenol and jugs of hand sanitizer.
Feeling a bit stronger, she hurried over to Charlie. Dick was a little further away, gathering armloads of softball-sized mushrooms. The orange dust was all over his chest, arms, and chin. “Good! Good!” His words were clipped and erratic.
She looked anywhere but toward her mother’s ruined visage. She charged, taking in more and seeing little hope.
The stuff dropped in front of the Mini and Tanya saw the sum of a very bad situation. Everywhere was wet with blood and other fluids. Charlie had torn the crotch out of her yoga pants and her vagina was swollen and ugly, hiding—though not well—beneath all that blood.
“She’s coming!” Charlie shouted between choo-choo breaths and grunts.
Tanya bent and grabbed the Tylenol bottle. It was a friendly container and she didn’t have to screw around lining up tabs. Her thumb jammed through the silver seal and she tossed the cotton away. Six pills went into her palm and the container was resealed and slipped into her jeans pocket. Dick had already gather bottles of fluid and had them leaned against a tire rim that bent in a half-moon.
“Mountain Dew or Cream Soda?” Tanya asked.
“What?” Charlie was indignant.
Tanya shrugged it off and grabbed the Mountain Dew—there was already enough red stuff all over the place, better to go with green. The cap hissed when it opened. Tanya held a dirty hand up to Charlie’s chin. Charlie saw the pills and stretched her jaws wide. The mouth of the two-liter jug met the mouth of a woman giving birth.
Tanya wondered if any woman in the history of the world had ever paused while pushing out a baby to chug back some Mountain Dew. She thought probably, maybe, someone like Honey Boo Boo’s third cousin down in an American trailer park bathtub because going to the hospital would cost the same as a new transmission for the pickup truck they’d scored when the neighbor moved away in the middle of the night. Then she wondered if that thought was mean. Her mother would’ve laughed.
She started sobbing again.
Dick had dumped a helping of hand sanitizer onto Charlie’s vagina. It thinned the red to pink and also acted as a lubricant. The under-baked head breached quickly. It was too small for comfort.
Charlie was on her thirty-second week, though she told everyone she was later than that because the stretchmarks felt like they looked thirty-sixth week instead, and a big part of her wished the deed was done already. This baby was about fifty days too soon and showed it. That’s besides the damage from the fall.
“Keep pushing,” Dick said. He’d lost the excitement and became dutiful.
Tanya looked at the premature, blue-faced baby in Dick’s palm. That wasn’t good. Scout probably wouldn’t give her free groceries if the baby didn’t make it. That thought almost made her choke. The Pick ‘n Save was rubble and they were somewhere in the middle of the world like some kids’ movie, but instead of, like, the Rock, she was stuck with an old doctor named Dick and a woman who would suddenly have much more free time than she expected for the next eighteen years.
“Keep going.”
Charlie wailed. Tanya suddenly wanted to be busy with something and tore away from the scene to seek out useful items. What if that baby wasn’t as dead as it looked?
3
Tuesday, April 29, 2019: 11:30AM
The sky had fallen and the woman who had once been known as Jane Hartman crouched with little Shroomshine in one of the several squatter caves she’d marked to hide out in when danger approached.
Back in seventy-seven, she’d fought nerves and terror and hopelessness and the idea that she was caught in some kind of acid hallucination long enough to recognize that the prick named Pierre with whom she’d shared a tent and wasn’t lucid enough to fight off or tell no, had impregnated her. Being a mother became a duty and the rest seemed to shrink, even the sixty-foot dinosaurs that ate the twenty-foot dinosaurs and seemed to want to eat her just for kicks.
After Doobie came out, a boy with a full head of hair and eyes so deep brown she almost wanted to smother him to death rather than force him to live in the underground hell from which she’d not figured any possible way out. She didn’t and he grew and she was alone with him.
Wrong in so many ways, but impossible to avoid. Adam and Eve started as two and spawned the world, wasn’t that how the story went? Doobie and Jane spawned six more, three of them survived into adulthood. Doobie took a new sister-bride and Jane took a new son-husband—once that rule was broken, there was no sense fighting it. And more heads gave her more purpose. She was the matriarch of a tribe of cave dwellers in a lost world or maybe a world in an alternate universe. She heard a guy talk in high school once about that, said he read some doctor scientist theory on it.
That surely made more sense than what she thought. The memory of the fall and the sliding. Dinosaurs didn’t live in the middle of the Earth, that was a Jules Verne fantasy—she’d seen the movie.
She missed movies and people who didn’t look like her and who had different stories and music and drugs. She missed prepared food and toilet paper.
Then the sky fell and she saw both. Plus people, though they didn’t look so good and it seemed as if dozens of them were dead. But that chunk of…store made it. STORE, what a beautiful word. She hadn’t used it in the way that meant purchasing goods since the before times. When she was a hippie amongst hippies despite the sixties being long gone. They were going to bring it back, as a group.
If they did, they did it without her and instead of fun and dope and far out, she breathed life into an incestuous living in a lost world of dinosaurs and glowing mushrooms that didn’t get you high.
“Stay low,” she whispered to Shroomshine.
Shroomshine was naked like her mother, but coated in filth in case she had to avoid dino-detection. This was a perfect time to hide, but her grandmother was sneaking out.
Jane stayed lowed and broke for a target only thirty or forty feet from the screaming woman and the busy man. She dropped in behind debris and popped out when she felt it safe; did this sixteen times on her way to the chocolate bars she’d seen not so far from the cans of beer. Many of the cans had broken, some had
pinhole leaks, shooting tiny fountains into the air.
Once she had her arms full, she forewent ducking and hiding, went straight to the slim cave mouth where she’d left the girl.
Winded, she peeled back the purple foil on a jumbo Cadbury bar. “Take a bite.”
Shroomshine took a grand mouthful and her eyes bugged. She swished the chocolate around her mouth enough that runoff painted her lips brown. Jane grinned and picked up a can of Molson Golden, figured out the pop tab—oh things had changed—and gulped the can down where she sat in the dimness of the squat cave. The beer was miraculous.
She snatched the bar from Shroomshine and took a bite. It was too sweet, but it had to be that sweet to wash away the waste of her life and remind her of the real world.
Shroomshine had picked up the emptied beer can and sucked back the dregs, made a face. “Here.” Jane cracked two cans and they both drank. The younger wasn’t so impressed right away, but felt it soon after.
Ah, to be young again, catching a first buzz.
Jane finished her second can and took another bite from the bar. Shroomshine broke a quarter of the big bar off into her mouth and began making mush. She swallowed and laughed.
“Shh,” Jane said and looked back out the cave to the people helping the woman give birth. These people would look for a way out, and since the ceiling of her world was all new, maybe they’d find one, or maybe they’d know where to look. Maybe she’d be free and maybe… But what would people say about the children? “We can’t let them see us. Know what, you gotta run quick-fast and tell the others to see but don’t be seen by the new people, got it?”
Shroomshine swayed as she got to her knees. She then vomited twice and whined.
Great Big Teeth Page 4