by A.R. Wise
It’s the Apocalypse, Dave
Try to Have Fun.
By: A.R. Wise
Cover image sourced from istockphoto.com
Cover designed by A.R. Wise
Dedicated to all of the fans who’ve stuck with me since the beginning, and all of the fans who just made it to the party. My career, and most of my happiness, are thanks to you.
1 – The Gas Station Catastrophe
I had thirteen dollars in my pocket, a stack of overdue bills, and a rip-roaring hangover the day the apocalypse started. All in all, not a bad time to hit the reset button on life.
When you hear the word ‘apocalypse’, the first thing that pops in your head is probably meteors falling from the sky, zombies munching on brains, or ancient Aztec prophecies. That’s not the way it happened. Our apocalypse started with a simple news report that I barely paid attention to on my drive to work.
‘Scientists in Hamm, Germany have announced the creation of a metamaterial that was meant to collect positive ions, but might also attract antimatter. The creators say this synthetic material could give us insight into the origin of planets, and answer some questions about gravity that have puzzled physicists for decades.’
That was it. I would’ve forgotten about it entirely if not for how I chuckled at the fact there was a town in Germany named Hamm. The next blurb in the report was about how some reality TV star was suing the makers of his show because they didn’t blur his butt crack. The news about the experiment that would threaten the entire world was breezed past.
You can hardly blame me for not paying attention. I was late to work, and I’d already been written up twice. Over the past couple of weeks I’d smashed my alarm’s snooze button so many times that it finally stopped working, requiring me to actually turn off the alarm to get it to stop. This morning my solution was to pull the clock’s cord out of the wall and throw it across the room. It worked fabulously, and allowed me another hour of blissful sleep that was interrupted by the terrified realization I’d overslept.
I didn’t bother with a shower, and gargled with some mouthwash instead of brushing my teeth. I gave my clothes a sniff test to see if they were clean, or at least smelled relatively clean, and settled on a pair of jeans and a black t-shirt from a recent Faith No More concert. The front of the shirt was emblazoned with massive red text that said, ‘Mother’, and the back had similar letters that said, ‘Fucker’. It wasn’t the ideal work outfit, but at least it didn’t stink. I threw on a hoodie as well, to cover up the bad word on the back of the shirt, leaving people the impression that I was attempting some feminist declaration about how a man could be a mother – or something like that.
I debated whether or not it was too warm out for the hoodie. Any job that hires a guy like me has got to be prepared for the possibility that I’m going to come to work with some inappropriate attire from time to time. My arms are covered in tattoos of skulls and grim reapers, and I’ve got the words ‘Game Over’ tattooed on my knuckles, one letter per finger in a font reminiscent of old school videogames. I’ve got a beard that’s the result of laziness instead of fashionable grooming, my last appointment at Supercuts was four months ago, and most of the time people can pick up the faint smell of weed on my clothes. Long ago I lost the ability to smell it on myself, which is odd considering a person could be taking a hit two blocks away and I still manage to sniff it out.
My hoodie reeked of weed. That’s exactly why I decided to keep it on. I loved the idea of my boss wrinkling his pug nose as he got a whiff of dank every time I passed. Perhaps that’s a good example of my self-destructive, anti-authoritarian streak coming through.
I grabbed my phone on the way out the door, and was about to call work to give them some BS story about how my car wouldn’t start. Unfortunately, the phone’s battery was dead. I’d left it on overnight watching movies. Whenever I get so drunk that the room starts to spin, I like to lay down with my cell phone, and focus on a movie. It helps take my mind off my whirling surroundings, but eats up my battery. Just as well. I didn’t feel like explaining myself on an empty stomach.
My hangover was twisting my gut into knots, and in my infinite wisdom I thought a greasy fast-food bacon, egg, and cheese belly bomb would cure my ills. To counteract the edible poison, I ordered orange juice instead of coffee (you know, for the vitamins), which ended up being another decision I’d come to regret. I’m sure there are lots of people in this world who enjoy swallowing chunks of pulp with their orange juice, but I’m not one of them. I told that lady at the drive-thru, “No pulp,” but apparently they had a quota to meet for screwing up orders, because my juice was packed so tight with pulp I’m surprised there was any liquid in it at all. It was like trying to suck the water out of a cottage cheese container – and I’ll just let that image toy with your gut for a minute. Maybe then you’ll start to get a sense of how my stomach was feeling.
I finished my sandwich, and then crumpled the wrapper. I tossed the greasy paper over my shoulder onto the mountain of similar trash in the back seat. Don’t judge me. The last serious relationship I’d been in ended almost eight months earlier, and I’m a testament to the old adage of how a man is only as good as the woman beside him. If you were hoping for a story about a strong-willed, quick-thinking protagonist with all his shit together then you came to the wrong place. I’m a mess. A proud, lazy, mid-thirties mess with more skeletons in my closet than a mausoleum, and no shits left to give except for the ones headed to the toilet.
My car, Betty Boop (I wish there was a great story behind the moniker of my old Ford Escort, but I just named it that because I had sex with a girl named Betty in it once), chugged along dutifully, spitting out enough blue-tinted exhaust to poison whole neighborhoods. Someone had warned me that blue exhaust was a bad sign, but the car cost me less than four hundred dollars. I’d be damned if I was going to pay for it to get fixed. Betty was the type of lemon where the minute you fixed what was wrong with her, something else broke. Best just to leave her be.
The brakes squealed as I pulled into a parking spot outside of the warehouse where I worked. I saw my friend and coworker, Otis, standing outside waiting for me. That was the first sign of trouble.
He approached the car as I got out. “Hey Dave.”
Now I knew there was trouble. Otis rarely used my real name. He normally greeted me with a jubilant, ‘Double D’ because both my first and last names start with a ‘D’, and also because he liked referring to me as a big tit.
Otis was an assistant supervisor at the warehouse. Some begrudged coworkers suspected it was an affirmative action appointment, but I knew he got the job because our boss was a sniveling puke of a coward who tried to avoid conflict any way he could. Otis got promoted because of his size, not his skin color. Otis stood somewhere between six and seven feet tall, with shoulders as wide as a fridge, and a chest that put barrels to shame. He was an imposing figure, with arms that dwarfed most men’s thighs, and hands that could palm watermelons. That’s not racist, he really could. I saw him do it once.
“How’s it going, Oatmeal?” I asked with a lighthearted smile as I headed towards the warehouse. I kept trying to get other people to call him ‘Oatmeal’ as well, but the name never stuck.
Otis moved to block my path.
“Don’t tell me,” I said as my shoulders sunk.
“Sorry, brother,” said Otis.
“Let me talk to him. I can change his mind. Trust me.” I looked around the titan in my path, searching for our chicken-hearted employer’s frightened face peering around a corner to watch as his lackey did his dirty work.
“Not going to happen,” said Otis.
It would be a mistake to assume Otis was one of those kind-hearted giant stereotypes you see in popular fiction. He was willing and able to deliver a punishing beat down to anyone who deserved it. Even though we were friends, I knew better than to cross him.
“Is it because I’m late?” I asked as I checked the time.
“You’re not being fired,” said Otis, and I could tell by his tone that he knew he was serving up a load of bull. We used to joke about how the majority of his job was what he called ‘shining turds’. The boss would make a crumby decision that negatively affected his employees, and it was Otis’s job to figure out a way to sell it to them. “It’s a lay off.”
“A lay off?”
“Jim got word from the investors that they’re restructuring the department. It’s not just you. I had to let Chris and Jay go too. I’ve been out here waiting for you to show up. We still haven’t turned on any of the equipment today. We’ve just been waiting for your ass. Didn’t you get my calls?”
“Phone’s dead. What about Tony?” I asked about our mutual friend.
“He’s inside. He’s one of the three of us keeping our jobs.”
“Jim’s too scared to come out here and tell me himself?”
Otis glanced over his shoulder to make sure our boss wasn’t eavesdropping. “Of course he is. You know how it goes.”
“Man, this really sucks,” I said. “Is there a severance or anything like that?”
“Not unless you’ve been here a year, so you’re out of luck.”
“What about vacation time? Do I get paid for that?”
“Vacation time?” asked Otis with a smirk. “You ran out, and you used all your sick days.”
“Great.”
“Don’t go feeling sorry for yourself,” said Otis with a characteristic lack of sympathy. One of the things that made him a good fit for his position was how he refused to accept excuses, and didn’t pity anyone. He worked hard, and didn’t have any patience for laziness. Otis had moved here alone to get away from a dark history he didn’t like to talk about back in East St. Louis. We’d become friends because we didn’t know very many other people out here. “You knew you were on thin ice as it was. And then you show up all late like a jackass. What’d you expect?”
“You don’t get to bitch at me, Otis. I don’t work here anymore. Remember?”
“Yeah, all right. Then I’ll bitch at you ‘cause you’re my friend. Stop being a jackass. Go get another job, and try getting to it on time for once in your life. You’re not a kid anymore. Stop acting like one.”
“All right, Dad,” I joked.
“Shoot,” Otis snickered. “If I was your pop, you’d have a size fourteen steel toe shoved so far up your ass…”
“I’m not interested in your weird sex fantasies.”
“That’s not what I heard,” said Otis, continuing our light-hearted banter. “You going home to sulk? Or are you going to get out there and try to find another job?”
“The way my life’s going, I’ll be flipping burgers at noon and back on my ass by five.”
Otis rolled his eyes and said, “Oh brother, give me a break. Quit your belly-aching. You’re a middle class white dude in the suburbs. No matter how tough you think you’ve got it, trust me it could be a whole lot worse.”
“Otis, you suck at pep talks.”
“And you suck at keeping a job.”
He had me there. There’s nothing I hate more than going to work. I wish I had that fabled Midwestern work ethic that my grandfather did, and that I could whistle my way through the drudgery of a work week so that I could try and enjoy life a little on the weekends, but that’s just not me. I abhor every minute that gets wasted in a warehouse, or a kitchen, or a factory chugging along like a cog in a machine that’s making money for the fat cats up top. Of course, the downside to my sort of attitude is that those fat cats are more than happy to bury a shit like me in the proverbial litter box of lower-middle class.
“I’ll give you a call tonight,” said Otis. “Maybe you, and me, and Tony can go out for a drink.”
I laughed and said, “Not unless you guys are buying. I don’t have a job, remember?”
“Water’s free.”
“You could buy me a beer.”
“Nah, I’m not enabling your lazy ass.” He clopped that thick paw of his on my shoulder and squeezed. He meant the gesture as a kind one, but it hurt more than helped. I’m pretty sure he left bruises. “I’ll talk to you tonight.”
I said goodbye, and walked back to Betty Boop, who was still smoking and making an odd clanging noise. I had no idea where to head next, and sat in the driver’s seat as I tried to decide. The hangover headache that’d caused an ever-present throbbing behind my eyeballs had spread to my temples, and I decided the best thing for it was the tallest cup of coffee I could buy. There was a specialty coffee shop down the street, but considering I had to stretch the thirteen dollars in my pocket to near miraculous lengths, I decided it was a gas-station-coffee sort of day.
I drove over to the Kum and Go (which I still think is the worst name for a respectable business I’ve ever heard), and went in to plunder their burned coffee selection, a taste sensation that I’d mask with a zealous helping of hazelnut creamer. The coffee station was set up beside the rotating hot dog rack, and the smell of those sweaty meat sticks made my stomach churn. As poor as I was, I couldn’t fathom resorting to buying a hot dog at a gas station. That was a low I hadn’t yet reached.
“No dogs,” said the Middle-Eastern gas station attendant behind the counter. I looked up at him, befuddled by his declaration. I wondered if he’d read my mind.
“He’s a service dog,” said the woman at the entrance. She was holding the leash of a friendly looking German Shephard. She was an older lady with large, black sunglasses, and a babushka that couldn’t hide a large earpiece attached to the side of her head. I recognized the device as a Cochlear Implant. My ex-girlfriend’s grandmother had one of those attached to her for a while, but had to have it taken out because it caused what they called, ‘Transient Dizziness’. She would get inexplicably dizzy, and fall down from time to time, which made me wonder if the person who came up with the term for the side effect was having a laugh. Why else would you watch someone stumbling and falling down, and decide to name their ailment something synonymous with ‘Drunk Bum’?
The attendant appeared ready to argue with the lady about her dog, but relented in a huff as he went about his business behind the counter. The lady and her dog walked past me on their way to the wall of coolers. I smiled and nodded at the fragile little woman, but either she couldn’t see me or had no interest in pleasantries.
I tasted my coffee, and was satisfied with the excessive sugar to liquid ratio I’d concocted. It looked more like milk than coffee by the time I was done with it. I’m sure gas stations hate patrons like me, who take full advantage of the free creamers and all but erase any profit gleaned from the sale of a half-gallon tub of coffee. I swept the mound of emptied creamers into the garbage, and headed up to pay.
That’s the first time I felt the sensation of what would eventually become known as a ‘rift-buzz’.
The hairs on the back of my neck stood up, and a tingling sensation ran down my spine with enough force to cause me to wiggle my hips, as if my body had been invaded by the entirely foreign desire to break into dance. The smell of ozone was pervasive, and it felt like I was moving in slow motion as I began to turn around. My first thought was that the lady’s Cochlear Implant was about to explode and pop her head like a Scanners victim. That was a stupid thing to assume, and was probably a good sign that my fascination with 80’s horror films had gotten out of hand.
There was a quick ‘zip’ sound, and then a muffled pop. The smell of ozone got worse, but there was no explosion. I looked back fretfully, but there didn’t seem to be anything awry.
“What was that?” asked the attendant.
“I don’t know.”
“Did you break something?
”
I didn’t answer because my attention was on the service dog trotting into view. It walked unguided along the length of the coolers, and out of my view again. Where was the dog’s owner?
“Did you break something?” asked the attendant again, but I continued to ignore him.
There was a noise coming from near the coolers that I needed to investigate. It was a wet, sloshing sound followed by a low gurgle.
“Ma’am?” I asked, convinced the owner of the service dog had hurt herself. “Are you all right?” The notion that she’d suffered a horrendous implant explosion was still on my mind, and that was a sight I didn’t want to see.
The dog started to bark. It was to my right, out of view, and the wet, slapping sound was to the left as I approached the end of my aisle. The smell of sweaty, day-old hot dogs overcame the pervasive ozone. I set my coffee on the counter and inched closer to the end of the aisle.
“Ma’am?”
I’m not going to lie, I was really freaking scared. The electrical charge that’d sent shivers up my spine had convinced me that something bad was happening, and the barking dog didn’t help either. I searched the corners of the store for a concaved mirror that would reveal what was going on along the coolers beyond my aisle, but there were cameras installed instead of mirrors. I asked again, “Ma’am, are you okay?”
Wet slaps on linoleum answered me. I walked to the edge of the aisle and saw a brown pool of fluid expanding on the linoleum. At first I assumed it was soda, and that the movement I saw within the liquid was carbonated bubbles popping. It wasn’t until I was nearly at the end of the aisle that I realized those weren’t bubbles. They were tiny, writhing worms.
The attendant screamed, “Watch out!”
I assumed he could see what happened to the woman through the cameras, and was trying to warn me. I backed away as the pool of wormy liquid spread.
A thunderous crash shook the building. Shards of glass careened through the air. I fell against the plastic shield protecting the rotating hot dogs, which subsequently burned the crap out of my arm. I curled into a ball to protect myself as a light fixture broke free of its mount above and fell. The electrical cord stopped the fixture from tumbling onto me, but the fluorescent light bulbs snapped free and crashed down. They exploded into tiny shards of glass and dust, adding to the madness of the moment as I tried to figure out what the hell just happened.
I could smell exhaust, and heard an engine rumbling. When I stood back up I saw that a station wagon had crashed through the front of the store. It would’ve plowed through the aisles and over me if not for a particularly sturdy energy drink cooler that was now tipped on its side against a shelf of crushed chips and beef jerky. Several cans of energy drinks had broken open. They were spinning on the floor, spraying their contents around the store like a series of sugary, guarana-enhanced sprinklers.
“What’s happening?” asked the attendant in a panic as he grasped at the sparse tufts of hair on the side of his head.
The dog started barking again, but I was focused on the crashed car. The radiator had busted, and steam was jetting up, clouding my vision as I tried to see if the driver was okay. I saw movement behind the cracked windshield, but it wasn’t what I expected. My brain couldn’t fathom what I was looking at. There were several quickly snapping cords lashing about within the station wagon. I foolishly wondered if wires in the dashboard had broken free and were whipping around. As stupid as that thought might be, it made a lot more sense than what I was about to discover was really going on.
My first clue that things were about to get weird (as if the brown pool of worms wasn’t enough) was when I saw what looked like an octopus tentacle slap against the inside of the station wagon’s windshield. The white suction cups affixed to the glass just long enough for me to recognize what they were, and then the tentacle pulled away, leaving behind circular marks.
“What the…” I muttered.
I was interrupted by an ear-piercing shriek behind me. I turned, and was shocked to see a humanoid creature in the aisle. I recognized the basic shape of the person. It was the owner of the guide dog, but her body had been twisted and mangled. Her head bobbed to the side, her shoulder and left arm drooping beside it. Her right arm was up in the air and twisted so that it was pointing slightly backward as her hand grasped uselessly. A fleshy, translucent sac filled with brown fluid was growing beside her head, filled with the writhing worms that I’d seen on the floor moments earlier. The sac was ballooning at an alarming rate, and the woman watched it grow on her as if she was just as horrified as I was.
The fluid-filled sac was formed near her neck and chest, and below it her shirt was moving as if a family of squirrels was hiding beneath it, battling with the resilient material to make their escape. The woman gasped in an attempt to say something, but the growths affected her ability to speak. The brown fluid that covered the floor flowed down her chin, dripping like melting gelatin as the little worms swam around within it.
I let loose a litany of curses that would make a lifelong bartender blush. The dog was still barking, and I assumed if he could speak he’d be cursing the same as me.
I grabbed the sugary coffee I’d made for myself, and threw the massive Styrofoam container at the woman. The cup hit her in the bulbous sac and spilled the hot contents all over her face and chest. The sac undulated and hissed before popping, sending a gush of fetid liquid over me. It smelled like someone dunked me in a Porta Potty filled with baby poop.
I staggered back, swiping at the sticky, worm-infested liquid that covered me, and nearly tripped over a spewing can of energy drink as the gas station attendant screamed words in his native tongue that I instinctually knew were curses as foul as my own.
The diseased monstrosity in the aisle was coming at me. The deflated sac flopped around like an elderly porn star’s breast, and now I could see what’d been struggling to free itself of her shirt. There was a creature emerging from the woman. The closest thing I could compare it to would be an octopus, but it had a face full of small, black, pupil-less eyes and multiple rows of triangular teeth that looked like several mouths turned sideways and stacked on top of one another. Tentacles slithered like snakes around the woman’s body, their suction cups tearing at her skin and leaving behind bloody welts. There were red flecks of color along the topside of the tentacles.
Desperation took hold as I floundered in a lake of energy drink and hellish baby/tentacle-monster diarrhea. I reached for the closest thing I could grab to defend myself, which happened to be a box of Slim Jims. I whipped the foot long meat sticks at the creature as it came at me, which had exactly the sort of effect you might expect. The monster’s advance was unfazed by the spicy pseudo-meat. The creature’s mouth opened wide and emitted a piercing screech as the multitude of tentacles stiffened and stretched out at me.
I didn’t have the time (or the dexterity) to get to my feet, so I grabbed the side of the counter and pulled myself across the slick floor like a fat kid desperately trying to make it down the final few feet of a Slip ‘N Slide.
I heard the woman’s feet slapping on the wet floor as she chased me. One of her tentacles wrapped around my ankle and started to pull me back. I reached out for something to hold onto and grasped the edge of the beef jerky endcap. I had ahold of a giant, plastic Slim Jim that was, unfortunately, only attached to the shelving unit by a series of flimsy twist ties. The display piece broke free in my grip, leaving me sliding backward through the grime while holding onto the most useless sword ever conceived.
I turned and whacked at the creature with the plastic Slim Jim, which produced a loud, hollow noise akin to a Wiffle ball bat, but did little to impede the retracting tentacle as it pulled me along. I felt like Lando in search of my blind Han Solo rescue as I slid through the goop on my way towards the gnashing maw of the demonic mutation. The multiple rows of teeth rotated in opposite directions. It was built for shredding and grinding its prey like a food processor. I was about to get juice
d in the worst way fathomable.
The guide dog leapt to my rescue and attacked the tentacle that was wrapped around my leg. His teeth punctured the squishy flesh, producing founts of black blood like a Texas oil dike. The tentacle released its grip on me as the monster focused on the poor animal. The dog yelped in pain and shock as the appendage wrapped around his midsection.
I got to my feet, safely out of danger. The dog had earned the demon’s full attention, giving me the opportunity to get the hell out of there. To my shame, for a brief moment I considered bailing on the dog who’d saved my life. Instead, I gripped that Slim Jim Wiffle ball bat with both hands and steeled myself for some foolhardy heroics.
“Hey,” I shouted to get the creature’s attention. “You squid-looking, fetish-porn freak, suck on this.” I speared her with my plastic meat stick with all the ferocity I could muster.
Not my smartest move.
2 – The Fort Knox of Shitters