by Eirik Gumeny
She did not remove her finger from her nose.
The sextet of nude folks dispersed throughout the store, rummaging through racks and shelves and piled tables of cargo pants and heavy canvas frocks and leather jackets and thermal-lined flannel shirts and tactical vests and ripstop khakis and wool panties and radiation-resistant boxer-briefs and boots and hiking shoes.
“So,” asked Ellie, “is it still just a panorama of desolate, flattened hellscapes everywhere out there?”
“Pretty much,” replied the ivory-white red-haired woman, slipping into a heavily-pocketed leather and canvas skirt.
“Are the flying monkeys still a problem?”
The tiny ponytailed woman by a rack of camp shirts raised an eyebrow. “No?”
“Oh,” said Ellie, disappointed. “I guess that’s good. Hey, does anyone want coffee?”
“I could actually go for one,” said the dark-skinned man with the limp metal hand, wriggling his head through the neck of a hooded fleece sweatshirt.
“Cool. It’s down the way,” explained the salesgirl, pointing to her left. “You can crawl through the hole in the security gate. The Sumatran roast is pretty good.”
“Oh, uh, all right,” he replied slowly. “Did you want anything?”
“No,” said Ellie, admiring the bevy of private parts still on display, “I’m good.”
“Don’t you have anything less ... mountain man?” inquired the dark-skinned woman, holding up a heavily-pocketed vest and grimacing slightly. “Something more form-fitting and bulletproof? Or underwear that doesn’t make me look like I’ve given up on life?”
“That’s why I gave up on underwear,” said the redhead, her voice muffled by the bulky cable-knit sweater she was swimming through.
“You could try Ashley J. Williams’ Fancypants Emporium, or Cobblepot Couture,” replied Ellie. “I think they’re still standing. There might be wolves, though.”
“I’m coming with you,” said the handsome mostly-metal white guy, tossing a nylon field jacket back onto the display table.
“What’s the matter?” asked the shirtless, broad-shouldered blonde man, a handful of abdominal muscles etched across his belly. “You guys too good for this stuff?”
“Yes.”
“We like fancy things, Thor,” the raven-haired woman stated. “For whatever reason, our progenitors’ fashion sense stuck with us, even if things like ethnicity and their crazy-ass morals didn’t.”
“That’s dumb,” said the blonde man.
“You’re dumb.”
“Really? Then why did I pick these flannel-lined jeans? I’ve farted twice during this conversation and you didn’t hear anything!”
The metal man and the naked woman shook their heads in disgust and walked out of the Eddie Bauer.
“I dunno,” said Ellie, “I thought it was pretty smart.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Is Heaven Missing an Angel? ‘cause You’ve Got Nice Cans
Mark Hughes slumped in the vinyl booth, dejected and filthy and mechanically shoveling fork after fork of cheesecake into his mouth. Lime green sunlight poured through the windows into the powerless diner.
“Come on, Mark,” thought Timmy the super-squirrel, sitting on the table before his friend, but off to the side enough that he wouldn’t accidentally get stabbed with the fork, “you can’t keep doing this. This is your third cheesecake since we got here.”
Mark responded by vigorously licking the pie tin clean.
“That’s not right, man.”
“Nothing’s right,” replied Mark sullenly, throwing the pie tin to the table and startling Timmy’s wife and children. They had been nearby, working on a small fruit salad, blissfully unaware of Mark’s existential breakdown, as they were neither telepathic nor understood human languages. The squirrels looked around skittishly. Once they were certain there were no more pie tins being thrown, they resumed their meal.
Mark raised his hand and indicated to the waitress to bring another cheesecake.
“You can’t think like that,” pleaded Timmy. “It’s not healthy.”
“I can be however I want!”
Prior to the cheesecakes, Mark had also ingested a decent-sized bottle of whiskey.
“Is it the hotel or the vending machine?” requested Alexa Kostopoulos, sitting opposite Mark, although not directly opposite, because then she would have been hit with the pie tin. “Because we can get you a new one of either.”
“What’s the point?” With a heavy sigh Mark sunk lower into his seat. “There is no point. It’s all pointless. Broken and dull and unable to be written with.”
The former hotel owner leaned forward and placed his forehead on the Formica table.
The great and majestic city of Secaucus, in what was formerly the state of New Jersey, was still the metropolitan hub of the northeastern section of the continent, and was one of only a dozen or so remaining in the world. Calamity after earth-shattering calamity, the resilient urban center of Secaucus thrived, remaining a place of business and culture and a surprisingly low murder rate.
The Plaza at the Meadows, the shopping center that had housed the former Secaucus Holiday Inn, however, was having a harder time of things than the rest of the city. Firstly, the plaza had been built in the center of a swamp that regularly smelled of the decaying corpses of urine-soaked sewer denizens, despite being mostly corpse-free. Secondly, there had been a number of fires a couple of years earlier, started by an anonymous blonde man of Scandinavian descent, that destroyed all the competing hotels in the shopping center. Allegedly and theoretically, the arson spree was committed as an effort to drive tourists away from the other smoking husks of hotels and to the relative safety and more-or-less clean beds of the Holiday Inn. In practice, though, the fires served only to scare tourists and travelers away from the entire plaza, as they all assumed it was only a matter of time before the arsonist came back to finish the job and incinerate them in their sleep.
Things didn’t get any better for the Plaza at the Meadows after that. Every year that passed brought more apocalypses and fewer members of humanity left breathing. Between the frequent ghost pirate raids, the zombie frogs, the racist alligators, and the Burger King, word got out that the Plaza at the Meadows was not as desirable as the many alternative commercial centers within the sprawling boundaries of mighty Secaucus. The final nail in the coffin was the outbreak of flesh-eating chlamydia in the plaza’s only remaining office building. There were no survivors.
With no office, there were no office workers, and with no office workers, there were no customers for the remaining shops. They began to close one by one: the deli, the Chili’s, the cocaine bazaar. All gone within the span of six months.
Mark Hughes was not taking it well.
Mark hurled the empty pie tin across the diner like a Frisbee.
“Sir,” said the waitress, ducking out of the way, “please stop doing that.”
“Why the hell should I?” slurred the former hotel owner.
“It’s dangerous and stupid and it means I have to do more work later.”
“That’s not my problem.”
The waitress looked at Mark with lowered eyes, her ocular implant whirring and turning a deep, unsettling red. “I will make it your problem, sir.”
“Hey,” said Mark, sliding toward the edge of the booth, his own ocular implant clicking impotently in return, “I have a pneumatic penis. What do you say we take it for a spin?”
The waitress threw him through the diner window.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Breaking News
“This is Sam Stonestreet for WWOR with the six eighteen news.
“We begin tonight with continuing coverage of the massive power outage that has blighted the land. As society prepares to enter the second month of this godforsaken blackout, we can, at least, take some small comfort in the fact that the Cannibal Season seems to have ended, presumably because someone somewhere finally remembered that there are other animals and
foods that can be consumed, foods that don’t have thumbs and own houses and scream at you from a barricaded bathroom every time you try to make a sandwich from a small child’s thigh.
“Moving now to our top story this evening, the complete and total failure of our electrical infrastructure appears to have spread to the sun, as even the outdoors has now been plunged into a deep and even more unexpected onslaught of total darkness, complete with dropping temperatures and falling ash, and we are all going to die in a new ice age. This, of course, is only an extrapolation of what I can see from the studio’s windows, but one has to assume the view from this dismal, despairing industrial waterfront is exactly the same as everywhere else on the planet.
“After leafing through WWOR’s library of mildewed and out-of-date reference books, this reporter feels comfortable presupposing there has been a supervolcanic eruption in, let’s say Chile, because that’s the only place this book mentions that I know for a fact still exists and that I can find on a map.
“Apparently, claims the book, this permanent night is probably the result of an explosion of nearly three thousand megatons, or three times the size of the atomic bomb those fundamentalist merpeople accidentally detonated under the Pacific Ocean exactly one year ago today, maybe, depending on what day today is. Enough crap has most likely been thrown into the sky to blanket our planet for years, obscuring the sun entirely and plunging Earth into a volcanic winter the likes of which we have never seen.
“We here at WWOR realize this news is of little comfort, but I would much rather make a guess at the specifics of this heretofore unconfirmed catastrophe than simply shrug off this nightmare as yet another vague, undefined way the world is trying to kill me.
“This has been Sam Stonestreet for WWOR. Please be sure to join me again at six twenty-five when I’ll update you on our earlier story about talking to yourself in front of a fleet of non-functioning cameras in a futile effort to stay sane because you’ve been living in an abandoned news studio for weeks, drinking your own urine and eating old transcripts.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Super Size Me
Somewhere near the Golden Arches of St. McLouis[xi], the bright orange sky began to suddenly and disjointedly get dark. And not the abnormal kind of deep purple dark that everyone was used to. This was a sinister kind of dark, thick and grey and ashy and blocking out any and all light the sun feebly hurled against it.
Queen Victoria XXX stopped the tank on an overpass next to the archway. The passengers sat in the yellow glow of the curved neon, staring off over the jagged cityscape, watching the crawling blackness envelop the horizon. The nearer and thicker the darkness got, the harsher and brighter the Arches glowed. Eventually, the grey sky began to fall on them in ashy chunks.
“That can’t be good,” said Chester A. Arthur XVII.
“What is it?” asked Queen Victoria XXX.
“I don’t know. I feel like I should, like the answer’s on the tip of my brain’s tongue, but that doesn’t even make sense.”
“I’m telling you this now as a courtesy: If you keep getting stupider I will break up with you.”
“That’s only fair,” replied Chester A. Arthur XVII. “Can you at least try to withhold judgment until after we meet with a scientist who specializes in people and not robots?”
“I make no promises.”
The grey flecks began to collect on the windshield. Queen Victoria XXX turned on the wipers. The temperature plummeted like a coyote off a cliff.
“Didn’t we just go through this?” she grumbled.
“That was nuclear in origin,” her boyfriend explained. “This one, uh ... isn’t.”
“Thank you for that information, honey.”
“I feel like you’re being sarcastic.”
“Of course I’m being sarcastic,” she teased.
“Can you turn on the heat?” asked Catrina, pulling her long, hooded cardigan tighter.
“Oh, I’ll turn on the heat,” said Thor, thunder rumbling in the distance.
“Is that you,” asked Queen Victoria XXX, “or the –”
A brilliantly white bolt of electricity slammed into downtown St. McLouis, tearing through the black cover of ash and igniting the debris-filled sky. The roiling firestorm spread outward for miles.
“Holy nuts,” said Boudica IX, leaning against the window and peering upwards. The other passengers – except Chester A. Arthur XVII – did the same.
“You know you probably just killed some people, right?” Ali offered.
“Hey, so, those weren’t normal clouds,” said Thor, studying the crackling red and black atmosphere.
“You just set the sky on fire, Thor,” said Catrina.
“Verily.”
“It can’t be any worse than whatever else was going on up there,” said Chester A. Arthur XVII, staring as best he could through the windshield.
“I beg to differ,” said Queen Victoria XXX.
A trio of smoking ducks crashed onto the hood of the tank.
“What the hell was that?” asked Catrina.
“Do you think they’re edible?” suggested Boudica IX.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Nature Finds a Way
Mark, Timmy, and Timmy’s family had been crashing above the Olympia IV grill and bar, in Alexa Kostopoulos’s apartment, for several days. The apartment was tiny, very blue, and constantly smelled of lamb, but it was the closest thing they had to a home at the moment.
Alexa didn’t seem to mind cooking and caring for the displaced cyborg and his squirrel friends. Whether this was because the extra occupants provided additional body heat and meant a smaller fire in her trash can and therefore less chance of Alexa burning her apartment down, or because the Greek woman was physically incapable of cooking for fewer than ten people, she hadn’t specified.
Despite Timmy’s affirmations and protestations, Mark had spent most of his time either drunk or sleeping, and was in fact currently both of those things on Alexa’s couch. The super-squirrel, meanwhile, was trying to explain to his wife and four children that they couldn’t go outside because they were not adequately prepared in either size or coat thickness to deal with a volcanic winter and, as a result, they would probably freeze to death and freezing to death was not good. Every time he thought they understood, one of them would scamper up the wall and began clawing at the windowpane.
It was at that moment, with Timmy retrieving one of his children from the window, that several members of PUTA – People for the Unethical Treatment of Animals – kicked down the apartment door and barged into the tiny blue living room. Turning their respective heads spastically, searching the corners of the room, the group found the squirrel family and began creeping towards them.
“We heard there were a group of squirrels here being treated with respect and dignity,” hissed the closest one, his back hunched and his eyes bulging.
“You should all be ashamed!” snarled another.
“Animal lovers!” barked a third.
The cacophony of voices roused Mark from his slumber long enough for him to attempt to get up from the couch. He promptly fell to the floor, landing mainly on his face, and passed out again. A rotund female from the back of the pack waddled over and dumped a bucket of lead-based paint onto the drunk man’s back anyway.
She rejoined the rest of the PUTA members, who had by now cornered the squirrels, arranging themselves in a semicircle around the tiny creatures, laughing and staring and hurling epithets. Standing on his hind legs and facing the intruders, Timmy spread his arms and pushed his family behind him. He fixed his tiny face with the steeliest gaze he could muster.
“If a single one of you cocksuckers hurts them,” he threatened, “I swear I will –”
The squirrel was immediately tasered.
Here is a brief highlight reel of the things that had happened to Timmy the super-squirrel in the last eighteen months:
he was kidnapped, experimented on by a team of scientists, and inadvertently giv
en telepathic and telekinetic powers, at which point he murdered the scientists in question with his brain
he was thrown into a low orbit around Earth by an angry Aztec snake-god, a snake-god who was quickly beaten to death by the reborn Norse God of Thunder
he was attacked by an elderly mad scientist with a penchant for electromagnetic weaponry and lost his telekinetic abilities, forcing him to scratch the old man’s face off the old-fashioned way
he fought off an invasion of ghost pirates, all of whom were either dematerialized or ran away screaming
Here is an even briefer list of the points that should be taken from this:
Timmy had very strange reactions to getting electrocuted
things did not end well for people that attacked Timmy
The shortest trespasser opened his dolphin-skin knapsack, handing out several heavy knives and rusted hammers, before throwing Timmy’s unconscious, twitching body unceremoniously into the bag. The PUTA people circled closer around Timmy’s wife and kids, wearing unsettling smiles and waving knives and smacking hammers into their palms. The squirrels huddled together, shrinking back and pressing against the wall. The youngest rodent began frantically scratching at a floorboard hoping to dig his way out.
The People for the Unethical Treatment of Animals reached down toward the squirrels, blades and hammerheads first.
Then they levitated two feet in the air.
The knapsack drifted gently to the ground.
“What the hell?” asked all of them, to one degree or another, the swear words and inflection varying somewhat from member to member.
The animal-hating dickhead with the taser was flipped upside down and slammed into the hardwood floor several times before he knew what was going on. He found himself hovering eight inches from the ground and staring face-to-face with a very pissed off Timmy.