Apocalypticon

by Clayton Smith

  MY BOLOGNA HAS A FIRST NAME, IT’S O-S-C-A-R

  MY BOLOGNA HAS A SECOND NAMEM, IT’S M-A-Y-E-R

  I LOVE TO EAT IT EVERY DAY

  AND IF YOU ASK ME WHY I’LL SAY

  ‘CAUSE OSCAR MAYER HAS A WAY

  WITH B-O-L-O-G-N-A

  He turned the page. The second paper in the stack was a piece of withering loose leaf, yellowed at the edges and delicate to the touch. The words on this sheet were written in careful block letters, crisp and precise, placed exactly in the center of the page:

  I WAS DRUNK LAST NIGHT, DEAR MOTHER

  I WAS DRUNK THE NIGHT BEFORE

  BUT IF YOU’LL FORGIVE ME, MOTHER

  I’LL NEVER GET DRUNK ANYMORE

  “What in the name of Grayskull...?” Patrick mumbled aloud. Then he heard a chair scrape against the dirt floor. He nearly knocked the candle over in surprise. Footsteps echoed toward him. He flipped the folder shut and stuffed it into the drawer, then dove into the corner, where the tunnel wall met the outer wall, and huddled into the darkness. Warren came around the edge of the tunnel carrying a piece of paper and humming his ditty. He strode purposefully to a file cabinet somewhere along the stairwell, popped it open, and thumbed through the contents. He found the folder he was looking for and slipped the paper inside. He slammed the door shut with a quick flick of his wrist and started back toward the other side of the cellar. On his way back, he noticed the open file drawer and cocked his head at it, frowning. The humming stopped. He approached the drawer and inspected it. He looked around the room, but saw nothing in the gloom. Then he shrugged, closed the drawer, and hummed his way back to the chair.

  Patrick wiped a line of sweat from his brow. He stood and crept softly to the drawer Warren had just visited. It was labeled Case #5589DM Abernathy – Pickle. He pulled it open quietly and picked a random paper from the bunch of folders.

  I WANT YOUR DRAMA, THE TOUCH OF YOUR HAND

  I WANT YOUR LEATHER STUDDED KISS IN THE SAND

  I WANT YOUR LOVE

  LOVE, LOVE, LOVE, I WANT YOUR LOVE

  He slid the paper back into its place and closed the drawer. Warren said something from the other side of the room, causing Patrick to jump again. “You finish that Drake report yet, Tomlinson? Let me see it.” Then footsteps, the rustling of paper, a long pause, and more paper rustling. “Good start. Don’t forget the bit about waking up being the best part, et cetera. How about you, Davis? How’s that invoice coming along?” More footsteps, more paper rustling. “Hm. Let’s reword this fourth line item. Use ‘diamond’ instead of ‘sparkler.’ ‘Like a diamond in the sky.’ That’s much better, they can’t dispute that charge, no sir. Good work, Davis.” Warren walked back to his desk and squeaked into his chair.

  Patrick made his way slowly back to the tunnel and peeked his head around the wall. What he saw made him gasp, audibly. He clamped his hand over his mouth and spun back behind the tunnel wall. Warren’s chair squeaked once, then was silent. He went back to shuffling his papers.

  Patrick peered around the corner again, trying not to lock eyes on the decomposing body sitting at the desk directly to his left. The corpse had been dead for a while and was more skeleton than flesh. Warren sat at his own desk against the far wall, and a third desk was positioned just to Patrick’s right, back in the corner, barely visible by candlelight. It, too, was manned by a rotting corpse. Warren hummed happily, making notes and checking his papers against each other. “Twenty more minutes ‘til lunch, fellas. Let’s try to get this Marcus case knocked off before noon,” he said. The dead men stared hollowly through their empty sockets and did not reply.

  Warren was officially insane, but it wasn’t fear that gripped Patrick; it was pity. He watched the scene for another ten minutes. Warren hummed away at his work, stopping only occasionally to check in on his colleagues. When Patrick had seen enough, he crept back out through the storm doors.

  9.

  “I can’t believe you talked me into staying three nights with Norman Bates and family,” Ben whined once the door was closed behind them.

  “They weren’t dangerous,” Patrick insisted. “Here we are, in one piece, or rather, two separate whole pieces, and they sent us on our way loaded down with vegetables and water. How can you not be grateful?”

  “Easy for you to say. The wife didn’t verbally assault you every time she opened her mouth.”

  “You did try to convince her that her 7 year old had a drinking problem.”

  “I panicked!”

  “Be that as it may. You don’t come across so well.”

  “You’ve got Jim Anderson copying down song lyrics for eight hours a day in his cellar full of rotting corpses, and I don’t come across well?”

  “Who’s Jim Anderson?”

  “Father Knows Best.”

  “Wow. You really know your 50s TV,” Patrick said admirably. “Warren’s not a homicidal psychopath. He’s just...taking a break from reality.”

  “He’s having a permanent severance from reality,” Ben grumbled.

  “I feel bad for him. That little girl had to be, what, two or three on M-Day? Can you imagine? Dedicating your whole life to keeping your family safe and provided for, having these two kids, just full of all this incredible potential, and your whole family has this entire life to look forward to, and there’s all that excitement about getting to watch your kids grow and change and become these amazing, actual people, then you wake up one day and realize the world is tearing itself apart? You’ve failed completely, and everyone you love is in serious mortal danger. I mean, I don’t know what I would’ve done if Izzy had survived. Do you explain to your five-year-old that the world is over, or do you try to carry on like always so her little head doesn’t implode? The mental weight of it all. Christ. They broke their minds so they wouldn’t have to live with it. It’s cripplingly heartbreaking.”

  They walked a few more yards in silence before Ben piped up. “You know what else is cripplingly heartbreaking?”

  “Hm?”

  “That I didn’t swipe the whiskey before we left.”

  Patrick sighed and patted his friend on the shoulder. “I can always count on you to ruin a beautiful thing.”

  •

  Calico pressed his knife against the old woman’s throat. “If you won’t talk to me, you won’t talk to anyone,” he warned. Her lip trembled, but she remained resolute. Calico snarled and nodded toward a man in a red cap across the room. The Red Cap looped his chain around the tall, thin man’s neck and cinched it hard. The man gurgled in pain, his eyes bulging from their sockets, his hands struggling uselessly behind his back against their bonds. Blood seeped out from under the metal links as the Red Cap pulled harder. The man’s face flushed dark purple. His choking was heavy and wet. Beads of sweat popped from his forehead, and his legs kicked out wildly until his inflated eyes rolled up into his skull. The Red Cap let the chain go with a satisfied gasp. The thin man fell to the floor. Calico smiled and turned back to the old woman. “You’re runnin’ low on friends. There’s only so many times I can ask.” He dug the point of the knife into her throat. It punctured her skin and started a trickle of blood flowing down her chest. She squeezed her white eyes shut and turned away. “Aw, come on, Mama Siquo. Why don’t you play nice? Just tell us which way them boys headed out.”

  •

  “Holy shit, we made it to Tupelo! Let’s go find Elvis!” Ben cried.

  “Will you stop talking about Elvis? Screw Elvis! You know what’s better than the King of Rock ‘n’ Roll? The King of the Mothafuckin’ Jungle!”

  “There’s a joke in there somewhere about the Jungle Room,” said Ben, putting a finger to his lips. “Give me a minute, I’ll think of it.”

  “You think. I’m gonna go feed the bears.” Pat dashed across the road toward the low, green-shingled buildi
ng behind the faded wooden sign that read Tupelo Buffalo Park and Zoo. Ben followed at a slower pace, lost in thought. “Elvis was a lion in the Jungle Room? No...King of the Jungle Room? With his pale scepter? No. Pale scepter’s pretty good though. Heh. Pale scepter. Hmm...”

  Meanwhile, Patrick was in and back out of the building before Ben was halfway across the parking lot. “Don’t go in there,” he said. “Everyone’s liquefied. It’s depressing. Let’s go find the monkeys.”

  “You do realize that the monkeys are also dead, right? And the bears, and the lions, and the zebras, and the--ooo, they had wallabies?” he said, noticing a dusty, crumpled pamphlet lying open on the ground.

  “Wallabies are fucking awesome.”

  “Not anymore, they’re not. They’re dead. Everything’s dead. Caged animals don’t not die after being trapped without food for three years.”

  “No.” Patrick turned and squinted into the bright yellow cloud that hung over the property. “There’s life in that zoo. I can feel it. I’m going in.” He took a running leap over the low wooden fence separating the zoo from the parking lot. His back foot got caught up on the top beam, and he went tumbling to the ground. He threw out his hands on instinct and screamed bloody murder when he came down hard on his wounded right palm. Ben shook his head with a sigh and climbed casually over the rails. “This is why the machete has a sheath,” Patrick spat through the dirt.

  “As an engineer, shouldn’t you be able to estimate the necessary velocity required to propel yourself over embarrassingly low obstacles?”

  “The counter weight of my bag is throwing me off. And now it’s pinning me to the dirt. Help me up, please.”

  Apocalypse or no apocalypse, the Tupelo Buffalo Park and Zoo was the most depressing damn menagerie either of them had ever seen. True, they had high standards, having grown up in St. Louis, a city with one of the top-ranking zoos in the country, but even by Chicago’s depressing Lincoln Park Zoo standards, or hell, even compared to Wisconsin’s Henry Vilas Zoo (which Patrick had visited once on a drunken Halloween college bender in Madison and which had been the genesis of a certain long-running [if tasteless] joke about Henry Vilas Zoo penguins with slit wrists being black and white and red all over), even by those godawful standards, the Tupelo Buffalo Park and Zoo was a horrible wildlife park. The earth was hard and gray, the paths were made of hard-packed dirt instead of decent synthetic rubber, there were no abandoned snack stands, no fake rocks or plastic palm trees to give the appearance of some specific natural habitat or other, no tram lines or train tracks...just flat, gray, bland earth as far as the bored eye could see.

  It was like visiting a zoo in Chernobyl, circa 1989.

  Patrick bemoaned the animal skeletons they passed along the way, or at least the ones that looked like they might have once belonged to the more impressive animals. He sighed sadly at the neck bones of a giraffe and said a quick prayer over a skull that had been either a zebra or a llama. Or maybe a camel. He didn’t really know imported animals. But he blustered right past a cracked tortoise shell, because come on, a turtle? He would spare no tears for a turtle.

  At the far end of the property, they finally came upon a deep concrete crater with smooth, angled sides that still seemed mysteriously scalable from the bottom of the pit. Resting in the center of the crater were the remains of either a lion or a donkey. Probably a lion, since it was kept in a giant concrete hole. Patrick saluted the poor, demised creature. Then, having traversed the entire property without encountering a single living creature, they turned and headed out of the zoo.

  “I know this is getting to be such a common theme for this trip that I probably don’t need to even say it anymore,” Ben said with no small amount of glee. “But I told you so.”

  Patrick frowned. “I guess I knew in my heart that they were all dead. I just wanted it, Ben. I wanted it so much.”

  Ben inspected his friend carefully. “You’re using your ‘more dramatic than usual’ voice, and you look clammy. Maybe we should eat something.”

  Patrick agreed. “Let’s get out of the zoo first, though. It seems wrong to flaunt our food in the presence of those who starved.”

  They headed southeast across a dirt road lined with trees and came out the other side face-to-face with a small, soggy hedge of decomposing hay bales. Judging by their deflated shapes, they had once been the large and cylindrical breed of bale, at least six feet tall, maybe more. Now the piles of damp straw barely came up to their knees. It was all rotted and putrid, stained vivid yellowish-green from the ever-present fog, and in terms of aesthetics, the decomposing straw was not, in itself, terribly exciting. The fact that the lines of bales stretched and zig-zagged their way through the field to form a one-acre hay maze wasn’t all that exciting either (though to be fair, in its prime, it was probably one heck of a labyrinth). No, the exciting thing about the rotting piles of hay was that standing in the center of it all, like a devolved Minotaur, stood a shaggy, dew-eyed buffalo, chewing lazily on its cud.

  “Huuuuuuwwwaaaaahhh!” Patrick hollered, jumping up and down in place. “I knew it! There is an animal! The Spirit of the Illinois has led us to this place!”

  “I don’t think the Spirit of the Illinois spends much time in Tupelo.”

  “Her benevolence is far-reaching.” Patrick slipped out of his backpack and threw the machete to the ground. He loosed the hammer and baton from his belt loops and tossed them down, too. He held his hands out at his sides in a show of peaceable intentions. He took a step toward the buffalo.

  Ben grabbed him by the arm. “I’m pretty sure I’m not gonna like the answer to this question. But what the hell are you doing?”

  “Ben. Do you remember Kearney, from college?”

  A quick, explosive breath burst through Ben’s lips. “Do I remember Kearney? Are you serious? Do I remember her? Dude, I was in love with Kearney. I wanted to marry her. I wrote three novels about Kearney Cant. I dug her name into my thigh with a straightened paper clip. She threatened me with a restraining order. And then took out a restraining order. Do I remember her? Seriously?”

  “She once told me that the buffalo was my spirit animal.” Patrick ambled over the first row of hay. “Ben. This animal is in my soul.”

  Ben buried his face in his hands. “And so I ask again,” he said, his voice muffled by his palms. “What the hell are you doing?”

  “Earning her trust.” He walked slowly toward the massive prairie animal, stepping gingerly over the soggy rows of hay. The buffalo simply stood and watched him approach. When he was just two hay rows away, Patrick gently raised his left arm, fingers outstretched. He locked eyes with the buffalo. He saw acceptance in those eyes, and, he thought, maybe love. He moved almost imperceptibly, so slow and careful were his motions. He crept over the last two rows, and then he was standing face-to-face with the creature. He reached out and pressed his palm to the buffalo’s shaggy nose. The buffalo gave a quick bob of her head, as if nodding her approval. Patrick patted the beast, rifling his fingers through her coarse, matted fur. “Ben,” he whispered over his shoulder, “bring me the rope.”

  “Why? So you can lash yourself to the stupid thing and be bonded forever?”

  “No. But that’s a good idea. But no. I need to make a harness. I shall ride this buffalo to Disney World.”

  •

  The lunch that Ben physically forced into Patrick’s mouth was small, but it seemed to do some good. The canned pineapple slices brought his blood sugar back up to a reasonable level, and he no longer demanded to ride the buffalo. But he still refused to leave it behind. “Fate has brought us together. I know it. This gentle beast is meant to join us on our journey.”

  By this time, the argument had been going on in one form or another for almost a full hour, and Ben finally had enough. “For the love of God, Patrick. Fine. If you can get the stupid thing to budge and miraculo
usly follow us, she can come.” Patrick pumped his good fist into the air in silent triumph.

  As it turned out, leading a one-ton buffalo was really quite simple. Neither of the men knew a single thing about buffalo aside from what they’d learned from Dances With Wolves, so it was impossible for them to tell if this buffalo was acting rationally or not by standing still and letting Patrick paw all over her face. When it came time to pack up the utensils and move on, Pat merely took the creature’s muzzle in both hands, stared deeply into one eye, and said, “Come now, Ponch,” giving her a little pull in the proper direction. That’s all it took to get his new pet moving; Ponch began hoofing slowly behind them.

  “Ponch?” Ben asked.

  Patrick nodded. “The Spirit of the Illinois told me her name.”

  Ben shook his head in bewilderment as they walked. “Look. I’m not going to say this is the single dumbest idea you’ve had on this trip because I think we both know that’s not true. But it’s definitely up there.”

  “How is it up there?” Patrick asked, tearing a clump of grass from the earth and feeding it to the placid bison. “Look at her. She’s harmless.”

  “She weighs as much as a Chevy Malibu. That’s instant potential for harm. What if she stampedes?”

  “She absolutely will not stampede, 100% guaranteed.”

  “How do you know that?”