Apocalypticon

by Clayton Smith

  “Think she’ll be able to get free?”

  “Probably. But not before we’re halfway to Florida.”

  “Aren’t we already more than halfway to Florida?”

  “I mean from here.”

  “Oh.”

  Patrick reached down and gently tapped the girl on the forehead. She stirred and raised her head groggily. She tried pulling away from the tree, but the rope held taut against her throat. She gagged and spat into the mud. Patrick smiled down at her. “Hi. Sorry to wake you. We’re gonna head out. We just wanted to say thanks for the hospitality.”

  “What’d ya do to ‘im?” she said, her speech slightly slurred.

  “To who? To the human flesh-starved maniac on a chain? We killed him. Were we not supposed to?”

  “You sonsabitches!” The girl lashed out with her foot and brought it up, hard, into Patrick’s crotch. He let out a squeal of pain and fell backward onto the ground.

  “He did it!” Patrick groaned, pointing at Ben. The girl kicked out at him, too, but he was well out of foot range. “You killed my daddy, you murderin’ sacks o’ shit!” She burst into tears.

  Ben screwed up his face at her. “Okay, I’m going to need clarification on two points, here. He was a zombie, right? Not just a really hangry hillbilly? I mean, you had him locked in a closet on a chain. Also, you dissected one in your shed. I usually try not to use idioms, but I feel like you’re kinda calling the kettle black right now.”

  “That one killed my sister,” she snarled, her voice thick with rage, “I didn’t have no choice. I cut him open so’s I could figger out what was wrong with ‘im so’s I could find a cure!” She spat a thick glob of mucus at Ben’s head. It splattered against his neck.

  “Classy.” He wiped the wet, green ball away with his sleeve. “Look, I’m sorry about your dad and all, but first off, he’s not your dad anymore, he’s a zombie, and you can’t cure zombie. And, second, he was going to eat us, so really, I guess I’m not sorry. At all.” Leanne screamed again and strained against the rope, scrabbling at it with her short, dirty fingernails, but the trunk was too large for her to reach the knot with her back to the tree. Ben nudged Patrick with his shoe. “Pat? Can we go? She looks really pissed. I want to grab a couple knives and go before she Hulks through the rope.”

  “Right behind you,” Patrick groaned, rolling slowly to his feet. He grabbed his bag and pulled out the folded Disney maps. “I’m keeping these,” he said indignantly. “Oh. Yeah. That’s right. They’re mine now.” He shoved them back inside, threw the pack over his shoulder, picked up his machete, secured his hammer, and thumbed his nose at the angry girl tied to the tree before wandering off to collect his buffalo.

  •

  Ponch turned out to be an incredible duster duster. She wiped out two more drug-addled lunatics that evening, and no less than 23 more over the next five days. Whenever they came to a creek or a river, Patrick spent at least half an hour washing the caked yellow goo out of her fur, but if there was no water nearby, Ponch didn’t seem to mind. She walked with her giant head held tall, wearing the duster blood like a coat of sticky arms. It was her badge of honor for saving their lives on a daily, and sometimes hourly, basis.

  Between the bond Patrick felt with her and the wondrous benevolence with which she saved them from the runners, it was with considerable and heartfelt horror that the two men watched her fall horns-first into a giant sinkhole in the middle of Nowhere, Alabama.

  “PONCH!” Patrick screamed. He dove onto the edge of the sinkhole just as the bellowing buffalo splashed into a pool of water hidden deep inside the Earth. “PONCH, PONCH, PONCH!” The chamber below was dark, but the sun provided enough light to see the buffalo splashing around in slow, confused circles down below. “Ben! We have to go after her!” he cried.

  “Yeah, let’s just drop into a dark cave and lift a buffalo out of it.”

  “Good. We’re agreed.” Patrick shrugged out of his backpack, unzipped it, and pulled out a sweater. “Here, put this on. That water’s gonna be cold.”

  “What’re you, nuts? We’re not jumping down there.”

  “We have to do something!”

  “Fine. I’ll say a few words. I’m an Internet-registered clergyman.”

  “She’s not dead!” Patrick roared. “Don’t you dare give her last rites. Don’t you dare! We’re coming, Ponch!”

  “Pat, she’s a thirty-ton animal trapped down a narrow hole. We’d need a super-winch to get her out of there.”

  Patrick looked up with thoughtful, glassy eyes. “I could build a super-winch,” he decided. Ben rolled his eyes. “No, I could! We need to find a scrap yard. Quick! Pull out your iPhone!”

  “You keep saying that. You know I never even had an iPhone, right?”

  “Ah yes. You communicated by carrier donkey, if I recall.”

  “I don’t like technology,” Ben huffed.

  “When you write my biography, don’t take unfair jabs at me for being a technophile.”

  “When I write your biography, I’m telling everyone you were a hermaphroditic hair dresser who had a love affair with a wild buffalo.”

  “It is bordering on love, isn’t it?” Patrick asked with a frown. “Come on, Ben. We have to at least try to get her out of there. How many times has she saved our lives?”

  “I don’t know. About a hundred.”

  “That’s right. 100 times exactly. And we’ve only known her a week! I’ve known you for seventeen years, and you’ve only saved my life once.”

  Ben swore he could actually feel his spirit crumpling in on itself. “Fine,” he grumbled. “But we can’t just fall in after her. Let’s look for another way in.”

  They set off in opposite directions, plunging through the undergrowth, pushing aside brush piles and saplings in search of a second entrance to the cave. They tramped a wide circle around Ponch’s hole, never going far enough from the center to be out of each other’s sight. “Hey. Remember that scene in Batman Begins where little boy Bruce falls into the bat cave for the first time?” Patrick asked, digging through a pile of branches on the forest floor.

  “Yeah?”

  “Ponch is like Batman,” he said. “She’s the buffalo Gotham deserves, but not the buffalo it needs right now.”

  “She would never fit into a batsuit.”

  “She’d look great in a batsuit. Schumacher’s batsuit, obviously. With built-in buffalo nipples.”

  “Don’t ever talk about buffalo nipples again.”

  “Oddly, this is not the first conversation I’ve ever had about buffalo nipples.”

  “Stop talking about buffalo nipples!”

  They were still searching for another way into the cave when they heard chanting in the distance. Patrick held up a hand to signal for quiet, which Ben misinterpreted as a call for a high five. “Knock it off,” Patrick said, swatting Ben’s hand away. “Listen. Do you hear that?” Ben pricked up his ears. The chants were growing louder now. Whatever voices were undulating were doing it in their direction.

  “Ooh-ye, blah-deh, domin-eh,” hymned a male tenor.

  “So-mah dee-bah doo-ba day,” intoned a host of male basses.

  “Dus-oh foam-oh scardin-eh.”

  “Vos-to oo-ve martin-ay.”

  Patrick and Ben exchanged confused glances. “I might be wrong here, Benny Boy, but I think we’re about to get into a street fight with St. Francis.”

  The chanting grew louder, and soon the strangers were upon them, cresting the wooded hill. And they did look something like monks; they wore coarse, blue, hooded robes, cinched at the waist with shiny silver ropes. Their hoods were deep and floppy, like giant manta rays that had attached themselves to the back of each brother’s head.

  “Tone-day la-fay ari-dos.”

  “Sacro sancto
formidos.”

  The brothers were split into two columns, with a solo tenor leading the pack. Because their hoods were too big for their heads, the front hems hung down to their noses, obstructing their collective view. As they chanted, the leader walked witlessly into tree after tree after tree. “Ooh-ley mal-tay domi--” Smack! “Kee-ree may-oh weer-ee--” Smack! But he plodded on, bravely weathering each blow to the face.

  Eventually, the monks meandered toward the sinkhole and passed blindly within two feet of Patrick. He reached out and tapped the leader on the shoulder. The brother screamed and flailed his hands in the air. His brethren, uncertain about this new ululation, but loyal nonetheless, shrugged and followed suit, screaming in a chorus of high-pitched shrieks and wiggling their hands to the heavens.

  “Goodness me!” the leader cried, yanking back his hood. His wiry brown hair exploded outward in a ring around a gleaming, bald pate. “Strangers in the woods!”

  “Strangers in the woods,” the two columns of friars whispered to each other, “strangers in the woods, hm.” Yet not a single one of them removed his own hood, so they could not actually see these strangers in the woods.

  “Sorry, didn’t mean to startle you, but we’re having a bit of a problem. Maybe you can help us. You seem to wind your way around these woods pre-tty well,” Patrick lied.

  “These woods are the corn upon which we thrive,” the leader said with a curt, but not unpleasant nod, “and we, naught but pilgrims upon which nibbling knowledge does tread.”

  “What is he saying?” Patrick hissed to Ben over his shoulder.

  “I think he’s agreeing,” Ben whispered.

  He turned back to the leader and thrust out his hand. “I’m Patrick Deen, this is my comrade-in-arms Ben Fogelvee, and the furry one stuck in the cistern over there is Ponch, our stalwart companion, whose aforementioned imprisonment in aforementioned cistern is the source of our aforementioned problem.”

  The unhooded brother shook his head. He seemed physically pained. “I’m sorry, I have a hard time understanding you. We’re not used to such expressive epithets of the common tongue,” he explained.

  “The common tongue?” Ben asked, raising an eyebrow.

  “Yes. ‘English,’ you probably still call it. We in the Post-Alignment Brotherhood find solace in the communicative power of Latsish.”

  It was Patrick’s turn to send his eyebrows skyward. “Latsish?”

  “Mm, yes. The lost language of the ancient Muroos, bequeathed to us in the chaos of the Alignment.”

  “Thuukos, Muroos,” the brothers murmured.

  “Your English sounds fine to me,” Ben said.

  The monk bowed. “Thank you for your kind, if counterfeit, words. I am Brother Triedit, Holy Father of our order. It is a true pleasure to make your acquaintances, Brother Patrick and Brother Ben, and we shall assist you with Brother Porch if we are able.”

  “Ponch,” Patrick corrected him. “And she’s a sister. Of the Order Patri-Benicus.”

  “A member of an order! A fellow true believer?” the monk asked, his eyes wide. He rubbed his hands together. “Then let us not delay! Take me to Sister Porch!”

  “Ponch.”

  Patrick escorted Brother Triedit to the edge of the sinkhole and pointed down at Ponch’s calm, quiet figure. “That is Sister Ponch. We require her replacement onto the Earth’s upper crust.”

  Brother Triedit frowned. “She is a buffalo.”

  “She is the buffalo to end all buffaloes,” Patrick said. “Is that right? Buffaloes? Or is it buffalo?”

  “Buffaloes,” Ben said.

  “Buffaloes. Buff-a-loes. Huh. Sounds weird.”

  “It does sound weird,” Brother Triedit agreed. “Are you sure?”

  “I’m sure.”

  Patrick shrugged. “He’s sure.”

  “Wait, now I’m not sure,” Ben decided. “Buffaloes? Buffalo? Buffaloes?”

  “Buffali?” Patrick guessed.

  “Hm. Buffali.”

  “We’ll take it under advisement,” Brother Triedit said. “But regardless, that, down there, is a singular buffalo.”

  “It is.”

  “Hm.” Brother Triedit nodded slowly. “Yes, I think we can take care of this for you. Brother Mayham!” he called to the group of monks huddled off to the side. One of the friars from the front of the line hurried over to the sinkhole. “Brother Mayham, please take care of this beast of burden.”

  “She is not a burden!” Patrick gasped.

  “Yes, Brother Triedit, of course,” Brother Mayham said, bowing respectfully and ignoring Patrick completely. He hurried off and began speaking to his brethren in hushed tones. Meanwhile, Brother Triedit placed his hand firmly on Patrick’s shoulder and squeezed. “The Post-Alignment Brotherhood will take care of your buffalo. But let us retire to the friary. You gentlemen must be hungry.”

  12.

  The “friary” turned out to be a system of shoddy tree houses connected by a poorly designed series of rope bridges. As far as Patrick could tell, Brother Triedit’s tree house was the only one with a full roof overhead. “Settle yourselves in here and meet us down in the dining pit for dinner,” he said, pointing at a picnic table set into a dip in the earth below. Then he disappeared across a bridge and into the chapel, an especially rickety tree house with a poorly angled cross nailed to a branch near the door.

  “Go on,” Patrick said as they hefted their bags onto the crude wooden floor. “Give me a six-hour rant about how this is dangerous, and how we shouldn’t stay here.”

  “Are you kidding me? It’s a society built around tree houses! Tree houses! Throw in a ball pit and a grilled cheese castle, and we’re pretty much staying in my childhood fantasy town.”

  “What’s a grilled cheese castle?” Patrick asked. But Ben was already out the door and on his way down the flimsy rope ladder.

  Brother Mayham and his fellow rescue monks were just returning by the time Patrick and Ben sidled up to the dining pit. “Dommy novus somi-naaaaay,” they chanted. Patrick was dismayed to see they had returned sans-buffalo. He approached one of the brothers and tapped him on the shoulder. The brother jumped in surprise. “How’d things go with Ponch?” he asked.

  “Oh, very well,” the friar said, “very well indeed. We managed to salvage your buffalo.”

  “Salvage?” Patrick said.

  “Yes, salvage. Isn’t that right? I’m sorry, we have such a difficult time with your English. What might be a better word to use?”

  “Saved?”

  “Ah. Saved, then.”

  “Can we go see her?”

  “Oh, no,” said Brother Mayham. “She’s being prepared!”

  “Prepared?” Patrick asked doubtfully.

  “Prepared. Yes? She is being made presentable? Is that the word?”

  “Presentable for what?”

  “For her introduction into our camp!”

  Patrick frowned. “I don’t know. I’d feel much better if I could see her.” But Brother Mayham just laughed.

  “Animals may not enter here without proper preparation,” he said. He patted Patrick on the shoulder and disappeared up into the trees.

  “Must be some sort of religious purification thing,” he said to no one in particular. Ben shrugged.

  “I’m sure she’s fine. She killed a whole football team’s worth of zombies, I’m sure she can handle some Gregorian weirdoes.”

  They feasted early on beefsteak that evening, and by the time the last rays of sunshine drained from the foggy yellow air, the plates had been cleared and Brother Triedit had retrieved a giant bladder flask from his tree house. He squeezed a stream of light purple juice into his mouth, swallowed happily, and passed the flask to his right. He smiled at his guests from across the fire. “Centerwine,
” he explained. “Our own concoction. Please, help yourselves.” The flask passed from brother to brother, each man taking a gulp of the wine before passing it on. Patrick took the bladder gingerly and inspected it in the firelight.

  “What is it?” he asked.

  Brother Triedit frowned. “Centerfruit, and other various fermentations.”

  Ben nudged him gently. “Don’t piss them off, they wield the God-force,” he whispered.

  “I don’t think you know how religion works,” Patrick whispered back. But he nodded his thanks to the Holy Father and squeezed a jet of wine into his mouth. He gagged instantly and spat the whole mouthful onto the table.

  “What’s it taste like?” Ben asked nervously. “Good?”

  Patrick’s face soured as he forced himself to swallow a second swig. “Moldy Windex and braunschweiger,” he decided. He handed the flask to Ben, who held it like he would a rotting skunk carcass. He pinched his nostrils shut and squirted a quick spray into his mouth. He swallowed with a grimace, his face shading a deep purple.

  “My God!” he gasped, shaking his head. “What is that shit?” He handed the bladder to the brother on his left, who grinned a broken-tooth grin and squirted a gulp happily into his gullet. Brother Triedit smiled too.

  “Centerwine stimulates mammarian development,” he said.

  Patrick tipped his head to the side. “Beg pardon?”

  The one called Brother Mayham cupped his hands in front of his chest. “It augments the boobular region,” he explained. “Bazoombas.”

  Patrick and Ben both groaned. “That’s very thoughtful,” Patrick said, wiping pale pink spittle from his mouth, “given the importance of a healthy bust and all, but we don’t have boobulars. Bazoombas. We have testiculars. Generally housed in this area.” He swirled a hand near his genitals.

  “It is customary for Brothers of the Post-Alignment Order to consume the centerwine in the hopes of achieving gender transmutation,” Brother Triedit explained.