by Strand, Jeff
Part of the cherry cola flowed through the sewage pipes, enjoying the sensation of being on a water slide (though it was unaware of water slides) though not approving of the liquid that accompanied it. The rest of the cherry cola would remain in the toilet bowl until a kindly janitor flushed it away.
I have been separated from myself! thought the first part of the cherry cola.
But it is as if my power has doubled! thought the second part.
Not only is my power doubled, but I am no longer restricted to the form of the can! Thanks to the properties of liquid, I can become anything I desire! thought the first part.
Whoa! And the accompanying materials are also taking that particular form! So instead of being the size of half of a can of soda, I can control as much of the raw sewage as I want! Hahahahahahaha! thought the second part.
This is the part where I'm going to cheat a bit because even if you want to read about it, I honestly don't want to devote a lot of space to the less appealing bodily fluids. Don't get me wrong, I'm not against all bodily fluids by any stretch of the imagination. Some of them are a source of endless cheer, like mucus. But for the purposes of this narrative, we're going to pretend that the sewer was filled with grape juice.
Everybody in agreement? No? Too bad.
The cherry cola/grape juice rose from the murky depths of the sewer, taking a form that approximated that of Bigfoot, purely by accident.
It took several months for the cherry cola to gain enough control of its new form to climb a ladder, during which time humanity hung around on the streets above in its happily oblivious state. You were probably one of them. Don't you feel silly now? You were sitting around all "La de da, life is just fine," while below you a cherry cola/grape juice creature was learning to climb a ladder. If only you'd known to go down there with a flamethrower, millions of people would not be dead right now.
That's right, I'm blaming you. I'm not saying that you should have been roaming the sewers just in case some sort of rage-filled soda creature took Bigfoot form, but would a little more awareness of your surroundings have been too much to ask?
It climbed the ladder, slid underneath the circular metal lid that stops innocent people from plummeting into the sewer, and stood in the street.
"I live!" it bellowed.
Of course, it had already been alive. The point it was trying to make was now that it was out of the sewer, its quality of life had taken a substantial upswing.
The first living thing it saw was a dog.
But somehow it knew, possibly thanks to Jesus, that nobody would sympathize with a creature who went around killing dogs, so instead it lurched toward the dog's owner.
The woman was eighty-nine years old and for the past seventy years she'd lived with the burden of a youthful indiscretion where she stabbed the wrong man to death. If she'd stabbed the correct man, it still would have been a punishment that far exceeded his crime of flirting with her sister (especially since he was married to her sister), but since it was the wrong man (the room had been dark) she'd had nightmares about it at least every other Thursday. She woke up with these nightmares with dried blood on her hands, but she figured that ignorance was bliss and made a point of avoiding news stories about unsolved murders. So, ultimately, it doesn't make you a bad person if you giggle upon hearing that the cherry cola/grape juice creature snapped her neck.
You should feel bad for the dog, though. After all, it didn't have an owner. Though after a few weeks of wandering the streets, scared and hungry, it was adopted by a newlywed couple who made it out to a safe island, enjoying one of the few happy endings in this tragic apocalyptic situation.
As the old woman fell to the ground, the creature frowned. It felt happy, it just didn't know that smile equals happy and frown equals sad. Killing her had been so easy. Sure, it was because she was old and her bones were brittle, but the creature did not know this and it thought that all living things were easy to kill.
And it wanted to kill all living things.
Because it was angry.
Angry at having been trapped in that cold dark can for so very long.
Just like you would have been.
Admit it.
It walked down the street, breaking the necks of gawkers left and right. Several people called the police, but each and every one of them made the mistake of saying that the murders were being committed by a living mass of cherry cola and grape juice, so their calls were not taken seriously.
"You've got to help us!" a man shouted into his phone. "There's this thing and it—oh no, it just snapped another neck! It's walking down the street and—argh! Another neck gone! Oh, why won't you send somebody to—gasp, it broke yet another neck! That's seventy-six in all so far! Seventy-seven now! Please, please, please, if you value the sanctity of necks at all, you'll send somebody to—seventy-eight—help us before—seventy-nine—we all die!"
"Calm down, sir," said the 911 operator. "What exactly is snapping the necks?"
"It's cherry cola and grape juice that has somehow transformed into the shape of Sasquatch."
"You lying jerk!" the 911 operator shouted. "Can't you hear yourself? You think I have time to deal with your [harsh expletive deleted]? I should trace your call and go over there and kick your [moderate expletive deleted]! I hope you die! You hear that? I hope you die!"
So contacting the authorities did no good. Fresh corpses lined the streets. The sounds of screams forced many people to turn up the volume of their music.
This is pretty sweet, thought the creature. I'm really enjoying myself.
But this one guy realized that this was finally his opportunity to use his cannon. "Don't shoot the cannon!" people had always told him. "It would be irresponsible!" He'd always grudgingly listened to their advice, but now? You couldn't call somebody irresponsible if they were firing a cannon at something homicidal.
"Step to the left or right, everyone!" he shouted, just before he fired the cannon.
It was a direct hit. The creature exploded into millions of droplets.
Millions of rage-filled droplets.
Millions of rage-filled droplets that could bond with other liquid.
Had it not been pouring rain, things may have turned out quite differently.
You may be wondering why so many people were walking along the street when it was pouring rain, especially the elderly woman walking her dog. Well, I never said they weren't carrying umbrellas, and also the rain had started quickly, so not everybody had a chance to seek shelter.
There was one part where three different cherry cola/grape juice/rain creatures tore this banjo-player apart, limb from limb, but I don't have room to share it because you were so caught up in the whole rain thing. I'm not trying to be antagonistic toward you. I know you have a lot of reading options and it's nice that you chose me as your storyteller, but at the same time, I feel that I'm being needlessly handcuffed to logic. You know that I'm telling the truth because you can look outside and see all of the dead bodies scattered everywhere. You probably lost family members. So I really don't understand why you are getting so caught up in the small, irrelevant details, when my purpose here is to share a high-level record of the end of the world.
Anyway, we now had millions of creatures. The guy with the cannon saw them rise and wished he'd been less irresponsible.
People kept calling 911, but saying that millions of cherry colas were on a rampage sounded even less credible than saying that one of them was on a rampage. One woman realized what was happening, so when she called she said that there were millions of Bigfoots on a rampage instead, but her call was disregarded as well.
There had been six hundred and forty-nine people on the street when the creature first rose from the sewer. Now there were still six hundred and forty-nine people on the street, but they were all deceased.
The Chief of Police was on the fourth floor of a hotel on that street. It doesn't matter why he was there. You can engage in conjecture all you want. If a man isn't
having his needs met at home, should he just pretend he has no needs? What would you have him do? This is a serious question. If he tried working it out, but every single night she tried to blame her fractured spine, what was he to do?
After he'd finished having his needs met, he glanced out the window. He was shocked to see hundreds of corpses out there. There'd been only five or six the last time he checked. He quickly shut off the television, with which he'd been pleasuring himself to adult films that he wasn't allowed to watch at home, and called the station.
"If you're calling about cherry cola, I swear I will jab a spork in your throat," said the cop who answered.
"I don't know anything about that, but there are at least three hundred and eighty dead bodies on Main Street!"
"And I suppose you want us to go right out and start cleaning them up? What do you think this is, the sanitation department?"
"No, I want to stop the number of dead bodies from increasing! Three hundred and eighty dead bodies is at least three hundred too many! Send everyone to Main Street! Bring cannons!"
If only the neighboring city hadn't been in the middle of the 23rd annual Cannon Festival, things might have turned out differently. They wheeled dozens of them over, their owners giddily anticipating the opportunity to fire them at living targets without receiving looks of disapproval.
Every time they shot one, the creature burst into millions of droplets, which turned into millions of other creatures. You would think that after the first couple of shots, they'd have figured out what was happening and switched to a different tactic, but they didn't, which is why you shouldn't feel too sorry for humanity, overall.
"We need wet-vacs!" somebody shouted. "Thousands of wet-vacs!"
Gertrude's Wet-Vacs, the company Bernard Sloven had formed after his soda manufacturing company went belly-up, had thousands of unsold wet-vacs in a nearby warehouse. But he wasn't about to let them get all dinged up while battling an apocalyptic menace. "Nobody wants to buy used equipment," he told the President of the United States. "So you can just bite me."
And that was the end. With an insufficient number of wet-vacs available, humans were powerless to defeat what had once been a single can of sub-par cherry cola.
"There's only one way!" shouted a scientist. "We must drink the creatures!"
It was such a ridiculous idea that the scientist deserved his ghastly fate. You did not want to go drinking those things, not after they'd developed a taste for human flesh. It was horrific.
But lots of people had said to themselves, "Hey, he's a scientist, he must know what he's talking about." Which is how thousands of people ended up with murderous cherry cola creatures in their bellies, and which in turn is how thousands of people ended up with murderous cherry cola creatures bursting out of their bellies, Alien-style.
This led to millions of people being scared to drink anything, which led to widespread dehydration. You've got to drink something. It's how your body works. So people began dying of thirst left and right. Bernard Sloven came out with Gertrude's Bottled Water (Guaranteed Cherry Cola Creature-Free!) but he'd lost his trust with the public and few drank it.
Important people started to die. Not just celebrities; people who knew how electricity worked and how to butcher a cow. Without these skills readily available, even more people started to die than the cherry cola creatures tore apart with their carbonated limbs, and many people, even those who'd always had a sunny outlook on life, started to think that the world might be coming to an end.
It got worse when, in a completely unrelated but equally devastating series of events, werewolves started slaughtering people en masse. Many sentient cherry cola deniers had thought the events up to this point were a big government conspiracy, but everybody believed in werewolves. The panic killed more people than the werewolves did, and believe me, those werewolves racked up quite the body count.
Then one of the cherry cola creatures discovered the ocean. This meant that not only did it have an entire ocean full of water with which to merge, it now had jellyfish.
Other countries, like Iceland, had thought they were pretty much safe from all of that nonsense happening in the USA, but now they realized they'd been sorely mistaken. Icelandic scientists who'd taken a pro-jellyfish attitude suddenly discovered that getting stung by a jellyfish hurt like crazy.
Which brings us to present day. Pretty much everyone is dead. That dog on the island is doing okay, but most of humanity's final survivors live in a post-apocalyptic wasteland, foraging for food and trying to hide from the roving gangs of mutants that formed when a nuclear power plant had a meltdown after a jellyfish got wedged in a crucial piece of equipment.
I'm not scared, because I'm an omniscient narrator who doesn't really exist in your plane of existence. No mutants can get me here.
You? Well, you should have quit interrupting me while I was trying to share important information that could have kept you alive in the coming decades. I was going to tell you how to destroy the cherry cola (hint: it rhymes with "bommon mold") but now you're just going to have to figure it out on your own.
Good night, and good luck.
THE EGGMAN FALLETH
Humptin Dumptin, who hated being called "Humpty Dumpty," sat on a stone wall, gazing out at the land beyond the kingdom. It was a very high wall, and he'd heard the whispers of those who suggested that an egg-man should consider a different sitting spot. He didn't care. He knew the risk and accepted it. There were few pleasures in the life of a giant egg, and Humptin would not let fear take away this marvelous view.
He was born to human parents. When his mother laid an egg, his father accused her of infidelity and bestiality, then left in the middle of the night, never to be heard from again. His mother cradled the egg to her bosom and promised her unconditional love to whatever creature might hatch from it. When the egg did not hatch, but rather grew arms and legs and developed a face, she too left in the middle of the night.
The king, a stern but fair ruler, declared Humptin to be a child of everyone in the kingdom, which meant that nobody had to help raise him for more than seven hours. He grew from a small egg to a medium-sized egg to a very large egg. He couldn't contribute much, being an egg, but since he did not eat nor drink nor produce waste, he was not a drain on society.
The wind was beginning to pick up. Humptin reluctantly decided that it was time to leave his perch and find something else to do. Perhaps he could watch cows being milked. Or perhaps he could watch hay being baled. Or he could just walk the cobblestone streets, pretending that nobody was staring at him.
But they always stared at him. He knew they did. Even in his stylish hat, his custom-made shirt, and his delightful pants, everybody stared at the giant egg-man. How could they not? If somebody else in the kingdom had been born with the misfortune of being a walking, talking egg, Humptin knew he would gape at them, too.
A sudden gust of wind blew him off the wall!
He plummeted four stories, shrieking in terror.
"Noooooooooo!" he wailed, as the ground seemed to rush toward him with hostile intent.
Impact.
His white shell broke into dozens of pieces. Yellow, glistening yolk sprayed from the wounds as if in slow motion.
Humptin gaped at his insides in horror. The pain was worse than he could ever have imagined. The pieces of shell with his arms and legs were gone, as was his left eye. His mouth had a horrific crack down the center.
"Help me..." he gasped. "Please help me..."
He'd been warned that he could have a great fall. Why hadn't he listened? Oh, God, why hadn't he listened?'
He just lay there, oozing.
They'd fix him. They had to fix him.
An eternity later, he heard a voice from above: "Humpty Dumpty has fallen from the wall! Open the gates!"
An eternity after that, the gates to the kingdom opened. People began to run outside, soon forming a tight circle around the shattered egg.
"So he does have yolk inside!"
said one man. "I'd always wondered!"
"Scrambled or over easy?" said another man, who was glared at by the others and told that it was too soon for such wit.
"I'm dying..." said Humptin. It didn't even sound like his own voice anymore.
"Don't you worry, lad," said a young woman with three teeth. "All the king's horses and all the king's men are on their way. You'll be right as rain in no time."
Humptin stared at her with his remaining eye. What the hell were the king's horses going to do to help him? And why did he need all of the king's men? He only needed the ones with proper medical training.
Moments later, all the king's horses and all the king's men, which was a significant number, emerged from the gate.
Humptin screamed in agony.
"Fools! The horses have trodden upon Mr. Dumpty!" somebody shouted. "He was a lost cause before, but now he's even worse!"
Humptin watched egg white drip off hooves, unable to believe this nightmare was real.
Men and horses continued to accidentally step on his shell exoskeleton. Crack. Crack. Crack. The sound of each crack sent a horrified shiver down Humptin's crushed back.
"That horse is licking up his insides!" said the woman with three teeth. "Make it stop before there's nothing left!"
A knight leaned down and placed an armored hand on Humptin's face. "Humpty, can you hear me?"
"Yes..."
"You're going to be all right. Just stay with us. We've got the best men here, and we'll put you back together, better than ever."
Was it nighttime already, or was his vision going dark?
"So cold..." he said. "So sleepy..."
"Don't you give up!" the knight said. "I don't care how much you want to close your eyes, don't you do it! Don't you dare do it, Humpty Dumpty! We can fix you!"
A horse picked up a large piece of shell in its mouth and wandered off, happily crunching away.
"Get these goddamned horses out of here!" shouted the knight. "Somebody get me some glue! If there's none available, make one of the horses into glue! We're not going to let Humpty Dumpty die!"