Literal World

What if there was a world where every phrase was taken literally? Like “Do you take me for a fool?” literally means you  kidnap someone and bring them to a seedy underworld jester that’s, like, part of the Triad or something. And then “easy as pie” would mean that pie was widely known to have loose morals. (Oh, pie. You saucy harlot.) Or have you ever said “close but no cigar” to a kid? What if the kid was right? You’d cough up that damn cigar. People’s brains would rattle around on account of the marbles inside of them, which would frequently be lost by people with large earholes. Old habits would roam around the wild, full of bullet wounds and tough as gristle. There would be a law in place, as well, the final article of the Geneva conventions: “all good things must come to an end.” If a country doesn’t abide, well, then probably the entire world would end on account of them all nuking each other back to the Stone Age (and, of course, the explosions would literally rip the fabric of time and bring us back to the time of Neanderthals).

Man, this stuff is good. I should probably write some of this down… oh wait.

Fire (Revision of “Blood,” part 2)

Josh and Theo drove in amidst a shrieking stampede of people and zombies. Given the overwhelming mass of flesh in the streets, it got to the point where they couldn’t tell whether they were running over people or avoiding zombies. A horde of people stood on the car, trying to break their way inside.

“Just step on it!” Theo screamed. Josh closed his eyes and did as he was told.

Vera stumbled out of Tobias’s reach, jumping from the table and running for the car. She was lost in the sea of people. Tobias, his father’s revolver in hand, aimed his sights into the crowd. He inhaled deep to keep from trembling. These were people. Tobias could try to shoot to maim, but then they’d be dead anyway. Zombie chow. Either way, they were going to trample Vera.

“Damn it!” he growled, squeezing the trigger. Something grabbed Tobias’s leg, ‘causing his shot to fire high. He hammered his foot against the creature’s face, not sure if it was among the living or dead. Face bloodied the thing let go of his foot. He stumbled back up to locate Vera in the crowd. No sign of her. Or Theo.

Tobias’s heart seemed to slow. Vera’s body was lost in the stampede. Theo, who had flung his door open to save her, was quickly taken by the crowd, which seeped into Josh’s car. Josh was thrown out and crush under the wheel as the car crushed everyone in its way, driven by a hysterical creature bent on safety. Vera was dead. Josh was dead. Maybe not this second, but it hardly mattered whether they were dead or dying. Tobias fired off a few rounds into the crowd around Theo, but he was too late. A wave of bodies crashed in like the ocean tide. He aimed at Theo’s head to save him the pain of being eaten alive, but a crashed into Tobias, throwing him from his perch, his gun flying from his hands. The wind was crushed out of his lungs out of him, but he managed to keep his footing and keep from being trampled. Somehow, he was able to pick out Theo’s dying cries.

Tobias ran with the crowd to keep himself from being crushed under frantic heels. They were trying to break into the Rapturist compound, a place where they could get cover from the horde. He crouched low and covered his head. Gunfire was spraying the spearhead of this phalanx. The guards were making a futile stand to keep the populace from entering the cathedral. The gunfire quickly died out as the unstoppable wave of people and zombies crashed through the windows and doors like a storm hammering against a crag. Tobias’s clothes were torn, bruises smashed all over his arms and middle. He gained a reprieve when the large lobby fanned out and he was crushed a little less. The crowd dispersed and Tobias went with where his section of the flood carried him.

Tobias remembered Raj saying that zombies could fall down stairs, but they had trouble climbing up. Still, Tobias was just as afraid of the people as he was the zombies. There were fewer people that trickled downstairs. He pushed his way down, following this tributary of lost souls into the basement. The hallway ended in a locked door: “employees only.” The people at the door were ramming into it with their shoulders, trying to push it down.

“Out of the way! You!” Tobias grabbed the arm of the largest man at the door, a man he vaguely recognized from his time in the militia. The man was built like a linebacker, weighted down with almost as much fat as muscle. He’d do fine. “On the count of three, we kick at the same time! Okay?” The man nodded, panting from exertion.

“One. Two~! Three!” They took their rear legs and shoved them into the door. For a second, Tobias thought it was going to give. “Again!” They kicked again and hinges began to give way. A final time  and the door cracked partway off its hinges, ready to be tossed down by the mob.

“Let’s go! Let’s go!”

The place they entered was pitch black and reeked of piss and blood. “Light switch! Find it!” The fluorescent lighting flickered on. Tobias almost wished someone would turn it off. People were pinned or chained to the walls, dying or dead. It was some kind of dungeon. The crowd walked through the room, dazed and fearful. Tobias spied a young woman in fair condition, if a little shaken up. Though her hair covered her face, he thought he recognized her.

“Sarah!” She writhed, as if the name gave her pain. “You’re Sarah Scarborough, ain’t you?”

“She won’t talk. She’s been raped too many times to respond to anyone anymore.” Tobias jumped at the croak of a man’s voice; he couldn’t have been sure that the man hanging there on the wall was actually alive or not.

“I was hired by Sarah’s husband…” Tobias started to say. It sounded strange now, as if it had happened to him in another life and he was just remembering. “To find…” His friends were all dead. He paused, staring into space, remembering that sound that could have been Theo. No. It had unmistakably been Theo screaming for death.

“What’s your name?” the man asked.

“Toby.”

“I’m Hermann. Dr. Hermann Schulz.”

This brought Tobias from his more painful memories. “You’re Dr. Z.”

His chuckle sounded like sandpaper. “Not by birth, I assure you.”

“Let me try to get you two out of those chains.”

“It won’t matter,” Hermann said. “The guards will be down here. They’ll kill us all.”

“The guards are dead. The city’s being attacked by zombies.”

“You act like that’s a better way to die.” Sarah began wailing. Dr. Schulz lowered his head.

“Somebody shut her up!” a man yelled and pounced on Sarah’s throat.

“Brady!” Tobias remembered the big man’s name. “Help me out!” Tobias tried to pull the man off Sarah. Brady took his hair and cracked his head against the wall next to Sarah’s head. This didn’t help her screeching. “Help me get them free, Brady!” He wasn’t sure if the man was dead or not, but it didn’t matter, as long as they could control the crowd.

The crowd, suddenly aware of themselves and their safety, began freeing the prisoners as well. Whether they were remembering their humanity or whether they just needed something to do to fight the fear, it didn’t matter. They all tried their best to break or pry the chains from the walls. Some worked on the barricades, stacking shelves and the shattered door up before the zombies arrived. There were many loud and strange noises, but no zombies. Instead, a thick smoke began crawling along the ceiling.

“Stay low!” Tobias yelled. “Stay! Low! The smoke won’t reach us down here!”

“Hell it won’t!” someone yelled.

“You want to run up there and die, go ahead! If you’re gonna stay here, just shut up! We need the air!”

They squatted down, staying silent for a good twenty or thirty minutes before Tobias noticed that the man was right. The smoke was still getting thicker.

“I’m going to go scout it out! Stay low!” He wrapped his coat around his face. Brady helped him clear part of barricade. “Thanks, Brady. I’ll be back.”

“Live and let die, brother.” It was one of the mottoes the militia spouted off to get themselves pumped up for raiding homes.

“Live and let die.” He clasped Brady’s hand and slipped out.

Year of the Meteors

“Year of comets and meteors transient and strange!—lo! even here, one equally transient and strange!” ~ Walt Whitman

This year, a hale of meteors falls upon us like the retribution of those we’ve wronged, victims of genocide and spousal abuse alike. In Argentina, a man was struck down by a meteorite. It crashed through his ribs, cauterized the wound, killed him on impact. There was no sign of the rock; it had sunk into the earth. The Argentinians and much of the world took it as a message from God, that the man had been smitten.

For the first few seconds we met, all I noticed was her lips. They were full like two moons. I wanted to bite into them and suck whatever juices they held. The thought both repulsed and aroused me. I looked at her eyes and her hair next, and I was sad to find that she was very plain. Her eyes were gray and smooth like washed pebbles. No texture or depth to them at all. Her hair was coarse and unbrushed. The breasts weren’t amazing. If had seen any other part of her, I would have passed her by without another glance, but those lips…

There were cults. Lots of ’em. As our neighbors drank the Kool-aid, the grape soda, and the Mr. Pibb, we laughed. We all laughed as the world came falling down. What else could we do? It seems like the messenger for catastrophe is always Chicken Little. Sure, the news is terrifying, but who can take the bastard seriously? The smokers, the drinkers, they all killed themselves slowly, while the “sane” ones bit the bullet faster than an Ethiopian sprinter with a jet pack.

She looked burned out, like she’d been running around all her life and finally had the chance to stop. The dust kicked up behind her where she walked as if some small hammer had just beat itself into the Earth. “Was that a–” I started. She only smiled, pushing those reluctant lips deeper into her cheeks. I must have been seeing things, getting all hysterical over nothing.

We watched the religious wars on the T.V. Christians and Jews shot at Muslims. Muslims shot back. There was nothing different about them from before, except now people were shooting each other over whose interpretation of the apocalypse was correct. It was just an excuse, like everything else. All they ever wanted to do was shoot at each other.

When she leaned in to kiss me, my breath caught. I’d always closed my eyes before when I kissed a girl–it just seemed polite–but with her I kept them wide open. She must have sensed I was looking at her because she opened her eyes too. Those eyes, that had looked so bland before, were burning. I could see the burning trees falling onto burning people running into burning houses. I pushed her away. Her laughter split her perfect lips in two, exposing the hard, stained teeth beneath. I backed away and I’m glad I did. A meteor the size of a Buick flew out of the sky and swallowed her up. The aftershock broke my ankle and knocked the breath out of me.

When the year of the meteors had ended, everyone had their stories, their physical and emotional scars. Bridget’s poodle mix–yappy little shit–went up in smoke while she was taking it for a walk. Doug la Pier’s death shook everyone in town when one rock took him right in the head while he was passed out on his couch. None of the drunks crashed on the couch after that. Instead of kicking their husbands out, wives held their men closer. Everyone had a story after that year. But even in the midst of all that craziness, I wasn’t sure if my story was even real at all. I kept it to myself.