Apocalypse Soonish

Read previous entries:
Day 1
Day 2
Day 3
Day 4
Day 5

50

Day 6

Dear Journal,

I awake to an empty home and find a note next to my “V” badge.

Take this. Find Hank in the sky. With, well — you might say — love, -GR

I grab the badge and make my way back to Hank’s Mad Ape Den. I don’t know what the gummi bear meant by “the sky” but…

Now I understand, for in the eastern sky, silhouetted against the sun, I see an enormous flying machine. It is in the shape of a chicken, with a zeppelin-like body and many whirring motors along its feet, wings, and coxcomb.

I run, desperate to reach the contraption before it takes flight. I reach the airfield and hide behind a rock as I look for a way in. Dozens of apes are loading large tubs filled with oysters and pearls into its metal bulk.

Suddenly I hear from behind me a pair of marching primates. I scuttle behind the far side of the rock and see, with amazement, that they are —

51

Carrying Virginia. And she is … ALIVE! (In her way.)

I stifle a cry. They are marching her, bound as before, to the flying metal chicken. I watch them drag her flattened, broken body on board but can see her head lolling from side to side in a not-dead fashion. My heart swells. Of course! She wasn’t really dead — she was playing possum.

The engines of the flying machine roar to life, lifting its massive bulk. Many strong ropes tether the craft to the earth. I run forward, desperate to get on board before Virginia and Hank take to the skies. I see an ape sawing the ropes one by one and recognize him as the leader from my initial capture. He sees me.

“Man!” he yells, and charges at me wielding his saw.

We enter hand-to-hand combat — his simian strength against my human wits, the saw poised above my head, now his. We crash against the final tether, which frays and strains with the enormous effort of grounding the flying chicken contraption. The ape leader wrests the saw from my hands and backs me against the taut rope.

“Now,” he says, “you die!”

He swings the saw at my midsection and —

52

Cuts the rope as I leap over his swing. At the height of my leap I grab the tail end of the rope and soar with the flying chicken machine into the clear blue sky.

I hoist myself into the monstrosity’s metallic belly. Another guard stands among the tubs of pearls. I grab him my the scruff and throw him into the abyss.

The time for diplomacy has passed, Journal.

I climb through a labyrinthine series of bulkheads, and emerge into the cockpit — situated at the beak of the avian airship. There I see something I will never forget for the rest of my days, however many or few they number —

53

Virginia, the necrotic possum with whom I had formed such a tight bond in so short a time struggles with all her feeble might as her ape captors lash her broken limbs to the very tip of the ship’s beak. They stand on a rickety scaffold that was built, it seems, for this very purpose. Wind shrieks through this open-aired cockpit

“You monsters!” I yell, stepping forward. They bear their yellowed teeth.

“Do you not get it?” a sardonic voice behind me says about the howl of the air. I don’t need to turn. I know who it is. “The ape, he can not get it as you say it in the way you did.”

“I’ll get to you next, chicken.” I say, and crouch into an athletic martial arts pose. The apes do the same from the scaffolding. They pounce at me and —

54

Trip, falling from the beak. I look down and see that Virginia used what little energy she had left to trip the apes with her prehensile tail.

I rush to free her from her bonds but the voice stops me once again.

“Go a bit on and I nix the big rat,” Hank says.

I turn slowly and see with terror, that —

55

This giant chicken has doubled in size since last I saw him. He rests, enormous, strapped to the hollow center of the airship with a series of suspension ropes. I see only his head, which takes up nearly half the giant chicken head exoskeleton of the ship. As he speaks he pecks at a giant tub of pearls by his side.

“What the hell is happening?” I ask, finally.

“I get men.” Hank says with drawling contempt. “Men get orb for me. I eat orb. I get big. I do how a hen has had a yen to do for eon. I fly.”

My mind begins to cloud at his strange hypnotic speech. Yes, I get it. He is a hen. He is a she! Wait a second, I’m becoming like them. Thinking like them. I hear the voice of Georgia Red and see her hazy ghost-like image at my clouding vision’s periphery.

“Remember your training,” she says. ""At least, remember the part before you fell asleep.”

I shake the cobwebs from my head and try to parse what Hank said. This chicken, who is a hen, not a rooster as I assumed in my sexist assumption of villainy, has enslaved humans to gather freshwater pearls for her, which grant her some kind of power to grow larger. Now she has built a flying machine to help her achieve the dream of all chickens since time immemorial: To fly.

“What about Virginia?” I say, looking sidelong at my friend as she approaches death for the second time. “How does she fit into your mad scheme?”

“One yen of the hen is to fly. But the big yen is to — “

56

“Not die.”

Again my mind fuddles at her strange riddles. How will strapping a possum to the beak of an airship help her —“

My rumination is cut short as the airship lurches suddenly. Hank laughs maniacally.

“Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!” she cackles, with deliberate pauses between each syllable. “The big rat can not die. I get the rat to die on me, and I get to be as she was. I get to not die. I am to be Ha Ank, the god of wit and all the big wet orb.”

The ship careens and plunges into descent. I’m thrown from my feet and somersault down the cockpit, past the beak, and into the air. Virginia’s tail whips out again and I grab its tip.

I stare up, along Virginia’s tail, past her flattened abdomen, through the cockpit, and into the gleaming eye of Hank the mad comic chicken as she sacrifices my undead marsupial companion in a crazed attempt to achieve life everlasting.

“Now you die!” She yells.

I look down. The mad ape den, directly below us, hurtles closer with impossible speed. I crawl up Virginia’s thick coat to say goodbye. I hug her with all my might and feel a strange enveloping sensation as we crash into the ground —

57

I open my eyes to an impossibly bright whiteness. I blink. I make out another color — orange.

I try to sit up but I can’t move. I’m trapped, somehow. I look down and see that I am inside some kind of sleeping bag. It’s moist and strangely malodorous. This is not how I imagined heaven to be.

I push myself out of the sleeping bag and realize — I was inside Virginia! That is, I had hugged myself into her marsupial pouch. Gross.

I look around and see that the other half of the white-and-orange structure I’m in has been utterly destroyed by the crashing chicken airship. Hank’s remains burn within.

How was I spared? I look back at Virginia, who blinks her eyes awake. She’s alive! Of course — I was protected in the crash by Virginia’s immortality!

“Do you know where we are?” she asks, a smile crossing her mangled snout.

I look up at the strange building. I know this place. It’s …

Whataburger! It’s the only recognizable sign of civilization I’ve seen since awaking from my frozen sleep. But that must mean this is — or was — Texas. What happened in the Lone Star State to cause all the destruction?

Then I remembered — I was frozen shortly before Meh.com’s third birthday. Meh’s operational headquarters was in Dallas. They must have done something on that day so heinous, so destructive, that it destroyed society and the world as I knew it.

“It was Meh!” I yell.

“Well, err, yes, well, about that — “

I turn and see Georgia Red looking brighter and greener than ever.

“I thought the last who knew about, well, that, had, umm, died out long ago. But then I saw your, as who should say, VMP badge and, well —“

I hug the confection with delight.

“What about Friend?” I asked. Georgia Red shook her head solemnly.

“Oh no … she didn’t make it.”

“Err, what’s that, then? I am shaking my head because, well, I have no idea who that is.”

…

I find Friend later, with the band of humans she had led in revolt against the mad apes, who lost their pluck when their leader crashed her airship into Whataburger. We are rebuilding, now. We have grand plans for a new society without violence, without suffering, and most importantly …

Without Meh.