Anything But Zombies (7 page)

“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 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 one of them. 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 twenty-third 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 subpar 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 marketed 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 this was all 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 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 postapocalyptic 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 on 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.

Dillon's dad always said, “Political correctness is bullshit. Whatever happened to my right to have an opinion and piss people off?”

It seemed to Dillon that he was now living in his old man's nightmare. If the old bastard were still alive—well, human—he would have gone completely insane. The current society didn't just contain humans anymore . . . but Undead Americans as well and all the politics that went along with living side-by-side safely with one another.

The old man would have really hated Dillon's job at the main medical facility that restored the Undead Americans to as close to human as possible. He was heading there now, wondering if today would be the day he was finally reunited with his old man.

Dillon didn't know where his father was, if he was anywhere. For all he knew, the man had rotted away to nothing. There was really no way to know. He'd been halfway across the country at medical school when the plague had hit—he hadn't gotten to say good-bye to the man who'd raised him alone. For all Dillon knew, he was really gone forever. He just couldn't help hoping that maybe someday he'd help bring his father back.

The sun was just peeking over the horizon, casting warming rays of light on the dark city, bringing it to life. With the dawn, Dillon's wariness eased slightly. The anti-undead terrorists were in rare form lately, constantly picketing and threatening his place of employment. He dreaded going to work, often afraid he wouldn't make it home. The hope of finding his father was the only thing that kept him going day in and day out.

Dillon slowed as he came upon the first of five security checkpoints leading up to GenRest. Today there were twice as many armed personnel guarding the barricade than there normally were and there was a short line of cars in front of him. On most days, he just cruised right through, familiar to the guards who worked the checkpoints. Today was nothing like normal.

When it was his turn to pull up to the little shack beside the narrow area for vehicles to drive through, two men with guns stepped in front of his vehicle, preventing him from driving forward without going through them.

Dillon rolled down his window and an unfamiliar man in riot gear asked to see his ID.

“What's going on?” Dillon asked, handing over his identification.

“We're verifying who you are and your right to continue onward,” the man said gruffly, handing Dillon back his ID once he'd scanned the barcode on it, the security computer confirming Dillon's identity.

“I understand that,” Dillon said. “I was wondering what was going on with the extra security—has something happened?”

The man waved his hand and the men in front of Dillon's car moved out of the way.

“There's nothing for you to concern yourself with, sir,” the guard said. “Please, proceed.” He waved the next car forward.

Dillon drove through the checkpoint, feeling like he'd been forced to leave. He moved along with more questions than answers. Obviously something had happened, be it an attack or a threat. They wouldn't increase the security personnel for no reason.

He experienced the same treatment at all of the other checkpoints before heading across the compound to the main building where he worked: a towering six-story monolith covered with mirrored windows that glittered in the sunlight. The building looked impressive—it was one of the few places newly built after the plague. Medical advancements were the name of the game in this new society, since zombies were the majority of the population.

When Dillon arrived, he parked in the employee parking garage, more confused and wary than he normally was when he came to work. As he climbed out of his car, he took in his surroundings with a critical eye. There were a bunch of people coming and going—other employees. There were no zombies allowed in this part of the center, unless they had been previously restored; the company employed many of them as counselors for the newly processed.

“Undead Americans,” he corrected himself under his breath as he thought “zombies” yet again. He had to constantly remind himself not to be politically incorrect, a trait he attributed to his father, who'd never been politically correct a moment in his life. Dillon struggled to be PC in the new world, and for that reason he thought of his father every day he came in to work. His dad had always talked about political correctness like it was some kind of disease that ate at people's brains to make them stupid. Nowadays, what had once been political correctness were the laws of life. If you stepped outside those laws, you, or someone else, got hurt. Tolerance of those who were different was the name of the game and, if you wanted to survive, you learned to play it well.

Dillon walked over to the elevator (where two armed men stood guard, who were another new addition), swiped his ID, pressed his palm against the scan panel beside the door, and stepped into the transport as soon as the door opened.

After a smooth ascension, the doors slid open again and he stepped off the elevator, directly into the restoration floor's waiting room. He looked around at all the Undead Americans ready for their restoration appointments.

He continued on, past the desk where a receptionist was working on a computer, through the door to the back offices. As soon as he stepped into the hallway, his and Dr. Miller's new assistant slammed into him.

“What's the rush, Eddie?” Dillon asked, taking a step back to retain his balance.