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- She/Her/UnstoppableEvil
At one hundred days, the announcement was made. Well, maybe that was a bit generous. What really happened was some cyberterrorists rallied together and released the official documentation to the public, and once it was out, it was out. We could already see it - a tiny blackening in the corner of the sky.
At ninety days things had pretty much gone to shit.
Cars burning, stores looted, pretty much any horrendous violent crime you could consider was being enacted because - who gave a shit right? It was the end of the world. By now, the shape was unmistakable. Visible during the day now, too. The thing didn't really seem to care about the known laws of physics. Funny, neither did people. They were mostly just trying to get their rocks off.
We were going to die as we had emerged - a bunch of apes - intelligent enough to use spatulas to throw shit at each other instead of our hands.
By seventy-five days, the governments had all collapsed. It was hard for those in power to care about power when it was all coming to an end anyway. Better to go underground, take what they could, and survive.
And then there we were - just sixty days out.
Rocco was watching me out of the corner of his eye, the way he always did when he got wild hair. We'd been friends for most of our lives, and before the announcement, we'd been a couple of customer service representatives for AT&T. Spent the last 3 years screening phone calls and trying to keep our assistance time below 30 seconds. Which is fucking impossible if you want to help people. So you learned not to help people.
Rocco - whose name had been Robert but who'd changed it shortly after the announcement - was kicking the tip of his Converse into the dirt now. Like he was about to toss a baseball at my head. I wasn't particularly worried if he did - but that wasn't a flicker of the old ultra-violence in his dark, narrow eyes. That was an idea. A real, solid, honest-to-god idea.
I thought he'd done enough whippets by now that he'd lost the ability to have them.
"We should break into one of the bunkers."
I scoffed.
The governments had collapsed because most of the people operating them were relocating into these bunkers deep underground. Deep enough that they could survive the oncoming mass-extinction event for a couple of hundred years - maybe even longer. But the places were fucked up with drones and low flying planes and men in uniforms who'd been promised their place if they could keep the riff-raff out. There was one ten miles away from us.
"Come on, Charlie. What the fuck do we have to lose?"
He had a point.
We were dead anyway, right?
There was this little thing inside of me that'd been brewing since I was five. The first time I heard the words "uninhabitable by 2050" used to describe a potential future for our planet if the guys in charge didn't pull their heads out of their asses and do something about it. Somehow, in school, they also managed to make it seem like we were responsible.
"It's you and your mom living in your 3-bedroom apartment with your grandma, choosing to recycle that plastic instead of throwing it away, that's gonna fix things, little Charlie. Not the billionaire who owns 45 different major industrial complexes."
Always struck me as unfair that it was our fault when we barely had enough power to get through our day. That seed had been blooming for decades now. It wasn't just me either - a lot of that had come to a head at the 90 day mark when it all went to shit. I'd resisted the temptation and spent that day taking advantage of electricity while I still had it, enjoying the AC and playing Mario Kart with Rocco. Our manager was blowing up our phone because we were supposed to be in the office.
"Really, man? The world's gonna die. Fuck off."
Where was I?
Oh yeah. The existential seed.
It had sprouted - I finally had the balls to do something about it.
I glanced at Rocco and then stepped out from the metal awning in what had once been a parking lot but now resembled an oversized dumpster fire. With a yawn, I turned my attention to the shape in the sky. It was one of those summer nights that wasn't cool, but it felt cool compared to the heat of the day. Cicadas were screaming in the trees, and mosquitoes buzzing in my ears, and now a good portion of the sky was blocked out.
The day-night cycle was fucked.
"Jesus Christ, Charlie," Rocco exploded, jumping out from the bed of his truck to join me. "Why you gotta take so long to answer shit?"
"Just considering my options," I replied - a lopsided grin shifting a cigarette to the corner of my mouth. Those had gotten real big since people stopped having to worry about lung cancer.
"Options?!"
I honestly don't know why he put up with me.
Rocco was one of those guys who always had ideas and was always trying to find a way to fight his way out. At some point someone had put him in this box and told him if he didn't punch someone or call someone a fucking idiot, he'd die in there. But he was smart - smarter than me. Detail-oriented. He could have been anything he wanted - instead, we'd become burnouts together. At least he had some excuses - his home life sucked. Mine was fine till my parents took the easy way out.
I didn't want to get onto that train of thought, so I grabbed him by the shoulders and pushed as I yelled laughing, "yeah asshole - options!" I was taller than him by a solid 4 inches and so I was always doing shit like that. Rocco stopped me suddenly and punched me hard in the arm with a scowl. "It's time to get serious, Charlie."
So we got serious.
A few decades ago, there was this terrorist organization - they were these rad black masks and fought for independence against an oppressive and outdated monarchy. It was a bloody mess - innocents and criminals alike were killed, and everyone hated the monarchy and everyone hated the terrorists. But Rocco was obsessed with them. They were his candy. Since he'd turned 19, he'd been steadily collecting guns, ammo, camouflage, and masks - not because he'd ever intended on doing anything violent - he just liked having them because they put him one step closer to being one of his heroes. I was the only person who knew.
If we were likable, we might have had more people to join us. But the truth is, before everything went down we were both assholes. I've always been too distant, and Rocco's always been too blunt. But we compliment each other - because I never had to guess what Rocco felt about anything, and Rocco never had to worry about saying something that was going to piss me off enough to drive me away.
So it was just us.
Him - small, wiry, and wild-eyed.
Me - tall and thickly built - his personal bodyguard who was too much of a pussy to throw a punch.
It took twenty days to prepare, which doesn't sound like a long time, but our deadline was pretty strict. They started shutting down bunkers on day 40. There was this big one still open - everyone knew about it - the governor of our state was going to be there. It was in our city because we were far enough inland and in a dry enough area that he didn't have to worry about the water table like the other cities in our state did. Same one that was ten miles from where we lived.
There were a lot of corpses around the gates. They'd been carefully piled against the wire fence and away from the entrance - hundreds of them. People who had tried and failed to make a break for it. I figured they were kept as warnings. For the most part, they worked - a month ago, there'd been this big group of folks who'd gathered and thought if they all ran together, one of them might stand a chance at slipping in.
It was a dumb, desperate plan.
Ours was, too, but at least it was stylish.
See, every Thursday, there was a delivery of goods. And boy did they inspect the shit out of that truck. Every ration, every ounce of waste and water, every little thing was accounted for. They'd insisted that all it took was one extra person to get in to shave off the number of years they could survive in the bunker by decades. Maybe even hundreds of years. Life in the bunker was going to be tough. But at least it was life.
I don't think either of us thought we'd pull it off.
I think it was just - I dunno, a call to adventure?
When you spend your whole life following the rules and playing it straight, and the world breaks anyway, don't you deserve to go out with a bang?
Oh yeah, the goods.
The goods were thoroughly inspected - they looked in the back of the truck, in the bottom of the truck, they checked IDs - the whole nine yards. Except the thing was - Rocco and I recognized the logo on the side of the truck. It just so happened that their canned goods were being delivered from a local cannery that - no shit - was three blocks away from where we grew up. So all we had to do was get in that truck.
Here's where Rocco's guns came into the picture.
He insisted on keeping a black balaclava in his pocket so he could throw it on when we were inevitably discovered. I had to assume that the truck drivers had been promised some kind of stake in survival, too, because I couldn't figure out why else they might do it. Rocco though - he wasn't so sure. He said that there were examples all throughout history of folks doing shit like this - working for systems that in no way benefited them - even when they had limited time or when it seemed like the systems were breaking down. People just wanted things to feel normal.
But I couldn't remember a time when anything had ever felt normal.
Not in the way they told me it was supposed to feel.
One of the drivers at the cannery nearly burst into tears when I pulled my gun on him. I felt bad - my hand was shaking. Pistol-whipped him till he was out. Rocco got the stoic one, a woman who looked like she was in her mid-thirties with bangs and glasses. Had this kind of holier-than-thou attitude about the whole thing. "This is humanity's only chance!" She kept yelling that as she tried to scramble, tried to kick, tried to punch -
Rocco put two in her head.
Then it was go-time, because I don't know if anyone's ever told you this, but guns are not subtle things. Silencers and suppressors don't work the way they do in the movie. They just kinda soften the sound so that it can't be heard from quite so far away. But we'd fired the gun in the garage of the warehouse, and had a body to hide - so we threw her in this big ole meat grinder that was being used for wet dog food.
Which was nuts, right?
Were they seriously saving dogs in the bunkers?
Twenty minutes later, we were pulling up to the gate, IDs in hand, wearing the right clothes and saying the right words because Rocco had the balls to creep up and listen to their conversations through the fence over those twenty days. (See, the downside of a wall of bodies is that it means that they can't see you through the fence anymore.) Me, I was sweating. I've never been a really good liar, and one of the guys noticed me sweating and immediately called it out. Rocco told him I had food poisoning and really needed the can.
Maybe these guys were being worked too hard, because they waved us through.
Then we drove down. Down, down, down into a dark tunnel illuminated only by LEDS every twenty feet or so. We started unloading the truck, and this was where the improvisation started because now we had to figure out a way to stay inside.
One of the ways we'd prepped for this whole ordeal was by growing out our hair and beards - the idea being that once we were in, we could shave and cut them. I read somewhere once that if someone you don't see every day has that drastic of a haircut and that drastic of a shaved face, our little ape brains aren't going to pick up that it's the same person right away. Not unless you were memorable - and boy did we make a point to remain entirely unmemorable.
While we were unloading the food, Rocco told a story about his cat's diabetes. He didn't have a cat, but it was boring enough that people weren't listening. So when he said he needed to use the shitter they didn't care to stop him. Then again - maybe it was because it really was the end of the world? Either way, they didn't stop me either. Small comfort.
I couldn't stop thinking about the bitch with the bangs.
I couldn't stop thinking about the thing coming for us in the sky.
We shaved and cut our hair and found a quiet corner to seclude ourselves in.
It was easy. They'd built an entire city down there - but hadn't lit it. We managed to squirrel ourselves away in the dark even as dogs and men searched desperately for us. Rocco had this awful mix that burned our noses - kept the dogs at bay.
We were in.
The day the asteroid hit, we were sitting in our coveralls in the sewage processing center of one of the biggest shelters in the country. The impact was felt through the bunker - the artificial sun lamps swaying heavily and the power flickering dangerously, and voices all over screaming until the nuclear generator kicked up and it all came back. And then there was this heavy silence because we couldn't see - but we knew. Every plant, every tree, every bird, every little creature on the planet, except for those that'd been squirreled away down here, was vaporized in an instant. We held our breath, waiting for there to be some of the seismic platonic shifts that were the biggest threats to the bunker situation. But the safeguards held.
Rocco changed his name to Harrold.
I changed my name to Derryl.
Two nobodies smuggled away with the most powerful people in the world.
I can't wait to fuck a senator's wife.
At ninety days things had pretty much gone to shit.
Cars burning, stores looted, pretty much any horrendous violent crime you could consider was being enacted because - who gave a shit right? It was the end of the world. By now, the shape was unmistakable. Visible during the day now, too. The thing didn't really seem to care about the known laws of physics. Funny, neither did people. They were mostly just trying to get their rocks off.
We were going to die as we had emerged - a bunch of apes - intelligent enough to use spatulas to throw shit at each other instead of our hands.
By seventy-five days, the governments had all collapsed. It was hard for those in power to care about power when it was all coming to an end anyway. Better to go underground, take what they could, and survive.
And then there we were - just sixty days out.
Rocco was watching me out of the corner of his eye, the way he always did when he got wild hair. We'd been friends for most of our lives, and before the announcement, we'd been a couple of customer service representatives for AT&T. Spent the last 3 years screening phone calls and trying to keep our assistance time below 30 seconds. Which is fucking impossible if you want to help people. So you learned not to help people.
Rocco - whose name had been Robert but who'd changed it shortly after the announcement - was kicking the tip of his Converse into the dirt now. Like he was about to toss a baseball at my head. I wasn't particularly worried if he did - but that wasn't a flicker of the old ultra-violence in his dark, narrow eyes. That was an idea. A real, solid, honest-to-god idea.
I thought he'd done enough whippets by now that he'd lost the ability to have them.
"We should break into one of the bunkers."
I scoffed.
The governments had collapsed because most of the people operating them were relocating into these bunkers deep underground. Deep enough that they could survive the oncoming mass-extinction event for a couple of hundred years - maybe even longer. But the places were fucked up with drones and low flying planes and men in uniforms who'd been promised their place if they could keep the riff-raff out. There was one ten miles away from us.
"Come on, Charlie. What the fuck do we have to lose?"
He had a point.
We were dead anyway, right?
There was this little thing inside of me that'd been brewing since I was five. The first time I heard the words "uninhabitable by 2050" used to describe a potential future for our planet if the guys in charge didn't pull their heads out of their asses and do something about it. Somehow, in school, they also managed to make it seem like we were responsible.
"It's you and your mom living in your 3-bedroom apartment with your grandma, choosing to recycle that plastic instead of throwing it away, that's gonna fix things, little Charlie. Not the billionaire who owns 45 different major industrial complexes."
Always struck me as unfair that it was our fault when we barely had enough power to get through our day. That seed had been blooming for decades now. It wasn't just me either - a lot of that had come to a head at the 90 day mark when it all went to shit. I'd resisted the temptation and spent that day taking advantage of electricity while I still had it, enjoying the AC and playing Mario Kart with Rocco. Our manager was blowing up our phone because we were supposed to be in the office.
"Really, man? The world's gonna die. Fuck off."
Where was I?
Oh yeah. The existential seed.
It had sprouted - I finally had the balls to do something about it.
I glanced at Rocco and then stepped out from the metal awning in what had once been a parking lot but now resembled an oversized dumpster fire. With a yawn, I turned my attention to the shape in the sky. It was one of those summer nights that wasn't cool, but it felt cool compared to the heat of the day. Cicadas were screaming in the trees, and mosquitoes buzzing in my ears, and now a good portion of the sky was blocked out.
The day-night cycle was fucked.
"Jesus Christ, Charlie," Rocco exploded, jumping out from the bed of his truck to join me. "Why you gotta take so long to answer shit?"
"Just considering my options," I replied - a lopsided grin shifting a cigarette to the corner of my mouth. Those had gotten real big since people stopped having to worry about lung cancer.
"Options?!"
I honestly don't know why he put up with me.
Rocco was one of those guys who always had ideas and was always trying to find a way to fight his way out. At some point someone had put him in this box and told him if he didn't punch someone or call someone a fucking idiot, he'd die in there. But he was smart - smarter than me. Detail-oriented. He could have been anything he wanted - instead, we'd become burnouts together. At least he had some excuses - his home life sucked. Mine was fine till my parents took the easy way out.
I didn't want to get onto that train of thought, so I grabbed him by the shoulders and pushed as I yelled laughing, "yeah asshole - options!" I was taller than him by a solid 4 inches and so I was always doing shit like that. Rocco stopped me suddenly and punched me hard in the arm with a scowl. "It's time to get serious, Charlie."
So we got serious.
A few decades ago, there was this terrorist organization - they were these rad black masks and fought for independence against an oppressive and outdated monarchy. It was a bloody mess - innocents and criminals alike were killed, and everyone hated the monarchy and everyone hated the terrorists. But Rocco was obsessed with them. They were his candy. Since he'd turned 19, he'd been steadily collecting guns, ammo, camouflage, and masks - not because he'd ever intended on doing anything violent - he just liked having them because they put him one step closer to being one of his heroes. I was the only person who knew.
If we were likable, we might have had more people to join us. But the truth is, before everything went down we were both assholes. I've always been too distant, and Rocco's always been too blunt. But we compliment each other - because I never had to guess what Rocco felt about anything, and Rocco never had to worry about saying something that was going to piss me off enough to drive me away.
So it was just us.
Him - small, wiry, and wild-eyed.
Me - tall and thickly built - his personal bodyguard who was too much of a pussy to throw a punch.
It took twenty days to prepare, which doesn't sound like a long time, but our deadline was pretty strict. They started shutting down bunkers on day 40. There was this big one still open - everyone knew about it - the governor of our state was going to be there. It was in our city because we were far enough inland and in a dry enough area that he didn't have to worry about the water table like the other cities in our state did. Same one that was ten miles from where we lived.
There were a lot of corpses around the gates. They'd been carefully piled against the wire fence and away from the entrance - hundreds of them. People who had tried and failed to make a break for it. I figured they were kept as warnings. For the most part, they worked - a month ago, there'd been this big group of folks who'd gathered and thought if they all ran together, one of them might stand a chance at slipping in.
It was a dumb, desperate plan.
Ours was, too, but at least it was stylish.
See, every Thursday, there was a delivery of goods. And boy did they inspect the shit out of that truck. Every ration, every ounce of waste and water, every little thing was accounted for. They'd insisted that all it took was one extra person to get in to shave off the number of years they could survive in the bunker by decades. Maybe even hundreds of years. Life in the bunker was going to be tough. But at least it was life.
I don't think either of us thought we'd pull it off.
I think it was just - I dunno, a call to adventure?
When you spend your whole life following the rules and playing it straight, and the world breaks anyway, don't you deserve to go out with a bang?
Oh yeah, the goods.
The goods were thoroughly inspected - they looked in the back of the truck, in the bottom of the truck, they checked IDs - the whole nine yards. Except the thing was - Rocco and I recognized the logo on the side of the truck. It just so happened that their canned goods were being delivered from a local cannery that - no shit - was three blocks away from where we grew up. So all we had to do was get in that truck.
Here's where Rocco's guns came into the picture.
He insisted on keeping a black balaclava in his pocket so he could throw it on when we were inevitably discovered. I had to assume that the truck drivers had been promised some kind of stake in survival, too, because I couldn't figure out why else they might do it. Rocco though - he wasn't so sure. He said that there were examples all throughout history of folks doing shit like this - working for systems that in no way benefited them - even when they had limited time or when it seemed like the systems were breaking down. People just wanted things to feel normal.
But I couldn't remember a time when anything had ever felt normal.
Not in the way they told me it was supposed to feel.
One of the drivers at the cannery nearly burst into tears when I pulled my gun on him. I felt bad - my hand was shaking. Pistol-whipped him till he was out. Rocco got the stoic one, a woman who looked like she was in her mid-thirties with bangs and glasses. Had this kind of holier-than-thou attitude about the whole thing. "This is humanity's only chance!" She kept yelling that as she tried to scramble, tried to kick, tried to punch -
Rocco put two in her head.
Then it was go-time, because I don't know if anyone's ever told you this, but guns are not subtle things. Silencers and suppressors don't work the way they do in the movie. They just kinda soften the sound so that it can't be heard from quite so far away. But we'd fired the gun in the garage of the warehouse, and had a body to hide - so we threw her in this big ole meat grinder that was being used for wet dog food.
Which was nuts, right?
Were they seriously saving dogs in the bunkers?
Twenty minutes later, we were pulling up to the gate, IDs in hand, wearing the right clothes and saying the right words because Rocco had the balls to creep up and listen to their conversations through the fence over those twenty days. (See, the downside of a wall of bodies is that it means that they can't see you through the fence anymore.) Me, I was sweating. I've never been a really good liar, and one of the guys noticed me sweating and immediately called it out. Rocco told him I had food poisoning and really needed the can.
Maybe these guys were being worked too hard, because they waved us through.
Then we drove down. Down, down, down into a dark tunnel illuminated only by LEDS every twenty feet or so. We started unloading the truck, and this was where the improvisation started because now we had to figure out a way to stay inside.
One of the ways we'd prepped for this whole ordeal was by growing out our hair and beards - the idea being that once we were in, we could shave and cut them. I read somewhere once that if someone you don't see every day has that drastic of a haircut and that drastic of a shaved face, our little ape brains aren't going to pick up that it's the same person right away. Not unless you were memorable - and boy did we make a point to remain entirely unmemorable.
While we were unloading the food, Rocco told a story about his cat's diabetes. He didn't have a cat, but it was boring enough that people weren't listening. So when he said he needed to use the shitter they didn't care to stop him. Then again - maybe it was because it really was the end of the world? Either way, they didn't stop me either. Small comfort.
I couldn't stop thinking about the bitch with the bangs.
I couldn't stop thinking about the thing coming for us in the sky.
We shaved and cut our hair and found a quiet corner to seclude ourselves in.
It was easy. They'd built an entire city down there - but hadn't lit it. We managed to squirrel ourselves away in the dark even as dogs and men searched desperately for us. Rocco had this awful mix that burned our noses - kept the dogs at bay.
We were in.
The day the asteroid hit, we were sitting in our coveralls in the sewage processing center of one of the biggest shelters in the country. The impact was felt through the bunker - the artificial sun lamps swaying heavily and the power flickering dangerously, and voices all over screaming until the nuclear generator kicked up and it all came back. And then there was this heavy silence because we couldn't see - but we knew. Every plant, every tree, every bird, every little creature on the planet, except for those that'd been squirreled away down here, was vaporized in an instant. We held our breath, waiting for there to be some of the seismic platonic shifts that were the biggest threats to the bunker situation. But the safeguards held.
Rocco changed his name to Harrold.
I changed my name to Derryl.
Two nobodies smuggled away with the most powerful people in the world.
I can't wait to fuck a senator's wife.
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