R.E.M. and Other Musings

It all started with that god forsaken sword. Yes, the one so famously thrust into the stone, only to be removed by the ‘one true king’. Excalibur, if the myths are to be believed. But those stodgy old storytellers got it wrong, every last one of them. It didn’t bring peace or prosperity, it brought death and destruction on a scale that the world had never before witnessed. A virus of some sort swept across the globe, killing off a vast majority of the population. Those lucky bastards, they didn’t have to witness what came next. Droughts followed by floods, earthquakes and landslides, tsunamis and tornadoes. And that’s only the scientifically explainable stuff. For an entire month fire literally rained from the sky, fat droplets of flame and ash pummeling the ground. Then towns vanished along with everyone in them, a few cities went as well. The entirety of Tokyo simply ceased to exist, that’s 9.2 million people and 847 square miles that the whole world simply misplaced.

Experts, and I use that term very loosely, claim that the sword released some sort of curse. When that poor sod ripped it from the stone, it loosed literal hell on earth. I’m not joking, the majority of downtown New York is now just a flaming pit that will occasionally spit out what I can only assume is a demon. No two look quite the same, sort of like snowflakes, if snowflakes ripped people in half and devoured their organs. If whatever malcontent deity that stuffed the sword into the stone in the first place is still around, I’m sure they are having an absolute heyday watching us scramble to make sense of the senseless.

 When the virus first struck, there were obviously dissenters, people who refused to believe that it was real. A conspiracy theory devised by the government was the leading idea. Oddly enough most of those people are dead, killed by the very diseases they denied. It’s hard to say how many people were left after the last dregs of illness were sapped from the streets because anything that even resembled an electronic device spontaneously exploded at exactly 1:45 pm GMT on January 15th. I know this because clocks and watches were immune to the sudden combustion, instead frozen at the exact moment of incineration. Whatever number that was has most certainly halved since then, each successive event culling hundreds if not thousands of people. Any body of land smaller than Great Britain was eaten by the ocean, the sea suddenly surging up and gulping down entire nations in the span of a few minutes.

It’s hard to tell with some things if they are by-products of the original curse made worse by our own advancements or if they stem wholly from the events wrought by the sword. The animals for instance, most mutated, things you would expect from a sci fi novel about nuclear disasters and radiation. Sprouting extra limbs, occasionally from a completely different species. I saw a deer the other day with an entire dog growing out of its back, it barked at me, as if I was the strange one. These occurrences could very well be explained by the sudden disappearance of every ounce of radioactive material from every nuclear power plant around the globe. It all just up and vanished one day. Maybe it dispersed into the surrounding wildlife or maybe its holed up with Tokyo and the hundreds of other small towns.

 It’s also hard to get a read on the number of deceased considering a pretty sizable portion of those ‘dead’ have come back. They’re roaming the streets, leaving behind chunks of themselves as they go. When they first started clawing their way out of the graves, we validly assumed they were here for our brains. Thankfully we were wrong, mostly they just amble and stink up their immediate surroundings. I don’t think they need any form of sustenance, but I did once spot a guy munching on a moldy Egg McMuffin. I’m pretty sure he bit off one of his fingers in the process, but he didn’t seem to mind. I guess there’s no accounting for taste, even in the afterlife. Speaking of Egg McMuffins, McDonalds, despite having no employees to speak of, is still spitting out food on a daily basis. Phantom workers unfreeze the meat in the morning and slave away at the grill all day, ensuring that diabetes can still be a significant cause for concern, even amidst the literal apocalypse.

 I like to say we are in the post apocalypse phase but that could just be wishful thinking on my part. No new phenomena have popped up since a few months ago when every bird dropped from the sky, lost both feathers and wings, and became a land bound beast. We haven’t had a break longer than two weeks from the torrential downpour of strange, not since that pimply 12 year old slid the sword from the stone and thought himself a king. Not much left to rule but it’s certainly an accomplishment to be able to claim the destruction of the entire world. A king of ruin if you will, which he does. Choosing to see the “silver lining in all of this”, his words not mine. In his defense, I’ve heard that he tried to thrust the thing back into the rock, but the crevasse originally formed by the blade had sealed shut. If only it could have held onto that wretched curse a little longer maybe we’d still be wondering what the heck was going on with Brexit.

 I’d probably be complaining about schoolwork instead of how annoying the land locked pigeons have become, rats of the sky was right. Maybe I’d have gotten a significant other, people usually did that in high school didn’t they? Instead I’ve got Fred, at least that’s what his nametag says. He can’t tell me his name, seeing as he’s a) very, very dead and b) missing a tongue. Why he was buried in his Dairy Queen uniform is beyond me, dedication to the job seems like a bit of stretch considering he’s still got an ice cream stain on the seat of his pants. It will still emit a sparse vanilla scent if the cross breeze through the house hits just right.

While there are certain amenities I miss from pre end times, like Big Gulps and Netflix, this life isn’t too bad. I’m not anywhere near the sparking cesspool that used to be the Big Apple, I didn’t disappear along with the rest of my known associates, I didn’t die from literally hacking up an organ (anatomically speaking I’m not sure how the virus pulled that one off), run ins with mutated creatures are low and incidences of attack from said creatures are even lower. Fred is good company, despite the stench. The library is right around the corner and looters are apparently uninterested in expanding their knowledge so I’m not hurting for entertainment. And to top it all off, I found this diary, so I can write down my thoughts and stories, most of which, unfortunately for the reader, pertain to the unexpected hilarity of grounded crows. It was the end of the world as we knew it, but I feel fine. It’s a shame most of R.E.M. wasn’t around to witness this catastrophe, they may have gotten a kick out of it.