Ran and Sacked

I went for it because I was my stomach was eating itself and all of the grocery stores had been ransacked by the outskirt bandits and their exotic animals they walked around on with computer wire leashes. The smell made me want to puke up the drugs I was coming down from but then I'd have to face the second dark ages sober. It was already brutal enough with the elite artificial intelligence soldiers guiding citizens around like domestic animals. I had found the jar of pickles clutched in the arms of an old trampled bag who had been knocked over by the younger community saints. The lost and last generation of kids had been on a Sahara scramble to the last bread crumbs without price tags in the town. The only grocery store left that hadn't burned down to parking lot level was around the corner of my house and I snuck out of the bushes by the dog park after the flies had scattered from the woman of the Lord.

I didn't feel like the light was shining on me on that moment as I was prying the pickles from old broad's cross-armed grasp. When I peeled the jar out of her sarcophagus selfie-pose a methane specter creaked open the door of her basement and floated out. Immediately the wheat fields of my nose caught on fire and the cartilage tarps folded into creases like crushed foil. The stench that would keep a New York sewer rat away from a filet mignon pissed me off so I kicked a soft orange inside the crumpled bag so the sarcophagus lid would loosen.

With my fossilized cucumber prize in hand I sprinted for the forest behind the dog park again. I was excited and expectancy salivating was watering the lawn inside my mouth as I made exaggerated-stress breathing faces while running like a pro football receiver clutching a nickle garage sale item.

Behind the fortress wall of shrubs where I now ruled as king of the squirrels, I whined as I tried to pry open the jar with my arms that hadn't been to a gym in a month because they were now extinct. I strained so hard that I cried and peed a little bit and the urine soaked my survival sweatpants that still had blood from a mouth on one knee spot. "Great Valhalla's Venereal Visage!" I cried out but then tried to catch the words with a fishing net to suppress them back inside. You couldn't be too careful these days. Horrible things happened to people found with food and alone and armed only with a nail clipper- sharpened chopstick.

I gorged on the pickles and got sick of their warm brine after the fourth one, but kept eating until the jar was only off-color sour Gatorade. With a little bit of energy but feeling sick and woozy now, I stumbled back into the desolate concrete veins of the evacuated city. I jogged for about four miles in hopes of finding a stray car someone had had a heart attack in or one of those city scooters a lazy Hipster had dropped to refill his vape juice cartridge. I was in luck when a woman was texting and crashed lightly into the wall of a bridge that stretched over the electric train. She was breathing hard as I broke in to her car to "provide assistance" and said, "Text... my... mom... and... tell... her... I... won't... make... it... to... the... cellar... Toto."

I was offended at being called the name of a dog from a town a girl had to have a lucid dream just to escape for a while, but I blew it off as I helped the dying woman down on the sidewalk to take a nap.

Hyena chuckling came from some shaking trees by the quarry a few yards down the sidewalk. Panic struck my nerves like a micro waved stroke so I shut the door faster on the hysterically crying woman who was choking on all of her life's regrets, flat on the concrete. Savage, shirtless children popped out of the trees like popcorn out of a popcorn machine cart with one broken side window pane. "Don't do drugs!" I vocalized a priceless old fashioned life lesson to the street rats as I shut the door of my new car and locked it with bravery.

"Too late!" a mobile gargoyle yelled as he blew weed smoke at my window.

"Hopeless," I muttered.

The snarling beasts spit and threw rocks at the car as I was reversing the crumpled plastic frame away from the concrete wall and swerving into a backwards turn.

"Little Bitch!" Shakespeare's descendant yelled with gentleman's charm.

I left "Dorothy" to the hawk-monkeys as I cheered and sped away, finding Mastodon's TREAD LIGHTLY was playing in the CD player. I blared the song through the subwoofers and banged my head and sang along with the rhythm as I sped at ninety two miles an hour towards a town along the outer ring past the boundaries of the city.

There were so many tragic scenes of silent marionettes holding their dying loved ones outside of their burning cars that had crashed on the highway that it was like watching quickly passing animated meme scenes flashing by the mobile screen of my moving car. I couldn't help but laugh as I adlibbed the dialogue of the frowning faces that were rushing by like crying mimes across the screen and were then ripped out of the corners by the physics of time and space. I watched memes all night as I swerved through the maze of exploded car comets that were all over my highway as they played along with a modified freelance heavy metal soundtrack spliced into the images. The news came on the radio and they said they had just discovered a cure for the disease that had started it all in another city that hadn't been hit by the big mushroom cloud shock wave yet. I thought it was ironic that they were still trying to cure the people who'd already devolved and were almost done consuming each other.

Comic relief blessed me when I found a tape of Abbot and Costello. They were doing a spiel about the essence civilized society where one played a businessman and the other played a caveman who'd traveled into the future by time machine. I laughed until the esoteric resonance of two ends of a black hole being connected by the folding physics of spacetime crashed into me with a ripple of ethereal wisdom. I was living in the first aftershock of a ripple collision of the science fiction spacetime concept theory like the actors were playing out.

I had an underground bunker built out there with a an epic stash of steaks, cereal and great movies out there. Hopefully I could make it in time to pour a bowl and watch Armageddon. I promised myself ahead of time that I wouldn't cry during the animal cracker scene between Batman and Arwen. Those animals had survived an apocalypse without an ark and I wasn't going to let a good movie remind of some others that I'd just seen in real life who recently hadn't.

THE END