Tales from the Road: The Abandoned Zoo Story
Part Two.
The world was transformed. There were no people anymore. None alive, anyway. Only me, and the oceans of bone. Stacks. Piles. Mountains. They covered every inch of the planet, as far as I could see. As long as I traveled.
I stayed away from the cities when I could. They were buried. Towers of ivory blocked out second, third, fourth story windows. In places they swallowed entire buildings. They could swallow me, too, if I wasn’t careful.
I kept to the backroads, where the bone piles were closest to earth. Where I could still see the tops of vehicles. Where rows of trees pointed me down paths that existed long ago. Highways. Towns. Farms.
The countryside was desolate, but I never felt alone. Maybe it was insanity creeping in through my psychic wounds. Maybe it was the ghosts of untold legions populating the space, watching me–the lone survivor, the outsider in the apocalypse. Or maybe it was all those eyes–hollowed out pairs of darkness, with their smiling faces staring up at me from the ground as I tread over what was left of mankind. Thousands of them. Millions of them. Tens of millions. Hundreds of millions…
More?
More.
Always more.
Staring at me in screaming silence.
I didn’t know where I was going until-
I saw it in the distance, rising out of a giant mountain of white. It beckoned me to continue, beyond the point where hope had disappeared and survival instinct had given way to madness. It was my only purpose, to reach the obelisk at the top of the summit.
And when I finally reached my destination, I realized with horror and fascination that the structure was eerily familiar and undeniably manmade. The column, wider than an ancient sequoia and stretching a hundred feet into the air, was made of hard plastic.
There were words carved into the side. Words that I couldn’t read.
I couldn’t read them because I couldn’t read anything in this universe. Because, as many of my sleep doctors have told me before, you cannot read anything in your dreams.
So, without the benefit of knowing the true names etched into the side, I’ll fill in this part with my best guess (bear in mind, these names are 100% fictional and made up and in no particular order):
Spacey Trash Pandas, Ecks, MandaMaelstrom,
Dev, Zero132132, CeeCee, Polihi84, Nick H,
Simon Baars, Amy Helps, Genghis Dong,
Genkenzie, xfilesier, Tyler Martin, Em Rifting,
Daniel Boules, Cian B, Taff, atrophic, Schlordis,
Katie, Minky, Ariel, Catnip411, Himbojerry,
JudeGulick, Aditi, Danny Griffin, ArbitraryHandle,
Dresik, Ride and die, Villicus, Mikey,
RaccoonKaiju, LaurenKanne, Steve
What could these names possibly mean, I wondered. Was this a memorial of some sort?
I couldn’t guess, but somehow I understood that–without the people named here–I wouldn’t have made it this far. They had my full gratitude for whatever it was they’d done.
“What in the unholy nightmare shit is this?!”
I turned to see that I was no longer alone with the ghosts. Another individual had appeared out of nowhere. I would have been surprised, if that emotion hadn’t left me long ago–burned out from overuse.
“Hey!” I said. “Who are you?”
“Jesus Christ!” he yelled, looking around us.
“I doubt that,” I said. “Everyone knows Jesus was Middle Eastern.”
“No, I… Jack!?”
“Also not true. I’m Jack. We can’t both be Jack.”
After a few more long seconds of watching him fumble about, trying to find balance in the bone ground, the answer presented itself to me all on its own. This was the man (or demigod, or trickster, or ghost, or whatever else it might have been) that I’d encountered ever-so-briefly another lifetime ago. At a small diner in the middle of nowhere. He showed off an impossible ability to freeze time, all so he could offer an unsolicited warning about where my travels might take me. So much for that.
“You’re the nerd from Gilligan’s Place,” I said.
“Yeah,” he responded, struggling to stay upright. “We never got properly introduced. My name is Am-” The tip of his boot caught inside the mouth of a skull as he tried to step forward. Immediately, he fell over and crashed into the pile.
“What are you doing here?” I asked.
He sat up and looked around. “Why are there so many skulls?!”
I shrugged. “Beats me. The entire Earth appears to be covered in skulls. Which really begs the question, where are the rest of the bones? I’ve been hiking for eons, and I haven’t seen one femur, one collarbone, one rib. Nothing. Just skulls. I mean, when you think about it, the marvel of engineering that is piling up all these skulls pales in comparison to the feat of disposing of the rest of the skeletal remains.”
“What?!” he asked, exasperated.
“Sorry,” I said. “I haven’t talked to anyone in a while, so these thoughts have been simmering. What brings you here, Am?”
“That’s not my whole name.”
“I don’t care.”
“Well,” he stood on shaky legs and looked around. “I just wanted to check in. Last time we spoke, it seemed to me like you were preparing to return to your home town.”
“Yeah,” I said, nodding. “You told me not to.”
“Right,” he said, hesitantly returning my nod. “And then, it looks like… you didn’t?”
“No, of course we didn’t. You told us not to.”
“Yeah, but… I guess I wasn’t actually expecting you to-”
“To heed the advice of someone who can freeze time?” I asked. “Are you kidding? What do you think I am? An idiot? A glutton for punishment? You said to stay away, so I did! Now you’re here to criticize me?”
Just then, I felt the cold, heavy rain begin to fall from the sky. I knew what this meant. But he didn’t.
It was early in my adventure here that I learned how to stay alive. Key was keeping your head above the pile. I fashioned a pair of snowshoes out of a couple of tennis rackets and some twine. I lifted my prosthetic leg and showed the man the special footwear attached at the end.
“You may want to try something like this before–”
Churchurchrurch…
It was too late. The reaction had already started. Water and dirt turn into mud. Water and fire turn into smoke. Water and skulls turn into… something similar to a ball pit from a children’s play place (only way less gross).
He sank to his knees as the falling water increased into a torrent.
“Jack,” he screamed. “You are so…”
He sank to his chest. “Freakin’”
He sank to his chin. “WEIRD!”
He slipped below the surface.
Right then, I heard another sound. I turned to see that the obelisk of plastic was moving, lifting, rising out of the ground. I braced for the skullvalanche that rushed in every direction from it, pelting me with bone and teeth. But I couldn’t look away, couldn’t take my eyes off of it.
The tower rose further, and further, blacking out what was left of the sky. The dark-green plastic in this scale revealed a new shape. Curvatures too subtle to see from up close. And with a loud crash, the largest section of the gargantuan object burst from the ground. I was falling into the empty chasm it left behind, but still, I couldn’t look anywhere but up. All I could do was watch. The newest piece was wider at the bottom, a rectangular shape, with rows of shimmering metal plates, bladed edges that glimmered in the rain as it levitated with the rest, floating into the sky.
As I fell, my feeble mind began to comprehend the entirety of the object. The shape I recognized as… a giant disposable razor.
And then I heard the voice booming inside my brain, a titan screaming the words:
“DOLLAR SHAVE CLUB. USE PROMO CODE “SKULL WORLD” AT CHECKOUT FOR 15% OFF YOUR FIRST MONTH’S BOX!”
Skulls collapsed around me as I sank into my grave. And all I could think was that fifteen percent doesn’t really seem like all that great a deal to me…
***
15% e ótimo cara