One Fine Day

a story for Angryman


One fine day you wake up smelling like the sewers and roasting your own meat on a giant bonfire. Clairy makes the punch, you roast the meat. We always joked about being prepared. We had the right ideas. We invaded the grocery store. You know, the big one with the liquor store inside. It had a generator and gas tanks. Clairy knew how to forge steel. I knew how to shoot and hunt. We were both decent with wood and nails. Life was good.

Then, you wake up and stink until it's time to haul crap from the freezer section out to the fire. This requires a Clairy punch. A simple recipe, he tells the newcomers. Brown Liquor, White Liquor, Champagne and Kool Aid. They try to make it after the first night. Turns out he's screwed them on the recipe.

You don't mix fine liquors, we tell them after their first aborted attempt. He makes the punch again and then we all spend the night guessing how until someone gets sick. Slow cooked meat and hooch will do that to people who haven't eaten.

It's funny. The end of the world never happened. People died, but the world never ended. Some survived. I was hiking the north country. Clairy was in a bomb shelter at a high school. By the time we hooked up, like we planned, the forcast had gone from nuclear winter to pleasant street almost overnight. People up and died. A lot of people died, that was all.

The first few months were the best. No one in sight. We had lots of food and space and fire and Clairy Juice. His secret ingredient is proprietary knowledge. I'd tell you, but there'd be trouble. I told you that some people survived. They all seemed to find us. Maybe it was the fires. The best thing to keep a fire going for a day or so is old tires. It makes food taste like an oil covered otter, so we had smaller cooking fires. At one point, we had a fire collection. I had three personal fires. Clair had two.

How's a guy get a name like Clair anyways? Long story short, his momma wanted a girl. I hope you bought that. So, all these people found us by the fires. They found us, our food, our bottled nasties and our punch. People slept in the store and shat in the parking lot. It was like Woodstock with no music. Oh, and angry hippies. Lots of angry hippies.

The weirdest thing was that no one ever talked about rebuilding. Life smelled like a fart closet and no one wanted anything more than the damned meat and punch. Survival was as much of a grind as before. Wake up, wash, clean the store, move food, open cans, haul trash, hunt crap, cook food, get drunk. That and take massive dumps in the parking lot. No TV. No entertainment. No one was up to it. The only game was guess what's in the freaking punch.

Two thousand years grooming our minds and skills as a species and we were no where near being up to the task. Most people blamed governments or terrorists. Clairy and I knew different. No one believed us. Sometimes we'd tell the stories to piss them off and get some space. Then we'd drink punch, eat meat, laugh and sleep in the stench.

Mother Nature sure can swallow up a road. She'll swallow whole buildings. We waged war against green growing things. We patched a little road here and there. We hosed down the parking lot. That was another fun thing. A 300 foot deep artesian well and a water pump could run indefinitely. One night we tried to calculate when the generator would run out, but after a few hits off the punch bowl, we couldn't decide how many gallons were in all three gas tanks.

Oh, and one of the new bastards left the premium unleaded uncapped for two days. We probably lost a month's supply of gas. Have you ever watched gas evaporate? So, you wake up smelling like ass towels and you pray. You don't pray to God. You pray for the lights in the sky.

We used to pray for Armegeddon. I didn't even know what that was until after all the stuff blowed up. Now, we pray for lights. Me and Clairy get pissed on punch, gnaw bones to the marrow and pray for lights. We stay up later than the rest and talk about it. Lights would kill people or us and then, done. Over. Anything was better than day to day disapointment. Depressed at the end of the world, send help.

Clairy says they came from inside the planet. I say aliens. We don't know. I suppose it doesn't matter. Wherever they came from had better wars than we dreamed up. They knew how to make stuff explode and radiate. Our greatest arrogance, meaning humans in general, was assuming we were the baddest. We always figured we'd wipe ourselves out. We never though what a high velocity chunk of debris from space could do. Well, we thought about it. We never lassoed an asteroid and threw it down.

Don't you tell Clairy it was asteroids. He knews for certain, or so he says, that they triggered a supervolcano out near Yellowstone. Fifteen hundred well placed charges of c4 and the whole crater fell in. So he says. They infiltrated us from below and we never knew until it was too late. They launched our missiles too.

He's heard helicopters. Black helicopters followed him for weeks. This is why we stay here. We hate it, but we stay. They're sure to find us and kill us if we just stay close in a big bunch and make ourselves noticeable.

So, we light big smokey tire fires, defecate all around and cook meat. We get soused and howl. We clear the underbrush and fix the roads a bit. It's just natural. That's what they would look for. Clairy and I want out. We pray to the lights for release. We'll handle God afterwards.

Meanwhile, we try not to squash ambition. We also keep everyone tight with the punch. No one can leave even if they want to. They always come back for the fire and the punch.

Clairy got the idea from fast food chains spiking their food with drugs to calm and addict people. Clairy never gave up on that. He knew for sure they did it. I wasn't sure if he meant we or they or the other they. Whatever. It was a conspiracy, no doubt. Keep us fat and lazy, then blowed all the stuff to hell. Great strategy. We'd deny them the satisfaction this time.

Yes, we discussed the other option. That became plan B. The only reason to wait for the underground asteroid exploders from volcano space was to prove a point. No one believed the story. Fine. We'd wait. They'd see. So instead of poisoning the punch, we kept people hooked on it.

That's part of the grocery store story and no one wants to hear about it. I have a laugh about it from time to time. If they'd only listened to the part about the piles of clear crystaline substance we'd found in the basement while hiding from the underground aliens, they'd win tonights game of 'guess what's in the punch'.