Did you hear that?
Did the world just end?
I think it's starting.
Little Apocalypse is now online. Just in time, sugars.
The first incarnation includes stuff from Cassie Smyth, Paul Carrington, Tim Wiley, and Brandon French. ARAJAY is fleeing his own little apocalypse in the form of hurricane Gustav, so his contributions are understandably delayed. But we hope to have some of his material available with the September 7th or 14th updates.
We hope you enjoy the apocalypse.
I talk in my sleep more and more often. Sometimes I wake myself up.
I woke up about 4AM last night. I always do, and it drives me mad. Most people, or at least most people I know, would roll with it. It's cool, it's silent, I have these dark spaces to myself. I could get so much done if I'd just embrace it.
But see, it's all about mood. And when I wake up to my own voice shouting nonsense in the middle of the night? Well I'm just not in the mood, thanks. To be truthful, I'm quite disturbed.
My cousin used to sleepwalk. He'd get up after 2 and make strange sandwiches. He was a Libra.
Last night I woke up to the words: Please don't let the next Lifesaver be banana. I can't remember the last time I even bought candy. I don't even like candy. I certainly don't like banana candy, and a banana Lifesaver would probably be awful. But I can't figure out what led to this statement. This phrase that was so tangible and so terribly important that it woke me up at 4AM. And this missing memory is frightening to me in a way that I can't begin to rationalize. I just know something essential has been forgotten.
Please don't let the next life be bananas. This one's cherries and I still can't pin it down. Maybe I could make more sense of it with a good night's sleep.
After a time you can sleep without the sound of B-52's constantly taking off and landing a few miles from your window. Not at first, though. You can't hear the trains, either, or the constant patter of a million insects smashing into screen doors up and down the block. It's all too silent. It's too much like you dreamt the end of the world would be.
Right before the planes quit flying and the trains quit running and the mosquitoes quit biting, I helped with the evacuations. We set up in a shopping center right across from the AFB, the same shopping center where I worked my first full-time job more than a decade ago now.
Have we really aged so much? I used to think the future would bring flying cars and meals-in-pills; two thousand still sounds like it ought to be far away. All the time in the world to realize our great human potential, but you can see how all that turned out, with the evacuations and the sterilized plains and such.
Point being, we had to get a lot of people away from the base and we weren't sure how much time we had to do it. I had the joy of driving one school bus after another from scattered lots across town to our evac point as the milling crowds grew on the asphalt. Then Greyhounds, SporTrans, stolen VW vans, anything that could move the masses.
I ran one of the SporTrans into a building. I do not anticipate being granted my CDL.
Eventually I ran out of vehicles to bring back and ways to get to them in the first place. They filled up and headed south as quickly as we could gather them. Soon everything was gone but the three buses commandeered by the Air Force. And the AF was more interested in transporting equipment and materials than people.
The sun was setting by the time a woman named Gloria made it to the evac. She was middle-aged, Hispanic, on foot and obviously panicked, but managed to be polite and business-like despite our imminent doom. She asked me when the next bus was leaving.
"Monday."
This wasn't the answer Gloria wanted. Wasn't the answer I wanted to give, either. I didn't exactly want to be standing there as the city detonated.
Gloria's husband and son were already in Natch. All she really wanted was to find them. To be with them when the lights went out.
"Until Monday, all we have is these three buses under AF. One is leaving tonight. It's the only ride out in the next 24 hours. But the things they're carrying, you could die of radiation sickness in a week."
Then again, we both thought, chances are we'll die instantly right here in this parking lot, waiting for a bus. And this is all I had to offer her. A slightly less certain death, one that might afford enough time to say goodbye.
I rode to Natch with her. I didn't mind the vomiting so much after watching the sun rise in the North just 3 days later. Monday's buses never made it, of course. Monday's buses were eaten by the sun and Gloria died of radiation and the skies and trails and tracks all went quiet. I feel like the merchant of death, hate that it hasn't killed me, too. But what's really keeping me up at night is that it's so goddamned peaceful.
At the time I might have known what it meant, but now I've forgotten. The image that stains my vision is water. Shaped like a car, placed in the correct lane of the highway, a Jello mold of liquid. So strange. No ghost of the accident victims or memory of how it happened. Only the water remains. What an unusual haunting. It feels like I'm drowning but that's my blood. My chest's been crushed. The tread marks are actually standing out of my flesh. I'm a Jello mold.
