Post apocalypticon, p.1
Post-Apocalypticon, page 1
part #2 of Apocalypticon Series
POST-APOCALYPTICON
CLAYTON SMITH
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AUTHOR’S NOTE
This book is the sequel to a novel called Apocalypticon. If you haven’t read that one yet, you’ll probably want to do that first. Not that this book can’t be enjoyable on its own, but the jokes are going to be a whole lot funnier, and the feels are going to be a whole lot feelier, if you’ve read Apocalypticon.
You can find Apocalypticon by clicking here.
1.
The end of the world was bullshit, everyone worth anything was dead, and Ben was completely and utterly alone.
Except for the dozen or so Red Caps lined up against the train car wall, watching him with looks ranging from fearful awe to general confusion.
“In the post-apocalyptic wasteland,” Ben said dramatically, giving his best Charlton Heston, “who is your best and only friend?”
The Red Caps blinked at each other. Some of them shrugged. One raised his hand. “Mark?” he asked uncertainly.
Ben stared at him and tried to comprehend the answer, but he didn’t try very hard. Red Caps were rarely worth the effort. “Mark what?”
“My best friend in the post-apocalyptic wasteland,” the Red Cap said, gaining confidence as he spoke. “It’s Mark.”
Ben crossed his arms in annoyance. “Who the fuck is Mark?”
A Red Cap in the corner waved his hand. “I’m Mark,” he piped up.
“Mark is my best friend,” the first Red Cap explained.
Ben shook his head and waved his hands. “No. Not Mark. In the post-apocalyptic wasteland, Mark is dead.” The first Red Cap and Mark both gasped. But Ben continued, undaunted. “In the post-apocalyptic wasteland, your best and only friend is…this.” He bent down and picked up a pool noodle from the train floor. Mice had torn chunks out of the foam, and one end was covered in some sticky substance that Ben hoped to God hadn’t come out of someone’s body. He held that end away from himself.
A different Red Cap raised his hand. Ben sighed. “What?”
The Red Cap cleared his throat. “Our best friend is…a pool noodle?”
“No,” Ben said, shaking his head again. “Have you been listening? The pool noodle is not a pool noodle; the pool noodle is a machete.”
The Red Cap frowned. “It…looks like a pool noodle,” he said. The other men murmured and nodded their agreement.
Ben wondered how painful it would be to just throw himself under the train. It would almost certainly be less painful than serving as a babysitter-slash-survival trainer for this newest batch of morons. Especially if he got Horace to ramp up the engine to full speed and use the hydraulic plow. The whole thing would be over pretty quickly, and as a bonus, the Red Cap recruits would have to spend hours cleaning his guts off the engine car. That thought actually made him happy.
“The pool noodle represents a machete. It is not an actual machete. Do not take a pool noodle off the train and into the world and threaten to cut someone’s face in half with it. It will not work. We’re just using it right now in training. And the fact that I have to explain this to you makes me want to firebomb the shit out of everything and leave us all for dead.”
The Red Caps hemmed and hawed. They felt nothing but the utmost respect for Ben Fogelvee, the mysterious wasteland warrior of legend, because even though he’d never opened up to them about his past, they knew he had really seen some shit. They could see it in his eyes. They could smell it in his sweat. And they could hear it in his voice each time he turned away from them with that far-off look and said, “I’ve really seen some shit,” in an impressively dramatic way. They revered him, and they all wanted to make a good impression.
Even so, they had some questions.
“But we literally have a whole train car full of machetes,” said a Red Cap whose name Ben thought was Bob or Glen or something. “Wouldn’t it be better if we trained with the real thing instead of…” His voice trailed off as he picked up a flaccid pool noodle and held it up. “Instead of this?” He gave the noodle a jiggle. It flopped around a little.
“Good question,” Ben said, and Bob (Glen?) sighed with relief. A bad question would have set the wrong tone for his training. “First: we don’t literally have a train car full of machetes. We figuratively have a train car full of machetes, and you are literally a disappointment to me and to the whole human race if you don’t understand the difference.” Bob’s face fell, but Ben didn’t care. He’d come to grips with the fact that there weren’t a whole lot of English teachers left alive, and that most AP style guides had probably been incinerated in the name of warmth during one of the five chemical winters that had passed since the Flying Monkeys fell. So now it was up to him to save grammar. “Second,” he continued, “we can’t use the real machetes for practice anymore because that’s how Ricky murdered Jim.”
“It was an accident!” Ricky volunteered from his spot against the far wall. “I thought he was going to dodge it!”
“Well, he didn’t dodge it, and he got a machete to the neck, and now he’s buried under an overpass in Iowa. Now no one gets machete privileges, and it’s all Ricky’s fault.”
The Red Caps booed. Ricky crossed his arms and turned away.
“Now shut up,” Ben said. He’d been practicing this speech, and he wanted it heard. He held up the pool noodle for everyone to see and started again. “The machete is your best and only friend in the post-apocalyptic wasteland. As a survival tool, it’s great for cutting through brush, chopping up kindling, opening fruits that are really hard to open—all that. You can probably even use it to start a fire if you strike it against flint, I’m guessing. That might chip the blade and ruin it, but if you’re dumb enough to be on your own out there, then you’re too dumb for a working machete anyway. Got it?” The Red Caps nodded. “Okay. So it’s a good survival tool, but it’s obviously better as a weapon. A machete is easy to carry; it’s light enough to use with one hand. If it’s sharp enough, you can hack a guy’s arm off. You can saw through a pretty good amount of his gut. Or, as Ricky has shown us, you can chop halfway through Jim’s neck in one blow.”
“It was an accident!” Ricky reminded them.
“But the real reason to carry around a machete,” Ben continued, ignoring both Ricky and the uncomfortable looks everyone was giving Ricky, “is because if you hold it just right, like when it’s dark and you’re in front of a fire on top of a hill, you’ll be in silhouette, with your machete-shadow stretching across the highway, or the desert, or the rubble, or whatever, and believe me…you will look totally badass.” Ben smirked and folded his arms across his chest. The pool noodle rested uncomfortably against his nose, but he was striking a pose, and he didn’t want to ruin the effect. “With the right attitude, and the right stance, your machete will transform you into Patku, the great anime spirit of the Apocalypticon.”
The Red Caps shifted their weight uncomfortably on their heels and gave each other nervous looks. They’d heard Ben talk about Patku before. And never in a way that made sense.
“Any questions?”
The Red Caps mostly shrugged. A few of them shook their heads. Mark raised his hand.
Ben scowled. “What?”
“So you’re saying that looking like a Japanese cartoon is better than chopping someone’s neck in half?”
“It was an accident!” Ricky shouted.
“I’m saying that if you look like a Japanese cartoon, you won’t need to chop anyone’s neck in half,” Ben said. He thought for a second. “Unless you look like Sailor Moon. Then you will probably get into a fight.”
The Red Caps all nodded their agreement.
“Okay. Everyone grab a pool noodle. For the next hour, I want you to practice posing. Your goal is to look intimidating. To look badass. To let everyone know that you are a motherfucking Colombian drug lord with that machete. Be like Patku,” he said, eyeing one bulbous Red Cap in particular whose name he was pretty sure was Fred. “More like Patku,” he said, “and less like Tinky Winky.”
“I think the Teletubbies were Korean,” Mark’s friend pointed out.
Ben closed his eyes and rubbed them. “They were British,” he said. “And for the love of God, just shut your stupid mouth.”
Ben took a seat on an old milk crate across the car while the Red Caps shuffled around clumsily with their noodles. He pinched the bridge of his nose wearily and sighed. He thought back on his old life, the life he’d had before M-Day, when his biggest problem was a toss-up between student loans and the mysterious smell that came through his radiator pipes in the winter. It was a noxious mixture of natural gas, dead animal, burning mold, and, inexplicably, potatoes. It used to fill his apartment until his eyes watered and his throat clogged. He had begged Patrick to fix it, but Patrick refused, saying that he definitely could fix it, if he wanted to, but that Ben deserved the smell as punishment for that one time in college when he’d gone ghost hunting in Texarkana with their mutual friend Clark and hadn’t invited Patrick along.
Patrick had a lot of feelings about ghost hunting in Texarkana. Or, at least, he had had them, before M-Day.
Stuck with the terrible stench, Ben resorted to opening the windows to get rid of the poisoned air, letting it out and letting the sometimes-forty-below-wind-chilled Chicago air in, thereby completely negating the point of the stupid radiator in the first place.
But he’d trade anything for that smell now. Anything for that time now.
Loan payments and ESL landlords and silverfish infestations and eggplant emojis and Miley Cyrus and toxic radiators that clanged like they were being beaten with wrenches. He’d give everything he had to get those things back.
Of course, these days, “everything he had” amounted to an old purple Jansport backpack, a small bundle of clothes, a few rusty weapons, a mostly-full notebook, and unfettered access to a dozen or so Red Caps whose lives rested pretty squarely in his apathetic hands. He doubted anyone would trade him his old life for all that.
“Am I doing it?” Mark’s friend asked, spreading his legs wide and holding the pool noodle over his head with both hands.
“No,” Ben sighed. “You look like an idiot. No one respects you, and no one fears you, so Ricky just chopped you in the neck.”
“Oh, for the love of God!” Ricky cried.
Ben was about to inform Ricky that if he didn’t want to be the team’s de facto murderer, he should stop murdering so many people, when he noticed a trail of aqua-blue smoke blowing past the window. “Okay,” he said, pushing himself to his feet and tossing the noodle aside. “Code Blue. Go get a real weapon and try not to die.” He shuffled toward the door that led toward the front of the train.
“Hey, Ben,” Bob called out. His voice trembled when he spoke, but a few of the other recruits nudged him encouragingly. Go on, they whispered, ask him. So he did: “Is it true that...that...”
Ben stopped and gritted his teeth. He was so short on patience these days. “That what?” he said without looking back.
He actually heard Bob gulp. “Well…is it true that…that you…cut the last assistant conductor’s head off?”
There was a sudden stillness as all of the air was sucked out of the train car, drawn deep into the lungs of each Red Cap recruit holding his breath. Ben bit down harder. His teeth squeaked. His jaw quivered. His fingers dug into his palms so hard his knuckles turned white.
Bloom.
“Yeah,” Ben whispered, staring resolutely forward. “Yeah, that’s true.”
Now it was Mark who piped up from the back, his voice soft with horror, or maybe awe: “What did you…do it with?”
Ben ground his teeth so hard his jaw cracked. “A fucking pool noodle,” he said. Then he yanked open the door, pushed his way through, and headed toward the engine to see what fresh hell Horace had in store for them now.
2.
Ben poked his head into the engine room. “What happened? Is it a sasquatch? Oh my God, please tell me we’re being attacked by a sasquatch.” Ben had always wanted to see a sasquatch. It was pretty common knowledge around the train.
Horace frowned beneath his mustache. He tossed the remains of the sputtering blue smoke bomb out the open window and wiped the waxy residue off his fingers. “Not this time.” He grabbed a pair of binoculars off the control panel and offered them over. “Something worse.”
Ben looked at Horace suspiciously, then looked at the other man in the engine car, Assistant Conductor Rogers. Rogers had a short, wispy mustache, a smattering of complementary chin hairs, and beady owl eyes behind a pair of mostly-broken rectangular glasses. He didn’t say anything; he just watched Ben with a mixture of trepidation and irritation. He didn’t much care for Ben. He, too, knew what had happened to the last assistant conductor.
“Worse than a sasquatch?” Ben asked, snatching the binoculars out of Horace’s hands and stalking to the front of the train car. “That could be literally anything. A sasquatch is the best-case scenario.” He held the binoculars up to his eyes. “Where am I looking?”
“Up ahead. On the tracks.”
Ben peered through the binoculars. The tracks disappeared into the yellowish-green mist ahead. “Am I looking for tracks, or fog? I see both.”
“Further down, where the tracks head down between those cliffs. See that?”
“Barely,” Ben mumbled, twisting the horizon into focus. “There’s too much fog.”
“It’ll clear.”
Horace was right. Horace was usually right, and Ben hated that. As he looked on, the desert wind pushed a tunnel through the mist, and he caught a glimpse of something on the tracks. “Oh,” he said, lowering the binoculars from his eyes. Then he lifted them again and took another look. “Yeah. Okay. Definitely worse than a sasquatch.”
He strained through the magnification to see the details of the obstruction far ahead. It was a woman, slight and knobby and built mostly with right angles. She was lying across the tracks on her back. And she appeared to be tied down. “Did we just roll into a Charlie Chaplin movie?”
“Maybe.” Horace took back the binoculars and gave the woman another look. Then he pulled his pocket watch out of his vest pocket, checked the time, and sighed. “All right, Rogers,” he said, his voice heavy with disappointment. “Stop the train.”
The assistant conductor reached up and pulled back on the throttle, but Ben grabbed his arm. Rogers flinched at Ben’s touch, and Ben thought about making a hilarious joke about calming down and keeping his head, but now just wasn’t the time. Also, he couldn’t quite get the wording straight, and he didn’t want to waste the joke. “Wait,” he said. “You’re gonna stop?” He looked at Horace like he was crazy. “Don’t stop; speed up!”
“Speed up?” Horace gasped. “I’m not going to run her over!”
“Why not?” Ben demanded. “This is a trap! This is obviously a trap! This is a trap taken right out of the Idiot’s Guide to Traps! Don’t stop the train! For fuck’s sake, Horace, make him go faster!”
“I’m standing right here,” Rogers said.
Ben ignored him. “Make him go faster!”
Horace adjusted his glasses on his nose and looked at his assistant conductor. “Stop the train,” he said, his voice firm.
Rogers tugged his arm free of Ben’s grasp and returned his hand to the throttle. He pulled back, and the train began to decelerate.
“You can’t stop the train in the middle of the desert!” Ben cried. “This is where the sand zombies live!”
“Sand zombies,” Horace scoffed. “Look, if we’re attacked by dusters, we’ll take care of them. But I’m not steamrolling over an innocent woman.”
“Innocent? She’s not innocent; she’s part of a trap!”
“I don’t care! Even if she is, I’m not going to murder her with my train!”
“You murder people all the time with your train!” Ben said. “You’ve murdered half a dozen already this morning!”
“Those were dusters—that’s different!” Horace shouted. His cheeks flamed with anger. He hated when Ben questioned him in front of crew members.
“It’s barely different,” Ben insisted, crossing his arms. “Barely. And what about all those marauders you obliterated with the pushy plow last week? You exploded at least three of them.”
“That was different, too! They were marauders...they meant to do us harm; those dusters meant to do us harm. That girl out there? She’s tied to the tracks, Ben.”
“She means to do us harm,” he said through gritted teeth. “You think someone tied her there because they want her dead? If you want to kill somebody, you bash her with a bat, or you knife her in the throat, or you push her off a mountain. You don’t tie her to train tracks and hope for the best. You brought me on this stupid fucking train to keep it safe. Remember that? ‘Oh, Ben, nice to see you again, small world, finding you out here by the tracks—hey, by the way, you look like shit...wanna work on my train and keep it safe?’ Remember that? I’m trying to keep it safe; that woman wants to stab you in the throat!” Jesus Christ, was he the only person who remembered how the apocalypse worked?
“We don’t know that for sure,” Horace insisted. The flush in his cheeks burned to crimson. “Even if it is a trap, she might have been kidnapped and used for bait...we don’t know for sure! And I’m not taking that chance. Rogers, stop the train.”
