Meaningless Meandering by the Trio

September 26th, 2013. On that day, the world as they knew it ended. But as one candle flickered out, another was lit. But the brave new world is no welcoming place. There is a story that has been told many times in the twenty years since that fateful day, across the world. Different places, different people, but always the same at its core. The location doesn't matter, nor do the tattered remnants of the flags still hanging. A city that was once a bustling metropolis, now a deserted corpse crumbling with each passing year as nature reclaims inch by inch. Most have departed to find hope in a world where hope slowly withdraws each second. To the place where they can escape from the nightmare. A castle in the sky. Escape from the monsters and the monster men. Those who remain are dead, or shall be one day like the rest.

Two such men linger on in these ruins, knowing full well that they only delay their destiny, but they continue to drift about. Neither of them knows what they are surviving for, or why they have joined together. But regardless of what it might have been, they stick together like puzzle pieces. They pick through every corner and doorway they come across, looking for the necessities. They hide from the nightmares that lurk in every shadow, the fearsome clicks resonating in their sleepless nights when the sun sets. And it's not just the infected that were once human like them that the two men worry about. It's the other humans that frighten them the most, so badly that they've begun shooting at others upon sight. Morality be damned, better them than I.

Life in these times is hard, and it only gets harder. A downward spiral, the ship of rescue having sunk before it even arrived.

When they aren't fighting for their survival, the two men meander about. After twenty years drifting about in this manner, even the crucial act of finding something to eat can become somewhat of a predictable chore. The two are half-heartedly cleaning out a row of office cubicles filled mostly with dust and rotted paper when one man bends over suddenly.

A-ha! He cries out in excitement. Look what I found. He says to the second man.

You know that shit isn't worth anything now.

Yes… nobody in particular wants money anymore, but I couldn't help but think.

Think about what?

About our lives.

A 2011 Gettysburg quarter makes you think about our lives?

Well, you see, each coin has two sides to it. Back in our day, when we sometimes had trouble decided between two different things, we'd flip a coin to decide based on what side it landed on.

As he said this the first man flipped the coin in his hands and the second man asked him a question. So what does the quarter mean in our case?

Think of the coin as our destiny. Time is the person unseen that flips it… The first man flipped the coin but as he did this he stumbled and flying the coin went. Through a broken window. They heard the coin land on the pavement below and following it, the sounds of a clicking beast as it screeched and thrashed about, confused by the noise the quarter had made.

Can you see what side it landed on?

No. But we were fucked regardless of what side it landed on. Only difference is when.

So what's for lunch?

I caught a rat earlier. If we eat around the green parts I think we should be fine…

Another day, they hid themselves in a building that stood across from the hospital. They spied on the yellow-jacked men and women that went in and out, or wandered about. These people were the only folks left in the city who seemed to be coming to the place, in sporadic intervals of time, instead of passing through or getting out other than the two. Who exactly were they? The first man brought this question up.

What do you suppose they're doing in there?

Nothing.

That's it, nothing?

What do you suppose anyone has to do these days besides eat, sleep, shit, and occasionally fuck a bit?

Well, more of them wouldn't be arriving if that was all they were doing. Sometimes they bring in supplies and medical equipment, plus a bunch of science looking stuff.

How would I know? Why should we even care? I wouldn't even know how to work any medical or science looking things if I saw one.

What do you suppose they are?

Soldiers, maybe.

I don't think soldiers dress in eye-sore colors like yellow. I think they'd be wearing something a bit more badass like black.

Black, badass? What the hell are you, a twelve-year old who just discovered how to masturbate? Maybe they're just soldiers with a death-wish.

You think they're the Fireflies that used to be on all the radio broadcasts? Sometimes I wished our radio still worked, but not that much. It was just mostly static from what I can remember.

Maybe. You know what I think they're doing in there?

What?

Just waiting for everybody to come. And when they do that, it's going to be like one of those ritual suicides in cults you sometimes saw on the news. Before it became too commonplace and the news and the people who watched the news just stopped caring.

So they're just there waiting for the right time to commit suicide? Seems sorta bleak if you ask me… but that makes me think about something. Why haven't we killed ourselves yet?

I don't know. Maybe it's just cause we're too scared to face the certainty of death or because we don't know what's for certain after. I used to believe in something, but after seeing everything's that's come and gone these past twenty years, I can't really believe those words anymore. But if they did turn out to be true, well, I'd be fucked. We're all fucked. There's none of us that will go anywhere but downwards.

You know… they probably have a holy grail of shit in there. We could live like kings if we managed to take them out.

Yeah, good luck with that. They have assault rifles and God knows what else. All we have is a rusting rifle, a 9mm with one round in it, and a big stick. One of them alone could turn us into assburgers. They probably have an entire army down there.

Hey, it's a really big stick.

Another day they came across a family of tourists going through a section of the city that was far off from the patrols of the yellowjackets that had taken up housing in the hospital. Without a moment's hesitation, the two men murdered the family and took to looting their corpses and car for supplies. As they stripped the father of his clothes and tossed the bodies away, they talked to pass the hours while they did their ransacking.

The first man commented. Well, that was easy. Say. Remember when people were actually trying to help each other instead… of you know, doing what we're doing here?

Yeah, I remember those days well. Hell, I even remember feeling hope that the Pandemic would only be temporary and soon enough the Cavalry would come charging down the hill with the cure and all that shit. That tomorrow we could still wake up to the smell of bacon and eggs frying, go catch a flick in the cinema, and check on e-mail on the computer. I guess that once we came to realize that no one was coming to save us especially not the FEDRA pigs and their QZs and that it would simply be easier to play last man standing, things fell apart.

Do you ever miss those sorts of things?

I don't think about the past a lot. I just think about now and the future. Might as well be depressed by what could happen instead of depressed because of what you knew once happened and know will never happen again. It's hell when I do. Not just memories. Sometimes my stomach grumbles when we

Man, look at all this stuff they were carrying on them. This will last us for months. The first man bent down and knocked on the gas tank's lid, pressing his ear against it. Too bad there isn't a lot of gas in this thing left. Otherwise maybe we could find some old rock and roll cds and ride this thing out of town like a bunch of badasses. And all we had to do to get it was kill these kids and their parents. Huh. I wonder why they bothered stopping in a place like this. Not like they were going to easily find more gas for this thing or whatever they were looking for.

Who the hell cares? Why bother thinking about it? We have problems of our own to focus on.

A few months later, when the season was spring, they were low on supplies once again. They left their safehouse to comb the city, ignoring the growling in their stomachs, the empty feeling that they had grown so accustomed to over the years. They crept through a district littered with decayed cars and fallen buildings when suddenly they saw the animals. The first man's jaw dropped as he saw the herd come into view, eating from the trees that had overgrown in the area. He hadn't seen anything like this in decades. Their necks were just as long as he remembered, the spotting just as peculiar as he remembered from his childhood animal books. As the first man stood admiring the giraffes, liberated from the shackles of his life for just a few moments in euphoric ecstasy, he heard the second man cock his rifle.

Wait… what the hell are you doing?

Bagging us some African style steaks for tonight.

Jesus Christ, man, you can't shoot a giraffe!

Why the hell not? We need food, otherwise we are going to die! Do you think that we could subsist entirely on leaves like these long-necked fuckers?

Well, we could try.

Aw, fuck you.

Come on. Just how many of these giraffes do you think are left in this world? Do you know the ramifications of what you will do if you pull that trigger?

I never see you getting all teary-eyed whenever we fuck up a cat or bunny or rat we come across.

Well, cats are everywhere. So are bunnies and rats in this piss-water city. They breed like there's no fucking tomorrow, so there's always going to be another cat or bunny or rat no matter how many of them we hunt down for food. But giraffes… we don't see much of them anymore. And it would be a mighty shame to know that we could never see them again.

Fuck off, you sentimentalist cunt. We're still eating African burgers tonight. The second man pulled on the trigger. The first man looked away, but there was no death cry. The shot had missed. The herd of giraffes stampeded away. They could hear the shot reverberating in echoes, ricochets. Then the sound of something breaking, the sound of something heavy dropping down. Then they heard the moans, the crazed laughing, and the clicks of all that was inhuman. In front of them, pouring from out of the darkness like ants from an anthole, came the infected. Worse than nightmares. Bodies that once were human, mangled beyond sanity's comprehension by the force of the fungus. With only one purpose left.

They both knew that they didn't have enough ammunition or a good enough position to fight off the entire horde. So the two men turned and ran.

See, asshole? This is why you don't fucking shoot at the giraffes!

Somehow they managed to elude the horde. But there was hardly a chance to catch their breaths. They heard footsteps coming. They dove behind through the broken window of an adjacent deli to hide. Peeking a sliver out, they caught a glimpse of two yellow-jackets dragging away two bodies. One a small red-headed girl, the other an older man.

What was that all about? The second man asked.

I don't know. The yellowjackets are dragging away a couple of tourists.

For what?

Maybe they're planning on eating them. Or having the greatest post-pandemic orgy the former US of A has ever seen. The old faggot I can understand them wanting to fuck. But that girl hardly looked like she was beyond thirteen. Do you think that the yellowjackets could be that depraved?

Who cares? We've all done things we thought we never would have since Pandemic Day. It not like thirteen makes a difference from twenty-five or sixty-four anymore.

I was just thinking. We've been spying on these yellowjackets for months, maybe years cause I can't remember time now, and we haven't got a single idea just what the hell they're doing in that hospital. Sometimes I wish we knew what was going on.

I don't. It's not our problem. Just like how New York City was flooded because no one could man the sewers and pumps anymore. Just like how Israel and the rest of the Middle East reduced each other to big smoking craters with their nukes is not our problem. The more we concern ourselves with the needs of others is the more we risk ourselves getting killed.

Sometime later.

They were about to cross the road when from out of nowhere a car sped past them, splashing them with filthy water. Neither of them saw who the driver was. They talked as they walked, going far from where they had been splashed when their conversation ended.

What the hell was that about?

I don't know. But that fucker ruined my clothes. Christ, it's going to take forever to get rid of the smell.

Who care? We can always kill another family passing through for more clothes.

Yeah, but then there's the matter of bullet holes and blood.

Goddamn it, don't you be bringing that u- um, who the hell are you assholes? The two men found themselves surrounded by flashlight beams. Weapons pointed at them, held in the hands of yellowjackets. One of the yellowjackets, flat-chested cunt wearing a beret, reached for a radio and spoke into it.

"I found two stragglers not too far from where Joel was last spotted."

Who the hell is Jo- The first man was smacked in his face by another yellowjacket's rifle-butt. Jesus Christ, you fucker! The first man screamed as he bent over, blood dribbing from his smashed nose, teeth falling from his mouth. You could've broke my jaw with that!

"And it's not the only thing we'll break if you assholes don't shut up until we tell you to speak."

"Yes, I know. Alright, line them up." The head cunt decreed.

Wait… what the hell are they doing? The first man asked as the two men were stripped off their supplies and weapons, forced against the wall.

What do you think?

This isn't very fair. We don't even know these people, we don't even know who they're hunting after, we don't even know what their whole problem is, and yet they're just going to line us up and shoot us like we're nothing.

I know. But I guess we reap what we sow.

Guns fired. Two bodies dropped. The Firefly spoke back into her radio. "Alright, it's done. The stragglers are dead." She turned it off and spoke to the rest. "Let's get back to what we were supposed to be doing."

They left the bodies behind.