Disclaimer: I do not own Calvin, Hobbes or any other characters derived from the Bill Watterson Comic Strip featured in this story.
"Where? The corpse of what the world used to be."
"When? The silence after the end of everything."
"Who? Us, the survivors of the destruction. We, the stragglers, the scavengers, the survivors. In this time when the world has resigned itself to a twisted, gargling death, we use our strength and our minds and our fearlessness to take what we need and what we want from the blighted land and the nightmarish mutations that roam it. We are indomitable. We are ruthless. We-"
"Calvin!"
The skinny, tall, wild-haired young man turned his head back, away from the awesomely devastated landscape that he had been dramatically gazing over. "What!? Can't you see I'm in the middle of something?"
A few feet away, next to the battered gladiator jeep, stood a feline creature who looked as if its body had been reshaped into an imitation of human form, with a tiger's head and a furry, humanoid body. Its looks were awkward, but it held itself with a grace and elegance that you didn't see in most mutants, even the sapient ones.
"Everything's loaded, we're ready to go. Unless, of course, you're not finished talking to nobody."
Calvin scowled and turned away from the cliff to walk over to Hobbes. "For your information, fuzzball, I was cementing the monumental importance and utter coolness of who we are into the very fabric of this place with my immortal words!"
Hobbes rolled his eyes. "I'd rather not be cemented, if it's all the same to you. Can we go now?"
Calvin grunted and shook his head. "Fine." He opened the jeep door and got in, taking the wheel. Hobbes, as he was getting into the opposite side, said, "I think I should drive this time."
"What? I'm a perfectly fine driver!
"You're also the one who talks to landscapes! I don't know if I trust your mental abilities behind the wheel."
Calvin started the engine and began to move the jeep. "At least I wasn't the one who nearly crashed us into the acid pit!"
"No, you were just the one who drove right through that nest of Bitewarpers and nearly got our eyeballs gnawed out of our skulls."
"It was either that or try to make the jump over the pit!"
"And who was it that set off that old landmine and made the pit in the first place?"
The two continued to bicker as the jeep drove on through the sand. The weathered and scratched vehicle made a small but persistent path away from the cliffs and further into the desert, weaving in between the weird and jagged rock formations that sprouted around them like giant twisted bones. The sky above was a never-ending cloud of ash, veiling the sun and making the entire world around them a dismal gray.
It was the Ashen Plain. And it was after the end.
A few miles later, after the duo had stopped their arguing and settled down into a sullen mutual cold shoulder, Calvin finally asked, "How much longer until we reach the forest?"
Hobbes consulted a wrinkled, dirty piece of paper with a map crudely drawn on it. "Looks like about half a day's drive."
Calvin looked around. "It's getting dark. Well, darker, anyway. Let's stop here and make camp." Hobbes nodded.
They killed the jeep engine and exited the vehicle. Hobbes opened the back and got out a bundle of kindling and an old lighter. Calvin picked a spot and cleared away the surface-level sand to make a shallow pit. As Hobbes brought the kindling over and set it in the pit, Calvin stared off into the distance. Hobbes, having started the fire, looked up to see him reaching down to take a quarter out of his pocket. Calvin began to flip the coin, over and over, and with every toss, he would mutter something too quiet to make out.
Mutter.
Flip.
Mutter.
Flip.
Mutter.
Flip.
Mutter.
Flip.
Hobbes, uneasily, said, "Here, let's roast some dinner." He held up a couple slices of ambiguous pink meat. It was only after he had skewered his with a stick and held it over the fire that he looked up to see Calvin walking over to join him, having come back from whatever faraway places his mind had been.
As they cooked their food, Calvin mused, "I wonder what kind of meat this is?"
Hobbes made a face. "Maybe we don't want to know."
Calvin grimaced. "Good point."
After eating their dinner (the meat was tasteless, but they suspected that those who had sold it to them had done that on purpose so as to spare them from the unappetizing original flavor), the two laid out their ratty sleeping bags in the low red light of the dying fire. All else around them was pitch black, there were no stars to be seen in this part of the world.
"G'night, Hobbes," Calvin whispered.
The tiger mumbled an unintelligible response, already half-asleep. Calvin settled in, doing his best to forget about the untrustworthy grit of the sand underneath him and the staleness of the air.
A sharp pain. Something was poking at Calvin's arm, and it wasn't going away. He opened his eyes.
At first, the world was a confused leakage of red light in deep blackness, but as his eyes adjusted to make sense of what was before him, Calvin realized that the hot, wet air he felt brushing over his skin was panting breath. He couldn't see the jaws that the breath came from, but he could see the sickly greenish glow of the feral, predatory eyes.
In an instant Calvin realized, using instincts that he had built up from years of surviving in this world, that the thing was going to snap at his face. He turned his head and craned his neck as much as he could, feeling the movement in the air as what sounded like razor-sharp teeth clapped together just an inch from where his face had been. He opened his mouth to yell for Hobbes, but the monster, as if sensing that he was going to call for help, slammed a hairy paw down on his throat. What was supposed to be a yell came out as a strangled choke.
The claw was just beginning to pierce Calvin's flesh, he could feel the trickles of blood going down his neck, when the fierce yowl of a jungle cat rang through the night, and the monster's pressure vanished from Calvin's body. He jumped up, croaking, and fumbled around in the sand by his sleeping bag for his flashlight. Finding it, he turned it on and shone it on the spot where Hobbes wrestled with a four-legged, furry grayish-green creature about his size. The monster's talons like long rusty knives swung and swiped wildly, but it was no match for a mutant tiger, and soon Hobbes got up and shook himself off as the monster lay dead at his feet.
After wiping some black, sludgy blood off of his fur in a coolly triumphant way, Hobbes remembered that Calvin was there and turned to him. "Are you alright?"
Calvin nodded, and pointed towards the abomination's carcass. "What was that?"
Hobbes looked back down at it and shrugged. "Just a mutant, I guess. Looks like an irradiated wolf."
"You don't usually see anything living this far out in the Plain."
"This one must've just been an explorer."
Calvin turned his flashlight back towards the sleeping bags. "Just the same, I think we'd better sleep in shifts the rest of the night. Wouldn't want the rest of this guy's pack to suddenly surprise us, if there is one."
He held out his fist, and they rock-paper-scissored for it, with Hobbes losing. As he took a seat in the sand, idly playing with a stick of unused kindling, Calvin opened his sleeping bag, paused and said, "Hobbes?"
"Yeah?"
"Thanks, buddy. I owe you one."
Hobbes looked up and smiled. "Don't mention it." He held up his extended claws. "These bad boys needed a workout, anyway. They were getting antsy."
Calvin chuckled, zipped himself in his bag, rolled over, and tried his best to go back to sleep. The idea of having Hobbes on lookout duty helped him do so.
And so the two friends survived another night, hard and cold as it was, on the ruined planet. They didn't have much, but they had each other.