My Quiet Apocalypse

I was out walking my dog when the end of the world landed a few roads away. I didn't see where it had come from and, back then, I didn't know the reasons behind it. But it landed shortly after 8pm on a lazy Sunday. Seeing the distant glow, my dog whimpered. When the noise followed very shortly afterwards, he bounded away, howling in fear, or perhaps pain. I didn't chase after him because the sight and the noise had arrested my attention. I could see a distant volcano of embers showering my town and engulfing it in orange haze. I wandered, feeling strangely ethereal, towards the glow.

As I approached the pandemonium, I saw a man lying on the floor, holding his stomach tightly, trying to contain his own entrails. I gave him my coat to press against his abdomen but he fell down dead shortly after. I picked up my coat and dusted off the mess and put it back on. I walked on.

Fire rained down from my girlfriend's flat but I didn't feel it when it scorched my skin. I walked in, brushing past a red-faced screaming woman holding a blistered baby. We made eye-contact but I looked away. My girlfriend's floor had disappeared and only fire and debris remained so I walked away from the building. I couldn't see the woman, but the baby was lying in the doorway, grasping at the embers as they cascaded around it.

Someone pushed past me and knocked me to the ground. I stood up and brushed myself down, wetting my fingers in the blood of the dead man on my jacket. I tried to wipe my hand off on a nearby car, but it was hot and dusty, so I wiped it on my jeans instead. I saw people taking bottles of wine from a battered off-licence and took one from a small boy as he ran from the shop, past me. He shouted something at me but it was impossible to hear or see what he'd said, so I turned away.

My head felt hazy, and my vision began to seem blurry. I almost tripped over a corpse in the middle of the road. A thick dust descended and made it more difficult to see. Someone ran into me, screaming, red-eyed, wild. I pushed him over, feeling sluggishly aggressive. I stumbled for a few more minutes through the jungle of maddened creatures. I seemed to be going against the flow, but I found my way to the safety of a brick wall, and then a doorway, and I leant against it, coughing. Feeling ever more sluggish, I crouched down, wheezing heavily. And then I sat down and went to sleep.

Extra-ordinary

I once initiated an argument with a man who resented my bland inoffensiveness. It was likely that, in the eyes of wider society, I was worth a lot more than this fusty old gentleman. I was reasonably intelligent, relatively attractive, and perhaps even vaguely witty and amusing. He was unemployed, unkempt, and warranted numerous governmental health warnings. My weakness, however, was my vanity, and he exposed it ruthlessly. He whiled away hours on his hobby of undermining self-belief. And in many respects, in this instance, he was entirely justified.

I had achieved nothing of note. I went from dreaming of stardom, to hoping for success, to wishing I was someone else, somewhere else. My love life, for example, was dull, uninteresting, and frequently gave me cause to feel utter humiliation when recalling past romantic events. Everything about me was loathsome and ordinary, and left little or no impression on anyone who had the ambivalent pleasure of meeting me. His crushing conclusion would always revolve around the observation that I was one of billions of identically-ordinary little humans pursuing their unattainable and worthless lives.

As he reached this damming summation, he chuckled blithely, because he knew that his hurtful words could not penetrate his own thick hide, and because he, pointless and worthless as he appeared to others, was self-assured, self-confident, and self-congratulatory on his ability to ridicule others. But I don't see him often.

VP: Canadian Syrup-Boarding

It was the end of another hard day of Canadian syrup-boarding. Once again, every one of their terrorist suspects had suffocated when the maple syrup clogged their nostrils, and Conrad suspected that syrup as a method of torture was too viscous. He frequently articulated this idea to his immediate superior, who vigorously slapped him and called him a Yank. Conrad dreaded telling people of his profession when he attended social events such as parties, not least because every person he told tried to fit the phrase “sticky situation” into their response, with varying degrees of success and self-satisfaction.

A few weeks’ later, Conrad arrived in the torture chamber to find every one of his tables occupied. There were so many potential terrorists that they had brought in desks from people’s offices to use as temporary agony-tables. Conrad groaned as he realised how late he’d finish if he had to tackle all these potential terrorists alone. As one of them frantically flapped around on his table like an expiring fish, Conrad realised he recognised him as a member of the local hockey team, the Sticky-Bears. In fact, every potential terrorist had identical clothing identifying them with the Bears. When Conrad asked his immediate supervisor about this, his supervisor explained about a bomb threat against the Bears’ bitter rivals, the Sticky-Salmon.

After another hard day of syrup-boarding, when the last Sticky-Bear’s corpse had been wheeled out and the cleaners had entered to begin mopping up the gallons of syrup which now covered the walls, floor and ceiling, Conrad reflected on the mediocre quality of the information that the Bears had delivered. A few weeks later, the captain of the Sticky-Salmon phoned up to confess to falsely reporting the bomb threat as part of a night of drunken tomfoolery. Fortunately, Conrad didn’t have to receive the news himself, as he was busy with another potential terrorist.

VP: The Adventure of the Dead Dog

It was raining outside, and the postman was bored. Since his wife had died in mysterious circumstances, he had passed much of his time by eating microwave curries and using his faithful dog for taser practice, but since the dog’s heart-related demise, he had little in the way of entertainment to occupy his evenings. To ease the boredom, the postman penned a detailed plan of serial tasering, in which unsuspecting members of the public would be surreptitiously stunned by him as he hid from view. As he got up and went to retrieve his taser gun from the basement, the postman fortuitously slipped on a novelty rubber phone which had belonged to his dead dog, and tumbled down the basement stairs, breaking his neck.

When, a few months later, his elderly neighbour contacted the police because of the foul smell now emanating from the postman’s house, a couple of young officers entered his abode and discovered his festering body, and his diabolical plan, which was still scrunched up in his rapidly rotting hand. As they read his scheme, their initial sadness turned to relief, as they comprehended the needless suffering and inconvenience that had been averted by his timely demise. Later on, the Chief turned up to make an exciting quip on which to end the day, but could only muster up a stuttered joke about dog being man’s best friend, which his subordinates didn’t think quite fitted the situation. In the end, they decided to laugh politely, instead of vocalising their concerns about the joke. He was the Chief, after all.

VP: Republicans and Vending Machines

It had been a hard day in the House, and several prominent Republicans were congregating at the vending machines, eyeing up the pickled onion Monster Munch and chatting quietly. One of these men, "Rad Mad Thad", became distracted as the conversation moved from relevant political matters to theories on gender relations, and decided to purchase a tasty snack. He reached into his pockets and pulled out a grubby fifty pence piece, and pushed it into the coin slot. The coin disappeared, but the machine failed to register any credit.

Rad Mad Thad was, by nature, a bilious and belligerent old man, and was not prepared to have his patience tested by a machine. As he felt rage pulsing through him, he lashed out at the machine's keypad, to the horror of his colleagues, who halted their trite conversation, and hastily offered to purchase him some Monster Munch from the shop next door. But Rad Mad Thad's choler could not be contained. After launching a tirade of abuse at the silent machine, Thad pushed his face through the glass, which sliced his skin and ruptured his eyeballs. Blinded by blood and trapped by the jagged glass, Thad thrashed wildly, opening his jugular and drenching the snacks, which were thankfully waterproof, by virtue of their foil wrappings. As he attempted one final time to free himself from his blood-soaked - but still scrumptious - prison, he unintentionally tipped the hapless machine onto its glass front, crushing his body and dislodging several of the snacks.

After the excitement of the preceding minutes had ebbed away, a semblance of calmness gradually settled on the group of Representatives, who lost interest in the now-defunct machine and the now-defunct Republican. Thad's Republican colleagues saw they could no longer see the pickled onion Monster Munch, and, having lost their main attraction to the area, decided to continue their discussions elsewhere.