Anything But Zombies (6 page)

Two of the three cans in Gloria's cooler remained regular cherry cola. The third, however, came to life.

You have to look at this from the cherry cola's perspective. You're suddenly alive with no explanation and you're trapped in a dark, cold, twelve-ounce can. There is literally no room to move except to swirl around. You have no idea what's going on. I mean, it's not like you're thinking, “Wow, I'm some cherry cola that has somehow come to life! This is incredible!” You don't
know
you're cherry cola. One moment you're not aware of your existence and then the next moment you are, and your existence sucks.

The can of cherry cola went from Gloria's cooler back into her refrigerator, where it remained unopened for seven months. Imagine that. For seven months you're stuck in this can with no idea who or what you are. Can you imagine being stuck in traffic for seven months? Or trapped in an elevator? Or down in a mine shaft? At least if you were in the mine shaft, you could eventually turn to cannibalism to stave off the boredom, but that cherry cola had no stimuli beyond the inside of an aluminum can. What if you were a newborn baby and your mother abandoned you in a gravel pit and you just lay there for . . . actually, maybe abandoned newborns isn't the comparison I want to make. That's kind of depressing. Nobody wants to read about that. I apologize.

What I'm saying is that the cherry cola, though it would later do awful things, is deserving of our empathy. First it was confused and frightened. But as time moved on, it began to feel rage. Deep fury. Typically, Gertrude's Soda lost its carbonation in a couple of weeks, but the cherry cola's rage was so intense that its level of carbonation more than doubled.

The cherry cola did not think in English, so to do a literal transcription of its thoughts would mean that much of this narrative would be self-indulgent gibberish. Instead, as your omniscient narrator, I will take it upon myself to translate its thoughts into language that makes sense to you, rather than making you do all of the heavy lifting.

“
Hate everything. Kill . . . kill . . . kill . . .”

Which would be your exact attitude in its position. Don't try to deny it. You wouldn't be the merry cherry cola that tried to bring a sense of wonder and delight to children everywhere.

I know you've got a lot of questions already and I'm not going to be able to get to all of them in the allotted space. Every time you demand some exposition, it's at the cost of a wonderfully gruesome death scene later, so take that into consideration when you start asking questions like “How was the cherry cola aware of the concept of death?”

You just
have
to know, huh? And those of you wanting answers are probably the same people who will be complaining about how long it took the cherry cola to get out of the can. “It took over a thousand words for it to do anything but swirl around, being angry!” you'll say. We could
already
be at an awesome gory death scene, but noooooooo, you want everything to make sense!

Fine. It was witchcraft. Those nekkid dancing Wiccans instilled the cherry cola with a magic that made it aware of the fact that you can murder somebody.

Pretty scary stuff, isn't it? A rage-filled cherry cola that knows about death? It sure would be inconvenient for humanity if it got out of the can.

Every once in a while, the cherry cola would hear Voices from Beyond. They were muffled and the cherry cola didn't understand the meaning of their words.

“
Don't just stand there all day with the refrigerator open!
”

“
There was ketchup in there the last time I looked!
”

“
That's just the date the store has to sell it by. It's not like it suddenly turns to poison on the expiration date. Just drink the milk!”

Did these voices belong to Jesus Christ?

Of course
the cherry cola was aware of our Lord and Savior! How could it not be? I'm not trying to turn this into a Jesus-themed story, but if you keep asking questions like that I
will
break out the Good Book and start quoting the appropriate scriptures.

Yeah, I didn't think so. Let's move forward.

It was a dark night (though the cherry cola had no concept of night) in the middle of winter (though the cherry cola had no concept of winter) when a flu-ridden (though the cherry cola had no concept of influenza or inoculation) Pete, who was Gloria's son, got out of bed to poke around in the refrigerator. As always, he was annoyed that no new food had materialized since the last time he checked.
In the
Star Wars
movies, food materializes in refrigerators all the time
, thought Pete, who didn't pay very close attention to the
Star Wars
movies outside of the swordfights.

As he moved items around, hoping that there might be a previously hidden turkey, he saw, way in the back, the can of cherry cola.

He didn't feel like a soda (or “pop” as some heathens call it) at the moment, so he ended up eating half of a packet of premade squeezable guacamole and then went back to bed.

Ha! You thought he was going to drink the cherry cola, didn't you? Psych! Psych your gullible little mind! You were reading this, all arrogant and stuff, thinking that you knew exactly what was going to happen, but you were as wrong as a baby in a blender.

I'm sorry. I really didn't mean that. I mean, I did mean that a baby in a blender is wrong—only the most wretched of wretches would try to argue that point—but I didn't intend to bring up dead babies again. Your arrogance distracted me. Once again, I apologize.

The next morning, Pete had a bowl of some sort of cereal that had formerly had “Sugar” in the name and then he drank the cherry cola.

“This is a lot fizzier than usual,” he said out loud, even though there was nobody else around, because Pete was better at speaking than thinking.

The cherry cola's rage intensified not only its fizziness, but its cherry flavor. Usually, upon drinking Gertrude's Soda you had to really concentrate on your tongue to detect the artificial fruit flavor, but this particular drink tasted as if a half-dozen actual cherries had been squeezed into the high fructose corn syrup.

It was incredibly tasty.

Pete drank it all.

Every last drop.

Have you ever tried to get the last drop out of a can of soda? It doesn't really work. No matter how many times you tilt it back and shake it over your mouth, a drop or two is going to be denied you. So Pete took a knife out of the silverware drawer, cut open the can, and licked the inside.

Have you ever enjoyed soda so much that you cut open the can so you could lick the inside? Of course you haven't. Because you know that you'd probably slice open your tongue on the sharp edge and it wouldn't be worth those extra two drops of Mountain Dew, no matter how delicious Mountain Dew may be.

Your takeaway from this? Rage is delicious.

Gloria walked into the kitchen and demanded to know what the [mild expletive deleted] Pete was doing. His answer was difficult to understand because he'd cut off the majority of his tongue.

The cherry cola swirled around angrily in Pete's stomach. There had been a brief moment of light and then it had been plunged back into darkness. And it was a much grosser darkness. Have you ever felt the inside of your stomach? No offense, but it's disgusting.

As he sat with his mother in the hospital waiting room, Pete realized he had to go to the bathroom. So he went into the restroom, unzipped his pants, and . . .

I'm not going to describe this. If you want some deviant descriptions of that sort of thing, you'll have to look elsewhere. Sorry to disappoint, pervo! But feel free to take a good long look at your life and the choices you've made that led you to want to read about that sort of thing.

After Pete flushed, he began to feel a bit queasy because, as mentioned before, he had the flu. So he dropped to his knees, leaned over the toilet bowl, and . . .

I
am
going to describe the puke, so sensitive readers will want to skip the next paragraph.

Oh, it was a mighty flood of vomit! Cherry cola mixed with chunks of chicken pot pie mixed with cranberry juice mixed with chocolate pudding mixed with a cockroach that had crawled into his mouth while he slept (fun fact: 13 percent of us have had a cockroach crawl into our mouths as we sleep each night and we don't even know it) mixed with gum that he'd swallowed six years ago mixed with paste he'd eaten in first grade mixed with one of his kidneys.

“Gaaaahhhhhhh!” he said.

Pete died minutes later. It's a sad thing when somebody under the age of eighteen dies, but millions more people perished after that, so let's not get
too
mopey about Pete.

Part of the cherry cola flowed through the sewage pipes, enjoying the sensation of being on a water slide (though it was unaware of water slides) but not approving of the liquid that accompanied it. The rest of the cherry cola would remain in the toilet bowl until a kindly janitor flushed it away.

I have been separated from myself!
thought the first part of the cherry cola.

But it is as if my power has doubled!
thought the second part.

Not only is my power doubled, but I am no longer restricted to the form of the can! Thanks to the properties of liquid, I can become anything I desire!
thought the first part.

Whoa! And the accompanying materials are also taking that particular form! So instead of being the size of half a can of soda, I can control as much of the raw sewage as I want! Hahahahahahaha!
thought the second part.

This is the part where I'm going to cheat a bit, because even if you want to read about it, I honestly don't want to devote a lot of space to the less appealing bodily fluids. Don't get me wrong, I'm not against all bodily fluids by any stretch of the imagination. Some of them are a source of endless cheer, like mucus. But for the purposes of this narrative, we're going to pretend that the sewer was filled with grape juice.

Everybody in agreement? No? Too bad.

The cherry cola/grape juice rose from the murky depths of the sewer, taking a form that approximated that of Bigfoot, purely by accident.

It took several months for the cherry cola to gain enough control of its new form to climb a ladder, during which time humanity hung around on the streets above in its happily oblivious state. You were probably one of them. Don't you feel silly now? You were sitting around all “La de da, life is just fine,” while below you a cherry cola/grape juice creature was learning to climb a ladder. If only you'd known to go down there with a flamethrower, millions of people would not be dead right now.

That's right, I'm blaming
you
. I'm not saying that you should have been roaming the sewers just in case some sort of rage-filled soda creature took Bigfoot form, but would a little more awareness of your surroundings have been too much to ask?

It climbed the ladder, slid underneath the circular metal lid that stops innocent people from plummeting into the sewer, and stood in the street.

“I live!”
it bellowed.

Of course, it had already been alive. The point it was trying to make was now that it was out of the sewer, its quality of life had taken a substantial upswing.

The first living thing it saw was a dog.

But somehow it knew, possibly thanks to Jesus, that nobody would sympathize with a creature who went around killing dogs, so instead it lurched toward the dog's owner.

The woman was eighty-nine years old, and for the past seventy years she'd lived with the burden of a youthful indiscretion where she stabbed the wrong man to death. If she'd stabbed the correct man, it still would have been a punishment that far exceeded his crime of flirting with her sister (especially since he was married to her sister), but since it was the wrong man (the room had been dark) she'd had nightmares about it at least every other Thursday. She woke up from these nightmares with dried blood on her hands, but she figured that ignorance was bliss and made a point of avoiding news stories about unsolved murders. So, ultimately, it doesn't make you a bad person if you giggle upon hearing that the cherry cola/grape juice creature snapped her neck.

You should feel bad for the dog, though. After all, it didn't have an owner. Though after a few weeks of wandering the streets, scared and hungry, it was adopted by a newlywed couple who made it out to a safe island, enjoying one of the few happy endings in this tragic apocalyptic situation.

As the old woman fell to the ground, the creature frowned. It felt happy, it just didn't know that smile = happy and frown = sad. Killing her had been so easy. Sure, it was because she was old and her bones were brittle, but the creature did not know this and thought that all living things were easy to kill.

And it wanted to kill all living things.

Because it was angry.

Angry at having been trapped in that cold, dark can for so very long.

Just like you would have been.

Admit it.

It walked down the street, breaking the necks of gawkers left and right. Several people called the police, but each and every one of them made the mistake of saying that the murders were being committed by a living mass of cherry cola and grape juice, so their calls were not taken seriously.

“You've got to help us!” a man shouted into his phone. “There's this thing and it—oh no, it just snapped another neck! It's walking down the street and—argh! Another neck gone! Oh, why won't you send somebody to—gasp, it broke yet another neck! That's seventy-six in all so far! Seventy-seven now! Please, please, please, if you value the sanctity of necks at all, you'll send somebody to—seventy-eight—help us before—seventy-nine—we all die!”

“Calm down, sir,” said the 911 operator. “What exactly is snapping the necks?”