The addict rolled over and looked at his clock. #$%@! Time to get up and start getting ready for work. How stupid was that; the world had ended, but somehow he still had to work every day.
Was this hell? Had he died and the grim reaper, mighty Death personified, had been so busy collecting the Souls of the Damned that he had fallen through the cracks and entered the Underworld accidentally? No… He had never been a lucky person, and such a thing would happen to other people, but never him. The grim reaper, his assistant, Satan, Hades, or whatever entity governed death would absolutely collect him, if such a thing existed.
Stupid work, stupid apocalypse (as that’s what the internet people had been calling it, apocalypse), stupid morning, stupid everything! Oh, how he hated it all.
He couldn’t wait for his fix. That simple, easy bit of heaven that made it so that he could tolerate the bullshit that he had to get through every day, just to survive until the next day. There wasn’t really any other way to get by. That simple, sweet-but-also-bitter ambrosia, perfection-in-the-form-of-a-liquid that made the days tolerable and helped him deal with the fact that the world was ending.
The cupboard door swung open and, tragically, was empty. NO! The horror! Frantically he slammed open the other cupboards in the kitchen. MORE FAILURE! Nowhere. There was nothing.
What the hell?! How could this have happened to him? Had the university apartment been infested with evil Brownies? Wait, no, this was China, and Brownies/“Little folk” were more of a Europe type of thing. A malevolent house ghost? Maybe one of those “hungry ghosts” that people burnt “ghost money/houses/whatever” for during Hungry Ghost Festival? But, 1. This was February, closer to Spring Festival than to Hungry Ghost Festival, 2. He was decidedly not Chinese, and 3. Why would a Chinese ghost bother stealing his stash? Something with no form has no need for drugs, unless…. No. There was no way that his Highly Terrible Bad Luck would allow for the ghost of a Chinese drug Addict thief to wander into his dormitory apartment on the 30th floor and steal his stash.
“Hey, thief! Gimme my stash back! Don’ be like this,” he belted into the darkness. “Dead people don’ need that.”
The addict paused, listening for the telltale sounds of a ghost re-corporeating.
“Mon dieu, shut your stupid American mouthes. Let a Tulpa sleep without le pathétique mewling like, how you say, mind-addled bébé stuck in le closet with a clown but she is afraid of le clown. Why you is un crétin? Mon stupide ami Americain, my friend with le croissant brain, you incompétent soggy baguette, no one stole your stupid stash. Yous now is what, le ghost whisperer now?”
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Pierre, his somehow lingering French Canadian “imaginary friend” that after thirty years of being together continued to deny being imaginary, despite the fact that he was invisible, was right.
“Shit! A Chinese ghost probably wouldn’t know English. Umm… This is ridiculous. Where’s Dr. Ray Stantz when you need him.”
Maybe there wasn’t a ghost/monster/some other supernatural entity that stole it. After all, what would they want it for? No, it definitely wasn’t a ghost, but JUST TO BE SAFE he grabbed the bag of salt that he kept on the table and sprinkled a line along the door leading to the outside and his inner windowsill and covered up the massive bathroom mirror so that no wandering entities could breach in and snatch anything else.
Time was almost up. How was he going to do this? How to get through the end of the world without his precious, special, super important elixir of life? What was going to keep him from violently-verbally ripping someone’s metaphorical head off because of how stupid they were?! How could he function? No, he was NOT going to survive the end of the world because he couldn’t live without it.
“Don’t talk to me until I’ve had my daily fix if you value your life,” he used to joke with his students. How was it possible that such a thing could happen to him? That stupid HIghly Terrible Bad Luck, again?
He always made sure that he had enough to cushion himself for at least a few weeks, but ever since the beginning of The End of The World…. Yes, stress made him use more, more often, but had he really used ALL of it? There was no way to get more, either, because everything everywhere was closed.
It had happened so suddenly that most people had been caught surprised, shocked, himself included, and unable to stockpile anything important. He wasn’t going to die of starvation any time soon, at least not FOOD starvation, and had enough toiletries to last him a while. The internet was rife with stories and pictures of people panic buying toilet paper in the United States, but it had hit too quickly for such weirdness to happen to him.
The alarm buzzed. Damnit, it was ten minutes to eight! Had to start the stupid class on stupid Webex for his stupid students. He imagined ripping the iPad in half and picked it up as the rage boiled through him.
One by one, the students logged on and turned on their stupid cameras as he listlessly stared at the screen, trying to use The Force to make each and every one of them spontaneously combust.
“Good Morning Mr. P, how are you,” cheerily chirped Potato, one of his most annoying, stupidly named students. What a stupid name, might as well have named herself Spambot, seriously
“Well, Spud,” he droned miserably, “honestly…. Screw Covid, I would kill for a cup of coffee.”