The apocalypse was upon us, but why was I still here? I gripped the crucifix that dangled around my neck tighter feeling its corners push into my skin. That feeling always gave me comfort, as if the holey spirit was surrounding me, and the lord almighty knows there have been plenty of times in my life that I needed his embrace.
The others fluttered around Frances as she recounted her battle with the unicorn, but I had fallen back closer to the door to the kitchen. The fog was still visible in some parts of the yard, just beyond the fence and the gate that encircled the Summer Eve Residence.
"Do you think the others got raptured? My son Gabriel, surely he, has been called back to Heaven, he's always been good, righteous, a defender of those in need. Even when he shouldn't have been! Even when..." I didn't want to think about it, about old wounds inflicted, about how he might be gone from me, or how he might still be here. His father was a son of a bitch and if Gabriel is still here it's his father's fault, and I will make sure he finds no rest in hell for it.
"Tami May!" Linda's voice pulled me from my spiraling thoughts.
I turned back to them to find Marlean bent over Frances and prodding the new hole in her shirt. There was no wound, only the remnants of something miraculous. Frances had been resurrected.
"We need to get Frances back into the house, but she is too weak. Would you be a dear and go back to the kitchen? Maybe there's something we can use to get her inside."
"Yes... yes, I can do that." There was no point in wondering why I was still on this earthly plain. The only thing I could do was what needed to be done, and that currently was easy. We needed to make sure that Frances and the rest of us were safe and back inside the Summer Eve.
Without a second Look towards my friends, I marched into the kitchen. The feeling of doom lessened considerably once back inside the kitchen's light-yellow walls. Without much thought, I made my way through the kitchen to the storage area just down one of the halls that twist their way through the underside of Summer Eve Residence.
The metal cabinets were unlocked as always. The first two cabinets held nothing of interest or helpfulness but the third had what I was looking for, a tarp. A tarp was a great way to move a body.
Tarp in hand I made my way back to Linda, Marlean, and Frances. Marlean was, as always, looking suspicious as she quickly shoved a silver candy wrapper into her pocket. No doubt another one of her candies she had won before all this had happened. She had been sucking noisily on them the whole way down here while talking about some System thing. Whispering the whole time to Linda about it as if I couldn’t hear her.
The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.
“See I told you that it was going to be fine. I explained the whole game to that System thing,” said Marlean.
The phone she had brought with us now dangled from around her waist. The stretchy spiral phone cord acted like a makeshift belt sinching the colorful muumuu she often wore tight against her waist. She had also, unsurprisingly, found a large stick from some wear on the ground and was poking at one of the piles of meat lying on the ground. “Sparkly meat I wonder what it tastes like?”
“Well parts of the game are the same, but it has definitely changed some things. You didn’t suggest anything did you?” Frances was sitting up now watching Marlean.
Marlean ignored the question and continued to poke at the meat. It was laughable really. This was the apocalypse there was no way that she would have had anything to do with it. It was much more likely that Satan had simply used her words to trick us. I let out a sigh as I unfolded the tarp next to Frances.
“It’s the end times and you two are discussing games. Sure, the devel loves playing games.” My hands began to shake. “This is all just a figment of Marlean’s imagination; how else did she win so easily earlier? She has been talking with the devel this whole time leading us further astray.” The words came out of my mouth in a blur and instantly I knew how it sounded.
Marlean stopped poking at the meat and looked up at me.
“It’s not the devel… or maybe it is but it's not the devel that you are so afraid of. And I’m not helping it. This was going to all happen whether you like it or not it just so happened that I was special and had a say. You should be thanking me, it wanted to do this whole crazy thing with math and stat points. Tree skills, or skill trees.” She waved her free hand in the air. “We all know Pig, and I already told you I got a special bonus for being special. If you do enough battles, you will get choices later on as well. I explained this all to you earlier.”
Tears filled my eyes as wet sobs escaped my lips, and I fell to the damp ground not even caring that I was getting someone's blood on my clothes. And that’s saying something, as blood can be a pain to remove from many fabrics.
“You two stop it!” Linda’s voice was sharp as a whip. “This is not the time or place for any of this. Marlean, your story is fantastic, but until we have some hard proof, I think you will need to give Tami May some grace.
“To be fair Linda I did just get stabbed by a unicorn while being forced to play some altered form of Pig hosted by the System. Sorry Tami May but I think something else is going on… well some other sort of apocalypse. It’s definitely an apocalypse the System said so.”
“Oh well if the System said so.” Linda threw her hands up, finally losing her signature composure. “Well, if it said so. I guess we will look past all the other times you accidentally sampled other people's meds. Do you remember all of those?” She held a hand up silencing Frances before she could speak. “Obviously something happened, something horrible, to you and to—”
“Rachel Yates,” said Frances.
“Rachel Yates, thank you, Frances. Something horrible happened to both of you. And out here, in general, is a mess. But until I—we have proof we need to calm down and get back in—”
[WELCOME TO APOCALYPSE PIG!]
I screamed as the disembodied voice echoed around us. The words welcome flashed in the air around us like a swarm of bees.