Milky air, in a patina, thickened around the shape of the vehicle. The lions, kangaroos, and Jim Breuer disappearing, drowning in swirls; the animals becoming stuffed animals, toys for fat kids in Kansas. The animals becoming lost faces in heavy cream, the animals amassing with the miasma.

“… … things you do really make me mad I must confess.”

Santa smashed his left elbow, like a cage-fighter, jabbing at the car’s driver side control panel. The Caddy’s windows creaked upwards, pathetically warbling. The pangolin rested back on its haunches, had the defeated look of a whipped child.

“Goin' a million miles an hour headed out…”

“We’re fixing to find Patient Zero. We’re fixing to find God. We’re fixing to find the culture dish, the mice, the missing millions, the urns, and the grant network. I’m making my list…

“It’ll be the New Normal at the New Nuremberg Trials… It’s Daszak first, then the Bat Lady, the doyenne, then the Wuhan body snatchers. Then the Snakeheads and organ thieves and graverobbing bureaucrats. It’ll be those whose actions spoke louder than words…”

Santa spoke softly through his clenched white teeth. Santa spoke without moving his lips. Santa will always be a ventriloquist.

“And there will be justice for the elves… No more just saying ‘Candyman’ into a mirror…”

The air curdled and tossed droplets, bits of icy spray. The Caddy was getting moist. Its windows misty and slick. The air’s viscous composition further greasing.

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But the Caddy was undeterred, kept cutting forward. The Caddy barreling, nose first, veering off the highway, roaring onto a bamboo path.

Santa brushed his hands over his bloodshot eyes, struggled to summon a smile.

“Crazy Train” then came on the Caddy’s speakers, and Santa cranked the stereo up louder than a jackhammer… Randy Rhoads’ guitar riffs rattling the car…

Breaking through a flimsy cardboard barrier, the Caddy swerved into the mouth of a white-water lake. Santa squinted, tried to recognize a ridge in the surf, where dark, curving humps were rising to the water’s surface.

The Caddy’s engine screamed. The vehicle pushing further, digging deeper into the ivory depths.

Stony atolls appeared, rising like dragon’s teeth. Off in the distance chalky sediment had formed a delta, a wedge-shaped landform. An island of an island.

Further afar, the misty outline of a wave kept creeping closer, and closer…

The car nosed forward, slicing through the white waters like a knife through a birthday cake. The Caddy a spoon plunging into a bowl of yogurt. The car soon flooding in loose wet clumps, rippling burbles.

But the Caddy kept its centrifugal force, kept careening onwards.

Cream-white swamp-waters splashing, flooding the vehicle’s interior, foaming above Santa’s waist. Slick, ice-cold eels slithering in, encircling Santa’s marbled legs...

But Santa was undeterred. And Santa stoically manned the wheel, like the captain of the Titanic. Santa focused as a shaman. Santa’s intentions set in stone. Santa driving forward. Santa up to his buttery neck in the water’s chill, its hardening churn.

The pangolin then floated to the surface, sleeping like a shark. The pangolin a dramatic character for the cereal.

Santa grinned, crookedly, and cried out, “God Himself, an agnostic. God Himself, the biggest misanthrope of all… There’s no murders in paradise… No murders in paradise…”

As the cream rose, it numbed the passengers, like the purest cocaine. The bathtub waters increasingly argent and rising over Santa’s bloodied nose. Santa’s bushy white beard then gathering, folding like a funeral shawl over his round, bruised apple of a face.

Santa then juddered and swam, stomped even harder on the gas pedal. Santa splashing at the milkshake waters. Santa flailing, until he was blinded by a crushing sheet of ice.

The pangolin, ride or die, resorted to doing the breaststroke. Then the pangolin capsized, its black belly protruding upward.

And now Santa knew, exactly, his plan for everything... Be it contemptuous amnesty, merciful oblivion, a towering wave, or just a shadowy blur...

“And the last thing was hope,” gargled Santa, underwater, his limbs spreading, stretching like a starfish, as the music suddenly stopped.