Anything but Zombies: A Short Story Anthology

by Gerald Dean Rice

  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?”

  “It’s cherry cola and grape juice that has somehow transformed into the shape of Sasquatch.”

  “You lying jerk!” the 911 operator shouted. “Can’t you hear yourself? You think I have time to deal with your [harsh expletive deleted]? I should trace your call and go over there and kick your [moderate expletive deleted]! I hope you die! You hear that? I hope you die!”

  So contacting the authorities did no good. Fresh corpses lined the streets. The sounds of screams forced many people to turn up the volume of their music.

  This is pretty sweet, thought the creature. I’m really enjoying myself.

  But this one guy realized that this was finally his opportunity to use his cannon. “Don’t shoot the cannon!” people had always told him. “It would be irresponsible!” He’d always grudgingly listened to their advice, but now? You couldn’t call somebody irresponsible if they were firing a cannon at something homicidal.

  “Step to the left or right, everyone!” he shouted, just before he fired the cannon.

  It was a direct hit. The creature exploded into millions of droplets.

  Millions of rage-filled droplets.

  Millions of rage-filled droplets that could bond with other liquid.

  Had it not been pouring rain, things may have turned out quite differently.

  You may be wondering why so many people were walking along the street when it was pouring rain, especially the elderly woman walking her dog. Well, I never said they weren’t carrying umbrellas and the rain had started quickly, so not everybody had a chance to seek shelter.

  There was one part where three different cherry cola/grape juice/rain creatures tore this banjo player apart, limb from limb, but I don’t have room to share it because you were so caught up in the whole rain thing. I’m not trying to be antagonistic toward you. I know you have a lot of reading options and it’s nice that you chose me as your storyteller, but at the same time, I feel that I’m being needlessly handcuffed to logic. You know that I’m telling the truth because you can look outside and see all of the dead bodies scattered everywhere. You probably lost family members. So I really don’t understand why you are getting so caught up in the small, irrelevant details, when my purpose here is to share a high-level record of the end of the world.

  Anyway, we now had millions of creatures. The guy with the cannon saw them rise and wished he’d been less irresponsible.

  People kept calling 911, but saying that millions of cherry colas were on a rampage sounded even less credible than one of them. One woman realized what was happening, so when she called she said that there were millions of Bigfoots on a rampage instead, but her call was disregarded as well.

  There had been six hundred and forty-nine people on the street when the creature first rose from the sewer. Now there were still six hundred and forty-nine people on the street, but they were all deceased.

  The chief of police was on the fourth floor of a hotel on that street. It doesn’t matter why he was there. You can engage in conjecture all you want. If a man isn’t having his needs met at home, should he just pretend he has no needs? What would you have him do? This is a serious question. If he tried working it out, but every single night she tried to blame her fractured spine, what was he to do?

  After he’d finished having his needs met, he glanced out the window. He was shocked to see hundreds of corpses out there. There’d been only five or six the last time he checked. He quickly shut off the television, with which he’d been pleasuring himself to adult films that he wasn’t allowed to watch at home, and called the station.

  “If you’re calling about cherry cola, I swear I will jab a spork in your throat,” said the cop who answered.

  “I don’t know anything about that, but there are at least three hundred and eighty dead bodies on Main Street!”

  “And I suppose you want us to go right out and start cleaning them up? What do you think this is, the sanitation department?”

  “No, I want to stop the number of dead bodies from increasing! Three hundred and eighty dead bodies is at least three hundred too many! Send everyone to Main Street! Bring cannons!”

  If only the neighboring city hadn’t been in the middle of the twenty-third annual Cannon Festival, things might have turned out differently. They wheeled dozens of them over, their owners giddily anticipating the opportunity to fire them at living targets without receiving looks of disapproval.

  Every time they shot one, the creature burst into millions of droplets, which turned into millions of other creatures. You would think that after the first couple of shots, they’d have figured out what was happening and switched to a different tactic, but they didn’t, which is why you shouldn’t feel too sorry for humanity, overall.

  “We need wet-vacs!” somebody shouted. “Thousands of wet-vacs!”

  Gertrude’s Wet-Vacs, the company Bernard Sloven had formed after his soda manufacturing company went belly-up, had thousands of unsold wet-vacs in a nearby warehouse. But he wasn’t about to let them get all dinged up while battling an apocalyptic menace. “Nobody wants to buy used equipment,” he told the president of the United States. “So you can just bite me.”

  And that was the end. With an insufficient number of wet-vacs available, humans were powerless to defeat what had once been a single can of subpar cherry cola.

  “There’s only one way!” shouted a scientist. “We must drink the creatures!”

  It was such a ridiculous idea that the scientist deserved his ghastly fate. You did not want to go drinking those things, not after they’d developed a taste for human flesh. It was horrific.

  But lots of people had said to themselves, “Hey, he’s a scientist, he must know what he’s talking about.” Which is how thousands of people ended up with murderous cherry cola creatures in their bellies, and which in turn is how thousands of people ended up with murderous cherry cola creatures bursting out of their bellies, Alien-style.

  This led to millions of people being scared to drink anything, which led to widespread dehydration. You’ve got to drink something. It’s how your body works. So people began dying of thirst left and right. Bernard Sloven marketed Gertr
ude’s Bottled Water (Guaranteed Cherry Cola Creature-Free!) but he’d lost his trust with the public and few drank it.

  Important people started to die. Not just celebrities; people who knew how electricity worked and how to butcher a cow. Without these skills readily available, even more people started to die than the cherry cola creatures tore apart with their carbonated limbs, and many people, even those who’d always had a sunny outlook on life, started to think that the world might be coming to an end.

  It got worse when, in a completely unrelated but equally devastating series of events, werewolves started slaughtering people en masse. Many sentient cherry cola deniers had thought this was all a big government conspiracy, but everybody believed in werewolves. The panic killed more people than the werewolves did, and believe me, those werewolves racked up quite the body count.

  Then one of the cherry cola creatures discovered the ocean. This meant that not only did it have an entire ocean full of water with which to merge, it now had jellyfish.

  Other countries, like Iceland, had thought they were pretty much safe from all that nonsense happening in the USA, but now they realized they’d been sorely mistaken. Icelandic scientists who’d taken a pro-jellyfish attitude suddenly discovered that getting stung by a jellyfish hurt like crazy.

  Which brings us to present day. Pretty much everyone is dead. That dog on the island is doing okay, but most of humanity’s final survivors live in a postapocalyptic wasteland, foraging for food and trying to hide from the roving gangs of mutants that formed when a nuclear power plant had a meltdown after a jellyfish got wedged in a crucial piece of equipment.

  I’m not scared, because I’m an omniscient narrator who doesn’t really exist on your plane of existence. No mutants can get me here.

  You? Well, you should have quit interrupting me while I was trying to share important information that could have kept you alive in the coming decades. I was going to tell you how to destroy the cherry cola (hint: it rhymes with “bommon mold”) but now you’re just going to have to figure it out on your own.