Universal Monsters XI

Eventually we made a new calendar.  It only made sense, we thought, to start working forward from Tuesday.  We wanted every damn date to be a reminder.  We wanted a count.  An at-a-glance, fuck-you-monsters number.  We wanted even our cheques to tell us we had survived if we ever had a banking system worth using and robbing again.  And “Anno Domini” felt like a lie.  “The Year of Our Lord” makes less and less sense every time a Catalan Drac pops outta wherever the fuck and tries to eat your face.

We didn’t have a name for it yet, but Wednesday was A+1.  Wednesday was the first day of the Armageddon calendar.  And it was the day we walked out of MGD for the last time.  Most of us wanted to burn the motherfucker to the ground on our way out but concrete doesn’t light and some of us stayed behind so that may have been unkind anyway.

We didn’t know it at the time, but the beasts were organizing.  It took them twenty-four hours to end the earth.  Rome wasn’t built in a day but it sure as hell burned in one.

They came at us unified, and, say what you will about the demons but that shit was effective.  They scorched the world as one but now they were segregating.

We didn’t know it yet but they were dividing the land into, we still don’t really know what you’d call it, principalities? Parishes?  Cubicles?  Something.  Different beasts got different cities and states and nations and what not.  There was a cast-system; there were warlords and dukes, probably.  They gerrymandered the fuck out of pretty much everything.  Drew lines through lines and around shit and ignored natural borders and the whole thing got way too complicated to understand.  We never saw it but there must have been some kind of monster-congress or something making plans and infrastructuring and whatnot.  Space found a laptop once and started trying to build a spreadsheet to keep track of it all but the politics of Hell are like child-actors: They’re fucked.

What mattered was that they divided.

What mattered at the time was, we were lucky bastards.  You wouldn’t think so since we’re a fugly, mostly-dumb-as-hammers group of convicts who are walking our way through the end of the world and most of us have spent as much of our lives in the bucket as out, but every one of us that got shipped from everywhere in the country over to the fuck-off-forgotten, blue-hair, seven-miles-an-hour, dinner at three-thirty Cape Coral, we were born with horseshoes up our asses.

Because the Mummies got south Florida.

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