Corn, Cows, and the Apocalypse

Day Tens

Ten days.

That's how long it took to come to terms with the post-apocalyptic world. I mentioned that I spent three months immersed in self-pity, doubt, shame, and loneliness, before I reconciled with my fate. But the first ten days were still the hardest.

I may have given a playfully satiric description of day one, but allow me to rein in any humor and once again express that, one minute, I was a hard-working, under-paid grocery clerk. The next, I was standing in a sea of dead bodies.

The formula for that conversation in your brain goes something like this. This can't be happening. Why is this happening? What do I do? Please, God no! Please, God NO! PLEASE, GOD NO! If you reciprocate the integer times ten to the 100th power, you begin to form a picture of my thought processes taking place over the first 48 hours.

This is key, because within that first 48 hours, everyone on Earth was thinking the same thing. Even the greatest of tragedies pale in comparison to the electric spine-tingling psychic energy that was produced by this event. It was within those first two days that everyone knew, without abjuration, the truth.

He was there.

And we were not in His good graces.

Into day three, the electric energy of thousands upon thousands of collective thoughts faded away. We started to think about survival. Panic set in fast, but it quickly eroded when we realized the demand for food and water was at an all-time low.

On day four people started vandalizing, either in anger or just because they could. It's a strange desire, but somewhere in our human DNA is a gene that insists when the world goes to pot, we must break glass and spray-paint profanities on walls.

Day five, the anger fades, because you realize no one is going to punish you. Just to the left of the vandalism gene is the gene that creates our desire for punishment. Technically the gene should be on the right, but what can you do.

Day six is when you start to feel the emptiness. That's when you realize that you aren't going to wake up. It's not a dream.

Day seven and you've reached a week. This should be the transitional day, but it's not. You become numb. Everything that's happening is happening. That's all the farther you get with that pseudo-philosophical thought process. It's real.

Day eight, you're depressed. It goes without saying, but there is something horrifying about turning the calendar back to that dreaded day of the week for the first time.

Day nine, you're angry again. It doesn't matter at whom and the point is moot. You just can't stand that all of it has been left on your shoulders to figure out, to survive, to atone.

Day ten.

It takes ten days to realize that you just came full circle, and you are about to repeat it again: atonement, loneliness, numbness, sorrow, anger. Rinse and repeat.

Day ten was when the second wave of bodies arrived. They didn't receive the astounding shock value that the millions received, but to those remaining, the death of even one more person near them was intolerable. Incidentally, those who die after the apocalypse don't crystallize. They just rot where they lay.

The day ten suicides were a lesson, a warning, and an answer to a question that no one wanted to ask. What's going to happen to me when I die?

Priest should have been a day ten suicide. I wasn't sure if he didn't want to die or if he just didn't want to piss off God that much. Either way, he had made it over a year without accidentally overdosing. I wasn't about to let him give up now.