A Big Friggin’ Hole

This is a work of fiction. No real people, places or events were used. Copyright 2011 Plot Roach.

A Big Friggin’ Hole

By Plot Roach

Carol looked out on the bright new day and sighed. Finally she had the chance to see the Grand Canyon for herself, but strangely, she was not as impressed as she felt that she should have been. It’s just a big friggin’ hole, she thought. Maybe it looks batter in a certain light, or with live tourists and donkey tours. But for now, it’s just a big hole.

She turned away from the land formation which had wowed travelers for generations, only to walk back inside one of the tourist shops that lined the national monument. She grabbed another few cans of soda from the refrigerator (though the section no longer held power), a bag of teriyaki beef jerky and some ranch flavored Corn Nuts. She had gotten to the site the night before, and in the dark she thought that the canyon had looked only vaguely like a big hole. She had decided to wait until dawn to make her full judgment of the place and found that first impressions really were the strongest. She pulled a folding chair out of the front window display and a pair of sunglasses off of a revolving rack, stepping over the corpse of the cashier as she went. Her purse bobbed by her side, hitting her in the hip in time to her footsteps. She did not know why she kept her purse with her at all times, chalking it up to habit.

She set the chair by the edge of “the big hole”, as she now thought of it, and opened the paperback as she waited for the dawn’s first rays of sunlight to warm this place. I’ll either have to stay another night or else leave before noon if I want to make it through the next road before it overheats the car, she thought. She was leaning more towards staying the night, and maybe raiding some of the local shops for “Authentic Indian Jewelry” as advertised in their windows. She had a thing for turquoise and silver. And now thanks to the end of the world, she could have all that she could find. Her fingers were lined with the stuff and she had pierced her ears a third time just to accommodate a new pair of earrings she had found while traveling through the ruins of Las Vegas. As for her neck, when she looked into a mirror she often felt like one of those Amazon women she saw in her husband’s “National Geographic” magazines with the brass neck rings which made them look like aliens.

Chubby, silver decorated fingers tore open the jerky and corn nut packages as well as popped open the first lukewarm soda of the day. She was a quarter way through the paperback novel, just getting into the good housewife smut that called itself a "romance", when she heard an engine in the distance. Well hell, she thought, it’s been a month since I’ve bumped into another traveler.

She almost missed the sounds of humanity and told herself on a daily basis how much she missed her husband and their two kids, now gone eight months ago thanks to the plague that ravaged the planet. But deep inside her heart she knew that if they had been along for the trip, they would only have been in the way. They would have acted like they had on all their vacations together: her husband, Bill, would have bitched about how much it was all costing them (though paper money now held no value in this world of the dead), and her son and daughter would have bitched and complained about the heat, the lack of videogames and the time taken away from their friends (who were now just as dead as her children). She sighed, she knew that she should have been more “broken up” about the downfall of mankind, knew in her heart that she should have pined away for her dead family. But she had always been the practical sort of woman that as a child had simply flushed her dead goldfish and bought another instead of writing a eulogy and torturing family members with a long drawn out funeral for a dime store pet. When her family had finally succumbed to the deadly flu, she took the car keys and locked the door behind her. They needed no burying, as no one would be breaking into their home anytime soon. She decided to let the family home be their shrine, filled with knickknacks and personal mementos now rendered obsolete with the loss of electricity. She simply walked away, finally finding the time to live her life for herself in this new urban wasteland.

The noise of the engine got closer and Carol pulled herself up from the chair to seek shelter in the tourist shop she had broken into earlier. If the person(s) in question were friendly looking, she would reveal herself. But she knew that when the plague had spared a handful of the survivors, some bad were left to wander the earth alongside the good.

A few minutes later a police car, its front window a spiderweb of broken glass, pulled to a stop in front of the shop. Carol held her breath, as she saw a man more rhesus monkey than human, get out from behind the wheel. He yelled at the dog he had chained to the backseat. It looked like a German Sheppard that had seen the business end of a blender. It snapped and snarled at the man, and Carol knew that there was a very good chance it had been part of the police’s K-9 unit until this excuse of a man had used it as a furry piñata.

The monkey man walked toward the store and carol hid herself behind a partially collapsed display of toilet paper. He made a beeline for the hard liquor before walking down the candy aisle and filling his pockets with enough sweets to kill a convention of diabetics. The dog barked furiously and Carol wondered if the dog was still responding to its training of if the monkey man had broken its spirit and driven it insane. “Shut up, Skidmark!” the man yelled, throwing one of the bottles of alcohol at the car where it shattered and dribbled broken glass and caramel colored fluid down the side of the police cruiser.

All of this hit Carol in such an emotional way that she not thought herself capable of. She stepped out from behind the ruined pyramid of extra-soft, triple-ply tissue and confronted the man.

“That’s not a nice thing to call your dog, mister.”

"Yeah, well. He ain’t my dog.” the man said, taking a step back when he realized that he was not alone in the store after all. “What the hell do you want to do about it?”

“I’ll take him off your hands, if he’s such an albatross.”

“A what?” the man asked. Carol could smell his body odor from five feet away. He had not seen a shower, but had plenty of baths in alcohol since the beginning of the plague, she guessed. “What have you got to trade him for?”

Carol looked about her. Everything in the shop was there for the taking. She simply shrugged. He looked her over, licking his lips and she felt a chill creep up her spine. He looked up into her face and saw her revulsion. “Yeah, like I’d waste my time on you.” he snarled. “I’m only keeping the mutt alive for emergency rations, you know what I mean?”

“What do you need emergency rations for with all this stuff left behind?” she asked.

“What are you, my mother? Just stay the hell out of my way, this town belongs to me now, until I decide to move on.” he said, throwing a bottle at her feet like he had the police cruiser. He sneered and laughed at the destruction before heading out the door, where he paused at the car, tossing a bottle at the dog. He was rewarded with a yelp from the dog and Carol’s heart went out to the beast.

It never fails, she told herself. Some jerk has to come out of the woodwork and ruin everything in his quest to rule the world -even if there are only two people left in it. I should just get out of here now, she told herself. Just go someplace else and pretend that this man doesn’t exist. But even as she was thinking the words, her body was acting of its own accord. She walked up to the front of the store and grabbed an “Authentic Imitation American Indian Arrow”, covered with dyed chicken feathers and gaudy paint and walked out into the heat of the day to confront the man. She walked smoothly up to him, her heart pounding in her chest. She tapped him on the back and he spun on her, wide eyed. He had not heard her approach the car, mainly because the dog had resumed its barking and snarling. “What do you want, you bitc-”

But he never finished his sentence as she plunged the wooden arrow into his left eye. He fell to the ground in a heap, twitching in the dust for a moment or two before finally coming to a stop. She edged him over to “the hole” and rolled his body between two of the safety gates, letting his body fall to the rocks down below.

She then went into the shop, picked up a bottle of water, another package of jerky and a Frisbee she could use as a bowl and went to feed the dog. It stopped barking long enough to down the offering she placed before it. Then it sat in the car seat and panted while regarding her. Carol figured that it would take her a couple of days before she could approach the dog to mend its wounds and set it free from the ruined police cruiser. But she had all the time in the world, and now she had a purpose.

She tossed the empty bottle and food packages over the edge of the canyon. It seemed to carol that it was finally more than a “big hole” after all, it could also rid the world of unwanted garbage -both plastic and human.