*originally published as part of Strange Story Saturdays by Strange House Books
Not long ago, General Mills, in their infinite wisdom, began selling Lucky Charms without the oat shapes – a breakfast cereal consisting of nothing but marshmallows. And while, on paper, this sounds delicious, the reality was far, far more terrifying.
Now, I’m no fool – the marshmallows really are the best part of the cereal. I know that. But they’re only part. Once that line was crossed, once they went full marshmallow, there was no going back. A cereal consisting of nothing but hearts, stars, horseshoes, clovers, and blue moons, pots of gold, and rainbows, and the red balloons, instantly outsold all the other competition, driving an untold number of companies into the ground and destroying breakfast as we know it.
Cereal manufacturers plummeted into bankruptcy, oat and wheat farmers were forced into unemployment, the giant grain typewriters responsible for Alpha-bits and Cheerios began to rust and collapse, taking entire factory towns to their dusty graves, as supermarkets fired stock-boys left and right because a dedicated cereal-putter-away-er just wasn’t necessary anymore. Commercials touting Lucky Charms as “part of a balanced breakfast” were forced to include a gallon of milk, a loaf of bread, an omelette the size of a chihuahua, half a dozen oranges, two grapefruits, and a note of apology to Bill Watterson. A balanced diet became even more involved and cumbersome for soccer moms and stay-at-home dads to accomplish, and their children instead ran rampant and wild into sugar-induced comas. Legions of college students became diabetics, choosing a box of Irish marshmallows over meticulously-prepared cafeteria eggs and microwaved bacon. Acres of land were set aside for all the amputated feet.
Despite all this – despite the mountains of comatose infants, the insulin shortage, the burgeoning and cutthroat wheelchair monopolies – those few cereal companies still standing decided to copycat the marshmallow craze. No-frills brands gladly sacrificed the lives and unimpeded colons of their loyal elderly in exchange for a chance at some demographically superior coin. Health and common sense quickly took a permanent back seat to greed as the entire notion of breakfast became so ludicrous that many ceased to believe in its existence at all.
As breakfast perished, so to did other meals and deeply held digestive beliefs. IHOP was eliminated in the first wave, as brunch dropped from a logistical debate of times to an antiquated form of rationalizing an extra meal. Diners were next – “We Gladly Serve Breakfast Anytime” replaced by “We’ll Kill Unborn Chickens for You, Whenever, Just Ask.” Pancakes, omelettes, and French toast lost their appeal; Denny’s, Village Inn, and most of New Jersey were all lost in a sinkhole of financial ruin.
As the notion of starting the day off right became laughable, lost in a sea of sugar and leprechauns, other food-related axioms followed suit. People, swimming before waiting an hour, drowned by the score. Doctors, no longer held at bay by a simple apple, swarmed the streets, prescribing painkillers with wild abandon and jacking up their rates to heretofore only theoretical numbers, driving millions of insurance agents to insanity, EMTs to the breaking point, and homeopaths into abject poverty.
Humanity’s obesity epidemic, meanwhile, became even more epidemic-ier, the seas swelling with the bodies of those unwilling to eat the less tasty parts of the food pyramid. Physics then ran its course – water rising with the influx of fatted corpses, Archimedes’ Principle being cursed daily — and shorelines eroded at exponential rates. Flooding wiped out entire coastal communities, islands, and, with no more ports and shore resorts, the vacation cruise industry. Sea life died in bucketloads, no one giving a good God damn about Nemo or his whereabouts. The fishing industry grew prosperous but then collapsed just as rapidly, the shelf life of seafood not exactly being the greatest.
Meanwhile, the rampaging doctors only grew more powerful, to the point of becoming medical tyrants, taking control of towns and cities willing to sacrifice their free will for medical treatment. Frat boys and antivaxxers became a class of vicious, errant knights, offering sexual favors to the doctors in exchange for a panacea for all their herpes- and easily-preventable-disease-related problems. Growing ever stronger, and now impervious to illness, the Walking Dumb (as they were now called), tied closely to their doctor-kings, overwhelmed the land, each wave more invulnerable than the last. The poor were forced to either concede to the brainless or run scared at the feet of their physician overlords.
In defiance, a vast black market began to thrive in Mexico, millions selling their organs, or those of their loved ones, just to make a dollar free from the doctors’ grasp. As a result, thousands of spleen-less, lung-less, liver-less unfortunates keeled over and died, while a race of multi-organed supermen swarmed forth from Tijuana. Condors and vultures flourished with the overabundance of hollowed-out carrion, growing larger, stronger, fiercer, and no longer wanting the flesh of only the dead.
The doctor-kings and their armies of idiots ultimately engulfed all of North America, while mob-owned supermen inherited South America, and predatory birds, the likes of which had never before been seen, took back Asia, their desire for human flesh now unquenchable.
Those of us not slaughtered in the upheaval flocked to Europe and Africa, grabbing what scant supplies we could, trekking for weeks across water-bloated bodies, and eventually forming a resistance movement to take back the planet. Unfortunately for humanity, though, in-fighting, cultural differences, a drought of resources, and the severe loss of land due to the flooding quickly tore the movement apart. Smaller bands of independent revolutionaries flourished in its wake, fear and a tacit declaration of martial law all that remained of order.
There were some who refused to take part in the rampant violence. The cowards, the fools, retreated to what was once France to try and drink away their sorrows, only to accidentally set off a nuclear arsenal and vaporize most of the western coast of Europe. The organ-bloated supermen, meanwhile, were growing too fast, too soon, becoming Akira-like abominations suffocating in their own bodies. Mexico and Central American collapsed under their collective girth, sinking into the sea, and South America was set adrift, removed from the world and forever known as the Island of Guys Who Look Like Marlon Brando.
It continued like this for years – globe-scarring accidents, hidden caches of arms discovered and brutal wars enacted, mutations, starvations, a sudden uprising of monkeys or leopards or hippopotami. Order was never restored for more than a month or so at a time. Lawlessness literally turned the planet askew, explosions and population shifts twisting the Earth’s axis and screwing up its orbit, while the genetic anomalies slowly drove nature insane, until, finally, last Thursday, the apocalypse was upon us.
The earth cracked, the oceans of the bloated dead rose, and then, as we watched in horror, the Four Horseman rode down from the thundering heavens, sealing our doom for all time:
And, lo, there came unto the world the mounted harbingers of man’s fate. An unholy army of the undead rising beneath their hooves, the four swooped down on wings of fire. War, a medallion clad warlord called the Captain of Crunch. Famine, a desiccated hare eternally rasping his curse of “Trix.” Pestilence, the plague-carrying Honey Frog of Smack. And, Death, upon his pale horse, clad in darkest green, eyes burning with hate, forever taunting, “You’ll never get me!”