Science Fiction and Fantasy

This rock band rescued me from the side of the road.

By Karen S. Cole

Word Count: 500 words

Well, once upon a time there were people, according to intellectuals. They said, “If there was not a God, we would be forced to invent one.” One day, two married souls, a man and a woman, got together but else-wise. I mean, they handily dropped all ineffectual pretenses, realized they were only animals, and followed a clarion call from Nature.

They entered a car that they owned, drove out to the desert, and stripped off all of their clothes. It was the Red Desert down in the American Southwest. They stuck their people butts up in the air, cracks in them, and began to run around in the desert like that. It took years, no decades, no centuries, no millennia…their passing generations grew smaller. Also, real people joined them. Many other “humans,” in fact, did.

After millions of years, they became small, insignificant lizards. Evolution is a process, and it can leap ahead through the centuries, and backwater until it turns into devolution, which is not Satan worship.

So anyway, it was a lot later, and they still had human brains. But they were different than ours, in an awful lot of ways. Also, the nuclear war that wiped out all of humanity transpired, without our “new” lizard folks. They just survived it, for no known reason, and the cacti around them kept getting bigger and bigger and bigger. So did the lizards. Natural selection began choosing out mostly the huge and more visible lizards to reproduce. You can see it coming.

In a few years, what looked like giant Tee Rexes but sporting the most mellifluous feathers, sparkling scales, gorgeous skin colors, beautiful attractive darks and lights, were stomping towards the former big cities. In order to comprehend their former selves better, they thought inwardly.

“Hey,” said Dinah, “How you doing, Horatio, what is shaking?”

“Earthquakes, we’re making them happen now. I am looking over the scenery, and it must be our honorable ancestors, the people. However, they are obviously dead from nuclear radiation.”

Another female got curious. She wasn’t as brainy as the others, so she strolled lightly over to one of the other buildings. So lovely that she was their Queen, she peered into an office window, gazing at everything inside in a loving way. Her courage was merely inquisitive.

“Oh my God,” she breathed, “There are still people in there, and they are doing…something. Why, they are groaning with their arms extended in front, moaning, rotting and looking…sorta like semi-naked corpses with lots of freckles!”

“Is it Mad at Mance?” crooned the King. “Another Zombie Apocalypse rudimentary dance?” He boldly stroked her errant backside. “C’mon, they know better now. Let’s take off for where we belong…you’re right. They’re what we used to be. Except some of us were far more worse looking. Well, it may be better than puking.”

And so they ate those former people, who were all grateful for the change.