The Elephant and the Crocodile

Had a dream last night. This is it’s tale:

I wondered what to do with the elephant and the crocodile. The crocodile was a rare albino, and the elephant was one of the oldest captive elephants in recorded history. They were starving in their cages, and no amount of peanuts thrown at the elephant could sate his appetite, or remove the weakness from his thin form and give him life again.

The Cheyenne Mountain Zoo had gone bankrupt during the economic depression, and to salvage what they could, sold the animals which weren’t endangered to the strip malls in the hopes that their captivity would remind those shopping of the natural world. Zookeepers became part-time clerks who mucked stalls and prodded depressed beasts awake long enough to make a spectacle for the shoppers.

The government had just done something that made no sense whatsoever. They had made the decision to use small nuclear warheads on American soil. I believe their reason was to detonate the bombs underground in the bottom of deep shafts, to shock the planet into coughing up more fuel to supply our materialist greed. There never is a good reason for nuclear detonation, so I forgot their claim for it’s greatness, except to recall they were using the event to show how they were ‘safely getting rid of nuclear bombs in the name of world peace.’ By using it on us, and not others for a change.

Most Americans didn’t care, and only a handful put up any level of resistance. Those sparse few who found out about it found out too late to make any real change to government action. All our news and internet were now censored propaganda, very much like the internet of Our-Motherland-China, so finding out about anything required a level of tech-knowledge that only a small number of persons possessed.

We had about a day to prepare for the seven warheads striking our Colorado eastern horizon, and could only salvage enough water for a month, but not enough food. I found hoarding food and water to be an act of folly; we were only delaying the inevitable death-by-nuclear-fallout by a month in some unknown future. I tried to gather as much water as I could, but the purest water was to be found in the richest neighborhoods, as they had access to the water which was most cleansed by filtration, and most Americans, myself included, had to make do with fluoridated-arsenic-and-Fukushima-laden tap supply. My father and I had to make a trip to the Broadmoor to find a spring which the public could access, and that was when the nukes hit.

My father was a shadow that followed me everywhere. He’s dead, but his memory and warding protect me throughout life. At times of intense stress, I can make his form out, following me. I was alone when the warheads met the horizon, aside from his ghost. My partner was "safe" and in our shelter in Manitou, but our separation only brought to mind how slim our chances were of seeing each other again, especially if I couldn’t get home with the water before the bombs hit, which was my present situation.

The Broadmoor was decorated with fancy strip malls and promenades, glitzing with the gold and green and red of Christmas, that most spectacular consumer-driven time of material worship. People were out and about, shopping the deals at the promenades, eating out and rutting in the bounty of glitzy things placed before them. Most Americans were too distracted to even notice the mushroom clouds popping up in the distance. Many were crowded around the flat screen tele-stations, little outposts of nonstop entertainment, to watch the current football game, shouting and whooping for their choice teams. I was near one of these tele-stations when I noticed the explosions in the distance. They happened almost instantaneously, blooming upward into the sky and dominating my view. They were surreally beautiful, reds and oranges and purples mingling with the blue and pinks of sunset. It looked like a Maxfield Parrish sky, and for a moment all was silent save for the football game blaring at the tele-station. The quiet seemed like a frequency-wake coming off the explosions, a tsunami of malice, hushing up all life before it. The birds stopped making noise. The cars came to halts in the middle of the thoroughfare, people getting out to witness Death running to meet them.

People began to vacate their cars and the stores and seek shelter. Most of them hadn’t any idea this was going to happen today. Some just laughed and continued watching the football games. I was so brokenhearted, for an instant the football seemed more comforting than anything else in the world. My eyes lingered on the red and white uniforms of the opposing team, watching them chase the ball around like ants hunting a crumb. It gave me a second of peace, but the terror soon welled up inside me. I may never see Beth again. I may die here, in this rich neighborhood, this material-mecca. I may die here...

I ran to a nearby mansion. The woman who owned the mansion had decorated it in the Roman style. She had onyx busts sitting on top of marble pillars, lining her garden which was beside the mall, so she could wander from her house through a garden and into a shopping center, never having to go far for her wants. Her house was decorated with a dark mahogany, each square tile of wood lined with shiny brass, which must have taken hours for her maid to clean. Her kitchen was lined with copper pans and her countertops were made of pink granite. It was decadent, warm, and inviting, so I ran inside through a broken window bordering her front door. Her front door was oak, ornately carved and lined with fleur-de-lis, pineapples, and spirals. A wall of glass flanked the eastern-facing side of the mansion, and I could see the mushrooms ever-expanding in the distance. I wondered if my kindred in the eastern country had made it, but I suspected they had not. When they had given over their property’s mineral rights to the gas company, I suspected they were closer to ground zero than anyone. I tried to phone earlier to warn them, but got no answer.

There were people eating outside the mansion on a deck, which circled the home and connected the owner to a five-star restaurant. The people eating dinner were carrying on as if the explosion hadn’t happened, but some were beginning to wake up from their gourmet-coma and panic at what they saw. I could not keep the tidal wave of people from entering the mansion, and part of me felt safe around more people, knowing that perhaps we could work together to survive this. I kept wondering if I wanted to survive this, and deduced I only wanted to survive if I was with Beth.

The woman who owned the mansion had it well-stocked with food for the coming holiday. It seemed she may be entertaining an army, and her availability of fresh produce was unbelievable. An icebox fridge set at the perfect temperature for vegetables and herbs was filled to the brim with all manner of organic bounty, and the first thing people did was immediately begin raiding her home for food. The woman phoned her home, and I answered. It seemed as though she had been alerted to a break-in, and she was quite irate. I told her that there had been seven nuclear explosions not 100 miles from her home, and that people had run in for cover. She was more concerned about her possessions than she was food or fallout-armageddon, so she aked me to “keep people in check and let them take all the food they want, so long as they keep my stuff alone. I saved for years working in a jewelry shop as a manager to obtain that wealth, and I’d like to keep it with me. It’s all I have.”

I found it to be bizarre that the woman cared less about the destruction of the biosphere supporting her, and the death soon to hit all of us nearby, than she cared about her bloody things. I figured if she didn’t see her food as gold, she wasn’t too bright and I wasn’t going to mention anything about it to her.

We created a feast before us, a feast lacking in meat and animal-products, but oddly nourishing. It gave everyone in the home energy, and it calmed their fears about the looming mushroom clouds in the background. We all believed if we kept ourselves shut up in the house, we may survive the initial fallout. The overall lack of knowledge regarding nuclear fallout was astounding. It was as if everyone believed that if they simply ducked and covered, they’d be okay.

People were looking to me for answers. They saw that I was more prepared than most, that I had an understanding that this event was going to happen before it did, so people began to rely on what I told them. I needed people to forage the nearby mall for items, blankets, foodstuff, and any survival gear or weaponry we could find. I led a team through the Roman-garden and into the mall’s covered promenade.

I figured we would soon have to eat our own kind to survive, and I wanted a crossbow for that moment, if it came. Something to protect myself from ravenous packs of humans seeking weaker human flesh to feed upon. Trauma can cause carnage and a lack of moral compass when it comes to survival. Nuclear fallout addles the logical mind, as well. I was expecting my jaunt back to Manitou to be a violent one, and I sought the sporting goods store for protection.

I found a crossbow and a handgun, and I loaded up. The security guards were as panicked as everyone else, apart from the children, which the parents were keeping calm by placing them around the animal pens in the middle of the mall eatery. Mothers were searching everywhere for peanuts to give to their children, so that the children could feed the elephant. My sister was in the mall, and I was glad to see her, but she seemed to have had some sort of nervous breakdown as she was just giddily kicking her bare feet in the water of the crocodile pond, laughing maniacally as the crocodile would lazily attempt to pull her in. The albino crocodile was so frail it hadn’t the energy to pull anyone in, and my sister found this to be quite hilarious. I looked at the crocodile, it’s ancient eyes glazed over with cataracts. It stared into my soul with a piercing gaze of knowing, it’s eye moistened with tears as it had been weeping. I heard a splash and looked to see the elephant had fallen into the water with the crocodile, it’s trunk lifted above the water level to breathe, it’s skeletal mass struggling to swim. The crocodile didn’t bother with the elephant, their shared years of captivity seemed to have created a level of mutual respect between them. They were alone in a sea of monstrous selfish primates, more kin than enemy. Neither animal attacked the other, both seemed more calm in the same pool of water than they were when separate. I wondered if the people would eat the animals, and I woke from this madness to the sound of a backhoe moving up my street outside my window.