Chapter 2

Continued from the immediately previous post. I post this knowing full well that Greg has threatened to kick my ass if I wrote any more about Jennifer Love Hewitt. Well, great literature requires taking risks, and although that's probably not too applicable here, I will provide the stepstool he will require in order to attempt said ass-kicking. Hey, a man's gotta do what a man's gotta do. Anyway, enjoy.

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The battle had gone on for decades and taken out all in its path. The cities had been destroyed for years already. There were children now who would never know what it was like to have a Burger King, a 24-Hour Mobil Station with a Dunkin' Donuts in it, a doublewide discount cigarette trailer, and a combination Pizza Hut/KFC/Taco Bell all right next to each other off the interstate. There weren't any more interstates.

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Meanwhile, the air inside the camoflaged tents on the top of the ridgeline was thick with sweat, drama, and estrogen. The outgunned, yet resourceful band of women's pro tennis players had held the valley for going on three months, keeping the semi-hot celebrities from getting to the river beyond. There had been casualties, of course, but their supply line was holding, and reinforcements had arrived. Morale on the lines was good; it always was when the patrols came back with the occasional severed head or pair of really fabulous pumps. But Martina Hingis had reason to worry. The gritty racketeueses were still just one serious uphill charge away from being overrun by the "pops"--short for Pop Tarts--and their artificially firm fannies and Hollywood tramp stamps. Only they stood between them and everything Supreme Leader Monica Seles had built over the last long and bloody year. Besides, they knew that no prisoners would be coming down from that hill. They were staying put--one way, or the other.

"Call up Davenport, tell her to grab Pierce and Dokic, and suit up for recon," she told Serena Williams. "We need to fuck with those bitches a little bit."

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The word "postapocalyptic" can mean a lot of things. It can refer to a subgenus of fungi indigenous to the Central Amazon Basin, or the flow turbulence caused by the vibration of the impellor assembly of a jet engine, or it can describe the way things look after one or more apocalypses. In this case, though, it goes way beyond that.

It started innocently enough. Nobody in the Before Time would have banked on society's annihilation coming from a simple feature on SportsCenter, designed to eat up two minutes of TV time in between basketball highlights and beer commercials. Two junior producers thought that having Anna Kournikova and Reese Witherspoon play some skee-ball would be worth a few yuks. And it was--right up until Witherspoon lay dead in a pool of her own blood, a skee-ball jammed down her larynx. From that point on, it was war.

ESPN was, as most probably could have guessed, first up against the wall. As nobody was able to adequately provide coverage of the first skirmishes, all the celebrity magazines and on-line sports betting web sites went tits-up. Their parent media conglomerates and publishing houses turned inside out and collapsed, followed closely by the demise of the consumer electronics industry. The financial, manufacturing and hospitality sectors all crashed and burned soon after on the same fateful April afternoon. Within two weeks of that, government employees just stopped showing up for work, and by Memorial Day, all that was left of the world economy was Nigerian spam emails. Everyone left alive just scavenged for enough scraps to make it through the long, cold nights.