Rated R for violence and colorful language.
Written for the apocalyptothon challenge.
This fic takes place very early in Season One, so slight spoilers for that season.

Apologies to bennet_7. This is not a Killer Zombie Unicorn story. I tried, but I couldn't get your KZUs to work for me. (This time!)

x-posted to fic_from_mars & veronicamarsfic

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The world ended on Monday during English class, while Logan was trying to take a nap.

He hadn't done the homework, so Mr. Daniels pacing the rows between the desks, passing back last week's papers wasn't exactly riveting. Logan put his head down on his desk.

Well, come on. How could he keep up with his schoolwork? He had couches to slump on and walls to stare at. He had one betraying, bitchwhore blonde to torture, another blonde to fuck, and a third murdered blonde to mourn. Lilly, Lilly. Planted and flourishing in such rich earth, roots sinking deep in the dark garden of Logan's brain. Waking or sleeping, he could not dig her out. It didn't matter what he'd written in that letter. Living, laughing, lost -- she was still his girl.

Mr. Daniels slapped a piece of notebook paper face-down on Logan's desk, jolting him alert again.

Logan had kept up a steady state of functional drunkenness throughout the summer, rolling himself into September easy as falling off a log or anything else that looked promising, such as beds and curbs and giggling sluts. Every so often, he had moments where later on, he couldn't remember what he'd been doing beforehand, and that really pissed him off. The whole idea behind drinking the pain away was that he was supposed to remember not being crushingly miserable for a while. And during one of those moth-holes in his memory, he'd apparently decided that doing his homework was a splendid way to spend an evening.

Creeping, hilarious dread mingled with his curiosity. He did remember last week's assignment. Vaguely. Everybody in class was supposed to write a poem about themselves. Two options, therefore.

1) Logan had scrawled something stupid and illegible on that piece of paper.
2) Logan had actually written a free verse poem about himself.

He couldn't stand the suspense, so he turned over the paper. He had written (neatly), and in the exact center of the sheet:

I am a jack-o-lantern.
Mr. Daniels clearly did not appreciate his pupil's bold, avant-garde statement, because the F, circled many times in red Sharpie, was larger than Logan's entire poem.

Finished with handing back the homework, Mr. Daniels asked Mandy to read her poem out loud. Mandy stood up, hunching her shoulders awkwardly. Her dark hair slid forward to hide her face until, in her oversized white sweater, she looked like she'd come scrabbling and slithering straight out of a cursed videotape.

She read, "I am shy. Nobody tries... to look inside. And then I cry, and wonder why... I have to hide."

It certainly sucked less than I am a jack-o-lantern.

The light outside faltered. Logan turned his head, watching as the sky over the school parking lot darkened to reddish-black like a scab, and filled with sudden thunderheads. He blinked hard. The grainy, ash-flecked stormlight didn't vanish into late-summer blue.

You're hallucinating now? Dude, that's alcohol poisoning. That's a level of fucked-up verging on the epic.

He shook off the unease. He was asleep, that was all. The world was always slightly off-kilter and blunted at the corners these days. He never one hundred percent certain whether he'd taken the red pill or the blue pill. But, no problem. Now he knew he was asleep and dreaming about last night. That explained the blood. Or, earlier tonight, since there wasn't a tomorrow for tonight to be a yesterday yet. Back burning and sticky, a hot metal ball of nausea wedged under his Adam's apple, hands braced against the wall to keep himself on his feet, telling himself his father couldn't keep going forever. He was old. Eventually, he'd tire himself out. Like his mother said all the time, It'll work out. It always does.

Do you actually believe that? he'd asked her once, fighting to keep the scorn from his voice.

She'd stroked his hair. Just keep smiling, baby.

What the fuck kind of answer was that? That answer sucked. He hadn't said that, of course. Not to his mom. Didn't matter; she'd answered the question anyway.

A roaring, booming concussion shook the room and cracked the sky in two, and everybody noticed that. Mandy dropped her poem with a startled shriek as the classroom windows exploded, spraying pulverized glass across the classroom. All the car windshields went at the same time, then the cars flipped over and flew across the parking lot, crashing back to the asphalt with a whooping honking howling car alarm cacophony of an orchestra in Hell warming up.

Mr. Daniels shouted at them to get under their desks, because it was a bomb, it was a missile, it was a plane crash. Logan was already ducking and covering, thanks to years of elementary school bomb drills. Right. Like a plastic and particleboard desk with stalactites of ancient gum crusted underneath would be any protection whatsoever against a nuclear blast.

But, no blinding white light followed. No wall of fire blasted Neptune squeaky-clean save for silhouettes burned into the walls. Somewhere across town, a siren wailed faintly like a cranky baby. A tense and shaken stillness fell in the classroom. Mr. Daniels rose slowly to his feet.

Logan's brain had time to turn over again, and start running. Last year in science class, Mrs. Kemp showed them old photographs of trees blown down by an explosion in Siberia in the early part of last century. She'd explained how nuclear bombs hadn't been invented yet, and no chunks of a meteor had ever been found, and some guy had theorized that a black hole had blown right through the planet, except there wasn't a hole on the other side. Veronica had raised her hand and said sometimes bullets didn't come out of bodies. Maybe the black hole was lodged somewhere inside. Mrs. Kemp had smiled. Maybe, she'd said. Nobody really knows what happened.

And then he saw them. Two pale, pinkish creatures glided down through the ceiling, and three more parted the blackboard like viscous mud. Logan was dreaming. Or hallucinating again. But, this beat the shit out of the sky turning to blood, because the creatures drifting into the classroom, bumping gently against one another... they were pink elephants.

Except, they weren't elephants. He could see how drunk people kept making that mistake, though. They were about two feet around. Fat little fuckers with long trunks dangling between membranous, rounded fins or wings. They hovered in midair, bobbing like jellyfish. On either side of each one's trunk, two black and shiny slits were set at angles, giving every single one a look of stupid malevolence rivaled only by members of the PCH Bike Club.

One of the jellyphants floated down in front of Mr. Daniels. The English teacher kept right on talking, telling the class to stay calm, to stay where they were, that emergency services were on the way, that everything was going to be fine. Mr. Daniels didn't see the thing open its trunk like an undersea flower. Nobody saw the jellyphants at all. Except for Logan.

The creature cruised around Mr. Daniels, looking for a parking space, then it fastened its tendrils on the back of his neck. Mr. Daniels shuddered and stumbled back against his desk. Several of the students turned frightened faces in his direction. He lifted a hand to the back of his neck, a puzzled expression spreading across his face as his dark skin turned a sickly grayish shade, then swiftly wrinkled and sagged as he sank to his knees. The jellyphant feeding on him blushed a deep and sinister pink.

Silence shattered into screams. Casey started yelling about poisoned gas and radiation. The room was full of the things now. They hung in quivering party-balloon clusters on the ceiling. Mr. Daniels had been the highest target. Not anymore. The jellyphants broke formation, descending as kids toppled desks and shoved one another out of the way to reach the door first.

Logan decided he'd changed his mind. He didn't want to die anymore. Not like Mr. Daniels. Not at all, in fact.

The jellyphants battened on his classmates; two and three and more and more of the creatures brought the kids down one by one, as they stumbled over each other and blundered into hungry mouths they couldn't see.

He wanted to turn his head, curl into a ball and cover his eyes and his ears. But, he couldn't. He could only watch, and pray to God his mother was sufficiently pickled to see the things, and smart enough to run.

He stayed put under his desk, chilly sweat stinging his scabbed back under his tee shirt. And at last the classroom was silent save for the white noise buzzing of many wings. In the hall outside, something heavy toppled over with a muffled rumble. Somebody screamed. Short and sharp.

One of the jellyphants finally found Logan. He wrapped his fingers around the huge, hardbound copy of Understanding American Literature that he'd bitched about lugging from his locker to class.

The jellyphant's squishy, pale ridged trunk lifted as it sampled the air in front of Logan. The comparison was inescapable -- however, if Logan ever discovered something like that in his underpants, he seriously would kill himself. No take-backs this time.

Its trunk split open, revealing a horrible, gray-lilac interior lined with barbed suckers.

Where best to hit it? He might only get one shot. Eyes? Wings? Maybe ram the American Lit textbook straight down its ugly throat.

Tentacles feathered the air tentatively.

"Fuck you," he snarled, raising the book.

The jellyphant retreated, making fussy little clicking noises. Logan's upraised hand stayed in mid-air. The thing wouldn't touch him. None of the others had even come near him, although it looked like not all of them had... eaten a full meal.

Still brandishing the book, Logan stood up. The flock of jellyphants at the front of the classroom erupted in a flurry of wings, rising from the pile of corpses like pigeons off a sidewalk. Logan froze, positive he'd made a very bad decision. In a long, long history of cataclysmic fuck-ups, this would be the last and the worst. Then the jellyphants settled, whirring irritably.

"So, I taste bad," he said to the jellyphant still hovering hopefully nearby. "My hideous little friend, that is one criticism I've never, ever gotten before."

It made sense. In a weird, ironic, awful way. The same reason he could see the jellyphants made him unappetizing to them. Alcohol-altered brain chemistry, or some shit. The entire school, the entire town of Neptune, and maybe the entire human race was falling down dead, leaving only Logan and (Please, God. Please.), his mom, and those guys camping out under the freeway overpass. Only they'd survived. Maybe even Duncan; he was drugged up to the gills. But, everyone else? Gone. Aaron Echolls, who rarely ever drank because he constantly obsessed about his image -- he was not only merely dead, he was really most sincerely dead, and all the Photoshop in the world wouldn't turn him into a pretty corpse. Good. Fuck yeah.

Not to mention: fewer people, more booze.

It would work out. It always did. Logan's mother had said so all along.

"Just keep smiling, baby," Logan told himself.

THE END