GuNNhead

It was your average bus ride in summer. Another sweltering hot day. Sweaty, sticky, humid. Everyone secretly hated everyone else for creating body heat: sweating, breathing their hot, humid breath.

Towards the front of the bus, there sits a beautiful young woman. Her mouth is ever so slightly open, showing her full, pouty lips, her smooth skin has visible moisture upon her fresh, ample bosom. Her small, thin tank top does not help her keep cool in this overbearing heat. She fans herself, and pushes a bit of her hair back, while wiping some sweat from her brow, when: she suddenly bursts into flames. Her clothes instantly incinerate as her flesh melts away. She screams as she leaps up in a panic, clawing and tearing at those around her to help, but there is nothing that they can do, for at that very moment, even more people go up in flames. An old woman in the back, a couple in the dead center of the bus, a group of high school kids, and finally, the driver. The bus careens into traffic, smashing a small sedan; on impact, the family ignite into flames. The sedan swerves across the oncoming lane hard into a fire hydrant, sending water spraying up out of the ground, and the driver through the windshield in a flaming nosedive into a nearby playground. All the children in the park rapidly erupt in a blaze. The ones on the swing sets go flying off into a pile, creating a bonfire of child-flesh. The ones on the see-saw fuse immediately to the handles of the toy, spending their remaining minutes teeter-tottering while watching their playmate burn to cinders. Parents, in a fit of blind protective instinct, go directly to their child’s side, but the mere act of going towards their ash-children set their own bodies alight. A bicyclist pedaling by slows to gawk, when he too explodes with fire, searing his flesh to the bone. As he burns uncontrollably, he and his bike enter a large intersection, lodging themselves under the moving tires of a Humvee, setting the occupants of that aflame. As their eyeballs burst and their blood boils, a huge multi-car pileup ensues, torching every motorist for miles.

Seas of flames eventually engulf the city, stemming from within the hearts of the populace. The inferno causes a pyre of flame to erupt, becoming visible at a huge distance. A Rube Goldberg-esque chain reaction of monumental proportions erupts across the country. People burning alive scorch the earth, entire cities turn to ash enveloped in a firestorm. It was hilarious. Best. practical. joke. ever.

“When there’s no more room in hell, then the dead will walk the earth”
Sage advice, a warning to live proper lives, or face the wrath of hell and the undead. So one’s soul does not return to the land of the living to feast upon them. However, what happens, and the time will come soon, when there’s no more room on earth?

People are overpopulating the planet; plausible sustainability is becoming a larger issue every day as more humans are being born than are dying. That is simply viewed as progress, though. Population growth means that humanity isn’t dying off, we’re thriving.

In this possible world, however, capacity has been reached and surpassed. The core of the story though, begins where we end, with death. It all started logically, you create ashes of your loved ones; spread them where they may have enjoyed in life, perhaps a lovely spot on the mantle, no burial plot. Then, diamonds: wear your loved ones in small pieces of jewelry. Even in your world, this is possible; the cremated carbon remains of your loved ones are subjected to great pressure and heat, and the entire process, from cremation to finished stone takes up to nine months. In this other possible world, as in all things, given enough time, an extrapolated logic set in. The bodies of people who died were no longer venerated, they simply became no longer practical or cost efficient, taking up too much valued real-estate; the dead outnumbered the living.

It began with the evisceration of graves en masse, destroying all those who died, creating new homes for those still alive. Eventually, death was barely even taken seriously anymore, and life was enjoyed much more, death became an afterthought to the joys that life could bring: what happened, happened because of fate, out of our hands, impossible to control. Live fast, die young. Eventually, people began to celebrate death. Feasts and celebrations of the dead took on new meaning. We became our own comestible, a rare delicacy served only on special occasions. Some took great pride in living gluttonous lives to be a delectable feast, to be able to have large celebrations, able to feed large amounts of the friends that they had accumulated and acquired in life in one final dinner in their honor.

There were no true repercussions, and for those of you wondering, there were no dead to walk the earth for revenge. The only time the dead rose was when the living over indulged upon their corpse, or had indigestion. Don’t you see what this world has become, when the living feast off the dead? When there’s no more room on earth, then the living will walk in hell, and the dead won’t have a prayer, because it’s the logic of the living.