Failsafe of the Street Soldier

Chapter Two - Digging Out of the Rubble of the Paradise Lost

John's beautiful wife sure is beautiful, and also his wife.Dawn broke across a changed landscape. Even the small town of Raccoon City had been nearly leveled by powerful shockwaves from the nuclear bombs and neutron missiles and nuclear lasers that had rained fire down upon the cities of America. Even the solid steel Umbrella Corporation tower was toppled, twisted metal and concrete amid a sea of shining broken glass. Down a quiet rural road a cellar door opened with a thud next to the ruins of a small house.

John Daring slowly lifted his head out of the basement and he gasped like a woman in the 19th century who just saw a black man eating a pickle in a white man's restaurant in Atlanta. Not a tree was standing in the woods behind their house, when he turned his head he realized that the house was not standing either, both had forest and home had been reduced to a pile of splinters and television components. Probably more television components in the house pile, and not really all that many to begin with since the Darings only had two TVs. I probably should not have mentioned the television components at all.

The sky above was a strange color as if God himself was blushing. That's assuming that God's face was the size of the sky and the sky was like some sort of mirror for God's face. Perhaps he was blushing at the fact that the human race was teetering on the brink of total annihilation, or perhaps he was blushing because Jesus just walked in on him masturbating, it's difficult to say with any degree of certainty. Below that crimson sky was a panorama of twisted blackened clouds hovering above the smoldering remains of all of man's achievements. Yes, even the pornographic web sites, they too smoldered.

"Oh jeez," remarked John Daring as he doffed his cop hat and rubbed his hand across his face.

He walked over to his neighbor's pile of wreckage to see if anyone had survived. Alas, all that remained of his corpulent neighbor was a smear of grease on the front lawn and several teeth. His wife had been reduced to a pair of smoking shoes. I mean the shoes had smoke coming out of them, not that the shoes were smoking cigarettes or cigars. Similarly all that remained of the Daring family dog named Extremely was a slightly charred collar attached to a leash.

John Daring had attended several joint vocational classes on self-defense and he knew that in the event of the apocalypse the best thing to do was to go to the grocery store and loot canned food and then board up your house in case zombies or mutants attacked at night. Unfortunately for him the force of the nuclear bomb exploding a hundred miles away had turned his car into a mass of wreckage similar to his house only with less wood and TV components and more safety glass and metal. Even nuclear bombs couldn't destroy the world's most reliable form of transportation, which was walking, although I guess if a nuclear bomb landed on your legs you wouldn't be able to walk. Or if a nuclear bomb landed on a shelf holding bowling balls and then the bowling balls fell off the shelf and crushed your kneecaps then you couldn't walk either. So in conclusion, nuclear bombs could take the ability to walk away from John Daring, they just happened not to in this particular instance.

"Where are you going?" Asked Mrs. Daring, her hair disheveled in just the right way to make her even hotter looking, a slight streak of dirt on her cheek to highly her bone structure.

"I am going to the store to save mankind," replied John Daring without looking back. He pumped his shotgun dramatically to chamber a shell.

He set off along the deserted State Route. The walk was long and tiring under the dreadful radioactive clouds that filled the sky. Occasionally Daring would pause to tie his shoe or examine a ruined house for survivors or canned food. At one point he found a car that looked mostly intact but it refused to start, possibly because of electro-magnetic pulses or some other phenomenon like plate tectonics.

The Iron Lord confronts John in the ShoppelmartWhen he reached Raccoon City he could hear the sound of revving engines and he approached the crude wall surrounding the grocery store. Strung up on the exterior were several rotting corpses. A guy with a Mohawk and football padding painted black leaned over the top of the wall and yelled down.

"Are you here to join up or are you here to be the Iron Lord's bitch?"

"Neither," said daring right after he shot the man in the face with the shotgun. "I'm here to finish my grocery list."

When he kicked in the gate to the grocery store he saw that a number of modified cars and motorcycles were set up in the parking lot. Many of them had spikes and machineguns attached to them. He wasn't really sure where they all came from less than a day after the nuclear bombs fell, but he was more concerned with punching the nearest member of the "Iron Lord's" gang in the face. The man was wearing a sack over his head and had two chains he was spastically swinging. When Daring punched him in the face he flew off the motorcycle he was riding and landed in the thresher of a souped-up combine with hot-rod flames painted on the side. Luckily the thresher was not turned on so the man just fell unconscious on top of it.

Unfortunately Daring walked over to the controls and turned the thresher on.

"Hay there," he quipped as the man was pulverized by the rotating arms.

Three more gang members ran at him as if they had been waiting for him to finish off their comrade but before they could do much more than look mean Daring gunned them down with another blast from his shotgun. The shell flew out of the side and made this awesome sound when it hit the pavement.

He encountered a few more gang members as he fought his way into the grocery store. Just as he entered the canned food aisle a massive man with a hockey mask over his face and a gigantic battle axe rounded the corner. John fire his last shotgun round into the giant's chest. Blood and guts sprayed everywhere making a huge mess.

"Clean up on aisle die," he stated emphatically to a stand up display of Mrs. Butterworth.

"The only clean up on aisle die will be you," said a man with a mysterious Australian accent. "And I'm afraid we're all out of mops."

The man had a menacing goatee and two red tribal-style marks that perfectly matched his red Mohawk. He was carrying a really big combat knife, like the kind Rambo used to kill minorities in "Rambo: First Blood: Part II".

"I am the Iron Lord and I welcome you to the Shoppelmart of your doom," the man sneered and could tell that John Daring was looking at his really huge knife. "I see you like my knife."

"That isn't a knife," said John as he reached behind his back, "this is a knife."

Then he shot the Iron Lord in the face with the pistol he had concealed in the waistband of his pants. The Iron Lord gurgled and there was blood everywhere.

"We're going to need a bigger mop," commented John as he began to fill a large sack with canned goods.

He got a lot of peaches because he especially liked canned peaches.