The True Meaning of Smekday

“Oh,” I said. “Okay. I guess you can come. But you’ll have to do your business at rest stops.”

Pig purred.

By this point, I was thinking it would be nice to have some company, as I didn’t expect to see anyone else for a couple days. I assumed the highways would be empty, you see, what with nearly everybody taking the rocketpods.

I was right and I was wrong.

Did you know that cats don’t like riding in cars? They don’t, or at least mine didn’t. Before we started out, I reset the trip odometer, so I know that Pig spent the first twenty-two and a half miles staring out the rear windshield and hissing. She clung to the headrest of the passenger seat like a Halloween decoration, back arched and poofy.

“Calm down!” I shouted as I dodged abandoned cars on the highway. “I’m a really good driver!”

She stopped hissing and started growling, sort of. You know how cats growl. Like pigeons who smoke too much.

“I could have left you home, you traitor. You could have moved in with your precious Boov.”

I have no trouble looking at a cat and steering at the same time, but for some reason the car sort of hopped over a skin of tire tread in the road, and Pig squealed and shot off the headrest, looped around the backseat a couple of times, and darted over the gearshift, finally curling into a ball under the brake pedal.

“Uh-oh,” I muttered. I pressed the brake gently, trying to coax her out. She hissed and took a swipe at the can of corn under my shoe.

I looked up at the road, dodged an empty motorcycle, then glanced back down at my feet.

“C’mon, Pig,” I said reassuringly (while swerving to avoid a minivan). “Come on out…(oil tanker)…I’ll give you a treat!” (Sports car. Why had everyone just left their cars?)

“Mrrr?” said Pig.

“Yeah! You want a treat? Treat? Treat?” I lilted over and over like a songbird.

Pig still hadn’t moved, but I had a stretch of clear road. I was just keeping my eye on a big rig on the left, in the distance, and that’s when I saw something move. It hung in the air over the trailer, lazily bobbing up and down. It was a mass of bubbles; soap bubbles: maybe. But some were the size of softballs, and others like basketballs, and they all stuck and interlaced together to make a star shape as big as a washing machine. Like this:

It didn’t move with the breeze, it just dipped and rose slightly, as though tethered with invisible string to the big rig’s smokestack. And as my eyes traced down the smokestack, I saw something else. Or someone else, standing on the road.

“There’s a guy or something,” I said, as much to myself as to Pig. The guy, or woman, or whatever, was wearing bright safety orange, easy to see, and maybe some kind of clear plastic helmet, and I thought, Radiation suit? and then we got close enough to see it was one of them. A Boov.

“Okay…okay,” I whispered, and pulled the car as far to the right as I could without hitting the barricade.

The Boov noticed my approach and turned that weird body to face me. The sun was glinting off its helmet, but I think it raised its arm, palm out in a way that must be recognized across the galaxy as stop. Then again, it was hard to tell. They had such small arms.

I couldn’t stop, but I could take my foot off the gas, so I slowly lost speed as I hugged the shoulder of the road and said Hail Marys under my breath.

We were getting really close now, close enough to see that awful mess of legs under the Boov’s body, and the broad, flat head inside the helmet. It made its gesture again, more forcefully, and it was definitely stop. I lifted my hand in return and smiled and waved and kept my eyes on the road. I didn’t want to look at it anymore. So I almost missed it when the Boov’s other arm whipped down to its side and snapped back up with something in its hand. All at once I recognized the thing from the TV, one of those horrible guns you saw a lot of when we’d still been trying to fight. Terrible guns that didn’t even make a noise, or a light. They just pointed at you and then half your body was gone, just like that.

Well, one thing I could still do was hit the gas. I ducked and slammed on the pedal, and the car lurched forward, not nearly fast enough, scraping the highway barricade and sending up sparks like the Fourth of July.

The Boov shouted something I couldn’t hear or understand. I tried to make a poor target of myself, swerving back and forth and looking up just in time to avoid hitting an SUV. I looked out at my right-side mirror and saw that it had been wrenched off by the barricade, so I looked at my rearview mirror and noticed that most of the SUV wasn’t there anymore, a huge chunk scooped out as clean as ice cream, and so I tried to look at my left-side mirror, but it wasn’t there anymore, either. I turned and saw the Boov fading into the distance, far away now. It wasn’t chasing me.

“Oh boy, Pig,” I said softly, and Pig crawled out from under the brake like it wasn’t anything to her one way or the other.

A minute later I pulled to the side of the road and stopped, and looked around at the car. The Boov gun had disintegrated my mirror, and there was a hole in the left rear window where the beam had entered the car. I craned my neck and saw there was an even bigger hole in the rear windshield where it’d left. Each hole was as perfect as could be, like a biscuit cutter through dough.

“I hate them,” I said. “I hate them. We were really lucky, Pig.”

But Pig didn’t hear. She was stretched out on the passenger seat, asleep.

Why did the Boov shoot? I didn’t know—all I was doing was driving to Florida, like they wanted. But at mile forty-eight I found out why nobody else was on the road. There wasn’t one.

We were curving around a bend when the car bucked over a pothole. My seat belt went taut as I jerked forward and back, pain twisting up my neck. Pig rolled off her seat, woke up briefly on the floor of the car, and fell back asleep where she was.

I swerved around chunks of asphalt and rounded something that was less like a pothole and more like an empty swimming pool. Then another curve, and the road was gone. My little car dropped off a shelf of pavement into a crater of earth and tar, and I jiggled the steering wheel as I mashed my corn-can foot against the brake. We skidded and plowed through twisted metal curlicues that were once a barricade, then slid down the embankment, rolled over twice, and came to an abrupt stop in a MoPo parking lot.

The air around the car was orange with dust. I clutched the steering wheel like a life preserver. Pig was sprawled on her back in the crook where the windshield meets the dash. Our eyes met, and she gave me a short hiss.