Havoc and Chaos

Your alarm wakes you up with the reminder that a) you live in a capitalist hellworld and it's time to rise 'n' grind, baby, and b) you need your morning piss sharpish. Off you trot.

You lift the lid on the toilet… and it's full of whitish fibrous matter. You don't remember blocking it with a load of paper last time you used it… Wait, it's not paper. It's a morass of lots of little dusty strands, a bit like a lion's mane fungus. What the hell? You think you'd better not flush it; it looks stodgy enough that it would cause a blockage and back up your toilet. Hang on… it's… pulsating? The fibres are undulating and wafting slightly. That's… not a characteristic you want to applied to anything in a toilet. Is it slowly rising? That must mean your outside sewage line is proper backed up. You'd better put off work and deal with the toilet first, otherwise when you get home this rising mass might be spilling out all over the floor.

You close the lid on the toilet and count to 3, then lift the lid again. It's still there. Damn. So it wasn't just morning sleepy-brain playing catch-up.

You piss down the sink while you text your boss:

"Hey, Big D. Am going to be well late because my shitter's got the dick big time. I should still be able to get the Henderson Report done today provided I can swing in after lunchtime."

Your boss texts back:

"Nooo, not U as well. Genevieve and Lolade both called out and u were the only one left who's both forklift certified AND can write SQL."

Then a second text:

"Why's everyone's toilet on the fritz today anyway??"

"No friggin idea, first I heard of it. Did G and L have fungus-looking nonsense in theirs too?"

"No idea lmao, I called both of them and they started saying some bollocks like 'skippity dippity'. Is that a thing?"

"No idea lmao"

"Hurry up and fix ur shitter, I need you. See ya whenever"

"Later, Big D."

Your little cat Wackadoo comes trotting into the bathroom and rubs against your legs. You pick him up, your dear darling little kitty-cat, and bury your nose in his soft fur. "Wackadoo, my jelly roll gumdrop, my jiggly-wiggly! My sweet-patooie honey bun."

"Mao," says Wackadoo.

Wackadoo is every desirable quality in a cat. Big (despite the fact that you always call him your 'little cat', because you've had him since he was tiny-wee), cuddly and tolerant of being picked up, and talkative.

You get your fuzzy feline friend his breakfast. Now, time to deal with the freaky shit that's messed up your toilet. You equip yourself with a pea stick (to break up clogs) and a screwdriver, and set to removing the cover on your outside sewer line. You lift up the cover, expecting to see a vile morass, and are surprised to see… nothing. Your sewer line's just fine… so whatever this is, it's confined to the toilet alone. A slight blessing. You set everything back to how it was, then return to the bathroom. The sink and bath are draining just fine, so there really isn't a problem with the sewer line. So what's in the toilet??

You lift the lid again, and the fungus-mass chokes out a cloud of spores, and the main mass… groans??

Fungus does not do that.

It's air escaping, like a weird puffball fungus, you tell yourself. But it sounded horribly like a human vocalisation!

You put the lid down. If some of your colleagues have had problems with their toilets too, maybe it's a widespread issue and it's affecting your neighbours too. You go to find your phone so you can ask about it on the local TwatsApp group. You'd muted it, because no-one ever had anything interesting to say.

The replies from TwatsApp are unhelpful - everyone just replies with some gibberish that reminds you of what Big D said. Is there some stupid app virus going around? (And has your phone now been infected with it? Fuck sake.) Is there some new craze?

Maybe you'll have better luck going out and talking to people in meatspace. You ignore your arsehole next-door neighbour (you've forgotten what they're actually called; you just call them Whingy McTwatpants in your head) and walk a few doors down to one of your neighbours, Gwen Guffney, whom you know isn't a complete bell-end (they've fed Wackadoo for you when you've gone on holiday, and you've done the same for them with their pigeons). "Alright, Guffney?" you call out in greeting upon seeing them in their front garden.

"Hurk," says Guffney.

"Fuck me, you look rough," you say. Guffney suddenly pukes out a load of fungal fibres that look just like the ones you saw in your toilet. "Oh fuck!" you exclaim. "Are you actually alright?"

"Skibidi," says Guffney. That nonsense word again. Why is everyone banging on about that? What in-joke have you missed? "Skib skibidi yes."

"I think you need an ambulance," you say. "That puke does not look like something that should come out of a human. Can you sit down?"

You pull your phone out of your pocket and dial the emergency services. "Skibidi," says the operator, "What skibidi do you require, skibidi?"

"Ambulance," you reply (frustrated at the operator dicking around). You hope it gets here soon - Guffney has now collapsed on the ground twitching and is exuding fungal-looking foam.

"Skibidi?" says the dispatcher on the phone. Fuck sake! This is no time for them to be joking around!

You begin to give your location, when Guffney's front door bursts open from the flood of fibrous spores that surges against it. The tide of spores engulfs Guffney and drags them back into the house.

"What the gibbering fuck?!" you exclaim. "What the fuck's even going on?" (You're dimly aware of the chorus of 'skibidi skibidi skibidi'-type vocalisations coming from your phone.)

"Skibidi!" comes Guffney's voice from inside the house. Guffney bursts back through the front door, ripping it off its hinges in the process and splintering the door from the impact. You realise it's not exactly Guffney -- it's… a toilet. Presumably Guffney's. A toilet with Guffney's head coming out of it on a bizarrely lengthened neck, like a human worm. "Skibidi dom dom dom yes yes," chants Guffney - the creature with Guffney's face and voice. "Skibidi dabidi neep neep." Guffney rotates their head on an axis that no human neck could accomplish, then lunges at you teeth bared, with lips pulled back further than a human's should be able to.

"I don't know what the fuck you are," you say, blocking Guffney's advance with a handily-placed garden gnome, "But you're not Gwen Guffney any more."

Guffney bites the head off the garden gnome that you'd rammed in their jaws. There's nothing human left in their eyes.

Nothing human at all.

Your fight-or-flight response kicks in - and you're a flightless mammal. You bash the Guffney-toilet creature with the remains of the concrete gnome until you've staved in its cranium and it is still. Fuuuck.

On a whim, you flush the toilet. You wouldn't be able to explain why, but it just feels like the correct thing to do. It's not even plumbed in - but the creature's remains somehow flush anyway. That… shouldn't… have been able to fit down there. You look around the base of the toilet, expecting to see some mess oozing out of the trapway. There's none. The dead creature apparently flushed away to nothing. You try tilting the toilet so you can look in the outlet hole. Nothing. It's an empty toilet. Nothing in the bowl, in the trap, in the cistern.

"Stop violating the laws of physics!" you shout at the toilet as you pick up the concrete gnome and drop it onto the toilet, smashing it into porcelain shards. That'll teach it. To your horror, each porcelain shard suddenly explodes into a cloud of spores, which drift away on the wind. What have you just done??

You sit down on a tree stump in Guffney's front garden. (It used to be a pear tree. Guffney had cut it down shortly after moving in because it blocked so much sunlight from their front window. You were glad - it was one of those varieties of pear tree with flowers that stink of jizz.) What now?

┄

Broadcasting from an undisclosed location:

"…And that was my first encounter with the skibidi toilets. They go down from any weapon that can take down a human. I find your best bet is usually some kind of heavy blunt object. Blades require a bit of finesse to use - but with a more 'hitty' weapon, generally, if you can see your target, you can hit it. Axes are pretty good, but there's the risk of them getting stuck or wedged. A good old table leg with some bolts screwed into it will probably become your best friend. Avoid chainsaws - yes, they can be lethal, but they're so unwieldy. And they run out of fuel quickly, which leaves you with a not-very-good club. Hope you're taking notes. Hope you can hear me at all. Havoc out."

┄

You try calling a few more people on your phone - friends, family. Either there's a dead tone, or the receiver responds with only silence, or with more of that 'skibidi' gibberish. You're not sure which of those is worse. You try checking news websites, but every site you check is down.

Some sort of emergency is clearly unfolding. Is it confined to your local area, or is it further afield? If the armed forces are going to arrive and evacuate people to areas free from the… skibidi fungus? You need to be on those vehicles. You'll need to pack a bag and stuff Wackadoo in his carrier, and you'll need to help any of your neighbours who are still unskibbed.

On the other hand, if everywhere has already fallen… you might be better off staying here and building your home into a fortress. Or making a run for another building that might serve better for that purpose. Whatever the case, you need a plan.

The web isn't providing you with any information - what about TV news? You don't actually have a way of receiving broadcast telly, because knickers to paying the TV licence fee just to have the opportunity to watch endless reruns of unfunny sitcoms and barrel-scraping reality shows. Urgh. You'll have to ask Whingy McTwatpants if you can come in and watch their telly.

Someone approaches. Good timing - it's Whingy McTwatpants. Bad news - they're a skibidi toilet now.

"Not this shit again!" you say, getting up and picking up the trusty garden gnome. "I will name you… John Cunnyhole," you say to the gnome.

Whingy McTwatpants bears down on you, chanting angrily, teeth bared and jaws flared in a horrible grimace. John Cunnyhole strikes true, and Whingy McTwatpants is no more. Unfortunately, neither is John Cunnyhole, who shatters from the repeated impact.

"Rest in pieces, John Cunnyhole," you say. To the splatted remains of Whingy McTwatpants, you cackle triumphantly: "Hahaaaa! That'll teach you to keep treading on my festucas, you fitbin!"

Well, if Whingy McTwatpants is dead, they won't object to you breaking in and watching telly. Luckily, their front door is wide open, and you go right in. "That's where it went! Bastard!" you exclaim upon seeing the drill you'd lent to Whingy McTwatpants and never got back (and which they claimed you'd never lent to them in the first place. Bastard).

The telly is already on, and appears to be playing an emergency broadcast announcement on loop. Finally -- now you can get information on what to do next.

National emergency: fungal plague
Evacuate to safe zones immediately
Avoid exposed individuals
Wear hearing protection
Do not use toilets

From what you can gather from flipping around channels, there is something spreading through water courses and sewerage systems, and hearing the 'skibidi' chant seems to increase the risks of exposure and accelerate the transformation process. But what about the airborne spores you saw? If it spreads through the air as well as through water…

"Fuck sake," you mutter. "We don't need this on top of bloody covid-19."

You heard a lot of skibidi chants without hearing protection, and you were in close combat with two affected individuals… you're probably a dead skibidi walking already.

Who will look after little Wackadoo??

Should you still try to get to a safe zone? If you've been exposed, are you just bringing the plague to the other survivors? "I need something," you say to yourself. "I need, I dunno, a great blazing hedgehog to descend from the sky and tell me what to do."

"Weck," says Wackadoo. Aww, they followed you.

"Baby~" you say, picking up Wackadoo.

The images on the telly become more distorted and pixelated, and the audio more garbled, until the video is replaced by a generic 'technical difficulties, please stand by' screen. You flip channels again, seeing much the same result. What was that? You scroll through channels back to it. It's the emergency broadcast, but that word jumped out at you.

National emergency: skibidi plague

Well, it makes as much sense to call it that as anything else. Why fanny around declaring official names for it right now, though? There are more pressing issues.

The text changes before your eyes.

National emergency: skibidi plague
Evacuate to skibidi zones immediately
skibidi exposed individuals
skibidi hearing protection
Do not skibidi skibidi

What

Skibidi skibidi: skibidi skibidi
Skibidi skib dom dom skib
Skibidi dom dom dom yes yes
Skibidi dabidi neep neep
Skibidi skibidi skibidi skibidi skibidi

Fuck sake.

"Well, nothing to do but face the end of the world together, my dear one," you say to Wackadoo. He rubs his face on your shoulder. Aww.

You go back to Gwen Guffney's house and make your way to their back garden so you can release their pigeons. You pop Wackadoo down and shut him in the kitchen for a sec to avoid freaking out the pigeons. You open the doors of the pigeon enclosure. "Sorry, cuties," you say. "The world's gone to shit. You'll have to fend for yourselves now. Be happy, darlings." You watch the pigeons hop out and flutter to freedom.

┄

Broadcasting from an undisclosed location:

Of course, we know now what caused it. Climate change re-activated the spores that were supposed to have died off, and they found a lovely diet of fatbergs and microplastics in our sewerage systems. Combine that with a weakened human populace from the effects of covid-19, and it had no problem taking hold. Spreading through both water and air meant that even isolated areas got hit eventually. …Wonder if it spread to the Sentinelese? They're - or were - pretty isolated. Not that far from the mainland, though. …I hope someone else is picking up these broadcasts. Well, I've been Havoc. Goodnight."