The Eleventh Plague

Word count: 1,089
Notes/Warnings: None
Summary: Written for the prompt(s): Why it should never rain bubblegum.

When the Rain started, life quickly went to Hell for us all.

Everyone came to call it the Eleventh Plague . . . but at first all the kids—and even many of the adults—were thrilled with it. “It’s raining bubblegum!” was the overjoyed, universal cry. So many of us were delirious and already chewing, by that point. “All different flavors!”

I, myself, had been particularly fond of the days it rained Berry Mint Blast.

But then we noticed that the rain—normal rain . . . you know, the kind made of water—had stopped completely. We further noticed that the rain of bubblegum was happening more and more frequently.

My Appa soon got laid off from his job at the BubbleYum factory, suffice it to say.

Then the problems really began.

Crops began to die, and not just because of the drought. There was also the not-so-negligible matter of the chemicals in the gum which, while breaking down and decomposing—if it could be said to do so; bubblegum, like uranium, seems to have a half-life of ten thousand years, pre-chewed—choked and poisoned the soil.

So when the food rationing began, even the sensible people started to panic.

Some said the Rain of Gum was a sign from an angry God—then killed themselves. Others said there was no God . . . and killed themselves. Others, still—the nihilists among us—said God was irrelevant . . . and kept on keepin’ on.

When the water rationing began . . . everyone stopped talking about the Bubblegum Rain altogether. We tried to pretend it was same shit, different day—that we weren’t all collectively shitting our britches over what we’d thought had been a miracle or a fluke, and was quickly turning into a planet-wide death sentence.

We tried to pretend that the bird and the bees and the frogs weren’t all dying off at an exponential rate, and that the fields and forests were still being pollinated. We tried to pretend that the Earth wasn’t being choked by flies and other vermin that the birds and frogs had kept in check.

This pretending got considerably tougher when the pestilences spread by the up-surge in vermin began to mount, and people began to die in waves that made the mass suicides look like practical jokes.

The starving peoples of the Third World—and parts of the First World—took to cannibalism rather quickly, and many governments turned a blind eye to it, as they simply didn’t have the man-power or resources to police every citizen with a craving for meat.

Martial law was declared in more than a few of the only marginally modern countries, and in several of the supposedly thoroughly modern ones. But even the best militaries couldn’t fully control or stamp out the rioting caused by food and water shortages, and increasing despair.

In most countries food and water became better than currency. The Stock Markets of the world had crashed spectacularly and fairly quickly, after everyone knew that the Bubblegum Rain wasn’t likely to stop any time soon. The new barter-economies of the world left rich men paupers and made survivalists and shut-ins kings. Those who knew only the value of a dollar were often the last to adjust to this new order.

As ever, science rallied and came to our rescue in the form of the Great Reclamator Plants—hundreds of them—commissioned and built worldwide. People began to go into the very lucrative water-farming business, some reclamating water from sewers, oceans, lakes, and even—in the cases of quite a few patient and enterprising souls—the air.

That was one success story. In the first year after the Bubblegum Rain had started, there were over one hundred patents pushed through for competing chemicals, machines, and bio-engineered plants which purported to be able to cleanse the gummy, dead soil. And some of them actually worked . . . albeit slowly.

And slowly is how we began to take back our world from the Bubblegum. Baby steps.

By the end of the first half decade, between the suicides, murders, rioting, genocides—the religious wingnuts of the world went insane-er trying to prove their Willy Wonka-God was responsible, and killed a lot of people, including their own, while doing so—and the still-rampant cannibalism, the world population had halved almost exactly, with numbers leaning toward fewer rather than more people.

By the end of the first full decade, car companies were rolling out the very first cars powered by a form of fusion that combined electricity and bubblegum. These new cars ran about 95% cleaner than cars powered by fossil fuels and, if they didn’t get one where one was going faster, they still managed to get one there, period. And the fuel was free and readily available. To fill up the tank, all one needed was a small shovel and a funnel.

(NASCAR was never the same, though.)

By the middle of the second decade the food rationing was mostly lifted, as the water rationing had been nearly a decade prior with the opening of the Great Reclamator Plants. With the invention and refinement of nano-tech and of biochemical-engineering, the cleansing of soil was a much faster and easier process—and cheaper—than it had been in the early days. With a lot of hard work and ingenuity, and a little more common sense, humans, as a species, were taking infinitely better care of the planet we’d once been well on the way to wrecking beyond repair.

By the ushering in of the third decade A.B.R., few even bothered to reminisce about the good ol’ days, before the Rain. We are—as a species and as a planet—far better off, even with the Bubblegum Rain still continuing on a nearly daily basis, than we were, once upon a century.

Everything worked out, and all’s well that ends well, right?

Exactly.

And so, I sit in my living room, gazing out my picture window at the colorfully overcast day, and the downpour of Red Rubble Bubble pelting passersby and parked cars, and I smile.

In my hands is the battered, grimy monkey’s paw I inherited from my Amma, and which I haven’t touched since I was eight.

One digit is already bent down toward the palm. The others, though slightly curled inward, are still upright.

“One down, four to go,” I murmur, clutching the paw tightly and closing my eyes. I take a deep breath. “I wish. . . .”

END