Smithers says "Women and semen don't mix." And Mr. Burns says "We all know what you think, Smithers." And that was my favourite joke in The Simpsons. That's what they're doing a few hundred miles away, across the Channel, across the Atlantic: eating dinner and watching the fucking Simpsons! They're sleeping in their beds next to their wives. But we're here chained to a fucking radiator BECAUSE THE O.C. HAS GONE INSANE! Starting the world again when the rest of the fucking world hasn't even stopped! Just imagine, just think about it: how could infection cross the oceans? How could it cross the mountains and the rivers? It can be stopped. Right now TVs are playing and planes are flying in the sky and the rest of the world is continuing as fucking normal. Think! Actually think about it. What would you do with a diseased little island?
[Beat]
They quarantined us.
[Beat]
They quarantined us.
—Sgt Farrell, 28 Days Later
Between the time I had closed my eyes on the train and the time I had opened them again, some organizing principle had failed. I’ve always imagined the occurrence in very literal terms. I have always envisaged a vast, impossible building, a spiritual power station with an unstable core shitting out the world’s energy and connectivity. I’ve always envisaged the cogs and wheels of that unthinkable machinery overheating, some critical mass being reached... the mechanisms faltering and seizing up as the core explodes soundlessly and spews its poisonous fuel across the city and beyond.
In Bhopal, Union Carbide vomited up a torturing, killing bile. In Chernobyl, the fallout was a more insidious cellular terrorism.
And now Kilburn erupts with vague entropy.
The Divide erupted in fire, violent, red as the last message of the two Couriers arced into the sky... the missiles rained like spears down on the land, burning flags and communities alike... destroying all they struck. The history of the West was erased for the second time, thorough and complete... and America slept once more.
—Fallout: New Vegas — Lonesome Road
