'71 Monte Carlo - To the ends of the Earth.

Doreen and Hal were so in love. They needed a car as big as their love, but it had to be a coupe, because they were still young and vibrant, you know? It was so hard to keep a relationship fresh once civilization had been destroyed. Fortunately, the remains of their Chevy dealer had an intact Monte Carlo. Turns out it was the perfect car for them! Groovy.

First off, the "Monte" was a luminous shade of Coffee Ground Brown, so the Russian jets would have a hard time spotting it from the air. The color was relaxing, like a bowl of prunes, and blended in nicely with the irradiated rubble they found themselves driving through, one day after another.

Then there was the size. Sure, it was a coupe, but it wasn't small like a coupe. Just walking down to the hood in the morning to check the coolant  was enough of a journey that Hal always gave her a kiss and gave her specific instructions if he wasn't back by noon. She was to seal herself in the cabin and load the shotgun with deer pellets in case the "trogs" came foraging. Trogs loved the tatse of "norms" like Doreen and Hal.

Sure the new fissures in the Earth's crust were deep, but the Monte's suspension had just about one Earth's crust of travel, so the ride was butter smooth no matter what geographic anomaly they drove over. Sure, you wouldn't want to take it around any sharp corners, but now that all the cities were flattened, there was hardly any need for turning, except to dodge the odd mushroom cloud. But how many more of those could there be? The knowledge to make bombs died with the knowledge of how to build a radio or make pancakes.

Like all cars that had gone before and all that ever would, the Monte ran on compressed fossils. That was not problem, what with all the corpses of humanity and whatnot. Sure corpses needed pressure to become oil, but that's what a 6000 lb coupe is good for. A car as big as the Monte could generate pressure on a geologic scale. Park it on top of a pile of "ex-folks" and in the morning, after eight or so hours under the weight of the Monte, you had oil, ready to be refined into cheap, plentiful gasoline.

Most of all, the Monte Carlo had the room in the back to carry a family, if they decided to start repopulating the Earth. They weren't sure about that just yet. They weren't sure if they were ready for the responsibility of building a civilization and everything, but when they were, the back seat could accommodate several tribal villages. On one side of the transmission hump would be the hydroponic garden and on the other side would be the Learning Zone, where they would build a fire and gather round to "do the tell" every night, so that "them's that go after us won't forget the learnin' and the doin' of them's that's gone before us." It was the way.

Yes sir, when life gives you lemonade, you just smile and make it into an empty glass of lemonade. That's what survivors do. And that's what Hal and Doreen were: survivors. They just had to remember what went wrong, so they could tell whoever came next how to make sure nobody ever had to survive anything ever again. And they'd do all that suviving in their '71 Monte Carlo - a car to drive to the end of the Earth.

* We apologize for the folded corner on today's image. The Images and Scanning Them dept. has been warned, and the next time this happens, the moon shall turn as blood and afternoon ping pong breaks will be shortened to just five minutes. Such insolence will notbe tolerated.  [ -Mgmt]