Story Time: Quetzalcoatl's Apartment

This is for the terribleminds.com Flash Fiction Challenge: Choose Your Own Setting.

The feathered serpent sat in his recliner as the end of the world came, just as the Mayans had predicted. His penthouse apartment was covered in sacrificial blood, hand sanitizer, and bones of mice. The sun shot a narrow beam through the window into Quetzalcoatl's eye just as a crazed man kicked in his door. A vision of leather and spindly limbs.

"I must save the world!" The stranger screamed as he threw off his sunglasses.

Quetzalcoatl squirmed in a pile of used tissues, feathers, and TV Guides. "Just sit here with me and watch it end."

The window cracked. The frame groaned. An unseen hand slowly crushed the apartment under its weight.

"The world can't end this way! It's supposed to be a meteor, dammit!" The stranger held up a copy of some book. Presumably one he wrote. It's Supposed to be a Meteor by Rick Robbins.

The apartment throbbed. The feathered serpent jerked his head back and forth creating a whirlwind of refuse. A laptop computer, coffee cans, and a refrigerator door gave the mini-tornado a bit more heft. Robbins covered his face, but the twister buffeted him back out of the doorway.

A blender struck Quetzalcoatl's head. Shattering into a million pieces. Then a swordfish came harpooning down from above his fireplace, almost piercing right through his face. "What the fu--?"

Robbins appeared back in doorway. "I'm a psychic asshole! You're costing me tons of money!" Putting two fingers to the side of his temple, he blasted a mind wave of invisible energy at the feathered serpent, flipping him over into a bundle of tangled tail and wings.

Quetzalcoatl hissed. He uncoiled, lashing out at Robbins with incredible speed. But he only crunched against a psychic wall of force in front of him. A ripple of dull pain surged down the length of his body. His tail went limp and he sagged to the floor.

"Change it! Stupid Mayan prophecy! This is wrong, wrong, wrong." Robbins prepared another mind blast, but Quetzalcoatl unhinged his jaw and clamped it down on one of the psychic's heavy boots.

The apartment shifted. Glass broke somewhere. A table collapsed. Posters peeled off the walls.

Robbins dragged Quetzalcoatl across the floor. The fangs were deep though. The psychic frantically looked for stuff to mind-hurl at the serpent. A painted vase spiraled from the top of a bookcase, crashing against Quetzalcoatl's coiling form. Nothing. Knives were flung from black marble holder. They cut, but not deep enough. A velvet love seat battered the serpent violently, causing him to gasp but not to release his death grip.

The apartment began to revolt. A wall stud shot out and pinged Robbins in the eyeball. The ceiling fan whirled out of its socket and thwapped him in the side of the head. A fluorescent light tube exploded into his mouth. As he reeled, a wooden beam swung down like a pendulum and uppercutted him into the ceiling. Even with the psychic's head stuck, Quetzalcoatl still hung onto his foot like a tacky key chain.

Then they both fell in a heap. They lie there as the sun seared their skin, gravity slowly collapsing the apartment around them. The sound of dying brick and wood. An inhuman groan.

"Maybe a meteor will still come. You know, afterwards." Quetzalcoatl wrapped around Robbins's abdomen, feeling his ribs crack. "Just relax now."

The psychic doom-sayer screamed silently as the air left his lungs. As the apartment's shadow became smaller. As the sun's heat became hotter.

"But-" Robbins's veins in his face throbbed. He sputtered and placed his fingers gently against the serpent's rainbow-colored scales.

"That's it. Just let it end."

The Mayans were right. About the end. About him. A breeze slid through the broken window, and a heaviness left the room. Quetzalcoatl breathed it all in. And the apartment breathed with him, its last breath as it finally imploded into a folding darkness.