Life is a Beautiful Thing (4-Book Box Set)

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Life is a Beautiful Thing (4-Book Box Set) Page 59

by Harmon Cooper

(Inhale, exhale for old time’s sake.)

  Tripping balls is an understatement – I licked the red snail.

  (Maybe I’d be saner if I’d read Infinite Jest.)

  Nausea a sea of me, unbeknownst to Meme who seems to be somewhere I’m not. An odd sensation pisses through me like R. Kelly, bubbling from my ankles to my knees to my tummy to my nipples to my shoulders to my throat and like that, I am split in half.

  Le boom. Ignore the Warp Riders winnowing around you!

  The sutures come undone until there are two Memes, one black, one Asian lying on the floor of Dr. Hewman’s snail sanctuary.

  Two Memes!

  “Are you me?” I ask. The OG over here straight out of Compton or actually the suburbs of greater LA where I grew up in relative peace and quiet – but fuck the back story.

  (Two Memes? Somewhere a stuffed bird laughs!)

  “I am you,” Asian Meme tells me. His skin is porcelain, his hair nicely parted, his features sharp, his wrists thin.

  “Well, isn’t that … convenient,” I say, suspicious as anyone should be given my current situation.

  “It isn’t convenient at all.”

  “And I’m supposed to believe that I licked a toxic snail and somehow this has produced two people, one black and one Asian?”

  Asian Meme nods, cracks his knuckles. “Yeah, you are supposed to believe that. There are now two Memes. Hi, Black Meme.”

  “Hi, Asian Meme.”

  “You seem confused,” he says.

  “Please – whoever is writing this book – for the sake of humanity, for the sake of all that is holy, PLEASE quit typing this crazy shit!”

  “Who are you talking to?” Asian Meme asks.

  “I’m … ”

  One glance around the room reveals madcap amounts of color and turmoil, inimical sadness, bloated madness. Everything has a buttery glaze to it; everything is what it seems.

  Two Memes – one dying the other floating, one gloating the other straight tripping.

  Asian Meme stands, burps.

  “Where are you going?”

  He burps again.

  “What did you eat for dinner?” I ask.

  “Something Cuban. Follow me, you stupid fuck.”

  THIRTY-TWO∞

  “Meanwhile, back at the ranch, Harry Potter jerked off into Professor Snape’s McStarbucks cup of herbal tea while Hermione ordered a pizza only to contemplate the purge after she’d binged it down. Luckily, Ron came, his hair on fire, and he came again and again until his seed was spent and all he could do was grow a Chester mustache and cruise around primary schools selling ice cream out of a Volkswagen van that doubled as a place for him to keep the bodies nice and cold. For some reason, this inspired Hermione to write a series of shit books about a girl who falls in love with a vampire and a werewolf. This book inspired another author to write a book about bondage that sold more copies in one day than the book you’re currently reading will in its lifespan. I know, right? The early twenty-first century was pretty daft.”

  Asian Meme is not amused by my rambling.

  “Oh come on, I was just getting to the climax – a clickbait listicle!”

  “You are as crazy as a shithouse rat, he tells me.

  Nuthatches tweet inconsistently – cue the Phantom of the Opera music! Asian Meme and I are holding hands now, skipping down the hallway towards a destination unknown like a couple of Don Quixotes. Since he is a part of me, or more appropriately, I’m a part of him, or we are a part of each other, I’m trying to do my best to entertain him.

  I shake my head as blips of light jellyfish around me. Damn that red snail! “Well, would you like me to talk about something else? I’m not quite an expert, but I do know a lot about Mickey and Minnie Mouse.”

  Redonkulus!

  Asian Meme stops and glares at me. “What … what do you know about them?”

  “Well … ” I hate to disappoint, but I’m too far gone to make sense any longer. “I don’t really know much about them. I just thought you’d like DisNike because everyone likes DisNike. I can, however, tell you that the movie Frozen was shit and that I would have tagged the ice princess in a heartbeat. A HEARTBEAT!”

  “Her sister was hotter, but that’s beside the point – don’t pretend to know things about Mickey or Minnie Mouse.”

  “What? You’ve never lied just to get someone’s attention? Look, Asian Meme, if we are going to be friends, we need to be able to entertain each other,” I say for shiggles.

  “Just shut the hell up. I’m here to show you something, not… entertain or be entertained by you. I’ve spent a considerable amount of time in your head trying to make sense of your megalomania.”

  I pull him closer to me. We’re eye to eye now, millimeters away from Eskimo kissing. “Are you saying – ”

  “What?” he asks, frustrated. “Am I saying what?”

  “Are you saying that you’re my guardian angel?”

  I’ve always wanted a guardian angel! I mean, about the only thing better than having help from the spirit world would be the Second Coming of Christ or seventy-two virgins as soon as I get to Heaven. Turn my water into Pepsi! Show me the honey pots! Rapture my testicular fortitude!

  “I’m not … ” Asian Meme thinks for a moment. “Okay, maybe I am your guardian angel, but that doesn’t mean you should treat me any differently.”

  Too late, old chap.

  “I want a pony, a new Corvette, a plaster copy of Owen Wilson’s crooked-ass nose, the Declaration of Independence printed on a roll of paper towels – ”

  He ignores my requests and drags me forward as things take a turn for the worse. The walls morph to a sickening red color, the floor turns to lava, the ceiling fills with cracks barely containing evil grunts and the sound of terrible moans and cries for help. Sauron’s Eye appears, raining down on my parade and filling the hallway with orcs and the corpses of celebrities who OD”d. Jimi! Janis! Shai! Jim! John! Sandra! Chris! Amy! Perez! Jim again! GG Allin! Kate Perry! Ol’ Dirty Bastard! Young Dirty Bastard! Mark Rubio!

  “What’s happening?” I ask, trembling as their eyes sink into their faces and their wagging tongues rot and their images are bought and sold and plastered on people’s walls all around the world.

  Asian Meme turns to me, grabs my collar. “You don’t get it, do you? Meme, look at me!”

  “I am looking at you!” I say, cringing, crying, feeling nauseous, feeling a bowel movement coming on, feeling sweaty, feeling scared out of my goddamn mind. The walls shrink, my knuckles crack.

  Asian Meme slaps me. Ouch! “You know you should be dead, right?” he hisses. “You should have died multiple times by now.”

  Crows enter the room, swarm around my head, peck at my skin. I open my mouth to scream and the crows surge in, beating their wings against my cheeks and bloating my throat until I can no longer breathe.

  Another slap. Asian Meme cups my mouth with his hand. “Keep it down.”

  “The crows!” Part of me wants to yell something about bat country but I have no idea why.

  “Come on.”

  He grabs my hand and leads me down a winding staircase.

  Fare thee well, Reader, fare thee well.

  THIRTY-THREE∞

  “Time to meet your maker.”

  Keva kicked the kennel door open, tucked one of Manuel’s feet under each of her arms, and dragged him inside. The smart survivors – the ones that would actually survive – had put as much distance between themselves and MercSecure’s war party as rapidemente as their pedal appendages would carry them. The brave, bold, macho stupid ones chose to stand and fight, and died for their choice. The increasingly infrequent bursts of automatic weapons fire was invariably met with an RNG-8 zap … and then silence.

  If it wasn’t over yet, it would be soon.

  “Poor Manuel,” she said as she dragged him closer to the dogs, who were barking with ravenous enthusiasm. Keva looked down and wrinkled her nose. “Heilig Scheiss, Manuel, did something die in here
or did you shit yourself? Damnt you! Be honest with me for old time’s sake,” she said as she kicked open another door. “Were you going to feed my friends to these dogs?”

  She looked down at the dead body with a pouty face.

  “Well?”

  Manuel didn’t answer.

  “You never were very talkative. I guess you’re right … ” she paused in a rare moment of introspection. Friends definitely wasn’t the right word – she had no friends, other than Rinchi. “ … they really aren’t my friends. They’d probably kill me if they had the chance.”

  The sound of barking dogs grew louder as Keva stepped into a circular room. There were overstuffed sofas of soft Corinthian leather lining the walls and a minibar overlooking the dog pit, which was about ten feet below.

  “I see.” Keva dropped Manuel’s body, leaned on the rail and looked down into the pit; from inside their cages, the dogs barked and snarled and snapped as they caught her scent – and Manuel’s. “You pendejos set up a little torture ring in here, didn’t you?”

  She tsk-ed as she walked back over to Manuel. “You sure were a sick fuck,” she remarked, as she hoisted his body up to the railing. “How many people did you toss in here?” She turned his face to hers, looking into his dead eyes. “I wish you were alive to see what happens next.”

  His corpse tumbled into the pit with a Thud!

  The dogs went into transports and raptures of barking and growling and gnashing of teeth; they slammed themselves into the bars of their cages, eager to get to their next meal which was right there in front of them.

  “Now to release the hunde… “ Keva wiped her hands on a white leather sofa as she searched for a button. “Oh, there must be something around here…”

  If the King of the Self-Important Over-Blown Macho Douchery had ordered that an ostentatiously tasteless, hand-carved, Aztec-themed throne to be made as gaudy as humanly possible, said objet d’art would seem tame in comparison to the ebony, ivory, gold leaf and alabaster monstrosity that perched upon a dais that commanded the best view of the pit. The Cartel Alpha Male’s throne was a work of art, in the most shockingly vulgar, nouveau riche manner imaginable.

  “I have a feeling … ” Keva sat down in the chair. Her hands came down, immediately finding a series of buttons on the underside of the armrest. She pressed the buttons one at a time until the cage doors slid open and the dogs surged out like a tide of short-haired barking piranhas.

  MercSecure’s top rep watched as the dogs reduced Manuel to rags of clothing and scraps of bones and flesh. Unsated, the Hell puppies turned on each other in a frenzy of bloodlust. She wept as she watched this – it wasn’t the first time she’d seen such a thing, and while she was in no position to muse on the subject, the term dog-eat-dog came to her. For now she was the dog, but one day she would be the puppy chow.

  “Rinchi,” she finally said, wiping away the tears.

  Keva turned towards the exit of the kennel. Her eyes blinked shut.

  Keva (to Lorem Ipsum): I will now recover Rinchi. Make sure I have an exit strategy. I don’t care what the other reps do.

  Ipsum: You have clearance to find Rinchi. Do it before nightfall.

  _∞_

  It took about twenty minutes, but Rinchi finally made it into Ben’s room. For a second, she thought of shutting off her olfactory senses, a trick she’d learned from Anna, a Humandroid escort she used to live with. By cutting the red and blue lingual cord under her tongue, she could essentially shut her sense of smell down. However, this would require something sharp, and there were more important things to do at the moment.

  “This place smells horrible,” she said, pulling herself and Sand further into the Techback’s bedroom. “I didn’t notice it before.”

  “Ben must have taken a bath today,” Sand the Humandroid head said. “We usually can smell him coming. He bathes and changes his shirt about once every two weeks.”

  “Homo sapiens…”

  “Scoot left.”

  Rinchi did as instructed. She touched the wheels of a desk chair, felt her way up to the cushioned seat and lifted herself into place. As she ran her hands along the edge of the desk she asked, “Is there room for you?”

  “Yes, just sweep away some of the candy wrappers,” Sand said.

  Rinchi set Sand on the edge of the desk and swiveled in the chair to more or less face the computer.

  “Is the computer on?” she asked.

  “Turn my head towards the computer,” Sand instructed her.

  “Sorry.”

  “Okay, good. The mouse is on the right.”

  “Mouse? Oh, yes.”

  She started clicking. “How about now?”

  “No…” Sand thought for a moment. “Reach your left hand out until you touch the monitor. From there, move down and to the right until you reach the power button. If this doesn’t work, you’ll have to go back down to the ground and turn the computer on by its power button. Hopefully, Ben just turned the monitor off.”

  The monitor buzzed to life.

  Sand said, “Yes, now move the mouse down three centimeters. Too far, up a hair … good. Click there. Now, you have to click the connect button. It’s to the right; click when I tell you. No … too far … good there. Click the mouse.”

  Rinchi heard a dial-up tone, sharp and ancient. “That’s what it sounds like? Amazing! I’ve actually never heard one before.”

  “Most people haven’t; it truly is primitive technology. I’ll tell you where to click once it is connected. You’ll have to send an e-mail from Ben’s email address to your corporation. Do you have an email address?”

  Rinchi listened for a moment as the modem beeped and booped and chirped and clicked. “I think I can just send it to the main server. From there, someone will forward it to the appropriate party. We may be here a while.”

  THIRTY-FOUR∞

  Keva had just commandeered one of the cartel’s vehicles when she got the message from Lorem Ipsum.

  Ipsum: Keva, Rinchi has been located!

  Keva: Coordinates?

  Ipsum: Forwarding them now.

  “Aeros – receive location,” she said. “Auto steer.”

  Keva: Transfer me everything ExEx has on the location.

  Ipsum: Doing so now. Make this quick, in and out. Get Rinchi and get to the airfield. Murika and the rest of the reps are waiting for you there.

  A GoogleFace satellite view of the area appeared on Keva’s iNet. The tactical overlays were mostly no threat blue; Rinchi’s location was marked with a flashing blue cursor, and was in a cluster of small buildings on an isolated hilltop. The nearest neighbor was several kilometers away.

  The registered homeowner’s details were sparse: Ben Richards – naturalized Mexican citizen, probable Techback, thirty-nine-year-old white male, divorced four times, from Bakersfield, CA. Previously employed by Vehicular Architecture Division of HondaFord until Division outsourced to the Philippines. Most recent employment Walliburton Comsuit Tech Research Division. No further updates for last eighteen quarters.

  It took Keva’s aeros all of ten minutes to reach Ben’s home. The vehicle dropped down to his cactus lined, lava rock driveway; her feet hit the ground before the vehicle finished landing.

  With her PHASR RNG8 up and ready, Keva was just about to knock at the massive wooden door when she thought why knock when you have the key? She moved about twelve paces away from the front door and zapped it with the PHASR. Moisture in the wood flashed into superheated steam and blew the door into flying toothpicks.

  Keva waved away the dust and steam as she stepped into the home. “Hallo Ben?” she called in a chirpy sing-song voice. “Ben Richards? Come out, come out where ever you are … ” A portion of the transom fell behind her, followed by shattering glass. “It’ll be much better for you if you just come out; you don’t want to make me come and find you.”

  She methodically cleared her way into a hallway that led into a tiled room filled with Humandroid parts and an operating ta
ble.

  “There you are,” she said, crouching down in front of his body. “Looks like someone got to you before I could.” She blinked her eyes and sent a picture to Lorem Ipsum.

  Keva: Ben Richards dead of apparent strangulation prior to my arrival.

  Ipsum: Registered. Why is your ocular feed disabled? Please activate it.

  Keva ignored him and moved to the smashed Humandroid heads lying on the floor. “Someone got angry,” she said, as she picked up one of the caved-in heads, perfunctorily examined it, and then tossed it over her shoulder. She turned to the kitchen. “Hello? Anyone here?”

  “Keva?”

  She heard shuffling behind her and immediately spun around to find Rinchi dragging herself towards her. The droid’s skin was scorched and abraded, her skull was exposed on the left side of her face, and her legs dragged uselessly behind her. She carried a Humandroid head like an American football in the crook of her elbow.

  Keva slung her RNG8 and crouched in front of Rinchi.

  “Holy shit … ” She waved her hand in front of the droid’s eyes. No response. “Can you even see?”

  “I’m at five percent power … I can barely do anything … ”

  Keva gave the hairy eyeball to the Humandroid head Rinchi was cradling. It was Caucasian with unremarkable male features, short hair, and the neck stump capped in an aluminum casing. Surgical staples closed the incision where Ben the Butcher had removed the iNet modem. He blinked.

  “Who the fuck is this?”

  “Don’t hurt him,” Rinchi said. “I wouldn’t have been able to contact MercSecure without Sand.”

  “Nice to meet you,” he said.

  Keva picked the head up and set it on the counter, next to a half-eaten bag of export FritoNestleLays Dorito Non-GMO, Cilantro-free Carnitas tortilla chips. She returned to the crippled droid, cradling Rinchi in her lap. “The other reps are waiting for us. I brought Clove and Monique as well. I was off the coast of Somalia when I heard what happened. I got here as quickly as humanly possible.”

 

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