Grasshopper Jungle

by Andrew Smith

  There were several unfortunate clips of the Unstoppable Soldiers eating a few of their co-workers, but what can you do?

  It was all in the name of science and anti-Communism.

  A commercial had been spliced directly into the middle of Reel Five. The commercial was a sales pitch to the Defense Department for McKeon Industries’s Unstoppable Soldiers. It suggested exposing prison inmates, the unemployed, welfare recipients, and hippies to 412E, and then dropping them off in sunny Havana, or possibly deep inside Red China.

  Bulletproof, tireless machines of conquest. McKeon Industries presents to the world our Unstoppable Soldiers!

  The commercial footage kept replaying the image of Felek Szczerba in the process of hatching out.

  As soon as an Unstoppable Soldier hatches out, he is a bit puffy and wilted, kind of like a butterfly when it sheds the husk of its chrysalis. But as soon as the Unstoppable Soldier ate what remained of Felek Szczerba’s corpse, it also ate two attending nurses and a physician.

  All of this was captured on camera.

  Bulletproof, tireless machines of conquest. McKeon Industries presents to the world our Unstoppable Soldiers!

  The Unstoppable Soldier that hatched out of Felek Szczerba ate the cameraman, too.

  Apparently, the scientists at McKeon Industries did not have any ideas for what to do about the Unstoppable Soldiers that had taken over their Unstoppable Corn Research Unit. They only knew that they wanted to sell the Unstoppable Soldiers, and that they were unsuccessful at shooting them. So the leaders of McKeon Industries did the worst possible thing you could do with an Unstoppable Soldier infestation: They waited to see if the Unstoppable Soldiers would simply die, or go away on their own.

  Unstoppable Soldiers do not just go away.

  Unstoppable Soldiers can live a very long time between meals.

  McKeon Industries eventually learned these two details. Unfortunately for an entire crew of McKeon Industries scientists, they also learned that Unstoppable Soldiers were bulletproof.

  Dr. Grady McKeon narrated:

  In the spring of 1968, tireless scientists at McKeon Labs kept round-the-clock vigil on our formidable troops, observing carefully while the burgeoning females deposited egg masses as large as a high school basketball court!

  Imagine the reproductive and growth potential of such an army, my friends!

  Robby said, “Uh. Those egg things look exactly like the shit inside the globes.”

  He was right.

  The third stage in the infestation of Unstoppable Soldiers—the breeding and egg-laying phase—reverted back in appearance to the original black-pulsing and cauliflowered mass of the 412E mold; but on a much grander scale.

  Like the contained mold specimen Robby and I first saw inside Johnny McKeon’s office the night we climbed down the Roof Access ladder and into From Attic to Seller Consignment Store, the egg masses laid by the two female Unstoppable Soldiers quivered and writhed, radiating an obviously powerful light.

  The egg masses swelled with small volcanic bulges that would rise up and spit globules of snot-like eruptions, only to be reabsorbed into the pulsating blob. And the female Unstoppable Soldiers never moved from their guardian positions over their rookeries. They stayed with their spiked arms spring-loaded, just waiting for anything to get near enough to become a next meal.

  Dr. Grady McKeon appeared once again in the role of on-screen narrator before the end of Reel Five.

  Dr. Grady McKeon had aged considerably between the filming of the first reels and the reel that showed the siege of the Unstoppable Soldiers. His hair was thinner, and behind the thick distortion of Dr. Grady McKeon’s eyeglasses, his eye twitch fired and fired like an inexhaustible machine pistol.

  Dr. Grady McKeon said:

  It was merely by blind chance, my friends, that we at McKeon Industries ultimately discovered the secret to demobilizing our Unstoppable Soldiers. Pay attention, my friends, for you may be able to affect a similar salvation if the conditions are favorable in your situation.

  If not, then take heart. Enjoy your lives here in Eden. And, by all means breed, my friends. Breed and live in love. The New Universe depends on your success.

  I love you. I do love you all.

  Then Grady McKeon began to weep on camera.

  Robby said, “He is fucking insane.”

  “Uh,” I said. “Let’s have another cigarette.”

  Scientists at the lab dared to enter the sealed-off Unstoppable Corn Unit where the eggs had been laid. The McKeon Industries scientists formed an armed phalanx in their Eden jumpsuits. Dr. Grady McKeon himself led the entry of the scientist army into the secure laboratory.

  Dr. Grady McKeon and his scientists were armed with flamethrowers.

  History provides a compelling argument that every scientist who tinkers around with unstoppable shit needs a reliable flamethrower.

  When Dr. Grady McKeon entered the lab, however, the Unstoppable Soldiers reacted to him in exactly the same manner I had seen Hungry Jack respond to Robby: The Unstoppable Soldiers were afraid of Dr. Grady McKeon.

  They tried to get away from him.

  Dr. Grady McKeon was clearly the God of Unstoppable Soldiers.

  So McKeon Industries reasoned that since Dr. Grady McKeon had brought the Unstoppable Soldiers into being, it was he that could erase their existence as well.

  So they experimented.

  The notable characteristics of McKeon Industries experimentation entailed two prominent features: First, scientists working alongside Dr. Grady McKeon seemed to have no logical expectation for any particular outcome. They simply randomly selected any convenient biological agents and threw them into the paint cans of their soup kettle.

  Second, for whatever reasons, the McKeon labs seemed a bit overly obsessed with blood or sperm as their default catalysts.

  ROBBY THE THEOLOGIAN

  UNSTOPPABLE SOLDIERS WERE ridiculously easy to kill.

  It cost McKeon Industries a few more scientist-meals to figure that simple fact out, but eventually the problem of the first infestation had been clearly put to rest.

  They started, naturally, with sperm.

  Scientists at McKeon Industries’s Unstoppable Soldier Unit used Dr. Grady McKeon’s sperm. They loaded plastic capsules filled with sperm into ink-marker guns and shot the capsules at the Unstoppable Soldiers.

  Unstoppable Soldiers do not appreciate being shot with somebody’s sperm.

  One Unstoppable Soldier snatched the unfortunate scientist with the plastic-capsule-sperm-pistol, and picked him up by his head, while the other two males played wishbone with his legs.

  It was a gruesome spectacle.

  “You can’t really blame them for doing that,” Robby said.

  “No,” I agreed. “Can’t blame them at all. Who wouldn’t get ticked off if you shot them with plastic capsules filled with Dr. Grady McKeon’s sperm?”

  “Even Saint Kazimierz would get mad at a guy over shit like that,” Robby said.

  Robby Brees was such a gifted theologian.

  The two female Unstoppable Soldiers remained, poised motionless in their guarding positions over their pulsating mountains of eggs.

  The scientist who lost his life in the failed sperm attack was named Heinrich Fuchs. It was an unfortunate surname, by Iowa standards.

  Heinrich Fuchs was born in a place called Splugen, which is in Switzerland.

  I researched Heinrich Fuchs. There were a lot of Fuchs in Splugen.

  Splugen was full of dumb Fuchs.

  The Swiss are famous for maintaining neutrality, except, apparently, when it comes to shooting at monstrous bugs with someone else’s sperm.

  Dulce Et Decorum Est.

  If McKeon Industries ever reworked its motto following infinita frumenta!, which basically means Unstoppable Corn, and its successor, infinita milites!, which means something like Unstoppable Soldiers, or shit like that, they might have considered a slogan along the lines of post sperma sanguine conantur!r />
  I believe, from Latin, the phrase might be translatable to something like this: After sperm, try blood!

  It rings nicely, but it is not nearly as melodious as a good old rhyming Iowa name.

  “I’m glad it didn’t work,” Robby decided. “I would hate to have to fill up little bullets with my sperm just so we could go out and kill Hungry Jack.”

  “Uh,” I said.

  We realized that in the same way the 1968 Unstoppable Soldiers cowered away from Dr. Grady McKeon because it was his blood that created them, the Unstoppable Soldiers in Ealing today would only be stopped by Robby Brees.

  That was what the insane Dr. Grady McKeon meant when he told us, “Pay attention, my friends, for you may be able to affect a similar salvation if the conditions are favorable in your situation.”

  It was the blood that did the trick, and Robby Brees was God to Ealing’s newest crop of Unstoppable Soldiers.

  The scientists at McKeon Industries, none of whom had ever received a Nobel Prize and its accompanying million dollars and trip to Sweden for a threesome with Robby Brees and Shann Collins, nearly drained Dr. Grady McKeon dry collecting blood from the twitching man. Once they did, their initial method of delivery was less sophisticated than the plastic capsules filled with sperm: One of the scientists went into the lab where the Unstoppable Soldiers had taken over, and he squirted them with Dr. Grady McKeon’s blood from a large plastic hypodermic.

  That particular scientist lost his right arm from the elbow down.

  “That is a really dumb way to lose an arm,” I pointed out.

  “Those guys actually went to college and shit,” Robby said.

  “I think a lot of colleges in the sixties offered degrees in taking LSD, Rob,” I said.

  “It is fortunate you were not born with two heads,” Robby concluded.

  But a remarkable thing happened once the targeted Unstoppable Soldier had come into contact with the blood of his God. The Unstoppable Soldier stopped, and fell to pieces.

  The six-foot-tall praying mantis with tooth-spiked arms simply broke apart, segment by segment.

  That was the first Unstoppable Soldier. It was the one that hatched out of Felek Szczerba.

  At that exact moment, as Robby and I sat watching Reel Five of Eden Orientation Series, the disconnected pieces of Felek Szczerba’s Unstoppable Soldier body were floating in a brine of preservatives, sealed within large glass cases resembling aquariums, inside Johnny McKeon’s private office.

  So McKeon Industries was able to clean up the first infestation of Unstoppable Soldiers in Ealing, Iowa, during 1968. They let the eggs begin to hatch, unfortunate as it was. Film images captured the black creatures as they began bursting out from the gooey egg masses. The miniaturized Unstoppables were about as large as third-graders as soon as they hatched, and the first ones immediately began feasting on their brothers and sisters.

  They were, after all, Unstoppable Soldiers. Actually, until they’d eaten and molted several times, the hatchlings were more like Unstoppable Cub Scouts.

  Unstoppable Cub Scouts only want to do one thing, at least until they enter Unstoppable Puberty, which happens in about four hours.

  Within days, the sealed-off McKeon Industries lab facility was completely packed—from attic to cellar—with full-grown, hungry Unstoppable Soldiers, all of which engaged in a round-the-clock unstoppable orgy of sex and cannibalism.

  The experiment had to be halted.

  More blood was drawn. Dr. Grady McKeon became frail and anemic. But finally, all the Unstoppable Soldiers had been erased.

  It was not the end of the film, however.

  The worst was yet to come.

  Robby Brees and I did not know anything about it.

  SATAN AND THE PASTOR

  “UM, ROBBY,” I said, “I just thought of something.”

  “I don’t like the idea of draining my blood, Porcupine,” Robby said.

  “Not that. I was thinking, what if Ingrid needs to shit?” I said.

  Neither one of us considered the fact that getting Ingrid up the ladder to the entry hatch was likely going to be far more difficult than getting her down.

  Robby said, “You might just have to put her inside the Nightingale.”

  I shook my head.

  “I could never do that to a genuine Nightingale,” I said.

  The movie played on.

  And, at that exact moment as Robby and I sat next to each other inside Eden’s theater, Pastor Roland Duff and Stan, the Mexican man who owned and operated Satan’s Pizza, cautiously made their way across Kimber Drive toward the red and blue flashing lights of the Iowa State Patrol car.

  It was not a good idea.

  Stan, whose real name was Sevastián Hernandez, walked one step in front of Pastor Roland Duff. The two men saw Johnny McKeon driving away from the Ealing Mall.

  Grasshopper Jungle was eerily quiet. The shops were all dark. This was normal for the most part because so much of the mall had shut down. But even the Ealing Coin Wash Launderette was lightless; and that was unusual.

  Pastor Roland Duff assumed the power on the south side of Kimber Drive must have gone out. The lights were still on at Satan’s Pizza.

  Roland Duff glanced nervously at Stan Hernandez illuminated by the silent flickering lights from the patrol car. The alternating washes of blue and red made it seem like the men were standing on the dance floor at a discotheque. Pastor Roland Duff realized he had never actually looked at Stan Hernandez before.

  Stan Hernandez was very handsome.

  Too bad Stan Hernandez was Catholic, thought Roland Duff.

  Roland Duff, who had never had sex with anyone, was very aroused.

  Unfortunately for Pastor Roland Duff and Stan Hernandez, so was Travis Pope.

  Stan Hernandez and Pastor Roland Duff got right up alongside Denny Drayton’s abandoned patrol vehicle. The driver-side door had been left fully open, and the vehicle’s motor was idling. The two men saw the sideways Diet Coke bottle that leaked its viscous contents of tobacco spit all over the cushioned upholstery of the driver’s seat.

  Denny Drayton’s emptied Sig Sauer was on the ground next to the rear tire.

  Trooper Drayton’s mostly headless and entirely hairless corpse lay in the parking lot in front of the car.

  The Unstoppable Soldier that had been Travis Pope flitted up to the roof of Denny Drayton’s patrol car. He perched like an obscene living gargoyle atop the rack of flashing colorful lights.

  Stan Hernandez looked up and said, “Holy shit.”

  Those were the last words Pastor Roland Duff, who was mostly a virgin, ever heard in his life.

  Holy shit.

  Excrementum Sanctum.

  Travis Pope killed Stan Hernandez and Pastor Roland Duff. Travis Pope also ate Pastor Roland Duff’s entire aroused body. The headmaster from Curtis Crane Lutheran Academy was very tender and moist. Travis Pope made bug shit all over the Iowa State Patrol car, then he scampered away, sniffing the air, trying to find where Eileen and the other bugs had gone.

  And at exactly that moment, Ollie Jungfrau opened the door to his Dodge Caravan minivan. He put his laptop and a plastic Walmart bag, into which he’d stuffed some clean clothes, onto the passenger seat.

  Ollie Jungfrau was going to get the hell out of Ealing if it was the last thing he’d ever do.

  It was.

  As Ollie Jungfrau made his way toward the east-west highway that connected Ealing to Waterloo and Dubuque, he noticed a figure running along the side of the road.

  Ollie Jungfrau imagined he was stuck inside a video game.

  He imagined he was in charge of driving a Dodge Caravan minivan, and the object of the game was to run down big fucking bugs.

  “Suck on the front end of a Dodge fucking Caravan, you big fucking alien bugs,” Ollie Jungfrau said.

  Ollie Jungfrau’s penis was hard.

  Ollie Jungfrau got erections whenever he killed aliens in video games.

  The thing Ollie Jungf
rau saw running along the roadside was not a big fucking alien bug, however. The thing Ollie Jungfrau saw was Louis, the cook from The Pancake House, whose real name was Ah Wong Sing.

  Louis was five foot four inches tall.

  Louis had fucked Connie Brees three times that day, using condoms that Connie Brees found on the floor of Robby’s bedroom.

  Ollie Jungfrau nearly ran his friend over before he realized it was not a big fucking alien bug.

  And running next to Louis was another person Ollie Jungfrau recognized: It was the eighth-grade English teacher from Curtis Crane Lutheran Academy. Her name was Mrs. Edith Mitchell.

  Mrs. Edith Mitchell sometimes shopped at Tipsy Cricket Liquors. However, Mrs. Edith Mitchell did not purchase condoms there. Mrs. Edith Mitchell smoked Marlboro menthol cigarettes and drank white wine from cardboard boxes.

  Ollie Jungfrau pulled his Dodge Caravan over to the side of the road.

  “Hey, you two,” Ollie Jungfrau said, “I think Ealing’s being invaded by aliens or something. I’m not joking, you better get in.”

  Ah Wong Sing and Mrs. Edith Mitchell were frantic.

  They had seen the bugs, too.

  Ah Wong Sing slid open the rear side door on Ollie Jungfrau’s Dodge Caravan.

  “Thank God,” Ah Wong Sing said.

  “Thank God,” Mrs. Edith Mitchell echoed.

  They got inside Ollie Jungfrau’s minivan. Ollie accelerated as fast as a Dodge Caravan carrying three Iowans could go. He headed toward the bridge that led out of town, just on the other side of Amelia Jenks Bloomer Park.

  It was not a good idea.

  SERIAL KILLER USA

  I KNEW HOW to kill the Unstoppable Soldiers.

  “We could use my paintball gun,” I said.