by Andrew Smith
“I wonder if Johnny kills queers,” Robby whispered.
“Uh,” I said.
Johnny McKeon did not come down into Eden to kill Robby Brees and me.
Shann and her family had come down to Eden because they knew the Unstoppable Soldiers were running wild in Ealing, Iowa.
Robby and I stood in the doorway to the locker room. Ingrid, never one to get too worked up about such things as late-night visitors, sat on the floor between us and yawned.
To Johnny McKeon and his wife, Robby Brees and I must have looked like players in a science fiction movie, dressed as we were in our matching and numbered Eden Project jumpsuits.
Shann Collins, who now officially hated me and Robby Brees, avoided my eyes when I tried to look at her.
“Welcome to Eden, Johnny,” I said. “I think you are safe down here.”
“Uh,” Johnny McKeon said.
Johnny McKeon was pale and shaken. He looked at the gun in his hand, then back at me with an apologetic expression like Johnny McKeon wasn’t aware that a gun the size of a small bazooka had somehow attached itself to the palm of his right hand.
“You can’t shoot them, anyway,” I said.
“Uh. I know that, Austin,” Johnny McKeon said.
And then Johnny asked, “Are you okay?”
I caught Shann’s eye.
Shann Collins had been looking at my face. She turned pale and immediately lowered her gaze. Shann Collins was confused. She was in love with the Polish kid who was also confused.
I said, “Yes. We are okay, Johnny.”
Johnny McKeon walked across the floor of the mudroom and placed his Smith & Wesson .500 magnum on the bench just below the scientist’s old windbreaker that had been hanging from a hook on the wall for nearly half a century.
I said, “I suppose it’s time for me and Robby to show you what has been going on.”
Shann coughed nervously.
You know what I mean.
EVERYTHING A GUY COULD NEED, AND THE TWO BEST ROCK ALBUMS EVER MADE
WE WERE THE New Humans.
Johnny McKeon, Shann Collins, and her mother, Wendy Collins McKeon, changed into Eden Project jumpsuits and white scientist socks. Robby and I did not stay in the locker room and watch them change their clothes. Things were weird enough without doing shit like that.
When the newest New Humans joined us in the lecture hall, I pointed out the chalkboard diagram of the development from 412E, the Unstoppable Corn mold, to the creatures Johnny McKeon had seen fucking and eating earlier that evening in the alley at Grasshopper Jungle.
Although we suspected it, Robby and I did not know for certain that there were several more Unstoppable Soldiers up above us in Ealing until we heard it from Johnny McKeon.
Up until that moment, Robby and I had only seen one Unstoppable Soldier, the one that came out of Hungry Jack. Despite that, we did believe the Hoover Boys and Grant Wallace had to have hatched out as well.
Johnny McKeon also confirmed the Unstoppable Soldiers were spawning.
Robby Brees and I had watched all five reels of Eden Orientation Series. We knew the world had less than twenty-four hours before every human being on the planet dropped to a lower level on the food chain.
It was not a good level to be on.
“Uh, Rob,” I said. “You still against the paintball idea?”
Robby said, “Uh.”
Johnny McKeon drank Scotch, and Wendy made herself a vodka gimlet at Eden’s Tally-Ho!, which was the nicest bar in a thirty-mile radius for this part of Iowa.
Things would be better for Johnny and Wendy McKeon if they were drunk.
Robby Brees reached across the bar and nonchalantly grabbed the bottle of Scotch whisky and poured some out into two glasses.
Nobody said anything about it.
Robby said, “Tally-Ho!”
Robby Brees and I drank the Scotch whisky. It tasted like hot cinnamon and dried fruit.
Johnny McKeon said, “This Scotch must be sixty years old.”
Johnny McKeon appreciated good Scotch whisky.
“It is like drinking history,” I said.
Johnny said, “Cheers.”
Robby Brees and I got drunk with Johnny McKeon and Shann Collins’s mom in Eden. It only took two small glasses of Scotch whisky to make me feel like everything was funny, and I wanted to dance with Robby Brees again.
We lit cigarettes.
Wendy McKeon might have known Robby and I smoked cigarettes, but we had never done it in front of her. She was distant and unaffected by what was going on. Johnny and Shann must have scared the shit out of her with the stories about what they knew was happening in Ealing.
And Johnny and Shann didn’t know half of it.
Wendy McKeon was very pretty. Her breasts were tight and sharp beneath the shimmering fabric of her jumpsuit. I wanted to touch them.
Wendy McKeon was Eden 93.
Johnny McKeon was Eden 7.
Wendy McKeon’s hair was the color of ground coriander.
I fantasized that somebody would suggest we all have an orgy when we got to the parts of the film where Dr. Grady McKeon commanded us to breed. The Scotch whisky made me feel very horny and confused. I would be the first one to volunteer to strip naked out of my clothes, but Johnny McKeon kind of made me feel nervous.
I could not imagine Johnny McKeon ever having sexual intercourse with Wendy Collins McKeon.
Johnny McKeon was the only person in Eden I did not want to take a shower with at that exact moment.
I realized I was getting a Scotch whisky–fueled erection. I did not believe anyone would approve of my erection at that moment. So I sat at the bar and asked Robby for another cigarette.
Robby knew what I was thinking. He always did.
“Tally-Ho! Porcupine,” Robby said.
Robby Brees was drunk. He lit a cigarette for me and passed it to me.
The filter end was just a little bit wet with Robby’s spit.
“I’ll be danged if they don’t have everything you’d ever need down in this place,” Johnny McKeon said.
Johnny McKeon got up from the barstool. He threw a dart at the board that hung on the other side of the pool table.
“I’ll be double-danged,” Johnny said, daringly.
“A proper Eden will always have everything a guy could ever need or want, Johnny,” I said.
“That, and the two best rock albums ever made in the history of humankind,” Robby added.
THE BLOOD OF GOD
WE TOOK JOHNNY McKeon and his family on a tour of the silo.
We did not show them the entire Eden Orientation Series. Johnny McKeon only wanted to see a portion of the final film. He wanted his wife to know what the creatures he saw at Grasshopper Jungle looked like.
It did not matter. You could not watch five minutes of Eden Orientation Series and not witness some experiment with sperm, or shit like that, or hear Dr. Grady McKeon telling us that it was our duty to start having sex.
“My big brother was a nut case,” Johnny McKeon concluded.
“Isn’t there television down here?” Wendy McKeon asked. “Maybe there would be something on the news about what’s going on.”
It was a good question.
The lack of televisions did not register with me until Wendy McKeon asked about it. We hadn’t seen one television set in Eden. I imagined Dr. Grady McKeon concluded that when the Eden Project became a necessary sanctuary for humanity, there would be nothing at all worth watching on any broadcast stations.
New Humans would be without commercial television.
Maybe there was hope, after all.
Dr. Grady McKeon was probably correct about post-apocalyptic television broadcasts, although we eventually did find a bank of five side-by-side televisions that night in Eden’s Brain Room.
Here is what happened:
We were all very tired after watching the final few moments of corn eating and three-legged-race running in Reel Five. Shann would neithe
r speak to me nor sit near me inside Eden’s theater. I thought Johnny McKeon or Wendy might have seen Shann’s behavior as cold or unexpected, but if they did, I could not tell.
I began to think guilty thoughts that maybe Shann had said something to her parents about me. I was confused and frustrated, and I desperately wanted to have an opportunity to speak to Shann.
Robby Brees and I were also drunk. The Scotch whisky made us brave and reckless.
I admitted to Johnny McKeon that we had come up with a plan to kill the Unstoppable Soldiers—a plan involving Robby Brees’s blood and the paintball guns that had been stored inside my garage ever since my brother, Eric, went away to join the Marines and have his testicles blown off.
Robby announced that if he could have one more drink of Scotch whisky he would let me take blood from him.
It was all a very ghastly proposition.
I did not think I could actually do something like stick a needle into Robby Brees’s arm. The thought of inflicting pain on Robby nearly made me cry. With everything that had been going on in my life that past week, and now with Shann treating me like an enemy, I was an emotional disaster.
Shann’s mother, Wendy McKeon, had been a registered nurse before marrying Johnny McKeon and moving to Ealing. She said if she could have one more vodka gimlet, she would draw a few vials of blood from Robby Brees.
I went pale.
Robby went pale.
It was all very ghastly.
The clinic filled with the steaming smell of alcohol breath. There is something about the sterility of clinics that repels everything, as though they are vacuums unto themselves, like the glass globes into which the McKeon scientists trapped all kinds of shit. As soon as the five of us entered the Eden Project clinic, the place absorbed the odors of booze, sweat, cigarettes, and golden retriever.
“I have B.O.,” I said.
Ingrid sighed and curled up on the floor beneath the flat, padded examination table.
“Saint Kazimierz brought a dead girl back to life, and he also made a blind boy see,” I said. I unzipped the top of my jumpsuit and slipped the silver chain over my head. I told Robby he should wear the Saint Kazimierz medal while Wendy McKeon drew blood from him. I put my chain on Robby. He looked scared.
Wendy McKeon told Robby to lie down on the table and strip to his waist. Wendy began opening cupboards and drawers in the clinic, gathering the things she would use to collect blood from Robby Brees.
Robby undid the top of his jumpsuit and slid it down around his hips. He lay there, half naked on the operating table.
“I wonder if those McKeon sickos ever operated on teenagers here,” I said.
Robby said, “Uh.”
I touched the Saint Kazimierz medal and pressed it against Robby’s heart.
Wendy put two wadded balls of gauze into Robby’s palm and told him to squeeze them.
“I bet that’s the first time you ever squeezed someone else’s balls in a doctor’s office,” I joked.
Robby said, “Shut up, Austin.”
“Okay,” I agreed.
Shann was exasperated. She said, “I can’t watch this.”
Shann thud-thudded in her padded scientist socks out into the hallway.
I wanted to follow her, but I was stuck. I could not just leave Robby alone in the clinic. I looked back and forth, from the door to Robby’s pale chest as Wendy McKeon tightened a rubber tube around my best friend’s bicep.
Robby gripped the wads of gauze in his hand. He was scared. I didn’t want to see Robby Brees scared and hurt.
Robby’s skin was the color of the insides of sweet Babcock peaches.
He knew what I was thinking.
Robby Brees whispered, “You should go talk to her, Porcupine.”
Robby Brees always knew what was going on.
I wanted to ask Ingrid what was I going to do, but I did not want Johnny McKeon and Shann’s mom to think I was an insane kid who talked to his non-barking dog and shit like that.
“Uh . . . Um . . . ,” I said.
Wendy McKeon stabbed a thick needle right into the bend of Robby’s arm.
“Gee whiz, babe,” Johnny McKeon said.
Thick maroon blood began filling up the cylinder on the syringe.
Blub-blub! went Robby’s blood.
Robby winced.
I felt my knees buckle.
“Uh. I better step outside,” I said.
WANDA MAE’S PINK BOWLING BALL
SHANN COLLINS HAD gone down to the end of the hallway. She stood outside the doorway to Eden’s bowling alley. Shann faced away from me, but I could tell she was crying.
I felt like shit.
“Please don’t cry, Shann,” I said.
I put my hand on her shoulder and slid it up beneath the soft warm fluffs of her perfect hair. She did not pull away from me. That was progress, I thought.
History is all about progress.
“And please don’t hate Robby. Uh. Or me. I would never lie to you, Shann. I love you too much.” I said, “And, uh, be honest: How many boys do you know who actually have the ability to save the entire world? Robby Brees is like a superhero.”
Shann laughed and cried at the same time.
History does show that Shann Collins was a complex person, capable of doing such things simultaneously.
All my best friends were very complex.
“Why didn’t you ever tell me, Austin?” Shann said.
I nearly gave Shann Collins the automated teenage boy response, which would have been I don’t know. I stopped myself.
“Do you really want to hear about Robby? Because I will tell you everything I know about him, Shann,” I said.
Shann said, “No.”
I said, “I love you, Shann Collins.”
She wiped at her face. It was my fault Shann was crying.
“Tell me the truth. Are you gay, Austin?” Shann Collins said.
“I really don’t think so. Uh. I don’t know, Shann.” I said, “Maybe there is something wrong with me.”
“But I love you, Austin,” Shann said.
“I know that. I’m sorry for hurting you, Shann.” I said, “I can’t even begin to tell you how much I love you.”
Then Shann turned around and put her arms around me. We kissed, more deeply and passionately than we had ever kissed in our lives. I pressed my hips into hers. She did not back away from me at all.
Shann Collins clearly approved of my erection.
She said, “I’m scared, Austin.”
I whispered, “I guess I am, too.”
“Okay.”
“I’m sorry.”
We moved like tangled dancers through the doorway and into the bowling alley.
That was a lot of progress.
The world was turning, and mankind was marching onward, doing the same stupid shit over and over and over.
I unzipped Shann Collins’s jumpsuit and did the same to mine, so I could press my bare chest against her full breasts. My throat tightened. My heart felt like it was squirming up inside my neck, just like a fat walleye forcing its way through a shallow creek during the spring spawn.
Eden 5 needed to spawn.
We went deeper into the bowling alley.
I imagined being inside a cave, fifteen thousand years in the past.
Shann Collins and I threw off all our clothing. Naked, we went down onto the floor together.
“Do you think this is the end of the world, Austin?”
“We’ll be okay. We’ll be okay.”
Shann kissed me. She put her mouth everywhere on my body.
It was electric.
But I could not stop myself from thinking about my brother, Eric, and the two prostitutes named Tiffany and Rhonda. I thought about Saint Kazimierz and his hair shirt, about Krzys Szczerba, and all the Szczerba men after him. I thought about Robby in the clinic.
I thought about naming my balls.
Shann Collins helped me put my penis inside her vagina, and we h
ad sexual intercourse right there on the floor of Eden’s bowling alley, below a pair of shoes and a pink ball that had Wanda Mae embossed in gold on it.
Our sex was noisy and urgent and wet. I rubbed my kneecaps raw, scraping them on the rough carpeting at the shoe-changing station. I pushed Shann along on her butt until her head and mine bumped against the rattling rack of bowling shoes.
I did not care about anything at that exact moment.
No one knew anything about it.
Dr. Grady McKeon would be proud of Shann Collins and me.
We were unstoppable.
At exactly that moment, Louis, the cook from The Pancake House, whose real name was Ah Wong Sing, climbed over the bloody, shitty mess in the front seat of Ollie Jungfrau’s Dodge Caravan minivan. He got out of the van through the shattered window, the same way the Unstoppable Soldier that once had been Travis Pope did.
Ah Wong Sing wanted to help Mrs. Edith Mitchell get out, too.
“Climb over the seat,” he said to her.
Mrs. Edith Mitchell shook her head and said no.
Ah Wong Sing tried all the doors on the Dodge Caravan. He could not open any of them.
“Climb over the front seat,” Ah Wong Sing repeated.
But Mrs. Edith Mitchell would not move.
Ah Wong Sing said he would get somebody to help. He ran off, across the Kelsey Creek Bridge toward Amelia Jenks Bloomer Park, which was the opposite direction from where he had seen the Unstoppable Soldier going.
Ah Wong Sing was smart.
Mrs. Edith Mitchell waited in the crumpled Dodge Caravan minivan.
It was not a good idea.
At exactly that moment, Robby Brees was lying back, dizzy. Robby stared up at the soft fluorescent lights inside the clinic while Wendy McKeon smoothed a plastic bandage across the small dark hole she had left in Robby’s arm.
“Just lie there for a few minutes,” Wendy McKeon told him.
Then Wendy McKeon put the three large syringes she had filled with Robby Brees’s blood inside a small steel clinical refrigerator.
Johnny McKeon was asleep on a wheeled doctor’s chair with the back of his head propped against the wall.
In the bowling alley, Shann Collins and I hurried to put our clothes on. We were both sticky and smeared all over with semen and saliva. I wanted to take a shower.