by Brian Hodge
“He’ll learn, he’ll remember,” says Dr. Amway, now out of breath. “Only a matter of time. And if the ungrateful wretch still refuses, well, I can always sue the bastard.”
Inhibitions fall as frequently as the night, the warmbloods of Tartarus making revel mockery of their old lives, or trying to resurrect them in bacchanalian ritual. Few dare talk with a newcomer, for fear of betraying themselves to a watchful agent of the ruling regime, and so I am invisible. I soon understand that their displays are considered unmistakable proof that they are alive.
On a typical night, swing-shifts of wailing penitents beat their breasts before the god of their choice, or possibly several, and pray for deliverance. Housewife strippers undulate wildly onstage while straying husbands stuff supermarket coupons into their garters. Two transvestite priests kneel before altars while genderflecting nuns dispense antacid hosts upon their tongues. Lonely schoolboys with tentacled acne meet for masturbatory excess over piles of burning magazines. A dominatrix professor in rubber lactates stale theorems into imbecile mouths that gape like baby birds. Shopkeepers in back rooms shit into relabeled jars and boxes, then sell them for spiraling prices. Suburban social pillars invade the homes of despised neighbors, lock them in cellars with hungry, transubstantiating rats. The Tartarus aristocracy preens along the streets, holding tight to leashes collared to surgically reconstructed meatchildren; their knees fold backwards as they obediently chatter like Rhesus monkeys, are rewarded with raw cubes of indeterminate origin.
“At last,” the aristocracy cries, “we have reason to bury all the elder bipartisan hatreds. Even within Apocalypse can the wise find Shangri-La.”
In certain hard-to-locate bars, frequented only at night, meatboys and meatgirls sit bolted immobile into wooden chairs, mouths clamped shut, while surgically implanted shunts drain off pituitary extract. The runoff collects in receptacles over gas flames, then is channeled into intravenous drips. Coded bathroom graffiti informs the careful reader that this technology is the work of Dr. Amway, as means of controlling the restless and ill-contented living. By 3:00 a.m., the only sound comes from dozens of groaning meatfolk, each bar filled with comatose warmbloods in their grave-spangled purgatorial trances, heavy inside with the cindery burnt comet empathic visions of those on the far side of the perimeter. It is their new lives we wonder and worry about, their eternities.
I am without choice on a biological level. Sit down next to grimacing meatboy hookah and plug in. Avoid the eyes and find the vein … before long I may be confusing the order in which things are done. But paradoxically, I will die, if it’s the last thing I do. Hard to get that wrong … but then, look at the meatfolk, though I am not so sure they deserve quite all the blame.
SUBJECT 92
He occupied a suite of rooms on the top floor of the Tartarus Clinic for Applied Research. In the eyes of the staff, “Subject 92” replaced his given name of Leland Lovejoy, and behind him laid the terrible abattoir of misfortune which had led to his residency at the clinic, where he hobbled about with some assistance.
Subject 92 had lost various bodily parts in nine separate attacks by the walking dead. While drunk on a potent concoction of sterno and Gatorade, the then-itinerant Leland Lovejoy was set upon by a trio of corpses who chewed his left leg off at the knee before he fought them away. While sedated in an emergency room, he then awoke to find a newly-deceased woman from an adjacent room drooling into his face, after which one eye was sucked from its socket like a cocktail onion. In later attacks over the coming months, several of which were alcohol-related, he lost an ear, a flap of scalp, three fingers, his surviving baby toe, most of his right bicep, half of one cheek, plus assorted divots of flesh estimated to total seven pounds.
“Well, I used to hate them,” he frequently told his attending staff, speaking of the ambulatory corpses who had so bedeviled him, “but then I realized, no matter what, it’s still nice to be wanted. And they’ve done a lot for me, in their way. Three squares a day and a roof over my head and a fistful of remote controls, you think I ever had it this good when I was on the streets?”
“But the price you paid to be here,” said one of his nurses. “Some people would call what you lost an exorbitant fee.”
Subject 92 dismissed all misgivings with a noxious cloud of cigar smoke and a wave of a four-fingered hand. “Lemme tell you something. They left my pecker and my nuts alone. They’d’ve taken those, yeah, I might be singing a different tune. But everything vital’s still in place, and what’s gone, I can’t say I miss all that much. Hey, you know anyone needs a kidney? I got one to spare.”
Subject 92’s usefulness came as a result of his being the only known living human to sustain bites in one, let alone nine, attacks and then fail to succumb to infection by the Quayle-Beta virus. The Tartarus Clinic for Applied Research was an inevitable destination, as medical science had long known that if you want to learn how to defeat a disease, study who does not have it.
He was much beloved by Dr. Amway, who routinely had Subject 92 brought down to the labs, where they would freely, and with great exuberance, converse on topics as diverse as cheap alcohol substitutes, sightings of the Virgin Mary within foodstuffs and bathroom mildew stains, and post-amputation phantom pains.
“Excellent progress, we’re making excellent progress with you. You really are quite the miracle man,” Dr. Amway would tell him, and praise him effusively for his courage. “In fact, we’re making such excellent progress that I am almost ashamed to inform you that we need a few more tissue samples for further analysis.” He would then toy with a sterile, gleaming scalpel and surgical spatula.
And Subject 92 would look at him with an inaudible whimper, remember his home several floors above, with all its fine and expensive trinkets, sigh, and roll up the skin of his stump.
THE PARKING LOT
Thad in his suit, gray, Savile Row and tailored to a perfect 40-Regular frame. Always told, be a model, Thad smiling with mild indulgence but flushed with flattery. Bess in her Dior strapless, a diaphanous sweep to just below her perfect knee. Had turned down eleven proposals of marriage, but the night was young. Each were with friends at different richly cultured oases in the same plaza of trends, where rehabbers made killings and the dead were not allowed. This was where the beautiful could still come for a night devoid of worries, while they still could, here at civilization’s last stand, at least any civilization that truly mattered.
A determined, intermittent blare muscled through the refined chime of crystal and china and harp, and Thad saw the world through a red mist of irritability as he left the table.
“Pardon me,” to his companions. “My car, I believe. If someone’s dinged it, I’ll bring back a foreskin as a trophy.”
The plaza oozed smug propriety beneath a sick orange sodium haze, cars in orderly rows like rounded steel hummocks, or burial mounds, their windshields gleaming with indifference. It was not a light to flatter human faces, but Thad found her lovely just the same. Bess stretching to delicate tiptoe, craning her neck after her rush down from her own dinner, own drinks. Thirty feet and four cars away from him, and he knew love all over again. From somewhere in the assembly of cars, a horn droned its repetitive pattern, three quick toots, then two longer ones, over and over, loud as gunfire.
“My mistake,” Thad called over to her. “I thought it was my car!”
“And I mine.” A vision, she was. “I guess we’re both wrong.”
Standing tall and tottering on stiffened legs, they scanned the lot again for the trumpeting car.
“There it is!” She pointed. “See the lights flashing?”
“Come along,” and dazzled, he took her by the wrist as they hurried between cars like mischievous trust fund heirs, until they stood beside the empty, convulsing auto. One fender appeared stricken with a fresh wound. No one else was in sight.
“And it’s only a Mazda,” Bess said. “Some people, you wonder what goes through their minds.”
Thad held her sur
rendered hand, turned the diamond ring down, and directed her reach toward the windshield where, together, they etched in the glass: CLEAN THE WAX FROM YOUR EARS, YOU FUCKING CRETIN LOSER, after which they laughed and fell into each other’s arms. Some nights it really was possible to love a lifetime’s worth in five minutes.
But then the dead crawled from beneath a dozen cars, Beemers and Mercedes and Volvos, and surrounded them in a stinking ring of gray sodium putrefaction and maggot runoff. Even their clothes were as ragged as their skin. Who knew they were smart enough to set traps? Who knew they possessed the skills of pack hunters?
Thad and Bess were brought down in screams and threats of litigation, evoking the names of lawyers and aldermen, as business cards spewed like feathers in molt. Their buttocks were eaten away, until denuded pelvic bone showed through the tears in pants and dress, but the dead stopped when Bess groaned, newly revived, and they recognized in her a kindred lack of soul.
She waited at Thad’s side until he, too, roused, and together they straggled their raw bony asses upright.
They returned to one restaurant, together still and forever, and they never even knew the difference.
Quick, now. Wake up to the sound of maggot jaws but I realize it’s just another flashback. Got to rub the head before dreams sink seeds too deep and become the reality. Maggots eat their way back out. I assume it hurts, but might be a cure for narcolepsy.
Stumble out into the street in the gray deathly morning, a sky like moldy old cheese and winds full of sand to scour loose skin from brittle bones. “Bring out your dead,” the meatwagon on morning rounds. The bonegrinder pulls her lever whenever they get one. Got to maintain warmblood order in Tartarus until Dr. Amway’s proper conditioning reintegrates the meatfolk back into my world. Like I really want them? Just another new immigrant to hate, or hire, depending on your politics.
Bonegrinder grins. The mulch makes wonderful fertilizer, all that bone meal. Calcium is our friend.
Crying children sit filthy and naked around dead televisions with gutted insides, fires burning in the cavities, fed by random books. New billboard goes up, blue collar joes hoisting like the flag on Iwo Jima, says I AM NOT RESPONSIBLE, giant red letters. Another in the next block:
WHAT ARE YOU LOOKING AT?
Prostitutes linger exhausted around red-lit houses after a long night, bungee cord labia snapping in the dawn. “Disease-free,” they call. “Checked every other Monday. Come on, you got something better to do? Our pussies moan like the Gyuto Monks.”
Too fast now, at the perimeter wall before I know it. Up and on top, I balance between worlds. Stare over the desert, burnt brown like shoveled ashtrays. They move out there, they swim in it, they eat it because they can’t get to us. They eat sand and shit glass. A million of them now, too stupid to climb the wall, but maybe not so stupid after all … patient, they know we’ll come to them eventually. We still the ones winding all the clocks.
A thousand fathers sire a thousand offspring, a thousand mothers gagging on placental screams in the wretched morning. A thousand whipping boys cover their asses and weep with midnight despair, crying, “This is the life you gave me? This is what you wanted me for? You offer me nothing more than this?”
“We did the best we could.”
“Ignorance is no defense in the eyes of the law of nature. ‘tis better to create than merely to consume.”
From my pocket I pull the works, syringe filled with extract of bootleg meatgirl five blocks back. Never paid money for one before. Why had I started now, of all days?
Slap the arm and rouse the vein, lazy worm that it is. I probe around with the needle, more than I need, long after the vein is found. Deeper
— deeper.
There is a corpse under my skin, just waiting to get out.
I’ll find it.
Before it find me.
Death be not proud … just prompt, a definitive end. And you know me, I’m easily satisfied.
Cancer Causes Rats
ready, sandra? roll tape. three
She would be here today, no matter what, even if it weren’t all in a day’s work.
two
Just to make sure he was actually put away for good, he who had vowed to do no hard time. Not unlike the old joke: We’ll go to his funeral to make sure he’s dead.
one
Static for the lens, she’s framed off-center so that her backdrop is clearly seen: a building of vast graystone tonnage and Corinthian columns, too stately for anything so gauche as a statue of Blind Justice. She’s young, the low side of thirty. Trim, the consummate professional, dark hair conservatively styled. One of the city’s favorite daughters, even if adopted. She has no need of introduction of self and place, for time must not be wasted. The more stories per thirty-minute newscast — minus sports, weather, and commercials — the more exciting the flow. The more excitement, the more viewers, the higher the Arbitrons. Self and place will be added in-studio, superimposed text from the Chyron machine: Sandra Riley, ActioNews 8 Reporter. Municipal Court Building.
Microphone in hand, she dives in:
“The reign of terror that began eighteen months ago has finally reached its end this afternoon at the sentencing hearing for Darryl Hiller. The twenty-six-year-old Hiller — the so-called Tapeworm — was convicted five weeks ago on sixteen counts of rape and murder. This afternoon, Judge Thornton Steckler passed down the expected maximum sentence of life imprisonment without the possibility of parole.”
She’s cool and steady, forever striving for the perfect blend of authority and compassionate story involvement. That intangible quality which will later, on playback after editing and splicing with other footage, reach out through the tube to seize viewer attention. Telling one and all, I speak the truth, it’s something you want to hear, and no one can tell it quite like I can.
Sandra’s trick: She focuses not on the camera lens, as do so many lesser-talented competitors. Instead, she focuses two feet beyond the lens, a starmaking quality that plunks her firmly inside the living room of an entire city.
In truth, Darryl Hiller has yet to be sentenced. Sandra and her crew — cameraman, sound recordist, and film editor — are taping the segment in advance. If they’re wrong they’ll reshoot later. But no one in his right mind expects the Tapeworm to get slammed with anything less than the max. Pre-hearing is simply less congested outside the Municipal Court. Less background clutter to detract attention from Sandra Riley. And it will give them more time post-hearing to scrounge reaction footage of the principle players in the Tapeworm’s final day as a newsmaker: attorneys, police officers, victims’ families.
As well, she has her own press conference to give, and the anticipation is delicious. Her contemporaries and competitors citywide — from network affiliates, network O&Os, local indies — have already accused her of grandstanding. She can afford to laugh off such accusations, knowing they’re born of professional jealousy. All of them report the news; only Sandra is an insider on this, making the news as well as distilling it for consumption. She had no say in the manner it plummeted into her lap.
“But even as the city breathes a collective sigh of relief,” she continues, “this day of justice cannot be considered a total victory. Police still have no leads in the copycat killings patterned after the Tapeworm’s methods of rape and murder, which began two months ago…”
Sandra wraps it, packages it, and Kevin the cameraman bags it. She reaches around her back and unclips the Sony from her skirt’s belt, draws the earphone line from beneath her jacket. Every word was taped informally from a written script so she could listen and repeat verbatim — no TelePrompTers on site — and be free to concentrate on projecting through the lens.
“Let’s get set up outside Courtroom C,” she tells her crew as they pack it up. No cameras allowed inside the courtroom.
Sandra lights a nervous cigarette and the nicotine rush calms her empty stomach. She’s eaten nothing today but a handful of peanuts gulped for breakfast,
and the cigarette helps her forget.
Kevin straightens from his camera, a tall and handsome black man with a moustache and a hightop fade. “You oughta give those up. Give you those pucker lines around your mouth, look like hell on camera someday.”
She smiles, considers grinding the cigarette with a shoetip but doesn’t. “By the time I get the lines, my airtime days’ll be over.” She’s on a fast-track rise, gunning for network anchor by thirty-five. Only the youthful need apply. There are no female equivalents of wise old Walter Cronkite and Mike Wallace. Her biological clock is ticking, and it has nothing to do with children.
Gear is packed for mobility and Sandra pitches in to help lug it along. No off-camera star demeanor for her, and the crew loves her for it. She’s one of us. But in her heart she questions the purity of her motives. Even altruism can be self-serving.
As they reach the court steps they realize something is wrong. Pandemonium and harsh voices rebound along marble corridors. Sandra and her crew break into doubletime and gear is readied on the run, and they find themselves in a swarm of confusion. Civilians are herded away by police. Courthouse deputies speak frantically into walkie-talkies. A custodial type flanked by two cops aims a fingertip along a ceiling path, as if following ductwork. A pudgy, weeping, red-haired man in a rumpled jailhouse jumpsuit is escorted from a men’s bathroom, wearing handcuffs, but these are quickly removed. Moments later a uniformed deputy is stretchered out of the bathroom, a bloody mask for a face, and a police sergeant is screaming for everyone to get back, back —
“Are you getting this?” she snaps to Kevin.
His camera is balanced on one broad shoulder. “Oh yeah.”
The sound tech feeds her impatient hand the microphone and they wade into the fray. Sandra digs in for internal focus, that center of calm, grace under pressure. They battle chaos to find someone who can tell them what’s going on, but deep within she knows it’s all about this man who vowed he would do no hard time.