Satan Burger

by Carlton Mellick III

  It’s so cold now. There’s no wind but it’s still freezing, even for New Canada. My teeth start chattering. It scares me at first. I’m not used to having my teeth chatter in me. Maybe they are trying to communicate, to tell me there is something wrong with this place and to leave immediately.

  “CHATTER, CHATTER, CHATTER,” my teeth scream at me. But I don’t seem to leave.

  I begin to look for my friends.

  All the nearby streets are closets. I do not take them. The buildings behind the gas station look more admitting: a slight light shining from that direction. Once I go, I see all but one of the windows are darkened, still silent. An alley of vacant crabwebs and pallid scraps of plastic dolls.

  The only lit building looks like this:

  A wood shack structure with one window and one door. It has no sound coming out of it, but there is a dull light. The structure blends in with all the alley garbage. It is moist from rain, malodorous, stodgy. There is a sign that comments, Humphrey’s Pub, looks to be made from the aluminum of beer cans and black house paint.

  I enter to a small room made for no more than ten sitting or eighteen standing. There are four people inside of here, but it still seems as lifeless as the outside. They are bundled up in snow clothes, seem to be Russian. One man is a waxy-faced bartender, polishing his beer steins, and the others are on stools, nodding at their drinks. The only noise they make is a tipping of their mugs.

  I pause, waiting for a response to my presence.

  No response.

  “Has anyone seen three men?” My voice echoes over the silence. The sound seems stale.

  Nobody answers.

  “One pirate-like Asian, one in a suit, and one vampire-looking wannabe German?”

  Nobody even turns around.

  “I’m talking here.”

  Nothing.

  Patience…

  Then I get an answer:

  One of the customers speaks without turning to me. His words slip out from under a bushy handlebar mustache, whisper softer than the breath that carries them. “We heard you. Nobody’s seen anyone here. Nobody ever sees anyone here.” His voice has no sensation.

  Another one, an old man, whispers, “You should be quiet. Nobody talks here.”

  “Why doesn’t anyone talk here?” I crusty-ask without whispering. I’ve always been annoyed by whisperers.

  “Nobody ever talks in Silence,” the third one answers.

  My eyes curl about. The bar rolls in my vision.

  The bartender remains silent.

  I don’t understand them. I say, “I don’t understand you.”

  “You’re inside of the Silence,” he says. “The Silence has eaten you away from your friends and put you in her belly. You are not dead, however. And you will not be dead for as long as you keep quiet. If she doesn’t hear any noise inside of her belly, she will think there is no food. She will figure you are part of her and forget about you. Otherwise, she will digest your meat and you’ll be excreted as part of the wind.”

  “I don’t understand,” I say. “I go to this gas station all the time. And it has never been quiet here before.”

  “What gas station?” one asks.

  “The one outside. You’re all cracked on dippy bobs, aren’t you?”

  “I’ve never heard of your gas station, nor dippy bobs,” another says.

  “All of you, be quiet,” whispers the bartender, cop voice.

  “You can see the back of it from outside the window,” I say.

  I try peaking through the window but I see blackness; the glass doesn’t seem transparent. Huff-frustrated, I open the door and point to the station’s backside.

  “See,” I say, still pointing.

  None of them speak. They ignore me.

  “You’re all crazy.”

  I go back to the front of the gas station, afraid that it has disappeared. But it’s still there and so is the Gremlin autocar. Mort, Vod, and Christian are back, smoking cigarettes on the pavement, drinking some fresh-bought Creamed Corn Pale Ale.

  When they ask me where I’ve been, I say, “Taking a piss.”

  When I ask them where they’ve been, they say, “Smoking a bowl.”

  The air is still silent as ever, and the surroundings are as dark as before, but I feel safe enough to realize that the old crazies in Humphrey’s Pub really were just old crazies. We get back into the autocar and head for Satan Burger, drinking beers and singing All For Mr. Grog.

  Back at the gas station, Mort asked, “Why is everything dead here?”

  Back at the gas station, Christian answered, “Because it’s 3:00 in the morning, guy. Nothing stays awake this late anymore.”

  “Except Satan,” I said, back at the gas station.

  Nan and Lenny are driving in the silence too. There’s no sound coming from the wind. It should be hitting them through the open windows right now. No sound from the outside at all. Like everywhere else, the road is empty-dark. There are streetlights all down the road, but none of them have turned on. Even the lights don’t care about anything anymore. They stare at Lenny’s autotruck and shrug.

  “Have you been to the walm?” Lenny asks Nan.

  “No, have you?” Nan seems to care less.

  “I went with Stag the other day. It’s weird as hell. There are somethings going in and somethings coming out — mostly coming out. It’s guarded by these fish people with wings and large brains. We also saw this creature that had a blank face: no physical features or any hair. Stag called it a Dance, a heavenly creature whose only purpose in life is to dance across eternity. He said he read about them in mythology class.”

  I’ve heard of the Dances as well. They are ignorant (innocent) beings similar to humans, but have no mouths or ears or eyes or noses. The only sense they have is feeling, so the only thing they can do is dance and screw each other, trying to produce as many Dances as they can populate. Usually, they over populate to drive their race as far from extinction as possible, since it is not very hard for a blind and deaf mute to go to its death.

  We call them Dances because they appear to dance in the sun on the mountains — blind, deaf, and mute — but they are not really dancing. They are eating sunlight. The dancing motions are similar to the motions our arms make when eating sausage with a fork and a knife; the only difference is they’re eating solar energy. And when the sunlight gets digested and goes through the tubing to the exit, it is dumped as a shadow. In fact, thirty-four percent of the world’s shadows are now produced from Dance droppings. Some Arizona businessman used to harvest the energy waste and sell it for BIG profit during the blistering hot Arizona summers. He called his product Shade in a Can.

  “Sounds boring,” Nan says about the walm.

  “No, it’s great. You should go there sometime.”

  “Lenny, I’d bash my face into a brick first. Why the hell would I care to go see a bunch of disgusting walm people? You’re the only person I know who enjoys learning about other cultures.”

  “I’m the last anthropologist, you can say.”

  “I never cared there was a first one,” she says.

  Lenny’s autotruck goes up the scorpion fly hill and down to the scene of an accident, which is shrouded in silence. No one has arrived before them.

  “Is that Stag’s car?” Lenny asks, knowing the answer.

  They park next to the wounded autocar. The thing’s been torn in half by an aluminum tree which is now leaning out of its roots. Pieces of engine have been sewn into the soils for nature to grow them into new autocars.

  Nan darts out of the truck, asking a tree, “Where is Gin?” but the tree is still unconscious. She doesn’t bother to ask the jogger that is strapped to the roof, because it is very obvious that he is dead.

  Lenny finds Stag on the other side of the autocar covered in black loam and tree sap, with his skull broken indoors and all the blood dried to a film on the outside of his body.

  “Stag’s dead,” Lenny says.

  Stag is not
dead, as I told you before. He is unconscious without a heartbeat.

  But we can’t blame Lenny for thinking this, because it is a very common misunderstanding to take a sleeping someone who has no heartbeat for a dead someone. Doctors, coroners, morticians, even grave-diggers all make the same mistake on a daily basis. If you haven’t got a heartbeat, I suggest that you don’t sleep so much because eventually someone will think you are dead and either cremate you or bury you. And I assure you, waking up to find out that you’ve been cremated or buried is no way to start your day. I especially stress that you don’t sleep in the middle of the street, floating in the swimming pool, hanging from a noose, curled up in a bathtub with a toaster, holding an empty cup of liquid plumber, or lying on the kitchen floor with a knife stuck in your back.

  In addition to the missing heartbeat, Stag doesn’t breathe, feel (other than his left eye), or need to eat. He’s a zombie.

  Richard Stein said that a zombie is the star of a very low budget horror movie that can’t be killed and hates to come out during the day. Its favorite pastimes include the mindlessly gnawing of human brains with a group of companion zombies, moaning really loud, and taking very-very slow nature walks by the graveyard. But Stag is not the same as Richard Stein’s zombie. He’s just a dead person that is still alive. He’s not mindless and doesn’t care much for eating human brain.

  Nan finds Gin rickety-smoking a cigarette on a nearby pile of granite, trying to straighten out his broken neck. She hears his neck snip-crack a bit, getting a better position; he sighs with relief. The sigh was queer to him, not a normal sigh of relief that comes naturally after fixing a problem. It was a forced sigh. This is because he doesn’t breathe anymore. He can force himself to breathe if he wants to, but he doesn’t need to in order to survive. For Gin, breathing is completely voluntary now. He can go weeks without taking a breath and without even realizing that he hasn’t taken a breath.

  Nan squats next to him on a cardboard log and asks, “What happened?”

  “I was killed,” he answers.

  “What — how could you be killed?”

  “Stag and I got in a car accident and died.”

  She laughs. “What are you? A zombie?”

  “Yes.” He puts her hand on his heart. “No heartbeat,” he says.

  Ripping her hand back, she shivers a laugh. It is funny to her.

  “You’re cold,” her voice giggling-drunk.

  “Not completely,” he says, serious.

  “Does that make me a necrophiliac?”

  “Stop.”

  His hippie-sorrow eyes drool into her, and she feels his hurting. Please-please, she senses him say. Nan holds him. All he can hear is her awkwardness.

  Lenny arrives to repeat, “Stag’s dead,” purple-wide face, stutters.

  Gin answers, “Yeah, so am I.”

  “How can you be dead if you’re walking around?” Lenny asks.

  “I don’t know. I’ve never been dead before.”

  “Stag isn’t walking around,” Lenny says.

  Gin says, “Maybe he is asleep.”

  “No, he’s dead. His skull is broken.”

  They go back to the autocar to find Stag.

  “I’ll show you,” Zombie Gin says… But Stag isn’t there once they arrive.

  “He was here,” Lenny says, adjusting his nerdy-wear glasses.

  “Are you sure he was, Lenny?” Nan asks, holding onto Gin to warm his blood.

  “Of course I am,” answers Lenny. “What did he do? Just get up and walk away with a collapsed skull?”

  “Yes,” Gin says coldly, scratching his left eye.

  I go to my body.

  A handwritten sign says, “Satan Burger, 2 miles.”

  “It’s a pretty long drive for food,” Mort comments.

  I look through the windows at the moon. It isn’t our original moon. We lost the original moon in ’72. Well, we didn’t lose it. The moon lost itself. It forgot its way around the Earth, probably because of its Alzheimer’s or maybe it was committing suicide to save itself from the oblivion that Alzheimer’s would cause. It strayed from its usual path, breaking from its orbit, sinking into infinite soot, through millions of tiny white dots — pinholes in black construction paper held up to a light. And we never heard from it again.

  Now we have a new moon.

  We had to build it ourselves out of concrete. It wasn’t an easy job. Making colossal molds, miles and miles high — a pain in the ass. It was a titanic ball of white, larger than mountains, but not as BIG as the original. To solve the size difference, it had to be launched into a new orbit, placed closer to the Earth, so that it would appear to be the same size as the original.

  Sometimes I look at pictures of the old moon. There’s not too many differences, except that the sponsors who paid for the new moon insisted on putting their logos all over the surface. But it’s better to have a corporate moon than none at all.

  The world was miserable without its moon: that’s what my ex-father told me. He said the night skies were empty-dark. So dark that more streetlights had to be made and people owned a dozen flashlights each.

  Back then, romance seemed foolish without a moonlit night; not that anyone cares for romance anymore, but I heard it was a BIG thing back then. And the astronauts that went to the original moon felt really stupid for wasting their time on a sphere that no longer exists.

  They thought the poetic words, “One giant leap for mankind,” should’ve been used somewhere else.

  Scene 6

  The Queen of Darkness

  It is now the period between day and night where the sky is dark blue and silky cold. Normally, the sky’s condition would not be considered strange, but after three minutes of driving, the sky went from pitch night to almost morning. Even though it’s only 3 a.m.

  I come to the conclusion that this side of town is closer to the sun than our side, so the day here arrives earlier than what I’m used to.

  Vodka drives without noticing the sky change. He is within a small cotton ball cloud, which is his go-away place. A go-away place is the place where your mind goes when it is tired of being on Earth. Normally, it is a comfortable place where you can sleep and relax and forget all your worries. Sometimes it’s a fantasy world that is more interesting than real life. It may not be less laborious, but it is less boring.

  It’s not hard getting to your go-away place, but coming back can be hard. One side effect of not coming back very often is having difficulty distinguishing fantasy from reality. That’s what Richard Stein said. In his history book, he talks about his cousin, Anne, who was committed to an institution because she couldn’t tell the difference between fantasy and reality. They called her insane. An institution was once a place where they cared for people like this, but nobody cares enough to care for anyone anymore, so insane people are now in the streets and institutions are places where new people find refuge after coming out of the walm.

  My go-away place is almost impossible to leave. Luckily, I don’t go there often enough to lose touch with my sanity. I call it Sleepyland. It’s a place where dozens of naked people are piled together inside a moist fruit cellar, doing nothing but sleeping lustfully on top of each other. This doesn’t seem like much, but it is complete comfort to me. Sleepyland is so hard to leave because the fruit cellar chemicals make you feel drugged-drowsy and stiff-shanked, so all you do is sleep and dream, which makes it hard to get back to reality.

  To get out of Sleepyland you have to: first, get woken up by one of the sleeping nudes who inhabit the sleepy land, and second, you have to be taken out of your head by someone in reality before you fall asleep in Sleepyland again. You can never get out all by yourself. You need to go there when a friend is nearby who has the ability of waking you; and inside of sleepy land, you should sleep next to someone who snores or rolls around a lot. Actually, it’s better not to go at all.

  We see a BIG sign ahead:

  “SATAN BURGER: THE NEW FAMILY RESTAURANTE.”
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br />   The street is no brighter than before, but now it’s grayed misty. An early post-rain morning, cold and calm, the whole city asleep. Well, besides one car and one business. It’s still around 3:00 a.m. on an Erdaday — the eighth day of the week.

  They created the eight-day week about ten years ago. Erdaday was put between Saturday and Sunday, to break up the alliteration, kind of like how Wednesday breaks up Tuesday and Thursday. Erdaday means Earth Day. It was invented by TES — The Environmentalist Society — who thought that we were messing the planet up much-much more than we were cleaning it. So they thought that everyone should clean up Earth for one day out of every week. It was a BIG hit with the American population, because people would have three-day weekends instead of just two. Mostly everyone just looked at it as a day off, even though it was meant to have a purpose. It’s just like how Sabbath Day was meant for church-going, but not too many people went to church. Most people called Sabbath day Hangover Day and instead of going to church they would spend their time drinking a lot of bloody marys stepping over newspapers in their underwear. Now, there are no more church-goers and there are no more environmentalists, so every weekend day is Hangover Day.

  I don’t know why Christians used Sunday as the day of Sabbath and Jews used Saturday (though Saturday is the last day of the week and makes more sense). I think Christians made Sunday the Sabbath because God and the sun are — more or less — the same entity.

  Christians made Monday the first day of the week. Monday means Moon Day. Tuesday comes next. It means War Day, named after Tiw, a god of Germanic mythology. Wednesday was also named after a god — Woden, the chief god. Thursday is Thunder Day. Friday is Love Day, named after Fria, Goddess of Love. And Saturday is Saturn Day.

  A while back, somebody explained that having an eight-day week would be sacrilegious, but these days one person can’t make a difference. Hell, a whole barnyard full of people can’t make a difference.

  As we pull into the Satan Burger parking zone at the bottom of a hill, we see a chair holding a sign that reads. “GRAND OPENING,” and a ceiling fan that promotes, “TWO SATAN BURGERS FOR THE PRICE OF ONE.”