“Where are you?” I say, not perceiving anyone in Punk Land.
“Right here,” Lenny says.
Then I notice that he’s right in front of me, but transparent. A fading image. He’s half-digested and now only half-exists, sitting in a queer position and trying to hold on to his remains.
“Where’s Stag?” I ask, not whispering.
“Gone like the rest of them.” His voice isn’t a whisper either, but it’s not as loud as mine. “You got eaten too, eh?”
“Yeah, but I’m not staying here. I’m indigestible.”
Lenny doesn’t believe me. He says, “Cock wash.”
“I just came for you. We’re getting out of this world.”
“I’m not going anywhere,” Lenny says.
“It doesn’t matter then,” I gripe.
I tell him the story of Satan Burger and how we’re going to restart the human race. He doesn’t seem to know where he is. He has cotton stains on his mouth and doesn’t speak. Speaking to me has already caused him to be digested a little more.
He tells me where the walm is. “Near the center of Punk Land, where they filmed Death Corpse.” That movie I was in, as a zombie in the back of the zombie crowd. There was a close-up of my back when I and a few other corpses were killing a major character that was dressed up like a butt-rocker. Mortician and Lenny were in that movie too, but I didn’t know them very well in those days.
“Is it dangerous?”
Lenny shrugs. “There’ll be something waiting for you there. It’s the Movac and it knows everything. Everything about everything. From how the universe began to how the universe will end, to what you are thinking to what you’re going to think.”
“What is it doing there?”
“Answering questions.”
“Do me a favor, Leaf.” Lenny scratches his chest and fades a little more.
“Sorry, I’m in a hurry.” I get up to leave.
“Please.”
“What is it?”
“Kill the Movac for me.”
“Why do that?”
“It doesn’t deserve to live. Nothing should know everything.”
Scene 23
Carnal Run
I leave Silence as slip-easy as before, and feel a tremendous smile overtake my face; I’m the only person who can escape such a creature after being swallowed. I am special. Just how I am the only person owning God’s Eyes, though they have been repossessed. I walk out calm-slinky and go back to Satan Burger, through the street that Silence emptied for me.
The walk is not dangerous anymore, I think, with more Silence-emptied streets, but danger can come from within you. Right now my head-visions seem like danger — my eyes are going hell-whirl. It’s enough for me to commit self-murder, but I won’t give in to the suicide voices in my head. I have mankind to save. And besides that, I’m sensing a hard-on coming. A BIG bulge in my pants. Richard Stein always said that hard-ons are bound to happen when you least expect them, but nobody ever thought that the hero of mankind would be having trouble with a hard-on during the moment of his ultimate test.
I am guessing my shank is craving the blue woman — maybe the blue woman is craving it too — but it’s not getting any blue pleasures anymore, because I will never see that creature ever again. She tricked me into pregnancy, without even loving me, but she was so beautiful… I’m definitely going to miss the sex. But I’ll have another blue woman soon enough. Once I give birth to it, I’ll have to feed it in the same manner I fed my old blue woman. Sure it seems like incest to molest my own child, but blue women belong to another culture.
My hard-on is still going strong when I get to Satan Burger, trying to hide it from my friends when I see them (I use the history book of mankind as a shield). Mort, Nan, and Gin’s body parts don’t seem to notice my hard-on. They probably don’t care enough to let themselves notice.
“We need to get going now,” I tell them. Then I realize one member of our group is missing. “Where’s Christian?”
Mort sway-looks around. “Must’ve wandered off.”
“Where?” I stomp toward him.
He shrugs.
“Stay here. I’ll find him.”
I jamble-hike to the other side of the hill, searching, searching… but my vision is too harsh and unclear, so I call to him. Three yells, but he doesn’t give an answer. If he’s joined the crowd of insane ones, I’ll never be able to find him. I won’t even bother, not even for my best friend.
Richard Stein’s best friend was a guy nicknamed Hobby, who produced twenty-six children from thirteen different women, none of which he was married to. It had something to do with his brain, but Hobby loved to impregnate women, more than one woman at a time, and every pregnancy happened to manufacture identical twins. His friends, like Richard Stein, thought he was funny, but thirteen pairs of children thought he was a jerk.
They ended their friendship the day Hobby was arrested for giving twins to a sixteen-year-old. Richard normally would have thought it was a funny thing for Hobby to do, but Richard’s little sister was where he drew the line.
I find Christian across the street. He managed to climb to the roof of the bakery building on the left foot of the Satan Burger hill.
“What are you doing?” I yell to him. “You lost your fucking mind?”
Christian stands there messiah-like, his arms spread. “It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” he calls.
“What?”
“This place is groobly-goo. The whole world. The streets full of creatures and colors. I feel like Mr. T.”
The rain has gotten to him, or maybe it’s the silly-go.
“You’re going crazy, Christian,” I say. “Stop it.”
He laughs. “I know. It’s great.”
“Try to fight it. We need to leave.”
I see him swaying and twisting in my ocean eyes, drowning. The rain has drizzled him soggy and he can’t stand up on his own anymore.
“We need to get to Punk Land,” I scream to him. “That’s where the walm is.”
“Sounds like fun,” wobble-words from his mouth.
Christian looks at a point high above me.
“Scorpion flies,” he says.
“What?”
“Scorpion flies.”
I see the swarm tornadoing above me. Buzz-whirling for an attack. The scorpion flies have gone crazy as well, and are actually coming to ground-level to kill. A BIG panic hits my face. A smaller one hits Christian’s.
“Get out of here!” I scream to him. “Meet us in Punk Land. We’ll be waiting for you.”
Christian nods, jumping onto the whirl crowd below, and I run back to Satan Burger, slipping every footfall and moving in circles with my rolling world.
“Let’s go!” I yell to Mort and Nan, who are already up and ready to run. Staring dead into the millions of beady-minded insects in the sky.
I glance up at the sky on our way down the Satan Burger steps, wheel-screeching black ones in the orange wind.
“Where is it?” Mort screams.
“Punk Land.”
We jump full into the crowd of insane ones and barge our way through. Breakfast and all of Gin’s other body parts begin fall-hanging from Nan. She loses one of the Medusa Hairs and keeps moving through, pulling off her shirt and wrapping the demons inside of it. Her skin now exposed to the dirty world, cuts and bruises from the sex with Gin and her bra is ripped in places where Gin’s teeth had been. A pink nipple smiles in the soaking air.
My hard-on will not go away, especially with Nan rubbing her open breast against my arm, trying to keep with me. Also, all of the insane ones seem to have gotten into a rumble-orgy of licking and rub-scouring. Pressing against my shank as I barge my way through, feeling very displaced by the performance…
A masturbating woman with green-speckled hair licks the sweat from my neck, trying to keep me with her, trying to pull me down. She must realize my condition and wants to release the pressure, as a favor to me. And I want to go into her.
But I must shove on. I try to pull her forward, to come with me toward the walm, but she releases her grip and continues pleasuring herself.
I keep going, pushing through the rolling insane ones, trying to keep my shank from running into any other hungry women. I wonder if the rain is what gave me this unstoppable hard-on. Maybe my penis has maggots in its brain.
The scorpion flies attack.
I hear the people scream from behind us, dropping paralyzed.
Running begins.
The whole insane crowd, just now getting a glimpse of reality, filling their nerves with fright over lust, terror. Then trampling starts. Screams and thrashings through the puddles of pulpy yellow.
My legs and eyes don’t communicate properly, but I’m moving. Jumping over the already-paralyzed. Fighting the slow ones in my way. I still feel Nan’s arm and breast wrapped against me, running with my speed. I’m not sure if Mortician is behind us, or if he’s been taken down, but I keep going, crushing MAN’s history book against my erection.
Some people take to a manhole, to the dark ones’ territory, which might be the safest place to go. But I don’t follow them. We might get trapped down there, unable to reach the walm, or maybe the dark ones will hold us there and let their dark females molest us beyond death. I push into my erection again and groan. I still have the dark female’s love wounds from when I was with Vodka, and the open sores are still numb-felt. Even the flaps of skin hanging from my shoulder feel like cloth, or something not attached to my nerves. Maybe the rain is some kind of special acid juice and melted my nerves.
The crowd is thinning, too many fallen prey to the scorpion flies. It doesn’t seem like the scorpion flies are eating all of their victims. Normally, a swarm of a hundred would sting one human-sized creature and it would be enough food for the whole family. But the scorpion flies are crazy now. They’re trying to take down every member of the group, as if the crowd is one prey instead of a group of prey.
Nan cries out and goes limp, falling from my grasp. Turning, huffing, I stomp on the scorpion fly eating her stomach, grinding its insides out, pushing all the wind out of her. I gawk around. Gin’s body parts are squirming in Nan’s shirt. There aren’t too many scorpion flies attacking nearby, just a couple. I can’t see Mortician. He’s gone. He must be one of the frozen bodies in the distance, where some scorpion flies start feeding. I’m not going back for him.
I am alone.
I stare down at Nan’s thin, vulnerable body. She looks as if she’s asleep, but her eyes are open and blinking a little. Her legs have fallen open and there’s a wet pond between them. Her exposed breast is now sweat-dungy, glistening and oily. The history book pressed against my shank is only making things worse.
She can’t do anything if I pull down her tight shorts right now, and give it to her right in the middle of all this chaos. I never liked to think about Nan sexually, but the rain must have gotten to me. We need to get going. If I do this here a scorpion fly might get me. Then we’ll both be devoured, without dying. And even if a scorpion fly doesn’t attack me, she’ll kill me once she comes to. Literally kill me.
I feel so perverted, but I can’t stop feeling it. I wish the tables were turned and Nan was the horny one, molesting me while I was paralyzed, with the insane screamers stampering around us.
I bend down to pick her up, podding my arms around her hips. I lift a little with my weak muscles and take her shoulders off the ground, but then my penis stabs her in the side with a shock, and I drop her. Her head claps against the street. My erection doesn’t leave her side, though, it presses further instead. I must be insane, truly insane. I feel my way up her stomach to the unexposed breast and pull the bra down. Smoothing my palm into it. I can’t stop myself now. My penis has taken full control over my body. Screaming-commotion all around this performance, people being eaten alive, beating each other to escape, and my other hand decides to go between Nan’s legs, feeling the outsides.
Then, before my hand goes any further, I stop. The hard-on is gone, the penis has shriveled… I pull both of my hands away from her skin, lean in to her ear and whisper, “I’m sorry, Nan. I’m going crazy.” Then I plunge my head into her bloody stomach, but I don’t cry. My mind doesn’t care enough to feel the disgust I should be feeling now.
“Leaf!” I hear from the distance.
Mort limps toward us, smiling at his act of survival.
“What happened?” I ask Mortician when he arrives to us.
“I almost got it back there,” he says. “I tripped on some bastard and fucked up my leg. I’m surprised those things didn’t get me. Especially with my slow ass.”
Mort pauses. He looks down at Nan.
“Did they get her?” he asks.
“Yeah.”
“She’s fucked.”
“I couldn’t pick her up.”
“We’re going to have to leave her.”
For a second, I feel relieved, because I won’t have to face her after she wakes up from paralysis. But I know that would be very wrong.
“We can’t just leave her. She’s our friend, and she’s the last human female left.”
“Well, my leg is crippled and you’re weak, plus you have your fucked eyes. How are we supposed to get her out of here?”
“We’ll have to both carry her,” I tell him. “I know she hates me, but I can’t leave her here.”
“Fine,” Mort says. “But if you get stung, I’m leaving you both here.”
As we leave, I see a human clown with its arms missing. They look like they’ve only recently been severed. The clown is wandering incoherently toward the scorpion flies. Blood drip-drips onto his side. He doesn’t seem to notice that his arms are missing, and it’s almost funny. Richard Stein said that clowns are goofy people that know how to be funny. I think he’s right, because even though this clown is in a terrible state — losing his arms in a violent sort of way and all — I still cant help but laugh.
Richard Stein also said that there are only two sorts of people that would laugh at someone so pitiful as a clown with its arms cut off. Those people are the mean sort of people and the sort that have maggots in the brain. I wonder which sort I am.
But Richard Stein said that there are very few people in the world that don’t laugh at the pitiful and the misfortunate, which means that most human beings are generally mean and/or have maggots in the brain. But mean people and maggot-brained people can be pitiful themselves, so there was a lot of confusion among humans before their souls were lost.
Scene 24
Ocean Man
The drizzle-rain dies as we arrive at Punk Land — not the punk version of heaven, but the place where punks acted punk before the walm took it over.
We’re not strong enough to pick Nan up off the ground and her knees are raw-bloody from scraping against the asphalt. She has yet to become un-limp, but I’m not impatient for what she will do to me when her strength returns. I cringe at the thought.
I left Gin’s demon body parts where they were. Besides Breakfast, that is, who refused to be left behind. He followed for almost a hundred feet, crawling on fingers, before I noticed him. Then I stuffed him down Nan’s shorts, hoping she wouldn’t mind. She’ll probably kill me for that too. Waking from paralysis to find out she’s been pervert-handled by both myself and her dead boyfriend’s demon hand will probably be damaging to her mental health in some way. I hope I can make it up to her in the future, after we start a colony in a different dimension.
The scorpion flies are behind us, feeding probably, but we can’t be too sure we’re safe from them. And there are other creatures to worry about as well. Like the dark ones and the prowler beasts and the krellians. And the Movac, who knows everything, who is awaiting us at the walm.
Richard Stein said that it would be a terrible thing to know everything about everything. I bet he would’ve agreed with Lenny’s statement that nothing should know everything, and whoever does know everything should be killed. Richard Stein also said that
all human beings are born with the wish to know all there is to know, even if it is such a terrible thing.
The park, which used to be punk-filled, is now flooded with a miniature ocean — one that must’ve been brought from a miniature world. At first I see it as a giant puddle, through gyration eyes, but once I scoop a handful of the water I can see closer-closer. Turns out there are tiny whales and sharks and sailboats inside. So small that a sandwich bug can eat them in a gulp. I drop the chunk of ocean back into place, probably drowning the sailboats that I had. The ocean seems to go for half a mile, all the way through Punk Land.
Richard Stein said that the ocean, not old age, is where all the world’s wisdom comes from. He believed that oceans produce an aura that seeps into the souls of anyone around it, so people that live in or around the ocean are generally the most enlightened people alive. Mr. Richard Stein never knew this for fact, though, because he didn’t know any wise people that lived near the ocean. He just assumed he knew what he was talking about after he visited the Atlantic one summer. He said, “The vast emotion was overpowering and my thoughts were never so clear.” But he never went inside of the water, since Richard Stein couldn’t swim. One of his legs didn’t work correctly.
Water-wisdom is what he called it. He said that it’s much more powerful than old age wisdom or educated wisdom or the common wisdom you’re born with. In fact, he mentioned that if there was someone who knew everything about everything, that person would’ve gotten his/her knowledge from water-wisdom. If this were true then more schools should’ve been built on beaches or near lakes, because wisdom is more important than school-learning — which is intelligence. The thing about intelligence is that it revolves around memory. Those with good memories will learn more. Those that forget easily will not be intelligent. And those with photographic memories will be considered geniuses. I don’t like to hear that someone with such good memory can be called such a name, a genius is one who has both intelligence and wisdom.
Satan Burger Page 20