Welcome Thieves
Page 15
Young Nick Drake thought we should let them in, negotiate.
Jeff and Pink Lady locked themselves in the Torino’s trunk.
Larry yelled, “Poke ’em through the links with sharp sticks!”
Which worked.
After that he was in charge.
3. To avoid abuses of power that will prove irresistible to even the most wizened leader, said leader can be overruled at any time by the checking balance of the Cabinet of Women. Base Omega formally recognizes that bigoted, entitled white men are responsible for the entirety of our plight and have always been the resource-sucking plunderers that certain websites once had the fortitude to point out. The early pagans were correct: matriarchy is the natural order of things. Chicks is smarter than dicks.
However, granting women a voice in decision making and then institutionally ignoring them is actually sort of comforting, a familiar precollapse blanket. After being elected leader of the Cabinet of Women, Dorsal Vent wrote, “Being teased by inclusiveness and then cruelly shut out reminds me of Christmas morning.” Dorsal Vent is a former escort with a weird cut on her neck that at first everyone took for a gill-slit, a harbinger of our collective impending mutation. Even Larry Our Leader was sure we’d soon morph into semiamphibious quadrupeds, and so a mildly hysterical Base Omega spent weeks obsessing over various moles and armpit lumps.
“How can we be amphibious in the desert?” Jeff asked.
“Will my gill-slit breathe sand?” Pink Lady asked.
“This is just the sort of hysteria that keeps us from accomplishing the simplest of goals or improving our situation in any way,” Young Nick Drake said. “Which, unfortunately, points to a vacuum in leadership.”
“Quiet,” I whispered, but Young Nick Drake just spoke louder.
“My friends, if we cannot express ourselves plainly here, in the apocalypse, then why bother having mouths at all?”
Larry fumed, twirled his scepter, marched around with that Someone Wants a Taste of the Wheel look until I ran for the Freon rag and lured him back to his yurt.
But Young Nick Drake was right about one thing: turns out Dorsal Vent’s vent was just old pimp retribution uninclined to heal, which she insisted all along, but no one listened.
Because, really, what else would a mutant say?
4. Fuck your own gender, Base Omega. Gay is okay! In fact, it’s a massive biological advantage. Just keep your dance moves to yourself, Alphonso. Just don’t put any cilantro on Larry’s rat-on-a-stick, Julian.
At first, Base Omega was all, Hey folks, forget outdated societal norms concerning public fornication and scripture-based monogamy, we need to repopulate, stat! Larry’s favorite affirmation was Don’t waste it in the sand, go ahead and put that seed in a pal! But then one morning we woke up and three women were pregnant (four if you count Pink Lady, who kept shoving a pillow under her dress) and suddenly Base Omega was all, Oh, shit, we need a doctor! Plus vitamins and less-restrictive maternity wardrobes! Base Omega was all, Exactly who in this godforsaken sand pile is going to provide basic health services, let alone comprehensive postnatal care? Six months later the preemies all came together, as if by prearranged signal, pushed between bloody thighs and into the dirt. Base Omega was all, No, you bite the umbilical cord! Even so, the babies were hearty and thrived. Tiny miracles! At least until Osiris disappeared without a peep, his bucket-seat crib empty and undisturbed. Base Omega was stumped. Maybe God lifted him back to heaven on a silken throw pillow? But then Ranxerox was dragged off by a reptile that Jeff and Pink Lady swore was the size of a German shepherd. During the Day of Uncontrollable Crying, while a twenty-four-hour detail was formed to watch over Aegisth, she seems to have spontaneously combusted. All that was left was a tiny briquette, still warm, like it was just waiting for a match and stalk of mesquite.
After that, Base Omega was all, Fuck this shit, and, Hey, no one get pregnant again, ever. Okay? Please?
The future is frottage.
5. There will be games.
Every Sunday during Low Radiation Season there’s a tournament + festivities. Four teams, one bracket. The lizard jerky stores are plundered, and someone unearths two fingers of backwashed Johnnie Walker. Jeff wears his lucky cummerbund. Pink Lady puts on her was-once-paisley frock. The Penalty Box is filled with soup cans and rusty scissors.
Young Nick Drake refuses to join in.
Young Nick Drake says sports are an anachronistic vestige of the blood plunder of black lives, a sweatshop of concussions and splintered bone, and that the continued thirst for random violence after the Collapse is something any decent apocalypse would repudiate.
Larry laughs and says Young Nick Drake is just mad because he was picked last.
Larry laughs and says Young Nick Drake throws like a girl.
Young Nick Drake begs me not to play.
“Why?”
“I’m scared you’ll get hurt.”
A tear rolls down his cheek.
An actual tear. In the middle of the desert. He dabs it and rests it on the tip of my tongue as the Clanging Pot of Beginning clangs.
I make it to the opening ceremonies just in time. There are fireworks (throwing lots of sand in the air) and a speech from Larry Our Leader about not hiding random scavenge from Larry Our Leader (You tell them LOL!).
Then Dorsal Vent rolls out the first iguana bladder.
I play for Team So What. We’re young and fast. Bob Her New Boyfriend Who Swears He Didn’t Kill Dad plays for Team Dreaming of Waffles. They’re old and slow. It’s the first to a dozen, win by two. Winners get double rations for a week. Losers are sent on Go Hike Twenty Miles Looking for Food That Isn’t There patrol.
Last year’s losers never came back.
Same with the year before.
The smart money is not on Team Dreaming of Waffles.
6. Do you really give a crap about #6? No, you want to hear more about Young Nick Drake.
Fine. He’s fifteen. He has soulful green eyes and a wispy goatee and plays delicate songs about collapse and redemption on the lizard-tendon guitar. He wears a black trench coat, always, even in the worst of the heat. Jeff and Pink Lady say it’s because he’s hiding a gill slit. So not! Young Nick Drake speaks with a delicate lisp and lives in a ’68 Citroën that smells like old man hospital sac (which he burns various desert herbs to get rid of, but only makes it smell 40 percent more like old man hospital sac + lightly seared with new potatoes and pistachio chutney). Young Nick Drake sits near the Dictate Crate during tribal meetings and stares at me with an expression that says he’d happily carry all of apocalypse on his thin shoulders if I’d only ask.
Which makes it hard to concentrate.
Jeff and Pink Lady say, “We don’t trust him! He’s not one of us! You know nothing about his sensitive poet ass!”
Which is true, because Young Nick Drake refuses to say anything at all about his past except that his sister jumped off the Ninety-Seventh floor of an unnamed Steve Wynn property two days after the Collapse. And I only know that because it’s also the chorus of his best song, “My Sister Jumped Off the Ninety-Seventh Floor of an Unnamed Steve Wynn Property Two Days After the Collapse Blues.”
Base Omega was all, Yeah, chief, that’s a real sad story.
Base Omega was all, Yeah, champ, that’s totally tragic.
But they knocked off the crap once Young Nick Drake strummed those gila tendons around the campfire. Then Base Omega nodded in time and sang along with the catchy hooks and hooky melodies and forgot that they didn’t trust Young Nick Drake as far as they could throw him, which probably wasn’t high enough to clear the fence anyway.
Young Nick Drake tells me he’s working on a brand new song.
A ballad.
He says it’s called “Krua by the Glow of a Thousand Burning Well Fires.”
Sure, it’s pure corn.
But there are times when I watch his fingers ping ping ping over the strings, nails polished black with melted tar, l
ips parted wetly in song, and think, well, you know, maybe.
7. Stealing is venal. Thieves will be flayed. Food thieves will spend a week in the Box. Minus a hand.
The Box is really just the trunk of a Kia Sorento buried up to the wheel wells next to Base Omega’s latrine. Which is really just the camper shell of an Isuzu Trooper dragged over a hole in the tar that’s not nearly deep enough.
It gets hot in the box.
It smells in the latrine.
No one really steals anymore.
Especially left-handed.
8. Base Omega will each memorize a work of classic literature to ensure that we do not lose touch with our vital literary traditions and a connection to the higher arts.
Larry Our Leader got the idea from a graphic novel called Fahrenheit 451. Lizard bones were drawn from a beret. Jeff and Pink Lady pulled John Cheever. Dorsal Vent got Gertrude Stein. Crazy Apron Alice made a run at Green Eggs and Ham. But after a few days of laborious mumbling, Base Omega was all, Wait, what was the problem with burning books again?
Young Nick Drake got Naked Lunch and immediately had the exterminator parts down pat, could quote Dr. Benway in a Dr. Benway voice that even Larry Our Leader said was creepier than a run of bad Freon.
I memorized the first four pages of Madame Bovary and walked around for a month like, Monsieur Roger, I have brought you a new boy, and, You may now discard your helmet, young fop, but it turns out even the future hates Flaubert. Base Omega was all, We’re fine to lose touch with that French pussy. Base Omega was all, Fuck books, their pathetic reliance on recycled plots and ill-considered foreshadowing are no longer germane to our rapidly changing world. Besides, we’re tired and bored and would give almost anything for a chipotle-braised organic pork medallion right now.
I’m like, Wait, what wouldn’t you give?
Base Omega was all, We would happily rekill our dead mothers for a chipotle-braised organic pork medallion right now.
9. All Base Omegans will be trained in self-defense and the use of modern weaponry.
At first it was guns, guns, guns. But that didn’t last. Ever try to fire a TEC-9 full of sand? Ever watch a movie where the hero’s pistol never runs out of hollow points? Here’s how the real apocalypse works: for the first seventy-two hours everyone left is terrified to the point of raggedy psychosis, so they shoot at whatever blinks, farts, or moves, and by Wednesday are out of ammo.
Even people smart enough to stockpile have to waste their stockpiles killing people dumb enough to try and take their stockpiles away.
Guns = hunks of metal not good for much except tenderizing rat meat.
It turns out the best possible weapon in the future is a sharpened length of galvanized pipe. Preferably about five feet long. The key to dystopic combat is not Korean assault rifles or suppressing fire or slow-motion kicks, it’s a Medium-Deep Puncture.
In the end, we are the thinnest of balloons filled with organy pudding, just waiting to be popped. Get stuck with a sharpened length of galvanized pipe and you might not die right away, but you will soon after. Sepsis sets in almost immediately. There’s no surgery, no fighting off infection, no antibiotics, no wrapping strips of dirty sheet around the wound and somehow it’s fine the next day. It’s infected the next day. It’s gangrene the day after that.
Get poked = you die.
So Pink Lady teaches Weapons N’ Tactics. Dorsal Vent leads Take Back the Night self-defense class.
Of course, Young Nick Drake refuses to train at all.
“I am committed to nonviolence.”
It makes Larry Our Leader very mad.
“If it helps, I’m happy to lead a Conflict Resolution seminar instead.”
Larry Our Leader is fairly certain that conflict cannot ever be resolved.
“Well, let’s just see who shows up.”
I am the only one who shows up.
Young Nick Drake puts away his notes, refolds the folding chair, and then leads me by the hand across the compound.
“Where are we going?”
“The Camry Lending Library.”
In the backseat Young Nick Drake leans very close, reaches into his pocket.
And presents me with a gift.
It’s so beautiful.
So perfect.
A rolled up tube of Crest X-Tra White that’s got, easily, two squeezes left.
It goes a very long way toward resolving our biggest conflict.
10. Never make out with Young Nick Drake.
His chin whiskers tickle. He strokes my neck softly and whispers my name with a longing that transcends the end of the world and everything in it.
“Krua. Oh, Krua.”
“If we’re going to be friends,” I say, trembling, “you’re gonna have to knock it off with that shit. My real name’s Sandy.”
Young Nick Drake kisses my knuckles. He kisses my filthy little fingertips. He wraps the empty toothpaste tube around my third finger like a ring.
“Does this mean we’re engaged?”
He winks and says, “Sandy, we gotta get out of this place.”
He says, “I know somewhere we can be alone, pitch our own decoratively embroidered yurt.”
He says, “I’ll be Romeo and you be Milla Jovovich.”
“But what’s wrong with Base Omega?” I whisper.
He shakes his head as if I’m a child.
“Isn’t it obvious? Larry’s insane.”
I wonder if it is obvious. Or maybe just predictable.
“We have to go, Krua,” he hisses. “Like, tonight.”
11. All empires invariably collapse, from Byzantium to Egypt to Vegas. And usually with a whimper of irrelevance. Except this one.
Larry Our Leader calls me to his yurt, asks what I think Dictate Eleven means. I tell him I couldn’t even hazard a guess.
He waits, slapping at insects that aren’t there.
So I say if forced to hazard at stick-point, Dictate Eleven suggests we’re nothing but vague organic amalgams, random cells made flesh, whose interior mechanics have no real purpose except to slowly degrade until they fail.
He takes a mighty huff of Freon, grins redly.
“Excellent. Continue.”
I tell him that the reign of any society is merely the interstices prior to its collapse. That all thought systems fall apart, philosophical conceptions nothing but buzzard carcasses waiting to rot and be replaced. I say that even Apocalypse Now eventually becomes Apocalypse Then.
In other words, we’re all just a big pile of crap.
“Sure. But why sentient crap?”
It’s a good point.
Larry gets up from the rusty architect’s table where he spends all day drawing pictures of displeased Asian women. He’s nude, oiled from head to toe.
“You’re a good girl, Krua. A real asset to Base Omega.“
It is clear that Larry does not believe this.
“One day you will lead us.”
It is clear that I will never lead us.
“But you seem distracted. Like there’s something you want to tell me.”
On the oak dresser is Larry’s collection of used candy wrappers. I hold a scrunch of plastic to my nose, inhale the scent of vintage Twix.
“I’m going to find out either way.”
We’re practically touching. My forehead comes up to his neck. Heat radiates from his sunburn. A lust for something far more complicated than lust exudes from every pore.
I try to keep my mouth shut, but it’s hard. Larry’s eyes beam directly into my skull, searching for lies. I have to give him something real, something true.
“Before the Collapse my father used to wake me every morning by making fart noises on my belly button with his lips. Then he’d say, ‘You must rise, my little pumpkin, but I give you permission not to shine.’ ”
Larry shakes his head, disappointed.
“The boy, Krua. His plan.”
A rusty knife is sunk to the shaft in the Eames bed stan
d. Several lengths of sharpened galvanized pipe lean against the wet bar.
I know Larry knows I’m considering them.
He grips my shoulder, squeezes way too hard.
“You’re a very lucky girl, Krua. Do you know why?”
“No.”
“Because I am giving you a gift much more valuable than toothpaste. I’m allowing you to make a choice. Do you remember the baboons?”
I did. A year ago a pack of them appeared on the fence. Perched along the razor wire. They croaked and spit and scratched. At first Base Omega was excited, thinking we could trap and eat them. But then the baboons started throwing excrement. Which was watery and neon red. Also, they all had both sex parts. And weren’t shy with the flashing and fiddling. Larry said it meant they were a bad omen, pumped full of toxic effluent. He said Base Omega might as well cram down a plate of Fukushima fajitas. Twee Rob, a former kindergarten adjunct with a passion for artisanal cheese and locally sourced vests, disagreed. He twirled his mustache and said, “Au contraire, mi amigo!” He said he could prepare the beasts correct, just like how sushi chefs serve blowfish, which are poison if you don’t know exactly where to slice, but are otherwise this prized delicacy. Twee Rob managed to impale one of the healthier-looking baboons with a sharpened galvanized pole and then slow-roasted it for many hours.
“See!” he said, crunching through the first chunk, as wonderful-smelling juices ran out the corners of his mouth and dangled from his beard.
Everyone laughed, wanting some too, and began to fight over Omega Plate and Omega Spoon.
Until Twee Rob screamed. Until foam bubbled from between his teeth. Until his eyes flipped inside-out.
And then he exploded.
So, maybe Larry Our Leader knows what he’s talking about. Maybe he’s the person who’s right for once.
“I choose you,” I whisper.