Moth Mang

~ Sunday night ~

Fuckin’ moth.

Paul Burkett had just laid down for the seventh, and (he’d hoped) final time when he heard the tell-tale flapping of the goddamned moth from dinner. He remembered the laughter of his children as he flailed and swung about the room. He’d grabbed it, wrapped it in a guab of toilet paper, flushed it. He’d done these things. He remembered doing them. But now here’s the moth, his moth, the very same moth, which he knows because only his moth sounded like this moth. Flapping. What the fuck kind of insect flaps? Also, his moth had been big. The part of the moth between the wings was the size and length of a AA battery. The moth had trouble flying with any accuracy, because - Burkett assumed - It’s mutated thorax fucked with the thing’s spatial awareness and internal sonar.

Wife. At the bedroom door, standing up. Giving voice to a discontent separate from his own:

Fuckin’ moth. Again. You said you killed it.

I killed it.

But she was gone. Walking back to doing whatever. Singing his incompetence.

He got up. Stood up. The moth was on the wall, highlighted against wall-white. Burkett advanced and the thing did not fly away. Another step, and one more. Now, face-to-moth, Burkett considers the options, narrowing the options down to two, then taking a few moments more to think about how he was so clever in the narrowing. He begins an ill-concealed move back toward the Kleenex on his side table. The moth flies and hits the ceiling. The impacts are both audible. The ceiling a hollow “ponk”, and the bed a softer “Pat” sound. The moth is on his back, on Paul’s pillow, on Paul’s bed.

The beast seems stunned, so Paul charges in close, bringing a tissue-clump down on the giant winged thing. He scoops with tissue-protected fingers, mushing the foul thing in the paper, feeling the gristly fucker cracking and grinding in the tissue. He thinks, for a brief moment, of potential moral implications of cruel and unusual moth punishment. That’s when the moth interrupted him by flying away. It bounced off Paul’s face, crashed, and bounced again, this time off his low bureau, landing gracelessly in the laundry baskets his wife had placed side by side on the floor. The moth was in his whites. Paul found himself besieged then, by thoughts of greasy brown smears left behind by past moths - post crushing - on other things in his house. Fuckin’ moth.

He was struck then. Inspired. Visited by the muse of moth-murder. Spotting a gigantic 1970’s Webster’s Dictionary- also on the bureau - he grabbed it two handed, and spiked it into the laundry with a tentative…

Yahhah!…Ah. Ha…..

For a moment, silence. In the near distance, Paul heard the wife, squawking into her phone about his impotency at moth-destruction. He took a moment to curse her, and then another to forgive her, and one more to castigate himself in his own head for being too inward-looking. The Webster’s was heavier than he’d remembered without the blood lust.

The Moth was upon him before he could even stand straight. Assaulting him down onto his back, on the bed. He took a moment to consider that his head might be resting on the moth-smear from his previous attempt at capture. His brain sent a message to his neck, legs, head and abdomen: “Get up! Moth mud!”

The message never arrived though, because it was at the very instant that the freaky moth lit on the tip of Paul Burkett’s face and bit him.

Had he remained conscious, he would have most certainly remarked about it. Most likely it would have been quite awful, easily the most pain Mr. Burkett would ever endure. Instead, Paul passed out, probably from an unconscious decision not to endure it.

***

Yes yes yes! Carol I love you! Ok…Ok….Ok…Ok. Gotta go he’s coming. Yah maybe he caught it…

And then the wife burst into a cynical kind of laugh that made his heart hurt. Paul opened the fridge and stood gazing into it like a dog staring at wind chimes. At some point becoming aware of his wife’s stupid, cloying voice:

How’d you do it?

It?

The moth. You killed it?

Uh…

You didn’t. Oh well, dare to dream. Did you at least herd it out of our bedroom so it won’t crawl into my lungs as I’m sleeping?

Uh…Yes. I did do that.

Close the fridge.

And he did, but it didn’t cure the staring. Now he was just facing the closed fridge, breathing like a fat person in deep, moist gargles.

Hon?

Paul turned to her. The wife said:

What…?

And reached up at his face. Specifically his nose. She was grabbing at him…

You’ve got something…What the fu…

When she touched him, a bolt of spiky hot pain went roaring from the area on his nose. The room went spinning. Burkett leaned back on the closed fridge howling and tearing up from the adrenaline. He took an instant to make sure the reason for his tears was - in fact - only that and not fear, or pain. His wife brought him a mirror and held it up. The room went rotating and ranging away on him again and this time he couldn’t make a stand. He heard a loud report from somewhere behind him, and his last thought before waking up in a totally different circumstance was spot-on. He thought:

“That noise was my own head hitting my granite counter top”

~Monday Morning~

Geoff Rowdike was the only EMT left. Rhode Island was a small state and Wakefield was one of the smallest towns in it. Weekends - especially summer weekends like this one - most of the state’s first responders were backed up and stressed, forced to stack victims like diseased aircraft and waving them down to the tarmac, incident by unfortunate incident. If a caller sounded especially compromised, however, there was the occasional bending of the rules. Rowdike had been assisting in the separation of an elderly couple from a local nursing home. Geoff had been driving an ambo for almost six years, and before that he’d been an emt for another two years. All that time, not a month went by without some elderly housecat trying to cage some strange off one of his fellow sundowners. Most times they never got to the actual no-pants dance, settling - instead - for a wrinkled helping hand or maybe a gummy fellating. The ones who dreamed bigger were in for a cold-shower, the kind administered by a creeped out EMT in order to expedite genital separation. In his time, Rowdike had seen some very, very long showers. When the call came from 204 Division St. the overworked EMT bolted, screaming apologies and something about a man who’s face had come off.

Pulling up the driveway, Burkett saw an open garage with lights on, and a door along the back wall. He entered at double time to give the victims a good first impression. He found himself standing in a modest kitchen, well lit kitchen and called out:

Hello! Hello! Maam? Anybody hear me?

He felt a pinch on the back of his neck like a horsefly bite and threw a clumsy jab over his shoulder. He was shocked to find he’d actually hit something. Felt like butterfly, but when he opened his hand there was a giant moth in the palm, staring back at him, motionless. A voice from behind him gurgled the word:

Help…

And he turned.

Ambo driver and emt he was, and even all those years of experience couldn’t have prepared him for what his eyes found before him. A woman. He knew it was a woman because of her breasts. More correctly, her left breast. The other, right hand breast, was gone along with half the flesh on her abdomen and almost all the skin from her face. Whatever was burning the flesh away took the clothing as well. The remnants frayed ends were gooping and dipping into the gore-line marking off the progress of her receding body. Rowdike could see that line moving, making a wet-sounding march and hissing evil vapors. The stench from the thing was heavy and tangible like an impenetrable wall of odor. Rowdike gaped. Somewhere in the attic of his brain he was goading himself into some type of action, but his amazement and revulsion were too strong, and he stood rooted until the body fell to pieces before him in a hissing, steaming hump.

That’s when he noticed the other mess of a body, which - by now - in no way resembled the human form. Geoff was assuming it was only because the mess’s jeans were still mostly intact. Sergio Valente. Rowdike could see the cow on the pocket.

Geoff had turned heel when the world started to spin away from him, and he heard a great report from somewhere behind him. He had a last thought as he fell, that the sharp “whack!” had been his own head hitting the Burkett’s granite countertop.

　

　

　

　

　

　

　

　

Miss Missy

Despite strident testimony to the contrary, Susannah Prendas was not “ok” to drive. The three drunks sitting next to her at the Safari Lounge could’ve attested to that, but they were all unconscious when she left, thanks to the many rounds of drinks that Mrs. Prendas herself had paid for. Only the bartender - Lu - was left standing by the time Shelia got up to leave, and Lu never was never one to be taking keys. Lu did holler after her as she bobbed and weaved her way towards the Safari’s front entrance, but that was only to ask her if she wanted to buy some coke.

Fuck no

Sue had belched back at him.

Coke would prolleh keep me awake, and we shckan’t havieh nowcan weesh?

***

Sue’s ride home would have been terrifying. Luckily she didn’t recall much of it. She’d shoplifted a bottle of Smirnoff during one of Lu’s thousand trips to the bathroom, and spent a lot of the 12 minute trip home searching under car trash for something to drink it out of. The bottle had a shot-measure instead of a cap and she couldn’t suck enough booze out of it. Some of the things Susannah almost hit during the search: A stop sign, a mother and toddler riding their bicycles, an elderly couple in a crosswalk, a meter maid in a cross walk, and a Boston Whaler fishing rig. Things she actually did hit: A parked car, a squirrel, a bird (!), and “Tunces” her next door neighbor’s eight year old Jack Russell Terrier.

She was aware of hitting all of them except the dog. Tunces had been asleep in his owner’s back yard until a squirrel came hurdling through the area, darting for the giant Oak in which he’d made his home. Tunces gave chase, and was gaining on the intruder when he slammed into his invisible fence. If his owner had been home at the time, he’d have come charging out of the house, wild eyed and probably armed, to investigate his animals keening.

Instead, Tunces continued his wailing, writhing and spasming around in the street for what seemed like hours. He stopped only when he realized that he was no longer in his yard. His momentum had sent him tumbling into the street, free of the invisible barrier. Finally getting shut of the horrible, invisible fence-induced pain-waves, Tunces wasted not a moment more of his newfound freedom. He sniffed the air and, finding it rich with squirrel, let his head follow his nose until he made visual contact with the offending rodent. Then, with a howl and a bark, Tunces the terrier was in hot pursuit. His horrified quarry feinted left and bolted right, breaking for a nearby birch he hadn’t a chance at making. That’s when Susan Prendas pulled her 2005 Maxima into her driveway, and ran over Tunces head, squishing the faithful old hound’s cranium like an aluminum can full of red paint.

*** 365 days later.

Susannah Prendas came home drunk enough to forget to turn off her car. It was still running when the police arrived at her house two hours later, and running - still - when they left it, an hour after that. Officers Jim Pierce and Ray Beck were too freaked out to go back into the house and tell Sue. Eventually it would run out of gas, and Prendas would use the event as further proof that the universe was against her.

But before any of that, Prendas planned on taking an extended vacation to a place called vicodin, most likely with her two best friends Johnny Black and Mr. Kendall Jackson Chardonnay. It wasn’t everyday a girl got fired AND sued.

A banner day calls for a banner buzz!

She chirped and went skipping toward her house. It came out :

Banndaee? Bambosh…

Sue made sure, on the way to her front door, to toss a drunken glance toward her homicidal freak neighbor’s empty fucking house. Gone was Mr. Speed, out of her life forever as of two days ago. His departure - she liked to think - the one positive thing the pathetic series of creepy events known as her life had managed to vomit up in the last 365 days.

But It’s a start!

It came out:

Isha Shtarrd!

She sang in full throat now, fumbling open the mailbox to grab the bills, dropping them, dropping her keys, singing again, and then dropping everything…Dizzy with ethyl-fueled anticipation, Sue finally picked up her shit and gained entrance. Throwing her getting-fired box on the kitchen table, Sue took off all her clothes, grabbed a stick of butter from the fridge and started rubbing it vigorously between her legs while calling for her beloved cat:

Missy. Lovely lady Missy-the-Cat!! Mommy needs…Mommy needs…

But no cat came. Prendas was too drunk to make much of it, but Miss Missy was always at the door to greet her as she returned from work. Even on short days like today, the cat knew where to be, and when to be there. Sue called a few more times with waning enthusiasm, finally getting up - butter stick in hand - and casting about in the nude for the missing kitty. That’s when she noticed the DVD on her table.

DVD case anyway, she thought as she approached, a blank one. No markings of any kind on it, or on the CD inside. Sue Prendas was still clutching her stick of Land ‘o Lakes as she made her way over to the 58-inch plasma in the Living Room. She pushed the disc into the front of the player and pressed play on the remote. Then she plopped down on her couch and found Miss Missy.

　

***24 hours later

Detective Kent Chantner didn’t have to watch the video again. The girl was a suicide, plain and simple, slam dunk. Enough people in Penrose getting killed by other people, he shouldn’t be spending the taxpayers hard-earned watching unnecessary “evidence”. He promised himself just the one last time before he put sent the thing to the E-locker where it would disappear forever. He pressed play and got comfortable. His partner Lars Mitten pulled up a chair too, thinking the same thing as Kent.

One last time just to make sure amigo?

Why not Lars. Nothin better to do.

Amen.

Chantner pressed “play”

　

　

　

　

　

　

A black screen for three seconds and then right into the action. The camera is trained on what appears to be a small airplane, the kind powered by a propellers instead of jets. There are voices off-screen, but nobody is visible. The camera carrier held up when he reached the plane, then zoomed on the 4-color lettering on the side of the aircraft. They read:

Speed sky jumping, freefall, sky surfing

“I feel the need…The need for Speed”

There was a parachute in silhouette Just below the writing. The same logo that appeared on the aircraft’s tail, visible during the approach. The camera held on the letters for a few seconds, and then panned to the left and down, taking a bead on a large pet carrier on the tarmac. Zooming in to where the words:

“Miss Missy”

were visible over the latticework at one end of the carrier. The camera view sank lower still. The cat inside was ugly and Siamese-looking. It was huddled at the rear of the carrier of the box and when the camera found it the thing looked back over it’s shoulder and hissed loudly. Mitten said:

Look at that fucker. That cat’s a dick. You can tell just by looking at the hairless bastard.

Kent said:

Yep. Dirty fucking cat. Up…Here we go.

A cut to another close-up of the Carrier. An ambient Humming is audible, along with giggles. A crushed beer can is thrown into view, and once again the camera slides down to get a look at the animal. It’s pressed itself up against the back wall and hidden it’s face. A voice off camera says:

Missy. Hi Missy! Who’s a pretty kitty…

The camera stays put for a few moments more, and then another cut. Now the camera is apparently mounted on a helmet. For a few seconds it looks as if the camera is in free fall, but the doorframe keeps bleeding into frame and panning down to reveal the camera person’s lower half. A shout comes from behind the camera and just like that the pov is plummeting. For almost 30 seconds all we see is green ground and blue sea below. Then the camera looks back up and finds four skydivers arranged like points of a square. Between them, in the center of the square, is the pet carrier.

The camera stays on this scene for what seems like a long time. The skydivers are talking to each other but the camera is only picking up wind. Finally, one of them gives to camera a “well, here we go…” look and begins fiddling with the carrier. A few seconds later he swings it open and reaches a gloved hand in. The fall as one, the skydiver appears to be giggling as he moves his arm around inside the plastic box. After another few seconds the skydiver jerks his hand back and holds a grey lump up like to display for the other chute-ists. Two of them clap. The diver holding the cat then wheels around and faces the camera, holding the cat up by neck scruff like an angler displaying a catch of bass.

Things start moving fast when the guy lets go of the cat. It takes some doing. The thing looks like a permanent appendage, wrapping around the diver’s hand like a Boa constrictor. Finally the guy is able to peel it off, and when he does, the cat looses it’s cat mind. It writhes around for a while in the air, and then goes into the traditional “scared cat” position: back up, legs bolted straight, fur hackled and rippling. The freefall has a weird effect though, and the two detectives laugh guilty laughs. Onscreen there’s more clapping.

The first time he watched the video, Kent remembered, he got to this point and just figured the guy would put the cat back in the box and land safely, with nobody the worse. He remembered having had that thought, and then having to abandon it when he noticed one of the skydivers was now wielding a giant black .12 gauge autoloader. As the other three jumpers move off camera, the gun-holder moves closer to the still-freaking animal. Before Detective Mitten even had time enough to wonder of the guy would really do it, the guy did it.

It was hard to see at first, because the report from the gun is no match for the wind and the muzzle flash doesn’t show against the bright November sky. The effect almost looks like a special effect. The guy floats over, puts the barrel of the Shotgun about six inches away from Miss Kitty, and then Miss Kitty disappears. Not practically, or figuratively , or mostly disappears. No: this cat literally blinks out of existence. Before the group pulls their chutes one by one, a lone diver drifts back out in front of the camera and holds up a crude slate tablet. The camera zooms, and the words:

Fuck you CUNT!

Are visible as the scene fades to black.

The Nanos Papers

Prologue

Mojave Desert, One Month Ago:

The last day of testing (TeeDee 33 to Dr. George's people) dawned pink and blue and 83 degrees. Nobody on the team had slept. Most of them hadn’t even sat down by the time the soft glow began it’s daily advance across the desert skies. The rooms and labs all smelled like stress, and there were pieces of clothing, empty cans, and used food covering every surface in the cramped, one floor lab. All the work for the past 15 days had been done using targeting coordinates hundreds of miles away, and normal standards of decorum and cleanliness had been suspended indefinitely, or at least until the job was done in two day's time.

An array of monitors told the story in efficient short-hand. Screens to the left showed different angle POV’s of the same scene: two chairs, both empty, pulled alongside a oval-shaped white table. The room behind looked like unused office space. Grey rug / White walls / Metallic door with an iron wheel instead of a doorknob. Most of the right-side screens were showing a small, one floor dwelling, obviously reinforced to withstand firepower. It looked to be made entirely of poured cement, and there were no windows, only a tiny slot bisecting - top to bottom - the walls of the tiny building. Two screens on the far right of the wall showed a long shot of the same building. Desert was visible for what looked like miles around the place, and there was a stripe of blacktop that went passed the building and off into the distance. There was a time stamp in the bottom right of each screen with zeroed factors for hours, minutes, seconds, and tenths.

The team members (there were five of them including Doctor George. Three men and one woman) moved unconsciously through their preparations, checking each step of each protocol off imaginary lists. Writing wasn’t allowed in the Subb Sipp - it was outlawed in the ground rules along with every other possible method of note taking, or recording. The project, every success and failure, existed only in the minds of the team members.

Before long, Dr. George sat down and a voice came over the team's headsets:

Test Deployment 33. Clear to Commence. On go. We are Go.

another voice answered:

Roger that TeeDee. We are Go. Number 33.

And it began. A cloud of dust appeared at the horizon and began to grow. Before long, a black Lincoln Town Car pulled up near the building and a tall, heavyset man opened the driver side door. He paused for a few beats sizing up the building and it’s surroundings. Then he stretched and then walked around back. A few minutes later, the same man was visible on the monitors in the center of the wall, sitting gingerly on the left hand chair with nervous eyes beaming. Before long another cloud of dust became another Lincoln. A woman this time, but everything else the same. She sat next to the man without speaking. There were three minutes that passed like years then, the Doctor pressing buttons on laptop open in front of him, the team around him staring at the screens, the watched man and woman seated and silent, waiting. Another dust-cloud appeared on the horizon of the right-hand screens just as the Doctor said

Prepare. One minute, twenty seconds on my clock. Now.

Part I: Pres

The President broke the silence:

Wait…The bee guy? George?

The very same.

I thought we…

Nah. Didn’t happen.

But everybody was…

Yep. Not him.

Wow.

Yah.

Fuck.

Yah.

He’s not mad? I mean we…

Not mad. Fabulously wealthy and not mad.

Wow

Yah.

So who’s…

Spitze.

Spitze?

Yah.

Same guy? Last time?

Yep.

Wow.

Yah.

How?…Both of them!?

Long story.

I guess it would have to be.

Yep.

So then, when this is over….

Maybe.

Definitely. And he’s fucking late.

OK.

Ten fucking minutes.

Fuck.

***

The man realized too late that he’d sweated through his shirt. By the time he was able to check himself out in a mirror, the damage had been done. There were shadow-continents formed over all problem areas, and a few areas that only became problems on a day like today. Luckily for Mark Spitze, days like today were rare enough. His family’s enthusiasm for his task did nothing to assuage the muddy sweat flooding onto his forehead. “Once in a lifetime” they said “Your big moment!”. But the urgent praise and encouragement did nothing to remedy the circus going on in his stomach. In fact, the only thing that would help - he knew - was getting the whole affair over and done with. He drove into the pentagon security check and watched the seconds drain on his watch while the guards performed the Patriot Act on his car. By the time the guard - Officer Mumps, his name tag read - tossed Mark back his keys, he was already five minutes late. He ran through two more security passes and took an elevator almost a mile down into the ground, worrying the whole way, tracking the degree of tardiness in his head, and hoping like hell the President would understand.

***

15 minutes later, after Spitze had left them alone was making his way back through the pentagons multi-point security apparatus and the President sat alone with DOD chief Roger Majors. It was a full three minutes before either one said a word. Majors had been pacing from wall to wall even since before the Spitze meeting began and he was still at it. The President was still seated with one leg crossed over the other, gazing intently at the tip of his own shoe. At last Majors knifed the silence:

So…Three trials then. A field work-up, just to see whatever there is to see right?

The President’s gaze never veered from the shoe:

Three trials. Tomorrow, concurrently, Afghanistan, Somalia, and Domestic…Have you decided?

Majors, shrugging:

Not yet, although…New York? LA?

The President smiled back. He said:

NOLA.

Majors nearly gagged. During the campaign, much had been made of the Chief’s love for his home city of New Orleans, but that had been before the big storm. Majors shivered a little thinking about planning and logistics in the wounded wastes of the post-Katrina Crescent City.

Well, uh, yes Mr. President we um…Well sir, it’s certainly a possibi…

Mr. Majors: NOLA.

Realizing the true nature of an order he’d assumed was merely a suggestion, Majors looked the exact opposite of the way his enthusiastic…

Yessir! Sir! I’ll tell them. Right away…

…Ended up sounding. He left in more of a hurry than Spitze. Then the Chief was alone with his whiskey and his thoughts of home. He found himself slightly less worried than he’d been before the sit-down with Spitze and Majors. For a man in his position, he knew, sometimes slightly less worried was the best one could hope for.

Part II: Sloop

He hadn’t made it to the toilet since 20 hours before, instead - too sick to move more than a few feet at a time - he’d started stockpiling vomit in a 12 qt pressure cooker at the foot of the bed. The cook-pot would have been full many times over had his aim been better. As it was, the there was only a thin scrim of regurgitate covering the it’s no-stick bottom, and a massive, multi-colored puddle surrounding covering the floor around it. Had there been anybody else living in the deserted second floor of the never completed government housing barracks Sloop Green called home, they’d have vacated by day two of his non-voluntary kicking. Instead, motherfuckers just stopped coming by.

For a time, that was just ducky with Sloop. If you asked him, the place was oversold anyway. Since he’d pulled up two years ago, after winning the floors by physically throwing out ten other dudes, he’d try to keep traffic through the place to a minimum. He didn’t mind people slinking across from whoever was playing at the Wolf across the street (that was - after all - how he’d found the place). But lately, it seemed like he’d been stuck playing host to a party that never ended, and was fueled almost exclusively by Sloop’s drugs. He hadn’t minded when the boom times were on. Now, though, after losing his dealer, and with him, the hope of being spotted any sort of weight, Sloop found himself kicking more often than not. By his lights, this latest 4-day flu was his twelfth of the year and it was only August. He crawled to the “bedside” (Sloop bedded atop an ancient pile of oak joists covered with about 30 blankets, towels, and rags) and dry heaved some yellow mucus onto the floor next to his cooker as he considered the recent troubles.

It had all started - of course - with a massive police action. Post-Katrina cops don’t truck much with actual police work, there being plenty of graft to perform, and homeless to beat down and lock up. Every so often, though, they hit the streets looking to actually lock somebody up for more than a weekend. That that “somebody” would one day become Sloop’s age old partner, employer, and skag-merchant Ox was - every junkie in the Treme would agree - a certainty long overdue in becoming. That didn’t stop everybody being shocked to silence as the word traveled. They took the old man off his blocks, along with every family member, underboss, and junkie that ever lent him a hand. They grabbed weight. A record amount of weight. Ox, his family, and his narcotics were gone away for good.

From then on, the team-effort ethos keeping the NOLA dealers and hop-heads out of the hurt locker dissolved like the Levees in the lower ninth. Ox found himself counted amongst a short-list of dealers who actually knew enough other dealers to perpetuate the lifestyle. That circumstance worked wonders when any of those guys was straight, but when they all cacked out at once (as had happened WAY more times than he’d have expected), well there was no choice. He had to sack out on his bed of joists and wait for the storm to pass like every other Opiate enthusiast since the beginning of time. Dealing with the moments one at a time, and keeping his cell phone charged and ready.

As it turned out though, the phone never rang. His deliverance showed up on foot, halfway through the third day of Sloop’s awful, and pungent detox. Sgt Slaughter, his new running’ buddy and - only having lived been in town a month - a certified rookie to the Crescent City, raised Sloop from awful dope-deprived reverie. Sloop, still rubbing the sleep from his face, connected the dots using his super junkie spider sense: the Sarge wasn’t sick. Sarge was glassy eyed and lispy, but didn’t reek of alcohol. It was three am and Sarge the soldier boy wasn‘t fucking sick. It taxed Sloop to even life his head up, but he did it anyway. He wiped a muddy flop-sweat off his brow and offered with great economy:

You’re not sick. Y’ got Dope?

Sarge responded with a standing back-flip. At least 250 pounds of hard muscle was the Sarge, but the guy lept into the air and flipped and landed on his feet like a bantam-weight. No way to do that nursing the sickness. Salvation - Sloop knew - had arrived. Too tired to be outwardly thankful, Sloop concentrated, instead, on getting out of bed. By the time he’d forced himself, with great care, onto the bedside and then attempted to sit up, there was already a needle pushing a shot into the full-sleeve, five-color flesh mural that decorated Sarge’s right arm. It was a copy of the Sistine Chapel ceiling, with God’s pointing finger touching one of Sarge’s prominent mainlines. The old soldier’d been sitting up on the stack of 2 x 4 for his fixing, but now Sloop saw him go withering into a horizontal position, a spike still dangling from the crook of his arm. Sloop scrambled for the gear Slaughter’d strewn all atop his 2 x 4’s. As he plucked the spike from a suddenly very relaxed looking Sarge, Sloop Green marveled at his great windfall. He took a lighter and heated the bottom of a spoon filled with a milky, bubbling solute. He dipped a cotton ball into the spoon, slowly drawing out his piece of dope, and paused to take one last consideration of these last few days of dope sick hell. His stomach was sill heaving and contracting though, reminding Sloop that he’d remain sick until the hypodermics were engaged. He did so, and fell asleep right next to the soldier for three whole hours.

Fifteen minutes of cook-prep-shoot after that, and both were humping, on the double, toward Sarge’s new contact‘s place. Sloop was skeptical, but way too stoned to be saying “no” to anything. Besides, they’d already shot through the Sarge’s tiny piece, and Sloop couldn’t face another cold turkey. He had to hand it to the guy: for a newbie, Sgt. Slaughter was mastering the NOLA lifestyle pretty quick. Sloop had been in NOLA two years before he’d met Pam, and never thought to so much as text her during the drought weeks. The relationship had gone through Ox, and Sloop new very little of the Lady Pamela save for the inarguable fact that she was the ugliest woman in New Orleans and possible the entire United States. When the Sarge mentioned one tooth, a curly red afro, and a weird accent, Sloop knew exactly who they were going to see. The old man ran a weekly ten-box through Lady Pam, but they fell out over a money thing a few years back. Sloop - if he’d thought of Pam at all - just figured she’d dried with the rest. Slaughter’s baggie said different.

It’s the best I’ve had since Providence, maybe even before that. She said to bring you by and she’d give you a deal. Something about your old boss.

If Sloop had been listening instead of thinking about how much heroin he could afford, he’d have probably caught himself, or at least given the thing some thought. As it was though, all he could think about was turning the 300 dollars in his pocket into enough of Pam’s amazing narcotics for at least the weekend. Sarge’s claims had been modest. The shit was the best Sloop’d been into since Ox name rang out. Maybe the best ever. He was planning his next three days of perpetual bliss as he and Sargent Slaughter pulled off Fleur Di Li, and waded into NOLA’s biggest trailer park. Pam had lived deep in the bowels of FEMAland in the bombed out wastes that had become the lower Ninth Ward.

Part III: The Lady

I’m embarrassed for you, motherfucker!

Lady Pamela, dressing down the latest dope-fiend fuckup to come beg favors from her, lit a cigarette in ruddy, dry lips and exhaled smoke in an angry grey sigh. She stared at the guy then, his sordid backstory and credit history playing in her minds eye like a movie about a fucking idiot. After a long silence, punctuated only by the soft hiss of a dragged-on Marlboro Medium, the guy finally spoke up for his own defense:

Lady, I always meant to say I’m sorry about the last time. I was wrong to pull that shit. I SWEAR

- the guy raised a pointing finger at this point in the testimony -

you gimme a few days, maybe a few g’s. How about it? You know I done for you ina’ past, no? Right? One more time then…

Pam kept staring so the dude kept talking:

…It was my old lady, not no more she aint, she’s fuckin done now. But back then though…Ugh she tasked me Pam. Stole from me, stole from everybody that trusted me. Before I tossed that bitch she put me in dutch with the whole town, and now look at me out here: I’m getting’ sick already, tryin put out these fires that bitch started up. You know…And PLEASE Pam. I said it: Please motherfucker, please! I’m sick. You see it.

But Pam had raised a hand in silence by then, having heard, and recalled, enough about the gentleman’s case to pronounce a verdict. She locked eyes with him and let the silence loom between them for almost a full minute. When at last she spoke, it was with economy, muttering the word “Lerion” in a near silent whisper. Just then a shadow fell across the opposite side of the Pam’s beaded curtain, blocking out all light from the FEMA trailer‘s forward windows. The begging junky turned away from Lady Pam to watch a catcher’s mitt sized hand begin part the beads from the “living room” side. Without another word, the hop head turned, exited, and ran like hell to put blocks between himself, and the Lady‘s gigantic employee.

Part IV: Sarge

The Sarge’s real name was Tom Speed and he actually was a Saergant. Sgt. Speed had been a career military man in a not-quite previous life. After graduating West Point, Magna Cum in 1987, he’d been groomed for command, and eventually given charge an elite force of combat engineers in the Marine Corps. From 1988-2004 Speed and his boys traveled the world - and especially the middle east - building things that would enable the infantry to kill people more effectively and in greater numbers. While the engineers - who styled themselves “Skinchangers” after a favorite children’s cartoon - were Semper Fi, Do or Die, Speed was allowed to detail personal from any branch of the Armed services, special forces included. In his seventeen years as LT, Sgt., And then Seargant Major, Tom Speed had trained, and worked with, every elite fighting unit in US, and allied command including the Navy Seals, Delta, MI-6, and the Green Berets.

But that was all a long time ago. Sarnt. Speed’s last billet had been almost a decade ago, working with Mossad in Pakistan. He taken what was supposed to have been a vacation then, three months in a thatch hut on the beach in Kuai to recharge the battery. Instead the months became years and Kuai became Boston and then Hartford. His habit - an un-wanted souvenier among many from his time in the desert - Grew as he drifted in and out of labor-work in New England, New Jersey, Connecticut, Rhode Island. He finally settled in Sarasota, mostly because he knew the climate would suit a fellow who might not be able to afford a roof from time-to-time. New Orleans just kind of happened. Speed had been working for a guy who owned 24 Waffle Houses between Tampa and Meterie, LA. He’d asked Tom to help him get three of his parking lot’s cleared and re-painted. The third of three was in New Orleans, and Speed never went back to see about a fourth. Instead, the Sarge met Sloop, bought drugs from him, then shacked up with him in a string of awful NOLA motor-inns until his money and narcotics ran low. By that time, Ox had taken his charge, so Sloop and the Sarge were forced to work a pathetic, hand-to-mouth existence while awaiting fortunes sweet, rare smile. Pick-pocketing, Shoplifting, drunk-rolling, Mail-fraud…The two had become experts in making just enough cash to buy just enough dope. Sarge - had thought he’d heard a note of hope and goodwill when he told Pam he’d been sleeping in his friend’s deserted building:

Sloop? The Sloop? A little light brown dude with look like Urkel? You gonna see him tonight?

Tom was startled by a sudden, booming laugh from the rear of Pam’s FEMA. Lady Pam offered no clue as to the laugh so Sarge said:

I guess so. Did you say Urkel?

***

But now Tom Speed wasn’t sure what he’d heard was hope. Not the kind he’d been counting on anyway. His new friend Sloop had been as strung out as anybody he’d ever seen, but Sarge practically had to carry him out here even knowing about the score. Watching the two of them through the beads, Sgt. Speed was catching all kinds of weird shit. Pam seemed to be doing most of the talking, and Sloop’s head, held fast between his wrists with his hands closed over the top, was sinking lower to the ground with each passing minute. The fact that Tom was stoned beyond muscle coordination didn’t help matters. He kept nodding off trying to read lips, and the sounds he was hearing weren’t in synch with what he was watching. On top of everything, Pam’s muscle, a hulking giant with a head like a whiskey Barrel and the unlikely name “Lerion” had been detailed to entertain Sarge while Sloop and Pam had their chat. Lerion, seven feet tall and missing “Cops” because of Tom, didn’t seem in the mood for small talk, choosing instead to stare at Sargent Tom Speed without blinking for the duration of the visit. Now the Lady was passing something over to Sloop, and now Sloop’s looking at it, looking back up at Pam, looking down again. Speed was trying to lean forward to catch the words when the trailer door opened and a boy - not a day over 5 and wearing only cut-off jeans - came galloping in. There were hi-fives and hugs traded between the boy and the giant Lerion, and then the boy broke a chocolate pudding out of the fridge and pulled up next to Speed in the Trailer’s breakfast nook.

Can you pass that spoon please?

The kid asked him in a clear, pre-pubescent soprano. Speed passed the spoon and started to ask if he could have a pudding before he stopped cold. The boy had reached under the table and come up with a tin-foil bindle and a small white cellophane bag. He emptied the contents of both out onto the table and Lerion said:

Hey hey, hold little man. You know she said you gotta’ finish homework…

The boy and the man held serious gazes on each other for a few beats, and then both exploded into giggles, laughing long and hard at the concept of completed homework and bumping fists over the table. Sarge felt out of place, thinking he should‘ve laughed as well, but that he’d missed his chance and would feel foolish starting so late. Lerion, however, was still coughing and guffawing while the tiny boy mixed coke and heroin in a spoon, fired it, drew a shot, and punched out, pumping the warm shot into a mainline with a secretive gasp. Instead of nodding right there in the kitchen though - as Tom would’ve assumed he would behind dope this good - the boy policed the gear from his area, asking without a hint of intoxication:

You want a taste? No charge for my stash…I got my own money.

Part V: Oscar Mike

Later, sifting through the FEMA parking lot in search of Pam’s black Camry, Speed tried to connect some dots:

How you so much about that? Talk to the cops?

Sloop, head on a swivel trying to track the Toyota, answered without pause:

Nah. I was the guy. Unassisted too. Took ‘em on a Friday night. 5,000 in the drop and another g in the register. You workin’ with the best tonight son.

Speed said nothing.

There she is Sarnt Major Captain, sir, our evenings mobility.

As they reached it, Sloop clicked it open and they poured themselves into the Camry, still high like the devil and bursting with the euphoric confidence of a well-fortified opiate-stoning. Sarge saw Sloop stash his .357 under the driver’s seat and they were off. Sloop kept a running monolog the whole 100 miles to the Florida border, but Speed was too busy being doubtful to hear much of it. The act itself didn’t bother him. Breaking, entering, and violent theft were all tent-pole components of most drug dependant lifestyles. Speed’s new friend, however, was a wild card. Tom had known Sloop almost a month and Sloop had spent near the entire time unconscious. They’d enjoyed almost three weeks of boom times, and Sloop had nodded through most all of it, waking up only to eat the occasional Junior Mint or smoke some of somebody else’s weed. Then, when opiate-river began to run dry, the lazy shit had crawled into bed with a box of Junior Mints and tried like hell to sleep away his jones. Gunpoint robbery didn’t require a well-spring of physical gifts, but it was essential for the man holding the gun - at the very least - to remain awake. Sloop Green was insisting on holding the gun.

Part VI: Raghead

Seven fucking times.

The booming voice loosed from one of three men seated around a weathered butcher block table in a musty basement, no-windows dark save for a the area the men were working in. A conical florescent glow bathed them as they reached back and forth between the table and the enormous Firearms each was holding.

Seven times.

The same voice again, this time little more than a resigned whisper between the occasional “click” of a dry-fire to the menacing “Chick-chit” of chambered round in a automatic pistol. The silence made the gun noises seem like some cryptic alien tongue, yet none of the men felt like talking. The fact of their labor - they all knew - required focus unleavened by bullshit. When the same voice came up again, and singing the same mantra, Sahir Tikrit felt compelled to answer back:

It was six times father. Maht doesn’t count.

Tikrit’s father wasted no time with his own answer

My own son stealing my cash register to buy narcotics doesn’t count? Petir you’ve spent too much time amongst the elites. I should send you back the Kasmir, and learn about what counts and what does not.

The younger man opened his mouth to speak again, but it was the third man - silent up until then - who rejoined:

Six times, seven times, 100 times. There is little difference considering the stores been in business seven months. If this plan doesn’t work we’ll all be moving back home father, so let’s keep the help here while there is still work to do.

The exchange, though brief, torpedoed the entire conversation until an hour later, just as they were finishing up. The Father, Deploying the booming voice once again:

Sahir make sure you change position sitting down there with your legs bunched up like that. Stay to long in the one position and you’ll find your legs asleep at the switch, yes? Ok. Seven times I said eh? My sons let number eight be the last, hey? Ah.

Part VII: Sex Mart

Seven Fuckin’ Times.

Tom Speed had to repeat the number a few times just to make sure. He’d heard of shops getting robbed a few different times over years and months, but seven times in three years? Even for Florida, the figure seemed outsized.

Sloop expanded his vocabulary and ratcheted up his body language behind his fix. He turned Pam’s 1998 Camry into a stage, flashing spastic all about the cabinet like a bird trapped in a phone booth. Sarge only just able to decipher the narrative between gesticulations and derivations of the word “fuck”.

Well fuckin‘…Fuckin’ place was robbed once last year, and that’s when the owner decided he needed out. I guess he was tryna sell it for a while, but after they fuckin’ hit him that one time he took his best offer and bounced for Boca Raton. Then a new guy took over, from either Iraq, Iran…Africa…Some fuckin’ place. Him and his two sons. They got robbed the third week of being in business, and that one was bad. They took cash and computers and whole bunch of shit. Next three times, fuckin’ the very same dudes looking for the same fuckin’ stuff. One, two, three just like that. They caught the fuckers the last time. Dumb fucks coming with regularity, and - duh - the cops basically just waited outside and pinched the guys comin’ out. Next? Fuckin’ two fuckin’ times on the same fuckin’ day: once in the am, once in the pm. Took the drawer early and the safe late. Fuck.

Sloop’s intonation was nothing like he’d planned for the last few sentences and wondering if he should repeat them when the Sarge asked:

How do you know so much about a convenience store 100 miles away from where you live?

Well I was the guy who robbed them the last few times.

OK but how do you know the dude went to jail, and what they took?

By “The last few times” I meant “Most of the times”. It was my boy who got taken. Did two years for a third strike. I got away with my break-away moves.

Speed was amazed and still tear-jerkingly high. He said:

All of the times. Dirty fucker.

Nah, his kid robbed him when…

You said that didn’t count!

Well…

Well? Dude they probably have your face in a pattern on the wall-paper.

I don’t think they got wallpaper. And we’re in the old Lady’s whip. They don’t know this ride.

So you’re planning driving through the place like Jake an Elwood? Damn dude what that ol’ lady tell you? You’re on the hook. I can tell. You’re sweaty. Who was on the picture? She let us take her car!

Sloop told him. Or, at least, he meant to. They got off at their exit though and then they were at the place. 1:30 in the morning, The sign over the store front said “X-Mart” and some clever soul had spray painted a clumsy letters SE on the brick façade before the X. No other trade but Sloop and Sgt Speed milling about. Sloop broke out the drugs Pam’d kicked down for the trouble: a thumbnail sized corner of coke and two giant shots worth of her psychotic dope. Sloop worked the gear and they fixed and snorted in relative silence. They were just finishing up a blunt when Sloop started to put his hood down over his face. Speed grabbed his hand:

Dude. Seven times and you’re putting your cowl on in the car? Holy shit. Maybe I should go alone.

What’s the fucking difference yo lets do this!

Mask on as you enter fuckwad. If a cop drives by….? You don’t think they come passed this place? C’mon fuc…

But Sloop was already on his way in, Hood down, brandishing to beat he band.

***

Sahir was watching the parking lot, so he saw them coming. At first he thought they might just be kids from the neighborhood, out to sneak a buzz in the folk’s car, but when the goofy looking kid behind the wheel tried to don a winter facemask he abandoned that theory. He kicked at his brother Tikrit crouched next to him and out of sight behind the counter. Tikrit responded by raking the fore-stock of the .12 gauge he had resting on the floor between his legs. He said:

How many?

The reply came:

Two but one might be to stoned to participate. They smoked a blunt, and after that the shithead tried to put a mask on.

Bush-league.

Yes.

I’m going to shoot him in half through the Slim Jims. Have no fear.

Yes. Shoot this silly motherfucker in the belly. Here they come.

Part IX: Speeds-eye-view

The weather in Providence was unseasonably warm, and Tom Speed found himself over dressed in his heavy jeans and flannel under hooded sweatshirt. He was in the middle of a story, a funny one by the reaction he was getting, and he was getting to the big finish.

…So we go in. Asshead’s got his mask on running across the lot. Fuckin ski mask in Florida right? Not suspicious in the least. Anyways, the front door of the place was on the opposite wall from the counter, and the raghead owner was eye-fucking the both of us right from the start. We got to the counter, masks on, Sloop’s hand-cannon leveled on the dude. For a minute we just stood there like that. The three of us just sort of staring in circles at each other. After a few seconds of this, Habib opens his mouth, starts to say something, and then BOOM! It’s on. The noise of the gauge in that little space was deafening, so everything that happened after that was performed in absolute silence, like a tv with the mute button on. Lot’s of things happening all at once: The guy fired the shottie from a crouching position behing the counter. I had no idea he was even there, and then there’s an explosion of beef jerky sticks, tic-tacs, and what looked like most of the boy Sloop’s upper and lower intestine. The blast cut him in two, and the top of him went flipping away down one of the aisles, spattering and sliming all the way. Next thing I know, the dude without the shotgun is sliding down the wall with nothing left of his skull but a shriveling face. Sloop was man enough to touch the guy even all blown up like he was. All that stuff came down in the space of seconds, and now I hear the slide rake back again and baseball-dive backwards. I’m thinking the shooter reloads and fires from his previous position, but no. Fucker stood tall, trying to draw a bead. By the time he’s standing, I’m in the back of his store against the cooler looking for a back door. Again, my expectation then was that the guy would bail, or at least call the cops and wait for them in the lot. Wrong. Homeboy starts advancing down the fucking aisle looking for a shot. Dude’s stalking me right? Fucker’s serious. I can see him through the shelves at waist level, shotgun at ready position, wading in to find me. Not good. All the way up the aisle he goes, and the whole way I’m thinking his next step will be the last, he’s gotta bail. But no. he’s coming, and I got nowhere. By this time we’re like seven feet away tops. With buckshot, the dude likes his chances. Eventually he came to the end of the aisle and he needs to make a decision. Ready left or ready right. If he goes left he’s mine. I’ll twist his head around on his shoulders till he’s facing back at me. If he turns right though…Well, that’s probably the end of it. Three steps left. Then two. He’s stopped now, thinking. Drawing quick conclusions from sparse information. I feel he’s going left. Just then I felt sure the motherfucker was going left. But I was wrong yet again. Dude turned right, looked down, and took his bead. I said a quick goodbye to the world and waited for the void. Three years of leading infantry men through desert and jungle. Ten years teaching boys how to kill people. Now I’m greased by some camel-nigger behind a robbery I was never quite comfortable with. I’d have kicked myself but I was about to get shot. Habib smiled at me, and I saw his silent lips curse me to hell.

Part X: Upshot

Tom Speed was fucked. The store owner had found him, cursed him, and was closing. Sgt. Tom Speed, the one who'd fought with the Skinchangers under the legendary XO Lucien Dithers, had training for the situation. Sadly, Tom Speed from the present day had was a decrepit old junky no moves left. Closing his eyes in anticipation of the worst, he could only cower and hope the end wasn‘t too painful. He opened his eyes again a few minutes later, face intact, and was puzzled. At first it looked as if the guy was just fucking with him, just standing there prolonging the inevitable. But time kept slinking by and the guy kept staring. Speed ducked left, ducked right, waved a hand in front of the guys eyes - nothing. Speed heard sirens in the distance and realized he might get off this thing. He was sneaking backwards and facing forward when the habit dropped the party-pump and threw his head back like an invisible hand had grabbed his hair and yanked. Speed stopped inching. Now the guy started to moan. Low at first but ramping up fast.

AaaaauuuugggAAAAAAHHHHH!!!

And that’s when tiny licks of orange and blue flame started sprouting out of the shop owner like a hundred mini afterburners. Speed felt an overwhelming heat then, and started backwards once again. The sirens were everything now, and he could see red flashers reflected on the wall behind the shop owner as the man’s eyes exploded, flame bursting from the sockets and out of his open mouth. Speed saw the man’s face burn off his skull and shrivel into itself while his shirt and pants went up. For a split second Speed saw the guy as a ball of flame wearing dickies and a striped POLO knock off. Then the clothing went up and what had been a man only minutes before had become an extremely hot ball of fire in a small space lousy with flammable things. The aisles and shelving behind the habit went up like they’d been gasoline doused and the whole back wall and drop ceiling were consumed. Speed finally turned to make his escape, but ran into a police cordon composed of what looked like the entire Tampa PD. Even as they slammed him to the ground and kneed his back to apply flex-cuffs, Tom Speed couldn’t shake the feeling he’d been lucky.

Epilogue

The President looked across the table at Marc Spitze and smiled.

Spitze

He said.

Nice work boy, you’ve done it again. Take a message to your man and tell him we’re in. All in. Today, do it. I want the system up and ready for deployment next week. All the PD’s we’d discussed, the four branches, and the Coast Guard.

Spitze said only:

Yes sir. My pleasure sir.

And he left the office at his normal, joggers, pace. After he was gone the chief poured scotch and pulled a drawer from the left of his gigantic Presidential desk. He removed a small black device, pressed a hidden button on it, a and spoke five words into a tiny, built in microphone:

Everyone we discussed. To be clear: Speed, Spitze, Dr. Fillings and the team. Make sure Speed didn’t speak with anybody else.

And for a while after that, the most powerful man in the world put his feet up and sipped $150 a bottle scotch. He found himself slightly less worried then he had been, and sometimes, most times for a man in his position, slightly less worried was the best he could hope for.

　

　

　

.

Eradicate (A dogshitland editorial)

On a molecular level, there’s very little difference between a soldier killing an enemy in a military engagement and one person killing another in cold blooded murder. Save for the context, the two acts are identical. It follows then, that the act of “declaring” war on a country, or ideology, or group, is an announcement:

Capitulate now, or we will come over there and start murdering people. In fact, we’re going to murder and murder and murder until you see things as we would have you see them, or at least act on things the way we would have you act.

This is the way things have been here for a very long time, and some would say that’s as it should be. I, however, am not one of those people. Nor am I an optimist, or an idealist, pacifist or any sort of “ist“. Just the opposite in fact, I always expect the worst. I never see any good in anybody or anything, and I enjoy physical confrontations. Even so, a world where the overriding social contract that simply doesn’t allow for war, or any situation where a human or humans effort to put a violent end to the life of another human or humans, doesn’t seem so far out of the realm of possibility.

For one thing, war hurts. Bullets hurt. Modern industrialized engagements are a special kind of horror, one that never leaves anything but misery and confusion in its wake. It’s not just the casualties that suffer. Recent studies have found that proliferation of post-traumatic distress amongst combat troops is almost 100 percent. Everybody who takes the field carries the baggage, whether or not they make it back home alive or in a box.

Also, modern warfare of the sort being waged by the U.S. on at least two fronts comes with no attendant long-term financial triumph to counterbalance the blood cost. People talk about the boom times that followed WWI and II, but evolution of societal structures and the modern military/industrial complex have removed the possibility of wartime manufacturing initiatives that would jump start such a boom. Rumsfeld put it best when he said, “You go to war with the army that you have.” Standard military practices don’t allow for a market of competitors bidding for rich, long-term military production contracts. Instead, the government uses the vast surplus of goods left over from other wars, oftentimes without even the most basic upgrades, and the military saves it’s money to build hi-tech, big dollar machinery like drone fighter jets and nuclear submarines. The money starts and ends in the pockets of the same institutions: the military, and a handful of companies that the military works with exclusively.

Lastly, humans are smart. It takes time, but we usually end up eradicating, or at least trying to eradicate, things that might spell our collective doom. We’ve poured so much energy and care and thought into doing away with hunger, human rights violations, belly-fat, and whatever else. Is it really so out of bounds to think we might someday turn our attention to the ever-destructive disease state of war itself?

Awareness is the beginning. American citizenry doesn’t know anything about the wars
being prosecuted on its behalf right now, and that’s by design. The military is acting in Afghanistan without an objective. Bin Laden is dead, and a case could be made for the idea that even his extermination is of no great consequence in our country’s specific conflict. I know the war is there, because I make an effort to find out about it every day. Why it’s there is another question entirely. As it’s being related in the press, both here and abroad, we’ve got our people marching around the country shooting at whoever shoots at them. Can this country really afford to be engaged in what is so plainly a zero-sum game?

Read CNN every day. Find out about why your country is killing people, and where. That there are forces in the world that would purposely muddy that picture is reason enough to try and clarify it. Murder is an ugly, senseless thing no matter whose command makes it so, or what ideology one uses to justify its commission.

Hell's Kitchen

~So where were the spiders?

-D.B.


When it was all said and done, the only people still left on the street were dead. The spiders had begun stacking them in the middle of what had been 42nd Street and Ninth Avenue, an area known not so long ago as Hell’s Kitchen. They’d been at it all night and they were still going strong, he could see, as the sun rose up from behind the buildings across town. It came glowing over the skyline as the monstrosities stacked their hideous column of wasted flesh and blood and bone. Tom Speed found himself almost astounded as he was revolted. He could see the bodies below sagging and spreading, losing form under so much dead weight. He watched in disbelief as the bugs flipped body after body onto the corpse-mountain. Speed had a commanding view of the street. He didn’t see anything human for the whole of it. The spiders held sway here now. The city - or at least this part of it - had been taken. It was hard to gaze up at the creatures - so busy and efficient at their grizzly chore - and not guess the same was true for the rest of Manhattan.

Speed looked up, rapt, as the immense beings ran up and down the street passing corpses through their ranks like water buckets to quench some irresistible, fast moving wildfire. He didn’t remember seeing any of the things last night. Then again, there wasn’t much he did remember of last night. The whole last forty-eight hours, in fact, had been a whirlwind of events, people, and sounds. He’d been drifting in and out of fever dreams and hallucinations and, so far, lucking up. He knew it couldn’t last.

***

You can stay with us you know. Down here. There’s lot’s of us. Daddy says if we keep moving, he can figure out a way to get the city back, or at least to get us out of the city. He says he knows about the spiders. What they are and what they do…If I was you, I’d stay here.

The girl had spoken to him in even, measured tones, even as the sounds of death and gunfire and screaming rained down on them, echoing back a thousand-fold in the cement labyrinth. As she spoke, she redressed his wound, packing it with gauze and disinfectant. She was gentle and his arm felt better. For a while, sitting there watching the mound of bodies grow in the gathering dusk, he thought there might be something to the girl’s idea. Maybe he should hang around. Watching the death creep up and down 9th Avenue, flinging bodies onto the miserable rotting pile, the choice seemed easy.

But that had been at least a few days ago. The bodies were still stacking and the boiling air was thick with rot. The girl hadn’t reappeared to dress his wounds and he wondered if he’d dreamed her. He wondered if he’d been dreaming still. He didn’t remember anything after seeing his friends throat slashed. The blood spray, her eyes. They’d rolled white, and he heard her drown. He’d seen it over and over again in his mind but somehow he couldn’t push his memory past it. He remembered seeing fire out beyond the crowd. He remembered the children closing the distance. They’d meant to kill him…And then…What?

***

He’d woken up here. In the dark, in a sewer pipe? A drain? Someplace directly underneath where he’d been. He recognized the sounds and run toward the closest beam of light. He watched twenty spiders kill hundreds of people.

Spiders. He thought it was appropriate, and the girl…

The spiders can’t get us down here. They can’t smell anything.

The girl he’d dreamed had told him that while putting an imaginary dressing on his imaginary wound. Somehow, the wound was still there. It itched now, where before it had burned, but it was still there. The imaginary dressing? Well it had been hours. It was dirty. He thought he remembered taking it off. At some point he began to doze, and would spend the rest of the night ping-ponging back and forth between weird nocturnal reveries, and the horrible stench and sound of his amazing new reality.


He studied them up close through the drain but they were always moving fast. They were spiders plain as day, but something else as well. They had metal plating jacketing he length of each leg, so there was that. They were giant spiders and therefore not real, actual animals, so there would have to be some metal somewhere. They wore helmets, which wasn’t a spider trait that he recognized. On the other hand, he was certainly no expert. For all he knew, all spiders were all metal. Also, they were wearing pajamas. Black ones. He’d seen a few breathe fire as well. It sprayed from under their Volkswagen-sized midsections in great tumults of orange and red. He watched them silently from the drainpipe as they scurried around the area, picking up three or four bodies at a time and then bolting back down the street towards the mountain of corpses.

***

A few hours later they torched the pile. The gathering and stacking of flesh had long since stopped, and the creatures had gathered around the base face-in like a security cordon in reverse. The blazing NYC sodium lamps caught some type of spray in florescent relief, and from the safety of the drain pipe he was hidden in Tom wondered if they were spraying some form of disinfectant, or sanitizing agent. Then the sharp stench of raw gasoline hit him through the drain-grate and he knew what was about to happen. Just as the loop closed in his mind, the pile of corpses - at least forty feet high by now, went up like a roman candle, snapping and popping in the saturated city air. He could hear the flames feasting on first the gas, feel the omnipotent heat of the thing. Then - after only a few minutes - the dead flesh began to roast and slough off bone. It took five minutes and the entire pile was a flaming, melting mass, dealing out black smoke touched with gasoline, spent oxygen, various roasting plastics, and a deeper, weightier scent, almost appetizing to Tom Speed, whose last square meal had been over a week ago. The street was soon filled with the acrid, malignant smoke, and the pile became a hot glow somewhere in the caustic air. When it started to fall into the grate Speed pulled back and backed a few paces down the giant pipe. He sat, then lay, then fell asleep, dreaming vigorously of horrible things he hoped he’d never remember.

dogshitart

Supernova Remnant II, 2010

Spray Paint and Dirt on Canvas

11" x 14"

Play Ball!

The Doctor finished writing at dawn. Technically he had until next afternoon to get the thing sent, but he wanted - for once - to be early. He also wanted to show them he could still be effective, and this thing - he knew - would accomplish that in spades. They were talking, after all, about history. This was something for the ages to ponder, and his name would be it’s standard for all history. He read through one last time, adjusted the time stamp for the program, and hit send. Tomorrow, all they’d have too do was interface with the jet’s onboard circuit, and then blast the program into the air like frequency modulation from just shy of Mach 1...

***

There was never supposed to be a flyover.

Not that opening day in Pelham, Wisconsin, wasn’t a great, big deal. It was. Chuck Nettles, PR manager and part-owner of the Pelham Billy Goats, knew that better than anybody. Which was he’d set up a midway outside with rides, and vendors, a dunking booth, games of chance, and a Ferris wheel. Beers were special inside and outside the park: $1.00 for a small, $2.00 for the big dog 20oz. There was a giant inflatable waterslide. Every single person in Pelham - all 10,784 of them - made sure they came out on opening day. It was tradition, and towns as small as Pelham were built on tradition.

This year the opponent was a foreign one. The Yunkai Thunder-Donkeys had come all the way from Osaka, Japan to showcase against the Goats. They brought with them a gentleman by the name of Danuke Sunaki, a right-handed starting Pitcher. Mr. Sunaki - his baseball people told him - threw over 100 miles an hour, and was due to join the Red Sox big club as soon as his lawyers learned enough English to say “More money”. Chuck knew it was a coup: The team, the pitcher, opening night…All of it made his heart sing a song of money and commerce. He’d been slugging his 6’6” frame across the diamond, under the grandstands, and up stadium seating, patrolling around since three hours before the gates opened. He’d busted balls, told staffers where to go, and what to do. He’d given a rousing locker room speech to the Billy Goats, and made sure uniforms were spotless and well-fitted. Now, with game time only minutes away, he’d finally begun to calm down and loosen up. The night, barely even begun, was a success.

Then the flyover.

For a few seconds, Chuck had actually thought they’d been bombed. Nuked, by mistake, from friendly fire, or even - Nettles thought with a shudder - unfriendly (Chuck had always thought that ball parks in general, and his team’s park in particular, presented about as soft a target as any team of lazy ragheads could hope for). As the Goat’s fans began to get up and look about after the tremendous BOOM, though, Chuck Nettles found himself at a loss.

When a fighter jet strafes a target, that target doesn’t get the benefit of a warning, because by the time the explosive roar of the turbines finally becomes audible, the target has already been reduced to particulate. It was a home truth that Chuck Nettles knew well, him having served two tours in Bagdad and Afghanistan’s Korengal Valley, where jet fighter attacks were a daily occurance. Chuck also knew that a traditional flyover, to commemorate a death, or a battle, or opening day for a AA ball club in a small market, was usually executed with three airplanes in a slow, v-formation. A single jet, usually a bit faster and lower that the vanguard sometimes brought up the rear to commemorate a “missing man”, usually a pilot recently deceased. Nettles had seen nothing of the kind in the skies above his baseball park.

No sound on Earth can equal the assaultive, gut-seizing decible-blast of jet-fired US Steel booking at the speed of sound. Chuck’d seen the thing flash by in the upper corner of his vision, ripping the sky overhead and blasting a gust of hot air down on the park. He had a spilt-second to wonder just what the shit was happening, when the sound body-checked the full-to-capacity stadium. It was a sound like twenty million shotguns going off at exactly the same time. The plexi covering the new mini-jumbotron in far center/left field disintegrated into thousands of sharp plastic shards, and poured down like razor-blade sleet on the terrified fans in the batter's eye. The crowd had done two things at just the same time. First they screamed - as one and loudly - in surprise and shock. Then they swooned, taking cover as a group instinct. Chuck saw some grab kids, trying to stuff them between plastic folding chairs and bleacher concrete. Chuck had hit the deck too, but he bounced up quick when he realized the show was over.

Ten minutes later people were still talking about the strafing, but most of them were also glancing at their watches waiting for the game to start. Chuck was making his way toward the owner’s box when he saw the young couple.

He would have kept motoring right out onto the mezzanine, but at the last second, he let his attention wander over to the closet just in back of the beer concession under the grandstand. The door was opened all the way, and Chuck could see the couple inside. He saw nakedness, two bodies mashed together, coupling aggressively. They were covered in something. Was that…Mud?

They’re fucking!

The shouting was from behind him, and as he turned to face it, somebody hit him dead in the face with a cro-bar. That’s what it felt like anyway, ripping a gash in his right cheek and opening him to the teeth and bone. He fell, screaming in pain and confusion, to the cement. There was more shouting then, but Chuck felt his mind slipping out of it. The shouts and screams dwindling, the blows to his curled body, head, and legs softening until he was alone in a blackness that was all his.

Chuck didn’t see the mob that attacked him, and it’s questionable how many of them saw him. By that time, by that time they’d ceased to exist as individuals, opting, instead, for a tiny part in a furious and violent mob-mind. A few of them kicked and shoved and punched Nettles as they made for the better action up on the field.

***

The violence actually began on the field in the same place where violence usually begins at a baseball game: in the 60‘6“ between home plate and the pitcher’s mound. The phenom had walked a guy on balls, thrown behind his head. The next batsman he stayed away from, putting the guy away in three tosses. The batter - Tarkis was his name - was pissed off even without the drilling. He was booking his way out to the bump even as the ump was calling the third strike. The phenom Sunaki stood stock still, watching a snarling Taarkis tear-assing towards him with his bat cocked. He didn’t so much as raise a hand in defense, and so he took the first blow full in the face. The crushing swat took the gifted hurler out of his Nikes, and for a minute he seemed to hover, suspended horizontal over the bump as if by some arcane Japanese magic. Later they would tell his wife he was dead before he hit the ground. They wouldn’t mention that Taarkis, even seeing that he’d caved the guy’s face into his grey matter, wasn’t satisfied to stop. They didn’t mention the hundreds of overhand hammer-strikes that he proceeded to deliver to the motionless phenom lying in the blood-mud, or the way the phenom’s whole body was reduced to a sort of crimson pudding shot through with uniform linen.

***

Chuck managed to rise, and will himself toward what he thought would be the safety of the mezzanine seats. There was a spilt second, just as he was getting to the middle of the ramp, where chuck allowed the blue sky, easy winds, and relative quiet to convince him that what he thought was happening was, in fact, not happening. But Nettles was cresting the top of the ramp at exactly the time when the batsman Taarkis was finishing up with the phenom. The crowd had maintained a respectful silence while Taarkis did his thing, as if they were appreciating the work of a great genius and didn’t want to be distracted. Then the action in the stands began to ramp up. The twenty or thirty people in the field box to his left began to wail like animals and rip at their clothing. Chuck saw a woman leap at the guy next to her and bite a sizable chunk of the man’s face clean off in a gout of purple fluid. He saw a guy rip a swaddled baby from a mother’s arms and begin to whip the helpless things body around like a mace at anyone and everyone. In the upper deck, gang warfare had broken out. He saw a massive pile of flesh where the battle had been joined. A guy near the top of the pile was kicking and stomping the heads and bodies of those trapped below him. As he flailed away a young girl - no more than 12 to chuck’s mind - ran up the opposite side of the pile and body checked the man off the pile and into the pit formed at the ramp. Chuck saw his head break like a watermelon taking buckshot. The body danced and jumped it’s way to the bottom of the ramp, and a mob of angry fans fell upon it, fighting for the tastiest parts. Everywhere he looked now, Chuck saw it: people using their own mouths as weapons like animals. He began running up the stairs for the box now, taking two and three at a time, looking up at the open door to the box only yards away.

But then somebody grabbed his feet and he was down. The screams and violence drowned him, and once again the kicks and the punches mashing his body to a pulp. He heard somebody shouting “burn him burn him burn burn burn…”


Then he saw the flame reflect on the cement under him and he knew he was done. He tuned to face a giggling stranger clutching an aerosol can in one hand and a lighter in another. The man was bringing the weird diy weapon to bear when his head popped like a balloon. Chuck jumped back, recoiling from the spray but he heard more shots. Around him more bodies were falling. He saw a woman’s face disappear in a red foam. Pop! Pop! Pop! Sixteen times over and the screams of pain and hideous confusion were all around him. He saw eyes and heads and limbs exploding. He saw chests and faces destroyed. Finally he saw daylight and broke again for the box. He made it, and locking the wood and steel door behind him, fell to the floor and began to think.

***

The players had joined over the puddle that had been the Daisuke Sunaki, and by this time the victors were feasting on the dead and wrestling with each other for their share of the kill. A woman suddenly broke from the stands and rushed the opposing teams manager as he sucked, unawares, and bit at piece of arm. She slashed a hand down across his face and then another. The second burst the coach’s eyeball in the socket and icor was running from the wet wound. As he screamed the woman lept at him, grabbing his head between her knees and riding him down like a rodeo-wrangler breaking a calf. They hit the muddy field with a moist "THURP!!" and the woman used her claws again, this time opening the managers throat and chewing at the spongy gash. Then the mob of players noticed her and fell upon her from all sides. They ripped the woman limb from limb, tug-of-warring her arms in a violent spasm until she split in two, flooding musculature and fluid and bone down on the first base line. The fans stopped warring - if only for a few seconds - to take it all in.

***

Then they started up again full-steam. The blood was running in streams now, down every stairway in the place. It pooled and hardened in reflective puddles around the dugouts. Before long the entire backstop area was a crimson/black reflecting pool, hot and pungent. Bodies were raining from the upper tiers. All around him, Chuck saw babies and toddlers falling like bales of hey in a silo. They burst like water balloons all over the field and the lower levels. Each had drawn it’s own circle of predators to suck at the meat and drink the blood. The first wave was over now, and the victors were enjoying heir haul, gorging themselves on the fresh blood and tissue until they were sated enough to go try for more. Chuck heard them howling and snorting in the acrid humidity, sounding like something less than human.

Directly across the park, on the same level as the owners box, Nettles saw what appeared to be a waterfall, dirty brown and thick, gushing down on the first base field boxes. The occupants of the boxes were too busy trying to physically destroy one another to register the thing, but it looked to Chuck like the flow from above was getting wider, and more intense by the second. Only then, soaking the mountain of writhing flesh like a torrential downpour, did the liquid finally declared itself. Just as the reality was dawning on the combatants below, he saw a column of fire climb down the waterfall and the whole pile went up with a big SHOOOOOP Noise. Chuck heard screams from there, unholy and fading, grabbing at last chances in the raging combat. The sour, acrid stench of the gasoline mixing with roasted human flesh, fill the ball park with viscous, dark smoke and bringing sudden nightfall on the field and lower grandstands. The flames, force-fed by the open air swirling and gasoline vapor, enveloped the entire first base seating within a few minutes. With the heat suddenly so close, the gang-battle was forced to pause for self-preservation. Nettles watched as hundreds tested the 45 foot fall to the burning hell below.

For a time, chuck could only watch from the relative safety of his box, the cycle repeating and repeating until there were only a few predators left going carcass to carcass in search of meat. Chuck saw them stumbling about out there, looking as scared as he himself was. What in sweet fuck all had happened here today? His wounds were worse than he’d thought. His shoulder had a coke-can sized chunk taken out and was beginning to stiffen and throb. His cranium had been fractured in three separate places. He was seeing triple and thinking double. It was coming, he knew. Before to long he’d be in shock, and without a rescue soon after that…

In the boxes just below his box, a teenage couple chaperoning a camp trip to the ballpark had just finished butchering every last one of their charges with pro-mo bats. They’d broken one of the fuckers in half to use stiletto style. The girl brandished it to the corpse of a kid she’d been teaching about mockingbirds scant days before. An overpowering stench filled the air on that part of the stadium as she opened the boy, and three others lying next to him with the makeshift blade. When she was done, her and her boyfriend began to reach into the corpses and drape the offal and musculature over their bodies. The girl began to masturbate furiously, crying out in screams and rants as she pumped away at herself as her partner began twitch and convulse like vhe was conducting high voltage. He to vomit and shit all over himself and the pile of guts. Some of the kids were still alive, eyes open, bearing witness to their own calculated destruction.

He risked one more peak through the window, noting just prior that the park was now in almost complete silence, punctuated by the occasional scream or moan. Just then a voice, a woman or a child, took up the loudest death-wail of the afternoon. An awful cry/scream/moan that echoed across the entire, blighted stadium. On and on she went, gaining volume and pitch as the minutes ticked. Finally, a solitary report: Pop!, and it’s echo. Then nothing. Chuck looked around and popped the door. He made it three steps down before noticing the giant black spiders flooding into the ballpark from underneath the grandstands. Old Chuck Nettles saw that and decided he’d had enough, turned, one more time, for the safety of the owners box.

Play Ball!

The Doctor finished writing at dawn. Technically he had until next afternoon to get the thing sent, but he wanted - for once - to be early. He also wanted to show them he could still be effective, and this thing - he knew - would accomplish that in spades. They were talking, after all, about history. This was something for the ages to ponder, and his name would be it’s standard for all time. He read through one last time, adjusted the time stamp for the program, and hit send. Tomorrow, all they’d have too do was interface with the jet’s onboard circuit, and then blast the program into the air like frequency modulation from just shy of Mach 1...

***

There was never supposed to be a flyover.

Not that opening day in Pelham, Wisconsin, wasn’t a great, big deal. It was. Chuck Nettles, PR manager and part-owner of the Pelham Billy Goats, knew that better than anybody. Which was he’d set up a midway outside with rides, and vendors, a dunking booth, games of chance, and a Ferris wheel. Beers were special inside and outside the park: $1.00 for a small, $2.00 for the big dog 20oz. There was a giant inflatable waterslide. Every single person in Pelham - all 10,784 of them - made sure they came out on opening day. It was tradition, and towns as small as Pelham were built on tradition.

This year the opponent was a foreign one. The Yunkai Thunder-Donkeys had come all the way from Osaka, Japan to showcase against the Goats. They brought with him, a gentleman by the name of Danuke Sunaki, who threw over 100 miles an hour, and was due to join the Red Sox big club as soon as his lawyers learned enough English to say “More money”. Chuck knew it was a coup: The team, the pitcher, opening night…All of it made his heart sing a song of money and commerce. He’d been slugging his 6’6” frame across the diamond, under the grandstands, and up stadium seating, patrolling around since three hours before the gates opened. He’d busted balls, told staffers where to go, and what to do. He’d given a rousing locker room speech to the Billy Goats, and made sure uniforms were spotless and well-fitted. Now, with game time only minutes away, he’d finally begun to calm down and loosen up. The night, barely even begun, was a success.

Then the flyover.

For a few seconds, Chuck had actually thought they’d been bombed. Nuked, by mistake, from friendly fire, or maybe even unfriendly (Chuck had always thought that baseball in general, and his team’s park in particular, presented about a as soft a target as any team of lazy ragheads could hope for). But as the Goat’s fans began to get up and look about after the tremendous BOOM, Chuck Nettles was - for the moment - at a loss. When a fighter jet strafes a target, that target doesn’t get the benefit of a warning, because by the time the explosive roar of the turbines finally becomes audible, the target has already been reduced to particulate. It was a home truth that Chuck Nettles knew well, him having served two tours in Bagdad and Afghanistan’s Korengal Valley. Chuck also knew that a traditional flyover, to commemorate a death, or a battle, or opening day for a AA ball club in a small market, was usually executed with three airplanes in a slow, v-formation. A single jet, usually a bit faster and lower that the vanguard sometimes brought up the rear to commemorate a “missing man”, usually a pilot recently deceased.

But Chuck’s fighter (he knew it was fighter jet, and American. Nothing sounds quite the same as US Steel moving out around mach 1) was way too fast, and way too low. That, coupled with the fact he didn’t order up a fucking flyover had him ducked. He’d seen the thing flash by out of the upper corner of his vision, ripping the sky overhead and blasting a gust of hot air down on the park. He had a spilt-second to wonder just what the shit was happening, when the sound body-checked the full-to-capacity stadium. It was a sound like twenty million shotguns going off at exactly the same time. The plexi covering the new mini-jumbotron in far center/left field disintegrated into thousands of sharp plastic shards that rained down onto the field. The crowd had done two things at just the same time. First they screamed - as one and loudly - in surprise and shock. Then they swooned, taking cover as a group instinct. Chuck saw some grab kids, trying to stuff them between plastic folding chairs and bleacher concrete. Chuck had hit the deck too, but he bounced up quick when he realized the show was over.

Ten minutes later people were still talking about the strafing, but most of them were also glancing at their watches waiting for the game to start. Chuck was making his way toward the owner’s box when he saw the young couple.

He would have kept motoring right out onto the mezzanine, but at the last second, he let his attention wander over to the closet just in back of the beer concession under the grandstand. The door was opened all the way, and Chuck could see the couple inside. He saw nakedness, two bodies mashed together, coupling aggressively. They were covered in something. Was that…Mud?

They’re fucking!

The shouting was from behind him, and as he turned to face it, somebody hit him dead in the face with a cro-bar. That’s what it felt like anyway, ripping a gash in his right cheek and opening him to the teeth and bone. He fell, screaming in pain and confusion, to the cement. There was more shouting then, but Chuck felt his mind slipping out of it. The shouts and screams dwindling, the blows to his curled body, head, and legs softening until he was alone in a blackness that was all his.

Chuck didn’t see the mob that attacked him, and it’s questionable how many of them saw him. By that time, by that time they’d ceased to exist as individuals, opting, instead, for a tiny part in a furious and violent mob-mind. A few of them kicked and shoved and punched Nettles as they made for the better action up on the field.

***

The violence actually began on the field in the same place where violence usually begins at a baseball game: in the 60‘6“ between home plate and the pitcher’s mound. The phenom had walked a guy on balls, thrown behind his head. The next batsman he stayed away from, putting the guy away in three tosses. The batter - Tarkis was his name - was pissed off even without the drilling. He was booking his way out to the bump even as the ump was calling the third strike. The phenom Sunaki stood stock still, watching a snarling Taarkis tear-assing towards him with his bat cocked. He didn’t so much as raise a hand in defense, and so he took the first blow full in the face. The crushing swat took the gifted hurler out of his Nikes, and for a minute he seemed to hover, suspended horizontal over the bump as if by some arcane Japanese magic. Later they would tell his wife he was dead before he hit the ground. They wouldn’t mention that Taarkis, even seeing that he’d caved the guy’s face into his grey matter, wasn’t satisfied to stop. They didn’t mention the hundreds of overhand hammer-strikes that he proceeded to deliver to the motionless phenom lying in the blood-mud, or the way the phenom’s whole body was reduced to a sort of crimson pudding shot through with uniform linen.

***

Chuck managed to rise, and will himself toward what he thought would be the safety of the mezzanine seats. There was a spilt second, just as he was getting to the middle of the ramp, where chuck allowed the blue sky, easy winds, and relative quiet to convince him that what he thought was happening was, in fact, not happening. But Nettles was cresting the top of the ramp at exactly the time when the batsman Taarkis was finishing up with the phenom. The crowd had maintained a respectful silence while Taarkis did his thing, as if they were appreciating the work of a great genius and didn’t want to be distracted. Then the action in the stands began to ramp up. The twenty or thirty people in the field box to his left began to wail like animals and rip at their clothing. Chuck saw a woman leap at the guy next to her and bite a sizable chunk of the man’s face clean off in a gout of purple fluid. He saw a guy rip a swaddled baby from a mother’s arms and begin to whip the helpless things body around like a mace at anyone and everyone. In the upper deck, gang warfare had broken out. He saw a massive pile of flesh where the battle had been joined. A guy near the top of the pile was kicking and stomping the heads and bodies of those trapped below him. As he flailed away a young girl - no more than 12 to chuck’s mind - ran up the opposite side of the pile and body checked the man off the pile and into the pit formed at the ramp. Chuck saw his head break like a watermelon taking buckshot. The body danced and jumped it’s way to the bottom of the ramp, and a mob of angry fans fell upon it, fighting for the tastiest parts. Everywhere he looked now, Chuck saw it: people using their own mouths as weapons like animals. He began running up the stairs for the box now, taking two and three at a time, looking up at the open door to the box only yards away.

But then somebody grabbed his feet and he was down. The screams and violence drowned him, and once again the kicks and the punches mashing his body to a pulp. He heard somebody shouting “burn him burn him burn burn burn…”


Then he saw the flame reflect on the cement under him and he knew he was done. He tuned to face a giggling stranger clutching an aerosol can in one hand and a lighter in another. The man was bringing the weird diy weapon to bear when his head popped like a balloon. Chuck jumped back, recoiling from the spray but he heard more shots. Around him more bodies were falling. He saw a woman’s face disappear in a red foam. Pop! Pop! Pop! Sixteen times over and the screams of pain and hideous confusion were all around him. He saw eyes and heads and limbs exploding. He saw chests and faces destroyed. Finally he saw daylight and broke again for the box. He made it, and locking the wood and steel door behind him, fell to the floor and began to think.

***

The players had joined over the puddle that had been the Daisuke Sunaki, and by this time the victors were feasting on the dead and wrestling with each other for their share of the kill. A woman suddenly broke from the stands and rushed the opposing teams manager as he sucked, unawares, and bit at piece of arm. She slashed a hand down across his face and then another. The second burst the coach’s eyeball in the socket and icor was running from the wet wound. As he screamed the woman lept at him, grabbing his head between her knees and riding him down like a rodeo-wrangler breaking a calf. They hit the muddy field with a wet noise and the woman used her claws again, this time to open the managers throat, and chew at the gushing hole. Then the mob of players noticed her and fell upon her from all sides. They ripped the woman limb from limb, tug-of-warring her arms in a violent spasm until she split in two, flooding musculature and fluid and bone down on the first base line. The fans stopped warring - if only for a few seconds - to take it all in.

***

Then they started up again full-steam. The blood was running in streams now, down every stairway in the place. It pooled and hardened in reflective puddles around the dugouts. Before long the entire backstop area was a crimson/black reflecting pool, hot and pungent. Bodies were raining from the upper tiers. All around him, Chuck saw babies and toddlers falling like bales of hey in a silo. They burst like water balloons all over the field and the lower levels. Each had drawn it’s own circle of predators to suck at the meat and drink the blood. The first wave was over now, and the victors were enjoying heir haul, gorging themselves on the fresh blood and tissue until they were sated enough to go try for more. Chuck heard them howling and snorting in the acrid humidity, sounding like something less than human.

Directly across the park, on the same level as the owners box, Nettles saw what appeared to be a waterfall, dirty brown and thick, gushing down on the first base field boxes. The occupants of the boxes were too busy trying to physically destroy one another to register the thing, but it looked to Chuck like the flow from above was getting wider, and more intense by the second. Only then, soaking the mountain of writhing flesh like a torrential downpour, did the liquid finally declared itself. Just as the reality was dawning on the combatants below, he saw a column of fire climb down the waterfall and the whole pile went up with a big SHOOOOOP Noise. Chuck heard screams from there, unholy and fading, grabbing at last chances in the raging combat. The sour, acrid stench of the gasoline mixing with roasted human flesh, fill the ball park with viscous, dark smoke and bringing sudden nightfall on the field and lower grandstands. The flames, force-fed by the open air swirling and gasoline vapor, enveloped the entire first base seating within a few minutes. With the heat suddenly so close, the gang-battle was forced to pause for self-preservation. Nettles watched as hundreds tested the 45 foot fall to the burning hell below.

For a time, chuck could only watch from the relative safety of his box, the cycle repeating and repeating until there were only a few predators left going carcass to carcass in search of meat. Chuck saw them stumbling about out there, looking as scared as he himself was. What in sweet fuck all had happened here today? His wounds were worse than he’d thought. His shoulder had a coke-can sized chunk taken out and was beginning to stiffen and throb. His cranium had been fractured in three separate places. He was seeing triple and thinking double. It was coming, he knew. Before to long he’d be in shock, and without a rescue soon after that…

In the boxes just below his box, a teenage couple chaperoning a camp trip to the ballpark had just finished butchering every last one of their charges with pro-mo bats. They’d broken one of the fuckers in half to use stiletto style. The girl brandished it to the corpse of a kid she’d been teaching about mockingbirds scant days before. An overpowering stench filled the air on that part of the stadium as she opened the boy, and three others lying next to him with the makeshift blade. When she was done, her and her boyfriend began to reach into the corpses and drape the offal and musculature over their bodies. The girl began to masturbate furiously, crying out in screams and rants as she pumped away at herself as her partner began twitch and convulse like vhe was conducting high voltage. He to vomit and shit all over himself and the pile of guts. Some of the kids were still alive, eyes open, bearing witness to their own calculated destruction.

He risked one more peak through the window, noting just prior that the park was now in almost complete silence, punctuated by the occasional scream or moan. Just then a voice, a woman or a child, took up the loudest death-wail of the afternoon. An awful cry/scream/moan that echoed across the entire, blighted stadium. On and on she went, gaining volume and pitch as the minutes ticked. Finally, a solitary report: Pop!, and it’s echo. Then nothing. Chuck looked around and popped the door. He made it three steps down before noticing the giant black spiders flooding into the ballpark from underneath the grandstands. Old Chuck Nettles saw that and decided he’d had enough, turned, one more time, for the safety of the owners box.