SKIMMING THE GUMBO NUCLEAR
By M.F. Korn
Chapters 26 thru 30

"Facilis Descensus Averni"

Chapter Twenty Six

There were too many yuppie road killers out there who were frightful and had no hesitancy to haul ass before they would succumb in the mausoleum which Baton Rouge had become. The graveyards might as well have toppling tombstones and the incurred wrath of ruinous corpses. However embalmed with reddish fluids, pushing their way out of resting places and start walking around like ghoulish biblical prophecy. Bobby MaGee would no doubt believe this was the last book of the New Testament coming true.

People were so dumb around these part that they wouldn't give a hang if all their insides were maggot-infested. Folks would go to work the next day having crapshooted on the experts of medicine Was there a comet passing its tail through the earth's orbital path, Ricky wondered?

It was like some horrendous splatter thriller. No matter how many showers one took, there was the incubation of locust eggs, like the spawning scene of "The Brood." Hell yes, Harrison was raising hell in the car. Like he was one toke of secondary contact buzz from insanity a la Mardi Gras on Bourbon Street disinfected streets. One shot of Thunderbird away from alcoholic poisoning and the loss of all reasoning. If there were to be a horror film enacted out, if there was no cure, then he would get as much fortified wine and Jim Beam in his aching psyche before he was to be a corpse lying in the street. Crud on this age of man and his vile spittle of glycol and enzymes and polymers. There was his own theory. The whole town was dying like Cancer Alley because Dow had a good year, and so did Exxon. A holocaust, but they would just build a fence round it, bury us in mass graves like Mi Lai, and go on about their business.

"Are we or ain't we gonna die?" Rayhound was insisting in his frenzy. He was beseeching the think tank. Joe Taylor was more silent than usual. The basketball player gone depressed, like some mental patient.

"I'm worried for my little girls," he said, quite solemnly.

Mike Green burped some bubbles of seltzer of fruity variety towards the front seat. He wouldn't go down without a fight.

"Look, screwa da plaque. We jus do what they tell us ta do. If they tell us to go ta Mississippi, we go! We ain't dead yet!"

Rayhound insisted they were gonna die. "It's already in us, like a fuggin horror movie!" He went on, but he had that right.

"I don't know, man." Harrison said, pining for his dear mother. "I don't care if I die or not."

"Come on man, don't bring us down even more," Mike Green said. Harrison wasn't sure if he was gonna cry or not, in front of them. They were screwed up more than a bum begging in the French Quarter. And here there was a no win situation.

"They are saying dat there's gonna be a cure and everybody is gonna get that crud outa them. Hell, they said there's a good chance there ain't nothing in us----YET."

He began whispering in cadences of word jazz, the poem, "To an Athlete Dying Young."

 The time you won your town the race

It withers quicker than the rose.

 He said it a bit louder and Joe Taylor, Mike Green, Rayhound all screwed up with wog hemp, were silent. The radio was turned down as they listened further in the moment.

 And round that early laureled head

The garland briefer than a girls.

 Silence remained with them for the rest of the ride.

"Man, that was beautiful, dude." The tincture of toxins would embalm them all; sooner or later they would surely bloat, but Harrison, before he climbed out of the car, said:

"Joseph, do you remember playing that basketball game, the one in Baton Rouge where everybody playing had once been on national television, in NIT and NCAA basketball tournaments?"

"Yeah, Li'l padnah . . .what about it?"

"You know that was the best basketball game in the whole state going on, the biggest sporting event around, and no one knew about it."

He went on.

"The colleges used you guys. You shined, sparkled, won championships, and then you wind up in the city park gym so tiny playing herculean games (Rayhound said herculean, what's that?). And none of these people give a crud anymore if you are flipping burgers at McDonald's or starving on welfare? Doesn't that piss you off?"

Harrison saw that Joe was looking in the mirror as the Riviera stopped to let them out. Mike Green had fallen asleep from his silent seizure of fright. the pot and liquids wondrous had stopped the sledgehammer of death.

"I tell you what, li'l padnah, . . . No matter if I AM on welfare, or working at Joe Delpit's frying chicken. Or robbing banks, they can't ever take those days away from me! I have been to basketball camps with guys playing in the NBA! I met Al McGuire, all the SEC coaches, and famous people and was loved by my whole campus! You don't ever forget that! I was their hero. (He paused.) So it really doesn't matter. Like that poem you just quoted. They cheered me through the market place. But you only stay gold for a while. Nothing gold can stay! That's what I think about it."

He shook Harrison's thin hand tightly.

"I'll see you at work tomorrow. We ain't leaving town yet. This is my hometown!"

Rayhound murmured some slurs of love for Harrison. "Man, you alright. I love dat poetry when I get screwed up."

"See you later Rayhound, Joe."

Harrison got out of the car. He felt resistance to the death wings fluttering above the illuminated pageantry of a town in the grips of all those horsemen of the new Apocalypse.

Chapter Twenty Seven

In the abysmal mist of Devil's Swamp, in the forest of confusion, melting eyes appeared from the edge of the drains to gaze at the surreal landscape of phosphor gleaming. It was the mutant folk still hidden; they knew fear too.

Fear of discovery by humans. Inside their bloated bodies was a radioactive high of fever sickness. Ultimate pleasure from hybrid pain cutting through the nerves. Putting each into a frenzied malevolent thrill mode. They did not remember how to speak to each other anymore. They kind of scurried around and depended on one another's tasks in their newborn anomaly.

They kind of grunted knowing monosyllables about what they had just seen. More intruders to invade their precious landfill. They got used to the laborers and garbage men who just ran their trucks through and dumped their loads and hauled off. They remembered little about themselves, what they once were.

Fever and a mixture of toxic waste enabled them to get their Jones off the heat, the melting of their psyches, thus rendering them soulless. They had not wished to be there. They were almost silent, mute. They were inexplicable by their very presence. It couldn't have happened here. But nonetheless they peered from the tunnels and drainpipes, that led to the riverbanks. There was a medium sized group of them.

There was not any understood structure of the new village beneath the concrete where the seepage would cover them, and scar them in their writhing frenzies. They subsisted on eel-things. The eel-things appeared not to mind when they reached in to divvy up the meatiest ones. They bit into the horrid reptiles raw and quivering as chunks would be ripped from the turgid things. Their constant euphoria of frightful chemical imbalance, the toxins had a searing effect on their central nervous systems, causing them to writhe and quiver and shake, rattle and roll. The jerking came when they had reached their final poisonous state, the deathrattling. Then they would offer themselves to the eel-things in the final sacrificial offering.

They roamed the areas at night, lurching through the black neighborhoods; none had been caught. They chivvied out dead insects, rodents, vermin and consumed them alive, raw, bloodied countenances of sheer horror! In that forlorn cavernous den next to the festering nest in utter blackness where their eyes could now see, were shrieks and sights and sounds unholy!

But demented people were of this particular pit. There was another village of the damned growing in numbers in the Atchafalaya swamp. Another outcrop of maligned ape-humans radiating and disdainful of sunlight. They were not conscious of their robbing actions; of stealing foodstuff in garbage cans. They had good instincts to remain hidden in the safety of their drainage nest in the utter bleakness. They had become squinty eyed nocturnal animals of a low grade, an undefined wretchedness. The eternal joke of the chemistry set that the dying industrial nest of yuppies trying to live amidst toxins in all elements, the alchemists nightmare. The surreal landscape of Baton Rouge, the industrial giant, surrounded, bounded on all sides by cancerous sewage. The glistening infernal machinations of waste treatment plants. Perhaps now the plague could spread like gospel to the untouched of the city.

The treading over nightly terrain, neighborhoods being accursed by the village of the damned, was beginning to be noticed by the black residents who lived in those tar paper shacks.

Ricky Harrison lay in his unwashed bed sheets with a bottle of Ten High to keep his body and soul intact. He would go out there again, if he dared. After all, he had nothing to lose. He had one foot in the grave just like the newscasters bleated out on TV. His mother had just bit the big one a bit early. The town rotted from the beauteous hideousness, the semblances of decay and its devotion to entropying down to charnel tombs for every working yuppie, redneck, and black neighbor stupid enough to have lived here in Cancer Alley. He lay asleep, the ringing in his head of mewings of the drainage pipes echoing from somewhere far within the tunnels. The puddle ridden sewers held a unique mysteriousness that he would ferret out. He was not necessarily a singularly brave person, but was evolving into just such a man. Was it a death wish? He fell asleep in an alcoholic induced hallucination of the singing eel-things at the foot of his bed. In the little efficiency apartment, cheap shag carpet was dingy and perhaps the snakes were under his single bed. He gazed one last time at the news screen of round the clock coverage of the black plague that would come if resisted. Antidotes, cures, consumptives, where were they now? He could feel his tainted insides festering and incubating with maggoty diseases viral. it made one feel quite ill, as he wrestled with himself, wringing the shoddy flat pillow and cursing the eel-things mewing and the lost soul of Marleine Harrison, now charred and blotted in the manicured cemetery where existing plots lay for him and his somnambulist brother and sisters and Dick Harrison. Thomas Mann would have been quite proud in the rotting pervasive decline. He fell unconscious once more now.

When he got up, he thought, we still have to go to work. Sunday night was like a millennium of stuff of dreams and sleep. He felt new, though festering as he sped to work, muffler exploding all the way, he felt revived, rejuvenated. He went to work only to find some of the boys not there.

"Out sick. Probably got the plague." Half the company wasn't there. Something was not surprising about the absentees.

"We don't have much work today." That's the way it was around the whole city apparently. Same as for a hurricane, or worse.

They let him go home. They shut the company down. The few heroic people to have the moxie to go to work were feeling suddenly relieved that they too could go home until further news was heard.

The city was at a veritable standstill. Shut down for the duration. Only about an hour after he had been present at the ugly company in the middle of many other ugly companies, he was heading home. There wasn't much traffic on the streets now. There were sirens of fire engines and ambulances all over the place. Was martial law going on or what? No way. People were worried, but the news said that they think there will be a sure fire cure administered after proper testing through the federal government.

Ricky Harrison, in the confines of the rubber room of apartment 318 in Bellevue, Baton Rouge. Saline solution tanks left unattended in his efficiency apartment, the mental asylum for the a number one lunatic. The antihero of the epoch. Pantheon of maniacs in greatness. Everything seemed too real. When he was home, he pulled out that card with the goddess's phone number on it. It said "LSU Biochemistry, Faculty Member, Kendra Horst, LSU, BR, LA., etc . . ."

Three rings, finally through. ." . . LSU Biochemistry Dept."

"Kendra Horst please."

"I'm sorry, she's not in the area right now. Can I leave a message?"

"Uh, well . . ." There went that confidence. Breakdown of himself beginning already. Come on what happened to that pioneer spirit that will get you through the plague?

"Wait, I think I can connect you with her in the labs, faculty labs . . ."

"Thank you."

Click, ring again . . .

"Umm, Kendra, this is Ricky Harrison." God, she probably didn't know who he was . . . but what mattered in these panicky times? The place was about to be razed and chock full of dead.

"Oh, hey sweetie? How are you?"

"Are you sure you remember me?"

"Yes, of course. How's it going?" Adorable she was. Amazon wonder woman.

"Look, I think I believe you now. Can you . . . I mean, I know it is really a bad time. I mean, aren't you on one of the research teams trying to find a cure or antidote before the bad times really begin?"

"That's right, dearie." She really was sweet. "It is pretty hectic around here, that's for sure."

What are the odds on finding the cure or antidote? I mean, what I hear from the news is really like there's nothing to worry about. Like before it even hits there will be a cure."

"Well, Ricky, that's not what we are saying over here. It's so complicated you wouldn't believe it. I don't want anybody to lose hope. Right now it's kind of unsure."

"Well, all I was wondering is how the media have all rallied everyone from panicking, by saying the antidotes will come and no one will get sick or die."

"Well, I hate t say it, but if we don't come up with a serum, which we are trying to extract from the venom of these eel mutant creatures, in time, we are going to have the whole city empty. I hope I didn't scare you."

"Kendra, this is the worst thing to happen in a long time, right?

"Well, without mercy of both sexes and of all ages, Procopiu's account of the first pandemic was AD 541. Five to ten thousand people died daily in Constantinople. Next was 1346, second pandemic . . ."

"The one in 1346 was the darkest times, a third of the world died. They blamed it on the Jews. The third pandemic occurred in Europe during the 15th and 18th centuries. the fourth began in China in 1855. It reached Hong Cong in 1894. They finally realized a bacilli which had killed 6 million people in India. They finally figured it was fleas as carriers. Then the disease reached the United States. But so many people died of Syphilis that it was deceptive to them."

She sighed. Ricky Harrison looked about his clammy rubber room.

"You are way smarter than I am."

"Look honey, you don't realize some of the hunks I have gone out when my wonder days were during undergraduate craziness. They were fine but plain stupid. Unoriginal Macho energy. Which I despise!"

"Well, I hope I wasn't bothering you."

"Not at all. I enjoyed talking to you. I was feeling pretty bad at the Chimes. I had just come from New Orleans and press conferences and big medical meetings."

"Well, I thought I used to see you around campus after I quit my frat and became a bum."

"Don't be so down on yourself! You are to cute for that."

"Well, thanks Kendra, but . . ."

"You are. You were dreamy back then. I remember you. You were the talk of whole sororities. They thought you looked like Nick Nolte or Robert Redford or something."

"Really?" He was elated, his heart soared.

"You would be surprised what I could tell you. Sorority Suzies are notorious for cattiness and gossip." He sensed she had to get back to finding a solution to the pandemic.

"Well, I gotta go back to the slide show. Call me again sometime. Maybe we could go out for lunch or dinner."

"Sounds good! I will call you soon."

"Alright sweetie, I'll talk to you later."

"Bye." Click. Unconscious fettering of guilt lifted from his aching chest; he had his answer. Just think, all that wasted energy on negative thinking. What had he been doing with himself? He though about it, and put on a movie. The choice of videotape was "Death in Venice." Venice, a dying city. Italian film. Gorgeous strains of Mahler's Fifth symphony, non troppo came blazing forth from the speakers.  

Chapter Twenty Eight

School wasn't quite out for the kiddies. Baton Rouge wasn't just refineries and squalid apartments for the damned dead men like Ricky Harrison. There were high schools teeming with pubescent kids, grunts and embryonic youths. Cheerleaders. Turfs were made not by pissing on fire hydrants that would get washed away in the rain, but the local McDonald's, Mr. Gatti's with Science Fiction and Star Trek Clubs. Gaming shops with Dungeon and Dragon nerds and comic book shops teeming with assortments of bright eyed boys and girls.

The parents were concerned for their new wave generation that was prepping up for placing out of Calculus, chemistry, trig, English.

There were all the various strains of students in these high schools. There were little arrays of students, the end product of Baby Boomers whose parent were depression era kids. The kindergarten students whose spirits were already broken by that potty training, were too young to fear the magnitude of the impending pandemic. The elementary kids were innocent enough, they were told at various lengths that everything would turn out okay. There was no reason for their parents to leave the city, because the virus's were already implanted and evident and going someplace else wouldn't do any good.

The high schoolers were a bit terrified, they already had to deal with AIDS and condoms and the terrors of post-teenybopper knuckle boogers. Fist fights between the dopeheads and the jocks, homobashing of the nerds. Ogling and probing of teen breasts beneath sweaters and Calvin jeans rolled up in a ball at the submarine races near the LSU lakes. All those preteen hussies and their steady boyfriends were ultimately glad that school was out for a while.

There were the awful rumors of course. The LSU campus had a bit more capacity for sense, but the high schools were rampant with tabloid tidbits of genuine originality. That the Governor put LSD in the drinking water, and that everyone was tripping. That the whole was going to keel over and die three hundred thousand strong, regardless of race, creed, etc. That the federal government was going to get rid of the virus by detonating the nuclear power plant (meltdown), to save the rest of the country, and subsequently the entire planet. That they weren't allowed to travel across state lines and that they were all technically medical prisoners, now under quarantine. That not just the little eel-things were rampant, but that there were Loch Ness monsters of enormous size also dwelling in Lake Ponchartrain and the Gulf of Mexico. That it was the end of the world. That Russia and China were responsible for the soon-to-be destruction of America. Too many of these kids saw the movie "Red Dawn," where a cheerleading squad and second string football team take on the entire Russian Army.

There were rumors flying around these fertile grounds of teenaged angst-ridden hordes. Running around the hallways, shooting spitballs, smoking pot. Savage beatings on the most frivolous pretexts. That these eel-things were seedpods that came down inside meteorites. They were from Mars or further out. That only grown ups were going to die, leaving all teenagers to rule the schools, cities, streets in one big keg party too underage to attend. That they were all going to be shipped to some big secret military quarantined underground mineshaft city in New Mexico, where they would be experimented on Nazi style, and them summarily killed off.

That this was going on around the whole country, and that America would collapse and other countries take up stakes on their bones grinding in the swamp. That American fighter planes and aircraft carriers would come up the Mississippi and start bombing the refineries, the nuclear plant. That was the only way to get rid of the monstrous huge nests and feeding grounds of the villages of mutants.

That there was a village of unconscious creeping subhumans who ate plutonium and eel-things and were going to stalk the city. And their locations were the Atchafalaya Swamp, Devil's Swamp, West Baton Rouge parishes where all the refineries were. where they could bathe and eat toxic poisons and still not die but become even stronger. The teenaged mind knew no bounds in the pantheon of apocryphal universal imaginations.

The McDonald's on Sharp Road, territory of the Broadmoor High rodents and gawkish clodhoppers of demonic libidos and that urge below their belts of dripping hormones outa whack, was populated with essentially the whole of the shut-down student body. Severely structured into quadrants of social class, justly shuffled about until some rational order like sifting layers fell into place.

"Give me a Big Mac, dude! An' three fries!" The blonde little girls said who was growing into a little lady awful fast.

"Yes, would you like an apple pie with that?"

"Just give me my screwing Big Mac, Billy."

"You don't have to say it like that." He turned away, his scrofulous face gone rampantly apecrud with blemishes and scars.

"Come on!" Tiffany said. Her three girlfriends were sitting over at a table next to those cute boys: Danny Jackson and Paul Roberts, and Timmy Crowhurst. They were so cute! The bracerfaced girls were just sprouting and developing with every minute of the ticking clock. But for now they were indulging in a maniacal french fry eating endeavor that was not uncommon. Everybody knew that McDonald's had the best french fries. Wendy's was crudty, and Burger King was, well, full of black boys who would mess with these poor suburban kinds sheltered from life. Free Fabian society, a Marxist miracle of equality and brotherhood. The McDonald's was approaching overkill as far as capacity. This was the first McDonald's in Baton Rouge, before these kids were even born. Used to even have the golden arches until they took them down and remodeled. Every football game these kids came crashing in, mayhem of the best sort. And a small microcosm of high school and junior high perceptions about life, namely that they didn't know anything about it. Their personalities were just remnants, or fledgling gossamer intonations of the fleshing out processes. But they were rather rambunctious, the bombastic jocks were glowing. They had been acting like they were gonna take over the town case of this radiation epidemic. All they knew was that there wasn't going to be any more school for a while. And their parents were treating them really special. They were too alive to be afraid, all the niniom burns, and snuggies (pulls of the underwear in gym class and knuckle boogers. And indian burns, and noogies were still happening just as if it was Friday night and the girls were feeling cute. And the boys were trying to talk them into making out, getting them into some sort of situation where if they could only get that blouse off, and kiss them. And then get that bra off, and maybe even go all the way! But these were good Catholic and Presbyterian and Methodist girls. And they all had boyfriends if they weren't goofy too much. If they acted all mature. If they didn't treat their girlfriends like crud. If they were cool and weren't badasses. If they didn't get into trouble and take acid and smoke like dopefiends. If they were cute boys, not nerdy and zitfaced and stupid acting.

Tiffany was looking over at Danny Jackson. He was the junior varsity quarterback and he was just a sophomore. And he didn't even act like a jock. He made good grades and was so cute! Every girl wanted him and they voted him one of the sweetheart couples along with Melissa Barry, that little tramp whore! She was so two-faced and Danny didn't even like her, and they still made them a sweetheart couple. Danny had broken up with this cute girl who had a reputation for getting drunk and acting really weird. And hanging around with college guys way too old for her.

And Danny was so nice to every girl, even the dweeby ones who were so immature. But football season was canceled, there wouldn't be any more games. And there were four left, and Broadmoor had a chance of being district champs even if the head coach was an ass and the whole team was a bunch of potheads. Pot did the worst thing for football teams. All the football players would act all big shots and tough. Just because they worked out with weights and had good bodies. Three of the defensive players were the biggest dealers in the school, and the faculty didn't even know about it! Pot wasn't good for a football team, just think what they could have been like if they just got drunk like everybody else.

Tiffany walked over to where Danny was acting quiet and shy, even though he was almost six feet tall. And had already gone all the way, (everybody knew about it!) and his older brother had led Broadmoor to the state championships and went on to play for LSU until he got a knee injury. He wasn't nearly as stuck up as any other boy would be if they had all that going for 'em.

"Hey Danny, how's it going?" Tiffany said with all she could muster. She was a definite cutie. Her little petite ass wiggled around. Her pert little breasts were just right. The other boys were about to spurt. Tiffany came over, with her friends. Just like she had wanted them to.

"Alright." Danny said. He was so cool.

"I heard they canceled the INXS concert!"

"What a drag!"

"Yeah, I was gonna go with Timmy and his older brother's college friends."

"I mean, all this stuff about the plague, or the sickness is really totally crudty!" She said. God, did I say that?, she thought. I don't want to look too smart! She was smiling at him, and her girlfriends were giggling. They ALL wanted Danny. And his buddies were playing with them, stealing their fries.

"Give us some french fries!"

"Yeah," Danny said. "I think school is going to be out for the rest of the semester."

"Really? Cool!," she said. Don't try and look so enthusiastic! Bitch!

"You still going out with Mike Trailer?" Danny asked meekly but politely.

"No. We broke up. He's so weird!"

"Well, my dad won't let me go out right now. They are worried about all the crud going on." The plague crud.

Right. "You want the rest of your Big Mac?" his buddy said.

"Yeah, I want it! Ass!"

"Shut up man!" Ah, the privilege of youth. What a hope for the future.

The nerdy assistant manger came over. He looked retarded. Everybody knew he really was. But he was just a spazz.

"What are y'all gonna do while the weird crud is going on?" Danny asked.

Wow, Tiffany thought. He's really interested.

"Nothing," she smiled. Her friends laughed and looked away, nervous by now.

They were all screwable, the boys thought.

"Hey, Melissa, you still hung over from that keg party at Janet's house?"

"Shut up, ass!" She said. Totally assholic. What a geek. But he was second string. But ugly. He wasn't cute. She thought about Timmy Crowhurst. Just because he had a cool car that he raced on Airline Highway against the Denham Springs asses. They thought they were so cool cause they won their district last year and beat up the black manes at a riot after the game.

"Would your parents let you go to the Neon Club Friday night?" Danny asked sheepishly. He was asking her out, practically. Oh my God, she thought. I'm gonna die! Don't blow it.

"Yeah, we're gonna be there. Lisa and Terry and Melissa were going too, but their parents aren't letting uh. And they aren't even grounded." She sounded so immature, for sure, he thought quickly.

"We are gonna be there," she said, lurching a bit. Her little perfect frame, aching to get fondled by those big quarterback hands. He was God! So cute! Smart.

"Well, I'll be there, but I'm gonna go with my brother to Fred's bar. You know, Tigerland."

"Cool, dude." She waved bye. Her girlfriends were about to pee in their pants; they were about throw up they were so nervous.

Chapter Twenty Nine

The Po-lice department of Baton Rouge had been getting some weird calls about break-ins and prowlers in Scotlandville. The predominantly black neighborhood or town north of Baton Rouge, where the shotgun shacks were.

"Goddamn black people. Fuggin crime alla time. Thank god I got taken off that beat," Officer Perkins said, to some fellow officers.

"What is going on down there?" a red haired officer asked. It was coffee time down at the Dunkin Doughnuts at 3 in the morning.

"How the hell do I know?" Officer perkins said. "Prowlers." Strange calls coming into the dispatch. He resigned after eating that last raspberry filled doughnut. He wanted a refill of that wonder coffee go-juice. The gal working behind the counter was bit of a mild retardate, probably. She weren't that bad looking, just those ears flapping in the air conditioning. And that terminal bun. But that look of plumb blessed ignorance and boredom was promulgating all around the empty doughnut emporium on Essen Lane. There were several police cars parked outside. Everyone was taking a break. Thank god it was a slow night. Double duty now with this plague thing. Everybody was talking about it. They all felt, well, touched with some sickness that they couldn't define, feel. For all they knew, they could have a six foot long tapeworm; that's what the eel-thing connection felt like. Just couldn't sleep as good is all.

"All I know is we got enough problems understaffed with this city practically going fuggin militia and martial law. I got my family to think about. You too, Tom, Dave. We gotta take care of our own. How do you know they ain't starting some riot because of the panic that's in the streets?"

"Look, we hadn't had no riot problems since the Black Panthers came in and started all that trouble on North Boulevard, or that skirmish at Southern University."

"We got good black officers. Let's not start talking about black people rioting. This whole town's going down the tubes."

"What we need is someone to explain this crud to us!" One huge officer said, humbly. "I'm totally confused."

"I don't understand either, man."

"Another refill officer?" the mild retardate with the industrial strength bra strap quizzed.

"All I know is we got some guys looking around down there, and one officer, . . . who was it? . . . Broussard from Baker said he was some really weird looking people stalking, kinda hunched over. Scurrying around in the woods, near the fringe of that Main Street in Scotlandville, between LTI and Exxon."

"Man, I tell you it's just a bunch of mumbo jumbo. There is enough panic around here with us all contaminated with some virus. While the rest of the country just kinda gawks at us. Reporters ain't even coming in to interview us, cause they are afraid to catch what we all supposedly have."

The night scanned from afar was surprising callow and peaceful. The air was surprisingly clear. The people were just sitting back, awaiting more information. The suburbs were filled with fear; it filled the streets. Curfews were imposed. Some wild teenagers were having a ball, like it was the millennium, or a black mass, or a heavy metal headbangers ball on M-TV. If we are all going to hell, or we are in hell, then why the hell not stop by K and B and pick up a couple cases a' Michelob Dark, and a couple half gallons of Crown Royal. Or even that cheap ten high stuff. Let's make it worse, let's do the wrong thing. Lets just ignore that crud. But tell the truth, they were all scared right down to their socks. Death hath not a kind little face. It was blood red and grinning fire trails down every back road and lovers lane and hot rod pad in the inroads of this dying, though not old, city.

It was a teen terror on Party Beach for every "Be true to your school" pizza face and adoring madonna in active esprit designer wear and stonewashed jeans. The girls and boys were given something to reckon with besides whether or not to use a condom if that particular favorite choice ever came up. The outcome of that could be dealt with. But festering in each little lithe frame of bright eyed boy and sweetest girl was presumed to be a horrid existence. A frightful horror right out of Stephen King movieland, that junkheart of the college freshman girl-reading-Dean R. Koontz-in-a-bikini in the sun.

The rains came. It was rather a strange order of things. It was seasonal, though, after all. No, just the Jenkins Bible Academy thought that the rains coming and persisting were more than a bad luck mood altering thing. It was nigh when Noah would build himself an ark and take em two by two. Fundamentalists hardly ever used logic to explain how a rich man could go to heaven about as often as a camel passing through the eye of a needle. But those poor little suburbanites who now ruled over Sherwood Forest, and the vast expanses of Baton Rouge Yuppie town full of Baby Boomers, were living a two-reeler horror show. Mothers took their sons and daughters to doctors. The medical community was amuck with outpourings of calls. There would not be a prom. Businesses tried to run as usual but no, everyone had that look on their face like when the iranian hostages were doing time during Carter's reign. Utter disgust seasoned with despair, agony, manic hyperactive frenzy. Frustration with no one to nail to the wailing wall. 

So little Tod, Tad, Timmy and Jimmy with skateboards in tow and thunderbolts emblazoned in their spiked hair, bejeweled with precious earrings like little princes, were not going to sneak

into R-rated films. They weren't doing much of anything these days. Not stealing dad's Playboys, not running in soccer-sprawled acreage near the old airport. Not going to the Cinema 15 to see Arnold Schwarzenegger pound some fruits into trout meat. Quarantine was slowly settling, like when a cold starts digging into one's kidneys, way down there. Similarly, the little Alice, Tiffanies, Brittanies, Alexis, Chloe's, Daphne's, Brandy's, Crystallines, were all confined to the erudite chambers of yuppie havens. Those miniature Kubla Khan domes shielding from dangerous transmitted diseases. God forbid that one of those creatures from the villages of zombies would swipe that nurturing child from their breast.

Matter of fact, lots of guys in souped up cars were just beginning to figure out how to use this plague thing that had been yawping from radio and television, to their advantage, really. Tell a sweet little girl while you pat her little belly of love, pointing right by her belly bottom, that there is a festering in there. Something unnatural, something bacterial-like, that there is not an antidote for yet. These greaseballs and roadkillers weren't stupid. They wanted to get all the poon they could before their privates began to shrivel up. There wouldn't even be time to start getting carded at bars they were too underage to attend. So these girls would let them go under the bra, under that shirt, under that body suit, and even down there. That was the privilege of youth, jailbait being harpooned by jail bait, therefore everybody wins. But Mr. Death from Twilight Zone would be grabbing all their little girlfriends' hands and making a brown casket for them. So get that pliant nubile flesh while they could, for their male video-gamed hands would be still soon also. To disregard playboys, to kill that spirit below their belts. To cease those strong young mens respiratory systems, to attack the nerves and infiltrate their once strong vessels.  

Chapter Thirty

Jeff Pepper, the leading acoustic guitar in the garage band of Shenandoah apartment trash in South Baton Rouge, took some bong hits of ging dope. He was trying to tell his buddies about the zombies in Devil's Swamp.

"Screw the practice session." The headbanger's Ball on M-TV was on television. Women were lounging around drinking low cal wine coolers and hugging their boyfriends. Women were suckers for rock non-talent trash.

"There ain't no Zombie village!" , Ozzy (that's what he started calling himself, before he was just John Crowhurst), said with that rhombus of upside down insanity in rock mentality.

"I'm telling ya, John-boy," Jeff said, shaking his mane of blonde hair out like he was hands on an ion-generator. "Our dope connection down at Uncle Earl's (revered hot band bar); Bruce, the California dude, works down at the River Bend site."

"Big screwin wowser!"

"Don't be a cuz, wheezer John!"

"Ozzy to you carrotwanger . . ." They were still miffed at each other for stealing the show down at the Sport's Page on Old Hammond Hwy. That was the night they almost got a DWI while Dirky was in the back seat taking a bite out of a girl named Beverly, in her desirous y-joint.

"I didn't take the solo too long, Ozzy!" Their voices carried barely in the room over the MTV VeeJay yelling at America.

A girl walked downstairs in the sleazy townhouse amongst the Fender Rhodes, speakers, and wires strung out in disarray in the studio. It was a darkly lit pit of thrash metal good times by Miller beer. They were all holding Miller beers and waterpiping themselves some heavenly hash passed around in freak central. The girl was not wearing anything but a bra and a pair of walking shorts. She had a pair of mou mou's that made one's manhood bristle with rock n'roll testosterone.

The girl walked past and said, "I ain't going to the zombie village."

"They are stoned as we are. I'm going to head on over to Village of the Damned for a sneak peak at radioactive green oozing crudheads munching on legs of teenaged hookers."

He was the king of weird, kind of like a poor man's Phil Spector with lots less brain damage. MTV just kept on rhapsodizing on skittles sugar candy for whatever rots your teeth. The VeeJay was being embarrassingly smug and pretentious as he was interviewing Jon Bon Jovi in the Hard Rock Cafe.

"Is that the one in LA or New York?"

"It ain't the one in New orleans. Crud you are one stupid bass player."

"I should have hacked you up with my razor guitar, hatchet face."

An evening at home with the Addams Family. The girl grabbed yet another lite wine cooler and bent over to take a big hit to further create a hollow cavity in between her ears, right in the middle of the cranium. Like when she opened up a green pepper with a ginsu knife, and inside was a bug sitting there saying, "Damn it's been cold in this green pepper in the screwing fridge for the last three weeks, it's about time you cut this screwin thing open, I'm tired of eating my screwin way out of this green screwing pepper you screwin hippie." That's exactly what was going on in that girl's screwing mind. Underdeveloped brain. Firm breasts that were mushed together quite nicely. The bra folded wide open and her nipples were viewed by all boys and girls in the mousketeer LSD club.

"Sherrie, darling, could you do me a favor?" Jeff Pepper said.

"Anything asswiper, I mean darling," she said.

"Don't show your screwing brown aureoli to everybody," he said, with a hint of death.

"What's that asswiper? I mean darling?" she said.

"That is that dark brown wrinkly area around the protruding nipple tips of your big screwing breasts? Aren't they? I mean, you own them, they are a part of you. I've fondled them many times, I guess I mean your nipples. I wonder? Have you ever heard of shirts?"

"Asswiper, Sorry bout that. But they are mine nonetheless." Truly madhouse. Jeff (asswiper) got his car keys after the titty peep show of this carnival of souls. In the room with a water pipe in the middle of a den with MTV blasting away some RATT and purple haze of stench like incenses of sanctimony.

"Let's go dudes."

"Sounds like a plan and a half to me," Ozzy said.

"Actually, it sounds like a plan and 3/16's to me." They left as she put her lite wine cooler right down on top of a speaker frame standing six feet tall. Which would have made Jeff Asswiper take a lunge at her in his misogynist way that rockers do to make their women feel kinda special. She finally put a shirt on as there weren't any males in the room to gaze upon her bronzed chest.

"Awesome and polymorphously excellent," resounded from the little toyota filled with ging dope from mexico via the River Bend connection. The Toyota trudged down the slick slab of interstate as they weaved miraculously in their marvelling moment. Searching for signposts like ancient mariners, or the lights of Oxford like a beacon to the blind. The thrash metal basically beat in their chests from boombox speakers that made up 50% of the bashed up Toyota. They howled and screamed as they went to a zombie village in the middle of the night.

The traffic was nil; nobody got around since the curfew. The police state terrorist's against hippie booted musicians who knew dominant, tonic and subdominant guitar chords, and could make up five albums of that basic knowledge.

"This is a screwin ghost town."

"It ain't no apocryphal legend."

"What isn't, Ozzy?" he said as he handed him the joint and ashes flung all over creation in a flash of hot spark.

They would be there essentially in thirty minutes. The whole of the metropolis as seen from interstate at unholy night in drizzle. The Exit at seedy North Baton Rouge, the descent into that good night, to Devil's Swamp. Inequities unbound, as those longhairs swooned from substances and Ozzy (John) was attempting to drive. No doubt he would have been stopped all the way back by the JE$U$ $AVES trestle by the Jenkins Ministries for badly following dotted lines in the street. With a Toyota way out of alignment, but well worth the value from thrashmetal gigs and selling office furniture to suckers in three pieced suits at rock bottom prices. Imperialist dweebs all.

"Man this is too much . . ," Ozzy said as Dirky in the back seat was playing the beat from "WIPEOUT." Ahead of them as they drove the car through the vast wasteland of drudgery-induced bleakness, the little car hit the ruts in the landfill. The mysterious pylons and manmade forms of zombie headquarters near the way off horizon of darkness and water's edge in moonglowed drizzle. Wet, warm and eerie all over, was all around them amongst the fetidness. They got out of the car without question; they had a quest.

These wispy-haired lads put one keebler boot in front of the other in that quest to find zombies. The darkness enveloped them like a black velvet curtain. The unholy stench wrapped around each of them. It was a bit surreal in the wasteland here in the middle of the night amidst topographical blemishes in the blasted landfill heath. They sort of wandered about aimlessly, amusing themselves with what was accomplished so far. Boy would they be able to tell their story now; write songs about this Village of the Damned, yet unseen.

Ozzy hoped there wasn't such a thing. He knew enough about radiation from "Nightflight" programs and cult classics and punk rocking slam dancing themes. That you just got radiation and melted your eyeballs, and then keeled over. None of this nonsense about putrefied walking green wagon loads of sputum flotsam caked in crud. He was observing the structures of heaps of organized piles of junk in some sort of fashionable formation. That was his first mistake; to go near there, past there, and summon the others.

All of them were down by the water's edge. That's where that maze of largest pipes were jutting out, the water level quite down. Up in the treacherous skies where the space pods of viral death per high school informed sources, was something malevolently scrupulous. It was a good night to die. Ozzy started, quite unphased, walking. Click, clacked his boots down into the pipe into the darkness. He had done such before; he was the rebel for their times. That's what he always had to prove with Jeff's girlfriends. That was the way they would always migrate to him. His antics. Jeff started to go in but saw the ultimate shade of black in there, and waited. He could hear Ozzy's foul mouth arresting the mother tongue whilst on uncontrolled substances and then some screaming.

Was he crudting? That ass was doing a hell of a job scaring him to pee in brown velvet pants. It felt good, but it ain't a good idea. Dirky started in, to further the prank. He went quite a ways, and then the screaming stopped from Ozzy's frayed pipes. Jeff decided that he would go and seek a newer world, to sail beyond his dismal asswiping sunset like Lord Alfred Tennyson himself. He walked with gravity boots to keep him from tripping and busting his arse. He kept going.

They didn't come out. The Toyota was found the next day by some brothers dumping some garbage. Finally after a few days Jeff's girlfriend reported them all missing. The Toyota was found at the scene after a few flatfooted detectives who had no time for amateurish thrashmetal crimes decided to look into the matter.

The bodies of three long-haired boys were being chomped on by a whole nest of eel-things, all large and fat and wide-bellied. Gnashing of teeth and mutated slithering as the village of zombies waited patiently for the nest of holy creatures to get finally full. Then they casually but fumbling took the carrion of what was left, the heads and some flesh and entrails, and gnawed on those until there was nothing left. The pools of yellowish waste were bathing spots to keep that monstrous sickly high buzz of radiative extreme rush to a happy medium. These creatures who watched and cared for the eel-things threw the skeletons with all the others. All the missing persons of Baton Rouge were in a heap and the air was rife with dried blood, coagulated. Some of these zombies had uniforms quite shredded by now which read River Bend nuclear plant staff. They had no idea of who they were, due to infection.

There were several carcasses of dogs, nutria. The bundles of slithering eel-things were in some hierarchical order. And the zombies were duly reverent and benign and worshipping them. Cats which had strayed into the tunnels by the smell of dead rodents. The entire scape of Devil's Swamp still appeared okay to those whose daily job was to landfill and dump and level out the increasing bile and fodder.

 Chapters 31 thru 33 

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August 1999 HofP