SKIMMING THE GUMBO NUCLEAR
By M.F. Korn
Chapters 31 thru 40

"Facilis Descensus Averni"

Chapter Thirty One

Kendra talked to her supervising Medical Officer.

"We expect the first wave of deaths to begin by the end of next week."

Dr. Khan said without a hint of death. Without a nod, without a strain in his voice. Kendra gulped.

"Oh, my God."

"Yes, well, we haven't heard anything about a breakthrough in our vaccine for what is coming," Khan said further.

She saw a black wave of Death swath over the entire town. Empty cars, streets sprawling with carrion, bodies of kids, their parents, all forms of life.

"Has the governor decided to start evacuating?" She asked impatiently.

"I don't know." he paused. "I think that is to be decided within the next 48 hours." All he said further was "Yes." to fill in that void where she didn't exactly know what to say.

"Are you staying behind? We can use you?" Khan said.

She knew she had to. She walked out of the room and Dr. Khan moved into the other lab rooms of the immense chemistry biological sciences building, which was now housing some of the more preeminent scientists from the best research centers in the world. Onward Christian soldiers, she thought, as she passed a really handsome guy who was extremely preoccupied with his struggle to come up with his share of information in regard to the team effort of vaccination.

The BIG ANNOUNCEMENT, (BIGGEST NEWS IN STATE HISTORY) CAME FINALLY SIMULCAST OVER ALL FOUR TELEVISION STATIONS AND RADIO:

I KNOW HOW FRIGHTENING ALL THIS SOUNDS, AND SCIENTIST TEAMS OF WORLD EXPERTS ON HIS SUBJECT OF DISEASE ARE WORKING ROUND THE CLOCK TO FIND A VACCINE TO KEEP A PLAGUE From ACTUALLY OCCURRING. I THANK YOU AND YOU WILL BE INFORMED MORE IN THE VERY NEAR FUTURE IN REGARDS TO THIS MOST TERRIBLE CHAPTER IN OUR STATES HISTORY. WE ARE A STATE THAT KNOWS HOW TO TAKE CARE OF ITS OWN GOOD PEOPLE. DO NOT PANIC. YOU WILL BE SAFE ELSEWHERE. THERE WILL BE CAMPS SET UP IN THOSE PARISHES . . . THE RED CROSS AND FEDERAL ASSISTANCE FROM AROUND THE COUNTRY WILL BE ON HAND . . ."

He went on. he probably wouldn't be reelected, even though this was the most historical announcement ever made by a Louisiana Governor since Reconstruction.

Kendra just stood gawking for a moment at the broadcast as it hummed in the lab. She kept probing the creature all slit open. Vials of fluids and chemical analyses apparatus were strewn all about. The others had left for the night, having been up since 4 am on their particulars.

Ricky Harrison got a call from Joe Taylor. He was frightened. "Harrison. I got some bad new. Elward died last night at Lady of the Lake Hospital. The plague."

"God!" was all that Ricky Harrison could say.

"I'm leaving, li'l padnuh . . ," he said as his voice grew wise and quieter.

"Joe!" Ricky said, from the dearth wastrel lot of narcissism and self denial.

"Huh . . .."

"I'm staying," Ricky said. The television flashed phosphor dots of death in the dim glow of the cavernous efficiency. Right smack on that side of the fence from the projects, he could see people packing, getting in their cars, leaving. The city was becoming dead, a disinfected, dying organic slab of disparate chunks of clans of people. People had now grown to forget their usual injustices, perjurious thought, hatreds, for something better. United against the onslaught of Death, the folks were running their white and black asses out of the city. Across parish lines, and into interment camps in Mississippi, and some in Texas. Louisiana was cradled into Mississippi and Texas like a little spot of cultural wonderment, but now it was going to be a ghost of a dwelling place, a phantom.

"You staying?!" Taylor said. "You're crazy. You's a fool!" Ricky thought, he's trying to keep his sense of humor, even through his kids are probably going to die before they get past the parish line.

"How are your kids? Your family?" Ricky thought to ask. Joe Taylor sobbed and relentlessly fought it back. Can't have no brother crying in front of a sorry-assed white boy, who didn't know any better, Ricky thought.

"Oh, little padner, we are on our way out. You know me, always looking for that basketball camp, playing against Larry Bird. Going to maybe play ball in Australian league, or Europe. Something I almost did once. Got the shots, and everything, and didn't go."

"Well, I am going to stay here." Ricky said, in wonderment as to why he kept emphasizing that. Something to PROVE.

"Well, why?"

"Because I just know that I have to."

"Okay. Look, I gotta go. I wish you would get your Jethro ass outa there."

"I'll be alright" Ricky said, with ambiguity that became him. Ennobled right then and there through his own hypocrisy. A walking misnomer. A truly mixed up man. "I gotta go, Ricky . . ." His wife was almost out the door.

"Just remember, li'l padner, if you do decide to go, the interstate and all roads leading out the city are jammed full of the brothers and honkies all trying to get out."

"Alright, Joe." Ricky gulped. He wanted to say something to Joe Taylor.

"Well, it looks like our lives are all full a crud . . ," Joe said in disillusioned reckoning, his voice fading away once more.

"Joe. I guess that at least I got to quote some Lord Byron to all the brothers . . ." Ricky said, half sobbing now.

"Maybe you can do it again. Remember, nothing gold can stay." He said it again, and how lovely it ended in that resonant pallor of muriatic tone quality. Timbre, coming from the head brother, the golden athlete, the hipster who shined for MacNeese where life was fun as it began to fade to memories and mystical legend. The palette of Baton Rouge during the seventies when both Joe Taylor and Ricky Harrison were once on top of the world; slashing through the murky past, once present, new gone, and forgotten.

"I love you guys," Ricky said.

"You too, li'l padnuh. I gotta go now . . ," Bye he had said. Bye Harrison had said. Too melodramatic in those days of plagues, locusts, biblical hardships of modern people. The decay of the yuppie from the inside. The ant hill of cave dwellers now pulling up their roots and yanking themselves out of their falling decline. Ricky Harrison was going to stick it out. Going to stay there. On his answering machine, with his message outgoing, his father had told him to get the hell out. His sisters left their share also. He heard the sound of Army trucks in the martial law atmosphere now going down.

Ricky Harrison put a little nip of bourbon in a jigger, and proceed to have other jiggers laid right down the line. Till he was possessed with that malaise of embalming himself so sweetly against the mounting deadness. The incessant silent white noise of a town being purged.

He watched the cars going by, past his apartment. Mostly black people coming out of the inner city, the industrial lower rent, less fashionable people who knew better. They wanted to live, probably. Was he going to stay? DID he have a death wish? Why had he come to that decision? Marlene Harrison would be waiting for him in Paradise?

What possessed Ricky Harrison? He knew he was in decline before, with the boozing and depraved poetic stance, but now! It would certainly make good fodder for some black-and-white grainy art film. Ricky Harrison, concurrent altar boy, in decline for drinking the monsignor's wine at those 6 A.M. masses for the little old ladies who felt the Holy Trinity. Then Harrison put on "War of the Worlds," the George Pal movie. The part where Gene Barry and Ann Robinson are finding themselves in the only possible safe haven, the cathedral. Ricky Harrison cited this sudden connection of body and soul intertwining in some knotted monstrous aberration, a good rough blind spot where he could feel peace. The martians wreaking havoc, and the viruses do them in. How fitting, appropriate. Indeed! Harrison believed in something. Harrison believed he would have another drink.

The telephone rang. It was his sister, the now repentant yuppie housewife, whose great accomplishment was passing the CPA exam. Now she was finding herself nursing the only nephew that Ricky Harrison had, Christopher.

"Ricky . . . It's Karla. When are you leaving?"

"Umm. I'm leaving real soon."

"We are going to go through Hammond, into Jackson, Mississippi. We want you to meet us there."

"Okay." Ricky knew she was in dire need of something, some reassurance.

"I just want to make sure Chris is alright," Harrison said, truly moved by imagining himself playing with Chris, Nintendo video games. Being beaten by a five-year-old who was quite capable of whipping Harrison in Nintendo and subsequently peeing in his pants, all over the bed the next instant.

"I love you, and Karen, and Daddy. I just want y'all to know that."

"So you are going soon?" she asked. The anxiety welled up in her exclamation. Yuppie mothers had given their offspring virtually everything that one could buy in a large shopping mall. Or at K-Mart, or Toy's R Us. But could they watch their little yuppie toddler die, giving way to death and his brother sleep, as Shelley once said? Could they envision the little magnate of the toy kingdom dead and silent, in his Big Wheel? Silent in the crib, now a makeshift grave? Their once perfect world, painting by the numbers on everything sober successful yuppies did so well. Now turned into a rotting freak show of events, a terrible succession of hideous images, the family succumbing.

Ricky talked with her, his mind freed from bondage through K & B liquor. The ghost town was becoming real. He would revel in this knowledge. A death wish, he now knew, was ten times better than being once promising, and now in decline. You could go all the way with a death wish. How incurably romantic it all was. The main routes out of the cauldron were jammed with redneck families, yuppie vans with 2.3 kids in each. Veritably every permutation of people hightailed out of what was now terrain stunned with the "Mark of the Beast." The fallow ground was now embodied evil. The land nothing but loblollies and shallow swampy terrain was now looked upon by the frightened gentry as never returning back.

Chapter Thirty Two

On the rainy Interstate fork, where I-10 met I-110, the folks were bumper-to-bumper white-feared. Honking, they had a certain frenzy but were united in their cause to flee the cauldron. One could see Volvos, pickups and good times vans waiting their turns as the numerous army vehicles in their drab olive green with brave ROTC and regular army guys stationed to watch for looters as if the Baton Rouge riots had been summarily restarted.

The hegira from LSU was awe-inspiring. Amid the worried countenances of hardworking honest families escaping, there was a convoy of preppy frat rats and their skirt trash in monster trucks. Accommodating the right lane of the now rather ugly mob scene of desperate Christians. There were groups of girls in bikini's adorning the flatbeds of these monstrous steel muscle-wagons. Whorehouses on wheels, the lot of them. Amid the anguished souls in all outgoing lanes of I-10 to Mississippi were the cherubic beckoned, tanned lithe sorority suzies all clutching that Miller Light. Some even had kegs in the wheelwells, death on tap. They were laying in the sun-god sphere beating down on the entire carnival sight. These girls were exuding no worries as they lay there, striking some attitude there on that passage. These little bun-nuns decked out in the latest shopping mall swimwear, were proclaiming their short lived, but possibly eternal yes by chugging down brews. An attitude to the mass confusion of army trucks, armed inclusions of less-promising military bohunks from the various depots. These guy and girls were hardly bringing anything with them. A sort of nihilistic End-of the Word get together for the college aesthetes. They were fleeing too, though.

Folks who were abandoning their second-mortgaged homes and social class lifestyles, were just ignoring the slight strain of youth. They were in the midst of the biggest evacuation. The wide-opened interchanges were filled with families scuttling like snakes going for higher ground when the mud holes get flooded during spring high water.

One youthful group of high school football athletes were attempting to start some version of "Deathrace 2000." Trying to score women, and decked out with their hunting rifles. The army boys up the road a half mile by the airline highway exit followed the clodhoppers. The meaty boys bent on badassed bullcrud. With a bit of a struggle and a couple of nut-stomping ass-kicking, got the weapons away from them. They knocked out a couple of tech sergeants who didn't see it coming. Meanwhile, the monster trucks hauled ass on the shoulder. They followed the high school jocks, because they saw a flash of weaponry, amid the monstrous coalition of state troopers, families, girded in three lanes bumper-to bumper like it was the screwing SEC title in the offing.

The army troops aimed their carbines at these unfortunate high school punks raring-to-go versus the college pansies. To rip those blouses off the bitches decked out in the backs of these trucks on aluminum lawn furniture. The kegs rolling around the floorboard with every acceleration from the boys.

The cities' cathedrals and Catholic churches were not empty, either. They were filled with old ladies, madams who went to mass two times a day. Our Savior would protect them. Saying the rosary was the best thing you could do. Lots of priests were almost down to Holy Orders, Extreme Unction. The ashened foreheads of these ladies were little streaks remarking pollution to all.

Ricky Harrison watched "Death in Venice," with Dirk Bogarde. He had stashed a treasure of several half-gallons of smooth bourbon from the Schweggman's grocery before they shut it. There was something touching as Ricky watched Dirk Bogarde in rapid decline in the Lido in that dying city, Venice. There was no Tadzio for Ricky to divert his attention from the plague. He could call Kendra, maybe she was gone too? No, she had to be holed up in some lab somewhere. He would find her, even if she roamed to the ends of the earth, which was surely nearby. The national news folks were already too scared to come near the infected wasteland that Baton Rouge had become. Folks out in the sticks like Prairieville, dilettantes from Sorrento and Gonzales were not leaving their hallowed land. They were on the fringe anyway, or what those fancy news people were calling the line of death. Re-invention of the plague to come, of terms, misnomers. The vilified facts as they saw them, and from what they could gleam from the medical folks ensconced in those high rise hospitals. The highways were still congested.

Harrison thought the town had made it out en masse. The next morning he took a walk in a long arcing perimeter of the cauldron. There were no principalities in the vicinity. Just carrion and carnage. Not a sound was heard from insects, animals, people. Almost total silence. Auto alarms ringing like dirges from way off. Silence.

He loped along Lobdell and walked down Florida Blvd. in earnestness. The sun was shining brutally as usual. He wasn't he dead? As he walked he stepped over corpses. Families fell almost together. It was ghastly. He made his way seeing veritable pyres of bodies. That first wave must have hit. He didn't feel too good himself; perhaps he was finally catching the incubating disease. He had that welcome death wish. But he wanted to live! Oh, grave where is thy victory, he thought, from that Rachmaninov song. The little dirges of those rather incessant car horns bleating against man and God, found him humming quietly in his madness. He had rather hoped seeing somebody on this spritely walk through purgatory. He walked through the mall. Surely there would be somebody. Right past B. Dalton, on to the largish McDonald's and right past the cinema eleven where he had once seen his fair share of bad movies. Give me Bergman in this suffering. Death walking in a mall, not a beach. Playing chess with Death, he would even be sporting by giving me a few extra moves in the endless game of soul wrenching bargaining. He surely had gone mad, the distilled reality of this sudden affront against death. The bodies sprawled in the indoor mall of a few army troops, having gallantly braved the pandemic. In order to shot a few looters for ripping off the Picadilly Cafeteria's leg of roast or stealing cowboy boots in a brave attempt to dress smartly and indulge in a welcome shopping spree. Perhaps the Wal-Mart down the road was filled with corpses. Their last words heard over the eternal microphone "Attention K-Mart shoppers, we have a special on anything you could possibly want in this misguided free-for-all before you succumb."

He was quite hungover, but the mindboggling proportion of humbling actuality of death in large numbers; everyone was dead. So everyone hadn't been smart enough to high tail it, bird dog down the interstate to a border state.

As he stepping over dead souls, there was some wailing coming from the TCBY yogurt place. A middle-aged man was sprawled up against the rising stools, his legs moving slowly. Ever so slowly, his mouth an anguished gash of soft screaming. Ricky walked over pronto.

"Can you hear me? Are you alright?"

The man shook his head no. "Ugh," was all he could muster. Harrison grabbed a misplaced piece of fabric, a sweater or something. Harrison placed it under the man's tired head, to comfort him. Oh, God, he thought.

The man breathed in spasms. He now wrenched in unbearable pain. It wouldn't be long. He was trying to tell him something.

"What is it? Where is your family?" The man appeared delirious.

"I gotta get home. My wife will . . . (gasp) be waiting for me."

"Okay. I . . . ," Harrison didn't know what to do.

He continued . . . "I got to meet my foursome on the back nine . . ." and then no more. Delirious.

At that point, Harrison now witnessing death first hand, retched right by the rum raisin canister on it's side. He threw up K & B bourbon. And then onward, out of the mall, down silent Florida now realizing he was fashionably alive; but it wouldn't be long. He had miraculously not partaken of a slice of death on a slab. He walked down the street. The abandoned cars housed their unlucky owners, who could've have made it, if only they had the sense enough to leave earlier. Harrison would walk these streets in light of this hellishness. To observe, to walk until he too would succumb. He finally wound up at a pay phone near the Hopper's drive in, after he had successfully raided the Church's fried chicken for a bucket of double battered crispy legs and wings.

It was just a guess, he thought as he pulled out Kendra's card. Surely those screwing scientists stayed behind. It rang and miraculously it was her.

"Hello?" He now realized he was panic stricken. It had all finally sunk into his skull.

"I"M ALONE IN A town OF CORPSES AND ZOMBIES, AND I"M GOING TO BE AS DEAD AS MARTHA MITCHELL, TOO!"

"Hello? Hello?" went the other end. He couldn't bring himself to say anything. Finally, he screamed out his vision of world sorrow. Cataclysmic gregorian chant of raving lunacy. Now in shock. She waited for a moment.

"Who is this?" she said.

"It's Ricky Harrison" he managed.

"Who?" she said, quite rightly raving herself. Why was she still here?

"Ricky Harrison from the Chimes."

"Oh. Just listen to me. Get here right away. Go to the LSU campus and look for me at the biochemistry building!"

"But I have seen death here, and it hath not a kind face!" He had probably lost it.

"Just get the Screw over HERE Goddammit! NOW!"

Click. He picked himself out in his mania a bright shiny new Volvo coffin station wagon. He had to tidy up by pulling out a lovely yuppie family by their coattails and flop them onto the pavement, sprawling and still. Was he getting hardboiled against this sort of thing? The keys were still in it.

Down the road he saw people walking around, scurrying, yelling. Looters whose immune systems had enabled them to loot till doomsday. Which was in about 10 minutes. He drove towards them in the volvo. Peeling rubber as a Volvo will do when one punches it and swerve around like a maniac.

Inelegantly he went over bodies instead of around them; their impact resounding thawks and thuds. He was adjusting, alright. The pack of looters, black men, started running towards him as he came up on them going rather fast.

I've got to turn around, he thought. These guys are killers. They snarled and lunged for the Volvo as it did a 180 degree clumsy spin around and Florida Boulevard and the thugs suddenly became like backscreen projection in a Flintstones cartoon or any bad old movie. He hit one of them, he thought. One of them grabbed at the side of the Volvo. One threw something at him, and then one pulled out a pistol and aimed it at him as he sped away full throttle. The gun popped off repeated rounds and the back tail gate plunked with hot lead in it. He ducked and almost wiped his ass out heading towards the highway 61 which would get him onto the interstate and the hell out of harm's way.

He breathed tenfold, his heart pumping like this Volvo had a boom box that would put the Holy Ghost up and down his rib cage with double bass hip hop. He couldn't bear the dismal carnage, cars stopped in mid-death. The sickness, the disease just apparently came suddenly. Death surely had not a kind little face. But he was alive. And there was free food, free liquor, supplies, ammunition, guns, water, supermarkets brimming with more carnage in human from that the rotting meat section. No army regular types; they knew when to get the hell out. He was the one square dancing with the screwing devil. That Benedictus and Kyrie Elision had a good beat, but you can't dance to it. He sped down the Airline Highway past the wreckage piled up at various intersections. Car dealerships, Circle K marts, Steak and Egg Kitchen, Redneck nightclub, (More free liquor, there would be continuous ladies night, bring a dead friend and we'll give you all the liquor you can stand to wash away your iniquities, cleanse me of your sins. . .) So this is what it's like to relive "On the Beach." Was the whole country in this thing? By God, he did not think to check the television stations! What a moron. He didn't know if he was the last man on earth or not. But Kendra was there. Well, maybe he would get lucky, an end of the world extravaganza!

He went from that stray thought to practically spewing the Hail Mary's out the window with no one to listen to in this mindblowing anomaly.

He ambled by the skeletal metal cars prone on the interstate. A mottled array of abandoned cars where families were struck with the onslaught. He then throttled it and went past College, past Acadian Thruway. Up and over till he got off at Dalrymple. Through the LSU lakes, he slowed down to see something up ahead, a commotion. Activity of some sort, as the sun was going down and it appeared on any other sort of day, to be a nice day. He got closer to the red light.

It was a few sprawled corpses of what appeared to have been a family. A foreign family, Koreans. There were, some zombies, wild frenzied renditions of monstrous something or other, munching on these corpses. Harrison went into sort of shock. They didn't even bother to look up. One was ripping away the flesh from an arm, and another had eaten a good bit of a leg. What should he do? Stop them? Distract them. No. Stay away,he should run them over. The Zombies looked thin, gaunt. Their eyes subhuman in nature, that gone gaze. No sentient entity, no realization, just lower-animal instinct like common dogs. He throttled it, ran the light, and hit one of them dead on. They bounced and careened off, wounded mortally, the other casually kept devouring.

Harrison threw up the Church's fried chicken that he had heartily eaten an hour ago near the Bon Marche shopping center. Now he knew he wasn't exactly safe, as some other rustling in the marsh by the city lakes denoted more creatures lurking about. Zombies in the bulrushes, out of their mind, down-the road whacko. In the valley of the blind, the one-eyed man was king. Or so said H.G. Wells. But in his dystopia, or extreme situation that would remain so, Ricky knew that there was no wanderlust here. There was nothing beatific or remarkable about this situation. His head was throbbing with the anxiety, the remorse, the utter bleakness regarded.

it was untenable, as he careened into the gates of LSU past the Varsity theater. Other zombies or victims were slowing ambulating, crawling in agony on the pavement, in the last throes of death-grippe. He flew through the traffic lights, and ran out the car into the biochemistry building, fifth floor.

And there she was down the hallway, in her underwear, sobbing.

He saw now that there were corpses stacked up in one end, in white medical smocks. He ran up to her and saw that pouty look, but multiplied combinations and permutations tenfold worse. She was shaking visibly.

They hugged together for a good twenty minutes against the tide of bereavement. He hadn't realized it himself, but he was in shock. She unlocked from his hug and reached to the small table for a few syringes. She wiped those eyes many times as she readied the needle. 

Chapter Thirty Three

"You're in shock ...(she sobbed), let me shoot you up . . ." 50 milligrams of demerol. Puncture and immediate fulfillment of gratifying pleasure; a short commuting of his rather immense anguish. He was crying now, as the shock of everything he had witnessed had worn off. They both sat there, in the rank formaldehyde, with an audience of esteemed corpses of the finest medicine studies all gone, forsaken. The radio playing BLACK FLAG from a cassette, new wave manic guitar licks resounding forth as they hugged each other and they cried together.

The end of the world get-together. She hadn't the strength to explain why her colleagues were dead. They began passionately kissing each other, her gorgeous face stunned, both of them, stunned. Then she had almost forgotten . . .

"Here's your temporary immunity . . .." He looked at her, into those eyes.

"There is a cure?" She nodded ambiguously.

"Not exactly." She felt his forehead with her hand. "You look like you wouldn't have made it through the night. You have the signs: jaundice around the eyes, the increased blood pressure, the profuse sweating. In short, you have the symptoms of someone, just before they would normally succumb. The loss of memory, loss of some reasoning, that loss of certain nerve or motor functions." She said that as she regaled him sitting there in her cotton underwear, her little slip and panties. She shot him up with several of the temporary cures.

"How come the others didn't make it?"

She brooded.

"I didn't have it ready. I was erroneous in the mixture. I should by all rights be dead also."

"Is anyone else alive?"

"There are some folks staying in the Varsity Club Alumni quarters. They have been reprieved from . . . I shot them up." He kissed her. There were others.

As the radio chugged forth nihilistic chords, they were foretold of this blanket of death that now covered all of them. Ricky then felt some sensibility coming back to him. He was creaking in his joints with the sweetness of the demurral. He felt oddly at peace, down amongst the dead men, the wave of death that came because the toxin serum was days too late.

"There is one thing that I don't know that I am afraid to ask . . ," Ricky said in his deliria. He reached for that bottle of Benchmark bourbon and swigged it down as the formaldehyde began to seep into him in the ether-like funeral parlor pall in the hallway. There were still dissected specimens of the stygian eels in the adjoining labs, lit up as the lights flickered constantly.

"What's that sweetie?" She said as her lips pecked at him, sweetly kissing his face. His unshaven brownish stubble, his blond hair messed up, his handsome features. He had lost several pounds, enough to get him almost thin, gaunt, lean mean. He hadn't really eaten anything substantial; his appetite had waned for at least a month. Liquid diet of scotch and soda and cracked ice.

"Is the whole world like this?"

She grabbed the remote control and CNN came on with rushes of new anxiety and urgency. The reporters were whispering death like bearers of bad news. Pictures of videoed masse bodies, carrion all around familiar streets of Baton Rouge. Apparently the plague had swept Baton Rouge, West Baton Rouge Parish, up north to St. Francisville, down halfway to New Orleans and east to Hammond, Livingston Parish.

"You see the world, right? Does that answer your question?" She cried again and he too. They began kissing passionately as the tears rolled down their cheeks, as Mahler's Fifth Symphony blasted forth from the ghetto blaster. The misery of the second movement resounded as they thrust away at each other naked and quivering. Loving each other, striking an attitude of nihilistic love to combat the events.

She was still every bit as beautiful as . . . hell, he loved her. Even if they were the last people on earth, he loved her. Her blonde mane, her heaving breasts, her little butt brown as a nut, her lack of hips, her shape , her full lips, her eyes mesmerizing him from now till doomsday. The worst could be over. He was rambling away in his ratiocination dulled by the demurral running through his brain like cocaine. They thrust ever more so, and they both came together, like it was all written, in some book centuries ago. Everything was meant to happen this way. Refineries, nuclear power plants, all running with no one at the controls, nothing but corpse grinding machinery to run until a cog is pulled, broken, jamming the works.

Out in the demilitarized zone, amid the wailing sirens and that sour quiet of no one alive outside those gates of LSU where Ricky Harrison lay in a cot-bed with Kendra, all doped up and full of Benchmark bourbon, was chaos.

Kendra lay there in her tanned glory, her face wan and slack from the absorption of the sheer bluntness of the events. Tantamount to funeral pyres, bodies at once piled up, doused with Coleman fuel, kerosine and the barbecue of sweet smell of these Dixie sons and daughters rupturing in waves of yellow orange flame. In the etherization of the medical holding hall of dankness Ricky and Kendra lay next to one another in their deliriousness. Pills and syringes and textbooks lay about like scrolls, a language of symbols now worthless as the witnessing of the assault of the fallow land come to take back what was taken from it.

Kendra lay there with cottonmouth hangover blurriness in her fuzzy face of waking too early in her sheer fright. The fever gaunts of an all too true destiny as they lay together like the last man and woman on an eerie blue cloud-scape of land. The moon-glow skittering across the horizon in this surreal portrait landscape. Ricky nudged her with his soft fingers touching her pureness, her little blonde haired arms askant as her loveliness lay there in everlasting glory.

He got up and shot himself up with twice as much demerol as a man could stand in his blue period, his washed salad days here where he hadn't a right to be. Why him? Out there, all those refineries, those suburbs, that nuclear chemistry set of the centaurs of some mythological fable. Why was he able to huddle into a fetal position with the most siren-like vision of splendor since Rimbaud went to business college? He knew he was glad he wasn't dead. He went to the window of her office where a doctor's corpse lay stiff but comfortable, died smiling and thinking about sailing to a newer world. Hippocratic oath in his front pocket, medical miracle of those who could not even save their own mortal souls in this debacle. Ricky Harrison sat there next to the corpse in Kendra's chair. Smiling through the sweet demerol and the needle tossed to the floor in his delight, in his blindness against pain. As the huge billowing fires raged where Kaiser Aluminum, Dow Chemical and Exxon were burning like Pearl Harbor. With no one to needle with gauges and dampers and if they were lucky, the whole place would go up in flames before the new armies could control the giant napalm party across the Mississippi River which was magnificent from their seventh story lookout like it was the Hilton or the Pierre. Or the Lido in Venice where he could look with scorn and not amazement at the pyrotechnic fireworks display as these Wagnerian lightships of ghostly mysticism flickered in the vast distance as the sun began to come up from the east, to the opposite side. He stood there in his pristine nudity leaning next to the good doctor, gripping the chair and imagining the doctor mumbling epithets of candid holiness. Silent little orisons to bury the dead all round the city, sprawled in and out of McDonald's. Malls turned into Dog Mulch Glue factories, the Wal-Marts and K-Marts turning into allegorical vestiges of Dante's inferno. Suburbs now getting yuppie blood pouring into those well manicured lawns.

Up north the nuclear power plant was probably in disarray also, Monday morning meltdown. Burn a hole right through the earth like Sherman's March through Atlanta. What about Angola State Penitentiary?

The majestic lightning blew in arcs of white heat against the glow of the dawn. The Mississippi River had a black brackish stillness and the bridge sparkled as the metal girders flayed against the smoking morass of chaos.

Kendra got up sobbing immediately.

Harrison gripped her, stroked her back. She pulled away and then fell into his arms.

Chapter Thirty Five

There was a giant free for all going on between the incursion of faceless army breathing through filters. The army guys went into Dow Chemical in columns to try and patch up the nightmare gunmetal works gummed up and wilting pvc pipes. The fires were ongoing and it was a miracle that Exxon hadn't turned into a nuclear paddy cake with Mr. Death. The trucks were rumbling through the once innocent campus, now turned battlefield of casualties and carrion. Chimes Street was festooned with maggot infested punk fodder, dead. Silent hippies who had lost their angelic ways in their struggle for iconoclastic dharma-treks. A dog was hobbling on its two front paws, through the now drizzling scene. Not content to be slowly more paralyzed with the disease spreading through his nervous system. Army grave diggers and corpse grinders threw once promising men, children, women, and babies into the garbage trucks like they were sides of beef, on the hoof.

Kendra looked murkily out the window at two soldiers in air suits tossing a cache of bodies into the meat-mill ass-end of the green truck. She tossed her only manageably edible food into the corner of the room. Nothing would stay down for either of them.

On Government Street the Army guys were scabbing around for collectibles and worthwhile items in this fashionable free-for-all. Greedy GI soldier blues already tempted by the yard sale now offered to them by the folks at Dow Chemical. The guys were laughing through their templates and helmets and guffawing through their filters at the oblivious humor of it all. The regiment from Tylertown, Mississippi was having a field day amid the street meat now bloating a bit around the face in front of locked pawn shops, photo outlets, radio shacks and Joe Delpit's chicken shack. Death hath not a kind little face. The rail began peeling down now. Sergeants and rifle toting maniacs grinning half mad at the sooty irony of a gruesome eternal jest.

"I'm alive . . . that's all I know!" one man shouted as he walked into a pool room bar to slake his thirst in the miasma. (The lieutenant will never know I am confiscating this perfectly good bottle of Jack Daniels, he thought). Before he could tuck the bottle under his arm, a ruddy coal, wan face of sheer madness 10 times amphetamines and reds and bennies and acid and ecstacy bore down on him and he fell dead. Hacked to pieces by the ax wielding zombie who lost his way from the fold of dense Devil's swamp encampment where those who went in didn't come out again.

Jocular Smitty, the other army regular came upon a sight of unflinching horror. His new buddy had his head sliced much like a ripe melon with the stench of Jack Daniels and shards of broken glass glittering with the dim light all lacquered with darkish blood slowly dripping off his features now fragmented and unrecognizable. The zombie was heaving in the corner, a piece of arm in his grip. He was hysterically smiling with unknown sinister insanity as he came for Smitty, who was now hyperventilating. A radio tinnily played big band music. The Harry James orchestra swinging to that death beat dirge as Smitty counted in his head the seconds before he would be beat and hacked at like sweet pine. He lowered his head, his frightened stance, his legs shaking, as the zombie man came forward. He began urinating in his pants and singing "Not a mumblin Word."

The zombie appeared a scared sight to behold: His bluish face full of toxicity unparalleled . . . his mouth whittled back baring teeth of crooked invidiousness. Inside were still remnants of something undefinable. His hair was caked with some sort of plasmic substance, perhaps internal fluids, organ fodder, and mostly a full head of dried blood sustained. As if he bathed himself in blood in a most despicable design. As if they were in a British Hammer movie but for real. It was Nightmare on Elm Street personified evil incarnate! The zombie had ripped trousers, no shoes. Its feet were bloody trophies of uncaring treatment of walking through glass, other jagged shards without any remorse or feeling as to injury. The zombie lurched a bit, it's ambulation rather jerked. As if whatever caused the insane translation from human into soaked chemical plant on two legs, had begun to affect the motor and other neuron functions. It rather dragged one of it's legs in a sort of wounded mentality. It bent over slightly. It's breathing was irregular, gasping, wheezing. One would guess they didn't have much of a lifespan How could they still survive the effects of the pandemic disease, while ordinary citizens were dropping like flies on a crudwagon?

Smitty didn't see that spark of hope. There was total despair in the countenance. The radio continued belting out the "String of Pearls." Smitty saw the zombie put the ax down on the floor, dropping it with its melted burned forearms almost melded to its tattered shirt, which hung about like Bruce Banner (the Hulk's) clothes. The boggle-eyed subhuman transformed from mortality into dread.

The Hyde creature with the mark of the Beast seemed to come forward with curiosity. It was insanely smiling like some heavy metal slayer in the gaping jaws of this broiling London pan of intense heat. The stifling claustrophobic room now smelled surely and sweetly of death. The corpse continued to issue, trickle forth more fluid. Blood puddled up in a sticky insolent lake of fire. It came to him and sniffed the man. It was Smitty's helmet that fascinated him. It grabbed the hard hat off and it seemed to like the fluorescent stickers stuck like decals to it. Bright shiny objects would tend to form attraction to someone who had virtually nothing left of the cognizant brain portion.

Smitty tried to shake the zombie's hand, a white man who appeared to have once been something decent. The zombie took a big bite out of Smitty's shoulder. Then "Crack" went an army buddy's rifle which hit square between the brains, at the high arch of the bridge of the nose. It crushed his skull and splattering the brains and other soupy mixture all over Smitty's body.

At a perimeter a few blocks down closer towards the Mississippi there were army troops patrolling through the new stench ridden throngs, not seeing much of anything. A young black, just a boy jimmied the lock on a comic book shop on Main Street right next to the Thirsty Tiger. He holed himself in there reading X-men, mourning his mother, who had zombied out in that insular but deathlike grip accorded zombies. It left them alive for a while, the disease of the eel-things. The venom from their whistling lips puncturing the zombies in that huge nest in Devil's swamps. It enabled the zombies some sort of lucky immunity of a base origin, a primitive salve, a little unknown cure, a bump of medicinal luck that had somehow kept them alive. The trance-like state of the "Zombie two step," a dragging of limbs, a paralyzation, a walking death, a touched and tainted brain fever. He was reading the Dark Knight Returns, with MC Hammer blaring like some sonorous fog horn hip hopping with a methodical madness. The zombies came cavorting in, shattering the windows with their pummelling bleeding fists. Caked with shards of tiny jagged cuts, it was as if through their numbing loss of sensation, that they really dug hurting themselves. With glee as if they were criminally insane.

They were bringing pieces of carcasses of animal and man back to the swamp. It was a long trek, an underground connection, a path trod. Streets of dead near those shotgun shacks in Scotlandville, near Exxon, where the zombies stumbled like army ants carrying grains of sand. They were somehow redolent of each other's actions, like some empathetic symbiotic knowingness amongst the new breed. The chrysalis however cryptically evil, was these sickly creatures summoned back to the caves and pipes a dripping sewage, over the land fill. Only to keep their host creatures, the eel-things, happily fed with the consumable arms, limbs, internal organs, raw and safely minced about in their gnashing teeth. They ate there in silence, in some misbegotten nightmare.

The army men had shot a few zombies without realizing that they could have been brunch for them, because they mistook them for plain looters. Finally, orders came forth through the ranks of this military city staked off. Vehicles moved about like a war zone. Because the zombies were killers, they began shooting the creatures on sight. They wouldn't necessarily go down right away, only if a head shot. The bodies were caked with lime to kept the odors down. The bloated exquisite corpses of the naked and the dead were trekked out of there.

The army folks seemed to have it under control for now. They were all given Kendra's successful serum. She had, through the direction of the medical colony, given the formula to the military who together with medical teams made large batches of the wonder serum to all possible people.

The zombies were only operating on acute pain, unrest, triumphing indelible madness. Seeing army guys with those masks and plastic hoods in their biochemical protectant suits was a bit like sitting in the middle of a set of a cheap 50's xenophobic horror monstrosity. Like the road company of "Andromeda Strain" hit the local theaters. 

Chapter Thirty Six

Up the muddy Mississippi north, it curved sharply this way and that like a coiled snake, all the way to St. Francisville. The largest Southern Prison was a malevolent morgue for some, for others it was unmanned by the staff, guards. And some of the men were getting out.

The Dixie mafia types, if they were capable of hustling phone scams for hundreds of thousands of dollars, then they were surely going to get out if the staff suddenly up and died in their shiny boots. Some of the popular were blue and cold in their state issue uniforms. Their lax bodies once rippling from extensive workouts were now expanding with inert gases like a magic trick in their torsos emitting the foulest odors. The guards had become half dead, half delirious. Somehow one inmate got free and took advantage of the situation. He began summarily letting free the most coldblooded maniacs of every race, creed and color onto the East Feliciana Parish.

"Mohawk Joe, you're with me?" one of the pack said. No dogs out to sniff them down. They were free as drinking water now. One or two of them took to taking out some revenge from the crud pulled on dem in the joint, croaking the offending party.

"Come on, lets go." The murderers spilled into the countryside where the disease had trickled but not entirely blanketing that parish with pandemic, just a smattering that somehow randomly slew different men. And left others alive.

"What de fug's going on around here?" one man asked. They were running to a nearby farmhouse, where they summarily stole two cars and a truck and only beat up the folks a bit for their trouble.

"Man, hadn't you heard? The fuggin world is a ending! You's looking at the only men alive in da world now. Screwbrain!"

"That black man's lying his ass off . . ." He had the terminal look of a fate worse than the Red Hat cell block where they house a man before he would fry in that antique electric chair.

"Bullcrud!" he laughed, and then knew he believed the fugger. The men were on their own now. Some buddies took off in a dodge Charger, not a bad set a wheels for a man just got out da joint. The men in the truck were aiming to kill that fifth a wild turkey. They backslapped the old woman before they raped her sorry country ass. Old woman. Wasn't exactly a fresh harpy for the boys all taking turns with it, getting their jollies while the old man whimpered before they coldcocked his sorry grandpa ass.

"There weren't no cars on the road, no 18 wheelers fulla Willie Nelson asses, no fuggin nobody. The world musta fuggin ended." Come da rapture, like Mohawk Joe didn't believe that Biblical crud they were forcing on a man! Judgement day. Was he worry he killed his whole coonass family at the Oil Show? There ain't no fuggin Jesus. Ain't no such thing. He done wiped his manhood when he came outa that old woman's business. Was da best piece a white ass he ever done had in 7 fuggin years. There was more; you're is only as good as your last piece a cuz.

The prisoners spilled onto the clean land. The highway 61 was 20 mile down before they could get outa that fuggin pasture land near the Nuclear River Bend Plant. The prison now only housed pieces of bad meat. Badassed men who died in those stinking white walls, never getting out. Worse than a fuggin fire swept through here.

In Zombie Village, Baton Rouge, Target Zero for the human meltdown of death and limed corpses stack all pretty in a row, there were various strange assorted stragglers and rover packs scurrying through who were not zombies yet. They were sort of in that limbo, that middle ground where they had enough venom in them through weird mishaps, contact however obliviously ignored, and they weren't zombie full fledged.

Three pre-teens outa whack with Walkman's bejeweling their skulls, with thunderbolts emblazoned in each, were in that superior position of having caught a zombie bareassed munching on a pretty fair-sized dog, a mutt who had been dead long before of the plague and now a noon meal.

"You sure this dude ain't getting loose?"

"Look at him! This zombie motherscrewer don't even know who he is!"

They had him tied up at the self-service pump at the Circle K. They had been stealing everything, mostly beer and pints and candy and stuff. The monster zombie had been unconscious for a while, and that was when they had the good fortune of tying him to the Super Premium. Chris was the one that said he wanted to douse the man with gasoline and torch him up like a stoked piece of soaked charcoal. These kids had somehow wangled a trip back into town, sorta too crud as all stupid to think that they might actually die from the plague. The rub was that they already had the symptoms, so they might anyway.

Jimmy was gorging himself with candy and trying to feed the zombie. It looked like it was once a good American, a citizen of high moral character, before his brains turned to shake-a-pudding and he started crudting all over himself, and eating pieces a people's faces, and chewing on bloated German Shepherds which was a smorgasbord for this sorryass middle-aged piece a crud.

"We'd better bail, you screwers . . .." But Jimmy was going to have a little fun. This was growing tiresome, lighting firecrackers in the zombie's hands and him trying to put the black cats in his wailing mouth. The fuse would spark and the thing would explode every time before the zombie screw could get it all the way in his mouth.

"Frankenstein, you been watching television?," Chris asked, feeling that cherry kick form Vick's Formula 44 and a pint a rum that made him wanna puke all woozy.

"See, he don't even know who he is." They reached into his back pocket as he lunged back and forth like a rodeo rider, his teeth snapping, his face fulla meanness like a cur.

"Looka this! This motherscrewer was a State CPA supervisor?"

"What da screw is that?," Chris asked. The other little boy had passed out at the TRON machine. He got this close to top-score-rule before he retched beer up and took a little snooze. In his surfer dude pants and Air Jordans he had pissed used malt liquor all over himself. These little suburban badasses were no older than ten years.

"What's the worst thing we can do to this old piece a zombie dweebie?"

"Man, let him go!," the other skateboarder said. "So he can eat our screwin feet and hands and rip out your heart and eat it in front a you like Indiana Jones Temple a fuggin doom?" He laughed. He reached for a tepid quart of Miller Light. "He likes Miller Light."

The zombie swilled it as it poured around his throat and into his soiled ragged clothes smelling like a waste dump mostly.

"This modderscrewer stinks like Dogcrud!"

"You would too if you were eating dead bodies and crud!" The little dudes who once revelled in PeeWee's Playhouse and graduated to daddy's Playboys hidden in the bureau had somehow stepped over that little imaginary line.

"Watch this crud!" He took that Miller quart and broke it against the concrete. He held it up to the zombie's face, not touching it.

"No man! That man will . . . EEEEEEYUUUUUU!!!!!

"WOW! Screw!!! NEAT!!!

The zombie screwed his face into the jagged edges. Once again, zombies proved that they couldn't feel pain. The central nervous system had shorted out long ago, only now giving mixed signals from the guacamole brain.

Blood trickled down into the man's shirt. His face was hideously flushed with lacerations. He only smiled as his face had nearly been severed off. Jimmy had never seen anything like that wasn't in an action movie. Jimmy holding the bad end of a broken bottle and a grown man purposely cutting himself badly. Like this was better than beating GALIGA, Dude!

The man smiled with his lower lip hanging by a thread of skin. Smiling with less than half a face, losing blood like a good zombie dweebie!

"Mister Zombie! Do you want to take a bath?" Chris laughed. Spiraling into a violent rush, the zombie was doomed now.

Chris picked up the gas pump of regular unleaded.

"Do you want to take a shower?" The zombie didn't understand exactly, he just smiled and pulled that lower lip off, now detached in his hand. The oozing lesions of serious lacerations, punctures that glass would tend to make even on a zombie's face, were oblivious, like a sincere pleasure-pain more like a good shock feeling.

The zombie smiled. Chris smiled, "Coming right up mister! Go get a lighter Jimmy!"

"I'm already ahead of you, Chris! Asswipe!" They laughed manically as the clear yellow gasoline fell about the zombie, soaking into his clothes and skin. He smiled with a mouth now much wider. The gas was being swallowed now by the zombie.

"It must taste kinda good, huh Mister Zombie!" They laughed again, their pubescent tremolo voices crackling with delight. Jimmy came back with the lighter.

"We can't just torch him up! Dude! No!"

Chris shrugged him away with one arm.

"No, You listen dude! He is already dead by swallowing the gasoline! That's poisonous." The zombie's stomach was going like a cuisinart from hell.

He began vomiting up paws and fur and a human ear.

They looked down at the sidewalk at the ear.

"Gross! You're dead, Mr. Zombie! Can you say DEAD?" The zombie gnarled at them. Intense hate, that's the only thing that really lasts!

"Okay, I ain't gonna do it!," Jimmy smiled and Chris put the hose back on the holder. Chris chugged a Cherry sloe gin half pint like he was trying to be a grown up or something. Too much too fast. Their skateboards stood standing up at the curb. Chris flicked the Bic lighter over and over. The zombie was mesmerized by it!

"Hey, just like YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN! He likes fire!" And he handed it to the zombie. The zombie used his few remaining stumped fingers and flicked it.

Flick. Flick. Flick . . . He dropped it accidentally. Moaning and screeching with glee like a mongoloid in Wal-Mart with a piece of styrofoam or in toe Hong Kong toy section, getting all stiff over Hot Wheels.

"See, Mister Zombie? I'm your puppet Master . . ." Chris and Jimmy laughed and Chris gave him the lighter again. Flick . . . Flick, (FLAME ON!!!) And the zombie became immolation like a walking flaming carrot! Like James Arness as the Thing in "THE THING." Like on TEE VEE!!!!

"FAR OUT"! "Gee!," they exclaimed as barbecue filled the air with sweet dixie melody. The Zombie was flash frying and smiling at his own burnout! He fell down chained up still, and the boys took off now running with their skateboards in tow, as they now feared the whole Circle K would go up like a roman candle!

"Whoa!," they jeered as they hauled punk ass outa that broken glass parking lot. They could find another convenience store where there wasn't no screwin' GI Joe's screwin around and chasing them off. Telling them to get the screw home asking them what was wrong with their screwing parents! They cheered wildly on their skateboards for at least a quarter mile before their final destination! The fuggin Mini Mall! Cowabunga Dude! This was gnarly! Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

Ninja Turtles could kick Adolescent Radioactive Black Belt Hamster ass any day of the week, Chris thought. Every comic book ass knew that. They looked behind them and the zombie and the Circle K just blew up, like a huge screwin hundred feet high pop! and wham! and more of the same, and fire all over the place!

"WOW!" was the final judgement call accorded their barbecue Mister CPA accountant with the State. Asswiper, Chris thought!

Chapter Thirty Seven

"I need to screw a cutie babe!" was all that Kenny the rotsie screwer could say, as he pulled the shirt off every dead girl's corpse he found in the street.

"You're a sick motherscrewer! Get the fawk away from those dead women!"

Kenny rubbed the breast as the bra came unloose! Creamy still but cold. This one over here was fine off her ass, even dead! It was almost the same. Almost. He went around the corner from where the Army guys were eating Big Macs at the McDonald's amidst the McCorpses. He found a real Debbie Gibson cutie miniature girl who was still whimpering! He was gonna poke her!

She moaned and tears were in her eyes. Also, flecks of mucus or some secretion in those corners of her eyes. She was a bit delirious and would probably succumb. There were dried bits of vomit at a corner of her petite anguished mouth. Her sweet complexion wan, her eyes swollen a bit, her face extolling pain from her feverish body.

He unbuttoned her blouse a button at a time. Those other screwers were still at the McDonalds. He got that last button unbuttoned.

"We are gonna give you medical help now! What's your name?"

"Tiffany . . . St. Amant" . . . She smiled through her bleary view, her little sweet eyes barely opened. He saw that little white bra with those little creamy breasts nestled in each of them. He gasped, breathing heavily. He reached in and felt her right breast, that nipple! Oh, he had to look at it. He pulled the edge of the bra cup away from her breast. She pulled her legs slowly back and forth, muttering "I gotta return my Prom dress. Gotta Go to the Ester Lauder store, for a facial . . ." He rubbed that little pink nipple back and forth and then commenced to unhooking that hook in the back of her bra. Her little back was writhing and she might not have known what he was doing. Fair's fair in love and war! Martial city had turned into Fat City! He had her bra mostly off, those two breasts poking out of the shirt. He unzipped her pants and felt down there, that little mound of venus. She moaned with pain and looked up at him. She looked into his eyes. His wanton rotz weeny eyes as he pulled her Calvin jeans to her ankles. And pulled those panties off and he felt that little tuft and it wasn't wet. He poked her anyway; his little rotz member invaded the demilitarized zone of a valley girl extraordinary. He was getting that pumping primed cunt and she recoiled finally realizing what was going on. She wasn't a virgin. Valley girl sluts! He sucked that breast. She was still alive. This wasn't a bad thing he was doing as he felt her tighten up and wince that pretty pouty little whitish blue face.

"Stop! Stop!" she said.

"I'm helping you get better!"

He came inside her and pulled out of her, and she lapsed back into unconsciousness.

He was pulling up his pants when the other swinging dorks in the field came over to him.

"Man! Look at that!"

"Womanhood!" They looked at Kenny the rotz bastard nerdscrew.

"You didn't fawk her!"

"No!" he said. His face could not tell the truth.

"Man I tell you I didn't!

"You sorry ass piece a crud! You screwin loon!" He spit to the side.

"You are sick as crud!" "You fat screw!"

"Cheesedork!"

"Well" said the other boys, and they shook their heads with shame.

A pause. Silence. The mall was as quiet as a church . . .

"Sloppy Seconds!" One man cried.

"No!" "Screw you!" "I got it!" They all pulled their clothes off. She was good for about as much swinging dork as they could sling at her! Those little courtesies were important; offering your bunk buddy sloppy seconds. Those little courtesies, Kenny the dork thought. He watched Harold the fat screw hump the little valley girl's sweet ass. Semen dripped off her little tight belly recoiling with pain.

Guess you ain't gonna get that facial?" Huh Sweetmeat!" Kenny said and they had left him some McMuffin's that tasted like ratcrud. He chewed and thought, maybe there will be some more womanhood roundabout here. Even screwing a zombie would be good enough for me, he thought! Na!

Booger Thompson and his wife were buck naked in the Wal-Mart on the predominantly white trash end of Florida Boulevard. They had left town just like all the others. But at the Shelter in Tylertown, Mississippi they were done inoculated with that temporary immunity whatchacallit, and were done told that they wasn't gonna die, at least no time soon. So they done packed their two kids from Rita and came back. They was from his wife's second marriage to that ass welder who used to beat up on Rita so bad. They came back to town to get some good pickings where a fellah didn't need no Mastercard, or Discover Card with that 22% outrageous stuff. They done hit the K-Mart already.

It was Rita's idea about getting buck naked in Wal-Mart. There wasn't no one alive around and besides, they done got some of the best Sensimilia weed that a working man could afford. There was this LSD ranch out in Bunkie, Louisiana, near all them horse ranches, and Burl had done scored them a whole hundred pounds. They had been smoking like chimneys and the kids just sat in the back seat of their Dodge Station wagon with the window's cracked so's they could breathe. Rita didn't think it was bad in front of the kids. But they done left the kids off at Toy's R Us and told them to pick out as much toys as they could carry in a buggy and wait for them to pick em up.

Rita said: "I always wanted to run through a Wal-Mart buck naked, stoned on mushroom soup and shopliftin'." They done used to fence Japanese cameras but this was biscuits and gravy. This beat hell outa when Booger's parole officer done made him take a drug test and he failed. Or when Booger got caught selling hot stereos in New Orleans four months ago.

"Them army grunts better not come round here is all I gotta say!" he told her standing naked in the cross aisle.

Rita laughed at Booger, his business all hanging out in Guns and Ammo. He done busted the glass and stole him about four hunting rifles and a bright-shiny-new 9 mm automatic. Rita squirted Elizabeth Taylor perfume all over her spavined saggy-ass body. He had that hungry look in his eyes.

"Come over here baby," he said. She saw he was all frisky and before they knew it, they were doing' it on a fake Danish Stratolounger in Furniture. The muzak changed to "Mandy" when he strewed stuff all over.

"You Always finish too fast, baby!," she wailed, lying there, looking at his fat old body. He got up and didn't say nothing and started putting on a nice suit with the price tags still dangling. She done had two grocery carts full of those tacky t-shirts and then some nice knit shirts, too.

That's when she saw a woman standing over in lingerie. But it weren't no screwin woman standing up to the four way mirror, it was a fuggin transvestite man, a bald frail man with earrings bejeweling him, munching on a century old po-boy form the putrescent deli, he was pulling off his brassiere with no titties underneath, and shaved all over his body, and he didn't even see her. Her lined countenance with stoned eyes like goliath unwavering, she wasn't exactly horrified, she done commenced to giggling . . .

"Hey you!:, she yelled. He still didn't hear her, he had a walkman on playing some Cole Porter, done swirling outa then chink little earplug-phones on his fruit bald head, he was kinda dancing and kicking like a Rockette, except he didn't have the leges for it. He reached over and carefully cradled some brandy from a decanter than he done found in accessories for the kitchen. In face she done walked a bit closer and he had himself a miniature place is what it was, little doilies, chairs, a fake colonial coffee table and chairs and flowers all round he done stole form the horticulture, he had immersed himself in a somewhat jejune air of class afforded Wal-Mart shoppers who had an authentic taste for near imitation class. The opulence of that lingerie section, all the teddies, bra and panties scattered all round like it was that scene in GREAT GATSBY when Daisy cries when Jay Gatsby starts throwing about 50 brand new shirts picked out by a man in London for the fall collection all cascading around the bedroom in that movie with Robert Redford and Mia Farrow. He done set himself up a video CD player electronic home entertainment center, and there were turkey legs scattered about the floor rather incensing his guests.

She done walked up right behind him in the four way mirror, her breasts flopping about like hanged men dangling form scaffolding, her varicose veins riddling her tree trunk legs, her below-navel gut sported a huge scar form one of them tubal pregnancy things where they gotta cut you open and cut out your utopian tubes and put em in a jar and show em to you so you're know you ain't gonna have now more kids, and her privates were endowed with a widow's peak of hair that ran all the way up to the navel, the pooch of her belly a girdle-maker's nightmare. She pulled those chink earphones off his fruit head and he done seen her in the three way, his skirt pulled down to his lovely turned ankles and his no-nonsense panty hose giving a sort of tan and smoothness about like the way Joe Namath's legs done did in that commercial. He eked out a little shriek.

"Aa! Oh!," he said humbling and embarrassed even through the veil of tinctured brandy spilling around his little frame and insides.

"What the screwin hell you doing here?," she asked. He didn't say nothing but sorta stammered, he couldn't get out a single syllable, or string of em, to make a real English word.

"Look my old man is coming over here and he's a gonna blow your nuts off with a pump shotgun!"

"Ma'am, I didn't mean any harm . . . I'll leave . . ."

"Well, you're oughta be ashamed a yourself . . . wearing women's underwear an stuff. Are you on o them queer psycho killers or something?," she said cautiously her lack of better brain matter and current knowledge of watching Dirty Harry movies or such with gay people froth as homicidal murderers as a frustrating conclusion to an alternate lifestyle unpopular with Jerry Falwell's Heritage Bible Academy and Reverend Jimmy Lee Jenkins' horndog womanhood-slinging ministry had her perplexed, although she done used to hang around Haight Ashbury with a bunch a queers in the Summer of Love, they used to wanna try and screw her and she was doing way to much acid, and they were nice people, fit in just right with the hallucinogenic hayride, making it weirder, the better.

"Ma'am, I was just taking advantage of the open store, I didn't think anyone else was here . . . Please don't shoot!," he begged with that melodious sophisticated kinda tone.

"You is a queer, right?" she said through her long crooked teeth, gaps in her mouth from her brain done split in half on some crystal meth two month binges where she almost fried her brain again, not eating nothing and shooting up between her toes, she was so hard up to find a genial vein left.

"No ma'am, I just . . . like dressing up in smart outfits . . ., he laughed nervously. She gazed at him through a rose-colored chianti bottle depression era glass all smoky looking, that was her views of seeing the real world with that sense strong ass pot that had a kick like a stubborn mule done kicked her straightaway in the head! She gave that knowing junkie kinky laugh, now just realizing that he was staring at her abundant breasts, the nipples having expanded like that teat end of a helium balloon, ripe about to fall off, you know. He kinda had that look, do you know that look when a man contently gazes at a naked woman all pretty and stout like and there's a waterbed where he can dive in and she could throw the man a life preserver. That ocean storm of wobbling cyclic waves bouncing off the frame of the water bed, and commence to giving her 9 inches of real manhood.

You know, this guy, iffun he wasn't wearing women's nightclothes on himself, he looked pretty good. That striking face, he didn't have no hair, but he had himself a good body . . .

"Baby! Whatcha doing?, Booger said, his red prickled face and lit up slits a foggy eyes caught a sight a this man, and he done cocked that shotgun at his nuts . . . He had been target practicing in the washing machine dept, he done plugged himself a few Maytags, bagged a few Frigidaires . . .

The Wal-mart lay in ruins, edified, still the allegory, the prehensile legendary setting as if it were Stonehenge itself, incarnate. The junkie darlings, the international white trash couple had tied the transvestite to a makeshift plywood pillory (it used to be a goodly housewares shelf) and was summarily castrated, and with much aplomb and wholesome glee. The couple left him in tissue bleeding form the waste down, dripping and unconscious, their faces radiant with pharmaceutical offerings from the robbed K-Mart pharmacy where no one could beat their prices. Laudanum when cooked down was the greatest thing God ever put on this earth, said William Burroughs, the couple were draping each other with potting soil and frolicking african violets, Hydrangeas, ferns palmy in the drenching cognac splashed about his remains, as the cleansing muzak riddled about the hollow inner circle that the Wal-Mart had become.

Chapter Thirty Eight

Above Baton Rouge on Highway 61 a town called Jackson was noted for its mental facility. It had not changed one iota since Uncle Earl Long was Governor. He himself had been committed to the Mandeville mental Hospital once.

The rumor that Julia Adams heard on her shift of bathing, stripping beds, and feeding mongoloids was that the black men took them in the back and beat them up. One can get awfully pissed trying to help the poor retards and all they wanna do is beat their meat as if all sense God gave em was knocked out of them. One never saw something more horrible than spending a week on her shift. She had that look of hard work about her. She would undoubtedly spend the rest of her life mopping floors, smelling vaguely of Clorox. She did a hell of a job of it, too. The state gave her 850 bucks a month. When she was on unemployment she didn't have no more than 5000 bucks a year in which to feed, care for her little one, the meanest SOB in his playschool. Her ex was a heroin addict on the lam in Chicago. He often would call and leave distressing messages while on his cherry highs, the rigging of his mindset via the heroin Jones.

She stayed on when the other staff mostly left out of there to the internment camps in scenic Natchez. She was caring for the whole degenerate class of unfortunates wailing and sobbing and screaming. She thought she was going crazy. They would try and grab her. She would have to give them a good RAP across the face. Hell, they didn't know who they were or that they even existed. She might have been better off as assistant manager of that Sicily's Pizza in Hammond.

Rufus kept coming on to her, trying to get her ta just pull that shirt off and let him diddle around with her little scraggly blonde self. But she kept a telling him to lay off.

"I know y'all take these things back in the back and beat em up. I done seen them black eyes and bruises. So iffun you don't lay off me, we gonna have words. Or I am gonna blow your black man ass to hell" she said with a christian conviction.

But Rufus didn't care none. He was a big guy. He would just laugh and continue to harass her. Until she went ahead and locked him in the pit with a whole naked swarming mass a waterheads, all scary looking and all. She didn't let him out and had taken his keys, until he promised. See, she was all scared that her little rugrat kid was gonna get sick of that biblical plague and all. So her momma and TJ (her beloved child) went to Natchez. They would call every once in a while saying, "Come on up here. Leave them creatures be. There will be some state workers showing up sooner or later. You ain't even had ya'lls shots yet. If you ask me, they ought to no t even waste them shots on those jugheaded waterbabies. God just screwed up on them unfortunate idiot kids, they don't live long no how."

And Julia would say, "Momma, they is already dropping off. I have a stack of these retards out in the back behind building A12. Dead smelling' bodies of these unfortunates. I done called the state board about coming up here with those inoculations . . . what ever ya'll call em . . ."

(She didn't know how to pronounce em and all . . .). She would go home and wouldn't even think about bedroom business. Her sex drive was all bottled up from staying up 20 hours in a row on a triple shift caring for these jack offs who wouldn't stop screaming. But she done got Rufus to stop beating em, and the other black men. Cause she done went ahead and slept with Rufus, cause she wanted to. But now all the other men wanted a little bit, too. So what was she gonna do? Rufus done wound her wristwatch. Darn, she didn't remember how good it was. Them laying up in the staff office all naked, Rufus sipping on some Mad Dog. Her momma would kill her if she knew she done slept with a black man. Now what would happen if she done had a mixed baby? She had done stopped taking them birth control pills. She even thought she might be afflicted and maybe start getting mongoloid-like from serving these jacking off waterheads! Save her soul!

Then when she done finally got some relief help from the state workers, that's when the massacre occurred. Them prisoners done wiped out the whole ward! It was all over the news, her hand ta God!

It was a good thing that she was laying over at home with a shotgun laying by the vcr. Cause she heard it on the news. That very next day after she done finished her last triple shift they told her to go home. To call em back at the end of the staggered shift week to come back to work. The four prisoners done came over there in Jackson which was a little bitty town (ain't nothing there but a Sinclair Gas Station, she done remembered that green dinosaur sign there she done past it every day coming to the mongoloid bin). She didn't like to talk about those retarded unfortunates, especially since they was all shot in cold blood. Like hogs in a pen slaughtered.

Her momma called home from Jackson fearing TJ's poor little mother, her only daughter, was kilt and maybe even raped by those godless cons. But she sighed a relief like she was singing at the Grand Old Opry. She got that disability for that plate in her head cause they had done put it in wrong and all and that was what was causing her those migraines and hearing tiny voices in her ears. She done talked with Julia, and told her "mind you don't go back there, withun' out they put men on the road to the mongoloid farm with a shotgun each!"

The sheriffs had got inoculated and they had that task force thing trying to round up cold hearted killers loose. She done even heard a rumor that they was gonna go around wherever everyone had hightailed it outa state to Texas and Mississippi camps. To rape and steal and take money and stick up places where folks was maybe in a few weeks gonna come back and start their lives all over again. Excepting of course unless them scientist doctors didn't find that permanent cure. When they done shot her with a hypodermic needle. Now that done scared her. She didn't want to catch no AIDS from no needles that drug addicts and fruit junkies done been popping their veins with. Jabbing her with no dirty needle! This plague thing was bad enough. She done been going to a little pentecostal church outside Natchez. Where that minister kept a talking about Revelations, the end of the world. How all of them is going to feel when Judgement day comes and the Lord will be there. Taking names and kicking ass and deciding who will be spirited off to heaven just in the nick a time while all them godless humanists, Russian commies, and homosexual fruits and crooks, will all burn in hell, once this plague done come down. The Earth was gonna just turn into a prehistoric world once again, she was done told. Like the Garden of Eden. She done been reading her scripture. Smoking Viceroys at lest three pack a day. She couldn't even get no decent "National Enquirer" and the "Weekly World News" to find out about what Liz Taylor and all them others was doing. She felt like this world was still alright. It was just here in Louisiana for some reason that God wanted everybody ta die. That preacher done said that the reason Denham Springs was flooded every year come Spring was cause them humanist scientists done kept launching them Space Shovels, into outer space. This lady done told her seriously at the tire store in Natchez that was one of the reasons for the Apocalypse. Men tamper in God's Domain, she said. But Julia was safe. She secretly hoped Julia wasn't gonna ever get bothered by them black manes on the staff of the night shifts for trying to get in her daughters pants. Now if they was white and didn't have no prison records or nothing it would be a whole nuther ball game. She knew TJ needed a daddy. One who didn't shoot up with junkie needle works. Hell, he was probably a fruit dying of AIDS. He might as well move to San Francisco, junkie screwer!

She mumbled ever since all this was started. But she was on God's football team, Reverend Wiper done said. Just keep making that Vow of Faith, and God'll get you anything you wanted. A million dollars, spiritual contact with Elvis, (he musta been joshing her, it was kinda weird the way that fat little bald headed man could be so serious one minute talking about holocausts and rats and plagues and disease and John's trials and tribulations, and then joke around like he didn't have enough sense to unzip his britches to take a piss!) 

Chapter Thirty Nine

Billy and his full time night woman, the acid squaw he packed named Gail, and their new dope connection just made it back into town.

"This is the partying place to be!," Billy said as he peaked on a couple of blotters and saw crud as they tooled down I-12 at about 100 miles per second.

"Look at the fuggin' smorgasbord!," he said. Nobody was saying anything. No time to worry about that. He hit the Sherwood Forest exit at about Mach 1 in his El Camino. The classic-rock station played antediluvian heavy metal. Slashing fuzztones coincided and bounced all over their interior. Hell, he could see 'em.

Gail laughed. She must be having one of those, again. He looked after her when she tripped weird. The car hit light speed. Billy couldn't see too good. The Cuervo he snorted to take the edge off his sharp tattered soul made him see the road all fuzzy, swirling around. He couldn't focus through the windshield; he focused AT the windshield. God gave a man the right to move his molecules around until psychedelic substances came forth and they were good! This acid guy next to him and Gail had last seen sanity back in 1985. Just a glimpse before he ran into a Catholic Church with nothing on but a Golf Cap. He had run up to the Altar to look for that bone fragment from a Saint 1700 years ago. He told them once that he knew it was there somewhere. He remembered from his Catechism classes, which was in the Age of Reformation.

He asked the priest that if he would "Chase him around the vestibules and the stations of the cross he just might get lucky and catch him by the organ!" Then he squatted on top of the Altar, ordained by the people in the audience. He commenced to defecate right smack dab into the Chalice, splattering the wine as the holy fecal bits fell. Then he started yelling that "Pope Innocent the 3rd, when he wasn't having so many orgies, said that "Crud was vile spittle." According to what he told Billy, the altar boys melted into statues with stigmata coming forth. A song came on: "The Long and Winding Road."

"Hey! That's my all time favorite noise! The Beatles! I got blister's on my fingers!"

Gail began seeing Flying Wombats like as big as that ROC in the Popeye Cartoon of Ali Baba and the 40 thieves.

They all sang in ancient Sumerian tongue, vessel instruments of God.

"The Long and Winding Road" played at least 14 times, according to the scriptures. Blessed be the name of God. The Holy Mystery could not be understood, and the Holy Mystery will never be understood! That was the beauty of it, Billy thought. In biblical pageantry, Billy saw camels and three wise men as he slowed down on the machmeter and the car finally touched the Earth.

"Look, it's zombie Wisemen!"

"There ain't no such thing as Zombies! Unless you try and perceive that they have a whole community somewhere."

Billy recapitulated for the sixth time since they flew through Livingston Parish, holding their breath all the way. They breathed once in a while, involuntary vagus nerve and all that.

"They have discovered a whole new way of life, not like our antiquated system."

Gail suddenly laughed as the acid dealer squeezed her breast as Billy smiled at her. Her nipples turned into eyeballs, and winked at him like Henry Matisse drew a painted beautiful eye converging at the zenith of what it was all about in the first place.

The acid man, whose name was never really remembered because he himself had forgotten that he even had a name, sucked on Gail's white breast like Tintorelli's "Madonna With Child."

Gail sang "Onward Christian soldiers," and suddenly the rock station began issuing forth through sinister invisible penetrating electrical X-Ray's, Gregorian Chant, with a disco beat.

"You know the ancient monks used to suck on microdots!," Gail cried like Aeschylus at the Olympics. The incognito acid man started dissolving and then solidifying as his lips nurtured her nipple.

The gregorian chant blew in multicolored layers, like sheets of sound. Like John Coltrane.

"Is he sucking your right nipple?"

Gail laughed. She knew Billy was looking through his eyes at her as he stomped it through red lights. The accelerator pedal was a time machine clutch, and would take then a million years into the future.

"I think he really is. He told me he used to go back in time. Go visit people and start lynch mobs throughout europe. Do nasty things to famous people to screw them over real bad."

Hee, hee she giggled. Shake a pudding swirling around, banana flavored medulla served with a beverage of your choice.

"That's right," the acid head said.

"I used to go to the Louvre, the New York Museum or Art. And right in front of God and everybody, I would find a Gauguin with great big aesthetic titties and toss off."

"I tell you, I graduated from Swank, Stag, Gent, Cavalier, Hustler, Gallery, and Reader's Digest. You know, you can just about even jerk off to Bosch, Picasso, Early Picasso. Yanking your crank while starting up at the Sistine Chapel." He found he could not blink his eyes anymore or make a fist.

Billy began talking about the matter.

"You know, there is really a central Nest of these mutated Bolsheviks, these teenage Trotskies, these Schoolboy Lenins." Gail tried to touch her navel with her tongue, on the inside.

Couldn't be done.

"God said it, God meant it, even though he was diagnosed as a severe paranoid schizophrenic regarding the matter. . ."

"Go on," Gail said. "You got our attention."

She giggled to high heaven. The acid head actually believed he was munching on a Goat's udder. Like the poor children in Bunuel's "Los Olividados."

He sucked back the transubstantiated whiskey and remembered to swallow once it was in his mouth.

"And yea, they slew the goat, and came forth . . . Okay, there is a sort of blob, nest, like that movie, "Them," in the drainage pipes with Eel-things infested inside this greenish goo."

"How do you know?," Gail said.

"I heard it from my connection that's in the Army. He and some other heads were scouting around Devil's Swamp. Sucking back Nitrous Oxide that they had copped at the dentist's office. They were full up with pharmacy stuff, all they could cook down and shoot up. And they saw this BLOB!" It was the way he said it, she thought.

"How big?"

"Don't you ever say anything? If I really thought you were sucking on this Woman high Priest's breasts, I would drop you off at Alpha Centauri."

"Just finish describing the gelatinous thing." The Acid head stopped his breast feeding and she put her rack of sweater meat back in the constrictive apparatus. She was still twinging from arousal, truly ordained like the Madonna with child.

"Okay. It's big like 100 feet long, and it's coming out of the drain pipes. And it is maybe alive, or not, or it's symbiotic with the snakes. And there is this big queen Eel-thing manifested from all that.

"You got lying eyes regarding the matter!," came out of the blue from the lizard King reincarnated. All sliced eye slits from beneath fancy eurotrash sunglasses.

"He has spoken!" Billy said.

"You actually speak!" Gail said.

"Okay, I saw the damned thing!" Billy yelled rather amusingly. He put his arm around his earth mother, Gail. They suddenly saw stacks of corpses, rising flesh. A rather putrid ambiance all about the white elongated slab. There were cars like locust shells. Perfectly good Chevies, Ford, the yin and yang of American Motors. Plymouths, Chryslers, Volvo's, and Toyotas. All pushed to the side by a yellow Caterpillar with a man in a spacesuit at the helm! Was he going to catapult like a brick moon into the harnessed heavens?

"Are you seeing spacemen around?" Gail asked.

"ROTC bastards! Honey, those are ROTZ men. Lean and thin and raping and pillaging us good people!"

"I tell you, they are SPACEMEN." She lingered on that thought. Spacemen, coming down from the fleecy skies. The smoke fog banks of chemical plants burning in the distance. In the direction of Exxon were funnelling clouds of smoke just incredulously billowing up. Inversions, curvy mushroom pillars bursting forth, shooting ever upwards. The sky was where the spacemen had come down. Keep watching the skies! Heed me! Keep watching the skies. The rock n roll requiems of sacred music were blasting from the cabin of the El Camino.

Billy slowed down. Perhaps it was a denouement of his LSD trip, a quelling, a sobering? Besides, men in space suits were flipping him off. Waving at him, as if he had the audacity to go 100 miles per second. He was barely humming at 88 miles per. Tunneling through the morass of dead and dismembered. That foul odor hit them and they slung psychedelic chicken nuggets about the small vinyl chamber of the El Camino. Keep your eyes on the road. Or was it the skies, from whence spacemen jumped their mother ship. He was harping on the BLOB phenomena. The blob, the gelatinous blob.

"Okay, I'm telling ya, about two months ago I was dropping some incense with some Catholic priests down at Devil's Swamp. If you don't believe they were priests just ask me. They wore black robes, they knew latin, what are you gonna think?"

"Tell Easy Rider here the true facts now," Gail giggled.

"Okay. It was a bunch of my outlaw Mississippi friends, we had just come from a long deathride from Franklin County. It was Jimmy Craig, David Allen."

"We found a dead possum that we dropped off in Bude at the Quarters where the brothers live. I put a couple bucks down on that floating crap game in the back of a Ford pickup truck. And lost. They did give us a half pint of Jim Beam for the possum, fair trade."

"You're starting too far back. Get on with it!" she said. The acid head tried to use his eyes like electrical x-rays to see those Madonna milk duds beneath her angel shirt.

"Well, we came down Highway 61. We thought we saw the Nuclear reactor at River Bend melting. The concrete terminal just melting like a surreal dream. But it might have been those microdots cleansing us."

"By the way, did y'all hear about the prison thing? Every goddamn killer on the road is outa the pen! They massacred all those mongoloids at the Jackson Facility. Hey, that sounds alliterative ... The Mongolian Massacre. Let's see, how about the Waterhead wipeout?"

"Now that's not appropriate talk for a good Christian acidhead. What would God think?" Gail said, seeing more corpses stacked. They whizzed off the Interstate to Airline Highway. Highway 61 where God said "Abraham, kill me a son."

The men in spacesuits rummaged through everything as dusk hit the place rather condescendingly. Evocative of a splashing in the air of golden clouds with silver linings amidst the orange and crimson soon to follow. In fact the sky appeared to be bursting through a dense motley group of clouds that had formed in the exact shape of John, Paul, George, and Ringo. The mop-topped lads from liverpool smiled at them and their perjured vision.

They were wizened and struck peculiarly by the offbeat cloud formations, as the rock n' roll cascaded into the car. The El Camino careened through stacks of corpses and rotz spacemen filching their own black market treasures of Captain Cortez.

"Now Honey, you know God is playing Bass in the Allman Brothers band."

"Quite right!," she said and lit up a badly rolled double-papered dread monstrosity of locoweed. "One of these days we will find out the story."

"Okay, now we were rummaging around the Landfill down there, looking for our respective heads, you know how that can be . . ." He began to pay more attention to the el camino.

"We started wading through that maze of sewer pipes. We observed a whole menagerie of withered kooks, which were the zombies. All laying in some greenish ectoplasmic egg sac with eel-thing snakes twitching. I mean, it filled a thirty or forty foot area in that maze of tunnels. Right where they all drain. Now these nests are in pockets of geographical intensity. In the Atchafalaya swamp, in the Comite River out near Denham Springs. In Thompson Creek, and across the river by Dow Chemical. It was too much for the Madonna with Child, posing for Tintorelli. The salty nipple plucked from his gums, the acid head, just like Lady MacBeth.

"So these nests of monstrous evolutionary egg sacks are growing, expanding. Full of poisonous and disease carrying insanity."

"Right honey! The whole parish and border parishes are right back into like the Middle Ages!"

The acid head shook his head. Billy thought he saw him remove his head with his own two hands and put it in his lap. Really good acid. Far out.

"And we probably shouldn't be back in town either, right?" Gail said.

"Well, we can go north to Mississippi. Or we can go south to New Orleans."

"Let's hit the French Quarter! Flaming Dr. Peppers at the Gold Mine bar! Pat O'Briens' watching the two hags playing "Sally Swinging on the back door gate" and pass out in a large plant pot that holds just one drunk."

"And puke in Faulkner's old apartment in Pirates Alley, or step in fecal matter from bums right next to St. Louis Cathedral!"

"Or better yet, hit the voodoo shops and get really wicked." The El Camino zoomed on I-10, back on the terminal concrete slab as nightfall hit. New Orleans, the Emerald City beckoned them out of the Middle Ages.

Chapter Forty

East of the Pandemic, on the fringe in Livingston Parish the High School football team often feasted on Taco Bell at two o'clock in the morning. And were Quad A champs more often than not, and hard liquor was not sold on Sundays. Some rural urchins who had ambled back were inoculated and ready to prowl for zombies. Outer space seed pods incubating into identical duplicates of their favorite town leaders and neighbors of goodly white trash. They had begun the odyssey of tracking down that mystical rumor displayed from mouth-to-mouth gossip. They would have no patience regarding aliens, zombies, and rioting in that township known as Denham Springs. This was where Justin Wilson lived, the cajun chow hound. And the Grand Wizard of the KKK lived down Highway 58 towards Walker, where bevies of trailers and monster trucks festooned the wooded thickets.

Debbie and her badass boyfriend were sick of staying cooped up with nothing on Television but international news about crud going on a few miles down the road. They wanted Nintendo, cases of beer to loot from that Junior Food Mart. Before the asses made it back to the stores where one could steal their pickled eggs and pigs feet, and potato logs and fried chicken gizzards. But most of all things like hefty video games like Mrs. Pacman, which her boyfriend swiped with his high school blood buddies. Along with 30 cases of beer, virtually wiping out the entire freezer coolers. Along with Oui's, Penthouses, Playboys, Hustler's and other skin job magazines like Swank, Nugget, Stag, Cavaliers, which the boys adorned their mob hangouts with like amulets of luck in their adventures.

Tod, Debbie's steady badass tanned bohunk, had come back in his own Jeep. No doubt to lengthen his list of crimes as he and everybody else knew that looting and pillaging were second nature in a situation like this. They had tried to hit the bank. Then the pizza hut, where they were chased off with a couple of rounds from a 357 magnum.

Now they had knocked over everything from the Chink restaurant, the Exxon station and the McDonalds. Half the fun was just destroying crud while loaded on reds and Jack Daniels. These were a deadly combination, when mixed generously with handguns, rifles and bad attitudes.

They camped down at the beach of the Amite River. They got some heavy metal babes whose forte was popping Crystal meth until their heels sparked and their eyes lit up like pinball machines. They would constantly screw these boys because it was exciting for them. These 20 year old boys came from Christian homes and trailer parks. And they deserved to rip off some skank every time they got that look in their eyes and the feelings below their blue jean belts started stirring in a rather carnal way.

A slice of life in Denham Springs was this: Ordering Domino's pizza and going to the video store religiously for the pablum of commercial hits. ESPN football for the ensconced dominant husband, who was literally the reigning monarch in a 3 or 4 bedroom home with satellite dish. Professional wrestling, caching teen coin to see new cinema extravaganzas like "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II." The mother constantly shopped for mall luxuries, new dresses for the boys and girls. Smart shopping at Wal-Mart. Teaching the kids about Jesus and Football, and making sure none of em turned out liberal or weird, or fruits! Christians with muscle is what it was. Prom dates, Junior kicking ass at Noseguard for Denham Springs (who should have rightly been neutered).

The Taco Bell was sanctified holy ground like warrior graveyards somewhere long past. Pissing on every fire hydrant before pep rallies. Getting bare tit off the finest piece of nubile teenage skank was way up there on the short list. Not thinking about college. More of construction work to sweat away that ambivalent teenage angst. The daughters were getting puberty damage. It was so the mother, the bitch didn't even recognize the pups anymore. The father would kill anyone who touched his daughters.

Now it was: rotted refrigerator spoils, a wrecked looted suburban shack, cars stolen from the driveway. Pets lay about like roadkill yet unbloodied from any auto incursion. Young toddlers dead in their Nintendo hideouts. Daughters lay about, bloated carcasses. Once little redneck princesses to their french kissing fathers. Now gutterfodder, maimed beyond recognition. The mothers and fathers who did make it out would never be the same again. A trial by fire from the cruel twist of dead children strewn about the playsets and tire swings, unrecognizable and horrible. The little palaces of teeming children were now charnel graves.

Down by the Amite beach there were six monster trucks parked like steel steeds, their huge rubber tires a precursor to monstrosity. The teenage orgies, boys and girls screwing, fighting and beer guzzling with a medicine kit of drugs from the various pharmacies. Little pillboxes of splendorous ecstacy. Junkie Heaven. Good turned bad, gone wrong. The girls were little screwing machines; they couldn't stop humping even when the little roadmasters had ejaculated. All were duly cranked on any sort of drug made available and brought to them by Parke-Davis.

They found an egg sack about fifty feet wide under a set of tree branches and trash that floats until snagged by fallen obstacles. They saw hibernating snake things. One boy even said "I got a prize once for catching the biggest eel, but we got em ten feet long here."

They busted the sack. One boy got bitten by the razor sharp monsters as they spilled onto the beach and scattered. They riddled them with their ammo and shotguns; blew them to hell. One kid wanted to cook em up, but they nixed that. He was out of it anyway on a month-long acid high. There were a couple of zombies found in the sack too. All yellowish ocher green and striped and blotched. And still alive. They tied them up to the bumper of the Bigfoot, Jimmy's pride and joy. They were barely alive, in some sort of embryonic trance. The boys scattered the ectoplasmic gelatin that surrounded the curls of snakes which had slumbered before the boys had ripped it open. The clear skin sack jiggled just like the blob.

 Chapters 41 thru 50 

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August 1999 HofP