SKIMMING THE
GUMBO NUCLEAR "Facilis Descensus Averni" Chapter Fifty That hatred syndrome brought in by the pandemic plague of the epochs, was creeping south and north and every which way. Everyone was killing that wouldn't have exactly done that. Hatred filled the atmosphere, and everyone was psychotically receptive to that malevolent cursed sickness that blanketed this little muggy state. And the folks knew that they were psychotic from the plaque as they pounded one another. If there couldn't be a cure it wouldn't matter much anyway. It was getting really close now. And the point spread, the line in Vegas was that they would be shoveling dirt over every woman, man and child in the pit, smoking with death. The French Tudor Mansion on Highland Road across from the vast stretch of parade grounds on the LSU campus that once housed ignorance and its brother twin, intellect. It was the only site of human's living through the brunt of the plague. But now, everyone was back. Faculty members hungry for knowledge, still stunned by the events. There certainly wasn't any student body, they had splintered up a long time ago. Hardly good time to attend classes. The plague was just in its infantile stages. "Kendra," Ricky Harrison said, as they lay in bed together, not used to loitering around the opulent upstairs room replete with cable, luxury afforded movie stars, and VIPs. "Huh, what sweetie?" she said, laying there naked and wheedling beauty. "They want up out of here tonight. Everybody." "I know, Mary told me a day ago, since we got back from Grand Isle." Ricky waffled his hair, then Kendra stroked it gently. Stroking a once-bloated pig's arse, wonder cow (Ricky had described himself like that from imbibing too much K & B drugstore cut rate bourbon), to this chiselled down swanky hunk. He was a hunk. He had a scar on his nose that he told her he joked to folks that asked him how he got it. It ran on the right side, straight across, and blood vessels were starting to appear since a year ago, from the ripped cartilage that had since healed. "Fencing at Heidelberg," he would say. Kendra thought about that and smiled. She looked over at him in their closeness, not closure. He look at her gladly. He had a sheepish quality that shows through all the problems. It was nice. "Where do you want to go?" "Well, I was staying at my older sisters condo in South Sherwood Forest subdivision. "That would be better than my french garret only good for punishing oneself and drinking oneself to death." "Is that what you were doing?" "Yeah, I was jazzing myself that I was pitiful, so therefore I was saintly, only much worse." he smiled as he reflected on that. "No, from what you describe, that wouldn't do." "Right," he said, stroking her tanned arms, looked at all of her. "It's really elegant. She was married to a filthy rich guy." "What do I do for clothes?" "Well, for starters, we have to get rid of everything you own." "Okay. I can't afford . . .." "I know, but my daddy pays off my Mastercard, a five thousand dollar limit, every year on my birthday. No pillaging malls for us. No hate crimes in our heads. We have to overcome this plague. We know there are only a few days left until they can come up with the cure. They have left me out of it now. these guys are the top. They took what I gave them, all my notes, my culture dishes, my specimens. They have the best in the world, the most brilliant men. That's what should have been done in the first place. Not just the pseudo genius's that I was working alongside." "Well, we gotta start packing. But what is the use? Aren't we all going to die?" "It's much worse than that. Dr. Sajjhi said he heard from some French specialist and we aren't going to die right off. First WE ALL GO CRAZY! "So we will suffer badly. We will eventually die, but for now we will start what? Getting into the advance stages?" "Yes," she said solemnly. "We are all going to be violent psychopaths?" "They aren't sure exactly HOW we are going to act, we are going to lose our normal sensibilities. Those of us are going to be affected more than others." They dressed and went downstairs, just to see the same thing emoted forth on the wide screen television. Insanity before Final Exit, DEATH. The big screen pronounced thusly: "The Special National Conference on this worst disaster of the twentieth century, in peacetime, has concluded that everyone in a one-hundred-and-fifty mile radius of Baton Rouge, will be susceptible to psychotic actively. This is due to a determined hypothesis that the later stage of the ongoing disease of this Pandemic is that of psychosis simulating in otherwise normal people, that of schizophrenia, paranoia, perhaps violent episodes." Dr. Parrill looked sadly away, thinking about his decreased brother from long ago before he ever fell in love with Stanley Kubrick movies. Kendra did not gasp for only one reason. The inside information had cushioned the onslaught of this information. Ricky let it sink in. All the folks who were going back to their own houses were not crying only because they hadn't time for this one and all still mortally wounded and weakened wholly with ongoing pain. Kendra and Ricky walked outside with their bags, suitcases. They headed to Kendra's deceased older sister's swanky townhouse in South Baton Rouge. Outside on the way, glorified battalion, legions of hackey sack mongers, frisbee whirred's flag football squadrons, softball national pastimers, and a whole mess of nature reduced mystic soothsayers out to commune with grassy sod beneath their bohemian bloomers and undertaker-for-the-art-world flashers. Folks leisurely strolling at much happier times, before the wave of bible-epic do-see-doing came forth to rattle their cages. Kendra couldn't wait for a new change. The television show said there were special pharmaceutical pillboxes in various locations. Every Savco drugs, every K & B liquor drugstore. Every Wal-Mart was now issuing almost any antipsychotic medicines of a last ditch effort against this latest card hand dealt by Mr. Death. The acidheads, thrashmetal goosesteppers and MTV heads were ecstatic over the news that there would be as many free prescriptions for their little mental ballets: Prozac, Mellaril, Dalmane sleeping agents, Darvon for headaches and migraines. Doses of Navane and Mantrax for those just a bit off kilter. But knee deep in Valium mixed with Tequila Sunrises, that crimson fruity mixture that would send the youth into the lagrange points where gravity nulls out between the earth and moon.
Chapter Fifty One Kendra and Ricky made it to South Baton Rouge, into those manicured subdivisions like Shenandoah, where streets were named after civil war battles, like Manassas, Vicksburg, Gettysburg. The golf courses running through Shenandoah; the huge tracts of fancy townhouses, neighborhoods that were mostly predicated by white folks who made enough money to get as far away from North Baton Rouge. That migrained melancholia induced by living in the maligned and homely industrial area where now no more hookers were trading sex for microwaves and other household appliances. They were probably the first to go by either plague, radiation, or the appetite of a few zombies. Now firmly ensconced in ground zero of the radiation cloud fuzzily indefinable but pervasive like a dream whipped up by a puritanical Jonathan Edwards furious god. He was holding the little mortals above the lake of fire, raking them over the stoked coals, like a spider over a firepit. Ricky began taking those Thorazine, not caring a whit about the side effects. But then again they were sitting pretty in radiation coming in through the skylights, seeping through pretty bordered coroneted and matching wallpaper. Through bevelled mirrors, into their being as they poured themselves a healthy dose of world's finest scotch, imported. They took Thorazine, mixing it with scotch awaiting their critical and most monumental fear, that of losing sanity and losing control totally. Kendra slinked around knowing they were digesting rays however sinister and watching pay per view cable movies on a huge entertainment system fit only for the indulged spoilt growing wan and indifferent. On the news now in the midst of a swell of drug-induced euphoria. Only minutes ago it had Kendra and Ricky wrestling on the floor like a two-out-of-three free for all, like frisky animals in a frenzy. Ricky pinned Kendra down and planting a loving kiss to his beautiful stork leg, that flaxen haired myth that had given meaning to his penchant for dotting the eternal punctuation mark with a cosmic flair pen. Kendra was laughing, herself too warm and animated by those mixtures of Darvon for her ongoing headaches, and a delectation for diet kamikaze's as if it were happy hour at the Hilton on an ordinary day. Harrison looked into her eyes as if to savor what was his for now. She did love him, that ironclad strawhaired swain with doses of unlearned suaveness. A sweet man who cared about nothing anymore, circumstances not withstanding, but to possess her, to covet her. Their passages in the Old Testament and literally find allegorical translatable passages that would unlock with an unknown silver key those very eternal questions that no one ever dwells on but science fiction writers with dementia. And poets with scarfs whiled about their neck like noses, and melancholic pursed lips spouting scrambled kinetic blocks of pure modified passion. That was what they had in their little villa on the Mediterranean. Two very youthful and handsome opposites as a cosmic couple. The kind of love fettered about, bandied about that made old people smile giving to one another in this true state of static decline here now spending out in their villa smack dab in a dreary subdivision of duplicitous ordinariness. It was in their hearts, their central primal understanding of something that came naturally to those who could not taste the unfamiliar badinage that one could not possess, unless the universe melded and entropy itself had reversed. And attention to such wondrous love only spawned more happiness and good well in such a despicable and tyrannically unfair universe with cold equations governing such matter in what was supposedly God's eminent domain. But ample supplies of scotch and ice from the hereafter only promoted a lucid activity of sweetness emoted from Kendra and Ricky. It was just too bad, Harrison thought, holding Kendra's arms down on that fine tapestry, as uninterrupted reports documenting the tragedy now, came through in spurts in the middle of some soap opera otherwise unencumbered by the rest of the continental United States. Kendra smiling at him, he saw true love in their little irrational mushroom cloud of love, radiation only addled their heads into a still further headlong swirled love pattern. Love at ground zero was tasted by them, as long as River Bend didn't explode and melt down, whereupon the Nagasaki stirfried eyeball melting would definitely put a damper on an otherwise undisturbed camelot in the nuclear age witnessed firsthand. Finally they sat up, Ricky looking spectacularly handsome despite the roentgens cranking through out him in toxicity levels unparalleled. Kendra slightly feverish by the ravages of the disease. There was a ticking time limit on this cartoon bomb of their getting a hint of Death. But it only made them feel more alive than ever imagined by Hemingway even tanked spritely on the best morphine or grog in a French hospital, recovering from shrapnel. Harrison's whole took on full broad meaning in the middle of this frenetic mosaic of slam dancing, a town rocking in the age of the rat, ravaged and pillaged both. Psychically raped and emotionally distraught if such a thing could be personified by some, Harrison wondered for a moment how bugscrewed he would slay himself before laying a finger on Kendra. There would be some tenable shred of rationality to him to make Kendra's stay till the bitter end as palatable as possible. The television ranted on by gargoyles in pompadours, and remote newscasters from CNN television. The current raid of the tunneled labyrinths of the zombies were quite successful, thanks to the torpid veterans of an amalgam of wars brought together for one last Battle of the Bulge. "I ain't taken any thorazine! You hear me woman?," Ned I. Reilly said to his doting wife who had only pulled herself together for the sake of the family, and of course, Ned I. Reilly. "But sweetcakes ," she begged, "You remember what happened to my mother? . . . She reverted back to her psychotic episodes." "So! She can go on thinking she was Betty Boop from now till doomsday!" he said, harshly. "You used to make fun of her for thinking that." He looked directly at her. "She's your screwing mother, and you let her keep believing she was Betty Boop?" Anything one could expect with a schizoaffective mother. "But we used to steer her away from Betty Boop and all that. She went from spinning around and dancing and fluttering her eyelashes in Parkville Hospital to being what she used to be." "I ain't taking no thorazine. It screws you up. I ain't' crazy. If I was crazy I would tell you." The next thing he knew he had tied Mrs. Ned I. Reilly to the colonial dining room chair, and put blowtorch to her face. That blue hot thing literally melted her all up. Her face burned off while she was alive. He should have taken his thorazine. The kids were summarily broiled like London pan broil. How in the hell can you keep both a microwave with a toddler inside and the oldest in the conventional oven, without them screaming and putting up a fight? T'aint easy. Nuff said. He topped the indulgent FACES OF DEATH episode the Home Game version, with disemboweling himself. It took lots of nerve to bring the knife around just so. Took a lot of moxy.
The Saxon family on Robin Hood drive were doing what they were told. The government men had used the local elementary schools as way stations for picking up each family's reinforcements of literal pharmaceutical cache. After all, these places were where the suburban folks went on election day in the past. Now they were going there to retain shreds of logic. Vestiges of morals. Peggy Saxon was by farther easiest to succumb to fever madness. She had that sensibility of the kind of nervousness one would get from drinking a pot of Waffle House coffee. At this point she was fighting the image of her getting naked and trying to ram her newborn son back where it came from. Not an exact fit. No dilation this leg of the trip. That's when John Saxon was going really goofy, like Ed Gein goofy, and he went across Florida Boulevard and was found digging into a fresh grave. Popping the top of the coffin like it was the door in MYSTERY DATE by Mattel, and munching on rather unfriendly human flesh. John went off the deep end after being a Vietnam war hero and joining the Kiwanas, and keynote speaker at Amway rallies from Texas to Georgia. Peggy locked herself in the laundry room and forced herself to have a nice slow tumbler full of liquid drano. Hit the spot, she thought, as the intensely violent pain came from her esophagus melted like onions turning clear in a buttered skillet.
Chapter Fifty Two The worst part of the epidemic was quite arriving in fashion. If the first part was cruel by just silently stalking and killing figuratively, then this murderously wrong scheme of pervading an entire city and East Baton Rouge Parish. From Off Track Betting Parlors on the other side of the river, to the KKK Christian folks in lazy Livingston Parish, this way lied madness. Husbands reenacting hunting swallowing their tongues quite properly and with little complaint. So what can a pose of gangly sheriff's deputies do? They didn't know how to retain 65 thousand maniacs. What was that film? 2000 Mad Maniacs? Well, that was just a newsreel or cartoon in front of the main feature. What a grim twist to the pandemic nightmare. Be the life of the covered dish Avon meeting in your neighborhood. Slit your wrists and you may be a contestant in our chicken biting cavalcade. Throughout the dingy pit of city it was a demonical humorless as one could imagine in a kafka art film, or a David Lynch preview. Folks now stomping the school grounds and parks, walking sideways, one foot dragging, so coy and frivolic. Where the sheriff's deputies and a whole bunch of good old boys reliving their war remembrances, by cutting down the zombies, now suddenly all were zombies. The town was walking Kafkaesque tone poem. Literally hundreds at a time crowds in a madcap lynch mob were seen stalking in rover packs amongst the nestled manicured subdivisions. Army soldiers were stoking themselves on so many big-boostered Thorazine and fistfuls of Navane and Prozac. They couldn't focus on these legions of stalking deadish comrades.
"Start shooting Mister!" Lieutenant Gil Straton said, to another soldier listing badly with tremors of white cold fear. "I can't, I tell you!" A squadron of mindless vegetables who were the easiest and first to succumb to the invisible red death, were stalking the huge supermarket and stereo store next to the comic book shop and across Greenwell Springs Road from the Wal-Mart now virtually destroyed by hand. They were not hesitating, brave through their dementia. "God dammit crudfugg, I'll do it," Lieutenant Gil Straton said, and grabbed the rifle so hard that it knocked the poor soldier out cold. 'Whack!' against his head that rang through heard round the parking lot. He shot a few automatic bursts into a couple of coot-sters hellbent on reliving the prohibition days. Down they went. Pop! went the gun, a neat little explosion that brought down Ma and Pa Kettle, of Broadmoor subdivision. Then he shot every zombie behind them, they had not a whit of gleaned logic to run. They almost welcomed sure death as an escape from the sudden tormented disease that gripped all, at once, like a blanket of darkness. The streets were cavorting with snatches of sirens coming forth like doppler effects. Ambulances, cars driven by DWI's (Drunk while Insane). It sounded like Beirut or any Wild West Western. They mostly were fighting each other, killing and wounding each other. Just who was sane and who wasn't? It didn't matter. For one thing, there was no way to tell from the all-out street violence just who was the man. Besides, it would eventually sweep and get everyone.
Chapter Fifty Three "Are you watching the news?" "Oh, the cable went back on?" Kendra asked. Ricky popped another big booster Thorazine. The side effects were making him rock back and forth like a swinging mongoloid. All those toxic drugs being taken on by a sober, once-pristine bodice. Corpses. "Live footage by outsiders braving the hellhole we are in, and I have seen more dramatic killings in the last ten minutes." Kendra had that look on her face of either worry or confusion. Was she already going too? He wondered. She was the only one for me, he knew. If she goes hugger tea I have to think what I am supposed to do? I would gladly sacrifice my paltry existence for her. He was as he always was since he had met her, thought only of her and not of himself. She had given much redefined meaning to his otherwise meaningless existence. He should have been dead long ago, when the first wave hit and killed off a good 69% "I'm alright," she said, sitting down on the comforter. She was still possessing on that lovely face a strained look that could not be mistaken. They slept that night together, only after he told her that he had to witness her talking a fistful of crudty mindnumbing Thorazine until she could only rattle herself to sleep. There, in that luxuriant ensconced villa bordering Hades on the North and Danteville on the south. Below the Manson\Nixon line of death, in what was once a plodding peaceful corner of the world, now were the leftovers from a fitful dreaming sleep chocked full of demons. Kendra was rolling on her side of the bed, fighting off the dreadful side effects. Most of the people who ended up dying violently at this last stage of that grand play that this pandemic had strutted forth, had not had enough sense to take their own given supply of thorazine to ward off Mr. Nutzo. The mad monk of insanity, a real entity in itself. They just went along with that last lifting dance of insanity that led them to die fighting and mad screams and blood flying. If they were stupid enough to vote for a crooked racketeering governor four times-in-a-row, then they qualified for genuine ignorance for lack of wanting to swallow powerful Haloperidol and other cute names as such to at least give them some sanity; some dignity that had been stripped from them long ago. The makeshift clan at the now-notorious alien-killing quilting bee was whooping it up. Little did they realize that they were sublimely usurping themselves to being something undefinable, monstrous. John Ed was kicking back with some near-blinding clear brain bending mash. Chugging it with Mr. Benson, the Exxon boss that was in AA with him, once. With the Henderson twins, and Old Man Muskie, who had won more medals than T.E. Lawrence. But then Balmy Joey Nuttson had planted a shotgun spraying into Junior Slugger. It literally spread that fast. The sheriffs showed up and pistolwhipped the heavy set madman, who had just 10 hours ago, fought against the jello-lime green and valiantly split open the albino, red-eyed mutations with a double-bladed ax. Joey's head went skattershot all over. Joey Nuttson just said in mid sentence, "I've got a hankering to get in the sack . . ," and then he heaved the mall handled ax and pulled back and with a demented glazed psychosheen of Ed Gein's bent view, had no quandary with whacking and splitting quite smoothly, the tough but easily cracked skull like it was a coconut being purposely thrown on rock by a Darwinian tool using prized specimen. John Ed and the others stomped him subsequently into the terra.
On the radio came blaring fuzzy yelling, that indeed all hell had broken loose. It was biblical in proportion just as Kendra and Dr. Ravi had prophesied. Incoherent metallic screeches that just stymied the boys, all standing around, feeling carnal lust after stomping and stoning one of the boys. "Let's make tracks . . ," John Ed said, literally swallowing his Redman chewing 'backie. The sheriff's deputy who was wounded earlier was crying, 'this is too much'. "Said something bout the whole town is gone apecrud!" John Ed hacked and the truck careened flinging sod on it's double-axled stance. The jeeps, vans, big trucks, filled with men and weapons, men who were now touched as if it had made semblances of just little inklings of psychotic forget-me-nots inside their bouncing skulls. "Stop that crying! Screwing mamma's boy!" "I'm sorry, Mr. John," the deputy simpered. They drove into the wretched cityscape, seeing literally throngs of ill-medullated citizens of Baton Rouge, scouring the neighborhoods, making a legion of somehow makeshift camaraderie among the touched, or afflicted. The disease was uncannily working too properly. The scientists at the labs had not figured on the hurriedness of the malaise of insidious maligned death fluttering like a blanket of vultures over a now doomed landmass. "It appears the disease is in final stages now, General Berkley," said the national newscaster having just been dropped onto the wildness; the mayhem of the mad carnival of lost souls. She looked around her in the middle of a midtown mall, directly in the parking lot filed with troops having flown into the metro airport, who were not succumbing to the terrible illness because they were outsiders. The mobs came in waves, and the men attempted to shoot with tranquilizer cartridges. The mobs came in waves, and the men attempted to shoot with tranquilizer cartridges, but then the boys ran out and the mobs kept coming. Live ammo was next. The waves of madmen, little children incensed with fury, a dementia, their parents disassociated with all normal social significance, forgetting and blanking out reason and sanity. They were doing each other in, violently whacking each other with crude rudimentary tools like knives, butcher's cleavers, axes, shovels, rakes, whatever didn't require a knowledge of remembering how to use a rifle. That was a bit complicated for this low intelligent new form of mutated zombies. Literally turncoated in the blink of an eye by the dormant sickness. The newscaster sobbed, as she witnessed mob killings, the army and crack troops sent by the government. The nation watched the entire spectacle on CNN and every possible channel, it was as easy as televised as the Vietnam War on evening news, or the Persian Gulf tapdances. "Oh, my God," all of the outsiders said, and they couldn't take it anymore. The city was now crawling with newly embryonic zombies, a more gruesome facsimile of the evil village in Devil's swamp that had been successfully burned out with flamethrowers borrowed for some ex combat guys. And now they were using them on each other.
Chapter Fifty Four Dr. Ravi turned to Dr. Thompson, and said , "Well, we did not know that the disease could mutate and evolve to such a quickened from of dementia, and resultant death." "I tried to tell them! Goddammit!" "Oh, my God," as they watched the incredible gulfs of rampant violent as the refineries blazed in the background like brilliant pyres to a Vulcan god of WAR. Mars. Exxon was ablaze far worse that it was a couple of weeks ago. Every single tank in the farm out there on 61 was ablaze. Kaiser aluminum was nothing but a seething cauldron, bauxite burning badly and causing a great into literal HELL. Texaco down in Prairieville and Convent by the Sunshine Bridge was the only refinery that wasn't set afire or rattled by mutant zombies. The air was as bad as those infinite amounts of oil rigs set afire during the all of televised history. Unsurmountable. Deathly feared, hideous. A morass that literally was propelling this central part of the country into a war zone, blasting themselves back into the stone age Cro-Magnon style. Real horror show. The nuclear plant was reported in safe conditions. The folks who turned batcrud were wailing about in unsurmountable hideous racking pain. Slow death. The night went on, the crowds spilling into every street, every once able bodies citizen now a demented loathing ghouls. It was like a swath of voodoo imported from New Orleans had wafted through. The national government was attempting to figure out how to shut down the whole thing. The next morning after what would be known as the great blackout day, of national mourning for the masses of folks listing about. Unaware of their sanity, or lack of; mutilations, emasculations, dismemberment, all in the name of Black Death. At least the pandemic before throughout the Middle Ages were of folks spared dementia. That was the weird beautiful part. Never before had a toxin actually turned a few curves an j-curved into something so unusual in nature. Truly the most ravaging sort of disease. It had a bent for scrupulous as to turn these good Louisiana folks into madmen. Preying on their nervous systems, hunting down their brain. That morning all over the flat fallow land, from manicured subdivisions in squalid Sherwood Forest, south Baton rouge gentry, were moaning, wailing turncoated zombies. Transfigured surely by the painfully ravaging diseases. The lashing wailing gashed bouts like Edvard Munch's The Scream" were evident. The creepy and sad sight of hearing mutilated zombies crying, wail, whimper, slowly dying some radioactive, tempered with a growing festering disease that was long ago supplanted within each of them like arsenic dipped. It was a stygian horrid deathscape transformed now into myth. One sentient intelligent, relatively good, churchgoing suburban, urban. North Baton Rouge, white collar, blue collar, had still found enough energy to fight. To kill aimlessly, with no outward knowledge. It was the most horrid, sight ever witnessed by the rest of the world. The footage was poured into every living room of this senseless purgatory. Waystation of death.
Chapter Fifty Five Ricky and Kendra had both taken every single tranquilizer and shot of thorazine, big bolstered tranquilizer liquid solutions, every anti-depressant. Kendra looked at Ricky and asked him quietly, a madness welding in those blue dreamy eyes, gone sour, with pain, intense loathing terrible quaking, if he would put her out of her misery. "Darling, I can't kill you!" She began hitting him. His love, his dream, his Leonardo concubine, his byronic vision, his little aryan wonder, his Rimbaud verses, dreamy dream; now beginning to start the descent into the hellishness of this particular hades, or Pyrahus. Decadent decay, of a dying city, war ravaged, paved streets lined with corpses of army and mostly zombies without the consent, still many were suffering and quite alive, helpless than ever seen before. Ricky got the prepared syringe, the death solution. "Me first . . ," he whimpered. The little pink fluid looked like it certainly could do its job. Everything was so sad about the whole matter. It was the end of time for them. That cloying decayed dying, the bitterness of a bad deal. "No," she said, grinding her teeth together and pulling on her hair. Ripping pieces out as she shook and bared fists, and gnarled and hissed. Just barely able to keep that one last flounced bit of scintillated sanity. Probably her deep love in this, the last of their lives. She hit him hard in the face. She was gone, but she said her very last set of syllables before being reduced. He laid the syringe on her left, bronzed, beautiful arm, pricking her vein. She said: "You know what you should do." They were both crying. It was almost beautiful. Through this enormous pain came a bit of earned comfort. He kissed her, sobbing badly. Sorrow racked through him, and he pushed the fluid in. She lay back down, on the lovely comforter. "Okay." "I love you." Ricky said. He looked into her painful wretched face, which was a sort of facsimile for a saint, an ennobled beautiful goddess of myth. He cried profusely, and as did she, violently shaking now. She was trying to hit herself in her gnashing and wailing. He stayed with her, him now not feeling too sensible, forgetting what he was supposed to do. She lay on the comforter sofa now, as the big screen television poured out the now forgotten details of his life, of this wretched landscape once just a sportsman's paradise, but now limbo, of waiting, suffering people. She was still, now. Gone forever. He looked down at her body, and kissed her on the lips, the final gesture. He lost it. He got into the turbo Volvo and sped down the street, curving, swaying in outrageous maneuvers to avoid the literal mass of bodies of dying victims, who were suffering like no others had ever before. The army people had skirted out. The government declared it had to quarantine the entire populace. Very real danger of weeping through the rest of the country. Harrison flew down the interstate at warp speed, a hundred miles an hour. He was heading North on I-10, the I-110, past the Mississippi River bridge. Going past the Governors Mansion, he saw through his now maligned and confused state, the literal thousands, tens of thousands of bodies, of suffering wailing. The radio was screeching like stygian caves forlorn, of sights and sounds unholy! "What did Shelley say in Queen Mab? Death and his brother Sleep," he yelled. The dreams of some long-gone Greek gods. Morpheus, the god of this land now, and Hypnos were both on this tail. He could barely keep his eyes open, as he flew to points above Exxon. There were no army people left. They had long ago bugged out. Every person who was ingrained with the horrid outcry of the disease were in for a long time of unending torture. But not if he could help it. He looked at the interstate curving into various appendages like some grand junction of traversing this hallowed land, fraught with suffering. He looked at the grey gunmetal sky. The smoking morass of refineries blazing like olympian pyres all along the river, on both sides. Never had the smell of death been so clear and resonant. He kept driving, thinking about his family, who had all succumbed. There was a way to sail to answer world. Kendra Hoerst and he had known love like Heathcliff and Cathy. Like Romeo and Juliet in some twisted pit of hell. But love survived almost, but not to conquer or oppose this manmade eternal question not answered or unanswered, but struck down. Erased, by man's godlike charm at creating his own hell, fashioned certainly on Earth. He turned into the Nuclear Bend Nuclear plant. Its alabaster seams on its concrete surface were quite seamless. The integrated artistic beauty were capable of striking beauty against the huge clouds of the burning refinery pyres. He went inside, limping badly. Hobbling, to set off what would only be instant relief for these death pyres of wailing and gnashing, forever. The End
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