Satan Burger

Scene 17 Maggots in the Brain

The madness comes second.

It starts when Christian goes outside for a cigar. He lights up under the dry clanking metal, looking up at the grotesque patterns in the clouds. They remind him of my descriptions of my acid ocean eyes, wondering if my vision looks similar to this. But my vision doesn’t make me see evil-sickly patterns like these, only swirl-whirls.

The warehouse doesn’t mind the maddening rain too much. Neither does it give a fuss over the crowd inside its belly. We asked if it would be okay to have another concert, but the warehouse just stared at his carpet walkway and shrugged.

Christian is very calm. He’s been very calm for a long time now. Very unlike him. He doesn’t seem totally emotionless, but surprisingly laid-back, strutting around in his zoot suit like a real classy gangster. The loss of his emotion has actually helped make him more appealing to people, especially women.

He looks into the BIG crowd of street people and their malformed-minds, all of them beady-watching him back. He knows something is wrong with them, the way they are staring. But he tries to ignore. Cool smoking.

Richard Stein would have said they all have maggots in the brain, which he used to say about his wife. His wife was quite the insane one back when she was alive. She was afraid of almost anything, especially moving things. She didn’t feel comfortable in cars or walking near cars, or taking the subway or trains, or airplanes, or even riding bikes. She couldn’t leave the house on some occasions, paralyzed on her sitting chair.

Richard Stein was attracted to her because of this insanity, which is why he married her. There is something passionate about crazy women that can’t be described, he said, you know you are absurd for getting into these relationships but there’s nothing you can do. And he was happy with her for several years, even though he never got to know her completely, never figured out what made her tick so awkwardly and without rhythm.

Once age turned her ugly, Richard Stein initiated hate towards her. The crazy personality no longer cute. And the older she became, the more maggots crawled inside of her skull. Eventually, she drove her crazy emotions into Richard Stein’s skull as well. And he spent a lot of his time hiding under blankets in the attic like a piece of furniture.

Christian glances away from the crowd of sniveling insane ones. Looks up into the sky, with droplets hitting his cigar.

The rain’s influence starts to alter the warehouse crowd. Finally there are enough droplets indoors, enough punks to breathe in the lunacy. And the crowd of emotionally weak people begin a dance. Crooked-slowly at first, then fast and slamming, smashing into each other, moshing. The ultimate of all round-a-go crowds. Boot Lips, a screaming machine, starts punching the skinheads that get too close to him, kicking over tables and stands. The band plays chop-chop. Consumed by the insane energy, they sing song after song without a break.

Then the entire crowd is throw-slamming themselves against themselves; even the walm people that live in the corner of the warehouse join in. Battering into the walls and each other, pounding and skull-blasting…

Wild maniacs around the crude sculptures.

The insanity hits the blue woman. She sucks and rubs faster on my stomach, trying to swallow me. She puts her vagina into my face and a small tongue emerges. It laps at my nose and an eye. The itch-meat slides into my mouth and squirts a sweet flavor into me, a strong aphrodisiac — produced under the blue woman’s vaginal tongue like a salivary gland.

She slides the little tongue down my neck and body, leaving a trail of sauce. Then it takes a couple licks off my shank skin and slides me into her feeding hole. Immediately pounding, bouncing on me, rubbing my chest hair with her blue claws. Eyes in deep contact with mine. Whirlpool.

God’s Eyes to the outside:

Christian puts out his cigar as he notices the street people dancing as madly as the ones inside the warehouse, like the thrashing hardcore is powerful enough to hit anyone that hears it.

Then a small group of them charge the warehouse screaming carnal violence. Christian falls back, stumbles inside, kicks the door shut… He locks the door in two places and throws his weight on it.

The insane ones attack the door, booting, ramming…

Christian yells out for help, but the words drown under the singing.

The mosh pit gets out of control. People use chairs and guitars to beat each other. Beer bottles smash over heads, glass covers the floor, a skinhead uses a broken beer bottle to stab everyone as he dances, the wounded keep dancing, showering blood onto the stage…

Mort tries to stop them from ruining his equipment, but a large walrus-shaped man hits him with a speaker box, knocking him into painful sleep. Some blood tangles down his neck.

The blue woman uses her mouth-tongue on my face now. She leans forward so that her breasts can massage my skin.

She bites into the fat of my shoulder, moving it in circles with her screwing, drooling out the cold liquid of the yellow-violent pleasure.

People brush against the scornful artwork. They cut themselves on acute edges and knives. Fria’s blade-like nipples slice into the dancers, two or three at a time, and their tips become red.

Nan and even Gin join the slamming. They’re near the sculptures and hold onto each other, Nan laughing insanely at the pain of broken glass digging into her feet. Gin’s dreads do a snake-dance. They attack skinhead faces, whipping with excitement. Breakfast holds onto Gin’s pocket, regretting that he was separated from his wrist/womb for the first time.

Christian braces the door with the little of his strength, as the insane ones shriek-slam the outsides, ripping apart the windows and yard decorations. Some make it on the roof, stomping on the shelter, trying to tear it down. Others send rocks through the windows toward the dancing crowd, bludgeons on their meat.

The blue woman leans back, still glaring into me, and my rolling vision at her. She uses her leg powers to fuck faster. She spasms her back like caterpillars, smack-bouncing her breasts… ocean waves ripple through the soft fleshies. She drives my body with mean thrusts, fucking my skull into the concrete, hard, nonstop, a spark of pain flashing in every drum…

She makes her hands into claws and strikes my chest, digging them with purple nails, enticing my blood to come play.

When I scream, the pain becomes bliss-intense. Furious animals tearing into me for food — I notice myself enjoying the idea. I’m weak and whining under her dominion.

And she’s only four.

A skinhead is thrown into Fria’s nipples. The nipples pierce through both of his lungs and kill him instantly. After this first death, the mosh pit becomes a giant murder-dance game.

People are toss-hammered, mangled into the knife sculptures, thrashing to the music. And stomachs are opened on the palm tree and the windmill and the cactus and the monster and Fria.

Vodka’s pale skin is drenched with blood and chunks of hamburger fat. He begins masturbating, greasing up his shank with shredding men’s red fluid.

The slicing massacre continues until most of the crowd is covered with slash marks. But nobody dies, because death doesn’t exist anymore. So the crowd continues to slam each other, cut each other, with no blood left, with missing limbs and facial features, and everybody slips in the blood pool beneath them and sometimes gets back up again.

Gin stumble-slides into the cactus sculpture, and gets his leg stapled between two limbs, with a dozen long needles through his ankle, trapping him beneath the stampede. All he sees is a repeat of combat boots stepping on his body, but his body can only feel mental pain.

The blue woman slices reckless, trying to claw all the way through my body. Blood whipping off of me with the pulsation, soaking the sheets brown.

My screams continue. She starts punching me with her left arm as she continues to cut me with her right claw. Fists nail my face and mouth, maybe so I’ll stop whine-yelling.

I put my arms around her neck and squeeze, choking some pain back in her direction, but she seems to like it. And it gets her more excited, throwing more punches, with both hands this time. Beating my shank inside of her, beating blue knuckles onto my face…

The front door breaks away and Christian is tossed into the blood dance that cyclones him away from the street people, who begin crazy on the punks as they dance by. Battering orgy. Boot Lips continues screaming with gore leaking from his forehead into his eyes.

The street people enter the dance. Their skulls smash into the deadly artwork as they try to get to Sid to stop him from singing so harshly. Some begin ripping the place apart. Skinheads slice into them with knives and hammer them with chains belts.

The blue woman stops beating me when I climax — squirting blue woman food into the eating hole. She seems to climax too, vibrating her thigh muscles and lower lips. But it’s not a realorgasm. It’s just the blue woman’s mouth-like vagina slurping up my juices to process them into her system. I go dry and her vibrating stops. She falls onto my mutilated body, stinging the wounds as she rubs herself…

I can sense her smiling with satisfaction, licking the blood from my face with her chilly tongue. Then she falls asleep with her face on my raw-beaten skin.

The street mob makes it to the band, to Boot Lips, and destroys all the equipment.

The music ends.

I hear the combat-scramble continue — yelling, smashing, pounding — throughout the rest of the night. Falling into my head, staring at the whirling ceiling. I am a shredded towel underneath a sleeping dog.

The blood trickles quietly.

Scene 18 The Death of a City

Rippington died last night.

It just looked at all the people in its belly and figured that its life wasn’t worth carrying around anymore, since the citizens were ungovernable and incapable of becoming civilized ever again. It found no reason for itself to go on.

So it rolled over in its bed and died.

This morning, its rotting corpse can be sniffed in the air, all over the streets and inside buildings. Madness-rain is pepper in the grey sky. There aren’t anymore businesses or any money being circulated. No one has any food or water left to survive on, and nobody cares. No one even has sense enough to leave town to search for food; they’re all just waiting to die and become zombiefied.

Rippington is no longer here for us. No more city for us, we’re just living inside its remains, mutating into nothing but remains ourselves.

And little boy Earth watches us die and giggles.

I awake to the rain tapping on the ceiling and the blue woman lapping at my damages, sucking on my shank with her eating hole — not hungry enough to eat, just vagina-licking it, like a funpop — propped on top of me again.

When she sees me awake, she gives her tongue a rest and glares at me. Her BIG eyes — engulf-swallowing me like normal, but something is not all-normal about this look. There seems to be something new added. It almost seems like… love.

Just as I see this look, I feel it coming on… a love-passion moment, which she hasn’t felt for me even though we’ve had sex many times, thinking that it was impossible for her, impossible for blue women to love because they are machines.

And just as any two regular human beings tossed into such a situation, we bend our necks forward and wrap ourselves into each other, lips into osculation, kissing.

I soon feel human again.

I thought the act of kissing became extinct long ago, even before the walm, people just stopped caring enough to kiss before fucking. Love is a dead performance. Only the hardcore fuck job is required.

But here love is, right between us, flaming up and stabbing us.

And it is almost beautiful, in a pedophiliacal sort of way.

Richard Stein said that love pops up when you least expect it.

He also said that alcohol can play a BIG part in the birth of love, even though love is only love because of drunkenness.

The killing of a buzz can kill this emotion very quickly.

After a few minutes of passion, a slug of mucus-goo — a squirming worm-ball — crawls up her throat and into my mouth, sliding down my throat too quickly for me to react.

It chokes me with its intense, porkfat scent, this large regurgitated stomach booger, which goes down my throat and into my stomach bag like a bowling ball.

Then I cough her kiss away from me. Push her back like she just took a shit in my mouth and hack up the bad taste.

I dip my face over the bedside to puke up the snot ball, but nothing comes out. It resists. I turn to the blue woman to see her face, wondering what she did to me. Was it some accident that she’d be sorry and disgusted for?

But she just smiles and grabs my stomach for a caress.

Her touch burns cold.

I forgive my blue woman once the taste leaves my mouth. I must. She is something I cannot stay mad at. Besides, without her my world would be blunt-somber, perhaps nothing.

I stagger from my room, slight hunger. Into the meaty wreckage, swirl-whirling me into dizziness, tornadoing red.

An arm hangs from Fria like an offering, and her companion’s disfigurements received body chunks as well.

The storm and madness are still fill-screaming the streets outside. People are babbling crazy and beating and killing each other. Some rain-pounds fall through the roofless section of the warehouse, almost a Hell carnival outside.

My feet stick to the floor, and my eyes dizzy-roll as usual, as they walk to the toilet, pass a few sleep-dying corpses in the corner. Not too many homeless ones in the warehouse today, just a few. The rest must’ve been sickened away. I guess there’s not much point in them staying; half of the roof is missing along with the entire front wall; not much shelter for anyone here. If there was another place to go, I would’ve left too.

I piss in a corner, too weak to move the sculpture gore. It burns, and I like it…

When I turn around, the blue woman is there; she has been behind me for the whole piss. An inch away, watching me go to the bathroom. She’s not sleeping like she usually does at this time, like all blue women do for entertainment, like I figured she was doing now.

She has the same happy look on her face that she had when I awoke, issuing love emotions from her blue skin that sink acidly into mine. I grab her around the back and pull her closer. As I caress her buttock-mounds, she caresses my stomach.

Vodka groans from his toilet seat, trying to push his way out of the sculpture-fortress. He crawls out with palms flaky with dried blood-film. The blood isn’t his. It came from the wounds of skinheads/crazies. Coughs take turns burst-popping from his lungs.

He sits and lights an old cigarette, sitting next to the corpse of John — the weird old guy that lived in back of the warehouse. John isn’t completely dead, as everycorpse else in the room, just sleeping without a heartbeat. Vodka uses the perverted man’s back as an ashtray, spitting shhh -dust all over him. Vodka always loved his smoking. But he doesn’t seem to be enjoying the smoke now, even when defacing a half-dead man’s back.

“Where’s the portal?” Vodka asks me. The tone is unfamiliar. A normal tone — not a fake German accent.

I look around the room for the portal, but it’s gone.

When my mind goes back to my girl, I feel a sharp pain of perception. It creeps up on me and swims through her skin into my mind.

Looking into the blue woman’s eyes, I figure her all out. I see all of the plans she has for me and know that I’m not just sex-food for her. I feel that emotional-telepathy the blue women have. And my mind snaps with a greenish-red color, the color of unbelief, mistrust.

Her eyes glitter into me, guided by icy fingers to my stomach.

Her telepathy-emotions tell me: You are pregnant.

She had shot her cum ball into my gut — tongue-kissing gave her an orgasm — and now a baby blue woman is squirming in me.

She smiles, proud of herself.

I start thinking. Seriously. Men can be the only creatures to spit cum into someone else. I come to the conclusion that blue women are actually men with breasts and vaginas.

So. I must be gay.

With the rage of homophobia — a phobia that’s very strong in me because I was never exposed to homosexuality during my younger years, and it is yellowish-gray in color. Blaming the blue woman for turning me into a pregnant homosexual — as if I didn’t have enough problems — my fists decide to break her face.

She doesn’t swell or bleed from the punches. She doesn’t seem shocked at me either. But she does fall down into a comfortable sleep, curled up in a red film. Some of my knuckles go fat. They darken around the edges and say, “Why’d you do that for? You don’t know how to hit anybody.”

“Why’d you do that for?” Vodka asks from another side of the warehouse.

I grip my swelling parts. “She turned me into a pregnant faggot.”

“A pedophile, too,” he adds.

Sighing, looking down at her/his sleeping body. And even though I hate homosexuality, I still find her/him amazingly attractive. Which means I’m in the middle of a sexual identity crisis.

“Fucking bitch,” I tell her/him for putting me in this situation. “I’m getting an abortion.”

Of course, I’m kidding myself. She/he has me now. I’m the wife of a four-year-old blue woman and there’s no getting out of it, because she’s an absolute beauty — even if she is male — and I’m slave-weak to her.

“Go back to being a street whore,” I tell her.

Then I carry her into my room, into my bed.

Suddenly I realize something else:

My God’s Eyes have ran away from me.

I can’t see in the third person anymore.

I panic, sick.

A whirl of gin-dust heat pours over me. The only sight left is the crippled one, drug-damaged. It makes me frenzied and ill.

The power left me the second I tried to look into Satan Burger.

It has to be the storm that cut out my vision, cut out my vision like it cuts out electricity. Or maybe it was God. Maybe God stopped feeling sorry for me and wants me to use my normal sight. Or maybe something happened at Satan Burger that I’m not allowed to see.

“There must be something wrong,” I croak at Vodka. “At Satan Burger, I mean. The portal wouldn’t be down like this.”

“It’s just because of the storm,” he answers, cigarette calm.

“The Crazies probably got in and ripped apart Satan Burger, like they did to the warehouse.”

“Nothing’s wrong. You’re being paranoid,” he says.

“I’d be lucky if paranoia is the only thing I’m being.” I hear my words freaking, silly-going. ” Everything’s wrong. Let’s go to Satan Burger.”

“I don’t want to go to Satan Burger,” he whines. At least he can still whine.

“You don’t have a choice. It’s the end of the world.”

“We’re not going anywhere, not with the streets clogged up like they are.”

“We might as well try,” I argue. “Unless you want to become one of these living corpses on the ground.”

He says, “That doesn’t sound like a bad idea.”

Scene 19 Streets Raging

I convert Vodka to get himself up and going, trip-boring into the car. The old lightning Gremlin starting up a whir, with a good collection of gas still in its gut.

A puddle-mud row is the closest thing to use for a street; we spark-scrape over curbs to get there. People and debris and handmade shelters — cheap patchwork or plastic tents, boxes, piled up scraps — clutter all other areas; even the carpeting on the sidewalks are not accessible. The rain seems to be black-yellow in color, I stare up at it in the sky. Mud water splashes under the wheels, greasing up the windshield.

The street is furious. The rain is sinister and the ill-fighting people are all coated with blankets or trash and plastics over their tops, trying to stop the cold and the plague-rain. The rain’s consistency candywrap the street people, melting them it seems, leaking over their eyes and faces to make them blank or inflamed or uncontrollably nervous.

We find an empty spot in the street and take the opportunity to merge. We plunge into the ocean of people, surrounded by Crazies zombie-walking in circles, all trapped inside of their minds — their own little terrors.

The driving is slow.

Vodka travels with caution. I’m not sure if he’s afraid of the Crazies or just too bored/lazy to use force. The street people soon crowd us into small sections of off-street. Then it gets too thick to make through at all. The Gremlin comes to a snarling halt and I shiver-cough.

A boy without hands crosses and Vod decides to drift from consciousness. He flows outside of reality into his go-away place.

I tell Vodka, “Just run through them. Force ‘em out of the way.”

The Gremlin finds its fashion through without hurting anyone, not terribly at least, just toughguy shovings. A woman spits on the car for touching her. The spit might be blood or vomit. Vodka frowns at her. She glances at me as she spits again, a dead stare, almost a doll-face looking at me. Her eyes don’t seem to be inside of the sockets anymore — I see two yellow eyeholes screaming at me. Her face wrinkles in and around and dissolves. A good many Crazies give me the same horror-melting look, all soggy with yellow gleams. Paranoia washes over me. The sick rain seeps into my skull. Some of the devils punch and kick the car. Bleed-slashing claws attack and splatter against the metal. The autocar drips blood.

Vodka doesn’t seem to care. He continues to drive as if the traffic is normal.

A small tribe of microwave ants crawl on my arms — not certain whether they’re real or just a rolling vision. It’s getting unbearable to be alive without my God’s Eyes. Can’t escape the uneasiness. Maybe I’ll get them back after the storm. Hopefully, praying…

I’ll be praying for a real death otherwise.

“This is going to take forever,” I tell Vodka.

“I told you,” he says.

Vodka’s voice is too foreignto me; he sounds like another person completely. I can’t tell whether he’s still himself or somebody new. Maybe this is the real Vodka, Gin’s brother, the way he was before he started pretending. Maybe his soul is so far out of him that he doesn’t care to pretend. He says, “Oh, well,” more than occasionally.

“I’m going through them,” he says. “I’m sick of waiting.”

At least he is sick of something.

“Finally,” I say.

“What do you mean, finally ?”

“You’ve been driving like a scared old lady.”

“I didn’t want to hurt anyone.”

“Who cares about hurting them? Go ahead and kill them, nobody dies anymore.”

The car hits its power chords, Vodka’s foot full on the gas. The engine fart-rumbles and we go faster, beating our way through the Crazies that scatter in an ant-frenzy.

Only one person goes under the wheels, lifting the car upward on my side, and I feel a little pain for that person, but it soon passes. It’s more important to get to Satan Burger right now. Much more important than worrying about millions of crazy street people that can’t be killed. If people could die, the population problem would be easily solved.

Speed builds. We’re still moving slow but at least we feel like we’re driving now instead of slim-rolling. The crowd seems cautious of us up ahead. They bowl out of the way easily enough, gleam-yellow eyes on all of them as we go. The population seems smaller too. And for litter in the gutter, we have human corpses too soulless to ever get up again.

I don’t notice — because of my rolling vision — what race of people we have gotten into until I see them coming out of the sewers and shadow-corners.

The dark ones.

All pale features, mostly naked, more reptilian than I heard — tough skin, lizard-sharp faces, snake eyes — we see a male stamper to our car. Evil white eyes. I can tell it’s a male because he has long pale hair and is veiny with muscles.

My eyes skip a beat.

And then I see that we’ve been thrown into a reel-violent situation, flee-flying out of the scene. Vodka jammed the gas, maybe out of fear, as the dark male approached us. We just crushed his ribs underneath the Gremlin wheels.

And the lightning Gremlin breaks some legs underneath the wheels, curling through Crazies, and a few dark ones are chasing after us — two females and one male. Looking back: a thrash-tatter of movement ripping through the crowd. Our vehicle is the wind. It splits open the air and through the street people…

The crowd is thicker up ahead. The Gremlin accelerates, hoping… Vodka gnashes his teeth, squeezes his eyes, locks his joints. I watch the dark ones fall further and further behind us…

The car beats into the ruff ahead, popping. Some of it over the hood and knocking some of the Gremlin’s life out of it. But we don’t stop… and then we do stop. The Crazies’ faces shriek at our lack of motion…

And the dark ones catch up to us. The females, with their hook-blade claws, rip into street people who are too close to the car. They frighten into balls and some of them run away, clearing a path for us to fly-flee again.

But the dark ones come too quickly, one female gets onto the roof, straddling the Gremlin. Another female pop-breaks my window and tears into my shoulder, worming its claw-fingers deep-deep into me.

I don’t seem to feel any of the pain.

Then her face appears to me, as her other arm grabs my neck. She pauses, stare-growling. Fang-like teeth and snake-like eyes. And I just stare at her… she’s actually a beautiful creature — maybe it’s because I’m drunk-crazy from the rain, but she is extremely attractive to me right now. Her slender white body, chiseled breasts. Her eyes are black pools, trancing me. She tears at my shoulder, howling at me like I’m her food.

She reaches her head inside, my body shock-shaking at the pain I do not feel, opening her mouth to expose sharp snake teeth to my neck. She lures my body closer. My head penetrates the window, my skin is opened by the glass shards, cutting folds of meat from me. Vodka screams in a faraway place…

My head emerges into the outside whirl… ruffling around me… her face wrinkles lewdly. A naked feeling seeps into me, like the passion of being born; this must be the passion of death as well. Orally defeated by a beautiful snake woman. And the dark female screeches, leans closer to chew my neck apart. But stops biting…

She gushes out her BIG goo-tongue, pressing against my chest, long-long and thick but like a human’s, and tough. It gorges into my shirt, probing, tasting the blood that streams there. It’s large enough to drench-hug most of my torso, and it caresses my neck and face, a pepper-melon flavor that drools into my nose and taste. My hand begins to polish one of her breasts. They’re rubbery but nice — a nipple harder than a human’s could get. She is powerful and strong, not a soft little girl like my blue woman.

She grips harder into me, clawing upward under my skin. I don’t feel the pain; her nails soothe instead of worry. She bites my chin to the bone. Then the tongue slides over the wound, tasting, healing it. She loosens her grip and slithers her giant tongue into my mouth. She pulls my jaw far out of lock and forces it down my throat, painfully shoving it in and out. Fucking it.

I awake a few minutes later, detached from the dark female.

Vodka is covered in red and whine-driving uncontrollably over curbs and street people — they come in flashes as we go through, skiing in a forest. They had cut him, the dark male and female, from his neck to his stomach, jugular open and sheeting him. His eyes are fading in and out, but he won’t die. A large hole is in his stomach, and his insides mumble-screech and bubble. My body seems fine, though bloody and molested. I look around at what’s going on with chaos-eyes.

Vod’s voice makes a gurgle-blood noise. “Get it off the roof!” he shrieks.

There’s still one hanging onto us. She’s trying to cut into the car’s top, holding on tight and getting in a scratch or two at Vodka’s face. His whimpers turn to shrieks at each of her attacks.

The dark female’s yowls scorch into me, just above my ear, in a torture-fury, and I scream, “How the hell am I supposed to get it off the roof?”

But Vodka doesn’t answer. He’s zoning zombie-minded and curling at the eyes, driving harder. We destroy anyone/anything in our way, breaking through crowd and rubble, unstoppable. The dark female cuts into him again, screaming at him, and again, but he doesn’t feel it or seem to care. His meat is dead, and all of his blood is resting on his lap.

Then there is Silence.

The Gremlin piles straight into the Silence, and everything clears.

No more crowd ahead, just quiet and deserted… The dark female’s howls continue for a few more seconds, then fade away, eaten. Even the engine sounds go away, we feel deaf. The car razors into a wall, near the autocar graveyard — where I found the blue woman. I don’t scream before we hit, I let it come, I don’t even bracing myself.

Vodka just didn’t seem to care enough to hit the brakes.

I awake alone, Vodkaless. In the rain-molested autocar.

The Silence is gone too, traceless as it came, and another crowd of street people has filled the area, gushing in as the Silence cleared the way. The pain starts in, from my forehead — broken over the dashboard. Skin flaps from my shoulder, where the dark woman’s nails screwed like shanks.

I feel sick.

I have to get to Satan Burger.

The crowd is too BIG. There’s more people here than there is space. Head-dizzy and grrrrr ing, I can’t even open the car door. I climb out of the collapsed window, to the roof. Vodka’s living corpse is up here. He’s sitting there wet and soggy, like the street people, rocking-rocking, red-stained clothes.

“I thought you were dead,” I tell him.

“I wish it were possible,” he tells me.

The street people wave-ripple in the storm. Miles, miles of ocean-crowd, rolling with patchy colors, dissolving in the distance. They really seem like an ocean now. The car’s roof is our raft.

“We need to swim for it,” I tell Vodka.

I can’t hear his reply in the metal-clanking rain.

I lug-haul Vod off the raft. We go into the water — sweaty smells from the water-people. He’s lunked over, drug-headed it seems, not swimming very well. I have to pull him so that he won’t drown.

The ocean people press tightly together, then roll-expand a little so we can move a few feet, then they crash together again. Everyone is struggling to move but nobody’s getting anywhere. We get shoved back toward the raft, then forward across a building wall. A piece of the water claws another gash into me. Blood drips through my fingers when I hold my face.

My breathing is weak. I’m trying to stay above the water, trying to get some breath going. I find Vodka’s hand slipping from mine… he’s getting away. The water behind me is moving back toward the raft. My body is going forward. I stare Vodka in the eyes, examining his stone expression. Then I let go.

The force wasn’t even that great. I could’ve kept us together easy. But I let him go.

Looking into his face, I didn’t see Vodka in there at all. I saw an empty container. There was no soul behind his eye-windows, just a calm brrrr noise. So I let him go, and the crowd swallowed him up, another one of them. It doesn’t take long before he gets to the distance, and I can’t tell which one of them he is anymore.

Vodka didn’t seem to mind.

Scene 20 The Man Who Loves Everything

I flow a few miles, emptying into rivers, taken by the people-current toward Satan Burger, ignoring the faces on the water surface. When I get there, the lot is brimming; persons climbing the steps to get out of the people-ocean, some falling off. They’re screaming insanities at each other.

Then a swish of thinking bleeds into my emotions, a grind-spinning view of the area above me, on the hilltop.

And what I see is: Satan Burger is gone.

I swim to the steps for a closer look, but there are too many people, too many rage-frustrations inside of me. The sickness gets stronger. I get claustrophobic.

I start climbing.

Halfway, I meet a familiar face. It’s soggy in the rain and I’m surprised I recognize him with my acidy eyes.

“Satan,” I call.

He notices me and squeezes in closer.

“What happened?” I scream over the insane ones before he reaches me.

The insane ones hand out jabs and tickles.

Satan Burger was destroyed,” he yells, getting closer… His face is sooty and blood-cut, his nice clothes are rip-sliced apart too. As ironic as it sounds, he looks like he’s been to hell and back. I can’t even see his gay-pride button.

He shouts, “An earthquake hit, tore the whole building in half, into pieces.”

I shout, “But there aren’t any earthquakes in New Canada.”

“It doesn’t matter,” he yells. “Child Earth did this, the little shit. He was pissed off that I was stealing the souls of his new toys and sent an earthquake after me. I should’ve never touched the fucker.”

“What do you mean, touched ?”

Still screaming: “I’m responsible for putting breath in this planet’s lungs. I touched it. I have the touch of life, remember. I made it alive. I made almost every planet in this damned universe alive, with my gay fucking hands.”

The sense of the whole situation hits me, and I say it to myself: “Earth is a demon?”

“I’m getting out of here,” Satan yells. “I suggest you come with me.”

“Go where?” A headache spikes me. “Where is there to go?”

“Through the walm,” he says.

“That’s crazy. You could end up anywhere. Even in a place without oxygen and die.”

“I’m willing to take the risk if you are.” Satan grins darkly.

“Where is everyone else?” I ask.

“Who cares.” Satan drops himself into the water crowd. “Come on, let’s go before another earthquake hits.”

“Where are they?” I scream-ask again, but Satan gets carried away by the people current. He lets the crowd take him. The distance between us is suddenly very BIG.

From the edge of the parking lot, he yells, “I’ll see you in hell,” which is the common thing for him to say when departing. Sadly, it makes him laugh.

Then his body is gulped away from my sight.

I find another way up the steps, on a side path, and I’m able to get up pretty quick, but on the wrong side of the hill. This side is open, and I have to stop to breathe in some space… Then I realize I need some time to sit. I find a rock underneath a demon-tree, who shelters me from some of the irritating rain.

“He’s right, Leaf,” says a nearby voice.

I don’t turn around right away, still breathing in the space, trying to relax this dizzy head of mine by squeezing my eyes closed…

“Who are you?” I finally ask.

I hear him sitting next to me. Dead leaves crackle.

He says, “I am Jesus Christ.”

When I open my eyes, I see a roll-pudgy man with a beard wearing a janitor’s outfit. A tag on his shirt tells me, “This is Jesus.”

I can’t say anything, or maybe I can’t think of anything to say. I’ve never met the messiah before and I’ve never met anyone who ever has. I don’t seem to care.

He continues, “Satan was right. The walm is your only out.”

My mouth doesn’t say anything

He says, “You have to save your immortal soul.”

Then I shake my head. “I don’t know if it’s worth saving anymore.”

“Don’t say that!” Jesus says, waggling sense into me. “That’s the walm stealing your lifeforce that made those words. You have to fight it.”

I realize Jesus is right. Sort of.

Richard Stein always wanted to meet Jesus Christ. Of course, he never got to. Maybe he did after his death, but I’m not sure how the afterlife situation works. I don’t know if you get to talk to Jesus right away or if you have to wait a hundred years. I think I’m one of the only living people to ever meet Jesus Christ after his crucifixion. I should probably feel special or something. But I don’t.

Richard Stein was very Jesus-curious during his early thirties. This Jesus-curiosity caused him to accept Jesus into his life. But Richard Stein didn’t like God. He didn’t like the way God capitalized the word “He,” in regards to Himself. God seemed too-too superior to Richard Stein, and Richard Stein called superior people like Him Hot Shots. This is the way I figured it: “God is the ultimate authority figure, and people like Richard Stein don’t like authority figures.”

Jesus was a lot like Richard Stein, though. Jesus was a human, he could be killed, stopped. He was the savior, but still needed saving. He could walk on water, but could still drown. He caused the better organization of society, but also caused wars over faith in him. To Richard Stein, Jesus was both a saint and a devil, and that’s what he liked about him.

Richard Stein always wanted to meet Jesus so that he could see what he looked like, what clothing styles he liked, what foods tasted best to him, what regrets he’s ever had — all the small things that would make Jesus more human. He especially wanted to know if Jesus hated anything. He wondered if Jesus hated Satan — or if he pitied him, or was frightened by him. He wondered if Jesus hated evil and sin.

Once Richard Stein said, “I already know that Jesus hates sin, I just want to hear him say that he hates something.”

If Richard Stein was in my position, he’d have a whole bundle-pack of questions lined up for the savior. He would have loved the idea of Jesus being a BIG fat guy, ugly instead of the beautiful image people paint. But of all the questions he would’ve had, I can only think up one for him.

I ask, “Why are you wearing a janitor’s uniform?”

At first, I figured he wore it because he was the janitor at Satan Burger, but Satan said his demons did all the cleaning, so I just had to ask him.

He responds, “I am the janitor of mankind, not the shepherd as the BIG bible says. I clean up the dirty parts of society, the dirty sides of men’s souls. It is the job I was born to do, and I don’t get paid anything to do it.”

“God won’t pay you anything?”

“Well, God isn’t the person who would pay me if I got paid. He hires accountants from an agency to handle all of his income. But his chief accountant doesn’t think there is a reason for me to be the janitor of mankind, so he does not pay me. It is volunteer work.”

I say, “It sounds too hard to be volunteer work.”

“Hard work doesn’t bother me. To tell you the truth, I love to work.”

“What?” I’m shocked to hear love and work in the same sentence. Jesus is beginning to seem crazy.

“Work keeps my life in order. Keeps an even amount of hard times and good times in my life. When I work, I learn to appreciate the free time I have, I don’t waste it on trivial things like music and television.”

“You don’t like music or television?”

“Are you joking? I love those things.”

“I don’t like commercials,” I tell him, wand-spindle voice. “That’s what makes television a waste of time.”

“Commercials are better than nothing,” Jesus says. “If there were no commercials, what would fill the spaces where the commercials are supposed to be? The announcer would say ‘we’ll be back after these messages.’ There would be three minutes of black space. There would be nothing. Wouldn’t you prefer commercials over that?”

I guess he’s right, He is Jesus, but I think television networks would just make television shows longer if there weren’t any commercials instead of add in black space. Jesus knows best though. “I guess you’re right, but commercials represent corporations and money. And money is the ultimate evil.”

“No, I don’t believe so. Money is extraordinarily good. Money gives people a reason to work. Without work we’d still be sleeping in caves.”

“Oh.” I seem annoyed by his replies.

There has to be something that Jesus Christ doesn’t like. I’ve already asked him about the three evils of the world. Richard Stein always said that nothing is more evil than work, money, and commercials.

“Is there anything that you don’t like Jesus?” I ask.

“I love everything,” he responds.

“You can find good in every single person, every single object?”

“Of course.”

Thinking of Richard Stein, I say, “But there is one thing you hate. You hate evil.”

Jesus just shakes his head.

“People don’t understand evil,” Jesus says, pinching a piece of sand. “Nobody realizes how absolutely necessary evil is.”

He pauses, staring at the street people in the rain. The water drops are getting slender, and shrill-winding waves start in.

He continues, “Satan wasn’t the person that started it either. Of course, the bible says he did. But God was the one responsible for evil, and everyone in heaven knows this. He made Man with an evil side, but told him not to use it. God expected Man to succumb to his dark side eventually, wanted Man to, because without evil there is no God.

“After evil was invented, there had to be an opposite to it. That is where good came from. So you see why I have to love it? Good comes out of evil. Without bad in the world, there cannot be good, because there is nothing to compare good with. That is one reason why I am not in heaven. Heaven is a terrible, boring place. It is too perfect. It is paradise. Sure it seems nice, but there is no evil there, no conflict, there is no such thing as satisfaction. And people forget how beautiful satisfaction can be.”

He gives examples. “Nobody works in paradise, so there is no such thing as coming home after a hard day of work, and just sitting on your ass, doing absolutely nothing and getting absolute pleasure from it. Even love is boring in heaven, because there is constant love all around you there, and no hate at all. So love is nothing special. And you never go through the hardships of falling in love, which is what gives the winning of love a feeling of victory. And all the food is perfect in heaven, so you can’t compare it to bad food. And there is no excitement in heaven, because conflict and danger makes excitement. There is also nothing there to fear. Everything is comfortable in heaven, so even comfort isn’t satisfying. You last about two months in paradise before you get completely bored. And if boredom doesn’t find you, you’ll become one of the heaven zombies.”

The word heaven zombies makes me turn my head to the crowd of insane ones. I ask myself, “Are they the same as angels are?”

Jesus says, “There is one thing that I do hate. I hate it with passion. I loath it…”

He hates perfection.

“What are you going to do?” I ask Jesus, ready to leave. “Are you going to go through the walm like Satan did.”

“Never.”

“Why? You’ll lose your soul if you stay.”

“I have already lost my soul, so it is no use going.”

“What? You seem perfectly fine.”

“That’s because I am Jesus. Jesus is supposed to be filled with love. It is just routine for me to act this way, emotion has nothing to do with it. And also because of routine, I will never leave my people. I am their last protector. Even if I still had soul, and still cared about things, I probably would’ve stayed.”

But then it would’ve been out of love, not routine.

Jesus says, “I need you to do something for me, Leaf.”

I nod.

“I need you to survive.”

I nod again.

“I have been writing a BIG history book.” Jesus pulls out an old-skinned pack. Patting it — a hard drumming. “This is the book of Man, all the events since man’s birth are in it. And it has been handed down and down and down, until it reached me. Man will never die if he is kept in memory. Memory saves people from oblivion. So I need you to get through the walm with this history book, and save it. Then you need to continue writing in it. Write about you and your friends, the society that you start within whichever world you end up in. Breed and build your numbers, see if you can create a human civilization again. Before you die, hand it over to the next generation. And hand it down and down and down. Until there is only one human being left alive.”

“What about the humans we leave here? What is going to happen to them?”

“They have no emotions,” Jesus says. “They are not human beings anymore.”

He places the history book in my lap. Then a hand on my shoulder. “And the very last human alive must bury this history book on a high peak, and the words written on the tombstone must say this.” He draws the words in the dirt:

Scene 21 Flying Fish

I climb the hill to the ruins of Satan Burger and see a flock of flying fish scavenging for scraps of food. The fish aren’t the winged, footed fish-birds that I once saw in the midget president territory. These are normal-looking fish that seem to have confused the air with the water, swimming through the oxygen with their flappers, and getting rained on quite a bit. Maybe the fish confused the air with water because they are insane.

I walk up, up, watching the fish dive down to the Satan Burger rubble to piles of burger-wastes, dead customers, bloody demon corpses. I see Mortician up there. He’s climbing on top of the rubble. He’s probably looking for water, or maybe for his pirate hat, but I don’t say anything to him.

At the flat edge, Christian is relax-sitting on a piece of sign. Smoking a cigarette with comfortable breaths — a pile of cigarette boxes near him taken from the broken cigarette-dispenser demon. I go to him.

The only thing I can hear is the train-roaring wind and Nan’s cries coming through it. I see her once I get to Christian. She’s on top of Gin’s body, wrapped around him, punching him for not working right.

“What’s wrong?” I ask Christian.

“Not much,” he says, shrugging. “Not much.”

“What happened to Gin?”

He looks over at the corpse on the ground. “He’s gone.”

Finishing his cigarette, Christian stands up and looks at Nan. “While Nan was unconscious, after the earthquake took down Satan Burger and knocked her asleep. Gin ate a Satan Burger, right there. He put his nostrils inside of Nan’s mouth while he ate it, and his soul wandered out through his nose holes, just like Satan said, and it was absorbed inside of her. He was gone before Nan woke up. Gone to… oblivion.”

I watch Nan pushing at him, screaming, swirling. Gin’s body parts are still moving, still alive. Breakfast runs around Gin’s face. It smacks him, but the face is soulless tissue.”

“Satan was wrong,” I say. “There are people that will give up their immortal soul and go to oblivion to save another person’s life, even if that person doesn’t love him.”

She loves him now.

“What’re we going to do?” Mortician asks. He jumps down from the rubble toward Christian. “Satan’s gone and he was the only one who could help us.”

“We’re basically fucked,” Christian says, lighting another cigarette, this one a menthol.

“What do you think, Nan?” Mortician yell-asks her. “What do you wanna do?”

It takes her many cries, getting them all out. A gash bleeds down her forehead.

Mort asks her again.

More talking between Mort and Christian. Then she interrupts with her answer: “I want to die ! All what I want to do is die. That’s the only thing I was guaranteed in life, how come I can’t anymore? If only there was an afterlife, any sort of small afterlife, I wish Gin and I could go there. I wish we died last week, when death was working right.” But they pay no attention.

“Give up, Mortician,” Christian says. “You know we’re fucked.”

Mort says, “I know we’re fucked, but our souls are running out. We might as well do something before we’re boring zombies like everyone else. Let’s do something fun.”

“We aren’t fucked yet,” I finally tell them, wondering if they would’ve thought about it themselves. “If we go through the walm, we can find another world. One where we won’t lose our souls.”

“Dumb ass,” Christian says. “Whichever world we end up in will still have a walm in it, and it will still eat our souls. You can’t get to a walmless world by going through the walm.”

“But then we’d be new people,” I argue. “New people don’t lose their souls to the walm here, so I’m positive we’d be fine.”

Christian shakes his head in an I don’t know fashion.

“Let’s do it,” Mort says. “Even if we lose our souls, at least it is something we can do.”

“But how are we going to find the walm?” Christian asks. “We’ve never been there. It’ll take us forever to find it in this city, especially with all these crazy people around.”

“I think there is someone who knows where it is,” I say.

“Yeah? Who’s that?” asks Christian.

“Stag and Lenny.”

“They’re gone,” Christian says. “The Silence took them. Nobody comes back from the Silence.”

I shake-spin my head. “I’m willing to go. I’ve been inside of it twice already. I’ve been inside of its stomach bag, and I have returned. For some reason it will not digest me. I’m probably too disgusting. One of them still has to be alive somewhere inside of it. I’ll find the Silence and get them out.”

“I’ll come too,” Mortician says. “It sounds like fun.”

I say, “No, you don’t need to go. I should do this alone.”

I go to Nan on my way down the hill.

“Nan,” I say. “Stay here, okay? We’re going to go through the walm once I get back. I’m going to get us out of this place.”

She’s calm. Well, she’s not as hysterical as she was before. “I’m not leaving Gin,” she says.

It’s a hysterical idea.

“You have to come,” I say.

I sit down next to her and the corpse. All of Gin’s living body parts are cut off and hugging Nan’s lap. There is Breakfast, Battery, Encyclopedia, Selenson, Tofu, Beer Mug, and the Medusa Hairs. I wonder if part of Gin’s soul is inside of his living parts. Did some of it survive? Nan seems to connect to them. She holds the body parts like she would Gin. Her behavior doesn’t frighten herself.

“Nan, please,” I say. “We’ll escape and be free.”

“I want to die,” she says.

“You can’t do that here,” I say. “Come with us and live a life. Eventually, you’ll die and your soul will go somewhere. If you stay here, you’ll never die. And your soul will leave you. You will live for eternity without a soul.”

“I don’t want my soul anymore. Once my soul is gone I won’t be sad anymore. I won’t ever have to deal with my emotions ever again.”

“What about the good emotions? Like love and joy and pleasure and excitement. Don’t you want them?”

“They aren’t all that great. I’ll give them up if it means getting rid of sadness.” Nan pets Breakfast, crab-crying. She’s a little girl again. All of her toughguy features are gone. “I’ve had too many depressing moments in my life. I can’t ever escape sadness and hate. Never. If I go with you through the walm, it will follow me. It has always followed me, going to another world is not even far enough to escape it. I want to stay. I want the walm to rip that sadness right out of me and grind it up inside of that machine. I want sadness to be destroyed. So I’m not going with you. This is my only escape. My only revenge.”

“This is hard for me to say, Nan,” I put my hand against her polite-fleshed shoulder. “But the future of mankind depends on you.”

“Don’t say that,” she growls. She knows what I’m about to say.

“You’re the only woman left. Without you, mankind will go extinct.”

“Let it,” she says.

“Don’t be selfish.”

“Humanity doesn’t deserve saving. And there’s no way I’m going to fuck any of you three.”

“You don’t have to fuck any of us. Someone will jerk off in a cup if you want. We’ll figure it out somehow. Don’t worry about it being me, if that’s what you’re thinking. There’s no way I’d force my shitty genes on anyone.”

“It’s not going to work, Leaf. I don’t want to take part in making a society of inbreeds.”

“It worked with Adam and Eve,” I say. “Plus, it was Jesus’s idea. You, of all people, have to listen to him.”

“I don’t like Jesus anymore. He’s a fat guy. I liked him before because I thought he was the guy in all the paintings. That Jesus is sexy. And even if that Jesus told me to become Eve, I would refuse.”

“I see.”

“I just want to die,” she says.

“Good,” I say. “Then come with us and die there.”

She sits in silence for awhile, thinking, pouting.

Then she says, “Whatever.”

But “Whatever” might mean “I’m sorry, Leaf. I’ll go with you and see what happens. Maybe I’ll change my mind in the future, but we’ll have to see. I just wish I could die.”

“I know, Nan,” I say to myself. “I wish we all could die.”

She’s staring at the ground and holding me with one of her arms. I don’t remember when she put her arm there, or for what reason. I grasp her hand, and squeeze, pretending she is physically familiar to me.

Under the rain’s patting, I hear her say, “I’m already pregnant.”

I’m not surprised. But for some reason, she gives the same response when I tell her, “I am too.”

Scene 22 Horse Mansion

Back to Silence.

It wasn’t difficult to find it boom-sweeping through the streets like the shadow of a thundercloud, sucking up the insane ones into its gut — which was called Humphrey’s Pub back when it was behind the gas station but that doesn’t exist anymore. The pub had to be torn down and replaced with a larger building, since the Silence has been eating so many street people and needed a stomach structure BIG enough to fit them all in. The building that has replaced the pub is the largest building that has ever existed in the universe. It’s called a Sutter.

Sutters are machine-mountains. They’re sky-bathing power plants that are used on planets whose god has been killed by Time. The Sutter is the mechanism that takes over the god’s duties; it’s the autopilot, you might say. It’s not as good as a god, but it works. But a Sutter isn’t capable of performing all of the god’s duties. Nothing can completely take the place of a god because gods are very complex life forms and are easily offended by men who compare them to machines.

But all-in-all, the Sutter can handle the basic god tasks that are important to human beings: creating life, changing Mr. Sun’s batteries every hundred years, dispensing good and evil evenly throughout the world, and bringing souls from death to heaven. Sutters do not have the technology to access heaven, though, so they were designed to summon the souls inside of them into the wing called Heaven Two. The wing is large enough to possess about eight hundred generations of souls before a new one needs to be built.

Heaven Two is not as enjoyable as the original Heaven, but it’s better than oblivion.

A Sutter is powered by the same energy that powers the walm: lifeforce. Lifeforce is the universal fuel. It’s used in the god dimension much more than electricity or gas. But Sutters don’t use humans as their power source. They use the souls of horses. Horses have small organs inside of their brains that have regenerative abilities. These organs — known as Tompets — will rejuvenate any lost soul particles in the horse, making it impossible for horses to lose their souls until they die.

The organ was discovered accidentally by a man named Philip Tompet, who was trying to prove his theory, “Horses are superior to humans,” which was published in a book called, Horses Are Superior To Humans. He wasn’t trying to stress the importance of horses, but rather to demean the idea that mankind is the best meat-form that has ever been pooped into being. Four more books were published under his name that corresponded to his original theory; they were, Dolphins Are Superior To Humans, Polliwogs Are Superior To Humans, and Somebody’s Nose Is Superior To Humans.

After Mr. Tompet presented the Tompet Organ to his world, many people started to agree with him. And after the publication of his fifth book, Venereal Disease Is Superior To Humans, he was killed by the rest of his race, who said to him, “You took that last one just a little too far.”

So each Sutter is chocked full of millions upon millions of horses, and there are four immortal humans — more like machines — who take care of all of the horses and make sure the Sutter is nice and clean. Still, it’s the closest thing they have to a god, so they treat it with respect. If you ask them where they live, they’ll tell you, “In the Horse Mansion,” because it’s a more descriptive name.

Richard Stein never got to read Horses Are Superior To Humans, but I’m sure he would’ve enjoyed it. He always said that horses are the greatest creatures invented, because they are BIG and strong, yet still beautiful. He said humans can never have beauty when they are BIG and strong, and neither can any other animal, even lions and bears. Unless you’re an artist, that is, because artists usually find all creatures beautiful, especially the ugly or peculiar-looking ones.

He was a BIG man himself. Not extremely defined with muscles, but pretty massive. He found himself disgusting, an ugly beast with pants. He cringed in the mirror every day, just like me. And he found all of his BIG-strong friends disgusting as well, even though they found themselves beautiful, and so did their women.

Richard Stein always envied all of the thin-small people in the world. And all of the thin-small people in the world envied him back, just for not being thin-small.

This Horse Mansion doesn’t work anymore. It was swallowed up by the Silence just yesterday, when it took its morning stroll through the walm and back, leaving a world without their god machine, which means that that world will probably die soon. It has already digested all of the horses inside of it and rendered it a BIG useless building. If it did still work, it would be a perfect solution to our problem. We could’ve gone to Heaven Two instead of oblivion.

Now that I think of it, God could’ve put a Sutter on Earth after Heaven filled up, but I guess he just didn’t care enough to do it.

Of course, even if there was a Sutter, we would’ve had to kill ourselves before the walm took our souls, and that would’ve been a pretty hard thing for us to do. It would’ve been a good backup plan anyway. Especially if there’s something that will try to stop us from going through the walm, like a prowler beast or a gatekeeper, which is a good possibility.

I was expecting the Sutter to be crowd-stuffed, but I find the opposite when I go in. It’s totally empty. I go inside, my steps echoing, echoing…. I guess all the crazies were too loud and got themselves digested already.

I just used the word praying, but I meant hoping, because praying is a pointless act in this world.

Walking hyper-stretched. Vision sick, lunking through horse-scented spaces. Some people here — walm people. Just a small some. A couple quiet blue women feeding from a wormy teenager. A few scraggly ones and a dark male are here. All of them are in their miserable insides {?}, sitting.

Keeping my mouth shut, I walk on… If I’m wrong about the Silence and it digests me, all of my friends — who happen to be the last real humans left — will become walm fuel. I can’t let that happen. They’re counting on me to be a hero. A hero. A human fuck-up is mankind’s only hope. It scares me. Obscene colors leap into my head. I murder the thought.

After an hour of striding through hallways and finding only twenty-two sad-sad beings, I go to Heaven Two to satisfy my curiosity. If Stag and Lenny aren’t in this area I’ll at least be able to say that I’ve been to heaven.

Inside, I can think of only one descriptive word for heaven: carpet. I’m not sure if I can describe what I mean, but I feel all carpety inside of here. I feel comfortably drugged and released from all stress. The whole panic of the world has slipped right off of my shoulders.

Of course, this isn’t the real heaven. It’s just an imitation of paradise. And the only thing great about it is its comfortable atmosphere. I’m sure that the comfort gets boring after some time. At the moment, though, I am tempted to stay.

I don’t find Stag or Lenny, but one of them finds me.

I hear his voice calling me from a dark section of Heaven Two, where the words Punk Land have been hand written on a carpet wall. It was Stag’s little joke.

“Where are you?” I say, not perceiving anyone in Punk Land.

“Right here,” Lenny says.

Then I notice that he’s right in front of me, but transparent. A fading image. He’s half-digested and now only half-exists, sitting in a queer position and trying to hold on to his remains.

“Where’s Stag?” I ask, not whispering.

“Gone like the rest of them.” His voice isn’t a whisper either, but it’s not as loud as mine. “You got eaten too, eh?”

“Yeah, but I’m not staying here. I’m indigestible.”

Lenny doesn’t believe me. He says, “Cock wash.”

“I just came for you. We’re getting out of this world.”

“I’m not going anywhere,” Lenny says.

“It doesn’t matter then,” I gripe.

I tell him the story of Satan Burger and how we’re going to restart the human race. He doesn’t seem to know where he is. He has cotton stains on his mouth and doesn’t speak. Speaking to me has already caused him to be digested a little more.

He tells me where the walm is. “Near the center of Punk Land, where they filmed Death Corpse.” That movie I was in, as a zombie in the back of the zombie crowd. There was a close-up of my back when I and a few other corpses were killing a major character that was dressed up like a butt-rocker. Mortician and Lenny were in that movie too, but I didn’t know them very well in those days.

“Is it dangerous?”

Lenny shrugs. “There’ll be something waiting for you there. It’s the Movac and it knows everything. Everything about everything. From how the universe began to how the universe will end, to what you are thinking to what you’re going to think.”

“What is it doing there?”

“Answering questions.”

“Do me a favor, Leaf.” Lenny scratches his chest and fades a little more.

“Sorry, I’m in a hurry.” I get up to leave.

“Please.”

“What is it?”

“Kill the Movac for me.”

“Why do that?”

“It doesn’t deserve to live. Nothing should know everything.”

Scene 23 Carnal Run

I leave Silence as slip-easy as before, and feel a tremendous smile overtake my face; I’m the only person who can escape such a creature after being swallowed. I am special. Just how I am the only person owning God’s Eyes, though they have been repossessed. I walk out calm-slinky and go back to Satan Burger, through the street that Silence emptied for me.

The walk is not dangerous anymore, I think, with more Silence-emptied streets, but danger can come from within you. Right now my head-visions seem like danger — my eyes are going hell-whirl. It’s enough for me to commit self-murder, but I won’t give in to the suicide voices in my head. I have mankind to save. And besides that, I’m sensing a hard-on coming. A BIG bulge in my pants. Richard Stein always said that hard-ons are bound to happen when you least expect them, but nobody ever thought that the hero of mankind would be having trouble with a hard-on during the moment of his ultimate test.

I am guessing my shank is craving the blue woman — maybe the blue woman is craving it too — but it’s not getting any blue pleasures anymore, because I will never see that creature ever again. She tricked me into pregnancy, without even loving me, but she was so beautiful… I’m definitely going to miss the sex. But I’ll have another blue woman soon enough. Once I give birth to it, I’ll have to feed it in the same manner I fed my old blue woman. Sure it seems like incest to molest my own child, but blue women belong to another culture.

My hard-on is still going strong when I get to Satan Burger, trying to hide it from my friends when I see them (I use the history book of mankind as a shield). Mort, Nan, and Gin’s body parts don’t seem to notice my hard-on. They probably don’t care enough to let themselves notice.

“We need to get going now,” I tell them. Then I realize one member of our group is missing. “Where’s Christian?”

Mort sway-looks around. “Must’ve wandered off.”

“Where?” I stomp toward him.

He shrugs.

“Stay here. I’ll find him.”

I jamble-hike to the other side of the hill, searching, searching… but my vision is too harsh and unclear, so I call to him. Three yells, but he doesn’t give an answer. If he’s joined the crowd of insane ones, I’ll never be able to find him. I won’t even bother, not even for my best friend.

Richard Stein’s best friend was a guy nicknamed Hobby, who produced twenty-six children from thirteen different women, none of which he was married to. It had something to do with his brain, but Hobby loved to impregnate women, more than one woman at a time, and every pregnancy happened to manufacture identical twins. His friends, like Richard Stein, thought he was funny, but thirteen pairs of children thought he was a jerk.

They ended their friendship the day Hobby was arrested for giving twins to a sixteen-year-old. Richard normally would have thought it was a funny thing for Hobby to do, but Richard’s little sister was where he drew the line.

I find Christian across the street. He managed to climb to the roof of the bakery building on the left foot of the Satan Burger hill.

“What are you doing?” I yell to him. “You lost your fucking mind?”

Christian stands there messiah-like, his arms spread. “It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” he calls.

“What?”

“This place is groobly-goo. The whole world. The streets full of creatures and colors. I feel like Mr. T.”

The rain has gotten to him, or maybe it’s the silly-go.

“You’re going crazy, Christian,” I say. “Stop it.”

He laughs. “I know. It’s great.”

“Try to fight it. We need to leave.”

I see him swaying and twisting in my ocean eyes, drowning. The rain has drizzled him soggy and he can’t stand up on his own anymore.

“We need to get to Punk Land,” I scream to him. “That’s where the walm is.”

“Sounds like fun,” wobble-words from his mouth.

Christian looks at a point high above me.

“Scorpion flies,” he says.

“What?”

“Scorpion flies.”

I see the swarm tornadoing above me. Buzz-whirling for an attack. The scorpion flies have gone crazy as well, and are actually coming to ground-level to kill. A BIG panic hits my face. A smaller one hits Christian’s.

“Get out of here!” I scream to him. “Meet us in Punk Land. We’ll be waiting for you.”

Christian nods, jumping onto the whirl crowd below, and I run back to Satan Burger, slipping every footfall and moving in circles with my rolling world.

“Let’s go!” I yell to Mort and Nan, who are already up and ready to run. Staring dead into the millions of beady-minded insects in the sky.

I glance up at the sky on our way down the Satan Burger steps, wheel-screeching black ones in the orange wind.

“Where is it?” Mort screams.

“Punk Land.”

We jump full into the crowd of insane ones and barge our way through. Breakfast and all of Gin’s other body parts begin fall-hanging from Nan. She loses one of the Medusa Hairs and keeps moving through, pulling off her shirt and wrapping the demons inside of it. Her skin now exposed to the dirty world, cuts and bruises from the sex with Gin and her bra is ripped in places where Gin’s teeth had been. A pink nipple smiles in the soaking air.

My hard-on will not go away, especially with Nan rubbing her open breast against my arm, trying to keep with me. Also, all of the insane ones seem to have gotten into a rumble-orgy of licking and rub-scouring. Pressing against my shank as I barge my way through, feeling very displaced by the performance…

A masturbating woman with green-speckled hair licks the sweat from my neck, trying to keep me with her, trying to pull me down. She must realize my condition and wants to release the pressure, as a favor to me. And I want to go into her. But I must shove on. I try to pull her forward, to come with me toward the walm, but she releases her grip and continues pleasuring herself.

I keep going, pushing through the rolling insane ones, trying to keep my shank from running into any other hungry women. I wonder if the rain is what gave me this unstoppable hard-on. Maybe my penis has maggots in its brain.

The scorpion flies attack.

I hear the people scream from behind us, dropping paralyzed.

Running begins.

The whole insane crowd, just now getting a glimpse of reality, filling their nerves with fright over lust, terror. Then trampling starts. Screams and thrashings through the puddles of pulpy yellow.

My legs and eyes don’t communicate properly, but I’m moving. Jumping over the already-paralyzed. Fighting the slow ones in my way. I still feel Nan’s arm and breast wrapped against me, running with my speed. I’m not sure if Mortician is behind us, or if he’s been taken down, but I keep going, crushing MAN’s history book against my erection.

Some people take to a manhole, to the dark ones’ territory, which might be the safest place to go. But I don’t follow them. We might get trapped down there, unable to reach the walm, or maybe the dark ones will hold us there and let their dark females molest us beyond death. I push into my erection again and groan. I still have the dark female’s love wounds from when I was with Vodka, and the open sores are still numb-felt. Even the flaps of skin hanging from my shoulder feel like cloth, or something not attached to my nerves. Maybe the rain is some kind of special acid juice and melted my nerves.

The crowd is thinning, too many fallen prey to the scorpion flies. It doesn’t seem like the scorpion flies are eating all of their victims. Normally, a swarm of a hundred would sting one human-sized creature and it would be enough food for the whole family. But the scorpion flies are crazy now. They’re trying to take down every member of the group, as if the crowd is one prey instead of a group of prey.

Nan cries out and goes limp, falling from my grasp. Turning, huffing, I stomp on the scorpion fly eating her stomach, grinding its insides out, pushing all the wind out of her. I gawk around. Gin’s body parts are squirming in Nan’s shirt. There aren’t too many scorpion flies attacking nearby, just a couple. I can’t see Mortician. He’s gone. He must be one of the frozen bodies in the distance, where some scorpion flies start feeding. I’m not going back for him.

I am alone.

I stare down at Nan’s thin, vulnerable body. She looks as if she’s asleep, but her eyes are open and blinking a little. Her legs have fallen open and there’s a wet pond between them. Her exposed breast is now sweat-dungy, glistening and oily. The history book pressed against my shank is only making things worse.

She can’t do anything if I pull down her tight shorts right now, and give it to her right in the middle of all this chaos. I never liked to think about Nan sexually, but the rain must have gotten to me. We need to get going. If I do this here a scorpion fly might get me. Then we’ll both be devoured, without dying. And even if a scorpion fly doesn’t attack me, she’ll kill me once she comes to. Literally kill me.

I feel so perverted, but I can’t stop feeling it. I wish the tables were turned and Nan was the horny one, molesting me while I was paralyzed, with the insane screamers stampering around us.

I bend down to pick her up, podding my arms around her hips. I lift a little with my weak muscles and take her shoulders off the ground, but then my penis stabs her in the side with a shock, and I drop her. Her head claps against the street. My erection doesn’t leave her side, though, it presses further instead. I must be insane, truly insane. I feel my way up her stomach to the unexposed breast and pull the bra down. Smoothing my palm into it. I can’t stop myself now. My penis has taken full control over my body. Screaming-commotion all around this performance, people being eaten alive, beating each other to escape, and my other hand decides to go between Nan’s legs, feeling the outsides.

Then, before my hand goes any further, I stop. The hard-on is gone, the penis has shriveled… I pull both of my hands away from her skin, lean in to her ear and whisper, “I’m sorry, Nan. I’m going crazy.” Then I plunge my head into her bloody stomach, but I don’t cry. My mind doesn’t care enough to feel the disgust I should be feeling now.

“Leaf!” I hear from the distance.

Mort limps toward us, smiling at his act of survival.

“What happened?” I ask Mortician when he arrives to us.

“I almost got it back there,” he says. “I tripped on some bastard and fucked up my leg. I’m surprised those things didn’t get me. Especially with my slow ass.”

Mort pauses. He looks down at Nan.

“Did they get her?” he asks.

“Yeah.”

“She’s fucked.”

“I couldn’t pick her up.”

“We’re going to have to leave her.”

For a second, I feel relieved, because I won’t have to face her after she wakes up from paralysis. But I know that would be very wrong.

“We can’t just leave her. She’s our friend, and she’s the last human female left.”

“Well, my leg is crippled and you’re weak, plus you have your fucked eyes. How are we supposed to get her out of here?”

“We’ll have to both carry her,” I tell him. “I know she hates me, but I can’t leave her here.”

“Fine,” Mort says. “But if you get stung, I’m leaving you both here.”

As we leave, I see a human clown with its arms missing. They look like they’ve only recently been severed. The clown is wandering incoherently toward the scorpion flies. Blood drip-drips onto his side. He doesn’t seem to notice that his arms are missing, and it’s almost funny. Richard Stein said that clowns are goofy people that know how to be funny. I think he’s right, because even though this clown is in a terrible state — losing his arms in a violent sort of way and all — I still cant help but laugh.

Richard Stein also said that there are only two sorts of people that would laugh at someone so pitiful as a clown with its arms cut off. Those people are the mean sort of people and the sort that have maggots in the brain. I wonder which sort I am.

But Richard Stein said that there are very few people in the world that don’t laugh at the pitiful and the misfortunate, which means that most human beings are generally mean and/or have maggots in the brain. But mean people and maggot-brained people can be pitiful themselves, so there was a lot of confusion among humans before their souls were lost.

Scene 24 Ocean Man

The drizzle-rain dies as we arrive at Punk Land — not the punk version of heaven, but the place where punks acted punk before the walm took it over.

We’re not strong enough to pick Nan up off the ground and her knees are raw-bloody from scraping against the asphalt. She has yet to become un-limp, but I’m not impatient for what she will do to me when her strength returns. I cringe at the thought.

I left Gin’s demon body parts where they were. Besides Breakfast, that is, who refused to be left behind. He followed for almost a hundred feet, crawling on fingers, before I noticed him. Then I stuffed him down Nan’s shorts, hoping she wouldn’t mind. She’ll probably kill me for that too. Waking from paralysis to find out she’s been pervert-handled by both myself and her dead boyfriend’s demon hand will probably be damaging to her mental health in some way. I hope I can make it up to her in the future, after we start a colony in a different dimension.

The scorpion flies are behind us, feeding probably, but we can’t be too sure we’re safe from them. And there are other creatures to worry about as well. Like the dark ones and the prowler beasts and the krellians. And the Movac, who knows everything, who is awaiting us at the walm.

Richard Stein said that it would be a terrible thing to know everything about everything. I bet he would’ve agreed with Lenny’s statement that nothing should know everything, and whoever does know everything should be killed. Richard Stein also said that all human beings are born with the wish to know all there is to know, even if it is such a terrible thing.

The park, which used to be punk-filled, is now flooded with a miniature ocean — one that must’ve been brought from a miniature world. At first I see it as a giant puddle, through gyration eyes, but once I scoop a handful of the water I can see closer-closer. Turns out there are tiny whales and sharks and sailboats inside. So small that a sandwich bug can eat them in a gulp. I drop the chunk of ocean back into place, probably drowning the sailboats that I had. The ocean seems to go for half a mile, all the way through Punk Land.

Richard Stein said that the ocean, not old age, is where all the world’s wisdom comes from. He believed that oceans produce an aura that seeps into the souls of anyone around it, so people that live in or around the ocean are generally the most enlightened people alive. Mr. Richard Stein never knew this for fact, though, because he didn’t know any wise people that lived near the ocean. He just assumed he knew what he was talking about after he visited the Atlantic one summer. He said, “The vast emotion was overpowering and my thoughts were never so clear.” But he never went inside of the water, since Richard Stein couldn’t swim. One of his legs didn’t work correctly.

Water-wisdom is what he called it. He said that it’s much more powerful than old age wisdom or educated wisdom or the common wisdom you’re born with. In fact, he mentioned that if there was someone who knew everything about everything, that person would’ve gotten his/her knowledge from water-wisdom. If this were true then more schools should’ve been built on beaches or near lakes, because wisdom is more important than school-learning — which is intelligence. The thing about intelligence is that it revolves around memory. Those with good memories will learn more. Those that forget easily will not be intelligent. And those with photographic memories will be considered geniuses. I don’t like to hear that someone with such good memory can be called such a name, a genius is one who has both intelligence and wisdom.

The man who knows everything is an exception, however, because he was probably born with the knowledge to know everything — at least in my opinion. So memory would not be an important commodity for him, since there is nothing he can learn that he will need to remember.

By the way, I have been addressing the man who knows everything as a he, but I perfectly well know that it could be a she — the woman who knows everything. I will have to start calling it the Movac, so that I do not ruin its gender.

Richard Stein figured that he could find total enlightenment by heading out to sea in a little sailboat. In fact, he said that he would either find enlightenment or die trying. With his spouse gone and without giving the world any children, there was nothing he really had to lose. Except for his life, but by then he was so old-hugging that he would’ve died soon anyway. He was probably going out to sea to kill himself. That’s the way he wanted to die.

On the side of his little boat, he printed the words Ocean Man, which was the title of his ship. He took two months supply of food and three months supply of whiskey and a few books; one was Hemmingway’s The Old Man and the Sea and another was Kafka’s The Castle. Then Ocean Man shoved off from the port in Gloucester, Massachusetts, where he lived for two years during adolescence. His girlfriend back then was called Nina, and she was the first woman that he ever loved. The one he never forgot.

Richard Stein said that you’ll always love your firs t love, no matter how many partners you may go through. The first is always special. His second love, which became his first wife, did not compare to the memory of Nina. Neither did his second wife, who was his eighth love, and who died in an institution populated by crazies. Besides Nina, Richard Stein loved his Cool Blue Lady the most; she was the only woman who stood with him throughout his entire life.

The Cool Blue Lady hovered over Richard Stein solemnly as he washed against the sea, kissing him with her breath. Yes, the Night was his love, deeply. He embraced her with passion, allowing Ocean Man to drift him into the betweens of her firm dark legs. Richard Stein called this voyage the supreme ordeal of his life — the climax of fire, his grand finale. It was the first and only time he truly felt alive and he was glad he lived so long to reach it. He was glad he never put the gun to his head as he always figured he would.

Mortician and I find a dry island underneath a tree and set Nan down. On the swap-side of the tree is a miniature city by the ocean that has a port leading out to the sea. Dozens of fishing boats are coming and going. I wonder if this port is similar to the one in Gloucester, where Ocean Man set sail. I wonder if there is a character similar to Richard Stein over there, setting out to find clarity during the twilight of his life, trying to get in his grand finale before he dies.

“What are we going to do?” Mortician asks.

“I don’t know,” I say. “Wait awhile, for Christian.”

“Do you think he will make it?”

“He better.”

I pressure-thumb Nan’s eye open to see how she’s doing. Still unconscious. Her nipple has been covered over with a coat of mud. I’m guessing that Mortician is responsible for earthing Nan’s breast, because he was probably disgusted by it. Mort finds Nan dyke-hideous because she’s too thin, bald-headed, and without many curves. Skinhead girls are dirty to him.

I hit myself in the skull, thinking about how I almost raped Nan back there. Then I hit myself again.

Some walm people pass by, through the tiny ocean, slug-legged people with no eyes. I often wonder how significant the human race is/was compared to the other peoples of the universe, wondering if we were superior or equal or less. So far, I haven’t seen any race that is technologically more advanced than humans. I have seen some that were emotionally more advanced, or physically more advanced, or own better lives than us, but none are particularly evolved scientifically.

Can it be that humans are ahead of their time? Can everyone else out there be as primitive as the walm races? Are we something special ? Maybe we were put to an end because we evolved past the danger zone — which is the zone where even gods are vulnerable to man’s destructive power. Maybe we invented a device that could blow up the sun, heaven, where Yahweh lives. Maybe He cut us off because He was afraid we would destroy Him.

“I’ve got an idea,” Mortician says.

I glisten to the rolling water and stutter-mumble a word.

Mort asks, “Why do we have to leave?”

“Because of the walm. Forget already?”

“I didn’t forget,” he says. “But what if we get rid of the walm? We wouldn’t have to go anywhere. I think we should just destroy it, just fuck it up with an ax or light it on fire, damage it enough so that it won’t work anymore. If the walm is gone we can stay without losing our souls.”

“You’re forgetting about the Movac,” I tell him. “The walm is guarded by something that knows everything. How are we going to beat something that knows everything? It’s impossible.”

“Nothing’s impossible.”

“The Movac knows everything, understand? It would know exactly how to stop us. Even if we had a gun, it would know where to go to dodge the bullet. Lenny told me to kill the Movac also, but he’s an idiot. It’s impossible.”

“We might as well try,” he says. “What’s the worst that can happen? Get killed? So what, we can’t fully die anymore.”

“Don’t be stupid. I’m not living here as a corpse, waiting for the walm to steal my soul. I wouldn’t want to stay even if we did destroy the walm. There’s no future.”

“But there’s probably hundreds of people around the world that still have some soul left. We’d be saving them.”

“You don’t know that,” I tell him. “We could be the only ones. I’m not going to risk restarting the human race so that we can save a few half-zombie people. Besides, we don’t stand a chance against the Movac.”

Of course, there is one way we can defeat the Movac, although it’s a long shot. The only way you can beat a man who knows everything is if he wants you to beat him. If the Movac knows someone is trying to kill him, he has two options. One, he can take the necessary steps to stop that someone — not to mention the Movac already knows he will succeed, because he knows the future, which can almost be considered cheating. And, two, the Movac can accept death and do nothing — but the Movac would already know this before needing to decide.

By the way, decisions are just as irrelevant to the Movac as memories. You don’t need to make choices when you already know which ones you will choose.

Then again, the Movac may want us to kill him, because the one who knows everything must be waiting for death, out of boredom. Everything must be so boring to him. Then again, the Movac has always lived knowing everything about everything, so he’s probably so accustomed to knowing everything that he wouldn’t have it any other way. Humans may want to better themselves and better themselves and better themselves without being the best — because the best, since they’re the best, can’t better themselves — but the Movac’s point of existing has nothing to do with bettering itself, so these rules don’t apply. The Movac’s point of existence must be something I can’t understand, something beyond my personal knowledge. Something godly…

I’d prefer to leave the walm in soul-sucking order anyway, instead of destroying it. Even if the Movac would allow us to kill it, I wouldn’t hurt the walm. Because I’m hoping that it will go out of control, become unstoppable. And it will suck the souls out of everything nearby. It will finish off the human race, then go to the walm people, then go to the Movac or whatever other super-beings are here, then go to Child Earth and suck the bratty little soul out of it, and then it will start taking the energy out of heaven. It will suck God’s soul away, chopping it up into the walm, into oblivion. And I’ll be laughing safely on the other side of the universe, because that’s what He gets for turning His back on us. A taste of His own medicine, you can say.

Of course, this is very unlikely. I’m sure that God is the one controlling the walm and has the ability to turn it off. I don’t even know if the walm can reach that far. Of course, God might want the walm to take Child Earth’s soul away, which is good enough for me. If I was God, I would’ve straightened out this bratty planet a long time ago. I think Child Earth deserves oblivion. On the other hand, I’m just an action figure. I don’t have any say in the happenings of the universe, and I’d be laughed at if I thought otherwise. I’m just a form of amusement.

I wonder how amusing Richard Stein was to Child Earth, when he shoved off an old man into the sea without any sailing experience, and without any company besides his Cool Blue Lady during the second half of each day. I wonder how Child Earth felt about old men in their twilight moments altogether. I wonder if he gives them their grand finale without killing them off first, if he thinks it would be funnier to not satisfy a pitiful old man. Or was the distribution of such grand finales God’s job?

Scene 25 Brain City

An hour or two passes and still no Christian.

He went crazy, so who knows what could’ve happened to him. Being in a bad place to be when the scorpion flies attacked, probably paralyzed in an alley somewhere, or in a pile of half-corpses.

We can’t wait for him anymore. Humanity’s future depends on our survival.

So we decide to head towards the walm, with Nan against our shoulders. She can walk now. Well, it’s more of a stagger-wobble, and her head is still drunk with toxins, but she’ll pull through in time. Through the miniature ocean cluttered with micro fish and organisms. I wonder if there are water bugs trying to eat the tiny people in the sailboats. I wonder if the tiny people are scared of this new land of giants.

“It must be there,” Mort tells me, motioning to a flesh-tangy area up ahead, beings walking (or sometimes oozing) from that direction.

“Here we go,” I tell Leaf.

The area is peach-meat sunshine, flowing curly, plastic.

Peculiar shock emotions hit me here, right here, emotions that I haven’t felt before in my life, wiggling strong. Just as strong as love or fear or hate or happiness. Another emotion, never felt by human feelings. So new to me, freshly breathing into my system.

Intensities camber and take me over.

I’ve always figured there could be more emotions out there somewhere, similar to love or sadness, but I never thought they’d be so different, so unexplainable. I feel like the color orange with red dots and a tree branch inside. Then I feel like the tip of a needle and the fabric of a plaid couch. I can’t tell if these feelings are beautiful or scary. I can only say that they are extraordinary.

The emotions must be emanating from the walm like sillygo, but I can’t see the walm entirely — just a glow of red light.

It’s blocked by the people leaving from there. More new people. I see one man attached to a woman, who seems to be his wife. Joined in flesh as well as in marriage.

Another being has a snake’s torso, like something from Greek Mythology, but it also seems to be a hermaphrodite with crab-claws for hands. I don’t go too near it, especially with my dizzy visions mixing with my dizzy emotions. Who knows what these creatures are capable of?

Mortician is in awe and doesn’t speak to me now. I don’t speak to him either.

I look towards the red light behind the walm people, over the heads of twelve identical beings.

They’re fish-like beings, scaled wings along their arms, and large hook-like skulls that waterfall a salty liquid down their shoulders and into the miniature ocean — the source of ocean water. Dark pools for eyes, staring at me, all twenty-four eyes directly at me.

As they stare at me, I figure out what they are. But I’m not sure if it’s my intelligence that comes to this conclusion or if they have subconsciously told me in some way.

I realize: they are the Movac.

The Movac isn’t a male or a female, as I earlier believed. It is twelve beings — all with the same mind. They seem to be four males and eight females, an entire race that share a brain. They probably reproduce so that the Movac’s conscious thoughts will continue. A race of one. A single brain.

“We are not a single brain,” says one of the Movac.

I’m surprised to hear it speak, and I’m sure they know that I’m surprised, and I’m sure they knew that I was going to be surprised before he said that.

“We have separate brains, Leaf,” says another. “But we lack a sense of individuality, even in our appearance, but we are still individuals.”

I think I understand. When you know everything about everything, it’s probably hard to be unique from others who know everything. You own every consciousness of every being that is, has been, or ever will be alive. Which makes it irrelevant to have one of your own. It all sounds hideous-depressing to me. But the Movac live for a different purpose than what I live for, so I should stop comparing them to myself. Their purpose is something completely beyond me.

“It is to answer questions,” the Movac says, all of them.

“What?” Mort shrugs.

“The purpose of our existing is to answer questions.”

“That’s it?” I ask.

They all nod.

I feel betrayed and punch my leg. They know everything and all that they do is answer questions. What in the hell is that supposed to mean?

“That’s why we were created,” says the Movac. “We were created because something had to know everything. With us around, nothing will be forgotten. Not a man, not a thought, not anything. You think of us as beings, but don’t. Think of us as the record books of everything.”

“Nobody else knows everything?” Mort asks. “What about God? Doesn’t He know everything?”

“No, gods created us because they didn’t want to know everything. In a way, you give up your individuality to know everything, and the gods refused to give that up. It was necessary for us to exist, for history’s sake, and also for the future’s.”

I ask, “So you are the all-knowing computers of the universe?”

They started nodding before the question came.

I notice that the Movacs have miniature cities inside of their brains. These cities are inhabited by the same miniature people that inhabit the miniature ocean. An entire society physically living inside of a brain city.

They are the brain citizens: physical beings formed from the thoughts of the Movac. The process of knowing everything must be so complex that they need hundreds of brain-workers, functioning together in one society — moving toward one goal — to form a Movac’s super-complex brain. And all twelve Movac brains work together to form the all-knowing super computer of the universe. I’m not sure if my theory is correct, but I don’t want to know for sure, because theorizing exercises the brain muscles. The Movacs know I am thinking this, so they don’t tell me if I’m right or wrong.

The brain citizens build their societies outside of Movac brains too, expanding productivity across the countryside of Punk Land. This entire ocean, which Mort and I are standing in and Nan is lying in, is the overflow of the Movac brain. Ships and villages and animals — all part of the Movac brain, all working together to maintain the knowledge of everything.

A female Movac stares at me with a gurgle-leak coursing down her neck. Her brain citizens have built elevators from her chin to her breasts, where they can relax on the soft flesh before taking a shuttle to her toes. Through my swirly eyes, I see her body as an arousing work of architecture. A sky-scraping building that I wouldn’t mind laying over a mountain to inject my whale-sized shank through its front entrance, knocking the doorman out of the way and flooding the lobby once I am finished with her.

The Movac woman must’ve had her dark-pools eyeing into me because she knew I was about to fantasize about her, and wanted to give me a good stare-down before I performed the sex thought, licking some brain citizens from the corner of her white lips to dissolve in thick mouth water. I’m embarrassed, but I shouldn’t be, not at all: she’s known I was going to do this her entire life. It wasn’t a shock in the slightest, I’m sure.

“We’re going through the walm,” Mortician tells them.

“We know,” they say, pig-drippy.

The female, the fantasy building with large vacation breasts and the leaky saltwater entrance, approaches us, stiff-moving with her city built on her insides, trying to keep the brain citizens from falling into the ocean. She glares into my eyes again, her pools gathering hints of purple and silver. Black cave of a mouth… shingles for teeth… opening with pearl-expression…

“Let’s go there.” She turns and heads to the walm light.

I wonder why she is taking us rather than any of the other twelve. Is it because I’m attracted to her? Is she attracted to me as well? Will she take advantage of my weakness to alien women before allowing me to escape through the walm?

I hope so.

She leads the way, through the vapid humanoid crowd emerging from the light. Her walk patterns are mechanical. Her backside is so sensual yet it’s like a machine, just how the blue woman’s seems to be, but the blue woman is an animal-like machine and this Movac is a machine-like animal. I’ve never been attracted to mechanical women before. Now I guess it’s becoming a trend in my life.

The walm emotions go squirrely here, as do my eyes, running up the tree bark and chirping. Brain liquid drools from the Movac woman’s head, and I watch it slowly licking down to her fleshy rounds that are inhabited by the lower class of her body’s citizens — the salty odor thickens the air down there — then slipping between the crack to her thighs where it weeps into the miniature ocean world.

I’m paying so much attention to her absorbing body that I don’t realize we have reached the source of the light. My head fixes on the lower parts as she stops, then it looks up at the sublime doorway, the walm, eyes fixed without much dizzy-swirling.

The door is a giant vagina. It’s lips are spread out wide and emit a green light in all directions. The Movac female statues herself next to it, arms out at diagonals and chin up. Then her muscles go tense and it looks as if she is absorbing energy from the walm, as if she runs on soul-fuel as well, soak-slurping it from the reserve that the walm has collected.

Then the walm door dilates, the green light melting our skin color to lime. It awaits our penetration. On the inside of this thing is our future, our new life. Everything chaotic about this world will be uplifted from our crusty old shoulders. Now the human species still has a fighting chance against extinction.

“I’m not going,” I tell Mortician.

“What?” His face goes into shock, or maybe it’s disbelief.

“I’m going to wait for Christian.”

“You want to wait longer? We can wait for him longer if you want, but I’m not going in there alone.”

“You won’t be,” I say, brushing mud out of Nan’s half-conscious eyes.

“Come on, Leaf. Let’s go. You know Christian isn’t coming.”

“You go,” I tell him. “Take Nan and the history book and get out of here. If I Christian gets back here I’ll… Look, I can’t just leave him.”

“Well, I’m staying too,” Mort says.

“No.” I shake my head lightly. “I’m willing to risk myself to save Christian, but I’m not willing to risk the future of mankind. Get out of here now before the walm takes anymore of your soul.”

“Dickhead.” Mortician spits at me. He nods his head and puts the history book of Man in his belt. He takes Nan’s arms around his shoulder and she hugs into him, embracing to keep herself from falling and shattering on the ground.

Before he enters the fleshy lips of the walm, he turns back to me and gentle-smiles. Then he tips his pointy head up as a salute. Before I can salute back, he disappears into the walm and its lips press slowly around him, sucking him into another world far away from here.

I’m only giving Christian another hour or two. If he doesn’t show, I’m leaving him. Even if he’s wounded, another hour is plenty of time to get here. Otherwise, I’ll know that he’s lost too much soul to make it. He has the ability, but he might not have the will.

I glance back at the walm and realize the light it issues is no longer green, but purple.

“What does that mean?” I ask the Movac.

She turns to me, a cricking of gears in her neck. “The door has opened to a different world.”

“You mean I can’t go to the world my friends just went to?”

“This world and the world your friends now inhabit will not share a doorway until the cycle is finished,” she says.

“How long will that take?”

“Twenty-four hours.” She turns away from me and begins to absorb more energy from the walm. She will possibly be absorbing my energy from the walm if I stay for too long.

My words come out soft and slightly panicked. “You mean I’m stuck here for another day?”

“Exactly another day.”

Scene 26 Ten Commandments

I wait for several moments of time, curled in a ball, soaking in the thick brain sweat of the Movac woman and sometimes rubbing against her fishy leg for erotic purposes, over and over until it becomes droning.

I stare up swirly-visioned at the Movac woman, waiting and waiting for her to say something to me. She has nothing to say. It stands next to me, protecting the walm from my wandering eyes. My head-sickness gets too strong when I look out across Punk Land, so much life-chaos of colors, crowds, all around me. A melting pot far beyond what the United States had been, the melting pot of the universe. And not one of them seem to be human.

“Why has this happened to us?” The words, directed at the building/woman I guess, slip out of me without asking first. The woman was already glancing at me, knew the precise moment to turn her attention. She knows much more about me than I do.

The building/woman answers: “God Hates You.”

My eyes wet with brain juice, little brain people crawling through my hair, sometimes sneezing when one approaches a nostril.

The Movac woman speaks to me, “God doesn’t want anything to do with you anymore. He hates you.”

“I’m sure we all know that,” I tell her. “But how can He possibly hate His creation? That’s like a mother hating her child.”

“Sometimes mothers get sick of their children. Sometimes they steal all the love out of one child and give it to another, a more desirable child.”

“That makes God superficial, irresponsible. Maybe even white trash.”

“Gods are not the most open-minded of creatures. They are ruled by billions of years of tradition. Tradition closes your mind.”

“Religion closes your mind,” I say. “It creates a very strong view that is one-sided.”

“Closing your mind to religion is no different than the close-mindedness that religions can cause.”

“The God of this planet was not worth the religion.”

“You speak so negatively about God. You, of all people, should understand Him.”

“Why me of all people ?”

“You combined your soul with God.”

My face contorts and before I can ask the Movac to explain, she explains: “Every once in a while God will merge His soul with a human’s, to see things out of his eyes, think his thoughts, become that person, for a long period of the person’s life. You were such a person. And, in a way, you were God. Or to describe it more accurately, God was you.”

I don’t believe her, and the Movac knows this.

“God and I are complete opposites,” I tell her.

“You know I am right,” says the Movac.

I decide not to argue.

“It explains some things,” I tell her, gazing over myself and thinking about all of the things that I can do that others can not, all the things I knew that no one else knew.

She tells me: “You have been God for as long as your eyes have been distorted. When God got word that there was a mortal whose vision existed in the rolling world, He had to see it for Himself.”

She sits next to me, rubbing her machine body against me and causing an earthquake for her knee citizens.

“You are special, Leaf,” she tells me. “God merges with only a small amount of people. And they are usually only the most righteous of men. You were the first low-lifer to ever merge with Him.”

“I wouldn’t have chosen me,” I mumble.

“Yes, God regrets it severely,” nodding. “When souls merge together, they do not separate very easily. The process is something that was never meant to be reversed. It was meant for soulmates who wanted to join into one being, to be together forever.

“When your souls were separated, God took some of your lifeforce and you took some of His.”

So I am still a part of God.

“Everyone is watching you, Leaf,” says the Movac. “Everyone in Heaven. They can read your thoughts. They have been writing down all of your thoughts, all of your actions, as you think them, as you do them.

“They wanted to create a record of the last man who merged with God, the man who is right in the middle of the end of the humanity. Even right now, they are recording the words you hear coming out of my mouth as your brain processes them. Everyone is in your mind.”

Behind me, the walm changes color. It turns to a color I have never seen before. Something different than red, blue, yellow, black, white or any of the combinations. It’s something totally foreign. My God thoughts tell me it’s called newa.

“The walm is now a doorway to Heaven,” says the Movac woman. “Now that God is a part of you, and you are a part of God, He doesn’t want your soul to perish here on Earth. He has made room for one more person to join Him in Heaven. Of all the people on this planet, God has chosen to save you.”

My swirling eyes blink hard.

“I don’t think I can go,” I tell her.

Her face doesn’t change expressions. Tiny people marching in and out of her eyeballs and nose.

“I have met a couple people who have been to Heaven and neither of them recommend the place. Perfection is ugly to me. I’d rather take my chances in the walm.”

She nods and the walm changes color to a dark blue.

“God respects your decision, but it saddens Him to know your soul will be lost.”

“I bet He’s only sad for the part of me that belonged to Him.”

The Movac eyes me, stretching her face closer to me, so close I can smell the city inside of her brain.

“God wants you to leave Earth as soon as possible. If not to Heaven, then to somewhere else. Just leave right away.”

“I need to wait for Christian. We have to all go to the same world. I made a promise to Jesus that we would keep mankind going.”

“Christian does not want to come here,” says the Movac.

“Where is he? You know where he is, don’t you?”

“He is in the trainyard a mile south of here, waiting for his soul to disappear.”

“He was supposed to meet us here. Why didn’t he come?”

“He lost interest in survival.”

“Can I get to him in time?”

“Some soul is still lingering inside of him.”

“What will happen if I try to save him?” I ask the Movac woman. “Will he make it, or is it useless? Will I end up losing my soul in the process?”

“We do not speak the future,” she tells me. “Knowledge of the future is only for Movac brains.”

“I might as well try,” I mumble to the brain city. “I have until tomorrow anyway, don’t I?”

The Movac woman just glazes me with her shiny black eyes, sniffing the cold crowded air, curling a lip to allow some brain citizens to step inside of her mouth and give themselves over to their monstrous female home as protein.

Scene 27 Sick Train

The journey to the trainyard slows my vision. My thoughts go limp.

I am moving very slowly.

It’s not a difficult journey through the streets, even though I’m staggering half-mangled. Not too many people bother to walk anymore; they just sleep in piles along the side of the road. A few walm people flicker to my left, I think. My vision scatters so much I’m not sure if they’re real. I don’t bother to make sure.

Emptiness.

It clots in my head and scabs over all of my fluffy bright-colored emotions.

The horizon line doesn’t seem to make the landscape feel like it goes on forever anymore. The line is more like an ending. It shrinks my path, makes it smaller and smaller, until the path is just a dot. And after the dot, there’s nothing.

Pieces of cars and buildings are curled up in tiny balls next to the street corpses.

I have brain sickness. I’m drowning.

The train yard. It has less people in it than the street. The train still moves through its belly. It never stops. It never leaves either. The railroad tracks have been reconstructed into a crooked circle, screaming round and round. It’ll keep screaming round and round forever.

The train has been diagnosed with a dangerous rusting disease; it can’t touch other machines or they will go to pieces. The train is quarantined to the rail yard and was told by the rail master that a cure is in its way and to just hold on. But the rail master is walking up the road without any arms or face.

The sick train paces around the trainyard, shrieking against the track, moving-moving so that it doesn’t break into bits.

Some human passengers are aboard. They’re speaking casually to one another, waiting patiently to be taken somewhere. Prisoners of the train, these passengers, but they’re acting like they’re prisoner by choice.

The people are even smiling at each other, and they’re shaking hands every few minutes too, oblivious to the outside world and to the sad-sad train that possesses them.

Stepping through a patch of steel weeds.

I trip over an overgrown glass bush, crashing it between my corpse and the ground. My face filets open against the plant shatters.

A watery liquid pours out of my forehead; plastic-clear fluid floats on top of the soil in my face. I’m coughing up knotty ropes of slime into my arms.

Standing. Trying to ignore the large wounds in my flesh. A large section of my body opens up to the piercing gray wind I stagger against.

After stepping a dozen feet I notice the Richard Stein history book has fallen out of my hands. It’s lying in the crude pile of mucus that leaked out of my body.

I’ll have to get it later. No time to backtrack.

I spot Christian. He’s a swirling image but I still recognize his rotten suit. He’s sitting in a junk pile made of shriveled up medical equipment that had never been used.

His lungs are still breathing and the way he scratches his leg indicates he still has emotion enough to become physically irritated. Or is he scratching out of habit?

“We were waiting for you,” I tell Christian.

He doesn’t bother looking up at me. He’s staring with deep black-filled eyes at an empty bottle of Gold Rush liquor. Medical ants march in and out of the bottle and gather dry-sticky droplets.

“I guess I couldn’t find my way,” Christian tells me.

Standing there in silence and staring out at the hills of clutter-architecture, scrambled up in the red landscape.

The clear fluid drips out of me and runs down my legs. Neither my flesh nor the earth will soak in the fluid, allowing it to jiggle and dance on surfaces.

I’m sitting on a hollow respiration machine with my face in my lap.

“Why does there have to be life after death anyway?” Christian asks me. “Why can’t there just be death.”

“You might as well have killed yourself when you were born,” I tell him. “Why live at all if everything you did will die with you when you die?”

“We live for the present,” Christian says. “The past is always forgotten eventually. Why try to hold on to it? When our lives end, and we become the past, we won’t matter anymore.”

“You’re suggesting oblivion then,” I tell him. “Oblivion is a very ugly place to go to.”

“Oblivion is freedom. It’s like sleep without dreams, without waking up.”

“I would love to sleep forever, but I want to dream. I want to remember.”

“To disappear forever is bliss.”

“But everything will disappear forever…”

“It’ll be like nothing ever was.”

“Was there ever anything?”

“I think there was something at some point.”

The sun goes down and we are still in the trainyard.

“What will we do?” I ask.

“I don’t care, do you?”

“I’m pregnant,” I tell him.

“How did that happen?”

“The blue woman impregnated me with another blue woman. Maybe I’ll raise it.”

“Maybe you should abort it.”

“I think I should go back to my blue woman and start a family with her. Even though she’s a man.”

“And only two years old.”

“And a cockroach.”

“At least you have something to do. I wish I had something to do…”

“You have something to do,” I tell him. “You’re supposed to meet us at the walm.”

“I wish there was something else.”

“Something else…”

“I’m supposed to find my little sister. I promised myself I’d find out whose body she’s living in now and protect her from the walm creatures.”

“My eyes are all dizzy.”

Some medieval ones are battling across the train yard. They’re crashing against the rails and making a lot of noise.

The sick train is dying, coughing slowly along the train track, wheezing. There are no longer any people inside… as if they were digested within its guttering stomach.

The medieval ones slash each other in our direction, near my face and shoulder, battling and splashing against our corpses.

“Maybe we should go back to the walm and find Mortician and Nan,” I say to Christian.

“Yeah, let’s go back there.”

“Nice fighting,” I tell Christian about the medieval ones fighting around us.

“They go on forever… don’t they?”

“Forever and ever. Even when they are surrounded by death.”

“So violent.”

“The sun is coming up and they’re still fighting.”

“The sun is hardly a sun anymore.”

It reflects on a large brick wall ahead of me. A very large brick wall. I’m not sure if it was there before. It’s on the path back to the walm. I must have missed it on my way here.

It’s so large.

How did I overlook that giant obstruction, a hundred feet in the air?

It’s so large.

A sword cuts through Christian’s throat. Sounds like the ripping open of a papier-mâché donkey, and his severed head plops into his lap, staring back at himself.

“Has that wall always been there?” I ask Christian.

“My head’s fallen off,” Christian tells me.

I continue staring at the wall.

“I’m just a head,” Christian tells me.

I continue to stare at the wall.

“Why do you keep staring at that wall?” Christian asks.

“I’m trying not to shrug,” I tell him.