Slag Attack (10 page)

   “
You guys are going back into town. This time I made a list.” He shakes the piece of paper in his left hand, slaps it to Cobra’s cheek, and staples it there. Cobra says “ow” once but doesn’t make any attempt to stop him.

   “
Have you guys pissed yet?” Commando says.

   “
No, but I really have to,” Rambo says.

   “
Go use the jugs over there.” He points to a place in front of a fluorescent orange refrigerator. “Make sure you take plenty of gas with you.”

7.

They walk out front to the El Camino. Cobra is breathing very heavily. He says it feels like something is in his stomach. Rambo tells him he’s probably growing a second skull. Cobra says he feels like there’s something on his face. Rambo checks and says there is. It’s a list.

   
The list says:

   
HAMMERS

   
WRENCHES

   
SCREWDRIVERS

   
SCREWS

   
NAILS

   
BOLT CUTTERS

   
YOU GUYS ARE BOTH CUNTFACED ASSHOLES

   
Rambo says he doesn’t like the tone of it but they should probably leave it there.

   
Standing beside the car, looking into the back of it, is a man in a black robe. Cobra and Rambo stop about ten feet away and stare. Cobra strokes the piece of paper on his face.

   “
Excuse me,” the man says. “Is that a dead person in the back of your car?”

   
Cobra and Rambo continue to stare. Rambo thinks there was a time when the answer to that question should have been ‘no’ but he’s not so sure how to answer it now.

   
The man, maybe thinking Rambo and Cobra can’t hear him, walks toward them. He holds out a bony hand.

   “
I’m Gravedigger John.”

   
Rambo wonders if that’s his God given name and thinks maybe he should change it to ‘Slappy’.

   “
I just peed in a jug,” Rambo says.

   “
I’ve got a lower skull.” Cobra points to his stomach.

   “
Those both sound like excellent and wonderful things, gentlemen, but what I’m here for is to see if I can’t take that corpse off your hands. It’s a donation, I want you to understand, to God’s Mountaineers.”

   
Rambo thinks that sounds fun. He says, “Cave hat,” and makes a chopping motion with his arm.

   “
Of course. Of course!” Gravedigger John pats him on the arm. “I’ll just get that all loaded up.”

   
Commando storms out from the front of the trailer.

   
Rambo turns and shouts, “This is Slappy!”

   “
I know who the hell it is,” Commando says. “What the hell you want, John?”

   “
Your friends here have a dead body in the back of their truck or car or . . . whatever it is. I’ve joined an organization called God’s Mountaineers.” He points to a large truck idling on the side of the road. It’s a pick-up truck with giant pieces of plywood rising from the bed. A childish mountain ascending into a radiant cross is sloppily spray painted in yellow on the side of the plywood.

   “
I don’t see what that has to do with dead bodies.”

   “
Since we cannot give everyone a proper burial, we have decided to place them in a communal grave. A mountain in the center of town so that we may return to the god who has stricken us down and beg his forgiveness. Maybe then this horrible plague will leave us in peace.”

   “
Aren’t you afraid of slags?”

   “
I think if they really wanted me, they would have taken me by now. This would be a great act of charity, Mr. Flemian. Each corpse gets us that much closer to God.”

   “
Take it. I don’t care. Say, would you mind helping me out?”

   “
Anything for a philanthropist such as yourself.”

   “
Will you let these boys follow you to the hardware store? Their brains are ate up with slags. There’s a list stapled to that one’s face. Could you help them pick up what’s on the list and send them back?”

   “
Very well,” Gravedigger John says. “They can just leave the body in the trunk until we get into town.”

   
Commando turns to walk away and spins back around. “You picked up any reports?”

   
Gravedigger John nods his head. His good natured smile drops for just a moment.

   “
And?”

   “
They seem to be getting bigger. Some of them are as big as we are.”

   “
Where?”

   “
The coasts mostly.”

   “
How long?”

   “
A week at the most.”

   “
Thanks.”

   “
God bless.”

8.

The drive to town is treacherous. Rambo closes his bad eye and tries to focus as best he can. Cobra rubs his stomach and wonders what he’s going to name the new person he’s certain is growing there. They follow Gravedigger John as best as possible. One of the El Camino’s axles must be bent or something because the car goes up and down, up and down. Cobra says he feels sick and Rambo stops the car so he can vomit out the window.

   “
How’d it look,” Rambo asks.

   “
Full,” Cobra says.

   
Rambo assumes this means full of slags. He passes the jug of gasoline to Cobra and he pounds it. They forget where they are, what they’re doing. The big truck with all the corpses in the back honks its horn. Rambo remembers they’re supposed to be following it.

   
They reach town and stop in front of the hardware store. Cobra writhes on the passenger side. Slappy gets out of his truck and comes around to the passenger side. He plucks the piece of paper from Cobra’s face and tells the boys they should put the woman in the back of their car into his truck while he’s in the store. Cobra doesn’t listen to him. He just continues to writhe around on the seat. Rambo gets out of the car and hopes the slags have eaten most of the woman away. He feels tired. Tired all the time. And his muscles feel full of lead. He lets down the tailgate and drags the woman by her feet. It looks like she might have been decent looking at one point in time. Maybe when she had her whole face. Slags cover her body but they’re not the big kind of slags. Rambo holds out his finger to one of them to see if it tries to bite it but it shrivels away. He begins to walk back to the driver’s side of the car and then remembers he is supposed to move the woman. He pulls her the rest of the way out in one swift motion and then walks as fast as he can to Slappy’s truck. He tosses the woman in and stands for a couple of seconds, staring in awe at the mass of bodies in the back of the truck.

   
He remembers a church in town and remembers that sometimes it used to give him peace but when he walks a little way down the street to see if he can see it, there is just a pile of smoldering ash lined with dead bodies. The embers are cooking the bodies and he thinks it smells really good. His stomach rumbles. He wonders why someone has decided to cook so many dead bodies. Maybe they are going to offer them to the slags when they finally come. Cooked meat always tastes better than raw.

   
Standing there in the street in the middle of the dead town with everyone either dead or hiding in their locked up homes gives Rambo the creeps. He walks back to the El Camino, hops in, and speeds away.

   
When he looks to his right, he’s startled to see Cobra there. Cobra isn’t moving. Some kind of yellow-tinged foam is oozing from the corner of his mouth. Rambo pokes his finger into it and tastes it. Tastes like gasoline and something else, maybe battery acid. He pulls away from the curb. He turns the radio on and up. It’s just static bursting through the speakers but Rambo pretends it’s a song called “In the Hall of the Abortion King” that he really liked before the radio went crackly.

9.

In the scrap yard, there’s a dirty mirror propped up against a sky blue refrigerator. Commando looks in the mirror and tries to think about what his Grandfather told him about the Garbage Planet. It wasn’t just the one time he had told him about this kind of thing. The old man would go on and on about it. Commando had ideas. He had all kinds of ideas. But he feels like these ideas aren’t coming true. What his grandfather described was some kind of intuitive science, something that couldn’t be found out by any scientist or hiding in the pages of a book. What his grandfather described was something that could only be felt in the bones and the skin and, if he had one, the soul. Commando feels this knowledge reaching out for him. But there’s still something he feels like he isn’t hearing.

   
Take, for instance, the robots. Commando feels robots can save the world. But right now, he only has two piles of scrap metal. It was after having the idea about the robots he came to the realization that he didn’t have a clue how the hell he’d build one. He needed the voices reaching out for him to instruct him, guide him. The best way to hear them, he thought, was to install an antenna. He found a rusty awl on the ground and got a starter hole going, trying to center it on the top of his head. Then he found an old stainless steel car antenna and unscrewed it from the car.

   
Now he stands in front of the mirror and screws the antenna into his skull. There seems to be a profuse amount of blood but what was the worst that could happen? He figures if he’s meant to die then he’s going to die. The slags are a definite sign, if not a God given one, that people are being placed on sides. The living and the dead. If he’s meant to live, if he’s one of the chosen, then he’s going to live. Nothing could stop him.

   
He nearly blacks out installing the antenna, takes a couple of deep breaths, and wanders around the scrap yard trying to pick up a signal.

   
It’s late afternoon when he hears a car pulling up out front. He hopes Rambo and Cobra have brought him everything he asked for. He has an idea about the robots. Building them isn’t going to be the hard part. It was the animating them that would give him problems. But that spooky knowledge that was only there in bits and pieces, the knowledge that made him think it was a good idea for he and his partners to drink gasoline, showed him the reason for this. He felt more alive than he had in weeks.

10.

Commando’s surprised to see it’s Gravedigger John and not Cobra and Rambo and then he isn’t surprised at all. It isn’t dark yet and he hasn’t turned on the lights. Not once on their night prowls, at least since they’d upped their intake of gasoline, had they been able to find the scrap yard.

   
John steps from the cab of the truck carrying an olive green canvas army sack with lots of odd shapes bulging from it. He smiles and raises his free hand. As he draws closer to Commando, he glances up at his new antenna and says, “Them boys ran off before I could give them your tools. Wasn’t sure how much you needed them so I figured I’d drop them off on my next corpse run.”

   “
Yeah. They’re fucking idiots. How’s it going?”

   “
How’s what going?”

   “
The collecting.”

   “
Pretty good. We should be about where we want to be by the end of the week. It’s pretty much just me doing the collecting but we have a few builders helping out. You really should consider being a Mountaineer. I find it rewarding.”

   “
How many?”

   “
How many corpses?”

   “
How many mountaineers?”

   “
About six.”

   
Commando thinks this is a lie. “Any women?”

   “
No.”

   
Commando thinks this is a lie, too. He wonders if John is protecting them for their benefit or if he’s protecting them because he wants to keep them as sex slaves.

   “
And you’re planning on… making a mountain out of the corpses?”

   “
That’s right.”

   
Commando touches his forehead, maybe looking for an answer from space. “Why?”

   “
Because I feel like that’s what God wants.”

   “
Intuitive knowledge.”

   “
Pardon.”

   “
I think you’re talking about intuitive knowledge. You hear a voice in your head, right?”

   “
Well, it’s more like something I feel in my soul.”

   “
I hear that voice too, sometimes. It wants me to build robots.”

   “
Robots?”

   “
That’s right.”

   “
Well, if that’s what you think you have to do. Personally, I feel like your time would best be spent among the Mountaineers, in a community, building a future.”

   “
Robots. My time is best spent making robots.” Commando is suddenly angry. He feels like grabbing Gravedigger John and shaking him, telling him there is no God, that the voice he hears is wrong. It lacks clarity and focus. “You need to install yourself one of these!” He points to the antenna in his head, flicks it, and feels a metallic twinge rattle through his skull and jaw bones.

   
John is already backing away. “Think about what I said. You’ll always have a place with the Mountaineers!” He’s climbing into his idling truck and pulling back out onto the road. Commando sees his pious smiling face in his head, probably brought to him by the antenna, and he thinks he’ll give it some time. If the robots don’t work, maybe he’ll see about becoming a Mountaineer, but he can’t see anything dumber or more ghoulish than building a mountain of corpses.