Slag Attack (11 page)

   
He goes into the trailer, rinses out a goblet, and drinks some Gatorade. The green kind.

11.

It’s just after dark and Rambo is driving toward the light. He throws occasional glances toward Cobra. Slags have begun crawling out of his mouth as well. Rambo thinks he should scream but his throat won’t make the sound and he’s secretly hoping the slags will bring the skull or the baby or the goblin Cobra had growing in him out so he could see it. He doesn’t want to have to cut him open but he will. Unless he forgets. He thinks he should write it down. He wishes he had a slambox so he could put it on his face.

   
He almost runs the El Camino into the trailer but slams on the brakes just in time. He wants to get away from Cobra and he throws the door open and goes spinning out into the humid night and then he tries to stand still but his body and his brain just keep spinning and spinning and then he’s lying in the gravel with Commando looking down at him. Commando has something on his head and Rambo thinks it makes him look like a unicorn.

   “
Unicorn!” He points at Commando’s antenna. Commando kicks him in the side.

   “
You guys forget something?”

   “
Rambo had a baby. Somebody burnt down the church. The town is dead.”

   “
The hardware store?”

   “
Huh?”

   “
It’s okay. Gravedigger John brought them. I’m glad I could count on you. Where’s Cobra?”

   
Rambo’s mouth opens and some weird keening sound comes from it.

   “
Please stop,” Commando says.

   
Rambo continues, only louder.

   “
Please stop making that sound.”

   
Commando covers his ears with his hands and walks over to the car, leaving Rambo to lie on the ground. He looks into the passenger side and says, “Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck!”

12.

At their best, humans are pure inside.

   
Garbage Planet is toxic.

   
Space is toxic.

   
Space is toxic and it rains down slags onto the earth.

   
The slags want humans because they are, at their best, pure inside.

   
Humans need to become toxic to keep the slags away.

   
They need to be garbage on the outside and toxic on the inside.

   
Hence, the robots.

   
The antenna tells him this.

13.

Rambo rolls over and Cobra is lying next to him in the gravel. Only this isn’t the gravel where he collapsed whenever. This is the gravel of the scrap yard. He doesn’t remember wandering back here. Cobra smells really bad and he’s missing his face. What happened to Cobra’s face? Rambo thinks about screaming again but he just wants some more gasoline. He wants to drink it and let it fill up his empty stomach until he can feel it burbling at the back of his throat.

   
He tries to stand up but he can’t. He thinks maybe he’s glued to the ground but he can vaguely see he has some sort of yellow rope around his wrists. He can’t look over his bloated stomach to see his ankles. Maybe his legs have turned to lead. Maybe he will have babies out of his feet. Maybe his toes have been taken by goblins.

   
Commando stands above him. He’s drinking something that looks like gasoline from his goblet, looking cool as hell. Commando never drinks gasoline. He usually drinks whatever that stuff is that makes you sweat paint. He’s surprised by the antenna until he remembers Commando is now a unicorn. He wonders if Commando is his God given name and thinks maybe he should change it to Unicorn Skyhair.

   “
I don’t see how you guys drink this shit.” He offers the goblet to Rambo and Rambo lets him pour the gasoline down his throat.

   “
I grew into the ground.” He belches.

   “
You sure did.”

   “
Cobra’s face fell off.”

   “
It sure did.”

   “
The world has gone bad.”

   
Commando laughs. Throws back his head and laughs and laughs and laughs. The antenna bounces around on his head framed by the blue sky.

   
Unicorn Skyhair.

   
Rambo laughs too.

14.

Commando spends the morning gathering and shaping metal. He lays the pieces out in a row between Cobra and Rambo. Cobra’s body is twitching with all the slags packing his insides and writhing beneath the skin. He thinks maybe he could still use him, but the antenna tells him this is a bad idea. He knows what he’s going to have to do. He can’t drink gasoline. He’s tried but he just can’t.

   
He’s hungry. He hasn’t had meat in weeks so maybe it won’t be as hard as he thinks.

   
The sun is very high in the sky when he hooks the drill up to the generator and places the first piece on Rambo’s forehead. He drills in the first screw and Rambo screams, wide-eyed and incomprehensible.

   
Maybe Rambo needs an antenna, too. Maybe he needs to hear the calming space voice. The voice of knowledge and reason. The voice of intuition.

   
He looks for an antenna and can’t find one. How did he get so lucky? This is something he’s never noticed before. It bothers him that he’s missed this. That he’s grown up in a scrap yard and never noticed that none of the junked cars have antennas. It seems like the least important thing to take. He imagines a car, somewhere out there, covered in antennas, or perhaps made entirely of antennas.

   
He gives up and looks for anything long and metallic and removable.

   
He finds a scythe in relatively good shape and returns to Rambo.

   
He bores a hole in Rambo’s skull, saws down the handle of the scythe and inserts it into the hole. It’s a little loose so he fills the hole with glue and scrap metal shavings. Then he remembers wood is not really a conductor so he finds a massive pile of copper wire and wraps the handle with it, making sure plenty of the wire gets down into Rambo’s skull.

   
Rambo continues to scream. Commando feeds him more gasoline.

15.

Rambo tries his hardest to get up off the ground. He wants to be in the El Camino and driving around town with Cobra, feeling like the only two people alive. He likes the way the El Camino rocks up and down on the road. It makes him think of a ship. He looks at the sky and how blue it is and wonders why the sky had to kill everyone and thinks, if anything, the sky is more dangerous than the sea.

   
A sense of dread fills him when Unicorn Skyhair comes tromping back into his vision, holding more pieces to his puzzle of pain and working it out on Rambo’s skin.

   
But there’s a constant flow of gasoline and that helps. He can’t scream when he’s drinking gasoline and after drinking so much he thinks if he screams his stomach will come flying up through his mouth and it will fly away until it reaches the sky and then it too will be eaten by whatever evil waits out there.

   
If he remembered what death was, Rambo would have wished for it.

16.

Commando thinks he has Rambo just about fixed up. He decides to weld Cobra’s face to his stomach, knowing they were always close and this was probably what Cobra would have wanted. Besides, he doesn’t think he can eat Cobra’s face. He had a bad acne problem and that unibrow. He drains some of his blood into a goblet, mixes it with Gatorade, and manages to choke it down.

   
The vision he had, the vision the antenna gave him, was of two robots. He originally thought those were supposed to be Rambo and Cobra but Cobra was dead, which left only him. It’s a drastic decision and he finds himself hesitant. He thinks about God’s Mountaineers. Maybe he needs to leave the scrap yard. Maybe he needs to go check things out. If he gets into town and every beautiful girl is there with Gravedigger John and they’re all huddled around a mountain of corpses, holding hands, and singing hymns to God, maybe he’ll think about it.

   
He dips a siphon hose into one of the tanks of gasoline and puts the other end in Rambo’s mouth, tells him he’ll be back.

   
Rambo’s eyes are rolled back in his head.

   
Commando tells him to wait for the voice. He tells him it comes from space. He tells him it speaks the knowledge. He tells him it’s called intuitive knowledge and knows Rambo doesn’t know what the hell that means.

   
He hops in the El Camino and drives into town, the sun low in the sky.

17.

Commando can see the mountain of corpses at least a mile out of town. By the time he reaches it, he’s nearly seasick. He has the windows down and the smell is atrocious. He visited a slaughterhouse one time and that smell was similar. But this was much worse. Death and rot. He parks the car in the parking lot of a shop, amidst other junked and burned out cars. He wonders who did all this destruction if there wasn’t anyone left.

   
He wants to see what God’s Mountaineers are doing but he doesn’t want them to see him. He’s afraid they will drag him in, turn him into one of them. He’s afraid that’s what he wants.

   
On the other hand, it could be a trap. Gravedigger John was never the most trustworthy fellow. It’s possible he just wanted to lure them into town so he could use them for food or something even worse. But he’d had his chance with Rambo and Cobra if that was the case.

   
Commando opens the door of an antique store, goes to the back room, and finds a ladder to the roof. He can’t believe the Mountaineers are building a mountain of corpses just to honor God or the dead or whatever. He thinks the voice they’re hearing is similar to the one he has heard. There has to be something else behind it. Maybe the mountain is going to come alive and be a mass of dead humans. He read a story where something like that happened. Things had changed and he wouldn’t say anything was impossible. Early on, when he had watched the news reports, he saw evidence of it. He never questioned it because it was on television before the television went to a test pattern and then to static and then just black.

   
It was from the first day of the rain. Footage from Central Park in New York. There were three things he saw. The first was a man with an eagle’s head. The second was a person standing with his arms outstretched, Christ-like, with a smaller person crawling out of his mouth and then drifting into a panicked crowd. The third was a man dressed in a suit walking into and disappearing into a tree. This was all amidst a lot of chaos and screaming and sheets of slags raining down from the trash galaxy, but these were the things he focused on and he thought maybe he was the only person who saw them and then, weeks later, when he was still alive, he thought maybe this meant something. Maybe he was chosen.

   
He stands on the roof and looks at the mountain of corpses. It is the most depressing thing he has ever seen. Most of them are not whole. Most of them are hollowed out shells, the slags eating away their insides while their skins hang in rotten gray folds. Black blood runs down the mountain slowly and collects in the gutter. And there, at the foot of the mountain, he sees God’s Mountaineers. There are quite a few of them. Maybe a hundred. There would have to be to be able to move that amount of corpses in such a short period of time.

   
About ten of them play an odd assortment of instruments and not very well. Some of them are singing. Some of them are dancing that blissed out hippie dance Commando had seen on footage of Woodstock and every bad concert he’d ever been to. Some of them are writhing on the ground, in the blood, smearing it over their bodies, over their faces, onto their lips.

   
Men.

   
Women.

   
Children.

   
Commando has never felt so alone.

   
This will not save them.

   
The voice is loud and clear. Coming through the antenna, radiating down through every bone in his skeleton.

   
This will not save them.

   
The god they’re praying to is dead and they’re too optimistic to see that.

   
And it becomes clear what he has to do.

   
Protect them.

   
Yes.

   
Commando feels something he’s never really felt before kick up inside of him, some synchronous harmony moving him along, back downstairs, back down to the car, back to the scrap yard.

18.

Rambo can’t struggle any more. He lies there and looks up at the black sea, imagines unicorns swimming in it, thrashing wildly around, possibly drowning, before glowing dots float to the surface, jellyfish intended to snare the unicorns, and then his mind goes blank. He feels a hum begin at the top of his skull and spread down through his body and he’s filled with something like cool contentment.

19.

Commando reaches the scrap yard after dark. He feels renewed and purposeful. It is no longer as difficult to eat the flesh of Cobra. Throughout the night, he gorges himself. Rambo has stopped thrashing and moaning but he seems to be alive. His metal chest rises and falls. He touches his scythe antenna and feels it vibrating with the same energy surging through
his
body. Rambo needs nourishment and he feeds him the raw flesh of Cobra as well, filling his body with both essential toxins and nutrients. He unties Rambo and he doesn’t fight back or attempt to run away.