Slag Attack (9 page)

   
He reaches down to clasp the door handle and she knows if he actually closes the door then it’s all over. She will never make it out alive. She wants to remain silent. She’s crouched right beside the door. She wants to not blow her cover until she is right up on him but she blurts, “Syd Barrett!” and then she has to act. She springs at him, standing right there beside her, and rams her head into what’s left of his face.

   
He slashes out with the knife, catching her just below her ribs. It goes in deeper than the other ones had. Those had been warning, cautionary cuts. Keep him from the door, she thinks, and go for the eyes. Go for the eyes.

   
He reaches out for her but maybe his eyes have not fully adjusted to the light because he can’t grab her. She throws her body crossways into his knees and feels the blade come down hard into her ass. Already, she is covered in blood. She has to move before he has the chance to stab again. He’s bent over. She raises her head as fast as she can, praying she doesn’t run it into the knife. The back of her skull connects with his nose and she hears a popping noise, feels the slags squirming against her scalp.

   “
Robert Smith!” she shouts. Then she falls onto her hands and sweeps her legs around behind his, dropping him to the ground.

   “
Stop sayin those fuckin names!” he shouts, swinging his arm out with the knife but now he is on the squirming floor and she is standing up. She eyes the distance, sits down perpendicularly to him, brings her ankles together, raises them and brings the heavy cuffs down onto his left kneecap, shattering it.

   
She wants to go for the eyes but he has the knife.

   
And he’s trying to stand up. If it weren’t for the damn ankle cuffs she could just run and she’s pretty sure she could outrun him. She can’t let him stand up. She leaps across him, bounding from her place on the ground, and brings both her knees down into his other knee.

   
He swings the knife down toward her back but she’s already moving away from him and the blade slices rather than plunges. Her organs are grateful.

   
She has visualized so much of this in her head. What he would do with the knife, how she could maneuver in her restrained fashion, that it feels almost like she is fighting something she has practiced before.

   
He swings out with the knife again and she raises the cuffs behind her enough to snag the point in one of the few chain links. Quickly jerking her wrists, the knife falls from his hand and she throws herself on it.

   
He still has upper body strength, she reminds herself, thinking of that bullish head on those bullish shoulders. But he’s weakened so much. Parts of his skin have been eaten away.

   
He sits up and pushes her back, trying to get her off the knife but she already has it in her hands. His face is a mass of blood from his exploded nose. She turns with her back toward him, still on her knees, and thrusts herself backward, careful not to let go of the blade’s handle as it plunges into his flesh. The knife hits to the right of his bellybutton, barely missing the huge transplanted nipple. Using his still considerable arm strength, he grabs her around the neck, squeezing brutally and lifting her up. She manages to plant her feet on the floor and give another great thrust, this time aiming the knife near his head. His hands, slick with blood, slip, and she buries the knife in his left eye. He squeals in pain and clamps his teeth on her lower buttock.

   
Knowing she is in position, she mentally gauges where his right eye would be from the position where her hands are. She is surprised she hasn’t penetrated the brain. His teeth grind against her flesh.

   
She savagely stabs the knife downward, feels it punch into his eye, and screams, “John Lennon!”

   
This is her time to leave, while he is blinded, while those powerful arms are off of her and reaching for his wounded head. She stands up, continuing to clutch the knife, and begins hopping toward the door. He drags himself through his expanding pool of blood and slags, almost catching her, snarling, “Stop sayin those stupid fuckin names!”

   
Crossing the threshold, she clasps the large handle of the iron door and, looking down at him, shouts a little rhyme she has worked on in the madness of her confines, “Vincent Severity isn’t so severe. With both his eyes gone he’s really quite dear!” before slamming the door and searching the house for the keys to the cuffs.

11.

She finds the keys. They’re hanging right next to the front door. If she hadn’t become so used to doing things with her hands behind her back, she never would have been able to get them unlocked. It’s painful. The cuffs dig into the flesh of her arms but she’s lost so much weight that she’s able to slide them up, manipulate them so she can fit the key into the hole and slowly turn. She rummages in his closet for some clothes. She thinks about looking for some gas to burn his whole fucking house down. But when she thinks about the slags slowly consuming him, she realizes she likes that idea better. She takes the keys to the El Camino and walks outside.

   
She has the desire to shout a name but she quickly realizes there isn’t a name in the world that can undo this kind of damage. The plague gods have found her but, miraculously, she feels like she is not infected.

   
She climbs in the car and starts toward Hollow City. Past the destroyed and burning buildings. The trees stripped bare. The mounds of burning dead piled up outside of towns. Past all of this.

   
On her way to Hollow City.

Corpse Mountain

1.

Two men sit in an El Camino and watch Reverend Hacksaw set fire to the Baptist church. The El Camino is nearly totaled. It came barreling into their trailer about three days ago. The woman driving it was dead. Hence, the accident. It still ran okay and they decided it was theirs. They didn’t figure there would be much in the way of an insurance settlement and thought they needed some form of repayment.

   
The dead woman is still in the car.

   “
What do you think he’s doing?” Rambo asks.

   “
Fuck if I know,” Cobra says.

2.

Until a week ago they had been John and Larry. Larry said, “Fuck it. If God is dead then I don’t need to use my God given name anymore.”

   “
What should we call you now?”

   “
Rambo.”

   “
Fuck yeah. Call me Cobra.”

   
They toasted over goblets of gasoline and went to see how Will was doing with the robots. Will became Commando. Commando thought he knew two things. One: drinking out of goblets was medieval and badass. Two: Robots could save the world.

3.

“
That’s a fuck ton of gasoline that guy with hair is using,” Cobra says.

   
Rambo says, “Yep, he’s got gasoline and legs.”

   
It’s a pointless observation. The church is really burning now. The Reverend says something about building a mountain to God and throws himself into the fire.

   
Rambo forgets where he is, forgets what he’s watching, and chalks it up to the gasoline intake or maybe thinks he has a slag stuck somewhere in his head.

   
The sky is blue.

   
The smoke is black and covering it up.

   
Cobra has two eyes and a unibrow and for a second Rambo wants to punch him in the face to make the unibrow separate in two.

   “
Smells like burning,” he says.

   
Cobra coughs and asks if he wants to go to the refrigerator graveyard and see if Commando’s there.

   
Rambo can’t remember where the refrigerator graveyard is but says okay and that he thinks the El Camino is sick and he’s pretty sure there’s a dead woman filled with slags in the bed of it.

   
Cobra tells him the world is mostly water and evil anyway and they pull away, chugging gasoline straight from the plastic milk jug.

   
Neither one of them can remember what Commando said about goblets. He might have been talking about goblins.

4.

Five hours later they finally reach the refrigerator graveyard. During this time they pass the burning church several times. Sometimes Rambo points out that the church is burning. Sometimes it’s Cobra.

   
It’s dark by the time they get to the refrigerator graveyard. It helps that it’s the only remaining place in town that has electricity. The front of the graveyard, which is actually called Flemion’s Scrap and Metal, is just a trailer. Out back, stadium lights shine on junked cars, washing machines, dryers, old school buses, and random piles of miscellany. But, perhaps oddly, the most predominate things are refrigerators. They line a central walkway. They are in virtually every color, some loud and vibrant and others more muted.

   
Neither Cobra nor Rambo can remember seeing a refrigerator that was anything other than white or black in a house or trailer.

   “
Where the fuck you guys been?” Commando asks. He sounds mad a lot.

   
Rambo says, “Somebody burnt down the church.”

   
Cobra says, “Like five times.”

   
Rambo says, “How are the robots coming?”

   “
You get the shit I asked for?”

   “
Uh,” Cobra says. “We got a car with a dead girl in the back and the Reverend burned down the church.”

   “
Burned down himself, too.”

   “
I sent you specifically to the hardware store. Please tell me you went to the hardware store.”

   “
We couldn’t find the hardware store,” Cobra says.

   “
Did you get more gas?”

   “
For the car? Yeah.”

   
Commando punches Cobra in the stomach. Cobra drops to the ground and vomits. Gasoline fumes waft from him.

   “
For the generators, fucker. How do you think the lights stay on here?”

   
Cobra can’t say anything. He continues to writhe around on the ground and flap his arms.

   “
We thought everything runs on magic. That’s what you said.”

   “
No.” Commando shakes his head. “That is not what I said.”

   “
Oh.” Rambo looks up at one of the bright stadium lights and continues to stare. First the light is white and then blue and then orange and then pink and then they’re spinning all around and he stops thinking or seeing.

5.

What Commando actually told them was a version of what his grandfather had told him a very long time ago. Commando couldn’t help but think his grandfather knew the slags were coming. Even though he never lived to see it, he predicted something like this was going to happen.

   
He said somewhere out in space was a place called the Garbage Planet. That probably wasn’t its real name, the smart name, but it was out there. On Garbage Planet, people found a use for waste. He said it was evolution. He said they were training it. That’s what recycling was. It was our attempt to train garbage to be something else. That’s why he opened the scrap yard. So he could surround himself with garbage and things people just didn’t want anymore. On Garbage Planet, he would have been a king. This was mostly metal garbage he collected. Expensive stuff. It was worthless to most people because they didn’t want it anymore, but if you added up what people had originally paid for this stuff, he would have been a millionaire.

   
The problem with Garbage Planet was that, once the garbage evolved, it could first live alongside humans and then it would overtake them. People and trash would become so indistinguishable nobody would be able to tell which was which. Then the only things able to live would be the maggots and the roaches and the parasites. And they didn’t know how to do anything but expand and expand and expand and take over as many hosts as possible. He said eventually they would start taking over whole planets. And that was how he said we’d know when we were fully evolved. Humans, he said, aren’t really given to suicide and it would take something apocalyptic to make the planet remotely livable, to get rid of the excess humans.

   
Commando was too young to know what to believe but now he believed. He believed the slags’ arrival heralded the shift in evolution. They’d entered the next phase. Even their biology had changed. It would take some sort of symbiotic relationship with the garbage surrounding him if he wanted to survive.

6.

Rambo wakes up in roughly the same spot where he collapsed. He stands up and nudges Cobra with his foot. Maybe they can sneak out before Commando knows they’re awake. Maybe they can drive into town and see if there is anybody left who has anything left inside. Most people have gone crazy. He wants to do more than nudge Cobra. He wants to kick him and just keep on kicking.

   
Cobra flaps his hands and says he’s awake, that his eyes are out of his head.

   
Rambo has to piss and thinks about pissing on Cobra. His mouth tastes like gasoline. His stomach is burning. He might be blind in his left eye.

   
Cobra stands up very slowly.

   
Commando storms from the back of the trailer and into the scrap yard. He holds a piece of paper and something Rambo thinks is a stapler only he’s pretty sure it’s called a slambox.