Universal Monsters XIV

It was Space that figured the rags would be combustible.  It was Space that figured they were eraseable.

He did a little math and came up with the Anti-Life equation.  He put two and two together and it equaled kaboom.
 
He rubbed his chin a little and nodded for a while and said they’d be “Inflammable like a drunken fleet of crispy, undead Hindenburgs.”  Then he spent about fifteen minutes explaining that flammable and inflammable mean the same thing.  About how “flammable” wasn’t even a word until the 1920’s when the fire safety people felt that folk would be confused by the proper word, so they invented a new one.  He told us academics to this day think that anyone that gets baffled about it deserves to die in the fires they set when they have a smoke in the hottub they filled with acetone, paraffin and matches.  We listened and told him that English is stupid.  He said we were stupid and then Lucian punched him in the balls and we all laughed.

Even Jack Quietly laughed and we all thought, “Damn, Jack we forgot you were there.”  But none of us said it because it seemed rude since he saved most of our lives and most of his arm was still gone.

Once setting them all on fire became the goal, and we all agreed this was more or less always a good goal, a catch-all solution, the problem became the most efficient way to blaze them.  And then the efficiency argument gave way to trying to figure out which way would be most fun.  Time is probably not on our side, but pretty much the only thing that’s ever been on our side is us so fuck it, right?  And if time wants to fuck with us, then we’ll set it on fire, too.

Brinkmire had been napping most of the day but he woke up and said we should find a sporting goods store, get a bunch of archery shit and lob fire-arrows at them.  It’d be “So damn King Arthur.” he said.  And we told him that sounds fun but it also sounds like a lot of work and also no one saw that movie but him.  He grumbled something about wanting a cup of tea and went back to sleep.

Jackson had the right idea.  He said the important thing was to have a good time.  He said to keep it simple.  Space said something about Occam’s razor and Lucian hit him in the balls again and it was funny again.  

We waited for dark.

We couldn’t really tell if the rags had eyes at all, but we figured if they did it would be harder to see us coming in the low light.  Also, you don’t throw fireworks in the daytime.  That’s wasteful.

We sneaked around the edges of their camp.  Turns out Mummies sleep.  They’ve been asleep for thousands of years so you’d think they’d be into staying up but, then again, they did build and sink, like, seven pyramids today and that shit has to be exhausting.  And if Letterman and Ferguson are even alive they sure as hell aren’t on the television so late-night is as good a time to nap as any.

We spent the afternoon breaking in to anything still standing.  We all found watches, mostly on what was left of wrists, and we synchronized them.  

We encircled our enemies.  Or as close to encircling them as we could being outnumbered fifty to one.  At 1:01 eastern standard time we sparked the lighters we found at gas stations and head shops.  

And the black, moonless night glowed bright orange.  And they wanted to bring hell to us, so we brought hell to them.

They went up like powder and ran like methed-out bottle rockets.  They tripped over one another and crashed into themselves and the fire spread like gossip.  Every time a rag touched another rag the fire went bigger and bigger.  One rag hit two rags, and those two rags hit two rags and it it got all kinds of exponenty.  The inferno squared and cubed and went to the power of fuck-yes.

It was pinball.  It was mummy-pinball and we were everyone of us Tommy.  We played the silver ball.  We were wizards.  And we laughed to drown out their barks and screams.  

They ricocheted and exploded and when they tried to escape we paddled them back into play.

They smelled like sandlewood and church when they burned.  And we knew they were probably diseased like you read about, but we breathed deep because they smelled, also, like vengeance.

The high-score was genocide.  We played to win.  By morning we stood in the shadow of a pyramid in south Florida and we were ankle deep in ash and we were the only things moving.  Brinkmire dragged a branch threw the black until he spelled “TILT” in letters twenty feet long.

And we smiled and we felt righteous and we breathed deep.

And we felt like we were beginning.

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