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Universal Monsters XXIII

Wed, 13 Jun 2012 13:52:24 -0400

We carried our ghosts.

Lucian strapped the dustbuster to his back like a katana as we walked west. Into the sun.

Tesla and Art Fleming could be heard whining from time to time, from deep inside the tiny vacuum. It reminded us of Limbaugh and Hannity bitching on the radio. The bulls listened to that shit non-stop. We don’t know why. You’d think being in prison you’d get your fill of mindless hate and poisoned tongues and misery and lies. Maybe that was the point. Maybe the right’s hate and violent bigotry kept screws warm on break, like the way a pitcher wears a jacket when his team is at bat, even on summer nights. As a bull, you let your hate get cold, you could throw out your arm the next time you beat a nineteen year old kid for something he never did wrong. You don’t want that.

Anyway. It reminded us of Limbaugh and Hannity. Reminded us that the apocalypse wasn’t all bad. Anything that kills those two, ya know?

We imagined the feast the demons must have had dining on their fat asses and made mental notes to high five those ones before we ripped them apart. Even if they were fucking hippogriffs we would high five those bastards.

We carried the dustbuster in part because it was a weapon, in case spirits that didn’t used to host Jeopardy showed up, but also because it was really funny. Why those two could float through the concrete walls of a planetarium but were trapped inside something someone bought on sale at Sears eluded even Space and he got a little lost in the math for a while, a little drunk on algorithms or something, but mostly it was just funny.

Brinkmire chewed on the irony.

We had become jailers.

It’s not that the rest of us didn’t get it, we just had other things on our minds. Food was becoming problematic.

Perishable things were already pretty much boned, because refrigerators don’t work in an apocalypse, apparently. And hunting wasn’t an option. The demons didn’t much discriminate between animals. On that tuesday, if it walked it burned.

A lot of markets still existed, existed enough, and convenient stores, and there weren’t very many things with teeth to scavenge, so we were all right for now. And there were always homes and things we could break into. But the scarcity was worth considering.

It was worth talking about. Hell, it was about the only thing we talked about for miles and miles. At some point we just started listing foods we had once eaten, and salivating over how awesome it was before Satan killed Sizzler. Eventually it started to feel like a scene from the damn Oliver musical. Hot sausage and mustard!/While we’re in the mood/Cold jelly and custard!

It was worth talking about until we found the woman in red sitting on the hood of a Buick on the side of the road.

She called us by our names and, before we could say a word, we were struck dumb.

“My name is Pythia,” she said.

She said, “Turn around.”

———————-

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Audiobook for Chapter 23

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Universal Monsters XXII

Thu, 08 Mar 2012 16:08:00 -0500

Being dead didn’t make Nikola Tesla any saner and it didn’t help that Art Fleming was egging him on.

It also didn’t help (it never helps) that if you’re in a room with more than ten people you are in a room with a fucking ghost expert. They’ve seen Ghostbusters One and Two and they’ve got a respectable Casper collection, two or three long boxes at least, and they watch Ghost Hunter without irony and they know every damn thing there is to know about spirits. Half the time they have a business card that says they’re a “Paranormal Investigator” when they aren’t fixing stereos. Half the time “Paranormal” is misspelled. Half the time, so is “Investigator.”

Business cards should be like drivers licenses. There should be a test.

Their websites all sparkle and dance and seem to be built on Geocities architecture which may be proof enough of demonic possession in and of itself.

Anyway. Tesla was a crazy ass ghost and Art’s suit was shit.

Probably this should have been a lot weirder or scarier or something, but Tuesday seemed ages ago already and we were remembering who we were and fuck it. None of us ran. None of us screamed. Most of us didn’t even stand.

They floated in right through the wall, like if Kitty Pride were old and a dude and creepy and a ghost. And there were two of her. Tesla looked directly at Space and said, “I thought I heard your voice, Gerald.”

Some of us surely thought “Gerald?” But most of us pretty much just thought, “Huh. Ghost.”

Jackson, who is regularly an exception said, “Nobody move. Their vision is based on movement.”

Space wasn’t listening. No one was listening but Space was super not-listening. He threw his head back, rolled it round a few times and shouted at the taller of the two ghosts, which is something none of us had really ever seen. He busted up his cool. Shook it off like rainwater. It was like watching Spock kick the shit out of Kirk on the bridge of the Enterprise. Or like watching a Muppet ride a bicycle. It was entertaining but also a little wrong.

“Fuck me!” Space screamed. “What the fuck are you doing here?”

Tesla smiled and the temperature dropped ten degrees. “I’m here to help, as I always have been.”

Space threw a chair at Nikola Tesla. It passed through him like you’d expect. Effortlessly, like a lie through a newsreaders lips.

“You can’t hit a ghost with a chair unless it’s been blessed by a blind rabbi,” Jackson instructed. “Or a blind rabbit. Or Blind Melon. I don’t…I need to brush up. That was a great band, though.”

Space threw a finger out to Jackson who traced the digit back through a sinewy, shaking arm, over a tree-knot shoulder and up to a gritted face. The message was clear. The message was “Shut the fuck up, Jackson.” But Jackson was never a very good reader.

“I was floating by because that’s what I do now. I float.” Said Tesla. “It’s my primary mode of transportation and also my basic entertainment. It’s pretty good cardio, I guess, considering I’m dead and don’t have what you would call a circulatory system any more. Anyway, I was floating by and I felt you and I knew you needed me now just as you always have. I am returned. And you are very welcome”

Art added, “You’re a lucky mook. Nick is the greatest mind of any generation.”

Space threw someone else’s shoe at Tesla and said, “I never needed anything from you but silence and absence.”

And someone else said, “Dammit, that was my shoe.”

Jackson whispered, “Shoes won’t work either, unless they have a proton in them.”

“All shoes have protons in them, idiot!” Scolded Space.

Jackson was undeterred. “Does anyone else smell that? Ghosts often make their presence known through smell.

“He farted!” Space said, raising his voice again. “He’s a farty, farty ghost. And he’s making his presence know by appearing in front of us and speaking condescendingly, jackass.”

“You can’t be so negative,” Jackson said. “Negativity can drive spirits away. It can also make them farty probably.”

“I want him to go away. I hate him.” Space said, his anger deliquescing into something closer to sadness.

“Who is this?” asked Brinkmire while Lucian walked calmly out into the hall. “You seem to know him.”

“Tesla. Nikola Tesla.”

“Who the fuck is Nokola Tesla?”

Space thought for just a moment how to explain a man the size of Tesla to a brain the size of Brinkmire’s and then said, “He’s like, like a hipster Thomas Edison.”

“Not fucking cool,” said Tesla while everyone else laughed at a joke we really didn’t understand.”

Space gave us all a little more, “Mad genius. Mad scientist. Lived in hotels. Only stayed in rooms with numbers divisible by three, hated pearls, ‘bout the only scientist I can think of that hated Einstein.”

“I didn’t hate Einstein.”

“You hated him.”

“A bit, I did.”

Space continued, “Claimed to hate war, too, but he died working on a death ray.”

“It was not a death ray, it was a teleforce weapon.”

“What’s a teleforce weapon, Nick?

“Death ray.”

Space grinned like the Grinch who hate the canary, “Died in poverty, now he’s on money. The Serbian 100 dinar bill. That’s how I like my irony served.”

Jackson who still hadn’t figured out he was meant to be shut up said, “The hundred? Ballin’!”

Space said, “That’s about a dollar thirty eight, US.”

Jackson seemed sad for a moment but then, “Even better! He’s basically Washington!”

Space turned to Tesla and said, “One hundred, by the way, not divisible by three.”

Tesla said, “Yeah, that one gets me.”

Space went on, “Also, he’s a fuck-off annoying, farty ghost that’s been following me around all my life taking credit for my work.”

“I’ve been your muse!”

“You only ever inspired me to go to therapy because I was sure you were a figment of my imagination. You used to haunt my dreams and I thought it was just because I was a lonely, fucked up orphan who idolized you until I found out how fuck-off annoying you are. But, no, you were actually haunting me, weren’t you?”

Art Flemming was aghast. “You’re not gonna take that? Are ya, Nick? Huh? Huh? Are ya?”

“Oh, come on,” implored the spirit. “I was hugely helpful. You never would have made that Pringles rocket without my help.”

“All you did was convince me to paint flames on it.”

“Looked like it was going faster that way.”

Space rubbed his eyes and gritted his teeth. More than a ghost, it was a migraine that floated through those walls. “I hate you.”

“I also told you to put an AM/FM radio on board.”

“Yeah. I’m pretty sure that’s what made it explode and burn down my parents house and make them leave.”

“Well, you put it in the wrong place.”

“There is no proper place on a Pringles rocket for…no. No. I’m not going to have this conversation I’m just…I’m going to figure out how to kill you. Re-kill you, I guess.”

Tesla’s demeanor shifted, his entire presence contorted into something a little more solid and much less kind and his floating, translucent body went crimson. His voice shook the room now. “You think they’re gonna rename Mars for you now you little shit? Now that the demons are bending Earth? It’ll never happen. And what do I care? I’ve already got a planet named after me.”

“A minor planet!”

“It’s a good size!”

Art Flemming tugged at Tesla’s robes and said, “This guys a graceless ingrate. Let’s bodyjack his ass!”

Brinkmire spoke up again, “And who the fuck is this one?

Space shook his head. “I have no idea. Never seen him before. He wants to jack my ass, though. So that’s funny.”

Lucian walked in the door holding a dust buster that he got we-don’t-know-where. “Think I’ll name him ‘Butt-Monkey,’” he said before switching on the vacuum cleaner and sucking the ghosts up in a well-practiced sweeping motion. He smiled, “Or is that too nineties?”

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Audiobook of Chapter 22

Universal Monsters XXI

Mon, 17 Oct 2011 13:21:00 -0400

Space started pulling at the stuffing in the planetarium chairs with two fingers, like getting the yellow foam out of them one fiber at a time was the only thing in the world worth doing, and he took enough time off talking that we pretty much all assumed the story was over. It was a good story, not as funny as maybe some of us would have liked, some of us might have added a chase scene in act two, but it had girls and exploding asteroids and it was an excellent story we all agreed, but it was time to be over. The sun had set dozens of times, Mars had dragged Phobos and Deimos along its elliptical orbit at least twice and the daylight was coming on. But after what seemed like an hour, when his seat wasn’t really something that could properly be described as a seat any longer, he spoke again. I mean, none of us are seatologists, but by the time he started up again what he was sitting on was something else.

“The thing about being the guy that bends a planet is you’ll never get to touch it,” Space said. “Even if you live out the fifty years of slingshotting hell and salvation at the fucking thing, even if you live that fifty years, never a guarantee even in a world without vampires, you still have to let shit settle. For hundreds of years the entire planet has to calm the fuck down before you can go anywhere near it. It won’t thank you for what you’ve done. You only ever made it better. It was useless and wasted and just spinning in the dark until you got there but it won’t thank you. It will hate you. And you’ll never get near it.”

Brinkmire finished a cup of tea drunk from that simple ceramic mug that he smuggled out of MGD 64 and held the teabag up to his mouth before realizing that he didn’t really need to eat it anymore. He smiled maybe for the first time in his life and dropped the bag back into his cup where it landed with a squish and a thud, and he said, “Why didn’t you get away with it? A guy like you, as clever as you, feet smarter than the smartest cop in the world I’d imagine, how did you get caught?”

“I didn’t,” Space said. No one understood what the hell that meant in this context but at least half of us pretended we did. Some of us pretended because we didn’t want to seem daft, most of us did it just so he would finally stop talking but Brinkmire, who really should have switched his brew to Sleepytime hours back kept on.

“How’s that? You are here, aren’t you? I mean, I don’t want to get into a whole Cartesian thing about the nature of existence and if we’re just brains bubbling in a thing. I just mean, you are here. Were there. Prison. MGD You got caught.”

“I turned myself in.”

Someone asked, “Why?” Might have been Brinkmire or it might have been anyone else.

Space answered, “Because I’ll never get to touch Mars. My Mars. The Mars into which I breathed all life. But the people who live there damn sure better know who I am. What I did. They better name, at the very least, the capital city after me. Maybe the whole damn planet. The Statue of Liberty that welcomes immigrants to that whole new world will be a statue of me. I turned myself in because when I do something I sign my name.”

Lucian snarled, “Ego.”

“Yeah,” Space agreed.

“Is she smarter than you?”

“The Statue of Liberty?”

“The girl. The girl you bent.”

“No.”

“As smart as you?”

“No.”

“Then why the hell would you trade her for you?”

Space raised his eyebrows and shrugged just a hint of a shrug and said, “That’s just about the only question I’ve ever thought was hard.”

And then, whether he meant for it to be or not, the story was over for sure. Because that’s when the ghosts walked in.

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Audiobook of Chapter 21

Universal Monsters XX

Wed, 14 Sep 2011 14:03:00 -0400

“Here’s how terraforming Mars will work.” Space was rolling now and maybe a little drunk on a story that’s been fermented and aging in his mind-cask for over a decade and we don’t know if he cared that we were in the room at all at this point. He didn’t seem to notice but someone switched the presentation on the planetarium dome from “Sunrise” to “Mars.” The red planet spun overhead like a blood-stained Deathstar and Space said, “Asteroids,” and then there was another long silence, which had become kind of trademark at this point.

“It sounds like something out of a terrible movie but this is how it will happen. We’ll attach nuclear thermal rocket engines to giant, icy, ammonia filled fuck-off asteroids and hurl the bastards at Mars. We know where these asteroids are, they’re just hanging out on the edges of the solar system, all we have to do is duct tape the rockets to them and we’re off. The energy released from the impact of each ten-billion-ton asteroid would be approximately one hundred thirty million megawatts. Enough to power the Earth for a decade. Enough energy to send the Delorean back in time 107,438 times.” Space did that math in his head without slowing down.

“Each asteroid would raise the temperature of the planet three degrees Celsius and melt a trillion tons of water. Enough to form a lake the size of Connecticut and one meter deep.

“We would do this for fifty years. For fifty years we’d sling rocks at her and at the end of it all we’d have a temperate climate on that shithole of a planet, which would now be about twenty-five percent covered in water.

“What I’m saying is, creating an environment where life can flourish is violent like you can’t imagine. We can go up there right now. I’ve built the rad shield, we’ve got the rockets. But we’d have to be hermetically sealed. We could walk around a bit, even build a little bubble, probably. But that’s not living. That’s quarantine. And that’s not who we are. A rock is not the boss of us. Not while I’m around. I can bend proud planets to my will. Mars is hard. I’m much harder. And to live like you mean it? To thrive? Fifty years of nuclear powered asteroids, each one equal to seventy-thousand one-megaton H-bombs is what it takes in the best case scenario.

“Living, really living, is violent like you can’t imagine.

“So I looked her up in the phone book. It was a day-trip to her place. Her front door had a five pin tumbler lock. The house was wired with a single circuit alarm. My cat could have bypassed it after an hour of googling.

“But first I just watched. I built a surveillance van to spec with what the FBI was using at the time, working with designs I took off of their server. Three trips to radio shack and I was set. Wired for video and sound. I had eyes and ears on them twenty-four hours a day.

I could set my watch by their schedule. Get up, shitty breakfast, peck on the lips for goodbyes and off to their jobs, about as aware of their lives as Rags. Home, shitty dinner, shitty TV and bed. Husband on the north side of the mattress, wife on the south. Never touching Not even a peck for goodnights. No talking if they could help it. No thinking. Even the toddlers’ tantrums were on a timetable, accurate to within seven minutes and dependent on how far they were from a snack and a nap on each end.

“Emerson taught us that ‘consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds,’ but he never warned us about the enemies that fire consistency at us from orbital stations. Husbands and children and television shows about doctors that never go to work and mortgages and cheese you eat in strings.

“That’s not living. That’s quarantine.

“She was just so…ordinary. That’s not who we are. And it was. It was treasonous.

“And I can bend worlds.

“I did what had to be done. In the middle of the night on day fourteen, after accumulating terabytes of data, when I was dead-sure my hypothesis was correct and articulately simple to the point a fourth grader could have presented my findings and won the school science fair, I bypassed her lock and her security system and I walked into her home and I very gently murdered her husband and her children and I set everything she owned on fire. Because her life-entire needed to burn.

“She needed to watch her world explode and to catch the ashes on her tongue.

I watched her lay on her lawn and sob. And her tears pooled into a lake roughly the size of Connecticut. And one meter deep.”

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<— Previous Chapter

Audiobook version of Chapter 20

Universal Monsters Chapter XIX

Mon, 29 Aug 2011 14:13:00 -0400

“There was a time when music only existed while it was being played,” Space said. And then he paused like we were all supposed to get that this was way, way deep and maybe “ooh” or “gasp” or something. Brinkmire choked on some candy corn he found under a chair but we didn’t think that counted.

“It was not very long ago, really,” Space continued. “Wasn’t till Edison came up with the phonograph cylinder in 1877 that we had any reasonable way to record it and reproduce it. Before then it only existed while it was being played. People are like that. Not all people. Some people are just noise, but some of us are melodic. She was. For a time. For a spell she was magic. I’m a scientist but I’ve always believed in magic because I’ve always believed in girls. She was flaxen haired and she was the reason I learned the word “flaxen” and, probably, she was the reason the word was created. And she was skin. And she was light.

“She was never going to be Oppenheimer but she was going to contribute. She was going to be…she was going to…nothing much has happened in physics since String Theory and…she was making it elegant. She wasn’t trying to, I don’t think, but she was. Her notebook read like Byron. Her equations were cloudless climes and starry skies. Simple pleasures. Poetry in potions. She worked out a formula for a hyper-efficient nitrogen-based fuel on the back of a napkin once that I swear gave me a boner. I mean, I was thirteen at the time so the napkin alone could probably give me a boner but…she was something else.

“And I was her lab-partner and I was thirteen and she never treated me like a child, but we were never going to be…and I would have given up all the cleverness and purpose and fuck Mars and sat in a box for five years just waiting to be old enough if I could have. If she could stay the same. But time is linear probably just to fuck with me. Einstein said, ‘The reason for time is so that everything doesn’t happen at once.’ But I’ve thought about it and I’m pretty sure it’s just to fuck with my head.

“Platypi are like that. There’s no other reason I can think of for a duck-beaver that lays eggs. The fuck is up with that? I may be off topic again.

“I figured she’d write the book that brought high-level science to the masses. Not dumbed down just dressed up. You’d be amazed what even an average mind can grasp when it’s laid out like underwear by a pretty girl. Maybe, if we were very lucky, it would be the new Bible. Not the new Bible, the companion piece. One in every drawer beside the other. Telling us that God and science can co-exist just as long as you keep your eyes and your mind open and understand that love and chemistry hold hands on the beach and the age of the earth ends in ‘illion.’ And then she would write a book of poetry with math. She was Shakespeare in a lab coat and she would write the psalms and the sonnets.

“We would talk about her future and the things she would publish and the minds she would change. ‘The sky isn’t the limit,’ she would say to me. ‘Not anymore. There are no limits. I’ll take us anywhere and when we get there you’ll bend the fuckin’ thing.’

“You guys can probably fill in the really sad shit. The shit where I would just stare at her and draw love-fractals and the longing and all that unrequited whatever. That part isn’t important, really, but it was my first crush and I want to be honest about it because, I mean, fuck it. Why else would I tell the story?

“We graduated and I lost track of her. This was in the days before Facespaces and Mybooks and Frienderfritters and I lost track. And I got my Ph.D and I went to work for NASA like I was always going to and I grew up a little and actually kissed a girl at one point. And I went about trying to bend a piece of shit little red planet into something that just might not kill you if you’re very, very hard and very, very lucky. But that’s okay. Hard is good. Luck is good. That’s why America is great. We’re a country built on the backs of the hardest, most ambitious people the rest of the world had to offer. If you were satisfied with your life, if you were complacent, you stayed in Europe. If you were willing to take a fifty/fifty roll of the dice that you would die on the boat to a new country, and miss your stop by two-hundred miles and watch most of your family waste away or freeze to death in a mini ice-age or both all on the chance that you might be great, then you were American. Then you were music. You were fucking metal. You just didn’t have a name for it yet. Because Black Sabbath hadn’t taught us what we were yet.

“I’m actually not off on a tangent here, believe it or not. Not really

“I lost track of her but every three months or so I’d walk the aisles of bookstores and look for her name. I never saw it. I looked for years. It got easier when I got a driver’s licence.

“Then one day I found her at a shop called Demarcation. Not her book. Her. She was on Merrit Island, where I worked. She had been living in Jupiter, Florida for years. She didn’t recognize me at first. I was nineteen and the last time she saw me I was fourteen and I guess those are a pretty important five years for a lot of people. I needed a shave. But I told her who I was and she said, ‘Oh my god! Look at you!’ And I thought, I’ve been in a box for five years. A box of research and grease boards and rockets. I told her I was building off of her nitrogen fuel ideas for power sources on Mars, the one she worked out on the cocktail napkin and she said that made her very proud and she introduced me to her children Tyler and Barret.

“Tyler ignored me because he was ripping a copy of A Study In Scarlett to pieces and Barret said something that resembled hello and then licked me and told me I tasted like paint and spat on my pants. His spit was green and red at the same time and to this day I haven’t worked that one out.

“She told me, ‘Boys will be boys’ and I smiled and I nodded and in my head I calculated the torque I would need to snap their necks.”

She told me she met someone the summer after college and she was meant to do research at MIT for the fall semester but instead they got married and now she teaches physical science to high school freshmen at a public school in Jupiter. And in my head I calculated the torque I would need to snap my own neck. I worked out if it was possible to do. It isn’t. I mean, not without a fairly complex mechanical rig. In my head I built the rig out of things I saw around the bookstore.

I asked her if Tyler liked Sherlock, because he was my favorite growing up. She said he can’t read and I reminded her that he was almost five and what the fuck? She said that Jared didn’t want to rush the boys or pressure them to excel and I guessed that Jared was her husband and that he was European.

I asked her if I could buy her dinner and she said she was just in town antiquing and had to be home in time to make Jared’s dinner. And probably Tyler or Barret would need their diapers changed soon. And I reminded her that Tyler was nearly five and then I was sure Jared was European.

She told me he was a found-art sculptor and I said of course he was and had no idea what that meant and I went out to my car. It was the first time I can ever remember crying.

I’m the guy whose parents left him in the shell of a burned out house in the middle of winter when he was five and just took off and didn’t say goodbye or leave him food or electricity and in that car, outside that store, that was the first time I can ever remember crying.

I couldn’t get her out of my head. For days. For weeks. That was nothing new but this time it wasn’t sexy or fun or her laugh or her napkins. Now it was like she was an entire planet made of sadness and broken shit. And it was up to me to bend her.”

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Audiobook for Chapter 19

Universal Monsters Chapter XVIII

Mon, 01 Aug 2011 13:39:00 -0400

“There was always going to be an extinction event, so it was my job to bend Mars,” Space said as he worked something out in the middle distance. Like he was pulling the memories through a crack in time.

Everyone gathered in a circle like we were at camp and that was okay because we all knew it was a ghost story coming.

Jackson said before we went on we needed music. He told us it would be more cinematic. None of us knew where all this electricity was coming from but Brinkmire had read a book called “The Hiding Place” that he said was also about monsters and that it taught him not to look too closely at blessings like this and we thought that sounded good.

Frank found a copy of Back to Black in the planetarium PA and he put it on to soundtrack the story. We listened to the dead.

Space continued. “There was always going to be an extinction event. If it wasn’t this it would have been anything else. Not many people had hippogriffs in the office pool, but this was always going to happen. Most of us didn’t even guess this century, but this is what futurists are for.

“We already had one ice age, what’s to say we won’t have another? Or a lava age. Or a Geoff age where everybody gets turned into a Geoff and then a Geoff-only disease wipes us all out. You can’t trust the weather. Or Geoffs. I dunno. Asteroids are a good bet. Nuclear war. Nuclear winter. Smallpox. Bigpox. There are a million ways the human race could die. A million ways we haven’t even thought up, yet. Like that Geoff thing. The very best case scenario is overpopulation, probably. Where we live long enough to fuck our way to the planet not being viable. Nowhere to put us and nowhere to grow the food to keep us. I mean, that was best case, not really a concern now I guess. Not for a while. Anyway. There is no long-term scenario where being Earthbound makes sense. But I should go back. I met this girl in college.”

He pauses like he’s listening for someone to call to him, but the only other voice in the world as far as we can tell is on the speakers. Amy Winehouse is saying, “We only said goodbye with words,” while the sun rises for the forty-fourth time today.

“I should go back further,” Space said.

“I was born genius. I guess that’s how most people catch it. If there were a pill to prevent it you should load up on that shit.

“My IQ can’t be accurately measured. Gifted they call it. But genius is a gift like a puppy is a gift. It’s mostly a responsibility. Genius pisses on your carpet all the time. Genius will eat all of your shoes.

“When you’re born genius you have a lot fewer options than you think. You’re supposed to do something to…I don’t know, fix us. It’s treasonous to the species to play Street Fighter or to watch TV or to sleep when you could be curing something or figuring out how to make pizza out of nothing but corn and the tears of Africans. That’s what they tell you. I decided to use my genius to get us off-world. Like you mean it. Mars. Mars is the only real option right now. Mercury is a suicide run and we can’t stay here. A single planet is irresponsible. It’s a closed system. Those are never sustainable. That’s QED.

“Mars is a shitty option, though. No magnetic field, really, it’s balls cold, we still have no clue what the water situation is like up there, but if there is any it’ll be a bitch to get to. It’s a shithole, but maybe we can shape it.

“I built my first rocket when I was three. Mostly it was pressurized cleaning products and a little black powder from some of my dad’s bullets and a bunch of Pringles cans and duct tape. I worked on the thing for two years. By the fifteenth iteration of the design I achieved low-earth orbit. With potato crisps. The first seven set small fires. The eighth gave a deer a heart attack and taught me that, in a pinch, I can perform CPR on a dear. It mostly tasted like leaves. The ninth one burned down most of my parents house and that was the last time I saw them.

“They never knew what to do with me. They looked at me like we look at Fraction. Like we’re not the same species and one of us is fucking scary. Like I had a second head that was hungry for human flesh or, I don’t know. I didn’t really know them so it’s hard to guess how they thought. I can’t remember being touched by my parents even once. Still I didn’t mean to… Anyway. So they packed up the things that were only mostly singed and took off in a car I built the year before. They didn’t tell me they were going and I waited nine days and then I called social services myself from a neighbor’s phone because they cut off the utilities when they went.

“The next six months are mostly foster homes and beatings,” Space says.

Amy says, “Love is a losing hand.”

Space says, “When I turned six I got scholarships to private schools. I went to class but mostly at this point I was working on building a rad shield for space exploration. Before me, any theoretical trip to Mars meant nine months and at least twice the radiation exposure any human can withstand. Without a proper shield we’re just a bunch of burritos watching Cheers reruns while we cook. No point in bending a planet we can only get to dead and glowing.

“I built the shield and NASA bought it. I sold it cheap because it didn’t take a mind like mine to realize the American space program would be fucked sideways any day. They told me when I was out of college to give them a call and I was nine and I told them to give me five years.

“I falsified documents to make it look like I had parents so I could leave school on holidays and during the summer I took AP classes and I never kissed a girl and I worked on teraforming theory, because without resources like you wouldn’t believe it’s awfully hard to work practically with teraforming.

“When I was twelve I went to CalTech and I met this girl and she had poetry in her fingers and in her eyes and it bled into everything she touched and, of course, that’s why I had to kill her. But I didn’t know that, yet. And, of course, neither did she.”

And Amy says, “The shadow covers me.”

And we listened to the dead.

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Audiobook for chapter 18

Universal Monsters Chapter XVII

Fri, 22 Jul 2011 13:38:00 -0400

We slept that night in a junior college planetarium with the “Sunrise” presentation on a loop. We had no idea if it would work on the vampires, but we had high hopes. We had high hopes, also, that bloodsuckers couldn’t come in unless they were invited. There really doesn’t seem to be any kind of consensus on the matter amongst fiction writers or inmates and, at the time, documentaries on vampires were difficult to come by.

Jackson was a big Buffy fan growing up and he did a lap around the perimeter to make sure there were no signs that said, “Enter all who seek knowledge” or some irresponsible shit like that. On the south lawn he found one sign that said, “Omnia mea mecum porto” but he didn’t speak Latin and couldn’t take the chance it said “Come the fuck in and drink us.” so he he broke it into about ninety-three pieces and brought the shards in with him. Some of us learned to whittle that night.

Space was the man of the hour. The man with the daylightsaber. And while Frank sulked and Brinkmire tried to bandage a frankly crybaby Jack Quietly with the remnants of a campus-issue first aid kit the rest of us asked Space to tell us his story. Some of us knew a little but most of us didn’t. MGD wasn’t so big you didn’t know most everyones face, but prison is not a socially progressive place, even by Civil War standards, and if you were white you probably only knew the Hispanics and African Americans by various racist slurs and you sure as hell don’t know where they come from. And vice vice versa or however you say might that. And we all wanted to know what brings a man like Space to a prison like that.

He was younger than most of us but he’d been on the inside longer, too. Space was the only proper genius any of us had ever seen in real life and he did everything accelerated, like a cheetah wearing rocket skates. Graduated high school by 12, college by 14, had his PhD when he was 16 and by 19 he was Inmate 9932033-A in the Florida Department of Corrections.

Pretty much we all knew that much. Space was a legend at MGD. He did all the guards taxes and shit because they saw that movie once. He got his law degree on the inside and he’d represent anyone who wanted him to the extent that he could from a prison cell. Also, he wrote a one-act play the New York Times called “The funniest dissection of ichthyology you’re likely to see this year.” We knew his thing was the shouting and the crazy, but most of us figured he did that just to fit in. Nobody would hurt Space because probably you’d need him at some point. We knew he taught classes in the yard on…anything. Everything. You could go to Space and ask him what was the deal with Wonder Woman and her rope and he’d tell you her creator believed that sexual bondage was the path to world peace. He would teach. He would preach. Space was 34 when we walked over the walls and we all knew the legends and some of us knew the man but knew almost nothing pre-MGD. Just the degrees. And even that we only knew because they hung in glassless frames on the walls of his cell. Frames he made himself out of fashioned, painted paper and memories he couldn’t seem to leave behind.

He folded them and took them in a knapsack when we left for the last time.

Pretty much everyone at MGD liked to say they were the only guilty man in prison but that makes pretty much everyone in prison guilty. In fact, most of us admit we did what we did and at least half of us brag about it and more than a lot of us were pretty glad to be inside. Nine times out of ten running is way worse than being caught. It’s true what they say, a guilty man can sleep in prison.

But Space, he never said if he was guilty. Never even said what he was rung up on and I guess we never asked. Until that night in the planetarium, I mean.

“I’m guessing he split an atom in his guest bathroom,” Lucian said. “With a knife and fork. Took out a whole village.”

Jackson answered with, “I’m thinking he might be dead, too, that were the case.”

Brinkmire spoke loudly to be heard over Jack Quietly who was mumbling something about, “Seriously. Seriously” over and over.

“Maybe,” Brinkmire said, “Maybe he hid in a refrigerator.” And then most of us threw whatever was nearby at Brinkmire because we all kind of agreed to pretend The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull didn’t exist.

Lucian threw Hancock at him which Hancock didn’t really appreciate but the rest of us thought was awfully funny.

After he landed Hancock said, “I’m betting he melted a bunch of Smurfs down for gold and he’s inside on Smurficide,” because Gargamel was Hancock’s only reference point for a mad scientist.

Space turned his flashlight over in his hands and looked around at us and smiled like we don’t usually see, like he was having a pretty good time.

Someone said, “Well, what was it, then?”

And Space said, “Nothing as special as Smurfs, though I bet we find some before all this is through. Bet we find a Thundercat or three, too. Nah. Just murder. Pretty simple. Pretty pedestrian. I’m just like all the other boys in here.”

“Well,” someone else said. “D’ja do it?”

“I did it,” he said. “Sure I did. Of course I did. I murdered a young family and I’m not sorry. Probably they’d send me a thank you card and maybe a nice basket of mini-muffins if there were post between here and hell.”

And it wasn’t until right then that it occurred to any of us that we really aught to be able to at least write to our dead what with them walking around and trying to stab us with other peoples teeth and all.

And it wasn’t until right then that we all realized that we all really wanted some damn mini-muffins.

And Space looked down at the ground and his smile kind of left him and so did his posture which, generally, was pretty impeccable. And finally he looked up and he grimaced just a little and he squinted and he said, “It starts like this.”

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Universal Monsters Chapter XVI

Tue, 12 Jul 2011 12:56:45 -0400

Ever stood in the kind of rain you can’t see through? Sure you have. It’s also the kind of rain you can’t hear through. It’s loud and thick and everywhere at once. It piles up in your eyes like you’re crying and it ruins your phone. Probably you’ve kissed in that kind of rain and maybe danced and laughed. This would have been before that Tuesday when you still believed in dancing and love and kissing. It was like that only what it was raining was blood and meat. Crimson tears. It wasn’t all our blood but a lot of it was and either way it was blood. And the noise we couldn’t hear through was us. We were screaming.

Shit jumped off like we couldn’t understand. We met the vampires on the road and, basically, it was like, “Hello.” Beat. “Oh, you’re eating us, then. Okay.”

Jack Quietly was a bull through and through and still. He stepped to the bastards and lost his other arm almost immediately. Jack screamed, “Are you fucking kidding me!?!” to no one in particular while the rest of us made Monty Python jokes and the vamp who ripped the arm out of its socket worked the thing like corn on the cob. We would swear at one point it salted the thing.

Brinkmire played dead and it worked. We pretty much figured it didn’t fool anyone but that the vamps just didn’t want to eat something that sad. A weeping hamburger.

Frank, of course, was much too ugly to eat. One of the blood suckers grabbed him and just kind of stared at him the way maybe your four year old stares at green beans and, after a while he pushed Frank away with an, “I just can’t.”

It saved his life but Frank has been pretty down about it ever since.

We lost seven men to the vampires and it could have been everyone but Frank if Space weren’t there. He watched them under the half moon and he sorted out that the vamps had eyes that see better in darkness than light. Shine a a dead police’s LED right in their face, he figured, it’d be like sparking a road flair next to someone wearing night vision goggles. It was a sound enough theory. They’d be blind.

Space took the unlikely weapon off his belt and shot it right into the face of the toothy bastard that was gnawing on Lucian’s leg while Lucian gnawed on his. And in a turn none of us expected the half-breed demon’s head exploded and the world-entire smelled like sulfur we thought.

All of us, convicts, inmates and demons alike, we all stopped what we were doing and in time like we practiced it we said, “What the fuck?” Some of us spoke with our mouths full.

Space looked down at the torch and it only took him about moment to realize he had sunlight in his hands. He had sunlight in a tube.
“It’s UV,” he said. “It’s a daylight saber.” And he wielded it like he’d seen Empire thirty-six times. Which, of course, he had.

He cut them all down in a heartbeat and and he stood inside a circle of smoke and death and he smiled and said, “I’ll never walk around a vampire again.”

And we all agreed it was time to stop by the Wal-Mart.

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Universal Monsters Chapter XV

Thu, 30 Jun 2011 14:13:00 -0400

We had to walk around Alabama. The entire damn thing was on fire. Fire to the skies, and, hell, maybe into the heavens and maybe into Heaven proper. Fire as high as we could see. And something swam in the flames. Brimstone Whales or Ember Sharks. Something. They were only silhouettes, really. We couldn’t get to close enough to make much out. Hair started burning ten or fifteen feet away from the state line and there was nothing to breathe but heat and fear and rage.

Jackson tried to fish into the fire, just to see what he could get and because we were in no particular hurry and because, we suppose, Jackson liked to fish. But even when he spent half a day making a line out of the Kevlar he found on the ashes of a city police a few days earlier, the thing dissolved a good three feet in front of the flames. And we didn’t say it, but we all thought of Fraction. And how he probably would have just walked right into the damn thing, he would have stood barefoot on streets of conflagration, with flickering tongues of flame lapping at him and he would have walked out with a demon squid in his teeth. Food that cooks itself. We thought of how Fraction would have laughed and about how demon squid would probably still be chewy.

We took other things from what little was left of the body of that police. A flashlight and a service revolver with one bullet in the chamber. We talked about how well the flashlight was made to survive whatever turned its owner to dust and about how whatever took down the lawman was probably still out there carrying five of his bullets. It was the first time any of us ever liked a police and we all agreed that it probably helped that we didn’t know him.

This was back when Alabama wasn’t even on the horizon, when we met the vampires for the first time and lost seven men. Maybe even good men. Surely we knew their names once but bodies stack like we suck at Tetris and we move on like we’re a dot org because it’s all we can do. Space told us about a book where death was the only thing that granted a man a name and we all liked the story and we nodded and laughed but it didn’t apply to us. We had our great war now. Apathy borne of fortune was about the last thing we needed to worry about. We were not Jack’s broken heart. We got rid of those things ages ago.

These vampires, the first ones, walked. They wore sunglasses at night and no shirts and when we cut them they didn’t bleed and that bothered us.

When we first saw them we thought they were maybe a gang and, like us, they had survived through the cunning use of hiding behind folk. They were hard men, we could see that, and they were roughly the color of the ash that hangs off a cigarette you’ve forgotten about and we greeted them cautiously outside of Sarasota. We knew we couldn’t trust anyone but we knew also that we couldn’t afford to ignore any potential allies. We knew that the days of men hating men were over. Space was the cleverest person in the state as far as any of us could see and as we got closer to the grey men we told him to suss out their intentions and alert us if he thought they meant us harm.

Someone reached out his hand to shake and the vampire started eating him and Space tugged on his ear like he was signalling to his children watching at home and we thought, “Yeah. Picked up on that one.”

They didn’t know karate which was frankly disappointing. They were strong, stronger than most of us but not stronger than all of us and when they growled we growled. And with our own blood staining our teeth we smiled.

And most of us, we were glad Armageddon came on that Tuesday. We never knew how boredom got invented but we knew, then, for-sure how it died.

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Universal Monsters XIV

Tue, 08 Mar 2011 16:27:00 -0500

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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Universal Monsters XIII

Tue, 01 Mar 2011 13:06:00 -0500

The other mummies were more productive .They were trying to bring the mountain to Mohamed. They were trying to build pyramids. But south Florida is made almost entirely of strip malls and swampland. If the ground can support a discount haberdashery, then one has been built there. Step off the sidewalk at your own risk. Hope you can swim.

So the rags kept breaking off chunks of Gap Outlets and Sunglasses Huts and trying to stack them and watching them sink. This went on all day. We watched from beneath a nearby tree. Jackson found most of a movie theatre and brought back popcorn and we sat in the shade and it was a damn good show.

Sometimes they’d get their bandages stuck on one another, or a leg would fall off and they’d just hop around for a bit and fall down and, overall, it was a highlight of the end of days, we all agreed.

Every time a pyramid would sink, hundreds of mummies would curse in unison and we realized all the legends were based on misunderstandings and homophones and shit. The curse of the mummy. And if you’ve never heard a mummy swear, it’s fantastic. It sounds like if Al Pacino were a frog that had a squirrel stuck in its throat. And he was pretty pissed-off about it.

Space explained the pyramids of Egypt to us. He said they were designed by Imhotep, who we thought was a made up movie monster, but we were glad to be told his name because that had been bothering us all day. He said they were tombs for Pharaohs. The Pharaohs died, were mummified and placed inside, along with their consorts, for their eternal slumber. Or at least until they showed up on the Gulf of Mexico in the early 21st century. But the pyramids were tombs. Tombs for the things that were now building them. Basically, the damn undead rags were putting up condos.

Space told us there were a few different ideas about what the pyramids actually meant. He said they were tombs, for sure, but that some people believed they were also meant to be resurrection machines. We all nodded and agreed that that was scary, and that “resurrection machines” would be an awesome band name.

Eventually the rags sunk enough shit that the new shit started to stay up, built on a scaffold of what used to be Arbys and Costcos now buried feet and feet under marsh. They were mummies and they were evil and probably they killed a lot of people on that Tuesday, but they were ambitious, we had to give them that. And they were tenacious.

“It’s almost, it’s impressive, right?” Jackson said, trying to work a kernel of stale popcorn out of his teeth. “There’s a lesson in there or something. About not giving up. They just failed until they stopped failing, you know. They were wrong until they were right. And they are literally building their success on the foundation of their fuckups.” He looked to Space to make sure he was using the word, “literally” correctly. Space threw him back a half-nod and Jackson was child-like in his acceptance of the praise. “It’s impressive. And those dudes are dead! Imagine what they probably accomplished when they had, like, brains and skin and internal organs and shit.”

Lucian nodded. “Totally. We should set them on fire, now.”

Everyone agreed this was an excellent plan. It had been a great show but it was time, now, for a little murder.

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Universal Monsters XII

Wed, 19 Jan 2011 17:49:00 -0500

Mummies are like molotov cocktails with feet. They’re anointed with oil, wrapped in linen, kept away from moisture and whatever organs and things don’t get yanked out before they get entombed basically liquefies and ferments. They’re just these fantastic little fire-bombs that moan a little here and there and explode on impact.

Sure, there’s the whole idea of the curse of the mummy but we live in a world where most of us have been eaten by things with wings so, you know, not a whole lot of places to go but up.

Space thought boils might have been a very real concern, and we all agreed that boils would make everything way worse, but we’ve all decided not to concern ourselves too much. With anything. Ever again.

We called them “Walking Rags” and then just “Rags” or, sometimes, “Hey, Fucky!” if we were just trying to get their attention. Because, “Mummy” just sounded way too British and fey. And even we aren’t wild about the idea of massacring moms. Even British moms.

We walked the water line. We stayed close to the gulf coast because we figured that limited ambush opportunities from land monsters and it gave us a quick way to put out any of us who found ourselves even the smallest bit on fire.

We saw our first rags on the beach, just a few miles north of MGD 64. We recognized them pretty quickly from the movies and we all tried to remember Imhotep’s name and if mummies had any super powers. We tried to remember if The Rock was a mummy or something else and we all agreed that Indiana Jones was a way better series. We all agreed that we didn’t recognize The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull as canon but some kind of snuff film or something.

The gulf was calm, the gulf is always calm, but the wind was strong and loud and the rags didn’t see us at all so we decided we could sneak up on them.

Lucian took point because, absent Fraction, Lucian was probably the scariest person we knew and on opening day you start your best pitcher.

There were three rags sitting in a circle, or maybe a triangle, and we couldn’t hear anything but we thought maybe they were talking and we wondered if they had tongues or brains at all. Most of us remember stories about mummies brains being yanked out through their noses with wire-hangers or something, though none of us could remember the source of our information and some of us thought maybe we were thinking of abortions.

But there were three of them and Lucian crept as close as he could before giving up cover and then he just sprinted flat-out and some of us remembered that Lucian was a running back in college before he was a murderer and a convict.

If you’ve never seen a look of pure shock on the face of a 3000 year old mummified Egyptian corpse, believe us, it almost makes an Apocalypse worth it.

They all made this sound, like Tim Allen asking a question about metaphysics and then Lucian’s fist connected with the first rag. He tagged it right in the back of the head and its skull deflated like he plugged a basketball with buckshot. Lucian spun around and clotheslined the next mummy sending its head a few dozen feet away where it got stuck, eyes down, in the sand. The third rag punched Lucian in the back and its hand snapped off at the wrist. Lucian broke the rest of its arm off at the elbow and started stabbing the sad little bastard with his own bones.

The rest of us were supposed to be helping by this point but we couldn’t stop watching. There hadn’t been a lot of levity in the past few days. Even for convicts pulling a jolt these were depressing times and this was just too awesome to mess with. If he had been in trouble I’m sure we would have stepped in but, at this point, this was the funniest a corpse had been since Weekend at Bernie’s or at least the Joan Rivers show and we weren’t gonna screw that up.

It turns out mummies don’t die when you decapitate them, which is a fact you may want to write down for future reference assuming we didn’t get them all. But they don’t die like that, probably because they’re already dead. The one whose head was stuck in the sand, it was just flailing wildly and, at this point, was a good eight feet from the fight, but was still going at it, punching and kicking at nothing at all, like a dead little Billy Blanks. Lucian was still stabbing the third rag with its own ulna when the one with the four-day-old birthday-balloon-head tried to mix it up again. Lucian dodged a couple of sad punches and then grabbed a loose bit of fabric and started running down the beach unraveling the bastard. It looked for all the world like he was trying to fly the thing like a kite. A few hundred yards later there was no more mummy and Space said, “God, if only we had some popcorn.”

Lucian made his way back to the kill-box he had created and mopped up. He drop-kicked the decapitated head into the gulf and then dragged what was left of the other mummies into the water as well, where they dissolved into nothing at all. He collected something from the triangle where they were originally sitting and strutted back to the rest of us.

“You believe this shit?” he said. “The fucking mummies were playing Pokémon cards. One of em had a fucking Squirtle. Nice.”

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Universal Monsters XI

Fri, 07 Jan 2011 13:21:00 -0500

Eventually we made a new calendar. It only made sense, we thought, to start working forward from Tuesday. We wanted every damn date to be a reminder. We wanted a count. An at-a-glance, fuck-you-monsters number. We wanted even our cheques to tell us we had survived if we ever had a banking system worth using and robbing again. And “Anno Domini” felt like a lie. “The Year of Our Lord” makes less and less sense every time a Catalan Drac pops outta wherever the fuck and tries to eat your face.

We didn’t have a name for it yet, but Wednesday was A+1. Wednesday was the first day of the Armageddon calendar. And it was the day we walked out of MGD for the last time. Most of us wanted to burn the motherfucker to the ground on our way out but concrete doesn’t light and some of us stayed behind so that may have been unkind anyway.

We didn’t know it at the time, but the beasts were organizing. It took them twenty-four hours to end the earth. Rome wasn’t built in a day but it sure as hell burned in one.

They came at us unified, and, say what you will about the demons but that shit was effective. They scorched the world as one but now they were segregating.

We didn’t know it yet but they were dividing the land into, we still don’t really know what you’d call it, principalities? Parishes? Cubicles? Something. Different beasts got different cities and states and nations and what not. There was a cast-system; there were warlords and dukes, probably. They gerrymandered the fuck out of pretty much everything. Drew lines through lines and around shit and ignored natural borders and the whole thing got way too complicated to understand. We never saw it but there must have been some kind of monster-congress or something making plans and infrastructuring and whatnot. Space found a laptop once and started trying to build a spreadsheet to keep track of it all but the politics of Hell are like child-actors: They’re fucked.

What mattered was that they divided.

What mattered at the time was, we were lucky bastards. You wouldn’t think so since we’re a fugly, mostly-dumb-as-hammers group of convicts who are walking our way through the end of the world and most of us have spent as much of our lives in the bucket as out, but every one of us that got shipped from everywhere in the country over to the fuck-off-forgotten, blue-hair, seven-miles-an-hour, dinner at three-thirty Cape Coral, we were born with horseshoes up our asses.

Because the Mummies got south Florida.

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Universal Monsters Audiobook Chapter 10

Fri, 26 Nov 2010 15:01:00 -0500

Here, then, is the audiobook version of Chapter Ten. If my voice sounds a little odd at times it’s just because my throat has been trying to secede from my body for about a week, now. At one point, when I say the word, “sanctuary” it sounds like I’m doing a Tom Brokaw impression but, in fact, I’m just dying a little.

Download it here.

Enjoy, all,

Universal Monsters X

Fri, 26 Nov 2010 14:29:00 -0500

“This is very sad,” said Brinkmire. “Very sad. I’m very sad for us. Coming back here, to this place, this may be the most fucked up thing I’ve ever seen. And, as some of you may know, I’ve recently been through a bit of an apocalypse.”

It was hard to argue. We all agreed on that. We agreed that we needed a plan. What divided us was everything else.

Do we stay? The prison has food and drugs and ghosts and its own generator and it smells like death and a few walls are left. Maybe this place is a DMZ after today? Is a DMZ a good thing? What does the “Z” stand for? Do we go? Probably. Where? Is anywhere safe? Is there a sanctuary somewhere and do people with teardrops tattooed beneath their eyes get in?

A few of us made choices. To weep for a while was pretty popular, as was staring into the middle distance like the answer to something was there somewhere, if you could unfocus your eyes just right.

Two of us took suicide as the preferred egress. The rest of us, we thought less of them, but not much. The rest of us, we were a little jealous of their decisiveness. We were a little jealous that they might be sleeping.

The rest of us spent the night at MGD 64 talking ourselves out of shit and watching lights in the distance. Lights from fire-breathing things and lights from things that glowed and, with scant, tacit hope, very occasionally lights from guns. Muzzle blasts and tracer rounds.

We watched every direction for hours. On a clear night in Florida you can see forever. You could see until judgment day, unless that day was yesterday. And with electricity a thing of several hours ago there was no ambient light pollution. Just crisp, matte darkness cut, here and there, by a survivor, like a dangling participle, being struck through by hell’s pen.

Here and there we’d see a car’s headlights and, moments later, we’d see an explosion and then we wouldn’t see the headlights anymore. Sometimes we’d hear a pop and, if it was close enough, a little scream, like a mouse thrown on a stove. Sometimes, if it was close enough, we’d hear Jack Quietly vomit.

A car’s engine and high beams and whatnot, after that Tuesday, that shit is just a dinner bell.

We agreed that our plan probably shouldn’t involve cars.

The bombs had stopped some time ago. With no information anywhere we generally assumed everything that dropped bombs was grounded and destroyed. Either that or everything with wings and piloted by man was in Europe or Asia by now. If there still was an Asia or a Europe. We reckoned there wasn’t a United States, anymore. At first some of us hoped it was just Florida or just the south or just the east coast that died that day, but there was no television or radio from anywhere. It could have been that all the affiliates and relay stations and things were down and that was it, but there were no more bombs. No doubt the military killed as many people as the monsters that day. No doubt more than a few demons were jealous of the way we blanketed the earth with horror and fire and death. But now we missed the bombs. At least it meant someone was still fighting. And, for whatever reason, we liked the idea of dying at the hands of a man way more than at the talons of a beast. Fires, it turns out, aren’t all the same.

No more bombs, we thought, meant no more nation.

Surely if there was a bomber left in the country it would be bombing us. The only other option, we thought, was that in other places shit was even worse, and they needed the bombs and the jets and infantry even more than we did. But the idea that something could be worse than this? We couldn’t wrap ourselves around it. Like trying to divide infinity by zero, we didn’t know how to even begin. All we knew was that we were the remainder.

Or maybe they just ran out of bombs. That thought was the only comfort most of us found that night. The ones who stayed.

As we watched the lights we wondered how many people could have possibly survived. Without weapons and guards and high walls and without Danny Fraction.

At MGD 64 pretty much everyone majored in Comparative Murder, and, still, we were almost erased. Without Fraction our losses would have surely been total. How were psychiatrists and lawyers and weather men and students and architects supposed to walk away?

We laughed about teachers fighting off mummies with chalkboards and sending abominable snow folk to detention and meter maids ticketing Satan just before being decapitated with a “No Parking” sign. We laughed not because we didn’t care they were all dead but because we didn’t know what else to do. We wondered how things went down at fireworks factories and zoos. Which demon drew the kill-the-tigers-and-rhinos card?

And then.

We started to consider firefighters sending demons home with axes and hoses and we thought of coal miners defending their children with picks. We thought about the gangs to which some of us once belonged. We thought about SWAT and SEALs and snipers. We thought of the fathers we collected, about the hard men who taught us to be hard men. We thought about the many, many coffins we had built.

We studied our scars and we remembered. We remembered what they grew over. We remember what we were made of underneath.

Somehow inside this place we forgot what we were. We play-acted and ate teabags and contracted AIDS and we forgot that, once, we were the scariest things we had ever heard of.

Nostalgia washed over us as we remembered how blood tasted off a knife warmed in a liver and how words like, “help” are like laughter, they just sound different when you’re the one that brings it out.

We gathered weapons, whatever was left from when this place still existed. We collected food and we sat in a circle and we asked one another what we regretted even though we all already knew what we regretted most.

“There’s this girl,” Lucian said. And we all agreed that just about every story worth telling could start with, “There’s this girl.”

“I knew her,” he said, “back in LA. She was a dancer. She danced like she was made of flames. She flickered. She smelled like vanilla and wind. Like a vanilla breeze. When I paid her enough she’d smoke cigarettes and tell me stuff. Stuff, like, who she was when she had her clothes on and why she did what she did. She used to tell me that the most important thing in the world to her was knowing for sure that she would die. She said it made everything, everything, seem important and time sensitive. She pressed, always. Every day. It was the difference, she said, in why she could walk but instead she would run. Death was on her heels and he would catch her, she said. But until then she was damn sure going to be alive. I must have asked her out forty times. More. Her skin looked like you could drink it and it would be good for your bones. Not a day’s gone by since I left that I haven’t thought of her. Every day since then. Every single day. I think of her every time I think about living. Living instead of just…I think about her every day. I think about her and I don’t know why I’m not more like that. I don’t know why I’ve always walked when I wasn’t standing still. I think about her a lot and I’ve always regretted that I never held her throat in my hands and watched all that fire leak out of her eyes. I’ve always regretted I never killed her.”

He took a cigarette out of Jack Quietly’s mouth. He took a long drag and he shook his head. “I don’t know if Death ever caught her,” he said, “but I’d sure like to find out.”

Like most important things between men, it went unsaid, but most of us understood, most of us agreed it was as good a reason as any to walk across the country, or maybe run, and kill everything moving.

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With very special thanks to a great friend of mine I don’t speak to nearly enough, and from whom I stole a tiny, fraction-of-a-fraction of a life so that I might create a pursuit of death. I hope this doesn’t piss you off, madam. And I would have asked your permission, but it’s just so much more me to ask for your forgiveness.

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Universal Monsters Audiobook Chapters 1-9

Wed, 17 Nov 2010 21:21:00 -0500

A few people have mentioned that they prefer audiobooks for working out and driving and being illiterate and whatnot. Also, some people don’t see so good. So I’ve recorded the first nine chapters in audiobook format and hope to include an audio version of every chapter with its posting as the book progressess. As always and of course it is cheap as free.

It sounds more than a little like I recorded it in a large bathroom, which I did not, but I was pretty drunk so there’s that. Maybe as the book goes on I’ll get better at audio but probably not.

Also, it’s read by the author and, you know, Stephen Fry I am not.

For now the file lives here, until I get around to posting it on my own damn website.

Thanks for reading and listening, all. Hope you enjoy it.

Best,

Universal Monsters IX

Tue, 16 Nov 2010 01:01:00 -0500

He told us we could call him Casanova Jones. We told him that was ridiculous and we would not.

Even though he was sitting on a throne he made from werewolf skulls we told him we would call him, “Sarah.” He had a small Dutch boy he named Jeff that he used for an ottoman and his throne-skulls were held together by taffy and coagulated chupacabra blood. From time to time Jeff would turn back and gnaw at the mortar only to be scolded whenever Sarah noticed. If he was after the taffy or the chupacabra blood remains a matter of some debate, and even those of us who came down on the side of the taffy have never really trusted the Dutch since. Or Jeffs, for that matter.

Seventy-seven minutes after we met him Casanova Jones killed a dragon with his teeth and we told him we would call him anything he liked. He grilled dragon steaks and told us stories.

But we are getting way, way ahead of ourselves. Streets ahead. States ahead.

After Fraction went swimming we wandered for a spell. Directionless and still without any real clue what was going on we stalked information. We broke into abandoned homes and bars swimming ankle deep with blood. We tracked down computers and smartphones. But every television was white noise, radios were silent, phones dead. Every facebook update was, “Ohhhhhh Fuuuuuuuck!” Or some variation thereof.

“They’re everywhere!”

“Holyshitrunthisisnotokay!”

“It’s eating me! Why am I typing this while it’s eating me?”

Stuff like that.

We traveled in a small pack. In part this was for protection but mostly we just didn’t know what else to do. We stayed at the waters edge for a while, but the damn Loch Ness monster, or his cousin or his protégé or something ate a guy named Brett and pretty soon after that we found ourselves on the move. We figured we may as well move together.

Brett’s thing was, I guess, getting eating by giant fuck-off monsters. None of us really knew him.

We tried to stick to shadows, tried to keep our backs to walls, but we’re convicts, not ninja. And if we were better at not being caught we wouldn’t be convicts at all. Just regular old murderers sitting across from you at Starbucks and beside you at the cinema and on the train.

Two-hundred of us followed Fraction to the Gulf, seven hours later we were nineteen. Not all of us died. We splintered and argued and fought and yelled and napped and decided here was as good as anywhere else and we might as well stay. Most of us decided things like that at pubs and roadhouses.

We didn’t see another living creature that day. Not a man, not a cat, not so much as a mosquito in the Everglade swamps. Not a single living thing. Other than the demons, of course, if they may be called, “alive.” And if they may be is a matter of some debate. None of us are ickyologists.

We didn’t even see all that many bodies or parts, as if everything with guts in them had been swallowed whole. Everything in the world that wasn’t us.

The religious amongst us thanked our gods that we were still walking. Thanked them for their mercy. The rest of us, we thanked Danny Fraction for his.

It got late and we got tired. Most of us, we didn’t understand the outside world before that Tuesday. Now we had no fucking clue. The universe was all the way out of it’s entire mind and we needed sleep. And we needed to get off the roads because nighttime is when the vampires show up. And even ropens don’t fuck with vampires.

We had no homes to speak of, no back to go back to. And sleeping in a dead man’s bed has a way of feeling wrong even to a killer. Not all killers, of course, but all the ones you’d want to know.

It turns out there are all kinds of prisons.

Seven hours after we walked out of MGD 64 State Penitentiary, we walked back in.

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Universal Monsters VIII

Wed, 13 Oct 2010 14:27:00 -0400

It had been the kind of day where a body could miss a few details. And by the time we noticed it was too late. And even if it wasn’t.

None of us had the heart to tell Fraction he was swimming west. None of us had the balls to tell him he was in the Gulf of Mexico.

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Universal Monsters VII

Fri, 08 Oct 2010 15:39:00 -0400

The gates were open. What was left of them. But we walked over the crumbled, tumbled, bombed-to-fuck-all rubble of the walls anyway. Walking through the gates felt like parole. Walking over the walls felt like freedom.

It also would have made a flippin’ sweet photo had anyone been alive to take a picture.

Space bandaged Quietly as best he could, but even a one-seventy IQ can do only so much with a mostly-eaten arm and the bloody, charred, exploded shit that Armageddons leave behind. He really just wrapped it up for show, to make our savior-guard feel better about it all, and because after everything else that happened that day amputating his arm just seemed silly. It could probably wait a day or two, we agreed. And if it couldn’t wait and he died we’d probably find the strength to move on. If we noticed.

Most of the prisoners and staff were dead. The kind of dead that makes a body realize that “dead” is not an absolute adjective. There are degrees of dead, it turns out. Most of us were seriously fuck-off dead. Arms and legs in different states and different states-of-matter dead. Liquid feet and misty, gaseous spleens. We seeped into groundwater and floated on the wind. Those of us who lived were mostly the ones who stood behind Fraction which didn’t make us proud of ourselves so much as it made us alive. Which remains impressive in its own way.

The convicts we’ve known nearly all have a way of collecting fathers. Different fathers for different occasions. Most of us grew up without a dad or wishing we were without one, so we grab them where we can and put them on mantles too-high. Where the views and winds scare them off while they still have things to say.

Space teaches us about people with mostly Jewish names. Oppenheimer and Jacobi. Einstein and Ferme. Brinkmire tells us stories about bears and dear and makes us tea. A man named Brit used to explain the infield fly rule and the wheel play to us three times a day before a simple dental infection retired him, because, as Michael Chabon tells us, baseball is a game given from fathers to sons.

It was a man named Laurey that told us about men like Chabon. And Doyle and Dickens and Stephen Fry and Tim O’Brien. He could recite The Things They Carried and The Final Solution and The Final Problem from memory and the things he couldn’t remember he could make up.

Laurey’s thing was, nobody hurts a man like that.

On the outs they showed us what women want and inside they show us what rapists do not and the fact that we almost never listened wasn’t their fault. They tell us where we are and where we have been and even if they don’t know where we’re going, they make us want to get there. They protect us from men like us. And a thousand, thousand things.

We collect fathers not because we are lost men so much as because we are men.

We knew he was set for Cuba and somehow we knew we weren’t but at least for a little longer we wanted to stand in Fraction’s shadow. So we followed close.

MGD 64 was in the wetlands and almost ocean-front. Less than two miles from the water the surrounding land would be high-dollar property if it weren’t made almost entirely of swamp and alligators and mosquito’s.

Fraction walked atop the alligators like fucking Pitfall. He strode easy like he could walk on water. Not in a hurry but not taking his time and as silent as ever, silent as every one of the graves he had dug he walked. And we followed.

At the waters edge Danny Fraction took off his shirt and his pants, but not his shoes, and he walked into whatever was next. He gently smoothed bodies out of his way and he began to swim.

We watched from the shore. Probably none of us could have made a swim like that and even if we could. Cuba would have been another prison. And there are just so many things here that need killing.

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Universal Monsters VI

Tue, 28 Sep 2010 14:57:00 -0400

We lined the walls of the yard like a middle school gym during a fifth grade dance. Convicts on one side, inmates on the other. In the middle was the disco ball. In the middle, was Fraction.

Death was Fraction’s dance floor and every living thing at MGD 64 and all of the spirits that couldn’t leave just yet because this was too damn entertaining and all of the beasts and trees and rodents and rocks were waiting for him to cut a rug to fucking pieces. To split the air, to split the earth. To rape and pilage and fucking Hulk Smash!

Most of us believed in demons long before that day because most of us believed in Danny Fraction.

But he just smiled.

A too-white smile that glinted and shot the light from the bombs and the flames back in every direction at once. He stood too-still, and his smile made us even more antsy for him rain murder on these assholes. To soak them bone-wet in crimson and rage.

He was adjusting his eyes to the sun and the flashes and the napalm, we said. It had been ages. It had been God-knows how long since he’d been out of the hole. And if God was in South Florida on that Tuesday he wasn’t saying much.

Or, hell, maybe he was. Maybe he was shouting.

Either way, Fraction just stood there.

Monty, who was an NBA referee before he made boots out of his children, once told us, “When you’re good at something it happens slow.” And we believed him. And Fraction was good at war. But this wasn’t slow; this was…nothing.

Space quoted Tolkein. “I don’t want to be in a battle,” he said, “but waiting on the edge of one I can’t escape is even worse”

Then Brinkmire told us to look around. Shifting only his eyes he said, “They’re not moving either. The beasts are graveyard-still. This,” he said, “is a showdown. It’s a dual. It’s motherfucking pistols at dawn.”

Fraction got it. He stood like a gunslinger with the sun at his back and his oil-slick black hair blowing in the wind of concussive blasts off bombs that were way too close for us to stand this still. When he started to move he moved only his fingers. They twitched a bit, eager to draw a weapon at his hips that none of us could see but all of us trusted was badass. And then he cracked his knuckles one at a time, each snap of synovial fluid a gunshot drowning out the explosions and gasps. There must have been gasps.

Demons perched atop the walls and the roofs. They knelt like sprinters and wrapped themselves in their wings and some of them purred. For all the world we would swear they were smiling, too. The ones that had mouths, at least.

Minutes turned into hours into days into weeks into months which were really only seconds before anything happened at all. After all the blood and screaming and body parts and the explosions and the sickly-sweet smell of burning people and the teeth and the eyes of the craziest-ass war anyone had ever seen it’s just one scary, scary, scary man staring down what’s left of the beasts.

And then a monster appeared and approached Fraction. Slowly but tall and with a straight back and high chin a demon that could have been a man if he didn’t have horns and wasn’t mostly on fire and fine with that walked toward the scariest thing any of us had ever seen. The demon held up one hand and two fingers as if to say, “Wait.” He put his hand on Fraction’s shoulder whose skin bubbled under the demons grip. The beast leaned in close and said a few words and we imagined that he spoke English though none of us could hear.

Fraction’s smile left him and his eyes squinted and his ear caught fire just a little from the demon’s breath.

Fraction nodded.

The demon turned his back and walked away from Fraction and from all of us and through the gates. And every one of the beasts followed. Calmly, almost single file they walked and flew and crawled away from the yard.

Fraction watched them go, snuffed out his ear and bandaged his shoulder with the skin of a nearby guard and then he started walking, too.

The silence was more concussive than any ten of the bombs. Lucian knew a word from Fraction’s mouth might well destroy us all but he was willing to take the chance. The curiosity, he said, would kill him just as quick. He sprinted up to Danny Fraction, craned his neck to look into his eyes and asked, “What? The? Fuck?”

Fraction looked down at him and smiled softly, like a father leaving his child at a market to be found, hopefully, by someone better. In the most confusing part of a day that included hippogrifs Fraction hugged Lucian and whispered,

“They said I could have Cuba.”

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