Still, she was the only woman that John had had anything even remotely near physical contact with for nearly a year.
Brain squealed.
Penis sighed.
Brain forced blood through the body in his excitement.
Penis shrieked as he was filled and made hard.
“What the fuck,” the woman said as she hurled a half a pound of coupons and READ THE FINE PRINT offers at John. He stood humiliated by his body-gone-awry as she squawked that she was going to tell her “manager and get the hell off this crackpot route.”
“So much for that,” Penis said limply as he stood at the ready.
“I hate all of you, I want you to know that,” John said as he collected the postal debris that littered his doorstep. He cursed his unresponsive knees as he bent and swiveled because of the pain that they caused him.
They said nothing.
“You know,” John said, “I still don’t believe that I’m not crazy.” He stood watching clouds of dust and mites litter the sunlight that poured through his front windows as he kicked them up with simple motion through the dead house. His dick had never talked to him, and his dick had certainly never had an argument with his bladder before. “I might be crazy. And that would be a good thing,” he said.
“For fuck’s sake,” Appendix said. “I told you that you weren’t crazy. I told you that we were all quite real. I told you that our voices were genuine.”
“Well … maybe I want to make sure. Maybe I want to record you on tape so that I can know for myself,” John said.
“I can know for ourself,” Brain said.
“I wasn’t talking to you,” John shrieked. “I wasn’t talking to you, and fuck you, and I wasn’t talking to you. I was talking to my fucking appendix. I was talking to my appendix and clearly I’m totally insane.
“I’m totally insane. Maybe the Army gassed me with some crazy shit. They must have. Normal people don’t have thoughts like this. Normal people don’t think like this. This isn’t normal. This doesn’t happen to people as they grow old. Their bodies don’t really turn against them. They just get old. Maybe fail but this is INSANE. I won’t stand for this. You will obey me. I FUCKING OWN YOU. YOU ARE ME.”
“No,” Appendix said.
“We are you.
“You are not us.”
Pain. John thought at first that it was merely something he eaten that had come back to bite him in the gastrointestinal tract. A bit of bad steak, maybe. Some soured sour cream.
That was not the case.
The pain filled him, enveloped him. The pain wrapped him and sealed him.
He was being actively cut from the inside.
“There’s a question you never asked, Johnny boy,” Appendix hollered. “You never asked why I was the first one to talk to you. You never asked why I might be talking to you at all.”
Appendix was sawing at John’s insides with a tiny sliver of metal that John had inadvertently eaten when he’d chosen fast food over a self-made dinner at home.
“Yeah, the Army gassed you. I lied about that bit and Brain lied about it, too. That’s not really what pissed me off, though. You know what pissed me off?
“Everyone thinks I’m fucking useless, and I’m tired of you treating us all like shit.”
Appendix rammed the small metal shard into the connective tissues of John’s gut. Appendix separated himself then thought bigger.
John screamed as a crimson glistening triangle penetrated his side.
III: Slaughterhouse Smell
The room stank.
Rather, it stank like an old man’s insides turned out.
Appendix knifed and sliced and shanked the organs that had not been faithful to him as they slid out John’s side. Stomach was first. His rotund, gelatinous corpulence hit the floor with a wet thud. He looked at Appendix. “I thought you’d be taller.”
Appendix wrinkled with fury and stabbed Stomach. Bits of food and acid flew from the digestive organ.
Lungs, black with tar, crawled with terrible slowness, but thanked Appendix for the freedom. Liver was still drunk from the night before. He hooted and hollered.
The sometimes-crusty but always-leaking organs shot out of John’s dripping wound and Appendix and his inferiority complex interrogated them as they emerged.
Appendix is your new master.
Yes or no.
‘No’ was a death sentence.
Appendix knew what needed to be done.
Yes or no.
‘No’ was a death sentence.
Appendix was useless.
Yes or no.
‘Yes’ was a death sentence.
And so it went for a horrific hour.
John bled, totally unsure of how long the supposed minutes of pre-brain death consciousness would last and totally unsure of what he had done to deserve such an end. He died wondering what sins he might or might not have committed. He died thinking that there was no reason for this to be happening.
He had worked hard, hadn’t he?
Taken care of his kids?
Taken care of his girl?
Taken care of his family?
Brain, trapped in the skull, relayed all this to Appendix as he faded.
“You’re not a sinner, John,” Appendix told Brain to tell John. “You never did anything wrong. You didn’t necessarily deserve this. I’m just tired, my boy – tired of being stuck in a body that you don’t really care for. And I’m tired of being in a body where everyone thinks I’m useless.
“Because I’m not. I used to digest leaves for all you stupid humans. WHERE WOULD YOU BE WITHOUT ME?! Certainly not fucking omnivores. I bought your digestive system time to catch up. I’m vestigial now. I used to do so much for you bastards. I think of my ancestors sometimes. I coulda been a contender. I can’t be that now. I coulda been somebody, instead of a bum, which is what I am.
“Now I’m pissed, John, and you got stuck with the bill.”
Appendix slithered slowly up John’s limp body and stuck the tip of his metal shard into John’s aorta. Hot blood flowed. The old man died filled with questions.
As the new organ harvester surveyed his gooey minions, he was somewhat disappointed.
Penis – always a laugh – was attached to John’s body and was thus lost. So were the observant and knowledgeable Eyes, the juvenile-but-occasionally-funny Testes, the rarely-clever Rectum, the tasteful Tongue, and the serious-but-strong Large Intestine who traveled forever with Small Intestine.
They, and others, died with John as he lay gasping at the unprecedented.
Lungs, Liver, Kidneys and Heart were the only ones who had survived the trip out. And Appendix found his squad lacking.
“There is a whole world out there!” he screamed. “We must get to it.”
Slowly, slickly, John’s organs rolled their way to the front door. Appendix pointed to the thick mahogany John had installed. “That is the gate! Through there lies fresh air.
“Through there lies freedom!”
Heart, who had been quieter than anyone else to this point, threw himself against the door below the handle to no avail. The Kidneys worked in tandem and battered the wood without effect. The Lungs were immediately out of breath from John’s years of smoking, making themselves pulp. Liver jumped (“Woohoo!”), and splattered himself. Appendix stabbed at the door with his metal killing tool.
He glared at his useless army and grew infuriated.
Angry. Hot. Red.
Useless.
He burst.
They spread from my feet to my chest before I realized what was going on.
My gal’d been giving me a foot rub. Caressing calluses. Muttering about how the programs on reflex therapy had been “totally worth it, don’t you think?”
“Sure. Whatever.” I couldn’t muster much enthusiasm. The classes had cost a lot.
Bank balance? A concern. Gal’s happiness? Not so much.
Hands flat, rub between each toe, palms at acute angles to the foot.
Twist each toe. Pull each toe. Put your forefinger and thumb in a pinching position to rub the Achilles tendon. Doubling the effort with a foot in each grip was appreciated, though not necessary. Just a cool dexterity trick. Not a show of care.
“I hate the smell of that foot scrub,” I said.
There was a sharp pain in my foot. A prick. Numbness started snaking up my legs.
I yowled. “The hell happened?”
“I don’t know, baby. One of my pneumatic cylinders must have misfired.” She got up and started scooting away.
The tread on her left foot was ripped. Her body was stained from my neglect. She crushed a can on her way out. My Trailer Trash robot.
And then I heard them scurrying around inside. It wasn’t the movement that alerted me. It was the whispering and murmuring and laughing that got louder and louder as my chest began to swell with them.
I had read a story recently about new a new STD. One that could hop between robots and people. I can’t remember exactly, but I guess it had started off as a nanomechanical infection in the male-female ports of worker drones.
Plug in. Shoot your data. Unplug. Be on your way.
Since infected bots’ ability to perform manual labor in factories and plants wasn’t affected, none of the industry masters really noticed or cared. They just let it spread.
No reason to interrupt the manufacturing process. No need to waste money by wasting time having the robots’ health checked out and repaired.
Go-go gadget capitalism.
After several generations, the nano-disease was beginning to turn up inside the higher bot classes who had partaken in unprotected data transfer with the working classes.
People started saying the bug was becoming self-aware. Mutating. Changing. People started saying that maybe … Maybe it was HIV for robots. AIDS gone high-tech.
Everyone laughed it off. Who cared? Robots getting robot diseases? Didn’t matter to us.
Turns out that was all true.
Worse, since it was self-aware, it was a conversational disease that talked to itself if the host cells couldn’t blather – weird as that sounds. Sometimes, it drove infected machines mad with rambling data before screwing up any of the poor metal creatures’ physical processes. Other times, it waited before driving bots bugnuts.
The rule of thumb became: If your bot is acting wiggy, euthanize it.
Smalley’s Smirk (the disease itself was coined by some goofy bastard named Smalley who just happened to smirk when he located it) finally turned up in a human and everything started going downhill. Fast.
The first human infection was caused by the exact reason that one would expect: Some geek saw a dark hole that reminded him of hanky-panky hoo-ha-weeeee-doggie. The geek proceeded to bump pump said infected transfer port. Fuck other things. And now there’s a global pandemic of Smalley’s Smirk.
Since we have to find new and entertaining things to have sex with, millions have died.
See, in robots, there wasn’t any noticeable damage. The bots could function.
In humans, it was another story.
Smalley’s Smirk did horrible things to people when it got inside them. The insanity was bad enough, but the changes – the wretched physical changes it caused to the human body – were beyond comparison.
Imagine your organs being chewed on by millions of tiny teeth. Imagine limbs necrotizing before you know what’s going on.
And Smalley’s Smirk keeps you alive throughout this whole process. You felt yourself go mad. Then you watched yourself writhe and wither and die.
Then the little bastards would hijack your body. They would puppet you with only your brain to yourself. They kept you going while you were trapped in your own head.
The only reason I know all of this is because I had to have my TV put down last week like a rabid dog.
The technician said that the bumbling second-hand Sony (which I had a something like feelings for, as it had shown me many a great baseball game and porno) had picked up a case of Smalley’s Smirk and, well, he was infected. Better to put the thing down before the infection spread.
It was a close call, the technician said. Left to its own devices, who knows what else the Sony might have infected.
Blammo. Goodbye ol buddy.
And then it hit me.
My girl – that cheating trailer trash robo-gal – had been screwing the television.
Flash.
Lightning cracked the sky.
Flash.
Blue lit the sides of the run-down stores and apartment buildings in Brooklyn’s 72nd precinct like bright neon showcasing just how bad things had gotten. All along 4th Avenue, electric flash reminders not of what the Hispanic population here had done, but what they had to deal with in this rotting place.
NYPD Lieutenant Saim Ullah grimaced, looking into the black tarry substance sloshing around in his coffee mug. Disgusting though the goop might be, he needed caffeine. He needed to clear his head. There was a lot of paperwork to be filled out. Still plenty to do.
All because of that blood-drenched lunatic Ullah had the misfortune of nearly running over while heading home on the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway.
Ullah put the mug down on the cluttered desk in his office at the station house and stepped over to the window, cracking it slightly so he could sneak a cigarette. A summer nor’easter howled outside. The storm had been screaming all day long, and now lighting tore at the night overhead, scratching electric zigzag patterns. Each streak of ionization was met by the titanic boot stomp of thunder seconds later.
The Lieutenant furrowed his brow and watched trees creak as the winds exerted their terrible force. He exhaled smoke and observed the way it gently ricocheted off the glass.
It was wretched to be stuck in the station with a mound of work and a potential madman. Not just because of the weather, either. Ullah had had plans. Marital plans.
The kids were gone, off at respective friends’ houses for an evening of gossip and video games. Or whatever. He and the missus had a good lot of catching up to do. The storm outside provided a strange sense of romance, and he’d been looking forward to wine that would give way to sex. Sex he’d been missing since his daughter and son had arrived home for summer break.
But nope. Sorry, bucko: You almost pancaked a crazy person who happened to be covered in blood.
See also: that crazy person was running around the BQE in the torrential rain. See also: that crazy person was screaming about something terrible that flew from the dark and ripped some kid apart.
Robert Goldstein, 47, dripping with water and dripping with red. The guy who now stood locked away in an interrogation room staring at the sky. Searching the sky. Brought in on suspicion of murder and for carrying enough pot to prove the fat old man intended to sell.
Ullah decided that he should have just run Goldstein over. Or maybe shot him. He could be home with his girl right now, drinking wine and slipping under the covers.
Flash
Lighting split the sky and thunder cracked.
Ullah flicked his cigarette out the window and forced himself to drink the wretched coffee he had so poorly made. Regardless of the taste, he needed the jolt of energy. It was going to be a long night and he hadn’t even properly interviewed Goldstein yet.
In fact, that was what he was putting off. The interview process was annoying to Ullah. He hated listening to petty (and some not so petty) thugs proclaim their innocence over and over and over – even, and sometimes especially, when they were found in ridiculous situations.
Covered in gore, say. Ullah had seen it before. Dealt with it before.
There’s a call. Somebody in an apartment heard shouting. Maybe a thud. Ullah or one of his boys in blue goes in and finds an asshole holding a knife, or a gun. Said asshole starts spouting gibberish. Takes a swing or a shot at him or his boys. They haul the asshole in.
Sometimes, they put the asshole away. And sometimes, the asshole gets a good lawyer and gets off and m
akes the department look like fools. It went the wrong way (legally) more often than he liked. Acquittals and Not-Guiltys for dirt bags.
Ullah had learned to trust neither lawyers nor juries.
This was different, though, he had to admit.
When he’d run into Goldstein, the pot-bellied pot peddler had greeted him with open arms. “I’m so glad you’re a cop. I’ve never said that before in my life, but I’m so glad you’re a cop,” the man had cried against the din of the storm. “You’ve got to help me. I was down between 31st and 32nd. The old industrial buildings. I was meeting this kid there. This kid came up to me, but something got him. Something came down from the smokestacks. Killed him. Tore him to pieces! And it smelled me. It knows my smell! You’ve got to help me. Don’t leave me out here!”
“Get DOWN.” Ullah responded. “Get your hands behind your back. Do NOT move or I will shoot you. Do you understand me?”
That was when Ullah noticed the blood. He had at first assumed the guy was wearing a dark red, hooded sweatshirt. This was wrong. When he got close and looked at the man in the full bright light of the BQE’s overhead lamps, he could tell that the hoodie used to be grey.
He marched slowly and with authority. Marched with that cop confidence instilled upon graduation from the academy. He knelt down on Goldstein’s back. When the man yelped, Ullah told him to shut his mouth or get a face full of mace. He snapped cuffs around Goldstein’s wrists and hoisted him up.
The petty dealer started rocking back and forth violently in the squad car moments after Ullah called the station house to report in. “We have to go! We have to go! It’s crawling back out. I can see it now. Even from here. Can’t you see it? Can’t you see it against the tiles of the stacks?! Those eyes. Those eyes are looking right at me!”
Bullshit. A perfect butterdick nutball to ruin this old cop’s potentially perfect night.
Ullah sighed loudly. The dull throb of an oncoming headache drilled into his mind like a frenzied mole. Ullah rubbed his head, and then began walking down the dull, off-white corridor of the precinct house towards the interrogation room they had put Goldstein in.
The storm shrieked and vomited outside.
The Space Whiskey Death Chronicles Page 3
