by Andrew Smith
Paintball is a game teenage boys like to play. We dress up in old clothes and shoot one another with mushy plastic balls filled with paint. The balls are about the size of a nickel. They burst open and leave a splatter mark upon impact, like blood.
“Uh,” Robby said.
“We could take some of your blood and inject it with a hypodermic into paintballs.” I said, “That’s how we can kill the Unstoppable Soldiers. I am certain they have the needles and shit to do it in the clinic.”
“You are insane, Austin,” Robby said.
Robby crossed his arms tightly in front of his chest. He did not want me to take any of his blood.
“Do you want to stay down here forever?” I asked.
“Yes,” Robby said. “I do want to stay down here forever. As long as the Rolling Stones are here, it’s fine with me.”
The film continued:
From mid-1968 until early 1970, there were a series of unsolved beheadings in Ealing, Iowa.
Robby Brees and I solved them that night, as we watched Reel Five of Eden Orientation Series.
Newspapers, and even the few books that had been written about the Monster of Ealing serial killings put the number of victims at seven. There were actually a lot more than that.
A head belonging to one of the victims was floating inside a large glass jar that sat on a shelf in Johnny McKeon’s office in From Attic to Seller Consignment Store at the exact moment Robby Brees and I sat and watched our film play out.
Dr. Grady McKeon got his contract for Unstoppable Soldiers.
What engineer of warfare could possibly pass up a chance to set free a breeding, self-regenerating horde of horny and hungry Unstoppable Soldiers inside enemy territory? The Defense Department of the United States of America wanted Unstoppable Soldiers very much.
McKeon Industries tested their 412E strain on prison inmates. The prison inmates had all volunteered for the program. They had been told it would be an opportunity to leave the country and kill Communists.
Offering the possibility of such an experience to an incarcerated prisoner in the Iowa Men’s Reformatory, which is now called Anamosa State Penitentiary, is kind of like offering a lazy white kid one million dollars, a trip to Sweden, and a threesome with Shann Collins and Robby Brees.
Sign me up.
So the scientists at McKeon Industries exposed the inmate volunteers to their 412E plague mold, strapped them down naked to hospital beds, pumped them full of liquid sedatives, and filmed the volunteers while McKeon Industries teams waited for the hatching to begin.
Monsters were making monsters.
At first, Dr. Grady McKeon’s staff assumed the Unstoppable Soldiers that hatched would be placid and sedated from all the drugs, too.
It was not a good idea.
History shows that, as a group, scientists tend to not be very aggressive when it comes to physical attacks. The scientists who worked for Dr. Grady McKeon were like good-morning breakfasts for the first hatchling Unstoppable Soldiers.
It also became apparent to the McKeon Industries scientists that the Unstoppable Soldiers are always very horny. The Unstoppable Soldiers needed females, but, unfortunately, there were no female volunteers for the Unstoppable Soldiers Project, Phase 2. This made the Unstoppable Soldiers very edgy.
Six-foot-tall praying mantises with jagged rows of serrated teeth on their arms are not very good at masturbating. This made them even angrier.
Dr. Grady McKeon decided to halt the experiment a second time.
Again, the Unstoppable Soldiers proved difficult to stop. Ultimately it was discovered that the only way to prevent hatching-out among the exposed inmate volunteers was by removing their heads.
This is what the scientists at McKeon Industries did.
And they cleaned up their failures as sloppily as they did everything else, which accounts for the discovery of headless corpses in fields around Ealing, Iowa, in 1969.
Robby posed a question: “Austin, is it just me, or do you feel dumber, too, after spending the last couple hours watching those McKeon scientists experiment with shit?”
“No doubt, Rob, we have lost some brain cells,” I answered.
And Robby said, “What are we going to do, Austin?”
Ingrid sighed beneath my feet.
That was usually Ingrid’s question.
The film ended with footage of the McKeon Industries Family Picnic Day: happy scientist families eating corn on the cob and playing softball or running three-legged races. It was all very creepy, made more so by Dr. Grady McKeon’s voiced-over exhortations:
Breed, my friends, breed. Breed and be the New Human Race.
“I wonder if that corn they’re feeding the kids is Unstoppable,” Robby said.
I said, “Uh.”
Fuck corn.
I never wanted to eat corn again.
Just as the film ran its last strip of leader through the projector, Robby and I heard another sound coming through Eden’s speaker system:
Welcome to Eden. Please secure the hatch upon entry.
Welcome to Eden. Please secure the hatch upon entry.
Someone had opened the hatch from outside.
Someone was coming down the entry ladder.
Welcome to Eden. Please secure the hatch upon entry.
LOOKING FOR WIGGLES
THE MOVIE MADE quite an impression on Robby Brees and me.
We were terrified.
Robby and I stared at each other, both of us uncertain as to which course of action to take: Run and hide, prepare to fight, or go out to the mudroom and see who might be calling on us so late at night.
It was past midnight, Friday morning.
The end of the world was one week old and it was getting out of hand.
“What are we going to do, Ingrid?” I said.
I pinched the silver medallion of Saint Kazimierz between my finger and thumb, raised it to my lips, and kissed it.
At exactly that moment, Eric Andrew Szerba, my father, and Connie May Kenney Szerba, my mother, were drinking cups of strong German coffee. They sat at my brother’s bedside in a military hospital, where he was not recovering very well from losing the lower half of his right leg and both of his testicles to a shrapnel bomb in Afghanistan.
On the other side of Ealing, on Onondaga Street, the Unstoppable Soldier that hatched out of Eileen Pope entered Duane Coventry’s house through the open front door. Eileen Pope began filling the rooms of the small house with jellied clusters of translucent gray eggs. In a few hours, the house would be entirely filled with Eileen Pope’s egg mass, which would turn black and boil with mountainous eruptions of oily unstoppable goo.
The males would have to leave Eileen Pope alone now. Tyler Jacobson and Roger Baird perched alongside each other, up on the roof of the house. Unstoppable Soldiers do not sleep; they rest.
Unstoppable Soldiers cannot close their massive compound eyes.
The Unstoppable Soldier that hatched out of Tyler Jacobson would not have slept even if he could shut his massive, lidless eyes. Tyler Jacobson was hopped up on all the crystal meth that had been coursing through Duane Coventry’s body. The crystal meth made Tyler Jacobson very edgy and extremely horny. Tyler Jacobson scrambled on top of Roger Baird, who was also an Unstoppable Soldier, and attempted to copulate with him.
Roger Baird had been in a resting state.
Roger Baird was not very happy after being disturbed from his rest by another male Unstoppable Soldier that was in the act of copulating with him. Tyler Jacobson was confused. The two six-foot-tall praying mantis monsters fought.
Roger Baird was pinned. Tyler Jacobson bit Roger’s head completely off. Roger Baird’s head rolled down the slope of Duane Coventry’s roof like a noisy pinecone felled by a gust of wind.
Clop clop! Clop clop! Thud! went Roger’s triangular head as it tumbled unevenly down the shingled pitch of the roof, dropped, and landed below the front porch.
Undeterred, Tyler Jacobson continued doing the two t
hings that Unstoppable Soldiers on crystal meth like to do.
Tyler Jacobson was very confused.
Connie Brees was very tired. She worked on the night staff at the FedEx facility outside Waterloo. She sorted and scanned flats and packages. While she worked, Connie Brees’s brain floated along on little blue kayaks.
She floated and floated.
Connie Brees thought about Ah Wong Sing, the man she’d had sex with all afternoon long. Connie Brees wanted to have sex with Ah Wong Sing again. She thought about the ocean, volcanoes in Guatemala, and her son, Robert Brees Jr.
Connie Brees had never actually seen the ocean in her entire life.
Connie Brees wondered if her son, Robert, and the Polish kid he constantly hung around with were gay. Connie Brees glanced at the clock to see if it was time to go outside and have a cigarette. She decided that her son, Robert Brees Jr., and the Polish kid he always hung around with were most likely homosexual for each other. It did not matter, Connie thought. She wanted Robert Brees Jr. to be happy.
The Polish kid seemed nice.
Connie Brees would rather Robert be happy than grow up and float around on little blue kayaks going nowhere.
Connie Brees looked up at the clock again.
Travis Pope made his way through the pitch dark at Amelia Jenks Bloomer Park. Unstoppable Soldiers can see very well at night. Travis Pope sniffed and sniffed at the air. He could smell Eileen Pope, and he was making his way out of the park toward an older neighborhood of small homes along Onondaga Street.
Travis Pope scurried out onto the highway behind Amelia Jenks Bloomer Park. A two-lane, steel Warren truss bridge crossed Kelsey Creek there.
Kelsey Creek is a tributary of the Cedar River, which runs through Waterloo.
Travis Pope stood in the center of the highway at the threshold of the Kelsey Creek Bridge.
The headlights from Ollie Jungfrau’s Dodge Caravan minivan washed over Travis Pope, making him glow like a pale green ghost. Everyone inside Ollie Jungfrau’s Dodge Caravan minivan could see the six-foot-tall, spike-armed Unstoppable Soldier that stood in the middle of the bridge.
Ollie Jungfrau laughed.
“Ha-ha,” Ollie said.
Ollie Jungfrau was in a video game, and he had two passengers who were watching him play from the backseat of his Dodge Caravan.
“Suck on my fat Dodge Caravan cock, you sonofabitch fucking alien bug,” Ollie Jungfrau said. Then he added, “Welcome to Earth, motherfucker. Next stop: Hell.”
Ollie Jungfrau was a tool.
Ollie Jungfrau jammed the accelerator all the way down to the floor.
Ollie Jungfrau had an erection.
Louis, whose real name was Ah Wong Sing, knew that Ollie Jungfrau regularly used obscene language when he became caught up inside his video games. Mrs. Edith Mitchell, on the other hand, was disgusted by what she heard and saw.
It did not matter. Mrs. Edith Mitchell was in shock, anyway.
Earlier that evening, Mrs. Edith Mitchell had been outside in her neighborhood, which was just west of the Del Vista Arms. She had been looking for her blue Maine coon cat. The cat had not been home in two days.
Edith Mitchell’s blue Maine coon cat was named Wiggles.
Wiggles had no balls, but this was neither a result of having eaten Unstoppable Corn, nor because Wiggles had ever been in the blast pattern of a roadside bomb in Afghanistan.
Wiggles’s balls had never been named, as far as I can tell.
Mrs. Edith Mitchell did not find Wiggles.
When she returned to her home, the Unstoppable Soldier that had hatched out from Hungry Jack in the middle of a cornfield across from a Waterloo gay bar was inside her living room eating her husband.
Tally-Ho!
It was a mess.
Edith Mitchell’s husband was named Leslie Mitchell. Leslie Mitchell was a retired veterinarian. Leslie Mitchell cut Wiggles’s balls off.
Wiggles’s balls ended up in a trash can, which is what animal doctors tend to do with all the testicles they cut off things. Wiggles’s balls ended up in the same trash can that contained a thumb-sized tumor that had been cut from the throat of Ingrid, my golden retriever.
Ingrid never barked after that.
When Mrs. Edith Mitchell came home and saw an enormous bug devouring her husband inside her living room, she ran off screaming down the street.
The television was on. Leslie Mitchell had been watching a program about how to cook lamb when Hungry Jack came in and started eating him.
Now Mrs. Edith Mitchell was staring through the windshield of a Dodge Caravan minivan, while Ollie Jungfrau zeroed in on one of the monsters poised motionless in the road directly ahead.
“Suck this dick, bitch,” Ollie Jungfrau said.
Ollie Jungfrau dripped sweat that smelled of garlic and urine. His arms locked straight on the steering wheel.
The Dodge Caravan minivan impacted squarely with the Unstoppable Soldier that had been standing in the roadway at the Kelsey Creek Bridge.
Dodge Caravan minivans do not hold up so well against Unstoppable Soldiers with exoskeletons as tough as the exterior hull of an aircraft carrier.
It was like an Ozark watermelon throwing itself onto the cutting edge of a samurai sword.
The front end of Ollie Jungfrau’s Dodge Caravan minivan shattered. The impact of the collision with Travis Pope drove the Dodge’s motor all the way back to the front seat. Ollie Jungfrau’s right foot was severed in the crash. Travis Pope’s enormous head slapped through the Dodge Caravan’s windshield and crushed Ollie Jungfrau’s rib cage.
The crumpled Dodge Caravan grinded and scraped its way to the center of the Kelsey Creek Bridge before coming to rest against the steel trusses. Before the van stopped moving, Travis Pope had climbed in through the broken windshield.
Travis Pope, who was not very hungry, began picking disinterestedly at Ollie Jungfrau’s fleshy corpse.
In the backseat, Ah Wong Sing and Mrs. Edith Mitchell had been dusted with gems of safety glass and flecked by Ollie Jungfrau’s blood, but they were still very much alive. They were also trapped inside a crumpled Dodge Caravan minivan.
Ah Wong Sing attempted to open the side door, but it would not move. The frame of Ollie Jungfrau’s Dodge Caravan minivan had twisted inward on itself, so nothing would open.
Mrs. Edith Mitchell covered her face with her hands.
The Unstoppable Soldier that hatched out from Travis Pope sat up front, watching the two frightened humans in back while he chewed and chewed at Ollie Jungfrau.
Kelsey Creek Bridge is a good spot for walleye fishing.
The vice president of the United States of America once caught an eleven-pound walleye in the Allegheny Reservoir in Pennsylvania.
One female walleye can lay 500,000 eggs during a spawn.
Travis Pope made shit all over the front seats. Then Travis Pope climbed out through the van’s shattered windshield and scampered off into the Iowa night, sniffing the air, looking for Eileen Pope.
The vice president of the United States of America was asleep. He dozed off after receiving a blow job. Blow jobs always made the vice president drowsy. The vice president of the United States of America was scheduled to fly to Germany early the following morning, to visit in the afternoon with American soldiers who had been wounded in Afghanistan.
The vice president’s wife, who has no formal title, was having a glass of Scotch whisky.
And at that exact moment, Wiggles, Mrs. Edith Mitchell’s wayward blue Maine coon cat, came back home looking for food.
CONCERNING THE BISON, AND FREE WILL
LATER, AFTER ROBBY and I left Eden, I came to a sudden realization about history.
Here is what I concluded:
All this time, I have been devoting too much thought to the guys who painted the bison on the wall of the cave, and too little attention to the bison itself.
I mean, the bison is the important member of the team, isn’t he?
But once t
he historians put the thing on the wall, it was almost as though every bison for all eternity became doomed to face the hunter’s interminable slaughter.
We killed this big hairy thing and this big hairy thing. And that was our day. You know what I mean.
I began to consider the fact that maybe history is actually the great destroyer of free will. After all, if what we blindly believe about history is true—the old cliché admonishing us to learn how not to repeat the same shit over and over again—then why do the same shitty things keep happening and happening and happening?
I felt guilty for ever having written anything at all about me, about Robby or Shann, Johnny McKeon, Pastor Roland Duff, Unstoppable Corn, Saint Kazimierz, Krzys Szczerba, Contained MI Plague Strain 412E, Andrzej Szczerba, Herman Weinbach, a talking European starling named Baby, Felek Szczerba, Phoebe Hildebrandt, Eva Nightingale, my brother, Eric, and two prostitutes named Tiffany and Rhonda, whom we met on the third-floor balcony at a hotel in Nashville, Tennessee.
Each of us became a bison on the wall of my own cave.
Paavi Seppanen.
Julio Arguelles.
Everyone on every road that crossed beneath the point of my pen was always going to do the same things over and over and over.
I was confused.
How could I be in love with a girl and a boy, at the same time?
I was trapped forever.
You know what I mean.
POPULATION EXPLOSION
WELCOME TO EDEN. Please secure the hatch upon entry.
The repeating message finally stopped.
Whoever had joined Robby and me in Eden closed the hatch after they came inside.
But it was no six-foot-tall praying mantis army of spike-armed killers, nor was it some crazed hermit McKeon Industries Unstoppable Scientist. Our new arrivals in Eden were Shann Collins, her stepfather, Johnny McKeon, and her mother, Wendy McKeon.
Johnny McKeon was carrying the biggest handgun I had ever seen.
Johnny McKeon’s Smith & Wesson .500 magnum was made in Massachusetts. A bullet fired from the pistol travels at nearly two thousand feet per second.
