“I’m sorry.” Molly composes herself and tries to be cordial. She changes the subject.
“Are you seeing anyone?” she asks me, with a condescending false smile.
“No,” I say.
“I think a woman is what you really need. Somebody who can clean you up and set you on the right path. If you had a wife and maybe some kids you would know the importance of getting a good job and living in a good neighborhood.”
Guy gives her a look and she backs off.
“She has a point, Daniel,” Guy says, rubbing special sauce from his mustache. “Meeting Molly was the best thing that ever happened to me. You should find a woman to settle down with.”
I shrug. “I’m just not interested in any women around here.”
He shakes his head. “It isn’t because of Nova?”
I take a big bite of apple pie.
“I see it is,” Guy says. “It’s been years. You should have moved on by now.”
“She was the only girl I’ve ever been attracted to,” I say.
“She was your girlfriend when you were a teenager,” he says. “You’re nearly thirty now.”
“We were still dating in our early twenties,” I said. “I probably would have married her by now.”
“You’ve got to get over that,” he says. “She’s gone. She’s never coming back.”
I finish my food as quickly as possible and stand up.
“I think I better go,” I say. “I’m already two hours late for my job.”
November, who went by Nova for short, was the daughter of the Chief of the Fry Guys. He’s one of the main reasons I hate the Fry Guys so much. He’s the man who took Nova away from me.
In school, teenagers are usually plump. I’m not really attracted to plump girls, even though that is the desired figure of most McDonaldlandians. When I met November, she was as thin as me. She liked sports and exercise. She didn’t like eating greasy food. We liked the way we looked.
It wasn’t long before we became good friends. I would call her my Novey, as a pet name. She thought it was cute. She didn’t like making things, as I did, but she liked doing things, which I decided I liked, too. She liked to climb trees, throw rocks at the nu-cows, steal burgers from fat men who didn’t have the energy to chase after us, and look under the dresses of veiled mothers to see their hairy legs. She had less interest in maturity than I did, though that might have been because she was two years younger. She liked getting into trouble.
Her father didn’t like her behavior. With his busy job and without a mother to keep her in line, she didn’t have anybody to discipline her when she was doing things she wasn’t allowed to do. So she did whatever she pleased.
When she had sex illegally, her father was forced to kick her out of town. She didn’t have sex with me. Although we were very close, we never were very intimate. Everyone thought she was my girlfriend, we even kissed a few times to see what it would feel like, and we showed each other our naked bodies out of curiosity, but we didn’t have that kind of relationship. I loved my Novey. I’m not sure, but I think she might have loved me back.
After her twenty-first birthday, on her way to work in the apple orchard, November was raped at gunpoint by a man in a yellow mask. Rape is very common in McDonaldland. Men are able to masturbate, so most men are able to sexually relieve themselves without the need for sex with women. But there are some men who need more than that. They don’t care if it is against the law. They don’t care about the women, or what it does to them.
If a woman is raped she is considered guilty of having illegal sex, even though it was against her will. Some women do not have enough sexual stimulation for any changes to occur. These lucky few only have to keep silent about the sexual assault and nothing will happen to them. But the majority of the women who are raped are banished from McDonaldland and sent into the wasteland. This is what happened to November. The man who raped her got away, and she was the one to be punished for his crime.
It is believed that the wolves outside the walls are cannibals. If a woman is not developed enough as a predator she will be hunted down and eaten by the more wolf-like women. It is believed that none of the rape victims survive long in the wasteland. After only having sex once, they are hardly wolves at all. Just normal girls with slightly sharper teeth and slightly yellowed eyes.
Everyone told me that there was no way Nova would survive out there. She has to be dead. But I know November. She’s a survivor. If it is survival of the fittest out there, I bet she found a hole to hide in and then masturbated over and over again day and night until she transformed into the biggest, toughest wolf in the wasteland.
Sometimes, when I hear the howls outside the walls, I like to think one of those wolves is her, causing trouble in the wild.
Guy the Fry Guy gives me a ride to work in his red Fry Guy McCar, that is shaped like a red package of fries with a yellow “M” on top. Cars used to be fueled by something called gasoline, but McCars are solar-powered. Almost everything in McDonaldland is solar powered.
I don’t speak to him during the trip, but he speaks to me.
“If dad were still alive he’d have been pretty disappointed in you,” he says.
“He was always disappointed in me,” I say.
“That’s because you reminded him of his dad,” he says. “Grandpa didn’t know how to fit in. He was a silly old fool. He committed crimes just for the sake of committing them. If he wasn’t so insistent on going against the flow he wouldn’t have been such a miserable man. I don’t want to see you going down that same path.”
I definitely want to go down that path.
“Yeah, I hear you,” I tell him. “I’ll try to get my act together.”
Then we get to my work. A faded yellow building with no windows and only a couple doors.
“I hope you do,” he says. “Now I want you to come visit me on a weekly basis, so that my children come to think of you as a normal uncle. Sundays would be best. Perhaps we can even attend church together.
“I’m not allowed in your church,” I tell him. “I don’t live in your neighborhood.”
“If you arrive with me you will be let in,” he says. “Just make sure to look your best.”
“I’ll see if I can get out of work,” I tell him.
I have no intention of seeing if I can get out of work.
“It’s important,” Guy says.
I nod at him and get out of the car quickly before he makes me promise to meet him before church this Sunday. But, as I’m trying to get out as quickly as possible, one of my extra arms breaks free of its binding and slips out of my shirt.
He’s looking right at me as I pull it back into my uniform. He doesn’t say anything, just stares at me with a surprised face.
“See you later,” I say, and walk away, pretending nothing happened.
My dad died when he fell into a giant fryilator. He was deep fried alive in a vat of boiling oil. Following in the old man’s footsteps, I now work in the exact same factory that he worked at, above the exact same fryilator that he was killed in.
Guy forgot to give me the note of excuse, even though it was the only reason I let him convince me to go back to his house with him (he always does that kind of stuff to me), so when I arrive to work my boss, Landon, is more pissed than I have ever seen him.
“You know, I could get you arrested for ditching work like this,” Landon says to me, wearing his tiny little yellow manager hat. “Do you know how many fries are consumed each day? Do you know what would happen if production went down by just ten percent?”
I’m not sure if it is a rhetorical question.
“I’d have to announce a fry shortage alert,” he says to me. “And that’s going to freak the Hamburglar out of everybody.”
I stare at him for a minute, then say, “Sorry,” and walk to my work station.
“Sorry?” Landon says. “Sorry?”
I get back to work.
“Get back to work!” he yells at
me, even though I have already gotten back to work, and then goes to his office.
My job is to work the potato-chopping machine. I basically just dump boxes of potatoes into a machine that washes them, peels them, and then cuts them into fries. All I have to do is carry boxes around and push buttons on a machine.
I’m not the only one who works this machine. It is usually a two-man job. I work with a fat guy named Pete. Well, calling Pete fat doesn’t really cut it, because pretty much everyone in McDonaldland is fat. But Pete is special. He is the fattest guy I know. It’s because he eats a lot of salads, which are actually more fattening than Big Macs, and McGriddles, which are the most fattening thing on the McDonald’s menu.
When I see Pete, he is sweating out of every pore in his body. I wasn’t here, so he had to do the job of two people. Because Pete is so out of shape and so hopelessly lazy, he’s used to me doing most of the work for him. I do the work of two people and he just tries to get out of my way. But Pete would have trouble doing the job of just one person, let alone two, so he is struggling to keep up with the machine.
When he sees me, he nearly collapses with exhaustion and relief.
“Thank Ronald you’re here,” he says, his voice cracking between rapid breaths. “I thought I was going to die.”
“Sorry about that,” I say.
Wiping wet hair out of his eyes, he says, “I don’t care. Just take over for me.”
I take over for him.
As I work, Pete collapses onto a bag of potatoes and gasps for breath.
“Never do that to me again,” he says. “I nearly had a heart attack. And it didn’t help to have Landon yelling at me the whole time.”
“Landon’s an asshole,” I say.
“Of course he is,” he says, wheezing, “but there’s no need to swear.”
I see Pete more than anyone else these days, because we work so closely together. But Pete is too much of a goody-goody for me to call him a friend. He’s too patriotic, too conservative. Still, he’s not a bad guy. Better than people like Landon or my brother.
While lounging on the potato pile, Pete pulls a cheeseburger out of his pocket. He takes a bite of the burger and blows his nose into the wrapper.
Pete doesn’t even stand up for the next hour as I do both of our jobs. Usually, he at least pretends to be working. Landon must have really pushed him hard while I was gone.
After he gets back up, I notice something strange about Pete. Something is moving inside of his pants. At first, I thought it was just an erection. Since sex is illegal, a lot of guys get erections at inconvenient times. And with Pete being such a conservative religious man, I can see him avoiding masturbation as much as possible. But it isn’t an erection, unless he has a penis the size of an elephant’s trunk.
The bulge starts at his waist and goes all the way down his left pant leg ending a little past his knee. Once I see the bulge moving, I know exactly what it is. He’s got the same deformity as I have. He has an extra limb.
While Pete pretends to work, the appendage kicks and twitches in his pants. He tries to hold it still, but it thrashes around, probably because he overexerted himself while moving so many potatoes double-time.
After twenty minutes of it, the thrashing only gets worse. I can’t ignore it anymore. I have to do something about it.
“Come with me,” I say quietly behind his shoulder.
He looks at me like I’m mad. “What?”
I look down at his squirming pants, then look him in the eyes.
“I can help you,” I say.
He still pretends that he doesn’t know what I’m talking about.
I lean in closer and whisper, “You have to restrain it or else somebody is going to notice.”
He reluctantly gives in and follows me into the corner, behind a mountain of potato crates. I untie a couple of potato bags and remove the twine.
“Pull down your pants,” I say.
“But neither of us are working the machine…” he says.
I notice that he is sweating again.
“Then we have to hurry,” I say.
When he pulls down his pants, I see a long skinny leg growing out of his crotch, between his dick and the plump of his upper thigh. It is not fully developed yet. It is the leg of a ten-year-old boy.
Pulling the twine around both legs, I realize that I underestimated the thickness of Pete’s thighs. I have to knot two pieces of twine together for it to be long enough to tie down the new limb.
I get two more pieces of twine and tie the ankle of the new leg to Pete’s knee. The new limb is still twitching.
“It’s not enough,” Pete says.
I think for a minute.
“If we had a bandage we’d be able to wrap it up against your leg, encasing it like a mummy. That’s the only way we’ll be able to restrain it completely.”
“What’s a mummy?”
“Corpses that were encased in bandages,” I say.
“Oh,” he says.
“If we can rip some cloth into strips that will probably work fine.”
Before we can put my plan into action, Landon finds us behind the crates. He sees Pete with his pants down. At first, he thinks some kind of homosexual activity is going on.
Although homosexual activity is considered immoral in the McDonaldland religion, it is not illegal, so it is not uncommon for men to have sex with other men to relieve their sexual needs. However, this kind of activity is definitely not allowed in the workplace. It is an arrest-worthy offence.
Then Landon sees the extra leg I’m holding against Pete’s thigh.
“What in the Hamburglar?” Landon says, staring at the extra leg.
Pete pulls up his pants as quickly as he can. I separate myself from him.
“We were just getting back to work,” I tell Landon.
Landon is too shocked to say anything. He just goes back to his office and closes the door.
Back at the machine, I move potato bags as quickly as I can.
“Shit, Daniel!” Pete says to me.
“I know,” I say.
“He saw it,” he says. “I’m dead. He’s going to tell the Fry Guys for sure.”
I now see that Pete’s obedience has always been motivated by fear, rather than conviction. If he were truly loyal to The Blessed McDonald’s Corporation he would have reported his deformity to the Fry Guys at the first sign of his condition.
“Don’t worry about it,” I tell him. “Landon can’t afford to turn in his workers. If he doesn’t meet his quota it will be his ass on the fire. He’s not the type to follow the rules at the expense of his own hide.”
This calms Pete down a little bit. Unfortunately, Landon knows that Pete is next to worthless at his job. If he had the fat man arrested he knows that I could do the job for both of us and meet his quota every day until a replacement was found. But, at the same time, Landon does not like the idea of drawing attention to himself.
“Just work as hard as you can,” I tell Pete. “If you show him that you’re a useful worker he’ll probably just pretend he never saw anything.”
“Probably?” he says.
“It’s the best assurance I can give you.”
After the shift ends, Pete is able to relax.
“You were right,” he says.
I shake my head.
“If Landon was to turn you in it wouldn’t have been during the shift,” I say. “He has to meet his quota, remember?”
That nervous look comes back on Pete’s face.
“Then when would he call them?”
“If he planned to today, he would have done it about ten minutes ago so that the Fry Guys wouldn’t get you until your shift was over. He would have told them to wait for you in the parking lot.”
“What?” he says, almost ready to cry.
“Don’t worry about it,” I say. “I really don’t think he would risk drawing attention to himself. Tomorrow we’ll go into his office and tell him that if he reports your deformi
ty, we will report him for having failed to report you the instant he witnessed your deformity.”
In McDonaldland, failing to report a crime is the same as committing the crime. However, there is not a written law against deformities, so I’m not sure if that would work in this case. Regardless, the Fry Guys would probably arrest Landon as well, because nobody is supposed to know that these deformities exist.
“Would that really work?” he asks.
“Of course it will work. Landon’s an idiot.”
That made Pete feel a lot better. He takes a deep breath and his stress begins to vanish.
When we leave the building, five Fry Guys are coming toward us. One in red, one in blue, and three in yellow. I’m as surprised as Pete is to see them. Once they reach us, Pete panics. He pulls down his pants and grabs his extra limb.
“It’s just one leg,” he cries. “You can cut it off. Nobody will ever know.”
The yellow Fry Guys go for him and take him by the arms.
“Bring him to the truck,” the blue Fry Guy says.
It’s my brother.
“There’s just more and more of them every day,” says the red Fry Guy. The sergeant.
Pete looks at me.
“You said Landon wouldn’t turn me in,” Pete cries.
“He didn’t,” I say. “You just turned yourself in.”
My brother points at me and the sergeant lifts my shirt. The red Fry Guy turns me around and shows my brother the two limbs strapped to my back.
When they turn me back around, I tell Pete, “They were here for me.”
My brother just stares me in the eyes, unapologetically. He has a cold expression on his face, the same one he always has when he’s ashamed of me.
“It’s for the best,” he says.
He’s full of shit.
They bring us to the red windowless Fry Guy McVan. Whenever they take people away for good, this is the type of van they use.
After they put Pete into the van, I say to my brother, “Where the hell are you taking us?”
Warrior Wolf Women of the Wasteland Page 3
