I always use the word hell instead of Hamburglar. It confuses most people.
“Into the wasteland,” he says.
He won’t explain any more than that.
Pete and I aren’t the only people that are being taken away. In the back of the van, there are three more men. All of them with the same deformity as I, only they are in even worse condition. There is a short dark-skinned man with a third arm and two extra pairs of legs. Another man has at least seven fully grown extra arms and a few smaller ones budding on his torso. The third man is about my age. He wears a white suit, black gloves, and has a shaved head. He doesn’t seem to have any extra limbs.
Nobody says anything until the van begins to move, then Pete says, “What’s going on? Where are they taking us?”
“They’re getting rid of us,” the short man tells him. “They’re going to drop us off in the middle of the wasteland and leave us for the wolves.”
“They’re not even going to do that,” says the man with too many arms. “They’re just going to take us out and shoot us.”
The man in the white suit says nothing, but he watches the rest of us, examining us one at a time.
“How did this happen?” Pete begins to panic. When he panics, he talks a lot. “Why did this happen to all of us? I thought I was the only one with this condition. I thought I was becoming a freak. At first, it was just a lump. Then it kept growing and growing. Then it formed toes and a foot. I thought I was going crazy.”
“It’s got to be some kind of experimental hormone in the food,” I tell him. “That’s why they need to keep it a secret and take us out of town. There are probably a lot more people who have had the same deformities.”
“A lot more,” says the man in the white suit, breaking his silence. “Hundreds.”
The rest of us look at him, but he doesn’t say anything else.
There aren’t any windows in the back of the van, but through the front windshield I can see the large city gates ahead of us. I’ve never seen the McDonaldland exit before. It’s always been hidden. It is in a walled area behind Fry Guy headquarters. You have to go through five different security gates in order to reach it.
We stop in a parking lot in front of the gate. The lot is filled with several types of automobiles I have never seen before. The vehicles are not yellow or red, they are black with razor sharp spikes on the roof and sides. And they are armed to the teeth with machine guns, flame throwers, and harpoon guns.
When the gate opens, one of the armed vehicles leads us into the wasteland. Another armed vehicle follows. In the front seat of the van, my brother looks back at me. His face is serious, almost angry with me.
Dawn breaks.
The road outside of McDonaldland is not yellow. It is black and crumbling. As far as the eye can see, the wasteland doesn’t appear to be much of a wasteland. It is a lush forest. I have never seen so much green in all my life. It is not the miserable ruins they had made it out to be. It is the most beautiful scenery I have ever seen in my life.
As we are escorted through the badlands, I move up to the chain-linked screen that divides the front seat with the back of the van so that I can speak to my brother.
“What exactly are you going to do with us?” I ask him.
He looks at me but he doesn’t respond.
“Are you going to leave us in the middle of the wasteland to fend for ourselves?”
He says nothing, straightening out his mustache with a little comb.
“Are you going to execute us?”
He doesn’t speak.
“Tell me something,” I say. “Anything.”
He doesn’t say a word until he is finished with his mustache.
“You’re getting a new job,” he says. “Outside of the city.”
“How much does it pay?” I ask, trying to crack a joke.
“It doesn’t pay anything,” he says.
“That sucks,” I say.
“You’ve been drafted into a secret army. Outside of receiving supplies, this army has no connection with McDonaldland civilization. You will never be able to return. After this trip, you will never see me again.”
“Can I refuse?”
“Yes,” he says, “but it would mean your death.”
“Then I guess I’ll take the job.”
He doesn’t like my lighthearted tone of voice, but I guess I would feel the same way if I were him. It can’t be easy when your asshole fascist Fry Guy job description calls for you to banish your brother into the wasteland, and your brother decides not to take your final moments together very seriously.
But my brother believes that everything should be taken very seriously all the time. There is no room for goofing around in his world. He’s just like my dad. Every year, during McDonaldmas, my grandpa and I used to make fun of them from the other side of the room. It was supposed to be a holiday of fun and joy, but the two of them would always take it so seriously. The golden arches at the top of the red plastic tree had to be centered just perfectly. The Ronald McDonald nativity diorama had to be created just right. Even though they were trying to be such serious people, my grandpa and I thought they were completely ridiculous.
“So, what will I be doing in this secret army?” I ask my brother.
He gives me a very serious look. It is the same serious look he would use when decorating the McDonaldmas tree when he was a little kid.
“Hunting wolves, mostly,” he tells me.
After a couple of miles down the road, I begin to understand why they call it a wasteland. Although the forests are lovely, the ruins out here are not. We pass small deserted towns that resemble junkyards. The buildings are rotten, burned down, and collapsed. The rusted skeletons of cars line the road. The bones of animals, perhaps human, dangle from the trees.
“Does anyone live out here?” I ask my brother.
He says, “I don’t know. But I can tell you that besides those from McDonaldland, there hasn’t been a living soul in this area of the world for over a hundred years.”
Several more miles of wasteland and then we hit a dirt road. It isn’t really a dirt road, but the old road has crumbled into such disrepair that it has basically become dirt. It is slow moving from here out. The solar powered cars normally move at sixty miles per hour max. Now they are moving at about twenty.
“How much longer?”
“Get back in your seat,” he tells me. “This is the most dangerous part of the drive.”
As soon as he says that, both front tires of the van pop. The vehicle comes to a stop.
“No, no,” says the red Fry Guy in the driver seat. “Not here. Anywhere but here.”
I don’t sit back in my seat.
“What’s wrong with here?” I ask.
“Just get back,” Guy says.
The armed vehicle in the front of the caravan doesn’t stop for us. It keeps driving.
“Where do they think they’re going?” Guy says.
“They’re ditching us!” says the sergeant. “Those fuckers!”
The black vehicle becomes smaller and smaller in the distance. Then we see a dark cloud rise from the horizon beyond the vehicle.
“Shit,” Guy says, as he sees the black cloud.
“What?” I ask him.
It is too far away to see exactly what is going on, but the vehicle fires its machine guns for one short burst before it is flipped over backwards.
“Shit, shit,” Guy says again.
“What?” I say again.
Then I see it, in the distance. The black cloud is some kind of enormous beast. It comes around the side of the car, now flipped onto its back. The thing looks like a big black dog, but it’s huge, bigger than a McDonaldland city bus. It raises its muzzle into the air and howls. Then it bites through the passenger side of the armed vehicle, its teeth tearing through the metal as easily as you could through a burger still in its wrapper. It’s too far away to hear the man’s screams as he is bitten in half and chewed in the giant wolf’s
jaws along with most of the passenger side door.
Then we hear the howls coming from the forest. Maybe a dozen of them, from behind us, in front of us, on all sides. They close in on us within seconds.
Growling and snarling sounds race up behind us. With no windows back here we can’t see it coming. We hear shouting and machine gun fire from the armed vehicle behind us, then we hear the driver slamming on the gas and the tires peeling out.
The peeling out sound continues, but the car doesn’t sound like it’s going anywhere. The wheels squeal in higher and higher pitches, but the growls in that direction are louder still. Then we hear the squealing tires move forward, one inch at a time, along the side of the van.
Once the vehicle moves up far enough so that we can see it through the front windshield, we see dust and smoke pouring out from beneath the tires. Then, as the back of the car comes into view, we notice what is wrong. Something is attached to the car. My first thought is that a tree trunk had fallen on the back of the vehicle, but once I see the eye on the side, I realize that it’s not a tree.
We can only see part of its head, but it is an enormous blonde wolf with the vehicle’s trunk in its jaws. Its muzzle snarls and tugs at the vehicle, like a dog who won’t let go of her chew toy. The vehicle is able to pull ahead a few inches, but the wolf pulls it back, then it drives a few inches farther, then the wolf pulls it back.
The man standing through the roof of the vehicle at the machine gun is missing his head and part of his shoulders, blood gushes out of what was once his neck. The yellow Fry Guy in the passenger seat is trying to remove the body so that he can take his place at the gun.
“Drive,” Guy says to the sergeant.
The sergeant can’t take his eyes off of the other vehicle.
“Drive,” Guy says, smacking him out of it.
The sergeant yells back at his superior, “We don’t have any fucking wheels!”
“I said drive,” Guy said, “so drive.”
Once the yellow Fry Guy in the vehicle next to us gets his hand on the machine gun, he fires a few rounds into the beast’s nose. The wolf barks a whimper and releases the vehicle from its mouth. Once freed, the car shoots forward at full speed. The driver quickly loses control, and swerves off the road, crashing head-on into a tree.
The blonde wolf wiggles off its bee sting of a wound and charges the vehicle. It snatches up the Fry Guy sticking out of the roof by his uniform. We see the man dangling in the wolf’s mouth, screaming and flailing his arms, as the creature runs across our path to the other side of the road, disappearing into the woods.
Another wolf with reddish-brown fur emerges from the forest and pounces onto the armed vehicle. The driver inside screams in the direction of my brother as the weight of the creature crushes the roof of his vehicle, trapping him inside.
The sergeant finally hits the gas and the van moves forward, though very slowly on the flat tires. It seems like a hopeless endeavor, but I would probably do the same thing.
In the distance, the black wolf hears the van moving and turns away from the overturned vehicle. It charges us. Running down the road with its powerful legs, the beast moves twice as fast as any vehicle in McDonaldland. The closer it comes, the more enormous I realize it is. This one is even larger than the blonde wolf. Perhaps twice its size.
The creature doesn’t stop running when it reaches us, it lowers its forehead and rams its face into the front of the van. I get a good look into its golden yellow eyes as it flips the vehicle over with its muzzle.
I tumble over Pete and would have slammed my head hard into the door if the man with nine arms wasn’t there to catch me. The van on its side, all the mutants in the back are piled together. I look into the front seat to see my brother trying to get out of his seatbelt. The red Fry Guy is struggling to climb out of the van, but his only way out is through the driver’s side window that is now above him.
The enormous paws of the beast walk past the front windshield. Beyond, there are two more wolves gathering, all of them biting and scratching at the smashed vehicle on the side of the road. The man inside is still alive, and still screaming for help.
“Why are there so many of them?” the sergeant yells at my brother. “There’s not supposed to be so many of them.”
My brother just wants the sergeant to get off his mustache.
I can’t see it, but I can hear the wolf peering down at us from above. Its growls are so loud that it feels like the entire van is inside the beast’s mouth.
The sergeant gets his door open and tries to climb out, but once he turns he sees something that makes him duck back inside.
“Look out,” he says, closing his eyes and bracing himself for another impact.
The van is hit again, but it doesn’t roll over. It’s just pushed into a spin across the road. Pete screams in a girlish voice.
“What do we do?” I ask my brother.
He doesn’t say anything.
“We can’t just hide in here,” I tell him. “We have to get out and run. If we scatter maybe some of us will make it.”
My brother tries to adjust his position, squeezing as much of his large frame under the dashboard as he can fit.
“If we go out there we’re dead,” he says. “None of us would make it.”
The sergeant doesn’t even have the chance to scream as teeth tear through the metal, bite into him, and rip him out of the vehicle. Looking through the windshield, we see the black wolf thrash him just once to break his neck. Then it lies down, holding the corpse down with its two front paws, as it gnaws on his body like a small doggy biscuit.
The other wolves have finally torn the armed vehicle into halves, and fat brown wolf was able to beat the others to the morsel of food inside. Once they’ve realized they’re not getting any, the other two wolves move on to our van.
We hear them barking and snapping at each other as they claw at the van, fighting over which one gets the meat. The hole created on the driver’s side of the vehicle is where they begin. A brown wolf with one eye, much smaller than the black wolf, sees my brother down in the hole. It digs its snout inside, sniffing at my brother’s blue suit.
Guy doesn’t scream. He just tries to flatten his body out so that it can’t reach him. Then the wolf begins to lick. Its massive tongue is a wet bed of pink flesh, and fills almost the entire cab. It laps at the seats like it’s drinking from a water bowl. The tip of the tongue squishes into Guy’s chest, but the creature cannot lick him out. His blue uniform becomes soaked with slobber.
The other wolf digs through the top of the van. I see its reddish-brown fur and monstrous face looking down at me as it opens up the vehicle. The creature’s head is as big as the van itself. Its hot breath pours onto me. It salivates when it sees us inside, drooling and baring its fangs. There’s nothing protecting us now. We’re just a bowl of dog food to it.
Like bobbing for apples, the red-furred wolf sticks its head in and catches the man with nine arms. He punches it with all of his fists at once as it takes him out of the van.
“Run,” says the man in the white suit.
We don’t question him. While the wolf has the nine-armed man in its mouth, we make a break for it. I follow the man out of the van, helping Pete get his fat ass through the hole the wolf created so that he doesn’t cut himself on the jagged edges.
I look up at the reddish-brown wolf as it slurps down the mutant man in one bite. He keeps thrashing with all of his limbs as he goes down its throat.
The other wolf sees us running into the woods. It gives up on trying to get to Guy and chases after us. The black wolf comes after us as well, leaping over the van.
Once we’re in the forest, the wolves have difficulty running as fast as they can, because they have to weave around trees.
“Go for the dense region,” says the white suited man. “Running in the direction of a cluster of trees.”
Pete and the short man with three pairs of legs cannot move very fast. All of their extra lim
bs make it difficult to move.
The black wolf quickly catches up to the short man and bites into him. Within seconds, he’s inside of the creature’s mouth and chewed to death by teeth larger than his arms.
Once we reach the dense part of the forest, the wolves aren’t able to follow. They are just too big to get through the trees. Pete makes it to safety last, but he’s so exhausted that he collapses the second he gets through the first row of trees. He’s too close to the perimeter.
A brown wolf charges forward and rams its head through the trees to get at Pete. But the trees are too close together. It can’t get its shoulders through. Pete rolls out of the way and comes over to us. Now the brown wolf’s head is stuck. It whimpers and struggles to pull itself free.
The black wolf stares at us. It is not a stare of hunger, but a different kind of stare. As though it wants to play with us in a violent, cruel kind of way before killing us. It circles the perimeter of the trees, looking for a way in.
“What are they?” Pete asks us, kneeling on the ground to catch his breath.
“Our women,” says the man in the white suit.
“Huh?” Pete says.
“When we banish them from our city, they continue to grow and become more wolf-like,” he says. “That is what they eventually become.”
The man in the white suit points at the black wolf. It’s difficult to think that the enormous creature was once a woman. Its legs and arms do kind of resemble human limbs. I can see large mounds on the wolf’s chest which could have once been human breasts. But I think it’s the eyes that are the most familiar. Although they are yellow and look completely animal-like, there’s something behind the eyes that seems human to me. I sense emotions that only a human could feel.
In the distance, a pack of giant wolves surround the van. Guy is still trapped inside. He’s not screaming, but I know he’s not yet dead. They bite and claw at the vehicle, flipping it over and tossing it around the street, sticking their tongues and paws into the hole to get at him.
Warrior Wolf Women of the Wasteland Page 4
