The Crawling Abattoir

by Martin Mundt

  Yours truly,

  Rex

  August 20

  Dear Editor, Weekly Global Spectator,

  Why doesn’t anyone ever answer my letters? I feel as if I am writing into the void. What is it about me that people feel compelled to avoid?

  Excuse me for unloading my problems on you. You are not my postman, or the counterman at the donut shop. It will not happen again.

  I am the person with the celebrity corpse on the couch in my living room. I have written before, but have been met only with the silence of the grave.

  By the way, what about that word “grave”? It is so somber, so very inappropriate. Perhaps you could begin referring to it in your fine publication as “the Happy Hole”? Or the “menage a trough”? Or how about the “Zoom-Zoom Tomb”? Well, you are the professionals. You can be more creative than I. Your publication is influential, and many people in mobile homes and transient hotels and grocery check-out lines across the nation look to you for leadership. Thanks for listening. The postman and the counterman at the donut shop only avoid me when I try to talk to them.

  But I digress.

  I must urge you to answer my letters. Entropy is becoming a problem on this end. Duct tape, glue, staples, saran wrap. All of these have become mere stopgaps, and I fear the gaps are gaining on me. My celebrity corpse now has more holes than my imagination knows how to fill.

  True, entropy can have its sensual side. Did you realize that lingerie does not age well underground? Satin panties bear up much better than, say, silk or cotton, in my experience. It is like a strip-tease, but only if one is prepared to be very patient.

  But, again, I digress.

  Please answer my letters. I have included my return address this time, since speed is of the essence.

  Yours in haste,

  Rex (my real name after all)

  PS Doctor Dixie never printed my letter, or her answer to it. Did she receive it?

  August 25

  Dear Editor, Weekly Global Spectator,

  I am just dropping you a note to inform you that we may have to put our celebrity corpse negotiations on hold indefinitely.

  There seems to be a large gathering of police around my house. I fear the worst.

  I have placed a lampshade on my love’s head and surrounded her with bric-a-brac and doilies as camouflage, but I have watched Cops too many times to hope that my ruse will prove successful.

  I should have thought of a plausible excuse for the corpses, the shovels, the stolen backhoe in the backyard, and the used coffins before this, but it just never seemed necessary.

  Ah, well, dig in haste, invent at leisure.

  Yours truly,

  Rex

  September 18

  Dear Subscription Dept., Refrigeration Technology Monthly,

  Please cancel my subscription. Thank you.

  Yours truly,

  Rex

  September 19

  Dear Editor, Weekly Global Spectator,

  May I interest you in the in-depth story of a grave-robbing trial? First-hand?

  My lawyer thinks that writing you is a first-rate idea. He thinks a series of articles by me about grave-robbing is just the ticket to keep me busy. “Out of my damned hair,” as he puts it with such well-feigned irritation.

  I will call the series “From the Grave, by Rex.”

  What do you think? I, personally, feel afflicted with a nearly fatal anticipation.

  Also, could you return my correspondence of the past few months? My lawyer assures me that those letters will help my defense immensely. We are in complete agreement that I am not insane, but that certain of my actions, if presented in the proper light, might give the appearance of insanity, and this can do nothing but help my insanity defense. I have a fine lawyer. He devised this defense almost immediately upon meeting me.

  I must sign off now. I can see that my Thorazine syringe is on its way. I will write again the very next time I am allowed the use of my hands.

  Yours truly,

  Rex

  PS It seems the syringe will be delayed a bit. The orderlies have been distracted by a growling fellow who is convinced he is a tiger.

  This hospital is pleasant. Most of my needs are cared for. My room is cramped, but that is due mostly to the straitjacket. There is no couch, and there is no living room, and worst of all there is no sweet and lovely corpse in white gloves and pearls waiting for me when my shift is over, and to top it off I fear my paramedical career is flatlined. It is lonely with only the living around, and no one to buy mothballs and air freshener for. No one to dust. No one to zip up next to all snuggly in the body bag playing forks. I say forks rather than the more middle-class, conventional spoons, because, truth be told, my love is a bit bony.

  But my lawyer swears the doctors here will help me, and I am giddy with anticipation. The cemeteries are changing colors this time of year. I wonder which doctor will keep lookout, and which will help me dig?

  Road Rage

  hit the Edens on-ramp doing sixty. I gulped down the last of my thirty-two ounce, extra-caffeine coffee and dropped the Styrofoam cup into the slipstream outside my open window, and the cup disappeared. I drove with my right hand while I adjusted the bulletproof window back into its NBC seals with my left, and then the car was airtight, resistant to nuclear, biological and/or chemical assaults.

  Probably. The car couldn’t survive a direct nuclear strike, of course, but if a weapon got detonated on, say, the Kennedy Expressway out west, or the Dan Ryan down south, then the seals should be proof against fallout. Ditto for any bio or chem agents that might get tossed my way during the commute. Like I said: Probably. Hard to tell with after-market modifications. Sometimes the stuff worked. Sometimes it didn’t.

  I hit seventy as I passed the toll-bunker – the familiar, ten-foot-tall, flat-topped pyramid of steel and concrete and ablative armor guarding the Road. One of the dashboard lights lit up. The bunker radio-linked with my onboard computer and downloaded my daily Informed Commuter Consent Form, my updated Life Insurance paperwork, and my notarized Hazardous Activity Disclosure Form – all of which were provided by the legal kiosk at the same 7-11 where I picked up my coffee.

  My car and the bunker de-linked in less than a second, all official dithering having been satisfied – I could die now and the government would happily be blameless – and I was alone with the responsibility for my own actions.

  I shut down the outside communications port. I wouldn’t need it for the rest of the drive; in fact, leaving it open would be the equivalent to suicide. I was now fully self-contained and self-sufficient. On my own.

  “Fuck, yeah,” I said, and I smiled.

  I hit the Edens proper flying past ninety.

  The Edens Expressway had been the first to get the technology. A smart road. Thousands of sensors, computers and radio-links used to control traffic, to grab cars as if they were trolleys and manage their speed, their spacing, their routes, steering, brakes, gas mixture, everything, all in the name of safety and efficiency. Your pollution paperwork wasn’t up to snuff? Fine. The smart road would drive you to an approved repair shop. You had unpaid parking tickets? The smart road would drive you straight to a police impound lot until you paid up. People didn’t drive their cars anymore; the system drove their cars, and it all worked just fine.

  At first.

  I slid my glossy-black, chamois-skinned, state-of-the-art, ‘26 National into the right lane and floored it. Traffic was heavy, but the majority of the cars were in the two left lanes, screaming towards downtown Chicago at about 130 mph in the center lane, 145 in the far left.

  “Fuck, yeah,” I said, and I checked the four heads-up video displays superimposed on my windshield, one tuned to the forward-looking-infrared, and the other three, for the moment, fanned out to cover the rearview, the blind spots.

  The rising sun was blocked from view behind the thirty-foot-high steel-and-ceramic blast walls that lined both sides of the Road. I took off my sunglasses. The
Road would be like a shaded canyon for another hour or so, until the Sun rose above the walls.

  The National hit one hundred, its room-temperature-fusion power plant making its usual weird hissing noise, like electrical lines in the rain.

  I saw movement, high up in the sky and to my right.

  “Anti-aircraft visual. On,” I said to the computer.

  The National’s anti-aircraft laser would already be tracking it, whatever it was, in case it decided to make a threat of itself – the Road had been known to co-opt aircraft before – but I wanted to put eyeballs on whatever it was myself.

  One of the rearview displays switched views to track the aircraft. It was a traffic copter, hovering well off to the west of the Road. Traffic copters never flew directly over the Road, of course. Never. The pilots didn’t want to die; they just wanted to broadcast other people while they died.

  “Fuck, yeah,” I said. “No fools flying copters. Anti-aircraft visual off. Radio, On.”

  The radio came on, loud, tuned to the only station I ever listened to in the car: WDIE, ALL TRAFFIC, ALL THE TIME.

  “Good fuckin’ mornin’ out there to all the extreme animals in Mother’s mornin’ zoo,” screamed a woman in a deep, gravelly voice, like she had a throat and larynx cobbled together out of crushed glass, sparking electrodes, and tetanus-infected nails. “It’s 7:20 in the good fuckin’ mornin’, twenty after seven, forty in front of eight, an hour-forty coming up on the upswing of nine, and it’s already a scorchin’ eighty-four degrees out there in my extreme murderous cesspool of Chicago…” A sound-effect egg hitting a sound-effect frying pan sizzled over the speakers. “… and Mother is going to give all you drivin’ animals in the mornin’ zoo her secret routes to work this fine suicidal Monday mornin’…” A sound-effect crowd cheered, dopplering up and down.

  “Fuck, yeah,” I said. I loved Mother. Her cigar smoke nearly drifted out of the speakers along with her voice. Mother gave the best traffic anywhere up or down the dial, and her reports had saved my ass more than once.

  When Mother talked, I listened.

  The smart road had worked fine, at first, but people got bored. The system wasn’t totally integrated, since it used modified, dual-purpose cars. On the expressways, the smart road controlled the cars, but everywhere else, the drivers still drove. And so, without the need to drive on the expressways, people got bored. Most people dealt with the boredom in socially acceptable ways. They slept; they read; they sang at the top of their lungs along with the latest revival of Grand Funk Railroad.

  But, as always, there was the usual minority of people who simply could not let a good thing remain a good thing. The kind of people who had bumper stickers that read HOW’S MY DRIVING? CALL 1-800-FUCK OFF. The kind of people who used street signs for target practice. The kind of people who threw small dogs into traffic just to see them get run over.

  These people didn’t sleep, or read, or sing in their cars to relieve their boredom. They shot at things, or exploded things, or tossed electronic static-bombs into the smart road’s sensors to screw things up. They caused delays; they caused accidents; they caused trouble.

  An old Porsche, vintage Nazi-lover chic, oil-age technology, upshifted and braked in front of me, upshifted and braked, flinching from the centerlane traffic, lacking the skill or the horsepower or both to get over. I couldn’t get over either, not while riding my brakes behind the jittery Porsche. My laser rangefinder dipped and peaked like an EEG hooked up to a seizure – seven point six meters, five point three, seven point one – and on and on, until the Porsche suddenly began to blow blue smoke from its seams. Popped a hose. Blew a gasket. I didn’t know. I didn’t care.

  I just jerked the National to the right onto the shoulder, missing the crippled Porsche by less than a foot.

  I inhaled – braking, swerving, swaying against my shoulder-harness, dragging the suddenly heavy wheel back to straight against the chewed-up pavement of the shoulder, stomach going that way, hands going the other, a squeal of tires, sideslipping over old shellholes, accelerating, a burst of doublequick speed kicking me in the back, passing the Porsche, passing, blowing through its death-smoke, a rattle of oil-splotches running across my windshield and swept away by the autowipers before they could even be blown tear-shaped by the slipstream, and, to my left, a flash of driver’s face in the Porsche – but, but… I’m driving a Porsche, for God’s sake; this can’t be happening – then, fear; then, gone, all gone, the oil and smoke and Porsche and face and fear all gone, just like that, gone, done, end of the road, and ahead of me, all that mattered now, an old, unexploded canister of scatterbombs glowing active on the infrared just fifty meters away; and I knew there was a space to my left – I just felt it – empty, asking to be filled, and I snapturned the National back to the left, off the shoulder, just missing the scatterbombs, slotting myself between a Toyota TurboMax and an Infiniti Interceptor, spray-painting myself seamless back into the traffic-stream, and there was an explosion from behind me, shivers running through the floorboards like the Braille of a scream, and a fireball in the rearviews, and another explosion, secondary explosions, fireball, fireball, and black smoke as the Porsche got rear-ended at a hundred miles per, and all of it, everything, in one motion, and I floored the National, merging into the fast lane like I’d wanted to do in the first place – I exhaled.

  Sociologists analyzed the dog-tossing anticommuters and decided that they were people with emotional, psychological, learning-attention-deficit, socialization, gambling, family-dysfunctional, sexual-addiction and substance-abuse problems. They were people who couldn’t be trusted, who couldn’t be reasoned with, and who certainly couldn’t be left unsupervised.

  The sociologists created an acronym for these people: SHURPITAJ. Serious, hard-core, unrepentant, recidivist, pain-in-the-ass jerks.

  Other people called them other names, of course, and then the other people got their own guns to protect themselves, and still other people got their own explosives, and still more other people got their own electronic static-bombs, and zip-pistols, and opti-dazzlers, and virus inflictors, and expanding butterfly exhaust cloggers, and hypno-stunners, and bangalore confusers, and electro-caltrops, and micro-motile system-crashers, and free-floating autonomous minigun jet-flitters, and… and the smart road just wasn’t working very well at all. Not at all. The smart road was simply getting overwhelmed by stupidity.

  “All traffic all the time, every minute on the minute.” The radio waves trembled with Mother’s voice. “It’s nuts to butts on the Kennedy all the way into… wait a second… Accident Alert!” Sound-effect crash. Sound-effect siren. Sound-effect screams. “There’s a twenty-car pileup at Willow Road on the inbound Edens.”

  I glanced at the Willow Road flames fast-disappearing in my rearviews. I’d just missed my fifteen minutes, just missed being on Mother’s broadcast, but being alive was better than being famous.

  “There’s a trucker jack-knifed,” said Mother. “He’s crawling out of his cab. Look out, buddy. He’s on the pavement; he’s fallen; he’s bleeding. This makes the Teamsters blooper reel for sure. He’s getting up; he’s looking around. Oh! He just got run over by a Honda.” Sound-effect car-flesh collision. Sound-effect screams. The morning-zoo chorus chanted the happy, cheerful, morning-zoo jingle: ‘It’s a good day to die in traffic!’ “He’s Roadmeat,” Mother summed up.

  Never, I thought to myself, never, never challenge the Road with internal-combustion technology. Never. If the Porsche driver hadn’t insisted on testing his fine-tuned, fuel-injected, million-dollar, glossy-chromed, graying, gearhead, beergutted, monkeywrench technofossil against the Road, then the Road wouldn’t have eaten the mopar-hugger alive.

  But it wasn’t my concern. I left it all in the rearviews. I left it to Mother to read the obituaries. As far as I was concerned, there wasn’t any such thing as a good day to die in traffic.

  “Go!” the engineers were told. “Go forth and fix the smart road.” Because the smart road was revenue-
generating, and the smart road had bipartisan support, and the smart road was a technological showcase, the smart road could not be allowed to fail, not because of a bunch of… a bunch of… SHURPITAJ’s.

  And so the engineers, being engineers, did go forth, and they did fix, despite the fact that they knew, or they should have known, that it was impossible to make anything proof all the time against the mad, natural genius of truly inspired nitwits.

  The engineers gave their fix an acronym, because they sure weren’t going to allow an acronym-gap to open up between themselves and the sociologists, not when future funding could hinge on something as arbitrary as how jargon-rich any particular discipline might be. They named their fix the Scenery Creating Anti-Rage Experimental Design: SCARED.

  The engineers set up telepathic projectors along the length of the highway system, projectors which broadcast soothing, subliminal messages, calming waves of fetal ease, pastoral visions, cradling amniotic rhythms, all of which taken together transmuted commuters from creeping, sweaty, bored, frustrated, fifth-wheeled, useless, scuttling, cursing, furious, speed-limited, human cargo into patient passengers relaxing away their commutes completely absorbed into their happy, happy, individualized fantasies.

  Drives to and from work became romps with childhood puppies, or long walks on beaches with loved ones, or kinky sex on beaches with rainbow-bikinied loved ones, or world peace, or Rosebud reclaimed, and each and every dream was like an open fire-hydrant of serotonin soaking down a naked brain.

  And it worked. At first.

  But SCARED also turned out to be highly addictive.

  And so traffic started to get worse.