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 the 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.
&nb
sp; 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.
“I wonder if Johnny kills queers,” Robby whispered.
“Uh,” I said.
Johnny McKeon did not come down into Eden to kill Robby Brees and me.
Shann and her family had come down to Eden because they knew the Unstoppable Soldiers were running wild in Ealing, Iowa.
Robby and I stood in the doorway to the locker room. Ingrid, never one to get too worked up about such things as late-night visitors, sat on the floor between us and yawned.
To Johnny McKeon and his wife, Robby Brees and I must have looked like players in a science fiction movie, dressed as we were in our matching and numbered Eden Project jumpsuits.
Shann Collins, who now officially hated me and Robby Brees, avoided my eyes when I tried to look at her.
“Welcome to Eden, Johnny,” I said. “I think you are safe down here.”
“Uh,” Johnny McKeon said.
Johnny McKeon was pale and shaken. He looked at the gun in his hand, then back at me with an apologetic expression like Johnny McKeon wasn’t aware that a gun the size of a small bazooka had somehow attached itself to the palm of his right hand.
“You can’t shoot them, anyway,” I said.
“Uh. I know that, Austin,” Johnny McKeon said.
And then Johnny asked, “Are you okay?”
I caught Shann’s eye.
Shann Collins had been looking at my face. She turned pale and immediately lowered her gaze. Shann Collins was confused. She was in love with the Polish kid who was also confused.
I said, “Yes. We are okay, Johnny.”
Johnny McKeon walked across the floor of the mudroom and placed his Smith & Wesson .500 magnum on the bench just below the scientist’s old windbreaker that had been hanging from a hook on the wall for nearly half a century.
I said, “I suppose it’s time for me and Robby to show you what has been going on.”
Shann coughed nervously.
You know what I mean.
EVERYTHING A GUY COULD NEED, AND THE TWO BEST ROCK ALBUMS EVER MADE
WE WERE THE New Humans.
Johnny McKeon, Shann Collins, and her mother, Wendy Collins McKeon, changed into Eden Project jumpsuits and white scientist socks. Robby and I did not stay in the locker room and watch them change their clothes. Things were weird enough without doing shit like that.
When the newest New Humans joined us in the lecture hall, I pointed out the chalkboard diagram of the development from 412E, the Unstoppable Corn mold, to the creatures Johnny McKeon had seen fucking and eating earlier that evening in the alley at Grasshopper Jungle.
Although we suspected it, Robby and I did not know for certain that there were several more Unstoppable Soldiers up above us in Ealing until we heard it from Johnny McKeon.
Up until that moment, Robby and I had only seen one Unstoppable Soldier, the one that came out of Hungry Jack. Despite that, we did believe the Hoover Boys and Grant Wallace had to have hatched out as well.
Johnny McKeon also confirmed the Unstoppable Soldiers were spawning.
Robby Brees and I had watched all five reels of Eden Orientation Series. We knew the world had less than twenty-four hours before every human being on the planet dropped to a lower level on the food chain.
It was not a good level to be on.
“Uh, Rob,” I said. “You still against the paintball idea?”
Robby said, “Uh.”
Johnny McKeon drank Scotch, and Wendy made herself a vodka gimlet at Eden’s Tally-Ho!, which was the nicest bar in a thirty-mile radius for this part of Iowa.
Things would be better for Johnny and Wendy McKeon if they were drunk.
Robby Brees reached across the bar and nonchalantly grabbed the bottle of Scotch whisky and poured some out into two glasses.
Nobody said anything about it.
Robby said, “Tally-Ho!”
Robby Brees and I drank the Scotch whisky. It tasted like hot cinnamon and dried fruit.
Johnny McKeon said, “This Scotch must be sixty years old.”
Johnny McKeon appreciated good Scotch whisky.
“It is like drinking history,” I said.
Johnny said, “Cheers.”
Robby Brees and I got drunk with Johnny McKeon and Shann Collins’s mom in Eden. It only took two small glasses of Scotch whisky to make me feel like everything was funny, and I wanted to dance with Robby Brees again.
We lit cigarettes.
Wendy McKeon might have known Robby and I smoked cigarettes, but we had never done it in front of her. She was distant and unaffected by what was going on. Johnny and Shann must have scared the shit out of her with the stories about what they knew was happening in Ealing.
And Johnny and Shann didn’t know half of it.
Wendy McKeon was very pretty. Her breasts were tight and sharp beneath the shimmering fabric of her jumpsuit. I wanted to touch them.
Wendy McKeon was Eden 93.
Johnny McKeon was Eden 7.
Wendy McKeon’s hair was the color of ground coriander.
I fantasized that somebody would suggest we all have an orgy when we got to the parts of the film where Dr. Grady McKeon commanded us to breed. The Scotch whisky made me feel very horny and confused. I would be the first one to volunteer to strip naked out of my clothes, but Johnny McKeon kind of made me feel nervous.
I could not imagine Johnny McKeon ever having sexual intercourse with Wendy Collins McKeon.
Johnny McKeon was the only person in Eden I did not want to take a shower with at that exact moment.
I realized I was getting a Scotch whisky–fueled erection. I did not believe anyone would approve of my erection at that moment. So I sat at the bar and asked Robby for another cigarette.
Robby knew what I was thinking. He always did.
“Tally-Ho! Porcupine,” Robby said.
r /> Robby Brees was drunk. He lit a cigarette for me and passed it to me.
The filter end was just a little bit wet with Robby’s spit.
“I’ll be danged if they don’t have everything you’d ever need down in this place,” Johnny McKeon said.
Johnny McKeon got up from the barstool. He threw a dart at the board that hung on the other side of the pool table.
“I’ll be double-danged,” Johnny said, daringly.
“A proper Eden will always have everything a guy could ever need or want, Johnny,” I said.
“That, and the two best rock albums ever made in the history of humankind,” Robby added.
THE BLOOD OF GOD
WE TOOK JOHNNY McKeon and his family on a tour of the silo.
We did not show them the entire Eden Orientation Series. Johnny McKeon only wanted to see a portion of the final film. He wanted his wife to know what the creatures he saw at Grasshopper Jungle looked like.
It did not matter. You could not watch five minutes of Eden Orientation Series and not witness some experiment with sperm, or shit like that, or hear Dr. Grady McKeon telling us that it was our duty to start having sex.
“My big brother was a nut case,” Johnny McKeon concluded.
“Isn’t there television down here?” Wendy McKeon asked. “Maybe there would be something on the news about what’s going on.”
It was a good question.
The lack of televisions did not register with me until Wendy McKeon asked about it. We hadn’t seen one television set in Eden. I imagined Dr. Grady McKeon concluded that when the Eden Project became a necessary sanctuary for humanity, there would be nothing at all worth watching on any broadcast stations.
New Humans would be without commercial television.
Maybe there was hope, after all.
Dr. Grady McKeon was probably correct about post-apocalyptic television broadcasts, although we eventually did find a bank of five side-by-side televisions that night in Eden’s Brain Room.
Here is what happened:
We were all very tired after watching the final few moments of corn eating and three-legged-race running in Reel Five. Shann would neither speak to me nor sit near me inside Eden’s theater. I thought Johnny McKeon or Wendy might have seen Shann’s behavior as cold or unexpected, but if they did, I could not tell.