All houses in Iowa have pantries.
Cup-O-Noodles are unstoppable food.
Before we left my house, the telephone in the kitchen began ringing and ringing. It was my father calling. He wanted to know what the hell was happening. He wanted to know why the hell I had not called him. And he asked, how the hell did Ealing, Iowa, end up on news broadcasts in Germany, telling stories of enormous bugs that were devouring every man, woman, and child in the town? What the hell was all this about?
“It is a lot of hell, Dad,” I said.
At exactly that moment, all the power cut out everywhere in Ealing, Iowa.
The wireless phone in our kitchen went dead.
Robby and I heard gunfire in the distance.
Ealing, Iowa, had gone to hell.
RAT BOYS FROM MARS, AND AN UNFORTUNATE INCIDENT INVOLVING AN INFLATABLE WHALE
PICTURE THIS IF YOU CAN:
Robby Brees and I, wearing fur-covered, full-head grimacing lemur masks that helped identify Unstoppables, smoking cigarettes and dressed in matching form-fitting blue-and-white Eden Project jumpsuits, as we carried fully automatic paintball rifles slung over our shoulders. And we were accompanied by a sixty-pound golden retriever that could not bark.
If we had thought everything out more clearly, we probably would have anticipated the likelihood of being fired upon by real guns and real bullets from my next-door neighbors, Earl Elgin and his teenage son, whose name was Earl Elgin Jr.
Earl Elgin Jr. was fifteen years old; a redheaded Lutheran boy who attended Curtis Crane Lutheran Academy, and fortunately for me and Robby, he and his father were both terrible shots. They were especially terrible shots because they were scared out of their minds after enduring a night-long rampage of six-foot-tall praying mantis beasts with spike-armed claws. And now they had come face-to-face with what they believed could only be alien invader rat boys from Mars.
We knew Earl Elgin Jr. as EJ.
EJ Elgin had skin the color of cottage cheese.
He also had a real dynamo of an Iowa name—EJ Elgin.
In the same way that Benson & Hedges says I spend a lot of money on my cigarettes, EJ Elgin says Sperm met egg in Iowa.
EJ Elgin only had one ball.
EJ Elgin lost one of his testicles when he was nine years old. EJ’s father, Earl Elgin Sr., hired a giant inflatable whale-shaped bouncer house for EJ’s birthday party. One of EJ’s balls got stuck inside a plastic-rimmed ventilation hole near what was supposed to be the big inflatable whale’s spout. It is painful to recall, but I am only doing my job. I was there. I recorded the history of EJ Elgin’s detached ball.
Nothing puts a damper on a boy’s ninth birthday party like the loss of one of the guest of honor’s guests of honor.
EJ had to be taken to the hospital in Waterloo after having one of his balls detached when it became lodged in the plastic vent on a giant inflatable whale. He came home the following day with an excess of unoccupied space inside his scrotum. I do not know if doctors discard detached human balls in the trash can or not.
The boys at Curtis Crane pestered EJ for a while.
After his ninth birthday party and the horrible incident with the enormous inflatable whale, all of us, to a boy, were horrified and curious. All the boys at Curtis Crane Lutheran Academy wanted to see EJ’s ball sack, now that one of EJ’s balls had been lost to a whale attack.
By the time the boys at Curtis Crane Lutheran Academy entered puberty, which is an epiphany, a kind of religious awakening as to the true magnificence of our balls, and shit like that, we all felt mournfully afraid of EJ Elgin, the boy with only one ball.
EJ Elgin, to my knowledge, never named his solitary ball.
The one he lost might have been appropriately named Jonah.
Perhaps Ahab.
“Stay right there and don’t move, you motherfucking rat boys from Mars,” Earl Elgin Sr. said.
He nervously pointed his emptied assault rifle directly at my belly.
“Dad, we caught us some alien rat fucks from outer space,” EJ added. “Let’s shoot them in the balls.”
EJ plinked a shot level with Robby’s crotch. Robby flinched and whined. EJ only had a BB gun.
The Elgin males were not especially brilliant, but they had been through a lot. I had to give them that.
“Uh,” I said.
Robby raised his open hand in the intergalactic gesture of peace, and said, “Please do not shoot us in the balls, EJ Elgin. It is only me, Robby Brees, and my friend, Austin Szerba, who is your next-door neighbor, and we are not rat boys from Mars. We come in peace, and smoking cigarettes.”
“Benson and Hedges,” I said.
Earl Elgin squinted and tilted his head. The weapon he held was a Colt AR15-A3 Tactical Carbine. It looked exactly like the paintball rifles Robby and I carried, except if Earl Elgin had actually shot us with it, Robby and I would both be dead, gory messes. EJ Elgin had a Daisy .177 pellet rifle. If he had actually shot us with it, Robby and I would have stinging welts on our skin, possibly on our ball sacks.
He missed Robby’s ball sack.
A Rat Boy from Mars definitely would not want to get shot in the balls with a Daisy .177.
My next-door neighbors, EJ Elgin and his father, had been packing camping equipment into the bed of a pickup truck. They were planning on taking the rest of their family, which consisted of EJ’s mother, who was named Rosemary, and his two younger sisters, Edie and Donna, as far away from Ealing and the monster invasion as they could get. When Robby and I came outside of my house, carrying armloads of underwear, shaving stuff, and Cup-O-Noodles, Earl Elgin Sr. and his son, EJ, saw us and grabbed their weapons.
Earl Elgin Sr. let loose a burst of rifle fire that shattered nearly every window on my house, as well as one on the driver’s side of Robby’s old Ford Explorer—which had really taken a beating since the attack by Hungry Jack the night before.
“Holy shit!” I said.
Boxers, T-shirts, and Styrofoam containers of dehydrated ramen noodles flew everywhere.
Ingrid, who was not particularly startled by the gunfire, was shitting in the front yard when it happened.
That was exactly when Earl Elgin Sr. told us to put our hands up and surrender, because he and his boy were going to become some kind of national heroes for capturing the invading Rat Boys from Mars.
“Shoot them in the balls, Dad,” EJ Elgin urged.
“Uh,” Robby said.
Both of us had our hands raised in the intergalactic gesture of Please do not shoot us in the balls.
“Earl Elgin, you shot my goddamned house!” I said.
Earl Elgin Sr. looked confused.
Earl Elgin Sr. said, “What the fuck did you creatures do with the Szerba boy?”
Robby Brees and I did not get killed that day by Earl Elgin Sr. and his one-balled son, EJ.
But it took some dramatic pleading from me to stop Earl Elgin Sr. from shooting me and allow me to take my head off so I might show him who was actually inside the clinging and form-fitting Rat Boy from Mars jumpsuit.
“Thank you, Saint Kazimierz,” I said.
I felt like the virgin saint was looking out for me and Robby.
There was no other way I could explain not being shot in the balls.
We left Earl and EJ to their hurried departure preparations and got into Robby’s battered Ford Explorer.
And Robby said, “Holy shit, Austin,” as we drove away from my house and headed toward the Del Vista Arms.
What could I do?
THE BATTLE OF THE DEL VISTA ARMS
I ASKED MYSELF THIS:
What could I do?
Just one week earlier, everything was perfect. Everything was Iowa blue plaid. Robby and I skated in Grasshopper Jungle. Shann Collins made me very horny. There were no books mentioning Catholic
s or masturbation available in the library at Curtis Crane Lutheran Academy. Ollie Jungfrau dreamed of internet porn and Saturday morning donuts with me and Johnny McKeon.
All of that equaled normal.
Then Grant Wallace and the Hoover Boys beat the shit out of Robby Brees and me. They threw our shoes up on the roof at Grasshopper Jungle because they said we were queers from Curtis Crane Lutheran Academy, and after that, the whole world went to shit.
So, what could I do?
Robby played Let It Bleed.
Although it had been made more than forty years before, it seemed like every song on that Rolling Stones album was precisely about Robby and me, or Unstoppable Soldiers, Ealing, Iowa, and McKeon Industries.
Robby sang, “We all need someone we can feed on. And if you want it, you can feed on me . . .”
“Uh,” I said.
We smoked cigarettes.
Ingrid sighed and yawned in the backseat.
And at the exact moment we pulled up to Robby Brees’s apartment, the cook from the destroyed Pancake House, Louis, whose real name was Ah Wong Sing, happened to be hiding inside a cinder-block cubicle where dumpsters were stored at the Del Vista Arms.
Louis’s clothes were ripped. He was missing one shoe and his shirt hung open. Dried blood stippled his torn cook’s trousers. But he was very, very happy to see us.
He also did not glow red when I looked at him through the eyes of my grimacing lemur mask.
But Louis was so psychologically worn from what he had seen and been through that he did not even seem startled by the Rat Boy from Mars with the fully automatic AR15-A3 Tactical Carbine replica paintball gun.
“Good morning, Louis,” I said.
I waved my open hand in the intergalactic Rat Boy from Mars gesture of This is the end of the world, but I am politely greeting you anyway.
“Um,” Robby said.
Robby Brees was not wearing his grimacing lemur mask. “It’s just us, Louis. Me, and Austin from the secondhand store. You know? Austin Szerba? The dynamo kid?”
Robby Brees held up a lit cigarette in the intergalactic gesture of We are the skater kids who smoke in the alley, and shit like that.
Louis had not slept in two days. He was spent. He’d had sexual intercourse with Robby Brees’s mother three times in the previous twenty-four hours. After he ran away from the carnage at the Kelsey Creek Bridge, Louis came back to the Del Vista Arms, thinking he would find safety and Connie Brees.
Instead, Louis found the Unstoppable Soldier called Hungry Jack.
The end of the world was one week old, and people everywhere were finding out about it. And the Battle of Ealing began that morning at the Del Vista Arms Luxury Apartments.
Here is what happened:
Hungry Jack was confused, and Louis was a very motivated runner when being chased by Unstoppable Soldiers. Hungry Jack had been huddling beneath the aluminum roof that covered a row of cars at the Del Vista Arms when Louis ran through the parking lot.
Unstoppable Soldiers are like cats in that they are stimulated by movement. They are also like walleyes in that they only want to do two things. The two things walleyes and Unstoppable Soldiers want to do is fuck and eat.
Unstoppable Soldiers are not as intelligent as either cats or fish.
So when Louis managed to slip inside the dumpster corral, Hungry Jack looked around for a while and then forgot what he had been looking for.
Unfortunately for Robby and me, Hungry Jack became stimulated by the movement of a Rat Boy from Mars in a tight blue-and-white jumpsuit. The Unstoppable Soldier that had hatched out from Hungry Jack’s body in a cornfield outside of Waterloo while Robby and I stood in horrified amazement and watched it happen became very aroused by the motion around Robby Brees’s Ford Explorer.
Hungry Jack flitted down to the lot from the rooftop of the car park.
I saw him first.
Through the lenses on my grimacing lemur mask, a brilliant flash of red caused me to momentarily consider that I had indeed ignited the flammable, carcinogenic, messed-up-sperm-causing mask with my Benson & Hedges cigarette.
Hungry Jack looked like a ball of flame as he flew down from the awning above the car park.
“Holy shit,” I said. “These things really do work.”
I was impressed by the technology of the grimacing lemur mask.
Unfortunately, I should have been more impressed by the speed with which Hungry Jack closed the distance between us.
It was also impressive how Hungry Jack picked me up by my head. Until that moment, I had never in my life been picked up by my head. I did find myself marveling for an instant at how well the grimacing lemur mask protected my skull from the piercing barbs of the studded spikes all along Hungry Jack’s tri-segmented pincers.
But it was only an instant.
Then I screamed.
And while I was screaming, Hungry Jack unhinged his bear-trap mandibles in order to crush my Rat Boy skull. I looked over at Robby, thinking my beautiful friend, a person I loved very much but had also inflicted a great deal of pain upon, was going to be the last image burned into the screens of my dying eyes.
Robby Brees stood there, looking more cool and superhero-ish than any Lutheran boy from Iowa ever did, calmly smoking a cigarette while his eyes, which were the color of robin egg Cadbury chocolate Easter treats, focused directly on the monster that was just about to eat my head.
Robby raised his paintball gun and let go a burst of three rounds that splattered into Hungry Jack’s mouth and compound eyes.
Pop! Pop! Pop!
The paintballs gushed.
The Unstoppable Soldier received a faceful of the blood of his God.
Fortunately, this caused Hungry Jack to release his vise clamp on my head. I hit the ground, and Hungry Jack reeled away from the concussion of the blast.
“Shit! Shit! Shit! Holy shit!” was all I could say.
Excrementum Sanctum.
And while Unstoppable Soldiers’ exoskeletons are as impenetrable as the hull on an aircraft carrier, the blood of their God rusts every rivet in their construction, and sinks them on the spot.
“Glad we didn’t have to use my sperm,” Robby said.
“Uh,” I said, dazed, on my hands and knees in the parking lot at the Del Vista Arms. “Thank you, Saint Kazimierz. And thank you, Robby Brees.”
Louis, whose real name was Ah Wong Sing, cowered in the doorway to the dumpster corral.
Hungry Jack hissed and gurgled.
The Unstoppable Soldier looked confused, if such an expression could manifest itself on the face of a six-foot-tall beast that looked like a praying mantis. Hungry Jack’s left arm fell off first. The right arm disjointed and plunked down onto the ground seconds later. The tooth-spiked claw arms rattled around on the pavement of the parking lot, spastically opening and closing, opening and closing, as they scraped along the ground with no coherent mission.
Where the claw arms had detached from Hungry Jack’s thorax, a gooey stream of slick yellow fluid burbled like twin pots of boiling unstoppable cornmeal mush. Then Hungry Jack’s chin lowered and his head rolled away from his body, landing on the ground between the two flailing arms.
What was left of Hungry Jack scampered away on four gangly legs, which soon became three, then two, and the entire Unstoppable Soldier collapsed in puddles of oily mush.
Robby Brees saved my life.
Being a historian naturally has its dangers, but this is my job.
I tell the truth.
THE END OF THE WORLD
AT THE CONCLUSION of the First Battle of Ealing, which took place in a parking lot at the Del Vista Arms Luxury Apartments, the Unstoppable Soldier that had once been growing inside a homeless man named Hungry Jack lay in a soupy yellow mess of jumbled bug parts.
At that moment, there were
only three Unstoppable Soldiers remaining on the surface of the planet called Earth. They were Tyler Jacobson, Travis Pope, and Travis Pope’s wife, Eileen, who had filled Duane Coventry’s house on Onondaga Street with a jellied, pulsating black goo of fertilized eggs.
Robby Brees and I, the two Rat Boys from Mars who were the only people capable of saving the planet called Earth, had no way of calculating how many other Unstoppable Soldiers there were, and no way of knowing where to look for them.
So Robby put on his grimacing lemur mask and the two of us entered the hallway of the Del Vista Arms Luxury Apartments. Ingrid, my silent golden retriever, and Louis, the equally silent cook from the most certainly closed-down Pancake House, cautiously followed.
We were there to save Robbie’s mom, Connie Brees.
“Aaah!” screamed Eunice Mayhew when Robby Brees and I entered the hallway of the Del Vista Arms.
Eunice Mayhew was the manager of the Del Vista Arms. At the exact moment Robby and I stepped through the entrance that led in from the parking lot, Eunice Mayhew was posting two more Pay or Quit notices on locked doors to silent apartments.
Eunice Mayhew did not glow red.
Eunice Mayhew was fifty-three years old. She had a figure like an upended pickle barrel, and was just about the same height. Her hair was the color of cigarette ash, and her skin had a similar hue to the gritty waterline around Robby Brees’s bathtub, where I’d showered after spending the night with Robby earlier that week. I know that you would not eat either one of those things: cigarette ash or the ring inside Robby Brees’s bathtub.
I also do not believe an Unstoppable Soldier would eat Eunice Mayhew.
“Aaah!” Eunice Mayhew screamed again. She threw her hands up, in what I suppose was the intergalactic gesture of I surrender to the conquering Rat Boys from Mars.
If somewhere there existed entire planets of Eunice Mayhews, Robby Brees and I could rule the cosmos.
Eunice Mayhew is also a very solid Iowa name.
A name like Eunice Mayhew says Sperm met egg in Iowa, and zygote grew up to become a bingo-playing, quilting square-dancer with a body like an upended pickle barrel.