I left the highway in western Kansas, the time feeling right when I came upon a green exit sign with a plank boarded over the upcoming town’s name. The old town dead, it had begun life anew. TARTARUS, someone had painted across the new wood, black block letters that wink subtle invitations when the sun hits them at precise angles. I find a town under martial law and underlying chaos.
A newcomer, I am assigned to the employ of Dr. Amway, of the Tartarus Clinic for Applied Research. My job being to report any activity within the perimeter of a postmodern death nature, or soon to be deceased. My judgment will be invaluable, they inform me, for my status as newcomer leaves me unencumbered by prior prejudices or allegiances.
Dr. Amway was a pathologist and medical examiner in one of the western metropoli, has since assumed a new mantle of command combining now-usurped control systems of medicine and law. He is a man of numerous facelifts, with four square inches of original face left, stretched tight over his skull.
“I am the man with his finger up the ass of the nation,” he tells me. “How would you define deviance?”
“I wouldn’t, but I know it when I see it.”
“Splendid,” and he clapping, then lead me to rows of cages filled with meatfolk. They eyeing us with confused dead glimmers and reaching with broken-nailed hands, but not as eager as average meatfolk beyond the perimeter. I remark that some progress appears to have been made here.
“I am the great white heterosexual overlord,” says Dr. Amway. “And by that divine mandate I am eminently qualified to convert these poor blue heathen. I must admit, the task might be safer from the go if custom still insisted we sew the mouths shut immediately upon death, but I enjoy a challenge.”
[Note: During Colonial and westward expansionist phases of American history, the lips of the newly dead were stitched closed, a custom brought over by European immigrants. Reportedly this practice still goes on in remote areas of Appalachia. Its function was spiritual in nature, to prevent evil entities from gaining access to the deceased and taking up residence. This measure would obviously be a failure in light of Quayle-Beta Syndrome, but I purport it might still be of use in thwarting their appetites.]
Dr. Amway waves one hand about. “You see the stubborn dead, but I see a roomful of potential. Actually, their chance at becoming productive citizens is greater now than it ever was. They’re so much more pliant now, all they lack is the proper conditioning. Somatic and neural trigger experiences to remember that in their old lives, they were motivated not by hunger, but by sexual desire. They have forgotten that. They’ll eat anybody now, without discrimination. It’s a roomful of raging bisexuals, as far as I’m concerned, but I’m convinced they can be reconditioned to behave as God intended.
“I feed the males a steady diet of Rocky Mountain Oysters, keeps them virile. The females I don’t feed at all. Keeps them slim and, I should hope, inordinately vain. The restorative potential of enforced anorexia cannot be exaggerated. Next week I shall introduce full-length mirrors into the females’ quarters. They’ll thank me then, just you wait and see.”
Dr. Amway has a meatboy brought out and stripped, chained securely to the lab floor by knees and elbows, then he liberally applies K.Y. He dons a stovepipe top hat of stars and bars and fucks the meatboy in the ass. Ropes of saliva stream from dead jaws to puddle on the floor, and I thought the meatboy looked confused before.
“He’ll learn, he’ll remember,” says Dr. Amway, now out of breath. “Only a matter of time. And if the ungrateful wretch still refuses, well, I can always sue the bastard.”
*
Inhibitions fall as frequently as the night, the warmbloods of Tartarus making revel mockery of their old lives, or trying to resurrect them in bacchanalian ritual. Few dare talk with a newcomer, for fear of betraying themselves to a watchful agent of the ruling regime, and so I am invisible. I soon understand that their displays are considered unmistakable proof that they are alive.
On a typical night, swing-shifts of wailing penitents beat their breasts before the god of their choice, or possibly several, and pray for deliverance. Housewife strippers undulate wildly onstage while straying husbands stuff supermarket coupons into their garters. Two transvestite priests kneel before altars while genderflecting nuns dispense antacid hosts upon their tongues. Lonely schoolboys with tentacled acne meet for masturbatory excess over piles of burning magazines. A dominatrix professor in rubber lactates stale theorems into imbecile mouths that gape like baby birds. Shopkeepers in back rooms shit into relabeled jars and boxes, then sell them for spiraling prices. Suburban social pillars invade the homes of despised neighbors, lock them in cellars with hungry, transubstantiating rats. The Tartarus aristocracy preens along the streets, holding tight to leashes collared to surgically reconstructed meatchildren; their knees fold backwards as they obediently chatter like Rhesus monkeys, are rewarded with raw cubes of indeterminate origin.
“At last,” the aristocracy cries, “we have reason to bury all the elder bipartisan hatreds. Even within Apocalypse can the wise find Shangri-La.”
In certain hard-to-locate bars, frequented only at night, meatboys and meatgirls sit bolted immobile into wooden chairs, mouths clamped shut, while surgically implanted shunts drain off pituitary extract. The runoff collects in receptacles over gas flames, then is channeled into intravenous drips. Coded bathroom graffiti informs the careful reader that this technology is the work of Dr. Amway, as means of controlling the restless and ill- contented living. By 3:00 a.m., the only sound comes from dozens of groaning meatfolk, each bar filled with comatose warmbloods in their grave-spangled purgatorial trances, heavy inside with the cindery burnt comet empathic visions of those on the far side of the perimeter. It is their new lives we wonder and worry about, their eternities.
I am without choice on a biological level. Sit down next to grimacing meatboy hookah and plug in. Avoid the eyes and find the vein … before long I may be confusing the order in which things are done. But paradoxically, I will die, if it’s the last thing I do. Hard to get that wrong … but then, look at the meatfolk, though I am not so sure they deserve quite all the blame.
*
SUBJECT 92
He occupied a suite of rooms on the top floor of the Tartarus Clinic for Applied Research. In the eyes of the staff, “Subject 92” replaced his given name of Leland Lovejoy, and behind him laid the terrible abattoir of misfortune which had led to his residency at the clinic, where he hobbled about with some assistance.
Subject 92 had lost various bodily parts in nine separate attacks by the walking dead. While drunk on a potent concoction of sterno and Gatorade, the then-itinerant Leland Lovejoy was set upon by a trio of corpses who chewed his left leg off at the knee before he fought them away. While sedated in an emergency room, he then awoke to find a newly-deceased woman from an adjacent room drooling into his face, after which one eye was sucked from its socket like a cocktail onion. In later attacks over the coming months, several of which were alcohol-related, he lost an ear, a flap of scalp, three fingers, his surviving baby toe, most of his right bicep, half of one cheek, plus assorted divots of flesh estimated to total seven pounds.
“Well, I used to hate them,” he frequently told his attending staff, speaking of the ambulatory corpses who had so bedeviled him, “but then I realized, no matter what, it’s still nice to be wanted. And they’ve done a lot for me, in their way. Three squares a day and a roof over my head and a fistful of remote controls, you think I ever had it this good when I was on the streets?”
“But the price you paid to be here,” said one of his nurses. “Some people would call what you lost an exorbitant fee.”
Subject 92 dismissed all misgivings with a noxious cloud of cigar smoke and a wave of a four-fingered hand. “Lemme tell you something. They left my pecker and my nuts alone. They’d’ve taken those, yeah, I might be singing a different tune. But everything vital’s still in place, and what’s gone, I can’t say I miss all that much. Hey, you know anyone needs a kidney? I got one to spare.”
Subject 92’s usefulness came as a result of his being the only known living human to sustain bites in one, let alone nine, attacks and then fail to succumb to infection by the Quayle-Beta virus. The Tartarus Clinic for Applied Research was an inevitable destination, as medical science had long known that if you want to learn how to defeat
