boils. One of them sported an eyeball dangling from its socket. At the little park on the other side of the bridge he found himself in a congregation listening to the director of operations, a bull of a man with prosthetic eyes and a voice raspy from inhaling the particulate of decimated signature architecture. Castiliano was that bastard’s name and this was his rallying moment, a little rhetorical propane to get the soldiers hard.
“We bring death today to those who claim to become God! We slaughter under the banner of Christ! We butcher the hordes who’ve come to rape our children! Root them out, grab a limb, rip it off! Coat your faces in their gore! Stomp harder on the rising lids of their rancid coffins, Boeing army fighters!”
A great cry went up and Skinner, queasy, broke off into a unit with Carl and five other sick motherfucks, as it were, guys with faces and names and homes that had been erased from Planet Earth. Supposedly they were to head west and root out a couple remaining pockets of newman resistance.
“I don’t think I can do this,” Skinner said in his memory.
“Fuck you, Skinner. You were born to do this,” Carl said.
One of the other guys in the unit looked exactly like the pre-FUS comedic actor Will Ferrell. Another bug in the program. Apparently if you remembered a person as looking sort of like someone famous, the famous person tended to show up in your memory instead. “Guys?” Will Ferrell said, his voice cracking. “Maybe we should just find a Starbucks and get lattes? My treat? What do you say?”
Carl whispered in Skinner’s ear, “Come on, dude, you’re in command.”
“Listen, you sick Homo sapiens,” Skinner said. “The heavy lifting’s been done. We’re basically the janitors, scrubbing the newman shit from this godforsaken island. Let’s quit fucking around and move!”
They passed through acrid manhole steam and subway entrances piled with rotting body parts swarmed by mutated, screeching larvae. Skinner glanced down to see a woman’s shoe with the foot still in it, toenails painted lavender, sliced off at the ankle so cleanly it could have been done by a surgeon. It wasn’t the enormity of it all that fucked you, it was little shit like this. A headless body slumped in a doorway beneath an advertisement for Guns N’ Roses’
In the East Village they came to a cafe, still operational amid the rubble. Everything above the second floor of the building looked to have been vaporized. Within the ground-level walls baristas steamed milk and a sound system blasted fusion-era Miles. In a corner, under a painting of flames, the scarred remnants of a company of mercenaries sat drinking. Seven guys speckled in concrete dust and dried blood, knocking back coffee spiked with scavenged liquors. Their eyes barely moved when Skinner and his crew arrived, stepping over dead laptops and brick chunks.
“We’re the Boeing 83rd,” Skinner said. “What company you all with?”
“Who wants to know?” said a man in the rear. Jet-black hair, glasses, untangling a Rubik’s Cube.
“I’m Lieutenant Al Skinner.”
Carl said, “They’re the Pfizer 190th. The insignia on their gear.”
“I thought Pfizer ran screaming from this shit,” Skinner said.
“We
Will Ferrell ordered a grande nonfat decaf mocha.
“This all that’s left of your company?” Skinner asked.
Cube said, “You want to know the difference between a war and a war game? A game comes with a reset button. But the only way to access that button is to die. Want to test this theory?”
Skinner said nothing. Cube shrugged, asked his command, “Who would be willing to blow his fucking brains out to see if there’s a reset button?”
A young, stone-faced soldier drinking a cappuccino unholstered his sidearm and pressed the barrel under his chin.
“You don’t have to prove anything to me,” Skinner said.
“This is the fuck and death party,” Cube said. “You don’t wanna see the death? How about some of the fuck? We’ve got a surprise downstairs. You fellows can help yourselves to the leftovers. We’ve had our fill. Go on ahead, indulge.”
“You don’t have girls, do you?” Carl said, his face falling.
“No, man, we’re following the code. We got ’droid pussy.”
“Tell that idiot to holster his weapon,” Skinner said.
Cube nodded. “Goldberg, we don’t need you to hit the reset button just yet.” He turned back to Skinner. “You look like you’ve been at this for a while, soldier. Tell me, do the newmans make any sense to you? Has killing them made it any easier to determine whether
“I kill what I’m told to kill,” Skinner said. “I don’t give a fuck if it’s got guts or chips.”
“Good for you,” Cube smiled and tossed his toy to Skinner. “Now mess this puzzle up and solve your way out of it.”
An iron stairwell led to a basement. The stairs opened into a dim, low-ceilinged space that smelled of opium smoke and industrial-grade lubricants. A soldier elbowed past them on his way out, zipping his fly. The 83rd turned on their beams and swept the floor with light. The room appeared littered with dissected mannequins. An arm crawled out of their way and hid under a sofa as they advanced. They followed the sound of sex groans to a curtained alcove. When Skinner swept aside the curtain they found a fat, naked man on his back on a couch. Skinner blinked, trying to figure out what exactly he was looking at. As best he could tell, it was the lower half of a male newman, the legs wearing fishnet stockings, mounted on the fat man, rocking back and forth while the man stroked the thing’s artificial cock. Where the torso should have been was a mess of organic newman technology, cords and sacs, severed tubes spurting clear fluid. While this half of a newman got fucked, a severed newman head of indeterminate gender licked the fat man’s balls.
“Hey! Can’t a dude screw in peace around here?” the fat man complained.
“My God,” Skinner said. (Decades later, in Carl’s living room, Carl said, “Yeah, that shit was sick. And you don’t even remember it as gross as I remember it.”)
“Identify yourself,” Skinner said.
“And you are?”
“My name is: I’ve got a loaded Cherry Coca-Cola and your dick is up a robot’s ass.”
“Name’s Caponegra, senior regional manager of the Pfizer 183rd.”
Will Ferrell spoke up. “Guys? Is it considered a threeway if two of the participants used to be one person? Just wondering.”
“Shut the fuck up, Ferrell,” Carl said.
“We’re sweeping the ’hood for insurgents,” Skinner said, yanking the newman body half off Caponegra’s lap. “And you’re going to data dump all your intelligence on us.”
“Dammit, fine. Let me rub one out and I’ll brief you upstairs.”
Upstairs, over coffee at a table freckled with cigarette butts, Caponegra, now mostly clothed, told stories of raids, ambushes, casualties received and delivered. Skinner divvied the info into little piles, separating a soldier’s braggadocio from strategically relevant data. Caponegra’s blustery yarns did support the case that the newmans were in full retreat, escaping into the forests upstate where they were burying themselves under trees to hibernate.
“They’re like bears,” Caponegra said. “I got a report from a scout in the Glaxo-Wellcome 3rd infantry that they cornered four of them up near Saratoga Springs, all huddled in a hole in the ground, skin going pasty from lack of sun, eyes glowing red as they went into sleep mode. Interrogation revealed they had no power-up date. Meaning someone would have to come along, find them, and manually turn them back on.”
“We’re sweeping west through Soho,” Skinner said. “What can you tell us.”
Caponegra rolled his eyes. “You guys got the easiest job in the world. There’s no one left out there. We practically bleached the place.”
“So what are you doing hanging around here?”
Caponegra gave him a look. “There’s somewhere else?”
