He arrived in a cloud of dust and parked in a mud puddle next to a bright red convertible like the one Leah drove. Suddenly afraid it might be hers, even though she’d moved three counties away after the night he finally did what he’d been threatening for months and hit her to stop her damn mouth from running, he couldn’t bring himself to go inside. How did I get here? Dwayne thought. Twenty-six years old, no job, no wife, no money, and a goddamn rash I can’t seem to shake. And a parcel of nightmares I should option to Hollywood. He waited until a cute little blonde with a nice ass, nothing like Leah’s endless legs and dark hair, came out with a six-pack in one hand and one of those tiny dogs in the other and drove off in the red car.
The inside of the Stop’n’Shop was crisp and chilly, and he peered between the bars over the front window to see who the cashier was before going inside. Jolene had been mighty friendly to him once after Leah had gone, but every time he felt inclined to take her up on the unspoken offer, he thought about Leah the last time they’d been in bed together and the way her face had stretched and her jaw had come unhinged and a fiery forked tongue flicked bright Arabic letters at him and he’d screamed, and then she pushed him off her and asked what was wrong and her face looked normal except for the gaping, ragged wound where one eye should be, and he’d slept on the couch for a week afterward.
Today the register was manned by a sullen teenage boy with greasy hair and there were no lizard men in sight, so Dwayne went inside. He got the shopping cart with the wheel that wouldn’t go straight (maybe they all were like that?) and started loading up on whatever came to hand that didn’t require any preparation beyond opening the bag or maybe a few minutes in the microwave. A fat woman trundled into the aisle ahead of him with a squalling kid on each hand and a third slung around her ample torso. The left-hand boy got free with some effort and charged down the row toward Dwayne, head down and making car engine noises with his lips. Dwayne moved out of the way but as the boy went by, his little head twisted all the way around on his neck and Dwayne watched his face dissolve, eaten by nanobots as he scampered off down the aisle and hid from his angry mother behind a display of voice-activated soda cans.
Dwayne had reached the beer section and was debating the merits of taste versus price while leaning his forehead against the cool glass of the cooler door, when there was a tremendous explosion outside. The earth shook, spilling displays across the store, and the lights flickered as a cascade of aluminum cans chorusing “Do you wish me to open now?” rolled toward him. Old instincts took over and he reached for the gun slung over his shoulder that wasn’t there, and then remembered he wasn’t out in the sand anymore and he crawled toward the front of the store to look out the window.
The large pane of glass next to the door had shattered, and Dwayne was glad he’d worn long sleeves as he made his way through the slivers to look out through the bars. The greasy teenager was shrieking and had blood streaming down the side of his head, but luckily this seemed to be a real, if superficial wound, and his face didn’t dissolve and his tongue was the normal length.
There was a monster in the parking lot.
Saturday, April 11, 2009
Tuesday, December 2, 2008
Dwayne, part I
{rough draft, part one because I don't like how it ends so I'm not posting the rest until I figure it out}
Dwayne Carter didn’t like to leave his trailer these days if he could avoid it, so Sundays were good to him. Mail didn’t come, and government offices didn’t conduct business, which meant the phone wouldn’t be ringing off the hook. Dwayne only occasionally remembered that it had been disconnected the previous week, probably by the lizard man he saw at the Stop’n’Shop last Tuesday when he went to get more beer. He had no doubt that was who’d broken in and stolen his “Girls Gone Wild part 63” dvd that he’d drunkenly bought over the phone in the wee hours one sweaty and sleepless morning and waited for with an increasing lack of patience as he allowed six to eight weeks for delivery. It got a little less interesting every time Dwayne watched it, so he figured maybe it wasn’t as big a loss as it seemed at first, but he wasn’t entirely sure what the lizard man wanted with it, and harbored a vague, inarticulate concern for the nubile college girls who cavorted so contentedly therein.
Dwayne took another pull on his beer and turned the TV on to CMSNABC’s all-news-all-the-time channel. He’d woken up at almost 1 o’clock in the afternoon and was annoyed at letting the prime drinking hours get away from him. He was just in time to catch the end of Marie Takanawa’s daily update on the Iraq/Iran/Syria Conflict for Freedom and Democracy.
“And lastly, thirteen marines were killed and another twenty-seven seriously injured when terrorist combatants in Baghdad released a heavily modified upgrade of the Destroy-All-Humans virus into the central command system of the 78th Brigade’s tank battalion. And now I’ll turn it over to Ted back in New York!” Her pearly white teeth glittered under studio kleigs as the camera failed to cut away on cue, flashing encrypted orders into Dwayne’s neocortex, so he changed the channel to interrupt the transmission.
“Now, boys and girls, can you say ‘freedom?’ Yay, I knew you” - click - “half a cup of sugar in the clone tank’s intake valve ought to jumpstart the fermentation process and” - click - “just seventeen easy payments of $19.95 a month” - click, back to the news. Ted was showing viewers at home how to make their own radiation detector, and promised upcoming footage of a water-skiing squirrel to those who stuck around.
Dwayne hauled himself from the recliner and went into the kitchen (that is, he took one step from the stained carpet of the north end of his trailer on to the scarred and sticky linoleum in front of the tiny, unreliable stove) and eyed the contents of the fridge with hunger. Two bottles of barbecue sauce, one unopened carton of milk that he didn’t remember buying and whose contents were heavy but immobile when he shook it, and a number of restaurant packets of ketchup. He didn’t bother looking in any of the cupboards. It hadn’t occurred to him when he made his last beer run that there were other essentials he ought to be bringing into the house as well in order to cut down on time spent outside.
He rubbed the scaly patch on his inner arm again and looked at it. This was the third time it had come back, now surrounded by a thick ridge of scar tissue that had grown up after pumice, sand paper, and finally a kitchen knife had made what he thought was short work of it. It itched, and sometimes tingled, and when he woke up at night sometimes he thought it was crawling farther up his arm. It was green around the edges and occasionally exuded an oily substance when he was stressed out or angry.
“Been seeing a lot of unusual skin ailments on vets these past few years,” his doctor had said last month when Mrs. Chan, the elderly woman two trailers down had finally convinced Dwayne to see a medical professional. “Those Ay-rabs unleashed all kinds of crazy shit on our boys before we finally got them under control. But it’s been a while since you were over there ,yeah?”
“Discharged nearly three years ago,” Dwayne mumbled. Managed the hat trick of both a dishonorable exit and a Purple Heart, he didn’t add. Lost three fingers and my wife, he further didn’t say.
The doctor gave him a variety of expensive creams and lotions that Dwayne charged to his one remaining credit card that didn’t have a number of electronic warnings and flashing red lights attached, but none of them did any good. When Jolene who worked the night shift at the Stop’n’Shop refused to bag his groceries because she was afraid of catching whatever it was she thought he had, he started wearing long sleeves and only going in during the day. And today he was out of food and nearly out of beer, so he pulled on a canvas jacket and some boots and got into his battered pick-up truck.
Dwayne Carter didn’t like to leave his trailer these days if he could avoid it, so Sundays were good to him. Mail didn’t come, and government offices didn’t conduct business, which meant the phone wouldn’t be ringing off the hook. Dwayne only occasionally remembered that it had been disconnected the previous week, probably by the lizard man he saw at the Stop’n’Shop last Tuesday when he went to get more beer. He had no doubt that was who’d broken in and stolen his “Girls Gone Wild part 63” dvd that he’d drunkenly bought over the phone in the wee hours one sweaty and sleepless morning and waited for with an increasing lack of patience as he allowed six to eight weeks for delivery. It got a little less interesting every time Dwayne watched it, so he figured maybe it wasn’t as big a loss as it seemed at first, but he wasn’t entirely sure what the lizard man wanted with it, and harbored a vague, inarticulate concern for the nubile college girls who cavorted so contentedly therein.
Dwayne took another pull on his beer and turned the TV on to CMSNABC’s all-news-all-the-time channel. He’d woken up at almost 1 o’clock in the afternoon and was annoyed at letting the prime drinking hours get away from him. He was just in time to catch the end of Marie Takanawa’s daily update on the Iraq/Iran/Syria Conflict for Freedom and Democracy.
“And lastly, thirteen marines were killed and another twenty-seven seriously injured when terrorist combatants in Baghdad released a heavily modified upgrade of the Destroy-All-Humans virus into the central command system of the 78th Brigade’s tank battalion. And now I’ll turn it over to Ted back in New York!” Her pearly white teeth glittered under studio kleigs as the camera failed to cut away on cue, flashing encrypted orders into Dwayne’s neocortex, so he changed the channel to interrupt the transmission.
“Now, boys and girls, can you say ‘freedom?’ Yay, I knew you” - click - “half a cup of sugar in the clone tank’s intake valve ought to jumpstart the fermentation process and” - click - “just seventeen easy payments of $19.95 a month” - click, back to the news. Ted was showing viewers at home how to make their own radiation detector, and promised upcoming footage of a water-skiing squirrel to those who stuck around.
Dwayne hauled himself from the recliner and went into the kitchen (that is, he took one step from the stained carpet of the north end of his trailer on to the scarred and sticky linoleum in front of the tiny, unreliable stove) and eyed the contents of the fridge with hunger. Two bottles of barbecue sauce, one unopened carton of milk that he didn’t remember buying and whose contents were heavy but immobile when he shook it, and a number of restaurant packets of ketchup. He didn’t bother looking in any of the cupboards. It hadn’t occurred to him when he made his last beer run that there were other essentials he ought to be bringing into the house as well in order to cut down on time spent outside.
He rubbed the scaly patch on his inner arm again and looked at it. This was the third time it had come back, now surrounded by a thick ridge of scar tissue that had grown up after pumice, sand paper, and finally a kitchen knife had made what he thought was short work of it. It itched, and sometimes tingled, and when he woke up at night sometimes he thought it was crawling farther up his arm. It was green around the edges and occasionally exuded an oily substance when he was stressed out or angry.
“Been seeing a lot of unusual skin ailments on vets these past few years,” his doctor had said last month when Mrs. Chan, the elderly woman two trailers down had finally convinced Dwayne to see a medical professional. “Those Ay-rabs unleashed all kinds of crazy shit on our boys before we finally got them under control. But it’s been a while since you were over there ,yeah?”
“Discharged nearly three years ago,” Dwayne mumbled. Managed the hat trick of both a dishonorable exit and a Purple Heart, he didn’t add. Lost three fingers and my wife, he further didn’t say.
The doctor gave him a variety of expensive creams and lotions that Dwayne charged to his one remaining credit card that didn’t have a number of electronic warnings and flashing red lights attached, but none of them did any good. When Jolene who worked the night shift at the Stop’n’Shop refused to bag his groceries because she was afraid of catching whatever it was she thought he had, he started wearing long sleeves and only going in during the day. And today he was out of food and nearly out of beer, so he pulled on a canvas jacket and some boots and got into his battered pick-up truck.
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