A Rage for Revenge

28 Inferno and Brainstorm

After a while, I got up. I walked down to the far end of the hangar and found a Jeep. I powered it up and began driving slowly up and down the aisles, loading it with supplies.

I issued myself a new uniform, new underwear, a new helmet. I gave myself a new torch, a set of grenades and a launcher, three AM-280's and a case of ammunition. I took three weeks' worth of food, a first-aid kit, three canteens, and two gallons of distilled water. It was Christmas. New binoculars.

New dog tags. New ID's. I stopped at the security console and invented six new identities. All the way from Lieutenant to General. I doubted I'd ever use the General, but it would be nice for clearances. I gave myself clearances. I wondered how much of this stuff would actually work. I made a new set of ID's for Duke, but with my picture. There were a lot of valuable things I'd learned in Special Forces.

I had to get out of here quickly. There would be a recon team dropping in here any minute.

I looked through the security cameras: There were no choppers around. No trucks. No worms.

I opened the ramp and drove like hell.

I drove in the opposite direction of Jason and his goddamned Revelationists, and the tears began streaming down my face.

I was confused, I didn't know what to believe and I hated the entire human race!

I wanted to be safe again. I wanted to go home. And there was no safe place, no place on the planet. I was dead. I might as well be.

I wanted my mind to stop chattering in my head. I wanted absolution.

Finally, I drove the Jeep into someone's living room, crashing through the picture window, taking out half a wall and crunching furniture on both sides.

I fell out of the Jeep onto the torn-up carpet and sobbed into the floor. Why was I so crazy? Why was I crying? Jason was right. Jason was wrong. I was crazy.

I pried open the medical kit and hypoed myself into insensitivity.

I did that for three days, I kept myself sedated and zombied. I hardly moved. I lay in my sleeping bag and shivered and wept and trembled in fear. I knew they had followed me. I knew they were looking for me. I knew they would find me. I knew I was dead.

I forced myself to eat. I turned on the radio and listened to the news. The election returns were coming in slow, but the president was going to be reelected. There'd been a satellite receiving station failure. No details. The army had wiped out a major infestation of renegades in California. The red sludge had reached the coast of Virginia. The puffball clouds in Texas were easing up, but local air traffic would not be resumed for at least a week. The Zimmerman child had been found alive.

I listened to music. Beethoven. The fifth symphony. The sixth. The seventh. Brahms. The first symphony. Mozart. A Little Night Music. Dvorak. The New World Symphony. Bach. Toccata and Fugue in D minor. All the familiar pieces that would bring me back. '

I tutned on the TV and watched I Love Lucy reruns. I remembered the episodes as if I'd never seen them before. "I know this one . . ." And then I'd watch to see how it turned out. I forced myself to wallow in the world I'd rejected.

I powered up the terminal. There were games here. Inferno and Brainstorm. I knew these games. My father had written them. You couldn't lose in Inferno-because you had already lost. The game started when you died and went to hell. You had to find your way out. It was filled with devilish traps.

Brainstorm took place inside the human brain. You had to find the room with the secrets of the mind. There was a key here; you could use it to unlock the monsters from the id. It had been a game filled with old jokes and startling surprises. My dad's games were usually very serious, but this one had been written for outright silliness. If you weren't careful in your choices, the program gave you a prefrontal lobotomy, and then all the judgment circuits switched off. The program wouldn't give you any help at all in your decision making.

I sat before the terminal, shaking.

Nobody would give me any help in my decision making any more.

Not my father, he was dead.

What was it Jason had said? Oh, yeah. Help diminishes a person. It rips them off of the opportunity to grow. You have to handle it yourself.

I was truly alone.

And here was the question that Jason had left me with: What was my life about?

Killing worms.

Except-what if worms weren't a threat any more?

It was only that we insisted on seeing them as a threat. But-that's not true, Jason. I'm not making the worms a threat. They are a threat. They eat people. You, yourself, said it, Jason. We are their food.

And I don't fucking want to be food.

There is only one law in biology. It is the fundamental law. Survive!

If you don't survive, you can't do anything.

Goddamn you, Jason Delandro-what did you do to me? How do I deprogram myself from your madness?

I climbed back into my sleeping bag. I masturbated myself into unconsciousness. I awoke and ate and cried for no reason at all. I stayed there in that ruined house waiting for it to be over, waiting for Santa Claus, waiting for rigor mortis

I was tired of waiting.

I thought about killing myself.

No. Not until after I put a bullet through the brain of Jason Delandro.

That was what my life was about. No.

I didn't know. It didn't matter. The Chtorrans were going to take over the planet anyway. Gizzard.

That was the rhyme I was looking for.

There once was a lady named Lizard,

who got lost in a pink candy blizzard, with a fellow named Jim

who wanted to swim,

up her legs to visit her gizzard.

It wasn't a good one, but it was a start.

I never had found a rhyme for Jason. That was what had stopped me. If I could find a rhyme for Jason, I'd be free. He wouldn't be in my head any more. I could put him dawn on the paper and rip up the paper and burn the pieces, and put the ashes in a jar and seal the jar and put the jar in a lead box, and seal the box in concrete and drop it down to the bottom of the ocean where an undersea volcano will swallow it up, and if that isn't enough, I'll have a comet strike the goddamn planet to obliterate the last trace of that scumbag son of a bitch

Comet. Vomit. Not the best rhyme, no.

There was a young fellow named Ted,

who had a radio put in his head.

Long wave or short,

he did it for sport

- and to improve his reception in bed.

Okay. But what rhymes with Jason? Basin? Maybe.

There was a young lady from Venus,

whose body was shaped like a penis.

A fellow named Hunt

was shaped like a cunt,

so it all worked out fine, just between us.

It made no sense at all, but I loved it. It rhymed and it was filthy as hell. I wanted to stand up in church and recite it aloud. Nascent? No, bad rhyme, and too obscure.

Jase?

Trace. Face. Place. Disgrace.

He said, with a trace

of the stuff on his face,

No, not the internal couplet. And not Jase. It would have to be Jason.

Disgracin'? No.

The problem gnawed at the back of my brain. I could hear a thousand little voices scrabbling around for answers; but I had ta solve this one myself to be free.

There was an old bastard named Gene,

impotent, selfish, and mean.

His dick was so shamed

by what the man claimed,

it pretended that it was a spleen.

That one was easy.

Probably because I didn't know anyone named Gene. Jason.

There once was a fellow named Jason,

whose horrible death I would hasten.

That was it.

Jason had left me incomplete.

No. I had let myself be incomplete with Jason. Incomplete-meaning there's stuff you haven't said. You need to say it to be complete; but you haven't said it, so you're walking around carrying all this stuff you haven't said and need to say-and you're going to say it to the first person you meet who looks like Jason. Heaven help them.

So what did I want to say to Jason anyway? Fuck you?

It was a start.

No. I knew what I wanted to say.

I'd say, "I don't like being cheated and robbed and manipulated and lied to."

But Jason wouldn't see it that way. He'd just see it that I'd betrayed him. He wouldn't see it from my side. He wouldn't see it the way I'd experienced it.

"Fuck you," would have to do.

Except he wouldn't squirm. He'd see it as an honor. I wondered how the worms would feel about it.

That made me smile. Then it made me laugh. Out loud.

That would be the ultimate irony-if everything Jason said about the worms was bullshit.

What if Jason was wrong? What if the worms didn't care? What if he was just one more piece of food-but useful food because he kept the rest of the food from running away.

Ha ha. Oh God.

With a French lass, it's unwise to trifle.

They have urges they simply can't stifle.

A woman of France

will pull down her pants

at the sight of a towering eye full.

I didn't know where it was coming from; once it got started, I couldn't stop-but I didn't care.

I'd write them and I'd laugh and feel pleased with myself. It was so satisfying to be able to do something that didn't have to mean anything at all.

The rest of the world could go to hell.

"My God!" screamed devout Mrs. Pike,

as she fondled her stableman's spike.

"This is quite out of place,

and a great loss of face

- but I think I have fallen in like!"

I'd feed him to worms,

just to see how he squirms

but they'd vomit his crap in a basin.

I made up my mind. I will never be food again. I took long thoughtful baths.

I masturbated and thought of Lizard.

I left the TV to babble about shuttle launchings and lunar ecology projects. I turned on all the machines in the house and surrounded myself with music and words and pictures and smells. I went from one house to the next, all of them abandoned, looting through the shelves for discs and tapes and books and games.

I got angry. I got afraid. I cried.

I screamed. I did a lot of screaming.

I slept and ate and shivered and after a while I didn't cry as much, and I didn't rage as hard, and one day I even found myself laughing at something somebody said on the TV because it was silly and stupid and funny, and I marveled at myself.

A well-endowed fellow from Ortening

prepared for an evening of sportening,

with a boy from a disco,

till he lubed up with Crisco,

and discovered, alas, it was shortening!

I was learning how to be ordinary again. I felt terrific. I could be ordinary!

And then I felt sad again for a while, I didn't know why. But now I knew what was happening. I was getting better. Something bobbed up to the surface of my mind. Something I'd heard about the Revelationists, from way back before the first plagues appeared in Africa and India. Somebody had left a Revelationist tribe and written a book about his experiences. He'd said that he'd lived at such an intense, incredible peak of emotional activity, day after day after day, that when he was finally free of that kind of continual stimulus, he went into a profound physical and mental depression.

That was what was happening to me now. It was all right. It was part of the process.

When I finished being depressed, I would be me again. Whoever that was.

But at least, now that I knew what was happening, I could begin to be really responsible for myself again.

I walked outside for the first time in days. The sky was drizzly. Cold droplets spattered into my eyes. It was beautiful. For the first time in months, water rolled down my cheeks that didn't have salt in it.