Fear and Loathing in the
The only thing that really worried me was the
ethereal.
It had flew onto the hood
of the car five miles and twenty minutes ago and loudly demanded drugs. It wanted a pillowcase full of drugs, and when I gave it one it had burrowed
into it like a psychotic puppy and came out the other side cackling and smeared
with a witch's brew of dangerous and illegal narcotics. You could see the cocaine and the crystal meth fighting each other on the broken landscape it called
a face.
It reminded me of my editor. Especially when it curled
up in the back seat and started muttering about deadlines. Put a worse suit on it and nobody would know
the difference.
My thoughts were interrupted in the middle of an
evil, twisted plan involving my editor, this replacement, a quart of tequila,
five
Traitor! I
turned and screamed at - what the hell!
When did I get a woman for a moral advisor! Where's my attorney? I reasonably asked her that one. "What did you do with my attorney! You shot
him, didn't you? Shot him in the head
and left him out for the bats and snakes."
She had a lovely face and it was the way that he would have wanted to
go, after all. "And now we're driving to the site so that you can get me,
too!"
I fumbled for my gun. Any gun. They must have been buried with my
attorney. Or maybe they were in the
trunk. I yelled for my editor to stop
giggling and open the God-damned trunk.
While he was ripping the lock off, I settled for snarling obscenities
and keeping my eyes on the road. This
was the battiest of bat countries, after all.
The bastards come when you least expect it,
little Luftwaffes of terror strafing innocent
journalists on their way to... I realized with a cold sweat that the drugs had
definitely kicked in; I couldn't remember where we were going. Have to hide that, before my moral advisor caught
on. If she was going to kill me and lay
me out next to my attorney, I didn't want to hear her lecture me first.
So we drove.
I turned on the radio; she turned it off. I adjusted the mirror to check on my editor;
she adjusted it back. I found a gun and
shot her; she didn't blink a hair as the gun didn't go off. So I shot her again; nothing. Cheap piece of junk; I threw it out the
window. It went off and managed to bring
down one of those damned bats. Landed right on the hood like a mutant figurehead. I grinned.
That'll put the Fear into the little bastards.
My editor finally pulled out the really big guns
from the trunk. My moral advisor
sighed. "Those won't work around
me."
"These are good guns! Expensive guns! They always work!"
"Can they aim and fire themselves?"
I kicked myself for not asking my friendly,
neighborhood arms dealer that very question before I guaranteed his
methamphetamine habit for the next ten years.
"No."
"Then they won't work."
That did it. This
country may have been endlessly circling the drain for the last forty years,
with a collection of grinning zombies in ties and good hair leading the charge
as they munched down on their followers' sheep brains and ask for more - and no
salt worries for them, no; they were all too stupid to realize that sea salt
should have put them back in their rotten graves, so they asked for seconds and
straightened their decaying ties - but our incestuous love-in with our guns
remained. This was
"This isn't
How did she hear that? Was she a telepathic moral advisor - that
would be worse than I thought. Could she see the sick and rotten
worm-thoughts that slithered in and out of my brain, scaring small children and
more cowardly dogs? I hated her, of course - I had hated her on sight - but I'm
not a vile man. The worms were too much
for anyone without my keen judgment in massive drug use to handle. And even I didn’t know their color. Or was I muttering aloud?
"I'm reading your mind. And
you're muttering aloud. And the worms
are blue."
Blue! Of
course! Good moral advisor; the blue worms could be fought with a simple
cocktail of Miller Lite, vodka and amyl nitrate. Luckily, I always carried that particular
witch's brew around my neck; you never knew.
The worms screamed as I drank it down; they knew when they were
licked. Oh, yes, they did.
My moral advisor could see that the screaming
mellowed me out. She looked at me. "Can we talk, now?"
I was willing to humor her, although I wanted to
know where she got the wings. "We
can talk."
"Good.
First, you're dead."
I didn't know how to handle that, so I looked
ahead. Come to think of it, this didn't
look like the
"Hunter.
Look at me." Her hand turned my head. Her eyes were cornflower blue. "You died. The gun went off. Now we have to figure out what to do with
you."
"Who the Hell is we?"
The light flashed about her and I realized that the
wings were really there. And the halo. And the
harp, and I saw that God really did have a bastard
sense of humor. After all of this, those
idiots with the crystals and the fluffy white heads were right after all. There were angels, and they looked insipid.
Except that this one had a certain something about
the eyes. "I can read your mind, remember?
Even if you weren't mumbling. I haven't enjoyed trying to keep you out of
trouble, and how I'm going to explain this to Mother... right, no whining. There's no whining in Flowers.
"It's like this. You died.
You somehow managed to connect yourself to this car and this road. You'll be driving on this road forever - with
the bats, I should add - until you decide to give it up and go where you're
supposed to."
I didn't want to believe her, but then I saw a
dinosaur herd, all with the face of Pat Boone, scamper across my rear view
mirror. I've been twisted enough to imagine that, but never enough to add the
pink tutus. I was Somewhere Else, that was certain.
I cagily assessed my assets. Drugs, a car, booze, guns, my editor, a dead
bat - I could use all of this, just as soon as I lost the angel. Of course, I didn't know what to use it for,
but like that psychotic Patton once said - shit, I never saw the movie. He probably said something about going in guns
blazing and shooting everything that moved or twitched; I'd go with that.
I looked around.
"So, we're in Hell?"
My moral advisor shook her head. "You never earned it." I was surprised that she didn't sound
surprised.
I looked around again, took in the bats and the road
and the writhing cacti. "So, this
is Heaven, then?"
She blinked.
"No. First, you didn't earn
that, either, and second..." she pointed up. "The stars are spelling out rude words. Do you think that we'd let that go on?"
Her logic was potent. "Not Heaven, not Hell, not Hell... where
are we?"
"The
I started to smile.
Then I remembered a dream or two that I once had, back when the drugs
were having a banshee convention in the lizard part of my brain, and I began to
shudder.
"Pretty much. I can't make you let go of this; you have to
choose to of your own free will. And if
you do, you'll either have to go back and try again - or you'll just fade
away. That's the hand that you've been
dealt; there aren't any other choices.
So, what do you want to do?"
I drove a while and looked at the desert. The sun would probably be coming up soon, or
whatever freaky substitute there was for a sun.
The cacti were singing, the wind was crying; it made you think.
On the one hand: this was a seriously fucked-up
place to hang your head. On the other: I
was here. I had looked old No-Nose in
the eye sockets, kicked him in the pelvis without warning and ran away with his
scythe. My editor was fiddling with it
now, in fact. I was ahead of the game,
and when you had previously looked at your favorite gun and think, Hell, maybe I'll luck out and just be able to quit
it all that's nothing to sneeze at.
Besides, as far as I could tell the massive amounts of drug ingesting
that my editor and I had done had no noticeable effect on the amount and extent
of our collection. If this wasn't
Heaven, it would do until we found a bathroom.
My moral advisor closed her eyes. "I wish I could say that I was
surprised. Fine. We'll be coming up to a town, soon. Well, sort of a town and sort of a mutual
hallucination."
"That's what a town is - and what's this 'we', angel?" Damn, I had bought into her head-trip. Even with the wings, that was sloppy of
me. Behind us, my editor cackled and
started to call ahead for rooms. Even in
the afterlife, you can't escape those damn cell phones.
"You're stuck with me for a while. Until you change your mind, whenever that
is. As your moral advisor I suggest that
you calm down about it and have another beer."
What kind of moral advisor counsels her charge to
indulge in the evils of ethyl alcohol?
"One that's dealt with
you for going on forty years. Now keep
your eyes on the road. This is bat
country."