Free Rant by Chuck Palahniuk

rounds. How all Catholics or Baptists had rabies.
    Shot Dunyun: My pug, Sandy, every day she’d sleep on my bed, her little head on the pillow next to my pillow. Like a little bulldozer, she’d plow her way under the covers, turn around by my feet, then push her way out until just her head was showing. Talk about personality. Sandy even snored like a little person. She knew “fetch” and “roll over” and “wait.”
    Galton Nye: Despite how much her mother and I tried to warn her, she rejected us. We tried to teach our little girl right from wrong. We begged her not to throw her life away on some silly teenager act of rebellion. We made it abundantly clear that day versus night was entirely a conscious lifestyle choice, but she wouldn’t hear a word of it.
    Neddy Nelson: Are you aware that, before his gruesome experiments on Auschwitz concentration-camp prisoners, Dr. Josef Mengele had been a well-respected anthropologist? Did you know Mengele had traveled through Africa, collecting human blood and viral samples? That his lifelong dream had been to identify factors that proved a difference between the blood of different races? Then to create a race-specific plague?
    Did you know that much of Mengele’s findings came to the United States as part of Project Paperclip, where the CIA granted pardons and gave new identities to Nazi scientists if they agreed to share Mengele’s research?
    Jayne Merris: To insult somebody, the worst thing you could say was “Don’t be such a Drooler.” Or “Don’t go all rabid on me.” Instead of holding outlaw, elite status, Nighttimer culture became an object of disdain. The way to dismiss anything was to say: “That is soooooo nighttime…”
    Galton Nye: Our little girl graduated the salutatorian of the Christian Pathways Academy. That means her grade-point average was second highest out of a class of almost forty students. She was a junior youth minister at our church, three years running, and she played varsity soccer her senior year, first string. Her mother and I hired a so-called private detective–this was the week after her running off. All the detective ever gave us for our money was a picture of her in some junky car with the boy, “Just Married” written in white under her window, and her wearing a veil and laughing. The boy had on a white shirt and bow tie. After all the dreams we had for giving our little girl a big church wedding, that picture broke her mother’s heart.
    The Bible says, “Weep you not for putrid refuse all the better lost.”
    Five thousand dollars for that one blurry picture, and all it bought us was heartbreak. At the least, we know that Nighttimer son-of-abitch finally married her.
    Shot Dunyun: I don’t give a shit what the song says, sometimes a kiss is not just a kiss. That’s for sure. My theory is that, every time a bat or skunk bit Rant, he’d by accident let the rabies go a little farther before he’d get treated. If he was trying or not, Rant hatched some bug that medical science couldn’t touch.
    Phoebe Truffeau, Ph.D. ( Epidemiologist): The only two untreatable rabies-type viruses were the African strains Mokola and Duvenhage, prior to the identification of the Rant serotype.
    Galton Nye: The Bible says, “…thus if poisoned be the child not of service beneath the parent.” You just keep that in mind.
    Neddy Nelson: Have you read that Kissinger report he’s supposed to have submitted to the National Security Council in 1974? The one where Henry Kissinger warns that the greatest threat to the future of Americans is overpopulation in Third World countries? How’s it go? We need the minerals and natural resources of Africa? Pretty quick now, those banana republics will fall apart as their populations rise too high? The only way America can protect its prosperity and political stability will be to depopulate the Third World?
    Should we be surprised that the AIDS virus showed up about 1975? Do you understand what the term