Free Slag Attack by Andersen Prunty Page B

arms are off of her and reaching for his wounded head. She stands up, continuing to clutch the knife, and begins hopping toward the door. He drags himself through his expanding pool of blood and slags, almost catching her, snarling, “Stop sayin those stupid fuckin names!”
        Crossing the threshold, she clasps the large handle of the iron door and, looking down at him, shouts a little rhyme she has worked on in the madness of her confines, “Vincent Severity isn’t so severe. With both his eyes gone he’s really quite dear!” before slamming the door and searching the house for the keys to the cuffs.
       
    11.
       
    She finds the keys. They’re hanging right next to the front door. If she hadn’t become so used to doing things with her hands behind her back, she never would have been able to get them unlocked. It’s painful. The cuffs dig into the flesh of her arms but she’s lost so much weight that she’s able to slide them up, manipulate them so she can fit the key into the hole and slowly turn. She rummages in his closet for some clothes. She thinks about looking for some gas to burn his whole fucking house down. But when she thinks about the slags slowly consuming him, she realizes she likes that idea better. She takes the keys to the El Camino and walks outside.
        She has the desire to shout a name but she quickly realizes there isn’t a name in the world that can undo this kind of damage. The plague gods have found her but, miraculously, she feels like she is not infected.
        She climbs in the car and starts toward Hollow City. Past the destroyed and burning buildings. The trees stripped bare. The mounds of burning dead piled up outside of towns. Past all of this.
        On her way to Hollow City.
       

 
    Corpse Mountain
       
    1.
       
    Two men sit in an El Camino and watch Reverend Hacksaw set fire to the Baptist church. The El Camino is nearly totaled. It came barreling into their trailer about three days ago. The woman driving it was dead. Hence, the accident. It still ran okay and they decided it was theirs. They didn’t figure there would be much in the way of an insurance settlement and thought they needed some form of repayment.
        The dead woman is still in the car.
       “ What do you think he’s doing?” Rambo asks.
       “ Fuck if I know,” Cobra says.
       
    2.
       
    Until a week ago they had been John and Larry. Larry said, “Fuck it. If God is dead then I don’t need to use my God given name anymore.”
       “ What should we call you now?”
       “ Rambo.”
       “ Fuck yeah. Call me Cobra.”
        They toasted over goblets of gasoline and went to see how Will was doing with the robots. Will became Commando. Commando thought he knew two things. One: drinking out of goblets was medieval and badass. Two: Robots could save the world.
       
    3.
       
    “ That’s a fuck ton of gasoline that guy with hair is using,” Cobra says.
        Rambo says, “Yep, he’s got gasoline and legs.”
        It’s a pointless observation. The church is really burning now. The Reverend says something about building a mountain to God and throws himself into the fire.
        Rambo forgets where he is, forgets what he’s watching, and chalks it up to the gasoline intake or maybe thinks he has a slag stuck somewhere in his head.
        The sky is blue.
        The smoke is black and covering it up.
        Cobra has two eyes and a unibrow and for a second Rambo wants to punch him in the face to make the unibrow separate in two.
       “ Smells like burning,” he says.
        Cobra coughs and asks if he wants to go to the refrigerator graveyard and see if Commando’s there.
        Rambo can’t remember where the refrigerator graveyard is but says okay and that he thinks the El Camino is sick and he’s pretty sure there’s a dead woman filled with slags in the bed of it.
        Cobra tells him the world is mostly water and evil