Grasshopper Jungle (29 page)

It was not a good idea.

“Robby!” I screamed, but it was too late.

THE COMPOUND EYES
on an Unstoppable Soldier take up approximately three-fourths of his head.

Hungry Jack could see the entire world around him at all times, even when he was focused on getting to me and Ingrid, who were hiding inside Robby Brees's Ford Explorer.

The poor old car took a beating from Hungry Jack's tooth-spiked arms.

Hungry Jack's head swiveled entirely around when he detected the movement of Robby Brees outside the doorway to the Del Vista Arms.

Robby Brees was going to be easy prey.

Robby stood, frozen. I screamed for him to run, but Robby was not paying attention to me.

I realized I was going to sit there and watch my best friend get killed if I did not do something about it. I crawled up from the rear compartment and grabbed the latch on the rear passenger door. I was not even thinking at that moment about how Robby and I were going to die together.

All I knew is I had to do something for the person I loved.

I opened the door and screamed at Robby again.

Hungry Jack sprang down from the hood of the Explorer and landed squarely on his four rear feet. Hungry Jack was so close to Robby that his folded and spiked arms were practically touching Robby's shoulders.

Then Hungry Jack backed away from Robby. The monster butted up into the fender of Robby's Explorer without ever looking toward me or Ingrid again.

Hungry Jack ran,
clickety clickety
, down the street and disappeared into the night.

Unstoppable Soldiers could run at speeds exceeding forty miles per hour.

Hungry Jack was afraid of Robby Brees.

I had seen it before. The first night—when Hungry Jack hatched out in that cornfield across from the
Tally-Ho!
—he did the same thing. He ran away from Robby Brees.

It was because Robby Brees was God to the Unstoppable Soldiers.

We found this out later.

“Holy shit,” I said.

“Uh,” Robby said.

Robby Brees had still not moved from the spot I thought he was going to die in.

“Holy shit, Rob.”

I grabbed Robby and hugged him. We stood there on the street holding each other. Ingrid curled her body around our legs, wagging her tail.

Above us, Ollie Jungfrau looked down from his window. He had regained his composure, but was still standing, soaked, in a puddle of his own piss.

Ollie Jungfrau said, “I might have known little Dynamo was a queer, too. Dumb stupid lucky queer kids.”

Robby and I had to get out of there.

Robby Brees and I had shit to do, and monsters to kill.

ROBBY SPED ALL
the way to Grasshopper Jungle.

It turned out the things Robby wanted to get from his apartment at the Del Vista Arms were these: some clean underwear and socks, his toothpaste, the plastic lawn flamingo with the steel spike coming out of its ass, and the grimacing lemur mask.

“I should have gotten some underwear, too,” I said. “What if we end up having to
stay
down there?”

“I don't know, Austin,” Robby said.

“Neither do I,” I agreed.

Nobody knew anything about what we should do.

It was why we needed to get those last two reels of film from the roof of Grasshopper Jungle.

Dr. Grady McKeon
told
us to get those films.

We had to get the films and go back to Eden. Robby and I both knew that it was not too late, that the infestation was still in its first stage. We still had time, and Dr. Grady McKeon said there would be instructions for what to do on the last reels of the
Eden Orientation Series
.

Maybe Robby and I could stop the Unstoppable Soldiers.

Maybe Shann Collins would forgive me.

Maybe that plastic flamingo would start shitting candy bars and vanilla ice cream out of its ass, too.

When Robby rounded the turn onto Kimber Drive, his phone chimed.

It was a text message from Shann Collins.

Shann's text message to Robby Brees said this:

I hate you.

Robby glanced at the message on the screen of his phone. I watched him. He did not show any reaction at all. Robby knew it was not a joke message, though. Then he handed his phone over to me so I could see what Shann had written, too.

“I had a feeling you told her about me and you,” Robby said.

I said, “I never lie, Rob. Shann asked me about it. I don't know what I am going to do.”

Robby sighed.

I answered Shann's text message using Robby's phone:

Shann, it is me, Austin. Please do not make this about Robby. I love you both too much. Can we talk?

Shann's answer came to my phone:

You are disgusting. I hate you both.

Robby pulled the Explorer into the alley at Grasshopper Jungle.

If we had gone around to the front of the mall, we might have seen the mess Travis Pope had made at
The Pancake House
.

Robby and I had no idea what had been going on at Grasshopper Jungle.

He eased the Explorer along the back of the mall and parked beneath the metal ladder that came down from the roof behind
From Attic to Seller Consignment Store
.

Robby and I left Ingrid inside the car and climbed up onto the roof racks of the Explorer. From there, it was an easy reach to the bottom of the ladder.

“Um,” Robby said, “that creature-thing really messed the shit out of my car.”

“Sorry, Rob,” I said. “We might as well call them what they are: Unstoppable Soldiers, created from the sicko brains at McKeon Industries who thought it was a good idea to mix bug sperm and blood with anything that happened to show up in their petri dish.”

“Who would think it
wasn't
a good idea to mix bug sperm and blood with shit?” Robby said.

I said, “Uh.”

Robby said, “I wonder what a can of bug spray would do to them.”

“Uh,” I said. “I think Eden One Thirty-Three and Eden Five better get their butts onto the roof and find the rest of that movie.”

“I
do
hate stopping a film right in the middle,” Eden 133 said. “Just when it was getting good.”

Actually, we stopped the film just when my grandfather, Felek Andrzej Szczerba, became McKeon Industries's first Unstoppable Soldier.

We climbed up onto the roof of the Ealing Mall.

Johnny McKeon was hiding inside, just waiting for somebody to respond to his emergency alarm. Johnny McKeon was also going through the stock of handguns he had on display in the glass case at
From Attic to Seller Consignment Store.

Johnny McKeon had a lot of guns for sale.

Robby and I had no way of knowing Johnny McKeon was directly below our feet.

“Smoke?” I said.

“Fags,” Robby agreed.

“I guess so,” I said.

We lit up.

The steel film canisters were right where we had left them. I bent down and picked up both canisters. What we hadn't noticed the first time we were up on the roof became strikingly obvious now. The film cans were wrapped with tape and marked with a thick black pen: Four of Five, and Five of Five.

Robby said, “Can I ask you something, Austin?”

I said, “Sure.”

“Was it hard for you to tell Shann the truth?” Robby asked.

I shook my head.

“No,” I said.

It was the truth.

“Oh.” Robby said, “And you really don't know what you're going to do?”

I took a drag and exhaled.

“No,” I said. “I think I should just leave you both alone before I ruin everyone's life.”

“You wouldn't ruin my life,” Robby said.

“I don't want to hurt you or Shann, Rob,” I said.

I
was
ruining Robby's and Shann's lives, even if Robby told me I wasn't.

I was disgusted with myself.

We threw our cigarette butts down and stamped them out on the grit of the roof.

A police siren wailed. We could see the pulse of red lights coming closer through the night toward Kimber Drive.

“Do you think someone saw us come up the ladder?” Robby said.

“I don't know,” I answered. “We should get out of here before we get arrested, or shit like that.”

JOHNNY MCKEON TURNED
off all the lights.

He was inside
From Attic to Seller Consignment Store
, waiting for the coyote cry of the Iowa State Patrol car that had been dispatched from Waterloo.

The State Patrol was responding to an emergency alarm Johnny McKeon rang when he saw Hungry Jack and the other Unstoppable Soldiers in the alley at Grasshopper Jungle.

There was only one bored trooper in the patrol car. He sat behind the wheel. He was bored because he was coming to Ealing. Nothing ever happened in Ealing, and he figured it was going to be another pile of Ealing nothing crap from a false alarm at an abandoned business in a loser town.

Ealing, Iowa, was the elephants' graveyard for American entrepreneurism.

The trooper was named Denny Drayton.

It was a good Iowa name.

Denny Drayton's skin was nearly translucent white, the sickly color of the coconut center in a Mounds bar. He had absolutely no hair.

Denny Drayton needed to take a shit. He hoped wherever he was heading to had a shitter that worked, and toilet paper, too. Denny Drayton carried a pack of baby wipes in his patrol car for emergencies, like when he'd pull off to the side of the road and shit in someone's yard.

The baby wipes in Denny Drayton's patrol car were made in a place called Eden Prairie, Minnesota.

That is the truth.

Denny Drayton chewed tobacco while he was on patrol. He held a plastic liter Diet Coke bottle between his thighs as he drove. The Diet Coke bottle was three-fourths full of hot tobacco spit. Iowa State Troopers were not supposed to chew tobacco on the job, but Denny Drayton had a motto for just about every situation he encountered.

His motto was this:
Fuck that shit. I have a gun, motherfucker.

Denny Drayton's motto was tattooed in an arc of Old English lettering that made a semicircle like a rising sun over his white and hairless belly button.

Fuck that shit. I have a gun, motherfucker.

Denny Drayton shaved his entire body every morning. He shaved all his hair off, even his eyebrows and pubic hair.

Trooper Drayton also had a tattoo of the flag for the Confederate States of America. The stars and bars flag was tattooed directly on the front of Denny Drayton's hairless scrotum.

Denny Drayton was most likely insane.

Denny liked to show off his hairless body and the tattoos of his motto and the Confederate flag in the shower room at the police station in Waterloo. Denny Drayton told his police officer friends that he got the tattoo of his motto for reading material, just in case he ever hooked up with a bitch who was smart enough to read
and
give blow jobs at the same time.

Denny Drayton had one joke, and that was it.

It wasn't a particularly good joke, and everyone knew it. But Denny Drayton had a gun, motherfucker.

The six-foot-tall praying mantis beast that used to be named Travis Pope lumbered out of
The Pancake House
on his four clicking lower legs. He was a little groggy. Will Wallace had been exceedingly drunk, and Unstoppable Soldiers are sensitive to eating drunk people and people who smoke meth and shit like that.

Travis Pope only wanted to find the swarm and go dormant with them overnight.

Denny Drayton was just pulling into the parking lot.

Johnny McKeon noticed the flashing red lights through the glass front of his secondhand store. Johnny McKeon had a gun—a Smith & Wesson .500 magnum.

The gun weighed six pounds.

A Smith & Wesson .500 magnum could blow a man's head off.

Pastor Roland Duff saw the lights on Trooper Denny Drayton's patrol car, too. Roland Duff had come back from Waterloo, where he had met a nice Christian man at the
Tally-Ho!

Roland Duff sat alone inside
Satan's Pizza
. He was eating a small
Stanpreme
. Roland Duff was exchanging text messages with his new friend. Roland Duff was very excited. He had an erection. Pastor Roland Duff and his new friend were flirting suggestively, and arranging a date for Saturday evening.

Roland Duff's new friend was named Shaun Doherty.

Shaun Doherty owned a septic pumping business. He lived in a town called West Bazine, which was in Iowa. East Bazine did not exist at all.

Shaun Doherty and Pastor Roland Duff planned on meeting at the Waterloo
Cinezaar
on Saturday evening.

They were going to see
Eden Five Needs You 4
.

That was the plan, at least.

Denny Drayton turned his spotlight onto the dark front of
The Pancake House
. His keen sense of Iowan normalcy alerted Denny Drayton that something was not right. Windows were shattered, the front door had been torn from its hinges, and it looked like there were some bloody shoes and a belt lying on the sidewalk in front of the mall.

“Something's not right here,” Denny Drayton said.

Denny Drayton spit into his Coke bottle and pinched another wad of black, moist tobacco from a can of Copenhagen he kept pinned behind the patrol car's sun visor.

He farted. Denny Drayton admired the smell of his own farts.

“I really need to take a shit,” Denny Drayton said.

Then the Iowa trooper saw Travis Pope, an Unstoppable Soldier, moving with mechanical jerkiness through the debris field of blood, glass, clothing, and imitation-maple-flavored pancake syrup.

Denny Drayton opened the door on his patrol car. He spit onto the asphalt of the Ealing Mall's parking lot and then stood up, angling his spotlight so it would fully illuminate the strange creature in front of
The Pancake House
.