Grasshopper Jungle (31 page)

Robby Brees put his hand on the armrest, so he was touching me.

The final two reels of film in
Eden Orientation Series
contained some of the most horrible things either one of us had ever seen.

We lit cigarettes and watched.

This is what we found out:

McKeon Industries worked frantically toward the development of Unstoppable Weapons and Unstoppable Soldiers during the second half of the 1960s.

McKeon Industries wanted to make Unstoppable Anything. They would have made Unstoppable Cup-O-Noodles if they could. The scientists who worked for Dr. Grady McKeon didn't seem to be overly concerned about consequences, like how to stop shit once they made it
unstoppable
, and shit like that.

Reel Four of
Eden Orientation Series
opened with a headshot of the insane Dr. Grady McKeon himself. Dr. Grady McKeon sat behind his mahogany desk in what was called Eden's Brain Room, wearing a thin white, V-neck T-shirt.

“I'll bet you anything he wasn't wearing any pants when they filmed that,” Robby said.

I had been thinking exactly the same thing.

Dr. Grady McKeon rambled on about his projects, and bragged about corn and the dissolved balls of Maoist thugs, while he smoked a cigarette and his eye twitched like a strand of Christmas tree tinsel during a springtime Iowa thunderstorm.

Robby Brees and I found the Brain Room later that night.

Dr. Grady McKeon licked his lips and began:

Ah. My friends. Tell me, are you breeding?

Are you? Hmmm?

Breed, my friends. Breed and love. You are the New Humans.

It's a lovely place, our Eden, don't you agree?

Robby said, “Thinking about that guy kind of has a damping effect on the drive to conjugate.”

I said, “Uh.”

McKeon Industries experimented with several methods for creating an Unstoppable Soldier.

Dr. Grady McKeon's Human Replication Unit actually grew human body parts that floated in polymer suspensions. The polymer suspensions created their own electrical charges, like jellied batteries. This was where the praying hands, the penis, and the little two-headed boy came from. They were all created from Dr. Grady McKeon's own tissue samples.

So each jar actually
was
Dr. Grady McKeon,
more or less
.

Apparently, all of the things inside the jars filled with electrical polymers were
more or less alive
, too, according to Dr. Grady McKeon.

More or less.

Johnny McKeon didn't know anything about the somewhat-living penis, hands, and baby boy he'd been keeping inside his office at
From Attic to Seller Consignment Store.

Dr. Grady McKeon had been a sick monster.

“Well, he did develop a most soothing showerhead,” Robby pointed out.

“I will give him that. There is nothing quite like showering beneath a Pulse-O-Matic
®
showerhead,” I agreed.

I could not help but feel sad about the poor little boy with two heads. I really
did
see his hand move that day when I was alone inside Johnny McKeon's office. The two-headed boy had been imprisoned within that glass container,
more or less alive
, for over forty years.

But the man's head in the jar came from something else entirely.

We found out about that in Reel Five.

The Human Replication Unit
at McKeon Industries also collected and experimented with sperm. Dr. Grady McKeon had no apparent difficulty obtaining sperm samples from very powerful and important American men. Dr. Grady McKeon's power sperm had been frozen and stored in a cryogenic vault inside Eden's Brain Room.

It was exactly like
Eden Five
.

On the door of the freezer vault were framed photographs of men, including President Richard Nixon, Vice President Spiro Agnew, the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, whose real name was Richard Helms, and, of course, Dr. Grady McKeon.

Each of them had donated multiple samples of their Unstoppable Sperm.

The Unstoppable Sperm was intended as the beginning of a New Universe.

Robby said, “Um.”

I said, “This place really
is
full of sperm, Robby.”

Dr. Grady McKeon explained that the vault full of Unstoppable Sperm was a precaution. What if, he postulated, only women managed to escape to the Eden Project, or if there was a depletion of desirability among male breeders? Dr. Grady McKeon confidently answered his hypothetical question: Unstoppable Sperm would become the genetic seed bank for the New Universe.

It was most likely something that Dr. Grady McKeon had intended all along.

Much later, in conducting further analysis inside the Brain Room, and through reading Dr. Grady McKeon's barely legible and ranting diaries, I did discover that in 1975, McKeon thawed out the sperm from CIA Director Richard Helms, President Richard Nixon, and Vice President Spiro Agnew.

Dr. Grady McKeon discarded that sperm unceremoniously into his prized
Nightingale Urinal
.

Dr. Grady McKeon replaced the Unstoppable Sperm with his own.

The Brain Room was pretty much full of Dr. Grady McKeon's sperm.

From the Unstoppable Sperm experiments, Reel Four jumped across the McKeon Industries Complex to the Unstoppable Corn Unit, where a series of catastrophic accidents of nature sprang up like milkweed in well-watered fields of Iowa corn.

HERE WAS REEL FIVE:

Felek Szczerba was the first Unstoppable Soldier.

The end of the world began in Ealing, Iowa, in 1968. Nobody knew anything about it. The scientists at McKeon Industries were crazy and drunk on money. Dr. Grady McKeon would have done anything to be the man responsible for creating an unstoppable force in the universe.

He nearly got away with it, too.

Initially, there were five people infected by Dr. Grady McKeon's
412E
: three scientists and two secretaries. The five victims made a mess of McKeon Industries in 1968.

They were Unstoppable Soldiers. All they wanted to do was fuck and eat.

Because McKeon Industries maintained such extreme levels of security during the Cold War, the Unstoppable Soldiers that had been accidentally created there never got a chance to step outside into the Iowa daylight. If they had ever gotten outside, the world would have certainly come to an end, and there would have been a new apex species in charge of Planet Earth—one that wanted only to fuck and eat.

Besides fucking and eating, a few of us human beings are driven to paint on the walls of caves. Other than that, and the fact that we die relatively easily when you shoot at us, I think human beings are very much like Dr. Grady McKeon's Unstoppable Soldiers.

INFINITA MILITES! INFINITA MILITES!

Despite images of all the dead people inside the lab building, the destruction of an entire research wing of the facility, and shit like that, Dr. Grady McKeon's voice had a gleeful chime to it as he narrated over grainy black-and-white surveillance footage of the beasts, while cameras caught them unreservedly engaged in the two things that Unstoppable Soldiers like to do.

There were several unfortunate clips of the Unstoppable Soldiers eating a few of their co-workers, but what can you do?

It was all in the name of science and anti-Communism.

A commercial had been spliced directly into the middle of Reel Five. The commercial was a sales pitch to the Defense Department for McKeon Industries's Unstoppable Soldiers. It suggested exposing prison inmates, the unemployed, welfare recipients, and hippies to
412E
, and then dropping them off in sunny Havana, or possibly deep inside Red China.

Bulletproof, tireless machines of conquest. McKeon Industries presents to the world our Unstoppable Soldiers!

The commercial footage kept replaying the image of Felek Szczerba in the process of hatching out.

As soon as an Unstoppable Soldier hatches out, he is a bit puffy and wilted, kind of like a butterfly when it sheds the husk of its chrysalis. But as soon as the Unstoppable Soldier ate what remained of Felek Szczerba's corpse, it also ate two attending nurses and a physician.

All of this was captured on camera.

Bulletproof, tireless machines of conquest. McKeon Industries presents to the world our Unstoppable Soldiers!

The Unstoppable Soldier that hatched out of Felek Szczerba ate the cameraman, too.

Apparently, the scientists at McKeon Industries did not have any ideas for what to do about the Unstoppable Soldiers that had taken over their Unstoppable Corn Research Unit. They only knew that they wanted to sell the Unstoppable Soldiers, and that they were unsuccessful at shooting them. So the leaders of McKeon Industries did the worst possible thing you could do with an Unstoppable Soldier infestation: They waited to see if the Unstoppable Soldiers would simply die, or go away on their own.

Unstoppable Soldiers do not just go away.

Unstoppable Soldiers can live a very long time between meals.

McKeon Industries eventually learned these two details. Unfortunately for an entire crew of McKeon Industries scientists, they also learned that Unstoppable Soldiers were bulletproof.

Dr. Grady McKeon narrated:

In the spring of 1968, tireless scientists at McKeon Labs kept round-the-clock vigil on our formidable troops, observing carefully while the burgeoning females deposited egg masses as large as a high school basketball court!

Imagine the reproductive and growth potential of such an army, my friends!

Robby said, “Uh. Those egg things look exactly like the shit inside the globes.”

He was right.

The third stage in the infestation of Unstoppable Soldiers—the breeding and egg-laying phase—reverted back in appearance to the original black-pulsing and cauliflowered mass of the
412E
mold; but on a much grander scale.

Like the contained mold specimen Robby and I first saw inside Johnny McKeon's office the night we climbed down the Roof Access
ladder and
into
From Attic to Seller Consignment Store
, the egg masses laid by the two female Unstoppable Soldiers quivered and writhed, radiating an obviously powerful light.

The egg masses swelled with small volcanic bulges that would rise up and spit globules of snot-like eruptions, only to be reabsorbed into the pulsating blob. And the female Unstoppable Soldiers never moved from their guardian positions over their rookeries. They stayed with their spiked arms spring-loaded, just waiting for anything to get near enough to become a next meal.

Dr. Grady McKeon appeared once again in the role of on-screen narrator before the end of Reel Five.

Dr. Grady McKeon had aged considerably between the filming of the first reels and the reel that showed the siege of the Unstoppable Soldiers. His hair was thinner, and behind the thick distortion of Dr. Grady McKeon's eyeglasses, his eye twitch fired and fired like an inexhaustible machine pistol.

Dr. Grady McKeon said:

It was merely by blind chance, my friends, that we at McKeon Industries ultimately discovered the secret to demobilizing our Unstoppable Soldiers. Pay attention, my friends, for you may be able to affect a similar salvation if the conditions are favorable in your situation.

If not, then take heart. Enjoy your lives here in Eden. And, by all means breed, my friends. Breed and live in love. The New Universe depends on your success.

I love you. I do love you all.

Then Grady McKeon began to weep on camera.

Robby said, “He is fucking insane.”

“Uh,” I said. “Let's have another cigarette.”

Scientists at the lab dared to enter the sealed-off Unstoppable Corn Unit where the eggs had been laid. The McKeon Industries scientists formed an armed phalanx in their Eden jumpsuits. Dr. Grady McKeon himself led the entry of the scientist army into the secure laboratory.

Dr. Grady McKeon and his scientists were armed with flamethrowers.

History provides a compelling argument that every scientist who tinkers around with unstoppable shit needs a reliable flamethrower.

When Dr. Grady McKeon entered the lab, however, the Unstoppable Soldiers reacted to him in exactly the same manner I had seen Hungry Jack respond to Robby: The Unstoppable Soldiers were afraid of Dr. Grady McKeon.

They tried to get away from him.

Dr. Grady McKeon was clearly the God of Unstoppable Soldiers.

So McKeon Industries reasoned that since Dr. Grady McKeon had brought the Unstoppable Soldiers into being, it was he that could erase their existence as well.

So they
experimented
.

The notable characteristics of McKeon Industries experimentation entailed two prominent features: First, scientists working alongside Dr. Grady McKeon seemed to have no logical expectation for any particular outcome. They simply randomly selected any convenient biological agents and threw them into the paint cans of their soup kettle.