It was hot, so very damn hot. The heat seemed to come not from the sun but out of the earth itself. Dust hung suspended in the air like talcum, making breathing difficult. The moan of the didgeridoo was a pounding in his temples.
A March fly landed on his arm, and he smashed it before it could bite. It spiraled indifferently to the ground, as though its death didn’t matter even to itself.
As he fumbled with the door handle of the car he stared wide-eyed at the road, brand new but crumbling, unable to resist something he could not fathom, could not analyze. It ran north through the fringes of the Outback, a feeble lifeline stretching from the cities of the south toward the hostile tropics. Stretched too thin?
Bad place for a road, he decided. The problem was simple enough. It wasn’t wanted here. The country, the land, didn’t want it. Yet as he was wont to do, man persisted in trying to defy the obvious, to bend to his will a part of nature too ancient to know it had no choice in the matter.
A growling sound made him whirl, but it was only a truck coming toward him. A dozen men rode in the open bed. As it slowed to pull over, several of them eyed him knowingly.
“Car trouble, mate?” one of them asked.
“No,” Harbison replied slowly. He gestured. “There’s something wrong with the road here. There shouldn’t be.”
Several of the crew exchanged glances. One of them smiled down at him. “Don’t worry, mate. She’ll be right. You worry too much, I think.” He squinted at the silent, suggestive gum forest through the beige-tinted heat. “Can’t worry too much out here. Gets to ya.”
“Not a good place to be standin’ about alone,” the man next to him said. “Hang about too long and a bloke’s liable to go troppo. Start seein’ things, know what I mean? This ain’t Bondi Beach.” His tone was sympathetic, understanding. “Care to join us in a beer?”
A new image filled Harbison’s brain, shoving aside the cloying, suffocating silence that pressed tight around the intruding road. A cool dark room surrounded by thick walls that shut out the oppressive heat, the dust and the flies. Shut out the hum of the didgeridoo and hallucinated roos. Kept the quinka at bay.
Better to drink than to think. Thinking was wasted in this place. Ambition was excess baggage. This country battled both, all the way. It always had. No wonder the aborigines had never developed much of a civilization like other primitive peoples.
Man had spread his highways, his parking lots, his civic centers and shopping malls across the face of the planet. Everywhere the land had accepted the insult in silence. Except here. Here the land fought back, fought every incursion, every attempt to domesticate it. Not with violence, but with ennui. It wore you out, just as it wore out the roads.
There was a reason why people here kept tight to their few cities, clung to the cool southern coasts. Up here, in the north, in the great center, the Dreamtime still held sway, still dictated the pace of life and decay, of people and of roads. It sucked the drive out of a man, and if one wasn’t careful, the life.
He understood the drinking now, the intensity and the frequency of it. It held the land at bay, kept it out of a man’s mind, kept him from thinking too much about the vast open empty spaces. Prevented them from invading one’s spirit and taking over.
God, he was tired.
His shirt was soaked through. He pulled it over his head, threw it up into the truck.
“Yeah, sure,” he mumbled, accepting a hand up. “I’d like a beer.”
Someone could pick up the car later. It didn’t matter. Nothing mattered now, except getting to the pub.
The truck drove off. Once more the shiny new section of road was silent and empty. A beetle struggled out from beneath a bush, to be snatched up by a silent, watching magpie. Already the black sheen of the newly laid asphalt was fading, turning to a tired gray.
A foot-long crack appeared in the southbound lanes. Soon it would widen.
BETCHA CAN’T EAT JUST ONE
When I was growing up, two of my favorite foods
were Hostess Cupcakes and Twinkies. I’d put them in
the fridge and eat them cold. That way, the chocolate on
the cupcakes didn’t melt so fast, and the cream centers
had more of the flavor and consistency of ice cream. I
never gave these gustatory affectations a second thought.
After all, food was food, and if your body could digest it,
then how bad could it be for you? Really.
It was only much later that I encountered the significant body of deprecation that hovers about these gooey
concoctions like hard lumps of sarcasm orbiting a soft,
chewy, defenseless center. I foreswore my childhood
addiction and moved on to more healthful, nourishing victuals—like cappuccino mousse, super-premium ice
creams, and 77 percent dark chocolate. There are times,
though, when I look back fondly at lost childhood pleasures like Twinkies and Ho Hos. Innocent pleasures all.
Aren’t they?
“Can I help you find something, sir?”
Moke glanced sharply at the checkout clerk. He was more nervous than usual these days, with the Study so near completion. Always having to watch his step. Never knew when they might be watching.
“You cannot. I can find everything by myself, when I want to. I simply choose to proceed at my own pace.” He offered up a smug smile. “I’ve found a great deal already, and am in the process of finding more all the time.”
She eyed him uncertainly. Lately, the majority of the people she found wandering in this aisle wanted to know the location of the new Adolescent Altered Killer Gerbil Cookies, the latest kid food and comic sensation. This customer was different. For one thing, he was bigger. And he seemed not so much lost as preoccupied.
That’s when she noted the microcassette recorder he was carrying in lieu of a shopping bag. “You from the Health Department or sump’in? You want I should get the night manager?”
“No. If I was from the Health Department I’d already have shut down this unholy establishment—and every one like it, until they agreed to change their policies. I’m not in a position to do that—yet.” The widening of his humorless grin failed to enlighten the baffled clerk. Or to reassure her.
It was one in the morning—near closing time for this particular market. A few amnesiatic shoppers remorselessly cruised the aisles, dumping toilet tissue, canned dog food, cereals and breads and optimistically dolphin-safe tuna into their carts. Their expressions were resigned, their postures lethargic. Except when they passed through this aisle. Then cheerful gossip freshened the air like verbal Muzak.
Everyone, absolutely everyone, bought something from Aisle Six, and luxuriated in the process.
The clerk was reluctant to abandon her morose, angular stray. “So if you don’t mind my askin’, mister— what’s to shut down? We’re as clean as anyplace in town, an’ our inventory’s just as fresh. We ain’t violating no ordinances. We ain’t guilty of nothin’.”
“No?” Moke’s sweeping gesture encompassed the entire aisle. “You’re like everyone else. You don’t see what’s going on here. You really don’t see it.”
The clerk blinked at the shelves, seeking enlightenment and finding only cellophane and plastic.
“This, all this, is garbage, young lady. Offal, swill, chromatic slops: the insidious poisoning of a people who have forgotten the nature of real food.”
Until now emotionally becalmed, the clerk straightened. “Our stock is checked and replaced every day, sir. Everything on our shelves is fresh. If you don’t like it here, why don’t you shop someplace else?”
“It wouldn’t make any difference. It’s the same everywhere,” Moke informed her sorrowfully. “Do not think that in my ire I have singled out your place of work for especial condemnation. The entire supermarket industry in which you are but an insignificant if courteous cog is equally culpable. All participate eagerly in the general conspiracy.” He peered intently at her.
“Are you aware that today’s junk food contains more than a hundred times the volume and variety of chemical additives than the junk food of just twenty years ago? That the very companies that disgorge this mountain of hyena chow on an innocent unsuspecting public have little or no idea of how the human body will react to increased consumption of their products over a reasonable period of time?”
The checkout clerk relaxed. Everything was clear enough to her now for her even to forget that she’d been called an insignificant cog. She even managed a sly smile.
“I know—you’re a health-food nut.”
“And proud of it. Do you know that ever since I first unearthed the conspiracy and swore to expose it I haven’t touched any of this stuff?” He indicated the marshaled ranks of sugar-stuffed cakes, of candy-coated marshmallow, of puffed imitation cheese and fried air. “And that since then I haven’t been sick a day? Not a day! Not a cold, no flu: nothing. There
has
to be a connection. And I’m going to reveal it.”
“Uh-huh.” The clerk had begun to slowly back away.
Moke noticed the look in her eyes. “You’re the one who should be afraid of these remasticated additives; not me. My system is clean, pure. I’m a trained scientist, young lady. My specialty is nutrition chemistry. I have devoted all of my adult life to this Study, and next week I shall at last begin to publish. What I will reveal will rock the American junk food industry to its grotesquely profitable core.”
She halted, grinning insouciantly. “I ain’t afraid of no potato chips.”
“You should be, because I have discovered that they, in common with most other popular junk foods, contain hidden within their artificial flavorings and artificial colors and preservatives and pseudoingredients newly developed complex amino acids of extraordinary vitality and volatility. Either the food companies have been far ahead of the pharmaceutical and pesticide industries in genetic engineering or else we are witnessing sustained sequential organic mutation on an undreamt-of scale.
“To what nefarious end the food companies are striving I have yet to discover, but rest assured that I will. Some of the molecules I have isolated within Shoo-pie Bunny Cakes, for example, are positively Byzantine. Something sinister is taking place within our groceries, and whatever it is, it’s finding its way into our children’s lunch pails.” He turned wistful.
“Thirty years ago I would’ve said it was all a Russian plot, but I think the poor Russians are likewise on the verge of succumbing to the same sort of global gut-busting infiltration.”
“Right.” She made a production of checking her watch. “Well, you’d better finish up your studies here fast, Professor. We close in thirty minutes.”
“I need more time than that.”
“Thirty minutes.” She turned and headed north, in the direction of the checkout registers, and safety.
Idiots, Moke thought. Blind fools. He was going to save the country, save the world, in spite of its slavish ingrained genuflection to oversweetened dreck. Considering current dietary habits it was a wonder the species continued to survive at all.
Facts were undeniable. When his paper finally exploded on the world convenience food scene, specialists would rush to confirm his findings. Too late then for the bloated minions of a bilious multibillion-dollar industry to conceal the truth any longer from a hitherto thoroughly duped market-going public.
Emerging from beneath the concealing pile of un-crushed cartons, he climbed out of the compacter and surveyed the storage room at the rear of the market. It was dark and deserted. Refreshed from his nap, he had a couple of hours before the store reopened. It was all he would need.
Using his keychain flashlight, he returned to the aisle where he’d had the encounter with the young clerk. Going to save her too, he thought determinedly, before her body was unalterably poisoned. It was his crusade, and his alone. The big health-food groups didn’t have a clue. Or his analytical expertise.
A few final notes and his research would be complete. Then to the computer, to integrate final thoughts with the rough manuscript. Polish and publish, then sit back to await the coming explosion.
This was the last store on his list, the final line of the last page of statistics in a study that had taken decades to compile and encompassed more than fifty cities and towns. All visited personally by him. He couldn’t trust graduate students to carry out the fieldwork. They were all contaminated by the very products he was sworn to eradicate from the shelves of the world’s supermarkets. He’d been forced to do all the research on his own.
It was the same wherever he went. Identical eccentric molecules and weird peptide chains in dozens of products, regardless of brand name. Clever they were, but Moke had stumbled on their secret. Soon he would expose the full nature of their callous perfidy to a shocked public.
Aisle Six stretched on ahead of him; shelves crammed full of brightly colored air-puffed victuals utterly devoid of nutritional value and inherently antithetical to the digestive system of the human body. They all but glowed behind their glistening, brightly colored wrappings; tantalizingly easy to consume, irresistibly crammed full of false flavor, quisling comestibles capable of rapidly weakening both mental and physical resolve. He knew them for what they were: opiates for the progressively brain-damaged.
Something quivered slightly on the shelf just behind his left shoulder.
He whirled, saw nothing. Chuckling uneasily to himself, he sauntered on. And froze.
They were moving. The packages on the shelves ahead. Twitching slightly, jerking against their containers and restraints. Huge bags of intimidating chips, densely packed containers of vacuum-restrained pretzels, stacks of creme-filled non-cakes. All gyrating and weaving and rustling invitingly. And he could hear the sound now—a low, insinuating moan. The tempting murmur of empty calories, of empires of gluttony built on mountains of salt and plains of refined white sugar.
“Eat us,” the enticing susurration whispered coaxingingly. “You have deprived yourself for too long, have put yourself outside pleasure for no reason. Devour, and delight in us.”
He blinked, clapping his hands over his ears. The microcassette recorder slipped from his fingers to strike the unyielding, Hawaiian Punch–stained floor. Its cover popped open and the tape flew out. Pained, he knelt to recover it.
Something landed on his back.
Forgetting the recorder, he reached around wildly. Something soft and sticky squished between his fingers. The tactile sensation was oddly sensuous. Terrified, he found himself staring down at a handful of smashed, bloodred lunch-box cherry pie that contained no cherries and no pie. It oozed from between his fingers, the unctuous crimson gunk packing in beneath his fingernails.
“Eat me,” the glutinous mass urged him. “Suck me up. You’ll like it.”
With a cry, he rose and flung the fragments of pseudo-pie as far as he could—but some of it stuck to his fingers anyway. Stumbling backward, he crashed into the nearest shelves. Flailing wildly, he brought down on top of himself piles of chips, stacks of Cheetos, heavy lumps of sponge cake and devil’s food cake and white cake and lemon cake differentiated solely by the type of artificial coloring and flavoring they contained.
They were all over him now, moving, surging lugubriously to and fro; those strange molecules he’d discovered boldly asserting themselves. They wanted, cried out, demanded to be consumed. He struggled beneath their empty weight and tried to scream for help, but the eight-year-olds who could have rescued him were tucked snug in their beds far from the shuttered market.
Looking down, he saw bags of pretzels and honey-roasted Cornnuts splitting open; their overbaked, over-saturated, oversalted entrails spilling across his chest and legs. He kicked wildly, sending crumbs flying but unable to get to his feet. His arms and chest were slowly disappearing beneath thick cords of plaster-white creme and dark imitation fudge filling.
His eyes widened as he saw them humping sinuously toward his face; death reduced to spongy sweet bland-ness. They crammed themselves into his mouth, shoving his lips apart, forcing themselves down his throat. He continued to struggle, to fight, but it was useless. They overwhelmed him, relentless and unyielding in their desire to please, to slavishly gratify the basest of human desires.
The light began to fade from his eyes. He’d been careless, he realized. Unwilling to envision what they were capable of. But who could have imagined? Did even the bioengineers who’d given impetus to such syrupy mutations imagine what the ultimate result of their work might be? He doubted it. Surely the lethal reality he was experiencing exceeded even their capacious greed.
He was going, going—but at least he wouldn’t die hungry.
“Gawddamn! What a mess.”
The officer wrinkled his nose at the sight and its attending smell. Forensics was finishing up, making way for the coroner. Their jobs were relatively straightforward.
It was the mortician he didn’t envy.
The coroner’s assistant was writing on a pad. The officer nodded to him. They knew each other well.
“Kerwin.”
“Hey, man.” The assistant looked up. “Ever see anything like this before?”
The cop shook his head. “What do you think happened?”
The coroner glanced up the aisle. “Off what I’m used to seeing on the street, my first guess is that he swallowed a twelve-gauge shell that went off inside him, but there’s no sign of powder or shell fragments. I’m beginning to think he just overbinged and self-destructed. Gastrointestinally speaking.”
“The hell you say. Look at him.”
“I’d rather not. At least, no more than I have to.” The coroner’s reluctance was understandable. Most of what had once reposed in the cavity between the dead man’s sternum and crotch lay scattered across the supermarket floor and shelves, shockingly vivid amidst the frozen, undulating sea of partly digested cakes and cookies, snack foods and fruit chewies.