Month: January 2022

Down in a hole and I don’t know if I can be saved

Did you ever see that movie the Longest Yard?  Me neither.  Burt Reynolds?  Give me a break.  I assume that the producers of that movie were referring to some kind of metaphorical long yard for the characters with that title.  Perhaps their longest yard is illiteracy.  Or a lack of self-confidence.  Or a stupid mustache.  The longest yard in that movie is probably not a literal yard of ground covered with barbed wire and broken glass and acids and hornets and used syringes.  

Martialla and I crawled a lot more than a yard, but it was still the longest X amount of distance I have ever covered.  My left leg hurt too badly to stand up and my left arm hurt too badly to use for crawling so I slumped on Martialla and scrabbled along beside her like a sidecar as best I could as she scuttled along.  With seven limbs on the ground we still could have been run circles around by a three-legged dog.  

It didn’t take long before the dim light coming through the buggy-hole crevasse behind us was far enough away that it did absolutely nothing and we were skidding along in the pitch dark.  We didn’t even think about it, we just started crawling down a dark tunnel that we had no reason to believe led anywhere.  I wonder what we would have done if we weren’t both likely suffering from concussions.  Waited until we thought the Invincible were gone and then tried to climb out the hole we fell through?  Probably.

Every now and then I felt a little patch of carpet under my hand.  Mostly I felt some kind of vinyl flooring tile which was jumbled up and cracked and ripped my skin open like paper cuts every two “steps”.  Sometimes I felt mud, which was a nice change of pace because it was soft and was probably only giving me gangrene.  Sometimes I felt rocks.  The hallway or tunnel or whatever you want to call it was wide enough that you could stretch out your arms (not that I could) and not touch the sides from the middle but I still felt claustrophobic like I was wedged in a Shawshank shitpipe.  The dark does funny things to your perception of space.  

We crawled for ten minutes before we saw another light.  Which doesn’t seem like a long time but I challenge you to crawl on any surface for ten minutes.  Even on nice soft carpet.  I double dog dare you.  Just try it.  Adults aren’t meant to be crawling around.  While we were being ripped to shreds, I had this image pop into my head of a stripper crawling “sexily” along a strip club stage and then it extends out for miles and miles and she has to keep crawling and there are men lined up all along the entire thing throwing money at her and hooting while her hands and knees are sliced to bloody ribbons and she’s leaving a streaky red trail of blood with bits of flesh behind her.

We reached the light, which was coming from a large round area that reminded me of a car showroom without any cars.  The ceiling was ripped open to the outside/above and so much debris and junk had washed in that there was a ring-shaped hill in the middle that was close to five feet high on the edges.  An Invincible biker had driven right into the hole and smashed himself to bits against the far wall.  I could see how that could happen.  Even though the hole is a good fifteen feet in diameter, it’s grown up with weeds all around the edge so you wouldn’t see it until the last minute.  It’s like how people used to fall in old wells all the time.  Remember that from the eighties?  People fell in wells every week in the eighties.

The biker had a ceramic canteen on him that was shattered by his death plummet, but the bottom part still had some water in it and we drank it like we were dying of thirst, which we probably were.  He also had an ugly pipe gun that Martialla took and two smaller ceramic things like test tubes with a blue liquid in them.  The bike looked like it might be functional but what were we going to do?  Ride it around through pitch dark tunnels filled with debris?  We sat against the wall on either side of the dead man and looked up at the clear not-blue sky through the hole.  There didn’t seem to be any sounds of fighting from above anymore.  

I looked over at the dead guy, knowing Martialla was on the other side of his head “Well.  That didn’t pan out.”

“No, I shouldn’t say so.”

“Are we fucked?”

“Fucked proper you mean?  Probably.  But here’s something I’ve been thinking about.  You can’t cryogenically freeze someone without killing them because the cell membranes . . .”

I groaned “Jesus, here we go with the cell membranes again.  Can’t I die without listening to you winge on about cell membranes?”

“That remains to be seen.  What I’m saying is that before they put us in those tubes, they injected us with something.  What if that something was nano-robots?  That would explain how we could survive being frozen without the rupturing of the membranes, they did rupture but the nanos would repair us as quickly as they did so, allowing us to live in stasis.”

I laughed “Nano-robots?  Where do you get this science fiction shit?  There aren’t even robot robots let alone microscopic robots that live inside you.”

“Maybe these Applied Cryogenics scientists invented them as part of their process and nobody knew yet because they hadn’t gone public.  That would explain why we’re still alive with poison air and all the other stuff going on.  It would probably also explain why you’re so sick to your stomach all the time.”

“I’m sick to my stomach because we’re literally eating rotten garbage and drinking dirty water every god damn day.  What does this have to do with anything?”

“Well, if there are nanos inside us they might be able to repair our injuries, and that’s the only way we’re going to survive.  So that’s the one way that we might not be fucked.”

I thought for a moment “They did inject us with something.  Don’t robots, even little ones, need a power source?  What would these nanobots run off?”

“Uh, kinetic energy?”

“So we’re fucked.”

“I mean . . . probably yeah.

With your feet on the air and your head on the ground

I heard someone say once that if you take a bad fall it’s best if you land on your head since the skull is the hardest part of the body.  I call bullshit on that.  On account of the neck.  Luckily I fell on my entire left side so only the side of my head hit the ground.  For a few precious seconds that blow to the head left me too “fuzzy” to feel the pain in the rest of my body.  Those were good seconds.  I look back on those seconds fondly.  When those seconds were over, the pain introduced itself.  And there was a lot.  My left shoulder and hip hurt so badly that I couldn’t even pay attention to the pain on my elbow, wrist, and ankle.  For a couple minutes I couldn’t see out of my left eye.  That was scary.  

I wanted to curl up into a ball but curling made the pain eighty trillion times worse.  When I tried to straighten out the same thing happened.  I lay on the ground in a C-shape for lack of any other options.  I thought about the words of my long dead yoga instructor “don’t worry about how the position looks, worry about how it feels.”  Bad.  It feels bad.  

After another minute I realized something was dripping on my face.  After several attempts I was able to to roll over onto my back, keeping my left side crunched up like I was doing a half-cannonball into a pool.  Executing that roll so hurt so badly that I couldn’t scream or grunt or make a sound because my breath caught in my throat.  I thought for a minute I was going to suffocate on nothing.  

I saw Martialla floating above me like an insane drunken angel.  Big gobs of bloody (and brown for some reason) saliva were plopping off her face onto me.  It took me a while for my brain to decide what I was seeing.  Our warbuggy was upside-down, wedged nose down in a crevasse, caught by three wheels.  Martialla was dangling down tits first from the buggy, bent backwards with one leg and one hand caught in the netting on the back.  Her eyes were open but they were blank and vacant Troy Aikman on the sidelines against the Niners in the NFC championship game.  Or Troy Aikman any other time.    

“I guess you were right, there are underground tunnels.”

That’s what I tried to say.  I think what I really said was “errrrrlp” and then rolled over onto my right side in a pain-spasm.  Once my left eye started seeing again I noticed that the little shafts of light coming down around the machine were flickering.  Watching as best I could without moving, I realized the light was dancing because there were people moving around up there casting shadows across the light holes.  I watched one of them jam a stupid gun that looked like an old Civil War musket into a gap.  Not sure if he was trying to shoot me or Martialla but he didn’t have an angle either way.

In my mind I thought I would pull out my knife and hurl it at the rifleman like Britt, deadeyeing that mofo through the gap and causing his rifle to fall down to me where I would catch it with one hand and smoothly use it to take out his buddies.  Instead my right hand was shaking so badly that I could barely get my knife out of its sheath (sheaf?) and when I did, I immediately dropped it and lost it in the dark because for some reason it weighed nine million pounds.  

I understand why pain exists, knowing what hurts you helps you survive, but why does debilitating pain exist?  That makes no sense.  If you break your leg, why doesn’t your brain go “okay, we know what happened, now time to shut down the agony so we can figure a way out of this”?  Being in so much pain that you can’t run away on your broken leg doesn’t help anything.  From an evolutionary standpoint it makes no sense.  I was able to kind of roll and get my right knee underneath me, in my mind I would get my arm under there too and lever myself up, but I ended up slumped there in the world’s shittiest Child’s Pose.  

“Spirit of crocodile, I summon you.”

I tried to say just in case magic was suddenly real, figuring that crocodiles don’t really feel much pain, but instead I think what I said was ‘huuuuuuurlk” and then started gasping like I had been freshly kicked in the sternum.  I was at lunch with William Baldwin once and he was saying that the CIA should recruit masochists because they couldn’t be tortured for information because they like pain.  I don’t think that’s how pain works, moron.  

Next I heard a thunderclap and then I felt something smash directly into my tailbone.  Martialla had come un-groggied enough to draw her sidearm, and then have it fly out of her hand when she fired it at the people above us where it then slammed into me below her.  I know this sounds stupid since I just survived a crash (two actually) followed by a twelve foot fall but that gun-ass ram hurt worse than anything.  I’m not ashamed to say that I started sobbing then.  Actually I am ashamed to say it but I will anyway.  

More liquid started splattering on me and eventually I was able to look up and see the outline of a body across one of the light-holes, still kind of moving but mostly raining down blood (and other stuff) onto the car, onto Martialla, and onto me.  The extra weight was making the buggy groan and shift.  I doubt it would have fallen, thinking about it after the fact, given how firmly it was wedged in there, but at the time it seemed like it was going to come down any second and crush us both.  

Gathering myself like I was about to swim across the English Channel, I was able to force myself to sit up and gasp instead of laying like a lump and gasping.  Suddenly Martialla seemed like she was right in front of my face.  My eyes were not working together.  It was like I had glasses on with only one side of the frames having a lens in it.  I had to shut my left eye to not get dizzy.  

Martialla wasn’t as close as one eye made it seem but she was still a lot closer than I thought.  When I levered myself to my feet, even though I was going like negative seven miles an hour, our heads conked together like a fucking three stooges routine.  I grabbed onto her so I wouldn’t fall over while I was seeing stars.  She started struggling weakly and then bit me on the forearm strongly.  I grabbed her by the belt and gave her a not very emphatic shake.

“Ow, it’s me you fucking idiot!”

“Me who?” she asked and then started giggling like a child and coughing like a syphilitic old French whore.  

“Jesus, sort yourself out” I slurred at her.  I couldn’t really pull at her so I wrapped my right arm around her leg and just let my weight go to try and pull her down with physics.  She screamed that I was ripping her foot off and I let go, doing that one foot hop you do when you try to land with a bad wheel.  I gave her a shove, sending her swinging.

“Shut up, there’s people up there!”

On cue, a shot rang out from above.  I staggered around looking for Martialla’s pistol while she tried and failed to get one of her fifteen knives.  I guess she should keep one strapped to her forearm too huh?  Eventually I found her gun and was able to drag it up into a firing position even though for some reason it weighed eight thousand pounds.  I put my arm in Martialla’s crotch as a firing platform and tried to aim up at one of the light holes that was currently not shedding any light.  My arm decided it wanted to slowly wave back and forth without me telling it to do that.

“A little higher” Martialla said dully, and then “A little higher!” in a frantic tone.

Keep your hands inside the vehicle until it comes to a complete stop

Driving around with Martialla trying to fire on the move proved to be useless.  Part of the reason was my wrist was hurting so badly that I couldn’t grip the wheel with that hand.  I had one hand on the wheel and then I jammed my forearm through the wheel-hole on the other side to kind of make it so I could steer.  Point being it was much easier to turn one way than the other.  Shifting was a problem.  

But shattered wrists aside, I figured out quickly that it made more sense to get into what I thought was a good field of fire and then come to a complete stop so Martialla could shoot from a stationary position.  Then when a clump of enemies started coming our way, I’d take off again.  That worked better than the old run and gun, until Martialla ran out of ammo.  Which happened in very short order.  

She switched to the crappy plastic assault rifle from the swap meet and we were able to take out a couple of Invincible vehicles (the drivers really) by way of me pulling up aside them and her firing off a burst.  Their machines seem to have a lot less armor on them than J-Lo.  Which I wish we were in at the time instead of that fucking flimsy dune buggy.  I heard Martialla cursing and slamming her rifle into the buggy frame, I think it jammed almost every time she fired and had to be cleared.  That ammo was gone even more quickly.  Quicklier?     

Looking back on things, that is the point when we should have gotten the hell out of there, if not before.  In the moment it’s hard to realize what’s going on.  The defenders were fucked.  Nothing we were doing was going to make a difference.  And what’s worse was we had done enough damage to the Invincible to start attracting too much attention.  I wonder if there’s a military term for getting into a fight and kicking ass at first so hard that it makes you blind to the fact that you’re about to get bent over the barrel.  I suppose that’s just called overconfidence.   

Two very clear things stick in my memory.  One is that I was mouthing the words to “Got Your Money” under my breath while I was driving.  I’m not much of a rap fan, I don’t know why I was chanting that like a mantra, but I was.  The second thing is that one of the Invincible-mobiles tried to sideswipe us with spinning blades on the side and it made me think of Grease and how strange that drag race scene is.  

So these are high school kids right, and they’re racing around, and one of them pushes a button and some whirling blades of death come out of the Scorpion guy’s car like it’s James Bond and tear the shit out of John Travolta’s car?  What the fuck is that about?  Where did that come from?  That would be like if Anna suddenly lashed out at someone with a lethal karate kick to the head in the King and I.  It’s nonsensical.  But when you’re a kid you just think “oh yeah, that’s how street racing works, why wouldn’t it?”  

I turned to get out of the path of the spinning blade machine and I cut too hard and the buggy went over on its side.  When I was a kid once I fell off a horse and broke my collarbone.  That was bad.  I must have learned something from the experience though because somehow I managed to come through flipping that damn buggy without much more than bumps and bruises – honestly it barely felt different to me than when you’re drunk and you go to sit down and you fall on your ass because there was no chair there.  

Back in Martialla’s position there was no harness exactly but there was like a cargo net thing that kept her from flying off the back.  When we went wheels up, I distinctly heard a thud-ping that I’m pretty sure based on the massive amount of blood on her face was Martialla’s skull smashing into the bar she was holding onto on the back.  I scrambled out and saw Martialla hanging onto the net with one arm and clutching a pistol with the other.  Somehow she didn’t drop her gun, it looked like she was eighty percent unconscious.  Points for persistence. 

I drew my pistol and fired at the spike-car as it wheeled around towards us until it went “click, click, click”.  I must have hit something (or someone more likely) because it veered slightly and then continued our way at like three miles an hour.  I didn’t slap Martialla so much as I pushed her in the face with my hand and I yelled for her to help me get the thing back onto its wheels.  When she didn’t move, I yanked on her hair and demanded that she help me but she barely even moved then.   

I think I could have rocked it back over on my own, like I said before it didn’t weigh a ton and it seemed like it was kind of built to flip back around, but it turns out that I didn’t have to because while I was trying to push on the frame, another Invincible car (with a limbless torso stuck into the front grill) came at us with a sideswipe maneuver.  I think technically a sideswipe is when both vehicles are going in the same direction, and it’s called a rake when they’re coming at you head on, but no one would know what I was talking about if I said it tried to rake us.  

I jumped up out of the way and did like a hanging crunch on the frame of the buggy to avoid getting my pretty little guts splattered across the plains.  My trainer Maurice would have been so proud of me if he wasn’t long super dead.  He was always on my ass about working out my core.  I told him a hundred times that I don’t need core strength because I’m a sexy actress not a lady athlete but he never listened.  He was Algerian or something so his grasp of English wasn’t great.  I doubt I could do that again under normal circumstances, adrenaline is a hell of a thing.  I didn’t even feel the oblique I ripped to shreds doing it until later.  

The impact of the rake ram sideswipe knocked the buggy back upright and I jumped back into the seat and floored it.  Martialla wasn’t shooting anymore but I don’t know if that’s because she was out of it and wasn’t able to shoot on account of being bashed or because there was nothing much more she could do because our two longarms were both out of ammo.  

I realized at this point that more and more hostiles were buzzing by us subjecting us to wildly inaccurate gunfire and stabbing at us with various long implements and/or trying to ram us while simultaneously realizing that there seemed to be no defenders left in our area at all.   Aside from the looming threat of death, the scariest part was how fast it happened.  Even though we were engaged in a deadly fight, it felt like we were safe until then you know?  It felt like we were on the side (the flank they call it in the army I think) and we had better range and maneuverability and we were kind of okay.  Then all of a sudden we were surrounded in like eight seconds flat.

I tried to get off the dirt tracks and cut through the fields hoping that we had better ability to travel through the wheat crop (or whatever the hell it was) but this backfired horribly as we were immediately slowed down and the Invincible machines seemed to handle it just fine.  I jerked to the right to avoid a fucking rocket that someone fired off the back of a truck at us and moved directly into the path of a thing that looked like an airplane engine that someone had put wheels on.  Out of all the insane bullshit vehicles I’ve seen in this junkyard of a world, that one was the insanest and bullshitest.  It slammed into us a dozen times harder than that rocket would have, I bet.  

I remember a brief feeling of weightlessness and then boom, lights out.

It will help us every day, it will brighten all the way, If we’ll keep on the sunny side of life

One thing I’m trying to do for myself is think about the good aspects of waking up in a post-apocalyptic hellscape.  For example, in the before time I dated a guy who would use the expression “all fucked out”.  Such as, we’d be at a restaurant and we’d be out of bread and he’d say “Ela, can you grab the waiter next time he comes by, this bread is all fucked out.”  Or I’d ask him to get me a beer and he’d say “Sorry, the beer is all fucked out”.  I told him that I hated this expression but he still kept saying it.  In his defense I don’t think he was doing it to be a dick, I think he was just used to saying it and he didn’t make an effort to change.

One time he said “all fucked out” at brunch with my friends and I wanted to stab him in the forehead with a fork.  But I couldn’t because pre-apocalypse you got in trouble if you fork stabbed someone.  At the very least, people would be upset.  At worst I might go to jail.  Can you even imagine?  Me?  Ela?  In jail.  Martialla will tell you that I was in one of those “caged heat” type movies but Certainty of Debt wasn’t like that.  They did add in a shower-fight scene post-production but that wasn’t me, they shot that with a body double.  They really screwed that movie up in editing.  Anyway, my point is that now I can stab whoever I want and it’s fine.  So that’s a good thing about my current predicament.  

Even though he was just accusing us of being part of the attack, Mr. Codpiece scooted off after his friends a second later and left us standing there.  We heard more bells ringing and some of the bug people tending the fields ran and jumped into little tunnel-holes in the ground while some of them ran towards the northwest.  We saw a bunch more of the non-bug warrior types coming out of the woodwork too, on horseback, on those stupid scooters, and on foot.  They didn’t seem to have much in the way of sturdy vehicles or firearms.  Some of them did have bangsticks, I learned all about those when I was in Shark Huntress 2: Blue Eyes.  Fun fact, I got warm water hypothermia working on that movie.

In retrospect, going towards the sound of fighting was not a wise thing to do.  Martialla and I probably should have just driven the other way as fast as we could.  When I jumped behind the wheel of our borrowed buggy though, I knew where we were going.  Martialla did too because she didn’t get in the seat beside me, she jumped on the back thingy where you go when you want to shoot stuff and unlimbered the rifle we took from the traders that tried to kill us for no reason.  

I know why I did what I did.  I was desperate to see what was going on at the doctor’s lab and figured this was a good way to curry favor.  Not the research, I don’t care about that, I mean does she have power?  And maybe therefore air conditioning?  Refrigeration?  And maybe therefore real food instead of smashed-up worms fried with mud?  Are there beds?  Showers?  Could I shave my legs?  I know a lot of women hated shaving their legs but I like it.  And all the feminists who gave me shit about it are all dead now so there’s another good thing.  

But why did Martialla immediately jump into battle mode?  Despite her churlishness did she realize that making nice with the doctor was our best chance for survival and she didn’t want the place to burn just like I did?  Was she merely backing me up, falling back into the old pattern of following my lead?  Or was she simply in the mood to shoot something?  Ever since she found out that her husband was super duper dead along with all her friends and family (except me, her best friend) she’s been in a mood.  Maybe I’ll ask her later.  

War movies have told me that after a battle, soldiers have to write a report about what happened in that battle.  Maybe that’s just the officers.  I wonder if they learn how to do that in soldier school because it seems impossible to me now that I’ve done it.  There’s a lot going on in a battle.  It would be like trying to write a report about what happened when a three-ring circus exploded because a train hauling dynamite and bouncy balls and hookers collided with an airplane carrying some of the worst criminals living and the US president.  I was supposed to be in Con Air you know, but my idiot manager double booked me and I was on set as a corpse on ER the day I was supposed to shoot my Con Air scene.  

Broad strokes are the best I’m going to be able to do here.  The main thing I can tell you is that being in a battle sucks.  And yet it’s kind of easier than the couple of scrapes Martialla and I have been in so far.  See when you shoot a dude in the neck and then just stand there and watch him bleed out/suffocate, that’s troubling.  On the other than when you’re zipping around all over the place shooting at dozens of people, you can kind of ignore the results.  It’s like the difference between hitting a raccoon with your car and having to beat a raccoon to death with a sharp rock.  As long as it’s over quick you can go back to listening to the radio and put it out of your mind.  

The attackers were Invincible.  I saw those fucking stupid red and blue fists they like painted on a bunch of their shit.  I think it may have been the same crew we saw attacking those people outside of Bosstown.  Some of the vehicles looked familiar.  It’s hard to say for sure but I think there were a lot more of them.  I saw a couple bigger armored things that I never saw before, they were kind of like tanks but maybe more like garbage trucks with armor bolted on them and some platforms.  They build some top-heavy shit around these parts.

The Invincible opening move was a bunch of truck/bus type things that came forward and offloaded dudes on foot who charged forward.  They all had blades and clubs, I didn’t see a single firearm in that first group.  After wave one was engaged with the defenders, the Invincible bikes and buggies moved in to attack.  I’m no military strategist (obviously) but that doesn’t make a lot of sense to me.  Isn’t the idea behind armor that it goes first and punches a hole for the infantry to exploit? (phrasing)  Maybe it’s a cannon fodder scenario.  Maybe the machines are more valuable than the people.  

The bigger vehicles stayed back out of the fray which makes even less sense to me since they seem like they’re the ones that would be the hardest to damage or destroy.  Some of them had cannons or harpoon launchers but a bunch of them had, I shit you not, catapults on them that hurled jagged scraps of metal and rocks into the fight, but a lot of them just sat there and did nothing other than offer the people in them a good view of the battle.  

The defenders were outnumbered badly I think.  The Invincible seemed like they were everywhere.  When the guys trying to fight them stood their ground, it didn’t go well.  Things worked out much better for them when they hid in the rows of crops and jumped out with their bangsticks to attack the wheels of the attackers’ vehicles.  I don’t know why they didn’t do that more.  The worst was the little bee-people.  They had no weapons, they ran forward and threw themselves at the attackers like suicide bombers – only without the bombs.  They were just trying to gum up the machines with their flesh.  It was nauseating but it worked a couple times.  More than once I saw one of the leech guys grab one of the little people and “bite” onto them with their hideous lamprey-mouths and then toss them aside like a crushed soda can.  I don’t know if that actually did anything to make them fight better or if they just liked doing it.

It’s a trap!

Leave it to Martialla to be unremittingly (not totally sure what that word means honestly) hostile to the only person we meet that I want to befriend.  Whenever we meet some scabby dusty ugly future goblin man with a rusty sharpened piece of bloody metal clenched in their gnarled fist wearing a necklace of fingerbones, she wants to make friends, but when we encounter a normal human doctor from our time she loses her God damn mind.  I tried to talk her down, explain that maybe, just maybe a woman in a functioning hazmat suit with medical training and an underground facility of some kind could be helpful to us but she was having none of it.  

The doctor and her leech-men drove away on their contraption, leaving us with Stabby and the Horseman.  Stabby had been willing to chat before, but Martialla’s attitude towards his doctor-lord must have offended him because he clammed up after that, watching us suspiciously and ignoring my witty remarks.  While Martialla stood there sullenly and returned their suspicious glares with some of her own, I occupied myself examining the horse.  Since everything is horrible now I expected to find something strange and off-putting about it, like spikes on the knees or an extra set of eyes on the rump, but it was a normal horse seemingly.  Its mane and tail were both full of tangles but other than that it was just a horse.  

I asked the Horseman if I could pet it and he laughed and said “sure” in a way that made me think that it would bite and or/kick me.  So I didn’t.  But I wanted to.  I wanted to feed it an apple and comb those tangles out of its hair.  Although if I had an apple I would eat it myself.  Or better yet make some hard cider out of it.  I think you need more than one apple for hard cider though.  And brown sugar?  And probably like a jug or something.  I’m not really sure how you make hard cider.  And what makes it hard cider instead of just cider?

Maybe twenty minutes later another pair of brutes came our way, one on a little scooter and one on horseback to match their buddies, and riding on the back of the tiny scooter (instead of the giant horse) was one of the bee people.  This one was bigger than the field workers, maybe as much as four feet tall, and she was wearing a blindingly white speedsuit type thing only without a helmet.  That suit was by a wide margin the cleanest looking thing I have seen to date here in the future/present.  

She was carrying a machine (?) that looked like a cross between a tackle box and a charging station for a bunch of D batteries with a riotous explosion of tubes and wires coming out of it.  It kind of looked like what a nurse might have to work in a bloodmobile in our time but it also looked like something that a prop master would knock together on a Sci-Fi channel original movie.  Martialla shook her head at the sight. 

“I don’t like this.  How do we even know they have the filters?”

At this the new horseman, who I shall call imaginatively Horseman #2, held up two big canvas bags tied together and kind of shook them around so we could see that they were filled black canisters that kind of looked like those little propane tanks that caterers have for their chafing dishes.  Why are they called that?  Whenever I heard chafing dish it made me think of a dish that they rake across your nipples as a form of torture.  It’s probably French or some bullshit.  

Martialla looked over at me “Is that enough?”

I shrugged “How the fuck should I know?  We’re didn’t go into this mission with a lot of details on what we needed.  Truth be told I was expecting a bunch of little white coffee filter things.  If this isn’t enough we’ll just have to come back.”

Martialla eyed the four men eyeing us back “I don’t think we’re going to be welcome back here a second time.”

“Oh pish, I have the feeling this is the start of a wonderful friendship.  Soon enough the three of us will be having slumber parties and braiding each other’s hair.  I love Indian food you know, maybe she has some good recipes she can make.”

Martialla scratched at her scalp “That reminds me, we should both shave our heads if we find a sharp enough knife, these lice are driving me crazy.”  

“Fleas Martialla, we have fleas not lice, get it right.  You can Uncle Fester yourself if you want but I’ll die before I cut my hair.”

“I mean probably, yeah.”

I turned to the little bug-woman who had been standing there uncertainly “So are you like the lab assistant then?”

She started like no one had ever spoken to her before, and surprised me almost as much by answering in a tiny piping voice “Y-yes . . . we help Doctor Baidyabhusan.”

“Oh shit, you can talk?!  Sorry, I didn’t mean . . .” I gestured at the even smaller bee-people tending to the fields “I just mean that I tried to talk to them and it seemed like they weren’t capable of answering me.”

She licked her lips nervously, which was such a commonplace thing that it became super freaky happening under two giant fly-eyes “I’m not like them.  I need . . . to get the samples.”

I knelt down and held my arm out to her “Sure thing.  So a few days ago I was at a swap meet and there was a guy there who looked somewhat like you only he was bigger.  A friend told me that he was a ‘splice’ is that what you are?  Like gene splicing?”

She produced a thing that looked mostly like a butterfly needle set-up but there didn’t seem to be an actual needle, just a tiny black nozzle type thing at the end “You’d have to ask Doctor Baidyabhusan about that, I don’t know about anything. We’re helpers . . .  with the research.”

“Did she make you?”

She stopped her work for a moment “Of course, where else would I have come from?”

Martialla snorted “Impossible.”

At this the four warrior types grumbled and started mad dogging us even more if that’s possible and even the little bee girl’s voice took on the tiniest bit of flint.

“Doctor Baidyabhusan is intelligent.  She’s working on a cure and we help her.”

Martilla all but rolled her eyes “A cure for what?”

The tiny woman’s voice took on a hint of awe “For everything, for all of it, for the world.”

Before I could say anything we heard a bell clanging loudly in the distance and the two horsemen quickly mounted back up and spurred their mounts up the path between the fields towards the northwest.  The second scooter-man grabbed the little bee girl bodily like a piece of luggage and kicked off on his comically small machine back towards the northeast as she hugged her little bloodwork kit and protected it with her body.  I turned to the original scooter-rider with his very interesting codpiece.

“What’s going on?”

“We’re under attack.  Interesting timing huh?”

Blood drive

When I didn’t answer right away, the Indian woman gestured towards her minions “If they don’t answer in three seconds, kill them.”

Is it racist that I’m always surprised when an Indian person speaks with a British accent?  Martialla drew her pistol and I held my hands up, appealing for calm.

“Whoa, whoa, whoa, everybody chill.  There’s no need for any killing here, we’re all friends here.  We were cryogenically frozen in two thousand and two if that’s what you’re asking.”

There was enough room that the headpiece/helmet thing on her suit didn’t move much but I saw her head swinging back and forth inside “Impossible.  You’re lying.”

“No, honest inj . . . uh, I mean, for real we’re from two thousand and two.  Uh, George Bush is president.  Uh . . . Friends is still on but it sucks now.  Uh, some stupid movie about a girl on a swim team is number one at the box office right now.  Oh, wait, wait, check this out, I never thought I’d show this to anyone again.”  I dug out my driver’s license and held it up at her.  “See, issue date nineteen ninety-eight?  Uh, what else?  Y2K was bullshit, nothing happened.  Uh, who won the Superbowl?  Some skinny dude, I don’t really follow sports.  Help me out here, Mar.”

“Queen Elizabeth celebrated her Golden Jubilee.”

I scowled at her “What are you talking about the Queen for?  Indian people don’t want to hear about the Queen!”

“India is part of the Commonwealth, I figured she’d know about it at least regardless of how she feels about the Queen.”

“Commonwealth?  What the hell are you talking about?” I turned back to the doctor “Ignore her, she doesn’t know what she’s talking about.  I assure you . . .”

She gestured with the sound of her crinkling plastic arm covering “Would you be willing to give me blood samples?”

“Sure. . . yeah, why not?  Actually were here to trade anyway so . . .”

“Where is your facility?  How many more of your people are awake there?  Do you have satellite access?”

“We can talk about all that, what we need is some water filters, downriver . . .”

I started as Martialla suddenly had her pistol in both hands in a shooting stance, shouting as she pointing it at one of the flukeman “Stay the fuck back!”  She barged back into me, kind of shouldering me back while gesturing with the gun at them “Stay in fucking front of me where I can see you.”

I held my hands up again, I almost stepped into Martialla’s line of fire but realized at the last moment that was a terrible idea and stopped “Hold on, hold on, hold on, everyone’s cool right?  We’re all getting along here.”

Martialla turned her weapon in the direction of the Indian woman and her five guards all instantly clumped together in front of her, protecting her with their bodies like the Secret Service “Lady, tell your fucking mutant fucks to stay away from us.”

Her voice was significantly cooler than before “There’s no need for alarm, they’re just curious about you.”

I looked back at Martialla “Would you lower that please?” She kept both hands on her pistol but dropped it to her waist and I turned back to the doctor “No offense meant, you know how it is out there, dangerous world and so forth.  Sounds like we’re all on board with making a trade here, right?  And maybe this will be the first step to a more cordial relationship between you and the folks downriver.  They certainly could use the help of a doctor down there and it looks like you have . . .”

Her voice had turned absolutely frosty “I have no interest in those violent degenerates.”

I forced a laugh “I hear you there, they’re gross, between you me and the lamppost I don’t really want to deal with them either, but when in Rome you know?  I was just thinking that if we all worked together then maybe . . .”

“They have nothing of value to me.  I’ll give you all the water filters you want for blood samples from you two.  I don’t want to hear from anyone else or see anyone else on my land.”

“Fair enough, fair enough, maybe over time we can help . . .”

She gestured curtly “Come to my lab.”

Before I could answer, Martialla barked out “No.  We’re not going anywhere.  You want to draw some blood you can fucking do it out here.” She gestured at Stabby and Horseman “You want to bring Tweedle-Dee and Tweedle-Dum here back with you that’s fine but leave the rest of these freak show assholes in whatever slime infested kiddie pool you keep them in.”

I held my hands up yet again “Now hold on here, there’s no reason to be hasty, I think . . .”

Martialla’s face was like stone “I am not going anywhere near whatever Island of Dr. Moreau Mengele bullshit she has going on in there.”

The big sleep

When I woke up, Martialla was already up scanning the area with the binoculars.  I’m not sure I’ve seen her sleep more than an hour or two since we “arrived” here in the future-present.  But she must be sleeping, right?  Without the use of powerful stimulants no one can go without sleep, can they?  I’ve heard people say that Leonardo Da Vinci and Tesla and other so-called geniuses certain kinds of people like to swoon over only slept two hours a day, but that’s bullshit right?  Physiologically that can’t be possible, can it?  If the human body only needs a nap every two hours, what the hell are we doing sleeping all the time?  

Remember those old cereal commercials where they would say their bowl of sugar was “part of a complete breakfast” and they’d show the bowl of cereal along with a “complete breakfast” of more food than anyone would ever eat in one sitting?  There’d be a soft-boiled egg, and a huge tray of blueberries, and some scones with marmalade, and a grapefruit, and some orange juice, and some tea, and berries with cream, and an apple, and a pear, and a banana, and a short stack of pancakes, and some toast, and a cup of coffee, and a glass of milk, and some hash browns, and some eggs over easy, and some strips of bacon, and some sausage, and another stack of pancakes, and some toast with eggs, and a crock of honey, and a loaf of bread, and some rolls, and a vat of butter, and some scrambled eggs, and some link sausage, and orange slices, and a jar of some kind of grain, and some cream?  

I would eat all of that right now and feel just fine.  Instead my complete breakfast is a roasted beetle the size of a fist that looks like it’s going to come alive and attack my face, wrapped in a dirty piece of a tarp and a bottle of tepid cloudy water.  I don’t even want to know what’s going on in my bowel right now.  It’s like world war three in there.  Nausea, weakness, abdominal cramps, diarrhea, dizziness, that’s my complete breakfast now.  You know what the weirdest thing is?  I have an insane craving for salt.   I want to take a shaker of salt and just pour it into my mouth.  

I yawned and almost threw up from the bile that came up “Did Magic Slim do Raw Magic or was that Magic Sam?  I can’t remember.”

Martialla continued looking at whatever she was looking like, being very rude “The porn?”

I rolled my eyes “Har-har, you really turned it around on me there.”

“I have no idea, I’m ever so slightly less into Chicago Blues than you are you, Ela.” She pointed “You see that?  I think that’s where the complex is where the doctor hides.  See those piles of humped dirt? I’d bet you dollars to doughnuts those are collapsed underground passages.”

I yawned again, this time without almost puking “I’ll give you all the dollars for one doughnut.  One of those jelly filled ones.”  She came over to hand me the binoculars and I waved her away “I believe you.  Why would anyone build an underground facility here?  Was there an army base here?”

She pointed again “I don’t know, but you see the way the ground ripples outward there?  I bet you that’s a fucking missile strike.  Someone tried to blow this place up.”

“Wonderful.  Well since the fields are being tended by tiny bee children instead of army men, maybe they succeeded.”

She pursed her lips “I’m wondering if we should try and sneak in there.  I see a couple spots, what do they call them, defiles, where it looks like maybe we can go straight through into the tunnels.  Assuming there’s still any tunnels down there.”

“That sounds like a terrible idea.  Why don’t we see what Captain Stabby Arm has to say before we go on a suicide tunnel crawl?”

Martialla frowned “He’s probably gathering a kill squad to come eliminate us right now.”

On cue, we saw a cloud of dust kicking up on one of the trails between fields.  We didn’t see where it started so maybe it did come out from under the ground.  It was a good ten minutes of slow zig-zagging around fields before they came into view.  Captain Stabby was there on his child-sized minibike and joining him on honor guard was another similar sized fellow with a mask on riding a horse.  That brought up a little catch in my throat.  I gave it up when I moved out West, but back home I used to ride horses all the time.  I love horses.  It’s a childhood thing I never outgrew.  I dated a guy for a year for no other reason than he had horses on his ranch.  Seeing something that I Iove, something familiar, it hit me harder than I thought it would.  

Trailing them a little ways was a ramshackle (I say ramshackle 1,000,000% more now than I did in the old world) contraption that looked like two motorcycles lashed together to make the world’s shittiest car – and there are a lot of shitty cars in the running for that title these days.  Driving that pile of spare parts was a guy that looked way too much like the leechman from the X-Files, pale beyond the pale, hairless, and with a massive round monster-mouth.  In the “back” were two more leechmen and a figure in one of those suits like the doctors wore in Outbreak. 

They came to a stop a few yards away, Stabby and the Horseman keeping an eye on us while the leech trio helped the hazmat figure down off the ugly motor-cycle car.  Hazmat stumbled a little as they touched the ground, like a sailor coming back into land after a long time out.  I saw through the faceplate/mask thing that it was an Indian woman.  Like a normal Indian woman from our time I mean.  I was so amazed that I couldn’t say anything, I just stood there mouth agape like a dork at a strip club for the first time.  Her voice was kind of hard to hear through all the apparatus around her head.

“What year did you two go under?”

I’m just gone, just gone

We went down into the fields and tried to talk to the bug farmers but they wouldn’t make a sound, not even to each other.  They just stared at us.  I think they were looking at us anyway, it’s hard to say with bug-eyes if they were looking at us or not.  Up close they were even smaller than we thought, like just three feet high.  And they were very slight as well.  They kind of looked like kids only, you know, bugs.  Bug kids.  

We were resorting to bad mime (from Martialla: I’m great at miming, I took a movement class) and pointing when we noticed a trail of dust coming down one of the paths between fields.  A fella rolled up on us atop a comically small scooter-type machine.  It looked a lot like an old “motorcycle” I saw in a museum that was really just a bicycle with a tiny motor the size of a can of peaches on it.  At the museum display there was a big blown up photo behind it of a lady in a huge old timey fluffy dress sitting on the thing sideways.  

The guy sitting on it was less humorous all around.  He was our height, which makes him a giant among men around here, and he was a big monger.  He was decked out in standard Mad Max S&M marauder gear with a little bit of flair for individualization – a couple tongues nailed to his giant codpiece (it was so big it was almost a trout piece, ba-dum-dum).  He was missing his right hand but that’s okay because he had a giant Jai-Alai killer hook strapped to that arm to make up for it.  This whole look was “post-apocalyptic murderer” so I admit that I was a little thrown off when he spoke in the clearest and most intelligible English we’ve encountered so far.

“Can I help you ladies?”

He said it like we were marks in a pick-up bar.  He had pulled up next to us and kind of crouched/squatted on his little scooter in a casual way.  Which is tough to pull off, but he did it.  He had goggles on and when he lifted them to his forehead, I saw that his eyes were a little wonky too.  Not like bug eyes, but something was funky about them.  Like his pupils weren’t the right shape or were too big or something.

“Uh, we’re from Bosstown and Smashweed, we came up here looking for some water filters.”

He nodded like this was perfectly normal “And they sent you on this mission?  Have they run out of warriors?”

“I think they’re keeping them in reserve so they can kill each other later.”

He paused a second like he was remembering how and then coughed something like a laugh “That does sound like that pack of savages.  Doc says that back in the sixties some of them came up here and caused all kinds of trouble, stole a lot of her things, not just filters for the river.  I don’t think she’s going to be happy to find you coming back again on their behalf.  As you can see, she’s got things a little more organized up here now – just to avoid trouble like that happening again.”

“The sixties like a year?” He nodded. “What year is it now?”

“Twenty ninety-seven or thereabouts.  I haven’t checked in a while but I think that’s right.  When you’re the only ones keeping track of the calendar it doesn’t really matter.  It’s important to the Doc though, probably for her research and such.  She’s fanatical about dates and times.”

I exchanged a look with Martialla “Do you have any filters?  The river is polluted and it’s causing problems downriver.”

He blinked and I realized what was wrong with his eyes, they open the other way. “Not the kind of thing that I would confirm for hostiles, is it?  I tell you what we have up here and next thing I know, your raiders are attacking us.”

I smiled “Hostiles?  Come on, do we seem hostile?”

His mouth moved in what may have been a return smile of some kind “No, you don’t, matter of fact, but I’m not some ignorant paddy peasant, those firearms on your hips speak volumes.  You may not be dressed like warriors but that’s a great way to catch someone with their pants down.”

I dropped him a sassy wink “I do like catching people pants down.”  His reaction, or lack thereof I guess, was to stoneface me. “Uh, anyway, I assure you that we’re not here to cause any trouble, the villagers don’t even know you’re up here, they don’t even know what happened.  Maybe we can work out a trade.  Assuming that you even have the filters of course, which you are not saying that you do and I wouldn’t dream of asking.”

He kicked-started his little machine, which barely made a noise as the engine fired “There’s nothing down there that the Doc would want to trade for, but I’ll let her know, go on back out of the fields and wait, I’ll let you know what she says about it.”

“How long might that take?”

He didn’t bother to answer, putting down his goggles and skidding slowly in a little circle and heading back the way from which he came in a cloud of dust and grit.

I can’t be the same thing to you now

Martialla is excited because she found a functioning solar battery (among other things) in the traders’ junkpile but since we have nothing to plug into it and I doubt we’re going to come across a hair dryer or a CD player, I don’t see what the big deal is.  Her priorities are out of whack. 

We’ve come to an area where the ground has big furrows in it like there’s a colony of giant moles digging around under the earth.  Martialla says that this is from the earthquake activity but that makes no sense.  Earthquakes make cracks in the ground, not lines?  Although now that I think about it, if two plates are pulling apart that means one of them has to be smooshing into a third one on the other side?  I should have paid more attention in geology class.  Also I should have taken a geology class.  

At one point I saw some eyes peering out from about ten feet deep in a crevasse.  All I could see was two tiny shining white pinpricks of reflected light but I got the sense they belonged to something much bigger than the eyes would suggest.  I had the perverse desire to stop and get a closer look.  Like a little fish blundering into one of those other fish with the light thing on their head.  Good thing Martialla was driving.  My wrist has been bothering lately and she’s better at handling this piece of crap buggy anyway.  

When we did come to a stop it was because she said that she saw a landmine sticking out of one of the furrows.  She was worried about possibly driving into a minefield based on the theory “why would there be just one landmine?”  I’m not totally convinced that she knew what she was talking about because I thought landmines looked kind of like Frisbees and this thing looked more like a thermos to me.  She spent a lot of time looking around with the binoculars and saying what we needed was some ground penetrating radar.  Yeah, I’ll see what I can do about that.  

I gestured at the sluggishly flowing greyish waters “You can’t put landmines in a river, can you?  Maybe we should travel in the water for a while.  It doesn’t look very deep.”

Martialla glanced at the gravy-esque ribbon besides us “You mean the river that’s full of poison?”

“I wasn’t suggesting that we drink the water while we do it.  I’m just trying to offer alternatives.  You’re the one who’s worried about a minefield in northern California.  I say we just drive on.”

“Ela, I feel like I’ve told you a million times that anything could have happened while we were asleep.  There’s some very real evidence that there was a Russian army invasion at some point, in which case it would make total sense for someone to be laying down mines.”

I scoffed “Why would Russia invade California?”

Martialla gestured helplessly “I have no god damn idea!  That’s my point Ela, we don’t know.  Think about all the shit that happened in the last hundred years before we were frozen.  World War One, World War Two, Korea, Vietnam, half the countries that existed in nineteen oh two aren’t around anymore.  Think of all the stuff that was invented!  Cars, planes, radios, lasers, battery powered sexual devices, computers.  People traveled to the moon Ela, the moon!  A hundred years is a long time!”

“Huh, I suppose you’re right.  My grandma was born in nineteen thirty, she must have seen a lot of stuff go down.”

For lack of a better idea, we tried the river.  It was too deep for the buggy to drive in but the thing is so flimsy and it partially floats so we struggled upriver pushing/dragging/carrying the thing through the water for maybe two miles.  (Martialla’s note – it was barely half a mile at best) It was a serious pain in the ass.  Eventually we gave up and dragged the thing out of the water on the east side and hoped there were no mines over there.  How big could a minefield be anyway?  I feel like even burying one square mile of mines would take forever and majorly suck.  I bet the people whose job it is to make minefields just toss down a couple, call it a day and go back to base to jerk each other off.  

A few hours later (we didn’t get blown up by mines obviously) the ground flattened out and we saw fields.  Actual cultivated fields with channels from the river for irrigation.  Aside from the scale, which was small, it looked like something approaching modern agriculture.  Although it looked like it belonged in the Midwest, not California.  I have no idea what they were growing, corn and soybeans are about the extent of my ability to visually identify, but it looked like grain of some kind.  Wheat maybe?  Sorghum?  Sorghum is a thing right?  

We watched for quite a while because there had to be people somewhere and eventually we saw them.  It’s hard to say without getting closer but they seemed especially short even for future people.  They also had huge red bug eyes – and I mean literal bug eyes with all the little cells, not like Steve Buscemi.  Other than that, they didn’t look very buggy.  The guy at the bazaar that we saw looked more buggy than these people with chitin and such, also he was much larger.  

“Is this it then?  This doesn’t seem like the kind of place to get water filters.”

Martialla took the binoculars away from her face and gave me one of her patented “Look, you keep asking me things like I somehow have more information than you do.  It’s really getting on my nerves.  How the hell would I know if this is the place?”

It’s no different when you’re leaving home

After making sure the five men we just murdered were well and truly murdered, Martialla first collected up their weapons, stacking them carefully in a little pile.  After doing that she searched them more thoroughly, pulling a couple ceramic canteen-type things and various other odds and ends off their dead bodies.  After doing that she took a look at their strange vehicles before she turned to poking around in their wagon full of trash.  At that moment I was struck by how much it reminded me of a childhood memory.  

Each spring back home they’d have a scrub day where everyone could put out whatever you wanted for the trash collectors, expect paint cans, you can never get rid of paint cans.  Old TVs and mattresses were common choices but there was all kinds of stuff you’d see out at the curb.  Whenever the scrub day would come around so would the junk collectors who would drive around in big pickup trucks hauling big trailers looking for trash worth collecting.  My dad generally never got mad, he was a mild guy, but he used to lose his mind whenever the “pickers” were out there blocking the road while they mulled over how many broken lawn chairs they wanted to pull off the curb.   

I was still sitting where I fell.  It wasn’t that I couldn’t move, there just didn’t seem to be much point.  I dropped the gun out of my hand because guns are heavy and it was dry anyway.  Martialla will probably be disappointed in me for that.  Seven shots and I only killed one person?  Very wasteful.  I watched her for a moment, picking through the trash, and at one moment she leaned so far forward that her shirt and little FBI prop jacket rode up to her mid-back.  I always thought she was kind of gangly and stick-like but now she looks strong to me.  It would be wrong to say that she seems like she’s in her element here because this is no one’s element but she seems more confident, more in control.  I think she would have done well in prison.  

At one point she turned and said something to me but my ears were still ringing so it just sounded like “merfer-merfer-merfer” and then she climbed into the wagon to get a better look at something.  I suppose she was telling me to keep a watch in case there were more of them around.  That would be smart.  It’s the kind of thing she would have said.  By the time she climbed out of the junk wagon and crouched down by the pile of weapons to start examining them, I could hear pretty well out of one ear.

“Do you think warriors in olden times got PTSD and just no one cared back then?”

Martialla was examining a boxy rifle looking thing “Uh . . . maybe.  Probably it depends on the culture you’re talking about.  From what I’ve read Samurai sound like they were pretty emo.  They wrote poems about death and worried about what would happen to them after they died, things like that.  I read somewhere that’s why when Christian missionaries started showing up in Japan, the Samurai were the only ones who liked them.  Being enamored with a redemptive religion seems like they had some remorse.  On the other hand the Cossacks don’t seem like they give a shit about slaughtering entire races.  So . . . you know.”

“You know what Doctor Katz would say to me?”

Her head jerked up “What? Why would you bring that up?”

I frowned slightly “Why wouldn’t I?  Killing someone seems like the type of thing you’d mention to your therapist.”

She shook her head slowly “It’s just . . . I . . . Kurt loved that show is all.  I hated it but he watched it all the time anyway.  It’s weird that you’d bring it up now.”

“What are you talking about?”

“What are you talking about?”

“I’m talking about my therapist Doctor Katz.”

She made an ugly confused face “You mean that you actually had a therapist named Doctor Katz?  That was a show on Comedy Central.  It had that stupid animation where it was all blurry.  Sara Silverman was on it.  I think Tom Snyder created it or was a producer maybe.”

“That smarmy old fuck from the Late Late Show made a cartoon about my therapist?”

“No . . . look, forget it, you were saying?”

I threw my hands up “I don’t even fucking remember what I was saying!  The gist is this though, how are you okay with this?  Do you have some deeply rooted personality flaws that make it so you can kill someone and be unphased by it?  I’m freaking out over here.”

She looked at me for a minute “You seem fine.”

I slammed a fist into the ground “I’m not fine!  Well, actually, I am kind of fine, I’m just trying to wrap my head around this.  Self-defense is self-defense but it’s still killing someone.  Were you a hitman when you worked for the government?  Have you already made your philosophical peace with murder?  Is that why you’re so calm right now?”

“I was basically a secretary Ela, you know that.  Didn’t you bash cows in the skull with a sledgehammer or yank the heads off chickens on the farm?  I’m surprised you’re so squeamish.”

“I grew up on a farm, I didn’t work in a slaughterhouse!”

Martialla stopped fiddling with the weapons for a moment and thought for a while before answering “Okay, I can see that you’re upset here, I want to help you, but I don’t know what to say.  This is how it is now.  What did your yoga instructor always say?  You don’t get frustrated by things or angry about them, you just notice them and put them in your mind.  Maybe in three months I’ll have a total breakdown, but this is the world.  You may be struggling with it but at least you’re able to pull the trigger.  I don’t know that everyone would be.  You can handle it.  I mean if you were surfing and a shark came at you and you bashed its head in with your board would you feel sorry for it?”

“No, but that’s different, it’s an animal.”

She turned back to examining the weapons “Exactly, animals don’t know what they’re doing so they don’t really have it coming – people do.  So killing them should be easier if anything.”