More Bedtime Stories for the Apocalypse (7 page)

Harry’s eyes widened.

They didn’t take the folder. The important
one.

He couldn’t believe it. A smile crept across
his lips. With shaking hands, he pulled out a folder labeled
BLISS ARCANA.
Bliss Arcana was one of Harry’s first
projects, one he took on years ago. It was a study of ancient
techniques to obtain bliss. The project had been pure research, the
only palpable outcome a kind of chewing gum Harry invented for fun.
When chewed, it released a long lasting chemical that directly
affected the brain’s pleasure centers. The chewing motion of the
jaw increased the experienced pleasure. The harder you chewed, the
better you felt.

It was pristine chewing satisfaction.

But that was years ago. Harry had all but
forgotten about it. Bliss Arcana was still a favorite at children’s
illegal chewing parties, and it was still quite legally used at
mental health institutes to keep the patients happy and occupied.
There were no side effects, other than a dropping out from society
and a tremendous amount of drool coursing down the user’s chin.

But the reason Harry’s eyes lit up when he
saw the folder was because it no longer contained the Bliss Arcana
research. In his haste to clean up his office for an upcoming visit
from his mother, he had stashed a large stack of his Vibrationless
Sound project notes into the old, empty folder.

The Mayor’s thugs took the headset
schematics, the headsets themselves, but the important gizmos of
the headset - the things that transmitted the human voice directly
to the correct brain frequencies - were explained in detail in the
papers Harry now held.

The bastards won’t know what to make of
it all
. Harry walked out into the sunshine, papers held firmly
in his hands.

As he strolled along the breathing sidewalk
and his eyes slid across the organic road, he was suddenly wary of
a slight change in the coloration of the Oxycrete. What was once a
healthy green had become a bit -
dull
.

Maybe his eyes were playing tricks on him,
or perhaps it was shadows cast by the sun, but it seemed all the
newly erected buildings were letting out a collective sigh.

I told them it was too soon. Not enough
research. Not enough time.

He clutched the folder and stepped gingerly
over the respiring sidewalk.

That was when the voices in his head
started.

-
What the hell. It’s a headset
.

-
Transmitter of some sort.

Harry cringed. Of all the headsets, they had
to try the one tuned to his own frequency. He had forgotten that
the one he’d been testing on himself worked just fine. It had all
the proper parts in place.

- What does it do?

- You talk into it.

- No shit.

- Supposedly, it’s tuned into someone’s
brain waves.

- No shit?

How long will this go on? Harry’s thoughts
tried to rise above the transmitted cacophony in his mind. Aside
from the two morons talking into the headset, there was the sound
of a television in the background and the sound of tools tinkering
on the transmitter.

- I might as well be talking to a wall.

- It wouldn’t be the first time.

The sound of the headset being dropped to
the table made Harry wince.

- I was kidding! Let go of my shirt.

- No more cracks about me talking to
walls.

- Okay, okay.

* * * * *

Somehow, Harry managed to get through the
days that followed without pounding his head against anything
solid. He gathered from the conversations in his brain that there
had been no progress made on his invention. It was next to
impossible without the notes.

And suddenly –

Silence
. It spread soothingly over
his brain. The transmitter had been turned off.

They must have given up, Harry thought. Of
course, they’ll soon be knocking on my door asking all sorts of
questions. But at least it’s quiet.

He began thinking of evasion tactics.

The next day, as he was jotting down excuses
for a vacation in the synthetic western forests, another voice
chimed in.

- Roger. Roger. Do you read me? Am I coming
in?

The voice of a child.

- Mission one. Mission one. This is base
command. Ready to commence engine pulse on cue.

The child began a countdown starting from
one hundred.

By the end of the day, Harry was well
acquainted with Bobby, the child who was unwittingly talking
directly into Harry’s brain.

Harry also became acquainted with Bobby’s
mother (‘Maaa-aah!’) and father (‘Daaa-aaad!’) and their lack of
effective discipline.

- Bobby, take off that damn headset and sit
up at the table.

- But Daaa-aaad! Can’t I wear it while I’m
eating?

- Just until your mother gets home.

Later -

- Bobby, take off that damn headset right
now!

- But Maaa-aah! Can’t I wear it to bed? Just
tonight? Pulleeease?

- Well - just don’t let your father catch
you with it on.

And to top it all off, the little shit
snored like an off-key chain saw.

Harry gritted his teeth. Tossed and turned
in bed. Pounded his fists against his pillow.

“
I have to find that boy,” he thought
out loud. “Or I’ll go crazy!”

* * * * *

He went crazy within the week. One of his
lab assistants found him huddled in a corner of his lab screaming,
smelling of urine. He was taken to St. Clinton’s Mental Health
Institute that same night and put on a diet of vitamins and Bliss
Arcana an hour after checking in. As he chewed his own invention,
the child’s voice didn’t sound so bad. The snoring became music.
The child’s conversations with make believe astronauts and
invisible animals became a series of warm, tender notes as Harry
chewed. A psychiatrist asked him why he was swaying his head back
and forth.

“
I’m listening to my inner child,” he
replied.

Harry was placed in a ward for dangerous
psychotics and began to chew his prescription gum all the harder.
The entire ward was redolent with the percussive sound of chewing
and lip smacking. Unfelt erections were plentiful as drool dribbled
down numb chins. Yet everyone smile pleasantly. Even many of the
interns hid in closets full of cleaners and disinfectants, sitting
on piles of clean rags, chewing their shifts away. It was indeed
true bliss.

After a month passed, they inexplicably
stopped giving Harry his gum and put him in a straight-jacket.

“
What’s the meaning of this?” Harry
bellowed, wiping dried spittle from his cheeks onto his confined
shoulders. “This is inhuman!”

While they explained to Harry that he was
getting visitors the next day, little Bobby was still in Harry’s
head, singing an off-key and grating song.

- You’ve got a big butt,

A very hairy pig butt

A stupid, stinking ugly butt,

A smelly, gooey, fooey butt.

Little Bobby sang it over and over,
sometimes whispering it, sometimes shouting it.

- You’ve got a big butt!

A very hairy pig butt!

Oh, Christ, Harry thought. I’m in hell.

By the time the Mayor came to visit the next
day, Harry was writhing on the floor of a padded cell, the
straight-jacket keeping him from pounding his head into the shape
of a squashed melon.

“
Harry,” the Mayor said. “Harry! Snap
out of it, boy! We’ve got a problem.”

“
You’ve got a problem?” Harry grunted
through clenched teeth.

“
It’s the Oxycrete. It’s turning bad.
It’s beginning to stink. The smog is coming back in waves. My
constituents are up in arms. What the hell am I going to
do?”

Harry’s head lolled around to face the
Mayor. A large malicious grin crept onto Harry’s face.

“
It’s hungry,” he said. “You have to
feed it.”

“
Feed it?” the Mayor blustered. “What
the hell do you feed it?”

“
I don’t know.”

“
Don’t know? You’re the guy who
invented the stuff. It’s your baby. What do you feed
it?”

Harry’s eyes rolled in a circle. He began to
chant;

“
You’ve got a big
butt.

A very hairy pig butt.

A stupid, stinking, ugly butt.

A smelly, gooey, fooey butt.”

“
My God!” the Mayor said. “You sound
just like my son!”

Harry’s jaw dropped.

* * * * *

After removing the headset from his son and
removing Harry from his straight-jacket, the Mayor set Harry back
up in his lab.

“
Find me something to feed it,” the
Mayor pleaded. “That’s all I ask.”

Harry got right to work.

The high points of Oxycrete were its
durability under pressure, its release of oxygen into the
atmosphere, and its consumption of not only carbon dioxide, but
carbon monoxide as well. It even purified acid rain.

But what to feed it? Harry knew this would
come up eventually, but not this soon. It was supposed to be fairly
self-sufficient.

He felt a tenderness in his back and
shoulders where the straight-jacket’s constraints had pressed
especially hard.

If they want me to feed it, he thought, then
feed it I will.

Meanwhile, the Oxycrete’s color turned to a
sickening vomit green. It smelled bad, too, as if all the
pollutants it consumed were stagnating in its cells. The Mayor
called Harry every day, every night, sometimes ranting, sometimes
pleading.

When Harry finally came up with a solution,
he went directly to the Mayor’s residence. He was greeted at the
door by young Bobby.

“
Here kid,” Harry whispered, slipping
the boy some Bliss. “Have a piece of gum.”

The Mayor appeared. “Harry! Thank God.”

Harry told the Mayor of his plan, while
Bobby slouched in the corner, drooling happily.

Two weeks later, the slow moving rain-hovers
poured oceans of water onto the city of Bushton far below. Water
mixed with Harry’s special Oxycrete Feed Formula.

* * * * *

Soon, the buildings took root, their walls
creeping with vines. Parking lots became carpeted with thick, tall
grass. The streets of Bushton grew slick with moss.

The Oxycrete, luxuriating in its new food
source, excreted not just oxygen, but oxygen rich with a fine mist
of Bliss Arcana extract. Despite the difficulty going to and from
work with the pavement sprouting flora left and right, and the
buildings becoming self-contained jungles, the citizens of Bushton
found themselves quite content. Very content. Very happy. They
smiled a lot. They giggled as fortresses of trees surrounded their
homes. Even though their automobiles became useless, the busses and
subways unable to maneuver through the incredible growth, Bushton’s
citizenry didn’t seem to mind.

As the city’s inhabitants happily drooled,
the streets, the buildings, the parking lots of Bushton, breathed
like never before.

* * * * *

* * * * *

St. John’s Lutheran Church sat a mile out of
the town proper of Vidar, a small Minnesota town whose weekly
newspaper announcements were filled with Norwegian names. A
cemetery spread out from the back of the church, and the
gravestones, too, were heavy with Norwegian names; Isaksons and
Johnsruds, Morstads and Wolds, Ullands and Sandviks. Beyond the
cemetery was an apple orchard, and beyond that, forest. n front of
the church a dirt road took carriages and those on horseback and
foot all the way to Mankato, where one could catch a train if one
so chose.

By now, Amund Grotberg was comfortable among
the gravestones. The first few nights had been hard, and he was
spooked more than once by owls hooting and deer treading on the dry
grass, but now he was used to it. The job paid him in food – a pint
of beer and a lard sandwich made by the pastor’s wife for the night
(and any apples he desired from the orchard) and a nice breakfast
in the morning when his shift was over; coffee, eggs, a hunk of
cheese, bread, the occasional slice of ham. It was the breakfasts
that kept him from running those first few nights. He was all of
sixteen and done with school. His parents were both gone; mother
dead long ago and father – at least according to the town’s gossip
– had run off with a caravan of gypsies.

Reading troubled Amund; the letters appeared
jumbled and backward. And math – not his strongest suit. He liked
working with his hands, and he helped the undertaker when needed.
It was the undertaker who recommended him to Pastor Blom.

His job here was two-fold; keep away
potential vandals or body thieves, and listen for the ringing of
the coffin bell. He’d been on the job a month already, and none of
these things had happened, yet. Every once in a while local youths
would sneak in, trying to scare each other, and once he caught
Frode Wangen and Jacobine Overland embracing fervently on the edge
of the cemetery. Frode was only a year older than Amund, and
Jacobine was the wife of Gunnar. Amund scared the kids away, but he
let Frode and Jacobine keep doing what they were doing without
announcing his presence. He watched them from behind a gravestone,
the moonlight shining on their exposed bodies, and he wished he was
Frode in those moments.

The town’s undertaker, Morten Ruen, started
selling the coffin bells the previous summer. “What could be worse
than burying your loved one alive?” he’d ask the relatives of the
recently deceased. “This way, if by some miracle, they awoke, they
have a way of letting us know.” He’d lower his voice to a whisper.
“It has happened, you know. Coffins have been dug up for whatever
reason, and the evidence of their struggle was clear as day. The
fingernail scratchings on the coffin lid, the look of terror frozen
on their faces...”