Crash Test Zombie

Inspired by Bentley A. Reese’s “Suicide Bots”

Friday?

Ha-ha. Faster. Faster! Pedal to the metal, s’il vous plait. Let’s get this show on the road!

A woman sits in the car next to me. In the passenger seat. Her name is “Jane.”

Jane.

That’s what she said when they hefted her in, buckled her down. Her leg was shattered, splintered bone jutting through skin. The smell: dead for days.

What’s your name?

Jane, she said.

We’re in love. Me and Jane, we’re holding hands, over the gearshift, because that’s what couples do. Hold hands. Share feelings. Never seek to “fix” each other.

Mostly, the hands, till death do us part, which will be soon, seeing as how we’re careening toward a speck on the horizon, the termination of a seven-thousand-meter length of track, which I know from yesterday’s deaths terminates in a solid wall of concrete.

God, I’m in love! Are there guns in the car? Are there? Because, and maybe it’s this Richard’s biochemistry talking, maybe it’s the Euforaflex Control keeps glanding, but right now I wish to fire a gun into the sky as a declaration of love.

For Jane.

You know, like cowboys robbing a bank? How they fire their pistols? Where will the bullets land? Who cares! say cowboys, who live fast, die young, blazes of glory, no time to pay no mind to the terminal velocities of celebratory gunfire.

Dear god, please let me empty a clip into heaven as an expression of love.

For Jane.

{Control: There are no firearms in the car, Richard.}

Fine. No guns. I hang my head out the window, howl storms of crazy-ass elation—

I do not. The windows are up. I fumble at the window switch.

I do not. What’s wrong with my hand?

{Guys, seriously, what’s up with my hands?}

Clearly, whoever’s in Control (Chalmers? Yablo?) can’t be bothered to restart my hands, which won’t budge from the steering wheel, which is locked on that spot on the horizon, now clearly a wall, which comes as no surprise—in Life there is only Speed and Pain and Love (for Jane) and, usually, a thirty- to forty-minute CI on the pros and cons of experimental safety technologies.

These truths fill my mind: Speed, Pain, Love.

But my bullet-firing-into-the-air love will not be silenced, so I pound my forehead into the window until it’s smeared in purple goo and cracked with spiderweb threads.

The pounding joggles memories. For a moment, I am Lil’D’Anthony, seventeen, hefting a coffin, older brother Pepe inside. Nineteen, cold night, me and Tay-Tay littering his headstone with brandy bottles. Twenty-one, drunken sway-dancing in a social hall’s basement, clutching my two-year-old, Janessa, and promising, music too loud to hear it, that I shall be a better man.  

Then I’m me again.

Jane says, “What’s your name, hon?”

I say, “I am Richard. But, please, call me Dick,” and wiggle my eyebrows up and down.

Jane’s in her fifties. Male. Caucasian. Looks to weigh around 250 pounds. She has a pencil-thin mustache, gray whiskers, which no one in Control bothered to shave before they stuffed her in a sundress and drew ragged lines of devil-red lipstick over her mouth, tossed on a wig. Copper-colored ringlets. They look like a stainless-steel sponge.

Her GEIST™ is fitted in her right eye cavity. Its LED blinks at me.

Please, let me kiss Jane.

Let me fire bullets into the sky.

Let me kiss fire bullets into Jane’s sky.

I stomp on the gas, lean on the pedal so hard I stand in my seat. “This is fun, isn’t it?” I say. “We’re having fun, right?”

There’s a biker tattoo etched across Jane’s chest, a skeletal eagle clutching assault rifles and a billowy Confederate flag. Teardrop tattoos run down her cheeks. Her eagle has faded. It’s difficult to see under her ample carpet of chest hair, and, okay, I want to kiss her, I do, but, guys, come on, would it kill you to thaw more ladylike Janes?

{Control: Sorry, Richard.}

I inspect myself in the rearview. My face, what’s left of it, what’s not yet beaten to pulp, is dodgy, shifty looking, like I would’ve made an excellent dog catcher in a children’s movie full of talking pets. My GEIST™ has been staple-gunned onto my clavicle. Control’s run a Chebel into my mouth—over teeth, through palate. I feel it when I bite down, gritty on my tongue.

I wish I was prettier. Fortunately, there’s little time for remorse.

I didn’t write this script, my life, its notes, my score. What’s mine is to play it well, abandon myself to truths, Speed-Pain-Love, hoping only to discern in my lunar moth livings and dyings, my untimely loves of Janes, precious splinterings of energies on their way, dissolving like patterns in beach sand, frost flowers on drafty windows, melodies spat into the endlessness of night and melting to quiet, for to blind oneself to such fleeting beauties is, in our short days of frost and sun, to sleep before—

What did you enjoy most about dying in the all-new 2049 Chrysalis Gallivanterra?

If you could add any feature, what would it be?

Monday?

Today is a new day. I am a new Richard.

My new Richard tastes like sour cream. Not him. Like, I didn’t stick his fingers in his mouth to assess their taste. What I mean is that this Richard’s world, its taste, is similar to sour cream.

Not sour cream. Sour cream-flavored potato chips. With chives.

A woman sits in the car next to me. Her name is Jane.

“What’s your name?” she says.

I want to say Toby. Just to be spontaneous. Shake things up.

Hello, my name is Abed. Hello, my name is Pete. Hello, my name is The Fonze. Ayyyyyyyyy.

Like, instead of saying Richard, maybe once, just once, I could say My name is Root Beer because I’m sodalicious.