The New and Improved Romie Futch (24 page)

The last berries I will ever lay eyes upon
, I thought, as tears rolled down my cheeks.

When Hogzilla finished his lunch, he unleashed a brontosauran bellow and romped around the glade sniffing tree trunks. The poor fool thought a fertile sow was in the area. As he dashed around with increasing desperation, his roaring became mournful, full of plaintive notes. In a small, warm corner of my frozen heart, I understood where he was coming from. There we were, two solitary bachelors, too weird to find mates, plying our frustrations in the empty forest. But then Hogzilla turned, sniffed the air, emitted a queer whinny, and trotted right up to me.

I trembled in the vast shadow of the beast. I gazed into his crazy bulbous eyes. Braced my rifle against my shoulders and fired. The razorback snorted with annoyance as the bullet bounced off his leathery chest, his shield fortified with cartilage and scar tissue, tough as a triple-alloy tank. The monster stepped around my buttonbush cover and grinned at me. The great Hogzilla loomed, blotting out the sun. The animal leered with red, protuberant eyes, his pupils shrunk to pinpricks.

I regarded his mammoth cutters, razor sharp and blood crusted. I beheld his gaping mouth, the teeth jagged and yellow and bedaubed with tidbits of gore. His head was bald, the color of Bazooka gum, adorned with haphazard clumps of black bristle. A crop of whiskers grew about his black, smiling lips.

The monster wheezed into my face, his breath evoking primordial slime, some fertile sludge from which newts might hatch. The creature snorted, and I opened myself up to death. Closed my eyes. Waited for the gouge of Hogzilla's tusks.

Instead, I felt the warm tickle of a hog snout against my belly. I opened my eyes. The pig was sniffing me over, huffing and puffing, snuffling under my shirt. Hogzilla sniffed my armpits. My elbows. The fingers of my left and right hands. The animal licked my right pinkie and emitted a sultry grunt. The sky split open with a thousand red shrieks as the bastard nibbled nearly an inch off the smallest finger of my right hand.

I heard the sick crunch of bone. The air went splotchy. I thought I saw Hogzilla extend a pair of dark, fleshy wings and bound off into the clouds.

I fainted, I suppose—possibly from candy-assed fear, possibly from some neurological dysfunction bequeathed by the Center for Cybernetic Neuroscience—but I woke up five minutes later. I gazed with surprising calm at the carnage, ripped off the hem of my T-shirt, applied a makeshift tourniquet, and drove straight to Hampton Regional.

•  •

My finger had been bitten off just between the knuckle and the distal phalanx. The harried authorities at Hampton Regional sent me home with my maimed digit gauze-wrapped and encased in
iced plastic. Fearing nerve damage and lawsuits, the emergency room doctors referred me to an orthopedic surgeon. Armed with a Demerol prescription, some free antibiotic samples, and the name of said surgeon scrawled onto my release form, I drove groggily home. When I called the specialist who would supposedly take care of me on the spot, his office informed me that they did not treat uninsured patients. They provided the names of several doctors who might.

I slumped on the couch, cradling my ruined finger in my lap, wondering if I ought to call Dad, expert on the medical industry's dark shenanigans, wise to the horrors awaiting an uninsured man in my condition. But no, I could not bear to hear his grim
I told you so
, could not stand the thought of Marlene flitting around me in a perfumed panic, dispensing advice from women's magazines and self-help blogs.

“Fuck the medical-industrial complex,” I hissed.

I popped two Demerol, downed a beer, and slathered my pinkie in antimicrobial goop. I walked over to my shop, retrieved the needle and super-thin nylon taxidermy thread I used for small game animals, and stitched up my own torn flesh. I was pretty handy with a needle—even with my left hand—especially since my final
BAIT
downloads had endowed me with meticulous fine motor skills. Plus, I'd recently had lots of practice with tiny specimens, which require intricate stitching. So I managed to seal off the wound with a fairly neat seam. I applied a glop of SilvaSorb gel, a swaddling of white gauze, and returned to the house. I downed another Demerol, collapsed onto my bed, and fell into psychedelic dreams.

•  •

The next morning I woke up with a morphine hangover and a raging fingertip, which sent me spiraling into a synthetic opioid binge, fueled with splashes of Jim Beam.

In a lawn chair on my back patio, I lolled in a narcotic haze, gazing down into the gorge, watching the sun creep over the algae-infested roof of my boyhood home. Observing the breathtaking exfoliation of the leaves,
drowsed with the fume of poppies
, I marveled at the paradox of festive festering.

My errant fingertip, a floating signifier detached from its original context, had already dissolved in the burbling cauldron of Hogzilla's belly. I envisioned a small sliver of bone wedged like a splinter in one of the monster's steaming turds. I thought of Ahab in his bitterness, Moby-Dick rising from the watery abyss to chomp off the sea captain's leg. I saw the half-crazed Ahab staring down at his bleeding stump. I pulled out my phone. I surfed the web for fake fingers.

Would I go with a lifelike silicone finger prosthesis? Would I flaunt my disability with a clip-on robotic digit made of steel and futuristic plastic? Or would I simply carry on with a nub? Fake fingers were expensive, especially the high-functioning units with bionic flex joints and nerve-sensitive wiring. Calculating how many deer heads I'd have to stuff to pay for a mock pinkie, I panicked about getting back to work, but I couldn't bring my wounded hand anywhere near an animal carcass, pickle bath, or tanning chemicals anytime soon.

I sighed, popped another pill, enjoyed another swig of bourbon.

When I hit an invincible Demerol groove, I couldn't resist the perverse urge to pull off my stiffened bandage and gaze at the sight of blood-crusted stitches oozing at the seams. I worried about infection. I worried about gangrene and deep bone rot. But I slipped the bandage back on, had another drink, and hoped for the best.

I sent a drunken group e-mail to my clients explaining delays in product turnaround. I lobbed another furious electronic message at the Center regarding my headaches and blackouts. Receiving an instant automatic reply, I vowed to drive to Atlanta right then and there. I even looked around for my keys, planning to burst into Morrow's inner sanctum. I'd slam the asshole against the wall cowboy-style. Punch him in his bland face. See if the mannequin had human blood in his veins or some creepy android fluid like the milky stuff that Ash leaked in
Alien
.

I could barely walk, much less drive, and by the time I got there the business end of the Center would be void of humans, humming on autopilot. So I texted Trippy, again and again, too wasted to be disheartened by the sight of multiple one-sided speech bubbles going on and on, a madman talking to himself.

Just after dark, when I finally stumbled inside, I called my father. He bleated like a cryptic goat before uttering my name. But I couldn't bring myself to speak. When I heard the archetypal sound of his sinus-clearing maneuver, I breathed like a serial killer and hung up. The walls were melting from Demerol and Beam. But I still felt the urge to express myself, to volley some poignant message into the cold, mute universe. And so, minutes before I passed out, I removed my crusted bandage, snapped a pic of my castrated pinkie, and posted the gory, Freudian image on Helen's E-Live Wall.

It sat there for a solid week—outcast as a leper among happier images of birthday parties and karaoke jaunts—inciting no comments whatsoever. At last, Helen private-messaged me.

What the hell's going on, Romie? Are you drinking again? I'm worried about you
.

I chose to remain aloof in sulky silence. I chose to retreat deeper into pills and booze, nothing to entertain me but the gratuitous stunts of my own cyborgian brain.

•  •

One week later, I was still in self-medication mode, ignoring impatient customers, trashing late notices sent by the shady mortgage company that owned my house, surfing the hog-hunting message boards, exploring the hinterlands of obsession until my eyeballs throbbed. Ahab-style, I vowed revenge against the stinking monster who had casually nibbled my finger off. Vowed to up my game when my wound healed. Vowed to purchase a gun-mounted kill light and blow that motherfucker to pulled pork while he was sleeping.

According to the fanatics on HogWild.com, Hogzilla was still fading in and out of dimensions, melting into air, flying off into the clouds as bullets ricocheted off his pachydermic hide. According to one anonymous poster,
that hell hog gobbled up a toddler in Yemassee
. SquealinGroovey claimed that the boar
ate off a man's leg and left the rest of him to set there and suffer
. PigglyWiggly69 attested that the evil razorback had
ruint a whole kennel of prize coon pups, biting off pieces and leaving the poor things alive
. Though newspapers never confirmed these suburban legends, I could easily see the nasty pig gulping down babies like tender hors d'oeuvres, torturing innocent fawns, milk-plumped puppies, and downy baby rabbits.

As usual, PigSlayer stepped into the debate and offered a more cynical perspective:
I have reason to believe that Hogzilla is a mutant
, she wrote,
a transgenic monster escaped from GenExcel, that genetics lab on the outskirts of Yemassee that's funded by BioFutures Inc. This would explain Hogzilla's baldness, his weird skin color, his quasi-mythical wings
.

Who was this woman who used words like
quasi-mythical
and knew how to slay a boar with a bow and arrow and field dress it
with a T-handle saw? Was she real or was she some cynical nerd, holed up in a big city apartment, chuckling as she created fake identities to toy with yokels on backwoods message boards? For all I knew, PigSlayer could be an adolescent boy, indulging his fantasies with a sexy female avatar.

Nevertheless, I sat there, fingers poised over the keyboard, ready to rattle off a clever message to this mysterious woman, converse about the mutant nature of our beloved Hogzilla, discuss the shenanigans of corporate entities like BioFutures Incorporated, a name that rang a bell but which I couldn't quite place. I felt tongue-tied and dull-witted and was, per usual, wasted. I vowed to write a clever bit the next morning—sometime between my first coffee and my second shot of bourbon. But I didn't even have a username, a fantasy identity that would allow me to cut a witty swath through the dense brush of hog-hunting discourse. I was just a voyeuristic creep spying on a spectral woman.

But then, deep in the night, it came to me: I was PorkDork—badass yet nerdy, cerebral yet self-effacing, playful and language drunk, with an affinity for rhyme, consonance, and alliteration, just the kind of man a woman like PigSlayer would be drawn to. With a pounding heart, I typed in my username. I created a password that I'd probably forget. And then I rested my ravaged head upon my keyboard and fell asleep.

•  •

One unseasonably warm night, crickets still screaming in November, I felt a headache blooming in my skull, a blood-dark flower swelling up from the stem of my brain. I was out on my front porch, gawking at the mist-blurred moon, when my cell buzzed. It was an unfamiliar number, but I felt lonely enough to pick up.

“Romie, man, it's me.” The familiar voice was nestled in static.

“Trippy? Shit, it's about fucking time. Didn't you get my texts?”

“Shhhhh,” he hissed. “They'll hear you.”

“Who will?”

“Dr. Jekyll and his evil posse.”

“What you talking 'bout, Willis?”

“I think they're watching, listening.
Feels like they're in my motherfucking head
.”

“Where are you, man?”

“Can't say.”

“You mean you can't tell me or you don't know?”

“Look, I'll get right to the meat. Have you been suffering any blackouts?”

“Actually, a couple. Didn't you get my texts?”

“Some bastard pinched that phone.”

“Well, good. That explains why you—”

“Listen, I don't have much time. You been waking up with a sense of lost time?”

“Once or twice, but I figured it was just a side effect, along with retinal hemorrhaging and elephantiasis of the testicles, all covered by section 3, clause 9.5 of contract 2.”

I forced out a laugh, but Trippy didn't join me in my merriment.

“Have you heard any voices, Romie?”

“It depends.”

“Depends? What the hell does that mean? You either have or you haven't.”

I thought of the time I'd passed out in the bathroom after that monster migraine and bout of garbled speech. Yes, I
had
heard a voice, but it might've been part of the dream I'd lapsed into, the one about Helen. Voices in the head were the signature lunatic trait, and I wasn't ready to fess up yet.

“Trippy”—I forced out a brutal chuckle—“have you, perchance, been indulging in some substance abuse?”

“I don't think the experiment's over, Romie. I think they're still dicking with us.”

“Who, exactly?”

“Dr. Jekyll. BioFutures. I don't know.”

“BioFutures—that rings a bell. Wait a minute.”

“Daddy Warbucks behind the Center. Got a weird e-mail from Skeeter. Think he—”

Trippy's voice fizzled, our connection lost. When I rang him back, I was sent straight to voice mail.
I remembered that Bio-Futures Incorporated was also, according to PigSlayer, the dark force behind GenExcel, that laboratory in Yemassee that was supposedly doing some unkosher shit with animal DNA. I wondered what kind of dark corporation was funding both GenExcel and the Center for Cybernetic Neuroscience. I envisioned a Darth Vaderesque CEO sitting at a twenty-thousand-dollar desk carved from a chunk of obsidian. I heard his inhuman laughter echoing down the labyrinthine hallways of his corporate aerie. Heard the
click, click, click
of his secretary's noir stilettos on Italian marble tiles.