(PGLYLND)
Chapter 10: A Giant Albino Alligator, for one thing

 

10.

     The alligator was easily the size of a school bus, and a pearly iridescent white. The cop that had slapped me was already completely consumed, and all that I could see of the kicking cop was the leg that had kicked me, sticking out from between two giant teeth like a cigar. The Alligators’ head turned to the side and its slitted eye, as large as a bowling ball, regarded me coldly.

     “I’m sorry, were you saving them to eat yourself?” she said. She snapped down the remaining leg. My retreat was blocked by a mountain of  smoking tires, and I was still sitting down, all of seven feet from her nose. I stood up briskly.

     “…No, thanks, already ate, earlier, help yourself, by all means. Must be getting along, now, hope you enjoy your cops.” I went to walk directly past her, but she swung around entirely and blocked my path.

     “I don’t meet others often,” she said, and continued to look at me. I could see my reflection in her green crescent eyeball. I straightened my collar and smoothed my hair self-consciously.

     “Well, I’m glad to meet you,” I said. What else could I say? “My name’s Fang. I’m attending the Taxi-to-Trucking Transportation Industry Convention/Fiesta! At the Ice Cream Indulgences! Hotel and Resort. It’s absolutely awful.”

     “I don’t really remember my name,” she said, “ and that business stuff bores me. I could never have a job like that. Even if it does get a little repetitive just haunting these wastelands and eating people. Oof…that second cop was too chewy. I should have stuffed him under an underwater log for a couple of weeks to tenderize.”

     “How’s the hunting? You must get a lot of the overflow from Piggleyland over here, I suppose,” I said.

     “To tell you the truth, I don’t really get over in the Orlando area often…I prefer to stay in less developed areas, but every once in a while I feel like I really should come into the city to wreak a little of the awesome vengeance of nature on these motherfuckers. Phoo,” she said, spitting out a pistol, “Say, speaking of the awesome vengeance of nature, you haven’t heard anything about a swarm of hamster-sized killer bees, have you? I owe those guys five bucks.”

   “I haven’t run across them, but if I do I’ll let them know you’re looking for them. Look, I gotta go. I’m drunk and miserable and I think my wife might be cheating on me. I mean, probably not. She wouldn’t do that. I don’t think. I mean, I’m sure she wouldn’t. I’m going to call her.”

     “If you’re drunk and she’s cheating on you, the last thing you want to do is call her on the phone. Wait until you see her face to face and can talk it out…”

     “Thanks, that’s probably good advice.”

     “…and if she’s really cheating on you, eat her quickly so you don’t have a lot of leftovers in the fridge reminding you of the relationship.”

     “Thanks again, good luck wreaking the awesome vengeance.”

     “Same to you, businessman!” she laughed, spinning her bus-sized body around and diving into the drainage ditch..

 

     I picked up the cops’ pistol. It took me about five minutes to figure out how to spring the cartridge out of it and eject the shell in the chamber. Once I was sure it was empty, I put it in my pocket. The bullets I tossed into the ditch. I looked up on the freeway and noticed that the police car was sitting there, abandoned. I climbed up to it and found that they’d actually left the doors unlocked, and my eighteen bucks was in the change holder in the console. I also got a cool pair of mirrored aviator sunglasses.

     I hopped back down the embankment from the freeway. I had nowhere in particular to go, so I just set off towards a cluster of buildings in the distance to the North, walking the whiskey off as the sun glared down on me like the naked eye of a merciless God, and then the crisscrossing freeways and highways overhead would cut the sunlight off for dark, dead intervals, and now that I’d been walking around in these areas for a couple of days, I knew how much more there was going on down here than was immediately evident. I saw other people occasionally, dodging this way or that, giving each other a wide berth.  Most of them looked fairly dangerous or demented in one way or another.

     There were a lot of lost and desperate looking people, like the fat lady in the leotard with the stuffed poodle and the dwarf with a spiked football helmet and the reciprocating saw. I was kind of glad to see a couple Lost Pigs running off in another direction at one point: apparently they hadn’t all been eliminated by the Piggleyland Security Warthogs. I saw a large band of  roving Cuban cyborgs but I was not seen by them.  I was walking towards downtown Orlando, but I was probably ten miles from it, if Orlando still had a downtown.

 

     I came to a fifteen-foot wall with spikes on top of it and climbed over to find myself in a suburban neighborhood. A guy watering his lawn looked concerned when I jumped to the sidewalk, but I gave him a big smile and just sauntered up the street and he kept watering.

     The houses were all pastel cinderblock, ranch-style, close together. It was just getting to be rush hour, and the first cars were docking in their driveways, kids getting out of the cars, people with bags of groceries, bags from fast-food joints. The whir of traffic from the encircling freeways had been rising in volume steadily for 45 minutes. After a few blocks I found a playground, had a long drink from a water fountain and sat down on a bench to relax for a few minutes and get my bearings. Looking down the street I watched the choreography of the suburban evening, car after car nesting in garages, kids back and forth on various colorful wheeled devices, some guy listening to rock and roll while he swapped out the alternator on his car, people gardening. It was hot, but I was in the shade of a large flowering bush, and the yells of the kids on the merry-go-round did not keep me from falling asleep pretty quickly.  

     When I awoke it was dark, probably 10 PM, with a fat gibbous moon, and there were just two kids left on the playground, pale, scrawny specimens, one boy and one girl who surveyed me dispassionately from their perch atop a metal slide. I stood up and stretched, feeling old but not as drunk as earlier, “Hey, kids, it’s late. Why aren’t you at home?” I asked the kids.

     “Aw! Mom’s having an affair with her boss,” said the boy. The girl added “… She has to have sex with him before Dad gets home, so we have to stay out here until she calls us. It won’t take long!” at that moment a blowsy woman wearing a feathered muu-muu opened the back door of a nearby house. A man ran out of the door, tying his tie and hopped into a big red Dodge Penetrator parked at the curb. He squealed off down the street.

     “See!” they said and ran happily towards the house. The screen door slammed them in.

I stared blankly after them just long enough to see the Dad come home, looking daft and happy, riding on a bike. Now I was wearing my delicate new sobriety like a hair shirt full of beetles. I set off to try to make my way back to Alligator Al’s Central Florida Jungle Fun Compound. I came across a few old brick storefronts just before I had to climb back over the wall out of the residential neighborhood, and one of them was a party store and I bought a pint of more whiskey for six bucks and climbed over the wall, drinking.

 

     Now it was real dark, absolutely black under the Freeway overpasses. The swelling moon was rarely visible for scraps of cloud, moving fast and looking like torn black rags. Small fires burned here and there, and I kept to the shadows and moved slowly, concentrating on staying unseen by the tattered shapes that stumbled around out there in the dark.

     I took a shortcut through an abandoned cemetery. It was very peaceful, with the shiny white stones under the black underbelly of the Freeway. There was a small gang of Goth kids having a party by a mausoleum, and I was petrified for a time watching a girl with long red hair and a lacy bustier dancing in the firelight. She looked just like Vampirella, albeit with more piercings, straps and zippers. I kept going before they saw me.

     I finished the pint of whiskey in the parking lot of Alligator Al’s Central Florida Jungle Fun Compound and left the bottle on the antenna of Sam Handwichs’ Gold Cadillac. There were four sullen teens in the hot tub. I staggered up and stepped into the tub fully clothed, and submerged up to my chin. After a minute, I remembered the gun in my pocket, pulled it out and put it on the side of the hot tub to drain out. Almost immediately, there weren’t four sullen teens in the hot tub anymore, or anywhere in sight. I soaked in the hot tub for a good 45 minutes, then got out, kicked off my shoes, stripped to my boxers and started swimming laps in the murky pool, keeping my head well out of the sludgy water. Once I had exhausted myself I gathered up my stuff and the gun and dripped back to my room, where I turned the TV on and took a long hot shower to scrub the nearly lethal levels of chlorine off my burning skin.

     I sat up for a long time looking angry at the phone, but I didn’t try to use it,  I just did push-ups and sit-ups until I threw up, and then I fell asleep, looking forward just ever so much to  the final day of the Taxi-to-Trucking Transportation Industry Convention/Fiesta!