The Eighth Plague: A Narrative of Sex, Drugs, and Rock 'n' Roll

Chapter 5: The first car on the foggy road riding.

The only breathing thing outside the Rivington Street Condominiums was an elderly tortoise.

Scant hours ago the streets had been packed with throngs of civilians, militants, and jesus freaks of every imaginable shape and color; all scrambling about, trampling one another; fighting, laughing, and fucking. Now, there was nothing. Everyone had gone inside, either to protect themselves from the virus, or (more likely) to watch television.

Television had seen a resurgence in popularity after the virus had spread onto the internet, necessitating the global recall and extermination of all internet-connected machines and personalities. With the internet inaccessible, modern music stale, and radio-drama and the printed word too boring, a planet reached once again for its collective remote. However, the only channels that hadn't cancelled programming due to outbreak concerns were TV Land and a grainy snuff-film channel that was set to old British TV themes. Currently, it was showing POV footage of someone with jet black gloves choking out a Princess Di lookalike set to the theme from Bootsie and Snudge. Truly, things had never been better.

This was especially true for a certain elderly tortoise, who was currently outside the Rivington Street Condominiums, slowly crawling across the pavement, enjoying his first moments of freedom in decades.

He'd lived for seventy years in the Zoo, and once it had been shut down due to disease concerns, he had been adopted rather against his will by a family of middle-class Serbs, who decided to paste assorted cut-out Spiegelman drawings onto his shell and hide. The whole thing was in rather poor taste, and the tortoise would have said so, if he could talk. Or was even aware of human concepts like poor taste or the moral obligation to speak up about it. As was, his only real problem with the drawings pasted all over him was the resultant itch.

Then, in a fortunate twist of fate, the Serbs were run over by a gang of virus-crazed, drug-addled, and sex-mad Christian fundamentalist bikers. The tortoise was free.

So, now he wandered. A living collage of assorted violent comic-panels from Maus and The Viper. He was hideous, but he was happy.

For a little while anyway, because before he could leave Rivington Street, he was accidentally killed by a falling Ruritanian woman.

"Ah! Fuck!" Martie yelled, as her jackboots tore through the elderly tortoise when she and ten others parachuted onto the sidewalk using garbage bags.

Patiently, the others (her sister and Space Program coworker Margie, their five foreign coworkers, the American Major they'd hired on a mercennarial basis to help them recapture a space station, the old man in the clown suit they'd similarly hired whose pad they'd crashed in and whom Margie had screwed while Martie watched, a cleaning woman mourning the death of her invalid son, and an old albino Kraut) all waited patiently as Martie tried to dislodge herself from the carcass of the large reptile.

"Well, then, Major. Where was it you parked your car?" she asked when she had removed herself fully.

"Car?" Major Collins asked, his already ugly face now turning an unsettling red.

"Yes, the car. You know, the one you went to get the beers and lean from?"

"Oh, yes. The Car. Well, I thought we would, ah... procure a new one instead. More fun that way, right?"

Unfortunately, they could not find any cars to steal, and Major Collins was forced to suffer that ultimate embarrassment of having one's friends see one's car.

Major Collins's car was a beaten-up 1978 Cadillac Limousine whose original color was impossible to guess, but which had nonetheless faded into a soft brown-yellow. On top of the roof was a taxi sign on which was stamped the word "Polizei." The doors were covered in graffiti, featuring slogans such as "I Don't Break for Mormons" "I Don't Break for Vegans" "I Don't Break for Mets Fans" "Fnord" "Saigon or Bust" "Berlin or Bust" "Comet Ping Pong or Bust" and "Let Me Bust One on Your Bust."

Struggling to hold in laughter, the party entered the vehicle after Major Collins, who took the driver's seat. Not quite trusting him to drive, Martie was sure to take shotgun. Squeezed together in the back seats were Colonel Van Bach, Margie, Spade, the Arab, the Chinese, and the Confederate; while Doris Daker, the Samoan, and the Swede, the heavyweights of the assemblage, lay on the spacious floor.

The Major self-consciously hit the gas, and they were off. Things were nice and calm, until about a minute into the drive, when Margie began playing She Blinded Me With Science on the tape player, causing everyone to get understandably quite angry and begin yelling at her all at once.

Taking a break from a long and loud list of racial expletives, Colonel Van Bach yanked the machine from her hands and tossed it out the window, where it hit the sidewalk and shattered into a million tiny pieces.

The party breathed a sigh of relief, and Major Collins turned on the radio to a random station, which happened to be playing Jumpin Jack Flash, which everyone likes. Sadly, the eleven people in that car were the only ones on the face of the earth listening to it at that moment, as everyone else was watching men in Nixon masks stab to death two very pretty young strawberry blondes as the Billy Bunter song played in reverse. It was the only tolerable thing on TV at the moment, the alternative being Alf's Hit Talk Show.

And outside the Rivington Street Condominiums, there was no sign of life, save a very old and very dead collage-covered tortoise.