Matthew teased the cat several times before he finally dumped the bag in until he felt no more movement. Climbing high up under the bridge, he took the dead cat out and laid it across the concrete in front of him. He could feel no pity for the creature. In his mind, it had made no effort to save itself.

All that is weak, he understood, is doomed.

Brandon had committed a cardinal sin. In his backpack was a stack of paperback books. When Matthew saw him open it and rummage through them, he a.s.sumed they were comic novels or science fiction or something else dorky. He ignored the new kid for a moment.

Then he saw the book Brandon had decided to read: The Stranger, by Albert Camus.

This had been Matthew"s favorite book since the fourth grade. Who the h.e.l.l did this kid think he was?

The other students noticed and were throwing erasers at him for doing something school-like on the bus.

"Can"t you wait for the first bell to ring before being such a d.a.m.n dork?" Jason Bugle chuckled, and then looked at Matthew, for the first time, for a follow up.

All Matthew could think about was the fact that he was no longer the true genius of the school. This new kid was obviously just starting the fourth grade. He himself had not discovered Camus until well into the second semester. Brandon would no doubt find his way to Nietzsche"s The Anti-Christ before the end of the year. Mentally, he was superior. Matthew could feel it.

"n.o.body reads on the bus," he finally sneered.

"Yeah, Yuckystein," Jason laughed, "give "em h.e.l.l!"

Brandon ignored them all and continued reading. Continued soaking up the truth about people and apathy and the over-arching insignificance one could attach to something as mind-boggling as murder.

Matthew could no longer take it. "Put the book down," he demanded, "or I"ll shove it up your nose!"

The other kids went silent. Here was an event one might expect to hear about for years to come. Stupid, nerdy Matthew Yutzenstal lost it, the first day of sixth grade, and beat the c.r.a.p out of the new dork on the block.

He stood up. "Put the book away," he said again.

Brandon looked over, realizing the situation was beyond a simple Christian turning-of-the-cheek. He protected the book.

Matthew reached over and yanked Brandon"s gla.s.ses off.

"Whoa!" a collective grunt of animal approval waved across the bus.

Tony the bus driver looked into the large mirror above the windshield. Seeing Matthew Yutzenstal stand over the new kid in bully formation made him smile. "You show him who"s boss, Yuckyboy!"

Matthew dropped the gla.s.ses on the floor and stepped on them. "You gonna put the book away?"

Brandon"s mind made the show of force his body could not. Squinting, he opened the book back up and continued reading.

This was too much. Matthew pulled Brandon by his hair out of his seat and threw him to floor of the bus, right on top of his broken gla.s.ses. He brought his foot down, again and again, on Brandon"s face. First the nose cracked, then the blood flew.

The rest of the kids stood up and moved away. They made no noise. Tony couldn"t see what was happening. He a.s.sumed it was a good-natured a.s.s-kicking that would remind the new boy that nerds don"t have it easy at Carmel Elementary #12. The bus drove on as though nothing unusual was taking place.

Brandon kicked and swung blindly, desperately trying to stop the beating. This encouraged Matthew, who picked him up and dragged him to the emergency exit.

"Here"s a lesson for all of you to learn," he addressed the dropped-jaw audience he was now in total command of.

Brandon grabbed the seats around him with his bloodied hands. Matthew opened the latch on the emergency exit. The bus was rumbling at about forty-five miles an hour up Keystone. There were cars right on their tail, honking, demanding the school bus simply not exist during their dash for work.

The emergency exit swung open and the alarm went off.

Tony finally looked back to see what was going on.

Wind rushed in, making the girls on the bus scream. Matthew ignored everything else. He quickly wiped the blood out of Brandon"s eyes so that he could look into them.

"If there"s an afterlife, I beg you to haunt me so that I may go through the rest of mine with complete peace of mind."

And then he tossed the new kid out of the bus.

The little boy flew onto the hood of a BMW racing up behind them. His fragile frame shattered on impact with the windshield of the fancy car. He b.u.mped the hood once more as wind, gravity, and physics yanked him to the side of the road. Brandon turned several times and died.

The bus pulled over. n.o.body would stand near Matthew. As Tony called for the police and an ambulance, Matthew watched the BMW with envy as it slowed and stopped at the side of the road.

Does that beautiful, expensive machine appreciate the life it just took? he wondered. To snuff the living without so much as a single emotion, this would be bliss, he realized, and sat back down to wait for the stupid pig-eyed police and whatever mundane ritual the simple-minded ma.s.ses would employ to punish him.

To attempt to punish me, he corrected himself.

The World Without Souls.

by D. Krauss.

Stupid civilization ended on July 31, 2012 at noon, Geneva time (6 am here, so I was sleeping) when the Director of the Large Hadron Collider announced, "We have proven G.o.d does not exist." He beamed. The six or seven equally white coated, bespectacled, and (except for the two frowzy women) bearded geeks flanking him on the facility"s steps also beamed.

And they had. It was quite elegant really. See, by isolating the Higgs boson and fooling around with it a bit, they discovered nothingness had this odd tendency to fold. Mind blowing, yes, the idea of nothing that can fold, but it does and out of the folds of nothing came something they called the Light quark (as in Let There Be). And from that came all of us. Not from some guy"s rib.

There were some other things they proved, too, like energy"s constant wasn"t and that energy did, indeed, dissipate. So, on August 15th, some other guys did this worldwide thing where they took the formulas from the collider (something along the lines of E = -M, where M is the nothingness times itself with a factor a little over 1 divided by some string left over from one of Einstein"s old doodles. Hey, look, the math is baffling but the theory is simple, okay?) against several thousand near death patients and, using the new particles and their tracery, proved once and for all, when we die nothing happens. You just go phfft.

Just like the world did.

Some stupid church people stood up all offended and tried to say things about G.o.d beyond the measure of existence and the soul and its travails, blah blah blah, but come on. Proof was proof. On August 31, 2012, in the middle of one of those harangues by one of those Luddittes, some guy got up from the audience, walked on stage and pumped six bullets into the Reverend So and So"s head. On television, no less. Quite entertaining. I laughed when I saw the replay, before all the power went out.

A lot of people thought that day marked the end of civilization. Or maybe it was August 15, but, uh, July 31, 2012. When you prove G.o.d does not exist, everything else is anti-climax.

Like the next morning, August 1, when Billie Saint McKinney walked into the Fairfax County Courthouse, shot the two guards on duty, calmly entered the divorce court, shot his wife, his oldest daughter, the judge, and the bailiff. He set the old biddy court reporter on fire just for the fun of it and was heading towards his car when some cop shotgunned him. His last words were, "Wot"d jew do that fer?"

See, Billy got it. Billy knew. He"s my hero.

It took a little into September before everyone else got it, and then, whoa. 9/11 taught us brick and steel and mortar could really burn, and boy did it. Wall Street actually reached Dresden firestorm proportions and a lot of the droogs got sucked up and incinerated. Good. Less compet.i.tion. Not that I"d go to New York, there"s plenty still here in DC, but sometimes people start thinking regionally and want to extend their empires. I don"t need the Great Exalted Murray of Brooklyn showing up here and throwing that All Ye who Hear My Words Tremble c.r.a.p around. I mean, I got enough skulls impaled on the lawns around the White House. Yeah, the friggin" White House, cool, huh? But if those Murrays keep showing up, I may have to expand out to the Treasury lawns.

I am the King of DC, got it?

Some people don"t and tell ya I"m getting a little tired of tribes happening by and seeing the skulls and getting all macho and then there I am, in the middle of another d.a.m.ned firefight and then here I am running out of pike room. The last time, it was some guy from Leesburgh, all decked out in bear skins, believe it or not, and I had him up on the pike and he was groaning and inching his way down and I"m thinking, ya know, I need something else, need to escalate. So I took his girlfriend (why do these idiots bring their women? Showing off?) out of the bas.e.m.e.nt and strapped her face down in front of him and did her while sawing at her neck with a rusty trowel. Man, that was fun, she bucked and screamed and fought and I loved it. I took her ragged head and stuffed it down the front of Bearskin"s pants. He probably didn"t appreciate the extra weight, yuk yuk. Some of his minions were hiding out in Lafayette Park, trembling, so I made big movements and yelled a lot to give them full effect.

Ya gotta have a legend.

Achilles knew that. Achilles made sure he"d be sung forever. Oh not that wimpy Brad Pitt-a.s.s Achilles in that old p.u.s.s.ified Troy movie, the real Achilles. I"ve read The Iliad, probably the only one still alive who has, and that Achilles was not some brooding boy toy walking around with his lower lip in a pout, no sir. Achilles was a man, a real man, and he clanged eviscerated Trojans to the ground and stole their women and stood on piles of bodies with his sword shining hot and his throat hoa.r.s.e with war.

Yeah.

Five thousand years from now, they"ll remember me, too. Because, f.u.c.k it, they sure ain"t gonna remember much else.

Like I had this droog, you know, another stupid Murray, and he"s all trussed up and cussing and crying because, well, sharpened point of a stake going up your a.s.s, imagine. And he was kinda young and I got curious and I said, "Who"s Lincoln?" And he just stops crying and looks at me, so I ask him again, "Who"s Lincoln?" And, you know, he"s thinking there"s some angle here, so he says, "I knew him, man, I knew him!" I just laughed, I did, and yanked the pike up straight and he screamed, "I knew him!" for the next twelve hours. Got d.a.m.ned irritating after awhile.

"Knew him." What a moron. I know Lincoln. Every morning, I get up from his bed and give him a salute. A legend, took no s.h.i.t off those southern crackers, kicked their f.u.c.kin" a.s.ses. And I salute Churchill, too, because that English doughboy (ha, I just realized how funny that is) was a tough f.u.c.ker, kicked Hitler"s a.s.s, who was no slouch.

They"ll be saluting me long after everyone"s forgot Lincoln and Churchill.

"Brad the Impaler," I"m already hearing it. I think that"s hilarious. Still some wags out there and if I catch whoever started that, why, hmm, you know, I just might make him my court jester. Until he p.i.s.ses me off, then up he goes.

I have this little game I like to play where I put two guys on the poles real close together so they"re scrambling and clawing at each other, trying to ease the pressure but all they end up doing is pushing down that much faster. It"s a hoot. The minions sit around and bet on who"s going to poke through first and I do my part, "Whichever of you lasts longer, gets off the pole!" I yell. Lie, of course, but they"ll start going at each other like there"s no tomorrow. Which, in their case, is true.

No tomorrow. There is no tomorrow. There is only now.

You know, some people, some, still push it. There was this group out of Maryland, wore all white sheets and c.r.a.p and walked around moaning and proclaiming the need to restore order and society and law and all that junk. I got curious, so I went out to hear them, brought the minions for the entertainment. The guy in charge, some Jesus lookin" freak, came right up to me with his High Priests "cause I"m pretty disarming. I am. I don"t look like anything, which is the trap. I"m small and kinda soft lookin" and I got this real pleasant smile. Girls in bars used to like it. They don"t so much anymore.

Anyways, Jesus walks up lookin" all towards Heaven (ain"t there no mo, bud) goin" "My brother, my brother!" and the minions are behind nudging each other "cause they know what"s going to happen. And I just stand there smiling, looking interested. "These evil times! Join with me, my brother, and bring back the world, its leeks and garlic."

And I kinda nod and I put on the soft voice and I ask, "Why?"

And he blinks and has this beatific smile, "Because, brother, it is the way, it is the way of happiness."

"Happiness?" I almost laugh. "Whose happiness?"

"Of us all," and he sweeps his hand so grandly back at the sheep.

"And what," I say sweeping the hypodermic from my jacket, "is the point of that?" I jammed it in his arm and plunged. Gasoline. Not good for anything else these days and I saw in the Holocaust museum how Mengele used to inject the Jews with it to see what it would do. I like that museum.

Well, Jesus danced and screamed and made a lot of noise and I just stood there watching while the minions mowed down the sheep. Stupid sheep didn"t even have weapons, just love overflowing from their hearts, going to win me over with weeping and joy and hands raised in brotherhood.

Haven"t they been paying attention?

We kept a few of the sheep for awhile. Lot of women with them and that was good because women are getting a little scarce in these parts. Gettin" to the point you have to go on a full blown expedition to locate a couple, so I amused myself with the windfall. Had one bound on her knees before me with her teeth knocked out and, well, you know what that was for. The minions had a couple and were playing Guess the Sodomite when one of them started screaming, "You animals, you pigs!" and the boys started laughing and playing harder and I said, "Hold on, Myrmidons." I use that word when I want their attention. They have no idea what it means but they stop when I say it because I mean business. The first time I used it, one of "em said. "I ain"t no merman!" and got all righteous with me so I staked him. No problems since.

"Keep working this," I said to No Teeth. "Bring her here," I said to the minions and they did. Cute one. Mixed race, light skinned and exotic looking, all petulant and offended. Oh boy. I kept my face straight and the minions gathered to listen. "What"d you say?" I asked her.

"You"re pigs!" she spat it, just like a 12 year old girl on the playground at the boys who yelled "Show us your t.i.ts!" Ah, memories. "He was a saint!" By this, I guessed she meant Jesus of the Gasoline Blood. "He was going to save us all!"

"Save us from what?" I had to ask.

"From all of you," and she was soooo contemptuous. A couple of the minions guffawed but I put on the interested look. See, I"ve found with these girls that if you play along, they"ll think you"re some kind of hero or something and get all hopeful and dewy-eyed. Makes the inevitable dismemberment that much more fun. "What do you mean?"

"This!" and she pointed at No Teeth, who wasn"t stupid and was working it rather enthusiastically (I might have to keep her awhile), "You rapists. You s.h.i.t on everything."

I tapped No Teeth on the head, "Stop now, darling," and she backed off and a.s.sumed a properly subservient position. I leaned forward, looking at Exotic, looking receptive, "Go on."

"It"s like you spit on the freedom we earned," she was making a 12 year old"s gestures, convinced her scorn had some kind of power. Hee hee. "We got out from under the churches and the governments and all the old chains, man. We had a chance, a real one. Nothing in the way, nothing but freedom and love. You guys," more wild hand waving, "destroyed it."

The minions busted out at that point and I waved them down, making Exotic think she was reaching me, "You mean, Saint was going to lead us to Utopia?"

"Yes!" Eyes popping out and a real att.i.tude.

"How?"

And here she got the dewy eyes and all righteous, "With love."

At that point I lost it, busted out along with the minions, did a bit of knee slapping, even a little eye wiping. "Okay, okay, I thought that"s where you were going." I settled back, the dead smile splitting my face, the one that tells the recipient I"m not the cute little nice guy I look like. She stepped back, wary, an "oh s.h.i.t" look on her face. You"re right, oh s.h.i.t. "Let me see," I said, throwing up a palm, "if I can explain. Consider this a what, a teachable moment?" I looked around the minions and they all nodded enthusiastically. They loved teachable moments.

"See, what your saint was intending was exactly what we"re all free from. Now, how was this going to happen, this Utopia, this quotes "love" unquote," I made the requisite finger movements.

"Uh, well," she was starting to get it and looked around for an escape path. None. "He would teach us how to love."

"Ah, I see," I nodded, "so let me ask you, what could he say that hasn"t already been said by the Pope or Billy Graham," look of puzzlement there, "or Jesus Himself? Don"t answer, don"t answer," and I waved down her bubbling words, "I"ll save you the trouble. Here"s what," I paused dramatically. "Nothing. Absolutely nothing.

"In fact," and here I raised a teaching finger, "wouldn"t have been too long he"d have to use Catholic church methods, you know, ceremonies and punishments and heresies and things like that, to keep you all in line. I mean, how many of you were there, a thousand, two thousand?" She nodded slightly. "Sheesh," I shook my head sadly, "you probably had fifty or so guys right there who wanted to be the saint and would knock him off and proclaim some new kind of doctrine that was the One Truth and then someone would knock him off and then you"d all be fighting each other. Really, I did you a service. Because," another teaching finger, "you can"t have more than ten or twelve in a tribe." I swept a hand at the minions, "More than that, someone gets ambitious. Right fellas?" And they all nodded enthusiastically and slapped hands and one of them, Karl, shouted, "Amen, brother!" What a card.

"See, they"re a bunch of happy fellows," she turned to look, genuine fright on her face at all the dead eyes staring back at her, "because they can indulge their true natures. Nothing in the way. Especially," air quotes again, "love." I looked at her and she blanched and her knees started to shake. Oh yes, baby. "You believe in evolution, right?"

"Yes."

"So," I bore down on her, "why are you so f.u.c.king inconsistent?"

She furrowed her brow. That"s the point with arrogant b.i.t.c.hes like her; they still gotta a.s.sert themselves, even when they"re about to be chopped up. "Don"t look at me like that!" I roared her back a step or two. "You"re f.u.c.king inconsistent. All those millions of years, whose genes got pa.s.sed along, huh, b.i.t.c.h? Huh?" Her knees could no longer support her and she went down to them. I smiled. "I"ll tell you who. The rapists, the murderers, the ones who stole the eggs out of nests and put in their own and ate," here I clicked my teeth, "the loving and the sweet. Umm umm umm."

I sat back, steepling my hands. She was panting hard, her eyes wide with terror, but still wanting to say something. "I know, I know," I was actually getting bored with the conversation, "Michelangelo, t.i.tian, the Declaration of Independence, yeah, yeah, yeah. Back before. Back when we thought there was Something Beyoooond," I waggled my fingers and used my spooky voice, which really cracked up the minions, "all that was cool. But," now was the point of the lesson, "there ain"t Something Beyond. All there is is you. And if you"re not spending every moment you got here doing everything you feel like, building your legend, then you"re wasting it." I raised both of my arms Heaven... er, skyward, "Praise Billy."

"Praise him!" the minions replied and they grabbed Exotic and threw her screaming to the ground. Karl decided to go for a little extra shtup while I was going over the options and I took my time, let him finish up. "Well?" Sandy asked, big goofy West Virginia gap-toothed grin on his face. "Let"s play..." and I stroked my chin as if pondering Life"s Mystery, "...a.s.syrian."

"a.s.syrian!" they all cheered and dragged Exotic off a bit, kicking and shrieking, and pounded the stakes and leather-bound her to them, spread eagled. Shame, really, she was nice. The minions played rockpaperscissors and Sandy won. He pulled out his Bowie, tested its edge, and started at the right wrist. That"s the rule. The one who can carve off the longest piece of skin without breaking it or causing too much bleeding or killing her, wins. Takes awhile, if done right, and my guys were good at it. Sandy might even win, the slow careful way he was proceeding down the forearm.

I looked at No Teeth. "You wanna get back to it, or do you wanna play a.s.syrian, too?" She scooted right up and resumed, much more enthusiastic. Nothing focuses the mind like the prospect...ha ha. G.o.d, she"s good. I think I will keep her. Have kids. They"re so delicious.