Reverend Bingo could not throw shoes to save his life, which made him even angrier.
“Stop tricking me, fucker! What did you do to my arm, Satan? How dare you possess my arm! Foul demon! I will smite you!”
Then he tried to throw his other shoe at us. His release was a little off. The shoe hit the ceiling of the hallway just above his head.
“Bitch! Fucking bitch!” Reverend Bingo screamed.
He was very mad.
“He’s a terrible thrower,” Meg said.
“Definitely having trouble finding his release point.”
“He thinks I’m a cog. He’s going to try to bite me. What do you suggest we do?” Meg asked.
“We should throw our shoes at him,” I suggested.
“Mine aren’t heavy enough,” Meg said.
“You want one of mine?” I had on sneakers, which are very good for throwing.
“Sure.”
I slipped off my left sneaker and handed it to her. Meg cocked back to throw and let loose the most wicked fastball tennis-shoe pitch I’d ever seen. I could practically hear my shoe cutting the air between her and Reverend Bingo.
Meg Hatfield’s arm was golden.
Reverend Bingo flinched spastically and tried to slap at my sneaker with his gawky tentacle of an arm. Of course he missed, and my shoe smacked squarely into the side of his face. It sounded something like a fish hitting a windshield at seventy miles per hour.
Reverend Bingo shrieked a high-pitched scream. “AHHHHHH! Fuck! Fuck! You hit me! That hurts!”
Then Reverend Bingo locked his eyes on Meg and began walking toward her, taking long, slow steps, saying, “I should have bought the blue car! I should have bought the blue car! I should have bought the blue car!”
“See? I told you,” I said. “Do you want my other shoe?”
Meg nodded and held out her hand.
Giving up my shoes was worth it, just to watch Meg Hatfield throw them at a cog.
Shwak!
My second shoe hit Reverend Bingo squarely in the forehead. He actually fell down, and when he got back up, his right eye had popped. It rolled up inside his skull, and a gooey clot of cog pus ran down Reverend Bingo’s cheek.
“I should have bought the blue car!” Reverend Bingo kept coming toward Meg.
And as Reverend Bingo got closer and closer to us, a bell rang over the ship’s sound system, and Rabbit and Mooney came on, singing a song about eating.
Tell me if you disagree,
We’re getting hungry, aren’t we?
Depressed cogs taste like spaghetti,
So it’s time to eat now,
It’s time to eat now.
“Do you think we should run? I don’t need my shoes back that bad,” I said.
“He’s just a cog. We should kick the living shit out of him,” Meg said.
At that precise moment I fell completely in love with Meg Hatfield.
“I should have bought the blue car! I should have bought the blue car!” Reverend Bingo was just a few paces away from us now. “Fucker! Fucker, fucking, fuck Satan! Stand still, so I can eat you, Satan fuck!”
I’ll admit it—I was a little scared. But I didn’t want to seem scared in front of Meg. After all, I had been schooled in such things as dance, knotting bow ties, and proper dinner table posture. I had never in my life fought back, even if there were a pathetic number of times I might—or should—have. I felt all hot and swollen inside. For the first time in my life I had an awareness that my balls were telling me what to do.
The mad ones taste like pepper steak,
Happy cogs cause stomachaches,
But horny ones are chocolate cake,
So it’s time to eat now,
It’s time to eat now.
I looked at her. “Meg, I . . . Oh, nothing. Screw it.”
I may as well have been invisible to her, and to Reverend Bingo, too, since he was only fixated on Meg, whom he mistook for his next cog meal. I sucked in a deep breath, stepped in front of Meg, and smashed the palm of my right hand square into Reverend Bingo’s goo-slicked nose.
He reeled back, arms windmilling uselessly as he fell to the floor.
“How dare you! How dare you! Ow! Fuck! That hurt! Bitch!”
And the song played on.
And if you’re not quite satisfied
With gluttony and fratricide,
The smart cogs have whipped cream inside,
So it’s time to eat now,
It’s time to eat now.
I wiped Reverend Bingo’s cog sauce from my hand onto the leg of my pants.
Then I walked up to him and kicked Reverend Bingo’s face. It was like kicking a busted refrigerator. I forgot that I wasn’t wearing shoes, so it kind of hurt my foot. And when I stomped on Reverend Bingo’s throat, a little geyser of cog glop spurted up from his broken eyeball and gushed all over my socks.
It was so foul, I nearly vomited on him.
He burbled, “I should have bought the blue car, motherfucker!”
His arms flopped around like he was being electrocuted.
Reverend Bingo, who had no talent for throwing things or choosing automobile color, was also not much of a fighter.
Tell me if you disagree,
We’re very hungry, aren’t we?
We’ll all die on the Tennessee,
So it’s time to eat now,
It’s time to eat now.
The Cruise Ship to End All Cruise Ships
We left Reverend Bingo lying on his back in the hallway, percolating a steady stream of cog snot from the hole where his right eye used to be, while flopping his arms and legs wildly and chanting his buyer’s remorse.
Meg picked up my shoes and handed them to me in the elevator.
“Thanks,” I said. “Where did you learn to throw like that?”
“At Grosvenor Divinity School. Cheepa Yeep,” Meg said.
“Really?”
Meg gave me a look like I was stupid, which made me feel extremely, well, stupid. What did I know? I couldn’t tell that Meg was joking. I’d never been around a normal human being in my life.
“You really need to get out more,” Meg said.
I bent down on one knee to put on my sneakers. My socks were ruined, soaked with Reverend Bingo’s hydraulic mucus. The stuff smelled like aluminum and soft onions. Gross. I took off my socks and tossed them aside.
“Get out where?”
“Good point, Cager.”
“Look, I’m sorry if I seem like a pampered little shit. I’ve never done anything real, I guess. I’ve never hung around with regular kids,” I said.
“Don’t worry about it. You’re an okay guy.”
“Oh.”
“You kicked the shit out of that cog,” Meg said. “That was pretty heroic, if you ask me.”
So first I was stupid, then I was okay, and now I was a hero. Meg Hatfield and space were making me totally crazy. I looked away from her and tied my shoelaces.
“You’re not pouting, are you?” she said.
That was one of those questions a guy with no socks, alone in an elevator with a smart and beautiful girl, just can’t answer in any way that might spare his self-image, so I said nothing.
“You’re really sensitive for being one of the richest kids in the world. You’d think that someone like you wouldn’t care at all about what someone like me ever said or did,” Meg said.
“Why would you think that? Besides, we aren’t in the world anymore.”
“Well, you do own this entire ship, by default and probate laws.”
“None of that matters now,” I said. “It’s like the song said: We’re all going to die here on the Tennessee. And I don’t think it’s going to take too long for it to happen, either.”
“You know what I think?”
“What?”
“The ship wrote that song,” Meg said.
I shook my head and stood up. I didn’t get what she meant.
“You heard it. It’s Queen Dot f
ucking with the systems on the Tennessee. She admitted it. It’s one of her Worms. That song was about what’s going on right now. She made it start happening. There’s no way the song could have been coded in before all this shit with cogs eating cogs.”
I sighed. Meg Hatfield was so much smarter than I was.
I said, “Livingston did it.”
Meg nodded. “I can fix it. I swear, if I can get in, I can fix it.”
She caught me staring at her. For just a second our eyes locked. It was awkward and thrilling at the same time, but I couldn’t help myself. Meg Hatfield was a shoe-throwing wonder.
The elevator stopped. The doors opened. Meg and I walked the hallway in silence. I was so confused and flustered by her.
We opened the door to the bridge and looked inside at the carnage in the wheelhouse on the Tennessee—my ship, the cruise ship to end all cruise ships.
We stood there, neither of us saying anything.
Then Meg said, “Don’t like me, Cager.”
“What?” I felt myself turning red. My throat constricted like invisible hands were strangling me. She was too smart; she had to have seen something in the way I’d been looking at her. But she was so damned likeable. I had never met anyone as real and as human as Meg Hatfield.
“I don’t want you to like me.”
“Would it make you happy if I told you how much I hated you?” I asked.
“Probably.”
I followed Meg as she stepped over gooey fragments of cog bodies that lay scattered around the control room’s floor. For the most part the cogs had stopped moving and making conversations about their anger, happiness, or horniness. The security cog who’d been ripped open—the one I saw dipping his fingers into his own innards and then licking them clean—had been nearly completely eaten. All that was left of him were his feet and the top portion of his face. His eyes blinked.
Meg sat down in front of a bank of computer terminals. “You should tell me all the things about me that you hate. This would help you,” she said.
I didn’t want to make shit up. I was frustrated that she was so in control of herself, and I found myself wishing Rowan were here so he could give me advice about what to do, since I was such a hopeless and pampered piece of shit who knew nothing about how to talk to a real girl.
My voice cracked. “I hate how good you are at throwing shoes.”
“I knew it. What else?”
While she talked, her fingers whizzed over the hovering flash screens that had lit up above the computer terminals.
“I don’t want to do this.”
“Come on. Admit it. You hate me,” Meg said.
Click click click click click.
“And how good you understand that coding shit too. I don’t know the first thing about it.”
“So you hate that about me, right?”
I shrugged. “Why do you want to do this?”
I sounded pathetic.
Meg didn’t answer. She kept typing, then wiping lines clear, then typing again.
“Do you have a thing against people?”
“Most of them. But I don’t set things on fire. Jeffrie does that stuff,” Meg said.
“Between cogs eating cogs and having a burner on board, we are pretty much doomed.” And I added, “Don’t you want to have any friends?”
Meg stopped typing and looked at me. I pretended to be fascinated by Captain Myron’s white feathered hat, because I didn’t want Meg Hatfield to see any other true things that might be so obvious in my eyes.
She said, “I’m sorry for being mean to you. It’s just . . . well, I’m sorry, Cager.”
“Whatever.”
Meg started typing again. I continued faking interest in Captain Myron’s bicorne.
“Anything else you hate about me?”
I sat down in the captain’s chair and spun the shiny wheel that hovered in the air.
“Where did you learn coding?” I said.
“Same place I learned how to throw shoes,” Meg answered.
“Oh, yeah. Cheepa Yeep.”
Meg said, “No. To be honest, I taught myself code. It’s actually simple, because it’s a language with absolutely no nuance, no subtext, no possible way of misinterpreting what’s being said.”
“It would be pretty boring if human beings used a language like that, wouldn’t it?” I said.
“Zing. That’s a good one, Cager Messer. You got a dig in on me.”
I looked at her. Meg smiled at me, with her mouth; not with her eyes. And then I turned red and had to look away.
Bullshit.
I spun the wheel, and Meg typed and deleted, typed and deleted.
I wanted to go back to my room and lie down in the quiet dark, but I couldn’t leave Meg alone out on the ship with all those cogs, even if she was more capable of protecting herself than I was. I stood up and walked over to where Captain Myron’s hat was lying against the wall. I decided to pick it up, and when I did Captain Myron launched into another of his hostile tirades.
Well, his head launched into a hostile tirade, I should say.
“Don’t touch my fucking hat!” Captain Myron’s head screamed. “How dare you? How dare you touch my fucking hat? Get down here so I can bite you, you fucking little prick!”
“No,” I said.
I took a step back, away from Captain Myron’s head.
“I’m the captain! How dare you defy me? You little shit!”
Then Captain Myron—his head, that is—actually tried to bite the floor, to pull himself toward me. I was being chased by an angry severed head that could barely manage to move an inch.
“You can’t be the captain anymore. You’re only a head. No one’s going to listen to you.” Then I put Captain Myron’s feathered admiral’s bicorne on my head and added, “I’m taking control of the Tennessee now.”
“No!” Captain Myron shrieked. “No! No! No! This is not fair! You are humiliating me! Bully! Bully fucking coward prick! What gives you the right? I am filled with rage! I’ll fucking bite you! Come here! Come here now! Now! Trigger! Trigger! This impudent fuck is triggering me!”
And Captain Myron began shrieking unintelligible curses. He sounded like a thousand cats being thrown into the blades of an enormous fan.
“Will you please hold it down?” Meg said. She stopped typing and glanced at me with an annoyed expression. “Oh. Nice hat, Cager.”
And Captain Myron screamed and screamed.
I said, “Sorry, Meg. I’ll just . . . um . . . escort Captain Myron’s head outside. Um, so you can work.”
Captain Myron’s head kept cursing and screaming as I used my foot to roll him out the door and into the hallway.
After all, I was captain now; I was in charge.
The Nicest Giraffe I Ever Met
Hello, my friend! Bonjour, mon ami! Ah, but you look so handsome in your feathery cap and man clothes!”
“How does a giraffe get inside an elevator?” I asked.
Maurice, the giraffe from the recreation deck, who had never seen me with clothes on and had apparently taken an elevator to the ship’s bridge, was hunched down on his belly, lying in the hallway outside the control room.
“I can fold myself up into a teeny tiny little box!” Maurice explained.
“Practical, especially for someone who’s fourteen feet tall.”
“But please, s’il vous plaît, I am very, very hungry and have not been able to find any food this morning for one’s petit déjeuner,” Maurice said. “Is this, by chance, un personne mécanique? As you say, a cog?”
There was something about Maurice’s accent—and the fact that he was a giraffe—that made me feel cheerful.
Maurice’s nose hovered just a few inches above Captain Myron’s head. And Captain Myron’s head’s eyes ticktocked from Maurice to me.
“What outrage is this? Is there an animal on my deck? How dare you offend and ridicule me in this manner?” Captain Myron’s head shrieked, “How dare you turn this around into so
mething about you? It is NOT about you! This is about ME! I order you shot! I order you both shot!”
So I faced a real human dilemma. Look, cogs are just machines, right? And Captain Myron—now Captain Myron’s head—had never done anything nice to anyone. In fact, I was pretty sure Captain Myron started all the trouble on the Tennessee by biting Dr. Geneva’s face, which quickly escalated into a cannibalistic slaughterfest among the ship’s cogs. On the other hand, Maurice had been pleasant to me and was reasonably cute, in an enormous-bisexual-French-giraffe kind of way.
Maurice was the nicest giraffe I ever met.
I toed Captain Myron’s head forward a half roll and took a step back.
“If you don’t mind,” Maurice, always polite, said.
I gestured a palms-up hand downward to Captain Myron’s head and said, “S’il vous plaît, Maurice.”
Then Maurice lowered his snout to the bellowing and cursing head on the floor and began devouring what remained of poor screaming and swearing Captain Myron.
Mmmph! Mmmph! Mmmph! went Maurice as he ate.
“I order you shot! How dare you offend me in this manner!” howled Captain Myron’s head, but only for a little while.
Soon all that remained of Captain Myron was a puddled slick of gravy goo in the middle of the hallway, which Maurice lapped up eagerly using his enormous, snakelike, black giraffe tongue. Then Maurice burped.
“Ah! So delicious, my friend! And I feel as though I could eat another four or five, if you have any nearby!”
“Sorry, Maurice,” I said. “There’s really nothing left at all on this deck. I just rolled him out because he was making too much noise.”
Maurice sighed. “Ah! Such is life!”
And I thought, what the fuck does a cog know about life? But I liked Maurice, because he was a giraffe, and he ate the tiger who scared Parker up a tree and destroyed all my clothes; and he also finally made Captain Myron shut the hell up, so I nodded and said, “Yes. Life is like that, isn’t it?”
“What can one do? As for me, I will go to look for more aliments, as I am still somewhat peckish.”