Rant

bellowing for help.
    Phoebe Truffeau, Ph.D.: It would not be unrealistic to assume that—like bubonic plague and syphilis—the current rabies epidemic is due to casual contact, becoming a zymotic disease common to crowded cities. Like syphilis, the disease brings the subject to an agitated state where he is more likely to seek out and infect others. Additionally, the damage caused by the Lyssavirus to the central nervous system prevents the sufferer from “boosting” or otherwise enjoying the solitary entertainment of neural transcripts. This inability increases the likelihood the infected individual will seek amusement outside his home, indulging in risky social interaction such as “Party Crashing” and casual sex.
    Vivica Brawley: Poor Bernie. After the cops shot everybody, they had to autopsy their stomachs to find all the bites people took. Bernie’s ears and nose and his lips. The surgeons at the hospital showed me some toes in a pan of salt water and offered to reattach them. The toenails still had their nice white-tipped French pedicure.
    But I just looked at those toes all chewed up by a Teamster and half digested, and I told the doctors, “Don’t bother.”
    23–Love
    Shot Dunyun ( Party Crasher): The minute Rant comes to me asking what model car has the biggest backseat, I could tell where he was headed. My advice was, I told him to get a car with dark upholstery.
    Echo Lawrence ( Party Crasher): Forget it. Our first time alone, I asked Rant what he really wanted from me. Did he plan to go around with me, then take me home as a fugly club to beat on his parents? Was dating a deformed cripple his last act of teenage rebellion? A surefire way to freak out the folks down on the farm?
    Or was I some erotic fantasy? Was sex too boring with normal girls, people with two arms and legs that matched, mouths that could kiss back? Was fucking me some one-time goal in the great scavenger hunt of his sex life?
    Or was I just the only girl he knew in the big, bad city? His mentor. A guide into the Nighttimer life. Was sex his way of clinging to me because he was too afraid to be alone in this scary new world?
    Sitting in the backseat of that Eldorado, I really let Rant have it with both barrels. We’d parked next to some bushes, away from streetlights, but it’s never totally dark in town. I can remember Rant wore his blue bug suit, and smelled toxic. None of this sounds very romantic.
    Shot Dunyun: Part of my job, renting bullshit peaks to idiots, is to boost a few myself and stay familiar with the various current titles. For that couple weeks, all we got from the distributors were defective transcripts. I’d be boosting a dessert peak, and the taste track would cut out. A thick slice of chocolate cake would become a mouthful of sticky, greasy pulp. It smelled like chocolate, but in your mouth the cake was nothing but gummy texture. Trapped at home during curfew, one day I boosted my favorite porno peak, and none of the vaginas smelled like anything. The transcripts weren’t the problem. My brain was the problem.
    Echo Lawrence: Sitting in that Eldorado, Rant looks at me until I stop talking. He waits about two traffic lights’ worth of silence, then he says, “What did you eat for breakfast yesterday?”
    No cars go past. The street’s empty. Rant’s eyes float in the shadows. His black teeth, invisible.
    Yesterday? In my kitchen, I have frozen waffles, but when I go out to Tommy’s Diner I order the hash. I tell Rant, “Cereal.” I say, “No, wait. French toast. No…cinnamon toast…”
    Rant’s hand slides across the seat until his fingers touch mine. He lifts my hand to his face, his lips touching my knuckles, he sniffs, eyes closed, and says, “Wrong.” He says, “Yesterday, you had rolled-oat granola with maple sugar and pumpkin seeds, vanilla yogurt, and dried cranberries…” And of course he’s dead-on.
    Shot Dunyun: Most boosted peaks are bullshit compared to even the slowest night spent Party Crashing, spending time in a car with people and music and snack food, always in a little danger. On a secret mission to meet more strangers. Real people. A road trip to nowhere.
    Nonetheless, I’d been boosting peaks since I was in diapers. My parents used to port me to infant-enrichment peaks. Half my childhood I spent plugged into babysitting peaks. As a transcript artist, not being able to plug in would make me the equivalent of a blind painter or a deaf musician. Beyond my worst