Meat

How I wound up naked in a parking lot on the last night of the world is kind of a long story.

Actually, wait. No it’s not. It’s all thanks to Dingo. Stupid dumb stupid idiot moron Dingo. I hate you. I hate you I hate you I hate you hate hate hate hate hate hate hate ahhhhhhhh!!!!!!!!!! I wish I never met you I hate you I hate you you moron and I wish you were never born. I HATE you, Dingo, you dumb stupid idiot.

“Dingo, I love you.” I was sitting in the ripped-up passenger seat of his stinking car. It smelled a little like a combination of fruity gross vape and roadkill. We were in line at the drive-thru at Mendy’s.

“What? No. What?” Dingo looked at me like I had ripped his left nipple off. I mean I had, but that was years ago and it was an accident and he said he forgave me.

“I mean not like love love. Jesus. Just like. You’re my best friend, man.”

“Gross.”

“What. Dude, I just mean, like, you’re my… you know. Like, we’re friends, man. Like for real.”

“Ew. Friggin stop.”

Well, I pretty much had to stop whether I wanted to or not at that point cause Dingo’s cat Dog started squawking from the back seat. Dog had indigestion problems sometimes and when he did he made this sound that sounded like he was dying and made anyone who heard it wish they were instead so that they wouldn’t have to listen to it anymore. He was always ok though.

Finally we got to the speaker thing.

“We need some meat.” Dingo didn’t even give me the chance to tell him what I wanted, just shouted over the sound of his howling cat.

“Excuse me?” Static confusion from the other side.

“I said we need some meat. I’ll meet you at the window.”

“Wh-what? Sir, this is a Mendy’s.”

Dingo didn’t care whether it was a Mendy’s or a WcDonald’s or what. As soon as the car in front of us was done he blasted forward to the window where you pay and get your food.

“Do you have the meat?”

“Sir, you didn’t even place an order.”

“Meat, man. Meat. This isn’t about an order. This is about meat.”

“I’m going to have to ask you to— What is that sound? It sounds like an ill parakeet gargling rocks.”

“Oh, sorry, that’s my cat. You sicko. Cat’s aren’t meat except in the direst circumstances.”

“I wasn’t talking about meat—”

“Well, I am. Now look here and look good. I’m willing to pay you, yes you, a lot of money, a lot of cash, dough, moolah, green, coin, legal tender if you catch my drift, if you can wire us up with enough meat to last fifty elephants a lifetime, or thereabouts.”

“Elephants are plant eaters, genius,” I chimed in.

Dingo wasn’t even listening.

Drive-thru guy shut up for a second to think. He looked like he didn’t get out much and he obviously couldn’t tell Dingo was broke and lying. It was still hot as a sauna and I could see the sweat rolling down his pasty oval face. His name tag was black and shiny with white letters embossed on it. “Hi, I’m,” and then in bigger letters below: “Tomothy.” The cars behind us were honking at this point like they wanted us to hurry up. Tough. Fast food isn’t even fast anymore. And it was never food.

This was the longest I’d seen Dingo sit still in years, and he looked like he was starting to come down with the shakes, a real cold sweat. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a small scrap of plastic and flicked it at Tomothy. “There. Take that. It’s as good as a blank check.” It was his ATM card. He had zero dollars and zero cents in his account and the bank charged him $25 a month plus interest for it, which he never paid.

“Alright fine,” said Tomothy. He slipped the card into his pocket. “Wait here. We have some yak meat in the backup freezer. Got it in bulk, like 90% off, cause it was all expired. We use it when corporate forgets we exist and skips our patty shipments. Happens like once every two months.” And then he turned and yelled, “Kenny, turn on the backup freezer for two minutes! And get the mold scrubbers out!”

We went out back and Dingo POPped the trunk while we waited for the meat. Dog was fine now. He had calmed down. He was chewing a bone.

“Dingo, what the hell are we doing?” I wanted answers and I wanted them half an hour ago when Dingo dragged me straight back to his car after we saw Mystic Eyes with Wonderbaby and we drove here.

“Weasel, how do you like your steak?”

“What? Dude. I don’t know. Medium. I don’t know.”

“Good. Well it doesn’t matter. If you’re going to a steakout, you need steak.”

“It’s stakeout. And we already did that.”

“Doesn’t matter. Even if you’re not doing one, you still need steak. Now Tomothy? Good old Tom isn’t like you. He’s more like me. He’s a gentleman. So is Ken. And they are going to be gifting us some delicious yak meat.”

“Gifting? So you admit you’re practically stealing it.”

“Weasel, Weasel, Weasel,” he chided. “How many times do I have to tell you? It. Doesn’t. Matter. What you have to say. Doesn’t. Matter.” He mimed zipping his mouth shut and tossing away the key.

“Now,” he continued, drumming the wheel with his bony fingers, “do you know who likes yak meat?”

I twisted around to the back seat, then looked back at Dingo. “Dog, right?”

“Yes. Dog. It’s his favorite food. And do you know who doesn’t like Dog?”

“Mystic Eyes?”

“Yes. Exactly. Mystic Eyes. Hence…?”

“Hence what? Dude, what are you talking about?”

“Think, Weasel, think. This is basic logic. Simple arithmetic. Hence Mystic Eyes isn’t going to like it when we dump a million tons of yak meat on her front door and stink her place up with the stuff.”

“Huh,” was all I said. It wasn’t a bad idea.

“She’ll be smelling like yak for years! Tasting yak in her dreams! Serves her right!”

“What are we gonna do about Wonderbaby?” I asked.

“One thing at a time.”

That was when Tomothy and Kenny got back with the ground yak meat. It was blobbed onto pallets with little burger wraps with the Mendy’s logo, a pigtailed girl with her eyes gouged out, sticking to it here and there, like Tom and Ken had tried using the little paper sheets to wrap it all up but gave up almost as soon as they started. The stuff stank and was swarming with flies and all bedded up with maggots squishing in and out of it. Some of it was a gross pink but most of it was furred over teal and gray with mold.

“Fresh yak meat incoming,” said Tomothy. Kenny was holding his nose. They jacked the pallets up on pallet jacks and tipped them into the trunk, and then we all hopped on the hatch a couple times to weigh it down. It finally smushed closed with a suctiony squish sound. There was some slimy ground meat oozing through the cracks, so Dingo smudged it off with a finger and flung it into the backseat through the window, and I could hear Dog start smacking in delight.

After that, Tomothy and Kenny started arguing about how they were going to split the money, but we didn’t stick around to hear any of it. Dingo sped off. Even though it was all in the trunk, the meat was making the car stink like rancid filth and death. Dingo’s car hadn’t smelled this nice in years. Before I knew it we were back at Mystic Eyes’ place.

“Aright, let’s do this!” Dingo was psyched. Maybe it was all those energy drinks. We unloaded the rotten yak meat by hand. It smelled worse than homeless basketball day at the Y. It smelled worse than Dingo’s tangly ropey hair. It smelled worse than Wonderbaby smelled every day. It smelled worse than the Drip. It smelled worse than anything I had ever smelled in my life. It smelled worse than anything I ever would smell in my life, I thought. I mean except for Dingo’s car. Naive, naive, naive. How naive I was. It makes me laugh now, so hard I can’t help but shart a little and shoot dry scaly larynx flakes out my toothless mouth. If I had known what kind of smells would assault me in just a few hours, I probably would have gone full crazy right then and there, in the parking lot of Mystic Eyes’ warehouse, as pitiful neon lights scattered a sorry glow across the cracked and neglected asphalt.

“Hey,” I said as we handled the meat, “isn’t Mystic Eyes a vegan?”

“Yeah.”

“Insult to injury, then.”

Dingo smirked. Before long, we were done with the meat. Stupid Mystic Eyes had left her front door open, I guess because pretty much everything in there belonged to her 107 girlfriends and all she had that was hers was some clothes and weapons, so we crammed a bunch of the meat inside too, not just outside the front door like we’d planned. We got the stuff everywhere. Inside cabinets and drawers and dressers. Into coat pockets. Stuffed it into the soil of a potted plant. Into bags of food and down drains. Everywhere we could think of. I looked at Dingo. He was splattered pink and reeking. So was I.

Exhaustion caught up with us then. We were sweaty and tired. I might’ve even hopped into Mystic Eyes bed for a nap if I knew where it was, which I didn’t, partly because it might’ve been on the ceiling and partly because it was almost too dark to see anything anyway. The entire place was blanketed in shadow. We could never find the light switch. We sat on the cold concrete floor in the gloom to catch our breaths. Which was a terrible idea, all things, and all smells, considered. I coughed. I heard Dingo throw up without warning, just launch it out into a splat on the floor. Heh. Better here than elsewhere. Another surprise for Mystic Eyes. I could hear Dog munching some of the moldy meat somewhere.

I was starting to have some misgivings though. “Hey, Dingo…”

“What? Don’t start spewing that love crap again.”

“I won’t. I was just thinking. Is this really right?”

“Is what really right?”

“What we’re doing. Y’know. Revenge. Sneaking in and mucking the place up.” I heard something POP and sizzle in the darkness over to my left. The air was so hot in here it was practically baking the moldy blobs of meat where they sat.

“C’mon, man. What’s with you tonight, dude? Are you with me, or not?”

“I am.”

“You sure don’t sound like you are. Look, Weasel, you’re not an intelligent guy, so I’m gonna make this very, very simple for you. You’re either with me or you’re against me.”

“I’m with you, man. Jesus. I’m with you.”

“You sure?”

“You’re my best friend, dude.”

“Yeah.” It was pitch black but we were close enough that I could see his shadowy blob-form moving in silhouette. He leant back to sprawl out on the floor with his hands behind his head next to the pile of vomit, just looking up at the endless dark ceiling. I looked up too. It was like there was no roof, like I was looking raw at the sky, up and up forever at invisible stars blotted out by the dirty light humanity kept burping out down here. “Well, don’t take this the wrong way, but you’re mine too.”

As we left I had to wonder just what the hell he meant by that, “don’t take this the wrong way,” as if there were some wrong way I was going to take it. For as long as I’d known the guy, I sure didn’t get Dingo at times. The guy was a total idiot and the biggest moron I’d ever met, but sometimes he had these moments where I felt like he was broadcasting from a different planet and saying something so smart that the rest of us would need another million billion years of evolution to understand it. Like he was some kind of alien who got dropped off here on earth as a baby, some kind of strange and foreign creature walking around looking and acting and sounding like a person. Sometimes I felt like I was. I mean minus the occasionally really smart part and all of that. I sometimes felt like I was the only one in the whole world who didn’t get some joke that everyone else was laughing at. And sometimes, just sometimes, when I thought too hard or when I couldn’t sleep or whatever, I’d get the idea in my head that the joke everyone was laughing at was me.

Maybe that had something to do with why everyone hated me except the two stupidest people I had ever met. I don’t know.

We wanted to see Mystic Eyes’ reaction when she got back, so Dingo moved his car out of the parking lot and we crept back to the other side of the street so we could climb back up the catwalk and wait there.

But before we could get there we got jumped.

“Oh, FU—” was all I heard Dingo say, then came the crunch of gravel, then he was down, face first.

And then I was. I felt the world slip out from under me like shoreline when the waves suck the sand out from beneath your feet and suddenly you’re standing on nothing. I hit solid ground hard.

And then? Nothing. Blackness. Darkness. Void. Sensation. Spinning. Turning. Vortex. Upside down. Down. Down. Down. I was falling, suddenly, for just a second, then…!

—POP!

I snapped awake and the first thing I saw was the sparkling corpse of a mylar balloon. Then that pulled away and I was looking at Mystic Eyes. She was holding the deflated balloon in one hand and a needle in the other and scowling at me like she was telling me I was next, that she was going to POP me too. The only one who hated me more than I hated Mystic Eyes was Mystic Eyes.

That was about when I realized I couldn’t move from the neck down. I looked at myself. I was tied to a dirty plastic lawn chair and, worse, I was buck naked. I felt like someone had run over my face a few times with a truck. I looked around. Dingo was next to me in the same state I was in. We were back outside Mystic Eyes’ place and we were surrounded by her and a circle of her girlfriends-slash-flunkies.

Mystic Eyes walked up to Dingo. Her face was slathered with more makeup than I had ever seen in one place and the tips of her gross mess of hair were smoldering red with crimson dye, almost as bright as her glowing neon eyes. She spoke. “Dingo, my beloved, my one and only ❤️!”

Groans from the peanut gallery. Mystic Eyes’ 107 girlfriends never liked to see her doing all that lovey puke with Dingo. I was with them.

Dingo tried to say something but it just came out as a sorry muffle because he had some kind of rag balled up into his mouth. “You sure don’t sound too mad considering we just trashed your place,” I said, stupidly, considering Mystic Eyes hated my guts, and the rest of me, and had me tied up and at her mercy.

“Shut up, Weasel. See this balloon? Your face in five seconds if you don’t put a sock in it.”

She ripped the rag out of Dingo’s mouth and cut the zip ties around him with her pocket knife. He stood up and she started hugging him and kissing him on his pimply oilspill of a face and on his humid mouth. I could see their tongues way too well for comfort, bright red meaty slugs coiling around each other in thick spirals of sloppy wet. There was some leftover vomit on Dingo’s. They pulled apart with a sucking sound and Mystic eyes said, “I saw what you did to my home. We were watching the whole time…”

“Stab him, Mystic Eyes, stab him now!” one of the girlfriends said.

“Shut up!” she yelled. Then, back to Dingo: “How could you, Dingo…? I thought you loved me.”

“I do, baby. I do.”

Ugh, I thought. Eviscerate me. No, better, eviscerate them. Brutally. While I watch. With POPcorn. The buttery kind.

Up in the sky above, the Drip chainsaw-ripped a huge fart.

“Then why…” Tears pooled up in the corners of Mystic Eyes’ mystic eyes. “...why did you say I was a vegan!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!??????????? I’m a VEGETARIAN, THERE’S A DIFFERENCE DINGO YOU MEANIE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I THOUGHT YOU KNEW ME I THOUGHT YOU LOVED ME WWWWWWWWAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHGHGHGHGGHGHGHGHGHGHGGHGHGHGHGHGHGHFDHKEKFH”EOHJ”OIWH(#Y(&YR($HRUBWOUFBJBCJOU#OH{IVRH#RVY*#YR)*Y#R)!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!1111111!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!11!!”

“Oh. Yeah, my bad. I meant vegetarian.”

“Oh, Dingo, I knew you cared ❤️!” She smiled and threw her arms around his naked neck.

“Psst! Psssssssst! Dingo!” While Mystic Eyes was distracted by her eternal undying love, I hissed for Dingo’s attention. He sideeyed me. “Wonderbaby,” I whisper-yelled.

His eyes went wide with understanding. He peeled Mystic Eyes off and asked her about what we had seen before, what started all of this, her being with Wonderbaby earlier this evening.

“You’re not… cheating on me, are you, babe?”

I heard a random sob from the circle of girlfriends and someone swore profusely for two seconds into the sweltering sewage stink of the night air.

“Oh, him?” Mystic Eyes told Dingo. “Don’t worry about Wonderbaby. I would never be into someone that old and gross and weird. I was just pretending to like him so we could make a little trade. Check out these homegrown radishes!”

She pulled a mesh sack of the red tubers from out behind her back or something. “Now we won’t have to go grocery shopping for one whole day! Isn’t that great?”

“Organic!” someone from the crowd chimed in.

She took one of the radishes out of the sack and bit into it. “Tangy!” Then she fed one to Dingo, who took a tiny nibble and spat it out. Dingo had never eaten a vegetable in his life.

“That’s great, hon. I didn’t know Wonderbaby grew his own radishes.”

“Yeah! He does! Next to the nuclear waste dump.” I knew exactly where she was talking about. The abandoned lot with the glow-in-the-dark soil. “But he wouldn’t give me any for free so we had to make a trade.”

“What did you trade for them?”

“Oh, not much. He just wanted to go on a few dates with me is all, and then he also asked for that bomb we’ve been making.”

I had heard about that. Mystic Eyes and her flunkies had been going on and on about this bomb they were building based on some blueprints they found online or whatever.

“Oh, ok. Cool, cool,” said Dingo. “We’re all good then. My bad about the yak meat thing, but you know how it is.” Mystic Eyes nodded.

“By the way, speaking of meat,” Dingo continued, “how’d you even meet Wonderbaby to start with?”

I had to admit it was a good question. Actually it was the only good question Dingo had ever asked. The only good one he would ever ask, though none of us knew that at the time.

“Oh,” Mystic Eyes told him bashfully, “nowhere special. Just the Nighttrippers.”

“The what?”