There’s a girl here and she’s almost you

Today I’m feeling like the kid at the end of Old Yeller.  If Martialla has gone rabid on me I’m going to have to put her down.  The upside is that if I do shoot her then I can say cool gritty post-apocalypse stuff like “It’s a hell of a thing having to killing your best friend”.  If I do need to take her out it’s going to be tough though because she has the nanocanister which means she’s the one with access to healing and super-strength and stuff.  Also she has most of the guns.   Another issue is that she has Paul watching her back like a faithful hound.  Since he’s a rabid monster maybe he’s Old Yeller in this situation.  Would that make Martialla the bear?  Or was it a wolf?   

The worst movie I’ve been in (so far) started out as a script for Old Yeller 2.  I’ve seen many a shitty script in my time but this one took the cake.  Nothing in it made any god damn sense to me.  Gun to my head I couldn’t tell you what the plot was.  Was it supposed to be an erotic thriller about rabies?  Maybe.  Was Cujo one of the characters?  I think so.  Whatever the movie ending up being was never finished, but I get residual checks from a company in Singapore for it.  They must have sold the footage and they used in in another movie.  Martialla gets checks for it too and hers are three times more than mine.  I don’t remember her even being in that movie.  I should ask my agent about that.   Which will be even more of a challenge than knocking off Martialla since my agent is super dead already.

I suppose for now I should just keep an eye on Martialla.  She’s been acting out ever since we came bounding out of those cryo-tubes like Frosted Chocolate Vanilla Crème Pop Tarts out of the toaster. Probably because her husband and all her family and friends besides me are super dead.  For a while I wondered if she was pregnant since she’s been acting so squirrelly, but we’ve been here long enough that she should be showing by now if that was the case.  Or maybe the nanos ate her baby.  That’s a grim thought.  Why would you even think something like that?  You are messed up.

She just needs a project to work on I think.  She’s much happier when she was something to keep her simple little mind occupied.  Martialla is like a service dog, she wants to work.  Since her embarrassing emotional outburst she’s been avoiding me, going off with Paul during the day to do whatever it is they do, and Lucien has been staying at the garbage-shack with me.  I don’t know if it’s for my protection or because he doesn’t want to be subjected to the sight of Martialla and Paul going at it or both.  Whichever it is he was standing guard at the front garbage hole while I was ripping up Martialla’s books to teach her a little bit of a lesson about respect.

“You’re not getting any less blue are you?” I observed attractively.

He glanced down at his arm glumly “No.  It’s quite garish.  I wonder what color the Russians turned their test subjects.” 

I raised an eyebrow that could use some serious thinning out “They were chemically freezing people too?” 

“Whatever we were working on it was assumed by the planners that the Russians were doing the same thing.  It’s a named doctrine but the title escapes me.  The idea is you’re smart enough to come up with something your enemy is too.” 

“If the Russians were working on it they probably only produced corpses, so whatever color corpses are.  White?  When the Soviet Union collapsed they discovered that they actually sucked at almost everything and the whole Cold War thing was kind of a shame.  Just nobody knew it at the time.  Er, sorry you wasted your life on that.” 

He frowned slightly in a Canadian way “You say that and yet we’ve seen evidence that Russia invaded the west coast.  Maybe they wanted to seem incompetent.  What happened to the Soviet nuclear arsenal?” 

I thought about it for a moment “I don’t know.  I guess they still have it?  Er, had it, you know what I mean.” 

He gave me an incredulous look “You don’t know?  How can you not know?  The threat of nuclear exchange has been the primary concern in human history since the end of the Second World War.  The disposition of the Soviet nuclear arsenal had to be what everyone was paying attention to.  It should have been in the news constantly.” 

I grimaced slightly “I don’t remember the news saying anything about it.  I mostly remember them showing people dancing on the Berlin wall.” 

He frowned “In Germany?  What does that have to do with the fall of communism in Russia?” 

“I was in junior high dude, what do you want from me?  I wasn’t paying attention to current events I had dances and Trapper Keepers to worry about.  And don’t give me that look, what were you doing when you were fourteen?” 

“Working in a sawmill.” 

I shook my head “Jesus dude, give it a rest.  How about this, if you had to guess how would you expect that the Soviet Union would collapse?” 

He seemed impressed “Good question.  First thing that pops into my head is an instigating incident in the form of another Warsaw Pact action like in Hungary and Czechoslovakia.  Say Poland and Romania both try to remove their governing communist party and Russia intervenes while already engaged in Afghanistan.  Prolonged military conflict erodes the reputation of the Red Army and undermines Soviet legitimacy to the point where internal groups start pressuring for change.” 

“That sounds familiar, that’s probably what happened.  Don’t shake your head at me Blue Man Group.” 

“What’s blue man group?  Some kind of therapy for men?” 

I shook my head “No, it’s three guys who paint themselves blue and then . . . uh, do a performance of . . . of some kind.  Like they hit a tube with a hammer or something.  I think I saw a commercial where they threw jello at a guy . . . something like that.  You know, its performance art, it doesn’t make any sense.  They get up there and do crazy shit and don’t talk and people love it for some reason.  It’s like on Broadway.” 

He laughed mirthlessly “Well, I can see how the west won the Cold War now, we have the Blue Man Group.” 

“I mean don’t knock the idea, that’s how we defeated the aliens too.  When the space invaders invaded in ninety-five at first they were kicking our ass with their alien spaceships, but you see they came from a warrior culture, they had no exposure to music or art or entertainment of any kind, all they knew was military service.  The first wave of alien soldiers who put boots on the ground became infatuated by human society, and spread these ideas to their comrades when they returned to the alien home planet.  End result, the alien soldiers refused to fight and the whole planetary government fell apart because of Mariah Carey, old sitcoms, and some postcards from the Louvre.” 

“You’re making that up!”