9

New Madrid Levee, Missouri

The number of the beast is twelve, but he cannot fathom why. There were twelve letters in Udanax Xanadu.

His mind is stranger than a glass hammer. It does, or tries to do, many things simultaneously: receive and transmit impulses, assess and collate, identify, compute, extrapolate, measure, recall, plan, direct, monitor, safeguard, but the infinitesimal data stream has been dammed to a trickle.

One piece of information computes: his mouth is dry. Two: he is hurt. How badly? This fails to compute.

There was an op in the mangrove swamps of the Rung Sat, where even angels feared to tread UC123Bs defoliating the trails with Agent Orange, poisoning all who traversed them, an equal opportunity toxic agent, entering the bloodstreams of the Ranchhands and Charlie alike. His mind fed him the fringes of a ‘60s arc light strike, when he'd been concussed in the blast pattern of the B52 Superforts.

For no reason his wobbly mind locks onto a line of errant poetry. Something he'd read in a stolen library book, something that caused him to smile his fierce parody of a human grin, tear the page from the book and eat it, which he sometimes did to things that pleased him.

Udanax. A pharmaceutical trade name. He knew that it was Xanadu reversed, and his shaky brain reached out for the poem:

In San Antone did Keebler's can,

A tasty weatherdrome puree,

Where Alice Sager's reefer band,

Played taverns’ pleasureless Duran,

Into a funhouse free.

He tried to shake it off and saw the word cauterization imprinted, like a sign, above his thoughts. Twelve letters ... no, thirteen in cauterization: to make insensible, dead; to sear, burn, or destroy tissue. Had he undergone cauterization? The number of the beast was thirteen.

Bunkowski tried to focus, searching for memory of cauterizations past, as a caustic envelope of sunrays, reflected or refracted by the curved surface of his broken computer screen, catoptrically mirrored the reflected light.

A catalyzed cataplexy had left him catabolized, catastrophically catatonic on the catafalque of his categorically catadioptric catechism.

What this cat wouldn't give for a mouse!