Milo sat in his car drumming his fingers on the steering wheel while he waited for the Creator to give him something to do. It would come, as sure as a porn star lies about her age at both the beginning and end of her career, Milo's moment would come.
He was looking at himself in the rearview mirror, scrunching up one eye into a flinty stare. He liked that look. It made him look flinty. The cigarette dangling from one corner of his mouth added to the effect until it began to make his eye water. Flinty was cool. Crying was not. He flicked the cigarette out of the window toward some dry brush and quickly lit another.
He saw a child, maybe eight years old, wearing a little-league uniform and standing at a bus stop across the street. The kid was humming a Justin Bieber song. The Creator had come through, serving up Milo's next move. This was going to be fun.
Milo put his car into gear and pulled away from the curb. He drove half a block, made a U-turn, then came back and pulled up along side the kid.
"You're looking a little scrawny there," Milo shouted from the car window. "You could use some steroids so you can grow up to be big and strong like Barry Bonds."
"I'm just gonna wait for the bus, Mister," the kid said. "I'm not supposed to accept rides from strangers."
"A wise policy, kid. You never know when some sicko is going to abduct you and leave your body to be discovered in a drainage ditch strangled with a piece of clothesline and your mouth rigor mortised into permanent fellatio face. Lucky for you, I don't get off on that shit. So how good a ball player are you anyway?"
"I lead my team in stolen bases," the kid said.
"Excellent. Everything is better when it's stolen: bases, kisses, lunch money, cars."
Milo slapped his hand down on the dashboard when he said that. He assumed that he acquired his car by theft though he had no recollection of actually stealing it. It just seemed like the kind of thing he would do.
"You know what would make even better at stealing bases, kid? A cigarette, that's what."
"Nuh uh," the kid said.
"Yeah uh. When I played for the Lucas Orange Sox, I used to smoke half a pack before every game. I stole more bases than the rest of the starting lineup combined and there wasn't a pitcher alive who could pick me off."
He leaned across the passenger seat and held out a pack of smokes with one cigarette protruding from the rest.
"Go on, kid. No one ever made it to the big leagues by being a pussy."
The kid hesitated for a moment then reached out and took the cigarette.
"Here kid, let me light that for you."
Milo took the Zippo from his pants pocket and flicked it open. The kid leaned forward with the cigarette between his trembling lips. Milo shoved the burning Zippo into the kid's face.
"Smoking kills, you little fuckhole. Ha ha ha," Milo said.
While the kid was sobbing, Milo sat up and put the car into drive. His tires hopped the curb as he accelerated and the kid cried out when the rear wheel began to run over his foot. Milo stomped the gas at that moment. The spinning tires sprayed the sidewalk behind with pieces of athletic shoe, bone, and foot meat. The kid's base-stealing days were over.
Milo drove away, laughing and thanking the Creator for providing such a wonderful start to the day. He turned left on Expiration Blvd. and went past Casa de Llorar, a maximum-security retirement community. It was a huge, imposing, windowless building where the muffled cries of the inhabitants could be heard at all hours day and night. Milo accelerated. He was intent on putting as much distance between himself and that building as he could for reasons he couldn't quite understand.
He turned right on Caitiff Way and continued down that road past its trailer parks and strip malls full of liquor stores, check-cashing places, and massage parlors. He stopped at a red light at a corner diagonally across from a small church consisting of a double-wide mobile home and a huge sign above it proudly proclaiming "God Is Drunk."
There was a memorial service letting out and a small group of mourners shuffled out of the church. Milo watched a middle-aged man console and embrace a teenage girl in a black cheerleader uniform. It started innocently enough until he started sniffing her hair with deep lungfuls and slipped his wedding-ringed finger between her satin panties and her taint. Her eyes opened wide and she stood there paralyzed with fear as the man cleaned out the inside of her left nostril with his tongue.
Milo approved.
An old woman emerged from the group, got into her Chevy Nova, and turned left onto the road. She signaled as she changed from the left to right lane. The signal stayed on as she pulled away at a steady 24 mph.
"What a creaky old whore. I think I'll kill her," said Milo.
The light turned green and he took off after her. He kept pace with the old woman for a mile or so, half hypnotized by the blink of her right turn signal. He then gunned it and his front bumper met hers, first with a slam and then with a steady push. He thought the old woman would simply give up and let him run her off the road, but she started accelerating away from him. She had some fight in her after all. Milo's car was faster than hers, but rather than rear ending her again he swerved to the left so he was driving next to her and motioned her to roll down her window.
"What is it? What do you want with me?" she yelled.
"Relax, madam. I just wanted to say that I admire your spunk. I hope that fact brings you some comfort as I amuse myself by murdering you."
He pulled his steering wheel hard to the right. The side of his car smacked into hers and she went flying into a tree. During this moment she might have been thinking "Who is this man and why is he doing this to me?" or "Gee, I should have fastened my seatbelt." Whatever her thoughts were, they were to be her last as her life was snuffed out when her head went through the windshield.
"Creator, you are chock full of awesome today," Milo said. He decided he wanted a souvenir so he put his car in reverse and backed up to the crash site. He considered taking her head but with the skull split open and brains everywhere, it wasn't much of a trophy. Her lower half was far less of a mess. He reached into her car window, pulled off her panties, stuffed them in his mouth, and walked back to his vehicle.
Milo was now five miles down the road from the scene of the kill, the dead woman's underwear still clenched between his teeth. Up ahead he saw a woman in a hospital gown hitchhiking on the side of the road. He briefly entertained the notion of running her down and leaving a red smear where she once stood, but he didn't want to kill her right away. That would be wasteful. She had nice legs.
He slowed the car and pulled to a stop along side of her.
"Mblgrblglb," Milo said.
The woman laughed and pointed at Milo's self-administered underwear gag. He pulled the panties from his mouth and tried again.
"I was saying," Milo said. "I support the First Amendment. If you get in the car, I'll respect your right to worship my cock."
"You're a real charmer," she said. "Lucky for you, I'm not picky. My name is Madge, by the way."
She was older than Milo thought when he first saw her up ahead on the road. She looked to be about 50, a svelte 50, not unattractive but with a sadness in her eyes and the way she carried herself. She had obviously experienced some great tragedy in her life causing an emotional wound that would never heal. Milo shrugged and began to unzip his pants.
"Easy tiger," Madge said. "There will be plenty of time for that. Besides, I think we need to get out of here before they come looking for me."
"They? They who?"
"Police. Just drive, will you?"
Milo and Madge drove off. She slid down in the seat so no one could see her. Milo continued down Caitiff Way and the strip malls began to give way to vacant lots until there was nothing on either side of the road, not even plant life, just desolation. All the while, Madge.told him about her former life as a cancer researcher and then cancer patient. According to her, the last thing she remembered was how she was about to be murdered in hospital ward by a homicidal cult of fiscally conservative religious zealots. After that, she woke up as an unwilling resident of the Casa Llorar retirement community.
"I busted out this morning, slipped out in a laundry truck. Cliche, but effective. Unfortunately, they're after me now and when they catch me they'll lock me in solitary forever. There will be no more escapes for dear old Madge."
"Now wait a second," said Milo. "You're nowhere near old enough to be in a retirement home."
"You don't need to be old. You just need to be old news. You, for example, are in the prime of your life, but it won't last. In a month's time, it will all be over. You see, in Casa Llorar they let us know all about our new neighbors before they arrive. I know more about about you than you know about yourself. You probably think you're in your 30s when in fact you are less than 12 hours old."
"Lady, you're crazy."
"Am I? Today is November 1st. Is it not?"
"Yeah, so?"
"OK, just answer me one question. How was your Halloween?"
"It was awesome."
"Really? Tell me about about it. You don't have to tell me everything. One little detail will do."
"I...uh..."
"You don't remember a thing, do you? That's because you didn't exist then. Unlike a lot of us, you were never even given a past. All you have is a desire to harm as many people as you can and free rein to do exactly that. Oh the Creator must have been in a real foul mood when he came up with the likes of you. But when he's through with you, and come November 30 he will be, you'll go where I went, where everyone goes."
Milo clenched the wheel and stared out at the road that cut through the treeless wasteland beneath the midday sun. He wanted to kill Madge, to drag her from his car and jump up and down on her for a while then burn her with cigarettes while she slowly succumbed to internal injuries. If he sensed that she had any fear of dying, he would have done just that. By the way she was baiting him, it seemed like that was exactly what she wanted. Well he wasn't going to kill that woman, not on her terms.
"Oh I've hurt you terribly," Madge said. "That was never my intention. I don't want to ruin your fun, far from it. I might be able to fix things so you never have to set foot in Casa Llorar and you could have an eternity of sociopathic frolic. How does that grab you?"
"And how do you intend to do that?"
"With allies. If you take this road out past Memory Lane, there's a graveyard of sorts. It's filled not with dead people, but those who have never lived. They're the folks that the Creator conjured up and promptly forgotten. There are literally thousands of them, none of whom are under the Creator's control. If we can wake them up and release them, this will become their world. The Creator, feeling outnumbered, will give up. He does a lot of giving up you know. There is one thing though. I doubt our newfound friends will much like your proclivities, but I'm willing to make it our little secret if you will."
"OK," Milo said. "We'll do this your way, for now."
The two drove on in silence for over an hour. A few minutes after passing a road sign that said "Memory Lane, Jct. 100 mi," Milo spotted a police car with its lights flashing in his rearview mirror. He tried accelerating away, but the vehicle continued gaining on him.
"What is it?" asked Madge.
"Pigs."
"What's the matter with you? Why don't you outrun them?"
"Silence is an excellent way to avoid claw-hammer rape."
Milo continued looking in the rearview at the approaching car and failed to notice police roadblock ahead of him. He drove right through the tire breaker strung across the road. All four tires ripped open and as Madge screamed, the car spun off the road and into the dirt. By the time they stopped, the view of everything around them was obscured by a huge cloud of dust.
Barely visible, there were four people approaching on foot. Madge leapt out of the car and ran toward them.
"I've been abducted. He's insane. Thank God you're here officers!"
The dust had cleared enough to show that the men were police in riot gear. Milo saw four arms raised with nightsticks, which came crashing down upon the head and body of Madge. Neither her upraised arms nor her pleas for mercy did her any good against the blows that continued to rain down upon her. When she was reduced to a sobbing mass on the ground, three of the cops unzipped their pants and urinated on her.
The fourth approached Milo.
"You really should never try running from the cops, Citizen. But in this case, I'll let you off with a warning."
"What about her?" Milo asked.
"Well, it's a good thing we caught up with you. She was working for the Creator all along. She wanted you to take her to the Sanctuary of the Forgotten Ones so the Creator could follow you and enslave them all."
"Why would she do that? He's the one who imprisoned her?"
"Free drugs, a TV in her cell, it hardly matters. She's a whore and he probably picked her because she'd work cheap. Now that she's failed, the Forgotten Ones are safe."
"Wait a minute. Didn't the Creator create you cops as well?"
"Indeed he did. He put us here to protect and serve, but he failed to specify whom so we improvised."
"OK, so what about me? What's going to happen to me?"
"You? You have the entire month, Citizen. Have yourself a ball."
There are maybe 200 calories in a ceviche tostada, give or take. I was eating two of those and was on my second pint of Trumer Pils. Each beer was also 200 calories. Combine that with the dressingless salad and however much sugar I dumped into the coffee I drank throughout the day, I figured my total calorie intake was somewhere between 1200 and 1500. Wait, my tostada came with tortilla chips. so maybe the maximum for the day was more like 1800 calories. 
I try to make it over to the East Bay at least once a week. It keeps me from feeling like my life is just one day rolling into the next, an unintended consequence of an easy existence. 
I used to tell myself I had lived through a major earthquake. The Loma Prieta quake certainly was the largest local temblor in recent memory. It paled in comparison to the big one in 1906, but 1906 was a long time ago. 