Rant Read Free Page A

cultures, shamanic drummers trigger theta activity by a steady, constant four beats per second.
    Pattie Reynolds ( Bartender): I was at Pump Seven. The man you’re talking about was at Pump Five. I heard splashing and turned to look, and this old man was hosing gasoline all over the mattress tied to the roof of his red car. He wore a dark-blue business suit. Gray hair. Good wingtip shoes. The gasoline soaked into the mattress, except a few drips of it rolled down the sides of the car, the windows. The smell was suffocating.
    I remember he climbed into the driver’s seat and started to drive off. He had to turn on the windshield wipers, so much gasoline was running down the windshield.
    Wallace Boyer: Like I told you, I didn’t really meet Rant Casey until after he was dead. The remainder of that flight, the time I sat next to Chester Casey, he tried to teach me the impossible. He drank my scotch and told me that time is not a straight line.
    Time is not a river. Or a clock or hourglass. It doesn’t only run one way.
    You could hire a gaggle of brilliant experts to dissect how it might happen, but some people will still look at the proof and argue that the world is flat. Humans didn’t evolve from something else. And Elvis Presley is still alive.
    From DRVR Radio Graphic Traffic: I’m Tina Something with a Graphic Traffic emergency bulletin. All westbound lanes of the Madison Beltway are closed, due to the crash of a burning car at the CenterPoint exit. Emergency crews are on the scene trying to control the fire. Already traffic is backed up to the Market interchange and the 287 Freeway. Traffic on the eastbound Madison is also slowed to stopping…
    Shot Dunyun: Shit. I don’t know how flashbacks work. I couldn’t tell you exactly how a lightbulb works, much less make you one from scratch. But I can use one.
    You burn out your brain with rabies. Go all theta-trance-y with driving. You hit something and wake up naked in history.
    Wallace Boyer: If it helps, consider how people used to think the world was flat. Two-dimensional. They only believed in the part they could see, until somebody invented the ships and somebody brave sailed off to find the rest of the earth. Consider that Rant Casey is the Christopher Columbus of time travel.
    From DRVR Radio Graphic Traffic: Traffic on the West Side is at a standstill. A parking lot. Emergency crews report the fire at the CenterPoint interchange is extinguished, and the accident has been moved off the roadway, but the boysin the meat wagon are still waiting for their cargo.
    According to the early rumors, the burned Daimler-Benz appears to be empty. Bringing you the gory details, this is DRVR Graphic Traffic…
    39–Werewolves V
    Hudson Baker ( Student): This is hard to explain, but in every toilet stall in every bathroom at the high school we go to, somebody wrote in every stall: “Amber Nye Is Dripping with Rabies!”
    Only, really, Amber wrote that herself. It’s really hard to explain.
    Toni Wiedlin ( Party Crasher): High-school kids would do a dance they called “The Drooler,” meaning they’d mimic the partial leg paralysis of an end-stage rabies victim. Kids would stagger around the dance floor, foaming from Alka-Seltzer on their tongue, crashing into each other, and snarling. The word is, doing that dance is a good way to get shot by the police.
    Shot Dunyun ( Party Crasher): People who want to catch the bug, we call them “spittoons.” People willing to pass along the rabies virus are “hawkers.”
    From the Field Notes of Green Taylor Simms ( Historian): As Charles Dickens once described the French Reign of Terror: During times of plague there will always be those who can’t rest until they’ve become infected.
    Hudson Baker: Amber and me would cover our whole, entire bodies in sunblock, SPF 200 or something. We so wanted people to whisper we were Nighttimers, and for the curfew police to try and bust us. Looking back, we wanted people to be scared of us.