The Lizards -Installment 3-

A.N./ Have you read installments 1 and 2? If not, you might be confused, but I welcome advice either way. /end A.N.

The sprawling, open-air complex Amylace and Grover reside in is affectionately named Sub-District 49b. Combined with it’s a, c, d, e, and f counterparts, the place houses 350,000 lizards. They’re packed into the locker-apartments like Perdue chickens, up to ten in a single-room enclosure, though the average is four. There is some agriculture, but it’s limited to semi-edible desert weeds and allium flowers because they’re the only things that can survive in the thin city-air and the barren city-dirt, them and lizards of course.

The hexagon shaped dwellings are stacked five high, double wide, and run in six, 10 mile-long rows fanning radially out from the corners of a hexagon (sensing a theme?) shaped government center. The space between the rows is assigned a letter, and in order to pass from one sector letter to another, officially the lizard residents must go to the government center, present a valid I.D. and proof of residency, and proceed to their publicly announced destination from there, but none of them bother, and the bored, fat government employees in the government center prefer it that way.

To put this information into perspective so that it might be at least a little bit helpful to you, sectors a and b, b being Grover and Amylace’s sector, are the northernmost sectors in this scheme. Moe lives in sector f, facing west, next to sector a, and Maurice and Zoey live under a mega-bridge that runs the length of the eastern border between Sub-District 49 and Sub-District 50. The five of them live within seventeen miles of each other, walking distance for lizards who have no choice but to walk.

Currently a large portion of the row of apartments between sectors c and d is burned down from the lizards’ first meeting. It was reported that no one died in the fire, but you can never be sure with Duckville local news.

---

Amylace sat outside on the fire escape attached to her and Grover’s third-floor apartment. The raccoons in the area had basically become domesticated cats since the construction of the lizard Sub-Districts, and she idly ran her hand along the head and spine of one while she thought about food, and how nice it would’ve been to have some right then.

She was waiting for Grover to come back. He’d gone to the ‘lizard-market,’ a collection of dirty peddlers and their goods surrounding the government center where they were accessible to lizards from all over Sub-District 49, to see if he could barter or steal his way into some food or water or shoes, or anything really.

“Hey,” someone shouted from the ground, startling the raccoon so that it bit Amylace and ran off. The young woman cursed and tucked her bleeding hand into her armpit before she thought to address the voice. Upon a quick glance down, she saw that it was the POE lizard, Zoey Owens, that’d shouted up to her.

“Hey,” she shouted back, unsure if that was the correct response or not. Zoey narrowed her eyes and un-narrowed them a few times, having trouble getting them to focus exactly on Amylace’s face, when the predator in her made them want to pinpoint the young woman’s jugular.

“Do you recognize me?” Zoey squawked. Amylace took a moment to look around for someone else the mutant might be talking to. To her rising panic, there was no one.

“Yeah, you’re Zoey. I met you two days ago.”

“You’re Moe?”

“No. I’m Amylace.”

“The Hooker?”

“No. Moe is the hooker.”

“Are you the mutant?”

Amylace hesitated.

“Do you mean you? You’re the mutant, aren’t you?”

“Oh, you’re the useless one?”

“No, that’s Grover. I’m the genius lesbian.”

Zoey seemed to calculate for a few seconds, then she grinned a great big, pointy toothed smile and started climbing, rapidly, up the outside of the fire escape. She seemed to launch herself from one floor to the next with her terrifying velocity. Amylace thought to get up and run, but she was only half up by the time Zoey reached her and wrapped her in a suffocating embrace.

“I missed you,” the dinosaur girl whispered. Amylace didn’t reply; she was too busy being shocked and afraid. When Zoey finally released her, the young woman took several stuttering steps backwards and crossed her arms over her chest. She managed to open her mouth and furrow her brow, but Zoey started talking again before she had a chance to answer.

“Oh, hello there,” the mutant exclaimed, sounding wary and looking Amylace over as if she’d done something strange. Amylace swallowed, waited, and when she realized Zoey wasn’t going to say anything else, she nodded.

“Yeah, hello, Zoey,” the confused young lizard agreed. This mutant with impressive motor skills and a complete lack of mental stamina was throwing Amylace off, and Xenu knows Amylace is not used to being thrown off. Being confused, in fact, is just under male genitalia and the ingenuity of prison inmates on her list of worst fears.

“You know me?” Zoey breathed, looking more nervous by the second. Amylace searched Zoey’s face for any sign that the strange creature might be shitting her. There were no signs of anything at all.

“What? Yes, Zoey, we met two days ago. I’m Amylace?” The question in her voice betrayed the effortlessly-confident, snarky exterior she tried to maintain at all times. Zoey’s expression softened into one of pleasantly surprised recognition.

“Oh, Amylace; you’re the hooker, right?”

Amylace shook her head more from being baffled than to answer the question. She threw her hands out at her helplessness.

“Oh my god, what is happening? We just had this conversation.”

“Or are you the useless one?”

“Fuck, woman, just tell me why you’re here,” Amylace shouted, noting that she’d lost her cool way too easily. “Please?” she added as an apologetic afterthought.

“Why am I where? Who are you?”

"Zoey, my apartment. Why are you at my apartment?"

"This is your apartment?"

"Yes."

"Who are you?"

Zoey cracked a wide smile when Amylace covered her face with her hand and groaned, she went back to feigning confusion as soon as the young genius looked at her again.

"Zoey, I'm Amylace, the genius lesbian, we met two days ago, and I want you to tell me why you're at my house."

Zoey nodded cooperatively.

"Yeah, no problem."

They were quiet for a while. Amylace realized faster this time that this reptile-person, who laughed in the face of her highly-functioning intellect, wasn't going to answer her.

"Zoey, please, can you hear me?"

"Yeah. I've got hearing like a bat."

"Do you have a mental condition? Amnesia?"

"A forth of my brain is a dinosaur's brain, Grover, I am a mental condition."

"Amylace."

"What?"

"My name is Amylace."

"No. My name is Amylace."

Amylace's bottom, left eyelid twitched a little, and she ground her artificial teeth together so hard she was reminded of why she needed artificial teeth.

"No, Zoey, I'm Amylace. You're Zoey."

"Who?"

Amylace felt like she might start crying. She hadn’t cried since she was three years old, so this was an event not to be taken lightly. Fortunately for her, and unfortunately for the end of monotony, Grover showed up and saw that his young roommate was on the verge of a psychological heat death. He called up to her.

“Hey,” he shouted, bearing a rubber hose, a few pieces of paper-thin scrap metal, and a tin pail full of dead rats. Amylace took a deep breath and looked down at him, pleading with her eyes that he help her.

“Hey,” she pled, overcome with a feeling of déjà vu. Grover took the cue her distraught, freckled face gave him to start climbing up the fire escape to join the pair.

“What’s going on? Is that Maurice’s friend?” the young man asked. His breathing was labored from carrying his things all the way from the market. Amylace pushed Zoey away when she tried to hug her again.

“Yeah, and she’s got sudden-onset dementia. She won’t tell me why she’s here; she can’t remember my name; I don’t think she can even remember her name, and I’m about to lose my god damn mind, Grover.”

Grover thought about that for a few seconds while he brought the stuff inside their hovel and came back outside again. After a careful glance at Zoey, he shrugged.

“I know sort of where they live. We can just take her back to Maurice, like a lost dog-”

“Call me a lost dog again, and I’ll rip your throat out like a feral dog,” Zoey snapped, and Amylace about pissed herself. The look of horrified shock stayed on her face while Grover apologized and started guiding the both of them back to the fire escape.

“Let’s all calm down just a little bit. Not everything is a damned crisis. We’ll walk to the 49-50 bridge, reunite Zoey with Maurice, then we’ll come home and have a rat-feast. I’m starving.”

---

The three of them went on their way with little resistance from Zoey, except that every few miles she’d collapse and demand CPR. Because she wasn’t unconscious and seemed completely able to continue on except that she didn’t want to, every time, Grover and Amylace refused. It seemed to work when they just continued on. She’d get up and follow them for a while, chirping on and on about nothing, and then she’d collapse again.

---

By the time they reached the chemical-barrel fire surrounded by couch cushions that marked Maurice and Zoey’s place of dwelling, Amylace and Grover had been physically and psychologically worn into tired, compliant nubs.

Incidentally, they were right where Zoey and Maurice wanted them.

“Maurice?” Grover shouted, exhaustion in his voice. To his and his roommate’s surprise, but not to Zoey’s, Moe emerged from the dirty, sketchy crevices of the under-bridge, not Maurice.

“Oh, there you are, little shit. What do you want?” the woman grouched with her hands on her impressively sculpted hips. Amylace hardly heard her. Grover stuttered and gestured at Zoey, who was looking unsettlingly smug.

“We were just bringing her back to Maurice. She showed up at our place, so we brought her here,” he explained quickly so that Moe wouldn’t have time to get angry. Moe narrowed her eyes at a figure behind them, Maurice it turns out.

“Maurice, you prick, what the hell is wrong with you?” the woman snarled like a tall, sinewy lion. She turned back to Amylace and Grover. “This mother fucker, told me you mother fuckers had some urgent thing you needed to tell me, so I walked all the way here. I walked for five hours-” Her voice was building in volume and intensity so Maurice cut her off before she could ignite the whole place.

“Yes, Xenu, we lied to you. I needed you all to be here so that I could show you something, something amazing.”

Moe ground her teeth with a terrifying look on her face; Grover fidgeted where he stood, and Amylace stared at Moe.

“Fine,” Moe growled eventually, tossing a skeptical glare at Zoey before refocusing on Maurice. “Make it fast.”

Maurice nodded and swooped his hand towards one of the massive support beams that held the mega bridge above their heads, where filthy-rich vipers and humans zoomed past, unconcerned with the fate or the wellbeing of the lizard scum below them. There were at least fifteen brick-shaped, grey slabs stuck erratically around the base of the pillar like a monument to a dead god.

Suddenly Amylace was paying attention again and at the sight of a long wire running to a device in Maurice’s hands with a comically large, red button, there was a spark in her brain that made her lunge at the entrepreneur, shouting and clawing at the thing in his hand. He, shocked at the sudden attack, promptly dropped the device.

In slow motion, I like to think with a badass dubstep beat thumping in the background, the device flipped three times in the air and landed face-down. There was an unimpressive beep, and Amylace screamed. As she ran to get out from under the bridge, she pulled Grover with her. Moe stumbled backwards and took the cue to follow the two of them.

Everything went dead for half a second, and then a massive explosion rang out and sent the lizards rocketing outward. They landed hard on the ground and turned around to stare at the bridge in horror.

For a second, the bridge remained unchanged except for the “photon-vessels,” blindingly efficient vehicles owned only by the blindingly wealthy, speeding up or turning around to flee from the blast, and then there was a heavy, whole sound like a crack of lightning. Slowly the pillar fractured and collapsed, taking a huge portion of the bridge with it. Chunk after chunk fell, booming in the ears of the lizards who’d never seen anything more frightening and beautiful at the same time.

The emergency functions in the vehicles kept the important, and by important I mean wealthy, vipers and humans floating safely above the hole. There were no casualties.

The five lizards, now bound to each other by this unspeakable crime against the state, kept their heads down and went back to Grover and Amylace’s as quickly as they could without drawing attention to themselves.

---

A few hours later, they sat in a semi-circle, eating rats in front of a tiny television owned by a man who let them watch in return for their rubber hose, and then took the rubber hose to his friend’s home, who wanted to trade it for a stick of chewing gum.

Today, the public is in a panic at the shocking collapse of the mega-bridge running above the border between the forty-ninth and fiftieth lizard districts in Duckville. The event has been confirmed a malicious attack by authorities in the last hour, and investigators speculate that it may have been the act of an intra-national terror cell. You are advised to stay in your homes until your government locates the threat and neutralizes it.

Static

Up next, what new service bot is best at raising your children for you?

Their faces were blank, like the blast had shattered their brains and left them sitting in pieces at the bases of their skulls.

“Oh god we’re terrorists,” Amylace murmured, her voice cold with shock. Maurice shook his head.

“We’re not terrorists,” he argued, “we’re freedom fighters.”

“Yeah, that’s what terrorists say,” Amylace countered flatly.

“No one died. They were just inconvenienced, exactly how we planned,” Maurice tried again, but no one was convinced.

The five were quiet again for a while, and then Moe broke the uneasy silence.

“I mean, I’m not endorsing terrorism or anything, but…and I’m just being completely honest…it does feel a little nice knowing all those rich assholes will have to drive for another half an hour to get to work every day for a while now.”

After a few seconds, the other lizards murmured in hesitant agreement.

“And,” Grover continued where Moe left off, “since no one was actually in danger, and we never even wanted them to be, it’s sort of…cool to think they’re afraid of us, for once…instead of the other way around.”

The lizards started to lose their glum heaviness, and eventually they were talking lightly amongst themselves about all the encounters they’d had with vipers and humans, and they got to feeling pretty justified in their actions.

“You know, Maurice, maybe we were wrong to write you off so fast. Is your offer still standing?” Amylace asserted, and Maurice beamed.

“Of course it is! Are you all in?” he whelped, his grin growing to Cheshire cat proportions. They nodded emphatically, and a cheer went around the circle.

And that is how the lizards, as a plucky band of political activists, came to be.

-to be continued...-