Read Online Rant by Chuck Palahniuk - Free Book Online

virgins was willing, even excited, to participate in his project. His experiment.
    Echo Lawrence: With every sperm that met an egg, Simms claims he felt stronger. He was hoarding more gold, making a fortune, and stashing it for his future self.
    Shot Dunyun: Totally, balls-out crazy.
    Jarrell Moore: Geriatric dementia, to say the least.
    Shot Dunyun: The moment of every conception got him high. It jacked him up, all his chromosomes or whatall, changed in that instant. Rearranged. New and improved. And, same as any addiction, it was all this guy knew to do, so he did it, over and over and over.
    He just kept fucking with the past. Filling the future with a new himself.
    Chester Casey: After telling my boy his crazy story, this old nutcase, he asked Buster to roll up his shirtsleeves. The old miser pointed at the shadow bites, the dirt tattooed by teeth into Buster’s hands and arms, and he said, “Badger…coyote…pit viper…” Getting every scar exactly right.
    Echo Lawrence: Supposedly, Green Taylor Simms asked Rant to go back in time, to crash in a car accident. People were living longer now. Rant could go back a hundred years. Seed more generations of himself. Rant could memorize lottery numbers and invention plans over time, building an even larger fortune.
    Jarrell Moore: Along the way, diddling thirteen-year-old girls.
    Shot Dunyun: And Simms promised some way Rant could live forever. Become immortal.
    Echo Lawrence: Plus, possibly to hide his tracks, or maybe because he’s inbred, hybrid crazy, Simms has been sneaking back to murder those Middleton girls in their old age, using poison spiders, bubonic fleas, and killer bees…
    Shot Dunyun: Rant tells this crazy old Simms, “Memorize? You don’t figure what rabies does to a brain…”
    Echo Lawrence: And Green Taylor Simms says, “I know exactly what you’re capable of doing.” He tells Rant, “I am you…”
    Neddy Nelson ( Party Crasher): Nobody wants to go there, but…wasn’t the Virgin Mary, wasn’t she God’s child? And back in Biblical times, wasn’t she, like, thirteen years old?
    Shot Dunyun: Sixty years ago, this other Rant Casey got bumped back in time and had to wait his way back to the present, along the way making a few changes. Stoking.
    Neddy Nelson: Besides, what about the creepy Old Testament stuff about Lot’s two daughters getting their dad drunk and then…“preserving his seed”?
    Chester Casey: Close as I can figure, that wild story is how come Buddy drove his car off that bridge. All that crazy coot’s dreams, my boy was supposed to fulfill them. But I’d wager that’s not exactly what my Buddy done.
    34–What If
    Neddy Nelson ( Party Crasher): I want to ask, you ever wonder why the dominant culture says certain stuff? I mean, really hammers on you that some stuff is absolutely, deadly impossible? For instance, what science calls the “Grandfather Paradox”? How it works out that you should never, ever even consider time travel, because you might go back in time and kill your own grandfather by accident, let’s say, and then—kah-poof—you’d not exist? I mean, if you trusted in the government experts, wouldn’t you be careful and never go back in time?
    Echo Lawrence ( Party Crasher): I was so little, but I remember the I-SEE-U Act shutting down the rubberneck studies—those government engineers, like my mother, crashing into each other to study the effect on traffic. I remember my mother saying who was missing from her office, and I thought she meant fired or laid off. A few more engineers each week. I asked if she’d be leaving, and she told me no. Never, she said, not without her little Echo, meaning me, and my father. She said she’d never leave us behind.
    Neddy Nelson: What if this? If somebody went back and reworked the past, how would the rest of us know? Don’t we only know the present reality that we know? What if reality gets reshuffled—in little, tiny ways—all the time? Or what if the people in