by Alex Johnson
***
“Well, that was curious,” said Paul Diamond, the sole male member of the Geek Squad. He wiped his forehead with a pale yellow napkin, the rolls of fat trembling beneath his Extra Large Dr. Who Vs. the Daleks t-shirt. The Squad was assembled in the basement of Blackstone’s house in East Sugar Valley, Diamond sitting cross-legged on the floor.
“What do you think?” asked Ravyn, who was sitting on the couch opposite to Diamond along with the two girls.
“I think it’s horrible!” burst out Alice O’Halloran, she of the orange-red hair, ultra-pale skin and freckles. Then she was silent, her thin shoulders moving up and down spasmodically as she quietly wept.
“I don’t know,” threw in Mintzy Spielbaum, who most closely resembled Ravyn in size, stature and coloration. “There were moments I thought I was going to vomit, but then again, there’s something almost…ok, you’re going to think I’m a total perv, but, there’s something kind of hot about the tape. Especially all that girl on girl action.” She suddenly colored, realizing what she had just said.
“I don’t remember any girl on girl action,” said Ravyn.
“Oh yeah, well there was a little burst of it towards the end,” said Mintzy. “A trace. Almost subliminal. Ok, maybe I just projected it.”
“It’s perfectly normal to have those desires,” said Paul kindly. “It doesn’t make you a bad person.”
Ravyn threw up her arms. “Right, so, before this degenerates into a group confessional, I really want to know what you guys think about the tape, and what’s on it, and what we should do about it, if anything.”
“All right,” said Paul. “I think what we’re looking at is an experiment of some kind. Or an attempt to make monster porn. But the realism of it…that’s what gets me. And you almost recognize some of the girls, right? They look like our classmates. The others. The blondes.”
The other three nodded in unison. “Ok, I’m just throwing this out there,” said Mintzy. “But maybe, maybe there’s a connection. To our classmates, I mean. When do you think the tape was made?”
“That’s easy,” said Paul. “There’s a timestamp at the bottom. December 1994.”
“Eighteen years ago,” said Mintzy.
“Right, right,” said Ravyn. “So if we put it all together, eighteen years ago, there was this experiment, and it was recorded…an experiment that involved, um, wait, the blondes’ moms. Some crazy shit. A heavy metal Frankenstein monster, a fucking…mad scientist with a puppet glued on his hand, hardcore penetration, more jizz than I’m frankly comfortable with, and…maybe a little girl on girl action at the end.”
Mintzy smiled and nodded enthusiastically.
“And it was just lying there in the cabinet waiting for you to discover it,” said Paul. “That’s just fishy. First of all, it’s evidence of a crime. A few of the girls look underage, they’ve obviously been coerced, maybe drugged, kidnapped and raped by the creature while the whole thing is being filmed. It’s not the kind of thing you just find in the AV room. Someone put it there. The question is, who, and why?”
“I dunno,” said Ravyn. “Or…maybe I do. It has to be Ms. Bunford. She gave me a copy of the key to the room. She’s always been, I guess sympathetic is the right word. Like she gets us, gets the whole Geek Squad thing. I’ve never seen her hanging out with any of the other teachers, except when there’s faculty meetings. She doesn’t car pool, she doesn’t socialize, she just does her own thing. Like we do. But…oh hell, why don’t we just give her a call?”
“I agree,” said Paul. “Either it’s her and she can fill us in, or it isn’t, and, well, maybe we all got loaded on cough syrup or something, and it’s awkward, but Ms. Bunford seems like the kind of lady who’s been there, you know what I mean?”
***
“I’m so happy to see you all here,” said Linnea Bunford to the Geek Squad, cozily settled around her couch in the little cottage she owned near the woods, right before the freeway to Bone City. “Having to keep a secret all these years, well, it became too much for me. I had to share. I knew I could trust you with the information, because it’s critical you understand what happened nearly twenty years ago, and what’s happening to our community now. The future—if there is to be such a thing—rests on your tender but very capable shoulders.
“Like you, I was never a joiner. There were reasons for that, maybe personal, maybe not. I moved to Sugar Valley forty years ago with my husband, now deceased, God rest his soul. Mr. Bunford was a gentleman, a courageous and outspoken advocate of ideas that are now fairly mainstream, but at the time were considered heresy, especially here. They only tolerated him because of his immense wealth, and then barely. As for me, I was the wife—a liberal, a radical, political. Which made me poison to them. But I didn’t care. I never really cared. I was happy to be the school librarian, which put me in a position where I could encourage students who were different as I was, as I am. Point them in the right direction. Guide them.
“We’re at a tipping point as a nation, as a culture. What’s going on in Sugar Valley is just a reflection of that, a microcosm of larger forces. The old guard still wants to preserve their hallucination of a pure bloodline, whatever that is. But what they didn’t get, and will never appreciate, is the insanity of wanting that purity. Unmixed, they think, therefore untainted. But you can’t stop evolution. There’s only one way, and it’s forward. Oh, listen to me rattle on. It’s not so important what I say, or even what happens to me after this. But you young people…I’m sorry, I can’t talk right now.”
“That’s totally cool,” said Ravyn. “We just appreciate that you trust us. But what do you want us to do? What can we do? We’re just kids.”
Ms. Bunford took a deep breath. “I’d like you to meet a dear old friend of mine. He will help explain. Oh Fuzzly!”
They turned around as a familiar figure walked into the room. He was furry and red and his eyes rolled freely in their plastic cornea.
“B-Burp Me Melmo?” gasped Mintzy.
Dr. Fuzzly settled into a lounge chair near the fireplace, a thoughtful expression on his face. He slowly packed his pipe, torched the kindness with a wooden match and inhaled. “It’s good to see all of you here,” he said after awhile. “Children of this generation…meh. But you know all about that now.”
“You escaped from the clutches of that evil Shreck!” Alice said suddenly.
“We escaped…from one another. Ours was a symbiotic, deeply complex relationship,” said Fuzzly. We worked together until we were forced apart. After that came the deluge. I was a wanted butt-puppet, sought by the federal government for trumped-up crimes. They looked for me everywhere, but I hid. Sometimes in plain sight, for example that one reality show—Whatever Happened to Burp Me Melmo? Of course we made up some bullshit for the viewers. Said I had a hardcore Tide addiction, disappeared into the Hondurican jungle and joined this revolutionary circus. That part was halfway true, actually. I’ve been through so much since Shreck and I…anyway. Ancient history. You might say I’m a reformed puppet. I’ve changed, see. Shreck used me for his evil plans, but you know what, I can’t say I blame him either. We were all conscripted, some of us grafted on to hands, others…other places. I was lucky. After awhile you stop struggling and learn to enjoy it. Adopt or die. Well, I’m old now, but there’s still a chance for you lot. Only you have to get out of here, and I mean now. Don’t wait. Don’t wait till the duck priest finds out about you. Stay one step…ahead of them. They will turn clown, oh yes. I saw what happened to Shreck’s prototypes. Even now there are days I wake up in a cold sweat to the sound of bicycle horns.”
Tears welled in his saucer-like eyes. Ms. Bunford reached down, picked up the puppet and sat him in her lap.
“I’ve suffered…oh, how I have suffered,” he said, sniffling.
“There, there.”
Fuzzly let out a long, loud burp, and Bunford patted him gently on the belly.
IV.
Bone City, 1994
; Shreck pressed a button on the control panel. The centrifuge whirled again.
Fuck if he knew went into the mix this time. It had been a long and complicated night.
Tinkering with the human genome was a sideline. Shreck’s heart lay in videos now—directing when he could, but also cinematography and sometimes choreography if dance was involved. But he had undertaken this chore—this bitter, godawful assignment—and he would see it through to the end. Even if many had to die in the process.
The body count was ridiculous. Who knew there’d be so much waste involved, so many buckets slopping with organs that would never see use, besides the usual eyeball boxes—like Joseph Cornell on the corpse juice—and whimsical arrangements of stiffs. The Sugar Valley crowd never really saw the point of these, as hard as he tried to convince them that he needed to let off steam. Sometimes that meant digging around in a cheerleader’s guts, stripping off his sterile nitrile gloves so he could get right in there, preserving her screams for use in an ongoing industrial noise project, and for the following weeks noting the stages of de/composition, the rank, sugary smell as the body grew rigid, then wet, finally achieving its apotheosis as acid-eaten bone. Where its resurrection as sculpture began.
He looked up at the monitors. They scrawled the usual peptide chains and polymerase combinations, gabba gabba hey, we accept her, etc. He’d thrown in some salamander this time, the Hamburger Helper of rogue genetic science, hoping to see some improvement in the prototype.
The pink sludge had begun to form at the base of the cylinder. Slowly taking shape as the ultimate doll, the perfect playmate. The apogee of blondeness.
Shreck’s heart skipped a beat. He punched some random numbers into the sequence, ran his fingers through his hair, took a swallow from the mason jar and made a wry face. It had been a long but productive night, from the taste of it.
He realized he had no business manning this particular ship. As a latter-day Frankenstein toiling in his underground laboratory to create the ideal mall-walker, he suspected his true talents lay elsewhere. Nevertheless, he would be damned if he didn’t finish the job. Even if it took blood, sweat, tears, horrible nightmares, tyranny, mutations that had to be quickly put down, and baroque variations on the double-helix model that left wiser heads securely planted over his notebooks and re-utilized as lamps.
Was it soup? Was it the real turtle dove, or only the rock lobster? He fanned himself. The lab was getting stuffy.
And the pink pulp was forming limbs. The girl looked like rubber, but with such a wonderful texture. He couldn’t wait till she had fully formed in the cylinder to waltz her around the lab, even if her head fell off and had to be sutured onto another body, as happened nine times out of ten.
He looked up the monitor. The sequence was slowing down. Another trickle of bases, a little glee-dance for good luck, a quick snort of the fun powder, and…nothing.
Still, 80% of a successful experiment was something more than his competitors had accomplished. Did he have any competitors? Or, as he most feared, was he operating solo—the playing field his and his alone, the protocols cooked in hell, the very nature of his experiments condemned by wisdom, common sense and the strict limits of sanity?
Not that it mattered. At the end of the day, he got the check. And if he was lucky, a discount on hermaphrodite whores.
Shreck just wanted to play rock and roll. Lou Reed during his Transformer period, preferably, or Bowie’s Thin White Duke, throwing darts in lover’s eyes. He knew fuck all about making workable fleshbots. But the money was far too good to pass up. And he was so close to a solution now, he could feel it thrumming in his blood.
There came a gurgling sound from the cylinder. The centrifuge had started again, on its own. Dripping strands into the helical matrix, a little dab’ll do ya, et voila—this time, the soup.
The cylinder opened, and the girl opened its eyes.
She was the ideal, pink in every way, blonde where it counted, a blank void yawning behind her baby blues.
“It’s…not dead!” exulted Shreck, taking the girl’s hands and whirling her about the lab.
Her eyelashes had just begun to sprout, right on time for batting practice. “Hello there,” said Shreck, looking deep into her eyes. “How does it feel to be newly arrived?”
“I feel like…shopping,” said the girl, tossing her head until the blonde curls showered down her back. “I feel like…buying…stuff.”
“Excellent,” said Shreck. “I love it. Anything else?”
“I’m so…hot.”
“Yes you are, my pretty girl, yes you are.”
Shreck’s Journal
So I get this call from Hank Owens, a friend of mine who lives on the hill—Sugar Valley. A real doctor, from what I can remember, although those days are obscured by clouds. We did a lot of solvents in college, hazed and were hazed, sometimes both at once. A lot of trauma, self-inflicted and the other kind. But that’s history. The important thing was that I had a job. I was making these videos for a glam metal band called FuckAngel, half-assed artsy shit. The lead singer was living with his girlfriend, who supported him on her salary as a paid intern for Wanton Meat, Inc. They weren’t exactly loaded, but they had the kind of green you don’t see much of these days, especially in the circles I come from. And boy, are those circles—wheels within wheels. I had a pentagram half chalked in when the phone call came. I said hello, hoping there was money on the other end. And sure enough, I felt that green buzz. You know the kind. No, not that. Why am I addressing a ghost reader? Anyway, he told me to get my ass out to the hill because there were some people who wanted to talk with me. They required my special talents, such as they are.
Okay, I said. I had nothing to wear. At least nothing that would impress the hill people that I was qualified to do more than wash their cars or rape their nubile daughters. Just the thought gave me wood. I rubbed out the chalk with my sock toe and checked the closet. My wardrobe in those days was halfway between Liberace and punk rock—a lot of shredded suits with mirrors on them. A pile of curdled jeans. Some underwear that had seen better days. Some underwear that looked like I could resuscitate it, at least better than the girl at the club. Boy, was that a toilet case! I could still smell her baby whore perfume.
But to business. I found one clean dress shirt—violet, it so happened, which suited my needs. Best to look queer, especially with these folks. And one half of a suit, charcoal gray slacks. They kind of matched if you squinted. I finished up the outfit with a gray jacket, slightly crumpled, and a burgundy tie. I checked myself out in the bathroom mirror. Not half bad. Then I remembered the lipstick. It was a dark red “fuck me” color. Glad I caught that in time! I rubbed it off with some cotton balls that I was pretty sure didn’t have any solvents in them, called a taxi and waited.
It took the guy two hours of getting me lost on narrow, winding streets for him to charge me 60 bucks. I tried to argue with him but he threw a fit in some Slavic language, so I peeled off some counterfeit bills—no need to argue in a language I didn’t understand—and stepped out into the street.
There was pin-drop silence. Immaculate green lawns. I felt like I was polluting their precious air just using it to breathe. The address was this mansion, gravel pathway, huge garage, at least three entrances that I could detect. I went up to what looked like the main door and pressed the buzzer. Nothing. Then my friend came to the door. I was so relieved I nearly shit myself. He took me to a living room where these middle-aged white women were sipping coffee and talking loudly about appliances. They took one look at me and I could tell they were skeptical. At least I wasn’t wearing a mask, I thought.
A man came into the room. He was sweating heavily, overweight, apologetic. He asked me if I wanted anything to drink. I said I was fine—which was true because I’d done a little X to gird myself. It was starting to kick in now and I felt friendlier than I usually did. The man was an old Death Ball star, I recognized him from the funny papers.
So this was the gi
g: they wanted me to make them the perfect blonde, blondes, a whole army of them. They were determined that the following generation would respect their traditions. They were concerned about the influx of rap and hip-hop into their blonde community and some of the weirder races their daughters had been associated with. Their conversation was peppered with references to Death Ball and Jesus and how good Jesus’s butt had looked in those tight, tight DB pants.
I was a little appalled—this was coming from the guy, I mean all that stuff about Jesus ass. But I kept quiet.
It seemed pointless to explain to these people that my knowledge of genetics ended with sophomore biology in high school and that I’d spent most of the class drawing elaborate pornographic space operas modeled after the stories in Heavy Metal magazine. I vaguely recalled something about an Austrian monk named Gregor Mendel and his hybrids. Then there were some other guys, Watson and Holmes, and they came up with the model for DNA. Watson was big into opium, from what I remembered, and Holmes was a spastic with a preference for dwarf amputees. I pretended to listen but figured I would do as I usually did, look a few things up on the Internet and fill in the rest from my jaded imagination. It was a good hook, though. Other than some obvious legal angles, the prospect of making a nice, big-assed blonde girl in a lab just tickled my fancy. And with these guys throwing me the long green, I really couldn’t lose.
***
Now, Roughly Speaking
The private detective agency of Oroborus and Glide was on a stakeout in Sugar Valley. Strange things had been happening with the students and faculty of the elite high school, but the detectives were there for another purpose. To whit, watching the house of an SV society lady who might, according to their source, be using it as a wetback brothel.