Made in the U.S.A.
The 10th Anniversary Edition
by
Jack X. McCallum
Original Edition
Copyright © 2001 by Jack McCallum
10th Anniversary Edition
Copyright © 2011 by Jack X. McCallum
Presented by Dark Red Press
ISBN #: 978-0-9840406-0-5
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
This book was printed in the United States of America.
DEDICATION
As promised a long time ago,
this one is for Peter Donaldson.
A Page from the Past
Highway 78 outside Bexar, Alabama, January 8, 1935
The sides of the old panel truck were covered by the fading illustration of a genial elderly man tipping his hat and the legend Stern’s Frozen Meats. As the truck had rumbled northeast out of Louisiana and across Tennessee, it passed people on city streets and along country lanes, none of whom would ever suspect that the meats in question were babies. Frozen babies.
Gerald Bloom always heard echoes. He spoke English, and tried to think in that language as well, but in his mind he always heard a German echo following every word. Saying something as simple as his Americanized name, Gerry Bloom, made the words Gerhard Blum echo in his mind. It was strange.
He was sitting behind the wheel of the big Ford truck. He looked to his right. Sleeping in the passenger seat was Al Hobbs. Alois Haub echoed in his mind when he looked at his partner.
Bloom had pulled the rig off the road into an abandoned pasture half-hidden by trees and a sway-backed rotting wooden fence. He looked at his watch. It was after midnight. He rolled down his window. A frosty chill was in the night air and he found each breath refreshing. The area was deserted. The motor was running. The motor was always running, to provide power. He switched off the lights and rested his eyes in darkness that was nearly complete save for a sliver of the moon glowing high in the sky.
Most of the truck’s storage area held squat metal cases bolted to the floor. In the spacious insulated compartment were ten small devices like safes mated with refrigerators, which Doctor Stern referred to as lockers. In the lockers were children. Cryogenically frozen children. Stern’s Schlafende Kinder.
Bloom and Hobbs had a problem. One of the passengers in the back of the truck was dead.
The truck had an array of backup batteries that powered the cooling units for the lockers, batteries that were charged when the engine was running and were drained after a few hours when the engine was shut off. Earlier in the day the truck’s fan belt had broken. The backup batteries kept most of the lockers cooled. What Bloom and Hobbs hadn’t anticipated and discovered too late was a rusted metal hose that leaked the coolant circulating in one of the lockers.
Pulled over on the side of a road in northern Mississippi It had taken the men hours to make repairs. Bloom had done a detailed check of each cooler. Hobbs hitched a ride into the nearest town to buy a fan belt and had to walk back to the truck. It was while he was waiting for Hobbs to return that Bloom discovered the rusted hose and saw that one of the lockers had failed. He had checked the gauges. The passenger was beginning to thaw. Without the constant circulation of Stern’s chemical coolant the passenger was dead. Thawing and rotting.
Bloom disposed of the tiny corpse quickly.
When Hobbs returned, Bloom had told him of the loss. They cursed the failed tiefkühlschrank and swore at each other, kicking stones across the road and raising dust. Then they replaced the fan belt and started the engine.
By the time twilight was falling, they were on the road again. They had left a laboratory in New Orleans behind and were on their way to Washington DC, where Stern had established a new facility with funding from the American government.
Stern said he had the approval of the President of the United States, though Roosevelt knew only that Stern had worked as a geneticist and that his knowledge might be put to use in developing defenses and counter-measures against any newfangled weapons Hitler’s Germany might create.
Many high-placed Yanks were afraid of the growing Nazi menace in Germany and felt that brilliant men like Stern, who had worked for the Third Reich, could put their experience to better use for their new homeland.
Bloom knew that Stern didn’t care who he worked for. The Nazis could provide adequate facilities and cheap labor for Stern’s gene-mapping project, but the pay was terrible and Stern was unmoved by visions of Adolf’s glorious Reich and the desperate pleas for the preservation of perfect Aryan traits through genetic engineering.
No, if Stern had an allegiance, it was to the power of money and the facilities it could provide him in his quest for knowledge. American dollars, which were being offered to Stern in obscene amounts even in the midst of an economic depression, were the most powerful of all.
Now, after midnight, Bloom sat beside the sleeping Hobbs, letting the rumble of the engine calm him. He wished they could have just loaded everything onto a train, but if the public learned of Stern’s hobby they would lynch him. A truck was discreet, easier to hide.
Bloom figured that if he had to face Stern’s wrath over the loss of a passenger, so be it. At least the other coolers were okay. He reached over and nudged Hobbs to awaken him. The next eight hours would be Hobbs’ time behind the wheel. They were expected in Washington in two days, and since they were ordered to use rural roads they would have to push the old truck day and night to get there on time.
Hobbs sat up, looked at his wristwatch, and nodded at Bloom. The men opened their doors, climbed out and stretched as they met in front of the truck. Bloom produced a pack of cigarettes and offered one to Hobbs. They stood and smoked, looking up at the moon. A coughing roar cut through the still air.
An old sedan was coming down the road, and its motion was erratic. Only one headlamp was lit and flickering fitfully. The sedan slued to a stop on the shoulder fifty feet from the truck. Bloom and Hobbs stood in the skeletal shadow of a leafless tree, peering at the car beyond the fence that hid the truck from view. They could hear a man shouting, a woman screaming, and a baby crying.
The driver’s side door of the sedan burst open and a huge man in overalls stepped onto the road. “No!” he yelled. “I ain’t havin’ it! You must be crazy thinkin’ I’m gonna let you do this!” He dashed around to the passenger door and pulled it open. “Give it to me!”
To Bloom and Hobbs the man sounded like an extra in a Wild West picture.
There was another scream from the woman and the baby wailed louder.
Bloom and Hobbs smoked and watched. This wasn’t their business. They weren’t going to get involved. So what if the guy got out of control, Bloom thought, trying his best to think like an American. Big deal! If he slapped the broad around some, she probably had it coming.
“Give it to me!” the man shouted. He reached into the car.
The woman began talking fast, in a high hysterical voice. “No, please, we can keep it. Nobody’ll know. It was left for dead, my baby’s dead, who’s gonna know?”
The man was bent over, struggling with the woman. “I’m gonna know. I didn’t want you to have the kid in the fir
st place. Being born dead is the best thing that ever coulda’ happened to him. And I’m sure as hell not gonna tend somebody else’s bastard! Give him over!”
There was another scream. The man backed out of the car, holding a naked squalling baby by one leg. It was tiny, surely a newborn.
For Bloom and Hobbs, things had become interesting.
The baby was crying loudly, dangling from the big man’s fist. The woman’s open arms reached out from inside the car. The man raised a foot and drove a heavy black shoe into her stomach. The man held the baby in front of his face, now gripping the tiny torso in one massive hand, studying it like it was a bug. “Noisy little white trash bastard. You’ll be better off dead too.”
He whirled and flung the squalling infant into the trees along the side of the road. The tiny cries stopped. The woman let out a weak, pitiful scream as the man slammed her door shut, ran back to the driver’s side, climbed behind the wheel, and drove away.
Bloom and Hobbs watched the car race past them. They dropped their cigarettes and ground them out, and then they went down the road. They crossed into the trees, rustling about and snapping twigs in the darkness. Then Hobbs said, “Got it.”
They stepped out onto the road, studying the child in the moonlight. Hobbs held the child steady while Bloom, who had been a medic in the Great War and who had learned a great deal from Doctor Stern, examined the child quickly.
“Amazing,” Bloom said. “Only a few scratches as far as I can tell, but he’ll have an ugly bruise on his head in a day or two ... if the bruise is allowed to develop.”
“Strange luck,” Hobbs replied. “Can we use him?”
Bloom thought a moment. “Do we have a choice? If Stern finds out we lost one of our charges he’ll be outraged. I helped him prepare three of the passengers. In the truck we have most of Stern’s equipment, including the frog enzymes for injection and the cooling baths. If you can replace the empty locker’s rusted hose, I can tend to the child. We can do this.”
“Good,” Hobbs said with a relieved smile. He didn’t want to lose his job now, not when jobs were so hard to find and Stern paid so well.
Always conscious of his attempts to think and talk like an American, Bloom looked down at the baby. “You got one break tonight kid, and one break is all you get. Tonight you’re gonna die.”
Hobbs smirked. “You don’t seem to have a great deal of faith in the good doctor’s work, Gerry.”
“No,” Bloom said quietly, looking down at the tiny upraised face, “I don’t.”
The men went to work. By dawn the new passenger was cooling in the repaired locker and the truck was moving down the road leading through Tennessee and on into Virginia.
Neither of the men nor the recently acquired passenger was aware of the slow bleeding inside the infant’s brain, hemorrhaging caused by a blow to the head the child received when it struck a tree after being thrown through the night.
1
The Misfits
A black LTD pulled off Interstate 40 and crossed the gravel parking lot of the In the Shade diner, the engine misfiring and dripping fluids as the car moved behind the building and eased between two dumpsters. The rear window had been shattered and the windshield had starry holes in it. Bullet holes gaped in the hood like tiny mouths.
The driver got out and stretched. He looked at the car and knew it had run its last mile. He walked to the front of the diner. There were only a station wagon and a pickup truck parked in the front lot. Standing in the bright sunlight he couldn’t see much on the other side of the diner’s long picture window; just the blue seats of empty booths and the shape of a large man seated on a stool and looking back over one shoulder.
The driver of the LTD felt sweat running down his back and he found it hard to believe that tomorrow it would be January. As a kid back East he’d always frozen his ass off at this time of year.
He was wearing a checked shirt over a plain white T-shirt. He reached under the shirt and scratched beneath the strap of a leather holster holding a Springfield Armory .45 automatic. An eight round magazine was strapped above his left ankle, undetectable beneath the leg of his blue jeans unless he was frisked. Anyone who tried to frisk him would most likely end up dead. On his right leg was an ankle holster holding a small Smith & Wesson revolver. Under the bill of a worn Brooklyn Dodgers ball cap his blue eyes seemed screwed into a permanent squint against the brightness of the open Mojave Desert. His tousled brown hair had been bleached by the sun. The way he moved made him seem younger than his forty years.
He looked at the station wagon as he pulled a pack of Camels out of his shirt pocket. He tapped one cigarette out and lit up with a Zippo. The lighter was decorated with an insignia in chipped enamel, a black square with a white lowercase c inside it. There were a few road-worn cases in the back of the station wagon. Cheap business cards were strewn on the dashboard. What was a traveling salesman doing out here?
He felt a tingle on the inside of his left arm, just below the elbow. It felt like an ant walking across his skin. He scratched at it without thinking. He’d felt that itch for a few weeks now.
The diner was old, its stucco exterior painted a brilliant lemon color. Plaster chips had flaked off, revealing a multitude of previously applied colors. The smoking man figured that if you looked at the vibrant yellow walls too long under the hot sun you’d feel your eyeballs begin to boil. The diner lived up to its name with the help of a steel support as thick as a telephone pole that rose to a height of thirty feet and supported a broad expanse of aluminum scalloped to look like a shell that blocked the sun during most of the day and created a cool pool of shade.
Dusty birds flocked on the roof of the diner, escaping the sun and sleeping away the heat of the day. A few of them had chirped in curiosity or anxiety when he had pulled up. When the sun went down and the cooling desert came alive, they would be off, looking for dinner. Bright white fans of bird shit spread down the walls from the roof. The smoking man smiled and flicked his cigarette butt away. It looked as if the owner just repainted with whatever color he could get his hands on when the shit got too thick.
“Speaking of which ...” the man said under his breath. He looked both ways down the deserted road, west toward distant Ludlow in one direction and Needles and the Arizona border in the other, and then entered the diner.
A bell over the door clanged as he passed through. It was cooler inside, ceiling fans moving the air around. There were five empty booths along a wide picture window.
Christmas decorations were taped to the walls. Above the counter was a banner which read: Happy Holidays & Happy New Year.
A muscular man of about fifty who was squeezed into a cheap, tight-fitting suit was sitting on a stool at the long counter reading USA Today. On the other side of the counter a pretty waitress in her late thirties looked up from filling the man’s coffee cup and gave the newcomer a smile. There was a wide serving window behind the counter. In the kitchen a young man wearing a cook’s paper hat was feeding pots and pans into a belt-driven dishwasher. A CD was playing and he was performing a duet of Como la Flor with Selena.
The man in the ball cap sat at the counter one seat over from the man in the cheap suit. Reminders of Christmas in desert climates always struck the man in the ball cap as weird, but then again the whole thing supposedly started in the desert so in a way it probably all made sense. The waitress appeared before him.
“Happy New Year,” she said, in a high, sweet voice. “What can I get for you?” Her voice gave away no accent or regional twang. It was West Coast generic.
The voice of the man in the ball cap was the same, devoid of any apparent origin. It had taken him years of hard work to achieve that anchorman’s authoritative blandness. He didn’t want an accent that would place him as the product of a certain locale or time.
“Hi, I’m Will,” the man in the ball cap said. He paused, wondering why he did that.
He recalled a voice from long ago. An old German man with a rasping
accent saying, “Units of information, like bullets in a gun, can be deadly, William.” The old man had raised a finger underscoring the importance of his words. “From our darkest secrets to the enlightenment of scientific discovery, information is a weapon. The original weapon, you understand? As the first men began the ascent from primitives in animal skins to executives in tailored suits their first weapon was information. That rule holds to this day. Never forget that, young man.”
Will remembered a large rough hand tousling his hair. That hand had seemed as big and powerful as a bear’s paw when he was a kid, and that hand had been the only gentle touch he had ever known. Except for one other. He closed his eyes a moment, trying to grasp fragments of memory as fine as dust motes floating in a shaft of sunlight.
“Mister?” The waitress was waiting, eyebrows arched, big brown eyes watching him.
He forced a smile. “A tall glass of cold OJ and something sticky-sweet.” He gave the waitress whose name tag read JEANNIE the up-and-down body-and-face once-over that is as instinctive as breathing to every man meeting a pretty woman for the first time.
“Sticky-sweet?” she asked, cocking her head.
“Yeah, anything loaded with cream or drowning in icing. I could use a sugar boost.”
She nodded, and took a few paces to a big, glass-fronted refrigerator.
Will couldn’t help noticing how attractive the waitress was and he could also see that she was working hard to avoid that. She had sparkling dark brown eyes and a cute, engaging smile. Her jet-black hair bounced with every step in a messy flip. She sort of had a Laura Petrie thing happening. She was wearing a retro waitress uniform, a one piece smock loosely cinched at the waist, and she didn’t appear to be wearing makeup. She wasn’t wearing any jewelry either, just a Swatch wristwatch with a wide white strap on her left wrist. It was as if she was trying to appear plain and avoid standing out, but when she reached up onto a shelf for his juice glass her figure strained against the material of her uniform and revealed itself to be a delight. She had nice legs, remarkably pale skin and a slight wiggle in her walk that threw his concentration out the window.
Made in the U.S.A.: The 10th Anniversary Edition Page 1