Made in the U.S.A.: The 10th Anniversary Edition

by Jack X. McCallum

  She never really thought much about sex. She’d tried dating a few guys in different towns over the years because it was the thing to do, but just couldn’t allow herself to sleep with them. There was too much fear, because of what Eicher had done.

  Too much anticipated pain and shame, even after all these years.

  “I’m fine,” she replied.

  “You look ...” he was going to say unwell, when he realized exactly how she looked because he’d seen that look before, from women in bars and women on the road, women who wanted nothing more than to fuck the shit out of him. It couldn’t be the face, he’d reasoned. There wasn’t that much resemblance between him and the one he thought of as his little brother, when he thought of him at all and that wasn’t often. It was something in him that set women off. Maybe he smelled good.

  Jeannie looked the way those women looked. Like they’d do anything to fuck him, fuck him at gunpoint if necessary. Yet there was also a softness in her face, a yearning in her eyes which came from her heart and not any physical craving. She was excited and aroused and sad and scared and beautiful. It was weird.

  “I’m fine,” she said again, lowering her eyes. Now she was looking at the shape of his cock through his jeans, and to her horror part of her wanted to unzip his pants and touch him, to see if he would be different from Eicher, who had been her only experience of a man’s nakedness and touch and not exactly what she’d call an incentive to explore the wonderful world of male genitalia. She abruptly turned her head away.

  “Should I ask?”

  “Not now,” she said.

  He gave her a nod, took a deep breath to try and clear his mind, and then handed her one of Richards’ handguns. She took it as if he had just given her a turd. He squatted beside Richards and pressed the barrel of his Springfield to the man’s head.

  “Please!” Jeannie said. “Is that necessary?”

  Will looked at her and chuckled. “They were gonna kill us.”

  She nodded. “I know. I just ... I’m just tired of all the killing.” She turned away from him, brushing dust off her uniform.

  He sauntered back to her. “Have it your way. But if these guys ever resurface and bite your ass, don’t blame me.”

  “Let me worry about my ass,” she said, dusting off her behind.

  O that I were a glove upon that hand, Will thought, that I might touch those cheeks.

  “So, mystery-girl,” he said with a grin. “Is it Jeannie Norman or Nelson? Or is it Healy, or Bellows?”

  Jeannie was surprised by the little snort of laughter that escaped her. “You know, I’ve used all of them at one time or another.”

  A car was coming down the road, from the west.

  “Here comes our ride,” he said.

  Jeannie nodded toward the approaching car. “What if it’s more of them?”

  “Then we’re in very deep shit.” Will said with a smile. “But at least we’re in it together.”

  She glared at him.

  He gave her a cocky grin.

  Will and Jeannie stood side by side as a Lincoln Town Car pulled onto the shoulder. There wasn’t any question of trying to hide. They were surrounded by open desert and the wrecked Taurus, which was gleaming and steaming under the sun. Will counted two men and two women as the Lincoln came to a stop.

  “They look just like the people from the diner,” Jeannie said.

  “Yeah,” Will agreed. “That means they’re after you, and I’m in the way.” He stepped behind her. “I’m not gonna hurt you, but I don’t want to get my ass shot off either.” He slipped his left arm around her waist and pulled her against him.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Boy, you sound really scared. That’s good.” He nestled the barrel of his .45 against her left ear.

  “I am scared,” she said. In fact, she was scared and excited. Three people with handguns and one with a shotgun were getting out of the car. She could feel the warm metal of Will’s gun on her skin. Will’s arm around her was strong and warm, and she could feel his chest and his groin pressed against her back and her butt. She wondered how it would feel to be held like this if they were both naked. God, she thought, I’m a fucking pervert. Even as she thought that and saw the armed strangers coming closer, she shifted slightly and felt a thrill when her left buttock brushed his groin.

  Will was waging a terrific war against the ghosts. A detached, emotionless part of him held the gun and watched as the quartet from the Lincoln drew closer. Another part of him smelled herbal shampoo in Jeannie’s hair and Halston for Women on her skin and felt the curve of her buttocks against him and the warm weight of her breasts on his left arm and wished he could be holding her like this under more pleasant circumstances. Part of him was raging along with the ghosts. Jeeezuz! Feel that ass! And those tits, man what a pair of hooters! Come on man, get it done! Kill the fab four and then you can have an orifice jamboree with this hot little babe, pop those titties free, get those lips wrapped around—

  “Christ,” Will growled, as his dick was pressed into one round, firm cheek of her ass.

  Unzip, muthafucka! Just lift her little Wendy the Waitress uniform a bit and you can slide that blue steel right up inside her hot’n’juicy self! C’mon man! Do it! Shove it so far up inside that it comes out the top of her head!

  “Shut up!” Will whispered.

  “I didn’t say anything,” Jeannie replied.

  Marilyn Monroe! His ghosts screamed.

  What the fuck? And then he remembered seeing Jeannie in the diner, imagining her setting her naked bottom in wet cement. He’d seen something similar to that on TV, maybe Biography on A&E. Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell were big stars after the movie Gentlemen Prefer Blondes came out. Back in the fifties they had put their handprints in cement at Grauman’s Chinese Theater and Marilyn had suggested it might be more appropriate if Jane Russell leaned forward into the cement and Marilyn sat in it.

  Marilyn Monroe! The ghosts bleated. Marilyn Monroe! Norma Jeane Baker! Marilyn Monroe! Jesus! What the hell did Jeannie have to do with Marilyn Monroe?

  Will fought the ghosts down. He loosened his hold on Jeannie, lowering his arm and easing away from her behind. He felt his tumescence subsiding. “Do you trust me?” he asked, still in a whisper.

  “I don’t know.”

  “I won’t let them hurt you. You don’t trust them, do you?”

  “No.”

  “Then trust me.”

  “How can I?”

  “Because. We’ve met before.”

  “That’s ridiculous. I would have remembered.”

  “Reach into my pocket and you’ll find a surprise.” He grimaced, regretting his choice of words.

  “That’s not very funny,” she snapped, feeling another delicious thrill.

  “Do it. Right side.”

  Jeannie slid her hand into his jeans.

  Will started getting hard again. Fuck! His ghosts were whooping it up until he silenced them. Yeehah! Touch it, baby! Stroke that thang! C’mon doll, just pull on it a few times!

  Jeannie paused. The muscles of Will’s upper thigh were rock-hard and trembling slightly. The four suits from the Lincoln were a few yards away. In spite of this she couldn’t help wondering what she’d find if she groped around a little. Her fingers touched cloth and metal.

  “Not the spare change. The ribbon.”

  Jeannie pulled the ribbon out of his pocket and looked at it. It was worn thin and retained a faded pattern of blue flowers.

  “No,” she said.

  Jeannie could see herself as a little girl. It was before she had moved to L.A. with Eicher. She had to have been very young. Four years old?

  She was in a room she had forgotten until now. A room with a dresser and a bed and what had been her only doll. Mr. Jones. Yes, her only doll, her first doll. A sagging stuffed bunny she called Mr. Jones. Eicher had later taken Mr. Jones away from her. Jeannie saw herself sitting in the room’s single chair, looking at her reflection in the c
hipped mirror as she tied a ribbon, this same ribbon, in her hair. Outside the window was a place that looked like some kind of prison. Cottages. Far-off fences and gates. Nurses to watch over her and a few other kids there, kids she occasionally heard but never saw. Some of the male nurses had carried guns and big sticks. One of the nurses had noticed Jeannie’s only doll and had said she would bring the little girl another one today, a Barbie doll. Jeannie wanted to go out and play with it in a sandbox she had seen a few days ago. Daddy, as Eicher called himself then, didn’t like her wandering off that far, but it was still inside the fences and she wanted Barbie and Mr. Jones to be at the beach.

  Jeannie was transfixed as she turned the ribbon over in her hands. How had she forgotten all of this? She had tied her hair back with the ribbon, admiring her reflection, the way her hair shone almost white, like fresh snow. She had seen the nurse, who had given her the Barbie, and then she had taken Barbie and Mr. Jones to the sandbox.

  When she got to the sandbox there was a boy there with his back to her. She set Barbie down in the sand and began playing and then the boy started shouting at her and she couldn’t answer him because she could see bruises on his elbows and his face and cuts on his knuckles like he had been in a fight, and it made her sad, so she had reached out and touched him, hoping to make him feel better.

  “That was you?” Jeannie asked.

  “Yeah.” Will said. “Yeah, it was me.”

  She held the ribbon in front of her with both hands and Will caught a glimpse of what looked like scarring on her left wrist. That band of skin was paler than the rest of her because it was always hidden by a watch band.

  Jeannie touched the ribbon. “Who are you?”

  Will was deadly serious as he said, “I’m the love of your life.”

  A Page from the Past

  The Compound (outside Vienna, Virginia), March 4, 1970

  James Madison Zane was a man from another time.

  The Director of the Compound was only thirty-seven, but his dark outdated suits, conservative tapered haircut and browline glasses made him appear older. Almighty God and the Compound’s ancient Executive Director Randall Kraft were his only authority figures.

  Zane could not understand what had happened to the generation that had come after his own, a generation raised almost exactly as he had been. America was a country in crisis. With the coming of spring yet another crop of flower-children had sprung up out of nowhere, thinking their disturbingly un-American thoughts. Protest! Get high! Get laid! Grow your hair! Hate authority! Kids today were vermin, and none was more detestable than Stern’s boy.

  Sitting at a gray metal desk in a sparsely furnished office, Zane read through the file on William Hill. He knew he would have had one less headache to deal with if only Stern had aborted this particular experiment long ago. Although everyone who had ever worked on Stern’s decades old cryogenics program known as Project Thaw swore they knew nothing of young William’s identity or heritage, Zane was sure he knew the truth. It was hard to miss, even for someone like Zane, whose idea of musical entertainment was an evening spent sipping wine in front of the television watching Lawrence Welk.

  The divisions within America today, between old and young and State and citizen existed because of the children, Zane thought, and the condition of America’s misguided youth was the result of the drug culture which sprang from the growing power and perversity of Rock and Roll, of which in turn there was only one direct ancestor. Elvis Presley.

  As far as Zane was concerned, Elvis Presley was the individual responsible for the upheavals occurring in America today. Kids dropping out of school. Kids metamorphosing into unwashed long-haired freaks. People indulging in hallucinogenic drugs. Women wearing suits with pants. Women not wearing brassieres. Filthy words appearing in popular novels and in the movies. Civil unrest. Protests. Riots. Assassinations. And nudity everywhere. In the movies. In magazines. On college campuses. At music concerts. Zane hated all of it.

  Despite a disgustingly energetic performance two years ago in the NBC television special sponsored by the Singer Sewing Machine Company, a performance lauded across the country, Zane knew Presley was turning into a chemically dependent zombie well on the way to being washed-up, a has-been, unable to escape the weaknesses inherent in his pathetic corn-pone roots. Yet his influence was widespread, an unstoppable wave of change.

  Zane now feared Stern’s psychotic little imp for the same reasons.

  If a man who simply wanted to sing songs could create waves of discord that spread across the country in a tumultuous flood, what would happen if that same man was a sociopath, a trained killer with a hatred for everyone and everything except one old kraut he saw as his father? Everyone said that Elvis’ twin had died at birth. Zane was sure they were wrong. Somehow Stern had gotten his hands on a scrap of white trash from Mississippi.

  True to his roots, little William was always listening to his hi-fi at mind-shattering volumes, be it blues or jazz or rock and roll, all of which Zane considered evidence of the destructive and uncivilized heritage of the Negro that had influenced Elvis. Also, the boy was unpalatably malodorous from the cigarettes he smoked, and Zane detested filth. Stern insisted these noxious habits were actually essential forms of therapy, repeating his old argument that complicated musical rhythms actually forced the boy’s brain to heal itself in an effort to understand what was being heard. The same apparently went for cigarettes. Even though Stern supposedly limited the amount the boy smoked, the old man said that along with carcinogens that could lead to an early death there was compelling evidence to indicate that something in the smoke, most likely nicotine, was stimulating William’s brain to perform better than anyone had expected.

  The boy had to be disposed of. It was bad enough that Zane had not been able to destroy any evidence of that cracked malefactor Eicher’s cloning projects. The two viable tests had slipped through Zane’s fingers. The first had disappeared just after birth. Zane had questioned his superior on its status, expecting to be told it had been terminated long ago, but decrepit Randall Kraft simply gave Zane a thin, reptilian smile and shook his head. The second, which had been perfect in every way according to what remained of Eicher’s notes, had been spirited away, stolen, kidnapped, by Eicher himself after he set fire to his laboratory, destroying almost all the evidence of his work. Eicher and his creation could not be found, because there were ongoing problems with the tracking device implanted in the child.

  Zane had no idea of the source material for the clones and often lay awake at night twisting and turning, gripped by horrific dreams of what might come when the clones reached maturity. Because he had no control over Eicher’s works, Zane was determined to destroy that which he could, including Stern’s little boy, even though Mondani seemed to think the boy might be useful.

  Zane read through the profile of young William. Phrases leaped out at him.

  We conclude subject sustained irreparable damage to frontal lobes ... suffers delusions, auditory hallucinations (see reference to ‘talking ghosts’ in appendix B) ... fits of rage similar to seizures ... takes extreme risks ... shows no feelings of remorse or guilt when his actions injure another (see pg xxvi of appendix D for finger severing incident).

  Tracking and File Closing Section recommendation that subject be trained for removal and clean-up work is under consideration by Dir. Kraft. Offensive/Defense training continues, but exposure to lethal bare-hand and common-object-utilization removal techniques should be limited if not stopped due to incomplete assessment of mental state.

  Early tests had indicated a 95% probable mental collapse by age six. Since this collapse has not come, the subject should be observed closely until we can conclude predicted collapse is imminent or has been averted.

  Models suggest that the subject would begin acting out violent impulses with small animals, escalating to larger animals, children, and then adults. Dr. Stern points to tenderness with animals as evidence of empathy, yet we conclude empathy for anima
ls is not evidence of empathy for human beings and consider the subject a risk.

  The subject has demonstrated a remarkable bond with Dr. Stern ... Tests reveal the subject is prone to fixations of an extreme nature, with the ability to bond to one person to the exclusion of all others, willing to do anything to aid or protect that person. Subject believes Stern is his father. Removing Stern now may not be advisable as this would push the subject toward violence or collapse.

  Zane closed the file. He decided that one facet of the boy’s training would actually be extended for one more day. An accident at the firing range might be just the solution to his problems.

  * * *

  When Will and Stern arrived at the firing range the following day, Will walking slowly and Stern limping along behind him, they found a new instructor waiting for them.

  Albert Fay had received short notice of this latest job, but it was a remarkably simple assignment. Kill the old man. Kill the boy. Set the scene so it looks like the boy went nuts, shot the old man and had to be shot before Fay was killed. A fucking snap, Fay thought. The kid was what, nine or ten years old? Not much of a threat there. Fay wasn’t in the least disturbed by his order to kill an incapacitated old man and a little boy. He was a file closer, and killing was his job. The fact that he was carrying out the job right here in the Compound was a plus. It was like working from home!

  Will saw the new instructor waiting at the firing range and knew something was wrong. His regular firearms teacher was a man name Wiltse who had been quiet and funny, taking his time with Will and showing him the basics of handgun use. This new guy looked different. He looked mean. If this was a movie, say a sword and sandal kind of adventure with special effects by Ray Harryhausen in which Will was Jason or Sinbad and Stern was the kindly old scholar or wizard, the new instructor would be the Black Prince of the Southern Wastes or something like that. He’d be the guy who acted loyal until halfway through the picture, when he’d commit an act of betrayal and draw a sword on the hero. Will knew this just by looking at the man’s big, ugly hands, his lumpy face, and dull eyes that were as dangerous as gunmetal.