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

by Jack X. McCallum

  The pages were torn from a year-old issue of Time magazine that had been in the dentist’s waiting room. The article was entitled Hopes for the Future–Failures of the Past. There was an article on the Edsel, and another on things created by Howard Hughes, like the Spruce Goose, a massive wooden airplane. There were stories about futuristic products and anticipated lifestyles promoted at various World’s Fairs across America in the 1930’s, none of which had come to pass.

  And there was a sidebar entitled We saved Germany’s Genius?

  The story was brief, mentioning men like Albert Einstein and Werner Von Braun, but most of the article focused on obscure scientists who had had fled Nazi Germany and found sanctuary in America, where they put their skills into the service of their adopted country. There was a list of contraptions and crazy theories put forward by some of these men who had been supported by the Defense Department since coming to the United States, men who had never produced anything of any real value.

  Men like Karl Ogurtz, who had not only patented a jet pack but was now developing boot rockets that could be worn by every American soldier, provided they could be prevented from splitting any test subjects in half. There was Hentje Warmann, who was synthesizing a placid pill, an anti-depressant which could theoretically be slipped into a hostile foreign power’s water reservoirs, creating a nation of peace-lovers overnight. The team of young physicians named Ernst Pfaltzer and Wolfgang Schroedecker were said to be on the verge of pioneering new methods of gene therapy. They were also said to have had the reputation of quacks in their homeland. Also mentioned was Lionel Eicher, who was rumored to be working on cryogenics and cloning projects with his mentor Edmund Stern. There were reprints of old photographs of these men, and one of the photos featured Lionel Eicher.

  Jeannie was certain the man in the photo was her Eicher. He had almost all of his hair and he looked happy, but she was sure it was him.

  Jeannie didn’t understand all of what the story was saying. It frightened her badly and after reading it again she tore the pages to little pieces, trying to put them out of her mind. She was just a normal girl whose mother had died long ago.

  She wasn’t an experiment. It was stupid to think that.

  But last week one of her classmates at The Muller Academy had been showing all the other girls a book about Hollywood’s blonde bombshells. In the chapter about Marilyn Monroe there was a picture of the sex symbol at age twelve. All the girls in classroom agreed that Jeannie looked so much like Marilyn Monroe it was scary.

  Jeannie had laughed and said they were being stupid until the book had been placed on her desk and she had leaned over and looked at the picture. Except for young Marilyn’s hair color and less than perfect teeth and the slightly different shape to the end of her nose, Jeannie felt as if she was looking down into a pool of reflecting water. The shape of Marilyn’s mouth was the same, and her eyes. Looking into the eyes in the picture made Jeannie so dizzy she felt like she was going to throw up.

  She wondered about her name, Jeannie Norman, and Marilyn’s real name, Norma Jeane. Why did the man who said he was her daddy always call her vier when he was drunk? Why did he call her four in German when the only child he had was her?

  Jeannie thought about these things until late into the night. When she finally fell asleep she had dreams that scared her badly and made her wake up in tears, but she didn’t call out to Eicher.

  10

  There’s No Business Like Show Business

  The man who called himself John Godson was tooling down the highway in more ways than one. His dick was in his right hand and his left was resting limp on the bottom arc of the steering wheel. The white convertible followed the straight line of the road while he stared at the horizon, deep in thought.

  Something was happening to him, of that much he was sure. It seemed that with each passing day he wanted to know more about himself. He spent a lot of his free time on the road sifting through memories of the past, trying to separate what had actually happened from what only seemed to have happened, such as his dream-like recollections of multiple childhoods. At times he felt immortal, divine, full of good, but more often he felt as if he were standing in the dark shadow of something vast and ancient.

  His old tattoo was itching, sometimes just a tingle, sometimes as if calcium-eating termites were burrowing into his bones. The ink of the tattoo, the words VA VA VOOM! etched into the flesh of his left bicep in black ink, had faded. When had that happened? Now the tattoo looked ridiculous. It seemed to read VI VI VI and that didn’t mean a damned thing.

  The more he felt chilled and dark, the more he preferred it that way. When he felt malicious, mean, evil, he felt good.

  The increasingly infrequent feelings of let’s-all-hug-and-love-each-other goodness felt wrong, made him twitchy and uneasy, like a smoker craving nicotine.

  He hadn’t had a spell of niceness in quite a while. Being bad didn’t bother him, but he wanted to know why he did the perverse things he did, such as eating human flesh and enjoying the hell out of it, and he wanted to know how he was able to do the unnatural things he had done, like reaching inside Bonnie Hubbard’s perfect breast with a hand as insubstantial as smoke ... or bringing her back to life, for that matter. Sometimes Godson wondered if he was even human.

  With the wind whipping his hair, Godson stroked himself until he was hard. He looked down. It looked like a normal penis, the same coffee-and-cream color as the rest of him, the head tinged purple. “I’m normal,” Godson said to no one in particular. “I am a normal man.”

  He stroked himself and studied his foreskin, or lack thereof. He had been circumcised. One of his earliest but most certainly real memories was of a flash of metal, a sharp pain, and a chuckling man in a white mask. He had hated the pain, and in the simple, awkward thoughts of a newborn had wished the pain back on the chuckling man. The man in the white mask had stopped chuckling and started screaming.

  Godson worked himself harder now, his breath coming quick. “Bigger,” he rasped, yanking on his cock. Now he was stroking an organ fifteen inches long and as thick around as his wrist. Blood rushed into the spongy tissues of the fleshy obscenity in his grip, engorging it. As his enlarged dick became harder, Godson felt light-headed. He laughed. “Smaller.” In the blink of an eye he was tweaking a tiny sliver of flesh between finger and thumb. He sighed, and his erection returned to normal proportions.

  Thinking of fuck movies he’d watched, Godson started beating off as hard as he could. The car never swerved from its course. He thought of all the cumshots he’d seen, marveling as ugly men with the dicks of mutants shot thick streamers of pearlescent jizz across the tits and asses and faces of the bitches they were heartlessly banging. Godson wondered why, if he was as normal as he tried to convince himself he was, why, goddammit, why couldn’t he ever shoot his own load like that?

  Without realizing he was stomping down the accelerator, Godson stroked his cock fiercely, his breath catching when an orgasm gripped him. His penis gave a huge twitch and a stream of his semen sprang from its tip. But this discharge was iridescent black, and as it arced into the air, surely about to splatter onto Godson’s white suit, it became black smoke, then a gray mist, then nothing as the breeze swept it away. Godson’s cock surged a few more times. More smoke. Even a single drop that did land on Godson’s trousers faded away in an instant like some bizarre magic trick, the kind that once sold for a buck or two in the back pages of comic books. Hey kids! Disappearing ejaculate! It’s fun! It’s mysterious! Amaze your friends!

  Godson stuffed his deflating cock back in his pants and zipped up. “I’m normal.” He pounded on the steering wheel with both hands and screamed at the desert slumbering under the sun. “I am a normal man!” He felt tears and sniffed loudly. “Either that, or the Antichrist.”

  He took a few deep breaths and drove on. He saw a news van coming toward him. The van reached the wreck of the Taurus before the white convertible.

  * * *

  “Let
’s kill this bitch,” Louis said. He had thought he and Oscar had just been partners in the traditional sense and now that Oscar was dead, Louis was rocked by the strength of his grief. “Let’s just kill her. The Compound said they want her dead or alive. So it doesn’t matter either way to me.”

  Stella was watching the target, vaguely aware that Louis had turned off the highway and was following a hidden road, racing across the desert to Big Blue Rock. Mesmerized by the way the woman’s skin was glowing, Stella was yearning to reach out and touch it. The target looked at her and then stared out the window, biting her lower lip. Of course, this turned Stella on even more, and she swallowed quietly, her mouth watering. She realized that she was watering at both ends, and found herself wondering if she would eventually soak through to the car seat.

  Jeannie had a major case of the creeps. It was bad enough when she had to endure being felt up by the blond guy with the lousy-tasting nose. Having a woman look at her the same way was just creepy, and she wasn’t sure what to do. When the woman had taken off her jacket and adjusted the straps of her shoulder harness, Jeannie had turned to her to ask her what was going on, who these people were, any one of the questions she seemed to have been asking all day, when she saw the gun in its holster. Then Jeannie noticed that the woman wasn’t wearing a bra, and her nipples were pressing against her starched white shirt like a pair of hitchhiker’s thumbs. Jeannie looked out the window again, watching featureless desert terrain slip by. If they had figured out she was the one who had killed Arthur Norman and were arresting her, why hadn’t she had her rights read to her?

  “I’m serious,” Louis said, looking over his shoulder and feeling dismay when he saw the hungry look in Stella’s eyes. “Let’s just kill her. We can stick her in the trunk and be done with it.”

  Stella glanced at Louis. She didn’t like the insinuation that she could be distracted from her appointed task by anyone or anything, not even Ms. Norman. “Face forward and drive,” she said. Louis did.

  Stella flipped open her phone and contacted Compound West. She told them what had happened and said she had the target in custody and was only a few minutes away. She was told to watch her back. A county Sheriff had come across the wrecked Taurus and called for backup. Stella remembered passing the patrol car, assuming the cop was dead.

  She was told Compound West had intercepted all of the Deputy Sheriff’s numerous calls, confirming the validity of a Compound-issued ID and telling him back-up and medical help were on the way, when in fact it was a Compound clean-up crew that was on the road, dispatched from the State line near Needles where they had been cleaning up another assignment. They would reach In the Shade shortly. A second crew had been dispatched from Compound West itself to get rid of the bodies near the wrecked Taurus.

  The Deputy was supposed to be driving to San Bernardino with two suspects, but Stella was told to watch for him.

  They asked for a description of the man who had been with Jeannie. When Stella gave it, they told her she might just have killed two birds with one stone, since the Compound was looking for him as well.

  Jeannie heard all this and wondered if Carlos and Will were dead.

  “We’re going to reach our destination soon,” Stella said. “When we get there, some of the staff may make a fuss about your condition.”

  “My condition?” Jeannie asked.

  Stella nodded, lowering her voice. “The fact that you’re still alive. We have orders to clean up what’s left of experiments carried out years ago. You are one of the living results of those experiments. Your life means very little to my employers. It means much more to me.”

  The story of my god-damned life, Jeannie thought, staring out the window. Just another horny asshole wanting me to shut up, lie back, and spread my legs.

  Stella lowered her voice. “I can protect you from them.”

  Bitch. “How?” They were approaching a low mountain. Stella licked her lips. Nervous, huh? Bet you’re taking quite a risk with me.

  “Tell them you have information, just for me,” Stella said. “Tell them you’ll talk only to me, alone. Tell them about the other guy, the guy you were with. The pretty boy. They’ll want to know about him.”

  Jeannie gave Stella a look. “You want me to talk about some guy I’ve only known a few hours, a guy who was killed because of me, just to stay alive long enough for you to make a move on me? Fuck you.”

  They were close to the mountain now. Jeannie could see shrubs growing on its rocky sides. The driver maintained the car’s speed.

  “Listen you ignorant cow,” Stella growled. “That man was as good as dead long before you ever met him. You aren’t, and you should be doing everything you can to stay alive.” She felt desperate. Things weren’t going the way she thought they would.

  “Maybe I’m better off dead,” Jeannie replied. “If the whole world is full of shits like you.”

  Before Stella could respond, Jeannie flinched back in her seat as Louis drove the Pontiac straight into the side of the mountain, and through a door that had appeared there.

  * * *

  Brian and Ravi were already out of the van and looking at the bodies in and around the Taurus when the white convertible came to a stop. Ravi had his video camera on his shoulder and was shooting the scene. Brian was scribbling notes and wondering if he should call the station and cut in on the afternoon movie with a live report. The station was running a Don Knotts flick. He knew a guy at CNN’s Los Angeles bureau. Maybe he could interest the guy in what he had, providing he could figure out exactly what the hell had happened here.

  The man in the white suit got out of the Thunderbird and surveyed the scene. Ravi thought the guy looked like one of the singing Desi Lotharios in the videos his mom rented from Bengali Box Office. Ravi hated the guy on sight.

  Brian was also struck by the guy’s good looks and bearing, figuring the man could be anything. A movie star, a politician ... No, Brian thought. In that suit? The guy has to be a preacher of some kind.

  Godson was annoyed. Dealing with Bonnie Hubbard had been one thing. She was already dead, and after he left her he knew a clean-up crew from the Compound would trace her steps after they lost contact with her and clean up the scene at the diner. This was different. These men would have families and friends and worse, the tall guy with the hair looked like a reporter, a known face. Waylaying these two would be tricky.

  “Gentlemen,” he said, approaching them. “You’ll have to stop recording. This area is a crime scene.”

  Ravi snorted. This guy was a cop or a Fed? In a suit like that? He continued shooting. Brian smiled and offered his hand. “Brian Hanus, Channel Three News, Needles.”

  Godson showed them an FBI badge. “Please, stop recording.”

  Ravi ignored the man. He got close-ups of the well-dressed man and woman sprawled on the ground near him, and then panned over to the wrecked Taurus and the two men there. His low battery indicator flashed for a few seconds before his camera shut down. “Damn!” Ravi said. The batteries in the utility belt he was wearing had been fully charged by a battery charger on one wall of the van. He went to the van and checked his back-up power belt. The low battery indicator was flashing on it as well.

  Brian heard Ravi cursing in the van and looked at the Fed. The man’s dark eyes were almost completely black. Man, his pupils are big enough to walk through. I wonder what the hell he’s on?

  Still in the van, Ravi opened the foam-padded footlocker that held his cameras. He removed a digital SLR Nikon with a wide-angle lens. The camera could store dozens of high resolution pictures. Unlike a lot of photographers who chose film over silicon chips, Ravi thought the camera took really good shots. He looked through the viewfinder. The battery was dead. He set the camera aside, digging to the bottom of the box. Inside a scuffed leather case was an old 35mm Pentax. The camera was operated manually, the shutter controlled by a spring. The light meter had a battery, but Ravi didn’t need it. He opened a small fridge, pushed aside Brian’s six-
pack of Yoohoo and grabbed a roll of film. By the time he climbed out of the van he had the camera loaded and was ready to shoot.

  The man with the perfect hair was grinning and working Godson like a Democrat at a Beverly Hills fund-raiser and the man with the cameras was a little too persistent. Godson was annoyed. He toyed with the idea of striking the white man dumb and letting the scales fall over the eyes of the Indian, but he was in a hurry and had done enough dramatic show-stoppers for one day. Raising Bonnie Hubbard from the dead had been fun, but exhausting. He could fuck ten times in one night and still bounce off the walls full of energy but as soon as he pulled a genuine miracle he was pooped. He flexed the little finger on his left hand. Keep it small. If the mote in thine eye offend ye, he thought, just try and pluck it out.

  Ravi was lining up a nice shot of the dead woman when he felt as if his left eye had been stabbed with a sewing needle. “Oh man! Oh Christ!” He let the camera dangle by the strap around his neck and blinked rapidly as tears ran down his face.

  Godson suppressed a smile. He flexed the little finger on his right hand.

  Brian was about to ask the man with the FBI badge another question when his bowels gurgled like a toilet struggling to flush a heavy load. “Oh my,” he whispered, wincing through another gut twisting gurgle. “Oh my goodness.” He looked left and right and raced behind the overturned Taurus, clawing at his pants.