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

by Jack X. McCallum

  “I want to, but I’m still afraid. Pathetic huh? Thirty-six years old and I’m practically a virgin.” Jeannie turned away from him and said, “Unhook me.”

  Will fumbled, but finally managed to undo her bra. He could strip, clean and reassemble virtually any weapon in absolute darkness, yet his fingers slipped on a simple eye and hook.

  She faced him again felt a little shiver as he slid the straps off her shoulders. She let the bra fall to the floor and stood up, looking down at her breasts. “There was a time when these were higher. Now they’re starting to sag little. I guess I’m getting old.”

  “It ain’t the meat, it’s the motion,” Will said. “Southside Johnny and the Asbury Dukes.” He wiped a bead of sweat off of his forehead.

  Jeannie realized that she had rattled the hell out of Mr. Cool. She turned away and looked back over her shoulder. “Take these off.”

  Will raised his hands and took a deep breath. He slid his fingers under the waistband of her panties and gently drew them over her hips and down her thighs.

  His touch was so light, she thought, it was as if he were unwrapping something fragile and exquisite.

  If she had expressed this thought he would have said that was exactly what he was doing.

  When her panties slid to her ankles she stepped out of them and flicked them away with one toe.

  “Oh my word,” Will breathed, slowly shaking his head in wonder. “This is like seeing the Rockies for the first time, or the Grand Canyon.”

  Jeannie looked over her shoulder at him with distress on her face. “My ass is that big?” She sounded horrified.

  “No,” he said, putting his hands on her hips and turning her around. “It’s a natural wonder.” He was about to stand when her pubic hair caught his eye. It was almost white; gleaming like it was on fire. This can’t be real, he thought. He touched it and found it was as soft as down.

  “That tickles,” she said.

  He breathed, “It’s remarkable.”

  She looked down. “I’ve always hated it. Just one more thing that shows I’m nothing but a genetic Frankenstein’s Monstress.”

  Will shook his head and stood up. “It’s lovely. And it’s a part of you, which makes it even more special.”

  Jeannie raised her left arm, not seeing the delight on Will’s face when he found that she had the faded ribbon wrapped around her wrist and tied with a tiny bow. Jeannie was even more nervous about exposing the gouges in her flesh to close scrutiny than she had been about taking off her underwear. She loosened the ribbon and held her wrist up for his examination like a child with a scrape or scratch.

  He traced the jagged scars on her pale skin with one finger. Jeannie shivered.

  “After Eicher did what he did, the first time I mean, I tried to—”

  Will’s finger left her wrist and settled on her lips. “Shhh. Forget it. It was long ago and you can leave it behind.” He hugged her, running his fingers through her hair and marveling at the silvery roots. He gave her a gentle kiss.

  She pulled back and said, “Now it’s my turn.”

  Oh shit, he thought. He didn’t know what to say.

  She pulled his T-shirt off and tossed it aside. His chest and arms were covered in wiry muscle. She was glad he wasn’t all bulked up, glad that he had a deceptively flat, almost scrawny chest. Guys that worked out all the time turned her off. She could never sleep with a guy who had tits as big as hers.

  His chest and back were covered with scars and burns. There was a tape bandage on his ribs and a large circular bruise over his diaphragm.

  Jeannie dropped to her knees and gently eased off Will’s shoes and socks. She undid his pants and they fell around his ankles. She got rid of them too. She paused, looking at another bandage around his left leg.

  “Bullet,” he said, his voice breaking and making him clear his throat. “No big deal. Through the meat. In out, clean and quick.”

  He had more scars on his legs and that saddened her, but now that Will was down to his underwear she was nervous again. Trying desperately to appear at ease, Jeannie whipped his briefs down and when he stepped out of them she threw them over her shoulder. When you see this part of him, she told herself, don’t think of Eicher. Remember that it’s a part of Will, part of everything he is.

  Will was looking at the ceiling. Being judged by whatever God might still actually be out there giving a shit wouldn’t have made him feel any more anxious than he did at this moment.

  “Geez.” Jeannie’s voice was a breathless whisper. She looked up and saw Will looking away, realizing this was the first time she had ever really seen him look scared. Even when he had been a kid, lying in the sandbox while Eicher kicked at him in a rage, Will hadn’t looked this stricken. She realized that her opinion, which she never really thought was worth much, meant a great deal to him. This made her feel better about herself than she had in a long time.

  Her fear was fading. Eicher’s penis had always struck her as monstrous and ugly, and he wielded it like a weapon. Will’s penis was much like Will himself, when he was with her. Caught between eager and hesitant. Funny-looking and at the same time beckoning her touch. He was scarred here too, an ugly white line that wound half way around it as if someone had tried to cut it off. Jeannie ran her finger along the scar as he had done with her wrist, horrified to see that even Will’s scrotum was scarred by two puckered white puncture wounds as if a nail had been hammered through it. She heard him suck in a breath and felt his heartbeat in her hands. Now she was feeling better.

  She stood, holding his balls in one gentle hand and his cock in the other, and although his penis was a perfectly normal appendage it looked and felt singularly strange to her. It was heavy and warm and getting bigger, but still a little floppy. It was kind of funny, and it made her snort as she tried to hold in a laugh.

  The way Jeannie’s breasts bounced when she stood, her delicious smile and warmth of her hand wrapped around the most sensitive part of him made Will lose control. He grunted and ejaculated uncontrollably.

  Jeannie saw and felt the white heat of him splash across her thighs and for a moment the sight and smell brought back a terrible, dark memory. Then she saw Will’s cheeks burning red with embarrassment, saw the way his body was trembling from her touch, and she kissed him. “It’s alright,” she said.

  Will went to the bathroom. His was still getting hard and his cock waved before him like a blind man’s cane. “I’ll get a couple of Kleenex.”

  “Better bring the box,” Jeannie replied.

  Will saw his reflection in the mirror; horror-struck, red-faced, his hard-on rising eagerly. He started to laugh. His dick bounced and drooled.

  He cleaned Jeannie as well as he could, and then she slipped under the single sheet on his bed.

  “Make love to me,” she said.

  “That I can do,” he said. He had intended it to be funny, but when he spoke his voice was deep and soft, and he was speaking from the heart. He looked down at her a moment longer, seeing big blue eyes that were scared and willing at the same time. Then he was on top of her and trying to be as gentle as he could when he just wanted to ram the bejesus out of her. He had to muster all of his restraint whenever she hesitated or froze up, and that happened often. He came again, she didn’t.

  Soon he was lying beside her, holding her.

  “You okay?”

  She nodded.

  They dozed a while in each other’s arms.

  When they woke up they made love a second time, with Jeannie on top. He had to coax her. She felt self-conscious, convinced that he was seeing her from an unflattering angle. She wanted to close her eyes as she sat atop him and began to exert a little control, stopping and starting at her own pace, but he seemed to be watching her every move, watching his hands as they moved on her, so she watched him. After a while she realized that the mere sight of her was giving Will pleasure, and this made her feel wonderful.

  For the first time in years, gripping Jeannie’s hips so
hard she’d be bruised by his fingers the next day, with his cock rammed as far as he could go inside her and his face buried between her breasts, Will thought that maybe life was worth living after all.

  Jeannie was aware that most but not all of the monsters that had lurked in the back of her mind for what seemed like forever were crumbling to nothingness. All those fearful old mental pictures of Eicher were fading, replaced by visions of Will that made her feel like a real person and not a thing, a person who was loved and safe and able to laugh with him inside her. He hurt her a little the first time, but it was a good hurt, as weird as that seemed. When she was on top of him she felt a growing tingle and then a series of pleasurable little jolts that left her breathless as Will bucked beneath her, his harsh breath catching in his throat.

  Now she was sleepy and he was keyed up. He lay back on the bed, wide-awake, smoking a cigarette. Will got up and flushed the cigarette butt down the toilet. Getting back into bed he drew the single sheet over them and she curled up beside him. “Where do you want to go when we get out of here?”

  “If we get out of here,” Jeannie replied.

  ”The question is when, not if. So, where would you go?”

  Jeannie looked up at the ceiling. “I don’t know. I like America. I was born here. I’m a citizen, even though I could never prove it. I’m proud of my country and I love it here. I couldn’t imagine living anywhere else.”

  “Me either,” Will said. “I’ve been all over the US, but there aren’t a lot of places that are safe. If I really wanted to go to a haven, a sanctuary, I’d go to a place not too far from here. It’s called Hometown, in the southeast corner of New Mexico, right on the Texas border. What a state. New Mexico has Alamogordo, Los Alamos, Roswell, and Hometown. If the government wants to keep a secret, they keep it in New Mexico. No wonder they call it the land of enchantment.”

  In spite of her sleepiness, Jeannie was curious. “How is it safer than any other place?”

  Will smiled and closed his eyes, remembering the time he had spent in the place he was telling her about. “If we were there we’d be untouchable.” Will’s voice dropped to a whisper, a near melodic crooning in her ears. “It’s a whole community of misfits and cast-offs and freaks. Like us. It eventually became what they call a domestic dependent nation, a self-governing city, state and country all rolled into one. There was a war there. I saw it when I was a kid. It was a terrible thing, people killing each other, Americans killing each other. But Hometown survived, and the government promised to leave them alone.”

  “Where is Hometown?” Jeannie asked through a yawn.

  Will’s lips brushed against her ear as he whispered to her. Jeannie snuggled against him and soon fell into a deep sleep. Will couldn’t sleep. He was wondering how the hell he was going to get them out of here.

  * * *

  “Holy Christ, that was some hot stuff,” said one of the three people monitoring the video feed from Will’s room. “Are we taping this?”

  “Yeah,” replied the woman running the VCR. “I think we’ll all be taking copies of this home in the morning.”

  “No fucking shit,” a gruff-voiced man said in agreement. “Say, did any of you catch what he was whispering about?”

  The others shook their heads, and all three of them quickly forgot about any conversation between Will and Jeannie as they hit the rewind button to watch what one of them referred to as some serious New Year’s Eve fuckin’ again.

  A Page from the Past

  Compound West (Devil’s Playground, Mojave Desert California),

  April 12, 1994

  Doctor Mark Mondani was watching his immediate superior suffer a nervous breakdown, and it was fascinating.

  The mind of James Madison Zane, Director of Scientific Research, was crumbling in the face of catastrophic news. The media, for the most part the underground press, had been breaking stories in the past few months that put Zane’s future in jeopardy. He was older now, his hair silver-gray, but he had always made an effort to appear presentable. Now he was slouched behind his desk and staring into space. The lenses of his glasses were smudged. The knot in his tie was loose and his dark suit was rumpled. Zane was unaware that Mondani had arrived for their Monday morning briefing and had taken a seat in front of him. He felt as if he was standing on the edge of a cliff in a strong, shifting wind.

  Those members of the public who actually gave a hoot about such things were now being told about programs funded by the federal government, programs in which experiments were performed on unknowing civilians and members of the military. The Atomic Energy Commission was under fire for exposing people to radiation and studying the effects. The military was being pressed to reveal details of previously covert operations, many carried out in towns and cities across the country, which resulted in strange illnesses that were for the most part cancers. The President had created the Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments, and that was just the beginning.

  That overweight cracker Clinton was opening the government to the people, a ludicrous face-saving operation that had the directors of various agencies publicly taking responsibility for the naughty deeds of years ago. Most of the agency heads standing before the press and taking the heat weren’t part of the agencies that had carried out the various tests decades ago. Zane thought that Clinton should stand up and take the entire burden on as President. Kennedy would have done that. Heck, even Nixon would have shouldered the blame, back when he listened to his own voice and not those of his advisors. Instead the fancy-haired, ass-grabbing bumpkin had spread the blame around, letting others get blasted for what had been done. Some of the decisions that had brought about many of the misguided and misunderstood experiments had been made by people long dead. Why not dump all this blame on their graves and leave it there? In his desperately dopey attempts to be honest before the people, Clinton had already come perilously close to revealing the Compound. The secrets of the FBI and the CIA had been discovered and trumpeted long ago, and Zane didn’t want the Compound to become the first of America’s half-dozen shadow agencies exposed by some granola-eating, animal-loving dead-beat writing for Mother Jones.

  Executive Director Kraft had already put in calls to operatives who would immediately begin arranging a scandal, something that would involve Clinton and take the President’s mind off all this amending for the past hogwash. Would they pay or blackmail some young bimbo to pull on the Chief Executive’s weenie and then crow about it to the press? Perhaps. It had to be something involving sex, that was certain. Zane knew that sex was a nasty filthy business and he knew that most Americans were puritanical, upright souls who would disapprove of any hanky-panky in the White House. It would be a few months before an operation like that could be put together. In the meantime Zane would have to sweat it out.

  “You okay, Chief?” Mondani asked. He was concerned for his boss. Zane may have been difficult to deal with at times, but he had shown faith in Mondani, hiring him right out of University and bringing him into the fold. Mondani loved working at the Compound and swore that no matter how difficult things became with Zane he would remain loyal to the DSR.

  Zane looked up, startled, as if his assistant had just this moment popped into existence on the other side of his desk. “Okay?” Zane asked, with a tremor in his voice. “No, I am not okay, we are not okay, and nothing is okay. Okay?” He pursed his lips and said softly, “We are completely and thoroughly boned.”

  Mondani found this language extraordinary. Only under extreme duress would Zane ever swear, and the most vulgar word in the DSR’s vocabulary was boned. Mondani remembered when a lab assistant working within earshot of Zane had dropped a box of slender glass pipettes on the floor and muttered, “Well, fuck a duck,” before proceeding to clean up the mess. The assistant never got the chance. Zane had grabbed the young man by the lapels of his lab coat and rushed him out the door, muttering, “Filthy mouth, filthy mind, filthy habits! The laboratory is no place for filth!”

  �
��Look at this,” Zane said, holding up an issue of The Albuquerque Tribune dated November 13, 1993. “There is a story here about forty year old radiation tests on human beings, complete with copies of Atomic Energy Commission memos suggesting a careful cover-up of the facts. This little snot-rag has a circulation of about thirty-five thousand lousy readers, and yet now the mainstream press is picking up on this, and pressing the government for full disclosure on this and similar matters. This is going to cause us problems! This is our tribulation!”

  Mondani tried to reply in a way that would seem supportive. “Sir, I don’t see how that can affect us. We had nothing to do with those experiments. Even if this story were in some remote way a threat to us, I don’t think you need worry about the reactionary left-wing press influencing public opinion.”

  Zane responded with a bizarre grin that exposed teeth and gums as if he were posing for an ad in a dental hygiene magazine. “Then how do you explain this?” he hissed. He held up a recent issue of Time and a copy of Newsweek. Both magazines had blurbs on the cover concerning the declassification of secret experiments. “That country-bumpkin is opening the government to the people. Telling all about the nasty ways American citizens have been used and abused in secret operations and exposing long hidden truths so we can see that his Presidency is an honest one. It is only a matter of time before some experiment in which we at the Compound played a peripheral part with some other less covert agency in charge comes to light and the public learns of us, and there were many of those, of yes indeedy-do! This cannot happen! It will destroy us! Calamity!”

  Zane removed his glasses and pinched the bridge of his nose.

  “We never should have pushed the limits of our research as we did, exploring every squalid avenue imaginable. Kennedy was on to us! Oh yes, and brother Bobby too! Jack was going to drop the hammer. Dallas was our reprieve. After Kennedy was removed from office we thought we could continue our research, committing the most repugnant, obscene acts in the name of science without a President clucking at us like a mother hen. Johnson had Vietnam, Nixon had that wretched Hometown business, Ford was an ambulatory vegetable, Carter was utterly clueless, Reagan and Bush were power-mad, but now the economy is strong and there aren’t any wars or threatening empires or internal crises to worry us so Clinton needs to do something to pass the time when he isn’t playing with his pecker, and we will suffer the consequences!”