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

by Jack X. McCallum

  Betsy shouted, “Don’t call me sweetie!”

  When the Thunderbird’s wheels met the cracked asphalt again Stella came down on the trunk, her jaw snapping shut as it slammed down on the glossy white surface, her Glock nearly falling out of her grip.

  Stella was sure she was toast when she slid helplessly onto the road, hit hard and rolled, tearing clothing and skin and feeling something burst in her left shoulder. She got to her knees and saw the Corvair bearing down on her with Jeannie behind the wheel. Ignoring a whistle that filled the air, she raised her automatic and said, “Bye-bye,” setting Jeannie in her sights.

  Jeannie fought the urge to close her eyes when she saw Stella point a gun at her. Before she could decide to either hit the brakes or try and run the woman down Stella’s body and a large portion of the road blew apart in a swirl of dark dust and fire. Jeannie screamed and steered around the smoking crater in the road, passed through a cloud of dust. A moment later she took her foot off the gas when she saw Betsy slowing and pulling over, not far ahead.

  * * *

  “Good Lord, Dolan,” Mondani said, as they watched a ball of fire and smoke bloom between the fleeing cars. “Can’t you do any better?” The cars were still moving, but he could have sworn that someone had been caught in the explosion. “We need to stop those cars. The daughter could be useful to us, but we absolutely need the mother alive.”

  Mondani had decided it was more important to stop Jeannie and her daughter. They were watching two different views from the same satellite. One screen showed the Corvair and the T-bird. On the other screen the reporter and his cameraman reached the Deputy Sheriff, helped the cop into the Oldsmobile and then drove a short distance to the Interstate where they would soon be out of reach.

  Mondani believed Dolan’s assurance that the mortars would be effective. “Fire more LARs in front of them. Use everything you’ve got. Those women have to be stopped.”

  Dolan looked at his shoes a long time before finally meeting Mondani’s eyes. “That was it, sir. They’re all gone. The mortars were old technology that was being phased out. We only had a small supply. There’s nothing more we can do.”

  * * *

  Jeannie stopped the Corvair alongside the idling T-Bird and shifted into park. She didn’t look over at Betsy as she spoke. “I’m going to a safe place, a place Will told me about. You can follow along if you want . . . I think you’d be welcome there.”

  Will’s head was in her lap, and although his bleeding had stopped, her thighs were wet with his blood. She touched his ashen cheek and put the car in gear.

  * * *

  Mondani began to pace in frustration. “I can’t believe we have to let them go. They have my clone book. Tupper, I’ll see you shot for this insurrection, but not before I find someone to pluck out your eyeballs and tear off your testicles.”

  “There isn’t as much to worry about as you might think,” Tupper said. “If they ran to the press with your clone book, who would believe what they saw? Isn’t it just your handwriting? Your notes? That could very well be the ramblings of a psychopath.”

  Mondani’s eyes narrowed and he pursed his lips as he wondered if he was being mocked. “So we just let them go? We’ll lose them!”

  “No, we won’t.” Tupper said, allowing himself a tense smile. “During their medical exams we marked Hill, Norman, and Jones with a new tracking device. It’s a living biocomputer developed by our nanobiotechnology department and implanted just under the skin during an eye exam. Since the process only takes point seven seconds, implantation was easily hidden in the burst of compressed air they felt when they were tested for glaucoma. They can’t feel or see the biomaterials under their skin. With the proper viewer, which can be anything from a pair of glasses with adaptor lenses to a camera lens in a satellite, one can see a real-time hologram generated by the biocomputer, a three-dimensional band on their foreheads which contains their complete history and is constantly updated.”

  Mondani looked surprised and delighted. “Well done! I thought the holomarking technology was still in development?”

  Tupper shrugged. “No, the holomarks appear to be functioning exactly as they were designed. I personally assisted with the development of the project in my free time. Now our former guests bear the mark of the Compound Accumulative Information Network.”

  Mondani rubbed his chin. “You know, Kraft wanted to use those holomark tags for the coming AmeriTrack program. He thought we could start tagging newborns in maternity wards and older children and adults in schools and hospitals whenever they got inoculations, when they gave blood, or when they received a dental checkup or an eye exam. He even showed me the prototype for a device which could be placed in ATMs, marking new faces and tracking those already in the system.”

  Tupper looked ruffled. “Isn’t that excessive, in light of the Constitution?”

  “Perhaps,” Mondani said with a stern look. “But you know the Compound is not the only covert agency that will eventually start marking every citizen so the minutiae of their lives are fodder for our databases. We already have experimental tracking chips in place in cash money, bank and credit cards, driver’s licenses, passports, civilian and military identification cards, and library cards. We are able to access any and all personal data from personal computers, networked computers in the workplace, digital services such as cable and satellite TV, and cell phones, which will be even more useful when the day comes that everyone has a phone with GPS capability in their pocket. We’ve also suggested that Congress mandate auto manufacturers begin installing black box event data recorders and video cameras in all new vehicles as safety standards reporting measures. With all of that information . . . Imagine the power we would wield if we knew the whereabouts and history of every citizen. It would be simply awesome.”

  Tupper shook his head. “Don’t forget the old saying about absolute power. As for Norman and Hill, we can easily track them by satellite and follow them anywhere . . . But for the time being, perhaps we should just observe.”

  “Why?”

  Tupper leaned forward. “We’ve learned some interesting things after performing extremely detailed analyses of the specimens obtained from their medical examinations. Both mother and daughter may be pregnant. The presence of a fertilized egg confirms Jeannie is pregnant by William Hill, and the slightest of changes in hormone counts indicate that Betsy . . . well we aren’t sure about her.” Tupper appeared uneasy and redness crept into his face as he said, “She is carrying a fertilized egg as well, but a pelvic exam showed that her hymen is still intact. An error must have been made and we’re double-checking her results.“

  Neither Tupper nor Mondani wanted to mention John Godson. It was known that he had spent some time with Betsy.

  “Good work, Doctor Tupper,” Mondani said vigorously. He added with a sneer, “If you want to stay out of a Compound holding cell for the rest of your life, you’ll continue to do this kind of outstanding work, for me. Understood?”

  Tupper nodded silently. He was in serious trouble now, but Mondani wasn’t getting any younger. Perhaps someday he’d get a chance to fill Mondani’s shoes. In the meantime it would be utterly fascinating to see what strange fruit the simultaneous conceptions of Jeannie Norman and Betsy Jones brought forth.

  As if reading Tupper’s mind, Mondani’s face lit up and he hissed, “Imagine the children!”

  * * *

  Jeannie looked down at Will, his head heavy in her lap. She wondered if a normal person would be able to go on as she was doing now, after all they had experienced. The reporters and the Sheriff hadn't been through as much as she and Betsy and Will had, and Betsy looked as if she was going into shock when Jeannie had driven away from her. Maybe I'm crazy, she thought, as crazy as Marilyn was at the end of her life. Her fingers tightened on the steering wheel. Crazy or not, her whole miserable life had been preparing her for what lay ahead, right up until the moment Will had been shot before her eyes.

  She had followed th
e old road to another bridge over the gorge and turned south, traveling across rough terrain as the road led her between bleak mountains and through the sharp contrast of the fertile Palo Verde Valley.

  "I'm not going to take it anymore," she whispered, stroking Will's cheek. "I’m not going to be scared anymore. I'm going to fight, and be strong." She looked at the rear-view mirror and saw Betsy behind her. "I feel like I finally have something worth fighting for."

  She turned onto the smooth ribbon of Highway 10 and drove east through more desert. The fear was going away. She was uncertain of what lay ahead and was terribly concerned for Will and for Betsy, despite what her daughter had done, but she wasn’t as afraid as she had been. She had never felt so strong.

  Jeannie drove across the southwest with the sun setting behind her and the sky ahead darkening to night. When she stopped it was to fill the gas tank, paying with cash from Will’s pocket. She didn’t eat. She bought water and used the restroom while the tank was being filled. In the lingering heat of the day she drove with the windows down and the frayed ends of the faded ribbon in her hair fluttered in the cross draft.

  With his head in Jeannie’s lap Will’s eyes opened just for a moment; he could have been looking up at her or at the ribbon in her hair or at nothing at all.

  In the orange light filling her rear-view mirror, Jeannie thought she saw the Thunderbird’s headlights behind her, but by nightfall she had lost track of her daughter.

  In the last hours of the first day of the new millennium Jeannie drove on. She turned on the radio, hoping the music would help her stay awake. As Elton John and Kiki Dee sang Don’t Go Breakin’ My Heart, a song she hadn’t heard since she was a teenager, Jeannie stroked Will’s cooling cheek and sang along with them, hearing Will’s voice in her mind and following his directions to the place he called Hometown.

  Afterword

  I’d like to thank my editor Bob Udell for his unimaginable patience in reading through Made in the USA and other stories and highlighting my multitude of errors, large and small. My first drafts are not fit to step out in public, but he shines their shoes and tucks in their shirts and makes them presentable. Thanks, Bob.

  I’d also like to thank Brian Fatah Steele for doing the cover to this 10th Anniversary edition of Made in the USA. I’ve never told Brian that when I started working on this story in the mid-nineties I became obsessed with the idea that the cover image should somehow contain a tattered or faded American flag. The original edition was released with drab (and inexpensive) cover art. A decade later, Brian used a distressed flag in his cover art with no prompting from me. Tupper would love the synchronicity.

  Made in the USA is just one of many Compound Tales. Along with a number of short stories, the novels to come will be diverse. An untitled semi-prequel to MITU will tell the tale of Hometown’s origins and its founder, and the war that was fought there long ago. In a stand-alone tale called Sunday Morning we’ll meet Al Johnson again and watch as Al’s home, friends and neighbors are all dropped in the shit, thanks in part to the Compound. The final Compound Tale, Hometown, will be a direct sequel to MITU, set in that strange little town in New Mexico.

  Most of the outlandish and paranoid bullshit in this novel is just that. Yet the majority of factoids sprinkled through the story like spices, such as Tupper’s speech about synchronicity (those odd occurrences can be found in Alan Vaughan’s extremely entertaining 1989 book Incredible Coincidence – The Baffling World of Synchronicity), the things we do to animals in the name of science, and details about sweet, lost Marilyn (aside from my suggestion of how she died, of course), are all the real deal.

  Finally, any errors are mine and mine alone.

  Thanks for reading.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Jack X. McCallum lives in Northern California and is a founding member of Dark Red Press, His stories range from graphic horror to tales for younger readers. He also writes screenplays, and makes inexcusably awful short films.