“Have it your way, man. Those things may just drop off in about ten years. Funny thing about the Venus is, they tend towards hermaphroditism. Big word, huh? Plain English, they may already be fertilized spores, and they could sprout. They like bat shit best, but they can grow just as well out of human flesh, when push comes to shove. I know you don’t want that, and I want my spores back. So why don’t you just be a man and go in and satisfy Astarte, back there.”
Friendly imagined the purple buboes sprouting out of his cock and balls, singing their virulent hormone mating call to turn him into their zombie slave, turning his crotch into a raging fungoid brothel. “Okay. What do I have to do?”
“Just go in there and introduce yourself, and let nature take its course.”
Friendly backed into the vault, his gun trained on the dealer. Then he heard something moving behind him and he turned. The dealer shut the curtains. “Don’t be freaked out by Astarte’s appearance. He’s, uh, kind of a mutant.”
“He?”
Friendly’s dark-adjusted eyes barely made out a column of mottled purple flesh rising five feet out of the batshit trench. Its gill-frilled stalk split in a vaginal mouth to display pouting red lips like a giant calla lily, or a massive baboon’s ass in estrus. The gleaming, honey-dripper lips parted provocatively as a tongue, white and eel-slick, slipped out and lapped up the cream of its own distilled, overripe desire.
Friendly backed away and raised the gun. “Don’t come any closer—”
A trumpeting fart split the lips of the fungus and ejaculated a shower of pheromonal syrup into Friendly’s face. There was no coy chemical invitation in Astarte’s message. It was an undiluted masculine command to render up his seed for fertilization, and though it made a WOMAN of him, it was not to be denied.
Waves of indomitable lust tenderized him, and he dropped his gun to tear off his pants. The prehensile tongue darted out of the mouth to circle enticingly above his head as he approached. Seeking its own spoor on him, it homed in on his engorged penis, now twice its normal size. More tongues shot out of the livid mouth and buffeted him, lifted him off the ground and into the waiting, hungry lips.
The tongues greedily scoured every last bud off his crotch, then bored into his asshole and his cock, down his throat and into his stomach to retrieve spores he’d ingested during his affair with the Venus. Penetrated and transfixed, Friendly retreated into a tiny bunker in the attic of his brain and sang to himself, rode out ferocious orgasms that multiplied to critical mass when he gagged on the fungoid tongue down his throat as it met another of its kind that had come in his asshole. He exploded fluids out of every orifice and felt them licked away by rasping tongues, MANIPULATED DOMINATED CONTROLLED.
He prayed to die until the male Venus spat him out.
He lay insensate for years at the foot of the torpid Venus, bleeding and heaving, gasping for breath enough to slip into a coma.
Then he heard gunshots.
Friendly clambered to his feet and staggered out into the strobing glare of flashlights.
“Freeze! Police!” A strident female voice pinned him down. Friendly tried to cover his nakedness and hold his hands up at the same time. He understood now the hesitant panic of the SUSPECT, that drove them to grope and make half-steps towards fleeing, even as they surrendered.
“Lie down on the ground! Put your hands straight out at your sides! Do it now!”
“You don’t understand! I’m a victim! I mean—I’m a cop! I’m one of you!” Lying down in batshit, a boot on his spine, hands laced in the small of his back and cuffed together.
“Really? Where’s your ID? In your pants?” Friendly was hoisted to his feet and steered towards the door. A line of cops, all butch bulldaggers, stood along the wall, up the stairs and on out the front door, waiting their turn to glare in righteous disgust. Friendly hung his head and tried to pin his shriveled cock between his legs, noticed that the buds were gone. His penis looked and felt as if cats had been licking it all night long, but he was free of its mark of sin.
In the Captain’s office, rubbing cuff-burns on his wrists, studying his shoes. The Captain’s eyes flinty gray buttons robbing him of his last dignity. Her scrubbed, ruddy face pinched in distaste.
“I suppose I should say first that you are back on suspension. Your actions, once they’re finally sorted out, will be entered into your permanent record. We don’t like off-duty Dirty Harry’s in this person’s police force, do I make myself clear?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Now, I have to say that without your tip on the drug house, the raid we launched never would’ve been the success it was. We were unable before today to penetrate the ring, and you provided an invaluable source of information.” Her face pinched still more as the script she was reading from left its bitter taste in her mouth.
“It wasn’t a drug house,” Friendly managed.
“Not true. They were growing and distributing a controlled substance in the form of a psychoactive marital aid. We also found a number of other illicit substances, along with a cache of illegal firearms. They resisted our attempts to serve a search warrant, and we responded with force to insure your safe recovery.”
Her acting stank up the joint. If this was TV, Friendly would have turned it off. “How did you know I was in there?”
The Captain’s jaw worked. “You phoned us before you went in to the house.”
He wanted to scream at her to stop it. “How long were you having me followed?”
“You called us, Officer Friendly. No one followed you. Ever.” Tight lips pressing truth into the assertion. “We advised against your going in, which advisement you disregarded, hence your suspension. But your captivity led to a search warrant, which led to the raid. You are to be commended. Well,” closing the file on the desk before her, “your ordeal has left you in need of rest, so why don’t you get yourself cleaned up and go home. You’ll be facing a board of review in about three weeks, but I wouldn’t worry.”
“Thank you, Captain.”
“We have to have men on the force like you, Friendly. You’re an example to us all, an example of what we could become.”
Friendly went to the locker room, and realized just how filthy he’d become. Black gobs of guano under his fingernails, in his hair, and… The buds were gone, but the thing he’d had to be with to get rid of them left him unable to touch or look at himself. He’d never been able to bring himself to use the locker room showers—homophobia or fear of athlete’s foot, or enjoyment of his own B.O., or all of the above—but he knew he couldn’t go another moment coated in the slime of the night-hag.
He stripped and wrapped in a towel, went into the shower room. A misty steam-tunnel, the shower room curtained each of its bathers from each other, so that as Friendly tore off the towel, turned the water as hot as it would go and scrubbed the purifying stream into his crotch, he didn’t see the other cops. He noticed their feet as they came out of the steam, a cordon hemming him into the corner. His eyes wandered up to their faces, but never got there, because for the first time in his life, Friendly stared deliberately at male genitalia without questioning his own manhood, and understood why the other cops all looked at him like he was some kind of freak when he’d tried to get them to go cruising.
Each cop’s penis dangled down to his knees, studded with prickly-pear purple buds, swollen fit to burst.
“You smell like Her,” one of them said, and came closer.
The Wage of Dinosaurs
THE CUSTOMER IS ALWAYS RIGHT, said the sign over Herman Heinz’s head. It said it again, because he could not read it.
“No, no, that’s not how I remember it at all!” screamed the customer. “You’ve got the figurines’ heads all switched around, and some of them are naked!” Even under the hood, her mind entrained into a state of dreamlike recall, Mrs. Hale’s strident voice scissored through the last threads of his composure.
“I’m sorry ma’am,” Herman said, “but I just guide the imagery.
If it’s not in there right, I can’t fix it.”
“Well, I’m paying to remember the Japanese netsuke exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art as it was when I was a little girl, and not some deplorable wet dream of yours!” Mrs. Hale ducked out of the hood and pried the sensors off her temples with a withering scowl on her painted face, preened her imperious silver fright-wig. Grumbling, “I certainly don’t expect to be billed for this nonsense,” she tottered out the door.
Heinz didn’t try to explain, as he did every time she came in, that he couldn’t change the content of her memories even if he wanted to, only focus their retrieval and process them into holograms; that any confused details or sexual imagery that seeped in were from her own subconscious; that, to him, her memories were meaningless squirts of neurochemical syrup in a broken brain.
Outside, honey-dappled waves of tamed sunlight glorified birch-lined Main Street, painting idle window-shoppers in hues of Rembrandt gold. He eyed the burnished mahogany bench out front, where he sat when the door unlocked and he was allowed to spend fifteen minutes each shift smoking and reading comic books.
Every eight-hour shift he spent in Los Altos Estates© was a week in the outside world, and not in any fruity metaphorical sense. In here, even the passage of time was retarded.
What day was it outside? Thinking about that made him begin to suspect that maybe the whole temporal retardation field around Los Altos Estates© was a fraud. Every shift felt like a week, in here, too.
The next old ghoul was already rapping her cane on the counter. “You’ve mixed it for me a thousand times, I don’t see why you’re taking all day. Ought to be preset, or something—”
“It is preset for your prescription, Mrs. Rowbotham, and it’ll be done in two minutes, like always.”
“I don’t like your tone, young man,” Mrs. Rowbotham rasped, snatching up a comment card and a pen as she crab-walked to the overstuffed vinyl chair where she’d left her unfinished macramé varmint trap.
She sat down next to Mrs. Paupp, who lay semi-comatose, thankfully, under a VR hood that mainlined Mexican soap operas into her age-raddled gray matter. Heinz was pretty sure Mrs. Paupp didn’t know Spanish, but he didn’t care, so long as it kept her quiet. Though the tinny voices that leaked out of the helmet drove Heinz to contemplate murder—like hot-blooded cockroaches singing opera between Mrs. Paupp’s ears—he kind of liked it, because it seemed to bother Mrs. Rowbotham even more.
Herman slipped out from behind the counter and unlocked the door to the back room.
“Where’re you going, now? Taking a break, already?”
“No, ma’am, I’m just going to check on your mix.”
“My what?”
“Your mix, Mrs. Rowbotham, your brain-juice. The same stuff I always give you.”
“Isn’t the other boy here? I like the other boy so much more…”
“I’m the only one here, ma’am, and I’m very, very sorry.” He ducked behind the door.
This wasn’t even his job. Alec, the other clerk, fronted the desk and guided the retrievals, and Herman mixed, safely insulated from the cranky clientele. Alec was pinched by the narcs for selling the store’s wares on the street in San Jose, and after three shifts, the company still hadn’t seen fit to replace him. Getting people to work in Los Altos Estates© was tough.
He looked in the mirror by the door, seeing himself through the whispering slogans etched into the glass—WHATEVER IT TAKES, ALL THE TIME, and ARE YOU SMILING? Stooped shoulders, pattern baldness, dull expression; with this body, this mind, this was his lot in life. All the hallmarks of early middle age were creeping in, yet Herman’s physique was still that of a five year old.
Mom wanted a puppy; out of the question on Dad’s salary, so they got the next best thing. As an unregistered natural birth, Herman was an illegal alien, but he’d never be found out, she figured, if he never grew up. Mom snuck him off to back-alley gene therapists to fix his age just before he was to start school. Neighbors ratted her out, and she went away to a very nice jail run by the Mormons. Dad had to sell Herman’s contract to keep out of debtor’s gulag, and so he had joined the workforce.
Without further gene therapy, Herman would probably never grow up, and gene therapy was outlawed long before he was born—by their generation. By the Hales, Rowbothams and Paupps, who decided that tinkering with the laws of physics to prolong their own lives was okay, but altering the human genome was blasphemy.
Herman punched up Mrs. Rowbotham’s prescription. It was ninety percent complete, awaiting synthesis of the neurotransmitters that would unlock her rusty receptors and let the memories out. He sat and watched the machine work, and silently hated Mrs. Rowbotham.
In the two calendar years he’d worked at MemoryMart©, he’d come to despise the elderly and the rich with a fierce purity that would’ve made a radical Communist out of a brighter employee, and a killer out of one with more gumption. He loathed their smug self-worship, their zeal for microscopic detail, their incessant whining about how the world was a better place when they were the ones ruining it. They were vampires, feeding on the humiliation of young human hosts. While they reveled in sucking the life out of him moment by moment, he couldn’t begin to guess how it enriched them. Maybe the time retardation field itself was powered by his degradation.
He hated Mrs. Rowbotham the most, because her mind was so fragmented. Her paranoia was such that she wouldn’t let him in to guide her retrievals, never ordered a hard print, and always complained that she was viewing someone else’s memories by mistake. When she got really riled up, she threatened to cut him out of her will and ordered him to rub her feet. The company, of course, always took her side. When he tried to dump her as a client, they reprimanded him, ordered him to put more L-dopa in her mix—and rub her feet.
It was time for direct action: a show of defiance.
Herman jabbed the STOP button on the mixer and lifted out the vial of supercharged brain juice he’d be injecting into Mrs. Rowbotham’s wattled blue neck. He uncapped it and tugged his particle filter mask down. He sucked in air hard to scrape the walls of his throat, hocked a king-size lunger into the juice, and replaced it in the mixer. He watched the shake cycle dissolve the gooey morsel of lung-butter into the clear serum.
He lost track of time, and was still watching when the staccato rhythm of Mrs. Rowbotham’s cane against the counter set off an alarm in the antique shop next door.
An hour later, watching Mrs. Rowbotham twitch and fidget under the hood in the retrieval salon, he wondered if he hadn’t gone too far. Her vital signs were normal, and her brain readouts looked stronger than ever, but she wasn’t talking. The foggy fossil normally growled and purred through her sessions, murmuring endearments to some ghosts, shouting at others—downtrodden relatives and store clerks long since dead. Today, she only hissed, stabbing intakes of breath between clenched dentures, her sunken bosom heaving and buckling like a bellows.
Usually, Herman jimmied the lock and snuck outside for a quick smoke, or tripped on the residue he could sometimes skim off her mix, while Mrs. Rowbotham remembered. But this time, he knew, he had to watch. He’d hawked snot into the dismal pool of his future, and, hypnotized by the wheezing, centuried shape his doom had taken, he had to bear witness to its arrival.
Suddenly, Mrs. Rowbotham spasmed and sat bolt upright, yanking off most of the sensors. Her face twisted into a gruesome predatory mask, jaws flexed and drawing down the corners of her mouth, dentures flecked with foamy spittle and black lipstick. Her eyes darted about with a steely awareness utterly alien to the crone’s vacant mask.
Herman hesitated at the outer door when those eyes fastened on him. She knows, he thought, but that vital, ruthless glare seemed only to know how good it would be to rip out his throat and lap at his gushing blood. Herman thought of sharks and lions he’d seen in the sims, and backed up.
Then her eyes clouded over and she subsided on the couch and clasped her chest. Her breath came in ragged,
bubbling fits, and with a noisome blast like ripping fabric, she voided her bowels.
He’d killed her. Good, he thought. I fixed the old bitch, didn’t I? They’ll fry me, but it was worth it. Wasn’t it?
He approached her stilled, stinking carcass and, trembling, reached out to touch her wrist. The eyes, half-lidded, revealed nothing. The stink of her shit made his eyes water.
The blue-veined hand caught his with blinding speed, even as she doubled over coughing. Herman jerked back, but she held him fast, scalpel-sharp acrylic nails shredding his sleeve.
Mrs. Rowbotham slid off the couch, pulled him closer still, into an awful embrace, into the palpable vortex of Tea Rose and diarrhea and PolyDent Green and primordial carrion. Heinz closed his eyes and helplessly voided his bladder.
“Eeeeiiisssss! Heinzzzssss…” She hissed in his face. “Wasssszz gooooood…” Mrs. Rowbotham pinned him there as her other paw reached into the folds of her double-knit polyester jumpsuit, emerged with a violet rubber change purse. She taloned it open and pinched out a crisp hundred dollar bill in old federal currency, pressed it into his trapped hand. She let him go. He staggered back into the corner, arms wrapped around his vital organs.
“That’ssz for you, sssssonny, thankssss.” Springing from the couch, she loped out of the salon and into the street, leaving her cane.
Stupefied, Herman watched her through the window until she disappeared round the corner onto State Street. He massaged feeling back into his hand and looked in wonderment at the bill. It was worthless, of course, but Mrs. Rowbotham had never tipped him before. None of them ever did.
He wondered if he hadn’t stumbled onto something that the company might be grateful for, something that would get him out of this dead-end job. He wondered if maybe this wasn’t the greatest discovery in the history of mnemonic retrieval technology. He wondered—
“Where the hell are you, boy? What’ve I got to do to get some service, over here!” Mrs. Paupp was crashing hard from her soap opera dream, and banging on the counter bell. Herman forgot what he was wondering and listened to the sign that reminded him to SMILE!
All-Monster Action! Page 6