“You made us remember,” a third voice said, from the intercom speaker on the wall. Herman had never heard anything come out of it but announcements for shuffleboard tournaments and square dances, but he recognized the voice that came out of it, now. “You’ve made us young.”
Something slammed into the window again, and this time it broke through. All eyes turned to face the thing that lumbered through the waiting area, slashing tail sweeping chairs and magazine racks aside, battering-ram head lowered in majestic menace. Its jaws lolled open and Herman saw those double-rowed teeth, saw that some of them were lucite implants. Mrs. Rowbotham, here for her appointment at last.
The guards made ready to shoot. The execs dove behind the counter. Only Herman stood rooted as Mrs. Rowbotham stalked the store.
“Don’t you dare hurt her!” the voice from the intercom shouted. “This is Homeowners’ Association President Dwight Eichelburger. Now, here’s what you’re going to do: pack up and get the hell out of Los Altos Estates©. We don’t need you, anymore. Any delay or interference, and you’ll be hearing from our lawyers, who’ve been empowered with trusteeship of our pooled assets. Any attempts to interfere, and you’ll wish you were back in here with us, when they get hold of you.”
The execs stared daggers at Herman. They were going to exercise the bylaw now, no doubt about that. He’d given Los Altos Estates© an unspeakable gift, and in return, he was going to customer service hell.
It was time for direct action.
While Eichelburger droned on and the sentries covered Mrs. Rowbotham, Herman blew the gauze out of his nostrils. Hot blood sprayed his palm. Ducking under the third sentry’s rifle, he lunged for Mrs. Rowbotham and stuck his hand under her foamy muzzle.
She scented the blood. Her head dipped and clamped his hand like a steel trap. He felt teeth like steak knives slicing through his tendons, crunching down on bone, and the pain was terrible, yes, but it was wonderful, too.
The execs knew what it meant. The sentries were a little slower on the uptake, so he ripped his mangled hand free of Mrs. Rowbotham’s jaws and held it up. “I’m infected! I’ve got it!”
“Don’t shoot! Don’t shoot!” the execs screamed. “You’ll get infected blood everywhere—” They dropped the emergency barrier behind them and disappeared into the storeroom.
Herman backed away, covering the guards with the bloody ruin of his hand. He was weak in the knees, but exhilaration kept him moving back to the hole in the window, out onto the cobblestone veldt of Main Street. They were afraid of him, and Herman almost thought he detected a bit of awe in their eyes, just before Mrs. Rowbotham ate them.
“I quit,” he told the security cameras.
As he raced away, clamping his hand under his other arm to minimize the blood flow, he believed he could feel it working, the recombinant agent opening sealed vaults in his genes, revealing ancient treasures, forgotten forms.
His flesh began to dream.
And he started to remember.
The Care & Feeding of Sea Monkeys
The naked jogger ran on the fringes of the heaving Pacific surf until he came alongside something sprawled in the surf and dove in after it.
At first Ramdu thought it was only a beautiful girl, her curvaceous hindquarters propped up and presenting to the shore. He watched as the jogger impaled her with a barbaric shout, amorously plowing the shallows with her face.
Just when it seemed she might drown, her tail coiled round the jogger and she let out a keening fax machine shriek of presentient ecstasy. For a moment they reared up and crawled all over each other in midair, then darted into the waves and were swept out on the retreating tide.
Ramdu Gul flushed with elation and let out a stale breath that had been strangled in his chest since the first stirrings of puberty. He was really here, on Venice Beach in the Commonwealth of California, and all the stories were true.
He couldn’t repress a big goofy grin as he stepped through the last checkpoint and out onto the boardwalk. Ramdu had come a long way to get here, greased many palms, told many lies. He had seen horrible things, seen men killed, or worse. Still, he was grateful. If the stories were true, if the Sea Monkeys were anything like the tall tales told in the darkest, deepest chatrooms on the Net, he would always remember this day.
One last check of his gear—the neuro-enhanced titanium-graphite mesh skinsuit, already deployed under his baggy linen caftan; the subcutaneous 310 ID chip embedded at the nape of his neck; the web-harness filled with dangerous, expensive things he’d never used before—and he was ready for his day at the beach.
He checked his reflection in the chrome face of his pressure gauge: absurd nose like a pelican’s beak, pockmarked cheeks, crooked, betel-stained teeth, no chin and almost as little hair, tiny honey-mud eyes blinking a telegraphic SOS because his contact lenses never sat quite right.
Ramdu’s father had only ensnared his radiant mother by arranging to marry her in Kashmir when she was an infant. The pride of his checkered, unremarkable life, she died in the Guangzhou Flu outbreak of ‘29, and he perished when white supremacists firebombed his convenience store. Penniless, cut off from his kin in India, Ramdu had been turned down even by untouchable brides on the Net.
These beauties will not want you for your looks, or your wealth, he thought. But they will want you—
Ramdu schemed and saved for months to make this trip. From its first stirrings as a guilty fantasy, it had swelled to devour his dreams and his working hours until nothing seemed more natural or more urgent. But even his considerable computer skills and enough dogged determination to shame a salmon had failed to bring him any closer.
Southern California was still a war zone, though hostilities had dragged out to sporadic exchanges of missiles and Net bombs with NorCal, and rattling its ragtag submarine fleet at the rest of the US and the narco-republic of Mexico. If ever the lawless Southlands were pacified for tourism, it would only be by some invader who would destroy what he had come to conquer.
Then last week, Mr. Harkin had come to see him, a rare occurrence in itself, but compounded by his boss’ awkwardness, as if Ramdu had caught him doing something wrong. So, he wanted to go to SoCal? Ramdu made humble noises about long-lost family, but Mr. Harkin waved it away. Men of the world didn’t need to make excuses, yes? Adventurers? Ramdu felt dark rhetorical waters close over his head, nodded. If he really wanted to go down there, Harkin could put papers together, and all he had to do was pick up a package.
Ramdu had been overjoyed, but cautious. Mr. Harkin was a VP at Allied Teledildonics, and, so the company rumor mill had it, a despicable pervert. His wife had Milkmaid implants, a bovine hormone treatment that made grotesque, perpetually lactating udders of her already considerable breasts. Harkin carried vials of her milk at all times, and was known to suck shamelessly from the source at Christmas parties, or whenever a disgusting display gave him the upper hand at a power luncheon. Whatever Mr. Harkin wanted so badly, it must surely cast Ramdu’s own fetish in the shade. The transaction was quickly accomplished before breakfast, leaving him the rest of the time to plot his beach trip.
Ramdu snaked through gangs of surfers with razor-finned boards and matte-black sharkskin hides; blubbering chaingangs of debt-orphans on litter duty; sailors and Marines and corporate mercs on shore leave, already spoiling for blood-feuds with the locals; and gibbets bowing under bumper crops of gull-ravaged corpses with their out-of-state American license plates around their bloated green necks, and sprayed with day-glo graffiti: LOCALS ONLY.
The whole spectrum of robed cultists clotted the boardwalk—tangerine Krishnas, argentine Meta-Buddhists, fuligin Neo-Ninjas, aquamarine Channel Surfers in their unbreakable water-triads, a senior oxygen and two yoked hydrogen acolytes, humming the ocean’s monotonous static mantra as they trickled through the gate. A camo-clad Vegan militia played blowtorch-wands over a Thai rat-stick wagon like a hippie re-enactment of the My Lai Massacre.
Swarms of skaters in logo-strobing body
armor ripped through the crowd and each other, caroming off pedestrians, screaming smart-boards slashing the air around Ramdu’s head like silicon shurikens. Clouds of silver birds and bugs circled overhead, but only camera-drones could survive in the rusty red air. Anything remotely interesting that might happen would end up on TV, somewhere.
“Do not waste yourself, young man, on the succubi of the shallows.” A Channel Surfer gloomed in his path, arms outstretched to catch him in the undertow of holy oblivion. “The rapture of the deep beckons.” His eyes blazed with the bioluminescent flares of abyssal anglerfish lures. Under the wet scarf round his wattled neck, Ramdu knew, would be surgically installed gills.
Ramdu knew better than to try to escape, so he opted to zero in crazier than the cultist, circling and babbling improvised Hindi haikus. “Waves break on the shore. The earth cradles the sea. I am a rock, to dash out your brains!” He brandished a random dermal card, a hyper-nicotine patch from a local bail bondsman. The narcophobic Channel Surfer vaporized, Draculated, and there was nothing, finally, between Ramdu and the beach.
Sand had been trucked in or dredged to bury old Santa Monica, but the tallest ruins jutted out of the ash-gray beach, and a row of skyscrapers still stood against the choppy, rainbow-sheened ocean, marking the old shoreline. Yachts, hovercrafts and skimmers ferried people out to these, where wild parties and drunken, naked block wars raged on the roofs. The boaters howled and blasted music and fired harpoons into the water.
He’d expected, feared, bigger crowds. Cliques and cult cells and solitary freaks wandered the beach as if it were some endless, purgatorial cocktail party. A few hapless tourists actually sun-bathed, turning purple under the punishing sun before his very eyes. Too many of them were flyblown cadavers in seaweed shrouds, washed in on the tide.
There were no lifeguards, but surfpunk militias patrolled in jeeps, coked-out kids in Foreign Legion kepis with recoilless rifles on swivel-mounts and endlessly blaring warnings: “The area north of the checkered flag is for surfing only! All swimmers in the surf zone will be shot!” There was no checkered flag, anywhere. Surfers ruled, but swimmers shot back.
Checking the seals on his suit so none of his skin was exposed to the sun or the water, Ramdu clumsily vaulted over the railing of the boardwalk and shuffled down the beach, eyes peeled for stingrays and mermaids.
Mermaids. The Disneyfied stuff of sexual desperation, wishful myths spun by seamen of yore, drunk and bored with buggering each other, to while away weeks of empty sailing. But there was never a sailor half as horny as Ramdu Gul, nor one nearly so ugly. Spurned by all specimens of the female kingdom, he had turned to the Net for release, and found the stories of the Sea Monkeys.
Once he sorted out the legends and outright lies, he had decoded the unlikely origin of the species. They were not creatures out of myth, any more than they were a sport of capricious Mother Nature; they were real, and like most truly inspired inventions, their creation was an accidental byproduct of an awful mistake.
Serialized megaquakes and offshore oil spills rendered the Southern California coastline seismically unstable and virtually uninhabitable, but a host of corporations posited solutions, the most subtle but effective of which were biological.
Nobody remembered the name of the biotech startup that designed the mega-krill, which could not only survive in petroleum-choked waters, but could feed on it and become a viable food staple itself. In advance of a huge IPO-rollout, the biotech company dumped its super shit-eating shrimp into Long Beach Harbor in protest of a State Supreme Court decision—and was eaten alive by the decrepit justice system.
The orphaned mega-krill, however, thrived and reclaimed the coastline from Newport to Malibu. Where all natural marine life had failed, the mega-krill stepped into the breach to put fishing fleets back to work, and almost saved the breakaway republic’s fragile economy.
When the Last Big One dropped the mean coastal elevation two feet, tidal waves washed whole zip codes out to sea and rendered the beach suburb of Venice into a trashier twin of its namesake. With millions displaced and martial law already an empty threat over much of LA County, it was several months before word of Venice’s miracle spread beyond ground zero.
A notable corporate casualty of the quake was Muscle Bunny Body Sculpting, a boutique plastic surgery outfit that pounced on the new liberty of Californian secession to diversify into gene tweaking. After collecting skin and hair samples from celebrities and prize specimens on local beaches, these unlikely pioneers claimed they had isolated the DNA sequences that governed human beauty. Demonstrations left the media skeptical, but the porn industry made the company rich enough to deliver on any crazy promise almost overnight.
Within a few months after the last aftershock, stories began to leak out of giant crustaceans prowling the flooded streets of Venice. The stories got stranger, urban mariner’s tales of men drowned in shallow water by sea creatures more terribly beautiful than any siren ever hatched by Hollywood. Viral vids of Sea Monkey “petting parties” staked out an appalling new pornographic frontier.
The serendipitous parents of this marvelous chimera never lived to see it—the nameless mega-krill inventors vanished, and Muscle Bunny’s gene therapy program had long-term side effects too awful to detail, and the surviving executives died in Riverside Debtor’s Prison. But they had given a tired, broken land something magical—and they had given Ramdu Gul hope.
Blessedly, nobody looked twice at him as he went down to the water. Many wore similar suits, but while few carried as much equipment, all carried more weapons.
He had read articles, formed plans, flow charts of scenarios both desirable and not. He swam a hundred laps daily in the company pool. He trained in kenpo and kickboxing and Filipino “drunken uncle” knife fighting. He studied the Kama Sutra and the collected writings of Casanova, Xaviera Hollander and Jacques Cousteau. His frame was honed to carry as much muscle as his wiry, stoop-shouldered bird-body could bear. He swallowed his fear. You know what to do next. What happens after that—will happen…
He slipped on his mask, his vulpine beak mashed against the Plexiglas, and stepped into the shallows, a wavelet of clingy yellow foam breaking around his ankles. His suit wanted to tell him its analysis of the “water” he was wading in, but he grimly ignored it. Bubbles percolated out of holes in the sand around his feet, the respiration of unseen cousins of the object of his desire.
The tide rolled lazily back, disclosing jumbled mounds of masonry and sidewalk and rust. The next wave reared up almost in front of him, and it was like looking into a giant slab of green glass; suspended in it like primeval insects in amber, the voluptuous curves of cavorting, impossible bodies slowing time to a crawl. None of them were human.
He became hard in the instant before a pack of surfers dropped into the tube and slashed the vision to whitewater ribbons. He staggered back under the force of the wave, let it drag him back out to where the suds swirled around his waist.
Every time he tried to swim past the breakers, the waves chopped him down and forced him back on the beach. He hacked at them with his hands, whipped into hyperventilating rage.
It was like everything in this godforsaken country! Dumb, inexorable forces pushed you back whenever you tried to forge out beyond the polluted shallows, but they seemed to embrace and exalt the lotus-eating locals who laughed at him as he wallowed in the breakers. But he swallowed his pride and watched them, copied their strokes and the suit obliged by doing the rest.
An armada of surfers, masked and snorkeled and piebald with tribal melanomas, straddled their boards in the lull between sets. With every swell he crested, more of them popped up on the surface, as if from their true home on the ocean floor.
A few of them unslung spearguns or piano-wire bolos and whistled at him. He smiled as he pulled the dinner-plate sized plastic disk out of his backpack and depressed the stud that unfolded it. The surfboard sprang out and the skegs nearly castrated him.
He lay on it and dog-paddle
d like he had at the company pool, but the novelty of the relentless waves made it almost impossible to stay on his board. With painful effort, he steered away from the other surfers and got the riptide to drag him out to a gutted concrete tower that stood six stories above the water.
Naked kids jumped out the windows or lobbed rocks at him from the roof. He threw a fistful of coins and simstim ampules into the water, and they dove like gulls.
From here, he had to be careful. There were plenty of credible survival vids on the Net, but they always had gangs of men trapping a Sea Monkey. Nobody who took one on alone had ever recorded it…
Ramdu landed in a half-submerged office, took out an aerosol can and sprayed his suit, careful to coat everything, especially the exhaust vents on his respirator. The stuff was available on the black Net, for an astronomical price: male Sea Monkey musk. Sold as an instant aphrodisiac, the stuff made human women sick, while the female musk made human men homicidal.
Female Sea Monkeys were willing and able to couple with humans, and had quickly become quite adept at seducing men. But they seemed to engage in this pursuit only to bring their suitors out past the waves, where the male of the species waited for his supper.
As Ramdu paddled out to the open ocean, he pledged to attract a mate or die trying, and he was almost relieved to discover that he didn’t really fear the latter so much as he did going home a virgin.
He went south with the tide, trying to stay out of the surfers’ way, looking out for male Sea Monkeys, of which there were no clear images. When he got to a place equidistant from all potential hazards, he folded and stowed the surfboard and treaded water.
For a few endless seconds, the rolling swells before and behind walled off the shore, and there was nothing in the world but Ramdu alone on the open sea.
All-Monster Action! Page 8