by Larry Doyle
J!m dropped his head into his hands. Filaments of electricity arced to his fingertips, taunting him.
This was the worst of all possible worlds, he realized. It was the one he lived in.
Chapter 3
Mated to Wild Atomic Energy!
rock and roll, loud and fast approaching, disrupted J!m’s reverie of woe. Through splayed fingers he saw the chrome nose cone, leading the electric pink Barris Ballistic, bearing down on him.
J!m didn’t move. He knew Russ Ford had no intention of damaging his beloved automobile, and, as predicted, the convertible rimmed the curb and cut away. Russ nuked it down the street and hit the retros when he reached the girls.
Marie pretended not to see him, but Sandra Jane brought the walkway to a halt and pointed her milk glands at the boys. Sandra Jane’s mammaries were a fine size, not too large, and she considered them her best feature, which, sadly, they were.
“Russ!” Sandra Jane said, arching her back.
He smiled upon them, a copper god: auburn hair and eyes, a brash of freckles, a thin, mean mouth that could do terrible things to a girl, according to testimonials on Plexmate.
Meanwhile, his buddy Kenneth Morrow was thrusting his pelvis all over the backseat. “Human fee-males,” the goofy-toothed beanpole screeched, a poor imitation of Marshall the Martian but better than the one he was doing of sexual congress, unless he was rutting with a polytwatted she-boar from Babirusa-8, unlikely on his allowance.
Russ lowered the aud and revved the reactor to a high thrum, extracting a rod while in park, not recommended. He lowered his right eyelid, a seductive move that in his later years would be mistaken for a stroke.
“Which one of you moon maids wants to hop on my atomic rocket?”
Sandra Jane did. Marie demurred. “Someday I’d like to have children,” she said. “With forty-six chromosomes.”
Sandra Jane secured Marie’s wrist and moved toward the Ballistic.
“They wouldn’t make them if they weren’t safe! Don’t be such an Einstein!” She pressed her teeth against Marie’s ear, whisper screaming, “Are you deranged?”
As they reached the car, Russ looked at Sandra Jane and nodded to the back. “You know Tubesteak.”
Yes, she knew Tubesteak.
“Shotgun!” Sandra Jane deployed.
Russ winked and nodded to the back again.
Spread across the seat, Tubesteak had both hands deep in his pockets, and not in a cool way. Sandra Jane dutifully hiked her skirt and climbed aboard.
Marie chose to use the door. Before getting in, she looked back.
He was standing where she had left him.
“Jim!” she summoned.
“Jeez, Marie,” complained Sandra Jane. “It’s all even.”
J!m did not want a ride from Russ Ford. He detested Russ, and Russ more than detested him. They had been at each other for years, from that first noon on the second-grade playground, when Russ called J!m a blue fairy and J!m speculated that Russ was projecting and that those statements Russ made about J!m reflected back upon himself, as if metaphorically J!m were made of an elastic hydrocarbon and Russ were an adhesive. Russ had replied that he was going to pound J!m, then the bell rang. And so it had gone, with Russ crudely taunting J!m, and J!m coming back with cryptic insults, vexing Russ and leading to further threats of violence, unconsummated but cumulative, building tension and testosterone, so that it was inevitable that one day they would have to fight or fornicate, and J!m was in the mood for neither.
Marie motioned for him to hurry up.
J!m hurried up.
The double bubble top did not leave room for him in the front with Marie. There was plenty of room in the back, since Sandra Jane was on Tubesteak’s lap, accepting her change in station, but J!m was about as welcome there as the Jovian clap, perhaps a little less so.
He reached for the door. It locked.
“Looking slick there, Scrotar,” Russ said.
“Shi-NEE!” Tubesteak parroted, misusing the slang for new, excellent, delicious, drunk, sex, almost anything but reflecting light.
Russ feigned giving J!m the once-over, a fair appraisal. “You gonna grease my seat?”
“Not on our first date.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
The male game bored Marie. “Don’t be a pod, Russell.”
Russ yeah-yeahed her and released the lock.
J!m wrapped his fingers around the door handle.
Deep in the trunk, the reactor glowed and hummed.
The Ballistic blasted, briefly leaving the ground, jerking J!m off his feet.
On his knees in the street, J!m looked up.
Tubesteak hung over the back, giggling insanely, Sandra Jane braying alongside him, this being the story they would tell their ill-conceived children someday. Marie appeared to be yelling at Russ, who responded with a hard left turn, throwing her against the door.
J!m started to brush himself off, noticed:
His right hand was missing.
Annoying.
tubesteak carried on, giggling even as Sandra Jane inserted her tongue into his mouth and pushed him down on the seat. In front, Marie fumed off to the side. Russ switched on the aud. Behemoth’s Mark Bowland sang,
You’ve got the teeth
Of the hydra upon you
You’re dirty sweet
And you’re my girl
Outside the Ballistic, J!m’s Severed Hand pulled itself onto the door handle. It sprang up, catching the top of the door, and scrambled into the car.
in the middle of the street, outplayed and unhanded, J!m was feeling a certain wretched exhilaration, that all was rightly wrong in his world, when an old-fashioned roar of internal combustion gave him a mild pang of hope. A 1950 Triumph Thunderbird 6T rolled to a stop beside him. Its rider wore immoderately furry black boots, or had ape feet.
Johnny was a cool beast in a black leather jacket with matching face and chest, his head pelt in a carefully tousled ducktail. If he seemed to glow, it was because he did.
He regarded his kneeling friend curiously. “You prayin’ or workin’?” he drawled.
“Funny monkey,” J!m said, climbing to his feet. “I’d flip you a nickel, but my goddamn hand just got ripped off.”
Seeing the stump, Johnny hooted softly. “Grows back, yeah?”
“Well,” brandishing his absent hand, “it’s an inconvenience.”
J!m examined the injury. The wound had sealed and new finger nubs were bubbling on the surface.
“Want me to kiss it?” Johnny asked.
J!m grinned. “I would love that.”
He jabbed his stump at Johnny’s face. Johnny leaned away and fell off his bike.
J!m kept coming.
“Kiss kiss!” Jab, jab.
“Kiss it!”
Straddling Johnny: “Just lick it a little!”
Though a foot shorter, Johnny more than twice outweighed J!m and had perhaps ten times the strength. And yet here was J!m, on top again, one-handed, and Johnny grunting and bobbing submissively. Johnny wasn’t afraid of J!m, his fear grimace notwithstanding. Quite the contrary. He was afraid of himself.
It had happened only once, back at the Hospitality Center, when J!m was a baby and Johnny a toddler, and Johnny had ripped both of J!m’s arms off playing a game of Let’s-See-If-I-Can-Rip-Your-Arms-Off. Baby J!m didn’t cry; he laughed while his tiny severed limbs reached out to hug the monkey. Johnny jammed the arms back on, and miraculously they knitted in place, and no one would have been the wiser had Johnny known his left from his right. The arrived-upon solution was to have the radioactive ape boy rip the alien baby’s arms off all over again and let new ones grow in. Johnny was thereafter more careful with, and watchful of, his breakable friend.
j!m was rubbing his stump on Johnny’s bared teeth when the patrol car arrived. The modified Gaylord coupe bore Manhattan Township’s seal, an eagle clutching lightning bolts in one talon and corn stalks in the other, and the mott
o To Protect. The emergency lights flashed and siren wailed until the person in the passenger seat reached over and turned them off.
Swaggering out of the driver’s side was Deputy Peg Furry, rimless glasses and updone hair, the body of a real woman under that uniform, all too real. She wore her Stetson at a dramatic angle and spoke in a folksy northern accent that made her sound both more confident and less right.
“So, whaddya know, whadda we got here?”
Sheriff Nick Ford exited the passenger side, in street clothes, a badge pinned on his jacket. He rubbed his forehead.
Deputy Furry approached the boys, working her hips like a cowboy on a catwalk. “Jim and Johnny, Jim and Johnny, Jim and Johnny,” she wound up. “A broken record. Jimmy Anderson and Johnny Love.”
Johnny, domesticated: “Ma’am.”
The deputy flinched at ma’am, but stayed on screed. “Okeydoke, let’s do this again: Shouldn’t you be in school by now?”
“Shouldn’t you be married by now?” J!m asked.
“Smart mouth for a . . . ,” Deputy Furry began, before she was joined by her boss, “. . . dumb punk. Maybe you haven’t heard—too high frequency or some such—but this town is a No JayDee Zone. That’s J, juvenile—”
Sheriff Ford squeezed her elbow, his cue for her to yammer down. He took a long look at these boys, well known to law enforcement, Johnny because he broke whatever laws they had, and J!m because he got caught more often. Johnny was a beyond reform, Army fodder, but J!m unsettled the sheriff. It didn’t help that he had feelings for the boy’s mother.
The sheriff pointed to the stump. “What happened to your hand?”
“Your son tore it off. Sheriff.” J!m had found that being polite to authority figures infuriated them the most.
Nick Ford, weary: “You gonna be all right?”
“I’ve lost worse.”
They were trapped in their permanent conversation.
“What’re you rebelling against, Jim?”
“Rhetorical questions,” J!m answered. “Sir.”
Nick Ford was frustrated, halfway toward J!m’s goal. “You don’t have to be this way, son.”
“I’m not your son,” flawlessly respectful. “Your son has red hair, and one of my hands. I’d like it back, if you see him.”
The sheriff touched J!m’s shoulder. J!m felt a sadness coming from him, a sadness deeper and richer than anything J!m had ever felt. This irritated him.
“You know what I’m saying,” Nick Ford said. “You don’t have to be your father.”
“You mean,” J!m asked with the least chalance he could, “superior?”
The sheriff removed his hand, and his more authentic sorrow, which J!m immediately missed.
Nick Ford glanced down, then returned with his official countenance.
“Go to school.”
The sheriff walked to the car. Deputy Furry backed away slowly, keeping the suspects in sight.
“D, delinquent,” she continued in strategic retreat. “My eyes, your ass,” she warned them, indicating with her finger, repeating the gesture twice, once for each of their hindquarters, before backing into the vehicle.
The cherry top lit. The sheriff killed it. The patrol car peeled out and a moment later slowed down.
Johnny mounted his cycle.
“Thanks for backing me up there, Monkey,” J!m said, climbing on back. He wrapped his arms around Johnny’s waist, getting that old jolt of inner ape, a primal brew of agony and ecstasy that J!m could feel but not understand.
Johnny kick-started the bike.
“Ain’t my war, Freak.”
Chapter 4
Teasing Becomes Torture!
that star-spangled banner yet waved, minus the first, thirteenth, thirty-sixth, and forty-fifth stars, over the campus of Manhattan High School. The stars were there, symbolically, the same navy blue as the field, a compromise between legislators who thought they should be removed and those who wanted them in red, a political fight that had gotten churlish without ever making sense. But however many stars and whatever their color, when Lewis Seuss ran that newest Old Glory up the flagpole every morning, somebody saluted. Usually Lewis Seuss. The rest of them were normal teenagers.
Manhattan High was one of the oldest surviving buildings in the area, done in Collegiate Gothic, a majestic, soaring architecture that its occupants associated with cavemen. There was nothing shiny, oblique or curved about it. The three-story brick edifice had a stone façade cast with shields, eagles, arrows and other symbols of higher learning, and a central bell tower that had remained locked ever since Dr. Terwilliker, the old music teacher, had castrated dozens of pupils up there, using the pealing bell to mask their girlish screams, in hopes of creating an unstoppable five-hundred-boy soprano army, his plans becoming vague from there. Either that or the tower was locked because the administration didn’t want kids messing with the bell.
The halls of MHS, on this particular morning, were the same as any other morning. Students bustled and loitered, primped and posed. Tony Baker and Joan Staples, intimately intertwined and sharing Bone Domes, swayed down the hall, almost stepping on Bud Beezle, a vampire squidling from Beyond the Deep, causing the startled sophomore to squirt his bioluminescent mucus, at great emotional and metabolic cost. Nine out of ten students were human, and most of the others were humanoid, with enlarged or additional parts or animal attributes, but each somehow alike, as if one could strip away the fur and scales, the ear tips and pig noses, and they would be no different after all.
And then there was Larry Sweeney, a big tub of purple goo in husky-boy clothes.
A protozoan collective capable of taking any shape, Larry had long ago settled into the fat kid mold because it required the least effort, being essentially globular, while maximizing his digestive volume. He wasn’t bothered by the taunts, or anything, really. Larry was a happy mass, as transparent emotionally as he was physically.
At the moment there was only one thing on his amorphous mind: a Coco Zoom, the fourth-most delicious snack cake in the galaxy, and the only one currently in his possession.
Larry removed the silvery foil, though that wasn’t strictly necessary, from the chocolatey-coated devil’s food rocket filled with a creamy fuel of sugared fat and a drop of genuine rocket propellant in every Zoom. He leered at the treat for almost a minute before sticking it into his mouth shape, also unnecessary.
The rocket cake tumbled slowly, lost in inner space, savored by every amoeboid of Larry’s being, as he dreamily crooned the Coco Zoom jingle,
When the grumbles strike
And hunger looms,
Blast to the rescue
With Coco Zooms!
which was less lame sung by Titanic Sirens.
Larry was about to begin the dirty version when a hand reached into his head and snatched the cake away.
Tubesteak bit the gloppy pastry in half. “Sorry,” he said, cream and Larry dripping off his lips. “Were you eating this?”
“Careful,” Larry advised him. “I’m high in fatty acids.”
Russ took Larry by the elbow area. “Wanna show you something.”
“Fantastic!” Larry said.
the triumph rode past Howland’s Farm, a subsidiary of The Carboration, producing corn forty percent higher than an elephant’s eye since the year four EI. The proprietarily treated fields abutted the high school and served as an informal smoking and petting area, where, instead of gaining reputations, girls grew mustaches.
The final morning bell tolled as Johnny jumped the curb onto school property, tore up the lawn and narrowly missed the MHS sign, recently converted to viz, and its operator, Lewis Seuss, making the most of it, flashing, scrolling, sliding, flipping, spinning and wiping the morning blurbs:
MANHATTAN VS. SPRINGDALE, SAT., 1 PM
GO, MUTANTS!
HARVEST HOP, SAT., 7 PM
DRINK FIZH!
TODAY’S LUNCH: HOT PROTEIN RODS
Johnny parked the bike in front of the e
ntrance, where no one would touch it, twice. He and J!m dismounted, walked up the steps and through an infrared field that confirmed their identity and tardiness.
larry went along, as he always did, until he saw where Russ and Tubesteak were taking him.
“Hey,” he said, “love to hang out with you fellas in the boys’ room, but I gotta tell you. I don’t smoke. Or excrete.”
“That’s okay, Goo,” Russ said.
“It’s Jelly,” Larry politely corrected him.
demagogued the banner above the entrance hall, a green hand squeezing the life out of a whirling sports demon. It reset, then killed and killed again.
J!m and Johnny dawdled as other students rushed around them, giving Johnny wide berth on account of his reputation and high Geiger count. J!m they shouldered and elbowed and kneed with impunity, even the girls; he was light and squishy, had no talons or stingers or corrosive juices, and so served as a safe outlet for their proactive passive aggression, each blow a penance for the sins of his ancestors and other unrelated individuals.
Johnny’s wristplex barked. “We got detention,” he noted, erasing the plex. This was J!m’s sixth of the year and Johnny’s fiftieth, notable in only thirty-nine school days. Johnny also never served his, and since delinquent detentions doubled every semester, he was up to 12,028, which would take sixty school years to retire. Johnny figured they would be easier to do after he was dead.
J!m, rote: “You going to class today?”
Johnny raspberried. He did not put much stock in course work, either; he had only come today because J!m needed a ride, and some characters owed him money. He began two grades ahead of J!m, and for the last five years had been in the same grade, but now he was a junior and holding.
“You’ll never graduate.”
“I’m here until you go,” Johnny said, “then it’s the Army for me.”