Go, Mutants!

by Larry Doyle

  J!m was bemused. “You’re gonna join the Army?”

  “Who said join?”

  J!m didn’t respond.

  “They better send me to Brazil, or the Ozarks, ’cuz I am not going to the Pole. That Thing’s unkillable.”

  J!m wasn’t listening. He was staring at Marie, smiling back at him, all three of her.

  the boys were jolly friends, Jelly in the middle and Russ and Tubesteak on either side, holding him down.

  Jelly, apologetic: “I’m just not thirsty.”

  “Sure you are,” Russ said, shoving Jelly’s head into the toilet, or, rather, shoving his hand through Jelly’s head and into the bowl.

  “Sowwy,” Jelly snuffled, a fist in his nose.

  Russ yanked his hand out, took Jelly by the shirt front and dragged him down.

  Jelly’s hands and feet shot backward, stretching several feet to grab hold of the outside of the stall.

  Tubesteak flushed.

  The water sluiced viciously around Jelly’s hydrophilic head. Drawn into the whirl, his face twisted around and down.

  Jelly’s hands and feet let go as his gelatinous mass slid out of his clothes and down the drain with a loud gurgling slurp.

  Tubesteak giggled. Russ, too, was pleased.

  “I can’t believe I didn’t think of this before!”

  marie’s campaign posters were unremarkable, VOTE MARIE, MARIE 4 ALL, MARIE CARES, etc., over an embedded viz of her smiling, politically primitive compared with those of her opponent, Lewis Seuss, declaring LEWIS IS THE KEWLEST and SEUSS FOR YOUTH, showing his intense head, rotating 360 degrees and then transforming into a werewolf, with the disclaimer, FOR ILLUSTRATIVE PURPOSES ONLY; LEWIS SEUSS IS NOT A LYCANTHROPE. All Marie had going for her was her charm and decency and the fact that most of the electorate had not, at one time or other, beaten her up.

  J!m gazed at Marie’s vizage in a way he couldn’t to her face. She was unpretentiously pretty, hair short and black, eyes blue and green, right and left respectively, lips that most human females must purchase. He was most whelmed by her smile, so big, so intense, flagging in one corner near the end of the ten-second loop, and then pushed harder still before starting all over again.

  “You gonna or not?” Johnny asked.

  J!m walked away from the posters. “I’m gonna.”

  “If you don’t, maybe I’ll punch you.”

  “I said I’m gonna.”

  “Maybe I’ll punch you hard.”

  The halls were empty; everybody else was in homeroom, sarcastically pledging allegiance and disregarding an announcement that due to a plumbing snafu in the girl’s locker room, all female students should schedule mammograms immediately.

  “How hard can it be? It’s a dance,” Johnny was saying. “You’ve seen each other naked.”

  “We were five.”

  “Savor it. You may never see another one.”

  “You’re a sick monkey.” And likely right. There were plenty of girls that J!m could get, the kind attracted to off-species bad boys. Johnny attracted them from out of state. But J!m had never been interested, always thinking that Marie was his girl. They held hands and kissed often, if not succulently, and while the clothes had not come off in a few years (though far more recently than Johnny knew), J!m thought he and Marie were dating, or at least pre-dating, until this morning, when she got in another boy’s car.

  “How about I do it for you?” Johnny offered. “I’ll tell her, Jim woulda asked you himself, only he is tragically dickless.”

  “I’m asking her,” J!m said. “Right after Bio.”

  “Sure,” Johnny said, “you can grow yourself some nuts in a beaker.”

  the giggle echoed behind them. J!m turned to see Russ and Tubesteak running from the bathroom, beside themselves with malevolent glee.

  J!m didn’t use public conveniences, in compliance with hazardous waste protocols, and was appalled when he entered the boys’ room, how organic it smelled: fecal, alkaline, musky, fetid, curdled, Brylcreemy and smoky, from the incineration of three distinct plants. He couldn’t fathom why human females would have anything to do with these mammals.

  Heaped on the floor of an open stall was a pair of fifty-eight-inch Rolypolyester pants in a gingham pattern. Johnny reached in and fished out an X4L Polynesian shirt, the one with the Tiki Goddess that Jelly claimed to have wet humped.

  “That’s one creature you do not want in the sewers.”

  A glurping came two stalls down.

  J!m opened the door. An undifferentiated purple column rose from the commode, taking shape, head first, filling in eyes, ears, nose, and big mouth.

  “Refreshing!”

  “Hey, Jell,” Johnny said.

  “How’s the water?” J!m asked. “Meet anybody?”

  An idea spurted from Jelly’s head, forming a lightbulb. “Boing!” he said, head disappearing down the toilet, followed by the bulb.

  A few seconds later they heard a woman, possibly Principal Brooks, shriek, with either fright or delight.

  Jelly reemerged from the bowl, a grin as wide as the toilet seat.

  “Incredible!”

  Chapter 5

  Science Gone Wild!

  written on the blackboard, in the crabbed hand of a man unappreciated in his day, mocked and ostracized by his peers, who were not peers at all but mental gnats whom he could crush with the contents of a single neuron in his vastly more sapient big toe:

  Friday, October 27, 10 ex iste

  Xenobiology

  Dr. Howard Rand

  Exam today!

  Dr. Rand sat behind an antique wood desk, paging through a plexicon set to A. Z. Rosenbaum’s Show Them All!, a favorite among misunderstood geniuses and adolescents. Behind him was the skeleton of an aquatic humanoid from the Devonian Age, the last of his race, a splendid specimen that Dr. Rand had harvested personally on an Amazon expedition years ago, over the hysterical objections of irksome locals.

  Plastered about the room were hand-drawn charts showing cross-sections of various aliens and mutants Dr. Rand had cross-sected, scribbled with voluminous notes and diatribes. The students sitting nearby were freely referring to them for the test.

  J!m was in the back, pretzelled into a chrome and teal desk, its kidney-shaped top tilted acutely into where somebody failing this test might guess his kidneys were. J!m wasn’t far along, and wasn’t getting any farther; he was watching Marie, sitting up front, going over her answers. He was crafting his next words to her, looking for something friendly that sounded like him, lighthearted yet within his ennui. So far he had: Dance?

  “Two minutes,” Dr. Rand said, looking directly at J!m.

  J!m reluctantly returned to the test, an inane exercise in a tiresome subject that J!m would never have any use for unless he decided to direct episodes of Edward Morbius, Monster Doctor, which he would not. He knew all of this material anyhow, as he knew everything he had ever heard or seen, along with a lot of drivel his brain came with, including Sumerian, the complete lyrics of Frank Sinatra’s Songs for Young Lovers, and a post-Newtonian meta-calculus that was only good for guessing the number of jelly beans in a jar. J!m learned so much so fast that he found the process supremely insipid, the only fascinating aspect being how much worthless information there was out there.

  2. What is the main diet of the Venusian Succubix?

  Baby stuff, much like J!m’s new hand. He began to write, his stubby nascent fingers holding the pen like a dagger, “Myelin glycopro—”

  A thundering crack from the center of his skull discharged bolts of white through his brain. His craniun flared with a soft pop, and went dark.

  Forty-five seconds he sat there, eyes forward, little fist, all the lights out.

  “One minute.”

  J!m blinked and looked at his test.

  2. What is the main diet of the Venusian Succubix?

  He was nonplussed to find half the answer written there, as if written by an infant, and then he saw his tiny hand, and the
morning began to reassemble itself bit by charred bit from his frazzled synapses, none of it explaining J!m’s most pressing question: Had he just died for a minute?

  Not quite, or yet.

  sqt.

  That was external. J!m picked the wet wad of tissue off his eyelid, and followed it to its source:

  Russ, adjacent, impatiently indicating J!m’s full-size left hand, blocking a clear view of his answers.

  J!m lifted his hand—momentarily, to swat Russ away—and returned to his test just as a scarlet F manifested on its surface. J!m looked up to see Dr. Rand swiping a finger across his desk with extreme prejudice.

  The test fluttered off J!m’s plextop, replaced by a soundless adviz for Fizh!, that day’s learning partner.

  An adolescent human male and female sat in a car in a secluded area. He was earnestly arguing a position that she found unconvincing. He reached between his legs, pausing long enough to raise expectations, and produced a tall bottle of bubbly luminescence. The greenish glow lit up her eyes, which impossibly dilated in response.

  The camera craned back, leaving the couple to imbibe indescribable refreshment, or to test the soft drink’s rumored effectiveness as a contraceptive.

  The product’s lazy slogan effervesced into view:

  J!m watched, registering another product he would never buy, and waited for the bell to ring.

  It did.

  Tests minimized off all the PLEX desks, and Dr. Rand announced, “Chapters twelve through sixteen for Monday.”

  A group groan, sprinkled with whines and one asshole.

  Dr. Rand, magnanimous: “Just chapters twelve, thirteen and fourteen. Enjoy the dance.”

  This reminded J!m that there was a dance, and that he was going to ask a girl to it, that girl, the one walking out the door.

  J!m staggered from his desk, half dragging it down the aisle, and went after Marie.

  “Jim?”

  J!m kept moving, and so, more forcefully: “Jim, could I see you for a moment?”

  Marie slipped into the stream of passing students.

  Dr. Rand did not look up from the test papers arrayed on his desk, checking and X-ing, his finger swooping in the air with the metronomic fury of a conductor who would one day be found with a sharpened flute through his neck.

  “I expected more from you, Jim.”

  “I would have expected more from Russell. He was raised right.”

  Dr. Rand grandly swept the papers into memory. “This isn’t about that.” He rapped the desktop. The Darwin English Oak reverted to the black gloss of its off state.

  “Jim, you’ve got 6.5 times the brains of any kid in this school, but you’re getting straight C’s.”

  “I don’t test well.”

  “That’s a load of feces, Jim,” Dr. Rand said, pivoting to face him. “Immature feces.”

  J!m bowed his head in contrition. “You’re right, Dr. Rand. I’ve been suppressing my true intelligence to conceal my plan for world domination.” Head up, voice even. “It’s unfortunate you found out.”

  He raised his arm and reached for the teacher’s throat, his infantile fingers wriggling slowly.

  Dr. Rand, unamused: “This isn’t one of your silly movies, Jim.”

  J!m commenced an evil laugh, and was reaching a gratifying crescendo when his head suddenly effulged, sensational arcs of light fracturing across the whole of his brain. He lost his balance and grabbed the corner of the desk, which emitted a C major chord and restarted.

  J!m did not experience pain like humans and other mammals, his body sending discreet advisories on injuries, not wishing to impose, but this was pain, extreme and insistent, and for someone who had never felt such a thing, terrifying.

  Dr. Rand found it fascinating.

  “Fractal grid,” he observed, poking J!m’s supple skull, disrupting the grid and causing J!m additional and inestimable pain. “Curious.”

  The discharges dissipated, a letdown for one of them.

  “Jim, after school I’d like you to stop by my lab.”

  “Your . . . garage?”

  With prickly imperiousness: “It may not be as ‘shiny’ as the one at the university, but it’s uncompromised.”

  J!m, senses returning, had one thought.

  “Gotta go.” And he did.

  Dr. Rand sat against the edge of his desk. It changed from oak to Von Braun Gun Metal. He dispassionately smelled the tip of his finger, then sucked on it with intellectual rigor.

  Chapter 6

  Their “Growing-up” Shocking

  lurching into the hallway, j!m miscalculated the corner and slammed into the lockers, wobbled off them and lunged headlong in the direction he knew Marie had gone, clipping and spinning Lewis Seuss, who was unsuccessfully distributing radiation badges inscribed: FOR A HOT TIME, VOTE SEUSS.

  “Vader,” Lewis muttered, vowing revenge yet again that morning.

  J!m was digitigrade, a toe-walker, and wore a prosthetic wedge in his boots to affect a human stride, but at times like these, when he forgot where he was and who he was pretending to be, he ran on his phalanges, torso canted forward, in a kind of manic prance that was quite graceful in slow motion. He forgot to pump his arms, another assimilation, and dangled them in front, limp-wristed. Moving in this manner up to thirty miles per hour, J!m was one scary sissy.

  Students waited until he was well past before laughing at him.

  J!m downshifted to indifference as he came into view of Room 15, Marie’s third period, the room where Marie took Wifely Arts second semester of sophomore year, seventh period.

  He could see Marie through the door, facing away, talking earnestly with Sandra Jane, who looked as if she were trying to explain something to a child and proving she should never have children.

  J!m signalled to Sandra Jane. A brief eye movement acknowledged, and negated, his existence.

  “Marie,” J!m said at a volume he calibrated to be heard by her and no one else. She turned and smiled.

  J!m leaned forward, and into a bright green raptorial foreleg. The pincer tugged his earlobe, its spiked tibia grazing his throat. A triangular head appeared from above, a woman’s face etched in exoskeleton, her antennae twitching impatiently.

  “Shoo!” Miss Mantis said.

  melia mantis had been teaching Feminine Hygiene at MHS for a dozen years, since the accident. To look at her, her lime hair in shellacked buns on the corners of her head, her prothorax nothing to write home about, it was hard to imagine she had once been Miss Greece, a Jill of the Month, and a promising sex researcher. Had she isolated that pheromone that drives male mantids so wild they don’t mind getting their heads bitten off, she’d be Queen of the Earth. Instead she was a nine-foot-tall predatory insect with an enormous caboose, things sometimes turning out differently than one imagines they will.

  Miss Mantis loved her girls, though, she often said, while despising them.

  “Ladies,” she addressed them with a sensuous Grecian hiss. “Shut it up now.”

  The whispering and tittering came to an abrupt halt.

  Miss Mantis clicked across the room and crawled onto the tree trunk that served as her desk. “So,” she said, “who are we going to the dance hop tomorrow night?”

  After a pause for translation, all the girls raised their hands except Marie. Sandra Jane kicked at her, but Marie shook her head.

  “It is time”—Miss Mantis tented her forelegs—“for you ladies to see the sex viz.”

  There was much unladylike excitement.

  Hissssssssssssssss, her spiracles at full blast, brought about order.

  “It is not for giggling,” Miss Mantis said.

  boys were being boyish, denigrating each other’s genitalia and reputed genital accomplishments, when Coach blew the whistle and they jogged out of the locker room, spanking and pinching one another’s posteriors.

  When the last of them had gone, J!m slunk from a bathroom stall wearing his athletic uniform, carrying his street clothes.

&nbs
p; the title promised, and the dark room tingled with the nervous yearnings of eighteen adolescent human females desirous of desire. Marie alone took notes.

  The viz was at least ten years old, judging from the subtly ridiculous hair and clothes, with odd scratches on the image. But what it lacked in contemporary setting, good writing, credible acting, adequate lighting and any camerawork at all, it made up for in being about sex.

  In the hallway of a high school much like their own, Molly, a pretty brunette, was talking excitedly to Peggy, an equally pretty blonde.

  “And after the dance, we went up to Lookout Point—”

  “You went up to Lookout Point with Archy?”

  “Sure, silly.”

  Peggy gasped. “But he’s a Cucurachan!”

  “It was fun!” Molly said. “But you have to watch out for that second set of arms!”

  The two girls laughed.

  Molly fainted.

  The scene switched to a doctor’s office. Molly sat in a gown on an examination table, attended by kindly Dr. Kinsey, whom Marie recognized from an adviz for Frost Chief, the home head freezer.

  Molly was distraught. “How can I be pregnant? We only kissed!”

  “Molly,” Dr. Kinsey patiently explained, “for your friend Archy, kissing is a form of mating. And now, I’m afraid, he’s laid eggs in your brain.”

  “Oh no!”

  Dr. Kinsey placed a reassuring hand on Molly’s knee, chuckling softly. “ ‘Oh no’ is right.” Then, with a pat above the knee: “But that’s the risk you girls take when you get into sexual shenanigans with alien species.”

  Marie stopped writing. She could not understand how identical information could have come from an approved educational viz and Sandra Jane Douglas.

  Dr. Kinsey gave Molly a comforting squeeze a few inches higher on the leg and walked over to a file cabinet, a metal device once used to store paper documents. He removed a manila folder, like a plexfolio, only with mass.

  “Here, let me show you some disturbing photographs.”

  The girls in Miss Mantis’s class, based on the sounds they were making, did not want to see disturbing photographs, yet could not look away. Especially Marie.