Go, Mutants!

by Larry Doyle

  (c) If the apology is deemed insincere, or excessively babyish, you may proceed with the beating

  (i) at the current level, or

  (ii) with renewed vigor, to teach it a lesson about being a lying pussy.

  Russ saw himself awash in paperwork.

  J!m, deeply penitent: “I didn’t know this was a private circle jerk. As you were.” He walked away, almost two steps this time, before Toad grabbed him and drove him to his knees.

  So XVII.B.1.c.ii it would be.

  “What’s it gonna take,” Russ said, his anger refreshed, “to teach you some manners? A good beating? A great beating?”

  “A best beating!” Tubesteak chimed in.

  Russ had a whole speech, dependent on rhythm and momentum and building to a well-chosen cri de coeur, now ruined.

  “Let’s just kill him,” suggested Ice, snapping his obviously spent antipsychotic gum. “It’s not illegal.”

  This was an intriguing interpretation of the case law, and if this were Mississippi, a conservative reading. Before the one-stop genocide could be debated on the merits, Bennie staggered into the circle, wristplex under his chin, unlit and in transmit mode, sending viz of his neck to his personal business node, The Happy Stop.

  “A beating will do,” Russ decided, feeling chivalrous.

  Toad lifted J!m to his feet. Russ got in close.

  “Now,” reprising his earlier witticism, “where were we?”

  “That thing I said about your mother,” paraphrased J!m, “abandoning, never loving you, thus explaining your deep-seated yet entirely justified feelings of inferiority.”

  Amply reminded, Russ prepared to proceed with the beating with renewed vigor, when his eyes were drawn to a prospective humiliation he could not pass up.

  He turned his torch on J!m’s abdomen. The shirt was soaked blue-black, seeping up from the waist.

  “You piss yourself, Anderson?”

  Oh, how they laughed, never tiring of Russ’s observational humor, laughing at J!m for the fifth or sixth time that weekend, as if they were doing it for the very first time, instead of the last.

  “How can he piss?” Tubesteak bon motted. “He’s got no dick!”

  The laughter died.

  “Don’t talk anymore,” Russ said.

  J!m saw his opportunity and wrested himself away from Toad, who effortlessly wrested him back. J!m thrashed, the dark secretions spraying off his head and into Russ’s face and mouth. The droplets boiled on his skin.

  Tubesteak, squeaky: “I don’t think that’s piss!”

  Russ spat out the silver nitrate. He gritted his blue and corroding teeth and threw a punch to J!m’s gut. J!m’s head responded with a concussive wave that knocked Russ to the ground and broke Toad’s nose.

  Every synapse in J!m’s brain fired at once, invoking a million billion memories, several not his, the pyrotechnics scored through a cognitive quirk with Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Festival Overture, Op. 49. Wild current encircled his head, swarmed down his neck and crazed along his torso and to his extremities, consuming his clothes.

  Russ shouted to his crew for support and saw the last of Tubesteak disappearing into the corn. He faced J!m, unable to turn away from the burning and shining light.

  J!m raised his arms, hands open, his face to the sky.

  “Dad?”

  “Listen,” Russ said, stepping back. “I didn’t mean to set you off. I’m gonna—”

  The electric tempest whirled away from J!m with tremendous force, curlicues of light crisscrossing Russ a thousand times as they threw him deep into the corn.

  And then, complicating matters, J!m burst into flames.

  He burned brightly for several seconds, flared, and fell over.

  About a half hour later, he extinguished.

  Chapter 19

  Death and Desire!

  OPEN ON

  Black.

  Not noir or vérité, not the luxuriant gloss of the classics nor the sooty murk of the bottom of the bill. There is only one true black, and it can’t be filmed.

  This black.

  FADE TO BLACK

  from the air, it was divine, a vast mandala carved out of the corn, Fibonacci spirals and Platonic solids woven with a golden string, of greater beauty and complexity than one of those Martian crap circles. The only blemish was a tiny black smear at the bottom.

  A Gaylord coupe pulled up underneath it.

  The sheriff and deputy stepped out. Left in the backseat was Tubesteak, who had struggled with his duality as a loyal flunky and a natural snitch before coming to a thrilling solution: ratting out his friends in secret.

  It did not look like a burnt body. The remains were charred but intact, each of its reaching fingers articulated, its upturned eye sockets unsunken, the anguish on its face exquisitely detailed. It was as if J!m had been cast by Rodin, the missing black Jesus from The Gates of Hell.

  “Crispy critter there,” Deputy Furry said.

  “He was a boy,” the sheriff said.

  “Boy,” the deputy repeated, skeptical.

  Nick Ford crouched next to the carcass. It smelled wrong, absent the cupric acridity of boiled blood or sulfurous stench of burnt hair; of course J!m had no hair, and his blood could have been chocolate sauce for all the sheriff knew. What concerned Nick was what he did smell: plastic and gasoline.

  “Napalm.” There were canisters of it in his basement, which his father used to facilitate weeding.

  He couldn’t believe his son was capable of this, but he couldn’t disbelieve it either.

  The rumble of a motorcycle cut off further supposition, followed by the crack and thresh of falling stalks and the arrival of Johnny at the crime scene. He leapt off his bike and knelt next to the body.

  “Freak.”

  He cupped his hand under the head.

  “That’s evidence,” Peg Furry said.

  Had the sheriff not been there, Johnny would have torn the deputy’s heart from her chest, bitten off half, and shoved the rest up or down one or more orifices.

  Instead he roared, from the half that could not speak, ancient and ferocious.

  He picked J!m up.

  The deputy went for her gun.

  “Peg,” the sheriff said.

  J!m’s outstretched arms proved awkward, but Johnny solved it, carrying his cruciform friend over his shoulder in the traditional arrangement. He mounted the bike, nodded to the sheriff and left.

  “That’s tampering, Sheriff,” Furry said. “You’ve gone and lost chain of custody there. Why in God’s holy name would you let him take it?”

  “It,” the sheriff said, “was his friend.”

  And, yes, he was aware it was evidence, too.

  j!m didn’t fit on his bed. His arms stuck out, and with his body stiffened to his full height, his feet hung over, too.

  Marie, Jelly and Johnny milled around, feeling rightly useless.

  At the bedside, Dr. Rand studied the blackened boy. He rapped on the fire-hardened chest, shave-and-a-haircut, and took as significant that he did not hear two-bits back.

  “Anthracite,” he concluded, incorrectly. “What did Dr. Bennell say?”

  “That he’s dead,” Miw sniffled in the corner, needing two walls to remain upright.

  “I’ll see what I can do.” The science teacher unlatched his tackle box and pulled out a hammer. He considered it, and put it back.

  “what I don’t understand,” said Sheriff Ford, in uniform and on duty, in his own living room, in his own goddamn chair, “is, what were you doing in the cornfield in the first place?”

  “You think this is my fault?” Russ’s hair and eyebrows were gone, his head and upper chest etched with a web of fine second-degree burns. He was slathered with Vaseline, slick and pinguid, a delicious irony if J!m weren’t dead.

  Rusty sat at the other end of the couch, medium-keening, her grandfather behind her, patting her head.

  “If you ask me,” the general said, jawing his pipe, “our boy has done a s
ervice to his community.”

  Russ, protesting too much: “I didn’t do dink!”

  “Like he burst himself into flames!” Rusty lost it, yet again. “Why would he do that?”

  “I don’t know,” Russ whined. “He’s a creature.”

  EThL, programmed to attend to that very cry, motored up behind Russ, extracted the pillow from behind his head and fluffed it. As the consequent cloud of feathers settled into Russ’s gooey scalp, Rusty felt a teensy bit better.

  the professionals had come and gone. Handsome Dr. Ben Bennell had stayed only a minute or two, using the word dead seven times, but offered to come by that evening if there was anything he could do, or any other evening. A weeping Father Egan performed the Anointing of the Sick, despite the disqualifying factors of J!m’s not being Catholic and no longer sick; later, he said a prayer for the boy at Mass, the first time a priest had been heckled in that church since they’d added perfume to the holy water to keep Mrs. Porter from guzzling it. Sheriff Ford also came by to express his genuine sorrow and disingenuous avowal to uncover what had happened.

  And so it was all up to the mad scientist.

  Miw had not called Dr. Rand; he had assumed an urgent invitation based on his nonexistent relationship with Miw. Also, J!m had always been his favorite specimen. Miw didn’t hold out much hope. She had heard rumors that Howard had fooled with the primal forces of nature during his days with the RAD Group at the university, but also that his results had ranged from poor to apocalyptic.

  Miw knew only one person who could bring back the dead, and they had killed him.

  But she hoped.

  Dr. Rand had what appeared to be a grade school microscope strapped to his head, and was hovering over the body making scientific sounds.

  Marie watched her father with low expectations, conditioned by her mother’s lifelong harangue on his inability to grow or fetch her a body, along with all the pets that had gone into their garage for repairs and never come out.

  On J!m’s bedside table was the book she had given him.

  It fell open to the first page. J!m had underlined a passage at the very bottom:

  “You dummy,” Marie said, closing the book.

  Dr. Rand lifted off his Rand Zoomatic Portoscope. He ran a fingertip along J!m’s forehead and studied it intensely. He licked it, confirming his hypothesis.

  “Based on the carbon signature,” he pronounced, “it appears as if Jim here has been incinerated.”

  A short interval later he thoughtfully added, “Sorry.”

  Miw crumpled and Johnny caught her. Jelly went to give Marie a hug, but she escaped it; he pivoted and embraced Johnny from behind, reaching all the way around to include Miw.

  Marie sat at J!m’s side. She touched his cheek, bent over and kissed him.

  She turned to the others. Her lips were black.

  She might have said how much she loved him, or what a bastard he was for dying in the middle of a quarrel. She knew a lot of applicable poetry.

  “He,” she said, and ran from the room.

  Dr. Rand should have waited a few more minutes before saying, “Miw, if it’s all right, I’d like to take this,” meaning J!m, “back to the lab.”

  Miw wasn’t certain she had heard that correctly.

  “All my power tools are there,” Dr. Rand elaborated.

  She had.

  “You want to cut him open?!”

  “Perhaps,” pronounced Dr. Rand, “from what I learn, we can prevent this tragedy from reoccurring.”

  “To who?” Miw screamed, to be forgiven the grammatical lapse. “He was the only one!”

  “So,” said Dr. Rand, “no?”

  it was almost not a sound at all.

  s.

  An individual fizz, liminal, and yet to Miw it was deafening.

  A ray of light emanated from J!m’s lips, and multiplied, stippling across his mouth, shooting from his eyes, everywhere, a thousand points hissing in high harmony, singing a body celestial.

  Miw and Johnny were transfixed. Dr. Rand observed from an increasing distance.

  “He’s gonna blow!” Jelly yelled, duck-and-covering.

  The beams shut off. The smooth hard surface of the body was riven with fissures.

  “The core is still burning,” Dr. Rand said, stepping back into the room. “Obviously.”

  Jim’s right hand slowly closed, crumbling its carbon shell.

  “He’s alive,” Miw wished.

  J!m sat up, arms outstretched. The dark chrysalis fell away in hexagonal shards.

  “He’s alive!” Miw kissed Johnny, and kissed him again. “He’s alive!”

  “As I suspected,” said Dr. Rand, leaning in for his kiss.

  Miw pounced on the bed, on J!m, baby-babying him, all over him, blackening her fur as she squeezed him.

  “So hard,” she said. “Like your father.”

  His skin was a cool silver, armored in a shining carapace; his brain bobbed regally in a diamond skull.

  “He’s mutated into his adult form,” Dr. Rand said. “Obviously.”

  Johnny was crying, a little bit, but able to maintain male camaraderie.

  “Ain’t puberty a bitch?” he joked.

  J!m looked around the room, wafting into consciousness. His voice was twelve notes lower than before, fuller and more mellifluous.

  “Where’s Marie?” he asked.

  “She left,” Johnny said flatly.

  Jelly pulled his head out of his anal region.

  “Astounding!”

  the mood was grim at the Ford household. First Rusty outright accused Russ of murdering J!m, because J!m was too pure and Russ couldn’t stand it. Russ maintained that J!m attacked him, and that Rusty was defending J!m because she’d wanted him bad, only she could never have had him, since J!m had no him to have. The twins swapped obscenities while the general mused, what with aliens attacking humans and the local constabulary doing nothing to stop it, if maybe it wasn’t time for the Army to step in, prompting the sheriff to counter that the last time the Army stepped in, it had resulted in tens of millions of deaths and the loss of four U.S. states and seven countries. The general took this personally, and thanked the Lord that the sheriff’s sainted mother wasn’t around to hear this, and the sheriff said no, she was in Chicago and had far more unsaintly things to say about the general, provoking the general into bringing up the twins’ mother. The twins stopped bickering, wanting to hear this, at which time EThL mistook Russ’s feathered head for that night’s supper and tried to pluck it, which required a hard shutdown.

  Sheriff Ford’s wristplex rumbled. He read it twice.

  “It appears that Dr. Rand has . . .” easing into his chair. “Jim Anderson is alive. He’s going to be fine. Good news.”

  Rusty whimpered with joy. Russ just whimpered.

  “How is that good news?!” he moaned, his grandfather dismantling the robotic claw clamped to his head.

  black liquid swirled down the drain. J!m waited as the water went gray and then clear, unsure when the shower was over. He did not know the protocol; his previous greasiness precluded human ablutions. He was oil-free now, though, and filthy, this black powder in every crevice, of which there were millions more, his whole surface encrusted with carbon nanocrystals, harder than ordinary diamonds and a bother to clean.

  The water got cold and he got out.

  He stood before the mirror, which he hadn’t done in years, admiring himself, which he had never done. He was like a five-year-old boy after a bath, posing and preening and finding no flaws, only his own fabulous self.

  J!m had not liked dying (and he had died, a fully off state required for his transmogrification, so there’ll be no carping about that). The preceding pain was intolerable, and preferable to the moment when all feeling ceased and his last lucid thought was of nonexistence. After that there had been nothing, not Heaven nor presumptive Hell, nor even the sense of nothing, until he was resurrected, or reincarnated, or rebooted. The experience had taken
all the fun out of entertaining his own death.

  And yet, he couldn’t argue with the results.

  He was nearly seven feet tall, half a foot over last night, and daunting, his shoulders broad and sharp, his posture martial. The soft ridges and bumps of his larval self were glimmering blades and spurs, the rest of his skin a glittering lattice of the highest mathematics, playing in the light, stylish paisley waves gyring across the surface. And being silver was far superior to baby blue.

  His mother was right. What standing up straight and eating your Nixons could do, along with a little immolation.

  His gorgeous exodermis was not merely cosmetic. His limbs were angular and reengineered, responding crisply to instructions. His head was streamlined, his old soft buttocky skull an adamantine heart, imperial rather than scrotal, and held high; he couldn’t feel its weight at all. His tail was coiled tightly against his lower back, not lolling around creating a disturbance.

  J!m clenched his fist, encountering something queer: strength. He rapped his knuckles on the wall and went through the plasterboard, kicking up gypsum.

  “You okay in there?” called Miw, from the hallway.

  “Yeah, Mom.”

  “Go to sleep. You’ve got school tomorrow.”

  So: everything and nothing had changed.

  J!m slipped on underpants and got on the bed. He picked up the book from his night table, finding his place, about a third of the way through.

  That kid is messed up, J!m thought.

  “Lights out!” his mother yelled.

  J!m put down the book and shut the lamp off.

  “Thank you.”

  “Love you, Mom.”

  “Go to sleep.”

  J!m pulled his knees up to his chest.

  The moonlight felt sweet.

  He laughed when he realized: he did not dread tomorrow.

  Chapter 20

  Teenager or Terrifying Beast?

  INT. SHOWER—NIGHT

  White HISSING from above.

  THE CREATURE tilts its head back, letting the hot water cascade down its face.