Go, Mutants!

by Larry Doyle

  October 8, 1955 - “Operation: Welcome.” Under the supervision of Army General Walter M. Ford, all aliens and natural-born mutants in the USA are transported to military hospitality centers for “welcoming activities.” Leonine Miw Bastet, mate of And¡ Ra’, is taken from Los Angeles to the Army Guest Suites at Groom Lagoon.

  October 13, 1955 - At the Six Gallery in San Francisco, USA, poet Allen Ginsberg debuts Howl, a youthful cry of anti-conformity. Swift and decisive intervention by the authorities brings the movement to an end.

  October 27, 1955 - Miw Bastet gives birth to male alien hybrid, weighing 8 lbs, 6 oz, mostly head. He is named J!mmu, Regulese for “the First.”

  There was much to process here, not least that his given name was even more abnormal than he knew.

  J!m shuddered. The sky was black and the stars too far away to provide any warmth.

  He started to slip the document back into the envelope when he saw there was something else.

  A magazine, the old, corporeal kind.

  promised “Fun for Men.” The cover, dated December 1953 (AI), was a mixed-media illustration of a smug rabbit with antlers wearing a silk smoking jacket. J!m flipped through it, intrigued by the very tangibility of it, and also what had been considered fun for men, largely premium liquors and room-size music devices. A large percentage of the cartoons involved fully clothed men talking to naked women. The quality of the writers was surprisingly high, though Arthur Conan Doyle would not be a regular contributor. As curious as it was, J!m couldn’t imagine why Mr. Gray had given it to him.

  The answer was on page 57.

  Running along the bottom of the page were three photos of J!m’s father, looking urbane and erudite and not the least bit evil. J!m read the caption under one of them:

  “Humans are barely 200,000 years old. You’re babies. No wonder you’re so fond of shiny objects.”

  And he could be monderately amusing. J!m read another:

  “I do love these ‘movies’ of yours. Not clear on what purpose they serve, but I quite enjoy them. Dreams you can have while awake, yes?”

  J!m almost dropped the magazine. He grabbed for it and the center spread slipped out. Anxious to get back to his undiabolical father, J!m nudged the pages back in; they folded over. Frustrated, he opened the magazine.

  There, posed against a red satin backdrop, knees bent, torso to camera, face half hidden behind her arm, was Miw Bastet, twenty years younger and extremely nude. Her stomach fur was lighter and her pink belly shone through; mercifully, she had only two breasts.

  J!m’s mother was Jack’s Jill of the Month.

  The reading light on his forehead flared, not poof but kapop, lighting half the block with the retort echoing beyond that. The magazine and envelope he was holding flashed several times, riddled with electricity; very soon the paper reached 451 degrees.

  It was promptly engulfed, and J!m could do nothing but hold the ball of fire and watch it burn. History, his personal past, was in flames, and he didn’t feel it. He was retardant.

  The orange husk rose from his hands. He reached for it, scattering the glowing embers. They floated into the night sky, higher and farther, until they were indistinguishable from the stars.

  Chapter 24

  Devastating Passions

  “fire good!”

  Russ marched down the beach, wielding fire at the end of a stick. In this light and context, the turbulent whorl scorched onto his face gave him the mien of a tribal warrior.

  “Fire bright!” his gang rejoined, in formation behind him.

  “Fire, fire, cleanse the night!” two hundred teens shouted, parting the sands for Russ, the one with the fire.

  Russ strode through them, stopping before a large dark figure. He held his torch aloft and ceremoniously threw it into the kindling at his feet.

  The oil-soaked Bibles burned magnificently, and the flames climbed up and outward, raging across the thirty-foot-high effigy with its arms outstretched.

  There was much rejoicing.

  Generations of teenagers had come to Crater Cove the night before Halloween for “Fire Night” or “Night of Fire,” to writhe before the Man on Fire, or Fire Man, in an orgy of community-approved paganism. In the very old days the entire town came out, and the Man on Fire was an actual man, but this tradition was phased out as the area became less agrarian and the locals were less concerned about the harvest and more interested in a spectacular fire. This year’s Man, it was widely noted, had an unreasonably large head, but that was a happy coincidence.

  “fire is good,” jelly said, the flames reflecting off his facial surface.

  “Yeah, who doesn’t love fire,” muttered Rusty, looking around for J!m or Johnny, or anybody really. J!m had said he wasn’t coming, and Johnny was off in the city, salving his wounds with the blues and women who appreciated men who sang the blues.

  Rusty stumbled upon the conversation between Cathy Downs and Pamela Duncan, two girls Rusty did not like, based on their dumb faces.

  “He almost killed Russ Ford,” Cathy Downs said, adding gravely, “our quarterback!”

  “You know,” Pamela Duncan said, “his dad killed six million Jews!”

  Rusty, uninvited: “That was Hitler, wastebrain.”

  “What’s up your orifice?” Cathy Downs defended her dumb-faced friend. She pointed to Jelly. “Goo juice?”

  Rusty was upon her. They fell into in the sand, fighting like girls, without form or function. Pamela Duncan kicked into the tangle of hair and nails, enthusiastically but inaccurately, deviating her ally’s septum.

  Jelly was overjoyed. They were fighting over him!

  across the inferno, Marie felt crowded and alone. Lewis Seuss had already approached and offered, in the spirit of bipartisanship, to mate with her, as long as nobody else had to know. He was only a few feet away now, enticing Sheila James with promises of access to the highest corridors of Manhattan High power, unable to accept that his election was a fluke, and that even if legitimate, socially meaningless. He was a mutant, human or not, in costume or out.

  Marie was about to go home when two mammoth glands with a softball on top approached her.

  “Guess what?” Sandra Jane squeaked. “Russ is ready to forgive you.”

  “Hot joy,” Marie said.

  “If you say you’re sorry. And show you’re sorry.” To illustrate, Sandra Jane tried to suck on her fingertip, but found her new hands were more than her new mouth could handle. She gagged.

  Marie, politely: “Thanks for the heads-up.”

  “Is that some kind of crack?!” Sandra Jane stormed off.

  Marie glanced after her, and saw:

  J!m, away from everyone, standing in the surf, his diamond skin gleaming in the moonlight.

  russ watched marie and J!m stroll off down the beach.

  “Let’s blast.”

  “It’s still burning,” Tubesteak objected, gesturing to the fire to bolster his argument.

  “Leave the girls,” Russ ordered. “We’re getting women.”

  Sandra Jane saw them go and cupped her hands around her head. “I don’t have to be home!” she offered. “Ever!”

  “girls, girls,” jelly chided the females wrestling at his feet. “There’s plenty of Jelly to spread around.”

  Cathy Downs sniggered into the sand. Rusty yanked her hair one last time and got up, brushing herself off. She saw J!m and Marie receding down the shoreline. Jelly stepped into her eye line.

  “You don’t have to fight over me,” with needy bravado, “I’m your private playground!”

  Rusty spat blood and sand. “Don’t make me laugh,” clarifying: “in disgust.”

  Jelly’s face lost definition. “Hey, I’m a human being.”

  Rusty laughed. “No, you’re not.”

  “I look like one.”

  “No, you don’t. And even if all that,” a backhand swipe at his mass, “was real, who would want it?”

  Rusty laughed again and left him there, seeping into
the beach.

  “But . . .” Jelly blubbled, “You were inside me.”

  j!m and marie walked along the water, a lifetime together, the last four days between them. J!m had shown up solely to talk to her, to share what he had learned, and if that didn’t work, to apologize. But Marie spoke first.

  “I’m glad you’re alive.”

  “A minority opinion.”

  Behind them, one of the arms fell off the Man on Fire. There were rowdy cheers and near orgasmic squeals.

  “Oh,” Marie said, “people are just . . .”

  “Pigs with fingers.”

  Same old J!m, Marie thought. They passed a dinosaur skull, its skeleton extending into the water, covered in barnacles and seaweed.

  “I’m liking that book,” J!m said.

  Marie pre-winced at the forthcoming wisecrack.

  “It’s good,” J!m said. “Sad. Good sad.”

  They circumnavigated a large deposit of gnarled driftwood, adorned with a polka-dot bikini top.

  “I’m sorry you lost,” J!m said at last.

  “Thank you,” she said, and took his hand.

  The rush of her into him, so much more intense, more explicit, than before, made him stupid.

  “That’ll teach you to side with a bunch of space freaks and half-breed mutants,” he said.

  Marie frowned but didn’t say anything.

  Only J!m heard:

  “Shut up.”

  J!m looked at Marie. Again, her mouth remained closed.

  “Just shut up and kiss me.”

  J!m obliged and kissed her. A wave hit them, quite romantically. Marie pushed J!m away.

  “What was that?”

  “It was,” thinking it a trick question, “a kiss.”

  “I got that,” Marie said. “Why?”

  J!m, logical (the wrong approach): “You wanted it.”

  Marie did not often get upset. And when she did, she got upset over the matter at hand with all the ado of every previous matter not worth getting upset over, accruing perturbation for use at a later time, such as the present.

  “What makes you think I wanted you to kiss me, Jim?” she began. “Because what? I mean, Jim, you’re not even nice to me! But, oh, that’s okay, you’re not nice to anyone. You hate everybody . . . equally. How we humans must disgust you!”

  “Not,” wanting to be kind but credible, “all of you.”

  “What a hell this Earth is for you!” She knew sarcasm, too. “Everything is awful! Everybody fails you! Your life is agony. It’s called adolescence, Jim! We all have problems.”

  She stopped, lowered her head, composing herself, he thought. But when she looked up, she was crying.

  “My mother is a head!” she yelled. “And it’s a bitch!”

  It’s been established that J!m had an immense intelligence. There were gaps.

  “Hey,” he said in measured tones with tender gestures, “I know you’re menstruating, but . . .”

  “Oh my God!” Marie gasped. “Can you smell it?” He could. “Oh my God!”

  J!m decided that what Marie needed was a hug.

  It was not.

  J!m backed away, perplexed that this had gone so disastrously, worse than even in his worst universe, the one ruled by rabid seadogs with penis teeth.

  “I thought that we . . .”

  “So did I, Jim,” Marie said, finally and simply exhausted with him. “Then you turned into a teenage boy.”

  She left him there in the romantic surf, gone cold.

  the ballistic careered into She, skidding on the gravel and almost sideswiping a slime green turd on wheels, which they all recognized as Dr. Rand’s and laughed about reporting his presence at this wanton den as they entered it.

  Mickey Mansfield stopped them at the door.

  “How old are you boys?”

  “Old enough to know what goes where,” Russ said, true for most of them.

  Mickey acquiesced. “But no alcohol.”

  The boys hit the floor.

  “I want one with multiple butts!” Tubesteak said, his preferences formed at an early age based on bad information, a Sheb Wooley novelty song he took to be true:

  Every part of you gives me fits

  Your segment eyes and furry lips

  But you know what I’ll mostly miss?

  Your blue moons

  Your blue moons

  Your round and blue

  Neptunian moons

  Tubesteak wasn’t going to find that here. Mickey only hired classy alien ladies.

  Russ scanned the room and located his target.

  “Back at the car in twenty,” he said.

  “it’s you who do not understand! It’s you who are destroying the world!” Dr. Rand ranted, something he should have said eighteen years ago, and did, but not with this delivery, which would have made all the difference.

  “Unnatural? I’ll show you unnatural!”

  He reached for his belt.

  “Howard,” Miw said, picking up his empty, “it’s time to go home to your wife.”

  “Wife?” Dr. Rand scoffed. “I have no wife. I have a . . . Hag-o-matic OmniNag! No, an AutoCentered MaxiSonic DynaShrew! A Compu-niving—”

  Miw lifted her finger from his carotid and let him slide to the floor. She nudged him under the table, where he would not be stepped on; she’d be driving him home again.

  She detected something at her back, something semi-solid.

  “Why, Mrs. Anderson,” Russ said as she spun around. “In a cathouse. Haw haw.”

  “You’re Nick Ford’s kid.”

  “The one your son maimed. No need to apologize. I’ve thought of a way you can make it up to me.”

  Miw, alas: “I serve drinks. To men.” She raised her hand to wave ta-ta.

  Russ grabbed her wrist.

  “You just got promoted.”

  Miw’s meticulously lacquered nails were ruined, protracting fully and flaking at the razor tips.

  Russ laughed.

  “This kitten’s got—”

  The dewclaw sprang from Miw’s wrist and through Russ’s hand. It looked as if it smarted.

  “I think you’ll find what you need in Pod Six.”

  Russ expaled himself, his fury magnified by the crazed mosaic of his face, but his movement, characteristically, was in retreat.

  Miw lapped her wrist, slightly regretting what she had done, and was about to have done, to that horrible boy. Then again, his blood was delicious.

  I got a rocket in my pocket

  And I’m a-headin’ for the moon

  the singer butchered a Stan Beaver classic, establishing a distinctly unromantic mood as Russ entered Pod Six. Fortunately, he wasn’t interested in romance.

  The lighting was infrared; there were hanging silks, scented candles, the standard misdirection from the stains and smells of mortifying flesh.

  Russ liked what he saw.

  Lilitu was arranged on crimson sheets, her freckles pulsating, her eyes burning bright red.

  “A human male,” brusque, husky and on script. “Fascinating. Disrobe so I may examine your reproductive orga—”

  Her eyes dimmed, her voice unsurled.

  “Russell?”

  Russ stared back with growing horror.

  “M-muth—”

  Russ lurched out of the pod, vomiting at irregular intervals.

  Lilitu appeared at the doorway.

  “Where do you think you’re going?!” she demanded in her crass alto, and then, in consideration of her honored guest, she softened, pleading, “We’ve got fifteen minutes.”

  the head cindered and fell into the sand. From this distance the cheers sounded elegiac, not exultant.

  He was ankle-deep in the tide.

  “Jim?”

  Rusty stood twenty feet behind him.

  “Rusty. Hey.”

  “Is there anything I can do?” she asked. “To make you feel better?”

  She opened her coat. Underneath she was wearing what may have
been nothing. Also, her freckles lit up, and her eyes began to glow.

  J!m couldn’t believe he hadn’t seen this coming. “You’re a Succubix?”

  Rusty looked down at herself, as surprised as he was but far more delighted.

  “How about that,” she said, and dropped the coat.

  He turned to run.

  She flew several feet in the air, landing on his head and driving him into the water.

  They thrashed around a bit. She ended on top, straddling him. She kissed him as if she wanted to eat his face, which she did, but refrained.

  A wave broke over them. The sea foam receded with them in adamant embrace.

  Rusty growled:

  “I am so wet!”

  a fine, dismal rain fell on J!m, the mist mingling with the brine and other fluids he was coated in, each droplet an additional weight dragging him down. He was two miles from home, and doubtful he would make it. Between Rusty and Marie, he was thoroughly drained. He looked down the empty street.

  It’s lonely out in space

  On such a timeless flight

  Reggie Dwight sa—

  Kreee-ak!

  A bolt arced off a PLEX transponder and struck him in the head.

  J!m picked himself off the pavement. Steam rose from his clothes. But he was okay.

  Good, in fact.

  He started to trot. A second PLEX pole gave him a jolt. The nearby streetlights went off.

  J!m ran, holding out his arms.

  The transponders fed him, energy streaming to each of his fingers, first on his right hand and then his left, as he receded down the street, leaving darkness in his wake.

  Chapter 25

  A Savage Lust... to Kill!

  INT. BEDROOM—NIGHT

  The room is dark, the shadows gray.

  SFX: THEREMIN

  The REVOLVING HUM starts low and grows in pitch and intensity.

  Light floods in through the open window.

  A LITTLE CREATURE, no more than seven, sits up in bed. It rushes to the window.