Go, Mutants!

by Larry Doyle

  “I come in peace,” his father said, as J!m had heard, and raised his hand, as J!m had seen, but then, gauging the reaction of the thousands, J!m’s father added, with practiced British understatement:

  “A bit awkward. Is this a bad time?”

  Marie laughed, enchanted at this humanizing glimpse. J!m felt two fists squeezing his hearts.

  The presentation continued, history with additional footage.

  His father at a blackboard, awe-inspiring a younger Dr. Roberts.

  “He came bearing gifts,” the doctor read, “including an advanced technology . . .”

  On the blackboard was a diagram of receptors and generators, electrical arcs, equations. Written across the top: Pneumatic Light and Energy eXchange.

  “. . . to transmit limitless electricity and information . . . through the air.”

  J!m’s father held his hands up, a couple of feet apart. Electricity arced between his fingers. The younger Dr. Roberts’s coiffure foofed.

  “I had so much hair,” the older doctor reminisced.

  J!m’s father kneeled on a road, next to a dead dog and a crying twelve-year-old boy.

  “And he performed small miracles as well.”

  J!m’s father placed his middle fingers on the sides of the dog’s head. They extended into the animal’s ears. A moment later, the dog leapt up, very much alive.

  His father posed with the boy and his dog.

  “That’s Tommy Gray, the boy there,” Dr. Roberts remarked. “He became a teacher, I heard.”

  Marie turned to J!m with a knowing look, but seeing his face, the joyous devastation, she took his hand.

  “He was the toast of both coasts.”

  There followed a series of whimsical viz, of J!m’s father draped in an ape on the Today Show, stumping Dorothy Kilgallen on What’s My Line? and in a cameo on I Love Lucy, before its star was outed as a Succubix and left Hollywood for a certain small town, with complicated results.

  “But he also had,” Dr. Roberts said, “an important message to impart.”

  J!m’s father wore a burgundy velvet jacket, seated across from Bert Wallace on a dark TV stage. Both were smoking copiously. The show title superimposed:

  Wallace had his hard-nosed reporter act down cold, and the lighting to prove it. He read from notes in his lap. “And”—he trilled a high e—“Rah. Am I pronouncing that correctly?”

  “Call me Andy.”

  “All right, ‘Andy,’ ” Wallace pressed on, “you’re giving us all these gizmos, you’re curing disease, eradicating famine. What’s your angle?”

  “I like appearing on television programs,” said J!m’s father, cheeky but charming.

  “You’re some kind of messiah . . .” Wallace led him, “a god?”

  “That’s what you say I am. My wife would disagree.”

  The reporter changed tack.

  “You are demanding we destroy our atomic weapons or face annihilation.”

  “That sounds dire,” lightly sardonic. “Here, all I’m saying is, there are a lot of fellows ‘out there’ distressed about your nuclear ambitions, and some of them are not very nice. Your Martian neighbors, for example, are nasty, brutish and short. But no, I’m not saying . . .”

  He blew out cigarette smoke and leaned menacingly into the camera.

  “. . . destroy your weapons or you will be destroyed!”

  J!m’s father sat back, laughing at himself, and took another puff from his cigarette.

  “No, no, no,” he said. “Just a little friendly advice, that’s all.”

  Chapter 27

  Excitement . . . Explodin’est!

  “if he was only warning us,” marie asked outside the observatory, “why did we blame him for everything?”

  “Tradition,” her grandfather said.

  J!m felt as if he had exploded several more times, scattering jagged fragments to seven continents, and had serious picking up to do. He wasn’t confident it would be worth the effort.

  “Ji’ ’im,” Dr. Roberts told him, “your father was a great man and a dazzling conversationalist, though he did cheat at cards.”

  “Oh,” J!m said.

  “How’s your clairvoyance coming?” the doctor put his hand to the side of J!m’s crystal skull. “What am I thinking?”

  J!m heard, and said, “Baked Alaska?”

  “Crème brûlée. Close. It’ll get better with practice, and the better you know the person. Your father could also put thoughts right into your head.”

  Dr. Roberts glanced at Marie. “But don’t.”

  He kissed his granddaughter. “Dear, give your mother my love. And tell her I died, would you?”

  The professor padded back inside and closed the door. They heard it lock.

  “So,” Marie said as they returned to the car, “what should we do?”

  “I guess we should take Larry home to his parents,” J!m said, checking the bucket again for any sign of Jelly. There was only goo. “They’re gonna cry. Can you do it?”

  “No, but sure, yeah. What I meant, though, was what are we going to do about—” She paused to convey the import. “—the truth?”

  “I suppose,” J!m said, “we could confront a vast government conspiracy and a contentedly brainwashed public, or . . .” better yet, “. . . we could do nothing.”

  “I don’t do nothing!”

  J!m guffawed, for perhaps the first time in his life. The adorably defiant delivery was part of it, and how precisely Marie it was, but what he found most endearing was that it had taken her so long to state it.

  “It’s not funny,” Marie insisted, “that I happen to care—” and she was laughing, too.

  This was the moment J!m kept thinking was coming, the movie moment where their laughter would dissolve into a kiss, then tears, then a lot more kissing. Only in his universes it had always been because of something he had said.

  This was definitely the kissing scene.

  And yet, so was on the beach, in the moonlit surf, the girl telling him to shut up and kiss her.

  J!m had run sixty-four simulations, of perfect, imperfect and misbegotten kisses, when he noticed Marie had stopped laughing and was talking to the bucket.

  “Goodbye, Jelly.”

  Or that.

  We got no class!

  We got no principles!

  vince furnier shouted, by way of introduction to the pink Ballistic cresting the hill to the observatory. Russ let the car idle through the chorus, embracing a world where school was out forever, a world of myriad food service opportunities.

  He killed the reactor and his troops fell out.

  Marching in line, as rehearsed, though sluggishly, were:

  Tubesteak, an aluminum cricket bat dangling from his belt;

  Toad, his fists twinkling with chrome knuckles;

  Ice, chewing gum;

  and Russ, his spirographic mask brought out by the thick application of Vaseline, looking more and more like a permanent feature.

  They all wore yellow rubber boots, custom-stolen for this operation from the town’s firehouse, and pale blue rubber gloves they’d gotten from Toad’s mom, who thought they were doing a charity car wash.

  They took their places at the corners, Russ at the fore.

  “Your father is deeply disappointed in you, Marie.”

  “What do you want, Russ?”

  “Lots of things,” Russ said. “But I’ll settle for you. How about it, Chrome Dome? Fight for your woman?”

  “That’s a little human,” J!m responded, putting down the bucket. “But I know how much your heart is set on it . . .”

  The sun came out from behind a cloud and bombarded J!m with photons, captured by the millions of diamond-silver cells on his surface and converted to energy, substantially more than he would need. J!m estimated that this fight would be approximately one punch long. He would have said the same thing if he was still soft and spindly, he’d like to believe.

  Marie begged to differ.

  “Abs
olutely not. I’m not your—”

  Toad dragged Marie away. She kicked and hit, and when Toad clapped his hand over her mouth, she bit down hard. Blood drizzled between his fingers.

  “How do I taste?” Toad asked.

  Russ had a speech prepared about how they were going to fight anyway, whether J!m wanted to or not, and found himself on the conversational defensive. “Okay, great,” he said, vamping as he mentally skimmed for the next relevant passage, which was:

  “Ground rules . . .”

  Behind J!m, Ice twitched his arm and a switchblade dropped out of his sleeve into his hand. He flipped it open.

  “How about,” Russ said, “no ground rules?”

  Ice aimed the blade and lunged.

  A silver whip shot out the back of J!m’s T-shirt and slashed deep into Ice’s hand, severing the tendons that held the blade. J!m’s razor tail swizzed viciously, forcing Ice into retreat, before returning to the base of his spine.

  Tubesteak swung the aluminum cricket bat. J!m raised an arm. When the bat struck, it rang in C Major, the vibrations fracturing half the bones in Tubesteak’s hands. He dropped the bat and cried like a human baby, the crybabiest of all the Milky Way babies.

  Russ was unruffled by these early setbacks. He reached into the seat of his pants.

  “Well, let’s just even things—”

  Johnny’s appearance roaring over the top of the hill was not as serendipitous as it seemed, since he had been following Russ all afternoon, and had been hanging back for the most dramatic entrance.

  J!m didn’t need Johnny to protect him any longer, yet was deliriously happy to see him.

  “Hey, Freak,” Johnny said.

  “Hey, Monkey.”

  “Found something worth fighting for, I see.”

  “I did.”

  Behind Toad’s hand, Marie smiled.

  “Can I play, too?” Johnny asked, dismounting.

  “I would like that,” J!m said.

  “Shut up,” said Russ, avec revolver.

  “I hope you’ve got more than forty bullets in that gun,” Johnny said.

  “Marie, get in the car.” Russ gestured with the weapon, a common but unsafe practice.

  Toad shoved Marie toward the Ballistic. She resisted.

  Russ pointed the gun back at J!m. “Or I shoot the creature.”

  Marie got in the car.

  Russ backed toward the vehicle.

  J!m started walking toward Russ, calmly and deliberately.

  “Jim, don’t,” Marie said.

  Russ opened his door and sidestepped in, keeping the gun trained on J!m.

  “You don’t want to shoot me, Russ,” J!m said.

  “I really do.” His eyes went red and his freckles glowed.

  “Careful, Russ,” J!m said. “Your mother is showing.”

  Russ fired and fired and fired.

  The bullets sparked off J!m’s chest and abdomen, deflecting into Tubesteak, who grabbed his spurting thigh with shattered hands and went down.

  The gun emptied in due course, and Russ threw it down. He pulled a rod on the Ballistic and its wheels spun, sending up white clouds into which Marie’s face dissolved.

  J!m scooped up Jelly and got in the Buzzer.

  “You’ll never catch him in that, Freak,” Johnny said.

  “And yet,” said J!m.

  The electric vehicle hummed forward.

  Johnny leapt on his bike. He wove around the Buzzer and headed into the hills.

  As the burnt rubber lifted, Tubesteak could be seen squirming on the pavement, Toad and Ice on either side, watching him impassively.

  “I’m bleeding to death!” he snivelled. “Do something!”

  With his unslaughtered hand, Ice took the gum out of his mouth and twisted it into Tubesteak’s wound.

  Tubesteak shrieked weakly.

  the ballistic proceeded at an unsafe speed through the hills toward the iconic

  sign, built in 1923 to promote the Manhattan Sign Company, which went bankrupt before it could finish. In the early forties it was rebuilt by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, some say as cover for a secret military project taking place deep within the hills. This was misinformation; in fact they built an underground warren of bedrooms to house Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s dozens of mistresses, some of whom lived there to this day, bitter that FDR had not left his homely cousin to marry one of them.

  Back in the Ballistic, Marie was screaming.

  “Stop this car, Russell Ford,” unlatching her door. “This instant!”

  Russ turned to her with amused menace.

  “Or what, Marie Rand?”

  He returned his eyes to the road, only to have his face snap back in Marie’s direction, this time with blood gushing from his smirk.

  Johnny, riding alongside at fifty miles per hour, punched Russ again, yanked him by the collar, halfway out of the car.

  “The lady asked you to stop.”

  “Okah, okah!” Russ said, juggling the tooth in his mouth.

  Johnny released Russ.

  Russ scowled as he slowed down, then grinned as he sped up, ramming the motorcycle.

  Johnny and the bike flew off the road, spinning laterally over the precipice.

  Russ spat out the incisor, and raised two fingers.

  “Two down,” the sanguine gap in his smile combining with the hair and freckles to create a Boogey Howdy Doody, every child’s nightmare.

  One long blue finger crooked over the top of the bucket seat behind him.

  the ballistic was three curves ahead.

  J!m jammed the joystick forward. Sixty miles per hour. Sixty-one. Sixty-two.

  The parental control activated on the dash, an uncanny animaviz of his mother’s lips.

  “You’re exceeding the speed limit, Jim,” his mother’s simvoice said in a cool monotone.

  “Change voice, carputer,” J!m commanded.

  “I’m afraid I can’t do that, Jim,” said his mother’s dispassionate mouth.

  the wooden barrier delineating pavement from dirt road splintered easily. Russ whooped at the bonus destruction.

  Marie stared forward, coldly crying.

  “Save some of those tears,” Russ said. “For later.”

  J!m’s Severed Hand pulled itself up onto the seat back. It was weak, desiccated, barely alive. And famished.

  j!m kept steady pressure on the joystick but the Buzzer was losing speed. Fifty-nine miles per hour. Fifty-seven. Fifty-six.

  “We’re out of plex range, Jim,” Miw’s lips informed him. “I have to go into reserve mode.”

  The vehicle downshifted dramatically.

  Exasperated, J!m threw his hands up in the air.

  And saw his father’s fingers.

  He placed his hands against the top of the glass cockpit.

  Electricity trickled from his fingers to the plex node of the Buzzer; the car surged forward a few feet and rolled to a stop again. J!m concentrated, tightening his brain, trying to squeeze out more juice.

  Nothing.

  He exhaled.

  Another convulsion shot from his fingers.

  It wasn’t a pump. It was a sphincter.

  J!m relaxed and the current began to flow in thick jagged arcs to the back of the car, which responded by accelerating beyond its specifications. He grabbed on to the joystick, leaving one hand on the bubble. Energy flowed through his body, up and out his fingers. He felt light-headed.

  A half mile ahead, Johnny climbed up onto the road, carrying his battered cycle on his shoulder.

  The Buzzer blurred past.

  It took the next curve too fast, back wheel swinging off the road. Inside, J!m was rapidly depleting, the car pulling the power from him, leaving a citric taste in his mouth.

  “I’m getting hot, Jim,” said his mother’s lips.

  J!m took his hand down, clamping his energy sphincter. The car went faster still, its battery gauge past capacity.

  “I’m going to crash now, Jim. Goodbye.”
<
br />   J!m looked up into the rear bumper of the Ballistic. He slammed the joystick to the right. The Buzzer rode the inside scarp, going over and around the Ballistic. Returning to the road, J!m veered back and forth for several seconds before yanking the joystick back, sending the Buzzer into a spin. It came to a stop in a fog of dust.

  J!m heaved himself from the car, drained and coughing dirt.

  He saw the Ballistic coming in the distance.

  j!m’s severed hand perched on the back of Russ’s seat, incapable of following the action but with a general sense something was up. Its middle finger quivered, detecting a mixture of mineral oils and paraffin high in yummy heavy carbon, the semi-solid petrolatum. Vaseline. Food. And there was plenty of it, very close at hand, no pun intended, since, honestly, it’s only a hand and that would be silly.

  Russ was delighted and Marie horrified to find J!m standing in the road, directly in their path, staring Russ down.

  Russ pulled all the rods. He held up one finger.

  “And one to g—”

  A disembodied blue hand clamped onto Russ’s face, slithering its worm down his throat, divining that with that much oil on the surface, he must be a well.

  Marie screamed such a scream that all of her previous screams were downgraded to voice raisings.

  Russ gagged on the hand, unable to tear it off.

  J!m did not move, assuming Russ would stop, which he might well have if he weren’t busy.

  Marie, even in her scream state, saw that while she could not stop the car, she could make it not hit J!m. She jammed the wheel to the left.

  The Ballistic swerved violently, missing J!m, but also throwing open the passenger door and hurling Marie out. The vehicle launched off the cliff, and sailed rather phallically, a hot pink atomic rocket, down a hundred feet before plunging into the loins of the M on the MANHATTAN sign.

  Russ was slumped against the wheel, his face saved, slightly ironically, by J!m’s Severed Hand, which lay on the floor, broken and dying, perhaps.

  Russ roused himself, his head thrumming.

  No, the sound was behind him.

  He turned.

  The nuclear reactor in the trunk was cracked, leaking plutonium, and thrumming in a higher and higher pitch, which was one of the reasons they discontinued this model.