by Larry Doyle
johnny was straightening the front wheel of his bike with his teeth when he saw the flash.
He shielded his eyes and watched the small mushroom cloud blossom down the road.
The hot, hot wind blew back his fur.
it was christmas, the very last one.
Great white flakes, no two alike but for their half-life, fell on the living and the dead, coating the road and hillside and neighborhoods below.
Johnny rode up on his bike. There was nothing but ash and an otherworldly glow off the embankment.
He rolled to the edge, and looked over.
J!m stumbled up the hill, carrying a lifeless female in his arms.
marie lay on her father’s workbench, her clothes burned and torn in a manner that, under different circumstances, might have been considered sexy. On the pegboard behind her hung an assortment of carpentry and surgical tools.
J!m hid in the far corner of the garage, blaming himself and finding no argument.
“Don’t worry, baby girl,” Dr. Rand was telling Marie, holding a wrench in one hand and a speculum in the other. “I’ll . . . I’ll . . . Oh, dear God, I don’t know what to do!”
He dropped the wrench.
“I’m not even a real doctor!”
Johnny pointed out, “You make us call you Doctor . . .”
“Ph.D.’s!” Doctorate Rand wailed. “Lousy Ph.D.’s!”
A few feet down the bench, Dr. Roberts fiddled with what appeared to be an electric crown.
“Ph.D.,” he said matter-of-factly. “And you never did successfully defend your dissertation.”
“They were fools!” Mr. Rand ranted, and jabbing a nutcracker at his dead daughter, “Can we please concentrate on the problem at hand?”
Mrs. Rand, on the circular saw/operating table, was at least three Kübler-Ross stages ahead of her husband. “Howard, I think we have to accept the fact that our Marie is gone,” squeezing out another tear. “Now let’s get her body on me while it’s fresh.”
“She’s our daughter!”
“I didn’t kill her!” Mrs. Rand shot back. “I’m just trying to turn lemons into lemonade here!”
“Trick or treat!”
At the open garage door: a boy in a pointy ghost costume, a girl dressed as Layla, the moon princess, and a little Cucurachan in a cowboy suit.
“Right,” Howard Rand said.
He snatched a beaker of reactive orange liquid and poured a jigger into each treat receptacle. The kids looked forlornly at their hydrolizing treats.
“Happy Halloween!”
The children ran away.
Mr. Rand turned around to find that his father-in-law was about to place the coronal gizmo on the head of his dead daughter.
“This won’t revive her body,” Dr. Roberts explained, “but it will capture her mind, and I can build an automaton to host it.”
“Back off, old man!” Mr. Rand warned. “I don’t want a robot-daughter!”
“Don’t dismiss it just because it’s not your idea!” Mrs. Rand chided, her eyes involuntarily grazing her daughter’s form. “This could work out for everybody.”
Mr. Rand grabbed his head.
“If you would all shut up for a second, perhaps I could remember how I brought Dinosaurus back to life!”
“Like we need that again!” his wife said.
J!m approached Marie.
“I think I can do it,” he said.
“And how is that?” Mr. Rand queried facetiously. “By rebuilding her neural web with your cerebrumatic fractal grid?”
“I don’t know.”
J!m placed his middle fingers into Marie’s ears.
“I saw my dad do this.”
The worms inched into her brain. J!m closed his eyes.
It was dark in her.
He fumbled around, feeling for a switch.
Mr. Rand, snippy: “Why don’t you kiss her while you’re at it?”
Marie’s eyes opened.
Her grandfather was elated, clapping like a toddler. Her mother, to her credit, was relieved. Her father felt a little put out.
Marie bolted upright on the workbench. She jerked her head and stared at J!m blankly.
She emitted a long monotone.
“Great,” Johnny said. “She’s a zombie.”
J!m was dumbfounded. “That didn’t happen to the dog.”
“How do you know?” Dr. Roberts asked.
Mr. Rand moved to reassert command of his lab. “That was an interesting effort, Jim,” he said, nudging the boy away from the bench. “Now let’s see if I can fix this mess.” He poked around in his toolbox for a leather punch.
“Guys!” Rusty rushed up to the garage door, panting. “Somebody nuked the Manhattan Sign and they’re blaming us—you guys. There’s a big meeting at City Hall to decide what to do about it!”
Marie pitched off the table and shuffled out of the garage.
“I think she wants to go to the meeting,” J!m said.
“Duh,” said Rusty, making yappy hands. “She never met a meeting she—”
Zombie Marie plowed right into her, unable to process her presence, one could argue.
Chapter 28
Today’s Most Vital Controversy!
even a minor atomic explosion tends to capture the public’s imagination. City Hall was packed with citizens concerned about the rapidly revising events of the past few days, aliens vaporizing the entire football team and nuking beloved monuments and who knows what other un-American activities. For the most part, though, the citizens who got up to speak were the ones who always got up to speak, and on the same topic regardless of the agenda item.
“Aliens,” Charlie Weston crabbed, thumb tugging his waistband, seeking relief from his obesity, “have been into my garbage almost every night for the past two years. And the sheriff refuses to do anything about it!”
Mayor Sam Wood, sweating uncommonly, was happy to delegate.
“Nick?”
“We looked into that, Charlie,” Sheriff Ford said from his seat behind the podium. “It was raccoons.”
“Raccoons from outer space!” insisted Weston, reluctant to yield the floor, his rage unsated, and also afraid to sit down in those pants.
Mayor Wood wiped his face and spacious pate with a red silk handkerchief. “Your complaint has been duly noted,” he said, dabbing his damp mustache.
Weston got in the last word: “Then you don’t mind if I poison them.” Some people booed, thinking he was talking about the raccoons.
rusty, johnny, j!m and zombie marie entered at the back of the chamber. J!m had brought the bucket of goo, in case the Sweeneys were there, or on the off chance Jelly would come back to life. Odder things had happened, only moments ago.
The mayor determined that this meeting was going nowhere, like all the others, that nobody knew anything about the sign explosion, beyond wet guesses, and that there would be no agreement on what to do, beyond something, so it would be best to adjourn while he could still make his dinner engagement.
“Thank you, Charlie,” he said. “And since I’m sure we all want to get back to our Halloween festivities . . .”
A formidably buxom blonde in an insufficient sweater stood up. “Yes, Mayor Wood, permission to speak?” she asked with formal vapidity.
“Go ahead, Miss Fuller.”
She spoke from a prepared and scented statement. “I am Barbara Fuller, residing at the Hidden Glen Apartments, number—well, never mind that. Last week, aliens, or mutants, or some weirdo, broke into my place and stole my best sweaters . . . ,” lower but somehow louder, “. . . and underthings.”
The depravation of aliens invading unmentionables reinvigorated the crowd, which had been ready to go home and continue their grievance in private.
“I’m sorry for your loss, Barbara,” Mayor Wood said, nervously scratching the seat of his pants and drawing Sheriff Ford’s eye to the frilly pink lace peeking out. “But I think—”
“One of them planted his seed in
me.”
Marge Talbott, a permanently frightened housewife, clung to the microphone stand, unable to speak above a whisper. She inhaled for strength.
“In my husband’s car.”
She was not finished.
“And then he zapped all my grocery money out of my PLEX account.”
A dozen women turned in unison to the back of the room. Johnny shrugged sheepishly.
The crowd chattered in a predominantly female register.
Can you imagine?
The big guy there?
How much grocery money, do you think?
Deputy Furry, at attention behind the podium, ground her teeth so hard she almost started a fire in her mouth.
Into this incendiary mix, crazy old Miriam Brewster shouted, “I’m missing seventeen cats!”
A Caimanese family bowed their snouts and tried to look vegetarian.
They smell bad!
They work too hard!
They can see our sins!
“People, please! People!” Mayor Wood banged the gavel, resolved to wrap this up and at least make dessert. “I’ve heard enough. I’m imposing a dusk-to-dawn curfew on all teenage aliens and mutants while we investigate the situation. So unless there is . . .”
Zombie Marie pulled away from J!m and shuffled up the aisle to the microphone.
“We’re going to be here all night,” Mayor Wood said off mike, easily heard, and returned with a wan smile. “Miss Rand, do you have something—short—to say?”
“Here we go,” one attendant groused on behalf of the crowd, which turned toward Marie, glancing at their wristplexes.
Marie cleared her throat and said: “Hrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.”
The audience whispered apprehensively, undecided whether this was more alien atrocities or Marie deploying some new and more agonizing rhetorical device.
The argument was soon moot.
“good evening, folks.”
General Walter Ford, flanked by soldiers armed with advanced submission equipment, spoke through a small silver ring, which amplified his voice twentyfold, courtesy of a technology humans would certainly come up with themselves within a century or so.
“In light of recent events,” the general related as if instructing company to proceed to the dining room, “and to preserve the peace, we are inviting all guest species to check into Hospitality Centers, where they will undergo enhanced naturalization and be released, eventually.”
Sheriff Ford whispered to Mayor Wood, “He can’t do that.”
“He’s your father,” the mayor said.
A soldier took J!m by the arm. J!m shrugged, and the soldier shook, shocked, and twitched to the ground.
No sooner had he discovered this marvelous trick than a new application presented itself, the barrel of a gun, cold and metallic, pressed against his forehead.
Recited the gun’s assistant:
It left a big stain
That looked like chow mein
J!m raised an eyebrow, enough said.
A third would-be captor approached and J!m, getting fancy, dispatched him with a move from an ancient comedy short, a modified Moe Howard double eye poke with bifrontal electroshock. The attacker lost a bit of tongue and the prior two weeks, but later awoke to find the world a much more bearable place.
Johnny, in the meantime, had punched eight soldiers, three into brand-new faces.
“We should go,” J!m said.
Johnny scanned the room. Soldiers were converging on them from every direction but up.
“Hop on.”
J!m climbed on Johnny’s back, sliding the Jelly bucket into the crook of his arm. Johnny charged one of the oncoming soldiers, who had been hoping to be killed by an alien, since there was a medal and a memorial for that, death by mutant excluded because of lobbying by the Atomic and Pharmaceutical Industries, which cited the lack of clear-cut evidence that mutants even existed. The soldier raised his weapon, a pitiful response, and unnecessary. Johnny leapt over him, catching a fixture and swinging across the room in a shatter of glass and light. Johnny, J!m and the last of Jelly crashed through a cathedral window on the opposite side.
The general was mildly perturbed.
“Shoot.”
A gunshot.
“Not you,” the general said.
frenzied crowds fleeing in terror had been a familiar motif during the unpleasantness, and it was repeating itself this evening, with a nifty twist: the unhinged throngs running for their lives were the monsters, and the things coming after them were human.
The gilded dome of City Hall reflected the setting sun and cast a warm twilight over the scene. With the right soundtrack, perhaps Puccini’s “O mio babbino caro,” the flailing of aliens clutching darts in their necks and staggering to the ground might have been poetic. Instead, the present accompaniment, unearthly caterwauling and the cries of children for their parents, added an unseemly patina to the whole enterprise.
One soldier, exceptionally unsporting, mouthed pow with every fwip of a dart, and booyah for every direct hit. He was also a poor shot, or was aiming for faces. When Johnny blindsided Pfc. Roy Haskell as he tore past on his motorcycle, one might rightly have thought he was meting out swift justice. But he was only riding by.
Johnny clocked two more, and J!m took out three from the back of the bike. They would have gone for a return sweep had it not been for the plasma fire from the two jet jeeps coming straight at them.
Johnny perpendiculated and peeled off down an alley.
“Where we going?” J!m yelled.
“The other way,” Johnny yelled back.
sandra jane waltzed into her home, tickled by recent developments, because she was an idiot.
“Bad news, guys,” she announced. “Looks like you two are going to—where’s Mom?”
Her father was up on the bar, his arms and legs wrapped around a tumbler. He fished the cherry out of the glass and chomped it, covering his face with red syrup.
“She went out.”
“Where?”
“To Japan.” The shrunken head of household threw the cherry back, splashing bourbon all over himself. “For a goddamn lizard!”
Mr. Douglas’s head lolled back. His eyes widened, taking in his daughter’s doll head, basketball hands and amazing, colossal rack.
“Sandy, sweetie, have you been taking your stabilization pills?”
Sandra Jane was horrified. “I thought those were birth control pills!”
A wumping, wood against wood, gun butt against door.
Sandra Jane looked down at her tiny father, passing out into his drink. She felt . . . something.
“Daddy.”
The front door splintered. Sandra Jane fished her father out of the glass.
Two soldiers entered.
Sandra Jane twirled a king-size finger between her Brobdignagian breasts, adding a bit of sauciness to her father tucking. “I’m afraid you’ve got the wrong house, Officers.”
The soldiers chuckled. They took her by the shoulders and escorted her from the building.
“No, no,” Sandra Jane said. “You’re making a mistake. I’m human . . . human . . . HUMAN!”
googie laid eggs all the way to the military transport, yet maintained her bright hospitality.
“Would you boys like takeout?” she asked her captors, depositing another one.
The cordial incarceration was breached by the entrance of Johnny and J!m (and dead Jelly) on the Triumph, weaving through the lot, scattering the jetpacked carhops, skipping across a few hoods and cracking a few windshields before moving on at maximum speed.
One of the Army jet jeeps giving chase crashed into the big yellow chicken statue, toppling it. Its head rolled to Googie’s feet.
“Poor Googie,” Googie said.
the monsters were lined up on Maple Street.
A tiny alien sobbed as the big scary soldier removed its face and discovered that underneath it was a small human.
“Scram,” the soldier sai
d to the trick-or-treater, patting him on his flammable butt.
Howard Rand rushed past them, up the walk to the Anderson house. Miw answered the door in long black wig and tight black gown, holding a bowl of medium treats, her fangs out until she saw it was just him.
“Where’s Jim?” She was in a dry panic. “Is he all right?”
Rand slipped inside and closed the door.
“Forget about Jim,” he said. “We need to think about us.”
“Us?”
“There’s places we can go,” he assured her, “secret, secure,” placing his hands over hers around the bowl, “but also romantic.”
Withdrawing the treats: “What are you talking about, Howard?”
“Don’t you see the logic in this?” the doctor-absent-dissertation said. “You’re a sexy widow. My wife is only a head, which is of limited utility . . .”
This was too much for Miw, with her missing son, the impending genocide . . .
“You don’t even know me,” she said.
He was smugly smug: “You have fifty-three vertebrae. Your core body temperature is one-oh-two. You have hooked papillae on your tongue, which I find incredibly stimulating.”
He chuckled at her disbelief.
“Why, Miw, I’ve catalogued your sister’s insides.”
This was news. “You dissected my sister?!”
“During the wars,” he backtracked. “It was a different time,” slipping into his natural defensiveness. “Don’t give me that look. You’re not a princess on this planet!”
under the werewolf mask was a small hairless boy with large eyes and white skin. The soldier directed him to the truck.
“But,” the boy stammered, “I have leukemia.”
“Above my pay grade,” the soldier said, facing a two-block line of trick-or-treaters he had to process before going home to a wife who would be mad at him for imprisoning all these children, not getting that it was his job.
Howard Rand stalked out of J!m’s house, nursing a shredded cheek.
“There’s one in there,” he told the soldier.
alientown, loud, rude and noisome most nights, was trebly so this evening, with an excess military presence out for a good time other than the one offered for sale, shattering storefronts and smashing foreign objects, setting off the scent glands of many worlds and giving the low-rent district a distinctly End Times sensibility, not very touristy.