Go, Mutants!

by Larry Doyle

  Johnny sped carefully through, hoping to avoid killing anyone, a handicap not shared by his pursuers. The jet jeep’s plasmagunner swiveled in his turret firing with wide discretion, almost anything he hit in this neighborhood worth bonus points.

  An errant bolt goosed a parked VW Ladybug and it shot up on a thirty foot cushion of air, crashing inches from Johnny and J!m before bouncing into a SoGoan massage parlor, where the endings were always happy but deadly.

  The gunner got around to his present assignment, and blasted J!m square on the back with a packet of 2,500 volts, a little more than the electric chair. It was refreshing.

  J!m leaned in to Johnny, assuring him, “I got you.”

  Johnny slumped forward, unconscious.

  J!m had ridden on the Triumph a thousand times but had never been allowed to drive it, shortsighted on Johnny’s part. J!m called up all available information on motorcycle operation and maintenance. He pried Johnny’s hands off the bars and twisted the right grip hard.

  The bike reared up and roared forward, exhilarating in the moment but impractical, the steering useless and that food cart straight ahead.

  The front wheel dropped just short of the nick of time, allowing J!m to swerve incompletely, sideswiping the cart and sending Hot Monkey Pies—ALL THE GREAT TASTE OF MONKEY WITHOUT THE FUR!—flying in unwelcome directions.

  The Houyhnhnm vendor shook a hoof and whinnied epithets, unfortunately forgetting he was supposed to be only a horse.

  through the open-air galactic bazaar, the abandoned steel mill, the Futurama exhibition, and down the Manhattan Steps, J!m couldn’t shake the second jeep and, plum out of interesting chase locations, had decided to get the hell out of town.

  Astride the gas tank, Johnny was dreaming of Africa. His knowledge of ancestral lands limited to viz, the dreamscape was composed of a few large palm fronds and a Caucasian female in animal skins straddling a bunch of bananas. He reached for a banana.

  His knuckles scraped the pavement.

  He winced. “Are we dead yet?”

  “Not yet.”

  Johnny sat up and retook the controls. “Twelve miles,” he muttered darkly, checking the odometer.

  They zoomed past the high school, for the last time. J!m had run the realities and there weren’t any in which he went to school tomorrow.

  “But very soon now,” he reported to Johnny.

  “Uh-huh,” Johnny said.

  Facing death in 999,996 of a million possible outcomes, J!m marvelled that none of these new demises matched any of the ones he had predicted for himself earlier. And yet the probable future, that he would be hunted down by humans convinced that he posed a menace as the son of his father, was so ridiculously obvious, it made him suspect there was a glitch in his modeling software, or even that his obsessive anticipation was fundamentally flawed as an approach to dealing with life.

  If so, the epiphany was a little late.

  The jet jeep was gaining, and Johnny was considering a detour into the corn as they crested the hill and collided head-on with an oncoming Gaylord coupe, driven by what, from the brief glimpse that was available, was a very grouchy Deputy Furry.

  Johnny smashed into the windshield. J!m flew over Johnny’s shoulders and across the roof, sliding off the back. He managed to catch the bumper, never letting go of the bucket.

  The patrol car veered wildly, J!m dragging behind, throwing up tremendous sparks from the pavement.

  The jeep jetted skyward to avoid a collision, and the Gaylord drove up onto the high school’s lawn, crashing into the viz sign, flashing:

  LARRY SWEENEY: 1955 AI - 10 EI

  WE LOVED YOU, JELLY!

  TRIBBLES! BET YOU CAN’T EAT JUST ONE!

  J!m got to his feet. His jacket and shirt were in tatters, but he was unscathed. His chest was wonderfully buffed, in fact.

  A bloody paw took his wrist and dragged him toward the building.

  Deputy Furry fell out of the squad car, her shoulders well out of alignment, her face asymmetrical, with much too much blush, or something. She went for her sidearm, and, finding it absent, dove back into the vehicle and returned with a rifle.

  “You got her pregnant?!”

  “This one’s mine,” Johnny said, strong-arming J!m into the building.

  Johnny grinned, spread his arms. “Hey, babe.”

  The first shot took off a bit of his left ear.

  the halls of mhs felt alien and anachronistic. J!m couldn’t believe he had attended this school only that morning. In the short space of eight hours:

  his second- or third-best-friend was dead;

  the love of his life was undead;

  his mortal enemy had been atomized, a bit much;

  he was a fugitive from, well, justice wasn’t the right word.

  Or it was, exactly.

  J!m was overcome with a sense of awesome and awful responsibility, envisioning a bright causal line between all of his actions and inactions, between his very existence, and this. Two and a half people dead and thousands hunted, because he went through puberty.

  Perhaps he was the Antichrist.

  If so, where were his superpowers?

  the last light coming through the clerestory gave the gymnasium an expressionist cast that J!m found aesthetically pleasing and instinctively unnerving. The blacks were gorgeous, and hiding knives.

  He put down the bucket and walked inside.

  He stood center court, on the face of Manny the Mutant. This depiction was more graphic, less cartoony, than the old one on the stadium booth. The new mutant was darker and meaner; the buck teeth had points.

  skrt ikit ikit ikit.

  A shadow, long, angular, hexapedal, swept across the wall before being swallowed in the sound of a release bar and metallic chung of a closing door.

  From elsewhere:

  “What are we going to do with you, Anderson?”

  Coach McCarthy appeared from behind the bleachers, tucking the shirt into his shorts.

  “You mess up my quarterback, you don’t take required showers, you don’t knock . . .”

  He approached J!m, rubbing his fist into his palm. On an intellectual level, J!m knew the coach could not harm him and would break his hand if he tried; years of verbal and physical abuse beat logic every time, though, and J!m’s fear response engaged.

  He hunched his back, arms and fingers out, tail up, an altogether different effect than at the drive-in, presumably due to the electricity shooting out of his tail, arcing to the scoreboard above his head, which lit up, flashed GO, MUTANTS! six times and erupted in fireworks that were not part of its programming but should have been.

  Coach McCarthy’s attitude was much improved.

  “Okay, look,” he said. “I’m a gym teacher. It’s my job to be an asshole.”

  He chewed his tongue. “Are you going to kill me?”

  J!m let the interestingness of this question linger.

  Eventually he said, “No.”

  “And that’s why,” Coach McCarthy strutted in reverse, “you’ll always be a pussy, Anderson,” speeding up as he got close to the door, and could be heard running thereafter.

  J!m was alone again, naturally, as that fellow sang. And tired. He had fully discharged himself into the scoreboard. He’d have to learn to control that better, among other things.

  He looked around the gym. Over there was the spot where he’d said that unforgiveable thing to Marie; and here, where he was standing, was where they would have danced afterward had he only said, I’m so happy to see you, too, Marie.

  But then she would have been with him later when he combusted, and much closer than Russ was, ideally. She would have been killed immediately, instead of three days later, and J!m would not have been able to partially unkill her. That might have been better, or not.

  Life was complicated enough without all these other lives.

  Dong.

  The school bell, only it did not ring at night.

  Dong dink dong.

 
Or like that.

  johnny’s attempted reconciliation with Deputy Furry had failed, she uninterested in his explanation that the other lonely women of Manhattan were vocational, and that she was different, which is why he had not raised prices on her all these years. The deputy insisted on shooting him, which had driven him to the tower, from which he presently swung, tolling away and dodging bullets that dinged the bell, sounding sour notes.

  Dong dong dink.

  “C’mon, babe,” Johnny sweet-talked, not his specialty. “Furry muffin . . .”

  Dong dink dink dink dink.

  One bullet ricocheted off the bell into his left shoulder. Another went straight into the opposite leg.

  Several military vehicles converged on the school lawn at once. General Ford drove up in his ground jeep, Zombie Marie strapped into the passenger seat.

  “Guard her,” he instructed the first soldier he saw. “We may need bait.”

  “Mrrrrrrrrrrrrrr,” said Zombie Marie.

  The general approached the deputy, who was eyeing her kill shot.

  “Stand down, Peggy.”

  “I will not stand down!” the deputy yelled, the assault on her professionalism far more grievous than her Johnny Love trouble. “And you, sir, will address me as—”

  For an older gentleman, the general packed a wallop. The deputy complied without further complaint.

  Walter Ford lifted the sonic ring and addressed Johnny with jolly paternalism.

  “I’d rather not kill you, son. So why don’t you be a good little monkey boy—”

  Johnny swung out from behind the bell, his fur bristled green.

  “I am not a monkey boy!” Johnny roared. “I am an Ape Man!”

  The general, an aside to his right: “Maximum setting.”

  Pfc. Roy Haskell, nose broken and both eyes blackened, blasted a modified transponder. The bolt struck Johnny in several places.

  He fell.

  The doors to the school opened and J!m rushed to Johnny, sprawled on the steps.

  “Hey, Monkey.” J!m lay his hands on, absorbing the excess electrons. The body was inert, the eyes fixed and dilated. J!m could bring him half back, but that would be selfish. A Zombie Johnny would not be Johnny, and they’d kill him again anyhow.

  J!m closed Johnny’s eyes. “You don’t have to fight anymore.”

  Johnny replied, “It takes more than a couple of bullets and one crummy lightning bolt to do me, Freak.”

  He groaned.

  “Not a lot more.”

  Chapter 29

  Daring and True Exposé— of a Hush-Hush Subject!

  shackled aliens bobbed groggily as the army transport lifted off the ground and hovered away, leaving Rusty Ford stomping her feet.

  “What do I have to do?” she wailed. “Suck out somebody’s spine?”

  Nick Ford put his arm around his daughter.

  “Let’s go home.”

  “But I’m one of them!”

  “I love you, Kitten,” he said.

  They walked across the civic square, strewn with orphaned shoes and trampled hats, handbags and thousands of tranq darts.

  “Have you seen your brother?” the sheriff asked.

  russ was in the back of a transport, coming down from the hills. The Ballistic’s ejection system had worked as advertised, except for the part that guaranteed it would never be needed, and launched the lead-lined cockpit out of the disintegration zone. Russ nevertheless got a nasty gamma blast and was glowing like a ghost when he clomped out of the woods near his home.

  He was spotted by a military patrol and chased into what to them looked like a flying saucer.

  EThL the nedroid stopped the soldiers at the door.

  “What are you doing to my boy?” she yelled, fiercely loyal even though Russ only acknowledged her existence when annoyed by it. “You clear outta here ’fore I call the general! Go on! Go on, now!”

  The first plasma squib fried her, the second wiped her clean.

  “Now let’s get that mute outta the general’s house before he nukes it up.”

  In the transport, fellow mutants and aliens kept their distance; Russ looked both mentally and subatomically unstable. He was more than in a bad mood; he was only mood. Anger fragments boiled in his brain in an inconsolable soup, and it was unclear if Russ would ever return to perceive them. Also unresolved was whether the radiation he had taken was going to make him gigantic, tiny, psychic or merely dead.

  a convoy of hover transports whooshed past the Watch the Skies Drive-in, which was offering a Harrowing Halloween Tuesday Twofer:

  known to cinephiles as Blackboard Jungle and East of Eden, and fooling no one.

  Miw sat quietly in one transport, thinking only of J!m, or would have, if she hadn’t been shackled to Mrs. Rand’s head.

  “This is all because of your son,” Mrs. Rand bitched. “And your whoring.”

  Miw scratched her nose, inadvertantly driving her elbow into Mrs. Rand’s ear, bumping the head to the floor, where it was swarmed by randy robognomes. Mrs. Rand would never be mistaken for her daughter, but she would do.

  On the other side of the vehicle, Sandra Jane was not there, as far as she was concerned. Once she got to the camp she would explain to the cutest soldier that it was all a big mix-up, and couldn’t they find someplace to mate outside these icky fences?

  She felt an itch.

  Her father, waking, clambered from her bosom, rubbing his eyes. “Where am—”

  Sandra Jane poked him back in, glancing around to see if anybody saw. Kiel, a big, broad-shouldered Kanamit, had been inspecting her breast meat for some time and looked away when she met his eyes. Her first instinct was to ridicule his expansive forehead, something along the lines of What are you looking at, Frankenbrain? but, she figured, she might be here for a while, and he was tall.

  “Hey, big fella,” she said, pinning her wings back to better showcase her plump, juicy chest.

  The Kanamit smiled tightly, lest he drool.

  floodlights swept the old Army base, welcoming them to the

  established 1955 AI to welcome guest species and mutated citizens, a process that ended up taking seven years.

  Their transport was at the end of the caravan, nearly empty, Zombie Marie, half-dead Johnny, J!m and the Jelly bucket on one side, and Pfc. Haskell aiming a PLEX gun at them on the other.

  “Have we met?” J!m asked the private, knowing they had, and where: he was that teeny boffer from the drive-in.

  “Shut up,” Pfc. Haskell said.

  J!m looked out the back of the truck, at the razor wire that twinkled and twirled as they drove past it, at the dark barracks, trying to guess which one had been his birthplace.

  He remembered:

  a bright hot day, a veil of rust, a shimmering silhouette, his mother, her arms out, him toddling toward her, toppling, a face full of dirt;

  a child ape, smashing a Tonka tank, looking up and leaping onto him;

  a caduceus, on a barracks door, opening, a young Dr. Rand sitting on a stool, beckoning with wire cutters, and in the corner, a little dark-haired girl cradling a doll’s head, smiling at him.

  The transport whirred right past the gate, which was closing after the previous truck went though.

  “Where are we going?”

  “I thought I told you to shut up,” Pfc. Haskell said.

  the transport went several more miles, taking a rural road into a forested area, the location of J!m’s presumed execution. He accepted that, but was determined to preserve what was left of the lives of his friends. He might have to kill someone as a diversion, and he was fine with that, too. The general, riding in the cab upfront, was the right choice from a strategic viewpoint, and in terms of overall righteousness, but Pfc. Haskell had a killability that J!m found appealing.

  J!m’s mortal dilemma was resolved when the transport turned into a thicket of trees, which fuzzed as the truck passed through them.

  “Drink up,” Pfc. Haskell said, sticking a small de
vice into his own mouth.

  And then the truck drove straight into the Groom Lagoon, inappreciably disturbing the water as it slipped beneath the steaming surface.

  forty-two seconds later, longer-seeming if one’s lungs were full of water, the transport arrived in a gray metal chamber, which far too slowly drained of lake.

  General Ford disembarked the sealed cab and sloshed to the back of the transport. The gate dropped, gushing water and a couple of nonstandard flopping fish. Pfc. Haskell prodded the sputtering, soaked captives out. J!m decanted the bucket, careful not to pour Jelly.

  “This way,” the general said, leading them from the airlock into what appeared to be a toaster. Coils on the walls and ceiling heated to a smithy orange, and jet turbofans blew them dry.

  In keeping with the doggedly industrial look, the antechamber was a barren, harshly lit box of iron. J!m, Zombie Marie and Johnny entered, the last fluffed to plush proportions. A soldier removed their manacles.

  “The President is looking forward to meeting you, Jim,” the general said.

  the room was long and narrow, illuminated by a bare yellow bulb.

  “The President would prefer that you not look him directly in the eye.” General Ford pushed a button and the wall before them began to move upward with a medieval rumble of chains and gears, altogether alien to J!m, whose world zipped and zimmed with whisper efficiency. It sounded natural, and scary.

  Light spilled under the wall at J!m’s feet, permeating the corridor, actually a visitor’s gallery. Behind the iron curtain was another wall of thick glass, or likely Zirclear, looking out onto a large antiseptic room with curved walls, ceiling and floor. Everything was white or clear, except for, in a refrigerated glass case in the back, hundreds of jars of yellow liquids and brown solids, trending toward paler yellow and blacker brown on the lower shelves. They were all signed and dated.