Go, Mutants!

by Larry Doyle

  I buttoned up, giving the boy cover, which naturally was when he chose to communicate.

  “I’m sorry,” J!m said.

  “For which thing?” Johnny asked.

  “For everything. For being a jerk to you, and everybody. And for, I don’t know, for causing all this, scaring the whole country and getting us put in camps again.”

  “Pish posh,” I said. “They needed a distraction and you provided one, that’s all. If it hadn’t been you, they were going to stage something. Had the dogs all mutilated.”

  “So,” J!m smiled, in a realization most males in this galaxy don’t come to until, well, ever:

  “It’s not all about me.”

  “Not at all,” I said. “As far as they’re concerned, you’re nothing but a pawn. Which is rather ironic, given—”

  “Something’s coming.”

  Johnny stopped, putting his hand up. He shone his wristplex torch down the pipe.

  It moved through the water, fast.

  A one-eyed Coprosaur rose from the sewage, its intake valves open, its radulae churning peckishly. One of the few awoken beasts of any use, the species was secretly introduced to the sanitation system fourteen years ago, where it efficiently processed solid waste and negated the need for security viz. I should have mentioned that.

  Marie screamed, as was appropriate.

  The Coprosaur, a less picky diner than its name would suggest, clamped several mouths on Johnny and began processing.

  “I’m in it!” Jelly yelled, and dove into the saur’s dorsal maw. The beast reared back, assumed an expression of shit-eating chagrin and turned translucent. It collapsed into a massive pile of goo.

  “Jelly?” J!m said.

  The surface rippled and a face emerged, four feet high, covering the upper half of the mass.

  “Nasty!” exclaimed Jelly, and, beholding his new monstrosity: “This is so much better than being a fat boy!”

  Johnny rubbed the raw, circular sores on his chest.

  “How much further?”

  “Oh,” I said. “We can go up here, if you’d like.”

  Chapter 32

  Flaming Fury from the Skies

  the sky was pinking up into as glorious a morning as I could have hoped for my return to the surface. The UVs were low yet invigorating, and I felt a hundred years younger.

  What a bedraggled troupe we were. Johnny, nursing bullet and beast wounds, was bloody and listing to port. Marie was death warmed over, sunken eyes and a blue cast that would take days to clear, dying being less restful than most people imagine. Jelly, oozing out of the manhole, was more robust than ever, though not in a lovable way, nor in the best interest of his future health.

  And J!m, poor J!m. Shredded attire aside, he was uninjured, but he had the open stare of a man who had abruptly stopped being a boy.

  And he wasn’t finished.

  “This is Floral Avenue,” Marie said, noting Sandra Jane’s house, hard to miss with the airplane hangar attached to the back. “We live a couple blocks from here.”

  I put my hand on J!m’s shoulder.

  “Let’s go home.”

  He allowed my hand to stay there.

  “Fine,” he said. “But Mom is gonna fuse.”

  I chose not to remind him that his mother would not be home.

  We began to walk.

  “I know how to handle your mother,” I said. “Which reminds me. You’ve probably been wondering how you fornicate . . .”

  “Later,” J!m said.

  “Yes,” I said. “Later, then.”

  “shouldn’t we,” j!m asked, “be coming up with some kind of plan?”

  We had.

  “We fight to the death,” Johnny said.

  That wasn’t it.

  “I think,” Marie said, “if we apply ourselves, we can do better than that.”

  We turned onto Maple. The system’s yellow star, a hazy orange, hung above the end of the street. I closed my eyes to bask in its large photoelectrochemical potential.

  J!m peered into the dawn.

  “Johnny nailed it.”

  Over the horizon, as if out of the sun itself, arrived the cavalry, not to the rescue.

  First came the helicycle squadron, followed by flying tank turrets, and the hovertrucks, disgorging troops.

  A ground-based jeep drove up and General Ford got out.

  “Walter,” I said.

  He chomped his compensative pipe. “Are you lost, Andy?”

  “Not one bit,” I said. “I assumed our agreement was no longer in force.”

  Walter chuckled with sinister chumminess.

  “Andy, if you had come to me, I could’ve explained that your wife and son were safe, as we agreed, and that the current action was only temporary, until after the elections. Which will now have to be cancelled, unfortunately. You’ve turned this into a public-relations nightmare.”

  Neighbors ventured out of their homes, in pajamas and less. They had never wanted my wife and son here, lowering property values and causing diversity, but this morning they were feeling guilty, not wanting it to have gone this far, and worried about what or who would be next.

  “May I say something here?” Marie ventured.

  “If you have any last words,” the general said, atypically curt. “You’re the reason my grandson is suspended in a vat of Prussian Blu, fighting to maintain his humanity.”

  A battered patrol car pulled up next to the general. His granddaughter leapt from the passenger side.

  Rusty took in the whole scene and focused on one detail.

  “Jelly, you’re alive!” she squealed, “and so big.”

  “What the hell is going on here?” Nick Ford shouted, exiting the cruiser.

  “A military matter, Son,” the general said, “beyond your jurisdiction.”

  “Andy Ra’ is alive? What’s going on?”

  On nodded orders, two soldiers secured the sheriff. “You’ve been lying to everyone,” Nick Ford yelled as they dragged him away. “You told us he was dead!”

  “He is,” Walter said. “There’s nobody standing there.”

  The crowd murmured. A small boy spoke up.

  “There is somebody standing there!”

  “No, there isn’t,” Walter said. “Allow me to demonstrate.”

  He removed a small device from his pocket.

  “Walter,” I said, “I built that. Do you think I would’ve given you something that could destroy me?”

  “We made some adjustments.”

  He fired.

  zt.

  My body language expressed dismay, easily read, even without a head.

  J!m wailed and hugged my body, a heartening sight. The corpus took J!m’s head in its hands and, judging it a satisfactory substitution, attempted to tear it off.

  “Son.”

  My head lay in the curb.

  J!m disengaged from the body and came to me.

  “Dad?” cradling my head in his arms.

  “It looks worse than it is.”

  “You’re decapitated, Dad!”

  “J!m, Son, listen. I’m going to die shortly, and I don’t know how long I’ll be dead, so I need you to pay attention.” I coughed up something apparently disturbing. “I did all this for you,” I told J!m. “I built it for you.”

  “You said that before.”

  “And I’m saying it again for a reason,” a bit irritated. “And one other thing: be nicer to your mother.”

  My eyes closed, first horizontally and then vertically.

  J!m, frantic, stuck his fingers in my aural slits.

  “Don’t do that,” I said.

  My head burst into flames.

  J!m wept.

  the following occurred while I was dead and has been reconstructed from surveillance viz and memory tapes.

  johnny, wounded and exhausted, estimated he could nevertheless take out the general, a few soldiers, and potentially commandeer a helicycle, which was a sweet ride.

  Plotting a s
wing path from branch to PLEX pole to the general’s neck, he sprang, only to be swept aside by a slow but unstoppable red tide.

  “It’s gobblin’ time!” Jelly bellowed, rolling in folding waves of bloodthirsty and bonehungry Gelatinous Offensive Organism.

  The general fired.

  zt.

  Jelly quivered, the ray concentrating in his scarlet core, disintegrating him from the inside out. A hand appeared out of the top, futilely flailing, and then he was nonexistent.

  Rusty opened her mouth to scream and something hot and viscous landed in it. She spat into her hand.

  “Shhh,” Jelly said.

  j!m slumped on the curb, rocking my smoldering head. Behind him, three soldiers were shooting at my body’s feet, making it dance.

  Marie sat down next to J!m.

  “I had questions,” J!m said, absentmindedly picking at my face, “and now I have to wait until he’s not dead anymore.”

  “Oh, Jim,” Marie said, thinking him deluded with grief, unfamiliar with the conventions of the genre.

  J!m handed me to Marie and got up. He passed Johnny, who had determined an attack at this time would not be advisable, and walked to a black sticky spot in the middle of the street.

  He was thirty feet from the general, the recommended firing distance for the death ray. J!m didn’t care. Stripped of all his adolescent affectation, unprotected by ironic distance and undistracted by invented agonies, he was in the real world, in real pain.

  “My father came in peace!” J!m cried. “All he wanted was peace!”

  “Everybody wants peace,” the general replied. “What matters are the terms.”

  My body grew tired of dancing and zapped one of the soldiers in the face. The other two blew it to bits.

  “So what are your terms, Jim? Unconditional surrender or . . . well, how about I start by erasing the monkey?”

  The general fired.

  z—

  J!m made a wish.

  The beam bent away from Johnny, in a lovely parabola, and struck J!m in the chest. It was quite a jolt, a shade more than three million bolts of lightning, and J!m fairly fulminated, rays spiking from each and every hyperdiamond on his surface, burning tiny microholes through trees, buildings, people and property.

  J!m looked up and saw, again, in the air, pneumatic, light and energy, in a matrix exactly matching the one in his brain, and neatly described by the post-Newtonian meta-calculus he had lying around up there.

  He got it, as I knew he would. He just needs to apply himself.

  J!m lifted his arms. Bolts shot from his fingertips, jagging at all angles to PLEX transponders up and down the block.

  The helicycles and flying turrets went fzzt and dropped from the sky.

  The general shut off his weapon.

  But J!m was inside, connected; he was the PLEX, as it was him, in accordance with the original design, which, to the assembled, was indisguishable from magic.

  J!m lifted a finger. Reverse lightning cracked the sky behind him, spreading in both directions until it encircled the world in fire.

  The general’s weapon went red in his hand, fusing his fingers before it vanished.

  J!m blinked and the lightning was gone. He lowered his arms, maintaining eye contact with the general.

  “Let’s talk,” Walter Ford said.

  Chapter 33

  It’s Rockin’ Rollin’ End!

  “this memorializes all the rights, and reparations, we’ve agreed to, surrendering the PLEX to public control, and so on.” General Walter Ford signed the docuplex with an eye blink and slid it across the table.

  J!m, in a silver jacket with matching crown, flicked through the treaty officiously.

  “Only thing,” the general mentioned tentatively, “we don’t have broad authority over school lunch menus . . .”

  J!m raised a finger.

  “But we’ll make it work,” the general said.

  J!m eye-signed.

  “Now, if you’ll excuse me,” he said. “I’ve got a social function.”

  The gymnasium resounded with applause, some with genuine joy for this milestone in human-nonhuman relations, some in fear, and some because it was a party.

  The theme for this year’s Winter Ball was NO ONE ALIKE, necessitating the cutting and hanging of thousands of foil flakes, but students were eager to participate, and to assure a record of their participation was made available to J!m, who was quite easily voted the Winter King as well.

  J!m rose from the negotiating table and strode in his silver tuxedo to center court, recently repainted, where his queen awaited.

  They kissed, and Marie’s hair fluffed out.

  “I hope I never get used to that,” she said.

  “I can keep upping the voltage,” he said.

  The subsequent power chord was a nice touch.

  Johnny hooted in harmony with the sustained note, then led his new band, the Wild Ones, in a scorching original.

  The Martians need women,

  And they need ’em really soon;

  Mysterians got ray guns,

  And they set ’em on swoon;

  The king and the queen of the ball were joined by their court:

  Jelly, back in his boy mold, with Rusty, lit up and flaunting her Venusian heritage;

  Hel and Mil, dispensing with the manoflage;

  and Dorothy Spiva and Bernie Karsko, who were more popular than this narrative suggests.

  Kronos got the power

  To party every night;

  Miw sat on the sidelines, in her appropriate chaperone wear, radiating at her son the hero, the king, the man.

  She felt a tug on her dress.

  I offered her refreshments, and crawled into her lap. We made a ridiculous pair, me with my toddler body, weeks yet from adulthood, but these are the accommodations of which a marriage is made.

  Klaatu barada nictu

  Every gal in sight . . .

  Sheriff Ford and Lilitu rumbaed by, putting aside past acrimony and leaving open their rekindling options, at least until later in the evening, when she would broach rates.

  “Would you like to dance?” Howard Rand asked his wife, in the pan in his lap.

  “With you?” came the merely caustic reply, for her a stab at rapprochement.

  Rand took a swig from his flask and poured the rest in the missus’s tray.

  We’re gonna rock this planet

  We’re gonna roll this planet

  The music echoed out in the hallways of MHS, where Miss Mantis prowled in the shadows, awaiting her next opportunity to take head . . .

  We’re gonna blast this planet

  We’re gonna blow this planet

  . . . and to the parking lot, where Sandra Jane, stabilized by medication but experimenting with dosages to increase her bust without affecting her head or hands, sat in Toad’s rebuilt Turboflite, with Tubesteak and Ice and a baby blue Russ, asking, “Where’s the rest of the girls?”. . .

  We’re gonna destroy planet Earth

  ’Til your females can’t please us anymore

  . . . and farther still, to the scorched cornfield, carved in a complex and delicate pattern known to the Mayans, and Egyptians, and Sumerians, and the unnamed protohumans before them, upon which shone landing beacons emanating from a thousand brilliant silver saucers, glowing in the night.

  Sorry about that.

  Also by Larry Doyle

  i love you, beth cooper

  Copyright

  GO, MUTANTS! Copyright © 2010 by Larry Doyle. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express wri
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  FIRST EDITION

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been applied for.

  ISBN: 978-0-06-168655-9

  EPub Edition © 2010 ISBN: 9780062000149

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