Zanesville: A Novel

by Kris Saknussemm

  “Where’s Go-Go the Eskimo?” he heard Aretha call, looking more like a former Princeton linebacker than a drag queen, despite the Day-Glo wig.

  Clearfather was sorry to see his hair drop. Then he was led to another tent and given underwear, socks, woollene jeans and a Pendleton shirt, Red Wing boots and a musty St. Vincent de Paul peacoat plus a shoulder bag. Natassia was crying, and someone they called Go-Go the Eskimo or the Gator Girl arrived, a woman of about eighteen or twenty, as pale as toilet porcelain, with two fried-egg eyes. She was joined by an Afro-American boy of about ten or eleven, who was even paler than she was.

  “You’re sending me off with a couple of kids?” Clearfather asked Aretha.

  “Go-Go’s forgotten more about the layout of this city than any civil engineer, fireman, cop, or comtrol wizard ever knew,” Aretha announced. “She freed the GATORS.”

  “Who are the gators?”

  “Guided Automatic Tactical Operation Response Systems. Robot units designed to deal with toxic disasters and terrorist crises. Always handy to have friends in low places.”

  “Psych level is still rising—but slowing,” Lila reported.

  “And who’s he?” Clearfather asked, pointing to the spirit-white black boy.

  “Hermes is an albino,” Aretha said. “He beat fully envenomed security and communed with the master Subway System grid. He knows every inch and chaining code—every signal light. But he doesn’t talk.”

  “Tell the III Chings that there are no llamas in the Bahamas.” Clearfather giggled.

  “Find Finderz. And where are the rest of the supplies?” Aretha called, fearing that Clearfather’s brain might turn to mucus before making the Port Authority.

  “I’m coming!” hollered the dwarf. “A nice set of instructions for Clearfather—and a private I-gram off to Dingler.”

  “This paper’s blank,” Aretha said, examining the note.

  “It won’t be in a few hours’ time,” Keeperz answered. “Delay-action ink in case anybody swoops on him straight up.”

  “What did you say to Dingler?”

  “Visitor arriving. Has information vegetable, animal, and mineral. I signed it The Wichita Lineman. Then I bounced it off a couple of satellites. THE ENTOMOLOGIST gave it what he called ‘the scent of the hive.’”

  “Ticket’s all set,” Broadband reported. “What’s wrong with Nasty?”

  Aretha turned to see that Natassia was down on her knees trying to hold Clearfather’s hand in an act of supplication.

  Clearfather stroked his head and, as he did, all his remaining hair fell out. “No!” Natassia cried, clutching at the hair, trying to give it back to him—stuffing it in his pockets—then clasping his knees and burying her face against his thighs.

  “Old Mrs. Rushcutter had a rough-cut punt. Not a punt-cut rough, but a rough-cut punt,” the now bald Clearfather cackled.

  “He doesn’t know what he’s saying!” Aretha insisted, thankful to see Dr. Quail approaching with another dose of Oblivion.6.

  “How can he ever know what he’s saying after what we’ve done to him?” Natassia shouted—peeled away by Quail’s assistants.

  They rolled out a motorcycle sidecar bolted into a sled-frame mounted on PowerMountain® tires. There was a small step behind for the driver to stand on. Go-Go reappeared leading a motley pack of dogs. Two of the mongrels had lost all their hair and were battling a rampant fungal infection. Some were missing snippets of ears or an eye. One had a bionic leg; another had five legs. Then there were two dogs that looked fit but wild, big muscular wolves from another time and place—the woods of Maine or the steppes of Asia—all of them straining at their thick black Hemlar straps. The egg-eyed girl hitched the panting dogs into the sled harness. Clearfather felt a wave of feedback slosh through his head.

  “Here’s a little smash’n’grab,” the drag queen said. “I’m sorry we couldn’t arrange a credit card for you but we need more time for that. This is a note for later. And this is a bus ticket good for unlimited travel for three months. What name did you use, B?”

  “Elijah Clearfather,” Broadband replied. “Thought it had a nice ring.”

  “Where am I going?” Clearfather asked. “Why can’t I stay here?”

  “Go-Go and Hermes will get you to the Port Authority,” Aretha continued with great effort. “Do not speak to anyone you don’t have to.”

  Ouija appeared, carrying a supply of food and drink provisions that she stuffed in his bag, followed by Grody clacking and shimmering and Big Bwoy squeaking along behind—excited by the other dogs.

  “Lucky! Lucky! Lucky!” Grody croaked, and then—as if concentrating very hard—he bowed the caged helmet full of rattling balls and said, “You pick . . .”

  Clearfather eventually reached into the wire basket on the man’s head and plucked out one of the blank spheres. It felt as smooth as a stale gumball. He put the ball in his pocket. Go-Go strapped on a motorcycle helmet with an American flag painted on it and motioned for Clearfather to climb in the egg. Tinkerbell and the man called Ripcord were topping up the oil in the forks of two superlight Kawasakis when young Hermes growled up on a graphite-framed Husqvarna. On his back was what had once been a Miroku shotgun, which someone had taken interesting liberties with.

  “Are they coming, too?” Clearfather asked, pointing to Tinkerbell and Ripcord.

  “Always have a decoy and a backup plan if you can,” Aretha replied. “We don’t have a backup plan, but we got us some badass decoys. And just as well, Sawbuck says there’s lots of action tonight.”

  Friar Tuck pulled back a section of trodden turf to reveal a large set of utility doors leading to a jeep-width concrete ramp. Tinkerbell wore on her left thigh a .45 Adder that she’d boiled in a phosphate solution to obtain a poisonous green corrosion-resistant finish, while Ripcord, whose eyes now had a luminous amphetamine sheen, waved a Schaurig machine pistol that gave off a pheromonal whiff of gun lubricant. All of them goggled up except for Go-Go, whose bugged-out eyes seemed beyond electron-stimulated assistance.

  “All right,” said Aretha. “This is goodbye, Clearfather.”

  Tinkerbell and Ripcord roared out like muzzlefire and Go-Go whipped up the dogs, which were happy to be under way.

  “Close the doors!” Aretha called after they’d disappeared. “Everyone to combat-ready positions. All you in CyberIT—get your ears to the grindstone! And you, Little Man, tell Broadband to power up the GATORS.”

  “Don’t crucify yourself, Big Girl,” Finderz consoled. “Everybody here’s guilty of something. Cocoa in my tent?”

  “Guilty?” Aretha muttered, grateful now for any distraction. “I thought you were just a Caltech prankster who got in Dutch with de guvment.”

  “Dutch, huh? I’d be doing twenty-five-to-life at Marion. Somehow I don’t think I’m going to get that Nob Head Prize that Momma dreamed of,” Finderz replied.

  “Well, let’s not dwell on the past,” the drag queen said with a sigh as they reached the dwarf’s tent. “I want you to find out all you can about those probes. We may have had to send Clearfather away, but we aren’t just going to abandon him.”

  “I’m on the case.” Finderz nodded, putting milk on a Bunsen burner. “But that stealth unit’s bad business. Developed for the Holy War. The motto of the designers was that none of their probes was ever MIA, they were NYA—Not Yet Arrived. But THE ENTOMOLOGIST and I will find a way to flush it out.”

  “Heaven help us if he ever goes against us,” Aretha said.

  “His eccentricity may be the best defense against infiltration,” Finderz asserted. “I think that was another of Parousia Head’s great insights. The Rickerburn construct might’ve flipped because it was too rigid. Spiral minds are harder to twist.”

  “Do you think we’ll ever see her . . . ,” Aretha was musing. “I was going to say again. But you haven’t ever met her, either, have you?”

  “Nope.” Finderz shook his bulbous head, handing Aretha a mug. “But I can feel her prese
nce in the tech. The coding . . . it’s like Bach. I don’t believe she’s just a myth—but I can see why people do.”

  “It comes down to faith,” Aretha said.

  “It’s a fine line between inspiration and delusion and this whole place is balanced right on the fucking edge,” the dwarf agreed. “But here’s something I am sure of. You know those relatives Clearfather was talking about? Well, Aunt Vivian was the name of a project that Ronwell Seward was involved with before Vitessa.”

  “Ronwell Seward . . . now, there’s a name I haven’t heard in a while. What did he end up calling himself? Stinky Wiggler?”

  “That’s right. Good old Stinky Wiggler. Another neglected genius. Along with Parousia, he’d be the climax mind of our time—if he hadn’t lost his.”

  “Imagine what would’ve happened if those two had ever joined forces,” Aretha enthused. “He disappeared, didn’t he?”

  “We may hear from him yet. In the meantime, ‘Aunt Vivian’ was a project that concentrated on real-time continuous and spontaneous encryption. Very edgy for its day. Refers back to Prohibition-Era Seattle. A woman broadcast secret messages to smugglers on her radio program Aunt Vivian’s Bedtime Stories for Youngsters.”

  “What do you think that means for Clearfather?”

  “No idea. But I’m glad we’ve got a tracking device on him.”

  “Well, I hope for his sake Aunt Vivian turns out to be a nice old woman who can make a good cup of cocoa,” Aretha said.

  CHAPTER 5

  Deadland Running

  The cage fighting, cantor singing, vindaloo—everything stopped as the high-pitched droning grew louder and the insidious tom-tom network pounded out its call to arms and, in some cases, claws. The cacophony drove the Fort Thoreau dogs wild, echoing off the blackened brick archways and tiled caverns beneath the megalopolis—a Neolithic delirium of Japanese cartoons, Mexican ghost murals, and Mandarin death slogans.

  Through the agony in his head, Clearfather glimpsed mazes of ramps and planks thrusting out and falling away into untold darknesses, as if some fiendish network of pharaohs’ tombs were simultaneously being constructed and excavated. He seemed to see everything through a grid of plasma tinged a nauseous methyl violet. Mummy-like shadows gesticulated, ravaged old women swathed in cellophane and crumbling New York Posts . . . hooded figures celebrating bizarre jackhammer rites. Frying offal, octane, cordite—bodies soaked in kerosene and set alight to keep them from the rats, some of the chem-fed mutants reaching the size of pit bulls—this was what the subway-sewer-and-maintenance tunnels had devolved into, an archaeological nightmare where the withered and the larval writhed side by side and totemic dream societies turned themselves into hybrids of flesh and machine while being preyed upon by the gangs that warred for turf and tissue.

  This was also where Clearfather and his escort now faced a gauntlet that was closing on them like a fist. The Satyagrahi dogs groaned with dismay as the evil throbbing grew in intensity. Go-Go whipped them up through another tunnel lined with dripping pipes. On and on through the intestinal labyrinth the girl steered the mongrels until they swept through an intersection of conduits and switching terminals and Clearfather saw Ripcord’s crumpled bike—the Schaurig smashed in a pool of blood. Go-Go ducked just in time beneath a line of piranha wire stretched across the passage. A human hand and a Browning automatic lay on the ground. From out of the dark, Tinkerbell laid down rubber. The bald man turned and saw Hermes roar in from the western tunnel. All around them wailed and pulsed the raucous jeering of plastic horns and drums.

  “They got Rippy,” Clearfather heard Go-Go call.

  “I know.” Tinkerbell gestured with the Adder. “He didn’t go quiet!”

  “We gotta take 111 and then run the subway to the sewers.”

  “Shit,” Tinkerbell gritted. “Trains don’t eat you, zombies’ll get you in the drains.”

  “The GATORS are on the move,” Go-Go answered.

  “All right,” Tinkerbell said. “I’ll draw as much heat as I can.”

  She let out a war whoop, skidding past a stripped Yellow Cab with a burned corpse still clinging to the wheel, an old-style cell phone stuck to its head. Hermes revved off south and Go-Go whistled up the team and took off after him, the eyes of the two wolves shining in the dark. It seemed to Clearfather that he could see their eyes gleaming as if he were out in front of them, his mind surging forward out of his body—beyond the sled—beyond the barricades of shopping carts and baby carriages.

  Through the rubble around them and the dry ice and barbed-wire misery in his mind he took in the shrapnel of images. Psych ward rejects armored in hubcaps and stop signs. Lab abominations with the jaws of anglerfish huddled around steam grates. Steroid-gorged weight lifters naked except for hard hats and G-strings, pumping iron in grottoes of sputtering neon.

  But it was not these overtly gruesome visions that wormed their way deepest into his consciousness. It was the little girl without legs, rolling herself along inside a studded BFGoodrich snow tire. And still the dogs pulled on and the hunters closed.

  AK-47 fire tore the air in Tinkerbell’s direction. It came from an acetylene-torched chicane of butcher’s racks and grappling hooks. A shotgun blasted and a body rolled underneath—the dogs and the tires crushing it without swerving—then a rush of wind and dust hit Clearfather in the face—trash and fresher air roaring past as if a valve had opened. He saw the tracks of the subway trains—his mind moving out in front of the sled again and back behind into darkness—the different drugs in his system peaking—the scar on his back burning. Go-Go lashed the dogs forward down the service path beside the rails, every six hundred feet a blue light and another emergency station—behind them an express train bearing down. In the headlight he picked out four ferals on MX bikes. One of them sported a helmet-mounted turbine-driven Black Swarm unit ready to spew a horizontal rain of steel.

  The driverless southbound was almost upon them—Clearfather heard a scream. “Yee-ahhh!” Go-Go brayed, driving the sled into another passageway—and down—the dogs floundering through a sewer, the chemical burning of the disinfectants and the industrial cleaners worse than the shit and body scum.

  Out of the dark he saw red laser sights bloom over the tunnel walls. Five Jet Skis came rooster-tailing around a bend. Hermes farted out a fatboy canister of mustard gas that sent the flank ski plowing into the wedge. A flametrail of wreckage ripped between the walls, but the other skiers sliced through—the nearest one shouting, “GATORS!”

  Up out of the mouth of one of the other tunnels there appeared a smooth dark metal-skinned amphibious robot on all-terrain tractor tires. It churned through the sludge, cutting between the dogsled and Hermes. The gangbangers let loose with what they had but the GATOR drove them back down the tunnel. The dogs heaved up into a drier passageway, a potassium glow revealing arms hanging from ventilation grilles, the smooth floor strewn with cartridge casings.

  They switched between tunnels, occasionally catching sight of Hermes and Tinkerbell. Clearfather noticed that the dogs nearest to him were tiring. He could smell their exhaustion. I must pull them, he thought. I must pull them. Barking crazily, the team renewed its attack from the rear, the five-legger spurring on the hairless ruin in front of her. It was only because of this sudden burst they weren’t all taken down in a hail of metal—for coming up behind them again was the feral with the Black Swarm, this time joined by an unholy alliance tattooed with the warpaint of skeletons.

  Go-Go knew what would happen. They’d eat the dogs and rape her. Or maybe they’d rape the dogs and eat her. Hermes’s bike took a hit and the albino cartwheeled off—landing in Clearfather’s lap. The impact knocked the money Aretha had given him out of the peacoat. The cash blew back into the tunnel. “Mister,” Go-Go yelled to Clearfather. “You got any ideas, now’s the fuckin’ time!”

  The voice reached him through a firecloud. He hadn’t seen the money fall from the sled into the darkness behind. He was aware only of the stunned flesh cra
dled in his arms and the fear-for-life smell of the dogs. Then the Swarm turbine whined behind them and he found that he was singing . . .

  Like a bat out of Hell

  I’ll be gone when the morning comes . . .

  When the night is over . . . like a bat out of Hell

  I’ll be gone, gone, gone . . .

  Go-Go heard the whir of the weapon’s motor and braced to be ripped apart . . . so when the dogs didn’t disintegrate and the pain didn’t come, she glanced back over her shoulder to see a wall of ammo chasing the sled but never gaining. Gradually the angry cloud of bullets lost all momentum and fell to the ground as harmlessly as thimbles and confetti while the incredulous skeleton men blazed through. Holy shit, Go-Go thought. “That was good, mister . . . you know any more?”

  Clearfather looked down out of the acid mist in his mind at the boy he held. Then the deep anguish came. Go-Go watched in shock as her passenger’s back burst into flame—which she hosed down with the mini fire extinguisher she carried—but not before the terrible heat shot through her. Then she felt unaccountably cool. She looked behind to see how close their pursuers were now, and all of the figures began to destabilize. They were no longer painted up as skeletons, they were skeletons. Their machines seemed to petrify and fade, their forms dwindling into disembodied tattoos that disappeared like gunsmoke, leaving behind a litter of flesh-piercing jewelry like savage party favors.

  Onward the dogs pulled and no gun barrages could be heard—all the way to 42nd Street. Not a single lurker or malingero. No Hyena Men, no Curare Girls. Just an eerie quiet—except for a lone motorcycle. Hermes had regained consciousness by the time they arrived. A bad knock to the head, but when he climbed out of the eggshell Go-Go noted no major bleeding or penetrative wounds. What was even more surprising was that the scorch marks on Clearfather’s peacoat weren’t there.