“That’s not the end of it, Mr. Komodo. Oh, no. There’s more. Much more. You’re a child abuser. A mutilator, too. We’re running checks on all those kids you had up there at that house. It looks bad. Real bad. Grieved parents from Somalia and whatever other third-world hellholes will be coming forth in droves to tearfully testify how you stole their kids and threw them into your freakshow movies. But the worst of it is probably the murders. How you kill them when they get too old to be in the pictures. We found that grave, you know.”
“What?”
“Hey, Joe! We get a name on that kid in the grave yet?”
Joe, blow-dried and heavyset, looked up from the Penthouse magazine he was reading. “Yeah. Ebi. Little girl. Horrible, just horrible. Tears your heart right out.”
“You’re a ghoul, Mr. Komodo. The American public needs to know that. We got a disinterment order on that grave. We’ll dig her up, find some very graphic things in the autopsy, I’m sure.”
“Ahhhhh!” Komodo’s shriek came from the bottom of his soul, welled up, sprang him forward. He flew across the room, knocked Henderson aside, and went for Stiller. He got his hands around the old man’s withery neck, began choking.
They pulled Komodo off, threw him against the fireplace andirons. Then Henderson was there, with his .45. “Just the way it has to be, I guess. We confronted you with the proof of your inhuman activities, you went berserk, attempted to do bodily harm to several officers, were unavoidably shot dead. Kind of too bad. I saw a couple of those Gojiro movies. Lots of laughs.”
It was right then that red water balloon crashed through the chalet window and exploded against Henderson’s forehead.
“Ughhhh!” The agent went down immediately, his body covered with what looked to be hundreds of leeches and lampreys, all immediately burrowing through his jogging suit and into his skin.
“What the fuck?” The others whirled their guns around from combat crouches, only to be met by a barrage of balloons. It was a regular Republican convention in that chalet, the way those shiny red, white, and blue spheres poured in through the windows and filled the living room, each one packed with a payload of slime and squirm.
Komodo rolled under the coffee table, hid there. He knew those leeches, the slugs and maggots, too. After all, he’d made them, modeled them after mescal worms for that wooden zard scene in Gojiro vs. the Vulgarians of Troy at the Seven-Layer Siege of Ahistoricism. The pseudobeasts were programmed to skintunnel upon impact with any living tissue in the 98.6 range. Of course, in the interests of safety, the minisludgicles only had a half-hour lifespan and left no lingering slimetracks, but Komodo was not about to tell Henderson and his crew that.
Then there were footsteps on the stairs outside. Shig was deploying the more mobile Atoms. Each carried a snaploaded crossbow, ten balloons on the shaft, two more at the ready. Wing, wang, zing, they fired, sending the agents screaming hysterically through the room, eel simulacra extruding from their every orifice.
“We have rescued you, Mr. Komodo!” It was Bop, that saddest Atom, attempting to keep up with the others on his prosthetic legs. He smiled wide, showing that bottomless hole, no tongue or teeth. Suddenly, Bop’s banty chest exploded. That Henderson! He shot Bop in the back!
Shig sprang as if jets were in his boots, sword drawn. With one crescenting slice, he hacked off Henderson’s arm, the blood spraying across the portrait of Joseph Prometheus Brooks. But Henderson, his face so thick with worms as to look like a shag-rug remnant, wasn’t done. He staggered up, pumped a bullet into Shig’s side. Blood blotted the neoteen’s white linens and he fell. Henderson reached over, grabbed Komodo, and using him as a shield began to make his way out of the room.
“Get back you little bastards or he gets it,” Henderson called out through maggot-teemed lips. With his still-extant arm, he managed to pull Komodo onto the chalet’s deck. Komodo felt himself go numb. He had no doubt that the big man planned to kill him, break his neck right then. Down below, a gray Mercedes sped down the dusty road. Stiller was getting away!
That’s when Komodo sensed that blast of heat go past his ear, felt Henderson’s clutch release. It was Trumaine Crenshaw, standing there, holding the laser gun Shig had used to blow clay pigeons from the sky at Albert Bullins’s house. Henderson made one last lunge, trying to take Komodo with him, but he missed and fell off the chalet deck, making the three-hundred-foot plunge into the pine tops by his lonesome.
“Damn . . .” Shaken, Trumaine wiped his brow with his Triple-Ring-tattooed hand. “I wasn’t meaning to shoot nobody, but . . .”
Komodo got up, put his arm around Trumaine. He could feel the boy’s heart beating. “But how could you know?”
Trumaine spit a few times. “My Uncle Walter, he made me swear, ‘Yuke the Nuke comes to call, do what you can for him.’ ”
The New Equation
CRYPTED UP ONCE MORE AMID the macabre expressionism of the White Light Chamber, Gojiro lay numbed and bummed as the Coma Boy coverage splayed before him. Garish stills of Komodo tipsy under Albert Bullins’s big top split-screened with delicate black-and-white shots of a small boy sleeping on a stainless-steel pallet in Okinawa. “Is this the same man?” tightbootied tweet-tones from here to Tonopah intoned.
Of course there was no proof, no evidence. The “investigation” turned up nary a matching hair fiber or corresponding swirl of thumb. Cops in smocks potted busts depicting what the Coma Boy was supposed to look like today, but as for the likenesses they produced, they might as well have been trying to hang a rap on Charlie Chan. No obstensible principle was talking. The army put forth the tersest of no comments. At Hermit Pandora Productions, the phone had been off the hook for days. The only one who’d speak for attribution was Albert Bullins, and all he said was, “Cut off my nuts and fry ’em on a redhot skillet if I know a thing about any Coma Boy. I thought he was a surfer.”
But once the tabloid reflex locks and Luce’s sluice flings loose, who needs proof? The tale’s a torrent, cresting over every levee, each stonewall. It’s no coincidence that “journalist” and “jerkoff” start with the same letter, ditto “reporter” and “retard,” the monster fumed as he watched the story roll on. No angle was too obtuse, no slander too low. “The coma guy’s gotta go,” a hamfaced gaffer’s union boss bellowed into an obliging mike. “He brings in these little freaks and lights that don’t got no plugs. I say, Hey Frankie, this AC or DC? They say they’re running the stuff themselves. I say, Hey Frankie, get the bats, nobody turns on a nightlight in this town unless it’s us. But they start shining those crazy floods on us. I got three fellas that still can’t read the big E on the chart. That coma guy, he’s a lowlife union breaker. A gook scab from outer space.” Killed Gojiro, hearing that. Komodo was a good union man! How the monster longed to Radi-Breath those teamsters’ slack skin—fry that jerky beef like a Bikini Bar-B-Q. Assholes! They all should sleep beneath Hoffa’s sheets.
It didn’t stop there. One after another, leering, sneering faces tossed in their supposedly sensational tidbit. Some third-banana character actor who owned the estate down the road from the Traj Taj was all shook up. Eyebrows arching for the sky, greased and powdered for his first TV shot in years, he told how he woke to find a “hideous beast” in his swimming pool. What a moron—it was only that toothless, harmless giant sloth, escaped from the Zoo of Shame. On the talk shows, Pacific-theater vets kept calling to warn that Komodo was the ultimate of Jap cave-dwellers, surfaced at last to banzai his emperor’s most nefarious bidding.
Gojiro listened with growing helplessness. Komodo = Coma Boy had captured the nation’s imagination; it was an idea on the move! With every replay of those suddenly ubiquitous Okinawa newsreels, each repeating crescendo of the announcer’s booming question—“This boy, is he our witness or our judge?”—the concept lurched forward, reaffixed itself to long-dormant mythic wiring, struck submersed chords.
Then: Extra! Extra! They were going live remote to the Traj Taj. The videoboys had busted in, were steady
camming down the empty corridors, zooming in on the devastation. The place looked as if it had been ransacked by a column of Crusaders searching for their car keys. House plants were ripped from pots, their roots still twitching. The dining-room table was hacked to pieces; china lay shattered on marble floors. Fires burned in shower stalls, mysterious dark fluids ran from beneath doors.
It was insane; Komodo would never have stood for that sort of mayhem. Certainly he wouldn’t have allowed the slashing of those paintings the old producer had made of his beloved starlet. Komodo would rather die than see true love’s expression desecrated. There was only one explanation: It was a set-up. Komodo was in trouble! The monster summoned all his strength. Komodo in trouble? Help was on the way!
Upward Gojiro soared, bent on breaking the Chamber’s miserable confines. But just as quickly, he thumped back to the cavern’s unforgiving floor.
“If Komodo’s in trouble,” he puzzled, “how come I don’t know about it?” How come he wasn’t already on the scene, battling alongside his friend, a fabulous avenger wreaking inconceivable destruction on whatever Opposer dared threaten the most elemental provinces of the Triple Rings? It was supposed to be automatic, Prewire.
It core-quaked the monster, made him wail. “Komodo in trouble and I got to find it out from the Dish, like some barroom lug listening for a ball score!” What was happening? Why didn’t Komodo call out for him in the night, send his plea across all space? Then it came to the monster: Maybe Komodo had called him—tried, and failed!
“Oh, no!” Did that Beam interfere, blot out his friend’s SOS? “Fuck!” the monster anguished. “Komodo invokes the great Oath, and I’m not around to take the call—’cause I’m in an egg, a sixty-six-million-year-old egg!”
Then: “Come in, Gojiro! Please come in! Please heed this humble servant’s plea.”
“What?” The monster looked up, saw them on the Dishscreen. G-fans! Hundreds of them. A thousand ’tile-o-files, more coming all the time according to the traffic choppers. They were converging on the Traj Taj in their scruffy, makeshift leathers, carrying scrapbooks, Crystal Contacts on their juggy heads. “Why are you here?” a newsman asked a zardpard, son of a Salinas migrant worker, caked with dirt from his all-night hitchhike. “Why?” the G-fan retorted, the homemade parietal swirl strapped to his forehead glaring in the sunlight. “Because he’s here.”
“The Coma Boy, you mean?”
The ’tile-o-file looked at the microphone man with disdain. “No. Him!”
“Him?”
“Him—Gojiro! The 90 Series! It’s happening now!”
The reptile reeled, fell backward, crashed down. When he looked at the Dishscreens again, the G-fans were gone. All around flickered images of Joseph Brooks. Immediately the monster relaxed. Anything was better than those screaming ’tile-o-files. But there was more to it than that. It was different now between Gojiro and Joseph Prometheus Brooks.
The turning point had come just hours before, as he hung from the ceiling of that old ranch house, watching Stiller and Grives scream. That’s when the monster saw that old photo lying on the mantel of the stone fireplace. It was two pictures actually, side by side on a single card—a stereopticon photo now minus its holder. Not that the monster needed the viewer to make the 3-D come alive. One look was enough. He saw the whole family there, ten kids at least, dressed like pioneers in patches, hand-me-downs. The mom stood behind, severe, frightened. The dad was off to the side, his eyes dark with dread, piercing. And in front—a boy, the youngest one. What an odd, faraway look he had on his face. From his perch, Gojiro tried to meet that boy’s eyes, to see things from his point of view. That’s when it started, when he felt himself begin to be transported, just as he had been so many times before. And suddenly he wasn’t suctioned on that ceiling anymore. He was waistdeep in a Wisconsin snowdrift, running toward his mother’s call.
“Joseph!” Her dress was gingham, her brown hair done up in a bun. How big and white (his skin!) she looked, how soft her hands felt around him when they hugged. Then she said it was time to go, his trunk was packed, everything arranged. He was different from his brothers and sisters, she said, suddenly stern and practical, her pale blue eyes firm and dry. He was different from everyone. He would understand that someday. Thu-wap! His father was out behind the house, cutting firewood. She put her hand across his lips. There could be no goodbyes. The wagon was there, waiting, that tired horse and the man with the hat pulled down. “My son,” she said, pushing him up into the seat, kissing him one last time, an icy oval on his cheek for a moment, “please, help us. Redeem us.”
Then through the snow . . . crying, shrieking . . . a nine-year-old boy with a freezing nose going to the university, incredible ideas inside his head. Even the professors receded from him, made timid by what he knew. Then he was on a ship, great waves rolling, and in a carriage, riding through black forests to Göttingen, to be with Stiller and the rest. Even there, feeling the sting of their envious, scheming glances, he was an aberration, different. How he hated their glibness, their minds so fluid, their hearts so empty. Then he escaped to the club . . . the music hot and slick, the terror in his mind funneled out through the end of a licorice stick. Except the saxophone player, whom he hoped would understand, could only shake his head and say, “Joey B, sometimes you go way outside.”
Only she knew. Leona. She came over after he played “In a Mist,” looked up at him with her green eyes. “I know who you are, I’ve seen you . . .”
They left the club immediately, ran through the rainy streets, up the flight of stairs to a small room. She took the sheet off the easel, showed him what she had made. He went closer, touched the canvas, saw himself in his parson’s clothes, standing by a fence, hands outstretched looking out.
“But it’s not finished,” he said. “You can see through it.”
She looked at him, beaming. “You will finish it.”
Then they were in the desert—Brooks and Leona in the Encrucijada! It was dawn and they were walking across the sand. Walking toward the tower where the gadget hung. The Heater! Dead ahead. What was that in Brooks’s arms? The monster strained to see. But now the worldshatterer was yelling, “No! Leona! It’s wrong!”
That’s when the reptile grew weak, when his tears fell from the ceiling of that ranch house, splashing down unnoticed amongst the screaming men below. Brooks was right, Gojiro knew then: Grives and Stiller didn’t understand, they never would. They’d never know the apartness, the illimitable separation, what it was like to be without a Beam, without a Bunch—to be an Atom.
Could Joseph Prometheus Brooks, father of fingers on buttons and red telephones, be an Atom? An Atom just like that melancholy crew from Radioactive Island, like Tyrone from Philly, Abdul from Beirut, and those thousand G-fans wailing in the night? Yes. There was no question, Gojiro decided. After all, it took one to know one. Years ago, when he was a lonely mutant stuffed inside a foreign world, he cried for help across all time and tide. And then, from the mind of a Coma Boy came the words, “You have no friends? . . . I will be your friend!” Komodo came for him. Who, Gojiro wondered, would come for Joseph Prometheus Brooks?
But then the monster’s mood shattered yet again. It was what Brooks said about that hot afternoon all those years ago, about the mistake he made, why forty-seven times the projected payload was still not enough. Because “He did not show His face.”
He. Him.
On the Dishscreen they were showing the scene outside the Traj Taj again. “90 Series now!” a thousand G-fans shouted. “90 Series now!”
* * *
He pumped half of Hanford into his throbbing head, sought to seal himself up in the hardcuttin’ 235’s special glow. But it didn’t work. No stupor was thick enough to keep him from looking at those monitors, to deflect the probe of Pro Brooks’s stare. At least until he noticed that the worldshatterer wasn’t in the position anymore. “Shit!” The monster fumbled with his fieldwork notes. “Subject’s gaze alters . . .” Brooks�
�s basic stance hadn’t changed, but the trajectory of his gaze had lowered. He wasn’t staring into that same spot of air above the Encrucijada. He was watching something straight ahead of him. Something getting closer all the time.
“Pull back! Give me a wider angle,” the reptile screamed at the unresponsive monitor screens. But it didn’t matter, because right then the Echo Man stepped forward into the picture.
It wasn’t easy, measuring a mess of that shrink potion, shooting it on the run. But there was no time, he’d have to shrivel in stride. Back in that courtroom, the Echo Man’s slick lawyers were obviously just stalling, trying to explain away their client’s disappearance with that obvious fiction about a secret religious ceremony. As if they could have known, or cared, what Nelson Monongae was doing out in the middle of the Encrucijada, dressed in the same leathers—the Varanidid’s leathers—he wore the night he met Leona Brooks all those years ago. And around his neck, that vial. The Echo Man had returned to the Valley to stand before Joseph Prometheus Brooks. Gojiro had to know why.
However, when the monster reached the Valley floor, the Echo Man was gone. There was only Brooks, back in his standard position, searching as always. If the Echo Man’s presence had made a difference, the old scientist exhibited no evidence of it. “Where’d he go?” The reptile pivoted every vertebra, scanning the darkening horizon, but there was no sight of the Indian. “Shit, shit, shit!” he screamed, pounding his foreclaws into the hard sand.
Then, from the corner of his eye, Gojiro noticed the approaching tumbleweed. At first, it seemed just one of millions bouncing through the sagebrush. It wasn’t until the thicket snagged against Brooks’s leg and the old man tried to flick it off that the lizard saw the flat green object caught up inside. Again Brooks sought to free himself but still the tangle wouldn’t move. Finally, he reached down, grabbed the snarl, examined it. Then he shoved his hand inside and pulled out the green item.
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