Two blue-bottle flies had found their way onto her eyes, sipping away with their pseudotracheae. I waved them away.
“Then the other night ol’ George drains the box of wine, passes out on the porch, wakes up with a kink in his neck, figures, ‘Hey, it’s all well and good for Kirk and his new pals, what good did our concoction ever do me?’ Doses himself, fourteen times just to be sure. Good science, hey? No control subject at the dosage, does it all to himself. Kink in the neck. Dean’ll take you out to the workshop in a second, you’ll get a good look at George.”
On cue, Dean bent under the doorframe to clump into the room.
“Hi, Dean,” I said.
“Come look at this, Giller. See down there?”
I didn’t budge, but Duffy pointed out the window as though I had.
“That animal lying there is named Hopper, you see her? Look at those wings. The pride of Pismo Beach colony.”
“She’s a him now,” said Dean.
“You’re entitled to your opinion.”
“Why’d you treat the animal like that?” I asked.
“For the same reason that any field of medicine is pursued!” Turning, Duffy smiled slowly, gradually, as though he’d just figured out he was capable of it. “To answer the question, ‘Exactly how much can this poor creature stand?’ But I repeat, I don’t answer to Alice on this. Not for ten seconds. And not even her dad talks to me like you’ve been doing.”
His tone had changed like I had a spanking coming, and as the tiny hairs inside my ears detected the switch, I felt like I was already taller, though I was still sitting down, and my fingers curled into hard little animals, and the muscles in my neck turned hydraulic so I could head-butt the top off a guy’s skull, and neither of them even noticed.
“That lion has a sister.” Now with every word Duffy jabbed a finger down at the floorboards, like the soapbox hippie he was, every syllable political and important. “A twin sister, and her grafts have been much less debilitating. Dean’ll take you down to her. Between the two of them, sir, you can consider yourself cured. Your problems, sir, are behind you.”
“His name’s Whistler,” said Dean. “That other lion.”
With hands the size of hubcaps he picked me up around the shoulders, which brought my forehead level with his nose. His armpits smelled of tangy human b.o. I bunched every iota of pink goop into the back of my neck, let it compress there while Dean went on talking.
“If we can,” Dean told me quietly, “we’ll—”
I launched my forehead through the bridge of his nose. His hands opened and I dropped to the floor, and he would’ve fallen flat on his back except the wall got in his way, and with a new hole in his face he wound up sitting down cross-eyed while the whites of his eyes filled with blood. I got up and faced the doctor, who stood with his hands spread on the wall, his back against the bright rectangle of window. My lips pulled back from my teeth like I was a saber-toothed tiger, though my main thing was still to stay inconspicuous. As I came closer he wheezed. I hadn’t had any kind of fight since Pimples and Patrick Pig the day before, and my system wasn’t engineered for such a long intermission.
“Think,” Duffy finally stammered. “If your intent—”
I threw myself around his swirling pink-and-green middle and drove us out through the glass. I squinted against the violent sunlight at the oval of lawn stretching under us. We flipped once in the air, then I made sure my shoulder was against Duffy’s sternum—in the name of medicine we’d see exactly how much impact he could stand. We’d come down in the middle of the lion. Some open-mouthed guy in a blue plaid shirt cast a shadow. The smell of grass wafted up.
After we hit I must’ve blacked out for one second, then I was peering at the yellowy dominoes of Duffy’s spine. One of his shattered ribs was jammed against my elbow but I wiggled it loose and sat up with the sawdust reek of the lion dripping from my ears. Hopper’s shaved hip rose to my right and her ragged shoulder on my left, but her middle had dissolved so it was like I’d pushed Duffy into a kiddie pool of yogurt. The doctor’s eyes gazed up at me, though blood had burst from every opening in his face. I didn’t even think that was gross. It was just science.
The sheep-faced guy stood framed against the white wall of the farmhouse. He held a blue syringe.
“I was trying to bring her temperature down,” he said.
“This dumbass said there wasn’t any cure.” I staggered to my feet, shaking yogurty goop off my arms. “But that’s not right, is it?”
He swallowed with his big Adam’s apple. “There’s no cure,” he said.
I bunched up a yogurty fist. He dropped the syringe, and I was only a step from him when a wasp stung me familiarly on the side of the neck. I had to drop to one knee. I looked at the sheep guy but there were stars all around the periphery.
I saw Camouflage Mike bring a rifle down from his shoulder up on the driveway. A-ha, I said to myself: Good Old Tranquilizers (A Penzler Company).
I had to stay on one knee while Mike rolled his wheelbarrow across the lawn. At least I wasn’t looking at Hopper and Duffy, I was sick to hell of those two. My shoulder-bone throbbed from its minor fall.
“You sure one’s enough?” asked the syringe guy.
“You tell me, Tyrone.”
Mike picked me up under the armpits, then Tyrone got my ankles and they floated me into the wheelbarrow. My arms and legs draped over its sides but otherwise I just melted into the bottom like it was a bathtub.
“Why not kill him?” Tyrone was suddenly ballsy.
Colleen, I thought, Harv. Luke Skywalker dangling from Cloud City. Help.
“What are we here for in the first place, baby?” Mike lifted the handles and I rolled across the lawn. “See what makes the fucker tick, right? Exploratory surgery.”
“Jesus, but look at Doctor—”
“What would the doctor say if he was standing here, hey?”
“He’d say,” Tyrone admitted, “ ‘Get the heck back to it.’ ”
As we started up the slope my hands dragged across the grass. I tried to waggle my fingers, and they did waggle. Thirty more seconds and I’d be ripping some nuts off.
“And what else?” hissed Mike.
“He’d say, ‘Call no one in authority until every invoice has been filed.’ ”
“Zigactly.”
Mike pushed me onto the driveway. I saw his rifle propped against the bench on the porch between the broken screen door and ceramic cat.
“What about Hopper?” Tyrone asked.
“Thas one more chore for Dean,” said Mike.
He rolled me toward the garage, and I tried baring my teeth. And did bare them. But then the wheelbarrow was set down.
“Just grab that gun,” Mike said behind me. “Can’t hurt to give him one more.”
I woke up in a fetal position with red bungee cords tight around my wrists. I was hyperventilating, so I slowed that down, took some deep breaths. Seemed that I was inside a long plastic case like delis use to display sausage rolls. Man, was anything better than a nice fresh sausage roll, if the sausage was nice and peppery, and the flakes of pastry melted like butter on your tongue? My mouth filled up with drool.
It’s possible my head wasn’t quite in the game.
I gulped back that spit, because maybe it held all the nitrites available to me. I pulled my knees toward my face, and saw my ankles were tied up too. The case was too shallow for me to even turn over, but I twisted my neck and saw cages and tanks around me, and a big blue tarp that was the ceiling. I took another deep breath, guessed that there was only about three cups of air left in there, and wondered if any other past visitor to Dickside Synthetics had been permitted as much pure enjoyment as I had.
Dear Josie & Ray,
You can ignore the letter that shows all the chunks I’ve had taken off me, because that was a downe
r. Instead let’s look on the positive side with an inventory of my even-less-fortunate stablemates:
In the terrarium across from me, a tabby cat with what looks like a salmon for his back half. His tail’s splashing the greenish water while his poor wet paws cling to the sand. Panting like he just ran two hundred miles, he stares at some spot out ahead of him.
A bunch of foot-long squid zipping around the tank under him. Might not be anything weird about them but it’s more likely they’ve switched brains with the architects of the Third Reich.
Whistler. A lioness/lion pacing in a square cage, lapping her/his water, sniffing the air, acting like any lion does in a zoo when it’s not passed-out asleep. I’ve watched her/him two minutes, and three times the half-dozen black wings she/he has sticking out of either shoulder sprang up all at once and flapped without any synchronization but with enough lift to pull Whistler three feet in the air before dumping her/him onto a trash can of dog food. Whistler has the same black balls as another lion, Hopper, but not the udder, thank god, and without that udder it seems Whistler is thriving.
Some kind of big green snake, twisted back and forth all over itself. Maybe it’s six snakes.
A large caramel-brown sea lion, twisting and turning in the tank of water beside the squid’s, and the tank must be a good size, kids, because half the time he disappears back into the murk. If there’s something called Bacon of the Sea he’s getting plenty.
A black-and-white calf and a black chimp, both seemingly intact, in a cage right against my deli case. I have to twist my head almost backwards to see them, but their shaved hips are clear enough. The calf lies on its side next to a scattering of hay, its head sometimes up and sometimes down, and the monkey scampers up and down its carpeted Wal-Mart cat tree, throwing poop at the calf and sometimes swinging off to stand and pat the calf’s head or sit abjectly on its hip while it sleeps. But then the calf springs to its feet like it’s been electrocuted, and the chimp darts for its tree but isn’t quick enough. The calf whacks him with the top of its little head so the monkey flies six feet and clangs its teeth against the bars. The calf shrieks like an air-raid siren. The air feels thin in here.
Hope it cheers you up to never receive this horrible letter written inside my head,
Dad.
Mike ran up, gumboots flapping against his shins, and put his hand between the bars into the calf’s cage. It licked red powder out of his palm then slid onto its front knees. Mike whistled, wagging his sharp little beard, and the monkey came out from behind its tree to creep toward him.
“Hey, man!” I yelled, thumping my bound feet against the top of the deli case. “What the hell?”
“Shut up, zombie dipshit,” he said. “Wait your turn.”
“You too big a pussy to just chop my head off, is that it?”
I was a strategic genius. I was goading him into opening the case. He crouched in front of me, rapped a knuckle against the plexiglass.
“Can’t get out, hey?” His tattooed forearm read it’s clobberin’ time! “We found Dean upstairs, ya see, and Dean was like the little brother, and we’re so happy right now that we’re moving up your schedule, good, right? What’s not good is that Tyrone’s not much of a surgeon. Doc gave him a chance a couple times but, God, it got gross. Hold on.”
He moved to the left to crouch beside the cat-salmon, its paws thrashing the sand while its tail dragged it further into the water.
“See the Cat from Atlantis? Isn’t he pretty, hey?”
“How long until I fight the lion?”
“Whistler? She’s a griffin.”
“A griffin’s half-lion and half-eagle.”
“Yeah, body mass was incompatible for that.”
“Let me go home,” I said.
Which didn’t sound tough at all.
“This is all going to be big, man, you’re on the fucking cusp—think of the military applications for the shit! Baboons flying around with machine guns! We’d kick Congo’s ass! And look who’s here! Ol’ Roger!”
The sea lion pressed his whiskers against the glass then darted off into the murk.
“That’s going to be you—your back end, anyway.” Mike straightened up and twisted his hips to crack some vertebrae. “Then you’ll be able to sit out on the rocks and call to sailors, you lucky dipshit. Suck some Filipino cock.”
“Prep me, nurse. I can’t wait.”
“Har, har.”
“Zombies don’t float, either. Watch and learn.”
He walked off behind the tanks. I could hear him muttering.
“Really?” another man shouted. Distorted somehow. “Let me—”
Then quiet.
Mike reappeared carrying a slab of ham and threw it between the bars to Whistler, but instead of gobbling it down she put a paw on it and looked over at me. Her wings shivered. Mike knelt in front of me.
“How long since you had bacon, zombie?”
“A zombie eat brains, and I don’t eat brains,” I said. “Bring me some bacon.”
“Or to quit being a zombie maybe you ought to eat some brains, you ever think of that? Paradoxical reasoning like that might’ve got you out of this, but instead you get to be the first zombie mermaid to suck a Filipino cock.”
“Yum,” I said.
“Think I’m kidding? Roger’s got more compound in him than any animal here, he pisses the stuff, and you know how a piece of a zombie falls off, zombie snaps it back on like Lego, right? Your arms’ve got more scars than Frankenstein, man, so you know what I’m saying. The FBI figured that out for us, Christ knows how.”
“LRA detainees.”
“Amen to that!” Mike stroked his little beard. “The doc figured out it worked for other species, too, so Penzler wrote him a blank check, then Doc got the idea that if two species fell apart you could put them back together wrong and it would still work, so Penzler wrote him an even blanker check.”
“What in hell for?”
“Make his daughter happy.”
“She said the horse didn’t come out right.”
“Shit, you’re not wrong. You think that’s ham the griffin’s eating?”
Though the lion wasn’t eating her meat. She’d laid down beside it.
“Get your jaw nice and loose,” Mike grinned, and ambled off behind the tanks.
The Cat from Atlantis stretched on the sand, its shimmering tail raising dust. The snake slept. The chimp dangled from his tree by one hand, his dart-shaped penis gripped in the other. My nearest ally. The tarp flapped over us, sounding like distant helicopters.
It’d been a mistake to do this last stretch on my own. If I’d had the brains to bring Amber she’d be breaking Mike’s head open with her good right arm; Franny would say, “Buck up, G, you’re in sunny California and you’re not even dead, and what’re the odds you’d still be alive dressed like that? And this feels like a really special time in our lives, et cetera,” even though those two were young girls who were dead now.
Colleen would’ve watched, wrinkle-cheeked, and waited for me to get on with it.
Lydia? My Lydia would tear my prison to pieces, lift me on her mighty shoulders and carry me off to the burst of white light she’d been inhabiting, six long months for me but still just a heartbeat for her. She could crush my fingers in hers as I kissed her brown neck and we told each other how lucky we’d been and ever would be.
Josie and Ray? There was no way I could spin that. I’d tell them run, get out of here on your mosquito-bitten legs, hold tight to your pretty lives.
“Right, right, right,” Mike was saying. “Here’s your big chance!”
I heard a rumble, something rolling across cement, then Mike pushed in some kind of aquarium on a cart, a round shape inside it—maybe a puffer fish. He plugged a dangling cord into a power bar and the tank immediately filled with bubbles and light.
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“Fine, good!” Mike stomped out of view. “So socialize!”
The tank contained a man’s head. It bobbed toward the surface then descended, smiling at me from behind the clear plastic mask it wore over its mouth and nose. A hose connected it to a tank strapped to the leg of the cart. Smiling. I’d seen roughly the same thing at Carver’s, sure, but I retched a little anyway.
“Hey, hey, you know why I’m happy? This is Sprite!” the head grinned. “Get a sugar high right through my pores! Warm as spit.”
A plastic G.I. Joe walkie-talkie lay on a towel in front of the tank, its talk button taped down. He was familiar as hell. Not the voice but the rest of the package.
“So,” rasped the walkie-talkie, “maybe you’re the shy type?”
Holy god. My feet shook involuntarily. It’s George Reid.
All forehead and beard, my floating head of the Hoover High corridor. The George of Duffy’s story. Twenty-five years he’d worked hand and glove with Penzler, then during his absence he’d mysteriously sent his class to Dockside? Where a pipe had coincidentally burst?
“Okay,” he said, “I’ve been in here since the weekend—how’d the World Series turn out? I hear every molecular detail of the workings of Penzler Industries, but I don’t hear shit about the World Series!”
“Last Monday the Red Sox tied it two all.”
“Speak up!”
I repeated myself.
“Screw the Red Sox!” he yelled. “Fuck them, did St. Louis take it?”
He started to cough and bubbles filled the tank. The chimp watched him and hopped up and down at the bars, then ran a lap around the cage and mounted the calf from behind.
The Sprite became less turbid. George Reid got his breath back. He gazed at me without the trouble of having to blink.
“That was a bad start,” he said. “What’s your name, kid?”
“Peter Giller!” I yelled.
“You shit me. The substitute?”
“Yes!”
“How the hell’d you get here?”
How much story did he want?
“You splashed us with that pink crap on purpose. You just wanted to see what’d happen, that was why?”
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