Comeback Tour

by Jack Yeovil

  “Where’s yo lady, Elvis?” asked Gandy.

  “The ma’am said she’d be ’long round about noontime.”

  Elvis wasn’t sure how much he was looking forward to a few days in the seat next to Krokodil. She looked like an angel, sure, but… Well, Krokodil didn’t sound like the sort of handle a nice girl would pick. And there were those panzergirl words that kept cropping up in her otherwise impeccable speech. He had run a check on her, but found nothing under the “Krokodil” alias. The Indian had called her something else—Jessamyn—and that beat some distant drums. There was something about the way Krokodil carried herself that reminded him of Redd, and Elvis had seen Ms Harvest take down five or more Maniax in a solo engagement. Still, for this trip, he’d rather have a combat cutie with him than a Sunday school teacher.

  Gandy had one of those GenTech miniradios clipped to his sunglasses, and Elvis could hear the tinny sounds of Petya Tcherkassoff singing “A Cry for Help.” The vocal tricks were his, straight off the “Blue Moon of Kentucky” he had done at Sun for Sam Phillips in 1954. “Fine, man!” Sam had shouted, loud enough to get on the master tape, “that’s different. That’s a pop song now, nearabouts.”

  “Shut that Sove crap off, Gandy,” he snapped. He immediately regretted it. He didn’t usually let the stuff get to him.

  “Sure, Elvis,” Gandy said. “Sorry, man. I wasn’t thinking.”

  Gandy was a late ’70s baby. His parents might have remembered who the old Op he hung out with had been, and he had never concealed the fact that he had been a musician before he went in the army. But Gandy’s parents were long-term smacksynth mainliners the kid didn’t like to be around, and he imagined that Elvis had been in some high school band like the Memphis Cossacks, the imitation Sove group Gandy and Big Bill had messed around with for a while. It was known that he wasn’t enthusiastic about Russian musickies, but no one pressed him on it. Once, he had recommended that the kid track down some Carl Perkins if he wanted to listen to real music, but Gandy had never taken him up on it. Gandy was more interested in securing a bootleg musichip of ’Tasha’s “Concert for Uzbekistan.”

  He found himself humming “Blue Moon of Kentucky” under his breath. Recently, the old songs had been coming back to him. Something would remind him of a line of lyric, or a piece of music would contain a string of similar notes, and he’d find himself half-way through “Heartbreak Hotel,” “Jailhouse Rock” or “Blue Moon.” He was getting old, he guessed.

  An armourcab drew up across the street, and Krokodil got out, with Hawk-That-Settles in tow. She had forsaken her pinstripes for a loose white outfit a little like Elvis’ karate robe. She was carrying a hip-holstered magnum, and a heavy shoulderbag. Her hair was tightly drawn back in a ponytail. Her eyepatch made her look like a zen pirate. Hawk smiled and waved, but Krokodil just carefully crossed the road. Gandy whistled as if a ’55 Chevrolet with sharkfins and a chrome jukebox radiator had just cruised by.

  “That is some woman,” said Nick.

  Elvis didn’t say anything in reply, but shouted “Good morning ma’am” across the road.

  “Hi, Colonel,” said the Indian.

  “Can I put this in the back?” Krokodil asked.

  “I can open up the trunk. There’s no one in it.”

  Krokodil explained. “We may need these things quickly. The back seat will do.”

  “You’re the boss.”

  Gandy stepped forward, and opened the door for her, grinning. She slipped her bag, which was weighty, onto the seat. Elvis heard metal objects shifting inside the holdall. Krokodil came along with her own tools.

  Krokodil left Gandy standing holding the door and walked over to Elvis.

  “You’re ready?”

  “Sure. Do you want a recaff or anything before we set off?”

  “No.”

  There was a pause.

  “Fine by me. We might as well go, then…”

  Krokodil opened the front passenger door and got in, fastening the seatbelt over her chest. She looked straight ahead, and waited. She didn’t have anything to say to Hawk.

  Elvis looked around, shook hands with Hawk and Nick and gave Gandy a high five.

  He got into the car, and left them standing outside his apartment building. Nick waved a rag.

  It was a long, straight highway for a while. In the rearview, Elvis saw Hawk get back into the armourcab. He wondered what the Indian would be doing while his… his what?… employer? mistress? owner? best friend?… while Krokodil was off to Cape Canaveral.

  They came to the PZ wall, and the Memphis cops processed them through. They knew Elvis and his business, and didn’t give him too much hassle. The cops in this town were okay. It was the Good Ole Boys you had to watch out for.

  The Memphis NoGo wasn’t too heavy. It was mainly just run-down. People came out of their shacks to watch the cars pass by, but they didn’t often set traps or toss petrol bombs. Last year, Elvis had put together a watertight kickback and corruption case against Burke Crowther, a city councilman—a Good Ole Boys client, naturally—who had been trying to get a ruling through at state level declaring any unemployed NoGo dweller as fair game for the indenture gangs. Councilman Crowther had been removed from office, and since then Elvis could park his pink Cadillac unlocked outside the NoGo clubhouse of the Mighty Mean Mothergrabbas gangcult for a week and come back to find it unscavved, unscratched and fresh-polished.

  Elvis waved to Mama Maybelline, Den Mother of the MMM chapter, as the Cadillac cruised past her open-air exercise class. Then, they were away from the city and out in the soggy scrublands that would eventually turn into fullblown swamp.

  Krokodil sat like a dressmaker’s dummy, not speaking. Elvis asked her if she wanted him to play some music on the system. He had some good stuff on pirate CDs. Howlin’ Wolf. Johnny Burnette. Hank Williams. Gene Autry. Bobbie Gentry. She wasn’t interested. Elvis was beginning to get the impression he was sitting next to a human-shaped refrigerator.

  Then, she reacted as if she smelled something. Cyborgs were like that. They had esper senses you couldn’t figure out.

  She opened one of the dash compartments, and pulled out Dollman Cleele’s likeness of Robert E. Lee Chamberlain.

  “What’s this?” she asked, her tone telling him that she knew all about Santeria.

  “A present.”

  “Who is it?”

  “Not a nice man.”

  “I can tell.”

  “One of Gandy’s friends made the thing. A houngan. Do you believe in all that hoodoo?”

  Krokodil was quiet for a moment, looking at the doll’s face.

  “Do you?” she asked.

  Elvis felt an icy tingle. He had a feeling this salvage gig was going to be a lot less simple than it sounded.

  “I don’t know. I was born in the backwoods. I’ve spent time in the Caribbean, in Latin America. And I’ve been in and out of the swamps for ten years or more. I don’t know if there’s a Jesus H. Christ like my Mama said, or if there’s a Damballah, a Baron Samedi, a ’gator that walks on two legs or a Sanity Clause. But I do know there are unnatural things in this world.”

  “You’re right there.”

  The way she said it, flat and inexpressive, give him a frisson. Elvis was grateful that they were heading South-East, away from the Delta, away from Robert Johnson’s crossroads. But the Blues That Walks Like a Man wasn’t just a Mississippi myth, and the Devil was waiting at more than one crossroads.

  Krokodil carefully put the doll back into the compartment, and shut it up. She put her hands in her lap and seemed to go to sleep with her eye open, like a machine with the power switched off.

  Elvis took the main interstate to Grand June, just dipped into Mississippi to go South of the expanse of still deep water that had been Lake Florence and which filled the Tennessee River Valley. There were church steeples and shaky upper-storeys standing out of the Lake at Tuscumbia and Decatur, where whole towns had been abandoned to the rising water level. They took
the high ground around Guntersville and cut South through Alabama, striking towards Birmingham and Montgomery. They made good time. After about three hundred miles of engine purr and air conditioner hum, Elvis cracked and reached into the music rack.

  He jammed in a CD at random, and wished he hadn’t.

  The clear, young voice, given its twang by a curled lip and a flared nostril, filled the car. Krokodil turned to look at him, her neck working like the swivel arm of a security camera.

  “Is that…?”

  The song was “I Don’t Care if the Sun Don’t Shine.” He had cut it in 1954. The session percussionist, Cunningham, had used an empty record box instead of a drum. Marion Keisker, Sam Phillips’ secretary, had written an extra verse in the studio to fill out the song. All these things were creeping back to his mind now.

  Krokodil’s eye narrowed. Her question hung in the air.

  “Yes ma’am,” Elvis sighed. “That is.”

  Part Two: The Battle Hymn of the Republic

  I

  The church’s executive helicopter had kept fairly low as it flew over the Gulf of Mexico. The main airborne gangcults kept to the Great Central Desert, where there were lots of long, hard freeways to use as landing strips, and the Confederate Air Force shouldn’t be interested in tangling with the Church of Joseph, but Roger Duroc knew the South-East was full of 57 varieties of psychopathic crazy, and it only took a set of wings and some air-to-air Stinger missiles to put a severe dent in the flightplan. As it turned out, the flight was quiet. Boring, even.

  Simone just sat strapped into her seat and looked out of the window at the flat, sparkling expanse of sea. She had never flown before, and had been afraid it would upset her tummy. After what she had lived through, she had obviously developed a strong stomach. She didn’t complain. Duroc wondered whether the Elder would approve of his bringing the girl along. They were close to the Last Days, and Seth probably wanted the elect to purge themselves of all distractions. Duroc wasn’t quite sure why he had decided to pick Simone out of her New Orleans hell, but it still felt like the thing to do.

  Since the Jibbenainosay, he had been having to crunch his way through an increasingly scary dosage of narcolep pills to get any sleep. Simone helped. She was energetic, and tired him out. Their love-making was desperate, and draining, and afterwards he could usually sink into a dreamless oblivion for a few hours. It was comforting, after being so close to the Great Secret Shaping Events of the Age, to be around a girl who barely knew the name of the President of the United States. She was smart, but her life had robbed her of too much awareness.

  They flew over a little battle. A coastguard PT boat, augmented by a couple of Good Ole Boy skimmers, was methodically sinking a bargeload of Mexicans. On the skimmers, fat men with cowboy hats were picking off the bobbing heads in the water with precision rifles. Duroc wondered what the wetbacks expected in the land of the free. If by some miracle they got through the immigration patrols, they’d just wind up indentured for life. From the perspective of the killing fields of Guanajuato, even a life of servitude in chains must seem like a step in the right direction. At least if you were property, you were valuable enough not to be shot for sport. Duroc wondered whether he could take the time, in the name of chaos-spreading, to lay down some napalm on the Good Ole Boys. Biron the Rouge would approve, he was sure. But it was a side issue. He had Brother Sam Quarrill, the pilot, take the spidercopter up out of range, and they headed on, towards the Keys.

  It was difficult to draw a coastline on a map these days. Just as the swell of the Mississippi Delta had put New Orleans on an ineptly-walled island in the mud, so the rising sea level had sunk most of the Florida peninsula. They flew over sunken towns, thickets of swampland, and shallow lakes. East coast resort towns like Daytona and Miami had done their best to keep some tidal integrity, but the rest of the state was practically a primeval waste. There was still some kind of community at Tampa, but that was as far as it went. However, the flyover did reveal some traces of inhabitation. There were swamp-skimmers out, and Duroc noticed more than a few houses in trees or artificial islands.

  There was a big GenTech experimental compound at Narcoossee, he had been warned, and it was suggested that he not tangle with them. “Work of the Devil,” Quarrill muttered as they overflew Narcoossee. From the air, the place looked like a prisoner-of-war camp. Duroc supposed the boys in Tokyo just kept the plans from WW II in case they ever had to build a swamp hellhole again. There was quite a bit of activity around the compound as they passed. As usual in America, there were people running around with guns.

  They came up to Cape Canaveral from due East. The reclamation crew were supposed to have raised a stretch of the firing grounds out of the water as a landing pad, but work had gone slowly. Quarrill inflated the amphibian runners, and touched down on the sea off Merritt Island. They waited for the boat to come for them, and Duroc wondered who he would have to single out for the blame.

  The seas were scattered with dead fish.

  “Are we there?” asked Simone, waking up.

  Duroc nodded.

  “It stinks.” She wrinkled her nose.

  A human body, face-down, floated by. It bumped against the copter and slowly turned over. The fish had taken most of the flesh off its face, but Duroc could tell from the exposed skull that the dead man hadn’t been normal. The jaws were lengthened, and seemed to have more teeth than usual, and there were bony ridges around the eyes. What little skin remained was green, and rugose. Duroc stuck his leg out of the copter, and shoved the corpse with his boot toe. It sank beneath the surface, and didn’t come up again.

  Simone was still looking with distaste.

  “There’s a boat coming out from the Cape,” Quarrill said.

  A skimmer, its bulk raised out of the water on treads, was darting towards them. A couple of people in Josephite black hats were standing up in the prow. Evidently, they wanted to make a ceremony of greeting the Big Man from Salt Lake City.

  Duroc was wearing a short-sleeved black shirt and slacks. He held out his hand, and Simone gave him what she called his preacher hat. He set it on his head, and tried to look religious. Elder Seth’s people were indispensable, but Duroc wished they didn’t have to go through a lot of this thee and thou crap.

  The skimmer slowed, and bobbed next to the spidercopter.

  “Elder Duroc,” said a square-faced young woman in Josephite strip. Duroc held out his arm, and they awkwardly shook hands across the gap. “I’m Sister Addams. Bethany Addams.”

  “Well met, Sister. This is Simone. She’s my… executive assistant.”

  Simone wore a flowered beach coat over a coffee-cream string bikini that matched her skin-tone almost exactly. She wiggled close to the open hatch of the copter, and gave Sister Addams a look at her long legs. The Sister wasn’t impressed, but swallowed her disapproval. Duroc came with the Elder Nguyen Seth seal of divine approval.

  “We’ll tow you in. A ceremony of thanks for your arrival has been prepared.”

  “I am well pleased.”

  Quarrill and the Brother driving the skimmer got together and slung a line up.

  Duroc noticed another person in the skimmer. He was obviously not a Josephite. His head was buried in a mass of tangled grey-and-white beard and hair. He wore open-toed trainers, ragged army pants and a denim vest covered in patches. Duroc recognized the names on the patches. Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, Hercules, Pegasus, Circe, Argos, Vulcan.

  “This,” said Sister Addams, “is Commander Fonvielle.”

  “Of course. Good afternoon, Commander…”

  Fonvielle saluted. “Present and correct, Mr Prezz, sir.”

  Duroc caught Sister Addams’ look.

  “And how are things in the White House?” Fonvielle asked. There was drool in his beard.

  “Very well thank you.”

  “And the First Lady?”

  “Excellent.”

  “Bully.”

  Duroc felt a twinge of worry. The plan depe
nded on Commander Fonvielle’s expertise, and the astronaut was obviously a couple of planets short of a solar system.

  The skimmer was roped to the copter now. Duroc strode across and got a firm footing on the deck. He helped Simone, and she pushed herself away from the copter door.

  Something surfaced between them, pushing the spidercopter and the skimmer apart. Simone screeched, and Duroc grabbed her.

  The water was frothing and foaming, and the thing—a large animal—thrashed.

  A long arm, basically human but thickly scaled, latched onto the side of the skimmer. Duroc took in the hand in a glimpse. The fingers were webbed, and instead of nails, the creature had yellow barbs.

  Duroc struggled with the thrashing Simone, trying to pull her out of the water, to get her out of the thing’s way.

  It had both hands on the skimmer now, and was hauling its bulk out of the sea. Streams of saltwater gushed from its orifices. It was wearing the remains of a lacoste shirt, the alligator still visible over one knobby nipple.

  Quarrill had a boathook. He struck the thing on the back of its skull. Roaring, it turned around, opening its snout to reveal a tangle of green-furred teeth. Quarrill backed into the copter, but the thing pushed away from the skimmer and leaped for him. The pilot screamed as the barbs went into his flesh.

  It had a long, thick tail, poking through the buttseam of a pair of waterlogged and multiply-holed designer jeans.

  Simone was still screaming. Duroc had her in the skimmer now, and she was clutching her knees, certain that her legs ended there. He saw she wasn’t hurt.

  “A gun,” he said. “Give me a gun.”

  Quarrill’s cries got sharper, and then cut off. His head rolled across the floor of the copter, and dropped into the water. The eyes were rolled up, showing only white. The mutant turned around, its jaws bloodied, and yelled in triumph. Pouches under its jaw inflated as it shouted.

  “Go for it, buddyboy,” it was saying, the words struggling through a throat no longer designed for speech. “No pain, no gain.”