Comeback Tour

by Jack Yeovil

  Surfacing, she shouted “my hair is a mess” and struck for the jetty. But something— quicksand?—grabbed her ankles, and pulled her down. Her smiling face disappeared under the greenish mud, and there were only bubbles left behind.

  “What the hell…” Elvis said.

  Krokodil had her breath back. “It’s like a progressive mutation. I’ve seen these things before. Not all Josephites are like that, but a lot of them are. I don’t know, but I think they might be clones or something.”

  “Creepy.”

  “Yeah. And people call me Frankenstein’s Daughter…”

  Krokodil pulled her jacket over her bruises, and wiped her hair out of her eye.

  “They don’t have any body hair. They also don’t have belly buttons, nipples or private parts. Some of them have their toes fused together like dummies.”

  “And they come from Salt Lake City?”

  “Yeah, God’s paradise on Earth. Don’t be fooled by all that grace-saying and thanks-giving. These people wouldn’t know Jesus Christ if he asked them for change on the street.”

  The pain in Elvis’s ankle flared up again, and he looked down. An arm, still in a sportscoat sleeve, was fixed to him by a gripping fist. It held fast like a beartrap.

  Krokodil bent down and prised the fingers loose, snapping them back. The thing still lashed. She tossed it into the swamp, where it floated a while, fingers flopping, and sank.

  “Krokodil?” he asked.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Where’s the car?”

  VII

  He was able now to view what was happening to him with some detachment. He was even gaining some degree of control over his tail. It was odd, having a new appendage, but he found it easily manipulable. With the changes overtaking him, the tail was like an anchor, holding him steady.

  His body was finding its own reptile-human equilibrium. He felt hungry all the time, and had to chew his way through the raw carcasses they threw into the cage every few hours, even though the human brain wrapped inside the alligator tissue knew they were using the meat to administer knock-out drugs. After feeding, he would fall asleep and dream of operating tables and agony and Dr Blaikley, and then awake, changed even more, in the cage.

  He knew he had been moved permanently into the experimental block, which Dr Blaikley insisted on calling “The House of Pain” for some reason, and that he was no longer an administrator. He was a subject. And he was not alone. There were other cages. He found old friends. Reuben was in one, his black-green skin crinkling as he progressed. And there were those whose changes were almost complete, who could no longer speak properly.

  Reuben told him what they were becoming. The indentees called them the Suitcase People. Shiba could not see the point of the experiments, but that was not his business. Dr Zarathustra would have authorized Dr Blaikley’s work. The experiments would eventually benefit the corp, and Hiroshi Shiba was not going to jeopardize his position by criticizing them. Inoshira Kube had explained to him that the corp was like a complex organism, with myriads of cells performing differing tasks all geared to the perpetuation and protection of the whole. This might not be as well-publicized an operation as the submarine oil drilling, the transport and media monopolies or the designer plastic surgery, but it contributed to the economic and social health of the whole being that was GenTech. And as a member of the Blood Banner Society, Shiba was sworn above all to protect the corporate colossus that embodied all that was fine and noble and strong in the values of the Orient.

  Still, Dr Blaikley was looking juicier and juicier every time she came to feed him and haul him off to her surgery. He estimated that he had been taken to the House of Pain three times in the day and a half since he had moved into “A” block. He was further gone than Reuben, but he could still articulate words. From what he understood, Dr Blaikley hoped to preserve in him the capacity for speech. It was important to the experiment that the subject be able to give a subjective account of the experience.

  Just now, he was reciting his Blood Banner oath. He had always had trouble with English consonants, now his throat felt as if it were not suited to Japanese either. He persisted, trying to master his new body. He must not give in. Great things were expected of him in Kyoto.

  He lay on his belly, so his tail wouldn’t get in the way, and looked through the bars of his cage. It would be feeding time soon. And then there would be the House of Pain.

  Reuben was singing an old negro spiritual about Israel being in Egypt’s land.

  It occurred to Shiba that perhaps Dr Blaikley was proceeding without Dr Zarathustra’s authorization. This line of research was characteristically flamboyant, but it might be a little too wild even for him. And usually Zarathustra’s projects had obvious practical applications, like retarding the ageing process or building up the body’s auto-immune systems. Shiba couldn’t think what earthly use a human being half-turned into an alligator might be. If Dr Blaikley were using lizards as a model, he would assume she were trying to get amputees to grow new limbs. But alligators were just big, ugly reptiles with lazy appetites. Perhaps Suitcase People could be trained to work in sewers, scuttling through pipelines in filthy water. Shiba did not relish the prospect, but GenTech knew best.

  “Let my people gooooo,” sang Reuben, his voice resonating around the cell block.

  The food and the pain was late. Shiba wondered if the routine of the compound had been broken. If so, it was due to the lack of a good administrator, he was sure. If he were removed from his position, the corp regs automatically promoted the security chief to the co-ordinator’s chair, and Shiba couldn’t see the slobbish Spermwhale Visser handling the responsibilities at all well.

  Shiba thought of Visser, and wondered whether his nickname wasn’t a reference to another strand of Dr Blaikley’s experimentation. Was the man ballooning into an aquatic mammal? Did some of the GenTech East executives miss the old days of illegal whale-hunting, and want to reintroduce the creatures into the Sea of Japan so they could resume their sport? As a trainee, Shiba had had to do three weeks on a GenTech R & R yacht, caddying harpoons for the upper-echelons. He felt cheated that the animals had become extinct before he got far enough in the hierarchy to be the whaler rather than the poon-boy. It was the duty of all those who saluted the Blood Banner to kill without a second thought when it was required of them.

  Shiba’s stomach hurt. Alligators, he had heard, did not need to feed more than once a week. He still had human appetites. Indeed, more intense appetites than he had had as a human.

  Although unwilling to admit it, he felt an enormous sexual desire.

  He was ravenously hungry. There were growls and cries from the other cages. His condition was shared by the rest of the Suitcase People.

  He wrapped his lanterning jaws around the bars and chewed them, but tasted only flake iron. One of his teeth broke and he spat it out. He had the impression that it would grow back. New teeth were sprouting all the time, crowding his lengthening jaw.

  This breakdown of the orderly schedule was intolerable. He would issue a reprimand when he was returned to his office.

  Reuben stopped singing. There was gunfire outside.

  “It’s come,” he said. “We’re rescued.”

  What was the old indentee talking about?

  There were screams amid the gunshots. Shiba heard creaks and crashes, and knew that the compound was under attack. The fences were going down. The security klaxons were sounding.

  The lights flickered and went out, then came on again, humming. The emergency generators were working, but the main power plant must be down.

  There were explosions outside.

  The cage room had no windows. It was most frustrating not to know what was going on. Shiba didn’t care to ask Reuben what he knew. It was not seemly for an executive to appear ignorant.

  He slithered away from the bars, and waited for further eventualities.

  The main doors burst open, and a Good Ole Boy backed in.

 
; He was firing wildly at something advancing on him. The doors swung open and closed as he fired at them. Bullets ricocheted, clanging spent against the bars.

  Shiba warned the security man that his carelessness would be reported.

  Something big came through the doors, and towered over the Good Ole Boy.

  “Hallelujah,” breathed Reuben.

  It was about twelve feet tall, and reptilian. It had mighty thighs and a tail, but small, almost useless human arms hanging out of the sleeves of a Petya Tcherkassoff T-shirt. Its head was the size and shape of the front of an old-fashioned helicopter, tiny eyes high up on either side, and its sharklike mouth was crammed full of large teeth.

  “Yo,” said the creature, “we come to bost yo asses out, homes!” It had a hispanic accent, and there was a five-foot scarf knotted around its brow.

  It dipped its head to the Good Ole Boy, and opened wide.

  “Excellente,” it said, chewing. “Thass real radical, maaann! Thees pendejo ees out of the game.”

  A green-faced, upright figure with combat fatigues and a Statue of Liberty crown of horns squeezed past the saurian, and saluted Shiba.

  “We have liberated this facility, sir.”

  Shiba reared up on his hind legs and stood like a man, tail lashing the floor.

  “We are presently trying to locate the keys. You will be free within moments, sir.”

  Shiba bowed at the soldier lizard, foreclaws locked in humility.

  The saurian stumped off, whooping in Spanish, and Shiba heard lab equipment falling over.

  “Arriba, arriba!” the saurian shouted.

  “Be careful,” Shiba told the lizard.

  “Discipline will be maintained, but the action is still being fought.”

  Shiba understood.

  Two Suitcase People, former indentees to judge from their dark hides, dragged Visser in. The Good Ole Boy was bloodied and shaky.

  The lizard pointed a revolver at Visser’s blubbery neck, and ordered him to turn over the keys. They were on a ring attached to his belt. The officer tore them free, and passed them to a female Suitcase Person with long, straight black hair and dainty human hands. She tried the keys systematically until Shiba’s cage was open, and then progressed to Reuben’s cell and repeated the process.

  The lizard saluted. “Captain Tip Marcus, sir,” he said.

  “Hiroshi Shiba.”

  “Pleased to make your acquaintance. Are you the ranking official here?”

  Shiba looked at Visser, whose eyes were tightly shut, and nodded his head, slapping his chest with his lower jaw.

  “We have received a surrender from this man. Do you accept it?”

  Shiba lifted Visser’s head. The Good Ole Boy’s eyes opened. He was speechless with fear.

  How much had Visser known? Was he another catspaw, or in on Dr Blaikley’s schemings? Shiba growled, and felt saliva fall from his jaws.

  “Sir?”

  “Oh, yes, the surrender. I accept.”

  “Very well.” Marcus nodded to the Suitcase Men, who shoved Visser in Shiba’s old cell. The alligator girl locked him in.

  “We’re not quite sure, you understand,” Marcus said, grinning, “whether to treat these people as prisoners of war… or as emergency rations.”

  Shiba felt his stiff snout forming a smile.

  With Marcus at his side, he walked out of the animal room. The House of Pain was messed up. Evidently, a lot of Marcus’s people had suffered extensively here and felt the need to wreak a degree of retribution. But even amid the mess, Shiba could make out the remains of Dr Blaikley’s programme of experiments. There were half-dissected alligators lying in shallow tanks of blood. And in the vats, bulbous organs were being grown. A child’s paddling pool was incongruously lying in one corner, pale-grey quadruped reptile babies swimming in the shallow water. They looked up at Shiba with big, human eyes.

  “We’ve been regrouping since the initial break-out, sir,” said Marcus. “Mother Mary Louise has had this coming for a longtime.”

  Shiba would have to get to the bottom of this backstory eventually. Evidently, his arrival at the Narcoossee compound had come very late in the plot.

  “Where is Dr Blaikley?”

  Marcus looked at the floor, horizontal lids blinking over his eyes. “I’m sorry, sir… I accept full responsibility… I was unable to maintain discipline…”

  He drew back the sheet that had been flung over the main operating table. Bloodied instruments clattered to the floor, and the naked and flayed thing on the red rack writhed, exposed eyes moving in the ruin of a face.

  “Old scores, you understand, sir?”

  Shiba laid a cold-blooded palm on Dr Blaikley’s meaty brow, and felt something approaching regret.

  It didn’t have to be like this. Marcus’s people should have known that the doctor hadn’t acted out of malice. She was merely a loyal GenTech employee, doing her best for humanity.

  If she hadn’t died that instant, Shiba would have ended her life for her.

  He paused a moment, in tribute to a woman of science. A woman who had done some good with her life.

  Then, he dropped the messy sheet over her and accompanied Marcus back outside, to survey the damage and to resume the organizational reins.

  There were reports to be made, and things to be done.

  VIII

  There was no sign of Colonel Presley’s pink Cadillac. Krokodil suspected the old man who had been on the jetty of spiriting it away. It didn’t really matter who had taken the car. It—along with all their heavy weaponry—was long gone and would never be coming back. While they had been distracted by the Josephite freaks, someone had cleared a neat profit. Ve-hickle theft was a capital offence in most states of the union, including Florida, but few people ever went to the chair for it. Compulsive car thieves didn’t have much of a life expectancy anyway, and the professionals were much too cool to get caught.

  Krokodil, who still retained a residual prejudice against Sanctioned Ops from her gangcult days, wasn’t sure how Elvis would take the loss of the carboat. It was a common panzergirl taunt against Ops that their guts were under the hoods of their machines and that if you took their wheels away they were like turtles on their backs. There was even a whole range of semi-obscene jokes about the relationship between Redd Harvest, the top T-H-R Op, and her G-Mek V–12 ’Nola Gay. But, hell, Krokodil had known gangcultists who were just as hung up on their hardware.

  Elvis surprised her, by taking the loss as a simple irritant. She had gathered that a good deal of his earnings over the years had been channelled into the Cadillac, and that this would practically wipe him out financially. Apart from the one million he would pick up for this job if he survived, of course. But even a cool mil probably wouldn’t replace a ’57 Cadillac with more firepower than a US Cavalry cruiser.

  “Easy come,” Elvis said, “easy go. We better find ourselves a boat to requisition.”

  “Requisitioning” was a term used by Ops whenever they wanted to steal anything. They would turn over the Walton diner completely before leaving.

  They hunted through the ruins of the kitchen and dining room. They came up with a cache of ammunition for the Moulinex machine pistol Elvis had requisitioned from the late Donny Walton.

  “Do you reckon any of this stuff is okay to eat?” he asked, indicating a refrigeratorful of supplies.

  She wasn’t sure. Most of the food looked like the plastic replicas they use for adverts.

  “Best be safe.”

  “Yeah,” the Op sighed. “Hell. I could do with a candy bar or something.”

  “I could catch you a trilobite and we could cook it in swamp water.”

  Elvis made a face. “I just lost my appetite.”

  Upstairs, the Waltons had lived in an illustration from an old magazine. Everything was perfect in its place. There were Readers’ Digest condensed books in neat rows on shelves, dust-free but blatantly unread. There was no teevee or ceedee. The couches were plastic-covered
, and the lamps ugly. A pile of Josephite tracts lay neatly on the table. Happiness Through Spirituality, Miracles by the Moment, Further Down the Path.

  “Do you notice?” she asked him.

  He looked around. “Nope. Nothing strange here.”

  “It’s what’s not here, Colonel.”

  “What?”

  “This is their living room. It’s their only room. No bedroom, no bathroom. What kind of people don’t need a toilet?”

  “Jeeze,” he shuddered. “These people are weird.”

  Krokodil smiled at the understatement. Like almost everyone else in the world, Colonel Presley didn’t really know what was going on. It wasn’t his fault. She had crossed Elder Seth back when she was a teenager, taken his spectacles and been taught to see the world as it really was, a fragile place being crowded at the edges by the Dark Ones. Monsters and demons walked with her always now. The thing inside her was coiled dormant, but she was forever aware of it, waiting for it to erupt again. She hoped never to see anything like the Jibbenainosay again, but knew that her life held those horrible possibilities, and that she would have to confront them.

  “Look at this,” Elvis said, pointing to a framed picture.

  A talon of fear punctured her heart. It was Elder Nguyen Seth himself, amateurishly painted with an unconvincing angelic smile, standing in front of the Josephite Tabernacle, a glowing halo around his black hat, surrounded by little children who were beaming merrily up at him.

  Without thinking, she made a fist and put it through the picture. Glass shattered.

  “Whoa there, ma’am. It ain’t that ugly.”

  The picture was torn now, ripped across the face.

  In her head, the Elder spoke to her again, taunting her for her many failures. No matter how she strove, she would never stop him. She didn’t even know what his Grand Design was; how could she hope to prevent him from the accomplishment of it?

  She broke contact with the painted eyes, and stormed downstairs, with Elvis following.

  “I never thought to see that face again,” Elvis said.