The younger woman wanted Brian to leave. She tried to slap the ring out of his hand but he tightened his grip. She felt her throat working and thought the man’s perfume was going to make her throw up. “You,” she said, gagging on some of her words. “No, too strong. Go ... You can’t ... Go ... go!”
I’m not stupid, lady, Brian thought. This ring is a talisman, a charm, a sacred device! They think it’s too strong for me. Well, I’ll show them. “How much?” he barked, slipping the ring onto what he thought of as the eff you finger of his right hand. It fit perfectly. Damn, it’s heavy, he mused. And warm. Weirdly warm. Must be some kind of Shaman’s magic.
The idea that the silver ring had been absorbing the heat of the sun all morning never crossed Brian’s mind.
The older woman covered her face with her hands, shaking her head, as if horrified by Brian’s gall. The younger one was frantically waving him off.
“How much?” Brian cried. “Twenty? Thirty?”
The younger woman was shaking her head, thinking, I can’t throw up here!
“Forty? Fifty? Fifty bucks?” Brian pulled out his wallet and opened it.
Ravi was watching this exchange with interest. He knew that chunk of turquoise and silver Brian had slipped onto his finger would be worth over a hundred bucks in any city, but out here fifty would be overdoing it, since screwing over the American Indians had never gone out of style.
Both women were waving Brian away now. He started pulling twenties out of his wallet and slapping them down on the blanket, making the other jewelry on display jump and bounce. “One-fifty? Two hundred! Two hundred is my final offer!”
Ravi shook his head. Where the hell did you learn to haggle, Bri?
The older woman scooped up the cash and Brian stepped away, triumphant. He strutted to the van and slipped behind the wheel. “Bought a ring,” he said, sounding smug.
As they pulled back onto the highway, Ravi watching the women fan each other with their shawls and take great gulps of fresh air.
The radio crackled, and they heard a different tone in the dispatcher’s voice. One of the Sheriff’s mobile units seemed to be missing.
* * *
With a cigarette in one hand, John Godson leaned against the long counter in the diner and used a worn but clean linen napkin to wipe his mouth. On a plate was a small mound of meat strips that could have been lean bacon. He went around to the serving side of the counter and helped himself to a cup of coffee. He went back and sat on one of the stools.
He’d been rolling all night and hadn’t stopped to eat or drink. Sometimes he wondered how it was that he could drive night and day for weeks on end without sleep, or how a single glass of water or a bite out of some babe’s tit or ass could sustain him for days. He rolled the meat strips into a gummy ball and stuffed them into his mouth, chewing and slurping coffee.
“Mental note,” Godson said, thinking of Bonnie. “Take a few more strips off of that perfectly toned butt for eating on the road. Dry it out. Butt Jerky.”
He wiped his hands on the napkin again, finishing his coffee. Sometimes he wondered about his decidedly bizarre eating habits, but just when he seemed to be on the verge of explaining his odd ways his mind seemed to skip ahead a few tracks all on its own.
The same thing happened when he tried to remember his childhood. His memories got all jumbled up and jumpy, like watching a movie shot and edited by a little kid. And it often seemed like he was remembering scenes from movies instead of his own life, because the uncertain images in his mind always depicted things that defied explanation.
Different families; black, white, Asian, speaking many languages.
Many childhoods, some of which were excruciatingly normal, others that were cruelly cut short by accident or design, like the one in which he was thrown into a net bag by screaming people in peaked hats who dragged him to a river and held him underwater until he drowned, or the one where he was carrying a heavy bucket through a bustling preindustrial marketplace until he slipped on a wet cobblestone and fell flat just as a slow-moving wagon wheel rolled over his skull and burst it like an over-ripe melon.
Yes, he remembered other eras, some of which had not happened. Not yet.
Sometimes he was attending school wearing Buster Browns and short pants, and sometimes he was wearing dirty robes and sandals, as in the marketplace.
Sometimes his head was shaved bald and he walked through a jungle completely naked.
Sometimes he was wandering underground through clean white plastic tunnels that reeked of antiseptic while wearing a skin tight suit that was actually alive and feeding on his sweat and shed dead skin cells. Sometimes he wandered the back roads of America, a lost child taken in by kindly families whom he would kill in the dead of night.
Sometimes he was crying because he knew he’d never go home again, and he shivered in a cheap paper shirt and pants as he stared through a round window at a faraway Earth, feeling completely alone among a thousand other abandoned children in a big metal ball in orbit.
Sometimes he was simply a happy little girl with a nice family and a cozy home, feeling ever so pretty in his brand new dress as his momma tied ribbons in his hair, and wasn’t that a fun one to ponder?
He could remember a lot of years with reasonable clarity, but nothing certain before reaching puberty. In his only reliable memories he was living and studying in or working for the Compound. When he tried to dredge up other memories, why he got the ridiculous VA VA VOOM! tattoo on his left arm for instance, or when he tried to work out the specifics of some of the truly strange things he had done, he lost the thought again.
How could he apparently bring Bonnie back from the dead and then kill her with his finger?
How did he muster an almost hypnotic power over people when he focused on getting them to do what he wanted? He remembered instances when he had healed people, like the arthritic old crone who had worked in the records area at the Compound. He’d wanted some information on a target and the woman had just been too damn slow calling it up on the computer screen, slowly pecking away with the twisted sticks of her fingers, so he’d impatiently grabbed her hands. She’d screamed and pulled back saying he had burned her, but when she looked at her hands they were fine. Still wrinkled and age-spotted, but also sleek and flexible, all traces of the arthritis gone.
He had annoyingly useless visions of the future as well, confusing snippets of sight and sound that unspooled against his will and showed him moments of time to come, events he would eventually hear about in the news. These prophetic insights rarely involved him, a fact that irritated him.
Then there were the weeping wounds that appeared on his hands and feet every spring. The Compound’s medical staff hadn’t been able to figure that one out at all, offering one variation or another on the theme of Easter and psychosomatic stigmata.
During a fight in March of ‘98 his prick had been ripped off like a branch torn from a tree. He remembered groggily picking up his detached member and holding it against the bleeding stump above his balls, watching in wonder as the wound disappeared and his cock rejoined his body painlessly and seamlessly.
And there was the time in London when he and a nasty citizen had been struggling on a deserted dock after midnight and both had fallen into the Thames. Godson couldn’t swim worth a shit. The target sank like a stone after he garroted the man and Godson had then crawled across the surface of the water to the shore. That had been weird.
An analyst at the Compound once asked him, “Do you think you are Jesus Christ?”
Godson had laughed and asked the analyst if that was the best he could come up with. But lately, when he started to add it all together, it was pretty damned—
He cocked his head. He thought he heard a car coming. He whispered, “Po-leece.”
As the sound of the vehicle grew louder, Godson slid off the stool and walked over to the shattered window. Anyone driving by would see the trackers’ car in the ditch, the broken glass, and bodies sprawled
in the booth inside the diner.
Unless they were made not to see. Unless the scales descended upon their eyes. Godson smiled at that.
It was a patrol car. A County Sheriff’s Crown Victoria, gold on white. A big black was cop behind the wheel. Godson closed his eyes and concentrated as the car rolled by. Then the car was gone, moving down the highway. The cop hadn’t seen anything Godson didn’t want him to see.
Godson opened his eyes. He dropped a quarter in the jukebox and called up a song, and went into the kitchen. Patsy Cline started singing about walking after midnight.
Earlier, he had thrown Little Miss Cute T&A over his shoulder and carried her into the kitchen. After setting her cooling body down on a big steel table and removing her clothes he’d let his hunger get the better of him, biting into her firm buttocks and tearing away strips of muscle with his fingers. She was still there, flat on her stomach, her pert little partially consumed dead ass sticking up in the air.
Patsy sang on as Godson selected a knife with a good edge. That’s how I feel sometimes, he thought as he put the knife to her unspoiled left cheek. I feel like I’ve spent my whole life walking after midnight. The song ended. Whistling a jaunty tune to fill the silence and brighten his mood, Godson set to work.
When Godson let the diner he was holding a small, heavy Ziploc bag of meat strips. He got into his car and pulled out onto the road.
A Page from the Past
Airborne, en route to Dallas, Texas, November 21, 1963
President John Fitzgerald Kennedy was looking out a window on Air Force One and wondering how much tougher this job could get. He had people screwing around in Vietnam, he had the Hometown situation hanging over his head like a goddamned Sword of Damocles, that particular secret being one he was sorely tempted to blow the lid off of—public opinion of him be damned, and now he had to deal with the intelligence community’s problem child yet again, the Compound.
Jackie was nearby, chattering away about something or other. Every once in a while he gave her a noncommittal grunt to keep her happy. She was chain-smoking her damned Salems and making a hell of a stink. Now she was on a tear about the limousine’s bubbletop.
She wanted the bubble on the limo when they drove through Dallas. We need the bubble. My hair will be a mess without the bubble. I’ll give you a goddamn bubble, he thought, and then grinned when he realized that as tense as she was and as aggravating as she could be she was still so delicately lovely that her beauty could strike him anew, as it did now.
His grin faded as he began thinking of the Compound again.
One of the rarest acts initiated by a President of the United States is the issuance of a noli scribo Executive Order, an official decree so explosive that even the smallest reference in the most obscure buried file could destroy a government, an order so sensitive, so dangerous that it could only be shared by the President, the Vice President, and those who carried out the order. It was a threat if discovered by the people the President served because a noli scribo was a directive to take action directly opposed to the basic tenets of the government.
When an outgoing President turned the Oval Office over to a new Chief Executive he shared the knowledge of past noli scribo orders with the newcomer as both a guideline and a warning to tread carefully in the most powerful office in the land.
Throughout history there have been rumors about noli scribo orders of the most outrageous sort. Despite that fact that Thomas Jefferson had put forth an order for the assassination of George Washington if the masses unsatisfied with the work of the Continental Congress should plead or demand that the Commander in Chief establish a monarchy, Jefferson was not President, so his order was not a noli scribo.
Roosevelt had issued the first confirmed noli scribo during the Second World War. Delicate politics necessitated that a boatload of German Jewish refugees off Philadelphia who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time had to be destroyed with literally not one trace of them remaining. Harry Truman was unable to avoid the sleepless nights and self-loathing when he issued orders to clean up the Roswell mess. Eisenhower was the only President who issued two noli scribo orders. One to found Hometown, without a doubt the most unusual and least known community in America, and one in the final days of his administration, to make Hometown disappear. That order was quickly rescinded by Kennedy.
A few days earlier Kennedy had been in the Oval Office contemplating the issuance of his own noli scribo Executive Order. He was almost alone with this, not even confiding in Bobby, who usually knew everything his brother was doing. Jack knew Bobby would absolutely shit if he learned half the things Jack was keeping under wraps. It was unfortunate Kennedy had to let Lyndon in on it, but the only way a noli scribo could be enacted was with the approval of both the President and the Vice-President.
That odd bird from the Compound, Doctor Lionel Eicher, had called Kennedy earlier in the week and said, “That blonde bimbo you were fucking? The Hollywood slut? She isn’t as dead as you think.” The German said a file was on its way to Kennedy that would explain all.
After receiving the package, Jack had leafed through the file. That crazy kraut Eicher, he’d thought, what the hell has he done now? Stern had been a little weird, but the old man knew when to step back and when to sit down and shut up. Eicher was always a lone wolf, doing whatever he wanted, and now it looked like he’d gone completely bananas.
Kennedy had shaken his head and turned a page, seeing a diagram of a glass and rubber pipette syringe Eicher called the seeding unit. To Kennedy it looked like a fancy and most likely overpriced turkey baster. The next page was a glossy 8 X 10 of an infant. The baby was held in the arms of a young woman identified only as Surrogate of item 6.4.63.A4.
Kennedy had cursed. As much as he would have liked to shut down the entire operation, he realized the Compound had to remain in existence for two reasons. It did a lot of good work, and its director had dirt on almost everyone who held power in DC.
Randall Kraft made J. Edgar Hoover look like an amateur.
It became tiresome after a while. Kennedy would mention he was thinking of cutting the Compound’s budget because they weren’t pulling their weight and then he would be face to face with the Compound’s carrion-bird Executive Director, who would offer him an envelope containing photos of some random broad going down on him, biting his nipples, sticking a carrot up his ass, that kind of thing.
Although in one case it had been a short reel of eight millimeter film featuring the President giving it to a stewardess doggie-style while blissfully stoned on codeine and thus able to ignore the constant pain in his back for at least a little while, and he paid dearly for what Kraft swore was the only copy of that footage, not only because of potential threats to his marriage and his public image, but because he had gotten pretty damned hot and bothered watching the thing.
Normally Kraft would hum and haw and explain that they had been testing out a new telescopic-microscopic camera system or some such newfangled surveillance contraption and had accidentally captured these images while doing a routine sweep of whatever hotel suite Kennedy had been in during the time.
All in the name of ensuring the President’s security, of course.
Then Kennedy would pay through the ass for the photos or film or reels of recorded audio tape and promise to leave the Compound’s budget alone. Kraft would slink away and not be seen for at least a few months, when they would play the game all over again.
Kennedy did have one thing in his favor. According to the founding policies of the Compound, if an avenue of inquiry could be proven to be too much of a risk to the organization itself and not necessarily the country, it could be shut down by the acting Executive Director, or by the President. All part of the give and take.
A lot of experiments had been shut down by Chief Executives over the years. Eisenhower had put a stop to the death ray and the laser gun. The death ray did work, creating an invisible particle beam that could slice a man in half, but the smallest
working unit weighed fourteen tons and that was a bit much. The laser gun worked better than expected, putting out a ruby red beam of deadly light that bounced off any reflective glass or plastic surface and flashed around the room at the speed of, well, light, slicing through any light absorbing object in its path. During the laser’s first and only demonstration it pierced and bisected five pieces of furniture, two physicists and a Chief of Staff.
Kennedy had already ordered Stern to abandon any cryogenics work, and while he knew there was value in the genetic prestidigitation worked by Stern and Eicher, cloning was just too damned slow and far too dangerous, an ethical nightmare better left to future generations. He thought it was better to put the funding into the Compound’s android program.
Of course Kennedy had been swayed to make this decision when he was taken to the Compound and introduced to MIA 9, a mechanically independent automaton with a molded outer body shell of synthetic skin so real Kennedy had nearly popped off in his undershorts when he first saw it. It was a remote control unit, the actual brains located in another room, each command broadcast by radio into the disturbingly real body.
To Kennedy it had been a naked redhead with bright green eyes, skin like milk, a lascivious smile and a body that gave the President of the United States an instant aching erection. Go Irish! When asked if he would like to see how real the mechanism was, Kennedy nodded, and the scientists left the room.
For a time Kennedy groped MIA 9, marveling over the realism of the red-gold tresses and pert nipples and cute dimples. Then he requested a blowjob.
The team of engineers controlling MIA 9 from the next room looked at the incident as a technical exercise. They demonstrated great skill in controlling the android jaws and ensuring the First Manhood was not chewed off by a machine built with tax dollars.
Made in the U.S.A.: The 10th Anniversary Edition Page 8
