Made in the U.S.A.: The 10th Anniversary Edition

by Jack X. McCallum

  Mondani shrugged. “Well sir, in this modern age it is a bit more difficult to shock people than it used to be. I’m sure we could evade any accusations of—”

  “Are you insane?” Zane stood, waving his arms. “The Compound has created more new weapons of war and improved the efficiency of so many others that we now receive the majority of our operations budget from the sale of patents and copyrights to more legitimate arms manufacturers and distributors.”

  Mondani sat back in his chair, hoping that Zane would blow off steam.

  “Our organization has dabbled in mind control on individuals and the masses through the media. We have taken part in political insurrection, career-destroying scandal generation and even assassination! Our perverse power reaches across history. How does that whiny old folk song go—Abraham, Martin, and John? We killed them all and countless innocent bystanders and assorted witnesses to our political and social machinations.”

  This was news to Mondani. “Sir . . . Abraham Lincoln?”

  Zane raised his hands, the fingers fluttering. “Yes, Abraham Lincoln! Like Lee Harvey Oswald, James Earl Ray and Sirhan Bishara Sirhan, John Wilkes Booth was nothing but a patsy, and the so-called co-conspirators were all removed or their reputations stained by the Compound’s ancestor, the Gentlemen of the Black House.”

  Zane was seething now, and bouncing on the balls of his feet.

  Mondani calmly made a mental note to visit the oldest part of the Compound archives as soon as possible. It sounded as if some fascinating reading lay ahead. “I’m sorry, the Gentlemen of the . . .”

  “The Black House,” Zane said, his nostrils flaring. “The Black House! The Black House became the League of the Black House, then the League of Patriots, and then the House of Patriots which eventually begat the Outlet, our predecessor, during the First World War!” Zane sucked air, his eyes bugging out.

  “The Compound’s East Coast installation as it stands today was constructed in 1949 not with taxpayers’ funds but with gold stolen from the Nazis in the Bavarian Alps, gold which many now believe was taken from murdered Jews, one of the seemingly infinite unpleasant secrets we’re sitting on, secrets, nasty secrets, oh my, oh yes . . .”

  Zane opened his mouth and grabbed the tip of his tongue with the fingers of his right hand. Mondani stared in alarm. Zane released his tongue.

  “Where was I? Ah, yes, our long list of misdeeds. We have performed experiments on newborn children! If the vagueness of Doctor Stern’s decades old notes is to be believed, some of these children were obtained by less than legal means! We have frozen children and kept them asleep for decades and then revived them to watch them die one by one, save for Mr. Hill, who should have died in that he would have saved us all a lot of sleepless nights. We made an android army and set those heartless killing machines against innocent American citizens! We’ve created human clones with source tissues which were either stolen or came from highly questionable sources! To date science has only dabbled in creating mammalian clones, and no legislative body has even considered the groundwork for ethical guidelines concerning such work in regard to human beings. And since we’re on the subject of ethics, most of our early endeavors were the results of original work performed for and knowledge gained by scientists who may in fact have been members of the Nazi Party and were most definitely funded by Adolf Hitler! Thus I say to you, Doctor, we are boned!”

  Zane sat down behind his desk, running his fingers through his hair, his body wracked with nervous shivers. “Tribulation,” he said. “Calamity. Woe. Woe!”

  Mondani cleared his throat. “I believe that now may be the worst possible time to come as the bearer of bad news, then,” Mondani said.

  Zane glared at him.

  “The 333X2 tracking devices implanted in William Hill and Jeannie Norman, with which we have had intermittent operational success over that last few years, have unfortunately ceased functioning just as we were closing in on them. Hill and Norman are in the wind, as the saying goes.”

  Zane grinned again, spittle creating a ghastly sheen on his lips.

  Mondani waited in uncomfortable silence as seconds, and then minutes passed. Zane continued to sit and grin as Mondani finally began asking if the DSR was unwell. The grinning went on while Mondani examined his boss, called a team of emergency medical technicians into the spacious office, and watched as his mentor was strapped onto a gurney and wheeled to the infirmary.

  One week later Randall Kraft placed Doctor Mark Mondani in charge of research at both the Compound and Compound West.

  Zane was to remain under permanent observational status, his mind an utter wreck. As he knew too much and was too unstable to ever walk the streets again, he would be a fixture at Compound West until his death, an annoyance to be tolerated for the rare opportunities in which his brain was picked for information, decades old minutiae not found in any files.

  15

  Gentlemen Prefer Blondes

  It was early in the morning and Johnny was sitting on the toilet. He was an old, old man. He had knobby hands and wrinkled skin. He had white hair and faded eyes. His back hurt all the time, sometimes a faraway hurt, sometimes right up close and angry. He had a dent in the side of his head and a tired scrotum that dangled alarmingly when released from his underpants.

  He was wearing one of those gowns he hated. The kind that was like a white shirt that got put on backwards and only had ties in the back, leaving his bony back and shriveled buttocks exposed. Dave the Orderly, who took care of Johnny during the day, said the shirt was called a hospital Johnny, the perfect thing for Johnny to wear because he was Johnny and he was in a hospital. Johnny thought Dave was full of shit. Usually Johnny thought and spoke in simple kiddie words just like in the picture books he read. Sometimes though, when he got angry, he would find that there were more words, surprising words, hiding inside him, like thinking someone was full of shit, or an ass hole, or a dick head.

  Johnny sat and tried to poop and thought about the last time he had seen the sun. Even though he had been good and remembered to drink all of his Metamucil last night after eating his favorite desert, yummy butterscotch pudding, he still was having a lot of trouble pooping. Dave the Orderly had once said to Johnny while giving Johnny his morning sponge bath that sometimes old people’s insides got slow and needed help, and that was why Johnny drank Metamucil, and that was why he was having trouble making a poop, and that was why he was straining harder than ever to poop because he knew that if he didn’t poop Dave the Orderly would give him an Enemy, and Johnny hated having that stiff rubber tube pushed up between his butt cheeks and he hated the big-as-a-balloon feeling it gave him and he hated the gushy watery poops that came after.

  So Johnny sat and strained while Dave the Orderly read a book in Johnny’s room, just outside the bathroom door.

  Johnny didn’t know why he was thinking about sunshine when he should have been thinking about pooping. It had been a long time since he had been out in the sun. Before Dave the Orderly started working here Johnny used to go for walks in a garden. He knew it was inside because he could see the hospital walls beyond the tall plants, but it was still nice because he could smell flowers and hear birds and stand in the warm sunshine that came down through a big round hole in the roof of the hospital. They didn’t let him do that anymore.

  Thinking about this made Johnny sad, and it was harder to poop when you were sad. So he thought about happy things. He thought about his big secret. He called it his dream life. Once each month, when he had to spend a day with the head doctors and the body doctors, the head doctors asked him if he remembered anything about Before. Before what? That was what he had asked they first time they had asked the question. Your life Before the hospital, they had said, giving the big creepy smiles they always gave him. No, Johnny would say, he didn’t remember any of it. He said that because he could tell from the way they acted that remembering and thinking about Before were bad, bad things, and he didn’t want them to think he was bad, so he n
ever, ever told them that sometimes he did remember Before.

  The Before memories seemed like weird dreams to him, so he thought of them as his dream life.

  Pictures from his dream life jumped through Johnny’s mind. The pretty pink lady that could parlez Français. The other lady, who was all kissy and wiggly and silver on top. The little children who Johnny thought were his friends from a long time ago because he could remember playing with them, the little boy with the name like Johnny’s and the little girl who had a name like one of the States in America, but he could never remember which one. And the other boy who seemed like a boy but seemed older at the same time, who was Johnny’s best friend in the whole world, who looked a bit like him and played games with him and worked with him that time he decided to call out the Army and the National Guard because things were getting out of control down south . . .

  Johnny sat on the toilet and laughed. There were always surprises from his dream life. He knew what Army men were, because there were lots of little plastic ones in a cardboard box here in his room at the hospital. But he didn’t know what the National Guard was, and he didn’t know what the trouble was that was down south. Gee, he didn’t even know where down south was. He only knew that he should be worried about his own parts down south, and tried harder than ever to poop. He made a fist with his right hand and placed it into the big dent in the side of his head. When he looked in the mirror he sometimes laughed, because it looked like someone had used a big ice-cream scoop to scoop away part of his head. He was sure that if he pushed down on his head hard enough, he could start pushing the poop down and out and into the toilet.

  Dave the Orderly was David Trane, a male nurse and a full-time employee of Compound West. At times like this he wondered if he had made the right decision in signing up when the recruiter from the Compound showed up at UCLA last year. The job had sounded fantastic. Sure, he had to undergo an excruciatingly thorough security check, sign a twenty page confidentiality oath and he had lost a lot of freedom, but his student loans had been crushing him and the Compound was offering full-time work and the chance to continue his education.

  Yet now he spent only a fraction of his time on his courses. Most of each eight hour shift passed slowly while he watched halfwit, and after each shift he had to complete an absolute shitload of paperwork, cataloging everything halfwit did. Trane didn’t care that halfwit was a living, breathing part of American history and was once the most powerful man on earth. Trane was just tired of wiping the man’s ass and searching for clean underwear when the old man crapped in his drawers, which is why he recommended the hospital gowns. Trane was bored, and in his line of work boredom often led to serious mistakes.

  Johnny was pushing harder now, but the poop wouldn’t come out! He felt like he had to poop and he knew it was time to poop and he wanted to poop but he just couldn’t poop! Maybe he had to push on his head harder. That was a good idea.

  Johnny looked around the bathroom that had been designed with safety in mind. There were no sharp edges. Most porcelain surfaces were covered with thick rubber. The mirror was polished aluminum. The water cups were paper. He had no toothbrush or comb or deodorant because these things were brought by the orderlies when required. There was even a moisture sensor in the bathtub, which would sound an alarm as soon as it started filling with water. The bathroom was safe. There were no objects that could be used by someone inclined to violence against themselves or others. Unless one considered the lid of the toilet tank, of course. Its top and sides were coated in thick white rubber, but it was still a heavy slab of porcelain. Johnny lifted the lid off of the tank.

  Still sitting on the bowl, Johnny got a grip on one end of the lid and raised it up as if seeking a bit of shade. Then he began driving the slab of porcelain down onto his head, battering his own skull.

  Trane was leafing through Yertle the Turtle and wishing they let the old man read Hustler when he became aware of a sound, a dull, meaty thump coming every few seconds. He went to the bathroom door wondering what the fuck was up and saw halfwit sitting on the crapper with a big grin on his face as he slammed the toilet tank lid down onto his cranium with all his strength. Blood was trickling out of the old guy’s head as if it were a punch bowl full of cracks.

  Trane didn’t waste any time. He sprang into action.

  * * *

  At the same time Johnny started caving in his own skull, Jeannie was awake and getting dressed. She had given Will a kiss and hopped out of bed. He was still half asleep as he heard her running water in the tiny bathroom, lying on his back and wishing they were together like this anywhere but here. She came out of the bathroom, tying her hair back with the faded ribbon. She had washed her face. Her cheeks were pink, her eyes sparkling cornflower blue. Will couldn’t get enough of those eyes and her smile made something flutter in his chest.

  “Can you believe it?” She said. “It’s a whole new millennium!” She jumped onto the bed, onto him, missing his gonads by inches and knocking the wind out of him, and then let out a laugh that was the most wonderful thing he had ever heard.

  The door opened and a trio of anonymous guards in black stepped into Will’s cell. Without a word two of them took each of Jeannie’s arms while a third raised a stun gun.

  “If you hurt her you’ll eat that fucking thing,” Will said. Jeannie’s smile was gone, and her eyes were now dark with fear. He felt as if someone had just snuffed out the sun.

  The light that had been in Will’s eyes a moment ago was gone as well, and now he was the cold thing that Jeannie feared, the thing that could kill without mercy.

  “We’ll zap her, not you,” the one with the stun gun said to Will. “Let’s all stay calm and no one will get hurt.”

  “Where are you taking her?” Will asked. Jeannie looked small and cute and helpless as they surrounded her, and she was very scared. With her hair tied back in a ponytail her white roots were much more evident.

  “The infirmary,” the man with the stun gun said, a moment before Jeannie was taken and the door was slammed shut and locked.

  Will looked at the door. It was solid metal, with inaccessible hinges, no doorknob, and no keyhole. There were faint seams in the metal where two slots could be opened from the outside, one for observation and one for sliding a food tray into the room. He looked up at the heavy metal ventilation grill above the bed, wondering if he could make use of the camera behind it.

  * * *

  Randall Kraft, the overlord of the Compound, was in Compound West’s infirmary. His excuse was that he was short of breath. He was always short of breath.

  The Executive Director had taken a redeye west to make sure no mistakes were made in the interrogation of the individuals whom he thought of as Presley and Monroe. He knew that the woman was getting another medical exam. They wanted to learn as much as they could about her since she was the only human clone who had lived from birth outside of the Compound’s influence. Not that there weren’t more clones, but they were under Kraft’s thumb. It was the woman he wanted to see.

  Kraft came into the infirmary seeking a breath of pure oxygen. He was ninety-nine years old, and any physical exertion left him exhausted. Even more exhausting was the chat he had just had with John Godson. That dark-skinned reprobate was always doing something crazy, hell, sometimes Kraft thought that half the Compound’s budget went to cleaning up after the lunatic. He usually did good work, though, there was no doubting that.

  After Stern’s defrosted, brain-damaged yokel, Godson was the best hitter the Compound had ever had, even better than Joseah Long, the cold bastard who’d done Jack Kennedy, his meddling brother Bobby and that enduring pain in the ass Martin Luther King Junior. Kraft tried to remember what happened to Long, who had been a particularly foul piece of work. He drew a blank. Had Long been one of the men who met his end in the Battle of Hometown? What an Alabama Dick Dance that had been, an incident best left buried and forgotten, like the men who had died there. Not that it mattered. If he was still alive Lon
g had to be almost as old as Kraft.

  Godson was another matter. He had been sent out long ago to take part in apprehending Hill, missing his target every step of the way. For some unfathomable reason he had carved up one of the Compound’s agents. They hadn’t actually seen Godson do it but it was his style. Then he showed up at Compound West with a young woman in tow and no explanation why. Kraft had tried to rake Godson over the coals, but how do you threaten a guy like that? They needed him more than he needed them. Besides, Kraft thought, Godson was just plain scary. Not a jittery flying-off-the-handle kind of scary, but a dark and soulless kind of scary.

  He’d dismissed Godson with a weak warning, and now he was sitting on a stool in an examination room surrounded by portable cloth partition walls, holding a plastic mask against his face and sucking air into his tired old lungs like a baby working a tit.

  Zane was with him. Even though Kraft had demoted Zane years ago and put Mondani in charge of the Compound’s day-to-day operations, Zane was retained on the payroll out west because he had a head full of useful knowledge that was picked at every now and then. Kraft hated how Zane, many years his junior but horribly aged by the stresses of the last few years, had deteriorated into a fawning little toad, and as useful as the man could be Kraft disliked having the former DSR around. Sitting on the edge of an examination table, Kraft took a few breaths of pure oxygen and tried to ignore both the physicians who milled around him, and Zane, who sat in a chair in one corner staring at his lord and master like that damn dog on the old RCA/Victor record label.