Zanesville: A Novel

by Kris Saknussemm

  One of them went and stood guard by his bus, which to his chagrin pulled out. Three converged inside the station, with the fifth minding the main door. The ones inside began to tap their canes and to make a sound in their throats as if they were preparing to sing. People covered their ears. Clearfather’s mind was filled with feedback and fear. He didn’t know what to do. Strangest of all, despite the growing panic, he felt a voracious sexual yearning come over him. I’m coming unglued, he thought. His head ached and the letters cut into his back began to burn. The rabbi ran for the restroom. The red-and-white-striped figures in the straw hats began to sing:

  Buffalo Gals, won’t you come out tonight, come out tonight

  Buffalo Gals, won’t you come out tonight

  And dance by the light of the moon

  But underneath the words, Clearfather heard them say in a single locust voice:

  Speak our mind.

  You will be told when it’s too late.

  Indecision is your only option.

  Doubt conquers all.

  The Sisters of Mercy rose and retaliated with a bar of “Jesus Is the Answer,” but the moment they’d waded into the song, the tenor pointed his cane at one of them and she let out a piercing cry as a second-degree burn began to form on her cheek. The group sat down and began comforting the injured woman, whose sobbing was now the main sound in the terminal but for the rhythmic tapping of the canes as the barbershop figures began to close in around Clearfather.

  Well, he thought. Maybe I should just let them take me. Stop this searching and running. But a part of him found the idea of surrender—if not unacceptable, then very unwise. Someone had given him the map. Maybe even Uncle Waldo and Aunt Vivian. In any case, he hadn’t completed his mission. He wasn’t supposed to give in. If he did, he was letting someone down—maybe his family, maybe something bigger. The station went still except for the sound of the floor buffer.

  “We’re here for you,” they said with one face, one voice.

  Clearfather was about to tell them about the Pheasant Plucker when the Harijan stepped from behind a pillar with a gentle hydraulic hiss.

  “U KANT,” the Harijan said in a buzz-distorted voice.

  The quartet stabbed their canes down together and made their harmonizing sound again. The Sisters of Mercy and the others fell back except for the quadriplegic.

  The quartet made a move toward Clearfather. “We’re here for you.”

  “GO!” the Harijan buzzed at Clearfather.

  The baritone swiped his cane at the drone, but the drone was much faster and more flexible than it appeared. It snatched the cane away and slashed down on the baritone’s arms and then the back of its legs. The striped figure buckled, but before the Harijan could finish it off, the others were upon it—its thin mantis frame wobbling and sparking.

  “GOHHHHHH,” the Harijan whined at Clearfather as a tracer dart occurred between the tenor’s eyes—then a second later blew the head clean off. Clearfather looked in the direction from which the missile had come and saw the bearded rabbi braced against a pillar with a spear pistol balanced on his arm. The shot drew the attention of the others, who were about to launch into song when to Clearfather’s further surprise the quadriplegic leapt from his wheelchair with what looked like an aqualung that glurped out a burst of purple-green juice. The fluid changed texture in the air, becoming a gelatinous mass that clung to the vests of the singers. Almost instantly it began smoking.

  “Get out of here!” the now very mobile quadriplegic yelled and shoved Clearfather toward the door.

  The crooners that had been hit with the goo were being eaten apart. The fifth member went for the rabbi but was grabbed at the ankle by the gripper-hand of the Harijan. Outside the station, the quad pushed Clearfather into the passenger seat of a taxi driven by a black man with a handlebar mustache. The rabbi leapt in through the open window and the cab shot off—but not before the fifth member of the quartet was able to fling itself on the back and scramble up on the roof.

  “Damn!” howled the driver. “The countertenor!”

  There was another sound—the thump of body on metal—and Clearfather saw that the bass had dragged itself onto the bumper and then up the back, the acid gnawing away the lower half of its body in a sizzling green miasma.

  “Lean on it!” the quad blared. “We gotta lose these things before we get cut off!”

  The cab screeched out and knocked over a rickshaw taking the turn onto Capitol Avenue on two squealing tires as the safety glass gave way in a cracked webwork of leeringly blank cyborg. The quad ripped out the panel and shoved it back at the bass, who hung on despite the impact. The countertenor’s cane lasersliced the roof open like the lid of a can and worse still the two deadly units—corroding apart—began singing “Sweet Adeline . . .” Clearfather heard the words but beneath the melody he knew they were saying in blind termite voices . . . Vitessa INTEL—Maximum Response . . . No Negotiations . . . YIELD OR DIE.

  The cab swerved across lanes and the biomechanoids continued to attack with the mindless fury of warrior insects. Police sirens were in pursuit now, and the countertenor had set the interior on fire with the cauterizing heat ray in the cane. The rabbi pulled out from his robes an evil-looking handcannon and let rip. The shotspray blew a hole in the countertenor’s chest and tore off the rest of the jagged roof, which had the fortunate effect of flying off and decapitating the bass.

  The driver feathered the brake pedal and the countertenor lost its balance—but just before it slipped all the way off to be steamrolled, it reached out its cane and hooked on, the termite voice gargling . . . DEATHFREEZEBRAINEATNOESCAPE.

  The cab squealed hard left on Michigan Avenue through the Indiana–Purdue campus. Overhead, Clearfather heard the Teflon-coated rotary blades of a Black Dragonfly helicopter closing out of the south. The driver punched up a liquid crystal map readout. With savage exertion the countertenor swung up and began bashing against the shotgun-side window while the car careered over curbs. The disintegrating cybersinger droned on, but no longer with any semblance of meaning. Finally the quad scrambled through the gaping hole in the roof and pried the cane free. The countertenor uttered an indistinguishable cry and was gone. Clearfather sat lost in a whirlwind of conflicting messages and impulses. Every drive, every need and capability seemed to be firing at the same time, leaving him paralyzed as the smoking car shot on with pursuit hemming them in.

  “All right,” said the quad, pulling off his face. “Get them to send out the decoys.”

  He, or rather she, indicated Clearfather, for with the skin mask peeled away it was apparent that the quadriplegic, who’d turned out to be so agile and quick, was in fact a woman—and a redhead. The driver nodded and pressed a button on the console. Then he plucked off his mustache and pulled off what Clearfather saw was a skullcap. The rabbi lost her hat and beard. All three were women.

  A giant Maori woman dressed in chain mail on a black 2000 Sergio Eliminator growled up beside them with a figure strapped on the back that resembled him. A moment later a husky blonde wearing a Viking helmet astride an exhaust-pipe-rumbling Harley appeared. She was armed with a modified Remington pump action and she, too, had a figure on the back that looked like him. Supersleek cinnabar-red Kawasaki speedbikes zipped into formation, ridden by two small figures in full Kevlar bodysuits and teardrop impact helmets. On the back of each was a dummy dressed like him.

  “Lissen up,” directed the redhead. “We’re gonna pull off under the overpass and you’re gonna be taken on one of the bikes.”

  “Where . . . are you going to take me?”

  “You’ll find out soon enough,” the rabbi answered, a short woman with wary hamster eyes and hair like a toilet brush.

  The convoy pulled off in the shadow of an overpass, the Dragonfly hovering out of rifle range.

  “This is it,” the redhead said and pointed to a big chrome Cyclone 1500 that roared up, ridden by a ham-fisted hillbilly girl in bib overalls with a Rebel flag painte
d on her helmet. She had a bowie knife strapped at her waist and a Ruger Blackhawk in a chiseled maduro holster. As Clearfather got out of the car, she ripped the dummy designed to look like him off the back and the rabbi and the driver stuffed it in the car and then started soaking the cab down with gasoline.

  A moment later Clearfather was riding pillion behind the strapping woman and his effigy was on fire. His escort shot off in formation with five other bikes. The Dragonfly picked them up immediately but hesitated when two of the formation diverged, and then rejoined the entourage a few minutes later. Clearfather hung on as the bike raced—the formation darting and weaving, splitting up and then re-forming—straight through an automated checkpoint with alarms ringing then back through the other side to confuse them. Steel cranes shadowed the streets like giant Shanghai toys. His mind seemed to fog and then the bike bucked up over a curb and stopped. The air smelled of nasi goreng. Long strips of silver gaffer tape held the starfish of a shattered window in place.

  “Here, Buck,” said the big girl, who had the oversaturated scent of a hog lagoon. She leaned back and handed him a fur-lined eye mask. “Put this on—or Dixie’ll get pissed.”

  His escort revved forward at half speed, winding around what he guessed was a network of alleyways in some derelict factory district. Finally the motorcycle stopped. He heard the rolling of a steel door. A cool garage-smelling darkness poured over him. The rider revved in over a grate. Another electronic door opened and they putted through. She shut off the bike and told him to get off. He heard the whoosh of a motorized vehicle. It squeaked to a halt just beside him.

  Two sets of hands began searching him. He slipped the ivory ball into a fist and removed it from his pocket. The hands continued examining him, one lingering a moment on his erection. He heard the click of a metal detector and then a softer hum.

  “There’s a stowaway,” a throaty female voice announced.

  “Thought so,” said another female voice. He thought it came from the vehicle in front of him. “Remove it.”

  Clearfather felt a prick behind his right ear as if a tiny scab had been picked.

  “Did you know you had a tracking device on you?” the leaderly voice asked. “With a psychwave monitor?”

  “No,” Clearfather answered.

  “Dusty, get one of our pigeons and secure the device to it, then let it go,” the voice said—and then to Clearfather, “I’m sorry. But you’ll have to strip down—we’ll need to go over your clothes for any more. You’ve also been given a mild sedative to calm you down.”

  Clearfather was tempted to tell them about the Pheasant Plucker. Waves of panic came, but in between he had reassuring intuitions. Despite the awkwardness of his situation he didn’t feel he was in immediate danger.

  There was a hushed murmur when he’d slipped out of his underwear and stood nude. Someone made a retching sound and another woman hollered “Hooo-whee!”

  “Turn around,” the authoritative voice said.

  He did and there was another almost symphonic silence.

  “He looks like somebody,” a woman whispered.

  “Well,” the authoritative voice said at last. “You’ve sure shown us yours! Take off the blind big boy and try to put that weapon down.”

  There were more snickerings and general exhalations as Clearfather eased off the fur-lined eye mask and blinked. He was in an old high-vaulted mechanic’s garage with service pits and hydraulic jacks—a pale hint of asbestos-blue sky leaching through wire-reinforced windows behind iron bars. Mounted on the nearest wall, as if ruling over the chamber, was an ornate neon Indian in full headdress with the words KICKAPOO MOTORS beneath.

  All of the figures in the room were women. Some wore feathers, some fur, others wire—with ritual scars, body piercing, and peculiar tattoos. Then there were the biosurgical modifications. A very homely white woman had hard, bony-looking growths on her head, like the beginnings of horns or antlers. Another had tusks. But what fascinated Clearfather was the Spanish woman with the tail. It was hairless and gristly but communicative, lighter in tone than the rest of her visible skin. It poked out of dark cottonex pants and curled like a question mark.

  There was a logo on the back of the roller door they’d come through—a silver wheelbarrow full of pink fire. Several of the women wore navy-blue mechanic’s coveralls. All of the jumpsuits had this same logo over the heart. One of those who’d been doing the inspecting—she had a bone through her nasal septum—motioned for him to put his clothes back on. He slipped the little white ball back into his pocket.

  Most remarkable of all the women was the nearest—the owner of the authoritative voice. She sat in a forklift the same pink as the fire in the wheelbarrows. The vehicle had robotic arms mounted on the sides and a rotating hydraulic winch fitted on the back. She was bald but for a small patch of strawberry-blond hair the size of a golf divot on the top of her head. Her face was fleshy and profound, an effect heightened by her pince-nez. Her entire outfit consisted of a kind of metal harness. Between two small exposed breasts whose nipples were pierced with gold safety pins hung what he thought was a gourd on a gold chain, but which, as he looked closer, he realized was a shrunken human head—male. Both her legs ended just before the knee, the stumps of which were capped in anodized metal cups the same color pink as the wheelbarrow fire. From the dashboard of the forklift she fished out a cigar. A butch-pixie lit it. The abridged leader mouthed the cigar until the cherry was glowing, and then produced a series of smoke rings that wafted toward the neon Indian. “My name’s Bean Blossom,” she said. “I’m Big Man on Campus and this is the Kickapoo Ladies Social Club.”

  Clearfather could feel the relaxant starting to kick in, easing the static in his mind.

  “What were those things that were chasing us?” he asked.

  Bean Blossom glanced at the redhead, who was now standing next to a woman with an anteater-like profile. “They’re called Disciplinarians,” the redhead said.

  “Organic robots,” Bean Blossom explained. “Part of Vitessa Intel.”

  “Why were they after me?”

  “We weren’t told that. Our instructions were to get you off the bus and out of the station any way we could.”

  “Who gave the instructions?”

  Bean Blossom sucked on her cigar a moment and then said, “Parousia Head, our patron and sponsor. We’re a little bit more than a lesbian motorcycle club. We’re a resistance unit jamming Vitessa where we can. I don’t know why you’re in trouble. All we know is that you have unusual gifts and that you’ve got memory problems—and that you’re important to Parousia.”

  “Where is she?” Clearfather asked. “Can I meet her?”

  There was a general murmur that echoed through the garage.

  “She communicates when she needs to,” Bean Blossom replied at last.

  “Is she the one who gave me the map?”

  “We don’t know anything about a map,” Bean Blossom said. “We were just told what you looked like and that Vitessa was on to you.”

  “What happens now?” Clearfather asked. “Am I . . . a prisoner?”

  “No, you’re not a prisoner. But our instructions are to keep you safe until we hear from Parousia. In the meantime, try to relax.”

  Two bottomless Asian women on Rollerblades wheeled in trolleys laden with teapots, china cups, a bowl of vivid pink tulips, and various nibblies.

  “We always enjoy a proper High Tea,” the crippled woman announced. “Although, mind the cucumber sandwiches!”

  Several women laughed at this. Clearfather had to think calm. On top of everything else he still hadn’t eaten.

  Bean Blossom took an appreciative sniff of the steeping tea and then an anxious expression crossed her face, morphing into annoyance. She opened the teapots to inspect their contents. “Who made the tea today?” she demanded.

  “I . . . I did, ma’am,” said a young black woman in silk karate pants and red bra.

  “Tourmaline,” the older woman simmere
d. “What we have here is Spiderleg Kokeicha and Temple of Heaven Gunpowder. Those are both green teas. We always serve a green tea and a black tea!”

  “I-I’m s-sorry, ma’am,” Tourmaline sputtered.

  “Sorry?” their leader shrieked. “Show me how sorry you are!”

  Tourmaline dropped her karate pants and bent over the forklift. Bean Blossom cooed as she slipped her left hand into an oven mitt made of mink and with tender care began caressing the black girl’s skin. With each lingering brush of the soft, almost wet-looking fur, Tourmaline arched her bottom in supplication. As she did, Bean Blossom took her other hand and reached down for an antique military baton made of cane. This she inserted in one of the gripper-arms. Still stroking the smooth young buttocks with the mink glove, she took a couple of practice swipes. The reed made a whistling whine as it passed through the air, faster and harder than any human arm could propel it. Clearfather saw the girl’s face grimace with anticipation.

  “You seem both excited and horrified,” Bean Blossom said to Clearfather. “You don’t know whether to try to save Tourmaline or just let things take their course. It’s an interesting dilemma, isn’t it?”

  Clearfather’s head throbbed. The garage was dead still except for a creaking off in another section. He squeezed the little ball, trying to hear the voices of the old people, but nothing came through.

  “Nietzsche said, ‘Few are made for independence.’ Are you strong enough?”

  Clearfather began to perspire and tremble. Tourmaline’s scent filled his nostrils. The robot arm whirred, lifting the reed like a moistened finger to gauge the wind.

  “Don’t push me . . . ,” he gasped.

  “Who are you to tell me what to do?” the stump-legged woman challenged.