Zanesville: A Novel

by Kris Saknussemm

  There was no trouble in Claremore or Tulsa, but west of Oklahoma City, Jacob noticed a formation of black maxicopters trailing close and a freight train hauling bright orange unmarked containers. The maxicopters never swept in to intercept; the freighter never varied its speed. Though the homing system may have been disposed of in Indiana, it was plain that Vitessa was still able to track Clearfather—or had anticipated his arrival. The question was, when would the ambush come?

  The Clinton checkpoint was closed but there were state police vehicles everywhere—and an air force Firedragon at a local airfield. The maxicopters had fallen back but heading east was an entourage of sleek dark cars—and still the freight train with its seamless unmarked orange containers paralleled them west.

  “Get them up,” Jacob instructed Sugar Bear at a sign for Shamrock.

  The big man dipped his shoulders through the hatch door into the body of the truck where the other passengers dozed fitfully. Down in the silk sling Clearfather was dreaming of the city of cyclones again. He saw the young girl inside. Then the three Chinese men. They were trying to talk to him but he couldn’t hear their voices over the wind. Then he woke up.

  “C’mon,” Sugar Bear urged. “We’re almost there.”

  Minutes later the truck slowed and stopped. The interstate was no longer visible. Jacob opened the truck’s main back doors. There was a graveyard of sun-crusted cars, two trailers, and a bungalow made from a converted boxcar, along with a couple of yurts—all seemingly empty. A convenience store with a Phoenix fuel pump looked vacant but was alive with weather vanes—hundreds of them covering the roof like shoots of hair. The embellishment on the arrows took all kinds of forms—proud eagles, Indian chiefs, silhouettes of locomotives with great cabbagehead smokestacks, Gabriel blowing a golden horn. A ways off Clearfather spotted a small wind farm, the white- and silver-bladed turbines looming against the sky.

  “C’mon,” said Jacob, helping them down out of the truck. “We gotta hurry.”

  “I want to thank you,” said Clearfather, noticing a little stone monument that rose out of the scrub grass.

  “I don’t know if you’ll thank me later. They knew you were coming. Good luck.”

  Clearfather nodded. Then Jacob and Sugar Bear and the truck were gone, and he and Kokomo were left in the dust and the wind.

  An S-113 strike cruiser banked out of a cloud. Clearfather didn’t see that the silver-blue arrowhead released a much smaller craft, perhaps a tenth the size. It drifted down out of the sky in absolute silence, tracking Jacob’s truck.

  An explosive blast lit up the horizon. Out beyond the windmills a dustdevil rose like a child’s hand.

  And so I ask, with shaking head,

  How many of my selves are dead?

  —JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY

  CHAPTER 1

  Bend Times

  Voyants were unplugging and reconnecting with the lives of their bodies and their local communities. Total media immersion was down around the globe, as was neurochemical consumption. The only sustained point of involvement was the sexing of Dooley Duck and the romance between the giant blue eidolon and his busty orangutan cohort. As more and more people sought the immediate physical experience of Dooley and Ubba, dependence on TWIN weakened. “Doing the Dooley” became a phenomenon of epidemic joy. Mass celebrations of intimacy broke out in otherwise bland, grim cities like Davenport, Iowa, and Wichita, Kansas—and overseas, from Antwerp to Auckland . . . Kraków to Kyoto. Even the Muslim countries and the Mormon enclaves were feeling the influence. And the nature of the celebrations just made the Dooley movement that much more miraculous. Sensible hygiene was discreetly practiced—and effective birth control. For couples who’d long struggled with infertility or who’d been driven broke by Vitessa’s deathgrip on IVF technology, there was at last fire in the hole and satisfaction in the action. Rapes were down by 90 percent, and wherever there was Dooleyizing, Pandora fever began to cool.

  The Pantheon, Vitessa’s shadowy board of directors, was in a tizz. TWIN’s fortunes were falling but ChildRite, under the leadership of Julian Dingler, had turned the emergency into a public relations triumph by rebuking the Christian Nation and their allies—suggesting that the fleshing and erecting of Dooley might not be the work of hackers trying to humiliate Vitessa but the work of a Higher Power reminding us of our divine and inescapable animality. In a move that sent shock waves through the Vitessalith, Dingler announced that a free, frank, and fun approach to sexuality would become an important new element in the ChildRite philosophy. Overnight ChildRite had become the darling of the empire and Dingler was being hailed as a Savior.

  It was a very different story elsewhere within Vitessa. Bitter rivalries and manic finger pointing broke out as technical faults and product contaminations were reported throughout Europe and Asia—while in Toronto, a resistance organization calling themselves The Church Invisible discovered that Efram-Zev was about to release a suite of psychoactive drugs under the guise of diet pills (and then later their punitively expensive antidotes), which triggered specific phobias such as arachibutyrophobia, the irrational fear of peanut butter sticking to the roof of the mouth. There were further indications that this insidious science of cultivated disability had reached unimagined depths with research into an agent intended to heighten the resentment and distrust of both Muslims and Orthodox Jews (as well as those few remaining lumberjacks) by instigating pogonphobia—the fear of bearded men.

  No wonder Vitessa was worried. But in addition to these tactical dramas, there was Clearfather. Dependent entirely on intelligence oozed to them via a previously unknown agent, the Pantheon struggled to come to terms with who and what he actually was. That he had indeed come to Texas, as their Mystery Informant had predicted, only marginally increased their confidence. This traveler, whose code name was FLEEING ANGEL, had already shown himself to be a dangerous nuisance. What was he capable of and who had sent him? Their data were crude—the information channel unproven. Worse still was their faceless snitch’s insinuation that Julian Dingler was somehow involved. Dingler was the moment’s Golden Boy. To investigate him now would only generate more instability. The irony of this wasn’t lost on the great creators and distributors of uncertainty. They who had pioneered such post-democratic stress disorders as Tuttle’s Syndrome—the obsessive-compulsive checking if one’s fly is zipped—knew very well what rich and strange shapes uncertainty could take. They didn’t know about the stealth mind probe that might be detonated if the signal could be pinpointed, as Finderz had kept such information to himself. And they didn’t know about Kokomo. So their proposed response was an unsubtle blend of massive assault and infectious disease control. Military roadblocks went up across Texas. Disciplinarians sealed off the quadrant. As Finderz Keeperz sat back in Fort Thoreau wondering what steps Vitessa was going to take, forces he had no knowledge of prepared to close in on Dustdevil.

  CHAPTER 2

  Skull & Crossroads

  Clearfather held Kokomo close as the weather vanes whined on the roof of the dirty-windowed store. The reek of the explosion had already blown away on the breeze but the aftershock seemed to keep hitting him. He hadn’t actually seen the truck hit but he knew what had happened, and it sickened him. He knew he was the cause. Vitessa or whoever it was after him had a deadly business in mind. Only his fear for Kokomo’s safety kept his mind clear. He looked around at this patch of Texas nowhere. What had he expected? What did he remember? The attack on the Charisma Train blurred his mind as the dust stung his eyes.

  He tried to listen for voices but no words or instructions came. He’d followed the map. He’d kept his appointment but there was no one to meet him, at least no one visible—just a bony dishwater greyhound nosing between the wrecked cars.

  Kokomo’s eyes were as green as kiwi fruit, but her face was stiff and vacant. He didn’t know if she was suffering withdrawal from the media helmet or if the trauma of leaving Bean Blossom and the Kickapoo Ladies had crashed her mind—but he was
afraid. She was all that he had to hold on to except for his dubious map. A part of him longed to yield and be done with whatever it was he was doing. I bring trouble with me wherever I go, he thought. Jacob and Sugar Bear and the others are gone. Soon we may be, too. And yet he couldn’t escape the fact that despite Kokomo’s incoherence, he felt comforted by her presence. Even in this lonely waste she brought him strength and reinforced the stubbornness inside him, the will to go on. To find the truth. Because it wasn’t just his truth. This wasn’t just his journey. It was hers, the lost Charismatics’—and Carny’s, too.

  He stepped over toward the little monument that peeked up through the starburst thistles—a smooth curve about four inches thick and a foot high. He couldn’t tell what kind of stone it was made out of but it was free of lichen or scratches. Looked at from the right angle it seemed to shine with brilliant flecks of yellow like the peridot crystals found in meteorites. Etched beneath the smooth flat surface was a tiny spiral that suggested a lock of a girl’s hair and the words:

  THE HIDDEN MAY BE SEEKING

  AND THE MISSING MAY RETURN

  Is this it? he thought. Am I the missing who has returned? He clutched the miniature ivory ball in his pocket and turned around. The earth trembled. He tried to regain his balance—but his next step fell away underneath him. He shot a glance at Kokomo . . . his fingers straining at the air . . . falling . . .

  When he stopped he was lying down, his right leg hurt, and there was a heavy smell of grave earth and iron. Gradually his eyes became adjusted to the faint light. He faced a steel screen anchored in concrete. Above him he saw a patch of light but not sky. Frantically he yelled out to Kokomo. A muffled voice chuckled. He struggled up. A shrewd repugnant face pressed close to the screen, a spot-welded claw clutching a polycarbonate and rubber-ringed baton. Clearfather caught the fumes of rutabaga-derived alcohol.

  “Way-elll,” grinned the face, which was like an opossum’s but laboratory-soft and hairless, with red-rimmed eyes like bloody eggs.

  Clearfather felt hornetfire and thudded into the back wall of railroad steel.

  “Thas jes a taste, fren. Yoo moove mifout n I say so El fry yer balls off! Unnerstend?”

  Clearfather nodded and clawed himself into an upright position despite the pain. He didn’t know how long he’d been lying in the steel-walled chamber. Minutes? Or hours? The disgusting creature gave him another dose of the baton.

  “Wee got yer pootykin,” it wheezed—and then belched—a wretched reflux smell that Clearfather found almost more debilitating than the taser.

  “Syut up!” another voice snarled.

  The mesh wall slid back and a sawed-off Savage side-by-side pointed up out of a hand and an arm and, indeed, a body unlike any he’d seen before.

  “Doan worry bough Chemo,” the peculiar figure announced. “His breath’s worse annahis bite. Come outtadair buh keep yer arms up.”

  With the screen slid back, more light filled the space. A yellowish glare emanated from a freestanding grain oil lantern. Sections of earthen walls were reinforced with heavy steel retainers, the ceiling supported by a mix of concrete pillars and coal-tarred railroad ties. It was cool and damp but the man with the sawed-off gun barrel was sweating and naked except for faded floral board shorts. He was cabled with muscle but his hands were misshapen as if he suffered from rheumatoid arthritis and his face was dominated by a nose that could best be described as a snout—one that didn’t provoke any confidence that it was either original equipment or even human. Two beady nocturnal eyes shone on either side of the proboscis.

  With a prod of the gun the snoutish man drove Opossum Face scurrying down the passage. Clearfather followed, surprised to find that any pain or damage he’d sustained in the fall had passed. They entered a much larger concrete chamber, illuminated by a battery-driven light rod and a colza oil lantern. Opossum Face was nowhere to be seen, but there were other figures present.

  One was a wrinkled codger without visible arms or legs, his torso nerved into a Taiwanese version of the robotic exoskeleton that the Man of Steel had used to impersonate Hooper. Above the man’s terrapin head was a safety roll bar. Mounted on it were three bedpans. Clearfather noticed the other denizens directed their attention to the bedpans rather than to the shriveled face below. Two of the other occupants were women. The one with a blue-vinyl beehive and swollen collagen lips, which made her look like a platypus, reclined on a chaise lounge. The other woman looked considerably more normal facially, and much younger—but she was a Sirenomelus, her legs were fused together like a mermaid’s. Clearfather got one quick look at her before she hopped to a walking frame with the brand name Tractioneer™ and wiggled into it with relief.

  The next individual was a very individual presence indeed. Of unknown age, and even race, he had skin with a raw, peeled quality as if he’d been turned inside out. He sat within a transparent shelter composed of some advanced polymer. The surface fogged in time with his respiration. When Clearfather peered in, the man leaned forward in his bedchair.

  “Who the hell’s this?”

  He spoke these words into a wireless microphone tuned to a speaker that was lodged in the mouth of a peccary mounted on the wall. The others turned their attention to the wild swine head in the same way they consulted the bedpans when the old man tried to communicate. Only the snout man addressed everyone directly.

  “Syut up, Davin!” he grunted and waved the barrel of the Savage at an E-Z Boy recliner—then fished out an air dart and injected it into his right butt cheek. “Haah’s bedda,” he snored, sucking a swollen knuckle as the anti-inflammatory kicked in.

  The room they were in was like a large basement. A steel vault door stood open just wide enough to suggest a passageway leading to still more chambers—as if a series of storm cellars or fallout shelters had been connected with tunnels. Clearfather sat gingerly in the E-Z Boy, fingering the white ball in his pocket, hoping Aunt Vivian and Uncle Waldo would give him direction. The terrible headaches he’d experienced and the bursts of lust and revulsion had abated, at least for the moment, as had the pain in his leg following the fall. It made him wonder if he’d been drugged again. He had to be careful now. These folk weren’t Vitessa. But he knew that whatever this troglodytic clan’s agenda was, it wasn’t good. The man called Davin kept misting inside his enclosure. No one spoke.

  “Where’s my friend?” Clearfather demanded.

  He tried to feel her presence but all there was darkness and static.

  He felt a sharp twinge in his head again and heard a quizzical sound. Everyone gazed over at the control board facing the peccary. It was a thinkstation with a datascreen and sensor lights intermixed with chains laden with different sizes of bells. A row of the bulbs had begun winking, and now the smaller bells shivered.

  “Wind’s up,” the relic on the chaise lounge remarked. Next to her the old roboman’s bedpans swiveled like parabolic radar dishes.

  Clearfather spied swirling masses of meteorological images and streams of changing numbers on the screen.

  “What’s this all about?” he asked. “What do you want with me?”

  The Mermaid made an indescribable sound and then the peccary, or rather the man called Davin, piped up.

  “What do you want with us? That’s the better question. We weren’t sneaking around where you live. Why are you here?”

  Clearfather realized that nothing he could say would make sense. He didn’t know where he lived. He wasn’t sure why he was there. That’s why he’d come.

  “Ah’m Van Brocklin,” the Snout said, resting the shotgun in his lap and rubbing together his fingers, which made a crackling sound as if crystals of gristle were breaking up in the synovial fluid.

  “He’s the Odd Vark!” the witch with the big lips guffawed.

  The Odd Vark nickname got them all sniggering and hooting.

  “Syut up!” Van Brocklin boomed and pointed the shotgun at the peccary head, which he blasted off the wall.

  The noise
was deafening. The shot disfigured the trophy head, which ended up on the floor—but the speaker, a golf-ball-sized Manila dinger, landed in one of the bedpans. Van Brocklin tore the bedpan off the roll bar and hung it back on the same hook the peccary’s plywood shield had occupied a moment before.

  Davin tried to say something—but the tinny echo his voice made whining out of the bedpan discouraged him, and he went back to misting and gurgling. Van Brocklin sucked his lubricating knuckles. The bells gave another shimmer.

  “I don’t know who you think I am, but I don’t mean any harm,” Clearfather said.

  “He’s a scout!” the Mermaid shouted.

  “Who would I be a scout for?”

  “The Celibaters of course—and them others—the Nightcrawlers.”

  The bells tinkled again, louder this time, more urgent. Van Brocklin left the chamber, still carrying the shotgun. He was gone for several minutes and in that time no one spoke although they all stole peeks at Clearfather, which he found very disconcerting. When Van Brocklin returned, he’d mopped the sweat from his body and put on a faded T-shirt that read STINKY WIGGLER—PETRIFIED AMERICA TOUR. Clearfather jolted at the name. Van Brocklin leaned the shotgun against Bedpan Man’s robotic frame and held up a smooth silver box with rounded corners. Inside was a set of teeth made of acrylic resin. He examined the dentures with pride and then inserted them into his gash of mouth.

  “Can’t have plastic teef in da sawna,” he said. The bells tinkled again.

  “Is someone coming?” Clearfather asked. “Vitessa?”