Zanesville: A Novel

by Kris Saknussemm

At first the mini combat craft were navigable. Clearfather could hear them humming—but as he began singing along with Kokomo, the gusts began to drive the microfighters into turmoil. Louder and stronger their voices lifted as St. Elmo’s fire glowed from the hoods of the abandoned vehicles and the weather vanes blurred. Clearfather felt the wind double and shift so that it appeared the windmills were no longer being driven by the force but creating it. The locusts hesitated in the air or tried to land to steady themselves. But the windmills were too strong, sucking the winged terrors into their whizzing circles; the black clouds of miniature robots vaporized on impact.

  Then the four windmill towers crashed into the dust, raising a cloud, and out of each cloud whirled a distinct, individual tornado pluming a magnetic field of sparks. When fully formed, they began to move in a chaos of partridge wings and aluminum cans, heading in the direction of the Reapers, gaining speed and size by the second.

  The air stank of steer manure and stressed metal. Vitessa Remote Command reawakened the Dark Rain cannons but the whirlwinds were revolving too fast for the steel projectiles—and what could bullets hit or hurt anyway, confronting giants without true form—only energy endlessly changing shape and yet maintaining force?

  In high-resolution machine vision Vitessa Intel watched as each of the Reapers was stalked by a separate hyperventilating tornado. One by one the spiral soldiers engaged the death harvesters, engulfing them. The armadillo-like tractors trembled on the edge of the twisters, their epicyclic knifedrives gouging at the ground, tank tracks bouncing, trying to hold their position—then one after another they merged and were absorbed, rattling apart and disintegrating into the air. Onward each of the tornadoes marched, dredging up the detonating Jack O’Lantern mines and inhaling the spent Dark Rain cartridges. When all the land around had been cleared of the explosives, the whooshing tornadoes converged on the old store. The doors and punctured window screens had all been swept away but the building still stood, boards clacking. The four tornadoes joined to form a single funnel in a howling boom of urgent air, like a backburn hitting an accelerant. The roof of the general store ripped off, shooting weather vanes from their perches like arrows. The weather station exploded—the Phoenix pump sailing away. The unraveling shape of the unified tornado bore down into the soil—radiant tongues of light licking the car bodies that one by one snuffed into the coil like cigarettes. Then up out of the ground groaned the elevator that had serviced the tunnels below—and Clearfather saw the Nourisher wrapped in torn gauze, flushed red with the strain of movement—nose broken—eyes wild. She’d been able to make the journey hanging on to Judd’s robotic walking frame, which still contained the ant-attacked remains of the old man. She staggered the skeleton off the cast-iron platform as the structure wrenched free from the shaft—cables splitting—pulleys flying—hovering for a moment in midair, rusted and huge, before it spun up the spiral stairs of the wind.

  With the elevator torn loose, the buried farm poured forth. Bedpans and prairie dogs—deaf girls with their deformed babies and the Randomized boys. Van Brocklin’s corpse and Chemo’s spastic form blew by—canned goods—ammunition—ant dirt and the flailing figure of Doreen followed by the desecrated pig’s head. All of the Sacred Gifts would go, too—along with Gog and Magog—but Clearfather was no longer watching, for the Nourisher was waddling toward him, Judd’s corroded exoskeleton barely able to propel her.

  She was almost to him when Clearfather felt something pierce him like a spear of ice. It was one of the weather vanes—the angel Gabriel blowing a tin horn. The Nourisher reached out for the end. He winced at the pain in his chest. He thought she was trying to ram the barb into his heart. She pulled the arrow free as he yanked the cylinder around her neck—the seal bursting—the tadpole made of golden sand whisked away. He saw the Nourisher ascend into the chaos gripping the silhouette angel. “Forgive me!” she cried and then was gone—and with her the tornado, which receded into the sky like a ladder pulled up behind the last climber.

  CHAPTER 8

  A Party on Ronald Reagan Boulevard

  LosVegas, Nevadafornia, had been described as the Emerald City on crystal meth, with generous portions of Osaka and São Paulo thrown in. But whatever the subjective impressions, the disaster-born megacity was undeniably the home of the World’s Largest Burrito and the World’s Largest Buddha. Aretha had been west only once since Bigfoot had bitten off the most populous sections of California, leaving Mount Whitney towering over the Pacific. Quick to seize opportunity from misfortune, IMAGINE-NATION, the theme-park and entertainment division of Wynn Fencer’s Vitessa Cultporation, bought up the land from the Panamint Ranges down to the Mexican border, creating a series of waterways and lagoons—and not so much theme parks as complete recreational worlds enclosed in giant domes. Seemingly overnight the city of Las Vegas was renamed and boundaries redrawn to form the “Now Frontier” state of Nevadafornia.

  The robotronic skyline, which continuously changed, had changed considerably since his earlier visit. As Monroe Hicks’s personal pilot overflew the megalopolis, only the humble old Stratosphere Tower seemed familiar, poking up in the shadows of the Hasami Totem, the Sony Cone, and the West Coast Vitessalith.

  They landed at Hillary Rodham Clinton Interdenominational Airport as the sun set. Aretha was glad to be back on the ground. Storms had plagued the Midwest on the flight out, and TWIN had reported a possible “environmental emergency” in conjunction with the tornado havoc in Texas. A so-called Black Corridor of air security had been established, and several air force Raptors had been seen in the sky. Aretha was certain the incident had to do with Clearfather—and not knowing about the betrayal of Finderz Keeperz hoped the testy dwarf had found a way to debilitate the stealth probe.

  There was nothing the drag queen could do about either of them now, plus he had his own problems. For starters, his wife had introduced him to Monroe Hicks as her cousin “Ernestine” from Alabama. Eartha enjoyed seeing him in such an awkward situation and, much to the drag queen’s discomfort, he found himself torn between being attracted to the sports star and extremely jealous.

  They cleared the airport checkpoint without hassle, and a limo ferried them to the hotel—with the former corporate lawyer unable to stop blinking at the sights of the city from the Tom Cruiseway. Even though it was early, Merlin could be seen leading a laser “War of the Wizards” at Camelot. The Valhalla had a flamethrower and dry-ice showdown between Frost Giants—and the forty-story Genie from The Arabian Nights continued to disappear and re-form by virtue of several cubic miles of mist pumped in and then vacuumed out of the micromesh spidersilk, lit from within by the largest collection of fireflies in the world. From the cerebral palsy beggars on Billy Crystal Way to the holograms advertising the Komodo dragon fights at the Jennifer Lopez Memorial Auditorium, there was a spectacle at every turn. And the eidolons! Every religious organization and instant-food franchise was represented: I-HOP, Pizza Shed, Curry Favor. Professor Chicken was a very small frog in this pond—up against Chu’s with their kung fu fighters or McTavish’s with the Highland Zingers and the Sassy Lassies, along with the Flying Haggis Fleet, a squadron of tartan blimps customized to look like the famous culinary delicacy.

  Monroe’s entourage checked in at the Sun Kingdom, the multibillion-dollar marvel of temples, lily-littered lakes, luxuriant jungles, and mosaicked pathways. Within minutes Monroe’s assistant PA was on the screen to room service ordering a chilled bottle of Dom and flaming Korean dog tongue while the superstar’s personal chef took over the suite’s kitchen and began preparing Malaysian hairy crabs served with Ca Cuong, the rarest condiment in the world: a secretion recovered in minute amounts from beetles in northern Vietnam.

  Aretha took the opportunity to slip out and recon the bizarre bazaar, and the moment he was past the Harijan doorkeepers the propositions started. Care for a sex change? What about a hit of Trimurti?

  “What’s Trimurti?” he asked the woman who was wrapped like a mummy to protect her ge
netically modified skin.

  “It’s one of the shape-changing drugs named for the three forms the godhead takes in Hindu mythology.”

  “No thanks,” Aretha said and pulled away.

  Next door at The Parthenon—with its millions of tons of white marble, pristine fountains, and reflecting pools lined with statuary, which were living men and women coated with latex—a temperature-controlled wind stirred the oracular oak leaves, and the Now Millennium’s Alternative Mind Congress and Spiritual Expo was winding down after a busy opening day. The foyer buzzed with Andean nose flutes while female monks in pale blue taffeta tunics with tellurium headbands demonstrated an ancient martial art that had recently been developed in Denmark.

  The other big convention in town was the biotech and cognitive sciences extravaganza held at The Time Machine at the gateway to 20th CenturyLand. Among medical folk from around the world, Dr. Hugh Wieviel of Pittsburgh was there and was at that very moment scheming a way to steer a big-breasted neurologist from Philly into a psychoactive bubble bath.

  Earlier that afternoon in a double ceremony at the Babylonian, the local manifestations of Dooley Duck and Ubba Dubba had been married, while Chipster, a rhyme-slanging boxing kangaroo, led a choir of emperor penguins in a hip-hop version of “Chapel of Love.” As if all this weren’t enough, there was the Fight for Life. Still twenty-four hours from the first punch and the fantasy empire was strutting its stuff down Tom Hanks Avenue.

  The Trumpanile sent an army of Donald Trump lookalikes. The Amazonia offered a tribe of headhunters and panther women, while the Celestial City sent robotic terra-cotta soldiers. From the Jungfrau marched busty milkmaids and men in lederhosen and feathered caps blowing a spirited ranz des vaches on giant alpenhorns. From Dreamland came southern belles with pink parasols walking tapirs on leashes—and from the El Dorado, a parade of gilded men accompanied by naked virgins. Next, the fakirs and white elephants of the Taj Mahal and the Knights of Camelot on chamfron-bedecked thoroughbreds, with a troop of hunchbacks leading Irish wolfhounds and an elastofoam dragon breathing fire. Bringing up the rear was a contingent of gay men from around the world, who’d come to rally behind Minson.

  Aretha flowed on with the crowd. You could bet on how long a convicted CFO could last in a tankful of barracudas or which couple would triumph in a tug o’war to win an adopted child. But the most popular and the largest-scale entertainment offered players the chance to control giant robotic battling action figures that took the form of crusty old showbiz legends: a fire-breathing Tom Jones going up against an acid-spitting Wayne Newton—a guitar-swinging Elvis against a cigar-shooting Colonel Parker—or a Black Hat Garth Brooks taking on a White Hat Garth (Garth Wars). The female characters were even more popular, whether contemporary stars like Mekong Delta and Sinergy or golden oldies like Sandra Bullock catfighting Julia Roberts. The biggest star of all was Oprah Winfrey. So popular was the giant Oprah, IMAGINE-NATION had developed two models, one known as Skinny Oprah, the other Big Oprah. The lines for the martial robots were long, and in the two-hundred-acre maintenance hangar on the shores of Lake Mead, the repair teams worked around the clock.

  On the corner of Cher and Spielberg, Aretha paused to catch a TWINplex update on the odds for the Fight. The Corpse Maker was favored one-hundred-to-one to win. The question was whether or not Minson Fiske would die. How encouraging, the drag queen thought. Then the Fight news was swamped with the latest Dooley Duck demonstrations—including highlights of the wedding that had been sponsored and officially blessed by Julian Dingler, the new CEO of ChildRite. Rippling time-release ceremonies were now in progress around the globe.

  Aretha crossed through a maze of arcades to Ronald Reagan Boulevard, and that was when it happened—his own epiphany—the sudden manifestation of the big blue duck and his giant orangutan bride—right there in front of the drag queen and a gathering crowd!

  “Listen carefully,” said Dooley, and gave his famous neck roll. “Ubba and I have a message and we want you to hear it clearly. It’s time for all of us Americans to raise our voices together—so that the rest of the world will understand. From Bhutan to Botswana, it’s time for us to pray to the downtrodden of the world for forgiveness.”

  “It is?” people gasped, surging around the giant bright animals.

  “Forgive us our insatiable need for stimulation and abundance. Forgive us our impossibly high opinion of our supposed generosity and our merciless disregard for anything but our own prosperity. Forgive us for seeing you—the war-torn, weary, diseased, and deserted people of the world in your billions—as simply billions—indistinguishable cartoons of despair. Forgive us for turning the promise of America into a commercial virus that threatens to destroy the other cultures and indeed the whole environment of the earth.”

  “Shit,” people in the throng said. “That’s pretty heavy.”

  “Imagine how I feel,” Dooley replied. “I’m a big blue duck. You think you’ve got problems? I’m an icon of all that is trivial and tragic in our civilization. I’m what the last and greatest of all human dreams has degenerated into. But I’ve had a revelation and a rebirth—and so can you. Today Ubba and I launch a new political but a very old philosophical party—the Surprise Party. We’ve all had too much to eat and drink. We need more to think. Wherever two or three are gathered in our name, let’s Party!”

  Aretha couldn’t be sure if he actually had sex with everyone who’d stopped there on the corner—but he had an amazing sense of connection and communion—as if they’d all joined to form a larger and more powerful creature. Everyone was naked, transparent, and seemed to be glowing—not like eidolons, but as he’d imagined angels would look back when he was a boy growing up in Fort Greene. He returned to the Sun Kingdom feeling younger and healthier than he had in years. But back in the suite, sitting in one of the carved chairs holding a champagne flute filled with grapefruit juice, was none other than Minson Fiske, the son he hadn’t seen in years!

  “Minson,” said Eartha. “This is my cousin . . . from Alabama. I haven’t spoken of her much . . . but I hope you’ll welcome her into our family.”

  “Hey,” said Minson. “Pleased to meet you. I’ll have to do you proud tomorrow night, won’t I?”

  “You already have, son,” Ernestine answered. “You already have.”

  CHAPTER 9

  Wrangling Dangler

  An eerie quiet fell over the land after the whirlwind. The sky turned a dead purple and there was no sign of military or police forces. The orange freight train had vanished. The great attack planes with their bellies full of weaponry had been scrambled back to Oklahoma or Nebraska. Vitessa’s Intel network was festering with the implications of psychic and meteorological warfare. Best to make a strategic retreat and consider an alternative ambush site when they’d collected more data.

  Kokomo’s leg didn’t seem to be bothering her as much as before. Clearfather wanted to get them moving. The greyhound that had led them up out of the subterranean passage wandered off toward the highway as if showing them the way. “C’mon,” he said, picking her up. “We can’t stay here.”

  The ground was dry and lifeless after the cyclonic winds, but the air smelled heavy with rain. They followed the dog. After the sun was gone they saw shimmers of sheet lightning. At any minute he feared Vitessa would strike again—or the sky would open and spill out all the bodies and the bullets. They came to the railroad tracks and then a county road. No sign of any cars but they could hear roadtrains beginning on the interstate, which suggested that Vitessa had lifted the blockades. Soon he suspected they would send in a ground team to incinerate the area.

  To the north were sporadic gunshots, and he recalled what the crew at Dustdevil had said about the Nightcrawlers. The tremblings of heat lightning turned into barbs—black licorice ozone storm smell. He still couldn’t believe what had happened. The forces released—the look on the Nourisher’s face as she rose. The way his wound had healed before his eyes. At last they came to the outline of
a building. It was a cowboy bar, a honky-tonk shot to hell and long abandoned. Clearfather stuck his head in and listened. He couldn’t see or hear the dog. Then the sky ruptured and the rain ran over the steel roof like the rats scurrying across the dance floor. He pulled Kokomo inside. A blue bolt stabbed down near the parking lot, irradiating the air. He caught afterimages of a towering headless cowboy and tried to pick out any details inside. Kokomo let go of his grasp. The rain bucketed down. He tried to listen for any inhabitants—any danger. Then another flash of lightning struck. He saw an animal! The greyhound snarled—or perhaps it was Kokomo. Shit, he thought—it’s a giant mutant rat! He was dashing across the dance floor, sending the other rodents flying—when he saw that Kokomo was on top of the beast—riding it. He seized the monster and realized that it wasn’t alive. It was only the knife-hacked remnant of an old mechanical bull! He gave out a long deep laugh that rolled like thunder through the honky-tonk.

  “I . . . I thought it was a giant rat!” he chortled, and they fell together on the turd-stained floorboards, laughing. Kissing. Sucking. The rain slowed—and they rolled. He tasted her mouth—her eyes like the lightning—the deep smell of her skin. Ooby Dooby, Ooby Dooby.

  He peeled back her stained satin jacket and pressed his tongue against her neck. The letters in his back burned but not as before. She kissed his mouth—her tongue snaking inside him in the dark—entering him—her hands pulling at his clothes. She pressed her hand against where the weather vane had pierced him—then she held his right hand beneath her firm breast and for a second he experienced the penetrative shock again. Her skin was slightly beaded, as was his there. The rain fell like silver spoons and skeleton keys on the leaking roof, rat eyes shining. Ooby Dooby . . .

  In another specter of lightning he saw a pale hooded shadow above the bandstand. Fear gripped him—but when the lightning came again, he calmed, glimpsing a hint of wingline. He expected it to be a barn owl—a white face the shape of an apple cut in half. But in the next pulse he saw that perched on the empty light rod above the bandstand was a bald eagle. The creature unfurled with primal authority—its claws shiny enough to reflect the lightning. What it was doing there, he had no idea, but it closed its wings like hands in prayer. From its hook-beaked mouth drooped the tail of a rat. Then the lightning stalked off and the deserted nightclub was crowded with darkness again. He leaned into Kokomo.