by Marc Laidlaw
Walter and Corey walked to the water’s edge.
A man lay sprawled facedown on the baked mud, his fingers splayed, the collar and shoulders of his suit rumpled and torn by clutching fingers. His hair and shirt were soaking wet, shimmering with the vapors of Gasoline Lake. For a moment, Walter thought they were too late, that he was already dead—again or for the first time. Then his body spasmed weakly, and he started to cough.
They turned the man over. Walter pulled off his Mylar hat to shade the man’s red face. He’d seen him earlier that night, shouting for his lawyer in the holding cell. Apparently he’d gotten his wish. Medford Bannister stood just offshore, wearing a defiant expression, up to his ankles in Gasoline Lake.
“It’s him, isn’t it?” Lorna said, walking up to them.
“I don’t know,” Walter admitted.
But Corey was nodding. “Same as his pictures, it’s him. Uncle Galvin?”
The old man sputtered and opened his eyes. “That—that’s my name! I’ve been trying to remember! What the hell’s going on here? You here to help me, or you in with the rest of them?”
“I’m your nephew. I wouldn’t dream of hurting you. You’ve been asleep for twenty years.”
Galvin sat up. He didn’t look quite so old anymore, though he was obviously worn-out by what he’d been through in the past few hours.
“Twenty years? And the drought’s over? It sure doesn’t look like it’s over. Twenty years, and you woke me up for this? To be dragged around in the night and have my head stuck in turpentine? Jesus, my eyes burn like hell.”
Corey opened the spigot of his pisspores and let recycled water drain into his palms. He splashed it into Galvin’s eyes, without much apparent effect.
“Let’s get him back to town,” Lorna said. “Mr. Orlick, I’m the sheriff of Gas Lake. I’ve got some questions for you.”
“Sheriff? Where’s my damn lawyer?—that’s what I’d like to know.”
She lifted her gun to point at Medford Bannister, who smiled sheepishly and shrugged.
“Him? But he was the main one trying to drown me! All I remember is, I came awake in what I think was a jail cell, some woman pouring chemicals all over me, and the next thing, I’m hustled off here with everybody trying to kill me.”
Marlys, the Rehydrator thought. Marlys had stolen his chemicals and revived Galvin. He suddenly remembered what the sheriff had said once—that Marlys knew how to dehydrate things. She must have dried out Fritzy, in order to learn how to rehydrate him. The process didn’t reverse itself naturally after all. A sense of relief nearly flattened him.
Corey said, “They wanted to make it look like you woke up on your own and staggered over here for a drink and died in the lake. That way they could solve the problem of whether you were alive or not once and for all, and make it look like an accident—your own fault.”
“Galvin,” Lawrence Wing said, coming down to the water’s edge, “I think you’ll need another lawyer now.”
“Jesus Christ, Larry, is that you?” Galvin said. “You look like shit! How old are you?”
“Almost your age now, Galvin. You shouldn’t speak till you’ve looked in a mirror. Come on; we’ll give you a hand.”
Walter bent over to help them lift the old man, and as he did, he felt something brush his calf under his robes. He realized too late what it was.
“Drop the old buzzard,” said Medford Bannister. “Drop him, and then nobody move.”
They let Galvin down gently. Walter turned around and saw Bannister standing in the shallows with his old gun. It was pointed right at Lorna.
“Skelton,” he said, “get over there and take the sheriff’s gun.”
“I don’t know,” the deputy started to protest in a shamed, whining voice.
“Come on; they can’t outnumber us. We’ll take care of them and no one’ll ever know better. We all know how to keep a secret, don’t we?”
He grinned. The mass of townspeople out in the lake began moving slowly toward shore, confident now. Walter started to back off, but the gun in Medford’s hand swung toward him, the hammer cocked back to strike. He stopped where he was and put up his hands.
“I built this town,” Galvin Orlick growled.
“It belongs to me now,” Medford said.
Out of the corner of Walter’s eye, he saw Corey moving, hidden behind Lawrence Wing. The boy slowly took the lawyer’s gun and raised it with the barrel between Wing’s body and arm, nestled in his armpit. His finger trembled on the trigger, ready to fire, when someone on the lake spied him, and a shout of warning went out to Bannister.
Medford Bannister whirled and fired, and that was the last they saw of him.
As the hammer fell, it struck a spark. Not only the gunpowder charge, but the whole lake, exploded.
A roiling ball of flame licked up from the shores, boiling back into the heart of the lake, exploding inward and outward at the same time. The sound was beyond deafening; it was a solid impact to which every bone in Walter’s body responded like a tympanum. The force of the blast hurled him over the mud and into the dune, where he lay covered in sand until the heat of the burning lake subsided, and the heat of the sun took its place.
He wiped sand from his eyes and looked over the shore, marveling at the blackened bowl where the lake had lain.
Wisps of fire still clung to a sunken plain of what looked like charred and tarry melted rubber. The foul smoke was visibly clearing, but he felt as if the reek of burning might never leave his nostrils.
He saw a few more survivors likewise coming to their senses on the bank of sand. Lorna and Corey and Lawrence Wing lay tumbled about. A few other townsfolk lay staring in horror at the lake where their conspirators had perished.
Galvin Orlick stood up, stretched, and began cursing methodically. “My kind of town,” he said, and shook his head.
* * *
“There I lay,” Corey’s uncle said, with a wistfulness turned instantly bitter. “And not long enough by far.” He aimed a toe at one of the meters on his headstone. Liquid crystal spurted over his shoe. Galvin crouched and fondly patted Fritzy’s head. The dachshund seemed to remember him.
“Well, son, let’s get going. I’m not crazy about this place, and there’s a wind coming up.”
“A big one,” Corey agreed. “Gonna be shoveling sand tomorrow.”
Corey had use of a police buggy, now that the force consisted of Sheriff Lorna alone. She had offered to make him a deputy.
“I wish I could help that friend of yours,” Uncle Galvin confided as they drove back. The road wavered under waves of sand. “My own memories are as spotty as his, I’m afraid. Still, I’m glad to see I’ve got some money to help him out with his search. What about you, Corey? What are your plans? You going to stay around and help me rebuild Gas Lake?”
“I don’t know, Uncle Galvin. Are you sure you wouldn’t just like to junk the place and start over?”
Galvin shook his head. “I don’t know, son. I don’t know what to do. I don’t feel fully awake yet, and damn if these pisspores aren’t the most uncomfortable things I’ve ever worn. I’m having trouble concentrating on anything except how to keep them from chafing.”
“You’ll get calluses, Uncle; don’t worry. You’re not . . . not thinking of going back to sleep, are you?”
“Sleep? Are you nuts? The way I woke up, I’m afraid to so much as take a nap.”
* * *
Walter sat in Lorna’s office and watched the sunset through the double-paned windows. She came in after a few minutes, holding a folded-up piece of plastic computer printout. Her expression was pretty mixed.
“You’ve got something, don’t you?” he asked.
She nodded, biting her lip. “It’s an address in California. A place you used to get mail. I suppose you’ll be going there right away.”
He nodded, taking the plastic, but not yet looking at it. “Lorna, why stay on here? Gas Lake’s a ghost town now. Does it really need a sheriff?”
“Lorna?”
He saw her fingers fumbling at her breast; they came away with her badge. She looked at it for a moment, then set it down on the windowsill. “When were you thinking of leaving?” she said.
* * *
When Marlys woke, the house was dark. She scrambled out of Medford’s bed and moved through the house, touching switches, shouting commands to the voice controls, but all to no effect. The power was out, and where was Medford? She had waited all day for news, figuring he was busy with the culmination of their plans. He hadn’t wanted her involved in the final action—everyone else must contribute, since they all expected a share of Galvin’s water, but Marlys had done enough. He was a cautious man, Medford. He left nothing to chance. She had to trust that he’d get back soon—before dawn, at least. What time was it, anyway?
She glanced at her watch, then stared at it.
The time was twelve noon.
She went to a window and opened the blinds, and saw nothing outside but darkness.
Solid darkness.
Leaning very close, she realized exactly how solid it was. Trillions of tiny grains pressed right up against the glass.
Marlys backed away with a scream barely held in her throat. Why hadn’t the blowers gone on? Because the power was out, she told herself. But why was the power out?
She hurried to the back door, punched for it to open, but none of the controls were working. She opened the panel for manual operation, and quickly spun the knobs.
The door opened inward, letting a sliding river of sand stream into the porch room. She tried to force it shut, but the sand kept pouring in, unstoppable. She backed out of there, closed the inner door, and went into the kitchen to try the phonescreen. It didn’t respond. Nothing responded.
She gnawed her baccorish three times faster than usual, as if it would help her to think. She had to stay calm. Panic was dangerous in a situation like this.
All right. She was buried. But Medford kept plenty of water and plenty of food in the cellar; she could survive a long time if she had to. With the case of revival chemicals, she could rehydrate Medford’s entire collection of horny toads and eat them fresh. Yes, if something had gone wrong and Medford didn’t come looking for her and the power never came on again, she could live under the dunes—possibly for years. And one day the wind would clear the sand away for just a moment. She would wake to find a thin light trickling through the windows, a hint of sunlight visible through the sand; ever vigilant for this opportunity, she would shatter the glass and climb to the surface and escape.
Someday all that might happen, yes. It was the best scenario she could imagine at the moment. There were plenty of worse ones.
She spat a mouthful of tobacco juice right on Medford’s polished real-wood floor. Let him come and wipe it up. She sucked up another few inches of tobacco, chewing furiously, and tried not to think about what might happen when she ran out of rope.
* * *
“Gasoline Lake” copyright 1991 by Marc Laidlaw. First appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Oct./Nov. 1991.
WUNDERKINDERGARTEN
The One and Only Entry in Shendy’s Journal
Dabney spits his food when he’s had too much to think. Likki spins in circles till her pigtails stick out sideways from her blue face, and she starts choking and coughing and eventually swallows her tongue and passes out, falling over and hitting me and cracking the seals on my GeneKraft kit and letting chimerae out of ZZZ-level quarantine on to the bare linoleum floor! Nexter reads pornography, De Sade, Bataille, and Apollinaire his special favourites, and thumbs antique copies of Hustler which really is rather sweet when you consider that he’s light-years from puberty, and those women he gloats and drools over would be more than likely to coo over him and chuck his chin and maybe volunteer to push his stroller, though I’m exaggerating now (for effect) because all of us can walk quite well; and anyway, Nex is capable of a cute little boner, even if it is good for nothing except making the girls laugh. Well, except for me. I don’t laugh at that because it’s more or less involuntary, and the only really funny things to me are the things people do deliberately, like giving planarian shots to a bunch of babies for instance, as if the raw injection of a litre of old braintree sap can make us model citizens and great world leaders when we finally Come of Age. As you might have guessed by now, when I get a learning overload I have to write. It is my particular pornography, my spinning-around-and-passing-out, my food-spitting response to too much knowledge absorbed too fast; it is in effect a sort of pH-buffering liver in my brain. (I am informed by Dr Nightwake, who unfairly reads over my shoulder from time to time – always when, in my ecstatic haste, I have just made some minor error – that "pH in blood is buffered by kidneys, not liver"; which may be so, but then what was the real purpose behind those sinister and misleading experiments of last March involving the beakers full of minced, blended and boiled calf’s liver into which we introduced quantities of hydrochloric acid, while stirring the thick soup with litmus rods? In any event, I refuse to admit nasty diaper-drench kidneys into my skull; the liver is a nobler organ far more suited to simmering amid the steamy smell of buttery onions in my brain pan; oh well-named seat of my soul!) In short, writing is the only way I have of assimilating all this shit that means nothing to me otherwise, all the garbage that comes not from my shortshort life but from some old blender-brained geek whose experiential and neural myomolecular gnoso-procedural pathways have a wee bit of trouble jibing with my Master Plan.
I used to start talking right after an injection, when everyone else was sitting around addled and drowsily sipping warm milk from cartons and the aides were unfolding our luxurious padded mats for nap-time. The words would start pouring out of me in a froth, quite beyond my control, as significant to me as they were meaningless to the others; I was aware of a pleasant warmth growing in my jaws and pharynx, a certain dryness in the back of my throat, and a distant chatter like jungle birds in jungle boughs singing and flitting about through a long equatorial afternoon, ignoring the sound of chainsaws ripping to life in the humid depths at the rainforest floor. Rainforest, jungle, I haven’t seen either one, they no longer exist, but they shared certain descriptive characteristics and as far as I can tell, they could have been no more mighty than our own little practice garden just inside the compound walls, where slightly gene-altered juicy red Big-Boy radishes (my design, thank you very much) grow to depths of sixteen feet, their bulbous shoulders shoving up through the asphalt of the foursquare court, their bushy leaves fanning us gently and offering shade even to adults on those rare afternoons when the sun tops the walls of our institution and burns away enough of the phototropic haze to actually cast a shadow! And there I sat, dreaming that I was a parrot or a toucan or macaw, that my words were as harmonious as flights of birds – while in actuality the apparent beauty of my speech was purely subjective, and induced in my compatriots a mixed mood of irritation, hostility and spite. Eventually, though no one acted on their resentment (for of us all, I am the pugilist, and Likki has never disturbed my experiments without feeling the pummeling wrath of my vulcanized fists), it came to be quite apparent to our supervisors, who heard the same complaints in every post-injection counseling session, that the injections themselves were unobjectionable, the ensuing fluxflood a bit overwhelming but ultimately worthwhile (as if we had a choice or hand in the outcome of these experiments), and the warm milk pleasingly soporific; but that the one thing each of the other five dreaded and none could abide were my inevitable catachrestic diatribes. The counselors eventually mounted a campaign to con
front me with this boorish behaviour, which at first I quite refused to credit. They took to amplifying my words and turning them back on me through earphones with slight distortion and echo effects, a technique which backfired because, given my intoxicated state, the increase in stimulus induced something like ecstasy, perhaps the closest thing I have yet experienced to match the ‘multiple orgasm’ descriptions of women many (or at least nine) years my senior, and to which I look forward with great anticipation, when I shall have found my ideal partner – as certainly a woman with my brains should be able to pick a mate of such transcendent mental and physical powers that our thoughts will resonate like two pendulum clocks synchronizing themselves by virtue of being mounted on the same wall, though what the wall represents in this metaphor I am still uncertain. I am also unsure of why I say ‘mate’ in the singular, when in fact I see no reason why I should not take many lovers of all sorts and species; I think Nexter would probably find in my erotic commonplace book (if I kept such a thing) pleasures more numinous and depraved than any recorded or imagined in Justine or The Story of the Eye. The counselors therefore made tapes of my monologues and played them back to me the day after my injection session, so that I might consider my words in a duller state of mind and so perceive how stupid and downright irritating my flighty speculations and giddy soul-barings truthfully were. Having heard them, I became so awkward and embarrassed that I could not open my mouth for weeks, even to speak to a mechanical dictascriber, and it was not until our main Monitor – the one who received distillate from The-Original-Dr-Twelves-Himself – suggested I study the ancient and academically approved art of writing (now appreciated only by theoreticians since the introduction of the dictascriber, much as simple multiplication and long division became lost arts when calculators grew so common and cheap) that I felt some of my modesty restored, and gradually grew capable once again of withstanding even high-dose injections and marathon sessions of forced-learning, with their staggered and staggering cycles of induced sleep and hypnagoguery, and teasing bouts of wakefulness that prove to be only lucid dreams, followed by long periods of dreaming that always turn out to be wakefulness. It was particularly these last that I needed full self-confidence to face, as during these intervals I am wont to undress in public and speak in tongues and organize archetypal feats of sexual gymnastics in which even Nexter fears to participate, though he always was the passive type and prefers his women in two dimensions, or in four – as is the case with those models who spring from literary seeds and caper full-blown in his imagination, where he commands them with nine dimensions of godlike power above and beyond those which his shadowy pornographic puppets can attain.
