The New and Improved Romie Futch

by Julia Elliott

  “Did you erase the last version before reinstalling?”

  “Of course.” The woman huffed with irritation.

  “Try rebooting,” said Morrow.

  “Should I give him another shot of propofol?”

  “Too dangerous.”

  “But he might wake up.”

  “He’s strapped down, isn’t he? We can do a synapse patch after it’s over so he won’t remember anything.”

  “Not at the moment, but he’s still unconscious so—”

  “Please proceed. Now, as for you, I think you’re going to have to head back to South Carolina. He might remember something.”

  “Come on, Doc,” said the rockabilly hipster. “I didn’t sleep last night. Can’t you send Josh?”

  “I need Josh here. I need Josh now, in fact. Josh?” Dr. Morrow sounded irked.

  “Yo, back here,” the lad called out. He was in the room next door. “Trying to tweak that vis-scanner grid for the taxidermist.”

  “Forget it for now,” yelled Dr. Morrow. “Pam needs reinforcement.”

  “Just a nanosec, dude.”

  Josh strolled out into the hallway just beyond my dark hiding place. His sideburns had flourished into full-fledged muttonchops. His hair looked shaggier. He’d been fucking with my brain, and there he was, gnawing at an energy bar and shuffling down the hall. I crept after him. He glanced back, saw me, yelped.

  I leapt upon him. He squirmed, stronger than I’d predicted, but I managed to stick the blade of my spear just beneath his tender, pulsing throat.

  “Please note that I have a very sharp object pointed at your neck,” I hissed. “And I will not hesitate to impale you.”

  “Dude, seriously?” Josh noted my weapon. He relaxed in my arms.

  I’d never held a man before—he was warm and bony; he smelled of some essential oil (what the fuck: rosemary?); and the stubble that trailed along his throat felt so velvety that I could not resist stroking it.

  “What’s going on here?” Dr. Morrow was now moving toward us, tailed by a young Asian woman with a Louise Brooks flapper bob that highlighted her spectacular eyes: amber irises, dark eyeliner, mod-Goth effect. She frowned.

  “Stop right there or I’ll kill him,” I said, wincing at the cliché. There I was, smack-dab in a ridiculous action scene, struggling to impress a femme fatale with a clever line.

  “You won’t commit murder.” Dr. Morrow stood tall, puffed up his chest.

  With the tip of my spear, I poked Josh, stabbing at the soft flesh under his chin, failing to break the skin. I jabbed again.

  Josh screamed, tensing in my arms. My stomach flinched as a rivulet of blood trickled down his neck, wetting my hand, staining the collar of his yellow polo.

  Josh shrieked. Josh whimpered. Josh sweated and trembled.

  “Sorry,” I whispered.

  “What makes you so certain the boy is not dispensable?” said Dr. Morrow in his best Nazi-scientist baritone.

  “What?” squawked Josh.

  I hated to do it, but I gently sliced into Josh’s throat, barely breaking the skin, producing another red trickle, another raw screech. He went limp in my arms. An intimate, humiliating intestinal miasma enveloped us.

  Dr. Morrow paused. His new assistant moved closer to him.

  “Don’t worry, Josh. You’ll be fine.” Dr. Morrow’s tongue flicked repeatedly over his bottom lip, lubricating it with saliva again and again. “Let’s be reasonable here.”

  “Where is the fucking rockabilly hipster?” I said.

  “The what?”

  “The cool fool you sent to tinker with my skull.”

  “Right here, right here,” said the young man, slipping out into the hallway, waving his arms in a farcical gesture of surrender.

  “Now,” I said, trying to think, “what I want you all to do is—”

  “What?” Dr. Morrow’s tongue slipped back into the arcane cave of his mouth. He smirked. “You know that murder is a felony.”

  Fuck. I needed a roll of duct tape, rope, handcuffs, something. Or maybe I could lock them all in that little office somehow. They were creeping toward me, Dr. Morrow in the fore, his face blank and focused like a slasher in a horror film, in no rush to destroy me but confident of my imminent doom—I would be hacked up into synecdochic parts, my tricked-out brain devoured by zombies, symbolically, metaphorically, ironically. The rockabilly hipster actually chuckled.

  And then I saw a familiar figure appear in the doorway behind them—dressed in gray sweatpants and a garnet Atlanta Falcons jersey, black socks, his hair recontextualized—none on his head now, but a bushy beard, as though—poof—some magician had shifted his pelt from scalp to chin. Trippy J pointed what looked like a plastic price-tag gun at Dr. Morrow’s back, pulled the trigger, unleashing a purple beam evocative of a Pink Floyd laser show—Dark Side of the Moon. The gun made a fanciful zinging sound.

  Dr. Morrow bellowed, did a spastic funky jig, and crumpled onto the floor. He lay there twitching.

  Zing. Zing.

  Wincing, as though it hurt his stomach, Trippy shot two more purple rays. Morrow’s minions brayed and convulsed, fell and lay quivering.

  “Some kind of fancy stun gun,” Trippy said. “Used this shit on me yesterday in a Best Buy parking lot. They’ll be down about five minutes, so we’ve got to act fast.”

  “What about Josh?”

  “Don’t tase me, bro,” Josh said, forcing out a cough of laughter, trying to get control of the situation with irony.

  “Hold him. I’ll be right back.”

  Trippy darted into the dark office room and turned on the lights. I saw a steel vintage desk, oddly askew in the middle of the room, cluttered with micropads and empty soda bottles. I heard Trippy opening and closing drawers.

  “Eureka!” he shouted, returning with two jumbo rolls of packing tape. “Not the best, but it’ll do.”

  Trippy turned Morrow onto his belly, bound his limp wrists with cellophane tape, and mummy-wrapped his ankles. Pulled the same procedure on the rockabilly hipster. By the time he got to Pam, she was groaning, but her limbs still flopped like dead fish.

  “Now get on the floor, Josh,” Trippy said. “Prostrate, pronto.”

  “What?”

  “Belly down, you idiot.”

  “Come on, man . . .”

  “You want a jolt from this Star Trek pistol?”

  I pushed Josh forward. He dropped to all fours, sighed as he assumed the worm position.

  “Shouldn’t we, like, stuff their mouths with something and tape them up too?” I asked.

  A thousand television scenes depicting mundane violence popped into my head, merging into a prototype: dark shapes in chairs, hands bound behind their backs, their profiles elongated into snouts by makeshift muzzles.

  “I reckon we have to.” Trippy sighed. “Lest they start yelping for help.”

  • •

  I don’t know how they’d moved it, but there it was, stuffed back into the room from which Trippy had escaped, the master biocomputer, that six-by-nine-foot high-tech fish tank with a row of lava lamps pulsing on top. Immersed in electric-blue brine, the familiar organisms bobbed and pulsed. Anemones of neural flesh swelled and contracted. Mollusk-like things glimmered with luminous mucus. Eel parts wavered and tentacles flexed.

  “Eerily beautiful,” Trippy whispered.

  We stood in the dim room, weapons poised, gazing into the uncanny tank, repository of all our new knowledge. The computer seemed both prehistoric and futuristic, both pre- and posthuman, a data network that existed unto itself.

  “The mother lode,” I said, thinking of Kristeva’s archaic mother, phallic, primeval, omnipotent.

  The tank emitted a strange smell, an evocative combo of marsh funk and synthetic outgassing, an odor that I didn’t recall from the Center, making me think that the move had upset the computer somehow, or that it had fallen into a state of semineglect. The bulletproof glass, which Chloe had once informed me was the same shit NASA
used to make rocket windshields, looked scummy.

  “Too bad we’ve got to trash it,” said Trippy.

  We placed our palms on the unshatterable glass. We exchanged soulful looks and nodded. We pushed against the tank with every ounce of strength our bodies could muster, ready to pour gallons of freaky water and creature components onto the floor, reduce all that complexity to filth and chaos in an instant, creepy flesh bits pining for oxygen on spongy office carpet—the kind of drama we pretty much required as a purgative at this point. But the tank wouldn’t budge.

  “Fuck and alas,” said Trippy. “You know they got that mother bolted.”

  So we climbed up onto office chairs to inspect the top component, discovering that it was held in place by a surprisingly old-school latch mechanism and that we could swing it open like a coffin lid and peep down into the depths. We peered. We breathed the boggy funk. And then we got to work: me with my spear, Trippy with the Taser.

  I stabbed mollusk-like mounds of pure muscle, releasing trickles of chartreuse blood. With deft swipes of my blade, I reduced sea-medusan entities to wisps of tissue. I chopped tentacles into sashimi. Hacked up minuscule eels. Punctured puffy peach-colored organisms that exploded into clouds of glowing yellow gore, tiny magenta globules spinning in the spew. Meanwhile, Trippy tased the fuck out of the mess, shot purple beams of radiation into the tank, producing a creepy wet crackle that made the components dance and flimmer, churning my remnants into chum. When we’d finished, the water was a sickly gray green, a few bright shreds afloat in the nastiness, meat chunks settling to the bottom.

  Next, we got down to gathering every last micropad we could find and dumping them into the tank, taking repeated trips through the hallway to explore various offices, stepping over the four writhing human grubs, trying to avoid eye contact. We had to hustle. It was only a matter of time before one of our prisoners busted through a cellophane shackle or gnawed through a muzzle. They were slowly worming their way toward the entryway that led to the elevator, but we’d set up a blockade of office chairs.

  Most of the micropads seemed to be stored in the messy office room where Josh had been working. As Trippy busied himself with their death by liquid, giving the aquarium a good tasing after each fresh immersion, I staked out the rest of the place, roaming through empty rooms, most of which had no furniture, only indentations in the carpet where desks and cabinets had once stood, but I gave all the closets a scan just in case.

  I was finishing off the last room, kicking through a pile of empty manila files from some defunct orthodontist office, when I heard a scream. I ran out into the hallway, thinking I’d see one of our prisoners braying, having chomped through his mouthpiece of wadded-up toilet paper and tape. But no, all four captives were still muted worms. And now Trippy was hollering.

  “Romie, man, get in here!”

  I ran into the computer room, but all I saw was Trippy standing baffled beside the dead tank. And then somebody let rip another bellow, coming from somewhere behind the tank—but there was nobody there.

  Trippy slipped behind the tank and frisked the wall with his hands.

  “Holy shit, Romie, a secret passageway. Are we in a movie or what?”

  Sure enough, an unobtrusive door was embedded into the drywall, wallpapered in the same mint flower print. Trippy found a plastic lever-knob and opened the door. A funky scent wafted out: meaty, septic. The room was windowless, but we could make out the familiar ergonomic shape of a medical recliner, the jerking body of an unfortunate subject strapped into it.

  “You fucking assholes!” screamed a familiar voice. “You won’t get away with this.”

  I groped along the wall, located a light switch, and filled the room with acidic fluorescence.

  There was Skeeter Rabin, looking dangerously skinny, flailing against the straps, his huge tarsier eyes bugging with astonishment. When I noted that he wore bloodstained medical scrubs, my heart sank. They’d probably been cutting him open, removing organs, filling his body with bioengineered animal parts, transforming the real Skeeter into something else. I sniffed, detecting a creepy, waxy animal smell in the room—the smell of guts and flesh and taboo inner fluids, mixed with some sharp chemical, that unmistakable tang of disinfected butchery that emanated from supermarket meat departments. There was a lab table in the corner, cluttered with stainless-steel medical instruments.

  “Romie, shit, Trippy.” Skeeter was laughing and crying, an astonishing gush of tears dripping over his knobby cheekbones. “Thank you, sweet Jesus. Thank you, sweet God. Get me out of this fucking straitjacket.”

  • •

  There we were, three warriors at rest, tucked into the darkest corner of an Applebee’s, huddled around a pitcher of Bass and a plate of flaming hot wings, the walls plastered with mass-produced Americana: segregation-era spirit pennants and sports paraphernalia. A fake-vintage photo of three midcentury cheerleaders hovered behind Skeeter’s skull-stark head: Death and the Maidens. Their tits stuck out like Cold War missiles, ready to nuke Russia to ash. Shouting into megaphones, they cheered Skeeter on as he sucked radioactive sauce from a deep-fried drumette.

  “Fucking delicious,” he said, for he hadn’t eaten since yesterday afternoon, had been receiving medical downloads all morning: basic human dissection, gross anatomy, human physiology. He’d changed back into the cutoff jeans and Motorhead tee he’d been wearing when he arrived at Future Solutions United three days ago, five pounds heavier, his brain still bustling with the humanities lore we’d received at the Center.

  “Okay,” said Trippy, “now that you’ve got a dozen wings in your gut, give us the full scoop.”

  “If you’ll allow me to begin in media res,” said Skeeter.

  “Was hoping you’d start with your birth trauma,” said Trippy, “from which, according to Otto Rank, you’re still trying to recover.”

  “Well, bo, I was actually doing all right,” said Skeeter, “living gratis on my uncle’s houseboat in Santee, trying to finish a novel before my stipend ran out, flirting with this divorcée who ran the marina, no Internet, no phone, just me and my laptop—no distractions but these loud-ass Jet Skiers who do stunts out in Cantey Bay every weekend.” Skeeter grinned. “That and the increasingly frequent appearances of Kelly Ann Flemming, née Dubard.”

  “Aw, shit,” said Trippy.

  “Get this,” said Skeeter, “just last Thursday I was chilling in the vastness of Lake Marion, sipping the wine Kelly buys by the crate, classic rock blaring from a half-rusted deck speaker, watching Kelly work her yoga-toned musculature as she reeled in a ten-pound catfish. Blue bikini. Yellow sun. Border collie napping in the shade. Kelly and I couldn’t stop smiling at each other. I felt reckless, engulfed by dangerous joy, but goddamn: sometimes you just got to close your eyes and go for it.”

  “Word,” I said, thinking of PigSlayer.

  “And there was also the novel,” said Skeeter, “tucked deep inside me, a flame guttering in the wreckage of my life—not just the plot and the characters but a bona fide vision.”

  “What’s it about?” I asked.

  “Don’t want to spoil it by talking about it yet,” said Skeeter, though he did reveal that the idea had stormed his brain shortly after he’d settled into the houseboat, two days after he’d first met Kelly, that first misty morning on the lake.

  “Coffee cup in hand,” said Skeeter, “gazing out into ethereal fog, I half expected a fairy hand to pop out of the water and hand me Excalibur.”

  “All this time,” said Trippy, “and no static from Morrow and his goons?”

  “Just the occasional migraine,” said Skeeter, “but no voices or anything like that.”

  “Must’ve been the water,” said Trippy, who’d spent his last month living signal-free with his cousin on Daufuskie Island, in a flood zone notorious for its bad cell reception.

  “I was feeling cautiously optimistic for once,” said Trippy, “normal enough to take jaunts to Charleston to visit an old flame. But then one d
ay, ten minutes after I left Lorraine’s house, as Romie already knows, Dr. Morrow tased me in a Best Buy parking lot.”

  Skeeter shook his head.

  “Same here,” he said, “but it was Blue Bay Hardware and Feed. I’d driven over there to buy kibble for Kelly’s dog.”

  According to Skeeter, as he struggled to stuff the jumbo bag into his trunk, a black Ford Focus eased into the space beside him. Seconds later he felt every muscle in his body tighten inexplicably, as though he’d jumped into an arctic lake, and then a pulsing heat penetrated his bones. He twitched. He fell, flailed upon the asphalt, and then he couldn’t move. A hoodied hipster squatted over him, pricked him with a jet injector. He woke up in the room we’d found him in, strapped into a medical recliner.

  “And there was our old friend Dr. Morrow, examining my brain hologram just like old times, except that I was shrieking to high heaven. But he just sat there, pretending like he couldn’t hear me.”

  Skeeter had kept screaming as he descended into that familiar BAIT-download well and a childhood memory rose from the obscurity of a frontal lobe: the tragic death of Godzilla, his pet iguana, who’d passed away when Skeeter was ten.

  “Thirty minutes later,” said Skeeter, “they had me shackled to a lab table, dissecting a fetal pig.”

  “And you were totally knowledgeable about pig anatomy?” asked Trippy.

  “Pretty much.”

  “How’d they make you do it?” I asked.

  “Well, let me tell you, bo: Josh stood there holding a Taser the whole time, bored shitless, thumbing his micropad with his free hand, snorting over E-Live posts, looking up every minute to make sure I stayed on task. Ashamed to say that after recovering from the horror, I sort of got into it, wanted to see if the diagrams and techniques in my head jibed with the real world. Plus, what else was I gonna do with the next hour, chained up in an empty room? And the pig was long dead, pickled and shrink-wrapped. But when they amped it up to primates, I couldn’t handle it.”

  “Uh.” Trippy took a tense sip of beer. “Dead or alive?”