Jim and the Flims (34 page)

My neck swelled into a spiky ruff. Jiva eggs flew from the ruff 's tips like popcorn from an overheated pan, like sparks from a log, like glowing thistledown.

27: Pied Piper

W
ithin seconds, I'd spawned ten thousand eggs. They were lavender specks, tiny globules with threadlike tails. Each of them was haloed by a golden aura the size of a grape. They drifted with the air currents, jittering along their paths, guiding their progress with the motions of their hair-thin tails. Right now three them were circling my head as if wanting to settle back into me.

I began chanting my yuel lullaby, and the jiva eggs zigzagged away. So long as I kept the song going, I could carve a safe space for myself within the swarm of parasitic eggs. I was a clumsy fool to have carried them over here—but I didn't have to let any of them incubate and grow to maturity inside me as well. Ginnie and Ira stood beside me, both of them singing as well.

Droog had no understanding of the situation. When an egg drifted near his nose, he snapped at it. With a quick darting motion, the egg made its way inside the dog's mouth. Droog widened his eyes and sat back on his haunches, listening into himself.

All around us the eggs were dispersing past the cars and the smoldering remnants of Sukie. Although Dick Simly was safe inside his air-conditioned showroom, a few salesmen and customers had been infested. These men and women were standing quite still, with their hands resting on their bellies—like statues of the expectant Madonna.

Across the street, the jiva seeds drifted in through the open windows and swinging doors of shops, finding hosts. And thousands of their sisters were riding the sea-breeze across the roofs to the blocks beyond.

Still humming the yuel lullaby, I returned my attention to Droog. The egg within him was maturing very fast. His belly was swollen, as if he'd eaten a week's worth of garbage. His sides jiggled with motions of the quickening jiva within.

And now Droog heaved himself to his feet. He stretched out his neck, coughing deep in his throat. A strand of drool hung from his lower jaw. He retched, and a pale purple tendril appeared beside his tongue. He strained and gasped, forcing something up. The mauve tendril lengthened. And then a shape like a wriggling parsnip slid from Droog's toothy snout.

The dog shook his head hard, flapping his ears to demarcate the end of his ordeal. He seemed quite unharmed, although—I now noticed— an ethereal control-thread led from the new jiva to Droog's head. Using the kessence-forces in my fingers, I yanked the tendril from my dog's skull. He looked glad.

Meanwhile, across the lot, the infested salesmen and customers were bent forward, vomiting up jivas of their own. These eggs were incubating within their hosts' stomachs, and growing to adulthood in less than three minutes. Evidently the jivas now viewed us as a valuable resource, and they'd learned to parasitize humans in a non-destructive way. If only that first jiva egg had treated my Val so gently.

Droog's newly hatched jiva drifted across the car lot to join the others. The jivas clustered together as if conferring, bumping each other like party balloons. Rather than flying immediately into the sky, the little group dug their tendrils into the asphalt. Rapidly they plumped up, as if feeding upon the kessence inherent in ordinary matter.

Looking up and down the street, I could see hundreds of people puking up jivas. The jivas emerged as lean and pale as white radishes, but quickly they swelled and took on colors.

“I like those big jivas,” said Ira. “They're as pretty as Easter eggs.”

Each jiva had her own special look. Their beet-like bodies were shaded in pairs of harmonious tones, usually with an elegant row of contrasting spots. They'd grown themselves topknots like party hats—imagine domed miters, floppy tams, rubbery crowns, and striped stovepipes. And the jivas' long, writhing tendrils were bedizened with balls, donuts, and disks.

“You screwed the pooch on this one,” said Ginnie, sardonically amused. “You came here to kill one single jiva and you made ten thousand more. See how the jivas have little kessence threads leading to their former hosts? Slaves of the puppetmasters, dude. We're exiles in zombietown.”

I glared at her, humming my protective lullaby like some far-gone monk obsessing on a mantra. “We'll drive to the Whipped Vic for Plan B,” I said finally.

I got Skeeves's van started and we drove off. Dick Simly was in his showroom, watching us. He shook his fist at me. That was my thanks for getting Sukie out of his head. An asshole all the way.

I drove very fast, slewing the car this way and that. A few of the jiva-controlled humans threw rocks or bottles at us as we passed. Seemed like we had a bad rep on zombie street. At least they weren't going all out to stop us. I figured the jivas didn't know about my Plan B. They didn't realize that, hopeless as things now looked, I was still planning to win.

Once we were off the main drag I felt safe enough to stop my chant. What with the van windows rolled up, we were protected from any laggard eggs that still hadn't found a host.

By now there were jivas growing from each stretch of pavement, and above every meager plot of grass. The jivas had sunk thick tendrils into the soil, and sometimes I had to steer around them. With the jivas bobbing on every side, Santa Cruz had an undersea feel, like a kelp forest. Away from the town center, the jiva-controlled humans were content to stare through the stalks—like wary fish.

I headed towards the general location of the Whipped Vic, expecting to get precise instructions from Ginnie in a minute, the usual odd-ball sequence of lefts, rights, and double reverses that that would lead in though the snail's protective maze of space warps.

“Do you notice how all the trees and bushes are wilting?” observed Ginnie for now. She was staring out of the van's window. “Much worse than this morning. Everything looks—wan.”

For that matter, the pavement beneath the car's tires was less solid than an hour ago, more cracked and crumbly. I recalled Weena saying that the jivas could weaken the structure of ordinary matter by drawing off its vital forces. Their prime mission here was, after all, to pump kessence from Earth to the Duke's castle in Flimsy. And presumably the border snail was willing to serve as their conduit.

Glancing upwards, I saw that some of the bigger jivas had sprouted extra tendrils that ran out horizontally like bright-colored phone wires. Up ahead of us, the feeder tendrils converged like power lines leading to a transformer station. And the node's location was on Yucca Street, the home of the Whipped Vic.

“Turn right, then left, then back up,” said Ginnie.

“We'll follow the flow,” I said, pointing to the ever-denser bundle of jiva tendrils overhead. They gave off a low drone. Faint undulations moved along the colorful tubes—successive gulps of kessence. “Never mind giving me directions.”

There were thousands of the low-hanging jivaic power lines. I swerved back and forth, tracking their turns. I approached the hazy zone around the Whipped Vic—and the pulsing cables led us though the maze.

We pulled into the driveway and hopped out of the van, once again singing our protective yuel lullabies. In the back yard the snail's door lay discarded on the ground, covered by a massive tangle of the humming pastel jiva tendrils. There was a smell like elephants and kerosene. The tendrils had twined themselves into a fat cable that led into the basement and through the border snail's mouth.

Presumably they led through the snail to Monin's farm, and thence to the Duke's castle in the land of Flimsy—which was hidden down inside one of the Whipped Vic basement's electrons.

Ira was kind of elated by the scene. “This feels like a sinister factory surrounded by chain-link fences with graphical images of trespassers knocked dead by implacable stylized sparks,” he said. “An alien industrial site involving forces yet more weird than e-lectricity.”

“It's dangerous for sure,” said Ginnie. “Hurry up and get help, Jim.”

I pulled the magic flute from my leg. Its chrome-like substance glinted with colored highlights from the jiva tendrils. Fitting my fingers to the little flute's elegant keys, I blew across the mouthpiece, playing the catchy jingle of the summoning call. Getting my rhythm, I began playing the tune over and over, each time a little louder, directing my toots towards the border snail's stuffed mouth.

Droog didn't like my noise or the tendrils; he was lying down flat on the ground. No yuels had appeared as yet, but the jivas were noticing the disturbance. Daughter-tendrils branched from the pipeline tubes, deceptively slender vines that felt their way towards me, surely hoping to do me in.

Ginnie and Ira redoubled their yuel lullabies. They'd found a way to vibrate their whole kessence bodies, pulsing out sound with the energy of a low-rider's thuddy bass units. The delicate attack-tendrils drew back a few feet. I played faster and more forcefully. Just then,
aha
, the wad of cables parted. Two yuels came wriggling through, both of them shaped like blue baboons.

Their great golden eyes locked upon mine. I could pick up their yuel teep—it was Rickben and his boyfriend Gaylord. They were singing yuel lullabies too. Agile as acrobats, the two yuels began a wild session of sex play, rolling on the ground at our feet. Droog went and hid under the back steps. He didn't like any of this.

The two yuels rubbed their flat-nosed faces against each other and raked each other's bellies with their claws. Each of them had a throbbing bulb at the end of his tail. The stiff tails twined around each other and then—thrilling climax!—the pods at the tips touched. Rickben and Gaylord howled like banshees. A thick cloud of yuel spores floated across the ragged lawn.

On the instant, baby yuels began popping up from the ground—like speeded-up mushrooms after a storm. Droog poked his snout from under the steps, sniffing at them. There were easily a thousand of the yuel-sprouts nourishing themselves on fecund Mother Earth's dirt. They looked like blue tubes with cup-shaped caps, and they were already singing yuel lullabies—it seemed to be a skill that they were born with.

The tangle of jiva tails faltered in their busy pumping. As the massed chorus of wee lullabies grew in force, the tendrils began to withdraw, first in ones and twos, then in clumps, and then all the rest of them at once. Pulling their tendrils all the way back from the Duke's castle didn't seem to take them much time at all.

And now, as if worn down by the intense traffic through her body's tube, the border snail abruptly stopped maintaining the space-maze that had hidden her from the outer world. Yuels blanketed the neighborhood lawns as far as I could see, thousands upon thousands of them. As they fattened up from the soil, they were rapidly popping loose and taking on the standard blue baboon form.

Some of the neighbors were wandering around, disconsolate and confused. I was glad to see that their jiva control-tendrils were gone. We were free agents on this strangely altered stretch of Yucca Street. And, at least for now, none of the locals wanted to mess with me.

Like some charismatic revival preacher, I reached out with my mind and linked my thoughts with the mob of fledgling blue baboons. I think there may have been twenty thousand of them. Working with rapid strings of images, I teeped the new yuels what I'd learned about killing jivas with yuelballs. And then I showed them the strategy that I wanted us to use. We were going to trap the jivas beneath a shrinking dome of sound.

The yuels understood. For the moment they suspended their songs, lest they drive the jivas further away. Flexing their protean bodies, all but a thousand of the yuels spouted membranous wings, flapping and grinning. They lifted off like a horde of demons, rising into the heavens to float above the highest-flying of the jivas. Meanwhile the baboon-shaped yuels took off for the far borders of Santa Cruz, traveling in high, elastic bounds. And once the jivas were surrounded on every side, the yuels began again to sing.

Like beaters herding game, the yuels drove the jivas across the town and down from the sky—condensing them into zone immediately above Yucca Street, directly in front of the Whipped Vic. The ten thousand beautiful beets were trapped in a mobile cage of hovering yuels. The disoriented jivas bounced awkwardly against each other, their tendrils spooled and twirled. The bat-shaped yuels thrashed their wings in tight circles, chorusing their numbing song; the blue baboons capered and gloated. It was awesome and terrifying, an apocalyptic scene.

And now the slaughter began. The yuels launched their first round of yuelballs, and the jivas began exploding into flaming shards, which the yuels guided away from the houses and towards the asphalt of the street. A few of the jivas survived the first fusillade, but a second brought them low as well. The rubble stretched perhaps a hundred yards along the street in a rick some fifty feet high and fifty feet across. The spectacular sheets of flame had an oddly geometric look to them, like stylized fins and triangles. And as the remains burned, they began dwindling away. For a time, none of us could speak.

“It's like the End Times,” said Ira finally. He was covering his awe with a hillbilly accent. “We're saved, brother Jim.”

“Except now Earth's infested with yuels,” said Ginnie.

“You two lead them back,” I said, gathering my wits. “You know how the yuels love music. You'll be pied pipers. Listen to this riff.”

I tootled a tasty arpeggio, the trill from “Winter Wonderland” that I'd learned in my marching-band days. Ginnie and Ira began broadcasting massive music from their shimmering kessence forms, building a matrix of their own acoustical stylings around my staccato riffs. The yuels harkened and drew closer, gliding down from the air. We three began playing with true abandon, layering on a glutton's feast of notes. The yuels crowded tight around us, worshipping the joyful noise.

And now, stutter-stepping and jamming, Ginnie and Ira led the yuels into the wide open mouth of the border snail. I stood to one side, piping the yuels on their way. It felt as if my life had become an epic movie.