The New and Improved Romie Futch (39 page)

THREE

I found myself on that endless stretch of I-20 again, driving through a storm, heading toward my maker, I hoped, that banal, corporate neo-Frankenstein who'd gazed into my soul with cold curiosity while nibbling a toasted bagel. I was a petty monster, alone in the world, my brain tricked out with worthless thoughts, coil upon coil of nonsense folding in on itself. Every now and then, a zigzag of gothic lightning ripped across the horizon. Rain pattered my windshield. Wipers swished at high speed.

Despite the dangerous weather, Morrow's lackey drove ninety, hyped on Red Bull, young enough to feel invincible. I struggled to keep up with him, always at least one car between us, the landscape blurred by rain. The rain that spattered my car, part of the world's water system, was spiked with human contaminants, I knew. And I occupied myself with lists: lead, mercury, fluoride, chlorine. Petroleum products, industrial agricultural nitrates, an endless series of pharmaceuticals. I pictured toxic streams trickling, poisoned rivers roaring into tributaries. Steam rose from overheated oceans and thickened into clouds, swaddling the planet like a dirty gray blanket. Polluted clouds hovered over cities, mixed with emissions,
coagulated into hot filthy masses, cooled, and condensed, seeping a zillion dirty drops. Water treatment plants seethed with feces and industrial waste, pumped chlorinated water into underground pipes that fed gigantic water towers. The same water trickled through my bloodstream, kept my organs lubricated in their soft rinds, my cells hydrated. My brain floated in a bone tank of fluid like some kind of fancy jellyfish. I sweated. I salivated. Wastewater trickled from my liver into my swollen bladder, and I needed to piss.

But I kept driving, onward through the storm for two more hours, relieved that the rain kept coming, enveloping me in a shroud of mist, concealing my truck from Morrow's minion, who didn't slow down until he'd reached the outer sprawl of Atlanta. He took the Lithonia exit, and I feared he'd lead me to his apartment, that I'd have to stalk him for days before he guided me to Morrow's lair.

He turned left, right, and then right again, onto a highway flanked with car dealerships. The storm was slacking off, sunlight lasering through clouds, glittering upon armies of rain-slicked cars. At last, the black Ford Focus turned left into a shabby office park—dingy beige three-story structures, the parking lot crumbling to rubble at the edges—and pulled up to a building that looked abandoned. Idling behind a clump of feral boxwood shrubs, I watched the young man exit his vehicle, open his trunk, pull out a large gray plastic suitcase, and lug it inside.

•  •

In the lobby, the teal industrial carpet smelled moldy. No air-conditioning system chugged away to give the illusion of sanitation. There was no furniture arranged into clusters of pseudo-coziness. Two fake ficus trees huddled together in a corner, vestiges of
more hospitable times. The peach vertical blinds were sallow from the sun.

Leaning my spear against the wall, I stood beside the elevator, a warrior at rest, scanning the mostly empty office directory: Gray and Brown Dental Financial Strategists (first floor), Prime Hospital Receivable Services, Inc. (second), Clickbait Digital Media Co. (second), and Future Solutions United (third).

Future Solutions United had the penthouse suite to itself.

I snorted at the bland corporate optimism of the title, the co-operative gesture, the vague acknowledgement that there were problems that needed fixing. Was this an outpost of BioFutures, I wondered, or had Dr. Morrow gone rogue, setting up shop in this obscure locale to conduct his research undisturbed, chasing that Promethean flame of pure scientific knowledge?

I gripped my boar spear: the blade cold-forged from high-carbon steel, designed to flex upon penetration, to yield to the flailing fury of a stabbed boar. I didn't take the elevator, but quietly climbed a side stairwell, my brain calm and focused in its tinfoil rind.

I stepped onto the third floor, noting dry, chilly air, a current-model window unit purring efficiently at the end of the hallway. I heard voices, not inside my head but toward the opposite end of the hall—masculine, plodding. I crept halfway down the hall, slipped into a dark office, and listened. I recognized Dr. Morrow's voice.

“Are you sure you recalibrated the third BC transmitter correctly? Because not only is the stream not appearing, but he's off grid
again
.”

“Maybe he's hunting,” said the rockabilly hipster, “out in the sticks.”

“I doubt he'd be up for that, but even if he were, we'd have a trace of something from earlier this morning.”

“Dr. Morrow,” said a female voice, but it was not Chloe, unless Chloe was intentionally speaking at a lower pitch, without her typical elementary-education smarminess. “62367FRD is still not taking the vis-scanner app.”

“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.