Go, Mutants! Read online

  GO, MUTANTS!

  A Novel by Larry Doyle

  for becky

  Through the infinite reaches of space, the problems of Man seem trivial and naïve indeed.

  —Dr. Minton

  I hate all Earthlings.

  —James Dean

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Epigraph

  Chapter 1 - Your Flesh will Crawl

  Chapter 2 - Stalks the Earth

  Chapter 3 - Mated to Wild Atomic Energy!

  Chapter 4 - Teasing Becomes Torture!

  Chapter 5 - Science Gone Wild!

  Chapter 6 - Their “Growing-up” Shocking

  Chapter 7 - Bare-Fisted Hate!

  Chapter 8 - One Name Stands out as the Epitome of Evil!

  Chapter 9 - Millions are Asking - What is it?

  Chapter 10 - Youth on the Loose!

  Chapter 11 - Temper-Hot Tensions...

  Chapter 12 - Back Seat Dating

  Chapter 13 - In Naked Screaming Terror!

  Chapter 14 - Horrorific and All New!

  Chapter 15 - The Raging Violence of a Maddened Ape...

  Chapter 16 - What Causes the Unbelievable to Happen?

  Chapter 17 - Explosive Drama ... Set to Rock’n Roll Tempo!

  Chapter 18 - Charged with Million-Volt Excitement!

  Chapter 19 - Death and Desire!

  Chapter 20 - Teenager or Terrifying Beast?

  Chapter 21 - Vicious and Venomous!

  Chapter 22 - Hate and Horror Gave it Life!

  Chapter 23 - Are we Delving into Mysteries we weren’t meant to know?

  Chapter 24 - Devastating Passions

  Chapter 25 - A Savage Lust... to Kill!

  Chapter 26 - To Bring Back the Dead!

  Chapter 27 - Excitement . . . Explodin’est!

  Chapter 28 - Today’s Most Vital Controversy!

  Chapter 29 - Daring and True Exposé— of a Hush-Hush Subject!

  Chapter 30 - Builds to a Thrilling Climax

  Chapter 31 - Your Heart will Pound...

  Chapter 32 - Flaming Fury from the Skies

  Chapter 33 - It’s Rockin’ Rollin’ End!

  Also by Larry Doyle

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Chapter 1

  Your Flesh will Crawl

  She SCREAMS, as if that will help.

  INT. HIGH SCHOOL—HALLWAY—NIGHT

  In BLACK AND WHITE, and not art. A hot smudge of blind whites and ash blacks, this is the sorry noir of drive-in horrorshows, the dreams of dogs and monsters.

  Enter right, SCREAMING:

  THE GIRL, in high distress and heels. She takes the corner wide, skips and skids into the lockers with a metallic WALLOP, ricochets and goes SPLAT, displayed.

  In such a lovely and hideous dress.

  The Girl CLAWS for traction on the cold waxed floor. Her nails shouldn’t SHATTER like that. She could use more zinc in her diet, and less stress.

  And here it comes, into the light.

  CLOSE ON

  THE CREATURE, cranial sac engorged, strange fluids ATHROB, the lobes beneath its diaphanous skull CRACKLING with spidery fire.

  Its big cat eyes lume with lust, or thirst, or the first to be followed by the second.

  As the Creature reaches for her, its middle digit extends telescopically, and impressively. The tip quivers along her pristine cheek, leaving an inappropriate residue.

  She SCREAMS again, her face meant to convey a complex interplay of terror and desire, not coming across at all.

  The Creature’s features collapse. Its feelings are hurt.

  She kicks off her heels, clever girl, and is up on stockings, slipping away, still SCREAMING, night after night after night after night.

  She should know by now that nobody’s coming.

  A bit of a jumble next, an editor’s breakfast of SWISH PANS, SMASH CUTS meant to scare and disguise the lack of a usable MASTER:

  the Girl’s wide eye;

  a blur of wall;

  the Creature’s dripping mouth;

  her frenzied rear end;

  assorted lights;

  some creature part;

  a flash of stock lightning;

  ending on her pretty, untorn face, eyes darting, seeking, and at last finding

  ROOM 51

  The Girl struggles with the knob.

  The Creature is gangling up on her.

  Of course she SCREAMS, a terrible use of her limited time.

  The Creature reaches for her with erectile fingers.

  The door is jarred loose by narrative imperative, and she exits, SLAMMING.

  INT. HIGH SCHOOL—ROOM 51—DAY

  The Creature throws open the door. It recoils.

  The classroom is filled with human adolescents, taking a test. Their instructor, DR. RAND, glances up from his desk.

  DR. RAND

  Jim, have you forgotten our exam this morning?

  The Creature is horror-struck.

  HUMAN ADOLESCENT MALE

  That’s not the only thing he forgot.

  As one, the class looks down.

  The Creature looks down.

  And sees that it is naked.

  The humans LAUGH.

  The Creature cannot hide its shortcomings fast or well enough.

  The humans GIGGLE MANIACALLY. This blends into a KICKY 12-STRING GUITAR OSTINATO, and they begin to sing:

  HUMAN ADOLESCENTS (in close harmony)

  It’s the end of the summer

  We’re having a blast

  They nuked the oceans

  Beaches turnin’ to glass . . .

  his lids opened, vertically then horizontally, unveiling eyes many shades bluer than his skin.

  J!m Anderson lay in bed contemplating another day, another dolor, as a teenage alien on planet Earth.

  Inside the orb at his bedside, Brian Wilson sang:

  It’s the end of the summer

  Here comes a hard rain

  They nuked the oceans

  The waves are insane

  The boy’s face wasn’t half so monstrous in color. His dusky blue-gray skin muted the ridges and spurs protruding here and there, in patterns beautiful only to mathematicians, and his features were humanoid, if a little more oidy in spots:

  his eyes were ultramarine, deep seas of whatever one wished to believe they were deep seas of, and kept in perpetual squint, which reduced their disturbing circumferences and made intimations of a soul;

  delicate respiratory slits suggested a vestigial cute nose, and his pouty lips were possibly kissable, if situated on another head, and not periwinkle;

  his ears were independently rotational, and highly emotional;

  his forehead was quite high, approximately ten inches, and bulging with brains, but even this evoked the slick upswept hairstyle favored by singers and delinquents, without the hair.

  A girl with enough imagination might have found him attractive in a rugged, sun-dried sort of way.

  The girls at J!m’s school did not possess that much imagination.

  Not just the end of the summer

  Looks like the end of the world

  J!m sat at the edge of the bed, the great mass of his head bowing his spine into a posture most adolescent males assumed voluntarily. This kyphosis, though mechanical, neatly expressed his ineffable burden, the worldview he carried on his shoulders.

  Armageddon’s a bummer

  Looks like the end of the world

  The singer faded from the orb, replaced by the K-BOM logo, which fissioned, leaving behind a pair of piggy eyes stuck in a slab of pea green fat. “Shiiii-nee!” the eyes squealed. “That was an H-Blast from the Past from the Rays, and this is,” with maximum reverb, “Marshall the Martian!” />
  In the morning!

  the Martianettes sang, to which the orb jockey appended his catch ejaculation: “Neep neep!”

  J!m squinted his first hate of the day. With a pass of his hand, the orb muted. The newer models would have automatically skipped the cretin, but there were no newer models in this house. The walls around J!m were paint, not PLEX; the movie posters were physically present, artifacts from another era. The floor below him was fixed, and he would once again have to walk to the bathroom.

  He stood.

  crk

  J!m’s nasal slits rippled. His day was about to become fifty percent more self-loathsome.

  He was alone, a small comfort. It could have happened later at school, in gym, and that would be fun, or the cafeteria, like last spring, when Sally Fraser screamed and vomited on Hazel Court, triggering a chain regurgitation that got lasagna removed from the lunch menu permanently.

  Best to get it over with.

  J!m twisted his neck, down and to the right. The seam between his cerebral hemispheres ruptured, revealing his next skin: silvery cyan, bright and shiny, unmissable.

  His before skin retracted with a viscous crinkle, peeling back over two glistening humps of cerebrum, blatant beneath the fresh membrane that clung to every nook and sulcus. All his thoughts were on public view, synaptic bursts twinkling across his cranium, the area currently most active being his basal ganglia, or profanity center.

  His dead face fell away, leaving one that only wished it was, coated with a clear oil similar to petroleum jelly but highly reflective and thirty times as aromatic. It did not wash, wipe, rub, scrape, scrub or boil off. Gradually the sebum would work into his new skin, darkening and dimming it to the pleathery exterior J!m could almost abide, but until then, J!m would be the Greasy Kid, subject to the customary names and jocularities, offering sweet respite to Bobby Harvey, an oil-producing human who was said to give girls blackheads simply by staring at them.

  The molt moved on, shuddering over J!m’s sloped shoulders and sloughing off his sinewy arms, crawling down his angular, occasionally pointed, torso, down, down his long, long legs and pooling, in underpants, at his feet.

  J!m kicked off his old sleeve. It skittered under the bed.

  Shit, J!m thought, meaning himself, and began his morning shuffle, teen beast slouching toward Armageddon, another day strewn with the idiocies and indignities he lived for, the petty evidence that he was right and they were human.

  A shame he didn’t know he would be dead before the weekend was out. It might have spared him some anguish.

  this had been the kitchen of tomorrow, only yesterday. The Plutoluxe decor, guaranteed to last 24,000 years, had oxidized from white to grayish yellow with olive spotting and had recently become unstable, cooking food left out on the counter and causing guests who sat in the chairs to appear in X-ray, a bit awkward. The Cryomagic magnet fridge was ten years old and had gone out of phase, giving foods a tart, cancery taste. And the fusion cooker had developed a wormhole, exchanging entrees across galaxies; a green bean casserole might go in, but out would pop a Giant Berenician Dungdaddy, which is not good hot.

  The worst of it was the PLEX nook. The built-in viz was minuscule, and could no longer be turned off or lowered in volume or changed from PIN, and so the kitchen was a constant source of dubious news, delivered by agreeable males and females, always human, ever since Gor from planet Arous, hired for the perceived gravitas of a gargantuan flying brain with eyes, used his program to bend viewers to his evil will, after promising not to.

  The current informer, a young man with old sideburns, sat before a mortise of lightning branching from the ground into a night sky. The chyron read: NOCTURNAL DISCHARGE.

  “Tonight’s PLEX release will be twenty-three teravolts,” Tom Snyder intoned, “beginning at one a.m. and continuing for six minutes. While there is no danger from the emission, the President is asking citizens to step up their energy use in this time of excess capacity.”

  J!m skulked into the kitchen, in his uniform of the day, every day,

  black boots, size 16,

  straight leg Lees, w 19 l 38,

  white T-shirt,

  and slumped around a chair.

  “In the tightly fought presidential race, Democratic nominee Jack Kennedy today denied that he is having an affair with his running mate.”

  J!m’s mother was at the counter, her tail swishing in a slow, sensuous way that couldn’t be helped. More feminine than feline, she filled her silk Capri pants and pink cashmere sweater in an optimal fashion. Her pin-curled hair and short body fur were platinum blond, plush and lustrous.

  On the viz, the four-term senator from Massachusetts spoke from the steps of the Rotunda, an unfortunate choice given his own rotundancy, alongside his short-suffering second wife, Judith.

  “Governor Baker and I have not been involved in that, uh, way, for a number of years, back when she was an actress, and I was, uh, good-looking.”

  The reporters laughed, as they always did. Jack Kennedy may have been a political joke but he was a funny one, who might even win this time. A three-time loser, slimly to Nixon in 1960 of the former era and then staggeringly to the President in the elections of two and six EI, Kennedy was four points ahead with less than a fortnight to go, owing to a buffoonish opponent with a scary running mate, and was favored to become the first ex-Catholic president, barring some last-minute surprise, which everyone expected. They would be sufficiently surprised nonetheless.

  j!m watched his mother being gorgeous. How had he come out of her?

  “And good morning to you,” Miw teased, her back to him, in that breathy coquette that made J!m cringe, the asthmatic baby voice, because it always came with a little wiggle. No boy wants a sexy mother.

  Miw did a little wiggle and went on with her merry business. She pressed a glass against an upper cabinet, dispensing a thick black liquid, grabbed a small plate and turned.

  Her eyes were huge and blue, like his, her lips also pillowy, but when she smiled the resemblance vanished.

  “Baby!” Her pink nose leather scrunched adorably. She shimmied over in unheeled pumps.

  “That’s five skins this year! You’re getting to be as tall as your father was.” She poked his forehead. “If you stood up straight.”

  Already at maximum hunch, J!m slouched his eyes.

  “Baby,” in her lower purr. She sat and petted his greasy arm. “They only tease you because they’re . . . ,” almost saying jealous, “. . . boys. Drink your oil.”

  She pushed the glass at J!m. He ignored it, but his middle finger, sensing hydrocarbons, dilated at the tip, releasing the Worm, as it was known colloquially. The wet, fleshy tentacle slithered forth, up the side of the glass, and plunged in with a lewd, guttural suck.

  Light sweet crude gave J!m natural gas, silent and deadly, but it was plentiful and practically free, and so long departed that J!m did not have to endure, as he did with animal and plant oils, the psychic aftertaste of how its source had been rudely butchered or brutally harvested. When he was eleven, J!m created a comic book character with his affliction, The Black Phage, who solved murders by eating a piece of each victim. He never understood why nobody liked it.

  “In Japan, Gojira destroyed six blocks in downtown Tokyo this morning, after becoming displeased with the daily offering. Officials there say the kaiju will not be disciplined, in consideration of his long defense of the country, most recently against King Ghidorah, the three-headed space dragon, and Gigan, the giant chicken robot.”

  The blue worm gurgled and slurped along the bottom of the glass, siphoning up every last C and H, until J!m, newly repulsed with himself, retracted it with a slimy snap.

  Miw gazed at her son, her famous empathy failing her, his feelings unfathomable, and the only ones she cared about. Instead, she found herself feeling with Charlie Weston across the street, whose pants wouldn’t button. She could have asked J!m how he felt. And he would have said nothing. He said nothing all the time.


  “Harvest Hop tomorrow night,” she tried.

  J!m gave her a look of dry amusement, or light contempt, she couldn’t tell.

  “I hear Marie Rand doesn’t have a date.”

  He smiled or frowned.

  “That’s what I hear,” Miw said. “Eat.”

  Two silver Nixons on his plate. J!m picked one up and flipped it onto his tongue with arguable belligerence.

  “Get anemic,” her disinterest badly faked. “It’s not easy to get coins anyway. You’re lucky Mr. Whitley down at the bank likes me.”

  J!m raised a brow ridge. Miw furrowed back. He tossed in the last half-dollar and started to rise. With one finger to his chest, Miw pushed him down.

  She began to sing,

  Happy birthday to you,

  at her breathiest, adagio, con expressione, practically osceno, and J!m worried that she was going to dance. She reached under the table, also discomfitting, and brought up an oblong box covered in silver foil.

  Happy birthday, Jim Anderson . . .

  The boy’s name was J!m, but everybody called him Jim, even she.

  Miw fanned her fingers at the box. J!m opened it. Inside was the jacket, cloth and cherry red, that J!m had admired, that once, at Mattson’s months ago. His mother wrapped it around his shoulders. “Happy birthday to you,” she said.

  J!m stood. He bent over and kissed her on the forehead. His voice was thin and high.

  “I love you, Mom.”

  And he left.

  miw lifted a saucer of milk to her mouth, thoughtfully lapping.

  “This is the PLEX Information Network. All the information you need. Brought to you by Memerase. Forget your troubles and sleep, sleep, sleep. . . .”