Comeback Tour

The porch-sitting old-timer had beat it out of there. Something else was missing, but Elvis didn't have time to think about it

Marie pulled up a board from the pier, and the Op saw polished nails sparkling in it. Krokodil put up an arm, and the board splintered against it.

Elvis found Donny's pistol under his feet. He picked it up, and rammed home the clip. Bullets might not hurt the Josephites, but they couldn't do them much good.

Marie stood on the pier, not even breathing heavily. He would show her that he was a mighty, mighty man.

Elvis aimed at the general direction of her head and chest, and emptied the clip in one concentrated burst. Marie shook and shuddered as scraps of her dress and skin flaked away. She lost her footing, and splashed into the swamp.

His hands felt as if they had been through a wringer. Moulinex claimed that this model was recoilless. He ought to report them to the Armaments Ombudsman.

Surfacing, she shouted 'my hair is a mess' and struck for the jetty. But something— quicksand?—grabbed her ankles, and pulled her down. Her smiling face disappeared under the greenish mud, and there were only bubbles left behind.

'What the hell…' Elvis said.

Krokodil had her breath back. 'It's like a progressive mutation. I've seen these things before. Not all Josephites are like that, but a lot of them are. I don't know, but I think they might be clones or something.'

'Creepy.'

'Yeah. And people call me Frankenstein's Daughter…'

Krokodil pulled her jacket over her bruises, and wiped her hair out or her eye.

'They don't have any body hair. They also don't have belly buttons, nipples or private parts. Some of them have their toes fused together like dummies.'

'And they come from Salt Lake City?'

'Yeah, God's paradise on Earth. Don't be fooled by all that grace-saying and thanks-giving. These people wouldn't know Jesus Christ if he asked them for change on the street.'

The pain in Elvis's ankle flared up again, and he looked down. An arm, still in a sportscoat sleeve, was fixed to him by a gripping fist. It held fast like a beartrap.

Krokodil bent down and prised the fingers loose, snapping them back. The thing still lashed. She tossed it into the swamp, where it floated a while, fingers flopping, and sank.

'Krokodil?' he asked.

'Uh-huh.'

'Where's the car?'

VI

He was able now to view what was happening to him with some detachment. He was even gaining some degree of control over his tail. It was odd having a new appendage, but he found it easily manipulable. With the changes overtaking him, the tail was like an anchor, holding him steady.

His body was finding its own reptile-human equilibrium. He felt hungry all the time, and had to chew his way through the raw carcasses they threw into the cage every few hours, even though the human brain wrapped inside the alligator tissue knew they were using the meat to administer knock-out drugs. After feeding, he would fall asleep and dream of operating tables and agony and Dr Blaikley, and then awake, changed even more, in the cage.

He knew he had been moved permanently into the experimental block, which Dr Blaikley insisted on calling 'The House of Pain' for some reason, and that he was no longer an administrator. He was a subject. And he was not alone. There were other cages. He found old friends. Reuben was in one, his black-green skin crinkling as he progressed. And there were those whose changes were almost complete, who could no longer speak properly.

Reuben told him what they were becoming. The indentees called them the Suitcase People. Shiba could not see the point of the experiments, but that was not his business. Dr Zarathustra would have authorized Dr Blaikley's work. The experiments would eventually benefit the corp, and Hiroshi Shiba was not going to jeopardize his position by criticizing them. Inoshira Kube had explained to him that the corp was like a complex organism, with myriads of cells performing differing tasks all geared to the perpetuation and protection of the whole. This might not be as well-publicized an operation as the submarine oil drilling, the transport and media monopolies or the designer plastic surgery, but it contributed to the economic and social health of the whole being that was GenTech. And as a member of the Blood Banner Society, Shiba was sworn above all to protect the corporate colossus that embodied all that was fine and noble and strong in the values of the Orient.

Still, Dr Blaikley was looking juicier and juicier every time she came to feed him and haul him off to her surgery. He estimated that he had been taken to the House of Pain three times in the day and a half since he had moved into 'A' block. He was further gone than Reuben, but he could still articulate words. From what he understood, Dr Blaikley hoped to preserve in him the capacity for speech. It was important to the experiment that the subject be able to give a subjective account of the experience.

Just now, he was reciting his Blood Banner oath. He had always had trouble with English consonants, now his throat felt as if it were not suited to Japanese either. He persisted, trying to master his new body. He must not give in. Great things were expected of him in Kyoto.

He lay on his belly, so his tail wouldn't get in the way, and looked through the bars of his cage. It would be feeding time soon. And then there would be the House of Pain.

Reuben was singing an old negro spiritual about Israel being in Egypt's land.

It occurred to Shiba that perhaps Dr Blaikley was proceeding without Dr Zarathustra's authorization. This line of research was characteristically flamboyant, but it might be a little too wild even for him. And usually Zarathustra's projects had obvious practical applications, like retarding the ageing process or building up the body's auto-immune systems. Shiba couldn't think what earthly use a human being half-turned into an alligator might be. If Dr Blaikley were using lizards as a model, he would assume she were trying to get amputees to grow new limbs. But alligators were just big, ugly reptiles with lazy appetites. Perhaps Suitcase People could be trained to work in sewers, scuttling through pipelines in filthy water. Shiba did not relish the prospect, but GenTech knew best.

'Let my people gooooo,' sang Reuben, his voice resonating around the cell block

The food and the pain was late. Shiba wondered if the routine of the compound had been broken. If so, it was due to the lack of a good administrator, he was sure. If he were removed from his position, the corp regs automatically promoted the security chief to the co-ordinator's chair, and Shiba couldn't see the slobbish Spermwhale Visser handling the responsibilities at all well.

Shiba thought of Visser, and wondered whether his nickname wasn't a reference to another strand of Dr Blaikley's experimentation. Was the man ballooning into an aquatic mammal? Did some of the GenTech East executives miss the old days of illegal whale-hunting, and want to reintroduce the creatures into the Sea of Japan so they could resume their sport? As a trainee, Shiba had had to do three weeks on a GenTech R & R yacht, caddying harpoons for the upper-echelons. He felt cheated that the animals had become extinct before he got far enough in the hierarchy to be the whaler rather than the poon-boy. It was the duty of all those who saluted the Blood Banner to kill without a second thought when it was required of them.

Shiba's stomach hurt. Alligators, he had heard, did not need to feed more than once a week. He still had human appetites. Indeed, more intense appetites than he had had as a human.

Although unwilling to admit it, he felt an enormous sexual desire.

He was ravenously hungry. There were growls and cries from the other cages. His condition was shared by the rest of the Suitcase People.

He wrapped his lanterning jaws around the bars and chewed them, but tasted only flake iron. One of his teeth broke and he spat it out. He had the impression that it would grow back. New teeth were sprouting all the time,