Hell on Earth (24 page)

This stretch of hovels didn't seem to have been bombed by anything but bad economic decisions. The house was one-story, shapeless as a cardboard box with a sheet of metal thrown on top pretending to be a roof. The yard was a narrow stretch of dirt with garbage piled high. It looked worse than any apartment I'd ever seen and gave the scuzziest motels a run for the money, if anyone with a dime in his pocket would be caught dead there.

The final perfect touch was a monotonous
cacophony of dumb-ass, psychometal “music” blaring through the thin walls.

“Let me take it from here,” Albert volunteered.

“Be my guest,” I said.

He knocked on a flimsy door covered with streaks of peeling, yellow paint; I half expected the whole structure to crash down in a shambles. I figured we'd wait a long time before any denizens within roused themselves. Instead, the door opened within a few seconds.

It was like stepping back in time to the late twentieth century, when post-punks, headbangers, carpetbangers, and other odd flotsam of adolescent rage had their fifteen minutes.

There were two young men standing in the doorway: one was blond, the other was darker, black-haired, and possibly Hispanic. Rocko and Paco, for the moment.

Rocko didn't say anything, staring at us with glazed eyes, mouth partly open. The only good thing to say about them was that there was simply no way they had been taken over by alien invaders! Even monsters know when to give someone a pass.

“May we come in?” asked Albert.

“Stoked,” said Rocko.

There seemed no alternative to going inside; there was no escape rocket in sight. Albert braved the cavern of terrible noise first, then Arlene, then Jill with our buddy. There was nothing left but for me to go inside and witness . . .

The living room. The place was stuffed with what looked like the world's largest and bizarrest crank-lab. There were chemicals of various colors in glass containers balanced precariously on the ratty furniture. A large bottle of thick, silver liquid looked like it might be mercury. I wondered if these guys would blow us up or poison us.

Jill laid the still-wrapped cybermummy on the ground. Then Albert stepped forward. Without saying a word, he flashed a hand-signal. I recognized it: light-drop hand signals, based partly on American Sign Language, heavily modified.

Earth,
said Albert.

Man,
responded Paco.

Native.

Born.

I blinked. Albert flashed a thirteen-character combination of letters and numbers, and Rocko responded with another. I raised my brows . . . a hand-signal “handshake.”

All of a sudden, Rocko's demeanor changed as his face melted into a different one entirely. He gestured to Paco, who closed his mouth. Both suddenly looked fifty IQ points brighter.

Rocko went to the stereo, a nice, state-of-the art system out of place in these surroundings, and turned down the music. “Let's talk,” he said, voice still sounding like a stereotypical carpetbanger.

Things got too weird for Yours Truly. While Rocko rapped in a lingo full of terms relating to drugs and rock'n'roll, he produced several pads and pencils, enough for each one of us. The real conversation took place on the pads, while the duo spoke most of the mind-numbing nonsense, occasionally helped out by Albert and Jill, who could talk the talk better than Arlene or I.

The only part of the conversation I paid attention to came off the pads.

Our hosts filled in more details of this Grave New World. Rocko was actually Captain Jerry Renfrew, PhD, U.S. Army and head of one of the CBNW (chem-bio-nuke warfare) labs. His buddy was Dr. Xavier Felix, another chemical warfare specialist.

But why did they pretend to be crystal-meth dealers?

Innocuous, no threat,
explained Felix with a scribble.

Civilian DEA,
Felix wrote.
Pose crank cooker stuck fake crim recs into Nat Crime Info Cen comptrs.

There was a noise halfway between a scream and a laugh. It was Jill, and she was jumping up and down. Out loud she said, “I haven't heard that group since I was a kid!” The music was still blaring in the background, even though reduced to a volume that didn't turn the brain to cottage cheese.

On paper, Jill wrote:
I did that!!!!! Mightve done your's!

Too young,
challenged Renfrew, erasing her apostrophe.

Judge/book/cover,
argued Felix, added a circle slash around the triplet, the international no-no symbol.

We passed all the notes around to everyone; but each person got them in more or less random order. It took me a while to make sense out of the jumble. When everyone had seen a note, Felix or Renfrew touched it to a Bunsen burner. The notes were written on flash paper, and they vanished instantly with a smokeless flare.

According to Dr. Felix, the DEA, under alien control, was still staffed by traitorous humans, even now. They went hunting for people who could produce the “zombie-brew” chemical treatment used to rework humans into zombies.

They specifically hunted for the more sophisticated drug-lab chemists. It made sense that Captain Renfrew and Felix, both infiltrating from opposite ends, would come together.

When Felix's hand needed a rest, the captain jotted down:
lab I headed one of few not overrun.
He escaped
with all his notes and some of his equipment, grew his hair long, and returned to alien territory to infiltrate.

Felix was already undercover, already infiltrating the alien operation, and that's where it got tricky: DEA knew Felix was really an agent; but they thought he was spying on the aliens for DEA—who were cooperating with the aliens in exchange for the promise of all drugs off the street.

In fact, Xavier Felix was a double-double agent, really working for the Resistance . . . unless he was a triple-double agent, or a double-double-double agent, in which case we were all sunk.

Don't aliens investgt horrible noise?
I wrote.

They allowed themselves to laugh out loud. At any point in the music discussion, a laugh fit like a corpse in potter's field.

Evidently, excessive noise was not a problem aliens cared much about.

Something was torquing me off. After wrestling with myself, I finally wrote it.
How humans make zombie brew, help aliens evin infiltrating?!?!

Renfrew stared, absently correcting something on my note. Don't know what. He looked wounded, in pain.
Delib scrwng up recipe. Neurologic poison slow kills drives mad. Makes useless.

The captain bent over me and read along. He flipped his own sheet over and added:
we're only hot chems. Others druggies cooks FDA that kind of crap.

Everyone else seemed satisfied, so I dropped it. I was the only one, I guess, who spotted the Clue of the Horrible Admission: even if they were screwing up the brew so the zombies died or went mad—weren't they still turning humans into zombies in the first place?

How did they live with that?

We showed them more about the cybermummy. They had the reaction of any scientist with a new toy.
If there were a solution, they were going to bust humps finding it.

They took us into the basement, where the music from upstairs was merely loud, not ear-splitting. I was surprised a house in Riverside had one, especially this piece of crap. Then it hit me like a bony's fist: they probably dug it themselves. Whatever the case, we were in the hands of impressive dudes.

“You can talk quietly down here without fear of surveillance,” Felix whispered.

“Hooray,” said Arlene, but kept her voice low.

“Amen,” said Albert.

We left Felix and Renfrew and went downstairs, where we rested a moment. I was so tired I felt like the marrow in my bones had turned to dust; or maybe I was having trouble breathing down there. Without intending to, I dozed off on a thick leather couch.

When I came to, the others were unwrapping the mummy. It was embarrassing to have passed out like that.

“You okay, Fly?” Arlene asked over her shoulder.

“Yeah, must have been tireder than I thought,” I said. “Sorry about that.”

“No problemo,” said Arlene, yawning. “I'll take the next nap. You up to joining us?”

I nodded and moved in for a closer look.

The cyberdude was the same as before, still a young black man turned into a computer-age pin cushion. Earlier, we removed enough bandages to see his face. We uncovered his head and saw it was completely shaved, the smooth dome covered in little metal knobs and dials.

As Albert and Arlene continued unwrapping, Jill took a step back. The man wasn't wearing anything but the quickly unwinding bandages. As they started unwrapping below the waist, our fourteen-year-old hellion got embarrassed. Oceans of gore she could
take without batting an eyelash, but a nude young man was enough to make her blush.

I was deeply amused and grateful I woke up in time for the entertainment—Jill's reaction, I mean, not the guy. The more nonchalant she tried to be, the more fun I had watching. She actually turned fire-engine red, her normally pale cheeks matching her hair.

I noticed Arlene noticing me noticing Jill. Ah, women!

“It's nothing to get worked up about,” she told Jill.

“Maybe Jill should leave the room,” suggested Albert.

“That's her decision,” said Arlene.

“I don't want to go back upstairs with the . . . chems,” she said. “At least we can talk down here.”

“Don't let them tease you, hon,” Arlene said. “Most everything you're told about sex when you're growing up is a lie anyway.”

“You mean what they're told in school?” Albert asked slyly.

“I was thinking of the lies they hear at home,” said Arlene, instantly regretting the reference. We didn't want Jill constantly fixating on the slaughter of Mom and Dad.

But the more serious tone affected Jill positively. She went back to the table and helped finish the unwrapping. She didn't look south more than about five or six times. Seven, tops. Being a professional, I was trained to notice details like eye movements.

“What time is it?” Arlene asked, yawning again. She definitely deserved some sack time.

“Ask Fly,” said Jill, “he's got the cl-cl-clock.”

“Why didn't they have our conference down here, where we could talk, instead of using the pads?” asked Arlene.

I shrugged. “Aliens might think it was weird if
‘customers' come over and the cooks disappear down into the basement with them.”

“Won't they think it just as strange if the customers disappear alone?”

“Well, let's hope not.”

I turned to Jill. “Earlier, you said you might be able to communicate with him on a computer, through one of those jacks. What's the next step?”

She went back to examining the body with the proper detachment. “Can you do it?” I asked.

“Yes and no.”

“Care to explain?”

“Yes I can connect,
if you
get me the cables I need. One has to have a male Free-L-19, the other a male Free-L-20, both with a two-fiber mass-serial connector at the other end.”

I sure hoped somebody else knew what the hell that meant. “Where do you think we can get all that?”

“Try upstairs; if they don't have any, try Radio Shack or CompUSA.”

After writing down the kind of jacks required, I took the list upstairs and showed it to the chem guys. They didn't have what we needed, but the captain produced an Auto Club map and pointed out the nearest Radio Shack.

Kind of reassuring that L.A. still had its priorities.

Back in the basement, I asked who wanted to go. And the result was predictable: “I'll go,” said Jill.

“Anyone but Jill,” I said. “Maybe I should—”

“Why can't I go?”

“I know there's not much to do in Riverside except shop,” I admitted, “even before the demons came. But we've been through this already, Jill. We're still in the you're-not-expendable period.”

“I'll go,” said Albert.

“Fine,” I said. “Now Arlene can get some sack—”

“I'll go with him, Fly,” said Arlene.

“But you were yawning only a moment before!”

“I'm not tired now,” she said, real perky.

I did what anyone in my position would do. I shrugged. If Arlene had surrender papers for me, I would have signed them on the spot.

L
ately, I thought I was overdoing quotations from the Book. I'd never had so vivid a recollection for the Word until the world changed. I'd found time to read the scriptures once more in the new era, and now the words stayed with me, perhaps because the altered world made the tales of the Book seem more vivid.

The original Mormons were condemned not only for taking multiple wives, a behavior that might have been cause for sympathy instead of resentment. What upset other Americans of the nineteenth century was the claim that God would reveal a whole new history to newly chosen saints. The concept of Latter Day Saints was more offensive to the Christian majority of that time than any personal behavior or economic consequences.

My favorite Bible passage was John 21:25, the end of the Gospel According to Saint John, and it should
have been the perfect shield against such prejudice; but most Christians pay little attention to the Word:

And there are also many other things which Jesus did, the which, if they should be written every one, I suppose that even the world itself could not contain the books that should be written. Amen.

They liked those words just fine in theory; practice was something else again. The portions where the Book of Mormon disagrees with established Christian practices didn't help either. People got really upset when they were told they were not merely wrong, but
diabolically
wrong, on the subject of baptism.