Beautiful You (26 page)

Rushing up the steps of the cathedral, Penny tasted spicy barbecued ribs. She heard sweet birds singing. She knew none of it was real. Max was only putting the perceptions in her head.
To comfort her, she supposed. Her mind would never again be her own.

Entering the foyer of the church she caught sight of three familiar faces but dismissed them as more Max-induced hallucinations. They smiled. She smiled back, asking, “Are you guys for real?”

They were her parents and her housemate. Her mom and Monique looked fragile and emaciated, but apparently Max had given them enough strength to be here today. The two women were less wedding guests than they were hostages brought to ensure the ceremony would go through without a hitch. Penny might attempt another rebellion, but not if the people she loved were in constant danger.

It seemed ironic how not long ago her mom and Monique had been badgering Penny to throw away her birth control and trap Max into marriage. Now she was the one who was trapped. And this morning they looked like mourners at a funeral. They all four hugged warmly.

As the ushers stood ready to seat her parents, Penny’s mother whispered, “Here, take this.” She pressed something into her daughter’s hand. “Read it.”

Penny noticed with horror that her mom’s wrists were raw with rope burns. Her bare arms were polka-dotted with the red scabs marking hypodermic injection sites. What she offered was a folded square of paper. Smoothing it flat, Penny found it was a yellowed page from an ages-old back issue of the
National Enquirer
. Nervously, she asked a bodyguard whether there was a toilet she could use.

Not one of the parish’s pious cleaning ladies had reported to work in weeks, Penny noted with disdain. Maneuvering her gigantic hoop skirt into a filthy toilet cubicle took some doing. Every movement caused the elegant satin to wick up unclean water from the urine-stinking floor. Penny could hear the first
strains of the “Wedding March” as her eyes furiously scanned the tabloid page. The headline of the article read, “DataMicroCom Gambles Big on Cloning Technology.” According to the piece that followed, Max’s company had made massive investments in researching how to create a viable human embryo and clone it. This research had taken place during the same era as the nanobot research. According to the
National Enquirer
’s science writer, the company’s stated long-term goal was to generate a microscopic clone. That clone would be sealed in suspended animation. It could be implanted and gestate to maturity within a surrogate womb.

Penny read and reread the article before flushing it down the toilet.

If Max could sneak mind-controlling nanobots into women, why couldn’t he smuggle a suspended embryonic clone into them as well? Including her! Without a doubt this would be a clone of himself. That,
that
was his master plan. To control world population growth … to perpetuate his global corporate power … like some parasite, he planned to hatch thousands, possibly millions of identical Maxes in the uteruses of unsuspecting women. That was his scheme to bring peace to mankind. His perfect world would be populated by a billion versions of him!

Maxwell was standing at the altar. Her parents were sitting in the front pew, waiting with the hundreds of dignitaries and celebrities for the bride to come down the aisle.

Every woman in the church smiled raptly. Clearly Max was bombarding their senses with every enjoyable sensation imaginable. Penny’s mom sighed as if lost in the rapture of fresh-baked brownies. Monique’s eyes slowly closed as if she were carried
aloft on a magic carpet of waltz music. Only Penny was exempt from whatever pleasures Max was using to keep the other women docile as the ceremony progressed.

Soon she’d become Mrs. C. Linus Maxwell. She’d found her destiny, or it had found her. From this day forward she’d be at the helm of the largest corporation in the world. She’d be wife to the richest man on the globe. Penny took her place at his side. Veiled. Implanted. To love, honor, cherish, but most important—to obey.

The bishop asked, “If anyone here can give just cause for why these two should not be joined in holy matrimony, speak now or forever hold your peace.”

A murmur came from the rear of the church. The multitude of elegant necks swiveled to watch as a stooped figure slowly trudged down the center aisle. Its scraggly gray tresses were streaming with rainwater. Its withered body inched along, unclothed. A trailing abundance of gray pubic hair hung so far down it brushed the red carpet. To judge from his expression of surprise and fear, Max knew instantly who this uninvited apparition was. The approaching hag lifted her blind, whitened eyes in his direction and spoke. Her crone’s nose sniffing the air, she cried, “Maxwell, I can smell your fear!” Her voice a rusty croak, her toothless mouth bade, “Stop this … travesty!”

Warily Maxwell dipped a hand inside his tux jacket and brought forth the black control box. His touch could torture or kill millions.

The ever-encroaching hag commanded, “Tell her, Maxwell!” The witch pointed a gnarled finger and ordered, “If you can wed the girl then tell her the truth! Tell your young bride the true nature of her existence!”

Max’s eyes bulged in horror.

Now halfway down the aisle, the ragged cadaver-woman bade, “Tell her the secret which I could not. This knowledge must come from you. Tell her!”

Penny stood, confused, glancing between the ragged accuser and the man who was about to become her husband.

Of course this was the Baba, come all the way from Nepal to New York. Her lips parted and she said, “Tell her why you’ve dedicated your life to the service of pleasuring women!”

Max lifted his controller for all to see. “Take another step, old mother, and the death of a billion women will be on your head!”

The Baba quelled her progress.

Here Penny interjected. “Baba,” she cried boldly, “I know the reason Maxwell stole the sensual secrets of the ancients. I know why he’s wagered his lifetime to gain access to the world’s best vaginas!”

The women present continued to swoon heavily in their waking pleasure dreams. The male guests seemed nicely surprised to have some unexpected interruption in an otherwise tedious wedding ceremony. If they were aware of the women’s pleasure they were studiously ignoring it. These men, for the most part, appeared to be the scurrilous lotharios and black-market profiteers who were exploiting the Beautiful You effect.

As Max’s finger hovered over the buttons of a global massacre, Penny announced, “I know about the cloning research. I know that Max has implanted cloned embryos of himself in every user of Beautiful You products, and soon he’ll trigger them all to begin gestation.” She had the attention of the entire cathedral as she shouted, “The same nanobots that bring pleasure and pain to Max’s slaves, those same tiny robots will suppress the immune function that might otherwise reject these foreign fetuses. That army of microscopic robots will protect
and defend those fetuses so that hundreds of millions of fertile women will give birth to exact copies of Cornelius Linus Maxwell!”

By the end of her short speech Penny was screaming her words. Wildly waving her wedding bouquet about. As she fell silent, the assembled crowds stared at her in disbelief. Penny, in her fluffy, flouncy gown, waited for the reaction of outrage. She readied herself for Max to begin tormenting her with a few keystrokes. None of that happened.

The Baba turned clouded eyes on her. The old woman tilted her head quizzically and said, “What are you talking about, my dear? That’s not it at all.”

Somewhere, someone in the cavernous church giggled.

“Another word,” Max threatened, “and I’ll deliver more suffering than you people can imagine!”

Heedless, Baba Gray-Beard ventured, “The dress you’re wearing, Penny Harrigan, it was
her
dress twenty-five years ago. It’s the wedding gown Max’s long-dead wife wore when she was your exact age!” Her words echoed around the huge stone chapel. “Ask your groom why that dress is such a perfect fit!”

The dress had been an exact fit. From the first time Penny tried it on, the gown had felt as if it were made for her.

Before she could ponder this miracle another moment, Max fingered his device. Unseen, a satellite relayed the signal, and Penny felt a searing jolt of pain shoot through her. Likewise, every female wedding guest shrieked and slumped to the cold floor. Only the Baba remained upright, staring defiantly into Max’s outraged eyes. “Tell the girl,” she hissed. “She must know the destiny she was born to fulfill.”

“Never,” Max cried.

Penny was only vaguely aware that the Baba had closed the distance between herself and Maxwell. The two adversaries circled each other, the tuxedo-clad dandy and the emaciated
skeleton. Maxwell stashed the control box in the inside pocket of his tux jacket and raised both his empty hands menacingly, ready to lunge at the hag’s next words.

The bishop stood over Penny, blushing furiously as she wriggled at his feet, writhing in agony and sensual pleasure, near crazed, with a lunatic’s guttural yammering streaming from her mouth.

“You, little Penny,” the Baba shouted. “You must reflect his evil energy. It was no accident that you met Maxwell. Only you can defeat him!”

No sooner had she muttered those words than Max sprang forward, grabbing Baba Gray-Beard around her desiccated throat and saying, “Die, wicked sorceress!”

Even as she gasped for her next breath, the Baba said, “Look! Look in his notebook at a date nine months before you were born, Penny!” Her voice reduced to a garbled whisper, she said, “Look and see who he was seducing.…”

Penny rolled around in the fluff of her vast wedding dress. She could sense the nanobots scooting about in her veins. She wanted to slice her arteries open and strain her blood clean. The robots would never be at peace. She’d never be free of them. Maxwell’s little sentries were alive and inflicting their pain from the inside.

Her neck crushed in Max’s cold hands, the Baba was dying. After two centuries of coaching pilgrims to sexual enlightenment, the gentle yogi was expiring in the grip of her greatest pupil. Even as the hands throttled her windpipe, she croaked, “Child, you must rebound his energy. Channel it through yourself and return it with greater force!” She whispered, “No mirror is ever burned by the rays from even the hottest sun!”

To displace the assault of false pleasure, Penny concentrated on her close-knit family and their simple Lutheran faith. She savored the real friendship that had formed between herself
and Monique. Penny’s mind embraced everything she truly loved in the world. Butter brickle ice cream. Ron Howard. Richard Thomas. With steady meditating, Penny’s consciousness began to deflect the signals from Max’s control box. The teeming nanobots gradually trickled downward, crowding to a halt within her waiting pelvis.

Simultaneously, a shrill whistle filled the church. Faint at first, the sound grew in strength. The whistle increased to become a siren, a wailing of air-raid volume. The siren built to a bullhorn, so loud it threatened to scramble the brains of everyone present. The guests, the bishop, every person in the cavernous church clamped their hands over their ears and cowered in pain.

Penny was its source. Muffled only by her skirts and crinolines, the trumpeting sound was being emitted from between her legs. It echoed off the masonry walls. The towering stained-glass windows rattled. As trumpets had toppled the great walls of Jericho, thin cracks opened between the cathedral’s stones. A dust of mortar drifted down. As the sound built to thunder it exploded through her satin and petticoats, spraying sequins and seed pearls like shrapnel. Shredded lace flew like countless flakes of white confetti, exposing the seat of the bride’s power.

Penny focused on the love she felt for the great Baba, and the edges of her sex flared outward, blasting forth a huge noise. It blared, a sonic cannon. The blast extinguished the sanctuary candles.

Without warning, the cathedral’s great rose window exploded. Not outward. The window burst
inward
, pelting the wedding party with razor-sharp fragments of red, blue, and green glass, shattered by something flying bullet-fast from the direction of Yankee Stadium.

Like a lightning bolt … a ball of fire … a molten flaming
mass of latex and batteries shot across the vast length of the great sanctuary. With the force of a shotgun blast, this murderous rocket smote Max squarely in the tailored inseam of his designer formalwear. This searing-hot mortar round of burning personal care products, it tore into the groom’s private man-parts, doubling him in half at the waist and toppling him backward.

The centuries-old lamia was dead.

Maxwell, he’d been mortally wounded by a weapon from his own arsenal of space-age pleasure tools—an immolating phallus that had launched itself from the Promise Keepers’ bonfire! Blood flowed steadily from the torn crotch of his tuxedo. Penny didn’t need to look closer to know his genitals were obliterated. Like a character in some Ernest Hemingway book she’d been required to read in high school, his private junk was blown to bits by the blast. Baba Gray-Beard was dead and Max was dying.

The nanobots within her ceased their torment. Slowly Penny and the other women in the church struggled to their feet, blinking dazed eyes. They shook their disarrayed hair out of their faces and opened their purses to begin the long, difficult task of repairing their makeup. And their lives.

The frigid fingers of a dying hand closed around Penny’s ankle. It was Max, looking up at her with pleading eyes. His already pale face was bled paper-white, and his lips moved to form words. “Listen,” he said. “Look.” With his free hand he reached into his jacket pocket and produced a ragged scrap of newsprint. “For you,” he said, and held it for her to take.

Penny knelt and accepted it: a newspaper clipping dated
exactly thirty years ago, to the day. It had been saved from the
National Enquirer
. Prominently featured was a black-and-white photograph. It was grainy and faded by the years, but it was like looking into a mirror. It was her face, wearing the same veil and gown she now wore. It was a wedding announcement. Cornelius Linus Maxwell was to marry Phoebe Bradshaw. Stapled to that was a second newspaper article, an obituary dated exactly 136 days later. The young Mrs. Corny Maxwell had died from an allergic reaction to shellfish.