Turing & Burroughs: A Beatnik SF Novel (16 page)

“Unknown,” says Hopper. “Look within. Your skug is as well-connected as mine. One straw in the wind: our Gibraltar agents reports that my prowling hand chose to recruit a sailor from a nuclear submarine to be Turing’s shadow. A Ned Strunk?”

“Strunk is nothing,” I rap out. “A hayseed. Not worthy to be Alan’s friend.”

“
Beware, my lord, of jealousy; It is the green-eyed monster which doth mock.
” Hopper lays his tongue roguish in the corner of his mouth, then holds out his hand. We shake, letting our flesh merge for a second, with the bustle of the market all around, and a muezzin calling in the distance. Driss watch us, alert to ebb and flow of control.

Back home I stuff my manuscripts and figurines into a suitcase. Driss put on my other suit and fill a bag with food. He excited to be going to London. Perhaps we meet there on my return.

And now I’m writing you as we wait for our ferry. Everyone I see here is a skugger already—some with three eyes, some with lariat arms. It’s like we’re inside a cartoon. Where I’ve always wanted to be. Whooo!

As ever,

Bill

Chapter 9: Cops and Skuggers

Buried in the sand, Alan had a dream of Burroughs, speaking to him from within the spy-eye, oddly tender and wistful. Bill was coming to Palm Beach, just as Alan had hoped. Were they enemies—or in love?

And then Alan awoke to a police raid. A snarling German shepherd snapped at his eyestalks. Alan stiffened his tissues against the teeth, then transformed his slug shape into the copper-skinned Abby form. Perhaps the policemen would drop their initial impressions of Alan and Ned—it was, after all, wildly improbable to find a pair of giant slugs buried in the sand with their eyestalks sticking up.

“We’re terribly sorry,” cooed Alan, executing a womanly shimmy as he worked himself free of the sand and shrugged his dress into position. He held his shapely hands high in the air lest one of the police dogs snap at him again. Two cops and two dogs. “Is it unlawful to sleep on the beach?”

Meanwhile Ned, menaced by the second dog, was again wearing the body shape he’d copied from the bus boy.

“We’re surrendering, okay?” yelled Ned. He wiggled his legs in a strange way, as if marching in place. Abruptly the hounds stopped barking and lay down.

“Don’t you freaks try nothing cute!” called the shorter of the police officers, a plump man with a pale face and a smeary mustache. Although he was holding a pistol he seemed scared. “I’m Officer Norvell Dunn and you’ll do what I say. Put the bracelets on ‘em, Landers.”

“They’re disguised as a colored couple,” muttered the other cop, a tall, weedy man. “Like the squawkbox said.”

“These the ones,” agreed roly-poly Norvell. “You saw how they was a-doing when we got here. Could be they already spread the disease to our dogs. Hurry up and cuff ‘em, Landers, you long drink of piss. Make the arrest before the back-up gets here. So we get some credit.”

Plain-faced Landers addressed Ned without moving closer to him. “I’ll need to handcuff you and the girl,” he said. “We got word about you from—where was it again, Norvell? Morocco?”

“Don’t go tipping our hand,” scolded Norvell. He was holding his gun with both hands.

“Let me talk to them in my own way, Norvell,” said Landers, annoyed. “You’re the muscle but I’m the brains.”

“
I’m
the brains, nincompoop,” yelled Norvell.

“Oh, silly me,” said Landers with placid mockery. “I forgot.” He remained rooted at Norvell’s side.

“What all’s supposed to be wrong?” called Ned at Alan’s side. He’d dialed up his Southern accent.

“As if you didn’t know,” said lean Landers, dangling two pairs of cuffs. “You have some horrible disease that turns people into giant worms or whatnot. We saw what you looked like asleep. I wouldn’t want to touch you. I wonder—could you clip on these bracelets yourself?”

“No need to shackle us,” put in Alan, sweetening his voice, hoping to work his sexy-girl act. “We’ll submit quietly. No need for concern at all. This is merely a misunderstanding.” Sirens wailed in the distance.

All Alan needed to do was to touch the skittish bobbies. Perhaps he could rush them. Malleable as his flesh was, he could heal a bullet wound.

“She’s like some sly goblin in a fairy tale,” said Norvell, keeping his pistol firmly aimed. “How come you talk so fancy, girl? How about you show us a driver’s license? Pull it out slow and don’t be changing into no killer squid.”

“Cool it!” interposed Ned. “We’re locals. Me and my girlfriend Abby. We spent the night in the sand because Ab’s folks won’t let us sleep together. She grew up in the Caribbean, which is why she talks so high-tone.”

The policemen looked almost mollified. But now, struck by a reckless whim, Alan flipped his wrist and let his fingers dangle, rubbery and two feet long. “Oops!” he giggled. Let the games begin.

Alan felt sure they could best these bullying fools. Malleable as his flesh was, even a bullet at close range should be manageable.

“Oh hell,” said Landers, seeing the determination in Alan’s eyes. He drew out his own gun as well. “We need to finish them off, Norvell. I say we lock the two of ‘em in our car till the others come. And then pour on a few gallons of gas and burn the car.” The approaching sirens had risen to a fever pitch.

“Let’s say that’s my idea,” said Norvell, after a brief pause. “I get the credit.” He gestured at Alan with his gun. “You first. Walk to our vehicle. And, Landers, you sic those police dogs on them again.”

Alan and Ned exchanged a pulse of teep, and now Alan understood what Ned had done to the dogs. He’d sent tendrils from his feet, through the sand, and up into the animals’ paws. He’d pricked their flesh and skugged them. The slightest infusion of skug tissue was enough. Reaching out with his teep, Alan could see a grayscale wide-angle view of the scene through the eyes of the nearest dog.

Landers let out a sharp whistle, and the skugged dogs began a charade of barking and nipping at Alan and Ned. Gun at the ready, Landers backed towards the cops’ black and white station wagon and opened the rear door. Norvell stood to one side, his heavy pistol at the ready.

As if cowed by the dogs, Alan and Ned shuffled forward. But they were in teep synch with the dogs and with each other. Like a ballet. And now the dogs charged the policemen.

Ned sent a quick tentacle around Norvell’s thick waist—and let the tentacle burrow into the cop’s pale flesh. For his part, Alan lost a precious half-second watching Ned. And thus the shot from Landers’s gun caught Alan by surprise. The bullet shattered his right knee.

As Alan fell, he let his right shin and foot come fully free—and he sent his lower leg dancing across the sand to spring onto Landers’s face.

By the time the other police showed up, Alan and Ned had the situation well in hand. Alan had regrown his leg with no trouble at all, losing only a little fat from around his waist. He and Ned were sitting in the rear seat of the cop’s station-wagon, as if in captivity. The dogs rested peacefully in a cage in back. And the now-comradely officers were standing outside.

“These ain’t the ones,” the skugged Norvell announced to the newcomers. “A false alarm like last night. These just a couple of vags. Landers and me gonna run ‘em in anyway.”

After a few minutes of tiresome American witticisms, the police dispersed. Norvell started the cop car and drove slowly down the West Palm Beach streets.

He glanced back at Alan and Ned, his pudgy face wreathed in a smile. “Being a skugger feels pretty damn good, don’t it?” he said. “Its like I’m a touch sharper than before. I can’t say as I’m sorry you infected us. So how can we help you on your way?”

“We need wheels,” said Ned.

“We have a mint 1955 Pontiac Catalina in the impound lot back of the West Palm substation,” said Landers. “Norvell and me took it off a dope dealer last month.”

“You can run hog wild,” said Norvell.

The four of them burst into a round of laughter—and the dogs joined in. Alan got perhaps too deeply involved in the laughing and yipping. He was modulating his sounds in frequency and amplitude, savoring the patterns of beats that arose as the joyful vibrations overlapped and bounced within the small cabin of the car, drawing the laughter out for as long as he could. Alan was no longer alone

There were only four other police at the small substation. For the sake of appearances Ned and Alan squeezed their flexible hands into those cuffs that Landers had. Leaving the dogs in the back of their wagon, Landers and Norvell herded the “captives” inside, talking roughly. It might have been okay, but Ned didn’t like attitude of the booking officer at the desk inside the station, who referred to Ned as “low-tide Black trash.”

In response, Ned grew one of his fingers out like a vine and skugged the white-haired officer on the spot. Exhilarated by the wild energy, the old cop let out a cracked hoot yelp and wriggled his arms like serpents.

“Did you see that?” yelled one of the other cops, drawing his gun. “All mutants!”

“You all right, Zeke?” a second cop called to the ecstatic convert at the desk. He drew out his gun and stood beside his partner. “Holy hell, that mutant-woman’s arm is sproutin’ like a kudzu vine—”

Growing rapid tentacles from his hand, Alan zapped both the cops before they could fire. But the fourth policeman, the substation’s captain, had been been concealed in an office to one side. He appeared in his doorway and shot Ned in the ribs.

This was more serious than being hit in the knee. Ned curled on the floor, focusing into himself to put his body back in repair. In a state of panic, Norvell fired his pistol at the Captain, hitting the man smack in the middle his face. The cop went down in a nauseating explosion of gore.

So now there was a corpse in the substation. And seven skuggers. Alan helped Ned to his feet. Urged on by their inner skugs, the cops gathered around their dead captain, lying crooked in a pool of blood.

“So long, Captain Jackson,” said one of them, with a hint of mockery in his voice.

Working on instinct, the skugger cops sent tangles of roots from their feet, sinking the tendrils into the body of the fallen Captain, rapidly absorbing his flesh and blood.

“Like mangroves growin’ on a dead alligator,” said Norvell.

Meanwhile a woman’s voice was quacking from the phone on the dead Captain’s desk.

“Damn,” said Landers. “His wife. She heard all this.”

He went over and hung up the phone. And then he turned his arm into a bouquet of tendrils that he ran along the Captain’s desk, wall, rug, and ceiling like a feather-duster, cleaning up all signs of the execution.

“Captain should just have let us skug him,” said Norvell. “Not that I’ll miss him none.”

“I’ll be skugging Captain Jackson’s wife in half an hour,” said Landers, starting for the door. “I’ll nip the trouble in the bud.”

“I’ll come too,” said Norvell. “Captain’s wife’s a looker.”

The five policemen burst into merry hooting, and the skugger dogs chimed in with howls.

“Don’t forget our new car,” put in Ned.

An hour later, Ned and Alan were back in the posh part of Palm Beach, driving their lavish populuxe car along the ocean boulevard. It was a mild, day, brilliantly sunny. The liberated Pontiac Catalina was a two-tone, maroon on the bottom and cream on top. America at her best.

By way of avoiding further confrontations with Southern police, Alan and Ned had their teep blocks up. And they’d switched their skin pigment back to the pinky-tan shade called “white.” But Ned still wore the busboy’s facial features, and Alan had kept his Abby look, although he’d plumped up his lips and breasts a bit. He was hoping to stun Vassar with his sexual allure.

“Now we’re all legal,” said Ned. The skugged cops had issued them driver’s licenses made out to Ned and Abby Smith, as well as a vehicle registration slip in Ned Smith’s name. “My keen skug-amplified mind noticed something about the number on our license plate,” Ned added. “Did you notice, mister math prof?”

“Oh, let’s not talk about numbers,” said Alan, practicing his Abby role. “Not on our
honeymoon
, Neddie dear.” He put on a simpering smile.

“I just hope those pigs didn’t find some way to double-cross us,” said Ned. “And what if that Captain’s wife calls in the FBI?”

“One assumes that Norvell and Landers have dealt with her in a timely manner,” said Alan, going back to his usual style of speech. “He peered in the car’s side mirror, adjusting the shade of his lips. “You’re so pessimistic, Ned. This is a glorious adventure.”

“I’m the one who got gut-shot,” said Ned. “Not you. If they chew us up with machine-guns, we might not bounce back. Who’s to say that eye in the sky won’t send a fresh wave of killer pigs?”

“I think the eye is gone,” said Alan, remembering a bit of his dream about Burroughs this morning. Had Bill really said he was coming here? Did Bill actually care about Alan that much? It was good that Alan had left a messenger skuglet in the Burroughs parents’ home.

“I don’t care what you say, I bet the cops will be on us like stink on shit,” said Ned gloomily. “We’re public enemies. We started a wave of mutation. And we killed a police captain.”