Turing & Burroughs: A Beatnik SF Novel (23 page)

As gently as possible, Alan skugged Cornelius, and the young man readily agreed to lead them down into the caverns for the night. He rustled up five foam mats and sleeping bags for them—apparently it wasn’t unheard of to have sleepovers in the cave.

As if by reflex, Cornelius gave them a bit of a tour along the way, turning the subterranean lights on and off as they passed. Alan was charmed by the names of the mineral formations: the striped beige draperies were cave bacon, the knobbly translucent growths were popcorn, the wrinkled, doughy slumps were flowstone.

They halted their progress beside a creamy, motionless cascade known as Moon Milk Falls.

“This is the perfect spot to camp,” said Cornelius, laying his mat beside Alan’s. “Dry and with sweet ventilation.” Shortly thereafter he turned out the lights.

In the intense, velvety dark, Cornelius and Alan deliciously made love—ignoring the others’ ability to hear them and to teep them. The others, as it happened, were
not
having sex tonight. Eventually Alan slept, falling into dreams of flight—with the ghost of boyhood flame Chris Morcom flitting along ahead of him.

In the morning Cornelius led them back the way they’d come, shyly holding Alan’s hand. As a precaution, they put up their teep blocks well before they reached the surface.

“Some of those bulges look bigger now than on the way in,” said Susan, merrily rolling her eyes at Alan

“A stalagmite could take a hundred thousand years to grow,” said Ned, who was a bit slow this morning.

Alan briefly let himself imagine that the tingling dark night by the Moon Milk Falls had indeed lasted for a hundred thousand years. What brave new world might they encounter when they emerged?

But outside the cave, it was still raining, still 1955. Eight in the morning, wet and gloomy. As a parting kindness, Cornelius brushed Alan’s cheek with his lips. A sweet goodbye. The low, dripping clouds seemed close enough to touch.

Soaked to the skin, Ned, Vassar, Alan and Susan motored down the hill to Gormly. The plan was to get breakfast at the Old Gib, and ask around about whether the police had passed through during the night. Perhaps Alan would phone Roland Gill’s office to check for messages. And, depending what they learned, they might strike out along the back roads—not that any of them other than Ned knew of Alan’s secret goal to reach Los Alamos, New Mexico.

Things felt wrong as soon as they coasted into Gormly. There was absolutely no traffic in either direction—and no people on the wet streets. They pulled up by the Old Gib diner. The place was deserted, with a CLOSED sign on the door.

“I’ll try the phone again,” said Alan, hopping out of the car.

Upon ringing Agent Gill’s New Orleans number, Alan heard a new voice, cruel and mocking, not at all the same as before.

“Is this ‘Old Gib’?” said the stranger, before Alan could even speak. “I’m Dick Hosty. You’ve reached the end of your trail, professor. Just like Roland Gill.” The sound of the phone line was false, echoing, empty. A local tap?

Hands trembling, Alan hung up. The wretched, empty town felt like a stage set.

And now, sudden as a shout, a helicopter clattered in through the steady rain, hovering directly above them, a chopper with a full bubble canopy and a tail made of struts. From the passenger seat, a man was aiming a machine-gun at them, a heavy weapon with Swiss-cheese holes in the barrel’s cladding. The first downward salvo, destroyed the Buick’s engine.

All around them, as in a terrible dream, the streets came alive with flashing police cars. Nestled among them like a queen among drones was the dreadful shape of the long white ambulance—bearing Landers the skugsniffer within.

One man was in charge of the milling chaos—a tall Texan in boots and a ten-gallon hat, standing high in the back of a pickup truck, pointing, gesturing, and talking into a jury-rigged phone. With sudden conviction, Alan knew this was Dick Hosty, the man he’d just talked to. As if in confirmation, the behatted man pointed straight at Alan, wiggling his thumb like the hammer of a pistol.

The cops and agents opened fire. There were no skuggers among them—only the sullen, resentful Landers, sealed in his bottle in the rear of Hosty’s ambulance.

The phone booth’s sides collapsed in shards; the Buick’s windshield and side-windows were punctured and cobwebbed.

In the car, the single-minded Susan, she bent over her stash of acousmatic tapes, rapidly pressing them against her belly one by one, burying them in her skugger flesh.

Backing up to the car, Alan held his hands high in a gesture of surrender. The unrelenting rain was running down his neck and into his shirt. Ned climbed out of the car, and then Vassar, with his arm around Susan. Vassar was bleeding from his shoulder.

“You can still heal yourself,” Alan called to Vassar, “Just focus, and you can grow the wound together.” Alan called to him.

Vassar stationed himself in front of Susan, wanting to protect her. And dear Ned did the same for Alan.

“We’re at the end of the road,” Ned told Alan, his voice calm. “Remember me if you make it outta here, man. We had a good run.”

“Maybe—maybe we can skug these bobbies,” said Alan. “Dear Ned.”

Two armored agents were striding towards them from Hosty’s pickup, each of them wearing a backpack and carrying a gun-like metal wand. Flamethrowers! In teeped synchronization, Alan and Ned grew tendrils from their hands and ran them along the ground and into the legs of the advancing executioners.

But it was fruitless. The two cops had been vaccinated. From a skugger’s point of view, their flesh was as infertile as glazing putty. There was no way to instill a symbiotic skug.

Hollering in fury, the agents pressed the triggers on their short-barreled wands and—here came the end—the nozzles blossomed with long tongues of flame. Crouching and moving closer, the killers played the cascade of burning liquid across Ned and across Vassar, moving the flames faster than the men could run away. Alan and Susan would be next.

Hosty’s riflemen were firing with brutal precision. They knocked out Vassar’s and Ned’s legs from beneath them. Another shot drilled a hole in Alan’s thigh. Vassar and Ned were screaming, their telepathic signals were horrible in the last degree.

Alan lurched over to Susan and manhandled her into the slight amount of shelter that lay the far side of the Buick. The helicopter remained directly above them, but for the moment they were shielded from the rifles and the flames.

Alan could teep the dying emanations of Vassar’s and Ned’s minds. The sensations were unfathomable, moving beyond pain and into a curious ecstasy. All the circuits blown, the networks curling inwards, the sense receptors gone.

“Save Vassar, you bastard!” said Susan, weeping and shaking Alan by the shoulders. “Can’t you feel it too? Go out there and save him.”

But there was no use. Alan lay down flat in the gravel beside the Buick, working on his leg. Peering through under the car, he could see Vassar and Ned very clearly. They were charred stick figures now, their limbs waving in a ghastly, insect-like parody of human life, their teep signals coming from a purer and calmer place. The flamethrowers took a pause, their first task done.

“So horrible,” said Alan, his voice catching. “I loved them.”

“Vassar was a gentleman all along. In his own way. I should have told him that.” Susan had flattened herself by Alan’s side. Suddenly her voice rose an octave. “Oh god, Alan, look now—look, look, look—I can see Vassar’s soul!”

Faint patterns of lines were visible above their beloved companions’ charred skulls. Alan couldn’t see them straight on, he had to look a little to one side, picking them up in his peripheral vision. Above Ned was an intricate polyhedron with faintly glowing edges, as if modeled from pastel neon tubes. Dear Ned and his love of math.

And above Vassar was a plump glowing shape like a thickened plate—hard to make out what it was. The forms drifted upwards, just barely visible, mysterious and promising. Souls? Who could say. By now they’d moved beyond the range of view allowed by Alan’s position—lying on his stomach, peering though the narrow space beneath a car.

“Kill the other two skuggers!” Hosty was yelling, his hoarse, vindictive voice clear against the splash and hiss of the rain. “Do it now!”

Alan made his arm very thin and long, like a spider’s leg. He grew his arm steadily upwards through the buffeting air-currents of the helicopter’s prop wash, focusing all his attention upon the task. Meanwhile, on the ground, the men with the flamethrowers were circling around the side of the Buick.

High in the air, Alan’s hand reached into the open door of the hovering chopper. He sank his branching fingers into the bodies of the pilot and his gunman. Blessedly these two hadn’t been vaccinated. Sighing with relief, Alan skugged them.

“Hold all fire,” bellowed the pilot through the helicopter’s loudspeaker. “Hold fire, Agent Hosty!” Dropping rapidly from the air, the clattering copter thudded down in the lee of the Buick—right beside Alan and Susan.

The cops and FBI agents hadn’t yet grasped what was happening. The skugging process was very new to everyone—and Alan’s upward-reaching arm had been so thin as to be invisible in the heavy rain. The men with the flamethrowers drew back, faces stolid, awaiting further orders, imagining things were proceeding according to some official plan. For the moment, even Agent Hosty had fallen still.

With a crisp salute, the gunman from the helicopter disembarked, bearing his heavy machine-gun, which was trailed by a belt of bullets leading back to an ammo box on the copter’s floor. Silently the barrel swayed left and right, as if defying anyone to challenge them.

Moving sullenly, as if in custody, Alan and Susan shuffled aboard the copter, Alan got the passenger seat, and Susan squeezing in between Alan and the pilot. The engine sound rose to a frantic roar. The skugged gunman from the chopper handed Alan the machine-gun and stepped away.

Alan broke into a wild grin as the chopper lifted off. He nudged the pilot, pointing his chin at the ambulance. “I want to shoot that!” he cried.

“You want to watch the kick on that Browning,” admonished the pilot. He was a hatchet-faced, olive-skinned man with a black crewcut. “Try to dance with the thing. My name’s Naranjo. It means juicy orange.”

As the chopper leaned and circled, the policemen around the ambulance became uneasy. Dick Hosty began yelling orders again. One of his guards took aim at the chopper with his rifle. Leaning from the copter’s door, Alan fired a fusillade towards Hosty and his men, sending the bullies scrambling for shelter.

And now Alan had the ambulance in the machine-gun’s sights. His mind was running at high speed, watching for snipers, correcting for the helicopter’s motion, planning the bullets’ downward trajectory. With his arms poised like springs, he pressed the trigger.

The Browning bucked and jabbered like a live animal. The raindrops sizzled on the cooler-jacket around its barrel. Alan poured round after round into the bland, eggshell-white roof of the ambulance. Hosty’s men were firing upwards. Fractures webbed the chopper’s bubble-shaped windshield. Susan was making herself as small as possible, her eyes wide with fear. And now, oh no, a sudden blot of red appeared on her chest.

Alan exhorted Susan to heal herself—and kept on strafing the cops. Naranjo threw the helicopter into a tighter gyre. Alan poured still more fire into the rear of the evil ambulance—and finally the thing split apart. Its gas tank exploded, and a crooked ball of fire engulfed the foul cargo in the rear.

As the chopper slewed away, Alan had a final glimpse of the misshapen Landers twitching in the flames. Another victim in the war against the skugs. As innocent, in his own way, as poor Ned and Vassar. Alan sighed.

And now his attention returned to the helicopter’s cabin. Rain was dripping in through the bullet holes in the canopy. Susan was bent forward, intent on healing the gunshot wound in her chest. Down below, Hosty was trying to follow them in a Jeep—but soon the chopper was alone above the cattle range, with a trackless wasteland of rocks coming up.

“Are you coping?” Alan asked Susan. “Can I help?”

“I’m patching my heart,” said Susan with a tight little sob. “Knitting it up. So crazy weird. Anyone else would be dead. And I’ve still got all those tapes down in my belly.”

“Nobody’s really explained to me what’s going on,” said the pilot. “What exactly did you do to me back there, Turing? With that long-arm finger-poke of yours?”

“I made you a skugger,” said Alan. “Gave you a symbiote. Like Susan and me. We have telepathy and we can shapeshift. That’s why Susan can heal her wound. We’re lucky.”

“
Lucky
?” exclaimed Susan, her face a stark mask of grief. “You’re killing us all! Ruining our lives. Poor Vassar! You thought he was just a toy to pick up and use. He was a man. He was my man. I want your horrible skug out of my body!”

“I’m with you on that,” said Naranjo. “I don’t like somebody reaching into me and changing me.” He glared at Alan. “And now I have to help you whether I want to or not. So where you want to go?”

“There,” said Alan, pointing northwest. “I’d like to make it to the northern part of New Mexico.”

“You’re talking about a five hour flight in my whirlybird,” said Naranjo. “And they’ll be sending planes after us. Fighter jets with radar.”