MEMP’IS

BOOK SIX – “MEMPHIS, TENNESSEE”

(Sunday {Venuday}, January 7, 2035, and After)

CHAPTER SEVENTY-FIVE – “I GOT STUNG”

"You don't know that he's behind that wall," a voice scolds. Sergeant Chester Aspid... the Corporal intuits, draped over the hard edge of a bathtub, brushing plaster shards from his face. There is blood, too, but no pain…

"Keb 'im!"

"Chet's right, Lieutenant." The voice of reason... no, not her, of Germany Smith. "If you blow Norlin up, you might damage the... you know... might even destroy it!"

"Keb th' Veronica, and keb kebbin' Norlin," Kruppe sneers, "that train's already left the station. Skark's dead... who's gonna test that old log and get the fex we need to fix the King?"

"Who says we need Skark to test the Veronica?"

Germany's remark brings up the Lieutenant short, even in the act of removing another grenade from his box.

"We got him!" and, hobbling from the bathroom, plucking things off his back, Norlin figures that the voice of Intelligence in the other room is talking about either the Gray or Blue Man, whomever hasn't been eaten by phibes. And it's probably so - they can throw a white coat over a monkey, over kebbin' Paul Parchette!... and, when some dressed-up doctor jackets Elvis an L.C. and Reason, or another of those chattering maidens, writes him out of history (or, at least, the Vitreopaedia), well, then there really will be no more music, and the hegemony of the fexxers will be complete. Or so, Norlin thinks, plucking another of those damn little red kebs off in the act of trying to slither under his armpit and dig tentacles in, shooting whatever paralyzing poison it possesses deep into his bloodstream - dreams to make him forget pain, pain - and all the fexxers. He holds it between thumb and forefinger, wondering… insanely, no doubt… how it would taste, what would happen if he put it in his mouth. Or, simply, if he squeezed until it popped. Bad idea, the answer comes - not from his head, nor heart, but from the fex in the purse against his hip. Careful not to make a sound, he drops the shuddering red blob into the water, makes a hundred-eighty degree turn on hands and knees, so as to face the blasted room and the police peering inwards.

"Fine, but no more grenades. Go ahead and shoot up the whole kebbin' mausoleum, if you must," he hears Germany scoff, "but the object remains to recover the fex, not destroy it..."

"I outrank you..." Kruppe complains, but, if there is a reply, Norlin can't hear it. Because it is dark inside Graceland and light without - even if the light is opaque, fading and swirling in stinking currents of fog - he can see the police swarming towards the front of the boat as Captain Sykes attempts to tie it up to the rotted, rose-mottled dock, slipping and cursing. Another thing drops from the ceiling... splat!... blanketing Norlin's forehead; he tears it away before the little tentacles can forage outwards out and, maybe, jab an eyeball. While the Corporal jitterbugs in the King's bathroom, apparently wrestling with himself in a shambling, comic waltz - sometimes visible to the police through the door, sometimes not - one of the officers takes a premature step outside the boat onto the deck's rotten planks. There is a rotten woodcrack and then he plummets straight down - one foot in the boat, one in the water - and his groin's impaled upon the cruiser's rail. He sways backwards, momentarily, then falls forward. The Misissippi erupts in a new melee of thrashing, starving phibes scrabbling for meat to eat; the officer turns his face up in a gesture of pleading and a saurian jaw grasps the back of his skull and squeezes until it ruptures with a sickening crunch, a cataract of blood and brainmatter spraying the boat, the dock and the police.

"Jesk'ball!" nine surviving Trouble Factory voices curse as one.

Norlin finally pries the thing off and flings it against a wall, shakes his hand to ward off creeping stupefaction and, unseen by the quarrelling, gesticulating police, hobbles back out of the bathroom and through the bedroom door. The stairwell to Elvis Presley's attic beckons at his immediate right, there is another stairwell to the left leading downwards, wholly submerged, and, at the end of the corridor, three doors, all closed. One to the left, another to the right, and one dead ahead. And what awaited - the lady, or the tiger! He passes the drowned stairwell and pushes at the left door, it opens grudgingly... eddies of filthy water lapping at his knees... it seems to be a sort of office. There is a barred, rose-throttled window far off at the northern wall, through which only dim light penetrates… falling upon a desk, some shelves and chairs, and the upper half of a floor-safe, opposite the door, next to the dock on the western wall of Graceland, is another bathroom. Half of a toilet in plain view beckons, unobstructed by roses, things or the Trouble Factory and Norlin steps forward, whereupon the Veronica in his pocket begins to throb again... vibrating against his hip with almost intelligent urgency until he steps back, fist on the handle, to close the door respectfully.

Tigers are too rough...

Which is when Lieutenant Kruppe, silhouetted in pusyellow, milky sunbeams streaming from the attic door, draws his prancer and plugs him in the gut.

After the eager-beaver policeman met his fate, Captain Sykes had backed the cruiser up, then plowed forward, ramming the crumbling dock while two officers secured a rope around the windowframe, allowing the Lieutenant, as nominal officer of rank, to blunder through, a gun in either fist and a fistful of grenades bulging in his pockets. Behind him, Germany Smith adjusts his alpine hat, then steps daintily down into the knee-high cloaca, wincing as the filth overlaps his rubber waders, seeping into his trousers. Eric Ice and Aspid follow, then the four surviving patrolmen as Sykes waits in the prow with a gun in his fist and another box of grenades at his feet, daring any phibe to attempt to crawl into the boat with him.

"What is this fex?" Norlin hears Eric snarl, swatting at one of the things that has dropped down his neck, leaving its comrades massing on the ceiling and walls. "Cobwebs?"

There is a lot more of that... crashing and swearing... but Norlin is bleeding and in shock. He slumps back against the great, dusky door at the center of the corridor; a target, a bullseye or crossed X all but scrawled across the front of his shirt. Kruppe, however, is of a mood to gloat first, then shoot - it has been a wretched, wretched day, and the cause of it all must be made to pay… to pay slowly, and with interest… before the Lieutenant finishes the renegade off, pries the Veronica from his cold, dead fingers and returns to Jatesland and a hero's welcome.

"Norlin... Norlin!" Kruppe smiles, almost clucking with feigned compassion. "What the keb were you thinking... mixing yourself up with perpetrators, going against the Trouble Factory. What about your father? Your family..."

Through the pain and nausea, the Corporal suspects that Captain Modesty's surviving lackey would like nothing better than to fire up a cigar and punctuate his jubilation with lungfuls of illicit smoke. Because the Lieutenant is such a big man... well, fat, to tell the truth... the rest of the posse is backed up behind him, and all of them are busy swatting at the falling things, now, as he soliloquizes on in the bedroom doorway, oblivious to their peril.

"I mean... thinking you could finagle us with made-up fables about criminal art and a pot of sticky protein, not to mention your imaginary friend on the Solar Commission. Really..."

"Didn't... didn't Henry Hat impress on you the importance of the vissure?

Kruppe scratches his head, something that ought not be done with the tip of a prancer... with, or without, a pocketful of grenades...

"Who?"

"Henry Hat. The suncop?" Norlin brays, feeling his blood as it seeps through his fingers. There is no pain - there ought to be pain, he realizes, it's the fault of those things. "That man in yellow... you spoke to him at that meeting the Captain held, Monday, the one in Room 2176?"

"2176?" parrots a genuinely puzzled Kruppe, drawing the skimmer with his left hand and training both guns, now, on the rebel Corporal. "There's no room 2176 at the Trouble Factory… we did hold a meeting, Monday, in 2174, where you were called in to account for yourself, but all that happened was that the Captain and Clem Clarke... Germany, too... warned you to do your job and stop trying to make an impression by sticking your schnozz into fex that it shouldn't be nosin' round in. Trying to worm your way back up out of C-Squad. Boy!" and the Lieutenant's smile fairly lit up the ruined hallway of Graceland, "C-Squad's gonna look like Heaven once we get done doin' what we're gonna do to you. And that's assuming you even make it outta here alive!"

Somewhere in the bedroom behind him, screams resound, loud enough to be heard above the generic tumult of curses and thrashings... "Get out of the kebbin' doorway, these kebs are biting!"

"Shut up!" Kruppe roars back, over his shoulder. "What the k'ball have you been up to, Norlin... Incident Reports from places you're not supposed to be at, ravings about the Solar Commission, not to mention Stimwood and the Depository? When you went down to Stimwood, the other day, we figured that you'd decided to do the right thing and check in for a rest, a long rest. Shoulda stayed there, boy..."

"Out of the kebbin' way!" someone roars, it's Eric Ice, and, as the Lieutenant turns to quash the malcontent, Norlin lunges forward to open the door opposite Graceland's office... to find himself staring at a garbage chute, rising from the waters. A book floats by… face down, cover illegible, pages a barely cohesive pulp...

"Go ahead... jump!" Kruppe has holstered the prancer and picked up a grenade in his left hand, skimmer still in his right - red laser trained on the Corporal's heart. "Nothin' down there but garbage, more fexxy water and phibes. So let's do this easy, take the fex from your pocket..." and he juggles the grenade as he points the gun at the side of the Corporal's bedraggled jacket, where Frank Desperate's facsimile of Reason's bag makes an unseemly, visible bulge, "...hand it over. Let's all get out of here, get you to a doctor, too, and maybe we can see about getting you a nice, warm room in Stimwood instead of a place on Lady G's scaffold, which is where you really belong. How about it, Norlin... three hots and a cot? Hear you've already made friends there, so how about doing the smart thing, for once in your life... hey! Keb!"

So many things have been pumping so much narcotic venom into the police that even the dimmest officers sense the wrongness of waiting for orders, and they swarm from the bedroom… howling and slapping at air… knocking the Lieutenant to one side, affording Norlin opportunity to open the central door and reel into a shadowy room that he intuits... even as he falls forward onto a bed of black fungi and dark, green mucous... must be the King's own bedroom. His lair, his womb... peanut butter, bacon and banana sandwiches, porn, pills… and, just beyond another threshold...

His throne…

The Veronica pulses appreciatively in his pocket.

And the red beam of the lasersight on the Lieutenant's skimmer zigzags across his chest, then careens up the wall - emitting little puffs of rotten plaster behind the peeling, putrid, black plastic ultrasuede.

In the hallway, an enraged Kruppe turns to club one of the escaping policemen with his gun, but there are too many of them, and they are half-blinded - boiling over with pain and rage… half-maddened, half-sedated with red thing-poison surging through their veins. They form an enormous, blind palisade of fighting, clawing, sighing police-flesh, rolling in foot-deep swill that covers the King's hallway. Hordes of red devils leap from the gyrating, shrieking cops to their commander… fleas from one dying plague-rat to another...

Norlin rolls across Presley's bed, popping mushrooms as he does; damp, black puffs of smoke swirling up into the murky, heavy miasma where loud, lurid faces animated by sputtering spotlights and crisscrossing laserbeams shriek and grimace from the ceiling...

Not things, nor police, but…

The news!

And Norlin remembers something about Baratarian vidsignals wobbling over the border into East and WestAmi - also, that the corporation that took over Graceland had rewired all the satellite disk electronics to thwart and survive time, trauma and the k'ball…

"...latest on the Jatesaneum when we return," smirked Mister Simple, "when the coverage you can come on... count on... continues..."

On the King's ancient screen, the ancient, pitted face of Spitta Stennett looms, chancred lips twisted in scorn. "Nice one, jateshole..."

"Spitta's only holding down a place until Pamela Herring can be brought up as permanent replacement for Honey," the anchorman lashes back. "She was willing to undergo the operation. Come Kingsday, Mister Herring will be in that chair," he points, "and Spitta, well, her only exposure to vidcom will be monitoring a surveillance cam at Sixth and Abraham Northwest for MAU..."

"Mister Herring?" Spitta snarls, face brittle as glass. "O what a fishy web we weave, when first we practice... Triple J said that. He's not so smart..."

There is a terrible pain shooting through Norlin's hip as he rolls over the petrified fex in his pocket, driving out the lesser cramps of his limbs and stomach and, as he slides off Presley's mycoid pallet... flopping on his belly, face-down in reeking muck... the rotting, rusted chain of the King's television finally gives way. Two decades and change after the K'ball!... it plunges downward onto the slithey, slippery bed and, almost as if debating with itself the intensity of shock, waits a full three seconds before Spitta and Simple explode in a shower of sizzle and sparks. Norlin's arms leap involuntarily to cover the back of his neck while, in the hall, Germany Smith (face poxed with red things, sweating and swearing) slaps at men and water with Sykes' fishing pole like a jockey whipping his tiring nag.

"Get up! Get up!... you kebs... he's getting away! He's headed to the King's crapper!"

Eric Ice, disengaged from the brawling pile, hunches back against the wall next opposite the open door to Graceland's attic, which he regards, now, with narrowing cash-register eyes. "Relax, Chief... ain't nowhere the keb can go, nothin' around for miles but water, phibes and junk. Y'know what that kebbin' Presley used to call his fexxer, Germs? The kebbin' Lounge Room, ferjessake! - like it was one of those place, y'know, where old zooks went to drink cocktails and pick up a donna? Tho' th'only cocktails Elvis used to down was cocktails full of pills. Relax! We'll get him... oww!"

The barbed tip of the fishing pole flicks his cheek, draws blood... but, at least, snaps one of the red things off Eric's face.

"Idiot! If he gets to a toilet, with a connection to the world, outside," Germany Smith declaims, "he means to flush that damn turd down, and we're fexxed..."

Eric scratches his head, hadn't thought of that.

But the Blue Man... it had been the Gray Man eaten by phibes while his confederate was being hauled onto the surviving patrolboat... kneels in Graceland's baleful water, and says...

"Sir? Sir!... with all due respect, there's no way that the plumbing here, or anywhere within two hundred miles of this place, could've survived the k'ball. If Corporal Norlin tries to get rid of the Veronica, it'll just float back up, and we can take it."

"Do you know that for sure?" Germany Smith fires back. "Would you be willing to put your career... your life... on the line in defense of that supposition? Well?"

"I... I..." and, as he has always done, the Blue Man looks around for Dr. Skark, to give him his answer.

But, there's no more Skark.

"I thought so," scoffs the Intelligence Chief, but he is brushed aside in the act by the four remaining patrolmen fleeing Lisa Marie's room of the round bed and round, red things... slapping and gesticulating like men being assailed by bees. One bolts, screaming, into the flooded locker room - another plunges over the tip of the stairway down towards Graceland's submerged ground floor, flailing and thrashing in the reeking waters... and, then, there are only two.

"Get back on course!" Germany Smith grasps Kruppe - the worst quality about the red things is that the pain of their stings should be intense, but it's otherwise; the Lieutenant is slack-jawed, rewarding Smith with an idiot's smile and a shake of the gun in one fist, a little bounce of his grenade in the other.

"Got 'im, Germs!"

"Not yet, you keb!" Germany swears and tugs Eric and Aspid behind him, shoving the both of them towards the door of Elvis' bedroom, barking: "Finish him off!"

But Eric resists, lingering in the corridor, peering through the office door, which has creaked open under pressure from the swirling water... "There's a safe in there!"

And one of the surviving officers trains his skimmer on the other, who is shrieking "Get it off! Get it off!" He fires, but his aim is wobbly - the bolt of congealed light plugs both the thing and the patrolman's neck and hundreds... thousands... more begin emerging from the crannies of the walls and ceiling to feast on the spouting blood.

Norlin, on his hands and knees, crawls across the threshold to the King's bathroom.

For the conclusion of “Memp’is”, order the serial on 3 ¼” disk, HERE!

The serial begins again, July 2^nd, with Episode 1, “Big Boss Man”!