Jim Morrison's Adventures in the Afterlife (20 page)

“And what happens when the rubes get confused?”

“The rubes stop bidding.”

“And if they stop bidding?”

“We stop selling.”

“And if we stop selling?”

“We die in agony.”

“Now do you see why you shouldn’t attempt to think?”

The assistant stared at his sandals. He seemed to be praying that Fat Ari had finished upbraiding him, but the gods of his choice had betrayed him. Fat Ari still glared down. Semple had noticed that all of Fat Ari’s entourage seemed to be shorter than he was. “So what are you going to do now?”

The assistant didn’t fall into this trap. “I don’t know, boss. What am I going to do now?”

“You’re going to take this piece of worthless protein up to Dr. M’s as fast as you can, and you’re going to get her branded.”

The assistant nodded eagerly. “I am. Right away.”

“Once she’s branded and she has a price tag, she can legitimately call herself merchandise and we can start all over again. By their prices shall ye know them.”

The assistant continued to nod. “I’ll have her branded right away.”

At the first use of the word “branded,” Semple’s every instinct of self-preservation jangled for her to do something. The third time it was repeated, she spoke without thinking. “I can’t be branded. I’d have to get a whole new body.”

Fat Ari didn’t even look at her. “Keep quiet.”

The assistant frowned. “Even if we get it done right now, she’ll still be groggy from the anesthetic when she hits the runway.”

“So do it without anesthetic.”

Semple’s horror couldn’t stay silent. “No!”

Fat Ari looked at her this time. “You be quiet. You have nothing to say in the matter.”

“I’m not being branded!”

Even the assistant seemed to be on her side. “That would be a punitive branding.”

Fat Ari swung back on him. “So?”

“It’s beyond the bounds of our authority.”

Fat Ari’s eyes were dangerous. “There are no bounds to my authority when it’s two hours to air.”

“She still might not be able to handle the runway.”

“She’d be conscious, wouldn’t she? Run her as a submissive in bondage.”

Unable to think of anything else but to play the hysterical slave, Semple fell to her knees, grabbed hold of Fat Ari’s robe, and began to scream. “You can’t brand me! It’s impossible! You can’t brand me like a steer!”

Fat Ari curtly shook himself loose. The act was an utter failure. “Get security. Gag her if you have to.”

“But we’d need paperwork for a punitive branding. The doctor could get difficult if we just march her in there.”

“Then you will simply remind Doc Mengele of what he owes me for the last two sets of twins.”

“The medical examination is nonnegotiable. It is required of all life-forms who board our vessels.”

Jim squared his shoulders and drew himself up to his full height. So far, the aliens had been having things too much their own way. The time was more than right for Jim to start asserting himself. He
didn’t know if two skinny, yard-high aliens could be intimidated by his greater height and mass, but it was worth a shot and also about the only thing he had left. “I’ve learned that most things are negotiable, given sufficient motivation.”

The Bogart alien and the robot doctor alien stood in the single spotlight, making no attempt to approach or back away. Their huge, enigmatic eyes were directly on Jim, and they didn’t look intimidated in the slightest. “That is exactly the kind of remark we have come to expect from Earthlings.”

“It is?”

The Bogart alien took a drag on a cigarette that wasn’t there. “He’s right, pal, you’re a bunch of natural-born troublemakers.”

“We are?”

“Your statement had all the properties of the prelude to a threat.”

Although Jim would hardly admit it, the doctor alien was absolutely correct. He was certainly weighing the odds. The creatures looked frail and feeble, and it was hard to imagine what kind of a fight they could put up if Jim went in swinging like a barroom brawler. The UFO crash at Roswell indicated that they could be hurt. Hadn’t that left dead and broken aliens scattered all over the chaparral? A simple frontal assault, though, took no account of science fiction trickery like invisible force fields or concealed death rays. Obviously any being who could stand a glass in thin air and have it vanish at will certainly knew some more tricks. He decided to switch to another line of persuasion, putting a two-fisted John Wayne eruption on hold for a while. “Strictly speaking, I’m not actually a life-form. I’m dead, dig? More like a metaphysical entity.”

“You’re here, therefore you are. And if you are, the medical examination is mandatory.”

Jim wished that the damned aliens would blink or twitch or something. Anything but paraphrasing Descartes. He knew it was one of Doc Holliday’s favorite tricks and he wondered if they’d pulled the idea out of his own mind. He couldn’t shake the thought that, behind the blank masks, the sons of bitches were doing the telepath and having a good extraterrestrial laugh on his dime. “Yeah, that’s right, I’m here, but that still doesn’t make it right to be sticking probes in me. I mean, anything could happen.”

“That’s what makes it all the more interesting. We probe and then we see what happens. That’s the fundamental nature of a probe, now, isn’t it?”

“I suppose so, except . . . ”

“Except what?”

Jim was wondering if the UFO and it occupants were strictly a part of the Afterlife, or if they’d invaded this space with the same lack of by-your-leave as they did Earth. Jim decided he might as well ask. “I guess you guys are dead too, right?”

Jim couldn’t read any expression in either of their faces, but something told him that the creatures weren’t impressed. “No, we are not dead.”

The Bogart alien added its confirmation. “You better believe it, Jim. Alive and ready to probe ass.”

Jim could have sworn that the doctor alien’s face registered a twinge. “So to speak.”

“So what are you doing running around in our human Afterlife?”

“Our mission is the seek out new life-forms and new civilizations.”

“Don’t try and con me. That’s fucking Star Trek.”

“You noticed?”

“I’m no idiot.”

The doctor alien spread its hands as though it had long ago given up on humans. “It’s hard to tell. Sometimes your kind can be so fiendishly clever; on other occasions, you’re mind-boggling in your stupidity.”

Jim frowned. “Is that why you never just set down one of your ships on the White House lawn and said, Take us to your
leader?”

Bogart leaned into the exchange. “Listen, buster, that wasn’t our idea. All the lies and deception came strictly from your end. You think we wanted to be dismissed as marsh gas, flocks of birds, and weather balloons? We were quite ready to go live on Ed
Sullivan
or
Face the Nation
and reveal ourselves to the world. We even had a guy at William Morris, but Hoover had a shitfit and Truman vetoed it. It was those sons of bitches that wanted us to do the whole Area Fifty-one covert ops bit, in and out of the back doors of the Pentagon all the time, the interplanetary fifth column selling ray guns to the natives. They claimed that irrefutable proof of life elsewhere in the universe would freak the living shit out of the Arabs, the Bible Betters, and the Hasidic Jews; for all they knew, the Pope might resign unless he could come up with a good reason God had never warned him we were out there. Kennedy was okay with it, but look what happened to
him
. You know some of them even tried to blame us for that shit in Dealey Plaza?”

Jim held up a hand. “Hold it a minute. Are you seriously telling me that the William Morris Agency knew all about you?” Bogart nodded. “At least a month before the FBI.”

“You were going to go on
Ed Sullivan
?”

“It worked for Elvis and the Beatles.”

Jim shook his head ruefully. “It never worked for me.”

The doctor alien made a dismissive gesture. “That’s because you had to be the petulant rebel and keep in the drug reference. I mean, they warned you, didn’t they?”

Jim saw he was making no headway. “I’m not one of your abductees, you know?”

“We are well aware of that. You came aboard uninvited and of your own free will.”

“So just drop me off at the nearest accessible spot and we’ll forget the whole thing.”

The alien doctor shook his head. “I’m afraid it’s a little too late for that.”

“I could incapacitate your warp drive with ectoplasm.”

Although the doctor alien had no mouth, Jim could have sworn that he sneered. “We don’t have a warp drive. That’s also Star Trek. Now who’s conning whom?”

Because they had no iris or pupils, it was impossible for Jim to tell exactly where the big alien eyes were looking, but he had the distinct impression that they had left his face and were now staring past him into the darkness. A moment later, as if in confirmation, he heard the patter of tiny feet coming toward him, the patter of dozens of tiny feet.

Semple was more helpless than she could ever remember. The chair in which she sat could have been in any dentist’s office except for the padded restraints; no dentist would have secured her body with a tightly cinched belt around her waist and an equally tight crisscross of webbing across her chest that kept her from moving her shoulders and upper body. No dentist would have fastened her ankles to the footrest of the chair to prevent her from kicking out, or locked her skull in a steel clamp, or placed a rubber gag in her mouth so she was unable to utter a sound. Semple’s fear was off the scale. The outward trappings of this were definitely medical. The
small lab was bright and scrupulously clear, all white surfaces, gleaming stainless steel, and glass cabinets. The individual in charge was even referred to as the doctor, though the intention of the operation that this so-called doctor was about to perform was nothing but gratuitous and agonizing torture.

Had Semple been a different person, had she retained some of Aimee’s guilt when the siblings split, she might have made use of the time while she waited for the worst to happen regretting all the pain that she had just as gratuitously inflicted on others. In some ways, her own torturings were less morally excusable than that which she was about to receive. At least Necropolis had a system, no matter how diseased; Fat Ari was just trying to make the equivalent of a buck. The suffering she had inflicted on the unfortunate angels, cherubs, and wandering spirits who had fallen into her clutches had been strictly for her own bored and private amusement. In that, she was equally as culpable as Mengele, maybe more so.

Semple, however, was made of sterner and much less repentant stuff. Even with no gag in her mouth, she would never have considered making any promises of atonement. Her only words would have been vitriolic, obscene, and abusive, directed at the doctor and his assistant, at Fat Ari, at the cops who had arrested her and all the others who had conspired to bring her to this place of degradation and promised pain. Helpless as she was, Semple still flexed her muscles against the restraints and bit down angrily into the hard rubber of the gag, determined that, when the awful moment came, she would give no one the satisfaction of seeing her cower.

The awful moment turned out to be a long time coming. Soon even the doctor began to grow impatient. He frowned vexedly at his assistant, who was bent over a wheezing computer that leaked wisps of vapor from bad seals in its microplumbing. “What the hell is the problem? This is a straightforward branding. It’s not supposed to take all day.”