Skeletons (52 page)

"How 'bout: 'We finds 'em, you turns 'em'?"

He just kept looking through the windshield, studying the sky. I tried to come up with another: "How 'bout 'As the world turns'?"

This time he kicked me out, said, "Get back to work," and locked the cabin door behind me.

"Another Cap'n Bob!" I muttered.

But they're not all so ramrod. One guy, name of Paul Piper, I call him
Pipeman
, though I haven't shared any of my stash with him yet—let's face it, this whole bunch is G-man and I'm scared boneless one of them is going to stumble across one of my straws or something and throw me out a hatch or tell Mr. L—anyway,
Pipeman
acts like somebody who might like the stuff. Rather weird, by his shroud looks: skinny and dorky, with those black glasses you want to put on the pavement and step on, but he's definitely got a sick mind. And likes rock and roll, because the first thing he did when we got off shift the first day is start hot-wiring some of the equipment into a stereo receiver. Next thing you know we've got two hundred watts of an R.E.M. CD blasting through the belly of this monster, and Cap'n Bob is roaring at us down the aisle, screaming at
Pipeman
to "Turn that shit down!"

"Okay, Mommy," I say, and
Pipeman
grins sheepishly and notches the volume down until Cap'n Bob goes back to his cabin. Then we crank it up again.

It's then I come real close to sharing my stash, until
Pipeman
tells me he learned all this gizmo stuff in a room so deep in the Pentagon you could feel the pressure pop in your ears. "We were working on all kinds of neat-o stuff, before Lincoln busted up the Company. The man hated the secrecy, but he sure loved the toys," he says, grinning. "Little lasers that could burn your eyeballs out, leave the rest of you fresh as a baby's butt. That would have been a good one on the battlefield—if the suckers are blind, they can't fight, right?"

"Uh, right," I say.

"We had another one that could give you headaches, bad bangers, through four feet of cement wall. Pretty cool. I mean, this stuff we're using here," he said, patting our human finder like it was some sort of pet dog, "is just a variation on something we came up with for scoring drug users. It's little more than a supersensitive heat sensor, okay? The way we originally had it tuned, it could tell if you were using drugs. The body metabolism gets screwy when you've loaded it up with, say, cocaine. This baby could pick that up. Now all we've done with it is tune it to a general human metabolism, which is different than ours, and boom! Like shooting fish in a barrel!"

He isn't kidding. This sucker of his digs humans out like ticks from a dog's back. One overfly of the grid pattern
Pipeman
has programmed into his toy and —
whammo
—what looked like empty office buildings, deserted cellars, streets devoid of people, becomes a pin-perfect map of every hiding human there is. We found one guy four hundred feet underground, drooling on himself in an anthracite mine, laughing over how he'd fooled the
skels
.

Uh-uh.

But back to the drug thing, I turn to
Pipeman
when he tells me all this stuff; try to keep a straight smile on me, and say, "Um, I mean, like, this thing can't pick up drugs anymore, can it?"

"Nah. Not unless I want it to." And then, to my proverbial horror,
Pipeman
taps a few keys, singing my new tune to himself while he does it, "I got the world by the bon-
er
!" and then turns to me with his sheep grin and says, "There. Now it's tuned for coke." And slyly, turning a nearby sensor my way: "Now if I was to train this baby on you . . ."

"Hey!" I say, pushing the little beeper away as Pipe-man starts laughing like a loon.

"Just kidding,
Rog
," he says, doing away with the sensor and punching the original codes back into Big
Skel
; and once again I can't tell if this is
Pipeman
humor, or
skel
humor, or if that little glint in the back of his eye sockets is that all-present boner wish to make anything nearby that looks human into a Halloween cutout. "Just kidding."

"Uh, right," I say, swiveling my seat back to the console, and the human hunt on terra firma, twenty thou below, continues.

With amazing progress.

In four weeks we've covered all the continental U.S. In another four weeks Europe is clean, as well as Australia. Then it's South America's turn. I like that one, because we make our landing in Rio, which I haven't seen in a while and which looks exactly the same to me as it always did. Lots of record deals always got done in Rio. Great convention town. I mean, they were always carnival dudes down there anyway, and what's the dif if instead of wearing skeleton costumes they actually wear the skeletons? They're still all drunks and crazies. Even
Pipeman
gets into it, permanent Mardi Gras, complete with fruit hats and drunken stupor. Only Cap'n Bob seems unaffected, though I do spy him one night, after a coded message has come through, which
Pipeman
has of course decoded for our own personal fun, which is from Stanton, Mr. L's warmonger. The message is glowing with praise for our little mission. There's even mention of me—KEEP DINNER WARM, the message says, and I already know that my code name is Dinner so that means they aren't planning on turning me boner, at least not yet. And that same night, lo and behold, I see Cap'n Bob with not one but two
skel
ladies on his arm, both of them with legs up to there, if you squint and look at the shrouds and not the bones. Not bad. He even has a
Carta
Blanca in his hand, the old rascal, and gives
Pipeman
and me a solemn wink as he passes us on the street.

Finger on the side of the nose, Cap'n Bob. Your secret is safe with us, unless we can use it against you.

It's in Rio, this same night, in fact, that I see a little business springing up that it seems is getting popular everywhere, and which, frankly, gives me the willies.

It's
Pipeman
who stumbles on the shop first, because he's drunker than I've ever been and looking for a fight. I've already had to keep him out of two, which is strange because he's supposed to be protecting me. The word has gone out that I'm not to be touched, but that hasn't stopped a few hombres from wanting to impress their bone
chiquitas
by tearing the only human left in the district apart with their bare fingers. I mean, fun is fun. But always we get out of it, I don't know how, because what starts out as hostility with a capital "H" toward me always ends up with
Pipeman
trying to steal some hombre's woman and me having to haul him into an alley before he gets dusted. A dust wish is what
Pipeman
seems to have.

So when we pass this little shop with a crowd around it, Pipe-o naturally figures it's another fight scene. He barrels through, me in tow, screaming, "
Lemme
at 'em!
Lemme
at 'em!"

But there ain't no fight, only to shop with a big clientele.

Creep city. I mean, I should have turned and run right away. But there was a crawly fascination to the whole thing. Even
Ricki
Scum, the late (I imagine) and great (some say) and (definitely) unlamented lead singer of Pustule never got as weird as this.

Walls and walls of human stuff. And I mean stuff.
 
We're talking heads, and not all of them shrunken, and limbs of all kinds. Jars and jars on shelves up to the ceil-
ing
, everything neatly labeled. Ears must be in this year, because there's a woman in a fancy shroud outfit, screams money, maybe Tahoe or at least Bev Hills, who's fighting with another woman over a jar containing a human hearing organ. It's just floating in alcohol, like some gnarly little flounder.

"
Wha
?" I say.

"Famous ear," says some hombre next to me, who's suddenly studying me like I'm a crayfish under his fifth-grade microscope. "Notice the small bite out of the lobe. It's said to have belonged to Van Gogh." A chuckle. I know that sound, the sound of a merchant. "It's not the first of its kind to be sold this week. The women, they think that if they bring the ear back to Van Gogh, who's rumored to be alive in Brussels, he will paint them, make them immortal."

I turn to look at this
skel
, who's smaller than me, but that makes me feel no better, the way he's staring at me. "Ever think of selling?" he says.

"Huh?"

He suddenly pinches my arm. Testing, I suppose. "A whole specimen, I could fetch a pretty price indeed. Keep
you
whole, of course."

"I don't really . . ." I say, knowing I've gone white, sidling like a crab away from the man who's following me through the crowd, his lust apparent and growing. There are two huge goons behind him, who now appear to be attached to him, in a very muscle-like way.

Then the Roger-radar goes off, full blast, and I know I'm in trouble.

Not that he tried, but
Pipeman
takes care of it for me. He would have gotten in a melee anyway, condition he was in. It's just that his timing was perfect. Watching the two women wrangling over the ear in drunken fascination,
Pipeman
has suddenly decided that he has to have it. So he makes a lunge, which happens to cut across the path between the shop proprietor and myself. Then, in another four seconds, the whole shop is alive with bony fists flying and colorful Brazilian curses.

We get out, but I don't know how. At one point I find myself face-to-face with one of the owner's goons, who puts a surprisingly gentle and large bone hand on my head and starts to lift me off the ground.

"Don't harm him!" the little man shouts from across the room, where one of the two ladies who has been left high and dry on the ear deal is pummeling him with her pocketbook. "Raoul, don't harm a hair on his head!"

Which is about the only thing Raoul is harming, since he is picking me up by my spike hair.

"You heard the man, Raoul!" I shout, but then
Pipeman
has burst on the scene.

"You heard the man!" P-man shouts, ducking between Raoul and me and coming up swinging. Raoul drops me after the second punch and turns his goon attention to
Pipeman
, who's grabbed me by the arm.

"Out!" he shouts. We flog our way through the crowd toward the front door. The human wedge that is
Pipeman
and his knuckles of rage gets us to the door before the curious
skel
crowd outside blocks our path.

P-man stops, opens his mouth wide, and shouts, "Conga!"

And that's how we escape.
Pipeman
is suddenly behind me, his hands on my hips, swaying to an unheard melody, kicking his feet out to one side and then the next. And this crowd, no crowd, at least not one in Rio with this amount of craziness and alcohol in their blood, can resist. They're all lining up behind him. Soon we're kicking and snaking our way out into the street as the police cars arrive, sirens screaming—only to have the Brazilian cops join the line!

And then real music appears, rising out of the streets, one-two-three-four-one-cha, one-two-three-four-one-cha, and we're snaking around the entire city, me at the lead,
skels
pressing
Carta
Blancas
into my hand, rum and Cokes into my other hand. And I'm into it, celebrity of the night, yeah! and we're
congoing
through the whole city of Rio, thousands and then millions of
skels
behind me,
Pipeman
waving his finger in the air, one-two-three-four-one-cha, music everywhere, guitars, marimbas now thrust into my hands, cha-cha-boom, cha-cha-boom! and then the Philharmonic, pulled out of the opera house, carrying their instruments, dancing in the streets, joining our manic line, the entire city of Rio, which by the way has hardly been wrecked at all, I mean, it's always been party time here and I doubt they knew the difference when the boners came, every
skel
in sight, and I find out later that the news had come out that Brazil, and all of S. America, is free of humans, which only fed the frenzy of Mardi Gras, the biggest party of all, and me at the head!

I hear later, from an unreliable source named Pipe-man, that Cap'n Bob was seen at the very end of the line, with both his bone bimbos, something I'd give mucho
dineros
to see a picture of, but alas.

Our mission continues. After Rio there are other places, other grids. We are the vacuum cleaner of boner world, which is what earth's becoming. We sweep over every tiny square inch of China. I gotta tell you, no fun there. I mean, there were billions of Chinese before, there are billions of Chinese boners now. If there's a difference, I can't tell. Beijing is a bust, most of
it's
been torn up. I think they still hold it against us for that Nixon thing. The food stinks. I mean, I've had better Chinese back on Rodeo Drive at three in the morning. I can't say I'm sorry to go. Even
Pipeman
is morose here, they've taken to outlawing beer, they need the grain to feed the people or some such swill.

Canada is a little better. It's cold, late winter, but here they're still playing hockey and there's a beer tap every three feet.
Pipeman
likes it just fine. He even gets himself a little girlfriend, which makes me kind of lonely since I'll be damned if I'm gonna date one of these bone babes. Makes me real nostalgic for ol' Rita.