The Lust Lizard of Melancholy Cove (7 page)

The Sea Beast

He knew he should return to the safety of the sea, but his gill trees were singed and he didn't relish the idea of treading water until they healed. If he'd known the female was going to react so violently, he would have retracted his gills into the folds beneath his scales where they would have been safe. He made his way down the creek bed until he spotted a herd of animals sleeping above the bank. They were ugly things, pale and graceless, and he could sense parasites living in every one of them, but this was no time to be judgmental. After all, some brave beast had to be the first to eat a mastodon, and who would have thought that those furballs would turn out to be the tasty treats that they were.

He could hide among this wormy herd until his gills healed, then perhaps he'd take one of the females on a grateful hump. But not now, his heart still ached for the purring female with the silvery flanks. He needed time to heal.

The Sea Beast slithered up the bank into an open space among the herd, then curled his legs and tail under his body and assumed their shape. The change was painful and took more effort than he was used to, but after a few minutes he was finished and he quietly fell asleep.

Molly

No, this wasn't what she had planned at all. She had stopped taking her meds because they had been giving her the shakes, and she'd been willing to deal with the voices if they came back, but not this. She hadn't counted on this. She was tempted to run to her kitchen area and gulp down one of her blue pills (Stelazine—“the Smurfs of Sanity,” she called them) to see if it could chase the hallucination, but she couldn't tear herself from the trailer window. It was too real—and too weird. Could there be a big, burnt beast lumbering out of the creek? And if so, had she just watched it turn into a double-wide trailer?

Hallucinations, that was one of the five symptoms of schizophrenia. Molly kept a list of all the symptoms. In fact, she'd stolen a desk drawer version of the
DSM-IV
—
The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders
, the book psychiatrists use to diagnose mental illness—from Valerie Riordan. According to the
DSM-IV
, you had to have two of the five symptoms. Hallucinations were one; okay, that was a possibility. But delusions, no way; she wasn't the least bit deluded, she knew she was having hallucinations. Number three was disorganized speech or incoherence. She'd give it a try.

“Hi, Molly, how the heck are you?” she asked.

“Not well, thank you. I'm worried that my speech may be disorganized,” she answered.

“Well, you sound fine to me,” she said, by way of being polite.

“Thanks for saying so,” she replied with genuine gratitude. “I guess I'm okay.”

“You're fine. Nice ass, by the way.”

“Thanks, you're not too bad yourself.”

“See, not disorganized at all,” she said, not realizing that the conversation was over.

Symptom four was grossly disorganized or catatonic
behavior. She looked around her trailer. Most of the dishes were done, the videotapes of her movies were arranged chronologically, and the goldfish were still dead in the aquarium. Nope, nothing disorganized in this place. Schizo 1, Sanity 3.

Number five, negative symptoms, such as “affective flattening, alogia, or avolition.” Well, a woman hits her forties, of course there's a little affective flattening, but she was sure enough that she didn't have the other two symptoms to not even look them up.

But then there was the footnote: “Only one criterion required if delusions are bizarre or hallucinations consist of a voice keeping up a running commentary on the person's behavior or thoughts.”

So, she thought, if I have a narrator, I'm batshit. In most of the Kendra movies, there had been a narrator. It helped tie a story together that was supposed to take place in the nuked-out future when, in fact, it was being filmed in an abandoned strip mine near Barstow. And narration was easy to dub into foreign languages because you didn't have to match the lips. So the question she had to ask herself, was: “Do I have a narrator?”

“No way,” said the narrator.

“Fuck,” said Molly. Just when she'd settled into having a simple personality disorder, she had to learn to be psychotic all over again. Being schizo wasn't all bad. Being diagnosed schizo ten years ago had gotten her the monthly disability check from the state, but Val Riordan had assured her that since then her status had changed from schizophrenic: paranoid type, single episode, in partial remission, with prominent negative symptoms, persecutory-type delusions, and negative stressors (Molly liked to think of the negative stressors as “special sauce”) to a much more healthy, postmorbid shizotypal personality disorder, bipolar type (no “special sauce”). To make the latter you had to fulfill the prerequisite of at least one
psychotic event, then hit five out of nine symptoms. It was a much tougher and more subtle form of batshit. Molly's favorite symptom was: “Odd beliefs or magical thinking that influences behavior and is inconsistent with subcultural norms.”

The narrator said, “So the magical thinking—that would be that you believe that in another dimension, you actually are Kendra, Warrior Babe of the Outland?”

“Fucking narrator again,” Molly said. “You're not going away, are you? I don't need this symptom.”

“You can't really say that your ‘magical thinking' affects your behavior, can you?” the narrator asked. “I don't think you can claim that symptom.”

“Oh hell no,” Molly said. “I'm just out practicing with a broadsword at two in the morning, waiting for the end of civilization so I can claim my rightful identity.”

“Simple physical fitness regimen. Everyone's trying to get into shape these days.”

“So they can hack apart evil mutants?”

“Sure, Nautilus makes a machine for that. Mutant Master 5000.”

“That's a crock.”

“Sorry, I'll shut up now.”

“I'd appreciate that. I really don't need the ‘voices' symptom, thanks.”

“You've still got the monster-trailer hallucination outside.”

“I thought you were going to shut up.”

“Sorry, that's the last you'll hear from me. Really.”

“Jerk.”

“Bitch.”

“You said…”

“Sorry.”

So without voices all she had to deal with was the hallucination. The trailer was still sitting there, but admittedly, it just looked like a trailer. Molly could imagine
trying to tell the shrink at county about it when they admitted her.

“So you saw a trailer?”

“That's right.”

“And you live in a trailer park?”

“Yep.”

“I see,” the shrink would say. And somewhere between those two little words the judgment would be pronounced: crazy.

No, she wasn't going to go that route. She would confront her fears and go forward, just as Kendra had in
The Mutant Slayer: Warrior Babes II
. She grabbed her sword and left her trailer.

The sirens had subsided now, but she could still see an orange glow from the explosion. Not a nuclear blast, she thought, just some sort of accident. She strode across the lot and stopped about ten feet away from the trailer.

Up close, it looked—well, it looked like a damn trailer. The door was in the wrong place, on the end instead of the side, and the windows were frosty, as if they'd iced over. There was a thin patina of soot over its entire length, but it was a trailer. It didn't look like a monster at all.

She stepped forward and ventured a poke with her sword. The aluminum skin of the trailer seemed to shy away from the sword point. Molly jumped back.

A warm wave of pleasure swept through her body. For a second she forgot why she had come out here and let the wave take her. She poked the trailer again, and again the pleasure wave washed over her, this time even more intense. There was no fear, no tension, just the feeling that this was exactly where she should be—where she should always have been. She dropped her sword and let the feeling take her.

The frosty layer on the trailer's two end windows seemed to lift, revealing the slitlike pupils of two great golden eyes. Then the door began to open, not from side
to side, but splitting itself in the middle and opening like a mouth. Molly turned on her heel and ran, wondering even as she went why she hadn't just stayed there by the trailer where everything felt so good.

Estelle

Estelle was wearing a leather fedora, a pair of dark sunglasses, a single lavender sock, and a subtle and satisfied smile. Sometime after her husband had died—after she'd moved to Pine Cove and started taking the antidepressants, after she'd stopped coloring her hair or giving a damn about her wardrobe—Estelle had vowed that no man would ever see her naked again. At the time, she considered it a fair trade: carnal pleasures, of which there were few, for guilt-free cookies, of which there were many. Now, having broken that vow and lying in her feather bed next to this sweaty, stringy old man, who was teasing her left nipple with his tongue (and who didn't seem to mind that said nipple was leading her breast over her arm rather than jutting skyward like the cupola on the Taj Mahal), Estelle felt like she understood, at last, the Mona Lisa's smile. Mona had been getting some, and she had her cookies too.

“You are some storyteller,” Estelle said.

A spidery black hand crawled up her thigh and parked an index finger moistly on her pleasure button—just settled there—and she shuddered. “I didn't finish,” Catfish said.

“You didn't? Then what was all that ‘Hallelujah, Lord, I'm comin home!' followed by the barking?”

“I didn't finish the story,” Catfish said, his enunciation remarkably clear, considering he didn't miss a lick.

Harmonica player, Estelle thought. She said, “I'm sorry, I don't know what came over me.”

And she didn't. One minute they were sipping spiked tea and the next there was an explosion and she had her mouth locked over his, moaning into him like a saxophonist playing passion.

“You didn't see me fightin you,” Catfish said. “We got time.”

“We do?”

“Sho', but you gonna have to pay my way now. You done chased the Blues off me and I feels like they ain't never comin back. I'm out a job.”

Estelle looked down to see Catfish grinning in the soft orange light and grinned herself. Then she realized that they hadn't lit any candles, and she didn't have any orange lights. Somewhere in the tussle between the kitchen and the bedroom, amid the tossing of clothes and groping of flesh, they had turned the lights out. The orange glow was coming through the window at the foot of the bed.

Estelle sat up. “The town is on fire.”

“It is in here,” Catfish said.

She pulled the sheets up to cover herself. “We need to do something.”

“I got an idea a somethin we can do.” He moved his spidery fingers and her attention was taken away from the window.

“Already?”

“Seem soon to me too, girl, but I'm old and this could be my last one.”

“That's a cheery thought.”

“I'm a Bluesman.”

“Yes, you are,” she said. Then she rolled over on him and stayed there, off and on, until dawn.

When Mikey “the Collector” Plotznik wheeled into town and saw that the Texaco station had blown up, leaving a charred circle two hundred yards wide around it, he knew that it was going to be a great day. It was a shame about the burger stand going up too, and he'd miss their spicy fries, but hey, you don't often get to see the toasting of a major landmark like the Texaco. The fire was all out now, but several firemen were still sifting through the wreck-age. The Collector waved to them as he wheeled by. They waved back, somewhat reticently, for the Collector's reputation preceded him and made them nervous.

Today would be the day, Mikey thought. The Texaco was an omen, the star in the sky over his lifelong dream. Today he'd catch Molly Michon naked, and when he did (and brought back the proof), his reputation would grow to mythic proportions. He patted the disposable camera he carried in the front pouch of his hooded sweatshirt. Oh yes, he'd have evidence to back up his story. They would believe him—and bow to him.

At this point in his life, the Collector was more interested in explosions than in naked women. He was only ten, and it would be a couple of years before his interests moved to girls. Freud never identified a stage of development known as “pyrotechnic fascination,” but that was only because there wasn't an abundant supply of disposable lighters in nineteenth-century Vienna. Ten-year-old
boys blow shit up. It's what they do. But today a strange new feeling had come over Mikey, a feeling he couldn't put a word to, but if he could, the word would have been “horny.” As he Rollerbladed through town, tossing the
Los Angeles Times
into the shrubs and gutters of businesses along Cypress Street, he felt a tightness in his shorts that until now he had associated with having to take a raging pee in the morning. Today it signified a need to see the Crazy Lady in a state of undress.

Paperboys are the carriers of preadolescent myth. On every paper route, there is a haunted house, a kid-eating dog, an old woman who tips with twenties, and a woman who answers the door in the nude. Mikey had never actually seen any of these things, but that never stopped him from spinning wild stories for his buddies at school. Today he would get proof, he could feel it in his loins.

He skated down the driveway into the Fly Rod Trailer Court, chucked a paper into the rose bushes in front of Mr. Nunez's trailer, then made a beeline for the Crazy Lady's house. He could see a blue glow coming through her windows, a TV. She was home and awake. Yes!

He pulled up a couple of doors down and noticed that a new trailer had moved in next to the Crazy Lady. A new customer? Why not give it a try? The Crazy Lady didn't receive the paper, so his pretense for knocking on her door was to get her to subscribe. He could practice on these new people. As he skated up to the front door of the new trailer, lights came on in the two front windows. Yes! Someone was home. Strange curtains—they looked like cat's eyes.

 

Through a part in the curtains, Molly watched the kid come down the road into the trailer park. She liked kids, but she didn't like
this
kid. At least once a week he knocked on her door and tried to get her to subscribe to the paper, and once a week she told him to go away and
never come back. Sometimes he would bring one of his little buddies along. She could hear them skulking around her trailer, trying to peek in the windows. “Swear to God, she's got a dead guy in there that she does it with. I've seen him. And she ate a kid once.”

The kid was heading for the monster trailer.

In the background, a videotape was playing on her TV—
Mechanized Death: Warrior Babe VII
—and THE SCENE was coming up. Molly looked away from the window and watched THE SCENE for the thousandth time.

Kendra is standing in the back of a jeep, manning a rack of net guns as the jeep pursues the Evil Warlord across the desert. The driver turns, as he is supposed to, throwing up a fishtail of dust, but the front wheel of the jeep hits a rock and the jeep rolls. Kendra is thrown fifty feet in the air and lands in a heap. The steel bra she is wearing cuts deep into her chest and blood sprays out across the dust.

The bastards! Every time she watches THE SCENE she can't believe the bastards left it in. The accident was real, the blood was Molly's, and when she returned to the set ten days later, a security guard escorted her to the producer's trailer.

“I can pay you extra's wages as a mutant,” the producer said, “but let's face it, babe, you didn't get your billing because of your acting ability. You think I'm gonna hold up filming for ten days when the whole schedule is only three weeks long? We got a new Kendra. Wrote the accident and the facial reconstruction into the script. She's a cyborg now. Now you can get in line with the mutants to pick up your bag of rags, or you can get the fuck off the set. My audience wants perfect bodies, and you were getting up there anyway. With that scar you don't sell anymore.”

Molly had just turned twenty-seven years old.

She pulled herself from THE SCENE and looked out
the window again. The kid was there, right there in front of the monster trailer. She should warn him or something.

She pounded on the window and the kid looked up, not startled, but with a dreamy expression on his face. Molly gestured for him to move away. The window she was looking out of didn't open. (Trailers built in those days were designed so people would burn up in case of a fire. The manufacturers thought it would keep the lawsuits down.)

The kid just stood there, his fist poised before the door as if he were frozen in the middle of knocking.

As Molly watched, the door began to open. Not on the hinges, but vertically, like a garage door. Molly pounded furiously on the window with the hilt of her sword. The kid smiled. A huge red tongue snaked out of the door, wrapped around the kid, and slurped him in, Rollerblades, paper satchel, and all. Molly screamed. The door slammed shut.

Molly watched, stunned, not knowing what to do. A few seconds later the mouth opened and expectorated a soccer-ball-sized wad of newspaper.

Theo

The hours of Theo's day had moved like slugs crawling on razor wire. By four in the afternoon, he felt as if he'd been awake for a week and the cups of French roast he'd been drinking had turned to foaming acid in his stomach. Mercifully, there hadn't been a single call for a bar fight or domestic dispute, so he had spent the entire day at the scene of the fuel truck explosion, talking to firemen, representatives from Texaco Oil, and an arson investigator sent up from the San Junipero Fire Department. Much to
his surprise, going all day without a hit from his Sneaky Pete pot pipe had not sent him into fits of anxiety as it usually did. He was a little paranoid, but he wasn't sure that that wasn't just an informed response to the world anyway.

At a quarter past four, the arson investigator crossed the charred parking lot to where Theo was leaning on the hood of his Volvo. The investigator was in his late twenties, clean-cut, and carried himself like an athlete, even in the orange toxic waste suit. He carried a plastic space helmet under his arm like a tumorous football.

“Constable Crowe, I think that's about all I can do today. It'll be dark soon, and as long as we keep the area closed off, I'm sure everything will still be here in the morning.”

“What's your call so far?

“Well, we generally look for evidence of accelerants, gas, kerosene, paint thinner—and I'd say there were definitely some flammable liquids involved here.” He smiled a weary smile.

“So you don't know what happened?”

“Offhand, I'd say a fuel truck blew up, but without further investigation I'd hate to make a commitment at this time.” Again the smile.

Theo smiled back. “So no cause?”

“The driver probably didn't seal the hose correctly and a cloud of fumes got set off. There wasn't much wind last night, so the fumes would have just clung to the ground and built up. Anything could have set it off: the driver could have been smoking, the pilot lights at the hamburger place, a spark in the truck exhaust. Right now I'd say it was totally accidental. It was a company-owned store, and it was turning a profit, so there really isn't a financial motive for arson. Texaco will definitely be building your town a new burger stand and probably paying
off some nuisance settlements from people claiming trauma, duress, and irritation.”

“I have the information on the driver,” Theo said. “I'll check to see if he was a smoker.”

“I asked him. He's keeping quiet” came a voice from a few yards away.

Theo and the arson investigator looked up to see Vance McNally coming toward them holding up a Ziploc bag full of white and gray powder. “I've got him right here,” the EMT said. “You want to interrogate him?”

“Very funny, Vance,” Theo said.

“They're going to have to do the autopsy with a flour sifter,” Vance said.

The investigator took the Ziploc from Vance and examined it. “You find any remains of a cigarette lighter? Anything like that?”

“Not my job,” Vance said. “The fire was so hot it turned the seat springs to liquid. Even incinerated the bones, except for those little bits of calcium in there. Honestly, this might not all be our boy. We might be giving his wife a bag full of burnt-up truck parts to put in an urn on the mantel.”

The investigator shrugged and handed the bag back to Vance. Then to Theo he said, “I'm going home. I'll come back tomorrow and look around some more. As soon as I give the okay, the oil company will send in a crew to drain the ground tanks.”

“Thanks,” Theo said. The investigator left in a county car.

Vance McNally turned the Ziploc bag of truck driver in the air. “Theo, this ever happens to me, I want you to get all my friends together, have a big party, and snort me, okay?”

“You have friends, Vance?”

“Okay, it was just an idea,” Vance said. He turned and carried his bag to the waiting ambulance.

Theo sipped his coffee and noticed something moving in the charred brush beyond the Texaco. It looked as if someone was holding up a TV antenna and getting altogether too close to the yellow tape he had run around the perimeter. Jeez, was he going to have to stay here all night guarding the scene? He pried himself off the Volvo and headed for the offender.

“Hey there!” Theo called.

Gabe Fenton, the biologist, emerged from the brush, indeed holding up some kind of antenna, followed by his Labrador retriever, Skinner. The dog ran to meet Theo and greeted him with two muddy paw prints on the chest.

Theo rubbed Skinner's ears to hold him at bay, the classic slobbering Labrador control move. “Gabe, what in the hell are you doing down here?”

The biologist was covered with burrs and foxtails, his face striped with soot from the charred brush. He looked exhausted, yet there was a note of excitement bordering on ecstasy in his voice. “You won't believe this, Theo. My rats moved en masse this morning.”

Theo tried, but couldn't match Gabe's enthusiasm. “That's swell, Gabe. Texaco blew up last night.”

Gabe Fenton looked around at the surrounding area as if seeing the destruction for the first time. “What time?”

“About four in the morning.”

“Hmmm, maybe they sensed it.”

“They?”

“The rats. Around 2
A.M.
they all started moving west. I can't figure out what caused it. Here, look at the screen.” Gabe had a laptop computer strapped into a harness around his waist. He turned it so Theo could see the screen. “Each of these dots represents an animal I have implanted with a tracking chip. Here's their location at 1
A.M.
” He clicked a key and the screen drew a topographical map of the area. Green dots were scattered pretty
much evenly along the creek bed and the business district of Pine Cove.

Gabe hit another key. “Now here they are at two.” All but a few of the dots had moved into the ranchland east of Pine Cove.

“Uh-huh,” Theo said. Gabe was a nice guy. Spent too much time with vermin, but he was a nice guy. Gabe needs to talk to humans occasionally, Theo thought.

“Well, don't you see? They all moved at once, except for these ten over here that moved to the shore.”

“Uh-huh,” Theo said. “Gabe, the Texaco blew up. A guy was killed. I was talking to firemen in space suits all day. Every paper in the county has called me. The battery is almost out on my cell phone. I haven't eaten since yesterday and I only slept an hour last night. Help me find the significance in rat migration, okay?”

Gabe looked crestfallen. “Well, I don't know the significance yet. I'm tracking the ten that didn't move east, hoping the anomalies will give a clue to the behavior of the larger group. Strange thing is, four of the ten disappeared off my screen a little after two. Even if they were killed, the chips should still transmit. I need to find them.”

“And I wish you the best of luck, but this area may still be dangerous. You can't be here, buddy.”

“Maybe there were fumes,” Gabe said. “But that doesn't explain why they all moved in the same direction. Some even came through this area from the shore.”

Theo couldn't bear to express to Gabe how little he cared. “You had any dinner, Gabe?”

“No, I've been doing this since last night.”

“Pizza, Gabe. We need pizza and beer. I'll buy.”

“But I need to…”

“You're a single guy, Gabe. You need pizza every eighteen hours or you can't function properly. And I have a question to ask you about footprints, but I want you to
watch me drink a few beers before I ask so I can claim diminished capacity. Come, Gabe, let me take you to the land of pizza and beer.” Theo gestured to his Volvo. “You can stick the antenna out the sunroof.”

“I guess I could take a break.”

Theo opened the passenger door and Skinner leapt into the car, leaving sooty paw prints on the seat. “Your dog needs pizza. It's the humane thing to do.”