Larry Doyle - Go, Mutants!: A Novel

She SCREAMS, as if that will help.

INT. HIGH SCHOOLHALLWAYNIGHT

In BLACK AND WHITE, and not art. A hot smudge of blind whites and ash blacks, this is the sorry noir of drive-in horrorshows, the dreams of dogs and monsters.

Enter right, SCREAMING:

THE GIRL, in high distress and heels. She takes the corner wide, skips and skids into the lockers with a metallic WALLOP, ricochets and goes SPLAT, displayed.

In such a lovely and hideous dress.

The Girl CLAWS for traction on the cold waxed floor. Her nails shouldnt SHATTER like that. She could use more zinc in her diet, and less stress.

And here it comes, into the light.

CLOSE ON

THE CREATURE, cranial sac engorged, strange fluids ATHROB, the lobes beneath its diaphanous skull CRACKLING with spidery fire.

Its big cat eyes lume with lust, or thirst, or the first to be followed by the second.

As the Creature reaches for her, its middle digit extends telescopically, and impressively. The tip quivers along her pristine cheek, leaving an inappropriate residue.

She SCREAMS again, her face meant to convey a complex interplay of terror and desire, not coming across at all.

The Creatures features collapse. Its feelings are hurt.

She kicks off her heels, clever girl, and is up on stockings, slipping away, still SCREAMING, night after night after night after night.

She should know by now that nobodys coming.

A bit of a jumble next, an editors breakfast of SWISH PANS, SMASH CUTS meant to scare and disguise the lack of a usable MASTER:

the Girls wide eye;

a blur of wall;

the Creatures dripping mouth;

her frenzied rear end;

assorted lights;

some creature part;

a flash of stock lightning;

ending on her pretty, untorn face, eyes darting, seeking, and at last finding

ROOM 51

The Girl struggles with the knob.

The Creature is gangling up on her.

Of course she SCREAMS, a terrible use of her limited time.

The Creature reaches for her with erectile fingers.

The door is jarred loose by narrative imperative, and she exits, SLAMMING.

INT. HIGH SCHOOLROOM 51DAY

The Creature throws open the door. It recoils.

The classroom is filled with human adolescents, taking a test. Their instructor, DR. RAND, glances up from his desk.

DR. RAND

Jim, have you forgotten our exam this morning?

The Creature is horror-struck.

HUMAN ADOLESCENT MALE

Thats not the only thing he forgot.

As one, the class looks down.

The Creature looks down.

And sees that it is naked.

The humans LAUGH.

The Creature cannot hide its shortcomings fast or well enough.

The humans GIGGLE MANIACALLY. This blends into a KICKY 12-STRING GUITAR OSTINATO, and they begin to sing:

HUMAN ADOLESCENTS (in close harmony)

Its the end of the summer

Were having a blast

They nuked the oceans

Beaches turnin to glass...

his lids opened, vertically then horizontally, unveiling eyes many shades bluer than his skin.

J!m Anderson lay in bed contemplating another day, another dolor, as a teenage alien on planet Earth.

Inside the orb at his bedside, Brian Wilson sang:

Its the end of the summer

Here comes a hard rain

They nuked the oceans

The waves are insane

The boys face wasnt half so monstrous in color. His dusky blue-gray skin muted the ridges and spurs protruding here and there, in patterns beautiful only to mathematicians, and his features were humanoid, if a little more oidy in spots:

his eyes were ultramarine, deep seas of whatever one wished to believe they were deep seas of, and kept in perpetual squint, which reduced their disturbing circumferences and made intimations of a soul;

delicate respiratory slits suggested a vestigial cute nose, and his pouty lips were possibly kissable, if situated on another head, and not periwinkle;

his ears were independently rotational, and highly emotional;

his forehead was quite high, approximately ten inches, and bulging with brains, but even this evoked the slick upswept hairstyle favored by singers and delinquents, without the hair.

A girl with enough imagination might have found him attractive in a rugged, sun-dried sort of way.

The girls at J!ms school did not possess that much imagination.

Not just the end of the summer

Looks like the end of the world

J!m sat at the edge of the bed, the great mass of his head bowing his spine into a posture most adolescent males assumed voluntarily. This kyphosis, though mechanical, neatly expressed his ineffable burden, the worldview he carried on his shoulders.

Armageddons a bummer

Looks like the end of the world

The singer faded from the orb, replaced by the K-BOM logo, which fissioned, leaving behind a pair of piggy eyes stuck in a slab of pea green fat. Shiiii -nee! the eyes squealed. That was an H-Blast from the Past from the Rays, and this is, with maximum reverb, Marshall the Martian!

In the morning!

the Martianettes sang, to which the orb jockey appended his catch ejaculation: Neep neep!

J!m squinted his first hate of the day. With a pass of his hand, the orb muted. The newer models would have automatically skipped the cretin, but there were no newer models in this house. The walls around J!m were paint, not PLEX ; the movie posters were physically present, artifacts from another era. The floor below him was fixed, and he would once again have to walk to the bathroom.

He stood.

crk

J!ms nasal slits rippled. His day was about to become fifty percent more self-loathsome.

He was alone, a small comfort. It could have happened later at school, in gym, and that would be fun, or the cafeteria, like last spring, when Sally Fraser screamed and vomited on Hazel Court, triggering a chain regurgitation that got lasagna removed from the lunch menu permanently.

Best to get it over with.

J!m twisted his neck, down and to the right. The seam between his cerebral hemispheres ruptured, revealing his next skin: silvery cyan, bright and shiny, unmissable.

His before skin retracted with a viscous crinkle, peeling back over two glistening humps of cerebrum, blatant beneath the fresh membrane that clung to every nook and sulcus. All his thoughts were on public view, synaptic bursts twinkling across his cranium, the area currently most active being his basal ganglia, or profanity center.

His dead face fell away, leaving one that only wished it was, coated with a clear oil similar to petroleum jelly but highly reflective and thirty times as aromatic. It did not wash, wipe, rub, scrape, scrub or boil off. Gradually the sebum would work into his new skin, darkening and dimming it to the pleathery exterior J!m could almost abide, but until then, J!m would be the Greasy Kid, subject to the customary names and jocularities, offering sweet respite to Bobby Harvey, an oil-producing human who was said to give girls blackheads simply by staring at them.

The molt moved on, shuddering over J!ms sloped shoulders and sloughing off his sinewy arms, crawling down his angular, occasionally pointed, torso, down, down his long, long legs and pooling, in underpants, at his feet.

J!m kicked off his old sleeve. It skittered under the bed.

Shit , J!m thought, meaning himself, and began his morning shuffle, teen beast slouching toward Armageddon, another day strewn with the idiocies and indignities he lived for, the petty evidence that he was right and they were human.

A shame he didnt know he would be dead before the weekend was out. It might have spared him some anguish.