JULY, 199X
"So what's it going to be, eh?"
Officer Bill Blattroot rolled the words over in his mind as he sat in his patrol car alongside a dusty road in New York. The summer heat was merciless, but Blattroot's sweat wasn't caused by the weather. His unit had gotten a visit from a Government Man (the capitals implicit in his thousand-dollar suit, his immaculate ID flashed too quickly for the eye to catch, and his own personal helicopter - in black). Seems that some cult by the name of the Church of the SubGenius was planning to have a gathering a few towns over in Sherman, New York, at that faggy campground where all those hippies went to run around naked. The Government Man indicated that some of the attendees at this "X-Day Drill" might well be people engaged in sedition, sabotage, and conspiracy against the government. He had tendered a pile of photographs, some weird-looking equipment, and a card with a phone number on it; then he'd zipped away in his helicopter.
Most of the guys had groaned in complaint as they affixed the strange equipment to their cars and headed out into the heat of a July day. A day that could have been spent back in the squad room, drinking coffee and bitching about the lack of women in town ever since the whorehouse on Route 17 shot down, and getting ready to nab themselves some kids playing with firecrackers later, would instead be spent looking for some maybe-criminals who might, if they were lucky, drive through their town on their way to Sherman.
But not Officer Blattroot. He'd put the cylinder and the dish with the weird iridescent finish on his dash with great care, and strapped them in like they were his own children. He'd double-checked the blank arrest warrants (needing only to be filled in with one or more of a list of names), and made sure that he brought an extra speedloader. Blattroot, you see, knew about the Church of the SubGenius. Oh yes. And he was sure that if any showed up on the road in front of the bug-speckled windshield, they would soon know him.
Very, very well.
***
It was Blattroot's partner, Officer Guy Fairmann, who actually first saw the white car coming around the curve of the dirt road towards their hiding place; Blattroot's mind was far, far away. He jumped when Fairmann spoke. "Think that could be it?" he said, his Adam's apple bobbing up and down on his emaciated neck.
"Who cares?" growled Blattroot, his overmuscled shoulders shrugging off the question. 'Shoot 'em now and let God sort it out. If it's just some damn tourists, we'll tuck 'em into the shade and they'll wake up eventually. If not, well, we can do whatever we want so long as we bring their asses in alive." Blattroot's hands clenched until his knuckles turned white. He grinned a grin with absolutely no humor on it, and tapped the pad on the back of the government machinery strapped to the dash. The dish gave off a "chi-THWING!" noise, and there was a burst of blue light that seemed to be behind Blattroot's eyes, rather than in front of them. The approaching car slowed as the driver lost consciousness and her foot slipped off the gas; the last thing she saw was a police car pulling out from behind a stand of lilac trees to block the road. "Bingo!" gloated Blattroot. "Now what's it going to be, eh? Man, if we could only use this thing on speeders!"
Fairmann gulped. "But ... they'd be running over everything in sight! This car was only going 20 miles per hour or so - if it had been on the highway, going 85 ..."
"The smell of the hamburger would slow the others down," said Blattroot, squeezing out of the police car and slamming the door behind him; his hand rested gently on the grip of his pistol. "You coming or what?" Officer Fairmann got out of the car, his six-foot height making him look even skinnier than he already was. As he walked over to the white car, he suddenly stopped and backed away: he knew his partner well enough to know that when he was shaking like that, you did not go near Bill Blattroot. It was the way he'd been shaking when he'd strangled that junkie who'd planted a knife in his thigh ... The verdict had been suicide, at least after Blattroot had finished wrapping the rope around his neck in the police cell.
"Bingo, bingo, bingo," chanted Blattroot, his whole body trembling with intense, focused, joyous rage. His rage was centered on a seemingly innocuous piece of paper taped to the inside of the back seat window: the picture of a grinning, pipe-smoking man. Fairmann recognized the picture, it had been with the pictures given them by the government man, it was the SubGenius logo or leader or something ... but he had no idea what his partner was going to do. He'd never seen him this angry, at least, not at somebody who wasn't trying to kill him.
Blattroot tore open the driver's side door and grabbed the occupant by the hair, lifting her half-out of the seat and turning her face to the light. He studied the snub-nosed, pale face with care, even pulling back to look at the roots of her red-brown hair, before muttering "Not her!" and dropping her back into the seat.
"Not who?" asked Fairmann, looking into the passenger side at a hefty man with long blond hair whose limp hands encircled a large, ornate-looking electronic keyboard. Fairmann had a nephew who was into music, perhaps he'd like ... He reached in, only to snatch his hand away when the keyboard moved, writhing like an earthworm in the hot sun. Now that he was so close, Fairmann could see the sides of the keyboard move in and out like it was breathing, and see the veins pulsing across its surface. He changed his mind: maybe his nephew wouldn't want this particular keyboard. Instead he patted the burly man down, awkwardly through the open car window, and finally came up with a wallet.
"Bill T. Miller," said Fairmann, reading off the Massachusetts driver's license.
"And the lady is ...?"
"She's no lady, she's a SubGenius," said a distracted Blattroot, groping through her pockets - and groping a fair bit of the lush flesh underneath in the process. His search turned up a SubGenius membership card made out to Friday Jones, a pocket knife, and a roll of Trojans. "You won't be needing these, you sweet thing," crooned Blattroot, preparing to drag Friday out of the car.
Leaning in, he noticed that the back seat was packed with camping gear and sound equipment ... but there was a women squeezed into the middle of the heap, long brown hair covering her face. Blattroot pulled open the rear door and unceremoniously dumped sleeping bags, tents and several tape decks onto the ground. The woman - no, man - slumped on his back. Fairmann exclaimed "It's him!" "Oooohhhh - yes," Blattroot slurred, dragging the slender, long-haired man out of the car and pinning him against the side of the car, head lolling. "What we have here is the B-I-N-G-O spells fuckin' Bingo, head of the Church of the SubGenius himself, Ivan Stang." "I'll call in and tell them to send out another car." Fairmann walked towards the police car and froze after only two steps, hearing the "click" of a safety being taken off. He turned, very slowly, hands out to his sides; Blattroot had his gun out and aimed squarely at Fairmann's chest, his other arm crushing Stang against the side of the car. "Do you remember Alice, sweet Alice?" Blattroot said in an almost conversational tone.
"Uh ... yeah. Brooke Shields never took off her clothes and she was dead in just a few minutes," answered Fairmann, whose heart felt like it was about to tear out of his chest with its frantic beating. "I'm talking about my WIFE, you idiot, ALICE my WIFE!" screamed Blattroot. "I loved her and I always told her what to do and then one day she was gone and do you know why she was gone?"
Fairmann looked at the drooling, gun-waving madman in front of him and prudently made no reply.
"She was gone because of HIM!" Blattroot pointed the gun at the picture of "Bob" in the back window of the car, and then whipped it back to point at Fairmann. "She read about this fucking CULT, and the next thing I know she's in fucking MALAYSIA, and when she comes back and I try to give her a talking-to, tell her to come home, she goes off with some SubGenius GOON and I NEVER - SAW - HER - AGAIN!" Blattroot was screaming now, and he holstered his gun so that he could grab the SubGenius leader by both arms, leaning forward and spitting in his unconscious face. "You know what it's going to BE? You and your fucking "Bob" FUCKED up my life, and now it's time I started to FUCK BACK," said the deranged officer, as he grabbed Stang by the collar and started dragging him back to the police car, one hand opening his own fly as he walked. As he passed Fairmann, he bellowed "Check out that car! When I'm done giving this SubHippie his talking-to, THEN we'll call it in!" Fairmann looked on in shock as Blattroot chucked Stang face down across the rear of the car and started haranguing his unconscious form, while squeezing his own crotch. Muttering "Geez ... I always thought you'd killed Alice ..." he went around the white car to grab the keys out of the ignition and open the trunk. But with the key in the lock, he stopped. Suddenly his mind was overwhelmed with a memory from his past. Jeannie, the first girlfriend he'd had who'd go all the way. She had hair black as night, and the most beautiful pussy he'd ever seen in his life, even in movies. He'd been fifteen, and she seventeen, and the first time Guy rose off her body, in the back of her dad's car, and smelled her perfume and her pussy and his come all mixed together, he swore that it was the smell of Paradise itself. His head spun, and he felt like he was back again, on that night. He could hear the crickets chirping around him, and squinted up at the sun as though he thought it was an unnaturally bright moon. He was here, and Jeannie was here, and that was all that mattered. Except that for some reason Jeannie had been locked inside the trunk. He had to make love to her, the way he never had a chance to after she ran away to New York City. He could smell that smell again, and he clumsily stripped off his clothes, wondering muzzily why he was dressed in a policeman's uniform, as he opened the trunk.
The trunk had been lined in heavy plastic sheeting, and filled with burlap-wrapped blocks of ice. Nestled in the middle of the trunk were two white, still forms. "Jeannie?" Guy whispered, his voice breaking.
***
The Government Man who had provided the officers with the stun equipment had been absolutely certain that it would put any humanoid flat on his, her or its back for a minimum of four hours. He had after, tested the equipment - or rather tested the people the equipment had been tested on - to destruction.
Unfortunately, all of these tests had been done in a laboratory in a rather dry part of the country, and the Government Man never had the chance to discover that the saliva of the common mosquito contained a declotting agent that, when present in the blood of the subject, limited the stun effects to only a few minutes.
Nor did he know that all of the cars' inhabitants had been bitten by a mosquito that had flown into the car through an air vent in the trunk, before it passed out in the haze of smoke. Luck's funny that way, sometimes.
***
Stang woke up first.
***
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Original file name: Friday's X-Day V.1
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