"Thanks, m.o.f.ongo," Theresa says, when she comes back a few minutes later and m.o.f.ongo grins. Then he realizes that she"s being sarcastic and his grin fades.
"You"re all signed off, sport," the Animal Control agent snarls.
Theresa is jabbing her signature on a final form. m.o.f.ongo wants to say something but he"s too confused. Did he do something wrong? He doesn"t think so. Theresa marches over to the bars of his cage.
"What did you say?" she snaps. "Did you say something gross? I know how you can talk. Did you say something ugly to my little girl? Because she"s sitting in my car sobbing."
m.o.f.ongo can"t think of an answer, his brain is so sluggish and confused and the words float to the top one at a time, like bubbles in syrup. It takes forever to put them together. Theresa"s expression softens.
"Why do you have to make everything so hard, Mo?" She rests one hand on the bars. "Why won"t you just talk to me?"
m.o.f.ongo wets his lips to say something, but Theresa doesn"t notice. She just shakes her head and turns and walks out of the trailer. Men drop the metal ramp with a clang and slam the doors shut and m.o.f.ongo speaks too late.
"Don"t go," he says.
But no one hears.
Flat as a putting green, Arlington National Cemetery stretches out to the horizon, interrupted only by the bone white dot, dot, dot of headstones. Theresa wishes she could have a gla.s.s of wine. A thin, tinny, pre-recorded version of "Taps" has just finished drilling its way into her skull and now two pimply soldiers in dress blues are folding up the American flag from her father"s coffin.
They march over to her like clockwork dummies and present her with the folded flag.
"As a representative of the United States Army," one of them chants in a shrill voice that is still breaking, "It is my high privilege to present you this flag . . ."
He squeaks on and Theresa remembers how much her dad hated the military. He thought men in uniform were chumps, that"s why he killed so many of them in the war. He would have died twice if he knew he"d wind up being buried with a bunch of them. Theresa uses a Kleenex to blot the sweat off her forehead.
A wild scream cuts through the hot noon air. Human blood instinctively freezes in its veins.
It is the wild scream of the great ape.
"Hoo hoo hoo!" Comes the terrifying, jungle hoot. "Haa haa! Huh huh huh!
And they look up in the sky. Hanging by one arm from the robed figure on top of the Monument to the Confederate War Dead is m.o.f.ongo. His head looks bigger than Theresa remembers, as if his brain has turned malignant. His skull looks sick and dark, like rotten fruit.
Confusion and chatter, and m.o.f.ongo shoulders some kind of rifle and one of the clockwork Marines dissolves into bones and dust. Everyone screams and scatters, as a SWAT team- who were waiting for just this kind of incident- runs forward. They outnumber the mourners ten to one.
The FBI agent grabs Theresa"s arm and drags her behind a round concrete memorial, where men in black are doing frantic things. The Animal Control agent is here. He says. "I"m so fired," and lights a cigarette off an eternal flame.
"I am holding you personally responsible for this travesty," the CIA agent yells at the Animal Control agent.
"I blame you people, too," the FBI agent joins in. "We"ve monitored this monster for almost fifty years, we turn him over to you, and he busts out of that big rig like it was nothing in less than seventy-two hours."
"He used his mind rays!" the Animal Control agent whines. "We didn"t think they still worked. We thought they were supposed to be killing him!"
"Does he look dead to you?"
m.o.f.ongo leaps off the Monument to the Confederate War Dead and charges Steve Savage"s freshly dug grave, tossing aside fleeing mourners like tenpins. The SWAT Team sets up a skirmish line, then opens fire.
They shoot to kill. Their automatic weapons chop the still summer air. m.o.f.ongo doesn"t even slow down. He barrels through them like they"re a bunch of crippled children. One of the Marines in full dress makes a patriotic last stand. He locks eyes with the charging gorilla, aims his rifle at m.o.f.ongo"s overflowing skull, and fires. The air around m.o.f.ongo shimmers and the bullet falls to the ground. m.o.f.ongo plucks the rifle from the soldier"s hands and bashes him over the head with it.
The SWAT Team fires again, but the air around m.o.f.ongo keeps shimmering and their bullets keep falling. Theresa realizes that she"s relieved. She thought m.o.f.ongo was committing suicide by SWAT, trying to go out in a blaze of glory. But m.o.f.ongo is smarter than that.
More firing. More shimmering. More bullets fall.
"What the f.u.c.k is that?" the CIA agent screams.
"It"s his Kinetic Suspenders," Theresa says. "He invented them a long time ago. I would tell your flamethrower guys not to bother."
A Flamethrower Team is trotting through the headstones, then they stop and unleash a black and orange column of fire at m.o.f.ongo. No effect.
"Kinetic Suspenders," the CIA agent moans. "That doesn"t even make sense."
"Where the h.e.l.l did he get them?" the FBI agent asks. "We closed down all his stupid Science Bases."
"I guess you missed one," Theresa says.
m.o.f.ongo jumps down into the grave. SWAT snipers take a few more useless shots. A CNN he li cop ter appears on the horizon, zooming closer.
"Listen, Savage," the CIA agent says. "We only gave your old man a plot in Arlington because he shot up a bunch of n.a.z.is back in the day. See that helicopter? That"s CNN. America is going to see this desecration of our country"s most sacred site live on cable TV and you will have good, clean children throwing up into their breakfast cereal from coast to coast and it"s all going to be your fault."
There"s the distant sound of something breaking and pieces of plasticized wood are tossed out of the hole. Suddenly m.o.f.ongo is clambering up from the grave, and in his arms is the corpse of Steve Savage.
"Holy s.h.i.t," the FBI agent says. "He"s taking the body!"
"Will you people show some respect!" the CIA agent yells impotently at the CNN he li cop ter.
Theresa just watches.
A few more shots ring out. She flinches. m.o.f.ongo raises his middle finger at the SWAT team and then touches a control on his chest and a cloaking device clicks off, revealing a hover plane materializing behind him. He lopes over to it, climbs on board, puts Steve Savage"s corpse in the co-pilot"s seat and gets in. The ship lifts off.
They watch it rise into the air. It hangs there for one unnatural moment, every swooping, graceful curve of its Atom Age engineering sneering at the twenty-first century. Then it"s gone, screaming for the horizon.
"Which direction is that?" shouts the CIA agent.
"East," the FBI agent says. "Toward Africa."
"Wow," Theresa says.
"Wow?" the CIA agent says. "Our nation"s most hallowed resting place is vandalized by an obscene baboon and you say wow? Are you sick?"
Hearing it like that, Theresa wonders if she is sick.
"I just wanted to protect people from dangerous animals," the Animal Control agent moans. "I"m going to lose my job. What am I going to tell my family?"
"Come on, people," the CIA agent says. "Let"s find out where they"re going and shoot them down. Anyone know where they"re going?"
But no one knows, because suddenly the hover plane vanishes off the radar. Expensive satellites blink in amazement. Where did m.o.f.ongo go? No one knows.
Tight-lipped, agents of the United States government stuff Theresa into the back of an armored SUV and question her severely. They want her to know just how angry they are, and so they take turns sitting backward in the front seat, yelling questions at her. Where did m.o.f.ongo go? Why did he steal her father"s body? Did m.o.f.ongo have contact with Islamic fundamentalists or with members of Al Qaeda? What does she know and when did she know it?
What can she tell them? She doesn"t know anything. She doesn"t even know where m.o.f.ongo has taken her father. A Viking funeral in Antarctica? A memorial on the moon? A secret base buried deep beneath Saharan sands? In a way, it feels more natural to not know where her father is. He was out there, somewhere, the way he"d been out there somewhere all her life. No known phone number. No known address. Maybe in the Himalayas, maybe in a bar, but as long as she never knew for sure, he could be anywhere.
She smiles again, and they ask her what"s so funny? Why is she smiling? She doesn"t answer them.
But m.o.f.ongo knows.
In the hover plane, m.o.f.ongo wipes more blood from his face and feels his ultrabrain collapsing into mush. He was still smarter than five thousand men, but that number was falling fast. His push to escape the tractor-trailer, his push to locate his last science base, his push to open its doors- three pushes too far.
"Feels like old times," m.o.f.ongo says to Steve"s dead body. "Except I"m not punching you in the face."
Then he turns around and punches Steve"s corpse in the face.
"That"s better," he says, and smiles.
m.o.f.ongo flies, finally free. America is behind him, shrinking with every second, and Africa is up ahead, getting bigger all the time.
Grady Hendrix is the author of the novel Satan Loves You, and his short fiction has appeared in Lightspeed Magazine, Strange Horizons, Pseudopod, and 365 Tomorrows. He is one of the founders of the New York Asian Film Festival and his nonfiction writing has appeared in Variety, Slate, Playboy, Time Out New York, the New York Sun, and the Village Voice. He attended the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers" Workshop in 2009.
Evil and genius are not bound together. Insanity is no guarantee of evil, either- madness can bend a great mind to kindness just as easily as it can send it spiraling into cruelty. But there can be brilliance in acts of evil; there can be a mastery of despair and torment. History is dotted with great (or infamous) men who have learned these secrets.
Our final story is the story of a man gifted in these dark arts of domination. His remarkable mind has found a way to bend the world to his liking, and his methods are both cruel and hard. He"s spent a lifetime bringing his boot down on the neck of the world, and now at the pinnacle of his success, he can only wonder what is left for him to conquer, what is left for him to achieve.
One of the things that inspired Winters to write this story was the contemplation of the empty lives of dictators and despots. He realized that there is a cruel paradox to have everything and yet to lead a life so hollow.
THE FOOD TASTER"S BOY.
BEN H. WINTERS.
I: Melancholy.
Periodically, C. toured the lands.
He traveled by boat, by truck, by revolving-bladed copter, by viperclaw, by rattling rail and in ma.s.sive, battered silver air-frigates, swooping in over the villages, his smoke-black contrail drawing a thick, choking curtain across the land. On tour, C. would congregate the people of a village, inspect the teeth of the children, run his fingers along the lintels of the cottages and gaze down into wells. Sometimes, unspeaking, he left the villagers as they were when he came. Sometimes, he would command the strongest man to his knees, have him lashed to senselessness; burn a factory; dissolve a marriage; elevate an idiot pauper to some administrative post.
He undertook them at irregular intervals, these traveling displays of his all-encompa.s.sing authority. Sometimes months would pa.s.s from one to the next, sometimes years. Sometimes he would return almost immediately, doubling back to reinspect the lands by a different route, to catch his subjects unawares.
But always he found the people as he left them: miserable where they lay in their meager homesteads, exhausted from their labors, reliant on his munificence, dest.i.tute of possibility and hope.
Again and again he returned, for C."s power lay in presence. He was there, or had just been there, or was about to be there again, at any time, at all times. Any thought of insurrection, any conspiracy would then be caught out before the barest quiver of an idea could develop into action. His presence was reminder that any rebellion, any thought of rebellion, would earn the famous consequences: the controlled fires; the slow deaths of the children; the caloric restriction; the rains of poison and the blackened sky.
C. was leader of his Earth and G.o.d of it.
He toured the land so belief in the presence of G.o.d would not wane.
But it was fast approaching the second decade since the last of the Wars, and there had been no insurrection, no whiff of insurrection. Two decades, and he lorded over a grim and broken people, minds dulled by labor, hearts hushed by fear.
As C. had envisioned it, so had it come to pa.s.s.
There appeared around this time- or it might be said that around this time there emerged, within C.- a new enemy, of a kind he had not previously encountered or imagined.
One afternoon, the clouds foul smears against a gray-blue sky, C. returned by revolving-bladed copter from his latest tour of inspection. He felt the thrust of the motors in descent and then the jolt of the forward wheels biting into the landing strip. He stepped out and his boot heel crunched on the graveled roof of Glory One, that sheer gleaming black giant, the last of the tall buildings. His home, and what he called, with a dark humor only he was free to enjoy, "the seat of government."
He stood outside the craft. The engine churned down to silence, and the pi lot and his guards stood in a respectful semicircle around C., waiting to proceed in his wake to the stairhead. But C. stayed still and silent. He tilted back his head, feeling in his gut a queer dark ache, a sensation of emptiness so sudden and so vivid that he shut his eyes against it and moaned, rocking slightly backward on his heels.
C. opened his eyes to the north, to the sloping hillside littered with impoverished villages, to the parched hollow below it, dotted with factories.
His villages. His factories. His world.
"What then?" C. murmured, and took a step closer to the lip of the building and said it again, his voice a low, whispering rattle. "What then?"
"Commander?" ventured the pi lot, and C. rushed at him, seized him by the collar of his flight suit, kept rushing, forced the surprised, thrashing body of the pi lot past the others, to the southern lip of the roof, and with a grunting burst of speed and strength hurled the man screeching over the side.
C. watched the body drop, saw it bang against the gla.s.s wall of the Glory One, pinwheel out, grow smaller and smaller, until it was an insignificant speck slipping soundlessly into the water.
And still he felt it.
"What then?"
II: Epiphany C. was not a stupid man.
The problem was not in figuring out what it was- this dark growth that had taken root in him (and which he could not thereafter shake free of)- it was melancholy, thick and clotted, belaboring his limbs, slowing the motion of his pen at his long desk, pooling behind his eyes as he tried to focus on the screen-bed, undertaking the administration of his world.
Neither did it take great effort to discover the wellspring of this foul humor. C."s had been a life built on carnage: He had fed on the violence of his age as a beast on meat, from his squalid birth in a camp for the displaced to his days rampaging on horse back as a militia commander, the terror of all enemies, a legend of force and savagery. He had turned from each victory to the next struggle, emerging victorious from that struggle in its turn. Laid waste to challengers, building his empire, closing his fist around the universe.
But now the guns had been long silent, and every corner of the world was his and his alone. Knowledge of victory was the seed of his misery.
There was no violence but that which he ordered, no savagery that did not begin and end at his command.
Which left only silence. The cold, mocking silence of triumph.
C. tried to dissipate his newfound despondency in the various decadences that his power and position afforded him. He stayed up for a week on artificial stimulants, his eyes twitching, studying the ersatz combat known as chess. He sank himself into elaborate, daylong feasts of food and drink. He ordered elaborate displays of dancing girls and acrobatics, commanded the construction of great amphitheaters in the lower depths of Glory One, sat staring with his thick arms crossed at increasingly fantastical performances and stagecraft.