Setting out to prove his theory, Rune built up comprehensive lists of the favourite nesting places of ‘lost’ household objects. Each week he would scour his home from room to room seeking out the wayward blighters and plotting their new habitations. It was his intention to compile a handbook which would enable the layman to trace without difficulty any mislaid item. With a Nobel Prize staring him in the face he was forced to abandon the project. All of his biros had gone missing and he could not remember where he had put his notes.
Sir John Rimmer, H. Rune Knew My Father
Jack kept his foot hard down. He was free! He had escaped with his life. Escaped from the soldiers. Escaped from the madman who claimed to be from the future. He was free! Jack threw back his head and laughed like a loon. ‘I’m free!’
Jack brought the jeep to a sudden halt. Gripped the door. Doubled over it and was violently sick. Milk and raw eggs. Bluch! What had he done? Cold reality made a head-on collision. He had betrayed the man who had saved his life. Left him to die. Guilt made a big bad fist in his stomach. Saved his own skin at the expense of a man’s life. How could he ever hope to live with that one? ‘Oh my God.’ Jack sank over the door and wept into his puke. What in the name of sweet Heaven was he going to do now?
He wiped his eyes and tried to get a grip of himself. He was going to have to do something. He wasn’t free. He was driving a stolen jeep. Men wanted to kill him. They would track him down. So what to do? Drive till the petrol runs out? Where? Upstate, downstate? And what about his family? What if they’d been arrested? Tortured? He hadn’t done anything illegal. Muttered some magic words or something. What kind of crime was that?
‘Think, you bastard.’ Jack punished his fists on the steering wheel. ‘Do something.’ Anything. Go back for Rex. That’s it. Go back and find him. Perhaps he’s not dead. No! He’s dead all right. The soldiers put a bullet through him. Go back and make sure. No! The soldiers might think of that, be lying in wait for him.
Go home then. No! They would be expecting him to do that. The university then? No point. ‘Do something.’ Get help. Someone he could trust. There wasn’t anyone he could trust. There had to be someone. There was someone. There was Spike. He could trust Spike.
But he couldn’t get her involved. Yes he could. She and her pirate friends had access to all kinds of computer equipment. They could run his program. Help him cut the cutter. No they couldn’t. Rex has the disc. Therefore the soldiers now have the disc. But he, Jack, had the entry codes. He could bargain. No! The soldiers didn’t want to bargain. ‘Oh, shit, shit, shit.’ But there was the other copy of the disc at his home. If the soldiers didn’t have that too.
‘I’ve got it!’ Jack jumped suddenly back in his seat. An idea had leapt with equal suddenness into his head. He knew exactly what to do. The idea wasn’t necessarily foolproof, but he could tie up the loose ends on the way. He was a scholar after all, an academic. He could beat these people. Whoever they were. Solve the mystery and then . . . well and then something or other. And then Rex would not have died in vain.
Rex had, of course, not died in vain. In fact he had not died at all. But then no-one other than Jack really thought he had. Killing off the hero when the plot is less than a quarter done rarely pays big dividends at the box office. And if you really want Harrison Ford to play Rex in the film version, you are cutting down the chances when he reads the script and says, ‘So I get killed on page 82 do I?’ Then he scrubs round the whole thing and takes Indiana Jones 5 instead. Unless, of course, you get Jack Nicholson to play Jack Doveston. Note the similarity in the names there? Surely no coincidence. But then I always saw Jack Nicholson playing Wormwood. And I always saw Rutger Hauer playing Rex. Mind you, I always saw Rutger Hauer playing me in The Robert Rankin Story. Or Will Smith in the bio-pic of my life, I Robert. But, I digress. And while doing so must beg the reader’s tolerance for this demolition of the “Fourth Wall”. But as this is, after all, the “B Movie” it is to be expected
The big marine with the broken nose finished kicking Rex and cocked the trigger on his pistol. He knew nothing about the way movies are put together. He was simply following orders. Today’s had been ‘Seek and Destroy’, one of his favourites. ‘Use All Reasonable Force’ was another he liked, but not as much though. He stuck his pistol to Rex’s temple. ‘So long, asshole,’ said he.
‘Hold it Cecil.’ His comrade with the bruised genitalia was holding the field telephone. ‘Change of plan. Control say to bring him back alive.’
‘Aw, but sarge . . .’
‘Private!’
‘Sir.’ Cecil dragged Rex up by his hair. ‘I’ll be waiting for you once they’ve done.’ The semi-conscious Rex considered it most unlikely that he and Cecil would ever strike up a deep and meaningful relationship. Presently a helicopter dropped down from the sky and the three soldiers bundled Rex aboard.
Jack abandoned the jeep on the outskirts of Kingsport. He found the nearest payphone and like the not un-legendary ET phoned home. Diane accepted the reverse-charge call, which seemed like a promising start. ‘Where have you been you little shit?’
Jack steeled himself. He really hadn’t been expecting much else. ‘Listen,’ he said. ‘I am in big trouble. Has anyone called today?’
‘Where are you? In jail?
‘No. We busted out.’
‘You did what?’
‘I’ve no time to speak. Has anyone called?’
‘That Spike person phoned. Where are you?’
‘It doesn’t matter. But no-one else? I mean the military. No-one has come to the house?’
‘Why should they? What is all this about?’
‘I’ll tell you everything. But I can’t come home. You’ve got to do something for me.’
‘Why should I?’
‘Diane, this is very important.’
‘Well . . .’
‘Do this one thing and we go back to England.’
‘What is it?’
‘In my study. The bookcase by the door. Third shelf up is a book. The Book of Ultimate Truths. In it is a computer disc.’
‘All right. Go on.’
‘Bring the disc to the Causeway Restaurant on the bay. You know it?’
‘Of course I know it.’
‘But listen Diane. Drive around a bit. Check your mirror. You may be followed.’
‘What is all this, Jack?’
‘I’ll tell you when I see you. One o’clock at the Causeway.’
‘Jack, I don’t think . . .’
‘Please Diane. This is important. England. I promise.’
‘All right. One.’
‘Thank you.’ Jack replaced the receiver. ‘So far so good,’ said he.
‘You did very well.’ The voice belonged to Jack’s former interrogator. He held a gun upon Diane. ‘Now just do as the man says and we won’t trouble you any more.’
Elvis was taking an early lunch. He’d had a busy morning. Made a few phone calls. Dug about in his wardrobes. Selected various pieces of advanced weaponry. Taken two showers and combed his hair a lot.
Although the Time Sprout, for all its smart-assery, was not actually able to read Elvis’s thoughts, it did have a pretty good idea what the lad had in mind. Now he listened while Elvis told him all. And when Elvis had, he said, ‘Kindly run that by me one more time, chief.’
Elvis munched his invariable diet of macrobiotic wholefood. Having long ago been made privy to his terrible end, glutted on junk food and banjoed by barbiturates, he had become a very choosy eater. And the sprout, who had previously needed regular bio-top-ups on the planet Phnaargos had worked out the perfect diet to keep them both running at as near to Al as was inhumanly possible.
‘The way I see it, Barry,’ Elvis pushed healthy little green things into his mouth as he spoke, ‘I gotta hit this sucker before he makes his speech tonight.’
‘I’ll buy that for a dollar.’
‘So I figure I mount a sniper rifle on the building opposite MTVVTV and pick him of
f as he gets out of his car.’
‘And if you miss, chief?’
‘Like I said. If I miss, one of two things happens. Wormwood makes a break for it and we go after him. Or he tries to go ahead with the broadcast.’
‘I’d bet on the latter.’
‘Me too. In which case the extremely clever phase two of the plan goes into operation!’
‘Chief. The extremely clever phase two of the plan, although I grant you, on the face of it, is extremely clever, does have one or two rather dangerous loose ends.’
‘We’ll tie ‘em up, green buddy. You and me got a long afternoon before us. Hey now, what’s this?’ Elvis peered at his left knuckle. A curious rash spread across it. ‘I never had this, this morning.’
‘What you got there chief?’
‘I got me some kind of infection.’
‘Can’t be. You can’t catch anything. Not with me here. You haven’t had a zit since 1958.’
‘Well I have now.’ The sprout peered through Presley’s eyes. It examined the rash and it did not like what it saw. ‘Eat up, chief. Probably just nerves is all.’
Jack Doveston lay in the long grass. The long grass was in a vacant lot. The vacant lot was opposite his house. The clock on the clapped-out clapboard mission house struck twelve thirty. And as if on cue, and indeed on cue, the front door of Jack’s house opened and Diane appeared. She climbed into her white VW and drove off up the street. Jack waited. His front door opened again and Jack’s former interrogator issued forth. He entered the rear of a plain van parked a little way up the street and this sped off in pursuit of Diane. Jack managed a bitter grin. There had been, to his mind, two possibilities. Either his phone was being bugged or the military were already at his home. Thus, he considered, his cunning ruse to have Diane carry a decoy disc, in fact the manuscript for his first novel They Came and Ate Us, to a restaurant five miles away, where he would supposedly be waiting, seemed just the job. Whilst his persecutors were off in the wrong direction, he could whip into his house and avail himself of the genuine disc. Now all he had to do was that very thing.
It was just possible that some guard remained in his home. And so Jack now set off with considerable caution. He crawled from the vacant lot. Sloped across the street and approached his house from the blind windowless side. He crept around to the back and liberated the spare key from beneath the stone gnome. He turned it as silently as he could in the kitchen door.
And suddenly he was home. It was a bit like stepping through some curtain of darkness into a blinding light. Well, a bit. It was all here. The safe. The normal. The dear dull real. Jack blinked. Here it all was. The sink piled high with unwashed dishes, many of which he had dined from himself. His coffee mug, its drips congealing nicely on to the stained pine of the table. The overflowing pedal bin. The foul linoleum. That furry thing in the fruit bowl that no-one cared to approach too closely. Jack could have bent down and kissed it. Home sweet home. He breathed in the terrible smell. Music to his nostrils. Sheer bliss. But enough of that. He had work to do.
Jack tiptoed across the room, his shoes making obscene lip-smacking sounds upon the sticky floor. Jack shushed his feet. With the held breath and the pounding heart that are always a part and parcel of such moments he eased open the sliding glass door which led to the living room. The fact that his shadow would have been plainly visible to anyone hiding in there escaped him completely. Jack poked his head in. The house made that soundless noise that only empty houses make. Although, of course, someone does actually have to be in the house to hear it.
Jack made haste. He passed through the living room and into his study. It showed no signs of ransack. He wormed the K-squared carbon from its hiding place in the record rack. For lovers of detail it was lodged between Bat Chain Puller and Trout Mask Replica. Jack was a major Captain Beefheart fan. Now chuckling in a most unhealthy manner he took out the long rambling insincere letter of apology he had an hour before penned to his wife and propped it amongst the family photos on the unspeakable olde worlde mantelpiece. From his desk drawer he pulled out a laser-sighted 48mm repeat pistol, which the gun-smith had assured Jack’s wife was ideal for home defence, and stuck it into his belt. And then he took his leave.
He felt reasonably sure that Diane’s display of fury, once he failed to turn up at the Causeway, would be of such magnitude that the military would be forced to conclude that she had no part in the deception. If not, then a few hours in her company would serve them right. There was always a certain crooked logic behind Jack’s thinking. But there was no doubt that here was a man capable of constructing any theory, no matter how ill conceived and improbable, in order to support an almost entirely selfish viewpoint.
Jack crept from the house. Ducked across the rear yard. Shinned over the broken picket fence. Prised open his neighbour’s shed door and stole his bicycle.
It is all for a good cause, he assured himself.
10
CAR MAINTENANCE: The Jesuit approach. It is an observable fact that all the best second-hand cars have had ‘only one owner’ and he invariably a man of the cloth who only used the car to drive to church. Yet, when purchased, these prove to be unreliable and very often a downright danger to life and limb. So how might this be?
Cynics assert that the car salesman has in some way misrepresented the car’s former owner. I think not. The simple fact is that the engine, bearings, gearbox and other mechanical bits and bobs have become Devil-possessed. The demonic forces were kept in check by the previous owners, notably the Jesuits. But once in the hands of free thinkers and atheists (a substantial percentage of Cortina owners) they go on the rampage.
The simple institution of the five-thousand-mile exorcism puts the little blighters to flight.
Hugo Rune, The Book of Ultimate Truths.
The helicopter carrying the battered Rex Mundi, he of the blue ribs and romantic bullet-grazed temple, swept over New York. Rex, lying face-down on the floor, with three pairs of army boots using him for a footstool, watched the metropolis flow beneath him. It was a mind boggler. He had seen a bit of countryside which had impressed him, but this was something else. And to think that in a few short years it would all be blackened rubble. Rex pondered. Somewhere, down there, from what he had been able to glean from his family history, his great-grandparents even now toiled away. Rex shook his befuddled head. None of it made any sense at all.
The helicopter spiralled down and dropped on to a landing platform atop a dizzying structure of red glass and steel. Hardly what Rex had expected. He was kicked from his contemplations. ‘Up, you,’ said Cecil. Rex thought to himself, your time will come. But being handcuffed and unarmed he kept it to himself. The hatch flung out and so was Rex.
He was bundled across the tarmac into a lift and then down.
Cecil, finding himself now alone with his nose-breaker, took the opportunity to enliven what would otherwise have been an uneventful journey by striking Rex repeatedly in the kidneys. It added nothing to his quaint, yet evasive charm. Presently, and not a minute too soon for our hero, the lift doors opened to reveal a long corridor, all bright lights, fitted carpet and synthetic pot plants. Rex was ushered along this at the double. It suited him just fine. Brushed steel doors opened before him and he was kicked between them. The doors hissed mercifully shut upon Cecil.
Rex gaped up to view his latest surroundings. He was almost beyond caring.
From what he could see of it, the room looked quite pleasant. The plush off-white deep pile spread wall to wall. It smelt nice. Some chrome chair-legs were visible and others which no doubt supported a desk. Beyond these were a pair of highly polished black shoes. Little shoes, Rex noticed. A little voice said, ‘Sandy, please take the handcuffs off Mr Mundi. He must be most uncomfortable.’ A very large pair of shoes now filled Rex’s vision. He was hauled once more to his feet. A massive grey-clad chest blotted out the world for a moment and then passed behind him. The handcuffs were removed.
Rex was aware of a vast wi
ndow filling one wall of the room. The top of the chrome-legged desk before it and the being which sat behind this. A child. Nothing more. He wore a sober business suit. His dark hair was slicked back. Dark glasses concealed his eyes. He was sucking a soft drink through a straw.
‘Sit down Rex. I can call you Rex, can’t I? Yes, I know I can. Sit down please.’
Rex dropped into a chair facing the empty desk. He rubbed at his ever-raw wrists. ‘Where am I?’ he ventured.
The boy put a slim finger to his lips. ‘Can’t tell you that, Rex. Not yet.’
‘Then perhaps you might tell me why. That would really help.’
‘All in good time. Do you need anything?’
‘Need?’
‘Food, medication? Whatever?’
‘Yes, both.’
‘No problem. Sandy ...’ Rex turned his head. The giant Sandy, evidently kin to the odious Cecil, nodded briefly and departed.
Rex felt his head swimming. He’d had a hard day and it was still early. He took a deep breath and leaned forward to support himself on the desktop.
‘Not too close now, Rex. I really must ask you to keep a respectable distance.’
Rex pondered kidnap. Even weak as he was he could surely overpower this child. Bargain for his release.
‘I don’t think so.’ The boy extended a hand across the desktop. ‘Here, feel.’ Rex felt. A jolt of electricity slammed him back into his chair. ‘A little self-security device of my own invention,’ the lad explained. ‘Works from a tiny unit no bigger than a matchbox, housed here.’ He indicated his chest. ‘Amplifies the heartbeat and converts the power into electrical energy. Harmless to the wearer, but a right bitch to the would-be mugger, rapist, whatever. I hold the patent. I hold over six hundred patents. I bet you didn’t know that.’ Rex blew on his scorched fingers. No, he didn’t know that.
‘It’s a jungle out there.’ Yes, Rex did know that.