Dr. Adder Read online

  I would like to add my vote in favour of showing female amputees in your magazine. One-armed and, especially, one-legged females offer a unique excitement and a pictorial featuring attractive girl amputees would certainly be welcomed by a large number of readers....

  —Letter, Penthouse magazine,

  November 1972

  ❖

  I only remember one thing very well from when I was a kid, and that's probably because of the fuss made at the time. I was outside the front door of a day-care center, cutting earthworms open with a pair of scissors so large I had to use both hands to hold them. The sunshine was kind of dry and hazy; I can recall it exactly. Just like it nearly always is.

  The attendant must have been looking for me for quite a while, because I could tell she was pretty fuckin’ exasperated. She snatched me out of the planter and took away the scissors. She carried me into a room with a little sign on the door that said YOUNG 4S. She sat me down in front of a large television screen, with a bunch of other little kids absorbed in it with their mouths open. She didn’t see me watching her leave the room, bearing off the scissors like captured enemy weapons.

  In the supplies room, she pulled open the drawer where the scissors were kept I remember her as being vaguely young and constipated. She was probably thinking, How did he get in here in the first place? and then, That’s odd, there’s supposed to be another pair of scissors in here. But by then, I had managed to catch up behind her, and plunged the article in question into her lower leg, through her mesh panty hose, soft flesh, and stiff muscle, glancing off bone, as I watched the blood flow over the protruding half of the scissors and then down my two little hands. I can still see it. When she flopped down onto her knees in front of me, her mouth and eyes were widened into silent O’s of pain and shock.

  Twenty-five years later, I was lying in that shit-strewn alley, near dead. A neat quarter-century. It must have looked like the blood had never stopped flowing, until I was drenched with it, sticky and warm. Solid red, a little pool collecting beneath me, with specks of bone chips and fragmented tissues clinging to my clothes and body. And one forearm buzzing and clicking, plotting lethal trajectories for enemies to which I was almost inviolate, beyond reach.

  ❖

  “I’m leaving,” said the young man. He was known throughout the Phoenix Egg Ranch as E. Allen Limmit; he ran the company-owned brothel.

  “No shit,” said Bonna Cummins, the ranch’s personnel manager. Beneath her seemingly thumb-wide eyebrows, she glared across her desk at him. Behind the eyes could be read the thought, The little twerp.

  Limmit nodded, trying not to be intimidated, oppressed spiritually by the woman’s overwhelming bulk. “That’s right,” he said. “I’ve arranged passage on tonight’s egg run to L.A. Paid for and everything.”

  “What’s the matter?” scoffed Cummins. “How come the little GPC faggot wouldn’t give you a ride back in his personal jet? Afraid you’d get chicken feathers on the upholstery?” She leaned back in her chair, trying to extract something from between her incisors with one spatulate fingernail.

  For a moment, he looked abstractedly around the cramped office. On one wall hung dusty and yellowing photographs of the ranch’s champion layers, with sometimes a smaller snapshot of one of their eggs included, with a man standing beside it to indicate the dimensions. Their eyes, thought Limmit, gazing at the dumb feathered faces; they’ve always reminded me of horses.

  Through the window beside the door, he could see out over the entire floor of the ranch’s main barn, and observe the white-overalled eggers and techs attending each stall’s occupant. Penetrating the window glass came a shrill, wailing sound. Limmit winced, remembering what it was. A short distance beyond the barn’s walls, past the other barns and dormitories, lay the outskirts of the city of Phoenix, the Arizona sand sifting through the abandoned streets and freeways. All this, he said to himself, I’ll be leaving.

  “It’s part of the plan,” he said finally, conscious again of Bonna’s heavy-lidded gaze. “It’s necessary for me to arrive in L.A. that way.”

  “Do I want to hear it?” asked Cummins, scowling. “Fuck your stupid plot, whatever it is. What I want to know is, who’m I going to get to run the damn brothel?”

  Shrugging, Limmit said, “That’s your problem.”

  “I oughta step on your skinny face for that. You know who’s going to have to run that place? Me, that’s who!” She calmed down, with visible effort. “But I’m going to be nice to you. After you get your ass eaten off in L.A., you can come crawling back here and I’ll give you your old job back. I’ll even have the rooms beside it kept ready for you; don’t even bother moving your stuff out.”

  “Thanks.” He turned for the door. “But I won’t be coming back,” he said grimly.

  “Sure. We’ll see.”

  Before he could close the office door behind him, her raucous voice called out after him. “Until you leave tonight, you’re still in charge of those beds, you hear? So put my favorite out, you know, Larry 4B. I need to relax after a shitty day like this.” Crossing the floor of the main barn, dodging the forklifts, each carrying another egg out to the loading dock or the ranch’s own freezers, Limmit paused outside one stall with the name LEONA scrawled in chalk below the stenciled code designation. Inside the stall, the hen lay on its side, as if stricken. Several eggers and techs stood around idly, waiting; one tech dispassionately inspected the enormous, distended cloacal opening. The straw beneath the tech’s feet was soaked with Leona’s blood: evidently, at some point it had been decided that replacing it was a waste of time. “Watch out, Cal,” he heard one of the eggers call, laughing, to the tech. “Don’t forget the time you poked your head too far and got sucked up in one of those. Like to smothered before we got you out.”

  Limmit knelt down beside the hen’s head. The red, equine eyes flickered in recognition, then clouded. “Nernts,” it gasped, the honking voice strangling somewhere in the animal’s beak. “Nernts neel bagh.”

  “I know it hurts,” soothed Limmit, stroking the down alongside its beak. “Don’t fret—it’ll be all right.” He looked up and saw one of the techs gazing amusedly down at the scene they made. Leona’s eyes had closed as if she had been comforted, childlike, to sleep.

  Limmit straightened up, meeting the gaze of the tech leaning casually against the animal’s flank. “How is she?” he asked evenly.

  “She?” echoed the tech, puzzled. “You mean the hen? Dying. The egg went blastomic—she’ll never get it out alive. Even if we went in and took the egg out in pieces, she’s too ripped up inside to survive. Besides,” she said coolly, “it’s too old to go to that much trouble to save. Only a few egglaying months left.” The tech shrugged her wide shoulders and turned away.

  He glared silently at her retreating back. Stupid bitch, he mouthed. Looking up, he saw one of the eggers watching him. He recognized her and quickly left the stall, his face burning angrily. “Limmit, wait!” the egger called after him. He only quickened his paces; behind him, in the stall, Leona moaned, then screamed shrilly at another contraction convulsing her massive form.

  The egger caught up with him in his living quarters beside the brothel. “Hello, Joan,” Limmit said, without looking around to see her.

  “I heard you were leaving,” she said, watching him open a small suitcase on his bed.

  “That’s right,” said Limmit. He studied the empty interior of the suitcase. There was nothing he could think of that he wanted to take from here. He glanced up at the shelves above his bed, lined with the yellowing paperbacks he had dug out of the dunes piling up in an old bookstore in the city. The largest science fiction collection in the Southwest (anymore), thought Limmit, gazing up at their once bright covers; maybe the world now. Who needs it?

&nbs
p; “How come?”

  He snapped the suitcase shut and turned around to look at the egger. Her wide, coarse face looked the same as when they had graduated together from the company’s high school six years ago. “Let’s just say I’m tired of the place.”

  She looked hurt. “You shouldn’t let them get to you,” she said. “They’re not mean—they just don’t have time to get attached to them like you do.”

  He snorted derisively. “I’m the last person you can tell that to. I run this little place, remember? I know exactly who gets attached to what around here. Which reminds me, I’ve got to go stiffen up Larry 4B for Bonna Cummins.”

  Joan stood silent for a moment, her close-cropped head bent as if studying her workboots. “Is that the only reason you’re leaving?” she asked softly. “I mean... it’s not because everyone here knows who your father was, is it?”

  Limmit stared at her without saying anything.

  “Because, if that’s it,” she gulped, and stammered on confusedly, “that’s nothing to be ashamed of, is it? I mean, without him, there wouldn’t even have been a Phoenix Egg Ranch, would there?” She looked at him in mute appeal.

  “What makes you think I’m ashamed of my father?”

  “Well, you know, taking your mother’s name and all.” “That’s just the way she brought me up; neither he nor I had anything to do with it. It’d be stupid for me to change it now.” She stood for a moment longer, gazing mournful and inarticulate at him, then she turned and fled out the door. Sighing, Limmit unlocked the brothel’s drug and alcohol cabinet and, without bothering to sign them out, swallowed dry two of the precious amphetamine analogs. Plenty of them out where I’m going, he reflected moodily. I’ll mail Bonna a couple to make up for these.

  He sat down on the bed and looked off into space. Without him, he thought, there wouldn’t even have been a Phoenix Egg Ranch. What a thing to be proud of. Just one of the many wonderful things Lester Gass left for us. In his mind, he surveyed the ranch’s barns like hangars, every stall containing its massive roclike hen, delivering its weekly egg to be cut up and processed into thousands of ersatz edible items. The increase in body size had had a parallel effect on brain capacity. The hens, too large to move about, watched and listened with interest to everything that happened around them.

  And the brothel too, thought Limmit. My old man thought of everything.

  Feeling the first wave of energy released by the capsules, he stood up and left the room. Better take care of business, he thought, crossing the walkway into the women’s section.

  He injected double the standard dose into Larry 4B, the small red eyes watching him with a curious emptiness behind them. He had never felt as close to anything in the brothel as to the egglayers below—the animals here having brains still too small for speech or thought, even if their beaks hadn’t been removed surgically, the only nongenetic alteration that took place on the ranch. Limmit watched the swelling response to the drug begin. By the time Bonna knocked off work and arrived here, it would reach its maximum.

  He didn’t inject any more of the cocks, or douche any of the hens. Let everybody do it themselves, he thought, returning to his rooms. Or with each other, though that was hardly likely: Lester Gass’ original schedule of fines for intercourse between ranch employees had long been forgotten, never having been used more than once or twice.

  Waiting for him in his rooms was Joe Goonsqua, the GPC official. “Ready to leave?” he asked, smiles and dimples breaking out all over his cherubic face.

  “Sure,” said Limmit. The amphetamine analogs were making him tense.

  “Well,” said Goonsqua, beaming, “the Greater Production Corporation just wants you to know that it appreciates your help in this little matter. And that, of course, we will appreciate your further discretion.” He extended a large black briefcase toward Limmit. “This is it.”

  Limmit took the case, the weight of it nearly pulling him over. “Christ, it weights a ton.”

  “Well, heh, you know what’s in it.” Goonsqua stepped back and clasped his hands together, looking around the room. “Sure you’re all set now? Everything taken care of?”

  He nodded. “There wasn’t much.”

  Goonsqua cleared his throat. “I understand,” he said, “that you have, ah ... something set aside for your personal use in the, uh, you know?” He waved a hand vaguely toward the door and the brothel beyond.

  “That’s right,” said Limmit. “Glad you reminded me. I’ll have to give the key to the compartment to Bonna Cummins on my way out.” He drew the key out of his pocket and glanced at it. He remembered the warm feathers of its breast, the tangling of the down with his own hair. Perhaps, he thought, I should’ve said goodbye to her—if she would’ve understood.

  “No, that’s all right,” said Goonsqua. “I’ll take care of it.”

  “It’s on my way,” he said, repocketing it.

  “Give me the key,” said Goonsqua, his face suddenly florid and unsmiling.

  Limmit stared at him, until something clicked together inside himself. “Sure,” he said understandingly, drawing out the key and dropping it in Goonsqua’s palm. “Try everything once, I guess.”

  Who would’ve thought it, Limmit said to himself as he crossed the main barn floor, heading for the loading area where the plane was waiting. That an important bastard like that would even be interested. The dying hen screamed miserably again, thrashing in the blood-soaked straw.

  All over L.A., television sets were being turned on; in Orange County they were on already.

  The first wave of the assassination party emerged onto the roof of the building. The setting sun, visible when they had started hiking up the dark stairwells, was gone now, headed for China. Eddie Azusa, working by starlight, began clamping the weapon and the separate, multilensed gunsight to the guardrail. Milch, the triggerman and hence the unofficial host for the party, pulled at a plastic jug of homemade alcohol, a cloudy brown fluid, then passed it down to little Morris, sprawled exhausted against an airshaft. Being a newcorner, Morris had been conned into hauling up everything.

  “Ready to go,” announced Azusa, and peered through the gunsight’s main eyepiece. It had two: one through which the gunner could zero in on almost infinitesimal targets, and another that allowed a second person to observe as well. The apparatus had been designed for CIA hit teams used to doing everything as a committee. “Pretty crowded tonight, though. Gonna be hard getting a clear shot.”

  Milch replaced Azusa at the eyepiece and grunted. “Maybe,” he said thickly, “this time I won’t wait for no gray coats, just take out who I feel like.” He was half drunk already, which in itself was only a buffering for the otherwise lethal or at least incapacitating compounds he would, as the moment approached, slowly and luxuriously inject to steady his hand.

  Observing Milch’s erratic motions, Azusa felt that there were few things in Rattown more disgusting than an alcoholic. He himself preferred kainine, in moderate amounts; as with the other compounds produced in the good Dr. Betreech’s labs somewhere in the Hollywood hills, there were no physical side effects to obscure the pure psychical, almost spiritual, changes produced. None of that tonight, however, Azusa told himself, checking the near-unconscious motion of his hand toward his inside jacket pocket; fine for the star and fine for the audience. But not for the “agent” who, he thought grimly, is going to have to keep his shit together to get through this party night.

  From the other end of the roof came sounds of violent retching. Sixty-plus flights of stairs, laden like a packhorse, topped off with the unfamiliar alcohol, had been too much for little Morris.

  “Obviously not cut out for this heavy revolutionary work,” said Azusa, to which Milch sniggered and said, “Send him over to Mother Endure.”

  Patti F. swam out of the darkness, bearing another plastic jug, full, out of the number that Morris had carried up. Milch’s current piece, and thus unofficial hostess: she set the jug down by the guardrail and stood by him placi
dly, her face as blank and vacant, Azusa saw, as any budding cowhead’s.

  “Wanna look?” Milch said, offering her the other eyepiece. Together they focused on the brightly lit street far below and away. Without removing his eye from the gunsight he groped for the plastic jug, guzzled from it, set it down, and fumblingly began caressing her flanks. A type of foreplay, Azusa knew. Later tonight, when he had made himself ready, Milch’s fingers would be curled around more triggers than one.

  “See any you like?” asked Milch, twirling the gunsight’s knobs.

  “Ooh, there’s a nice one; I’d like to snuff that one, or that one, or ...”

  Azusa looked over their heads, down to the distant Interface. From here it looked like a worm or a snake, filled with a slowly churning light, suspended close to the edge of the empty, disintegrating buildings and streets that constituted L.A., save for the merely disintegrating part that was the slum. A snake, he reflected, curiously moved in spite of his functional cynicism concerning the party’s quasi-mystical rationale. He became aware of a gentle guttural sound somewhere in the dark. It was little Morris snoring. He headed in the sound’s general direction. “Just a happy band of assassins,” he said to the night as he unpacked the tiny portable television from Morris’ prone form, plugged it into one of the ubiquitous outlets to the cable network that permeated all of L.A. like a living nervous system in a corpse. Bless John Mox, he thought, and his Orange County-size ego—keeping the cables into the slums live even though the chances of gaining any converts from this audience were just about zilch. He switched the set on, bathing a section of the roof in its soft, gray, trapezoidal light.

  “A pimp,” said Leslie. He could smell it, like blood; operating on the principle that it takes one to know one. He watched the figure, large black briefcase in tow, walking slowly on the other side of the congested Interface. The figure disappeared into the crowd. “From out of town—New York, maybe.”