Part 7
And while, dear readers, the ladies find out that sometimes you take horrible things back with you when you return from a trip (especially when you end your trip in such a hasty manner), let's all sit back and enjoy a lecture from Frank. Or rather, from Frank's diary.After World War II, and after the Korean War, after the HUAC committees and the senseless & mindless conformity of the 1950s, a wizard came to America. This wizard raised walls of gold, a beautiful Camelot that captured the public's eye, and drove off Mordred (in the person of a trollish little man from Yorba Linda) for 10 years.
Everyone was looking at the handsome wizard and his beautiful wife, and at the castle of gold. Nobody was looking anywhere else...Which in itself should have been an indication that something was very wrong in the realm.
Then one day in Dallas, the wizard was assassinated. Without him, the spell rotted; the golden walls folded up in the night like a carnival that has good & urgent reasons to leave town, revealing the napalm-drenched, bomb-ruined ripe paddies of a foreign nation behind where those walls had stood. And crowning himself in the wizard's stead was a pig-eyed monster from Texas, while 2,000,000 Vietnamese and 55,000 Americans lined up at the slaughterhouse chute.
What this ought to demonstrate is that you can't trust wizards, you can't believe in golden castles, and no matter how anyone tries to dress it up, the 20th century is and was one giant & bloody meathook. Because all those dystopian writers like Kafka and Gibson were dead wrong about one thing: the meathook world isn't the future, it's the past. And it's
hungry.We now return you to the ladies' story, which has gone horribly, horribly wrong.RitaWe were, as always, uncermoniously dumped on the floor of the bar's bathroom, directly beneath the mirror. Here's the part I don't get...They took the sinks out, but couldn't manage a gym pad for the floor? Janet was out...Not unconsciously but badly stunned. As my head spun, I heard the marines guarding the place howling, and they rushed in the room around me.
"No shooting!", I hollered, as I turned around. But what I saw when I finished turning made my blood run cold. Heydrich was halfway out of the mirror, from the waist up. His eyes were now longer pale blue...Instead both eyes were entirely a sickly fish-belly white. His skin was grey and his mouth was distorted in a bellow that sounded like an air raid siren, and which made that mouth about 5 times too large for his head.
The marines crowded around him, stabbing him with their bayonets, which they hadn't had time to install on their rifles.
In short order, Heydrich stopped fighting, and began to rapidly decompose. The marine officer took his men for a debriefing, and suggested that maybe we should talk to our own boss. I dialed him on his cell phone.
"General Johnson."
"Sir, it's Rita and Janet. We didn't catch our man...And we just had a Nazi try to follow us up out of 20C."
"Did he manage it?"
"No, the marines did him in."
"Well that's good news. I do have some bad news, though, that dovetails with what you're telling me. I need you back at the office right away."
"What's up?"
"Some very serious anomolies. I can't discuss it over the phone. Let's just say that your dead Nazi over there isn't alone."
To be continued
