DP Tool Club 26/CD_ASCQ_26_1295.iso/vrac/df9511g.zip/4L

Text File | 1995-11-01 | 16KB | 329 lines

 =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
 STRANGERS IN TOWN
   by T.J. Hardman, Jr.
 -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=


   Sirs,

   I have a strange tale to relate. I was traveling to Washington,
 DC, on business. I was scheduled to be in town for some time, so
 I took a place in the suburbs. I ride the subway to work every
 morning.

   I'm riding on the subway, looking at my fellow travellers,
 categorizing them, and I see a very uncomfortable looking guy,
 obviously paranoid, judging from the way his eyes are flickering
 from passenger to passenger. A spy, maybe? No, a spy would be more
 cool . . . Just nuts, I guess, or a drug casualty. Then I notice
 (I say notice, because I guess I've been hearing it all along) a
 quiet snapping sound from behind me, and a little white dot goes
 zipping past me . . . straight towards this flaky looking guy. It
 hit him in the face, and he started visibly.

   I do not use drugs or alcohol, and this is not something I
 usually see.

   So I start looking around, casually as I can, and I see that
 quite a few of the people on the train are up to the same trick,
 flicking their thumbs at this guy like kids flick marbles. These
 guys are *good*  at this. They are hitting this guy regularly,
 judging by his reaction . . .

   He starts sneezing, wheezing, and rubbing at his neck like it
 hurts him. He blows his nose, cranes his neck like he's trying to
 adjust it. He never stops looking around at all of the other riders.
 He looks mad as hell, getting totally paranoid . . . tendons are
 standing whitely out on his hands. I wonder if he knows what's going
 on? I guess he does, he *must* . . . . Maybe that's why he's looking
 around like that.

   I see then that he's looking at me. He seems to recognize me,
 perhaps mistaking me for someone he knows. Just for laughs, I hang
 my hand out in the aisle, and flick my thumbs at him. He glares at
 me, a particularly venomous look, and stands up as we pull into a
 station. He leaves in what amounts to a huff, still looking at me
 like I've turned into a bug-eyed monster. Anyway, he's off of the
 train, and everyone, and I mean everyone, checks the time, and then
 they go back to reading their papers. I am totally baffled. I turn
 around and ask the guy behind me, did you see that guy, what's with
 him?

   The guy says, do I mean the vampire-man. My mouth drops open.

   He says you must be new in town. I say, yeah, I am. What do you
 mean, vampire?

   You know, he says. Goddamn bloodsucker.

   What's this? I ask, flicking my thumbs.

   You don't know? he asks. Where you from, he wants to know.

   Chicago, I lie.

   OK, he says. Diffenbachia, beta-carboline, and ibuprofen.

   Huh?

   You know . . . Advil, Motrin. They sell it for headaches, but
 it's a muscle relaxer. That's mainly what he's got going for him
 is muscles and bone structure.

   I don't get it.

   If we relax the shit out of him, he's weak, he's slow, his
 liver gets screwed up. If he goes into overdrive, his back goes out,
 and then if he keeps it up, he tears himself apart. The Def, the
 Diffenbachia, you know, the Mother-In-Law plant, it makes his throat
 close up, makes him choke. The beta-carboline, it's a chemical that
 induces fear.

   Jesus, I say. That's goddamned cold.

   Yeah, he grins savagely, as it should be.

   Why don't they just take him out and shoot him?

   He hasn't done anything.

   So why do it to him?

   He's a goddamned vampire! he hisses, scowling fiercely.

   But you say he hasn't done anything.

   Nothing we can pin on him, he says.

   He is well and fashionably dressed, like almost everyone else in
 DC, wearing a long black trenchcoat. He also is black. I ask him
 what he does. He says he's an attorney, with some alphabet soup
 agency of the federal government.

   Isn't he watched closely? I ask of him.

   Of course, he says. Not my job, but I hear he's pretty good at
 dropping tails. Someone's killing a lot of people in this town,
 and there's less blood than there should be by the time the cops
 get there. Here, he says, and hands me a little packet. Vampire
 repellent, he tells me. Keep it under your belt. Oh, my stop, he
 concludes.

   He gets up, bracing himself against deceleration, holding on to
 the rail on top of my seat. His thumb recurves. The knuckle closest
 to the hand is huge, arthritic looking, and sits well away from the
 hand. From there, the long second leg of parallels the metacarpals,
 and the final joint bends backwards at almost 100 degrees. His nails
 are very broad, greatly curved, and appear to be extremely thick.

   The train stops, rather lurchingly, as he strides faultlessly to
 the door. He queues up first in line, and straightens his tie,
 collar and cuffs and hitches his belt all in about one second. The
 door slides open, and he strides out, barely allowing the doors to
 clear his wide shoulders, which he holds quite well back. His
 posture, like his attire, is impeccable. I get off at the end of the
 line. I return to my security townhome, and firmly lock the gate,
 and set the alarms.

   Vampires. Jeeze.

   Undeclared race wars. Conviction without trial, cruel and
 unusual punishment of an individual who has reputedly done nothing
 prosecutable to anyone, all on the basis of *allegations* that he
 is a legendary or mythical being? How many amendments to the
 Constitution are we throwing out the window, Mr. Modern and Equal
 Black Attorney?

   I think about Washington DC, with the highest rate of unsolved
 murders in the nation, all ostensibly drug related. I wonder if
 that's really the case here in The Nation's Capital, the *center of
 control and administration*, where no one is allowed to possess or
 even own a handgun. A sleepy southern town which has no reason to
 exist except that George Washington wanted it across the river from
 his farm.

   If there really are vampires, or such creatures as could give
 rise to such legends, what could they be, other than a co-evolved
 species of hominid adapted to nocturnal predation upon other
 hominids? Perhaps with rapid healing abilities, superior strength
 and reflexes? Perhaps only a handgun wound to the head would be a
 certain defense for an unlucky human.

   I've been trying to flick objects of varying sizes and densities
 at a target, a foot wide square of flypaper strips. Maybe if I'd
 learned young enough, or had been practicing for decades, maybe I
 could hit the center spot five times out of ten. I'm talking about
 from ten feet away . . .

   I tried a bit of this stuff on myself, and it is definitely some
 kind of nasty stuff. I spent the next twenty minutes with slow,
 powerful cramps twisting my spine, and for the next hour or so, I
 was seized by a nameless dread. When I was in college, I had heard
 of The Fear, a proscribed Soviet torture chemical mostly used in the
 dreaded psychiatric prisons. Nobody ever voluntarily uses it twice.

   A week later, I noticed the telltale fingernail striations of
 arsenic poisoning. I went to the drugstore and bought the components
 of Marsh's test, and tested the "vampire repellent". Arsenic
 positive . . . that would explain the poor guy's complexion, and
 his debilitated posture.

   Some of the folks flicking slow murder at a skinny, sickly-
 looking white boy were firing bank shots nearly thirty feet,
 rebounding shots that were all, or almost all, hitting the mark.

   Cliches come to my mind. Cliches may be old, or trite, but
 they have their value. Cliches express complex thought in simple,
 common terms.

   I've been back into town a few times, and I've noticed: People
 making strange gestures. Not any sign language I know of, and my
 mother was deaf, and taught the deaf. I sign rather well, myself.
 Sign language between spies? Can't be that many spies in town.
 We're talking majority here. How long would spies last, anyway,
 against "vampires"? Perhaps there really are no ordinary people
 in the espionage business.

   I saw a DC officer ticketing a jaywalker twenty yards from a
 crack corner. The out-of-towner was aghast, his New Jersey accent
 strident above the noise of traffic . . . then a cruiser pulled up
 . . . the Jerseyite protested that jaywalking wasn't an arrestable
 offense (I've looked it up . . . it isn't.) The cop threw him in,
 just grabbed him under the armpit and threw him in . . . the
 Jerseyite wasn't a small man, and the cop wasn't large -- but the
 cop just picked him up and threw him in. I saw bright blood, and a
 protruding rib . . . and the cruiser just sped off, and as I stared
 sidelong through my dark glasses, I saw the cops in the cruiser
 doing . . . something . . . to the man. It didn't look like first
 aid. As the cop walked on, the crack dealers grinned . . . showing
 teeth most of the way back to their small pointy ears. I waited a
 bit, then caught the next bus.

   There are as many people on the streets at night as there are
 during the day, all young, all hip, all well and fashionably
 dressed. Even in the dimly lit bars their pupils barely dilate.
 They are very hard to see in the dark corners . . . and in the
 light, they are often rather pale. There is something strange about
 their hands.

   Many, if not most of the non-tourists in town have very strange
 thumbs . . . and a powerful ridge of muscle to operate the little
 fingers. There is something . . . variant . . . about the shoulder
 structures.

   A lot of the people here walk that cocky homeboy strut. Others
 glide silently by me as I eat my burger in Dupont Circle at high
 noon, light glinting off of their UV-protected mirror shades . . .
 and their predatory gait reminds me of well-fed lions. I also saw
 what was evidently a modified version of the popular quarter-watt
 infrared-laser cigarette lighter . . . pointed directly into the
 side of a man's eyes . . . when the man turned in that direction,
 the other was already walking away with the device pocketed . . .
 an excellent sleight of hand routine, but fearfully practical, too
 much so for my tastes. I saw the man walk into a moving bus, which
 sped through suddenly conspicuously absent traffic, coming directly
 out of his conveniently-placed new blind spot.

   I bought a pair of mirrored wraparound sunglasses. On the train
 today, I saw more signing and silent lipspeech . . . like my mother
 and I often used to communicate when signing might not have been
 polite . . . I caught some of it . . . and looked at the man next to
 me. He was regarding me calmly, but my pulse quickened, for he was
 looking directly sideways at me -- without turning his head. His eye
 was rotated at more than 90 degrees from the forward plane . . . .
 In the kingdom of the blind the one-eyed man is king, and this man
 could get his one eye focused directly where I have limited
 peripheral vision at best. Now I can no longer ignore the unusual
 zygomatic arch placement I've seen so often here in the Nation's
 Capitol. I can also no longer ignore the variances in the location
 of the foramen magnum, nor in the temporomandibular joint.

   His eye was so strange . . . as I looked away I thought I
 glimpsed his cornea, which had been greatly curved, flattening as
 if he were able, by some muscular action, to change the curvature,
 using it as a secondary lens, and it seemed to change colors, even
 as I watched.

   On another train, I saw a -- I don't know what I saw; I can no
 longer think of these beings which seem to have occupied my Nation's
 Capital as human --  . . . person purse his lips, revealing a short
 piece of drinking-straw which he blew through, firing a small dart
 of some sort into the neck of the man (this one *was* a Man) who
 absently scratched his neck, and shortly thereafter fell into a deep
 sleep. The person who had fired the dart gave me an amused look, as
 if *daring* me to do anything about this activity of his. I got off
 of the train, and struggled not to run to my rental car.

   I'm thinking about Mr. Modern and Equal light-skinned black
 attorney with a peculiar, well-thought-out, indeed, almost
 *rehearsed* story to tell, and with no respect for the most basic
 laws of the land, thinking about his funny simian hands, animalistic
 claws, lightning gestures and savage toothy grin. Cliches . . . and
 more cliches. I've been thinking, and thinking . . . Red Herrings.
 Stalking horses. I'm thinking about that guy on the train, about
 pots calling kettles black. What I really think is about being
 thrown to the wolves. My neck hurts, and it's getting harder to
 breathe, and I'm so afraid.

   The striations on my fingernails have deepened, and my food in
 my locked security townhouse tested positive for arsenic for a week,
 and then didn't test positive. In the meantime, I've been eating out
 of cans, or I was until I saw that nobody in my usual store was
 buying any canned goods. As I picked out a can of tuna, several . . .
 individuals turned and smiled at me. They let me see a lot of teeth,
 anyway. I bought the tuna, not wanting to look suspicious . . . . I
 thought I saw something like a dark-colored hypodermic vanishing up
 the sleeve of the cashier as she weighed my bag of oranges. I spent
 a ridiculous amount of money on a very small amount of food that I
 am afraid to eat.

   I used the Marsh's test on some arsenical rat poison I had bought,
 and it didn't indicate, so I can't even get a reliable test in this
 town. My skin has taken on a grayish-white tone, and in the sunlight,
 I look like a dead thing.

   Today, I watched, terrified, on the train, as they flicked their
 slow poisons at me, and watched an out-of-towner listen credulously
 to a tale told of ME and my crimes . . . and on the street today,
 pointed fingers followed me, and so did the whispers . . . whispers
 saying: "Vampire man."

   I hope I can be brave, and hold together long enough to think this
 through . . . I think they may know I've been thinking . . . and
 wondering exactly what it is that has occupied my nation's capital
 . . . and wondering exactly what will soon befall my nation if these
 -- people -- are in control of the rest of us.

   I'm thinking of leaving the country.

   I wish I could leave the planet.

                         {DREAM}

 Copyright 1987 - 1995 T.J. Hardman, Jr., ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
 -------------------------------------------------------------------
 T.J. is 37 and describes himself as having no significant
 accomplishments to date, other than two novels, a lot of short
 stories and a half-jillion essays posted to various BBSs and the Net.
 He went to R.E. Peary HS, Rockville, Maryland, class of '76, and
 afterwards hasn't done squat other than sit around and write. He has
 no life ("I'm a writer, I just watch people and read a lot"), with
 no job and no prospects. Email to: [e-mail] and his page
 is at: http://www.clark.net/pub/klaatu/home.html Send email to:
 ===================================================================