“You will move,” said Vope.
“No,” the new arrival protested, and instantly he winced and grasped at the back of his neck. “Please…please lemme alone,” he begged, as tears bloomed in his eyes. “Don’t hurt me anymore.”
“You will move,” Vope repeated, with a robotic tone in his—its?—voice.
The man gritted his teeth. He frantically rubbed the back of his neck, as if that would cancel the pain spreading through him from the implanted device. But Jefferson knew it would not. Two more heartbeats, and the man stood up and gasped, “Okay! Yeah…make it stop!” He came down the steps, breathing hard and wheezing just a bit. “Christ…oh my God…what a world,” he said, as his terrified brown eyes surveyed the scene. He was a short man, maybe five-foot-seven, and he had been fat at one time because he had heavy-hanging jowls that quivered as he spoke. Under his dirty white shirt and black pants, the man’s flesh seemed to be loose and hanging off him. He, too, was in need of food. Or…maybe, Jefferson thought, the Gorgons wanted him to look that way. He had a grizzled gray beard and was probably in his late forties. He had spoken with a Brooklyn accent, or at least that’s what it sounded like to Jefferson. On the man’s feet were black loafers, scuffed all to hell and back, that probably at one time had been expensive.
“Nice shoes,” Jefferson said. “Used to be, I mean. You need some sneakers. More comfortable.”
“Yeah, right.” The man narrowed his eyes, taking Jefferson in. “Who are you? You human?”
“Jeff,” came the answer. “From Nashville, Tennessee,” he decided to say. “I’m human.” Don’t ask Regina that question, he thought. Don’t ask Amy Vickson, either. But Amy was dead, killed herself “but left my undying love,” the note had said. Lucky little bitch, is what she was.
“Burt Ratcoff,” said the man. “From Queens, New York.” Burt’s gaze moved to Vope. “Yeah, you’re one of them. Where you from? Fuckin’ Mars?”
“You make no sense,” said the Gorgon. “You will call me Vope. From this point on, both of you will do as I command.” The flinty eyes were lifeless, and horrible in their unblinking fixation on his subjects. “To fail to obey is to receive pain. Follow me.” He turned and began walking toward the metropolitan area again, and Jefferson and Ratcoff obeyed.
“How’d they get you?” Ratcoff asked.
“It’s a long story.”
“They got me when my apartment buildin’ was shot to hell. They lifted me out of it, as it was fallin’ down around my head. I woke up…” He stopped speaking and shook his head. “They did things to me. You know you used to hear when people got abducted and all that, they got needles put in their bellies and metal rods up their asses? Well…I remember a table. Freezin’ cold. Maybe metal, but different. But…it was like the table was alive…’cause it moved underneath me. Like it…shifted. It rippled, like flesh. I was on that table and there was nothin’ holdin’ me down but I couldn’t move. And…the figures around me. More like shadows than real. They didn’t walk…they just…like…I don’t know…it was like bein’ in a room with snakes that could stand up…or slither, or glide, or whatever the hell. But they did things to me, Jeff…can I call you Jeff?”
“Yes.”
“They did things. They opened me up. I think…I remember seein’ somethin’ pullin’ my insides out…like ropes. Bloody. I think they hollowed me out…and put somethin’ else inside me.”
“I’ve got that implant at the back of my neck too.”
“No…no. More than that. More,” Ratcoff said forcefully. And then, quietly, “That kind of thing could drive a man crazy. You know?”
“I know,” Jefferson answered.
“Silence,” Vope said. “Your chatter urinates me.”
“You’d better get your language straight,” Jefferson dared to say. “You want to pass as a human, you need some more lessons.” And those unblinking eyes…a dead giveaway. So the Gorgons weren’t as smart as they thought they were, at least not in the area of disguise.
For this remark, there was a little twinge of pain at the back of Jefferson’s neck, just a pinch and a quick burning of nerves to let him know who was the master and who was the slave.
They were nearly halfway along the next street when a door banged open. Two thin, bearded, and dirtied men with rifles emerged from a dilapidated house. “Hold it, hold it!” the taller of the two said. “Not a step more, mister!”
Vope did understand this much English. He stopped, and so did Jefferson and Ratcoff.
“Inside,” the man said, motioning quickly with his weapon. “Come on, move it!”
“Sir,” Jefferson began, “we don’t—”
“Shut up! Get your asses inside that house! Go!”
“You are interfering,” said Vope. “That is not permitted.”
“Hell, I’ll shoot you all down right here! Who’s first?” The rifle swung toward Ratcoff. Jefferson could tell the little man wanted to run for it, and he said in his most golden salesman’s tone, “I don’t believe that would be wise, Burt. Vope, I personally do not want to be shot down in the street today. We should do what they say. You need us.”
Vope stared at him for what seemed an eternity. Jefferson thought the rifles were going to go off at any damned second. Then Vope said, “Correct.” They entered the house, with Vope leading the way. In the dingy little front room, empty food cans and other trash littered the floor. A third man was in there, brandishing a revolver. He had a burn scar across the left side of his face, and his sunken eyes were either wild or crazy. A skinny woman also occupied the dismal room, with its faded and peeling wallpaper the color of dust; it was hard to tell her age or anything about her because her lank brown hair hung in her face and she held her arms around herself. Every so often she shivered as if at a memory of winter.
“Where’d you come from?” The leader’s rifle went up under Vope’s throat.
“A distance.”
“Where from, idjit?”
“Fuck that,” said the man with the revolver. He held the gun against Vope’s head. “You got food? Take off that backpack and let’s have a look.”
“Hey, I’m from Queens, New York,” said Ratcoff, holding his hands up. The sweat glistened on his head. “I don’t want—”
“Shut up!” the second man with the rifle snapped. He was gray-haired, long-jawed, and wore glasses held together with duct tape. The right lens was cracked. “Did you hear what Jimmy told you? Take off the backpack!”
“There is food,” Vope said. “For you, not.”
“The hell you say! We’re starvin’ in here! Take it off now or we’ll kill you where you stand!”
“No,” Vope answered.
“How come he don’t blink?” the woman suddenly spoke up, in a thin, high, and possibly also crazed voice. “His eyes…he don’t blink.”
The leader lowered his rifle, grasped Vope’s backpack and started to wrench it off him. Vope stood motionlessly, unblinking, with Jimmy’s pistol against the right side of his head.
“I wouldn’t do that,” said Jefferson gently, but he could not sell them on this. They were too desperate, and they couldn’t eat words. The manufactured framework of Vope’s face seemed to shift and change for the briefest of seconds; it looked to Jefferson as if the mask was beginning to slip and what was underneath it was trying to push its way out. Jefferson felt some kind of power coiling in the room, something getting ready to strike, and he began to hunch his shoulders forward in an effort to brace himself against it.