skonen_blades

When the boomerang returns to me, it is covered in blood and mucus like a newborn. This should be impossible. I don’t know what it found out there in the darkness or why it made it all the way back to me after it found it. This is a mystical night. The shroud of evening has removed all colour from the desert, making it into a black and white film that I can barely make out. I have a flashlight but when I shine it out into the gloom, only green pinpricks come back, my flashlight reflected in the eyes of distant kangaroos and nocturnal scavengers. I should put on my night vision goggles.

I am naked except for my holster, my bag and my belt. It’s too hot to wear anything else, even at night. The only fight I put up to the heat is my beard and my hair. I have let these grow long, regardless of the oven of the daytime. The sun is bleaching my hair blonde and ginger.

‘Glass’ scorpions wriggle across the nighttime prairie of sand. They feed on bioluminescent insects, making the scorpions glow in the dark after they’ve fed, scuttling around the desert floor and turning over pebbles. It looks like the stars are reflected by the ground, shifting over the surface like a lake. It brings water to mind and that’s not good to think about out here.

I take the night-vision goggles out of my bag and put them on. When I turn them on, the whole desert springs up in green detail in front of my eyes. The desert is a pale green and the sky is black. I can see the distant whorls of the wind-scoured mountains against the night sky in the distance. I can clearly see the animals searching for sustenance.

And I can see the giant newborn baby standing twenty feet away, staring back at me with its pupils gone green and bright. It’s not wearing any clothes and it’s slippery with afterbirth. It’s taller than me. All I can think is that the baby must have reached up and touched my boomerang, coating it as it passed without disturbing its trajectory. That’s impossible. The baby is looking at me, swaying with that difficulty that babies have with balance. Its eyes are looking at me with intelligence, though, and I’m scared by that more than anything else.

I step back.

It steps forward.

I turn around and run.




tags

We put Jesus24K99 into his cage for our own protection. The anti-coagulants weren’t holding. He was destabilizing. He’d bleed out soon.

The hole in our research was the stigmata. The actual crucifix had been uncovered in a basement vault of the Vatican. The nails from the cross had been scraped for flakes. The DNA, when used to make clones, had created short, dark babies.

Obviously not Jesus.

We tinkered with the DNA, adding a lot more milk to the coffee, if you will, to make the clone more acceptable to Middle America. We needed an Aryan beauty the likes of which would make women swoon and men envy. We needed today’s Jesus, not the old one.

Blond, emaciated babies were being created in our lab. They refused to eat. They cried a lot. Vials of their tears had cured cancer in my wife and two of the assistants. Even Jeffrey’s back was normal again.

Plans were afoot to release the cure for a price that was low enough to afford but would still make our company billions under masked creation papers. Lies, basically. The cure for cancer. Probably the cure for AIDS. Who knows? Maybe the cure for everything. If nothing else, at least these crying babies could make the people of earth healthy again.

Unfortunately, it made me picture rows and rows of eyeless Jesus Baby Clones crying into suction tubes in cages like chickens in KFC farms. I got back to work.

Most of them had turned out hemophiliac. We had no idea what to do when the holes in their hands and sides appeared. The baby Jesus in front of us that we'd just put into his cage, the last of the last batch, was moving sluggishly.

It was like the some unseen force was killing these babies, like what we were doing was not for the greater good and we were being sabotaged.

Jesus24K99 rolled onto his back and stopped moving. The pool of blood spread out beneath him, eventually slowing to a stop as his heart stopped pumping. The tattoo on his arm was scanned. The lights in his cage went out.

The compactor took over. He was added to the basement remains.

We hadn’t even figured out how to accelerate the aging process when we made a stable copy. There was talk of hiring an actor as Plan B and cutting our losses by sticking with the whole ‘cure for cancer’ thing.

I’d be out of a job if they did that but I was starting to think that maybe it wouldn’t be such a bad idea.



tags