"He removes your head and grows another. Brilliant! Can I go now please?"

"You are being very rude, Dr. Messinger."

"Frankly Mr. Lode, Orr, whoever you are, I think I'm entitled to be rude after all the crap I've had to take from you." Messinger grabbed his bag and stood. "I shall be sending for an ambulance as soon as I have left here, thereby discharging my obligations to you."

Lode raised a shoulder and let it fall, a one-shouldered shrug that said it was Messinger's loss if he left now. "Before you go, take a look out of that window, lad. Tell me what you see."

"What's out there, the tooth fairy?"

"Just look, will you?"

Messinger rested his hands on the windowsill and gazed out, blinking at the change of light. "There are a few old guys at the bottom of the garden. Weeding by the looks of it."

"They'll be tending the vegetables. We grow our own as much as we can. Look closer at them. Notice anything unusual?"

Messinger narrowed his eyes. He turned back to the man in the bed. He did a double take out of the window and then back at Lode.

Lode's smile was that of the cat that has found the cream. He indicated the scratches on the wall. "I have spawned 738 of us so far, with another on the way. And some of them have become lodes too, I daresay."

Messinger licked his lips with a dry tongue. "Why?"

"Why what?"

"Why would you want to create so many clones of yourself?" Messinger thought about what he had just said, and added: "That's assuming your story had a single grain of truth in it, which it doesn't, of course."

Lode laughed that bitter short laugh of his. "Haven't you ever dreamed of a world without divides? A world where everyone agreed with one another? One religion, one government, one mind; everyone living in harmony? Eustace has watched the world go to hell in a handcart, watched history repeat its mistakes----correction, he's watched peoplerepeat their mistakes. He's taking steps to put things right."

Messinger rubbed his eyes. "My predecessor must have been a gullible old fool if he went along with this lunacy. I'm leaving now, and when I get back to my surgery I shall remove the names Lode and Eustace Orr from my panel. As from this moment, you are no longer my patient."

"I've told you, it's not me you've come to see."

Messinger made a show of scanning the room. "So where's my patient?"

Lode motioned with his chin at a deep chest of drawers. "Top drawer," he said. "He's a slow developer, this one. We're a bit worried about him."

Messinger dropped the bag carelessly and crossed to the drawer in question. Glaring angrily at the heavy-looking brass handles, he gripped them tightly to still the quivering in his hands, his nostrils full of the almost overpowering stench of blood and disinfectant. On the limit of hearing he could hear a gentle sighing, a sound like a damp paper bag being slowly inflated. Was it the soft swish of his own blood pulsing in his ears, or the rhythmic rasp of raw, embryonic lungs pulling air? He whipped his head round and glared at Lode, sitting in the shadows... who grinned right back at him expectantly, his teeth a string of pearls in a peach-fuzzy face.

I have spawned 738 of us so far, with another on the way.

"Bullshit," Messinger growled. Annoyed with himself for even hesitating, he snatched open the drawer...

Going Down

NANCY KILPATRICK

Shortly after the Deadies got up to stroll the boards on Manitoulin Island, Paddy ran out of meds.

She'd been on largactyl for years----brain mangulations, dry gut ruttings, critical BO. The stuff stripped polish off floors and tasted rat-poison sweet so her insides undoubtedly resembled the arm of a kid she'd seen gnawed by a combine. She could've lived with that, though. But when everybody started coming back from the dead and chomping on everybody else, what was the point of taking drugs, even if she had any, with so much good film noir available?

Still, those asphyxiation-blue tabs had propped up everything crumbling inside her skull. Like the retaining wall that kept water from swallowing the land, her wall had worked pretty good most of the time. But nothing aired on TV anymore. Or radio. The movie theater closed. Her retaining wall was eroding fast.

Paddy opened Daddy's channel changer and twisted the wires so she could corkscrew holes in her wrist. The vein kept jumping out of the way and she ended up with ten round oozing bloodeyes. She sucked and tasted fresh flesh. Shit, she thought, now that the Deadies trudge the pebbles on the lakefront around the clock, nobody's left to ferry to the mainland. She'd seen all the videos and DVDs on the island. The pills from the drugstore might be gone, but residue floating in her blood stream still broadcast too loud and clear. Anyway, the second Marilyn Monroe got back, that signal would dim. Marilyn would like the Deadies, at least Paddy thought she would.

God knows, Paddy liked them. She'd tried to join their club before there was a club and if she'd done it right she'd have been a charter member. ODs. Hemp slung over the beam in Daddy's root cellar, where he used to lower his pants and pull down her... She'd dropped her eyelids once and the screen went blank. Marilyn's steady hand plunged the bread knife into her heart.She missed the projector and Paddy'd been pissed. Her lung felt like badly spliced videotape and that's all. Marilyn refused to visit Paddy the whole time she was in General Hospital. Paddy'd thrown a fit until they gave her more drugs and a new flat-screen TV.

Life had been tabula rasa with no chalk. But then the Deadies started. Right away Paddy saw they were luckier than her. They never worried about getting aced in the butt by stray emissions and they didn't have to memorize lines. Anyway, did they care why they were chained to this rocky poor-reception island, or wonder who would rip out their liver this week in 3-D, or make them sit in a hair seat and suck in a teen comedy then fuck them doggie style with blurry trailers, or any of the other stuff Paddy worried about all the time? All they thought about was grabbing somebody with their slimy green hands to snack on. She could handle that. She could be a Deadie.

But the Deadies didn't want Paddy. She stank wrong.

" It's an insult," Marilyn assured her when she finally deigned to visit. She waved a spotless silk hanky in front of her perfect transparent nose. Paddy was hurt until Marilyn said she had an idea.

" Shove your fingers past their cold black lips, into a living porridge mouth and let things crawl over your skin. Action!" Marilyn giggled.

Paddy tried it. No cracked molars clamped. No spoiled tongue licked. The switched-off eyes didn't flicker. "I'm not good enough for them," she whined. Marilyn slapped her silly and shrieked, "I told you before, diamonds are a girl's best friend."

Paddy felt iced as the black waters rose. The volume increased. Dense moisture plugged every orifice of her body like giant chilled-wax suppositories and the world slipped away on basic hypodermic steel.

Everybody she knew got to be a Deadie.

Everybody but her.

Meryl Streep, Tom Cruise, those anonymous B-zombie brats with mouse-turded hair and kiss-my-deceased-ass grins. Everybody on the island she hated, and that was everybody but Daddy. Even Marilyn got to chat with the Deadies at the Bus Stop and they listened like she emitted extra-terrestrial short waves, but she said it was because she was an Icon and closer to them than Paddy could ever be. That made Paddy real mad, especially when Marilyn signaled Daddy.