Since he couldn’t use his cellphone to search, the only way Jonas could figure to locate the old mannequin factory was to locate the bait shop. And the best way to locate the bait shop was to find a Fickle Creek telephone directory. So that’s what he did: rolled around the medium-sized community in his tow truck until he spotted a payphone mounted on the exterior brick wall of a convenience store, with a telephone book hanging from the bricks by a chain. And for the briefest glimmer of an instant he thought that maybe there might be some food inside the store, but that was not a wish to come true. The place looked as if a tornado had ripped through it like a demon bull through a china shop. He was able to scrounge up a city map, however; so he considered that a minor victory. And he did find one bag of ‘Pop Rocks’, that carbonated candy that explodes in your mouth. He didn’t even know that made that stuff anymore. And then, about half an hour after making the determination that Gil’s Bait and Tackle Shop was the most logical part of town for an old mannequin factory, he found himself looking across a small lake at a decrepit old building surrounded by cyclone fence and razor wire.
The morning sun was aloft by then and setting ablaze the underside of several weird clouds that seemed like they were skyward only about a mile above the property, and more resembled computer-generated images in a video game than real-life cumulus, lingus, cirrocumulo stratiformio, or whatever. This led Jonas to conclude that the Alien spaceships cloaked in the peculiar clouds and guarding the old mannequin factory by stealth, rendered pointless any attempt on his behalf at being covert or catlike in his endeavor.
“So what do you think Mister,” he said, “kick down the door for Jesus?”
The pig grunted what might have been taken as a grunt of agreement, “nnnnt” but Jonas was not exactly certain since the relationship was new and he’d not yet mastered the subtleties of pig language.
He followed the road around the little body of water until he arrived at the old gate that allowed folks in our kept them out of the weed and junk-covered half acre of dirt upon which the old warehouse sat, and then backed the truck against it and hooked up the snatch block and winch and shifted gears and goosed the accelerator and yanked the rusty old portcullis off its hinges. And then Jonas hauled balls the rest of the way to the warehouse with the rusty old gate dragging and clanging behind the truck like the body of Hector being dragged behind the chariot of Achilles around the walls of Troy.
Mister Pig grunted his seeming approval, “nnnt, nnnnnttt, nnnt, nnt.”
Jonas and the pig were fast becoming friends.
Fortunately or serendipitously or deliberately, and a bit to Jonas’s surprise, the front door to the old mannequin factory was unchained and unlocked. Jonas would’ve just hooked it up and yanked it off the hinges had it been: and perhaps, the Visitors had guesstimated that predilection in his nature already, so they simply didn’t go to the trouble of proving up their quantifications. And so Jonas, not finding any extraterrestrial resistance, just walked into the warehouse: bigger than King Kong’s Uncle, with his gigantic flashlight in one hand, Second A in the other, and Big Medicine slung over his shoulder, ready for anything but not knowing what to expect. Mister Pig, of course, had been left behind in the dog crate in the backseat of the tow truck for his safety and despite his protestation.
At first, Jonas was nonplussed at what he saw immediately: rows and rows of dummies.
It reminded him somehow of pictures he’d seen of the 8,000 life-sized terra-cotta soldiers found in the tomb of the first Qin emperor, Qin Shi Huang in China. Only there weren’t 8,000 of the old dusty and cracked and broken mannequins, maybe a few hundred and they didn’t seem to be as well preserved as the terra-cotta soldiers he had seen in pictures. But they seemed creepier and maybe, not as inanimate.
Jonas could see that the mannequins had once upon a time been painted in flesh tones with color in their eyes and lips. But they had not aged well. They were oddly comparable to human beings who had been attractive in their youth but then not treated well by age. The colors were faded, and the plastic on their cheeks and naked bodies was cracked and peeled. They seemed older and more forlorn than was likely: certainly, these mannequins had not yet reached a century. They were not dressmaker’s dummies but mannequins created to sport clothing in fine department stores. And it seemed that the knowledge of their rightfully innate glory denied made them even rifer with sadness: and perhaps, even as unlikely as it seemed, bitter of their purloined pulchritude and majesty denied.
One of them, a male with what remained of his hair in a yellow pompadour held an old-style telephone receiver in one hand against the side of his face as if waiting for a telephone call that never came and certainly never would, wheeled suddenly at Jonas as if it was alive. Jonas, of course, put a round 9 mm right between its faded blue eyes. The dummy’s head, of course, exploded like a giant Faberge egg with a lit M80 tucked inside.
Another male mannequin, bald-headed with a huge toothsome smile on its face that looked more female than male with bright red lips and long eyelashes seemed to grin or grimace even broader at the sight of his or her fellow dummies head being blasted off.
Tranny... Jonas thought.
The Aliens had done something to these mannequins. Had they mechanized them or just somehow brought them to life like they did the vegetable women in the copse of woods beyond his compound?
“Help!” Jonas heard. “Help!”
It was the voice of Iris Vandertrout.
He lifted Big Medicine by the strap off his shoulder and into his hands and began to furiously cock the lever and fire, blasting mannequin after mannequin to smithereens. One of them held a tennis racquet in one hand and one of them wore a top hat. One of them was dark-complected and had a well-trimmed mustache. And one of them leaned on a curled cane. They were all male dummies and of course sans genitalia. One of them was dressed in a woman’s girdle and brassiere, most likely the work of a prankster but then of course; there was no assurance of that.
At last, it seemed after mannequin parts flipping and flying in every direction and the final withering howls of dummies dying in silence, Jonas burst into the room where Iris Vandertrout was imprisoned and was flabbergasted, at a minimum, at what he saw.
She sat in an antique copper bathtub that was higher and curved at the end where her upper body reclined and lower where her feet and legs should’ve been. Jonas could see only her naked breasts, which were splendiferously magnificent, superbly large, and round with unquestionably the most beautiful brownish-pink hue to her areolas that could ever have existed in the history of nipples. A metal post stood on each side of the tub with small flickering lights on top and electrical wires that resembled grapevines coursing and flashing tiny sparks of electricity from one pole to the other. And a mannequin that resembled a soldier stood on either side with what appeared to be a ray gun in one hand like Jonas had seen in science fiction movies he’d watched as a kid and a curved scimitar in the other.
“Cover your ears,” Jonas said and raised Big Medicine with one hand and Second A in the other.
“I don’t like guns,” she said.
Each of the mannequins took a step toward Jonas and raised their scimitars as if to stop him from approaching Iris Vandertrout. They were stiff and wooden steps like puppets would take, or what one would expect from a crash test dummies maybe.
“Cover your ears,” Jonas said attempting to be as firm and considerate as possible without seeming to be over-bearing and brimming with masculine toxicity: a recently recent social phenomenon that many in American society blamed on the Russians.
“I said, I...” she said but too late.
Jonas cracked off a couple of rounds. The left eye of mannequin one became a black hole in his face and the back of his head exploded like a fiddler crab in a microwave. The entire face of soldier two imploded like the sphincter of a Pangolin after a meal of feisty fire ants.
“Oh my God,” Iris screamed and crossed her arms across her breasts. “Guns scare me so much. I hate them!”
“I’m sorry,” Jonas said. “It looked like the mannequins were going to attack me.”
“But did you have to blast them to smithereens with your guns?” she said still holding her arms across her breasts.
The two of them certainly had not gotten off to a good start.
“I hate guns,” she said.
“We’ve established that,” he said.
“What?!” she said still holding her arms across her breasts. “Did you come here to mock me?! Don’t mock me!”
“I’m not mocking you,’ he said.
“It sounded to me like you were mocking me,” she said. “Maybe you should just turn around and go back to wherever it was you came from.”
Jonas stood silent, stoic, and a bit confused. “Well?!” she said.
He was afraid to say anything.
“Well?!” she said again, more emphatically.
“Do you want me to leave so you can get out of that old bathtub?” he said.
“Why would I want you to leave?” she said, still holding her arms across her breasts. “Do you think I’m afraid for you to see me below the waist?”
“Nnnnnnoooo,” he said totally unsure of himself.
“Well,” she said, “I don’t want you to see me from the waist down,” she said and burst into tears. “The mannequins you shot, Pinocchio and Geppetto, are the ones who bring me minnows and worms.”
“Pinocchio and Geppetto?” Jonas said.
“Their names,” she said, “my friends.”
Stockholm syndrome... Jonas thought. Definitely! She identifies more with her captives now than a male of her own kind.
“So are you going to bring me minnows and worms now,” she said. “Maybe you should throw me in the lake,” she said. “There’s a lake close by, right?”
His leg was hurting like hell again. “Yes,” he said.
“Maybe you should just throw me in the lake.”
“Why would I throw you in the lake?”
“Because look at me,” Iris Vandertrout screamed. “Look at what they’ve done to me!”
Jonas cautiously took a few steps toward the antique copper bathtub Iris Vandertrout.
“Come on, come on!” She shouted, “just get it over with!”
Jonas looked over the edge of the tub, fully expecting to see an abdomen and a beautiful set of legs but what he saw instead was the lower half of a fish; a big fish she was from the waist down. Sort of like a mermaid.
“Oh my...” he started to say ‘God’ but stopped short.
“You’ll never want to have sex with me now,” she wailed. “How can we repopulate the Earth with mankind if we don’t have sex? And even if we did, because I do have a vagina, but even if did would they be like me or... or like you. Would I lay eggs or would they just... swim out of me?”
“I don’t...” Jonas started to say “know” but was cut off.
“And I’m so hungry,” said Iris Vandertrout, “all the time.”
“I’m hungry too,” Jonas said over the growling of his own stomach.
“Then go and find us some food,” said Iris Vandertrout. “Do the hunter-gatherer thing. Isn’t that what men are supposed to do, the hunter-gatherer thing?”
“I suppose that’s what...” he said and would’ve added “men do” to finish his statement had Iris Vandertrout not cut him off again.
“Go find us some minnows or worms or something like that,” she said. “And hurry!”
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