"They cheated. And that's my job!" said The Devil in Drag.
 

Green Sun

by Donna Lamb

 

Sophie Drake, the Devil in Drag, felt depressed. The picture of dejection, her shoulders slumped in her blue-green Paris original gown, her ankles turned under in their fashionable Italian pumps and she chewed on one of her elegant, New York manicured nails instead of the feast laid out in front of her.

Not even the excellent ribs from Mama Woods' Smoky Ribs and Chicken that Bill C. Bubb, her chauffeur, had fetched from South Chicago could cheer her up. Smelling the Delta-style sauce on tender Midwestern meat didn't even make her hungry. They sat on the concrete benches beside an abandoned Dairy Queen outside Perdition Falls, Wyoming. In one sort of record keeping, it had been almost two years since the debacle in Los Angeles, the cause of Sophie's depression. By another sort of reckoning, it had been No Time At All.

The demonic pair spoke mostly in the Dog Latin of Hell's Bad Catholics but, in English, the conversation went something like this:

"I lost the bet to that damnable clarence, Bill," she said, slumping across the stained and broken tiles. A clarence is hellish jargon for a low-ranking Guardian Angel.

"Too bad," her henchman said. Bubb tucked a white linen napkin he'd stolen from a London club into the bib of his denim overalls and pushed the straw hat back off his merely hypothetical forehead. Inserting a baby back rib into his froggy maw, he sucked the sweet-hot, juicy flesh down his gullet. Smiling like a trash compactor then, he crunched up the rib between his teeth and sucked the marrow out also before swallowing the splintery, pulpy, mass of bone. "R-r-ribs have r-r-roughage!" he announced in English since the joke would be meaningless in Latin, good or bad.

"I can tell you're all broken up by it," she said. She frowned at him, wrinkling her porcelain brow and squinting her turquoise eyes. She made a delicate moue with her blood-red mouth.

"Whajja bet?" Bubb asked, inhaling some Sour Milk and Carrot Slaw, one of Mama Woods' specialties.

"A thousand years of torment for that innocent Cinderella dweebette against a thousand years of granting wishes on Strangefellows Day," said Sophie. On Strangefellows Day, the third odd Thursday of any month, by previous arrangement Heaven had permitted the Devil in Drag to wander the Earth granting wishes, tempting souls and causing trouble.

"Sucker," said Bubb around an ear of buttered sweet corn. After gnawing off the kernels, he ate the cob, too. "That deck was stacked, Lady."

She nodded. "That's what rankles most, they cheated me. And that's my job!" She considered. "Cheating them, I mean."

Bill snickered, covering the sound of his amusement by shoveling in Louisiana barbecued beans with a mason's trowel. The little bits of mortar dislodged from his unusual tableware provided the demon with some not unpleasant alkaline crunchiness. "So now the clarence has to grant wishes?"

"No, you ignorant toadeater." And the bit of brisket Bubb had just picked up did, indeed, transform into a rather startled Bufo alvarius, the celebrated Colorado River Toad. Shrugging, the demonic driver popped the psychedelic amphibian into his mouth like a warty olive. "Well, he did grant one," Sophie admitted. "But the bet was, if I lost, I wouldn't grant any wishes on Strangefellows Day for a thousand years."

Bubb chewed twice, swallowed and burped up a Peter Max cartoon. "Starting when?" he asked, reaching for a drumstick.

"Starting...?" said Sophie. "Bill, you lovely old reprobate from the pit of Hell, I could kiss you!" The Queen of Air and Darkness ran her fingers through her long blond hair.

He considered, gnawing on the good but greasy chicken leg. "Wait'll the toad kicks in and you're on."

---

To be continued...?
 

Maybe you'd better read Blue Moon first...

at Doppler Press!

 
The emerald dawn caught him by surprise...
 

Green Sun
Chapter 2

by Donna Lamb

 

The ultralite came up over the desert mesa just before dawn, skimming low but avoiding downdrafts from the cool walls of canyons and bluffs to preserve minimum altitude and save fuel. The hundred and ninety pounds of man and gear did not strain the capabilities of the little machine, nor did the extra ten kilos of cargo. Funny, Hobie Carson reflected, to think of my own weight in pounds and the stuff I'm hauling in metric. He chuckled.

He'd been doing this for months; drive to the rural airfield in southern Arizona, fly down to Mexico in the ultralite with money and come back with.... He didn't like to think about that part. The money was good though. Very good. His original price had been two thousand per trip but with success, he figured the risk climbed each time and he'd asked for more. They never balked. This little sortie would net him twelve thousand dollars minus the piddling amount for gas and parking his camper at the KOA.

The risks weren't piddling, though. Besides criminal charges if he were caught, Carson could get shot down by anyone of a number of government agencies, up to and including the National Guard who sometimes patrolled these desert areas in post-9/11 paranoia. Knowing that put a wonderful fine edge on life. Carson enjoyed the savor that risking his life gave him. It wasn't enough just to fly a tiny plane across a forbidding landscape, he reveled in the added danger of doing something illegal, taking additional risk.

The desert scrolled toward him like the scenery in a video game. Miles and miles, empty of any habitation and for the most part, unmarked by any evidence of human existence. Here and there he spotted the trail of a four-wheeler or a dirt bike or the even rarer water dumps of another sort of smuggler--coyotes, travelers in humanity itself, who would sneak people across the border into the USA for a fee. Often a larger fee than what Carson collected, and one that was paid by each of several immigrants--it might amount to ten times what the drug lords paid their little dragonfly.

And if the coyotes thought they might be caught, they abandoned their human cargo in the wasteland below--just as Carson had rigged his own payload for a quick cut away and drop. The difference being that twenty kilos of cocaine--or whatever the stuff was, Carson didn't actually know and didn't want to know--would not suffer and die of thirst in the Sonora Desert.

The desert, beautiful in the pre-dawn twilight at an altitude of less than three hundred feet could be deadly. Carson did not doubt that. Most of the weight of his gear, minus himself and his cargo, amounted to twelve one-liter bottles of water. The remaining items--clothes, helmet, goggles, navigation computer, radios, phones, toolkit, trail knife, medical supplies, sleeping bag and snacks--weighed less than twenty pounds. Other than the multi-purpose knife, a tool really, he carried no weapons. He hadn't been paid to die in defense of the shipment and if anyone tried to rob him, he would meekly hand it over if it ever came to that.

Sand and scrub stretched away for miles with here and there an arroyo or wash where a palo verde or mesquite tree might thrive on hidden water. Iconic fork-shaped saguaro cacti stuck prickly fingers into the pinkening sky. Off to the east, a spot of horizon brightened. The emerald dawn caught him by surprise; for a moment, Carson thought he might have got something on his goggles. It lasted less than two seconds but for that brief frame of time, the desert turned a marvelous shade of living green.

Stunned by the wonder in the sky, Carson did not see the juvenile redtail hawk rising from a hidden arroyo with its breakfast, a desert vole, in its claws. The bird did not see Carson either or did not expect the tiny aircraft to suddenly dive in the grip of a downdraft from the cool arroyo wall. The hawk struck the left wing of the ultralite, tearing through the plastic fabric and snapping three important structural wires before striking the rear boom and ripping off the elevator on that side.

Hawk, vole and Carson were all dead--but only Carson knew it.

continued...

---

Maybe you'd better read Blue Moon first...

at Doppler Press!

Richard rubbed Jo's round little butt...
 

Green Sun
Chapter 3 - Spin Dizzy

by Donna Lamb

 

Jo Messenger ran her long fingers through her gingery-brown hair and bit her lip. Sometimes the music came like a bolt of lightning from a clear blue sky and sometimes it felt more like digging a badger out of a hole in a rainstorm with nothing but a dessert spoon. At least her hair had grown out to a decent length and she could stop wearing wigs on stage. Except taking her wig off in the middle of the next to last set had become something of a trademark--fans of I-NO-Y even referred to "blonde" songs and "redhead" songs, meaning whether she sang them with or without her wig.

After a year and a half since being shot in the shoulder, she still didn't have all the strength back in her right arm for extensive creative work on the keyboards. She found it easier to work out chords on a guitar where her right hand only had to strum. Hanging her Gibson Hummingbird acoustic guitar around her neck, she tried the lyric again:

"Tell me no secrets, I'll make no promises,
Let love's orphan in stillness die.
Tell me no secrets, Don't ask for promises,
And you know I won't need to lie."

"Bleah," she said. The second line still stunk like a big, wet dog lying on the dining room table. "This is going to be a 'b-blonde' song, I can tell." The cherry sunburst finish of the guitar matched the tones in her hair whether she wore her blonde wig or her natural locks but she generally played keyboards on stage. Only on slow ballads where Kylie Benjamin played trumpet did she pick up the rhythm guitar and play alongside Paul "Bugs" Benjamin, the band's authentic guitar-god and legendary sixties burn-out case.

Richard Alexander came into Jo's home studio from the hall with a caramel latte from Starbucks for her. He laughed. "Your problem is you're trying to write a cheatin' song. You don't have a disloyal bone in your body--it's no wonder you're having trouble." They kissed and Richard rubbed Jo's round little butt in her silken day shorts.

"Mmm," she said. "You think? M-maybe you should write it then." She grinned at him.

"Ouch," Richard said. "I think my, um, wandering days are over." He smiled at her, showing his dimples.

"Mmm, b-better be." She looked at him over the rim of her cup. Her slight stutter never affected her singing and had improved some over the months since she'd rejoined the band.

"Mmm," he said, still smiling. "You sure you want to wait till October to get married?" He sipped his own blueberry frappachino. Jo seldom drank icy drinks, preferring coffee, summer and winter, but a frozen fruity drink in July was Richard's idea of how to stay cool.

"We've got eight tour dates between now and Mom and Dad's anniversary; it's not that I want to wait, I just don't see how we've got time to get m-married any sooner. We've only got two more days here then we have to be in B-boston on Sunday." They'd planned on taking a week off from touring in late July when they'd drawn up the original schedule so Aron "Lemon-Eater" Jones, the band's bassist and hornman, could attend a family reunion in Cincinatti. But Jo's mom, Beverly Messenger, insisted on a month off from touring in order to plan a wedding. "We have to wait till October b-before we have time to do it."

Richard's dark eyes seemed to brim with tears like an anime character, "Wait till October? You mean.... We're not going to do it till October?" The pitch of his voice indicated just what he meant by it.

Jo giggled. She put her coffee down, swung her guitar out of the way and draped her arms around his neck. "Idiot," she said. Richard managed to set his own drink down while Jo enthusiastically nibbled on his lower lip. Then they kissed, long and deep. Jo ground her hips against his in the middle of the kiss, causing the guitar to thump him musically.

They came up for air. "So.... We're going to do it now?" Richard asked.

Jo picked up her coffee, "How about 'Let my love's orphan lonely die' for a second line?"

Richard closed one eye and peered at her. "You were thinking of songwriting while kissing me?"

She grinned. "It's only f-fair--I think about kissing you while I'm doing everything else."

* * *

An ultralite with half a wing gone still had plenty of lift but the impact with the hawk had wrecked or jammed all the controls except rudder and throttle and whatever attitude adjustment Carson could manage by shifting his weight. If he'd been flying "on the deck," under fifty feet, as he sometimes did, he'd have had no time to react or save himself. With only 300 feet below him and a cruising speed of thirty-five knots, he didn't have much time but he had some. Time enough but maybe not enough luck, he thought.

The severe yaw caused by the collision threatened to stall the plane so first he had to deal with that or fall sideways out of the air. He leaned his body weight into the yaw, steered the rudder out of it and goosed the throttle. The ailerons and elevators were not responding but the maneuver pulled the plane back into a mostly forward orientation, restoring lift. He eased the throttle back before the nose could pitch up.

Now the chaotic drag from the broken pieces flapping loosely on the left side of the little plane tried to pull him into a roll. He let the craft yaw again slightly, trying for a balance, but the unstable dynamics of the ruptured wing membrane and the missing elevator didn't allow for any sort of balance point--it took constant adjustment. Like juggling chainsaws and eggs at the same time, he thought.

One of the broken wire stays lashed him across the face, nearly blinding him--would have except for his goggles. He tasted blood running into his mouth from a cut across his nose. The lack of tension from the missing stays on the upright members of the plane's frame allowed a certain slackness in the lifting surfaces of the right wing, stealing lift and increasing drag. Nothing to worry about, he decided. I'll be dead before it matters.

He tried to look around for any sort of flat terrain without large rocks that he could aim for. The broken stay wire hit him in the mouth then struck the engine fairing and hung there, tangled somehow. Twenty-five feet from the desert floor, Carson over-corrected, starting a swift, irreversible clockwise yaw.

The little plane spun to the right, and simultaneously, rolled to the left. The right wing went through more than 270 degrees in two axes, struck the ground and pole-vaulted Carson and the engine, with the boom and tail assembly, over a pile of rocks and into a clump of prickly pear cactus. The plane landed boom-end first then toppled engine-down into the fat, beaver-tail leaves of the desert version of a fruit bush.

Not out of luck after all, thought Carson, just before he smelled gas.

* * *

Sophie Drake explained her plan to Bill C. Bubb again. "I'll serve my thousand years, Friday through Wednesday, every week for 1143 years. That makes a thousand years of days, none of which are Thursdays. The bet didn't specify when the thousand years began or ended or whether there were any gaps!"

Bill blinked. To his eyes, Sophie had green hair, orange eyes and palmate antlers like some sort of costumed elf. No, elk, not elf, he thought. "But Strangefellows Day only falls on Thursdays, and that only one to three times a year. It's exactly like not serving a thousand years at all."

Sophie nodded. "That's the beauty of it. Losing my bet won't interfere with my fun the least little bit."

The nodding antlers made Bill slightly apprehensive. He'd been gored by a moose once on a visit to the Upper Peninsula and thought that giant cervine ungulates should be confined to the walls above bar mirrors where they belonged, not roaming the wilds of Michigan without benefit of clergy or even a fishing license. "That's cheating," he said.

"Exactly!" agreed Sophie, looking pleased. "My premier especiality, even above tentacular dalliance with intent to engulf. Cheating is what I do best."

The shine off those antlers made Bill wince. "What are you going to do with all the extra Thursdays? The ones that aren't Strange? Fellows. Days?"

"Hadn't thought about it," said the Devil in Drag. She took out an assortment of fruit and began impaling peaches, pears and nectarines on the horny points of her antlers.

Bill decided that it presented him with a dilemma. One the one horn, his mouth was as dry as the Sonoran Desert and a juicy peach would go down very well. On the other antler, moose still gave him the willies. He licked his lips. "We could maybe look for more toads?" he suggested.

continued...

---

Maybe you'd better read Blue Moon first...

at Doppler Press!

"Cerveza," Bruce read off the can.
"You're welcome," Arthur replied.
 

Green Sun
Chapter 4 Prickly Pair

by Donna Lamb

 

The driver of the black SUV stopped on the top of a ridge and shut off his engine. Twice in the last month Bruce Martin had heard the distant sound of a small engine in the same area. Not a motorcycle engine, it had a different resonance, with a poppity cadence that made him think of his grandmother's old electric sewing machine.

Or an ultralite airplane.

Not that a tiny airplane would be involved in the sort of activity he hoped to find; a plane meant dope smugglers, probably. For his part, he'd cheerfully throw every drug pusher and dope smuggler into prison for life but his purpose out on the Sonora Desert didn't include the sort of quixotic impulse that would lead him into a confrontation with drug lords or their henchmen. He'd just as soon avoid them if he could.

Originally, he'd come to the Southwest as part of a contingent of the Border Regulation Committee. The Regulators believed, and Bruce had been convinced, that the tide of illegal aliens in the United States would eventually cause a serious threat to the Republic. Over the months of Regulator activity, he'd learned that many of his comrades had agendas that involved power and money in ways that had caused him to lose faith in their common ideals.

He still had faith, he just no longer believed that they did. Too much of the donations sent to the BRC had simply disappeared with no proper accounting and nothing but excuses offered as to why the accounting would not, could not and even, should not be done. Then he'd met an Indian in a dusty border town. His truck needed a part, a fancy belt to keep the power steering working. The other guys in his Regulation Group had spent the waiting time in the only bar the tiny town had to offer.

Bruce had walked out to the old mining railway that had been the town's original reason for existing, just sight-seeing. Under a cottonwood tree there he'd found Arthur Bullrush, a Native American of the Apache Nation. Arther had a little camp made, with a rock circle, an itty-bitty fire and a large restaurant-style tin can filled with venison chili. Some of the best chili Bruce ever had.

And some good company, too. Bruce had been ex-Army and Arthur, ex-Marine, but they'd had things to talk about. Like their mutual service in the original Gulf War; they'd actually been within a few miles of each other in camps outside Kuwait City.

"New War nothing like Our War," Arthur had said.

"Shit no," Bruce had agreed. Then they'd dropped that subject, sensing a deeper argument lurking in the shoals of their budding friendship.

They had scooped up chili with handmade tortillas Arthur had got from a Mexican lady in town. They drank beer from tall cans, a brand with a Spanish name Bruce had never heard of. "Cerveza," Bruce had read off the can.

"You're welcome," Arthur had replied and they'd both laughed as if it were the funniest joke they'd ever heard.

They were both big men with work-hardened hands who knew how to live in the near-wild, how to hunt and fish and how to cook what they killed. Arthur had black hair and nearly black eyes buried in sun wrinkles. Bruce had grey eyes and the sort of dark brown hair that turns red after a lot of sun. They could talk about a thousand things, sports, women, cars, military service--but they left the politics alone. Almost.

They laughed and talked and ate and drank most of the day away. In the cool of the late afternoon, Arthur had finally asked, "So you're with this Regulator Crew?"

"Well, yeah," Bruce had admitted.

Arthur chuckled.

Bruce felt defensive for some reason. "S'funny?" he'd asked.

Arthur smiled. "Well, we've both proved our bona fides, we're patriots and we've got the discharge papers to prove it. Neither of us had the bad luck to collect a lollipop but we put our skins on the line and we both know why we did it."

Bruce nodded.

"But you got to see the situation from an Indian point of view. All this hoo-raw over a few illegal aliens is pretty funny to us. Ironical, even." He smiled.

And Bruce had smiled back.

That's all it took. A week later, he'd quit the Regulators, gotten their stuff out of his truck and filled the back of the big SUV with blankets, water bottles and food packs. Then he'd gone hunting, looking for people who were lost in the desert with no food, no water and no shelter. He didn't care which direction they were going, people could die out there without a little help. Two more weeks, he figured and he'd have erased the time he'd spent on what he thought of as an honest mistake--then he could go back to his job with a clear conscience and hopes of finding solutions to national problems that didn't sound like the plot of a second-rate musical comedy.

Still, he had no desire for trouble with any drug cowboys so he scanned the horizon again, looking for a small plane. That's when he smelled the smoke.

* * *

Hobie Carson collected more than a few stickers from the prickly pears getting himself out of the burning plane. That broken stay wire that had finally tangled in the engine fairing had apparently also carved a slice through the double-walled plastic fuel tank. Leaking gas had somehow caught fire and the dried undergrowth below the green part of the beaver-tailed cactus burned fiercely.

Carson managed to get out with the medical kit, three bottles of water, a bag of gorp and his satellite phone and utility knife. Also first and second degree burns on his face, arms and legs to go with the stickers.

"At least I didn't lose any money on that ballistic parachute I thought of buying," he told himself. "I got the plane down not much harder than it would have landed with a $4000 recovery system. It's toast but that really happened to it in mid-air." He watched the fire for a moment, sad because of losing a friend, his plane.

The morning sun already felt hot on his burns so he found some shade behind the rocks he'd narrowly missed landing among. There he dressed the cut on his nose and slathered burn ointment and sunscreen on his face, hands and shins, then used a pair of tweezers to extract the worst of the stickers. He drank an entire bottle of water while doing this, knowing that it is better to carry water internally than externally on the desert.

Directly north of him, he knew from his last navigation reading in the plane, lay the touristy "ghost" town of Christmas Diggings, Arizona. The other two bottles of water would be enough for an estimated fifteen mile hike but maybe not in the middle of the day. Better to walk as much as he could before the day turned blistering, find some shade to wait out the heat and finish his hike in the cool of the evening. On the last Thursday in July, it probably wouldn't really cool off till nearly dark but he could start walking again around six.

His utility knife had a compass in the handle so he did not doubt he could keep a course but he spent some time on the north side of the rocks, picking out distant landmarks in the line of hills.

He didn't use his satellite phone right away because he didn't want any rescuers nosing around the wreckage of the plane. Just before he'd finally lost control, he'd pulled the quick release on the smuggler's pouch and dropped a hypothetical fortune in contraband drugs onto the desert floor. Maybe his employers would want to come back and look for it.

His burns hurt, his nose ached, he still itched from the cactus thorns and somewhere, somehow, he'd banged his left knee on something. He hoped it didn't swell up and slow him down too much. He pushed himself to his feet, his back still against the cool rock.

He grumbled under his breath a bit before starting out on his hike. Out loud, he said something like, "I wish someone would come along in a four-wheel drive and save me from having to walk out of here."

continued...

---

Maybe you'd better read Blue Moon first...

at Doppler Press!

Sophie glared. "You're saved. We saved you. What's'a matter, Hobie? You could at least be grateful and eat a damned hot dog!"
 

Green Sun
Chapter 5 Hot Diggety Toad

by Donna Lamb

 

No sooner had Carson made his wish for rescue than he heard the thrum of a large engine and a blood-red, antique Land Rover appeared around a nearby rocky knob. He stared. The canvas top of the old-style British 4x4 was down and a blonde wearing stagey makeup, long black opera gloves, a floppy rose-colored hat and a purplish evening gown stood in the passenger compartment. Carson didn't notice the driver at first, but when he did he saw what appeared to be a gorilla in a monkey suit--a tuxedo, that is.

"I must have hit my head," Carson murmured. "I wonder if I even got out of the fire alive?"

The apparition wheeled around the larger obstacles and over the smaller ones to come to a stop only a few feet away. "We're here, Hobie, darling," said the Devil in Drag. "You're saved!" She did something with her upraised arms, dipped, then stood straight and waved her arms again. She made crowd noises with her open mouth.

"Red hots, get'em while they're hot! Hotter'n hell!" called the ape. He stepped out of the car wearing a candy butcher's apron over his tux and a peculiar wide, wooden box on a rope around his neck. The box was filled with short cylindrical objects wrapped in waxed paper. Carson smelled hot dogs.

The Devil in Drag squealed, "Here it comes again!" She stood tall and waved her arms frantically, dipped again then stood and waved some more.

"You wanna hot dog, sonny? Just fifty cents, t'ree for a dollar!" the ape asked. Carson could see now that the beast had human arms and legs and a face that looked almost cartoony, like Alley Oop, rather than a real gorilla.

Carson shook his head. "I don't believe this," he said.

Bill C. Bubb, whom Carson had mistaken for a gorilla (a common error), turned to Sophie Drake and reported. "He don't want no wiener sandwich."

The Devil in Drag leaned on the top of the windscreen of the Rover. "You're saved. We saved you. What's'a matter, Hobie? You could at least be grateful and eat a damned hot dog!" she said.

Carson looked around. He noticed that neither Sophie, nor Bill, nor the Land Rover cast any shadow. In fact, none of them had any of the sort of surface shadows that an ordinary three-dimensional object has plenty of in direct sunlight. They looked two-dimensional, like painted cut-outs, even though Bubb was close enough that Carson could smell the barbecued toad on his breath.

"You're not real," said Carson, shaking his head again. "That car isn't real. You can't take me anywhere in it."

Sophie and Bill exchanged looks. "I blame television," said Sophie.

"Computer games," suggested Bubb.

The Devil in Drag made the universal hand sign for "What's the difference?" and glared at Carson. "Too smart to get into Hell's Chariot or even to eat a snack from Hell's Kitchen?"

"You're just an hallucination, him, too." Carson indicated Bubb. "And that car. Hallucinations. I must have hit my head."

"I'm an hallucination?" asked Sophie. She climbed out of the Rover, her gown dragging in the sand. She turned toward Bubb. "I'm an hallucination?"

Bubb shrugged. "It's possible," he said. "We have been smoking toads." He put a clawed finger in one ear and produced toilet plunger noises by moving it in and out.

Sophie made a rude ethnic gesture at him and turned back to Carson. "Well, Mr. I-Wish-Someone-Would-Save-Me--I've got news for you!" She pointed with an elegantly gloved hand. "That's not a car, it's a Land Rover!"

"I better stay here in the shade," said Carson. "I could get brain damage in this heat. I'll walk out tonight." He settled back against the rock pile, sitting down in the shade and wishing, silently, that he hadn't dropped his helmet into the fire accidentally. If he still had it, he could pull the goggles down and put the earplugs in. It might not keep hallucinations out but he felt like he needed the psychological distance wearing a helmet would provide. He tried not to think about the lack of shadows cast by the two demons--except, he didn't know they were demons.

"You call this hot?" asked Sophie. She looked at Bubb and he looked at her and they both laughed. Then they went into a conference. "You think he's got brain damage?" she asked.

"He could have," said Bill. He polished one horny fist in the palm of the other hand and grinned. The box of hot dogs had simply disappeared along with the butcher's apron.

Sophie nodded. "It's an idea." She looked over at Carson. "Hey, how about if we get another ride for you, you don't want to go to Hell with us?"

"Whatever," Carson muttered. He pulled his knees up against his chest, crossed his arms on them and put his head down. He didn't want to look at them or hear them either but putting his fingers in his ears seemed childish. Especially after what Bubb had done.

"Picky bastard," said Bill. "It's too hot for him, he doesn't like our, uh, vehicle, and he won't eat hot dogs."

"Maybe we'll give him a passion for eating fucking wieners," Sophie muttered. "Brain damage can do some funny things."

Bill grinned even wider than before, lolling a long tongue out like a dog. "Arf," he said.

Sophie smiled. "Stand up, Hobie! Your ride will be here in a few minutes and you need to be ready."

Carson ignored her, keeping his head down.

"He's a self-righteous sort in a big black truck, but a sucker for anyone helpless. So we've got to make you more appealing," she said.

Carson shivered, as if with a chill. The feeling rippled over him. Something had happened, something had changed. Maybe the universe....

"Those rags have got to go," said Sophie. "Naked and defenseless, gets the Lancelot-types every time. That junk, too, you won't need it."

Carson's clothes vanished, along with his shoes and all his equipment. They were just gone. He felt sandy rock under his naked bottom. He yelped. "What the hell?" and stood up, quickly.

Bubb smiled at him and panted like a cartoon bulldog. "What the Hell?" he repeated.

"Exactly," said Sophie. "Naked isn't enough. A naked man is just ridiculous. A naked woman is something else entirely."

It felt exactly as if Carson's private parts had just been turned inside out and tucked up inside. She screamed.

Sophie said, "And of course, a pretty girl is better than one who might as well be a guy. Especially if she's petite and blonde and stacked."

The new woman shrank several inches; her hips spread out; breasts appeared and grew larger as her waist diminished. Curly blonde hair fell to mid-thigh. Her face and skin changed too; the wounds and burns disappearing first and soft, fair, new skin spread to replace Carson's mildly hairy, masculine appearance. Carson screamed again, her voice climbing at least an octave.

Sophie made a few more changes; a large pouty mouth and long full lashes that were startlingly dark. Big, blue eyes. Pierced ears with cheap dangling earrings. A navel ring, too, and a trio of pink and blue butterflies tattooed on her pale left thigh. "She's obviously got only one purpose in life," said the Devil in Drag. She laughed. "I'll fix it so the poor thing doesn't have to shave anywhere, too."

"More tits," said Bill.

"More tits?" said Sophie. She closed one eye and looked at Bubb. "You're kind of a freaky son-of-a-bitch, ain't you? Two's not enough? What, three, five? Eleven?"

"No, no, just make them bigger. Like one of them strippers who've got tits bigger than their heads." He nodded, drooling a little.

"Oh," said Sophie. "Well, I suppose."

"No, no, no!" Carson screamed. She turned to run. She felt herself shrinking again and her breasts growing.

"Don't let her get away," said Bubb. He took a few steps after her.

"Where's she going to go? It's all desert out there." Sophie followed, not hurrying.

"Yeah, but a girl looks like her, she's got no business running. She could hurt herself."

"Oh, like you're concerned about that." Sophie snorted, delicately.

Bill shrugged. "Maybe she knows where we can find some more toads. It's what we came here for." His nostrils dilated and quivered. It's possible that his brain squirmed.

The Devil in Drag gestured and Carson tripped, falling to her hands and knees. She looked around, dazed. Her breasts hung well past her elbows--and she had a shadow. "It's real," she murmured. "I'm real!"

Sophie and Bill walked toward her, laughing. "After this, we'll go to Japan and have some fugu," Sophie told her driver.

He made a face, like someone who had just died of paralyzed respiration. She laughed.

Carson tried to stand but something seemed wrong with her feet. Her back hurt and she had somehow ended up kneeling on her hair. The demons loomed close. "Please, please," she whimpered. "What did I do?"

"Don't forget the brain damage," said Sophie.

"Right," said Bill C. Bubb, drawing back a large fist. "Don't let anyone cut your hair, it'll make you stupid," he told her.

"Well, more stupid," said Sophie.

Carson noticed claws in place of fingernails on Bubb's fist just before the daylight went out.

continued...

---

Maybe you'd better read Blue Moon first...

at Doppler Press!

"How would you like to be a clarence? A green one?"
 

Green Sun
Chapter 6
Red Rod, Black Jack, Green Gray and a Boy Named Soo

by Donna Lamb

 

Ted o'Mersey enjoyed desk duty. As a former solicitor, it suited his soul to help keep the internal functioning of Heaven smooth. He even excelled at it, though he had also demonstrated a capacity for deviousness that made him a very effective field agent. He looked at the trim young man in the uniform of the US 10th Cavalry, circa 1898. "Corporal, it says here that you have another 428 years to spend in Purgatory." Ted quirked an eyebrow.

The young man did not flinch. "Yes, sir. I'm hoping for a work-release transfer."

Ted smiled. "I see your nickname among your mates was Red Rodney."

Corporal Rodney nodded. "There was another Rodney who was darker than me. He was Black Rod and I was Red."

"Because your hair is more brown than black and you've got freckles?"

"Yes, sir," said Rodney.

"Not because you were particularly bloodthirsty?"

"Sir, we were Buffalo Soldiers. It was a bloodthirsty business." He looked uneasy for a moment before he asked."Sir, I did want to know. The men I killed as part of my duty, Indians and Filipinos, mostly, a few white men in Cuba. Do those count against me? And, and, are any of them here?"

Ted frowned. "Deaths caused by soldiers in the line of duty are not usually counted as murder. So, yes, they count, but not so much and sometimes they count for, not against. It's complicated but fair, corporal. And a few of the men you killed are here in Heaven, but you're unlikely to meet them unless you go looking. Did that concern you?"

"A little sir," Rodney admitted.

"No worries, to borrow a phrase from Down Under." Ted smiled. "Would you be willing to work as a Guardian Angel? It's not as easy as it sounds."

"Sir, it would be an honor I had not hoped for."

"Hmm, mmm," said Ted. "I've got a recommendation from one of your commanding officers here."

The soldier looked briefly uncomfortable. "Which--uh, which one, sir."

"Jack Pershing," said Ted. "He says that you are a brave soldier who will do your duty and make him proud."

"Lt. Jack always was good to us. Is he here?" Rodney looked around.

Ted shook his head. "Jack is currently serving as a squadron leader in the Armies of Light on the far side of the Tomlinson Galaxy."

"He'd be good at that, sir," said Rodney.

Jack Pershing was good at that; and his Commanding Officer, Colonel Joseph, had already recommended breveting the cavalry captain to field rank. In his previous life, Jack had never worn oak leaves, jumping directly from bars to stars--some said by political pull. Ted didn't mention to Rodney that all of Jack's current troopers were former Red Sticks and Commancheros. Work-release programs were supposed to be designed to try the soul. Still, Jack looked as if he might be getting the first of his stars back before he turned 160, measured from his birth in 1861 Missouri.

Ted stamped the papers in front of him approved. "Welcome to the unit, Probationary Guardian Angel Third Class Rodney Clarence." He smiled. "You'll have to find out why your last name is so propitious; I'll give you a pass to the cinema later. I know you're familiar with the American Southwest, so we've made your first assignment there. I'm sure you will do well." He passed a packet of papers across his desk.

Rodney saluted. "Thank you, sir." He stepped forward but he still had another question, Ted could see it on his face.

"We'll consider your other request when we see how you're doing on this assignment, Clarence." Ted smiled broadly, enjoying the joke.

"Yes, sir. Thank you, sir." Ex-corporal Rodney Clarence picked up his new assignment and saluted again before executing a precise about face.

Ted watched him march off into mists and the glare of an Arizona summertime noon. "Next applicant, Bo Lim'nhee of the Grays." The tiny alien with the bulging eyes stepped forward. Ted frowned. "Why are you here, Bo? I know you died on Earth but you could have gotten an automatic transfer to your own people's afterlife, you know?"

"Sti oyot thilish sturoi mixi," explained the gray humanoid.

"I see," said Ted. "But, you know, you're not even the right phylum, don't you? And do you chaps even have genders?"

"Struh, amra 'at coro ralko."

"Really? I thought you were all gray."

"Vaska, sti ralko trast zir?"

Ted laughed. "What color gray indeed? Well, then. I know you're a movie buff so how would you like to be a clarence? A green one?"

* * *

David Soo Wilson kicked a rock and watched it sail over the vacant lot where his grandfather's grocery used to be. Davy had never seen the old man's store; it burned down fifteen years before his parents had even met. But it still had a place in family history. Not that Davy felt especially familial this particular summer Thursday; in fact, he felt a grudge coming on against his sister.

"No fair," he muttered. Just because Mandy had turned eighteen and could drive now, she got to go to the beach with her friends. And Davy couldn't go without someone to take him because he was only eleven. His parents had to work and had never heard of buses, at least, not for eleven-year-olds; his sister would not relent and take him along, she made fun of him for asking; and G'ampa Soo had had one of his arguments with the ghost of his wife and was sulking in the upstairs apartment.

Davy kicked another rock, trying to make it travel the entire length of the lot his family still owned; at least, his mom and his uncles did in the family trust. G'ampa Soo talked about rebuilding the grocery someday, like anyone shopped in little neighborhood grocery stores anymore. His mom and his uncles couldn't agree to sell it, though now that Mandy would be the first of the grandkids to start college in the fall his Mom had a new weapon in her argument.

But Davy didn't care, it would be too many years before he'd start college. Who wanted to go to school, anyway, and what was college but more school? No one cared what a kid thought. He kicked another miserable rock. "I wish I were all grown up like Mandy," he said.

continued...

---

Maybe you'd better read Blue Moon first...

at Doppler Press!

"Boys don't have boobs, do they?"
 

Green Sun
Chapter 7
Moose and Walrus, Bruce and Hobie

by Donna Lamb

 

The advantage of smoking toads to get high is that you don't have to wait till you're sober to enjoy the hangover.

"What did that kid say?" Sophie moaned.

"Something about moose in the lake?" Bill guessed. He frowned, then winced because the frown hurt then smiled because the wince caused beautiful colors to coruscate down Sophie's antlers then frowned because he was afraid of moose then....

"I should just turn him into a duplicate of his sister, serve him right. Little half-Asian bozo. Teach him to live in the City of Angels and make wishes," Sophie muttered. She didn't actually have to be nearby to hear or grant a wish on Strangefellows Day and currently she and her driver sat under a ramada outside some fast food stand in a little town named after, or maybe before, a Vietnam war leader. They rubbed ice on their aching foreheads and drank multiple liters of Orange Bash trying to get the taste of fried toad out of their mouths.

"That's too easy, you could do that with one antler tied behind your back," said Bill.

Sophie looked at him carefully. "What does that mean?" she asked.

Bill carefully didn't look at her. "Be creative, make him look just like his sister."

Sophie frowned, winced and smiled then shook her head--gently. "Isn't that what I just said?" She examined Bill critically; in the last few moments he'd developed a certain walrusness, or perhaps, walrosity? She didn't like walruses--always befriending carpenters and singing about cabbages and Eskimaux.

Bill held his flippers just a scant bit apart, "Subtle difference."

"What? Difference from which?"

"Witch?" asked Bill, confused.

"Which witch?"

"Oh! Not wish, whisk. I mean, not witch, wish. The boy's wish. Subtle difference, his sister." Bill turned away. The cartoon squirrel on Sophie's left antler was making disturbing gestures. And when an imaginary squirrel makes a gesture that disturbs a demon--well, that's one disturbing gesture.

"Oh," said Sophie. "I think I get it. Good idea, Wally." She nodded her head, causing the squirrel to fly away with a whoosh! Which made both demons wince then smile then glance at each other then frown then....

* * *

Bruce Martin drove toward the column of smoke carefully. He didn't want to surprise any nervous drug dealers who might be armed with who knows what; machine-pistols which they would fire in a peculiar sideways method made popular in that 80s TV show starring the guy who didn't shave. He didn't believe anyone ever actually fired a handgun that way, it seemed dumb. Why forgo the aiming point built into any well-made pistol? Style? What was that about?

Across his lap he held an AR-15, the civilian version of one of the military weapons he had trained with back in the first Gulf War. He felt comfortable with the small rifle but had no desire to actual shoot anyone. Nor did he want to get shot, so he circled the crash site at a distance of about a quarter mile, watching for signs of life and getting upwind of the greasy smoke.

The smoke that smelled like garbage burning; he knew that meaty, sick-making smell and did not really expect to find anyone alive. He zigzagged in closer, approaching from the northwest. He spotted the body about a hundred yards from the wreck by movement of what he at first took to be a yellow flag then saw it for what it was.

"Oh, Christ of Mercy, it's a woman," he whispered. Maybe she jumped from the plane? He drove directly toward the body, forgetting caution. "It's her hair," he said, wondering at such a marvel. "Who has that much hair?" When he got closer, he saw her nudity, and whistled low.

He stopped a few yards from the body and pulled one of the blankets from behind the seat. He stowed the rifle and stepped out, seeing only a single line of tracks leading from the crash directly to the still form of the tiny blonde. "Her clothes must have burned off," he said. He threw the blanket over her first, then knelt and checked for a pulse in her neck. "She's alive." Her abundant hair lay mostly under her but enough had escaped to blow in the wind and attract his attention.

He tried not to think about the incredibly lush body he had seen. He wondered if he should pick her up, she might have internal injuries. But the only blood he saw was a slight scratch on the bridge of her delicate little nose. He noticed other things. Her lip liner, eyeliner and outlined eyebrows were tattooed on but lacked the finishing makeup to make them look correct. Her eyelids and lips might have some tattooed color, too, but without more makeup, her face looked unfinished, like a beautiful but poorly painted doll. She had heavy brassy-looking earrings, big hoops with charms hanging from other hoops.

He'd only ever seen a body like he'd glimpsed before putting the blanket on her in a few Las Vegas strip shows. And he'd only seen makeup like that on prostitutes in places like Bangkok, Miami, and Marseilles. He sighed. Under the tattooing, she didn't look like much more than a teenager, a girl really.

He stood up and looked toward the fire. Almost burned out, the prickly pear patch still smoldered with the skeleton of the dragonfly-like machine sitting in the middle of it. He could see the outline of what might be a two-seater ultralite--and the body of the pilot in the control seat. The source of the greasy, vomit-inducing smoke, no doubt. He walked close enough to be sure but no one could be alive when you saw charred ribs through burned clothing. He did throw-up then, and buried the bile with the toe of his boot. Nothing he hadn't done before.

And nothing he could do for the pilot.

He turned to go back to the girl when he saw a bundle of pinkish leather, half-concealed in a clump of creosote bushes. Investigating, he found three pink leather suitcases, large, medium and small, all bound together by black shipping straps and only slightly banged about. He picked them up, wondering only for a moment how both they and their obvious owner had escaped such a disastrous fire. Perhaps the pilot had thrown them out at the last minute, unlikely as that seemed.

He heard a noise like a lost kitten. Putting the suitcases on one shoulder, he hurried back toward the girl--stopping only to put the suitcases down and grab a water bottle from the big SUV. Seeing that her eyes were open he knelt beside her.

Her gaze didn't seem to track him well. "Who are you guys?" she asked in a little girl voice.

Bruce glanced behind him on reflex. No one. "There's just me, miss. I'm Bruce Carson."

She blinked a few times, closed her left eye and peered at him. "Oh, yeah, you're just one guy." She giggled. "I thought you were twins."

Is that an act? part of Bruce wondered. Another part of him didn't care; her voice, her giggle, her hair, her face, the shape he could see under the blanket, even a slight smell of perfume and musk, everything about her practically shouted, "Sex!"

Bruce cleared his throat. "Do you hurt anywhere? Are you hurt? Can you move your fingers and toes?"

She frowned, a tiny pout. "I don't know? Did you call me 'miss'?"

Richard felt a stab of pain he couldn't identify. "I don't know your name," he said. It took him only a moment to ignore the incomplete makeup job. She's got me, oh hell, he thought. He heard the softness in his own voice, he knew he would do, well, almost anything not to hurt or frighten this girl.

She stuck the tip of a pointy pink tongue between her lips. Bruce thought it looked adorable. Then she asked, "Are you sure? 'Cause, I don't know my name at all. And why does my voice sound funny?"

"I'm not sure, miss. I found you near a wrecked plane. Before I move you, I have to find out if you hurt anywhere." He wanted to run his hands all over her--just to check. Oh hell, he thought again.

"I feel fine," she said. She reached up from under the blanket to pull the edge down.

Bruce stopped her, noticing her painted, manicured, and long nails on delicate little hands. Every little detail announced that she must be someone's--lover? pet? sextoy? "You're not wearing anything under that blanket," he told her.

That didn't seem to sink in. "You did it twice," she said.

He blinked. "I did what?"

"You called me miss." She shook her head. "I'm not a miss."

"Uh? Okay. Can you wiggle your toes?" he asked.

"Sure," she said. "The blanket moved, obvious feet waggling and toes wiggling. "That kind of tickles." She giggled.

Relieved that she didn't seem to have any spinal injury, Bruce asked. "Are you married?" He hoped she wasn't and wanted to swear at himself for such a hope.

"No." She drew the word out into another giggle. "You're funny."

He smiled. He couldn't help doing so. She seemed cheerful, amused, even happy. He realized he liked seeing her smile, hearing her giggle. "Well, okay. We'll figure out what to call you later. But I need to get you up and into my truck."

"Why?" she asked.

"'Cause I need to take you to a doctor."

She fumbled around under the blanket for a moment, looking puzzled.

Bruce watched transfixed. Just how big were her...breasts? He could see her pushing them around and they looked bigger than her head. She must be a stripper, he thought. Only explanation.

She looked up at him. "Am I the only one under here?" she asked.

"Uh, yes," he said. Not counting the silicon twins, he thought. They have to be fakes.

"I guess you can call me 'miss' then. I've got boobs. Boys don't have boobs, do they?"

"Not...not usually?" What had he seen before he tossed the blanket over her?

He watched her hands feel lower down on her body, testing her crotch. "Yup, I must be a girl. I don't know why I thought I was a boy."

"You thought you were a boy?" Bruce asked, feeling totally inane. And uncomfortably male.

"Uh huh, I must have got hit on the head, huh?" Her hands were still moving under the covers. "Ooo! That feels nice!" she squealed. Bruce gaped at her. She went right on rubbing herself under the blanket. "Ooo!"

"Stop that," he said.

"But -uh!- why?" she asked. "It -uh!- feels good." She moaned. "Uh?"

He couldn't think of a good enough reason but after a minute or so, with him watching, she stopped on her own.

"It doesn't feel good any more," she complained.

"Uh?" he said. He had begun to sweat, and not just because of the summer heat in the middle of the desert.

"Maybe? If you did it for me?" she suggested. "Please?"

continued...

---

Maybe you'd better read Blue Moon first...

at Doppler Press!

"...when we get to your place will you tickle me all over?"

.

Green Sun
Chapter 8
Red Tape, Green Blanket

by Donna Lamb

.

Rodney Clarence slapped the Heavenly Requisitions desk. It made a sound like a gunshot, "I need more than an extra dead body, a burned-up aeroplane and some fancy luggage for my client! I need her changed back or at least her memory restored, her body turned into something more like a real person and identity papers for her! This is just unacceptable, sarge."

The young woman behind the desk jerked, startled by the noise. Dressed, as she had been in life, in the simple white shift of a temple attendant from 43rd century B.P. Egypt, she didn't look much like a sergeant and she confirmed that, verbally. "I am not called 'sarge', my name is Thema! And I've told you, you can only request material objects for your client here, not changes in living beings or history. For that you need to go to the Editation and Rewrite desk or to Documentation for earthly papers."

"But they won't do anything either! They say I have to have an orange seal from a Principality or higher, or two green seals from different Authorities!" Rodney protested. He took off his flat-crowned campaign hat and ran his hand through his close-cropped brown curls in frustration.

"Well, then, I guess that's what you need, those seals! You have to go through channels, even in Heaven. And you're just a Probationary Guardian Angel, Third. I'm only a Ministering Angel, Second, myself!" She shut the window panel abruptly, narrowly missing Rodney's fingers.

"But where do I find one of these Princes with an orange seal?" Rodney asked the closed panel.

"I'm on break!" came the reply. "See your own supervisor! He's probably an Archangel or an Authority himself."

Rodney frowned. "But I can't find him either, Heaven's a big place." No one answered.

Rodney turned away. It bothered him in many ways that Hobie Martin, his new assignment, had been transformed into...well, he couldn't think of a nice way to put it. If he didn't do something about that soon, Hobie and Bruce would probably be getting into even more trouble; he'd seen the look in the big man's eye. Poor Bruce had no way of knowing that Hobie used to be a guy. "And the way she looks now, it might not make any difference. I think those two toadeaters even did something to how she smells!" he muttered.

At least Ted o'Mersey had briefed Rodney on the Devil in Drag's shenanigans before sending him out on his first assignment. "She's a bad'un," Ted had said. "You may have to be creative about how you solve the problems she causes." But now he couldn't find Ted in Heaven's wide avenues and teeming multitudes. And he hadn't been able to find Bruce's Guardian Angel either, not in Heaven or on Earth.

He sighed. He'd have to do something. He'd sometimes got in trouble in life for going off on his own initiative, "being creative" in the military wasn't always a good idea, but he didn't see any other way to do it. Using his new angelic powers, he transported himself from the warehouse district of Heaven's Lowest East Circle directly to his client's vicinity in the Arizona desert, taking along the one item he'd requisitioned for himself.

*     *
*

"You can't even sit up?" Bruce asked. He'd tried to give her a sip from his water bottle but she'd been unable to lift herself up into position. Her effort had been something to see, though.

The girl under the blanket shook her head. "My boobies are too heavy; when I try to sit up, it hurts my back. Pretty silly, huh?" she said in her little girl voice. "I bet this must be your dream 'cause it's just too silly for one of mine." She giggled.

That actually offered a solution Bruce hadn't thought of before. A girl with breasts almost as big as soccer balls did seem like the stuff of dreams. He tried to will himself awake; that always worked in dreams once he realized he was dreaming. Not this time, though. He looked around and admitted to himself that he had never had a dream with such detail. Desert floor with heat waves shimmering. Burning airplane in a cactus patch with a towering smoke cloud. Blonde girl with dark eyelashes and a Barbie doll smile under a military surplus blanket. "I'm not dreaming," he said aloud.

The girl sighed."Then it must be me. Maybe it's like when I thought I was a boy and I only think I've got huge boobies. Huh?"

Bruce had to grin. She looked so cute trying to be thoughtful and serious.

Then she looked past him. "Who's that in your truck?" she asked.

Bruce turned quickly but he didn't see anyone. He got up and went to the truck to check then hurried back, scooped the girl crippled by her enormous breasts off the sand, and placed her in the back of the truck on top of a layer of blankets, surrounded by a cloud of her own fragrant blonde hair. He kept a lookout all the while, expecting something to happen but had a moment to marvel at how tiny she seemed, huge boobies and all. She couldn't weigh more than a hundred pounds.

"Are we going somewhere?" she asked. She looked so trusting--but his flesh felt warm and sticky where he had held her against him--he didn't trust himself.

"My place for now," he told her. Right, I should take her to a hospital or the police or the Border Patrol...no, I'm taking her home. Or to my motel at least. He groaned.

"Are you okay?" she asked. "You look all hot and bothered."

He squeezed his eyes shut tight and blinked a few times causing her to giggle. "I'm fine," he said. "Are you okay? You need anything?"

"Um, nothing right now but when we get to your place will you tickle me all over? I like to giggle."

Help me, Bruce thought. He stopped with the door to the back of the SUV half-closed, a ticklish image stuck in his mind. She giggled again and he came back to the moment, remembered the luggage he'd found and loaded that too. He closed the door, rushed around the truck and climbed inside.

"Are we in a hurry?" the girl asked.

"Yes," he said. He started the truck up and pulled away from the burning plane, still trying to look in too many directions at once. He didn't want to tell her that the rifle he'd left in the truck had disappeared. But whoever took it could have shot me in the back before I knew he was there...so we're probably safe. Probably.

continued...

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Maybe you'd better read Blue Moon first...

at Doppler Press!

"Blackberries are actual purple," said Bill, shortly before his head exploded.

.

Green Sun
Chapter 9
No Accounting for Taste

by Donna Lamb

.

Bruce drove back toward his base camp in the desert east of Christmas Diggings, very distracted by the happy burblings in the cargo compartment behind him. "The truck bouncing makes my boobies jiggle all over," said the girl. "It's so funny. I think I like it."

He turned on the air conditioning, something he didn't always do but he definitely needed to cool off. What am I going to do with her? he wondered. I know what I'd like to do but that would be like.... like stealing from a poor box. Well, sort of. He knew he could turn her into the authorities, that she'd probably been involved in drug smuggling as an accessory, that only someone with resources of a government would be likely to find out who she really was. But something made him hesitate. Something besides that, he told himself.

He could take her to the motel he kept in Christmas but he resisted that idea. Just before he passed the turnoff toward Arthur Bullrush's new camp he realized he needed to talk to someone. He slowed. Arthur had almost a decade more experience of life than Bruce did, he'd actually finished his twenty in the Marines and lived off his half-pay pension and what little he and a cousin took out of an old turquoise mine. Bruce made a decision and turned down the lane that ended in the dry wash that led to a burro track that went up the canyon where Arthur lived under a stand of cottonwoods very like the ones where Bruce had first met him.

On the pile of blankets in the cargo compartment, the girl giggled. "Whee! Look'at 'em go! That tickles!"

* * *

Out in Los Angeles, Davy Wilson did not make it home before his pants split along the rear seam even though he ran as fast as his new longer legs would carry him. Fortunately, he made it into the house before anyone saw him due to the coincidence of a well-placed whirlwind blocking the view of his sister and her friends climbing into the six-year-old Toyota Corolla Mandy had inherited from mom. Davy went in the side door while the girls piled into the car out front They had loaded down themselves down with video players, drink coolers, beach hats and blankets--and were squealing about what the wind was doing to their hair.

Davy dived into his room and hid in his own closet until the girls had been gone for ten minutes at least. Then he'd ventured out and looked at himself in the mirror over his dresser. Long, straight dark brown hair hanging past the bottom of his now very tight Westside Pizza Soccer Champs t-shirt, prominent titties making two bumps in the shirt. Slender waist, oval face with light brown eyes, arms almost as thin as his own had been. He didn't have pierced ears, blond, gold and red streaks died in his hair or fingernails painted Industrial Orange Smoke but otherwise he looked exactly like his sister.

His eyes got very wide like an anime character, even if he was half-Chinese and not Japanese at all. "Holy cow!" he yelped. Then he ran down the hall to the bathroom he shared with his sister so he could see all of himself in the full-lenth mirror on the back of the door. Even though his jeans hung in tatters, split in the back, crotch and inseam, he could see that he looked like Mandy from head to foot. Mandy's grown-up features and body looked back at him, not his own 11-year-old boy looks. "Holy cow!" he said again. "I'm a girl?"

He took the tattered jeans and very strained briefs off to check. "Oh, good," he said. "I'm still a boy."

* * *

"Kid ought to be more upset," said Sophie, watching the scene on the sideways screen of her pocket iHell. "And there's some meddling clarence on the job there, I can smell him."

"No accounting for the perversity of the human race," said Bill. He slurped at a blackberry, licorice, and peanut butter fudge triple cone outside of the Rite Aid in a shopping mall next to Highway 111 in Palm Desert. Sophie had a cherries jubilee and devil's food cake double in a cup. "Blackberries are actual purple," Bill added for no particularly useful purpose.

She frowned. "Here's a pair," she said. She unfolded the screen twice, making it large enough for Bill too watch.

"Where's this at?" he asked.

"Henderson, I think. She's a showgirl and he's some sort of security at one of the casinos," said Sophie. "Watch."

On the screen Tiffanee Topps (nee Bettina Phillips) gurgled a sob. "I'm getting fat and ugly!" Her tall blond hair looked as if she'd been running her fingers through it and tears left grayish tracks from her mascaraed eyes to her carmine lips.

"No, you're not, honey," Bret Dane (nee Daniel Bott) said. "Why, you're not showing at all! And it's only going to make you more lovely, darling." He tried to pat her on her naked tummy but snatched his hand back when she tried to sink her two-inch plastic claws into his wrist.

"A lot you know, Mister-Safe-as-Houses-If-I-Pull-Out-in-Time! I've gained six pounds! Six pounds! My costumes don't fit!"

Bret really couldn't tell that she'd gained any weight at all but he supposed that six extra pounds into costumes as tight as the one's Tiffanee wore might be noticeable. "Oh, honey." He tried to console her. "Oh, sugar, it's okay. You can--you can quit work till after the baby is born. I make enough for us to live on."

"Oh, right!" she said sarcastically. "That's why your car is a twenty-year-old Dodge and I'm driving a new BMW!" She sniffled. "We couldn't make payments, buy gas and pay insurance for my car on your pay. We're screwed! And it's your fault!" This time she did hit him, a back-handed slap on his biceps.

Watching, Bill and Sophie laughed. Violence is like chocolate to demons, even a taste is good.

Bret didn't flinch. Even though four inches shorter than Tiffany's six-one, he worked out a lot and his muscles were hard as iron. "It's okay, honey. It'll be okay. You can wear a different costume or let them out or borrow one from a girlfriend. Something. See? It'll be okay."

"You just don't understand, you...you...you man! I don't want to get fat and ugly and lose my job! Even if we get a kid out of this, I'm going to be ugly for months!"

"You won't be ugly, it's all natural and beautiful," said Bret. "And I'll be right here with you telling you everyday just how beautiful you are."

"Oh, that's so sweet, I could puke!" protested Tiffanee. "And that's another thing, how can I gain weight when I throw up everything I eat?"

"Baby," said Dane. He didn't mention the bacon cheeseburger, big salad and milkshake Tiffanee had scarfed down at three a.m. last night. "I understand," he said.

"Here it comes," said Sophie.

"Oh you can't understand! I wish you were going to go though this with me feel exactly what I feel and get all porky with bad skin and your tits hurt and then try to squeeze a watermelon out your pussy!"

"Wow," said Bill. "That's a doozy."

"Good one," agreed Sophie. "But I can't make him pregnant, against the rules for me to create a life. And she wants them to feel the same thing."

"Heh," said Bill. He reached over and manipulated the zoom to take the view inside Tiffanee's womb. "Twins," he said, pointing out the two separate blobs of tissue.

"Perfect!" said Sophie. "Watchit! Your dripping ice cream on the screen."

"Sorry," said Bill, putting the much-demolished cone behind his back.

Onscreen, Tiffanee and Bret embraced. She'd expressed her concerns and felt enormously better and Bret liked nothing better than comforting her.

The two demons cackled while the lovers merged down to a cellular level then separated into two identical pregnant Tiffanees.

About that time, while he was taking another bite of the cone, Bill C. Bubb's head exploded.

"Idiot," Sophie screeched. "You got brains in my ice cream cup!"

continued...

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"Whoo!" said Bill as his head rematerialized. "What a rush!"

.

Green Sun
Chapter 10
Ex Libris Purgatorius

by Donna Lamb

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Ex-corporal Rodney Clarence, once of the Buffalo Soldiers, stepped out from the shadows, holding Bruce Martin's stolen AR-15 carbine. No one in the crowded outdoor mall had noticed the gunshot or if they did, they'd thought it only a backfire from the traffic on the nearby highway. No mortals present could see Bill C. Bubb's body still upright, hands blindly groping for his missing head. "Next one goes through your pretty self, Miss Drake," Rodney called out.

"Oh, please," sniffed Sophie. She spooned up another bite of ice cream, deciding that the little bits of Bill's brain were only a sort of jelly sauce. After a bite she remembered that Bill had smoked eleven toads to her two, besides the extra one he'd actually eaten. "You can't kill us, we're demons." Her tongue tingled with toad toxin from Bill's gray matter. She decided she liked the effect.

"I know that," said Rodney. "But I've spent the last ninety-odd years in Purgatory, being killed over and over in the various methods by which I dispatched enemies of the United States during a long military career. I've been shot in the heart, the head, the throat, the thigh and the back. I've had my neck bones snapped by ropes, tree branches and bolo knives. I've had my ribs stove in by boots, fists and hammers. I've been drowned in salt water and quicksand and I've been eaten alive by crocodiles, coyotes and garbage dump dogs. I'm already dead so I can't be killed but it still hurts--it hurts like Hell!" He nodded toward Bill's body which had groped around for one of the concrete bus benches and had taken a seat. "Ask him," Rodney offered.

Sophie tsked. "Pull yourself together, Bill," she ordered. A ghostly miasma resembling Bubb's monstrous head began forming at the top of the truncated driver's thick neck. "So what, clarence?" said Sophie. "So you can blow my brains out and make me feel pain. I'm the Devil, you idiot. Do you think I'm not tough enough to handle it?"

"You misunderstand me, Miss Drake. I 'killed' Flymaster there to keep him out of the way. I don't have no mercy bullets for you. I'll use the first of these next ones to blow away your jaw. Then I'll start on your hands and work up your limbs, joint by joint. Since you can't actually die, this could take some time." He stalked slowly towards her, not lowering the rifle.

"Whoo!" said Bill as his head rematerialized. "What a rush!"

Rodney changed aim long enough to blow the left side of Bubb's face away with one round. "Ouch, that smartsh!" Bill said. A second shot made a ruin of the rest of the driver's head and Rodney shifted aim back to the Devil in Drag.

Sophie looked down the barrel of the stubby, semi-automatic carbine knowing that he could shoot again before she could vanish herself or summon some suitable defense or counter-offense. She knew too, that Rodney was not the type to give up and she'd be dealing with the ex-corporal attempting to discorporate herself for perhaps decades if she didn't find out what he wanted. Besides, she also knew her own physical cowardice and when he started shooting off her elbows she didn't want to be reduced to begging.

She sighed. "What do you want?"

Rodney told her.

"Impossible," she said.

Rodney blew the ice cream cup out of her hands.

"Seriously!" yiped Sophie. "I can't change the past and I can't un-grant a wish! It's in the rules!" She didn't tell him that she frequently violated those same rules but he knew that. And she knew that as a lawful clarence, he couldn't ask her to break the rules if she appealed to them.

"You'd better think of something," said Rodney. "I know o'Mersey tricked you once. I ain't even going to try that, you're the tricky one. And you're cruel. What I am is ruthless. I'm probably going back to Purgatory for this but my client deserves a fair deal on what was a harmless wish. So hop to it, toad lady." He fired a round that shredded the heels of both of her Tommy Choo's.

"You know she's a drug smuggler?" asked Sophie, limping over to the bench where Bill was again groping for his missing head. "Close to a ton of poison smuggled into your precious United States to kill and blight the lives of hundreds or thousands of people, she's no innocent."

"You ever hear of the Opium Wars? Hell, they were probably your idea. The United States, Britain and France carved up China into markets for opium, so don't let's try to define innocence or justice here. That ain't what we're doing. You know what I want, figure out how to do it. I don't want to argue about it," Rodney said.

"How the Hell do you know about the Opium Wars?" whined Sophie.

"Every book that's ever been purged or expurgated has a copy in the Library of Purgatory. Sundays we got to go there and read, 'stead of suffering our sentences. They show censored films in the cinema there, too. You going to get with the project or do I start blowing away toes?" He gestured with the rifle.

"Okay, okay." Sophie capitulated. "She's not going to thank you for this but here's what I can do...."

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AR15-M4 Photo Copyright 2007 by Igor Koltunov. Used by permission.

"He's what? Must have a bad connection, Vin. Sunspots maybe?"

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Green Sun
Chapter 11
Teenie Weenie, Red Bikini

by Donna Lamb

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"Waddaya mean, the kid's in trouble again? Didn't I get him a nice job in a casino and hook him up with a true fox? What's gone wrong now?" Larry the Wolf, also known in life as Lorenzo di Guelphi, sipped a double dry martini in his favorite dimly lit Trenton angel bar and talked on his cellphone to Coordinating Archangel, Vinny Gallo.

The pretty young Ministering Angel Third Class, Martina Przewski, sitting in Larry's lap made a face at him. Larry shrugged, business was business and Guardian Angels were never off the clock. "He's what? Must have a bad connection, Vin. Sunspots maybe?" Vinny had taken over watching Larry's clients so Larry could have a few days R&R.

The next thing Martina knew, Larry had spit a good mouthful of gin with hardly any vermouth down her decolletage and had started to stand up before remembering her. He caught her with one arm and stood her on her feet. "Sorry, Marti. My client has got himself into some strange shit out in Vegas. I gotta fly." A full G.A. First Class, Larry had two sets of wings and he spread them both, filling the narrow bar with pinions and feathers.

"Vegas? In July? Larry you gonna cook," Martina protested.

"'S'okay, doll," Larry said. He grinned and flapped gently. "I'm air conditioned." He rose slowly through the ceiling of the basement bar and on up through the ramshackle old brownstone that now housed a barbershop, a Jamaican grocery store, a second floor church, three lawyers and The Original Trenton Detective Agency, Rafael Original, Detective-in-Residence.

Rafe looked up from where he'd been sleeping with his feet on his rolltop desk as Larry rose through his floor. "Goin' somewhere in an all-fired hurry ain't you, angelman?" he drawled. "I know you know where the doors is."

"My boy out west has got himself pregnant somehow, got to see what I can do," explained Larry to the sometime occult investigator. "Don't ask how, 'cause I don't know yet." He drifted on up through the ceiling to the roof where he could safely use his wings to go supersonic.

"Hunh," said Rafe. "Sunspots maybe?" he suggested to Larry's toes.

* * *

In Los Angeles, Davy Wilson did the only thing he could think of to solve his nakedness. He raided his sister's wardrobe. Since he planned on going to the beach, he looked first for a swimsuit. The remaining evidence of his masculinity being hardly as big as his little finger--it hadn't grown when he did--he simply tucked it back and discovered that he fit very nicely into Mandy's red bikini. He admired himself in the full-length bathroom. "I think I'm prettier than Mandy, 'cause she's got girl cooties," he snickered.

Reluctantly, he decided that he'd better wear the top of the suit, too. It took him a few minutes to figure out how to tie it on. He picked out one of Mandy's beach cover-ups, a faded yellow one that hung down to mid-thigh, plus a pair of canvas sandals, red to match his bikini, and then he went back to his room to get the $33.73 cents he had saved up from his allowance.

But he couldn't get the front door open. Nor the side door, he tried it too. He frowned into the mirror over the fake fireplace in the living room, and got distracted momentarily by his sister frowning back at him. He stuck his tongue out at her. Then the phone rang.

He paused before answering it, wondering if he sounded like his sister, too. Finally he just picked it up and said, "Hello?" in exactly that rising lilt Mandy used that drove their Dad crazy. And he hadn't even tried to.

"You g'ammaw say you ain't livin' the house wit'out you pants on," said the voice of G'ampaw Soo from the upstairs apartment. "Gray fellow told her and she tell me. So put some pants on or a skirt, what you t'ink?"

Davy didn't point out that G'ammaw Soo had died six years ago, G'ampaw knew that but it never stopped him from finding out things from her or having arguments with her, and the family had just decided to act as if the old lady's ghost still lived upstairs and tried to run the old man's life--and everyone else's. "Yes, sir," said Davy.

"T'at you Amanda?" asked the old man.

"No, this is Davy," said the boy who looked and sounded like his sister.

"Okay, fine t'en," said the old man and hung up.

Davy went back to Mandy's room, picked out a denim mini-skirt with a wide leather belt, put it on, feeling only a little odd, then tried the front door again. It opened. Pleased, Davy trotted out, locked it behind him and scampered down the sidewalk toward the bus stop.

Bo Lim'nhee of the Grays followed him. "Avka usu tot," he said. Then he added, "Whew!"

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"Reality just is, it can't be tested or proven. You either believe in it or you don't. If you don't, people call you crazy." . Green Sun Chapter 12 Sapphire Eyes, Ruby Lips by Donna Lamb

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Bruce Martin parked under the leafy canopy of three cottonwoods next to the adobe cabin his friend Arthur Bullrush lived in while working the mine. Arthur had no motor vehicle himself and Holly Bullrush's Kawasaki crotch-rocket was nowhere in sight. Arthur may or may not be home but probably could be found nearby, possibly in the mine itself which was tunneled into the side of a rocky hillock about a hundred yards from the cabin.

"Stay here," Bruce told the girl in the cargo compartment.

"Okay," she agreed. "Can you bring me a Coke or something when you come back?"

"Um, maybe. Something," he said. Arthur probably had nothing but beer or water to drink--the ex-Marine was not partial to sodas, especially if he had to lug them in on foot from Christmas. He smiled through the rear window of the SUV at the girl and tried not to let his glimpse of her abundant assets distract him. Striding to the door of the cabin, he knocked and opened the door, calling out, "Art? You there?"

No answer. He stuck his head in and looked around in the dim one-room interior. Arthur's deer rifle lay across its pegs above the single bed and his hunting vest hung from another peg. Good, thought Bruce, he's here and not hunting, so he's probably in the mine. He backed out, closed the door and started up the trail toward the entrance of the shallow mine.

The old man sitting on the apron of the currently unused adobe fireplace chuckled, a deep delicious burble like an old fashioned percolator. The white man had not seen him but that wasn't unusual. He stood up from his almost yoga-like position and followed Bruce out of the cabin. He watched from the shadows of the cottonwoods while the white man crossed the strip of desert between hillock-and-mine and cabin-and-well. When Bruce clambered up the trail to the mine itself, the old man turned and went to the back of the SUV. Opening the hatch, he spoke to the girl lying on the army surplus blankets with one olive-drab corner being used as a sort of fig leaf.

"Hello," he said in a deep voice as calm and as dark as moonlight. "I am Mangas Junco. What's your name?"

"Hi," the girl said, smiling at first but then frowning. "I don't know what my name is. Do you?"

He nodded, putting a finger beside his broad Apache nose. "I'm a wizard. I know lots of things." And he smiled, moonlight on white desert rocks.

The girl giggled. "You're funny."

Mangas Junco opened the lower half of the tailgate downward, then hitched himself up sideways to sit. He half turned to face the girl. "I know that in a very few moments, you will begin to remember some things. It may be painful or scary to remember, that is why I am here--to help you to know that things are well and not horribly wrong as they may seem."

"Oh," said the girl in her tiny voice. Even a wizard who might have lived more than a century noticed how cute she looked, though the enormous breasts made her resemble a fertility idol or a cartoon character more than a human being. He swung his legs up into the truck and leaned back against the door frame. "Besides the remembering, there will be other changes. Here it comes," he said. "Don't be afraid."

* * *

Bruce stuck his head into the opening of the mine and called out, "Art? You there?"

"Yo! Don't come down here." A hatless Arthur Bullrush appeared in the dim light filtering in from the blue Arizona sky, his black hair slightly wavy from the dampness of his own sweat. "Too narrow for two big guys like us." He scrambled up the slight slope to the opening, walking bent over because of the low roof. He had a rock hammer in one hand and a canvas sack in the other. "What's up, Kemo Sappy?"

"I--" Bruce hesitated. "Um, I found a girl in the desert," he said then stopped.

"Yeah? Better'n what I've been finding." Arthur grinned. He dropped the hammer beside some other tools near the mine entrance and reached into a pocket in his shirt. "Have a look at this," he said, passing a polished blue nugget to Bruce.

The ex-Regulator took the item and looked at it. "Art, this is beautiful!" He tuned the pebble over in his hand, admiring the nearly sky-blue color and the hard, waxy shine.

Arthur grunted. "Should be, got that in a pawnshop in Bisbee. Here's what I'm digging out of this dung hole." He poured some greenish, chalky-looking rocks out of the sack into his big hand.

"Oh," said Bruce. "Well, they are bigger."

Art laughed. "Size isn't everything."

"That's what he said," said Bruce then they both laughed.

"Getting hot," said Art, wiping sweat off his face before retrieving his hat from a nail driven into the frame of the mine opening. Bruce held the sack for him and he poured the rocks from his hand back into the bag and put the blue pebble back in his shirt pocket. "Wanna a beer and some beans?" Arthur asked.

"Sure," said Bruce. They started back toward the cabin.

"What'd you do with the girl?" asked Art.

"She's in the truck."

"Yeah? Alive? Hurt? Illegal?"

Bruce shook his head. "She's not hurt bad, which is amazing since it was a plane crash and the pilot is burned up dead."

"Jeez," said Art. He resisted crossing himself the way he'd been taught in a Catholic boys' school he attended as a boy. He'd been exposed to so many religions in his life as a world-traveling Marine that he liked to think he'd developed an immunity.

"And while she's probably not an illegal, it's likely the plane was involved in drug smuggling," Bruce added.

"Drugs? And you did what? You put the girl in your truck and brought her here?" Arthur rolled his eyes. "Are all white men as stupid as you?" He grinned.

Bruce sighed. "You've got to see her.... But the kicker is while I was--uh--examining her--someone stole my AR-15 out of the truck. And there's lots of other stuff that makes no sense at all, like a full set of hot pink luggage that's not even singed."

"Hmm. Well, lucky for you, I happen to have a man staying with me who is an Authority on Stuff That Makes No Sense At All," said Arthur. "My great-great-grandfather, Mangas Junco."

"You're not helping. You're fifty if you're a day, your great-great-whosit Mangle Hunko would be something like one hundred and fifty. I'm serious, Art. This stuff is making my sphincter shrivel. And you've really got to see this girl."

"Mangas Junco," said Arthur. "And I won't be but forty-nine-and-a-half next month. I don't know how old he is or even if he's really a relative but Mangas is one canny old man. You know that card trick I showed you? He taught me that when I was eight. And I swear on a pile-of-shit the size and shape of the Pentagon, he looked just as old then as he does now. Old enough to have been the original owner of Manhattan. Is she that good looking? Or what?"

"She's Miss Wet Dream of Every Ninth Grader in America. Squared, cubed, blued and tattooed." Bruce blinked. "Literally for that last."

Arthur made motions with his hands.

Bruce nodded but said, "Biggerer."

"Whoo!" said Arthur. "Let's go see this Paragon of Pulchritude, if Grampa Mangas hasn't eaten her all up by now." He started down the hill and Bruce followed.

* * *

The memories came back at the same time as the last set of physical changes unwound. Hobie Carson's sapphire blue eyes got very big while her breasts shrank, her feet unkinked and her body grew from tiny to merely small. She made odd squeaking noises when her hair shrank to waist-length right under where she lay on it. "Those toad sucking bastards!" she said in what remained an almost-little girl voice. Her ruby red lips pouted deliciously, but she didn't know that.

Mangas Junco nodded. From a pocket of his loose khaki cotton pants he took a corncob pipe and a pouch of some herb.

Carson looked at her hands. Her nails had shrunk from two-inch daggers to mere half-inch extensions but were still candy pink and decorated with little white flowers with glittery centers.

Mangas began filling his pipe while watching Carson explore her new body. When she sat up easily, the blanket fell away, showing her breasts and the complete hairlessness of her body. She gasped but he merely quirked an eyebrow. She had not even the slight blond fuzz most people have growing anywhere below her neck. Without it, her skin glistened in a matte shine, her round softness seemed emphasized. It felt weird, too, wherever the blanket or her hand touched her skin.

"I could scream," she said. She still sounded cute. "Why...how? No, why did they do this to me?"

"Because they could," said Mangas. He went about the ritual of lighting his pipe and blew spicy puffs of smoke from the corner of his mouth before putting his matches away. "Understand that while they are evil, they do not always do evil. You were going to be caught with the money the next time you took the plane to Phoenix. Your partners in Mexico had sold you out to the authorities in exchange for letting them make this last shipment."

"What? How?" Carson gasped. One of Junco's eyebrows twitched slightly watching her chest inflate. "How do you know anything about it?"

He shrugged. "I am an Authority on Things That Cannot Be Explained But Just Are. Like the fact that you are now a beautiful, naked, young woman sitting next to a pile of luggage. Shall we open these cases and see what they contain?" From another pocket of his pants, he pulled a small Swiss Army knife, opening the smallest blade.

"I guess so," she said. "Am I really a woman? What do I look like? What am I going to do? Is there anyway to change back?"

He made his coffee-perking noise and cut the strapping tape holding the three suitcases together. Released, they tumbled off one another but he caught the smallest one before it landed on her foot. He closed the knife-blade one-handed and opened the "toothpick" blade. "You ask a lot of questions," he said, smiling at her.

She felt herself blush, a sensation she didn't remember feeling in years. "This can't be true. I crashed the plane and now I'm dreaming."

Without saying anything, Mangas reached over and poked the heel of her tiny foot with the pointy metal toothpick.

"Ow!" She pulled her foot up into her lap and examined it, amazed at her own limberness and startled that she had taken no actual injury. "Are you trying to prove this is real?"

"Can't be done," he said. Using the toothpick, he popped open the latches on the smallest cases and opened it. "Reality just is, it can't be tested or proven. You either believe in it or you don't. If you don't people call you crazy."

"Okay," she said. "I'm either crazy or I've been turned into a woman and I'm having a weird talk with an Indian wizard." She rubbed her foot and then stretched her legs out, looking at them. "Wow," she said.

Mangas puffed smoke from the corner of his mouth like visible laughter. "The rest of this one is full of cosmetics, cheap jewelry and bathroom stuff. You might want to look at that." He held a leather folder out to her from the top of the open case.

She took it, opened the folder and gasped.

Mangas commented, "Corporal Rodney Clarence remembered to insist on documentation for you. Passport, birth certificate, California I.D. card, Social Security card and two eight-by-ten color glossy headshots."

"Who's..?" she began then got distracted. She stared at the photos. "That's what I look like?" She began to cry, softly.

"Um, hmm." He pulled the middle-size case toward himself and worked on the locks. He didn't tell her not to cry but did hand her a small packet of tissues from the first case. "The boys will be here soon. Do you want to have clothes on when you meet them?"

She gasped, looking up. "Boys?"

"Bruce Martin, the man who rescued you, and my grandson, Arthur Bullrush." The second case popped open. "Underwear, stuff to sleep in, bathing suit, couple of dresses and a pair of high heel sandals." He said after searching a bit. "More than that, but not much more."

She sighed. "I guess I'd better put on some undies at least."

Mangas passed her a pair of lacy, pink, nearly-transparent, barely-there-at-all, thong panties.

She glared at the item. "You've got to be kidding," she said.

continued...

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"Does your mother know you left the house wearing that skirt?" she asked Davy. . Green Sun Chapter 13 Four-Fifths of Forever, Three Times by Donna Lamb

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"That'll do," agreed Rodney Clarence.

The Devil in Drag tossed her head and shot a glare at him. "Damn well better," she said. "You don't have any authority to force me to redo a wish, you know."

"I know," he agreed. "None but this." He patted the AR-15 which he still kept pointed at Sophie Drake's head. "Nice weapon, would have loved to have it when I was alive."

Sophie sneered. Guns had always been important to some of her less subtle projects but at the moment she wished she'd never midwifed their invention. "So we're done?"

"Guess so," said Rodney. He didn't change his aim but glanced at Bill C. Bubb's still headless body sitting calmly at the bus bench.

Unseen by Rodney, Bill had grown another face under his arm where only Sophie could see it. "Hell's Legions on standby, just say the word," Bill whispered. His mouth having formed right in the armpit, he had a curly mustache and a soul patch.

Sophie shook her head. "Can you point that thing somewhere else?" she asked Rodney.

"Not yet," said the ex-Buffalo Soldier. He kept his finger on the trigger, knowing by now exactly how much effort it would take to squeeze off a round.

"You're going to shoot me, anyway, aren't you?" Sophie asked.

"Thinking about it," admitted Rodney.

* * *

Davy considered where he wanted to go. Even though the girls had talked about the beach, he suspected they might have headed for the mall first. But he really did want to go to the beach, so he caught the blue Santa Monica bus at the corner and headed toward Venice instead of taking the RTD sideways to the mall. He couldn't help giggling at the freedom he felt, being a grown-up.

The bus driver grinned at him as Davy dropped his quarters into the box and he smiled back but blinked when he realized the man's gaze had immediately dropped to Davy's legs. Mandy's legs, really. Davy ignored him and found a seat next to an older woman who had motioned him to sit next to her. "Thank you," he said as he settled down.

The old lady nodded. "Don't neither of us want one of these hoods sitting next to us." The bus lurched into motion.

Davy looked around, wondering just who she meant. It looked like an ordinary bus full of students and business commuters to him. Except--every man or boy he could see from his seat was looking at him. Just the way they usually looked at Mandy when he rode the bus with her, he realized. He grinned, flipped his hair the way he'd seen Mandy do it, and giggled. No one at all realized he was just a little kid and he thought that was pretty funny.

Several of the men smiled back at Davy which caused him to giggle again. They all thought he was Mandy which made him wiggle in his seat with the amusement of it.

"Oh, don't encourage them, dear," sighed the old lady. She glanced at Davy's clothes. "Does your mother know you left the house wearing that short of a skirt?"

"No," admitted Davy, which caused him to giggle again. "It's the first time I've ever worn it."

Another sigh from the old lady. "Oh," she said. "Well, I remember enjoying such things; I'm not as old as all of that! We invented mini-skirts when I was your age." She grinned. "Enjoy yourself but be careful, dear."

Davy nodded, wondering what the old woman meant.

* * *

"How come you're a woman, anyway?" asked Rodney. "You're the Devil." The business of the mall in Palm Desert went on around them, the mortals saw nothing and heard nothing.

Sophie sighed. "We original angels don't really have gender," she said. "Though most of us show ourselves as male most of the time." She shrugged. "But I lost a bet a couple hundred years ago."

Rodney stared over the sights of the small rifle. "So now you're female?"

"Only on Thursdays; on any other day of the week, I can be whatever I want to be," she said. "Why am I telling you?"

"Because I've got the weapon," he pointed out. "But why the gender-bending wish granting?"

"Because it amuses me and I seem to be getting away with it, okay?" Sophie looked more annoyed. She glanced at Bill's yellow eyes peering at her from under his arm. He winked but she turned away. "Most of the time, I get away with it. I used to curse people on Friday the 13th, but the Muslims objected so I can't do that where anyone has heard of Muhammad, now. Actually," she ran her hands through her hair, "this is more fun, anyway."

Rodney watched her, frowning.

"You going to shoot me or just bore me?" she asked, putting her hands on her hips and glaring at him.

He pressed his lips together then licked them. "Still thinking about it," he said.

* * *

Her husband already occupied with the toilet bowl, Tiffanee ran for the trashcan in the kitchen. She barely made it. "It's not noon yet so I guess it's still morning sickness." She moaned. The two girls at opposite ends of the apartment heterodyned off the sounds of each other's nausea for awhile, taking turns throwing up; though in fact, it was mostly bad-tasting water because Tiffanee hadn't been foolish enough to eat anything more than toast and skim milk for breakfast.

When they'd washed their faces and cleaned up a bit, they met and hugged in the hallway; two identical, tall, busty blondes wearing boxer-pajama bottoms and Area 51 t-shirts. "So much for your idea of taking over for me when I get too fat to work," said Tiffanee. Her husband-sister giggled then began to weep. "Hey, hey," said Tiffanee, "I'm sorry about the wish, I didn't think it would really happen. What? Did one of us offend a genie or something?"

"I dunno," said the other blonde. "I'm pregnant, too, ain't I?"

"Uh huh," said Tiffanee.

"We're going to have babies."

"Yes, honey." They hugged again.

"We'll be mommies together," said the ex-man. She began to blubber again.

"Hey, hey," said Tiffanee, holding her tight. "It'll be okay. I said I was sorry. It's okay, honey."

"It's just such a beautiful experience!"

Tiffanee pushed her back and looked at her. "You're crying cause you're happy?" she asked, surprised.

"I dunno," the new woman admitted. "I'm so confused. I'm not unhappy. But I think I'm going to lose my job."

Tiffanee kissed her. "It's okay, hon. We'll just have to make twice as much money as usual for as long as we can."

"Um?"

"We'll go on as a double act. Twins. Tiffanee Topps and Brittanee Bottoms!"

They both got giggle fits, cried some more, then Tiffanee called her boss to tell him the good news about her long-lost sister.

* * *

Sophie looked at Rodney, still standing under the palm tree. "Is there anything you want, clarence?" she asked. "I could use a man like you."

"You trying to get shot?"

She rolled her eyes. "You're waiting for the cavalry to show up? It's not going to happen."

He shook his head. He knew he should get some other concession from the Devil in Drag before giving up his leverage. She'd never let this happen again. He just couldn't think of what he should demand. It wasn't safe to let the devil know what you really wanted.

"You're on your own, going outside of orders--that's the way it works. The same in any army anywhere." Sophie smirked at him. "But I tell you what, I'll give you, oh, four-fifths of an eternal second to get out of here before Bubb or I come after you. Plenty of time for you to use your Word of Recall to re-enter Heaven."

Rodney thought about it. "I want assurances from you first," he finally said.

"What. Kind?" she asked between her teeth.

"I want you to swear, three times, that you will not order, permit nor excuse any reprisals by yourself, your servants, or other forces controlled or influenced by you, directly or indirectly, against any Guardian Angel clients, past, present or future for my actions here."

Sophie looked impressed. "You sound like a lawyer," she said.

"A surprising number of law books have been purged at one time or another," he said. "I spent nearly a century of Sundays reading. That's about five college degrees worth."

"Maybe I should call you Dr. Clarence. All right," said Sophie. "I so swear. I swear it twice." She looked at him blandly. Bubb grinned at her with his hairy underarm mouth.

Rodney moved the rifle aim a fraction of an inch. "You want something back."

"Your resignation from the Guardian Angel Corps," said Sophie.

He didn't hesitate, he expected to be cashiered anyway. "Done and done and done, I say it three times," Rodney said.

Sophie nodded, smiling. "I swear as I swore before, three times and forever," she said.

Rodney shot her through the bridge of her lovely nose, disintegrated the AR-15 and spoke his Word, vanishing, all in less than four-fifths of an eternal second.

"Damn," said Bubb from his armpit. "Forgot to get him to agree not to shoot you."

"Oh, shut up," said Sophie's voice from where her head used to be. Like movie automobiles, demonic skulls usually explode when damaged.

continued...

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Wasn't it just too slutty? She felt confused. Slutty was bad, right? . Green Sun Chapter 14 Tailgate Party by Donna Lamb

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The old man hadn't been kidding. Carson pulled the tiny excuse for panties on, wondering vaguely if those were really her legs, they seemed so long. But looking around the back of the truck, she felt small. It confused her. The panties settled in around her hips, the small opaque part presumably covering -- important things. She resisted an impulse to feel around in that area. It wasn't so much what she would find as what she wouldn't find that bothered her.

It wasn't as if she'd made any great use of the missing items, Hobie Carson had sometimes parlayed the romantic danger of flying a small plane into a night with someone. But oddly, the memories that should be there of encounters she knew had existed -- well, the ones that weren't just missing were oddly distorted. As if she saw her old self from outside, not as if her memories were second-hand but as if she remembered them from a different viewpoint.

Mangas distracted her from a rather alarming realization by handing her a tiny, lacy, pink bra. Well it wasn't all tiny -- the cups looked plenty big even if they were only half there. "I don't know how to wear this," she said. She pouted at him without knowing it, thinking that she had simply frowned.

"Use your imagination," said the old Indian, who wasn't so old as not to appreciate a pretty pout.

Making a face at him, Carson put it over her hair and pretended to tie the straps under her chin. Mangas puffed on his pipe, spilling spicy laughter out of the corner of his mouth. "Suit yourself," he said. "I hear the boys leaving the mine, they'll be here in two minutes."

The boys meant Bruce and Arthur, she remembered. Carson eeped! fiddled with the bra, slipped her arms through the shoulder straps and managed to get it hooked behind her in only two tries. "It doesn't fit!" she squeaked. It felt terribly uncomfortable, too.

Mangas puffed, grinning. "One of your puppies is hanging her tongue out the window," he said. The permanent twinkles in his dark eyes danced arabesques of amusement.

She quickly adjusted the fit, glaring at him. He seemed to be enjoying this reverse striptease a little too much.

"Dress or nightgown?" he asked. He held up a silky red dress in one hand and a tiny bit of pink froth in the other.

"Aren't there any pants in there?" She stared at the suitcase. "What if we open the big one?" The third and largest case hadn't been opened yet.

"If there were any pants, they would do little to restore your masculinity," he said. "Take the dress," he handed it over. "It's red but the other one is pink and the nightgowns are all transparent."

It was intensely, deeply red -- as red as shadows cast by the moon outside a bordello. With pink and white lace hearts at the sleeves and pink and white ribbons to tie around the waist. It felt soft and -- well, it felt very nice, in contrast to how it looked which was very naughty. "How do I...?"

"Pull it on over your head like a t-shirt.," said Mangas.

"A what?" She asked. Mangas mimed the motion he meant. She did so. It fell into place and seemed to mold itself to her curves. Looking down, she could just see the pink lace of her bra peeking over the edge of her neckline. The deep cleavage visible had a very odd effect on her -- in that she suddenly wanted to see what someone else thought of it. Wasn't it just too slutty? Or did it look, um, well.... She felt confused. Slutty was bad, right?

Again Mangas distracted her. She left the waist ribbons untied while she examined the pair of high-heeled sandals he passed her. They were red and white leather with red, white and pink heart decorations and more ribbons, to tie around the ankles, she supposed. "Nothing but high heels?" she asked.

Mangas nodded. "You'll probably find them more comfortable than flats, anyway."

She remembered suddenly being unable to run in the desert and falling over on distorted feet while the demons laughed. Now her feet looked normal, but somehow the high-heeled arch felt natural when she slipped into the sandals. She sighed, wondering if she'd be able to walk in them. "This stuff is like a costume," she complained.

"You look like a confection," agreed Mangas.

"Like a what?" she said. She puzzled out how to tie the ribbon laces of the shoes, making a pretty bow of them, then tried to scoot toward the tailgate.

"Like candy, sweet and delicious," said Mangas.

He looked entirely too sly for Carson's comfort. Those dark eyes.... "That's not good, is it?" she said, struggling with trying to keep her dress down while scooting on her new cushiony bottom. It felt very odd. "I don't want any one to eat me by mistake."

Mangas coughed and she giggled, amazed that she'd actually said something with such an obvious double meaning. And even more amazed that she had laughed at his reaction. She covered her confusion by pausing to straighten her skirt and tie the ribbons behind her back. A skill that may have been related to working with tiny engine parts surfaced and she could see in her mind how the bow behind her looked. She retied it twice before she felt completely satisfied.

She scooted the last foot of the truck bed, dangled her feet off the end and tried to lift her butt and pull her skirt back under her at the same time. It didn't work and she started to slip off the padded tailgate. "Eep!" she squealed.

Mangas caught her by one arm and kept her from falling down, setting her on her feet. He grinned at her, two of his upper back teeth were gold she noticed. She wobbled a bit but stood there after a moment, looking up at him. "Even with me in these heels, you're taller than me," she complained. "I feel like a little kid."

"No one else will make that mistake," he said, smiling down at her.

She sniffed, knowing exactly what he meant. "But I'm so short! How tall am I?"

"It's probably on your ID card, though it may not be accurate," said Mangas.

She turned, almost falling off the heels, and tried to reach the folder of ID papers where she'd left it on the blanket but it was well out of reach. Mangas retrieved it easily and handed it to her. She opened it and paged past the two glossy photos. She did want to look at them again and also had a sudden urge to see a mirror but she needed to look at something else just then. She stared at the identification papers. "What did you say your name was?" she asked in a tiny voice.

"Mangas. It's an old name that belonged to an ancestor of mine."

"Mangas," she said in a small voice. "These things aren't written in Russian or something? I can't read them." Her lip trembled and her voice had a shiver in it.

He nodded. "The Devil will have her due."

"What does that mean?" she asked. She remembered the bizarre pair who had found her in the desert and promised her rescue, but it all seemed a little dreamlike -- too outlandish for reality and clouded by something else.

"The Devil was ... coerced into undoing most of the damage she did to you, but she doesn't give up easily. Rodney didn't cover everything, no one can, so she left a few surprises. He forced her to give back enough of your memory that you would know yourself but she left some things still erased. There's a balance here, though, so you probably have a few gifts you're not aware of yet. And some things may come back."

"Who's Rodney? And what kind of gifts?" Carson glanced down at her chest. "These melon cups weren't enough? What am I some kind of bimbo, I can't read?" She sniffled. "It makes me feel stupid!"

"Rodney is sort of a Celestial caseworker assigned to you, a Guardian Angel you could call him."

"An Angel?" she squeaked. "Where was he when I was lost in the desert?" She felt her eyes begin to fill with tears.

Mangas took the pipe out of his mouth and tapped the dottle out on the ground. He blew through the pipe to clear it and put it back in his pocket while stepping on the dottle to be sure it was extinguished.

Carson sniffled again. "Aren't you going to say anything?" she asked. She closed the folder and started to throw it into the truck but he took it from her before she could.

"Did you expect me to say something?" he asked. "I'm still waiting to find out if you think it would be too girly to cry about it. Oh, the boys are here."

That did it.

continued...

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Sophie re-materialized her head. "Talk about getting blasted!" She looked in the window of a parked Cadillac. "Was I a blonde before?"   Green Sun Chapter 15 Mattress Time by Donna Lamb

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Rodney materialized in the Department of Recruitment, Discipline, Promotions and Relegations in the Seventh Assize of the Eighty-Seventh Prefect of the Ninth District of the Third Terrestrial Heaven, North West Province, standing in front of a Ministering Angel First Class by the name of Samuelson who smiled thinly at Rodney and said, "All requests for resignation, promotion, discipline or relegation must be accompanied by a Form 32A-stroke-4786-dash-6,435,269,801 but we don't have any of those so you'll just have to fill out one of these Form 32A-stroke-4786-dash-6,435,269,800s and where it says 'Auto-immolation' cross it out and hand write in 'Resignation' then initial it, get your Supervising Angel to initial your initials then both of you sign all six pages and have it back to me not before next Whitsunday."

* * *

"They're stalling," the air where Sophie Drake's head used to be fumed.

"It's only been a few split eternities," said Bill C. Bubb from the face in his armpit.

Sophie re-materialized her head. "Whoo! See what you mean, talk about getting blasted!" She shook her body all over then looked in the window of a parked Cadillac. "Was I a blonde before?"

"Lady," said Bill seriously, "you probably invented blondes. How do I look?" He had regrown a head -- without a face.

"Something's missing," said Sophie.

"Well, you wouldn't want me to be two-faced, would you?" He laughed from down near his elbow. "How can you tell they're stalling?"

Sophie shrugged. "I would."

"Yeah, but they're the good guys."

She snorted. "Yeah, so? All that means is they cheat on the square -- like following the rules they choose to follow."

"You going to do anything about it?" Bill asked.

"Probably, it's just past noon, I've got time to think of several nasty things."

* * *

When Davy changed buses, Bo Lim'nhee got caught reading the latest issue of Gray Hulk over the shoulder of a boy sitting further back in the bus. Gray Hulk was a particular favorite of Bo's because he was big, smart, kicked ass and, best of all, was gray. But by the time the little alien angel noticed Davy moving, the mini-skirted boy had nearly descended the bus steps. Bo had to hurry.

When he reached the door of the bus Davy was changing to, Bo realized he didn't have a transfer in hand nor 75 cents. He hesitated before remembering that as an angel, he didn't have to pay bus fares. The door almost closed on his non-existent nose, the bus rumbled ahead and Bo did the only thing he could think of--he jumped on the bike rack at the back and yelled, "Stas' leren! Ez'ka floo!" to which he added, "Whee!"

They hadn't gone more than three blocks before a small yellow-skinned demon with spiky hair on a flying skateboard snatched Bo off the back of the bike rack and threw him under the wheels of a cement truck. "Marbant strikes!" cackled the little yellow demon. Then he said, "Oh, man! Rats!" as a second bus following the first ran over him causing his little yellow demon skull to explode.

* * *

Just as Larry the Wolf reached Coffeeville, a Hellbat came up over the horizon. "Aw, craps!" said Larry. He took evasive action but the hypnotic rays of the Hellbat sapped his speed and somewhere in the sage and scrub at the foot of the Rockies, the big purple Decepticon winged him with a blast. As Larry spun into a hillside, he put in a call to Angel Central. "It's a hit!" he told Dispatch. "I'm hit! Go to the mattresses. The B.A.D.* wants a war!" *Bitch of Air and Darkness.

After landing and plowing a few arid acres with his face, he took out his custom pool cue and quickly assembled it. Just as the Hellbat came over the horizon to see if he'd been forced to discorporate and retreat to Heaven, Larry played the nine-boulder in a carom off the mountain and clipped the Transformers head, causing it to explode. "Screwball in the corner pocket," he said in satisfaction.

* * *

Richard sat at the electric piano and pounded out a honky tonk rhythm, then blended into a set of bluesy chords and turned it into a nearly stacatto rock ballad. He sang, powering on the backbeat and gilding the blue notes at the end of the second and fourth line:

"I don't tell secrets, I don't make promises,
Let love gone astray linger and die.
Don't look for secrets, Don't ask for promises,
And you know I won't need to lie."

"How's that?" he asked.

Jo sat on the bench behind him, guitar in her lap. "Better than mine, f'shure. What was that transition chord? A7?"

Richard played the riff again. "Yeah, A7. Damn, I'm brilliant." He grinned at her.

She giggled and bent around to kiss him. "We like you to think so. Keeps you fat and happy."

He laughed. They played through a verse and the new chorus, including the honky-tonk bridge and tricky key change a couple of times. Jo made some notes. "Think you could still sing it if we transpose down a third?"

Richard considered. "I guess so. My range has improved and I've got better control down low than I used to. In the studio, sure. On stage, depends what else we're doing. Thought you were going to sing this one?"

She shook her head. "Changed my mind. It's perfect for you and you need another song if we're going to do a new album this winter." He opened his mouth but she went on, "You fixed the lyric and you're right, that bridge is brilliant. You can sing the devil out of that tune, Richard."

Richard smiled at her. "Well," he said, "let's hope so." He tinkled the keys one handed, the melody line of Lonesome Shoes.

"I know so," she said before putting the guitar down and kissing him again.

* * *

Rodney finally caught up with Ted o'Mersey at the Heavenly Cantina. Ted grinned at him, shaking his head. "Kind of took things ino your own hands, corporal, didn't you?"

"Yes, sir," said Rodney.

"Sit," Ted ordered, pushing one of the wire-framed chairs out of the cumulus for him. "Want half of my ham and cheese?"

"Thank you, sir," said Rodney, taking the seat.

"Betty!" Ted called. A stunningly pretty blonde appeared. "Couple of brews here -- lager, Rod?" The soldier nodded. "And another best ale for me," said Ted. He pulled the sandwich in two and gave half to Rodney while Betty fetched the mugs of ale and beer, almost ice cold for Rodney's lager and cellar cool for Ted's ale. She winked at Rodney as she set the glass down then sashayed off among the drifting clouds.

They chewed and drank happily for a moment then Rodney remembered the paperwork he'd brought. "I came to resign, sir. You know that?"

"Sure," said Ted. "These little sour yellow peppers are sure good, aren't they?"

Rodney nodded. "I think they're Italian, I first had them back in Philly."

"Good," said Ted. They ate and sipped their beers; contentment comes in pints, as they say in Heaven.

"Bit o' fruit ice would go, woonit?" said Ted. "No use getting piggy, though. Eternity is another day."

"About my resignation," began Rodney.

"Denied," said Ted. "Can't very well accept your resignation right after we promote you to Angel Second Class, can we? Betty? Check, please."

When the pretty angel rang up the sale, Rodney's first set of wings appeared on his back with a distinct ringing echo.

Ted laughed at the brave Buffalo Soldier's expression. "Ought to see your face, mate. Priceless."

* * *

Back on the road again, this time in leathers on Harleys, Sophie turned to Bill and snarled, "We'll just see about that!" She wore red and her sidekick wore black. They roared up 111, cruised Indian Canyon Drive (almost deserted in late July), got on the freeway at White Water and headed toward Los Angeles.

Bill's helmet concealed his head's lack of a face. He shouted from under his arm, "Ain't the guy you want back the other way?"

Sophie made a face which could be clearly seen since she wore a pseudo-Nazi brain-bucket-style helmet. "More mischief available in a big city. We'll keep an eye on the bimbo, but the City of Angels is where we can put the most hurt on those heavenly busybodies, the clarences."

continued...

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"Stop that," she told her naughty bits. Green Sun Chapter 16 Mirror Mirror? by Donna Lamb

 

"I can't let them see me like this," Carson wailed. "They'll think I'm...I'm...." She trailed off into sniffles. Her blond hair fell around her face like two golden wings, tears tracked down to her lips and she wiped them away with her delicate scarlet-tipped fingers. The color distracted her and she turned her hands over to stare at her manicured nails.

Mangas looked calm, not showing any emotion but he remarked, "It might be interesting to find out what you're afraid they might think, but I'm not sure you know." He made a burbling noise like a forgotten coffeepot.

"Is there some place I can hide?" she asked, still sobbing. "I can't let them see me." Her musical voice caught on a hiccough. She looked around at the truck and the cottonwoods, blue eyes still leaking tears. The men, Bruce Martin and Arthur Bullrush, approached from the other side; she could hear them talking. Away from the small stand of trees, the harsh sunlight of the desert showed no refuge in any of the directions she could see, just open desert of rock and shrub and cactus.

"There's a cabin around the front of the truck," said Mangas. He nodded toward the little building. "You can go in there and I'll keep them out here for a bit. But you're going to have to meet them sooner or later, and other men like them. And Bruce did bring you in from the desert."

"But...but..." she stammered, gesturing at her curves and skimpy clothes. She shivered all over and tried to wipe her face with her trembling hands. Her gestures accented her vulnerability.

He smiled and she knew that he understood. He put a thin, bony hand on her back and guided her around the truck to the adobe cabin, holding the door open for her. She stumbled a bit in the high heels on the uneven ground but resisted the impulse to grab Mangas for support.

The inside of the cabin had the bachelor neatness of someone who had spent twenty-three years in the marines and lifetimes living alone on the desert. Everything had in its own place and clutter had no place. Colorful, tightly woven Indian rugs decorated the clean, unfinished planks of the floor and the dried mud of the walls. Light came in through small high windows in two of the walls. A big fireplace looked as if it might be used in colder weather for both heat and cooking. A small old-fashioned wooden icebox, some pine cabinetry, a sturdy-looking bed, several wooden chairs and a small table furnished the space with Spartan efficiency. Hooks and shelves on the walls held clothing, unused blankets, tools, musical instruments (a battered acoustic Gibson, a four-string banjo, a fiddle) and other equipment. It looked comfortable and inviting.

Before going in, Carson turned to Mangas Junco and asked, "You know what happened to me?"

"Yes," he said. "You've been transformed by fate and rescued from a life that had many wrong choices ahead and behind." He smiled at her and laughed one of his happy, burbling chuckles. "You've got new chances to make choices now, some good, some bad. A new life and it's all yours."

She smiled, the old man's chuckles were contagious, but her lips trembled. "I don't know if I can do it. I used to be a man. I don't know...." She trailed off looking down at herself.

"You'll have help," said the old man. "Do you want to know what those papers said?"

She looked back up, blue eyes very wide. "Yes, please."

"According to the birth certificate and passport, you were born twenty-two years ago, in Long Beach, California. Your parents, Rachel Margaret Carson and Homer Bartholomew Marsh named you Phoebe Jacqueline Marsh. That name is listed as an 'also known as' on your passport but the name at the top and on your other papers is Hollie Dollie Hayes with an address in North Hollywood on your I.D. card." He braced her with a hand on her arm and by letting her lean on the door frame.

"I'm.... I'm.... Hollie?" she asked. "Hollie Hayes?"

"It's a good name," said Mangas. "I got my name because my arms are so skinny. Mangas Junco means 'Reed Sleeves'," He flashed a grin at her and she smiled back without meaning to.

"Hollie..." she said. "Hollie Hayes. My name is Hollie." She sighed, looking puzzled but also relieved. "No knowing my name was terrible. But that's not the name I had before... those... well, before?"

He shook his head. "That person is gone, do not concern yourself with that past. You are Hollie, now. You can remember and mourn later, but now you have to become your new self."

Hollie's beautiful eyes filled with tears. "I don't know how... I don't think I can do it. Being a woman...?"

"Go in and lie down for a while," he told her, his voice soft and gentle. "You are by nature a cheerful person, things will look better later."

She gave him a doubtful look but turned and made her way to the big bed made of black-stained oak timbers and covered in fanciful Indian blankets. Mangas closed the door behind her and went to the back of the truck where he closed up the open luggage cases just as Bruce and Arthur came through the screen of cottonwoods. Without hurrying at all, he stepped into the deep pool of shadow cast by a tree trunk.

"Now, I've got to see this woman," said Arthur as the two friends arrived. "Hey, Mangas, have you met Bruce's girlfriend?" he asked the old man, looking directly at him.

"Who are you talking to?" asked Bruce, looking around.

"Somebody white guys can't see," said Arthur with a straight face.

"An Apache ghost?" asked Bruce, smiling.

Arthur shook his head, "No, man. Don't joke about that, ghosts are not funny to Apaches. It's Mangas Junco, my great-grandfather I told you about. Mangas, let Bruce see you so he stops talking about ghosts."

Laughing his quiet bubbling chortle, Mangas stepped into the edge of the leafy shadow and raised a hand like a Hollywood Indian. "Ya-ta-say," he said. "Hello, my grandson Arthur's friend, Bruce."

"Ah," said Bruce, more than a bit startled. "The vanishing American? Good to meet you, sir. I had begun to think your grandson might have got too much sun." Since Mangas didn't make any motion to shake hands, neither did Bruce but simply held his hand up by his shoulder, palm out

Mangas nodded, his eyes twinkling. "We in the family have suspected that for years," he said. "The girl is inside, she has somewhat recovered from her ordeal and I found identity papers inside one of the cases. The name she seems to prefer is Hollie Hayes." He handed the packet over.

"What? She's got more than one name?" said Bruce. He opened the packet and shared the contents with Arthur who immediately spotted something.

"Her passport says she's married to Daniel German Hayes, and she's an entertainer," Arthur said. He quirked an eyebrow at Bruce. "From your description, maybe she's a stripper?"

Bruce frowned. "Her California ID lists her as Hollie Dollie Hayes but says she's single. Hmm. Five foot one, blonde, blue eyes. I would have thought she was shorter."

Arthur stared at the eight by ten glossies, "Wow," he said.

Bruce glanced at the pictures, "That's her." He stared at the passport, still frowning. "Maybe the man in the plane was her husband?"

"Wishful thinking?" said Arthur holding one of the photos. "Looking to comfort a young widow?"

Bruce shook his head. "No," he sighed. "Just the logic of it. If she's married who else would she be in a small plane with?"

Arthur nodded, glancing toward the door to the adobe cabin.

"Before more speculation, perhaps we should open the third case? It might help resolve the mystery," suggested Mangas. "The smallest had cosmetics, jewelry and those papers, the second contained clothing, and shoes. Perhaps the third contains the man's traveling necessities?"

"In a bright pink leather case?" Arthur made a face.

"Let's see." said Bruce. He made a long arm and pulled the last case onto the tailgate of the SUV.

* * *

Inside the cabin, Hollie first sat on the bed then got up to wander around. She picked various objects up to examine them, not so much out of curiousity but in an attempt to avoid thinking about her own situation. "Sooner or later," she muttered, "I'm going to have to pee."

On the little table, she found various rasps, files, picks and knives and a supply of some gnarled gray brown branch-like objects about six to ten inches long, pointed at one end and sawn off at the other. She had no idea what they might be or what someone might be trying to make from them. A nearby pile of stainless steel knife blades with bare, blackened tangs gave a clue but she didn't have access to the memories that might have helped make the connection.

Instead, she caught a glimpse of her reflection in the shiny metal. She picked a knife blade up with care, not thinking to grasp it by the tang but handling it as if it were alive, lethal and full of evil intent. Her caution defeated her purpose of getting a better look at her new face and eventually she dropped the blade where it landed point down, embedding itself in the floorboards right between her feet. Frightened she stepped away from the knives and looked for.... "A mirror? Is there a mirror here?" she asked no one.

She didn't find a mirror but the next shiniest object in the room seemed to be the bright hinges and fittings of the old icebox. She crouched down and turned her head this way and that, trying to find an angle where she could see herself but the metal had no sufficiently large flat area to see more than blue eyes and a lot of blond hair. While trying to move the metal to a better vantage, she accidentally opened the simple door latch.

The inside held food in various stages of preparation under a tray filled with a small block of ice. She touched the ice. "Cold," she said. Six cans on the shelf under the ice looked like they might contain beer. Just from the color and design of the cans, she could almost think of a brand name. She made a face. Hobie Carson had never liked beer and apparently Hollie Hayes felt the same. She made three tries to close the door of the icebox but it kept coming open again.

Staring intently at the latch, she finally figured out how to work the thing; she pulled the handle down, pushed the door closed and pulled the handle back to the straight across position, sliding the polished bar down into the slot on the frame. She felt proud of herself for a moment then shook her head. "Boy, am I dumb or what?" she asked. But she realized that the latch worked a lot like the fastener on her bra which she had figured out while holding it behind her back. She resolved not to have problems with hooks or tabs that fit into slots again.

Blushing because of where that thought led, she stood up straight again, and resumed her hunt for a mirror but didn't find one, at least not in plain view. She thought about going to the door and asking for her cases. She knew the little one had a mirror in the lid, she'd glimpsed it before when Mangas had opened it. But, no, "the boys" were out there and she had no desire to meet them until she had to, especially not the huge man who had carried her and put her in the truck and made her giggle.

Her nipples got hard while she thought about him. She looked down, smiling at first. The pointy little nubs showed clearly through the thin, almost transparent fabric of her dress and skimpy bra. She frowned. "Stop that," she told her naughty nipples.

* * *

Outside, Mangas used the toothpick-like prong on his pocket knife again to spring the locks on the largest case. He didn't watch his hands but kept his eyes level, his head up.

"Where did you learn to do that?" asked Bruce.

"UCLA," said the old man. "Class of '27." Mangas used a more familiar and less formal tone of voice with the two men than he had used with Hollie. The first lock opened with a snap and he began on the next one.

Bruce grinned. "Bachelor of Burglary?"

Mangas smiled. "Science; geology actually. Went back and got a masters in engineering when they offered it just before the war. Almost froze my Apache butt off in Alaska during the Second World War, building roads for the Combat Engineers; better than being an Indian dogface in the first one, though."

"He's a damn officer-type," commented Arthur. "Major Mannie Junco, no less. Got his gold leaf during the occupation of Japan."

"Sir, yes, sir," said Bruce, still grinning. "I kind of thought you had less of an accent than your jarhead relative here."

"Hey," said Arthur.

The second latch popped open and Mangas swung the lid up. He stepped back to let Bruce and Arthur get a good look. Both men used language that would have embarrassed them if Hollie had been there to hear it. The mildest thing either of them said was Arthur's reverent, "Holy Smokes!" Nodding, Mangas pulled his corncob pipe out of the pocket of his khaki pants and began loading it with fragrant herbs from his pouch. The contents of the third suitcase called for some powerful medicine.

Stacks of hundred dollar bills seemed to completely fill the leather container.

continued...

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Maybe you'd better read Blue Moon first...

at Doppler Press!

"What would men like?" She glanced down. "Besides those."   Green Sun Chapter 17 Thirsty Work by Donna Lamb

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"Eight packets high, five long, ten wide, one hundred bills per packet--I make it four million dollars if they're all hundreds." said Arthur. The other two men nodded.

"And if they're real money, not counterfeit," added Bruce.

They all watched the suitcase full of Ben Franklin portraits as if it might suddenly do something extraordinary like the chorus line scene from Blazing Saddles, perhaps. Mangas puffed placidly on his pipe. Arthur made ticking noises by clicking his ring finger nail against his thumbnail. Bruce tried to work out how a--dolly!--a girl like Hollie Dollie Hayes could come into possession of so much money, real or not.

"What are you smoking in that thing?" he suddenly asked Mangas.

The old Indian took his pipe out of his mouth and looked into the bowl as if curious himself. "Indian tobacco," he said. "Cured with vanilla bean, cinnamon, cherry, beet root, agave, wildflower honey and corn beer."

Arthur laughed. "He left out the owl spit this time."

"Indian tobacco?" asked Bruce.

"Grows wild all over the country, about six times more potent than the stuff they make cigarettes from." He shrugged. "I don't smoke much of it and I mix it with commercial tobacco usually."

"Sorry," said Bruce. "All that money made me think back to my first idea about that airplane."

Mangas nodded. "Drugs."

* * *

Inside the cabin, Hollie finally gave up on finding a mirror. Instead, she examined the parts of her body she could easily see. Her small hands with their delicate, painted nails. Her smooth, slender arms. Her long, shapely legs. Her abundant, bright blond hair which she could almost pull around her like a cape. It reached down long enough that she had to be careful not to sit on it. Her breasts.... Abruptly, she decided to see what the guys were doing outside.

She crept up on the cabin door and tried to listen through the chinks around the hand-planed door frame but the men were too far away, at the other end of the truck, for her to hear them clearly. The door latch operated as a simple pull up-and-in device, she had it open quickly and leaned against the doorway to look out. She saw Mangas take a step back away from the truck and wink in her direction.

She giggled. Mangas was funny and didn't scare her like the idea of meeting Bruce again. But she still couldn't hear what they were saying very well. She eased the door closed again and wagged her head in a gesture she must have seen somewhere. "Well, Hollie, if that's your name," she asked herself, "what now?"

The men outside scared her but she wanted to meet them. She frowned. Why? That thought scared her, too. Bruce she'd already met and.... Okay, don't think about that, either. "I used to be a man," she said out loud. She remembered that, remembered the demons changing her...but were her memories real? She sighed. She didn't remember much about being a man or much in the way of details of her former life at all. Like her name, Hollie almost sounded right but not really.

She knew she'd been alone in the airplane which implied that she had been flying it, a totally impossible thought at the moment when she had trouble opening doors. "Hope Mangas is right," she whispered. He'd said she would remember more later. She trusted him, though she could not say why.

She looked around the room again, hoping for inspiration. "I want to go out there, but I need...." She didn't know what she needed. A reason? An excuse? "What do I know about being a girl, why would a girl go out there?" Duh. To meet the men. She blushed.

"I should take them something, like food," she decided. "That's what a girl would do. They might be thirsty or..." She stopped talking and looked at the icebox. "What would men like?" She glanced down. "Besides those."

* * *

"Somebody will report the plane crash," said Arthur. "It made a heck of a tall smoke." He nodded in the general direction of the still visible column of greasy gray smoke. "And it ain't that far from Christmas. Someone's probably already on their way out there."

Bruce nodded. "Yeah, they'll find the plane and the body and, well, who knows what else? Can't quite figure out why she was out there naked.... You don't ride around in an open cockpit plane with no clothes on."

"There are any number of logical explanations," said Mangas. "One of them may even be true."

"Thanks a lot, Chief Confucius," said Arthur. Bruce chuckled and Mangas made his gurgling noise.

"This money complicates things," said Bruce. "Whether it's real or not, we should turn it in."

"Why?" asked Arthur. "Maybe it belongs to Lady Mysterious?"

"How could it?"

"Same way she lost her clothes?"

Bruce shook his head. "It's got to be illegal to find that much cash and not report it."

"Sure, 'cause the government wants that money and they sure ain't the ones that lost it."

Bruce frowned. "What if whoever it does belong to comes looking for it?"

"Now that's one reason to turn it in..." Arthur began.

They all heard the cabin door open this time and moved so they could see. Hollie came out the door carrying a plate and three tall cans of beer. She smiled at them nervously, standing there in her short dress and high heels, blond hair floating around her. "Bet you guys are thirsty, huh?" she said.

"Wow," said Arthur.

"Blue-eyed love, ain't it wonderful?" Green Sun Chapter 18 Making the World Round by Donna Lamb

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Arthur moved first, stepping around Mangas to take the plate from Hollie. "Thank you for bringing us beer," he said, smiling down at her. "I'm Arthur. And you're Hollie."

"Uh huh," she said, staring up at him. Most Southwestern Indians are not so tall but Arthur had some mixed ancestry and topped six feet easily with the heavy upper body of many Choctaws and Chickasaws. He stood more than a foot taller than Hollie, even in her heels. Looming over her like a giant and exuding some sort of masculine aura that must have been aged in oak barrels to an intense, mellow glow of strength, Arthur's simple speech overwhelmed Hollie's damaged coping skills. She knew in that moment that she would have agreed with anything he might have suggested.

"Mangas," said Arthur, "you want to split a beer with me?" He didn't take his eyes off her and his smile impaled her like a butterfly in a dusty museum case. He took a beer off the plate and held it casually in one hand, breaking the seal of the screw-off cap with a sideways push of his thumb.

She smiled back, dizzy.

Bruce grabbed Mangas's shoulder before he could step forward and whispered into the old man's ear. "That's her--but, what happened? She's...different..." he trailed off.

Mangas grunted. "The swelling went down," he said and chuckled. He stepped forward, took the beer from Arthur, popped the cap off and put it into his pocket before speaking. "Did you bring a beer for yourself, Hollie?" he asked.

Relieved because she could talk to Mangas, Hollie said, "Uh, no. I don't, um, I don't drink... beer." She still hadn't taken her eyes off Arthur's and the last word came out in a whisper.

"You sure?" Arthur asked, offering her the second beer with the cap already loosened.

"No?" she said but she reached for the beer since he offered it.

Bruce felt something he hadn't felt since high school. He felt jealous, jealous of his friend, and that made him angry--mostly at himself. He stepped forward to speak but he couldn't think of anything to say that didn't sound like some macho asshole talking. Looking at Hollie looking at Arthur--hurt in some way he couldn't define.

Hollie took the beer and stared now at Bruce, her gaze attracted by his movement. If Arthur seemed like potent masculinity aged in oak, Bruce gave the impression of triple distilled lightning in a glass bottle stored on a high shelf almost out of reach. It might even be dangerous to try. She gasped--and not only because she recognized him as the man who had rescued her from the desert.

"Who-ah!" Arthur grabbed the beer back before she dropped it. He glanced at his friend and grinned; none of the men had missed Hollie's reaction when she saw Bruce. "This one's yours, Bruce ol' buddy, ol' pal," said the big Indian, handing the half-opened beer to Bruce. He even stepped back a little.

"Thanks," said Bruce. "Thank you, Hollie. I'm glad you're feeling better." He took the beer and put the cap in his shirt pocket. "And I'm glad to find out your name."

"Thank you," said Hollie. "For...." She blushed, remembering her confusion and his kindness in her predicament. "I might.... I would have...."

"You're welcome," said Bruce.

"Sure you don't want this last beer?" Arthur asked before taking it off the plate which he wedged into a convenient low fork on the palo verde tree near the cabin. He popped the cap on the bottle and tucked it into his pocket, looking sideways at Mangas as he took a drink. "Ah, blue-eyed love--ain't it wonderful?"

Mangas chuckled."It's what makes the world round," he said before sipping his own beer.

"You mean 'love makes the world go round,' old man," said Arthur. "That's how the song goes."

"Different song," said Mangas. "Isn't it, Hollie?"

She blinked. Once again Mangas's voice had pulled Hollie out of a trance. "Um, yes. But in the song, it's not love...it's money." She put her head up, took a deep breath and sang in a bell-like soprano:

Money make the world go round, they say, so they say.
Money make the world round, so they say, so they say.
It ain't if you rich or poor, you still gonna pay.

That girl look at you, mister, what you gonna do?
That man look at you, sister, what you gonna do?
Someone gonna pay someone, that you know is true.

See the girl dancin', dancin', she got rents to pay.
Hear the girl singin', singin', she got rents to pay.
If you lay your money down, you can have your say.

Man got money in the bank, gonna get me some.
Man got money in the bank, gotta get me some.
Ain't thinkin' 'bout what I do, till it's gone and done.

See that pretty man workin' so hard for his pay?
See that pretty girl workin' so hard for her pay?
One of them gonna be broke by the end of day.

Money make the world go round, it's true, ain't it true?
Money make the world round, ain't it true, ain't it true?
You wanna get some money, what you gonna do?

She moved as she sang, dancing in place, a sexy, slow throb to some unheard blues sidemen. She rang the last note, high and clear, then she stopped, eyes bright, face flushed pink, dizzy and exhilarated.

Arthur and Bruce exchanged glances. "Holy smokes," said Arthur. "Voice like that, maybe that is her money."

"Baby make me feel so good, I just gotta sing." . Green Sun Chapter 19 Cold Drink by Donna Lamb

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"You're all looking at me," said Hollie. She felt self-conscious standing in the shade of the cottonwoods in her skimpy dress with three very male men staring at her. She glanced around as if looking for a place to hide. The big SUV, the cabin and the trees seemed inadequate hiding places but they were surrounded by open desert.

Bruce wiped his face. "Sorry," he said. "It's just...we didn't know you could sing." He took a sip of his beer. The cold drink shocked him a bit, he'd gotten used to drinking barely cool liquids while working the border both during and after his involvement with the Regulators. He took a bigger drink. The day's heat lingered in the air like a threat; not ten o'clock yet and it had reached the high nineties already. He glanced at the two Apaches, they didn't seem bothered by the heat.

Arthur snorted and Mangas chuckled. "It's not just that you sing, Hollie, honey," said Arthur. "You're a lot of fun to look at, you know?" He sucked down some of the ice cold beer, too. There's more than one kind of heat.

"I am?" She looked confused, vulnerable. Arthur blinked. Bruce took a step toward her and she focussed on him. As if pulled by an invisible magnet, she took a small step in his direction.

"How can you sing like that and look so innocent?" Bruce asked. He looked like the question caused him pain.

"I dunno," Hollie said, looking very innocent. Her blue eyes seemed enormous in her guileless face.

"And that song..." Bruce said. "I'd never heard that before. Where did you learn it?"

"I dunno," Hollie said again. "I don't remember where.... I just remember the songs."

"Songs?" said Arthur. "I don't think I'd heard that song before, either." He looked at Mangas.

The old man nodded. "It's an oldie. Do you know any other songs, honey?" he asked Hollie.

"Lots," she said, after staring off into space for a moment. Bruce thought she looked delightfully--well, spacey--while thinking so hard. He took a quick swig of his beer.

Arthur opened his mouth to say something but Mangas told him in Apache, "Don't gather flies, close your mouth. You talk too much, grandson. Listen." Arthur shut his mouth, only someone who knew him very well could have interpreted his expression.

Hollie looked upward into the green canopy of the cottonwoods and the sweet-smelling palo verde. She wrapped the fingers of her left hand around her right index finger, crossed her thumbs and put both hands under her chin. She touched the tip of her tongue against her upper teeth. Then she sang again and while she sang, she danced. She put her palms together and swayed from side to side; she made gestures and took little steps but mostly she danced in place, dancing with her hips. In the same bluesy rhythm she had used before, to almost the same tune, she sang:

One time, I took my baby somethin' cold to drink
One time, I took my baby somethin' cold to drink
I make him feel so good, he don't know what to think

And yesterday, I gave him a bowl of my stew
And yesterday, I gave him a bowl of my stew
I make him feel so good, he don't know what to do

Sunday, my baby and me went to church to pray
Sunday, my baby and me went to church to pray
I make him feel so good, he don't know what to say

Last night, I took him myself and a piece of meat
Last night, I took him myself and a piece of meat
I make him feel so good, he don't know what to eat

You know for my baby, I do most anything
You know for my baby, I do most anything
Baby make me feel so good, I just gotta sing.

Arthur and Bruce finished their beers quickly. Mangas chuckled and sipped his.

Hollie looked pleased.

"Hot day," said Arthur.

Bruce nodded. "I thought you... Nevermind."

"No," said Hollie, looking serious. "That was 'Cold Drink'; 'Nevermind' is a different song." She nodded.

The younger men stared at her some more. Mangas asked her, "Hollie, do you usually sing without any music?"

She blinked. "I dunno?" she said. "I mean, I don't sing...." She trailed off, confused. "I'm not a singer, I mean...." But she didn't remember what she had done before... before the demons found her. She felt scared.

Before he thought about it, Bruce stepped up and put an arm around her. "It's okay, you're safe," he said. She melted against him.

Arthur looked away. "You're some sort of entertainer, Hollie," he said. "No one learns to sing like that without doing it in front of an audience." Of sweaty, horny men, he added silently. He sucked on the empty beer bottle for a moment. "Somebody somewhere is probably looking for you..." He remembered the money. "Oh, shit," he said.

Hollie struggled with her feelings. Bruce's solid reality felt very good. Knowing what the demons had done to her, she wondered why she felt the way she did. I used to be a guy, she told herself. The details remained fuzzy but she knew that her old life had not included being held by men--or singing on a stage, either. But being held felt good, if scary in a different way than her memories of metting the demons. And the idea of performing scared and excited her in another way. She closed her eyes, wondering vaguely if Bruce smelled so good because he was a man or because she was a girl--now.

"What are we going to do about the money?" Arthur asked. He turned to Mangas. "Why am I asking those two?"

Mangas chuckled. "It's fortunate that we own a big hole in the ground full of tiny passages that only a skinny old man can reach."

Arthur grinned at him. "Oh, yeah," he said.

---

Theme From Green Sun (706.75 KB)

If you believe in coincidence... . Green Sun Chapter 20 Enemy Action? by Donna Lamb

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"You heard those songs somewhere else, sir?" Bruce asked. He glanced down at the tiny, big-eyed blonde still clinging to his left arm. She looked up at him with a puzzled expression, her blue eyes guileless.

Mangas snorted, "Don't take Arthur's noise about me being an officer serious. That was back before you were born. I'm just Mangas, unless you want something out of me." The old Indian had no expression at all but his dark eyes seemed to twinkle with amusement.

Bruce grinned. "Well, then, where did you hear Hollie's songs before? Mangas?"

Hollie smiled, though she couldn't have said why.

Arthur laughed. "Oh, oh, here it comes. Gramps is going to tell us how he dug the Panama Canal, single handed." The big Apache made motions with his hands, as if measuring a fish that kept getting larger.

Mangas chuckled. "No such thing. I was still in short pants when the canal opened, going to grammar school with the white family that raised me in Pasadena." Bruce blinked at this piece of information. The old guy had had an unusual life, a very long unusual life.

Hollie looked from Mangas to Arthur to Bruce; the younger men looked impressed even though Mangas had denied building the canal they were talking about. She tried to get back to the point. "Um, you've heard the songs before?" she asked.

Mangas nodded. "In a little nightclub in Los Angeles, back in the thirties. Woman named Clara Washington sang them. She used the stage name Clara Moon." He pulled his pipe out and looked at it thoughtfully. "There are recordings, she had a career for a number of years." He put the pipe back in his pocket.

"How can you remember her, Mangas?" asked Arthur.

Mangas shrugged. "I used to own some of her records. And we grew up together. Her mother kept house for my family in Pasadena."

Bruce wanted to ask more questions to straighten out the chronology but something stopped him. "That's... that's just a... a huge coincidence, isn't it?"

"If you believe in coincidence," said Mangas. Arthur snorted.

"Huh?" said Hollie, feeling she'd missed something.

"Do you know where she might be now?" Bruce asked. He looked troubled, his brow wrinkled and the corners of his mouth turned down.

"Clara was a few years younger than me; if she were still alive she'd likely be in a rest home somewhere," said Mangas.

Arthur closed one eye and looked at the old man around the bulk of his own big nose. "You ain't shittin' us, are you?"

Mangas shook his head. "As it happens, I know that Clara died back in the sixties. She's buried in Pasadena, next to her mother, in the plot my adopted family owned."

"Huh?" said Hollie, again. What the discussion meant to her situation completely escaped her and she didn't like Bruce's worried expressions.

Bruce said to her, "You couldn't have heard her sing those songs, but you could have heard a recording or someone else singing them."

"I guess so," said Hollie. "Does it matter?"

The men looked at each other, Mangas amused, Bruce still concerned, and Arthur's face expressionless as if he'd just bitten into a juicy koan.

"Well, we're trying to help you find out who you are," Bruce said.

"Oh. But don't you have my name? I mean, the name on those papers?" She gestured toward the SUV. She knew it wasn't the name she'd had before but it would fit her better as a woman and being unable to remember her male name, she'd begun to think of herself as 'Hollie'.

"Yes, but that's just your name, it's not who you are...." Bruce sighed. "If we know who you are, we may know if anyone is looking for you -- or that money."

Hollie glanced at the suitcase packed with $100 bills. "That's a lot of money, isn't it?"

Arthur grinned and Mangas chuckled. Bruce agreed. "That's enough money that someone might be willing to kill--a lot of people--for it. We need to know where it came from and...and...how it got into your suitcase."

"I know other songs," Hollie said, trying to be helpful. "Lots," she added after thinking for a moment.

"Do you know 'Stardust'?" Arthur asked.

She nodded and opened her mouth to begin singing but Mangas interrupted, "Do you know 'Summer Wine'?" he asked. She shook her head, looking confused.

Bruce couldn't stand it any more. He bent down and kissed her on the forehead.

Startled, she looked up at him. "Um?" she said.

"You're too cute," said Bruce, sounding so serious that she thought she'd done something wrong.

"I am?" she asked, a little worried and a little dazed as she realized she'd just been kissed by a man.

"You are too cute," agreed Arthur. "It's an incurable condition." He looked serious too, though his eyes twinkled.

"It's what?" she asked, looking even more confused and cuter than ever.

Mangas chuckled. "Do you know 'Downtown', Hollie?"

Relieved that she could answer the question, she nodded. "Do you want me to sing it?"

Mangas shook his head. "Not right now. Maybe later." He took his pipe out of his pocket again, looked at it and put it back.

"You know something or you've figured something out," Arthur accused him. "Enlighten us, O Skinny Buddha-of-the-Desert."

"Call it a guess," said Mangas.

* * *

When the phone rang, Richard and Jo had been mid-snuggle in Jo's big bedroom next to the upstairs studio in her Burbank home. "We going to answer that?" Richard asked lazily around a mouthful of Jo's neck.

"B-better," said Jo. "I told Ellie and Arnie we'd be here. They got a new music video to show us." She tried to sit up but Richard kept one arm across her middle, holding her round little butt against his thigh while he reached the phone with his other arm. Jo giggled and wriggled.

"Hey! You wanna answer the phone or start something again?" Richard asked.

"Yes!" Jo said, squeaking when Richard tickled her.

"All right, then," he said. "Whozit?" he asked into the receiver. "It's Ellie," he said passing the handset to Jo.

She took the phone, "Oh, hey, Ellie. Sure, come on over. Richard and I were just taking a b-break." She giggled and squeaked again as Richard gave her a stroke under the ribs. "No, really," she added. "Um, half an hour. I'm sure." She laughed and pretended to bonk Richard with the phone, "He'll b-behave," she told Ellie before hanging up.

"Half an hour?" said Richard, quirking his eyebrow.

"Lemme up," said Jo, pulling at his arm around her waist. He released her and she stood up, pausing beside the bed to look down at Richard's long, lean frame. "Well?" she asked. "We've got time for a shower, stinky b-boy." She posed her own slender body invitingly. After a year and a half and some special medical attention, the bullet scar on her right shoulder hardly showed at all on her lightly-freckled pale skin. She flipped her ginger-blond hair and turned to wiggle her ass at him.

Richard's interest in showering with Jo became very apparent.

* * *

Soundman Arnie Roberts, with some advice from Jo, had engineered the release of the "bootleg" audio tapes from the night Jo got shot at Wrangler Jill's onto the internet. Before Jo even got out of the hospital, the grass roots demand for an I-NO-Y album had turned into a prairie fire.

Elspeth Huffnire, a film student at UCLA, had come forward with her digital footage of several parts of the show, including a dimly lit and poorly vantaged ten dozen frames of the actual shooting. Which, oddly enough, made it look as if Richard had been the one to take the bullet fired by Cheryl Aronhaus, the assemblyman's irate wife who had thought that Barry had been having an affair with Jo.

After Ellie and Arnie had massaged the footage, music videos started appearing on You Tube. Ellie's sampling technique mixed up some of the songs into a dramatic ten-minute video with a storyline about the shooting, followed by two three-minute dance videos. The dramatic video played up the mystery of what had actually happened and the dancing videos displayed the band's energy and skill, all adding fuel to the blaze of public interest in the new group and keeping it alive and hot for weeks.

As soon as it became apparent that Jo would recover completely from her injuries, a bidding war erupted amongst indie labels wanting to produce an album for I-NO-Y. Tom Harmon and Andie Moore, the band's agent and new manager signed them up with Millennium Buzzards Nest for two albums and promotional tours. Jo, Arnie and Lemon Jones had produced the studio album I-NO-Y nine months after the shooting followed by a short winter tour through six cities and the release of the band's second album I-NO-Y LIVE * NEAR DEATH including tapes from the arena shows and the debut performance at Wrangler Jill's.

Jo hadn't recovered enough to play keyboards on the winter tour but made up for it with new songs and some electrifying performances during the first half of the NEAR DEATH summer tour. Blues-rock legendary drummer, George "Gogie" Luft, who'd also been shot in a separate incident the week before Jo's shooting, would be joining the band for two appearances in the latter half of the tour and would become the group's semi-regular studio drummer, letting Richard do some piano and guitar work. Kylie and Paul "Bugs" Benjamin remained with the band, too, providing Bugs' unique rolling guitar sound and Kylie's steady moral and rhythm support.

With very little in the way of interpersonal conflict, I-NO-Y looked set for a long and successful career.

After their shower, Richard went downstairs to let Ellie in while Jo finished getting dressed.

Arnie had come along with the young film student, less than half his age and barely one third his weight. Ellie dashed inside waving a freshly burned DVD. "Dynamite on steroids!" she enthused. "Going to knock your socks clean to Malibu!" The dark-haired young woman sometimes described herself as a "Jewish Dolly Parton pixie clone." To complete the image, she wore cut-off jeans and a rather tight Tinkerbell t-shirt.

Arnie and Richard chuckled. "We got a good mix on the sound," said Arnie.

"Don't get technical on me, guys," warned Richard. "Jo's the electronic whiz, you know. If it don't run on gasoline, it's too high tech for me."

"I'm just saying, we got a good mix. It sounds good," said Arnie.

"Looks good, too," said Ellie. "Black backgrounds, each of you dancing to a beat in turn. Who knew Bugs could get down without a guitar around his neck?"

They laughed and Jo's giggle joined them from the stairs.

* * *

From Greenwich to Honolulu and everywhere the calendar still showed Strangefellows Day, the demons who answered to the Devil in Drag went mano a mano with the heavenly corps of Guardian Angels. In Manhattan, an angel fed a demon into a paper shredder; in Surinam, blood-sucking flies chewed an angel into hamburger; in the Yukon, a ghost bear devoured the ectoplasmic corpsicle of a frozen demon and on Easter Island, a minion of hell toppled a 160 ton statue onto an inattentive Clarence.

"This is fun!" said Sophie Drake, the Devil in Drag. They cruised down Colorado Boulevard in Pasadena on their black touring Harleys while keeping mental tabs on demons scattered over two-thirds of the globe.

Bill C. Bubb made a rude snorting noise with the mouth in his armpit. "We're wasting time," he said. His silvery full face helmet concealed the fact that he didn't actually have a face in the usual way.

"Sure," said Sophie Drake. "But don't forget why we're doing this; it's not just for the fun of it." She giggled. The electric blue trim on her bike matched the blue inserts in her black and fuchsia leathers.

"We've still got about twenty hours to make trouble in," said Bubb.

"Memorable trouble," agreed Sophie. "Hit it!"

They left rubber down the middle of the Boulevard.