Jacques Debrot
ELVIS CLONE BOUNTY HUNTERS
The trio of Elvises lip-synching on YouTube to a bonzo hip-hop version of “Love Me Tender” are illegals.
“Look at that,” Ugly Romeo says, pointing to this awkward thing the clones do mid-song where they break into a flurry of karate moves. It’s the fourth video the Elvis clones have uploaded this week.
“Turtle-Sticks-Its-Head-Out,” Yo-Yo jokes. “Seven-Fang-Terror-Smash.” She and Romeo terminate Elvis illegals weekly on their hit reality-TV show, but they’re both superfans of the King. Yo-Yo’s even got Elvis’s death date, 8-16-1977, tattooed on the roof of her mouth.
Romeo zooms in on a Chinese watermark barely visible beneath a sweaty, wedge-shaped sideburn. “This is sick,” he says, pressing the zoom button combination again. By now Romeo’s so used to having every minute of his life recorded that he’s only remotely aware of the S&M Network cameraman filming him for the show. “It’s like these Elvises are just asking us to waste them.”
“WTF, how can you watch this crap?” Sticky Fingaz asks. “Ugly Romeo is such a shithat.”
For the past ten minutes, she’s been enumerating Poster Boy’s inadequacies as a boyfriend, but he just shrugs indifferently like he’s high, both eyes glued to his laptop.
“I thought we were going out tonight.”
“Go then,” Poster Boy says in a tone of surly boredom. “What do I care?”
The camera closes in on Romeo as he plays the clone video for Psylocke and Young Elephant Man.
“What do you make of this?” he asks. He pauses the video and hits the Select button, enlarging one of the Elvises’ bloated features.
“Close in on the sunglasses,” Psylocke suggests. She and Young Elephant Man are Romeo’s grown kids from his first marriage. Yo-Yo’s about their age so sometimes the family dynamic gets weird. Plus, the kids are mutants. Psylocke sees people as colors, like her mom, shimmering purples, dull greens.
Young Elephant Man takes control of the keyboard and zeroes in on the clone’s chunky gold aviator sunglasses. As he magnifies the left lens, the reflected image of a large disordered room comes into focus.
“It looks like an abandoned office,” Psylocke says. “Disheveled cubicles, busted file cabinets.”
Young Elephant Man zooms in again. “Watch this.” A little pinwheel icon on the display spins and the view scrolls toward a window on the office’s opposite wall. Suddenly a streetscape appears. The clone hunters are gazing out the window now. The detail is astonishing.
“The Venice Beach Ruins is my guess,” Psylocke says.
Young Elephant Man hits the ZZ button again and the image of a collapsed freeway comes into view. Huge slabs of concrete tilted at extreme angles, twisted pilings. “That’s Interstate 10, right?” A swatch of loose skin swings from the back of his skull. His gray head looks like a giant cauliflower. “We’re a mile south of Washington Boulevard’s my best guess.”
Sticky Fingaz gets up off Poster Boy’s bed in her bra and underwear and scrounges around the room for her clothes. The carpet’s littered with dented cans of Fistfite Light, chip bags, and old takeout food containers. Sweeping aside a sticky box of General Tso’s chicken, she accidentally tips over a glass bong.
“Hey man, be fucking careful,” Poster Boy mumbles.
A title materializes on Poster Boy’s laptop. THE VENICE BEACH RUINS, it says. A GUTTED OFFICE BUILDING INTERIOR.
“Hey jack, dig this,” an Elvis in a white jumpsuit says. He plays a little riff on his beat-up Gibson.
“I like it, Boss,” a second Elvis volunteers. Then he plays the riff back a little differently on his own instrument.
The two jam awhile, until a third Elvis clomps drunkenly into the room with a Smite & Waste’em 20/20. Something’s gone haywire in his DNA. Left to his own devices he’ll stay high for days and brood over true-seeming memories of his spurious past life—attending Bible classes as a child, the lost years in Germany, his alcoholic mother’s death. Curling his lips in a nasty sneer, he plops down on a wobbly office chair. “You know, I could waste both you greasers right now,” he says, “and do the world a big favor.” He leans back and closes his eyes. His belly lies in his lap like a balloon full of water.
Sticky Fingaz pokes her arm under Poster Boy’s bed like a contortionist, finds her smartphone half-shirt and gaze-actuated leggings, and pulls them on. “Laters,” she says, pausing at the door.
Onscreen the TV bounty hunters put their hover cars down on the Elvis hideout’s scorched rooftop. It’s high tide. What’s left of Venice is drowned under three feet of seawater. Ugly Romeo flips down his clip-on helmet cam. There’s a UV alert for the fifth straight day and the clone hunters are all cooking in their heavy body armor, messy sweat dripping down their back and legs like pond scum. The sky, bright with glowing red smog, resembles a photograph of bubbling lava.
In no time, they locate a stairwell bulkhead behind a pair of rusted-out turbine vents. Romeo kicks the door open with his boot and Yo-Yo, Psylocke, and Young Elephant Man fall in behind, battle choppas drawn.
Poster Boy hits the pause button on his laptop. “What?” he asks Sticky Fingaz over his shoulder. “You’re still here?”
Turning abruptly to the camera mounted on Romeo’s helmet, Psylocke’s eyes go wide. She raises a hand in warning. “You hear that?” she asks. Of course, Psylocke herself doesn’t actually “hear” anything in the ordinary sense. Instead, she perceives a shifting amoebic-like field of psychedelic colors.
Yo-Yo and Young Elephant Man stop to listen. The wormy blue veins in Young Elephant Man’s cauliflower head begin to pulsate. From someplace deep in the foul-smelling building below comes the faint recorded whine of “Suspicious Minds.”
Sticky Fingaz flashes Poster Boy the bird. “Fuck you,” she says.
The room the clone hunters enter is a maze of overturned desks. Yo-Yo catches sight of a huge shape materializing in the murk. “My God,” she whispers. It’s a levitating Elvis Head the size of fifty basketballs. Abruptly the music stops, replaced a second later by the opening fanfare from “Thus Spoke Zarathustra.”
Sticky Fingaz’s pulling ferociously on the handle, but Poster Boy’s door won’t open. “Alexa, open the fucking door,” she demands. “Now.”
“I went to Hollywood,” the Head intones as the Zarathustra intro ebbs away. “My next move was to Hollywood. I was twenty-one. That’s how it works. You get a record and then you get on television and then they take you to Hollywood to make movies.” The Head seems confused. “I don’t feel I’ll live a long life,” it continues tentatively. “That’s why I got to get what I can.”
In frustration, Sticky Fingaz kicks the door hard. It judders around in its frame.
“I’m sorry, I’m having trouble understanding,” Alexa says.
Now the hologram or whatever it is disappears and the clone hunters hear the CHUNG-chung of a twelve-gauge Street Sweeper being activated. It’s the nasty-tempered Elvis, big as a bear on its hind legs.
KAPOW! A round slams into the wall behind them. Then another.
Yo-Yo does an athletic back handspring in retreat as Romeo hits the deck awkwardly before letting go with his Warhammer. The first slug catches the clone in the forehead. His cranium goes pyroclastic.
“Gross,” Sticky Fingaz exclaims.
The clone remains upright for a second. Then, falling to his knees, topples over, spraying blood in a fountainy arc.
Finally, Poster Boy’s door unbolts with a soft chiming noise. Unfortunately, once again the elevator’s out of service so Sticky Fingaz shakily descends ten flights of stairs in her glitter thigh-highs. She’s drenched with sweat when she steps outside. As she makes her way to the subway station, she can feel the sun’s weight pressing down on her body.
Young Elephant Man spots the IED first—a long section of PVC pipe bristling with wires. His misshapen jaw drops. “Bomb,” he shouts. “Everybody, out of here.”
“Spare me some change?” a Young Elvis sitting Indian-style on a cardboard box asks Sticky Fingaz. He’s wearing a rockabilly bowling shirt and torn jeans. A hypodermic syringe lies next to his swollen feet. He stares at Sticky Fingaz with fierce blue eyes and holds out a black-nailed hand. But Sticky Fingaz’s broke so she pushes on toward the subway platform. There, she encounters more homeless Elvises. Fat, Young, all kinds. Huddled under a fluorescent light, a “Comeback” Elvis in a greasy black leather suit shares a bottle with a “Movie Years” clone. The clone, who looks like he just stepped off the set of Girls! Girls! Girls!, takes a long wincing gulp, then goes into a coughing fit. Behind them, an obese “Las Vegas” Elvis lies passed out on a graffiti-covered bench.
Young Elephant Man’s warning comes too late. In a blinding heat blast, the bomb explodes. Monster billows of smoke and flame leap out like dragons and fill the room. Seconds pass. Nothing moves. Then the echoey sound of “Return to Sender” is heard playing on a scratching speaker, but far away and strange-feeling, like it’s not even real. Like nothing is.