Darkman by Randall Boyll

Author:Randall Boyll
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 0515103780
Publisher: Jove Books
Published: 1990-08-11T07:00:00+00:00

23

A Ghost from the Recent Past

IT WASN’T UNTIL late afternoon the next day that Darkman was done with the manufacture of a new him. The hands, oddly hairless but very realistic, and the face, a little too tight around Darkman’s naked cheekbones but passable, first struck daylight at four-fifteen. He clicked on the stopwatch and hurried to get himself into a suit. His hands were shaking and his throat was parched. For breakfast he had ordered a plain cheese pizza and a Coke. The delivery boy looked absolutely stricken as Darkman peeled dollar bills out of a large bundle, then recounted them, his claws chattering and clicking. The boy refused a tip and hurried out of the factory. A moment later he peeled out with a tornado of tire smoke, giving the aged red Pinto a good shaking as he fled for his life. Like Bosco, he, too, would hand over his keys and quit his job when he got back.

The pizza tasted like a hot piece of cardboard without its usual assortment of goodies on top, but Darkman had no desire for Peyton to have bad breath today. He ate it by rote, pizza sauce and red saliva dribbling down his skeletal chin, dripping on his trusty raincoat. Without lips, he had discovered with absolutely no glee at all, everything he ate tended to squirt out through his teeth. Just another benefit of being roasted alive.

It had taken six hours to complete the awkward digitization by hand, a process the computer used to do in seconds with only a photograph and a lot of electricity. It had taken Peyton three months to invent it, back in the days when he was Peyton and the skies were blue. Next to the Bio-Press, it was the most important tool in skin production. But, like all of life’s other disasters, Darkman was getting used to it. He smeared his head with mastic, just loving the odor, and assembled his new head in four parts: face, back, top, neck. He pressed the seams together and looked at himself in the chunk of mirror he had found in the dead and musty Fresh Splash rest room.

Not bad. The skin tone and texture were exactly like Peyton’s, down to the small childhood scar on his chin. The lips were colorless, but a light application of lipstick would take care of that. The eyebrows had a hairlike texture to them. A little eyebrow pencil would make them passable. At this stage the most obvious flaws were the too-tight cheeks and the hairless head. Peyton reborn was a chrome-dome. Thus the wigs. He only hoped Julie would not run her fingers through his hair and dislodge the fake fur. Wouldn’t that be a riot? The fun simply never ended in the wild and zany life of Darkman.

Millings Supply had furnished the after-shave he had requested. He dumped some onto his hands and splashed his face, hoping to trade the smell of the mastic for the manly smell of English Leather.

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