Body Surfing

tracking down surviving demons and telling them how to reproduce.”
    “I thought you said the Mogran didn’t know how to reproduce.”
    “I didn’t say that. The doctor said that. And the doctor was half right. The vast majority of Mogran know neither how they came into being nor how to make another. But there have always been rumors of a sect within the demons. The Alpha Wave. The first nine Mogran, thousands of years older than the so-called Beta Wave. One of the legends about the Alpha Wave is that they hold the secret of Mogran reproduction, which they have kept to themselves for their own reasons. I myself have always dismissed such theories as idle speculation, but it is looking more and more as if there is some truth to it.”
    Q.’s mind flashed to the last few seconds before the accident. The demon’s intense concentration on Jasper practically glowed in his mind.
    “Shit.”
    “Shit is right.” The huntress reached a hand to help Q. up. “The clock is ticking, and we’ve got work to do.”
    Q. took Ileana’s hand, and she promptly threw him against the far wall.
    “Leave the sandwiches, doctor. We’re going to be a while.”

3
    S o—
    Much —
    Sex .
    From the time he was eight years old, when his cousin Sylvia had shown him how his pee-pee was like a lollypop, Larry Bishop had stuck his dick in anything that would have him. Fat girls. Skinny girls. Old ladies. Jailbait. Girls who were not quite clean. Girls who were not quite girls. He had done it in positions that weren’t particularly comfortable and he had done it in ways that were deliberately painful and he had done it till he thought his dick was going to fall off, but he’d never once failed to have a good time. He’d done many things to get girls in bed—cajoled, wheedled, begged, faked a French accent—but he’d never once forced himself on anyone. In his own humble opinion, the secret of his success was his smile. It wasn’t a particularly friendly smile, or handsome for that matter. It was, rather, the smile of a champion pussy grazer. Larry Bishop went down on girls with all the diligence of a suckerfish cleaning mold off the inside of a fishtank. Romantic? Not particularly. But Larry’s smile told any prospective partner that he wouldn’t quit till she’d gotten hers, and in a world full of one-minute men Larry’s track record spoke for itself.
     
    When he first found himself in Larry’s body, Jasper limped out of The Aristocrats and took the ambulance back to Sue’s house. As he drove, he sifted aggressively through Larry’s thoughts. Pushed passed the naked bodies, the tits, the twats, the asses, jumped the hurdles and pitfalls of all those bad drug trips, tried to zero in on the past two days. He knew he should be better at this: all the memories were there after all, each one simultaneously visible to him. His need to order and work through them one at a time was, as Leo would say, the way the living think, not the Mogran. It was for precisely this reason that Jasper clung to it, no matter how much it slowed him down. In his forty-eight hours in Jarhead’s body, he’d felt his old self chip away one fleck at a time, and the jump from Jarhead to Larry had left him even more disconnected. Two entire lives stood between his disembodied psyche and the Jasper Van Arsdale who had walked the earth, and it took almost as much concentration to maintain the connection to his real self as it did to control the myriad of functions happening beneath Larry Bishop’s pellet-riddled skin.
    By rights Larry was dead at least three times over—the shotgun blasts, the nine-story fall, the antenna spike in his brain—but Leo had managed to hold the man together by dint of sheer willpower. Jasper marveled at what the paramedic’s previous tenant had done. Things he’d only theorized about in Jarhead’s body were actually in process when he entered Larry’s. The energy output of each and every cell had been increased exponentially, as well as the operating capacity of all the organs, the speed with which electrical impulses were processed by the central nervous system. The broken rib, femur, pelvis, and fingerbones had all been set, and Larry’s own muscles, made rigid by a flood of chemicals, were serving as the cast. The brain was busily repairing the damaged tissue in the occipital lobe, and even the deepest lacerations had scabbed over. Nevertheless, the bones would take another day or two before they were fully