Excerpt from Chapter 15:
"...The ghostly figure was Will, the friendly truck driver who had come into the store earlier, either that morning, last week or a month ago, and told Mac of driving from Dallas and hearing on the radio of President Kennedy being shot. Like earlier, he was still dressed in his characteristic denim coveralls, and his truck was backed to the bay door, tight up against the loading dock.
From his silent dark corner Mac held his breath and watched as Will handed Jarvis similar boilerplate invoices just like the ones he had refused to sign earlier. Calm, and appearing fully composed, Jarvis tilted his glasses down his nose, looking very much like a typical accountant or bookkeeper as he studied the invoices like they were deliveries of faceless office supplies or crates of string beans to be stocked in the local Kroger. Jarvis then spoke very animated but in a low voice to Will, who listened patiently as Jarvis pointed to certain items on the papers.
Will nodded, then turned, walked back onto the dock, bent down and unlatched the truck’s door. Jarvis re-shuffled the invoices, signed every one of them, then watched.
Mac rubbed his eyes in frustration when he realized Will the truck driver was conspiring with Jarvis – yet another person who could not be trusted! Mac was suddenly glad he did not let Will unload earlier, as he was very concerned about what was really inside his truck – he had a sinking feeling it was not carpet and tile, or string beans or anything else as benign as that.
As he watched breathlessly Will rotated the truck door handle ninety degrees and with great effort raised the door open. Mac was aghast at what was inside the truck, ready to unload. In fact, he had to rub his eyes yet again when he finally could see what was contained back there.
The truck was packed shoulder-to-shoulder with dozens of teeming Leon Jarvises, all dressed identically and in various states of physical deformation. Mac sat there between the crates dumb-struck – Leon Jarvis clones had been prepared by somebody or something but they were malformed, inferior knock-offs of the original, pathetically squeezed into the back of the truck like deformed illegal aliens kicked out of turn-of-the-century Mexican sanitariums, dressed identically in short-sleeve lime green shirts, skinny ties and sent across the border to fend for themselves in the Texas desert. They looked like a truckload of off-brand, damaged computer hacks and comic book devotees, packed in so tightly they could barely move.
The first Jarvis to hop out of the truck onto the dock looked just like the real Leon but had one eye and only one left arm and limped badly. The next one looked as if the whole right side of his face and body had melted then refroze. The next one had no legs, and dragged his withered torso off the truck bed with his hands and fell unceremoniously to the dock, where he righted and dragged himself toward the bay opening leading into the store, his blank face showing no pain or emotion.
On and on it went; dozens of misshapen Jarvis clones, each wearing the same ill-fitting short-sleeve nerd shirt and a skinny grey tie walked, crawled, slithered, rolled or dragged out of the truck; stepped, flopped or hopped down onto the dock then disappeared inside the dark, dirty niches of the Linoleum store like cockroaches turned loose. None of them spoke or acknowledged Will or the real Jarvis, who stood to one side, still clutching the invoices and watching them impassively. Mac shuddered at one duplicate gingerly stepping out whose chest cavity and abdominals were missing and had to carry his lungs and intestines spilling from his torso in his hands. None of them were normal or even close to normal – then again, what constituted normal in this whole stinking scenario?
After what seemed to be about a hundred deformed clones fell from the truck like wasps dropping from a nest set on fire by a middle school bully, the last one that emerged seemed to have no skull, and his eyes and mouth hung limply down around his throat, his pink jelly-like brain exposed and bobbing back and forth, covered with flecks of dirt and dust. The clone before him had neither arms nor legs, and it struggled on its belly, falling face first out of the truck the 24 inches down to the dock, then rocking back and forth slowly toward the bay door, its head soaking wet, like it was the most natural thing in the world..."
