Morley and Me

They were originally called Sun Valleys. That was back in the '30s, though, so there ain't too many folk left alive who can remember that. That's for certain.

I think there musta been a guy named Morley who got the brand renamed in his honor. I don't think they named it for me, but I've been wrong before. It's rare, but sometimes it happens. But hey, sometimes Lee van Cleef and Clint Eastwood gotta be wrong, too. A stopped clock is right twice a day, and sometimes I'm right less than that. It would a little weird if'n they saw baby me and thought to name a whole brand of gold-leaf slim cigarettes after that. So I'm gonna presume that there's a bigger story there, which they just didn't tell me about. Morley has its secrets, just as the Sun Valley Cigarette Co. did when they were around. I left that all behind me. Nowadays I'm out where I belong—I'm out West, the real West, and not just an ad set. It's a little funny, because the real West is definitely a lot more modern than the West they told me about when they was raising me. I already knew that, of course. They let me have a TV and radio, so I've heard about and seen everything from Vietnam to Desert Storm to 9/11. It's just real recent that I decided to get out and stretch my legs, that's all.

I did get out of the Morley plant a couple of times before this. I ain't as dumb as I look, though that still puts a pretty stiff cap on things. I corresponded now and then with a British scientist name of Professor Bradford Markham. I heard his dad was I suspect he must've done some research along our interests over here in the Landa Uncle Sam. He ended up mailing me a wristwatch, which I thought was mighty nice of him—but then I read his letter. It was pretty to the point. He told there was a chemical in the watch what he called Thermo-Clyodine-Phostium, or TCP. It would react with the nicotine in my bloodstream and give me the power of Hercules—or at least a mini-Hercules. He said that if they were gonna make me keep smoking and testing the patches and all, he could at least give me something to counterbalance the poison, and give me a normal life. I was pretty damn grateful, but I didn't exactly know what I was supposed to use with these new super-powers. I mean, sure, they'd given me plenty of Action Comics growing up, but I knew even then life wasn't so simple as tossing your enemies into rivers like that old rabble-rouser Superman. He's the Superman I like best: the wild man, before he became the Boy Scout.

How I left is another story I'll save for another. All that matters is that I left.

I've taken to living out in the place they call Silicon Valley. Some rich caviar-and-cocaine chump picked me up when he saw me wandering the streets. He said he had to show me off, because I was the authentic Morley Man, and I didn't really mind. And I didn't deny it neither, 'cause I always learned it was a rotten thing to tell a lie. So along those lines there's a small preview into what's happened since then: I ended up finding out just how rotten my new roommate was.

But he usually didn't do anything badder'n being rich and telling a bunch of lies to his posse. The cowboy and the scumbag billionaire—heh. He gives me all the Morleys I can smoke, and I'm pretty grateful for that. Got me a habit to support. I hate to take credit away from Dr. Markham, given that he's dead an' all, but unfortunately the TCP has made me more addicted than the average smoker than less. Of course, the Morley company had me on cigs since I was six, so maybe that was it too. But I used to get the shakes, and not just normal nicotine ones, but like nightmare-sweat heroin shakes. The TCP stops that and it will make me live out my life fine and dandy—maybe even let me grow a little older than your average padre—but if I go more'n an hour without a smoke, well, there are people with tuberculosis who'd be better off than me.

I think I'm gonna save the current BS with the roommate for later, too. I wanna tell a story of one time they did let me out. It was for a purpose, and one they told me was pretty damn important.

It was in about 1961, I think—there were rumors of Russian ships having made it to the moon, I remember. That had nothing to do with the meteor that smacked down within the Morley perimeter. If I recall right, we owned the surrounding two hundred miles of forest, and technically the town within that perimeter leased and sold houses that'd once belonged to us. There was even a Morley Cigarettes High School. I asked someone once if that was a good idea, but no one on the outside back then knew that Morleys were bad for you, in fact worse than most cigarettes. Plus, from the business side of things, look what Hershey's Chocolates did for Hershey, Pennsylvania.

But yeah, there was a meteor that came crashing down on our land, and I had to go out and help the cops and whatnot. I had to wear a disguise, though, because every smoker in the world knew the Morley Man. I put on some glasses and became Dr. Bradford, named for my dead friend.

What we found was odd, and I'm putting it mildly. There was a monster in that meteor, and it had been rampaging around devouring the townsfolk, and even a few Morley employees. The issue was is that this thing was damn slow—like a caterpillar coming out of an all-you-can-eat buffet. When we finally find it, that confirmed it. The big slug was about as fast as molasses.

It was a weird, ugly, patchwork sorta thing. Sorta like a mucusy, venom-soaked carpet. I got to analyze one of the samples of the thing after we killed it, and it really was like a living silk, as from a silkworm. The poison covering its bad-smelling hide was a paralytic. That was one of the ways it made up for its speed. Then, there was its psychic effect. The thing could make you go into a weird animalistic panic state, where you'd lose control of your body. I only felt it a little bit—since the thing didn't get close enough to eat me and all. You'd just sorta flail around like you were gonna start speaking in tongues, and sometimes you'd even commit suicide by crawling into the monster's maw. Which was fulla acid, by the way.

A gross little dogie, but nothing we couldn't corral. We had to break out the bazookas, in the end, of course. What I meant to say is that that animal was a little more complex than he first looked—I like to think that he and me got that in common. See, it wasn't really an animal at all, or even a plant. It was sorta more like a machine. A machine that's meant to just eat up everything in front of it, some of it to destroy, some of it to analyze. The ship we found inside that meteor showed that there was a signal being beamed out into space, running data on our biology and whatnot. There were also some funny diagrams on the wall of the craft which showed a version of the slug that looked like it was big, and surrounded by stars. I couldn't rightly imagine what these spaceborne slugs would've been like—eating everything in front of 'em, like they wanted to eradicate all life or something.

There was a second slug in the ship, a beat-up one, with cuts from the crash. I gotta be honest when I say he caught me off-guard, and nearly got me. But that was just my luck, and a quick hand on the old six-shooter quickly took care of him. I used that as a chance to kill off “Dr. Bradford.” They blew the ship up and I pretended to be wounded. All the cops and townies who were with me assumed that was the last of me. But I had my orders and back then, I followed them. So I went back into the Morley site, where I wouldn't get out again for a long, long time. I've gone gray, it's a shame for me to admit. My face is like beef jerky made from boots. I still say they shoulda let me see the sun more.

I asked 'em, naturally enough, what that had all been about. Hell, I think I even aired out some of my suspicions at that point, that I thought it wasn't a coincidence the asteroid-ship had come down here. Why throw me into this but nothing else like it, all this time?

But at that point they went silent, and didn't talk to me again during the truck ride back. They stayed silent for three days afterward. Not even the janitors wanted to talk to me. I figured they were gearing up to send me another mission. But it never happened.

Ain't that a funny thing?

Well, I'm out now. They don't know where I am, either. So I figure I can do a little snooping. I still got my six-shooter and I still got my brains. I'm about fifty years late to the party, but better tardy than not at all—that's my reckoning.