Deep in the interior, between two looming piles of automobiles turned all to razor-edged rust, was a bare place. Tom kicked away snow with the heel of his shoe until he had uncovered the flat metal plate. He knelt, found the ring, and pulled it up. The metal was icy cold, and he was panting before he managed to shift the lid three feet to the side to open the tunnel underneath. It would be so much easier to use teke, to shift it with his mind. Once he could have done that. Not now. Time plays funny tricks on you. Inside the shell, he had grown stronger and stronger, but on the outside his telekinesis had faded over the years. It was all psychological, Tom knew; the shell had become some kind of crutch, and his mind refused to let him teke without it, that was all. But there were days when it almost felt as though Thomas Tudbury and the Great and Powerful Turtle had become two different people.
He dropped down into darkness, into the tunnel that he and Joey had dug together, night after night, way back in—what year had that been? ’69? ’70? Something like that. He found the big plastic flashlight on its hook, but the beam was pale and weak. He’d have to remember to bring some new batteries from the store the next time he came out. Alkaline next time; they lasted a lot longer.
He walked about sixty feet before the tunnel ended, and the blackness of the bunker opened up around him. It was just a big hole in the ground he’d scooped out with his teke, its crude roof covered over with a thin layer of dirt and junk to conceal what lay beneath. The air was thick and stale, and he heard rats scuttling away from the light of his flashlight beam. In the comic book, the Turtle had a secret Turtle Cave deep under the waters of New York Bay, a marvelous place with vaulted ceilings and computer banks and a live-in butler who dusted all the trophies and prepared gourmet meals. The writers at Cosh Comics had done one fuck of a lot better for him than he had ever managed to do for himself.
He walked past two of the older shells to the latest model, punched in the combination, and pulled up the hatch. Crawling inside, Tom sealed the shell behind him and found his chair. He groped for the harness, and belted himself in. The seat was wide and comfortable, with thick padded armrests and the friendly smell of leather. Control panels were mounted at the ends of both arms for easy fingertip access. His fingers played over the keys with the ease of long familiarity, turning on ventilators, heat, and lights. The interior of the shell was snug and cozy, covered with green shag carpet. He had four 23-inch color televisions mounted in the carpeted walls, surrounded by banks of smaller screens and other instrumentation.
His left index finger jabbed down and the outside cameras came to life, filling his screens with vague gray shapes, until he went to infrared. Tom pivoted slowly, checking the pictures, testing his lights, making sure everything was functional. He rummaged through his box of cassettes until he found Springsteen. A good Jersey boy, Tom thought. He slammed the cassette into the tape deck, and Bruce tore right into “Glory Days.” It brought a flat, hard smile to his face.
Tom leaned forward and threw a toggle. From somewhere outside came a whirring sound. That garage door opener would have to be replaced soon from the sound of it. On the screens, he saw light pour into the bunker from overhead. A cascade of snow and ice fell down onto the bare earth floor. He pushed up with his mind; the armored shell lifted, and began to drift toward the light. So Barbara Casko was getting married to that asshole Steve Bruder, so what the hell did he care; the Great and Powerful Turtle was going out to kick some monster butt.
One thing Tom Tudbury had found out a long time ago was that life doesn’t give you many second chances. He was lucky. He got a second chance at Barbara Casko.
It happened in 1972, a decade after he’d last seen her. The store was still called Broadway Television and Electronics then, and Tom was assistant manager. He was behind the register, his back to the counter while he straightened some shelves, when a woman’s voice said, “Excuse me.”
“Yeah,” he said, turning, then staring.
Her dark blond hair was much longer, falling halfway down her back, and she was wearing tinted glasses in oversized plastic frames, but behind the lenses her eyes were just as blue. She wore a Fair Isle sweater and a faded pair of jeans, and if anything her figure was even better at twenty-seven than it had been at seventeen. He looked at her hand, and all he saw there was a college class ring. “Barbara,” he said.
She looked surprised. “Do I know you?”
Tom pointed at the McGovern button pinned to her sweater. “Once you nominated me for president,” he said.
“I don’t,” she began, with a small puzzled frown on that face, still the prettiest face that had ever smiled at Tom Tudbury in all his life.
“I used to wear a crew cut,” he said. “And a double-breasted corduroy jacket. Black.” He touched his aviator frames. “These were horn rims the last time you saw me. I weighed about the same then, but I was maybe an inch shorter. And I had such a crush on you that you wouldn’t believe.”
Barbara Casko smiled. For a moment he thought she was bluffing. But her eyes met his, and he knew. “How are you, Tom? It’s been a long time, huh?”
A long time, he thought. Oh yeah. A different eon. “I’m great,” he told her. It was at least half-true. That was at the end of the Turtle’s headiest decade. Tom’s life was going nowhere fast—he’d dropped out of college after JFK had been shot, and ever since he’d been living in a crummy basement apartment on 31st Street. He didn’t really give a damn. Tom Tudbury and his lousy job and his lousy apartment were incidental to his real life; they were the price he paid for those nights and weekends in the shell. In high school, he’d been a pudgy introvert with a crew cut, a lot of insecurity, and a secret power that only Joey knew about. And now he was the Great and Powerful Turtle. Mystery hero, celebrity, ace of aces, and all around hot shit.
Of course, he couldn’t tell her any of that.
But somehow it didn’t matter. Just being the Turtle had changed Tom Tudbury, had given him more confidence. For ten years he’d been having fantasies and wet dreams about Barbara Casko, regretting his cowardice, wondering about the road not taken and the prom he’d never attended. A decade too late, Tom Tudbury finally got the words out. “You look terrific,” he said with all sincerity. “I’m off at five. You free for dinner?”
“Sure,” she said. Then she laughed. “I wondered how long it’d take you to ask me out. I never guessed it’d be ten years. You may just have set a new school record.”
Monsters were like cops, Tom decided: never around when you really needed one.
December had been a different story. He remembered his first sight of them, remembered that long surreal trip down the Jersey Turnpike toward Philadelphia. Behind him was an armored column; ahead, the turnpike was deserted. Nothing moved but a few newspapers blowing across the empty traffic lanes. Along the sides of the road, the toxic waste dumps and petrochemical plants stood like so many ghost towns. Every so often, they’d come across some haggard refugees fleeing the Swarm, but that was it. It was like a movie, Tom thought. He didn’t quite believe it.
Until they made contact.
A cold chill had gone up his spine when the android came streaking back to the column with the news that the enemy was near, and moving on Philly. “This is it,” Tom said to Peregrine, who’d been riding on his shell to rest her wings.
He had just long enough to find a cassette—Creedence Gold—and slide it into his tape deck before the swarmlings came over the horizon like a black tide. The fliers filled the air as far as his cameras could see, a moving cloud of darkness like a vast onrushing thunderhead. He remembered the twister from The Wizard of Oz, and how much it had scared him the first time he’d seen the movie.
Beneath those dark wings the other swarmlings moved—crawling on segmented bellies, scrabbling on meter-long spider legs, oozing along like the Blob, and with Steve McQueen nowhere in sight. They covered the road from shoulder to shoulder, and spilled out over its edges, and they moved faster than he could have imagined.
> Peregrine took off. The android was already plunging back toward the enemy, and Tom saw Mistral coming down from above, a flash of blue among the thin cold clouds. He swallowed, and turned the volume on his speakers all the way up; “Bad Moon Rising” blasted out over the dark sky. He remembered thinking that life would never be the same. He almost wanted to believe it. Maybe the new world would be better than the old.
But that was December, and this was March, and life was a lot more resilient than he’d given it credit for. Like the passenger pigeons, the swarmlings had threatened to blot out the sun, and like the passenger pigeons, they were gone in what seemed like no time at all. After that first unforgettable moment, even the war of the worlds had turned into just another chore. It was more extermination than combat, like killing especially large and ugly roaches. Claws, pincers, and poisoned talons were useless against his armor; the acid secreted by the flappers did fuck up his lenses pretty badly, but that was more a nuisance than a danger. He found himself trying to think of new, imaginative ways of killing the things to relieve the boredom. He flung them high into the air, he ripped them in half, he grabbed them in invisible fists and squeezed them into guacamole. Over and over again, day after day, endlessly, until they stopped coming.
And afterward, back home, he was astonished at just how quickly the Swarm War faded from the headlines, and how easily life flowed back into the old channels. In Peru, Chad, and the mountains of Tibet, major alien infestations continued their ravages, and smaller remnants were still troubling the Turks and Nigerians, but the third-world swarms were just page-four filler in most American newspapers. Meanwhile, life continued. People made their mortgage payments and went to work; those whose homes and jobs had been wiped out dutifully filed insurance claims and applied for unemployment. People complained about the weather, told jokes, went to movies, argued about sports.
People made wedding plans.
The swarmlings hadn’t been completely exterminated, of course. A few remnant monsters lurked here and there, in out-of-the-way places and some not-so-out-of-the-way. Tom wanted one badly today. A small one would do—flying, crawling, he didn’t care. He would have settled for some ordinary criminals, a fire, an auto accident, anything to take his mind off Barbara.
Nothing doing. It was a gray, cold, depressing, dull day, even in Jokertown. His police monitor was reporting nothing but a few domestic disturbances, and he’d made it a rule never to get involved in those. Over the years he’d discovered that even the most abused wife tended to be somewhat aghast when an armored shell the size of a Lincoln Continental crashed through her bedroom wall and told her husband to keep his hands off her.
He cruised up the length of the Bowery, floating just above rooftop level, his shell throwing a long black shadow that kept pace with him on the pavement below. Traffic passed through underneath without even slowing. All his cameras were scanning, giving him views from more angles than he could possibly need. Tom glanced restlessly from screen to screen, watching the passersby. They scarcely noticed him anymore. A quick glance up when the shell hove into their peripheral vision, a flicker of recognition, and then they went back to their own business, bored. It’s just the Turtle, he imagined them saying. Yesterday’s news. The glory days do pass you by.
Twenty years ago, things had been different. He’d been the first ace to go public after the long decade of hiding, and everything he did or said was celebrated. The papers were full of his exploits, and when the Turtle passed overhead, kids would shout and point, and all eyes would turn in his direction. Crowds would cheer him wildly at fires and parades and public assemblies. In Jokertown, men would doff their masks to him, and women would blow him kisses as he went by. He was Jokertown’s own hero. Because he hid in an armored shell and never showed his face, a lot of jokers assumed he was one of them, and they loved him for it. It was love based on a lie, or at least a misunderstanding, and at times he felt guilty about that, but in those days the jokers had desperately needed one of their own to cheer, so he had let the rumors continue. He never did get around to telling the public that he was really an ace; at some point, he couldn’t remember just when, the world had stopped caring who or what might be inside the Turtle’s shell.
These days there were seventy or eighty aces in New York alone, maybe as many as a hundred, and he was just the same old Turtle. Jokertown had real joker heroes now: the Oddity, Troll, Quasiman, the Twisted Sisters, and others, joker-aces who weren’t afraid to show their faces to the world. For years, he had felt bad about accepting joker adulation on false premises, but once it was gone he found that he missed it.
Passing over Sara Roosevelt Park, Tom noticed a joker with the head of a goat squatting at the base of the red steel abstraction they’d put up as a monument to those who had died in the Great Jokertown Riot of 1976. The man stared up at the shell with apparent fascination. Maybe he wasn’t wholly forgotten after all, Tom thought. He zoomed in to get a good look at his fan. That was when he noticed the thick rope of wet green mucus hanging from the corner of the goat-man’s mouth, and the vacancy in those tiny black eyes. A rueful smile twisted across Tom’s mouth. He turned on his microphone. “Hey, guy,” he announced over his loudspeakers. “You all right down there?” The goat-man worked his mouth silently.
Tom sighed. He reached out with his mind and lifted the joker easily into the air. The goat-man didn’t even struggle. Just stared off into the distance, seeing god knows what, while drool ran from his mouth. Tom held him in place under the shell, and sailed off toward South Street.
He deposited the goat-man gently between the worn stone lions that guarded the steps of the Jokertown clinic, and turned up the volume on his speakers. “Tachyon,” he said into the microphone, and “TACHYON” boomed out over the street, rattling windows and startling motorists on the FDR Drive. A fierce-looking nurse popped out of the front door and scowled at him. “I’ve brought one for you,” Tom said more softly.
“Who is he?” she asked.
“President of the Turtle Fan Club,” Tom said. “How the hell do I know who is he? He needs help, though. Look at him.”
The nurse gave the joker a cursory examination, then called for two orderlies who helped the man inside.
“Where’s Tachyon?” Tom asked.
“At lunch,” the nurse said. “He’s due back at one-thirty. He’s probably at Hairy’s.”
“Never mind,” Tom said. He pushed, and the shell rose straight up into the sky. The expressway, the river, and the rooftops of Jokertown dwindled below him.
Funny thing, but the higher you got, the more beautiful Manhattan looked. The magnificent stone arches of the Brooklyn Bridge, the twisting alleys of Wall Street, Lady Liberty on her island, the ships on the river and ferries on the bay, the soaring towers of the Chrysler Building and the Empire State Building, the vast green-and-white expanse of Central Park; from on high the Turtle surveyed it all. The intricate pattern of the traffic flowing through the city streets was almost hypnotic if you stared at it long enough. Looking down from the cold winter sky, New York was gorgeous and awesome, like no other city in the world. It was only when you got down among those stone canyons that you saw the dirt, smelled the rotten garbage in a million dented cans, heard the curses and the screams, and sensed the depth of fear and misery.
He drifted high over the city, a cold wind keening around his shell. The police monitor crackled with trivialities. Tom switched to the marine band, thinking maybe he could find a small boat in distress. Once he’d saved six people off a yacht that had capsized in a summer squall. The grateful owner had laid a huge reward on him afterward. The guy was smart too; he paid cash, small worn bills, nothing bigger than a twenty. Six damned suitcases. The heroes Tom had read about as a kid always turned down rewards, but none of them lived in a crummy apartment or drove an eight-year-old Plymouth. Tom took the money, salved his conscience by giving one suitcase to the clinic, and used the other five to buy his house. There was no way he’d ever have been a
ble to own a house on Tom Tudbury’s salary. Sometimes he worried about IRS audits, but so far that hadn’t come up.
His watch said it was 1:03. Time for lunch. He opened the small refrigerator in the floor, where he’d stashed an apple, a ham sandwich, and a six-pack.
When he finished eating, it was 1:17. Less than forty-five minutes, he thought, and he remembered that old Cagney movie about George M. Cohan, and the song “Forty-Five Minutes From Broadway.” A bus leaving right now from Port Authority would take forty-five minutes to get to Bayonne, but it was quicker by air. Ten minutes, fifteen at the most, and he could be back.
But for what?
He turned off the radio, pushed the Springsteen tape back in, and rewound until he found “Glory Days” again.
The second time around, things went a lot better.
After graduation she’d gone to Rutgers, Barbara told him that first night, over steak sandwiches and mugs of beer at Hendrickson’s. She’d gotten a teaching certificate, spent two years in California with a boyfriend, and come back to Bayonne when they broke up. She was teaching locally now, kindergarten, and in Tom’s old grammar school, ironically enough. “I love it,” she said. “The kids are fantastic. Five is a magic age.”
Tom had let her talk about her life for a long time, happy just to be sitting there with her, listening to her voice. He liked the way her eyes sparkled when she talked about the kids. When she finally ran down, he asked her the question that had been bugging him all these years. “Did Steve Bruder ever ask you to our prom?”
She made a face. “No, the son of a bitch. He went with Betty Moroski. I cried for a week.”
“He was an idiot. Jesus, she wasn’t half as pretty as you.”
“No,” Barbara said, with a wry twist to her mouth, “but she put out, and I didn’t. Never mind that. What about you? What have you been doing for the last ten years?”