7
Adam and the Grottle eyed each other in silence, the Grottle grinning and turning its shovel round and round in its beefy hands, Adam tense and focused and ready for anything.
This went on for several minutes, neither of them making a move, and the crowd—at least those who weren’t criticizing Dagmar’s lack of fighting skills—started yelling at Adam and the Grottle to just fucking do something already.
Finally the Grottle did. It squatted down until its thighs were parallel to the floor, and then it sprang into the air.
For a moment Adam just gaped at it. He hadn’t thought the bulky creature capable of such a move. But he didn’t gape long. As the Grottle sailed toward him, it raised its shovel, ready to lop off Adam’s head.
Adam tried to dodge out of the way, but he was too slow; the Grottle swung at him while it was still airborne, and the flat edge of the shovel struck him between the shoulder-blades and knocked him to the ground. At instant later the Grottle landed, whirled toward Adam, and charged.
Ignoring the pain throbbing in his upper back, Adam scraped a fistful of dirt from the arena floor and chucked it in the Grottle’s face. The Grottle stopped in its tracks and scrubbed a hand across its eyes.
By the time it had swiped the dirt away, Adam was already barreling toward it. It had no time to dodge or even raise its shovel in defense. Adam slammed shoulder-first into the Grottle’s chest. The Grottle crashed to the dirt with Adam atop it in a reversal of their initial melee in the arena.
Adam grabbed the shovel’s handle with both hands and yanked it upward, trying to wrest it from the Grottle’s grasp. The shovel started to slip from the Grottle’s shock-limp fingers, but at the last second the Grottle shook off its daze and tightened its grip.
They pulled at the shovel in a manic tug-of-war. Adam soon realized that he and the Grottle were strong enough and desperate enough to continue the tug-of-war indefinitely, which meant other means of gaining the advantage were necessary. And when Adam noticed their respective hand positions—his own hands in the middle of the shaft, the Grottle’s on either side of them—he understood exactly how to do that.
Moving faster than a greased fish, he let go of the shovel with one hand and swung that arm under the handle and then up until the handle was crooked in the bend of his elbow. Then he let go with the other hand, hoping his elbow was strong enough to counter the Grottle’s two-handed pull. It was, so he delivered the coup de grace: He bent the arm not holding the shovel, raised it high, and brought the back of his upper arm down as hard as he could onto the wooden shaft next to the arm that was holding it.
With a sharp snap like a bone breaking, the handle split in two.
A shocked silence descended upon the arena. The Marauders gaped at the broken shovel as if it were a defiled holy relic. Even Tork paused in his pursuit of Dagmar to stare at it.
The Grottle took it worst of all. Its eyes widened until it seemed its whole face would slide into them. Its mouth dropped open, and then its lips writhed in a dozen different directions at once, as if it couldn’t decide which emotion to express. Anger? Sorrow? Horror? Rage?
Before the Grottle could decide on a response, Adam grabbed the two halves of the shovel, one in each hand, and tried to pull them from the monster’s grip. He half succeeded. The all‑wood end came away easily, because the Grottle let it go. But the Grottle then switched the hand that been holding it to the blade-end and, pulling with both hands, tore that from Adam’s grasp.
Eyes blazing with hate, lips curled so far back from its teeth that Adam could see its black gums, the Grottle let out a bellow so loud it made Adam’s ears ring, then swung the shovel’s blade at Adam with a speed that surpassed anything it had demonstrated so far. Adam hadn’t considered the fact that with the length of the shovel now halved, the Grottle would be able to swing it while lying down.
Instead of trying to block it, Adam just dropped to his left. He felt the sharp edge of the shovel briefly tug at his sleeve, and then he was on the ground, rolling away from the Grottle, the lower end of the shovel’s handle held away from his body so he didn’t impale himself.
The Grottle shot to its feet and spun around to face Adam. With no time to stand up, Adam scrambled backward across the dirt like a crab.
Again the Grottle squatted and leaped. This time, instead of trying to get out of the way, Adam braced his back and shoulders against the ground, bent his legs until his knees touched his chest, and then kicked straight out at the Grottle.
Adam savored the Grottle’s look of mingled surprise and impotent fury as it sailed toward the rising soles of Adam’s boots. His boots struck it right in its massive belly, forcing a whoof of breath from its throat and pushing it up and back. When the boots stopped rising, the Grottle flew off them like a rock from a catapult and thudded to the ground ten feet away. Adam sprang to his feet, the segment of the shovel’s handle clutched in his right hand like a dagger.
Dagmar raced past on his left. He had noticed her and Tork passing by several times during his fight with the Grottle. This was, he estimated, their fourth circuit around the arena.
Dagmar didn’t look at him as she passed. She just sprinted by, not even remotely out of breath or tired.
Tork, on the other hand, was glistening with sweat and wheezing for breath as he half ran, half staggered after Dagmar. His face was twisted into a hateful sneer. He had tossed away his horned war-helmet, and his shaggy black hair flopped about as he ran, at least those locks of it that weren’t plastered to his sweaty forehead and cheeks.
Every so often he cast an evil glance at the audience, and it took Adam a moment to realize why. Adam had by now grown so accustomed to the roars and calls from the Marauders that he had had ceased to pay them any attention. Now, as he listened, he realized that many of the Marauders were laughing at Tork and his inability to take down one skinny little human girl.
Adam started to smile, but then out of the corner of his eye he saw the Grottle getting to its feet, so he turned his attention back to his opponent.
Though nearly blinded with rage at having its beloved shovel broken, the Grottle had learned enough from fighting Adam not to charge at him again. Instead it stalked forward, eyes never leaving Adam, shovel-half gripped tightly in both hands, until it stood only four feet away from him.
They stood there facing each other for a moment, crouched and ready like wrestlers waiting for the bell, then Adam lunged forward, swinging his left fist toward the Grottle’s face. The Grottle swung the shovel-head up to block.
But the punch was a feint, and as the shovel-head rose, Adam plunged the jagged end of the handle into the Grottle’s belly. The splintery wood punched through a thick wall of muscle and then slid deep into something soft and greasy.
The Grottle roared in pain. Adam tried to yank the handle out, but it got caught on something inside the Grottle, and while he was distracted with working it free, the Grottle slammed the broad side of the shovel into his face. Adam both felt and heard his nose crunch inward. His upper lip split against his front teeth, and blood squirted down his chin. One of those front teeth wiggled in its socket.
Dazed, Adam staggered backward, then stumbled and fell flat on his back. The Grottle dropped to its knees on Adam’s chest, driving the wind from him and cracking a rib. It swiftly raised the shovel over its head, ready to bury it in Adam’s brain.
And then the shovel disappeared from its hands. Bewildered, the Grottle looked over its shoulder and saw Dagmar racing away with the shovel held high above her head like an Olympic torch.
“Sucker!” she cried.
Adam forgotten, the Grottle shot to its feet and ran after her. Adam, now recovered from his shock, likewise shot to his feet and set off in pursuit of the Grottle. For a brief interval the quartet formed a line as they ran down the length of the arena—Dagmar in the lead, followed by the Grottle, then Adam, then poor Tork trailing behind everyone.
Sprinting so fast he could hear the air whistling past his ears, Adam
caught up with the Grottle and tackled it. They fell to the dirt and fought there like wild dogs, their careful, calculated battle reduced to clawing and punching and growling and biting.
Tork stopped a few feet away from them, then glanced at Dagmar. She was eighty feet away now. There was no way he could catch her. But he might be able to kill the other one if the Grottle could just maneuver the big yellow muktek into the right position.
The Grottle rolled onto its back with Adam atop him. Tork stepped forward to sink his axe into Adam’s back. But then they rolled away, flipping over so that the Grottle was now on top.
Tork waited impatiently while they beat each other senseless. The Grottle tried to pry out Adam’s eyes with its fingers. Adam bit off the end of one of those fingers. The Grottle kneed Adam in the crotch. Adam kneed it back. The Grottle head-butted Adam in the mouth, knocking free the loosened tooth. Adam spat the tooth into the Grottle’s eye. And all the while Tork lumbered in when he thought he had a chance to strike at Adam, only to back away when the opportunity quickly passed.
Then in mid-grapple, Adam glanced in Tork’s direction and something sparked in his eyes. A smile flitted on his lips.
Tork straightened up, confused.
At that moment several things happened more or less simultaneously.
First, Adam pushed the Grottle off him so hard that it crashed face-down in the dirt six feet away.
Second, something sailed into Tork’s field of vision from behind and slightly to the right of his head. It was the blade end of the shovel, and Adam snatched it out of the air with a grin as he sprang to his feet.
Third, Tork became aware that the Marauders in the stands were shouting his name, and had been for some time now. He had been too caught up in the impending kill to hear their cries of “Tork! Look out!”
This third thing led to the fourth thing, which was that he realized he hadn’t been keeping track of Dagmar the last few minutes.
He had time to think dolten tuko—a dwarvish term which literally translates as “turds galore” and is used to express the feeling that one is surrounded by misfortune—before something else flashed across his field of vision, this time from the top down. He realized too late it was Dagmar’s forearms with the handcuff chain pulled taut between them, realized it even as she pulled back with all her might and the chain tightened across his throat.
Had he done the smart thing and swung his axe back over his shoulder to try to bury it in her head, he might have survived. As it was, he foolishly dropped his axe and tried to pull the chain away from his neck. It was hopeless; Dagmar had one foot planted in the middle of his back and was pushing him forward with it while tugging backward with her arms. As Tork’s lungs burned, and dark spots filled his sight, he thought dolten tuko one last time, and then he didn’t think anything ever again.
Meanwhile, the Grottle leaped to its feet, plucked the section of the shovel’s handle from his gut, planning to plunge it deep into Adam’s eye, and turned around to rejoin the fray.
Adam was right there, teeth bared in fury, upraised arms straining as he brought the shovel-blade down upon the Grottle’s head with all his strength.
Chuck!
The Grottle staggered backward three steps, the shovel buried so deep in its head that the handle protruded from between its eyes. Green blood gushed from the cleft in the top of its head, poured down its shirt, puddled on the dirt floor.
It said, “Hurrrrrr,” then its eyes rolled up and it toppled backward and crashed dead to the ground.
The arena was completely silent for a moment. Then there was a clink from Dagmar’s handcuffs as she released Tork’s corpse. It likewise thudded to the ground.
Dagmar strode up beside Adam and glared at Emily, whose eyes and mouth were wide with shock. Adam glanced at Dagmar, noted her look of outraged regality, and decided not to speak as he had been planning to. He figured he had better let her have her say first.
Indeed she was more than outraged. She had just killed someone. Sure, he had been trying to kill her, but still…she had killed someone! She would have to live with it forever, live with the feel of his body convulsing, with the gaspy gurgly sounds he had made, with the small mole she had noticed on the back of his neck as she choked away his life. She knew she had lost something precious she would never get back. And it was all the Marauders’ fault.
Well, if they were gonna mess with her, she’d mess with them right back. She couldn’t fight worth spit. She couldn’t beat them up or hack them to pieces or grapple with them like Adam. But she could lie. Oh, man, could she lie. She was gonna lie like no one had ever lied before. And, no, it probably wouldn’t work in the end. But damn it, she’d get her licks in as best she could. She’d go down lying.
“See?” she shouted, her eyes ablaze with indignation. “See what happens when you stand against me and my subjects? Send out more of your men. Send them all, for all I care. Because in the end, I’ll be sitting atop a mountain of your corpses and laughing at your stupidity.”
All the Marauders were gaping at her now, not sure what to make of this imperious little girl who spoke in tones they had heard before only from Emily. Even Adam gaped at her. Her tone was so convincing that he fleetingly wondered if maybe she had been lying about lying about being a queen. But no: She was just a natural-born bullshitter.
Emily seemed to be the only one not buying it. She just sat there, staring narrow-eyed at the girl with one eyebrow cocked.
She shook her head slightly and opened her mouth to speak, but just then Freud spoke up instead, having seen his opportunity to non-violently cripple the Marauders’ belief in their leader—for psychoanalytic theory insisted that a mob like them would become a disorganized mass of egocentric individuals without a strong leader to keep them functioning as a group.
“The girl is correct,” he announced. “She is indeed the rightful queen of this land. Emily is a false queen, as has been clearly demonstrated by her repeated failures to vanquish her opponents.”
Emily shot to her feet and gawped at Freud with a stunned, hurt expression that made her look no older than Dagmar. Then her face set into a hard, hateful glare and she said, “Shut. Up.”
“No, we must face facts. This so-called queen is a fraud whose time is ending, whereas this young girl before us has demonstrated true queenliness. We must—”
“Fuck you!” screamed Emily. She pulled her yellow laser blaster from its holster and pointed it at Dagmar. “You wanna see queenliness? I’ll show you her queenly fuckin’ brains splatted all over the room.”
Dagmar didn’t budge. She just glared at Emily, too angry to care that she might be killed. Adam took a step toward Dagmar, thinking to block the shot with his body, but doubting he could make it in time.
And then he saw he didn’t have to, because as Emily’s finger tightened on the trigger, a black blur streaked down from the catwalk overhead and slammed Emily to the floor. A ray shot from the blaster as she fell and gouged a smoking hole in the dirt twenty feet to Adam’s left.
Emily found herself staring into Kukalukl’s snarling face.
“If you say another word,” he said, “I shall suck your eyeballs from their sockets and pop them between my teeth like grapes.” His voice was low and raspy, for his throat and vocal cords had not yet fully regrown. A concave ring of moist pink flesh encircled his neck.
Emily was smart enough to say nothing to this, but she squirmed a little to see if she could break free. She couldn’t; she was pinned to the floor by two hundred–plus pounds of angry jaguar, its forepaws on her shoulders, its rear ones on her thighs.
Dagmar felt like sobbing with joy to see that Kukalukl was still alive, but being the best liar in the world, she maintained her regal demeanor. It was difficult, but she did it.
“You see?” she said. “We are undefeatable. My subjects never die. This land and all its creatures are mine to control. The birds of the air and the beasts of the field do my will.”
Adam looked
around, amazed at how quickly things were turning in their favor. Half the Marauders had drawn their weapons, though they were reluctant to attack while their leader was in such a precarious position. The other half, however, were already inching toward the doors.
Adam and Dagmar started to cross the arena toward the throne. Those Marauders who wanted to fight scowled at them and tightened their grip on their weapons, but made no move to intercept them. Not yet, anyway.
On the floor in front of the throne, Kukalukl sniffed at Emily’s face, nose pumping madly.
“What are you?”
“Is something wrong?” asked Freud.
Kukalukl squinted up at him. “Freud?”
“Of course!” Freud leaned forward as if to impart a momentous secret and whispered, “I am in disguise.”
“Hh. All you robots smell the same to me. Oil and old pennies. As for this bogus queen, she seems human, but there’s something else…”
“I noticed she is unusually healthy, even for someone her age.”
“Yes. She radiates health like a god, which makes me wonder if she’s another immortal. It’s not just that, though. There’s a faint odor about her. Something I’ve never smelled before. It’s somehow both organic and artificial at the same time.” He lowered his face until his hot breath ruffled Emily’s hair. “I ask again: What are you? Where do you come from?”
Emily cocked a mocking eyebrow. “You told me not to talk.”
“You will talk when I tell you to. Now talk. Tell me who you are.”
“I am Queen Emily the First.”
“Your real name.”
She regarded him with smiling contempt for a moment, then said, “My name is Emily Jane Laramie. I was born in Burlington, Vermont. And that’s all you’re getting out of me, fuckhead!” Moving too fast for Kukalukl to react, her hands shot up and clawed into the soft pink flesh of his half-healed neck. Gouts of blood squirted out between her fingers.
Howling in pain, Kukalukl rolled away from Emily, who jumped to her feet.
The room suddenly became a blur of activity. Adam and Dagmar’s walk became a run. The Marauders who had been ready to fight surged forward to attack. Some of the other Marauders changed their minds about fleeing and rejoined their fellows. The rest ran straight for the doors, most of them choosing the double doors in the south wall.
Artemis got there first. As he threw the doors open, something twanged. He said, “Hey, that’s—” and then fell over dead, a crossbow bolt buried fletches-deep in his chest.
Quickly fitting a new bolt into the crossbow, Maggie limped into the room. Behind her came Anna, a sword in her hand. Behind Anna came the other eighty-seven women who had been locked in the harem, all of them armed with swords, crossbows, axes, maces, flails, spears, and a variety of other weapons.
“You know,” Maggie said to the formerly fleeing Marauders who now stood gaping in a semicircle around the doors, “it was very unwise of you to leave both the harem and the armory unguarded.” She raised her crossbow and cried, “Attack!”
The women charged into the arena to vent their long pent-up fury on their captors. The Marauders clustered around the doors fell like saplings in a flood. A few managed to take down a handful of women, but that only made their subsequent deaths much more brutal.
Most of the rest of the Marauders turned to engage the onrush of women. Afraid Dagmar would get trampled in the chaos, Adam grabbed her and set her on his shoulders. Then he proceeded to tear through those Marauders who had chosen to focus their attention on him, punching one—a blond man dressed like the Pope—so hard that with a sickening crack his head turned around one hundred and eighty degrees, kicking another—a four‑foot‑tall blue-haired gnome—in the chest with such force that his ribcage collapsed and he sailed twelve feet through the air. Adam wanted to get to Emily before she escaped. She was too psychotic and dangerous to be allowed to roam free in the world. He tried to get a glimpse of the throne, but with bodies in motion on every side and the air filled with blood and arrows and other debris, he couldn’t see a thing.
What he couldn’t see was this: Emily turned to flee, but before she could do so, Kukalukl leaped forward and raked his claws across her outer thigh. The force of the blow sent her tumbling to the floor again.
Kukalukl padded up to her. “You…” He coughed. She had damaged his throat badly, but he wasn’t going to let that stop him. Not now. “You will not…get away…so easily.”
“Wanna bet, pussycat?” she said. Her eyes flicked over his hunched shoulders.
Kukalukl rolled to the left, narrowly avoiding one of Johnny Circumcision’s clipper-hands, which instead punched into the wood of the bleacher.
“Bad kitty,” Johnny said as he yanked his clipper free. Smiling, he raised both clipper-hands and opened them wide.
Kukalukl glanced at Emily. She was struggling to her feet despite the blood streaming from the trio of gashes in her left thigh. Damn. He had thought he had hurt her badly enough to incapacitate her for a while. He wasn’t about to let her get away, not after she nearly murdered Dagmar, which meant that, mortifying as it was to flee a fight, he had to retreat from this broom-haired fool so he could go after Emily instead.
As if in response to this thought, Big Red stepped between Kukalukl and Emily, battle-axe in hand, a savage grin on his face.
“Your intentions are as plain as my mighty cock,” Big Red said, “and I tell you, sir cat, I shall die before I allow you to harm a single hair on my queen’s beautiful head.”
Kukalukl huffed in frustration. The throne blocked him in on the right, while a battle was raging between several Marauders and several women to his left. In other words, he was stuck between two idiots with extremely large, sharp objects. Worse, he hadn’t fully healed and was still quite weak. He had expended most of his energy getting in here and tackling Emily. This was indeed totally sucky, as Dagmar might say. He really didn’t want to have to heal another severed appendage. Given his low energy, it might take a week or more.
“Now, my blade-handed brother!” said the Viking in his big, booming voice. He raised his axe. Johnny crouched down, clippers wide open and ready to strike. Kukalukl crouched as well, determined to give at least as well as he got.
And then the amphibious Marauder, dead, neck broken, sailed right into Big Red and sent him smashing into Emily’s throne. A moment later Adam came leaping over the bleacher seats, in the process knocking asprawl some of the Marauders who were fighting the women. He held Dagmar in one hand by her shirt, and when he landed a few feet behind Johnny Circumcision, he set her down. Then he turned to face Johnny.
Now it was Johnny who was caught between two enemies. With a loud cry, he swept his arm in a wide arc at Adam’s chest. Adam leaped backward and ran right into Dagmar. They fell to the floor.
Johnny whirled toward Kukalukl, who was in mid-leap, having chosen to attack while Johnny’s back was turned. Johnny figured the jaguar would do this, however, and was ready for it. He ducked out of the way, jabbing one clipper at Kukalukl as he sailed past.
Kukalukl tried to twist in mid-air to avoid the blow, but it was impossible. The clippers punched deep into his left side. Unfortunately for Johnny, they got caught there and dragged him down with Kukalukl as the big cat crashed to the floor.
Kukalukl tried to slash at Johnny, but the angle was bad and he was too weak to put much force into the blow anyway. Johnny yanked the clippers from Kukalukl’s side. Blood streamed out after it. Johnny wanted to finish the kill, but there was still Adam to deal with.
He leaped up and spun around, certain that Adam would be on his feet by now. As he spun, he swung one clipper in an arc. It had worked before.
It didn’t work this time. Adam caught Johnny’s forearm in both hands, and before Johnny could bring the other clipper into play, Adam twisted Johnny’s arm and thrust the clipper up into the soft underside of Johnny’s chin with such force the tip of the clipper punched through the top of Johnny’s head.
&
nbsp; With a high-pitched gurgling sound, Johnny collapsed and died.
Squealing with glee, Dagmar raced out from behind Adam and sank to her knees next to Kukalukl. She started to throw her arms around him, then realized it probably wouldn’t be a good idea given his injuries.
“You’re alive!” she said, her cheeks wet with tears.
“Yes.” He coughed and bright red blood bubbled from the hole in his side.
Dagmar clapped a hand over her mouth as her tears changed from those of glee to those of fright.
“You’re hurt so bad!”
He chuckled softly. “I will be fine. If decapitation couldn’t kill me, I hardly think a punctured lung will do the job. I told you I would always stand by you, and I will. But right now I just need to rest a little while.”
Adam looked around. Emily was nowhere to be seen. Nor was Big Red.
“Damn it!” he growled. He looked down at Kukalukl. “She ran away. We need to hunt her down, but it is clear that you will be unable to bring your keen hunter’s senses into play at the moment.”
“Sorry about that,” said Kukalukl. “Getting hacked up has that effect sometimes.”
Freud, who had been staying well out of the fray all this time, now stepped forward. “I may be of assistance. My sensors will surely be able to follow the residue of her hideous perfume.” Noting Adam’s querying look, he added, “I am Freud. This is Adler’s casing. Miss Frankenstein and I—”
“Now is not the time for explanations,” said Adam. He took a quick look around the arena. He wasn’t needed here any longer. The women, led by Maggie and Anna, had things well in hand. At this point only about two dozen Marauders were still standing and they were quickly being overwhelmed by the women’s superior numbers. “If you believe you can track her, then come along,” he told Freud.
Adam and Freud hurried out of the arena and into the long corridor they had come down earlier. Far down the hallway, Adam saw faint movement.
“Is that Emily?” he asked.
Freud adjusted the magnification of his optical sensors. “Yes,” he said. “Emily and Big Red. Ah, they have seen us. They are running faster. Now they are turning down a side corridor.”
The movement up ahead stopped.
“I will run on ahead,” said Adam. “Catch up as fast as you can.”
He sprinted forward, his long legs helping him reach the side corridor in half the time it had taken Emily and Big Red to get there.
He stopped just short of the corridor and listened, fearing an ambush. He heard nothing, so he swung around the corner, fists raised.
Ahead of him stretched a long, empty hallway lined with doors.
With no idea where Emily and Big Red might have gone, he waited for Freud, who seemed to take eons to arrive even though the robot was hurrying along as fast as he could.
“Which way?” Adam asked.
Freud scanned the corridor. “Follow me.”
He walked forward slowly, turning his head from side to side. After about a hundred feet, he stopped and pointed at a door on the right marked “Staff Lounge.”
“The perfume-trail leads there,” he said, having lowered his volume to a whisper.
Adam motioned for Freud to stay behind him, then crept toward the door.
And then two doors across the hall flew open, Emily springing from one, in her hands a huge high-tech gun she could barely hold aloft, Big Red from the other, axe raised and ready to strike.
Emily pointed the gun at Adam and fired. A metal rod corkscrewed from the yawning barrel, leaving a widening spiral of blue smoke in its wake. But though Emily’s aim was dead-on, it didn’t hit Adam, because at the last moment Freud pushed him out of the way and took the shot himself. The rod punched straight through his midsection and vanished into the wall further down the corridor. When it exited Freud’s back, it took most of his insides with it: Rods and coils and shards of metal clattered away across the floor.
“Ah,” said Freud. He wobbled on his feet, then plummeted backward. By the time he hit the ground his orange eye-lights had winked out.
Big Red leaped forward and swung his axe at Adam’s head. Adam ducked just in time—as it was, a few locks of hair got cropped—and the axe buried itself in a doorjamb. Before Big Red could prize it free, Adam grabbed him by the collar of his leather vest and threw him as hard as he could at Emily, who was already bringing her gun around to shoot Adam.
When she saw Big Red hurtling toward her, she fired instinctively. The rod that spiraled from the gun blew a fist‑sized hole through Big Red’s chest and sent chunks of his right lung, liver, and right kidney splattering all over Adam, who had wisely dodged aside once he had set Big Red in motion and was now racing toward the door Big Red had emerged from.
Big Red’s body slammed into Emily, knocking her back through the doorway she stood in. The gun flew from her hands and skidded away down the hall.
Adam burst through the other door and found himself in a small room decorated in a girlish manner reminiscent of Emily’s throne room. The pastel-pink walls were covered with posters of half-naked musclemen and images of seashores and sunsets with motivational slogans beneath them such as “You are as great as you allow yourself to be,” and “Aim for the stars.” Full-length mirrors adorned every wall. A chandelier, a smaller version of the ones in the throne room, hung from the ceiling. Unwashed plates, packs of bubblegum, ceramic knickknacks, and old, pre-Cataclysm magazines with titles like CosmoGirl and Young Mademoiselle littered the glossy black tabletops. An extra-large T-shirt with a picture of a cartoon frog on it lay draped over the back of a white leather loveseat.
Kicking aside a purple bean-bag chair covered in Twinkie crumbs, Adam hurried toward a door in the south wall that he figured had to lead to the room Emily had just come out of. As he neared the door, he heard a muffled thump on the other side.
He slammed through the door. Beyond it was a bedroom dominated by a four-poster bed with lime-green sheets and a Hello Kitty comforter. On a bedside table sat an open box of Twinkies, an empty pink mug, and, though Adam tried to pretend he hadn’t seen it, a foot-long studded black dildo.
Big Red’s grisly remains lay in the doorway that connected this room with the corridor. Emily was nowhere to be seen.
But then Adam heard a faint clang from the closet. He rushed over and threw the door open. At first he saw only a wall of clothes—dresses and jeans and bodices and nightgowns—but soon discerned that one of the wooden panels at the back of the closet was askew. Another faint clang rang out from behind it.
Ripping out handfuls of clothes and strewing them across the room behind him, he cleared a path to the back of the closet and tore the panel away. Beyond it was a metal staircase spiraling down a concrete shaft.
It could be a trap. But what choice did he have except to follow her? He couldn’t let her get away to further pollute the world with her mad egocentricity.
He raced down the stairs, the banging of his heavy boots on the metal steps surely alerting Emily to his approach. Before he had gone far, he heard a series of mechanical sounds from below—chack-chack-chack clank.
At first he assumed she was preparing some sort of trap or weapon, but then a motor started up, and he heard the whine of rusty wheels grinding against equally rusty tracks. No, not a trap and not a weapon. An escape.
He practically flew the rest of the way down the stairs, his feet touching only every fifth step. Even then, even going as fast as he could, something deep inside told him it was already too late.
It was. By the time he reached the bottom of the stairs and stepped out into the end of a dimly lit concrete tunnel down which two pairs of train tracks extended, the little open-topped train-car Emily was in was already a hundred feet away and rapidly gaining speed. A second car sat on the second set of tracks, but its control panel had been ripped off and its wire innards torn out.
Adam glowered at Emily as she receded into the shadows of the tunnel. There was no way he could reach her now
.
Emily knew this too, and with a grin she extended one arm and flipped up her middle finger at him.
One day, he vowed to himself, one day he would find her and stop her.
He watched the train-car vanish into the darkness, then listened to the whine of its wheels fade into the distance, and even after that he stood there staring into the black tunnel for a long while.
With a sigh, he ascended the staircase and returned to Freud’s shattered remains. He had hoped there was some way to fix the damage, but when he inspected the body more closely, he saw that Freud’s torso was essentially nonexistent now. Or rather, it existed as a collection of tiny pieces scattered down the length of the hallway. He doubted if even a roboticist from Freud’s own time could repair this damage.
“I am sorry I did not protect you better,” Adam said to the inert assemblage of metal and plastic. “And I thank you for protecting me…”
He frowned, realizing the full import of what that meant. Freud had been programmed to prevent humans from coming to harm. His saving Adam meant that according to his cold, rational processors, Adam was to all intents and purposes human, a man.
Adam smiled sadly. “Thank you,” he said again.
He returned to the arena. As he neared the closed door, he realized he heard no sounds of fighting from within. And while his heart told him the women had won, his brain perversely concocted a different story: It showed him Maggie and Anna and Dagmar and Kukalukl and all the freed captives lying dead, having been taken by surprise by the last-minute arrival of a crew of Marauders who had been out pillaging and who now sat amid the corpses with smiles on their blood-streaked faces while they waited for Adam to return.
All these fears evaporated when he heard Anna’s voice, faint but unmistakable through the door, say, “Gordina, stop mutilating the bodies! I know what they did to you, but that’s no reason to be as bad as them!”
“That’s easy for you to say,” a woman—presumably Gordina—said. “They never got around to you. You don’t know what it was like.”
Adam tried to open the door, but it would barely budge. Something was blocking it. He planted his shoulder against it and pushed harder. It opened, but very slowly, as if it were moving underwater. Something large and heavy scuffed along the ground on the other side as it opened. When the opening was wide enough, he stepped through and saw what the problem was: Droke’s body, now bristling with arrows and crisscrossed with sword cuts, lay sprawled against the door.
He dragged the corpse out of the way. As he straightened up, Anna raced up and threw her arms around him.
“I knew you would come,” she said.
“That’s the guy you were tellin’ us about?” said a woman in a gauzy blue teddy dotted with Marauder blood. “He looks like one of them.”
Anna gave her a frosty look. “If you cannot tell the difference, Shona, then you are both blind and stupid.”
“Hey, I’m just sayin’, is all! He looks like what he looks like.”
“Perhaps. But remember: Were it not for him, you would still be…how did you put it? ‘Sucking assholes’ pipes,’ was it not?”
Shona shrugged in defeat. “Thanks,” she said to Adam.
He bowed. “My pleasure.”
Unused to men bowing to her, she just blinked in bemusement.
Maggie, Dagmar, and Kukalukl joined them.
“Where is Freud?” asked Maggie.
Adam shook his head. “Another one we owe that vile bitch‑queen.”
“I take it you failed to catch her, then,” said Kukalukl.
“Yes. There is a train system underneath the complex. She got to it before I could catch her.”
“She is far from the only one,” said Maggie. “At least half a dozen Marauders managed to flee during the battle.”
“Though the rest are deceased, I am overjoyed to report,” added Kukalukl.
“We lost over a dozen ourselves,” said Anna. “And a dozen more are wounded.”
“We should remain here at Yoyodyne until we have recuperated,” said Adam. “That will also give us time to thoroughly inspect the complex and see what sorts of useful items we may find here. It seems that—”
The double doors at the south end of the arena burst open and in rolled a long wheeled cart draped in a white cloth and laden with loaves of bread, tureens of soup, huge platters piled high with cuts of meat, dishes heaped with steaming vegetables, bowls of salt and sugar and spices; and pushing the cart was Asparagus Sam, who froze dead when he saw the Marauders’ corpses sprawled all over the arena and the armed angry women clutching bloody weapons and the jaguar that was watching him with an almost human expression of contempt and the eight-foot-tall monster-man with hideous wrinkled yellow skin. And then, seeing how things stood, Asparagus Sam cleared his throat and smiled as best he could and said, “I brought your victory dinner!”
And there was much feasting.
Chapter 12
The Road Home