The basement lounge was full of old people.
The bodysnatcher did a quick count while they locked the doors behind him. He saw three faces he knew, still wearing their own flesh, and fourteen geezers. Seventeen total, eighteen counting him. They’d started out with twenty-two jumpers.
The youngest geezer was maybe sixty. The oldest looked like he’d been embalmed a decade ago. A few seemed pretty spry, but one old fuck struggled with his walker, and there were a couple in wheelchairs.
The bodysnatcher studied the room. No windows, only the one door. A pair of television monitors were mounted high on the walls at either end. Sprinklers dotted the ceiling. A folding table had been set up, supporting a steel coffee urn and a dozen boxes of assorted donuts. Most of the donuts were gone. Not that he cared. Caffeine and sugar were poison.
“Zelda.” A hand clutched at his arm.
The bodysnatcher pulled away. “Don’t touch me.” He looked down at a cripple in a wheelchair. She was an ancient, withered stick of a woman whose ghastly blond wig couldn’t conceal almost total baldness.
“You didn’t jump,” the dried-up old cunt in the chair said in a high, quavery voice. She sounded like she was going to cry.
The bodysnatcher recognized her. Something about the way she whined. “Suzy?” she asked.
Suzy Creamcheese bobbed her head up and down. Her wig almost fell off.
“She’ll love your tits,” the bodysnatcher said. “Did you tell her about the herpes? I hope she has a warranty.”
Suzy blinked vague, watery eyes. “What do you mean?” She clutched at the bodysnatcher’s sleeve. “Why are they doing this? When will we get our bodies back?”
The bodysnatcher didn’t waste his breath answering. Behind them, the door opened. Juggler was ushered inside the room. They heard the door lock behind him. Juggler was still wearing his own body. The bodysnatcher went up to him. “Maybe you’re not as stupid as I thought.”
Juggler had a look of dismay and confusion on his face as he saw all the geezers. “It was one-way glass, wasn’t it?”
“One-way glass, one-way jumps.”
Suzy Creamcheese began to cry.
Juggler said, “They promised us amnesty.” He took the leaflet out of his back pocket, unfolded it.
“I take it back. You are as stupid as I thought.” The bodysnatcher looked around. “We’re three short. Who’s missing?”
“Gyro Gearloose, Hari-Kari, and Mam’selle,” Monkey-face put in. She hadn’t jumped either. She looked just like what she was, a frightened sixteen-year-old girl.
The bodysnatcher thought about the missing jumpers. Then it all made sense. Mam’selle was French. She spoke four languages fluently. Hari-Kari was a twelve-year-old nip who understood electronics better than Kafka. Both had IQs up in the genius range. Neither one was going to give anybody any trouble. And Gyro was a congressman’s son.
“This is bullshit,” Juggler told the geezers. “No way they can keep you in those bodies.” He held up the leaflet, shook it for emphasis. “We got amnesty in writing. If we need to, we can jump the guards, the doctors… whoever we have to, until we get our own bodies back.”
“You see anybody here but us chickens?” the bodysnatcher asked him.
Juggler glared at him. The bodysnatcher could see him struggling to come up with a nasty reply.
They all heard the sound at the same moment.
The bodysnatcher glanced up. Gas was hissing out of the overhead sprinklers. Someone screamed.
“Not very fucking original,” the bodysnatcher said. Then it was show-time. He went to his light-form.
They were four floors deep. It took him half of forever to bum his way back to the surface, and he felt weak as water before he finally got there, dangerously low on energy. He reverted to human form and hid in the bushes just inside the electric fence, naked and shivering. It was his own fault. He never should have stopped to kill the shrink.
By the time the guards came out of the building, the bodysnatcher had rested long enough. He lasered out of there at light-speed.
It wasn’t until he was almost back at the junkyard, coming in low and fast through the fog, that Tom finally lost it. He tried to concentrate, but it was no use. The shell slid downward. He felt faint.
The shell plowed into the wall of junkers along the shore, crunched through them, slewed heavily to the right, and crashed. Tom was slammed forward violently by the impact. He must have blacked out. When he came to, the shell was canted at a sixty-degree angle, and he was suspended in his chair. He knew he’d have bruises across his chest where the seat harness had caught him.
Tom freed himself, dropped two feet to the floor. His hands fumbled as he punched the hatch controls. There was a hiss as the hatch unsealed. He crawled out into the night, left the shell half-buried in rust and iron, and limped back to the shack.
Inside it was dim and still. The severed head of the first Modular Man sat on the television, staring at him. The dead eyes seemed to follow him across the room. “Stop looking at me that way,” he told it.
Exhaustion weighed heavily on him. The dull throbbing behind his eyes wasn’t going to go away anytime soon. He had flown sixty miles up the Hudson before finally dropping Hartmann off at a hospital. Even that far upstate might not be safe. The trip home had been endless. He’d had to detour around the Rox to get to Bayonne, and the fog was getting so thick that he almost overflew the junkyard.
When he was running before the Hunt, there hadn’t been time to be afraid. But the fear had found him now. He could still see the jaws of the hellhound as it slammed up against his shell. He could feel the impact as the Huntsman’s spear punched through his battleship plate. Another foot to the side and…
Tom didn’t want to think about that.
He hadn’t dared look at the Brooklyn Bridge on the way back. When he closed his eyes, he saw them tumbling…
In almost twenty-seven years as an active ace, the Turtle had never killed anyone. Until now.
Maybe they weren’t real, Tom thought. The hounds didn’t bleed, he remembered. When they died, there were no bodies. They just vanished. Maybe it was the same with the horses and the hunters who rode them. Not people, just demons off the Rox, like the mermen and the knights on the flying fish.
Only Bloat’s demons couldn’t go beyond the Wall, and the Wild Hunt had ridden through deepest Flatbush. And he’d seen some of those jokers out at the peace conference. The antlered man had even spoken.
Tom buried his face in his hands. His head was pounding.
Was this what war was like?
He needed to talk to someone. But Joey was in North Carolina, Tachyon was on his way to another planet, and Barbara had cried at his funeral, years ago.
They hadn’t given him any choice, Tom told himself. The hounds were ripping men apart. Hartmann’s hand had looked like something pulled from a meat-grinder. At least he had been able to lead the Hunt away from Ebbets Field, maybe that had saved a few lives, maybe he’d helped protect Danny and the rest.
He went to the medicine chest, dry-swallowed four aspirin. Then he turned on the shower. He stood under the spray for a long time, soaped and scrubbed until his skin was raw. It didn’t make him feel any cleaner.
The Outcast was wrenched from dreams by the thundering of the Rox’s thoughts. He found himself standing in the Great Hall, under Liberty’s torch, below the slumbering Bloat.
Pulse — bodysnatcher — kept throwing images of Bloat at him: Bloat skewered, great gobbets of Bloat-meat cooked by Pulse’s laser. Bloat chopped and diced and dead. The Outcast rubbed the smooth facets of the amethyst on his staff, looking up at the sleeping, pimply face of Bloat far above them. He stroked the monstrous flanks of Bloat’s body affectionately.
Outside, there was nothing. Just the fog.
“They fucking offed all the jumpers,” Zelda raged, stalking up and down the lobby. The others in the room watched him, silent, though their head-voices shouted in the Outcast’s m
ind. “They played with them, tricked them into jumping some fucking old codgers, and then gassed them all. That’s the kind of goddamn amnesty they’re offering the Rox. Anyone else feel like calling that fucking number now?”
“We’ll contact the media and let them know what happened,” Dylan said. “Enough bad press and they’ll be forced to call off the assault.”
Zelda snorted. “Call the reporters in and Battle will parade out all the nice teenage bodies his friends are now in, and they’ll answer all the questions just the way they were briefed, and all the controversy turns into more propaganda against the nasty old Rox. It’s almost beautiful the way he set it up. He’s got the jumper bodies for the old folks, and the jumpers themselves are dead. One less threat. That fucking stupid Juggler.”
They were all a little frightened: Kafka, Shroud, Dylan, most of the rest. There were images: images of war that looked like they’d been pulled from old pictures from Korea or Vietnam, the most graphic images from Shroud, who had been in the Joker Brigades in Nam. Kafka had even scarier scenes in his head — missiles streaking over the Wall and into the fog, disappearing down the flues and spires of the fantasyland he’d made here, buildings exploding one after another and the jokers running screaming with blood-streaked bodies…
“We could just leave,” the penguin said. No one paid any attention.
“Kafka?” the Outcast said.
“I’m worried, Governor. I didn’t think…” Kafka shivered, sending a dull ringing through the vast crystalline hall. “They’re going to land on us with both feet. I don’t even know if we can rule out a tactical nuke at this point — a ‘clean’ weapon that could take out the Rox, delivered in one of a hundred ways. Maybe they’d even dare the outrage that would cause. They want us dead.”
Kafka’s words fell into brooding silence. Even the head-voices went still for a moment. Shroud was remembering Nam: a village still smoldering from a direct napalm hit, a buzzing cloud of black flies rising from distended bodies strewn like broken dolls across the open space between the huts.
“I will not let this happen to the Rox,” the Outcast declared. “I hear what you’re all thinking. I will not let that hap
pen.”
“How you gonna stop it, Bloat — oh, excuse me, Outcast?” Zelda asked. “You gonna turn all the missiles into pretty little flowers like that trick you pulled last night with the jumpers? You gonna bring on enough demon armies to take out the whole frigging Marine Corps? C’mon, Bloat, can you think at transsonic speeds! — ’cause that’s how fast they’re gonna be comin’ in.”
“I can’t promise that there won’t be deaths here,” the Outcast said. “I ain’t stupid, bodysnatcher. Yes, jumpers are going to die; jokers are going to spill their blood on our soil.”
“Great. A bloody campaign speech,” Dylan muttered. The Outcast ignored him.
A hero could make them believe … He didn’t know where the voice came from, but the words lingered long after the voice had faded, and he realized that it was true. A touch, just a touch, of the Outcast’s power, of the dreamtime’s energy… His staff began to glow faintly. The purple radiance glimmered from the crystalline walls, touched the edges of the fog with color.
“All that happened the last time too. Yes, they’re going to throw everything they have at us this time. But I’m far, far stronger now. Then I couldn’t project myself out of that ugly body” — he pointed to the Bloat-mountain behind him — “then I didn’t have the power to transform the Rox, as I have since. We didn’t have the physical Wall, the fog, or anywhere near as many caverns. We didn’t have the Jersey shore or Liberty Island. We didn’t have the weaponry that the Twisted Fists have brought in, we didn’t have Modular Man, Pulse, Herne, or the Sleeper.”
“If he wakes up,” Shroud muttered.
“No. When the Sleeper wakes,” the Outcast answered. "Croyd is stirring already, showing signs that soon he’ll rise and join us. We have power. We have more power than even we believe or understand or can use.”
The Outcast listened to the mindvoices and realized that his words were beginning to weave a kind of spell. Even Zelda was listening, and the angry doubt in Pulse’s mind was slowly dissolving under the tidal impact of his speech. The Outcast found the power, followed the thread of it back into the world of dreams, and widened the channel, so that the energy poured through like molten gold. The penguin had stopped skating around and between the others and was standing watching him. He clenched his staff tightly, and the amethyst arced and flared, holding all of those gathered before him in a globe of light.
“There’s no need for this dissension,” the Outcast told them, and each word seemed to explode from the air. “Our bickering is exactly what they want. I am telling you as your governor, as the creator of the Rox: We are stronger than they are. We have the power of my magic, we have the power of the wild card, and we have the power that comes from being right. What we do here in the next day or so will be heroic, and we will prevail. We will keep the Rox as a homeland for all oppressed people; we will grow despite everything they do against us.
“They. Cannot. Win.”
The Outcast emphasized the last three words, slamming the end of his staff down on the tiles with each one, and with each, the staff sent out streamers of light that pierced the thick fog gathered around the castle, illuminating the roiling cloud with sapphire, ruby, and then coruscating emerald hues.
“Now go,” he spoke. “Go and get your people ready. I’ll be sending defensive plans to each of you in the next few hours. We’re going to hit everything we can before they use it against us. I need Pulse, bodysnatcher; I’ll need Modular Man too. I’ll have to have joker and jumper volunteers to go outside the Wall through the caverns. Kafka, send Wyungare to me as soon as you can, would you? We’re going to hit them first this time.”
They nodded. The spell slowly faded as the intense hues faded in the fog, but they remembered. One by one, they nodded to the Outcast and left the Crystal Castle. Even Zelda’s mind was cleansed of violent, sick images for a moment, and he shaped Pulse’s body into light and sped away like a lightning bolt. The Outcast smiled grimly.
“Not a bad little speech.” The Outcast glanced up at Bloat’s body. The penguin had somehow moved from the floor to the sleeping Bloat’s shoulder. “Jim Bowie to the troops at the Alamo, wasn’t it? Just wait until ol’ Santa Anna opens fire.”
The penguin cackled and skied away down the far side of Bloat.
Distant concussions battered the windows of the Rox. Kafka’s strike teams were hitting at Zappa’s supplies.
Modular Man, waiting for news in Patchwork’s high room, tried to stand out of the way of the crowd of jokers who’d shown up and ended up being shoved back behind the map-boards.
The big reel-to-reel rolled on, recording all for posterity.
“News coming in,” Patchwork said. “Somebody’s reporting jumpers hitting sentries at Prospect Park. The ammo dump at Clove Lakes has just gone up.”
“We can hear that,” said one of the jumper aides.
Patchwork’s chin lifted in the strange way that blind people had, as if she was trying to perceive the world with her chin.
“Just got another report. Somebody’s firing self-propelled grenades into the battery set up at Newark International.”
“That’s Giles Goat-Boy,” the joker said smugly. “Three jumpers on that team — nobody’s gonna stop ’em.”
“That got Zappa out of his office,” Patchwork said. There were cheers from the jokers. “He’s on the phone to… somebody named Ferguson?”
Jokers flipped through computer printout that listed military units and their officers. “I think this is him,” one said. “Colonel, U.S. Army Intelligence and Security Command, last stationed at Fort McPherson, Georgia…”
“Got another Ferguson here,” said another. “He’s a brigadier in the Marines.”
“Hold it! Hold it!” Patchwork said. “We’ve got a request from something called Os
car Red to commence hostilities.”
“Oscar Red.” Kafka jabbed at a map. “That’s the rocket battery set up down at Ft. Lee on Sandy Hook. MLRS.”
“Zappa’s thinking about it,” Patchwork said.
There was a respectful silence. Kafka had impressed everyone with the capabilities of the Multiple-Launch Rocket System, capable of saturating an area the size of the Rox with no less than 8000 sub-munitions — nasty little exploding bombs — in less than a minute. The location of any MLRS unit was one datum that Kafka insisted be reported before anything else.
“Permission denied,” Patchwork reported. Her voice had taken on a slight Zappa inflection. “Our ammunition reserves are too depleted on the Jersey side to he certain of sustained action.”
There was a collective sigh of relief. A big joker bit the top off a can of Spam and began squeezing the contents into his mouth as if it were toothpaste.
“We don’t have anyone near that unit.” Kafka was still looking at the map. “Modular Man.” His eyes swung, in their chitinous sockets, to the android. “Zappa might change his mind. I want you to take that battery out. That one and the other MLRS unit we know about.”
“Very well,” Modular Man said.
There wasn’t much else he could say.
The PATH station on the Jersey side of the bay was deserted except for a squad of pokerfaced soldiers. No one wanted to go into Manhattan today, what with last night’s series of unexplained disasters.
One of the soldiers saluted as Ray approached. “Mr. Battle is waiting downstairs, sir.”
“We taking the subway to Ellis Island?” Ray asked. "I don’t know, sir,” the soldier said, deadpan.
Ray nodded and went down the stairs. The vacant subway platform struck Ray as vaguely creepy. There was something about the vast, echoing expanse of concrete overlooking a silent tunnel that made Ray feel like he was in some cheesy post-holocaust sci-fi flick where a mutant form of the wild card virus had killed everyone or turned them into vampires or something.
The platform was not entirely deserted, however. A single soldier stood at its edge, looking down the silent tunnel, ignoring the people clustered around the battered vending machines and neighboring concrete benches.