Dealer's Choice

  There were 250 million more.

  Modular Man dropped onto the Rox, reported to Travnicek, was told to make himself scarce. He went to the intelligence group, where Patchwork and Kafka were still gathering information. Kafka was as far away from everyone as he could get in the small room. Patchwork, seen even through the bandages, was completely exhausted.

  “The brass are really pissed,” Patchwork reported. "Zappa’s delayed any action until the ammunition from Clove Lakes can be replaced.”

  The jokers seemed pleased. “We’ve shown ’em,” someone said.

  “He’s talking about something called ‘shoot-and-scoot’ tactics.”

  Kafka saw Modular Man and scuttled closer to him. “That could be a problem,” he said. “The artillery batteries set up, fire a few rounds apiece, then pull out and set up somewhere else. That means we can’t preempt them, because we won’t know where they’re going to be. And we’ll have a hard time retaliating, because they’re running away before we can get a fix.”

  “Not fast enough for Pulse and Modular Man,” said one joker. He was grinning hugely with three rows of pointed teeth. “Am I right?”

  Eyes turned toward Modular Man. “You’re going to lose,” he said.

  There was a long moment of silence. Patchwork lifted her chin toward Modular Man, as if once again sniffing for his presence.

  “I’ll do what I can,” the android said. “We caught them by surprise last night — they weren’t expecting you to have so many of their units located. But they’ll get better. Your strike teams are going to get killed or go to ground or get arrested. There’s only one of me, and one of Pulse, and Pulse’s energy is limited — during the Swarm invasion he ended up in a near coma with a glucose feed in his arm because he’d burned himself out fighting. My energy is limited as well, and I can’t be everywhere, and in any case Snotman can beat both of us with one hand tied behind him.”

  The others looked at Kafka. “We’re working out every contingency.” the roach said.

  “Up to and including getting everyone killed? Because there are over a million soldiers under arms right now, and lots of wild cards out there who will fight for the government, and — how many do you have here? A few thousand, and you’re all concentrated on a very small target?”

  “We’ve got the fog, and the radar spoofers, and” "How many million rounds of artillery ammunition do you have? How many rockets? How many fuel-air bombs? One fuel-air bomb could kill everyone here! That’s what Zappa told me, and he’s right. You can’t hide underground — a fuel-air bomb will suck the air right out of the caverns. Everyone below ground will asphyxiate, everyone in the open will bum to death. And if that doesn’t work there’s nerve gas, and even tactical nuclear weapons…

  “We’ve got Herne and the Wild Hunt,” one joker said.

  “We can kill anyone…”

  “How well did that work with Hartmann?”

  “Enough,” said Kafka. “We’re planning for everything.” But the other jokers in the room looked stricken.

  A moment ago they’d been congratulating themselves on a battle won. Now Modular Man had told them their victory was meaningless.

  The android pressed his advantage. “I think you should call that 800 number and work out the best deal you can.”

  ’We have our governor,” Kafka said. “He gave us the Rox, and he’ll keep us safe.” He looked at his staff. “I’ll prove it to you,” he said. “Come with me. To the Great Hall.”

  The jokers began filing out.

  “Hold on!” Patchwork clapped a hand to her missing ear as if trying to hear better. “There’s something going on!”

  For a few seconds the big reel-to-reel was the only thing moving in the room.

  “It’s that Katzenback guy,” Patchwork said. “He’s talking about security breaches. Wondering about how we knew where so much of their equipment was parked…”

  “Hide your eye,” Kafka said.

  “I am. I’m just hearing this.”

  “Katzenback, Horace.” One of the jokers read from computer printout. “Former AID official, now college professor, assigned to Zappa’s staff with the rank of”

  “Will you shut up!” Patchwork said. There were overtones of panic in her voice. Her head moved back and forth as if aiming her ears at a sound source. “Vidkunssen is agreeing. He’s wondering about whether their communications are se cure. Maybe somebody’s broken their cipher.” She took a breath. “Good,” she said. “that’s”

  Her head jerked up. It was clear that someone else was talking. “Oh, shit,” she said. “Katzenback’s talking about bugs. And Zappa’s come out of his office. He’s listening. He’s — he’s going to call the techs for a sweep.”

  “Good,” Kafka said. “They won’t spot you that way. You don’t transmit on FM.”

  “Shit!” Patchwork screamed. “Katzenback’s telling everyone to give a visual search first!”

  “Get your stuff out of the way,” Kafka said.

  “It is, it is.” She put her hands over her invisible eyes. “But it’s just lying there on the top shelf, behind a stack of folders. My eye can roll around, but the ear…” Her voice trailed away. “Oh, shit, I can hear them moving stuff around. Zappa’s telling everyone to be thorough.”

  Modular Man stepped to her couch, sat by her, and took Patchwork’s hand. She clutched at him. “I’m going to be blind,” she muttered. “Blind, with half the U.S. shooting at me. Shit!”

  Terror filled her face. “They found me! Oh, fuck…”

  “Run for it!” Kafka urged.

  “Eyeball’s rolling!” Patchwork shouted. “I’m off the shelf and trying to get under a desk!”

  The android’s olfactory sensors could scent her terror. She seized his hand in both of hers.

  “They’re jumping around and yelling! Oh, fuck. I hope I don’t get stepped on!” Her voice rose to a shriek. “Jesus they’re moving the desk they’re moving the desk…”

  Her body swayed in a circle, imitating the frantic rolling of her eye. “I’m getting covered in dust, I can’t see. I’m rolling — oh fuck they shut the door!”

  She shuddered. Her face showed total defeat. “Everything just went dark. They dropped something on me. A wastebasket or something.” Rivers of sweat poured from under her bandages. “I can still hear, though. Something’s touching my ear!” She gave a little wail. “Somebody get in there and get me!”

  “I’ll go,” Modular Man tried to make his voice soothing. "Just keep listening and looking, and find out where they put you. Then I’ll see if I can get you out.”

  “They dropped me!” Patchwork gulped air. “They dropped my ear into a container or something. I can feel cold, like glass or metal.” She bit her lip. “They’re all gathering around the… around my eye. I’m trying to creep the ear out while they’re not looking but it’s not working — the container’s too slick. Daylight!” Her voice rose to a shriek. “I’m rolling — oh, shit!” Her free hand pounced the sofa. “They’ve got me! They’ve got their fucking fingers on me!”

  Modular Man kept up his reassuring tone. “I’ll get you loose.”

  Patchwork’s voice changed. She stared defiantly into an empty space where she assumed Kafka and the jokers were. “I want the other eye now! There’s nothing going on at Aces High for me to see. I never should’ve let you make me blind in the first place.”

  “I’ll get it,” Modular Man said. “But let’s see what they’re doing with your other eye and ear first.”

  “I’m in a jar. There’s slime all over everything and it’s hard to see.” A spasm of disgust shuddered across her face. “It’s a peanut butter jar! And there’s still peanut butter in it!”

  “What can you see?”

  “Not much. I’m looking through peanut butter smears. Everyone’s staring at me. They’re passing me from hand to hand.”

  “Just wait.” Modular Man stroked Patchwork’s arm. “They’ll have to put you somewhere. And once we figure ou
t where that is, I’ll go get your eye and ear for you.”

  Zappa’s staff searched his room and office for at least ten minutes. Then they stood around staring at the peanut butter jar for another few minutes, conversing in low tones so that Patchwork couldn’t hear.

  “Somebody picked me up.” Her voice had grown calmer by now. “I’m being carried out the door. I think it’s that Katzenback guy. He’s walking down a corridor. We’re outside of the stadium — I see a burned-out tank. We’re walking up to one of those jeep things —”

  “A humvee?” "I guess.”

  “He just jammed me under the passenger seat. I can’t see anything.

  “I’m gone.” Modular Man didn’t bother to stand up; he just levitated up and started moving for the door. He paused in front of Kafka.

  “You’ve just lost your edge,” he said. “From now on, jokers die.”

  And then he was out and up into the fog-strewn sky.

  The corridor was natural rock, unimproved by human hands. The floor of beaten dirt was strewn with stones the size of pebbles to small boulders and was nearly blocked in places by rock-falls from the roof and walls. Some of the falls looked recent, perhaps caused by the explosion that had given them access to the corridor.

  Black Shadow was a three-dimensional ink spot, the darkness that was part of him soaking up the beams from their flashlights. “Which way?” he asked, his whisper echoing eerily off the tunnel’s ceiling and walls.

  The corridor ran due north and south from the point they’d broken into. As far as Ray could see it was dead-dark in both directions. Neither could he hear anything. Battle, however, didn’t hesitate. “North. If we go any farther south we’ll miss Ellis Island when we turn east toward the bay.”

  Black Shadow nodded and moved silently off into the darkness. Ray let him get ten or fifteen yards ahead before following. Shadow was good, Ray thought. You could hardly hear him moving in the darkness that was his natural element.

  Shadow suddenly hissed. Ray stopped and held out a palm to signal the others. He crept up to join Black Shadow and found him standing in front of a door set into the east wall of the corridor. Shadow had turned off his personal darkness, satisfied with the natural blackness that surrounded them all.

  “What is it?” Ray whispered. Something in the tunnel’s atmosphere made him automatically lower his voice as he pointed at the door and the face carved into the rock beside it. The door was made of wooden planks banded with iron strips. The stone face had a certain rough-hewn majesty to it, but underneath it all it was just the face of a teenage boy.

  “Bloat,” Shadow and Ray said in unison.

  They looked at each other and nodded.

  “I’ll get the others,” Ray said.

  They inspected the door carefully, trying to decide what to do. Battle finally nodded at Puckett. “Pull it out of its frame,” he told the ace. “Shepherd and Ray, cover him.”

  Ray nodded, but said, “Maybe you try the handle first. It might not be locked.”

  “Not locked?” Battle said.

  Ray shrugged. “Who knows? Have you got this Bloat character totally figured out?”

  “No,” Battle admitted reluctantly.

  Puckett looked at him and he nodded. The ace tried the handle, and the door creaked slowly forward, Puckett standing unconcernedly in the center of the entrance.

  Ray heard a sound over their heads like stone grating against stone, and shouted, “Look out!”

  But it was too late. A trapdoor opened and something red and viscous flowed out, totally enveloping Puckett, splashing on Danny and also on Ackroyd. Ray dodged the deluge as he tackled Danny, but was too late to pull her totally out of the way. The liquid coated the front of her right leg from the knee to the ankle, and also splattered her left leg. After a moment of stunned silence a white envelope fluttered down out of the trapdoor and landed right on Puckett’s head. It stuck there in the thick liquid. Puckett turned to look at the others, holding his hands up and out in a gesture that bespoke of his bewilderment.

  “What the hell —” Ray began. He reached down and gingerly touched the liquid running down Danny’s calf. He rubbed his fingertips together. “Paint,” he said. “Red paint.”

  “Give me that envelope,” Battle said angrily.

  Puckett reached up with paint-soaked fingers and carefully took it from the top of his head. He handed it to Battle, who tore it open impatiently.

  “‘I could have killed you just now,’” Battle read aloud, “‘but I didn’t. Remember that. Next time it won’t be for fun.’” Battle looked up, outraged. “He’s playing with me. The fat bastard thinks he’s playing with me!”

  Ray looked at Danny, his face inches from hers, her hard body half under his.

  “I think you can let me up now,” she said.

  Ray scrambled to his feet, giving her a hand up. She thanked him.

  It had really begun now. The score was Bloat 1, Battle 0, even though no one had been hurt. But that didn’t matter to Battle. Ray could see that he was seething. He wanted Bloat’s ass, if Bloat had an ass.

  Still, no matter how pissed he was, Ray noted that he was careful to set Black Shadow ahead on point, put Ray second, and station himself, covered by a paint-soaked Crypt Kicker, well to the rear.

  Modular Man was halfway to Brooklyn before he was out of the fog. The stuff was enveloping the entire city. He banked high and came down on Ebbets Field out of the sun. He could see Katzenback in a moving humvee — it looked as if it was heading for the Verrazano Narrows Bridge approaches.

  Modular Man dropped out of the sky like a fighter ace, tucked, came down feet-first, landed neatly in the passenger seat.

  Katzenback gave a yelp and sideswiped a cab. The taxi driver howled obscenities in Arabic and slammed on the brakes.

  “Sorry, Horace,” Modular Man said. “I didn’t mean to frighten you.”

  Katzenback pulled over into a loading zone. He recovered quickly, though he was still a bit wild-eyed. “What do you want?”

  “Peanut butter jar.”

  “Heh heh.” Katzenback grinned nervously. “What peanut butter jar?”

  Modular Man groped under the seat and pulled it out. Katzenback shrugged. “At least I tried.”

  The Syrian taxi driver stepped up to his door and began shrieking abuse.

  “I want you to know this isn’t my idea,” Modular Man said. “I’m obeying orders, same as you.”

  “Whose orders?”

  The taxi driver kept screaming. Modular Man, without result, gestured for him to be quiet. “I can’t say. But switching sides wasn’t my idea. Please tell General Zappa.”

  “You got jumped? Look, if you got jumped and are back now, we can work something…”

  “Later. I hope.”

  Modular Man rose into the sky and sped north, toward Aces High.

  Even that didn’t make the taxi driver shut up.

  Warm air caressed Ray’s face as he moved into the narrow corridor behind the door. He stopped and put his hand against one of the walls. The rock was warm to the touch when it should have been cool. He didn’t like the feel of it. He didn’t like the way the air smelled. It was hot and sweaty and tasted like fear.

  He wondered if this was the result of the spell that Black Shadow had warned them about. He glanced back at the rest of the team. Despite the poor lighting, he could see the strain on the others’ faces. Strained expressions wouldn’t be totally unexpected under the circumstances, but was it natural stress, or was Bloat playing with their minds? Black Shadow might know. He’d been through it before.

  Ray hurried up the corridor, catching up to the man in black.

  “Shadow,” he hissed in a stage whisper. “Wait up, dude.”

  The ace stopped and turned, his face shielded by the darkness that enveloped him like a mother’s arms.

  “That fear you told us about,” Ray asked. “Can you feel it now?”

  The darkness shifted, as if Shadow were looking about.
“Yes.” His voice was deep and unshaken. “There it comes.” A hand pointed out of the blackness, up-tunnel where two figures were approaching. They were young men, probably in their teens, and even in the dim light Ray could see crazed expressions on their ugly, manic faces. One had a garrote dangling from his hands, the other carried a large, shiny knife upraised and poised to strike.

  “Christ,” Ray said, “they’re ugly fuckers. No wonder they spooked you.”

  “You can see them?” Shadow asked. “Last time only I could —”

  He was turning, but it was too late. The schitzed-out one with the knife struck, plunging the weapon into Black Shadow’s back above the right shoulder blade. The ace screamed in pain, anger, and surprise. The maniac crooned in pleasure and pulled his knife out of Shadow’s back. He raised it above his head again, eyes gleaming brighter than the knife blade.

  Shadow pivoted off his right foot, falling backward, and kicked with his left, catching his assailant in the stomach, but the maniac just bounced off the tunnel wall and came back after him.

  Ray jumped between the two. The crazy guy with the knife seemed fixated on Shadow as Ray grabbed his knife wrist and broke it. The maniac dropped his blade and focused on Ray for the first time. Ray wasn’t taking any chances with this supposed phantom. He crushed the nut’s windpipe with a knife-hand blow, then kicked out both his kneecaps while he stood there wheezing.

  Ray turned as his opponent collapsed. Shadow was a puddle of blackness against the tunnel wall, leaking red. The knife must have cut something important, maybe a lung. There were shouts of consternation and surprise coming from the other team members, but they were all too far away to help as the second nutcase leaned over Shadow with his garrote stretched tight, looking for a neck to twist it around.

  Ray surged forward, kicking the apparition between the legs from behind. It was gratifying to discover that even apparitions had balls. The specter screamed and collapsed forward, falling unto Black Shadow. Ray went after him, but recoiled from the wave of killing cold that blasted out from the impenetrable blackness that was Shadow and the crazy guy.

  Ray motioned the others away as they ran up, then he cautiously reached out to test the air temperature around Shadow and the supposed apparition. It had warmed up to the bone-chilling range.