Dealer's Choice

  There was no answer from inside the walls. The rider pulled on the horse’s braided mane. The stallion reared back, snorting, and brought its front hooves down hard on the portcullis. Wrought iron rang and bent. The jokers on the battlements flinched, and brought their guns to bear.

  “Let him in,” the bodysnatcher called down to them.

  “You gone crazy, Zelda?” Blueboy asked.

  “Don’t call me Zelda,” she snapped. She’d killed Zelda herself, stuffing a sock in her mouth and pinching her nostrils shut until she suffocated, after she’d been left blind and crippled. Since then the bodysnatcher had stolen a half-dozen bodies, but even the ones that looked good from outside felt wrong on her. She never kept them long: they didn’t fit.

  There was the sound of running footsteps in the courtyard below. A squad of armed jokers spread out across the cobblestones. Kafka was with them, rustling faintly as he ran. The little brown cockroach-man carried a walkie-talkie instead of a gun. “Governor says, open the gate,” he announced.

  “That’s what I’ve been telling them,” she called down.

  The portcullis got halfway up and stuck, bent hopelessly out of shape by the blow it had taken. The rider dismounted and left his horse outside as he entered the castle. He had to duck low to get his antlers under the portcullis.

  Inside, surrounded by jokers clutching automatic weapons, he straightened to his full height, towering over all of them. With his antlers, he stood well over ten feet. Across his chest was slung a magnificent golden horn, carved in the shape of a dragon. Cloven hooves clattered on the cobblestones as he moved, and his genitalia swung heavily between his legs. There was no doubt that he was male. The bodysnatcher looked from the stag-man to Blueboy’s more modest equipment, and laughed. The other jumper flushed.

  “Take me to your governor,” the rider commanded.

  Kafka nodded. “Shroud, Mustelina, escort him to the throne room. Elmo, see to his horse.”

  “What horse?” he asked. He threw back his head and laughed. His laughter was loud and deep as thunder.

  The bodysnatcher glanced back beyond the gate. The huge black stallion had vanished as silently as smoke. There was nothing out there but night.

  “Jesus,” Blueboy said, beside her. He shivered and wrapped the policeman’s shirt a little more tightly around his skinny chest. “What’s going on?”

  “Go get Molly,” the bodysnatcher told him. “Tell her to meet me in the throne room.”

  The rider had to duck again to pass through the archway. He was the most beautiful thing she had seen since her own body had been taken from her. She wanted him.

  Kafka had lingered behind the rest, walkie-talkie crackling in his chitinous grasp. “Zelda!” he called up. “His name is Herne. He’s an ally. The governor says if you jump him, you die.”

  Herne the Huntsman — who was sometimes Dylan Hardesty — was like every last joker who had ever come before him, the first thought Bloat caught from the man was pity laced with scorn.

  Whoot a bloody ugly t’ing it be…

  “A bloody ugly thing indeed, but jokers should be the last to worry about someone else’s appearance.”

  Herne reacted very little. Maybe the frown deepened. “A person cannot stop his thoughts,” he said. The joker’s voice was as low as anything human could get, festooned with a cultured British accent quite unlike the one in his mind — something northern and low-class? Bloat wondered. “The Twisted Fists told me you could read minds.”

  Bloat followed the elusive thought-threads and saw a shipment of guns; a battle on the water; death. None of it was very clear, but Bloat knew from long practice how to focus a person’s mind. “You were bringing guns,” he said, “and a warning.” As he’d known it would do, the words sent Herne hack to the attack of minutes ago.

  … the nats had Carnifex with them, Hartmann’s old goon … hate the feeling of running from the ass but the information is more important than the guns…

  “How many jokers did you lose when the Coast Guard hit you?” Bloat asked. “How many did Carnifex kill?”

  Herne’s huge eyes blinked. He seemed to appraise Bloat once more. The memory that Bloat could see was a raw, oozing wound, and the anger Herne radiated could almost be touched. “There were six of us, all of them my friends, and I will pay back Carnifex for what he did. As you said, we were bringing weapons to the Rox. We — I — also had more. They are going to hit the Rox, Governor. They are going to hit it hard.”

  "Who told you this?”

  "I can’t tell you that.” And in his mind: … Matt Wilhelm. Furs…

  “You already have.” Bloat giggled, and Herne frowned at the screeching titter. Kafka sighed and rolled his eyes at Bloat, impatient as always.

  “This isn’t a joke, Governor. I don’t care about your parlor tricks. Read my mind, that’s fine — go ahead. It saves me my breath. They are planning to strike. Hartmann’s been placed in charge. There are aces involved, as well as the military. This is entirely serious. What are you going to do about it?”

  “Very little that I’m not already doing.” Most of Bloat wanted to deny everything that Hardesty was saying. That part of him was confident, almost arrogant. The nats had broken on the shore of the Rox twice now; the third time would be no different. Bloat was fairly certain that they wouldn’t even try. “Hartmann and some others are coming over today — a peace conference. We’ve already set it up. They’ve lost too many lives already. They won’t want to lose any more. This talk of an attack is a bluff, an empty threat.”

  He listened as Hardesty mulled that over and heard the answer even before the man spoke the words. “Governor, maybe they think that if they don’t take the Rox, all those lives were wasted.”

  “No,” Bloat said, but inside, the old frightened kid, the one who’d cowered before the neighborhood bullies, who’d been taunted and picked on and abused — that Teddy, he was scared. He remembered.

  … if they’d just leave Teddy alone… Yes… Well, thank you…

  His father hung up the phone. He shook his head at the overweight child hugging his knees to his belly on the sofa, the bloodstains from his nose dark on a torn T-shirt. “I just talked with Roger’s mother,” his dad said. “She said that she’d talk to the boy.”

  The combined relief and anger in his father’s voice told Ted how nervous and timid his father had been making the call. Now he stood in front of Ted, still shaking his head. “Really, Teddy, I don’t know why you can’t simply avoid these children. It’s your fault, really. They can’t pick on you if you’re not there.”

  Ted tried to argue — he told his dad how they’d corner him in the lunchroom or the playground, how they’d wait for him on the walk home from school, how anytime he stepped outside the brownstone stoop they’d BE there. The arguments didn’t do any good. They never did.

  The next day, Roger and his friends waited for Ted after the last bell. “You got me in trouble,” Roger said. “You’re gonna pay, asshole.” Ted limped home with a torn jacket and pants, another bloodied nose, a black eye, and a chipped tooth.

  Ted understood revenge. Oh, yes. He understood it very well.

  “No,” Bloat said again. “There’s no reason for us to get panicked about the situation.”

  In his mind, he heard the myriad voices of the Rox awakening, many wondering about the arrival of Herne. Molly Bolt was already heading for the castle from the jumpers’ tower on the other side of the island. “But I suppose we need to let people know,” he continued reluctantly. “You certainly don’t make it easy to keep things quiet. Kafka — if you’d arrange things. You know who we’ll need.”

  The junkers were stacked eight high along the Jersey shore: a wall of rust, broken glass, twisted metal. The car on top was a DeLorean. The morning sun still glittered off the brushed stainless-steel finish, but the frame had been twisted so badly that the gull-wing doors would never close again. It looked like a silver bird trying to take flight.

  Up on
the hood, high atop his junkyard battlement, Tom Tudbury stared through a pair of binoculars. The Rox was a good five miles northeast across the bay, but even at this distance, its towers were plainly visible, etched against the pink glow of the dawn. Its southern wall had engulfed the Statue of Liberty, her green copper flesh fusing seamlessly with the stone. Only the familiar crowned head remained the same. Below the neck, Liberty was nude and voluptuous. She had a huge oak-and-iron gate between her legs.

  Something about it suggested the witch’s castle from The Wizard of Oz. There were shapes wheeling about some of the towers that reminded Tom uncomfortably of the flying monkeys that had terrified him when he was six.

  It was the last place in the world he ever wanted to visit. He had been there once; that was enough. But in a few hours, he was going back. “Damn Hartmann,” he muttered aloud.

  Tom lowered the binoculars and clambered down, careful to watch his footing as he stepped from car to car, the metal shifting ever so slightly beneath his sneakers. He walked back through the junkyard with his hands shoved deep in his pockets. The place hadn’t changed much since he was a kid, coming here to visit his friend Joey DiAngelis.

  It was hard to believe Joey was gone now. He’d moved his family clear down to North Carolina two weeks ago. Tom couldn’t blame him. Not after last month. Corpses were still washing up on the Jersey shore, features bloated beyond all recognition, faces half-eaten by eels, with only their dog tags to say who’d they been. Joey had Gina and the kids to think about, and Bayonne was just too damn close to the Rox.

  On the news the other night, they said two million people had moved out of the New York metropolitan area since the last census. Most of them in the last four years. Manhattan real estate was selling like waterfront lots along the Love Canal.

  The dogs started barking as he neared the house. Tom had gotten them from the pound after he and Joey and Dr. Tachyon had faked his death a few years back. It was lonely being dead, and the dogs gave him plenty of warning whenever a stranger approached the junkyard.

  He paused on the steps to scratch Jetboy under the chin, then went inside. The shack looked rundown and abandoned from the outside, the porch sagging, the windows boarded up. But Tom had spent a lot of time and money fixing up the interior. A big-screen television dominated one wall. Tom had left it on when he went outside. CNN was rerunning its interview with Gregg Hartmann again. Tom fixed himself a mug of coffee and sat down to watch the broadcast once more.

  This was a national emergency, Hartmann told Wolf Blitzer. He quoted John Kennedy and Tom Paine. Many of his ace friends had come forward already; he hoped others would volunteer to help out in this crisis. “With great power comes great responsibility,” he said. They wanted Starshine, Modular Man, Jumpin’ Jack Flash, Water Lily, Chimera.

  They already had the Great and Powerful Turtle.

  Tom sipped at his coffee. It was too hot. He blew on it to cool it down.

  “This afternoon’s meeting will be our last best hope for a peaceful solution,” Hartmann told Blitzer. He asked everyone listening to pray for their success.

  It was smart of them to use Hartmann. Tom didn’t trust politicians, least of all George Bush and his rightwing friends. But Gregg Hartmann was different. Tom had believed in Gregg Hartmann. When the senator had his nervous breakdown in Atlanta in 1988, and lost his hard-won presidential nomination, it had almost broken his heart.

  Tom had witnessed the carnage last month, when the military tried to take the Rox. Hartmann was right; they had to make Bloat and his followers listen to reason. If not …

  He didn’t want to think about it. Hartmann would negotiate a settlement, he told himself. He had to.

  Joey had a spare room down in North Carolina. He had urged Tom to move down with them, before the shithammer came down. “This is where I belong,” Tom said simply.

  He turned off the television. In the silence of the morning, he felt utterly alone. Joey and Gina moved down to Charlotte. Tachyon gone to the stars, back to his homeworld Takis, no telling if he’d ever be back. That was most of the people who knew he was alive right there. Dead men don’t make a whole lot of friends.

  But it was only Tom Tudbury who was dead. The Turtle still had miles to go before he slept.

  He finished his coffee, and went to get his shell.

  Travnicek was facing south again. He had been doing that a lot lately, just standing there in the still light of dawn, motionless on his terrace above the park. His organ cluster, which looked like a lei made from H. R. Giger flowers, had blossomed around the featureless blue dome of his head. Petals, tentacles, sensors — whatever they were — had come erect and were tracking south like some kind of organic radar.

  Modular Man did not think this was a good sign. Travnicek’s obsessions were rarely healthy.

  “Sir,” he said, “do you still want me to join the government aces at Ebbets Field?”

  He spoke from the shelter of the penthouse door, where neighbors in the surrounding buildings couldn’t see him. Normally he flew in and out only at night, but he’d been delayed by the necessity of sorting the 65,000-odd dollars he had stolen, on Travnicek’s orders, from a Brink’s truck while its drivers were drinking coffee in a Roy Rogers.

  Travnicek had an uncanny ability to detect money — not that it required much skill in the case of a Brink’s truck. And Modular Man was very good with locks, particularly the electronic kind.

  Modular Man was wired to obey his creator and to protect him. He didn’t have any choice in the matter.

  “Sir?” he prompted. “Ebbets Field? Senator Hartmann’s request to help him in the battle against the Rox?”

  If he was lucky, he thought, Travnicek would order him to steal something else.

  “The Rox?” Maxim Travnicek didn’t have to turn around to address his creation — the mitteleuropean accent came out of a trumpet-shaped blossom on the back of Travnicek’s lei. “So go,” he said. “I want to see recordings of that place. It’s … interesting.”

  If he were human, the android thought, he would have shuddered at the tone of that interesting. “Sir?” he ventured. “There is probably going to be a fight. I might get injured.”

  “I built you twice, toaster,” Travnicek said. “If you get blown up again, I’ll build another one.”

  There was no point, the android knew, in pointing out that since Travnicek had become a joker he’d lost his ability to construct much of anything. Travnicek would just deny it, then order him to do something humiliating.

  “If you’re sure, sir,” Modular Man said. “If you’ve got enough money to”

  “Go!” The blue-skinned joker waved an arm. “And fuck you!”

  “May I take my guns first?”

  “Take whatever you want. Just stop bothering me.”

  Modular Man took the microwave laser and the .30-caliber Browning.

  It looked like it was shaping up to be that kind of day.

  The potpourri of thoughts around Bloat were amusing in their diversity.

  Kafka was radiating his usual sour paranoia and annoyance with the “juvenile behavior” of his compatriots: Zelda (who these days insisted on being called Bodysnatcher) was wondering whether she’d done a hundred bench presses this morning or just ninety. That was just mind-static: she’d been trying different strategies to keep him from reading her thoughts for the last few weeks. Shroud was gazing at his hand and wondering whether it was a little more translucent today than yesterday; Video was replaying the arrival of Herne a few hours ago; Molly was staring at Herne and speculating graphically about what she’d like to do with him (and whether it would be physically possible — evidently she’d seen some of the porno films in which he’d starred). Herne had become more his daytime personality of Dylan Hardesty; Hardesty was guiltily remembering an earlier Hunt and how good it had felt to kill the victim…

  And the penguin, as usual, was mind-silent — like all of Bloat’s creations. The penguin was staring at him, but he c
ould sense no thoughts at all behind the blank gaze.

  None of them were particularly thinking about the subject at hand. Bloat blinked and cleared his throat.

  “Look, people, you’ve all heard Hardesty’s information from the Twisted Fists,” Bloat said loudly. Thoughts shattered and refocused on the sound; Bloat grinned in quick amusement. “So who here thinks we got something to worry about?”

  Molly sniffed. The bodysnatcher crossed her arms across the middle-aged woman’s body she was wearing and scowled. Video silently, emptily recorded. Shroud grumbled inwardly. Hardesty looked at the others expectantly.

  “I do, Governor,” Kafka said. His carapace rattled like a child’s toy as he shifted position. “I’ve been telling you this since the last time, sir; they aren’t just going to leave us alone. They never do.” Dark images of the aces’ raid on the Cloisters ran unbidden in his head. Kafka rattled his carapace gloomily. “Bush is a hardass when it comes to confrontations — he’s shown that abroad and he’s shown it with anti-joker legislation.”

  “We have a conference with Hartmann today,” Bloat reminded him. “A peace conference.”

  “The Japanese were negotiating with Washington when they attacked Pearl Harbor too,” Kafka said. “This time they’ll use the aces to help. Pulse, Mistral, the Turtle… The fact that Hartmann’s involved cinches it — they want him because he knows the government aces best, through SCARE. This time they’ll use the aces to help.”

  “Aces can be jumped,” Bloat answered, taking the words that Molly was about to speak and smiling at the annoyance on the young woman’s face. “If they’re jumped, they’re ours. Aces will also hit the Wall and not be able to get through, just like nats. My dream creatures will eat them, just like with the nats. The jokers here are well armed.”

  “Governor, that’s all true, I suppose, but —”

  “We’re fine here,” Bloat interrupted. “I don’t see what we got to be worried about. Hey, you should see what I’ve done with the caverns.”

  “Shit.” The bodysnatcher stretched like a tawny lioness. “Dreams ain’t gonna keep the fuckers out.” Then, a moment too late: “Governor.”