The retreat had happened suddenly, the order relayed through someone — someone plural? the mindvoices weren’t clear on that point — called Danny. All the attacking forces had all moved back into the shroud of fog, away from the wounded and broken ramparts of the Wall and out of the Outcast’s hearing.
“Oh, thank God,” Kafka said. His body shivered with a faint rattling. His walkie-talkie sputtered static-ridden words. “Governor, they’re gone. Everywhere. They’ve left.”
“Maybe… “ Teddy whispered to Kafka wearily. From his vantage point in Croyd’s room, he surveyed the broken buildings around them, the tumbling walls of brick and the shattered timber supports. Only the great crystalline ramparts of the castle were still standing, untouched — he had repaired them even as the glass had crumpled under the impact of the barrage. Around the Rox, jokers and jumpers alike were coming from shelter. In the foggy landscape below him, there was a mass exodus outward from the caverns. “I’m going out to see.” he told Kafka and the penguin. “Keep trying to wake him up.”
Teddy slammed the end of the staff on the ground and willed himself to be at the Jersey Gate, but the expected transition was strange. The insistent, angry voices of the dreamtime shouted at him, and the fragile connections of power were hard to hold on to. He tried to pull in the energy, but his mind was exhausted. For a moment his vision cleared and he found himself looking down at the Great Hall of the castle, bound down with the immense weight of Bloat. Big Bird, one of the joker guards, noticed him immediately.
“Governor,” she said, her feathered face contorted with concern. Plaster dust shaken from the roof by the impact of bombs coated her high shoulders and a three-fingered, clawed hand was clenching and unclenching the grip of her AK-47 nervously. There were dead jokers here, five of them that he could see, still lying on the tiles of the Great Hall. The sight made Teddy ill; bloatblack spilled out in response.
The burden was almost too much. It would have been easy to remain in Bloat’s body. Teddy struggled, trying to find the power within him to leave Bloat once again. The voices of the dreamtime yammered and howled, angry at his continuing intrusion.
Wyungare gave you our offer. Leave us alone.
You will die, powerful fool. You will die and you will take us down with you. You don’t know what you’re doing.
“Shut up!” Bloat shouted back.
“Governor?” Big Bird said.
Bloat tried to smile at the joker. “Nothing. It’s nothing. Just some ghosts in my head.”
Teddy closed his eyes, searching for the dreams, searching for the path to the dreamtime’s power and finding them. There, the channels are there, running through Bloat and away… Teddy followed the path back, back, until he could feel the wind of the dreamtime tousling his hair. Bright forms of energy were spiraling in front of him, and they blocked the path, damming the flow. “Get away,” Teddy told them.
“You throw your weapons at us,” they cried. “You send us your demons; you create chaos, you drain our power. We can’t allow this.”
“You can’t stop it.”
One of the forms came closer; he recognized the leering face of Viracocha as the shaman or godling or whatever he was snorted. “You delude yourself. You’re weary. The power will burn you and scar you forever if you continue.”
“Tired or not, you’re not strong enough to stop me,” Teddy said. “Wyungare told me that.” He pursed his lips, blowing against the wind from his dream, and the energy forms screamed and cried as they fell away. The path was open once more. He could feel the energy, brilliant and invigorating, and he took it into himself, wrapping himself once more in the body of the Outcast.
The Outcast materialized himself on the ramparts of the Jersey Gate. The demons clustered around their master like bats wheeling about a cave mouth; the jokers looked at him expectantly. The damage here was far worse than on Ellis itself. His Wall had been breached, the massive gates facing the city had been torn from their hinges by the brute force of Snotman and Detroit Steel. Most of the gun emplacements were gone, the stones where they had been blackened and broken, and what Teddy saw there sickened him. Death was not pretty — even the swirling, diffuse view through the fog couldn’t soften it. There was a smell too: a sickly, sweet odor that made his stomach turn over. He brought a wind to take it away from the Rox, streamers of low gray clouds riding the gale outward.
The wounded were the worst because he could do nothing for them. The damage to the Wall he could fix — the Wall was only an image taken from his mind and made real with Bloat’s gift. But the jokers were real. Though he tried, he couldn’t close the wounds, knit the bones, or graft new skin over the bums. They moaned, they screamed, they clutched themselves. Their pain and terror brought tears to Teddy’s eyes. Your fault. This is your fault… He couldn’t tell where the words came from, but they clamored in his head. Teddy blinked away the tears, not caring that any of the others saw his weakness. He walked along the rim of the Wall, and with each of the worst of the wounded, he stole a bit of the power and sent them back to the island, to the emergency clinic that Kafka had hurriedly set up.
It was all he could do.
“You’ll be fine,” he told them, though he was sure most of them would die.
He came to the ruins of the main gatehouse. Modular Man was still there, watching the rubble carefully. Shroud came up from the joker brigade with the android. “Governor,” he said. “It was a little bit of hell here. The demons helped, but there were a lot of nats, and the aces… Modular Man…”
“I know.”
“Hope you have a good insurance policy,” Modular Man said.
“We’re okay.” Teddy said it loudly, so that all of them could hear. “You hear me? We’re okay. We still have our big guns: Modular Man here, Dylan, Pulse’s body, most of the jumpers. We’re still trying to wake up Croyd…” Teddy found that he was getting tired of the litany himself.
“Is it over?” Shroud asked. “Are you sure, Governor?”
Teddy listened to the head-voices, sorting out the jokers and jumpers and trying to find anyone who didn’t belong. It was easy to close his eyes. Very, very easy. There were two intruding voices in the chorus of the Rox. Two voices: both in agony, both rambling and confused. Below.
“They’re still alive,” he said.
“Won’t be for long, I’ll bet,” Shroud answered. “Can’t be much air down in that mess.”
The Outcast listened again. Detroit Steel — no, Mike was his name — was dying as Teddy listened, suffocating to death in his broken suit of armor. Snotman was pinned down, furious, with only enough energy to keep the enormous weight of concrete and stone from crushing him, and that ebbing with each moment. Shroud was right. They would die. Slowly. Horribly.
While he listened.
“Get them out,” he said to Modular Man.
“Hey, wait a minute, Governor,” Shroud protested, pulling at the Outcast’s cloak. “We just lost a lot of our people taking out these two bastards. And you want to dig ’em up again?” Around him, other jokers shouted agreement. “Let the fuckers die,” they said. “They’re getting what they deserve. Bury the mothers.”
Mikey… got get out ’cause the kid can’t take care of himself… he needs me … God don’t let me die like this all alone…
“Dig them up,” Teddy said again.
“Governor, are you crazy?”
The Outcast whirled around to face Shroud, and the joker drew back at the fury on Teddy’s face. “We won,” he told the jokers gathered around him. “We won and this time we’re going to ask for everything we need and we won’t settle for less. We’re going to shove this defeat down their throats. We’re going to make them pay for every joker who lost a life, for every drop of blood. I promise you that.” He paused. “But we gotta have some compassion. We gotta have some humanity. I won’t have anyone die like this, not when it doesn’t have to happen.”
He heard the thought, heard it from several of them in a dozen
variations. The governor’s gone soft. He’s scared and he’s lost his edge. Teddy even wondered if they were right. Maybe he should let them die. Maybe it made more sense. It just didn’t feel right. He didn’t want to have to hear their dying thoughts, didn’t know if he could bear the guilt. The governor’s gone soft…
But none of the jokers said the thought aloud.
“Governor, there is a certain problem with Snotman …” Modular Man interjected.
“I know that. You think I’m stupid?” Teddy took a deep breath, calming himself. “Get Detroit Steel out first. He’s not a problem — without the suit, he’s just a guy. Then start on Snotman. Take your time and be careful when you dig him up. I’ve been listening to him. He’s exhausted now and doesn’t have much strength left. Don’t touch him: uncover the feet and bind them, then the arms. Tie him up; don’t let anyone hit him or shoot him or harm him in any way. Don’t, for God’s sake, drop him. Just take him to the Iron Keep and throw — no, gently place — him in a cell by the others. Just keep him bound and alone so he can’t run against the walls or have someone else hit him.”
The Outcast looked at all of them, the sullen joker faces. “Dig them up,” he said again. “I want you all to help.”
He waited, wondering what he’d do if they refused. Obedient as he had to be, Modular Man had already gone to the mounded wreckage and begun levering away slabs of concrete. Slowly, Shroud turned and went to help the android, the others following.
Teddy, exhausted, felt his body dissolve.
The dungeon was damp and cold, and the blackness had a weight of its own. The bodysnatcher carried a torch to light his way down the narrow, twisting steps.
The girl was slumped against the wall in the back of her cell. There was straw in her hair. She lifted her head slowly, blinking at the light of the torch. After so much darkness, it must have been hard to bear. Her tears had left tracks through the dirt on her face. She stared up at the bodysnatcher with eyes gone numb and dead. Then somehow she recognized him. “Pulse?” Her voice was hoarse and raw. She got unsteadily to her feet, leaning on the wall. “Pulse, help me, please… She moved toward the bars.
“You should take better care of that meat,” the bodysnatcher told her. “Molly will be wanting it back. She’s sentimental like that.”
The girl in Molly Bolt’s body shrank back, suddenly afraid. “Oh, God,” she said. “You too.”
“Your daddy’s dead,” the bodysnatcher said. “Molly did him real nice. Smashed him like a fat blue bug. You should have been there. But then, you were, weren’t you?”
The girl just looked at him for a long moment, as if she couldn’t understand what he was saying. Then she started to scream. The bodysnatcher smiled and walked away.
Way down at the far end of the dungeon, he felt eyes watching as he passed. The bodysnatcher stopped and peered into the last cell, where a slender, half-naked black man sat cross-legged on the floor. “Your turn is coming,” he promised
“Excellent,” Wyungare replied. “I thought room service had forgotten about me. There’s been no shortage of roaches, but they’re a poor substitute for witchitty grubs.”
“That’s straw you’re sitting on,” the bodysnatcher told him. “What do you suppose would happen if I tossed the torch onto that nice dry straw?”
“You would stumble in the darkness on your way out, and be forced to grope your way up the stairs,” Wyungare pointed out.
His calm pissed the bodysnatcher off no end. “You’d burn to death, you stupid nigger!”
Wyungare shrugged. “That too,” he admitted.
The bodysnatcher was thinking about going to his light-form and burning a hole through the abo’s face when he heard a deep rumble far above, and the dungeon shuddered under his feet. He almost dropped the torch. “What was that?” he said, startled.
“The beginning of the end,” Wyungare told him.
The second explosion was much louder. An instant later, the shock wave shook the Rox like a bowl of stone Jell-O. The bodysnatcher lost his footing, stumbled to one knee.
The bodysnatcher left the Aborigine there to die in the darkness, and sprinted for the light. He ran up the steps. By the time he reached the surface, he was breathing hard.
The afternoon was dark as midnight. Screams, shouts, and moans of pain echoed through the fog. Acrid smoke burned his eyes. Someone was whistling, a high shrill sound like a teakettle starting to boil. The towers of the Rox were outlined dimly against the flickering reddish light of some huge fire on the far side of the island. The whistling grew louder, became a scream that filled the world. He saw the tall shadow of the jumpers’ tower turn to light. Then it was gone, while the night rained stone and fire.
Battle turned to Danny. “How’s the frontal assault progressing?”
She stared into space, rubbing her injured shoulder and listening to private voices whispering in her ears. “Not so good. They’ve been beaten back for now.”
Battle snorted. “Wimps,” he said. “Let’s go.”
As Battle strode off Danny grabbed Ray by the arm and surreptitiously held him back. “Doesn’t this underground playground strike you as odd?” she asked him.
Ray shrugged. “Bloat’s crazy.”
“Yeah, maybe. But he’s not irrational. He’s been doing a good job at holding off the frontal assault. Also” — she gestured around herself — “someone who was really insane couldn’t have built all this. It’s too well designed.”
They started after the others. “I see what you mean,” Ray said. “But so what?”
“All these traps,” she said. “All these obstacles he’s put in our path. Sure, some were pretty dangerous, but none were out and out deadly. It’s all like some big game with him.”
“Game,” Ray repeated. That word struck a chord, but just why he couldn’t say. “Game —” he said thoughtfully, then he stopped, staring.
Tacked to a stalagmite near the end of the chamber was a T-shirt similar in design to the one the old bridge-keeper had been wearing. Only this one bore the legend BLOAT FLOATS around the smiling Bloat-head silk-screened on it.
“Hey,” Ray called out, “wait a minute, everyone.”
The others hadn’t seen the T-shirt. They’d gone past it, almost reaching the door set in the chamber’s wall. They stopped, turned, and looked at Ray as he shouted.
“Look at this,” Ray said, gesturing at the shirt.
As he did, the Bloat-image winked at him. “Bloat floats,” the image said. “Do you?”
There was a grinding hum of machinery set in motion, and the floor of the chamber started to move and tilt. Ray grabbed a stalagmite and then grabbed Danny’s waist as she slipped past him, pulling her to him.
Battle let out a wild yell. Puckett grabbed his boss by the arm and grabbed Boyd around the waist and waited stoically until he slid toward another stalagmite that he managed to hook a foot around. Ray smelled salt water as the floor continued to rumble and tilt. “It’s a water trap,” he shouted, “opening into the bay!”
Nemo bellowed in fear and flung himself flat, desperately reaching for a stalagmite, but his clawing fingers missed by inches. Ray tensed, thinking about leaping after him, but Danny said softly, “There’s nothing you can do.”
They all watched, horrified, as Nemo, roaring and fighting for nonexistent purchase on the slippery chamber floor, slid inexorably toward the span of open water.
As he hit the water Ray shouted, “Swim for the other side.”
Nemo bobbed up and down, arms waving frantically over his head. “I can’t swim!” he shouted in an agonized voice, and then he was gone, the water closing sullenly over his head.
“Christ,” Ray muttered.
There was a moment’s silence; then the water split apart and something big and long heaved itself onto the level area of floor on the opposite side of the water trap. It was a fourteen-foot-long alligator, with a blue plastic hospital bracelet around its right front foreleg. Ray forgot the horror of t
he moment in sheer astonishment as it disappeared down the corridor on the trap’s opposite side.
Ray stared after it, hardly aware of the slim, hard-muscled body he held tightly against his own.
“Third time lucky,” Danny said to him. One of her slim, strong hands snaked up around his neck and pulled his face down to hers. Their lips touched; then she pulled away.
“Dead end, goddamn it,” Battle roared. “Goddamn dead end. There’s no way across this damn moat. Ray! Throw us a line and haul us the hell out of here! We’ll have to retrace our steps and hope the other corridor leads to that fat fuck’s throne room. Damn!”
Ray reached for his pack and the rope coiled in it, all the while staring at Danny. Once again, she had that internalized expression on her face, but Ray could think only of her sudden kiss, and the promise of more to come.
SATURDAY AFTERNOON
September 22, 1990
He waited inside his shell on the roof of the Jokertown Clinic, as he had waited a thousand times before.
Most of his screens were turned to commercial stations. WOR was broadcasting a Dodger road game. They were losing to the Seals out in San Francisco, 80 in the second. WPIX had Wheel of Fortune. But the networks were all news, and all the news was bad. What had von Hagendaas called it? The most powerful ace task force ever assembled… and the Rox had flushed them away like toilet paper.
Mistral, jumped. Pulse, jumped. Cyclone, believed dead. Detroit Steel and Snotman, buried under tons of rubble, believed dead. Elephant Girl, wounded, maybe mortally. And the Great and Powerful Turtle…
Tom laughed bitterly. The sound echoed dully in the close confines of the shell. His head was pounding, and one side of his face was stiff with dried blood where he’d smashed it during his tumble. Some heroes they’d turned out to be.
The military had resumed its shelling of the Rox. On CNN, Peter Arnett was broadcasting from the New Jersey, out in the Atlantic beyond Cape May. The decks were frantic with activity as the great battlewagon prepared to open up with its sixteen-inch guns. The open mouths of the huge turret guns loomed behind Amen, vast as caves. Tom was looking at them, and feeling sorry for the poor doomed jokers on the Rox, when Danny Shepherd finally returned. Finn was with her, the little palomino-pony centaur who had been running the clinic since Tachyon left.