Its rider had slipped off, falling on the other side of the stallion’s body. Ray leapt over the horse before it dissolved and landed on the Fist ace, snarling and pummeling his face and body with hammer blows that were too fast to see.
The ace was much stronger than Ray. He grabbed Ray around the waist and flung him away. Ray twisted in midair like a cat and landed on his feet. His opponent lowered his head and charged.
Ray put out his hands and grabbed the ace’s antlers, but his huge foe had built up too much momentum to be stopped. Ray screamed as half a dozen points penetrated his side. The ace tossed his head, lifting Ray off the ground and flinging him against the cavern wall.
Ray slammed against the rock, feeling his spine vibrate as if he’d been hit by a car. Blood spewed out from the deep wounds in his side.
“Motherfucker,” Ray ground out. He clamped an elbow against the wound and the ace charged him again.
This time Ray sidestepped. He lashed out with his leg as the ace passed him, tripping the Fist who fell heavily to the floor. Ray was all over him in a second. The ace twisted under him and got to his hands and knees, Ray clinging to his back.
“Fuck you, you fucking animal bastard!” Ray screamed. He grabbed the rack sprouting from the right side of the ace’s head. He heaved, twisting with all his strength, and the antler snapped.
The ace cried out in distress and pain. Ray hammered him twice in the kidneys, linked an arm around his throat, and yanked, flattening him to the ground. Ray shoved the tip of the antler against his foe’s neck hard enough to draw blood.
“Call off the dogs!” Ray screamed, spraying spittle. “Call off the flicking dogs or I’ll cut your flicking throat!” He yanked on the ace’s neck for emphasis.
“I can’t,” the ace gasped. "Do it!” Ray screamed, jabbing the antler deeper into the flesh of his neck.
And suddenly the hounds were gone.
“So,” Danny asked him afterward, “you like this model?”
“I like this model just fine,” Tom said. His hand moved down the smooth skin of her back. “My favorite.”
“Hah,” Danny said. She rolled over, straddled him. “Liar!” She was all bare skin and energy. “You like her better, admit it.”
“Who?” Tom said, confused.
“Me,” Danny said. “The me in the hospital. Admit it.”
“Why would I like her better?” Tom said.
“I designed her for men to like. She’s got all the features. That gorgeous hair. Longer legs. Bigger breasts.”
“I like your breasts just fine,” Tom said. He touched one of them, watched her nipple harden. This Danny had a tomboy’s body, all girlish energy and taut athleticism.
“That feels good,” Danny said. “Don’t stop.” He didn’t. “Most men like them bigger than this,” she said. She examined her chest critically. “This isn’t bad, but hers are better. My ass is tighter. But she’s tighter in other places.”
He was getting confused. “Are you jealous?”
Danny laughed, shook her head. “You men are all so weird,” she told him. “How could I be jealous of myself?”
Tom was getting hard again. Danny noticed. She reached back with her hand, fondled him, then rose a little off the bed and slipped him back inside her with a small gasp of pleasure.
“This isn’t happening to me,” Tom said.
“Sure it is,” Danny said. She bent forward, kissed him, rocked back and forth gently. He felt her breasts brushing lightly against his chest as she moved.
Tom was just beginning to lose himself in her when suddenly she stopped. He felt her body stiffen.
“What’s wrong?” he asked.
At first she didn’t seem to hear him. Her eyes were far away. She trembled, and climbed off him without a word. "Danny, what is it?” Torn asked, sitting up in bed. “Did I do something wrong?”
That got through to her. She gave him a quick glance. “Not you,” she said. She stood in the center of the room, naked, trembling, turning as if she were looking for something only she could see. “The dogs.” she said in a scared voice. “Oh, shit.”
Torn was out of bed in an instant, moving toward her. Danny backed away, but she didn’t seem to see him. Her hands came up in front of her face. “No!” she shouted.
Something picked her up and flung her backward. She smashed up back against the bookshelves on the wall. The shelves collapsed; books fell like hail, bouncing off her. She never felt them. Her eyes were wide with terror. She screamed.
Tom ran to her, tried to cradle her in his arms. She fought him with hysterical strength, still screaming, clawing at him. “Danny, stop,” he said. “Its me, it’s Tom, what’s wrong? Danny!” She wasn’t hearing him, she wasn’t seeing him. She raked him with her nails, broke free, spun around. fighting desperately against the empty air.
Her calf ripped open in a flower of blood. Danny let out a shriek that knifed right through Tom’s soul. He watched in helpless horror as a wet gash opened beneath her chin, weeping blood. He pulled her to him, grabbed the sheet, tried to stanch the flow of blood.
When a chunk of her right forearm blossomed red and pulled itself loose from her flesh, fighting like a living thing, that was when Tom began to scream.
Ray released his hold on his foe’s throat, but in a final bit of anger and blood lust, he grabbed him by the hair and bounced his face off the floor. The ace cried out in pain and Ray leapt to his feet. looking back to where the others had been trying to hold off the hounds.
Battle had his back against the wall. His eyes were wild, his face covered with sweat, and he was pulling the trigger of his empty assault rifle again and again, aiming at nothing.
Cameo was slumped against the floor, the fedora perched crookedly on her head. She looked up when she felt Ray’s eyes on her and waved. She was all right.
And Danny. Ray took two steps toward her, then stopped, groaning. Miraculously, her face had been untouched, but that was about the only part of her unbloodied. Her throat had been ripped out, her right arm was gone. Her Kevlar armor had given the hounds pause, but only momentarily. She looked worse than he had after his meeting with Mackie Messer, but Danny couldn’t put herself back together again. He turned away and let out a mixed scream of pain and anger, whirling on the big ace who was kneeling slumped forward, one hand to his face, wiping away the blood that was streaming from his broken nose. He looked up at Ray. His eyes were no longer glowing. “I called them off,” he said sullenly, “but was only able to do it because they’d been blooded.”
“You shit bastard,” Ray said. He hurled himself at the ace, but somebody grabbed him around the waist and tried to pull him back.
“Back off, Ray.” It was Battle. “Don’t you see? He’s our ticket to Bloat’s throne room. Don’t kill him now!”
Ray stopped, suddenly icily calm. He reached down and took Battle’s wrist, and twisted it, peeling his arm away from his waist.
“Oww!” Battle said, going down to one knee.
“Get off me, asshole,” Ray ground out. “Don’t ever touch me again.”
“Okay, okay,” Battle said. “Just let me go.”
Ray tossed him aside and turned to look at the Fist ace, who was staring at him sullenly. Just as quickly as it had hit him, the blood lust left. He tried to get it back, but somehow couldn’t. “Bloat didn’t kill Danny, this bastard did.”
Battle stood, rubbing his wrist. “I’m willing to overlook this breach of discipline this once” he began, but Ray cut him off.
“Shut the fuck up,” Ray said. He took a deep breath. “All right. You’re right. This hairy bastard is our ticket to Bloat’s throne room.” Battle’s eyes gleamed. “Yes, of course. I knew you’d understand.”
Ray stared at him without saying anything. But he was thinking, And there we’ll settle things once and for all, one way or the other.
One way or the other.
Now that he looked at the bodies and bits of bodies, Modular Man recognized a number
of parts other than Patchwork’s eye. A jaw, part of the scalp with its brown hair still attached, a slim hand with its thin, knobby wrist
Modular Man took the hand. It didn’t seem cold, but neither did it respond to his touch.
A shell landed in the courtyard. The Rox trembled. The android unwrapped his gun again, detached the power cable, threw the tarpaulin out onto the ground, and began to throw parts into the tarp.
He wasn’t entirely certain whose parts they all were. He’d sort them out later.
More shells landed as he worked. Glasswork shattered, stones fell. Then there was a shriek overhead and a huge flame exploded through the sky toward Jersey, a fire seemed to suck the air from Travnicek’s tower. Shattered stonework was blasted from the ramparts.
Fuel-air bomb, the android thought. It had fallen a hundred yards short, otherwise it would have killed everyone.
Strange lights, bright fractal images, seemed to hang in the air. Part of Travnicek’s tower, the wall between it and the Crystal Keep, melted like a river. Bloat was inside, among a litter of corpses. The Statue of Liberty’s torch had fallen across him, and he was asleep or unconscious.
A whole host of Bosch creatures — pigs with butterfly wings. a witch on a broomstick, amid them Christ with a halo — materialized in midair, all singing the Yale fight song. “Boola boola boola boo!” they hooted, then passed through a door that hadn’t been there a moment before. The door slammed behind them.
There was a shout, and Shroud, coughing in the smoke, staggered to the hole in the keep. “Help!” he yelled. “We’ve got to rescue the governor!”
The android looked at him. “I don’t work for you anymore,” he said.
He threw some last parts on his pile and bundled the tarpaulin.
Carefully, so as not to spill anything, he rose into the sky.
Someone was screaming, a pitiful wailing like that of a lost child. It’s okay, he said to the voice, it’ll be okay. He opened his eyes to see who the child was.
It was him.
Bloat’s throat was sore, and the keening sorrow echoing in the silent Great Hall was his own voice. Around him, the Crystal Castle was a shambles. He had been thrown from his platform, his immense body ripping free of many of Kafka’s inlet pipes. Raw sewage spilled over huge open wounds. Liberty’s torch had been sheared from its supports the massive sculpture had fallen on top of him, slicing into the slug-white body. Bloat could feel its weight on him. Most of the roof was down, the girders and supports and broken glass littering him like confetti. A monstrous hole had been torn in the back wall.
He had crushed his phalanx of guards. They were underneath him, suffocated and dead, but the same accident of fate that had killed them had saved Kafka and Pulse: Bloat’s body had shielded them from the worst of the blast. Kafka was stirring, spinning like a roach on its back in the detritus of the hail. Pulse was brushing bright glass from his/her clothing and wiping away a spray of blood from a cut on the forehead.
Most strange of all, Wyungare was in the Great Hall, staring up at Teddy’s head as if he’d been expecting Bloat to awake at any moment. Teddy was beyond surprise; seeing Wyungare here, now, made him feel nothing. Bloat was shivering, his entire body trembling slightly. No one else seemed to notice, but Teddy could feel it, like a fever chili.
Outside, the fog lingered, but through ragged tendrils, he could see the bombed-out buildings left from the brutal shelling. Only a few listless mermen were stationed around the room. Their fish-mounts drooped so that their fins touched the floor, their scales were without luster and tattered. His jokers were dead or had fled.
Kafka managed to right himself. “Guards!” Bloat’s chamberlain barked, but Bloat waved a hand — that was more effort than he expected — the gesture more a flap than an imperious command.
“They’re dead,” he said. His mouth tasted of dust.
Kafka gaped. Zelda stared with her usual antipathy, though she kept her true thoughts hidden behind a carefully constructed wall of images. Teddy closed his eyes for a few moments, ignoring Zelda’s hostility and Kafka’s concern. He sorted through the mindvoices of the Rox to find Battle and Billy Ray. He heard incoherent bits of panicked thoughts and mixed images of glowing-eyed dogs, fierce warhorses, and Herne. The Hunt was on them. That fight had begun.
“They’re going to die,” he said. A gout of blood suddenly gushed from his mouth, surprising him with its violence. Bright scarlet splashed on his chest and over the mound of his body. “So am I, I think,” he said wonderingly. Then, to Wyungare: “Did … you know that the penguin…” he began and couldn’t finish.
“…I know.”
“I brought it back once before. I’ll do it again, once I’ve rested. If I live. God, it hurts. It hurts a lot.”
“I know.” The Aborigine took a few steps forward through the rubble. “Teddy, they’re not going to let you rest,” he said softly. “They’re not going to give you time to get better. Not now.” He seemed to be listening to voices in his own head, voices Teddy couldn’t hear. “I came to give you a last chance.”
Teddy snickered halfheartedly. “I thought I had to order before midnight tonight. You know: offer void where prohibited.” The torch was getting heavier and he couldn’t laugh. The smell of bloatblack was worse than he’d ever experienced, and the wounds in his gargantuan flanks burned as if napalm had been set in them.
The weariness hit him again; the trembling in his body becoming stronger. The body of Bloat shuddered, rattling the few pipes that still pierced him until they sounded like a bad thunder sound effect. The pores of his grotesque body puckered and vomited streams of bloatblack, though the waste wasn’t black this time but thin, greenish, and diarrheic. I really don’t feel well.
“…already going to hit you again,” Wyungare was saying.
“And I’ll send them to the dreamtime. Again,” Teddy insisted, though he knew it was bravado. A bluff. He had no strength left. He heard the resignation and despair that Wyungare’s words brought to Kafka, Pulse, and the other jokers. They were as drained as he was.
The shaking of Bloat’s body increased, small wavelets rippling under the skin. Bloat’s pores spat out a mucus-like, thick liquid, and the trembling became an uncontrolled spasm that tore the rest of the pipes loose from his body. More untreated sewage gushed over Bloat and the raw wounds and poured onto the floor. Teddy howled at the searing pain.
Pulse laughed.
“Governor!” Kafka shouted, panicked. “We have to shut off these lines! The torch.…I need some help”
Wyungare watched, his gaze finding Teddy as he whimpered. “You see?” he said softly.
The pain was worse than Teddy could have imagined. He gasped for breath, the words coming out in shrill bursts. Bloat was shuddering like a great white maggot on God’s grill. “I’m tired of all of it. Call your shamans together. Make me a fucking nat so they’ll leave me alone.”
Wyungare frowned. “If you do that, you must know that everything here that you have made will disappear. Everything. All that you’ve created will dissolve back into the dreamtime.”
“Fuck the Rox,” Teddy said defiantly. God it burns, it burns. I’m going to die, the Bloat-body is going to tear itself apart and I’ll die with it… Kafka had fled into the next room; Teddy could hear him trying to shut off the intake valves. “What the hell has being a joker ever gotten me but pain and problems? Let someone else worry about it from now on. I don’t want to be a joker. I hate it.”
Teddy thought he saw disappointment in Wyungare’s walnut eyes, in the folds of his coffee-dark face. But the man nodded. “All right,” he said simply. “That’s your choice, then.”
Wyungare sank down to the floor, sitting cross-legged in front of Bloat. He began a low chanting rhythm, slapping his hands against his thighs in counterpoint to the words.
Even in the welter of anger and irritation, confusion and turmoil around him, Teddy should still have picked up on it sooner. But bodysnatcher had been spilling
out a steady stream of vitriol from the beginning, and in his own pain he simply didn’t notice that the thoughts had changed from fantasy to intent. He caught the threat an instant too late.
…kill the ugly traitorous worm…
Bloat couldn’t move. There was nothing left of his power to stop her.
He was going to sell them out!
The bodysnatcher listened from the balcony. The maggot mountain was as weak as all the rest. The nigger had talked him right out of whatever guts he’d started with. Who the hell had let the nigger out of his cell, anyway? He should have killed him when he had the chance; now it was too late.
“Fuck the Rox,” Bloat was saying, in his high little-boy’s voice. Then he screamed as another pipe ripped loose from his flesh. He was whimpering like a baby as he said, “What the hell has being a joker ever gotten me but pain and problems? Let someone else worry about it from now on. I don’t want to be a joker. I hate it.”
The bodysnatcher never heard the rest of it. His rage was a blinding red scream inside him. The nigger hunkered down in a squat and started some kind of chant. Bloat was buying it. He was giving up. The bodysnatcher thought of Prime and David and Blaise and K.C. and Molly, and then of Blueboy and the rest, the ones who died when the tower collapsed. It was Bloat’s fault, he realized. The slug had stopped a thousand other shells, but not that one, oh, no, that one he’d let through. Just like he’d let Juggler and the others walk off to die, like he’d stood by and watched while the freaking Oddity snapped David’s neck. He’d known. The maggot always knew. And he let it happen anyway. Bloat wanted the jumpers dead, he’d wanted it all along. And now he wanted to run away and hide.
I’ll kill the traitorous ugly worm NOW, the bodysnatcher thought. He went to his light-form.
All around him, time stopped. The world seem to catch its breath and stand trembling. Everything stretched and yawned away from him. The mountain that was Bloat receded into infinity. The room was bathed in a blue gloom. The chanting, the screaming, the gurgle of Bloatblack, the distant sounds of battle; all gone. Silence reigned.