Dealer's Choice w-11 Read online

  He pressed a button on the boom box and the Arab music was replaced by the sounds of John Philip Sousa. He buttoned up his blouse over the Judas Priest T-shirt, then tossed an army cap to Zappa, who put it on in place of his Arab headdress.

  Modular Man turned to see a black limousine driving slowly from a gate off in left field. Plainclothes security men hung on it or trotted alongside.

  A plump, red-faced civilian was walking toward the limo from the Dodgers dugout.

  “Hey, it’s the man himself!” Zappa had altered his voice to sound like an overeager deejay. “Here with his backup band, it’s the King of the Links, the Sultan of Suave, the Man a Heartbeat Away from the Oval Office Itself — here they are — Danny and the Dynamos!”

  The car came to a halt and one of the security men opened the rear door. The vice president stepped out and smiled. Zappa and Vidkunssen drew themselves up and saluted. Dan Quayle returned the salute and smiled again.

  “Stars and stripes forever,” he said.

  “Yes, sir,” said Zappa. “I agree with your sentiments, actually, but I think it’s ’American Eagle March.’”

  ITS’ THE VEEP, said the scoreboard. The letters, including the misplaced apostrophe, flashed brightly. There was scattered cheering from the bleachers.

  Quayle turned to Modular Man and offered his hand. “Glad you’re with us,” he said. “Heard from R2D2 lately?”

  Modular Man looked at him. “No,” he said. “I don’t believe so.”

  “Or C3PO?”

  “Afraid not.”

  “I saw Star Wars half a dozen times.”

  Modular Man wasn’t quite certain how to respond to this. “Good,” seemed appropriate enough.

  The plump, pink-faced civilian arrived.

  “Mr. von Herzenhagen,” Vidkunssen said. “Special Executive Task Unit.”

  Modular Man shook hands. Von Herzenhagen addressed Quayle. “I’ve just been on the SCARE hotline. Senator Hartmann’s coming out with a new recruit.”

  WHERE’S GEORGE??? said the scoreboard. Zappa turned to Vidkunssen. “Gunnar,” he said, “would you go up to whoever’s running the scoreboard and tell him I’m going to rip his arms off if he doesn’t knock it off?”

  “No problem,” said Vidkunssen. He trotted away.

  Zappa looked at von Herzenhagen, then at the Rox model. “I was just going to ask Modular Man to take a flight over the Ro — over Ellis Island, and drop some leaflets.”

  Von Herzenhagen gave the android a fatherly look. “Good,” he said. “Anything we can do to convince those people to give themselves up.”

  A small military helicopter arrived over the stadium and drowned out any further conversation. It circled the stadium twice and then flared and came to a landing near second base.

  Modular Man noticed that when the aircraft came near, some men appeared from the dugouts with shoulder-fired rockets. Just in case, he assumed, the craft turned hostile.

  You never knew with jumpers.

  The rotors began to slow. Gregg Hartmann got out, followed by a lean man in civilian clothes. Afterward, moving slowly on account of arm and leg shackles, was a strikingly handsome dark-haired man in plain civilian dress.

  Snotman.

  Cold dismay rolled through the android’s circuitry.

  Snotman, weighed down by the shackles, shuffled toward the pitcher’s mound under the guidance of the civilian. Gregg Hartmann came ahead and shook hands with the group.

  “General Zappa?” The thin man held up an ID case with a badge. “I’m Gregory, U.S. Marshal. I’m to release this man into your parole. Sign here.” Snotman looked up at Modular Man. The look was not friendly.

  Zappa signed the forms that Gregory held out, then undid the arm and leg shackles. Zappa offered to shake his hand, but Snotman chose instead to rub his chafed wrists.

  “I’m General Zappa. This is Mr. von Herzenhagen, Vice President Quayle, and Modular Man.”

  Snotman’s cold blue eyes stared at the android. “We’ve met,” he said.

  Gregory got into the helicopter, and it lifted off into the sky.

  “I’m glad you’re on our team,” said Quayle. Snotman didn’t answer. Von Herzenhagen whispered into Quayle’s ear. Quayle seemed surprised.

  “You’re ah —” he said.

  “The Reflector. Call me Reflector.”

  Quayle grinned in relief. “I suspected something — frankly — far more disgusting. I thought you were a joker that dripped, uh, mucus and —”

  Quayle’s speech faded beneath Snotman’s frigid glare. Quayle swallowed, then said, “We’re glad you’ve chosen this means to redeem your debt to society.”

  Snotman’s answer was simple. “I’ll kill any freak you like if it gets me out of Leavenworth. Not that Leavenworth is that bad, mind you, for someone like me.” He gave a thin smile. “I sort of run the place, actually. And the food’s better than what I’m used to.”

  Quayle paused. “Well,” he said, “I think it’s particularly good of you, considering you’re a joker.”

  “I’m not a joker.” The voice was sharp. “I used to be a joker. Croyd changed me, and now I’m the Reflector.”

  Von Herzenhagen stepped closer. His look seemed quite sincere. “We’re glad you’re with us, Reflector.”

  “I hate jokers,” Snotman continued. “I’ve got a lot of scores to settle with jokers. They gave me a lot more shit than the nats ever did.”

  “Whatever the reason.” von Herzenhagen said.

  Zappa looked from one to the next. “One big happy family,” he said.

  Tom had heard enough. He was getting queasy feelings about the company he was keeping. Von Hagendaas was bad enough, but now that Dan Fucking Qua vie had showed up, he had to say something.

  “YOU GUYS SOUND LIKE YOU JUST CAN’T WAIT TO GET IN THERE AND START A WAR,” Tom said. “DAMN IT, SENATOR HARTMANN IS TRYING TO SETTLE THIS PEACEFULLY, REMEMBER?”

  “Of course we do,” Vice President Quayle offered. “But if his mission should fail, we have to be prepared to —”

  Tom was out of patience. “TO WHAT?” he interrupted.

  “TO START KILLING JOKERS? WHY? ELLIS FUCKING ISLAND IS A GODDAMN RUIN BUILT ON TOP OF SHIP BALLAST. NOBODY GAVE TWO SHITS ABOUT IT UNTIL THE JOKERS MADE IT THEIR OWN.”

  “Turtle has a point,” Danny Shepherd said quietly.

  “Ellis Island is a national monument.” Quayle said. “It belongs to the people of the United States, not a gang of joker terrorists. Uh, and the Statue of Liberty too. Even more so.

  “Let me remind you that Bloat and his people have formally seceded from the United States,” von Hegenberg said stiffly. “That constitutes treason.”

  “No one has more sympathy for the jokers than I do,” Cyclone said, “but that doesn’t excuse terrorism.”

  Snotman glared up at the Turtle with open hostility. “Five will get you ten he’s a joker himself inside that tin can.”

  “Hey,” Detroit Steel put in. “Jokers, blacks, aliens, it don’t make no difference to me. This is America. But the law’s the law, right? And they been killing people, right?”

  “We lost almost six hundred men last month,” General Zappa said softly. “Good men. Brave soldiers.”

  “I SAW THE BODIES,” Tom said. “I SAW PLENTY OF DEAD JOKERS TOO. LET’S NOT FORGET WHO INVADED WHO. YOU GUYS HAVE HIT THE ROX TWICE, WITH NOTHING TO SHOW FOR IT BUT CASUALTY LISTS. NOW YOU WANT US TO DO YOUR DIRTY WORK FOR YOU. ACES AGAINST JOKERS. MORE BLOOD, MORE KILLING. WELL, FUCK THAT SHIT.”

  Tom realized that most of the enlisted men in the ballpark had stopped whatever they were doing. Everyone was watching the little drama down on the infield.

  “Turtle,” Gregg Hartmann said quietly, “you’re right, the jokers out there are victims. I know what they’ve suffered. But this isn’t the way. You know it, I know it, Bloat probably knows it too. He can’t win. Bush will never back down now. He’s too afraid he’d be perceived as a wimp.”

  Dan Quayle gave H
artmann a startled look. “You can’t —”

  Hartmann ignored him. “Those are political realities, whether we like them or not,” he continued. “The country is afraid. The jumpers terrify them, and intelligence claims there are more than a hundred jumpers out on the Rox. And Bloat… that castle of his… the Wall… armies of demons out of Hieronymus Bosch … all of a sudden, no one seems to know the limits of Bloat’s powers, or what he might do next.”

  Inside his shell, Tom shifted uncomfortably in his seat. “You can’t argue with that kind of fear,” Hartmann was saying. “The Rox is going to fall. Bush will use everything he has to bring it down, up to and including nuclear weapons. That’s why this afternoon is so important. We must convince Bloat that he cannot win. And for that, I need your help.”

  “I’M ALL FOR TALKING WITH BLOAT,” Tom said. “BUT WHAT IF HE WON’T LISTEN?”

  Hartmann sighed. “Then each of us will have to search his own conscience, and do what we must. But I tell you this — the Rox is a wild card problem. Wild cards should clean it up. There’s too much fear and hatred in this country already. The nation needs to see that not all wild cards are terrorists and killers. They need to be reminded that some of you are heroes.”

  Hartmann’s familiar eloquence hadn’t left him when his political career came crashing down in Atlanta. He was as persuasive as ever. “ALL RIGHT.” Tom said. “I’M IN.”

  Von Hagendaas smiled. “Of course you are,” he said. “I never doubted it. We’re offering them amnesty, you know. You can’t get more fair than that.”

  “They don’t deserve amnesty,” Snotman said angrily. “I deserve amnesty. They deserve punishment. Humiliation. Pain. Everything they gave me. Doubled.”

  “That kind of attitude won’t do anybody any good,” Danny Shepherd told him sharply.

  “I think…” Modular Man began.

  Snotman turned on him. “You’re a machine. Nobody gives a damn what you think. We might as well ask the jeep its opinion.”

  The android gave him an apprehensive look, and fell quiet.

  General Zappa said. “I saw the body bags at Fort Dix after last month’s try for the Rox. If there’s one chance in the million that talking will save that from happening to my command, I’m taking that chance.” He turned to Gregg Hartmann. “You’ve got the ball, Senator. Just put it right over the plate.”

  Building things was one of the Outcast’s favorite pleasures. Adding to the maze of caverns underneath the Rox was bliss. The Outcast grinned as he worked. Anymore, he could actually fee/ the energy coursing through him. The channel in which the power ran was almost visible, leading from his mind to the sleeping vastness of his Bloat-body — the engine driving the fantasy of the Rox. The governor’s body was a deep well and the Outcast drank deeply from his other self.

  Every day his surging will was stronger. Every day he could do more, as Bloat gorged himself on the waste products of the Rox. Every day he could spend more time dreaming himself as the Outcast, no longer trapped in Bloat.

  Ahh, my dear Kelly/Tachyon. I wish you were here. I wish you could be with me now. I could love you the way you deserved to he loved, you and little Illyana…

  That was the only sadness in him at all. The Outcast hummed tunelessly as he worked, and he smiled.

  Tendrils of purple-blue light splashed from his fingertips and from the stone set in the knob of his staff, leaping out into the darkness of the cavern far under New York Bay. He wove the light like a fabric, fashioning it.

  “Let me guess: a dragon.”

  “Right,” the Outcast said, not looking at the penguin. The voice was enough to tell him who it was. “Every good dungeon needs a dragon.”

  “Y’know, fat boy, for someone with a half-decent imagination, sometimes you ain’t as creative as you could be. I mean, c’mon, a dragon’s such a cliché. A standard, overused icon like a unicorn. You read too much Tolkien as a kid, y’know that? I think — hey! Whassa matter?”

  The lines of force composing the Outcast’s blossoming dragon form snarled and twisted, the solidity of the contours fading. “I don’t know…” he said. He raised his staff higher, straining to pull more energy from Bloat’s reserves. Something drained the energy from him, pulling it away. As the Outcast struggled to retain control, a huge, glowing white sword materialized. Swinging through the darkness with an audible whuff, the weapon sliced the birthing dragon in half and then shattered into a hundred streaming meteors. The penguin made a sound like a strangling cat. Pumping furiously with its tiny legs, it skated away over the rocky ground, its funnel hat askew. The Outcast reverted to Teddy behavior at the magical assault, burying his head in his hands as streamers of burning phosphorus hissed past him.

  “This isn’t the way,” a voice said. Teddy (No, he told himself, I am the Outcast. Not Bloat, and especially not Teddy…) peeked through his fingers. An ancient, olive-skinned man in a brightly colored serape was staring back at him. The old one’s face was leathery and almost flat. It had an Indian look to it, alloyed perhaps with Spanish blood, like pictures Teddy/Bloat/Outcast had seen of native South Americans.

  “You have interfered too many times. You ignore all the signs, and you’re utterly ignorant of what you’re doing,” the old man said. “I can no longer tolerate this. You make the Old Ones angry. They curse me.” Muscles wobbled in an empty bag of skin as the old one flung his arm out. “I brought you here to deal with you.”

  For the first time, the Outcast noticed his surroundings. He was no longer in the Rox’s caverns but on a lonely peak in the midst of a tall range of mountains. A cold mountain wind scoured his face. To breathe the frozen, rich air was both painful and exhilarating all at once.

  “Hey, man, I don’t have no quarrel with you,” the Outcast said. He tapped his staff on the ice-glazed rocks so that the amethyst glowed warningly. “Just leave me alone.”

  Bloat had two types of dreams. Lately, he was most often wandering the Rox as it truly was, usually as the Outcast and often in the company of the penguin. But the initial dreams, the ones that had first hinted at the power, in those dreams he walked in a surreal world, one littered with symbols and images and strange landscapes, a world that shifted under his feet and where things of myth and legend and tales lived all jumbled together. That strange place had always seemed real too. Still, he’d never had both dreams together. It had always been one or the other. This was the first time one had blended into the other.

  He willed himself to wake up, to be Bloat again, sitting in his fantasy castle in his fantasy land.

  He remained where he was.

  “You are Bloat,” the old man said. “Teddy.”

  “I’m the Outcast, not Bloat. And Teddy died years ago.”

  The leathery face cracked and folded under the freight of a brief smile, yet the lips were the only part that moved. The eyes — dark and brown like plowed earth — had no amusement in them at all. Instead, they were sad, gathering with tears. “A name means nothing and everything.” Then the smile vanished, as if it had never been there. There was only the quiet sadness and behind it, like a thundercloud, a lurking violence.

  “Yeah. So who the fuck are you? Are you someone else I dreamed up?”

  The Outcast knew that his defiance stemmed at least partly from the ignominy of having cowered like poor Teddy during those first few seconds of contact. He stiffened his full lips, let his muscular chest widen and fill. He could see the sinews rippling in his forearm as he gripped his staff. He looked fierce and wise. He looked good.

  The old man barked laughter. “I’m nothing of yours,” he answered softly. Do you really have such an inflated sense of your own worth that you think you can rule this place?” The man spat the globule hit the rocks and froze instantly. “You may call me Viracocha.”

  “Great. Viracocha. You dragged me to this damn mountaintop?”

  Viracocha nodded. He spread his hands wide as if in benediction; at the same moment the sun broke through the cloud cover. Great co
lumns of dusty yellow shot down from the sky, touching the blue spines of the mountain range. “This is my land, a vast place, but only a small part of the greater vista beyond.”

  “Very pretty. You probably do a great business with picture postcards.”

  “You mock me.”

  “You were first in your class, weren’t you?”

  Viracocha hissed, a sound like that of a thousand writhing vipers. The sibilance echoed from the stone cliffs surrounding them. “You are an abomination, Teddy,” Viracocha shouted. “You steal from all of us. You send your creatures to walk here where they don’t belong. I listen to the whispers in the winds; I’m not alone in my anger. They all talk of you, those who may walk here, and they spit when they say your name. I tell you, Outcast or Bloat or Teddy — you don’t know with what you play.”

  “I play with my own power.”

  “No.” The infinite sadness in the old, rheumy eyes hardened. “You have no conception of what it is you do or how you do it or why.”

  “Tell it to the fucking nats,” the Outcast shot back. “I handled them. I built a whole place all my own. I’m the governor. I’m the Outcast. I’m the one who built caverns, who gave life to dream creatures, who built a wall and palaces and gardens on a barren island. I did that, man. I got too many real things to worry about than dreams like you.”

  The Outcast could feel his power returning and settling in his bones. He could sense the link to the sleeping Bloat-body, stretched across some intangible mind-barrier he’d never felt before. He could move his will back along the lines of power to that division and push; he could open a rift in the dream and find his way back. The realization calmed him. His breathing slowed.

  “Look at you,” Viracocha said. “You’ve become so full of yourself. The others — they said that you’d learn, that you just needed help like any fledgling. ‘We should be patient,’ they said. They dismissed my warnings, saying that you’d lose your ability to interfere with us or that your own kind would take care of you finally. But none of that has happened. You’ve grown from an irritating scratch to a gaping wound in our land. I say it is time to stop the bleeding and close that wound.”