Dealer's Choice

Saturday night

September 22, 1990

On the heels of a strong north wind, through a storm of fire, carrying his new weapon wrapped in a tarpaulin, Modular Man returned to the Rox. Forgetting about shoot-and-scoot tactics, Zappa had finally unleashed a continuous barrage from his full arsenal, and though a lot was inaccurate, enough was hitting the target to continually outline the Rox in a glow of fire. Broken turrets yawned to the murky sky alongside shattered domes. Weapons lay abandoned on the ramparts. Smoke rose from the burning.

The last hour of the Rox had come.

The android timed the falling shells, waited for a lull, and dropped into Travnicek’s tower. As he flew over the inner bailey he saw that craters of various sizes had shattered the symmetry of the stone flags. The smell of high explosive hung in a noxious cloud. There were dead people, and parts of people, scattered in the rubble.

Modular Man dropped down the long tube of the tower. At the bottom he found Travnicek’s door still sealed. He knocked, received no response.

He put a hand to the door. It was hot to the touch.

He took the tarp off his weapon and aimed it at the door.

The gun’s official designation was XM-214, but was better known as a Six-Pack. It was a six-barreled Gatling gun developed for the military, a little over two feet long and capable of firing 4000 rounds per minute. Modular Man had stolen it, along with most of his other conventional weaponry, from a military arsenal.

He couldn’t mount it normally because the Turtle had seriously wrenched his shoulder mounts, but he’d lightened the weapon by removing the power pack and run a cable through the torn shoulder to his own generators. He set it for the lower rate of fire — a mere 400 rpm — stood so as to minimize the chance of ricochet, and aimed the weapon at the door.

He had to know. He had to know officially. Otherwise he’d just have to obey the last set of orders, defending the Rox till there was nothing left.

The barrels spun too fast for the eye to follow. The weapon was very loud in the closed space. The Six-Pack tore ragged chunks out of the door. Gas and smoke boiled out. The android reached through the door, spun the wheel from the inside, and opened it.

A cruise missile dropped dozens of cluster bombs somewhere on the Rox, the rolling boom going on forever, the light so bright it flashed through the semitransparent tower shaft and cast weird, flickering shadows on the dense, swirling smoke.

Travnicek was lying dead on his smoldering carpet in a sprawl of extended, flaccid neck organs and torn cilia. Modular Man bent by the body, turned it over, touched the neck, and sought a pulse. He couldn’t find one.

Modular Man stood up on his single leg. He paused a moment to see if anything would happen, if there was some hardwired circuit he didn’t know about telling him what he’d have to do next.

Nothing.

He was free.

He wondered what kind of moral universe he’d just entered. Probably, he thought, the same one Travnicek had lived in all along.

Somehow, though, he’d gotten away with it. That’s what seemed to be going on here, people getting away with things. The jumpers had got away with an appalling amount of carnage, so much the military had to be called in to suppress them, and Bloat had got away with an immense amount so far, and whoever was in Pulse was probably still getting away with it, with killing thousands in what seemed to be a personal war against all.

There was a huge explosion and the Rox seemed to jump six inches to the left.

Time to get himself and Patchwork out of here.

Modular Man bent to wrap his weapon in the tarp again. Something on the floor caught his attention.

Patchwork’s brown-gold-flecked eye, gazing blankly from a mass of rubble.

The young Aborigine walked along the beach toward the besieged castle. He glanced out across the water at the topless towers of Manhattan. There seemed a respite in the fighting. Could there be a truce?

Something whistled low and fast across the bay. As it neared the Rox, it simply blinked out of sight. There was a small clap of thunder as air filled the void where the cruise missile had been. Air displacement made the end of the smoke trail suddenly all ragged.

Wyungare smiled, but not happily. No truce.

Certainly there had not been for the past two hours since Wyungare had packed the motley convoy of Jack the Gator, Bagabond’s old black cat, the bruised Detroit Steel, an exhausted Reflector, and a nearly comatose Mistral back across the dangerous waters of the lower bay toward safety.

Wyungare had then spent nearly an hour hunkered on a canted slab of broken concrete, staring at the war-torn skies, but not truly seeing them. He was inside, down in the lower world, talking with the guardian warreen, the spirit of Wyungare’s companion beast. He had not reacted to or even noticed when debris from the increasing number of shells and ground-based missiles had sliced the air around him. There were priorities, and now it was more important to gather strength and resolve for the trial the man guessed he would be faced with soon.

The warreen had bid him farewell and good fortune with both affection and weariness. It was, Wyungare knew, not at all a goodbye.

In his second hour after escaping from the collapsed dungeon, Wyungare felt the fine engines of his muscles and bones beginning to function in harmony again as he wandered the tattered beaches of the Rox. Occasionally he found injured survivors he could help. For some he stanched the bleeding with bits of multicolored wire as tourniquets. He found ragged bushes, the leaves of which reminded him of mallee scrub. He made rudely blended poultices. He taught one woman to press the point on her torn artery that would keep her from bleeding to death for now. He tried to give her the courage to stay patiently in place — and alive — until aid might arrive.

Another man, he realized, was too close to death and in too much pain. Wyungare gave him release as quickly and mercifully as he could. He used his hands.

After that, Wyungare knew it was time to face that which he had discussed with the warreen. He walked upright and deliberately along the margin of raw sand toward the castle.

What looked like three cruise missiles came in low across the water from three different directions. The scream filled the skies and Wyungare’s hearing. Two of the blunt torpedo shapes flickered out of existence at the last possible moment before detonation. The third slammed squarely into the golden dome.

The explosion lifted Wyungare off his feet and hurled him back along the sand. Shards of castle flipped lazily end over end, then started spiking the packed sand like the knives of little boys playing mumblety-peg. The Aborigine lay dazed for a few moments, and saw a ton chunk of masonry bury itself a few meters from his feet. The ground coughed in pain and then was still.

He heard a few desultory splashes as the last of the sky-born debris plunged into the water.

Wyungare shook his head, sat up, then levered himself to his feet. Bloat’s refuge had been in bad shape before; now it looked like a sandcastle kicked to wreckage by a tribe of feral children.

Could there be anyone left alive inside?

Wyungare concentrated. Yes. Some of the life within the destroyed complex was agonized, but it was still vital.

He would go inside and find Bloat.

There were echoes of a scream and then the sound of an explosion. Somewhere in that reverberation, Bloat heard bodysnatcher and Kafka arguing.

“You can’t disturb the governor!” Kafka shrieked. “He’s sleeping. He needs to rest.”

“Fuck that, roach!” bodysnatcher shouted back. “He hasn’t got time to rest. None of us have any time left.”

Bloat’s eyelids seemed to have the weight of manhole sewer lids, but he forced them open. “Shut up, both of you,” he managed to grate out.

Kafka whirled around stiffly, craning his roach-head back to look up at Bloat. “Governor, I —”

That was all he got out. In that second, Bloat heard the alarm from one of the remaining radar units — far, far too late. In an instant that seemed to last a year, Kafka stood there, his mouth open, the shell-like body bowed backward. Pulse — bodysnatcher — stood behind him with hands on hips. His joker guards were arrayed before him like a shield, their weapons at ready and trained on bodysnatcher. The Great Hall glittered around him, glistening in the dark from a thousand lamps.

And it all shattered.

The image of his face graven on the ceiling collapsed in a ruin of steel, glass, and plaster. Something dark and sinister streaked overhead, tearing through walls and into the room behind him. The world exploded. Fire rained back into the Great Hall, the concussion tore at the building with violent sound, and suddenly he could hear nothing but the thundering and see only the fire and the falling stone and brick and steel and glass and even his immense bulk was lifted up and thrown sideways and he — mercifully, he thought — lost himself again.

He had pretty much decided that she wasn’t coming when the dogs began to bark.

Tom went out to the porch to wait for her. He’d left the gate open and put the dogs on chains. As he watched her headlights come down Hook Road through the fog and turn into the junkyard, he asked himself for the hundredth time just what the fuck he thought he was doing. He still didn’t have an answer. He never told anyone his name. He never brought anyone to the junkyard. But this was a night for firsts.

She parked right in front of the shack. It was his Danny who got out of the car. The first one he’d met. But somewhere along the way, she’d combed out her hair and traded her blue jeans for a dress. She looked around at the junkyard, gave him a lopsided grin. “This isn’t the way it is in your comic book.”

“Tell me about it,” Tom forced himself to say. His mouth was dry. “Come on in.”

Danny took something out of the car. It looked like a baseball bat, wrapped in canvas. She carried it up to the house.

“What’s that?” Tom asked as she stepped into the shack. He felt incredibly awkward. His house was a mess, a rundown fifty-year-old shack in a junkyard. Why the hell had he let her come?

“The Coast Guard fished it out of the drink,” she said. “They thought it was part of a body.” She put the packet down on the table, opened it.

Inside was Modular Man’s leg.

“You must have pulled it off just when Mistral hit us.”

Except for the torn wires and burnt circuitry dangling from the upper thigh, it looked almost human. Tom stared at it with revulsion for a moment. Then he began to laugh. “Oh, great,” he said. “Just what I needed.” He gestured toward his television, where the head of the first Modular Man stared sightlessly across the room. “Pretty soon I’ll have enough parts to build my own.”

“Speaking of heads,” Danny said, “how is yours?”

“Better,” Tom said. He’d taken a long shower, changed into fresh clothes, and swallowed a couple of heavy-duty painkillers Dr. Tachyon had prescribed for him years ago. The headache was still there, but not like before.

“You should have let them x-ray you,” she said.

“I only reveal my secret identity to one person a day,” Tom said. “It’s a little rule I have.” He changed the subject. “How is your sister doing?”

“Fine. Sleeping. They anaesthetized her to set the leg. Just as well. The pain was bleeding through to the rest of us pretty bad. Now we don’t feel a thing.”

It had been so long since he had entertained a visitor, Tom had almost forgotten how. “I’m not much of a host,” he said, suddenly awkward. “You want a drink, or something?”

“No,” Danny said. She stepped close, looked up at him. “I want a kiss.”

Tom stood frozen. He didn’t know what to say. What to do. “Danny,” he finally managed. “I don’t think…”

“Don’t think,” she told him. “Don’t talk.” Her hand went around his head, and pulled his face down to hers. “Just feel,” she whispered, as their lips touched.

Ray held up his hand. What was left of the team stopped behind him. He glanced back. It was just him and Battle, Danny and Cameo. Him and a nat, an ace who could talk with her so-called sisters and an ace who could channel the dead if she had anything of theirs to channel through. He wished that Battle would give her Black Eagle’s jacket like he’d promised, but then wondered if that was just another of Battle’s lies. He wondered if the agent even had the jacket.

All and all they were a ragged, sorry-ass bunch. The rest of the muscle was gone. It was up to Ray to see them through.

But, Ray wondered, through what? Battle was still hot to kill Bloat, but assassination was never Ray’s style. Still, what could you do with the fat bastard?

The corridor through which the Outcast — was that really Bloat? Ray wondered — had disappeared suddenly opened up into a large chamber that was dimly lit by the internal phosphorescence of its walls. Ray hesitated on the threshold. It was bigger than any of the other rooms they’d come across so far and it was relatively open with few rock formations to provide cover.

There was something about it that made Ray uneasy. He moved into the room slowly, motioning the others to follow at a cautious distance. He was well into the chamber before he noticed the figure at its far end, still and gigantic, looking like a statue in a park in hell.

It was a big man sitting on a big horse. Only the man’s legs were shaped like those of a stag and he had eyes that glowed green and a rack of antlers that would do any stag proud. The horse, too, had eyes that glowed. Ray recognized them right away. He had run into them both yesterday morning on New York Bay.

“I’ll he a son of a bitch,” Ray murmured, and grinned his lopsided grin. Here was something clear-cut, something he didn’t have to worry about. Here was serious ass begging to be kicked and Ray knew he was just the one to do the kicking. Grinning, he stepped forward as the big joker on the big horse raised a battered gold horn to his lips and blew upon it. The notes echoed eerily inside the cavern, bouncing and rebounding off the rock walls, striking Ray’s ears and stopping him with an involuntary shiver.

A crackle of green lightning pulsed through the air, playing counterpoint to the joker’s tune and suddenly there was a spear in his free hand. Ray didn’t like that, but he liked the horn’s other effect even less.

It called dogs, goddamn ghost dogs slipping through the cavern ceiling, running on air like it was ground. As they neared the cavern’s floor their ghostly bodies became more solid. At first Ray could see through them, but once their paws touched the floor they were as real-looking as any pack of white dogs with blood-red ears who were four feet tall at the shoulder and had green fire burning in their eyes and dripping from their tongues could be. There was a shitload of them.

The joker took the horn from his lips and smiled savagely, his dogs howling in a whirling pack at his feet. He pointed his spear at Ray and the others and spurred his night-black stallion. As he charged the pack howled like a chorus of the damned.

“Shit!” Ray said to himself. He turned and sprinted back to the others.

“What the hell is that?” Battle shouted.

“Goddamn Twisted Fist ace,” Ray panted. “Start shooting before the fuckers get all over us!” It was good advice.

The hounds were faster than the stallion. They outstripped the horse and its rider, giving tongue to cries of ferocious blood lust that sparked an answering surge in Ray’s veins. He ripped his Ingram out of its holster and triggered a long burst that plowed into the front-running dogs like burning hail.

The others all fired after Ray’s initial burst, all except Cameo, who was now wearing an incongruous-looking fedora that she’d taken from her pack. She had apparently summoned another ace, one who was swearing Catholic oaths while hurling balls of electricity at the charging hounds.

The carnage among the hounds was terrific, but they had neither fear nor blood. When they were hit hard enough they were blown to bits, but they neither bled nor cried out in pain. They dissolved into phosphorescent green mist. Half the pack was destroyed as it charged across the open cavern, but there were still maybe forty hounds left. Some were maimed and limping, but all were crying ferociously as they struck the team.

Ray suddenly found himself the center of a snarling pack of mad dogs. There were so many of them that they snapped at each other in a frenzy to get at Ray.

“All right you mother-fuckers, come and get it, come on, come on,” Ray snarled, not even knowing what he was saying. His expression was a locked, frozen grin as he fought like he’d never fought in his life, whirling and striking with hands and feet, growling back at the hounds, snapping limbs and breaking necks, dodging slashing fangs, ignoring the half-dozen wounds he received in the first half-dozen seconds of combat.

Four bodies lay at his feet, then dissolved, making room for more to attack. Part of his mind told Ray that he wasn’t going to make it, that he was going to be gutted again like when Mackie Messer opened him up on national television and he tripped in his own intestines as he tried to fight the psychopathic ace. But the other part of his mind didn’t care because this was what he lived for and it didn’t matter that his foes were goddamn ghost dogs or aces, as long as they were tough, as long as they were good.

He killed two more of the hounds and then a big brute fastened his teeth in Ray’s left forearm, biting through flesh and muscle. Ray bit back a cry of pain as it shifted its grip, trying to get the arm back far enough in its jaws so that it could crush Ray’s forearm like a candy cane, and then Ray heard the scream.

It was terrible, high-pitched and wailing, full of pain and fear. It stopped even the hound for a second as it lolled its eyes in the direction of the scream and looked, as Ray did, to see Danny Shepherd go down under a wave of the dogs.

Ray screamed in return. He grabbed the dog’s lower jaw and ripped it off. He flung the jaw away and grabbed the hound by its front legs. He surged to his feet, swinging the thing like a flail, instantaneously creating an open space around him.

He glanced around wildly. Battle had his back to the wall and was firing as quickly as he could at the circle of dogs closing in on him. Cameo, or whoever she now was, was holding the hounds at bay with balls of crackling electricity that were more deadly than bullets. But Danny was down and one of the brutes worrying at her pulled her back and lifted his muzzle to howl at the ceiling, his jaws running red with Danny’s blood.

The Fist ace, finally close enough to participate in the brawl, lifted his arm to fling his spear and Ray realized that he was the target.

He threw the hound at three others who were springing on him just as the ace loosed his spear, and grinning like a madman, he snatched the weapon out of the air. It felt good and solid in his hands.

Staring straight ahead, he cut through the pack of hounds ripping at him, the spear slicing through them like a sword through smoke. Ray locked eyes with the ace as he charged and saw more astonishment in his foe’s expression than anything else. One of the hounds rose up in front of his master and leapt at Ray, but Ray caught it on his spear and skewered it. It worked its way down the shaft and snapped its jaws inches from Ray’s face, but Ray kept charging. He felt another shock run through his arms. When the dead hound dissolved Ray saw that he’d speared the stallion in the side and the force of his charge had run the shaft through its rib cage and knocked it off its feet.

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 chill.

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.

On the floor, the stupid nigger squatted with one hand raised over his thigh, like a statue carved from ebony.

The bodysnatcher had all the time in the world.

He was an arrow of light, a burning lancet. He slid through the air with glacial slowness, floating toward the immensity that was Bloat. Tons and tons of smelly white jelly, his heart and lungs buried God knows where inside. But the governor’s head was still almost normal. That was where he’d start, the bodysnatcher decided. The eyes first. Then the ears. And only then the brain. He would make it last.

Then Wyungare got to his feet and floated up through the blue gloom in front of Bloat. “Is it my turn now?” he asked.

Coherent light… slowed. Halted. It was impossible.

“My turn?” said the black man again. Wyungare smiled. He interposed his body between the bodysnatcher and Bloat. The light-form hung incredibly suspended in the blue spectral twilight.

A physical impossibility.

“Improbable, yes,” said Wyungare aloud, grinning hugely, teeth shining in the gloom. “Impossible, no.” He received the electromagnetic translations of words. converted them to speech forms.

You will die now, nigger-man.

“So?” Wyungare shrugged. His hands moved slowly through the air, as though performing the most delicate motions of an elaborate dance. “Dying is not the point of all this. Life is. Healing is.” The light-form seemed to convulse in the suddenly thick air, pulsed as though struggling to move, then slowly accelerated toward Wyungare and the immense being behind him.

Burn, you asshole.

Wyungare took away his hands, baring his breast, exposing his heart. “Need a target, my bodysnatching friend?”

The light-form somehow picked up velocity in this energy half-world.

The fury: I'll barbecue you, you miserable jigaboo!

Wyungare laughed. “Is it so important to you that my color’s not to your liking? That I’m what, in a better mood, you’d call black?

“Then try this!”

Absolute crimson preceded the light-form. Blue trailed out behind.

And Wyungare became black. Literally. Physically. Spectrally.

Black as space without stars. Black as the ace of spades. Black as.…nothing.

And the light-form entered his heart.

The fury of energy ravened for food, sought fuel to burn, fed on itself, began… with horror… to be absorbed.

I cannot hold multitudes, thought Wyungare, and I cannot contain all of this.

There are limits.

He absorbed what he could.

And the rest he let flare out harmlessly in every direction except toward the child. The young man. The being he recognized was newly mature. That being he protected.

There was a need.

Wyungare wished he could see himself.

And was glad he could not.

His last image in this world, in this time, in this body, was Cordelia.

His final feeling was love.

And then the energy simultaneously was absorbed, and consumed him.

The Fist ace said his name was Herne. He proved to be a reliable, if sullen, guide. “It’s right through there,” Herne said sulkily after leading what was left of the team through a number of Bloat’s underground chambers. “Not that it’s likely to do you much good. The governor knows you’re here.”

“He hasn’t stopped us so far,” Battle muttered. He took off his backpack and pulled a package from it. He tore away the wrapping paper, revealing a folded black leather jacket.

Son of a bitch, Ray thought, he really did have Black Eagle’s jacket.

“Our ace in the hole,” Battle said triumphantly. “Put this on after we enter the throne room,” he told Cameo. “Bloat will never suspect the presence of another ace. This will give us the edge we need.”

Cameo looked at it doubtfully. “What are we going to do when we find Bloat?”

Battle stared at her. “What we have to do.”

“I’m not going to kill him,” she said. “I don’t kill. Period.”

Battle smiled. Ray didn’t like the look of it. “We’ll see. In the meantime just think of all the extra protection this jacket will give you. It might make the difference of coming out of this dead or alive.”

Cameo nodded doubtfully.

Battle looked at Ray. “You’re a good soldier,” he said meaningfully. “You know what we have to do.”

“Let’s stop talking and just do it,” Ray said. He pushed through the doorway and into Bloat’s audience chamber.

They were on a little balcony that overlooked the chamber from a height of about ten feet. The first thing that struck Ray was the god-awful smell emanating from the monstrous white slug that was Bloat. It was one of the most hideous sights that Ray had ever seen. But there was something more, a sense in the room, an air that something had just gone terribly wrong.

The bombardment had not been in vain. A direct hit had shattered the throne room’s crystalline dome. Pieces of the dome lay over the floor and Bloat both. There were gaping holes in what was left of the dome through which the stars looked down on a scene of carnage and confusion.

Bloat’s joker guards lay dead on the floor like abandoned dolls. Bloat himself was dripping smelly, viscous ichor from a dozen small wounds. He seemed to be in shock as he stared at the loincloth-clad body of a black man who lay dead on the floor in front of him.

“Something big just went down.” Battle said. “They’re all in a muddle.” He shoved the jacket at Cameo. “Now’s the time to strike.”

She took the jacket after a moment’s hesitation and put it on. Battle smiled gleefully, Ray frowned, and Herne watched dumbfounded as Cameo’s face suddenly went slack. It remained unfocused for a long moment, then she screamed as if terrified out of her wits as her face twisted into an expression of pure, sadistic hate. Before, when she was Blockhead, you could still see Cameo underneath. Now all traces of Cameo were submerged, as if she’d fled to the deepest corner of her psyche to escape whoever it was who’d taken charge of her body.

“Cut it up!” Battle screamed, pointing at Bloat. “Kill it and I’ll let you keep the body you’re wearing!”

“Christ!” Ray whispered.

Cameo’s shoulder drooped, as if her back were bearing an unendurable burden.

“Listen to me,” Battle said slowly and distinctly. “Kill that mountain of fat over there and you can keep the body you’re in. You can live again.”

Confusion was replaced by a look of animal cunning as the rider of Cameo’s body stared at Battle. She nodded, drool spilling from her twisted mouth. She approached Herne, who stood between her and the stairway that led to the throne room’s floor, and she began to whistle a familiar tune as her hands started to vibrate.

“Get back!” Ray screamed at Herne. “It’s not Black Eagle. It’s Mackie Messer!”

Herne stumbled backward, trying to get away from the reincarnation of the psychopathic ace with the buzz-saw hands.

“You bastard!” Ray screamed, unsure himself whether he was addressing the lying shit Battle or the twisted ace advancing on Herne. He hesitated only a moment, then he moved. He leapt, lashed out with his foot, and caught Cameo’s body on the hip. He pulled the blow at the last moment, realizing that he was facing a double dilemma. Mackie Messer, who had once un-zipped him from crotch to sternum, was in Cameo’s body. Normally, as he understood it, Cameo could control the psyches she channeled. But Messer was a twisted psychopath filled with such murderous rage that he must have momentarily overpowered her and gotten complete control. Maybe she’d be able to force her way back into the driver’s seat, maybe not. But in the meantime Mackie had her body and Ray had to stop him without injuring it. Last time they’d met he’d hammered the shit out of the little Nazi, and still lost. This time he had to take him out without damaging him.

Ray knew he had to stop Messer. Ray wasn’t a deep thinker. He was a fighter, a living weapon who gloried in combat. But Battle had crossed the line by calling the evil little psychopath back to life. It was up to Ray to stop them both.

Messer tumbled with Ray’s kick, falling down the short flight of stairs that led to the chamber’s floor. For a moment Ray thought that the fall might have stunned Messer, that Cameo could regain control, but they had no such luck.

Messer looked at him with Cameo’s beautiful eyes. “I know you,” he told Ray. “You hurt me once.” And he was back on his feet, his hands a buzzing blur.

Ray leapt down the stairs, landing on the chamber floor facing Messer. Messer stared at him as drool ran down Cameo’s fine-boned jawline. “But I hurt you even more,” he said, turned, and ran straight at Bloat.

Bloat finally seemed to rouse himself from his deep stupor. He screamed wordlessly, but that only served to incite Messer the more. He called for his bodyguards, but they were all dead or fled. He was alone.

Ray sprinted after Messer, but the hunchbacked ace had too much of a head start. He reached Bloat and sank his right arm to the elbow in Bloat’s slug-like side. He slashed, slicing a three-foot-long gash in the pulpy white flesh. Buckets of foul-smelling ichor pumped out of the wound. Bloat screamed. Ray gagged, but continued the pursuit.

Messer whirled and slashed at Ray, who turned with the grace of a ballet dancer, barely avoiding the blurred hand. Ray switched direction again and came in low, swiping at Messer’s legs. Messer scuttled backward like an angry crab, waving his arms in Ray’s face. Ray feinted a lunge. Messer buzzed him and Ray pulled back, circling.

“Let Messer kill the fat freak!” Battle shouted.

Without looking, Ray shot Battle the finger. He tried to sweep in low and knock Messer off his feet, but the ace was too fast. He chopped at Ray’s neck. Ray dropped back, barely in time, as Messer’s hand caressed his cheek that suddenly became covered by a sheet of blood.

Christ, Ray thought. How can I beat Messer without hurting Cameo? And then he had it. He didn’t have to beat Messer at all. He just had to beat the jacket.

He reached down for the knife sheathed at his ankle, drew it, and pointed it at Messer.

The ace tittered. “A knife? A knife against Mackie Messer?”

“Let’s dance, motherfucker,” Ray mumbled, his tongue probing the gaping wound in the side of his face.

He feinted a lunge. Messer chopped down with a blurred left arm. Ray went in over Messer’s arm and sliced the back of the jacket from the neck to the waist. Messer righted himself and took a sideswipe at Ray that missed.

They were still in close quarters. Ray punched Messer in the gut and the air rushed from Cameo’s lungs in an explosive gasp. But Messer still swung reflexively at Ray as he arched backward, and buzzed through the agent’s jaw and cheek. Blood blossomed from Ray’s face, saturating the front of his fighting suit. Ray growled inarticulately as Messer collapsed, holding his stomach with both arms. Cameo’s body wasn’t used to such abuse and it sagged with the pain of Ray’s blow.

Ray lunged forward again with the knife, slashing at the back of the jacket. It snagged momentarily, then cut through the leather. The jacket separated into two pieces and Messer suddenly seemed to realize what Ray was doing.

He screamed as Ray grabbed both halves of the jacket. Messer twisted and connected again, slicing through Ray’s rib cage, but Ray was already winding up and he was pissed and he suddenly didn’t care if it was Cameo’s body or not.

He whirled Messer by the jacket’s arms, hurling him into the chamber’s stone wall. Messer slammed into it with stunning force, bounced, and came back right into Ray’s arms. Cameo’s eyes were glazed as Ray ripped the jacket off her body and in a frenzy of strength tore it to bits before he threw it to the floor.

Her eyes fluttered for a moment and when she opened them again they were Cameo’s eyes, unaffected by the sadistic violence of Mackie Messer.

“You’re bleeding,” she said to Ray.

He looked down at his side. “Yeah,” he said. “I do that a lot.”

“Where’s the ambulance?” Tom wanted to know. His voice was edged with hysteria. “I called for an ambulance. We need to get her to a hospital, she needs help, a doctor, something —”

“Take it easy, mister,” the older cop said. He was a beefy man with a crooked nose and a mop of black hair. He pulled Tom aside while his partner went to check out the bedroom. “The parameds are on their way. Probably took a wrong turn in the fog. Nobody lives down this end of Hook Road.”

“She needs help!” Tom said. He was shocked at how shrill and crazy he sounded. He turned away, started to run his fingers through his hair, stopped when he saw the blood on his hands. What a sight he must be. He’d pulled on a pair of pants, but he was still bare-chested, still bloody where he’d cradled Danny, talking to her until he heard the sirens. No wonder the cops had looked at him funny.

“You told the dispatcher your name was Tom Tudbury,” the cop was saying. “Our records show that Mr. Tudbury died three years ago. Suppose you tell me who you really are, and what the hell you’re doing out here.”

“That doesn’t matter,” Tom said. “Just help her, okay? Where the fuck is that ambulance?”

The cop was about to say something else when his partner emerged from the bedroom. He was a fair-haired kid with freckles. He looked green. “You’d better take a look, Al,” was all he said.

Al went to look. His rookie partner stood by the bedroom door, staring at Tom. There was a strange light in his eyes. “What?” Tom said. “Don’t look at me that way.”

“You son of a bitch,” the kid said coldly. “You fucking butcher. Why’d you do it?”

Al reemerged with a grim look on his face. “Call it in,” he told his partner. “And get the coroner out here.”

“No,” Tom said. “She needs a doctor. She’s not dead, she can’t be dead, you don’t understand, she’s an ace, she has… she has powers … powers and …”

The two cops exchanged a look.

Tom couldn’t take it anymore. “NO!” he screamed.

The older cop was removing a set of handcuffs from his belt. “You have the right to remain silent,” he told Tom. “If you do not remain silent, anything you say can be used against you in a court of law.”

Tom held his hands up in front of him, backed away, shaking his head. “You don’t understand,” he said. “It wasn’t me. It was Bloat. Those bastards out on the Rox. The dogs. She said dogs … the Hunt … her sister was with the covert team… they’re all the same person, don’t you see?”

“You have the right to an attorney,” the cop continued as he started toward Tom, cuffs in hand. He grabbed him hard, spun him around, shoved him against the table. “If you can’t afford an attorney, one will be appointed for you,” he said as he pulled Tom’s left aim behind his back, cuffed him, reached for the right

Modular Man’s leg was on the table.

He reacted without thinking, grabbing the leg by the ankle, wrenching free with a strength he didn’t know he had, spinning, swinging. There was a sharp crack as the leg smashed across the policeman’s temple. He staggered. Tom shoved him to the floor, jumped over him.

The kid cop had his gun clear of the holster. He swung it up, aimed it with both hands. “Freeze!” he yelled.

Tom froze. Then the kid blew clear off his feet, right back through the window. Glass exploded all around him. He landed on the porch. Tom ran right past him. The dogs were barking as he plunged into the labyrinth of the junkyard. After a moment he heard running footsteps, then curses. The fog was his ally. A warning shot echoed through the night. Then the sounds receded.

He was panting hard by the time he reached the shell.

“Traitor!” Battle cried.

Ray looked up to the balcony to see him pointing his rifle down at them.

“Twisted genes will always show,” Battle intoned.

“Fuck you and your genes,” Ray mumbled wearily.

“I guess I’ll just have to take care of this by myself,” Battle said, smiling gleefully and aiming his assault rifle at an again-comatose Bloat.

“I think not,” a new voice said, immediately capturing everyone’s attention. It was the Outcast. He was hurt and bleeding and obviously dead tired, yet he managed to stand without help. “Put down your weapon,” he told Battle.

Battle pouted as Herne snatched his rifle and turned it on the agent.

“No!” the Outcast cried. “The killing’s over.” He looked down at the dead black man. “Everything’s over. He was our last chance. He could have saved everyone without more violence, without more death.”

“What happened?” Ray asked.

“He was killed by one of the jumpers.”

“What exactly the hell are you talking about?”

“He could have connected us with the shamans,” the Outcast told Ray, “powerful men and women who could have taken us to a place where we wouldn’t have to fight, where we wouldn’t have to be killed.”

Ray was suddenly deathly tired. “That sounds good to me.”

The Outcast sighed, then winced and tucked his elbow tight against a bleeding wound in his side. “It won’t happen now.,’

“Because this guy is dead,” Ray said.

“That’s right.”

Ray looked at Cameo. “Maybe we can help you.”

Upriver, the fog finally grew thin.

He detoured around the Rox, its battlements still cloaked in mist. He could feel its presence even if he couldn’t see it. He knew they were there. Bloat and his demons. The jumper bastards who had taken Pulse and Mistral and used them to kill and kill and kill. The antlered hunter and his terrible hounds. All of them were down there, with Danny.

He wondered what she’d been like, that seventh Danny, the one he never knew.

North of the Rox, flying high above the fog, he angled out over the Hudson, and headed north.

He saw the towers of Manhattan dimly through moving curtains of mist, scattered lights burning forlorn and frightened in the night. The fog had shrouded the whole island now. How far would it spread? Did Bloat’s power have a limit? Could he cover the whole city? The state? The world?

The George Washington Bridge was a steel shadow in the foggy night. Even here, no traffic moved. New York was a ghost town.

He pushed on. Now the Bronx was on his right as he floated up the Hudson, and finally the fog was thinning out. The gray curtains turned to a drifting gauze and then to pale white wisps and then to nothing. The night was crisp and clear, with a moon above and the river rolling blackly beneath him.

Danny’s blood had dried on his arms and chest. When he scratched, it fell away in brown flakes.

There was no air in the shell. Most of his screens were dead now. He could smell the circuits overheating. It didn’t matter. None of it mattered. He could see well enough to fly.

He was far past thinking.

The Bronx was behind him now. He moved up through Westchester. The New Jersey Palisades loomed up ahead of him. When he was a kid, Dom DiAngelis took him there with Joey, to the old amusement park. He still remembered the jingle. Palisades amusement park, swings all day and after dark. Gone now, like so much else.

North he went, and north, following the course of the Hudson, staring into the dead screen in front of him, hardly moving. The shell was full of ghosts. His parents. Dom DiAngelis. Joey and Gina. Barbara Casko, who’d loved him once. Dr. Tachyon. Jetboy. Thomas Tudbury. They were all looking at him. Whispering to him. But he was past hearing. Somewhere up where the Palisades rose high and white in the moonlight, he slowed, then came to a stop.

All his microphones were off. There was no sound in the shell but his own ragged breathing. But he could still hear her screaming.

He turned away from the dead screen.

The river rolled below him, black as death. The Hudson. It could have been the Styx. As if it mattered. He watched it for a long time.

Then he thought of a wall.

He was and he wasn’t.

That was the state of how he discerned himself.

After all, he had never been dead before. At least not that he recalled.

He contemplated all this while he drifted… somewhere. This was not the upper world, nor the lower world. It was not the earth. It was not the dreamtime.

He felt no temperature, yet no discomfort.

He could detect no direction home, yet felt certain he was moving. But from where, and to where, he had no idea.

It could have been millennia.

But after a certain amount of time (or non-time) had elapsed, he heard/saw/felt a voice. More than one.

Wyungare. It was more a statement than a question.

“I’m here.”

We would speak with you.

“Then you’ve found me.” The voice(s) were naggingly familiar. He had dealt with them long before.

We must know certain things of you.

“Then be direct. I’m dead, you know. Pomposity is lost on me.”

He felt a reaction very much like amusement. We shall be direct, then. About the boy, the one called Bloat. We have to make our own decisions.

“So what do you want from me?”

You taught him. Tell us of his lesson.

“It’s not as though I’ve a grade sheet,” said Wyungare. “No report card. I’m not granting or denying him passage to another form.”

We know that, Wyungare. The sensation of exasperation. Tell us.

Then a new, individual voice. One spoke with what Wyungare recalled was a West Texas twang. Never mind those high-minded sidewinders, man. You and me, we’ve got one hellacious more set of lives in common than them.

Wyungare would have smiled, had he lips. “Buddy?”

None other, pardner. Mighty sorry you won’t be seeing me at the Texarcana Club this go-round.

“Me too.” And then he remembered Cordelia. And tried not to remember Cordelia. That would come later.

About the Bloat kid, said Buddy.

“All right, why didn’t you say so?” said Wyungare. He gathered his thoughts, concentrated, molded a tight-beam image, and launched it like a bottle into the ocean from a desert island. No, more like a sounding rocket blasting into the mesosphere.

The young boy walks away from the place that was his home. It was not a happy place, but it was the only home he had known. And now he’s on his way. Gone. Trudging toward the forbidding trees that begin to forest the verges of the road.

Over his shoulder, the boy has packed the belongings that are important to him in a wrapped kerchief The corners are tied and the bundle is impaled by the stick the boy lays back over his shoulder.

As he walks, he realizes just how heavy his belongings are. He glances back and sees that the bundle has grown. It balloons as he watches, expanding into an enormous and untidy mass.

The boy turns hack to his course and resolutely forges forward. His burden grows even heavier. Yet the voices inside him, the voices of his old home, remind him that he has to carry it all. Every ounce, every pound, every ton of it.

— until he suddenly realizes that he no longer has to do that. There is no purpose served.

He releases his grip on the stick. He looses his hold on the burden that has somehow now grown to be larger than what he ever could have imagined he could carry.

It’s gone. Left behind him. He cannot believe how easy the final decision was.

As he continues down the road, he glances from side to side at the enveloping trees. They no longer seem as ominous.

The boy whistles. Not to warn away monsters. But in joy.

We see, come the voices. This was your perception?

“It is,” says Wyungare.

Hey, looks okay by me, says Buddy merrily. Seriously.

Some of the voices have faces now. An ancient holy man on a wind-flayed ridge in the Andes. A woman in the Bronx cradling a chicken. A young man tossing knucklebones in Riyadh. Many others.

Come on, friends, says Buddy. Time’s awastin’. Let’s do it.

And they vote. The decision is quick and anticlimactic.

Wyungare is suddenly aware of his aloneness.

Except for one remaining voice.

Rock on, says Buddy. You will, my friend.

And then he’s gone too.

What remains of Wyungare is still thinking about something else. The boy shucking his burdens … is it Bloat… or Jack? Or both?

Billy Ray reached down into the mess on the floor that had been Wyungare. He straightened a moment later, holding a rough-cut opal on a charred leather thong. He handed it to the one called Cameo as if it were a holy relic. Cameo stretched out her hand to take the offering. When she looked up again, her eyes were not her own.

“Hello, Teddy,” Cameo said. “It’s time to choose.” The sudden silence in her head was the silence of Wyungare.

“You really are him?” Teddy asked slowly. “You really are?”

“Yeah, she is,” Carnifex said. “So let’s get moving.”

“Choose,” Cameo/Wyungare repeated, frowning in the same way that the Aborigine had frowned. “You still want to be the Outcast, a nat? Then you will be.”

"Wait.” Teddy licked his blood-flecked lips, groaning under the weight of the torch and the agony of his wounds. The light in the room seemed to be flickering blood-red. Shadows were gathering, like vultures crouching around him.

“…Wait…” he said again, wondering if he could wait or if the deepening darkness would take him.

Teddy glanced around the room, looking at the carnage.

Most of them are here because of you. So many people dead, and they were fighting for you as well as themselves. Wyungare, the penguin, all of them who were killed by soldiers and the shelling. For you

“I’m a fucking lousy hero,” he told Cameo/Wyungare. The stench of corruption was overpowering. “I don’t want to be the Outcast, don’t want to be a nat. That ain’t me.”

Briefly, Wyungare smiled. “Good,” he said.

Cameo/Wyungare began bass chanting. Battle started forward to interrupt, but Carnifex held the man back. At first Teddy felt nothing, but the pain from the open wounds on Bloat’s body slowly began to recede and the trembling stopped. He could feel the power swelling deep within the body once more, but the energy was different this time — more diffuse, softer, and yet more powerful than what he had been given before. There was no longer just the connection to Bloat and the dreamtime, but an entire network of bright links, interlacing and flowing, all coming together inside himself. He could hear indistinct voices and a monotone, rhythmic drumming beat that made his blood pulse in time.

He let his consciousness sink into the chant, into the red pulsing, into the flaring, lacy threads.

Teddy looked outward. He had no eyes, no head; he saw in some way he didn’t yet understand. It was as if he stood high above the Rox itself and could look out over the entire New York Bay panorama. Through the last haze of the dying fog, he could see something, something far up the Hudson.

The chanting stopped. Now.…said a voice. Open yourself to us…

He tried. He imagined the Wall falling, collapsing, crumbling into nothingness. He sensed himself falling and he let himself go freely.

D

O

W

N

and then…

He rode five feet above the flood, his shell a green chariot in the moonlight.

Beneath him, the water was a living thing, a black torrent lashed with white, hundreds of feet high, roaring. Even through three layers of plate steel, he could hear its anger.

He had let the water build until it threatened to overflow the Palisades themselves. Then he wrapped his teke around it, pushed his wall up the banks of the river, and forced it even higher. Behind his dam, looming over him like a building about to fall, the river had fought like a living thing, like a monster in chains, like a terrible great beast hungry to be free.

He had let it build until he was trembling from the effort, until he was almost blind from the pain, until he could feel the blood trickling from his nose. He had held it until the last possible moment. Then he had risen, high over the river, high over the Palisades, high over the sword that he had forged.

He looked down at what he had done, and set it free.

Now he rode with it. Faster than he had ever flown before, his head throbbing as he channeled the waters, walling off the shores with his teke, scouring out the riverbed, keeping the torrent on course, aiming the hammer.

The Palisades vanished behind him. The fog sent out its tendrils. The black waters swept them aside. The lights of Manhattan shimmered up ahead. And beyond them, under the rolling mist, square in the mouth of the Hudson: The Rox.

He pushed ahead of the flood, and turned on his mikes. The roar of the waters filled the world, a thunder out of hell. There was no other sound. There could be no other sound.

And the sound was doom.

A north wind had sprung up and torn Bloat’s fog away from Manhattan. The island was remarkably still. Modular Man floated over its brightness, torn between a wish to savor his freedom and a desire to mourn that which was lost. His innocence, not least of all.

Something rolled down the flank of the island.

Foreboding chilled the android’s mind. He arched upward to get a better look, saw boiling white water thundering down the bed of the Hudson, its anger miraculously contained within invisible walls that prevented it from spilling into the city.

The water sounded like a world coming to an end.

And now that he had risen above the tall buildings of the island, Modular Man saw the fleeting radar image of the Turtle leading the angry waters down.

It was the end of the Rox. Nothing was going to survive that impact.

Hovering in air, the android thought for a long moment. He was a shooter. The business of the Rox filled him with little but disgust The island was full of criminals and killers, all shootees, and had nothing to do with him.

Criminals and killers and shootees like Patchwork.

He dropped to the top of one tall building and placed the tarpaulin carefully on the roof.

And then he was off.

The android’s top speed was over 500 miles per hour, and the Turtle was slow, tied to the speed of the tumbling river he was bringing to the Rox. Modular Man made it to the island well ahead of him.

The north wind had torn Bloat’s fog away. The island was a ruin, all torn walls and fire. There was hardly anyone moving. He flew through the ruins of the golden dome into the governor’s throne room. Bloat lay, bleeding and half-crushed, under Liberty’s fallen torch. A young woman sat cross-legged on the floor beside a corpse burned beyond recognition. She was chanting.

The rest of them were staring through the walls of shattered crystal, wondering at the sound of the water that was bearing down on them. There were too many to carry. Plans raced through the android’s macro-atomic mind.

He flew across the room to Bloat. The governor’s eyes were closed. He looked asleep, or dead. The huge weight of the torch had cut deep into his flesh.

The android placed himself beneath it, poured power into his generators, and pulled. Saint Elmo’s fire glowed off the broken glass surfaces of the beacon. Slowly, it began to move.

The oncoming wave sounded like a thousand Niagaras.

Modular Man looked at the others. “Huddled masses!” he shouted. “Hurry! Get on board.”

Billy Ray moved at once. The woman on the floor did not seem to hear. She kept on with her chanting, oblivious. The man with the mustache hesitated, then followed Ray.

The jokers had not moved. “There’s no more time,” Modular Man called out to them.

Kafka moved closer to Bloat, and shook his head. Herne hesitated, then backed away to stand beside the other joker. He reached out and took the cockroach-man by the hand. Kafka looked up at him, startled.

The wave sounded like a million typhoons.

Modular Man poured power into his flight modules. He was at the outer limits of his strength. Saint Elmo’s fire flickered off the shattered walls of the throne room, off the twisted bodies that littered the floor, off Bloat’s pale white flesh, off the solemn face of the chanting woman.

Slowly the torch began to lift.

“Wyungare?” Bloat asked. “Hello?”

He wasn’t sure where he was or what he was. He seemed to be everywhere within the Rox: within the ruined Great Hall where people were staring at the ugly, twisted thing that was Bloat; watching as jokers tried to pull the wounded from the wreckage of the shelling; stalking the ramparts of the breached Wall. Teddy’s outward vision was troubled. Under the moon’s regard, the water around Ellis Island was swirling, flowing strangely away from the Rox and moving upstream toward the Hudson. Teddy could see a glimmering there, a wall of angry water that even as he watched grew larger as it raged toward the Rox. A feeling of dread touched him with the sight.

“Wyungare, we have to hurry.”

There was no answer from the joker who held the Aborigine. Cameo was well beyond the Wall. “Wyungare? Viracocha? One Blue Bead?”

No answer.

Instead, he could hear the unison chanting again, the mingled mindvoices of the shamans. The power that they had lent him was changing again. The portals to the outside world closed like small wounds; the energy flow was now inward, concentrating deep within Teddy. It pulsed with the chant, growing smaller but more concentrated. The gift seared and flared and crackled. It was impossible to look upon.

The mass of light begun to whirl and spin. At the center of the vortex was an opening, a darkness through which Teddy could go — the gateway into the dreamtime. The chanting and drumming redoubled in volume and tempo, and Teddy concentrated on the sound himself, letting the Rox resonate with it, throbbing in time with the sonorous words.

The energy gaped wider, the darkness at its center a mouth that must swallow him soon.

Not soon enough.

New York Bay had dropped several feet in depth. Mud flats extended outward from the shores of Ellis and Liberty islands, fish wriggling silver-scaled in the moonlight as the Mother-Wave up the Hudson sucked the bay into itself. Teddy could see the tsunami rising, towering, a frothing Niagara set on end and spilling over itself as it hurtled impossibly down the Hudson’s bank. It was going to smash the Rox like a hammer against a wineglass. It would break him into a thousand pieces. The thing, this monster of water, was unstoppable. There was no power in this world or any other that could halt it.

Teddy felt awe, even as he felt terror.

There wasn’t enough time. The shamans were still chanting, still widening the gateway. Teddy readied himself to steal away the power of their rite and try to stop this monster of water even though he knew it to be hopeless. He raged at the Turtle’s shell.

You won’t kill them. I won’t let you. You can have me but I won’t let you hurt them. He knew that to do so would close the opening gateway for himself, but he didn’t care. My fault. It’s my fault for waiting so long.

He almost didn’t notice that the chanting had stopped.

“Now!” whispered Wyungare/Cameo desperately.

As the wave thundered and pounded over the flats, a nightmare bending to devour the Rox, Teddy took the swelling energy and willed himself to

He was a half-mile ahead of his tsunami by the time he reached the foot of Manhattan. The bay opened out around him. He moved across the waters with the thunder coming hard behind him.

The outer curtain wall of the Rox loomed up out of the fog and flashed by beneath him in the blink of an eye. If there was another wall above it, it never touched him. He was beyond fear, beyond doubt, beyond loathing.

Through torn wisps of fog, dimly, he saw the Rox.

Fallen battlements. Shattered walls. Onion domes half blown away by artillery. Towers that ended in jagged stubs. The castle lay spread out below him like a box of broken toys. The fog seemed thinner now. He could see it clearly. The thunder was louder, a deafening roar behind him.

Faintly, a mile to the south, he could see Lady Liberty and the south curtain wall. Beyond that was Jersey City, Bayonne, Staten Island, with their millions of innocents.

He pictured another wall on top of the one Bloat had built. A wall of steel as clear as glass. Immovable. Impregnable. An anvil for his hammer. He painted it until it burned in his mind’s eye, until it was as real as he was.

When he looked down, the fog was gone. The castle stood naked and clear below him, as a moving cliff of black swept down from the north. The sound of the water was too loud to hear now. For a brief second, Tom thought he saw Liberty’s torch, burnt and twisted, lifting slowly from inside the keep. The towers of the Rox seemed to shimmer and fade, and he glimpsed Ellis Island as it had been, another ghost come out to play in the moonlight.

Then howling darkness descended and Tom thought, This is what armageddon sounds like, as the waters exploded around him.