Once, almost in another lifetime, it seemed, Wyungare had visited Outback-Disneyland. The experience, business aside, had been horrifying. It all came back. The stately voyage to the Rox rapidly evolved into Mr. Goanna’s Wild Flume Ride.
First, there was the environment. The skies, what he could see of them through the swirls of fog, were ablaze with lights, most of them moving at speed. No missiles, heavy shells, or other bombardment, at least. But glowing streaks of exhaust that might be reconnaissance craft. There was a lot of air traffic behind him over Manhattan. Many helicopter landings. A couple of times he saw what looked like human figures moving through the air rapidly, without benefit of craft.
Then all hell burst loose as a sudden thunderstorm seemed to brew over the approaching island. Wyungare blinked and averted his face as lightning forked and linked sky and earth. It looked like a radiant vision tree impressed on his retinas. The thunder rolled past a fractional second later, the concussion shoving the air before it like the blow of a nulla nulla.
Wyungare thought he heard howling, as though from rather larger predatory throats than he cared to encounter in the middle of the Upper Bay. Madhi? he wondered. Perhaps extremely large dingos. Lightning blazed again.
Further speculation was lost as the alligator dipped his snout like a diving plane and water sheeted across Wyungare’s fourteen-foot reptilian vessel. The black cat leapt backward and the Aborigine found himself with nearly two stone of soaked cat wound around his chest.
Does this reptile fear thunder and lightning? he wondered. It couldn’t be.
It wasn’t.
Jack’s massive jaws opened and closed like a medieval portcullis. The webbed, slightly glowing tail of some unknown fish flopped frantically outside of the teeth. The alligator gulped and the tail disappeared within.
Ah, thought Wyungare. Supper. Jack was a mighty engine that needed fuel. Feeding could not easily be denied.
The alligator jigged through the bay waves with remarkable agility considering his size. Jaws opened. Jaws closed. Some of the prey screamed.
The Aborigine tried to hook his strong toes around the curve of the reptile’s body. He leaned forward, keeping his center of gravity as low as he could, attempting not to be thrown loose into the frigid water. Crushed between Wyungare’s and Jack’s rough hide, the black cat wailed.
Then Jack’s particular feeding frenzy ceased. His teeth clicked together decisively a few more times as he turned his snout back toward the Rox.
Wyungare tried to let communication sink from his fingertips into the armor protecting Jack’s head. You’re doing fine, he wanted to say. Now let us make land. It will aid your digestion. And mine, he thought.
The feeling of approaching Bloat’s psychic barrier crossed a spectrum of apprehension. It’s like — Wyungare thought a bit fuzzily — it’s like approaching a glass wall at speed in a Land Rover. He thought of insects squashed on windscreens. He felt an unaccustomed dread, and then a sudden terror, the abrupt image of shattering glass smashing around him. He felt as though he were breathing in a cloud of microscopic shards. They stung like ice, like invisible razors, like venomous, stinging mites. Wundas. Evil spirits.
The Wall was closer than it had looked. Suddenly it loomed directly in front, the waves slapping against the peculiarly textured gray stone blocks. The Aborigine’s head cleared.
Wyungare touched the alligator and suggested that he follow the curve of the Wall in the direction the Aborigine believed a gate to be.
Indeed, the Aborigine, gator, and cat arrived at the gate after the voyage of only another hundred yards. Jack docked as smoothly as the Staten Island Ferry pulling into its slip. The side of the alligator bumped up against what appeared to be oaken beams, but sounded more like heavy steel ringing like a gong.
Wyungare gingerly rapped his fist against the door. It did feel like metal. And it rang like metal. His head throbbed. He pounded harder.
With a rusty creak, the gate swung inward.
Wyungare said to the darkness, “Thank you, I was afraid I was going to have to bloody my knuckles.”
Light grew within the gateway. The entrance was lined with truly grotesque Boschian creatures. Beside them, the intermixed jokers looked like matinee idols.
“You a nat or what?” said one of the jokers.
“What,” said Wyungare. He motioned. “This is an alligator. That’s a cat.”
“I know the nursery rhyme,” said the joker. “So where’s the owl?”
Wyungare stopped, bewildered for a moment.
“Don’t worry, you’ll catch on,” said the roller-skating penguin, suddenly weaving its way through the crowd of guards. “So. You have business with his Bloatitude? Or just another version of the Circle Line cruise way off course.”
“That is correct,” said Wyungare. “The first hypothesis. I have important business with the one called Bloat.” "Well, he’s pretty busy,” said the penguin. “The war and all. Could you perhaps come back tomorrow?”
Wyungare felt like he was in Lewis Carroll Land. “Tomorrow, no. It is essential I see your… governor now.”
The penguin spun on the tip of one skate. “It helps me concentrate,” he said once he’d stopped. “All right, then. It’s off to the castle with you.”
Wyungare stepped into the gateway.
“Them too,” said the penguin, dipping its beak toward the cat and the alligator.
The guards, joker and simulacra alike, drew back when Jack hauled his long, armored body out of the bay and into the opening in the Wall.
Suddenly the cat sprung from Jack’s back and grabbed the penguin in his paws. Bird and beast rolled over and over as the guards glanced at one another.
Wyungare shook his head. “They are just playing,” he said reassuringly.
The penguin sat up, laughing uproariously. The cat purred and rubbed against the penguin’s feathered haunches.
“Perhaps we should go,” said Wyungare. “We’re off to see the wizard.”
“I don’t know how I do it,” Danny told him. “I mean, I do know, but there’s no good way to put it into words.”
She was perched on Detroit Steel’s right shoulder, legs crossed, Giants cap pulled low, looking down on Tom in his shell. They were alone with the empty armor. The soldiers had turned on the floodlights, and the outfield grass was a deep, rich green.
Zappa and von Herzenhagen had been taken off by helicopter, to supervise the surrender at the Jersey Gate. Pulse still hadn’t shown. The other aces had gone inside to get some rest. No one was saying when they’d be sent into action. There way no way Tom could get his shell down the narrow tunnel under the grandstands, so he’d been left behind to guard center field. The ponytail Danny had stayed to keep him company. "There’s six of you, right?” Torn said.
“There’s one of me,” Danny corrected him, “in a bunch of different bodies.”
“So,” Tom said, “so one of you is in New York, and three are in Minneapolis, and one’s in Chicago, and.…I mean, you’re in six different places at once. Doing six different things at the same time. Seeing different things. Feeling different things. I mean, how do you make sense of it?”
Danny pushed back her Giants cap, shrugged. “You ever eat and watch TV at the same time?” she asked. “Well, how do you do that? I mean, you’re doing two things at once, right? Doesn’t it get confusing?”
Tom thought about that for a moment. “I see what you’re getting at,” he said. “Have you always had six bodies?”
“Remind me never to introduce you to my mother. Giving birth to one baby was distasteful enough to hear her tell it. She’d be mortified at the suggestion that she popped a litter.” She grinned. “There was only one of me at first. I hardly remember what that was like. I drew my wild card when I was three. They thought I was going to die. I got very sick, and very big. You should see the pictures. I looked like Bloat’s little sister. Then I started to split. Mom was set to have kittens. The family wasn’t ready for a Sia
mese twin. When I turned into two perfect little girls, the relief almost killed her.”
“Only two?” Tom said.
“At first,” Danny said. “Would you believe it, they made both of us go to school. What’s the use of being two people if both of them are stuck in Miss Rooney’s class reciting the multiplication tables? My parents even named the other me. Michelle. I never paid any attention. I knew both of us were Danielle, even if nobody else did.”
“And your other, ah, sisters? When did they —?”
“When I hit puberty, I hated myself. I wanted to be taller. With beautiful long dark hair. No freckles. And boobs. I was thirteen and neither of me had any boobs at all.”
She had boobs now, Tom reflected silently as he watched her on her screens. They were right there under her shirt, giving a hint of curve to the bulletproof vest. "Next thing I knew,” Danny said, “one of me was getting big again. The splits take about a month. Fortunately, there was another me to go to school, so I didn’t miss anything.”
“Did you get, ah… everything you wanted?” Tom asked delicately. He couldn’t quite bring himself to say “boobs.” All of a sudden he felt strangely shy.
Danny grinned. “Oh, yeah. No freckles at all. Or were you thinking of something else?”
Inside the shell, Tom found himself blushing.
“You should have seen me in a bikini,” Danny said. “After that, it was easy. My dad tried to pretend we were triplets, but I’d started to see the possibilities. One of me kept on with school, one took up dance fulltime, and one helped out down at Dad’s store. After a while, I decided the world was too big for three of me to handle, and I split again. For a few years there, I gave myself a new body every year for my birthday. I stopped when I hit my lucky number.”
“Six,” Tom said thoughtfully. “Do all of your bodies split off the original?”
Danny polished Detroit Steel’s tailfin idly with her sleeve. “Nah,” she said. “Any of me can make a new me.”
“Which one of you is the original?”
“That would be telling,” Danny said coyly. “Besides, I’m not sure I remember. It was a long time ago.”
“How old are you anyway?”
“Free, white, and twenty-one,” she replied cheerfully.
“You don’t look more than nineteen.”
“Tell me about it. I still get carded everywhere I go.” She made a disgusted face.
Tom remembered when he’d been twenty-one, half a lifetime ago. Even then, he didn’t have a fraction of Danny’s energy or optimism. All of a sudden, he felt old, tired, and depressed.
“So there you have it, Mr. Turtle Sir,” she was saying, “the story of my life.” She flashed a crooked grin. “Your turn.”
That took Tom aback for a moment. Then he laughed. “Nice try,” he said, “but no way.”
“No fair,” Danny protested. “I showed you mine.” Tom was glad she couldn’t see him. He was blushing again. Forty-six years old, and all of a sudden he felt like he was in high school again. “I prefer to remain an enigma,” he said. “Don’t you read Aces? Mystery is the Turtle’s middle name.”
“And what are the Turtle’s first and last names?”
Tom laughed again. But Danny made a short, sharp gesture with her hand, cutting him off. Her head was cocked to one side, listening. “What’s wrong?” he asked her.
“Do you hear that?” she asked.
Tom couldn’t hear a thing. He turned a dial, boosting the volume on his exterior mikes, filling the shell with the familiar sounds of the Brooklyn night: a distant roar of traffic, a horn blaring, the rumble of a tank.
Then he heard it.
Far off and small, yet somehow it cut through the street noise to bring a chill to the blood. A baying, as of..
“Dogs.” Tom said. “A lot of dogs.”
“Hounds,” Danny said. Suddenly she was all business. She jumped down off Detroit Steel, landing with catlike grace on the balls of her feet and snatching up her M16. “I grew up in the north woods. I know the sound of a hunting pack.”
High, high overhead, a lightning bolt crashed across a clear sky. The thunderclap came an instant later.
It was warm and close in the steel confines of his shell. But Tom Tudbury shivered.
“Croyd, wake up, would you?” The Outcast shook the form on the bed. The bedsprings rattled, but Croyd continued to snore. From the doorway, the two guards that Kafka had set to watch the Sleeper stared silently.
“Bet if he got those adenoids fixed, he wouldn’t snore like that.” The Outcast turned to see the penguin, doing tight little figure eights on the ledge of the high tower window. The guards grinned; the penguin waved back at them.
The Outcast sighed and straightened up. He exhaled loudly. “He’s gotta wake up,” he said. “We need him.” He gestured at Croyd. “Look at that body. Those orifices have to
do something.”
“Well, I have other visitors for you, Your Largeness. They came to help.”
“More aces?” the Outcast said, suddenly eager. “Who”
“An alligator, a cat, and an aborigine.”
Oh, them. I heard. Thought there was supposed to be an owl along with that.”
“So they didn’t quite get it right. Are you perfect?” The Penguin attempted a triple axel, failed, and did a pratfall to the floor. It grinned up at the Outcast. “So you coming or not?”
“I’ll be there in a moment.” The Outcast looked down again at Croyd and sighed once more.
The penguin clucked at him. “You might try an alarm clock. Hey, okay, I’m going, I’m going.”
Tom’s fingers tightened on the armrests of his chair. He pushed with his mind. The shell rose slowly off the ground.
There was another flash of lightning. He heard rolling thunder. Then the baying came again, louder this time, closer. There was something terrifying about the sound. The way it lingered on the wind and chilled the soul. It was a dark, primal sound. It turned his bowels to water.
Tom turned up his speakers to drown out the distant hounds. “GET TO HQ,” he told Danny. “WARN HARTMANN AND THE OTHERS.” She didn’t move. She stood there listening, cradling her M-16. “NOW!” Tom thundered. “WE DON’T HAVE MUCH TIME.”
Danny turned her head slightly, looked up at him. The wind was rising. Her baseball cap went sailing off her head. “I’ve told them already,” she said. “They’re on their way up.,’
Her sisters, Tom remembered. Before he could reflect on it, the others came boiling out of the tunnel beneath the grandstands. Cyclone and Mistral in their fighting suits. Snotman in army fatigues, Mike Tsakos in his skivvies, Radha O’Reilly in a sari, a bunch of Dannys and a larger bunch of uniforms. Hartmann stopped by the dugout. He looked scared. Somewhere off to the west, thunder rumbled, and they heard the stutter of machinegun fire.
The Turtle crossed the infield, his shadow rippling across the model Rox, the rising winds buffeting his shell. “WE’RE UNDER ATTACK,” he told them. He wasn’t sure how he knew, but he did.
A grizzled, red-faced old man in a lieutenant colonel’s uniform was the first to gather his wits. “Cyclone, Mistral, do something about this wind,” he ordered in a southern accent so thick you could cut it with a knife. “Tsakos, get your skinny butt in those iron long johns and go reinforce the main gate.” Tsakos went running off toward center field. “We need to find out what’s happening out there. Turtle, you”
“Dear God,” Hartmann interrupted, his voice shrill with sudden fear. He looked around wildly. “They’re after me.”
A lightning bolt crackled toward the west, underlining his words. The call of a hunting horn shuddered through the night, faint but distinctive.
“We don’t know who they’re after,” Vidkunssen began.
“Can’t you hear it?” Hartmann screeched. “Dear God.” He sounded close to hysteria.
The thunder was louder, the lightning flashing all around. But under it, you could hear the eerie baying of hounds, com
ing closer and closer.
“Corporal Shepherd,” the lieutenant colonel drawled in his grits-and-bourbon tones, “the senator’s a little upset. Escort him back to headquarters and get him a warm glass of milk.” He looked around at the aces. “You, Booger —”
“My name is Reflector,” Snotman insisted.
“You let anything happen to the senator, boy, and your name is Shit, you got that?” the old man snarled.
Corporal Danny put a gentle hand on Hartmann’s arm. “Come with me, Senator. We’ll keep you safe.”
He wrenched away from her violently. “No,” he said. “They’ll find me. They’ll get me.”
The cracker colonel spat. “Shit, boy, get a hold of yourself. It’s just someone out walking his dawgs.”
Hartmann backed away from them. His head twisted back and forth, like a rabbit about to bolt. “Run,” he shouted over the wind, over the sounds of automatic weapons fire from the street outside. “We have to run. We have to get away from them…”
A lightning bolt flashed down and touched one of the light towers. For a moment a brilliant shower of sparks lit the night. Then the field went dark. The hounds were very close now. Outside the walls, someone screamed.
Even the grizzled old colonel looked shaken by that scream. He spit, and made a decision. “You up there,” he shouted at Tom. “The senator’s a little nervous. Maybe you should get him someplace safe. Can you do that?”
“NO PROBLEM.” Tom thought of a hand. Invisible fingers closed gently around Hartmann, lifted. Tom deposited him on top of the shell. Hartmann was hyperventilating, his eyes wide. “HOLD ON, SENATOR,” Tom told him. “THIS COULD BE A BUMPY RIDE.”
“I just don’t have time for this,” said Bloat. “I don’t. I really don’t.” He rolled his head distractedly.
Wyungare gazed up at the immensity that was the overgrown boy. The joker called Kafka set one chitinous appendage on the Aborigine’s shoulder. Wyungare shook it off.
“Sorry,” said Kafka. “That’s it for the audience. I’m afraid there’s a war on.”
Wyungare ignored him. “You have to listen to me,” he said to Bloat. “What I described to you about the destruction wrought to the dreamtime is, if anything, understated.”