“Where’s Paddy?” she demanded.
“Wandering the streets as usual as far as I know. Why?”
“He’s the only one of us who can get inside Acme. He has to go after Sarah or they’ll have the body snatchers sweeping all of us into their zoo.”
“We belong in a zoo,” I pointed out, but I got her drift, and it wasn’t a pretty one.
History lesson: The brothers Vanderventer created Acme and built it into a wealthy powerhouse. Then they died and left the mess to their frustrated wives. Max’s grandmother had vacated her responsibilities, leaving Paddy’s evil mother, Gloria Vanderventer, gripping Acme with an iron fist. I held Gloria at least partially responsible for Dane’s diabolical involvement in Max’s death. Even so, body snatching was a new low for the woman.
“Does Paddy still have an office at Acme?” I asked. He wasn’t reliable, but he was all we had. I just had to hope he wasn’t evil like his mother and son. Optimism doesn’t become me, so that was desperation speaking.
“Paddy has free rein to wander over there,” Cora said, watching over my shoulder as I opened more messages. “Who knew Bill had an iPhone?”
Hulking bartender Bill had videoed a gray-haired lady with a cane pounding the crap out of an ambulance attendant trying to pick her up off the street. She looked a hundred years old and not more than ninety pounds, but she beat the two-hundred-pound attendant away. Then fainted. She appeared lifeless, but my bet was that she was comatose like the others.
Cora whistled. “That’s some wacky gas.”
The video spun crazily, as if Bill had dropped the phone. Abruptly, we were watching a toppling blue mountain. I wanted to shake the screen to get a better perspective. A gloved hand grabbed a blue elbow. We caught a glimpse of a big shoulder being rolled onto a stretcher. And then all we saw was a plain white van driving away and pink particles drifting to the ground from a cloud of green.
Bill had been wearing blue.
Too appalled even to curse, I stared silently at the pink and green scene. Bill was a gentle bear of a man. He fed fish to Milo and looked out for me. He was my rock. Even though he wasn’t violent, he’d once raced to my rescue and chased baddies out a window for my sake.
They couldn’t have taken Bill! Bill couldn’t be down. Why hadn’t he been wearing hazmat?
Cora leaned over and punched off the message, then opened the next while cursing under her breath. Milo fled the room, and I couldn’t stop him. I needed to know what they’d done with Bill.
We hastily clicked more messages, searching for more videos. We needed cameras on the street, damn it. Who had Bill?
Of course, given the scrambled messages and photos of the Eiffel Tower the Zone was currently sending, even if we had street cameras, they would probably photograph Pluto and Mars. It was as if once the video of Bill had been allowed through, the Zone decided I’d had enough reality and needed a world tour.
“I’m going out there. You can do this.” I got up and headed for the closet Andre had pointed out. If the only danger out there was pink gas and feisty old ladies, I could handle it.
Cora didn’t argue. She slid into my seat and took over the controls. She worked computers daily, loved technology, and owned more equipment than I owned shoes. She was better at sitting still than me.
The hazmat suit stank. I was barely five-five—if I stretched—and the suit was obviously intended for someone half a foot taller. It sagged around me like a bridal gown on a six-year-old. The boots flopped awkwardly despite all the adjustments.
My biggest threat would be falling on my face and not being able to get up.
Or Andre, if he caught me.
He’d said this suit was only good for chemicals, not gas. I could ditch it, but I figured the breathing apparatus was better than breathing gas.
My Saturnian need for justice was welling, undeterred by practicality. I had to see for myself that my pal Bill was safe before I blamed the world and wiped it out.
With my temper, I couldn’t rule out the possibility of Armageddon.
4
South Baltimore is industrial. On any given day we can expect to smell garlic from the spice-packing plant, dead fish from boats in the harbor, or a rotten-cabbage stench from one of the chemical plants. Today, the air reeked of ozone, that fried electrical smell you get when a wire is going bad.
Being able to smell the air probably meant I’d better figure out how to work the suit, but it didn’t come with instructions. I’m good at reading rule-books and manuals, not so hot at intuiting technology on my own.
Staggering around in a hazmat suit—even one of the lighter ones—isn’t as easy as it looks. But I couldn’t tolerate watching injustice without taking someone down. My first goal was to find Paddy and see if he could be directed into Acme to find Sarah and Bill. I’d drag the eccentric scientist by the hair of his chinny-chin-chin if I had to.
Milo trotted after me. I sighed, glanced back to verify I’d firmly closed the warehouse door, then picked him up and put him in a pocket of the suit. He’d saved my life more than once. Who was I to argue?
Shuffling downhill, I gathered momentum and a little stability. Deciding I’d rather not meet Andre coming up, I took the alleyways and practiced judicious concealment, sort of like in the good old days when I used to keep my head down and my mouth shut.
That’s how I’d learned our Dumpsters traveled. I’d thought they were spying on me until one night I caught them dancing.
A big rusted green bin rumbled into my path now. In a hurry, I tried to squeeze past it. When the stinky Dumpster tried to crush me against a brick wall, I kicked it in a rusted patch, tearing a hole in it. Then I clambered up the side and over. I spit into the garbage as I crossed, to show it who was boss.
The erratic videos I’d been receiving hadn’t adequately depicted the fantastical image of the main business strip. The gas covering the Zone and harbor was more like drifting smoke than a heavy wet cloud. Sunlight filtered through, highlighting the sparkly pink particles. It made a great Disney effect. All we needed was a pink castle.
Instead of frivolity, though, we had eerily empty streets in the shadow of the looming remains of burned-out storage tanks and incinerator chimneys.
Since Chesty’s was the largest business in the Zone and had both liquor and food to attract crowds, I’d figured it was a good starting place for my hunt. Paddy sometimes hung out there. But I wasn’t ready to go in without scouting the territory. After the videos I’d received, I’d expected brawls on every corner. Where was everyone? Nervously, I peered from the alley beside Chesty’s to the main drag of Edgewater. Two people in the fancy style of hazmat suit were loading Officer Leibowitz into an unmarked van. Not an ambulance, a van. Now, I had no love for Leibowitz, our street cop. He was a rolling ton of lard who’d terrorized me, blackmailed a gay teenager, and used the law badly—but he was our crooked cop, and no human deserves to be treated like a guinea pig.
I was wondering if I could visualize blowing up the van’s tires, and engaging in my usual internal debate on morality, when Ernesto came rampaging out of the shadows with his wheelbarrow. Ernesto is pretty much a Danny DeVito doppelganger with a bad attitude. The hazmats he was attacking were twice his height and muscle. And there were two of them. Had he lost what passed for his mind?
Ernesto rammed the heavy wheelbarrow into the back of the first hazmat’s knees. With a cry, his victim lost his grip on the stretcher and crumpled backward into the barrow. His abrupt release caused the end of the stretcher to fall to the road, and in a very smooth chain reaction, Leibowitz flipped—unconscious, face-forward—into the barrow on top of the hazmat.