“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, coming 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.”
“Later,” said Bloat. “I can’t worry about it now.”
“There are millions, many millions of human beings around this world whose lives are being destroyed by you, however inadvertently.”
’No!” said Bloat. “There are hundreds on this island whose lives will be destroyed if we don’t figure a solution. They count more to me than your millions. Sorry.”
Bloat’s advisers murmured, mumbled, nodded appreciatively.
“I can appreciate that,” said Wyungare. “Your loyalty to your friends here, your colleagues, is admirable. But is it possible that both our purposes can be served? Perhaps if we simply reason this out."
Bloat said. “How many penguins can skate on the head of a pin?”
The penguin performed a series of tight infinity signs, each one precise and equal to the one before it.
Bloat nodded. “We will talk, but another time.” He pointedly directed his look toward Kafka.
Agitated, the joker looked from Wyungare to Bloat. He took a step forward. The sound of his body was like the sound of a barrel of steel flatware rolling downhill. “So where do you want I should take him?”
“A cell, I think,” said Bloat. “For tonight, anyhow. Tomorrow, we’ll talk. I promise,” he said to the Aborigine.
“I think it will be too late.”
“Can’t be helped,” said Bloat. “The feds didn’t consult me before setting up their offensive.”
“What about the gator?” said Kafka.
Bloat rolled his eyes. “Put him in the moat. He can earn his keep as one of the guards.”
“How we gonna get him there?” said the joker practically.
Bloat thought for a moment. “I’ll have one of the guards waiting out front on his fish mount. If that doesn’t work as bait, I don’t know what will.”
“What about the cat?” said Kafka.
“What cat?” said Bloat.
Kafka glanced around the huge chamber confusedly. “He was right over — shit, I don’t know where he went.”
The Aborigine smiled. No one but he had seen the black cat depart.
“I’m ready to go to my room,” Wyungare said. He held out his wrists as though expecting iron shackles.
“Just go,” said Kafka disgustedly. “I’ll tell you which way to turn and when to stop. If that doesn’t meet with your approval, well, then I’ll just fill you with nine millimeter.” He hefted his rifle suggestively.
“It’s not too late to discuss this,” said Wyungare over his shoulder.
"Yes, it is.” Impatient, Bloat clearly turned his attention to other things. Kafka gave a shove to his prisoner and Wyungare moved toward the door.
Wyungare sensed the presence of the black cat as Kafka and he moved up a spiral climb of stone steps. Good.