“I’m beat, Kafka. Leave me alone.”
“I thought… Excuse me, Governor, but I thought you would stay as the Outcast.” The rest of the sentence followed, unspoken …. why would you WANT to come back to this horror if you could get out?
“I would if I could, believe me. But I always come back here when I’m tired. Always. I’m linked with this body.” His voice was so mournful that he ended up giggling harshly at himself. “We jokers are so damned ugly,” he said. “We don’t like the way we look any more than the fucking nats. Ain’t that a trip? If we could, we’d cover all the goddamn mirrors in the world.” Bloat yawned, the pimply fat cheeks stretching like uncooked dough. “I was inspecting the Wall emplacements. We’ve picked up a fair amount of stuff from the Jersey shore. There’s a couple radar units. We got anyone who knows how to use them?”
“I think so, Governor. I’ll find out and get them set up. We can certainly use them.”
Kafka’s voice sounded weary, and the roach-man’s thoughts were pessimistic. Maybe they’ll give us a few seconds warning before the missiles hit. Just long enough to scream…
“Is it really that bad, Kafka?”
Kafka looked around. They were alone except for the ring of guards around the balcony and at each of the entrances into the main lobby of the castle — half of them jokers, half Boschian mermen seated on flying, armored fish. Outside, the Rox was slumbering as false dawn lightened the eastern sky. The towers of Manhattan shivered in the waters of the bay.
“I…” Kafka began. Stopped.
Kafka sighed, a high and thin wheezing. “I am worried, Governor. This time they won’t try a ground assault. If what you’re hearing from Patchwork is true, then it’s going to be a long-range bombardment. The New Jersey is stationed suspiciously close to the bay. Governor, a Tomahawk cruise missile comes in low and fast, maybe 500 mph — how quickly can we detect it, and can we respond to the attack in the four or five seconds we might have? A Lance missile moves at Mach 3, much faster than a Tomahawk. They have missiles that can be fired from Apache helicopters; some of the jets can fire from as far away as three miles and put a missile straight down a chimney… You want me to go on? Governor, they don’t have to commit any troops to this assault — not this time, not if they don’t want to. They can just bang away until there’s nothing left here but rubble.”
Kafka left one thought dangling, but Bloat heard it … and you’re the prime target, Governor. We already know that. What the hell chance do we have if you’re gone? If you’re dead, there’s no Wall, no caves, no fairyland castle, no demons from Bosch. There’s nothing but a bunch of jokers with stolen weapons and the jumpers. It isn’t going to be enough. The thoughts from the joker guards weren’t much better. More than one of them was thinking of that fucking 800 number and of the jokers who’d left yesterday under the amnesty. He knew he had to do something — talk like this would lead to flash-fire rumors, and he couldn’t afford that.
Bloat shook his head at Kafka. “You are about the most pessimistic roach I’ve ever seen.” Kafka glared up at Bloat at that. “No man, I mean it. You must think that every cloud is the bottom of a shoe. Look, everything you said is true. Okay, fine, it’s all true. But look at what we’ve got. Modular Man’s here, Molly’s in place, Croyd’s likely to wake up any minute, Hardesty’s banged up but he can call up the Hunt tonight if we need them. We have the caves and the Wall and a lot of goddamn equipment. We have a lot of jumpers. We have Patchwork’s eye and ear in Zappa’s goddamn headquarters, so we stand a good chance of knowing in advance every move he’s going to make. There’s a lot of protesters out there right now walking the streets in J-town and making noise about how Bush’s “kinder, gentler nation” is just a crock of bloatblack. Manhattan’s practically a ghost town, from what we’ve heard. Put enough pressure on Congress and they might demand that Zappa and his people get pulled back out. Half the aces they asked to join refused, didn’t they? — maybe they’ll even show up on our side if things get ugly. Maybe this Wyungare fellow can actually do something. If the military’s targeting buildings the way they are, then I can change them — every day if I need to — so their targeting systems are fouled up. We have some radar, we have some jokers with useful powers. C’mon, Kafka. Think. Give me advice, not sob stories. If you were me, what else would you do?”
Bloat’s shoulders sagged back against the rubbery skin of his body. The long speech had made him more tired than before, but he could hear the difference in the mindvoices. Even Kafka stood up a little straighter under his carapace.
“I’m sorry, Governor,” he said. “I —”
Bloat waved a weary arm. “What else would you do?” he repeated. He plucked the answer from Kafka’s mind before Kafka could speak it. “If all it takes is a little foul weather…” Bloat said.
Bloat giggled and looked out from the transparent walls of the castle. The sun was just rising over the bay. Deep black, long shadows crawled like ebony fingers over the lower buildings of Manhattan while bright sun was glinting from the upper windows. The moat between the Wall and Ellis was dark and still, with wisps of dawn steam rising from the surface of the water. Untroubled by Bloat’s Wall, a gull glided in over the Manhattan Gate, swooped low over the wavelets, and plunged into the cold water. It came out with silver wriggling in its beak. The gull raised its head and swallowed the fish whole.
It all looked so damned peaceful…
“Get me a phone,” Bloat said. Kafka snapped his fingers; one of the Boschian mermen leapt atop his fish-steed and left the room, returning a moment later with a cordless receiver. The merman glided up to Bloat’s head; hovering, he held the phone out to the boy. Bloat took it in his stick-thin hands and nearly dropped it. He giggled, then slowly and deliberately punched the buttons. “… I … Give … Up,” he said aloud, then cleared his throat.
“Joker amnesty,” said the voice at the other end. “Who are you and where and when can we pick you up?”
“You couldn’t pick me up with a fucking derrick,” Bloat shrieked. “This is Governor Bloat. Listen. I got a message for your goddamn General Zappa. Tell him that I figure the whole problem is that you nats hate the sight of us out in the bay. Well hell, I can fix that. Tell him to go look out his window.”
Bloat disconnected in the middle of the spluttering from the other end and let go of the receiver. The merman flicked the reins of its fish and did a power dive, scooping up the receiver just before it hit the floor. Around the room, Bloat’s guards applauded.
Bloat paid no attention. He had his eyes shut, humming to himself and imagining…
He visualized each of the hundreds of gargoyles he had so carefully placed along the roofs of the Rox — those leering, obscene little creatures. Then he thought of fog, a pea soup that London would have been proud of, a mist that might have wreathed the macintosh of Sherlock Holmes, one that would set the lighthouses along the Maine coast to wailing mournfully to unseen ships. Images of old horror movies came to mind: the Ripper stalking the streets of Whitechapel, bursting through ropes of fog to attack an unsuspecting woman of the streets; Frankenstein trudging stiff-legged through a smoky Bavarian village; Castle Dracula blanketed in stuff so thick it looked like coils of soiled cotton. He thought of fog so dense you could cut it and slice it and serve it for dinner.
He thought of that fog belching from the open mouths of all the gargoyles on all the rooftops and all the towers in his domain.