Bloat imagined it. He opened the gates and let the power flow through. It was so much easier now; if nothing else, Wyungare had done that for him. Now he knew where the power came from. He could find the path quickly, could tap the energy anytime he wanted. Voices from the dreamworld screamed at him in outrage as thick streams of cloud vomited from above.
Bloat opened his eyes. He chuckled. All around the Crystal Castle, from everywhere in the Rox, the wreaths and tendrils fell and spread, like thick gray velvet being pulled over the sun and sky. In moments, there was nothing outside the transparent walls of the castle except wisps of dark sullen cloud.
“So much for my great view,” he said. “This is really gonna cut down the value of the property.”
He yawned. A feeling of exhaustion overwhelmed him. Bloat slept.
The basement lounge was full of old people.
The bodysnatcher did a quick count while they locked the doors behind him. He saw three faces he knew, still wearing their own flesh, and fourteen geezers. Seventeen total, eighteen counting him. They’d started out with twenty-two jumpers.
The youngest geezer was maybe sixty. The oldest looked like he’d been embalmed a decade ago. A few seemed pretty spry, but one old fuck struggled with his walker, and there were a couple in wheelchairs.
The bodysnatcher studied the room. No windows, only the one door. A pair of television monitors were mounted high on the walls at either end. Sprinklers dotted the ceiling. A folding table had been set up, supporting a steel coffee urn and a dozen boxes of assorted donuts. Most of the donuts were gone. Not that he cared. Caffeine and sugar were poison.
“Zelda.” A hand clutched at his arm.
The bodysnatcher pulled away. “Don’t touch me.” He looked down at a cripple in a wheelchair. She was an ancient, withered stick of a woman whose ghastly blond wig couldn’t conceal almost total baldness.
“You didn’t jump,” the dried-up old cunt in the chair said in a high, quavery voice. She sounded like she was going to cry.
The bodysnatcher recognized her. Something about the way she whined. “Suzy?” she asked.
Suzy Creamcheese bobbed her head up and down. Her wig almost fell off.
“She’ll love your tits,” the bodysnatcher said. “Did you tell her about the herpes? I hope she has a warranty.”
Suzy blinked vague, watery eyes. “What do you mean?” She clutched at the bodysnatcher’s sleeve. “Why are they doing this? When will we get our bodies back?”
The bodysnatcher didn’t waste his breath answering. Behind them, the door opened. Juggler was ushered inside the room. They heard the door lock behind him. Juggler was still wearing his own body. The bodysnatcher went up to him. “Maybe you’re not as stupid as I thought.”
Juggler had a look of dismay and confusion on his face as he saw all the geezers. “It was one-way glass, wasn’t it?”
“One-way glass, one-way jumps.”
Suzy Creamcheese began to cry.
Juggler said, “They promised us amnesty.” He took the leaflet out of his back pocket, unfolded it.
“I take it back. You are as stupid as I thought.” The bodysnatcher looked around. “We’re three short. Who’s missing?”
“Gyro Gearloose, Hari-Kari, and Mam’selle,” Monkey-face put in. She hadn’t jumped either. She looked just like what she was, a frightened sixteen-year-old girl.
The bodysnatcher thought about the missing jumpers. Then it all made sense. Mam’selle was French. She spoke four languages fluently. Hari-Kari was a twelve-year-old nip who understood electronics better than Kafka. Both had IQs up in the genius range. Neither one was going to give anybody any trouble. And Gyro was a congressman’s son.
“This is bullshit,” Juggler told the geezers. “No way they can keep you in those bodies.” He held up the leaflet, shook it for emphasis. “We got amnesty in writing. If we need to, we can jump the guards, the doctors… whoever we have to, until we get our own bodies back.”
“You see anybody here but us chickens?” the bodysnatcher asked him.
Juggler glared at him. The bodysnatcher could see him struggling to come up with a nasty reply.
They all heard the sound at the same moment.
The bodysnatcher glanced up. Gas was hissing out of the overhead sprinklers. Someone screamed.
“Not very fucking original,” the bodysnatcher said. Then it was show-time. He went to his light-form.
They were four floors deep. It took him half of forever to bum his way back to the surface, and he felt weak as water before he finally got there, dangerously low on energy. He reverted to human form and hid in the bushes just inside the electric fence, naked and shivering. It was his own fault. He never should have stopped to kill the shrink.
By the time the guards came out of the building, the bodysnatcher had rested long enough. He lasered out of there at light-speed.
It wasn’t until he was almost back at the junkyard, coming in low and fast through the fog, that Tom finally lost it. He tried to concentrate, but it was no use. The shell slid downward. He felt faint.
The shell plowed into the wall of junkers along the shore, crunched through them, slewed heavily to the right, and crashed. Tom was slammed forward violently by the impact. He must have blacked out. When he came to, the shell was canted at a sixty-degree angle, and he was suspended in his chair. He knew he’d have bruises across his chest where the seat harness had caught him.
Tom freed himself, dropped two feet to the floor. His hands fumbled as he punched the hatch controls. There was a hiss as the hatch unsealed. He crawled out into the night, left the shell half-buried in rust and iron, and limped back to the shack.
Inside it was dim and still. The severed head of the first Modular Man sat on the television, staring at him. The dead eyes seemed to follow him across the room. “Stop looking at me that way,” he told it.
Exhaustion weighed heavily on him. The dull throbbing behind his eyes wasn’t going to go away anytime soon. He had flown sixty miles up the Hudson before finally dropping Hartmann off at a hospital. Even that far upstate might not be safe. The trip home had been endless. He’d had to detour around the Rox to get to Bayonne, and the fog was getting so thick that he almost overflew the junkyard.
When he was running before the Hunt, there hadn’t been time to be afraid. But the fear had found him now. He could still see the jaws of the hellhound as it slammed up against his shell. He could feel the impact as the Huntsman’s spear punched through his battleship plate. Another foot to the side and…
Tom didn’t want to think about that.
He hadn’t dared look at the Brooklyn Bridge on the way back. When he closed his eyes, he saw them tumbling…
In almost twenty-seven years as an active ace, the Turtle had never killed anyone. Until now.
Maybe they weren’t real , Tom thought. The hounds didn’t bleed, he remembered. When they died, there were no bodies. They just vanished. Maybe it was the same with the horses and the hunters who rode them. Not people, just demons off the Rox, like the mermen and the knights on the flying fish.
Only Bloat’s demons couldn’t go beyond the Wall, and the Wild Hunt had ridden through deepest Flatbush. And he’d seen some of those jokers out at the peace conference. The antlered man had even spoken.
Tom buried his face in his hands. His head was pounding.
Was this what war was like?
He needed to talk to someone. But Joey was in North Carolina, Tachyon was on his way to another planet, and Barbara had cried at his funeral, years ago.
They hadn’t given him any choice, Tom told himself. The hounds were ripping men apart. Hartmann’s hand had looked like something pulled from a meat-grinder. At least he had been able to lead the Hunt away from Ebbets Field, maybe that had saved a few lives, maybe he’d helped protect Danny and the rest.