by David Beem
“WE ARE THE CHURCH OF THE LADDER DAY DUDES…”
From beneath the ledge surrounding the deck, Wang and Shmuel pop up, spot me, wave, then duck down.
“Can you stop them chanting?” I ask.
“I’m going to let it stand,” Nostradamus replies. “Listen. The problem is you won’t get your hands dirty. But your hands are already dirty. The gas in your car doesn’t come without a few dead G.I. Joes. You didn’t get your smartphone without a six-year-old factory worker throwing herself out a window. You can’t afford to be so naïve, Edge.”
“WE ARE THE CHURCH OF THE LADDER DAY DUDES…”
“But these people are no better than robots.”
“Ouch, I’m hurt,” says Nostradamus, his head tilting to the side as he focuses on the monkeys. “Once I have time to synthesize your blood and recreate the formula, I’m sure I’ll be able to improve their quality of life.”
“WE ARE THE CHURCH OF THE LADDER DAY DUDES…”
“Don’t think this is easy,” he continues. “I only had to resort to borrowing Putin’s stupid mind-control monkeys because I couldn’t be certain how today was going to work out. It’s a lot of variables, and you never know which thing is mission critical, you know? It could be the assassination, or it could be something as trivial as making sure Caleb gets into the shaggy gorilla-unicorn costume. There are so many strings to pull. Olga tailing Wang and Shmuel. The couple in Colorado, the Super Target, the farmhouse, these two.” He breaks off, gesturing to the Marys, who are still on their time out. “Just because I’m good at prophecy doesn’t mean it’s easy. It’s hard work. It makes wedding planning look like tic-tac-toe.”
“I can see that.” My gaze returns to the writhing worshippers beneath the deck of the Buck Rogers’ Jollies. Every single one of them is wearing a medallion. Those monkeys sure were thorough.
“WE ARE THE CHURCH OF THE LADDER DAY DUDES…”
“And don’t forget keeping track of the Dr. Seuss clones,” says Nostradamus. “I mean, that alone. Which one is which, right?”
“Oh yeah. I don’t know how you do it.”
My gaze pans up. Wang is jabbing his finger at something farther down the deck. I follow the trajectory. Is that Gary Busey? It is Gary Busey. And he’s chanting along with the rest.
“I was writing a consolation card the other day,” says Nostradamus, still focusing on the monkeys. “Those two clones Mary shot at the football stadium. Your Mary, I mean. You remember that, right?”
“Like it was yesterday.”
Shmuel, holding a two-by-four, pops up behind Gary Busey.
“Anyway,” says Nostradamus, “I couldn’t figure out which guys she even killed. Can you imagine? I wanted to send a card, but I didn’t want to be insensitive. What if I’d written, ‘Sorry to hear about Zed,’ and then it turns out Zed’s fine, but Ked’s dead? Or maybe Ned’s dead. Or Ted, or—”
“Yeah, I get it,” I say. “Talk about a faux pas.”
“Exactly!”
Shmuel clobbers Gary Busey over the head. Busey falls over, Shmuel ducks below the ledge.
“That batch of clones is touchy,” says Nostradamus, still peering intently at the mind-control monkeys—and apparently not reading my mind, or aware of what’s happening on deck.
“Trust me,” he says. “I’ve never met a touchier batch of clones. Well, you know how Fred is.”
“Uh-huh,” I reply. “Say, are you sure you’re up for controlling the whole human race? Sounds like this has been a rough ride for you. Although I do admire your ability to split your concentration. Having this conversation with me while mind-controlling all these innocent people. Floating that ship.”
He waves these remarks away. “It’ll be much easier after I synthesize your blood. A fully powered Zarathustra who knows what he’s doing is more powerful than you realize.”
Busey pops up, rubbing his head but no longer chanting, and apparently free of Nostradamus’s control. Wang and Shmuel help him to his feet. They’re discussing something. Busey gestures to the worshippers beneath the ship.
“Question,” I hurry to say. “Why does Putin have mind-control monkeys?”
“Oh, you know. Him and his election meddling. He’s obsessed with it.”
“WE ARE THE CHURCH OF THE LADDER DAY DUDES…”
Busey steps up to the starboard ledge, an AK-47 propped on his hip.
“WE ARE THE CHURCH OF THE LADDER DAY DUDES…”
“Fellow traveler?” I ask, meaning Nostradamus and Putin, since both like to meddle.
“Nah,” he replies. “Propaganda is a dirty business. His meddling is like the Stone Age compared to me. I’m talking stripping people of their free will. So much better.”
“Right, right. I gotcha. I guess the worst part about free will is all the chaos, huh?”
“Yeah. Yeah, that’s right.”
“And you’re sure you’ve got a firm control on all the chaos here, right?”
Nostradamus’s head tilts. “Why? Did I miss something?”
A deafening squeal issues from the Buck Rogers’ Jollies’ loudspeakers. Wang yanks the person standing on the plank away from the ledge and raises a steampunk-style microphone.
“WE ARE THE CHURCH OF THE LADDER DAY DUDES,” he yells. “WELL, GUESS WHAT? IT’S LADDER DAY, MOTHERFUCKERS!”
Gary Busey screams, “YEE-HAW,” and fires the AK-47 into the air.
Nostradamus’s hand comes down from his temple. The chanting stops. His gaze whips around to face the Buck Rogers’ Jollies.
“Is that Gary Busey?” he asks in Darth Vader-like shock. “Okay—I did not see that coming.”
“Never underestimate the chaos of having a Gary Busey around,” I reply, stuffing my hand into my pocket. My fist closes on Dad’s ring.
CHAPTER Fifty-one
The door bangs open into a parking lot, and Danny goes into the light. Not the alien abduction light—never that—but the sweet light of sunshine and freedom!
He spins around to face Leo, who emerges from the stadium exit seconds after. He claps Leo on the shoulder, and the two of them double over, hands on their knees, and take a moment to catch their breaths. A group of cops chases a group of monkeys dragging parachutes behind them some hundred yards away. That and the distant police sirens barely register over the sound of their panting, or the still-receding terror of escaping commie-alien abduction on US soil.
A spaceship flies overhead.
Danny and Leo freeze. Their eyes track the spaceship as it zooms over the Notre Dame campus. When it’s out of sight and Danny’s sure they haven’t been spotted, they resume their earlier activity: hands on knees, sucking air.
Twenty yards away, the lid on a dumpster pops open. Two chimpanzees climb out. They look left. They look right. They make a break for the stadium exit. The one in front throws open the door, and the two file inside.
Leo stands up straight and turns to face Danny. “So what do we do about the commie alien?”
Danny stands up straight also. What do they do about the commie alien? Who would believe them?
“Gemini’s in on it,” says Leo.
“What?”
“Think. The Russians’ve been on him since San Diego. Now we find out she’s a Russian and an alien. Well, who do we know who stars in all these alien movies?”
“Johnny Gemini,” agrees Danny, the pieces coming together. He wags his finger. “Yeah. Yeah, it’s perfect. Hide in plain sight. Just like those friggin’ cosplayers. Aliens among us. I told you!”
“You did. You did in fact tell me.”
“And you! You told me about the friggin’ commies!”
“I did. I did that.”
Danny strokes his chin and thinks some more. “Okay, lookit: We find Gemini. We get our friggin’ money, and then we turn his alien-commie-loving ass in to the proper authorities. Let them sort it out.”
“Sounds good.”
“Sounds good.”
Danny chews the inside of his cheek as th
e distant police sirens grow louder.
“Hey, Danny,” says Leo, a funny expression crossing his features. “Did you see two chimpanzees come out of that dumpster wearing purple-and-yellow onesies sneak into the Notre Dame football stadium?”
Danny’s hand comes up to gesture over the top of his head. “With blinking caps with antennas sticking out and stuff? Like the monkeys the cops were chasing?”
Leo nods. “Yeah, yeah.”
Danny also nods. “I mighta seen something like that. After the spaceship flew over, I mean.”
“Okay, good. I just wanted to make sure I wasn’t going crazy.”
Olga and Putin lie naked, listening to Arcade Fire beneath a blanket on the quilt in a field at the edge of campus. Konyok Gobyunok the horse grazes behind them. Farther off, Boris sits picking his teeth atop the Mustang’s hood.
“You must come Cape Idokopas next veek,” says Putin, stroking her bare green arm. “Vee got Avengerz Vour,” he adds temptingly.
Olga tilts her head. She runs her fingers into his chest hair, then clenches them tight. “Bool-shit. Dat movie not out yet.”
Putin smiles and lays his hand atop hers. She relaxes her grip and nuzzles in. “Da,” he coos, the bass tones reverberating beneath her ear on his chest. “Vee got it. Come. You see. Wary nice.”
“Does Block Vidow die?” she asks.
“Nyet. Block Vidow never dies.”
CHAPTER Fifty-Two
I slip on the ring, and the world explodes into a billion streaking lights. The soul-stars’ screams are deafening. More than a billion white-hot pinpricks—the lives of everyone who has ever lived—race like electricity through the neural connections in my brain.
The soul-stars are back!
Not for long, says Nostradamus.
Cold goo slithers up my arm. Nostradamus steps in front of me, both hands now pressed to his temples through his helmet, his head tipped forward. A headache explodes from the base of my neck and speeds upward along the meridian of my brain. The pain burrows deeper in tendrils bent on ripping apart my two lobes.
I stagger backward.
A spectral flying sidekick streaks across my spotted field of vision. Nostradamus’s head cocks left as the ghost heel collides with the jaw of his helmet.
Nostradamus shakes head, refocuses on me.
The goo glides up my neck and spreads over my mouth, my nose, my closed eyes. They flutter open, and familiar crosshairs, spinning target locks, and scrolling diagnostics in the suit’s heads-up display cut across the shimmering spots blooming before my eyes.
A ghost grenade falls at Nostradamus’s feet. There are letters painted on it.
EAT MY NAVY SEAL GRITS, MOTHERFU—it explodes.
I fall onto one knee and press my fist into dirt. My gaze snaps up. Nostradamus is back on his feet, fingertips to temple.
My headache is like a fulcrum under a stressed level.
A ghost throwing star smashes bull’s-eye into Nostradamus’s helmet…
Red letters scroll across the inside of my visor.
RECOMMENDATION: ACCESS THE COLLECTIVE UNCONSCIOUS.
Edger—give me control!
Dad? Sure, yes, go! Go!
The pain vanishes. Waves of relief surge through me. I inventory my surroundings. Two astonished Marys gape back at me, their hands on their knees. The world around them is distorted and bent, the way it always is when the suit first forms. For a second, it’s like peering out at the world from inside a fishbowl, and then everything’s normal again. Everything, that is, except everything.
Facing the Buck Rogers’ Jollies’ plank, Nostradamus performs a two-finger salute. I whip around in time to see the person at the edge diving off.
Dad lifts my arms and has me make a swooping motion; an invisible force emanates from the center of my forehead like a snapping towel. The jumper swoops up like Superman before lowering to the ground for a safe landing.
“How’re you doing this?” asks Nostradamus, his hands finally lowering.
Yeah, how’re we doing this? I ask Dad.
You’re much more powerful than him now, he says. It’s not even close. He can sense it too.
Nostradamus makes another salute, and another, and another—
Three more jumpers. Three more invisible snaps whip outward from my forehead, this time without my arm motions. All three jumpers land safely, then queue in line for the ladder behind the first guy we saved like everyone’s at a warped amusement park ride.
Yeah, we’re gonna have to solve the monkey problem, says Dad.
But, how is Nostradamus not in my head? I ask. He blew up my cloaking device.
Did he? Dad’s psychic presence is amused. The cloaking device is the medallion Fabio gave you. When you put on the ring, the suit absorbed the medallion. I needed you and Nostradamus to focus on the storage unit, when, in fact, the medallion is the cloaking device. Bruce Lee, Killmaster, and Hanzo just had to hold him off long enough for the suit to form.
Wait—the medallion is the cloaking device?
All of them are. You’re surrounded by potential cloaking devices. I thought you figured that out.
Dad. No. Einstein couldn’t have figured that out!
Ja, I could—and did! offers Einstein with the random timing of a boogie-boarding giraffe.
We’ve got trouble, says Dad.
Five more jumpers. Five more brain snaps. Two Supermen and three Superwomen alight to the ground and requeue.
“How are you doing that?” Nostradamus asks again, his hands dropping from his temples to slap his sides.
“Free will,” I reply as bodies begin flying off the ladder in every direction. My brain erupts like chucked Pop-its on the sidewalk. The sky is teeming with flying mind-controlled people.
We’ll need to fix that, says Dad. There are too many people for him to mind-control without the monkeys, which amplify and relay his orders through those medallions.
I thought you just said—
Be quiet and listen. There’s a switch on the back. On one setting, they’re a cloaking device, meant to keep him out. Switch it the other way, it does the opposite. It opens the mind as wide as it can be opened, making it easy for him to get in.
Wait a second. You’re telling me some numb-nuts put a switch on the back to make them do the opposite of what they’re built to do?
Mm-hmm.
Who green-lit that design feature?
Nobody. The manufacturers were operating off Chinese instructions.
That actually makes perfect sense.
Dad reaches out with the Force through me. Hundreds of tiny switches appear in my mind’s eye, then resolve into a single switch displayed in the supersuit’s HUD. Red letters scroll across the screen.
DEACTIVATE? YES/NO
Dad still being in control, my retinas operate the YES toggle.
“Now what did you do?” asks Nostradamus, his arms coming up in a gesture of open frustration. The flying innocent people land, and this time they stay put.
Wang grabs Ralph’s shoulders and repositions him so he’s facing a different shot. Ralph adjusts the camera’s focus. He can’t believe what he’s filmed today. Mass mind-control. Flying people. Telekinetic power. Whoever—or whatever—those two in the futuristic suits are, he has no doubt they’re the ones responsible.
The one on the left—Future Knight, he’s taken to thinking of him—raises his arms overhead. Two dozen cars and SUVs swoop in above the astonished onlookers. The one on the right—Halo War Machine Dude—waves his hand. The vehicles lower to the ground. Ralph zooms in on a RAV4, but the family inside has somehow slept through the whole ordeal.
“Are you getting this?” asks Wang, pointing.
Ralph gives a thumbs-up. He can’t wait to get this online. The world needs to know what’s happened here. And so does Cannes Film Festival. He can practically smell that Best Documentary award.
“We are the Church…” someone says from below.
“…of the Ladder Day Dude
s?” another person responds.
Ralph’s camera pans left and right until—there. A man and a woman are staring at each other, bewildered.
“We are the Church of the Ladder Day Dudes!” someone else yells.
He pans left, searching for the speaker, and through his camera’s viewfinder, the crowd streaks by. There—a college kid pumping his fist in the air. “WE ARE THE CHURCH OF THE LADDER DAY DUDES!”
Ralph widens the aperture.
“WE ARE THE CHURCH OF THE LADDER DAY DUDES!”
“WE ARE THE CHURCH OF THE LADDER DAY DUDES!”
I stare at four college guys in backpacks, unable to comprehend what I’m seeing. They’re chanting their allegiances to the Church of the Ladder Day Dudes while, next to them, an older couple in Notre Dame jackets are doing the same. All the way down the line and thick into the throng of onlookers, everyone is doing the same.
These people are crazier than a hairless bigfoot, I say. Dad, I don’t get it. We switched off their medallions.
It’s residual, he replies, his psychic sense fretting. I’m going to have to puzzle on this when there’s more time. We can’t let Nostradamus get away.
Right.
I spin around, fists clenched, Dad still in control.
Screaming monkeys running every which way. Wang shouting into the microphone. Gary Busey firing his gun. People pumping their fists in the air, and a handful of sci-fi costumed extras—but no Nostradamus.
Two muscle-bound cavemen and three steampunk mad scientists march toward me like it’s Night of the Cosplaying Weirdos.
Can we find him through the Collective Unconscious? I ask, backing away from this new advancing threat, while trying to keep one eye on them and the other on lookout for Nostradamus.
No. It was the first thing I did after I died. Trying to locate him through the Collective Unconscious is what got Indiana Tim killed. It was from Nostradamus’s ability to cloak himself we learned how to build our own—
There! I exclaim, pointing.
Nostradamus is helping one of the Marys to her feet. He’s got her arm over his shoulder when he spots me. His free arm makes another slashing motion, and the Buck Rogers’ Jollies rockets higher into the air.
