The chimera Perfecto jumped up and grabbed my shirt. "Truth? Is it true?" he shouted, and several other people yelled, "Is it true?" His hands were like iron, and I thought he would shake me and snap my neck. I could no longer breathe fire at him. I was too cold. My skin was turning blue and purple from the cold. I looked around the room; no one came to help me.
I became enraged because this chimera was touching me without permission. He dared to touch me! He dared to invade my privacy. He was bigger than me, and I’d heard rumors of his super-human strength, and though he could kill me, I realized the cold in me was power, too—a magic power stronger than the flames I’d been breathing.
It looks as if you’ll have to beat these insolent curs, keep them in line,
"Of course I killed him, puto," I shouted at Perfecto. I stood up. "And because you’ve touched me, I’ll kill you, too!"
I brought my cold heavy leg up into his groin and at the same time clubbed him in the nose with a fist of ice. Drops of blood sprayed out of his nose in slow motion. Fascinating.
He let go of me and sagged partway to the floor, gasping more from shock than from the cold. I kicked at his face, ready to sacrifice my leg, to let it shatter against his skull so that shards of ice would spray out and puncture his flesh. But his hand came up in slow motion and grabbed my foot and twisted it and I heard the bones of ice in my ankle snap as he threw me. I rose in the air so that for a moment I seemed to be standing in the air a meter off ground, and I imagined I looked just like Christ ascending into heaven as I slammed against the wall.
Everyone in the room stared up at me with their mouths shaped in little O’s of surprise. Fascinating.
The air whooshed out of me from the blow, and I sagged onto the chairs and fell to the floor.
Now I will have to kill them all, and I’ll have to do it with my ankle broken. I got up and screamed in rage and threw myself at a chimera woman. I became tons of ice flying at her, an unstoppable glacier. She stared at me, frightened, clutching the handles of her chair, then leaned back and brought up a leg made of stone; her boot smashed my face, splintering the ice in me. Fascinating.
I should have eaten more reptiles, I thought as a wave of red washed before my eyes and the world faded to a cold, distant, black pinpoint.
Red and white clouds swirled and resolved into a shape. Whorehouse Rat was smoking his cigar, breathing smoke into my face. He was the one who was out of place here! He had come to kill me! I knew it as surely as I knew my own name. I screamed and tried to swing, but my arms were pinned behind my back.
"Overdose. . . Overdose. . . Overdose. Cocktails," he said, moving his cigar with his tongue so the glowing end tipped down at an angle. It left a fiery afterimage in the air. Fascinating.
"But he only took one," someone said.
Yes, I thought, but what dosage? I screamed in rage at the Whorehouse Rat.
He slapped my face. "What day is it?"
I tried to answer, but couldn’t remember. It seemed very important. The act of trying to think made my head ache. I began to laugh. In the snap of a finger, everything became very lucid again. And the lucidity was funny. I kept laughing.
"You’ve had an overdose of cocktails," Whorehouse Rat yelled. "Calm down!"
I looked at his face. He had two, thin, silver tears tattooed beneath his eyes. I had seen such marks before, in the ghettoes of Colón and Panamá City. Gang leaders wore them to advertise how many rivals they’d executed: one tear for each killing. They were very funny tattoos. I began laughing and weeping at the joke implicit in the tattoos.
Outside the customs office, a gringo shouted "Angelo Osic, come out with your hands on your head!" I couldn’t stop laughing.
"We’re trying to help you!" Rat Face explained. "See!" Someone twisted my head around so I could see everyone in the room. Some people sprawled on the floor, aiming long-barreled plasma rifles at the door. Others were suited in body armor painted in jungle shades of nonreflective green and dull red, waiting to fight anyone who came in. Perfecto wore only armored gloves. The man who’d played the guitar wore laser-targeting goggles and aimed a rocket launcher with four minirockets at the door.
The man with gray slacks stood weaponless and armorless against the wall, frowning, obviously upset by the turn of events, nervously watching me. He was very funny, and I laughed harder. All the duffle bags were dumped on the floor. Clothes, ammunition, and grenades spilled from every bag. "See!" Rat said. "We will help you. Perfecto says you are lucky, and you fight like a jaguar—a stupid, weak jaguar, but full of fury at least. Besides, you have avenged General Tapia today when you killed Arish. You have heard of Tapia?"
I tried to remember. My head ached. "Chile," I said, but the single word sounded so funny I just smiled and could remember nothing more.
"Yes, that’s right," Rat Face said. "He was murdered in Chile by that cabrón you killed today! We had Arish on trial, but someone poisoned his guards and he escaped. Remember?"
I didn’t remember. "Cabrón," goat fucker, that was a funny word. I said it over and over. "Cabrón, cabrón, cabrón."
Whorehouse Rat continued, "We will tie you up now, because we cannot trust you while the drugs are still working in your blood. Okay?"
"Wait!" I said, remembering the man in gray slacks. Someone stuck a gag in my mouth and tied my hands behind my back. Because my ankle was broken, I couldn’t get up. My muscles strained at the cords, but it was no use, and I watched the man in gray slacks and laughed.
The man who’d tied my hands whispered, "You’ll be fine. I’ll take good care of you." He stood behind me, so I couldn’t see his face, but he tapped my arm with the barrel of a fifty-caliber Rivas bush rifle to show me he was armed.
Out in the corridor, the gringo yelled over a loudspeaker, "Angelo Osic, come out with your hands on your head."
Of course, I was tied up and couldn’t come out. This seemed like a very poignant observation, and I would have notified the man who held the loudspeaker about my predicament, but I couldn’t because I was gagged. I just laughed at the irony of my situation.
Everyone in the room waited anxiously for something to happen, but no one broke through the door. Some people began to stretch, and one young man yawned as if bored. Some others saw him, and they began yawning too, as if to see who could feign the most boredom. Finally, in an effort to lure the security team into the ambush, a woman with a plasma rifle yelled "Help! Help! He’s got a gun. He says he’ll kill us all!"
Several people in the room snickered. And I agreed that her ploy was among the funniest things I’d ever heard. I began crying and laughing and became afraid I would choke to death on my gag because I couldn’t breathe and laugh at the same time.
One young man from the yawning team smiled and shot a flechette into the ceiling. "Get back in line, you," he yelled, and several men screamed as if in terror or pain while one of the youths made animal noises like pigs and monkeys. Little pieces of plastic fell from the ceiling as if it were wounded. This caused terrible spasms of laughter in me, and I began choking; every time I caught my breath a little I would laugh again. Some men looked at me and pointed and chuckled, and they were still trying to stifle their laughter when the station’s security guards ran into the room to rescue the "hostages."
There were six security guards wearing pretty space-blue armor and carrying stunners, and they didn’t have a chance.
When the first man came through the door, Perfecto slugged him in the chest so hard that the guard’s armor split, sending shards of enamel to skitter across the floor. The sound of Perfecto’s fist crashing into the armor startled me, and I realized it wasn’t funny. The second man in line shot Perfecto with a stunner, and Perfecto went down, but four mercenaries immediately jumped the guard. He was huge, and he slugged two of them and sent them flying, and one of them hit the wall and vanished, and I screamed as I realized it was a hallucination even though it looked so real.
The boys from the yawning team showed terror
on their faces. Every time the big guard hit someone, two more people jumped him. A young man popped the snaps on the guard’s helmet and pulled it off, so the chimeras could slug the man in the face. Someone slammed the door behind the security guards, blocking their escape. There were two armored mercenaries to every guard, and the mercenaries just held the guards and beat the hell out of them, stripped off their armor, dragged them to a wall, and stuffed them under the chairs, where they moaned, naked.
There were several moments of silence, and the mercenaries used the lull to get six more men in armor. The man with the gray slacks had moved closer. He was inching toward me. I began laughing again, but this time out of nervousness, and my arms seemed to strain of their own volition at the cords that held me. Perfecto clawed the air as he struggled to regain consciousness, and someone pulled him away from the door. A chimera went and stood in front of the door and stared as if he were trying to see through it. His ears swung out from the side and pricked up, like the ears of a dog. This frightened me because I had never seen such a thing and I thought it was a hallucination, but as I watched, his ears remained rigid and I knew it was real.
"Someone’s coming!" the chimera said, smiling. "I hear a remote! Or maybe a robot!"
The guitarist with the rocket launcher ran up to the door, and everyone held their breath. The man with the gray slacks was moving closer to me, was only an arms’ length away, and I saw that he held a knife in his palm. I tried to nudge my guard to get his attention, and I was not aware of any sound, but suddenly all the chimeras in the room yelled "Now!" as the man with the rockets kicked open the door and fired.
An armored remote the size of a small tank hunched behind the door. One missile hit the power plant to the remote’s chemical lasers. A tongue of fire lashed into our room and I felt I knew what it would be like to stare down the throat of a dragon. People screamed. The concussion peeled back the metal walls of the customs office, denting it out of shape, and flung me against the wall. The man with the missile launcher flew through the air and hit the wall above me, then slid down on top of me. Shrapnel and pieces of remote shot into the walls, and dark smoke billowed from the remote’s metal innards. A distant fire alarm shrilled. Tons of debris drifted down from a hole that opened in the ceiling.
One man staggered across the room, holding his eyes, choking in the smoke. Another woman writhed on the floor and screamed, a piece of metal the size of a crowbar lodged in her arm. Others were bleeding from various wounds. Blood had splattered my shirt, and I thought I’d taken a hit. I tried to scream, and looked around for help, and saw the man in gray slacks lying crumpled beside me. A pipe as thick as my arm was lodged in his hip, and a large piece of metal had caved-in the right side of his face. The blood was from him. His hands still twitched. And I realized I still didn’t know who his accomplice was.
Through the smoke I could see that a crowd of station workers had gathered a hundred meters down the corridor to watch the fight. The concussion had thrown them to the floor. Some of them lay screaming. Blood was smeared on the corridor walls.
All the mercenaries who wore armor untangled themselves from the floor and began cheering as they charged down the corridor and shot into the ceiling. They ran to the fallen and wounded station technicians and began rounding up hostages. I looked at the others in the room: Three armorless mercenaries were wounded but conscious, including the man with the silver face; two others were dead. Perfecto had been sheltered from the blast, and he sat against the dented wall, rubbing his head. Several naked guards had shrapnel wounds; two guards were dead.
Perfecto looked around the room for a moment, then said, "I need a drink," and picked his way among the bodies and wreckage and headed down the corridor.
My head ached and my mind felt numb. But I noticed something strange: As the mercenaries moved among their hostages, they moved with vigor. They seemed a great contrast to the haggard men I’d seen earlier. Their steps seemed almost choreographed, a dance of joy.
Within a few minutes Perfecto returned with a keg of Aguila beer. He sat beside me, gave me a drink, and talked. I was too stunned to answer his questions, so he carried on a rambling monologue, telling me how it was obvious I was a man with great luck. "Just look at all the friends you’ve found in your hour of need! Think of all the good things we’ll be able to loot from the station. Is there anything you want? Drugs? Liquor? Anything at all?"
Soon others began filing in with food and rum. They sprayed bandages on the wounded and filled their bellies with food. A couple mercenaries forced rum down the throats of captured guards, and several mercenaries gathered around the big guard who’d caused so much trouble. They praised him for his strength and courage and told him he should leave the punks in the security team and come fight on Baker, and when he was drunk enough he agreed it was a good idea. Everyone sang and ate and drank, and I became very tired and all my muscles ached and my head ached, so I stretched my muscles until they relaxed. The singing and the wails of people and sirens and the sputtering of small fires became a distant rushing in my ears that lulled me to sleep.
Chapter 6
I woke in a small gray room, tied to a chair. A dignified man with silver hair was leaning over me. Whorehouse Rat sat on the floor behind him, the light catching the gleam of tattooed tears. The man with the silver hair asked how I’d managed to kill Arish.
I looked into his gray eyes and my whole soul desired to answer him, but I couldn’t think straight, could hardly remember my own name. I wanted to go back to sleep, but the man said I couldn’t sleep until I told him everything, and this seemed eminently reasonable.
So, as best I could, I related how Arish had strangled Flaco and tried to kill me, and how I’d shot Arish and used his eye to trick the shuttle into bringing me to the space station. I could only remember the story in parts, brief unrelated flashes. I told him about Tamara and Jafari and the AI’s. He made me repeat several parts of the story over and over, and each time his request seemed very reasonable and I wished to answer perfectly. When I fell asleep, he’d jab my ribs to waken me. He grilled me about Jafari and asked me to name the AI’s. But I didn’t know the names of the AI’s who’d aided the socialists. He seemed very curious about Tamara, and began asking about her dreams, and when I told him how I’d wakened from the final dream unable to think, he became excited and his eyes gleamed. "Did you hear that! Did you hear that! I told you someone with her talent existed!" he said. I wanted to ask what he meant by "her talent," but I could not think straight. He looked at Whorehouse Rat and said threateningly, "Keep this quiet! Whatever you hear, keep it quiet!"
Whorehouse Rat nodded and smiled at me and said, "Of course, General."
The general said, "Tell me about the dream again, the darkness washing over you. What did it feel like? What do you remember after that?"
I repeated Tamara’s last dream over and over again as I begged him to let me sleep. My head hurt from trying to remember. The darkness coming out of her mouth, the cold numbness, and myself crying at a sense of loss was all I could recall. I could remember nothing concrete after the darkness hit me, but the general kept trying to draw out something more.
He yelled, "Her job in Intelligence. Did she say what it was? Did she give you any hint?"
"No."
"Think harder!" he said, grabbing my hand. "Any hint at all? This is crucial!"
I shook my head and realized I thought I’d known something about Tamara, that she’d seemed all-important to me. I’d been willing to give my life for her, but suddenly I was confronted by the knowledge that she was still a stranger.
"Did she live?" the General asked. "Where did you see her last?"
And then I remembered I’d brought her with me. I was afraid I’d been asleep for days, that Tamara had suffocated. "I put her in a trunk. She’s in a coma. It’s a brown trunk made of teak, with elephants carved on it. I left it at the station!"
Someone who’d been standing behind me left the room, and Whorehous
e Rat followed. As the door opened, I smelled oily smoke. A moment later a medic and the Rat dragged in the teak chest and flipped it open. Tamara was breathing easily, staring at the ceiling, zombie-eyed.
The General bent over the chest and examined her, caressed her arm with one finger. "Thank God," he said. He turned to the medic and said, "Keep this socialist whore alive!"
The Whorehouse Rat pulled out a cigar and lit it, inhaling deeply. He looked as if he’d just conquered a country. He said, "You know, I think that a man like me, a man who captured a whole space station with only a handful of men, pitting a mere twenty soldiers against hundreds, could be very valuable to you. No? A man with my talents would make a fine captain!"
The general glared at him, and spoke menacingly. "Idiot! How dare you? You want a promotion for murdering unarmed civilians?"
The Rat’s eyes smoldered. He exhaled his cigar smoke evenly. "I am not an idiot. I saved a valuable man from slaughter at the hands of the socialists, and I brought you an important prisoner. I took over Sol Station with very little bloodshed, and when you think upon it, I’m sure you will realize the rashness of your decision. Think about it. We have two years on ship before we reach Baker—plenty of time for you to show me your gratitude. We will be going to Baker with you—my men, Señor Osic, and the socialist whore—am I not right? It would not be wise to leave even one of us behind, knowing what we know."
The General frowned, appearing to weigh the consequences. He reached down to Tamara and ran his finger along her jaw line, caressing her. "For this, I thank you, Mavro. We can manage to bring you, I think," he said heavily. "Baker citizenship, and no extradition."
I started to nod off. My eyes were closing, and I no longer wanted to keep them open. I made a snoring sound and startled myself awake.
The General turned to me and said, "Thank you, don Angelo. You have done well today. Very well. You may go to sleep, now. You’re safe. You are going to Baker, with your friends."
On My Way to Paradise Page 9
