“No, zey vere broken in zee attack . . .”
“Oh, damn it to . . . here, just put these on him.”
A pair of sunglasses were slipped over my eyes, bringing my surroundings into slightly better focus. “Thank you, Doctor,” I said as the fog solidified into forms.
“You’re velcome.” All pretense of the doctor’s former composure was absent. His eyes were manic, darting everywhere, refusing to focus. A flop of hair hung loosely over his forehead, damp with fear.
“You’re to thank for all this?”
“I . . .”
“Save it. Not interested. You’re fucking dead if I. Ever get loose. I need you to know that.” I yelled past him into the great wide dark. “You are all. Fucking! Dead!”
Rhodes wiped at his eyes. “I am zorry, Sheldon, truly I am. Zey made me do ziz.” Random words tap-danced on his tongue, trying vainly to find a rhythm, a syntax. He clapped a hand over his mouth as if to stem the tide of nonsense. “Zey know zings, you zee. Zings I haff done.” He whispered the last, and then, inaudible to everyone, just a silent plea for me alone, his lips moved. Forgive me. He dropped to his knees and placed his head on my foot, barking out a sob.
“That’s not my job, Doc. You dug your own grave on this one.”
“This is all very touching,” the sour voice of the elder remarked. “Igör, get up now, you’re embarrassing us both.” Rhodes slid down further, pressing his face into the floor, still clasping my foot, beginning a mangled Anglo-Czech version of the Lord’s prayer, bawling throughout. “Christ. Simon, would you?” A fourth figure moved into the light, a looming musk-ox of a man, leviathan, neck as wide as my chest, arms the consistency of oak, hair buzzed to a flattop of exacting specifications. So level you could calibrate instruments by it. He hoisted Rhodes to his feet with the nonchalance of a man picking up a napkin.
I took in the room. “Rowan,” I said into the darkness.
“In the flesh,” Rowan said. She stepped forward into the light, calm and in control. She had put aside her fear of the old man and was back into her persona of slicked composure. “Surprised?”
“Not really. You are an agent.” The old voice laughed at that. Rowan blushed and played with her gloves. Shiny gloves.
“Chain mail?” I asked.
“Very good,” said the older man, still blurred beyond the border of the light. “We felt that some precautions were in order given your . . . unique qualities. Hence the gloves. Simon, do show him.” The giant released his hold on Rhodes (who fell prostrate to the floor, still blubbering) and put his hand up to my eyes. His gargantuan fingers twinkled daintily as he wiggled them, lit in the overhead beam, the only illumination in the room. “Divers wear such gloves in case of shark attack,” the man continued. “They can withstand enormous pressure. We felt they would do the trick in your case.”
“Handy.”
“Make no mistake, however; despite the protocols we have initiated, we will gag you if you don’t behave. The choice is yours.”
I squinted, but the man remained an anonymous shape in the shadows. “Look, could I ask you to. Move closer? I’m getting tired of the whole. Evil supervillain vibe.”
“Of course. Where are my manners?” He moved his right hand slightly. A whirring noise started up and the man trundled into sight, nudging Rowan to the side (“Move it, woman, goddammit,” he said as she spat a complaint), the gears of his motorized wheelchair whining as they spun. He expertly guided the chair up close, centering himself directly in front of me, our knees almost touching. “How’s that, Mr. Funk? Better?”
I took in the whole of him and winced. Having been kidnapped and now treated with the forced over-geniality of a James Bondian evildoer, I felt civility wasn’t necessary. “Worse. Coming from the living dead. I hope that means something.”
If his feelings were hurt, he didn’t show it.
The man’s entire head was a mass of aged tissue. Burn victim, I thought at first, but that wasn’t quite right. I would have smelled the char. The skin looked as fragile as crêpe paper. What I was seeing was advanced age of a sort not seen since Methuselah up and croaked after nine centuries of lingering around the desert. The figure I could make out beneath the immaculate suit was emaciated. His skeleton was hunched from several lifetimes of weakening bone structure. His neck looked to be sliding into his chest, the top of his balding head only inches above the apex of his hunch. His pants draped loosely over the scrawniness of his legs, the creases fitting smartly over his thighbones. He was barely more than a collection of bones with delusions of flesh.
But who was I to judge?
The wheelchair was a mobile life-support system, cocooning him in an electronic cradle. He was contained within a score of medical devices silently keeping track of heart rate and blood flow. Intravenous tubing snaked down his thigh and calf and back up underneath the fabric of his pants. Settled snug within the contraption, the man looked like a wizened fetus, something that should not be, something aborted that refused to perish.
His voice, however, was improbably strong, and his eyes were hard and alert. “I am well aware of the monstrousness of my visage, Mr. Funk. You would not be near the first to recoil in disgust.”
“I could be the last, you give me a chance,” I said.
A smack on the back of my head, hard. “You do not talk to Mr. Dixon that way, Sheldon,” Rowan hissed in my ear. She grabbed my head and held it steady. “This man deserves your respect, and you will give it to him.” I waited for the standard or else, but none was forthcoming, only a squeezing of my skull presumably meant to imply a promise of pain. I wasn’t worried; she hadn’t nearly the upper body strength necessary for such a threat to be taken seriously.
“There is no call for that,” the man snapped. “This man is our guest, here at our bequest, and you will treat him as such.”
Her hands relaxed. “But sir, he’s—”
He shushed her with a wave of his hand. “This is a stressful time, and I think calmer heads must prevail. Miss O’Shea, why don’t you wait outside for me? I won’t be a moment.”
“But—”
“Simon will see you out. Simon, please? Take that Nazi crybaby with you. And bring back the package?” Simon scooped the doc off the floor, flopped the still-weeping heap over his shoulder, and escorted my agent out, one massive hand covering the whole of her elbow and quite a bit of her upper arm. Her protests quickly receded as they left, their footsteps echoing though the dim.
“And turn the goddamned lights on!” the old wheeled man yelled out after them. “I’m tired of squinting!”
The man and I sat quietly as Rowan continued insisting Simon let go of her arm, she was an agent to the stars, she’d have his goddamned head for a keepsake, until at last there was the click of a lock, hinges squealing under the weight of a heavy door, and then a thick metallic slam that cut short her objections. Then switches clicked, fluorescent bulbs flickered into consciousness, and the room lit up. We were dead center in a chamber the size of several football fields, the ceiling an easy hundred feet above. Surrounding us was a sundry of military automotives in varied states of disrepair: jeeps without engines, tanks lacking treads and cannons, something that looked to be a deflated hovercraft; even a helicopter, its rotors gone missing but a menacing set of machine guns still attached and aimed directly at the two of us. Heavy footsteps reverberated off the metal as Simon thudded his way back.
“Much thanks, Simon,” Wheels croaked when Simon arrived.
“Don’t mention it, sir.” Simon held a large object in one hand, a plastic pet carrier. Sofa’s enormous marble eyes stared out at me accusingly.
Somehow, this is your fault.
“You see, Sheldon? We’re not so bad. We brought you your little pet.” The man pushed the carrier forward with his chair. “Consider it a gesture of good faith. A sign that, despite all evidence to the contr
ary, I am not wholly without consideration for your feelings.”
“Gosh, thanks. You’ve thought of everything.”
Dixon waved Simon forward, and the giant coaxed the fifteen pounds of feline from her cage and plopped her into my lap. I stroked her ears with my fingertips, all I could do with my arms bound. “Hey, babe,” I whispered. “They treating you okay?” She shrugged her entire back in a stretch, and then jumped down to explore the new territory, leading Simon on a chase among the abandoned wrecks. He nabbed her before she could squirm her way into some loose jet fuselage and plopped her back in her cage over her immensely unhappy objections.
“Can I let you in on a secret, Sheldon?” The geriatric leaned forward and theatrically cupped the edge of his mouth with his hand. “Between you, me, and Simon here, I can’t stand that Rowan cunt. To me, she’s nothing more than a slack-jawed hausfrau who just won’t shut the fuck up. But she does have her uses.” He spread his arms out toward me. “She brought me you, you see. Once word got out, I reached out through channels to make sure she’d follow my specific instructions concerning your movements. She kept you in line, never letting you off your leash. And I always reward success. She’ll be quite happy, don’t you worry about it.”
“That’s a load off my mind,” I said.
“The secret to success, young man. Reward the achievers! As for the others—” He threw his thumb over his shoulder, sticking out his tongue and blowing a wet raspberry to accentuate the move, spackling my face with spittle. “Pbbbf! Trash heap. Life’s too short for failure. Far too short. Most people cannot appreciate how little time we get. But then, look who I’m talking to!” He cackled until he began to choke, whereupon Simon slapped his back several times with well-practiced virtuosity. A sizable planetoid of phlegm was expelled from the man’s mouth and arced over my left shoulder. Comets of sputum broke off and collided with my cheek, the main mass splattering against hollow metal outside my view.
“Ah, thank you, Simon,” Wheels said when he had recovered. Simon expertly mopped up the spittle on the man’s chin with a handkerchief, not bothering to award me the same courtesy. “I don’t have much opportunity to laugh these days, so when it happens, I have a tendency to overindulge.”
He leaned back in his chair and took me in, taking a few puffs from an air mask adjacent to his seat. We wordlessly stared at each other.
“If this is a staring contest,” I said at last, “I’m going to win.”
“I imagine, Sheldon, that you have some questions.”
“Just one.” I took a breath in, deep, and held it for a time, letting it collect strength in the rotting remnants of my lungs. Clenching my muscles, I threw the sound forward, up and out my mouth, as ripe and threatening and gruesome a scream of rage as I had ever attempted. I’d figure out a way of escape later, but at that moment I craved death. I imagined the walls out in the dark bulging and warping under the force. I wanted the man’s eyes to liquefy and ooze down his cheeks, I wanted Simon’s bowels to detonate as his spinal fluid boiled and leaked from his nostrils. For a full minute I stormed in my bindings, closing my eyes as I strained my arms to break their chains, pushing at the floor with my toes. I bellowed one final time, a demand for release that would lay waste to a city block, would kill civilizations, would crack the barrier between time and space, and then stopped, opening my eyes, preparing for the bloodbath.
I couldn’t help but notice that the two of them were still conscious, observing me with clinical detachment, Simon stoic, even bored by my tirade. The man smiled at me, the smile never approaching his eyes. They were the eyes of someone long past true emotion. They were my eyes, glazed with death.
As the shriek echoed and died in the chamber, he turned his head and gave me a clear view of his ear. “Extraordinary things, these,” he said. I glimpsed a glimmer of chrome lodged deep in his earwell. “We did study you beforehand. In addition to the armor, some of my more clever employees were smart enough to craft these little darlings. Noise dampeners, tuned specifically to block out certain decibels and frequencies. Marvelous. I take it, Sheldon, you haven’t taken the time to consider just what, exactly, your voice does to people, and why?”
“Does a bird ask why it sings?”
“No, of course you haven’t. Introspection is for the intelligent. You are many things, Sheldon, but intelligent is not a word I’d use. We do have some theories. Some of my advisors actually believe your croak might just be the voice of God himself. Or maybe the devil. Audio analysis shows that your lovely voice can actually be separated into seven individual voices overlapping each other. I’ve heard them. I’ve heard and seen many things over a lifetime and a half, but I can honestly say, I’ve rarely been more scared than listening to the separate elements of your septuplet of voices.” The man allowed a shiver to cross his spine, shaking his entire body in the process. “Damned spooky, in a way none of us can explain.
“But laying aside possible supernatural underpinnings, your voice has practical applications. Military applications. We’re working on replicating it. A device for soldiers, worn about the throat. I don’t pretend to understand the mechanics — it modulates their voices into alternate registers or some such nonsense. I admit the results thus far are not promising. We have the sound, but there’s an ingredient missing from the recipe. We desire to cripple our enemies with shock and awe, as you do, but the most we’ve been able to achieve in our test subjects is a tolerable headache.”
“Vulcan neck pinch,” I said. “Can’t be taught to humans.”
“Star Trek, sir,” said Simon in response to the man’s furrowed brow. “The television show?”
“I am aware of Star Trek, Simon,” said the gent with patient irritation. “I am old, not ignorant. Never cared for such tripe myself. A waste of valuable brain matter, fantasy. For me, hard work and the Bible is all that’s necessary to get me through life.”
“Yeah, the Bible,” I said. “No fantasy in there. Nothing but facts and figures.”
In a swift movement that belied his condition, the gentleman withdrew a small revolver from beneath the folds of his jacket and shot me twice in the left leg, the shin, the bullets sliding clean into the bone and out the other side, thrusting mingled shards of tibia and fibula out through the skin and onto the floor behind me. Bioformaldehyde oozed out and pooled beneath my feet, and a token charley horse radiated from the wounds. I looked down at the damage, then back to the infirm geezer calmly aiming the smoking weapon at my other leg. “Something I said?”
“I am your friend, but I will not be spoken to with such insolence,” he said, voice crusted in anger. “It offends me. Now, play nice, Sheldon, or I will have Simon here poke your eyes out.” Simon whipped out a butterfly knife and expertly danced it around his fingers before placing it underneath my sunglasses and laying its tip directly against the lens of my right eye. “I trust my point is understood. I do need you, Sheldon. Just not every part of you.”
“Give me a reason, freak.” Simon’s threat rustled in my ear. “I need the practice.”
I kept my head still. “Nice moves with the knife, Simon. You learn that in the seminary?”
“Nuns, man,” he said, my vision distorting further as the blade depressed my cornea. “They will fuck you up.”
“Eye for an eye, got it,” I said. “You’re reading the Bible. I get it. That turn the other cheek part. Probably comes later. Near the back. You should take notes.” The blade skimmed the edges of my view, threatening imminent puncture. “Fine, call off your goon. I’ll behave.”
The knife withdrew. Simon sheathed the blade out of sight and stepped back, returning to taciturn mode.
“Why the hostility, Sheldon?” Wheels asked. “Surely you knew something like this was bound to happen eventually.”
“You killed everyone,” I said flatly. “You just came in. And slaughtered them.”
“Unhappily, that was neces
sary.”
“You killed the entire crew. The actors. The technicians. You killed Johnny Depp!”
“Hm?”
Simon leaned in. “Pirates of the Caribbean, sir.”
“Oh. Well, that’s a shame, I rather enjoyed that one.”
“You killed Duane,” I said.
“That would be Duane Linwood, sir,” Simon said. “Caught in the raid.”
“Hmm. Duane, Duane. Doesn’t ring a bell, but . . . oh yes. Your bum boy.” His lips narrowed into a slit of contempt. “With all your many faults, you had to be faggy as well.” He looked up to Simon, grinning. His skin stretched tighter. I could see the muscles beneath, working his jaw. “You remember, Simon, how they all crowed to me, ‘He’s the messiah!’” He chortled again, laughing around the coughs. “Oh my boy, if only you had played your cards right.” He drove his chair closer until we were side-by-side and placed a palsied hand on my knee. “You could be running this world right now. Every religion, Sheldon. The churches, the synagogues, the mosques — the Vatican itself would have fallen to your every whim. You could have changed the face of the planet. I said to them, ‘This looks like the Second Coming to you? A fag atheist Canadian actor?’ They let me alone after that. They would have twisted their beliefs to accommodate a Canadian, they would have found a way to justify worshipping an atheist. You could have been a woman, and they’d have reread their texts to allow for it. They would have swallowed you whole and asked for gravy. But a queer? A cockgobbler?” He patted my knee. “Not one of them could imagine pledging fealty to a son of God who enjoyed getting fisted. Imagine how the next Testament would read.”
He wheeled back and repositioned himself in front of me. “But still, my apologies for the death of your friend. I had hoped that this could have been done without bloodshed. But it is a sad fact that, in war, innocents must be sacrificed to ensure triumph.”
“We’re at war?”
“I am. Of a sort. Ask away, ask your questions, Sheldon, I’m sure you’re dying to know.” He laughed weakly at his joke.
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