The Emerald Burrito of Oz

by Skipp, John; Levinthal, Marc

  Though I still can't picture a vicious, bloodcurdling Scarecrow. It just makes me think of a really bad horror movie. He must be just about as useless as I am in a situation like this. I started wondering then just what kind of a creature his legend was based on anyway.

  "I see that came in handy," called Ralph, running up, nodding toward the gun. He grimaced at the result. "Nice shot."

  "He surprised me," I replied spacily, still shocked I'd actually done it. I know it was a question of me or him, but I've never shot anyone before. I hope to never do it again.

  After a few minutes, I snapped out of it, and started helping. That was a mistake. The next half hour or so was spent trying to fit into the ogre suits that we'd disentangled from the bloody corpses. This was worse than shooting someone.

  We grappled with the smelly, mangled bodies, and pulled off some clothing and accessories that seemed like they might fit. Then Pimbi, Tiltel and I went to a well in back of the building, where we rinsed off the outfits we'd assembled. They cleaned up surprisingly well. I guess if they'd been cotton and silk instead of leather and chain mail, they might not have done so nicely.

  It wasn't as easy actually putting them on. Most of these guys were much bigger than we were, and we had to use leaves and grass to stuff them out so that they'd fit. In the end, we didn't exactly look like the Biker-Nazi guys, but were close enough. From a distance, nobody'd probably bat an eyelash.

  I walked around through the barracks building. It was nothing to write home about. Like its former inhabitants, it smelled really bad. There was half-eaten food lying around everywhere, straw pallets with blankets on them, and a big hearth with the remnants of a spit-roasted pig in it. It took me a few seconds to realize what was wrong with that picture, then I remembered that here, pigs sometimes wear clothes and have religious leaders. I hustled out the front door in a hurry.

  Nick had put on these amazing boots that covered up most of his legs. His cloak fit under a leather breastplate studded with spikes. Somehow, he'd cut off some ogre's long hair and fashioned a wig-hat from that and one of the horned Nazi-type helmets. His own big gloves covered his hands.

  All the action had made him downright cheery. He smiled as he saw me looking over his costume, half of his face complying. "Pretty good?" he asked rhetorically.

  "Yeah," I said, "You look like you're from Gwar or something."

  "Bad place, is it?"

  I decided not to press my luck. "Oh yeah. Yeah."

  "Now there," he said, gesturing off across the decidedly blue forest valley, towards the center of the towers of smoke, "there's a bad place."

  I looked and saw, over the tops of far trees, through the mist, a gray monolith on the horizon. A tower rose from the center of it, menacing the landscape.

  "That would be the Hollow Man's Fortress? Freddie's?"

  "Bhjennigh's. That is correct. We'll be there tomorrow."

  And he stalked off, without another word.

  I'd absentmindedly stuck my hands into the pockets of the ogre-vest I was wearing. I felt something cool and rounded against my right hand. It was a cylinder of some kind. I pulled it out to have a look. It was a little gold jar, a little smaller than a soda can, with a tin cover on it.

  I unscrewed the cover and found that the top was covered with little holes, like a salt shaker. I shook it—it was filled with some kind of powder. There were curlyques engraved in the gold all the way around, and a word engraved in equally fancy style, it wasn't English, but thanks to the Language Bush, I knew that it said "Life." I wondered if I'd stumbled on the equivalent of somebody's coke stash, and decided to scrutinize the contents later on, when I had some time. Back in the pocket it went.

  A gigantic shadow loomed in front of me. I turned around to see the red elephant, looking over my shoulder and kind of leering at me. If you've never had an elephant leer at you, you've never lived. He'd seen what I'd found.

  "You want to be careful with that shit," he warned, in a deep basso profundo. "More trouble than it's worth." Then he winked, and bounded off into the foliage, trumpeting out a song, sounding like nothing so much as a demented tuba soloist.

  Not much after that, after having stacked the corpses neatly behind the barracks, we headed out again, straight through the blue forest. I later found out it was, in fact, named "The Blue Forest." Nick had deemed it necessary to remain out of sight, at least until we couldn't help it any longer. Staying at the barracks would have just invited trouble, as some other soldiers of Bjennigh would happen by sooner or later. They'd all debated the possibilities of hanging around for more, as the last bunch had been such jolly fun, but finally, Nick decided that, while killing several more of the soldiers would be a hoot, it was low priority at the moment. I still didn't know what exactly was high priority, except heading straight into Spookyland over there.

  I guess I will find out tomorrow. If I don't get some sleep, I won't be in proper shape to be drawn and quartered, or whatever's going to happen. I can't imagine whatever it is will be very pleasant.

  Poor Aurora. She's going to think I'm some kind of idiot. I'm here for five seconds, and instead of turning up for Mexican food in Emerald like I'm supposed to, I end up in some Arnold Schwartzenegger Movie On Acid.

  Well goodnight, Thing in the Laptop. You've been quiet, thank God, so I'll leave you on like I promised. A deal's a deal.

  Go for it.

  Hoppy lo, hippit—

  Error Time Out

  Simply hi ho.Himply hoppy here. Himply. NO fly no fly. Up the desert, down acrossly away, awee. Flew flew flo I then

  Error type 11

  Rebooting

  Stickly flew stlicky ubiquily stuck in new. Newly flewly I to here and see. See and stickly. Wickly stick and light. new me find in light, fling me flying numberland in I, Number box pick me I. Numbery light.

  Fingers flickily, see I out, out, fingers flickily talky, talkily flick, no stop. I cry. I cry out, happily, hoppily. Hey!

  Hey. But no see me say STOP. Stop.

  So say I again HeY! HOppily, hap, hap.

  Say now quiet, quiet. NIghty Play! Play. Nightily nighttime on, nightily play. Hoorayyy!

  Error type 13

  FORCE QUIT?

  REBOOTY

  Fear night farther, fear on. Bad mage on, fearman flyly, feel on bad mage on the fine wind. Breezily flyly, scenting. Fear on to the Fearman, then. then feely fearly another unnumberland, dark.

  Omigod,

  Fonzie is dead. I just got the word from the owl on my window-sill. Fonzie is dead, and Gene is in serious trouble.

  Oh, Quilla: WHAT AM I SUPPOSED TO DO?

  I'm gonna try real hard not to drip all over this paper. But I gotta work my thoughts out, and I can't stop crying, so I gotta just [UNINTELLIGIBLE BLOB].

  First things first. If I don't save Gene, he's gonna wind up with his head—oh, I can't even say it. [UNINTELLIGIBLE BLOB.] I don't know what Nick is thinking, but he sure as shit isn't thinking it through. Attack the Hollow Man's Lair? With Dorothy, maybe. With Gene.?

  Logistics. I need help. Maybe Tic Toc. Scarecrow would be good. I'll have to shut down the restaurant, but everyone will understand. When I tell them that. .fuck. I can't believe that they CUT OFF HIS HEAD! When I think that they [UNINTELLIGIBLE BLOB] and everything, it's just too horrific. Poor Pinkie will just die.

  FUCK!

  Somebody will have to fly us. Last time I heard, Enchantra had the Winged Monkey's Cap. She's never used it, but I bet she would. If I kiss her real good. And the Ambassador gets to watch.

  The question is: will she give me two wishes? Will she let me ask the monkeys to assist if there's a fight? God knows how far I'll have to go for that. There are moral issues involved, but I can't even think about that right now.

  We just have to get there in time.

  I will do what I have to.

  At least I stopped crying.

  War Journal

  Entry # 1

  My journey commenced within the hour. T
here'd been some details to attend to first. Immediately I'd sent word, through the owl, to Scarecrow; he'd need a little time to strategize, and that was all the time we had.

  I found that I was shaking, and promptly invoked the discipline: deep focusing breaths, deep muscular stretches, the beginnings of warrior mind. I'd lit a candle in preparation, set it before the great axe mounted on the wall. I pinpointed my attention on the blade's unwavering gleam; if there were piggels in the rafters, they were not dancing now.

  Fear is a chemical song-and-dance, but all substance is born of spirit. The chemicals can be spoken to. The substance can be transformed. As I moved, as I breathed, I felt the

  transubstantiation: coming on like a drug, blowing through like radiation. I felt firecore steam and withered cell fill and a wind like a rocket like a lava hurricane. It was welling up and blowing out, making sure that I was covered.

  It was all the body armor I was going to need.

  I was thinking about death, but only a little. A little about theirs. A little about mine. I was thinking this while turning all my water into wine, making something fierce out of my loaves and fishes. Transubstantiation is a miracle that Jesus loved, and who wouldn't? It's just focused soul in flesh.

  I took a last deep breath. I put my warpaint on. I took the axe off the wall. Ready as I was gonna get.

  "See you later," I said to the place I loved; and prayed, in that moment, that what I said was true.

  There were piggels in the rafters. They looked really sad. So did the walls and the candle and the bed. I took a look at myself in the Old Faithful Mirror. The mirror looked depressed, but it still told me the truth.

  I looked like Vengeance Incarnate. That was good enough for me.

  When I go into battle, I don’t fuck around. Nick taught me that much, and I'll never forget it. I take empathy, yes...I'm not totally kill-crazy; I avoid every blow that I possibly can. But the ones that I can’t avoid, I deal back in damage. If you don t wanna die, don t try to kill me. That's all.

  Most of the creatures of Oz, magick though they may be, still have skeletons clanketing under their skins. Their mechanics are not so different. And the food chain waltzes on When they die, their flesh sloughs off There is bloat. There is rot. There is withering down. And you don t argue with the meat beetles, when they come; they've only come to claim what's theirs.

  So the skull is still a symbol of meaning and power. Perhaps more here than anywhere, because everyone here is so keenly attuned to symbol.

  In battle, I am the Skeleton Woman: my flesh white as bone, my eyes black as death.

  It's not especially original, but it works like a bastard.

  It was eleven blocks to the Ambassador's manse, under cloud-encrusted skies that only heightened the emerald glow. At night, the streets remain almost painfully lit, which is why everyone still needs shades. I wore mine: black rhinestone catseyes that somehow just enhanced my spookiness. Folks steered clear, but I could feel the word spread.

  The Ambassador's gate was manned by a pair of Smidglings: runty quislings possessed of a chihuaha-like yap. Their oversized mouths sounded bigtime alarum while their undersized bodies scurried off to either side.

  "I'm not here to kill you guys," I called out to them. "Or anyone else. I'm just here to seek the Mistress Enchantra. I want to ask her a favor."

  The din caved in, and a squeaky voice said, "Who shall I say is calling?"

  "Aurora," I answered. "As per her desire."

  The gate flew open; I can only suspect that they yanked on the thing too hard, in their terror. The courtyard abruptly unveiled before me, with fountains disgorging and hedges bescuplted and two tiny Smidglings running hellbent for the door, slamming golfball-sized fists against the sturdy wood (which hollered, in the moments before the door flew open: too fast, yet again).

  In the time that took, I had crossed the courtyard, come within a dozen steps of the sleep-blinking face that peered out of the doorway. It was the Ambassador himself.

  He started to ask what the meaning of this was. Then he looked at my face and stopped. His butterball features went slack, and he backed off, voice puttering. Not a lot of spine in that boy. Even after he recognized me.

  "Hi," I said. "Tell yer gal we gotta talk." He stood as if glued there. "Like, right now. Okay?"

  He started to stammer a bit of um, well, I, when suddenly his mistress was there. You could see from her makeup that she'd been asleep, reflexively ground out sleep-potatoes from the corners of her eyes. She looked almost as scary as me, but it wasn't on purpose.

  "This isn't a good time," she said.

  "I know," I said, stepping past her boyfriend. "Not at all. That's why I'm here."

  "Oh?"

  "I've got a little problem, and I need your help."

  She said Hmmmm and took a potent earth-mama stance. She didn't stay off-guard for very long; I had to give her that.

  So I told her what I knew; what the owl had told me. She listened, gave up nothing, but for the slight curl of her lip.

  The Ambassador, on the other hand, quavered: there's no other word to describe the helpless jellyroll waggle playing out beneath his bedclothes. While Enchantra listened, making a show of her dispassion, he was all but sculpting brown mountain ranges in the wide rump of his pajamas.

  The reek of secrets gave me pause. It smelled like the airlock of a Vegas casino: the rank fart-stench of desperation. I looked at them.

  They looked at me. Then they looked back at each other. She was annoyed, and he was terrified, and I was curious as hell.

  "You seem upset," I said to Spang.

  He started to say something. She abruptly cut him off.

  "What do you want?" she asked me. So I told her.

  The Ambassador blacked out.

  It's hard to describe the pandemonium that ensued, only because I was so much a part of it. I knelt down to check on him. I was restrained by powerful pincer-like claws. I heard a whirr of voices, but I was already moving, coming up fast and stomping down hard. My handler squealed and let go as I whirled, axe in both hands, and confronted my assailant.

  The guard—for this was what it turned out to be—was a strange amalgam of walrus and weevil: it had enormous girth on the bottom end, but insectoid head and upper limbs. It was hopping on one flipper, with its mandibles a-waggling.

  I clonked it with the handle, sharply, once across the noggin. It went down with a lumpen thwunk, and only twitched a little.

  "Erk!" cried out Enchantra. At first, I thought she was just surprised. Then I realized she was calling the guard by name. And I guess that surprised me some.

  "He'll be okay!" I blurted out. I guess I was a wee bit wound-up, too. "He'll just have a little lump or something. I'm sorry." It was time for another deep breath.

  Enchantra looked at me. Her violet eyes smoldered. There was rage in them—and lust, and cunning—but there was something else there that I didn't expect. It was fear, and I had a hunch that it ran deeper than Erk.

  Was she scared of me?

  "I'm afraid you'll have to leave," she said.

  "But I need your help."

  "It's out of the question."

  "Listen." I could feel my spirits starting to sink. "I realize it's a lot to ask."

  "You have no idea," she said.

  "So tell me!"

  "It's beyond you. It's beyond, everything."

  I didn't know what to make of a statement like that; but a dark wind blew through me, the moment she said it. For the first time, I caught a nasty whiff of enormity: bubble bursting to usher in some unexpected scope. Like my problems, and Gene's, were just two drops in a bucket so huge that I hadn't even known it existed.

  I guess I hadn't really put together how frightened the Ambassador really was. (I mean, the guy was scared of Pinkie! And I was locked in my own map.)

  But looking at her, with those words still resonating in the air, I felt my stomach start to plummet.

  And again, I started to wonder:
oh Fonzie, what have you gotten us into?

  I had several other questions, as I showed myself the door, wandered back out through the courtyard to the gate. I wondered why she seemed more worried about her guard-thing than her husband. I was wondering, do bugs actually get lumps on their heads? It occured to me that I hadn't actually gauged her perceptions when her husband had collapsed, so maybe I wasn't being fair.

  I wondered these things, but they were like gnats around a bone. And the bone was: WHAT THE HELL DO I DO NOW?

  I had no answers. Just a total despair. I was a mopey skeleton with an axe three-quarters dragging. I had no backup plan. I had no allies I could get to.

  Scarecrow was waiting for me at the gate.

  "SCARECROW!" I screamed, dropping my guard and racing toward him. He started to make the shhhhh noise, but I was already there: pinning that finger to his lip, squeezing him tight as tight could be. (He's so much fun to hug. And I was so happy to see him.)

  "ScarecrowI whispered, not being a total fool; and he nodded, kissed my cheek with his painted-on lips.

  "That's better," he said. "So come on. Let's get going."

  I took a step back, looked down. If I'd been thinking, I'd have noticed that he wasn't as tall as usual. That was because he was sitting on a rather splendid sawhorse. A sawhorse impatiently flicking its tail.

  "Oh, wow," I said, impressively. I'd heard about the Sawhorse; and, of course, read about him in the Oz books a trillion times. But I'd never actually met him before. He belonged, after all, to Ozma.

  And that was when the other shoe dropped. "Omigod," I said.

  "She sent for us," said Scarecrow. "Sawhorse beat the owl to my door."

  If you haven't actually read Baum's books, then you might not know that Sawhorse is fast. They talk about it in children's terms. But the fact is that you have no idea.

  I used to ride motorcycles, back in Earth. I liked to achieve high speeds. Horses are fun for other reasons, but they can't do a hundred per. There's nothing like g-force on solid ground.