Untitled (33 page)

    But they weren't getting lost.

    So I planted myself in the middle of the hallway, turned, and aimed.

    The frst bullet blew most of the lead ogre's head off, much like it had done the last time I'd fred it. The second ogre was hit in the chest, and was merely slowed down. The third ogre started to implode. Thank you, Ledelei.

    I fred again, and took off most of the guy's left arm this time. He just grinned at me. Relentless. Stupid. Just did not give a shit.

    My aim was better the fourth time, and he followed his buddies to the big cesspool in the sky, or wherever it is that dead ogres go.

    "Ledelei?" I said, between breaths, trying to make contact with my invisible benefactor. But there was no response. I though she must have gone back to help the Tinman.

    I wanted more than anything to get the hell out of there. But where was I going to go? I didn't know if there was anything left of Emerald, or if it was there who controlled it, and I wouldn't get back to Earth without a Gate. But hell, I was a U.S. citizen, and they'd have to let me try to go back, wouldn't they? Wouldn't they? The thought of it started to make me sick.

    And Nick was back there somewhere, maybe dead, maybe alive.

    And I'd come here to get him out. Fuck it.

    I went back down the corridor the way I'd come, attempting to retrace my steps, to try to fnd the Tinman, and then—what? I guess help him nail Bjhennigh.

    Nothing looked familiar this time, and it felt like the foor was angling down. The corridor snaked left and right, defying any kind of reason.

    I started to notice trailers of black vegetation along the walls, black like what had been growing away from the black vines.

    It was getting harder to see. Everything was taking on a gray cast. The torches that only moments before had been hanging at regular intervals in the corridors were becoming few and far between.

    I thought maybe I could use this as a way of fnding my way back to Nick. I tried to backtrack, looking for a passageway with

more light, but this only got me more lost.

    The section of the fortress I now found myself in was growing tighter, claustrophobic, increasingly maze-like. Every few feet, the walkway turned in a different direction.

    The black kudzu was getting thicker, and before long the light started coming back, and I was dumped out into a cavernous chamber.

    So much for Dread III. This was defnitely not part of the game.

    High stone walls arched overhead, and the kudzu blossomed over it and rolled out across the foor. I had to walk over it occasionally, and when I did I felt a dull aching in the soles of my feet.

    From two holes in opposite walls, the thick black vines emerged, the ones we'd seen outside. They met in the middle, entering—a trailer. It was an ordinary, wide-load type trailer-park home. Defnitely not a product of Oz. This was the Trailer Home That Got Through.

    But what the hell was it doing in the middle of the Hollow Man's Fortress? Why was it—

    -and then it dawned on me, as I remembered my last conversation with Ralph in Topeka.

    Bjhennigh never moved his base of operations—why would he? He simply built around it. This, then, was where Bennie Birnbaum had become Bjhennigh. This was Ground Zero.

    Just then, on cue, the ground shook again, and a dull rumble rolled though me. Ralph was still at it, God bless him. I was amazed.

    I gripped the Magnum tightly, and headed for the door to the trailer. The place looked deserted, but I couldn't be sure.

    I'm not sure what I was thinking, refecting on it now. I had another hair-brained idea that maybe I could go in there and fuck things around. Do something like Ralph was doing, though I didn't know what. Something. Save the day. Fix everything.

    I went in.

    Just inside the doorway was an offce with tacky fake-wood paneling, a couple of ancient 386's on a card-table type desk, and some scientifc test equipment: oscilliscopes, what looked like a seismograph. This was the best the United States Government could come up with? No wonder they wanted my laptop, I thought.

    The black vines snaked into a toolshed kind of room, growing out wildly, almost flling it. In the center of the foor was a cylindrical tank, completely overgrown with the kudzu, looking like some giant ebony cocoon. I fgured this must be the containment tank. What the hell did it contain now? I wondered.

    I went over to it and crouched down. Setting the vest (and the snoring head) gently on the foor, I put my hands up close to it, attracted to something in there, listening, watching, I didn't know for what. I felt something. I couldn't hear anything but a mild slow hissing, like a slowed down teakettle. But the impression I got was of some nearly frozen thing inside there, screaming.

    "Hi. Whatcha doin?"

    I almost shit. I wheeled around, and saw a little guy in overalls, standing near the door.

    You know how sometimes you're just speechless for a second? I stood there looking at him.

    He was short, maybe fve-four, maybe a little taller. He looked at me, but it was hard to actually tell that he was looking at me, since his eyeballs were completely black.

    Jesus, I thought, even the janitor has to go over to the Dark Side.

    "Hey. You're not supposed to be here, are you?" He looked me up and down again. "You're a little scrawny for an Illdhthrazshu, aren't you?"

    I tried grunting at him, but he wouldn't buy it. He let out this nervous little laugh and shook his head.

    "All right," I shouted, pulling out the Magnum and aiming it at his head, "get back against that wall and shut up."

    It looked for a second like he was going to comply. But no.

    "That's not very nice, is it?" he asked, and the gun few out of my hand and skittered across the foor, way out of my reach. He grinned at me.

    He pulled a pack of cigarettes and a lighter out of a pocket in his overalls and lit up a cigarette. Smoke curled around his head, and stopped, then hovered, and sucked inward, back toward his eye sockets, nostrils and mouth.

    "You any good at games? Check this out."

    And my feet started moving, and I found myself in the last room of the trailer, and my butt slammed down into a hard plastic chair. I couldn't move. At least any way that I wanted to.

    On a table, directly across from us, was another lame computer, with black vines running all over it, up into the back of it, and it was running a game, complete with jokey music and cheap sound effects. The janitor sat down in front of it, and gleefully began to play it.

    The game looked really stupid: I mean, it wasn't even 3D or anything. It was totally nineties looking.

    There were a bunch of pixel guys that looked like they might be ogres, standing around a green castle. They weren't even drawn to the correct scale or anything. Most of the "sky" was covered with a big puffy stylized rain cloud, except for one side of the castle, and little black blobs rushed out of it, and rained down on the castle.

    He would tap some keys, and the little pixle ogres would run up against some other guys—little white guys with pointed hats, that came out of the castle. The castle would also sporadically glow green, and the ogres would back off for a few moments.

    We heard another muffed explosion outside, and the screen dimmed. It seemed a little soon for another tower to go up, but hey, I wasn't complaining.

    A few of the pixle-ogres disappeared with a really cheap "poof" sound, and a few more of the little white pointy-head guys appeared.

    "Shit!" he said, "I hate that. Haven't they stopped him yet? How many towers are there left, anyway?"

    "Um, one, I think."

    "ONE. Great. What am I supposed to do then? I suppose my friend will think of something. It hasn't let me down so far, I doubt something like that will stop it. It's got enough power now to get through another way, I'm sure. If it even needs too. Don't you think?"

    I opened my mouth, closed it again.

    "Fucking Ralph. I'd had such great hopes for the guy. I never thought I'd see him do something stupid like this."

    "YOU had great hopes for the guy?"

    He looked at me, cocked his head to one side. "Well, yeah."

    Uh oh.

    This guy wasn't the janitor. And that wasn't a stupid game. The castle was Emerald City. It was real.

    "Not that it matters much now anyway. Everything's gonna be... transformed... in a little while. I don't really even know how it's gonna be. It keeps upping the ante. Very exciting. I do know that there will be no theme park."

The was black kudzu around my feet, under it, and the dull ache was starting again in my soles. The stuff was starting to migrate up the side of my boots, trying to get at the space between the shoe leather and the soles.

    This was freaking me out, to say the least. And something larger was freaking me out. I couldn't help it anymore—I had to ask him.

    "Why? Why are you doing this?"

    He didn't turn around, he just talked as he played his deadly game. "Why?" He said in his nasal, whiney voice, "Let me ask you a question. How long have you been knocking around Oz?"

    "About a week."

    "About a week. Okay. Give it a month. It's nice for a while— it's—what's that word?—idyllic. But jeez, you can only take so much, right? Am I right? Pretty soon you're thinking, this fairyland shit is really starting to get to me. I want a hamburger. I wanna watch T.V.

    "And the people.

     "The happy, shiny people start to really piss you off. Nothing bothers them. Well, almost nothing. And they're smug! Americans used to be that way not too long ago, before they realized there were other countries in the world—I've heard the Brits were that way too, once. Anyway, pretty soon you're fantasizing about rounding up their plump little asses and using them for target practice. But you can't do that, can you? And you can't grind up Elsie to make a cheeseburger either, can you? No. It just wouldn't be right. But you're still thinking about it.

    "And all the while this is going on, you've still got your job to do. You're being treated like a funky, chastised by thick-necked idiots for not getting results, when all the time—you can see what they gave me to work with, for Chrissake—"

    The kudzu had an actual grip on my boots now, trying to work into the crevices. Behind my growing terror, I'm thinking, strangely, that I can kind of relate to what he's saying. Like nothing he'd said so far seemed that unreasonable. I actually nodded my head and raised my eyebrows a few times. And the dull ache from the kudzu was starting to feel—how can I say it? This is embarrassing. The pain was getting less painful, and more—stimulating. It was almost giving me a boner.

    "And the thing is," he continued, "I never did have too many friends, so, I was getting... kinda lonely I guess. I started doing some weird stuff, ya know?"

    "Yeah," I said, "I know."

     "I imagine you and Ralph have had some conversations about me, huh? You probably heard about the tank. Yes?"

    "Yes."

    "Anyway, I started spending alot of time in there. I felt—something, y'know?"

    "I know."

    "It came to me there, and I never—I have never felt that I was— alright before. It let me know that—those feeling I had—they were— okay. They were okay!"

    "Uh, Bennie? They weren't okay."

    "Bullshit!" He wheeled around out of his chair, and stuck his face in my face. I felt a chill coming out of him, and a smell like a musty attic. "It's all all right. And that's about the only difference between you and me, pal. Because you see me do these things and ask me 'why'? But see, deep down inside, you already know why. My friend made me see it. It's all all right." He looked down at the kudzu making its way into my shoes. "You'll be there soon. With me. And my friend."

    He turned back to his game, and it looked like he was doing pretty well. A few different monster type guys (one looked alot like that Power Rangers monster from the Burrito that ate with his crotch) were now inside the walls of the little green city, and more of the cloud blobs were dropping down inside.

    He tapped, and the screen fashed green.

    "Fuck!"

    I thought it was part of his trip, some kind of warning or something. He continued to tap furiously, and wreak more havoc on the tiny city. Then the fash happened again, and he swore again, and I could tell that this was not his doing.

     Whose then?

    He kept at it, and over several second the green fashes grew more frequent. They seemed like the green on certain old-type computer monitor displays, but more intense, brighter and more high

powered than any cathode ray tube could produce.

    A voice bellowed out of the walls, out of the foor, but emanated from the Hollow Man: "WHAT THE FUCK IS GOING ON?" Low, ominous, dopplered trails rang on after it.

    Then I thought I saw—I couldn't be sure at the time if I wasn't imagining it—strobing in between the green magnesium fashes, now so frequent that Bhennigh couldn't see the game, couldn't tap keys—I thought I saw a familiar Happy-Face-In-A-ComputerScreen.

    Winking at me.

The frst bolt of lightning landed about six feet in front of me. The second one landed about six feet behind. I wasn't all that surprised to see Rokoko before me when the smoke cleared on the frst one— baring his teeth, as usual—though those empty black eyes made me feel like I'd been dumped into the Chuck E. Cheese at Westworld.