Curds and Whey Box Set

by G M Eppers

  Andy gave me a sweeping bow but did not say, “At your service.”

  “I heard about you on the news,” I went on. “All your stuff uses alliteration. It’s nice to meet someone who has a plan and can follow through. All I ever meet are guys who can’t tie their own shoes. Let’s see if I can remember….you bug bombed a BMO Harris Bank, and passed fake fives all on a Friday, and stole seven…what was it Saab’s? on a Saturday. That’s so cool.” I deliberately got one wrong to see if he would fall for it. Guys like him want you to get it straight and they will correct you.

  “Subarus,” he said. “I stole Subarus. And the Saturday was in September, too. Gave them out to my family. Wouldn’t drive one of those on a bet.” That, at least, would prove to my loyal listeners on the other side of the lake that I was talking to the right man.

  “Oh, right. I remember that now. Subarus. What else was it? There’s probably some that didn’t make the story. Did you rob a Red Robin? Smuggle smokes from Somalia? Oooo, oooo, embezzle emeralds from a European embassy?” I almost jumped up and down in feigned excitement. “Tell me all about them. It’s so exciting!” I’m ashamed, but I had to do it. I batted my eyelids at him. If my hands hadn’t been trapped behind my back I would have brought together two fists in unadulterated admiration. “Did you know my name is Helena? If we got married, I’d be Helena Herd. Wouldn’t that be amazing!”

  Andy was squinting his eyes at me suspiciously. Was I over the top? Is an alliteration groupie too unrealistic?

  Under his breath and out the side of his broken jaw, Gary asked, “What are you doing?”

  “Stroking his ego,” I shot back the same way.

  “You know I can hear you, right?” asked Andy. “And I don’t need any stroking.”

  “I’m not patronizing you, Andy, um, Mr. Herd, sir,” I said. “You’ve probably done some that are much more clever than the ones I said.”

  Mr. Legoman pursed his lips, thinking about it. “I’m flattered, but I’ve been awfully busy building my cracker empire.” He waved a hand to indicate the compound around us. “This is my soon-to-be worldwide headquarters. A full blown cracker factory right here on The Angle.”

  “Factory?” I asked. “Fully staffed?”

  “No, I do it all myself, Einstein,” snapped Andy.

  He was drinking up my admiration like an alcoholic doing a fifth of gin. Despite his curt response, I felt I’d gained a certain amount of influence.

  He lowered his hand. “What was that you said about your name? Was it Helena?”

  “Yes, sir!” I tried to look pleased and flattered that he had remembered it.

  “Most women are ignorant slobs who don’t appreciate the art of alliteration. They laugh at me.” His eyes got dark and far away for a moment. “Bimbos. Bubble-headed bimbos.” He followed that with a few more descriptive words that were increasingly misogynistic and yet still alliterative.

  “I would never laugh at you, Mr. Herd.” Especially not with twenty guards pointing rifles at me, I thought. “How did you think up the cracker thing? It’s genius! Do you really make them right here?”

  “Would you like to see?” Before I could answer, he seemed to notice Gary again as if he’d been away. “Maybe this girl isn’t such a bad consolation prize, Gary.” He didn’t seem to care at all that Gary was holding his jaw together from the outside. “I can put her to work.” I was half expecting that he’d been so impressed by my alliteration that he would employ me as copywriter or something like that. “I need a dishwasher upstairs in the cafeteria. The kids from the Angle don’t do a very good job. See, that was the downside of setting up here. The labor pool is very small. I deal with virtual incompetence every day. Incompetence worse than yours, too, Gary, because it’s happening right here. But how would it look if I treated the kids the same way I treat you? After all, their parents are in the other buildings, baking crackers and cracking crabs and packing boxes into bigger boxes. Have to keep them relatively happy by not beating up their kids, right? Oh, look at that. I made a pun!” He took me by the elbow and guided me toward his throne. “Threats work just as well. I keep the adults in line by threatening the kids, and keep the kids in line by threatening the adults, and only have to do the occasional example.” I noticed him touch one monitor in the corner before he let me come around to see. That screen was black. He must have turned it off. “Ever worked in manufacturing, babycakes?” He sat on the throne and patted his leg.

  The bile taste was in my mouth again, but I gently sat on his lap and looked at the monitors, my hands still cuffed behind my back. “All this time I thought you were playing Candy Crush,” I said. I was intensely interested in what the monitors were showing, so I didn’t have to feign that, but I did have to curb my appearance of comprehension. I wanted to scratch the side of my head and fluff my hair, but had to settle for the occasional crossed eyes and a look of confusion. “What is all this?”

  “This is my masterpiece,” Andy said, pulling my hair behind my shoulder. I felt the hard metal of his skull ring on my cheek and suppressed a shudder. Gary was still standing at attention, the hand on his jaw the only exception. “I watch what’s happening in all my buildings. The first one there, that’s the crab cracking room.” The screen showed several men and women around a long rectangular table piled high with pink, boiled crab legs. Each person had a large trash bin next to them where they would throw the shells, and the meat went into a bucket on the other side. A man walked around collecting the buckets and taking them to a press in the corner which squeezed out the juice into large jars. “Look at the sheeple. Good people they had living here. Good workers. Spics and chinks and blacks, too. Who’d a thunk?” I tried not to hear him. Couldn’t he have been evil without being a bigot? “We only need the juice to flavor the crackers. The meat goes to the cafeteria. Think about it. All the crab meat you could want. You like crab, honey?”

  “I love crab.” My mouth had gone dry and the idea of crab was mysteriously nauseating.

  The second screen showed more people using vats to make dough, mixing it, dumping in half a jar of crab juice, and mixing it some more. Others were rolling dough out on tables and using large pizza cutters to cut it into uniform squares. Huge trays went into a brick oven. “Thought only the women would be good at baking. Some of the men really liked it though, so I let them. Probably queer anyway,” he mused.

  The third screen was blank. “What’s that one?” I asked, pointing with my head.

  “Camera broke. It’s getting fixed,” he said quickly, moving on to the fourth screen. “That’s packing.” More people were taking finished boxes of crackers and stacking them neatly into cardboard cartons, taping them shut and slapping various stickers and labels on them. The cartons were stacked into one side of the room. “They get hauled up at the end of the day and sent out by helicopter.”

  “That’s all the people who lived on the Angle?” I couldn’t help myself from asking as I watched them, not a smile among them, slaving away in this makeshift factory. There was no conversation, no camaraderie.

  “Now they live here. There’s dormitories upstairs and a cafeteria. I feed them, and house them, and they work for me. All the comforts.” The fifth screen showed a cafeteria kitchen where older kids were helping younger ones prepare a meal of undoubtedly something crab related. “I used to have an adult there, too, but she was too stupid. Almost burned the place down.” I thought it was probably not an accident and wondered silently what had become of her. More than likely she had become an example. He didn’t share her fate with me. “The kids are really dependable. They don’t want to get hurt.”

  I wondered about the blank screen. Could be the dormitory, which was probably dark and empty now anyway, or it could be another step to the process that he didn’t want to share.

  “The kids are upstairs?” I looked up at the ceiling.

  “Quiet as mice, aren’t they? Believe me, I’d hear it if they weren’t. What do you think?” His face was very close to min
e. He sniffed my hair, speaking into my ear in a low, throaty voice. I thought he was going to lick my cheek. Instead, he nudged me off his lap. “Enough with the niceties,” he said suddenly. “You’re going to help in the cafeteria for now. You start a fire or anything like that, I chop a finger off of a random kid. Hope you like kids, because you’re going to deal with them all day long, every day, for the rest of your life. Gary, you got the keys to these things?” He grabbed the chain connecting the cuffs and pulled me along with it back to where Gary was still nursing his injured jaw. “I’ll take her upstairs myself. The kids love to see me.” I had a hard time believing that was true.

  “Yeah,” Gary said painfully through clenched teeth, and he started reaching into his pocket.

  And then we all heard it. The sound of spinning blades chopping up the air.

  Andy looked up at the ceiling and smiled. “All right. Henrietta is back. About time. The packers almost have another load ready. I really gotta get a bigger chopper,” he said. “I’m telling you, I can’t keep up with the demand. No telling how much further it would go if I’d been able to do the ad campaign with the raccoon. Plus, your cabin is a lot closer as a distribution center than Henrietta’s. She’s always so late getting back. Product flow is just not working. Fuel stops, she says. The cabin location should fix that problem. Gary will make it work, won’t you, Gary?” He shrugged. “Well, Gary knows what it means to disappoint me now. And so do you. So there shouldn’t be any more of that!”

  We heard the chopper touch down gently on the ceiling a full floor above. Upstairs, dishes rattled and we could hear the muffled voices of the children. “What the -?” Gary was holding out the key to Andy, but Andy ignored it. “That’s not Henrietta. The Hiller doesn’t make that much noise.” He pulled me away from Gary, still by the length of chain. My shoulders objected. We headed back toward the monitors. Without letting go, he used his other hand to swipe a screen and the view of the crab room changed into a look at the roof. “Oh, hell no,” Andy said, looking at the huge Sikorsky settling onto the roof. Several people got out, carrying their own weapons. I couldn’t tell who was who because they were wearing helmets they hadn’t had before, but I was sure it was mostly my people. I’d told them to go back to the Mayo Clinic. Thank goodness they didn’t listen.

  “Incoming!” Andy shouted. All the guards leveled their weapons and cocked them, pointing at the doors. Gary dropped to the floor face down in the open and stayed there.

  We waited tensely and it seemed like nothing was going to happen. Like all the people had left the helicopter and vanished into thin air. Then suddenly all the doors tilted in at the top and fell forward off their hinges and onto the floor with a stereophonic thud.

  Parka clad men and women entered firing uniformly to their left, catching several guards by surprise who had been expecting the intruders on the opposite side. Some of the guards got back up again, clutching an injured arm or limping on an injured leg, juggling their own rifles and trying to aim where they wouldn’t hit their fellow guards. Bullets were flying as Andy dragged me to the throne and thrust me down with him between the chair and the monitors. A bullet cracked the casing above his head and he finally let go of the chain, hugging a pedestal instead.

  Ducking, I ran like a grounded goose back to Gary and knelt down. “Gary, the key! Get me out of these damn things!” I yelled at him. He was face down with his hands, one of them spreading blood wherever it went, laced behind his head. I couldn’t shake him. I couldn’t hit him. So I sat on my butt to free a leg and kicked him in the ribs.

  “Ow!” He curled up into a fetal position facing me. “Go away!” One of his hands came down to hold his jaw again as if speaking was going to make it fall off.

  “Gary, so help me. If you don’t get the key and unlock these cuffs I’m going to bite you.”

  He had dropped the key, but it was underneath him. Grumpily, he picked it up and spun me around so he could reach the cuffs. A moment later and my hands were finally free. I took the cuffs and the key and stuffed them into my back pocket. “Now stay down,” I told him as I disobeyed my own advice. I rose, but kept crouching and scanned the perimeter. It wasn’t long before I noticed that all the firing was around the perimeter of the room. No one was firing across. Each agent, CURDS or FBI, was focused on his or her nearest adversary. Because of the close quarters, most of the guards had abandoned their rifles and were engaging the FBI and CURDS agents by hand, but bullets continued to sputter from a few diehard trigger jockeys.

  I could now figure out who was who. My experienced eye recognized body types and mannerisms. Roxy’s heels were one giveaway, as well as her red hair leaking out of her protective helmet. She had her guard in a headlock, trying to remove his helmet while stomping her heel into his boot. He elbowed her, unperturbed by the heel, his thick work boots impenetrable. As I watched, she stretched a long leg around his lowered head and climbed onto his shoulders. He straightened, tossing her backwards. Her knees closed on his head and as her head swung toward the floor she curled her back and grabbed his ankles. He kicked backwards, striking her helmet, but she released his ankles and used her momentum and some amazing abdominals to right herself on top of his shoulders again, where she slid down enough to seat his head between her thighs and began choking him.

  A few doors over I spotted Fergie swinging punches and trying to use the butt of his presumably empty pistol to hit the guy on the back of the neck, wild west style. His guard was taller than him, but he ducked under the guy’s arms trying to get around to his back. The guard kept turning to reach him and the two of them circled each other until I was dizzy.

  I turned to the opposite wall and found Billings, taller by far than his guard, holding the guy upside down like a cartoon hoodlum shaking someone for loose change. The guard still had his rifle and was trying to swing it like a baseball bat at Billings’ legs. Instead, Billings began slamming him right into the wall until the rifle fell from his hands. My heart constricted as the guard slipped a dagger out of a leg holster and, still upside down, swung it wildly, slicing cleanly through his own belt. Before he knew it, Billings had nothing but an empty pair of pants in his arms, the oversized work boots falling in opposite directions as the guard’s small feet slipped easily out of them. Billings dropped the pants and descended on the guard, who was wearing Homer Simpson boxer shorts.

  I was noticing something else, too. Everyone was staying close to the wall. Any time a guard tried to move toward the middle of the room, he was pulled back. Maybe they wanted to make sure no one was coming after me or Gary, but I didn’t think so. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw one of the guards start to convulse and turned slightly to focus on him.

  Sylvia had him in the Hu hold and he was sneezing like crazy. She very calmly maintained the hold with one hand while light gunplay sent bullets all around her. Most of them seemed to be hitting the walls, puncturing them and producing tiny beams of sunlight. I could tell direction from it. The east side of the building had bright yellow light, but the west side let in beams of golden orange. I didn’t see how Sylvia could keep the hold going much longer. It’s usually a two handed hold which is why the twins were good at it. With four hands, they could hold it indefinitely, switching hands as they got tired. But Sylvia didn’t even seem stressed using only one hand. The guard kept sneezing, Sylvia politely and patiently blessed him each time and his rifle arm began to fall away from his body. With her free hand, she took the rifle by the end of the barrel and tossed it straight at me. It slid across the floor and into my left foot. Finally, she twisted the hold, ending the sneezing and bringing the guard to his knees. He fell forward and she stepped back. After checking to make sure he was out cold, she turned to find another guard to disarm.

  I picked up the rifle and took a good look at it, amazed. I recognized it. It was a LAN rifle, a modified M16 to be exact. My head turned around looking at all the guards still fighting, ducking down below the line of fire. This type of rifle had been used at CU
RDS Academy for combat training. No matter what, you eventually have to train with live ammunition and in large groups and it can be dangerous. LAN rifles are controlled by a computer chip in a circular housing mounted above the trigger assembly, with the software in a tablet held by the instructor. He or she could disable any or all of the rifles with a quick tap, ceasing gunfire in the event of an accident. I was pretty sure Andy had the software somewhere in his monitors so he could prevent a coup if his guards suddenly decided to mutiny. The problem was going to be finding it.

  I goosewalked, which is vastly different from a goosestep and considerably less graceful, back to the bank of monitors. Andy was still huddled under the last monitor hugging the pedestal, his eyes squeezed shut. Not so tough under fire, I thought, as I crouched nearby. The screen was showing the cafeteria. All the children were gone. The room was deserted except for untended pans of crab casserole. Quite possibly the software could be accessed via any of the monitors if you knew where to tap. But it seemed to me that it would be something Andy would keep handy.

  From just below, I reached up and felt along the edge of the blank monitor hoping to trigger the power. As I stroked the lower left hand corner the screen came to life, showing a list of active rifles designated by consecutive numbers. I stretched my neck to see without lifting my head any further above the bottom edge than I absolutely had to. I found icons labeled “Disable”, “Enable”, and “Send to All.” I tapped Disable and then Send to All.

  The gunfire got quieter, and then stopped as the FBI agents and my people realized they were no longer being fired upon.

  In the sudden silence, we all heard a creaking noise coming from above us.

  “Mom!” I spun around and spotted Billings standing next to his fallen guard who was desperately trying to hide his boxer shorts. Billings’ foot was on the guard’s neck. He pointed up, then flattened his hand horizontally and brought it straight down. I got it.