by David Beem
“A true leader understands the value of sacrifice,” says Nostradamus. “Wouldn’t you agree?”
“I would!” Wang hurries to reply. “In fact, I was just thinking about that this morning. I was thinking: What we really need to do is make a sacrifice. You know, to cement my leadership and whatnot.”
“Four lives for the freedom of one, for example,” says Nostradamus.
“Just four?” Wang laughs. “My good man, I’ve got hundreds out there. I can tell you where they’re at. Just say the word. I’m sure we can strike a deal.”
“I’d like to say this is in any way surprising.” Christine folds her arms and leans against the wall. “Lie down with dogs, get up with fleas.”
“They’re a bit insubordinate,” says Wang. “You know, from one leader to another. Leadership problems. Am I right?”
Ralph edges again for the door, and his body freezes like a statue. An invisible force drags him into the center of the room, his feet skidding. “Oh, come on!”
“Ralph, Ralph,” says Nostradamus. “Is there somewhere you need to be? Are we holding you up?”
“Holding me up?” deadpans Ralph, moving only his eyes inside his ninja mask as the rest of his body is rigid. “No. What gives you that impression?”
Nostradamus parts his hands. “I miss this, the shits and giggles. It’s just me out there now, you know? But you’ve got a good sense of humor, Ralph. Maybe I should trade your freedom for theirs.”
“I’ve got jokes!” cries Wang. “You like jokes?”
“I’ve got jokes!” cries Ralph.
“Making love to a woman is like buying real estate!” Christine blurts. “Location, location, location!”
“Hey,” says Nostradamus. “You were Tron-Tron for a while, weren’t you?”
“What?” she replies, and Nostradamus waves the remark away.
“Never mind. Let’s just say you have a strong case for keeping your freedom.”
“Yo mama so old, she got a Bible autographed by Jesus!” yells Wang.
“Uh-oh!” Consuelo cups his hands to his mouth. “It’s a yo-mama fight!”
“No-no!” cries Ralph. “Yo mama so fat, her driver’s license picture say, ‘continued on da other side, bee-yotch,’ BOOM!”
“Nuh-uh,” says Wang. “Yo mama so fat, she don’t need no internet. She already worldwide!”
“Whoa-oh!” says Ralph. “Wait-wait. Yo mama so ugly, she made One Direction go da other direction!”
“Yo mama so stupid—”
“Enough!” says Shmuel, for all the world like his brain isn’t the overcooked contents of an Easy-Bake Oven. “Your jokes suck. Everyone knows Nostradamus can take our medallions whenever he wants. He doesn’t have to give anyone their freedom. He’s toying with us.”
“Shmuel?” Wang counts silently using his fingers. “That was four whole sentences without question marks. You feeling okay?”
Nostradamus gestures with his hand at Shmuel. “Look. He can think.”
“Indeed,” replies Shmuel.
“Okay, that’s unnatural,” says Christine. “Shmuel…did you just say…indeed?”
Shmuel wags his eyebrows as his medallion rises from the floor in front of him and hovers in midair. Christine and Consuelo grasp their own medallions in their fists. Ralph, still frozen in the middle of the room, squeezes his eyes shut.
“Yo mama so…so…” Wang raises his hand. “Hang on… It’s on the tip of my tongue… Um… I’ve got more jokes. So many jokes.”
Danny swings a shovel, connects, and the shock rockets down his spine. Whump. The zombie collapses in the sand, and Danny peeks around the edge of the pen. The rest of the zombies are, for some reason, doing the electric slide out near the crash site. His grip on the shovel loosens, and he clutches with his free hand the medallion around his neck. “I think we lost ’em.”
“Come on, hurry up. Those idiots we call our dear leaders are about to become even bigger idiots unless we get this done.” Leo throws back the gate to the pen, and the seagulls come to attention in rows of twenty. “Okay, that’s just weird. Danny, help me get this net hooked up.”
“I dunno, man.” Danny peeks around the other side of the pen. Empty there too. “I don’t get it. Why didn’t more of ’em follow us?”
“Who the fuck knows? Wang’s gonna be pissed if we don’t…uhn… Come help me with this net already.”
A soft weight pushes into Danny’s leg. He looks down. Big brown eyes peer up at him and blink. That pig. Dressed in a friggin’ tuxedo. And wearing an ankle monitor?
“What. The fuck.”
“What is it now?” asks Leo. “Did I mention Wang is probably getting mind-controlled as we speak?”
“We can only hope. What’s with the friggin’ pig? It’s in a friggin’ tuxedo. And it’s on friggin’ house arrest.”
The pig rolls its eyes and trots off toward the bird cage. His head reeling, Danny follows.
“That’s Spy Pig,” says Leo. “He’s got a name.”
Danny shakes his head. “Spy Pig. Smart birds. Kinda makes you miss the days when it was just cross-dressing commie kung fu aliens.”
Spy Pig pushes a hoof into his bow tie and makes a kind of suave shoulder swagger. Light glints off its front right foreleg.
“Is that a friggin’ Rolex?” asks Danny, shuffling across the dusty floor into the bird cage for a better look. His foot scuffs across something slick. He lifts it, checks the bottom of his shoe, and discovers a white smear. “Dammit.”
“Quit foolin’ around.” Leo tosses him one side of the net. Danny catches it and carries it to the opposite end of the line of seagulls standing at attention.
“So what is this?” he asks, starting to kneel, then hastily checking the area for more bird poop. Finding none, he kneels beside an unflinching poker-faced seagull. “Some kind of brain ray? Alien brain ray, probably.”
“Ours is not to question, my friend,” says Leo from the opposite side of the tent, where he’s tying a knot around a seagull ankle. Danny finds the ties, then gently attaches it around the ankle of the seagull at his end. He casts a quick glance at its face, but the bird is still staring straight ahead.
“They’re like the friggin’ Queen’s Guards.” He ties off the knot and scoots on his knees to the second row, then drags and untangles the next swath of netting.
“Yup.”
“But how’d they get like this, is what I’m sayin’. Gotta be a brain ray, right?”
“If it is,” says Leo, “you can be sure the Americans didn’t invent it.”
Danny sorts through the layers of netting and finds the second tie. He tosses a length of net out, and then loops the tie around the next bird’s ankle. “So you’re sayin’ it’s aliens, huh?”
“Aliens?” Leo scoffs. “Hell no. The Russians have been developing brain rays since the ’60s.”
“I think it’s aliens. I think I saw somethin’ about it on that one Giorgio show, the big-hair alien guy.”
“Not everything is about aliens.” Leo ties off another knot and scoots to the next row. “This is about LSD and remote viewing and men staring at goats.”
“Goats? These are fuckin’ birds.”
“Same principle.”
Danny finishes his next knot and snaps his gaze up to catch the bird by surprise. Its eyes snap forward. His mouth twists to the side. “Men staring at goats,” he mutters. Raising his voice, he says, “What about birds staring at men?”
“What about it?”
He fixes his gaze on the bird’s profile, but its eyes remain front and center. “They’re listening to us.” He cranes his neck over the tops of the birds to find Leo peering back at him. Leo eases his shoulders and ducks down behind his side.
“Whatever, man,” he says. “Let’s just get this over with.”
Danny ties off his last knot, and something inside the coop starts beeping. His gets a knee up and pushes off to his feet. He casts around for the beeping. A four-legged tuxedo scurrie
s by, the back leg flashing.
“Shit!” cries Leo. “Shit, that’s the signal!”
Feathers lift into Danny’s face. He raises his arms, turns his head, and spits. He peeks out from behind his arm as the coop explodes in a mass of fluttering wings. The birds are hovering beneath the front canopy.
“Hurry up, Spy Pig!” yells Leo.
Spy Pig salutes, then scampers into the center of the net and sits. The birds flap slowly forward and clear the canopy, the pig dragging behind.
“Un-be-fucking-lievable,” says Leo.
“Fly, birds! Fly!” cries Danny. “Shoo! Away, birds!”
They lift off, Spy Pig secure in the net arching behind them as they speed toward the tower in the distance…
Wang faces Nostradamus, his nunchucks swinging at his side. “All right. That’s it. Unscrambling Shmuel’s brain is the very last fucking straw. Enough is enough.”
“Oh, really?” Nostradamus straightens and releases Ralph, who again sneaks for the nearest door.
Wang cups his hands in front of his mouth. “Yo! Spy Pig!”
For a second, nothing happens. Nostradamus’s head tilts. Then, distant fluttering wings…
“Oh no.” Nostradamus wheels around so his back is to them. “Not this again.”
A pig in a tuxedo flies through the large oval window. Four hooves hit the ground and skid. Spy Pig oinks. Feathers explode. Seagulls circle Nostradamus’s head.
“Agh!” he cries, ducking and swatting.
Wang snatches Shmuel’s medallion and wrestles it over his head. Consuelo, Christine, and Ralph break for the door.
Chapter Fifty-Four
Singing birds guide me from the dream. The pink warmth on my eyelids is inviting.
A hazy Tree of Life rises out of my subconscious landscape. An aardvark scampers across its trunk, followed by a family of javelinas. An eagle swoops down to scoop up the smallest and arcs away, forcing the perspective on the 2-D canvas and shrinking into the distance. The leaves at the top of the tree are green, and this is a first since I’ve been coming. Seems like it’s always been autumn. I wonder what changed.
“You changed.” Bruce Lee materializes at my side. Something seems odd about that. Not sure what. He’s always meeting me here, right? He’s not in his white suit and tie today, though. He’s in his Game of Death tracksuit.
“Are we gonna fight?” I ask, dazed and my blinking eyes seem to burn off some of the haze of my subconscious mind.
“Hope not.”
The haze over the tree lifts. My conscious memories begin tumbling in… I was dying…
I bolt upright on the park bench. “Is Mary okay?”
“What you did should’ve burned your light out of the Collective.”
“Is she okay?”
“It was foolhardy.”
“Bruce.”
“You saved her life.” He gives me a secretive smile, the kind you give friends. “And we will not be fighting today.”
I slump into the bench and release a breath I didn’t know I’d been holding. More memories slide into place like falling Tetris pieces. I clap his thigh, grin, and a profound calm fills me, like I just let out every worry I’ve been carrying since getting that stupid shot.
“So you’re fine after all,” I say, expelling an exasperated chuckle. “I’m relieved. Sorry, I’m still hazy, I guess. You let us think something bad happened to you! Are the rest of the dead human race fine then also?”
Bruce dampens a smile. “I’m not sure we can ever use the word ‘fine’ to describe Nigel, but…”
“But things worked out in the end,” I finish for him, extrapolating from his thoughts and giving him as much of a stern look as I can muster. “No thanks to you. You left me to figure it all out alone! That was really hard!”
Bruce arches an eyebrow. “We never abandoned you. That’s the conceit of the living talking. We are all of us with you. Always.”
Hot wind blasts over us as the Tree of Life flickers, replaced for a second by a vision of four armored space ninjas speeding across the desert toward a distant tower. And then it’s gone. Back to springtime in my subconscious mind.
“What’s this?” I ask, my ears still ringing from the howling wind.
“The final battle is begun.” Bruce idly plucks the tracksuit fabric on his chest, then eases his shoulders. “Your friends are approaching Nostradamus’s stronghold now.”
“They survived…but I didn’t?”
“No.”
“No to which part?”
“Mm-hmm.”
I expel a burst of air. “Am I alive or dead?”
“Yes,” he replies, smirking. “Okay, okay.” His expression brightens. “Truth: it’s up to you.”
“Up to me? What am I? A friggin’ Schrödinger’s cat?”
Bruce’s lips purse as his gaze returns unconcernedly to the landscape beyond the Tree.
“Why do I get to choose whether I live or die?”
“You’re upset?” He looks at me now, and his eyebrows rise. “Don’t you prefer a choice? I can show you to the Übermenschen. I’m sure Nostradamus would love to take the decision from you.”
He stretches out and puts his arms up on the bench back. I release a sigh and cross my legs. If there’s one thing I’ve learned from these little talks, it’s patience. He’s going to give me whatever he’s going to give me, and it’s going to be on his time.
“Mm-hmm,” says Bruce. “Told you you’ve changed.”
“Oh, shut up,” I snap. “Do you really have to listen to my every freaking thought?”
“Doesn’t feel decent, does it?”
“Why are you still messing with me?”
“Mentor trope.” He wrinkles, then relaxes his nose. “Remember, this is your subconscious mind.”
“Will they be okay? My friends?”
His lips twitch, and his head tilts to the side. “They could use your help.”
“My help. Says the guy who let me think I had to annihilate Mary’s soul. You’ve got a weird way of telling me what to do.”
“I don’t tell you what to do. Remember? That’s the other guy.”
“It’s a lot of game playing, if you ask me.”
“It’s called free will, Edge,” he says, his face becoming semitranslucent. “But we had faith you’d follow your heart. And you did.”
“Wait. What’s happening? Where are you going?”
“You’re waking up.”
“Waking up? Hey, I didn’t make my decision yet!”
Bruce laughs. “You made your decision the second you saw they were in danger. But don’t worry. You’ve got backup.”
He vanishes.
“We?” I say to my empty subconscious mind. “We had faith I’d follow my heart?”
All of us, he replies. Oh, and Edge? For what it’s worth, we’re really proud of you.
The brightness swells, and the netherworld flings me across the abyss, and, I presume, back into the fight.
Chapter Fifty-Five
I come awake to a cement ceiling and aching back. Mm. Tight shoulders. My arms are folded over my chest.
Pulse spikes. Adrenaline surges.
I feel like the dead body at an open-casket funeral!
I startle, twist, fall. Elbows and knees clack on concrete. I grab the cot frame and push up. Shelves, table, door… I’m back in the bunker, alone.
It’s a good day to die, sir, says Killmaster.
Killmaster! You’re back!
Ah, I never went anywhere, he replies. I’ve been hanging out in Club Brain like everyone else.
But Bruce said you and Shakespeare—
He lied, says Einstein, and Dad drops a two-ton block of information into my head. I stagger into the cot and fall on my butt. The reason for the lies, the past twenty years of Mom and Dad’s life, Mary’s parents and everything the Collective Unconscious knows about Nostradamus. It’s all just suddenly there. I drag the back of my arm over my forehead. Jeez, I’m panting.
<
br /> This is why we usually talk it through in small bites, says Dad. You’ve been in a coma, son. Your friends hoped you’d pull through, but the fight is happening.
This was the plan all along, I say, awe coursing through me. I mean, not the coma, but—
We wanted to tell you, says Dad. More to the point, I wanted to tell you. But this is a dangerous game, Edge.
You really strung me out on it, though.
You really think we expected you to annihilate Mary’s soul? asks Nigel. You’re rather more daft than I thought.
Sorry, Edge, says Dad. But the pieces are in place now.
I touch my temple and access his info dump. You want us to use one of the animals to deliver the antiserum.
Nostradamus can’t sense them coming, sir, says Killmaster. Just like when Mikey needed your help finding the cow.
I rake my fingers through my hair and try to shake off the weight of it all. Everything he just pushed into my brain.
The ring’s in your pocket, says Bruce. It is time to leave the plateau.
A hole in the fabric of space-time opens in front of me. On the far side is a huge red-and-gold pagoda. I rub my hands over my arms. There’s no tingling beneath my skin.
How are you doing this? I ask.
I’m not, Dad replies. Your friends are. They felt your return the second you woke up. Mary’s excited to see you.
Mary… She’ll need water. She’ll pass out! It’s too much for—
By sharing the load, says Dad, it doesn’t take so much out of any one of them. They’re combining their strength, son. Stronger together.
I close my eyes and focus. Her warm presence pushes through the boundaries of my consciousness. Goose bumps race over my skin. It feels like our first kiss, our mind meld or whatever. Only now we’re awake. She’s sad. Well, she was sad, but she’s not anymore. Oh, man. This is going to be awesome. Being connected in this way…
Kind of gives you something to live for, says Dad. Don’t be like your old man, Edge. Try to live through this one, okay? I want grandkids.
I want him to have grandkids too, says Nigel, his psychic sense virtually wagging his eyebrows at me. Lots and lots of grandkids.