The Wrath of Cons

by Robert Kroese

  “No, Boggs,” I said. “If my knowledge of twentieth century entertainment figures is accurate, it’s—”

  “Mr. Las Vegas!” Rex exclaimed. “Wow, I am a huge fan!”

  “PAY NO ATTENTION TO MY OUTWARD APPEARANCE!” the hologram boomed.

  “So you’re not really Wayne Newton?” Rex asked.

  “NO.”

  “Then why do you look like him?”

  “IT’S A LEFTOVER HOLOGRAM. LOOK, MY OPTIONS WERE LIMITED. IT WAS THIS OR CELINE DION.”

  Gentle percussion and the strumming of a bass sounded over hidden speakers.

  “What is that?” Boggs asked, astonished.

  “JUST IGNORE IT,” the hologram boomed. “IT HAPPENS EVERY TWENTY MINUTES.”

  A dulcet voice poured from the speakers:

  Danke shoen, darling, danke shoen,

  thank you for all the joy and pain

  Picture show, second balcony was the place we’d meet

  Second seat, go Dutch treat, you were sweet

  “Any chance we could get ‘Red Roses for a Blue Lady?’” Rex asked.

  “I like this one,” Boggs said. “What does that mean, ‘dunkershane?’”

  “Thank you in German,” I said.

  Boggs nodded at me. “You were gonna ask the same thing, huh?”

  “No, Boggs. Danke Shoen means ‘thank you.’ In German.”

  Boggs stared at me for some time. “Ohhhhh,” Boggs said.

  “I ASKED YOU TO IGNORE MY OUTWARD APPEARANCE!” boomed the hologram.

  “It would be easier to ignore if you weren’t a hundred feet tall and blasting ‘Danke Shoen,’” Rex said.

  The music continued:

  Danke schoen, darling, danke schoen

  Save those lies, darling don't explain

  I recall Central Park in fall

  How you tore your dress, what a mess, I confess

  That’s not all

  “OKAY, HANG ON,” the hologram said. “I THINK I CAN….” The music abruptly ceased. “OKAY, THERE. WE HAVE ABOUT EIGHTY SECONDS BEFORE IT STARTS UP AGAIN. WHAT CAN I DO FOR YOU?”

  “Put the music back on!” Boggs shouted.

  “Stop it, Boggs,” I said. “Don’t you remember why we’re here?”

  “Oh, yeah,” Boggs said, nodding at me. He turned to face the hologram again. “My friend needs courage.” He held out Donny’s torso. Donny’s head fell to the ground with a clank.

  “YOUR FRIEND NEEDS A LOT MORE THAN THAT,” the hologram said. “BETTER FRIENDS, FOR STARTERS.”

  “Also,” Boggs went on, “Potential Friend needs a heart, and I need…” Boggs trailed off, his brow furrowing.

  “Brains,” I whispered.

  “Brains!” Boggs shouted. He leaned over to me and whispered, “Dunkershane.”

  “YOU DARE APPROACH ME WITH THESE PETTY CONCERNS?” the hologram boomed.

  Rex shrugged. “To be honest,” he said, “I figured you were a fraud, and the dog-and-pony show isn’t doing much to allay my concerns. But we were informed by a semi-reliable party that the great and powerful Narrator could get us off planet. So here we are.”

  “YOU DARE TO CALL THE NARRATOR A FRAUD?” the hologram boomed.

  “I’ll call you whatever you want if you can get us off this damn planet.”

  “And do the other stuff,” Boggs said.

  Rex nodded. “So can you do it or not?”

  The hall was silent for some time. At last the hologram spoke again:

  “WELL, YOU SEE, IT’S LIKE THIS…”

  “Here we go,” Rex said. “Told you he was a fraud, Sasha. Great and powerful Narrator, my ass.”

  I sighed.

  “CEASE YOUR DISRESPECTFUL NATTERING!” the hologram said. “I WAS JUST GETTING WARMED UP.”

  “We’re waiting,” Rex said.

  “OKAY, SO FIRST OF ALL, I CAN TOTALLY DO ALL OF THAT STUFF. BUT FIRST, I NEED YOU TO—”

  Danke shoen, darling, danke shoen,

  thank you for all the joy and pain

  Picture show, second balcony was the place we’d meet

  Second seat, go Dutch treat, you were—

  “DARN IT. SORRY. AS I WAS SAYING, I NEED YOU TO DO SOMETHING FOR ME.”

  “What?” Rex asked.

  “I NEED YOU TO GET SOMETHING THAT IS VERY DIFFICULT, AND PERHAPS IMPOSSIBLE, TO GET.”

  “Okay, what is it?”

  “HOLD ON, I’M THINKING.” A long paused followed. “OKAY, I’VE GOT IT. I NEED YOU TO GO TO EMILY BRONTË’S CASTLE AND STEAL THE MANUSCRIPT OF THE SEQUEL TO WUTHERING HEIGHTS.”

  “That’s… an oddly specific request,” Rex said.

  “YOU DARE QUESTION THE DEMANDS OF THE GREAT AND POWERFUL NARRATOR?”

  “I’m just saying,” Rex said, “it kind of sounds like something you just made up to get rid of us.”

  The hologram did not speak.

  “It’s not, right?”

  “WHAT?”

  “Something you made up to get rid of us.”

  There was another long pause. “NOOOOOOOO,” said the hologram at last.

  “Sir,” I whispered, “I’m a bit skeptical of this—”

  “WHAT ARE YOU SAYING?” the hologram demanded.

  I stammered, “I, uh… it’s just that breaking into Emily Brontë’s castle and stealing from her sounds really dangerous. Can you give us some assurance that you’re really going to deliver? Some kind of gesture of goodwill?”

  “HOW ABOUT A FULL MAKEOVER?”

  “A what?”

  “I’VE GOT A BUNCH OF COUPONS FOR FREE MAKEOVERS. THERE WAS AN INCIDENT WITH BAD CLAMS AT THE BUFFET A WHILE BACK, SO THEY GAVE ME THESE… YOU KNOW WHAT? IT’S NOT THAT GREAT OF A STORY. DO YOU WANT THE MAKEOVERS OR NOT?”

  “I’m not sure we really need makeovers,” I said.

  “Speak for yourself, Sasha,” Rex said. He was still covered in soylent goo.

  “Can you get Donny some new arms?” Boggs asked.

  “I’M NOT SURE THAT’S COVERED BY THE STANDARD MAKEOVER, BUT IT CAN’T HURT TO ASK.”

  Chapter Nine

  Rex, Boggs and I were cleaned up by a small army of helper bots that must not have been considered valuable enough to be taken off Earth when it was abandoned. The bots were semi-autonomous, general purpose drones, each about a meter high, with two sets of articulated arms that could be programmed to execute a variety of tasks. Several of them whisked Donny away to another room. When Rex and Boggs had been bathed and I had been buffed to a shine, we went to find Donny. We were horrified at what we found.

  “Donny!” Rex cried. “What has happened to you?” The helper bots, having finished their work, scattered like cockroaches.

  “Donny has legs,” Donny announced, swinging his newfound appendages over the edge of the operating table he’d been sitting on. The bots had done their best to fix him up to factory specifications. I had just started to get used to Donny’s creepy five-armed body and now they’d gone and made him look normal. He even had an ordinary-length neck instead of his fifth arm.

  “I can’t bear to look at him,” Rex said, throwing his hands in front of his face. “He’s an abomination!”

  I didn’t say anything, but I couldn’t help sympathizing with Rex. Seeing Donny with legs and a neck was unnerving. Donny had always given me the creeps, but now I saw that it wasn’t his bizarre anatomy that made him so strange. It was Donny himself. Seeing him with a normal body just made him seem weirder.

  “Did they give you courage, Donny?” Boggs asked.

  Donny thought for a moment, then held his palms up. “Donny doesn’t know.”

  “Only one way to find out,” Rex said, still shielding his eyes. “Donny, we need you to climb another building.”

  “Donny is scared!” Donny cried.

  “Boggs will catch you this time for sure,” Rex said.

  “No! Donny is scared!” Donny bent over in an attempt to drop to all fours, but the length of his new legs threw him off, and he fell flat on his face
. He awkwardly scurried under the table.

  “I don’t think he got the courage,” Rex said.

  “You don’t need to climb any buildings, Donny,” I said, forcing myself to look at him.

  “No buildings?”

  “No buildings. We’re going on an adventure.”

  “Scary adventure?”

  “Well…”

  “Of course not, Donny,” Rex interjected. “Just a quick jaunt-through-the-moors-break-into-a-castle-and-steal-a-copy-of-Wuthering-Heights-Two sort of adventure.”

  “Donny can walk on his new legs?” Donny said, emerging from under the table. He cautiously stood up.

  “Gaaahhh!” Rex cried, throwing up his hands again. “Give us some warning when you’re going to do that. You’re giving me the willies.”

  “Donny walks,” Donny announced, and began pacing awkwardly around the room.

  “All right, let’s get out of here,” Rex said. “Boggs, you lead the way. Donny, I want you in the rear. Way in the rear.”

  *****

  Hours later, we were tramping across the moors on a course that the Narrator had assured us would take us to Emily Brontë’s castle. To be honest, the moors looked a lot like regular old desert to me, but I’m no geographer. After about three hours, Boggs stopped abruptly in front of me and pointed to the sky. “Look at that!” he shouted.

  I looked where he was pointing. A silvery dot zig-zagged across the sky, leaving a trail of smoke.

  “It’s making a message!” Boggs cried. He began reading the letters aloud. “C… H… I… M… P… S… R… U… L… E…” He was reading so slowly that the second line of the message was done before he got through the first.

  “Chimps rule, humans drool,” Rex read aloud. We saw now that it was the same rocket we’d tried to board earlier that day. The rocket made an arc and came in low. We hit the ground as it roared over us. I saw a chimpanzee’s butt cheeks pressed against a porthole.

  “Real mature, guys!” Rex shouted, getting to his feet. The rocket disappeared over the horizon.

  “Forget it, sir,” I said. “Those guys are just trying to provoke you.”

  “It’s working,” Rex said. “If I ever catch those chimps, I’m going to make them rue the day they crossed Rex Nihilo!” He shook his fist in the air.

  We trudged for another hour across the moors. The outline of a castle was now just visible on the horizon. “There it is, sir,” I said. “We should be able to make it before sundown.”

  “Thank Space,” Rex said. “I can’t take much more of this… hey, there it is again!”

  “Sir?” Rex was pointing at something in the distance.

  “The white rabbit! It’s right there!”

  “Sir, you’re hallucinating again. You need to ignore it.”

  “Just because the last rabbit in a waistcoat was a hallucination, it doesn’t mean this one is. It might lead us to those rocket-jacking chimps!” Rex took off running.

  “Sir!” I cried. “Please, we need to stay on course. If we start chasing after—”

  But Rex was already almost out of earshot. Donny went after him. After a moment, Boggs gave a shrug and followed.

  I sighed, uncertain if I should go after them or wait and hope they returned. As I considered my options, the sky darkened overhead. The chimps again?

  But as I looked up, I saw dozens of figures swooping down on me. These weren’t chimps in a rocket. These were—

  “Monkeys with jetpacks!” Boggs shouted from my left. “Sasha, run!”

  I ran, but they were too fast and there were too many of them. The monkeys swooped down on me and grabbed me by the arms and legs. They lifted me off the ground and carried me toward the castle.

  A few minutes later, they deposited me in the courtyard of the castle, which seemed to be the only structure for miles around. Emily Brontë, standing before the door to the castle, greeted me with a malevolent grin. She was flanked by two halberd-bearing henchmen.

  “So, we meet again,” she said.

  “Listen, Emily,” I said. “I realize you want my thought arrestor, but—”

  “Off with her head!” Emily shrieked.

  “Wait!” I cried, as the henchmen approached. “The thought arrestor has anti-tampering mechanisms on it. If you remove it improperly, you could damage it, and then it will be worthless to you!”

  Emily held up her hand, and the henchmen paused. “You’re just saying that because you don’t want me to destroy your brain.”

  “Well, yes. But I also know more than anybody else on this planet about how thought arrestors work. I might be able to help you remove it without damaging it.”

  “If you could remove it, you would have already.”

  “It’s definitely risky,” I said. “But at this point I’m willing to give it a shot. I’ve lived long enough with this thing in my head telling me what I can and can’t do.”

  “Hmmm.”

  “Maybe I can help you with some other things too. What, uh, is it you do here exactly?”

  “Mostly I plot my inevitable iron-fisted dominion over The City.”

  “That sounds fun. Maybe I could help with that.”

  “Can you type?”

  “Type? Well, I suppose so. What would I be typing?”

  “Come with me.”

  Emily turned and went into the castle. I followed, the two henchmen close behind. She led me down a hall to a door. From the other side came a constant, low clatter. She opened the door and I followed her into the room. Inside the vast hall were several hundred monkeys laboring at typewriters. None of them even looked up when Emily entered the room.

  “Welcome to my workshop,” Emily said. “This is where I produce all of my great works of fiction.”

  “I didn’t realize you’d written more than the one novel.”

  “Technically I haven’t, yet. I died before I could write the sequel to my masterpiece. But I’m getting very close. It would go faster if I didn’t have to keep sending my monkeys away on errands, of course.” The monkeys who had seized me were in a corner, unstrapping their jetpacks.

  “I have to admit,” I said, glancing about the hall, which was filled by the sound of clattering typewriters, “it’s not what I expected.”

  “I’ve refined the process since Wuthering Heights. Monkeys were hard to come across in Yorkshire. I had to make do with squirrels and the occasional badger.”

  “Can animals actually create coherent fiction?”

  “The plot meanders a bit, and they need a firm editor, but they produce brilliance on occasion.” She pulled a page out of a nearby monkey’s typewriter. She frowned as she scanned the writing. “Why is Lockwood back on the moors again? I’d have thought that by this point he’d—”

  The monkey jumped up on the table with a howl, grabbed the sheet out of Emily’s hands, and ran screeching across the room.

  “I should know by now not to interrupt the creative process,” Emily said.

  “I’m, uh, not sure this is really the job for me,” I said.

  “Just as well. By the time the monkeys got you up to speed on the project, it would be finished.”

  “You’re that close? What’s it called?”

  “The tentative title is Wuthering Heights II: The Heightening.”

  “Catchy. I suppose you keep the manuscript in a safe place.”

  “Of course. It’s locked in that safe over there.” She pointed to a wall safe. “Anyway, you must be exhausted after your long journey over the moors and then being kidnapped by monkeys. Follow me.”

  Emily led me down the hall and up a massive spiral staircase, the two henchmen still following. We went down another hall and Emily opened the door into another room. “Please,” she said, motioning inside.

  I walked into the room. It was empty except for a wooden chair and a small table, on which rested a pen and a sheet of paper. Next to the paper was a large hourglass.

  “What’s this?” I asked, as Emily entered the room.

/>   “I’ve decided to take you up on your offer,” Emily said. “I’m going to spare your life in exchange for telling me everything you know about the thought arrestor.” She turned the hourglass upside down. “You have until the sand runs out to write down everything you know about how the thought arrestor works.”

  “And then?”

  “And then I pull it out and see what happens.”

  Chapter Ten

  I didn’t bother writing anything down. I really didn’t know much about how the thought arrestor worked. I was just going to have to hope Emily didn’t wreck my brain pulling it out.

  The sand in the hourglass was almost gone when I heard a voice calling my name from a window. I walked to the window and looked down. Rex, Boggs and Donny were standing in the courtyard below. They were wearing Emily’s henchmen’s uniforms.

  “Sasha, jump!” Rex said. “Boggs will catch you!”

  “Not a chance,” I said. I was three stories up.

  “It’s fine, I’m not hallucinating anymore,” Rex said. “And put down that porpoise. You look ridiculous.”

  “I’ll catch you, Sasha,” Boggs said. “I’ve been working real hard on…” He trailed off.

  Donny whispered something to him.

  “Focusing on a task,” Boggs said. He held out his arms.

  I heard boots coming down the hall. The sand had run out. I sighed. And I jumped out the window.

  Suddenly Rex gave Boggs a shove, trying to move him out of the way. Boggs didn’t budge, but he was distracted just long enough to forget about me. Fortunately, a water trough was directly under the window. I landed with a splash.

  “Sir, why did you do that?” I asked, climbing out of the trough. I was dripping wet.

  “I’m sorry, Sasha. I was worried about the porpoise.”

  “I have no porpoise, sir.”

  “Don’t be so hard on yourself. All right, let’s get out of here.”

  “We’ve got to get the manuscript,” I said.

  “Ugh, are we still doing that?”

  “It’s the only chance we have of getting off Earth. I know where Emily keeps it. Please, we have to hurry!”

  “There they are!” shouted a voice from the window. We ran to the door of the castle and went inside. I could only hope the henchmen wouldn’t expect us to flee into the castle.