by Geoff Rodkey
From somewhere up in the middle of the left-side wall came a muffled reply. “Lan?”
“Oh good,” said Marf. “That’s progress.” She went to the control panel and began to press buttons on a screen as she kept talking. “So I sold a few of your Birdleys videos to my customers—”
“You promised you wouldn’t do that!”
Marf shrugged. “It’s not my fault you trusted me. I did tell you I was a criminal. Anyway, they went over even better than I’d expected. And if I’d just kept selling The Birdleys, I probably would’ve been fine. But then I made the mistake of showing one of your sister’s music videos to a Zhuri customer. Personally, I don’t care for that stuff. But Ezger had liked it, so I thought perhaps the Zhuri would too.
“And do you know what happened?” Marf turned her head to look back at me. “The man absolutely lost his mind! Do you have any idea what a powerful effect music has on the Zhuri?”
I nodded. “I do now. I’ve seen it.”
“I should’ve realized it was too hot to touch. But I got greedy. So I sold the ones I’d found on your sister’s screen, and they spread like a virus. I barely had a chance to build her a guitar and record a new one before the government got wind of what was happening and came after me. The music was just too potent—they had to shut it down before the whole planet’s emotions got out of control.”
Marf looked up at the section of the wall where we’d heard Ila’s voice. “I’m not quite sure how these holding cells operate—but I think this should do it.” She pressed a button on the screen, and a two-by-two drawer in the middle of the wall twenty feet up began to open. I saw Ila’s feet appear, followed by her legs.
The drawer began to tilt toward the floor. I gasped and stood up, but I was too woozy to run across the room. And even if I hadn’t been, I couldn’t have done anything to break her fall.
Fortunately, Marf could. She zipped over to the spot below Ila’s drawer, getting there just in time to plop down on her back before Ila plummeted from above with a scream.
She bounced, feet first, off Marf’s giant stomach.
“MMRRMMFF!” My translator beeped, I guess because it didn’t recognize the Ororo word for “OOOOOOF!”
“Are you okay?”
Marf sat up. “I’ll be sore tomorrow. But I’m fine now. Ila, how are you?”
Ila sat up, then nearly toppled over again. The neural disrupter was making her as dizzy as it made me. And without her translator, all she could do was stare, confused and scared, at Marf.
“Here!” I staggered over and handed Ila’s earpiece and screen to her.
Marf stood up and waited for Ila to get her translator functioning. “I don’t suppose you can walk any better than Lan?”
Ila got to her feet, took a step, and toppled into Marf.
“I’ll take that as a no.” Supporting Ila with one arm, Marf reached into her satchel with the other. She pulled out a small communicator and held it to her mouth.
“Ezger? I’ve got them both. Which exit should we take?”
Ezger’s snappish growl came over the communicator, too faint for my translator to pick up.
“Oh dear,” Marf replied. “That’s not good at all. All right—we’ll meet you in the back.” She pocketed the communicator, then propped Ila against the nearest wall.
“What’s not good?” I asked.
Marf headed toward the two unconscious Zhuri. “The electric fence around the prison just went down.”
“Why is that bad?”
She bent down and picked up the two prong weapons from the floor. “I was counting on the fence to stand between us and a swarm of angry Zhuri. Here.” She handed me one of the weapons. It was long and firm enough to support my weight like a walking stick. “You’ll need this.”
“To walk with? Or to fight with?”
“Both. Let’s go.”
MARF HERDED ILA and me down a narrow series of twisting hallways as fast as we could go. Using the prong weapons as walking sticks, we were both able to walk without help, although we had a bad habit of crashing into the walls.
Marf was carrying two prong weapons of her own, plucked from some sleeping Zhuri we’d stepped over along the way. As we turned a corner, I tripped over another one, and he let out a squeak. Marf turned her head in alarm at the sound.
“They’re starting to wake up. Move faster, please.”
The whine of the protestors had gotten louder with every turn in the hallway. As we started down the last one, which dead-ended at a wide doorway, a new sound joined the whining—a flurry of rattling thuds that sounded like someone was pounding on a garbage can lid. As we approached the doorway, both the whining and the banging got so loud that Ila and I stopped, afraid to go any farther.
Marf squeezed past us. “Quickly!” She opened the door, and the noise tripled in volume as she plunged into the unseen room. With no other choice, Ila and I followed.
It was a long garage, with four pods parked side by side. Each one faced a door wide enough for the pod to fly through. The room stank of Zhuri anger, and all four garage doors were shuddering under attacks from a shrieking swarm that was trying to break into the building from outside.
Marf was already halfway to the nearest pod. “QUICKLY! THANK YOU!”
As we staggered after her, I tried to ignore the rattling doors. The pod was locked, but Marf pulled some kind of gizmo from her satchel and used it to bypass the security system. The pod door opened, and she barged in, setting down her prong weapons as she headed to the control panel.
“Shut the pod door!” Ila and I got in and shut the door behind us.
“What can we do?” I asked.
“Sit down and hold on.”
We did as we were told. I looked past Marf out the pod’s front window. The garage door in front of us was shaking from the fury of the swarm on the other side.
The control panel’s display lit up. Marf had managed to get the pod started with no password or key.
“Now all we need—” she started to say.
Just then, the garage door two pods down broke off its hinge, and a flying mob of shrieking Zhuri streamed inside.
“Oh dear.” Marf pressed a button, and the garage door in front of our pod began to open, tilting outward on its upper hinge. The instant it did, the dozens of Zhuri who were rapidly filling up the garage realized where we were. Sprays of orange venom burst against the windows as they descended on us.
The garage door opened just wide enough to give us a glimpse of a seething mass of Zhuri on the other side, then shuddered to a stop as streaks of venom and flying Zhuri bodies blocked our view.
“Brace yourselves!” Marf yelled. The pod rose up and lurched forward. The swarming Zhuri in front of the pod scattered. I caught a glimpse of the half-open door ahead of us, and for a moment I thought we were going to bust through it and get free.
But the door was sturdier than it looked. When the pod struck it, there was a jarring crash, and all of our forward motion stopped. We skittered sideways, the pod’s nose scraping along the door as heavy thuds landed on the ceiling and sides.
Dozens of Zhuri were hanging off the pod, trying to drag us down. And they were succeeding—even as the pod kept lurching sideways, I could feel us sinking.
Then the pod’s nose lodged itself between the half-open door and the wall next to it. All the sideways movement stopped, and we dipped even farther. Marf kept throttling us forward, the whine from the stymied engine so loud that we could hear it over the screaming swarm.
The thudding got louder and more intense. Zhuri were hurling themselves at the pod’s windows from all directions, trying to shatter them.
“Hold tight!” Marf yelled. Ila and I hung on to our seats as she changed course, and the pod lurched violently across the door.
“And again!” We lurched back in the opposite di
rection, so hard that I banged my head against the window.
“Backward!” There was a hard lurch backward, then a sudden, whiplashing stop as Marf put on the brakes just as we were about to hit the rear wall of the garage.
The pounding on the windows stopped, quickly replaced by a heavy orange spatter. Not wanting to be crushed by the unpredictable pod, the Zhuri were hanging back and spitting venom at us instead.
“Hold on!” Marf throttled the pod forward, taking another run at the door.
This time it broke open. We sailed forward, free of the building.
But we weren’t free of the swarm. There were countless Zhuri in the air around the jail. As soon as we cleared the door, they began piling onto the sides and roof of the pod.
There must’ve been hundreds of them dragging us down, because even at full throttle, we moved like we were flying through thick mud. Once again, I could feel us sinking toward the ground.
“Ezger!” Marf yelled into her communicator. “Where are you?”
I heard Ezger bark a reply, but my translator couldn’t catch it.
“I can’t lift off!” Marf rumbled. “Find us and put up a fence! We’ll run to you!”
With a bone-jarring jolt and a loud scraping noise, the pod hit the ground, its underpowered engine defeated by the weight of the swarm. Marf turned away from the control panel and picked up her two prongs. She flipped a switch on the side of each one, and blue electricity arced across their tips.
“Turn your weapons on!” I did as she said, praying I wasn’t too dizzy to use it without accidentally zapping one of us instead of a Zhuri.
Their feet were hammering at the windows on all sides. It was only a matter of time before they shattered one.
Marf moved to the door, a prong in each hand. “Listen closely: Stand next to each other, just behind me. Put the prongs in your outer hands, pointed out. Keep your inner hands on my back. When I move, stay with me. Ezger’s going to land my pod next to us, and we’re going to run to it.”
“They’ll kill us!” Ila cried.
“They’ll certainly try. I don’t think they’ll succeed. But it might get messy. Don’t fall behind.”
We stood, propping ourselves up with the fizzing prong weapons as we got into position behind the huge Ororo. I was on Ila’s right, with my left hand on Marf’s back and my right hand on my now-incredibly-dangerous walking stick.
I was still dizzy, and it felt like the whole pod was spinning. I wasn’t sure if I could run even ten feet without toppling over, and the mass of Zhuri bodies hammering against the side of the pod was so thick that it seemed impossible for us to force our way through them.
“Are you sure this will work?” I yelled at Marf—but the last two words were swallowed by an electric thunderclap that lit everything up in a burst of blue light, blasting the swarm of Zhuri away from the pod door.
“NOW!”
Marf opened the door and barreled forward. Ila and I stumbled out behind her.
Marf’s body was so big that I couldn’t see anything ahead of us except the bright glow of an electric fence. The Zhuri screams coming from every direction were deafening. I tried to keep my eyes and my left hand on Marf’s back while I leaned on the prong with my right, angling its business end away from Marf as I hobbled forward.
A stream of venom hit me from behind, drenching my right arm. I gripped the prong tighter as the pain shot through me. With my next step, I jabbed backward without looking and heard a BZZZT! that made me think I’d probably hit whoever had just spit on me.
Another scream came from right above me, and I looked up in time to see a Zhuri zooming in. I raised the prong, zapping him in the shoulder. The shock knocked him sideways, hard enough to bring down two other Zhuri along with him.
But raising the prong that high unbalanced me, and I’d lost my touch on Marf’s back. I lowered the prong quickly, nearly hit myself in the face with it, and fell to my knees, almost dropping my weapon as I went down.
I looked ahead. Marf and Ila had both been hit with venom—there were streaks of orange running down their backs—but they were still moving forward.
And they were getting away from me.
I scrambled to my feet, staggered forward, and almost lost my balance again—but I managed to drive the butt of my weapon into the ground just in time to steady myself. As I took my next step, closing the distance between me and Marf, I got my first glimpse of what she was barreling toward.
Her silver pod was parked just ahead, a domed fence crackling in a ten-foot circle around it. The fence must’ve delivered some nasty shocks when it went up, because the ground just outside of it was littered with woozy, twitching Zhuri. There were only a handful of active ones within venom-spitting range of us, and Marf was using her prongs to zap them with both hands.
But beyond the narrow no-man’s-land, the swarm had started to close in on us. And I had no idea how we were going to get past the fence that was protecting Marf’s pod.
I caught up level with Ila, and my left hand found Marf’s back just a few feet before she reached the buzzing fence. As I shifted my weight onto her big frame, it dawned on me that all three of us were about to be electrocuted.
The Zhuri realized it too. The whole swarm suddenly stopped and wheeled back as one, expecting an explosion of light and noise when Marf’s enormous body met the high-voltage electricity.
But an instant before she touched the fence, it disappeared.
Marf barreled across its now-invisible line. As Ila and I followed her past it, screams of fury rose up from the swarm. They reversed course yet again, descending on us to resume their attack.
Then Ezger turned the fence back on.
There were earsplitting shrieks as a dozen Zhuri were zapped backward through the air. Ila and I both fell flat on our faces just inside the fence, safe from the swarm.
But not safe from the three Zhuri who’d managed to zoom inside the perimeter before the fence went back up.
Marf shocked two of them into twitchy helplessness.
The third one barfed venom all over my legs before I managed to zap it in the chest with my prong.
The pod door opened, and Ezger jumped out. He helped Ila and me inside as Marf clambered in and took over the controls. As soon as Ezger shut the door, the pod leaped into the sky.
A moment later, we’d left the swarm behind and were hurtling across the city at a few hundred miles an hour.
Marf’s voice rumbled from the front of the pod. “Don’t get venom on my carpet!”
“Too late,” I groaned. The poisonous orange muck had soaked through my clothes, and the pain in my legs and arm was excruciating. My right arm and both legs were dripping wet, and the exposed skin on my hand was bright red and swelling up like an angry balloon. Next to me, Ila was grimacing in pain, her back and left side soaked with venom.
Fortunately, Marf had stocked the pod with antivenom cream. As we rocketed across the city, we wriggled out of our ruined clothes and frantically rubbed the medicine into our wounds.
It fixed the pain and swelling. But there was nothing we could do for my blue cotton shirt and navy pants, or Ila’s peasant blouse and faded jeans.
“Do you absolutely have to wear clothes?” Marf asked.
Ila and I looked at each other in our ragged underwear. “We’d definitely prefer it.”
Marf sighed. “It’s a silly custom. But fine.” She fetched some kind of portable 3-D printer from a storage space in the back of the pod. A minute later, Ila and I were putting on makeshift overalls that looked—and, worse, felt—like they were made from plastic garbage bags.
But the garbage-bag clothes were the least of our worries.
We had a government to overthrow.
ILA WAS FLABBERGASTED. “We’re going to what?”
“Overthrow the government,�
�� Marf told her. “At this point, I’m afraid it’s your only alternative to certain death.”
“But how?”
“That depends on how things are playing out on Zhuri television.”
As she trundled past me to a TV screen on the pod’s back wall, the landscape outside the window—which had been zipping by so fast that it was a blur—rapidly changed from the usual beige to a reddish-orange color I’d never seen before.
Then, in a split second, the pod came to a dead stop in midair.
“How does it do that?” I asked.
“Do what?”
“Stop and start so fast without us feeling anything. We should’ve gone through the front windshield just now.”
“It would take several days to explain the technology,” said Marf as she turned on the TV.
“Where are we?” Ila was staring out the window next to me. The pod had descended to land on the floor of what looked like a narrow desert canyon. Giant rocks were scattered across it, casting gloomy shadows in the fading light just before sunset.
“It’s the empty quarter beyond the city,” said Ezger. “The government won’t think to search for us here.”
Marf gestured toward the TV screen. “Look—we’re on television.”
The Zhuri news channel was broadcasting drone-camera footage of our escape. When I saw the size of the swarm surrounding the prison, I gasped. While we’d been fighting our way through it, I hadn’t been able to see more than a few yards in any direction. But what I’d witnessed of the swarm turned out to have been just a tiny piece of the total. There must’ve been a hundred thousand Zhuri mobbing the building.
“…dozens of citizens injured in their escape. The human animals and their accomplices, pictured here—”
The image switched to a screen split four ways. On the top were grainy still photos of Ila and me, taken from drone cameras when we were entering school. On the bottom were what looked like mug shots of Marf and Ezger.
“—are violent and dangerous…”
“I do wish they wouldn’t use our school photos,” Marf rumbled.