The Fourth Bear

by Jasper Fforde

  “The technology belongs to all mankind,” replied Jack, wincing in pain from the Gingerbreadman’s overzealous grip, “not to QuangTech and certainly not to—ah!—you.”

  “Do you know,” said Mr. Demetrios slowly, “that’s exactly what Goldilocks and McGuffin said. Personally, I don’t see it that way. But don’t worry, I’ll use the cash to help bears. Or at least one bear in particular—me. The rest can go screw themselves.”

  “Can I kill him now?” asked the Gingerbreadman, who was getting bored and fast becoming a cookie of action rather than words.

  “Why not?” replied the small bear.

  “Do you think he’ll merely let you go?” said Jack to the Gingerbreadman, hoping to drive a wedge between them. “You’ll be disposed of just like all the others.”

  “A Ginja fears nothing except the failure to do his duty,” said the assassin simply. “Demetrios is my master; I do his bidding. All other factors are secondary.”

  “Didn’t I tell you he was the best thing ever?” repeated Demetrios. “He’s the cub I never had.”

  He clapped his paws together.

  “Well, that’s us done here, Spratt. I’ve got some unfinished business with a colleague of yours. Without anyone left in the NCD to explain the complexities of this case firsthand, I rather think my future is assured—wouldn’t you agree?”

  “You won’t get away with this.”

  “There you go with your clichés again. And you’re wrong—I rather think I just have.” Demetrios looked at his watch and patted the Gingerbreadman on the arm. “I’m off now, my faithful Ginja. Make sure no one discovers so much as an atom of his body. Are you going to kill him now or are you going to play with him for a while?”

  The Gingerbreadman raised an eyebrow and looked at Jack thoughtfully. “Since he has survived an unprecedented three encounters with me,” began the assassin thoughtfully, “I should like to test him ‘to destruction’ so to speak.”

  “Of course,” replied the small bear gleefully. “And to make the fiction complete, be sure he leaves some prints on this, would you?”

  He handed his revolver to the the Gingerbreadman and, without another word, departed.

  Jack’s thoughts turned to escape, but on reflection things didn’t look terrific. The facility was locked down tight, and even if he did get away, he wasn’t sure where he could go with a killer on the loose who could run four times faster than he and was eight times as strong. It was a bit like being handcuffed to a hungry and demented rottweiler, smeared with a steak and then locked in a wardrobe.

  The Gingerbreadman released Jack, who took a welcome step back, rubbing his arm. The Ginja smiled again and showed Jack the place where his thumb had been.

  “This was the closest I’ve ever been to death, and you know what?”

  “What?”

  “I felt so liberated. As if I had finally met my match. You and the delightful Sergeant Mary were a formidable team.”

  “I’m glad you think so.”

  The smile dropped from the Gingerbreadman’s licorice lips. “Sarcasm doesn’t suit you, Jack. You and I are going to play a little game. Ever seen a cat playing with a mouse?”

  “Ye-e-es.”

  “Ever wanted to know what the mouse felt like?”

  “No, never—not at all. Not once. Nope.”

  “Too bad. Here’s what we’ll do: To tip my inevitable triumph a few millimeters into your favor we’ll do this as gentlemen. Back to back, ten paces, turn and fire. Any questions?”

  “Yes,” replied Jack. “Are you a cake or a cookie?”

  The Gingerbreadman glared at him. “Don’t make this any worse for yourself, Spratt. Insult me again and I’ll ensure that the agony of your demise is stretched out so long that you will beg me for death.”

  He smiled a disquieting smile, the edges of his licorice mouth almost reaching his large glacé cherry eyes.

  “Right, here we go, then,” he said cheerfully, handing over Demetrios’s revolver. Jack’s prints were now on the weapon that had killed Bisky-Batt, but armed was better than not armed—he hoped.

  “Five shots left. Make them count.” He drew his sawed-off shotgun at the same time and flicked off the safety. “And since you’ve been such a tremendous sport over the past few days, I’m willing to give you the first shot. Am I not the most magnanimous of murderers?”

  “To a fault.”

  “There’s that sarcasm again! Jack, you disappoint me sometimes. We’ll do this out in the corridor where there’s more room. You stand there. Ready?”

  Jack nodded, and they stood back to back. Jack thought of turning and plugging him there and then, but he had seen the speed at which the Ginja assassin could move.

  “Eight paces, then,” said the Gingerbreadman, enjoying himself tremendously.

  “You said ten earlier.”

  “I did?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, let’s not be small about it. Ten it is.”

  They both started to walk, the Gingerbreadman glancing over his shoulder now and again to make sure Jack was playing by the rules. Jack was walking back toward the stairs and the rest of the visitors’ center. He looked at the revolver. He’d used one only three times before; he didn’t like them, and NCD work generally called for brains, not firepower. He reached his tenth pace, stopped and turned. The Gingerbreadman’s paces were longer than his and he was a lot farther down the corridor than Jack had thought, while Jack was only about two strides from the top of the stairs. He had planned to aim for the Ginja’s head, but given the distance a chest shot seemed like a better option.

  “Your go, then, Jack!” called out the Gingerbreadman cheerfully. “Take careful aim, now.”

  Jack lifted the gun, aimed and fired. The shot struck the Gingerbreadman in the area of where his heart might have been if he’d had one, but to no effect—the slug went straight through and embedded itself into a doorframe at the other end of the corridor with a resounding thunk.

  The Gingerbreadman smiled at him and said, “Oh, I’m sorry, I should have said: Bullets have no real effect on me. My turn.”

  He raised the shotgun and fired in a single swift motion. Jack dived to one side as the blast struck the wall behind where he’d been standing. Without pausing for a second, he dashed down the stairs four at a time and ran back into the darkened atrium to take refuge behind the tank.

  “Cheat!” he heard the Gingerbreadman yell. “I stayed still for you!”

  Jack looked around desperately as he heard the assassin walk noisily down the staircase. The tank was a battle-scarred example and was peppered with shell holes. He peered through one hole and saw the Ginja padding across the area outside the entrance to what would one day become The Phosgene Experience. Jack waited until he was opposite the turnstiles, then jumped out and fired. The shot blew a small patch of ginger off the assassin’s shoulder, and the Gingerbreadman bounded with surprising dexterity into the entrance of the Scents of the Battle Odorama™ exhibit. Jack took the opportunity to make a move and dashed across the atrium to the Virtual Trenchfoot attraction, shut the door behind him and then swiftly jammed a chair under the door handle.

  “Come out, come out, wherever you are!” sang the Gingerbreadman as he walked across the atrium. Jack looked around desperately for a possible escape route. The room was full of desks with Quang-6000 computers hooked up to virtual reality headsets, gloves and boots. There were no windows, so Jack headed as fast as he could to an emergency exit at the far end of the room. He pushed the bar to open it, but it was locked. He threw his full weight against the door but it wouldn’t budge, so he picked up the heaviest object he could find—a computer—and hurled it at the recalcitrant door, with all his strength. It did nothing except scratch the surface. He might as well have tried to throw a tomato through a piano.

  He had just raised his revolver to try to blow out the lock like he’d seen in the movies when the other door was kicked off its hinges by a well-placed gingerbread foot a
nd the Ginja assassin strode into the room. Before Jack could even react, the Gingerbreadman had loosed off a single shot that destroyed the exit sign above Jack’s head. He turned to look at the figure framed in the doorway, who was still smiling.

  “Not like you to miss.”

  “I didn’t miss,” the Gingerbreadman said, tossing the shotgun aside and removing the belt of cartridges from his waist. “It’s just that I do so enjoy a certain ‘hands-on’ feel to my work. Using a gun does so distance one from one’s victims. Why, you cannot hope to smell the fear from farther than a couple of feet away. What enjoyment snipers get from their sport, I have no idea.”

  Jack stared, his mind racing but his fear under control. The abomination at the door had killed—as far as Jack knew—112 times. One more was nothing to him. The Ginja rubbed his powerful, spongy hands together.

  “What shall I pull off first, Jack? An arm? A leg? I could twist your head a full three hundred and sixty degrees…. Okay, fun’s over. I’d expected a better fight than this, but perhaps you aren’t the man I thought you were.”

  Jack fired the revolver again, but the slug flew through the cakey body, this time hardly making a mark.

  “Two left, Jack.”

  He fired again and blew an icing button off the Ginja’s chest.

  “That leaves one. I’ll think I’ll do your legs first, but from the knee down—a leg torn from the hip always results in rapid death through bleeding, and I want this to last. Unless you have any objections, of course?”

  He smiled again, the murderous subroutines in his gingery body running through to their inevitable end. He was built for one purpose and existed for only one reason. Regardless of the ideological wasteland that governed his psychotic thought processes, he was a creature at peace with himself. His life, such as it was, had meaning.

  Jack, despite having a 280-pound monstrosity lumbering toward him, was oddly calm. He found himself thinking about Madeleine and the kids. He wouldn’t see them graduate, or even grow up. And then there was the wedding.

  “Pandora.”

  “Sorry?” said the Gingerbreadman, who was wondering whether to postpone the leg tearing in favor of something unbelievably unpleasant he’d seen happen to Mel Gibson at the end of Braveheart.

  “My daughter. I’ll miss her wedding. It’s in a month.”

  “Well,” said the Gingerbreadman reflectively, “I could just let you go—as long as you promise to come back straight afterward. No, just kidding. You’ll have to miss her wedding—and the birth of your first grandchild. You’ll miss your own memorial, too—but only by a couple of days.”

  Jack wasn’t listening. He was thinking. There had to be a very good reason that Project Ginja Assassin had been canceled. He was such a perfect warrior. Intelligent, resourceful, amoral and indestructible. Cake or cookie? Did it matter? Jack had a sudden thought. Yes, it probably did matter. A cake went hard when it went stale, and a cookie went soft. It was a long shot but he had nothing to lose. He aimed his gun at the Gingerbreadman. He had one bullet remaining.

  “You’re a cookie.”

  “So?” asked the Gingerbreadman, intrigued by Jack’s sudden confidence. “What are you up to, Spratt?”

  “This.”

  He aimed the gun, not at the Gingerbreadman but at the fire-control system on the ceiling above them. The well-placed shot blew off the sprinkler head, and a stream of water descended onto them both. The Gingerbreadman frowned and looked at the water pouring off himself, tiny particles of gingerbread already being washed off and falling to the floor at his feet. Cookies soften because…they absorb water. He made for the door. The other sprinklers in the room, sensing the drop in pressure, fired simultaneously, spraying the room with even more water. The Gingerbreadman tripped over a table in his haste to escape, and another jet of water caught him on the legs. They softened and buckled under him. He got to his feet and reached the door just as the sprinklers fired in the atrium; there was no escape from the deluge.

  “Quick thinking, Spratt!” he shouted, turning back as the water continued to gush down upon both of them, larger pieces of gingerbread now falling from his body as the moisture started to soften up his cookieish tissues. He studied one of his hands with interest as a chunk of gingerbread dropped off.

  “They designed me as the perfect warrior,” he announced with a wry smile, “only with one fatal flaw—I can’t get wet. I’m dying, Jack.”

  “I’m counting on it.”

  “Now, that’s not nice,” replied the Gingerbreadman reproachfully as an icing button dropped to the floor with a damp plop. He looked around and tried to pick up the shotgun, but his hands collapsed into mush around the weapon.

  “Rats,” he muttered. “Well, no matter.”

  He walked slowly toward Jack, who scrambled backward and threw his gun at the brown figure.

  “Congratulations,” said the Gingerbreadman slowly, as larger pieces of gingerbread started to slough off his body in the never-ending stream of water. “I underestimated you.”

  “I get that a lot.”

  “Really? D’ you know, in a way I’m almost glad it was you. I’d have liked to have been your friend. Perhaps that’s why I could never kill you—until now.”

  The Gingerbreadman lunged at Jack, slipped on the wet floor and collapsed into a puddle of water. Jack ran quickly around to the other side of the room as the Ginja tried to get up and fell over again as his foot came off. But he wasn’t giving up, trying desperately to crawl in Jack’s direction using arms that disintegrated into pulp as he grappled with the slippery floor. He stared at Jack, his crumpled features registering annoyance that he’d failed rather than any sort of fear over his demise. An arm gave way, and he collapsed facedown into the pool of water. When he lifted himself again, he was without a face. His cherry eyes, red icing nose and licorice mouth had fallen into the large brown mass of sodden gingerbread that had gathered beneath him. He flailed around wildly as Jack looked on, the water running off Jack’s hair and down his neck causing him nothing worse than mild discomfort. The Gingerbreadman, now blind and mute and without any limbs, thrashed uselessly about in the center of the room.

  Within minutes it was all over. The most notorious and violent multiple murderer the nation had seen was nothing more than a soggy lump on the floor. Jack walked over and cautiously kicked one of the grapefruit-size glacé cherry eyes that only ten minutes before had flashed such evil confidence. Abruptly, the downpour stopped. The water ran off the tables, mixing and swirling around the brown stain in the middle of the floor. Jack paused for a moment to collect his thoughts, then splashed through the puddle and out the door and made his way back to the tank in the center of the atrium. Mary was still very much in danger, and if he could rescue her and secure McGuffin and the Alpha-Pickle, all might still be well. His phone rang, and he dug it out of his pocket. It was Briggs.

  “You can arrest me later,” Jack snapped. “I’m kind of busy right now.”

  “I may not arrest you at all,” replied Briggs. “I’ve just been talking to Vinnie Craps, Bartholomew and Ursula Bruin.”

  “She can talk?”

  “She can write. And she’s indicated a few very interesting facts about Demetrios that need closer scrutiny. Plus, Mr. Fuchsia’s neighbors have positively identified Agent Danvers as one of the Men in Green who were there this morning.”

  Jack suddenly felt a huge weight begin to lift from his shoulders. For the first time that day, he had the feeling that everything might just possibly come out all right. As he began to breathe more easily, there was a thud of mortar fire, and he turned. Several parachute flares arced gracefully into the night sky and ignited above the theme park, illuminating the pockmarked landscape in a harsh white light. He turned back to his cell phone.

  “The Gingerbreadman and Bisky-Batt are dead, sir, the cookie by me and Horace by Demetrios. I’m at SommeWorld. The fourth bear, McGuffin and Danvers are here, and I believe that Mary is in very grave danger. If you w
ant to arrest me, you can—but please, after Mary is safe.”

  There was a pause.

  “Hold firm, Jack, I’m sending everything I have.”

  Jack paused for a moment in thought then ran to the costume store. He returned to the turnstiles, used a fire ax on a large glass door and stepped into the cool night and the jagged, unnatural landscape of the park. The star shells drifted down, their bright white light trailing long streams of smoke in the clear sky. Then a single faint whompa pierced the quiet. A barrage was about to begin, and Mary was probably right in the center of it.

  Jack ran down one of the supply roads as the steady crump, crump, crump of the barrage began to fill the air. The parachute flares faded and died, and the park was plunged into inky blackness. Jack stopped. He could hear the barrage building up, but the smoke had cleared and the night was pitch-black—he couldn’t even see his hand in front of his face. There was another thud of mortars as more star shells flew into the air, and with a crackle the parachute flares once more illuminated the landscape. Suddenly Jack jumped out of his skin—Danvers was not more then six feet from him, and she looked as startled as he was. He didn’t pause for a second—he planted a fist on her chin. She went down with a thump, and he relieved her of her pistol as she lay dazed on the ground. She had a pair of cuffs, so he dragged her to a nearby Model T and clipped her to a wheel spoke.

  “I’m National Security!” she yelled as she regained what little sense she possessed. “I’ll have your head on a platter for this!”