CHAPTER NINETEEN
Topper climbed up the barstool like a commando scaling a seawall at the spearhead of an amphibious landing. He spread his arms as far as they would go and dropped them on the dark wood with a thump. "Lloyd, you set 'em up, I'll knock 'em down. Bourbon, in tiny little glasses."
"My name is John," the bartender said.
Topper ignored him, "The glasses don't even have to be clean."
The bartender shrugged, and set a line of shot glasses on the bar. As he did, he dusted off a reasonable facsimile of concern and asked "What happened?"
"Nothing," Topper snapped defensively, "I just need to think."
"Did you lose your job?" he asked as he filled the shot glasses in their row along the bar.
"I QUIT!"
"Good for you," muttered the bartender and then he wandered down to the other end of the bar.
When Topper stumbled out of the bar, he was knocked backwards into a snow bank by a taller person who hadn't seen him.
"Hey, asshole, I'm walking here!" Topper cried. The man didn't even turn around, he just hurried off through the cold. Topper extracted himself from the snow.
The pain of soon-to-be-frostbitten feet and the wind clawing its way underneath his collar sobered him up quickly. Jesus, he hated the winter. It brought clarity. Topper's native season was the bloated days of summer that fuzzed the edges of everything. When it was warm and the living was easy and without consequence. "I gotta pull it together," he mumbled into the gusting wind. Even as low to the ground as he was, he found it difficult to walk into the wind. He held up his arm like a shield, and leaned into the air that howled like wolves between the high buildings.
As any nature documentary will show, wolves always go for the smallest, weakest members of the herd. Usually, that meant getting a meal with the least amount of effort. Topper compensated for his lack of size with a cunning viciousness. But, it didn't change the principle. If you were small, the wolves were always coming for you. But if you were big...
Why was it that the tallest guy was always in charge? What was so great about being tall? Why were they qualified? They're farther away from the ground. From the struggle. Where it happens.
An then he realized Edwin's problem. He was just too distant from everything. Above it all. He couldn't see the strains of an organization he was too distant from. He didn't know what it was liked to get walked on. Sure, he could understand intellectual reasons why people should do something. But Topper knew that wasn't how to motivate someone. Fear worked, of course. People will always respond to fear. But then you've always got to be on them. It was too much effort.
He turned a corner, and suddenly the wind was at his back. His steps were lighter and he felt the pressure compelling him forward. Why not the little guy, for a change? Couldn't Topper run things? Wouldn't it be better for everybody?
For the first time, he saw a way that he might inspire others. Inflame their passions. Make them feel loved, and they would love him in return. Fun. Hell yeah. Why couldn't work be fun? Just because you took a large group of people and put them together didn't mean it had to be so, so, so, corporate.
He knew the people who worked at Omdemnity Insurance. There was no reason their jobs had to suck their lives out of them. It could be different. It could be better. The only problem was that he didn't know how to convince Edwin. But maybe he didn't have to. Maybe he just needed to do it himself.
The thought scared him, made him feel alive. That spark was back. The swagger. He could still hear the wolves in the wind, but now they were howling for him. He was gonna do it his way. He was gonna stick it to the other guy. Bigger and badder than anybody had ever done it before. With his name in lights a thousand feet in the sky.
He didn't know how he was going to get there. But screw plans. He wasn't a 'plan' kind of guy. He didn't need the details. All Topper needed was the feeling. And out there, in the cold, cold wind of a hopeless winter, Topper saw a way to enjoy life again. He saw a way the little guy could be on top for a change.
When his spirits were highest—when he felt that he could do no wrong and that everything was coming his way—that's when the wind picked him up and lifted him into the air.
One minute Topper was walking along the sidewalk. The next he was high in the sky and rising. The wind buffeted him from all sides. It sucked the air out of his lungs and blurred his eyes. It happened so fast he almost had time to be afraid. Almost. When he tried to twist around, he realized that he was held fast in Billy's impossibly strong grip.
Billy was clearly upset. He was talking quickly and Topper would have guessed that he wasn't making any sense, but since he couldn't hear him, he had no way of knowing for sure.
"STOP! FRIGGIN' STOP!" he screamed at the top of his lungs. "I can't understand you."
But Excelsior went on and on, flying faster and faster in circles around the city.
"BILL-EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!" Topper shrieked.
With a suddenness that caused Topper's stomach to slam against his rib cage, they stopped moving. "There's no need to yell," said Billy.
"What are you THINKING?" asked Topper, kicking his feet and wiggling his arms.
"What? You said anytime I needed to talk."
"Talk. TALK? Moron! If I had a heart, you might have given me a heart attack."
"Sorry," said Billy, "I got excited."
"Now lemme go. LET ME GO!"
Billy shrugged and let Topper go. He dropped exactly like a stone, except that stones don't emit the high-pitched scream of a creature that knows, with an utter certainty, that its mortality has arrived.
Billy swooped down quickly and plucked him out of the sky. He giggled a little bit.
"Ah ahhh hahhh aahhh," Topper said, struggling to catch his breath. Unable to form a complete sentence, he settled for, "AH ah ah ah asshole. Ya ahh ahhh ahhsshole!"
"You said to let go."
"Well, I was MAD! Don't listen to what I'm sayin'. Listen to what I'm telling you!"
"What are you telling me?" Billy asked, genuinely confused.
"Put. Me. Down. Slowly."
Billy drifted towards the roof of an art deco building that was guarded by fearsome-looking gargoyles. When they had set down on the pebbled roof, Topper asked, "Now what the hell happened? Why are you so excited?"
"I quit."
"Hunh?" said Topper, overcome by the height and the cold.
"I told Windsor, I quit."
"You mean…?"
"I told him no. I told him I wasn't going to do it anymore. That I didn't want to work so hard." Billy flew in a tight circle of joy. "I'm a free man!" he yelled so loudly that the windows of nearby buildings shook.
"Well, how nice for you. Can you put me back down on the street now?" Topper said in a tone of voice one might use when talking to a small child. "Uncle Topper needs to do some more drinking."
"Yeah, it's great. I'm gonna be Evil. I'm going to do it all on my own. Only..."
Topper was looking for a stairwell or an elevator or a slide or any way off this roof, but when Billy stopped talking Topper looked at the ex-hero.
"I don't know what to do," Billy finished. "I need you to help me figure out what to do."
"How the hell do I know what you should do? Guy, if you haven't noticed, I'm barely holding it together myself."
"But you're a bad guy. And you know about fun."
Topper straightened himself up and stumbled a bit in the process. "Yeah, I do know about fun. I know a lot more about fun than a lot of people."
"See, that's all I want. Just a little help. To be bad. The fun kinda bad. Whattaya think I should do?"
"You got any money?"
"No, not a dime."
"Well, that's your first problem. When the good times roll, the wheels are definitely greased with money."
"Should I rob a bank?"
Topper squinted at him and weaved back and forth on the snow covered roof. He wasn't falling down drunk, but he realized he might just be falli
ng-off-an-icy-roof-in-the-middle-of-winter drunk. The shot of adrenaline that this thought brought to his brain caused it to start working again. "No, not A bank. You should rob THE bank!" Topper realized as he shouted the words.
"What's THE bank?"
"First we have to talk about my fee."
"Your fee?"
"Yeah, if I'm going to be advising you, I'm going to need... 20% of whatever you bring in."
"10%!"
"Fine," snapped Topper, backing away from the ledge, "15% and that's my final offer. I don't care if you drop me off the roof."
"Okay 15%," said Billy. "Now what bank should I rob?"
"Fort Knox!" Topper shouted, working hard not to add the words "you big dummy!" on the end. "You should rob Fort Knox. All the gold, just fly right in there and grab it up!"
Billy smiled. "See, I knew you were the right guy to come see."
"But before you do, there's something very important you have to do first."
"What's that?"
"Put me back down on the ground. Gently."
When Topper was safely back at ground level, he realized that his delicately calibrated internal mechanisms were demanding more self-medication. His ordeal with Billy had reduced him to a level of sobriety that he could neither countenance nor endure. So he set off in search of a bar. It was, in fact, the best idea he could come up with. Which is saying something.
Head down, leaning into a cold wind, Topper put one slush-soaked foot in front of the other. For a man with short legs, a journey of even a mile feels like it has a thousand steps in it. And when the man with short legs is feeling sorry for himself, the journey feels even longer.
As he walked, a nondescript white panel van threw icy slush onto the sidewalk in front of him. He hated winter. He also hated white panel vans. If Topper had been in charge, any nondescript white panel van would be subject to immediate and unavoidable search. And they would never be allowed through security checkpoints. Sure, there might be a legitimate use for a white, windowless van, but Topper's suspicious nature couldn't think of any.
So when the reflected light of the nondescript white panel van's brake lights turned the flakes of snow red, Topper was not surprised. When he looked over his shoulder to see the van bullying its way through a U-turn on the busy city street, he knew what was up. Even before the van plowed through the drifts and onto the sidewalk, even before the paneled door slid open and the guys in ski masks jumped out, he knew what the deal was.
His inner rabbit-brain held a quick debate about the merits of freezing or running. Then something occurred to Topper. As ham-handed and obvious as this was, it couldn't be the Adjustors. They would have waited for Topper to drink himself unconscious and then quietly carried him off. No, there could only be one group so incompetent as to attempt a snatch and grab job after making a three-point turn through city traffic.
With that realization, he went white hot with anger and insanity. As the van bumped up onto the sidewalk, Topper ran directly towards it. His boozy logic went something like this: if they're screwing with me, I'm screwing with them.
"Outta my way! You're in my seat!" he shrieked.
When the door opened and the "Acquisition Team" jumped out, they didn't know what to do. Nothing like this had never happened to these men before. Inside their ski masks, their mouths hung open.
"OUTTA MY WAY! COMIN' THROUGH! OUTTA MY WAY!"
As he shoved his way through the door, Topper said, "Okay, seriously? Did I get the only team of deaf kidnappers in the whole world? Come on, make a hole."
Topper plopped himself down on a seat and said, "Were you raised in a barn? Close the damn door!" He looked around at the dumbfounded, would-be kidnappers—who were at that very instant wondering if you could actually kidnap the willing. "Now, which one of you guys got my blindfold? Come on, gimme the bag over the head! Gimme the bag!" demanded Topper.
So they did.
CHAPTER TWENTY
After putting Topper back on the sidewalk, Billy walked for hours through the cold city. He could have easily flown where ever he wanted to go. But that was the problem. There was no place for him to go. And what he wanted was to be around people. To hear voices. To see faces. He had been a long time underground. And then he had been working like a slave for Edwin Windsor.
Deep down, Billy didn't want to be Evil. He just wanted to be his own man. He wanted to have fun doing it. And deep, deep down, he wanted to prove to Edwin Windsor that he could be a smart, successful man without him. That prick. How insufferably arrogant he had been.
When he got back to his tiny little hotel room, he changed into the costume of tight-fitting black. He opened the window and let himself fall from the 37th floor. As the street below rushed up to meet him, he felt the wrenching sensation in his belly that he always felt when he flew. He tore along the wide avenue 30 feet off the ground. In the past, he had always been careful about not breaking the sound barrier when he was in the city, or around people of any kind. It made Gus mad. Edwin would have told him that destruction of any kind was senseless. That evil, properly wrought, created value. But Billy had left that all behind. He wasn't a good guy anymore. He wasn't a good bad guy either. He was just a bad guy. Or maybe just a confused guy. But definitely not any kind of good.
He yelled at the top of his lungs and then accelerated. Sheets of ice came off the buildings as he passed them. They were sucked into his wake and sliced perilously through the air. When he broke the sound barrier, the glass shattered in buildings for a full five blocks. The boom knocked pedestrians from their feet.
Still accelerating, he arced upward and turned south. If he had just floated in the dense mass of cold polar air that had descended on the city he would have become chilled. But at this speed the friction of the very molecules of air against his suit warmed him. He did not feel the temperature rise as he flew west and south as much as he felt the air become less dense. Flying became less of an effort.
As short time later, Billy began his descent. If he had judged it correctly, those would be the lights of Cincinnati off to his right. He dipped lower and followed Highway 71 to Louisville, Kentucky. He hugged the earth, not wanting to show up on radar. Then he realized, it didn't matter. It wasn't like they had anything that could stop him.
At the control tower at Goodman Air Force base, an alarm went off. Specialist 1st class Radley Jones jerked up from the eyes-open nap that characterized his entire career as a military air-traffic controller. A bogey, out of nowhere? But before his hand could reach the button to silence the alarm, the blip disappeared. The green phosphorescent screen in front of him went dark again. Ah well, must have been some kind of error in the system. Airman Jones slipped back into his waking nap.
Outside, Billy had arced high into the night sky. Beneath him, his target was lit up like a Christmas jewel. Billy pulled over into a graceful loop and slammed, fists first, into the top of the United States Bullion depository at Fort Knox. There was a thunderous crash as he blasted through five levels of reinforced concrete flooring.
The sentry at the front gate turned just in time to see the bottom windows explode outward in a cloud of concrete dust. The moment after was quiet and still. The sentry couldn't process what had just happened. All he heard was the soft hiss of the lightly falling snow and the hush of a countryside draped in winter. Then the alarms blared. Now his orders made things nice and simple. He shouldered his weapon and ran towards the depository.
Inside, Billy was faced with a vault door. Normally, he would have melted it or shouldered his way through it, or something equally physical or dramatic. But he took a moment to admire the door. It was magnificent. It was a creation of a more innocent age, when men like Billy had been unknown. All of the heavy bolts and wheels and reinforced plates conveyed an impression of utter impregnability. It was a door that said, "Don't even think of coming in here. There's no way you can get this open."
Billy ripped it off its hinges and threw it out through the roof.
&
nbsp; On the lawn, the vault door sailed over the sentry and flattened the guard post where he had been standing just minutes before. The sentry cursed, cocked his rifle and charged into the dust. A few minutes later, rifle at the ready, he arrived at the entrance to the vault. As a figure dressed in black emerged, he held the rifle on him and commanded, "Halt!"
"There's nothing in there," said Billy.
"What?" asked the sentry, trying to figure out why this figure in black was not upset at having a weapon pointed at him.
"You're a guard?"
"Yeah," said the sentry, still trying to get a handle on the moment.
"I'm saying here's nothing in there to guard."
"What?"
"There's no gold in the vault. It's empty."
"What?" asked the sentry again, unable to comprehend that he had been guarding nothing.
Even Billy could recognize that this conversation was going nowhere. So he said, "See for yourself," and flew out through the hole he had come in. As he left, he slowed down long enough to give an approaching helicopter pilot the finger, and then tore off into the night, leaving a smoking hole where the nation's gold reserve was supposed to be.
As he made his way back to the city, he realized it all made a perfect kind of sense—it certainly wasn't the first time the government had lied to him. But now what was he going to do?
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
An hour later, Topper was unhooded in a nondescript white interrogation room. Everything was so nondescript he knew he knew he wasn't in the clutches of some thug or villain. It had to be some a government entity—the no-style thugs and villains. His handcuffs were chained to a stainless steel bar in the center of the nondescript table. On the other side of the table was Director Smiles, a terribly nondescript-looking bureaucrat who regarded the dwarf with what he hoped was studied indifference. Behind him, Topper saw the inevitable and expected one-way mirror. For a moment he wondered who might be on the other side. Then he decided that he just didn't care.
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