by Rob Reid
The Munk sighed. “From Fido?4 What’s he want this time?”
“He wants to play cowbell for U2 on their next tour.”
“That’s a big ask. What’ll he cave to?”
“How about a chummy voice mail from Steven Tyler?”
“Done. But he can’t fuckin’ tweet about it this time.”
The moment I reached the street, I heard someone calling my name. I turned and saw a familiar mullah waving a series of crazed hand signals at a passerby.
“Nick—it’s us,” the voice repeated. I turned a bit farther and saw Carly standing about eight feet off. She was hiding behind a pair of cheap sunglasses, pretending she didn’t know her strangely clad brother (she, after all, was respectably dressed as a young actress off to shoot a fetish scene with some monks).
I ran up to her. “Carly—how’d it go with the Guardians?”
“Nick, it’s us!” This was very loud.
“I can hear you. And I thought you were going to ditch those ridiculous outfits.”
“It’s me, Carly.”
“Yes, it is. Look, I’m glad you’re here. We need to go to the Waldorf immediately.”
“Carly,” she practically screamed. “And Frampton.” She pointed at her brother, who was wrapping up a small transaction with a businessman.
Ah yes. They were wearing their deafening apparatus—a good thing, as a Camaro packed with chubby Jersey girls had just started blaring “La Vida Loca.” I pointed at my eyes, then pointed at Carly, and gave her a big grin and a thumbs-up sign.
She flashed a relieved smile. “You recognize me.”
By now, Frampton was miming something spasmodically to a new pedestrian. I caught Carly’s eye, pointed at her brother, and gave an exaggerated shrug.
“He’s selling pencils,” she bellowed. “That way, everyone will think he’s really deaf.”
And that was when the whole of midtown ground to a sudden halt. Taxis, stoplights, buses, iPads, ATMs, LEDs, neon signs, the IRT—anything using a microprocessor, electricity, or even any sort of mechanical engine simply ceased. It was a Y2K nightmare times ten. Like practically everyone, my immediate reaction was to look from side to side, then up and down in wonder. The arrest of all mechanical motion wasn’t the most jarring part, because things didn’t look much different from your basic gridlocked rush hour. No—it was the near-total silence that was beyond surreal. There were no idling engines, cellphone ditties, car radios, jackhammers, honking, sirens—absolutely no sound except for a few scattered human voices, which all promptly fell silent.5
Carly saw everyone go all slack-jawed and gave me a confused shrug. I mimed the removal of a headpiece, then pointed at her ears. She looked at me suspiciously, but did as I asked.
“You don’t have to worry about hearing any music,” I said, as her hair fell down. “Everything’s just … stopped. But what’s happening?”
“Metallicam,” she said immediately. “It must have just arrived. In its raw, inorganic state it has so much stored energy that it temporarily disrupts every electromechanical process within a couple-mile radius after it Wrinkles into an area.”
“So we’re out of time.”
“Almost.” She waved a hand in front of Frampton’s nose to distract him from counting the cash from his latest sale. He saw me and gave me a joyous hug, then removed his headpiece when he saw that Carly had done the same.
“So what happened with the Guardian Council?” I asked.
“We were shut out,” Carly said. “The Guild was on to us, and they booted us right off the planet.”
I gave Carly and Frampton my own update while we headed toward the Waldorf. As we covered the short distance to the hotel, the area started to throng with people. Drivers were cautiously stepping out of their cars. Workers and residents—mindful of the lessons of September 11—were pouring from their buildings. And everyone was tense. There was no way to access outside information, so people were left to their imaginations in interpreting the situation.
At first we hustled down the middle of Fifth Avenue, jigging around stalled cars. But soon even the streets were getting tight, as every building in midtown flushed its occupants onto sidewalks that just couldn’t contain them all. By the time we got to the Waldorf, hotel security was aggressively turning away nonguests. Rumors of terrorist involvement were by then rampant. So if there’s ever been a good time to try talking your way past New York security with a carrot-topped mullah in tow, this wasn’t it.
“I’m sorry,” a huge guy with a very small head repeated to me. “There’s entirely no way you’re getting into the hotel without a key proving that you’re a guest.”
I tried to argue, but this only brought his thug of a boss over. “We got a problem here?” the boss asked Pinhead. I cringed inwardly, because I knew the boss’s type all too well. Pushing three hundred pounds and sweating in the February chill, he’d no doubt failed the psych exam to work for the city cops three times.
“Yeah,” Pinhead said. “These people are insisting on accessorizing our lobby without a key.”
The boss made a gesture and two more guards came over. “Look,” the boss said to me. “It’s within our discretion to incarcerate, if necessary, in times of emergency. And I don’t want to have to do that to you and your little friends.”
Things were starting to get heated when a forty-something guy in a suit strode out of the lobby, eyeing Frampton carefully. The guards quieted down as the suit walked up. Clearly he was management. He came closer, looking at Frampton more and more intently. He was practically nose to nose with him when he broke into a huge, deferential grin. “Mick?” he asked.
Frampton straightened his back and beamed.
“Mick Hucknall?”
You could power a city with that grin.
“But you haven’t aged a day,” the manager gushed. “I mean—throw on that beret, and pinch me, but I’m watching the ‘Money’s Too Tight (to Mention)’ video!”
I guess everyone has a little superpower—and Frampton’s had just saved the day, as this guy was apparently America’s solitary Simply Red fan. “Crikey!” was all he could manage (in the fakest accent since Chitty Chitty Bang Bang).
The manager swept us past security and into the lobby. As he raced off to get some paper for an autograph, we spotted Manda. “Where the hell’s your cousin?” she demanded. “He was supposed to meet me here.” She turned to Carly and Frampton. “And hi, I’m Manda.”
I was stumped about Pugwash, and shrugged.
“Then Paulie must have Dislocated him,” Manda said grimly. She turned to Carly. “Can you get us to the Decapus facility?”
Carly nodded. “I’ve got it mapped, and our devices still work. They don’t use electricity or silicon-based microprocessors.”
“It’s all molecular valves,” I added dashingly, feeling like Mr. Science.
Carly removed her crucifix, which flowed into a compact stereopticon form with an enlarged display surface. She navigated us down a long hallway that took us to a service staircase. It got pitch dark as soon as we left the lobby and the murky natural light filtering through its glass doors. From that point on, we had the place to ourselves, since not even flashlights were working in the metallicam’s disruption field. Frampton had his stereopticon generate a dim glow that we could see by without attracting too much attention. Once we entered the service stairway, he turned it into a floodlight.
We were back at the presidential train within minutes. “What’s the deal with this place, anyway?” I asked as Carly headed toward the chair with the access panel.
“FDR used to enter the city by way of a secret underground track, so the press wouldn’t see him getting lifted in and out of trains on a wheelchair. This is where it would pull in, and then he’d magically emerge in the Waldorf.”
She keyed in the color combination, and that soothing, golden light enveloped the room again. Moments later, the closet door opened and a familiar voice rang out. “Always with the visitors
this week. Thirty-something years without even a Jehovah’s Witness, and now all of a sudden, it’s like Grand Central Sta—” The Boss rounded the conference table’s corner and almost rammed Carly and Frampton. “Whoa, superstars!” He extended two limbs to each of them to double-shake their famous hands.
Then he spotted me. “And, a criminal!”
* * *
1. The Munk speaks a gutter dialect of English that makes Tony Soprano sound cuddly. Its roots were in a neighborhood that was known as Italian Harlem almost a century ago, until the roughest Italians moved over to the Bronx. It’s mainly heard in witness protection safe houses these days—but there must be pockets of speakers at Swarthmore, Yale Law, or maybe the Hebrew school that The Munk attended as a tot, because he clearly picked it up somewhere.
2. It’s entirely possible that he thought I was speaking in some bizarre code so as to foil a government bugging device, and was cautiously following my lead. Organized crime permeated the fringes of rock ’n’ roll in the early days, and old-timers like The Munk get a kick out of imagining that they still menace society enough to merit the feds’ attention. One aging bigwig is sure to ask if I’m “calling from a secure line” whenever I get him on the phone. Others use needlessly confusing ciphers when discussing business in public. It’s kind of pathetic, but also charming in a way.
3. (R.Utah)
4. Ibid.
5. With the inevitable exception of some joker who bellowed “D’oh!” at the exact right moment.
TWENTY-TWO
WELCOME BACK, SHERMAN
The Boss thrust four limbs in front of Manda to protect her from me. Four other limbs were already shaking hands with Carly and Frampton. And since Decapuses need at least three limbs to stand on, this sent him sprawling. Ancient reflexes cause Decapuses to clench their digits and violently retract their limbs whenever they fall. This yanked Carly and Frampton right off their feet, bringing their heads together with an impressive crack. The Boss’s torso bounced on the floor like a soggy tennis ball, then he slowly released their hands. As his limbs reextended, Manda tried to grab one to help him to his feet.
“No, no—I piss out of that one,” he warned. She backed right off. “Anyways, I’m sorry, but I have strict orders to deny entry to wanted persons.” He gazed at me sternly as he regained his footing. “Or, to unwanted persons who are traveling with wanted persons,” he added, giving everyone else a desperately flustered look. The fame field was clearly wreaking some havoc—but The Boss was no pluhhh, and he more or less kept his cool.
“Who says I’m a criminal?” I asked.
“The Guardian Council itself. A communiqué came in from them right after that Pugwash guy showed up.”
“And let me guess—it came to you via Paulie, didn’t it?”
“Who told you?”
“Criminal masterminds have ways of knowing these things,” I said. “Although I don’t know what I’m accused of.”
“Arson in a state prison,” The Boss said in a scandalized tone. “Armed robbery of citizens, banks, and post offices.” He started ticking off allegations on the digits of various limbs. “The theft of sacred objects. Perjury. Bigamy. Passing counterfeit money. Kidnapping, extortion. Receiving stolen goods, selling stolen goods. Inciting prostitution. And, contrary to the laws of this state …” He paused, struggling to remember the final charge.
“Using marked cards?” I offered.
“Exactly!”
I nodded. These accusations had dogged me throughout my childhood. They come from The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly—a film my cousin would quote from endlessly whenever we’d play Cowpersons & Native Americans.1 So Pugwash clearly had a hand in writing the bogus Guardian communiqué that had ordered The Boss to keep us out of the Decapus colony. But why?
“Boss, that’s bullshit,” Manda said hotly. “Paulie made it all up because he wants to keep us away from his metallicam. Don’t you know what he’s planning to do with that stuff?”
“Sure—he’s gonna solve your energy problems and give you all a lot more time to write music.”
“Not even close,” Manda said. “He’s planning to destroy the Earth with it.”
“Come on—that’s illegal!”
“Only if he does it to us,” I said. “But he’s figured out a way to make us destroy ourselves.”
“I don’t buy it. All of us Decapuses would get killed, too. And we’re union!”
We went back and forth like this for a while. Much as he disliked Paulie, The Boss couldn’t believe that the top echelons of the Guild would order this sort of destruction. And he wasn’t about to take a one-man crime wave’s word for it.
Carly figured out a way to break the deadlock before too many precious minutes ticked by. “Listen, Boss,” she said. “Believe what you want to about Paulie and the metallicam. But the other reason we’re here is to capture that Pugwash guy.”
“What for?”
“For trying to kill Manda. He set up a booby trap in her apartment.”
“He what?” The rest of our conversation was instantly forgotten. As its most adored (and internally famous) singer, Manda had become the Decapus colony’s emotional Achilles’ heel.
“He tried to kill her,” Carly repeated. “She clobbered him playing Settlers of Catan, and he couldn’t take it. He came down here to flee the police.”
“So that’s why he had Paulie set up that force field,” The Boss growled, balling up the digits of several limbs into fists. They took on a metallic color, and puffed up like balloons.
“He had Paulie do what?” I asked.
“Right after he got here, he told Paulie and Özzÿ to lock everyone else out of the transit bay,” The Boss snarled. “So Paulie used some metallicam to power up a force field. The three of them are behind it now.”
“Oooh—that’s really bad,” Carly murmured.
“I asked Paulie how he could block out his brothers in the Guild like that,” The Boss said as he herded us into the elevator. “It’s unheard of! He said it was that Pugwash guy’s idea.”
“Metallicam force fields are completely impenetrable by any means,” Carly warned me as the elevator plunged.
“Really? You know, we’re so lucky to have a force-field expert on the team.”
She glared at me. “I’m just saying that Paulie and your cousin are incredibly serious about keeping us out if they’re using up some of their metallicam to power a force field.”
Their metallicam. The phrase chilled me. What the hell was Pugwash up to?
We left the elevator and The Boss activated a small panel on the wall just outside of it. “It’s me, calling everybody,” he bellowed into it, and I heard his voice echo throughout the surrounding tunnels. “Manda’s here. Manda! And that Pugwash guy is trying to kill her! Meet us at the transit bay.”
The tunnels were roiling within seconds. All of the Decapuses had balled their digits into those huge metallic fists, and a pissed-off phalanx of them formed around us to keep us from getting trampled underfoot as we raced through the tunnels. It was as if a giant clan of pint-sized linebackers had just heard that their kid sister was at the junior high school dance with R. Kelly. A seething mob had already surrounded the transit bay by the time we got there. It parted like the Red Sea for Moses the instant Manda’s beloved form was spotted. Within moments, we were standing at the force field’s perimeter. The gibbering mob fell silent as my cousin strode out of the transit bay door with Paulie perched on his shoulder.
“Damn, you were right,” Paulie said to Pugwash, flicking a wing at the furious crowd. “Mutiny. Led by that broad. You sure called it.”
“So are we on?” Pugwash demanded.
Paulie nodded. “A deal’s a deal. And you delivered.”
“Delivered what?” I demanded.
“Information,” Paulie said. “Your cousin showed up here about a half hour back. Said things was goin’ sideways. But he wouldn’t give me no details. So I say, tell me what’s brewin’. If your war
ning pans out, you get two percent.”
“Two percent of what?”
“The assets the Guild recovers.”
I felt a familiar overwhelming urge to belt my cousin. And for the first time since eighth grade, I made no attempt to resist it. “Owwwwwwwwww!” I hollered as my hand connected with a solid, invisible wall.
“Eighty thousand times stronger than steel, right?” Pugwash asked.
“More like eighty-one,” Paulie answered, then turned to me. “Metallicam force fields’re tough on the dukes. I wouldn’t knock it again.”
“And calm down already,” Pugwash added. “It’s not like I did anything wrong.”
“Apart from getting the world destroyed?”
“Actually, I saved the world.” He turned to Paulie. “Tell him about the rest of our deal. You’re making me look bad.”
Paulie shrugged. “I said if his warning pans out, I give humanity an extra twelve hours to get us our money back.”
“I asked for a full week,” Pugwash said righteously.
“And I started at a fifth of one percent,” Paulie said. “A bit of back and forth, and we settled at twelve hours and two percent. Everybody wins.”
I turned to Pugwash. “How … could you?”
He glared at me. “How could I? Please. What would have happened if I’d waited for Manda like you told me to—and then Paulie saw us coming before your little mutiny could take him prisoner? He would’ve nuked us, or something—and then we’d all be doomed. I figured our odds of pulling it off were one in ten, max. And if we failed, it was all over.”
“Well … maybe,” I said. “But—”
“And meanwhile, what was my prime directive? Let’s see, wasn’t it something like, ‘Everything we’re doing now is strictly meant to buy us more time. So do whatever it takes to get us more time. Absolutely whatever it takes.’ Did I get that right, Nick?”
I just clammed up and fumed. I felt like I was nine years old again, and losing a semantic debate about the rules of Monopoly to my older, smarter cousin. And hadn’t I since gone to law school specifically so that I could win a few of these arguments? I silently vowed that if I survived this, my professors would receive the most withering demand for a refund that had ever been written.