by Mark Crilley
“Orzamo,” Billy said again, being careful to put the stress on the Or, just as Twain had. “Is that your real name?” Piker whimpered in a way that didn't really answer the question.
She understands English. On some basic level she actually understands what I'm saying. These AFMEC people have probably been beefing up her intelligence with chemicals or genetic engineering or something.
A silence followed during which neither of them did anything but sit and breathe. The air was heavy with the smell of microwaved popcorn.
Billy's thoughts turned back to his parents. The earlier mix of shock and dismay and hurt had simmered down into a thick bubbly stew of anger.
He looked around the room. All the things he saw were numbingly familiar, but now most of them seemed like props on a stage: canisters of insecticide locked in a case against the wall, shelves lined with books dedicated to the fine art of insect extermination, and a supposedly amusing plastic mosquito that boogied to a shrill snippet of Sinatra crooning “I've Got You Under My Skin” when you walked within a foot of it.
“They've been lying to me,” said Billy. “My whole life, they've been lying to me.”
He glanced at Piker again.
“Even my dog has been lying to me.”
Piker groaned and curled up into a ball.
Billy went back to staring at the TV, through the TV. There was a tiny sliver of popcorn kernel stuck between his teeth. He'd been unsuccessfully trying to dislodge it for the last hour and a half.
“Well, they won't get away with it, I can tell you that much. They're going to apologize. They're going to explain. They're going to make it up to me.”
Piker groaned. “And I'm going to take my good, sweet time forgiving them.”
He paused, then continued: “If I decide to forgive them. As a twelve-year-old who has been lied to every single year of his entire twelve-year-long life …” Billy's sentences weren't holding together as well as they normally did. “…I reserve the right to not forgive. To withhold forgiveness. For years.”
The sliver of popcorn kernel was tantalizingly close to coming free. But it stayed put.
“Forever, if necessary.”
BRRRUUUUUMMMmmmmm The van. That's them!
Billy jumped up from the couch, ran through the kitchen to the back door, and yanked it open. There in the driveway was the creaky old BUGZ-B-GON van. He got there just in time to see the headlights go out.
G'JUNK G'JUNK
Jim and Linda Clikk got out of the van. They were dressed in the same gray uniforms Twain and the others had worn. The only source of light in the backyard was an outdoor bulb jutting out from the aluminum siding of their two-story colonial. Its blinding white light sent long black shadows crawling off behind Jim and Linda and stretching out across the driveway. Crickets chirped in the bushes, and the smell of wet grass hung in the air.
Jim's face seemed to have creases in places it hadn't before. His eyes were pinched with uncertainty, and his high-andmighty jaw was nearly touching his chest. Linda was fidgety and fragile-looking. She blinked excessively, and her cheeks were a splotchy, feverish red.
They began walking toward Billy, moving slowly and cautiously, as if they were creeping up on a fizzled firecracker that might still blow. Neither of them spoke until they were close enough to reach out and touch him.
“Son,” Jim Clikk said, “I guess we have some explaining to do.”
On an ordinary night, Billy would have laughed out loud at the ridiculousness of this remark. It was, after all, one of the most monstrous understatements of all time. But this was not an ordinary night. Billy scowled and remained silent.
“Please don't be angry, Billy,” Linda said. Her face was twisted with guilt. “We were going to tell you just as soon as you turned sixteen.” She paused and added: “Or fifteen. You're twelve now, so that's not such a long time, really, when you… when you think about it.”
I can't believe this. As if that makes any difference! “Liars,” Billy said. “You guys are liars.” “Yes,” Jim said. Always better than Billy's mother at putting on a brave face, he nevertheless appeared thoroughly off balance, unsure of how to proceed. “We are liars, there's no getting around that. But we're good liars. I mean,” he added before clearing his throat, “liars for good reasons. Look, why don't we just go inside, make a few nice mugs of cocoa, and—”
“No!” said Billy, with an intensity that had neighborwaking potential. The crickets silenced themselves. Jim and Linda recoiled, raising their hands like criminals trying to prove they were unarmed.
Billy lowered his voice but sounded just as angry. “No cocoa. I don't want cocoa. I want …” It took him a second to put it into words.
I want things to go back to normal.
No. I don't want that. Normal wasn't so great. In fact, it sucked a lot of the time.
I want…to be in on everything.
He started over. “Look. I've got questions. Lots and lots of questions. I'm going to ask my questions and you're going to answer them, one at a time.”
Billy's parents glanced at each other, turned back to him, and nodded solemnly. The crickets cautiously resumed their chirping.
“And no more lies. Ever.”
“No more lies,” his parents said, as if taking an oath. “Ever.”
“Okay,” said Billy. The sliver of popcorn came free at last, and he spat it onto the lawn.
They wound up sitting around the kitchen table, a bowl of unpopped popcorn kernels serving as a sort of centerpiece. The smell of butter was mixed with whiffs of chicken curry, creating an aroma Billy might have found rather agreeable if he hadn't been sick to his stomach from everything he'd gone through in the last few hours. The refrigerator hummed noisily beneath it all, like a broken pipe organ playing one endless note.
“Now, let me get this straight,” Billy said. His parents had been talking for over half an hour and hadn't even come close to answering all his questions. Of course, it didn't help that every answer tended to plant entirely new questions in his head. “You guys have just come back from the Philippines.”
“That's right,” Linda said. “We were there from early
yesterday morning until about eight o'clock last night.” By this time she had tried to explain to Billy that keeping their work secret from him was not a mean-spirited trick. It was a way of protecting him, a way of ensuring that he would have a normal carefree childhood, free from the dangers his parents faced on a daily basis. (Billy was unimpressed.)
She'd told Billy that she and his father were performing an important service to the world, and that Billy's patience with their being away all the time was, in a very real sense, an essential part of that service. (Billy was unmoved.)
And she'd apologized. More than a dozen times and in a dozen different ways she'd apologized to Billy. For the lies, for the deceptions, for all the times he'd been left at home alone, and for the series of events that had led to his having five strange people crash through his bedroom window. But Billy was withholding forgiveness just as he'd pledged to, and so his mother finally stopped apologizing and switched to simply supplying him with as much information as possible.
Billy, for his part, had temporarily set aside some of his anger—about half of it, roughly—to concentrate on putting together the bizarre, secretive jigsaw puzzle of his parents' actual day-to-day lives.
“You were in the Philippines from early yesterday morning,” he said, sounding like an attorney taking notes for an upcoming trial, “until about eight o'clock last night.” He drew a breath before launching into the next sentence. This was the big one: the one that explained everything and yet was so utterly unbelievable as to be difficult to say while keeping a straight face. “You were sent to the Philippines…”
He inhaled and exhaled long and slow before continuing. “… as members of a secret society that battles things called creatches…”
Another deep breath.
“… which are, basically…”
“Yes,” Linda said. “That's right.” She was staring into Billy's eyes, speaking slowly, as if trying to help him accept all this. “Our job is to stop them from interfering with humans.”
“So you're saying that monsters…are real. That the world is filled with monsters.”
“Filled?” said Jim Clikk. He had apologized to Billy a grand total of twice, then abandoned that tactic in favor of answering questions, smiling a lot, and making heroic attempts to buck up everyone's spirits. To anyone else it would have seemed that Jim Clikk didn't like apologizing, or simply didn't care. Billy knew better, though. He knew his father was good at reading people, and that he'd taken one look at his son and understood that Billy was more interested in information than apologies.
“No,” Jim continued. “I wouldn't say that the world is filled with monsters. There are a lot of them, though. Plenty enough to keep us busy.” He chuckled in a way that suggested it was no joke. “They live underground and in the oceans. On mountaintops, in forests, and in the sky.”
“Monsters. Real monsters.” Billy kept saying the word. He was trying to get used to it. He sensed that until he could come to grips with this fact—this thoroughly ridiculous-sounding fact—the jigsaw puzzle could never be put together.
“Oh yes,” Jim said. “They're real, all right. Very real. Of course, they don't think of themselves as monsters. At least not in a very… monstery way.”
Billy tried to imagine what these real monsters looked like. He saw flashes of things—claws, teeth, eyes, tails—but found it hard to put it all together into one complete beast.
“And, uh, how long has this secret society been around?” “Centuries,” Linda said. “It's existed in different forms— and under a variety of names—since prehistoric times. You know the story of Saint George and the dragon?”
Billy didn't, really. “I've heard of it.”
“Old George was an Affy, just like your father and me.”
“Affy?”
“A member of AFMEC,” Jim said, “the Allied Forces for the Management of Extraterritorial Creatches. Your mother and I have been senior AFMEC agents since 1988,” he added, raising his jaw proudly.
“I know. I read that on your business card.” Billy narrowed his eyes. “Your real business card.” Billy's father winced and tried to smile. Only half of his mouth cooperated in the effort.
Billy cleared his throat and asked a question he was more than a little scared to have answered. “Were you two ever real exterminators? Or has BUGZ-B-GON always been a big show, just a, a…a way of hiding your secret identity?” Billy found it hard to use the phrase secret identity in a conversation with his parents. Somehow it sounded even weirder than using the phrase real monsters in a conversation with his parents.
Jim and Linda exchanged troubled glances. Linda leaned back in her chair, signaling that the question had fallen into Jim's territory.
“Um,” Jim began, and for a moment it sounded as if Billy was in for a long, complicated answer. Then his father let all the air out of his lungs and simply said: “Big show.” He paused and added, “Secret identity,” as if that might somehow soften the blow.
Billy scooted his chair back away from the table, producing a dut-dut-dut ting sound. He'd been preparing himself for this possibility. Still, it made him lose his breath for a second.
The funny thing was it didn't make him angry. Far from it. Deep down he had to admit he was impressed.
They didn't just fool me, they fooled the whole town: the neighbors, the police, everyone. These AFMEC people are cool. Way cool.
He definitely wanted to know more. Heck, he wanted to know everything.
“What about the answering machine here in the house? Sometimes people call and leave messages. You know, termite problems and stuff. What happens to those people? Do they ever get called back?”
“Right,” said Jim. He shot a glance at Linda, and Billy immediately sensed that replying to his question, if done thoroughly, could take hours. “Okay. See, there's a whole big division of AFMEC called the NCPD: the Normal Childhood Preservation Department. They make it possible for the children of Affys to lead normal lives up until the age of fifteen or sixteen. There's a group of men and women there who send mail, make phone calls, even drive by the house to drop off things ‘from work,' you name it. It's all part of ensuring that the son or daughter believes his parents do the ordinary boring jobs they claim to do. It's hard work, but important.”
“You mean that message last week about the fire ants at the Piffling Rotary Club…”
“That was Mamadou Diouf, one of the guys at the NCPD,” said Jim. “He does a pretty good American accent, doesn't he? You'd never know he was born and raised in Senegal.”
What an operation! These Affys had really worked out all the angles.
“So why does AFMEC have to be a big secret? Why can't you just… get everything out in the open?”
“Well,” said Linda, “there's world tourism, for starters.” “Tourism? You've got to be kidding me.” “Think about it, Billy,” she said. “If ordinary people knew about the creatches… all the nasty, saber-toothed, tentacled, bloodsucking beasts out there just beyond their range of vision… there'd be so much panic in the world no one would go anywhere. The human race would be crippled by its own fears.” She paused, then added in a half-whisper: “They don't all suck blood. Very few of them do, actually.”
“This is total insanity,” Billy said. “If there are monsters out there, people need to know about it. Otherwise they'll get themselves into…you know… life-or-death situations without even realizing it.”
“Not since the World Creatch Accord of 1815,” said Jim. “You mean 1816, dear,” said Linda. “Right,” said Jim, waving the fact away like a pesky mosquito. “See, that was when AFMEC leaders and creatch leaders got together and divided the world into human territories and creatch territories. Since then, humans and creatches have coexisted in peace and harmony to a remarkable degree. AFMEC steps in only when a few bad apples cross the boundaries and start causing trouble.”
Creatch leaders. At a meeting.
Billy thought this over. “So these creatches must be pretty sophisticated. They've got their own government, and leaders, and they can attend meetings and stuff. So are they just as smart as human beings?”
“Some of them are nearly as smart as humans,” Linda said. “But most possess no more intelligence than, say, your average insect. And as for a government, well, they are loosely organized, yes. The smarter ones use a variety of techniques to police the rest of them, ensuring that they stay out of human-controlled territories. Still, there are the inevitable transgressions. Like yesterday in the Philippines.”
“Mutating slimewarblers,” said Jim. “Ugly things. And they don't smell so hot either.”
“Mutating slimewarblers. Is that what all that purple gunk was in the video? Mutating slime?”
“Yeah, and that was the part of town that was relatively unscathed,” Jim said. “You should have seen the sports arena where they made their last stand. It was like a mountain of purple pudding.”
Linda shuddered. “Okay,” said Billy, “but I still don't see how you can keep creatches secret after something like this. Didn't some of the locals see the slimewarblers?”
“Yes,” said Linda. “It happens quite often. But AFMEC coordinates with local hospitals to have such people treated by Affy doctors rather than ordinary doctors. They get injected with a chemical called Somniron—a sort of memory inhibitor—that blurs their perceptions, makes them think it was all just a terribly vivid dream.”
“You're able to round up everyone ? Don't people get away sometimes?”
“On occasion, yes,” said Linda. “hen you end up with people going to the press. Nine times out of ten the newspeople think they're stark raving mad. The rest of the time you end up with a small story about how someone claims they saw an alien invader. Or Bigfoot.”
“So there really is a Bigfoot,” said Billy. “Oh, there are loads of them,” said Linda. “Well, technically they're called black-furred woodwalkers, but you can't expect your average moose hunter to know that.”
Billy paused to take in this new information. He was trying to stay angry at his parents—he had good reason to, after all—but AFMEC was absolutely the coolest thing he'd ever heard of in his life. The more he found out about it, the more he wanted to know.
“So who's in charge of all you Affys?” he asked. “The president?”
“Of the United States?” Linda chuckled, as if the very idea were preposterous. “AFMEC is a global organization, darling. It doesn't belong to any one country or answer to any one government. It was formed from a variety of creatch-battling groups that arose spontaneously all over the world in centuries past— China, Europe, South America. Today it's presided over by a prime magistrate: an elected official who could just as easily be from Wallonia as Washington, D.C.”
Jim Clikk gave his wife a curious look. “Where's Wallonia?” “Southern Belgium.” “Guys,” said Billy, “let's try to stay on topic here, all right?” Jim Clikk glanced at the clock on the wall and gently raised a finger. “Billy, these are good questions. Great questions. And we're going to keep answering them until you have all the info you need. And then some. But right now”—he leaned forward, striking a delicate balance between being buddy-buddy and reasserting his authority as Dad—“I'm under direct orders to touch base with HQ as soon as possible. So just where exactly did you find my viddy-fo—my, uh, business card case?”
“It's all right, Dad. I know what a viddy-fone is.” “You do?” “Well, I have the general idea. It's like a miniature videophone for all of you Affys.”
“That's right.” “It was behind your dresser. I left it next to the phone.” “The dresser,” Jim said, snapping his fingers and rising from his chair. “I knew it. All right, then. I'd better go get the little doodly-hickey and find out what they want us to do with you.”