“History first. Do you know the story of the continent of Atlantis?”
“Was that a real place?” Patty asked a fraction of a moment before I did.
“It was the home of most humans on the planet at the time,” Stan said. “A wonderful place, very beautiful. It was mankind’s third home on this planet, and it was destroyed in the first Fuzzy-Wuzzy invasion.”
I desperately wanted to ask him what the first two homes were and where they were and how old was he, but I managed to stay on topic somehow. At this point I had so many questions there was no chance I was going to remember them all.
“How did they destroy Atlantis?” Patty asked.
“They didn’t, we did,” Stan said. “We sank it to kill them and drive them back.”
I could hear a pin drop in that huge meeting room at that moment. Stan seemed very far away and didn’t want to meet my gaze at all.
“You sank it?”
He nodded. “All the gods combined, along with the Fates and help from the Searchlights. We all sank it. We killed almost a billion humans to save everyone else. Humanity almost didn’t recover.”
Again the silence filled the room, and my stomach felt like it was going to crawl up through my throat and lodge in my nose. I just couldn’t think of one damn thing to say.
Patty squeezed my hand really, really hard.
“Why are these Fuzzy-Wuzzy things so bad?” Screamer finally asked.
“Humans are a giant buffet to them,” Stan said. “They eat everything except bones and fingernails and hair.”
“They also eat most animals,” The Smoke said. “And trees and brush and everything.”
“Where do they come from?” Patty asked.
“They are coming from the alternation dimension over down the time stream,” Stan said.
I felt like a kid in school and the teacher was talking, but nothing was making sense. “Do you want to try to explain that?” I asked, “or for now can we just say they come from another dimension?”
Stan nodded. “Just say another parallel dimension, only the humans in all the dimensions in that direction along the time stream lost the war to the Fuzzy-Wuzzys and are gone. We are their next meal. But we managed to stop them so soundly last time that it has taken them thousands of years to recover.”
Again the silence.
“So what do these things look like?” I asked. “Why the name Fuzzy-Wuzzy? And why can’t we get the armies of the world to pitch into this fight?”
Stan pointed to the nail on his little finger. “They are bugs, covered in a light fur, and over a hundred of them could fit on my little fingernail.”
I just stared at him. “You are telling me this great threat to humanity is a mass invasion of tiny, tiny, furry bed bugs?”
He nodded. “They can take a human body down to a pile of bones and Fuzzy-Wuzzy black shit in two seconds. And once here they can move faster than any man can run. In Atlantis I watched them mow through a crowd of thousands before the crowd knew what hit it. The more they eat and digest, the smarter they get and the harder they are to stop.”
I opened my mouth and again could think of nothing to say.
“So you drowned them the last time?” Screamer finally asked.
Stan nodded. “We did, and poured an awful lot of ocean water through the dimensional portals. But they only came through five portals last time, not like the thousands they are attacking through this time.”
It finally dawned on me what was bothering me.
“You are telling me these things are very, very tiny. Yet you are acting like they are intelligent. That’s not possible.”
“Hive mind,” Stan said. “Alone or in groups of only a few thousand, they have no ability to think and can be easily killed. In fact, in groups of under a thousand they don’t eat. But in masses, they are eating and thinking machines of fantastic ability and intellect. Somehow they transport the energy from eating to the hive mind. No one is sure how that works.”
“So what weapons kill them?” Screamer asked. “And can anything protect a human from them?”
“Stepping on them kills them,” Stan said. “Drowning, flame, anything with any force. And chemicals of all types kill them. Just like any other tiny bugs. The problem is that they move so fast and together that they can loose millions and not be bothered in the slightest.”
“And protection?”
“They can’t eat through anything inorganic,” Stan said. “Stone, rock, rubber, things like that. But they can go through wood like it doesn’t exist.”
Again the intense silence.
I couldn’t think of another question to ask Stan, and neither could anyone else it seemed, so Stan nodded and said, “I’ll be back in an hour to see if you four have any ideas on how to fight these things.”
Then he vanished.
The silence again. I was starting to really, really hate the silence.
Finally I said, “We are so screwed.”
None of my team challenged me on that.
Chapter Four
After we all sat there in the silence for what seemed like the longest time, I finally couldn’t take it anymore. “Anyone up for a milkshake?”
Normally we met downtown, at The Diner, to plan operations and work to save people. It just seemed natural to go there now. It wasn’t more than a small hole-in-the-wall around the corner on a side street from the Horseshoe Casino. The Diner was decorated in fake 1960sstuff and had a phony jukebox playing in the background all the time.
Before anyone could say anything, Stan showed back up. “I would love a milkshake.”
A moment later we all appeared in The Diner sitting at our favorite booth while Stan sat in a chair in front of the booth. Madge, our normal waitress, was sitting at the counter shaking her head. In all the years we had been coming into this little place, I had never seen Madge sit down. She was a superhero working for the Gods of Food and Beverage, and she knew about us.
Madge always had an attitude, and was the best waitress I had ever met. And when in the 1960s diner uniform, she always wore too much make-up and light slacks three sizes too tight. She was a large woman both top and bottom, and it was a standing joke that no one should be allowed to watch Madge walk away or bend over.
Since we discovered she was a superhero as well, she had become a sort of unofficial member of my team.
We were the only ones in The Diner, and it was clear the place was closed, something I had also never seen. At least the oldies station was still playing softly on the radio.
Stan shouted over to Madge. “Our regular, then come join us. We’ve got planning to do.”
Madge glanced around and it was clear from the black streaks of thick make-up on her face that she had been crying. She must have heard about humanity’s upcoming doom.
She nodded and got to her feet, using a napkin to smear the make-up even more.
“So when are you going to teach me that jumping around in space trick?” I asked Stan. I’d been bugging him about learning that now for a while, but he had just never gotten around to showing me how that power worked. He had never said I didn’t have the power, only that I needed to learn how to do it.
“Next week,” he said, ‘if we can figure out a way to win this war, and there is a next week.”
I nodded. “Deal. Now tell me why the Searchlight came to me instead of going straight to Laverne?”
“Custom,” Stan said. “When you want to see the queen, you don’t just barge into the throne room, you talk to her guards.”
“Real old school,” I said.
Stan just nodded.
From the counter the milkshake machines started up.
“So how come you are back here with us?” Patty asked.
“I’m worthless with the Gods,” he said. “I told Laverne I’d do better back here with your team, and she agreed.”
Over the years, our team had saved the planet a couple of times, and saved Lady Luck herself more than once. She clearly
had a lot of faith in us to send Stan to help us. I just wish I had as much faith in us right now as Lady Luck did.
I was just a lowly poker-playing superhero. What could I do against an invasion of tiny bugs? I couldn’t read their faces because more than likely they didn’t have any. I couldn’t take their money, or bluff them off their chips. And I…
“Bluff,” I said out loud.
Everyone at the table looked at me.
I had zero idea what I meant by that, but my little voice, the voice that told me when to bet and when to fold, was shouting that the key to all this was bluffing. And I trusted that little voice.
But how the hell do you bluff a hive mind of millions of bugs?
“You want to explain that outburst?” Stan said.
I glanced around the booth, realizing that everyone was just staring at me. Madge was just finishing the milkshakes.
“Not sure what I meant,” I said. “I need more information. Wolfgang said that they are coming through one thousand portals? How big is a portal?”
“In Atlantis a portal was about five feet around, but impossible to block.”
“And we know where all these portals are going to appear?” I asked.
Stan nodded. “The Searchlights do, and the top gods will be able to see them forming in a few more hours as well.”
I wish I could figure out what I was thinking. It was just there, at the back of my mind, but darned if I could figure it out.
Then I had another idea.
I took Patty’s hand that had been resting on my right leg and placed it on the top of the table with my hand on top of hers. Then I looked at Screamer.
“I have an idea, but can’t quite get it to form. Come on in with Patty and help me figure it out.”
Screamer nodded, reached across the table, and put his hand on top of ours.
Suddenly Screamer and Patty were in my mind. We had joined minds so many times on missions over the last few years, the sensation almost felt familiar.
Weird, but familiar.
Bluff. What am I thinking about, bluffing the Fuzzy-Wuzzy?
I focused, trying to dig up the idea as Screamer and Patty searched inside my head. After what seemed like only an instant Screamer thought at me directly, Just what the word means. To mislead.
He’s right, Patty thought at me. You are thinking we can mislead the Fuzzy-Wuzzy.
Screamer took his hand away and I was again alone in my own head. But I did have a part of an idea.
“Stan, do any of the gods or Fates have the ability to open one of these portals?”
“I wouldn’t know why not,” he said. “It’s similar to the power needed to slip between a moment in time. I’ve never tried it since I have no desire to meet myself in another dimension.”
Suddenly I was confused again.
“Are you saying that the dimension to our left has never been attacked by these things?”
“No, it would take you moving over thousands of millions of billions of dimensions to find one that was never attacked. Think of a river. Every time there is a new event, it splits off two dimensions, like two almost-identical branches of the same river. When you all saved Lady Luck from the Bookkeepers’ little mistake, you created two dimensions, this one where you saved her, and one where you didn’t. So since the last attack on Atlantis, billions of new timelines have formed to the left of this one.”
“Every major event creates a new timeline, a new dimension?” Patty asked? “Every event? Anywhere?”
My head hurt.
“That’s right,” Stan said. “If we stop these things this time, there will be a new dimension where we don’t stop them. And in that timeline over, those of us existing in the neighboring dimension will have to fight them. And so on. The Fuzzy-Wuzzy need to keep eating, thus their need and ability to keep moving from dimension to dimension and eating entire populations. There are a lot of dimensions out there.”
“I’m really sorry I asked that question,” I said.
“I am sorry you asked it as well,” The Smoke said. “But we must focus on this dimension and let the others fight their own fights.”
At that moment Madge brought the milkshakes. She had managed to wash her face, but still looked completely distraught.
“Any ideas?” she asked, sliding a vanilla milkshake in front of me.
“A couple,” I said.
At that she brightened up. Then she turned to The Smoke. “It’s going to be a minute on the hamburger. I had the grill turned off.”
The Smoke’s regular was a hamburger, almost rare, instead of a milkshake.
The Smoke nodded and said, “Pull up a chair.”
“So what’s the idea?” Stan asked.
“I need one more piece of information. When these things run out of human food, do they attack each other?”
He shrugged. “I honestly don’t know. Let me find out about both questions.”
He vanished, and then a moment later he and Lady Luck herself appeared back. Lady Luck sat down in Stan’s chair and Stan quickly pulled over another chair.
“So what are you thinking?” Laverne asked.
I took a deep breath and stared at the most frightening god that existed, as far as I was concerned. “We need to bluff the Fuzzy-Wuzzy into going to another dimension, one where they have already eaten us all. Stan says we can form these gates to other dimensions.”
“Easily,” she said. “We don’t as a general rule.”
“Can the portals be made to be one way?” I asked. The idea was starting to form and I was getting excited.
“They can be,” Laverne said, looking puzzled.
“I asked Stan if these things ever got hungry enough to eat each other,” I said, “and he went to ask you.”
Wolfgang Sucker appeared in all his bright blue glory, standing beside the booth next to Stan, his onion breath covering us all instantly as his head turned slowly from side-to-side.
Madge jumped up and took a couple of steps back, the look of shock on her face very clear.
“They must eat every fifty years or they will turn on each other,” Wolfgang said, his voice again like sandpaper on a hard surface. “It takes them almost a half year to form the portals.”
“How long does it take us to form a portal?” I asked.
“Instantly,” Laverne said.
“One more question,” I said. “When they leave a dimension, do they leave anyone behind?”
“Nothing but a stripped planet with nothing alive remaining,” Wolfgang said.
I smiled. This idea just might work if there wasn’t something I didn’t know.
“Can you form a portal to one hundred dimensions back along the line of the Fuzzy-Wuzzy conquests?”
“We can go back thousands of dimensions, but all the worlds would still be dead,” the Searchlight said.
I nodded. “Okay, here’s the idea. “Form a portal to one of the destroyed worlds a thousand worlds away, and put that portal directly over their portal and somehow seal the connection. You won’t be blocking it. They just won’t know they haven’t arrived here yet.”
Stan and Laverne were nodding so I went on. “That way when they come through their portal, trying to get to us, they instead end up in a dead dimension without their knowing it. We bluff them.”
“Actually,” Screamer asked, smiling, “why not divide them into a thousand different dead worlds over a thousand dimensions, so far back they will only be able to eat themselves?”
Laverne stared at me for a moment, her dark eyes seeming to cut through me like I didn’t exist. Then she said softly, “That might work.”
At the same instant she and Stan and the Searchlight vanished.
Patty squeezed my hand and Screamer and The Smoke just smiled.
“You guys are really something,” Madge said, shaking her head. “Milkshakes are on me.”
I just hoped my idea worked and this wasn’t going to be my last milkshake ever.
Chapter Five
Around us, Las Vegas went on with its normal, noisy life. The night air was warm, but thankfully not hot.
I was the one holding the “can’t-see-us” bubble. Up until yesterday I didn’t know I had that power.
Stan, with help from the Searchlight, and with energy support from all of us, had formed a dimensional portal that fit tightly over the Fuzzy-Wuzzy’s portal. Stan’s portal shifted the Fuzzy-Wuzzy almost a thousand dimensions back.
From what I understood, the Fuzzy-Wuzzy could only move from one dimension to the next every half-year; so if this worked, it would take them hundreds and hundreds of years to get back. And since they would turn on each other to eat long before that, they might never make it back.
And we were splitting the entire invasion force up into a thousand parts over thousands of dead dimensions.
All over the planet right now, Searchlights and Gods were forming dimensional portals over the Fuzzy-Wuzzy portals.
It was our only plan of defense, and it had been my idea. I just hoped it worked. I hadn’t slept, worrying about it.
If this plan didn’t work, we were all going to be the first appetizer for a very hungry horde of bugs.
“Five, four, three,” Patty said, counting down.
All of us poured energy to Stan as we had practiced, while the Searchlight held the connection between the two portals.
Since I wasn’t a god, I couldn’t see the forming Fuzzy-Wuzzy portal until suddenly it formed directly under the one Stan had formed.
A blur of black seemed to fill the opening of the portal. It went on and on and on.
And then nothing.
“I think they have all gone through,” Stan said, beads of sweat forming on his face.
Suddenly the dimensional portal formed by the Fuzzy-Wuzzy closed and Stan slumped to the ground, breathing hard.
“I hate those bugs,” he said, panting.
For a moment the Searchlight stood there, then he said, with his rough voice loud enough to hear even against all the noise of a Las Vegas night:
Fighting the Fuzzy-Wuzzy: A Poker Boy story Page 2