by Bruce Bethke
Gunnar turned away from the sight and fought down a dry heave. Reba slowly lowered her binoculars and turned a deathly shade of white. Eliza was a deathly shade of white already, and that made it hard to tell what her reaction was.
“So,” I said, “I guess this rules out a frontal assault. Any suggestions for Plan B?” I looked at Reba. Reba looked at Gunnar. Gunnar looked at his feet.
Eliza looked at me. “Well, Max,” she asked, “have you ever tried improv theater?”
Five minutes later we were rolling up the main driveway, right up to the front gate, with a bunch of innocent smiles on our faces and some pools of virtual sweat filling up our damp boots. The OGRE RBVs, at least, seemed to be ignoring us. Then we got close enough to get a good look at the guards.
I turned my head and hissed at Eliza. “Nazis?”
“They work cheap,” she hissed right back.
Two heel-clicking Nazis stepped out from the shadows of the main gate and leveled their machine pistols at us. Reba slowed the HumVee to a stop, and I stopped right next to her. A third officer-type Nazi stepped out of a silly little booth painted like a barber pole and goose-stepped up to Reba, which meant he had his back to me.
“Vas gibt?” the officer demanded.
“AmmoGram!” Gunnar sang out. “Delivery for Mr. Curtis!”
“Vas?” the officer demanded again. “Nicht verstehen sie!”
Gunnar smiled broadly and winked at me. “Explain it to him, Max.”
Smiling and casual, I dismounted my bike and sauntered over. “It’s like this, Herr officer—” I flashed into Cubist mode and punched my hand through his chest, groping for the acceptance routine. He wriggled on my fist like a speared salmon.
“Vas?” the officer shrieked. “Vas?” The two with the machine pistols started to suspect something was wrong and walked quickly forward.
“Ma-ax,” Gunnar whispered, “hurry u-up.”
“Shit, Gunnar,” I whispered back, “he doesn’t have a heart.”
The other two guards stopped at point-blank range and cocked their machine pistols. “Well do something,” Gunnar whimpered. The soldiers carefully took aim.
“Hello, liebchen,” Eliza said, in an accent worthy of Marlene Dietrich. “Have you been on ze Eastern Front long?” I spared a glance at Eliza, and almost dropped my jaw when I saw she was lounging gracefully across my bike, wearing nothing but a strategically placed feather boa and some very heavy eye makeup. The soldiers did drop their machine pistols, and advanced on her, drooling. She waited until they were nice and close, then said, “Get their guns, Max.” I threw the officer to Gunnar and dove for the machine pistols. Eliza grabbed the guards by their necks and did something that made them drop in their tracks.
A minute later we had the soldiers bound, gagged, and rolled into the moat to enjoy the company of the crocodiles. We briefly considered trying to disguise ourselves with their uniforms, but Eliza insisted we didn’t need disguises, and I suspected she was right. We sorted through the officer’s huge key ring and found the one that unlocked the human-sized door next to the main door. “Ditch the vehicles,” Gunnar decided. “From here on, we go on foot.” Reba grabbed her rifle off the front seat, snapped her fingers, and randomized the HumVee out of existence. I decided to be a little more coy and shrank my Harley down to toy-size and pocketed it. “Okay,” Gunnar said, taking one last look around to make sure no one was noticing us. “Let’s move it!” He pushed the door open, and we charged—
Inside.
The interior of Castle Franklinstein was mind-boggling. Huge. An infinity of marble, chandeliers, mirrors and doors, stretching off forever in every direction. The four of us just stood there a moment, overwhelmed by the scale of the thing.
“Now what?” Reba asked.
“We search,” Gunnar said. He checked his watch. “We still have over an hour of safe time. If we go to high-speed, and skim through this thing as fast as we can, just maybe we’ll find what we’re looking for and still have time to make it out alive.”
Eliza stepped forward and raised her hand. “May I make a suggestion? My sources tell me that Franklin Curtis is the ultimate method writer.”
“We’ve heard that,” Reba noted.
Eliza nodded. “I believe what this means is, he writes a book by creating a virtual reality scenario of the setting. Then he plays the book until he figures out where the story is. So if we just discard everything that isn’t a VR scenario…”
“Ah,” Gunnar said, “we might be able to cut this mess down to manageable size.”
“But where do we start?” I asked.
Reba unslung her rifle, picked an arbitrary direction, and pointed. “That one.” Following her lead, we stepped through the door.
*shimmerCLICK!*
Reba staggered back and stared at the lever-action Winchester that had suddenly taken the place of her automatic rifle. “What the hell?”
21: THE ASSAULT, PART II
I looked away from Reba—who, I couldn’t help but noticing, was now wearing a fringed buckskin jacket in place of her former green camouflage flak vest—and took in our new surroundings. We were in some kind of old Western ghost town scenario, clearly. Overhead, a blazing midday sun beat down mercilessly, while in the dusty empty street before us, tumbleweeds, lizards, and rattlesnakes played leapfrog. Somewhere nearby, a loose door with rusty hinges groaned and clattered as it turned in the hot, fitful breeze, and the wind through the empty wooden buildings howled mournfully like a whole quorum of depressed coyotes.
“Damn,” Eliza muttered. I turned to her. She was overdressed in lace and petticoats, like Miss Kitty, or maybe Miss Piggy. She was also obviously very nervous.
“Damn is right,” Reba added. “Look at this!” She gave the rifle a backhanded slap. “An 1894 Winchester with a color case-hardened receiver and a brass loading gate! Winchester didn’t even start making this variation until 1964—”
“Shut up,” Eliza said.
Reba didn’t. “And look at this!” She drew the six-shooter from the holster on her right hip and waved it around as if to show us something. “The 1896 cylinder frame! My kid sister could have done a better job researching the historical—”
“SHUT UP!” Eliza suggested. Reba shut up.
A moment of silence.
“Er, excuse me,” Gunnar said. “Where are we?”
“In CowboyLand,” Eliza said, as she scanned the second story windows of the empty buildings. “Curtis’ first big commercial success. It’s the one about the Old West theme park where the robots go nuts and kill all the tourists. We’re the tourists.”
Gunnar’s smile vanished. “Oh.” His eyes went very wide, and he loosened his six-shooter in its holster and joined Eliza in scanning the buildings. The broken-out windows stared back at us like the empty eye sockets of dried-out skulls.
Reba checked to make sure her rifle was loaded, then backed around to cover our rear. “Eliza?” she asked. “Would you mind telling us what exactly we’re looking for?”
“We’re superusers, remember? And this isn’t the book we want. So we’re looking for the door out of here.”
“Oh, look,” Gunnar said, pointing. “Isn’t that—?”
The android gunfighter kicked open the saloon doors, strode quickly out to the center of the dusty street, and pivoted to face Gunnar. His eyes glittered like metal buttons. His voice was a low rasp. “Draw, varmint.” His right hand hovered over his holstered six-shooter.
“Fuck you,” Reba muttered as she blew the android’s head off with her rifle and put two more rounds through its chest for good measure. The thing collapsed with a sound like a falling plastic trash bag full of empty tin cans.
“There!” Eliza shouted, pointing at a glowing rectangle on the side of the livery stable. “The door!” As one, we turned and ran for it. More guns opened up on us then, from the second-floor windows and the roof of the hotel. Bullets pinged in the dust by our feet and ricochets whined into the distance.
“You know,” Reba shouted to Gunnar as we ran, “the .30-30 isn’t such a wimpy round after all!” She stroked the Winchester and grinned at Gunnar. “We’ll have to get us a matched pair of these when we get back!” We hit the doorway and—
*shimmerCLICK!*
We were in a shopping mall. Correction. We were in an amusement park in the atrium of the biggest goddam shopping mall you ever saw. I’ve seen towns that were smaller than this mall. And yet, there was something strange and unearthly about it…
“Daddy?” Eliza whimpered. “I’m scared.” I turned and glanced at her, and did a double take. Eliza looked to be about twelve years old here, and she was dressed like a junior-high grunge rocker wanna-be. She also looked oddly tall, which puzzled me until I looked at myself and realized I was about eight years old.
“Don’t worry, honey,” Gunnar said, with a calm maturity in his voice that was completely belied by his darting eyes and facial tics. “We’re going to be all right.” He stole a glance at Reba, who was clearly our mother figure in this scenario. “You read this one?”
“Yes.” She shuddered, grasped his hand convulsively, and watched nervously in the other direction. “Mesozoic Mall. An average American suburban family on vacation drives their minivan through a dimensional doorway into an alternate timeline, and ends up in a world where dinosaurs didn’t die out. We’re trapped here with no fossil fuels, no petrochemical plastics, no nylon pantyhose, and what’s worse—”
Gunnar touched a finger to her lips. “Shh. You’ll scare tihe kids.”
“Daddy?” I said. My voice was an adenoidal whine. “I saw something move over there.” I pointed at a clump of painted canvas shrubbery.
“Where?” Gunnar whispered to me.
“Here, chump,” the creature said as it stepped into clear view. Gunnar drew a sharp breath and grabbed for the pistol in the holster that wasn’t there. Reba went tight and tried to hide Eliza behind her.
The creature was impressive, in a frightening way. Powerfully built, at least seven feet tall, and covered with a bright, scaly, green hide and at least fifty pounds of gold chains. Its long tail twitched like a taut steel whip, its pants hung well off its birdlike hips at the side and almost down to its ankles at the crotch, its baseball cap was on sideways, and its baggy, multihued starter jacket bore the trademarked logo of the San Jose Plesiosaurs.
“Omigod,” Gunnar gasped, his face ashen. “A VelociRapper!”
“Easy,” Reba muttered as she smiled through clenched teeth and rooted through her purse. “Remember the book. They attack in packs, and it’s not the one you see that’s the threat, it’s—”
In a flash she pulled a can of pepper spray from her purse and nailed the bush to Eliza’s right. “—that one!” A second VelociRapper fell out of the cheesy artificial shrubbery, sneezing hysterically and clawing at its eyes, and Reba seized the opportunity to squirt the first one.
“The doorway!” Eliza shrieked, pointing at a glowing rectangle on the side of the giant inflatable figure of Mickey Megasaur. We dashed for the door just a snapping jaw ahead of the furious pursuit and dove through headfirst into—
*shimmerCLICK!*
The dominatrix stepped back, coiled her cat o’ nine tails, and put her hands on her hips. If her black corset was laced any lighter it would have needed a Caution: Contents Under Pressure warning. As it was, I was amazed her red stiletto heels didn’t stick in the floor when she walked.
“Well, well,” she said, shaking her head and tossing her long, blond, curly hair, “a foursome. I suppose we can fit you in, but I’ve got to warn you, this is going to cost extra.”
Gunnar’s jaw dropped. Eliza stared. “I think we found Curtis’ private playroom,” I whispered to Reba.
“Nah,” she said, shaking her head. “This is just his first novel, Hot Sluts In Black Leather. He doesn’t usually list it on his curriculum vitae.”
“Oh,” I said.
“Well?” the dominatrix asked, emphasizing the question with a flick of her whip.
“Sorry, Mistress Ayeisha,” Reba said to her. “We came in here by accident. So if you’d just show us the door—”
Ayeisha clapped her gloved hands together. “Mongo!” The door appeared in one wall as a lumbering hulk appeared from the opposite corner. We dashed for the glowing rectangle.
“Mistress Ayeisha?” Gunnar demanded as we dodged around Mongo. “You know this place?”
“Later, darling,” Reba said. We dove through the door—
*shimmerCLICK!*
We were in a generic lab: lots of rack-mounted gear, lots of flashing lights, no windows. Under a plexiglas dome in the middle of the room there sat this weird thing that resembled nothing so much as that gadget they have in sporting goods stores to measure your hand for the right size bowling ball.
“Oh, bugger,” Eliza said. “We’re in Artifact. Yet another formulaic potboiler about a bunch of neurotic scientists in a remote and secret government lab—I forget, are we under the ocean or under the desert in this one?”
“On top of a mountain, I think,” Reba said.
Gunnar walked over and laid his hands on the plexiglass dome. “And this, I take it, is the artifact?”
“Careful,” Eliza said. “That is an Alien Device Of Immense Power. It makes whatever you wish for come true.”
Reba spoke up. “In the book, it takes them four hundred pages and ten deaths before they think of wishing it would just go away.”
“I am wishing for a door,” Gunnar said.
“And there it is,” Eliza pointed out.
“My, that was easy,” Gunnar said with a smug smile. We filed through the portal—
*shimmerCLICK!*
The sun was hot. The sea rolled in low swells. I sat in the fighting chair on the after-deck of the fishing boat. The fishing pole in my hand was good.
Eliza brought me a cold beer. Her Spanish dress was low in front. The sweat made beads on her tan skin. She said nothing. That was good. I like it when the women say nothing.
Gunnar stood at the helm of the boat. He kept it on course with small turns of the wheel. The motors muttered in low voices. “Max?” Gunnar asked. “Is it good that we are fishing?”
“Yes, Gunnar,” I said. “It is good.”
“Well it’s driving me crazy!” Reba screamed from inside the cabin. “Can you at least use complex sentences once in a while?”
“No,” I said.
“We cannot,” Gunnar agreed. “A cadre of renegade gay naval officers have seized a Trident submarine. They are going to nuke Boston. It is up to us to stop them.”
“This is manly work,” I said. “It is good.”
“It is The Hunt for Pink November,” Gunnar said.
“And this is the freakin’ door! I’m out of here!” Reba opened a hatch below the waterline.
“This is not good,” I said. The water rushed in. Eliza brought me another beer. She broke the bottle over my head.
*shimmerCLICK!*
When I snapped out of it, we were on board a small submarine with too many windows, cruising through some really strange and twisted pink caverns. “Welcome to Thoracic Park,” Gunnar said. “Remember this one? The theme park where people get shrunk to microbe size and injected into Keith Richards’ vena cava? Of course, we’re just minutes away from Something Going Wrong.”
I sat up, brushed the bits of broken brown bottle glass out of my hair, and staggered over to a window. “So why are we still here?” Already, in the distance, I could see the lymphocytes gathering to attack.
“‘Cause Curtis is tricky. This sled—” Gunnar slapped a hull rib “—is just lousy with glowing rectangles. Reba and Eliza are having a bitch of a time finding the right one.”
I turned away from the window, back to Gunnar. “And what is Curtis’ problem with theme parks, anyway? Cowboy Land. Mesozoic Mall. Thoracic Park. Did he have a childhood trauma in Disneyland or something?” Gunnar shrugged.
“Found it!” Eliza ca
lled out from below decks.
“And just in time!” Reba called out as she scampered down from the navigation dome. “Incoming!” The first lymphocyte slammed into the ship with an impact that buckled seams and popped rivets. We fought our way through the exploding pyrotechnics and jetting streams of straw-colored plasma to jump feet-first through the doorway and into—
*shimmerCLICK!*
“Ah,” Gunnar said, “this is more like it!” He caressed the heavy double-barreled rifle in his arms and scanned the dense, steamy, jungle foliage, searching for something to kill. “A .505 Gibbs! This baby will drop a charging rhino in its tracks!”
Eliza backed into us, her eyes nervously scanning the trees. “How is it on tyrannosaurs?” she whispered.
Gunnar went into literal mode again. “I don’t know. With careful shot placement, I suppose—” He did a double take. “Did you say tyrannosaurs?”
“This is the sequel to Mesozoic Mall,” Eliza said, “Big Scary Monsters With Sharp Teeth. Yeah, I said tyrannosaurs.”
Gunnar thought it over a bit, then brightened right up. “Okay everybody!” he called out. “Important tip! If we run into a tyrannosaur, aim for the hip. A predator can still live long enough to kill you after you puncture its brain or its heart, but even T-Rex can’t chase you with a broken pelvis!”
“Thank you for that information,” Eliza hissed. “And thanks also for letting every creature within earshot know exactly where we are.” As if on cue, something huge let out a blood-curdling roar about a hundred yards off to our left and started crashing through the jungle toward us.
“Oops,” Gunnar said.
“Found it!” Reba called out, some distance ahead of us.
Gunnar put the rifle to his shoulder and pointed it in the direction of the roaring. “You two go on ahead,” he said to me and Eliza. “I’ll catch up with you in a minute.”
“Okay,” Eliza said. She took off like she had wheels.
“Gunnar?” I said. “I don’t think this is a good idea.”