It Was Only on Stun!

by Declan Finn

  His foot shot out between the man’s legs, catching him squarely in the groin. He dropped and the other knife came out, touching his throat. “Do not touch the ears.”

  The other three looked on in amazement, startled. And then they attacked.

  The elf was a blur, slashing and whirling past them, stepping away and between the attackers, slashing at their buttons, their belts, their pants, and then their shirts.

  He came to a stop, outside of their perimeter. Then their clothes fell off.

  He smiled, nodded at them, and walked off. This time he remembered the hood.

  ***

  Sean Aloysius Patricus Ryan flowed through the hall of the Rockycreek University Sports Center, imperial in the black flowing cape of a G5 Ranger and his sunglasses. He had his batons ready, the green badge loaded with a knife, and a pistol at the small of his back. At six in the morning, almost no one was awake except for hotel staff members, and Ryan looked forward to being able to stake out his surroundings in relative peace. In twelve hours, the building would be in the chaos of a convention. As it was, the setup crews would arrive within hours.

  He thought back to one of his other assignments, where he had to provide security for one rather odd Buddhist actor with Mafia ties; he sighed. Those were the days. That was when the bad guys actually tried to kill you outright; no intrigue, no delays, just simply them versus us! And most of all, no possibility for a set piece engagement.

  Sean stepped up to the catwalk above the track floor, overlooking the “zocalo room”—a C-Con term for the vendors’ room. He grabbed the railing and leaned forward to look at the setup. He imagined the layout in his mind, imagining what it would look like a few hours from now. At the entrance ramp—a flight and a half of stairs—there was a little barricade of tables set around what would be the celebrity autograph section. The guests would be fortunate enough to be at least eighteen inches to two feet away from anyone willing to pay twenty and fifty dollars for a signature. On the other side of the ramp would be a comic art boutique, also assembled from cafeteria tables, and taking up the remaining width of the room. Directly across from the autograph area would be another stand, about the size of a small Manhattan apartment.

  It might be bigger than my apartment.

  He racked his brain for the rest of the setup—he had designed the placement of every vendor and weapon section himself, trying to maintain some semblance of organization while trying to keep the potential weapons’ cache spread out over the entire hall. He knew that at the loading dock—on the opposite end from the entrance—there was a vendor called “Warrior Woman’s Weaponry” that sold all sorts of sharp, lightweight objects that wouldn’t stand a chance against anything Sean had on him. There would be makeup stands, pewter shops, art collectors, card swappers, T-shirts, bumper stickers, novels, novelists, and the occasional stolen goods, which he expected to show up no matter how honest most of the vendors were.

  The muzzle of a weapon poked into the back of Sean’s head. Before anyone could speak, Ryan shot his arm into the air and spun at the same time. His arm knocked the weapon aside, and swept down, wrapping around the attacker's arm, and punching with the other hand. Ryan spun, hurling the man over the railing. The stranger was apparently as fast or as lucky as Ryan, because he also caught the railing.

  Sean looked down and smiled at the stranger from yesterday. “Mr. Kerikov, may I help you?”

  Eric Kerikov, the man who Sean met in the lobby, looked up at the security consultant. “I saw you walking around—you should wear a name tag or something.”

  Ryan glanced down at the catwalk, noting that Kerikov had jammed a toy phaser into his skull. “Nice try. But if I were a real threat, you’d be dead by now, yes?”

  “Yes, and if I were the threat, I would have pushed you over the railing instead of playing around. Could you pull me up, please?”

  Sean Ryan thought a moment, and decided to get him up before he was introduced to the heavier side of gravity. He reached down, noting Kerikov’s yellow “C-Con Corps of Engineers” T-shirt for the setup crew.

  “Don’t do that again, okay?”

  Sending him on his way, Waldemar Janowitz came in as Kerikov left. The older C-Con organizer wore a gray “We are vanilla, we stand between the chocolate and the strawberry” shirt, leaving his gray beard as unkempt as ever.

  Walter smiled. “What did you think of Ester?”

  A shrug. “Not sure. She told me about all sorts of odd things like… vamprotica?”

  Janowitz chuckled. “Did she tell you she invented it? She’s written stuff so dirty it’s been banned on a dozen sites. She’s essentially SF porn.”

  “Special Forces pornography?” Sean asked.

  “No, Science Fiction. Her latest e-book is about ‘the ultimate weapon,’ meant to bring down entire armies—the orgasmo gun, designed to reduce anyone to—”

  Ryan flinched and held up his hands. “Don’t finish that!”

  “But you sort of have the flavor of her work. She’s the strangest one we have, so I wouldn’t worry too much.”

  “I’m not worried about the odd guest, the even guest, or the extremely weird. I’m worried about the ones who are coming armed.”

  Janowitz shook his head, mildly disappointed. “First, everyone comes here armed. Second, the odds of someone honestly coming after Mira are so small…” He shrugged.

  Ryan removed his glasses and looked at Janowitz with the full intensity of his electric eyes. “Mr. Janowitz, should you ever think to act upon your opinion of the threat assessment, I will personally hack your law firm’s computer system into the 1800s, and you can try to be an effective advocate when you’re reduced to quill pens. Just remember, you hired me to run security because your experience stops as soon as the bullets fly. I refuse to be dictated to by those who don’t know what they’re doing—and that, my friend, would be you!”

  Sean pushed past him and stormed out the door, humming Darth Vader’s Imperial March from Star Wars, and marching to the percussive notes.

  ***

  There was no warning from above when the load fell from the catwalk onto the moving men below. It fell directly onto a mover, and the box exploded, spilling its contents all over the place. The volunteer fell to the ground, buried alive.

  Sean Ryan scowled as he jogged into the mess. He sighed. I’m a young, healthy male, early twenties, and I’m up to my knees in stuffed tribbles.

  He quickly scattered the puffed up pieces of fur with a wave of his arm and pulled up the volunteer by his shoulders, then smiled. “Mr. Kerikov, improve your reflexes. We don’t want to lose you to powder puffs.”

  The morning had been going well for several hours. The vans of merchandise had arrived just after seven, and unpacking began only a half-hour later. Had there been a hope in Hell of getting it all done by noon, he’d be thrilled. As it was, it had taken three hours just to assemble the tables of books, and the comics were three times as many boxes. Sean had been there the entire time, scanning each and every box with a metal detector wand.

  I can’t wait to hand-search each box of armaments. That is going to be a nightmare.

  He saw boxes with T-shirts like “No Sex in the Bullet Car,” and one with the G5 Shield with Paramount in crosshairs…before the Mad Russian bought them lock, stock, and phaser barrels.

  The bumper stickers were just as strange, with sayings like, “Keep honking while I reload” and “You! Out of the gene pool!”

  At noon, when the armory moved in, he watched each box carried and unpacked each one himself. Chain mail, leather armor, steel armor, metal gauntlets, and boots from the Black Riders of Lord of the Rings, swords of all qualities and weights (he peace bonded each one with unbreakable plastic ties), throwing knives, throwing stars, Klingon swords and daggers; and it just kept coming.

  Sean Ryan returned to the hotel at three in the afternoon, thanking the Lord there were hourly shuttles for Con workers to and from the hotel. Once the convention started, they w
ould be every quarter-hour, on the assumption that when some of the patrons leave at one and two in the morning, they would be in no condition to drive.

  Upon arrival at the room, he made sure to enter “his” door, lest he wind up doing something that he himself had warned his charge about. The last thing he expected to see, however, was Goran still in bed at this hour. He glanced inside to make certain that no one was waiting to booby trap him, and quickly stepped past the closet at the bathroom, in case someone could ambush him from either of those hiding places.

  If the shrinks ever got you, you’d be locked away as paranoid.

  His only consolation, in a backhanded way, was a dimly-remembered footnote from an old psych course, arguing that a paranoiac might just be a realist depending on his zip code.

  No one made any move against him, however, and he glanced around, noting Marko napping in his crib, the wastebasket filled with bottles from the minibar. Given how much each of those tiny bottles cost, he was thankful C-Con would be floating the tab.

  The bathroom door opened and Mira Nikolic came out wearing a bathrobe, her face framed by long, wet hair. “Welcome back, Sean. Productive day?”

  “’Tisn’t over yet. Might I ask what happened to…?” He nodded to Goran on the bed, pretending the bottles were nonexistent.

  Mira smiled sadly. “He hasn’t yet been able to find work as a director in this country; he also does not handle any mention of our homeland well. With that and the threat…”

  Ryan shrugged. “If I were him, I’d be tempted to drink, too. He doesn’t get rowdy when he does that, does he?”

  She shook her head gently. “Not at all. In fact, I suspect he’ll be in proper form once he wakes up.”

  “If you say so… He misses where he grew up?”

  Mira’s face took on a neutral tone before she turned away and opened a drawer. She slid on a set of underwear without taking off her bathrobe and turned back to him. “There are some aspects of Serbian culture that can be … bloody. There have been some who have praised what they call 'the brutality of the Serbian people.' ” She spared Goran a long, mournful look. “He believes it is part of him, and is ashamed and frightened, and sometimes, sort of proud of it.”

  Ryan thought a moment, trying to picture Goran as a brutal monster—hard to do when he had seen him reduced to mush when his son giggled. “Not him.”

  Mira shook her head. “His cousin, back in the old country, before the war, first shot his neighbor over some imagined slight with a fifty-caliber rifle, then decided to…to…” She struggled with the word for a moment, trying to remember an English equivalent. “Make an incision?”

  He cocked his head. “Elaborate.”

  Mira raised her index finger, tapped it against Sean’s stomach, and slid it up to his chin. “With a knife,” she explained.

  He winced. What is “To gut someone”, Alex. “And Goran thinks it genetic?”

  “Yes. He imagines Catholics as the most saintly people, primarily because of what the Serbians have done; he thinks being Catholic makes one docile and harmless.”

  Ryan grinned. “I’ll show him my rosary sometime; it doubles as brass knuckles.”

  ***

  Middle Earth’s Most Wanted Elven Assassin walked into the sports center, and was stopped at the entrance to have his quiver and arrows checked.

  The Elf had already taken steps to guarantee that he would not be unarmed. The arrows were packed so tightly within the quiver they could not be taken out, and all it took was one twist of the correct arrow to make certain that the others would come loose in a second. As for the peace bonds, they were not even an issue.

  The guard pulled on the arrows, and they would not move. The arrows were obviously made of wood, the tails made with real feathers, but they were all locked in place, as though they were one piece.

  He nodded firmly. “Thank you, sir, have a good weekend.”

  The elf smiled. “I intend to.”

  He walked into the midst of people wearing disguises. He himself wore a simple gray, hooded cloak, instead of his elven white. Few people knew of him, but some might have known what he looked like. This way, he was invisible in this strange land.

  He never could quite understand what this was supposed to be, even though he came every year. The only thing he could imagine was this was some sort of neutral haven for warring factions to meet—Wizards and Warriors met with Dragons about prisoner exchanges (Why else would they refer to dungeons and dragons?), and the mediators must have been a group called the LARP, though Elbereth only knew who they might be. He had met Stormtroopers, who he guessed were a type of armored Orcs, as well as Jedi, who seemed to be a type of proto-elves ….or they could be the Vulcan elves.

  He thought a moment and shook his head. No, these Jedi had red blood; he could tell by the color of their arteries. The Vulcan elves must have been something else.

  The Jedi could just be delusional. That’s possible. They can’t all be as sane as I.

  The elf stopped the first set of recognizable kin he could find—he knew them by their bearing, and assumed their shirts were a cover of some sort. One shirt said, “No peeing in the EVA suits” and the other: “Aliens? Call Sigourny Weaver.”

  “Pardon me, friends, but might I ask what are the creatures called Vulcans?”

  “They’re aliens, from another planet.”

  He cocked his head. “They are not from Middle Earth?”

  One of them smiled. “Nope, from a planet called Vulcan.”

  “We’re looking forward to going there one day,” another one supplemented. “Thankfully, just a few more decades and they’ll come. With any luck, they’ll have a way of having us live as long as they do.”

  The elf smiled and let them go. Maybe he had been mistaken about them being elves. They didn’t sound like elves, and the idea that elves needed a way to extend an immortal life was preposterous. He had to write that down. He had heard of aliens before—he could not mingle among these people and not hear about it. He had, however, never heard of Vulcans. He would need to look into them when he had the chance.

  ***

  The graying, 5'11” man calling himself Eric Kerikov walked through the hotel lobby, smiling at the various outfits around him. He wondered exactly how anyone would manage to get through security; he had caught a note about “peace bonds,” gun-shaped items being forbidden, and the sundry threats leveled by the C-Con booklet. There were few things in this world that scared him—convention security was not one of them.

  That Sean Ryan fellow was interesting. Eric supposed he was the one who had come up with all the rules, obviously intending to make it harder for someone to attack. As if a murderer couldn’t simply wait for a victim to go outside to get killed. That’s how a real professional would do it—and he would know. The Rockycreek campus, he had noted in years past, was an apt killing field; one sniper on the proper building could hold down an amazing number of people, if done intelligently.

  Hmm, that might be interesting to try—

  Eric ran accidentally into a woman, managing to catch her before she could hit the ground. “My apologies, miss,” he said quickly, even though he had noticed she had passed the age of “miss” a few years ago. Chronologically, she was in her sixties, but her hair was fifty, her face was forty-two, her body was thirty-eight, and the mischievous sparkle in her lovely gray-green eyes hadn’t aged. Essentially, the woman he suddenly recognized as Erin Green was a starlet of unknown age. Not even a sideshow hustler at a carnival could peg her age down to within the decade.

  “Thank you,” she said. “I was distracted by the—”

  “Costumes?” he smiled. “Ditto…you’ve been to a few conventions, right? Have you ever felt like the most normal person at these things?”

  Erin Green smiled and laughed, turning to the twenty-year-old who was her son, saying, “Did you hear what he said?”

  When she turned back, Eric had disappeared, satisfied he had at least made her laugh. I hav
e to be careful who I run into over the next few days; I don’t want to nail a celebrity by accident. Susanna might kill me.

  He gently rubbed the back of his skull, still slightly annoyed at the falling box from that morning. Who knew that a box of tribbles could be so heavy? After he loaded the boxes, he'd replaced his “C-Con Corps of Engineers” shirt with one that asked “Got Blood?”

  Noting a sudden influx at the front door, he managed to slide out before the guests trampled him. The possibility of getting whacked by a few civilians in costume was too ludicrous to imagine, but dumber things had happened—he knew a fellow professional who could fillet a cow, a fish, or a person with only a few swipes of any edged object, but he had accidentally taken himself out while cleaning his rarely-used gun.

  In front of him, trying to sneak in with the guests, were two men who seemed oddly familiar. He walked over to get a closer look, suddenly recognizing the blond man with the horn-rimmed glasses as one of two men being chased through the lobby yesterday.

  “I wouldn’t try that,” he told them. “There are law enforcement officers all over.”

  Dennis Boyle and Francis O’Riordan looked up at him suddenly. He smiled and waved at them. The two IRA men frowned and left.

  Nice to see I can still ruin someone’s day just by looking at them.

  Eric chuckled and turned back to the hotel, hoping the crowd would thin out. He came face to face with Maureen McGrail, sidestepping before he ran into her. Actresses were one thing, the law was another.

  “Were you after those two guys in the lobby the other day? I just saw them go that way.”

  McGrail nodded, glanced the way he pointed, and smiled. “Then you came to the party a wee bit late, sir, but thank you, anyway.”

  “Are they wanted for anything?”

  “Felony stupidity.”

  ***

  Sean Aloysius Patricus Ryan walked out of his bedroom, having rearmed himself for battle, once again in his Ranger uniform, enjoying the way the cape fell on him. He had played one or two superheroes as a stuntman, and didn’t mind being able to let loose with his full strength. He worked out with enough frequency to be considered a skilled athlete—a trainer once even suggesting that he try out for the Olympics.