Stan and Burt just looked worried.
“Wolfgang,” she said, moving toward our guest. “It is always a pleasure to see you again.
Then Lady Luck bowed slightly in a show of respect, which flat stunned me. Laverne was one of the most powerful gods there was in all the deities. She didn’t bow to anyone I knew of.
At least until now.
Wolfgang bowed slightly in the same way to Laverne as he had done to Patty. “It is also good to see you,” he said, his voice clear even though it sounded more like someone was taking sandpaper to the large wooden meeting table in the room.
Laverne got right to the point. “Am I to understand that the Fuzzy-Wuzzys are coming back?”
“They are,” Wolfgang said, his head never stopping for an instant.
“How long until they reach this plane of existence?” Laverne asked.
“They will become clear to you in five hours, and to the rest of the human race in two days; just under forty-nine of your hours. If they cannot be stopped before that point, I fear for the human race.”
I glanced at my watch. It was just past eleven in the evening. So they would appear to humans in two days at midnight. Whatever they were. And Laverne would be able to see them coming in five hours.
And I assumed something called a Fuzzy-Wuzzy appearing suddenly to humans was a bad thing from the way everyone was acting and talking. But at this point I didn’t have a clue why or how we were all going to die.
And I also didn’t know where they were appearing from exactly. Laverne and Wolfgang sure seemed to think all this was serious. For the moment, since Laverne was the big boss, that was good enough for me.
“Are there other Searchlights involved?” Laverne asked.
“We all are,” Wolfgang Sucker said. “At the moment they are contacting all the other deities, and a delegation has been sent to the Fates. We have little time.”
Now I really wanted to know why this guy came to me first.
Laverne nodded. “I assume this is a worldwide attack this time?”
“It is,” Wolfgang said. “They are stronger and are coming in more numbers than before. They will not be easily tricked or defeated this time.”
“Humanity barely survived the last time,” Laverne said, shaking her head.
Now that didn’t sound good at all.
Patty took my hand and squeezed it.
“And why are you here?” Laverne asked. “Is this an attack point?”
“Yes, they are opening a portal just in front of this building. One of a thousand such portals around the world.”
“A thousand?” Laverne asked softly, more to herself than to Wolfgang.
He said nothing.
Laverne again bowed slightly to Wolfgang Sucker. “Thank you and your people for the warning and the help in this coming fight. As always, it is appreciated.”
“Unless I am needed before, I will come back to this room in twelve hours,” he said, returning the bow.
Then he vanished.
“Damn,” Laverne said, turning to the rest of us shaking her head. “I worried about this day coming again. I just hoped it never would.”
Now the silence in the large meeting room felt like a huge weight just pressing down on everything.
“Stan,” Laverne said, “please explain to Poker Boy and his team what’s happening.”
Then she and Burt vanished.
Stan moved over to the table and sat down hard.
Seeing the God of Poker completely shaken and hearing Lady Luck herself actually swear wasn’t a good sign.
Not good at all.
THREE
Patty and I went around the big table and sat facing Stan. Patty kept her hand in mine and I liked that. Together we were a lot stronger than we were apart. And from the sounds of whatever we were fighting, we were going to need all the strength we could muster.
I wanted to ask Stan about a thousand questions starting off with why something that could destroy mankind was called a “Fuzzy-Wuzzy” and why, if this Searchlight guy wanted to talk to Laverne, did he come to me first, but I decided to just wait. It sounded like these blue guys were a lot older than some silly children’s rhyme and more than likely had some ritual they had to follow.
Both Screamer and The Smoke came through the door two minutes later, for a moment letting in the loud sounds from the hallway and casino before closing the door.
Screamer was a superhero as well and his main power was the ability to connect minds of people and put images in people’s heads. He got his name from a time when the police asked him to get the location of a buried-alive woman from a killer’s mind. He made the guy scream and the nickname stuck.
The Smoke is a superhero working for the animal deities. He’s actually a werewolf of sorts, with complete control of which form he is in, and he can go through walls with ease. That’s a nifty trick that has come in handy a few times since he became part of our team.
“So what are we in for this time?” Screamer asked dropping into one of the soft leather chairs and smiling.
Then he noticed that Patty and I and Stan were all looking very upset.
“I fear this is no good,” The Smoke said, moving around and standing off to my right near the wall. The Smoke liked to stand, and only sat when he needed to.
Stan nodded and took a deep breath. “It’s bad and everyone is working on this. The Fuzzy-Wuzzys are coming back.”
“Oh, no,” The Smoke said, coming over and also dropping into a chair beside me.
It seemed clear that he knew what the Fuzzy-Wuzzys were. Screamer just looked as puzzled as I felt.
“Okay,” I said to Stan. “Time to tell us what these things are.”
“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 re
cover.”
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 lose 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.
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 wished 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.”
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