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by Lee Goldberg

He began to wonder if his erection would ever go away. It was painful and uncomfortable, but it could make him a real babe magnet at the Beyondcon. He was pondering that possibility, when the landing party returned from Thrifty Mart with potato chips, beer, cheese whiz, and some plastic rings.

  Now his plight became a pleasant way to pass the time in the back yard until their next mission.

  He looked down to see that Bev succeeded in landing three rings on his bulge. He was impressed with her aim and his size.

  "Congratulations," Thrack said. "You win. Anyone up for some baseball?"

  Before the others could answer, Captain Pierce stormed out of the house, a rolled up Daily Variety gripped in his hand. "Red alert!"

  His crew quickly lined up in a row, side by side, for his inspection.

  The Captain couldn't help but look at Thrack's most prominent feature, which now sported three plastic rings. "It's bad enough it's still there, do you have to decorate it?"

  He turned his back on Thrack, who quickly slid the rings off. The Captain stepped up to Artie and slapped his chest with the Variety. "The aliens have found another impersonator for me. Destroy him."

  "I've developed a powerful new weapon," Artie said. "I'm dying to give it a test."

  "Make it so," the Captain said.

  * * * * * *

  McGarrett lay beside Charlie Willis' recliner, barking in his sleep and passing gas.

  It was Charlie's fault. For lunch, he roasted a couple hot-dogs on the Grill-Master out back, piled them high with relish, onions and mustard, and gave one of them to McGarrett, then let the dog wash it down with a light beer.

  Charlie figured the dog only had a couple good years left, he ought to have the things he enjoyed, even if it meant some foul air. He lifted his t-shirt up over his nose and thought about what happened yesterday at Pinnacle City.

  The hot dog and a couple painkillers didn't make things any clearer.

  Could he be certain it was Clive Odett's Hummer that he saw? After all, he didn't actually see Odett in the car. Charlie called Lou, who checked with Odett's office. According to Odett's personal assistant, the super-agent wasn't at Pinnacle City yesterday, he was away on a religious retreat. Since no one reported him missing, there was nothing the police could do.

  Maybe the carjacking incident had nothing to do with Clive Odett or the Beyond the Beyond killings. Or maybe it did. It was all a confusing muddle.

  But now he didn't have to figure it out. The bad guys, whoever they were, would step right up and introduce themselves.

  His portable phone rang. He snatched it up and said hello.

  "One minute you're managing a storage unit and the next thing you know, you're a TV star," Alison Sweeney said. "See what a kiss from me can do?"

  It suddenly hit him that in the chaos of the last 24 hours, he forgot to call her. He felt terrible.

  "I'm sorry you had to read about it," he said, pacing in front of the window. "I should have called you."

  "It's okay, I know how busy you stars can be."

  "I have no intention of sticking with the show," he said. "I'm setting myself up as the target so the next time the killers strike, no one else will get hurt."

  "Except you."

  "Don't knock it, it was your idea," he joked, trying to lighten things up. He failed.

  "Don't you dare make me responsible for this," she snapped. "It's a stupid plan. And if you had called me, I would have done everything I could to make sure it didn't happen."

  She hung up.

  Charlie tossed the phone on the recliner. She had a point. Maybe that was the real reason he hadn't called her.

  He glanced out the window and saw a guy standing on the sidewalk in an orange, polyester uniform, a tank strapped to his back, holding some kind of hose in his gloved hands. At first, Charlie thought it was the exterminator. But he didn't call one, and something wasn't right about this guy.

  So Charlie stepped closer to the window and squinted at him. The guy turned towards the building, and that's when Charlie saw his hairy, pointed ear and dead, yellow eye. And that's also when he noticed the thing the guy was holding looked a lot like...

  ...a flamethrower.

  Charlie dived to the floor the same instant the stream of fire smashed through the front window and splashed against the recliner, setting it aflame and melting the phone.

  McGarrett dashed out the open back door, head and tail hung low, fur smoking, passing gas the whole way.

  Charlie tipped over the coffee table and, using it as a shield, peered out the window to get a better look at crazy son of a bitch who was trying to kill him.

  The assassin, disguised like some kind of hell horse, marched toward the window, spraying the room with fire, washing everything down with flames.

  The hell horse spotted Charlie and blasted the coffee table, turning it into fireball. Charlie scrambled back, everything around him on fire, the hair on his arms singed off.

  He crawled out the back door, the flames licking at him. Safely outside, he slumped against his Grill-Master, gasping for breath, finding it all very hard to believe. Thirty seconds ago he was just sitting in his recliner, listening to his dog fart. It never occurred to him that someone might come after him with a flame-thrower.

  He had to think fast. The entire apartment was engulfed in flames, and in two seconds the killer was going to come back here after him.

  Charlie looked around. There was no place to hide. All the storage units were locked.

  There was also no place to run. The fences around the property were ringed with razor wire. If he tried to climb them, he'd snag himself for sure.

  He was trapped.

  Then he realized what he was leaning against. His eyes fell on the Grill-Master's propane tank and he smiled.

  * * * * * *

  When Artie first saw Canoga Stor-All, he was certain he had the wrong address. Again. But Bev Huncke, a former postal worker who now worked at the Department of Motor Vehicles, gave him the address and even got him a picture of his target.

  He was pretty certain the guy he saw running out the back door, his ass on fire, was Charlie Willis. Even if it wasn't, Artie was having way too much fun to give a shit. His homemade flame thrower was better than anything Chief Engineer Glerp ever came up with. Artie couldn't wait to try this sucker out on a gas station somewhere. But first he had to toast Charlie Willis.

  And that was going to be easy, because the stupid jerk was just standing there in the open, beside a trash dumpster.

  Artie smiled. "Eat hot death."

  He squeezed the trigger, shooting a stream of fire at Charlie Willis.

  An instant before Artie exploded, he saw the hissing propane tank a few feet away from him and wondered what it was doing there.

  * * * * * *

  Charlie dived behind the dumpster, landing hard on the asphalt, the ground rocked by two strong blasts. Flaming chunks of flesh, metal, and mortar rained down all around him.

  He was still lying there, his face against the ground, when a yellow, plastic eyeball rolled under the dumpster and came to a stop against his cheek.

  ACT FOUR

  Chapter Twenty

  "Maybe you ought to let the paramedics take another look at you," said Harvey, the police artist.

  "I'm fine," Charlie sat in the back of his golf cart, holding an ice-pack to his forehead.

  Harvey sat in front of Charlie on a tiny, folding chair, a sketch pad open on his lap, staring skeptically at what he was drawing.

  Charlie glanced at the sketch.

  "The ear was more pointed," Charlie said, "and the eye looked like this."

  Charlie reached into his pocket and pulled out a scorched, plastic eye with a yellow marble rolling around inside it.

  Harvey abruptly closed the sketch book. He had enough. "Is this some kind of joke?"

  "Do you see me laughing?" Charlie said.

  Firemen were still hosing down the blackened remains of his apartment, and a dozen coroners wer
e picking up chunks of the killer off the pavement. As of now, he was homeless, jobless and pointless. There was nothing funny about it at all.

  "I'll work on it," Harvey said. "When I'm done, we can beam the picture into space and wait for word from Mars."

  The artist walked away.

  Charlie dropped the ice pack, resigned to the fact the police weren't going to do a damn thing. So Charlie considered the bright side. He and McGarrett survived. Most of his belongings were in one of the storage units, all of which came out of the blast relatively unscathed, except for a few gore-splashed and fire-scorched metal doors.

  "What the hell happened here?" Lou LeDoux staggered up to Charlie in a shocked daze.

  Charlie watched the coroners, who were dragging sacks of scorched body parts alongside them as they moved slowly and methodically over the pavement "This is what happens when someone tries to kill you with a flame thrower and you fight back with a propane tank."

  "No shit," Lou whistled.

  "Isn't that why you're here?"

  "I came to see Gharlane," Lou glanced. "He wasn't hurt, was he?"

  "He wasn't here," Charlie said.

  "What about his magazine collection?" Lou looked gravely at Charlie. "It wasn't damaged, was it?"

  "No," Charlie said.

  "That's a relief," Lou said. "Because I did that favor you asked for. I've been huddling with the lab boys and a team of anatomists at UCLA. They studied the nipple Stipe bit off, the bruises on his face, the amount of mass necessary to smother him, and did some calculations."

  Lou reached into his blue-checked jacket and pulled a snapshot from the pocket of his orange shirt. "They came up with this."

  It was a photo of a clay model of a woman's breasts.

  "The murder weapon," Lou declared proudly. "Think Gharlane can ID'em?"

  It was a ridiculous idea, but everything that was happening was so crazy anyway, it seemed to beg for craziness in response. Besides, nothing else Charlie tried seemed to be working.

  "It can't hurt to try," Charlie said.

  "Easy for you to say," Lou replied. "You don't have to explain it to my Captain."

  * * * * * *

  It would have been the perfect sexual experience, if only Zita hadn't got her hair caught in Melvah's Orgoglian mating clip.

  Writhing passionately atop Melvah, Zita tossed back her head and accidentally tore the ring out of Melvah's nostril. Melvah screamed, blood spurting all over her face.

  While Melvah went to the bathroom to stop the bleeding, Zita spent the next fifteen minutes trying to untangle the bloody ring from her hair.

  It was a real mood killer.

  Both were hoping that a little sex would soften the inevitable confrontation, that it would be a pleasurable reminder of what each of them could do for one another when they worked together. Neither one of them wanted to upset their alliance, but they each had clear, separate goals that were already beginning to clash.

  Instead, the sex had gone wrong. They were both weary, bloody, and frustrated. Not a good combination for rational discussion and compromise.

  Melvah marched out of the bathroom naked, a wet rag pressed against her nose, and stood in front of Zita who, in frustration, had started sawing off her blood-matted hair with a steak knife.

  "Eddie Planet cast Charlie Willis as Captain Pierce," Melvah said. "For that he must die."

  "I already told you, he's a potential client. He lives."

  "I'm supposed to become the producer of Beyond the Beyond," she said furiously, tossing the bloody towel aside and revealing her torn nose. "That was the deal, remember?"

  "You're are a producer," Zita said, "But if you are going to make it in this business, you're going to have to grow up."

  "What is that supposed to mean?" Melvah grabbed Zita but the jaw and jerked her head up. People were always telling her that and afterwards most of them either walked with a limp or ate through straws.

  "You're in the real world now, Melvah. If we kill Eddie Planet, another show-runner will be hired to replace him."

  "I'll replace him."

  There were many things Zita liked about Melvah. Her strong sense of self. Her devotion to her art. Her ability to kill with ease. But Melvah had no clue how the television business worked. She had to learn that Beyond the Beyond, more than anything else, was a business.

  "No, you won't," Zita took Melvah's wrist and wrenched her jaw free from her grasp. "The Company has power, but not enough to accomplish that. Neither the studio nor the network are going to give the series to someone they have never heard of, no matter how many people we blackmail, torture and kill. There's too much money at stake. You're going to wait and be satisfied with being the power behind the throne, for a while any way."

  Melvah face flushed with fury. "Eddie Planet doesn't know a thing about the universe. He's illiterate."

  Still holding Melvah's wrist, Zita gently began stroking it with the sharp edge of the knife. Just enough so Melvah could feel it, not enough to cut her.

  "I know how you feel, Melvah," Zita said softly. "Eventually, you will get the show, the same way I finally got The Company. The only reason Clive Odett is still alive is because he may have a few secrets I don't know about. But I'm being patient and methodical, just like you have to be."

  Melvah's eyelids fluttered, the stinging caress arousing her, tempering her disappointment. "All right."

  "I knew you'd understand," Zita ran the knife over the back of Melvah's hand and along each finger.

  "Charlie Willis has to go."

  "Of course he does," Zita said. "He's cost us several clients, and thanks to him, the police are asking questions about Clive's disappearance. But more importantly, we want Dustin Woods for the part."

  Melvah yanked her hand away, causing Zita to slice her. But Melvah was oblivious to the pain, to the blood dripping from her hand onto the floor. Seeing her standing there like that, naked and bleeding, skin flushed with rage, excited Zita so much it momentarily took her breath away.

  "There is only one Captain Pierce," Melvah balled her hands into fists, causing the blood to stream out of her wound, "and it's Guy Goddard."

  Zita knew she had to handle this delicately. This would be, perhaps, the hardest reality of all for Melvah to grasp. However, the fact that Melvah used the actor's name was a good sign, one that Zita took as encouragement.

  Zita dropped to her knees in front of Melvah, picked up the bloody towel and wrapped it around Melvah's hand, pressing firmly to stop the bleeding.

  "One day, Beyond the Beyond will be yours, but Guy Goddard will never, ever, be Captain Pierce again," Zita said. "I know how much you admire him, but he appeals to a very narrow, very old, demographic. If Beyond the Beyond is going succeed, if the universe is going to prosper, you have to draw in young viewers, and he won't."

  "He is Captain Pierce," Melvah whispered, her voice quivering.

  "And Captain Pierce would sacrifice himself to save the universe," Zita said. "Wouldn't he?"

  Melvah nodded, a tear rolling down her cheek. Zita pressed her face against Melvah's stomach and gently licked her navel ring.

  Melvah ran her fingers through what was left of Zita's hair and cried. She saw the future clearly. She would save Beyond the Beyond, and keep the universe alive, but it would cost Guy Goddard his life. He would kill anyone who tried to be Captain Pierce, so Zita would have to kill him.

  But Zita was right. It was the universe that mattered. And Melvah Blenis was its protector now, she had to make sacrifices.

  Right now, with Zita's tongue moving from her navel ring to one just a bit lower, the sacrifice didn't seem so hard to make.

  * * * * * *

  Charlie's new home had one bedroom, one bath, power steering, and a view of Soundstage 9.

  The decor of the Winnebego, Charlie's dressing room on the Pinnacle Studios lot, was modern American passenger jet, coach class. The cloth upholstery on everything resembled a plaid, shag carpet. The matching curtains were clos
ed over the windshield and the driver's seat was turned to face away from the dashboard, so the seat was now considered "a deluxe armchair."

  Charlie sat in the passenger seat-cum-deluxe armchair, feet up on his built-in dinette set, reading the pilot script for Beyond the Beyond and not understanding a word of it.

  He was wearing Pinnacle logo sweats and a Muck Thing t-shirt, an ensemble he bought for $45 at the studio store. The rest of his clothes, taken from the wardrobe department, were hanging in the tiny closet that separated the bedroom from the kitchen.

  The refrigerator was filled with soft drinks and sandwiches lifted from the Beyond the Beyond snack table, which was in the adjacent soundstage. The remains of his Dominos Pizza dinner were on the stove.

  The only things he brought back to his new home from his storage unit at Canoga Stor-All were his gun and, for some crazy reason, his badge. Sitting on his built-in night-stand, right beside his built-in bed, was a melted, miss-shapen lump of lucite with Esther Radcliffe's bullet in it.

  He didn't know how important that paperweight was to him until he thought he'd lost it. He spent three hours sifting through the ashes of his apartment before he found it. Somehow, the fact that it was melted by the fire only made it more valuable to him — it now immortalized two near death experiences.

  He was concentrating on his script, trying to make sense out of the Captain's line...

  "If that quantum singularity is a tachyon particle disbursement field, then it's possible the Nerglids exist in an alternate dimension in the space-time continuum!"

  ...when there was a timid knock at the door. Charlie parted the curtain and peered cautiously out the window. Alison stood outside. He opened the door and motioned her in.

  "Isn't it a little late to still be at the studio?" Charlie asked.

  "I just came back, I had an errand to run." She dropped a leash on the table. "I went by the vet and picked up McGarrett for you."

  The vet, Dr. Gaston Grospiron, was an old friend of Charlie's and offered to board McGarrett for free until Charlie found a place to live. It wasn't the first time Dr. Grospiron had come to McGarrett's aid. Several years ago, he wrote a very moving letter to the court on McGarrett's behalf. He explained that McGarrett was docile and kind, and only raped Boyd Hartnell to death because the studio exec was covered in excrement and had a head of Golden Retriever hair implanted in his scalp.