by Peter David
He had been right in his assumption, though: There were very few guests left, which made sense because of the late hour. Those who were there seemed to be in the process of leaving.
Carly was not one of the ones who had departed or were heading home.
He found her on a patio that was the size of a football field, laughing as if she had just heard the funniest joke in the world. And who was the one who had told that joke? Why, Dylan Gould, of course. Dylan Gould: businessman, Renaissance man, stand-up comedian. The complete freaking package—that was him.
At that moment he had his hand on Carly’s shoulder while pouring her a glass of wine. Carly looked so stunningly gorgeous in her blue cocktail dress that it made Sam want to sob.
Their backs were to him, and as he approached, he realized that he was the topic of conversation. That prompted him to slow down a bit so he could hear just what they had to say about his favorite subject, namely, his many shortcomings.
“It’s truly a man’s greatest challenge to strike that delicate balance between love and career,” Dylan said, oozing sympathy from every pore. “If I were him, I wouldn’t let you out of my sight.”
“Things are complicated for Sam right now,” Carly said.
That’s my girl. The master of understatement. Or mistress of understatement.
Carly was still speaking. “Look, it’s late. I really should go.”
Okay, well, that’s good. At least she isn’t talking about staying over.
“I bet it would help,” Dylan suggested, “if I was able to talk to him. Sometimes it just takes a mentor, a big brother, for a boy to be a man.”
Right, right. A big brother to help with the younger brother. That worked out great for Cain and Abel.
Sam was now close enough—and annoyed enough—to make his presence known. “Yeah, funny,” he said, prompting the two of them to turn around in surprise. “I was just thinking, ‘I need some advice from that Dylan.’ ”
If Dylan was put out by Sam’s arrival, he did a splendid job of hiding it. In fact, he was actually selling the whole notion that he was pleased to see him. “Sam!” he said, spreading his arms so wide that he looked like a cheerleader shouting, Gimme a Y! “Welcome! Just the guest I was hoping to see.”
Moving forward quickly, Sam took Carly firmly by the elbow and said, “I need to talk to my girlfriend about something important. That okay with you, Mr. Inappropriate?”
“I’m your girlfriend again?” She pulled her elbow away from him, although she didn’t seem to know whether to look peeved or grateful.
“I never stopped thinking of you that way, and we really need to discuss this somewhere else.”
“You get that I’m still upset with you, right?”
He hated seeing the amusement in Dylan’s eyes. He felt like he was providing entertainment for him. To make matters worse, Dylan was still trying to sound conciliatory. “I really think I could help you, Sam. I remember a talk Dad once had with me. About making hard choices—”
“Not a good time,” Sam said. “We’ll set something up.” Then, in a voice so low that only Carly could hear, he said, “Please, you said you were leaving anyway. Leave with me. Don’t hang me out to dry with this guy. I’m begging you.”
The emotion was so raw that Carly’s expression softened to sympathy. “Fine. But we still have a lot to talk about.”
“And I swear we will. We’ll talk about it all.”
She walked alongside him, although she seemed slightly puzzled by the urgency with which he was moving. And Dylan, who apparently hadn’t tumbled to the notion that Sam didn’t want his damned advice, followed them. “ ’Course, that was way back when Dad’s firm was in charge of budget review for NASA.”
Carly had been moving quickly to keep up with Sam and so was completely thrown off stride when Sam abruptly came to a halt, nearly tripping before righting herself. She looked to Sam in confusion.
Sam felt a pounding starting in his temples. Aw, you gotta be kidding me.
“And the thing he taught me,” Dylan went on, “was this: When it’s not your war, you join the side that’s gonna win.”
They were standing at the front door, which was wide open. It gave Sam a clear view to the front yard.
Perched atop a branch in a tree, his red eyes gleaming, was Laserbeak. The Decepticon gave Sam a long, slow wink.
Sam hurriedly pushed Carly toward her Mercedes, which was parked nearer than the Datsun. Carly was aware that something had fundamentally changed—that Sam had gone from urgency to barely contained panic—but she didn’t yet understand what was going on. It wasn’t her fault. There was no way she could, and these weren’t exactly the best circumstances in which to explain it. “Get in the car,” he said hurriedly.
She jumped into the front seat, fumbling for her keys in her bag. Sam jumped into the passenger seat, and she looked at him in confusion before casting a glance at the Datsun some yards away. “What about your car?”
“I never liked it anyway! Just drive! Go!”
Dylan was standing at the front entrance of his mansion, doing a superb job of looking wounded by Sam’s determination to get out fast. “Too sudden? Too strong? Is it me?” He sighed heavily. “It could have gone the easy way, but it’s always the hard way.”
He snapped his fingers.
Carly found her keys, but the car started up before she could get them in the ignition. She looked at the keys in confusion and then at Sam.
His heart sank.
Now how did I not see that coming?
“Get out of the car!” he shouted to Carly. “Get out before it’s—”
Too late.
The car began to shift, and that familiar clanking sound that Sam found so comforting coming from the Autobots filled him with fear when he heard it now. They had no time to get clear as the car grew and changed and, seconds later, Soundwave of the Decepticons was throwing his hapless passengers onto the driveway.
Carly, on her back, stared up at him, her eyes widening in horror, beginning to grasp the immensity of what she had been thrust into. Then Sam was yanking her to her feet. “Come on! Come on!”
Deep down he knew it was hopeless, but he refused to give in to that realization. He charged down the driveway, hauling Carly behind him. She staggered and kicked off her high-heeled shoes, desperately trying to keep up with him. “That’s … that’s …” she managed to gasp out.
“Welcome to my world!”
With a steady clanking, Soundwave came right after them. He could have overtaken them with a couple of quick steps. Instead he paced them, in no hurry to catch up. Seemingly bored with the chase, though, he leaped, more than covering the distance and landing squarely in front of them in a feral crouch. Carly screamed and Sam screamed even higher, and he grabbed her by the hand and yanked her in the other direction.
They continued to run, and Dylan was just standing there, a short distance away, never having stepped away from the front of his mansion.
And suddenly Carly was no longer there. Soundwave was yanking her away and changing back into his Mercedes form. He shoved Carly into his interior, and when Sam tried to get to her, the Decepticon casually slapped him away just before he finished shifting into his alternative form.
Sam hit the ground, rolled, and came up. Then he saw a guest about to pull away in his car, an older man who was barely glancing at what was transpiring right there in front of him. Frantic, Sam ran toward him, flagging him down, yelling, “Hey, you! Help, please!” In truth, he wasn’t sure what sort of help the man could possibly provide in the face of Decepticons, but he didn’t know what else to do or say.
The older man never lost a bit of his equanimity. Instead he called to Dylan, in reference to Sam, “He’s young. He’ll learn.” He then waved, said, “Great party, as always,” and drove serenely away as if a battle with Decepticons outside a luxurious mansion were the most commonplace thing in the world.
Sam was stunned but tried to recover quickly. He
turned back toward Soundwave and caught a glimpse of Carly within, pounding at the window, trying to get out, screaming wildly. Dylan stepped between them, blocking her from Sam’s view. “Think you’re so special, Sam? So unique?” he said mockingly. “Really think you were the first man ever asked to ‘join the noble alien cause’?”
“Who are you?” At this point Sam was so overwhelmed by what he was seeing that if Dylan had suddenly broken down into component parts and changed into a giant robot himself, he wouldn’t have been the least bit surprised.
Dylan didn’t answer directly. Instead, his hands draped behind his back, he said, “You know why we haven’t returned to the moon since 1972? Because that’s the year these two”—he indicated Soundwave, who was still holding Carly captive, and Laserbeak, who seemed most amused by the whole thing—“came to my dad. Told him to do some creative accounting. Make it far too expensive to ever go back.” He tried to look as if he regretted the events he was recounting but didn’t quite succeed. “He and others shut the program down, and a lot of families got to live—and they’ve been our best client ever since.”
Sam pointed at him accusingly. “You’ve helped them kill people!”
Sounding indifferent to the accusation, Dylan replied, “You think they give you a choice?” This was clearly a man who, if he had ever felt any sort of moral outrage over the things he was doing or the position he was in, had long ago come to terms with it. “It’s not like I’m personally participating. I’m a liaison. I … liaise,” he said with a shrug. “Hostile takeover time, Sam. Alien mergers and acquisitions. Can’t coordinate ‘human operations’ without a human touch.”
Sam had heard everything he was going to listen to. He drew back his fist to hit Dylan. Gould remained unfazed, not the least bit concerned about physical threat. The reason for that immediately became clear as the bodyguards, moving so quickly that Sam didn’t even see them coming, knocked him to the ground, pinning him. Sam struggled against them, but he had no chance at all. There were four of them to one of him, but that didn’t deter him from continuing to battle back. He even managed to sink his teeth into the arm of one of them, causing the guard to howl in pain and yank his hand away, giving Sam a bit more fighting room.
Carly had been shouting, screaming his name, but suddenly the sound and pitch of the scream changed from alarm to pure terror. Inside Soundwave, the steering wheel was steadily beginning to push toward Carly. At the same time, the seat was shoving her toward it. The ultimate result was inevitable: Carly’s upper body was, gradually but inevitably, going to be crushed.
Dylan rapped on Soundwave’s hood, and he admonished the Decepticon. “Easy … careful now … she takes such good care of her skin.” He turned back to Sam. “Man, talk about your compact cars. This baby just isn’t the right fit for a family of five. The upside is, you won’t have to go to the gym to get those flat abs you’ve been dreaming about.” He gave Sam a significant look.
Sam got the message. Instantly he stopped all resistance.
In response, Soundwave promptly halted the process that would have reduced Carly’s torso to a bloody pulp.
The guard whom Sam had bit was scowling fiercely, holding a handkerchief to where he was bleeding. Dylan strolled past him and paused long enough to feign concern. “You’ll probably want to put something on that.” Then he came within a couple feet of Sam and looked down at him, smiling. “Had my eye on you for years, Sam. See, the one spy I could never provide was someone close to the Autobots.”
It must have been agony for her to draw in another breath to make her voice heard, yet Carly managed it: “He’ll never work for you!”
“No? Never?” Dylan said, feigning disappointment. “As in never never ever?”
Then she shrieked, and Sam thought he was going to die as well just from hearing the agony in her voice as Soundwave applied a bit more pressure. Sam shouted for them to stop, and once again Soundwave did so, but there was even less room than before for Carly. One more application of the unyielding pressure from Soundwave, and Sam was afraid the results would be fatal.
“That sounded to me,” said Dylan, “like the cry of a young man who would do anything, absolutely anything, to save the life of his lady love. Hmmm?” He cocked an eyebrow. “Am I close? I am, aren’t I? Here’s the thing, Sam: They will slaughter her, do you understand me? In the time that it takes you to blink. They will do it to her, then they’ll do it to me. So try to show a little more respect when someone offers you a job.”
“You …” Sam gulped. “You make it sound like we’re in the same fix or something. We’re not. Because you’re enjoying this way too much, you sick bastard. I can see it in your eyes, hear it in your voice. You would’ve wound up screwing people over, hurting them, making them do whatever you wanted even if the Decepticons had never shown up. It’s just that this way, you have an excuse. You can tell yourself that, oh well, you didn’t really have a choice. When the truth is that on your own, you’d’ve been a sadistic asshole. Now you’re just a sadistic asshole with robots.”
Dylan’s self-satisfied smile never wavered. “Sticks and stones will break her bones, Sammy. You want to roll those dice, or do you want to shut your piehole and listen up? And be grateful. Most people have to work a job twenty-five years to get a special wristwatch. Here you get yours on your first day.”
Whereupon Dylan extended his arm and his wristwatch disengaged from it. The watch leaped to the ground, flipping in the air as it did so. Four tiny legs extended from either side of the watch face, eight in all, cushioning the watch’s landing. Then it skittered across the ground straight toward Sam.
Automatically Sam started to struggle, until he was halted by Dylan’s derisive, “Ah, ah. Wouldn’t want to put lovely Carly into an even more pressing situation, would we?” Upon hearing that, Sam immediately halted his attempts to pull free. The guard holding his arm angled it toward the approaching creature. As Sam watched helplessly, it hopped onto his hand and settled upon his wrist. It probed around a little bit as if it were a cat kneading in before making itself comfortable.
As it did so, Dylan circled Sam. “You are to track down Optimus Prime, because you are the only human he trusts.”
“Track him down? How am I supposed to track him down?” Sam’s voice sounded squeaky to his own ears, breaking with fear for Carly’s life. “It’s not like I have his phone number. What do you want me to do? Shine a picture of a big truck on a passing cloud?”
“You’ll figure it out, Sam. I have confidence in you. You’re a clever lad. And once you have accomplished this goal, you will ask him this question: How does he intend to fight back? We want their tactics, strategy, everything.”
The spider watch, apparently having found the space it wanted, bit down into Sam’s wrist. Sam let out a pained cry and felt like a wimp for doing so. He wanted to be strong. He wanted to show that he could handle anything these creeps could dish out. Instead he yelped at something as relatively insignificant as a bite from a spider watch. But he couldn’t help it; it hurt like hell.
“Okay, boys, let him up.” Dylan gestured for the guards to release their hold on him and they did so. Sam got to his feet, dusting himself off and glaring at Dylan the whole time. He also fired an angry look at his brand-new jewelry.
“Got a nasty bite, doesn’t it?” Dylan said with his typical mock sympathy. “Very high tech. Lets us see what you see and hear what you hear. And it taps your nervous system. Electrical feed right to the spine. So if you so much as try to signal Optimus or any of his pals as to what’s really going on …”
At that point Sam understood why Dylan had let him up.
It was so he could fall down again as more pain than he had ever experienced lanced through his spine. It was like being tasered except, he had to believe, a hundred times worse. His arms flew wide, his legs buckled, and his mouth was open in a soundless “o” of agony. He didn’t even feel himself hitting the ground because it felt like every single molecule of his bod
y was being blown apart. Lying on the ground, he spasmed out of control and then lay there gasping as it subsided.
And Carly, ever defiant, even with her own life on the line, shouted, “Sam! Don’t do what he wants!”
Sam knew of a certainty that if it were simply his own survival at issue, that would be exactly the course of action he would follow. He would have told Dylan to forget it. He would have taken every bit of punishment that this Rolex from hell was inflicting on him and more besides before he gave up Optimus Prime and risked dealing a lethal blow to the last line of defense humanity might still have. The worst they could do was kill him. It would be a slow and excruciating death, but eventually death would come, and he would die knowing that he hadn’t let his friends down.
Perhaps sensing the depths of Sam’s resolve, Dylan knelt next to him and once again put on that “we’re in the same boat” attitude. Like a bartender offering sage advice, he said, “What can I tell you, Sam? Relationships have consequences. I’m here because of my father. She’s here because of you.”
And then he heard Carly’s scream, and he was absolutely certain that it would quickly be followed by the sound of her ribs, her spine, even her skull, snapping like a wishbone at Thanksgiving.
“No! Stop!” In his voice was more than just a protest or a plea for mercy. It was abject surrender to the terms being presented to him.
Dylan had heard what he wanted to. “Soundwave!” he said sharply and with finality.
The steering column retracted, and the seat instantly returned to its normal position. Then the door popped open, and Soundwave essentially spit Carly out. She fell onto the driveway, her arms crisscrossed around her body, alternating between sobs and trying to get her breath back.