The Color of Fear td-99

by Warren Murphy

  Buffeted by the worst recession and coldest European winters in living memory, Euro Beasley underperformed with crushing losses, and Mickey Weisinger watched his stock-both personal and professional-plummet.

  "We're pulling out of Euro Beasley," he told the board of directors one chilly morning at the corporate headquarters in Vanaheim, California, pounding the conference-room table emphatically.

  "We can't! We own nearly fifty percent."

  "Not if we default. Then the banks and the French government will be left holding the bag."

  "We can't do that. It'll make the Beasley name mud."

  "I don't care about the Beasley name. I care about my name! " roared Mickey Weisinger, who, like so many CEOs in the late twentieth century, cared more about his resume than the stockholders or the business he was charged to captain.

  "If we pull out of France, we might as well surrender Europe to rival theme parks," complained Chairman Bob Beasley, the nephew of Sam and the only Beasley family member left on the board. "Already the Lego people have an outpost in Switzerland. And Banana-Berry Studios are looking at Berlin."

  "I don't care. Let Lego have Europe. We'll concentrate on Asia and South America. We're too exposed in Europe."

  "That wouldn't have happened if we'd have licensed the damn thing," a voice grumbled.

  "Who said that?"

  No one raised his hand.

  "That sounded like a vice president's voice," Mickey Weisinger said suspiciously, patrolling the room. "Which vice president?"

  No one volunteered.

  So Mickey Weisinger fired all the VPs on the spot.

  At the next meeting a flock of newly installed VPs voted to a man to pull out of France.

  Until Bob Beasley quietly objected.

  Mickey Weisinger hesitated. No one bucked Bob Beasley. He was considered all but the proxy of the dear departed spirit of Uncle Sam Beasley.

  "I think we should lay this before a higher authority," he drawled, scratching at the trademark family mustache.

  "Uncle Sam?"

  "Uncle Sam."

  Weisinger sighed. "What'll it be this time? Tarot? Ouija board? I Ching? Or do you want me to dim the lights while you try to channel him?"

  It was New Age bullcrap, Mickey Weisinger privately thought, but this was southern California, where people took their poodles to shrinks at five hundred bucks an hour and arranged their furniture according to two-thousand-year-old Chinese superstition.

  "I think we should pay Utiliduck a little visit," Bob suggested. "We have that new command-and-control wing down there. You know, the one we built in the event of thermonuclear exchange."

  Mickey scowled. "The cold war's over. The wall fell. Hell, Moscow has been faxing us feelers on a Russo Beasley project, but we'll never bite. If French winters are this rough these days, Russia's bound to be an iceberg."

  "Take a walk with me, Mickey," said Bob Beasley in his folksy voice, clapping an arm over Mickey Weisinger's broad shoulders and steering him out of the conference room.

  They took the monorail over Beasleyland, walked through the park, and for a moment Mickey Weisinger's sour mood lightened. Even he was not immune to the spell of Beasleyland under a glorious California sun. Everyone seemed to be having a great time. Except the park employees-the only slice of the American public the Sam Beasley Corporation treated with naked disdain.

  Mickey's good mood lasted until Screwball Squirrel minced up, bushy tail quivering, and stuck the cold steel muzzle of a MAC-11 into his back.

  "What the hell is this?" Mickey growled.

  "Just come along quietly, Mickey," said Bob Beasley in a new tone. One completely without respect.

  "What is this, a furschlugginer coup?"

  "Not exactly," said Beasley as Mickey was escorted to a turn-of-the-century apothecary shop on Main Street, U S.A., and into an open elevator.

  Down in Utiliduck, where the trash was processed and the rides and attractions were controlled by massive mainframes, Mickey Weisinger walked along stainless-steel corridors to the hardened wing of Utiliduck.

  A door emblazoned with the three overlapping black circles representing the silhouette of Mongo Mouse's round-eared head lifted like a dull guillotine, and he was pushed through.

  A pleasant plastic sign featuring Mongo wearing a policeman's uniform and lifting a white-gloved hand traffic-cop style greeted them. The sign said Unauthorized Persons Not Allowed Beyond This Point. Intruders Will Be Shot.

  "Isn't that a little extreme?" said Mickey Weisinger.

  "Not down here," said Bob Beasley. "You've never been to this wing, have you?"

  "No," said Mickey in a very small voice because he felt like a Brooklyn hood being taken for a ride in the trunk of a Buick.

  The room Mickey Weisinger was taken to was as warm as a steam bath. He started sweating immediately. It was a control room, he saw. Grid after grid of wall video monitors showed every cranny of Beasleyland above, including, he saw with shock, his private office.

  At the far end a man sat at a chair, punching buttons.

  "Uncle, he's here."

  "Give me a fucking minute," a grumpy voice said.

  Then the chair turned, and Mickey Weisinger found himself staring at the man whose place in the Beasley corporate structure he had usurped.

  "Uncle Sam?" he blurted.

  "You were expecting Tinker-fucking-belle?"

  It was Uncle Sam Beasley, all right. Not much older than on the day he had been buried three decades ago. His mustache was whiter, almost like hairs of frost. One eye looked glassy. The other was protected by a white eyepatch emblazoned with the corporate logo-Mongo Mouse's black silhouette. And where his right hand should be was a gauntlet of articulated steel.

  "Wait a minute, you're radio-animatronic," Mickey blurted.

  "That's right," said Uncle Sam Beasley.

  Mickey breathed a hot sigh of relief. "Whew. For a minute I thought you-you, you know-" Mickey swallowed "-were back."

  "I am."

  "This is a joke."

  "No, you're the joke."

  "Hey, I won't have a robot talk to me like that."

  "I'm not a robot, you bagel-munching moron."

  "You can't talk to me." Mickey turned to the others. "Who programmed this anti-Semitic hunk of junk?"

  Then the hunk of junk lifted itself out of his chair and walked across the room.

  Mickey Weisinger stared. He knew the science of radio-animatronics. The concepteers at the Sam Beasley R pioneered the science of freestanding radio-animatronic marionettes. They could move, after a fashion, simulate motion and voice and the semblance of life well enough to make Buccaneers of the Bahamas the most popular attraction in any and all theme parks the world over.

  But one thing they had never learned to do was walk.

  Mickey Weisinger felt a chill climb his spine under his three-thousand-dollar raw silk Versace suit as the thing that should not walk came striding toward him.

  "Somebody turn this thing off," Weisinger commanded.

  "You can't," said Bob Beasley in an affable voice.

  "Then shoot it."

  "I couldn't do that," Beasley said. "Not to my Uncle Sam."

  And before he could react, the thing that looked shudderingly like Uncle Sam Beasley reincarnate took Mickey's soft, fleshy hand in his steel grip and pumped it with hydraulic force.

  Through his own screaming, Mickey Weisinger heard the famous voice of Uncle Sam Beasley croak, "Aren't you going to welcome me back into the fold, Mickey my boy?"

  "Yahhh!" said Mickey Weisinger as the room turned a dull optic red before irising down into a smoldering blackness.

  WHEN HE AWOKE, Mickey Weisinger lay on his back, blinking up at the hideous face of Uncle Sam Beasley.

  "They tell me you're the fuck wit who's been running things in my absence."

  "That's true."

  "When people used to come to work for me, I would tell them straight out. You're here to promote the good name of Sam Beas
ley. If you buckle down and work your tail off for me, we'll get along fine. If not, you can haul your ass out of my office."

  "I tell my people the same thing, only more nicely."

  "You've been running my corporation like it was your private fiefdom!" Uncle Sam roared.

  "But---"

  "But it's not," Uncle Sam snapped. "It's my private fiefdom. Where do you get the nerve to run it into the ground?"

  "It's expanded wonderfully."

  "You built a fucking cold-climate theme park with my name on it. We've been hemorrhaging dollars over there."

  "Euro Beasley's turned around lately," Mickey pointed out.

  "Yes. No thanks to you. It's a good thing I escaped from that damned loony bin."

  "What damned loony bin?"

  "Never mind. I'm back and, since I was on ice when you climbed aboard the good ship Beasley, let me dispense with the usual pep talk."

  Mickey Weisinger was wondering if "on ice" meant what he thought it meant when Uncle Sam's face came up to his own and turned ferocious.

  "You work for me, asshole, and you dedicate yourself to the advancement of the name Sam Beasley. If there's any other agenda, you can leave now."

  "Can-can I think about it?"

  "Go ahead. But this isn't like the old days. You know I'm alive. Can't have it getting out. The government's trying to commit me. The only way you're leaving Sam Beasley is in a pine box."

  "This isn't the Mafia."

  "True. The Mafia is built on loyalty. There'll be none of that sentimental guinea crap here. I pay you, I own you. It's that simple."

  "Did Bob tell you about the park in Virginia?"

  "Tell me? It was my fucking idea."

  "I thought Bob came up with it."

  "My idea. He was just the mouthpiece. Old Bob's been feeding you my ideas for months now."

  "Exactly how long have you been back, Uncle Sam?"

  "Remember that time Sam Beasley World disappeared into a Florida sinkhole a couple years back?"

  "Yeah..."

  "I was around then. Then I had a little problem and had to drop out of sight for a while."

  "You've been out of sight since the sixties," Mickey pointed out.

  "There's different ways of dropping out of sight. Never mind. I'm back and I'm running the show again. You've been screwing up. First this Euro Beasley and now Beasley U S.A."

  "We have the state legislature of Virginia on our side. The governor's practically in our pocket."

  "And you got us chased out of Manassas. From now on we're digging in for a knock down, drag-out battle. We break ground on Beasley U.S.A. by next year, or I break ground on you. "

  Mickey Weisinger gulped.

  "You're going to Virginia."

  "Anything you say, Uncle Sam."

  Mickey Weisinger's teeth clashed as a steel hand patted him on top of his head with brute affection. "That's my boy. I have a plan to break all resistance to Beasley U.S.A. But I need someone to whip up local passions."

  "I'm a great corporate cheerleader. You should review the commercials I've been doing."

  "I have. You have the smile of a shark."

  "I'll get my teeth fixed."

  "Keep 'em. I need a shark for this. I want a guy out there people hate. I want you to be at your most insincere."

  "I'm not an actor."

  "Just act natural. If my plan backfires and people look ready to lynch you, I'll step in and save the project."

  "And me, too, right?"

  "If it's not inconvenient. Remember, I own you."

  "But I'm the second-highest-paid CEO ever," Mickey insisted.

  "A Beasley serf is a Beasley serf," said Uncle Sam Beasley as he clumped over to his control console and punched up different camera angles on his empire.

  Chapter 9

  Narvel Boggs never celebrated Independence Day. Never. Instead, he wore a black armband every July Fourth. What was there to celebrate when the nation into which he had been born, the late lamented Confederate States of America, had been cruelly vanquished a century before he had been born into this sorry world?

  Narvel had once celebrated Memorial Day. Proudly. Back when it was a proud Southern holiday known rightfully as Confederate Memorial Day. Then a few years back Washington federalized an obscure Yankee holiday called Decoration Day, renamed it Memorial Day and killed Confederate Memorial Day for good and longer.

  It was one of the last aftershocks of the War Between the States, and the fact that it had taken place in 1971 hadn't made it sting any less to an unreconstructed Southerner like Narvel Boggs.

  Probably no one was more unreconstructed than Narvel Boggs of Savannah, Georgia.

  As boys, some fantasized of pitching for the Braves, circling the earth as astronauts or, if their imaginations were particularly unfettered, crashing around the universe as Superman.

  Narvel's youthful fantasies had been especially unfettered. When he was eight years old, he began to imagine himself as Colonel Dixie, Scourge of the South, wearing a smart gray leotard and a cape patterned after the glorious Stars and Bars. Colonel Dixie's mission in life was to change history. Southern History.

  In his imagination Narvel Boggs had been a lowly Confederate corporal who, when the cruel tides of history threatened to swamp the grand forces of General Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia, reversed his uniform, pulled on the very colors he carried into battle and launched into action as Colonel Dixie, superhero.

  Narvel saved the day at both Manassas, Antietam and Cold Harbor. He salvaged Jeb Stuart's life with a transfusion of his own supercharged blood and, in his favorite fantasy, single-handedly stemmed the repulse of Pickett's Charge at Gettysburg, thus saving the Confederacy, which, no longer held back by Yankee foot-dragging, ultimately put an Atlanta boy on the moon in 1948.

  As he'd grown, the character of Narvel's fantasies naturally altered. It became harder and harder to sustain a Confederate victory even in daydreams when you opened your eyes and there was the cold concrete of the hateful Union. So Narvel contented himself with rescuing old Jeff Davis from his Union prison at Fort Monroe, rebuilding scorched Atlanta, flying an astonished and trembling Abraham Lincoln to odious exile in faraway Liberia and once in a while leading a twentieth-century uprising to restore the Confederacy.

  When puberty had hit, Colonel Dixie flew less and less often through the landscape of Narvel Boggs's imagination. And when he'd settled down and married Eliese Calkins, Narvel Bogg's invincible alter ego stowed away his battle-flag cape for good. A man had to raise a family, even if he didn't breathe quite free in his home state.

  Years passed as Narvel drifted from job to job. Eliese lost her easy Southern-belle smile and moved out. And of late Colonel Dixie had begun to peer out of the closet door of Narvel's interior life more and more, wondering if there was a place for him in the world. Once in a while Narvel let him fly around for an hour or so. After all, it was all transpiring inside his head. Who would know any different?

  So when the radio crackled the news that there was new Confederate skirmishing up Petersburg way, Narvel Boggs climbed down off the roof he was shingling, piled into his primer gray Plymouth Fury and lit out for a piece of the action.

  If the South was about to rise again, Narvel was going to be in the thick of it. Civil war came along only once a century, after all.

  On the drive to Petersburg, Narvel got on the CB and, using his Colonel Dixie handle, recruited some like-minded souls until a line of primer gray cars occupied an entire lane of Interstate 95 and no one dared stop him. The entourage stopped only for beer and guns and the necessary roadside piss.

  At one stop Narvel bought a Confederate uniform and flag. He put it on, tied the Stars and Bars around his collar, then turned around until the breeze sent it skimming smartly off his shoulders.

  "What are you supposed to be?" a good ole boy named Hoyt asked from around a plug of chewing tobacco.

  "Just call me Colonel Dixie," Narvel said proudly.

&n
bsp; When no one laughed, Narvel got into his Dixiomobile and sent it roaring toward Petersburg, hope in his Southern heart.

  BY THE TIME cheering pickets waved Colonel Dixie's Raiders onto the grounds of Petersburg National Battlefield, Narvel Boggs saw himself a man of destiny. Who needed superpowers when he had a cause both good and true?

  When the Crater came in sight, he put a yellow-gauntleted hand out the window and called, "Cavalrrryyy---halt!"

  The convoy of gray cars screeched and slid to a halt with only two or three crumpled fenders.

  Narvel stepped out, throwing back his Confederate cape so the wind caught it good and said, "Colonel Dixie's Raiders reporting for action."

  "You're too late," said a man in a uniform that combined the Confederate cavalry and the Virginia National Guard.

  "Who or what the hell are you?" Narvel demanded.

  The man threw a salute. "Captain Royal Wooten Page, at your service, suh. Stonewall Detachment of the Virginia National Guard."

  Narvel hesitated. Did a superhero colonel salute a lowly military captain? He decided what the hell and returned the salute.

  "Colonel Dixie, savior of the Confederacy." A freshening wind flung his cape across his face with a slap.

  "Ah fear you are a mite late with your messianic favors, Colonel. We have agreed to lay down our arms."

  "You done surrendered?"

  "We are obliged to cease all rebellious operations until such a time as the dread foe is met and sent whirling back to the lower regions from whence he came."

  "What dread foe be that?" demanded Narvel, falling easily into the speech patterns of his ancestors. After that PBS special a few years back, it had begun to catch on with the more unreconstructed among them.

  "The vile forces of Uncle Sam Beasley, naturally."

  "What about them durn Billy Yanks?"

  "It appears some form of misunderstanding has been perpetrated upon us."

  "Day-am!" said Narvel, fighting to keep his whipping cape out of his eyes. "My raiders didn't come all this way to protest that idiot theme park. We come to lift up the South and deliver it from durance vile. We come to shoot bluebellies." Colonel Dixie turned, thumped his gray chest manfully and said, "Ain't that right, boys!"