Head Rush

by Carolyn Crane

  He tries a smile. It’s not convincing.

  “Oh, Packard.” I wipe his chest with my sleeve, but it just smears the oily slime around. “That was so stupid!” Again our eyes meet. I want to hug him and hit him all at once.

  “Sometimes stupid’s all you have.”

  “We could’ve found another way.”

  “There wasn’t another way. We were running out of time.”

  I wipe some more. “This stuff is highly toxic, you know.”

  He grips my arm, eyes soft. “I’m okay now.” But he won’t continue to be okay if he’s suddenly acting heroic. And what’s up with the severed head thing? I feel deeply frightened for him.

  He’s talking to me. “Justine?”

  “Huh?”

  He takes his shirt from my hands. “You were attacked by a Belmont-Butcher copycat, right? Who you thought was following Shelby?”

  “Yeah,” I say.

  “Are you sure he was a copycat?”

  “I never saw the real one.” I straighten, trying to focus. “This one had a big black axe, and he was a telepath. I said, You’re supposed to be the Belmont Butcher? And he didn’t object to the supposed-to-be part. And I was like, Where’s your black apron? And he said it was under his coat.”

  “That said copycat to you?”

  “Yeah,” I say. “That, and the fact that the real one is in a force-field prison for eternity. Sealed up in the back room of the Wholesale Butchery by the railroad yards.”

  “Is he? Or is he out now? Here’s the thing—this is the Slinger and that was the Butcher. I’m convinced of it. Think—who in this world would most want my severed head?”

  I see now where he’s going with this. “But, to unleash criminals to hunt you down? Otto’s struggling to keep these people locked up. Everything he does is about safety. Why would a safety-minded mayor free dangerous criminals?”

  Packard waits.

  “And, I’ll tell you how else it doesn’t add up. Somebody like the Brick Slinger or the Belmont Butcher, if they got out of their prisons, the only severed head they’d want would be Otto’s.”

  “Why?” he asks. “They don’t know Otto was keeping them in there. They don’t know he can wield force fields. They don’t even know that he’s a highcap.”

  “They know he’s the mayor. He’s the man. He was the police chief. Especially the Brick Slinger—Otto chased him down on foot and caught him, remember? That arrest was half of how he got into office. Remember the way he milked it? There’s no way the Brick Slinger would be out there doing Otto any favors.”

  Packard looks down at the supposed Brick Slinger. “Why, buddy? You’ve got the answers, don’t you?”

  Jordan and Shelby come up with duffel bags.

  “He will not have answers for two or three hours, I think,” Shelby says.

  Packard nods. “Let’s see who’s sitting in that toll booth out on I-25.”

  Jordan says, “How much time do you have?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Before you and Otto have to pick up your dad.”

  “Oh, right! It’s not until tonight. But I don’t think I want my dad coming into this. I’m going to call him, get him to pull out. If the criminals of Midcity have all gone loose, I don’t like the idea of bringing Dad into town.”

  Jordan says, “If your dad’s suddenly not coming, it could raise a few red flags.”

  “It’s not as if there’s going to be a wedding tomorrow anyway,” Packard says.

  Jordan looks at him like he’s crazy. “The minute she stops playing along, we lose our element of surprise, our access. We can’t expose Otto and prove your innocence without somebody on the inside. Not to mention free our people and get the city right again.”

  “Do we have a plan for all this?” I ask.

  “It’s multipronged,” Packard says.

  “Yes, multipronged,” Shelby says sarcastically.

  “We’ve been trying to find some weakness or damning proof that will give us leverage over Otto,” Packard says, “or some way to destroy his personal force field so he can be zinged or dream-invaded.” He turns to glare at Jordan. “We don’t need her to marry Otto to accomplish that.”

  “But it would be easier,” I say. “Right?”

  “For you to marry him?” Packard’s jaw sets hard as stone. “Hell no.” Then he straightens up, seeming to realize he needs a better reason than that. “He’s not stupid. He needs you, but eventually he’ll see through you. There’s a time to pull up stakes, and your uneasiness might be a sign that it’s now.”

  “I feel uneasy about my dad, not myself.”

  “Sometimes you don’t heed your instinct.”

  “Look, the wedding’s not happening today. I’ll keep going like everything’s normal, and investigate from the inside. I guess if I make Dad stay in his hotel room, he’ll be safe. It’s not like he’ll want to go out into the germ-infested streets anyway.”

  “He will be fine then, I think,” Shelby says.

  “That long car ride to get him. You and Otto…” Packard says.

  “It’ll be fine,” I say.

  Packard doesn’t look convinced.

  “Brides are traditionally crazy and nervous before their wedding,” I add.

  Now he looks even less convinced.

  “Can we get out of here?” Jordan asks.

  Shelby dumps the bricks out of the Brick Slinger’s wheelbarrow and wheels it over. “Load him up,” she says.

  The three of us heave the unconscious Brick Slinger into it. I avoid Packard’s gaze. I don’t want to marry Otto either, but we have to expose him, and free our friends, prove Packard’s innocence. Get the city back.

  Chapter Eleven

  Packard and I squeeze next to each other in the back seat of Shelby’s little car. It’s wonderful to be together again, doing a normalish thing like riding in a car. It might even be romantic if the burly Brick Slinger wasn’t stuffed unconscious on the other side of Packard, head lolling on the window, and if there wasn’t a duffel bag of weapons crushing my feet. And if Shelby and Jordan weren’t up front, telling me about the harrowing existence they’ve led for the past two months.

  “We have to talk,” Packard says at one point, low so only I can hear.

  I nod, reveling in the press of his thigh against mine, the heat of his breath on my hair, the feel of his thick forearm under his sleeve when I shift against him. Sometimes he catches my eye as Shelby or Jordan tell an anecdote, and we have this secret moment of enjoying each other. It’s as if we’re drawing closer together. It feels good. New, but not.

  I even enjoy the way he lowers his voice when he gives directions—still the old, imperious Packard. Like a favorite song I haven’t heard for too long.

  Of course, I keep replaying that kiss. And I’m also gratified by how tormented he seemed by the idea of my being anywhere near Otto. I suppose it’s not right to enjoy that. It’s the sort of thing an insecure girl would enjoy.

  Most of all, though, I’m feeling worried for him, due to his Brick-Slinger heroics. Out-for-himself Packard played it a lot safer than heroic-gesture Packard. When did he turn over this new leaf?

  “Toll booth two miles,” Shelby reads. Jordan scans around for radio stations, settling on a Monkees song. “Hey, Hey, We’re the Monkees”. Not at all fitting.

  It’s been over an hour since we knocked out the Brick Slinger—it took a while to wheel him and the guns out of the Tanglelands, and longer for Shelby to sneak back to her place, steal away with her car and come get us. Which means we have another hour to get the Brick Slinger into a projectile-free environment before he wakes up.

  I learn they have allies—old friends and cohorts of Packard. And there’s also bespectacled Councilperson Henry Felix, the man who’s leading the charge to bring Otto down legally. Shelby and Jordan met with him to discuss Packard’s case, but Henry Felix can’t do anything without proof. Apparently, he and his comrades, the Felix Five, feel like they’re in
danger. Shelby said he was exhausted and distressed.

  “They seemed downright paranoid, actually,” Jordan turns around to face us, resting her chin on the seat back. “Worn out. Not right. Of course, any sane person has a reason to be paranoid in the best of circumstances…”

  “Then when Carter, Helmut, and Vesuvius disappeared,” Shelby says, “was like horror movie. Then Enrique. Jay. Every time one of us goes out alone, that person does not come back. Is because of curfew—this curfew makes it much too easy for Otto to hunt disillusionists. I wonder sometimes if that is true reason for curfew. I wonder, are cannibals really out there? But this—you will be surprised”—Shelby points at me—“last week, we had most interesting interaction with Sophia. She could not talk at that time, but she said that she wanted meeting with us.”

  “Sophia?”

  “We think she was going to defect,” Packard says. “She had something important to tell us.”

  “Sophia? Defecting?”

  Packard says, “Sophia loves getting behind a vision, working with powerful people. And she loves having a reason to ply her craft, but she’s not without morals.”

  I snort.

  “Even she has her limits. Maybe revising you pushed those limits, or maybe it was something else; Lord knows what kind of revisions Otto’s been having her do. Deep down, she wants to do the right thing. We thought she might help us expose Otto, but she never showed up. And we can’t find her.”

  “Otto said she was on vacation.”

  “I’m guessing it’s not any kind of vacation I’d want to take,” Jordan says grimly.

  There’s a long silence. We pass another sign announcing the toll booths. Over on the other side of Packard, the Brick Slinger drools onto his coat.

  “After that,” Jordan continues, “well, we thought maybe we could get some kind of intelligence down on the seventh floor. Shelby drew the short stick for that. All we got was the Fawna e-mail, though, and those guns. The Brick Slinger wasn’t the only telekinetic attack.”

  Shelby slows the car as we near the knot of traffic around the toll booth area.

  Jordan says, “We’re looking for a bearded man in the far toll booth? That’s the thinking?”

  “Yes,” Packard says.

  We come around the bend, and there it is. The row of booths, some automated, some designed for people. And one booth is empty. The far booth. That’s where he was. In fact, there are no bearded men in any of the booths. We’re silent as Shelby maneuvers into one of the open lanes.

  “You’re sure it was this toll area?” Jordan finally asks.

  “Absolutely,” I say. “Otto’s talked about it.”

  “He was here,” Packard says. “It was a poorly kept secret.”

  Shelby frowns in the rearview mirror. “So this is the real Brick Slinger.”

  After we pay our money and come out the other side, we loop back across town to check the Wholesale Butchery. There’s no Belmont Butcher inside. Up on Highway 390, the weigh station monitor’s booth is empty too—Jordan remembered she was assigned to disillusion a short-term prognosticator in there, before everything went to hell.

  So Otto’s let out all the violent highcaps. Set them on Packard. I sigh. Otto’s unattackable, and he’s holding our friends as insurance, so he’s double unattackable. And the city loves him.

  “We’ll find them,” Packard says.

  It doesn’t seem very likely. Otto has everything buttoned up, including me—he stole a day of my life and it altered everything for months. I sit back, feeling angry and hopeless.

  The way Packard glances at me just then, I know he gets it. It has nothing to do with his highcap powers and everything to do with us, and how we’ve always been attuned. It’s here, in this silent sharing, rather than the kiss or the torment or any of the fireworks, where I feel like we truly click into place. Packard speaks low, almost a whisper. “We’ll get our lives back. We’ll get it all back. I promise.”

  “We’d better,” I say.

  “Hey,” Jordan twists around. “Think one of you can hop to and see if the Slinger’s got a phone on him?”

  “I checked,” Packard says. “Just some cash.”

  “Hold on!” I pull out my phone. “I can’t believe I forgot about this! I might have clues…” I flip through to find the list-like document while I tell them how I snuck into Otto’s office, and that I suspect he’s using Vindalese for writing secret documents. Packard scolds me for sneaking around like that.

  I give him a look. “I’m the girl on the inside, Packard.”

  We examine the photos, and one of the docs, in addition to the cramped rows of squiggles and shapes that form the Vindalese alphabet, you can make out a few numbers mixed in, including 390, suggesting Highway 390.

  “E-mail it to me and I’ll enlarge it on my tablet,” says Jordan.

  “Hell no,” Packard says. “No transmission.” Jordan ends up passing the tablet back, and Packard painstakingly types Vindalese letters into an online translator. It’s not easy to make out Otto’s circles and squiggles, and a lot of the words Packard types come up as nonsense, but one item seems extra promising—it has five hash marks by it, and five of our disillusionist friends are missing, so we go at it hard. We finally get something: “tan foolishness happy house”. We rack our brains for a tan house that would be significant to Otto. Finally, Shelby puts it together—a fun house—the ruins of the fun house on the abandoned fairgrounds at Tandy Folly.

  Tandy Folly is north of the city, on a bluff overlooking the old port. We use one of Avery’s pin darts to knock out a security guard, and then Packard and Shelby and I crawl under the chain-link fence and head in on foot, leaving Jordan in the car to watch the Brick Slinger.

  It’s like skulking through the lunatic version of a ghost town—all giant, peeling clown faces and weathered stripes on every flat surface. Once-bright shacks that housed crazy-making games sit broken and shuttered. We head around a garbage-strewn bumper-car pit and past a toppled ferris wheel, which is surrounded by a confetti of mirror shards.

  The wind off the lake is strong up here. Things creak. Bright wrappers blow back and forth—the fairground version of tumbleweeds.

  Up ahead stands the fun house, which you enter through a clown’s smiling mouth.

  “I would kill myself if I was prisoner here,” Shelby says.

  “No, you wouldn’t, just out of courtesy,” I say, “because your body would be trapped in there after you die, and your friends would have to watch your corpse rot.”

  “Hmm,” Shelby says. “Smell it too.”

  “Well, now we’re looking on the bright side,” Packard says. We draw near. A loose shutter bangs. “I’m thinking we can walk right in there,” he says.

  “Me too,” I say.

  We’re both thinking Otto probably created a force field that holds our friends in, but doesn’t keep others out. It’s the sort of force field he created around Packard when he had him imprisoned in the restaurant—the public could pass in and out, but not Packard. It’s the easiest on Otto—it doesn’t take as much power to maintain, and it’s the most convenient for food deliveries. Only the really dangerous highcaps get isolated inside impenetrable force fields.

  We cross a wide, wooden plank over a dried-up moat.

  “Hello?” Packard calls. A face appears at a window above. Dark hair. Beard. It’s Helmut! He pounds on the glass, and looks like he’s yelling sort of maniacally. Which is quite unlike him. His yells can’t be heard, and he’ll never break that glass, but he keeps on, pounding and yelling; I’m reminded, horribly, of a gorilla I once saw at a zoo, enclosed in a Plexiglas cage. Kids would taunt him, and he’d pound on the glass and roar. What’s going on with him? Helmut’s disillusionist power is worry, not rage. Rage is Carter.

  Packard pushes open the door.

  “Oh boy. Visitors.” Vesuvius stands there in the dark.

  I go in after Packard. It takes a while for my eyes to get used to the darkness; when they do,
I see Packard pulling Vesuvius into a bear hug. “So good to see you! So goddamned good,” Packard says. “You’re okay?”

  “Well, Helmut hasn’t killed any of us—yet,” Vesuvius says.

  “What’s wrong with Helmut?” I ask.

  “He and Carter have been zinging each other,” Vesuvius says. “Carter’s not being himself either.”

  Just then Carter comes out looking haunted. “This is terrible,” he says. “We can’t last.”

  Helmut and Jay barrel down the crazy staircase, shouts of greeting. Helmut’s usually robust, opera-singer physique has diminished, and his dark beard, always so short and precise, looks as if it’s been trimmed by dull scissors.

  “Are you getting us out of here?” Jay asks. “Tell me you are!”

  “Sorry,” Shelby says, staring into a wavy mirror.

  Enrique emerges from a door shaped like a mushroom and saunters up behind Shelby. “Somebody smashes that thing every day, and every day it repairs itself. This place is evil.”

  Shelby turns. “Oh, Rico Suave.” She hugs him.

  “They send the food in on a fucking trolley,” Helmut bites out. “And we’ve been having to zing each other.”

  Carter glares at me. “What’re you doing here?”

  “Helping,” I say.

  Packard catches Carter’s arm. “We wouldn’t have found you without her,” he says.

  Wearily, Vesuvius rolls his eyes. Ennui. Did he and Enrique zing each other? I can only imagine what it’s been like for the five of them in here—they’re disillusionists because of a crazy surplus of obsessions and emotions, and they’ve been zinging each other? Like five bees, stinging each other? The fun house surroundings take on a horrible new dimension.

  Shelby and I fill the other guys in on what’s been happening, and we start making a list of things to bring them, beyond the survival provisions they’re getting. It’s good that we’ve found them, but knowing where a person is and getting him out are, of course, two very different things.