by Greg Cox
“Up in the air, junior birdman!”
The zip line carried her high above the floor of the Warehouse at a heart-stopping speed; she wished she hadn’t been quite so conscientious about keeping the line well lubricated. Her legs dangled freely as she swung back and forth beneath the cable. The airborne descent was both terrifying and exhilarating. An adrenaline rush was more effective than any so-called energy drink. All at once, she wasn’t drowsy at all.
Just scared out of her wits.
A bird’s-eye view of the Warehouse rushed below her. She slid above towering shelves and elevated metal gantries and catwalks. A labyrinth of overstuffed aisles, vaults, and storage areas, intersecting at seemingly random angles, reminded her of just how ridiculously big and complicated the Warehouse was. Not even Myka could memorize its convoluted layout, although Claudia suspected that Myka had given it her best shot. Amidst the never-ending galleries and archives, Claudia glimpsed a squadron of Air Force bombers (salvaged with great difficulty from the Bermuda Triangle), a fully inflated zeppelin (floating over the postwar extension), a beached cruise liner, the real Rosetta stone, a larger-than-life-size fiberglass statue of Paul Bunyan, a Venetian gondola, and even a full-size replica of Leena’s Bed-and-Breakfast, complete with turret and shuttered windows. Okay, to be exact, the one in the Warehouse was the original B&B and the one outside Univille was the reproduction, but why split hairs? A Claudia-size hole in the B&B’s ceiling, left over from the last time she had (literally) dropped in, had yet to be repaired. One of these days, she really needed to take care of that. . . .
A shadow passed over her.
“What the frak?”
She glanced up quickly. For a split second she thought she glimpsed something out of the corner of her eye, soaring high above her; but when she swiveled her head to get a better look, it was gone . . . like it had never really been there at all.
Had she actually seen anything, or were her tired eyes just playing tricks on her? She was running on minimal sleep after all, and the crash helmet didn’t exactly help her peripheral vision. She blinked and shook her head to clear it. Maybe she was just starting at shadows? The Warehouse was full of odd shapes and surprises.
Although they usually weren’t quite so far up. . . .
The line slackened as she neared the desired coordinates, reminding her that she needed to concentrate on where she was going. She counted off the corridors and crossings as they zipped by underneath her. The cable sagged, dipping between a row of high shelves until it was only five or six feet above the floor.
Right, she thought. This is where I get off.
Grimacing in anticipation, she forced herself to let go of the handlebars, so that only the harness clips were holding her aloft. She grasped twin rip cords. This wasn’t going to be fun.
“On second thought, maybe I should have walked. . . .”
She pulled hard on the cords, and the pulley released the harness. Gravity took over where the zip line left off and she plummeted toward the floor. Roll into the fall, she reminded herself, just as Myka had tried to teach her, but her gymnastic skills left something to be desired. Her shoulders banged against the floor and she somersaulted head over heels down the corridor before finally landing flat on her back on the hard concrete. The crash jarred a large stuffed swordfish on a shelf above her. It teetered precariously for a second, then toppled over the edge. Her eyes widened as she saw it falling toward her, sword first.
“Yoiks!”
Sheer self-preservation came to her rescue. Moving quickly, she rolled out of the way only seconds before the piscine pike could impale her between the eyes. The fish’s freakishly sharp beak pierced the solid concrete floor instead, sending up a shower of luminous sparks, so that the trophy ended up posed upside down with its tail in the air. A handwritten tag stapled to the fish’s scaly turquoise fin identified as it as “The One That Got Away.”
That was one fish story too many as far as she was concerned.
“Suckity-suck-suck!” she cursed. “There has got to be a better way to get around this place!”
The rough landing, and near shish kebabing, left her bruised and breathless. She rolled onto her back, staring up at the distant ceiling while she waited for imaginary cartoon birds to stop circling her skull. Despite the helmet and padding, she felt like she had just been used for batting practice by the entire New York Yankees. Too bad the Warehouse had never heard of workmen’s comp, let alone OSHA requirements.
Then again, she thought, falling back on the timeless wisdom of Super Chicken, I knew the job was dangerous when I took it. . . .
She clambered stiffly to her feet. Every square inch of her petite frame ached in protest. Forget black-and-blue, she was going to be positively ultraviolet tomorrow. Having no intention of riding the zip line again anytime soon, she took off the helmet and harness and hung them on the inverted swordfish, which made a convenient coatrack.
“Hang on to these for me, will you, Pointy? You don’t look like you’re going anywhere for a while.”
She was more worried about her genuine-collector’s-item Farnsworth. Rescuing it from her pocket, she was glad to find the prototype still in one piece; it had clearly been built to last. The burnished steel casing wasn’t even scratched.
Let’s hear it for old-time American craftsmanship, she thought. Artie would ground me for life if I broke this.
She considered checking in with him via the gizmo, but quickly rejected the notion. She had told him she would handle this herself, and that’s what she intended to do.
Not that there was probably anything to handle.
Putting away the Farnsworth, she scoped out her surroundings. In theory, the zip line should have dropped her at the right address, give or take a bone-jarring tumble. She glanced around to see precisely where that was.
High shelves packed with boxes, bins, and artifacts could have been anywhere in the Warehouse, yet this particular aisle struck her as oddly familiar. It took her a second to place it, but then she spotted a stale piece of wedding cake under glass on a shelf to her right. The slice, she abruptly recalled, was all that was left of the cake served at the wedding of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert. It reportedly had the power to render almost anyone less than amused. Claudia had inspected the slice very, very recently. She realized at once where she was.
“Holy déjà vu, Batman.”
This was the same aisle where she and Leena had been doing inventory a few days ago, right before that static ball nearly fried her. She probably should have recognized the address before, but lack of sleep, a dying friend, and the eminent threat of a killer typhoid epidemic must have distracted her somehow.
Imagine that.
That she was back here again couldn’t be a coincidence. Had she accidentally disturbed something the other day, or was the area still kicking up plenty of static? The latter explanation let her off the hook, so she decided to go with it.
“Stupid fireworks. Messing with the motion sensors again.”
Seriously, they had to figure out some way to deal with these random energy discharges. Maybe a network of grounded lightning rods, or counter-ionization generators? She had pitched various notions to Artie at least a dozen times, but he’d always blown her off. The way she saw it, he had been living and working in the Warehouse so long that he just accepted the occasional stray lightning ball as an occupational hazard, taking the danger and inconvenience for granted, just like he never wanted to change anything else around here. It was frustrating. She liked Artie, but he could be a real stick-in-the-mud sometimes. She had all sorts of good ideas on how to modernize the Warehouse and its systems, if only he would listen to her.
“What do I have to do around here? Go on strike?”
Grumbling to herself, she stumbled over something on the floor. She caught her balance and turned around to see what had tripped her. A fuzzy charred object, about the size of her fist, rested on the floor, where it obviously didn’t belong. Playing it safe,
she pulled on a pair of purple gloves before picking up it. She turned it over in her hands.
A blackened human face stared up at her.
“Jumping Jivaro!”
She almost dropped the shrunken head but managed to keep her cool. Holding it at a distance, she examined the out-of-place artifact. The shriveled eyelids were squeezed shut. It smelled like bacon and burnt hair. She shook it gently. “Hello? You awake, little guy?”
To her relief, the head did not react. It appeared to be inactive at the moment, but she bagged it just to be safe. But where had it come from and what had happened to it? Despite its extra-crispy condition, it was cool to the touch, which meant it hadn’t been fried too recently. She hung the bag on the swordfish while she tried to figure out where the head belonged.
A tall metal vault was open nearby. She peered into the vacant cavity, which struck her as way too large for one little shrunken head. Glancing around, she spotted an empty space on a shelf across from the vault. A slick red puddle had formed atop the shelf and was now dripping over the edge. A draft carried a sickeningly salty aroma.
Claudia’s nose wrinkled in disgust. Was that actually . . . blood?
That couldn’t be good.
She cautiously approached the shelf. A crimson drop fell onto the gory puddle, and she traced its origin to an overflowing marble bathtub one level up, which was itself directly below . . . John Chapman’s overturned pot-slash-hat. Apple cider dripped from the pot into the tub, which overflowed onto the empty shelf where the shrunken head must have been. A torn electrical cable had been gnawed apart.
“Jinkies.”
Darting eyes reconstructed the entire, improbable Rube Goldberg scenario. This was what happened sometimes when you piled so many unpredictable artifacts in one place; in a way, it was a minor miracle that they didn’t get more accidental chain reactions. Had this one been playing out ever since she and Leena had called it quits the other day? How long had it taken to fill up Elizabeth Báthory’s bloody tub?
Long enough, apparently.
The rolling metal ladder was right where she’d left it. Anxious to put things right before another artifact got triggered, she shoved the ladder into place. A quick dash up the steps brought her to Johnny Appleseed’s capsized pot, which was lying on its side. The cider dripping from the pot was a lot less gross than the blood spilling from the tub below. Hopefully, she could staunch one flow by fixing the other. All she needed to do was set the pot right side up again . . . just like so.
She made sure the pot was resting securely this time. The cider stopped dripping into the tub below. There would be no more trickling transubstantiation.
“Okay, that’s better.”
They’d have to drain the Blood Countess’s tub later. Artie couldn’t stand the sight of blood, so she was surely going to get stuck with the job, but she figured that could wait until she could put on a full hazmat suit sometime—or maybe talk Leena into helping her. The tub wasn’t overflowing anymore. That was enough for now, right?
She surveyed the scene from the top of the ladder. Had she missed anything? She traced the disturbance from the pot to the tub to the shrunken head to the gnawed wires to . . . the empty metal vault? What was supposed to be in there, anyway? She squinted but couldn’t make out the label from atop the steps. One thing was sure: the missing artifact had been big.
Maybe it was time to update Artie? She took out her Farnsworth, then hesitated. How exactly was she going to explain this to him? On second thought, perhaps she should go check out the vault first, just to find out how much trouble she might be in. The more information she had, the less upset Artie would be . . . hopefully.
“Please, let it not be anything too dangerous. Like maybe an arthritic old mummy or something?”
Another shadow fell over her. A bizarre caterwauling that sounded like a roar, a growl, and a squawk blended together nearly caused her to jump out of her skin. She looked up in time to see a huge winged creature swooping at her.
“Yikes!”
Her reflexes were on a roll today. She ducked in time to escape the sharpened claws or talons passing directly over her head. Another few inches and she would have been scalped by whatever had dived for her. But the surprise attack startled her enough that her Farnsworth slipped from her fingers. It crashed to the floor several feet below.
Exposed and vulnerable atop the ladder, she scrambled down the steps and took cover beneath the rolling metal stairs. “What the pterodactyl was that?” She peered up through the metal slats at what appeared to be . . . a totem pole?
The carved Native American objet d’art circled above her like an immense timber bird of prey. Red-and-black paint colored the bestial heads and bodies of a thunderbird, a mountain lion, and a grizzly bear, stacked atop each other like some sort of weird surgical hybrid. Ten clawed limbs were extended below the tripartite beast. Its wingspan was at least ten feet across. Three pairs of feral eyes glared down at Claudia. The bear and the lion bared their respective fangs. A hooked beak snapped at the air.
Not a friendly relic, she was guessing.
The bird cawed loudly. Defying both aeronautics and gravity, the totem soared high above the shelves. Claudia glanced over at the open vault, which was just the right size. She figured there was a reason the vicious-looking totem was kept locked up.
“Okay,” she asked herself. “Now what?”
There was no point in calling for help. The Warehouse was too big and Artie’s office too far away. Even if he could hear her, which was highly unlikely, he’d need a telescope to see what was going on all the way out here. She might as well be on the far side of the moon.
Where was her Farnsworth? Peeking around the side of the ladder, she spotted it lying on the floor too many feet away. She kicked herself for dropping it before. Now how was she supposed to send out an SOS? The totem was still on the lookout overhead, its claws and talons ready to slash at her again. The Farnsworth taunted her, tantalizingly out of reach. Should she risk making a dash for it?
The totem didn’t give her a chance. With an ear-piercing squawk and a couple of roars, it swooped down at her again. The bear on the bottom slammed into the top of the stairs and it spun away from Claudia, leaving her exposed. The ladder’s wheels collided with the fallen Farnsworth and knocked it under a shelf, where it disappeared from sight. Her heart sank.
“Really? My karma’s that bad?”
So much for calling for help. No way was the totem going to give her a chance to go digging around under the shelf, groping for the lost device. Running for her life took priority at the moment.
Hands over her head, she sprinted down the aisle. Adrenaline kicked her into gear. High above her, the totem executed a graceful turn and came gliding after her, the thunderbird’s wooden talons extended ahead of its snapping beak. Claudia wondered which part of the totem was the hungriest: the bear, the puma, or the bird?
“No fair!” she protested. “Three against one . . . sort of!”
She tried not to panic. It was just an artifact, after all, albeit a particularly antisocial one. There were ways of handling it. What would Artie do at a time like this? She looked around frantically for the nearest emergency neutralizing station. There had to be one somewhere around here, just for unfortunate incidents like this. She remembered Artie pointing them out the first time he gave her the nickel tour.
“Searching, searching . . . there!”
What looked like a coiled fire hose hung upon a support column, next to a circular metal handle. NEUTRALIZING STATION, a convenient label read. FOR EMERGENCY USE ONLY.
Just what the doctor ordered! She made a beeline for the hose and tugged on it with both hands. The dusty hose refused to budge; it probably hadn’t moved in years. “C’mon,” she pleaded with the stubborn mechanism. “Don’t be like that! Not now!” A hard yank finally got it unspooling. Squeaky gears whined for oil as she pulled the hose away from the pillar. “That’s it, baby. Keep on coming!”