The Del Rey Book of Science Fiction and Fantasy

by Ellen Datlow ed.

  As he said it, he wondered if he believed it. Admittedly, it was unlikely that Stock would come out of this as Brother Voodoo on Steroids. But with the Blues in the equation, who knew what might happen?

  “How do you know all this voodoo gubbins?” asked Brown.

  “The Internet. And the Library of Congress. Us army lawyers don’t have much else to do but research. I boned up on it before I came here.”

  Brown was distracted for a moment, as if he heard something. Dawn light was gathering, and new day’s hammer of heat banging down. Then the Brit was in focus again, in pre-mission briefing mode.

  “You’ve no objection to going after a commanding officer?” he asked.

  “Stock isn’t my CO,” Dice said. “He doesn’t even outrank me. But I underestimated him. I thought he was a brokeback scared of losing face, and it turns out he’s a fighting soldier. Trouble is, he’s chosen his own war. And he’s got Island Fever. One of the worst cases, I imagine. He has to be stopped, before he does any more damage.”

  “Aye-aye, sir,” said Brown, saluting.

  “I have to warn you, this isn’t a Free Willy scenario. The Prisoners stay in their pits.”

  Brown shrugged, accepting the ruling. Dice had a stab of thought—what was Wing Co Brown’s real agenda with regard to the POTAs? Inside a day, Dice had gone from writing off the Brit as an arrant loon to accepting him as a reliable witness and a sound adviser. Was that GJS setting in? Had he just joined the Tea Party?

  “One thing I should add,” he said. “I’ve fired off plenty of cutting questions at an enemy, but never a gun.”

  “Me neither, old chum,” Brown said cheerfully. “Bloody, isn’t it?”

  The invisible train had passed. Brown invited Dice to hop back onto the mudguard. He pedaled off again, picking up speed. The missile silos were in the other direction. Was Brown planning to circumnavigate the island and sneak up on them?

  “Hold on to your hat, my boy,” shouted Brown. “We’re going down the rabbit hole.”

  They swooped through a grove of palm trees, braked in a shower of sparks, and climbed off, leaving the bike in the dirt.

  A sign painted around a plywood archway announced the Great James Krazy Golf Course. The archway glowed white; the letters gold. Another sign floated in the air beyond, as pink as a blushing flamingo. DANGER: ORDINARY LAWS OF PHYSICS MAY NOT APPLY. Everything was glowing in vivid colors: the electric-green Astroturf; a clown’s head with gaping mouth and red-carpet tongue; a giant custard-yellow top hat that spun on its brim; a windmill as white as snow. Several soldiers stepping around the revolving cross of the windmill-sails, dark shadows amid the candy-colored dawn-glow, aiming M16s and stainless-steel service automatics, opening fire in a blaze of muzzle-flash.

  Dice didn’t have time to flinch. A clattering rain of bullets dropped out of the air in front of them. The next moment, Brown flourished his shell, and the soldiers flew away into the glowing darkness, smashing into the crude plywood and polystyrene mock-ups of giant boots, armored vehicles, an atom-bomb mushroom cloud, an eight ball hovering with no visible support. One man landed on a red circle painted on one of the Astroturf greens and promptly shot up into the dark air as if launched by a giant spring, landing somewhere behind Dice and Brown with a wet thud.

  “If you don’t watch your step it could happen to you,” Brown said, and grabbed hold of Dice’s arm, hustling him toward the windmill.

  “Someone invented antigravity?”

  “It cancels gravity—more of poor Glass’s tinfoil magic.”

  “And a force field. Those bullets…”

  “Their momentum went the same place as the noise of my little explosions. In here,” Brown said, and yanked open a yard-high door in the side of the windmill.

  Dice ducked after him.

  And fell for a long, floating minute through absolute black, Brown’s long scream of delight the only anchor for Dice’s unraveling sanity. Light loomed up, an electric glare suddenly all around him, and he landed on a collapsing pile of cardboard boxes, rolled off them in a cloud of dust, sprawling in dim red light on a concrete floor next to Brown, wind knocked out of him.

  Private Walter Garrett, an unlit cigarillo clamped in the center of his grin, lumpy watch cap pulled over his shaven skull so that its brim was level with his eyebrows, reached down and helped Dice up, saying, “It’s about time.”

  They had somehow landed in a low-ceilinged room full of metal racks crammed with tens of thousands of file folders, cardboard boxes, and plastic-cased CD-ROMs. No sooner was he over the queasiness of a fall through the void than Dice felt a pulsing like hot needles jammed against the fillings in his teeth. It was a sound that hurt, an arrhythmic thrum like the world wobbling on its axis.

  Dice said, “Your Lieutenant Glass did what this time? Tamed a wormhole through other dimensions? Invented teleportation?”

  Brown picked himself up and dusted himself down. “Dug a rabbit hole, so far as I know. It didn’t have an explanation on the packet. Sorry. This is, ah, one of the surveillance center’s document stores. And this, Colonel Dice, is…”

  “Private Garrett, I know.”

  “We’ve already met,” Garrett told Brown. “In the brig.”

  The big man was loaded for bear. An M16 slung over his shoulder. Grenades were clipped to bandoliers that crossed his broad chest.

  “No hard feelings for the arrest, I hope,” Dice said.

  “Nope. I owe you for not having me hunted down and shot, which I believe was the general plan after my so-called escape. See, they just opened up the door of my cell and kicked me out. Might as well have painted a target on my back.”

  “What’s your role in this unholy mess?”

  “I’m an accomplished thief,” said Garrett, with pride. “And a jealous ex-boyfriend. I didn’t like it when Chris got picked up by the Voodoo Krewe, so I liberated their camera. When my bunky ditched me to become a Mama-Loa, I’m afraid I got good and pissed and thought the folks back home should see how she looked in her new church. A touch ignoble of me, I admit. Stock’s got himself a new priestess now. Anyway, I gave the camera to my pal here and he got the pictures out. I told him to get them posted on the Internet but he went to the papers.”

  “Fat lot of good that did,” Brown said cheerfully, inspecting his crystal-studded shell. “After all the fuss and bother, what does the army do? It sends a lawyer. No offense, old chap.”

  “None taken. But I thought Garrett shot the pictures.”

  “No way,” Garrett said. “Man who took the pictures, that was Colonel Stock. All blacked up like an old-time minstrel for his voodoo show. Nothing more ridiculous than a white man painted black.”

  The pulse in the air was stronger. A drumming, nearby. There was wailing and chanting mixed in.

  “They’ve started the ritual,” said Dice.

  “You bet,” Garrett said. “I was beginning to think of testing their defenses by dropping a few explosive eggs on their heads. You know, just to see what would happen.”

  “It wouldn’t do any good,” Brown said. “They’re mad, but they aren’t stupid. They’ve made sure that the pit is secure from that kind of attack.”

  “They have a conch shell, too?” asked Dice.

  “Not a shell, but something similar,” Brown said. “It’s a perfect defensive shield against projectile weapons—we’d all be retired from the war business if it got out. So if we do have to go up against them in the pit, I’m rather afraid you Yanks are going to have to forgo the pleasure of your shootie bang-bangs and rely on cunning and good old-fashioned fisticuffs instead.”

  “The hell with cunning.” Garrett pulled a big hunting knife from a scabbard on his belt. “If their strings of garlic won’t protect them against my fists, I reckon I can make good use of this.”

  They snuck out of the document store’s steel hatchway, down a concrete-lined tunnel painted with yellow-and-black chevrons, to a T-junction with the wide passageway that led to the surveillance
room Dice had visited earlier.

  As they drew near, the sound of drumming grew louder and louder. Dice briefly wondered if Dr. Susal was the voodoo DJ, mixing hardcore hip-hop into the Haitian rites. When they entered the room, he realized he had done the Frank-Einstein an injustice. Susal was fixed to a swivel chair by duct tape wound around him mummy-wise, face red and bulging around tape that had sealed shut his nose and mouth and suffocated him. Dr. Wing’s baffles were set on his head like huge, furry earphones. The corpse sat in the center of the control room, lit by the dead blue light of monitors and torchlight that danced behind the armored glass window that gave a view down into the pit.

  The torches were fastened to scaffold poles planted in a ring around the big blue blob of the POTA. Half a dozen men stripped to the waist sat cross-legged, pounding tom-tom drums caught between their thighs, the sound transmitted by every speaker in the room. Two of the congregation were white, but blacked up with greasepaint. Colonel Stock and Sergeant Haines were also blacked up and swathed in white bedsheet robes. The colonel wore a top hat with toothlike shards of coral stuck through the brim and held up a long thin knife. Haines held a beheaded chicken by its clawed feet and shook it like a censer, blood from its neck-stump sprinkling everywhere. Anne-Louise Shane, bare to the waist, pale skin painted with symbols from an alien alphabet, shimmied and writhed, slapping a tambourine, making circles around and around the tethered POTA.

  Aside from Lieutenant Shane’s breasts, the whole thing looked as cheesy as a frat-house initiation ceremony in some Midwest agricultural college. Then Colonel Stock, his knife and the right side of his white robe spattered with chicken blood, stalked across the pit and slit open a bulging Hefty bag, revealing a pile of fat crystals that pulsed with poisonous green corpse-light.

  “He’s not using sea salt anymore,” said Brown.

  “What is that? Crystals from a POTA?”

  Brown nodded. “They’ve been irradiated. It’s Haines. He’s become quite the whiz at sums, and developed something akin to Lieutenant Glass’s quantum-mechanical alchemy. It’s amazing what people will tell you if they think you’re barking. He gave me the full lecture. The shell research team has been bombarding crystals with anything that comes to hand, including hazardous waste left over from Anthony Eden’s independent deterrent. Stock traded with the field boys, swapped medical data on the silo team’s softball players’ weaknesses for barrel loads of…what does it look like?”

  “Kryptonite?” said Dice. “Red, green, and gold, mixed together.”

  “Kryptonite on crack,” said Garrett.

  “Sewing the stuff inside the prisoner’s apertures,” said Brown, “might well be like priming a warhead with what’s that stuff called? Plasticine? No. Plutonium.”

  The drummers were going crazy. Sergeant Haines bit off the head of a chicken, squirted blood over Lieutenant Shane’s writhing body.

  “Better than the Playboy channel,” said Garrett, grinning around his cigarillo. He pulled a Glock semiautomatic and handed it to Dice. “The colonel posted guards outside the silos, in case anyone missed their supper last night, but didn’t know about the magic-carpet ride. As soon as the shit starts flying, the guards are going to come running. There’s no anti-bullet flypaper in this room. They’ll start shooting, an’ you better shoot back.”

  Dice clicked off the safety, racked the slide to put a round in the chamber. “You mean, ‘You better shoot back, sir.’”

  Brown strode across the room, flipped dust covers from a set of panels, closed a set of knife levers. Constellations of multicolored pin-lights lit up.

  “The cooling system still works,” he said. “Pit Three used to be one of the vertical-firing test beds, equipped with sprayheads pumping four thousand gallons of water a minute. Unfortunately for your countryman in the top hat, the drains were sealed when the engineers laid down reinforced concrete floors to turn the silos into cells. Fortunately for us, no one bothered to disconnect all the wires and pipes when the nukes were decommissioned. Never know when you’ll have to batter your ploughshares back into swords. With your permission, Colonel?”

  Beyond the window, down there in the pit, Stock shook blood from another decapitated chicken over the poison-green crystals. Blood boiled as soon as it touched crystal, spitting up thick curls of white smoke. Veins stood out in Stock’s neck; this was a man who expected to become a god within the next ten minutes.

  Dice said, “If you’re going to do it, fly-boy, do it now.”

  Brown pulled his watch cap down over his ears, counted backward from five to zero, and daintily pressed a button.

  In the silo, a hard rain came down.

  Haines took the full force of a jet. It smashed him face-first into the spill of crystals, which immediately transfixed him, burrowing under his skin like angry inchworms. The rest of the cultists were washed this way and that by gushing torrents. The water dump had instantly turned the bottom of the silo into a pool, thigh-deep around the flailing voodooists, then waist-deep, neck-deep. Brown poked at another button: a second rainstorm smashed down. The frothing tide gently lifted the buoyant POTA against the constraint of the Flavor Lock, closing over its head-bump, lapping at the edge of the observation window and climbing higher.

  Currents forced Shane against the window, breasts flattened against the glass, and then unglued her and whirled her away. Stock was dogpaddling, trying to keep his hoodoo hat on his head—without it, he would no longer be an avatar of Baron Samedi, just another fruitcake in a bedsheet. His chances of ascension were waterlogged at the moment, but he still clung to the hope of his reward on Earth.

  Dice kept shifting his eyes between the observation window and the door through which he expected the guards to come. Garrett had positioned Susal’s corpse as a natural target just in front of the door to draw fire, and had flattened himself to one side, the butt of his M16 resting against his hip, knife gripped between his teeth, ready to shoot or stab any intruders.

  The expected charge didn’t come.

  Instead, the guards did the stupidest thing possible—they opened the hatch in the wall of the silo to see what all the shouting and splashing was about, and were washed off their feet by a muscular gush of escaping floodwater.

  Stock, hatless, caught hold of the railing of the observation platform and was glaring at the window, face washed by clashing waves, legs scissor-kicking in foaming water. His mouth opened and closed—he seemed to be shouting. When Dice gave him a cheery wave, Stock pulled a gun from under his robes and fired a couple of rounds at the glass.

  The cultists’ anti-projectile-weapon hoodoo must not have been waterproof. Lead smeared glass tough enough to keep in an unrestrained POTA.

  Brown leaned into a microphone and said gleefully, “Colonel Stock, I’m rather afraid I shall have to ask you to write out ‘It is a severe breach of discipline to discharge a weapon at a fellow officer’ five thousand times and present the lines to your house prefect before lights-out. Failure to comply will be punished disproportionately.”

  Stock raised his pistol to fire again, lost his grip on the railing, and was washed away, floundering around with the rest of his hounfort like mice in a washing machine. They were a spent force.

  “Excuse me,” Garrett said, “but do either of you two officers know the best way to escape from a Flavors Lock?”

  “Don’t worry,” Dice said, “those things can’t drown.”

  Garrett pointed at the window—at the drowned base of the silo. “Not what I meant. Best way to escape, it looks like, is to become something else.”

  The shackled POTA was completely underwater now, half hidden by whirling bubbles and debris but clearly changing shape. Stretching. Growing taller and thinner. With a sudden rush it escaped the eye-bending topology of the Flavors Lock and shot to the surface, sending violent waves splashing back and forth. It was shaped like a coin now, fattened in the center, knife-thin at the edges. Balanced on one edge on top of the water, bobbing up and down, gaining speed,
bouncing higher and higher.

  “Oh dear,” said Brown. “Didn’t expect that to happen.”

  Stock looked up at the thing in terror, and then it plunged down and drove him under the water. Dice couldn’t tell whether it was a deliberate aggressive or defensive move or just a random motion.

  On all the banked TV monitors displaying feeds from the other silos, all the POTAs were blurs bouncing off walls in chilling synchrony. The images could have been different angles on one individual.

  “Simon Says,” Dice remembered, aloud.

  The water tanks had been drained; only light showers were dribbling from the sprayheads now. Most of Stock’s followers were alive, clinging to the railing of the observation platform, clambering over it, crawling through the half-flooded hatchway. One of the guards floated facedown. Shane clung around the neck of another as he kicked toward the platform. Stock’s hat sailed around like a busy little boat, bumping into a wash of chicken parts and tom-toms. At the bottom of the half-flooded chamber, what was left of Haines was pegged out like a ragged skin by spikes of crystal that glowed radioactive green through twenty feet of water.

  The POTA was bouncing higher and higher, rebounding from side to side now, hardly ever touching the water, smashing into the cap of their silo. Someone beyond the window fired an assault rifle at the big blue disk, as if that had never been tried before. Bullets spanged off it and smashed chunks from the concrete wall. At least the anti-bullet shield had been washed away.

  Someone was standing in the doorway of the monitoring room; Dice turned and nearly shot Moira Wing.