Billy: Messenger of Powers (42 page)

Soon the room was awash in hot chocolate and panicky Fizzles. Some of them were actually crying in frustration, grinding little sobs with dust-tears that ran down their faces.

“I’m not stopping,” said Billy, sending another round of cocoa clattering to the floor. “I’m going to do this forever, until I drop.”

The cleaners all gasped in horror. They all stopped moving, clearly paralyzed by such a callous, psychopathic disregard for neatness.

Then, one of the Fizzles nearby raised its tiny mop. It shouted a high-pitched scream that sounded amazingly like a bugle calling to arms. “Attack,” it seemed to say.

And that’s just what the rock Fizzles did. Billy saw instantly that the Fizzles’ didn’t just twirl rags with the skill of a martial artist, they actually
knew
some kind of magical karate. All of them dropped into what Billy could only assume were fighting stances. Then, with a synchronized “Key-yah!” the Fizzles attacked. The room was instantly filled with Fizzles that jump-kicked; with Fizzles that ran at Billy while carving intricate and dangerous-looking, though tiny, figure eights with their mops; and with Fizzles that did cartwheels and flips as though they had seen one too many kung fu movies.

They swarmed at Billy, and soon there were dozens if not hundreds of the rock janitors punching and kicking at Billy’s feet, pushing him bodily away from the bar. Billy’s feet slipped on several of the creatures as he stepped backward, and he went down—for the third time—to the ground. This time, however, it wasn’t only floor he fell on. It was Fizzles. They grabbed him tightly, holding his arms, holding his feet, holding his pants and his shirt, even holding his hair.

Billy struggled for a moment, but it was no use. The Fizzles had him held fast. The first Fizzle, who Billy had come to think of as something of a leader, crawled onto Billy’s chest and looked at him. Billy could feel the triumph in the Fizzle’s stance.

“It doesn’t matter,” Billy said. “You can’t hold me here forever, and as soon as you let me up, I’m going to go back at it again.” The Fizzles all gasped once more, and Billy added the coup-de-grace. “As long as I’m in this room,” he said as belligerently as he could, “I will make…a…
mess
.”

Another gasp. The leader Fizzle jumped down off Billy’s chest, and he could hear a buzzing sound as the Fizzles around him conferred. Then, suddenly, he was hoisted bodily in the air, hundreds of Fizzles moving under him to support his weight, like ants lifting a grasshopper.

At the same time, Billy heard something. The door to the anteroom! It was out of sight on the other side of the bar, but Billy could hear it opening. It was Mrs. Black, or even worse, Wolfen, it had to be!

But the Fizzles paid no heed to the sound. They simply continued marching him toward the bar, still holding him firm. They walked with him right under the shelf.

“Where are you, Mr. Jones?” came the voice of Mrs. Black.

But Billy had no chance to answer, because at that moment, the Fizzles holding him all gave a shiver, and with a small “pop” Billy suddenly found himself somewhere else.

CHAPTER THE EIGHTEENTH

Billy let out his breath. Holding it whenever Transporting was quickly becoming second nature to him. He managed to look at his wrist, and verified that Prince was still coiled coolly around it before the Fizzles holding his hair yanked on it so that Billy’s head snapped back and all he could see was a ceiling.

And what a ceiling! It was white, and that was all. That may not have sounded like much to anyone not actually there, but Billy had never in his life seen anything quite so white. It would have made a super-model ashamed of the color of her artificially brightened teeth, and a polar bear would have looked black if standing in front of it. It was so clean and spotless that it actually glowed, reflecting every bit of light in the room as brightly and perfectly as a mirror.

Below him, the Fizzles that Billy now thought of as the Kung Fu Cleaners were holding a whispered conference of some kind. Apparently they decided that in this place Billy was no longer a threat to the world’s cleanliness, and so they dumped him unceremoniously on the ground before skittering away. The leader of the Kung Fu Cleaners, the Fizzle who had berated Billy for spilling his cocoa in the first place, cast a last threatening look at Billy, then ran off as well.

Billy rose slowly to his feet. He had been dropped on the floor in some form or other four times in the last few minutes, and his body was starting to feel the effects. He suspected that he would resemble a grape this time tomorrow, puffy and round and a beautiful shade of deep purple from head to toe.

He looked around and took in his surroundings. It was an awesome sight. There were Kung Fu Cleaners everywhere. Not just the hundreds that had grabbed Billy, but thousands, perhaps
hundreds
of thousands. And each one was actively cleaning something: dishes, cups, silverware. Fizzles were loading dirty clothes into what looked like a washing machine the size of a house. Fizzles were putting even more sopping wet laundry into a dryer that was equally as big.

One Fizzle, Billy saw, was busily sorting socks into two mountainous piles, one of which had a sign that said “Left Socks Here,” while the other had a sign proclaiming “Right Socks Here.” This seemed to Billy to be not only a bit excessive, but actually ridiculous, because dozens of other Fizzles were hurriedly crawling around, on top of, and through the two piles, finding paired socks and throwing them into a bin the size of a dump truck.

But beyond all that, beyond the sorting and the cleaning and the polishing, beyond the hundreds of thousands of Fizzles and their hundreds of thousands of tasks, the thing that was first and most noticeable was that the whole place gleamed. Everything was pure, spotlessly white. The laundry machines, the neat stacks of clean plates, the floors. The place he was in was so large and so full of cleaning appliances that Billy couldn’t see any walls, but he suspected they, too, were that same brilliant white.

Something tapped his foot. It was another Kung Fu Cleaner, the Fizzle tapping on Billy’s sneaker with its mop as it cleaned the floor. Billy obligingly lifted his foot, and the Fizzle ran under it, mopping for all it was worth, continuing on in a perfectly straight line until it disappeared from Billy’s view.

“Where are we?” he asked Prince. The snake hissed, and licked itself like a cat. Cleaning itself. “Well I
know
we’re in someplace clean,” said Billy. “That’s not much help.”

As he spoke to Prince, a thought struck him. Fizzles, he now knew, carried something of the personality of their makers with them. So what kind of person would create Fizzles who knew karate and were concerned with cleanliness to the point of it being a psychiatric disorder?

A moment later, he had his answer as a spot of color appeared in his view. The color was brown, a brown coat worn by a bent and wizened old man who limped slowly, leaning on a cane held in each hand, into the area where Billy stood.

“More bleach!” bellowed the old man to the Fizzles who were washing clothes. He grabbed a sock out of the sock pile. The sock, like the floor and ceiling, was so dazzlingly white it almost hurt Billy’s eyes. But the old man apparently did not agree like what he saw. “You call this clean?” he grumped, throwing the sock back into the pile with a disgusted look. “It’s like a pig wore it to a pig sock hop in a mud pool and had pig mudshakes which it spilled on its muddy socks.”

Now, quite suddenly, the man spotted Billy. He frowned. “You,” he finally said, “are filthy.”

Billy didn’t know quite how to respond to that. On one hand, he knew he was sweaty and drenched with hot chocolate. On the other hand, considering what he’d just been through, he thought he probably looked rather spiffy. At least, he did as long as you defined “spiffy” as “not dead.”

The old man didn’t wait for a reply, though, and snapped his fingers imperiously. Several hundred Kung Fu Cleaners swarmed toward the man, who was clearly their master. The man pointed at Billy. “How did he get here? Who is he?”

The assembled Fizzles looked at each other as though waiting for someone to step up and start talking first. “Well?” asked the old man, waving his cane in what Billy guessed was supposed to be a threatening motion. Unfortunately, any sense of threat was mitigated by the fact that as soon as the cane left the ground, the old man toppled to the floor.

Billy rushed forward to help the old fellow up. “Are you okay, sir?” asked Billy.

“Certainly I’m okay,” snapped the old man, yanking his arm out of Billy’s grip. This caused him to fall again. Billy helped him up, and this time the old man let him do it, even going so far as to pull Billy with him as he hobbled along on his inspection tour. As they walked, Billy could see that the old man wore one of the required badges—the ones that called out a person’s name and affiliation with either the Darksiders or Dawnwalkers. Unfortunately, the old man’s cloak was so voluminous that the badge was always mostly covered in folds of dark cloth, so this strange old man’s identity remained a mystery to Billy.

And even if the badge
had
been visible, Billy didn’t know if he could have spared enough attention to read it. The old man was moving at a surprising pace, pounding along on two feet and two canes as he inspected his domain. The old man constantly called out directions to the cleaning rock Fizzles, sternly reprimanding them for the “untidiness,” “uncleanliness,” and “downright filthosity” of the area. Billy wasn’t even sure that “filthosity” was a word, but he
was
fairly certain that he had found the person in charge of cleaning, not just the anteroom, but much of Powers Island.

His suspicions were confirmed as he passed a chute, out of which half-eaten hot dogs from Powers Stadium were falling, landing in a bin the size of a garbage truck, all of them screaming piteously about the fact that they would never be eaten.

“Quiet!” roared the old man as he passed them. He handed Billy his canes, which Billy took automatically, then climbed with surprising nimbleness up the side of the container that held the hot dogs. He leaned far over the side, his cloak riding up to reveal the old man’s white legs and long white underwear, his behind stuck high in the air. Billy looked away, embarrassed. He didn’t know if there was some social rule against looking at the legs of hundred-year-old men, or watching their bony behinds stuck up in the air, but if there wasn’t there should have been.

The old man finally hoisted himself back over the side of the bin and clambered down holding a pair of half-eaten hot dogs.

“My prayers have been answered!” shouted one ecstatic frankfurter.

“Praise be to the Powers!” chorused the other.

“Eat me first!” said the first.

“No, eat
me
first!” countered the second. This spawned a short argument.

“He doesn’t want you first, you indigestible pig’s foot!” screamed one in miniature rage.

“Well, if you think he’d eat a hot dog made of chicken lips like you, you’re sadly mistaken!” yelled the other.

The old man quickly settled the argument, however, by squishing both of the partially eaten hot dogs into his mouth at the same time. His cheeks bulged like a fat squirrel’s, and tears ran down his cheeks, but he managed to chew and swallow the entire mass.

Billy felt slightly ill, both at the fact that the hot dogs were what car commercials tastefully called “pre-owned,” and at the fact that he was pretty sure he could hear moans of satisfaction still coming from the old man’s throat as the hot dogs went down.

“Well, don’t just stand there,” crabbed the old man, grabbing his canes from Billy and resuming his walk.