Head Rush (21 page)

“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.

There are only three ways to break somebody out of one of Otto’s force field prisons. One is for Otto to make a descrambler, and for the person inside to get hold of it. No way would he have made one for the fun house. The second is to get Otto to change his mind about keeping the person sealed up. That’s how we got Packard out. The third way is to break Otto’s will enough so that he just lets up all his force fields. Disillusionment would do it. In fact, we’re pretty sure that if I zinged Otto hard, that alone would probably break his will enough to get him to let them out. If Shelby and Jordan joined in, all the better.

Unfortunately, thanks to Otto’s new personal force field, he’s unzingable.

We can’t zing him, Ez the dream invader can’t get into his dreams to control him, telepaths probably can’t read him, and bullets likely can’t harm him either. Not that anybody wants that—if Otto dies, his force fields become eternal.

Shelby is staring at the wavy mirror again. She moves her head from side to side.

After getting everybody’s requests and promises to return, we head out of there. Time is running out; not only do I have to meet Otto in several hours but the Brick Slinger will be rousing soon.

We scramble back into the car and speed off, arguing about where to question him. The backup walk-in cooler at Mongolian Delites is the obvious place—it’s made of metal and you can lock it, and best of all, it’s usually empty, so the Brick Slinger won’t have anything to sling.

“No Mongolian Delites,” Packard says.

I give him a look. It’s dangerous that Packard’s out in public this much already. Where will he go if not Mongolian Delites? Where will he sleep? When did he last sleep?

Time is running out. The Brick Slinger is waking up. We end up pulling him into one of the empty railcars in the yards near our old headquarters. We lay him inside and open up the vent in the ceiling for light.

Shelby stays outside with a machine gun—having a gun inside there with him would be suicide, of course, because he’d take it away. We also tie up his hands and feet before we wake him. He’s a pretty big man. If he telekinetically gets his bindings off, the plan is that Packard will subdue him and I’ll stoke up some terror to zing him with, but that’s a last resort. Terrified people don’t give the best information.

When we’re ready, Jordan flicks water in his face, and the man rouses. She and I jump back. He swears a lot and struggles against his ropes.

“Hey,” Packard speaks to him reassuringly, tells him we have some questions, that he needs to work with us.

The Brick Slinger looks out from under bushy, brown eyebrows that match his beard. He has the look of a hunted man. “What day is it?”

“Friday, March 19,” I say.

“No!”

“Why is that significant?” Packard asks. “Why is the date significant?”

The man tips his head back against the wall and looks around. A creaking sound. I look up—the corner of an old, rusted ceiling panel moves back and forth, back and forth. Packard watches it too.

“You better let me out of here or I’ll bust up this whole car and impale you with the parts.”

Packard smiles. “No you won’t, or you would’ve. You go ahead and bend that corner all you want.” There’s something regal about the way he settles down onto a crate, legs crossed, leaning back against the corrugated metal side—a sultan on beach holiday, amused for the moment. Thoroughly confident.

Packard once told us that he looks at people the way a demolition expert looks at a building—he can see the cracks, the lines of strength and weakness. Is he doing that now?

The man keeps bending the corner.
Creak. Creak.
It seems like it’s loosening. I hold my breath, tense all over. But then it stops.

Packard says, “So, you want my severed head; let’s start there.”

The Brick Slinger frowns. “I’m not telling you anything.”

Packard shrugs. “Maybe, maybe not.”

“You can’t hold me,” he says. “Just a matter of time before I get something loose.”

“No you won’t.” Packard crosses his arms. “I’ve got my own force fields guy coming over later. My guy’s been holding up the Tangle for ten years.”

The Brick Slinger harrumphs back, like it’s all quite ridiculous, but he seems worried.

Packard presses him on the severed-head bit, and then he takes a different angle, painting a picture of himself as the outsider rebel. The rising threat. The man you’d be crazy not to ally with. The way he talks, I feel crazy not to be allied with him, but then I remember that I am.

The Brick Slinger looks away, face stubborn. “Doesn’t matter.”

“Of course it matters!” Packard talks about the severed-head job some more. “Who does that? Somebody desperate, and not all there,” he says. “It will end badly for you even if you deliver, I guarantee. I’ll tell you also, that you have about five minutes until we leave and get somebody else to give me the details.”

“In exchange for what?”

Packard tilts his head. “You think I’m here to bargain?”

The Brick Slinger touches the back of his neck. “Get this thing out of my neck. Tonight. I’ll tell you everything. Everything. But it has to be out tonight.”

I stare at him. “What do you have in your neck?”

“I want a bargain first.”

There’s new energy in Packard’s gaze. The Brick Slinger has some sort of ticking clock, counting down on him. They go back and forth some more.

I’m getting worried about our own ticking clock—we only have a few hours until I have to show up at the condo. And is Max still waiting outside Shelby’s apartment? I’ve supposedly been in there for like five hours. I’m also stressing about Dad’s being safe, and what happens after dinner. Otto will expect me to stay with him. No way will I do that.

Things are shifting. The Brick Slinger will tell Packard everything if only Packard will consider helping him. He
wants
to help Packard—to be allowed to help Packard, in exchange for some amorphous goodwill.

And just like that, the Brick Slinger is talking about life in the toll booth. Apparently, a man came with water and energy bars every week. “Got a toilet right in the floor. Like living in a goddamned latrine.” His beard jerks when he makes
eeee
sounds, like in the word
latrine
. He goes on about the boredom of the toll-booth prison. And then it all changed.

“A week ago, they come to let me out. I thought I was in heaven, but the next thing I know, I wake up on an operating table in some form of hospital. I’m lying face down and I can’t move a muscle. It’s some form of circular room with lights all around. Greenish lights, and there are other tables with other people—I can’t see any of them, but doctors are operating while they’re awake—I can tell by their screams. I couldn’t move, I couldn’t use my powers. I don’t know what they gave me. All these doctors with face masks. And the lights are green. The mayor is there. Watching.”

“Mayor Sanchez?” I ask. “Was there?”

“He was there. Across the room, watching. He’s in on it.”

I straighten. Otto? Watching people screaming and getting operated on? It’s so out of character…the last thing he’d ever do.

“So after that, two surgeons in masks come over to where I am,” the man continues. “One holds down the back of my head, and the other cuts into the back of my neck—got a knife of some sort. Scalpel, I suppose, and it’s this sharp pain, and I’m screaming and trying to move, but I can’t. And then they’ve got some laser thing going, like pins and needles. It sounds like a dentist’s drill, but it’s a laser. I’m begging for them to stop. And then I can feel something cold going in, on the back of my neck. Sharp edges. They seal it all up and it’s warm again.”

He goes silent for a while, staring vacantly at the light coming through the vent. Packard’s attention is focused on the Brick Slinger, but I exchange glances with Jordan. It’s all so bizarre.

“I feel this hot laser after that. The thing is still in my neck—I can feel it.” He goes on about the pain, the horror, and how the green lights played tricks on his eyes, and made everything that wasn’t black seem neon green.

I lean back against the cold boxcar wall. It’s all so science-fictiony. And really, Otto watching an operation? But why make it up?

“The next thing I know, I’m waking up in this seat in some kind of theater. Maybe thirty other guys and a few women are in the other seats. None of us can get out of the theater seating. Fielded in. There’s loose stuff all around the room—books, stools. I’m trying to get some projectiles going, cause I’m in the mood to wreck something, but it’s a no-go. The fields. We get to talking, turns out we’re all highcaps and we’ve all had this operation.”

“Had you all been arrested at some point?”

“Oh yeah. It was a who’s who in terms of Midcity criminals. Lots of us thought each other was dead.” He rambles on about the criminals, and how deferential they were to him; he’s clearly proud of being near the top of the Midcity criminal totem pole. I suppose he was pretty famous in his day.

“So the bunch of us, we’re stewing there, and finally some guy in a white coat walks in through a side door, up to this podium. Man just stands at the podium and tells us we all got a chip at the base of our brain. And on Saturday, March 20, at exactly three in the afternoon, every one of our chips will explode. One week.”

“The twentieth is tomorrow,” I say. I should know; it’s my wedding day.

“That was a week ago,” he continues. “The deal was, if any one of us deposits your severed head on the steps of the government building, all the chips get deactivated.”

Packard crosses his arms. “My head for all yours.”

“That would be…” The Brick Slinger nods, “…yup. Yup. They showed us slides of you. PowerPoint about you and your powers.” He points to Jordan. “Of you too. You’re a known accomplice. A few other guys. They tell us it’s okay to take out anybody defending you or keeping us from you, but no regular citizens. Any of us go and start up with attacking normal citizens, our chip will explode. One week to deliver your head.” He nods at Packard. “Your head or ours. One day left now. After the speech, the doc, he walks back to the door and opens it and he says,
You are free to go.
Well, he didn’t have to tell us twice. When we felt the field lift, we were crawling over each other to get out of there. Except Mangler. You know who that is?”

“Wish I didn’t,” Jordan says.

“Next thing I know, the podium is floating in the air above the doc. Mangler’s doing it. He says to the doc,
How about you get that thing outta my head or I kill you?
The doc turns around, calm as day, and looks at the Mangler. Then, right there, Mangler’s head explodes. Some of it goes on me. On my face. Warm. His goddamned brain on my face.” The Brick Slinger’s lips curl, and his expression stays like that for a few beats, as if the memory takes time to re-process. “It was like nothing I ever saw. So fast. Like a cartoon, but fast. His head
exploded
in front of us. And the sound…” he makes a popping sound with his lips. “Well, I would tell you that was a very motivational demonstration. We get the fuck outta there, the rest of us. You’re a lucky man, Packard, lasting as long as you have.”