The Bialy Pimps (57 page)

“I’ve got a secret,” he repeated.

He looked at Tracy, then at Philip. Philip thought he looked familiar, but couldn’t place him. If not for the stocking, then maybe... But it was no good.

“Mr. Martin,” said Dicky.
 

Philip looked up.

“You have two control panels for this alarm. One is here, by me, and the other is by the back door. If someone tries to get out that way, then these lights...” He waved his hand at the panel he’d used to lock the door. “... will flicker. And if I see them flicker, I will press this big red button. You don’t know what this button does, but I promise you that you won’t enjoy it. So stay put, all of you, and you might just get out of here alive.”
 

That was a lie. But what the hell, it was New Year’s Eve.

Philip wet his lips, nodded to the device in Dicky’s hand, and said, “What is that?”

“Don’t you watch movies?”

“Yeah...”

“Then I think you know what it is.”

“But you forgot your dynamite.”

“I told you, it’s a secret.” He pointed at the floor, at the basement.

Philip shook his head. “Bullshit. Is this one of Angela’s little ideas?” But then he glanced at Angela and noticed that she had wet her pants. He looked back at Dicky, saw the red in Dicky’s eyes, and let it go. Maybe this was real and maybe it wasn’t, but those eyes said that it wouldn’t hurt to play along just in case.

Dicky shrugged. “Would you like me to prove it to you?” He positioned his thumb over the now-unprotected button.

Philip shook his head. So did most of the others.

“Then let me have my say. What time is it?”

Someone yelled, “Eight minutes ‘till.”

“Okay. Now listen up. I have a real bad boy of a plastic explosive bomb planted in the basement of this store. It’s irrelevant how I put it there. Does anyone doubt me? Anyone want me to prove it?”

Nobody spoke; nobody even stirred.

“All right, then. Turn those cameras toward me. Are we still live? Good. Because I have something to say to all of you, and to the world. I’ll be brief. And you there by the window? Turn around and stop waving to the nice coppers. Mr. Martin here had those big windows replaced with security-grade Lucite after the crowds broke them for the second time. For the time being, it’s just all of you and me, and there are only two ways to unlock the doors.” He turned and punched a series of buttons on the keypad next to the door. After a few seconds, two flashes indicated a successful code change and he turned back to his audience. “Now, there’s only one.”

Dicky straightened up, gathering his thoughts.

“Those of you who aren’t pissing in your pants right now are probably thinking it’s a little overly dramatic to threaten to bomb a bagel deli,” he said. “But if you’re thinking that, you’re not thinking clearly. This isn’t about a deli. This is about a phenomenon. It’s about a way of thinking. It’s about the fact that at some point, we all decided at once that we were going to reward bad behavior and punish good behavior. And you’ve all borne that out. This place, even when it
was
just a deli, was bad. The people were incredibly rude and incompetent. The food was sloppy and inconsistent. The music was loud. The employees were lazy. The floors were dirty. And when people complained? They were told that what they thought didn’t matter.

“Then, at the end of this past summer, these same lazy, idiotic employees in their shitty, dirty restaurant got fed up with their jobs. Some of you think that what Bingham’s has become was the work of genius marketing. It was not. It was an accident. They were trying to put their store out of business in the most offensive, dramatic, overtly
wrong
way possible. What you think was amazing business insight or a psychological breakthrough was just dumb luck. And by dumb, I mean that it was anti-luck. It was luck that was so strong that it made exactly the opposite of what was supposed to happen, happen. They wanted to drive people away, but instead they drew them in.”

Philip, behind the counter, was working through the bomber’s speech in his head. How had he known their original intention? In fact, he seemed to know a
lot
about Bingham’s.

“So they tried harder to get rid of their customers – of
you,
you who spend millions of dollars on their crap and back their endorsement deals and have made them all millionaires. They wanted you
gone
. They
hate
you. All of you. They think that people are stupid, that they’re not worthy of their precious, arrogant attention. And so they did everything they could think of to get rid of all of you. They hit you. They sprayed you with chemicals. They shocked you. Shot you. Beat you. Insulted you. Humiliated you. And for the longest time, there was never anything but that behind any of their actions. There was only pure hatred and disrespect. You love them? Well, they don’t love you. It’s not an act, what they do. This is who these people
are
. They think they’re better than you.

“But how did you – you here in the lobby, you watching, you in the stores and on the internet and on the chat lines and on the radio – how did you respond to their hatred? You came back for more.
More!
You returned to the restaurant to be abused. You bought their merchandise. You listened to their music. You responded to their loathing with adoration.”
 

A white froth was forming at the corners of Dicky’s mouth. He scanned the crowd, then pointed an accusing finger at the cameras, at the onlookers in the lobby.
 

“You deserve what you’ve gotten, every one of you, and you deserve all of what’s coming.” His finger traced the button on the trigger in his hand. “You clamored for this. They threw shit at you and you bathed in it. They gave you their worst and you told them to make it even worse. What they did, they did, and it was what it was. But without all of you, what they did would have been just a series of crimes.
You
were the magic ingredient that turned garbage into gold. If this is anyone’s fault, it’s
yours
.
You
were the ones who made them famous.
You
are the reason they’re on TV, that the world knows their names.
You
were the ones who told the world that as a society,
this
is what we want more of.
This
is what we celebrate.
This
is what we stand for, what we accept and love and honor. You have erected a shrine to insult. To mediocrity.”

He paused, his air mostly spent. It was two minutes before midnight.
 

“To rationality,” said a voice.

“Who said that?” Dicky looked ready to kill. His trigger thumb was shaking.

“I did,” said the Anarchist. Jenny was shushing him. Darcy was pulling on his shirt. But he stood still, watching the man standing on the table.

“This isn’t rational,” said Dicky. “Far from it.”
 

“I have a question,” said Philip.
 

“What question?”

“Why does Ed McMahon write me sweepstakes letters that say, ‘MR. PHILIP MARTIN, you may have already won ten million dollars?’”

“Why does... what?”

Beckie raised her hand. “Why does the bag of BHT drying agent say ‘DO NOT EAT THIS?’”

“Why,” said Tracy, “do people sue when coffee is hot?”

Dicky shook his head.

“We didn’t want to be famous,” said the Anarchist. “We kept pushing because we hoped that at some point, the world would have to start making sense.”

“Well,” said Dicky, his eyes far away, “these are all very interesting points. But unfortunately, it is now thirty seconds before the start of 1999, and what
I’ve
hoped is that your joyride would end now, so that we could start fresh in the new year.”

He looked at the box in his hand, sighed, and raised his thumb above the trigger. “If only...” he began, but trailed off.

Philip saw what he was planning to do and lunged over the counter, hoping somehow, anyhow, to stop it. But he wasn’t fast enough.
 

With a solemn nod, Dicky took a deep breath and pressed the button.

The rats had been watching from the doorway to the front-room staircase, a small expedition of ten acting as eyes for the thousands of others below. Squeaky III was at the head of the party, choosing as any great leader to make command decisions from the front lines. And he was very near one of those decision points now.

There had been much tension among the humans in the past few minutes. One man had commanded the attention of all of the others. He had taken a high position atop a table and was now delivering a speech. The scenario seemed familiar, and then Squeaky III realized why that was: other than the fact that these were humans instead of rats, the scene in the lobby was just like that on the night that Squeaky III had delivered his own famous speech.
 

And that was troubling. Was this the humans’ call to arms? Was this their answer to the imminent rat offensive? Surely, that couldn’t be it. Surely, they couldn’t know what was coming. But still it made him nervous.
 

The rats watched from the doorway, their small red eyes like a string of beads in the darkness. Squeaky III was patient. There would be a moment of weakness, a moment of maximum distraction as the events in front of them reached a climax. Right now, all human attention was focused on the man giving the speech, and that was good, because it meant that the rats could take them by surprise. But soon even that spell would break, and the good moment would become even better. The man would finish, or something would happen to disrupt the humans’ focus. And when that happened – when their attention shifted, in that moment of transition – the rats would strike.

Squeaky III gave the order for his rats to assemble at the staircases. He told all to be ready. He’d see his moment any time now, and the rats must be ready to take advantage of it.

And then it happened. The leader focused his attention on the gadget in his hand, then moved to push a button. One of the other humans jumped toward him, and the entire room held its breath. And in that moment, Squeaky III gave the order.

It was midnight. The Uprising had begun.

Dicky hit the button again and again, swearing to himself that nobody made things worth shit anymore, that American craftsmanship had gone straight down the toilet. And each time he pressed, a message on the digital readout greeted him: NO LOAD. Had Rich seen the message, he would have giggled.

On the floor in front of Dicky, Philip was struggling to his feet. Most of the other employees and party-goers were still paralyzed with fear, but not Philip. Philip’s first thought came fast and hard: whether the man was crazy or lying or whether something had genuinely gone wrong, the fact was that they were alive. No bombs had gone off. And now, while he had a chance, he had to act. Before the man pulled it together, it was up to Philip to tackle the fucker, to pin him to the wall or to throw him through it.

Just as a mix of relief and anger began to sweep the room, just as Philip was tensing up to leap, a cacophonous scratching noise came from everywhere at once. It was the sound of a billion maracas being shaken, a billion rattlesnakes giving warning. The staircase door banged open with nobody behind it. The rusty grate on the gigantic air conditioner vent in the main room fell to the floor with a massive bang.

And then they were everywhere.

Rats.

They came in waves, heading for Dicky first and covering him head to toe in gray and brown fur. He fell to the floor and the controller, now useless, skittered across the tiles. Dicky was screaming, but the scream stopped moments after it started. There was a rat with its head in his mouth.

The sewer aroma of the rats wafted over the room in a pungent tide. There were hundreds of them in the room within seconds, and more poured in a steady stream from the open doorway to the basement and fell from the vent in the corner. Dozens arrived per second. A thousand each minute. The area beyond the counter began to fill like a tide pool.

People were screaming. Those in the back were the last to know what was going on, and looked angry. Some craned their necks. Some thrashed. Some tried to run, but the doors were locked. The cameramen, dutiful to the bitter end, watched it all with their electronic eyes to the world. They peered at the small viewscreens with morose fascination, unable to tear themselves away from the spectacle for long enough to fear for their lives. It all seemed too surreal – a network stunt to boost ratings for this ever-so-wild New Year’s Eve gala.
 

Philip, never terribly athletic, dove hands-first over the closed half-door in the counter to re-join the others and rolled as he landed. Watching this, Mike mouthed the words
Fucking awesome
and offered him a high-five that he didn’t notice and then they all turned, the entire crew watching the chaos unfold in front of them. Tracy followed, his leap far less graceful.

They were temporarily protected by the counter, but the tide was rising, and the rats could climb.
 

They were, in fact, climbing Angela the Agent already, making nests out of her fabulous New Year’s gala hairdo and scrambling up the legs of her pants. Captain Dipshit, who the rats remembered, was totally covered. The rats, who Captain Dipshit remembered, were trying to dodge his attacks as he flailed and tried to stomp them to death.
 

“Philip,” Darcy whispered. “The Plexi.”

Philip was watching the melee, transfixed. It was as if the room was on fire, but with fur instead of flames.

“Philip! The sneeze shield!”

Sneeze shield.
The words made sense, but they didn’t register. Less than two hundred seconds ago, Philip had been sure that they were all going to die and that there wasn’t a thing he could do to stop it. Now there were over a thousand rats in the lobby. Too much, too fast.

Darcy grabbed Philip’s shoulders and shook him hard. “Goddammit, Philip, lower that fucking shield before I kick your balls up into your chest!”