Untitled (32 page)

    But Ledelei was nonplussed. She bent down to pick up the oil can, grimacing a little at Guittierez' head. She turned around and started oiling Nick, starting with the rusty iron part of his lower jaw, careful to keep the oil out of bone and tissue.

    By the time he could talk, he was scary-calm.

    "Thank you, young lady. Now my knees, please."

    She obliged, and followed his subsequent oiling instructions. Soon Nick was sprinting around the room, swinging his ax menacingly.

    I couldn't stop looking at the head. The second-last time I'd seen it seemed a million years back somewhere. It had been attached to a smiling, live person in an Armani suit then. Now it stared at me like something from behind the window at the meat department at Ralph's. Alas poor Yorick and all that shit.

    It was time to go, and I was starting to feel a little inadequate. I had a gun, and a fghting chance, but I was no warrior like those two. I fumbled in my ogre-pockets, just making sure the weapon was handy, and felt the cylindrical curve of the gold jar that contained "The Powder of Life" in my other pocket. This time I was determined to say something. This was the time. If anybody knew what to do with the stuff, Nick would.

    I was about to walk (carefully) over to him and show him what I had, ask him if we could use it somehow, hoping I would save the day with this marvelous substance. But Ledelei grabbed the jar of powder out of my hand.

    "Hey!" I yelled. "What are you doing? Gimme that!" I lunged for it while she played keep away.

    She grinned at me slyly, untwisting the cap. "Don't try to fool me again, Gene. I am not stupid. I know all about the Earth drugs. This will certainly make me faster and stronger."

    And before I could do anything, she tipped some white powder out onto the back of her gloved hand, and snorted it. And immediately sneezed, blowing the remainder... onto the head of Alphonse Guttierrez.

    Now Nick had stopped his calesthenics, and was slowly walking back toward us, taking in the situation at the same time.

    As Ledelei read the label, fnally comprehending what she'd just done, I grabbed the bottle back and screwed the cap back on.

    "That was the stupidest thing I have ever seen," I seethed. "Do you know what this is? I don't. I was about to show Nick, but—"

    Nick was glaring at me, with his hand outstretched. I looked at the bottle, and back at him, then I handed it to him. No problem. The bottle disappeared into a metal drawer in his chest, and then I guess into history, because I never saw or heard of it again.

    Right about that time, two things happened. A groaning came from the direction of the head. And Ledelei began to act... strange. I was afraid to look at the head, but I forced myself to.

    "UUuuhh..." the battered, decaying thing hissed, sounding like a latino Miles Davis. "Chingado, I don't feel so good." The reumy eyes stared up at me. "What happened, man? Last thing I remember, I was heading for the Brick, and now I'm here feeling like shit. Who are you? And what smells?"

    The other two looked at me, like I was the spokesman for the group. Thanks, I thought.

    "Well," I stammered out, "my name's Gene, and—"

    "I've seen you before, somewhere...," the head interrupted. "You from L.A.?"

    "Uh, yeah," I said. "Uh, look—you had kind of an—accident? And you might have some trouble getting around for a little while. I think we're gonna leave and do some stuff for a bit, then we'll come back and get you. But—"

    "Fuck that. I'm going with you. This place stinks, and it's dark."

    Nick looked down at the head. "Mr. Guittierrez, things are a little different here now. Things have changed since you came through the gate." He paused. I think the head was even getting to him. "Bjhennigh has begun his war," he continued.

    Ledelei had a distracted look, and was starting to vibrate. I mean, serious vibrating, starting small and building, until her whole body moved back and forth in periodic bursts like the wing of a giant hummingbird.

    Nick glanced at her disgustedly, and went on. "When I heard about your—mishap—I knew that the aggressors would soon begin their move. Bjhennigh would never have been so bold as to kill a citizen of Emerald unless he were ready to proceed with his plans of conquest."

    "Kill? Whataya mean kill?"

    Nick got a strange look on his face, then glanced at me. "Did I say 'kill'? I meant 'molest'. Yes, I believe I meant it in that sense of the word."

    The head looked at me. "What's he been smoking, ese? You aren't makin sense, Mr. Nick. There's no sense of the word 'kill' that means 'molest'. I mean, English is my second language, and I guess Pawt'kween is my third, but I'm pretty sure 'kill' means 'kill' in both of them."

Nick wouldn't let it go. "An archaic usage."

The head wasn't buying.

"Very well. Mr. Guittierrez, you are a head."

"Ahead of what?"

"You are a head."

"I'm a head?"

    Ledelei was vibrating so fast now that you could hardly see her. She was whirling around the room, rather quickly. I guess if you were already alive, the Powder of Life made you really alive. I hoped that we could still communicate with her. It was getting hard to see where she was: she looked kind of like The Flash when he does laps around the world.

    "Look," I said, exasperated, "do we really have time for this?"

    The Tinman was staring at the doorway. "No," he said, raising his ax.

    I followed his glance, and saw the frst of the zombie munchkins shamble through the door. They looked the same as the stationary models we'd seen on the way in, dressed in the same striped P.J.'s. Except that they were shambling.

    I never thought I'd get to see an actual shambling zombie, but there they were. Only one of them had a chainsaw, and it wasn't even on. That seemed kind of a ripoff, on a purely aesthetic level. On a practical level, it was great.

    I wasn't sure what to do about the head, but I didn't think it was right to leave Guitierrez (or what was left of him) to the tender mercies of the munchkin zombies. So I leaned the torch against the wall, removed my ogre vest and, over loud complaints, stuck the disgusting talking head into the middle of it and wrapped it up. I had to gamble that it wouldn't suffocate, already being dead and everything. Guitierrez continued to complain in a muffed kind of way, jiggling around feebly under my arm. I felt bad, but there didn't seem to be a choice.

    Nick was just planted there, watching the zombies stumble up. He held his ax out in front of him, waiting for them to come to him.

    "Listen," I whispered, "I have some experience with this. I think the best all around thing to do is aim for the head. If you chop the—"

    Nick ran forward, ax held high, screaming at the top of his lungs (as if he was going to scare a zombie) and lopped off the frst of several zombie heads. As I fumbled for Ralph's gun in the balled up vest, I noticed that several of the other revenants were falling apart as if spontaneously. I heard a buzzing noise accompianing this phenomenon, as if the animated corpses were falling into a wood chipper. Suddenly I came to the realization that this was Ledelei's doing: she was whipping around these creatures so quickly that I could only see the results of her handiwork.

    By the time I had the Magic Magnum cocked and ready to go, it was over. Corpse parts lay strewn all around the front part of the chamber. I wasn't sure that Ledelei was even in the room anymore; I couldn't see or hear anything to indicate her presence either way.

    One of the munchkin heads stared up at me, insensate, bitterly mouthing something, some secret from the other side that I wasn't destined to ever comprehend.

    Nick sprinted over to me, a little out of breath but otherwise not too ruffed. "Your assumption was correct, Gene of Los Angeles." He reached out and, honest to God, ruffed the hair on my head. "I hadn't realized that these creatures roamed the surface of Earth."

    "Oh yeah," I said, following him out of the inner dungeon, "tons of them. All over the place."

We were halfway up the dungeon staircase when we heard the next thunderous explosion, and felt the earth shake under us.

    "Yesss," I said quietly, "Excellent. Ralph's still at it."

    Nick gave me a questioning look, and I explained Ralph's situation to him as we climbed.

    Nick chuckled. "I knew he would come around in the end."

    "What," I said, surprised, "you knew about Ralph?"

    Now he was laughing silently, resting his ax against the stone stair. He looked like he might be a bit tired, but he'd never let on.

    I looked at him, waiting, grinning uncomfortably, wanting to be let in on the joke.

    When he calmed down, he said, "You people from Earth seem to think of me as a jolly simpleton for some reason. I don't know why. Maybe it has something to do with the books that that Baum fellow wrote, or the moving picture with all the dancing and singing. I would venture to guess that you think of our entire world in the same light: some sort of savage playground populated by ageless

children. But it's not so, Gene."

    He smiled at me kindly; now there was no sign of the scary maniac. "Ralph is—a good man in a rather peculiar situation. He-there are many things going on here that you don't understand. One is that, while I am loyal to Ozma, and a friend and ally of Glinda, I am still a pragmatist. I have to gather my own intelligence, protect my own rather special interests. You see, Gene, I'm been the ruler of the Winkies for quite a long time now. When I'm not hiking around the countryside or rotting in a dungeon."

    I stared down at the foor, thinking, trying to absorb what this very important guy was letting me in on, and the import of it struck me suddenly, and I looked up again. "Yeah, I've heard about this." I was being allowed into the good-old-boys club! Gabba gabba, one of us!

    "Hmmm. So.. what you're telling me is... Ralph feeds you tidbits every once in a while and you turn a blind eye (sorry), and you don't let Ozma and Company in on everything you happen to fnd out." I chewed on that for a second. "Yeah. I don't think I would either, come to think of it."

    He gave me a feeting smile, then his face resumed its fearsome seriousness. "Let's get moving," he said.

    Maybe he wasn't so bad after all. Maybe.

    We climbed the rest of the way to the ground foor without much incident, except for once, when a strange sound came from the inside of the ogre vest. I was alarmed for a moment until I realized that it was Guittierrez's head snoring. I still don't know what it was using for air.

    We started down the hallway. I was looking for the way out, which I was pretty sure was a little way down and to the left.

    "Piece of cake," I said to Nick, "we'll be out of here in no time."

    He gave me one of those supremely scary looks, one of his Imay-just-chop-your-head-off-for-fun looks.

    "Out?" he said, "why would we want to go out? We're going in, Gene. We're going to fnd that—what is the colorful phrase that you use on Earth?" He searched the memory banks for a second. He found it, and savored the sound of it. "Motherfucker." This was a very tricky situation for me. On one hand, I'd done my bit, I'd gotten Nick Chopper out of the dungeon, and now I wanted to get the hell out of the fortress. On the other hand, Nick wasn't going to take no for an answer. Not so tricky of a situation after all.

    The corridor widened out into a large oval. This bothered me, because for the frst time since entering the fortress, the layout didn't look familiar.

    We walked into the middle of it. I had about three seconds to look around and scratch my chin, and was about to mention something to the effect that I wasn't sure where we were any more, when I heard noise coming from the other side of the oval chamber.

    Suddenly we were surrounded by big smelly ogre guys. Six of them had the large axes I'd seen before, and two had amazingly huge maces, which they were swinging around their heads.

    Suddenly, one of them yelped, like he'd been bitten by a snake. In seconds, blood started to squirt out from various places on his body, and he collapsed into a pile of muck, like one of those buildings imploded with strategically placed blasts of dynamite. Only this building was made out of meat.

    Ledelei was still with us.

    Nick made his move. He leaped forward to join battle with the frst of the remaining ogres. Suprisingly, it didn't go down like a Kung Fu movie. They did not all wait in line for him to kick the frst one's ass before the next one joined in. Three of the remaining ogres started towards Nick, while a fourth started to bloodily implode.

    Where were the other three? Looking longingly at, and moving cautiously towards me. Evidently, they were a little spooked by the sudden demise of their two buddies, but not enough to dissuade them from trying to turn me into a rump roast. I got my fngers wrapped around the trigger of the Magnum, which was stupidly back in the pocket of the vest, which was still wrapped around Guittierrez' head (which was still snoring).

    I dropped the torch, and managed to get the gun out this time. I aimed it at one of them, as they backed me into the corridor opposite the one we'd entered the chamber from. They let out a collective noise, a "hweeerrrugghhh" noise worthy of the Flatheads.

    I'm not proud to say it, but I completely lost my nerve, and tore ass down the corridor, hoping that the layout of the fortress was enough like what I knew to get me to the exit.

    But this didn't stop the ogres from following. I heard them stomping the foor behind me. They couldn't match my speed, but it was just a matter of time before I either got winded, or ran into another bunch of these guys, or something worse. I kept on running all the same, following twists and turns, trying to lose them.