No Small Bills Page 21

  This was a lot like that.

  Only without the costumes. None of us were that stupid.

  And for a big guy made of fiberoptic fur, that Gwarmesh moves pretty fast!

  “We’re not gonna be able to outrun him!” Ned shouted as we all bolted down the road. “We need a better plan!”

  “I’m open to suggestions!” I hollered back.

  “We’ve got to find some way to stop him from hitting anything, or anything hitting him!” Tall yelled. “Otherwise he’ll just keep getting bigger and stronger!”

  “Great, let’s wrap him in Saran wrap and be done with it, then!” I snapped. And then stopped short. “Yes!” I shouted. “I’m brilliant!”

  “You’re about to be flattened!” Tall retorted, grabbing my arm and hauling me out of the way just before what looked like a size 45 quintuple-D foot landed right where my head had been. “Keep moving!”

  “Thanks!” I pulled my arm free but followed his suggestion. “But I have a plan! We need to lead him back over to the general store!” I glanced ahead of us. “Or what’s left of it!”

  “Then what?” Mary asked, pulling alongside me. I couldn’t help noticing how gracefully she ran, even with a crazed scourge-thing behind us and a wrecked town all around us.

  “Tansy!” I shouted.

  “Here!” And she was, too, hovering on my other side.

  “Can your reality-warping merge things together?”

  “Sure, that’s easy—though if they have nervous systems it can get pretty ugly.” She made a face. “Don’t ask. I did have the coolest pet in second grade, though. For about thirty seconds.”

  “I don’t want to know. I need you to book it on over to the general store,” I instructed, “and find that barrel of taffy we knocked over on the way out. Then merge all of it into one big taffy-pull. Got it?”

  “Got it!” She flew past us, zipping through the wreckage easily.

  “We’re going to offer him taffy if he leaves us alone?” Ned asked, puffing as he tried to keep up with the rest of us. He has short legs.

  “Not exactly.” I told them my plan, and Tall scowled and shook his head.

  “That’s even more ridiculous than Tansy’s harebrained stunt!” he complained.

  “Still waiting for a better one from you, G-Man,” I pointed out. Which shut him up again.

  “I think it might actually work,” Ned offered between gasps. “Worth a shot, anyway.”

  “I agree,” Mary chimed in. “I will search for the other component.” I hadn’t realized she’d been holding back to pace us until she sped up and left us in her dust. Which of course meant I got to watch her from behind as she ran, so I was hardly complaining. Still, it’d be nice if I was better than her at something!

  Besides bobbing for apples, that is.

  “He’ll never fall for this,” Tall groused. “He’s too smart!”

  “Then we need a way to trick him into it,” I replied. “Too bad we don’t have anybody good at sneaking stuff and planning and tactics, hm?”

  For once he actually took the hint—and grinned at me. “I’m on it,” he promised, which may have been one of the least antagonistic things Tall’s ever said to me.

  “What about me?” Ned asked.

  “I need you to soup them up,” I reminded him. “None of the rest of us would have any clue how to do that. And I’m sure this plan’d work against a drunken frat guy—hell, we did something similar once, with Saran wrap and oatmeal—and maybe even against a small gorilla. But against that?” I gestured back behind us, where the growls and snarls and breaking sounds were. Neither of us dared to look. “You’ll have to figure out a way to super-charge them.”

  Ned nodded, that working-on-something look already in his eyes. “I think I can . . .” he trailed off, which was just as well since I suspected he’d been about to explain his idea to me and then my brain might have shut down from sheer futility. If Ned couldn’t figure it out I don’t know who could.

  So now everybody had a job to do.

  Including me.

  I was the bait.

  Which I suppose is what I get for having such brightly colored plumage.

  “That’s right, big ugly! Just keep right on my tail!” I shouted over my shoulder. Then, “Hey! Not literally! I don’t even have a tail!” as he swiped at me and narrowly missed carving open my backside. I’m pretty sure I heard a few sequins die horrible, messy deaths. I was zigging and zagging for all I was worth, waiting for one of the others to give me the signal—not that I knew what the signal was, mind you—and trying to keep Gwarmesh from getting his massive paws on me.

  I figured I could last maybe another thirty seconds. If I got lucky.

  Just then I saw Tall gesturing from off to the side. Finally! “Head for the doorway there!” he shouted. I looked, and sure enough, there was a doorway.

  No door.

  No wall, either.

  Just a doorway, standing there all by itself trying to look innocent. If it could’ve I bet the damned thing would’ve whistled.

  I gave it everything I had, and practically flew across the rubble. “What’s with the doorway?” I hollered as I ran. “Are we planning to mime locking the door on him?” I wondered if that would work—certainly those boxes could keep a mime trapped for hours, so why not a real door with a decent imaginary deadbolt?

  Tall just shook his head. I think he was getting used to me. “Just run through it!”

  So I did. I barreled along, over bits of wall and floor and ceiling and who knew what else, and leaped through the open doorway, with Gwarmesh hot on my heels. Literally—apparently being a galactic scourge and using kinetic waveforms meant you produced a whole lot of heat. I was pretty sure I’d have blisters on my rump next time I checked.

  I passed through the doorway without a problem. Gwarmesh? Not so much. He was at least two feet too wide for the portal, and a good foot or two too tall, as well. Which only slowed him down a little bit.

  Now here’s a thing. You’re standing in a field of nothing but rubble, nothing taller than a few inches in any direction. Except for this doorway, right in front of you. You’re chasing a guy and he runs through the doorway, but you won’t fit. So do you go around it? Or do you try to push and shove and squeeze through it anyway?

  I’m not saying I wouldn’t have done the exact same thing, you understand. I’m just trying to figure out why.

  So there’s Gwarmesh, groping for me with one clawed hand while the other tries to bend the doorframe so he can fit his bulk through it.

  Which is when I finally realized something:

  The doorframe? It was a bright, shocking pink. Not a color you see in nature much, except on flamingos. No, this was a shade you generally only got on Barbie accessories, little girls’ lip gloss—

  —and saltwater taffy. The strawberry kind.

  “Now!” Tall shouted. Gwarmesh had managed to beat the doorframe into something more curved than squared, and had his head and half his body through it. Which is when Ned nodded, pointed one of his gizmos at it, and pushed a button.

  The entire doorframe collapsed around Gwarmesh. And over him. He growled and snarled and began thrashing about, but it clung to every inch of him, and his struggles only made it stick more tightly.

  That was taffy for you. Tastes good, sure, but try getting it off your face or clothes or, God forbid, out of your hair.

  That stuff is murder.

  “Got him!” Ned whooped.

  “Nice!” I agreed. “Mary! Where’s the second half?”

  “Right here,” she announced from a few feet past the taffy-coated scourge. She was hurrying toward him, Tansy fluttering alongside her, and each of them held one end of a large cylinder of something frilly and pink.

  “Great!” I ran forward to help them. “Drop it down—yeah, just like that! Here we go!” Between the three of us, with Tansy and Mary holding the roll steady and me tugging the fabric and sweeping it around, in about two minutes we had Gwarm
esh the Taffy Monster completely swaddled.

  In taffeta.

  Tall studied the results. “You really think that’s gonna hold him?” he asked.

  “Absolutely,” I told him. “I’ve seen taffeta in action before—back when I was a kid there were always a few girls who wore dresses in this stuff and turned up their noses at the rest of us. But they played just as hard and just as rough as anyone.” I shook my head, remembering Mary Sue and Betsy Anne. “By the end of the day, our jeans would be torn, our T-shirts and sweatshirts shredded—but those taffeta dresses? Not a mark on ’em.” I glanced at the writhing mass beside us. “If it can survive two grade-school girls and a blacktop, it can handle the Scourge of the Galaxy.”

  “It certainly can now,” Ned agreed. “I’ve reinforced its atomic structure—it’s stronger than bifold aluminum glass. He can stretch it a bit here and there but it’ll never break, and the taffy’s absorbing all his kinetic energy so he can’t build up a charge.” He nodded. “Nice one, DuckBob.”

  “Aw, thanks.” I shrugged. “Good to know my crazy frat days come in handy for something.” I glanced around. “So, what do we do now?”

  “We continue on to the matrix,” Mary answered. “I have notified the galactic authorities, and they will take the Feh Har Bel Lanic into custody. With the restraints we have placed upon him, he will no longer pose a danger to anyone.” She favored me with one of those killer smiles of hers. “The universe is once again in your debt, DuckBob. But now we must make sure it survives long enough to acknowledge that debt, by realigning the matrix and preventing the invasion.”

  “Oh, right. That.” I brushed myself off, trying to look casual. “Well, I guess we’ve already saved the universe today. What’s once more among friends?” I stepped up to her and extended my arm in my very best Clark Gable fashion. “Shall we return to our cycle, my dear?”

  She giggled—actually giggled like a coed—and took my arm. “Absolutely.”

  We led the way back to our vehicles and took off as quickly as we could. No sense waiting around for the authorities, who’d only try to ask us a bunch of questions we didn’t really want to answer right now.

  Besides, watching that taffy and taffeta was making me nauseous. Or hungry. I can’t always tell the difference.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Sorry, this one’s taken

  It only took us another hour to reach the matrix.

  Well, sort of.

  “The matrix is housed in the structure just up ahead,” Mary explained from up against my shoulder. “We should stop and assess the situation before approaching it.”

  “Assess the situation? Why?” I asked her. “We ride up in a blaze of glory, I realign the thing, the reality-fence pops back into place, the invaders get the heave-ho, and we strut out like the triumphant heroes we are.” I thought about it. “Maybe the blaze of glory comes after? I guess in the movies they usually ride up in a hail of bullets, don’t they? Yikes.”

  “Precisely,” she agreed. “We do not know what will be necessary to reach the matrix, and if we simply continue on at full speed we will have no opportunity to stop and plan.”

  I wanted to point out that planning wasn’t exactly my strong suit, and that charging in blindly had been working pretty well so far, but then I thought about the particulars: a race’s history rewritten, a train crashed, a color lost, a car stolen, a shrimp killed, a prison sentence escaped, a town demolished, a scourge set loose—yeah, okay, maybe I didn’t have the best track record so far. I tapped the brakes and pulled over to the side of the road, right beside what looked for all the world like one of those cheesy haircut franchises you always see in the mall. Then I made the mistake of looking in through the plate-glass windows. There were . . . people in there, all right, and they were sitting in what looked a lot like barber’s chairs, with other people behind and around them, but they were . . . eating? Their own hair? I turned away quickly. Yuck. I was suddenly really happy I had feathers now instead—they just fell out and got replaced, so no barber shops. Ever.

  Ned brought his mecharoo space-hopper to a screeching, tail-wagging halt right beside us. “We need to check things out before we charge in,” I called up to him, and he looked at me funny. Tall nodded from behind him, though.

  “Good idea.” Then he frowned. “Real good idea.” The frown morphed into a grin. “It was Mary’s, wasn’t it?”

  “Oh, shut up.” His grin actually got a little wider. “You’re the sneaky spy-guy—get your butt down here and scout or something.”

  “Aye aye, sir!” he snapped off a salute and hopped down, striding past me to the corner of the shop. Then he peered around it—and whistled.

  “What? What’s up? What’d you see?” I crept up behind him, which was pretty silly considering I was: a) a man with the head of a duck, b) dressed like Elvis, c) riding an interstellar Harley, and d) trying to sneak past a shop with a plate-glass window. But at least it made me feel like I was being stealthy.

  “Take a look.” Tall pulled back so I could maneuver past him. “At least we found our missing . . . car.”

  I snuck a glance. There, up ahead, was a huge . . . building? It was tall and had curving walls made from some glittering grayish-pink stone or maybe dull metal, and there were big arches carved into the sides and a few more in front, some up high like skylights and some down below like doggy doors. It had what looked like small towers running in a row down the middle, too, and those were even more glittery than the rest, except for these other shapes like narrow balconies on either side. There was something about it that struck me funny, and not in a “oh ho, look at that space-matrix building, ain’t it a hoot!” sort of way.

  And there was something that looked like a miniature alien bridge sticking out of it.

  “Huh.” I twisted to look at Ned, who was behind me. “Guess that bridge-cluster-thingy would have gotten us here after all.”

  Ned peeked around me. “I knew I programmed the coordinates right!” he whispered. “If I’d only remembered to up the inertial compensators—”

  “Yeah yeah, water under the bridge—almost literally.” I looked at the weird building again. Whoever’d put that thing together could have used a subscription to This Old House. Or just a set of Lincoln Logs to practice with first. “So that’s it? That’s where the matrix is?”

  “It is,” Mary confirmed. “We must enter the structure and convey you to the matrix itself, so that you can realign it. Then this will finally be over.” She didn’t sound completely happy about that, but maybe that was just wishful thinking on my part. After all, once the matrix was fixed up again my part’d be done. They’d ship me back to Earth, back to my dead-end mind-numbing job, and all I’d have to show for it would be a pharmeon loop belt, a cool Elvis outfit, and a few galactic credit cards. Big whoop. I probably couldn’t even tell anybody, at least not without everyone assuming I’d finally lost it—I still had trouble convincing people I had a duck’s head, and that was when they were staring straight at me. Telling them all the weirdness I’d been through in the past year, all the places I’d been and the people I’d seen? Forget about it. Probably the closest I best I could manage would be muttering drunkenly about it in bars late at night, or using it as yet another way to heckle telephone psychics. Maybe Tall and I would get together every few months to sit back and reminisce like old war vets: “Yep, remember that time we were on the garbage truck and mistook that one owner for his trash? Or the little cartoon-bunny whose bridge we stole? Heh!” I probably couldn’t even sell the rights to late-night cable, and that was saying something.

  The job had to get done, though. I’d worry about the aftermath, well, after.

  “Okay, what are we waiting for?” I flipped up my lapels and straightened my shades. “Let’s go.” I started to step around the corner, and Tall’s heavy hand landed on my shoulder, yanking me back.

  “Wait!” he hissed. “It’s bound to be a trap!”

  I stared at him. “What’re yo
u talking about? We finally made it! The thingy is right over there, in that big ugly pink building! We just have to walk over there, let ourselves in, find the matrix, realign it, and we’re done! Easy as pie.”

  “Exactly.” Tall let me go but shifted so he was blocking my path. “And the enemy must know that.” He looked at Mary. “They know about the matrix, right?”

  “Almost certainly,” she admitted.

  “And they know where it’s located?”

  A frown crossed those pretty features. “I see no reason to believe otherwise—it is not a well-known object, yet its existence and location are hardly secret. Any who wished to locate it would be able to do so with only minimal effort.”

  “And they must know that if we realign it they’ll be blocked again.”

  Again Mary nodded. “If they know of the matrix’s existence and function, they would certainly know of the dangers involved for them.”

  Tall squared his jaw—I’d never actually seen anyone do that before, but he really did. I half-expected his eyes to glint coldly any second. “Which means the invaders know we’ve got to get here, and they know where here is. They’ve had plenty of time to get here before us, so they’ve seized the building and barricaded it against us.” He shrugged. “It’s what I’d do.”

  “Yeah, but you’re an FBI guy,” I argued—I knew he wasn’t exactly FBI but I loved watching his left eye twitch whenever I said it. I made a mental note to refer to him as CIA next time instead, to see if I could get the right one going, too. “You’re supposed to be all paranoid and conspiracy-oriented and such. You probably worry every time you order delivery that somebody’s intercepted it and spiked your food with acid and truth serum and rare Australian dingo-venom.” The look of utter horror on his face told me he’d never be able to order delivery again, which I simply considered a bonus. “Who’s to say these guys think that way? They may not even know the matrix exists!”

  “They’re invading our universe from a parallel reality!” Tall all but shouted in my face. “They’re a military force intent upon conquest! Of course they know it’s here, and of course they’ve taken it hostage! They’d have to be morons to do anything else, and despite whatever you may think they are not an army of you!”