No Small Bills Read online

  “I found this thousand-dollar bill laying on the ground just outside—is it yours?” That one always worked.

  There was a rustling behind me, or at least I thought so. It was like when you heard the wind in the leaves but weren’t completely sure you were hearing that or the sound of a crazed killer sneaking up the stairs, butcher knife in hand, ready to dismember you and festoon the walls with your bloody entrails.

  I watched a lot of cheesy horror movies when I was younger.

  There is nothing wrong with a grown man sleeping with a nightlight. Nothing!

  I tried to listen harder—which is a silly phrase, really, because how do you listen harder? Do you screw up your ears or something?—and the rustling slowly resolved itself into words.

  “Identify yourself.”

  “DuckBob Spinowitz,” I answered. “Nice to meet you. If I did, in fact, meet you. Wanna show yourself? Shake hands? Get a beer?”

  “Why are you here?” the rustling asked. It was still hovering just past the edge of my vision. I guess that meant no beer.

  “I wanted to talk to you guys. You know, about the whole invasion thing.” I didn’t see much point in lying. For all I knew they could read my mind. Though why they’d need to ask my name then I had no idea. Unless they were testing me to see if I answered them honestly, and reading my mind to make sure.

  Sneaky little buggers.

  “Who sent you?”

  “Oh, you know, the Grays. They sent me. Well, sort of sent me—I mean, they told me about what was going on and asked me to come. So did Agent Smith, though. So maybe he sent me. He’s more the ordering type, when you get down to it. The Grays didn’t actually demand I come, though they did say it was all up to me.”

  “Why did they send you?”

  I scratched at my bill. “I need to realign the matrix, I think. Something like that. Have you seen it around here anywhere?” I turned my head slowly, so as not to spook anyone, and scanned the rest of the room. More smooth shiny sparkly pink. Had I fallen into the universe’s largest bottle of nail polish? I hoped they tipped well, because whoever had the job of buffing all of this, they definitely deserved it!

  “How will you realign it?” the rustling demanded.

  “I have no idea,” I admitted. “I’m kinda hoping there’s a big button marked ‘Realign’ and I can just push it, though I suppose if that were the case anybody could have done it. Maybe there’s a keycode? Though they didn’t give me a code. Ooh, or a musical code, like I have to whistle the theme to Knot’s Landing to activate it—I can do that one, you know. You’d be surprised how well you can whistle through these little blowhole thingies on my bill. Listen!” I started whistling the Knot’s Landing theme, but stopped when something zapped me in the head. It felt like static electricity, like when you give someone a goodnight peck on the cheek and get a static shock for your trouble, stinging my bill and my cheek and making my eye twitch. Yowtch.

  “Where are you from?” was the rustling’s next question. If a rustling noise could sound impatient, it did.

  “Earth. New York City. Manhattan. Well, I mean I live in Brooklyn, because who can afford to live in Manhattan, right? But I’m in Fort Greene, it’s nice, and the commute isn’t too bad, so—” I shut up when it zapped me again. A shrink once told me I tended to babble when I was nervous. He also said I was one of the most nervous people he’d ever met. Of course, I was also one of the only people he’d ever met, at least professionally—he was a pet psychologist. They sent me to him because the regular shrinks couldn’t look at me without frothing at the mouth and ranting about actualized metaphors and extreme self-delusion made contagious and other big phrases that sounded impressive and apparently justified their charging thousands of dollars an hour just to gawk at me. I figured if anything I should be the one charging—wasn’t that how it worked in the circus? That’s what the recruiters kept saying, anyway.

  “What galactic coordinates?” the rustling demanded.

  “For where? Earth? I have no idea.” I tried to remember what Ned and Mary had said when we first met. “It’s something like forty million light-years from here, I think, though that was just a guesstimate rather than an exact figure. Does that help any?”

  “In what direction?”

  “Hm? Oh.” I thought about that for a second. “That way, I think.” I gestured. “Assuming the front door is that way—is it? Because we came from that direction.”

  Have you ever heard a rustling noise sigh in disgust? It’s amazing, actually—the pitch or timbre or whatever completely changes, and the rustling actually slows, becomes more drawn out, kind of like an old movie ghost moan. I totally want that for my next ringtone.

  “Did you come here alone?” it asked after a minute of moaning.

  “What, inside? Yeah, didn’t you see me walking across the street hollering at you?” Maybe it was blind. Maybe the rustling was like radar, where the sounds bounced back to it and told it where everything was. If that was the case, I was golden—I figured I could swish my pant cuffs back and forth and make it think the room’d turned into a maze somehow, or that it was stuck in the middle of a giant well, and make a run for it while it was still groping around looking for the door.

  “You are in communication with others,” it insisted, and I cursed under my breath. I’d always heard stories that people who lost one sense got stronger in the others to compensate. Obviously the rustling was blind but had excellent hearing. Though how it could hear anything over its own rustling was beyond me. Maybe it had special rustle-canceling earplugs, so it could filter out its own sounds. I’d kill for some of those, both one that silenced the rustling and ones that meant I didn’t hear myself talking. Come to think of it, if I ever found earplugs that cancelled out the sound of my voice I could make a killing. I knew at least a hundred people who’d buy ’em, right off the bat.

  I come from a large family.

  The rustling was still talking, which just shows that I don’t actually need noise-canceling earplugs. I’m capable of tuning out conversations all by myself. “Who are these others?” it was demanding.

  “Hm? Oh, right, my friends, the ones who came with me.” I ticked them off on my fingers. “There’s Mary, Ned, Tall, and Tansy. Want to meet them?”

  “Where are they from? Who do they work for? What are their capabilities?” Those all came in a rush of rustling, like someone had found a box of tissue paper and tossed a kitten inside to rampage around.

  “Um, where are they from? I don’t know, Tall’s from the East Coast somewhere, I’d guess not New York because his accent’s all wrong but not Midwest or West Coast either, so maybe something like North Carolina? He’s not a southerner, I don’t think, but he might’ve worked to lose his old accent as part of the job. Mary’s from—I have no idea. Isn’t that sad? All this time together and I really don’t know anything about her. I’ll have to do something about that, maybe over a nice quiet dinner in one of those little hole-in-the-wall Italian places with the good food and the dim lighting and the soft music. Ned’s from Betelgeuse, or someplace nearby. No idea about Tansy—I think she may’ve said once but I honestly don’t remember, which I feel bad about. I should make more of an effort to remember people’s details, shouldn’t I? Try to connect better, build a stronger bond—that’s what the HR people at work keep saying. At least I think they do.” I stopped talking when it zapped me again. My head was getting sore.

  “What forces have been arrayed against us?” it wanted to know next. Guess it had given up asking about the others.

  “Arrayed against you?” I laughed, though I knew it might get me zapped again. “Who even talks like that? Have you been watching old fantasy movies, the ones with the dragons on strings and the magic that looks a lot like silly string and smoke bombs? Because you really need to try some of the newer flicks, the action’s a lot better and the green-screen stuff is actually really cool now, this one I saw the other week had—” Zap.

  “What forces are a
rrayed against us?” it repeated. The rustling was louder, which I’m guessing means it was annoyed. I do seem to have that effect on people.

  “How the hell should I know?” I snapped back. “What am I, the latest issue of Newsweek? ‘Check page twelve for a full breakdown of the forces arrayed against the psychotic rustling sound from Dimension X’? Give me a break! And don’t you dare zap me again! Show some manners—were you raised in a barn? A big, rustling, other-dimensional barn?”

  I jumped to my feet while I was telling it off, and whirled around to face it—

  —only to find myself staring at nothing.

  No, not quite nothing. There was a shimmery patch in the air. Like the heatwave right behind a jet engine. I could see the room through it, but it was hazy. Something was definitely there.

  Something about half my size and floating about three feet off the ground.

  “Look,” I started, but didn’t get any farther than that because suddenly a siren went off somewhere nearby. At least it sounded like a siren—for all I knew it was one of these guys singing, or cursing because he’s stubbed his other-dimensional toe.

  “An intruder!” the patch rustled, so I guess I was right about it being an alarm. “It has breached the perimeter!” Which would have filled me with more enthusiasm if I had any idea where the perimeter was or what it took to breach it. If it meant someone or something had gotten inside the building, great. If, on the other hand, “breaching the perimeter” meant “someone has walked within a dozen light-years of this place,” I was going to hold off on the celebrating. Though if that was the case they’d probably have that siren going off a lot more often.

  “It is one of your allies,” the patch informed me. It sounded way too pleased with itself. “We will question it instead. It will be more forthcoming with its answers.”

  “You think so? I’ve been pretty forthcoming,” I shot back. “Is it my fault you don’t like my answers? I’ve never tested well—give me a script and I can do better. Or let me do interpretive dance instead—I’ve been told my Swan Lake is really amazing.”

  It didn’t answer. It was still there, or at least the air was still shimmering slightly, but that could’ve meant it had left the window open or the monitor on while it went off for a quick drink or a pee break or a nosh. I paced around the room, since it didn’t tell me to stop, and looked for a way out, but when I tried to step into a closet-sized alcove off to one side something threw me back across the room and the same happened when I tried the one visible door. Looked like I was trapped in here, waiting on His Highness the Rustling Shadowy Thing. Great.

  Since there wasn’t much else I could do, I got a drink from this one little indentation that had water trickling into it from above, then started rummaging through the little nooks and crannies that lined one wall like the cubbyholes we’d had in kindergarten. I got the feeling I was being held in the equivalent of a locker room, and these were the regular workers’ lockers. Several of them had these stretchy silvery fabric thingies that I took to be work shirts and one had a great gleaming candy-apple red spiked hardhat, which I would’ve borrowed if it had even remotely fit on my head—that’s a real problem for me these days. There were these big huge mechanical boots in a few, and what looked like a pair of worn old red velvet ballet slippers in one—I didn’t ask. But the third nook from the end was the real jackpot. It held one of those bits of fabric, a wide flat rectangle of smoky glass or plastic that I thought was probably like wraparound sunglasses, a shapeless brown pouch that might have been a hat or a bag or the start of a hand puppet—and a lunchbox, the big old metal kind you used to see in commercials being toted around by construction workers. Except that this one had a grainy white and gray and black finish with veins running through it, and it was hard and cold to the touch. Marble. The darned thing had been carved out of real marble. Was there some kind of rule here that everything had to be made out of ridiculously expensive materials? I half expected to find a toilet and discover it’d been carved out of solid diamond. Well, whatever—right now I was less interested in the box’s manufacture than in its contents. I grabbed it and sat back down on the bench before fumbling along its side and finally finding a narrow little depression just wide enough to slip one finger in. I shoved a digit in there, and was rewarded with a faint hum, a popping sound that messed with my ears—and the top half of the box folding down along the sides until they’d disappeared within the rest, leaving me holding an open marble box filled to the brim. Yes! Food!

  At least I think it was food. It certainly looked like some kind of round fruit-thing, though it had bumpy gray skin and a bright red interior. Plus there were two shiny paper-wrapped triangles I took to be sandwiches, a foil pouch of flat purple flower-shaped things I thought might be chips, and a long silvery cylinder filled with a clear liquid that smelled like bubblegum soda and left weird afterimages as I drank it from the spout that had appeared at one end when I squeezed.

  I really hope it was food. This was the Galactic Core, after all—it’s possible the round thing was an alien seedpod, the triangles data wafers, the purple flowers the compressed biological data of a dozen ecosystems, and the liquid a fuel for a faster-than-light hyperdrive.

  It tasted good, though. A little too minty on the drink, and a bit squishy and salty on the fruit, and the sandwiches had this strange habit of rolling up into a ball every time I raised them to my bill, but otherwise nice. And I was too hungry to be picky.

  I’d finished all but a few of the chips, some of the drink, and half of one sandwich when the door flew open and a shape landed on the ground at my feet. A tall, athletic figure wearing an Air Force jumpsuit.

  Tall.

  “Uh,” he groaned as I squatted down beside him.

  “Are you okay?”

  He groaned again, and cursed a little after that. Which felt really weird because he obviously had one of Ned’s little gizmos too, and so I was hearing it both through my ears and through my bill.

  “What’re you doing here?” I asked him.

  “Rescuing you,” he admitted after a second. I helped him sit up.

  “Oh.” We looked at each other. I wanted to say, “guess that didn’t go so well, huh?” but figured he didn’t need to hear that right now. Instead I said the only thing I could think of that might cheer him up even a little bit:

  “Want half a sandwich and some chips?”

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Take two, but where will you put them?

  “So walk me through this,” I said a little while later. Tall had eaten the rest of the food—I know he probably had a granola bar or something on him but of course he’d want to save that for emergencies—and we were both sitting on a long straight bump that rose from the floor like a bench, legs stretched out in front of us, heads and backs against the wall. “I walk in here and get myself caught, and you tell me I’m an idiot. Then you walk in here and get caught. So how does that make you less of an idiot than I am? You’d actually be the bigger idiot, because you’ve already seen it doesn’t work but you try it anyway!”

  Tall glared at me. Sort of. He actually had his eyes closed, and didn’t even turn his head. But he glared all the same. I could feel it—it was like a full-body glare.

  “I,” he informed me with one of those condescending tones you usually get from credit card customer service reps when they call to demand why you haven’t made a payment in months and you ask them if they’ve never been in a tough spot and they get all superior on you and say no, of course not and then you ask them why, if they’re so awesome, they’re stuck working for a credit card company, “have combat training. Do YOU have combat training?”

  “Well . . . no.” I didn’t think District LaserTag Champion when I was fourteen would really count.

  “I have extensive experience in tactics for a variety of situations, including search and rescue. Do you have that?”

  “No.”

  “I have training in infiltrating and taking out hostile en
campments. Do you have that training?”

  “I have the head of a duck,” I shot back. “Do YOU have the head of a duck?”

  That shut him up. Actually, I’ve found that shuts almost everyone up. Particularly useful if you’re in a packed movie theater and you get some of those idiots in front of you, the ones who think the theater is actually their living room and they can carry on a conversation with their buddies right in the middle of the pivotal scene. I recommend everyone get their head modified into a giant duck head just for the satisfaction of completely shutting those people down, leaving them staring and drooling for hours after the movie’s ended.

  That, plus then I’d have someone to talk to.

  And we could all take up synchronized swimming together. Move over, Rockettes! The Duckettes are coming atcha!

  “Okay, so we’re both stuck here.” I glanced around the room again, hoping that maybe a door would have appeared while we were bickering, “Swell. What about the others?” Ned and Mary had been strangely quiet.

  “No response, and no sound,” Tall confirmed, tapping his earpiece. “My guess is the invaders figured out that we were talking and blocked the transmissions.”

  “Damn.” I scratched at my bill. “Guess we’re on our own.”

  “Best to think that way,” Tall agreed. “Don’t rely on anyone who could screw you over later, whether deliberately or by accident. We need to do this ourselves.”

  “Okay, I have a strange idea. What if—” I didn’t manage to finish my thought—not just my words, I tend to just say whatever I feel or see or hear, like I don’t have filter in there, no buffer to let the thoughts stew a bit and mature or wither and die before they get spit out. But this thought faded into the air as the door creaked open, and something slid through. Something tall and broad and squared. And no, it wasn’t the NFL’s Mensa representative. It was some kind of machine, with straps and wires and hoses sticking out every which way and knob and dials and switches all up and down one side.