No Small Bills Read online

  At least it wasn’t glittery and pink.

  “We have you and your friend both now,” the rustling sound had returned, and I didn’t much care for the way it sounded, all slick and oily and nasty. “Now you will tell us everything you know or he will face the consequences.”

  The room honestly seemed to blur all around me, like I’d suddenly taken fifteen Jell-O shots intravenously and then gone on a merry-go-round at the state fair. Don’t ask. Whatever caused it, I felt lightheaded and blinked a few times to clear everything out—

  —and somehow I was alone on the bench.

  “Tall?”

  A string of profanity drew my attention back to the machine, now standing in the middle of the room.

  Tall was strapped to it.

  And not just jury-rigged, either. Those manacles looked heavy-duty, and they were bolted securely into the machine’s frame. I know how to check that sort of thing. I’d had a girlfriend once who was really into bondage. And blacksmithing.

  “What the hell?!?” Tall was fuming. I circled the machine, looking for some way to shut it down, but didn’t see anything with big red letters on it saying “Push me!” or “Pull me!” or “Hazardous Waste—Do Not Eat!”

  “Tell us: what forces are arrayed against us?” The rustling demanded.

  “Oh, come on!” I replied. “Didn’t we go through this already? I have no idea!”

  Zap!

  “Aaaahhhhhh!” That last contribution came from Tall as blue lightning forked across him and through him. I had a feeling from his response that being attached to that machine made the zaps considerably more powerful. And more dangerous.

  “I don’t know!” I shouted. “I swear it! Just leave him alone! Leave me alone! Leave all of us alone—pretend we’re Australia and we’re playing Risk!” That never works for an entire game, of course, but I hoped the metaphor still held.

  “We shall allow you time to reflect,” the shimmering announced after a minute. “To decide for yourself what path you must take. But do not reflect for long.” Then it faded away. We were alone again. Being monitored, possibly, but I was sure somehow that our nasty little shadows had left the building.

  ‘Quick, let’s get you out of this thing,” I told Tall. I stepped around to the front and studied all the dials and knobs and switches. Still no big red letters. Darn.

  “Do you know what you’re doing?” Tall asked me in a whisper. He was still shaking from that zap. Wow.

  “Sure,” I assured him. “I just need to flip this switch—”

  “Aaahhhh!”

  “Okay, maybe not that one. How about this switch instead?”

  “Aaahhhhh!”

  “No? Darn. Okay, how about this one?”

  “Don’t touch that!”

  “Touch what?” My finger was already on the button.

  “That! That!”

  “This? You want me to touch this?” I know, I’m a terrible person. Besides, I figured one of them had to work.

  “No! Not—aaahhhhh!”

  “Oh. Sorry.” Apparently not that one.

  “Stop doing that!”

  “Doing what?”

  “Touching that!”

  “Touching this?” I selected another likely looking button.

  “Aaahhhhh!”

  “Oops.” Maybe one of the levers instead?

  “Enough!” I couldn’t see Tall, since he was on the far side of the machine, but I could guess his expression.

  “I said I was sorry.”

  “Can we just get on with this?”

  “With what? Did you want me to—?”

  “No! DON’T TOUCH ANYTHING!!!”

  “Well, that’s going to make this more difficult, don’t you think?” Honestly, I’m not sure why he was quite so upset. What’s a little electrocution among friends? And I really was trying to help. Is it my fault I can’t resist fiddling with things? That’s why all my old co-workers had learned long ago never to leave their clock radios or MP3 players sitting out where I could reach them.

  Or their pets.

  We stood in silence like that for a few seconds. Which was about as much of it as I could stand. “Now what?” I said finally.

  “Just—just be patient, okay? Don’t do anything stupid.”

  “Oh. Sure. Right. No problem. I’ll just—hey, what’s this?” I hadn’t noticed that button before. I was sure it was the right one!

  “Aaahhhhh!”

  I straightened up quickly. “Sorry!”

  “Just leave it alone!”

  “Okay, okay. I was just trying to help. Sheesh.” I stepped around to the side, resisting the urge to flip one more switch or push one more button. Tall glared at me as soon as I came within his field of vision. “What?”

  “You’re a menace, you know that?” he gasped.

  “Hey, I’m not the one who put you in those shackles,” I pointed out. “Or brought that machine in in the first place!”

  “No, but you are the one who kept zapping me with it!”

  “I was trying to get you loose!”

  “Yeah? Great job!”

  “Fine, next time you try to rescue me I’ll be sure to leave you alone!”

  “Good!”

  “Great!”

  “Excellent!”

  “Superb!”

  “Fantastic! O!”

  Tall stopped just as he was getting ready to shout a reply. “O?”

  “Fantastico.” I shrugged. “I like it better that way.”

  “Fantastico isn’t a word.”

  “Is too.”

  “Is not.”

  “Too.”

  “Not.”

  “Tootootootoo!”

  “Notnotnotnotnot!”

  “Too to the infinity!”

  “Not the infinity plus one!”

  “Too to the infinity plus infinity! Hah! So there!” That stopped him. And Mrs. Scandariotto had said I’d never master math!

  I was trying to think of something else we could argue about when the air near the machine started shimmering again. “Uh oh, they’re back,” I whispered to Tall, who nodded and put on his best stoic expression. Which is what he usually had on when he wasn’t dealing with me.

  “Have you reconsidered your refusal to reveal your knowledge?” the shimmering patch of air rustled. “Will you spare your companion further pain by relinquishing your information?”

  “I already told you, I don’t know anything,” I said yet again. “You can torture him all you want”—that earned me a furious glare from Tall—“but it won’t change anything. I can’t tell you what I don’t know.”

  “They would not have sent you so ill-prepared,” the rustling countered, and I felt but couldn’t see someone or someones stepping up beside me and taking hold of my arms. If I squinted I could make out hazy outlines, but nothing more.

  “Oh, you should have seen me when I first hit the road,” I told them. “You think I’m unprepared now? Ha!”

  “Listen,” Tall called out, “I can tell you a lot more than he can! Release me and I’ll tell you whatever you want to know.”

  “You only wish to evade your confinement,” the rustling accused.

  “No, I’ll talk!” Tall insisted. “I really will!” He managed a small smile, though it faltered quickly—that might have just been from lack of practice, though. “If I’m lying, just do that weird flickering thing again and put me back in these cuffs. What’ve you got to lose?”

  The shimmer faded for a minute, and I could almost hear several voices speaking all at once. It was like I knew they were there but couldn’t quite hear them clearly.

  “Very well,” the rustling stated just I was getting ready to sing to break the near-silence. “We will release your shackles and you will answer our questions fully and truthfully. Fail to do so and we will attach you to the machine once more and torture the information from you.”

  “You got it,” Tall assured them. “No funny business, no evasions. Done.”

&
nbsp; There was that flickering again—it was like I passed out for half-a-second, between blinks, or like somebody rewrote the world while I wasn’t looking—and Tall was standing next to me. Then he was on the ground.

  “What is this?” the rustling demanded. “Return to an upright position and answer our questions!”

  “Give me a break,” Tall gasped, rolling over onto his back and folding his arms over his chest. “I’ve just been tortured for twenty minutes!” The look he gave me showed he hadn’t forgotten that at least half of that time had come from me. “I need a few seconds to catch my breath, otherwise I won’t be able to tell you anything!”

  Silence. Then, “very well. You may recover first. But do not try our patience.” This guy or guys or patch of crinkly paper or whatever really did talk funny.

  Tall lay there, eyes closed, his breathing slowing little by little until it was steady again. Hell, for a second I actually thought he’d gone to sleep. But then he opened his eyes and nodded.

  “Okay.” He levered himself to his feet, though I noticed him wincing a little as he did, and straightened up. “I’m ready.”

  Then he winked at me.

  Uh-oh.

  A wink like that was never a good sign. Okay, almost never. A wink like that from a hot chick in a seedy bar was a completely different matter, though sadly I tended to get them far more often from plain chicks in the avian sanctuary at the zoo—and not all from the human variety of “chick,” either. But from a guy, and especially in a hostage situation? Never a good thing.

  Sure enough, Tall opened his mouth as if he was about to spill his guts—and bolted for the door.

  Oh crap.

  “Escape attempt!” the rustling roared, the sound of it cutting into my head. “Stop the prisoner from escaping!”

  I felt the shapes next to me release my arms. They were going after Tall! And while he wasn’t my favorite person in the universe by any stretch, he wasn’t really all that bad a guy and he had come in here to rescue me. I couldn’t let them grab him. So I turned, squinted at the hazy outlines, and kicked the nearest one.

  Hard.

  “Aaahh!” It went down in a heap, which is when I realized it hadn’t been touching the ground in the first place. These things could fly! I didn’t have time to think about that, though. The other one was still moving, and it was like trying to track a fly—if it got too far from me I’d never be able to spot it again. So I threw myself after it, arms outstretched, bill open. My arms got nothing but air, but I felt something against my bill. Contact!

  So I bit him.

  Hey, let me tell you, you don’t want to get stuck in a duck’s bill. We’ve got some serious torque going on there. I had to learn real quick, after this first happened, not to try impressing people by opening bottles with my bill. Because broken glass? Not a turn-on. At least not for anybody I’d want to impress.

  Cracking nuts is always an icebreaker, though. So, for that matter, is breaking ice. Especially those swan ice-sculptures—somewhere there’s a picture of me doing that at an avant garde gallery opening, with the caption “Duck vs. swan as life imitates art.” I sent that one to my mom.

  This time I wasn’t going for tearing anything open—yuck!—but I did clamp down, and I heard a squeal of pain. Then I hit the ground, and something smaller than me hit the ground right by my head with a muffled thud. Gotcha!

  I spit out what I’m pretty sure was a leg, leaped to my feet, and kicked down hard. Another squeal as my boot connected, and then I saw a hazy outline collapse on the floor. Two down!

  Tall had made it to the door and gotten it open, but now it looked like he was doing one of those “punching-himself” mime fights. By squinting until I could barely see through the slits I could just make out the outlines all around him. They were practically swarming the big guy.

  “Hang on!” I shouted. “I’m coming!” And can you believe it? I actually ran forward to help him. Wild what enforced captivity and taunting can do to a person. I’m never gonna make faces at the bears and gorillas ever again.

  The orangutan, though, I can’t pass up. Besides, he makes faces right back at me.

  Tall was lashing out around him for all he was worth, and I heard several meaty thunks as his fists and elbows and knees and head connected. He couldn’t really see what he was fighting, though, and they were all over him, so it wasn’t going well. I waded in, squinting and grabbing and kicking and sometimes biting, and between us we managed to clear a space around us, at least for a minute.

  “Okay,” I said, wiping my bill on my arm. “We’ve made it to the door. Now what?”

  “Hold them as long as we can,” Tall replied. “Can you actually see them?”

  “Not really, no, but when I squint I can make out outlines.”

  He squinted. “Hey, yeah! That helps!”

  “So your plan is to hold them off as long as we can? What kind of a plan is that? Eventually they’ll just take us down, chain us back up, and torture both of us.”

  Tall grinned. “No they won’t,” he assured me.

  Then they were on us again, so I didn’t have a chance to ask him why not.

  We fought them back a second time, and they paused to regroup.

  “Is there more to this plan you’re not telling me?” I demanded as soon as we were clear.

  “Of course.”

  “What? Well, tell me what it is!”

  Tall laughed. “Why would I want to do that?”

  “Damn it, Tall, how can I help if you don’t tell me what’s going on?”

  “Just keep fighting,” he countered, and kicked out at an outline that had crept back within range. It went flying, and the others surged past it as it fell.

  It seemed like there were more of them this time around, and I had several hanging on each arm, one wrapped around my neck, and a few trying to scale my back and head. Tall wasn’t faring any better. How many rustling patches did it take to invade the galaxy, anyway?

  “Whatever else you’ve got planned,” I managed to gasp, “I suggest you do it now!”

  “Good idea,” someone agreed.

  But it wasn’t Tall.

  “Ned!” I half-shouted, half-croaked as he burst in through the door. Mary and Tansy were right behind him. Ned had what looked like a tricked-out firehose in both hands, and he twisted it on, flame-colored water spraying from it. Or maybe flames spraying from it like water. I’m not sure. Whatever that stuff was, the intruders recoiled from it, hissing and screaming like it burned them, but when droplets touched me they just felt a little tingly.

  “Charged relativistic particles,” Ned shouted over the noise. “Burns like hell when in contact with anything from a different reality, but completely harmless to us!”

  “Awesome!” I could move again, and so could Tall, so we quickly stepped over beside the others to give Ned an unobstructed shot. Mary wrapped her arms around my neck and kissed me soundly on the cheek as soon as I was within reach.

  “I was so worried!” she told me breathily, which almost made me forget all about this whole life-or-death battle thing.

  “Yeah? Thanks! I’m okay, though.” I glanced past her at Tall. “So this was the plan all along?”

  He nodded. “I was the distraction, made them focus on me so the others could slip in undetected. Ned needed time to get that hose thingy built.”

  “Nice.” I slipped my arm around Mary’s waist. She didn’t object.

  The last of the outlines stopped moving, and Ned shut off the hose. “Need to conserve the supply,” he explained, gesturing to a tank on his back. “Wasn’t easy filtering the particles into a usable form and applying the charge.” He grinned. “Looks like it did the trick, though.” Then he held out his hand. “Glad to see you’re okay.”

  I shook it happily. “Thanks to you guys I am.” Tansy was the only one who hadn’t welcomed me back yet. “What’s up, Tansy?” I asked her. “Aren’t you happy to see me?”

  “Sure,” she answered, smiling. “
Of course I am!” She fluttered over and gave me a quick peck on the cheek, which made Mary snuggle up against me more possessively. Damn, life was suddenly good! “I just—” she gestured down at the barely-seen figures on the floor. “What are we gonna do with them now?”

  “Get rid of ’em,” Tall growled in reply. “Maybe keep one or two for study. Destroy the rest.”

  Tansy sighed. “I was afraid you’d say that.” She wrinkled her nose like something smelled bad—and suddenly Ned’s firehose and tank were in her hands. Another twitch and they’d crumpled into a ball. “Sorry, guys,” she said, and she actually did sound sorry, “but I can’t let you do that.”

  “What?” Tall demanded. “Why the hell not?”

  But I got it. All the little things I’d been noticing finally came together. Small, winged, reality-warping—“you’re one of them, aren’t you?” I asked her. “You’re one of the invaders.”

  The others stared at me, then at her. Tansy glanced down. Finally she spoke. “Half,” she admitted softly. “On my mom’s side.”

  “That’s why we can see you normally, and hear you without that weird rustling.”

  She nodded.

  “But your reality-warping stuff, that comes from them.”

  Another nod.

  “And now, what? You’re siding with them? They’re trying to take over the universe, Tansy! They’re gonna destroy everything!”

  “No!” she shouted, finally meeting my eyes. “They’re not like that! It’s not about destruction! It’s just about expansion—and change! They need our reality! Theirs is old and tired and can’t support them anymore!”

  “So, what, they get to come in here and take ours instead?”

  “They’re not taking anything!” she argued. “They’re just changing it, so they can live here too! We’ll all still be here! YOU’ll all still be here!”

  “Tansy,” Mary said quietly, gently, “they have misled you. Their goal is conquest. And they consider us, all life here, to be the enemy. They seek to exterminate us, and to alter this reality until it is utterly inimical to all life but their own.” She held out a hand to Tansy, but the little flutterbug backed away.

  “No!” she insisted. “That’s not true! You just don’t understand! You can’t understand! But I can! I’m one of them!” She looked around, and managed a weak smile. “And now we have you surrounded.”