No Small Bills Page 25

  Damn. I had a feeling this time there wouldn’t be any sandwiches.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  And the color of the day is—

  “Okay, I’m fresh out of ideas,” Ned admitted. “Somebody else’s turn.”

  He was still taking the loss of his charged-particle spray pretty hard. The intruders had all recovered—most of them, anyway, since I think I may have stepped on one by accident while they were herding us over toward the bench—and had been intent upon swarming us when Tansy talked them into backing off. She convinced them to just keep us hostage instead, at least for now—I think she was hoping to show us both that she was still our friend and that her family weren’t actually as awful as we’d heard. I understood that desire—I’d once gone out bowling with some friends, back in high school, only to have some of my cousins show up at the same bowling alley, and I’d been torn in exactly the same way. Turns out that stopping your second cousin from lighting her bowling ball on fire and hurling it into the concessions stand instead of down the lane toward the pins? A real good way to show just how crazy she really is, and convince your friends that you’re only half a step away from that yourself. Yeah, that was a lonely year. My cousin, though, she got asked out a lot after that. Lots of sudden fires that year, too.

  Anyway, I felt bad for Tansy, but I couldn’t completely forgive her. We were her friends. Hell, we’d broken out of prison together! According to every cheesy movie I’d ever seen, that was supposed to forge an unbreakable bond between us! When I pointed that out she just shrugged and looked miserable.

  “I’m sorry,” she told me. “I really am. But they’re my family! What am I supposed to do? Just sit back and let you destroy them?”

  “No, you do what everyone does with family,” I told her. “You disown them and then you call the cops on them. What?” That last was to Tall, who was staring at me again, but he only shook his head.

  “Let us go, please, Tansy,” Mary pleaded. “We need to stop them! If they bring through enough of their kind they will complete the convergence and transform our reality into their own, destroying every living thing native to our own plane of existence!”

  “That’s not true!” Tansy snapped. “They don’t want to hurt anyone! They told me so!”

  “They sure have a funny way of showing it,” Tall commented, rubbing the many bruises he’d gotten during the fight.

  “You didn’t exactly give them a choice,” she pointed out sharply. “What were they supposed to do, let you attack them and not defend themselves?”

  “Would have been nice,” I muttered. I had more than a few bruises of my own.

  “It’ll be okay,” Tansy assured me. “You’ll see! You all will!”

  I was too tired and too depressed to argue.

  “What do they look like, anyway?” I asked her after a minute. “Your relatives, I mean. You can see them, right? And not just as hazy outlines?”

  “Of course I can,” she answered with a laugh. “I can see them just fine! You could too if they wanted. They can look like anything. Actually, they can be anything! My reality-bending? Nothing compared to theirs.”

  “Anything? Really?” There was something kicking around in the back of my head. I wasn’t sure what it was yet, but I figured if it rattled around long enough it might roll into view. “There must be something they can’t do.”

  “Nothing!”

  I glanced around at the hazy shapes filling the rest of the room and clearly listening closely to the conversation. “Is that true?” I asked them all. “You can do anything?”

  “Yes,” came the rustling reply, only now it echoed several times as more than one of them answered me together.

  “You can turn into anything?”

  “Yes.”

  Hm. “What about an elephant? Can you make yourself into an elephant?”

  There was some hushed rustling, like whispering, and the hazy shapes coalesced, coming together and growing larger and clearer and darker until suddenly there was an elephant in front of me! A big, dark gray elephant, with baggy skin and watermelon-sized eyes and dull ivory tusks. Amazing! If we’d had a small white mouse right about then the invasion’d be over, but oddly I found it more comforting to have them all looming over us in elephant-form. At least I could see them now. I hated not being able to see something—it made it hard to be sure it was really there.

  Which is when the idea finally bounced its way to the front and burst into my thoughts like a sugar-overloaded kid leaping into the neighborhood pool. Blam!

  “Okay,” I admitted slowly, “that’s not bad. But that doesn’t really prove much. Turning yourself into an elephant? That’s easy!” The others were all staring at me like I was nuts. And maybe I was. We were about to find out. “Now, turning yourself into raccoons—that’d be something.”

  The elephant stared at me for a second, its trunk waving idly, and then it collapsed in on itself, its body crumbling to pieces which spilled out onto the floor—and shifted on their own, each one developing whiskers and fur and bushy tails and masked faces. The room was now filled with beady-eyed raccoons, each one staring at me like it was debating whether to steal me, eat me, or ignore me.

  “Yeah, okay, so you can do raccoons,” I announced, trying to sound like I saw a room full of large conquest-crazed vermin every day. Actually I’d been through Wall Street more than once, so I guess it wasn’t a completely new thing for me. “Still, wildlife’s one thing. Becoming something inanimate, like a lamppost—that takes talent.”

  More rustling, and then the raccoons leaped onto each other’s shoulders, forming swaying, furry columns that narrowed and rose and widened at top. A second later and there was a forest of old-fashioned lampposts filling the room, each one shedding a soft light upon us and our bench.

  “What exactly are you doing?” Tall whispered to me. “Trying to wear them out?”

  “No,” I replied out loud. “I’m just curious if they really can do anything, like Tansy had said. I mean, okay, they can do wildlife and they can do street fixtures, but those are pretty easy, right? Now if they really wanted to impress me, if they really wanted to show off—but nah. There’s no way. Nobody could do that.”

  “Do what?” the rustling demanded.

  “Nothing,” I answered. “Forget about it. It’s impossible. Even for you.”

  “Nothing is beyond our capabilities!” the lampposts replied. “We can do anything! We can become anything!” Apparently including lampposts that could talk. I mean, it’s not like they had mouths any more! Because a lamppost with a mouth—that would just be wrong.

  “Really? Anything? Anything at all?” I pretended to think about it. “Yeah, but even so—I doubt even YOU could become this!”

  “What? Tell us!” they demanded. It was just like dealing with my kid sister. Only without the BB gun.

  “Well, if you really can do anything,” I said slowly, “let’s see you make yourself—mauve!”

  Ever see a lamppost blink in surprise?

  “Mauve?” they repeated.

  “Yeah, you know, the color mauve,” I said. “Not a shape, or an animal, or a thing, just a color. The color mauve.” For a second they didn’t answer, and I shrugged. “Well, like I said, that’s a pretty tough one, so I understand. But hey, the lampposts are really nice, right guys? Don’t sweat it. You did a good job with all that other stuff.”

  “NO!!!” the lampposts roared. “We can do anything! We can become anything! Even mauve!” They all merged together, into a single large shapeless blob, and began to shift color, from gray to dusky pink to more rosy-hued, and then—

  —they were gone.

  Not just invisible, either. There was a faint popping sound, like when you shake the water from your ears or blow to clear the pressure from your sinuses during a plane flight. The room was suddenly empty, except for the four of us on the bench—and Tansy fluttering nervously in front of us, glancing around behind her and growing more panicked by the second.


  Right up until Mary hauled off and slugged her. Tansy folded like a letter and crumpled to the ground, where Ned quickly tied her with some streamers he claimed were hardened relativistic particles and immune to her reality-warping.

  Then we all just sat there for a second, staring around us.

  Finally Mary turned to me. “How did you manage that?” she asked softly. “They are gone—you got rid of them. How?”

  I shrugged. “It was an idea I had,” I told her. “Remember that traffic court judge stole the color mauve from us?” She and Tall and Ned all nodded. “Well, I figured that meant not just that we couldn’t see it anymore, but that somehow it didn’t even exist for us. We no longer have the color mauve in our world. I tricked them into turning themselves into mauve, but since that color can’t be around us and suddenly they were that color”—I shrugged—“they couldn’t be around us. So suddenly they weren’t. The universe decided it couldn’t have them here anymore, not near us, and it tossed them back out.”

  The three of them stared at me for a second.

  “That—” Mary began, then stopped. “It—” she started again.

  “It doesn’t make any sense,” Tall finished for her. “In fact, it’s flat-out ridiculous. You convinced them to turn into a color we can’t see, and so they were ejected from reality? How could that possibly work?”

  “How the hell should I know?” I retorted. “Do I look like some egghead quantum physicist or something? Or one of those new-age philosopher types? All I know is, we and the color mauve can’t co-exist, and they’re mauve so they can’t be here.” I scratched my bill. “I was hoping the universe would decide that, since we’d been here first and they were johnny-come-latelies, we’d get priority. Seems like it worked.”

  “That it did,” Mary agreed slowly. “I still do not completely understand the how and why of it, but it seems you forced an existential conundrum upon our reality and it protected itself by shunting the invaders back into their own plane of existence.”

  “So that’s it then,” Tall half-asked. “We won? They’ve been sent packing?”

  Much as I loved to watch her move, I hated it when Mary shook her head.

  “DuckBob has banished them temporarily,” she informed us. “But they will be able to return once they recover from their forced expulsion. And this time they will be angry and will return in force.”

  Wait, that whole mob of rustling patches that had swarmed us earlier, that wasn’t “in force?” It had seemed pretty forceful to me!

  “Okay, so how do we stop them from coming back?” I asked. Then I smacked my forehead. “The matrix!”

  “Exactly.” She turned that kilowatt smile of hers on me. “You have granted us a reprieve. Now you can realign the matrix, which will restore the barrier between their reality and our own. Once that is in place again the invaders will be unable to return.”

  “Right!” I hopped up off the bench and offered her my hand. “What’re we waiting for?”

  Mary accepted my hand with a smile. “This way.” Ned and Tall pulled themselves to their feet and followed us as Mary led us out of that room and down a short tunnel into a big, wide-open space at the center of the building, shaped like an oval with flattened sides a huge domed roof way up above. There were several other openings at various points, none of them very regular in size or shape, and again I thought it looked more like a sparkly cave than a building. But at the moment, the architecture wasn’t important.

  Because there, at the center, was the quantum fluctuation matrix.

  It was beautiful. Like a band of shimmering silver and gold ribbons, all woven together and circling round and round, but with computer cables and monitors and processors mixed in. There were things in there that looked for all the world like massive piston engines, seeming delicate against the open backdrop, and other shapes that resembled blown glass vials and elegant pinwheels and curving horns and sparkling fans. If someone had taken props from a Victorian murder mystery, a period martial arts film, a modern-day IT department, and a high school marching band, and woven all those pieces together into something beautiful and glorious and seamless, that would be the quantum fluctuation matrix. It was the single most amazing thing I’d ever seen.

  And it wasn’t working.

  I could tell that right away. It was circling, but slowly, and there was a weird hitch to it, like watching a man with a limp trying to dance. The rhythm was off. And for all my other faults, I’ve got excellent rhythm. I have to—I spend half my life almost-falling and catching myself just in time, so I’ve learned how to dance around my own clumsiness.

  “Wow.” I whispered, unable to tear my gaze from it. “Just—wow.”

  “Yes,” Mary breathed beside me. “It is truly spectacular.” She gave me a gentle push between the shoulder blades. “Now realign it, and secure the safety of our reality once and for all.”

  “You got it!” I started forward, and got about three steps before I slowed to a halt again. “So, uh—how do I do that, exactly?”

  I glanced behind me, and saw Mary staring at me, open-mouthed. My heart sank. This didn’t look promising.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Anybody got a Phillips head?

  “Tell me you’re kidding.”

  She shook her head. “I truly wish I was. I thought—”

  “What, that there’d be a big red REALIGN button on it? Swell!” I didn’t want to admit I’d just spent the past ten minutes searching for the exact same thing. No such luck.

  “The Grays indicated that you would simply be able to realign it by virtue of your modification.”

  “Yeah, and they’re always so clear and concise about everything! These are the people who invented the crop circles, for heaven’s sake! Giant signs carved into the ground, when they could’ve just popped down and said, ‘Hi, we’re aliens, can we borrow a few of you for experimentation? Oh, and some beef, please?’”

  I looked to our resident techie. “Ned? A little help here?”

  But he shook his head, too. It was becoming an epidemic. “Sorry, no idea. I’m just a tinkerer and a fix-it guy. The matrix is way beyond me.”

  “Some suggestions, at least? A place to start? Something to look for?”

  He shrugged. Was that a step up from a headshake, or a step down? “Look for anything that seems particularly off?”

  “Okay, that’s something, anyway.” I sighed. “Spread out, everybody. Scan it for anything that looks ‘particularly off.’”

  Tall frowned. “I’ll look,” he agreed, “but I doubt it’ll do much good.”

  “Why’s that?” I demanded. “Your defeatist attitude blocking your eyes?”

  For once he didn’t rise to the bait. “No. But I’m not attuned to the matrix. You are. So I’m guessing I won’t be able to notice the problem because I don’t have an existing connection to it.”

  That actually made sense, unfortunately. I glanced at Mary. “Any chance we can get the Grays to kidnap Tall here and whip up a last-minute mod for him? The tail of a Pekingese or something?”

  “No, I am still unable to contact them,” she replied. Turned out she’d been trying since before we reached the building, actually, but hadn’t mentioned it because she didn’t want to upset any of us. Great.

  Which reminded me of something. “They modified you, too,” I told her. “So doesn’t that mean you’re attuned as well?”

  But she shook her head again. “No, my modifications are of a different nature,” she explained. “They involve cerebral upgrades only.” Which answered the question about her looks, at least—all natural. Impressive. “Only bodily modifications like your own require attunement to the matrix.”

  I turned to Ned. “And you completed my modification, but I’m guessing you can’t start one on your own, so you can’t attune the rest of you.” He nodded. I wasn’t sure where that landed in the hierarchy of body language for a screwed-up situation, but I knew what it meant. I was on my own.

  Okay
, I told myself. That’s okay. You can do this. You can look over this incredible piece of advanced alien machinery, suss out the problem, and fix it. You can save the universe from a horde of flying, near-invisible, reality-shifting invaders. All by yourself.

  Aw, who was I kidding?

  Just then a soft hand came to rest on my shoulder. “You can do this, DuckBob,” Mary told me quietly. “I believe in you.” And she kissed me on the cheek.

  Okay, as motivators go? Encouragement and smooches from a gorgeous dame? Pretty high on my list.

  “And you’d better hurry up,” Ned added, fortunately without the touching or kissing. “Because I’m guessing we only have a few minutes before the invaders start popping back in again.”

  Threat of imminent doom? Also high on my list. Though I prefer the kissing.

  “Right.” I rubbed my hands together and studied the matrix again. “Okay, big boy, Doctor DuckBob is here. Tell me where it hurts.” I was half-expecting and more than half-hoping it to answer. Hey, you never know! But not a peep. So much for the easy way out.

  I began walking a circuit around the matrix again, moving a little more slowly than it was rotating so I could study each section for a bit before it undulated past me. It was hypnotic, and I had to force myself to focus. Where was the problem?

  “It’d help if I knew what it looked like when it was working properly,” I called out to the others, who were leaning against one of the walls, where rows of ridges sat one behind and above each other, almost like stadium risers. If only they’d come with one of those guys who walked around selling hot dogs and beer! “Anybody got a snapshot?”

  “Sorry,” Ned replied. “I’ve never been here before.”

  “Nor have I,” Mary agreed.

  “I’ve never been anywhere,” Tall added. “Well, not past Lunar orbit, anyway.”

  I spared him a quick glance and he shrugged. Then I went back to looking at the matrix.