Kafka had lingered behind the rest, walkie-talkie crackling in his chitinous grasp. “Zelda!” he called up. “His name is Herne. He’s an ally. The governor says if you jump him, you die.”
Herne the Huntsman — who was sometimes Dylan Hardesty — was like every last joker who had ever come before him, the first thought Bloat caught from the man was pity laced with scorn.
Whoot a bloody ugly t’ing it be…
“A bloody ugly thing indeed, but jokers should be the last to worry about someone else’s appearance.”
Herne reacted very little. Maybe the frown deepened. “A person cannot stop his thoughts,” he said. The joker’s voice was as low as anything human could get, festooned with a cultured British accent quite unlike the one in his mind — something northern and low-class? Bloat wondered. “The Twisted Fists told me you could read minds.”
Bloat followed the elusive thought-threads and saw a shipment of guns; a battle on the water; death. None of it was very clear, but Bloat knew from long practice how to focus a person’s mind. “You were bringing guns,” he said, “and a warning.” As he’d known it would do, the words sent Herne hack to the attack of minutes ago.
… the nats had Carnifex with them, Hartmann’s old goon … hate the feeling of running from the ass but the information is more important than the guns…
“How many jokers did you lose when the Coast Guard hit you?” Bloat asked. “How many did Carnifex kill?”
Herne’s huge eyes blinked. He seemed to appraise Bloat once more. The memory that Bloat could see was a raw, oozing wound, and the anger Herne radiated could almost be touched. “There were six of us, all of them my friends, and I will pay back Carnifex for what he did. As you said, we were bringing weapons to the Rox. We — I — also had more. They are going to hit the Rox, Governor. They are going to hit it hard.”
"Who told you this?”
"I can’t tell you that.” And in his mind: …Matt Wilhelm. Furs…
“You already have.” Bloat giggled, and Herne frowned at the screeching titter. Kafka sighed and rolled his eyes at Bloat, impatient as always.
“This isn’t a joke, Governor. I don’t care about your parlor tricks. Read my mind, that’s fine — go ahead. It saves me my breath. They are planning to strike. Hartmann’s been placed in charge. There are aces involved, as well as the military. This is entirely serious. What are you going to do about it?”
“Very little that I’m not already doing.” Most of Bloat wanted to deny everything that Hardesty was saying. That part of him was confident, almost arrogant. The nats had broken on the shore of the Rox twice now; the third time would be no different. Bloat was fairly certain that they wouldn’t even try. “Hartmann and some others are coming over today — a peace conference. We’ve already set it up. They’ve lost too many lives already. They won’t want to lose any more. This talk of an attack is a bluff, an empty threat.”
He listened as Hardesty mulled that over and heard the answer even before the man spoke the words. “Governor, maybe they think that if they don’t take the Rox, all those lives were wasted.”
“No,” Bloat said, but inside, the old frightened kid, the one who’d cowered before the neighborhood bullies, who’d been taunted and picked on and abused — that Teddy, he was scared. He remembered.
… if they’d just leave Teddy alone… Yes… Well, thank you…
His father hung up the phone. He shook his head at the overweight child hugging his knees to his belly on the sofa, the bloodstains from his nose dark on a torn T-shirt. “I just talked with Roger’s mother,” his dad said. “She said that she’d talk to the boy.”
The combined relief and anger in his father’s voice told Ted how nervous and timid his father had been making the call. Now he stood in front of Ted, still shaking his head. “Really, Teddy, I don’t know why you can’t simply avoid these children. It’s your fault, really. They can’t pick on you if you’re not there.”
Ted tried to argue — he told his dad how they’d corner him in the lunchroom or the playground, how they’d wait for him on the walk home from school, how anytime he stepped outside the brownstone stoop they’d BE there. The arguments didn’t do any good. They never did.
The next day, Roger and his friends waited for Ted after the last bell. “You got me in trouble,” Roger said. “You’re gonna pay, asshole.” Ted limped home with a torn jacket and pants, another bloodied nose, a black eye, and a chipped tooth.
Ted understood revenge. Oh, yes. He understood it very well.
“No,” Bloat said again. “There’s no reason for us to get panicked about the situation.”
In his mind, he heard the myriad voices of the Rox awakening, many wondering about the arrival of Herne. Molly Bolt was already heading for the castle from the jumpers’ tower on the other side of the island. “But I suppose we need to let people know,” he continued reluctantly. “You certainly don’t make it easy to keep things quiet. Kafka — if you’d arrange things. You know who we’ll need.”
The junkers were stacked eight high along the Jersey shore: a wall of rust, broken glass, twisted metal. The car on top was a DeLorean. The morning sun still glittered off the brushed stainless-steel finish, but the frame had been twisted so badly that the gull-wing doors would never close again. It looked like a silver bird trying to take flight.
Up on the hood, high atop his junkyard battlement, Tom Tudbury stared through a pair of binoculars. The Rox was a good five miles northeast across the bay, but even at this distance, its towers were plainly visible, etched against the pink glow of the dawn. Its southern wall had engulfed the Statue of Liberty, her green copper flesh fusing seamlessly with the stone. Only the familiar crowned head remained the same. Below the neck, Liberty was nude and voluptuous. She had a huge oak-and-iron gate between her legs.
Something about it suggested the witch’s castle from The Wizard of Oz. There were shapes wheeling about some of the towers that reminded Tom uncomfortably of the flying monkeys that had terrified him when he was six.
It was the last place in the world he ever wanted to visit. He had been there once; that was enough. But in a few hours, he was going back. “Damn Hartmann,” he muttered aloud.
Tom lowered the binoculars and clambered down, careful to watch his footing as he stepped from car to car, the metal shifting ever so slightly beneath his sneakers. He walked back through the junkyard with his hands shoved deep in his pockets. The place hadn’t changed much since he was a kid, coming here to visit his friend Joey DiAngelis.
It was hard to believe Joey was gone now. He’d moved his family clear down to North Carolina two weeks ago. Tom couldn’t blame him. Not after last month. Corpses were still washing up on the Jersey shore, features bloated beyond all recognition, faces half-eaten by eels, with only their dog tags to say who’d they been. Joey had Gina and the kids to think about, and Bayonne was just too damn close to the Rox.
On the news the other night, they said two million people had moved out of the New York metropolitan area since the last census. Most of them in the last four years. Manhattan real estate was selling like waterfront lots along the Love Canal.
The dogs started barking as he neared the house. Tom had gotten them from the pound after he and Joey and Dr. Tachyon had faked his death a few years back. It was lonely being dead, and the dogs gave him plenty of warning whenever a stranger approached the junkyard.