Kafka managed to right himself. “Guards!” Bloat’s chamberlain barked, but Bloat waved a hand — that was more effort than he expected — the gesture more a flap than an imperious command.
“They’re dead,” he said. His mouth tasted of dust.
Kafka gaped. Zelda stared with her usual antipathy, though she kept her true thoughts hidden behind a carefully constructed wall of images. Teddy closed his eyes for a few moments, ignoring Zelda’s hostility and Kafka’s concern. He sorted through the mindvoices of the Rox to find Battle and Billy Ray. He heard incoherent bits of panicked thoughts and mixed images of glowing-eyed dogs, fierce warhorses, and Herne. The Hunt was on them. That fight had begun.
“They’re going to die,” he said. A gout of blood suddenly gushed from his mouth, surprising him with its violence. Bright scarlet splashed on his chest and over the mound of his body. “So am I, I think,” he said wonderingly. Then, to Wyungare: “Did … you know that the penguin…” he began and couldn’t finish.
“…I know.”
“I brought it back once before. I’ll do it again, once I’ve rested. If I live. God, it hurts. It hurts a lot.”
“I know.” The Aborigine took a few steps forward through the rubble. “Teddy, they’re not going to let you rest,” he said softly. “They’re not going to give you time to get better. Not now.” He seemed to be listening to voices in his own head, voices Teddy couldn’t hear. “I came to give you a last chance.”
Teddy snickered halfheartedly. “I thought I had to order before midnight tonight. You know: offer void where prohibited.” The torch was getting heavier and he couldn’t laugh. The smell of bloatblack was worse than he’d ever experienced, and the wounds in his gargantuan flanks burned as if napalm had been set in them.
The weariness hit him again; the trembling in his body becoming stronger. The body of Bloat shuddered, rattling the few pipes that still pierced him until they sounded like a bad thunder sound effect. The pores of his grotesque body puckered and vomited streams of bloatblack, though the waste wasn’t black this time but thin, greenish, and diarrheic. I really don’t feel well.
“…already going to hit you again,” Wyungare was saying.
“And I’ll send them to the dreamtime. Again,” Teddy insisted, though he knew it was bravado. A bluff. He had no strength left. He heard the resignation and despair that Wyungare’s words brought to Kafka, Pulse, and the other jokers. They were as drained as he was.
The shaking of Bloat’s body increased, small wavelets rippling under the skin. Bloat’s pores spat out a mucus-like, thick liquid, and the trembling became an uncontrolled spasm that tore the rest of the pipes loose from his body. More untreated sewage gushed over Bloat and the raw wounds and poured onto the floor. Teddy howled at the searing pain.
Pulse laughed.
“Governor!” Kafka shouted, panicked. “We have to shut off these lines! The torch.…I need some help”
Wyungare watched, his gaze finding Teddy as he whimpered. “You see?” he said softly.
The pain was worse than Teddy could have imagined. He gasped for breath, the words coming out in shrill bursts. Bloat was shuddering like a great white maggot on God’s grill. “I’m tired of all of it. Call your shamans together. Make me a fucking nat so they’ll leave me alone.”
Wyungare frowned. “If you do that, you must know that everything here that you have made will disappear. Everything. All that you’ve created will dissolve back into the dreamtime.”
“Fuck the Rox,” Teddy said defiantly. God it burns, it burns. I’m going to die, the Bloat-body is going to tear itself apart and I’ll die with it… Kafka had fled into the next room; Teddy could hear him trying to shut off the intake valves. “What the hell has being a joker ever gotten me but pain and problems? Let someone else worry about it from now on. I don’t want to be a joker. I hate it.”
Teddy thought he saw disappointment in Wyungare’s walnut eyes, in the folds of his coffee-dark face. But the man nodded. “All right,” he said simply. “That’s your choice, then.”
Wyungare sank down to the floor, sitting cross-legged in front of Bloat. He began a low chanting rhythm, slapping his hands against his thighs in counterpoint to the words.
Even in the welter of anger and irritation, confusion and turmoil around him, Teddy should still have picked up on it sooner. But bodysnatcher had been spilling out a steady stream of vitriol from the beginning, and in his own pain he simply didn’t notice that the thoughts had changed from fantasy to intent. He caught the threat an instant too late.
…kill the ugly traitorous worm…
Bloat couldn’t move. There was nothing left of his power to stop her.
He was going to sell them out!
The bodysnatcher listened from the balcony. The maggot mountain was as weak as all the rest. The nigger had talked him right out of whatever guts he’d started with. Who the hell had let the nigger out of his cell, anyway? He should have killed him when he had the chance; now it was too late.
“Fuck the Rox,” Bloat was saying, in his high little-boy’s voice. Then he screamed as another pipe ripped loose from his flesh. He was whimpering like a baby as he said, “What the hell has being a joker ever gotten me but pain and problems? Let someone else worry about it from now on. I don’t want to be a joker. I hate it.”
The bodysnatcher never heard the rest of it. His rage was a blinding red scream inside him. The nigger hunkered down in a squat and started some kind of chant. Bloat was buying it. He was giving up. The bodysnatcher thought of Prime and David and Blaise and K.C. and Molly, and then of Blueboy and the rest, the ones who died when the tower collapsed. It was Bloat’s fault, he realized. The slug had stopped a thousand other shells, but not that one, oh, no, that one he’d let through. Just like he’d let Juggler and the others walk off to die, like he’d stood by and watched while the freaking Oddity snapped David’s neck. He’d known. The maggot always knew. And he let it happen anyway. Bloat wanted the jumpers dead, he’d wanted it all along. And now he wanted to run away and hide.
I’ll kill the traitorous ugly worm NOW, the bodysnatcher thought. He went to his light-form.
All around him, time stopped. The world seem to catch its breath and stand trembling. Everything stretched and yawned away from him. The mountain that was Bloat receded into infinity. The room was bathed in a blue gloom. The chanting, the screaming, the gurgle of Bloatblack, the distant sounds of battle; all gone. Silence reigned.
On the floor, the stupid nigger squatted with one hand raised over his thigh, like a statue carved from ebony.
The bodysnatcher had all the time in the world.
He was an arrow of light, a burning lancet. He slid through the air with glacial slowness, floating toward the immensity that was Bloat. Tons and tons of smelly white jelly, his heart and lungs buried God knows where inside. But the governor’s head was still almost normal. That was where he’d start, the bodysnatcher decided. The eyes first. Then the ears. And only then the brain. He would make it last.
Then Wyungare got to his feet and floated up through the blue gloom in front of Bloat. “Is it my turn now?” he asked.
Coherent light… slowed. Halted. It was impossible.
“My turn?” said the black man again. Wyungare smiled. He interposed his body between the bodysnatcher and Bloat. The light-form hung incredibly suspended in the blue spectral twilight.
A physical impossibility.
“Improbable, yes,” said Wyungare aloud, grinning hugely, teeth shining in the gloom. “Impossible, no.” He received the electromagnetic translations of words. converted them to speech forms.