"‘What the world…needs now,’" sang Jay.
"Wait, shh. Someone’s coming."
"I can’t hear—"
"Dammit," whispered Doug. "Hide."
Jay lurched in one direction, jerked back, lurched in another, tripped for no reason. He finally made it through a gauntlet of invisible obstacles and crouched behind a water fountain shaped like a hippopotamus throwing up.
Doug scrambled over the railing and found a ten-foot drop into the panda yard. He hung by locked and aching fingertips from the top of the wall as a night watchman ambled into view.
Nothing to see, Doug thought at the watchman. Just walk on by…
The night watchman sat down on a bench with his back to the panda pen.
Son of a— thought Doug, as his grip failed and he tumbled noiselessly onto the lush grass below. He paused and listened. Jay was okay. The man above was unwrapping food and singing something in a mumbly hum, something about life being a highway. He sounded like he might be a while.
The yard behind Doug was still pandaless and quiet. He hurried, hunched, through the grass, past a thicket of bamboo, a pond, and stopped at the mouth of the cave Jay had pointed out before. It had a gate, but the gate was unlocked, designed only to keep pandas in, he supposed, not vampires out. It opened with a high squeal that Doug was pretty sure only he could hear. He, and any dogs nearby. And maybe pandas. He really wished now that he knew more about pandas.
Once inside, Doug got a good look at the panda and had to admit he’d been worrying too much. It appeared to be asleep. It appeared, actually, to be just a huge stuffed toy, the kind stepdads buy for their stepkids when they’re overcompensating. The illusion was supported by a rubber pig, which probably squeaked, nestled beside it on the straw bed. And a plastic xylophone hanging from the bars of a narrow window. And a big pink ball that had settled where the bare concrete floor sloped downward to a drain. It was like the toy department of a prison.
The floor curved up into the walls, one of which was nearly hidden behind a wide fan of bamboo stalks. The floor was painted bright white. All in all, the whole space wasn’t any larger than a two-car garage. It smelled the way a garage would smell if you left a bear inside it too long.
Doug breathed through his mouth and tiptoed over to the panda, its body slowly inflating and deflating like a fur balloon.
He realized, suddenly, that there was a significant difference between this panda and the cows back home. With the cows, it was easy to sniff out a vein, break the skin, take care of business. Here, he could imagine biting down and getting only a mouthful of hair.
He leaned over the animal, fangs bared, his hesitant hands hovering clawlike in the air, lacking only a black cape and high collar to finish the picture. Then a faint whirr from above caught his attention. Light glinted off a single lens, a glassy eye in the corner that motored slowly upward to look from panda to Doug.
Is that a camera? thought Doug.
The camera angled down again, past the panda, square on the rubber pig toy, and Doug wondered, Is that really a rubber pig toy?
He stepped around the panda and crouched on his hands and knees in front of the thing. It wasn’t a toy. It was some kind of animal. It looked like a naked rat.
What the hell IS that?
3
The magic kingdom
"OW. OW. OW," said Doug from under his white plastic poncho.
"It’s only a little farther," said Jay.
"Ow. Why would anyone want to live in a place this sunny? Is it leaving marks?"
Doug imagined what a pretty picture he made — zinc oxide on his nose, his cheeks greased with SPF 80. A small crack in the left lens of his spare glasses. Jay bent over to look under Doug’s hood.
"No. You’re just kind of red."
"Ow."
"Does it hurt?" asked Jay.
"What have I been saying for the past eight blocks?"
"It’s only a little farther," said Jay.
"Actually, that’s what you’ve been saying for the past eight blocks."
It was the first day of Comic-Con International, a four-day event in San Diego and the largest comic book and pop-culture convention in America. A building like a shopping mall with fins housed acres of elaborate booths with Jumbo-Tron displays and life-size sculptures of superheroes and signings with actual comics artists and creators. All right next to game-playing stations where you could try out next year’s video games and talk to the programmers and then mosey over to the seller’s area with its hundreds upon hundreds of long boxes packed with hard-to-find-issues and action figures — but who has time for action figures when you have to rush to make the eleven o’clock panel discussion with the creator and stars of Nebula-Bravo followed by a nap-inducing lunch in the food courts where you were forced to eat soft pretzels and pizza because they didn’t sell anything else.
Doug was really going to miss the soft pretzels and pizza.
"Ow. I’m going to have to drink someone soon," he told Jay, and realized he was slurring his speech. Was this what it felt like to be drunk? "I’ve got the shakes. And I was totally getting somewhere with that girl last night, too."
"Sorry," said Jay, for maybe the thirtieth time. Doug’s gut twisted. He hadn’t meant to squeeze another apology out of Jay. He hadn’t meant to give the impression that they’d only been thrown out of the party because of Jay’s monopoly of the hall bathroom, either, but somehow he had.
"What happened after the panda hit you?" asked Jay. "Can you remember now?"
"No. I can remember everything up to — Well, I noticed the camera, and it’s looking at me, and then it looks down at this little pink thing next to the panda, so I look, too, and it’s this tiny animal."
"Baby Shuan Shuan," said Jay. "You’re so lucky."
"I feel lucky. So I’m looking down at this tiny hairless panda when I hear footsteps, and a door bursts in, and these uniformed guys with metal poles start tasering me. And you know what doesn’t work when people are tasering you? It’s shouting ‘Stop tasering me.’ If they’re tasering you already, they won’t stop because you ask them to."
"No," said Jay.
"The Tasers aren’t working so well on me, maybe because I’m a vampire, but they really, really hurt, so I back up, trying to get away from the guards, and I guess I get too close to Baby Ching Chong because that’s when the panda punches me in the head."
"Yeah."
"Then there’s a scene missing, because the next thing I know I’m back out in the zoo, in the bushes, without any clothes on. So you gotta figure that’s one hell of a missing scene."
"Uh-huh."
"And then I go to find you, but you’re not where I left you—"
"I said we should meet by—"
"—but you are by the exit, and the exit is by the T-shirt stand, so I don’t have to drive home naked. So that’s fine. Ow."
Jay looked glum.
"We should have left money on the stand," he said. "What we did…it was bad enough without stealing a T-shirt."
Doug sighed. "Yeah."
They crossed the train tracks to the convention center.
"But it was a stupid shirt," Doug added. "They can’t expect anybody to actually pay for a shirt that says, ‘I (picture of an elephant) the San Diego Zoo.’ What does that even mean?"
"Oh, man," said Jay. "Look at that line."