“I don’t care! I’m uncomfortable as hell.”
“Yeah, it’s always hot at this end of the cavern. It’s farthest from the water. At the other end is where two of the rivers come in and they keep it at exactly sixty-four degrees. But this is the only place where we can gather all the mole people for a proper ceremony.”
That’s what the kid called the cavemen, mole people. Whiteslaw wasn’t looking forward to encountering them. He pictured savages, monsters. Whiteslaw liked to keep his world civilized. He fidgeted nervously on his too-hot stone seat. “Yeah, okay.”
Senator Whiteslaw was still not sure what the purpose of this crowning ceremony was. It was ludicrous, silly, even. It was out of character for Fastbinder and Fast. Why were they doing it?
“Stay put, Herbie. We’re about to begin.” With that, Jack Fast left the senator alone in the vast cavern.
The albinos arrived.
They were hideous, putrid creatures, as pale as walking cadavers. They were nude and filthy, and worst of all were their bulging heads where the eyelids had grown over their eyeballs.
They had weapons. There were spears with worked metal points, and swords of scrap metal with edges made deadly by pounding them into jagged saw teeth. Crude but doubtless effective.
The albinos came in small family groups, then in larger tribes. Whiteslaw was on a seat of honor in the center of the cavern on a carved bench atop a large stalagmite, where he was soon surrounded on all sides by the mole people.
He was helpless. Any one of them could ascend the steps behind him and rip his throat out with one of those saw-toothed swords. Even if he heard them coming he couldn’t run away—he could barely walk on his sensitive feet with their fresh new skin.
Would the albinos never stop coming? How many were there? How could there be so many? Whiteslaw tried estimating their numbers and came up with something like a thousand.
And more poured in every second.
They were haggard, road weary. Fastbinder had summoned his mole people to attend the event from miles away, and for some reason they had heeded his call, despite the danger of the journey. After all, this was a once-in-a-lifetime event: the crowning of the new king.
Jack Fast appeared on the stage, a flat slab of limestone at the opposite end of the cavern.
“Silence.”
The grunts and growls, the arguments and bickering, continued. Jack Fast gave Whiteslaw a wink across the sea of blind faces, then lifted a megaphone to his lips. “Silence!”
The sound was deafening in the chamber and the albinos quailed, some collapsing under the weight of the sound.
“You shall obey,” Fast thundered.
The albinos trembled, and Whiteslaw was fascinated by the performance. He had to remind himself again that the kid with the idiot grin was no idiot. Jack Fast knew how to work things.
So what was Fast doing now? Whiteslaw wondered. Fast had a Peavey amplifier sitting on the stone stage next to him. He spoke into his microphone, loud, but less abrasive than the megaphone. “Meet your new king.”
Fastbinder walked on stage. From the hips down he was encased in a steel framework of anodized, steel tubes and pneumatic cylinders. It was some sort of bionic thing, like the loader robots that people used in science fiction movies. But without the mechanical arms, what good was it?
Then Whiteslaw felt the footsteps vibrating the ground under his rump, and he understood. The albinos were blind—or as good as blind, according to Jack Fast. A light show or a fancy uniform wouldn’t impress the cave people since they couldn’t see it, but footsteps that shook the very rock—now that was something an ignorant mole person could understand.
Tides of fear and awe rippled through the albinos. Fastbinder stood at the edge of the rock, where the audience could feel his towering presence. “I am now your king,” he said. “Bow down and obey your king.”
According to Fast, some of the albinos could speak rudimentary English. Apparently, generations ago, these people dwelled on the earth’s surface. They had all been taught to understand some basics of the language. Many of the albinos obeyed at once.
Fastbinder spoke into the microphone, and his voice came from an amplifier on the wall in the back. “Obey your king!”
The albinos in back squealed at this display of great sorcery and prostrated themselves.
“Obey!”
This time his voice came from a speaker in the ceiling overhead. A crater appeared in the middle of the crowd of the albinos as they sought to mash themselves into the floor under the weight of the sound.
Whiteslaw was impressed. What power. What fear Fastbinder evoked from these miserable troglodytes. But the credit went to Jack Fast. He had turned his father into the new king of the Underworld with nothing more than a few loudspeakers and some cheap factory equipment.
The kid was loving it, too. His eyes were glittering in the light of a few strung-up bulbs, and his face shone with pleasure.
Jack Fast practically started bouncing with excitement when the resistance movement showed itself. A tight knot of powerful albinos was pushing its way through the obedient subjects. Whiteslaw knew them for what they were at once. Tough guys. Bullies. Their leader was a pale-skinned bulldog. Part of his upper lip was missing, giving him a permanent sneer. He trudged to a halt before the stage, lifting his scrap-metal sword defiantly.
“No king. No obey.”
The bully’s men were on the move, moving carefully through the crowds, not pushing now as they approached either side of the stage. They were going to make an assassination attempt on Fastbinder and Fast!
Which meant—Lord in heaven! If those two got killed, Whiteslaw would never see the surface world again.
“Obey!” Fastbinder shouted, amplifying his voice into thunder.
“No!” the bully bellowed.
“Fast, look!” Whiteslaw squealed and waved wildly at the sides of the stage. The idiot kid gave him a big smile and a thumbs-up, but never even glanced to the side. There were four on one side, two on the other, and they were going to chop Fast and Fastbinder into bloody pieces and all Whiteslaw could do was watch.
The attackers came to a halt, made surprised sounds and began straggling oddly. There was something sticking to their feet. One of them bent down and grabbed at the thin rag covering the stage, only to find his hand adhere to the stuff. Then his other hand.
Jack Fast wasn’t even looking, but he gave Whiteslaw another thumbs-up, then reached for his lighter fluid.
Whiteslaw watched the attackers wad themselves up in the sticky material, which was the human equivalent of flypaper. Before long they were enmeshed. They had no understanding of their predicament, only that they were helpless and vulnerable and they hooted in terror. The bully called to his men and got grunts in return that may or may not have been words, but the bully knew his men were in trouble. All the albinos knew it.
Jack Fast spritzed four of the attackers with Kingston Charcoal Brand Lighter Fluid and announced into his microphone, “They would not obey.”
He struck a fireplace match and tossed it on the helpless attackers, who burst into a white blaze of screaming flame unlike any stack of charcoal briquettes Whiteslaw had ever fired up. The fight was brilliant and the heat wave was intense, but not as intense as the sound the victims made before they died.
The albinos shrank back, and they looked up.
Yeah. Fast said they had some vision. They couldn’t see much, but they could see his blaze, and they saw Jack Fast silhouetted in front of it with both hands raised. Even with atrophied eyeballs and a coating of skin, they saw that much!
The fire faded in seconds to an orange glow, and Fast moved across the stage, talking, keeping the people trained on him. He came to the other pair of attackers, who were just as glued together as the first group. They wriggled as he spritzed them. “They would not obey. They would not obey,” Fast intoned from the speakers mournfully, and struck another match.