Rhubarb (36 page)

“What will you do when the truth leaks out? Your customers
will be furious,” said Martin.

“We may have to settle a lawsuit and pay off some
journalists. Maybe hire some nutrition scientists to prove it’s actually
healthier this way. This isn’t difficult stuff, Martin.”

“You’ll be the one held responsible,” said Martin.

Jeffrey laughed, then glurked in pain. The tentacles
loosened for a moment, and Martin shifted his hands closer to his back.

“Is something wrong?” asked Martin.

“The company will be making too much money to care. And even
if they try to make an example of me, some other company will snatch me up.
I’ll be able to write my own ticket after this.”

“You’re delusional,” said Martin. He strained his wrist to
reach his back pocket, but his stupid endoskeleton didn’t bend that way.

“Think what you want,” said Jeffrey. “It won’t matter for
long.” Martin yanked hard. His hand slipped a little against Jeffrey’s suckers.
His fingertips brushed against a knife handle, and he strained as if they might
grow longer.

“Do you hear that?” Jeffrey asked. Martin hadn’t, but he
stopped straining for a moment to listen. A vibrating rumble, oddly high
pitched, reverberated through the structure. “The engines are coming online.
We’ll be through the portal in a few minutes.” There came a whoosh, like the
sound of a thousand college kids flushing every toilet in a new stadium at the
same time, and then the rumble thundered into a screaming roar.

As Jeffrey marveled at the ignition, Martin got a knife
between two helpless fingertips. It wasn’t enough.

“So Mart—” Martin headbutted Jeffrey, right in the bandage.
It felt like plopping on a pillow full of eels. Jeffrey squalled. The tentacles
loosened. Martin grabbed the knife and hoped it was a big one. He twisted his
wrist and sawed into tentacle flesh. Fluid squirted on his hand, and Martin
flew free. Jeffrey snarled and flailed as Martin hacked at the grabbing
tentacles.

An appendage connected hard against his chest. Martin sailed
backward and crashed painfully through the remains of a wall. Jeffrey scrambled
through the hole after him. Martin pushed away, disoriented, shattering a pipe
with his forehead to make it through a narrow gap. He found himself on the roof
of the Screwmobile. Behind him, Jeffrey tore at the ragged opening; in seconds
it’d be large enough.

Martin knew he’d never make it down the tunnel. He found a
grip and pulled himself toward the cab. He swung in and clawed for the handle.
He yanked, but a tentacle caught the door midswing. Martin pulled again, but
another tentacle pad slapped down and then another. The suckers held firm
against the metal and glass. Martin squirmed across the bench seat. Jeffrey’s
eye poked into view, and more tentacles sprayed in. Martin hacked at them with
his knife.

His hand landed on the Thermos on the floor, and he threw
it. It bounced back ineffectually, so he ripped the lid off and shook the
steaming liquid over bare gray skin. Tentacles whirled in a panic, and Jeffrey
let out a chilling skree. Doris made a mean cup of coffee.

A tentacle ripped the steering wheel cover off and snapped
the cup holder. Another mangled the back support and tore it out. The GPS
almost broke through the windshield as it shattered. Martin scrabbled for the
passenger door handle and kicked his homemade radio box in the tentacles’ path.
They smashed it to splinters against the dash. Martin spilled out of the
passenger door just as Jeffrey squashed his bulk in from the driver’s side. Martin’s
feet found some purchase. He almost rebounded into the squid-filled truck but
caught himself on the door. A tentacle swiped at him. Martin pushed with all
the force he could muster against the door and the protruding tentacle.

Jeffrey screeched and Martin readied to do it again, but the
door had latched. The pad of the tentacle flailed and grasped at air, each
angry sucker gasping like a vicious little mouth. In the air, a few inches away
from Martin, hung the staple gun.

Jeffrey fell still as Martin made his way carefully and
deliberately around the front of the truck, keeping the FastNCo. 25-C pointed
between the wide black eyes behind the windshield.

“Killing me won’t stop anything,” Jeffrey said over the
engine’s roar.

“It’ll stop you,” said Martin.

“I’m the only one who can abort the manufacturing process
now.”

“Sorry, Jeffrey. I’m not taking any more chances with you.”

Jeffrey’s body appeared still, but Martin sensed him trying
to free his trapped appendage.

“If you open that door, I will shoot you,” said Martin.

“What are you waiting for?” said Jeffrey. “Pull the trigger.
I don’t think you can do it.”

“Maybe not,” said Martin. He pulled out the Pall Malls.

“What are you doing, Martin?”

“Thought I’d have a smoke.” With one hand, Martin opened the
pack, shook the tip of a bent cigarette out, put it to his lips, and tossed the
pack away.

“You’re disgusting. Your whole planet is disgusting,”
Jeffrey snarled.

“Maybe,” said Martin. “But we have really good pie.”

Martin found the lighter in his front pocket. Jeffrey
blinked once, and then his eye followed Martin’s to the wick of FastNCo.
shirts, still intact.

Martin flicked the lighter.

It sparked but didn’t light. He flicked again. In Martin’s
brief inattention, Jeffrey struggled to free his trapped limb, but Martin
re-aimed the staple gun and Jeffrey froze.

“I guess you’ll have to shoot me after all,” said Jeffrey.

Martin flicked one more time. Nothing. Nothing again. He
didn’t want to die of embarrassment.

Jeffrey laughed cruelly.

Zip. Click. A narrow, blue flame spiraled out of the lighter
to the ceiling. Jeffrey’s eyes flared wide. Martin leaned his head to the flame
and lit the cigarette.

“Martin?” said Jeffrey.

“See you around, Candy Man.” Martin blew out a smoky breath
and touched the cigarette to the end of his gas-soaked FastNCo. shirt. It took
the flames in an instant.

Jeffrey’s bellows followed Martin into the chewed tunnel,
until the explosion.

Martin tumbled end over end in an unbearable heat. He
wrapped his arms over his head as he crashed through surface after painful
surface. Hot nicks scraped his skin. Just when he thought the pain would never
stop, he was floating free in cool air. He opened his eyes to find himself
skimming across the hangar a few feet off the floor.

“Martin!” Cheryl screamed.

Martin twisted around and felt a dozen pinching twinges on
the skin of his back. His clothes were shredded. His arms bled from countless
scrapes. An acrid smell had taken up permanent residence in his nose. Cheryl
and Lee stood near Chumpdark’s ship a few degrees off his line of travel. He
tried to swim toward her, to painful avail.

Cheryl crossed the hangar floor with wide, strange strides.

“What’s happening?” Lee shouted. Smoking punctures riddled
the hangar wall. The hangar shuddered with a thunderous boom.

Martin strained to reach Cheryl’s outstretched hand. She
lunged and their fingers locked for a moment, but slipped apart. He hit the
floor and rolled, the floor tugging at his clothes and skin.

“It’s sticky,” Martin said, finding his feet, not with
gravity, but a treatment on the hangar floor.

“What happened?” asked Cheryl.

“I think I blew up the engines,” said Martin.

“We can’t get into the ship,” said Cheryl.

“I’d like to get out of here,” said Lee. As if to make Lee’s
point, another shudder shook the floor, and a large section of the back wall
exploded across the hangar in a fiery black ball.

“Jeffrey’s car!” Martin yelled.

They lurched wildly, prying each footstep free and swinging
their legs forward as far as possible. A few feet from the car, they were
peppered with a shower of debris. Martin prepared to smash a window, but
Jeffrey had kindly left it unlocked.

“Can you hotwire…?” Martin asked, and then laughed. “Never
mind.” The keys swung in the ignition. A crash sounded from the direction of
the Screwmobile’s tunnel.

“Someone else drive,” Martin said, pointing the staple gun
toward the hole.

“Is he coming?” asked Cheryl.

“Start the car,” said Martin.

Cheryl got behind the wheel. The Lincoln’s engine purred as
quietly and coolly as in any convenience store parking lot.

Martin sensed movement in the crumbling truck hole, and
fired. The staple gun clicked and debris exploded, doubling the size of the
hole, but leaving solid, not gooey, destruction. Martin felt his hair stand on
end as if he were back in physics class touching a Van der Graaf generator.

“Get in,” Cheryl screamed. Martin backed up and opened the
back door. He fired a few more times, and more of the wall exploded.

“Was that the air bubble I felt?” Martin asked.

“Yes, get in,” said Cheryl.

“We’re pressing this hangar button now,” shouted Lee.

Martin closed the door but rolled down the window, if the
staple gun shot through the force field, he couldn’t stop now. He aimed at the
hole, wreaking more and more damage. As Cheryl reversed and turned them, he
fired at anything intact.

“Oh my god,” said Lee.

“Martin?” Cheryl wailed.

The hangar door was rising, but no sun, no stars, awaited
them at the end of the alien canyon—only a swirling, widening blue-and-black
abyss rendered fractally terrifying by the shattered windshield. Plasma flashed
silently from point to point. The Lincoln idled.

“Go. Go. Go,” said Martin.

Cheryl jammed the car into drive and stomped on the gas. The
floor grabbed at the tires like fresh tar, but they accelerated. Cheryl
screamed. Martin and Lee screamed, and a few yards from the edge, Lee found the
presence of mind to reach over and tap the portal icon.

And then they popped out.

Martin opened his door for a better shot back into the
hangar, and stood with one hand gripping the handhold over the door. “Get back
in here,” Cheryl screamed. He squeezed the trigger over and over. Chumpdark’s
double-hulled ship exploded. Cheryl screamed his name again. Then blue
enveloped him and drew reality into fate’s fine thread.

~ * * * ~

A moment later, Martin tumbled, crunching and scraping,
rolling under his own painful weight and velocity on a very hard surface. He
floundered one last time and found himself under a bright blue sky. Crumbling
rock rose up on the edge of his peripheral vision. An electric-blue swirl spun
silently above him, and then bloomed across the sky like the second Big Bang.
Everything hurt, but Martin sensed no agony except the certainty of being too
late.

A bristle of long antennas emerged overhead, followed by a
black, blunt hulk blotting out the sun. One logo, and then another, and then
thousands.

Martin raised his arm, relieved to find the staple gun still
in his hand, and fired, once, twice—he stopped counting. Every logo was an easy
target. Every shot burst some part of the ship.

The factory continued to slip from the vortex. Each
ker-chunk of the staple gun was unsatisfying, but dozens, maybe hundreds, of
fires now spurted from the hull. Martin’s hand stung from the spring’s
concussion, over and over, against his palm. The ship kept coming and coming.

Martin didn’t remember getting to his feet, but he stumbled
forward, still firing, and almost collapsed, unprepared for the pain in one
knee, and again as he tripped over a state trooper on the side of the road.
People had fallen everywhere, presumably asleep from the portal and not yet
neurotoxined. The Lincoln had come to a stop sideways, mostly intact, against a
National Guard truck.

Martin found himself stopped by the guardrail and began to
shout, forcing his numb hand to squeeze again and again. There was now no sky
but the ship.

Martin ducked when finally an inert, pyramid-sized engine
bell, one of a dozen, passed overhead and the sky over the gap cleared. Plasma
sputtered from only two of the bells, but still the ship inched north,
stretching out over the northern horizon toward Brixton. Martin kept firing at
the still-working engines. If the neurotoxin came, he wanted to die as part of
the solution, and not part of the problem.

And then Big Thunder Valley earned its name.

The concussion hit his chest; the road, his back. And his
consciousness went out for a smoke break.

Martin sat in his usual chair by the window. The one with
the good view of the pantry and the breakfast bar. No one had set out breakfast
this morning, only a hand-lettered sign that read, “Out of Food—Sorry for the
Inconvenience.” Brenda had left the first aid kit on the table, having pretty
much exhausted its supply of bandages, gauze, tape, ointments, and expired
analgesics in individual packets.

Behind Martin, Highway 15 drained Brixton of the flood of
once exuberant, now shocked and beleaguered, Wakers. A few milled in the lobby,
waiting to check out or for the traffic to thin, speaking in quiet voices—or
maybe it was that Martin’s ears were still ringing from the explosion. They
showed one another video taken on cameras and phones. A few had artifacts, bits
and pieces taken from the wreckage before the National Guard had cordoned off
the area. Despite their tales, Martin sensed a disappointment, as if the truth
wasn’t good enough.

The Lincoln waited in the carport outside the lobby doors
like a smoking gun, with its smashed windshield and mangled front corner. The
passenger side had been scraped up in the landing, and the rearview mirror
dangled by a wire. After the factory had exploded, Lee and Cheryl had dragged
him to the car, and had picked their way down the hill and into the field on
the other side of the bridge before the crowd awoke.