The Takers: Book One of the Oz Chronicles (19 page)

"Okay," Pepper said, sounding almost embarrassed that he had been out negotiated by a kid. "We'll help, but not tonight and not without a game plan."

I stopped and turned with a smile on my face. "Deal."

***

Wes spent a good portion of the day showing the most mechanically inclined members of Pepper's group how to convert a gas-guzzling vehicle to one that runs on propane. Wes erupted into fits of frustration many times during the impromptu workshop, but eventually they came around and grasped the concepts Wes was trying to teach them.

I introduced Pepper to Ajax, while Lou sat nearby with Nate and Dr. Fine's book. Roy and the others in our group gathered around to listen to the next day's plans. Pepper invited only two of his men, Hollis and Shaw. The others milled around the south end zone. Hollis was tall and lean, if not a little on the lanky side. He did not speak unless spoken to, but he had the chiseled look of intelligence that did all his speaking for him. Shaw was the opposite of Hollis in almost every way. He was a rotund little man who swayed nervously as he flanked Pepper to his left. His left eye twitched distractingly and his belly rumbled almost continuously.

"You're trying to tell me this gorilla can talk?" Pepper said.

Ajax signed, "Gorilla think man dumb."

Lou giggled after she interpreted what Ajax had said.

"How do you like that?" Pepper said to Shaw. "A gorilla just called me dumb." The round man heckled more than laughed.

Ajax signed, "Go zoo now."

"He wants to go to the zoo now," Lou said. She was consulting the book less frequently than she had before. I realized she must have been studying Ajax's sign language on her own.

"Tomorrow," I said.

He signed, "Why?"

"We have to make a plan." I pointed to Pepper. "We have new warriors."

Ajax signed, "More warriors at zoo."

"Yes," I said. "More warriors for the zoo."

He grunted and hooted. He was clearly irritated. He signed, "More warriors at zoo."

"I think he literally means there are more warriors at the zoo," Lou said.

This surprised me. "What warriors?"

"Gorilla warriors," Ajax signed.

Pepper crossed his arms and raised an eyebrow. "Is he saying what I think he's saying?"

"Of course," I said. "Gorillas always know," I signed. "They've been waiting for this, preparing for this for generations."

"You expect us to fight along side a bunch of monkeys?" Pepper shook his head.

Shaw's stomach roared before he spoke. "If I want a bunch of bananas et, I'll call me some monkeys, but I got no use for 'em in a fight." He waited for his fearless leader to laugh, but Pepper ignored him.

"Apes," Devlin said.

I smiled. "That's right, apes."

"I don't give a damn if they're super-apes, I'm not asking my men to put their trust into a bunch of dumb animals."

"The Greasywhoppers can't see them," Lou said. She was more than a little offended that Pepper had insulted Ajax. "Besides I'd bet money this dumb animal is smarter than half the men in your group."

Shaw squinted one eye and looked her way. He was trying to determine if she was referring to him.

Kimball barked.

"Kimball, too," Lou added.

"Look," I said, "Ajax knows these things better than any of us. All the gorillas do. It's part of their folklore."

"You expect me to believe gorillas have a folklore." Pepper elbowed Hollis. "How do you like that, Hollis? These rubes think this gorilla is some kind of ape historian…"

"Historian? That's a good one, Pep," Shaw said trying to win favor with his boss.

Hollis cleared his throat. "I've seen a lot of weird things the last couple of weeks, Pepper. Once you've seen a monster eat your family, you'll believe just about anything. What they're saying doesn't sound all that crazy to me."

Pepper looked at his soldier. It was obvious Hollis had not questioned him before. He didn't quite know how to react.

Ajax started signing frantically.

Lou had trouble interpreting. "Day soon… He's going too fast." She gently reached out and grabbed his hands. "Slow down, Ajax. I can't understand you." He huffed and repeated his signs, this time slower and more pronounced. "Day longs come soon. Doctor knows. Must go zoo now," Lou said. "The Délons."

"What does he mean, 'doctor knows'?" I asked.

"What are the Délons?" Pepper asked.

"Monsters," Roy said.

"Wait a minute." Pepper twisted in his chair. "I thought you called them Greasywhoppers."

"The Délons are… different," I said. "We don't know much about them."

"Now hold on, we didn't sign up for this. We said we'd help you with these Greasywhoppers at the zoo, but nobody said anything about these Dalungs, or whatever you call them."

Ajax signed, "Doctor knows," again.

"What doctor?" I asked.

Ajax huffed and motioned his head toward Hollis.

Hollis's expression changed. He tilted his head and studied the ape. "I think he means me."

"You?" I said.

He became even more reflective. "Interesting," he said after a long pause.

Pepper looked at his second. "What's interesting, Doc?"

"Doc?" I said.

"He was the team shrink." Pepper smiled. "He kept all us savages out of the loony bin and on the playing field."

"I'm a psychologist. I specialize in sports psychology." He spoke about his credentials unremorsefully in the present tense. "In particular, I train athletes in the art of mental imagery or visualization as it's most commonly called."

"He's a genius. My sack total went up thirty percent after he started working with me," Pepper proclaimed happily, as if it were still a relevant achievement.

"The key is to get athletes to visualize each play before it happens. In doing so, you increase motivation, focus, and endurance. The brain can duplicate physical energy without the actual physical activity. In effect, the brain tricks the body into thinking the outcome has already taken place. In a properly trained athlete, the actual event becomes a reflexive formality. In some cases, the lines between reality and imagination can become very blurred."

"What does this have to do with the Délons?" Roy asked.

"A colleague, Dr. Bashir, in Buffalo was working with a group of patients that had underdeveloped brain functions for various reasons." In the telling of his past, Hollis had transformed himself from Pepper's number one, to proud psychologist before our very eyes. "Traditionally, society has taken the path of least resistance when treating such patients. The goal is to teach them to cope in society, but not to excel. Dr. Bashir had a different approach. He felt that through intensive mental imagery, these patients could do more than cope, they could thrive."

"This is all very interesting, Doc, but…"

Hollis cut Pepper off. "Let me finish."

Pepper gritted his teeth. He didn't like being cut off by his underling.

Oblivious to Pepper's frustrations, Hollis carried on. "It worked more successfully with some than it did with others, but what he found with his patients who suffered from Down syndrome was they possessed a keen talent for the mental imagery exercises."

There were those words again, Down syndrome. They'd haunted me since the day I walked into Stevie Dayton's house. It was absolute torture every time I heard them.

"In fact," Hollis said, "he found that with some of these patients the lines between reality and imagination not only became blurred, they were obliterated. Particularly in one case. He had one patient who developed what Dr. Bashir called Hyper Mental Imagery, or HMI. That is to say, this patient not only visualized prior events in his mind, he created events in the physical world; a snowy day in May, a particular food on the hospital menu every day, small things that he would image onto the physical world. Understand that these findings were largely discredited by mainstream scientists, but still they offer some fascinating possibilities."

"Doc, the Délons?" I said.

"Oh yes, of course." He put his hands behind his back and rose up on his toes. "This particular patient took to drawing what he wanted to image. They were quite spectacular drawings. In one noteworthy drawing he imaged a race of strange creatures that he called Délons. Anatomically they didn't make much sense. They were part man and virtually part everything else, thousands of tentacles that looked like spider legs on top of its head and outlining its corpse-like face, a set of insect mandibles for teeth, milky white protruding eyes, horrible, horrible looking creatures. "

"Why would he want to image something like that?" Pepper asked.

Hollis considered the question. "I don't know exactly, but it's likely he created the Délons to punish those who made fun of him. According to Dr. Bashir, he suffered enormous humiliation at the hands of his classmates."

Lou looked at me. I knew what she was thinking.

"Enough of this," I said. "We need to come up with a battle plan." I was harsh, and I didn't care. I wanted to get off the topic of HMI and retarded kids abused by their classmates. I had lived it. I didn't need to hear about it again.

"We still haven't settled on this Délon business," Pepper said.

I snapped. "We fight who we have to fight!" My voice carried throughout the entire dome. Pepper's men all turned my way. "Be a man, Sands!" I couldn't stop myself. I don't know if the pressure had finally gotten to me or the guilt for Stevie's death had been rekindled because of Hollis's little lecture on HMIs, but I was on the edge, and I brought Pepper with me.

Shaw snickered a hideous, insufferable laugh.

Sweat formed on Pepper's brow and his eyes turned blood red. The veins on his neck started to convulse. He wanted to kill me, and I didn't blame him. I had challenged his manhood in his house in front of his men. If he was any kind of leader, he would have to make me pay. The only thing I had going for me was I that I was only 13 years old.

Roy pulled me aside. "What are you doing?"

"We don't have time for this, Roy. We need to be talking battle strategy…"

"Listen to me," he said. "You can't force this guy to help us. All you're going to do is piss him off."

I looked at the now enraged Pepper Sands and turned back to Roy. "Too late, I already did."

Unbeknownst to us, while we discussed a way to get Pepper back on our side, Shaw approached Lou and the baby. Kimball growled as the fat man waddled closer. Ajax stepped in front of Lou and Nate. Shaw's stomach gurgled loud enough to shift Roy's and my attention to the increasingly tense scene.

"I just want to say hello to the baby," Shaw said pleading his case to Ajax and Kimball.

They would have none of it. Ajax gave a short roar and tried to shoo Shaw away. Kimball was stooping lower and lower to the ground. He looked as if he were about to pounce at any moment.

Pepper stood. "Call off your pets, kid! In fact, pack up your stuff and get out of my house! Our deal's off!"

Shaw tried to move in closer to see the baby. Kimball snapped at his leg. "Hey, that ain't nice," he said, backing away.

"Kimball, back!" I yelled.

Wes approached. His puppies were on his heels. "What's going on?" The eight little junior Taker slayers saw Kimball and clumsily bounded towards him. Their demeanor became as vicious as Kimball's when they got closer to Shaw.

"Would you look at that," Wes said. "I ain't never seen them react to somebody like that before."

"Yeah," I said. I caught a quick glimpse of Shaw's face. His eyes started to tremble, and for a fleeting second they seemed to bug out from their sockets and turn a milky white, but it was for the briefest of seconds. I wondered if my mind was playing tricks on me again. I moved in and grabbed Kimball by the scruff of the neck and pulled him away. The puppies yapped and growled as menacingly as they could at Shaw, but they couldn't quite pull it off. As I was dragging Kimball away, I saw Ajax signing something.

Lou swallowed hard. "Day long here."

Ajax erupted and flung himself on top of Shaw.

"Get him off!" Pepper shouted. "Get him off!"

The man we thought was Shaw was pinned beneath Ajax's massive 400-pound frame, and began to morph before our eyes. His round shape shifted into a long slender build. Thin, hairy tentacles sprouted from his face and head. His eyes bulged and turned milky white. He opened his mouth and two vertical pinchers shot out and snapped at Ajax. The military uniform was replaced by a black tattered uniform that left some of the creature's purple skin exposed. It began to squawk like a bird. The sound suddenly started to come at us from all sides. Looking around the arena, we saw half of Pepper's men undergo the same change as Shaw. They pounced on their former comrades. The thrashing tentacles held tight to the victims' faces while the pinchers cut through to their brains.

Pepper didn't know what to do. He watched in horror as his men were ambushed and destroyed.

I turned to Roy while I held Kimball back. "Weapons! Now!" Roy raced to our supplies.

To Tyrone and Valerie, "Get Lou and Nate to the wagon."

To Devlin, "Go with them."

That left Reya, Miles, Wes, and me waiting in a defensive posture against the Délons. Hollis approached Ajax and the Délon who was once Shaw. The grotesque creature struggled against the great ape's weight, but to no avail. It looked up at Hollis and hissed.

"Interesting." The psychologist dropped to one knee and examined the Délon like it was a science experiment. "It matches the drawing perfectly."

The Délon squirmed and manically tried to work its arms free, but he was no match for Ajax's strength. "Come a little closer, Doc." The Délon spoke. "I'll show you something really interesting."

Hollis was floored. "It talks!"

Pepper backed his way to us. "Looks like the deal's back on, kid. Got any ideas?"

"Fight," I said. I let Kimball go and he bolted toward Ajax and the Délon.

Four Délons released the lifeless bodies of Pepper's men from their tentacles and focused their attention on us. The bodies flopped and twitched until they too morphed into Délons.

"That's not good," Wes said.