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“What? No. No way.” Jack could feel himself blushing. “No. That’s stupid.”
“Uh-huh.”
He felt his way, step by step, through the directory, looking for controls that might not even be there, commands that might not even exist.
Drake reappeared. He was whistling happily to himself. “Slice and dice,” he said. “Slice and dice.”
“Good,” Caine said. “That’s one. Now set up for Taylor. Remember, we don’t want anyone shooting Jack or hitting any of the equipment.”
“I know what I’m doing,” Drake said. He pointed his tentacle at one of his two thugs. “You. Bring the shotgun.” When the boy had complied, Drake spent a few minutes moving him around the room, checking sightlines. “Okay. You have a simple job. You see Taylor popping in here, you shoot.”
The kid looked pale. “I have to shoot her?”
“No, you have a choice,” Drake said. “You can shoot her or not. It’s up to you.”
The kid breathed a sigh.
“Of course, if you don’t shoot her?” Drake snapped his whip arm. The tentacle wrapped around the boy’s throat. “If you don’t shoot her? If you forget, or get distracted, or miss? I’ll whip you till I see bone.”
Drake laughed happily and unwrapped his arm. “I believe we are ready,” he announced. “Taylor has a load of buckshot waiting for her. And if little Brianna decides to breeze on in at a hundred miles an hour, she’ll hit the wires.”
“And set off an alarm?” Jack asked.
Drake laughed like that was the funniest thing he’d ever heard.
“Slice and dice,” Drake said. “Slice and dice.”
Jack didn’t look at Drake. He looked at Diana. Her eyes were windows on darkness.
“Get back to work, Jack,” Caine said.
The McClub was closed down. There was a sign on the door that said, “Sorry, We Are Closed. Will Reopen Tomorrow.”
Duck didn’t know why he had been drawn there. Of course it was closed—it was after midnight. He had just craved company. Hoped someone was hanging around. Pretty much anyone.
In the three days—well, technically four, since it was tomorrow already—since Duck had fallen through the bottom of the swimming pool, his life had actually managed to get worse. First off, he had lost his private oasis of calm. The pool was obviously unfixable. He had spent some effort looking for another pool, but no other spot had been nearly as great as the one he had lost.
In the second place, no one believed him. He had become a joke. Kids didn’t bother to go and check out the pool to see if the hole was really there. And of course Zil and his punk friends didn’t exactly step up to validate Duck’s story.
When he’d tell people about this weird, un-asked-for power, they’d demand he demonstrate. But Duck didn’t want to demonstrate. It meant getting mad, for one thing, and he wasn’t naturally an angry person.
More importantly, it meant falling into the ground. And Duck had not enjoyed that the first time around. It had been sheer luck that he had passed out before he fell right on past the cave. He could have kept falling until he reached the molten core of the earth. That was the image in his head, anyway. Falling through the ground, down through the crust and the mantle and the whatever other layers there were that he had probably learned about in school but couldn’t recall now, all the way down to the big melted metal and rock core.
In his mind’s eye that would look like the scene at the end of The Lord of the Rings. He would be like Gollum, swimming for a few seconds in all that lava, then incinerated.
But that image was almost a relief compared to the other possibility: that he would simply be buried alive. That he would fall a hundred feet into the ground and have no way of extricating himself. He would slowly suffocate as the dirt walls of the hole filled in, clods falling onto his upturned face, dirt filling his eyes, his mouth, his nose…
He grabbed the handle of the McClub door to steady himself. The images were waking nightmares. They were in his thoughts more and more often.
It didn’t help that no one else took the problem seriously. Kids laughed at his story. They thought the whole thing was funny. The part about falling through the bottom of the pool. The part about the cave. The radioactive side cave. The blue bats. The emergence from the waves, half naked and shivering. The way he’d had to climb the cliff up from the beach, forcing himself to grin happily lest anger cause him to fall and keep on falling. Climbing had been the easiest part. He’d felt light with relief.
He had told the story and kids roared with laughter. The first day or so he’d played along. He enjoyed making people laugh. But he’d gone very quickly from being a funny storyteller to being an object of ridicule.
“Your power is the power to gain so much weight, you actually sink into the ground?” That had been Hunter, who thought himself a real comedian. “So, you’re basically Fat- man?”
After that it was open season: Fatman led to Fall-through Boy, the Spelunker, the Sinker, the Miner, and the one he heard most often, the Human Drill.
Kids didn’t get it: It wasn’t funny. Not really. Not if you thought about it. Not if you spent the night tossing and turning, barely able to sleep because you worried that you might get angry in some dream and fall to a slow, agonizing death.
