Year Zero (36 page)

“It’s all molecular valves,” I added dashingly, feeling like Mr. Science.

Carly removed her crucifix, which flowed into a compact stereopticon form with an enlarged display surface. She navigated us down a long hallway that took us to a service staircase. It got pitch dark as soon as we left the lobby and the murky natural light filtering through its glass doors. From that point on, we had the place to ourselves, since not even flashlights were working in the metallicam’s disruption field. Frampton had his stereopticon generate a dim glow that we could see by without attracting too much attention. Once we entered the service stairway, he turned it into a floodlight.

We were back at the presidential train within minutes. “What’s the deal with this place, anyway?” I asked as Carly headed toward the chair with the access panel.

“FDR used to enter the city by way of a secret underground track, so the press wouldn’t see him getting lifted in
and out of trains on a wheelchair. This is where it would pull in, and then he’d magically emerge in the Waldorf.”

She keyed in the color combination, and that soothing, golden light enveloped the room again. Moments later, the closet door opened and a familiar voice rang out. “Always with the visitors this week. Thirty-something years without even a Jehovah’s Witness, and now all of a sudden, it’s like Grand Central Sta—” The Boss rounded the conference table’s corner and almost rammed Carly and Frampton. “Whoa, superstars!” He extended two limbs to each of them to double-shake their famous hands.

Then he spotted me. “And, a
criminal
!”

The Boss thrust four limbs
in front of Manda to protect her from me. Four other limbs were already shaking hands with Carly and Frampton. And since Decapuses need at least three limbs to stand on, this sent him sprawling. Ancient reflexes cause Decapuses to clench their digits and violently retract their limbs whenever they fall. This yanked Carly and Frampton right off their feet, bringing their heads together with an impressive
crack
. The Boss’s torso bounced on the floor like a soggy tennis ball, then he slowly released their hands. As his limbs reextended, Manda tried to grab one to help him to his feet.

“No, no—I piss out of that one,” he warned. She backed right off. “Anyways, I’m sorry, but I have strict orders to deny entry to wanted persons.” He gazed at me sternly as he regained his footing. “Or, to unwanted persons who are traveling with wanted persons,” he added, giving everyone
else a desperately flustered look. The fame field was clearly wreaking some havoc—but The Boss was no pluhhh, and he more or less kept his cool.

“Who says I’m a criminal?” I asked.

“The Guardian Council itself. A communiqué came in from them right after that Pugwash guy showed up.”

“And let me guess—it came to you via Paulie, didn’t it?”

“Who told you?”

“Criminal masterminds have ways of knowing these things,” I said. “Although I don’t know what I’m accused of.”

“Arson in a state prison,” The Boss said in a scandalized tone. “Armed robbery of citizens, banks, and post offices.” He started ticking off allegations on the digits of various limbs. “The theft of sacred objects. Perjury. Bigamy. Passing counterfeit money. Kidnapping, extortion. Receiving stolen goods, selling stolen goods. Inciting prostitution. And, contrary to the laws of this state …” He paused, struggling to remember the final charge.

“Using marked cards?” I offered.

“Exactly!”

I nodded. These accusations had dogged me throughout my childhood. They come from
The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly
—a film my cousin would quote from endlessly whenever we’d play Cowpersons & Native Americans.
¹
So Pugwash clearly had a hand in writing the bogus Guardian communiqué that had ordered The Boss to keep us out of the Decapus colony. But why?

“Boss, that’s bullshit,” Manda said hotly. “Paulie made it all up because he wants to keep us away from his metallicam. Don’t you know what he’s planning to do with that stuff?”

“Sure—he’s gonna solve your energy problems and give you all a lot more time to write music.”

“Not even close,” Manda said. “He’s planning to destroy the Earth with it.”

“Come on—that’s illegal!”

“Only if he does it
to
us,” I said. “But he’s figured out a way to make us destroy ourselves.”

“I don’t buy it. All of us Decapuses would get killed, too. And we’re union!”

We went back and forth like this for a while. Much as he disliked Paulie, The Boss couldn’t believe that the top echelons of the Guild would order this sort of destruction. And he wasn’t about to take a one-man crime wave’s word for it.

Carly figured out a way to break the deadlock before too many precious minutes ticked by. “Listen, Boss,” she said. “Believe what you want to about Paulie and the metallicam. But the other reason we’re here is to capture that Pugwash guy.”

“What for?”

“For trying to kill Manda. He set up a booby trap in her apartment.”

“He
what
?” The rest of our conversation was instantly forgotten. As its most adored (and internally famous) singer, Manda had become the Decapus colony’s emotional Achilles’ heel.

“He tried to kill her,” Carly repeated. “She clobbered him playing Settlers of Catan, and he couldn’t take it. He came down here to flee the police.”

“So that’s why he had Paulie set up that force field,” The
Boss growled, balling up the digits of several limbs into fists. They took on a metallic color, and puffed up like balloons.

“He had Paulie do
what
?” I asked.

“Right after he got here, he told Paulie and Özzÿ to lock everyone else out of the transit bay,” The Boss snarled. “So Paulie used some metallicam to power up a force field. The three of them are behind it now.”

“Oooh—that’s really bad,” Carly murmured.

“I asked Paulie how he could block out his brothers in the Guild like that,” The Boss said as he herded us into the elevator. “It’s unheard of! He said it was that Pugwash guy’s idea.”

“Metallicam force fields are completely impenetrable by any means,” Carly warned me as the elevator plunged.

“Really? You know, we’re so lucky to have a force-field expert on the team.”

She glared at me. “I’m just saying that Paulie and your cousin are incredibly serious about keeping us out if they’re using up some of their metallicam to power a force field.”

Their
metallicam. The phrase chilled me. What the hell was Pugwash up to?

We left the elevator and The Boss activated a small panel on the wall just outside of it. “It’s me, calling everybody,” he bellowed into it, and I heard his voice echo throughout the surrounding tunnels. “Manda’s here. Manda! And that Pugwash guy is trying to kill her! Meet us at the transit bay.”

The tunnels were roiling within seconds. All of the Decapuses had balled their digits into those huge metallic fists, and a pissed-off phalanx of them formed around us to keep us from getting trampled underfoot as we raced through the tunnels. It was as if a giant clan of pint-sized linebackers
had just heard that their kid sister was at the junior high school dance with R. Kelly. A seething mob had already surrounded the transit bay by the time we got there. It parted like the Red Sea for Moses the instant Manda’s beloved form was spotted. Within moments, we were standing at the force field’s perimeter. The gibbering mob fell silent as my cousin strode out of the transit bay door with Paulie perched on his shoulder.

“Damn, you were right,” Paulie said to Pugwash, flicking a wing at the furious crowd. “Mutiny. Led by that broad. You sure called it.”

“So are we on?” Pugwash demanded.

Paulie nodded. “A deal’s a deal. And you delivered.”

“Delivered
what
?” I demanded.

“Information,” Paulie said. “Your cousin showed up here about a half hour back. Said things was goin’ sideways. But he wouldn’t give me no details. So I say, tell me what’s brewin’. If your warning pans out, you get two percent.”

“Two percent of
what
?”

“The assets the Guild recovers.”

I felt a familiar overwhelming urge to belt my cousin. And for the first time since eighth grade, I made no attempt to resist it.
“Owwwwwwwwww!”
I hollered as my hand connected with a solid, invisible wall.

“Eighty thousand times stronger than steel, right?” Pugwash asked.

“More like eighty-one,” Paulie answered, then turned to me. “Metallicam force fields’re tough on the dukes. I wouldn’t knock it again.”

“And calm down already,” Pugwash added. “It’s not like I did anything wrong.”

“Apart from getting the world destroyed?”

“Actually, I
saved
the world.” He turned to Paulie. “Tell him about the rest of our deal. You’re making me look bad.”

Paulie shrugged. “I said if his warning pans out, I give humanity an extra twelve hours to get us our money back.”

“I asked for a full week,” Pugwash said righteously.

“And I started at a fifth of one percent,” Paulie said. “A bit of back and forth, and we settled at twelve hours and two percent. Everybody wins.”

I turned to Pugwash. “How … could you?”

He glared at me. “How
could
I? Please. What would have happened if I’d waited for Manda like you told me to—and then Paulie saw us coming before your little mutiny could take him prisoner? He would’ve nuked us, or something—and then we’d all be doomed. I figured our odds of pulling it off were one in ten, max. And if we failed, it was all over.”

“Well … 
may
be,” I said. “But—”

“And meanwhile, what was my prime directive? Let’s see, wasn’t it something like, ‘Everything we’re doing now is
strictly
meant to buy us more time. So do
whatever
it takes to get us more time.
Absolutely
whatever it takes.’ Did I get that right, Nick?”

I just clammed up and fumed. I felt like I was nine years old again, and losing a semantic debate about the rules of Monopoly to my older, smarter cousin. And hadn’t I since
gone to law school
specifically so that I could win a few of these arguments? I silently vowed that if I survived this, my professors would receive the most withering demand for a refund that had ever been written.

“So you sent me down to
negotiate
for more time with Paulie,” Pugwash continued, moving in for the kill. “And let’s see—what did I have to bargain with? Oh, that’s right—
nothing
. Except for this one piece of information that I knew
he’d find valuable. The details of your pathetic little plan for throwing him off of his perch.
That
was the one thing I had to bargain with. And while I was at it, I also needed to come off as being believable somehow.”

“So in order to be believable, you sold out humanity’s future in exchange
for a commission
?” I asked.

“Of course!”

Paulie nodded. “Smart,” he said to me. “I mean, you gotta admit. No way he’d’a been believable as a do-gooder.”

“Exactly,” Pugwash said, beaming smugly.

“And this way, he saves the world
and
gets that two percent if things work out,” Paulie added.

“Ex
act
ly,” Pugwash said, beaming even more.

“And safe passage outta here and a Guild pension for life if everything blows up instead.”

“That was the, uh … other provision,” Pugwash stammered.

I glared at him.

“Oh come on, Nick—it would be over already if I hadn’t gotten us that extra time. Admit it.”

I considered this, then nodded grudgingly. He hadn’t done it with a shred of class or dignity. But if you really wanted to get all hair-splitting about it, my cousin had, in theory, saved the stupid, goddamn, motherfucking, worldwide world. Technically. For a few hours. Maybe.

“Okay, fine,” I said, turning to Paulie. “So let’s get this in gear. I already have the ball rolling with the biggest music company on the planet.” I pulled The Munk’s note from my pocket and held it up to the force-field boundary for him to see. “And I’ll get a lot closer with the rest of the rights-holders over the next twelve hours. But I’ll probably fall a little short. So what do you say we check in ten hours from
now? I’ll make enough progress by then that I’ll be close to clinching the deal. So hopefully you’ll be willing to give me a small extension at that point.” Of course, it would probably take decades of global martial law with me as Maximum Leader to get all of the sign-offs and approvals necessary to fully reverse the debt. But I was just playing for time. And every hour I could scrape up would give us that much more leeway to somehow get an audience with the Guardian Council.

Paulie’s eyes narrowed. “Not a chance. This is startin’ to feel like a goddamn setup. So no way do you get even an extra minute to pull somethin’ on me. I want the Guild’s money in twelve hours. Or the Earth gets it.”