Night of the Living Trekkies (3 page)

“I can help with that,” Jim offered. “I’m kind of an expert.”

“No, seriously. Look at this.”

Sarah pulled back her blue silk blouse to reveal her bare right shoulder. Just below her collarbone sat a purplish bruise about the size of a lemon. Her bra overlapped its edge.

“Itches like crazy,” she said.

“You should see a doctor,” Jim said.

“If I had health insurance, I would. But our company has a three-month probationary period for new hires.” Sarah retrieved her purse from under her desk and stood up. “Can you do me a favor?”

“Of course.”

“Rodriguez is setting up a dinner buffet in the exposition hall. We’re waiting on a big cake shaped like a . . . a . . .”

She retrieved a sticky note from beside her computer.

“A D7-class Klingon battle cruiser. But I can’t get anyone at the bakery to take my call. So, you need to give Rodriguez their phone number, okay?”

Sarah handed him the sticky note, and Jim noticed a wad of tissue wrapped around her right index finger.

“My neighbor’s four-year-old bit me,” she explained.

“You’re serious?” he asked. “Dexter was just telling me he—”

“I couldn’t believe it,” Sarah continued. “Little brat sneaked up on me while I was walking to my car. I thought he was going to chomp it right off.”

She showed him the wound—just some bloody, baby-tooth-sized dents. But as Jim watched, the dents welled up with blood. Sarah wiped them with the crumpled tissue and then threw it in her trash can. A can that was already half full of bloody scraps.

“It’s not the end of the world,” she assured him. “Just find Rodriguez for me, all right?”

Sarah stepped out of her cubicle and walked away. Jim watched her leave.

Then he looked down at the note. It was speckled with bright red flecks of fresh blood.

Little kids bite grown-ups every day, Jim told himself. And a drunk mime nipping a security guard was nothing to get worked up about. It was just a weird coincidence.

Yet his famed “spider sense” was tingling.

Jim had learned to trust his instincts during his first combat tour, when he realized he always seemed to know, maybe half a minute before everyone else, that the crap was going to hit the fan. His sergeant said it reminded him of how dogs can tell when an earthquake is coming.

He earned his reputation early in that first deployment. He was on patrol with his unit, marching down a rutted gash in the ground that the locals generously called a road. Beside it sat an old, rusted-out pickup truck that looked like it had been there since before the Soviets invaded. Jim’s unit had marched past it a dozen times on a dozen different days. The wreck was part of the landscape.

Except this time. As they approached it, Jim sensed something awry. He couldn’t put his finger on exactly what, but he felt it so strongly that he summoned the nerve to mention it to the captain leading the patrol. Not surprisingly, the captain ordered him to elaborate.

“The vegetation around the truck—it’s been disturbed,” Jim said, thinking fast. “I think someone’s been screwing around over there.”

Which, Jim figured,
might
have been true. Perhaps that’s the particular detail his ever-alert subconscious registered. What mattered was that his unit gave the truck a wide berth. And that later the captain notified ordnance disposal, which opened its hood and found two freshly placed 105-millimeter artillery shells linked to a radio-controlled detonator. Whoever was supposed to press the button was long gone.

So, he knew he had a sixth sense about danger. It served him well in combat zones, where he understood the threats. But now he was standing in the middle of a two-star hotel on a sunny August day, surrounded by innocent civilians, while his internal shit-storm detector buzzed for attention. He didn’t have a clue what it wanted.

Maybe I’m just bored
, Jim thought.
Maybe I’m so tired of this bellhop crap that my unconscious is trying to manufacture something for me to worry about.

He held Sarah’s note between his thumb and index finger as he walked the long, long hallway linking the lobby to the Endeavour Room, its main exhibition hall. To his right, restrooms and storage areas lined the wall. To his left were doors leading to smaller meeting and dining areas. Most had easels out front stating that, at some particular time on Saturday afternoon, they’d host events with names like “Cheating Death Via Transporter” or “Klingons and Bynars and Gorn, Oh My!”

Jim stopped just long enough to read a large poster taped to the door of the auditorium. It explained that Saturday night’s keynote address would be given by a Harvard professor named Eli Sandoval, an acclaimed exobiologist and one of the world’s leading authorities on the possibilities of extraterrestrial life. Jim wondered how the GulfCon organizers lured a fanboy with Ivy League credentials all the way down to Houston in the middle of August.

By the time he reached the Endeavour Room’s entrance, across from the GulfCon registration desk, the blood on Sarah’s note had started to dry. It was five fifteen and he was supposed to meet his sister in less than an hour. She and her friends were driving more than a hundred miles to attend the convention and hoped to arrive at six o’clock, or thereabouts.

Jim took out his cell phone and scrolled down the menu to “Rayna.”

His sister’s cell rang four times before she picked up.

“Hey, Jim,” was all he heard before a blast of static overwhelmed the connection.

“Rayna?” he said.

“. . . stupid phone . . .”

“Is everything okay?” Jim asked.

For a moment the static abated.

“We’re good,” Rayna said. “Traffic’s a bear.”

“What’s wrong with your cell?” Jim said.

“. . . phone connections get worse the closer we get to you . . .”

More static.

“I’m not sure this convention is worth all the effort,” Jim said. “You guys might want to detour and hit the beach instead.”

His half-shouted message got through. The reply came in fragments.

“. . . really looking forward . . .”

“. . . biggest all-Trek con in the South . . .”

From the background Jim heard a male voice. It said something about nonrefundable room deposits.

“All right,” Jim shouted again. “I’ll see you soon. But please be careful. And let me know when you’re close by, so I can meet you. What are you driving?”

Jim thought he heard laughter.

“You’ll see,” Rayna said. “And you won’t believe your . . .”

Her final words were swallowed by a howl of interference.

Jim looked at the phone, swore under his breath, then snapped it shut and slipped it into his pants pocket. Only then did he notice that his bellowing had drawn the attention of pretty much everyone at the GulfCon registration table.

“Trouble with your communicator?” asked a short, stout man dressed as a Ferengi.

“Subspace interference,” Jim said to the fifteen or so Trekkies staring at him. “It’s always really bad in this sector.”

A Tellerite and a Romulan nodded knowingly.

Rayna’s twenty years old
, Jim thought.
She’s a grown-up. I’m acting like an overprotective father.

But Jim knew he couldn’t help it. He’d played that role ever since their real father had died in an oil refinery accident. Even now, Jim’s mental picture of his sister was the indelible image of a ten-year-old girl with tears in her eyes, struggling to understand that Dad wasn’t coming home and that from now on she’d have to make do with just a mom and a brother.

Actually, she wasn’t even that lucky. Their mother, a borderline alcoholic before the accident, decided to go all the way afterward. She wasn’t violent or loud. She just wasn’t . . . anything. Every day, Jim would come home from football practice—with Rayna tagging along because after school she didn’t have anything else to do but sit in the bleachers and do her homework. And there Mom would be, parked on the couch, sipping wine and watching Springer.

She died from a heart attack while Jim was in Afghanistan. It was yet another example, he told himself, of how he was never around when people really needed him. His little sister picked the casket, planned the funeral, and even spoke at the sparsely attended memorial service.

Jim was discharged from the army two months later. Everything about his relationship with his sister changed. Rayna became the responsible one while he devolved into a lost, frightened child. She was a college junior, powering toward a psychology degree. She had a life. She had friends—even if some of them
were
science-fiction nerds. She had a future.

Meanwhile, Jim was a glorified bellhop. His only “goal” was never again to put himself in a position where others depended on him. Because he knew he’d fail. Just like he failed Rayna. Just like he failed in Afghanistan.

“Excuse me,” a voice said, interrupting his reverie. “Are you with the hotel?”

Jim snapped out of his funk. Standing before him was a trim, balding, middle-aged man wearing an impeccably tailored
Voyager-
style medical uniform. He bore an uncanny resemblance to the show’s holographic doctor. But Jim instantly recognized him as GulfCon’s keynote speaker, the exobiologist from Harvard University.

“How can I help you, Dr. Sandoval?”

The doctor stiffened. “You know who I am?”

“I just saw a poster for your lecture,” Jim explained. “It’s pretty heroic of you to come all this way just to brief a bunch of Trekkies.”

“Oh, it’s no trouble at all,” Sandoval said, seemingly relieved. “Public outreach is an important part of my job. And I wouldn’t miss GulfCon for the world.”

“You’ve been here before?” Jim was a little surprised. There were certainly bigger Trek conventions than GulfCon, and going to Houston in August could hardly be a draw.

“I come every year,” Sandoval said. “It’s a great place to disseminate . . . news about my work.”

“Any big breakthroughs in exobiology?” Jim asked.

“One could say that,” Sandoval agreed, smiling. “But you’ll have to wait until tomorrow to learn more. For now, if you could point me to the men’s room, I’d be quite grateful.”

Jim pointed the doctor down the hall, then proceeded to the Endeavour Room. He was confronted by what looked like a vast outer-space flea market. The front quarter of the expo hall was given over to vendors. It was lined with rows of eight-feet-wide by twelve-feet-deep stalls separated by fabric partitions. There were roughly a hundred vendors on hand—a typical industry-convention exhibitor floor.

What
wasn’t
typical was the stuff they offered. As he made his way deeper into the convention space, Jim saw booths hawking everything from Star Trek bobblehead figures to Spock and Kirk nutcrackers to Starfleet Academy coffee mugs. There were bottles of Pon Farr Perfume for Women, a USB webcam shaped like the USS
Enterprise—
even a full-size replica of the ship captain’s chair.

Perfect for the nerd who has everything except a life
, Jim thought as he walked past.

A sparse crowd perused the booths, some of which weren’t yet open for business. GulfCon had officially started at noon, but like most conventions it wouldn’t hit its stride until the weekend. The folks who turned out early were the hardest of the hardcore, the most eager of the eager. Jim spotted an old-going-on-elderly man dressed as a Talosian from the first
Star Trek
pilot episode, “The Cage.” Then a stroller-bound toddler decked out like Balok from “The Corbomite Maneuver.”

No matter the outfit, Jim easily identified them all. That is, until he crossed paths with a man wearing a pink jumpsuit and what appeared to be a werewolf mask.

The costume was so absurd that he wondered if its wearer didn’t know GulfCon was a Trek-only affair. This guy looked like a character from a weird Japanese video game.

Yet, the more Jim studied the weird ensemble, the more it tickled his memory.

The werewolf noticed Jim staring at him.

“Go ahead,” he said. “I dare you to guess.”

Suddenly, it clicked.

“You’re a Kzinti from
Star Trek: The Animated Series
.”

“Damn!” the man exclaimed. “You’re the first person to nail it.”

“It’s a great costume, but it isn’t canon,” Jim said.

“That’s totally debatable. If you think the cartoon show isn’t part of the official Star Trek universe, then how do you explain that Kirk’s middle name, Tiberius, was first mentioned in the animated episode, ‘Bern’?”

Jim felt a surprisingly strong urge to respond. Back in the day, he’d gone round and round in various Internet chat rooms about whether the obscure animated series, which ran on NBC from 1973 to 1974—a decade and a half before he was born—was a full-fledged part of the Trek universe. He even knew that the wolflike Kzinti were portrayed in pink uniforms because that particular episode’s director was color-blind and didn’t realize how absurd they looked.

In his younger years, he would have spent hours debating the finer points of Trek continuity with a man dressed as a pink were-wolf. But that was before he’d enlisted, before Afghanistan, before he’d sampled the real world. A real world that had annihilated his passion for Star Trek like so much antimatter.

“That’s a very interesting point,” Jim said curtly to the faux Kzinti. “I hope you enjoy the remainder of your stay.”

He was almost clear of the vendor area when one last booth caught his eye. It was full of lethal-looking edged weapons, all of unfamiliar design. Behind a folding table stood a vision of menace—a giant, scowling linebacker of a man in full Klingon makeup, including a massive cranial crest and braided, reddish-black, shoulder-length hair tumbling down over his dark skin. Every inch of his chiseled, roughly six-foot-eight-inch frame was swathed in impeccably tailored leather and metal armor.

Jim walked up to the booth and examined an exotic-looking, extremely heavy dagger. There was a button on the hilt. When he pressed it, two smaller spring-loaded blades popped out of the base.

“That’s a d’k tahg,” the big Klingon boomed. “The finest workmanship. A warrior such as yourself could slay many a hu’q with it.”