Authors: Mark Teppo
Rudolph! (6 page)
"The old Clock," he said.
Blitzen took a step back. "The Nuclear Clock? I thought that had been dismantled after the accident."
Rudolph shook his head. "You think anyone knew how?"
Blitzen moved even farther away. "What are you doing with that?"
"Insurance policy. Donner shot off both his missiles," he said to Blitzen. "We're out of heavy armament. They're going to cut us off at the exit again. They'll be waiting. We're going to need an edge." Rudolph looked down at the bag, the red light shining against his nose. "Get the others. I'll lead."
"Don't worry. I'll definitely be behind you," Blitzen said. He nodded toward me. "Bernie, get this gun rack off me. I'll be your taxi."
"No argument there," I said. The Nuclear Clock had burned a whole team once before. I really didn't want to be anywhere close by when Rudolph decided to turn it on again.
X
B
litzen explained the angelic hierarchy to me as we dashed across
the first lattice of purgatory. The little ones were cherubs, evidently the messengers and scouts of the order. The larger ones with the long streamers and the unformed faces were seraphim, the first order of angelic creatures that were based on the shape of man, or rather, the template which God used when he formed mankind. Next on the list were the thrones, those creatures who were used to tear open mountains and hold back the seas.
After that would be dominations, was Blitzen's theory. And he was right.
And they were bullet proof.
Donner's Hellfire solution had cleaned out the top room of the second lattice, leaving long gouges in the walls and floor. The rainbow-colored streaks on the ceiling were the only remnants of what must have been the corporeal shells of the angelic host that had been waiting for us. Evidently a pair of AGM-114F Hellfire missiles with anti-ship HE-blast warheads was all the emphasis one needed to make your point in purgatory.
After that, the angels kept their distance, massing in large blocks on either side of our path. The dominations were tall and thin, and they shined like polished ceramic. The first time we encountered a foursome of them, Comet diverted from the group and let loose with both barrels. The room was filled with the spattering sound of ricocheting rounds as the tall angels stood firm and reflected all the metal being slung their way. They didn't come any closer, and Comet, not nearly as bulletproof, opted to not waste any more rounds. They made their point: beyond the dominations was out-of-bounds.
We were being herded towards the first chamber where the host would be waiting for us again. And I knew who they would be: the greeters.
All three were there, taller and more beautiful than they had been in the café, and their broad white wings stretched nearly to the ceiling of the chamber. Their robes sparkled with light as if they had been spun from strands of diamonds, and their eyes were filled with the visible spectrum. They had flaming swords and their expressions were resolute.
Michael—Mike—held up his hand as the team dashed into the room. The reindeer slid and scampered to a halt. "You may not leave," he said. "No one leaves purgatory."
"We're on a tight schedule," Rudolph said, and he ducked his head toward the flap of his satchel, catching the fabric in his teeth and tearing the bag open. A red radiance spilled out, followed by a narrow metal container. The cylinder had three bands of fading orange paint about its column, and the top was surmounted by a pair of large switches. The device hit the ground with a clang, and Rudolph kicked at the switches. "This is an express run. No stops, no services."
The Clock engaged, and everything froze for an instant. The air was thick and heavy. The red light spilling from the base of the cylinder took on a tactile weight, an ooze that leaked like blood across the floor. The flames of the angels' swords slowed to frozen streams of orange and yellow light.
"I don't know how long it'll run," Rudolph said, his voice slipping and slurring. "But I'm not sticking around to find out." He made a dash for the exit, past the trio of angels.
We were all slowed by the Nuclear Clock's field—its bubble outside of Time was only partially effective here. We weren't completely untethered from Time, but we were certainly operating at an angle to it, an angle much more acute than the angels'. Their movements were even slower than ours.
They could clearly still think just as quickly as we could because their movements shifted from completely clumsy to marginally accurate as they tried to stop us. A flaming sword, lined with slow fire, cleanly missed Comet's head, but Dasher had to dodge the angel's backswing. Santa caught an angelic blade on his pistol, and the weapon slowly spun out of his grip. Donner ducked the angel's arm and drove a heavy shoulder upward, knocking him aside. The angel fell back in slow motion, his wings curling around his body like a flower closing at night.
Michael wasn't at the top of the hierarchy because of his consummate skill at greeting folk at the door. He corrected quickly to the Time shift, and his aim became true. His hand came down on David Anderson as Vixen ran past, and the man had only a moment to open his mouth in alarm before he was pulled off the reindeer. Vixen felt the man's weight shift across his back, and he tried to turn around, but the angel's swift sword stroke brought him up short.
The other reindeer couldn't fire their weapons for fear of hitting David Anderson and they faltered, unsure how to proceed. David Anderson was trying to wriggle free of the angel's grasp. Santa was shouting something from the hallway back to the café. Vixen pranced about just beyond Michael's reach.
Rudolph came back at a full gallop, his hooves barely touching the ground. He leaped, clearing Michael's raised sword, his head nearly smacking into the ceiling. As he sailed over the angel's head, he kicked back with his hooves, striking Michael hard between the wings. He landed on the far side of the trio of angels. "Go!" he shouted. "There isn't any time. Go!" His face was flush in the light from the bleeding Nuclear Clock.
Vixen grabbed David Anderson while Comet and Dasher dropped crosshairs on Michael and opened up. Archangels were equally bulletproof, but the force of the rounds was enough to keep him off balance. Long enough for the rest of us to get into the hallway that led to the white door and the café.
The red glow faded as we ran, and the reindeer stumbled out of the Clock's field, and the ambient sounds scaled upward. Santa slid off Donner as we reached the end of the hallway, and the muscular reindeer lowered his head and plowed through the handleless door. The team followed close on his hooves, leaping through the hole he had made. We were calling Michael's bluff.
It was chaos in the café: the patrons all scrambling for cover as Cupid emptied the rest of one of his guns at the big windows, clearing an easy egress for all of us. The reindeer bounced off chairs and tables, their hooves knocking against the wood and recklessly knocking aside cups and saucers.
I looked back as Blitzen jumped through the window. Comet and Dasher were right behind Santa. Smoke was billowing out of the ruined door, white and pink. The red light from the Clock was getting brighter. Santa dove through the window, tucking and rolling like a twelve-year-old Olympic gymnast as the back of the café exploded into a fountain of light.
"Move! Move! Move!" Santa shouted as he came to his feet, the security dongle from the sled in his hand. He auto-started the vehicle and shoved the staring Dasher towards the sled. "Don't look back, you idiots. Don't you read the stories?"
I hadn't, or at least, I didn't remember which stories Santa was referring to. I kept looking over my shoulder.
The fountain of light crackled and sparked as it ate the restaurant. As I watched, the computer station vanished, followed soon after by the bakery counter. The coruscating light snarled as it devoured everything it touched, like the sound of glass being ground beneath a steam roller, though magnified a few hundred times. The patrons of the café just stared at the light in wonderment as it rolled over them, dissolving them into its incandescent arc.
Santa shoved David Anderson up the steps of the sled, hollering at me at the same time. He didn't have to bother; I was right behind him. He shoved the other man into the navigator's seat on his way to the pilot's chair, and I hit the buttons to close the sled while grabbing the nearest protrusion to try to anchor myself. Santa yanked back on the stick, the powerful engines of the sled howling in protest. The sled tilted up as the roaring ball of light came after us, thrashing and glittering.
I felt the back end of the sled lurch suddenly, and then we punched through the film surrounding purgatory. The sky changed, and we were over the South Pole again, the white clouds beneath us, the black ceiling of night overhead. Just astern of the rapidly moving sled was a wound in the sky, a cascading stream of argent color. "Atmospheric phenomena," Santa said to David Anderson who was still staring at the play of light behind the craft. Santa punched the coordinates for Troutdale into the navigation system and throttled the engines fully up. "It's just a light show."
I couldn't look at it any more. I kept thinking about Rudolph.
XI
I
t snowed in Troutdale last night: three inches of fluffy stuff
covering the trees with a coating that looked like powdered sugar on French toast. The orange and red light from the burning wreck of the Mark V sled pushed back the shadows fronting the houses along the road. Santa was halfway up the walk to the house, cradling his right arm against his chest. I had torn a long strip from Mr. Anderson's robe before shoving the befuddled man towards the front door of his house.
Santa pushed me aside as David Anderson stood on his own porch and rang the bell. There was already a light on upstairs. Santa's block-long crash landing had made quite the Christmas night racket.
We had made it to the 45th parallel before the engines flamed out. The reindeer bailed out, and Santa had managed to turn the last sixty miles into a long power glide. The sled had only bounced twice on the road before it was abruptly stopped by the pick-up truck. There was enough electrical equipment in the nose of the sled that it hadn't taken long for a stray spark to find the truck's punctured gas tank.
The porch light came on, and the door cracked open. David said something, and the door swung wide in response. A small girl, her red hair askew and her pajamas twisted, stood on the step. She was still half-asleep, but as Mr. Anderson bent down and swept her up in his arms, she came fully awake, shrieking with delight.
Santa smiled. There were tears in his beard, and I pressed the strip of white cloth against my face, forgetting that I had meant to offer it to Santa as a makeshift sling. The smoke from the fire was getting in my eyes.
Lights were coming on in the other houses as people crawled out of bed to see who was making all the clatter. I lowered the cloth and looked at the snow-covered street. The reindeer gathered around the burning wreckage, looking toward the house. Santa—streaked with soot and camouflage, his holster empty, his hair wild about his bare head—slumped to his knees, completely enraptured by the reunion on the front porch.
I heard sirens in the distance. "Uh, Santa," I said. "We need to go. We're kind of making a scene."
He sighed and winced as his arm moved. "It's Christmas, Bernie. Don't rush the miracle."
I
T
he staff of the Le Grand Courlan Spa Resort on Tobago rake the
beach before sunrise, and if you're the first guest out on the sand, it's like you're the only one in the whole world. You can slather on the sunscreen, lay out your towel, and get nice and comfortable before anyone else can shatter the illusion of absolutely perfect isolation and anonymity. I had been at the resort for two weeks, and this was my third day of snoozing the morning away on the bench. I had . . . well, I had many more days of this bliss ahead of me. And the best part about Tobago? It's near the equator. The weather never changes, even when the leaves change in the Northern Hemisphere and stores start putting up their—
"Santa wants to see you."
The voice wasn't from the hotel staff. None of them knew my background. I had come to the hotel during the flurry of guests showing up for the Heritage Festival, and I stayed when they all left. I was just an anonymous little person who was content to sit in the sun and drink caipirinhas all day. I tipped well; they left me alone. It was working out pretty well.
I tilted my head back and cracked open an eye. The large shape blocking the sun was four-legged, but I didn't see any footprints on the beach other than mine. It was as if the reindeer had plummeted straight down from heaven.
Which was more than a little true.
"Go away," I said, making a languid shooing motion that I had picked up from watching the European women by the pool. "I've retired, Rudolph."
"Is that what you're calling it?" Rudolph snorted as he ducked his head toward my glass. He tried to get at my drink but the mouth of the glass was somewhat narrow and his tongue was rather broad. "I heard the NPC has erased you from the boards."
"Semantics," I quibbled, frowning at the sight of all that reindeer tongue on the rim of my glass.
Rudolph bit off a chunk of the top and chewed the glass noisily.
We weren't sure what had happened in purgatory after Rudolph stayed behind to hold back the Heavenly Host while we made our escape. The week between Zero Hour and New Year's Day had been a blur: I was either numb from the endless interviews with Internal Affairs, or I was sitting alone in my room, numb from the grief of having lost Rudolph. I hadn't even liked him all that much, but his absence was a deep, dark hole in my soul.
And then, on New Year's Day, there he was, in the Parkwith the rest of the reindeer, as if nothing had happened. Sure, there were some burns on his hide, and a few of the points on his rack had been snapped off, but unless you had spent a lot of time with him recently, you probably wouldn't have noticed. And with the NPC in total Cover Our Collective Asses mode,
no one
noticed.
Rudolph bit off another section of my glass, and his tongue snaked down into the remaining liquid, questing for the wedge of lime at the bottom. "I wasn't going to finish that anyway," I said with a sigh.
He was different, though. Still irradiated. Still irritable. But there was something about him that was, for lack of a better word, purified. Like bits of him had been burned away during re-entry. Plus he appeared to have the stomach and appetite of a super goat.
"Santa's sick, Bernie," Rudolph said, garbling the words around a mouthful of glass. "Real sick."
I still dreamed of the snow, but it was only a dim recollection of the frozen miles between the North Pole and the smoke-stained edges of civilization. I was an elf without a home. The NPC had, in fact, stripped me of my union card, and I had been informed that I was no longer welcome past the 60th parallel. They took the cost of a one-way bus ticket out of my last paycheck, and I had made the journey south like any other land animal.
Whatever. I was done with Christmas anyway.
Yet, here was Rudolph, dropping out of the sky like a lost satellite and ruining my vacation. What did I care about Santa being sick? Was he dying? Had he sent Rudolph to fetch me so that he could impart some final secret from his deathbed?
"I don't care," I said, though the gnawing burn in my stomach said otherwise. And it wasn't because I had had too many strips of bacon with my brandied crepes and peaches during breakfast. Sure, I had lost my union card and I couldn't work up north anymore, but it wasn't that. I had made someone a promise once.
At the Academy's graduation ceremony, Santa had personally given each one of us our pin. And I could recall that day clearly. He had been on his knees, working his way down the line of graduates. He put the pins on each of us, shook our hands, and looked us in the eyes when he said how proud he was to have us as Little Helpers. Yeah, I was young and eager and full of enthusiasm about being part of the team that made Christmas happen, and the whole ceremony was a bucket full of popcorn schmaltz, but I really felt like he meant what he said. To each and every one of us. And I had made a promise that afternoon in front of all my peers and my mom. I made a promise as I shook Santa's hand that I would never—never—let him down.
I felt the subharmonic ping in the base of my skull as we passed the outer markers at the 85th parallel, and Rudolph began his descent through the perpetual layer of clouds that wreathed the high latitudes. I was strapped to his back like a piece of cold pork, though I felt little of the outside temperature as I was wrapped up in a thermal radiation suit that was only a dozen sizes too big. After a few minutes of gliding, we broke through the clouds at the top of the world. Way off to the left, I could make out the tiny lights of some jumbo airliner on the polar route between America and Europe. We were only a few minutes from where Peary once thought he had reached the North Pole. I leaned forward, peering ahead for the telltale outlines of the Residence and the rest of the North Pole against the packed ice cap.
What I hadn't expected was a low-slung star hanging over the Residence. It couldn't be more than a hundred meters up, floating in place like some high-flying kite suspended perfectly overhead. As Rudolph flew closer, I could see that was some sort of glowing figure—like something that wouldn't have been out of place at the Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade.
Except this one had wings and a flowing white robe.
"Our own Star of Bethlehem," Rudolph quipped as he flashed over the southernmost fence of the Park and buzzed the floating figure. The glowing radiance was coming from the white halo parked over its skull like a ring of lucent fire. The smile painted on the helium-filled face was lopsided, which made it resemble something made by a team of asylum inmates rather than a cadre of dedicated kindergarteners.
The Residence was an eight-story knockoff of Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater, though the interior looked as if it had been designed by Antoni Gaudí. While it was the primary residence of Santa and Mrs. C, it was also the central hub of the entire North Pole operation. There is a wing of guest rooms for visiting dignitaries, a conference hall/3D IMAX theater, an indoor swimming pool, tennis court, and four bowling lanes down in the basement. Radiating out from the Residence were the endless warrens of the entire production complex of the NPC. There wasn't much to see aboveground, but trust me when I tell you that the entire polar cap was riddled with tunnels. The Residence, however, was the only building architecturally designed for people over five feet tall.
Rudolph came around the floating balloon angel once more as he floated down to the balcony jutting out from the third floor of the Residence. He landed gently, and it felt like falling into a pile of fluffy snow. For a large reindeer, he moved with astonishing agility. He stepped lightly through the recent snowfall, and the security system of the Residence, reading his rather unique heat signature, opened a reindeer-sized door.
I fumbled with the zippers on the thermal suit as the warm blast of the climate-controlled environment melted the layer of ice on the suit. Inside, the Residence was dark, lit only by the reflected light coming in through the windows from the miles of snowpack surrounding the Residence as well as the dim glow from the angel's halo. The inside air was still, and I felt like we were secretly entering a hidden chamber in one of the pyramids at Giza.
Rudolph headed for the second floor. I had half-hoped that Rudolph's words had been a scam—a shameless attempt to retrieve me for other reasons—but as we came off the stairs, that hopedrained away. We were heading for the infirmary, and the door at the end of the hall was partially open. Rudolph paused before the door, illuminated in the weak antiseptic light coming from the room beyond, and I felt his body tense beneath me.
I was suffering from a similar shortness of breath.
I thought of Schrödinger's experiment with the cat. The one where he posited that any observer couldn't know whether the cat was dead or alive until someone looked inside the box. What lay beyond the door in front of us was in that same quantum state—neither alive nor dead—until we entered the room. As soon as we peeked, the state solidified, and, well, in Schrödinger's case, the cat died.
Rudolph pushed his head against the door, and with a heavy step, we entered the infirmary. The walls and floors were ethereally white, and the bank of machinery next to the narrow bed was silent, the lines crossing the scopes flat and unmoving. Mrs. C sat on the edge of the bed, and she was as pale and devoid of color as the walls.
She raised her head as Rudolph came up to the bed, and her eyes were frozen chips of bent glass. "You just missed him," she said. "He might have been out there in the hall . . ."
I slid off Rudolph's back and approached the bed. Santa's skin was the color of fireplace ash, and his mouth hung open as if the muscles of his jaw had been severed. He had lost a lot of hair and most of his beard. His right hand stuck out from under the blanket, and it looked like nothing more than the bent wire frame of a toy that hadn't been run through the papier-mâché machine yet.
Mrs. C touched my head. "He asked about you," she said quietly. "He wanted to know if Rudolph was bringing you home."
I didn't argue the use of the word. This wasn't the time. "Yeah," I replied. I leaned forward, unwilling to come any closer. "Rudolph brought me back. You hear? It's me. It's Bernie. I've come back."
There was no response, and I felt a lump in my throat that I couldn't swallow away. I gulped air as if I was drowning. "How?" I finally asked.
"It started right after Christmas," Mrs. C said. "The letters started coming. More than a hundred thousand before Valentine's Day."
"What letters?" I had been on administrative leave by that point. IA was done talking to me, though the inevitable farce of a summary meeting hadn't happened yet. We all knew the NPC was going to yank my card—it was just a matter of when—and all my friends had long stopped pretending to know me.
"Christmas wishes. They started writing early this year. In the US, they wrote letters to Santa before they filed their income taxes."
Rudolph's voice was cold, like the bitter taste of a chain link fence on a winter morning. "One wasn't enough for them. They begged. They pleaded. They demanded that Santa bring each of them a Christmas miracle. Like he was some circus pony that would perform a trick on cue."
"He began to regret last Season," Mrs. C continued. "He began to doubt that he had made the right choice in bringing Mr. Anderson back." She stopped, and stared down at her hands. "And then—" she said softly, "—then the angel showed up."
"What angel?"
"The one on the rooftop."
I remembered the helium-filled figure floating over the village. "The balloon?"
Mrs. C shook her head. "No. That's just the reminder. The real angel is on the rooftop. The day after he appeared, Santa didn't get out of bed. At first, he just said it was a late summer cold, but it didn't pass. A week later, we moved him in here and started an IV-drip to keep him hydrated. He said he felt like an empty jack-in-the-box, like you could wind him up and he would pop open, but that there wasn't anything inside." Her voice dropped to a whisper. "Nobody wants an empty jack-in-the-box."
"What about the others? What about the rest of the staff? I thought the medical staff were all graduates from the best schools in the Northern Hemisphere."
"They're gone," Rudolph snapped. "They've all left."
"What?" Questions were beginning to collide in my head. "Why?"
"Holy Quarantine, Bernie. The North Pole has been shut down."
I sat down heavily on the edge of the bed. "Christmas has been canceled," I murmured, looking at Santa's skeletal visage. "So, there's nothing between Thanksgiving and New Year's now. Just a lot of cold days and cold nights."
"And they're going to get colder," Mrs. C said softly.
"This is how the next Ice Age starts," Rudolph explained. "This is how it begins: despair and the death of the holiday season. The nights are long, Bernie. They are very long. And if you can't push it back with extended shopping hours, then it will come into your house, into your heart. We can't let it end this way, Bernie. We can't."
My heart was already cold. "It's already started, Rudolph. It's too late. You—" I wanted to say that he came too late, but what would it have mattered if he had come and found me a month ago? "We can't—" I stopped. There was no point. This was Divine retribution for what we had done.
