The Night Sheriff, page 19
I straighten up and realize that my body is a symphony of assorted aches. I haven’t had a workout like that in over a decade, maybe more. But enough self-pity. Time is short. I go to fly over to Mr. Shulman’s precious file cabinets and collapse to the ground. I am more seriously wounded than I had thought, and no mistake. Bone Cat gets behind me and pushes as I crawl over to the opened file drawer and begin riffling through the files. Time may be short, and I may be seriously injured, but at least that fight wasn’t a complete waste of time, as I actually acquired useful information. Zoiden … Zoiden … There are a surprising number of files under Z, but here is Mr. Zoiden’s!
It is not very thick. Suddenly the sounds I’ve been anticipating, the thunder of approaching boots and the clatter of people laden with weapons, arise from the main corridor. I envelop the folder within my coat and swoop up towards the nearest vent opening. Ow. The swine sprained my lifting muscles and carrying a material object makes things even more painful. The late McGoon did a thorough job on me, and no mistake.
I’m so busy fretting about my lifting that I almost don’t understand what I’m seeing. There appears to be something moving jerkily within the air vent … I roll to the left just as a cluster of lights blaze on within the conduit. With a snap, I drop and then jink to the right and head for the great rolling garage door. There are plenty of openings sufficient to let me escape, but most of them are small enough that if I am hit by those lights while I am halfway through—
I am not, but it is a near thing, as yet another crew is putting the finishing touches on a light assembly right outside the garage. The fellow in charge screams and throws the switch as I rush past, and half the lights—all of the ones facing the door—come on. The rest of the guards fire their guns at me … smashing a fair number of the lights. Oh, it’s Amateur Night at Zenonland Park, and no mistake.
I hang in the sky to consider my options, and immediately begin to fall. I am too wounded. I must find a sanctuary where I can rest. I land with an undignified thump upon the roof of the World Is Made of Cheese ride and consider my choices. I could wait for this to blow over … while things have never gotten this bad before, there have been times I have considered abandoning my responsibilities. I have one bolt-hole no one would ever find, a natural cistern located deep within the earth, long dry, connected to the surface by a series of fault cracks and what I believe to be prehistoric gopher burrows. It’s where I plan to go if they ever play the “Waltz of the Cave Bears” song.
Sorry, I should explain myself. If you’ve ever been a guest here, you’ve no doubt noticed that your stay is accompanied by an endless parade of musical scores from movies, cartoons, and stage shows playing over the park’s sound systems. Very jolly. What most non-employees don’t know, is that there are songs that are only played in certain situations. If there is ever a crazed gunman in the park (during daylight hours, of course), then the loudspeakers will alert those who need to know by playing the disturbingly jaunty “The Love-sick Jackalope” song.
There are other tunes for other situations, but if you are ever unfortunate enough to hear the “Waltz of the Cave Bears,” then let the nice staffers herd you and yours underground, because the Missiles are on their way. Mr. Bartholomew really did try to think of everything. So that’s always an option. But I could be stuck down there for a very long time.
I could just start killing all the guards determined to kill me. This has possibilities but would have to take place only after the park closes. These religion-besotted fools have already killed one innocent. I honestly believe they would consider themselves heroes if they had to gun down a dozen park visitors just to wing me. It wouldn’t be sustainable, of course, the park would be shut down within the hour, and the Zenon Corporation itself might have to file for Chapter Eleven … This chain of thought actually forces me to sit down. My freedom. It could be as simple as that.
But … what price am I willing to let others pay in order to secure that freedom? Angrily, I dismiss the scenarios half-forming in my head. I protect the visitors of this park. That is who I am. But that said, I really see no problem with me taking out my frustrations on religious zealots determined to kill me, as long as I wait until after the park closes. It might take longer, but I’m pretty sure that if they haul enough bodies out of here, word will get out to the media (I can make sure of that), and there will be repercussions. This is certainly the more dangerous route, as the mysterious Herr Zoiden has demonstrated a distressing competence for utilizing both supernatural and advanced technological weapons against me. There is also the grim fact that my opponent’s forces can lose multiple times, while I cannot afford to lose even once. I will have to step up my own game.
I require advice and information. Luckily, I have access to clever fellows who possess both, and who owe me several rather large favors. The gremlins.
I stand up and promptly fall over, scattering files about me. I really am in a bad way. I need to rest and recuperate. I watch Bone Cat gather the files up. At least I’ll have some bedside reading. As the moon dips towards the horizon, I stagger towards my chosen resting place. As I lie myself down, I page through my hard-won dossier.
Hans Zoiden. Born in Düsseldorf, studied at several different universities. Interesting … earned an MBA and specialized in entertainment management. Joined the Zenon Corporation at our Paris branch. Managed the park there and did well enough that he was promoted. Promoted several times. Sometimes twice within the same year. Youngest ever member of the Board of Directors, and, according to this, a serious contender for the CEO position … and I suddenly realize that what I am holding in my hands is a fake. A very good fake, and one that would easily stand up to casual scrutiny, but again Mr. Mortimer’s tutelage comes to my aid. Someone has constructed a beautiful Horatio Algeresque fiction of a life filled with hard work and a love of children and entertainment so exemplary that his taking over the Zenon Corporation seems like the logical culmination of their life story.
But I can see the cracks. The inner inconsistencies. It is very well done, but I do not believe a word of it.
I feel a sudden chill as I wonder whether Mr. Shulman’s sudden transfer actually happened, or whether he made the mistake of voicing suspicions where he shouldn’t have. If he is, in fact, in Tokyo, I will send him a message to watch his back. If he hasn’t noticed something wrong, he soon will, and I am convinced that Herr Zoiden will kill him for simply asking the wrong questions. I toss the file aside. While I have learned nothing factual, I have learned yet another important thing about Herr Zoiden tonight. I can trust nothing about him.
As I begin to doze, I ponder this business about facing an assassin. Despite what I told the McGoon, there is something about it that is bothering me. A bit of lore is stuck in my brain—just out of reach—like an obstinate seed stuck in one’s teeth. It will surface in its own time. All I am sure of now is that it is important. But I cannot let it distract me. I have to be on my guard now. Tomorrow I will revisit The Happiness Machine.
Chapter Eight
The Happiness Machine was originally commissioned by a bottler of soft drinks for the 1964 world’s fair in New York City. It appeared to be a jolly little boat ride that promoted the idea of world peace and human inclusiveness through puppetry and song. In actuality, it was a diabolical machine designed to broadcast a newly discovered form of ætheric wave that, in laboratory tests, gave everyone within a five-mile radius an uncontrollable urge to consume vast quantities of soft drinks.
To the disappointment of the sponsors, however, once it was activated in the field, it did no such thing. It simply made everybody in the world slightly happier. Not everyone believed it at first, and they ran numerous experiments, but by the time the fair closed, there was no questioning the results. When the machine was running, everybody in the world felt happier.
The soft drink company considered it a tremendous failure, and was planning on scrapping it, when the United States government quietly stepped in and bought it from them. You might think this an unusual purchase. But you must remember that the world had just teetered on the brink of thermonuclear war (the Cuban Missile Crisis), and seriously clever people became rather determined to keep anything like that from happening again. Towards that end they were pursuing any number of different strategies. Some admittedly more outré and experimental than others.
The next problem was where to put it. This was solved when someone remembered Mr. Bartholomew. He had worked with the government during the last war, making propaganda cartoons, and was well regarded. He agreed to have it installed in Zenonland and received a very nice tax break for doing so. Mr. Bartholomew knew how to drive a bargain, and the fact that he was helping to prevent nuclear war was a bonus. Thus, it can now be mathematically proven that Zenonland is, in fact, “the Jolliest Place on Earth.”
In case you haven’t already guessed, I am, of course, referring to what most people know as the Itty-Bitty Planet ride. The one that was blown up. I have to admit that before I discerned that there was actually a coordinated effort to kill me, I had wondered if our suicide bomber had belonged to some sort of doomsday cult that was doing its bit to bring on Armageddon. I abandoned this notion fairly early on, because if someone was sufficiently in the know to be aware of the Itty-Bitty Planet ride’s true nature, then it would follow that they would also be aware that Mr. Bartholomew was a great believer in redundancy, which is why there are copies of the Happiness Machine in every Zenonland park on the planet, all reinforcing each other. None of these other machines have been attacked to date, and so I must conclude that it’s all about me. That’s good, I guess.
Anyway, a machine like that takes a great deal of maintenance. When the park was in its decline in the late seventies, the clandestine maintenance crews from the US military stopped coming. I couldn’t believe it, at first. One would think that keeping this machine running would be something the American government would do even if the park itself was shuttered. The only plausible explanation we could come up with was that after that unfortunate business in French Indochina, the United States military was in such disgrace that it lost control of its secret budget.
According to Mr. Mortimer, every military has its secret budget, financing hidden bases or questionable weaponry research. After the second world war ended, but before conflicting ideologies tore our happy little group apart, Comrade Polina, Mr. Mortimer, and I spent a very productive couple of months going down a list of secret Nazi military projects that had been found in a hidden safe belonging to former Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring, who, no matter what else one may say about him, did seem to have a genuine talent for recruiting unpleasant creatures, both human and not. He was also a stickler for paperwork, which we appreciated quite a bit.
But some Senator somewhere no doubt got his hands on some of America’s secret expenditures and realized he could demonstrably save the taxpayers some money by axing a vaguely defined maintenance program. It is a sad fact that politicians hate to pay for maintenance on anything. The idea of throwing perfectly good money at something that is still working seems idiotic. If it falls apart in the future, it will be somebody else’s problem. Once you understand this, most of the decisions made by government make a lot more sense.
So the maintenance teams were reassigned, a few thousand dollars were spent on something bright and shiny within said Senator’s home state, and the Happiness Machine started to go out of alignment.
If it had been almost any other tale of bureaucratic ineptitude, it might not have been so bad. As I mentioned, there was already another Zenonland down in Florida, with its own Happiness Machine grinding away. But we are talking about a device that was designed to alter people’s mental processes. Just because it stopped working correctly didn’t mean that it stopped being effective.
Luckily, in retrospect, when things started to go wrong, they did so quickly. In the autumn of 1980, something went off the rails in the heart of the machine, and for almost three days everyone who came within a hundred miles of it began to have terrible dreams. I had no idea the Happiness Machine was causing it at the time. To make things even more difficult, Bone Cat began to go mad, and most of my time was spent preventing him from attacking people, which gets tiresome, let me tell you.
I truly believe that things would have gotten very bad indeed if the local gremlins had not arrived. Up until this point, these particular gremlins had been a small, rather down-on-its-luck group of elders living at the local airport. They showed up at the park in great distress, claiming that they had heard the Happiness Machine screaming and were determined to get it to stop. In retrospect it was obvious that I wasn’t thinking all too clearly myself, as I was equally determined to keep them out of the park. I’m not sure why, but at the time, I knew it was very important I did so.
But they persisted, managed to get past me, and repaired the Happiness Machine. I came to my senses, the nightmares ended, Bone Cat stopped trying to eat people, and we once again narrowly averted nuclear war.
(I only found out about that last one a few years later. Apparently one of the Joint Chiefs of Staff located in California had such bad dreams that he become convinced that the exploding of several hundred nuclear bombs would, and I quote, “scare off the moon.” He had taken over a local launch facility and been industriously circumventing the fail-safes when he snapped back to sanity. This sort of thing happens more often than you’d think, and I, for one, am just as glad I don’t know about it.)
And that was how the now world-famous (amongst certain, select circles) Zenon Clan of gremlins became established here at the park. We have a rather robust population these days. The feat that cemented their place here was when they constructed their own brewing engine. A proper gremlin brewing engine is hard to hide, and many gremlin communities in the New World are forced to make do with inferior ale because they don’t have a place to hide one, or because of EPA inspectors. Our gremlins didn’t even try.
Do you remember the great steampunk tower that vibrates so majestically at the entrance to Futureopolis? The one that Celeste used as an example of voodoo science? Well, several decades ago, the gremlins appropriated it. They redesigned it and rebuilt it from top to bottom from the inside out and these days it delights our guests by roaring and spinning and venting great gouts of colored steam into the California sky. It delights the gremlins by producing prodigious quantities of a very foul artisanal beer that is in demand around the world. (I suspect it is because they put old beignets into the mash.) Between the vintage rides and the beer, the Zenon Clan enjoys keeping the place running, and we’ve become a prime gremlin retirement destination. Over the years we have been of much use to each other. I have been able to secure them raw materials through my contacts within the Zenon Corporation, and they have supplied me with gadgets and valuable assistance over the years. I would not say we are friends, as such, gremlins don’t see people that way, but we work well together, which is a trait that they value very highly.
Chapter Nine
I find myself standing within an ancient Mesoamerican temple. Huge stone blocks are cracked and warped by the roots of trees and vines that poke through. I look upward and see the night sky, but a sky that no one on earth has seen for hundreds of years. The stars shine forth in their unobscured glory, and I allow myself to enjoy the sight, until I realize that the constellations I see are unfamiliar to me. Then I try to remember exactly how I got here. I try to concentrate and realize that I cannot close my eyes—or rather, I can close my eyes, but it does not appear to change the view. Around me torches begin to burst into flame, and I realize that I am trapped within the dream of a god.
At the far end of the temple stands an ancient altar. No crumbled remnant this. It is straight and clean, and the inlaid precious metals and gems have been lovingly polished. Upon it is a familiar bowl carved from obsidian. As I walk towards it, I see blood begin to well up within the bowl, ooze over the lip, and drip onto the altar. Where it strikes, there is a hiss and great gouts of steam. More and more blood flows from the bowl, and the steam explodes outwards and upwards, filling the air above the altar. As it reaches the ruined ceiling, there is a low rumble, and I see a flicker of what can only be lightning causing the cloud of steam to briefly glow from within. The thunder grows in intensity. I can actually see forks of lightning now. They stab outwards from the cloud, growing in size and strength until, finally, there is a great bolt that crackles downwards, blowing the obsidian bowl apart to the accompaniment of a boom of thunder that rattles the ancient walls.
When my vision clears, I see a huge white serpent equipped with a magnificent pair of turquoise wings and glowing blue eyes staring down upon me. I clap enthusiastically. The serpent smiles in delight, and a blue tongue flicks forth. “Pretty Impressive, Eh, Amigo?”
“It truly was,” I say honestly. “Thank you, O Xochemilchic, for allowing me to witness your glory.”
“Glad You Liked It. It’s Exhausting.”
As I continue to walk towards him, everything begins to shift. The room begins to dwindle in size, the stars of the southern hemisphere fade away, as does the acoustical echo that one only truly gets inside a genuine stone building, that simply cannot be duplicated, even by the master craftsmen and masons employed by the Zenon Corporation, and within ten feet, I am recognizably within nothing more than the main throne room of the Lost Temple ride. I look up and pause. Xochemilchic is unchanged. I sigh. “I’m still inside some sort of dream or something, aren’t I?”
