Authors: Jamie Quaid
Ferguson?
He was worried about the
bullfrog
? I glanced at the smashed blinds covering the shattered window, but Paddy hadn’t even looked in that direction. Maybe I’d better not disturb his confused mental state just yet.
“Why was Ferguson trying to kill you?” I asked, trying to determine how much he actually understood.
“He turned on the magic machine again. I had to stop him.” He studied Andre with puzzlement and listened to the silence. “Did Andre stop him?”
“He stopped the machine, I guess.”
Paddy looked pretty pale and sweaty, so I didn’t see any sense in explaining too much, especially if he hadn’t seen Ferguson morph into a bullfrog.
“I want Bill and the others in a proper hospital,” I continued, mournfully stroking Andre’s glossy hair. I was all out of rage. I just felt hollow inside. Andre didn’t stir.
Paddy slumped silently into a chair. I was afraid he’d gone out on me too.
In response to my frantic call, Cora arrived with Frank and Leo in record time. I hugged Cora in relief, and she tucked her snakes back to their own dimension. We all stared solemnly at Andre’s sprawled form.
He seemed even bigger on the floor than he did standing up. I’d seen him in action. He was all solid muscle, and a whiff of gas had taken him out. My pulse pounded anxiously, but it would be uncool of me to reveal my fear for him.
While Frank checked Paddy’s bruised head, our perceptive cop wrinkled his brow. “What’s with the frog?” He pointed under the desk.
I accepted the distraction and glanced around. The stupid amphibian was probably poisoning himself on pink particles. Maybe he thought he was still a six-foot thug with a sweet tooth. Heck if I knew.
“Not important,” I said, going into impartial lawyer mode. “We have to remove Paddy and Andre and the zombies before anyone discovers they have a mad scientist impaled on the fence.”
Everyone raised their eyebrows in shock except Paddy, who was rocking back and forth like a dementee. Leo took the lead and strode across to the smashed blinds.
I shivered as he examined the broken window frame and wished this had all been a nightmare I could wake from.
“We won’t find Andre’s bullets in the guy down there, will we?” Studly Do-Right asked, reasonably enough.
If they wanted to check frogs, they’d find a bullet there. I didn’t tell Leo that. I’d added Andre’s gun to my bag before the troops arrived. “No, I gassed him,” I confessed, “and he went berserk and leaped out.”
No mentioning damning the bastard to hell. Leo
wouldn’t have believed that anyway. If we got out of this without a life term in prison, Leo was our Zone cop like I was the Zone lawyer. A regular clan, we were. Right now, my teeth were chattering in sheer terror. I didn’t much like killing people, and I didn’t want to lose Andre.
“That was some leap,” was all Leo said, testing the splintered frame. “Frank, you and Cora better check on Bill and the other patients. I’ll find something to carry Andre on. At this rate, we probably ought to keep a supply of stretchers on hand for Tina’s victims.”
I hugged my elbows and glared. Cora snorted. And Frank did as he was told. Still not looking good, Paddy lumbered out of his chair to lead the way. No one tried to stop him. I hoped he had the authority to order the scientists to back off when they reached Bill.
Once they were all gone, I kneeled beside Andre and gently brushed the hair off his forehead. He was cool to the touch and didn’t stir so much as an eyelid to acknowledge my presence, which left me feeling empty.
He was a handsome man when he wasn’t leering or being snarky. I’d just sent Satan a soul. Saturn or Satan or Someone owed me for that. I’d already asked the Great Whatever to return my friends from comas, but rather than rely on the fickle finger of fate, I was hoping Paddy had more magic formulas. We needed Andre too much to lose him.
Except the troll had said they didn’t have a solution yet.
“What the devil is that racket?” was the only other question Leo asked when he returned with a gurney just as the bullfrog roared his protests through the vents.
“Demon,” I joked. “You want to see Acme’s demon-transport system? It’s fiendish in its simplicity.” Although I supposed I’d need a definition of
demon
to know if a bullfrog qualified, but Leo wasn’t buying my attempt at humor.
Leo glared and heaved Andre onto the wheeled table.
I had no way of knowing if the boiler machine did anything more than thunder and smoke. I didn’t know how to blow it up without blowing up Acme. I had to hope Paddy would take care of it now that the villains were gone.
Mostly, I was worried that we weren’t dealing with normal chemicals. Given the amount of damage done, the new
magic
element the stupid scientists were testing could have come straight from hell. Did greedy, arrogant men never consider long-term consequences when they had dollar signs in their eyes?
Or had Ferguson and Bergdorff really been demons and not just corrupt men?
My wicked imagination conjured gates to hell in Acme’s basement, but I was reeling from exhaustion and despair and not thinking straight. How did one go about scientifically studying the underworld? If we proved it existed, could I write laws against demons?
I was thinking hard about resigning my Saturn duties. I was pretty certain it wasn’t possible, but watching
Andre lying lifeless on that cart, I considered it anyway.
How had the damned troll gotten that canister?
Unless there was more than one, Paddy was the only answer. Paddy must have retrieved the canister from Tim and not told us. We still didn’t know if Paddy was sane. Of course, at this point, I needed a definition of
sanity
. I needed a damned library of abnormal knowledge.
I wanted to cling to Andre’s hand and reassure myself that he lived as Leo wheeled him out, but I was afraid Leo would slam him into walls if I expressed my concern. Men are territorial for the stupidest reasons.
Ignoring the frogs hopping about in the puddles, we met the rest of the crew rolling Bill out of the elevator. My fear of losing friends was deeply ingrained. I touched Bill’s forehead, but he didn’t stir.
“We’ll have to come back for the others,” Frank said gruffly.
The security cameras would have had a field day, except Leo said he’d turned them off and wiped them out. Let them believe the sprinkler system had short-circuited the wiring.
Cora and Frank were intelligently wearing rubber gloves so no trace of them would be found later. Leo and I had been here before, so there was no sense in disguising our fingerprints. I hoped Andre hadn’t touched anything besides his gun. Both of us had fingerprints in the database if anyone cared enough to search.
“You mean you just walked in through the gate?” I asked suspiciously as we stepped into the night and I recognized Leo’s Ford SUV in the drive. “I could have walked in instead of crawling through ducts?”
Holding his bandage in place, Paddy glared at me. “I have keys. You could have asked.”
And gotten gassed for my efforts? I bit my already sore tongue and eyed him with more suspicion. He seemed to be recovering in the night air. “When I know I can rely on you, I will,” I retorted. “How did Bergdorff get the canister?”
He locked Acme’s front door and smudged the lock with the back of his sleeve. “Bergdorff is in charge of the magic machine.”
Even Frank rolled his eyes at this. “Magic machine?”
“Figure of speech. Bergdorff is mad as a hatter. I wanted to use the cloud on him and see if it would make him better.” Paddy studied the darkened windows of the plant. “I left the canister in my office. Maybe I’d better go back and get it.”
“Man, you lie better than I do, Padraig,” I said nastily. If he’d brought the canister here, he was as much to blame for Bergdorff’s death as I was. Although ultimately, as inventor of the gas, Bergdorff had killed himself in more ways than one. “Einstein’s deader than a doornail, so you don’t need to worry about him anymore. You’d better just hope Andre hasn’t sacrificed his life for us, or I’ll bring the whole place down around your ears.”
It didn’t sound threatening from a skinny shrimp like me, but he ought to have known by now that I was a loose cannon and dangerous when roused.
Instead of appearing properly terrified, Paddy looked sad, and not in the least guilty. “Bergdorff’s dead?”
“Trust me, he won’t be firing up the machine again.”
“He used the canister on Andre? I’d better go back and get it,” Paddy said worriedly, studying the plant. The first rays of dawn were lightening the sky over the harbor. “Did you leave it in the office?”
“Einstein took it out the window with him,” I lied. I wasn’t trusting that can in anyone else’s hands ever again. “I don’t advise you to go near the body, or I’ll have two murder cases to fight.”
“They know I’m there at night. The window in his office?” he asked worriedly, tensing as if he was about to take off in search of the canister. Or Bergdorff.
I grabbed his arm and shoved my phone in his hand. “Learn to use one of these, will you? Call the cops when we’re safely out of here. Pretend sanity.”
If glares could kill, he would have downed me then. Without another word, he departed at a lope.
Frank and Cora didn’t attempt to stop him. Cursing under my breath, I climbed into the back with Bill and Andre and held their hands.
We might not think alike, but Andre was my anchor to the Zone. I didn’t want to live here without him.
Which was just plain nuts, but I’d been gassed. That was my excuse and I was sticking to it.
• • •
The next afternoon, I watched the world go by outside Andre’s front window while sitting on his fancy leather couch with Milo in my lap. Andre’s apartment is on the first floor, so his porch blocked most of the view. But it would have been silly to ask Leo and Frank to cart him up to my barren apartment when Andre’s was more comfortable and accessible. And his father had so much more experience at caring for comatose patients.
Leaving Andre unprotected wasn’t on my radar, however. I didn’t know when I had appointed myself Andre’s guardian. If I gave it any thought, I’d realize he had an entire community to watch over him. Sarah had already been by, asking questions that I’d shrugged off. She considered Andre boyfriend material. I’d rather not set off a jealous rage in her murderous breast, but it didn’t matter. I was here, and I wasn’t leaving. I was probably still waiting for Saint Saturn to fix things. My world was just that confused.
My phone rang and I checked caller ID to make certain it wasn’t a hamburger joint in Alaska, but Cora’s number showed up. “Anything new?” I asked.
“Cops still crawling all over Acme and we’ve got newshounds cruising the streets. We got Bill to the hospital, but not the others. So far they’re only questioning Paddy about Bergdorff.”
“Bill still comatose?” I asked. I hadn’t even managed to rescue all the patients, dammit. I was feeling like a complete and utter failure.
“Bill’s still out. Frank’s at the hospital with him and the other patients they took from Andre’s. As far
as we know, Paddy hasn’t led the cops to the secret lab, and the research scientists are lying low. Paddy’s over there now, pretending to be sane. He says we can go in and get Leibowitz and the others as soon as the mundanes are gone. He’d probably get arrested if the cops found them. Bad for business. How’s Andre?”
I’d known that was why she was calling. Julius had wanted us to take Andre to the attic infirmary with Katerina, but I’d balked and insisted he be returned to his own room. I was convinced Andre would pull out of his coma, like Sarah. No one ever said I was
always
rational. But I did keep fretting over the part where Bergdorff had thought the gas only affected sick and old people. The baby docs had more or less confirmed that with the zombies.
Sarah hadn’t been sick. She’d just been shifting.
Andre took regular time-outs. Maybe he shifted in his brain. Bergdorff wouldn’t have known about those possibilities.
“Sleeping,” I insisted. “There’s a reporter outside taking pics of the warehouse,” I warned, watching out the window. Fortunately, I hadn’t had time to hang a shingle in front of my new office. I was thinking maybe I wouldn’t. I didn’t have a lot of friends in the media.
“We have people working overtime on faking them out,” Cora assured me. “Apparently gas explosions happen all the time on chemically enhanced ground. The road cracks are settling back to potholes.”
“Might work for reporters, but what is Paddy telling the police?”
“Leo and Paddy have them convinced Bergdorff committed suicide when the sprinkler systems malfunctioned and ruined his big, bad machine. The police think Ferguson may have sabotaged it. They haven’t found him yet.”
Even Cora didn’t know I’d turned Ferguson and the nasty security guards into frogs. I doubted that anyone cared. I occasionally gave the frogs a worried thought, but it wasn’t as if I’d figured out how to reverse my curses. I sure as hell wasn’t kissing any goon-frogs.
I was feeling a little lonely and depressed, with no one to talk to about my fears and no means of alleviating them. Andre was the only one who had any real clue about me. Maybe I should call Sarah. At least she understood, even if her reactions weren’t necessarily rational. She might try killing frogs to see if she was rewarded with longer legs.
“I’ll let you know if anything changes,” I assured Cora, knowing it was Andre she fretted over. “He has a court appointment next week. I’ll have to get a postponement. We can’t wheel him in like this.”
I’d slept all morning on Andre’s couch and prayed a miracle would have taken place by the time I woke up. Hadn’t happened. Of course, it had been after midnight when I’d damned Bergdorff to Hades, so maybe I had another twenty-four hours to wait.
Outside, a physically fit man with poker-straight posture pushed a twin baby stroller past the warehouse. If that was one of the soldiers I’d condemned to nursery duty, did I have to lift the punishment or
did it eventually wear off? Didn’t I give them a week? Their time wasn’t up yet.