Exiled from Earth

5

Lou woke up. He was in a room, on the floor. A single, naked bulb up in the ceiling glared at him. A half-dozen kids were standing around him. Black kids. Another gang.

He pulled himself up slowly to a sitting position. Every part of his body ached horribly.

The only furniture in the room was an antique wooden school desk and chair, battered and carved with hundreds of initials. On the wall behind the desk was some sort of old poster showing a huge lion leaping through a ring of fire. The top of the poster had been ripped away. Lou could make out the words …EST SHOW ON EARTH, APRIL 15 to 29. It didn’t make any sense to him.

And then he focused on the black man sitting at the desk. He was immense, the biggest man Lou had ever seen. He must have weighed three hundred pounds or more. And he wasn’t fat: just huge, giant muscles on a mountainous frame. He looked completely out of proportion to the rickety desk as he sat squeezed in behind it, looming over it and Lou. The only clothing Lou could see was an open vest. His black skin gleamed in the glare of the overhead lamp. It was hard to tell how old he was he could have been in his early twenties or ten years older.

He was talking to one of the other boys, ignoring Lou’s puzzled stare.

“…only way’s gonna be to give ’im back. Otherwise the peace ’tween us an’ the Peelers gonna get busted wide open.”

“He’s ours,” the other boy answered hotly. “They lost ’im an’ we got ’im. Makes ’im ours, right?”

The boys muttered agreement.

“You want the Peelers comin’ up here after ’im? Ready to fight the whole pack of ’em? Tonight? ’Sides, he ain’t got nothin’ on ’im, he ain’t worth keepin’!”

Lou realized they were talking about him. “Hey, wait a minute—”

“Shuddup, pinkey!” A toe nudged his tender back. Lou winced and closed his mouth.

“Naw, wait,” said the giant, looking down at Lou. “Know where you are, white man?”

Lou shook his head.

Smiling from the desk, “You’re in the secret headquarters of the Top Cats. I am N’Gai Felix Leo, president of the Top Cats, You may call me Felix, for short.” Felix spoke very slowly and carefully, in precise English, for Lou. The way a teacher would speak to a backward child.

“Apparently,” he went on, “you stumbled into our turf when the Peelers were chasing you a little while ago. We are now discussing whether we should give you back to the Peelers or deal with you ourselves.”

“Deal with me?” Lou echoed.

“Kill ya,” snapped a tall, lanky kid.

Felix shook his head and grasped the edges of the desk in his massive hands. “Zonk, whyn’t you keep shut?” he said to the kid who had spoken. Turning back to Lou, “You can’t stay here. You can’t join our gang, for obvious reasons. If we let you go free, the Peelers would take it as an unfriendly gesture and they might start a war with us.”

“Them whitesheets,” Zonk muttered.

“My friends don’t like to admit it,” Felix said, his voice rising ever so slightly, “but we are in no shape for a war against the Peelers. They outnumber us badly, and they can call in a half a dozen other gangs as allies.”

“An’ we c’n get all uptown to come on our side!” Zonk shouted.

“Yeah, an’ turn the whole city into a battleground?” Felix countered. “Been enough o’ that, you fool. We gotta work out somethin’ better… least, ’til we’re strong enough t’stand up t’the Peelers.”

“Look,” said Lou, “all I want is to get to the jetport before the police block it off—”

“Police?” Zonk flashed. “Helmet heads? After your…”

“Not the tac brigades… Federal marshal… and some world government people—”

They all stared at him blankly; none of them had the vaguest idea of what Lou was talking about.

Except for Felix. “Why are they after you?”

Lou shrugged. “They won’t tell me.”

Zonk laughed. “Since when the helmet heads tell you why they crackin’ your skull? They jus’ do it, tha’sall! You find out later in the hospital… if you make it that far!”

“If I don’t get to the jetport before dawn, they’ll probably be waiting for me when I do arrive,” Lou said.

Felix shook his head again. “You’re not getting to JFK either before dawn or after it. We can’t let you go, the Peelers would get sore at us.”

“You’re just a kneeler!” Zonk yelled. “A chicken, scared o’ them damn Peelers!”

Felix’s face went unimaginably hard. His eyes slitted, like a cat’s. Slowly, ponderously, he rose from his chair and stepped out from behind the desk on legs the size of tree trunks. Zonk glanced around at the other boys, then backed away a step.

“We been friends,” Felix said as he advanced like a tide, engulfing the room. His voice was low, menacing. “So I’m gonna give you one chance t’take back that mouth. Now!”

“I… I… I’m sorry,” Zonk stammered. “I got sore—”

“Am I a kneeler?” Felix was towering over the skinny boy, scarcely a centimeter away from him. He seemed to surround Zonk.

“No… no, you ain’t.”

“Am I afraid of anything or anyone on this Earth?”

“No. Nothin’ or nobody.”

Before he could even think of what he was saying, Lou heard his own voice call out, “Then you’re not afraid of helping me get to JFK.”

Everybody froze. The room went absolutely silent. No one even breathed, it seemed to Lou. Least of all Lou himself. He sat there on the floor, the other boys ranged around him staring open-mouthed, with Felix off to one side, back turned as he confronted the petrified Zonk.

Very, very slowly, Felix turned toward Lou. The grimy floorboards squeaked under him. His face was still as flat and hard as the face on the lion in the poster.

“What did you say?”

I’m dead either way, Lou told himself. Aloud, he answered, “If you’re not afraid of anything or anybody, then you’re not afraid of helping me get to the jetport. Tonight. Now.”

Felix stared at Lou for a long moment, grim, unblinking. Then slowly his mouth opened and he began chuckling. The chuckle deepened into a laugh, a strong laugh that shook the room. The other kids started laughing, too.

“You’re something, white man… really something, calling me out like that.” Felix roared laughter and went back toward the desk. “You got guts… not much brains, maybe, but plenty guts.” He dropped back on the chair so hard that Lou felt sure it would crack under him.

Felix shook his head, still laughing. “So you’re trying to dare me into helping you. That’s a jolt, a real jolt.”

Lou got to his feet. “Okay, so it’s funny. Either help me or kill me or let me go. Take your pick.”

Waving a heavy hand, Felix said, “Man, you must have some black blood in you someplace. You got guts, all right. Look… if I let you go, you’ll get killed before daybreak, y’know? If I help you, it’ll start a war. But… shoot, baby it’s going to be hard to kill you when you got the guts to dare me.”

He turned to Zonk. “Go get us a car.”

“You gonna…”

“Mari wants t’see JFK,” Felix said to them. “I ain’t seen th’ place myself for years. You ever see it?”

Zonk, wide-eyed, shook his head.

“You ready to fight a war when we get back?”

Zonk nodded. So did the others.

“Okay… get a car. Maybe we’ll stop uptown on our way back, bring down some reinforcements. Show th’ Peelers they gotta think twice ’fore they start a war.”

“Now you’re talkin’,” Zonk said, and he headed for the doorway.

The car was an ancient two-door, crumbling with rust, dented, upholstery ripped, automatic guidance long wrecked, lights defective, radio gone. But it ran. It shook and rattled and whined, but it ran.

They were sputtering down the throughway, air shrilling through ill-fitting windows. Zonk was curled up on the back seat, sleeping. Lou wanted to doze off, too. He ached from his scalp to his bare feet. One foot was throbbing from a cut he had picked up somewhere. But he couldn’t sleep. His insides were still as taut as a scream of terror.

They had gone across a bridge, and now the throughway was elevated. The horizon in front of them was just starting to turn gray. The buildings here seemed to be lower and not as closely bunched as back in Manhattan.

Felix was jammed in behind the wheel. He laughed softly. “Man, some people sure lucky. You got guts all right, but better than that, you got luck.”

Lou looked at him. Somehow, in this flat, cold gray of early morning, Felix seemed different.

“Still haven’t figured it out, have you?” Felix asked him.

“I don’t understand—”

He squirmed around in the too-small bucket seat and glanced over his shoulder at Zonk, who was still sound asleep.

Then he said to Lou, “You think you just talked your way out of being killed by a teen pack? Just like that?” He laughed.