Pandemonium

“The H doesn’t stand for Hilton,” I said under my breath. Louise shouted something, and several of the men shouted back—

commando shit like “Get down! Freeze!”—aiming their little science fiction weapons at her and O’Connell.

I stood up and Lew grabbed my arm. “What the fuck are you doing?” he said.

“They’re here for me!” I said.

I stepped forward, and some of the men swiveled to face me, barking orders to halt. I lifted my hands in the air and stepped onto the gravel of the parking lot. The foot soldiers surrounded me. I resisted the urge to glance backward at Lew, hoping they wouldn’t notice him, but no—they yelled for him to come out with me. From the helicopter doorway the smaller man waved excitedly. I waggled a hand, but only slightly—I didn’t want to give these guys an excuse to shoot.

The man with the chicken-wire face hopped down and strode toward me with an assured smile, like a pastor welcoming a sinner back to church. He was fifty, maybe sixty years old, the stubble on his scalp gray. A few feet from him I realized that the metal on his face was no mask; copper wire was stitched into his skin, threaded over and under. The skin was raw and peeling.

He held out a hand, and the skin there was embroidered too—a mesh glove.

“Delacorte Pierce,” he said in a booming, theatrical voice. “I am Commander Stoltz of the Human League.”

He stood there, hand out and smile steady, waiting for me to shake. The goons—I could only think of them as goons—seemed to aim their phasers a little more forcefully, if that was possible. They were all white men, faces wide and puffy beneath their black helmets. Some of the bulk that I’d attributed to body armor turned out to be beer gut and man boobs: most of these guys were seriously overweight. I gripped Commander Stoltz’s hand. The commander didn’t wince, exactly, but his smile faltered for a moment. The ridged skin of his palms felt like scar tissue, and was alarmingly hot, like a waffle iron warming up.

The short man in the sweater looked up at me, beaming. “Hi, Del!”

I sighed. “Let me guess: Caller ID.”

He shook his head, smiling. “You called collect. But the calling number shows up on my bill. I got it on the web.”

I’m an idiot. I never should have called from a landline. “I thought we had an agreement, Bertram.”

“You’re going to thank me later,” he said.

I didn’t think so. I nodded toward the goon to my right, at the thing in his hand that looked like a plastic bar of soap. “What are those supposed to be?”

“Show him,” Commander Stoltz said.

No boom or pop: just a delicate zip! and my vision went white. I hit the gravel on my side, my limbs useless. The pain, when it caught up to me a second later, was mathematically pure. And it didn’t stop. A thin wire connected my chest to the mouth of the goon’s gun, and the pain flowed for an absurdly long time.

The goon must have released the trigger at some point, but it was several seconds before thoughts could tumble into the void where the pain had been. My body felt like a pile of cooked, boneless meat. One of the camouflaged men did complicated things to my wrists, and commented on all the bandages on my hands. The other man fastened one of those helmets onto my head. I couldn’t marshal the neuromuscular resources for even a feeble thrash. Bertram leaned down into my line of sight. “I’m really sorry about this, Del. I really am.”

Fuck you! I shouted. You just fucking Tasered me! Converted through my nonworking vocal cords, this came out; “Faaagaaah!”

Somewhere above me in the unseen land of the vertical, much shouting. Lew, O’Connell, the goons, even Louise—all of them yelling. God, they wouldn’t Taser an old woman, would they? The shock would kill her.

“Take these people inside,” the commander ordered.