The Butterfly Kid

26

LITTLE MICKY bracketed the shadow with odd-shaped, rapid-fire cannons, but the shells passed through it like nothing at all, not bothering it a bit. I got the impression that the shadow didn’t even notice the cannons and shells, that it was aware of nothing on this whole green planet but our shaggy selves. This was not an impression to treasure.

Little Micky switched to explosive shells. They revised the landscape pretty drastically, but failed to inconvenience the shadow.

The shadow, meanwhile, was projecting gross despair and future pain much more intensely than before, inconveniencing us no end.

Little Micky poised two flamethrowers above the shadow and smothered it in fire. The shadow noticed this. It absorbed the flames, and then the flamethrowers, doubled its height, and kept coming.

I was now officially up tight. This wasn’t going according to the script at all. Of course, I hadn’t expected the first assault to be the shadow, but there it was, and Little Micky didn’t seem to be able to cope with it, and it didn’t seem especially stoppable, and I didn’t like anything that was happening.

Micky dropped bombs on the shadow — good, fat, healthy bombs — and the shadow didn’t notice.

“No!” Micky yelled. He was losing his temper.

The shadow reached the water while Micky was working out his next move. The water drew away from the shadow, as though refusing to touch such a thing. Spooky. The water wouldn’t come within a foot of the shadow, nor could I blame it. So the shadow moved toward us in the center of an absence of water. If I were superstitious…

“All right, you mother!” Micky had worked something out. “Take that!”

High-pressure hoses surrounded the shadow and shot iron-hard jets of water at it. The thought was good, but it didn’t work. The twelve-inch limit still applied, and the jets were shattered and deflected upward in a spectacular fifty-foot-high fountain that soundly drenched us and accomplished nothing else.

“No!” Oh, but Micky was bugged. “You mother, you! Dig it: I’m gonna put a flippin’ A-bomb right inside of you, you dig?”

Mike and I yelled, “Stop! Don’t do that!” and similar phrases intended to stop Little Micky from setting off an A-bomb in our laps, but he ignored us. He was POed at that shadow.

There was a muffled, almost subsonic Whump! The shadow bulged out at the middle, then grew another twenty feet, changed from a black shadow to a black flame, and kept on coming.

Little Micky went berserk. He started jumping up and down and screaming unbelievable polyglot invective and abuse at the flame. He was extravagantly out of his mind.

I was nearly out of mine. The flame was thirty feet away and coming strong, and the only member of our team who wasn’t helpless was throwing a temper tantrum. We were in trouble. I tried another test projection, and nothing happened again. I wasn’t properly high yet, but I could tell it was only a matter of minutes now. So, unfortunately, was that black flame.

But Little Micky stopped screaming and jumping, stood trembling still, and whispered in the tone that panthers use for hissing, “You mother! I am digging you a Pit!”

A moment later the approaching darkness abruptly fell out of sight and was gone. The whole world suddenly felt better.

Little Micky laughed forever in the space of two minutes and was glorious.

“How did you do it?” I wanted to know.

“Easy, baby, easy. I just made this like Pit underneath that mother an’, dig it, he fell right into some other dimension. Ain’t that a bitch?”

Ktch hadn’t expected to need a second act for us, so we enjoyed a ten-minute intermission while he assembled our next entertainment.

We needed those ten minutes. They gave the pills time to take general effect, giving us all a good jolt of euphoria, which always comes in handy, and curing our helplessness.

Ktch’s unplanned intermission gave our dozen neophytes some time to get more or less used to the techniques of projection, and it gave Mike and me a chance to better our working conditions.

The darkness bothered me, so I scattered a dozen nuclear flood lamps around at 500 feet and put on my shades. I tried to throw a spherical force field around the bus, too, but that didn’t happen. So the pill wasn’t unlimited after all. Force fields (I hoped) were probably too abstract for it.

(I also hoped I wasn’t going to learn any more of the pill’s limits under fire. That could be expensive.)

Our rooftop position was too vulnerable to suit Mike, so he hung an acre of wire netting twenty feet above our heads and clogged the water around us with barbed-wire emplacements. Our toothy guards had disappeared while we weren’t looking.

And then it started.

Nameless things were charging us from all directions, screeching, mewling, roaring, howling, piping, yelping, making sounds inside our heads, and all with grossly malicious intent.

My particular concern at the beginning was a transparent flying thing built like a loose heap of dry-cleaners’ plastic bags. It had taken a fancy to me for reasons I couldn’t imagine and didn’t care to learn. I broke it up with a well-conceived grenade, but the fragments were just as lively as the whole and shared the same fondness for me. They were too small to shoot at and too scattered to burn, so I gathered them up in a vacuum cleaner and burned it.

Then, there being nothing specifically after me at the moment, I took a brisk look around.

Andrew Blake and Karen, working together were coping with a swarm of what looked at first like long-tailed bees but turned out to be tiny flying serpents, no doubt ingeniously venomous. Being Andy and Karen, they were scooping the snapping beasties up in electrified butterfly nets. Each of them had on his shoulder a birdly creature with green angora fur and a huge appetite for such of the pests as managed to sneak past the nets.

Michael was being proficiently menaced by the front end of an orange and silver-striped centipedish horror, three feet thick and apparently quite long, overequipped with quick-moving needle claws and topped with a red and black face that was mostly mouth, and that mostly teeth. Naturally, Mike was using a sword to quell this monster. In fact, they were actually dueling — lunging and thrusting and parrying and all. The beast was down on points when I looked, with lots of open cuts oozing yellow and several arms lopped off. The thing made great soughing noises as it moved, like a very fat lady sinking into an armchair, and Mike was reciting something from Cyrano. Show-off!

Harriet, screaming like a dime on dry ice, was watching a large green lion with yellow spots devour something scarlet that would have been a lion if it had known how. The green one was obviously hers, and the screams were just embellishments.

Then Sean called for help. He had a squad of three large not-quite rats wearing blue capes and carrying weapons that looked like miniaturized stock goads attacking him with shrill cries from the left, and something I thought was a brown net but was really another flying thing clinging to his right arm in a hostile manner, and he’d panicked slightly.

On a hunch, I soaked the flying net with vinegar. It shrilled just within the audible range, fumed, shriveled, and fell off. Sean kicked it overboard.

The caped rats were a whole different thing. They were fast, smart, vicious, instinctive kamikazes, and their little stock goads were some kind of ultrapotent neural weapon. Even near-misses were painful, and I still limp a little from having been touched on the leg by one. Nasty.

Our immediate project was to keep the rats at a comfortable distance, but there were three of them and only two of us, and by their standards we were pathetically awkward and slow. Using larger versions of their own weapons, we could keep any two of them at bay, but the third rat was impossible.

But we kept trying until I got stung on the leg. In that first intricate moment of pain, I realized how stupid it was to fight these things with their own weapons, so I dumped five gallons of rubber cement on them and left them for Sean to sweep overboard.

The pain in my leg also reminded me that I wanted to do something about the jolly lobsters who were providing all this healthful exercise. I coolly stole a military robot from some half-remembered science fiction story, made a few slight alterations, and planted a dozen of them in the ravine behind the beach. The I resumed my look-around.

Gary the Frog and an ancient battle-ax were busily shortening the tentacles of a slimy gray water beast most of which was out of sight. The severed tentacles dripped a thin blue liquid that sizzled and evaporated as it fell, leading me to wonder where the beast came from and why. Oh, the tentacles had claws at their tips.

Gary seemed to enjoy his work. As he chopped, he loudly flatted “I Want to Hold Your Hand” to the rhythm of his battle-ax. Ah well: each man to his taste, I suppose, but I’d’ve used a laser.

We seemed to be in a minor lull. Oh, carnage was being dealt out left and right, with our side doing all the dealing, but there were three of us caught at the same time with nothing to do. I returned to my original post and took stock. Our side seemed to be doing pretty well for itself. We’d beaten off all boarders so far, without casualties. But that was just holding our own. We were actually doing somewhat better than that. The sky, for example, was crowded with gleaming metal gadgets — probably Michael’s — that were efficiently stopping most airborne attackers before they could get to us, so — the best battles being those you don’t have to fight — we were pulling a bit ahead of the game.

Of course, Ktch’s having bought his fighters at a rummage sale or whatever was to our advantage, too. It’s a hell of a lot easier and safer to fight isolated members of a thousand races than a thousand members of one race. If Ktch’d mounted a concerted attack, we’d be in trouble, but this catch-as-catch-can stuff was fun — even for me, and I’m no fighter.

Furthermore…

“Hello?”

“Gah!” I had company. Lots of it. Only one animal, but big. And it Talked?

“Did you,” I asked, “just say Hello to me?”

“I did.”

“How ’bout that?” This one was a serpent by trade, complete with forked tongue and fangs. A hooded serpent. He was silver above, gold-green below, had an armlike pair of tentacles (or a tentacular set of arms) growing just below his hood, and would’ve been quite pretty if he hadn’t been so huge. His head was larger than my body, and his tail was resting high up on the beach more than a hundred feet away. Big snake. And he could talk.

“You know, I’ve never been spoken to by a serpent before.”

“I understand. Some of us are excessively secretive.” Not speech, telepathy.

“If you’ll pardon my asking, sir: why did you speak to me?”

“I wanted to know who you are. I never eat anyone I don’t know. It’s not safe.” Okay, but snakes are easy. “Are you intending to eat me?”

“One of you, maybe more. That’s why I was brought here. But I don’t know which ones yet. You see, I’m very particular about my food. Picky. I have to be. I’m really very — Sensitive.”

Groovy. Ancient Village line, right? So I filled his inside and bathed his outside with liquid helium and watched him topple. Snakes are easy. Especially the sensitive ones.

But what was I thinking when the serpent interrupted? Oh yes, something had to be done about the lobster gang. With a mere shrug of the imagination, I established a dozen military robots in the willow grove behind the beach.

That minor lull was growing-major. Kevin, for reasons of his own, was sprinkling salt and pepper on a giant amoeba. Stu was hurling balls of colored fire at a six-armed but otherwise humanoid horned giant who, with a weapon in each hand, was diligently trying to get at Stu. The giant’s skin was the colors and texture of a Gila monster’s, but Stu didn’t seem to be in trouble. And Pat was off in a corner singing to some avant-garde crystalline life form that… Oh. The crystal shattered.

And that was all the action there was. The rest of the gang was just tossing ex-things and chunks thereof overboard — housecleaning.

Was it over? I still felt wildly manic, and I certainly hoped not. “Hey Michael,” I yelled, “this is our chance.” But maybe Ktch was only rounding up another team. “Chance for what?”

I walked up to him and whispered, “Chance to attack.” “Attack who?” Stu yelled. He was at large, too. He’d left old six-arms slumped down on the grass like a pyramid and burning merrily.

“Hey, man,” I reproached him, “I wish you wouldn’t burn your things on the roof. It’s bad for the grass. And what if the bus catches fire, hah?”

“Sorry ’bout that.” The fire died away.

“Strategy meeting,” Mike proclaimed. “Strategy meeting at this end of the roof. Meeting time.”

So we gathered at that end of the roof, all but Little Micky, who wasn’t interested in strategy and volunteered to stand watch at the other end.

“I’ve been thinking,” said the Michael, “that now’s the time for Us to attack Them.”

I: “You’ve been thinking!”

Mike: “I don’t claim to be the only one. All I said…”

Sativa: “For this kind of strategy, who needs a meeting?”

And then Little Micky made That Noise, the one that wakes me up some nights. High, thin, twist-tight, inhumanly sustained: I’d never heard anyone die like that before.

And there were Little Micky and this kid, this absolutely beautiful five-year-old American blond Kid — but Micky was dead and this Kid was pulling him apart and tossing the pieces overboard.

The kid looked up at us and grinned. There was blood on his chin. He threw a piece of Little Micky at us and yelled a treble war cry. A million shrill voices returned the cry, and the kids swarmed over the fence and charged. They were all beautiful children, all five-year-olds in pastel shorts, and they came at us yelling, with knives in their hands.

Our defense was pure instinct at first, hand — and footwork, dirty, minus intellect or any emotion but fear. Our minds hadn’t functioned since Micky made That Noise.

Here’s a little redhead coming at me, knife held low and pointed up. Kick him before he gets too close, kick him anywhere. Groin’s good. Get him under the chin and break his neck, but he’ll probably cut your leg before he does. And don’t just hurt him, kill him. Pain doesn’t stop these kids. Watch it! There’s another.

They came in waves ten feet apart, and they didn’t stop coming. Death was all they wanted — ours or theirs. Mortal wounds and broken bones only slowed them down a little. Kids’ bodies lay heaped three feet high around us like a wall. All of us were bleeding. This went on and on.

And all this bitter time they yelled shrill ferocity in glass-cracking, searing, mind-crushing, impossibly unending ultra-treble tones more agonizing than knives and more shuttering than fear — a million-throated irresistible loud cry of driving madness. Even their voices were weapons.

The first one to snap out of it was Harriet, our group’s outstanding lover of children. Suddenly she remembered that we didn’t have to do it this way. She swept the charging wave with submachine gun fire, and did it again and again. Her face was soaked with tears.

The rest of us remembered. Now we attacked with terrible weapons. And we got them all. We made darn sure of that.

But when it was finally over, we couldn’t find Little Micky’s body.