فصل چهارم

Chapter 4: Floyd’s Stag Night

Cancún, Mexico; the Night Before

Butler had an excuse for not being in Iceland that would hold up in any court of law and possibly even on a note for teacher. In fact, he had a number of excuses.

One: his employer and friend had sent him away on a rescue mission that had turned out to be a trap. Two: his sister had been in fake trouble, whereas now she was in very real trouble. And three: he was being chased around a theater in Mexico by a few thousand wrestling fans, who at this moment looked very much like zombies, without the rotting limbs.

Butler had read in the entertainment section of his in-flight magazine that vampires had been all the rage, but this year zombies were in.

They’re certainly in here, thought Butler. Far too many of them.

Strictly speaking, zombies wasn’t an accurate description of the mass of mindless humans milling about in the theater. They were of course mesmerized, which is not the same thing at all. The generally accepted definition of a zombie is: a reanimated corpse with a taste for human brains. The mesmerized wrestling fans were not dead and had no desire to sniff anyone’s brains, never mind take a bite out of them. They were converging on the aisle from all sides, cutting off any possible escape routes, and Butler was forced to back up over the collapsed ring and onto the wrestling platform. This retreat would not have made the top one hundred on his list of preferred options, but at this stage, any action that granted a few more heartbeats was preferable to standing still and accepting one’s fate.

Butler slapped his sister’s thigh, which was easy, as she was still slung over his shoulder.

“Hey,” she complained. “What was that for?”

“Just checking your state of mind.”

“I’m me, okay? Something happened in my brain. I remember Holly and all the other fairies.” Total recall, Butler surmised. Her encounter with the fairy mesmerist had watered the seed of memory in his sister’s mind, and it had sprawled in there, bringing everything back. It was possible, he supposed, that the strength of this mental chain reaction had obliterated the attempted mesmerization.

“Can you fight?”

Juliet swung her legs high, then flipped into a fighting stance.

“I can fight better than you, old-timer.”

Butler winced. Sometimes having a sister two decades younger than oneself meant putting up with a lot of ageist comments.

“My insides are not as old as my outsides, if you must know. Those Fairy People you are just now remembering gave me an overhaul. They took fifteen years off, and I have a Kevlar chest. So I can look after myself, and you, if need be.” As they bantered, the siblings automatically swiveled so they were back to back and covering each other. Butler talked to let his sister know that he was hopeful they could escape from this. Juliet responded to show her big brother that she was not afraid so long as they stood side by side. Neither of these unspoken messages was true, exactly, but they gave a modicum of comfort.

The mesmerized wrestling fans were having a little trouble negotiating the wrestling platform, and their packed bodies clogged the ringside like sticks in a dam. When one did manage to climb up, Butler tossed him or her back out as gently as possible. Juliet was not so gentle on her first toss, and Butler definitely heard something snap.

“Easy, sister. These are innocent people. Their brains have been hijacked.”

“Oops, sorry,” said Juliet, not sounding in the least penitent, and rammed the heel of her hand into the solar plexus of someone who was probably a soccer mom when not mesmerized.

Butler sighed. “Like this,” he said patiently. “Watch. You pick them up and just slide them out over the top of their friends. Minimum impact.” He performed the move a few times just to give Juliet the idea.

Juliet jettisoned a drooling teenager. “Better?”

“Much.” Butler jerked a thumb at the screen overhead. “That fairy has mesmerized everyone who looked into his eyes and heard his voice. It’s not their fault they’re attacking us.” Juliet almost looked upward, but stopped herself in time. On screen, the red eyes still burned, and over the speaker system that soft hypnotic voice flowed through the crowd like warm honey, telling them everything would be all right if they could just kill the princess and the bear. If they could perform that one simple act, all their dreams would come true. The voice affected the Butlers, made their sense of purpose a little mushy, but without eye contact it could not control their actions.

More of the crowd was making it onto the stage now, and it was only a matter of seconds before the platform collapsed.

“We need to shut that guy up,” shouted Butler over the rising hubbub of mesmerized moaning. “Can you reach the screen?” Juliet squinted, measuring the distance. “I can reach the gantry if you give me a little height.” Butler patted one of his broad shoulders. “Climb aboard, little sister.”

“Just a sec,” said Juliet, dispatching a bearded cowboy with a roundhouse kick. She climbed up Butler’s frame with the agility of a monkey and stood on his shoulders. “Okay, boost me.” Butler grunted a grunt that any family member could interpret as Hold on a moment, and with Juliet balanced overhead, he punched one of the support wrestlers in the windpipe, and swept another’s legs from under him.

Those two were twins, he realized. And dressed as Tasmanian devils. This is the strangest fight I have ever been in, and I’ve tangled with trolls.

“Here we go,” he said to Juliet, sidestepping a man in a hot-dog costume. Butler wiggled his fingers under her toes.

“Can you lift me?” asked his sister, keeping her balance with the ease of an Olympic gymnast, which Juliet might have been if she could have woken up in time for the early morning training sessions.

“Of course I can lift you,” snapped Butler, who might have been an Olympic weightlifter if he hadn’t been battling goblins in an underground laboratory when the last trials were on.

He sucked in a breath through his nose, tightened his core, and then with a burst of explosive power and a growl that would not have sounded out of place in a Tarzan movie, he thrust his baby sister straight up toward the twenty-foot-tall metal gantry supporting the screen and a pair of conical speakers.

There was no time to check if Juliet had made it, as the zombies had formed a body ramp, and the wrestling fans of Cancún were pouring onto the stage, all determined to kill Butler slowly and painfully.

Right now would have been a prudent time to have activated the jet pack he often wore underneath his jacket, but in the absence of a jet pack, and his jacket, Butler thought it might be an idea to increase the aggression of his defense, enough to buy himself and Juliet a few more seconds.

He stepped forward to meet the throng, using an adapted form of tai chi to tumble the front row back into the crowd, building a mountain of bodies the mesmerized fans would have to climb over. Which worked fine for about half a minute until half of the stage collapsed, allowing the unconscious bodies to roll off and form an effective ramp for the wrestling fans to climb. The injured fans seemed not to feel any pain and climbed instantly to their feet, often walking on twisted and swollen ankles. The drones flowed onto the stage with only one desire in their hijacked minds.

Kill Crazy Bear.

It’s hopeless, thought Butler, for the first time in his life. Utterly hopeless.

He didn’t go down easy, but go down he did under the sheer weight of bodies flowing over him. His face was smooshed by back fat, and he felt teeth close around his ankle. Punches were thrown, but they were badly aimed and weak.

I am going to be crushed to death, Butler realized. Not beaten.

This realization didn’t make him feel any better. What did make him feel better was the fact that Juliet should be safe on the gantry.

Butler fell back, like Gulliver dragged down by the lilli-putians. He could smell popcorn and beer, deodorant and sweat. His chest was pressed and tight, breath came hard. Someone wrestled with one of his boots for some reason, and suddenly he could not move. He was a prisoner under the sheer weight of bodies.

Artemis is alone. Juliet will know to take my place as his bodyguard.

Lack of oxygen turned the world black, and it was as much as Butler could do to shove his arm through the mass of bodies smothering him, and wiggle his fingers good-bye to his sister.

Someone bit his thumb.

Then he disappeared utterly, and the fairy on the screen laughed.

Juliet hooked two fingers of her left hand around the bottom lip of a gantry beam and pressed down so hard that she could almost feel her fingerprints. For ninety-nine percent of the world’s population, two fingers would simply not be enough to bear one’s own body weight. Most mere mortals would need a strong two-handed grip to keep them up for no more than a minute, and there is a large percentage of people who couldn’t hoist themselves aloft with anything short of a winch system and a couple of trained shire horses. But Juliet was a Butler and had been trained at Madam Ko’s Personal Protection Agency, where there had been an entire semester devoted to body-weight vectors. In a pinch, Juliet could keep herself off the ground using only a single toe, so long as no passing mischief-maker decided to tickle her in the weak spot under her rib cage.

While it is one thing to hold oneself aloft, it is quite another to hoist oneself upward, but fortunately Madam Ko had put a few seminars into that too. That is not to say it was easy, and Juliet imagined her muscles screaming as she swung her other hand about for a better grip, then hauled herself onto the beam. On another day, she would have paused to allow her heart to slow down a little, but from the corner of her eye she saw her brother about to be engulfed by wrestling fans, and decided that this was not the day for leisurely recuperation.

Juliet popped to her feet and ran the length of the beam with the confidence of a gymnast. A good gymnast, that is, not one who slips painfully on the beam, which is exactly what happened to a mesmerized lighting technician who attempted to cut Juliet off before she could reach the screen.

Juliet winced. “Oooh. That looked sore, Arlene.”

Arlene did not comment, unless turning purple and tumbling flailing into space can be counted as commentary. Juliet knew that she shouldn’t have grinned when the technician’s fall was comically broken by a cluster of men lumbering toward her brother, but she couldn’t hold it in.

Her smile faded when she noticed the mass of bodies swarming along Butler’s frame, burying him. Another technician approached her, this one a little smarter than his predecessor; he straddled the beam with his ankles locked below him. As he inched forward, he banged a large spanner on the beam, raising concussive bongs and spark flurries.

Juliet timed the arc of his swing, then planted a foot on his head and stepped over him as though he were a rock in the middle of a stream. She did not bother to topple the man from his perch. By the time he turned around, it would be too late for him to stop her, but he should have a nice bruise on his forehead to wonder about when his senses returned.

The screen was ahead, bracketed by metal tubing, and the red eyes glared at her out of the black background, seeming to emanate pure hate.

Or maybe this guy was up late partying.

“Stop where you are, Juliet Butler!” said the voice, and to Juliet it seemed as though the tones were suddenly those of Christian Varley Penrose, her instructor at the Madam Ko Agency. The only person, besides her brother, whom she had ever considered her physical equal.

“Some students make me proud,” Christian would say in his BBC tones. “You just make me despair. What was that move?” And Juliet would invariably answer, “It’s something I made up, master.”

“Made up? Made up? That is not good enough.”

Juliet would pout and think, It was good enough for Bruce Lee.

And now Christian Varley Penrose seemed to have a line directly into her brain.

“Stop where you are!” the voice told her. “And, having stopped, feel free to lose your balance and plummet to the earth below.” The voice, Juliet felt, was taking hold of her determination and twisting it like a wet towel.

Don’t look. Don’t listen.

But she had looked and listened, if only for a second, and it was long enough for the insidious magic to snake a couple of tendrils into her brain. Her legs locked as though clamped with braces, and the paralysis spread upward.

“D’Arvit,” said Juliet, though she wasn’t quite sure why and, with her last spurt of self-control, pinwheeled her arms wildly, sending her entire body careening into the tubular frame supporting the screen and speakers.

The screen yielded elastically, and for a moment, the little bubble of Juliet’s mind that she still held on to believed that the screen would not break; then her elbow, which Butler had told her as a child was sharp enough to open a tin of field rations, punched through the material, sending a jagged rent running down its length.

The fairy’s red eyes rolled, and the last thing Juliet heard before her outstretched arm snagged the AV cables was an irritated snort, and then she was tumbling through a hole in the suddenly blank screen and falling toward the spasming mass of bodies below.

Juliet used the half-second before impact to curl herself into a ball.

Her very last thought before striking the crowd was: I hope zombies are soft.

They were not.

As soon as the fairy had flickered from the screen, the enthralled wrestling enthusiasts gradually regained their senses.

Geri Niebalm, a retired beauty therapist from Seattle, found that she had somehow made it all the way from the rear of the hall to the stage itself without the aid of her walker. What was more, she had a phantom memory of vaulting over several youngsters in her pursuit of that pretty young wrestler with the stone in her ponytail. Two months later, Geri would undergo regression therapy at her friend Dora Del Mar’s salon to bring that memory to the surface so that she could relish it at her leisure.

Stu “Cheeze” Toppin, a semiprofessional bowler from Las Vegas, woke up to find his mouth somehow stuffed with a foul-smelling nappy and the words KILL BEAR KILL written across his shirtfront in lipstick. This rather confused Stu, as his last memory was of the succulent hot dog he had been just about to bite into. Now, with the nappy aftertaste lingering on his tongue, Stu decided that he might just forget about the hot dog for the time being.

Though Stu had no way of knowing, the nappy in question belonged to little André Price, a baby from Portland who suddenly developed a speed and grace unheard of in eight-month-old limbs. Most victims of the mesmer move in a sluggish fashion, but André skipped over the heads of mob members and executed a perfect triple somersault from the ringside commentator’s table, managing to sink his only tooth into Butler’s thumb before the bodyguard was completely submerged. André Price began speaking a few months later—unfortunately it was in a language that his parents had no way of knowing was actually Gnommish. To their relief, he quickly picked up English too, though he never forgot his strange first language and found that he could sometimes make twigs burst into flame if he thought about it hard enough.

A huge cacophonous moan almost lifted the roof from the theater as thousands of people realized they were not where they were supposed to be. Though there were miraculously no fatalities, by the time the last cut had been swabbed with antiseptic, there was a final count of 348 broken bones, more than 11,000 lacerations, and 89 cases of hysteria that had to be treated with sedatives, which, luckily for the patients, were a lot cheaper in Mexico than they would have been in the U.S.

And even though this was the age of amateur video, where most of those attending the event were in possession of at least one camera, there was not a single frame of evidence to prove that the mass mesmerization had ever taken place. In fact, when police flicked through the files on the confiscated cameras and phones, they found that every single instrument had been reset to factory conditions. No photos. In time, the Cancún Event, as it came to be known, would be mentioned in the same breath as Area 51 or the Yeti Migration.

Butler did not suffer from hysteria, possibly because he did not have enough air in his lungs for screaming, but probably because he had been in tighter spots (Butler had once shared a chimney in a Hindu temple with a tiger for several hours), but he had suffered over a dozen lacerations of his own, though he did not wait around long enough to have them added to the count.

As for Juliet, she was relatively unmarked in spite of her tumble. The moment she had recovered her breath, she began rolling bodies away from the spot where she had seen her brother submerged.

“Butler!” she called. “Brother! Are you under here?”

The top of her brother’s head appeared, smooth as a lollipop. Juliet knew immediately that her brother was alive because of the vein pulsing at his temple.

There was a chubby seminaked infant wrapped around Butler’s face and chewing on his thumb. Juliet dislodged the boy gently, noticing that he seemed very sweaty for a baby.

Butler drew a deep breath. “Thank you, sister. Not only did that child bite my thumb, but it tried to get a fist up one of my nostrils.” The baby gurgled happily, wiped its fingers in Juliet’s ponytail, then crawled across the piles of humanity toward a crying lady who was waiting with open arms.

“I know you’re supposed to like babies,” said Juliet, huffing as she grabbed a banker type by his braces and sprung him from his perch on Butler’s shoulders, “but that guy stank and he was a biter.” She took a firm grip on a middle-aged lady whose blond hair had been sprayed till it shone like a buttercup. “Come on, missus. Get off my big brother.” “Oh,” said the lady, eyelids fluttering as she tried to make sense of everything. “I was supposed to catch the bear. Or something like that. And I had popcorn, a large popcorn that I just paid for. Who’s going to compensate me for that?” Juliet rolled the lady across the bellies of four identically dressed cowboys who all wore FLOYD’S STAG NIGHT T-shirts under their rhinestoned waistcoats.

“This is ridiculous,” she grunted. “I am a glamorous young lady. I can’t be dealing with all this body odor and squidginess.” There was indeed a lot of body odor and squidginess about, much of it related to Floyd and his stag night, which smelled like it had been going on for about two weeks.

This was confirmed when the cowboy wearing a FLOYD badge awoke from his stupor with the words: “Dang. I stink worse than a dead skunk wearing a suit of bananer skins.” Bananer? thought Juliet.

Butler rolled his head, clearing space to breathe.

“We’ve been set up,” he said. “Have you made any enemies down here?”

Juliet felt sudden tears plop over her bottom lids. She had been so worried. So worried. Big brothers can only be indestructible for so long.

“You big galoot,” she said, sounding very Floyd-like. “For your information, I am fine. I saved you and everyone else.” Butler elbowed himself gently from between two luchadores dressed in garish Lycra and leather masks.

“Time for patting yourself on the back later, sister.” He climbed from the tangle of limbs and stood tall in the center of the stage. “Do you see all of this?” Juliet clambered along her brother’s frame and stood lightly on his shoulders, and then to show off she stepped with easy balance onto his head. One foot only, the other tucked behind her knee.

Now that she had a second to appreciate the enormity of what had happened, it took her breath away. A sea of confusion spread out all around them, groaning and twisting. Blood ran, bones cracked, and tears flowed. It was a disaster area. People pawed at their mobile phones for comfort, and sprinklers sent down a fine mist that dusted Juliet’s face.

“All this to kill us,” she breathed.

Butler held out his massive palms, and, as she had done so many times in the Fowl dojo, Juliet stepped onto her brother’s hands.

“Not just to kill us,” he said. “Two bolts from a Neutrino could have done that. This was entertainment for someone.” Juliet somersaulted to the stage. “Entertainment for who?”

At the rear of the conference hall, a section of the stand collapsed, sending up a fresh round of shrieks and misery.

“I don’t know,” said the bodyguard grimly. “But whoever tried to kill us wanted Artemis unguarded. First I change into my own clothes, and then we find out who Artemis has annoyed this time.”