Shoot the Moon, page 19
“Never mind,” I said. “It happened that first night after he brought you home to his modest, millionaire’s covered wagon to show you his unpretentious, lice-teeming antique mattress.”
The dame snarled, then mooed, then said, “I don’t like you.”
“You don’t have to like me to love me, you just have to have reasonable rates.” I turned to Mannix, who was still sporting a cherubic grin. “Have you read the afternoon edition of the Gazette, Mannix?” (He nodded, wide-eyed.) “Are the cops still treating this as a couple of missing lawns and only a lone werebull?”
“Yes, sir, Mr. Crag, sir,” the elf replied.
“Swell. And by that I mean hell. I’ve got to find out how many other morons Stradivarius pulled this on. Ideally, I’d like to know how big a harem I’m dealing with before he tries to get them to stomp the contents of my fedora to death.”
“I don’t know what you’ve got against him, mister,” the idiot dame with the absurd store-bought pontoons and busted gams said, “but good luck finding Mr. Igor William Morris now. Hah-hah! Moo!”
It was my own fault for keeping my back to the horse thief for so long. Somebody expert in stealing off in broad daylight with a flour tin jammed full of social security cash tucked under his armpit while half-assed driveway sealant was running like the French infantry behind him could surely slip quietly from a noisy emergency room.
I looked around the curtain at the adjacent emergency room bed. As I figured, Stradivarius was gone. The pile of filthy clothes that had been neatly bagged on the chair next to him had walked off, too. He’d managed in silence to finish removing the flat screen TV and carted that off for good measure.
The dame gave me a glare of victory that lasted only until she accidentally dropped her purple sheet and nearly blinded me with a flash of her headlights.
“Moo,” she said, as she fumbled around for the purple hanky.
I ordinarily would have wasted good money on the show she was putting on, but I didn’t at that moment have any interest to watch even for free.
“Forgive my imminent naughty language, Mannix,” I warned my assistant, whose pointed, North Pole ears were still sensitive, despite my best efforts to build calluses on his eardrums, “but I promise that it’s entirely appropriate to the situation. Shit. No, that’s insufficient. Shit. No, still not quite there. Shit, shit, shit and even more copious amounts of shit. An avalanche of shit falling from Mt. Shit and out across the highway, inconveniencing traffic for miles in both directions. Shit, goddamn shit.”
“Moo,” Miss Ivory the smarmy dingbat cow said.
She’d smugly mooed too soon.
“Hey, that son of bitch just bit me! Nurse! Nurse!”
The disembodied voice was howling from somewhere out in the emergency room.
Another voice, this time an unseen dame, shrieked in pain.
A third, overlapping voice hollered, “Call security! This nut is running around biting-- Ow, goddammit!”
Apparently, Igor Stradivarius had not already managed to shuffle off to Buffalo, as I’d prematurely feared. Mannix was standing on his little tiptoes trying to catch a glimpse of what was going on down the hallway. I nudged him back into Miss Ivory’s alcove.
“Stay here,” I ordered. “I mean it, Mannix. Do not move. And if shrapnel starts flying, take cover behind this mooing airhead’s massive, fake honkers.”
I booked it from the curtained alcove and took off in the direction of the shouting.
Stradivarius could have fled to freedom through any number of corridors or exits. Maybe the bastard wasn’t as smart as I’d occasionally given him credit for. Judging from the shouts that were filtering back to me over the regular hospital noise ahead, the Gypsy king was biting his way through the emergency room. He obviously intended to make an army of were-bovines to cover his escape. Problem for the genius was that it was still broad daylight and the moon wasn’t due to land for hours. Stradivarius would have been better off ducking out a door and praying I wasn’t hot on his heels.
A right-angle counter at the corner of the short hall was crowded with doctors on rounds who had temporarily suspended their important misdiagnosing and were all gaping in the same direction. I rounded the corner at a middle-aged sprint and found myself aimed down a very long corridor.
Stradivarius had chomped indiscriminately on anybody within range of his tartar-encrusted incisors. Down the entire length of the hall, men and women rubbed arms, hands and, in one pervert case, ass. Bloody red teeth marks oozed through white hospital jackets and purple scrubs.
I got a quick glimpse of the Gypsy king down the distant end of the corridor. Rather than take off through a set of exit doors that were two feet away, the old moron was trapping himself like a rat by ducking inside the last room on the right. I couldn’t read at a distance the white writing on the red plastic plate that was fastened to the door, but I’d have plenty of time to since there was no way out of the room.
The ground floor of the hospital was built into a hill, which meant this side of the building turned into a two story drop to the cafeteria loading docks. Stradivarius must have thought he could jump out a window. Were-animals heal fast, and they retain some of their animal traits while in human form, but there was no way an old bastard like Igor Stradivarius could make that kind of leap without some major broken bones. With a jump like that, he’d either wind up wrapped in plaster casts like sexy, somewhat-naked Miss Ivory or like Madame Danube, downtown in the city morgue with crazy Doc Minto.
I started to casually stroll with misplaced overconfidence down the hall, planning to kick open the door of the last room on the right and drag the SOB out on his bony posterior, but because the universe can’t go ten seconds without dropping a banana peel in my path and then laughing its ass off at my subsequent broken hip, the emergency room was suddenly overwhelmed by a catastrophe far greater than that of the rampaging Gypsy king.
Every TV screen in the joint suddenly switched over to static. Plasma screens on hallway walls, on counters behind the nurses’ station and in every little curtained booth in which emergency victims were being treated to television in lieu of medical attention were all at once hissing a jumble of gray.
“Hale-Bopp. It’s…it’s gone!” gasped Nurse Fatty. The behemoth was mounded behind the corner station. She was tapping her screen in disbelief with one huge finger, while the entire collection of overweight digits on her other hand stabbed at a computer keyboard. She had a momentary flash of relief when, as quickly as all the screens in the joint had switched off, they switched back on again. Her face thudded back to earth.
“That’s not Hale-Bopp,” Nurse Fatty groused. “Who’s doing this?”
She caught a glimpse of me over the orange fat deposits in the corner of her eye, and her hand flew immediately to her pocket where she removed the busted-up plastic remnants of the pulverized remote control she’d taken from me in the lobby.
“Don’t look at me this time,” I warned. “I am, unfortunately for us all, nowhere near this diabolical.”
I’d already had a very bad feeling about what was coming next, given that the TV outage occurred an instant after Stradivarius disappeared inside the little room at the end of the hall, but I hadn’t given Igor Stradivarius credit for being able to turn so amazingly cunning when cornered. The Gypsy king might not be a mad genius, but he was definitely a resourceful asshole.
When the hissing screens all winked back on simultaneously, the same bright white image of the moon shone out from every plasma TV in the emergency room.
It looked like a real-time satellite shot of the cratered rock hanging out in space like a piece of petrified fruit just beyond Earth’s reach. The picture was so crystal clear I could even see the gleaming silver spikes of the sinister palace home of Moon-Man Emperor Gorgonzola.
The people Stradivarius hadn’t bitten stared. Some, like Nurse Fatty, tried to flip the show from what was, in their minds, a boring celestial rock back to a far more interesting celestial hunk of dirty ice. The moon was on every station.
Almost as quickly as he’d vanished, Stradivarius popped back out of the distant room. He shot an anxious glance back in my direction, keeping his eyes low and shielded with one hand in order to avoid glimpsing any of the TV screens.
The old thief was carting under one reeking armpit a DVD player which he’d just swiped from what I now knew was some kind of media/security room. Before him, he pushed a wheeled chair on which he’d strapped a mini-fridge, on which was stacked a case of Styrofoam cups and a couple of boxes of computer paper. Behind the boxes he had tucked the plasma screen TV he’d lifted from his emergency room bay.
I was reminded for a moment of the stack of busted televisions out behind his magic sex wagon back at Big Chief Shortpants Campground, but had to tuck the thought away for a later moment more suited to contemplation than one in which I was about to be stomped to death like the clumsiest clown in the rodeo.
All along the long corridor that separated me from the Gypsy king, men and women who had glimpsed the image of the moon on TV were suddenly popping their seams like busting-open tubes of Pillsbury crescent rolls.
Shrieks of human agony dropped low, turning into violent moos.
The corridor was rapidly narrowing as the people in it expanded. Hooves tore apart shoes. Arms transformed into bovine legs. Torsos burst through hospital scrubs.
Stradivarius darted out the fire doors with his stolen swag, but before the doors swung shut I saw him bite a candy striper for good measure. Not that one more cow mattered, since the son of a bitch had already made it impossible for me to follow.
There was no going forward. Half-formed cows and bulls blocked the road. A few hapless humans who hadn’t been lucky enough to get bitten were attempting to negotiate through the herd. Some on the fringes managed to jump into rooms, but most were blocked here by a freshly-blossomed horn or there by a couple hundred pounds of newly materialized pot roast.
I decided the best way to help the people who found themselves trapped by the herd would be to find a quiet place where I could sit down and really hash out the most brilliant rescue plan possible. I was leaning toward the Bahamas as the best quiet spot to strategize, but I was open to hopping on the next plane out of town and riding it to the end of the line or until it burned off the last drop of goddamn fuel, whichever came last.
I turned to beat a rapid retreat.
“Moo!”
A pudgy young nurse with a bleeding wrist I’d passed moments before was in the final stages of transformation. Bones crunched as her skull flattened and spread wide. A swishing tail sprouted from the splitting ass of her purple scrubs.
To the werecow’s left, the new horns of a dame from food services were stretching her black hairnet. The hairnet gave up the fight and split apart, shreds of mesh dangling from the ends of freshly-sprouted horns. She jerked her new cow ass -- which I swore was slightly smaller than the massive human dumper it had replaced -- and slammed the silver rack of lunch trays she’d been wheeling to the elevators while in human form. The rack slammed over onto its side with a floor-shaking thud, scattering silverware and slabs of half-eaten hospital meatloaf up and down the corridor.
The noise from the thudding rack frightened the herd in mid-transformation, and the whole pile of them made the simultaneous decision to take out their new bovine panic on the scrawny little human beings, of which I was one, trapped in their midst.
“Moo!” “Moo!” “Moo!”
Bulls and cows jumped and kicked, and people began dropping from sight. A little Indian doctor flung his hands in the air and slipped down like a drowning victim going down for the last time. A burly orderly who at first glance looked like he could wrestle bulls for a living, couldn’t. It came as a pretty big shock to him too, which I saw at a distance in his wide eyes after a werebull hooked him in the chest with a horn and flipped him up and over its back. The poor bastard plunged to the floor and was gone, presumably permanently and eighty-plus years too soon.
The air was suddenly forced from my lungs and I felt the pressure of a couple hundred pounds of sirloin pressing in from both directions.
In their panic, the nurse and cafeteria worker werecows had stampeded as far ahead as they could, which was only far enough to trap me between them. The press of spotted flesh was crushing the life out of me, and even though it wasn’t much of a life it was still mine, so I felt a proprietary right to be the one to end it prematurely.
I tried to reach my gat, but my arms were pinned at my sides.
I wriggled to back up, but managed to squeak only a few inches. As soon as I did, I felt hot breath on the back of my neck.
Arms still pinned at my sides, I managed to half-twist around to find a werebull standing only a few feet behind me, held at bay only by the bulk of the dames who were currently murdering me between them.
The behemoth werebull jerked its head to one side, writhed in agony, and sprouted another ten pounds of shoulder steak.
None of the bulls in the hall was as huge as Stradivarius in werebull form (who as their sire remained their steroidal granddaddy), but that was a cold comfort while staring into the malevolent, coal-black eyes of a thousand pounds of furious ground chuck.
The bull jerked its head in the other direction and the tip of one horn came so close to brushing the front of my shirt that my necktie fluttered in the breeze.
“I purchased this tie for two bits from a thrift store that the owner went to prison for burning down for the insurance money six years ago, which makes it irreplaceable. If so much as a cheap rayon thread is snapped, you’ll be hearing from my overweight, overpriced attorney.”
I’m not generally a quick study, but I figured out the very moment I managed to exhale that particular hollow threat that it isn’t a great idea to bring up lawyers in the presence of a herd of werebull doctors.
Enraged cows and bulls mooed and thrashed in a corridor that had become a living thing. The werebull on my back bumper craned its neck, straining to take a bite out of any part of me it could reach. It snapped empty air with huge teeth. Twenty feet away, a security guard in white sneakers and purple uniform, the last upright human besides myself to be trapped amid the herd, caught an errant hoof to the temple and dropped like a rock, vanishing among the sea of glistening backs.
The living vise of the pair of cows in which I was trapped squeezed so hard that I nearly didn’t feel the frantic tap of a fingertip at my right ankle.
The cows who were murdering me exhaled at the same moment, the black-splotched white flesh parted, and I found myself looking down at the floor at a pair of familiar tennis ball-size eyes.
“Mannix,” I said to the elf who was lying flat on his back at my feet amongst the dangerously shuffling hoofs of a herd of deeply perturbed cows, “I’m absolutely certain that I gave you a direct order to stay with the airhead with the torso dirigibles.”
“I had to come help, Mr. Crag!” the elf replied.
His little, upturned face vanished for a moment as the cows on either side attempted once more to flatten me like Madame Danube in a plastic shitter.
“If I get away from this alive, remind me to dock your pay,” I gasped as the walls of homicidal mignon closed in. “For now, Pauper Memorial has a courtyard that’s a weed-choked smorgasbord. I assume the groundskeeper successfully murdered himself and is now enjoying an eternity of bliss inside a comet, presumably trimming shrubs into topiary Albert Schweitzers. There’s enough flora in that courtyard for all their fauna asses. Just follow the green line, which they’re currently shitting on, and spring the door.”
I heard a little grunting somewhere around my ankles, and felt the brush of the elf as he elbow-crawled past me. Thirty seconds later, the door to the courtyard sixty feet away sprang open as if by magic. A couple of the cows caught the delicious scent of weeds on the wind, and they lumbered through the door into the sunshine.
The herd had been like two dozen balloons inflated inside a five gallon fish tank, but as the first pair of cows departed -- soon joined by a third, then a fourth -- the pressure began to ease. The dames to my port and starboard separated further than before, and I spied Mannix right back where he’d been moments before.
“Did I do okay, Mr. Crag?” my assistant asked from the floor at my feet.
When the pair who were crushing me separated, the bull intent on killing me seized his chance and darted forward. I was barely able to fall back in time to avoid a horn to the right ventricle of my rapidly beating and presumably soon-to-be silenced heart. As if I didn’t have enough to deal with topside, down below a little hand was yanking furiously at my pant cuff.
“Mr. Crag, this way!” Mannix called.
I avoided once more the flashing horns of the second werebull in as many days who wanted to mount my head on the wall of his pasture.
“Mannix, you might have missed all the terminal screaming that was going on around here a minute ago, but the floor isn’t the best place to be for someone who wants to stay alive. I admit it, I’m as shocked as anyone about that last part, so I need a little time vertical to come to terms with the epiphany.”
“Hurry!” the elf insisted.
The thinning of the herd as more cows filtered out to the courtyard meant that the heifers on either side were relaxing their grip even more. This, in turn, gave the bull behind me the opportunity to jam himself between them and come at me full-throttle, presumably to settle my threatened lawsuit out of court.
I had no choice. Down I went.
The world around me grew dark. I prayed desperately to any deity that might be flitting through the nearby ether for forgiveness for a lifetime of thoroughly enjoyable (in the corporeal sense) but ill-advised (in the spiritual sense) debauchery.
“This way!” a breathless voice hissed.
I could see Mannix crawling off in the direction of the nurses’ station.
He had an easier go of it than I did, given his diminutive size and the fact that, unlike me, he wasn’t in worse shape than Hiroshima after the bomb.
