8
Oz was dead. So were Nero, Ossie, and Hawk. Digger was still dead. They’d killed another of Bo Peep’s proxies, but the original was nowhere to be found, just like Boyd. Jim’s back was broken. Panzer’s leg was shattered. Mars had come down with a cold, and his nose was kind of runny. Morale was low.
Whip was back to driving as the suit-clad gibbon. The jinn that might normally be criticizing Jim’s leadership or cheering Oz’s demise, was keeping his trap shut. Jim wasn’t talking to him. Jim wasn’t talking to anybody. He was catatonic, eyes locked forward in a creepy wax museum stare.
The bus pulled into the parking lot of the same abandoned pharmacy they’d visited the first time around. Buck ran inside and permanently borrowed enough medical supplies for Zoë to set both Panzer’s leg and Jim’s back in splints. Also permanently borrowed: several bottles of isopropyl alcohol and gauze (for everyone’s cuts and bruises), some vitamin C supplements for the sniffly Mars, and a children’s umbrella decorated with frogs and rubber duckies for Barney’s new leg. The latch that kept it closed was loose and failed often, but Buck successfully rigged it to Barney’s hilt while Zoë dressed wounds.
Whip was tailgating a station wagon that seemed determined to prove the inverse relationship between how many bumper stickers a vehicle has and how seriously the driver should be taken. This lady (twenty-three bumper stickers) had an actual tin foil hat on her head underneath an upturned colander still home to a few strands of spaghetti. She probably had theories of a secret world of Operators who battled one another with powerful bags of dust and bubblegum, used obelisks for transport, and had an inexplicable love for socks, avocado pits, and a Scandinavian business tycoon.
“This is more than a back injury,” Panzer said, motioning with his head toward the front of the bus where Jim lay.
Panzer, Zoë, Barney, and Buck had formed a council in the back, away from Whip, who was sure to gum up the works, and away from Jim, about whom they spoke.
Zoë nodded, arms crossed. “Guilt.”
“Really?” Barney asked as he absently pulled gauze apart with shaking hands.
“All this death surrounding him,” Panzer said, “he’s not used to it. It’s shocked him into paralysis.”
“That and the busted spine,” Buck clarified.
“He needs to talk to Oz,” Zoë said. “They ended wrong.”
“Can he do that?” Barney asked. By now, a snowy mountain of shredded gauze had piled up to his knees. The umbrella’s faulty latch chose that moment to fail, kicking up all the gauze and turning the bus into a temporary snow globe.
“Damn, man, take it easy!” Buck waved the bandage debris out of her face.
“I don’t know,” Zoë admitted. “Nothing seems quite impossible in Cryptofauna so I couldn’t say for sure. But I bet he can.” She pointed at Whip. The rest of the Combo looked to one another and performed an unplanned simultaneous nod. Zoë marched down the aisle, stepping over Mars and Jim.
Whip was still amusing himself by antagonizing the crazy woman in the station wagon, flashing the bus’s brights on and off rapidly.
“Is there any way for Jim to talk to Oz?” Zoë asked the gibbon.
“I seem to recall Oz getting dismantled in a great ball of fire no more than an hour ago.”
“Whip, we need your help.”
“Oh yeah?” Whip laid into a prolonged honk of the bus’s horn.
“Whip!”
The jinn flashed the brights again, timing the horn with each flare of light.
Zoë latched onto his simian privates and squeezed.
“Eeeeeeeeeeek!”
She let him go.
“Jeez, this bunch is uptight!” Whip whined, adjusting his little trousers. “What do you want from me? It’s not like I run the show here, you know. You’ve been around the game for a while too.”
“Not like you. You must know some tricks and shortcuts. What if we talk to the High Rollers?”
Whip laughed so hard he forgot to brake and nearly ran the station wagon off the road. “You don’t! That’s not me being cute or shitty, you just can’t. They’re entirely hands-off, a non-entity in the game, so don’t waste your time.”
“What about the Poker Room?”
“That’s for the living. But . . . that does give me an idea.”
“Well?”
“Apologize for squeezing my nads.”
Zoë instead squeezed them again. Harder.
“Ah shit! Knock it off! Alright! Alright! There’s a man called the Conduit. Like an anthropomorphized Poker Room. He can connect Mentor and Disciple across any distance, even after one of 'em’s taken a bath in nitroglycerine. And before you ask or squeeze my nads again, I don’t know where he is.”
“Who does?”
“Max would probably know.”
“Who the hell is Max?”
“Little spider jinn, contributor for JRN. He knows more about Cryptofauna than anybody. Loves the damn game. If ya ask me, he’s probably the one who let slip the J-man was training with you and the lepers. Squealed to Boyd or Bo Peep, you know? Max’s not supposed to pick sides, and as far as I know he never has. But this Boyd kid . . . he’s resourceful.”
“Just what side are you on?”
“Hey I like Jim, okay? He’s got guts, some brains, and a decent punch. But he’s an underdog. Even if he’s flayed alive, he—”
Zoë pulled the bus’s emergency brake and they squealed to a halt. She yanked the ape out of his seat and dragged him outside. Like most ESL folk, Zoë slipped into her native tongue when furious.
“Listen to me, you putain singe fils de pute! People are dying. Jim could be next. He might tolerate your aller et venir allegiance, but I will not. Either you start pulling your weight with the rest of the team or fly off into the night and never come back!”
Whip sulked, kicking rocks and dirtying up his suit. “I could turn into a gorilla, you know. Snap you in half,” he mumbled.
“He is broken in half, lying flat on that bus because you wanted to watch a show instead of helping.”
Whip brushed away a tear. “I’ll stick around,” he said quietly.
“Not good enough. Are you with us?”
“Yes, fine, I’m with you, alright?”
Zoë held out her hand. Whip’s tiny paw shook it.
“Okay,” Zoë said, satisfied. “To heal Jim we need to talk to Oz. To talk to Oz we need to find the Conduit. To find the Conduit we need to find Max. So where is Max?”
“There’s an army of those little jinn reporters,” Whip shouted above the idling engine. “Max has been covering Jim’s rivalry but I haven’t seen him in a while. Some other Rivalry is probably red hot right now. The jinn press core is understaffed and they have all the Operators on the planet to cover. So we could start doing notably crazy shit, like strapping Barney to a rocket in his underwear . . .”
Zoë looked up at Barney and Buck, peeking over the dashboard.
“There better be an or option,” she said.
“Or we amass an irresistible stockpile of narcotics.”
“Expand on that.”
“Jinn love drugs. We get bored and it’s tough to overdose. So I vote we throw a party, like a rager in a field with a Gizan pyramid of drugs. It has to be, like, way huge. We get the word out and jinn will come. That much I’m sure of. Then we just hope Max is one of them, grab him, make him talk.”
“What was the rocket idea again?”
“I’m withdrawing that as an option. Drug idea’s good, trust me. Contributors like Max are mobile and hard to spot, disappear quick too. Makes ‘em good at their job. If we try and snatch him and miss, we might not get another chance. The drug idea gives us a two for one: the pile draws him in, and once he samples our state-altering wares? Boom! Pliable as a boiled gymnast.”
Zoë was silent for a moment, considering the plan. “So you want to throw a party. For jinn.”
Whip gave a double thumbs up in front of his huge gibbon grin.
Zoë sighed. It seemed to be both the worst and only plan available.
* * *
Whether out of loyalty to the group, guilt from Jim’s injury, or simple enthusiasm for ambushes in general, Whip was tireless in the execution of his plan. The jinn beg, bought, and stole (emphasis on stole) any and all drugs he could locate in the West Texas prairieland they’d picked for the job. The focus was on quantity, not quality, so the growing collection ranged from pedestrian cough syrup and wine coolers all the way up to Schedule 1 big hitters like MDMA, opium, and peyote.
Whip wanted no help in assembling his pharmaceutical motherlode, leaving the Combo to watch and wait until he deemed the pile tall enough.
Jim was best at waiting, but he was also technically catatonic, so that was to be expected.
Panzer was the silver medalist, given his favorite hobbies of cleaning his gun and sitting still.
With his tinted sunglasses Barney could enjoy the American Southwest’s huge, cloud streaked skyscapes while he tried and failed to fix the latch on his umbrella (now failing at least once an hour).
Zoë lay with Jim and sometimes wandered off to watch the sunset and sunrise with Barney, saying she had some catching up to do after a long stretch below ground. She thought of Digger and cried a few times, her sorrow often turning to anger at Bo Peep. More than once, Whip spied her clawing her pickaxe into the field with prison break gusto.
Buck was on the restless end of the Combo’s spectrum. She somehow gained the allegiance of a few squirrels and trained them to steal Panzer’s bullets, which she eventually gave back in case of an attack by Boyd or who-knew-what-else.
Mars mostly stayed by Jim’s side but occasionally hunted rabbits to supplement the store-bought hot dogs, gummy bears, and carrots that everyone agreed just weren’t as good as the ones in Boston. The dog still wore the yellow bandana of the Abbey, feeling it gave his overall appearance some added character (in addition to his planet-stitched socks).
Whip got his paws on a declassified transcript of a JRN show called Operator Profile that did a piece on Oz years ago. Barney read it aloud to Jim as a bedtime story while night settled over West Texas.
“Rated fifty-six on the mensch scale, let’s see . . . that’s out of sixty-three so I guess it’s pretty good. Companion was Hawk, a cardinal. His Asset was his shadow. He had a six member Combination, including himself. It included . . . oh, Brother Graisse. I didn’t know that. That’s great! Then there was . . . Polly, a cat lady by most . . . no wait . . . all accounts. She lived alone in Togo, on an island covered in cats. Jeez, Jim, can you imagine the hairballs? She’s since retired back to that island. Then there were two twins, a boy and a girl from the Yukon Territory. Took Oz a year to track them down in all those trees. The male was killed by pirates some time ago . . . oh . . . oh wow, what a way to die. I’m not going to read that part. That poor man. Last member was Chilean or Peruvian by today’s borders. He was a magician. Oh wow, if he did some of these tricks, he was good! Says he died from bee stings when their Combo unsuccessfully tried to pollinate a dying species of flowers that lived in high altitude Tropical Asia. Says here ‘the flower could’ve been triturated,’ I don’t know what that means, ‘into a rather effective treatment for the common cold.’ That is a real shame.”
Barney read on as Jim, flat in the aisle, stared at the ceiling of the bus. Despite the fact that Jim no longer got sleepy, he got sleepy. Barney and the confines of the bus fell away. Jim’s body lifted upright, or maybe the world turned sideways. Either way, he now stood before the Poker Room door.
“You have to come in willingly,” a familiar voice said, scratching at Jim’s mind from the other side of the door.
Jim went in.
Boyd sat inside the Poker Room. “With all their resources, you’d think they’d spring for the Ritz. Well it ain’t. And relax, I’m not going to kill you here. I can’t.”
Boyd swiped at Jim’s head. Jim put up his hands to block and prepared to counter with a punch to the solar plexus, but their points of contact passed through one another like vapor.
“I said relax, spazzy boy. This isn’t a physical deal. Phone call might be easier but I don’t know your number.” Boyd flicked at a small green bug on his own shoulder but his finger simply passed through bug and shoulder alike. “I’m guessing you’re already done with your third task. Gettin’ all Certified and shiny, right?”
Jim said nothing. Hotheads like Boyd loved to correct an opponent at every turn, but Jim knew better. If they had misinformation, you counted your blessings and let that misinformation be. With any luck, it would birth more misinformation until the other party drowned in inaccuracy.
“Somethin’ up your ass? That’s fine.” Boyd grinned, a great before-picture for gingivitis treatment. He leaned back in his chair, smoothed out the crimps in his jean jacket, and locked his hands behind his head like someone on vacation. “Bo Peep’s not quite the murderer she’s cracked up to be. I mean, that’s what, two, three times now she’s missed the mark? I mean it’s getting embarrassing! Sure she can still make people shit their pants, but what do I want with shit pants? It’s all about the body count! But I’ve decided to do you a big, big favor.”
Jim continued to stand, tense despite existing as a vapor.
“Even you must know we’re no match for each other. Nothing personal, that’s just how things have shaped up. But I’ve got big plans, and I don’t want someone nipping at my ankles. One can get tripped up that way. It’s no real threat, it’s just god damned annoying. So . . . ” Boyd grinned another grin that would make a dentist drop his other patients and buy a Ferrari outright, “ . . . the deal is as follows. You and the people you got now just go elsewhere, live your lives however you want, just stay out my way. I’ll spare you what’s coming. But you so much as head in my general direction, and I’ll bring the hammer down. Because next time it won’t be some second-rate jinn thug in your face, it’ll be me. Let’s not bring it to that, huh?”
Jim had no response. Boyd flipped back to his charming true self.
“Alright, forget it. Just trying to keep from breaking a sweat, trying to be a nice guy. I’m going to eat you up, motherfucker. Everyone else will starve, but you’ll be eaten. You’re a janitor. You’re a janitor from nowhere and you’re going to die like—“
Jim turned around and walked out. The door closed behind him, and he fell back into his body. This would have been a great moment to spring up, declare his indefatigable opposition to Boyd, and lead the charge . . . somewhere. But it didn’t happen. His face gave no indication of anything at all.
Something about getting people killed just really took it out of him. First Digger, which he’d eventually been convinced wasn’t entirely his fault, and now Oz. There was no disambiguation there. You could likely check JRN notes on the event and see Jim say “I want to go to the Supercomplex” and Oz say “That’s a bad idea.” Flip forward a couple pages, and you’d find Oz swallowed by a monster moments before being disintegrated.
Barney, noticing no change in Jim’s disposition, continued a harrowing part of the transcript in which Oz chased down a runaway locomotive on foot and stopped it by jamming the smokestack with hairballs from Polly’s cats, particularly impressive as he’d just come from winning the Iditarod, pulling his own sled.
* * *
Whip got word out on the JRN that a treasure trove of substances had been unearthed in the American Southwest. Jinn could of course acquire drugs on their own, but Whip promised spectacle and ketamine party favors. Strolling alongside his creation, he plucked and tucked a joint safely inside his little suit jacket for later, then tossed a few fun-size liquor bottles he’d stolen from a hotel mini bar to Panzer, who nodded gratefully and pocketed the booze.
Mere hours after the announcement on JRN, the jinn came. Swarms of animals and people bled over the horizon, descending on the mountain of drugs. Precious gem eyes of every color glittered with delight as the party guests indulged and indulged again. None of them paid any notice to the black dog combing through the zoo of attendees, carefully searching for a spider.
The Combo had half-a-dozen plans and contingency plans on top of those to capture Max. They’d spent hours with Whip as advisor as to what was and wasn’t possible during the attempted capture of a jinn. They went over what they’d do if he tried to float skyward, if he turned invisible and ran for it, if he burrowed into the dirt for a subterranean escape, and a dozen other less likely scenarios ranging from a hang glider to a Saturn V rocket. Mars could run down almost anything on land and dig like a pro; Panzer was prepared to shoot all the jinn’s legs off if he had to (although he’d have to reload for the last two); Buck, Zoë, and Barney took positions at the edges of the field, armed with butterfly nets in case Max evaded the first line of defense; and Whip played the part of a watchful simian sentinel, armed with binoculars atop a precarious chimney of cocaine bricks at the peak of the drug pile, ready to turn crow if it came to an aerial battle. They were ready for damn near anything.
Mars found their target buried in a Mason jar of acid tabs, rolling around like a cat in catnip (also part of the pile).
Panzer picked up the lid to the Mason jar and screwed it on. Max was their prisoner.
* * *
Administrative functions are necessary in even the most exotic and unpredictable of organizations. Someone had to book the venue for Woodstock, someone in the bowels of Playboy corporate knew FIFO and LIFO, and many aspects of Cryptofauna were much less glamorous, but no less important, than the kinetic back and forth of Operators.
The JRN was sort of a gimme, a free service provided by certain jinn that the High Rollers loved to follow.
There were Fixers, local guides in the know that could provide information and materials to Operators they shared a relationship with. Male or female, Fixers always had curly blonde hair, and rumors persisted amongst the Operators that the quality of the hair matched the quality of the Fixer. The history of shampoo and conditioner is inextricably linked to the rise of Fixers, provided one is reading the right history book.
The Masseuses were a collection of Greeks who knew how to pamper the feet as well as the soul (Cryptofauna often challenged the mettle of both). The Masseuses were expensive and would only accept payment in the form of their favorite culinary delicacy: Carpathian wisent. Operators were so desperate for pedicures they hunted the European bison to extinction. The Masseuses begrudgingly accepted American bison before that species was nearly wiped out and they were forced to accept meat from the common dairy cow, although it was universally agreed the massages were never quite as good as they had been in the wisent days.
And then there were positions like the Conduit, unique even among the unique.
The Conduit had been created in order to increase variables within the game, something High Rollers were always in favor of because it made betting more expansive and interesting.
It was decided the Conduit would be located in North America and hired for locally. Locally, at the time, meant Iroquois. The method of communication employed by the Conduit evolved over the years but was always used for the same purpose: speaking with dead Operators. Advice was dispensed, tears were shed, secrets were spilled. Juicy-type drama that the High Rollers loved, loved, loved to consume.
Evolving alongside the Conduit’s method of communication was the Conduit’s riddle: a puzzle or cryptogram meant to keep the Conduit occupied during the long periods of inactivity. The Conduit wouldn’t be released from his post until he’d solved his riddle.
Most Operators treated the Conduit like a waiter, not even meeting eyes as they put in their request for contact.
Despicable.
But Oz had been different. More than just cordial, he struck up a friendship with the Conduit, a man named Jack Smoke Jackson. Treatment of Native Americans, even ones with the ability to establish a connection with worlds beyond our own, wasn’t always exemplary. And so Oz had the opportunity to save Jack Smoke Jackson’s life on several occasions. First from a violent pilgrim, later from a vindictive cowboy, and finally from an aggressive swarm of colonial bumble bees (which Jack Smoke Jackson was deathly allergic to).
Oz wasn’t any help, however, when it came to Jack Smoke Jackson’s riddle: a crossword puzzle several hundred thousand clues long. Oz’s talent for misspelling simple words resulted in many ink scratch-outs on Jack Smoke Jackson’s paper until 1866, when Oz got him a pencil and eraser for his birthday.
* * *
The trick wasn’t in getting Max to divulge information they weren’t supposed to have, it was in getting him to say anything remotely intelligible at all. It turned out the swan dive into LSD wasn’t the spider’s first stop in the pile. He’d done the backstroke in a punchbowl of gin and taken a sauna inside a bong used by three Canadian jinn-men known collectively as The Iron Lungs of Manitoba.
Buck poked a few air holes in the jar’s top with her pocket knife while Zoë asked a simple question as simply as she could: “Where is the Conduit?”
“The Redman can make the call you need. He is a free man with a free mind who cannot be described in any . . . meaningful sense of words. Have you ever tasted a secret? It tastes like . . . syrup!”
Barney gently tapped the side of the glass. “C’mon, Max. Please? Jim needs your help.”
Max looked like a mood ring on a pregnant woman, his color sliding across the spectrum as the different drugs he’d taken played off of one another. “Can any period of time ever truly be experienced, I wonder? Are they not fractures of fractures of fractures and on and on, over and over. No! It cannot be. It is too sad. Let time exist. Ticking. Able to be possessed. Able to be experienced. Eating away at surface-level pleasure seekers who will one day degrade into the salt they have stolen from the . . . earth. Salt was once a true currency! But the Redman . . . the Redman . . . endures. Over and over. Beat by beat.”
“I hate ramblers,” Panzer said and pulled back the hammer on his gun.
“No wait.” Zoë pushed his hand down and stuck her face close to the glass jar. “Max?” The tabs had started to stick to the spider, leaving an eight-legged mummy that wouldn’t shut up. “Max, where is the Conduit? Where is the Conduit, Max?”
“I told you . . . the Redman is the Conduit.”
“Where is the Redman?”
“You’ll excuse my outdated tongue,” Max said, settling to the bottom of the jar. “The Indian. He can contact those passed on. The big man for instance . . . oh what’s his beard?”
“Oz?”
“That is the man.”
“Max,” Zoë said, taking hold of the jar in both hands, “where is the Indian?”
“Shame on your racism! His name is Jack Smoke Jackson . . . racist.”
Zoë went ahead and shook the jar. “Where is Jack Smoke Jackson, Max?”
“Bring me . . . a map!”
Mars bolted across the field, past the seething pile of jinn who couldn’t care less about Max’s capture. The dog boarded the bus, vaulted over Jim, scooped up a roadmap in his mouth, and rushed back to their captive.
“Next page,” Max droned as Zoë presented the map. “Next page, next page, next . . . stop!” Zoë paused on Pennsylvania. “There, near Lake Erie.” Max’s leg shakily identified a spot on the map. “That’s where he is.”
Whip scampered off to check with another contributor jinn that the information was legit. A foal, out of its mind on uppers, confirmed Max’s claims.
Zoë de-lidded the jar, and the spider gleefully mummy-walked back into the mountain of drugs.
* * *
The man known as Jack Smoke Jackson sat on a tree stump, next to a phone booth, next to Lake Erie. Exactly where Max said he’d be. He was old but sturdy and didn’t look up from his crossword puzzle when the bus arrived.
Everyone not catatonic disembarked and walked unsurely toward Jack Smoke Jackson, except for Whip, who kept the bus running in case it was some kind of trap.
“Mr. Smoke Jackson? We need to speak with Oz, please,” Zoë said.
Jack Smoke Jackson took his time looking up. “Difficult or coarse. Five letters. Starts with r.”
Mars vocalized.
“Ruff is only four letters,” Jack Smoke Jackson lamented. “Oh.” His pencil went to work.
“Can we speak with Oz?” Zoë asked again.
“None of you,” Jack Smoke Jackson said, eyes on his puzzle.
Zoë and Barney got back on the bus and emerged with Jim between them.
Jack Smoke Jackson glanced up. “Yeah, he’s okay.”
They propped Jim up in the phone booth. “What number should we dial?” Barney asked.
“Dial zero for an operator, don’t you?” Jack Smoke Jackson said. “Then close the door.”
Zoë put the phone in Jim’s hand, held it up to his ear, dialed zero, and closed the door.
* * *
“Operator,” Oz answered like a busy news editor in the 1920’s.
Jim thawed.
The voice of the man he’d gotten killed unlocked his body and mind. He blinked and pushed his cheek tighter against the handset. “Oz?”
Excited voices rose outside the phone booth.
“Ah damnit. Jim? You didn’t waste your call already, did you? You only get one of these!”
“Where are you?”
“I’m dead, my boy, very dead indeed.”
“It’s . . . it’s my fault.”
“Of course it is! Nothing to get your socks snagged on, though.”
Jim was at a loss. He stammered into the receiver but couldn’t manage a coherent word.
“Alright, I’m minimizing it a little too much. Sure I would’ve liked to see you snuff Boyd, and I never did land Nurse Gail, but this is Cryptofauna. Even Operators have to go sometime. Nothing you did wrong. You don’t need my forgiveness, but I’ll give it just in case. You’re forgiven. There. The important thing is you don’t let it shock you into indecision. You made a judgment call. That’s what I’ve been twisting your nipples for this whole time. I want you making those tough decisions. Sure, this particular call killed me, but I was an old man. I’m just glad it had theatricality. High Rollers were talking about it for days!” Jim had to hold the handset at a distance as Oz roared with laughter, and he got the sense that there were things about Oz he would never understand. “It was all over the JRN. This is all part of the game, so don’t be a mope. You’ve been moping haven’t you?”
Jim shook his head as if Oz could see him.
“Do I hear a shake? Hmm, I’m gonna guess you have been moping, but that’s not quite it. Your voice is queer otherwise. Defeated, maybe.”
A feeling that had been tapping Jim on the shoulder, that had been whispering in his ear and laughing at him, that had made his stomach churn and spoiled his appetite was now facing him head-on: the specter of doubt.
I’m a janitor from Idaho.
Jim’s mind had been able to sequester this fact and prevent it from poisoning his attitude. Sooner or later though, something always seeped out, and this time it came in a flood. His old life had been mundane, but it was comfortable and free from consequence. Now he was mixed up in something wide-reaching and important, armed with a bag of dirt and a stray dog. And people were dying.
“He’s reached you, hasn’t he?” Oz asked.
“How did you know?”
“Your voice, Jim. Thin as Nero’s waistline. Boyd’s gotten to you, aggravated something inside your heart.”
“Doubt.”
“Ah. That one can be a bear.” Oz spoke more plainly than Jim had ever heard before. No charm, no pomp. “Listen up, ‘cause I can’t tie up the line for too long