Down And Dirty

"You couldn't have known he'd become a carrier."

"My point exactly. What's done is done. Let's get on with the future."

"If there is one."

"We'll make it happen."

"How did you end up so optimistic and well adjusted?"

"I'm too dumb to be otherwise."

All the King's Horses

VI

The big corrugated metal garage door rattled overhead as it slid back in its tracks. The opener was old and noisy, but it still did its job. Dust and daylight filtered into the underground bunker. Tom turned off the flashlight and hung it on a hook in the wooden beam supporting the hard- packed dirt wall. His palms were sweaty. He wiped them on his jeans and stood regarding the metal hulks before him.

The hatch gaped open on his oldest shell, the armored Beetle. He'd spent the last week replacing vacuum tubes, oiling the camera tracks, and checking the wiring. It was as ready as it would ever be.

"Me and my big fucking mouth," Tom said to himself. His words echoed through the bunker.

He could have rented a truck, a big semi maybe. Joey would have helped. Back it up to the edge of the bunker, load the shells, get them over to Jokertown the easy way. But no, he had to go and tell Dutton he'd fly them over. No way the joker would ever believe him now if the damn things got delivered by UPS.

He looked at the open hatch, tried to imagine crawling into that blackness and sealing the door behind him, locking himself into that metal coffin, and he could feel the bile rise in the back of his throat. He couldn't.

Only he had no choice, did he? The junkyard wasn't his anymore. A crew would be arriving in less than three weeks to start clearing away all the shit that had accumulated here in the last forty years. If the shells were still lying around when they showed up with their bulldozers, the jig was seriously up.

Tom forced himself to walk forward. No big deal, he told himself. The shell was okay, he could get it across the bay, he'd done it a thousand times. So he had to do it one more time, that's all. One more time and he was free.

All the kings horses and all the king's men…

Tom bent at the knees, grasped the top edge of the hatch, and took a long, slow breath. The metal was cold between his fingers. He ducked his head and pulled himself inside, swinging the hatch closed behind him. The clang rang in his ears. It was pitch-dark inside the shell, and chilly. His mouth had gone dry, and he could feel his heart shuddering away in his chest.

He fumbled in the darkness for the seat, felt torn vinyl upholstery, squirmed toward it. He might as well be in a cave at the center of the earth, or dead and buried, it was so black. Faint lines of light leaked in around the outside of the hatch, but not enough to see by. Where the fuck was the power switch? The newer shells all had fingertip controls built into the armrests of the seat, but not this old bucket, oh, no. Tom groped in the darkness over his head and jammed his fingers painfully on something metal. Panic stirred inside him like a frightened animal. It was so fucking black, where were the lights?

Then, suddenly, he was falling.

The vertigo crashed over him like a wave. Tom grabbed the armrests hard, tried to tell himself it wasn't happening, but he could feel it. The darkness tumbled end over end. His stomach roiled, and he bent forward, cracking his forehead sharply against the curving wall of the shell. "I'm not falling!" he screamed loudly. The words rang in his ears as he fell, helpless, locked in his armored casket. His hands thrashed madly, fumbling against the wall, sliding over glass and vinyl, throwing switches everywhere as he gasped for breath.

All around him the TV screens woke to dim life.

The world steadied. Tom's breathing slowed. He wasn't falling, no, look out there, that was the bunker, he was sitting in the shell, safe on the ground at the bottom of a hole, that was all, he wasn't falling.

Fuzzy black-and-white images crowded the screens. The sets were a mismatch of sizes and brand names, there were obvious blind spots, one picture was locked into a slow vertical roll. Tom didn't care. He could see. He wasn't falling.

He found the tracking controls and set his external cameras to moving. The images on the screen shifted slowly as he sca

"Okay," he a

The shell rocked slowly from side to side, lifted maybe an inch off the ground, then settled back with a thump.

Tom grunted. All the king's horses and all the king's men, he thought. He summoned all his concentration, tried again to lift off. Nothing happened.

He sat there, grim-faced, staring unseeing at the washedout black-and-white shapes on his television screens, and finally he admitted the truth. The truth he'd hidden from Joey DiAngelis, Xavier Desmond, and even from himself.

His shell wasn't the only thing that was broken.

For twenty-odd years he'd thought himself invulnerable once behind his armor. Tom Tudbury might have his doubts, his fears, his insecurities, but not the Turtle. His teke, nurtured by that sense of invincibility, had grown steadily greater, year after year after year, so long as he was inside his shell.

Until Wild Card Day.

They'd taken him out before he even knew what was happening.

He'd been high over the Hudson, answering a distress call, when some ace power had reached through his armor as if it didn't exist. Suddenly he'd felt sick, weak. He had to fight to keep from blacking out, and he could feel the massive shell stagger in midflight as his concentration wavered. A moment before his vision blurred, he'd glimpsed the boy in the hang glider slicing down from above. Then there'd been a tremendous loud pop that hurt his eardrums, and the shell had died.

Everything went. Cameras, computers, tape deck, ventilation system, all of it burned out or seized up in the same split second. An electromagnetic pulse, he'd read later in the papers, but all he'd known then was that he'd gone blind and helpless. For a moment he was too shocked to be afraid, punching wildly at his fingertip controls in the darkness, frantic to get the power back on.

He'd never even realized that they'd napalmed him. But with the napalm the weakness came again. He lost it then; the shell began to tumble, plunging toward the river below. This time he did black out.

Tom pushed the memories away and ran his fingers through his hair. His breathing had gone ragged again, and he was covered with a fine sheen of sweat that made his shirt cling to his chest. Face it, he told himself, you're terrified.

It was no use. The Turtle was dead, and Tom Tudbury, he could juggle bars of soap and robot heads with the best of them, but no way was he going to lift a couple of tons of armor plate into the air. Give it up. Call Joey, dump the old shells into the bay, write it off. Forget the money, what's eighty thousand dollars? Not worth his life, that's for sure, Steve Bruder was going to make him rich anyway. The waters of New York Bay were wide and dark and cold, and it was a long way to Manhattan. He'd lucked out once, the goddamned shell had exploded as it fell to the bottom of the river, must have been the napalm or the water pressure or something, a freak accident, and the shock of the cold water had somehow revived him, and he'd struggled to the surface and let the current take him, and somehow, somehow, he'd made it to the shore in Jersey City. He should have died.