“ ‘Betrayed’ you?” said X-Man from his workbay, his eyes still closed. Apparently someone had been listening to Mr. Piltdown after all.
“Interesting wording, Festus.” He chuckled. “You sound like a lover scorned. Of course…that’s exactly what everyone said actually happened, now isn’t it?”
Festus was crossing the distance to X-Man’s workbay and reaching for the weapons in his utility pouches before I could intervene. X-Man barked the words “Arms and armor!” and with the snap and stench of gunpowder he faced the Flying Squirrel in a battle stance and wrapped in the gleaming black armor of a fifteenth-century Benin warrior, mace in one hand and lance in the other.
“You filthy-mouthed carpetbagger!” said the Squirrel. “I’ll beat the black off you!”
“I’m not your sidekick, Festy.” Kareem laughed. “You won’t be beating off anything around me!”
Suddenly there was a deafening CRACK, and a ten-foot-high wall of blinding white ice crisped into existence between the two would-be combatants.
“I vudn’t touch zat if I vere you, Frau Doktor,” said Iron Lass, her white shortsword Grendelsmuter pointing toward the barrier she’d just constructed. “Unt you needn’t vorry about melting or mess, since ze vall’s at least vun hundret dekrees below zero. When all ziss nonsense is done, I’ll turn it into steam unt be done viss it. Unt I suggest you get a new Mind Vistle as soon as possible, ja?”
She turned back to her bickering fellow F*O*O*Jsters. “Now, shut up unt get back to vurk, you two, or I’ll put you bose in briefs I’ll make ze same vay I made zat vall.”
Iconflict
Tell you suh’m, Doc…gonna be some big changes when I get on that F*L*A*C,” said the X-Man, standing in his workbay behind the ice wall.
After my warning to him and Mr. Piltdown that I’d immediately place a call to the F*L*A*C if there were ever again a hint of violence between them inside the Hyper-Potentiality Clinic, Kareem launched into a fifteen-minute lecture to me on why he should not be made to remain in therapy when he should have been investigating full-time the “suspicious” death of Hawk King.
But finally both his eyes and his mouth were shut, his armor was gone, and his body was perfectly still, back in its uniform of white shirt and black suit and tie.
I was very conscious how intensely dry my mouth was, probably because Iron Lass must have sucked all the moisture out of the room’s air to make so much ice. Licking my lips to keep them from cracking and wishing I had not only a psychemotional but an epidermal balm, I told him, “You sound very confident about your chances of winning, Kareem.”
“It’s not a matter of confidence, Doc. It’s allies. It’s strategy. It’s having done the due diligence.” He breathed in deeply, let it out in a long rasp as if from the bottom of his soles. “Legs and feet.”
Like a prairie sky coning into twin tornados, dust and shadow condensed in front of me into two columns. Supple muscles puffed up like Ball Park franks, feet arching and toes curling inside golden sandals whose straps wrapped themselves like snakes around the calves of the disembodied legs.
Kareem opened his eyes, inspecting his work. “And it doesn’t hurt being up against a Ku Klux Klown like the Flying Fart. He really thinks he can get more than two percent of the electorate onside? That old allosaurus is probably the most hated member of the F*O*O*J—and not just by the public, I’m talking about F*O*O*J members themselves here.”
“If he’s no threat to your candidacy, why are you even talking about him?”
“Because even the idea of that filthy old fascist becoming the DOO is offensive to me. Nothing but a northern cracker. A caviar cracker. A canapé. He’s everything that’s wrong with the F*O*O*J. He’s—you know what this man is? The perfect metaphor for him is that ice wall right there. A cold, white barrier too tall to go over, and lethal to the touch.”
He closed his eyes, tilted his head back slightly.
“Now, what we should’ve been doing, especially after the end of the War, is using the power of the F*O*O*J to clean this country up for real—and not going after freaks in tights, either, not that there’re many of them on the outside of the F*O*O*J these days, anyway.”
“But how do you think that—”
“Hold on a minute.” He concentrated, closed his eyes. “Pelvis.”
Condensing into existence atop the two legs in three-dimensional block letters was the word PELVIS. It wobbled, fell to the floor, shattered.
The X-Man opened his eyes. “Damn it,” he growled. “Khaibtu kher.” The shards popped! into dust, and then even the dust disappeared. “Look, Doc, I’ve gotta concentrate on this—”
“Sounds to me like you were just about to say something rather important about what you feel is wrong with your organization.”
He sighed. “First of all, it’s not ‘my’ organization. The organization is nothing but a bunch of mercenaries in rainbow lingerie. Decades of taxpayer money funneled into DOD contracts for overseas ultraviolet ops or HUD contracts to ‘stabilize’ inner cities? Which it has always failed to do? What is that?
“F*O*O*J headquarters are right here on the West Coast, but where was the F*O*O*J during the maki epidemic when the DIA and the Office of Naval Intelligence were shipping in coelacanth-weed to sell to Southern California gang-bangers to finance their terrorist army to overthrow the government of New Atlantis? Suddenly every black or Hispanic neighborhood on the West Coast had a maki house on every block and enough automatic weapons to fight a war!” he railed in a single, indignation-powered breath. “Where was the kot-tam leadership of the F*O*O*J during all that? I’ll tell you where—Lying Squirrel was lunching with Kissinger and Reagan on how to destroy New Atlantis and Wally Watchtower
