Oh gods, no. Bill had to keep that wooden cyborg away. He encased her oversized legs in ice, just as he'd done with Joe's — but this was no normal flesh-and-blood person lumbering toward him. Tree broke through the ice with a casual step and kept right on coming, not even slowing down.
But . . . thankfully, she was just lumbering. She wasn't leaping at the 40 miles per hour she was capable of. Maybe the mind control interfered with her reaction time. Bill could hope. "Stay away!" he called out to her, and to punctuate the point, he swung at the open air in front of her and launched a softball-sized slug of ice directly into her. That trick had knocked down a kidnapper a moment ago; but against her hard, heavy wooden body it just shattered, completely ineffectual.
And now, even at her lumbering pace, Tree was upon him. She cocked back one enormous fist and started to swing at him. If that titanic wooden sledge hammer were to hit him, no amount of ice armor would protect him. He leaned as best he could to one side . . . and the blow sailed right past him. Tree hadn't even tried to compensate for his movement. Her reaction time really was impaired. Bill skated away on the icy ground and put some distance between them, if only to give him time to think.
But he didn't have much time to think. Those lumbering steps of hers were breaking through the thin ice coating the ground, giving each footfall a solid grip. The mind control . . . it had worked on her, even though she wasn't wearing one of those metallic bandanas. (Were those what the kidnappers had meant when they said Bill "wasn't ray shielded"?) Her brain, assuming she had a brain inside that wooden head, clearly wasn't fried when the machine had switched on at high power. Did her wooden cranium provide the "ray shielding" the kidnappers needed? Regardless, the mind control ray was still shining on its low power setting, still rendering Tree susceptible to the kidnapper's commands. If he could shut the machine off, Tree and Joe might both snap out of it.
If he could even figure out how to shut the machine off. He shrugged. If he couldn't figure it out, he could always smash it. That would shut it off.
Smash it? . . .
That machine was also the one-and-only thing that might conceivably give him back the all-too-fleeting omniscience he'd experienced. If it were destroyed, all hope of reattaining that beautiful awareness would be destroyed with it. He couldn't let that happen. He had to find another way out of this. There had to be a way to shut it off that left the machine intact. Maybe there was a power switch on the device, or a power cable he could yank out. It was worth a shot. He ice-slid over to the device and looked it over, then frowned. Nothing made sense. There were cables, sure, but they were as thick as a man's arm with no obvious means of unplugging them. Nothing looked like a switch. The kidnappers were probably controlling it remotely from some console or hand-held panel. He'd love to cart it off and give it to some tech-head who could reverse engineer it, except it was too big and bulky for him to lift.
And Tree was closing the gap on him again. Maybe he could slow her down with a different trick. She still had to breathe, right? Let's see how well she'd do with water up her nose. No thick bark would shield her from that. As he'd done once before, Bill made a flipping gesture with the fingers of one hand and fired a jet of water straight into her nose, or at least what passed for her nose on her wooden face. She grunted and flinched, but kept right on coming. No good. He'd better slide away to a different part of the warehouse once more.
In fact, playing keep-away seemed to be a damned useful strategy. Without her leaping toward him, he could keep sliding away faster than she could catch up with him. In theory, he could keep up this game of cat-and-mouse indefinitely, or at least until one of them got tired.
But even through the fog of the mind control, Tree must have realized this. Instead of trying to get up close and punch him again, she reached over to a stack of crates standing next to her, plucked the top crate off the stack with one hand, and then heaved the crate straight at him. Tree may have been lumbering, but that crate flew fast. Bill dropped to the floor as quickly as he could, and the crate streaked by just inches over his head. It impacted the wall behind him with a deafening crash; the machine parts within it spalled outward with a clatter akin to dropping an entire marching band's percussion section. That crate must have weighed close to a ton, yet she'd thrown it like a baseball pitcher might throw a fastball.
Dammit. Skating around wouldn't keep him safe any more. Bill's options were dwindling. And Tree was picking up another crate. He glanced over at the mind control device one more time, the source of his current peril and the only possible path back to his great enlightenment. No way could he get that machine out of here with Tree bearing down on him. No way could he stop Tree without stopping the machine. And no way could he stop the machine without wrecking it. Dammit! He'd have to flee the whole area if he wanted the machine to stay intact.
Then he looked back at Joe, still frozen in place. Fleeing now would mean handing Joe over to them, turning him into one of their lab rats. And that was no choice at all.
Dammit.
Tree cocked back her arm, holding another crate over her head, readying to throw it at Bill. Bill scowled. There's no other way. He skate-slid over to the mind control machine, and positioned himself directly between it and Tree. He waited, and tensed. Then, Tree heaved the crate straight at him. It came as fast as the first, but Bill was ready. He launched himself to one side the instant the crate left her hand. Right behind him, the crate crashed and smashed open just as loudly and violently as before.
But this time, it took the mind control device with it.
The dim light that had been coming from the machine vanished instantly. Sparks flew. Pieces broke loose and flung themselves backwards. Joe, and the other four victims, slumped with their eyes closed, passed out. Tree, too collapsed onto the ground unconscious. Bill let out a deep sigh, relieved but also deeply saddened.
"We've been compromised," the bullhorn boomed behind him. Bill turned. The kidnapper holding the bullhorn was pulling out a gun of his own. He glared at Bill. And at the five test subjects — including Joe.
"No witnesses!"
Send comments regarding this Web page to:
Roger M. Wilcox.
Roger M. Wilcox's main stories page
Roger M. Wilcox's Homepage