Through thud’s eyes and ears the telepathic worm had experienced their flight across much of Europe and then Central America, always - they feared - with the outriders of ZOXXON hot on their heels. Through thud’s thoughts she had felt him tiring, ever more closed to all but staying one step ahead of pursuers that may or may not exist and that they’d never see until it was too late. None of which makes for a happy holiday.
All they knew for sure was this: ZOXXON International, perhaps the world’s most powerful and ruthless corporate empire, claimed Cressida as their own property. They had begun a legal challenge for her, and whether through panic or just through thud’s intense fear of being at the centre of a potential media circus our heroes had taken to the hills. Shrugging off their friends’ pledges of help they fled from the Lair Legion’s Christmas celebrations, leaving only tracks in the Shropshire snow as Wilton Manor popped briefly out of this reality altogether.
They had barely stopped moving since. First was a skulk through Cornwall, where they stuck out like a sore thumb, what with thud’s Scottish accent and his parents not having been blood relatives. Britain quickly became too small, and they hit Austria before drifting through the Ljubljana suburbs, squatting in a series of crumbling apartment blocks. When Cressida decided they’d spent too much time hanging around Metelkova they set off for Poland, where they earned a crust giving informal lessons on English slang to tradesmen bound for the UK. Or Scottish slang, more accurately. It always gave thud great satisfaction to hear one student describe another as a pure radgey wee bam, likes.
Then there had been three weeks touring the Baltic states as drum tech for a Latvian metal band, stuck in a tiny van with a pack of sweaty Hell’s Angel types, going slowly deaf, living on a diet of salt beef and awful lager, wary of touching the rusting walls for fear of the multicoloured algae sustained by the condensation and soupy atmosphere.
But it hadn’t all been good times. Lisbon should have been fun, but by then both were jaded from the road. There was no turning back, so they plunged onwards; first to Brazil, which proved a mistake, then hopping through Colombia, Panama, up to Honduras and finally to the tiny and insanely corrupt republic of Monte Fiasco. This last had been an unspoilt paradise until the locals struck oil, whereupon ZOXXON had moved in and now effectively ran the show. Feeling more exposed than ever, psionic cestode and shambling ape stowed away on the first boat out and jumped ship at the earliest landfall.
And now?
Now was a sticky afternoon in Key West. Fine, it was a roundabout route, but for the last while they’d certainly been creeping ever closer to... well, not Parodopolis, that’s for sure. There were too many people there that thud wasn’t in a hurry to see. Not just ZOXXON, and not just The Law - he couldn’t guess at what Dancer or Dream or anyone else might have to say about the unannounced midnight flit, but they’d be quite right to say it.
In short, thud was less than thrilled to be back in the United States and quite annoyed to be in Key West in particular. Just for a start it was too damn hot. Further, while it had been child’s play to evade Customs and Immigration he was powerless against the unrelenting onslaught of Hemingway-themed tourist experiences. He found himself standing between the Papa Tours meeting point and a stall offering huge false beards and comedy pipes. Ordinarily he’d have been pleased by the town’s vibrancy; most anywhere else he’d be happy to sidestep the knots of Zeku cultists, the conch sellers and the surprising preponderance of people in absurdly loud Hawaiian shirts, but there was some indefinable thing wrong with the place that made him wish he was anywhere else.
No, wait. That was the same as he felt everywhere else.
So the bustle went on around and behind as dull thud just stood, blinking in sunlight, looking beat-up and hungry. Cressida sighed, like she was sickening for something. Slowly, methodically, her host patted down his pockets and located a small clutch of coins, some of which were bound to be American. The first thing to do anywhere was lose oneself in the local subcultures and make some connections. Cressida needed to eat and thud needed batteries for his Walkman. When critically low on funds that usually meant being able to call in some favours. Which meant first making some acquaintances. Which meant hitting the bars. Whatever the problem, there was a place for beer in the solution.
He walked east along humid palm-lined boulevards scanning for a likely spot. In another time all this idiosyncratic architecture would have been a novelty, something new and exciting to plummet from, but the last time he’d flung himself off a building for fun had been the town hall in Gdansk. That was an ocean ago. Just as it was an age since he’d used his power to teleport straight up or Cressy hers to change a nearby object into something that rhymed with it. Meantime he ran through the latest evolution of his cover story. Tonight he would be Bernard, outwardly a misunderstood misanthrope but with a deep-buried heart of gold, wry wit and poetic soul teased out only by acts of great kindness, such as someone else buying him drinks all night. There was no reason it would work better here than it had anywhere else, but while Key West was lively there wasn’t a big garage rock scene and that left him pretty much devoid of bankable social skills beyond drinking and complaining. He picked a doorway, gave his armpits a cursory sniff and went in.
It was a cramped basement bar, low ceiling, a welcome break from the heat and glare. There were a few customers, but none under seventy. Even so, a glance at the jukebox and the restroom graffiti confirmed that this would be good networking grounds later on. Like every bar in town it was wall-to-wall Hemingway. The bar was old. The men drinking there were old. Once they had been strong. Now they were old men, and soon they would rest. The men would rest, but first they would drink. They did not know why they drank. The men would drink in the bar, the bar made of old wood, good wood, strong wood, wood sawn by strong men who now were old. The men -
"Will you stop doing that?" said thud.
~~Sorry,~~ said Cressida. ~~When in Rome.~~
Photos of the great man and memorabilia of dubious provenance were all around. One wall had a bullfight mural, another harpoons and coils of tarred rope. Even the cocktails were Papa-themed, from The Gin Also Rises all the way through A Farewell To Balance. thud passed on these and sat in the corner under a stuffed marlin, content for now with a beer and a book.
The dustjacket promised a collection of Inspector Maigret, but thud had discovered too late that this was either mix-up or outright fraud. The book turned out to be Twinkle Twinkle Little Murder by L.M. Delafield, the only mystery novel by this enigmatic, reclusive writer marginally better known for existential SF. It opened with a woman found beheaded in a locked room. Delafield being Delafield, that was where it departed utterly from any conventions of the genre and spun off into a Dexedrine-fuelled treatise on solipsistic nominalism. The narrator was unmasked on page two as both culprit and victim; over the remaining four hundred pages she wrestled with how, why and whether existence itself was inherently futile before deciding she wasn’t honestly that bothered.
The critical response had been similarly tepid. Delafield never wrote again, vanishing completely from public life in 1973. After his own year out of sight it was close to being the only possession thud hadn't traded for food, information or transport and he was bloody well going to finish it one way or another. He still entertained hopes of returning it to Mumphrey's library before the old boy noticed it was gone. He also hoped Mumph wouldn't mind him having used the flyleaf to jot down important details of B.A.L.D.'s Slovenian gem-running operation. Now defunct.
Heh.
With a titanic effort he managed one and a half pages and Cressida another twelve lines before both glazed over. thud marked the page with a valueless Fiascan banknote and dropped the book into his rucksack. He gazed around the bar waiting for someone to turn up or for something interesting to happen. This had long ceased to be the life of adventure and thrills that the Littlest Hobo had led him to expect. He hadn't rescued any blind orphans recently, nor reunited grandmothers with their long-lost grandkids after a silly family feud. None of that doggy goodness. Indeed, there had been a weekend stuck in Swindon where capture and dissection seemed like a pretty attractive proposition. It was time to do something fun.
A poster behind the bar caught his eye. He walked over and peered at it. Key West, it said. Hey, that's here, thought thud. And that's two days from now. And the event... the world’s hundred hardest rockin’ cover bands; a large beer supply; put them together in a room and you have the seventh annual Punk And New-wave Tribute Symposium. A hawt rawk chik brandished a guitar; the caption said "get into my PANTS!"
Gooooaaallll.
NEXT: dull thud goes to see some bands. He enjoys himself hugely and there are no complications of any kind, no sir. That’s dull thud #10: Dead Air, arriving sooner than you think.
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