There Is No Wheel Read online

  * * *

  The word didn’t quite register with Honey. It seemed to be from some foreign language, nonsense noises strung together.

  “Hostage?” she asked.

  Stinger turned toward her and held up a Dixie cup full of yellow fluid. She couldn’t tell what it was. Then, without warning, he threw it on her.

  “What the hell are you doing?” she yelled. She sniffed the drops of the yellow fluid that trembled in the light hairs of her arm. It didn’t smell like urine. It smelled nice, actually, like daffodils. Still, that was no excuse.

  Outside the hotel window, there was a noise like a train passing. The mirror on the wall began to tremble and dance.

  Stinger rose from the bed and pulled open the curtains. It was dark out, even the city lights were blotted, hidden behind a moving curtain of particles that pattered against the window like angry rain. Stinger was humming a constant “zzzzzz” noise through clenched teeth.

  Then, with a kung-fu shout, Stinger thrust his hand forward in a sharp punch. The window shattered. Honey shrieked as a cloud of bees swarmed in, engulfing her in a black and gold tornado.

  “Don’t struggle,” Stinger said. “You’ll make the bees nervous.”

  “AAAAAAAA!” Honey cried. “Oh God! Oh God! Please! Don’t!”

  Stinger grabbed her arm and dragged her from the bed. She closed her eyes as bees climbed over her face, their tiny feet tickling her eyelids, their flickering wings teasing her nostrils. She screamed, her mouth wide, and bees crawled on her tongue, and on the inside of her cheeks. Her whole body grew encased by the vibrating, crawling blanket. In utter terror, she fell silent and still, not even breathing. Slowly, the bees crawled from the inside of her mouth.

  “Bees are interesting creatures, don’t you think?” Stinger’s voice sounded far away, nearly lost under the drone of the swarm. “Quite orderly—one might even say civilized. They can communicate by dancing. Can you imagine what the world might be like if mankind relied on dance to communicate with one another? It’s their beautiful world. It’s not our world. They swim in an atmosphere of pheromones. Their music is the rumble of ultrasound. Their skies glimmer in ultraviolet. It’s like a parallel universe, in the same space as ours, where flowers have patterns and shapes invisible to us. For a bee, the air is crisscrossed by highways of scent, which stand out as clear and well marked as our modern roads. And your screams—the vibrations are heard by their entire body. Have you ever felt the subway rumble underneath your feet without actually being aware of the noise? Bees hear everything this way.”

  Honey could hold her breath no longer. She sucked in air through clenched teeth. Then, barely parting her lips, she whispered, “Please let me go.”

  “I’m impressed that you haven’t fainted,” said Stinger. “Back in 1964, girls were always fainting. You future women are made of stern stuff.”

  “This is crazy,” she sobbed.

  “Honey,” he said. “I’m dressed like a damn bee. We can discuss crazy if you really want.”

  “Please, please, please, get them off.” She felt like the bees on her eyes were drinking up her tears. By some miracle, it didn’t feel like any had stung her. “Please. I’m allergic to bees.”

  “Ironically,” said Stinger, “so was I.”

  * * *

  Mick had been a sickly youth. He was allergic to everything. He’d been beaten up regularly at school, until his grandmother had paid for judo lessons when he was fifteen. Suddenly, his small, almost girlish frame was no longer an invitation for beatings. In the span of a year, he’d gotten his black belt, and placed nine bullies flat on their backs, out cold. Alas, this only resulted in multiple suspensions and eventually he’d been kicked out of school.

  He’d helped his grandmother on the farm. Unfortunately, she’d kept bee-hives—they’d been at the farm for half a century, and the honey provided a steady income. But Mick had been hospitalized three times in the last year, and the cost of treating him exceeded the income the honey brought in. One day there was an article in the paper about a physician, Dr. Robert E. Eggers, who’d developed a radical new allergy treatment. His grandmother had used the last of her savings to see that Mick became one of Dr. Eggers’ patients.

  What a whirlwind of events—the experimental therapy, a mix of venom and radiation, had nearly killed Mick. In desperation, Robert had taken the comatose teen to the one place on the planet that had the equipment needed to save him—the Bee Hive, the Blue Bee’s cavernous secret headquarters.

  Mick came out of his coma stronger than ever, his muscles swelling and growing as he followed Robert’s training advice and secret pollen-based vitamin therapy. To his amazement, Mick possessed new senses, could smell things he hadn’t smelled before, and see in spectrums of light that had once been hidden. With his newly heightened sense of smell, it didn’t take long for him to identify Robert as the Blue Bee. Robert responded by presenting him with a costume and a Sting Gun on his eighteenth birthday. The amazing team of Blue Bee and Stinger was born.

  And in secret, far from the public eye, the private team of Mick and Robert found love.

  * * *

  As a child, Honey’s family had attended a church with a fire-and-brimstone pastor. Week after week, her young mind had been filled with dread of the torments of Hell. She’d endured restless, nightmare-plagued nights for years.

  None of her worst nightmares rivaled this.

  She was blind. The touch of bees on her eyelids glued her eyes shut with a force her strongest desires for light could never overcome. A mask of bees crawled over her face, sparing only a small circle around her nose. The bees on her clenched lips squelched her yearning need to scream or beg for mercy. The thought of bees swarming into her again left her throat Sahara dry, her tongue glued to the roof of her mouth. She could hear only the drone of a million wings, the sound traveling through her bones, as the bodies of bees burrowed into her ears.

  She no longer had any concept of up or down. The bees moved her, supporting her weight, carrying her along a lumpy, lurching carpet. The mass of the bees was unreal, like a thousand heavy woolen quilts piled upon her, entombing her. The heat boiled copious, fevered sweat from her entire body. She could feel—or perhaps imagine—a million tiny tongues licking at her moist skin.

  The mass of bees smelled vaguely of clover, yeast, and urine.

  Where were they taking her? Time was impossible to gage. Occasionally, she would hear distant, muffled noises. A gun shot? Stinger shouting? The dinging of elevator bells?

  She may as well have been trapped in a barrel of cement for all the sense she could make of what was happening.

  At last, after what might have been hours, the bees retreated from her ears. Cool air rushed against them, a whistling of wind.

  “He’ll love this,” Stinger said.

  The chill touch of the wind found her lips. The bees there had left.

  “Oh, God,” Honey said, sucking in air. “Oh God oh God oh God.”

  “From your profession, I wouldn’t have guessed you to be religious,” Stinger said.

  “Please,” she said. “Please don’t kill me.”

  “I can’t make any promises,” he said.

  “Please. Not like this. Not dressed in lingerie, wearing this make-up. Oh God, what will my parents think?”

  “One advantage of being an orphan,” said Stinger. “I never had any awkward conversations. If I’d had folks, they probably wouldn’t have been thrilled by my career choice. I’m sure your folks aren’t happy.”

  “M-my real name isn’t Honey,” she said. She remembered hearing in movies that it’s important to remind kidnappers that you were a real person. So, as surreal as it seemed to make conversation buried under a mound of bees, she continued: “My real name’s Barbara. I’m from Dayton, Ohio. I came here to be an actress and only do this to pay rent. I have a mother, a father, two sisters—they don’t know I’m a hooker. I don’t want to die and have them find out what I’ve been up to on the
evening news. Please, please, let me go.”

  “If you could see where you are, you’d be more careful with your words,” Stinger said.

  “You said you were a hero! A superhero! Why are you doing this? Why?”

  “Because heroes work for justice, right? Wrong. The Blue Bee, he had forty years. He could have broken me out of jail at any time. He ignored me. I did forty years hard time before making parole. The Blue Bee, he had money. Impossible, unimaginable wealth. He could have pulled strings. He could have hired attorneys. He was a master of disguise—he had alternate identities set up. He could have helped me, but he didn’t.”

  “I’m sorry,” Honey said.

  “He’s vanished, you know. The Blue Bee hasn’t seen action in forty years. I watch the papers.”

  “He might be dead,” Honey said. “How do you know he’ll come here? Even if he’s alive, he might be in a home by now. He’d be in his seventies.”

  “He’s alive,” said Stinger. “His secret identity—the obituary appeared years ago. But it had a code phrase in it, to let me know he’d assumed one of his cover identities. I just don’t know which one.”

  “Where . . . where are we? It feels like I’ve been carried around a lot? It sounds like were up high some place? Oh God. They’re crawling on my eyes. Please, please take them off my face at least. Please.”

  Stinger sighed. He hummed a little noise, deep in his throat, and the bees crawled away from her face and neck.

  She opened her eyes and looked down, to police lights flashing a hundred impossible stories away. She was hanging over open space, supported by a bridge of bees.

  The scream long suppressed tore from her lips, echoing in the canyons of the city below.

  “We’re on top of the Empire State Building, my little Fay Wray,” Stinger said. “It’s perfect. All the cops in the city are below us. My swarms have emptied the entire building. My bees are instructed to clog the air intakes of helicopters. No one’s getting up here without a Bee Wing.”

  Honey screamed again, until every last spoonful of air was gone. Then she filled her lungs and screamed some more.

  “Yeah,” said Stinger. “That’s the stuff. I bet they hear that down there. I wonder if they can get a close-up of your face? What they can do with TV cameras these days—amazing. I was a real science fiction fan back in 1964. This world astounds me. My wildest dreams couldn’t top it. Look at all those lights!”

  Honey fought to get control of her panic and her vertigo. Suddenly it wasn’t screams coming from her lips, but vomit. She hadn’t had any food all day, so only long strings of drooling acid shot from her lips. She spat, trying to clear the bitter taste from her mouth.

  She felt completely empty, hollow as a dry gourd. If the bees were to drop her now, she wouldn’t mind. She would float to earth on the winds, weightless as a leaf.

  “All screamed out?” Stinger asked. “That’s okay. I’m sure they’ve got plenty of footage by now.”

  Honey felt light-headed and dreamy. Her situation assumed a certain nightmarish logic. “What if . . . what if he doesn’t come by morning? Are you going to let me go? You can’t wait here forever.”

  “Honey,” he said. “I waited forty years. Blue Bee might be in Hawaii, for all I know. I’m prepared to give him time. We’ve got a lot of media below. With luck, it won’t take too long for him to hear about this.”

  “Do they even know I’m up here? I was covered by bees.”

  “Of course. Right now, I’ve created a ten-foot grid on the street below. It’s like a blackboard. My bees land in it and form messages. I’ve told them I have a hostage. I’ve told them not to try anything stupid. And I’ve told them I want the Blue Bee.”

  “W-won’t the bees get tired? What if they drop me? You’ll go back to prison.”

  “I’m never going back inside,” said Stinger. “I either escape this cleanly or die a bloody, violent death. Don’t worry about the bees getting tired. I coated you with enough pheromone to attract every bee in the state. Pound for pound, bees are much stronger than people. You’ve got, oh, maybe three, four tons of bees working to keep you from going plop prematurely.”

  “Prematurely? You don’t need to kill me at all. They know I’m up here. Put me someplace safe now. Please.”

  “Honey, you just don’t get it. There’s a rhythm to these things, a ritual. If only you could have seen the Blue Bee at his peak, you’d understand. The way he’d swoop in, graceful and acrobatic, snatching the damsel in distress away from the teeth of danger at the last possible second . . . it was impossible not to love him, in those moments. He made me feel like he was something more than human.” Stinger closed his eyes and smiled.

  “You’re putting me in danger so your ex-boyfriend can save me?”

  “You . . . or me, possibly. If there’s anyone in the world who can find a way out of this for me, it’s him. My life has become a sort of horrible trap from which I can’t see any graceful escape. But the Blue Bee . . . he always escaped in the end. He came out on top no matter what. He’d said there was no problem in the world that couldn’t be solved by finding the right bad guy to sock in the jaw.”

  “Don’t you see that you’re the bad guy? If he’s even still alive, if he’s not in a wheel chair somewhere, you’re the bad guy he’s going to sock. Don’t you want to be one of the good guys?”

  “I’ve spent forty years in prison,” Stinger said, his voice hard and cold. “I was a young man with a pretty face, half-crippled from my injuries. You can’t imagine what I endured. I had plenty of time, more than enough time, to stop feeling like a hero, and see myself for what I really am. You learn a lot of things about yourself inside.”

  “You can’t . . . you can’t let these things haunt you,” said Honey.

  “That’s the damn point of prison!” Stinger said, waving his Sting-gun for emphasis. “The whole system is designed to haunt you. Some folks, maybe, have it easy. Maybe they’re in for a crime they didn’t commit. But you know, it’s an awful, awful thing to be in for a crime you’re guilty of. I did kill Mr. Mental. I don’t know that I could call him innocent, but maybe he was harmless. He was play-acting in a game he didn’t understand. And so was I. I was a man-boy caught up in a fantasy I confused with reality, playing dress-up, living like every damn day was Halloween. I had my God-given mission to save this world from crazy guys in funny hats. What a little self-righteous prick I was.”

  Honey blinked away tears. She could tell from the tone of Stinger’s voice he would never, ever, let her leave the top of the building alive.

  Her tears made the world wavy. All the city lights were surrounded by halos. From the corner of her eye, a shimmering, dark shape raced toward her with breathtaking speed.

  Though she’d never seen it before, she knew instantly: It was the Bee-Wing. It was a kind of dark-blue glider with a pair of silver wings buzzing at the rear. A long, silver rope hung from the glider, ending in a bar, from which hung a big, beefy man in a navy blue suit. He wore a domino mask and a bowler with a golden BB affixed to it. The Bee-Wing flashed by, blowing her hair, and the masked man extended his arm as he sliced through the air toward her. With a horrible, rib-crushing impact, his shoulder caught her in the belly, folding her in two, draping her over him, as they hurtled upward.

  “Oh no you don’t!” Stinger yelled.

  As spots danced before her eyes, Honey could barely make out a silver lasso flashing upward, snaring the Blue Bee’s ankle. Suddenly, their upward flight jerked to a halt as the Bee-Wing ripped away. They cut a rapid arc through space, back over the observation deck. Blue Bee grabbed her, yanking her to his chest, curling up to shield her as they smacked onto the concrete deck at sixty miles an hour. She was flung away on the impact, skidding across the concrete, crashing into the steel safety bars at the edge. Dazed, she sat up, propping herself against the bars. She looked down at her naked legs and arms. She looked like she’d been sliding across a cheese grater. Worse, her lingerie was ripped, nearly
gone, and dozens of bees covered her belly, struggling for freedom, their stingers impaled in her milky skin.

  A dozen feet away, the Blue Bee rolled over to his back. His blue suit was torn, revealing a steel exoskeleton and padding over thin limbs. He coughed, sending a spray of blood into the air. Stinger walked toward him, swapping out his Sting-gun for a gleaming black pistol.

  “Mick,” the Blue Bee gasped.

  “Don’t you . . . ,” Stinger said, his voice choking. “Don’t you dare. You son-of-a-bitch.”

  “Mick, we—”

  “Shut up!” Stinger took aim.

  Then, the Bee-Wing, its auto pilot set to return to Blue Bee, swooped in with an angry drone and caught Stinger in the throat, lifting him, throwing him backward, right over the edge of the building. Suddenly the bees went crazy, swarming down in a tornado formation.

  With a whir of gears, the Blue Bee sprung to his feet and rushed toward Honey. From the inner folds of his jacket, he pulled out a glass bottle with a spray top and began soaking Honey with the blue fluid inside.

  “Don’t panic, Miss,” he said. “I see he’s misted you with an attractant. This will negate it. No bee will want to come within ten feet of you with this pheromone.”

  “I’ve been stung!” Honey said. “Oh god! I’m allergic! I can feel my throat closing! I’m going to die!”

  “Calm down,” the Blue Bee said. He sat the bottle of repulse-pheromones next to her, then reached into his jacket again, producing a syringe and a flashlight. “I’m a doctor.”

  He jammed the syringe into her thigh and pushed the plunger. Then he clicked on the flashlight. Instantly, in the middle of the night, Honey developed a sunburn.

  “UV radiation activates my special anti-venom,” the Blue Bee said, his voice calm and reassuring despite the blood dripping from his mouth. She could see now how thin and frail he truly was. His skin was as wrinkled and thin as crumpled newspaper, stained with brown and blue ink. “This won’t merely save you from your present stings. It’s a permanent cure. It would have made me a thousand times richer than I already was if the government had ever learned to appreciate the side-effects.”