Into The Looking Glass
The Idols contestants came in with brooms and pitchforks that were bussed in from Home Depot by the producers. They didn't miss a trick.
The lot was a garish affair. Some dressed in costumes, some wearing odd layers of indescribable fashions, some in gang banger jeans and even one with a hand puppet. But all of them had large white papers pinned to their torsos with black numbers assigned to them.
"Gee," Jason blinked and focused again on the group. "That's a beautiful deck of playing cards." He shook his head and looked again. The expression in his face faded and he griped Mike's shoulder. "Do you see him! He's here! The assassin!"
"Where?" Alarmed, Mike rose out of his chair. "Describe him."
"He's a machine! An automaton with a stubby nose and a wooden expression. It's him! It's my doppelganger—my nemesis!"
"Where?"
"He's the one wearing a wire." Jason pulled out his gun and handed it to Mike. "Take this and get Simon to the security booth. I'll hold them off here."
Mike didn't have to be told twice, but Simon did. But when Mike showed him the gun, he decided to cooperate. They finally retreated ducking out of the hall and into a side corridor followed by their camera teams.
Jason focused on his adversary and stepped out in front of the mob purposefully. Their singing died in their throats as they witnessed his crazed eyes.
"It was you!" Jason advanced on the Idols who fell slightly back and parted in surprise. "It was always you!"
The macabre marionette centered within the mob of Idols turned slowly to face off with him; his expression revealing nothing; his eyes fixed open, missing nothing; wired for action. And the Idols split to either side revealing his chiseled form.
"I was created to defeat you!" Pinocchio's piping voice popped out. Instantly Pinocchio's nose grew an inch.
"What?" Jason snorted. "A small lost wooden boy, my double?"
"Hey, you took the little red Paula pills and fell down the rabbit hole. Not me!"
"So…, what? Are you going to try and garrote me with your string? It's been tried!"
"I'm alive! I'm alive! I don't need any strings!" The nose extended another inch. "I have invisible strings!" Another inch of nose popped out. "Okay, we all have our strings attached!" The nose continued to grow.
"You're saying I don't have free will?" Bourne's hand flashed forward and grabbed the offending nose and jerked it toward him. The nose kept growing out of Pinocchio's head longer and longer.
"Give me back my nose!" the piping nasal voice cried out before it morphed into the rest of the broom.
Jason wheeled the staff around and cracked four Idols heads in succession, the broom a whirl of force and contention. The contention seemed to be run like hell from the hallucinating mad man.
Idols contestants stormed the side doors in full retreat leaving five gang bangers in their wake wired with head gear. The broom didn't faze their advance.
The Latino gang members lined up side by side to take him. An assortment of weapons were held in their hands. A chain, a bat, knuckle rings, ninja star, and a pair of num chucks. Their black tee-shirts and baggy blue jeans were uniform among them. All of them wore red bandannas in some fashion on their bodies—tucked in a pocket or tied around an arm, head or neck. But the jeans riveted Bourne's attention.
He shook his head and focused again on the baggy pants, thinking he was hallucinating once again. The pant waists slung low under the cheeks of the Latino gang and revealed a lovely assortment of boxers. With every movement they were in danger of falling down.
"You all came dressed to kill?" Jason side stepped right toward the end of the line.
"We luke for Simon," the leader with the bat spoke.
"Luke? Oh…, look." Bourne edged more to the right toward the now deserted judges' table and the opposite exit. "He's not here. Uh, you'll have to come back later." He could swear his nose just grew an inch.
"You protect him, no?"
"No." Jason inched away as his nose inched outward. Why was his nose getting longer?
"You lie. I can see it in your face, mon." The leader slapped the bat against his hand. "You lie to us. You lie to yourself. You must face the truth. The truth of the bat."
"I can't." The nose grew another inch.
"Where ez Simon?!" The bat lifted menacingly.
"Truth? You can't handle the truth!" Jason swept the broom up with his right hand, blocked the bat, while his left shot out and grabbed Paula's enormous water bottle and thunked bat man across the head.
Chain man slung the chain around the broom end, but Bourne was prepared and yanked him forward into the path of the ninja star that was aimed right at his nose. The star buried into the neck of the chain man and he went down.
num chucks and knuckle rings closed in fast behind ninja man but Jason dropped his weapons and twisted ninja man's arm behind his back to use him as a human shield against num chucks and knuckles.
His human shield's legs buckled under the assault, so he shoved him hard against num chucks and let him go to grab Chuckle's wrist. The numb went into the wrist and the antagonist unwillingly chucked the weapon.
Jason cracked an elbow into Chuckle's head but he crumpled into him, falling over ninja man with Knuckles pressing in from behind. As he fell back under the weight of Chuckles, he reached over to yank Knuckles' pants down. Knuckles tripped over his cool baggies and fell in a tangled mess. Jason levered Chuckles to the side and aimed a hard kick to Knuckles head and knocked him out.
When he rose from the tangled bodies strewn around him, a struggling ninja man was reaching toward the bat, so Jason mercifully booted his head too.
His stubby nose, back to normal size, flared with each breath as he sized up the damage. Chain man's blood spread over the floor in a slippery pool of gore. His dead eyes stared up from a half severed neck. He backed away from the horror, slipping slightly on the blood.
In the waking silence of the battle his attention shifted to the double doors. Distant sirens screamed their arrival. His eyes went to the surveillance cameras mounted discreetly behind the one way mirrored bulbs and he started to move quickly toward the exit, but stopped to take bat man's radio and head gear off his ear.
He found the security room with about a dozen crew members crawling up and down the hall with equipment, trailing cables and light stands. The room sat tucked away on the second floor behind the central stage and hosted a bank of monitors with four-way split screens.
Mike had Simon and the security team sitting at the bank of monitors under gunpoint and he waved Jason over to his side.
"I'm Mike Rowe and we're back with Dirty Jobs. We just saw an incredible battle take place over the security cameras and the Radio City Music Hall was kind enough to download the footage for us. So how dirty are you?"
"I'm not exactly a morning person after I kill someone. You better take that camera out of my face, Troy!" Jason's attention focused back on Mike who had been waving the gun about expressively. "Give me the damn gun!"
"Are you hurt?" Mike put the gun in his hands. "There's blood on your hands."
"The human body contains a little less than one and a half gallons of blood, Mike." Jason grimly tucked the gun away in his coat pocket. "That's why I wear black. It doesn't show." He turned back to the camera man. "I mean it, Troy!"
"Uh, well, okay. Maybe we'll pick up on the dirt a bit later, Troy. So what are we doing here in this security room, Jason."
"Well, we're going to download the dirt on Simon's producers. They were plotting in the back of the theater about 11:15 this morning." Jason looked to the sudden activity in the main monitor. "We better hurry. The police are on their way now."
Faint whistles blew as New York's finest rushed the doors and surrounded the gory scene. Behind them came Ben Bailey and his camera crew. Ben looked very angry. Behind the crew came a mob of American Idol hopefuls led by Ryan Seacrest. They all looked angry.
"Hey, isn't that Ben Bailey from Cash Cab?" Simon leaned forward in his chair. "What the bloody hell is he doing here?"
"Focus, here!" Bourne yelled. "Find the footage now!" His gun whipped out and pressed against the sweating security guy's temple. "Or, by God, I'll show Mike here just how disgusting your brains look on him!"
The Security guard knew when to keep his mouth shut and search for the footage. Seeing he was in full compliance, Jason lowered his gun again and felt quite disgusted with himself. His oppressive mood infused the room with tension.
As the security man worked they watched the police block off the main theater and shove the mob back into the hall corridors. The mob, led by Ben Bailey, did a super sneak up through the mezzanine over the main lobby and around the other side of the theater, searching for the Dirty Jobs crew. The trail of stalkers stretched all the way around the theater corridors, up over the lower balcony, down through the other corridor and out into the street. And the mob was still coming.
When the security man found and downloaded the footage into Jason's phone, Bourne had returned to his cool demeanor. "How close are they?" Jason asked as he furiously worked the menu of his phone.
"They're still searching the ground floor," Simon supplied. "They're half way here."
"What are you doing?" Mike asked.
"Saving Simon," Jason responded. "I'm uploading our theater movie to CNN and You TUBE. When the Idols find out what the producers are up to, they'll turn on each other."
"How long will that take?"
"This is New York where everyone's plugged in." He ended the phone call. "When the message gets out, then we get out. Until then, we go up."
"Why up?"
"I always go up. It's my motif. Look, we can't go down. That's toward hell and about 400 people. I was just there."
"We can't go up," Simon interrupted. "The line is diverging. The gang leaders are cutting off our retreat!" His finger pointed to the monitors showing three separate lines climbing up above them into the third floor corridors.
"What are we going to do?" Mike asked.
"What I do best—create a little diversion of our own." Jason almost smiled as he pulled out the gang banger's radio.
"I got Simon," He said in Spanish. "He's trapped on the balcony of the third floor."
"Wha's up? You know I can't un'erstan' that Mexicano crap!" The voice crackled from the speaker.
"I have found thees Simon," Jason tried again. "He's in de balcony on thees floor número three."
"The upper mezzanine?"
"Si." Jason watched the three prongs of the advancing army turn and head toward the other side of the theater. "Time to move."
Jason pointed the crews toward the corner stairwell and hustled the four security men out of the room. He collected their tasers that Mike had thoughtfully left him and proceeded to zap the computer stacks one by one until the entire bank of monitors had gone dark.
It cheered him considerably.
As Jason headed toward the roof, he automatically cataloged the players positions in his head. There seemed to be an endless butt load of them.
