2004-04-04 - 11:56 p.m.

As Wheel leaned across the sun-dappled plank table in the courtyard of the Napoleon Bar, he heard the faint strains of a six-string guitar floating through the jasmine-heavy air. With his attention still riveted on the Estrodomite, he allowed the gentle music to pluck at the memestrings deep in the quiet idle 4.2% of his brain, bringing an old memory back like a forgotten song even while he faced down 'Pet in the thick syrupy noontime of the New Orleans:

The dust coated everything in Santo Poco. The few unbroken windows. The old Franciscan mission. The chickens in the street. The mug of cerveza plopped on the scarred unvarnished wood of the bar in front of Wheel. Brushing golden sands from the shoulders of his quetzal-and-lime patterned screaming yellow pancho, he reached thirstily for the dusty draught. The bartender pulled it back an inch.

"What're you here for, Ruedo? Your people already came through Mexico. The one with the endless pistols and the quiet asiático and the loud Irlandés with his dirigible rígido. They came to the Temple, and they left. Why are you here?!" The bartender, getting more agitated as he spoke, slammed the granulated beer down and leaned across the bar, glaring furiously at Wheel with his one good eye.

Wheel's eyes were invisible behind the shifting prismatic mirrors of his spectacles.

"Because they were looking in the wrong place." A grin. "I am looking for a man ... who calls himself ... Curare."

Even as he spoke, he heard the padding footsteps behind him, and as the last syllable slipped out like a whispered curse, he reached backwards and dropped off the stool, grabbing the thick belt of the thug behind him and yanking him forwards so the swing the baseball bat he was wielding met the skull of the one-eyed bartender. It connected with a hollow *thwock*, low and sweet, and the monocular camarero fell limp across his bar. Wheel immediately popped up and flicked his tongue across the Tajiri switch in his first bicuspid, spewing a haze of black mist into the eyes of the gamberro, sending him stumbling and screaming out into the wind-seared street of Santo Poco, where he collapsed.

He reached under his flapping aloha poncho and came up with a massive cobalt blue semi-automatic bullpup shotgun with barrels the size of the Chunnel, and began barking fire. Explosive rounds left exit wounds the size of casaba melons and sent pistoleros and toughs and surly drunks backflipping into walls and catapulting out windows, as the quiet bar shattered with a cacophonic roar of Magnificent Seven chaos. Finally Wheel racked the magazine and began methodically reloading the massive gun, as the overhead fan slowly spun, cooling a room full of dead men. His pancho split neatly down the middle and crawled down his arms, folding its fringes back into its seams until it had become a simple aloha shirt again. The Psychedelic Invisible sighed.

"And you had to do it the hard way."

He turned to reach for his miraculously unspilled beer when there was a faint scratch as the ancient jukebox, which in Wheel's estimation shouldn't have been working BEFORE he had blown a four-hundred pound Mexican into it, pulled a record down onto its turntable unbidden. A crackling hiss filled the dry, gunsmoked air of the little tavern, and Wheel heard measured bootsteps clocking on the packed dirt road outside.

A long shadow filled the saloon doorway. A tall figure in a black duster strode in, his face wreathed in shadows ... and every time it seemed he was about to step into the light ... it was like the shadows moved, just for him. Wheel raised an eyebrow.

"Curare."

The jukebox suddenly kicked into a high, savage burst of guitar music as the shadowed Doctor pulled twin triggerless revolvers from somewhere and Wheel brought up his shotgun. Hellfire ripped through the air as a smooth voice rolled over the guitar.

Wheel stepped up on a barstool and fired twice. Curare spun away, the dragonbreath shells tearing through the space he filled a moment ago, and fired a volley of whipcrack shots as he came out of his spin as neatly as a flamenco. Wheel kicked the stool away and cartwheeled one-handed over the bar, landing behind it. Curare's howling bullets blasted four-inch holes in the rear wall.

Curare smoothly leapt behind the bar, firing both pistols as he hit the ground rolling, and came up with his mystic guns leveled ... at nothing. His eyes flicked around the room and then widened for a moment as he pushed himself off the tiles, almost levitating up to his feet as a roar of gunfire tore apart the glazed floor where he had crouched a moment ago. There was a muffled curse as Wheel shimmered back into view, his light-bending Hawley device expended. As the shadowy, faceless doctor turned snake-fast, his pistols coming up again, Wheel dropped to one knee, bringing up his wristwatch.

Another rain of bullets spat from the Doctor's guns, but they gradually crawled to a halt as Wheel twisted the neowells knob on his watch, creating an aura of localized slowtime. The nattily-dressed agent of the Invisible grinned through the screen of high-caliber orichalcum shells, and as they clinked to the floor he cranked time back up and fired two barrels of Whedon ammo. The razor-tipped hard-oak microstakes tore through the air with a savage sound, but Curare deflected them with a swirling handful of blood-red shaman's leaves from the jungle primeval.

Wheel quickly fired a pair of hypermagnetized Thorshots from his long-barreled shotgun, crackling and spitting and ionizing the air. The shade-faced man crossed his pistols in front of him, setting his feet and taking the brunt of the berzerker lightning with a quiet growl, his pistols fading into smoke and wisps. The shadowy Doctor Curare pulled from the shadowy pockets of his shadowy cloak a long coil of shadowy whiplash, and let fly in a shadowy fashion, tangling Wheel's gun and jerking it from the furious Invisible's hands, sending it hurtling out a tiny window.

Wheel cursed vigorously as he did a backwards roll over the bar, just avoiding a snap of the shadowlash that shattered a bottle of Veracruz rum. He ducked under the bar and popped back up holding a bar stool as Curare reeled back his whip and took another vicious slash, lunging forward. Wheel twisted the stool violently sideways, his childhood barfight training under the tutelage of the immortal Serge coming to the fore, and caught the barbed tip of the lash in the footrails of the stool. With a grin, he released the stool with a vicious spin, coiling the whip around the legs of the stool and pulling it from Curare's grip. The shadowed doctor cursed in Olmec.

A flurry of curved obsidian blades chunked into the plaster as Wheel ran along the far wall, Curare hurling knife after knife from his capacious coat. The volcanic glass blades thrummed as they plunged through plaster, aged timbers, dartboards, and framed clippings from Peepshow magazine. Wheel kicked on his Garrick Impulse soles and blurred across the room faster than the eye could follow ... only to be nearly cut in twain as he blazed by Curare and barely cycloned away from the keening edge of a blackflame Toledo blade.

Skidding away from the skilled slashes of Curare at an eyetwisting velocity, Wheel managed to open his shirt long enough for a silver and black banded flashlight case to come flipping out into his right hand. He thumbed a switch and a blade of shimmering golden light sprang into being. Wheel managed to blast the black sword aside in a shower of sparks and thunder, and spun around as he came to his feet, the lightsaber flickering and blazing at the fringes of hyperspeed.

In the shadows of his face, Curare grinned.

The world went slow as the saber swung through the tall shadowed man.

A long black coat fell soundlessly to the floor.

The jukebox fell silent with a crackle and a pop, and never sang again.

Wheel stared down at the coat for a few long, quiet moments, the crumbling bits of the bar tinking quietly to the floor, sunlight pouring through a dozen bullet holes, lighting up the fairymotes of dust in the cloying gunsmoke air. With a snap, the saber faded and flipped itself back into its sheath inside Wheel's shirt. The Invisible padded from the saloon, his green and red Converse gritting across expended shells and remnants of the dead. As he pushed through the swinging doors into the snarling golden glare of the noonday sun, he peered back into the dim bar, and held up his forefinger and thumb a quarter inch apart.

"That close."

He strode away into the silent fastness of Santo Poco. In the darkness of the shattered bar, a voice chuckled back.

"Not quite THAT close."

Don't forget to catch up the previous adventures of the New College of the Invisible with our all-new Table of Contents!

*****

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