The Real Boojum

"*You're* the Boojum!" whispered Max Vasser in horrible realization.

Danno Chimeron's melancholy lifted and his sinister smirk widened to a demonic grimace as he watched the war of emotions on Max's face, as he saw understanding dawn there too late.

"Yes. *I* am the Boojum," he confirmed proudly. "The most powerful crime lord in the trans-Briar Patch sectors!" He coolly contemplated the helpless fly caught in his web.

"How can someone like you have escaped notice for so long?" demanded Max, desperate to make some sense of things.

"I learned long ago to keep a low profile, living in one place for a while and then moving on. In a few years, Danno Chimeron, child musician, will disappear and I'll become someone else. In my life I have done nothing noteworthy, fought in no wars, made no discoveries, gave no interviews, signed no autographs, interacted with no one important. History has never heard of the true me, only the facades." He smiled with diabolical pride at his cleverness. "I had wealth on Earth, and when humanity finally went to the stars, I went along. I have a whole galaxy to plunder now thanks to you puny mortals!

"Still, every so often someone learns my little secret, but they all lived to regret it."

Max's eyes shifted automatically to the man seated motionless in the wheelchair at the top of the stairs.

Danno noticed her glance and answered her unasked question. "Yes, like this poor fellow here. I don't even know his name, but he was the head researcher at a Federation R&D facility I raided some years ago." He paused and thought back for a few seconds. "I think this is the sixth or seventh guy I've used this way." He waved his disruptor in the air while he spoke. "A quick stun blast at point-blank range to the bottom of the spinal column and voila! Instant mute quadriplegic!" His fiendish smile and pitiless glee were awful to behold. "I can get around a lot easier if I have a 'parent' with me, you see."

*Don't be fooled by him... by the way he looks... Help him... He needs help...* Had the Snark been talking about the boy or the victim in the wheelchair?

The pitiless delight with which Danno tortured this poor man made Max sick to her stomach. She had never felt such pure evil emanate from anyone or anything before, not even from the monstrous Jelly Brain the Banshee Squadron had fought at the bottom of the dilithium mines on Rostella IV, the one that had murdered Jazz Phoenix and tried to devour their souls. The intense revulsion at what the boy had done to the poor scientist and so many others before him was almost overwhelming -- she could feel the bile rising as she imagined what it would be like to live trapped inside a completely paralyzed body, fully aware of everything that went on around you, forced to be the puppet of the very monster that had crippled you and unable to do anything about it or even call for help!

Max had never felt such primal fear in her chest as she did right now standing before this ancient twelve-year-old. And yet, he was just a child...

"And the Snark?" she managed to whisper.

Danno's evil smile vanished. "The Snark knew who I was, but we were a good team so I let him live. I even looked up to him in a strange way. Maybe in some twisted way he was the father figure I never had. But then he turned on me with those insane notions about helping me!"

"What do you mean?" The longer Max could keep the boy talking, the longer she had to come up with an escape plan.

"The R&D lab had developed a synthetic compound that completely neutralizes all electromagnetic and subspace radiation, including, presumably, the kind that sustains me," Danno the Boojum explained. "The Snark was planning to use it on me out of misplaced sympathy, so I killed him."

*The marble!* realized Max. The liquid inside was what the scientists had developed. That's why the Snark had given it to her!

Danno Chimeron took a step forward toward the edge of the catwalk and leveled his weapon at Max again. "And now, since I've explained my entire evil plot to you like every story's arch-villain is required to do... time for you to die! But first-- where is the pellet the Snark gave you?"

That marble was Max's ace in the hole. She couldn't give it up. "What pellet? I don't know what the hell you're talking about," she lied. "The Snark died before he had the chance to give me anything." She hoped her act was convincing enough.

Danno's youthful brow knit into a fine-lined frown. "Too bad," he said, then squeezed the trigger.

Max had been expecting it, but even so she was barely ahead of the blast. She dove to the side and sprinted for the stacking of crates behind which her phaser had been flung. Every jarring movement was a new stanza in the throbbing symphony of pain in her burnt right hand and forearm, but she bit back any outcry and forced herself to ignore it. If she could retrieve her own weapon she might have a fighting chance to stay alive. Then she could scream all she wanted.

Explosions chased her all the way to the shelter of the big crates, her running feet just barely ahead of the Boojum's enthusiastic disruptor blasts. She could feel the heat of the radiation on the back of her neck like a bad Vulcan sunburn. At last she saw the phaser lying in the shadows. She made a mad scramble through disruptor bolts as thick as last week's plomeek soup, and at last the fingers of her undamaged left hand closed around the familiar, comforting hilt of the weapon.

There was a lull in the Boojum's wild firing as he sought his elusive target, so Max gritted her teeth, said a lightning-quick prayer to the Great Bird, and leapt out from behind the wall of crates. There was no time to aim and the phaser felt awkward and unwieldy in her left hand, but she relied on her training, instinct and good old-fashioned blind luck, and fired a rapid series of shots up at the catwalk.

Her luck held true. One of the phaser beams hit an upper support strut and snapped it loose. In a shower of sparks, the heavy metal girder swung down and struck Danno Chimeron on the side, knocking the small boy a dozen feet. He landed flat on his face, stunned, and the big disruptor jarred loose from his little fingers and fell off the catwalk into the shadows among the crates on the floor below.

Max pressed her advantage. She ran towards the steps leading up to where Danno and his 'father' were, meaning to capture the notorious Boojum and put an end to his murderous rampage across the galaxy once and for all.

Danno shook his head to scatter the tweeting birds and spinning stars, and saw Max coming, and worse, saw the expression on her face. "Damnit!" he cursed in a very un-cherubic manner. For a split second, he almost felt fear before he managed to shake off the last effects of the daze he was in.

As Max's foot hit the bottom step on the stairway, Danno jumped to his feet with the energy of youth, grabbed the handles of the helpless scientist's wheelchair and shoved. There was nothing the paralyzed man could do to stop it. The wheels rolled off the edge of the top step and the whole thing, immobile scientist and all, went toppling down on top of Max.

Max's eyes widened in alarm as she realized she had just become an unwilling contestant in a game of dodge-the-avalanche. She might have won that game, but she instinctively tried to catch the research scientist to keep him from being killed in the fall, and by doing so she put herself directly in the path of the heavy metal wheelchair.

The limp scientist plowed into her outstretched arms and knocked her backwards, and a second later, the wheelchair crashed into her shins snatching her legs out from under her. Down they all went together, but Max somehow managed to keep the scientist from smashing his brains out on the hard plasticrete floor.

Above on the catwalk, she heard the high-pitched tittering of insane, maniacal laughter as Danno Chimeron the Boojum made his escape. Her phaser was still clutched in her left hand, so she brought it up and aimed as well as she could from the bottom of the dogpile she was under and fired. In the heat of the moment, she forgot the weapon was still set on the disrupt setting.

Danno had reached a doorway leading out of the building, but turned back to gloat one last time just as the phaser hit. The beam struck him square in the forehead, snapping his head back. He didn't even have time to cry out, but his face registered surprise at the unexpected turn of events. He tipped over backwards, teetered over the catwalk railing, and fell with a wet thump to the warehouse floor a dozen feet below.

Max hurriedly crawled out from underneath the scientist and his wheelchair and lay the man's head gently on the floor, and ran around some intervening crates to where the Boojum had fallen. When she got there, however, her heart sank into her boots and her stomach turned into a knot.

There was a wide pool of fresh blood on the floor, but Danno Chimeron was gone.