The Christmas MEGAPACK ®. Nina Kiriki Hoffman

door and Fats walked back down the hall to where I stood waiting.

      He stopped by me for a moment, smiled said, “Hey, it’s Christmas, Griff.”

      “I know.”

      “It’s been a tough year, but this makes it worth it.”

      I nodded, “You did real good, Fats.”

      “Yeah, I guess it kinda makes it like Christmas means something.”

      “It does,” I told and I thought I noticed a tear on the Fatman’s cheek. He rubbed his eye, making like he’d had something in it, but I knew better. It was nothing. No big deal.

      We walked back to the car and got in. I drove. I shot a look at Fats as he sighed and pulled a bagel stuffed with baloney and cheese out of the glove compartment. It must have been half frozen from the cold. I laughed and shook my head.

      “You missed a meal,” I told him. Fats never missed a meal.

      “Yeah,” Fats admitted between bites. He offered me a bite. I tried to take a chunk out of the other end. It was impossible.

      I handed him back the bagel uneaten. “Damn thing’s froze solid.”

      Fats just laughed between bites. He said, “yeah, cold as hell but it’s still pretty good.”

      I stopped the car and looked at him, sitting there stuffing his face, still dressed as Santa Claus, his .38 laying in his lap. I just shook my head. He was a sight.

      I said, “Merry Christmas, Fats.”

      He just looked up at me and smiled between bites and said, “Griff, same to you and yours, my man.”

      I started up the car and kept on driving. Through the white blanket of snow that was covering everything in Bay City with a clean blanket of pure white. Covering all the dirt. Covering all the hate and greed. For a while at least, things were quiet. Peaceful, at last. I looked at my Timex. It was just past midnight, turning into Christmas morning. A new day. A very special day. I smiled. Those were the old days. Fats and me in old time Bay City. We’ll never see their like again.

      SCROOGE 3000, by Michael McCarty

      Mr. Scrooge looked down at the megalopolis from his three-hundredth-floor office window. From that high up, the city below looked like a Dali painting, skyscrapers melting into an endless sky.

      “There are too many zeppelins these days,” the CEO of Scrooge Computers mused to his subordinate, Mr. Cratchett. “Of course, it’s the only decent way to get around in the sky-cities. I vaguely remember my great-great-grandfather once talking about an automobile.... It was a funny story.”

      “Yes, sir.”

      “I can’t believe Wall Street will be closed tomorrow. I’ll lose so much money!”

      “It’s Christmas, sir. They shut down to honor the holiday.”

      “Bah, humbug!”

      “Do you want me to send some flowers to Mr. Marley’s funeral, the day after Christmas?”

      “Certainly not! Mr. Marley bailed out of this company a long time ago. When the chips were down, he said, ‘I’m not shredding any evidence for a Senate subcommittee subpoena hearing.’ Bah! I don’t care if Mr. Marley was one of my biggest financial supporters at the beginning of this corporation. We revolutionized computers by having them built into the human skull. No more screens or monitors—just close your eyes and you can see everything! No more keyboards, just the glorious thought process. But Mr. Marley didn’t want to lie under oath—that was the last straw. The man was a traitor, pure and simple—a gutless, spineless traitor!”

      “Do you mind if I leave a little early? I still have some Christmas shopping to do for my family,” Mr. Cratchett said.

      “How’s the missus and your kid? What’s his name again?”

      “Tiny.”

      “Yeah, Tiny. That one-foot-tall clone of yours. Sorry you couldn’t afford a bigger one.”

      “We love Tiny, all twelve wonderful inches of him.”

      A zeppelin floated in front of the office window with the words Merry Christmas From Scrooge Computers flashing from the side of the airship.

      “Bah, humbug!”

      * * * *

      The airship stopped at the eight-hundredth floor and Scrooge stepped off the vehicle and into his penthouse suite. He turned on his hologram cat, Toogles.

      At one time, Toogles had been a real cat. Scrooge used to order his servants to feed him and change the kitty litter. When the cat started to want affection from the old man, he had the animal put to sleep and replaced with a three-dimensional feline replica.

      “Hello, Toogles,” he mumbled.

      The hologram tomcat meowed.

      Scrooge looked through his telescope, adjusting the lenses he could make out his office 500 floors below. He poured himself some gin and turned on the Free-Vee.

      Free-Vees had started out as a curio—a distant, promotional cousin to televisions. But with time, TV viewers ended up enjoying the commercials more than the programming, so the shows were abandoned and new one-hundred-inch curved 3-D screens were given away for free—all you had to do is watch the commercials.

      Scrooge sat with his drink, watching ad after ad. He chuckled at a sexy one about a robot cocktail waitress trying to get frisky with an automatic vacuum cleaner.

      The old man drifted off to sleep.

      Suddenly he found himself staring at a black man wearing a red cap, a multi-colored satin shirt, Bermuda shorts and floppy sandals.

      “Hello Scrooge. I’m Marley,” the man said in a thick Jamaican accent.

      “You’re not Jacob Marley!” the old man cried.

      “No, mon. I’m Bob Marley, the Ghost of Reggae Christmas.”

      “I don’t know anyone named Bob Marley....”

      “Jacob Marley was too busy, so he asked me to step in. If I can unite my country of Jamaica, then I can certainly help a fellow ghost. Besides this time of year is when we’re the busiest.”

      “We?”

      “Christmas Spirits Union 312.”

      “There must be a glitch in my computer programming,” Scrooge said, hitting the side of his head with his hand. “Maybe I need to have my hard drive adjusted.”

      The ghost rolled his eyes.

      “I just need a Phillips screwdriver—”

      Bob Marley pulled a screwdriver out of thin air.

      “How’d you do that?”

      “We don’t have much time, you old fool. This is overtime and a holiday on top of that!” The ghost grabbed Scrooge by his vest and dragged him into the past.

      * * * *

      Bob Marley and Scrooge rematerialized in a college dorm room. The walls were decked with 3-D posters of famous rich people of the past—Nelson Rockefeller, Bill Gates, and T. J. Hoy, the man who brought the airships to the megalopolis.

      “My old dorm room in college,” Scrooge said.

      Sitting at a desk was a teenage Scrooge counting a pile of money. “999,999,997...999,999,998...999,999,999...one billion!”

      “Ah, yes,” said the older Scrooge. “My first billion, and I was just a freshman in college.”

      The ghost frowned. “My entire country of Jamaica didn’t have that kind of money, mon.”

      “They must invest badly.”

      “We didn’t come here to talk about finances.