He spewed onto the door panel, then could no longer hold his body still. He took off like a crazed gazelle toward Johnson, bouncing madly out of control from wall to wall and past the man as Johnson fired once more, missing. Johnson whirled around; the people who'd thought the trouble safely past them ducked for cover again.
Gregg reached the end of the hall, trying to gain control of this wild body and managing to spin around and came back the other way again, scurrying past Johnson one more time. This time when he hit the stair door it gave like hot caramel, and Gregg was spiralling down the stairwell with all six legs pumping.
At the bottom, he slammed into the crash bar with a grunt. The door gave enough for him to slide out, and now he was skittering across the slick marble floor like an out-of-control kiddie car. He slalomed into a crowd, one woman falling on top of him. The impact re-galvanized him and he heard himself screech while the world around him slowed down even more. The front door guards were pointing at him - the DOOR, damn it, the DOOR! - and Gregg tried to control his furious retreat. He hit the lobby fountain, spraying water as he slid in and out like a neon otter. He skidded halfway back to the elevators before he could get turned around again. The guards were scattering, trying to catch him, but they moved as if their feet were stuck in tar. Unfortunately, Gregg moved like a Formula One Lotus with no one behind the wheel.
Johnson had reached the lobby. Gregg smelled him, smelled the sharp terror of the gunpowder even though he couldn't see him. He managed to get himself moving toward the entrance: as Johnson shouted behind him, as the guards leaped belatedly for him, as a delegate entering the building gaped with wide-eyed confusion at a streaking yellow apparition slithering through his legs and out the door.
There was only one place Gregg could go now.
Jokertown. With the rest of the freaks.
A Breath of Life
by Sage Walker
Finally, standing on the cracked, stained sidewalk, after the appointments were set up with the defense attorney, after she'd figured out precisely how her best friend had framed her, Zoe Harris let herself whimper, once. No one noticed. This was Jokertown.
Zoe wanted to go home. Home to momma, and safety, and emotional shelters that would let her forget that she had been an up-and-coming CEO this morning, and had become a suspect in an embezzlement case by afternoon.
She was aware that her clothes were too good for Jokertown, that her Armani blazer, simple red silk, targeted her as a mark, but she hadn't been able to face getting to her townhouse in Chelsea and then back into Jokertown tonight.
Out of the acrid smog, kids appeared from an alley, five of them, taking up positions around her. Joker kids; the oldest couldn't have been more than sixteen. Their faces (but one of them didn't have a face, the kid had a head that looked like a soggy balloon, contours shifting as she moved) were greasepainted, divided down the center into black and white halves. They backed away from her on tiptoe, circling like stray cats. Hands in the pockets of their jackets, half black and half white vinyl, zippered on the diagonal.
"Bad. She's bad." The boy's square teeth were yellow against the dead white of the greasepaint. "She wants to stay bad, this richass bitch, she turns around and goes right back home."
Zoe started to walk through them, toward home, toward the smallest of them, thinking. Don't stop. Don't stop and they'll back off. They're kids. She could smell rotting garbage and trash fires. The street was a morass of discarded paper, broken glass, gray rubbish that even her New York eyes couldn't ignore.
"Nat! Nat! Go 'way. Go 'way. Not your part of town. You keep us here, but you don't come 'round our space. It's all we got, and we ain't sharin'."
She lowered her head and tried to keep walking. The street wasn't empty; jokers of all varieties went about their business and studiously ignored her.
Then there was no kid in front of her. There was a tearing sound, as of ripping silk; she thought she felt cooler air strike the sweaty place between her shoulders.
She spun around in time to see a flash of needle-sharp claws on the hand of the kid behind her. He tucked his hands in his pockets and smiled, gray-pink gums and translucent teeth like a baleen whale's beneath sad, sad eyes.
In a mincing falsetto, someone said, "Such shoddy workmanship these days. These rags just hardly hold together."
Three in front of her now, dancing backward, just out of arm's reach. She slipped her left hand behind her, fast, and felt the back of her blazer. It wasn't torn.
"Don't be this way!" Zoe said, very low. She kept on walking. Forward, another corner and then down half a block, she'd get home.
"Don't be what, bitch? Don't be jokers? Don't be hungry?"
The kid with the claws let them flash again, inches from her eyes. She knew that if she started to run, she'd go down, hurt, and they would vanish.
Black as night and as shiny as patent leather, an unlikely champion moved up through the crowd and took up a position beside her. She had never been so glad to see him. Jube wore his porkpie hat and he carried his papers, as if he'd stepped out of the past, unchanged.
"Chill out, Needles. She belongs here," Jube said.
She could see the stoop, with its wrought iron lace that she used to push her fingers through. Half a block and she'd be home.
"Looks like a nat," Needles said.
"She belongs here. Needles, Jellyhead, Jimmy, Jimmy, and Jan, allow me to present Ms. Zoe Harris."
The black and white retinue ducked their heads. Their hands stayed in their pockets.
"Ace, huh?"
Jube didn't say anything. Jube didn't know, did he? Zoe thought no one knew....
"Okay, we'll mark her," Needles said.
Zoe wondered if he planned to "mark" her with his claws. She hoped not. He pulled a camcorder out of his jacket and focused its lens at her. She almost put on a smile for the camera.
"Safe conduct," the falsetto voice said. "Make it worth our time, bad lady. Our memories, they short, you know?"
Zoe felt someone touch her. The child called Jellyhead had grabbed a corner of her blazer. She rubbed it back and forth between her fingers, like some babies do with the satin bindings of their crib blankets. "Soft," the girl whispered. "So soft."
"Jellyhead! Mind your manners, please."
Zoe reached into her bra and pulled out her mugger's twenty. "It's all right, Jube. Here." She waved the twenty. "Needles? Jellyhead? Wait outside my mom's place. Then get me outa here safe. One of these every time I come around. Watch for me. You're my escorts, right?"
They hadn't stopped walking. The twenty disappeared, flicked out of her hand and into the pockets of the smallest one. One of the Jimmies, she guessed. Needles danced away and the kids widened their circle, but now it was defense.
"They are hungry. There's your mother, Zoe."
Anne waited on the stoop. Her eyes scanned the street, the silent, monstrous, wary array of jokers on their evening business. Zoe looked around at them, free to do so in the space people kept around Jube. No nat faces, and no masks. Zoe waved at Anne. Mrs. Pojorski, blue as a robin's egg, shouldered her way past Anne without a word.
"What's happened here, Jube?" Zoe asked. "Is Mrs. Pojorski mad at momma? They've been friends for years."
"You haven't been home in a while. The mandatory blood tests have flushed out the latents and the jokers who can pass as nats. And most of them have lost their jobs. Your mom hasn't. Some jokers hate her for that."
"Dad's still working," Zoe said.
Jube didn't say anything.
He handed her up the stairs to her mom's hug, the familiar soft warmth of Anne's six pairs of breasts under her loose caftan.
"Tell your kids how long you'll be. They'll come back. Evening, Anne."
"Jube! Come on up! Have some tea with us."
"Can't stay, lovely lady. Sorry." Jube turned to the black and white escort, who had ranged themselves at the bottom of the steps.
"Two hours," Zoe said.
"Got t
hat?" Jube asked.
"Got it," Needles said. The kids vanished. Zoe couldn't see jube anymore either; he'd fitted himself into some invisible space in the twilight.
The dingy stairs still creaked. The yellow fog put out by bare light bulbs still twisted the shadows into monstrous shapes. Home again, same as it ever was.
Bjorn sat in his disreputable leather recliner, his feet wrapped in hot towels and a heating pad, his thick legs covered in postman's blue twill. He still had his job, then. Jube had made her wonder.
"Hi, handsome," Zoe said. She kissed him, the bristle of his five o'clock shadow rough on her lips. Something was wrong, some pain had layered itself over his usual physical aches, had marked his face with deeper lines and reddened his eyes.
"Hi, skinny."
Zoe perched on the arm of the recliner.
Bjorn sat up and unwrapped his feet. Red-brown fur covered them, down to the vestigial claws on his splayed, short toes. He pulled on his ancient and disreputable slippers and leaned back again.
"Got news for us, do you?"
He knew it couldn't be just a duty visit. He knew her.
"Bad news. Very bad news."
He sighed and shifted his weight. "Seems to be the only kind there is these days."
And they waited, both of them, while she said "Uh," a couple of times, while she tried to figure out the best way to begin. "I've been called to a grand jury hearing. About some theft that's been going on in the company."
"They want you to be a witness or something?" Anne asked.
"Worse than that. I'm likely to be indicted for embezzlement."
"You?" Anne said.
"Or you. The stolen funds are in an account with your name on it, momma."
"Oh, my," Anne said. She sank back into her corner of the couch and waited. Not panicked though. Anne worked for a lawyer. Legalese wasn't likely to scare her.
"How much?" Bjorn asked.
"Half a million." And then the words came tumbling out, the neat, small transactions that Nosy had put together, the faked invoices for things that wouldn't have been noticed, now that the company had gotten bigger.
The mandatory wild card testing had started this. We can't have people like that working here, Nosy had said. Nonsense, Zoe had told him. Nosy, the disease is not contagious. But, he'd said. But nothing, Zoe had replied. This is a company that hires chemists. Jewish chemists, Japanese chemists, any old damned chemist who can do the work. And that includes wild card victims, Nosy. She'd put her foot down, he'd looked abashed, she'd thought the matter settled.
"An order showed up for a tanker full of acetone for the plant in Jerusalem. Paid in full. We haven't built the plant in Jerusalem yet. Accounting spotted it and called for an audit. I got a subpoena today. And a lawyer. Mendlen."
"He's good. But you should have called me," Anne said. "No, you couldn't, I had a clinic appointment. I wasn't in this afternoon."
"The funds were diverted to a signature account. We'll get a handwriting expert on it, momma, and you'll be cleared of all this."
Mendlen hoped.
"So what do I do now?" Zoe had asked.
"Act as if nothing has changed," Mendlen told her.
Right.
Bjorn was staring at the mute TV set, and he was trying not to look worried.
"I like Mendlen," Zoe said. "I'm going to see him again tomorrow. Dad? What else is going on here? Jube seems to think you've lost your job."
"No. No, I still get to carry mail around. As long as I can walk, I guess." He reached his arm around her and patted her hip. "The job's fine."
"So what's wrong? Something is!"
"Zoe, it's nothing you need to worry about."
"Don't make me crazy. Tell me, daddy."
He sighed and shifted in the chair. "My pension's gone."
"That can't be! You're a federal employee, for God's sake. The government hasn't lost its pension funds!"
"I'm a wild carder. What they said, is that - oh, just a minute here." He rummaged along the edges of the chair cushion. "Here's the brochure. I got it today."
He held it at arm's length and began to read.
"See? It looks like real good stuff. Wild card victims get cared for in special 'Biological Research Units,' they say. No Medicare or Medicaid, not for us. We get 'special treatment,' and 'individual financial assistance.' Got that, honey? 'If medical problems arise from these tragic infections.'"
"Barnett," Zoe said.
"Yeah." Bjorn sounded resigned. Zoe took the brochure from Bjorn's hand and scanned through it. It was as opaque to read as an insurance policy, but a sickening concept came through. Sick jokers would be spirited away, isolated.
"They can't do this!"
"Well, they did. It's enough to make me believe the Card Sharks are real." Bjorn patted Zoe's hip as if she were the one who was hurt, not him. "Barnett's in the White House, and Hartmann's dead."
"I never trusted Gregg Hartmann," Anne said, sotto voce.
"I did. Let me finish, Anne."
From her nest of pillows on the couch, Anne winked at Zoe.
"We've got another election before I'm due to retire," Bjorn said. "I think the law can't stay on the books, Zoe. the ACLU and the JADL will get it revoked."
"Sure."
"So, daughter. This mess you're in. It's a business mess, it's a money mess, but you've got your health and your strength. You can't let it get to you, Zoe. I'd hate to think some nasty little nat could stress you so much that your card would turn. Don't let that happen, Zoe."
Denial was a wonderful mechanism. Bjorn and Anne must have known that their daughter was no latent. Her deceptions could not truly have fooled them, back when she was small and not so clever. She'd known, even as a tiny child that they desperately wanted her to have escaped the wild card.
"There's pot roast and cranberries, Zoe," Anne said. "I can heat some for you, if you'd like."
Bjorn's dietary preferences ran to meat and fruit.
"Thanks, momma. But I had a sandwich at work." That was a fib. She just couldn't eat, not now. My family has always operated on a structure of polite lies, Zoe realized. Momma is facing a charge as an embezzler's accomplice, and she wants me to eat my dinner like a good girl.
Zoe got up from the arm of her dad's chair and went to sit on the couch by her mom. Muted by the thick insulated draperies Anne kept over the windows, a siren wailed, rap music blared, and the popcorn sound of automatic gunfire peppered the night, but it was far away.
As if tonight were an ordinary night, they watched while the TV ran its retinue of nightly news. The Great and Powerful Turtle was going to appear on Peri's Perch; tune in tomorrow.
"I've got to go home, momma," Zoe said. "No, don't get up." She paused with her hand on the doorknob. "What clinic appointment, ma?"
"Breast lumps. I'm waiting for some biopsy reports. I'll know tomorrow."
"Holy shit."
"Language, language, baby." Anne got up from the couch.
"I'll go to the clinic with you."
"You have an appointment with your attorney." Anne stretched on tiptoe and kissed Zoe's cheek. "You'd better keep it."
"Yes, momma."
"Your room's still here. There's always a place for you here, if you don't want to be alone."
"Thanks, sweetie."
Zoe kissed her and left.
She went down the stairs at speed. Her life felt unreal, the day's events impossible. Cancer. Poverty. Disgrace. She had to make these things not happen, and she didn't know how. Scenarios of a grim future kept popping into her mind; Anne dead, Bjorn locked in some walled enclave. She saw herself in gray cotton in a prison workroom, stitching useless things on old sewing machines. No.
Taking the first step outside always made her catch her breath, even though her fears of the stoop didn't seem quite real, even to her. Once, she'd seen an alligator under there. No fantasy, she'd seen it. A big one, too.
This time, she saw triangles of white that flitted away from t
he stoop when she came down, her "escorts" waiting for her. Jube was there, too, marked out of the gloom by the white rectangle of the newspapers he still carried.
"Hiya, people," Zoe said. "Hey, Tube."
Her escort fell in beside her, Jube at her left. There was something odd about the way he walked, as if his hip joints didn't connect in a standard fashion.
"Want a paper, Zoe?"
"No. Distract me. Tell me the news, Jube. I belong to a post-literate generation."
"Things aren't going well at home?"
Not exactly. "No."
The streets were nearly deserted, unusual for a citizenry who usually felt more comfortable in the dark.
"Where is everybody?" Zoe asked.
Three of the Escorts had placed themselves in a triangle ahead of Jube and Zoe. They rotated the point position, traded off by using some sort of hand-jive that Zoe couldn't follow, while the remaining two ducked in and out of shadows and alleyways, waited, and changed positions with the two kids who brought up the rear.
"Hiding, if they have a place to hide, Zoe. And some have moved away. Gone to Nam, or to Guatemala. Can't be that many with that much money, though. Makes you wonder."
Nam, Guatemala. And Jerusalem, where medical care was excellent and jokers were ghettoed, but relatively safe. Safer than Anne would be in Barnett's medical camps. How? Buy a ticket, that was easy. Convince Anne to go. Not so easy.
"I need to get my folks out of here," Zoe said. "How do I do it, Jube?"
Jube didn't speak for a while. She'd never known him to be reticent. The Escorts turned at the next corner.
"Where are we going, Jube?"
"Going to get you some news, Zoe. And maybe some help." His hand was firm on her upper arm, guiding her forward.
In the cluttered alley, a single forty watt bulb hung over a rickety stoop. Needles knocked on a thick steel door, and a man in a hooded black cape opened it and ushered them inside with an exaggerated bow. Inside the cavernous, echoing space, the Turtle's battered shells hung motionless over a murmuring crowd of jokers.
Marked Cards Page 26
