High Stakes: A Wild Cards Novel

by George R. R. Martin

  It was heavier, cruder, and somehow it tugged at her brain, seemingly whispering to it indecipherable but somehow insidious thoughts. It was all black, blacker than night with a dull sheen that threatened to draw you into its substance if you stared at it for too long, with sharp but jagged edges. The pommel was entwisted with thorns and barbed wire, holding her hands tightly within its grasp. The Angel was quite thankful for her leather gauntlets.

  Awed gasps and whispers sounded from around her as she experimentally cut the air with it, testing its balance, and the leading edge of it coming perilously close to a man in the tattered remnants of a Kazakh army uniform. The Angel found herself twisting her wrist ever so slightly and the edge of the blade lightly passed across the skin of his throat. He stood there staring for a moment and then a fine bloody mist jetted from his severed jugular vein, whistling a high-pitched tune in the sudden silence.

  He stood until he bled out, then he collapsed like a marionette with its strings severed. Again, gasps of awe broke out from the onlookers. A few applauded. The Angel, staring almost incomprehendingly at him, roused herself, laughed, turned, and severed the chain holding the door shut.

  Eager hands reached out and stripped the chain from the handles and pulled the doors open. The meat locker was packed, but not for long.

  Michelle could still hear the shuffling, and it was still coming closer.

  But the drumming in her head had diminished a little. And the buzzing was almost gone. Those horrible voices remained and they had been the worst of it. And she began to realize what she’d done.

  A wave of dizziness swept over her.

  Aero. She’d killed Aero. And for no reason other than … no, she hadn’t killed Aero. She’d killed Mummy.

  No, Mom, you didn’t.

  Shame. Shame such as she’d never experienced in her life came crashing down. And guilt.

  Oh, fuck that. She’d had to kill Mummy.

  Move.

  There was more light in the tunnel now and she saw Adesina. Maybe this has all been a horrible dream. I’m going to wake up and …

  Aero appeared and snapped Adesina’s neck. Her tiny neck. It snapped like a dry twig. And Michelle screamed. She didn’t know how long she screamed. It felt like it went on and on and on.

  Aero vanished before she could bubble him, and in his place Joey appeared. She smiled at Michelle, but it wasn’t a smile Michelle had ever seen on Joey’s face before.

  “I can raise her up, Bubbles,” Joey said. “I’ll bring her back for you.” And as she spoke, Adesina got up from the floor. Her head hung to one side and she tried to fly, but couldn’t control her wings properly.

  Mom. The voice came from Adesina, but it was wrong. It was so close.

  Mom, that’s not me. It’s nothing. Move.

  Michelle stared at zombie Adesina. She took a step toward her daughter, but whatever it was didn’t step toward her. And Joey still had that hideous grin on her face.

  Even though she was gaunt, she still had enough for this.

  A small bubble flew from her hand and gathered speed. It was as heavy and hard as Michelle had ever made. It sped up and smashed into Joey’s left eye. Joey collapsed like a rag doll. Adesina fell to the ground, too.

  Michelle walked forward and stepped over them, not bothering to look down. Now she knew something new and horrible about herself. She could walk over the corpses of people she loved and not turn a hair.

  That’s not you.

  I think we have plenty of evidence to the contrary. Her mind was clearing as she followed the voice, and what she’d done began to come back in dribs and drabs. Her mind shied away from what had happened in Talas. What she’d done. What she’d done. What she’d done.

  Michelle couldn’t think of anything else to do now except press on. Occasionally, she would hit herself in the face, and she didn’t know why. It hurt.

  The tunnel began to slope upward.

  We’re almost there.

  Who are you?

  I’m your daughter.

  She’s dead. She died back there in the tunnel.

  That’s not me. I came for you. I’d never leave you, Mom.

  I left you.

  You had to. And now you have to move. It’s coming for all of us. You have to save me now. I love you, Mom.

  I love you, too.

  Baikonur sat on a massive plain, a flat, featureless expanse. Marcus stared, trying to make sense of the geometric confusion of the place: rectangular wedges, domes white under the morning light, silos and towers that jutted up toward the sky. All of it like a scene from a Mars movie. But Mars was a lifeless planet. Not so Baikonur.

  “Look at this place,” Marcus said, to himself more than anyone else. “It’s a fucking tent city.”

  For an isolated compound strewn across a barren landscape, the plain outside the compound’s walls hummed with an incredible amount of activity. A whole army gathered protectively before the main gate and along the wall: khaki-clad soldiers by the thousands, trucks and jeeps galore. They weren’t the same as the Kazakh soldiers they’d encountered before. They were white guys, grim-faced and bristling with weaponry. Russians, Olena told him. There were tanks spaced at intervals, all of them facing outward toward some coming, but as yet invisible, threat. To Marcus it felt like those silent barrels were aimed at him and the people he cared for.

  Kept apart from the army but separated by a narrow zone patrolled by soldiers, the throng of refugees gathered. Tens of thousands of them. Men and women and children who must’ve rushed here for the protection—real or symbolic—of the old Soviet order. It was a makeshift array of tents and lean-tos. Numerous fires sent pillars of smoke rising straight up into a clear, windless sky.

  The caravan nosed as far into the refugee encampment as they could, coming to rest pressed up against people too fatigued to clear the way. They disembarked. Marcus and Olena did the best they could to get the various vehicles arrayed in a protective ring around the villagers. They posted sentries to keep watch, got their own fire going, and helped any who needed it onto the blankets to rest. Marcus lifted Nurassyl down from a flatbed, feeling the soft, moist texture of his skin. The boy’s large eyes stared into his. Despite the strangeness of the touch, the smile on Marcus’s face was genuine. God, he wanted the best for this kid. He lifted Sezim down as well. He snatched up her stuffed rabbit when she dropped it, dusted it off, and gave it back to her.

  “It’s going to be okay,” he said to both children. “We’re safe here.”

  Once the children were settled and Aliya began sharing out portions of biscuits between them, Marcus asked Olena, “Where’s your father?”

  “He’s gone to where the power is.” She pointed toward the compound.

  “Does he know people here?”

  “Of course he does. If it’s nuclear, corrupt … If there’s power to be had … My father has a connection to it. Marcus, I think we should not have come here.”

  “It was a crazy ride, wasn’t it? But at least we’re all here together.” Marcus, studying the wall behind the cordon of soldiers, said, “We get in there and find someplace out of the way. A room or something where we can lock the door and sit this out.”

  “They won’t let us in,” Olena said. “My father, yes. Me, yes, if I would go. But a village of jokers? No. They are here to protect Baikonur, not us. Anyway, that’s not the point. I was so desperate to get away from Talas I didn’t think why my father wanted to come here. Now I’m worried he wants to do something horrible. Marcus, this is Baikonur. Do you know what that means?” Marcus’s expression must’ve indicated that he didn’t. “There are enough nuclear weapons in there to destroy the planet. All of it, Marcus. All of us. I think we’ve come to a bad place.”

  Babel set up her staging area inside one of the immense warehouses adjacent to their arrival spot from New York. It seemed a reasonable base of operations: a large contained space they could control … assuming the evil insanity zone didn’t engulf it, and assuming t
he massive and constantly growing crowd of refugees didn’t force their way inside the facility. Half of it looked like something from Raiders of the Lost Ark; aisle upon aisle of crates and shelves, stretching into the fluorescent-lit distance. The shelves reached a good twenty or thirty feet high in places; Mollie pictured cherry pickers and forklifts on steroids. The crates sported stenciled Cyrillic labels; for all Mollie knew, they might have contained anything from baby food to plutonium. Keenly aware that Ffodor could read Russian and could have explained what this warehouse was for, Mollie swallowed the tightness in her throat and concentrated on where the real work would happen.

  In the far corner, Babel and Billy Ray liaised with a Russian officer. Decked out in pixilated tan-grey urban camouflage, he looked like his daily regimen included broken glass for breakfast and afternoon bear-wrestling for light cardio. Mollie wondered how hard it was to coordinate a three-way between the Committee, SCARE, and the Russian army.

  Many of the SCARE guys and Russian troops wore hazmat suits. Mollie didn’t know what to make of that. Would she get a suit? Did it even matter? Some cheesy Andromeda Strain suit wasn’t going to do squat against a tidal wave of supernatural evil.

  Joey sauntered up, zombie mutt—and its odor of putrefaction—in tow. Mollie changed her mind about the utility of a hazmat suit. At least some of them had built-in gas masks and rebreathers.

  Thick black cable bundles threaded the site. Some were electrical, she assumed, because they connected to giant arc lights on stands, like the kind of thing they’d used on American Hero when filming on location. The lights were arranged in concentric rings. Massive overkill: the interior of the warehouse was almost painfully bright. But there were other cables, too, with unknown purposes. There were at least a dozen cameras, too, and gadgets Mollie couldn’t identify. They weren’t fucking around.

  Just then, one of the Andromeda Strain guys came jogging up to the two of them. “Mollie Steunenberg?”

  “Yeah.”

  The man graced her with a curt nod from within his suit. “Agent Vigil, SCARE.” He spoke crisply and quickly, his diction as precise as his buzz cut. “The equipment’s in place, so we’re ready to begin when you are.”

  He looked at her, expectantly.

  “Um, okay. So what happens now?”

  “Agent Ray made it clear that you had the most experience with a crisis of this nature.”

  “What nature would that be, exactly?”

  “Agent Ray chose not to divulge that information to me, miss.” He continued to look at her as though he were the world’s most obedient dog. As though she was about to leap into action and take charge. As if she knew what the fuck she was doing. As if she wasn’t about to piss her pants.

  Joey looked at Mollie, then the SCARE guy, then back at Mollie. Joey said, “Ohhhkay. Thanks for the sitrep, agent jarhead. I gotta say, you two are instilling me with heaps of fucking confidence right now.”

  Mollie said, “From your end, how does this work? What do you need?”

  “You do what you do. Make a door to Talas. I’ll round up the largest crew of toe tags I can manage.”

  Toe tags? Oh: zombies. Cute.

  “Well. No shortage of bodies. So I guess that’s useful, huh?” Mollie tried for a halfhearted laugh, a little gallows humor, but it turned into a sob that clamped her throat like a vise. Christ, it hurt. She ran the back of her hand across her eyes. When she could talk again without croaking like a frog, she said, “Once your, uh, guys are on the other side, do you need me to hold the portal open? Or can you control them without it?”

  Joey looked at the SCARE agent. “How far are we from Talas?”

  “Approximately five hundred miles, ma’am.”

  She frowned. Whistled. “That’s not next door. I’ve never tried anything so remote. Getting anything useful from even a single toe tag over that distance … The headache would probably kill me, or give me a fuckin’ stroke.” Joey shook her head. “I’ll need a shortcut if my shamblers are gonna do anything useful in Talas.”

  That was not what Mollie’d hoped to hear. She started trembling again.

  “Are you absolutely positive? Maybe you could try it without the shortcut first.”

  Joey rolled her eyes. “Yes, I’m fucking positive. It’s not like my goddamned card turned just this morning, you know.”

  “If I have to keep a portal open to Talas, that bubble of supernatural psychosis will leak through. It happens fast.” Mollie hugged herself.

  … don’t think about pitchforks don’t think about pitchforks don’t think about Daddy’s missing ear don’t think don’t don’t don’t …

  “Well we don’t have a lot of fucking choice, do we?”

  “Are you even listening to me? You have no idea what you’re getting into.”

  Agent Vigil stepped forward. To Joey, he said, “Miss. How large would the opening have to be in order to enable you to do what you need?”

  She shrugged. “Not that big. I just need a connection, is all.”

  “Would a pinhole suffice?”

  “Beats me. Maybe.”

  He turned to Mollie. “Miss. Could you do that? Make a portal that small?” She nodded. “Would that be acceptable to you?”

  The portal from the family barn to the casino had been large enough for people, tools, slot machines, and loot. And the psychosis had taken over quickly. But maybe, just maybe, if the hole was small enough, Horrorshow’s sphere of influence would seep through more slowly …

  She goaded herself to answer before she lost her nerve. “Yes. I can do that,” she said, in a warbly voice that undermined any pretense of confidence. “Where will you guys be?”

  He pointed to a mobile command center parked on the far side of the warehouse, a hundred yards away. It looked like an armor-plated Winnebago, and utterly out of place outside a casino parking lot. The roof bristled with dishes and antennae. “We’ll monitor the situation from there as long as the feeds hold.”

  Mollie noticed that most of the cables strung around the site ran in thick bundles back to the command center. She shook her head.

  “Your electronics are gonna start to fail the minute I do my thing.”

  Vigil nodded. “Yes, ma’am. We’ve been briefed on that. The technical perimeter is our early warning sentry. We’ll track the advance of the effect as the electronics fail. We’ll stay outside the trouble zone and pull the plug when it threatens to expand beyond our control.”

  Clever. They’d actually thought this through. They’d actually listened to what she told Franny, Ray, and Babel, took her seriously, and come up with a strategy. Mollie didn’t know how to process that. It actually felt … nice. Still, there was a problem.

  Her voice trembled. Breathe. Take it easy. Just breathe. “How will you pull the plug if I go off the reservation?”

  “With this,” he said. The lieutenant shrugged, unlimbering the rifle slung over his shoulder. It was almost half as big as Joey. “We have shooters stationed around the perimeter.”

  Joey took a step back. “Jesus Christ taking a runny shit on a camel! What the fuck? What the actual fuck?” She grabbed Mollie by the arm and tried to pull her away. It was actually kind of touching. “C’mon. Fuck these motherfuckers.”

  Mollie said, “Relax. It’s just a tranquilizer gun.” She paused. “Um, it is, right? You’re just gonna trank me and not blow my brains out, right?”

  The corner of Vigil’s mouth twitched. The guy was wound so tight that this was probably the equivalent of a knee-slapping gut-buster on him. “No, ma’am. My orders are to knock you out, nothing more. You’ll have a nice nap. Not even a hangover.”

  Mollie nodded. “Okay. But you should be ready to pull the plug even before the danger bubble gets too large.” She glanced at Joey. “We might … I might…” She blinked, wiped her eyes, trying to clear away the nightmare images from the street in Talas and her own family’s barn. “Look. If I start acting weird, don’t hesitate to dose me.”

  Vigil
gave her his crisp little nod. “Understood.” Then he cocked his head, pressing a gloved hand to the side of his suited head; a little antenna ran along his jaw. After a few moments of muttering to the other jarheads, he said, “We’re ready to begin.”

  Mollie and Joey passed through several concentric rings of cables, lights, and electronics until they reached the center. Mollie turned, examining the windows. Each had a hazmat guy with a rifle like the one Vigil had brandished. Surprisingly, the hazmat suits made it difficult to distinguish the SCARE guys from the Russian soldiers. Big difference, though, between a Fed desk jockey who used firearms once a year during an annual requalification on the shooting range, and a battle-hardened Spetsnaz killer who slept with his rifle. Mollie wondered who’d be taking the shot at her, if it came to that.

  Vigil, stationed by the vehicle, gave her a thumbs-up.

  “Okay,” said Joey. “Gimme a minute.”

  Her gaze went a little distant, as though she was deep in concentration. Moments later, the dull murmuring of the crowd beyond the fence swelled into a white-noise hiss, as if storm-driven waves pounded rocky cliffs. Then came a flurry of shouts from inside the Cosmodrome perimeter. Past the command unit where Vigil stood, something shambled into the warehouse. And then Mollie understood. Joey was animating some of the freshly dead from around the premises.

  Dead men and women filed toward them like the world’s slowest, least enthusiastic conga line. The nat corpses among them had a chalky pallor broken with blackish-purple spots where blood had pooled; there were a few jokers among the recently dead, too. One toe tag shambled across the warehouse on feet like giant lobster claws. Eventually Joey managed to corral about a dozen corpses to the innermost ring of lights and cables where she and Mollie stood.

  None of the dead were as ripe as Joey’s dog, but the cumulative odor of death churned her stomach. She swallowed gorge. God, how did Joey stand it?