High Stakes: A Wild Cards Novel

by George R. R. Martin

  As the jokers filed back in, Marcus parted with Olena. When they hugged she gripped him hard, but only briefly. Her lips brushed over his so quickly it barely counted as a kiss. Then she disappeared into the hangar.

  It didn’t seem enough. There was so much more to say and so much he wanted to ask. She still hadn’t said a word about the fact that she killed her father, or that she seemed to have some variation on his power stuck right in the flesh of her palm. He might never see her again. Considering that, shouldn’t he tell her everything he might ever want to? It seemed like he should, but that was the problem. There was too much to say and ask and wonder, to promise and hope and swear to. Too much, and no time to do any of it.

  As a final measure the zombies shoved an old shipping container in front of the door, sealing them in. Marcus would rejoin them if he could, but first he wanted to see what the Committee had planned. He snaked his way back into the chaos with Joey and her zombie soldiers. Near the Committee’s warehouse, Joey stopped walking. Standing still as her undead army marched into the area they were going to defend, she pinched the lower end of Marcus’s T-shirt and tugged it playfully. “You’re a good man, Marcus. You know that, right? The things you been doing for them jokers … Shit, I’ll be direct. It puts me in the right kinda mood. We make it out of this, you and I should spend some time together. You ever been to the bayou?”

  “No.”

  “You’d feel at home. You’d feel like you never knew what home was. All this length on you…” She smiled and trailed her hand over his scales. They lingered just above his conveniently hidden groin. Her fingertips drew slow circles there. Marcus was beginning to see what she was getting at.

  She was about to say something else, but the pronounced sound of a throat clearing interrupted her. A voice said, “I hate to interrupt this moment of intimacy, but, Joey, they need you in the Committee briefing room.” It was the Lama. Or, not exactly the Lama, but a hazy, incorporeal version of him. He stood right beside them, looking grumpy and put upon.

  “Tell them we’re coming,” Joey said.

  The Lama looked down as if to inspect his translucent fingernails. “I’ll tell them you’re on your way. The snake-boy is not invited.” The image of him faded.

  “How can you tell he’s really gone?” Marcus asked.

  Joey shrugged. “Fuck if I care. Look, I gotta go deal with this shit. Stick around. Someone will fill you in. We’re not all assholes. And think about what I said. Most likely, we’re all gonna die horribly in an hour or so, but if we don’t … I wanna fuck you cross-eyed. And I’m not hating on that little Russian girl of yours.”

  “Ukrainian,” Marcus corrected. It was lame, but it was easier to respond to than the fuck you cross-eyed part. “Or … half and half.”

  Smiling, she backed away. “Whatever. Bring her. If we can open up her mind a bit maybe we’d all get along. All three of us. We live through today … it’s a new world. Who knows what could happen?”

  She turned and walked away. Despite the clean thoughts he knew he should be summoning, Marcus watched her for as long as he could, wondering, Would Olena ever …

  They were rolling across the plains of Kazakhstan. The three dead people were clinging to handholds on the hood of the truck while a small opening floated in the air over their heads. Through it Franny could see a portion of Joey’s bandaged face. Franny was in the passenger seat clutching a shotgun. Standing on the running board on his side was Michelle. She was at full fighting weight, and she was holding a kinetic bubble in her free hand. Ray stood on the driver’s side running board holding a sawed-off shotgun. Mollie was in the backseat muttering to herself. When Franny used the rearview mirror to check on her he saw sweat running down her face and she was shaking. She had her eyes fixed on that floating portal.

  Just some aces and zombies and one fucked nat off for a pleasant Sunday drive, Franny thought.

  He wondered how long this trip was going to take. Several hundred kilometers separated Baikonur from Talas. Supposedly Bruckner could get them there fast. So far the fast part hadn’t materialized. The old Soviet truck was rattling and groaning, slowly gathering speed, but it was no Tesla. Bruckner seemed to be on Franny’s wavelength.

  “Piece of shit, Russian crap,” he muttered. His cockney accent was very evident.

  They rolled on. Bruckner gave a small jink of the steering wheel and trees appeared on the horizon where there had been no trees before. Raindrops pattered against the windshield. It had been a cloudless day at Baikonur. Another subtle turn of the wheel and they were driving on red pavement rather than dirt and it was night. Five misshapen moons hung in the sky. A tall plant covered in spines loomed up on their left. Franny swallowed hard and sucked in a deep breath.

  Bubbles noticed. “You okay?” she asked over the rumble of the engine.

  He thought about blowing her off. Doing the guy thing. “Nah, I’m fine. Piece of cake.” Instead he told her the truth.

  “Scared.” He gave her a wry smile.

  “I don’t blame you.” The reply surprised him. “I don’t want to go back. I barely got out of there. But I’ve got a little girl and … Look, if it’s any help I’m going to do everything I can to keep you safe. We need you if we’re going to have any hope of pulling this off.”

  “I’m afraid I won’t be able to hold it together,” Franny admitted. “I was there at the very beginning, and it was almost overwhelming then. I saw parts of myself … well, let’s just say I really wish I didn’t know they were there.”

  “From what Ray told me you were right in the room with this thing. I can tell you from experience that the effects lessen the farther away you get. And it doesn’t hit all at once. It comes over you slow. We’re just going to have to go like hell, get to the hospital, grab the guy, and get the fuck out before we’re overcome.”

  Talking with Bubbles had taken his mind off the journey. He looked through the front window and realized they were in a city of squat, rounded buildings and signs in a script he didn’t recognize. Something large flapped past overhead, the beat of the fleshy wings bringing a stench like rotting flesh into the truck.

  Mollie whimpered. “Shit,” Franny said.

  The Zil’s shocks were shot. Michelle could hear Bruckner muttering under his breath about what a shitcan it was. She saw the others wince as the truck hit potholes. She didn’t feel the pain of the jolts, but she knew that as soon as they got into Talas, she would.

  Bruckner was cursing about not being able to get the truck up to speed. As long as he wasn’t calling her a dyke, Mollie a slit, or Billy Ray a faggot, she could ignore his bitching. She tried to stay calm. Someone had to be steady with Franny and Mollie looking like they were both going to freak long before Bruckner even got them into the hospital.

  Three of Joey’s corpses sat in the back of the truck. Occasionally, one would smile at her. She knew it was Joey smiling, but it was still pretty disgusting.

  “You could give me a smile back, Bubbles.” There was nothing like the sound of your girlfriend’s voice coming through a toe tag to make you feel loved. How much whistling past the graveyard can you do? she wondered. As much as it takes, apparently.

  She saw the land around her begin to change. It wasn’t a quick slam like the portals Mollie made. It was just a few things here and there.

  The terrain began to undulate, then turned more mountainous. Then it changed back to a steppe, but now there was a luscious carpet of grasses covering it. But instead of being verdant, the grass was a deep blue-violet. The sky took on a strange greenish color, as if a tornado was about to touch down. Then the world shifted again. It was disconcerting, and had she not been in Talas before, Michelle might have found it overwhelming. But now it was just an interesting ride.

  The world continued to shift and change. Then, abruptly, they were in Talas again.

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Secretary-General,” Barbara said, not knowing whether any of this was being recorded or not. Her voice echoed in th
e interview room within St. Gilles prison. She lifted her cuffed hands and let them drop again. The sound of them on the metal surface of the table at which she sat was terribly loud and final. “Everything that was done was at my orders, no one else’s. We had to release the Highwayman before President Putin’s deadline; this seemed to be the only way. I take total and full responsibility for what happened here.”

  “Ms. Baden,” Jayewardene said softly, with a hint of a smile on his thin lips, “I’ve made very sure that there’s no one recording this. But I thank you for your … candor.”

  Barbara gave a brief smile at that, but she also let her wild card pulse out to cover the two of them, just in case Jayewardene were wrong: any recording device now would record only nonsense syllables from the two of them, while she and Jayewardene understood each other perfectly. “Have you heard from Director Ray? Are they…?”

  “Yes,” Jayewardene answered. “A truck was stolen from Baikonur Cosmodrome. The guards there say they saw it vanish.”

  Barbara nodded, but Jayewardene continued speaking. “There have been other developments as well while you’ve been here, Ms. Baden. Kyrgyzstan sent in six attack helicopters to bomb Talas.”

  Barbara sucked in a breath. “No. Did they take out the hospital? Is Tolenka dead?”

  Jayewardene’s brown face remained impassive. “They did not. Their copters were taken out of the air by a winged woman and a flight of horrors.”

  “The Midnight Angel.”

  Jayewardene nodded. “Yes. The same woman who is at this moment leading a horde of monsters toward the Baikonur and the Cosmodrome. President Putin has informed President van Rennsaeler and myself that he intends to wipe out Talas with a nuclear strike before the Cosmodrome is overrun.”

  “Then get me out of here,” Barbara said. “We need to meet with Putin, talk to him.”

  “You won’t convince him.”

  “I don’t have to,” Barbara told him. “I just have to make it impossible for him to give the order. That, I can do—at least, hopefully long enough for Ray and Michelle to succeed or fail. All I have to do is stop them for a few hours. Hopefully that should be enough. What’s a few hours, Mr. Secretary-General? If three hours from now this isn’t over, then let Putin drop the nuke, for all the good it will do. Three hours, Mr. Secretary-General. Give my people three hours, then you may do whatever you want with me.”

  Jayewardene stared at her. Looking at the flat expression on his face, she thought she’d lost. I’m sorry, Klaus. I tried. I did all I could and I’m sorry it wasn’t enough. I’m sorry that I never got to talk to you and tell you everything …

  Jayewardene stood up and went to the door of the room. He knocked, and a guard opened the door, with another standing behind him with a hand on the butt of a holstered sidearm. “Tell the warden that I will be taking the prisoner with me,” he said. The guard nodded and closed the door again.

  “I will handle President Putin and get him to honor the window he gave you, Ms. Baden,” Jayewardene said. “You’ll get your hours—as long as Putin believes that the Cosmodrome is being adequately defended. That’s your task and your burden.”

  Michelle looked at the hellscape before her and despaired. Bruckner’s truck had gotten stuck again, and now she, Billy Ray, and Joey’s zombies were going to have to push through that sea of perverted flesh and writhing, unspeakable horrors to get Franny to the hospital and Horrorshow.

  Why did I think we could do this? In what universe could you stop this madness? The anger began to boil in her. Shit.

  They had to move, because otherwise they’d be too crazy to do anything but kill each other. Or themselves.

  Michelle opened her arms, and a stream of bubbles flowed from her hands onto the uneven road. The bubbles drove a path through the ichors, tentacled monstrosities, and spiders. Blood and viscera sprayed into the air. It wasn’t a perfectly clean path, but she thought the truck could get through now.

  “Let’s go,” she said.

  Sweat was making it hard to hold the shotgun. Franny switched it from hand to hand, and wiped away the wetness on his pants’ leg. Not that he’d had to use it yet. Talas was a city of the dead filled only with fog and that incessant drone like a dentist’s drill to the brain.

  “It’s like my shortcuts have invaded our world, and brought bloody hell with them,” Bruckner muttered.

  Brought hell. Brought hell. Brought hell. The older man’s words repeated over and over in Franny’s head. The tone and timbre changed. It was Sister Theresa Anthony from Holy Ghost Elementary School telling the second graders about hell. Her voice was very loud, ringing in his ears. Your fingers will burn away, and your eyes will melt, your skin will turn black and peel from your body. There will be no water or Kool-Aid. Nothing to drink to ease your agony … Franny looked to his left. She was sitting on the divider between him and Buckner, but there was no face inside the folds of her wimple, just shadows.

  Behind him one of those damned souls was whimpering. Franny started to turn around, drive the butt of the shotgun into the face of the tortured soul. Ray’s voice jerked him back.

  “Black!” Ray’s voice sharp and commanding. “Where now?”

  Sister Theresa Anthony was gone, and Franny remembered the whimpering was Mollie’s. Franny tried to pretend it hadn’t started. That he wasn’t already losing control, going mad. A new sound overlaid the droning. Singing. High-pitched and unearthly. A group of children, perhaps fifty of them with elongated heads and massive mouths, walked past the truck. They were in a perfect diamond formation, a choir of monstrous angels singing the praises of a diseased god.

  There was a tall structure ahead of them. Once it might have been a multistory office building. Now it was a tower of bleeding flesh. In places the glistening red viscera pulsed as if great hearts were beating beneath the oozing tissue.

  “I … I’m not sure.” The road opened up into a plaza. Fog drifted past, and briefly lifted to reveal other roads branching off the plaza. Giant dykes of dirt, asphalt, and cobbles blocked three of the roads.

  “Earth Witch was here,” Bubbles said.

  A burning wind that carried the stink of smoke, cordite, and rot ripped the fog into tatters. An equestrian statue appeared. “I remember that,” Franny cried. “Go left.”

  The Highwayman spun the wheel. He had begun to drone an unceasing litany of curse words.

  “Stop it! Stop it! Stop it! Fucking shut up!” Mollie screamed, and she punched Bruckner in the back of the head.

  The truck slewed wildly from side to side. Franny grabbed the steering wheel. Bruckner was digging out his pistol. Franny released the wheel, and wrestled the gun away before Bruckner could bring it to bear on Mollie. In the few seconds it had taken him to disarm the driver the truck had jumped a curb and plowed into a building. Ray yelled, zombies fell from the hood like overripe fruit, and Michelle lost her grip on the truck, and tumbled to the ground.

  Franny heard her murmur “Adesina,” as she started walking away. Bruckner’s nose was bleeding from where his face had hit the steering wheel and he was weeping, tears mingling with blood and snot.

  Franny shoved open the door and ran after Michelle. The ground felt strange as if he were running in taffy. “Michelle, Bubbles, wait! You promised. You have to keep us safe.”

  Ray had joined him. “Michelle, the kid’s right, we can’t do this without you.” She stretched out her arms toward nothing but fog, and gave a cry of joy. “Shit we’re starting to lose it.” Ray mumbled and checked his watch. Franny followed his gaze, but the hands of the watch were spinning, changing into spiders and running across the numbers that were melting.

  “Not much time. Not much time,” Franny whispered. He groped in his pocket for his father’s rosary, felt the carved beads and the arms of the crucifix cut into the palm of his hand.

  The pain gave him a moment of clarity. He looked around, tried to reconcile the strange and twisted surroundings to what he had seen only a few short days before. He
’d always had a good memory, and his years on the force had made him even better at observation. He had a sudden overlaid image of what the area looked like and realized they were only a short distance from the hospital.

  “I remember. I know. I know where we have to go.” He tugged on Michelle’s arm, but couldn’t budge her.

  “Baby, Mama’s here,” she crooned. A figure shambled out of the fog and tried to accept Bubbles’s offered embrace.

  Franny gave a cry of disgust and stumbled back. Sucking mouths covered the entire head. There were more mouths on the palms of the thing’s hands. Suddenly the zombies were there, interposing themselves between Michelle and the monster. They moved stiffly, but with surprising strength. They pushed the thing away, then two of them picked up bricks and battered it into a bleeding pulp while the third held it still. The arrival of the zombies broke the illusion. Michelle gave a shudder, and murmured, “Thanks, babe.”

  They returned to the truck. Ray clapped Bruckner. “Kid says he knows the way. Let’s go.”

  Franny climbed back into the cab, and the two aces took up their positions on the running boards.

  Mollie concentrated on maintaining a pinhole connection to the Cosmodrome for Joey while Bruckner rolled the truck to a halt. The idling engine chugged along, puffing diesel-scented exhaust into the same Bosch/Escher/Giger three-way acid trip Mollie had glimpsed when Joey was searching for A-team survivors. The landscape around the casino had become a forest of bone trees, the pustule-stippled boughs hanging low with pulsing organ fruit. A trio of twenty-foot millipedes reared like cobras before the truck, mandibles opening wide to reveal shrieking mouths bursting with dozens of shiny black spider eyes. A bubble came winging from where Michelle huddled in the canopy. It cratered the road—for lack of a better term, because the ground under the truck looked and smelled and jiggled like something hacked up by a lifelong five-pack-per-day chain-smoker—and sent little gobbets of singed nightmarepedes raining on the truck. They sizzled on the windshield glass. The other two monsters undulated away, leaving a trail of fizzing slime as they skittered on legs that looked like prehensile tongues.