Wild Cards III: Jokers Wild

by George R. R. Martin

  When he got off at Times Square and walked the block west in the tiled tunnels beneath 42nd, he overheard one transit cop disgustedly say to his partner, “Wait’ll you take a gander topside. It looks like a cross between spring break at Lauderdale and the Bronx Zoo.”

  He came up for air at Eighth Avenue, ascending out of the strong morning scent of disinfectant barely masking the smell of vomit. The street population looked to Jack like any rush-hour weekday morning, except that the average age looked fairly youthful, and gray suits had been replaced by considerably more garish attire.

  Jack stepped off the curb to avoid having to confront a swaggering trio of teenaged boys—normals by the look of them—who wore outrageous styrofoam headgear. The hats featured tentacles, drooping lips, segmented legs, horns, melting eyes, and other, more unappetizing appendages that jiggled and bobbed with the wearer’s movements.

  One of the boys put his thumbs to his cheekbones and wagged his fingers at passersby. “Ooga, booga,” he cried. “We muties! We bad!” His pals laughed uproariously.

  A block further, Jack passed one of the sidewalk sellers peddling the foam hats. “Hey!” the vendor called. “Hey, c’mere, c’mere. Y’ don’t got to be a joker to look like one. T’day’s your chance to act like one. You interested?”

  Jack shook his head wordlessly, scratched the back of his hand, and walked on.

  “Hey!” yelled the man to another potential customer. “Be a joker for a day! Tomorrow you can go back to being yerself.”

  Jack shook his head. He wasn’t sure now whether it would be better to go on being depressed, or just go back and rip out the hat vendor’s throat. He looked at his watch. Five before seven. The bus would be in. The salesman’s life was temporarily safe.

  The Port Authority building was a darker gray, bulking large in the chill gray of the Manhattan morning. Then Jack noted that most of the human traffic seemed to be exiting rather than entering the building. It reminded him of an Avenue A apartment after the exterminators set off their chemical bombs—an exodus of cockroaches carpeting every exit.

  He fought his way through one of the main doors, ignoring the hulking men importuning, “Hey, man, want a cab? Want an escort in to your bus?” Most of the storefronts along the interior promenade were locked and dark, but the snack bars were doing a land-office business.

  Jack looked at his watch again. 7:02. Ordinarily he would have stopped and appreciated the huge “42nd St. Carousel” kinetic sculpture, a glass box enclosing a marvelous and musical Rube Goldberg contraption, but now there was no time. Less than no time.

  He checked the arrival board. The bus he wanted was coming in at a gate three levels up. Merde! The escalators were broken. Most of the foot traffic was coming down. Jack made his way up the stationary metal flights. He felt like a salmon struggling upstream to spawn.

  Only a minor current of the incoming tidal crest of humanity seemed to be the usual sorts of people who arrived in Manhattan by bus. Most seemed either to be tourists—Jack wondered whether this many people would actually be coming into the city for this particular holiday—or jokers themselves. Jack noted wryly that the normals were obliged by the constraints of the stairs and escalator steps to associate much more closely with jokers than they might otherwise have wished.

  Then someone elbowed him painfully in the side, and the opportunity for musing was over. By the time he reached the third level and stepped outside the down-traveling crowd, Jack felt as if he’d used as much energy as he would normally burn climbing to the crown of the Statue of Liberty.

  Somebody in the crush patted him on the rear. “Watch it, jerk,” he said without rancor, not looking.

  He found the section holding the gate he wanted. The area was packed. It looked as if at least half a dozen coaches had arrived and were unloading simultaneously. He waded into the aimless melee and aimed himself at the right gate number. He stopped to allow a dozen traditionally garbed nuns to move past him at right angles. A big joker with leathery skin and pronounced tusks protruding from beneath his upper lip tried to muscle through the nuns. “Hey, move it, penguins!” he yelled. Another joker, one with huge puppy-like brown eyes and what appeared to be stigmata wounds on his palms, voiced exception. The shouting match looked as if it might escalate into something more violent. Naturally an increasingly dense crowd of onlookers stopped to gawk.

  Jack tried to bypass the mess. He stumbled into an apparent normal, who shoved back. “Sorry!”

  The normal was well over six feet tall, and proportionately muscled. “Buzz off.”

  And then Jack saw her. It was Cordelia. He knew that as surely as he knew anything, though he hadn’t seen her before in his life. Elouette had sent pictures the Christmas previous, but the photographs didn’t do the young woman justice. Looking at Cordelia, Jack thought, was like looking at his sister when she’d been three decades younger. His niece was wearing jeans and a sweatshirt. The sweatshirt was a faded crimson with screaming yellow letters spelling out FERRIC JAGGER. Jack recognized the name even though he wasn’t terribly interested in heavy metal groups. He could also make out some sort of pattern made up of lightning bolts, a sword, and what looked like a swastika.

  Cordelia was about ten yards away, on the other side of a thick flow of disembarking passengers. She held a battered floral-print suitcase with one hand, a leather handbag with the other. A tall, slender, expensively dressed Hispanic man was trying to help her with the suitcase. Jack was instantly suspicious of any helpful stranger wearing a purple pinstripe suit, slouch hat, and a fur-trimmed coat. It looked like baby harpseal pelts.

  “Hey!” Jack shouted. “Cordelia! Over here! It’s me—Jack!”

  She obviously didn’t hear him. For Jack, it was like watching television, or perhaps the view seen through the wrong end of a telescope. He couldn’t attract Cordelia’s attention. With the noise of the terminal, the buses revving their engines, the massed roar of the crowd, his words wouldn’t cross the intervening distance.

  The man took her suitcase. Jack yelled helplessly. Cordelia smiled. Then the man took her elbow and steered her toward a near-side exit.

  “No!” It was loud enough that even Cordelia turned her head. Then she looked puzzled briefly, before continuing toward the exit at the behest of her guide.

  Jack uttered a curse and started to pull and shove people out of his way as he tried to cross the waiting area. Nuns, jokers, punkers, street bums, it didn’t matter. At least not until he fetched up against the bulk of a joker who looked to have the general shape and about half the mass of a Volkswagen Beetle.

  “Goin’ somewhere?” said the joker.

  “Yes,” said Jack, trying to move past.

  “I come all the way from Santa Fe for this. I always heard you people here was rude.”

  A fist the size of a two-slice toaster grabbed Jack’s shirt lapels. Fetid breath made him think of a public restroom after rush hour.

  “Sorry,” said Jack. “Look, I’ve got to get my niece before a son-of-a-bitching pimp steals her out of here.”

  The joker looked down at him for a long moment. “I can dig it,” he said. “Just like on TV, huh?” He let loose of Jack, and the latter scooted around him like rounding the flank of a mountain.

  Cordelia was gone. The nattily attired man guiding her was gone. Jack got to the exit where the two had presumably left. He could see hundreds of people, mainly the backs of their heads, but no one who looked like his niece.

  He hesitated only a second. There were eight million people in this city. He had no idea how many tourists and jokers from all parts of the world had flooded into Manhattan for Wild Card Day. More millions, probably. All he had to find was one sixteen-year-old from rural Louisiana.

  It was all instinct for the moment. Without thinking further, Jack headed for the escalators. Maybe he’d catch up with them before the man and Cordelia got outside. But if not, then he’d just find Cordelia on the street.

  He didn’t want to think about wh
at he’d tell his sister.

  Spector hadn’t slept. He picked up the amber bottle of pills on the bedside table and dropped them into the trash. He’d have to find something stronger.

  The pain was always there, like the smell of stale smoke in a seedy bar. Spector sat up and breathed slowly. The early morning light made his apartment look even grayer than usual. He’d furnished the efficiency with cheap beat-up junk from pawnshops and secondhand stores.

  The phone rang.

  “Hello.”

  “Mr. Spector?” The voice had the refined edge of a Bostonian. Spector didn’t recognize it.

  “Yeah. Who are you?”

  “My name is unimportant, at least for now.”

  “Right.” They were going to play cagey with him, but most people did. “So why are you calling me? What do you want?”

  “A mutual acquaintance named Gruber indicated that you have certain unique abilities. A client of mine might wish to employ you, initially on a freelance basis.”

  Spector scratched his neck. “I think I see what you’re getting at here. If this is some kind of a setup, you’re a dead man. If you’re legit, it’s going to cost you.”

  “Naturally. Perhaps you’ve heard of the Shadow Fist Society? It could be very profitable for you to work within that organization. However, they are cautious and would require a demonstration first. Would this morning be too soon?”

  Word had it that the Shadow Fist Society was run by the city’s anonymous new crime lord. They were leaning hard on the older gang bosses. Spector would feel right at home in the upcoming bloodbath. “I got nothing else to do. Who do you have in mind?”

  “That’s really of no importance to us.” He paused. “Mr. Gruber seems to know quite a bit about you, and he’s far from discreet.”

  “Fine by me.”

  “Be at Times Square at eleven-thirty this morning. If we’re satisfied that you meet our needs you’ll be contacted there.”

  “What about money?” Spector heard a buzz at the other end.

  “That will be negotiated later. If you’ll excuse me, I have another matter to attend to. Good-bye, Mr. Spector.”

  Spector dropped the receiver into the cradle. He smiled. Gruber wasn’t one of his favorite people. He never gave anyone a fair price for their goods. Killing a greedy fence would be something of a public service.

  He walked naked to the bathroom and stared at the mirror. His stringy brown hair needed washing and his mustache was overgrowing his thin upper lip. Other than that he looked the same as the day he’d died. The day Tachyon had brought him back. Spector wondered if he might not live forever. At this point, he didn’t really care. He stuck out his tongue. His reflection didn’t. It smiled at him.

  “Don’t worry, Demise,” said his face in the mirror. “You can still die.” It laughed.

  He backed into the bedroom. The air was cold. There was a loud, crackling sound. Spector ran for the living room. The bedroom door slammed in his face. He smelled ozone.

  “Now, now, Demise. I only want to have a little chat.” Spector recognized the voice now. He turned. The Astronomer’s projected self was sitting on the bed. He was wearing a black robe sashed at the waist with a rope of human hair. His crippled body was straighter than usual, which meant his powers were charged up. He was covered in blood.

  “What do you want?” Spector was afraid. The Astronomer was one of the few people his power didn’t work on.

  “Do you know what today is?”

  “Wild Card Day. Everybody and his dog knows that.” Spector picked a pair of brown corduroy pants off the floor.

  “Yes. But it’s also something else. It’s Judgment Day.” The Astronomer knotted his fingers together.

  “Judgment Day?” He pulled his pants on. “What are you talking about?”

  “Those bastards who ruined my plan. They intervened with our true destiny. They kept us from ruling the world.” The Astronomer’s eyes gleamed. There was a madness in them that even Spector hadn’t seen before. “But there are other worlds. This one won’t soon forget my parting shot at those fuckers who got in my way.”

  “Turtle. Tachyon. Fortunato. You’re going after those guys?” Spector clapped his hands softly. “Good for you.”

  “By the end of the day they’ll all be dead. And you, my dear Demise, are going to help me.”

  “Bullshit. I did your dirty work before, but not now. You fucking left me hanging out to dry, and I’m not going to give you another chance.”

  “I don’t want to kill you, so I’ll give you one chance to change your mind.” A rainbow of colored light began to swirl around the Astronomer.

  “Fuck off, man.” Spector shook his fist. “You’re not going to make a fool of me again.”

  “No? Then I’m afraid I’ll have to make a corpse of you. Along with all the rest.” The Astronomer shifted into a jackal’s head. It opened its mouth; dark blood flowed steaming onto the carpeted floor. It howled. The building shook with sound.

  Spector covered his ears and fell to the floor.

  Fortunato called Caroline to come for Veronica. Caroline could take her to his mother’s townhouse, the official business address for the escort agency. Caroline, and half a dozen of the other women, more or less lived there. He hustled Veronica into her clothes and then left her nodding out on the living room couch.

  Brennan said, “Is she going to be all right?”

  “I doubt it.”

  “I know it’s none of my business, but weren’t you maybe a little hard on her?”

  “It’s under control,” Fortunato said.

  “Sure it is,” Brennan said. “I never said it wasn’t.”

  They stood and looked at each other for a few seconds. As Yeoman, Brennan was probably the only one of the costumed vigilantes running loose in New York that Fortunato trusted. Partly because Brennan was still human, unaffected by the wild card virus. Partly because he and Fortunato had been through some serious shit together, inside a monstrous alien that some people called the Swarm.

  The Astronomer called it TIAMAT, and he’d used a machine he called the Shakti device to bring it to Earth. Fortunato had smashed the machine himself, but he was too late. The alien had already arrived, and hundreds of thousands around the world had died because of it.

  “What about the Astronomer?” Fortunato said.

  “You know a guy they call the Walrus? Jube, the newsie?”

  Fortunato shrugged. “Seen him around, I guess.”

  “He saw the Astronomer in Jokertown early this morning. Told Chrysalis about it, she mentioned it to me.”

  “What did it cost you?”

  “Nothing. I know, it’s out of character. But even Chrysalis is afraid of this guy.”

  “Where does this Walrus know the Astronomer from?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “So we’ve got a secondhand report by an unreliable witness and a cold trail?”

  “Backoff, man. I tried to phone. The operator told me it was off the hook. This isn’t even my fight. I came here to help you out.”

  Fortunato looked at the Mirror of Hathor. It could take him all day to get it purified and get himself focused enough to try it again. Meanwhile, if the Astronomer had come out of his hole, it could be trouble.

  “Yeah, okay. Let me take care of this other business and we’ll go take a look.”

  By the time Fortunato had his street clothes on, Caroline had arrived. Even with her hair in short blond tangles, wearing an old sweatshirt and jeans, she made Fortunato want her.

  She didn’t look any older than she had seven years ago, when he’d first taken her on. She had a child’s face and a compact, energetic body whose every muscle seemed to be under her voluntary control. Fortunato loved all his women, but Caroline was special. She’d learned everything he could teach her—etiquette, foreign languages, cooking, massage—but her spirit had never cracked. He’d never mastered her, and maybe for that reason she could still give him more pleasure in bed
than any of the others.

  He kissed her quickly when he let her in. He wished he could take her back into the bedroom and let her give him a shot of Tantric power. But there wasn’t time.

  “What do you want to do with her?” Caroline said.

  “Does she have a date tonight?”

  “It’s Wild Card Day. Everybody has a date tonight. Mine should be over by midnight, and I may have to go out again if I get home too early.”

  “Keep an eye on her. Let her go out if she seems all right. But keep her away from any more junk. I’ll figure out the rest of it later.”

  She looked at Yeoman. “Is something up?”

  “Nothing to worry about. I’ll call you later.” He kissed her again and watched her take Veronica down to the waiting cab. Then he looked at Brennan and said, “Let’s go.”

  “Is that a lobster, or is that a lobster?” Gills asked. He held it up for Hiram’s inspection, and the lobster waved its claws feebly. The pincers were banded shut and a few strands of seaweed draped the hard green shell.

  “A lobster of distinction,” Hiram Worchester agreed. “Are they all that large?”

  “This is one of the small ones,” Gills said. The joker had mottled greenish skin, and gill slits in his cheeks that pulled open when he smiled, showing the moist red flesh within. The gills didn’t work, of course; if they had, the elderly fishmonger would have been an ace instead of a joker.

  Outside, dawn light was washing over Fulton Street, but the fish market was already busy. Fishmongers and buyers haggled over prices, refrigerator trucks were being loaded, teamsters shouted curses at each other, and men in starched white aprons rolled barrels along the sidewalks. The smell of fish hung in the air like a perfume.

  Hiram Worchester fancied himself a night owl, and on most days preferred to sleep in. But today was not most days. It was Wild Card Day, the day he closed his restaurant to the public and hosted the city’s aces in a private party that had become a tradition, and special occasions made their own special demands, like getting out of bed when it was still dark outside.