Wild Cards 15 - Black Trump

by George R. R. Martin

  The two hunchbacks became one. "Quasiman," Jay muttered. The cavalry had arrived, drooling, "What are you doing here?"

  "I always come here," Quasiman said, perplexed. "I have to do something." He frowned, trying to remember. "There was a paper. I need to get drugs for Mark."

  "I think you did that already," Jay told him. The hunchback looked lost. "Help me up," Jay urged.

  "Hold on to me," Quasiman said. Jay draped an arm around his neck. Quasiman pulled him erect. Blood was running down his face and soaking through his bandage. The floor slanted under his feet. The tourists were as far away as they could get, clinging to the walls and hiding under the furniture. Jay looked behind him and saw the wreckage of the helicopter where it had punched right through into the cabin. He reeled unsteady, blinking. He felt as if he were trapped in a dream. There was something strangely familiar about all this. He could not remember what it was, but the sense of deja vu was overwhelming.

  There was a sharp crack and something whistled past his ear. Quasiman vanished as suddenly as he had appeared. Somebody was shooting at him, Jay realized dreamily. "Freeze, or the pony gets it!" a shrill voice screamed.

  Across the cabin, a man with half a face stood with a gun in one hand and a spray nozzle in the other. The gun was pressed to Finn's head. The spray nozzle was pointed at Jay. It was fed from a long hose that led back to a bulky metal cannister on the man's back. Jay didn't need three guesses to figure out what was in the canister. There were other canisters on the floor behind Finn.

  "I'm sorry, Jay," Finn said mournfully. "I blew it."

  Jay realized blearily that there were bodies littering the deck; Shark gunmen, four of them at least, and a fifth wounded and moaning in the corner. The little centaur hadn't done badly at all, from the looks of it. Half Face looked to be the only guy still standing.

  Half Face pressed the barrel of the gun against Finn's temple and shouted, "I mean it! One move and the joker's dead." The right side of his head was a mask of blood, and the shoulder of his white lab coat was stained a deep red. He waved the spray nozzle around threateningly.

  "You release that shit and the joker is dead anyway," Jay told him, playing for time. "Along with me, you, and the rest of the world. What would you say if I told you your precious Black Trump kills nats too?"

  Half Face giggled crazily. "I'd say, Liar, liar, pants on fire. You can't fool me. I'm a trained scientist."

  Finn gaped at Jay. "Nats too? Everyone? Clara?"

  Jay nodded.

  Finn lifted a forefoot and slammed a hoof down hard on the instep of the man with half a face. Jay heard a crunch as bones snapped. Half Face screamed. Finn ducked, kneed him in the groin, and wrenched the pistol out of his fingers.

  By then Jay was moving. By then it was too late.

  As Finn wrestled with him for the spray nozzle, Half Face clenched his trigger finger. A fine mist sprayed out. It felt like a soft drizzle as it touched Jay's face. Half Face giggled. "Ooops," he said. "Sorry, you're dead."

  Finn wrenched the nozzle away, and gave him a backhand slap, hard across the cheek. Half Face went down like a sack of potatoes. Finn slumped helplessly. "I'm sorry," he said. He sounded so tired "I tried, but ... oh, God ... Clara ..."

  Jay bent over Half Face to examine the tank on his back. One chance in four, he thought, thinking of Hastet. And there it was: a mark on the bottom of the cannister.

  The world spun dizzily. "We can't die yet," Jay said. "We haven't seen The Jolson Story."

  Quasiman materialized out of nowhere. "Don't drink the wine!" he shouted in alarm. "They put it in the wine."

  Jay didn't know what the fuck the hunchback was talking about, but he had an idea. He took the spray nozzle from Finn and gave him a quick spritz. Then he hosed down Quasiman.

  "What are you doing?" Finn said, horrified.

  "Saving the world," Jay said, yanking Half Face's arms out from the straps that held the tank to his back. Half Face groaned in protest. "Quasiman, come over here." The hunchback stepped close. Jay hefted the bulky tank onto his twisted back and helped him tighten the straps. "This is Mark's Overtrump," he told him. "Do you know what you have to do?"

  "I remember now," Quasiman said. "I have to take it ..."

  "Everywhere," Jay finished for him. "Hong Kong, Saigon, Jerusalem, New York, Paris, everywhere there are aces and jokers. Spray Hannah and Father Squid and Peregrine and everyone else you know, no matter where they are. Spray Squisher's Basement and Aces High and the Louvre and the Kremlin and the Taj Mahal. Spray O'Hare and Tomlin and Heathrow, all the big airports you can find. Keep moving. Don't waste it all in one spot. This is all we have, and there's a whole world out there to dose. Do you understand?"

  The hunchback nodded. "What if I forget?"

  "You won't," Jay told him, praying that he was right. "You won't forget."

  "I won't," Quasiman said, vanishing.

  Finn was staring at the place he had been. "Overtrump," he said. "You mean ... a cure ... a vaccine ... my God, you entrusted our only hope to a, a, a ..."

  "A joker," Jay said. Finn shut up.

  There were still three canisters to take care of. The Black Trump, the real Black Trump. If this stuff got loose, it would be a horserace between the two viruses. Win, place, and die. Jay shaped stiff fingers into a gun. A canister vanished with a soft pop. Then a second one ...

  He was pointing toward the third when the tourists began to scream. The floor was tilting under him. Jay looked over his shoulder, just in time to see the wreckage of the helicopter shudder and slide backwards and fall away, leaving a jagged hole in the gondola. A sudden gust of wind plucked at him with cold fingers. Finn clutched for a handrail. Jay clutched at Finn. Tourists grabbed furniture and children. Souvenir booklets and maps and postcards skittered across the floor and were sucked out through the jagged hole into the night. A Chinese woman followed, screaming.

  "The Trump!" Finn shouted.

  The last cannister of Black Trump was rolling across the gondola, toward the darkness. Jay lurched for it as it went by, missed, and hung on to Finn for dear life.

  The tank bounced across the deck and slammed into Half Face where he lay. He clutched it to him, embracing it like a lover. "Mine!" he screamed. He hooked a leg around a railing as his plump hands fumbled greedily with the valve.

  Jay let go of Finn.

  The wind took him. He flew across the cabin. Half Face saw him coming. He lifted the cannister with both hands and smashed Jay full in the face with it. The pain was blinding, and Jay heard bones crunch in his cheek, but somehow he managed to get one hand on the tank and the other one in Half Face's hair.

  They rolled over and over, and went out the hole together, into the empty, moonlit sky.

  ♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

  The night air several hundred feet up was cool, not the usual Southeast Asian 22-degrees-of-latitude furnace blast. The lights of the New Territories appeared below him like pinpricks in the mantle over Hell. Radical flew on, upheld solely by the light of the moon and his own long-chained will to struggle.

  His mind phased in and out of consciousness. Sometimes he almost lost track of who he was; sometimes he seemed to be JJ Flash, or dour Aquarius, or Cosmic Traveler, or even Mark. Sometimes he had flashes of Moonchild and once or twice even dead Starshine.

  The moonlight was energizing him. But his body was trying to use all that energy to repair the terrible damage the missile warhead had done. It took constant application of willpower to hold himself in the sky - and when he would begin to fade again, the borders of his personality to blur, he would find himself dropping at an alarming rate.

  Focus wandering ... a small boy on a stove-hot sidewalk, under blinding Southern California sun. A little girl on a tricycle, with black hair in pigtails and lavender eyes....

  He was falling again. The cool rush of air saved him, caught him, returned him to himself. He shook his head, and he reveled in the agony-waves that motion sent crashing through his body; they returned
him to Now.

  Ahead; a half-ellipsoid shimmer of light. The lights of Hong Kong, reflected on the underbelly of the airship Harmony.

  He sped up. The effort felt as if it were tearing his mind like a sheet of rotten cloth. He forced his arms out straight in front of him, fists clenched, and drove onward.

  The airship swelled in his vision. He saw the air around his out-thrust fists shimmer and turn red as subconsciously he summoned a JJ Flash fireblast. His body dipped toward the hungry water.

  No, he reminded himself. I can't burn the blimp down. I can't be sure of getting the Black Trump that way....

  From the gondola, an object detached itself, dropping toward the choppy waters of the harbor below. On raptor instinct alone Radical dove, using gravity's insistent pull to gather speed.

  ♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

  The wind shrieked and the stars pin wheeled around them as they fell, tumbling, locked together tighter than honeymooners, arms and legs entwined around the cannister.

  Half Face was screaming, "Let go! Let go! It's mine," and hitting him in the face, over and over. Every punch felt like an icepick up his nose, but Jay wouldn't let go.

  He tightened his legs around the canister, dug his fingers into Half Face's hair, and began to slam his forehead into the valve. Half Face shrieked and kicked at him. The moon was below them, then the water, then the moon. Half Face screamed as a handful of hair and scalp ripped off in Jay's fingers. "We're going to die!" he yelled.

  "Might as well," Jay said. "Can't dance." The moon spun around them dizzily.

  Then the sky came lurching to a sudden halt.

  ♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

  Arm locked around Jay's waist, Radical fought to level off. He knew how an eagle felt, trying to lift a hare.

  Jarnavon clung to the canister, blood-masked half-face distorted with emotion beyond the point of madness. Ackroyd likewise clutched the metal container, like Sprout with a favored teddy bear.

  "No!" the scientist screamed at Radical's face. His legs flailed night air, pants cuffs hiked well up over his brown shoes. "You cant! All I've worked for - the brave new order - "

  "Ackroyd," Radical said in the hoarse, wind-torn whisper that was all he could force out still-blistered lips. "Just let go."

  From a handspan away the detective's eyes stared into his without comprehension. Then he said, "Oh," and relaxed his deathgrip on the metal cylinder.

  Jarnavon fell away beneath them. A bony hand feverishly turned a stopcock. "You'll see!" he cried. "I'll release it anyway! I've still won, you fools!"

  Radical let himself and Jay fall free. He flung his arm down, hand outstretched. "No," he rasped. "You lose."

  And a wash of plasma fire jetted forth. Jarnavon shrieked as flame vaporized him and the canister.

  ♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

  Zoe and Billy Ray rode the winds, leaving Croyd and his camels far behind. Sand ground against the carpet and needled the faces of its riders. Billy Ray dripped water on the carpet; molecular hydrogen hissed energy to drive them south, Zoe breathed instructions to the carpet and it found a place in synchrony with the wind, a calm place where its energies grew incrementally, an asymptotic curve on the graph of improbability.

  They could ride this current into Jerusalem, this peaceful nexus between energies. They sat on the carpet as if it were a bobsled. Billy Ray had his knees locked around her waist. She leaned back against him, wanting to cringe from his ugliness, but grateful for his warmth. The air was cold up here.

  A woman named April Harvest drove death toward Jerusalem. Zoe looked for any sign of a truck, for any fresh tracks made by anything, but the scouring sand hid all traces of roads and nothing moved across the dunes but the wind. This is the way the world ends, she chanted to herself. Not with a bang but a sneeze.

  Stars broke through the clouds of sand and winked away again. One of the clouds rolled over and smiled at her. It wore the face of the dead skinhead who had killed Bjorn. The Russian enterpreneur stood up behind him and tried to hand-roll a cigarette, but the wind kept blowing the tobacco away, each of the shreds a drop of brownish blood.

  At least she wasn't hearing voices again.

  "I'm muddy," Billy Ray said. "I hate being dirty."

  "I'll never get the sand out of my hair," Zoe said.

  The man behind her was in superb physical shape, his muscles taut as plates of steel. She guessed he worked out as a sort of defense against his ugliness.

  "How long until we get there?" Billy Ray asked.

  Zoe looked at the little pocket locator. "Half an hour," she said.

  "We can't go faster?"

  "No."

  The joker behind her shifted his posture. "Damn," he said. She could feel the tension in him, a rage that seemed personal rather than righteous. But he wasn't the kind to talk much, it seemed.

  Zoe watched for roads, for trucks, for people who might shoot at them. We're dead, Daddy, she told Bjorn. I don't think I can get Mommy out of this, or the kids, or me. I'm sorry.

  You aren't dead yet, honey. Bjorn spoke to her, his voice a voice of wilderness, so that she tasted fresh-caught salmon tossed on spring riverbanks, and nosed for honey in the tickling dust of dead trees.

  She was hearing voices, yes, but at least she wasn't hearing the voices of strangers, or of sand.

  "Don't fall asleep," Billy Ray said.

  "Sleep? Sleep would be so nice, but I won't sleep. I'll be good. Sorry, Daddy," Zoe said.

  Billy Ray shook her. "Stop that! Don't flip out, okay?"

  My world is dying and I can't stop it. We're all going to die, but this man says don't flip out. He's crazy, Daddy. "Okay," Zoe said.

  A hunchbacked man sat on the air beside them. He had something like a scuba tank strapped on his back. "Billy Ray," the man said. "I know you."

  "Quasi? What the hell are you doing here?" Billy Ray said.

  "I have to go. Everywhere he said. Spray them all. I have to remember. Be careful." He fumbled for something attached to the tank on his back, but before he reached it, Quasiman dissolved into the air.

  "Yeah, right, Quas." Billy Ray shrugged and stared at the landscape. Dawn showed roads below them now, and scrubby fields, and the earthen ramparts and barbed wire fences that marked a land in turmoil.

  "Zoe? That's Jerusalem, up ahead," Billy Ray said. "Maybe you'd better bring this thing down."

  She smelled smoke. Something was very, very wrong. The popcorn sound of gunfire rose toward them from the huddle of yellow stone, the maze of streets where people rushed back and forth like ants fleeing a kicked anthill. The streets were filled with cars and donkeys and camels and trucks, but none of them were water trucks.

  She had to get Anne, get the Escorts, get them out!

  The city was on fire. Zoe spiraled the carpet down toward Jerusalem.

  ♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

  Ray was worried about the attention they might attract as they approached the city on the flying carpet, but he soon saw that Jerusalem had other things to worry about. As they swooped down over the Walled City they saw smoke, street fights, and bodies lying everywhere.

  "Jesus," Ray said. "It's a madhouse down there."

  They landed on the flat roof of an apartment building avoiding the gates that were heavily guarded from the outside.

  "I've got to find my mother and the kids," Zoe said. "What are you going to do?"

  What was he going to do? He didn't know. He had to find Harvest and stop her, although it looked like they might be too late for that. He hated her. He should hate her. But he realized that he didn't. She'd betrayed him. Betrayed, hell, she'd tried to kill him in a particularly excruciating manner. But he could only think of her beauty, her cockiness, her coolness under pressure, her near-insatiable desire. She was everything he ever wanted in a woman, and by God he loved her still. He would always love her. Shit. What was he going to do? He gave Zoe the only answer he could.

  "Kick ass."

  Ray inserted clean filters in his nose and put one of Zoe's ext
ra surgical masks over his mouth. He felt feverish and light-headed. It could be an army of microbes working on him, whittling down his defenses until he collapsed in a pile of red goo. Or it could be the fact that he'd lost his woman, broken his arm, and hadn't eaten for twelve hours. Whatever, it wouldn't hurt to be a little cautious, what with the Black Trump raging through the city.

  "So long, Ray," Zoe said.

  "So long. And good luck."

  They opened the hatchway on the roof and went downstairs. It was a death house. An entire family, kids, parents, and grandparents had perished in their own blood. He and Zoe parted at the door. She went to seek her own family.

  Ray went to look for April Harvest.

  ♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

  "They've found the truck!" Needles burst into the room where Gregg and Hannah waited. "It's near the Wailing Wall. Come on - the Black Dog's already gone after it."

  Puppetman shrieked inside. No! We can't go out there! Hannah was already up. Her face grim as she pulled her filter mask down, her hands covered in a double pair of rubber doves, she took the Uzi that Needles offered her. "Hannah," Gregg began, "We don't know if masks and filters are going to stop the Trump. We can't - "

  "We have to," Hannah said. Her voice was muffled but her conviction was clear to the power inside Greg. He could barely see the core of doubt inside it. "I'm not going to stay here. If you can't, fine. But I'm going."

  "But I don't ..." Gregg stopped. He wore a mask, too, one jury-rigged to fit him as best they could, and his feet were swathed in wrappings of plastic that made it difficult for him to grasp anything. If I get out there and one part of this garbage doesn't work, I'm dead! he wanted to cry, and he knew the power inside him was shouting the same words. But Hannah was already heading out of the door behind Needles, and he didn't want to be alone.