Texas Hold'em

by Wild Cards Trust

  It stung and it felt as if he’d cracked his thumbnail, but then he looked. His nail had become as grey as the flints he’d hunted as a boy, his thumb as well, and from the tip, in the place of blood, oozed a tarry black substance like bitumen. But it was burning, with a literal flame. And Foxworthy still desperately wanted that smoke.

  Not questioning the nightmare logic of it all, he held his thumb to his pipe, drawing the flame until the tobacco caught, then sucking in. He was pulling too fast, the smoke scorching hot, but the fire soothed his lungs and it was, in fact, what he needed. Foxworthy examined his thumb, which was still burning like an oil lamp. He snuffed it out against his jacket. It extinguished like any ordinary flame, leaving a scorch on the wool, but he was more concerned for his thumb. The bituminous blood scabbed over, hard and black on the grey stone, but though the greyness had spread down his thumb and was progressing to his palm, his thumb was still flexible.

  He turned to the three-headed crewman who had got to his feet and was exchanging glances with himself in a shell-shocked daze. ‘You, sailor,’ he barked, ‘James, is it?’

  There was an instinctive posture to a trained military man when he heard a commanding officer’s voice, no matter the branch of service. ‘Yes, sir!’ the three-headed man cried from all three of his mouths, saluting, his hand only raised to his rightmost head upon his ridiculously broad shoulders, his uniform rent asunder.

  ‘I’m a brigadier in His Majesty’s Army, and I’m taking this as an act of war and declaring martial law. So, name and rank?’

  ‘Seaman Gully, sir!’

  ‘Commodore Ford is dead. Who is the next ranking officer?’

  James Gully’s heads swivelled, looking in all directions. ‘Maybe Eddy?’ said the leftmost, pointing out to the watery bulk of Neptune. ‘Lieutenant Waters,’ the right corrected him. Then the middle head, still wearing his sailor’s cap with the CUNARD band, said, ‘All the officers save the Commodore were on the bridge, sir. We were all swept overboard.’

  ‘Then barring any new information to the contrary, I’m declaring myself captain of this vessel. Is anyone manning the bridge?’

  All three of Gully’s heads looked in unison, then all of them shook. ‘No, sir. But Commodore Ford set us on autopilot. Our course is set on a very slow circle in order to conserve fuel.’

  ‘We’ll need to loop back faster to sweep for survivors.’

  ‘Should we radio for assistance?’ asked Gully’s left head.

  ‘Good God, man, no!’ Foxworthy cried. ‘I don’t know whether this was caused by Nazi gas, an alien plague, or Madame Blavatsky going to Atlantis to reopen Pandora’s box with the Thule Society, but we dare not expose other ships. Just go find any men fit to helm the bridge, and when you have enough, loop back.’

  ‘Aye aye, Captain…’ the three-headed man trailed off, staring.

  ‘What is it?’ Foxworthy had seen soldiers tongue-tied with shock before, but never one with three tongues who still couldn’t spit out what he was trying to say. ‘Out with it, man!’ Foxworthy snapped his fingers impatiently then watched as sparks flew and a chip of stone broke off his thumb, flying off like a flake of Neolithic elf shot, but burning with fire as it lodged itself in the woodwork five feet away.

  He then saw what all three of James’s heads were staring at: his whole hand had turned to stone, not just his thumb, like a sculpture expertly flaked from flint, still betraying the sharp edges and tiny traces and ripples left by flint knapping. ‘It’s flint…’ Foxworthy realized.

  ‘Aye aye, Captain Flint!’

  Foxworthy saw no reason to correct the three-headed sailor. ‘To your work, seaman,’ he whispered and stalked off, hoping Paddy was still alive. The animal trapper was a resourceful fellow and more importantly, not yet dead.

  Paddy was not in the Veranda Grill, so Foxworthy headed for the purser’s desk. On the carpet before it lay a gigantic speckled egg, big enough to hold a man. The desk itself lay abandoned save for the corpses of bellboys and one thing that resembled an enormous nudibranch, its colourful frills and tentacles lying limp, its mouth gasping where it had struggled out of the skirt and stockings of a purserette’s uniform. ‘I’m sorry,’ Foxworthy told her softly, but when the thing extended a plaintive but poisonous-looking fluorescent-orange-spotted violet tentacle, he snatched the guest book and retreated.

  Paddy and Chandra had taken the Windsor Suite. Foxworthy’s new hand at least worked for knocking. Paddy opened the door, looking sick with worry but still human.

  Foxworthy held up his hand. ‘Yes, it’s happening to me too.’

  Chandra lay on the bed. Her shapely brown feet that only yesterday had been learning the foxtrot, today were the ungainly grey feet of an elephant. ‘The curse of Ganesh has touched you as well…’ she sobbed.

  ‘Yes,’ Foxworthy agreed, ‘but my hand is not elephant hide but flint.’

  ‘Then it must be the curse of Kali.’ She held up her left arm with its elephant foot, the wound weeping from where her wedding band had cut through warped flesh and bone. ‘The Divine Mother’s wrath has cursed New York and now struck us here!’

  ‘Chandra, if we do not take control of this ship, we will be doomed. I need you to lend me Paddy.’

  ‘Don’t I get a say in the matter?’ Paddy asked.

  ‘Not if you want to save your wife’s life and yours into the bargain.’

  There was a silence broken by Chandra. ‘He is right, Paddy. Go help him.’

  Paddy nodded, then bent to kiss Chandra until she finally pushed him away with her elephant feet. ‘Go, my darling. Go. Save us both.’

  Paddy nodded and ducked out of the cabin. Foxworthy followed, not ducking but feeling the doorframe was nearer. In the hallway he asked, ‘Am I taller?’

  Paddy glanced at him. ‘Maybe, but I think you have bigger problems. The stone’s spread to your neck.’

  Foxworthy felt with his still-human left hand, finding that what Paddy said was the truth. ‘Bugger,’ he swore. He shook his head then led the way onwards. His right eye burned and then his left as the petrification swept over them, but his vision sharpened to crystal clarity so he didn’t complain. They made their way back to the bridge past vistas of surreal horror, worse than anything he’d seen in the death camps save in their sheer multitude.

  The only sight that truly disturbed Foxworthy beyond what he’d already seen was what he glimpsed in the first class children’s playroom. There, among the twisted bodies, stood a pretty rocking horse with a real horsehair mane and tail, but rocking by itself, with no child riding it. But then he realized the rocking horse was looking at him with a child’s brown eyes, pleading, weeping, rocking faster and faster as it tried to follow them but could not because its horse’s hooves were fused to curved runners bent from human bone.

  By the time they were back at the bridge, the petrification had become complete and Foxworthy not only stood taller than Paddy, but his knife-edged flint feet had cut themselves free of his shoes and his uniform was ripped at the seams.

  Gully, the three-headed midshipman, snapped a salute. ‘Captain Flint!’

  ‘At ease,’ Foxworthy said … or tried to say. His voice was gone, and only a stony whisper escaped his lips. He looked down at the motley crew that Gully had assembled. Well, looked down on all but one. Gully’s rescuer was there, his torso still three feet longer than it should be, with his left arm hanging down to his knees and his right arm hanging to the ground. His head was identical to James’s three. The two were identical twins … or at least had been until this afternoon, and quite young. ‘Brothers?’ Foxworthy assumed, his voice hoarse and whispery.

  James Gully pointed his thumb up at his telescoped former twin and his side heads nodded while his central head said, ‘Yes, sir. That’s John.’

  Foxworthy surveyed the rest of his men. Along with the twins were four other crewmen and two gentlemen from first class. One of the first class gentlemen had skin and hair striped vibrantly blue and gold like a tropic
al fish while the other appeared untouched. Suffering the opposite horror to James but still having his shirt ripped open, one of the crewmen had no head but a giant face upon his chest, exactly like one of the monstrous men found in foreign lands in medieval manuscripts but never seen until now.

  The other three crewmen appeared fully human, and in fact, the mechanic in the grease-stained overalls was almost impossibly handsome, tall, with Grecian features, wavy golden hair, and a figure so finely sculpted that it made even a mechanic’s rags look fashionable.

  ‘Ugly Harry?’ asked Paddy. The Adonis nodded sadly. ‘Damn,’ Paddy swore, ‘at least someone found a prize in the bottom of Pandora’s Cracker Jacks.’

  ‘You don’t understand.’ Handsome Harry had a gorgeous voice but a thick Cockney accent. ‘I’ll never find a woman who’ll want me. My face may look nice now, but I’m a freak. My navel’s disappeared. I ain’t got no nipples neither.’

  ‘You’ll find women who can overlook those flaws,’ Paddy reassured him.

  ‘No,’ Harry moaned wretchedly, ‘I’m sexless as a doll!’

  ‘Considering the alternatives, you are still very lucky,’ Foxworthy told him, ‘but let us compare horror stories when we are not in danger of dying.’ He glanced at John Gully. ‘Has everyone been rescued who went overboard?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’ John Gully sounded exactly like his brother James.

  ‘Who’s tending to the wounded? Has the ship’s doctor survived?’

  ‘The doctor and the surgeon are both dead, but a couple of the nurses are fine, for now, sir,’ John Gully reported. ‘They’re tending to the victims.’

  ‘Some on the wireless said it’s an alien plague,’ his brother’s leftmost head told him, then the right one added, ‘It’s all over New York.’

  ‘Sir,’ added the middle head.

  Foxworthy exchanged a glance with Paddy, but everything that could be said in their defence did not change the fact that they’d been wrong. ‘What’s the chance it’s a Nazi gas?’ he asked. ‘Do we have someone on the radio to find out?’

  ‘Everyone in the radio room’s dead, sir. It’s like the Blitz.’

  ‘My family survived the Blitz, but they didn’t survive this,’ said a girl’s voice as Jillian Fisher stepped onto the bridge. ‘Bertie just died. Muriel too. Mama died at the start.’

  ‘All of them, Jillian?’ asked Paddy.

  ‘All of them, Mr O’Reilly,’ said the girl. ‘There are horrid spiders that used to be parts of Robert, but they’re just spiders. Frankie’s a statue, but not alive.’ She glanced up. ‘Brigadier Foxworthy?’

  ‘That’s Captain Flint,’ James corrected, but Foxworthy nodded and said, ‘Yes.’

  ‘What do I do now?’

  ‘Go and help the nurses. I’ve no time to play nursemaid and we need to get the radio working.’

  ‘I’m clever with mechanical things,’ she offered. ‘I’ve taken apart a crystal set.’

  ‘I could do with some help,’ Handsome Harry admitted.

  ‘Then you have your assignment,’ he told her, then asked John Gully, ‘Do we have enough fuel to return to England?’

  The rightmost head checked a gauge. ‘Barely, sir,’ he reported, ‘but we could make it with the currents.’

  ‘Then let’s do so,’ Foxworthy commanded. ‘This is Mr O’Reilly. I’m deputizing him as my second-in-command. I feel an urgent need to sleep, and if I do not return in the morning, he is your captain.’

  ‘Aye aye, Captain Flint!’

  When Foxworthy woke, he found his grey legs dangling off the bed that he’d broken. When he stood up, he was hunched over against the ceiling, like Philip de la Beche crammed into his crypt. He stood over seven feet, if not closer to eight. His uniform lay shredded.

  He was also craving Scotch, and saw no reason to deny himself given the circumstances. He tore open his steamer chest. The bottle of Glen Grant Alice had slipped him as a parting gift tasted like nectar and he drained it. Then he realized he’d bitten off the bottleneck too. But the shards didn’t cut his mouth, only felt like a mouthful of boiled sweets, but tasting savoury, like lobster lozenges as they melted.

  Foxworthy regarded the broken bottle with horror, but still swallowed. Then he belched, a small gout of fire shooting out of his mouth like a dragon. Or a demon. Or John Ever Afraid returned from Hell.

  He glanced at the dresser mirror. His face still looked like his face, if larger, but sharper, more chiselled, as if a brutalist artist had hewn his portrait from solid flint, down to the waves of his hair. His eyes, always deep-set, were now pits to the fires of Hell, flames dancing in their recesses. But when he rubbed them in horror, he found he still blinked, and that his eyeballs were now made of some transparent mineral, like isinglass in the windows of a stove.

  His teeth were like diamonds as he took another bite of the delicious bottle. Then he stopped himself. ‘Oh Alice,’ he whispered, ‘what will you think of me?’ He flung the bottle away, glass smashing against the panelling. Then he gritted his teeth, sparks flying from his lips like spittle. ‘Kenneth Foxworthy,’ he told himself, ‘you are a man, not a monster.’

  His reflection mocked this lie, the mask of Hades looking back at him, but Foxworthy refrained from doing anything so childish as to smash the mirror … or eat it.

  Instead he regarded the rest of himself, the jagged points of knapped flint that formed his chest hair yet still felt soft when he smoothed it down with stone fingers, the other details, great and small, transmuted from flesh to the pinnacle of the flint knapper’s art. If he’d come upon himself in a gallery, he’d have thought the sculptor madly talented and the statue’s nudity unremarkable. But he was not art, he was a man, and the ruined bed once used by Churchill still had a bedspread of good English brocade. Foxworthy slit a hole in the centre with the flint knives that were now his fingers and donned it as a short kaftan, pinning the sides with his army pips, refusing to eat them like fruit pip sweeties no matter what they smelled like.

  He did refill his pipe. The smoke tasted even better than before, and smoking it made him feel like a man, which was something Foxworthy desperately needed as he hunched out of the door and went to explore the ship of horrors of which he was now in command.

  ‘Captain Flint!’ The man who greeted him on the bridge was not familiar to him. He looked like James Gully, with only one head. For a moment Foxworthy assumed the twins were actually triplets and he was speaking with a third brother … until the man’s legs grew at least two feet, his trousers becoming knee breeches.

  ‘John Gully, I presume?’

  ‘Or “Lookout” if you prefer, sir. I can see as far as a telescope too, and when I stretch out people are saying “look out” so…’

  He looked sheepish.

  ‘How long have I been asleep?’

  ‘Two days, almost three. We—’ He paused, his throat catching. ‘We thought you were dead, sir. Seaman Lawrence died. Wheildon too. And Mr Philips … we … we had to kill him … it…’

  The cadet didn’t say whether this was for mercy or self-preservation. ‘My name is actually Brigadier Foxworthy, but I suppose “Captain Flint” will suffice.’ He sighed. ‘Any good news?’

  John nodded. ‘Don’t know how she did it, but Miss Fisher got the radio working.’

  ‘That little girl?’

  ‘Said she was clever at mechanical things.’ He gave a weak grin. ‘Have you eaten anything, sir? We’ve had to pull everyone from the kitchens to keep the ship running, but we have cold rations: apples, cheeses, dried sausage—’

  ‘I do not seem to need food any more,’ he interrupted. The foods as the boy listed them made Foxworthy feel nauseous. ‘Where’s Paddy? I mean, Captain O’Reilly.’

  The stilt-legged boy bit his lip.

  ‘Is he alive? Did something unspeakable happen to him?’

  ‘He’s likely to die,’ said a girl’s voice, ‘and so am I.’ Jillian Fisher came onto the bridge, her grave expression heightened by the dark circ
les under her eyes. She’d changed from her girl’s party finery to a young woman’s green velvet dress a few sizes too large.

  Foxworthy reached out his hands but then stopped when he saw the stone knives that were his fingers. But John Gully dropped to his normal height and lower, his stilts compacting to stumps, and he hugged her. ‘It’s all right,’ he told her. ‘It’s going to be all right.’

  ‘No,’ she sobbed. ‘It’s not.’

  Foxworthy felt helpless. ‘I don’t understand…’

  Jillian eventually dried her eyes and pushed away from Gully. ‘Harry and I finally got the radio to work, and we found out what happened. It is an alien plague. Mr O’Reilly already worked out the plague part because his tigers weren’t touched. The Americans are calling it the Wild Card Virus.’

  ‘Wild Card?’

  ‘From poker,’ she explained. ‘You call a card wild and it can be anything, and you make a virus wild and it can be anything too, from the sniffles to turning a man into King Neptune. Nine times out of ten it kills you, and of those who survive, nine out of ten are turned into something horrid.’ She grimaced. ‘No offence.’

  ‘The lucky ones get something good, even if it’s not what they wanted.’ John gestured, extending his forearm by three feet.

  ‘Then why are you afraid you’re going to die?’ Foxworthy asked Jillian.

  ‘Mr Philips changed when he heard the news from New York,’ John said, pulling his arm back in and shuddering. ‘We all thought he’d been spared.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’ Foxworthy’s heart felt as heavy and black as the stone it undoubtedly was. ‘How far are we from England?’

  Gully squinted out of the window, his neck extending several inches. ‘Not far at all, Captain Flint. We won’t win the Blue Riband for passage west, but we should break the speed record east at least from where we were.’ His neck went back to its proper length while his legs extended, keeping his head at the same level, and Foxworthy saw the grey irises of the boy’s eyes whirl like spyglass lenses. ‘The Queen Mary never had King Neptune to help with the crossing before. We should be in Southampton in a few hours.’