Inside Straight

by George R. R. Martin

  “The Living God fellas are blowing up the airport so the Caliph can’t land his soldiers in airplanes,” Rustbelt replied.

  Michael blinked, rubbing at sleep-rimed eyes with his top hands. “They could have waited until daylight.”

  “They could have.” Michael wasn’t sure what that meant. Rustbelt hooked a thumb toward the entrance of the tent. “Come on. Lohengrin said to get everybody up.”

  Fifteen minutes later, most of the aces were gathered in the command tent, Michael wearing a long, loose white shirt with holes torn in it for his multiple arms and a blue scarf turbaned around his shaved head. The scene reminded Michael of the tryout sessions for American Hero, with so many of the former contestants standing there: Curveball, Earth Witch, Rustbelt, Bugsy, Holy Roller, Fat Chick, Simoon, Hardhat…

  Most of them ignored him after a glance his way.

  Fortune looked worried, but he looked up when Kate entered, nodding to her. Michael saw her give him a tightlipped smile in return—so it was Fortune and not Sekhmet running the body at the moment. “Here’s what we know,” he said. “The army of the caliphate is still advancing along the Nile. Right now they’re within thirty miles of Aswan, just leaving Kôm Ombo. They have Chinese WZ-10 attack helicopters providing cover and ground troops in APCs in the vanguard. The Djinn is back with Abdul, but we can’t assume he’ll stay there.”

  “What about the fucking Egyptians?” Hardhat asked. “Is one ass-kicking enough for them, or do they want a fucking encore?”

  “The Egyptians are staying out of it,” Jonathan Hive spat. A cloud of small green wasps detached from his cheeks and flittered around his head. One of them landed on Michael’s neck, and he felt a stabbing between two of his throat openings.

  “Ow! Goddamn it,” he said, slapping at the thing. He looked at his hand and saw green goo on his palm. Crouching, he wiped his hand ostentatiously in the sand.

  “Enough!” John Fortune’s voice cut through the rising hubbub under the canvas. Michael wondered who was really talking. “The Egyptian army no longer matters. The Caliph is our problem now. Him, and the Djinn. If any of you are having doubts …” He glanced at Michael. “… too bad. It’s too late to leave now.”

  Lohengrin stepped up alongside Fortune. “Where they will attack first, we don’t yet know,” he said, his accent more pronounced than usual: “vair zay vill…”

  “Jonathan is watching them with his wasps. The Low Dam is most likely, ja, but some of us must remain here at the High Dam, if they come this way instead.”

  Fortune nodded. “Sobek will be on Sehel and will handle things there; Hardhat, you’ll be with him. Taweret will cover Syrene and the river. Jonathan, DB, you’ll stay here at the High Dam with a full platoon of jokers—DB, you’ll prepare roadblocks every few hundred yards. Take anything you can find that’ll serve. The Living Gods and their people are doing the same right now on the Low Dam. All the rest of you, be ready to be in one of the trucks in an hour—on the west end of the dam, by the monument.” He turned.

  “Hey!“ Michael shouted. “I didn’t come here to babysit a dam!”

  Fortune scowled. “I told you what we need you to do. Are you telling us that you won’t do it?”

  Michael could feel them all watching him. He could especially feel Kate’s gaze, and he wondered what she’d said to him. “I’m saying that I could be more help elsewhere. You want to keep an eye on me, fine. Then keep me with you.”

  “I want you here,” Fortune said flatly. “We can’t afford mavericks, Drummer Boy.” He drew out the name, and Michael tried in vain to stop the scowl that twisted his face. “Everyone needs to cooperate. Everyone needs to do the job they’re asked to do, or we fail.” He stared at Michael.

  At the side of his vision, Michael could see Kate standing next to Ana, both of them watching. I can’t trust you. You’ve proven that. He let out his breath through his nose. “Fine,” he said, his teeth pressed together.

  Fortune nodded, and it was impossible to miss the look of smug satisfaction on his face. “Let’s go over things, then. There’s not much time. Lohengrin, if you’d give us what’s known about the Righteous Djinn.…”

  War was simultaneously nerve-wracking and boring.

  After Fortune and most of the aces left, Michael and the jokers spent several hours driving cars, trucks, and buses onto the four-lane road atop the High Dam, starting from the east side and working their way west. Once a vehicle was in position, Michael would turn it on its side. Michael wrapped metal bars around them while the jokers piled on truck tires and chunks of broken concrete and bricks.

  Around noon, he and the others went back to the tents near the monument to rest and eat. Hive was there, in one of the gun emplacements built into the dam. Four guards armed with Russian Kalashnikov submachine guns were with Hive, all of them jokers of the Living Gods, all of them grim as they stared out over the dam’s spillway toward the north. Michael thought Hive was sitting on a ledge near the antiaircraft gun mounted there, but only the top third of Hive’s body was there. Below the chest, there was nothing at all.

  The guards had set up a radio on a rickety card table, with the orange cord of an extension cord trailing off toward the tents around the monument. The voices were spattered with static and interference. In the distance, Michael could hear the faint rattle of gunfire, and once or twice the sound of explosions. In the air, there were a few dark specks hovering far downriver: helicopter gunships, perhaps.

  “It’s started,” Hive said. “Doesn’t appear to be any end run from the town toward us yet, though. Thank god, ’cuz we ain’t got enough firepower here to stop four hillbillies in a pickup truck.”

  “I’m wasted here, Hive. The action’s up north at Aswan. Goddamn Beetle Boy—”

  “Did you ever consider why John put you here?” Hive interrupted before Michael could launch into a tirade. “Oh, that’s right, thinking isn’t your strong suit. Look, we already lost King Cobalt—and he was strong and fast and tough and always wanted to be in the middle of the fight, just like you. And, just like you, he couldn’t do anything about bullets. John was doing you a favor.”

  “Yeah?” Michael snarled. “He’s just fucking looking out for me, huh? Seems to me that Kate can’t stop a bullet either, or Ana. Or Holy Roller, for that matter. Funny, I don’t see them here. Do you?”

  Hive just shook his head. Wasps came and went from where his body met the ledge. “What are you seeing?” Michael asked him. “Tell me.”

  Hive sniffed. “Well, the Caliph’s holed up in this damned mansion in Aswan, and I could tell you exactly what he’s got planned if I could speak Arabic. He’s got Bahir with him—and I’ll tell you, that fucker’s fast: he cut my wasp in half with that scimitar. Poor Abdul was badly stung, though—”

  “The fighting, Bugsy.”

  Hive sniffed again. He closed his eyes momentarily, as if resting. Wasps fluttered away from his sleeves, his hands gone. “There’s fighting on the east side of Sehel Island—the Caliph’s people are pumping mortar rounds onto the island from the east bank of the river, and they’re trying to cross over the channel to the island in boats. Sobek, Taweret, and Hardhat are doing what they can.”

  “And Kate?”

  Hive’s eyes opened. “She’s with John, trying to hold the dam. They’ve pushed back one assault already, most of it, anyway. The Djinn hasn’t shown up yet, though—so far it’s just been the regular troops.”

  “I should be there.”

  “You should be building roadblocks. And sitting here chatting with me isn’t helping anyone at all, is it?” Hive smiled. “Just a suggestion.”

  “Fuck you, Bugsy.” Michael drained his bottle of water. He stalked away, and for another half-hour assuaged unfocused anger by flinging cars into place. The jokers working with him whispered to each other in fast Arabic, pointing at him. The racket from the fighting northward continued to crackle over the water, growing louder and more intrusive by the minute. Michael kept looking that w
ay, wondering at every plume of smoke. When a particularly loud explosion thundered in the north, he plunged his lower hand into the pocket of his jeans and found the piece of crumpled cardboard there. “Hey, any of you got a cell phone?” he asked his companions.

  Ahmed chattered nonstop as they careened down the western Nile road behind a troop carrier laden with jokers. “I have no fear for myself, you understand, but my wife and my children, they would be lost if I were gone.…”

  They were stopped as they approached the western terminus of the Low Dam. “I’m trying to get to the front,” Michael had shouted to the nervous, armed jokers at the checkpoint, followers of the Living Gods. “Fortune’s orders. Sobek has called for me. Sobek … ? Sekhmet… ?” Eventually, through Ahmed’s Arabic and the guards’ pidgin English, he’d made himself understood. Ahmed’s taxi had been commandeered, however. A jackal-headed joker with an automatic weapon sat in the passenger seat, with three more sitting on the trunk and two on the hood. Yet another duo held onto the open rear doors, standing on the car’s frame. All the jokers were dressed in ragged uniform pants and shirts that didn’t match; most had animal heads or other body parts. They looked more like escapees from a zoo than soldiers, and they looked suspiciously untrained. Ahmed cursed and honked his horn endlessly.

  As the noise of gunfire grew louder across the river, Michael heard the thrup-thrup-thrup of copter blades, followed by a low, sinister whoomp and an explosion of dirt and sand. A troop carrier two vehicles ahead of them lifted its front end high into the air and dropped back again on its side. Ahmed’s brakes squealed in protest and locked; the jokers clinging to his car went tumbling, as trucks lurched to one side or the other to avoid hitting anyone.

  The air rained blood-spattered sand and truck parts. What had to be someone’s hand slapped dully against the windshield, a watch strapped to the wrist and the tattered dun camouflage remnants of a uniform around it. Ahmed stared, momentarily speechless. He made a warding motion toward the severed forearm on the hood. The chopper screamed overhead, heading north toward Syrene. A raging tornado of sand erupted from the ground ahead of it and bent its dark funnel—Simoon. The chopper turned sharply to avoid her vortex, but the rotors were caught in the swirling winds, flinging the craft down like an abandoned toy. They saw the flash as it exploded on the ground, then a second later came the shrieking howl of the crash.

  Smoke poured from the wreckage ahead of them. Through the haze, Michael could see figures moving over the sand, rushing toward the dam. “No further! I go back now!” Ahmed’s mouth was opened wide, but Michael could barely hear him through the roaring in his ears.

  “No further,” Michael agreed. Crawling from the rear compartment, he ripped bills from his wallet and tossed them to Ahmed. “Thanks, man. That was definitely over and above,” he said. “Go find your wife and kids and get the hell outa here. Salam alekum.”

  “Peace to you” sounded like a stupid thing to say, in context, but it was the only Arabic salutation he knew. Ahmed nodded furiously. He put the taxi into reverse, gears grinding, and fishtailed backward until the car was pointing south. The arm slid from the hood, smearing a line of blood over the rust-flecked paint. Ahmed, with a blare of his horn, spat sand from under the wheels, scattering running soldiers of the Living Gods as he fled.

  Michael faced south. You wanted to come here. You wanted to come because Kate was here. The smoke made him cough and cover his mouth and nose with a hand. The sand was bitterly hot through the soles of his sneakers. He could barely see through the haze of dust and smoke. Armed jokers were running past him. He joined them, jogging past the fuming wreckage and trying not to look at the carnage inside the twisted steel.

  A battle between armies, he discovered quickly, was no clean, discrete thing, but a whirl of individual scenes which made little sense.

  … Michael ran through the smoke toward the dam and the sounds of struggle, slipping near the smoldering hulk of a bus, on its side at the western end of the dam. There was the loud tink of a bullet striking metal not two inches from his head, and his shaved scalp was peppered with hot flecks of steel. He threw himself facedown onto the sand as a line of metallic craters dimpled the sheet metal where he’d just been. He felt warm blood running down one of his arms, and he realized he’d opened a long, deep slice in his middle left arm on a sharp corner of the wrecked vehicle. The pain hit him then, and he rolled on his side, clutching at the wound.

  He stopped. Someone was staring at him from alongside the bus, no more than four inches away from his face: Masud, the Joker Plague fan. His eyes were wide in his hairless skull and his mouth was open in a soundless scream, his temple a gory red crater. Gray brain matter and blood were sliding thickly down the bus just above him. Masud’s earbuds had fallen from his earholes, the white cord trailing back to the pocket of his uniform, and Michael could hear Joker Plague’s music playing shrill and thin. Michael’s stomach lurched, unbidden, and he vomited loudly and explosively. His stomach still knotted, he ran again …

  … he was on the dam itself, still running and trying to find any familiar faces in the chaos. Through the smoke, he saw Rustbelt as he came around another cluster of overturned vehicles barricading the roadway. Three soldiers in the uniform of the caliphate were firing at the ace from point-blank range, and Michael could hear a metallic ting-wheep, as bullets bounced from Rustbelt’s body and ricocheted away. Rustbelt, shouting, reached out to touch the nearest weapon. The barrel crumpled to red dust. Rusty was bleeding as badly as Michael. His right shoulder displayed a sickening red crater; he might be immune to bullets, but something had punched through his natural armor. Michael saw the soldiers backpedaling as they continued to fire at Rusty, retreating and clustering together. The weaponless man reached for a canvas belt bandoliered around his shoulder and fumbled with a grenade there.

  Michael crouched; the roadway was broken, and he snatched up a two-foot hunk of concrete curbing with his lower hands, and flipped it to his upper set of arms. Grunting, he heaved it overhead with all his considerable strength toward the soldiers. They went down hard as Michael dove for the ground, trying vainly to cover his head with all six arms. The gunfire stopped. When he glanced up, Rusty was looking down at him, nodding his riveted head and clutching at his wounded shoulder. “Thanks, fella. That would’ve been a bad deal.” Michael sat up: The grenade had rolled away from the crushed soldier’s hand, the pin still attached. He could see it on the pavement, not two feet away …

  … people were running westward past Michael and Rustbelt, all of them jokers, some of them with weapons clutched in their hands, many of them bloodied and injured. “What’s going on?” Michael shouted, catching one on them in his hands, but the man replied in fast, frightened Arabic, pushing at Michael’s arms to get away. “Djinn,” was the only word Michael caught. Rustbelt shrugged and pointed northward over the edge of the dam. There, maybe a mile down the river, Michael could see a large island. Bright girders glowed as a bridge between the island and the town of Syrene on the west bank, with the black dots of hundreds of people hurrying across the improvised span. Then smoke obscured the scene again. “Hardhat. Good fella.” Rustbelt grunted and started walking eastward, and Michael followed behind him.

  … it seemed like he’d been running along this road forever, dodging around the roadblocks and ducking behind any cover he could find whenever he heard gunfire. He’d lost Rusty during one of those moments. Craters erupted in the edge of the roadway as an automatic weapon fired, and Michael flung himself behind a stack of burning tires. “You never hear the one that hits you,” he muttered to himself. He thought he’d heard that somewhere. He was close to the middle of the dam, the arrow-straight roadway stretching out in front of him. A hundred yards ahead of him there was another roadblock, this one piled high with the burning, motionless hulk of a caliphate tank perched atop the rubble, stretching entirely across the two-lane road. To the north, there was an eighty-foot sheer drop to the Nile; to the south there was water,
only a few feet below the stone retaining wall.

  And on this side of the improvised roadblock: Kate.

  She wore a hodgepodge uniform: The helmet of a WWII German soldier, a bulky Kevlar vest over her T-shirt, camouflage pants tucked into heavy boots. Several joker soldiers were gathered around her. Ana, similarly attired, was with them, as was Rusty, Lohengrin clad in his shining ghost steel, and Holy Roller. Ahead of them all, prowling from side to side of the road, was Sekhmet, glowing brightly even in the sunlight. The huge lioness’s fur was spattered with blood, her claws were snagged with tatters of cloth and raw meat, and smoke coiled from her mouth as she roared defiance.

  Michael wondered what Sekhmet was growling at. He wondered at the shuddering of the roadway under his feet. The answer to both came immediately. The Righteous Djinn loomed up behind the barricade—a scowling giant who looked to be three stories tall, a nightmare with black tendrils of smoke curling about him. Fear struck Michael at the sight, a mindless, unreasoning fear that stole the air from his lungs and clamped hands around his throat, a fear that sent his bowels grumbling and bile burning in his stomach, a fear that made his muscles quiver. He shouted with alarm, the cry lost because it was echoed by them all. All but a few of the joker soldiers dropped their weapons and fled past Michael as he gaped up at the Djinn.

  “All is lost,” Michael heard Lohengrin proclaim, his sword down. “We cannot stand against this.…”

  Holy Roller shrieked. “It’s Satan himself!” he shrilled. “The devil walks the earth!” And he was gone, rolling westward and heedlessly bowling over fleeing soldiers in his rush. All of the rest of them except Fortune had backed up several paces. They looked ready to follow Holy Roller. Michael had to fight the compulsion to put his back to this horror.

  “Fear is his greatest weapon,” Lohengrin had told them yesterday. “He radiates terror, and his enemies often flee from him without fighting.” Michael believed that now.