High Stakes: A Wild Cards Novel

by George R. R. Martin

  An old man yanked on a dog’s leash, trying to get the frightened canine to move. It wouldn’t, and the man began walloping it with his cane. Young men climbed into a truck already piled high with furniture and household items. One of them waved an ax above his head and said something sharp and threatening to Marcus. A girl stood on a street corner, turning around and around, calling for someone. A guy on a bicycle weaved one-handed through the traffic, a flat-screen TV perched precariously on his shoulder. There was something in the air, a panic that seemed to have touched everyone. That was obvious, but just what caused it Marcus couldn’t figure out. It wasn’t like they were running in any one direction, or like there was anything causing the chaos other than themselves.

  Watching the cyclist weave away, Marcus realized another strange thing. “How come there are no jokers?”

  “In cities,” Olena said, eyes scanning the crowd, “they are not welcome.”

  A mother shouldered past them, crying baby clutched to her chest and an older child dragged behind her. The child, seeing Marcus, went wild-eyed and began crying. Olena caught the woman by the arm and spoke a rapid barrage of Russian words that meant nothing to Marcus. The woman tried to pull away, but Olena pleaded. Reluctantly, the woman answered, speaking even faster than Olena. She yanked her arm away and strode off, her baby crying all the louder.

  “What did she say?” Marcus asked.

  “Nothing that makes sense,” Olena said. “She said the police are killing people. That Allah has turned his hand and—”

  A car slammed into a lamppost beside them. The driver’s head smashed against the windshield, cracking it and leaving the driver bloody and unconscious.

  “Jesus!” Marcus cried. “What’s going on?”

  Olena finished her sentence, “—we are to be tested.” She looked at Marcus for the first time since they’d entered the chaos. “Marcus, you look horrible. You’re paling. I didn’t know you could, but … You’ve lost too much blood.”

  “Don’t start talking about the hospital again.”

  She exhaled. “We need to find someplace where they will help you. Away from here. We need to find it fast.” She glanced around, lips pressed together in thought. Her gaze settled on a truck that had just pulled onto the street. “I’ll be right back.”

  “What? Where you going?” Marcus asked.

  Pulling the Glock from her belt, Olena stepped into the street, heading toward the truck.

  Just how in the hell, Detective Francis Xavier Black asked himself, did he come to find himself in an elevator on the fourth floor of a Kazakh hospital while a cold breeze brushed his skinny ass exposed by his hospital gown?

  Because someone stuck a gun in your face, and suggested you’d like to investigate the screaming.

  The someone in question was one of the three thugs employed by the Russian crime boss Baba Yaga. Of course when you say “crime boss” the image of a wizened eighty-something-year-old woman with impossibly red hair didn’t spring to mind. But once he’d looked in Baba Yaga’s cold grey eyes Franny had no doubt about her ruthlessness or her resolve. She’d have her goons gun him down like a dog if he didn’t comply.

  Franny had been staring at his image in the bathroom mirror noting that his eyes seemed more bloodshot than blue, that he had two days’ growth of dark beard and his black hair formed greasy spikes. He was wondering when he’d be allowed to take a shower when a guy “no taller than a lamppost, and no wider than a beer truck” had dragged him out of the room. The fact the gorilla was wearing a two-thousand-dollar suit was offset by the fact he clearly wasn’t a big fan of showers. The man’s B.O. was like a wave proceeding them down the hall.

  In Baba Yaga’s room there were two more goons, and a very well-dressed man with a smooth expressionless face, manicured fingernails, a Rolex flashing on his wrist, and sleek brown hair. Something about him made Franny think of otters. Of the other goons one had a shaved head that glittered under the fluorescent lights. The other sported a large ruby earring and a luxurious mustache. Franny started to say, Hey, the seventies called, they’d like their mustache back, but didn’t because Baba Yaga had turned those dead eyes on him and scornfully called him a hero. Then the screaming had started.

  Baba Yaga’s command had been short and succinct. “Go. Check it out. Come back and tell me what you see.”

  Franny had tried to argue. “Send one of your damn bully boys.”

  “I’m not risking my guards and you caused this. Now go.”

  “If I caused this then you know what it should be…”

  The old woman had nodded at the Baldy and Franny found himself staring down the barrel of the guard’s Sig Sauer.

  “Okay, persuasive reason why I should go.”

  Franny had been dithering so long that the elevator doors started to close. He threw up an arm to hold them back, and was forcibly reminded that he had a recently sewn bullet wound in his side, and another in his shoulder. The room seemed to be ballooning in front of him. He knew he was pumped full of painkillers, but drugs alone couldn’t explain the creeping fear that was crawling up his spine and left his belly empty and shaking.

  Shouts and sobs were coming down the corridor. Franny shuffled off the elevator, his paper slippers sussing and crackling on the linoleum. A pair of security guards went past. They were muscling an older woman in a nurse’s uniform who was screaming abuse while she tried to claw at their faces. Her face was a mask of rage, spittle formed white flecks on her lips, and the front of her dress was spattered with blood.

  Franny pressed himself against the wall. The screaming was still continuing. More voices, bellows of rage. “Fuck this,” he whispered.

  He was no longer under guard. He could just exit the hospital and find help. The absurdity of the plan soon presented itself. He didn’t speak the language, didn’t have any local money, or ID, and was dressed in a hospital gown. If he saw himself wandering around New York like this he’d arrest himself.

  He forced himself back into motion. Heading toward the raised voices, the nexus of the uproar. Pressure tightened around Franny’s skull and it felt like something was crawling slowly down his nerve fibers. A low grotesque humming seemed to fill the air. Anger at Captain Mendelberg back in New York who hadn’t fucking listened and wouldn’t fucking help, thoughts of Abby constantly blowing him off even when he worked his ass off to help her. His fucking partner who left this pile of steaming shit on his desk and didn’t help until he made a halfhearted offer when it was too fucking late. The other cops at Fort Freak who couldn’t even give him one fucking little congratulation for making detective. Jealous assholes, all of them …

  What the fuck? He pushed aside the chaotic, angry thoughts, tried to focus. What had he come here for? Oh yeah. He continued down the hall and stepped into a room where doctors were frantically working on a man in a doctor’s white coat who was lying on a gurney. A scalpel was embedded in his left eye, his face a mask of gore. A pair of nurses were hugging each other and sobbing. There was a babble of conversation in a language he didn’t understand as several security guards seemed to be trying to interview the bystanders.

  Several IV stands surrounded the bed, and tubes snaked down to—Franny recoiled. He had thought his years in Jokertown had prepared him for anything, but the figure in the bed was beyond grotesque. The arms and legs were twisted and skeletal, but the belly bulged like a woman on the verge of delivering. It was so bloated and distended that the gown couldn’t hide it. It was also pulsing, shivers running across the skin, and there was the slow roil of deep purple and violent red beneath the surface as if something were swimming in the blood and viscera.

  The thing had a mouth, but the lips were elongated, resembling the proboscis of a mosquito or anteater. Those rubbery lips were working like a blind baby seeking a tit. Grey stony growths shot through with gleaming red veins protruded from his cheeks and neck. The grating humming, like foil on gold filings, was emerging from that deformed mouth. There was a faint glint f
rom beneath the wrinkled eyelids as if he was trying to wake.

  The smell of blood, vomit, and fear-induced sweat overlaid the tang of disinfectants and bedpans. Franny memorized the scene as best he could, and then stumbled backward out of the room. He staggered down the hall. He passed an orderly leaning against the wall, his pants unzipped, dick in hand. He was energetically beating off while staring at a young nurse who was crying in the corner.

  With each step away from the room the band around Franny’s head loosened, and that maddening humming began to ease. He punched at the elevator button with increasing desperation. Finally he went to the stairwell. No matter how much it might hurt he had to get away. All the anger was gone. Only fear remained.

  Mollie Steunenberg, still woozy from getting zapped with eight jillion volts right in her tits, slumped in the back of a squad car while the driver jabbered on his radio in French. She didn’t understand what he was saying, and she sure as hell didn’t understand why the cops had tased her—they fucking tased her—just for swiping a few shitty earrings. Was that even legal? They could have given her a goddamned heart attack. Plus, the electrodes had pierced two little holes in her blouse. Right over her boobs, of all places, which now ached like they’d been set on fire. Fucking frog cops.

  Oh, right, she remembered. Gendarmes. That’s what they’re called in France. Ffodor had taught her stuff like that. Which was how she also knew the streetlights glittering through the beaded rain on the car windows were the lights of the storied Champs-Élysées.

  He’d also tried to teach her that a smash-and-grab was the province of thugs and petty criminals. And therefore beneath her. But she was faster than any nat thief, and she hadn’t actually smashed anything. She, of all people, never had to do that. So it wasn’t her fault she got caught. She’d explain it to Ffodor: what lousy luck that a cop car happened past at the moment she was reaching through—

  She shook her head, clearing away cobwebs and uncomfortable thoughts, before testing the handcuffs again. The clink of a chain pressed cold metal against the small of her back. She could open an interdimensional doorway and leave right now, but then she’d go skidding out the other side with the same relative speed as the cops’ car. Which, given her lack of a portal site conveniently located over a giant stack of pillows, would suck.

  The car swung through a roundabout, leaning slightly on its suspension as it peeled away from the Champs-Élysées. The acceleration pushed Mollie away from the door. She toppled over like a sack of onions. Thanks to the Taser she had all the muscle tone of a jellyfish. The seat upholstery smelled like sweaty feet and stale cigarette smoke. Her wobbly stomach did a somersault. She tasted bile.

  Given a pen or paperclip, she could pick the cuffs. She’d learned all sorts of things from Ffo—

  Focus. Focus. Worst case, they’d stick her in a cell, and surely they’d have to take the cuffs off then. Worst case, she’d just have to be patient a little while. And then it’d be, Au revoir, Frogs.

  They passed the Louvre, and then Mollie understood why the cops—gendarmes—were so trigger-happy with the Tasers. The glass pyramid, along with wide swaths of the surrounding buildings, was still under reconstruction years after some badass old-timey ace had practically leveled the place. Mollie didn’t know the whole story there; she’d been busy at the time pinching a metric fuck-ton of gold from the treasury of a Central African dictatorship. Which is how she met …

  She shook her head again, this time in frustrated anger. It was also how she’d met prissy Noel Matthews. Noel Fucking Matthews. He’d found her after her stint on TV, where her troubles had really started. Not least because that shitmuncher Jake Butler had cheated her off the show, but also because it was via American Hero that she got tangled up with Michael Douchebag Berman. Michael Grabby-Hands Berman. Michael Needle-Dick Berman.

  By now she should have been living on easy street, but it never worked out that way because every single person she met turned out to be a flaming asshole.

  Well, except maybe one.

  Yellow halogen light and the silvery glow of a full moon kaleidoscoped through the rain-stippled windows when the car swung through another roundabout. Mollie watched the floor in the vague hope that a pen, paper clip, or other useful implement might slide conveniently from beneath the seat. No dice. She sighed. The residual tremors from the tasing had temporarily ruined her fine motor skills anyway. She couldn’t pick the locks, nor could she break the chain.

  Ffodor had insisted she could open portals within solid objects because it was no different from opening them on a wall or in midair. It was the closest they’d ever come to an argument. Of course it was different: air was invisible, and it moved. Her one attempt to visualize a portal inside something else had given her the worst headache of her life.

  The handcuffs clinked. The second cop, the one in the passenger seat, Monsieur Electrocute-First-And-Ask-Questions-Never, shot a glare over his shoulder. It was a look of naked disappointment: they’d nabbed a short, slightly plump, twenty-two-year-old American with too many freckles to be cute and unnaturally coppery curls in blue jeans and blouse rather than a tall, leggy, teenaged heroin-chic Parisian runway model in a skirt that reached just below her pubes.

  Mollie returned the glare. “Supermodels are all shrews and cokeheads, you know.”

  He said something to his partner. Everything sounded snide when you didn’t speak the language.

  The car swerved, pressing her face into the seat upholstery again. Her stomach lurched in response to a strong whiff of the foot stink. Mollie wormed upright into a sitting position before she upchucked all over herself. She resigned herself to watching a rain-soaked City of Light slide past the windows.

  The car passed a fountain. She smiled.

  Fine, she thought. Let’s do this the really easy way.

  Even with her brain half scrambled from the Taser it was easy as breathing. With barely a conscious thought, she opened a pair of twinned doorways: one atop the dashboard, and a much larger one in the fountain basin.

  Cold water gushed into the car as though somebody had pointed a firehose through the vents. The frogs swore in unison—“Merde!” (even Mollie could understood that)—as the driver planted his foot on the brake. They skidded. The water, already over her knees, sloshed over the headrests. Mollie slammed her forehead against the Plexiglas divider. She closed her eyes, concentrating on holding her breath to feign unconsciousness.

  The water kept coming. In seconds it was over her waist, but then it dropped as the befuddled cops bailed from the car. Mollie kept the doorways in place. Now the water gushing from the dash mostly poured out the open doors, but enough pooled in the backseat to pose a drowning hazard.

  The hard part was maintaining the act while the gendarmes dragged her from the car like a sack of fertilizer. Her lungs were well and truly burning before the idiots realized they had to take the cuffs off before they could do CPR. Mollie abandoned the act as soon as the cuffs fell from her wrists. She leapt to her feet, stumbling a bit thanks to the lingering dizziness from the Taser and holding her breath.

  “Thanks, morons,” she said.

  The driver barked at her. He didn’t sound happy. His partner scrabbled at the Taser on his belt.

  “Oh, yeah,” said Mollie, “please try it again.” He wouldn’t catch her by surprise this time.

  He aimed. She opened two new holes in space: one just past the end of his weapon, the other a couple feet lower. Between the darkness and the water dripping from his eyelashes he didn’t notice the shimmer. He pulled the trigger, shrieked, and immediately collapsed into a quivering heap, having tased himself in the nuts.

  Mollie made yet another pair of doorways. She flipped a double bird at the other cop as she leapt from a wet Paris night to the synchronized chaos of Shinjuku Station, Tokyo. She bowled into a salaryman with his nose buried in a manga featuring a cartoonishly buxom caricature of Curveball on the cover. He yelled at her. She put a portal under his feet and dump
ed the pervert in a smelly Venice canal. Then she sprinted through the crowd, snatching purses and billfolds along the way, leaving angry commuters in her wake. A transit cop tried to give chase but she leapt from the train platform and came to a soft landing on the sand of Cottesloe Beach, just outside Perth. Her cash dash had netted about twenty-nine thousand yen, or a little under three hundred bucks. Not great, but also not bad for ten seconds of work. She dumped the purses and wallets on the beach and stepped across the continent to a laneway just outside a Melbourne currency exchange. Five minutes after passing the fountain in Paris, she identified a suitable replacement blouse in a Sydney department store window. It was nicer than the one the gendarmes had ruined.

  “Well?” Baba Yaga demanded when Franny returned to her hospital room. She might be old and frail, but the rap of command was in her voice.

  Sucking in a breath, Franny gave a concise description as if he had been reporting to Maseryk or Mendelberg back at the precinct.

  “Hmmm, perhaps you are not quite as stupid as I thought.”

  The old woman turned to the Otter and said something in what sounded like Russian. The smooth-faced man pulled an incongruous evening gown out of the closet, helped the old woman out of bed and into the bathroom. A few moments later they emerged. Baba Yaga was now dressed. She wore the little slippers provided by the hospital rather than the high heels that Franny could see in the closet.

  All five of them headed for the door. It was clear they were blowing this popsicle stand. Franny stood for a few moments reflecting on what he’d seen on those fight videos. The unspeakable horror that had been unleashed on ordinary citizens by the woman who had just walked out.

  “Yeah, fuck no,” Franny muttered, and he went after them. It hurt to run and he felt like a fool as he tried to hold the back of his gown together. Baba Yaga and her thuggish entourage were at the front entrance.