She could hear the old excitement in his voice. His remaining eye sparkled with intensity, and she could nearly feel the energy pulsing from him. Yes, this is the way it should be with him …
“Barbara can’t go with you.” That was Jayewardene. His bald statement punctured the energy in the room.
“I need her,” Klaus said, glaring at the Secretary-General with an ice-blue eye as cold as ghost steel. Jayewardene sat placidly at the table, with what was almost a smile on his face. Barbara had also turned to look at him quizzically. “You can’t be serious,” Klaus railed. “What about the language problem? I need Babel there to make sure everyone understands each other, or to make sure that they don’t, if it comes to that. I—we—need her: to coordinate negotiations or just to talk to people on the ground there. She’s essential.”
Jayewardene shook his bald head. “Where she is needed more is here—to coordinate everything with the UN. I need someone who knows the Committee and its strengths, someone who will be in charge, who will be the general coordinating everything. Here. That’s where a general should be, not on the front lines. I need Barbara here … and so do you, Klaus. I know this.” He put quiet emphasis on the word.
“But Klaus is right,” Barbara said. “The language issue…”
“There are translators who can do that for the team,” Jayewardene said. “But there is no one else here who can do the rest of what is needed—here in New York. We have strategies to talk about and new reports to examine. Klaus, I agree with you. We can no longer wait. You have the decision you wanted, but we have much planning to do before we get there. Right now, Barbara, you’re more valuable in New York, where you can interface with me and the authorities we’re still in touch with in Kazakhstan, where you can make certain that everyone stays informed and in the loop, and where you can send Klaus whatever additional help he might need.”
“Ink can do all that for you, Secretary-General,” Barbara insisted. She wanted to scream, wanted to yell, wanted to shatter the placid calm on Jayewardene’s face even as she knew he was right. It was nothing she would admit, not to either of them, but the decision felt right, even though the thought of Klaus going into this uncertain hell without her threatened to tear her apart. She forced herself to keep her face calm, all the emotion dampened and held down.
She noticed that Klaus had stopped arguing, silently watching the two of them.
“Ink isn’t anywhere near as experienced or as effective as you are,” Jayewardene persisted, as she expected. “While I agree that she has much potential, she’s still learning the Committee, the personalities that are involved, and how you function within the organizations to which the Committee reports and with which it’s associated. You know those things intimately, and you’re used to dealing with all the rules and regulations and still getting what you want. That’s your strength and your value, even more than your ace ability. From these reports, it doesn’t seem that negotiation and understanding are what we’ll be needing. I’ve made my decision here, and it’s the one that has to be made,” he told her. “You know that too, I think. Talas…” His voice trailed off at the name, and he glanced at the video screens around the room. “This is like nothing we have faced before, and therefore we can’t react to it as we have in the past.”
He’s right. He’s right, one part of her mind insisted, but the other still screamed in terror and fear. I need to be with him, especially now. He needs me … and I need him. I can’t lose him.
She waited. Klaus still said nothing, carefully looking away from both of them. Barbara nodded once, tightening her lips against the press of emotions. She wanted Klaus to insist that she must go. She could see that he was already impatient to be in motion, to be streaking toward the action, wrapped in ghost steel and certainty. But he still didn’t speak, didn’t give her a clue as to what he might want her to say.
“Fine. I’ll stay,” she told them, though her gaze was now entirely on Klaus. She imagined him stopping her, shaking his head and insisting that this decision was wrong. But nothing changed in his face or his eye, and she released an unheard sigh. “I’ll get things under way with transportation, Klaus. Make the calls you need to make, and get yourself ready. I’ll take care of the rest.”
“I can see the soldiers,” Marcus said. He held Olena by the wrist, leading her through the rugged terrain outside of Talas. The landscape was barren and scrubby, sinister under the roiling light. He kept them moving toward where he thought their mountain landmark was. The main road was off to his left. He could see the vehicles clogging it, and the river of humanity flowing around them. He liked having the road near, but wanted to avoid people—and other things—as long as he could. “We’re almost there, Olena. Just a little farther. I can see them. I really can.”
It was true. When he rose up as high as he could on his tail, he could make out the silhouettes of the tanks and barricades and the men who manned them. Not far now, so he kept talking. He felt like he had to, like it was the only way to keep her with him. Since he’d pulled her out of the car and slipped away as the dog-men devoured one of their own, it had grown increasingly hard to keep her calm. They’d found her father’s helicopter soon after, but one of the pilots was dead and the other was nowhere to be seen. Olena had started calling for them, running in circles around the aircraft shouting in Ukrainian. It took Marcus several minutes to convince her they’d just have to keep moving. On foot and tail instead of in the air.
Each time he ran out of encouraging things to say, her eyes became jittery things that looked like they wanted to leap from their sockets. He knew that she was seeing and thinking horrible things. Things that were there and maybe also things that weren’t anyplace but in her mind. Once, she’d panicked so intensely that she fought to get away from him. She’d scratched at his face, seeming, for a few frantic moments, not to recognize him at all. He was crying by the time he got her back, begging her to see that it was just him. Just Marcus.
God, we have to get to the soldiers, he thought. Maybe they had doctors there that could treat her. He clung to the thought, voiced it out loud, making himself sound sure of it. Everything, he told her, would be all right soon.
As if to confirm this, a sleek jet appeared out of nowhere, announced by a boom that Marcus felt through his tail. The jet roared by overhead, straight toward Talas. It looked like a glistening savior, a thing of technology and reason. It was, Marcus thought, the outside world taking notice of whatever was going on here. “Look,” he said, placing one arm around Olena and pointing with the other, “help is coming. People know what’s going on here. I bet they’ll send aces to deal with all this.” He squeezed her, thrilled to see a glimmer of hope return to her face as her eyes followed the jet’s progress. “The worst of this is…”
Olena inhaled a sudden breath. Marcus looked back toward the city. The jet’s nose dipped. Its high-tech power seemed to wilt. It rolled, banked, and then slammed into the upper floors of an apartment building at the edge of the city. It exploded into a ball of fire and smoke and whirling debris.
“Fuck. Fuck…” Marcus exhaled the word several times before he remembered Olena. For her, he tried to regain his certainty. “Come on. Let’s get to the soldiers. We reach them and we’re safe.”
A few minutes later, he learned the truth. He’d been hearing sporadic gunfire since they first entered Talas. It had become background noise. But as they neared the cordon and he angled them closer to the road to join the others fleeing, the staccato bursts increased in frequency and volume. Marcus couldn’t see what was happening until he came up over a rise and got his first good view of the cordon. It wasn’t the scene he’d hoped for.
The soldiers were shooting, but not to defend the refugees. They were firing right into them. Bodies littered the highway. The place was in chaos. People running for cover. Others pleading with the soldiers, approaching with their hands held high, only to be shot down where they stood. Some cut away from the road and tried desperately to c
limb through the barbed wire and over the barricades. Many hung caught in the barbed wire, macabre, bloody rag dolls. Marcus remembered the soldier in the tank in Talas. Why had he ever thought these ones would be any different? He knew. He’d thought it because he had to. Needed to. Wanted to.
Things whizzed through the air above them. A moment later he heard the machine-gun reports that trailed the bullets. He ducked, pulling Olena down. Soldiers along the barricade nearest them had opened fire. Pressed to the ground, exposed, Marcus cast around for someplace to hide. Back down the ravine, he thought. That would take them out of the line of sight.
He’d just started to try and explain this to Olena when a blast of tank fire stopped him. A tank? They’re shooting at us with a tank? What the fuck? The machine-gun barrage increased as more soldiers turned their guns toward them and other tanks maneuvered to fire. That’s when Marcus realized they weren’t aiming at him and Olena. They were shooting at something beyond them. As soon as he understood that, he felt it, that something enormous was approaching from the city. He heard the impact of its steps on the ground, crushing plants, snapping things. He felt tremors through his tail. Just like back in Talas, when …
He snapped around and looked back toward Talas. There it was, the harvesting monster he’d seen from the casino. It was huge, bigger than before, prehistoric in its dimensions, with more grotesquely long legs than before. Its body had swelled, widened, stretched taller and pocked with even more of those horrible cells. Above it all that sightless, earless, mouthless, amorphous thing that was the creature’s head swayed and wobbled in a strange slow motion. But the creature wasn’t slow. Those long legs moved it forward with deceptive speed. Forward, right toward Marcus and Olena.
Olena began babbling. Her voice was so fast and high-pitched that it didn’t seem right, the sounds harsh and incoherent and not really like language at all. Her eyes were at their crazed worst. She squirmed out of Marcus’s embrace and got to her feet. She looked at the approaching monstrosity, and she screamed. Marcus lunged toward her. He grabbed her and tried to get her to focus on him, but she had eyes only for the monster. Her face, which had always been so beautiful, became a desolate horror that he could barely recognize.
The harvester headed straight toward them, nearer every second. If Marcus couldn’t still her, one of those reaping arms would grab them both and … He pleaded with her, tried to cover her mouth, to hold her still. But she was a writhing fury, completely frantic. She scratched and tore at him. She bared her teeth, lunged, and sunk her teeth into his shoulder. He released her, staring in horror at her blood-splattered face. Behind her, the harvester came on, massive, almost upon them.
Marcus did the only thing he could think of. Quick as he thought it, his tongue shot out and thwacked wetly on Olena’s neck. Poison. Delivered to skin. As she dropped, he swept forward and caught her. He cradled her limp body tight to his chest and squirmed toward the cordon beneath an onslaught of bullets and mortar fire directed past him at the looming monster. Marcus surged over the barricade. He fixed his eyes forward and slithered with everything he had. There was only one place he could go now. Only one person who might be able to save the woman he loved more than he would ever have thought possible.
The Angel stood before the door to Mendelberg’s apartment, thinking, I’ve been in this spot before.
She and Lonnegan had beaten the precinct cops to the apartment, but not Stevens. The three-story building that housed it was part of a row of old brownstones, close to the river in a nondescript, middle-class area, decent but certainly not extravagant. Mendelberg’s apartment was on the center floor. Stevens was waiting for them when they arrived, lurking by the big potted plant adjacent to the elevator door.
“Been here long?” Lonnegan asked.
“Two minutes,” Stevens said. “No sign of Mendelberg.”
They all peered at the door on the left end of the corridor.
“Sure that’s it?” the Angel asked.
“2A,” Lonnegan affirmed.
“You better be right.”
The corridor walls were a faded green. The carpet was on the edge of being threadbare. As they stood in front of the door the Angel was in the lead. The cops had drawn their guns. The Angel glanced back and nodded. Lonnegan and Stevens took a step backward as she called up her sword. They were close enough to feel the heat from its flame on their faces. The Angel kicked the door near the knob, and it slammed straight back into the room, torn off its hinges. The mechanism of the lock and bolt dangled from the frame.
The Angel led the way inside, scanning right and left. Lonnegan and Stevens followed, splitting left and right behind her.
It was a rather nice room. The carpet was deep pile plush, the walls a tasteful shade of deep, restful green, with half a dozen nice oil paintings and a cabinet of expensive-looking jade curios against one wall. The furniture, too, looked expensive though the Angel couldn’t say where or when it had been made. Unfortunately, the flying door had smashed one spindly-legged little table and shattered the once-elegant vase that had stood upon it.
Before anyone could say anything, Mendelberg suddenly appeared in an open doorway that led deeper into the apartment, feet spread, an automatic held up before her in a two-handed shooter’s grip. Her expression was grim, her scarlet eyes burned like bonfires in hell.
“You bitches broke my Ming!” she spat.
“Hey!” Stevens said.
“Shut up!”
The Angel was marginally closest to her. Mendelberg’s pistol was aimed more at her than anyone else.
“Good evening, Captain,” Lonnegan said. “We heard you weren’t feeling well so we decided to stop by and see how you were doing.”
Mendelberg hissed, her weird ears fluttering like fish fins caught in a swirling current. Her pistol shifted, fractionally, and focused on the female cop.
“I always hated you, Lonnegan,” the captain said. “Always so cocky, so sure. Always acting like the queen of the precinct.’
Lonnegan smiled easily. “That’s good to know,” she said. “I’d hate to think that a shit-stain like you liked me.”
“Your nat feelings hurt, Lonnegan?”
“The only thing that hurts is my knowledge of all the pain you’ve caused, all the suffering and death. And for what? Grekor’s filthy money?”
“Do you think this stuff pays for itself?” Mendelberg asked, gesturing around her with the pistol. “This is nothing, nothing, compared to what my family had before the Nazis stole it all. And then they came to America. To Manhattan, just in time to be born from their twisted genes.”
“Sad story,” Lonnegan said laconically.
“Sad? You don’t know sad, shiksa. I was born in Jokertown. I lived in the filth and among everyday horrors that could freeze your liquor-diluted Irish blood. I worked my ass off to get out of that place. Graduated magna cum laude from Columbia. Finished number one in my class in the Police Academy. And for what? Finally when I made captain, where did they send me? Back to that hellhole I worked so hard to escape. Back to the crapsack precinct, Fort Freak.” Mendelberg shrugged. “So I took the Russian’s money. Why not? It was as good as the city’s. Better, because it was tax free.”
“Jokers died because of what you did,” the Angel said.
“Jokers die every day.”
“Father Squid died,” Lonnegan murmured.
“A priest of a false, bastard religion.”
“Jamal Norwood died,” the Angel said.
“A shitty actor and jumped-up government stooge.” Mendelberg shook her head. “I was almost there,” she said quietly. “I had almost saved up enough…”
“For what?” Lonnegan asked.
“For what?” Mendelberg’s voice rose to a near shriek. “To fix these.” She turned her head so that her audience could see her filmy ears straight on. “To become human!”
“Goddamn,” Lonnegan said. The Angel couldn’t find it within herself to rebuke her as comprehension struck them
all. “You betrayed your people and your honor because you wanted plastic surgery?”
“I deserve it!” Mendelberg screamed, and the ghost rose right out of the floor before her.
The Angel recognized him immediately. It was the gunman who’d escaped from Jamal’s hotel room by slipping away through the floor. He was a plump five-foot-six or so, with fat cheeks, protruding watery blue eyes, and clothes that looked like they came from a parody movie about the disco era. He wore a glittering puce—she guessed—shirt of some hideous synthetic material that clung disturbingly to his rotund figure, tight pants, ditto, and shiny black patent leather half boots. He looked pissed, and drunk, which was a bad combination. He stared at Mendelberg, one of his guns pointing at her, while he tried to cover the Angel and the others with a second.
“Son of a bitch!” Mendelberg screeched, and opened fire.
Bullets flew like angry wasps, right through his chest and torso while Angel, Lonnegan, and Stevens ducked for cover. Mendelberg emptied her magazine, to no avail. The hit man, as he tried to cover everyone, spotted and recognized the Angel for the first time.
“You killed my Andrei!” he shrieked in a voice that was so heavily accented that he sounded like Boris Badonov from the old Rocky and Bullwinkle cartoons that she loved when she was a child.
“No I didn’t,” the Angel said as calmly as she could. She would have been more afraid if she hadn’t noticed that she could sort of see through his guns, much like you could sort of see through his body. She hoped Lonnegan and Stevens had noticed the same thing.
“You lie.” His hand was not exactly steady and his words were somewhat slurred. At least she thought they were, and not just oddly accented.
High Stakes: A Wild Cards Novel Page 25