High Stakes: A Wild Cards Novel

by George R. R. Martin

  “You got some muscles on you,” Tinker opined. “Not like a man’s, though.”

  Rather unconsciously, the Angel thought, he flexed his weight lifter biceps showing from under his short shirt sleeves.

  “No,” the Angel said. Gingerly, she slipped the bra strap off her damaged shoulder.

  “And some boobies, too.”

  Sudden anger flared through the Angel, overcoming her weariness. She locked eyes with Tinker.

  “You know who my husband is,” she said.

  “Yeah,” Tinker said.

  “And what I’m capable of.”

  “Just sayin’,” he said with a poorly concealed gulp. “I mean, we’re out here and all. Who knows if we’ll be alive this time tomorrow?”

  Her anger turned to something else as she regarded him closely. He wasn’t exactly handsome and he stank. He had big muscles, though. Looked strong. She knew that she could break him if she wanted to. Who knows, indeed, what they could do, alone, out in the desert, to each other?

  Her eyes closed momentarily and she swayed, barely catching herself before falling. What am I thinking? she asked herself. How can I think it?

  “I—Sorry. Tired. Loss of blood.” She was babbling.

  “Better wash out that wound before you dress it,” Tinker said, all business now.

  The Angel looked at him with concern. “Is there enough water?”

  Tinker laughed. “To clean wounds with? Right-o.”

  He went off toward the small group of Kazakhs encamped a little down the road and came back lugging a plastic jerry can that looked to be about forty gallons.

  “Need a hand?” he asked, dropping it at her feet with an effort-full exhalation of breath.

  The Angel just shook her head. She lifted it by a single handle with her left hand, hefted it experimentally. It was almost full. Virtually without effort she lifted it over her head, flipping it like a bottle of Coke when it was in the proper position, and poured the tepid, plastic-smelling water over her head as Tinker looked on, impressed.

  It was heaven, almost as wonderful as the most luxurious shower she’d ever taken. It took an effort to cut off the flow of water, to make sure she had enough to cleanse her wound. It looked puffy, red-tinged. She patted it gently with a towel, cleaning it as best and as stoically as she could, slathered it with powder from the first-aid kit, and as a final precaution jabbed herself with a syringe that contained a wide-spectrum antibiotic, and taped it over. She looked up to see that Tinker was following her every movement with interest.

  “How’s your first-aid skills?” she asked.

  “Nonexistent,” Tinker replied.

  “I’d better get this done by myself. God knows I’ve watched Billy do it enough times.” At the thought of Billy she frowned, gritted her teeth, and slammed her shoulder back into its socket with the palm of her left hand. There was a flash of white-hot pain that nearly brought her to her knees, and then, suddenly, it felt a lot better. Not perfect, for sure, but better. She went back into the duffel bag and removed a large ACE bandage and roll of tape.

  “Wrap the bandage,” she told Tinker. “Like this.” She held one end of the bandage against her skin under her arm and showed him how to unwrap the roll under, over, and around her shoulder. “Tightly,” she ordered.

  Once he pulled it too hard, and the Angel sucked in her breath and winced.

  “Sorry,” he said automatically.

  “That’s all right.” She took the end of the bandage from him and hooked it fast. “Now the tape.”

  Tinker nodded, bent down for the tape the Angel had set in the mouth of the duffel bag.

  “Thanks,” she said, flexing her shoulder experimentally, then gingerly reached into her duffel bag with her injured arm, found a shirt, and put it on, carefully.

  “You gonna be all right?”

  “After I get some food,” she said. “Some rest.”

  He nodded judiciously. “You do that. I’ll take the watch.”

  “We can pull shifts—”

  Tinker shook his head. “You’re a tough Sheila and game as Ned Kelly, but I got the feeling that the shit is just gonna get hotter. I’ve done nothing today, but play with the radio. Maybe I can fix it, somehow, anyway. You eat and rest.”

  The Angel nodded.

  “And get ready for tomorrow,” she said softly.

  He had once again been sent on an errand. “Go bring us a cassette player, boy.” The dismissive order from Baba Yaga.

  “Give me the money to buy it, bitch,” had slipped out before he thought better.

  Fortunately Baba Yaga seemed more amused than inclined to turn him into a Barcalounger. She had nodded and one of the goons had casually peeled off a hundred-dollar bill from a roll he had pulled from his pocket.

  Franny had gone straight to Nightingale’s Pawn and old Nightingale had hemmed and hawed to himself and flopped off into the shadowed depths of his cluttered, jumbled store. Franny had amused himself by counting the number of guitars hanging in the store—thirty-two. Studied the watches and jewelry in the locked case. The abandoned wedding rings were especially poignant to him. Wondered why on earth Nightingale would have taken in turntables and speakers. Finally the old man returned with an ancient cassette player. Its white plastic case had faded to an ugly yellow like a fungus-infected toenail.

  Still it played and it was doing so now. The speaker was tinny and crackled a bit, but the voice of the man came through clearly enough. It was a rich baritone, warm and almost buttery. Franny tried to reconcile it with the thing he’d seen in the hospital bed.

  Baba Yaga was expressionless, just staring at the plastic box resting at her side on the bed as the story spooled out. Which Franny understood courtesy of Babel’s power. He wished she hadn’t been so courteous. The man had been trying to give a dry, factual report, but Franny could hear the fear and sorrow beneath the words. He’d heard it in the voices of cops who had been through a harrowing situation, in the voice of a high school friend diagnosed with a brain tumor and facing death.

  “… Help me. For the sake of whatever God you believe in, help me…”

  “… I don’t know what entered me, Mariamna. I don’t want to know what it is. Horrorshow, I call it, or Dark God, or … The name doesn’t matter. All that matters is that it intends to move across all the realities, across all the boundaries between our world and the rest of the universes out there. It wants to own them, wants to devour them, wants to rule them. It wants all the pain and the blood and the agony to feed itself and grow stronger. It will create minor gods to worship it, but that won’t be us. [Tolenka laughs, a bitter cough.] We’re nothing to it, creatures hardly worth noticing …

  “… But I’ve found a way to keep it back, keep it inside and not be free to pursue its ends in our world. It feeds on death and fear, and that’s what I have to give it. Not too much or it would become too powerful; not too little or it would destroy me in frustration and emerge anyway …

  “… I’m so sorry, Mariamna. I didn’t want this …

  “… I don’t know how long I can continue this, Mariamna. I’ve become loathsome to myself, a creature nearly as bad as the Master inside. I hear its voice and it’s my own that I hear. I think of how pleasant it would be to just die and let it go, because I wouldn’t be there to know what happens afterward. If I die, it will be free to enter our world …

  “… Help me. For the sake of whatever God you believe in, help me…”

  Baba Yaga pressed the STOP button on the tape recorder. In the awful silence that followed, Barbara could hear her own breathing, ragged and too rapid. Her heart hammered against the cage of her ribs. Klaus, what do I do now? I want you here, my love, because I’m terrified.

  “I did what I could for him,” Baba Yaga was saying, and Barbara jerked her gaze to the woman on the bed. “That was recorded decades ago, not long after our botched mission. I tried to help him hold in that thing. I spent years nursing him as he became more and more twisted and awf
ul to be near. I managed to keep him at least somewhat sane and docile…” She nodded toward Franny against the wall. “Until Black ruined it for all of us,” she finished.

  Her thin fingertips caressed the black buttons of the recorder, and Barbara thought that she would play more of the tape. Instead, Baba Yaga closed her eyes hard, as if Tolenka’s voice amid the hissing of the ancient cassette had conjured up something terrifying in front of her and she wanted to shut out the vision. “Horrorshow is a monster from another place, another dimension. A terrible, awful god. It wants … it wants death and terror and horror. That’s what makes it strong.” Her eyes opened again. Yellowed pupils sought Barbara. “Now, there’s little hope at all. It’s growing stronger every day, and soon there will be no way to stop it. The whole world will become like Talas is now, and it will be the world’s master.”

  “Then we need to find a way to get to Tolenka and kill him, if he’s the one through whom this thing is going to come.”

  “No!” The word was a shriek, a scream. Baba Yaga lurched up in her bed, her hand clenched like a claw about to strike. “Didn’t you hear what Tolenka was saying? That’s what you can’t do, you fool! Tolenka is the only thing holding back the monster now. He is trying desperately to keep shut the door the creature has opened. If he dies, if you or your aces kill him, then the monster will step through fully, in all its awful power. It will rip open the walls between its world and ours, and everything there, all the horror and all the filth, will spill over. There will be no place for anyone to hide or escape. Everything and everyone in our world will die. Everyone.”

  She stopped. The truth of everything the woman had said was written in the lines of her face. Barbara felt sick. She imagined Klaus, caught up in the madness, or worse, already dead. I did this. I sent Klaus and the others there. I let Klaus go without taking me along. I could have at least been there with him when …

  She stopped the thought before it could go further. All the plans we’ve set into motion would end in Tolenka’s death. How can I stop this from happening? How can I convince Jayewardene and the others? “Is there a way to deal with this? Can we end this somehow and stop this thing? There has to be a way. There has to be.”

  At that, Baba Yaga only shook her head. “I know this: it is Tolenka that is holding back the Dark God. As long as he lives, the thing inside can’t step through completely. For there to be any hope at all, you must keep my Tolenka alive. As for the rest…” Baba Yaga shrugged.

  “Then that’s what we’ll do,” Barbara told her.

  She had no idea how they might accomplish that.

  “How do we know he’s not already dead?” Franny struggled to keep his voice level. To emulate the man on the tape. Just the facts, ma’am. “I was in that hospital room in Talas. People were going crazy then and that was days ago. Nobody’s replacing the IV bags, or changing his Depends, much less feeding him. And judging from the pictures this thing has been gorging itself on pain and death and fear.”

  “If Tolenka were dead we would not be having this conversation. The madness would fill the world,” Baba Yaga said. “He was a strong man. He knows what’s at stake. He will fight to the end.”

  “We have no choice but to proceed as if he’s still alive,” Babel said.

  “And whatever you do, you must do it quickly!”

  “Then I best get to it.”

  Babel left.

  “She’s smart,” Baba Yaga said. “She reminds me a bit of myself. I was prettier, of course. Well, we shall see. Perhaps she is clever enough for this.”

  Baba Yaga frowned at the tape player. She pushed it roughly aside. Franny felt a stir of pity.

  “It must have been hard. Hearing his voice. How long has it been since you listened to those tapes?”

  The cold eyes pierced him again. “You are a sentimental ass, Francis. Go away.”

  Nothing had made Marcus’s case about the evil coming out of Talas like the creature Vasel’s coin had turned into body waste. After that, when Marcus pleaded for the villagers to flee they had ears for it.

  Baikonur. The Cosmodrome. The names passed from mouth to mouth in fervent whispers. It seemed as good a place as any, and a much better one than a village apparently in shuffling distance from a city of horrors. The entire village packed up and prepared for the journey in a frantic rush, all of them with an eye toward the bloodred sky that made a beautiful twilight somehow sinister. Though they worked quickly and with collective purpose, there was much to be accounted for: joker bodies of all shapes and sizes, some with debilitating deformities, arguments over what could and couldn’t be brought and over how their precious few vehicles should be packed and passengers distributed. They didn’t roll out until the dead of night.

  Instead of joining the highway down in the valley on the Talas side, they fled via a smaller road up and over the ridgeline above the village. At the crest, Marcus turned and looked down the valley. Toward Talas, distant confusion, a strange glow that shifted colors and made the horizon roil with menace. The lights from planes or helicopters cut through air, fading in and out as if passing through banks of thick cloud. He thought he could see large shapes moving in the valley, but each time he tried to focus on one it seemed to blend into the mirk and vanish.

  He knew, though. Horrors were out there. The certainty of it made his skin crawl.

  He pulled his gaze in to what mattered, the people he cared about. The caravan of jokers crept upward under the bone-grey highlights of a full moon. The truck Olena had commandeered in Talas led the way, its engine rumbling loud despite the fact that it inched forward at a walking pace. The bed was crammed with children and the old, and those for whom walking was hard, or impossible. Behind it came the rest of the village’s vehicles: Timur’s truck, an old Russian-made van, a car missing doors on one side, another pulling a makeshift trailer piled high with supplies, and a motorcycle that looked absurd beneath the three teenage boys who shared it. In among the motorized vehicles, a procession of wagons creaked along, drawn by an old nag, a mule, and a joker who looked more like a white bull than like the man he’d once been. Many just walked.

  Silently, Marcus wondered, How are we ever going to make it? Five hundred miles … It seemed an impossible distance, but it was the only way. He wouldn’t leave them.

  Neither, apparently, would Olena. She’d had a dustup with her father, both of them speaking machine-gun rapid Ukrainian. Marcus wasn’t sure what she’d said, but she must’ve had him by the balls in some way or another. Instead of liquifying Timur and just taking his truck, Vasel had stood by impatiently as they packed. Now, he kept pace beside Olena’s truck, continuing to lecture her, gesturing his frustration with his entire body. He still scared the hell out of Marcus, but not the way he had as the cool customer who had first shown up in a helicopter with a mini-army at his call. He was jumpy in a way he hadn’t been before. There was fear in him. And just that fact chilled Marcus, underlined how real this all was.

  As she rumbled past him, Olena smiled and waved. She was clearly enjoying her father’s frustration. Watching her, it stunned him again that he was here, in some crazy-ass country he’d never even known existed, with a beautiful girl who he both knew and didn’t know, with a gangster ace that might destroy them or save them, and with a procession of jokers he could barely talk to but felt willing to stake his life on. He thought of his family, a world away in the suburbs of Baltimore. A quick barrage of ancient memories flashed through his mind, times long gone. What would they think if they knew where he was? Nothing, he figured. They didn’t want to know, wouldn’t care if they did. Forget about them, he thought. Only here and now and these people matter. He pushed his past out of his mind.

  He noticed Nurassyl gazing at him from the back of the truck. The joker boy held up a tentacled hand.

  Marcus did the same. He mouthed the words the boy was fond of saying, “High-five, bro. What’s up?” He couldn’t help saying them with a Kazakh accent. He figured he’d hear those part
icular words in the boy’s voice from now on.

  The Handsmith, who was trailing behind the truck, stopped beside him. He turned and took in the scene a moment. He didn’t give an indication he saw the vague shapes Marcus did. After a short silence, he said, “Moses.”

  “What?” Marcus asked.

  The man turned to him. He smiled with one corner of his mouth, revealing the gap of a missing tooth Marcus hadn’t noticed before. “You … Moses.”

  “Oh,” Marcus said, “you mean I’m like Moses leading the Jews out of Egypt? Hardly.” He smirked at the idea, though the compliment made him flush. “Like Moses taking you to a promised land called Baikonur…”

  The man nodded. “Like Moses to Baikonur. Come, Moses, to Baikonur.” He slipped an arm around Marcus’s shoulder and eased him into motion. Sliding forward beside him, Marcus looked ahead into the moonlit valley on the far side of the ridgeline. The road switched back and forth as it descended, a silver shimmer so bright that the vehicles had begun to cut their lights and inch along it at one with the night.

  Good, Marcus thought. This was one migration that was better done in secret. Better, as jokers, that they travel as far as they can unnoticed by the world. Or unnoticed by a god that looks down on it and laughs.

  It was close to midnight when some impatient asshole with no sense of time simultaneously rang the doorbell and pounded on the farmhouse door. Mollie, half awake, welcomed the respite from her dreams.

  Mom came downstairs a moment later wearing a dead look in her eyes. The same dead look she’d worn since Mollie had taken her to the hospital.

  “Mollie.” Her flat voice carried no emotion. “Get your lazy ass upstairs and answer the door.”

  “Why me? Who is it?”