High Stakes: A Wild Cards Novel

by George R. R. Martin

  Joey scowled at her. “Gkjj ybq ppjp xif aza bxb?”

  Mollie sighed. She raised her hand and waved. “Yeah. Back here.”

  Baden wended through the crowd with Billy Ray in tow. Mollie wondered where Franny had gone. Baden said, “We’re ready for you.”

  A twinge of panic softened Mollie’s knees, as though they were soft candle wax. “Don’t you want to wait for others to show up?”

  “We can’t wait any longer. This is the team we have.”

  Mollie followed Baden to a conference room, Billy Ray and Joey in tow. She felt as though she were walking to her own execution. It seemed a miracle her legs could even hold her up. But she made it to the conference room, where a pair of laptops had been plugged into the telepresence setup. An immense flat-screen monitor on the wall at the far end of a long table showed a split-screen image; the left half looked like either a satellite photo or high-altitude aerial photo; the right half, the grainier of the pair, had been zoomed in on a particular stretch of tarmac.

  “So that’s balalaika, huh? Big fucking deal,” said Joey.

  “Baikonur. A ‘balalaika’ is a Slavic musical instrument, like a triangular guitar,” said Babel.

  “What-fucking-ever.”

  The close-up showed a shaded corner where two warehouses met: the B-team’s landing site. The wider view showed a sprawling concrete complex stippled with warehouses (the landing site helpfully circled in red), hangars, subterranean silos, spaceplanes, even a tank or two. Beyond these, in the bottom left corner of the image, a portion of what appeared to be a perimeter fence and a multicolored mass. Mollie’s stomach did a flip when she realized it was a crowd comprising thousands of people.

  It seemed pretty clear the people were pressed up against the fence, trying to get in. But were they fleeing the madness, or carrying it with them?

  Now that she looked more closely, she realized there had already been skirmishes and fighting among the refugees. There were bodies strewn at the edges of the crowd.

  … don’t think about the barn, don’t think about the barn, don’t …

  With trembling hands, Mollie poured herself a glass of ice water from a decanter on the conference table. When it no longer felt like her throat was plugged with ash, she asked, “How recent are these photos?”

  “Six hours,” Baden said.

  “You don’t have anything more recent?”

  The Committee woman tensed. “Is that a problem?”

  “No. No, I can do it. It’s just … are you sure this place hasn’t been absorbed yet? By the, you know…”

  “Trust us. It’s safe. We wouldn’t use it for a staging ground otherwise. The whole point is to get in and out before it gets engulfed.”

  “Be smart, be safe, be quick,” Mollie whispered. Hidden under the conference table, her knees shook.

  “What?”

  She shook her head. “Nothing. Just remembering something a friend used to tell me.”

  Taking a seat at the conference table, she gazed at the video screen. She squinted from the effort to absorb every detail of the image: the angles of the shadows, the color of the concrete, the rust spots on the hangar roofs, the faded Cyrillic lettering on the runways …

  Baden said, “Will these images work?”

  Mollie cleared her throat, twice. The bruises on her neck did their best to squeeze every last burr and rasp from her voice. “Well, they’re grainy, but they’ll do. In a pinch I’ve used some pretty blurry webcams.”

  But that was before she’d been to Talas … where people shoved broken bottles into their own eyes … and lobbed babies onto iron finials … and gnawed each other’s faces …

  Her concentration dissipated like a burst balloon.

  The Angel desperately needed rest and sustenance. Luckily she spotted a flat-roofed building that looked to be in decent shape where she wouldn’t be too deep within the fog’s clutches. She made a graceless landing and came up against a small cupola that covered a staircase leading down into the building’s depths.

  Her wings vanished and she felt as if a great weight had been removed from her back and shoulders. She stretched gingerly and wished Billy were present with his powerful hands and awesome massage skills. His touch would be quite welcome now, she thought, even the slightest caress of his hand against her cheek.

  “You always were a defiant child,” a familiar voice said.

  The Angel straightened as real fear knifed through her body, fear she hadn’t felt in many years.

  “Willful,” it said. “Deceitful. Plotting. Conniving. Evil little brat.”

  She knew that voice. She knew it well. She turned and faced her mother.

  She hadn’t changed since her death. Not a bit. Her face was crisscrossed with still-bleeding wounds with remnants of windshield glass still embedded in the score of gashes, including the long, deep tear in her throat. The coroner had thought that that was the wound that had taken her life, but he wasn’t sure if she’d bled out because of the broken windshield that’d sliced her throat or the impact of the steering wheel that had crushed her chest or maybe the collision of her flying body against the tree that had broken her back as the car hit it. The vehicle had left behind no brake marks on asphalt or turf as she’d plowed off the county road while going ninety miles an hour in a drunken stupor.

  The words ran in an uncontrollable rush through the Angel’s mind. She could only watch in helpless horror as her mother approached her. It was a miracle that she could stand upright let alone walk, if you could call her halting, shambling gait “walking.” How, the Angel wondered, was she functioning at all, with quarts of blood soaking her tattered clothing and running down and dripping off her ruined body, leaving a thick trail behind. Much of it came off her face and head—she’d been half scalped by a sharp shard of the windshield that’d ripped half of the hair from her skull and left it exposing the bone underneath.

  “You should feel quite at home here,” her mother said, shambling to a stop before her. “You’re an unnatural thing, like everything here. Born a bastard. Turned into a twisted genetic wreck by that unholy virus brought to this world to act as righteous vengeance against the unworthy—”

  “It made me a hero—” the Angel dared to say, but her voice was that of the little girl she’d been before her mother had put the knife to her.

  “It made you a freak,” her mother shrieked. “You were always a little liar, an unbeliever, though I tried so hard to bring you to God. It turned you into a glutton, always stuffing your face, on top of your whoring after boys—”

  “I never—”

  “I saw you kissing him!”

  “Once—” the Angel said through her tears “—just the one time—”

  “You wanted them all!”

  The Angel slipped to her knees, able only to shake her head in denial. “I wanted someone to love,” she whispered.

  Her mother sneered. “Well, you found him. Another twisted freak, like you. And look at you now, in your slutty suit, crying and broken—”

  “Angel…” The voice came from behind her, low and tentative, seeking. “Angel…”

  It came again.

  The Angel twisted her neck, gazing behind her and saw an old woman dressed in a black cloak, tall but leaning on a cane. The woman looked at her and the Angel was startled to see that she no longer had eyes, just empty black pits where they once were, the cheeks below them rimmed with faint red stains like the remnants of strange makeup.

  “It’s you,” the old woman said breathlessly. “I can see you in my mind. My dreams have come true. I told you so. I told you all.”

  For the first time, through the thickening fog, the Angel noticed that there were people behind her. Or people-like things, anyway. One little boy stood behind her, peering around her and clinging to the speaker’s cloak. He had little horns like a faun and hairy legs like a goat.

  “In a dream I saw you, Angel of the Alleyways. We have suffered hard and sought you long, we beseech yo
u to succor us in the hour of our need.”

  The Angel swiped at the snot running down her face with the back of her leather gauntlet.

  Her mother laughed wildly. “What are these disgusting creatures?” she asked. “We would never allow such grotesque monsters into Mississippi State.” She shook her head in despair, the flap of semidetached scalp dropping down to cover one eye. “I always knew that you’d end up in hell,” she said.

  Slowly the Angel rose to her feet. Her head turned back and she looked at her mother.

  “Shut up, you drunken bitch,” she said in a low, hard voice.

  Her mother didn’t seem impressed. “So you break another commandment,” she said. “Will you break them all before you’re done?”

  “Shut up!”

  Unbidden, the sword was in her hand. She took a step forward, a fierce scowl on her face and a fierce joy racing through her body. She swung her blade with an angry, wordless cry and it cut through her mother’s neck right where the sliver of windshield glass had sliced. The head jumped away from the neck and the Angel watched it fly in a lazy arc. Interestingly, no blood splattered from either junction of the cut, but thick, green fog slowly roiled out in languid swirls.

  When the head hit the roof it vanished in a puff of green smoke while the Angel watched as her mother collapsed into herself like a punctured balloon and neatly vanished.

  “Madonna of the Blade!” the old woman cried. “Please come to our aid!”

  The Angel turned to her. “Show me what you need!” she commanded.

  The old woman turned without a sound. There were clicking and slithering and tittering noises as those behind her limped and slithered and flowed down the stairs under the cupola. The Angel followed them, for the first time realizing that the sword had come to her without her prayer. She thought about it momentarily, then dismissed it from her mind.

  “Thanks to everyone for coming on short notice.”

  “Cut the fucking bullshit,” Joey Hebert said. “All I care about is pulling Michelle outta Talas. You just gotta get me fucking there so I’m close enough to use my children. I can goddamn do the rest.”

  Barbara shook her head. “We’ll get to that. Right now, I want to make sure that everyone’s aware of the entire situation.” Joey pushed off the wall, coming closer. The smell of rotting meat was coming off the zombie dog beside her. Barbara leaned back in her chair, as far away from Joey as she could get. “Joey, there are more people than Michelle in Talas that we have to worry about. What about them, the rest of the team?” Klaus, especially, she thought, but bit back his name. “Yes, I want Michelle back as much as you do, but we also need the others—all of them, if they can be found.”

  Joey was already shaking her head. Billy Ray watched the confrontation with an amused look on his face. “Fuck ’em,” she said. “If those assholes are with Michelle and I can get ’em, fucking fine. If they’re not…” She gave a shrug of tattooed shoulders.

  Barbara could sense the desperation in the woman’s voice, in her stance, in the way her face twisted with those last words. The disgust she usually felt around Hoodoo Mama dissolved, and she realized in that moment that Joey was grieving for Michelle in the same way that Barbara grieved for Klaus, that the emotions racking Joey were the same that were assaulting her every moment for the last few days.

  The difference was Joey might actually be able to do something about Michelle, and maybe the others. Not me. That’s not a power I have, not my gift. And Klaus knew it.

  Barbara raised her hand. “We all want Michelle back,” she said. “And any of the others you can find while you’re there. We need them.”

  “You’ll fucking get me to Talas, then?” Joey said. “When’s the goddamn plane leave? I’m ready now.”

  “There’s no plane. There’s a better way.” Barbara glanced at Mollie, who visibly shrank back against the plush cushions behind her. There was no sign of cohesiveness to this potential team. Barbara had to stop herself from shaking her head at the realization. “I don’t know how much each of you know at this point,” she began. “So forgive me if I start telling you things you already know—others here may not be aware of it.”

  Even to her own ears, that sounded too flat and too rigid, not like Klaus, who would have been all flaming emotion and passion. “This is what I’ve learned from Officer Black and Baba Yaga,” she continued. “All that’s holding back whatever entity is trying to cross into our world from this place is the person she knew as Tolenka or Hellraiser, now in the hospital that’s the center of the disturbance. The man is dying. Will die, and soon. And when he does, Baba Yaga claims there’s nothing to stop the thing inside him from crossing over fully. That’s the situation that we’re facing.”

  “Then we take out this fucking Hellraiser guy,” Joey said. “Pretty goddamn simple.”

  “No!” That was Franny. “You don’t understand. Kill him, and it’s over. That horror steps on through then. Killing him isn’t the answer.”

  “How about grabbing the guy and tossing him in one of those rockets at the Cosmodrome?” Ray asked. “Putin would gladly cooperate with that. We throw the bastard into orbit, or put him on the moon, or hell, drop him into the sun. Either way, he’d be far, far away from us—and do you think this thing can survive the sun?”

  “That occurred to me also, Director,” Barbara answered. “If we can’t kill Tolenka, then maybe we can put him somewhere far enough away that it won’t matter. But we don’t know what this thing can survive. It might just put the sun inside the same darkness that’s around Talas and Kazakhstan now, and that takes care of all life everywhere in the whole damn solar system. We may make things worse.”

  Ray snorted a laugh through his nose.

  “The Russians want this ended. Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan want to bomb Talas to rubble,” Barbara continued. “Putin is willing to drop a nuke. President van Rennsaeler might even agree with that. Worse, the Cosmodrome is within hours of being overrun by whatever started in Talas—at which point we don’t know who or what will have control of the material and weaponry there.”

  “You’re saying we’re screwed,” Ray said.

  Barbara glared at him. “No. I’m saying that I have a plan. Maybe not much of one, but unless one of you has something better…”

  Move.

  Michelle was paralyzed. There were multiple ways she could go, and she didn’t know if any of them was the way out. She gritted her teeth with anger and frustration. The only reason she was here was because of Adesina. That brat had been nothing but a burden since Michelle had brought her home. A faint voice inside her cried out against the thought, then was eclipsed by her anger.

  And now she was stuck in the dark, with Mummy coming for her. The shuffling was closer.

  There was a blink of light two passages down. It couldn’t have really happened. It was some sort of hallucination. But all she had to do was cross the water to get to it. The water that had God only knew what in it.

  The shuffling was getting closer.

  She could feel how thin she was now. Her hands ran over her body. Ribs stuck out, her hip bones were sharp. About the only things with any fat were her breasts, which had never been large anyway. But large enough, maybe.

  The flash again.

  She strained to see it. The blobby remnant of the light floated in her vision.

  Move.

  Fuck you. I can’t move. I’m stuck.

  But she stood up and let another tiny bubble fly. Each one was one less that she could use to fight the shuffling thing coming after her. Mummy.

  Shut up. She can’t be down here. It has to be something worse.

  There is nothing worse and you know it.

  The bubble hit the floor on the other side of the water. The canal was about two and a half meters across. But she’d have to go into the water to cross it. And that made her shudder.

  She decided to try to jump across. She might be able to make it. It seemed so reasonable.

  Sh
e jumped.

  In the dark, she miscalculated—not that she could have made it across anyway—and ended up slamming stomach-first into the opposite wall of the canal. She got a little fat from it, but it hurt like hell. Her hands slid off the wet stones edging the wall and she sank into the foul water.

  It was deeper than she’d thought. She kicked hard and hoped she was moving toward the surface—when something grabbed her leg. She screamed, and noxious water rushed into her mouth. Whatever it was, it started pulling her down. She kicked and yanked, but the thing wouldn’t let go. In desperation, she put her hand on the tentacle wrapped around her leg and let a bubble go.

  There was a small explosion. It burned like fire, but the thing released her leg. Michelle kicked away and burst through the surface. She flailed around to find the edge, found it, then dragged herself onto the walkway.

  She lay there panting, and then she heard the shuffle again. It was closer now. She began shivering—from the wet or the sound, she wasn’t sure.

  Move.

  The only voice she could hear over the roar of everything else in her head.

  Now it sounded like Adesina.

  Only not like her. It was close, but the voice was deeper than her daughter’s. And she’d failed Adesina. She hadn’t stopped anything. Only ended up here shivering in the dark, with Mummy coming for her.

  Move.

  Shut up. Shut up. Shut up.

  Michelle was shaking all over now. She had no fat on her to keep her warm. But what was really making her shake was what was coming down the hall toward her.

  Mom, move!

  She wanted to cry. Adesina’s voice. The only reason she was here was to keep her from dying. And now she was trapped in the dark with Mummy. And she’d failed utterly.

  Then she did cry.

  Hot, bitter tears rolled down her cheeks. Shaking and crying, she hit herself in the face again and again and again.

  The faint light flashed once more. She scrambled to her feet and ran toward it. Her shoulder slammed into a wall, and she wondered whether she was in the right place or if she’d lost track of where she was.