High Stakes: A Wild Cards Novel

by George R. R. Martin

  The shuffling was closer. She could almost hear Mummy’s wheezing.

  There was a faint glow coming from the tunnel. Michelle ran toward the light.

  It wasn’t the most pleasant work, but they cleared the soldiers’ remains from the transports, claimed the vehicles, and turned—as Vasel wished—toward the highway. For a time after connecting with the A-2, the going was easy. The road was wide and flat enough for the trucks to open up and for the miles to scroll by beneath them. The transports led the way, with the best of the village vehicles close behind them. Gone were the wagons and animal-drawn carts. They roared past the foot traffic on the edges of the road, and wove around slower vehicles, many of them piled high with people and supplies. Clearly, they weren’t the only ones trying to put Talas far behind them.

  Marcus rode in the bed of the lead transport. Sitting upright on his coils, he took in the barren landscape the road cut through, the dry air hot on his face. He had to admit that they were making better time, and the villagers were getting some much needed rest. Still, they were riding in stolen property that had been attained through murder. That didn’t sit right with him.

  He was one of many in the transport. They were jammed in tight enough that many of the jokers pressed against Marcus’s coils. Nurassyl leaned back against him, his big eyes closed as he slept. A playmate of the boy’s, Sezim, had actually climbed onto a curve of Marcus’s tail and slept there, holding a stuffed rabbit cradled in her three small arms. Before Marcus would have felt embarrassed having so many people touching his deformity. In this case, it felt almost comforting. None of the jokers seemed to think he was deformed at all, and the press of bodies reminded him of something, some long-buried memory that he didn’t try to dig up.

  As they approached the city of Shymkent, the highway became increasingly choked with traffic. Vasel pressed forward, shoving his way through with vicious blasts of the horn. For a time that worked, too. People parted to let the big military vehicles through. But as they rolled past and they got sight of the joker passengers the other travelers’ deference turned to indignation. They glared. Shouted. Gesticulated.

  “Shit,” Marcus whispered. “This could get bad.”

  It did. With the M-32—the road that would take them north to Baikonur—in sight in the distance, they came to a dead stop. The whole distance to the turnoff was jammed, vehicles stuck bumper to bumper. Vasel leaned on the horn, but it was hopeless. The cars in front of them couldn’t have moved out of the way even if they’d wanted to.

  Olena climbed out of the second truck and squirmed through the crowd. Stepping up on to the sideboard, she peeked her head over the side of Marcus’s transport. “What is it?”

  Squinting into the distance, Marcus said, “I think there’s a blockade at the M-32. Soldiers, looks like. This is bad. Even if we get up to them how are we going to explain Kazakh military transports being full of jokers?”

  “They’ll never let us through,” Olena agreed. “That’s not our only problem, though.”

  There were murmurs coming from the vehicles around them. Whispered conversations. A few shouts. People, obviously, were noticing the jokers. They didn’t look happy to see them.

  Vasel’s door opened. He jumped down to the road, stretched his back, took in the gathering crowd.

  Marcus called down to him, “See? I told you the highway would screw us.”

  “We are not screwed,” the ace said. He jerked his head to indicate the vehicles clogging the road in front of them. “They are.” The coin appeared, this time spinning on its edge on the tip of Vasel’s finger.

  “No,” Marcus said. “Vasel, what are you going to do? Kill everyone between here and Baikonur?”

  The gangster shrugged. “Whatever it takes.” He turned and began to walk forward.

  Marcus lifted the little girl and set her next to Nurassyl. As carefully as he could so as not to hurt anyone, he flowed up and over the rim of the transport, grabbing the map through the open window of the cab of the truck in the process. He slithered around Vasel so quickly the man had to draw up. As he unfolded the map and scanned it, Marcus said, “There’s been enough death already. There’s a better way. Here. We backtrack on A-2. Connect to this smaller road. We passed it already and there wasn’t a roadblock. It heads north and connects to the M-32 farther up.”

  Vasel considered the route he’d drawn, coin still spinning effortlessly on his finger. “That will take longer.”

  “But it’ll save lives. You start flipping coins here, who knows what’ll happen.”

  Marcus motioned at the crowd continuing to congeal around them. They were pointing now, a few of them trying to climb up to peer into the transports. Timur fended them off on one side. The Handsmith and Bulat tried to calm them on the other. Olena spoke rapid Russian to another group, arguing with beautiful passion.

  “Why do you care about these people?” Vasel asked. “Do you know what they are saying? That you are contagious. That you are an evil to be destroyed. They would wipe you jokers from the earth without a moment’s thought.”

  “I guess that makes me better than them,” Marcus answered.

  Someone from the crowd threw a glass bottle that shattered on the truck’s railing, causing the jokers to cringe away from the shards of glass. “Come on,” Marcus said, “before things get out of hand. Let’s go back to go forward, and nobody gets killed.”

  After a moment’s more consideration, Vasel palmed his coin. “Okay. One last time we do it your way, if you can get us turned around.”

  “I can.” Marcus shot back toward the trucks, just in time to confront a group of young men converging on the Handsmith and Bulat with clubs and lengths of pipe in hand. Marcus rose tall and writhed toward them, throwing his coils out in front of him to drive them back. One of them brought a wrench down on his tail. Marcus snapped forward and clocked him so hard the man’s legs went to jelly and he fell. He hadn’t meant to do that, but adrenaline was coursing through him now. They were all getting too close, looking too beastly and angry. He shouted that they weren’t to blame. They were refugees just like anybody else. The commotion just grew, though.

  He raced around to the other side of the truck to find Timur fighting a guy wielding a shovel. He took his legs out from under him with his tail. A second later the air was filled with thrown objects. Bottles and rocks pelted them. “Olena,” he called, “tell them we’re going to turn around. Tell them to just let us go!”

  As she tried to do that, Marcus did what he had to. His tongue punched a man brandishing a pistol. He picked up another guy and hurled him into a group of approaching men. When one guy got up onto the side of the truck and lifted a pipe above the screaming joker women and children, Marcus careened around toward him. Before he knew that he was going to do it, he slung his tongue out, wrapped it around the guy’s neck, and yanked him back off the truck. He was unconscious by the time he hit the ground. He’d never used his tongue quite like that before, but he didn’t have time to pause and applaud himself.

  Through pure hard work and force, constant motion and all the menace he could muster, Marcus managed to back the crowd enough so that the caravan could pull off the highway and swing around.

  When Vasel finally pulled up beside him on the other side of the highway, Marcus answered the unasked question on the ace’s face. “I said I didn’t want anyone dead. That doesn’t make a pacifist.” He curved up into the truck bed, careful not to squash anyone as he did so. “Everybody all right?” he asked. Despite his English, they seemed to understand him. They made room, welcomed him, and, he thought, thanked him.

  The Angel was astonished to discover that the building was actually a giant department store. The first level they went through was devoted to home furnishings—beds, couches, tables, sofas, chairs, tables. You name it, it was there. Most were in use, with people lying, sitting, crouching fearfully on them. They were the helpless, the sick, the wounded, the starving, and the dead. Other items were occupied by other
beings, some at least partly human, but changed, horribly, in a parody of a wild card outbreak. The Angel had seen it all before. It was Jokertown writ small. They had too many heads or appendages or not enough. They had warty, leathery, bloody, oozy skin covered by fur, feathers, scales, or slime.

  But it was the others, the utterly alien with little of humanity about them, that disturbed her. The things with hooves and tentacle-covered bodies, the sifting masses of protoplasm that had mouths all over them, the hideous creatures with rubbery-looking skin, sweeping bat-like wings, and blank faces devoid of features that looked as if they’d been carved out of blocks of ebony. They disturbed her the most. They had the scent of alien realms on them, and somehow the Angel knew that they’d never been human. They had come to earth, and they did not belong here.

  Yet as she passed by them, led by the black-draped crone, they all turned to her. Even the featureless creatures of blackness turned their blank faces toward her, and a great murmur arose, a susurrus of awed voices whispered through the despoiled furniture showroom.

  “What is this?” she asked the blinded crone, who looked at her with blank sockets that seemed as if they could still see.

  “These are your people, my Angel. They have been awaiting your coming.”

  “How did they—did you—know about me?”

  “I told them that I had seen you in my dream, perhaps my vision—I often can’t tell now when I’m awake or sleeping. The dark and the light are all the same to me. But I saw you, Angel of the Alleyways, and I saw you protect us and rule over all.”

  “Rule?” the Angel asked, tasting the word, feeling it sweet on her tongue.

  “Yes, my Lady,” the crone said.

  She nodded. “What do my people need most?” she asked. Her own stomach rumbled emptily. The Angel ignored it, as well as the wave of weariness and unease that washed over her. “Food?” she asked.

  The crone nodded eagerly. “Yes, my Angel. There is a stock of it yet—but we can’t break into it.”

  “Take me to it,” the Angel said. She liked the tone of command in her voice. With her mother now truly and finally banished there was no one to rule over her, to order her about. She followed the crone down another flight of stairs.

  The second floor had been devoted to clothing, but it had been so thoroughly looted that nothing remained but scraps and rags and occasional corpses lying in pools of blood or ichor, depending. She stepped around them daintily. Disturbingly, some looked as if they’d been partially devoured. She made a note in her mind to outlaw cannibalism among her people. Perhaps it was understandable during a time of emergency, but generally it was not a healthy practice. She wrinkled her nose. The bodies were starting to smell offensively. She’d have to detail someone to drag them out of the building, which, she was thinking, could serve adequately as her temporary headquarters. Later she could inspect the city and find something more suitable.

  The Angel reached the ground floor, the crone behind her. She finally understood why a crowd had gathered here. The first floor had been a grocery store.

  There were still maybe a hundred entities—most of them passably human—in the room. Most were aimlessly wandering up and down the looted, trash-filled aisles, some of them scouring the floor for crumbs and scraps of the bounty that had once graced the now-emptied metal shelving. Once or twice she noticed someone pouncing on a forgotten box of breakfast cereal or a can of beets in an obscure or hidden nook and someone else pouncing on the unlucky finder until a fighting, yelling scrum of hungry bodies had gathered. Casualties usually resulted.

  She moved out into the room. Some noticed her and their random pacing through the devastated store ceased as they stood and watched her. She ignored them, moving to the store’s front and looking out the glass windows.

  Great gouges had been torn into what had been the parking lot, the asphalt dug up in huge cracked chunks and tossed about heedlessly. The city’s underbelly had been exposed, the pipes running through culverts in the packed dirt beneath parking lot and city streets. Great trenches had been dug through that dirt, which had been flung and heaped against adjacent buildings. Some were almost entirely buried. The Angel idly wondered if this was more of Earth Witch’s work, or the result of some barely glimpsed leviathan’s anger or whimsy.

  It hardly mattered. What mattered was the result of the colossal excavation. The Angel licked cracked lips. Thirst made as many demands on her body as hunger, and out there pipes extruded from broken culverts and from one, clear, clean water geysered up and fell back to the ground forming a muddy pool at the bottom of the excavation.

  And around the pool a pack of the hunting spiders like those she’d encountered earlier stood and drank, as well as less savory things.

  We need that water, the Angel thought.

  “Who’s this?” a voice behind her demanded in a childish tremulo. “Is this the savior you promised us?”

  “It is,” the Angel heard the old woman say in proud tones, and she turned to face the speaker and saw the last thing in the world, mad as it was, that she expected to see.

  It was no child, nor was it human. At least, most of it wasn’t. It was as high as she was tall, and much bigger around. It was more like a pile of protoplasm than a slug, but it had characteristics of both. Its flesh was translucent and you could see blurred things moving inside it as if caught in a slow-moving stream or perhaps more accurately, some kind of circulatory or digestive system. It, the Angel saw, had not lacked for food. Besides the human parts tumbling slowly around its body the Angel saw parts of some of its fellow alien entities. Obviously the thing was an undiscriminating eater.

  The childish voice piped up again from one of the score of mouths haphazardly located around its eight feet of girth. “It looks a tasty tidbit to me,” the creature said. Its voice made the Angel queasy and angry at the same time as she realized what it must have devoured to obtain it. “Why should I let it lord over me?” it inquired brightly.

  “The question is,” the Angel replied in a hard voice, “why should I allow such an abomination as you to live?”

  She reached for it with empty hands.

  It reacted suddenly, with frightening speed, rearing up on a stumpy base and stretching out two enormous tentacles, as to embrace and engulf her. The Angel realized that it was big enough to do so, but she didn’t pause. Ignoring the tearing pain in her shoulder as best she could she suddenly gripped the sword in her hands.

  The flames leapt from the blade. The creature tried to shrink away, but the Angel stepped within striking distance. Her blade had no problems cutting through the thing’s rubbery flesh like it was Jell-O.

  The tentacles thumped to the floor and thrashed around, leaking an abominably smelling ichor. She changed her grip on the pommel and rammed the blade like a spear into the creature’s chest. It screamed horrifically in its childish tremulo and the Angel slashed left and right, the blade engaged to the hilt. The thing’s flesh startled to sizzle.

  The Angel panted in her killing frenzy. She didn’t even think of a mercy blow, if she could figure out where to place one in the undifferentiated mass of the entity, but just kept whisking the blade around her opponent’s interior, as if she were stirring some nauseous soup, and it kept burning from the inside.

  It stank so badly that she would have vomited if there had been anything in her stomach to bring up. She could hear the onlookers’ cries of disgust mingled with calls of encouragement. Apparently it had not been a popular figure. She wondered how many of their companions had fallen to its oozing embrace over the last few days, whose child had provided the voice and the knowledge of English to the predatory entity.

  It started to shrivel up into itself and the piteous cries it emitted turned to wordless moans that grew softer and softer. Finally, it was a blackened lump of stinking protoplasm and it collapsed entirely into a greasy mass on the floor. When she pulled her sword away, it was still burning with a cleansing flame. She thrust her blade into the air and releas
ed a cry of triumph that was answered by the onlookers.

  The old woman stepped forward. “Bow,” she cried in a ringing voice, “bow to Our Madonna of the Blade! Our Savior who will lead us from this wilderness to a land of peace and plenty! On your knees, all of you!”

  One, then another, then two or three more followed the shouted order and the Angel felt her heart leap as everyone fell to their knees before her. She could hear their murmured prayers and supplications, and it was good.

  “Where is this food you spoke of?” she asked the crone.

  “The back of the store,” the old woman said. “In the storage lockers. The meat freezers, mainly. The walls are strong and we haven’t been able to break into them—”

  “I will,” the Angel vowed.

  Her people looked up, sudden hope on starving faces. She nodded, smiling, then thrust her arms out for silence. She was gratified to see that they obeyed almost immediately. The rapturous look in their eyes and on their faces was like nectar to her parched throat.

  “This sword,” she said, holding it high, “will break down any barrier!”

  They might not have understood her words, but there was no mistaking the meaning of her gestures. They cheered.

  “And then we will feast!”

  Ensnared by the strength of her emotions, they cheered louder and crowded around her, but left an open corridor that allowed the Angel to be led to the storage locker that was built into the wall in the rear of the store. The only entrance to it was a massive iron double door held tightly shut by a thick chain looped tightly around both handles, secured by a large padlock.

  The Angel laughed. She gestured dramatically and the crowd around her edged back, giving her more room. She demanded her sword to come to her, but for the first time ever it failed to appear.

  Anger shot through the Angel like a tongue of fire and she cried aloud. She shook a clenched fist and somewhere, somehow, her soul or her mind touched something that was, she knew, watching her, weighing her, and, she realized, finding her worthy. A heavy weight came into her grasp, but it was not the blade that she had used all through her existence as an ace.