High Stakes: A Wild Cards Novel

by George R. R. Martin

  Bruckner floored it. The truck smashed through the toe tags and bounced over the pulsating fleshroad.

  “You fucking asshole!”

  Abandoning people in their hour of need? That’s my role.

  She folded space. Bruckner slammed on the brakes. The skidding truck ripped bleeding gouges in the fleshroad with the sound of a wet bedsheet torn in half. It slid through the portal only to reemerge on the other side of the battlefield, headed back into the fray.

  “Nice try, motherfu—”

  A pair of tentacles whipped around Mollie’s arms and yanked her off her feet.

  Franny wiped sweat onto his forearm and took a firmer grip on the shotgun. The things on sentry duty didn’t look human any longer, but he still didn’t want to kill them. Not unless he had to. He had enough on his conscience.

  He tried to generate some spit to ease his desert-dry mouth and burning throat. It didn’t work. A few more of the monsters marched away, heading toward the fighting. Franny saw his opportunity and darted out only to draw back when the children’s choir of the damned came drifting past singing in their eerie piping voices. A shiver ran through him and for a moment Franny thought he understood if not the meaning of the grotesque words at least the intent. It was a song of praise to a new god, rising in darkness, eating the light. Glorious nothingness beckoned. He once again groped for the rosary, but this time it brought no comfort. What power did the Christian God hold against a deity that could twist the very fabric of reality?

  The singers moved on and Franny remembered his task. He hung the rosary around his neck as if it could ward off the doubts and the fear. The way forward was clear and a shattered door, hanging loosely on its hinges, beckoned. He ran for the hospital and ducked inside. It seemed to be a delivery area judging by the cases of canned goods trapped like bugs in amber by the transformed walls that had turned into red crystal.

  Franny moved on, searching for anything familiar. He finally located the entryway where he’d run after Baba Yaga and her goons a lifetime ago. The floor was littered with bodies. Overhead chandeliers of branching crystal tipped with growths that seemed to be sometimes flowers and sometimes grasping fingers were forming on the ceiling. It seemed the new God was making himself a palace.

  The lobby was filled with floating papers buoyed up by the overheated air. Franny took a breath and started running across the bodies. One of them moved and Franny lost his footing and went down. The man crawled his way from beneath the actual corpses and threw himself on Franny. His hands were at Franny’s throat, his teeth snapping. Oozing sores covered his face and hands. Franny tried to bring the gun to bear, but the barrel of the shotgun was too long. He dropped the gun, and tried to hold off his attacker while he felt and heard the bones in his throat creaking. The only thing saving him was that the pus on the man’s hands made his grip unsteady. A weapon, Franny thought. He needed a weapon. He wished he’d thought to equip a knife.

  He released one hand, and groped frantically at the rotting bodies next to him. Black spots were dancing in front of his eyes when his palm hit a set of keys. Franny snatched it up and jammed a key deep into the man’s eye. He screamed and fell back clutching his face. Franny scrambled to his feet, snatched up the shotgun, and swung it bat-like against the side of the man’s head. There was a sickening crunch and the side of his skull depressed. He flopped onto the other bodies and didn’t move again.

  Sparks were arcing in the one elevator that was in the lobby so Franny headed for the stairs. With each step it became more and more difficult to lift his foot, force the muscles to respond. A crushing weight rested not just on Franny’s body, but on his heart and spirit. All was lost. Nothing remained but fear and death. An image of Abby with the skin flayed from her body rose up before him. His mother twisted into one of those slug creatures, his comrades at Fort Freak dismembered. And he was a murderer. He was damned to hell. He gasped on a sob and sank down on the stairs.

  Franny stared at the shotgun. Better to end it now, by his own hand. Not end up like those monsters in the street. It would keep himself from killing again and again and again. He went to place the muzzle beneath his chin, but the rosary got tangled on the barrel of the gun. He tried to shake it loose and it swung before his eyes, the carved onyx beads, the silver crucifix. His father’s image filled his mind. All he had were pictures, a box holding his medals and this crucifix. John F. X. Black had died doing his duty fighting to protect Jokertown from an ace of terrifying power. What would he think of his coward son?

  He struggled against the hopeless lethargy that held him in its grip, but shame was not enough to break its hold. It had brought him to the point of understanding that this was an exterior force eroding his hope and courage, but not how to fight it.

  “Suicide is a mortal sin,” he whispered and dropped his head onto his folded arms. The shotgun rested on his knees. He found himself remembering Father Squid’s final sermon just before he was kidnapped. The priest had spoken on inequity, of the unfairness of the wild card virus, the unfairness of life itself. How some folks ended up with the ability to move mountains, and others were twisted and suffered, some were rich and some were poor, but the priest had concluded that there was a power that transcended the strength of aces or the affliction of jokers or the power of money—love. He had ended with First Corinthians—Bear all things, believe all things, hope all things, endure all things, but know that love never fails.

  Franny let the shotgun fall onto a step. He grabbed the railing with his hand, noting it was blackened with soot and stained with blood, and pulled himself to his feet.

  “Just a little farther now. I can do this.”

  He climbed.

  The tentacles dragged Mollie across bursting pustules and splashed her through puddles of steaming ichor. It burned. She writhed, first trying to wriggle free, but struggling only lured more of the slimy vines to come snaking across the ground and loop around her arms, legs, neck, mouth. The demon limbs were segmented with bristly black hair like tarantula legs, adorned with a cluster of tiny eyeballs at each joint. Mollie clamped her mouth shut, but one slender shoot wriggled past her lips and teeth to explore her mouth with its pulsating bristle hairs. The taste of sulfurous death filled her mouth; an odor like five-day-old sunbaked skunk roadkill wafted into her sinuses. She vomited. Yellow spume splashed against her face, but the tentacles only squeezed more tightly. Still she bumped across the putrid ground, moving faster and faster as more tentacles joined the effort to pull her … where?

  Mollie flopped like a trout on the bottom of a canoe. Straining against the pressure, against the feel of a thousand needle-like bristles piercing her skin, she righted herself and glimpsed her destination. A slavering maw, like the shared acid trip of Bosch and Giger—

  Another tentacle slapped around her head like a wet towel. She couldn’t see.

  She couldn’t see.

  She couldn’t fold space to intercept the tentacles; she couldn’t put a portal beneath the monster mouth; she couldn’t get away. The chittering grew louder, like the rattling of a thousand dice.

  The bristly tentacles secreted a foul slime that stung her skin. Oh God oh God ohGodohGod it’s salivating in anticipation of devouring me.

  She scrabbled for a mental handhold on any of the dozens, hundreds, of portal sites she’d used over the years. But every time her panicked mind landed on one, she couldn’t make it manifest. She tried to fold space just a few feet away, in the direction the slime ropes seemed to pull her, but the bumping and splashing across the pulsating earth fouled her sense of direction and prevented her from creating new doorways. She couldn’t sever the tentacles dragging her toward the maw because she couldn’t picture her surroundings.

  The chattering teeth grew so loud the ground shook. Hot sour breath gusted across her face like a sepulchral Santa Ana. Acid saliva burned her skin. But she didn’t dare scream because then the nest of wriggling tarantula legs planted on her lips would scuttle past her teeth and into he
r throat.

  “Mollie!”

  A thunderous roar shook the pulsating earth, then again in close succession, like lightning striking the same tree twice. The tentacles wrapped around Mollie went slack, and then a hot rain pelted her. Mollie shook off the amputated slime ropes and leapt to her feet.

  The maw was now a smoking crater, thanks to the bubbles Michelle had pitched into it. But even as she watched, a new crop of tentacles wriggled from beneath the maw corpse like a hundred snakes birthed at once. They slithered across the ground toward Mollie all over again.

  She folded space under the nest and over an Icelandic volcano. Gravity tore away a chunk of the perverted landscape and sent it tumbling into lava thousands of miles away.

  Billy Ray was insanely fast, but Michelle saw even he was having trouble keeping up with the swarm of noxious creatures flowing toward them.

  Fuck it, she thought. She could feel the dark rage sliding over her. She needed to channel it. Let me finish these things off. She raised her hands over her head, splaying her fingers out as she did.

  She rained bubbles down like so much fire from heaven. Each one hit and blasted holes into foul bodies. It felt as if her fat was pouring off. When she finally stopped, she looked down at herself.

  She wasn’t as thin as she’d been while getting out of Talas, but she wasn’t too far from it. She needed to get fat on, fast.

  “Director!” she shouted. “I need you!”

  Billy Ray spun around, then leapt to her side and began pounding her. It hurt like hell, but still wasn’t enough damage fast enough.

  Suddenly, she was falling so fast and it was like jumping off a tall building.

  The portals. Go one place—come crashing out another.

  Michelle slammed into the ground. The pain almost knocked her out.

  “Again!” she cried.

  The zombies were sluggish. Lohengrin’s sword cut clean through the last two shambling undead as though they were scarecrows stuffed with wet paper towels.

  Mollie tried to open a connection to the Cosmodrome so that Joey could animate more corpses, but just then Recycler raised a massive fist that bristled with plastic syringes and biohazard bags—it had absorbed the stinking medical waste dumpster behind the hospital into its body. The fist cocked back, ready to pound Billy Ray into the ground like a tent peg. But the SCARE ace was too busy fending off a nightmarepede to notice the killing blow.

  “Ray!” she cried, opening a hole in space just above his head. Recycler’s fist came whooshing down, disappearing just over Ray’s head and plunging into the Indian Ocean just off the coast of Perth.

  “Behind you!”

  Still wrestling with the immense ’pede, Ray glanced over his shoulder to glimpse the mountainous Recycler rearing back for another attack. He tore the monster in half, spun, and flung half of the still-scrabbling beast into Recycler’s face. Smoking electric-blue ichor splashed into his corpse-eyes. The demented ace howled, clapping hands of medical waste bags and used syringes to his face.

  Oddly there were no bodies in Tolenka’s room.

  The IV bags were flaccid and empty, the room smelled of piss and feces. The monitors were just blank screens, but Franny had the horrible sense that faces were peering out at him from the blackness. The droning hum had become almost a scream. It clawed at his mind, trying to find purchase to elicit the rage and violence and fervent faith. Exhaustion, mind-numbing fear, and prayer formed fragile bulwarks against the compulsion. Franny alternated between the Hail Mary and the Lord’s Prayer as he approached the bed.

  The shriveled body of the old man had coiled into an almost fetal crouch. His lips were cracked and bleeding from dehydration, and he barely seemed to breathe. The eyes were open, and a fearsome intelligence filled with malice and hate gazed out at him as Franny reached him.

  Franny took hold of the body, and then the throat pulsed, and an ululating cry burst out. The Dark God was summoning help. Franny pictured misshapen things loping up the stairs. He looked around desperately. Time was ticking away. It was uncertain how long Ray and Bubbles could continue the fight. Monsters were coming. He had to move.

  Franny wiped away the sweat that was pouring down his face and stinging his eyes. He glanced toward the window. “How about we take a page from Bruckner?” he whispered to Tolenka. “Take a shortcut.”

  He staggered out of the room, searching for something to fashion into a rope. The counter at the nurses’ station had become a strange nautilus-shaped thing. Franny feared something might actually be living inside the shell so he gave it a wide berth. He found a linen closet and pulled out an armful of sheets.

  Back in the room he slammed shut the door and backed it with a chair beneath the handle. He began frantically tearing the sheets. Blows began to hammer on the door. It flexed under the pressure from outside. With almost numb fingers Franny fashioned the sheets into a rope. He then created a sling and tied the dying joker against his chest like a father carrying a grotesque and ancient baby. The stink of shit and death hung on the body, and Franny gagged and began breathing through his mouth. The malignant intelligence seemed aware of these moves because the joker began to feebly kick his legs, but there was no strength behind the kicks and Franny could ignore them.

  Franny slung the shotgun, locked down the wheels on the hospital bed, tied off one end of his makeshift rope to a leg of the bed. He secured the other end around his waist and bashed out the window. He had hoped to back slowly out the window and pick his route, but the metal legs of the bracing chair bent, and the door came open with a screech. Franny twined the material around his hands and flung himself backward out the window. He swung violently back toward the wall of the building, and caught it with his feet. The shock vibrated through his body and tore at the wound in his side. He began to rappel down the building, grateful that he’d spent some time wall climbing at his gym.

  Tolenka’s teeth were clashing together as he tried to bite Franny. Fortunately he was slung low enough that he was simply biting Kevlar.

  What if he dies while I’m carrying him? Franny thought. He pushed aside that horrible thought.

  They were surrounded. Mollie again felt the edges of her chemically induced stability crumbling away.

  She stood with Michelle and Ray within a contracting ring of nightmarepedes, shambling things that once were human, scuttling eyeball spiders, and worse. The Recycler loomed closer, shaking the ground with every footstep.

  Michelle tried to summon more bubbles to hurl at him but she was too gaunt.

  She yelled, “Ray! Punch me again!”

  To Mollie he said, “Cover us, kiddo.”

  He did. His fists slammed into Michelle’s stomach with a steady rhythm, her body bloating just a bit with each impact. But he was tired and slowing, each punch slower and weaker than the one before.

  Meanwhile, Mollie struggled to maintain a flickering sequence of portals to intercept the monsters that lunged for them. Keeping the smaller beasts off prevented her from concentrating on the walking pile of putrid garbage and corpseflesh that the Recycler had become.

  Michelle, slightly more zaftig than she’d been moments earlier, broke off from Ray and hurled everything she had at the mountainous ace. The explosions cratered his armor but he kept coming. In seconds she was gaunt again, her bubbles depleted.

  “It’s not enough!”

  “Hold on,” said Mollie. She opened a hole in space directly under Michelle’s feet. Gravity pulled the ace through the hole and out through its flip side, which Mollie had situated hundreds of feet above the hospital battleground. Seconds later, Michelle’s impact sent shock waves rippling through the pulsating earth, violent enough to knock down the shambling abominations surrounding Ray and Mollie. When the model stood again, she was five times larger than she had been a moment earlier.

  “Again!” she cried.

  Ray did his best to fend off the circling menagerie of nightmares while Mollie repeated the process. The second time, she aimed th
e egress hole so that Michelle pancaked a troop of abominations. She wobbled to her feet, nearly as corpulent as the Recycler himself.

  A fleshfall of jowls wriggled when Michelle nodded at her. “Thanks,” she said, and unleashed a spectacular stream of bubbles at the Recycler, the rapid-fire concussions knocking him to his knees.

  But Mollie ignored her. Instead she wondered how she could cleanse herself of the Frankenstein god-machine filth before throwing herself on the maggot queen’s mercy to plead for sanctification.

  Michelle and Billy Ray were ankle-deep in carcasses. Now only Lohengrin stood between them and the hospital.

  She’d peppered Recycler with bubbles until all his flesh armor was gone. The kid underneath was gibbering in some tongue Michelle couldn’t understand. All she knew was she’d give anything to make him stop talking.

  Billy Ray gave him a quick punch to the jaw, and Tiago fell to the ground unconscious.

  Now they just had to keep Lohengrin busy until Franny got out with Horrorshow.

  A soccer-ball-sized bubble formed in her hand, and she sent it speeding toward Billy Ray. It caught him in the back, thrusting him out of the arc of the burning red blade. He tucked into a ball and was up on his feet before he hit the ground. Then he pivoted back toward Lohengrin. Michelle saw Lohengrin lift his sword again.

  She knew his armor was almost impenetrable. But he wasn’t immune from getting the shit beat out of him in that form. And thanks to Mollie, she was now incredibly heavy and had loads of bubbling power.

  She held her palms up, her fingers curled, and began to grow a massive bubble between her hands. It would be heavy, and hard, and right after it hit, it was going to explode. She hoped Lohengrin was as tough as he seemed, because she didn’t need another death on her conscience.

  But it’d be fun to see him die now, wouldn’t it?

  Something moved in the corner of her vision. She looked up and saw Franny climbing out a window on the second floor of the hospital. He had tied sheets together to form a rope. Swaddled to his body was a grotesque form. Horrorshow.