High Stakes: A Wild Cards Novel

by George R. R. Martin

  Above everything, the Harvester reigned triumphant. Its arms sweeping out to snatch up unfortunates and slam them into the misery that are the pits in its mountainous body. It was almost enough to stop Marcus right there, so filled was he with despair.

  The Angel leapt up and over one of the buildings, coming toward him. Not knowing what else to do, he leaned forward and took off, right through the pandemonium. Right toward the Angel.

  He wrapped his coils around her, and squeezed.

  Barbara swept her gaze from screen to screen. Everywhere she looked, there was destruction and death. The fog had already enveloped Gagarin’s Soyuz and the museum nearest the entrance to the compound; the hell-creatures roamed freely in front of it. Tinker’s robots and drones were all smashed and gone. Snow Blind and Toad Man were retreating together along with most of the remaining NATO and Russian troops toward the Energia launch pads, well to the north. She couldn’t find Wilma Mankiller at all. Earth Witch, looking exhausted and ragged, was erecting a massive rampart around the refugee camp, but Barbara couldn’t imagine it stopping the hordes that were coming.

  She toggled the switch to talk to them all. “Hang on,” she said. “A little longer—that’s all we need. A little longer…”

  She released the switch. She sobbed, unable to stop the grief, the pain, and the guilt.

  My fault. My fault. I’ve killed them all.

  The Angel and IBT were locked in an embrace like a statue born out of Greek tragedy, his snake part wrapped around her body, her hands clenched around his throat, preventing him from spitting his venom in her face. Now her weak arm was almost useless. With the length of tail wrapped around her and holding her mostly off the ground, she couldn’t get much in the way of leverage.

  She felt her rib cage constrict, press upon her internal organs, and flexed her muscles as best she could to keep the pressure off her dying baby, but still, it was coming down to a test of strength and she knew that she was stronger than the snake. She could see his face darken.

  Shrieks of laughter rang from behind them distracted her, though her grip relaxed not one iota. A glance at her foe showed sudden horror on his face as he tried to shrink back from the dozen or so approaching creatures, claws and fangs ready to rend.

  The Angel felt her vision darken to black. Unbearable pressure clamped onto her chest. Clarity and coherence returned for a nanosecond.

  So this is death, she thought.

  Marcus squeezed and squeezed and squeezed. It felt euphoric. Homicidally euphoric. Every muscle in his body was flexed, trembling with the joy of killing. He felt the Angel’s horrid body being crushed. He felt the tremors of ribs snapping, and he knew the moment that the baby’s skull popped. It was all glorious, and would never have stopped if not for the part of his mind that was conscious of the Harvester’s bulk sliding by above him, and of the monsters and walking dead of all kinds moving around him.

  Finally, knowing she must be dead, he relaxed his grip. His coils slackened and slid from around her. His torso rose and he looked down on her crumbled, lifeless form. For a moment, seeing her in death, he felt sated. Full. Satisfied in his exhaustion. And then he looked around. The chaos was as before, only it looked less chaos now and more like the world that was and ever would be. It was, he realized, a world he could triumph in, as he just had. He had only to kill. To kill and eat and take what he wanted and think of nothing else. Such a pure way to be. He felt it all so clearly. Not fear at all. Just bloodlust.

  Keep killing, he told himself. Keep killing forever and ever. It was just a matter of who was next. He looked about, searching. There were so many to choose from. The killing would be very, very—

  The impact was so complete that at first he didn’t know what had hit him. Something crashed into his side, lifted him in a viselike grip, and swept him up from the world with such force his brain rocked in his head. The world went black for a second, and then came again, all motion, him above the ground, everything a blur until the grip loosened and he was slammed into a tiny compartment, jammed in with the bunched length of his tail. He looked out on the raging battle now far below him. He saw those giant arms working below him and he knew he was in the Harvester. Panicked, he tried to push himself out, like a person leaping from a balcony. But he couldn’t. Something held him in place.

  The monster began to suck life out of him. It felt like every bit of fluid was being sucked out of him. His cells were being broken down, his flesh melting away from within. It was painful, but the worst part wasn’t physical. It was the utter desolation that came with it, the suffering, the longing for existence to just end, and the certainty that it would go on like this forever. He knew now why the faces inside these cells had looked so utterly desolate. It wasn’t just the agony of life being sucked out of them. It was because this world thrived on the misery of unending suffering. It had begun, he understood now, ages ago, and would continue forever onward. Never ending. He would die, yes, but the misery would go on. Misery triumphant. Every noble ideal or belief, every notion of love and right and good … all of it defeated by the world that now was and always would be.

  He thought of Olena, and the anguish was even worse.

  There had been no monstrous sentries left to impede his return to the truck. The fight against Ray and Bubbles had drawn them all off. Franny reached the truck and looked toward the front of the building. What he saw terrified him.

  Bruckner reminded him of their purpose. “Let’s get this done, mate! Old fucker looks like he’s about to croak.”

  Bruckner gave Franny a boost into the back of the truck and slammed shut the drop gate. Franny untied the makeshift sling and rolled up the sheets to form a pillow beneath Tolenka’s head. The old man had stopped struggling and the sunken chest seemed to be barely moving. Franny laid a hand on the age-spotted skull and the few remaining wisps of hair were greasy beneath his fingers.

  “It’s going to be over soon. One way or the other,” he said and wondered if the Russian could hear him or even understand.

  Bruckner slid open the window that divided the cab from the truck bed. There was a lurch as he threw it into gear and they reversed away from the hospital. Once he could, Bruckner turned and started down a street where all the buildings seemed to be weeping a strange viscous blue material. As the truck passed the buildings swayed and bent as if looking down to regard the passing vehicle. Franny shivered. He wasn’t sure Bruckner was seeing this.

  “Drive faster!”

  “I’m trying. Bloody piece of shit.”

  “Or at least get us off this street! Now!”

  Bruckner threw them around a corner. Franny grabbed Tolenka and buffered him so he didn’t hit the side. He feared what such a blow might do to his fragile grip on life. The slack mouth worked and a grating sound emerged, “Ma … ma … ma…”

  Was this it? Was he dying and calling on his mother? Then Franny took a wild guess and said, “Mariamna? She’s fine. Safe. I got her to the States.”

  A clawlike hand gripped Franny’s forearm. Tolenka’s eyes shifted colors and for an instant they seemed the eyes of a man and not windows into darkness. Franny kept talking, hoping to keep whatever remained of the man present.

  “She told me about you. Dancing at embassy balls, and … and missions together. She still wears your medal.” The slack lips moved—a smile or a grimace? “She told me you were brave. I heard your voice on those tapes. You got the warning to us. We listened. We’re going to make it right.”

  An exhalation of breath that might have been a sigh, though Franny feared it represented the final breaths of a dying man. He gripped the Russian tighter and whispered, “Hang on, sir. Just a little longer.”

  The old engine on the truck groaned, the wheels vibrated as their speed increased. Frank held Tolenka tightly to try to ease the jouncing. The view outside was uncanny but were they still in Talas or in that other place?

  “Bruckner, you gotta tell me once we’re … there.”

  “Gonna
be a bit hard to tell, mate, since there now seems to be here.”

  “We’ve got to be sure.”

  “I know!”

  They drove on. Tolenka writhed in Franny’s arms, but the movements didn’t seem directed at the cop. He fought some other battle. A sibilant whisper wove through the truck. Words on the edge of understanding. It raised the hairs on the back of Franny’s neck.

  A thread of violence began to weave and dance through his thoughts. He looked down at the misshapen horror he held in his arms. Such perversion shouldn’t be allowed to live. A new majesty was waiting to be born. Only this abomination held it back.

  Franny watched with bemused interest as his hand crept toward the ropy, wattled neck. The truck veered and he had to grab for purchase and it broke the spell. He noticed their surroundings. They were driving through a deep valley washed by a poisonous greenish-yellow light. The source of the light was a massive bloated moon that filled the sky and kissed the horizon. All around were colossal mountains whose unnaturally sharp peaks were like jagged teeth rending at the sky, trying to devour the moon.

  Franny didn’t need Bruckner to tell him that it was time. Cradling the old man in his arms Franny crawled on his knees to the drop gate of the truck.

  “It’s now or never, mate!” Bruckner shouted.

  Franny looked down into the ravaged face and tried to see the vestige of the handsome man from the picture. “You did it. You can rest now.”

  He heaved the wizened body out the back. It hit the slate-grey ground hard and exploded. At that moment a thousand mouths opened on the face of the moon and began to scream. The mountains walked, and out of the mist of blood rose something that defied words and understanding. A swirling blackness that began to rapidly swell until it was a towering twisted figure. Sparkling red glyphs ran through the body. An inchoate howl of rage like a gust of hurricane winds struck the truck. Bruckner fought for control as he downshifted and floored it.

  The mouths of the moon became eyes and they wept filling the valley with a heaving sea of decay. The smell of burning rubber joined the other stomach-churning smells as the liquid ate at the tires. The canvas cover was starting to burn. When the acid reached him Franny would burn, too.

  Franny flinched as liquid pattered through the holes in the canvas, but it was only water that struck his upturned face. Outside the pus slowly shifted into black water and the mountains transformed into trees trailing beards of moss.

  Franny collapsed onto his back and stared at the canvas roof of the truck but all he could see was the shadowed face of the god. The god he had defied and thwarted. It would find him someday and a reckoning exacted. He began to shake.

  New sounds broke through the fear that gripped him. Voices and car horns, the sounds of traffic. He managed to sit up. They were on a street circling a tall pillar with the figure of a man on top.

  “Where … where?” It was all he could manage.

  “Trafalgar Square. I don’t know about you, mate, but I could use a drink.”

  Barbara could feel the moment of change, even through the screens and the headphones. The grim, stormy fog melted away, as if being sucked in by some gigantic vacuum. Many of the horrors that had been marching on the Cosmodrome vanished with it: creatures that had emerged from whatever place Horrorshow had tapped. And the rest, those that the fog had changed and twisted and deformed, whose minds had been taken and used … they were returned to what they’d once been. She saw them in the viewscreens: staggering, lost, confused, dropping the weapons they bore as if in disgust and horror, falling to their knees or raising their hands toward the sky as if in thanks.

  Barbara sank back in her chair with them. “It’s over,” Ana’s voice whispered in her earphones, and she wanted to answer: No. Now the hard part starts …

  But she said nothing. She closed her eyes. The hard part. Waiting to know if I will ever see Klaus again …

  Marcus was screaming again. Silently, mouth full of blood, with frustration beyond anything he’d experienced before, he cried for his own death. He wanted nothing more. Only for everything to be over, for him and for the world itself.

  He was so caught up in that that he kept screaming as the cell around him dissolved. He felt himself falling, but he thought it some part of the Harvester’s torment. He fell through flesh that disintegrated as his body pushed through it. He flailed. He lashed at the air like a drowning man. His tail searched for purchase that wasn’t there, and still he plummeted. He hit the ground hard, in a rain of filth. Himself, and a thousand others. The living and dead. Foul things, thudding to the earth on and around him.

  Arms raised protectively over his head, Marcus squirmed upright. What had happened? he asked, and he beheld it. He saw it. Heard it. Felt it. Understood it. The Harvester had disappeared. All the beings trapped inside it fell to the earth in whatever state of life or death they’d been in. He watched other monsters vanish as well. A hog-like thing as large as a bus raised its head and bellowed as its legs disappeared. The rest of its body vanished before it hit the earth. Worms writhing on the ground undulated themselves into nothingness. Lumbering monsters became insubstantial mid-stride. Many of them howled as they vanished, but they may have been the lucky ones. They weren’t of this world. They were, Marcus thought, being transported to whatever hell they belonged in.

  Not so the mutated humans. He could spot those because no matter what form they took they didn’t vanish. Instead they writhed and bellowed and trembled as their bodies shifted back toward what they’d been. The agony of the transformation was clear. It was ghastly, watching them, but in so many ways it was beautiful, too. Humans were becoming human again! The air had a clarity it hadn’t had since the horde arrived. Creation itself shimmered. The world glistened like the entirety of it dripped with the newness of … creation. Marcus blinked in the sudden brightness. It was glorious. Amazing.

  Yes, he caught glimpses of even more massive and horrible creatures fading as the day brightened. They were the things that would have come, the leviathans of the other dimension, bigger even than the Harvester, but they had no hold here anymore. They faded to nothing as the world—the world Marcus knew and loved with a sudden, complete devotion—came back to its own.

  God, it felt good. He stood panting. Injured and burned and half dead as he was, he felt flushed through with ecstasy. It swelled in him until he wanted to sing it out loud. He didn’t have the tongue to do that, but the world did. It sang. Creation was, in that moment, a chorus of an uncountable multitude of voices.

  This, he thought. This is like witnessing the birth of a world. This, he thought, was seeing God work.

  The euphoria—as beautiful as it was—vanished as soon as Marcus remembered Olena and the villagers. He’d never gotten back to them! Anything might’ve happened to them. If another one of those dogs sniffed them out … Suddenly, it seemed a bad, bad thing that he hadn’t been with them the whole time. Please, God, let them be alive.

  He squirmed toward the hangar. He pushed through the crowds of stunned people and weaved around the carnage of the dead bodies and the destruction and debris. He ignored all of it, full of dread, his heart pounding, scared now as much as he had been in the worst of the miasma.

  It only got worse when he finally got a view of the hangar. Corpses littered the ground all around it. Human and joker, clear evidence that the refugees had been caught up in the madness. Survivors stumbled through the carnage, looking shell-shocked and wary. All of them bore scars of the ordeal in some way: clothes torn, faces scratched, bite marks on their arms. A few cradled broken limbs or limped along or lay moaning if their injuries were severe enough. Many of them were red and brown with blood and filth. Their own or others, Marcus didn’t want to think about.

  The sight of the hangar itself made his heart sink. It looked like a mound of rubbish, like flotsam from a flood or the ruination left in the wake of a tornado. For a moment he was afraid to go any nearer. It doesn’t matter what it looks like, he reminded h
imself. It looked like shit to begin with. Maybe they’re all right.

  He squirmed to it and went to work. He yanked boards away and shoved objects, first just trying to locate the door. When he found it he struggled to shove the container and other random objects away. He shouted for Olena and the villagers, calling them by name and identifying himself and telling them it was all over now. They were safe. Nobody answered. He hated that silence. Maybe they’re scared, he thought, staying quiet and hiding. Maybe … He worked even more frantically.

  When he finally had the door cleared, he stood panting, staring at it. The structure really did seem intact, but he realized it might have just become a prison of trapped madness. As quickly as he thought that, the idea curdled. Even if they hadn’t been discovered, anything might have happened locked inside a sealed chamber. The madness didn’t honor walls and concrete and steal. They wouldn’t have been themselves. It wouldn’t even be their fault if they’d attacked each other. He might find as great a slaughter inside as there was all around him. He tried to shake off the thought. It was no use speculating. He just had to find out. He gripped the handle, turned it, and stepped inside.

  Coming from the bright of day into the dimness, Marcus couldn’t see anything at first. The few lights that had worked last night were all out. Olena? He tried, but he barely produced a mumble. He tried other names. Jyrgal. Bulat. Timur. Nobody answered. The silence of the dark chamber seemed full of menace. Marcus slithered forward cautiously, his arms extended before him. He wove through the clutter of long unused planes, bits and pieces of discarded machinery. Gradually, his eyes adjusted and made the best of the dim light seeping through cracks in the ceiling and walls. Hulking things took shape, all of them motionless. In the silence, the scraping of his scales across the moist concrete seemed absurdly loud.