Wild Cards VI--Ace in the Hole

by George R. R. Martin

  Squirming, he was turned around into a blast of booze-and-tobacco breath. His captor was a large man in a bone-white jumpsuit, with black hair hanging into his face. It was a strange sort of face. It looked as if it had been busted into its component parts and hastily super-glued back together. The nose was a mangled mass, the cheekbones mismatched, and the green eyes burned at different angles.

  “You better not fuck with me, goddamn you!” Mackie screeched, half-blind with fury. “I’m goddamn not a joker! I’m Mack the Knife!”

  The big man winced from the shower of angry spittle. “You look like Jack the Shit to me, Junior. Now let’s you and me and my good right hand go somewhere for a little talk, nice and private like—”

  Mackie lashed out with his own right hand.

  His fingertips touched the knobbed right cheekbone with a noise and smell like a dentist’s drill going into a tooth. They slashed through cheek and lip and bone, cutting away half the lower jaw at a slant. Nude teeth grinned at him a millisecond before washing out in a rush of blood. The big man dropped him and clapped both hands to the spurting ruin of his face.

  Mackie turned back to the podium. A woman with orange-dyed hair stood in his path, her mouth a tunnel right down to her belly. He hacked her out of his way like an explorer taking a machete to an inconvenient branch.

  Der Mann would have to understand. There was no time for subtlety anymore.

  She hadn’t expected the screams so soon. She was betting her vengeance—since her life was forfeit anyway—that every eye in the Omni would be locked on the podium as Gregg began his speech. But no one in the VIP seats nearby showed any sign of being aware of her. The three dots of the sights rose before her eyes like fat white moons seeking auspicious alignment.

  Peripheral vision betrayed her. There was a commotion amid the Mississippi delegation, right up front of the podium. For all her efforts to see nothing but Hartmann and the rising moons, her eyes flicked briefly in that direction.

  She felt the strength puff from her like air from a burst balloon. He had come. The leather kid. Slashing a bloody swath through the crowd, straight for her.

  Hartmann was speaking. Mesmerized, Tachyon watched the movement of the mouth and heard not a word. Overlaid upon the plain familiar features was another face—bloated, dissipated, evil—Puppetman leered down at him.

  Sickened, he dropped his gaze. Stared blankly at his stump. His thoughts chased one another like swirling leaves.

  Have to stop him.

  How?

  Have to do something.

  What?

  Must think.

  Have to stop him.

  How?

  How?

  How?

  Screams cut into the words of the candidate, the cheers of the crowd. Thin, like a trickle of blood pushing into healthy tissue. Spreading now, becoming a hemorrhage. The reporters surrounding Tachyon sensed that something was happening. They began to lurch forward, carrying Tach with them. They came up against a wall of fleeing humanity. Delegates, mouths wide with terror, running for the exits.

  The world narrowed to thrashing arms, the stench of fear. Tachyon’s shields reeled under the onslaught of fifteen thousand people reacting in either terror or confusion.

  A burly man, the buttons that covered his chest chattering like castanets, caromed into the tiny alien. Tach screamed, a shrill tearing sound as the bandages covering his amputation caught on the man’s belt buckle, and he was yanked after him. He lost his footing and went down, the bandage tearing free. Feet pounded across Tachyon’s back, driving the breath from his chest. He felt his cracked ribs give. A red-hot poker had been driven into his chest. Driving deeper with every breath he took.

  But it was nothing compared to the agony of his arm as terrified humans ran over him, their heels grinding the stump into the floor of the Omni.

  I am going to die. Terror lay thick and choking on the back of his tongue. A tiny thread of fury shot through him. No! I am damned if I will die in this humiliating fashion. Trampled by hysterical groundlings.

  It took all his concentration to think through the suffocating blanket of pain. Braun’s mind was a familiar glow in the midst of madness. His power lashed out, nestled close like a homing bird returning to a place of safety. He read the confusion and hesitation in the big ace’s mind.

  Jack, save me!

  Tach?

  Help me! Help me!

  He couldn’t hold the contact any longer. With a sigh he dropped away.

  But Jack was coming.

  A freight-train weight smashed into Mackie from behind. It drove his right hand, held like a spearhead at the end of his stiffened arm, right into the chest of a man with a pink shirt and beige tie. Irresistible, the mass forced him onward, down. His hand exploded out of the man’s rib cage in a welter of blood. He hit the floor. His head rebounded off hardwood, and he felt something snap in his chest.

  Squealing with rage and pain, he put a buzz all over his body. His attacker yowled and rolled away. He jumped to his feet.

  “You fucker, you fucker, I’ll cut your dick off and make you eat it!” He was screaming in German now, but it didn’t matter; his hands would do all the talking that mattered.

  Through a screen of tears he saw a fist swelling toward his face. Something tugged his mind, an eyeblink of doubt, of distraction. Belatedly he started to phase.

  The blow caught him on the chin, snapping his head back.…

  And then passed harmlessly through.

  Gregg had stopped speaking, though with the cheering and chanting, no one seemed to have noticed as yet. Looking down, he saw Carnifex bull his way toward Mackie, making a visible wake in the crowd. Mackie, with some second sense, noticed the ace at the same time and turned, snarling. The hands were buzzing now. Someone next to Mackie screamed and pointed, and then everyone was trying to make space around the hunchback as Carnifex shouted and charged.

  Puppetman shouted with him, exultant. Good. The boy’s no use anymore. Let Carnifex kill him.

  Mackie will carve him up, Gregg told the power.

  They’re both puppets. We can control this game.

  It was a strange blend of ecstasy and fear. It tasted so good.

  Yes, get rid of Mackie. That wasn’t going to be easy. Mackie swung, and a line of blood followed, ruining the front of Carnifex’s spotless uniform even as the ace swung a fist and knocked Mackie backward off his feet. Already the blinding, pulsing red of pain and terror was swelling in Carnifex’s mind. The ace in white was backing up a step, watching Mackie’s hands as the kid levered himself off the floor, grinning despite his smashed, ruined mouth.

  Puppetman reached out. He found the fear in Carnifex and clamped down on it brutally. Then he reached for Mackie, looking for the switch in that crazed mind that would render him vulnerable.

  There, Puppetman said in satisfaction. There.

  A gunshot sounded loud in Gregg’s ear. In that moment, Puppetman startled with him, losing Mackie for a precious instant as the packed auditorium erupted in horrified screams, as panic and terror drifted through the air like a thick fog. “My god, they’re killing each other!” someone cried.

  “Stop!” Gregg shouted into the microphones, but his voice was lost in the uproar.

  Have to do it, she realized, now. Before he gets here. She willed into her arms the strength to straighten, to raise the blunt black pistol.

  Bleating in terror, a tall, gangly man with gray hair fringing a narrow promontory of skull came boiling out of his chair like a stork frightened from a canebrake. A flying elbow hit the gun and spun it out of Sara’s grasp.

  She shrieked in despair as it cartwheeled over the front of the box and into the crowd.

  Gunfire crashed from the podium, and Gregg Hartmann vanished under a wave of Secret Service suits.

  Spector jumped when something shattered the glass up in the media booth. It froze him for an instant and agents were already swarming over Hartmann and the other big wheels, pushing them
into the wings or knocking them to the floor. He ran several steps toward the senator, but two other men had him facedown behind the podium.

  The screams were deafening. Spector couldn’t think with all the racket. Gunshots. He saw several agents firing toward a target in the crowd. Golden Boy was swinging on the girders overhead toward the area where the men were shooting. Spector piled on top of Hartmann. The senator grunted, but didn’t turn over to face him. In a moment or two he would look over his shoulder, and Spector would be waiting.

  Jack swung from beam to beam like a desperate pendulum. He couldn’t tell what was going on up on the platform. He could see Billy Ray’s white suit, Secret Service with guns, delegates stampeding—no Hartmann, no hunchback. There was just the unmistakable impression of violence being done.

  He flung himself to a beam above his own California delegation, then stopped.

  Gregg Hartmann was the secret ace, a killer. Why should he care what happened to the man?

  While he hesitated, he heard a scream resonate in his mind. Tachyon was down in the stampede, being trampled.

  He hesitated again. The cry came again. He saw there was no one directly below him, then dropped.

  He danced back. His chin felt as if someone had hit him with a hammer and his neck muscles groaned. If he’d taken the full force of the blow, it would have snapped his neck. Who is this?

  His vision cleared. He staggered as if he’d been punched again. It was the black-haired man with the spare-parts face. Leering at him with his death’s-head grin. The front of his jumpsuit was red-splashed now, as by a spastic eating spaghetti in red sauce. The blood-geyser had dwindled to a trickle.

  “S’ow you a thing or two, you little son o’ a hnitch!” the big man bellowed. He swung a haymaker at Mackie.

  Terror yammered in his brain. I can’t beat this monster!

  Fighting down the fear Mackie phased, just ahead of impact that would have pulped his forebrain. The big man’s momentum carried him right through him. He recovered with a tiger’s quickness, spinning around with his hands coming up to strike or defend.

  Mackie was right after him, anger overwhelming persistent fear. He aimed a stroke at the temple. Let’s see how he does with his head cut in half.

  The big man snapped up a hand in a knife-edge block. Fingers tumbled like clothespins from a sack as Mackie sliced through it. The black-haired man threw himself backward into the crowd, just managing to keep from catching the buzz-saw hand in his skull.

  His breath tore at the right side of his chest like talons. He must have cracked a rib when that big fucker tackled him.

  He phased through the curtain wall at the foot of the podium, into the hidden moat that separated the delegates from the stand. From the corner where the square-sectioned column of the podium proper met the facing of the elevated dais a muscular young man with a wire trailing from one ear gaped at him and hauled a tiny machine-pistol from inside his dark suit coat. Mackie met his eyes and grinned, unaware that his nose was bleeding and his smile a ghastly clown’s.

  The Secret Service man’s finger convulsed on the trigger. A spray of nine-millimeter bullets passed through where Mackie wasn’t and ripped into the crowd behind. The fresh screams of the shot almost made Mackie come.

  He cut the Secret Service man’s neatly pressed legs out from under him, right below the knee. The agent toppled shrieking into the moat, leaving blood splashed across the front of the dais and his lower legs standing. Briefly.

  White ziggurat steps flanked the podium, too large to serve as stairs. Mackie began to clamber up them.

  A blow from behind sprawled him across the second. Dazed, he felt himself picked up and flung like a doll. He smashed into the outer wall of the moat.

  He was broken inside. “Mutti,” he groaned. “Mommy.”

  It was the black-haired man, who had clubbed him down with his mangled hand and thrown him with the good one. Who was snarling at him from the foot of the podium, peeling what lips Mackie had left him, back from his teeth.

  Who gathered himself and leapt like a tiger on a staked kid.

  In desperation, Mackie thrust himself from the wall, bringing up a hand. Bringing on that buzz.

  His hand met resistance. Fluids drenched his face, hot and sticky.

  The big man crashed through the retaining wall trailing loops of gut like greasy purple-gray pennons.

  Lying on her stomach on the VIP box’s floor, Sara had a perfect shot at Hartmann. He was buried for the moment beneath a pile of Secret Service bodies, but they were concentrating on what was happening in the audience. No one was sparing the dignitaries’ seats any attention at all. When they let him up, she’d have him dead to rights.

  Except she’d lost her gun.

  She drummed a fist on the floor of the box with a deliberate self-hating cadence.

  Gregg had no chance to recover.

  Two Secret Service people hit him like blitzing linemen, shoving him down on the floor with guttural, wordless yells, their guns out. Colin, the joker, piled directly on top of him, almost knocking his breath away. “Stay down, Senator!” Puppetman snarled at the interference.

  He could still hear the buzz-saw whine of Mackie’s hands, tangled with the crowd’s screams, as Carnifex plowed into the boy. But he couldn’t see, couldn’t pull the strings easily because he didn’t know what was happening.

  Let me go! Just let me have them! That’s the only chance.

  Gregg let loose all hold of Puppetman, lying there underneath the guards as the power reached out, savage.

  He mind-raped Carnifex, slicing out the pain and the fear, pumping the adrenaline so high that he could almost feel the ace’s heart pounding in his own head. At the same time, he tried to dampen Mackie’s insane rage, but that was like handling fire—it burned, it twisted in his grasp.

  Smash him! Puppetman screamed to Carnifex. Use that damn strength and make the little man another bloodspot on the floor.

  Then he felt Billy scream in agony despite the mindblock and even as he gulped at the pain greedily, he knew Mackie had won this battle. The weight on top of him was gone. Half a dozen of the Secret Service were shouting on the podium as Gregg struggled to get up, to see again. “He’s cutting us to pieces—”

  Then there was more gunfire, loud, and too close.

  With frantic palm strokes Mackie wiped his opponent’s blood from his eyes. The bitch was gone. Damn, damn, damn. He had to find her, he could not fail again—

  He looked up. Hartmann was nowhere in sight. Had something happened to him, happened to the Man?

  Weeping tears and blood, coughing up bloody snot, he scrambled up, a broken toy on a giant’s stairs. Unimpeded, up onto the ramp that gave onto the dais from stage right. Hartmann was lying there beneath half a dozen young men in suits. He looked all right. Grateful tears filled Mackie’s lower eyelids.

  He felt a hot breath on his cheek, heard a yell of agony from behind him as the bullet went home. A dark-suited man knelt beside the Senator on his knees, pointing a gun at him with both hands.

  He tried to phase. Doubt and fatigue clamped his mind. I can’t—

  Yellow fire reached for him from the short muzzle.

  Black fire exploded in his chest. He fell.

  Strong arms dragged Spector off Hartmann and spun him toward the crowd. “He’s cutting us to pieces. Get your piece out. We’ve got to nail him,” said the Secret Service man who’d pulled him upright.

  It was true. A little hunchback was slicing men to pieces with his buzz-saw-like hands. Spector popped the leather restraint and hauled out his gun. What the hell, might as well look the part; it could help him get free later. Spector kneeled and fired. The gun had more kick than he’d expected and the bullet took down a man well behind the fight. He steadied his gun hand with his free arm and aimed, then squeezed off three more rounds. The hunchback spun and went down.

  Spector turned back toward Hartmann. “Are you all right, Senator?”

  Hartmann lo
oked up and Spector caught his eye.

  Darkness pulled at Mackie with seductive arms. He fought it. There was something he had to do. Someone—

  Terror burst inside him. His eyes came open.

  He lay spread-eagled across a tier. The dais’s facing hid the senator from him. Der Mann needs me!

  That need gave him strength. He made his limbs respond to his will. Made himself climb, despite the tendency of hands and Keds to slip in the red liquid that covered the ledge.

  Der Mann lay where he had been before. But his neck was craned, and he was staring fixedly up at a tall, gaunt Secret Service agent. His expression seemed both elated and terrified.

  Hatred for the skinny agent hit Mackie like amphetamines. He’s the one who shot me! But worse than that, he was doing something to the senator. Mackie couldn’t see what, but he knew.

  He limped forward. His right foot dragged. Each step sent a white-hot poker through his belly. He needs me. I won’t—fail—him—again.

  Spector felt something in Hartmann resist him for a moment, then it sucked him in like a whirlpool. His death-pain boiled into the senator’s mind; every excruciating detail, the broken bones, the fiery blood, the choking, rushed out.

  But something was wrong. Hartmann’s mind wasn’t reacting like any of the others. It was bloating, feasting on Spector’s death. Spector pushed harder. Slowly, the other mind gave way under the pressure and began to fade.

  So good so tasty but it hurts and it kills … it isn’t real it can’t be real it isn’t possible …

  But it was and Puppetman’s voice had faded to a whisper and left completely and even the pain that leaked into Gregg from Puppetman was like a searing acid poured down his psyche so that he wanted to scream and plead and beg don’t kill me don’t kill me I don’t want to die.

  But he couldn’t break that awful gaze, couldn’t tear himself away from those strange, sad, pained, startled, hurt eyes, those eyes that weren’t Colin’s at all but someone else’s …