Wild Cards XVI: Deuces Down

by Michael Cassutt

  “Yeah,” Demise said. “You know, that attitude is just like you. It’s just exactly like all of you. It’s not about who’s going to remember what. It’s about principle. If you let people fuck with you, pretty soon everyone’s going to think they can get away with shit.”

  When Phan spoke, his voice was measured and careful. “I don’t think that someone who fucking kills people by looking at them is going to have a lot of trouble with people taking him lightly.”

  “You don’t get it. The priest has to die. And I know where he’s going to be on Sunday morning. I’ll kill the little shit in the middle of Mass.”

  “Hardcore,” Phan said, sounding unimpressed.

  SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 8. 1987

  Dawn threatened in the east, the light from the snowcovered trees making the kitchen window glow. Father Henry put the telephone handset back in its cradle just as Gina emerged from her room wrapped in a thick wool robe two sizes too big for her.

  “Coffee smells great,” she said, then “It’s so quiet out here.”

  “That’s what we call the country. Haven’t you ever been out of the city?”

  “Nah. I was born in Queens.

  “You take cream or anything?”

  “No. Black and bitter does just fine.”

  Father Henry poured the coffee into a couple of Marriage Encounter cups and took them over to the table.

  “The Archbishop says he’ll have tickets to Rome ready for us down in Albuquerque by Monday morning.”

  “I thought there was a month wait for passports.”

  “Vatican passports,” Father Henry said, blowing on his coffee. “There are certain advantages to being a sovereign nation, after all. And a quarter million dollars is a pretty sizable donation. Exerts a kind of influence.”

  “That was my money.”

  “It was blood money and only the grace of Christ shall make it clean.”

  “And the other quarter million?”

  “I’m a man of Christ. It’ll be just fine right where it is. You need any—like maybe for tuition or something?—you just come see your Uncle Henry.”

  “Tuition? Give me a break,” she said, laughing. Her face didn’t look so sharp, he thought. “I’ll go down on you for a hundred thousand, though.”

  “I was thinking about cooking up some eggs,” he said, ignoring her. “Care for any?”

  “Sure,” she said. “Over hard.”

  He tried the still-scalding coffee and reached up for a good copper frying pan. Gina stood, her hands deep in the robe’s pockets, went to the window and looked out into the woods. He wondered what it would be like, seeing a pine forest at dawn for the very first time.

  Just another little miracle, he figured.

  PROMISES

  By Stephen Leigh

  SEPTEMBER, 1995

  The squall roared and threw horizontal rain, coming in from the northeast off the North Channel and the Waters of Moyle. The storm had developed unexpectedly an hour ago. The fierce wind rattled the shutters, howled through the cracks in the stone walls and stretched wispy, persistent fingers down the chimney. Rain hissed and beat on the stones, and streams of cold water fell from the ends of the roof’s thatching.

  “Shite!” Caitlyn cursed as a gust blew out the match she’d placed to the newspaper under the peat in the hearth. There were only two matches left in the pack, and she’d been trying to get the damned fire going for the last fifteen minutes, since they’d gotten back from Church Bay.

  “Máthair?” Moira, Caitlyn’s daughter, shivered in the chair, her knees up to her chest and a woolen blanket wrapped around herself. They’d both been soaked just running the dozen steps from the car to the cottage. The storm had blown down the lines somewhere on the island, which made the electric heaters useless, and the small, three room house had seemed as icy and damp as the sleet outside. Moira’s face was illuminated in the orange-gold light of the oil lamps, her round features emerging from darkness like a Vermeer painting. “I’m awful cold.”

  “I know, darling. It’s just that the peat’s gotten soaked, and this damned wind . . .” Caitlyn struck another match. Her movements were clumsy and stiff, but she managed to light a corner of the paper. The crumpled sheet blackened and curled, the flame leaping blue and yellow as it crackled, but the flame hissed wetly and guttered out once it reached the sod, and Caitlyn cursed again. The shutters banged in a renewed gust, and a rivulet of water trickled down the inside of the chimney.

  The noise of the storm lifted to a wild roar: the door to the cottage opened. A man’s form filled the doorway. Moira screamed at the dark apparition, like a banshee in the midst of a tempest, startling enough that Caitlyn wouldn’t have been surprised to hear a keening death-wail. Caitlyn rose—slowly, the only way she could move—to Moira’s side. She patted her daughter’s shoulder with an unbending hand. “Hush,” she told her, though her eyes were on the stranger. “There’s nothing to be frightened about.”

  She hoped she was right.

  He hadn’t moved. He swayed from side to side, as if it were only an effort of will that kept him standing. With just under two hundred people on the island, Caitlyn knew them all by face and name, and this man was a stranger: tall, with skin the color of dark chocolate. He wore a leather jacket and there were straps and harness about him that looked as if he’d cut something from around him with a knife. He was drenched, the short, wiry black hair beaded with the rain; he steamed, wisps of vapor rising from him. She supposed he might have come over on the Calmac Ferry, maybe one of the rare visitors that came over from Belfast or Dublin to see one of the island’s archeological sites and who had been surprised by the storm. Strange, though, that no one down in Church Bay had mentioned a visitor.

  “I saw you through the window,” he said, and the accent was decidedly American. His eyes closed, then he opened them again with an effort. “I can help . . .” He took a step into the room, almost falling, then another and another, walking past them toward the fireplace as Caitlyn hugged Moira to her, watching and wondering what she would do. I haven’t checked the phones; they may be down too, and besides it would take Constable MacEnnis forever to get here in this weather . . .

  The stranger crouched in front of the fireplace. He reached out a hand toward the small stack of peat. Caitlyn cried out with mingled wonder and fear.

  Flame surged around his fingers, the peat hissing in the blazing heat of it and finally catching fire. He left his hand there, in the dancing blue flames, and Caitlyn saw the flesh blistering and charred to gray-white.

  He collapsed.

  Caitlyn saw his eyelids flutter. She waited, and when the man’s gaze found her, she brought the glass of water to his cracked, dry lips. He drank gratefully, muscles moving in his long throat. “Better?” Caitlyn asked. He nodded. “What’s your name?” she asked then.

  He hesitated, and she saw his eyes narrow. “John,” he said. “John Green.” His head lifted up, looking around the small room. His hand brushed the bed underneath him with a metallic rattle.

  “Sheet metal,” Caitlyn told. “I doubt it’s very comfortable for you, but you scorched my best sheets, and I was afraid you’d actually set the bedding on fire, as impossible as that seems. But maybe not for you, eh?” She kept her voice carefully neutral. “When I first felt your skin, I thought you were burning up with the worst fever I’d ever seen. You were sweating terribly. I was sure you’d die. But then I saw your hand healing as I watched, and your breathing was quiet. You slept easily, yet the fever never left you. And you’re still sweating, though there’s a chill in the air. So you’re an ace, are you, John Green?”

  “I’m nothing like an ace. That’s for damn sure.” The man gave a hoarse chuckle, grimacing as he pushed himself up. The blanket—actually an old horse blanket Caitlyn kept in the car; she wasn’t about to risk her good comforter on the man—fell around his waist. He seemed to realize for the first time that he was naked under the blanket, and he pulled the edge of it back up around
himself. “My clothes?”

  “Washed and ready for you.” She cocked her head at him with a faint smile. “Soaked through and muddy, they were. You didn’t want me to leave them on, did you?” He was staring at her, and she knew what he saw. The face that looked back at her every morning from the mirror was striking: flawless milky skin under curls of bright red hair, wide and round eyes that were the green of rich summer grass, full lips that seemed to easily smile. “You’re a rare beauty, Caitlyn Farrell, that you are,” her father had told her, years ago, and she’d blushed at the words even as she’d hoped desperately that they were true. “The image of your máthair, when she was young . . .” Her father had died during the ’62 Infection, or at least that’s what they’d been told—one of the thousands who had drawn the black queen. He’d been at work and neither he nor his body had ever returned home. And her mother . . . she’d been with her mother the night the virus spread over Belfast, and she’d watched in terror as the virus tore her mother’s body apart, as the woman screamed in terror and pain. Her mother had always loved knitting and sewing; the virus had drawn needle-sharp spines from her bones, lancing through her flesh at all angles, tearing and ripping, leaving her snared everywhere in a nest of hundreds of ivory porcupine quills that stabbed at her own flesh and that of those who would try to care for her. For twenty more agonizing years, she would live that way.

  Caitlyn had first thought that the virus had somehow left her unaffected. She’d been wrong . . .

  “Máthair!” Moira called from the other room, and she heard her daughter’s running footsteps. “Is the burning man awake yet?”

  Caitlyn rose from her chair as her daughter burst into the bedroom. She could feel his gaze on her: the way her head would not turn without the entire body moving with it, the creaking protest of her knees, the slow-motion change of the expression in that perfect face, the awkward way she hugged her daughter, bending from the waist with her back impossibly straight: a doll with frozen joints. “You can see him in a little bit. Go on with you, now.” Moira stared at the man in the bed for a moment, then laughed and ran from the room.

  “She’s cute. Looks like you. Your sister?”

  Caitlyn turned—slowly, carefully, her whole body making the motion—to find Green regarding her curiously. “Her máthair. Mother.”

  She saw him blink in genuine astonishment. “I’m not just saying this, but you sure don’t look old enough to have a child that age. What is she? Nine? Ten?”

  “Ten in another month.” She couldn’t keep the sadness from coloring her voice. Whatever the man might be thinking, looking at her, he kept it to himself.

  “Where the hell am I?” he asked.

  “You don’t know?” Green shook his head slowly. Caitlyn waited to see if he would say more; he didn’t. “You’re on Rathlin Island,” she told him finally, “just off the coast of Northern Ireland. And I’m curious how ’tis that you came to be on Rathlin, seeing as you don’t know where you are. I take it you didn’t come over on the ferry. You don’t know about Rathlin, do you?”

  She saw his hesitation again. “No, I don’t. I . . . I was on a ship, a pleasure craft, just me and a few friends I was visiting, coming out from Scotland. The storm . . . I guess it was too much for the boat . . .”

  “And your friends? What happened to them?”

  “Gone,” Green answered. “Lost.”

  Caitlyn gave him slow nod. “I have soup on. You look strong enough to dress yourself. There’s a chamberpot under the bed if you would be needing it, or you can use the bathroom just off the kitchen. I’ll let you get yourself ready while I put the bowls on the table. You can come on in and eat with the two of us, or I can bring it in here.”

  “I’ll be out,” he said. “Just give me a few moments.”

  Another nod. Caitlyn left the bedroom, feeling his gaze on her as she walked out with the stiff-legged gait of a marionette.

  The man emerged from the bedroom by the time Caitlyn, with Moira’s help, got the soup to the trestle table. He sat, wearily, and she ladled out a bowl for him, passing it across. She could feel the heat radiating from him. “Would you be wanting some milk with that, Gary?” she asked.

  “Sure. Sounds good. I-” He stopped. At the end of the table, Moira giggled.

  “’Tis Gary, not John, isn’t it?” Caitlyn asked.

  Muscles clenching in his jaw, he nodded. The spoon in his hand reddened like the glowing filament on an electric stove. “You knew all along?”

  “The radio,” she told him. “I was listening to the BBC. There was a news reports about a plane fleeing from the authorities in the States that had come over Ireland and gone down not a dozen miles out from here. The man said the passengers might have parachuted out of the plane, and were dangerous folk: a man who claimed to be former U.S. Senator Gregg Hartmann, who looked like a great yellow caterpillar, and a nat woman with blond hair named Hannah Davis. The pilot, they said, was a black man.” Caitlyn paused. “They gave his name, too, and you don’t look to be a yellow caterpillar or a woman.” She glanced at the bowl in front of him. “I’d tell you your soup’s getting cold, but I doubt that’s a problem for you.”

  “What are you going to do now?”

  Caitlyn would have shrugged, but it wasn’t something her body could do. “I’m going to eat my soup, and make certain my daughter eats hers. Then I’m going to wash the dishes.”

  “That’s not what I meant.”

  “I know. But that’s all that’s going to happen.” She paused. “You’re not a danger to me or my daughter, Gary. I can see that, just looking at you. And you are on Rathlin.”

  “You don’t know me.”

  “I know enough.” A faint smile touched the corners of her lips and vanished. “Eat your soup,” she said.

  “You really should,” Moira interjected, her voice serious and earnest as only a child’s can be. “Máthair makes very good soup.”

  The man nodded.

  “You’re sweating,” Moira told him.

  He touched his sleeve to his forehead. “It’s a bit warm in here for me,” he said. The spoon sizzled as it touched the broth.

  After lunch, Caitlyn went outside and stood in the sunlight, her eyes half-closed. She could hear the sea pounding relentlessly against the cliffs; to the northwest where the ruins of Robert the Bruce’s Castle were hung in moss and vines. Gulls swung over-heard in the rare blue sky, calling in the harsh voices. A few minutes later, she heard the door to the cottage open and shut again, and footsteps crunching over the gravel walk. “What did you mean, that I was on Rathlin?”

  Caitlyn swiveled her entire body to turn to him. “You don’t know about Rathlin? The Belfast Infection of ’62?”

  He lifted his shoulders. “I heard something about Belfast, I think. Not a lot.”

  Caitlyn nodded. “I suppose it wasn’t much compared to what happened in New York the first time. Still, the outbreak was a nasty one. No one knows where it started or why, only that most of Belfast was affected. Five thousand or more people drew the black queen and died in the first day; people fled the city in droves during the panic. Afterward, the government decided that they if they wanted to bring the people back to the city, they had to show Belfast was clean and safe. They didn’t want the jokers staying around to create yet another Jokertown—that wouldn’t look good. One of the politicians got the bright idea that maybe they should just move the jokers out. Relocate the resulting Jokertown to an island. And, oh yes, make sure that they were sterile and couldn’t produce more monsters. So they moved the hundred or so inhabitants who once lived here on Rathlin and brought in the jokers, and of course the relocation and sterilizations were all ‘voluntary’ . . .”

  Caitlyn tried to give her smile a sardonic twist. “They brought maybe three or four hundred of us in before they were stopped—too many protests from the United Nations, Jokers Amnesty International, the JJS, and nearly every human rights organization. But they also didn’t move us back. To make it lo
ok better, they gave us some limited self-government.” She laughed, a sound with an edge of bitterness. “You Yanks did the same thing with your Native Americans, putting them on reservations. Officially, we’re part of the UK. Unofficially, they leave us alone and try to forget us. Eventually, Belfast got its Jokertown anyway. Most of us already here on Rathlin—the Relocated—stayed. Why not? This is our island now. There are less than two hundred of us left; we’ve gained a few people over the years who came here, but we’ve lost far more.” She paused. “Not many left. Most just died.”

  “You must have come here later.”

  She shook her head. “I was with the initial group. I was sixteen, then.”

  The man was staring at her, and she could see him doing the calculations behind his eyes. “Thirty-three years ago . . . You can’t possibly be forty-nine.”

  “Touch me,” she said to him. When his eyes widened, she laughed. “Go on: my face, or my arms.”

  His hand reached out to her cheek. She nearly flinched, expecting his skin to be hot, but it felt nearly cool. He stroked her cheek, pressing once. She knew what he saw, what he felt: a slickness like hard rubber that would not easily yield to the press of his finger-tip. Like touching a doll’s face.

  The touch, though, was nice, and his hands were gentle and his chocolate eyes sad, and the baritone of his voice was rich and deep like a cello. Almost ten years, it’s been. An entire decade since you’ve been held and kissed and loved . . . She tore the thought away as Gary’s fingers dropped from her face. You can’t think that way. You can’t.

  “That’s what the virus did to me. It left me a permanent sixteen. I suppose I’ll always look this way. My body’s slowly hardening, calcifying. I came here because my mother was one of the Relocated; they knew I might have been infected, but no one was quite sure at first. I know now—and I don’t need the blood test to tell me. It’s moving through the rest of me now, faster and faster. I can’t turn my neck, can’t bend over easily, can’t bend my knees or my elbows all the way. And it’s spreading inside, or so the doctors tell me. Sometime soon . . .” She continued to smile; she had no choice. But twin tears trickled down the ceramic gloss of her cheeks.