Wild Cards V: Down and Dirty

by George R. R. Martin

  The wind of the hawks’ passing brought her back to consciousness long enough to hear their hunting screams. She felt blood drip onto her face before she was flung away. She was blind, but through the eyes of the ginger lying across the room, she saw her attacker driven back toward the window. The shattering glass showered her as he crashed through to plunge forty feet to the ground. Bagabond thought she felt the building rock when he hit, but she decided that it had to be a hallucination from the oxygen deprivation.

  The ocelot and the wolf crawled contritely over to her and leaned against her to give her strength. She could feel the rats running rampant throughout the building as the cats ran among them, scattering but not killing the vermin. As far as she could reach, her wild animals were going crazy. She did her best to bring them back to normal and sent those she could touch to their homes before returning to the bare apartment. Opening her eyes, she saw Cordelia, arms still tied behind her back, leaning over her.

  “Girl, you got to take responsibility for yourself and what you are. I ain’t goin’ through this again. Not even for Jack. Either learn to use what you have or go live in a convent.” Bagabond started to slide into the warm darkness again. She was not sure whether she had actually spoken to Cordelia or whether she had imagined it.

  Rosemary was feeling increasingly afraid of the entire situation. Chris was up to something; she could feel it. She did not have to be a telepath like Bagabond to sense that she was in trouble. She had not seen any animals around her, not even a rat. It was not a good sign. Where the hell was Bagabond?

  She deliberately slowed as she walked down the hallway. She tried to focus on her danger and use it. What was waiting for her in the filthy little room she was about to enter? Rosemary drew her own gun.

  She tried the knob. The door was unlocked. She pushed it open onto the room and its occupant. The man who had been described to her as Croyd stood there, about to leave.

  “Who the hell are you?” He was obviously surprised to see a woman. With the gun Rosemary gestured for him to sit back down on the iron-framed bed. She kept her back against the wall beside the door. “Christ, you’re Maria Gambione!”

  “I need to know what you actually found out.” Rosemary leveled the gun on the man across the tiny room, holding it firmly just as she had always practiced. “You’re not going anywhere.”

  Outside on the fire escape Chris waited for Rosemary to go down with the virus. Mentally he urged her to get closer to Croyd. He could not hear what they were saying. It did not matter as long as Croyd did to her what he had done to the capos. Chris knew Croyd had to have access to the virus somehow. Nothing else could have done that. Why didn’t she close in?

  He saw her gun go up. Croyd moved faster. Before Chris could get out of the way, Croyd had thrown the bedside lamp through the window and followed it out onto the fire escape. Chris scrambled backward, but in his haste to get away from Rosemary, Croyd was across the iron grating of the landing. Seeing Chris at last, Croyd tackled him and threw him down the next flight of steps. Chris gagged and tried to crawl away down the steps. A shot narrowly missed Croyd, and he clambered up the ladder two steps at a time.

  Rosemary had frozen when Croyd went through the window. As the echoes of the crash rang through the flophouse, she heard her bodyguards coming for her. She followed Croyd out the broken window and saw him start up the fire escape. She fired at him more to keep him moving than to kill him. The only way out was down the escape. Chris was coughing and convulsing on the landing below her. As she heard her men break down the door behind her, she was running down the steps and jumping over her lover. She did not stop.

  “Bastard!” she hissed at him as she left him behind. She was headed for the ground. She knew now that Chris’s men would kill her on sight. It would take luck and fast moves, but there was just a chance she could lose the bodyguards and the men out front. It was her only chance.

  Concerto for Siren and Serotonin

  VI

  CROYD TOOK A TAXI crosstown, then hiked a circuitous route to his Morningside Heights apartment. There were no lights on within, and he entered quickly and quietly, painkillers, antihistamines, psychedelics, and a five-pound box of assorted chocolates all gift-wrapped together in a gaudy parcel beneath his arm. He flipped on the hall light and slipped into the bedroom.

  “Veronica? You awake?” he whispered.

  There was no reply, and he crossed to the bedside, lowered himself to a seated position, and reached out. His hand encountered only bedclothes.

  “Veronica?” he said aloud.

  No reply.

  He turned on the bedside lamp. The bed was empty, her stuff gone. He looked about for a note. No. Nothing. Perhaps in the living room. Or the kitchen. Yes. Most likely she’d leave it in the refrigerator where he’d be certain to find it.

  He rose, then halted. Was that a footstep? Back toward the living room?

  “Veronica?”

  No reply.

  Foolish of him to have left the door open, he suddenly realized, though there had been no one in the hallway.…

  He reached out and extinguished the lamp. He crossed to the door, dropped silently to the floor, moved his head outside at floor level, and drew it back quickly.

  Empty. No one in the hall. No further sounds either.

  He rose and stepped outside. He walked back toward the living room.

  In the dim light from the hallway, as he rounded the corner, he beheld a Bengal tiger, and its tail twitched once before it sprang at him.

  “Holy shit!” Croyd commented, dropping Veronica’s present and leaping to the side.

  Plaster shattered and fell as he caromed off the wall, an orange and black shoulder grazed him in passing, and he threw a punch that slid over the animal’s back. He heard it growl as he leaped into the living room. It turned quickly and followed him, and he picked up a heavy chair and threw it as the beast sprang again.

  It roared as the chair struck it, and Croyd overturned a heavy wooden table, raised it like a shield, and rushed with it against the animal. The tiger shook itself, snarling, as it batted the chair aside. It turned and caught the table’s flat surface upon a smooth expanse of shoulder muscle. Then it swung a paw over the table’s upper edge. Croyd ducked, pushed forward.

  The big cat fell back, dropped out of sight. Seconds crept by like drugged cockroaches.

  “Kitty?” he inquired.

  Nothing.

  He lowered the table a foot. With a roar the tiger sprang. Croyd snapped the table upward, faster than he could remember ever having lifted a piece of furniture before. Its edge caught the tiger a terrible blow beneath the jaw, and it let out a human-sounding whimper as it was turned sideways and fell to the floor. Croyd raised the table high and slammed it down atop the beast, as if it were a giant flyswatter. He raised it again. He halted. He stared.

  No tiger.

  “Kitty?” he repeated.

  Nothing.

  He lowered the table. Finally he set it aside. He moved to the wall switch and threw it. Only then did he realize that the front of his shirt was torn and bloody. Three furrows ran down the left side of his chest from collarbone to hip.

  On the floor, a bit of whiteness.…

  Stooping, he touched the object, raised it, studied it. He held one of those little folded paper figures—origami, he remembered, the Japanese called them. This one was … a paper tiger. He shivered at the same time as he chuckled. This was almost supernatural. This was heavy shit. It occurred to him then that he had just fought off another ace—one with a power he did not understand—and he did not like this a bit. Not with Veronica missing. Not with his not even knowing which side had sent the stranger ace to take him out.

  He locked the door to the hallway. He opened Veronica’s present, took out the bottle of Percodans and tossed off a couple before he hit the bathroom, stripped off his shirt, and washed his chest. Then he fetched a beer from the refrigerator and washed down a French green with it, to provide the
Percs with some contrast. There was no note propped against the milk carton or even in the egg drawer, and this made him sad.

  When the bleeding stopped, he washed again, taped a dressing in place, and drew on a fresh shirt. He was not even sure whether he had been followed or whether this had been a stakeout. Either way, he wasn’t going to stick around. He hated abandoning Veronica if someone really had a make on the place, but at the moment he had no choice. It was a very familiar feeling: they were after him again.

  Croyd rode subways and taxis and walked for over four hours, crouched behind his mirrorshades, crissing and crossing the island in a pattern of evasion calculated to confuse anybody. And for the first time in his life he saw his name up in lights in Times Square.

  CROYD CRENSON, said the flowing letters high on the buildingside, CALL DR. T. EMERGENCY.

  Croyd stood and stared, reading it over and over. When he had convinced himself it was not a hallucination, he shrugged. They ought to know he’d stop by and pay his bill when he got a chance. It was damn humiliating, implying to the whole world that he was a deadbeat. They’d probably even try to charge him for a bed, too, he guessed, when broom closets should be a lot cheaper. Out to screw him, the same as everyone else. They could damn well wait.

  Cursing, he ran for a subway entrance.

  Heading south on the Broadway line, sucking on a pair of purple hearts and a stray pyrahex he’d found at the bottom of his pocket, Croyd was amazed and impressed that Senator Hartmann actually did seem a man of the people, boarding the train at the Canal Street Station that way. Then another Senator Hartmann followed him. They glanced his way, conferred for an instant, and one leaned out the door and hollered something, and more Hartmanns came running. There were tall Hartmanns, short Hartmanns, fat Hartmanns, and even a Hartmann with an extra appendage—seven Hartmanns in all. And Croyd was not so unsophisticated as to fail in realizing, this near Jokertown, that Hartmann’s was the Werewolves’ face of the day.

  The doors closed, the train began to move, the tallest Hartmann turned, stared, and approached.

  “You Croyd Crenson?” he asked.

  “Nope,” Croyd replied.

  “I think you are.”

  Croyd shrugged. “Think whatever you want, but do it someplace else if you want my vote.”

  “Get up.”

  “I am up. I’m a lot higher than you. And I’m up for anything.”

  The tall Hartmann reached for him, and the other Hartmanns began a swaying advance.

  Croyd reached forward, caught the oncoming hand, and drew it toward his face. There followed a crunching sound, and the tall Hartmann screamed as Croyd jerked his head to the side, then spat out the thumb he had just bitten off the hand he held. Then he rose to his feet, still holding the Werewolf’s right wrist with his left hand. He jerked the man forward and drove the fingers of his free hand deep into his abdomen and began drawing them upward. Blood spurted and ribs popped and protruded.

  “Always following me,” he said. “You’re a real pain in the ass, you know? Where’s Veronica?”

  The man commenced a coughing spasm. The other Werewolves halted as the blood began to flow. Croyd’s hand plunged again, downward this time. Red up to the elbow now, he began drawing out a length of intestine. The others began to gag, to back toward the rear of the car.

  “This is a political statement,” Croyd said as he raised the gory Hartmann and tossed him after the others. “See you in November, motherfuckers!”

  Croyd exited quickly at the Wall Street Station, tore off his bloody shirt, and tossed it into a trash receptacle. He washed his hands in a public fountain before departing the area, and he offered a big black guy who’d said, “You really a Whitey!” fifty bucks for his shirt—a pale blue, long-sleeved polyester affair, which fit him fine. He trotted over to Nassau then, followed it north till it ran into Centre. He stopped in an OPEN ALL NIGHT Greek place and bought two giant styrofoam cups of coffee, one for each hand, to sip as he strolled.

  He continued up to Canal and bore westward. Then he detoured several blocks to a café he knew, for steak and eggs and coffee and juice and more coffee. He sat beside the window and watched the street grow light and come alive. He took a black pill for medicinal purposes and a red one for good luck.

  “Uh,” he said to the waiter, “you’re the sixth or seventh person I’ve seen wearing a surgical mask recently.…”

  “Wild card virus,” the man said. “It’s around again.”

  “Just a few cases, here and there,” Croyd said, “last I heard.”

  “Go listen again,” the man responded. “It’s close to a hundred—maybe over—already.”

  “Still,” Croyd mused, “do you think a little strip of cloth like that will really do you any good?”

  The waiter shrugged. “I figure it’s better than nothing.… More coffee?”

  “Yeah. Get me a dozen donuts to go, too, will you?”

  “Sure.”

  He made his way to the Bowery via Broome Street, then on down toward Hester. As he drew nearer, he saw that the newsstand was not yet open, and Jube nowhere in sight. Pity. He’d a feeling Walrus might have some useful information or at least some good advice on dealing with the fact that both sides in the current gang war periodically took time out to shoot at him—say, every other day. Was it sunspots? Bad breath? It was rapidly ceasing to be cost effective for the Mob to keep chasing him to recover his fee for his investigation—and Siu Ma’s people must have hit at him enough by now to have recovered a lot more face than he’d ever cost them.

  Munching a donut, he passed on, heading for his Eldridge apartment. Later. No rush. He could talk to Jube by and by. Right now it would be restful to lean back in the big easy chair, his feet up on the ottoman, and close his eyes for a few minutes.…

  “Shit!” he observed, tossing half a donut down the stairwell to a vacant basement flat as he turned the corner onto his block. Was it getting to be that time already?

  Then he continued to turn with that rapid fluidity of movement that had come with the territory this time around, following the donut down into darkness where the asthmatic snuffling of some ancient dog would have been distracting but for the fact that he was viewing, even as he descended, a classical stakeout up the street near his pad.

  “Son-of-a-bitch!” he added, just his head above ground level now, outline broken by a length of upright piping that supported the side railing.

  One man sat in a parked car up past the building, in view of its front entrance. Another sat on a stoop, filing his nails, in command of an angled view of the rear of the building from across the side alley.

  Croyd heard a panicked gasping as he swore, unlike any doggy sound with which he was familiar. Glancing downward and back into the shadows, he beheld the quivering, amorphous form of Snotman, generally conceded to be the most disgusting inhabitant of Jokertown, as he cringed in the corner and ate the remains of Croyd’s donut.

  Every square inch of the man’s surface seemed covered with green mucus, which ran steadily from him and added to the stinking puddle in which he crouched. Whatever garments he had on were so saturated with it as to have become barely distinguishable—like his features.

  “For Christ’s sake! That’s filthy and I was eating on it!” Croyd said. “Have a fresh one.” He extended the bag toward Snotman, who did not move. “It’s okay,” he added, and finally he set the bag down on the bottom step and returned to watching the watchers.

  Snotman finished the discarded fragment and remained still for some time. Finally, he asked, “For me?”

  His voice was a liquid, snotty, snuffling thing.

  “Yeah, finish ’em. I’m full,” Croyd said. “I didn’t know you could talk.”

  “Nobody to talk to,” Snotman replied.

  “Well—yeah. That’s the breaks, I guess.”

  “People say I make them lose their appetites. Is that why you don’t want the rest?”

  “No,” Croyd said. “I got a prob
lem. I’m trying to figure what to do next. There’re some guys up there have my place covered. I’m deciding whether to take them out or just go away. You don’t bother me, even with that gunk all over you. I’ve looked as bad myself on occasion.”

  “You? How?”

  “I’m Croyd Crenson, the one they call the Sleeper. I change appearance every time I sleep. Sometimes it’s for the better, sometimes it isn’t.”

  “Could I?”

  “What? Oh, change again? I’m a special case, is what it is. I don’t know any way I could share that with other people. Believe me, you wouldn’t want a regular diet of it.”

  “Just once would be enough,” Snotman answered, opening the bag and taking out a donut. “Why are you taking a pill? Are you sick?”

  “No, it’s just something to help me stay alert. I can’t afford to sleep for a long time.”

  “Why not?”

  “It’s a long story. Very long.”

  “Nobody tells me stories anymore.”

  “What the hell. Why not?” Croyd said.

  Blood Ties

  IV

  BABY, YOUR MASTER IS an idiot.

  No, Master.

  Yes, Baby.

  Blaise lay curled among the tumbled pillows on the vast canopy bed that almost filled the bridge/stateroom aboard Tachyon’s yacht. Two of the curving pearlescent walls presented a miniature schematic of New York City. Different-colored lines connected red markers. The third wall broke down the location of wild card cases by building and business. Chase Manhattan Bank Jokertown branch, three apartment buildings (one of which was in Harlem), Top Hat cleaners on the Bowery, restaurants, bars, drugstores, department stores.

  It’s a human vector.

  Tachyon rose from the floor and dusted the seat of his pants, sensing irritation from his ship at this slur on her housekeeping. Sometimes ships had a skewed sense of priorities. An imputation of dust was far more significant than the announcement that a Typhoid Mary was threatening Manhattan.