“No,” he said. “Fuck it. Rick ’em all.” He turned and stalked off. A beat later Crypt Kicker followed.
“A hostile young man,” Colonel Vo said. “He bears watching.”
Sobel laughed. He was emcee of his own big show now, and feeling grand. “Not to worry Colonel,” he said. “His heart’s in the right place.”
The secret policeman looked dubious. “From the looks of him, it could be anywhere.”
Freddie Whitelaw mopped his brow with a handkerchief. It was already so soaked that all it did was redistribute sweat around his shining expanse of forehead.
“Colonel Sobel,” he said, “what are your intentions now in regard to your, ah, prisoner?”
“I’m having her tortured to death,” he said cheerfully. “Some of my boys are quite ingenious in that line, did you know?”
Freddie’s jaw dropped. “You’re joking, surely?”
The Colonel shook his head. “It will encourage the others, as the old saying goes. The rebels will see the penalty for their treachery firsthand. And of course they’ll see irrefutable proof that this Field Marshal of their counterrevolution is only too human, ace or not. We only await the arrival of the television crews to commence our little lesson.”
“Sir, you — you can’t be serious!” Whitelaw stammered.
Sobel dropped a comradely hand to his shoulder. “Have no fear, my friend. I promised you an exclusive on this story, and you shall have it. The TV news people will just have to wait until you publish to release their footage. Who better to break this story, after all, than a longstanding member of our socialist confraternity?”
He steered the journalist away from the cage. Looking over his shoulder, Whitelaw caught Moonchild’s dark eyes with his wildly rolling ones and gave his head a desperate shake.
She nodded back. No, there is nothing you can do. I understand. This is my karma. She wondered if he knew her for his old drinking buddy from Rick’s. Mark had never come out and blurted his powers to him, but it would not surprise her if he had done his research into the ace called Cap’n Trips.
Sobel and his official hangers-on had drifted over to the front of the temple, where the NJB commander was pointing to things and holding forth in his grand way. The jokers had for the moment grown tired of screaming abuse in her face, since Sobel had decreed death on the spot for anyone who went farther than that, and had mostly fallen away into little clumps to shoot the breeze and gamble and grumble about why the media types were taking so long and keeping the real fun from starting. For the moment she was alone with her misery.
— She felt the pressure of shadow. She looked up.
“Hi, hon,” said Eric Bell with a strange, sad grin. “I told you you’d come back to us.”
She pinned his eyes with hers. “Will you be first in line when they turn me out to rape me?”
He rocked back slightly, as if she’d slapped him. “We’re in storm season here. Desperate measures”
She turned away. “Save your rationalizations. The Brigade has become a pack of animals. They are everything the bigots paint the wild cards to be. They have given in to blood hunger. How soon before you begin to devour your own kind?”
He had no words. She looked at him sidelong. “What? No pretty pictures? Will you not fill my mind with images of the better world to be purchased by my degradation and death?”
He winced, squatted down beside the cage. His right hand was closed tight. Vein and bone stood out on its back as if to burst the skin.
“Look,” he said in a fevered half whisper, “we’re in the middle of a People’s Army armored division. It’s on the move even now. Can’t you hear it?”
The grumbling noise made sudden sense. She nodded.
“We have your rebel main force trapped in a pincers. By dawn it will be all over.”
She turned her face away. “Why do you tell me this? So you can taste my pain for the fate of those who follow me? Soul rape is much to your taste. Perhaps soul torture is as well.”
“Isis, please.” He grabbed the bamboo bar with his left hand. “Those dreams back in the temple — I had to distract you, don’t you see. So we could capture you without hurting you.”
“So I would be in good health for the torture.”
“That … that’s not my idea. I had no idea.”
“You attack me with tainted dreams. Yet you believe your greater Dream can somehow remain pure.” She looked at him. “Eric, I pity you. Truly I do.”
“Dammit, Isis, give it up! It’s not too late! You can join us. I can make Sobel accept it. He has to listen to me! I’m as much a leader as he is. And I’m a joker. He doesn’t seem to be aware of it, but the boys are right on the edge. They have a bellyful of taking orders from a nat. If he won’t do what I say, we’ll … make him listen.”
He thrust the ruin of his face right up against the bars. “Isis, please! Won’t you join us?”
She looked past him to the jokers of the Brigade, eyeing her like rabid dogs, tongues lolling.
“Mu,” she said. “That question is unasked.”
He half-rose from his crouch, waving his fist in despair. “You idiot! They’ll do it. You have no idea what they’re capable of.”
“I have every idea of what they are capable of. That is why I refuse to join them.”
“Isis, I beg you, I love you”
She shook her head. “That string is broken. Do not try to pull it anymore.”
She raised her hands to touch his face through the cool bamboo bars. “Eric, my beautiful boy. Eric whom I loved. Listen to me. Hear me. When I met you, we each had a dream, a beautiful dream. I have remained true to mine. I will die true to it.
“You have sold your dream, my love. Sold it for a feeling of power, sold it to feed your own lust for revenge. Sold it to assuage your terrible anger. You have polluted your dream, spewed filth on it like the factories you showed us in that vision the first time I saw you, after you showed us the death of the Rox.”
He frowned. “The first time you — but you weren’t there then. There was only that nat, the tall one —”
And a wind rose around the cage, drawing clumps of dirt, bits of grass, every stray piece of debris. Eric held up his hands to keep dust from his eyes.
When he lowered them, Isis Moon was gone. In her place was Mark Meadows, absurdly crouched in the tiny cage with his knees to either side of his head.
He gave Eric a sickly smile. “I guess this takes some of the fun out of gang rape, huh?” he said.
Eric dropped to his knees. “Oh, my God,” he gasped.
“I made love to … you”
“I don’t feel any better about it than you do, man,” Mark said. “But Moonchild is real while she’s around, if that makes any difference. It wasn’t really me.”
Eric turned away and vomited.
Then he was back, hanging one-handed on the bars like a monkey So far none of the others seemed to have noticed the change that had taken place. “If I talk to you, Moonchild hears me?”
“Yeah, man.”
“Very well. Isis, I love you. Please God, believe me. I know I used that as — as a weapon, but it’s true. I swear it.”
“Sure,” Mark said sternly.
“It’s true. I — never mind. I, I can’t bear to see you hurt, Isis.”
“I guess you’re lucky I turned back into me, man.”
“No, please. If Isis is … in there, they can’t hurt you without hurting her. That was never part of my plan. I won’t let that happen.”
Mark jerked his chin at the surrounding mob. It was about all the motion he could muster in the cramped space. “Just what were you planning to do about it? Your buddies have other ideas.”
“It’s too late for you to change what’s going to happen,” Eric said, “so what I do isn’t betrayal.”
He stuck his fist through the bars. “Take it,” he hissed to Mark.
Dubiously Mark opened a hand. Eric pressed something slender, cold, and hard in
to his palm.
“I didn’t know how Mark — how you summoned your ‘friends.’ I knew your drugs had something to do with it. Agent Ray took a pouch filled with little vials off of Isis when he captured her. I was able to steal one.”
Cautiously, hardly daring to breathe, Mark rolled his fingers open slightly. A tiny glass vial lay in his palm filled with orange powder. It had a brownish cast to it; doubtless a trick of the torchlight.
“I thought another of your friends might be better able to come and get Isis out. I hope that’s true.”
Mark nodded. His lips and throat were far too dry to let words past.
“Get her far away from here. And remember — remember that I love her.”
He grabbed Mark’s hand, pulled it to the bars, kissed it. Then he rose and began walking away.
He had not gotten twenty meters when a voice cried out, “Hey! He gave the prisoner something!”
Chapter Forty-nine
Eric froze. Faces turned toward Mark. “Hey, something happened to the goddam prisoner!” another voice roared.
Jokers crowded around the cage. They kept their distance, as if afraid Mark might be radioactive.
Colonel Sobel came striding up. “What seems to be the trouble here?” he asked, his voice a throb of wise forbearance.
The joker who had accused Eric thrust himself forward. It was Rhino, the German punk who hungered for acceptance from his cooler American comrades.
“He gave something to the prisoner,” he said, pointing at Eric.
Sobel glanced at the cage. He saw Mark and frowned. “Arranged for your little lady friend to make her escape, did you?” he said. Sadly he shook his head. “Eric, I thought better of you.”
Eric didn’t say anything. The Colonel drew his .45 and shot him.
The heavy jacketed slug knocked the light-framed boy sprawling on the tamped-down earth. “Holy shit!” a joker screamed. “He shot Eric! He murdered the Dream!”
Instantly the crowd transferred its anger at Eric to its nat commanding officer. To Mark, still huddled and helpless, it was as if something very palpable snapped.
Colonel Sobel missed it. Colonel Sobel had his Dream, too, and he couldn’t see anything beyond it.
Not until a joker covered all over with extrusions like fleshy leaves stepped up and twitched the .45 from his hand. Sobel frowned then. “What’s your name, soldier?” he demanded.
The joker flung himself forward and buried his teeth in his throat.
The Colonel reeled backward. And then the jokers were all over him, snarling and shrieking, darting in, clawing each other in their frenzy to get a piece of the action. Mark heard screaming, weird, unearthly. He saw blood arc, near-black by torchlight.
He saw the Colonel’s fine head raise up. And up, and up, until it was held overhead at the full extension of a pair of joker arms.
Mark threw up.
The two aces, the Vietnamese officers, and Casaday had trailed some distance behind Sobel when the Colonel walked over to investigate the disturbance by the cage. They were outside the lethal radius of the first explosion of joker rage.
No sooner had Sobel vanished beneath swarming bodies than a wave of jokers came for the little group. One reached taloned hands for Billy Ray.
His first reaction was to bat them away from his blood-spattered uniform. “Hey! Don’t touch the merchandise.”
The claws came back in a slash and laid open his cheek. That made everything different.
Carnifex smiled.
He caught the raking hand as it went past. With a mighty torque of his wrist he snapped the forearm. Then he shattered the joker’s snouted face with a vertical punch.
His own oddly matched assortment of features contorted in a triumphant Bruce Lee grimace. He let the joker drop.
He turned to the charging pack. An overhand right splintered teeth and snapped a joker head back so hard the neck vertebrae shattered like dropped plates. A sideways shuto snapped the arm of a second like a dead tree branch. Pivoting, Billy sank the fingers of his left hand into a joker’s belly with such force that the tips popped right through skin. He hoisted the howling joker above his head, the blood spattering his face and uniform like red rain, and threw him in the faces of his friends.
“I love a par—tay!” he cried.
Half a dozen jokers surrounded Crypt Kicker, standing silent and black to one side. They grabbed him, jostling each other for advantages of grip as they prepared to tear him apart as they had the Colonel.
Then they fell back shrieking, their hands and clothing smoking. The black shirt was melting away from the Kicker’s big chest and shoulders, revealing desiccated, discolored flesh beneath.
From inside the mask emerged a laugh that sounded like the tank army on the move around them.
O. K. Casaday had his Beretta M9 out. He stuck it in the multicolored face of a joker and fired. Eyes popped from sockets, brain and blood flew out in a mist.
He looked around. Vo and the two regulars had their sidearms out and were firing into the mob. The Aussie soak had his face covered with his hands, which was probably as constructive a thing as he could be doing.
“Let’s get back to the temple!” Casaday yelled. “We can fort up there.”
“It’s no good,” the junior PAVN officer sobbed. “They are too many!”
“Then fucking die here!”
“He’s right,” Carnifex said, momentarily out of foes. “Even the Alamo’s better than the parking lot.”
“Him! He’s the one! He got Eric offed!”
“Get the fuckin’ ace! Get him!”
With Sobel turned into organic confetti and Sobel’s entourage proving hard to swallow, the mob turned its attention on the cage. The occupant was supposed to be tonight’s feature performer, after all.
Of course the victim was supposed to be a beautiful, vulnerable young woman. That it wasn’t only pissed them off more.
Mark felt a pang as he twisted the plastic cap off the vial. It doesn’t look quite right, man.
You fool! the Traveler shrilled. What if it’s tainted?
With luck, J. J. Flash thought grimly, it kills us quicker than the mob will.
Mark slammed the contents.
He knew at once that he was fucked.
The earth began to shake. The jokers nearest the cage fell to the hard-packed ground.
A wind began to blow toward the cage from all directions. It scoured dust from the ground, raised it in a swirling, dense cloud that completely hid the cage from view. The jokers turned and scrabbled away, frantic lest they be sucked into the vortex of wind.
The ground kept shaking. The wind grew to a whistle, to a roar. The cloud mounted higher and higher, till it topped the peaked roof of the pagoda.
Lightning split the cloud. And then the whirling pillar of dust … vanished.
With one horrified voice the New Joker Brigade screamed.
Everyone has them inside, the little monsters. Creatures composite of all our repressed anger, all our pain, all our envy and jealousy and unspeakable desire. Like the sixties themselves, with their bright promise of peace and love and dope and hope that turned to shit in Altamont and the SLA, even gentle Mark, the Last Hippie, had his dark side.
He had been driving himself to exhaustion’s jagged edge, the last weeks — and beyond, to the all-too-brief interval in Holland, a halcyon interval of peace between Takis and flight. He had been slamming his Moonchild potion repeatedly, though it took a ferocious cumulative toll. He had been mixing his potions in the worst possible circumstances — on the run, under stress, under less than laboratory conditions. His component chemicals were of dubious provenance and purity.
When he took the unknown potion, he did not summon one of his friends. He opened the gate upon the Pit.
He rose from a crater his lust for substance had sucked from the side of mother Earth. He swelled until he stood a full seventy feet, a manlike figure, mighty with malice, his skin greenish-black, lustrous from a d
istance, up close rough and abrasive as the hide of a shark. His fingers were tipped with long black talons. Lightnings wreathed his head, which was huge and horned like a longhorn’s. His eyes were rattlesnake eyes, slit-pupiled, and they glowed with the yellow flame of Hell. His breath withered the forest where it blew.
Between his massive-muscled thighs he carried a gigantic hard-on for the world.
He was full of hate and pain. He was hate and pain. He tipped his enormous head back and roared with the awful joy of liberation. The flames of his gut lit his gullet like Moloch’s.
Mark’s alter egos took their names from sixties songs. Hair was overrepresented, with two, and the others came from King Crimson and Dave Mason and the Rolling Stones by way of Johnny Winter. Many of Mark’s favorite groups were totally neglected. There were no Beatles characters, no Dead, no Destiny, no Quicksilver Messenger Service. He had no potion to turn into the Crown of Creation or Mr. Skin or the Ramblin’ Man. But maybe now he had a persona for that other quintessential sixties group, Steppenwolf.
Call this one … Monster.
“What the fuck,” O. K. Casaday demanded, “is that?”
Standing on the temple steps, Carnifex rubbed his jaw, feeling the knobbed adhesions of countless healed breaks. “That,” he said, “is Cap’n Trips’ newest secret identity, unless I miss my goddam guess.”
Monster bent forward. A vast hand swooped down, caught up Rhino. The German joker squirmed, too terrified to try to defend himself with his powerful horn. For all the good it might have done him.
Monster held him up, studying him with yellow fire eyes. Then he tossed the joker down his throat. His fanged jaw slammed shut on a scream.
The New Joker Brigaders took off in all directions. Odds of several hundred to one didn’t look so attractive anymore.
With a squealing clatter like a steamer trunk thrown down a flight of stairs, a tank crashed into the clearing from the far side, shouldering aside young trees in sprays of splinters. “Thank God,” the junior PAVN officer breathed, and crossed himself
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