Dead Man’s Hand

by John Joseph Adams

  Gunsmith reached for another Card, but maybe she was injured, or just too slow. Whatever the reason, she never used it. An unseen force gripped her, arching her back and contorting her face, and then she toppled to the ground, still in the same awkward position.

  The attacker moved into the room. And as she neared, as the room saw her, felt her, her features resolved so that Quentin could see who it was. His skin went cold.

  Clarice.

  As he watched, she bent down over the dead form of Gunsmith and removed the Card from the still-clutching hand, then retrieved the rest from the holster at the dead woman’s side. It was a thin stack, but she took them, and put them in her own coat pocket.

  I’ve been a damned fool, Quentin thought.

  He ran upstairs, back into the bedroom. He remembered a photograph from before, in a tarnished silver frame. He picked it up. There was a younger Gunsmith and Clarice, no more than a girl. Why would she kill her own mother?

  He was just leaving the bedroom when a gunshot rang out downstairs.

  Quentin ran down the stairs and barreled into the shop. Clarice stood over a limp, dark figure on the ground, holding a still-smoking pistol. Gunsmith’s Spades pistol. Quentin recognized Hiram’s bowler hat rolling away on the floor. Clarice held Hiram’s Deck of Cards in her free hand.

  Clarice turned and leveled the pistol at him. Quentin’s Cards were still in his pocket.

  “Why?” Quentin gasped, reeling as he spoke the words. I’m sorry, old man—I failed you. I let your son die.

  “For these,” she said, holding up the Deck.

  Quentin shook his head. “But you can’t use another man’s Cards!”

  Clarice grinned with one side of her mouth. “Are you certain of that fact?” she said. Quentin began to move, but she cocked back the hammer of the pistol. “Uh-uh.”

  “Do you really think you can make them work?”

  “Oh, I know it to be true,” she said. “It’s clear you’re milling about on the ignorant side of the fence—and to be fair, most of us are—but there are ways out there, secret ways, that only a few know. One trick lets you take another’s Cards and make them your own.”

  Quentin gasped. The old man had taught him that there was only ever the one Deck. Once you used that up, the power was gone. Never to return. To be able to get more…

  “Why kill him?” he said through clenched teeth.

  “Don’t you understand how it works? The Cards are linked to us when we take them. When we use them. I can’t take these if the owner is still breathing. The ritual that tethers them wouldn’t work otherwise.”

  “Ritual?”

  “Yes,” she said, her smile widening. “Once I find it, I’ll—”

  “You don’t even have it yet?” Quentin said, incredulous. Without even meaning to, he moved forward, and then stopped when Clarice took a step toward him, gun arm fully outstretched, violence sparking in her eyes.

  “No,” she said, the smile now gone. “Not yet, but I will. Ma got it from one of her old pals. Only I had to kill him when I made my escape. Believe me, every day I spent chained up in her cellar… I don’t regret it one bit. Though it did make this part more difficult. The sad thing is that the cost, in Cards, is high. But with your two Decks, and Ma’s, I should have plenty leftover after.”

  Quentin shook his head. “She tried to take your Cards?”

  “I was so happy when she told me about them, when she made me my Deck. I was adopted, you see. I felt like this was her passing on her legacy to me. Only I don’t know if she did it because she wanted to share them, or if she knew this is how it would end. I think she gave them to me just so she could take them back again.”

  “My God,” Quentin said. “Why?”

  “Why?” she repeated, a wild gleam in her eyes. “You know why. So much power, but always fleeting. She spent most of her life trying to make them last longer. Putting their strength into objects. But, as you know, they dwindle. They go. She started getting weird in the head. Paranoid. She kept saying that old enemies were coming for her. She needed more. I guess… I guess I made things easier, unsuspecting as I was.”

  Quentin thought back to the old man training him. If he knew barely anything now, he’d known literally nothing then. The old man could have easily killed him and taken the Cards back. “How did you manage to survive?”

  The smile returned. “She had to learn me something,” she said. “I think that’s how the magic works. She couldn’t just take them from me right away. Even so, it wasn’t easy. I used one of my Jokers and that gave me an opportunity. I ran away and never came back. ’Til now.”

  It made sense. Jokers, as Wild Cards, had unpredictable results. He’d in fact used one to similar advantage.

  “Thing was,” Clarice said, “I was really gunning for you and your friend. I picked up on the two of you going around to some of the old-timers, asking questions. I figured you’d be easy marks. I never expected you’d lead me back here. I ought to thank you. Lucky I got to you before she did.”

  Realization dawned in Quentin’s mind. If she was right, Gunsmith wouldn’t have taught them about the Cards. She would have taken them. Still, it didn’t matter much. Clarice was going to do the same.

  She smiled. “Now, toss your Cards to me.”

  “No,” Quentin said. “You’re going to kill me anyway. I’m not gonna make this easy for you.”

  “Fair enough,” she said. The gunshot rang out even as Quentin felt the slug strike his left shoulder. He fell backward, his chest erupting into pain.

  This was it, then, he thought. Death at last. Still with some Cards remaining. The Cards she would take from him. From his corpse.

  He fell to the ground, the impact hard against his body. He’d been expecting a quick death, thought that’s how the gun would work, but it was taking its sweet time. He hurt too much—it was sadistic.

  Clarice moved toward him.

  Quentin found himself wishing that the bullet would take effect, would kill him before she took his Deck away. To have to watch…

  She stood above him now, her eyes greedy.

  Then the room exploded into a flurry of butterflies—fluttering, delicate wings of every possible color flitting and flying through the space.

  Clarice turned in surprise and started swatting at them as they flew at her.

  Quentin pushed aside his astonishment and moved. Whatever the reason, the bullet had yet to take him, and he still had his Cards. Ignoring the pain in his shoulder, he rose to his feet and took out the next Card from his deck, the Seven of Diamonds. His perceptions from the previous card were still lingering, and he reached out through them, feeling roots tangling beneath the wooden floor, coiling through the earth there. The Card flared in his hand and with a creaking, then a cracking, the roots shot up through the wooden floor, suddenly animated, wrapping around Clarice’s legs.

  The pistol went tumbling from her hands, and she reached for her own Deck, drawing a Card, which quickly burned away in her hands. The roots that gripped her suddenly took fire, sizzling away into blackish smoke that blew across the flying butterflies.

  Quentin flipped out another Card, the Eight of Spades this time, and focused his thoughts, throwing a thunderbolt across the store’s space. It flared bright blue-white, incinerating a wide swath of butterflies in its path as it arced toward Clarice.

  But the light from a Card in Clarice’s hand was already fading, throwing up a reddish, transparent shield, and Quentin’s thunderbolt danced across its surface without reaching her. It crackled, trying to penetrate it, but she held it back, her Play at least as powerful as his own.

  They stood like that for a moment, him pushing his power, Clarice holding it back.

  Quentin fumbled for another Card even as Clarice reached for her own, but his wound made his arm tremble and blood had run down onto his hand. He grabbed for one, any one, staring at it so that he could focus on a meaning. Something, anything to take Clarice down.

  He d
rew the Seven of Hearts, and his mind reached out desperately for the first meaning that appeared. The heart. Life energy. He grabbed it and seized it and in his mind pictured Clarice’s heart, willing his fear and anger at it.

  She had already drawn her Card, but then the hand holding it dropped and her other hand went to her chest, her eyes wide in fear and shock.

  He pushed with all of his willpower, carrying the Play through to its end.

  Clarice fell to the ground, terrible gasping sounds coming from her throat.

  He ran to her, crouched down over her. She looked up at him, tears spilling from her eyes. Then she was still.

  Quentin went to Hiram, who stirred on the ground. “How are you not dead?” Quentin asked. “How am I not dead? Did Gunsmith’s pistol fail?”

  Hiram, clutching at a wound in his thigh, shook his head. He pointed across the room to what looked like Gunsmith’s Colt lying in a corner.

  “But—” Quentin said.

  “I laid a glamour on it,” Hiram said. “Made the plain one look like the special one and vice versa.”

  “Didn’t trust her?”

  Hiram smiled. “I just wanted to keep it for myself.” He crawled his way over to Clarice’s body, wincing in pain, and roughly retrieved his Deck. “Bitch,” he said. “Luckily, I remembered the Jokers in my boots.”

  “Butterflies.” Quentin shook his head. “Unpredictable.”

  With his Cards returned, Hiram pulled out one of his own Hearts and fixed up the wound in his leg. Then, in a rare moment of generosity, he used one on Quentin’s wound as well.

  They left the body where it lay, though Quentin removed Clarice’s Cards. It would be up to the sheriff to figure out what had happened, if he could. Quentin knew that they would have to gather their things and move on. Both of them with their Decks lighter than they’d been when they arrived in Stillwell.

  Using a key they found on her body, they visited Clarice’s room at the Avery Hotel. Quentin wanted to open her suitcase but in a rare moment of insight, Hiram thought it might be trapped. “Gunsmith could put a Play inside a pistol, why not one inside a bag?”

  So it was one more Play each (a Diamond to detect and identify the protection and one of Hiram’s Spades to counteract it) before they could safely open it. Inside they found six Decks of varying sizes. These they carefully placed into their own bags.

  Quentin also found a journal filled with names and locations in a feminine scrawl. “Another list?” Hiram said.

  Quentin shrugged. “Got to play the hand that we’ve been dealt.”

  * * *

  Quentin fingered Clarice’s journal as they sat on the train heading west. Dusty brown land dotted with scrub passed by outside the window.

  “Did you believe what she said?” Hiram asked. “That you could get more Cards by taking them away from a person?”

  Quentin looked at his hands. “I don’t know,” he said. “It seems an awful horrific thing to do.” And yet, he thought, the Cards flee so quickly.

  “In any case,” he said, “none of us know the secret. And I think that’s for the best.”

  “Oh, most certainly,” Hiram said, an odd note in his voice.

  They looked at each other uneasily. The rest of the ride passed in silence.

  ALVIN AND THE APPLE TREE

  A TALE OF ALVIN MAKER

  ORSON SCOTT CARD

  The State of Hio, 1820

  It’s not certain now whether Alvin Smith was on his way to Hatrack River for a visit to his own birthplace and his wife’s people, or on his way west from such a visit, but the hamlet of Piperbury isn’t more than two days’ walk for a man with shoes, three days barefoot, and half a day for Alvin when he ran through the woods with the greensong in his heart.

  Coming or going, when Alvin came to a covered bridge spanning a brook so narrow a lazy man could step over it, he knew he was on the road his father and brothers had traveled not long after Alvin himself was born. They left no stream unbridged in those days, as a kind of vengeance on the Hatrack, which had served the Unmaker by taking the life of the family’s oldest boy, Vigor.

  “You seem to be touching that bridge like a half-forgotten friend,” said a man’s voice.

  Alvin turned and saw him then, resting his back against the trunk of a tree with his feet in the cold water of the stream.

  It wasn’t often a body could sneak up on Alvin. But since he was sitting still I suppose he wasn’t sneaking. He was as still as if he had grown like moss on that tree. Alvin could ordinarily sense folks, especially White folks, who didn’t often blend in proper with the living things around them. But this man did. Or rather, it’s more like he didn’t exist at all, for all Alvin had noticed of him till he spoke.

  “You seem to belong here,” said Alvin, “yet your worn-out pack and the calluses on your feet say that you’re a traveler who walked long today.”

  “And you’re not even out of breath,” said the traveler, “and yet you ran out of those woods so fast I thought you to be a hare in a hurry.”

  “That’s because my shoes are so fine,” said Alvin, “I have to run.”

  “But you ain’t wearing any shoes,” said the traveler.

  “My shoes are so fine,” said Alvin, “that only I can see them.”

  The traveler lifted one dripping, naked foot out of the water and rubbed the rough and horny sole. “You can see I’m wearing shoes, too, but coarse and homey ones. I never asked the Lord for any better, though.”

  “I think we have a cobbler in common, sir,” said Alvin.

  “Your clothes are homespun and your feet are bare,” said the traveler. “May I ask if you’re primitive Christian, sir?”

  “I’ve been called primitive,” said Alvin, “and I try to live as a Christian, but I think when you put those words together they took on a new meaning and I don’t know it.”

  “We’re the Christians who try to live the simple life the Master led. Shoeless, in coarse raiment, living from handfuls of corn in the field and the wind-harvested fruit of the tree.”

  Alvin thought about that for a moment. “I’m not sure if it says in the gospels, sir, that Jesus chose his simple clothing, but rather wore the best he could afford.”

  “He also said to sell all you have, give it to the poor, and come follow him.”

  “Did you sell all you had? Did it fetch a good price?”

  “I gave it to my brother and left it all behind. Now I travel from place to place with my bag of apple seeds and the word of the Lord.”

  “Then I have a name to put to you, sir, if I’m not mistaken. Are you John Chapman, the one they call Appleseed, who has established apple nurseries in towns from east to west and north to south?”

  “Not much east and even less south, but north and west of here, I’m sometimes called John Appleseed, or Johnny when they drink a toast to me with the cider made from the sour fruit of my seed-grown trees.”

  “Seed-grown always?” Alvin asked, for he had heard some faint emphasis in the way John Chapman said those words.

  “The gentle fruit for a rich man’s table is made from a grafted tree, delicate sweet-bearing trunk sprouting from a hardy sour root. But here in this country, I plant the seed-grown tree that’s honest from root to leaf, the kind of apple tree that a working man can keep, because he doesn’t have to climb up to pick the fruit when it’s unblemished and pretty. A working man comes to my tree and gathers the fruit from the ground, too ripe and tart to go into the mouth, but just right for the cider barrel. I plant drinking apples, my friend.”

  Alvin laughed, because he liked a brag and a tale as much as any man. So he stayed and jawed and bathed his feet with the man and they traded stories, some of them nigh on to true.

  But the best stories, Alvin reckoned, were the ones about the apples John Chapman planted. That’s because Alvin, being a Maker, had a way of seeing into most folks’ knacks, puzzling out exactly what it was they did, and when John Appleseed got to talking about how he put th
e pollen from one tree into the blossoms of another and found the best mix, Alvin understood his treeknackery better than any other soul was likely to.

  For John Appleseed didn’t just blow the pollen into the blossoms. John Appleseed breathed the pollen into his lungs and there he came to know the grains, the deep inner secrets of them, in the few moments of a held breath. Then he puffed out onto the blossoms only the pollen grains that he wanted them to know, and so the apples that came forth were like the animals from Noah’s Ark, ready to go and propagate the world, each after its own kind.

  “You’re a man with a marvelous knack,” said Alvin, “for talking and for growing things. But I don’t see a jug of cider in your kit.”

  “A man who’s had the pure pollen in his nostrils has no need of the fermented cider,” said John Chapman.

  And because Alvin was an honest man, and didn’t expect to hear any more lies than he would tell himself, he took him at his word. And, as far as it went, that word was true. John Appleseed was no cider drinker. He ate the tart apples as they came, sharp to the bite, and otherwise he ate cornbread like other folks.

  The sun was at midafternoon when they parted, Appleseed for a place he’d camped before, the time he came to plant his nursery here. “And you go on into Piperbury, my young smith. It’s a godly town.”

  “The whole town?” asked Alvin. “That will be a sight. Every other town I seen has its good and bad people all mixed up together.”

  “In Piperbury, they have a keen awareness of the goodness of God and the low poor condition of the human soul,” said John Appleseed. “Every living soul of them. It’s why I love it more than any other place where I’ve set up a nursery of my trees. It’s why I keep on coming back.”

  From this, Alvin wasn’t quite sure what to expect as he crossed through the bridge and walked on into Piperbury. Would they be a pious group, proud of their humility, critical of any who weren’t as humble as they? Or would they be genuine Christians, their hearts filled with compassion and generosity? From what he found, Alvin figured, he’d know a good deal more about John Chapman.