“You’re more subtle than a helicopter,” came the dry reply. “Why are you so reluctant? This is a small thing when compared to the actions you took to put me here.”
Noel briefly closed his eyes and remembered the night of chaos and death when he’d killed the Nur, clearing the way for Siraj to take control of the Caliphate. He was supposed to have been a compliant puppet for Britain’s ambitions.
It hadn’t worked out that way.
“That was another life. I’m different now. I’m married. I’m going to be a father. I do my shows. I don’t concern myself with politics.”
Noel felt a blaze of anger when Siraj’s lips curled into a smile. “You must be bored stiff,” the prince said, and Noel’s anger was swept away by a sudden cascade of laughter.
Suddenly they were whooping, struggling to catch their breaths. Siraj wiped away tears of laughter. “Well?” he asked.
“Oh, all right. One last adventure before staid middle age overtakes me. But remember, I can still kill you.”
“And I can still ruin you.”
Jackson Square
New Orleans, Louisiana
A flash of fire. The smell of bacon.
Not bacon-searing flesh. And it isn’t fire, either. It’s raw power right before it transforms into something else-something more specific.
And now there’s a bunny.
“Fuck the damn bunny.”
Michelle doesn’t need to look to know who it is.
“Hey there, Joey,” she says. “Are we going to have zombies, too? ’Cause you know I love me some zombies.”
Hoodoo Mama crouches down in front of her. “This is no way to run a fucking railroad, Bubbles. Cocksuckers out here want you gone, baby, gone. You can’t stay like this.”
Michelle can’t look at Joey. Not after what they did.
“What? After we fucked?” Joey says. A group of zombies appears behind her. Damn it, Michelle thinks. It’s my dream and there are still zombies.
“Shit, Bubbles, if you get like this every time you tear off a piece…”
“Okay, that is so not what happened!” Michelle yells. But she remembers what went on between them and feels ashamed and aroused.
“Don’t you understand?” Michelle wails. “I betrayed Juliet. Why did I do that? And I’m now the size of a elephant and, apparently, too large to move or be moved. Oh, and if I’m not mistaken, I think I have the power of a nuclear explosion in me.”
The zombies vanish. Joey stands alone on a blighted landscape. She’s frail, tiny, and anyone could hurt her.
Then Michelle is back in the pit. Adesina is there. Her face is obscured by her hair come undone from its braids. She isn’t wearing the faded dress anymore. Her body is barely covered by rags.
“Adesina,” she says softly. Michelle crawls to her. She tries not to think about the corpses. She brushes the hair from Adesina’s face. A dark bruise swells on the girl’s left cheek. There are half-healed cuts on her chin and on her forehead.
“Why are you in my dreams?” she asks. Michelle puts her hands on Adesina’s temples. She allows images to flow through her mind, trying to connect.
Adesina pulls away. It hurts. Dreams aren’t supposed to hurt. Nothing hurts Michelle. And dreams don’t smell. And there is a definite lack of bunnies here. If there aren’t bunnies, then this isn’t a dream. But if this isn’t a dream, then what is it?
There are bodies piled up in the pit. They’re in different stages of decomposition. And it reeks. A stench so bad she can barely keep from gagging.
“Adesina, are you really down here?”
And as she says it, a shriek explodes in her mind and Michelle runs to the only place far enough away that she can’t hear it anymore.
The Sudd, Sudan
The Caliphate of Arabia
The sudd was a stinking swamp.
The bloated bodies, already rotting in the sun, didn’t help. Siraj gasped, gagged, dug a handkerchief out of his pocket, but the rising vomit couldn’t be stopped. He turned aside and puked. The bile and chunks pattered in the standing water. A breeze hissed through the papyrus, carrying away the scent of vomit, but bringing more stench of death and blood, overlaid with cordite and gunpowder. Smells Noel knew well.
They picked their way through the reeds and papyrus, seeking reasonably dry ground. Bodies floated in the waters to either side. There were more on the solid ground. Noel paused over one corpse. The man’s face was gone. He squatted down, and inspected the raw wound at the top of the corpse’s skull and beneath his jaw. “No bullet did that,” Siraj said.
“No. His face has been bitten off.” Noel pointed at the raw edges. “Those are teeth marks.” He stood and looked around. Now that he knew what to look for he saw many more faceless corpses.
“What does that?” Siraj asked.
“Probably not your average soldier in the Simba Brigade.”
They broke through the reeds to a relatively open, dry patch of ground. Ruined tanks sat smoldering like Easter Island monuments to some forgotten war god. Several of the tanks were tossed aside, as if a giant’s child had thrown them in a fit of massive pique.
“I think we can safely assume that Tom Weathers was here.” Noel scanned the tank graveyard and spotted a human figure leaning against the shattered treads of one reasonably intact tank.
He and Siraj ran to the man. His face was smoke-blackened, and blood had turned his shirt into caked armor. He was in his early forties, and he recognized Siraj. “Mr. President. I’m sorry.” He coughed, a wet sound that Noel didn’t like. “We were winning. We outnumbered the Simbas. But then a darkness came. Unnatural, horrible. Our troops were blind, but somehow the blacks could see. They massacred us. There was something else in the darkness. Not human. A demon.” His head lolled forward onto his chest.
“Those are not among Weathers’s known powers,” Noel mused.
“We need to get this man to a hospital,” Siraj snapped.
“We’ll drop him in Cairo on our way to Paris.”
“Why are we going to Paris?” Siraj slid his arm beneath the soldier’s. He gave a grunt as he lifted him.
“Because you need a drink,” Noel said.
Offices of Aces Magazine
Manhattan, New York
“This,” bugsy said to himself, “is why print media is dead.”
The offices of Aces magazine had once been in the hippest, happeningest part of Manhattan. They hadn’t moved, but the neighborhood had changed. The tides of years had eroded all the cool out from under the fashion and finance, leaving the streets decent but unexceptional, and tacitly on its way down. Like the magazine.
Bugsy leaned against the door, squinting through thick security glass into the darkness beyond. He’d only met Digger Downs a few times before during Bugsy’s somewhat foreshortened run on American Hero. It seemed like a lifetime ago. Three years, it had been. The guy had seemed sort of an asshole, as much as you could tell when he was at the big desk and you were singing your heart out to make your big break in showbiz. But he’d been picked by the Hollywood types for exactly the reason Bugsy was there now. He was old school. He knew where the bodies were buried. In a lot of ways, Digger Downs was the history of the wild card.
But the history of the wild card clearly didn’t work weekends. So screw it.
Bugsy shrugged his laptop case back up onto his shoulder and checked the time on his phone: 2:30. Still at least three hours before Ellen would be back at her place. He had some time to kill, and there were about half a billion Starbucks to choose from within an eight-block radius. He picked the third one he came to because it had the free wireless sign up in the window and the barista smiled at him when he paused outside the window.
Double-shot tall dry cappuccino firmly in hand, he staked out a tall chair by the front window that afforded a view of the street, popped open the laptop, quietly cursed Windows Vista again, rebooted the laptop, and spent fifteen minutes checking e-mail and catching up on a couple news blogs. H
e cracked his knuckles and the joints in his neck, then pulled up Google and dug through the largest single machine ever built by humanity for traces of the Radical.
Wikipedia gave a decent overview. Tom Weathers, the Radical, had first appeared in China in 1993. That was actually a lot more recent than he’d thought. He followed some of the reference links at the bottom of the entry. As long as the fascists, the capitalists, and the willing collaborators hold the reigns of power, it is the duty of the people to oppose them. When the last landlord in the world is strangled with the intestines of the last banker, the work of peace can begin. Until that, any discussion of peace is treason against the people.
Bugsy figured the guy probably meant “reins,” but whatever. He read on for another few sentences, muttered “yadda yadda blah blah blah” under his breath, and went to a different site. There were a long series of small wars, guerrilla resistances, police actions, and freedom-fighting brotherhoods that Weathers had gotten himself involved in over the years. Burma, Indonesia, Colombia, Turkmenistan, Afghanistan… Yadda yadda blah blah blah.
A wild cards discussion board had a thread on him. It hadn’t been updated in a couple of years, but the archived conversation painted the same picture. The Radical was against the Man in all His forms, fighting for whomever he was fighting for and against whatever he decided was fascist or oppressive. He had a bunch of powers, real charisma, and a bad habit of deciding his allies weren’t politically pure enough. There were half a dozen sites that sold T-shirts with his face, many with slogans in alphabets Bugsy didn’t recognize right off.
“Need anything?” the barista asked. She was maybe twenty-two, blond, with the black tips of a tattoo sneaking out from her shirt near her collarbone.
“Freedom from the oppressors,” he said cheerfully.
“Word,” she replied in the whitest, most middle-class voice imaginable.
It would have been funnier if Bugsy hadn’t thought the Radical would have killed both of them, just for joking about it.
The willing collaborators. It sounded like a garage band.
Tuileries Garden
Paris, France
“If weathers doesn’t have these powers, then what killed my soldiers?” Siraj gripped the stem of his champagne glass like a man hugging a life preserver.
“Other aces. Aces plural.” Noel sipped his Hendricks gin martini and savored the cool/hot smoothness on the back of his tongue.
Siraj knocked back his champagne in a single gulp and waved his glass at a passing waiter. He got the usual Gallic sniff, frown, and shrug, but the man did head toward the bar. Noel looked out the window at the Tuileries Garden across the street. He had wanted to sit outside, but the late November rain made that impossible. The furled umbrellas in the metal tables looked like hunched, skeletal men in dripping coats.
“Then the PPA has multiple aces.” Siraj’s voice was heavy with despair. “How can that be? The release of the virus was localized over New York. The preponderance of aces has always been in America. I had one… Bahir… you. Now I have none. Unless…?” The implicit question hung in the air between.
Noel held up a restraining hand. “Oh, no, no, no, no. Weathers has sworn to kill Bahir.”
“I’ve got to have aces. If the PPA is recruiting them, then so can I.”
There was something about that that struck Noel as wrong. He contemplated Tom Weathers-charismatic, arrogant, impatient, always questioning the purity of one’s commitment to The Movement. “I can’t imagine Weathers ever accepting a mercenary ace into his army.”
“You’ve now taken two contradictory positions,” Siraj snapped. “Which is it?”
“Oh, they’re using aces. The question is where they came from.” Noel remembered Weathers’s dossier. The man had been thrown out of every revolutionary movement prior to the PPA because the other members always turned against him. The glimmering of an idea began to coalesce.
Siraj was speaking again. “Look, if you won’t fight for me will you at least help me recruit some aces? You have contacts from the Silver Helix.”
Noel gave an emphatic head shake. “If you field your own aces, Weathers will move directly on Baghdad. I have a better idea. One relying more on cunning, guile, and manipulation rather than brute force. The things at which I excel-”
“Yes, yes, yes, you’re a genius. Move on.”
“Remove the Nshombos. The PPA will collapse. The armies will pull back from the Sudan to join in the inevitable power struggle-”
“Which Weathers will win.”
“No, he has neither the personality or the force of character to hold it together. And he’s a white man. There are too many colonial memories to allow that to happen.”
“Yes, there are a lot of colonial memories.” Siraj smiled thinly. “So you’re going to kill the Nshombos.”
“That seems very crude. The last thing you want is to make a tin-pot dictator a martyr. It may come to that, but let’s try something more elegant and subtle first.”
“I suppose you use those same terms when referring to me,” Siraj said, and again smiled thinly.
“Oh, no, you’re not a tin-pot dictator.” Noel’s smile matched Siraj’s in thinness. “I know you actually want to help your people. I respected you for that, and that’s one of the reasons we selected you to replace the Nur.”
“Please, spare me your smug British approval.” The waiter returned with a bottle of champagne and an ice bucket. Siraj poured himself another glass. “I want this done by the end of the year. If it isn’t, I’ll release my little dossier on you to the World Court, the press, and Tom Weathers.”
There were times when remonstrating was pointless. This was one of them. Noel shrugged. “All right, but we need to postpone the march of the PPA on Baghdad. Let’s buy some time.”
“And how would you suggest I do that?”
“Ask Dr. Nshombo for a peace conference. If Nshombo refuses he’ll look like the aggressor. All these dictators like to think of themselves as the hero of their own three-penny opera. He won’t want the bad press.”
Siraj took another long swallow of champagne. “And if I involve the UN it will only add to the pressure on Nshombo to accept.”
“It will take time to arrange the conference, and you can spool out the talks for weeks, if necessary.”
“Five, to be precise.” Siraj filled up Noel’s empty martini glass with champagne. Their eyes met over the rim of their glasses and Noel saw no warmth in Siraj’s.
His old house mate would follow through on the threat.
Jackson Square
New Orleans, Louisiana
Michelle had been awake for several hours when Juliet and Joey showed up. The security guard let the girls in, and when the door opened Michelle could smell the olive trees, the heavy scent of the Mississippi, and beignets cooking at Cafe du Monde.
“Oh, honey,” Juliet said. “You’re awake again!”
Michelle opened her mouth, but only managed a hoarse croak. She swallowed and said, “Oil can.”
“Oil can?” Juliet asked.
“Fuck all. It’s a stupid joke, Ink,” Hoodoo Mama said. “ ’Member? Wizard of Fucking Oz? She needs some water.”
“Of course,” Juliet said. “You had that tube down your throat for so long.” She hurried out, then came back a moment later with a cup and a straw. Michelle drank and she felt as if there wasn’t enough water in the world to quench her thirst.
“Don’t drink too much, baby,” Juliet said. “The doctor said it could make you sick.”
Michelle dropped the straw. “I’m almost indestructible,” she said. “I doubt a little water will hurt me.”
Adesina hasn’t had water in God-only-knows how long, Michelle thought. She was just a little girl. Even a few days without water could… Michelle felt something warm and wet drop onto her cheek. Juliet was crying.
“Oh, God, Juliet… don’t.”
Juliet just cried harder. Michelle glanced at Hoodoo Mama-she felt guilt
y doing so with Juliet’s hot tears dropping on her. She shoved her guilt away and a stab of anger rose up in her.
It was Tom Weathers’s fault that she was here and that she couldn’t bubble even though she’d spent the last couple of hours trying to. There was this insane power in her and she couldn’t figure out how to get rid of it.
And that scared her so much she thought she might lose her mind. And then none of it mattered because Adesina was still stuck in that pit and Michelle couldn’t help her as long as she was trapped in her fat.
Another of Juliet’s tears fell on Michelle’s head and brought her back to New Orleans. The last time she had seen Juliet, she’d gone corporate for her job with Billy Ray. Now her hair was short and spiky again. But her tats weren’t the pretty Mayan ones she’d favored in her punk days. Now they were black and tribal and aggressive.
And then Michelle noticed that Joey and Juliet were dressed alike: both of them wore Joker Plague T-shirts and ratty jeans. What had happened to change Juliet back into a punk chick, and what had made Joey a fan of Joker Plague? Michelle knew the signs of girls who had hung out too long together. They’d gone all hive-mind. “What’s happening, Joey?” she asked. It was getting easier to talk. “Where am I? This is still New Orleans, isn’t it?”
“Jackson Fucking Square,” said Joey. “After you ate that fucking nuke you got really big and really, really, really, really heavy. The cocksuckers couldn’t move you, so, for a while, they just put up a tent around you.”
Michelle shook her head. Or at least she tried to. “How long have I been here?”
“A year and change.”
Michelle was staggered. A year. A year. A YEAR? She was cold, then hot, and then cold again. Her hands started shaking. How was she even alive after a year?
“I know it sounds like a long time…” Juliet said.
Joey interrupted her. “You just missed Thanksgiving. The city erected this temple thing over you after they couldn’t keep the tourists and grateful citizens away from your massive ass. You’re a cocksucking saint to most of the dumbasses on this planet. Except your shit-stain parents, who got you taken off life support so they could get their hands on your money again.
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