Wild Cards 15 - Black Trump

by George R. R. Martin

The Sharks' new hideout seemed to be a combination bomb shelter and emergency command post for the provincial communist party brass - Guangdong, way southern China, across the line from Hong Kong, at least until 1997, when the line would magically go away. The People's Republic of China was paranoid enough to still be testing thermonuclear weapons - if that was truly paranoid for a country trying to keep a lid on a numerous and vigorously oppressed Muslim minority - but with the collapse of the nation the Chinese leadership had always considered its true enemy, the USSR, the Guangdong CP evidendy felt safe enough to let the facility out for rent.

  The lab was on a lower level, possibly the lowest, and seemed to have been set up for medical treatment rather than research. That didn't matter. The Sharks had brought everything Mark needed to complete his betrayal of the wild cards.

  "Dr. Meadows."

  At the sound of that hated voice Mark felt a wild urge to sweep the flat round jars off the table onto the floor. Go for it, JJ Flash's voice urged from the back of his skull. They'll never let us go anyway. Why not cop a quick exit?

  But he didn't. He just held himself there, braced at the apex of the triangle of his arms like an asthmatic struggling to breathe.

  Then Jarnavon was standing next to him, blinking down at the petri dishes through his thick horn-rimmed glasses. "These are the wild-card positive tissue cultures you introduced the tenth-generation Trump variant to, aren't they?" he asked in tones of cathedral reverence.

  Mark's jaw muscles trembled. His teeth creaked. He nodded once, convulsively.

  Jarnavon raised a hand as if to clap Mark on the shoulder. It hesitated in midair, hovered, and then the younger man shook hands with himself in an I'm-the-champ gesture.

  "It works." The words came out of his narrow nose in a sort of giggling snort. "It works! Oh, Dr. Meadows, you've done it! Humanity will remember your genius forever!"

  "Yeah," Mark rasped. "That's what I'm afraid of."

  ♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

  Gregg decided that if Jerusalem was the Disneyworld of religion, then Temple Mount was the Magic Kingdom. All they needed were street vendors hawking Crucifix ice cream bars, Yahweh's All-Kosher weiners or "I'm A Dome-Head" hats. The city was littered with ancient holy sites, the detritus left behind as one group after another had occupied the area in the centuries-long tidal swell of war and conquest. The ground was watered with martyr's blood, there wasn't a stone left that hadn't been part of some temple or shrine or church at one point or another. A miasma of holiness threaded through the streets like a glowing fog. You breathed sanctity and exhaled history. You could not escape it: the legacy of this city became part of your blood and heart and soul.

  And the Black Dog was willing to blow it into atoms - or so he claimed.

  Gregg and Hannah were at the Western Wall, the Wailing Wall, watching the supplicants. Two rails partitioned the great Herodian limestone blocks of the lowest course into a section for men, a (smaller) area for women, and a (much, much smaller) area for jokers. All three areas were busy, the knot of people waiting longest, not surprisingly, at the joker section. Behind these ruins of the long-destroyed Second Temple - the edge of Temple Mount and perhaps Judaism's most sacred site - loomed the gilded presence of the Dome of the Rock, called Kubbat as-Sakrah in Arabic, the third most holy place in all of Islam. The rock enclosed by the Dome, the bared summit of Mt. Moriah, was said by the Muslims to be one of the stones from the Garden of Eden, and was the place from which Mohammed ascended into heaven. Those of the Jewish faith believed that this was the rock taken from underneath God's throne and thrown into the void, from which the very Earth was created. The Temple Mount was somewhat less sacred to Christians (though the Golden Gate behind the Dome was reputed to be where Jesus entered the Temple Mount after his descent from the Mount of Olives on Palm Sunday), but only a thousand or so feet to the west was the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, containing within its walls Calvary, where Jesus was crucified, and the tomb into which his body had been placed.

  A nuke wasn't going to leave much to worship but radioactive waste.

  But would the Black Dog really push the button on all this if the Nur calls his bluff? Gregg wondered. Or is the nuke really for the Nur?

  You'll find out, the voice answered him. That's your job.

  "What's he doing?" Hannah asked. She gestured toward a man dressed in Hasidic black, who at their distance was just a blur to Gregg. Hannah realized it a moment later. "I'm sorry - you can't see that far, can you? The man's stuffing a little folded piece of paper into a crack between the blocks of the Wall. Why?"

  "You put your prayer on a slip of paper," Gregg told her. "Sticking it into a crack here is making sure that God reads it directly. At least that's what I've been told."

  "What's your brand of religion, Gregg? You've never mentioned anything about it."

  "I was raised Catholic. I ..." Gregg stopped. "I kind of lost my faith somewhere along the line." Around the time I found Puppetman, he wanted to say, but didn't. Puppetman was my God, my own dark deity.

  "Did you ever get it back after you lost it?"

  Gregg shuddered, involuntarily. What's the matter; Greggie? the voice asked Answer her. "No. Though being here makes you think about things like that. What about you?"

  "Methodist. I still believe, I guess, though I don't go to services regularly. And you're right, there's a feeling here." Hannah crouched alongside Gregg, her arm around his body, uncaring that people stared at them as they passed. A discreet distance away, openly watching them, was Needles. Needles was supposedly their guide while in Jerusalem; Gregg knew the boy was more guard than guide, making certain that the two of them did nothing to harm the Twisted Fists and reporting what they did back to the Black Dog. Sightseeing while they talked over the Black Dog's requests was relatively safe; contacting any of the authorities would probably get them killed. "Gregg, what the hell are we going to do? I can't believe that the Black Dog would ask you and me to go into the desert and talk to the Nur. Delivering his ultimatum to the Nur is only going to get us killed - maybe that's what the Black Dog wants. It certainly isn't going to get the virus destroyed; the Nur won't fall for that bluff."

  But seeing the Nur is what you want too, isn't it, Greggie? When you heard the Dog say the words, you knew you wanted to go. The power ... the Nur ... "I don't know. I really don't know. He said he'd arrange for us to be under a flag of truce - we deliver the message, and we leave." The sun was hot on his back and sent shimmering highlights dancing from the Dome. And we take the Nur's strings with us.

  "I don't think the Dog was bluffing, Gregg. You don't go to the trouble of buying a nuke unless you're planning to use it. It's a lousy conversation piece. He'll use it - if not against the Dome, then against the Nur."

  "I agree."

  "We can't let him do that."

  Gregg glanced away from the Wall and the Dome, up toward Hannah's earnest face. "Do you have any ideas on how we can stop him?" His thin, high voice sounded more annoyed than he wished, and Hannah stood up abruptly without saying anything. Needles scowled in their direction. "Hey!" he called. "What you two talking about?" He took a few steps toward them. Gregg noticed that tourists were giving the three of them a wide berth.

  "We're talking about stupidity," he told Needles. "The radioactive kind."

  The kid blushed. Gregg could see the green-purple of embarrassment wash over his mind like a bruise. "Just shut up about that," Needles said. "The Black Dog knows what he's doing."

  "That's exactly what we're afraid of," Hannah told him, and Needles' face reddened further.

  "We need that nuke," Needles insisted. "Zoe wouldn't have helped him if it wasn't important." The voice was strong, but Greg could see the pale yellow underpinnings of uncertainty in his aura.

  "Important for what?" Hannah continued. "Has the Black Dog decided that five for one is too low a ratio? Is he going for five thousand for one? Look, you're just a kid. I've seen this five for one revenge crap. I've seen it up close."

>   As Hannah spoke, he could see something change in Needles's face, in his odor, in his colors. "You have too," Gregg broke in abruptly. "Haven't you?"

  "Yes," Needles admitted. He shuffled his feet, looked across at the Dome as if eye contact would burn him. "But I ... I ..."

  "You didn't like it either, did you?" A tug at the strings ... Oh, yes, this is delightful. Needles' guilt filled Gregg like a fine meal, satisfying a hunger he hadn't known he felt. Yes ... So hungry, after so long ...

  "It was necessary. We had to do it, to teach the nats not to fuck with jokers like us."

  "Sure, that's what they told you. Just like with this goddamn nuke. But what did you feel?" Gregg persisted, enjoying the taste of the youth's discomfiture. Needles looked at his shoes, like a kid being scolded by a parent. "Did you enjoy it, Needles? Did you like feeling the pain? Did this guy scream nicely for you?"

  That brought the youth's eyes up, angry. "What kind of monster do you think I am?" he said. "I'm not some sick creep. I don't enjoy hurting people."

  The voice laugned and Gregg shuddered. I'm not either, he told it. I know I was, once. But not now. Not now.

  "Right." Hannah sniffed her disapproval. "That's why you joined the Fists. So you wouldn't have to hurt people."

  "I joined so that the people I love wouldn't get hurt," Needles told her, sweeping his hair back from his eyes. A child, still, Gregg realized. "So I could protect them. That's all. I joined because I thought they would help us: me and Zoe and the others."

  "Who's Zoe?" Hannah asked, but Needles just shrugged. Gregg could feel a sadness settle around him like a veil. Just because he could, he deepened the colors, and was pleased to see tears well in his eyes. The youth blinked hard, suddenly looking away toward the Western Wall, to the supplicants placing their prayers into the cracks between the stones, his eyes bright, his mouth shut with his lips tight, and his hands clenched. Gregg knew what he was thinking by the colors of deepest aquamarine drifting around him.

  Sudden bright white blossomed in the center of the sapphire melancholy. It tasted of anise to Gregg. "All right," Needles said. "So maybe I don't like the Fists much either, and I wish the Dog weren't keeping no fucking nuke in the catacombs. There ain't much we can do about it, is there?"

  "I don't know," Hannah told Needles. "You have a piece of paper on you?" The boy plunged his hands into his pockets, pulling out a bedraggled slip that looked like a receipt. "That'll do," Hannah said.

  "What are you going to do?" Needles asked.

  "I'm going to borrow a pencil, and then we're going to take a walk," Hannah told him, pointing at the wall and the line of supplicants. "I'm going to stick the paper in there and ask Him what the hell we should do - ask for a sign. Anyone got a better idea?"

  "Not really," Gregg told her. But down inside, the voice grumbled. Yes, you do, the voice told him. With me, you can make things right. All you have to do is use me, Greggie ...

  "Come on, you two," Hannah said, interrupting his internal reverie. "We're in the Holy City; we may as well pray."

  They wound their way through the crowds toward the joker section. As Gregg brushed against people, he caught snippets of their emotions. As they approached the back of the line, he was frowning. There was a hostile atmosphere in the area, one that made the voice inside perk up. "Hannah, why don't we head back for the Quarter?" Gregg said uneasily.

  "What's the matter?"

  "I don't know. It's just - "

  Afterward, Gregg was never really sure how it started.

  Suddenly there was shouting and a quick flurry of activity. Then screams, and the cough of a handgun.

  People pushed against them. Needles unshouldered his rifle and sent an ear-shattering burst into the air. That earned them a brief clear spot as everyone in the vicinity dove for the ground or fled. All around the open area near the Wall, people were running, and the narrow lanes between the stalls were clogged. The scent of gunpowder was nearly overpowering. Hannah started forward, stopped; Gregg, trying to stay with her, bumped into her legs.

  It was worse than Westminster. There was no focus to anything, and he couldn't see.

  ♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

  In the Joker Quarter, Ray felt eyes on him wherever he went. He prowled the streets, familiarizing himself with their sights and sounds and smells. He went from market to cafe to bazaar. He stopped at a dozen cafes, using a straw to sip heavily-sugared tea through what was left of his mouth. He inspected the goods in half a hundred shops, buying things here and there, listening and watching without seeming to.

  By the end of the day he knew about the silent, black-clad guards who watched over the Quarter's streets. He also knew the streets themselves as well as he ever could and he was starting to get edgy even in his newfound patience. He considered half a dozen plans, all of which he knew would end in disaster, but, damn it, he had to do something, he just couldn't wander the streets from sunrise to sunset, watching, listening, and hoping.

  He was considering going up to one of the Fist guards and doing something foolish when the sound of gunfire, echoing weirdly off the ancient stone buildings, sounded from a couple of streets away.

  He smiled, though you couldn't tell it from what was left of his face, and hustled down a slop-filled alley toward the ratcheting gunfire. He stopped a moment to orient himself, went down another alley, crossed a street, cut through a small square filled with the carts of fruit vendors, and suddenly found himself on the edge of a large square that was packed with frightened, screaming people. Most of them had hit the ground. Some were desperately crawling for the pitiful cover afforded by a dozen or so food and souvenir stands scattered throughout the square. Some weren't moving or screaming at all, their blood staining the ancient cobblestones.

  It was easy to tell the two sides apart. The Sharks were dressed in khaki spruced up with odds and ends of paramilitary geegaws, though, Ray noted, they didn't have the fruity berets favored by the last bunch he'd run across. The Fists were easy to pick out, too. They were the ugly-looking ones, and they were losing.

  Thirty or more bodies lay in bloody pools on the pavement. Most were obviously by-standers caught in the crossfire, from the look of their clothes conservative or Orthodox jews. But some of the bodies were Fists, their black uniforms spattered red with blood.

  As Ray watched one of the Fists was blown out from behind a fruit cart he'd been using as cover. There were four or five of the jokers left, facing twice that number of Sharks. Most of the Fists seemed to be trapped against a tall wall that formed one end of the square. They had no cover except for the cowering bystanders trying to squash themselves flat against the pavement.

  Ray moved in to change the odds.

  The first couple were easy. Their backs were to Ray and they were concentrating on the Fists in front of them. Ray wasted no time. He swooped down on them and smashed them with his clubbed hands before they even knew he was there. Unable to contain his frustration or anger and without a hint of pity for his targets, Ray's killing blows left the Sharks in crumpled heaps at his feet.

  ♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

  For a minute or more, there was little they could do but try to avoid the fighting, trying to stay in the lee of the action. There were more gunshots, screams. Gregg could feel Hannah's panic and Needles' growing anger.

  A new fight broke out not far to their right when they were nearly to the edge of the square. Through the moving screen of the crowd, Gregg saw two men grab a Joker whose head looked like it had been hit with a shovel and then frozen, the nose flat and his mouth welded almost entirely shut with scar tissue. Gregg saw the joker's hands come up, and the fingers were fused together like the mouth. Still, the Sharks had made a mistake in their choice of opponent; the joker took one in each hand and slammed their heads together with a sound like coconuts. When he let them go, both men dropped like rag dolls, blood streaming from noses and mouths.

  "Assholes," the joker mumbled in an American accent, and the stitched mouth grinned in seeming s
atisfaction. "That was hardly worth the effort." The grin and the words sent a cold chill through Greg. He knew that lopsided smile, even with the changed and altered face. Jesus! the voice shrilled in his head. It's him! For a moment, the riot around them vanished. The world disappeared, focusing down to a universe that consisted only of the joker's face. Gregg could hear nothing, could see nothing else but those eyes and the hatred in them. The presence within him cowered, even as it searched for the strings to that fury. Ray! It's fucking Billy Ray! He's come after us! The strings burned in Gregg's mind, and he let them go, knowing he couldn't handle them.

  "Come on!" Gregg shouted to Needles and Hannah. "Now!" With the word, he tugged hard at their strings. They followed, infected by his panic.

  "Gregg?" Hannah asked as they pushed through the chaos, heading downhill toward the Quarter. Behind them, they could hear screams and wails and the sound of sirens approaching. The entire square was an unfocused melee, with more people rushing in toward the scene. Gregg, on all sixes, weaved through running legs. "Where are you going?" Hannah asked, trying to keep up with him. Needles panted alongside her.

  "Anywhere that's out of Jerusalem," he shouted back over the din. "Looks like we got the answer to that prayer of yours."

  ♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

  Ray had them flanked. He took one of the dead Sharks' rifles in his clumsy hands, pointed it in the general direction of the other Sharks and triggered a long buret. It got their attention even though it only splattered the sandstone wall above their heads. Attacked from front and side, the Sharks chose discretion over valor and slipped back into the surrounding alleys.

  For a moment there was stillness broken only by the frightened or pained weeping of the bystanders. The Fists checked their shot-up comrades, who were mostly ready for the grave. One of the jokers headed toward Ray with a peculiar, sliding sort of gait. He wore a black cotton cape and cowl and was built oddly, kind of roundly. As he approached, Ray could see that his body ended in a snail-like foot that left a broad smear of mucus in his wake.