"You always wear water bottles?" Billy Ray asked.
"I thought I'd have to run for it," Zoe said.
"Keep them," Billy Ray said. "We haven't made it out of this damned desert yet."
Zoe reached up and yanked the shower chain, and the three of them spluttered in a deluge of clean, tepid water.
"Outside!" Zoe said. She grabbed her robe. "We get dressed outside!"
Starkers, they ran out into the storm. Sand drove against Zoe's wet hair and coated it in gritty mud.
"We've got to catch April," Billy Ray said.
"We have to make sure nobody leaves this camp," Zoe said.
"They can't walk out. Croyd can get us to April's truck, and then he can run to Jerusalem in no time flat." Billy Ray fastened his belt and picked up his guns.
"What is he, a supersonic camel?" Zoe asked.
"Yeah."
"The camels. The people here could leave on the camels."
"I can turn the critters loose," Croyd said. "They'll follow me."
Billy Ray and Croyd started around the back side of the tent, on their way to the camel herd. Zoe followed grabbing her pack out of the sand as they passed it.
"We'll be stopped!" She couldn't hide the quaver in her voice. "If that water truck makes it to Jerusalem before we do - "
Billy Ray untied the camels. They snorted at the sight of Croyd but they got to their feet in the sand and crowded around him.
"That's all of them," Billy Ray said. "Sit down, Croyd, and we'll climb on." Zoe climbed on Croyd's hump and grabbed a double handful of muddy camel hair. Billy Ray clambered on behind her. "Giddyap," he said.
♥ ♦ ♣ ♠
Canton airport lay on the city's outskirts, on land built up from the rich, moist soil of the great Xijiang delta. Flying low above the paddies Radical saw a modern-looking multiple lane road leading to a terminal building and hangars. Held down by guy lines out in the middle of the runway, looking like the Macy's float for the song "Och, Johnny, We Hardly Knew Ye," lay the airship Harmony.
The runway looked deserted in the slanting yellow sunset light. No baggage and fuel carts roaming around, nobody standing by the blimp. There was an Airbus parked off on the right wing of the terminal, with a skyway ramp hooked up to it, but he couldn't see any activity around it. That might mean much or little; in the distance Canton looked like a pretty big city, and he would have expected more traffic.
"Well," he said into the heavy humid breeze of his passage, "let's try the direct approach." As peasants shin-deep in reeking water raised up their conical hats and pointed, he flew toward the terminal building. He was relishing the sense of liberation after so many years, and he wasn't as alert as he could have been despite the situation. He saw flashes like pale highway flares from several points on the roof, then heard nasty sharp cracks in the air nearby.
Somebody was shooting at him. He heard the full-auto reports as he swooped toward the front of the two-story terminal. He frowned. He was guilty of poor discipline; he had known he was flying into danger. He had let himself get carried away ...
The front of the terminal was glass. Or had been. Most of it lay in glittering shard snow on the sidewalk and street. He heard more gunshots as he touched down lightly on the sidewalk, saw muzzle flashes in the gloom.
Small arms fire didn't concern him too much. Bullets hurt like hell, and bruised, and if people concentrated enough fire on him he would certainly go down from the sheer battering. But he was Radical, and he was free. Standing upright he walked through the vacant windows into the building.
Cold air hit him like a bucket of water. The air-conditioning was still blowing, keeping the muggy air at bay. In front of him rose an escalator. To the left were ticket counters; to the right a couple of baggage carousels. It looked surprisingly like an airport back in the States.
Except of course, for the party of raggedy-ass South China Sea piratical types who were blazing away from the ticketing area at guys in khaki uniforms with red stars on their caps hunkered down beside the carousels. More guys with guns crouched at the top of the escalator, but Radical didn't get a great look at them.
The pirates and the locals didn't notice the newcomer. There's something about somebody firing an automatic weapon at you from sixty feet away that tends to concentrate your attention. Radical slipped off his peace medallion, began to swing it in circles on its chain.
Gunfire erupted from the top of the escalator. Whoever was up there had been engrossed watching the shootout on the lower floor, but now Radical's arrival had been noticed. More bullets shattered the air by his head. He smiled. By this time his medallion was a spinning blur.
He let it go. The heavy peace symbol flashed through the air and split the skull of a Chinese gunman. He dropped, anointing his comrades with his blood and brains.
The others turned around and cut loose on Radical with everything they had. Their bullets passed through the smiling blond apparition. So did the bullets from the men on the second floor.
A few serene paces and Radical was in among the uniformed troops. He held out his hand. His medallion leapt from the floor by the wall and flew into it.
He grinned more widely at the astonished troops. "Okay, boys," he told them, "time to show you what a real communist party is all about."
He began to whirl the medallion around his head. Steel gun barrels sparked and parted when it struck them. Heads and limbs didn't spark, but parted just the same.
The official Chinese party line opposed belief in the supernatural. That worked as well as anti-supersititon campaigns had everywhere else. Which is to say, the loyal soldiers of the People's Liberation Army knew there were no such things as evil spirits. Except, of course, when one appeared in their midst.
They ran.
Radical swung his medallion a couple times more to clear various clinging bits of stuff from it. Then he swayed and sat down on the lip of the carousel. Going insubstantial had really drained him. It surprised him. He knew that he partook of the powers of Mark's other alter egos but, unlike them, he didn't have substantial memories of an earlier life. The world had started for him in that battle at People's Park, and all the time intervening had been spent in a state below semiconsciousness, trapped in the depths of Mark's psyche.
A bandy-legged little bearded guy with a red rag tied around his head and a patch over one eye came up. "You one of Belew's boys?" Radical asked him.
"Bell You," he agreed happily, touching his chest. "Lu."
"Lu," Radical repeated. "We need to get up that escalator pronto."
Lu's one eye moved nervously. "No can. Too many on top, too many guns. We try, all die. You lose."
"You have a way with words, Lu," Radical said, smiling. He stood up. He felt better already, and losing was the furthest thing from his mind. "The solution is simple."
"What that?" Lu asked, squinting suspiciously.
"Follow me." He turned and strode for the escalator.
The men up there reacted quickly, loosing gales of small-arms fire. A pair of bullets struck him in the chest, but they were nine-millimeter rounds from an Uzi, with nowhere near the punch even of the short 7.62 bullets the Kalashnikovs fired. They stung, and rocked him back, but they didn't hurt him.
He laughed and answered fire with fire - JJ Flash's plasma flame. A gunman standing square at the escalator's top caught the brunt of the blast and fell in flames, but he was well dead before his central nervous system could register pain. Two others crouching behind the housings where the flexible handrail fed back down into the mechanism weren't so lucky, and caught air superheated by the plasma jet. One came hurtling downward past Radical to find the hard ground floor for anesthetic. The other tottered back, shrieking and waving his arms in his terrified comrades' faces like a flame-feathered bird. It was rough, but Radical wanted it to be. The fear of burning is fundamental to the human organism. It would make the others quail, or at least stand back - he sent another blast, a generalized dragon-belch without specific ta
rget, ahead to keep the way clear.
He gathered his legs - twice as powerful as a nat's - beneath him and sprang. He landed at the top, legs spread, grinning hugely. He held up a flame-wreathed fist in a revolutionary salute. "All right, you imperialist lackeys," he declared. "Who wants some?"
All of them, apparently. There were at least twenty armed Occidentals on the second floor, leavened with a few PLA security troops. Every one of them leveled his weapon at the apparition and held down the trigger.
At least a score of bullets struck the center of Radical's glorious bare chest at once. The impact knocked his glorious ass right back down the unmoving escalator steps.
♥ ♦ ♣ ♠
Sascha Starfin sneezed, spraying snot all over the interior of the rattling flatbed truck.
"Real good," Jay told him. "I feel a lot safer now."
Behind the wheel, J. Bob Belew gave off a sand-in-the-gearbox chuckle. They were riding in a rickety, farting stakebed truck liberated from the underground facility, down a road whose pavement seemed to crumble away beneath their tires. Ahead, the airport appeared across flooded rice paddies, where straw-hatted peasants worked to the timeless rhythms of Chinese show tunes playing from tinny sixties-vintage Japanese transistor radios.
Jay was mashed in the cab between Sascha and J. Bob. He jumped every time Belew reached to work the floor-mounted stick-shift, which was jutting up between the detective's knees.
"Are we there yet?" Sascha asked, his voice thick and congested. If he'd had eyes, they would have been running.
"The terminal is the building that looks like a baleen whale smiling at us," Belew said. "And there's the good ship Harmony beyond it." A white roundness swelled like a tumor from behind the terminal. "They're due to take off for Hong Kong at sunset."
"How fast is that damn thing?" Jay asked.
"She's good for upwards of sixty knots," J. Bob said, "but it'll take her a while to get up to speed, largely due to air resistance. Be a long trip there - hour and a half, maybe - but once they're on the scene you couldn't ask for a better vehicle to disperse the virus."
A face appeared at Belew's window. It was a handsome, round Asian face with deep soulful eyes.
Jesus!" Jay sputtered. "Can't you pick a face and stick with it? Who the hell are you now?"
"Chow Yun Fat," the face said. "The Cary Grant of the Orient. He stars in all those John Woo action flicks."
"Real good," Jay said. "Maybe the Card Sharks will all want your autograph."
"Chow Yun Fat is like a god in Asia, They'll never shoot at him." Chow Yun Fat showed them a suave smile.
"What's that sound?" Sascha asked.
As if for emphasis the truck backfired juicily. "It's our wonderful conveyance," Jay said. "The Chinese have figured out how to make the damn things run on pinto beans."
"No, not that," the joker said snuffling. "That."
Jay listened. He heard it too. "Either Casaday is making up a bunch of popcorn, or Radical started the party without us."
The terminal," Belew said. A quarter-mile ahead they could see the tall windows lit in pulses from within, as if pranksters were flicking lights on and off at random. "That's a firefight in progress," the mercenary said. "Looks as if Dr. Finn and Tung's men are having a difference of opinion with the local security forces."
Jay moaned and sank down in his seat. "Whose bright idea was it to send Bradley to the airport?"
"We're all at risk, Mr. Ackroyd," Belew said. "A bullet in the head may be a kinder fate than the Black Trump."
"A Bullet in the Head!" Chow Fat Jerry exclaimed. "That's one of the movies Chow Yun Fat made with John Woo."
"I wouldn't know," Jay said gloomily.
"Hang on," Belew warned them. He spun the wheel hard right and mashed the accelerator down. The truck departed the road, rolled across a shallow ditch with engine grinding and groaning protest. It struck the steel-mesh security fence and plowed through with a scream of anguished metal. Broken wire ends scraped along the doors like fingernails on a blackboard.
"Are you out of your fucking mind, Belew?" Jay screamed, as the truck bounded onto cement apron, in among hangars.
J. Bob was grinning beneath his mustache as if this were the greatest game of all time. "If you don't like action movies," J. Bob said serenely, "you're really going to hate this."
♥ ♦ ♣ ♠
Radical lay for a moment at the foot of the steps. From above came a shrill rebel yell of triumph.
Lu's face floated upside down above his. "Not dead?" the man said, wonder in his voice. He poked a thin brown finger at Radical's wounds, touching them to make sure they were real.
Radical glanced down at himself. His chest glowed with a lot of little pink circles, as if someone had been beating on him with a ball peen hammer. He was going to do serious bruising. "I'm fine," he said, managing not to croak it - although it felt as if somebody had been trying to resculpt his ribs with a cold chisel. He snapped himself up onto his feet like a gymnast. And he laugned. Despite the pain, despite the danger, he felt great. He was free, after so many years chafing in captivity.
Enjoy it while it lasts, came a voice from deep inside his skull.
For an instant he frowned. It felt disorienting to have the thoughts of such a dangerous reactionary rattling around in his own skull. Like having a traitor within.
I don't plan on going back to being that poor bourgeois fool Meadows in an hour, he thought haughtily.
None of us does, Harpo, JJ thought back. None of us does.
He shook the doubts off like drops of water in his wavy surfer-dude hair. He wondered what time it was. Then he decided he had no time to wonder.
"Let's try that again," Radical said. He flew up the steps - literally, a handspan above the rubber handrails. A pair of gunmen had crept up to the head of the escalator. Each was trying to outwait the other, fearful of getting a faceful of flame. When they caught sight of Radical shooting up at them they started to rise, trying to bring MP5 machine pistols to bear. Radical spread his arms, swept both of them up, and bore them right into the faces of their comrades.
Goons went everywhere. Radical got his feet beneath him, planted far apart, and began to swing his peace symbol above his head. Then he just waded into his opponents, giving them no clearance to use their firepower.
"All I'm saying, guys," he said in a ringing, sarcastic voice, "is give peace a chance." The golden medallion hummed round and round, splitting limbs and heads like a circular saw, surrounding the ace with a wave of blood like the splash from a boulder falling into a lake. Some brave soul grabbed his left wrist - then shrieked soprano as flame flared up Radical's arm.
Radical grinned at the man as he staggered back, staring at the chaired nub his hand had become. "What's the matter, comrade? Too hot for you?"
A Chinese soldier popped up to his left, shouldering a Type 56. Radical phased out as the soldier fired an ear-roasting burst. Goons screamed and fell as the bullets scythed through them.
The man lowered his weapon, gaping. Radical phased back in, swayed slightly - shit, that takes it out of me! - and turned the weapon to a yellow-glowing ingot in the man's hands.
He turned around, grinning into the faces of his terrified antagonists. "I'd love to stay and rap," he said, "but I've got a blimp waiting. Peace."
He turned. Flame flashed from his hands. The high windows looking out on the runway shimmered like mirages and vanished, puffing into incandescent gas.
Radical flew out where the windows had been, soaring up to let the rays of the setting sun, angling up over the terminal building, strike him fully. Energy filled him - energy, confidence, purpose. He felt the sun's heat inside him. Nova heat.
Nothing could stop him now.
♥ ♦ ♣ ♠
Belew brought the flatbed screeching around a corner. Automatic weapons fire chased them across the field. Lord Tung's boys were returning fire from the back of the truck. Jay half turned in his seat and saw one of their men take
a hit and tumble off the back, but Belew only accelerated, swerving.
In the shadow of the terminal building, J. Bob slammed on the brakes hard. The flatbed skewed around and came to a screaming halt beside a ring of baggage trailers that had been driven together to form a makeshift breastwork. Behind the piles or tourist luggage stood a ragged handful of Belew's South China Sea pirates, and Bradley Finn, MD.
Tung's boys were leaping off the truck even before they were stopped, scrambling for shelter behind the wall of Samsonite. Chow Yun Jerry sauntered after them. Belew moved around the truck, snapping orders in Cantonese. Jay tumbled out and helped Sascha down from the cab. "This way," he said, taking the blind joker by the arm. As they ran for the luggage a burst of automatic gunfire punched into the planks surrounding the truck bed.
Finn and the pirates laid down covering fire until they were safe behind the suitcases. "You all right, doc?" Jay asked him.
"No thanks to you guys," the centaur said. He had his hair tied back with a red bandana, and he was wearing his flak jacket and his Kevlar horse blanket. The bandana was soaked with sweat; he looked like Rambo with a tail and dyed green hair. "You took your own sweet time getting here. When Casaday showed up with the Black Trump, we figured you were all dead." He squinted at Jay. "Your face looks even worse than before."
"You should see the other guy," Jay said.
The airship Harmony was grounded about fifty meters from the terminal, held down against a slight eastern breeze by cables tied to trucks. There were figures crouched behind the trucks, and more lying outside the terminal with rifles pointed at their luggage. Desultory fire punched holes in Guccis, American Touristers, and cardboard valises alike.
"I can't tell our guys from their guys," Jay said.
"The ones shooting at us are their guys," Belew said. "It appears we have more than the Sharks to deal with." He gestured across the tarmac toward some little brown men in uniforms with red stars on their hats.
Wild Cards 15 - Black Trump Page 51