Wildcards wc-1

by George R. R. Martin

  It would have to be boldness, nerve, and luck. A lot of luck, Brennan thought as he walked briskly from the shadows. The man in the guardbooth was watching a small television set, a talk show hosted by a beautiful woman with wings. Brennan, who hadn't watched television since his return to the States, nevertheless recognized her as Peregrine, one of the most visible aces, the hostess of Peregrine's Perch. She was watching an immense bearded man in a chef's hat doing something culinary. They chatted amiably as his large hands moved with surprising grace and Brennan realized that he was Hiram Worchester, alias Fatman, another of the more-public aces.

  The guard was engrossed in Peregrine, who wore an undeniably attractive costume that was slit down nearly to her navel. Brennan had to rap on the glass door of the booth to get his attention, though he had made no effort to conceal his approach.

  The guard opened the door. "Where did you come from?"

  "A cab." Brennan gestured vaguely over his shoulder. "I sent it away."

  "Oh, oh sure," the guard said. "I heard it. What do you want?"

  Brennan was about to say that Kien sent him about the girl, but he bit the words back at the last instant. Chrysalis had told him that only very few people knew that Kien and Scar were connected. This flunky certainly wasn't one of them.

  "The boss sent me. About the girl," he said, keeping as vague as possible while making his voice assured and knowing. "The boss?"

  "Call Scar. He knows."

  The guard turned, picked up a phone. He hung up after a few seconds of muffled conversation and touched a panel in front of him. The wrought-iron gate swung open silently.

  "Go on in," he said, turning back to the television, where Hiram and Peregrine were eating sugar-coated chocolate crepes with delighted looks on their faces. Brennan hesitated briefly.

  "One more thing," he said.

  The guard sighed, turned slowly, more than half-watching the television set.

  Brennan rammed his palm, hard, in an upward motion against the guard's nose. He felt bone buckle and shatter at the force of his blow. The man convulsed once as splinters of bone knifed through his brain, and then went utterly slack. Brennan snapped off the television as Fatman and Peregrine were finishing the crepes, and dragged the body into the yard and dumped it behind some concealing shrubbery. Regretfully, he left his bowcase stashed there as well, but, so as not to go totally unarmed, extracted a spare bowstring and looped it loosely around his hips, under the waistband of his jeans. He walked briskly up the drive to the mansion.

  Scar needed a gardener. The yard had turned feral. The grass hadn't been cut all summer; the shrubberies had gone crazy. Untended, they had spilled over their original boundaries and provided a fairly dense undergrowth beneath the thick, untrimmed trees. It was more of an acre or two of forest than a front yard and for a moment it made Brennan long for the quiet peacefulness of the Catskills. Then he was at the front door and he remembered what had brought him here. He rang the bell.

  The man who answered the front door had the insolence of a city punk and the gun that he carried under his armpit in a shoulder rig looked big enough to bring down an elephant.

  "Come on in. Scar's got a client. They're with the girl." Brennan frowned at the man's back as he led him into the mansion. What was going on? Prostitution? Weird sex? He wanted to question the man who was leading him to the rear of the mansion, but knew that it was best to keep his mouth shut. He'd find answers soon enough.

  Scar kept a little better care of the interior of his mansion than he did of the yard, but not much. The marble parquet floor was filthy, and there were stale odors clogging the air that made Brennan sick. He was afraid to breathe too deeply, lest he find himself able to identify some of the odors. A stairway swept upward into the upper stories of the mansion, but they stayed on the first floor, heading toward the rear of the building.

  His guide turned to the left, passed through a metal detector which beeped once, and looked back at Brennan. Brennan followed him. The detector was silent. The thug nodded and led Brennan into a well-lit room that had four other people in it. One was a tough, identical for all practical purposes to the one who had met Brennan at the door. Another was a woman with long blond hair. She wore a mask that covered her entire face.

  Another was Mai. She looked up at him dully as he entered the room and quick stifled the look of recognition that came to her face when she saw him. It had been three years since he had seen her. She had grown into a beautiful young woman, small, delicate, fine-featured, with thick, glossy hair and dark, dark eyes. She looked unharmed, if terribly tired.

  There were circles under her eyes and Brennan could read the weariness in her every muscle by the way she held herself. The last was Scar. He was tall and lean, dressed in tee shirt and black chinos. His face was a nightmare. The patterns tattooed on it in black and scarlet turned it into the leering, bestial face of a demon. His eyes were sunk in black pits, his teeth inset in a scarlet cave. Brennan was surprised to see, when Scar smiled at him, that his teeth weren't filed.

  "What's your name, man?" he asked in the thick argot of the inner city. "I ain't never seen you before."

  "Archer," Brennan lied automatically. "What's going on here?"

  Scar flashed his smile again. It twisted his face into odd contortions that showed nothing of humor.

  "You just in time, man. The sister here is going to demonstrate her power, aren't you?"

  Everyone looked at Mai, who bowed her head in silent, wearied resignation.

  "She can do it?" the masked woman asked, her voice oddly eager and sibilant.

  Scar only nodded and gestured at Mai. The two thugs watched with disinterest. Scar kept shifting his gaze back and forth to Brennan, Mai, and the woman.

  "Tell the man," he said, watching Brennan closely as Mai approached the woman, "that I was going to tell him all about her. I was just checking things out."

  Brennan nodded impatiently, aloof and hard-eyed outside, indecisive inside. Mai walked to the woman without glancing in his direction. Whatever was going to happen, he thought, couldn't be too bad. She seemed to be taking things calmly enough. He decided to wait.

  "You have to take the mask off," Mai told the woman quietly. She drew back a little and glanced at the men watching her, but obeyed. Brennan watched impassively as she unmasked, Scar watched with a slight, sly smile. She was obviously ashamed of her face. Brennan had seen worse, but it was enough to evoke leering whispers from Scar's men. She had no chin and only a slight lower jaw. Her nose consisted of flat nostrils set above her lipless mouth. Her forehead was tiny. Her whole face was thrust forward in a reptilian manner that was enhanced by the colorfully beaded texture of her skin. She looked all the world like a Gila monster with long blond hair.

  "I used to be beautiful," she said, looking down.

  Scar's men snickered aloud, but Mai took her roughskinned cheeks between her palms and said quietly, "You will be again."

  The woman looked up at her, a world of pain in her eyes. Mai gazed calmly at her, her face blank with the serenity of a madonna. For a moment nothing happened. Brennan glanced from her to Scar, who was watching him carefully, then back again. Then, where her palms touched the leathery skin of the woman's cheeks, blood began to run in little trickles. It seemed to be welling from the woman's cheeks, Mai's palms, or both. Tiny rivulets ran from between Mai's fingers, down the backs of her hands to her wrists. Mai moaned and Brennan stared at her as her face changed. Her chin receded, her jaw shrank. Her forehead narrowed and her skin became thick and pebbly and banded in orange and black and scarlet. It took some minutes. Brennan watched with pursed lips. Scar watched him watch. He smiled malevolently, his tattooed face a demonic mask.

  Two lizard-women faced each other, one blond, one darkhaired. The woman looked at Mai wide-eyed, Mai looked back reassuringly. She sighed, longly, like a lover after release, and she began to change. Her skin lost its roughness, its bright color. The bone beneath it shifted back to normal configuration
s. Her lips twitched slightly, perhaps at the pain of the metamorphosis, but she said nothing. It took a moment longer, but the blond woman, too, began to change. Skin softened, bleached itself. Bone flowed like soft wax. Tears ran down her high, fine cheeks, whether from pain or joy, Brennan couldn't tell. The transformation took some minutes. When the tiny rivulets of blood ceased to flow, Mai took her hands from the woman's face. The woman was right. She had been beautiful, and was again. Weeping silently, she took Mai's hand and pressed a kiss into her palm. Mai smiled at her and swayed tiredly. Brennan could see that willpower alone kept her on her feet. Every line and muscle of her body cried out in weariness.

  The woman reached down to a purse on a small table near where she stood and took out a thick envelope. Scar gestured. One of his smirking thugs took it, put it in his back pants pocket, and escorted the woman from the room.

  "Well, man, what you think?"

  "Fantastic," Brennan said, still looking at Mai. "What is it, genetic manipulation of some sort?"

  "I don't know about that shit," Scar said. "I just heard that she was healing jokers in the neighborhood, and I figured why should she fix up those poor jokers when she can fix up jokers who'll pay plenty. So I snatched her."

  Brennan turned away from Mai and met Scar's eyes. "She's worth a lot. You should have told Kien about her. I'll have to take her to him."

  Scar puckered his tattooed lips in mock consternation. "You will? You seem to know a lot, man. How come you don't know that I told the man about her when that gook saw us together in the back of the man's limo?" He turned, looked at Mai, and added maliciously, "And then the man had the old gook hit so he wouldn't tell no one about it."

  "My father?" Mai asked.

  Scar nodded, grinning like a devil. Mai gasped, swayed, and would have fallen if Scar's man hadn't grabbed her roughly by the arm. Brennan moved.

  He launched himself across the room, ripped the gun from the man's shoulder rig, jammed the barrel against his chest, and pulled the trigger. There was an immense roar as the blast lifted the man ofu his feet and threw him against the wall. He left a red smear as he slumped to the floor, his eyes open and unbelieving.

  Brennan whirled, but Scar was gone. He saw a flicker at the edge of his vision and felt sharp pain as Scar chopped down on his wrist, knocking the gun from his grasp. Scar ducked Brennan's sweeping arm, kicked the gun across the room, and vanished silently and utterly.

  He reappeared between Brennan and the gun, smiling crazily.

  "You need a gun to go up against Scar? You some kind of crazy nat," he said. "What name you want on your tombstone?" He reached into the pocket of his chinos and with a practiced flick of his wrist opened a six-inch-long straight razor. He vanished again and Brennan felt a sudden biting pain in his side. He heard Mai's cry, threw himself away, rolled, and stood. Blood ran down his side where Scar had slashed a long, shallow cut across his ribs. He barely had time to stand before Scar appeared again, slashed his cheek open, and popped away. It was as Chrysalis had said. He was fast and precise in his teleporting. And he did enjoy his work.

  "I cut you slowly, man," he said, appearing with killing lust in his eyes, "I cut you till you beg me to finish you." He twitched his wrist, flicking Brennan's blood off the edge of his blade. It was bright in the room, bright and closed in. Brennan was trapped, confined, and he knew he didn't have a chance in hell. Scar would cut him to ribbons, laughing, as he tried to reach the gun. He breathed deeply, calming his racing mind, drawing, as Ishida had taught him, into a state of serene tranquility, and he knew what he had to do. Scar slashed his back as he turned, ran, and hurled himself through the French windows in the rear of the room. He burst out of the light onto a dark patio.

  Scar smiled a genuinely happy smile and stepped out onto the patio after him. He whistled tunelessly and watched Brennan run into the yard and blunder into a thick patch of trees.

  "Hey, nat!" he called out. "Where are you, man? I tell you what. You give me a good hunt, I'll cut you a few times then finish you fast. You disappoint me, I'll cut your balls off. Even the gook chick won't be able to grow you a new pair."

  Scar laughed at his joke, then followed Brennan into the dark. He stopped after a moment and listened. He heard nothing but the sounds of the wind in the trees and, distantly, occasional cars moving in the far streets. His prey was gone, vanished into the night. Scar frowned. Something was wrong. He walked deeper into the trees.

  And from nowhere, a ghost silent among shadows, Brennan rose from his hiding place, his waxed nylon bowstring wrapped around his fists. He looped the string around Scars throat from behind, yanked, and twisted. Flesh and gristle crumpled and Scar vanished. He reappeared a few feet away, clutching at his crushed windpipe. He tried to suck in air, but nothing reached his laboring lungs. He opened his mouth to say something at Brennan, to curse him or plead with him, but no words came. He vanished again, but reappeared a microsecond later in the same place, his tattooed face screwed up in pain and fear, his concentration shattered, his control gone. Brennan watched him flicker crazily among the trees, desperation on his face, teleporting madly, nonsensically. Finally he appeared spewing blood from his mouth, staggered against a tree, dropped his razor, and fell face up. Brennan approached cautiously, but he was dead. He hunkered over him, and took out the felt-tip pen that the waiter had given him in Minh's restaurant. He drew an ace of spades on the back of Scar's right hand, and, to be sure that Kien wouldn't miss it, placed the hand over Scar's marked face.

  He made his way back through the trees silently, like the ghost of a forest animal. Mai was waiting for him on the patio. She didn't seem surprised when it was he who emerged from the trees. She knew him, and what he could do.

  "Captain Brennan, is Father really dead?"

  He nodded, unable to say the words. She seemed to shrink, to look frailer, more tired, if that were possible. She closed her eyes and tears welled silently from beneath their lids.

  "Let's go home."

  He led her into the welcome darkness of the night.

  He left after she bandaged his wounds, promising to drop by when he could, sadness for her welling inside him, merging with the grief he himself felt at Minh's death. Another comrade, another friend, gone.

  Kien had to be brought down. It was up to him, one man, alone, with nothing but the strength of his hands and the cunning of his mind. It would take a long time. He needed a base to operate from, and equipment. Special bows, special arrows. He needed money.

  He drew back into the shadows of the Jokertown night, waiting for a certain type of man to come by, a street merchant who exchanged packets of white powder for green bills crumpled in sweaty desperation.

  He breathed deeply. The night stank with the countless scents of seven million people and their myriad hopes, fears, and desperations. He was one of them now. He had left the mountains and returned to humanity and he knew that this return would bring with it disappointment and grief and lost hopes. And comfort, some part of him said, wondering at the warm touch of invisible flesh and the sight of a visible heart beating faster and faster with growing passion.

  A sudden noise, a softly scraping step, caught his attention. A man passed him. He was dressed richly for a poor neighborhood, and he walked with jaunty arrogance. This was the one for whom he waited.

  Brennan slipped quietly among the shadows, following him. The hunter had come to the city.

  EPILOGUE: THIRD GENERATION

  by Lewis Shiner

  Jetboy dove out of the sky in his rocket-sleek plane, speed lines roarin off the swept-back wings. Twenty-millimeter cannons bared ragged calligraphy and the tyrannosaur staggered as the shells tore into him.

  "Arnie? Arnie, turn out that light!"

  "Yes, Mother," Arnie said. He slid the fifty-four-page special Jetboy on Dinosaur island back into its plastic bag. He switched of his reading light and carried the comic across the familiar darkness of his bedroom and put it away in the closet. He had a complete run of Jetbo
y Comics in one of the waxed cardboard boxes they used to ship chickens to grocery stores. On the shelf above it were stacked scrapbooks full of clippings about the Great and Powerful Turtle and the Howler and Jumpin' Jack Flash. And next to them stood the dinosaur books, not just the kid stuff with the crude drawings, but textbooks on paleontology and botany and zoology.

  Hidden in the back of another box of comics was the Playboy that had Peregrine in it. Lately, looking at those pictures had made Arnie feel strange, kind of nervous and excited and guilty all at the same time.

  His parents knew about his obsessions, all but the Playboy, anyway. It was only the wild card business that bothered them. Arnie's grandfather had been on the street that day, had seen it with his own eyes when Jetboy exploded into history. A year later Arnie's mother had been born with lowgrade telekinesis, just enough to move a coin a few inches across a plastic tablecloth. Sometimes Arnie wished she'd just been normal. Better that than to get a power that wasn't good for anything.

  He'd made his grandfather tell him about it over and over. "He wanted to die," the old man would say. "He saw the future, and he wasn't in it. just wasn't any place for him anymore. "

  "Hush, Grandpa," Arnie's mother would say. "Don't talk that way in front of Arnie."

  "I know what I saw," the old man would say, and shake his head. "I was there."

  Arnie crept quietly back to bed and lay on his stomach, pleasantly aware of the pressure on his groin. He thought about Dinosaur Island. There was no question in his mind that it was real. Aces were real. Aliens were real-they had brought the wild card to earth.

  He turned on his side and pulled his knees up toward his chest. What would it be like? When he was eight he'd driven through Utah with his parents and he'd made them stop at Vernal. They'd gone on the Prehistoric Nature Trail, and Arnie had run ahead to be by himself with the life-sized dinosaur models. Dinosaur Island would look like that, he thought, the rugged brush-covered hills in the background, the diplodocus big enough that he could walk under its belly, the struthiomimus like a huge, scaly ostrich, the pteranodon crouched like it had just glided in for a landing.