Wildcards - Jokertown Shuffle - Wildcards - Jokertown Shuffle Part 28
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Wildcards - Jokertown Shuffle Part 28

The smell was not good.

Shad saw two guards, both jokers. One, a slouched figure in a hooded cloak, paced atop the cages and carried an AK complete with bayonet, while another, a slab-sided gray skinned elephant man, drowsed naked in a chair to one side of the cages, sitting in front of a collection of electronic equipment that looked as if it had been kludged together by Victor von Frankenstein: video monitors, rheostats, switches, red and green Christmas-tree lights, Lord knew what. Both sentries were wearing shades against the glaring light.

The thing Shad found most pleasing about this setup was that there were a lot of photons to rip off.

He covered himself in darkness, inverted himself, and walked along the ceiling until he was over the cages. Most of the people in them were lying down, trying to sleep, arms thrown across their eyes to cut off the incessant light. Most were jokers, many badly deformed. One of them wore a straitjacket and was chained to the door of her cell. Little rhythmic moans came from her slitlike mouth.

The ones they couldn't afford to let go. People like Shelley they could release after a few days, but not Nelson Dixon or the city comptroller. Not the ones with access to accounts they could loot forever.

Shad looked down at the joker guard and felt certainty filling him like a swarm of buzzing photons. He'd hidden himself away, turned himself into other people.

No Dice, Wall Walker, Simon, other phantoms of his imagination or of the street. All dealing with penny-ante shit. Now he was himself again, working on something worthy of his time. Readiness filled him like a welcome draft of springwater.

Photons dopplered along his nerves at the speed of light. The joker guard was right below him. Shad dropped from the ceiling, turned himself upright in air, and landed just behind the guard. The wire mesh boomed. One hand twitched the hood off the joker's head and jerked him backward, the other drove a palm heel into the joker's mastoid. There was a nasty sound of bone caving in. The joker fell onto the mesh with a crash like a falling tree. Shad didn't figure he was dead, but of course skull fractures were unpredictable. And Shad was already on his way to the other guard.

The elephant man had come awake and was staring at Shad, blinking hard, shading his eyes against the glaring light and trying to make out what had just happened in the boiling cloud of darkness that had dropped atop his cages. It was far too late to do anything by the time he realized that the cloud of darkness was heading for him.

The cape crackled in Shad's ears as he sprang off the tiger cages and landed on the joker's chest with both booted feet. The chair went over backwards, and both Shad and the joker spilled to the floor. Shad rose to his feet and considered his handiwork. The elephant man was flat out of the picture, half his ribs broken, blood oozing from a scalp wound where the back of his head had hit the floor.

"Hey! Hey! Let me out!" The voice boomed in the huge room. Apparently one of the captives had noticed that his guard had been flattened right over his head.

"Put a lid on it!" yelled someone else.

The darkness swirled away, revealing Shad's form. He looked at the scarred homemade plywood desk that supported all the electronic gear. There were a series of numbered switches that Shad concluded operated electric locks in the cells.

"Let me out! Let me out!"

"Shut up, fuckface!" Another weary voice.

Shad peered toward the cells. "Which number are you?" he shouted.

"Six! Six!"

Shad pressed number six. There was a loud buzzing sound, a door slammed open, and a yellow-skinned, roundbottomed bipedal dinosaur, wearing nothing but a polka-dot necktie, flung himself out, looking wildly left and right, and started heading for the stairs leading down into the warehouse. "Not that way!" Shad yelled. "Over here!"

The dinosaur reversed direction and started running again, heading for the stairs to the roof. Shad intercepted him and grabbed him by the necktie.

"Hey! Lemme go!"

Shad started dragging the dinosaur toward the console. "This way," he said.

"We're letting everyone out."

"Me first!"

"What you're gonna do is push buttons. And then maybe I'll let you leave. Okay?"

Shad got the dinosaur in front of the console, then walked toward the first of the tiger cages. The door had 01 stenciled on it. Inside was a purple joker with flippers for hands.

"Hit one!" Shad said. He pulled the door open and turned to the joker. "You're free. Take the stairs to the roof, then down and out of here. Tell the police."

The joker ran for the stairs as if he were afraid Shad would change his mind.

Shad walked down the line of cells, opening one after the other. Captives moved toward the exits. The woman in the straitjacket had to have her chain torn off the door by main strength-Shad sucked a lot of photons and boosted his muscles-and then she ran, hooting, for the stairs without waiting to have the canvas jacket unbuckled.

"Hit eight!" The door buzzed and Shad looked up into Lisa Traeger's eyes. She seemed a more privileged class of inmate; she wore an opaque sleep mask propped up on her forehead and had an electric blanket for her cot. She was dressed well in Guess jeans and a cashmere rollneck. A delicate gold chain winked around her neck.

There was a dossier open on the bed, with photographs and xeroxes of bank statements. She was studying her next target. They didn't let their people out after they knew who the target was. A good piece of security, Shad thought.

"You're free," Shad said. His mouth was dry. "Follow the others to the stairs."

She made a nervous gesture with her hands. "I left you a message earlier."

"I forgot to check."

" I haven't told them anything."

He opened the door. "Better get out of here."

She took her blanket and left without looking back. Shad walked to the next door. Peering out the window was a scar-faced woman in an eye patch whose distinctive features he'd last seen in the New York Post.

Dr. Cody Havero.

"I've been looking for you, Doc," Shad said, and turned to the dinosaur. "Hit nine!" The lock buzzed, and Shad pulled open the door.

"Listen," Cody said.

"You're free," Shad said. "Take the stairs to the roof, go down the fire escape, and head for the police station."

"No. Wait. My name is Cody Havero."

"Hit ten!" Shad looked at her. "I know who you are. The whole city's been trying to find you. Hit eleven!"

"Listen." Following him. "I know things. A lot of what's going on, here and on the Rox. I know a lot of the people they've lined up as targets. And-"

Shad heard one of the freight elevators start up and put a hand over Cody's mouth. Night rose from the floor, covered them both. Cody gave a little shiver as her vision darkened.

The elevator platform rose, and Shad could see through the old-fashioned folding elevator door that Tachyon was on it. He looked pale and about a hundred years old. Even the plume on his hat drooped. He was carrying a tray with plastic-wrapped sandwiches and paper cups of coffee.

Shad was already moving, a memory flaming in his mind of Shelley in the hound joker body, little bits of tissue sticking- to her fur as she wiped away tears ...

Tachyon slid open the elevator door before he noticed anything was wrong, and Shad turned everything to night, reached into the elevator, and grabbed Tachyon by the throat.

Hot coffee spattered the floor. Shad slammed Tach's head into the side of the elevator, then swung him around and out of the elevator and smashed him into the brick wall of the main room. Tachyon went limp.

Shad reached down, took the alien's collar in his hands, applied an X-hand choke hold, pressing not only on the windpipe but on the blood vessels on either side of the neck, cutting the arteries that fed the brain. Whoever was inside Tachyon was going to have to die before he jumped out.

He tightened his hold. The darkness fell away, and Cody screamed.

"No! Leave her alone!"

Tachyon was moving feebly, trying without success to tear Shad's hands away.

Cody ran to him, grabbed one of Shad's arms in both her own, tried to haul him off the alien. "That's not Tachyon!" she said.

"Either way," said Shad, and tightened his grip, pressing hard. Tachyon's eyes rolled up. Shad remembered the way the garrote had sliced into his throat when he was a boy, the way the police had to give him a tracheotomy after they kicked down the door, dug a hole in his windpipe, and how he didn't understand what was happening and tried to fight them, thinking they were trying to kill him too.

Cody tugged on him. "It's just some girl named Kelly. She's not really anybody."

Shad looked at her. She took a step back, her eyes widening as she saw his expression, and then determination entered her face, and she yanked on his arm again. "She's Blaise's girlfriend. That's all she is. She does what they tell her."

Shad looked down at the alien body, its face turning purple, and released his hold. Tachyon thudded to the floor, clutched at his throat.

"Blaise is the bad one," Cody told him. "He's behind the whole thing. He's evil."

"Didn't think he was a choirboy," Shad said. His throat ached as if in sympathy with Tachyon's.

"He killed the real Tachyon months ago. Blaise told me." Tachyon's not dead, Shad thought in surprise. He's on the Rox.

He was about to tell Havero that, but suddenly the room was filled with the flat unmistakable boom of a Kalashnikov. Shad's nerves screamed as he dove forward and rolled, willed his opaque black cloak around him. He flattened himself against the metal wall of the prison complex.

The overhead mesh rattled. Cody, he saw, had reacted well, throwing herself flat, and she was now low-crawling toward cover. Her Vietnam reflexes seemed intact.

The AK boomed again. Shad extended his opaque field and climbed up the wall of the cage complex. There was a fountain of sparks from the control console, and the yellow dinosaur fell back, arms waving.

The joker was crouched, the AK shouldered and leveled, and there was a ripping sound as the guard unloaded a full magazine in the direction of the escaping prisoners.

Shad screamed in anger and ate every photon in the joker's body. It took several long seconds. Shad's heart seemed to swell with sudden heat. The joker pitched forward, frozen; there were little crystalline sounds as bits of him broke off and rattled downward through the mesh. Shad ran for the table, saw the dinosaur lying splayed with his brain oozing down the brick wall behind him, the yellow body twitching in its final throes. Shad looked wildly for Shelley and saw her-saw Lisa Traeger's body-running up the iron stairway, panic stamped on her face but otherwise unharmed. Two more of the prisoners were down, wounded. The rest of the swarm of bullets had only pocked the red brick walls. Either the guard was a bad shot, or he'd been seeing triple from his head injury.

Cody Havero ran forward to render first aid, her hands snatching automatically at her pockets as if for medical instruments.

A telephone on the control panel began to purr. Shad picked it up. His eyes tracked to the stair.

"What's happening? Who's shooting?" The voice sounded female and young.

"What's happened-" He felt himself smile. "-is that I just killed your guard.

The question is, what do you think you can do about it?"

He put the phone down. "Everybody out," he said, and hit the remaining switches.

Jokers burst out of cells and staggered for the exits.

"Help your friends!" Shad said, pointing to the two wounded. "Get 'em out."

Out of the corner of his eye he saw Tachyon rise to an unsteady crouch, then fall headfirst down the stairs. Shad suppressed an impulse to pursue and instead hit the switches labeled floods and managed to kill most of the floodlights. An alarm buzzer began its cry, repeating its grating message every three seconds.

Shad walked toward the stairway, darkness swirling off his form like dancing mist.

The first two jumpers bounded up the stairs with UZIs in their hands. Shad dropped night around them, watched the panic grow in their eyes, then drew heat from their bodies till they went unconscious and stumbled back down the stairs.

He heard someone scream down below. Shots bounced up the stairway, fired blind by someone out of sight.

Shad jumped over the barrier to the freight elevator that Tachyon hadn't used, then walked down the side of the elevator shaft. Peering around the corner, he saw a cold-eyed mastiff of a joker and a chubby-faced young white girl braced behind some packing crates, the joker with another AK and the girl with a Dirty Harry revolver far too large for her hands. Both were staring at the stairway with its two bluefaced figures. A white boy in a flash Italian jacket and Bart Simpson T-shirt was trying to kick-start a vintage Triumph motorbike, but in his panic he'd flooded the engine.

Shad didn't see Tachyon anywhere.

Van Gogh's Irises hung on one of the walls under a row of track lights. The warning buzzer was still crying.

Shad took them all out, dropping them with hypothermia, one after another. It took a long time because Shad's body had already absorbed a lot of energy, but the targets were helpless, and he took all the time he needed. When the boy dropped with the Triumph on top of him, the joker began firing wild, bullets whanging off brick, and when Shad began consuming his heat, he held the trigger down and emptied the magazine into whatever crates were nearest him.

Shad slipped from out of hiding, searched the area for Tachyon, and didn't find him. The red metal fire door in back was open; maybe the Tachyon body had simply bolted. Shad handcuffed each of the shivering victims, cuffed their feet as well, and put a garbage bag over each head. A hand-lettered tag attached to each bag identified each as a jumper. The police or emergency-room personnel would remove the bags at their peril. The jumpers couldn't jump anyone they couldn't see.

Shad wandered for a moment amid the stacks of loot. There were lots of paintings, some of which had just taken some 7.62-mm rounds. More prefabricated detention facilities, German in manufacture, designed to be ready for use in any insurrection, revolution, or instant concentration camp. Enough weapons to start a revolution, each labeled in its packing crate-grenades, mortars, antitank weapons. Some of the lettering was Cyrillic, some Chinese. Most seemed to have been transshipped from Texas. Medical supplies. Bearer bonds. Gold bars. Serious amounts of drugs, presumably not for use, rather an investment. File cabinets filled with reports from lending institutions, credit-check companies, credit-card companies, and private detectives hired to scour the neighborhood for new victims.

It was bigger than Shad had imagined. His heart blazed. This was the kind of thing he was meant for.

Well. Time to be a hero. He got on the Triumph, started it, heard the tail pipe boom off the echoing warehouse walls. He drove to the loading dock, opened the door, rolled the bike out. The cold street waited. Shad accelerated, cape snapping out behind him, and turned the corner.

A turreted NYPD armored car sat like a squat insect on the eroded city asphalt.

Police in helmets and flak jackets were setting up sawhorse barriers and stretching out yellow tape.

The Triumph's headlight rolled over them, and Shad saw them start nervously, a general movement toward weapons. Shad decelerated and held up a peaceful hand.

"Chill," he said. "I'm on your side."

A tiny Asian woman in a flak jacket-Captain Angela Ellis, he knew-gave him a narrow look. She had never met Shad, but she'd met one of his identities who had worked out with her in the same karate school. She was talented, Shad judged, but impatient. From her look, maybe the bells of memory were beginning to chime.

Her M-16 was pointed slightly to the right of Shad's heart.

"Who are you?"

"The warehouse is full of loot," Shad said. "Gold bars, paintings, drugs, and a whole lot of guns. There are some kidnap victims I've let go--"

"We've picked up some." A flat declaration. "Some are wounded."

Captain Ellis nodded, raised her walkie-talkie, spoke a few words.

"I've subdued the kidnappers and bagged them for you. Some are jumpers, so be careful."

Ellis nodded again.

"They've been jumping the rich," Shad continued. "The city comptroller, Nelson Dixon, other people with access to cash. There are files in there that should give you a lot of names."

She looked at him with unforgiving jade eyes. "You never answered my first question. Who the fuck are you?" Shad's smile broadened, and he couldn't resist a low, calculated laugh. "Call me Black Shadow," he said.

She stroked her chin and nodded.