He laughed again, exultant. This was, all of it, what he was born for. He looked at her, the laughter still rolling from his throat. "Somebody else got jumped,"
he said. "Somebody important."
Her eyes were most unfriendly. "Who?"
What should have happened was that he spoke the name of Tachyon, ate every particle of light for about ten yards around, gunned the Triumph, and disappeared like the Lone Ranger into the night, trailing triumphant laughter.
What happened instead: The world suddenly spun in his head, and then he was looking up into a starless New York opalescent night, and he could feel his own limbs twitch and spasm as if they were not his own. Shelley looked down at him with a sneer on her face. She was wearing a lot of mascara and the wrongcolored eye shadow. Her breath was warm and smelled of gin.
"Asshole," she said. "Son of a bitch. I should blow your brains out."
Brandishing a chrome-plated .38 revolver. Shots banged off hard brick walls.
Shad could hear shouts and screams. Shelley grabbed him by the collar, jerked him left and right. He couldn't seem to make his body do what it wanted. Roof asphalt and pebbles grated on his back.
It wasn't Lisa Traeger doing this to him but the old Shelley, the young girl he'd first met. He recognized the bridge of freckles across her nose.
"Hear that?" Shelley said. "That's Diego in your body, and he's kicking police ass." She laughed. "Cops are gonna come looking for you."
He had been jumped. The thought pierced Shad's mind like an icicle. He gasped for breath and tried to rise, arms and legs thrashing.
Shelley laughed contemptuously and shoved Shad back onto the roof. Police shotguns boomed out. "Relax," she said. "You'll be back in your body real soon, and you won't like it."
Shad's mind whirled. He had just worked out who he was, and now he wasn't himself anymore.
The hell he wasn't.
I am Black Shadow, he thought. There had to be a way to make this body work for him. He lay back on the cold roof and concentrated on making one finger move. It seemed to do as he commanded.
Okay. A start.
I am Black Shadow, he thought.
Shelley went to the roof parapet and looked down. "Diego, shit!" she said. "Get outta there! Jump! You've made your point."
She wore a white evening dress, a fur wrap, and an incongruous pair of battered red sneakers. Her hair was longer and punked up with mousse. She and her friend had probably just come back from a night of club-crawling and seen the police setting up their barricades. You needed a twenty-one-year-old body to get into the kind of clubs where jumpers probably wanted to hang out. Shelley had provided one. Maybe that's all they really wanted her for and the trust fund was just a bonus.
Shad tried to move his left foot, was successful, and managed to move the left leg a few inches. More or less as he intended. Then he tried the right leg.
I'm Black Shadow. Black Shadow. The words becoming a mantra.
More guns fired. Shelley paced back and forth at the parapet, muttering. Shad wondered if the police were winning. "Yeah! Yeah!" Shelley chanted. "Run for it!"
A storm of fire erupted. Shelley leaned out over the parapet, apparently following someone escaping around the corner, and then she sighed. "Good." She came back to stand by Shad's side and looked down at him. "You're gonna get yours, asshole."
Black Shadow. Black Shadow. I'm Black Shadow.
He looked at the woman next to him. And you're not Shelley.
Shad moved. His coordination wasn't very good, so he chose a move that could be done without any real precision. His kenpo teacher called it sticks of Satin. He dropped his right leg against the front of Shelley's ankles, then slammed his left leg against the back of her knees. His accuracy was none too great, but the leverage was still good enough to pitch Shelley forward, landing hard on hands and knees.
Shad lunged upward and grabbed her gun arm by the sleeve, then dragged her toward him. He clubbed one fist and tried to bring it down on the back of her neck, but his accuracy was wretched, and he hit the back of the head instead. He kept hitting. Shelley struggled, almost got free, but Shad lurched atop her and bore her down to the asphalt.
"I'm Black Shadow," he said. "Black Shadow." His arms wrapped Shelley's head, right forearm folding across her jaw, left cupping the back of the head.
"No," Shelley begged. "Don't." Shad's heart twisted. "Black shadow!" he screamed, and snapped Shelley's neck.
He pulled the .38 from twitching fingers and staggered to his feet. The sky whirled around him. He tottered to the parapet and looked down.
The Triumph was on fire. Angela Ellis was on the pavement, moving feebly as police figures crouched over her shouting into their radios. Other officers lay sprawled across the pavement, some in pools of blood.
They'd blame Black Shadow for it, he realized. How could they do anything else?
There was a noise on the fire escape, and Shad spun to face the sound. Dizziness almost brought him sagging to his knees. Black Shadow rose from the darkness. He looked at Shad and the sprawled figure of the lifeless jumper.
The cloaked silhouette approached. He was carrying a police M-16. "Man. I thought I was cornered there for a second. I musta jumped twelve times before I ended up back in this body." He dropped the rifle and grinned. "Turns out this guy can walk up walls. Lucky for me." His look turned puzzled. "Why are you in my body?" Thinking Shad must be his friend. He looked from one to the other again, then alarm entered his eyes. "What are="
Shad lurched toward him, swinging up the pistol on the end of his right arm. "I want my body back, motherfucker." Black Shadow looked uncertain. Then he smiled.
"Maybe," he said. "If you drop that gun."
"Bullshit." The gun swayed. Shad grabbed it with both hands.
Black Shadow's eyes narrowed inside the mask. "Maybe I can cross that distance before you pull the trigger."
"Just try it, motherfucker. I know I ain't faster than a speeding bullet, and neither are you."
The jumper hesitated. Apparently he didn't know that he could hide himself in darkness or freeze Shad solid, because he didn't try it. Maybe he hadn't been alive to read Aces magazine in 1976.
Shad blinked sweat from his eyes. The gun jittered in his hands.
"You don't seem too coordinated, asshole," said Black Shadow. "Why don't you put the gun down?"
"I want my body back," Shad said, "and if I don't get it, I'm gonna hurt you."
Black Shadow looked at him. "How you gonna do that?" He grinned insolently. "I'm in your body. You aren't gonna hurt this body, are you? Look at yourself. You're fifteen years old. I'm a grown-up."
Bang.
Black Shadow's eyes widened as the bullet whipped over his head. "Shit!" he said. "Will you put that thing down?" Shad blinked eyes dazzled by the muzzle flash, a problem his regular body didn't have. "If you give me my body back,"
Shad said, "you can have this body. This body has a gun, motherfucker. Maybe you can kill me with it before I snap your fucking neck."
Black Shadow hesitated, licking his lips. "Let me think." Bang.
The bullet clipped him in the leg, and he went down with a yell. "Stop that!"
"Give me my body back!"
"Fuck you!"
Bang.
The bullet took Black Shadow in the torso somewhere, and he went down, suddenly limp, hands clutching at the roof. "You're crazy!" he shouted.
And then his eyes narrowed as he looked at Shad. Triumph sang through Shad's veins as he realized what was about to happen. He gave his hand a command to drop his pistol, but suddenly the world was spinning again, and he couldn't be certain if the command was obeyed.
Asphalt hit him in the face. I'm Black Shadow, he thought, and laughter rang through his mind.
He ate every photon he could reach. Heat blazed through him. He rolled across the roof as blind pistol shots snapped out.
The jumper loomed in his awareness, a flaming infrared target that staggered around the roof, blinded by darkness.
Shad's body had been exercising hard, and it was starved for energy. Shad concentrated on the figure and drank in its heat.
The jumper swayed, staggered, collapsed.
Shad gasped for breath and tried to rise to his feet. The wounded leg seemed willing to support him; the bullet had gone through the fleshy part of the thigh. The other bullet had gone through the right shoulder, and Shad could feel bone grating as he tried to move it. Blood was soaking the jumpsuit, coursing warm down Shad's right arm.
The wounds were in shock, and there was no real pain yet, just little crackling twinges of what was to come. He was going to need a doctor real soon. Except that the police had fired a lot of bullets at him, would have no idea whether they'd hit, and would be searching the hospitals for him. The jumpers too, probably.
He'd have to find a doctor he could trust, a junkie or alcoholic or someone who would want his cash and not turn him in. He searched his mind.
Nothing. Shit. He'd settle for a vet.
He could hear police shouting, the pounding of boots on pavement. They'd heard the shots and figured something was up. Time to leave. He squatted over the jumpers and Shelley's body, and ate every bit of heat in them, feasted on photons until the two lay with frost covering their glassy eyeballs. Shad rose and headed off the roof. A tornado of heat swirled in his heart. Blood drizzled on the cold pavement below as he eased himself over the wall.
I'm Black Shadow, he thought.
A glowing green landscape burned in his mind. The night covered him with its velvet mask.
He collapsed two blocks away. He panted for breath, ate photons, tried to gather himself together. He became aware of someone moving cautiously across the street, watching him with dilated cat's eyes.
"Wait!" He called the darkness, staggering toward her trailing a boiling black shroud and a trail of red. She hesitated, then began to retreat. "I need help."
He sagged against the wall and slid to the pavement.
Chalktalk turned. Her dilated cat's eyes seemed big as the moon.
A bolt of pain shot up his arm. "I've been shot," he said.
"I need to get out of here." He sagged against a brick wall. Chalktalk stood, undecided, five long yards away. "Can you take me somewhere?" Shad asked.
"Someplace where I can ... get better? I can't have police involved."
She said nothing.
Shad tried again. "You've been following me, okay? I know that. So you know what I've been up to. I don't know what your reasons were, but-" Pain crackled through his body. He gasped. "Help me now, all right? Like I helped you with Anton."
She walked close to him and knelt, her bulky overcoat obscuring her work as she reached for chalk and began to draw.
Shad shivered. The girl's warmth called him, but he didn't take it. The chalk made little scratching sounds on the pavement. Shad became aware that he was sitting on wetness. "Hurry," he said.
The girl looked up at him. Her famished wide-eyed face was lit from below, as if the pavement were glowing with light. He crawled toward her, and she ducked her head toward him and kissed him, and before he had a chance quite to absorb that, he was suddenly aware that he was falling. Falling into another place.
The phone rang twice. 741-PINE. The answering machine picked up.
A woman's voice spoke for a few seconds. "I've called a dozen times," she said.
There was no one to answer. The little Jokertown room was empty, holding only a narrow bed and a footlocker with an odd assortment of clothing.
"I don't know what to do," the woman said. There was a click. And then there was silence.
The Temptation of Hieronymus Bloat
VII.
Blaise had torn down the Administration Building around me, replacing it with a gigantic cage of steel. I stared out forlornly through the bars as Blaise and Prime rounded up all the jokers from their houses and the caves below, herding them into a great mass before me. Tachyon-Kelly was there, too, standing beside Blaise and cradling the great mound of her belly. Blaise kissed her savagely, his eyes open and staring at me, not her. Prime applauded the gesture-Latham had taken all the money from the jokers; the bills in an enormous green pile before him.
"Now, Durg," Blaise said, and I heard a rumbling. An enormous bulldozer the size of a house came into view, and instead of grillwork, the front of it was Durg's face. DozerDurg churned the earth of the Rox, driving inexorably toward the jokers, who screamed with rapture-blue lips, cowering and backing away from the mechanical horror until the water of New York Bay lapped at their heels.
"Stop!" I yelled to Blaise from my case. "This is the joker homeland! This isn't your place; this is the Rox!"
Blaise only laughed. Prime smiled coldly, sorting the stacks of bills before him. A cold wind was blowing, a dark wind, and it scattered the money. Latham ran after the flying bills, shouting and grasping, but the wind took them all out into the bay. Prime-Latham jumped up and down on the shore, cursing.
"Prime!" I shouted to him. "You have to help me! I'm the governor!"
Blaise was laughing at Prime, laughing at me. DozerDurg herded the jokers, forcing them deeper into the water. "Well, Fatboy, they've got you trapped, but then you already know that."
I looked down to see the penguin grinning up at me. A huge key ring was hung over the funnel hat; an ornate ancient key dangled from the ring. "Shut up. Go away," I told it.
"Whassamatta, Gov? You afraid?" The penguin tsked softly, shaking its head. The key rang against the ring with a dull chiming. "You have so much potential, so much power."
"I don't have any power," I raged. "Nothing. The caves just came; I don't know how I did it or how to do it again. It's all a sham. Damn it, I could make this place something wonderful if they'd just let me."
"You certainly could," the penguin agreed. "If you'd get off your big ass and use that power. But you won't. You don't really believe in it."
I began pacing the perimeter of my cage. I was the Outcast now, with an empty scabbard banging against my hip as a reminder of my impotence. I shook the bars; I raged.
None of it did any good. Blaise laughed, Latham ignored me. Dozer-Durg drove the jokers out until the waters of the bay closed over them with black finality.
Blaise's arm snaked around Tachyon's swelling waist and walked her over to my prison. "You see," he said to her. "He's nothing. He's powerless to help you.