Wildcards - Jokertown Shuffle - Wildcards - Jokertown Shuffle Part 47
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Wildcards - Jokertown Shuffle Part 47

Now!"

For several moments, I caught nothing else from Blaise. Then there was another brief flash ... make you fucking fly this thing, asshole ... And then the image of one of the grounded troopships and its terrified pilot, his mind snared in Blaise's. Kelly was with them, stumbling along in Dung's grasp, half blind with fear.

Out of here. I'm out of here now, Blaise thought. The last image I caught from any of them was the sound of rotors screaming....

Kafka's voice brought me back. "You're the only one who can tell us what's going on, Governor!" he was screaming. "Where do we need to go? What do you want us to do?"

Kafka was gesticulating furiously in front of the Temptation, his carapace rattling like a bunch of tin cans. He was scared, and thinking that this was too much like the Cloisters when everyone ganged up on the Astronomer. Jokers crowded around him, armed with everything from baseball bats to Uzis.

Kafka kept shouting. "Bloat, come onl It sounds like the fighting's heading our way."

Kafka was right. I could feel it, like a dull scarlet tide rolling toward the building. " I didn't want to know them," I said. No, let's be fair-I was babbling. " I shouldn't have to know them."

"Bloat, man, jokers are dying out there!"

"They're just people. All of us." I was trying to blot out all the voices of the Rox. I couldn't. Behind Kafka, St. Anthony wrestled with demons and other fantastic creatures. They swarmed over him, biting and clawing.

"Bloat!"

I sighed. "There are three squads in the west wing already, coming up the side stairs. There's another group approaching fast from the east, near the water. In a few seconds, they'll be stuck in open ground. Forget the jumper side of the island; marines are everywhere over there. All the squads have orders to make for the Administration Building after they've secured their first objective.

They'll all be coming soon."

Kafka was snapping orders as I relayed positions. Jokers scattered, howling like mad things. Guards fanned out to protect the lobby and the rooms behind where my body lay helpless.

I heard the gunfire rise and swell in volume. I felt the deaths continue.

I was staring, immobile, as my mind roamed my poor Rox, my embattled island. No one had ever told me it was like this. Nobody could have, I guess. I just wanted it to stop.

Chickenhawk half fell, half glided through an open window in the balcony. Blood splattered his feathers, and one wing was crumpled and torn. "Bloat-" he began.

" I know," I said as one of the jokers ran to tend to him. "You'll be all right, man. It'll be okay." One of those cliches that tumble out when you're not thinking. Frankly, I wasn't sure anyone was going to be "all right." I wasn't sure any of us were really going to live through this.

"It's hell, ain't it?" someone said, and I looked down to see the penguin. It looked worried.

Then hell came to pay a small personal visit.

There were screams from behind the doors leading into the lobby. Gunfire stuttered its lethal percussive speech. I felt Vomitus and Mothmouth die just outside. The doors kicked open, glass scattering across the tiles. Soldiers in riot helmets, fatigues, and Kevlar armor were spilling out: from the doors, from the balcony.

Theirs were not nice thoughts. Not at all. These people had seen their companions hurt or killed already in the fighting. They were only thinking of staying alive.

Well, that isn't quite accurate. Let me qualify the statement. The way they intended to stay alive was to make sure that The Enemy was dead.

"Move and you've had it!" one of them shouted, waving an assault rifle. I thought people only talked like that in the movies. It was almost enough to make me giggle... almost. He had a lieutenant's bar on his shoulder and a badge on his Kevlar chest that proclaimed him to be I. SHER.

The penguin moved. It looked at me. "Sometimes ya just gotta do something, Gov'nor," it told me.

The creature made a mocking sound halfway between razzberry and caw, and launched itself at the lieutenant. The officer--a boy really, not much older than me-didn't even hesitate.

The stream of bullets nearly ripped the penguin in half. Bright arterial blood splattered everywhere-over me, over Kafka and the other jokers, over the Bosch painting. Bits of feathered flesh stuck to the glass walls, trailing rivulets of scarlet. The carcass, most of it, lay half on, half off my dais, and the kid was still firing wildly; I know that some of the bullets hit me, though I didn't feel much besides a distant dull ache. Ricocheting slugs tore more glass from the huge panes. I couldn't even hear the sound of the glass hitting the floor over the gun. The noise was deafening, the smell of cordite and oil and blood overpowering.

The silence when the burst had finished was long.

The kid laughed-like I might. His eyes were wild and strange. He'd enjoyed that; it made him feel powerful. When he looked around the lobby, he was looking for a new target. Just let one of them twitch, even a little bit ...

The hatred in the room was damn near thick enough to touch, like a red-tinged fog in my mind. I felt helpless. There was nothing I could do, and these SOBs were waiting for an excuse to let loose.

Sher barked "You Bloat?"

A couple dozen sarcastic answers came to mind; none of them seemed particularly smart. "Yes."

"Call off your goddamn dogs. Do it now."

I listened to the continuing carnage outside the building. I looked at the jokers nearest me: Kaflca, video, Shroud, Chickenhawk, maybe a dozen others.

They were all watching, like they expected me to do something, and I'll be damned if I could see anything to do. I'd failed, all around. My incompetence had killed them as surely as if I'd pulled the fucking triggers myself. Penguin blood dripped from my sides like an accusation.

"We're not dogs," I told Sher. "We're people."

"Fuck that shit. it's all over, asshole."

"I--I" I stuttered. They were all still looking at me, jokers and soldiers both.

"I can't call them off "

"I thought you were in charge," Sher spat.

I laughed, bitterly. "Yeah. That's right. Of course I'm in charge. I'm the governor." I lashed myself with the word. The kid snarled. He whipped his rifle around.

He fired.

St. Anthony flew apart in a spray of paint-flecked chips. The surreal landscape of Bosch's dreams ripped into long splinters, gouged and broken. A menagerie of deformities expired as the kid's weapon bucked and roared and shredded the triptych. The entire frame of the Temptation canted and slammed to the floor in pieces.

Ruined.

"Not" I screamed, loud in the silence after the gunfire. "Now you listen, Governor," Sher was saying, thou the din of the gun had made us all half deaf.

"Make them stop. Or this time it's the roach here."

The muzzle pointed at Kafka.

"I can't, damn youl Listen to me="

He didn't give me a chance to finish. "Bye, roach." I heard Sher's resolve. I watched the finger slowly tighten, and I knew he'd do it.

I knew.

"Not" I screeched again.

Bloatblack was falling like thick lava from my sides. I was sick-sick of death, sick of destruction, sick of my own inability to do anything. The rage and hatred had built up in me past endurance. With that... well, with that was the same feeling I'd had once before, when the caves had been created. Only this time the surging power was a darker and deeper sensation. Bigger than last time, but more a part of me, if you know what I mean. It was like ... I don't know, like imagining something in my head and then "thinking" it outside.

And there it was. Abracadabra. Poof.

Everything happened in that instant I shouted "No!". It happened when I knew that if I didn't do something now, I was going to watch Kafka die as Peanut had, as the penguin had, as I'd heard and seen jokers die throughout the Rox tonight.

"No!" I screamed, and something within me leapt out like a savage creature. I knew what I wanted, and I shaped it. I'm not sorry for it. I'm really not.

I wanted death. I wanted revenge. I wanted to make widows of these soldiers'

wives and orphans of their children. I wanted them to fucking suffer.

The fragments of the Temptation stirred on the floor. A thick greenish fog swirled at ankle level, coiling and rising. Groans and screams echoed, as if coming from some vast subterranean well. The sights and sounds made Sher swing his muzzle away from Kafka. The kid's eyes widened at what was coming from that fog, rising with it as if striding up from the depths.

The kid screamed.

He held the trigger down, a long and noisy burst.

A hand reached from the fog and snatched at the barrel even as Sher was firing.

The hand flipped the rifle, reversing it, and then the weapon fired again.

Sher's body danced backward in a ballet of death, moving to the jittery music of the bullets slamming into his body. He screamed wordlessly, but I could hear his thoughts, and I didn't care. It was my hand that had taken the weapon from the kid, even though the hand that had come from the fog had been clawed and green and scaly. It had been my hand--because I'd made it move. I'd ordered its actions, and it had responded.

Sher was dead long before the body stopped twitching and fell to the floor. His squad was staring, momentarily stunned.

It took only that instant of hesitation for them to die as well. A tropical hurricane wind roaring from below shredded the fog, and I took each tendril and made it a thing, a creature of Bosch.

A joker. A demon.

They poured out, shrieking and vengeful: the stag-headed man; a merman in full medieval armor riding a flying, metalscaled fish; a featherless bird with teeth stolen from a Tyrannosaurus; a claw-legged, man-size toad; a cat-demon; a ferocious winged fish bearing a unicorn's horn; flying devils of all descriptions ...

Tey tore the guns away from the soldiers and threw them back to us. The soldiers went down under a clot of swarming attackers.

My demons tore the limbs from their living, writhing victims. They died slowly and horribly, and I ...

I relished every last instant of their pain. The floor literally ran red with blood.

I laughed. I howled. I chuckled.

My jokers celebrated with me. "Out!" I cried to them, and my fantasy multitude echoed the word with their shrill inhuman voices. "Drive them all away! Kill any of them you can!"

Flowing like a massive black cloud, . my troops were gone. My will went with them. I sent them hurtling against the intruders. With their power, I ripped the choppers from the sky and tore the hulls open on their boats. They killed, they maimed, they destroyed.

More of my cavalry swooped down from the sky. Some were jokers riding armored flying fish and armed with (if I could believe the eyes of the Rox) swordfish lances. At their flanks, hags and beasts and creatures of all descriptions plummeted down from the false dawn glow, ablaze in their own infernal light. The apparitions were incandescent, painful to look upon.

The demons landed and tore the guns from the hands of the nats even as the soldiers fired on them. The joker riders flushed out the hidden troops and drove them into the open. The shining, awful hordes whooped and howled and dove at them; the riders impaled them on their strange lances. The soldiers fled before them. In a very few minutes, the attack was broken. The troops were fleeing the Rox any way they could, and my army-my dream army-pursued them. Briefly, anyway.

I was tiring rapidly. With my exhaustion, the summoned creatures of my mind lost strength as well. Those soldiers who made it to their boats or to their choppers I let go as the images of Bosch turned again to wisps of fog and faded away.

That night, I'm told, less than half the troops returned to their bases. The rest the bodies-were thrown into the Rox sewage system to rot. There was no place on the Rox to bury them, even if we'd wanted to.

So in essence, I suppose, I eventually ate them.

You know what? I didn't care. In fact, I rather enjoyed the thought.

It wasn't until hours later that I started shaking.

Lovers

VI.

There was a storm over Ellis Island. Strange green-black clouds roiled, and occasionally a sullen flicker of lightning would play in their leprous depths.

Suddenly a long funnel cloud dropped from the parent mass and with its end whipping like a snake, groped at the buildings below.

It was almost as if the weather were the deciding factor, for the assault troops began rolling back. Men came flying down to the shore, throwing away weapons as they ran. They usually found the LSTs retreating without them, so the water was bobbing with small dark heads.

Turtle, with Tach wedged on his lap inside the turtle shell, maneuvered at the edges of what had been a battle and had now become a rout. Their ears still rang from artillery shells striking the steel plates of the shell. It was a proof of the warranty of battleship steel-there was neither crack nor dent in the metal.

A pair of helicopters were chattering away from the maelstrom of the island. The funnel cloud hopped like a kid on a pogo stick, and one of the choppers was caught in the whirlwind. The blades clawed, found no support, were torn away. It was going down, the little rear propeller spinning uselessly. Then it stopped, and Tommy grunted with effort as his telekinetic power broke the dive and held the machine motionless in space.

Turtle moved slowly toward the Jersey shore, towing the stricken helicopter. The other chopper whipped past the shell, dangerously close, then banked and came around until it was hovering precisely in front of the flying ace. They both knew the machine guns mounted on the front of the copter couldn't do them any damage, but Tach felt herself tense nonetheless. It's disconcerting staring down gun barrels. Suddenly the helicopter wobbled, then peeled off and headed for Manhattan. Tommy resumed his errand of mercy, dropping off the helicopter and her crew on the shore. They emerged waving and cheering.

"Nothing to stop us now," Tommy said, and he flew back toward Ellis Island.

"Look's like the war's over."

"I don't know whether to hope Blaise is alive or dead," Tach said, sighing.

As they drew closer to the island, fear began nibbling at the edges of Tachyon's mind, wrapping tendrils about the ends of her nerves until a subliminal shivering gripped her body. The baby, sensing Tach's agitation, was turning over and over in her womb. Tachyon tried to send soothing thoughts to the infant, but it was hard to concentrate on anything but a desperate need to run.

The Rox drew closer. Turtle was breathing hard like a man in the middle of a long run who begins to doubt his ability to continue.

"It's ... it's Bloat ... Teddy," Tach forced out past the terror that wrapped like a smothering blanket about her lungs. "Fight it. Ignore it."

"Can't you ward us, or guard us, or do some damn Takisian thing?"

"No, I've trained this body, but its powers are... feeble." She ground her teeth together, holding back the scream that threatened to rip her throat apart. "But I'll try to contact him. He helped me once ... he cares for me ... he'll do it again."

Tach sent with her weak telepathic link and felt it recoil back on her, defeated by the terror of Bloat's mind. Tommy started screaming. A thin tearing sound that was terrible to hear. It fed and nurtured Tachyon's terror until she was blind, dumb, and deaf, locked in a world where only fear existed.

The shell flipped nosedown, and they were plummeting for the murky waters of the East River. A few bloated bodies bounced in the chop. Tachyon put her hands over her face and sobbed uncontrollably. With that small part of rationality that remained she remembered that Turtle could control his TK powers only when he felt secure, unafraid. She had conveniently forgotten that inconvenient fact, and the oversight was going to cost them their lives.