Wild Cards V: Down and Dirty Read online

  “They’ll come for you,” Mishmash suggested. “They’ll know you did it, and they’ll come. Kill him. Go on, I won’t tell.”

  Tom backed away, shaking his head. “No.”

  “Then I’ll do it,” Mishmash said. His lips peeled back over a mouthful of yellowed incisors, and the wrinkled face shot out and down, into the cop’s throat. Mishmash’s shirt sagged where his gut had been. The head worked at the soft flesh under the cop’s chin, bobbing at the end of three feet of glistening transparent tube connecting it to the joker’s torso. Tom heard wet, greedy sucking sounds. The cop’s feet began to thrash feebly. Blood spurted, Mishmash swallowed and sucked, and a thick red wash began to travel up through the thick glassy flesh of his neck.

  “No!” Tom screamed. “Stop it!”

  The monkey-face continued to feed, but on top of the joker’s body his second head, the movie-star head, turned to stare at Tom from clear blue eyes and smiled beatifically.

  Tom reached out for Mishmash with his teke, or tried to, but there was nothing there. The fury that had filled him when the cop threatened them was gone; now there was only horror and fear, and his power had always deserted him when he was afraid. He stood helplessly, hands clenching and unclenching as Mishmash gnawed away with teeth as cruel and sharp as needles.

  Then he leapt forward and grabbed the joker from behind, wrapping his arms around that twisted torso, pulling him back. For a moment they grappled. Tom was overweight and out of shape and had never been especially strong, but the joker’s body was as weak as it was misshapen. They stumbled backward, Mishmash thrashing feebly in Tom’s arms, until the head pulled free of the cop’s torn throat with a soft pop. The joker hissed in fury. His long glistening neck coiled around, snakelike, over his left shoulder, as pale eyes glared down, insane with frustration. Blood was smeared all over the shrunken purplish face. Wet red teeth snapped wildly, but his neck wasn’t long enough.

  Tom spun him around and shoved him away. The joker’s mismatched legs tangled under him, and he tripped and fell heavily into the gutter. “Get out of here!” Tom screamed. “Get out of here now or I’ll give you the same thing I gave him.”

  Mishmash hissed, his head weaving back and forth. Then, as suddenly as it had come, the bloodlust was gone, and once more the joker cringed in fear. “Don’t,” he whispered, “please don’t. I only wanted to help. Don’t hurt me, mister.” His neck shrunk slowly back into his shirt, a long, thick glass eel returning to its lair, until there was only the small scared face shivering between his buttons. By then Mishmash was back on his feet. He gave Tom one last pleading look, and then whirled and began to run, arms and legs working grotesquely.

  Tom stopped the policeman’s bleeding with a handkerchief. There was still a pulse, but it felt weak to him, and the man had obviously lost a lot of blood. He hoped it wasn’t too late.

  He looked around at the abandoned cars and headed toward a likely one. Joey had once shown him how to hot-wire an ignition; he sure as hell hoped he still remembered.

  It was standing room only in the waiting room of the Jokertown Clinic. Tom pushed his suitcase up against a wall and sat on top of it. The shopping bag, with Modular Man’s bloodied head stuck inside it, he shoved between his legs. The room was hot and noisy. He ignored the frightened people all around him, the screams of pain from the next room, and stared dully at the tiles on the floor, trying not to think. Perspiration covered his face under the clinging frog mask.

  He’d been waiting a half hour when a fat, tusked newsboy in a porkpie hat and Hawaiian shirt entered the waiting room with an armful of papers. Tom bought a copy of tomorrow’s Jokertown Cry, sat back on his suitcase, and began to read. He read every word in every story on every page, and then started all over again.

  The headlines were full of martial law and the citywide manhunt for Croyd Crenson. Typhoid Croyd, the Cry called him; anyone coming in contact with the carrier risked drawing the wild card. No wonder everyone was so scared. Dr. Tachyon had told the authorities it was a mutant form, capable of reinfecting even stable aces and jokers.

  The Turtle could bring him in, Tom thought. Anyone else, police or Guardsman or ace, risked infection and death if they tried to apprehend him, but the Turtle could take him in perfect safety, easy as candy. He didn’t have to get real close to teke someone, and his shell gave him plenty of protection.

  Only there was no shell, and the Turtle was dead.

  Sixty-three people had required medical treatment after the rioting around the Holland Tunnel, and property damage was estimated at more than a million dollars, he read.

  The Turtle could have dissipated that crowd without anyone’s getting hurt. Just talk to them, dammit, take the time to quell their fears, and if things got out of hand, pry them apart with teke. You didn’t need guns or tear gas.

  Sporadic outbreaks of anti-joker violence had been reported throughout the city. Two jokers were dead, a dozen more had been hospitalized after beatings or stonings.

  There was widespread looting in Harlem.

  Arson had destroyed the storefront headquarters of Jokers for Jesus, and firemen responding to the alarm had been pelted with bricks and dogshit.

  Leo Barnett was praying for the souls of the afflicted and calling for quarantine in the name of public health.

  A twenty-year-old coed from Columbia had been gang-raped on a pool table in Squisher’s Basement. More than a dozen jokers had watched from their barstools, and half of those had lined up to take their turns after the original rapists were done. Someone had told them they’d be cured of their deformities if they had sex with this woman.

  The Turtle was dead, and Tom Tudbury sat on a battered old suitcase stuffed with eighty thousand dollars in cash as the world grew more and more insane.

  All the king’s horses and all the king’s men, he thought.

  He’d just finished his third pass through the newspaper when a shadow fell across him. Tom looked up and saw the hefty black nurse who had helped him carry the policeman in from the car. “Dr. Tachyon will see you now,” she said.

  Tom followed her back to a small cubicle off the emergency room, where Tachyon sat wearily behind a steel desk.

  “Well?” Tom asked after the nurse had left.

  “He’ll live,” Tach said. Lilac eyes lingered on the green, rubbery features of Tom’s mask. “We are required by law to file a report on this sort of thing. The police will want to question you once the emergency has passed. We need a name.”

  “Thomas Tudbury,” he said. He pulled off the mask and let it drop to the floor.

  “Turtle,” Tach blurted, surprised. He stood up.

  The Turtle is dead, Tom thought, but he didn’t say it.

  Dr. Tachyon frowned. “Tom, what happened out there?”

  “It’s a long, ugly story. You want it, go into my fucking brain and take it. I don’t want to talk about it.”

  Tach looked at him thoughtfully. Then the alien winced and sat down again.

  “At least with the fucking Astronomer I could tell the good guys from the bad guys,” Tom said.

  “He has your name,” Tach said.

  “One of my names,” Tom said. “Fuck it. I need your help.”

  Tach was still linked with his mind; the alien looked up sharply. “I will not do that.”

  Tom leaned forward across the desk, looming over the smaller man. “You will,” he said. “You owe me, Tachyon. And there’s no way I can kill myself without your help.”

  Mortality

  by Walter Jon Williams

  RUN.

  Consciousness stitched a lightning path across his mind. It seemed to come in bursts, like lines of text from a very fast laser printer … but no, it was more complex than that. A master weaver was forming the largest and most intricate tapestry in the universe, all in a matter of seconds, and doing it all in his brain.

  He opened his eyes. St. Elmo’s fire shimmered before him like a polar aurora. A screaming noise assaulted his ears. Sub
sonics moved through his body like tidal waves.

  The noise faded. Internals ran lightspeed checks. Radar painted an image in his brain, superimposed it on the visuals.

  “All monitored systems are functioning,” he found himself saying.

  The St. Elmo’s fluorescence faded, revealing sagging bare roof beams, an half-open skylight with the glass painted black from the inside, diagrams tacked up helter-skelter, drooping electric cables. Electric fans made a busy stir in the air. Something in the room moved, imaged first by radar, then by visuals. He recognized the figure, the tall, white-haired man with the hawk nose and disdainful eyes. Maxim Travnicek. A frigid smile curled Travnicek’s lips. He spoke with a middle-European accent.

  “Welcome back, toaster. The land of the living awaits.”

  “I blew up.” Modular Man examined this possibility with cold impartiality as he pulled on a jumpsuit. A fly buzzed in the distance.

  “You blew up,” said Travnicek. “Modular Man the invincible android blew himself to bits. In a big fight at Aces High with the Astronomer and the Egyptian Masons. Lucky I had a backup of your memory.”

  Memories poured over the android’s macroatomic switches. Modular Man recognized Travnicek’s new Jokertown loft, the one he’d moved into after being evicted from the bigger place on the Lower East Side. The place was stiflingly hot, and electric fans plugged into overworked extension cords did little to make the place seem like home. Equipment, the big flux generators and computers, were jammed together on home-built platforms and raw plywood shelving. The ultrasonics had burst the picture tubes in two of the monitors.

  “The Astronomer?” he said. “He hadn’t been seen in months. I have no recollection of his return.”

  Travnicek made a dismissive gesture. “The fight happened after I last backed up your memory.”

  “I blew up?” The android didn’t want to think about this. “How could I blow up?”

  “Right. A surprise to both of us. Half-intelligent microwave ovens aren’t supposed to explode.”

  Travnicek sat on a thirdhand plastic chair, a cigarette in his hand. He was thinner than before, his reddened eyes sunk deep in hollows. He looked years older. His straight hair, usually combed back from his forehead, stuck out in tufts. He seemed to have been doing his own barbering.

  Travnicek wore baggy, army-green surplus trousers and a cream-colored formal shirt with food stains and frills on the front. He wasn’t wearing a tie.

  The android had never seen Travnicek without a tie. Something must have happened to the man, he realized. And then a frightening thought came to him.

  “How long have I been…?”

  “Dead?”

  “Yes.”

  “You blew up last Wild Card Day. Now it’s June fifteenth.”

  “Nine months.” The android was horrified.

  Travnicek seemed irritated. He threw away his cigarette and ground the stub into the bare plywood floor. “How long do you think it takes to build a blender of your capabilities? Jesus Christ, it took weeks just to decipher the notes I wrote last time.” He gave an expansive wave of his hand. “Look at this place. I’ve been working day and night.”

  Fast food containers were everywhere, a bewildering variety that strongly represented Chinese places, pizza joints, and Kentucky Fried Chicken. Flies buzzed among the cartons. In and among the containers were bits of scrap, yellow legal paper, pieces of paper bags, torn cigarette cartons, and the insides of matchbooks. All with notes that Travnicek had made to himself during his fever of construction, half of them ground into the naked floor and covered with footprints. The electric fans Travnicek used to move the sluggish air in the place had done a good job of scattering them.

  Travnicek stood up and turned away, lighting another cigarette. “The place needs a good cleaning,” he said. “You know where the broom is.”

  “Yes, sir.” Resigned to it.

  “I’ve got about fifty bucks left after paying the rent on this fucking heap. Enough for a little celebration.” He jingled change in his pockets. “Gotta make a little phone call.” Travnicek leered. “You’re not the only one with girlfriends.”

  Modular Man ran his internal checks again, looked down at his body in the half-zipped jumpsuit.

  Nothing seemed out of place.

  Still, he thought, something was wrong.

  He went after the broom.

  Half an hour later, carrying two plastic trash bags full of fast food cartons, the android opened the skylight, floated through it, crossed the roof, then dropped down the air shaft that led to the alley behind. His intention was to toss the trash in a Dumpster that he knew waited in the alley.

  His feet touched broken concrete. Sounds echoed down the alley. Heavy breathing, a guttural moan. A strange, lyric, birdlike sound.

  In Jokertown the sounds could mean anything. The victim of an assault bleeding against the brownstone wall; the sad and horrible joker Snotman struggling for breath; a derelict passed out and having a nightmare; a customer from Freakers who’d had too much liquor or too many grotesque sights and had stumbled away to upchuck his guts …

  The android was cautious. He lowered the trash bags silently to the pavement and floated silently a few feet above the surface. Rotating his body to the horizontal, he peered out into the alleyway.

  The heavy breathing was coming from Travnicek. He had a woman up against the wall, lunging into her with his trousers down around his ankles.

  The woman wore an elaborate custom mask over her lower face: a joker. The upper half of her face was not disfigured, but it wasn’t pretty, either. She was not young. She wore a tube top and a glittery silver jacket and a red miniskirt. Her plastic boots were white. The trilling sound came from behind the mask. Short-time in an alley was probably costing Travnicek about fifteen dollars.

  Travnicek muttered something in Czech. The woman’s face was impassive. She regarded the alley wall with dreamy eyes. The musical sound she was making was something she probably did all the time, a sound unconnected with what she was doing. The android decided he didn’t want to watch this anymore.

  He left the garbage in the airshaft. The trilling sound pursued him like a flight of birds.

  Someone had stuck a red, white, and blue poster on the plastic hood over the pay phone: BARNETT FOR PRESIDENT. The android didn’t know who Barnett was. His plastic fingertips jabbed the coin slot on the pay phone. There was a click, then a ringing signal. The android had long ago discovered an affinity with communications equipment.

  “Hello.”

  “Alice? This is Modular Man.”

  A slight pause. “Not funny.”

  “This really is Modular Man. I’m back.”

  “Modular Man blew up!”

  “My creator built me over again. I’ve got almost all the memories of the original.” The android’s eyes scanned the street, looking up and down. There were very few people on the street for a warm June afternoon. “You feature in a lot of those memories, Alice.”

  “Oh, god.”

  There was another long pause. The android noticed that the pedestrians on the street seemed to be giving one another a lot of space. One of them wore a gauze mask over his mouth and nose. Cars were few.

  “Can I see you?” he asked.

  “You were important for me, you know.”

  “I’m glad, Alice.” The android sensed impending disappointment in his demotion to the past tense.

  “I mean, every man I’d ever been involved with was so demanding. Wanting this, wanting that. I never had any time to find out what Alice wanted. And then I meet this guy who’s willing to give me all the space I need, who didn’t want anything from me because he can’t want anything, because he’s a machine, you know, and because he can get me seated at the good tables at Aces High and because we can fly and dance with the moon…” There was a brief silence. “You were really important to me, Mod Man. But I can’t see you. I’m married now.”

  A palpable sense of loss drifted like
scuttering snow across the android’s macroatomic switches. “I’m happy for you, Alice.” A National Guard jeep cruised past, with four Guardsmen in combat gear. Modular Man, who had established good relations with the Guard during the Swarm attack, gave them a wave. The jeep slowed, its passengers looking at him without changing expression. Then they speeded up and moved on.

  “I thought you were dead. You know?”

  “I understand.” He sensed an irresolution in her. “Can I call you later?”

  “Only at work.” Her voice was fast. “If you call me at home, Ralph might start asking questions. He knows about a lot of my past, but he might find an affair with a machine a little weird. I mean, I know it was okay, and you know, but I imagine it’s a little strange explaining it to people.”

  “I understand.”

  “He’s tolerant of alternate lifestyles, but I’m not sure how tolerant he’d be of me having one. Particularly one he’d never heard of or thought about.”

  “I’ll call you, Alice.”

  “Good-bye.”

  She thought I didn’t want anything for myself, the android thought as he hung up the phone. Somehow that made him sadder than anything.

  His finger jabbed the coin slot again and dialed a California number. The phone rang twice before a recording announced the number had been disconnected. Cyndi had moved somewhere. Maybe, he thought, he’d call her agent later.

  He dialed a New Haven number. “Hi, Kate,” he said.

  “Oh.” He heard someone inhaling a cigarette. When the voice came back, it was cheerful. “I always thought someone would put you back together.”

  Relief poured into him. “Someone did. For good this time, I hope.”

  A low chuckle. “It’s hard to keep a good man down.”

  The android thought about that for a moment. “Maybe I can see you,” he said.

  “I’m not coming to Manhattan. The bridges are closed anyway.”

  “Bridges closed?”

  “Bridges closed. Martial law. Panic in the streets. You have been out of touch, haven’t you?”