Card Sharks Read online

  Card Sharks

  * * *

  * * *

  a Wild Cards Mosaic Novel

  edited by:

  GEORGE R.R. MARTIN

  assistant editor:

  MELINDA M. SNODGRASS

  and written by:

  ROJER ZELAZNY

  WILLIM F.WU

  MELINDA M. SNODGRASS

  KEIN ANDREW MURPHY

  LAURA J. MIXON

  VICTOR MILAN

  STEPHEN LEIGH

  MICHAEL CASSUTT

  to Mary Wismer

  always an ace

  The Ashes of Memory

  by Stephen Leigh

  1

  How did I get involved in all this?

  I'm not surprised at your question, given what I'm asking you to believe. Quasiman - you know him? He knows of you, but then I think everyone in Jokertown can say that - anyway. Quasiman gave me his tale. That's the real beginning, after all. With that and my background. I can visualize that horrible moment, but I wasn't there. I wasn't part of it. Not yet, anyway.

  But I can see it. I can ...

  ***

  Evening mass in Our Lady of Perpetual Misery on September 16, 1993, was packed. Christmas, Easter, and Black Queen Night: those were the three times that Father Squid could count on a full house. Half of Jokertown seemed to be pressed shoulder to shoulder in the pews or standing in the aisles, giving the interior a look not unlike that of a Bosch painting. Many of them were families, with children entirely normal or as misshapen as the parents. Imagine a shape, anything vaguely human or even not so human, and there it would be somewhere in the crowd; a lipless frog's mouth open in the group prayer, tentacles folded in some imitation of praying hands, slimy shoulders adorned with a new dress or faceted eyes gleaming as they watched Father Squid at the altar, raising a chalice to the congregation.

  Swelling chords filled the nave, a subsonic bass trembling the floor: that was Mighty Wurlitzer. MW, as he was called, looked anything but human. He had once been the choir director for All Saints' parish in Brooklyn; now he was a ten foot long, thick tube of knobby, sand-colored exoskeleton from which dozens of hollow spines jutted out. A vestigial head capped one end of the tube: two frog-like bumps of eyes, a slit nose, but no mouth. Mighty Wurlitzer couldn't move, couldn't speak, but the bellows of his lungs inside that confining sheath were powerful and inexhaustible. He could vent air through the natural pipes of his immobile body, creating a sound like a demented bagpipe on steroids. Modifications had been added since MW had been "installed" in the choir loft. Flexible plastic tubing connected some of his spines to a rack of genuine organ pipes, allowing Mighty Wurlitzer to produce a truly awesome racket. It might not have been great music, but it was loud and energetic, and no joker in the congregation would ever fault another for doing the best he could with what the wild card had given him.

  Mighty Wurlitzer sang and a wild music sounded, his voice a breathy orchestra. The jokers below joined in after the eight bar introduction.

  "Holy, holy, deformed Lord, God of Hosts ..."

  Afterward, no one was certain who first noticed. Someone in the congregation must have been gifted with a keen sense of smell in exchange for their warped body - the wild card virus has that kind of sick sense of humor. At least a few would have noticed that the odor of the votive candles seemed to be particularly intense, that there was a thin pall of acrid vapor wafting in, that the air was growing hazy and blue ...

  "Fire!" The word was shouted into the teeth of the song, the warning drowned out by Mighty Wurlitzer's crashing thunder. A few people heard the warning. Heads began to crane around curiously, the song faltered.

  A bright yellow tongue licked at the crack between the side doors of the church, flickering in like a snake's tongue and then retreating. A child nestled in the multiple arms of his mother began to cry. The first tendrils of gray smoke began to writhe under the doorways.

  A jet of blue flame hissed as it shot from under the side doors.

  "Fire!"

  This time the cry came from a dozen throats. Up in the loft, Mighty Wurlitzer coughed, and the bagpipe drone hiccuped in mid-melody. Like drawing the Black Queen from the deck of the wild card virus, the soaring paean to Christ metamorphosed into something far more chaotic, more human, and more deadly. The interior of the church echoed not to a hymn but to screams and shouts. Mighty Wurlitzer abandoned the song to coughing, barking discords like someone pounding on a keyboard with desperate fists.

  The panic, the deadly fear, began its reign.

  Father Squid shouted from the altar, his whispering, sibilant voice amplified by the microphone under the tentacles of his mouth. "Please! Don't shove! Everyone, let's move quickly to the nearest -"

  The electronic voice went silent; at the same time, the lights inside the church died. In the sudden dark, the screams took on a new intensity. The surging, frightened congregation flailed and pushed and shoved toward the main doors at the rear.

  There, the first people died.

  Impossibly the doors were locked or barred. Worse, the metal bands of the great wooden doors were searingly hot, and through the seams of the oak a threatening brightness flickered. Those in front shouted pleadingly, but they were crushed against the unyielding doors by the weight of those behind. The doors bulged outward and then held, and now those unlucky ones who had been first to the doors were suffocating, as smoke billowed black around them and the roaring voice of the blaze announced itself.

  The mob tried to retreat back into the church, pushing now, heedless of those who slipped and fell and were trampled underneath, none of them thinking now of anything but their own survival. Breathing became impossible. There was no surcease in the superheated air around them, and the smoke flared in their lungs like acid.

  "Oh God, no!" Father Squid cried, but no one heard and God declined to intervene. The screaming had stopped out in the smoke-lost congregation. Those who could still breathe were saving that precious air for flight, for finding a way, any way out from the relentless hellpit that now surrounded and pursued them. Flames crawled the west wall, at the ceiling of the east wall a Niagara of superheated air boiled. Yet the fire had sucked most of the oxygen out of the interior, and the blaze seemed almost sluggish. The flames subsided to a sullen orange glow.

  Then the main doors went down - pushed open or unlocked - and the opening sent fresh air gushing in. The conflagration suddenly erupted with an audible whoosh, the inferno roaring higher and more searing than before. The walls re-ignited, a fireball rolled down the central aisle. As the stained glass windows shattered and rained bright knives, waves of fire leaped inward.

  The heat puckered Father Squid's face, made the golden thread of his vestments burn through the surplice beneath them. He couldn't breathe, couldn't see. He knew he was going to die. Now. There was only the smoke and the leaping, triumphant glare of flame. "Mommy! Where are you?! Mommy!" A child screamed out in the roiling hell, and the sound caused Father Squid to take a staggering step toward the beckoning flames.

  "Here!" he shouted into the roar. "Come over here, son!"

  A hand grasped his shoulder, pulled him back. "Father - this way!"

  "Quasiman. ..." Father Squid squinted at the hunchbacked figure through the smoke and coughed, pointing back into the inferno that was the church. "Save some of them ... the children, the poor children ..."

  "Come!"

  "Not me," Father Squid protested. "Them ..." But the hand was implacable and incredibly strong. Father Squid couldn't resist and - to his shame - he found that part of him didn't want to resist. The choir loft fell in an explosion of sparks, Mighty Wurlitzer giving a last scream like the final chord for Armageddon. The west wall sagged; part of the roof fell. Over the thunder of the flames, they co
uld hear sirens, but out in the church there was only black silence.

  Father Squid looked back once, then allowed Quasiman to drag him back: across the altar, into the sacristy to the side. That room was aflame too, but Quasiman roared back at the flames and leaped, gathering Father Squid in his arms. They crashed through the window in a cascade of glass, landing outside where suddenly there was air. Father Squid gasped and coughed, wheezing as he tried to drag some of that coolness into ravaged lungs. Half-conscious, he was aware of dark figures around him, faces peering worriedly at him through glass helmets. "Inside!" he tried to say, but his throat burned and all he could do was grunt. "For God's sake, please get them out!"

  Someone murmured something, and he felt himself falling backward into arms. His head lolled back. Far above, a geyser of bright, whirling sparks spiraled heavenward around the steeple like burning prayers.

  ***

  "Cassidy!"

  At dawn, Hannah Davis stepped through the leaning, blackened timbers that had been a side entrance of the church. The wood steamed and fumed and hissed in the autumn drizzle. She noted immediately the black, rolling blisters on the wood - the fire had been unusually hot here. The floor had been burnt entirely away in front of her; the undersloping angle of the char told her that the fire had communicated up from below. Someone had laid planks across the gap, and she walked carefully over into the church. The roofless shell of the building smoldered around her. Leo Cassidy, a lieutenant in the Jokertown fire division, straightened up from where he was kneeling near the front of the church and looked back at her. His visor was up, and Hannah saw the scowl plainly. He turned back to what he was doing without a word.

  Around the church's interior, department personnel were working, tearing down the walls as they searched out the remaining hot spots, or performing the grisly job of checking the soaked, black rubble for bodies. They were flagging the locations; there were far too many of the yellow triangles, more than seemed possible. The fire had come in as three alarms, had gone quickly to four and then five as soon as the first trucks had arrived on the scene. When Hannah had gotten the call to come down around midnight, the radio newscasters were already estimating that over a hundred jokers might have died. There'd been no hope of saving the building or getting anyone out - it had been all they could do to save as many of the surrounding buildings as they could. A strong wind had been blowing that night; the priest's cottage and two neighboring apartment houses had gone with the church. Burning ash had started several spot fires as far away as the East River. It had taken hours to get the fire under control.

  The fire had been spectacular, fast, and extremely deadly. Even without the added interest of its location, the blaze would have made the national news. As it was, the torching of the Church of Jesus Christ, Joker was the lead story everywhere this morning.

  And it was, somehow, Hannah's fire. Her file. Her problem. She still wasn't sure how she felt about that.

  Hannah picked her way carefully toward Cassidy. The rain made the fallen, scorched timbers slick and dangerous, and the smell of damp ash was overpowering. She slipped once, putting her hand out for support on one of the remaining pews and noting the capriciousness of fire - the wood under her hand was untouched: polished and golden and unblemished.

  "Where'd the chief get to, Cassidy?"

  Cassidy was putting a tarp over one of the corpses. Hannah forced herself to look. The body - too elongated, and with a neck as long as a small giraffe's - was on its side in the curled "fighting" position fire victims often assumed as the intense heat caused the major muscle groups to contract. The abdomen gaped open in a long crease that almost looked like a cut - another legacy of the fire: with the heat, gas formed in the intestines, swelling them until they burst out from the weakened, seared skin. Unburnt, pink loops peeked from the slit. The corpse was badly damaged. Hannah couldn't even tell if it had once been male or female. The smell made Hannah want to gag.

  "Funny, isn't it, that no matter how deformed they were before, they all look the same once they're crisped."

  "The chief, Cassidy."

  "Why you need the chief, Davis?" Cassidy grunted. He looked at Hannah, cocking his head as he noticed the leather apron stuffed with tools under her slicker. "Who you working under - Patton?" He put too much stress on the "under."

  "I'm not under anyone. This is my case."

  Cassidy snorted. "Fuck," he said. "I wondered why the hell you were hanging around. Just what I need. I guess they thought this was a barn that burned down and they wanted you to count the dead cows."

  Hannah ignored that, wishing she'd never mentioned that she'd grown up on the farm her parents still owned west of Cincinnati. She'd had to put up with the "country girl" jokes, with the sexual innuendoes, with all the bullshit "we'll never let you be just one of the guys" snubbing, with the "just how the hell did you get this job" attitude. The first few months, she'd told herself that the abuse would ease up. It hadn't. It had gotten worse. "Stuff it, Cassidy. Where's Chief Reiger?"

  Cassidy snorted. "In the basement."

  "Fine. I'll be down there. I have Dr. Sheets coming in to coordinate the photographing and removal of the victims. Pete Harris from the bureau will be here any time now - let me know when he gets here; he's bringing the forensics team. Tell him to start on the entrances - all the reports from the survivors say they were blocked. And, Cassidy ... give my people some cooperation, okay?"

  Cassidy just looked at her, and she could almost hear his thoughts with the expression on his face. Goddamn bossy bitch ... She also knew that if she'd been Patton or Myricks or any of the male long-term bureau agents, Cassidy would've happily nodded and said "Yes sir." But Hannah was a newcomer, which was bad enough, and, even worse, a woman. Hannah forced her anger down. "Any questions, lieutenant?"

  Cassidy sniffed again. Rain beaded on the black rubberized jacket, sliding down the yellow flourescent stripes on the sleeves and waist. "No, ma'am," he said flatly. "No problem, ma'am. Cooperation is my middle name." A tic twitched the corner of his mouth as he stared at her, his face soot-stained. Hannah took a breath, making sure the anger was sealed in. "Fine," she said. "I'll be down -"

  She stopped. On the rear wall of the church where a crucifix would normally be placed, she saw something mounted. It was a wooden figure, blackened with smoke but unburned: a two-headed person, one head bearded, the other female. One set of hands were nailed to what looked to be a twisted wooden ladder behind it; another set of withered arms sprouted from the chest where three pairs of breasts ran down like the teats on a mother wolf. The feet were also nailed to the strange cross. Rain dripped from the feet, from the multiple breasts, from the faces. A chill went through Hannah, an unbidden outrage. Alongside her, Cassidy followed her gaze. He spat into the rubble; from the corner of her eyes, Hannah saw him make the sign of the cross. "Fucking blasphemy," he said.

  "What is that?"

  "Don't you hicks out in Ohio ever get papers?"

  "Cassidy -"

  "That's Jesus Christ the Joker, nailed to a DNA helix. This place is a joker's version of a Catholic Church. Our Lady of Perpetual Misery, they call it. They even have a priest - guy looks like a squid. He went on that world tour five, six years ago, the one Senator Hartmann was on. You must've heard about that - the big dust-up in Syria with the Nur, Hartmann getting kidnapped in Berlin ... or did that get crowded off the front page because of the Pig Festival?"

  "Yeah, it did," Hannah replied. "And they ran your picture right above the goddamn blue ribbon."

  Hannah walked away before Cassidy could reply.

  In the basement, Chief Reiger was crouched in a puddle of water before an old porcelain-covered cast-iron sink. When the light of Hannah's helmet swept over him, the gray-haired man spoke without turning around. "Okay, Miss Davis, give me your evaluation of this."

  "Chief, that's not fair. I'm a licensed -"

  "Humor me, Miss Davis."

  I shouldn't have to prove myself over and over ag
ain, not to you, not to anyone. Hannah stopped the protest before she vocalized it. She sighed, taking a quick inventory. "The porcelain's destroyed and the handles are melted off. We used to have a plywood wall behind here - nothing left but the nails in the studs. The floor joists above are heavily damaged; so is the cabinet below the sink and the floor around it." Hannah paused, leaned over the sink. "I'd say that someone plugged the drain and poured a good quantity of liquid accelerant in the tub. Then they turned the water on and lit it somehow - the damage to the porcelain and the faucets means that we had one heck of a hot fire right here. The fire touched the wall and went up through them. When the sink overflowed, it spread the fire around the bottom of the sink and over the floor - you can see the trail following the slope of the floor. A definite torch, if we didn't already know that. No signs of a big explosion, so our friend didn't use gasoline."

  Reiger was nodding. The condescension bothered her. He acted like a teacher acknowledging a student. "Gasoline and fuel oil mixture," he said.

  Hannah shook her head. "Uh-uh. Too hot a fire for that - it melted the fixtures, and the ignition temperature of a gas/fuel oil mixture's too low for that. The fire went awful fast, too. When we get the results, we're going to find out it's JP-4: jet fuel. I'll bet on it - I worked on a job back" - home, she almost said - "in Cincinnati where the stuff was used. And look here -" She pointed to a corner of the sink, which had cracked off. "That's a concussion fracture, really clean. There was a little explosion here. Our torch used a device to set it off. He was already out of here when it went up."

  Reiger scowled, and Hannah tried to keep the satisfaction from showing on her face. He'd missed the fuse entirely, she realized. "You might be right," Reiger admitted grudgingly.

  "So did I pass your little exam?"

  Reiger grunted.

  "I'll take that as a yes," she said.