Jokertown Shuffle Read online

  She nodded and turned away.

  Jerry walked to the corner and hailed a cab. He felt like he was going to throw up. He leaned against a street sign and tried to clear his head. A taxi pulled over, and he was in the backseat in an instant. He lay down and wondered about the roaring in his ears. Then he passed out.

  The hospital room was as nice as hospital rooms ever get. Jerry pulled the bedcovers up to his chest. He was still cold.

  If they didn't have those stupid backless gowns, he might be able to get warm.

  Beth walked in and cocked an eyebrow. "Back in the land of the living, finally."

  "I died and went to heaven," Jerry said. "It pays to be Episcopalian."

  Beth put her hand on his forehead. "I think your fever's down from yesterday." She stroked his arm, carefully avoiding the area near his I. V "You were lucky not to lose that finger. The bone was pretty badly infected."

  Jerry propped himself up on an elbow. "Why did you decide to sleep with me? We didn't really talk about that." Beth settled into a chair next to him. "Because no other man could make me stop thinking about you. That hasn't happened since I first met Kenneth. Don't know what it is about you Strauss boys, must be good genes. I want you to be part of my life, Jerry."

  "Me too," he said. "I want that a lot."

  "I'm going back to Chicago, though. I know that now. This town is crazy. It makes everyone in it crazy." She took his hand. "I want you to come with me, but I want you to think about it first. I want you to be sure."

  "As sure as I ever get about anything." Jerry looked into her eyes. "I want to come visit real soon. I just might wind up staying for good."

  Beth got up and kissed him lightly on the lips. "Get your rest. You don't have to decide on anything today. I'm not leaving until you're completely well."

  Jerry closed his eyes. He was too tired to worry about it. He'd worry about it tomorrow.

  Tomorrow was another day.

  The Temptation of Hieronymus Bloat

  VIII

  "My army is gathering to me, Princess," I told her. "Every day since we battled the invaders from the great city and won, more and more people have come to me. They're jokers, most of them, but a few are aces…"

  "You have too many," she whispered in the darkness. "There are too many people here now. That is what the Pretender has told me. He says there wasn't room in your shared kingdom before the battle and the new caves aren't safe for his people. He says there isn't proper housing for those who deserve it. He says the jokers have too much money, too much room. He hates you, all of you, and the situation is making him angry. He says horrible things about you."

  "The Pretender is a fool," I spat out, though I had worried about the same thing. "His words don't scare me."

  "If his words don't scare you, then why have you not rescued me, my love?" Her soft, sad smile took some-but not all, not all-sting from her words. "I am in your hands entirely, Outcast. You have the power; I have nothing. I believe you. I… I love you. Please, please take me out of here."

  My soul ached. My breath caught in my throat. I stroked the smooth skin of the Princess's hands, glaring at the crude bars and stones that held her as if I could break them by the force of my will and desire. The ground underneath my feet rumbled and groaned in concert with my rage. "You know I will do that when I can, Princess," I told her. "You know that I have pursued several avenues to have you set free. I thought I'd found the way twice now. Both times I've been thwarted. This isn't easy. I must be able to guarantee that you will be safe and that my people will be safe as well."

  "When, then?"

  "Soon. Trust me. I will find a way. I must be careful. You know how powerful the Pretender is. If he knew I was here now, he might send the Silent Guardian." I felt a shiver, of fear go through her; the same chill touched me.

  But she was right. I couldn't tolerate her torment much longer. The soft swell of her belly under the dress was an accusation. I told myself that I would find a way, no matter what obstacles the Pretender placed in my way.

  The strength is within you, she had told me. I wish that I felt it were really true.

  "I won't let them hurt you anymore," I whispered to her, the Princess with Kelly's face. I said the words, and they became a vow, a resolution. "I will make you a way out. Believe me."

  Before she could answer, there was the sound of nearby bolts being loosed. I felt a rush of panic. I kissed the tips of her fingers before I hurried away from her into the darkness of the Catacombs and the long stairs under the Ruined Castle. I began the long climb back to the sun.

  The ascent was becoming more difficult every time. The hallways of the Catacombs had shrunk, pressing inward. I seemed heavier and much larger. My body barely fit in the passageway. The stones tore at my leather clothing, holding me back and making it difficult to maneuver through the twisting turns of the labyrinth.

  Exhausted and bloody, I paused at the landing where the crevice led to the caverns. The crevice had widened as the Catacombs had diminished. The opening was now easily large enough for me to fit through. I looked into the caverns beyond-there was a figure there. I thought for a moment that it was the toadlike presence of the Pretender, and my heart hammered against my ribs while my breath came harsh and quick. I held my torch high, letting the light shatter on the crystalline walls. I pulled the rapier from my belt.

  The penguin laughed at me. "You don't need that here, Fatboy. What a fucking scaredy-cat."

  "I'm not scared," I told him. "The Outcast is never scared."

  "Yeah. Right. That's why you've let your Princess sit in her cell for so long. That's why she's knocked up. That's why you've always tried to get someone else to do your dirty work. You're scared, all right, or you'd've done something." The penguin cocked its head at me. "You gonna stay out there, or are you afraid of the dark?"

  The penguin's scorn made me scowl. I scrambled through the rocky opening into the cool air of the caverns. Shadows fled the light of my torch. This place was vast: I could not see the roof or the far walls. Blackness hinted of openings leading out into secret ways and further caverns.

  "What is this place?" I asked.

  "It's your dream. You fucking tell me. All I know is that it's big and there're places here I wouldn't care to stay, and other places so damn beautiful, it makes me cry. It's a place. That's all. Big enough for everyone and all the horrors and beauty that the Rox can dream."

  The penguin looked at me strangely. "So, when you gonna do something?"

  "When the time is right."

  The penguin hawked and spat an enormous glob of spittle at its feet. Centipedes crawled from the rocks and lapped at the moisture. "Bullshit again. The time is now"

  "The Pretender's still too strong, even with the death of the Overlord."

  "Nope. You're too weak. It's time for you to grow up, Fatboy."

  With those words, the penguin sounded exactly like my father. "Just shut up!" I shouted back at him. Shadows moved in the darkness, as if my words had stirred unseen creatures to life. "What the hell do you know?"

  "I know that you're acting like a kid afraid of the neighborhood bully," the penguin told me. "I also know that for as big as you are, you just don't think big enough."

  "And what is that supposed to mean?"

  "You really love her? Then get her out. Do something."

  "I don't know how!" I told the penguin in anguish, and my voice was a wail.,

  "I'll help you, Governor. Let me help you."

  My whole body shuddered. The dream had dissolved. I found myself in the lobby, and Peanut was looking up at me with trust and loyalty and sadness in his mind. His wide sympathetic eyes, caught in their eternal hard folds of skin, gazed at me.

  "Peanut-"

  "It'd be best that way. Really. I know the way through the caves to her better than anyone. All you have to do is make an opening into her cell. You can do that, can't you?"

  He looked up at me with those trusting eyes. "I can lead her through the
caves, get into a boat, and take her to where she'd be safe. No one would know, Governor."

  "No," I said. I couldn't send a whole contingent of jokers-that would start a civil war here, and the jokers would inevitably lose. I couldn't afford to oppose Blaise directly, and with Latham gone, I had no more leverage within the jumper camp. So many people gone: K. C., Latham, Zelda…

  I smiled at Peanut. So simple and confident and faithfulhe believed that there was always a way. He believed that Good always had to win in the last reel.

  And so, I guess, did I.

  I felt the same stirrings of something that I'd felt when I'd made the caves, and I knew that, yes, I could make the door into her cell. I could do that much, I was certain.

  "Let me think about it," I told Peanut.

  Lovers

  IV

  The little room under the eaves was a stupendous improvement over the basement cell. There was a narrow window, and she could watch the sun set. She had a cot and folding metal chair, and once a day her guards took her for a walk about the perimeter of the hospital building. The food was no better, but at least there was more of it. But unfortunately she was, for the most part, denied the things most necessary to a breeding female-milk, fresh green vegetables, fruit. But as the days and weeks passed, as she became rounder and rounder, she developed a grudging respect for Illyana even as the baby made her more and more ungainly.

  "You are a tough little bitch, aren't you? Fed on next to nothing, and you still thrive. That's your Takisian bloodmakes you a fighter."

  Tachyon was sitting on the chair gazing out the window at a truly lovely sunset, provided courtesy of Manhattan's smog. It was beastly hot up under the eaves. Tach lifted the skirt of her dress, opened her legs even wider than was necessary to accommodate the bulge of her belly, and farmed herself vigorously. And for the hundredth time she made herself-and the illusory wife she might someday possess, should fate and fortune smile and restore her to her rightful body-the promise that she would never force a woman to endure a pregnancy in the summer.

  A small knot of jumpers emerged from the door four stories below and walked toward the trees. Tach leaned forward, more from force of habit than any real drive, and studied them. Fell back when there was no glint of copperred hair. Her body was not among them.

  This complacency was a recent development. In the beginning, she had peered from the window. During her walks, she had cast about like a hunting hound seeking desperately for a glimpse of herself, but the Tachyon body remained stubbornly out of sight. Now it was hard to arouse that level of concern. Her focus had narrowed to the room, and more importantly to what was occurring within her borrowed body.

  She was content to sit for hours listening to her heart beat, weaving her thought colors through the fabric and colors of the baby's thoughts, singing Takisian lullabies she had thought long forgotten.

  The grate of the key in the lock brought her head around, a frown of puzzlement between the blond brows. One of her guards, his mouth slack, drool running down his chin, jerked zombielike into the room. Her body was behind him. The reaction ran like fire along her nerve endings. Tach came to her feet, stared hungrily at her own body.

  The girl who wore her skin was dressed in tattered cutoffs. The shirt was the one Tachyon had been wearing at the time of the kidnapping-billowing sleeves, drawstring at the throat. It was open now, revealing a good deal of the chest with its whorls of copper hair. The bones of the clavicle were like stony ropes beneath the white skin, the legs stick thin. Stubble littered the pointed chin and the sunken cheeks.

  The sound they both made was surprisingly similar. A tiny whimper of misery, divided by two octaves. Tachyon recovered first. Stretched out imploring hands.

  "He raped me." The words were jarring in that husky baritone.

  "No, he raped me." Furious, Tach gripped the jumper by the shoulders. "Return me. Put us back! I can handle him."

  "I can't." "Won't:"

  "Can't! I'm not a jumper. Can't ever be one now" Before that bit of miserable knowledge could fully penetrate, the guard let out a choking sound and fell to the floor like a broken puppet. For Tachyon, medical instinct took over. Jerking her eyes from her body, she knelt awkwardly beside the boy and checked his pulse.

  Eyes shifting with lightning speed from the prone boy to Tachyon and back again, the body asked, "What's wrong with him? What did I do?"

  "A mind-control can be a silken web or a steel trap. Yours was of the latter variety"

  "Will he be okay?"

  Tachyon looked up at her eerie doppelganger. "No. His mind has been shredded. Death is only a matter of time." The body gasped, a sharp little hiss of fear. " I had to see you. You've got to help me."

  Tach gave a short bark of laughter. "Me? Help you? Isn't that rather presumptuous of you?"

  "You've got me pregnant," said the body in a blinding non sequitur.

  "Well, no. It's not something I managed all by myself… any more than I managed to get your body raped all by myself."

  The body was staring in fascination at the curve of her belly. He advanced a few steps, and his eyes jerked up to meet Tach's.

  "My head's making me crazy. I can't turn it off. I think things, and they happen."

  Tears welled up in the lavender eyes. Tachyon writhed inwardly. How painful to watch yourself weep. And for a brief instant she acknowledged that there was more than one victim in this hellish scenario.

  "What are you called, child?" she asked gently, feeling unimaginably old.

  "Kelly."

  Plans began to explode in Tachyon's mind. "Kelly, listen to me. Blaise is no match for my body. I can teach you how to control the power. You can mind-control him. Force him to return us."

  She was pursuing Kelly around the room as he retreated before her, desperately shaking his head. With panic shortening his breath, Kelly said, "I can't. I can't. He hurts me="

  The door slammed into the wall. They both cried out and whirled to face Blaise. And both fell back, for they knew the maddened rage that glittered in those dark eyes.

  Blaise seized Kelly by the arm and threw him across the room. " I told you… you couldn't see him. Don't ever… disobey me again."

  Kelly's teeth were chattering so hard, he couldn't speak. He shook his head frantically, the long red hair flying about his face.

  Blaise turned with almost balletic grace to face his grandfather. Tachyon's heart was jumping in her throat. Blaise stepped inclose, cupped her cheek in the palm of his hand. Suddenly his teeth clamped down on his lower lip, and hauling off, he backhanded her across the face. She was flung into the wall, pain exploding in her shoulder and head. With a moan, she slid down the wall. Black spots danced before her eyes. She could hear Blaise approaching. Ponderous footsteps.

  A lighter, quicker step. The sounds of a struggle. "Stop it! Stop it!" the Tachyon voice shouting shrilly. Tach opened her eyes. Kelly was clinging to Blaise's shoulder, clawing at his face. All the gestures were oddly feminine, jarring to Tachyon. Blaise snarled, and gathering up Kelly's shirtfront, he proceeded to beat the crap out of the smaller man. Kelly's screams filled the room. He subsided into muffled sobbing, curled like a ball on the floor.

  Blaise resumed his threatening advance. Tach watched the boy's foot draw back. She knew what was coming, and she managed to get her arms across her stomach before it happened. Her wrist took most of the kick, but even the residual force was enough to set her retching. Illyana's thoughts, pain, and fear were like the beating of wings in the confines of Tachyon's skull.

  Blaise backed off, reached down, and hauled Kelly to his feet. They exited, leaving Tachyon with the dying guard. "I swear to you, by all that I am and ever shall be." The musical Takisian syllables rippled through the room and mingled hideously with the dying boy's moans. "By Blood and Line. You shall die. And by my hand."

  Then and only then did Tachyon allow herself to faint.

  The garret room had metamorphosed into a tower cell. Lancet windows, gray ston
e walls, a private prie-dieu-ironic considering she wasn't Christian-a curtained canopy bed… a romantic's vision of the Middle Ages.

  And it irritated the shit out of her. This wasn't fantasy; this was deadly reality. And Tach was sick of the games. Her head seemed to be throbbing in time to her pulse, an outside pressure trying to warp and force the dream to fit his standards. Grimly, Tachyon fought back. What was achieved was a strange hermaphroditic compromise. Tachyon was male again, but pregnant.

  Alien man gives birth to human child!

  The ultimate tabloid headline, Tach thought, but then, we live in a tabloid nightmare. The wild card virus saw to that. We took order, peace, security… and gave them chaos.

  Tachyon was braiding his-her hair. But it really was his-her hair. Metallic copper curls sliding between his-her fingers. Frowning, tip of the tongue peeking from between his-her lips, he-she concentrated, struggled. Suddenly other hands took over the chore. The deft pull, right over left over right, the tug to the scalp was heaven. Tachyon sighed and dropped his-her hands into his-her lap, cradling the curve of their pregnancy.

  "You sent for me," said the Outcast. "Yes."

  Tach shifted around to face him. The wide brim of his hat shadowed his eyes but could not match the darkness within those eyes. Tachyon took the Outcast's hand and laid the palm against his-her belly. "Feel her." And Tachyon gathered up his-her child's thought and thrust them into the mind of his-her courtly lover.

  The Outcast reacted like a slaughterhouse steer seeing the fall of the hammer.

  "She's going to die. I'm going to die… if you don't help us."

  The man pulled his hand away as if the contact pained him. "I've tried… tried to help."

  "Here?" Tach gestured. "Well, it's not enough. The time for dreams is over."

  "It's difficult. He's very dangerous."

  "I know…" Long pause, then Tach added with poisonous softness, "I'd wager… better than you."

  The flush rode up in the Outcast's cheeks like a spill of blood. "How do you even know I can do anything?" There was a childish complaining note in the deep voice.