Jokertown Shuffle Read online

  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 light
ning 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.

  But Tommy surprised her. The plump face seemed wrinkled and old as the human concentrated, swung up the nose-and they were flying level again. Unfortunately they were flying away from the Rox, away from her body. They passed some invisible boundary. Tommy's breath steadied, and her tears cut off like dive doors closing against the inrush of sea. Tach had been waiting so long to cry. Now it had happened, and she had had no release. She felt angry, cheated, and most of all defeated. She sighed and cranked her head back until it rested against Tommy's chest.

  There was a tug of inertial motion, and she realized that they were coming around in a sharp, tight circle.

  "What are you…"

  "Trying again, I think I can get past this time," grunted the ace.

  "Tommy-"

  "No, I've felt it, I know what to expect. I can do it."

  "You're delusional. I have shields, and the wall tore my guts out. You're only a human; how can you possibly-"

  "I'm an ace."

  But it was said with that slow drawl, John Wayne bravura, and Tach knew what that sentence really meant: "I'm a man."

  "Tommy, don't. I know you're my friend, you're trying to help, but this is all tangled up with other things… emotions… pride. Don't kill me proving that you care for me."

  Her voice was already beginning to spiral as they hit the outer edges of the wall, and the fear crawled back. A sudden acceleration pressed her deep into Turtle's lap as they shot straight up.

  "Sucker can't extend forever," grunted Tommy. Tachyon laughed. "Tommy, you're a genius."

  The wall didn't extend forever. Eventually even imagination runs out, and in Bloat's case, it ended at two thousand feet. They shot past the top. Tommy leveled off, and they were behind Bloat's Wall.

  Fires still burned fitfully among the remains of joker hovels. The air reeked with a thick acrid smoke hanging like a funeral pall over the shattered remains of men, jokers, and machines. Through the inferno crept the less wounded coming to the aid of the whining, writhing, bleeding figures. The jokers were tended to. The nats were shot.

  As another uniformed body jerked and sprawled in that unlovely attitude unique to death, Tommy lost it. Cranking up the volume on his speakers, he bellowed: "KILL ONE MORE, AND I'LL MASH YOU LIKE ANTS!"

  Jokers gesticulated, waved guns. There was a whine like angry bees as several rounds glanced harmlessly off the plate steel of the shell. Then a penguin in ice skates came floating down out of the roiling clouds, executed a perfect pirouette in front of a camera, and gave a jaunty little salute. Simultaneously the weapons were lowered, and Tach knew they had been accepted into Bloat's kingdom of the damned.

  It was an impressive entrance. Turtle, with Tachyon riding on the back of the shell, sailed grandly into the great hall through the shattered windows. It was a wonder they sailed at all. Tommy was not sanguine about their outridersBoschean mermen riding on winged fish. Gravely they saluted Tachyon with the tips of their spears. She bit back irritation. She was tired of being treated as a fairy-tale princess. She wanted to get back to being an outcast prince.

  There were murmurs from the hundred or so jokers gathered like misshapen worshipers at the feet of an alien god as Turtle brought them to rest only a few inches from the head and shoulders of the young man who ruled and lay in helpless bondage to the world he had created. In the month since they'd last met, Teddy had aged. Recalling the bodies bobbing in the cold waters at the base of the wall, Tachyon understood why.

  "So, Doctor, what do you think of my little kingdom?"

  "Quite impressive," Tach said neutrally.

  "If we'd waited a couple of more days, you wouldn't have needed your ace friends to rescue you. This fat joker boy could have done it all on his own."

  "I don't have time for you to fish for compliments, seek reassurance, or air your grievances. You know the depth of my gratitude."

  "It's a poor second for love." Adolescent agony rippled through the words.

  "I have none to give you… none for anyone." She closed her eyes briefly, explored that vast echoing gulf that had swallowed her soul. She raised her head and stared into Teddy's eyes. "I've come for Blaise, and I've come for my body. Bring them to me." She indicated the Boschean demons. "I doubt he can mind-control your dream knights."

  "I would be happy to oblige, but Blaise and Kelly are gone." Tach flung out a hand to steady herself. "I think Blaise was finally impressed with of Bloat when my friends turned up to play. I think he also figu
red out he wasn't bulletproof."

  "Where have they gone?"

  "I'm not sure. They had that Durg guy with them." The young man tugged thoughtfully at his lower lip. "I think maybe they were going to an island. Hawaii, Tahiti?…"

  Tach made an `explain further' gesture with her hands. She wasn't sure she could trust her voice.

  "Blaise is usually leaky as a sieve, but he was really working at holding his shields. All I got was the image of a seashell-"

  "Baby!"

  She hadn't realized the cry had been audible until she felt Turtle pivot and accelerate for the window.

  The dark waters of the East River reluctantly and sullenly gave back the sheen of the streetlights. The motion of the water gave the illusion that the warehouses were rocking gently.

  And cradled within one of those faded and pitted buildings was Baby, Tachyon's living spaceship. Her friend, servant, stellar steed.

  Tach was once again in Tommy's arms as they flew toward the building.

  "How you doin'?"

  Tach threw back her hair. "I can't reach her," she panted. She licked sweat from her upper lip.

  "Maybe Baby'll be suspicious. I mean Durg and Blaise ordering her to leave, and you told her not to trust Blaise."

  "Yes, but they'll have the master with them. Even if this creature which has stolen my skin hasn't mastered my mental powers, Baby won't question him." Tach pressed a hand to her face. "They're loyal… they aren't bright."

  "Even if she buys it," Tommy said, "they can't get far, right? You burned out the whatchacallit when you came to earth, right? You know, the warp drive, whatever you call it… "

  "The ghost drive," Tach told him, her voice dull.

  "Yeah," Tommy agreed. "So the ship's crippled…"

  "Once," Tach said heavily. "No longer."

  Tommy turned his head to look at her. His mouth opened wordlessly. Tach didn't need to be a telepath to read the dismay in his eyes.

  "On Takis, we have a saying-as patient as a ship.' They are living organisms, Tommy. Given time enough, and rest, the ships can heal themselves."

  "Oh, fuck," he said. "How long since…"