Wild Cards V: Down and Dirty Read online

  A pimpled teenager leaned out of a white Ford pickup with Jersey plates. “The Guard,” he shouted. “That’s a Guard chopper!” He waved at the helicopter.

  The whap-whap-whap of the rotors mingled with the horns and sirens and shouting to drown out the loudspeakers. Horns began to fall silent. “… your homes…”

  Someone began shouting obscenities.

  The chopper dipped lower, came on. Even Tom saw the military markings now, the National Guard insignia. The loudspeakers boomed. “… closed … repeat: Holland Tunnel is closed. Return to your homes peacefully.”

  Huge gusts of wind kicked up all around him as the helicopter passed directly overhead. Tom dropped to one knee and covered his face against the dust and dirt.

  “The tunnel is closed,” he heard as the chopper receded. “Do not attempt to leave Manhattan. Holland Tunnel is closed. Return to your homes peacefully.”

  When the copter reached the end of stalled traffic, two blocks farther back, it peeled off and rose high in the air, a small black shape in the sky, then circled back for another loop. The people in the streets looked at each other.

  “They can’t mean me, I’m from Iowa,” a fat woman announced, as if it made a difference. Tom knew how she felt.

  The cops had finally arrived. Two patrol cars edged down the sidewalk carefully, bypassing the worst of the congestion. A black policeman got out and started snapping orders. One or two people got back into their cars obediently. The rest surrounded the cop, all of them talking at once. Others, lots of them, had abandoned their vehicles. A stream of people headed up Canal Street, toward the entrance to the Holland Tunnel.

  Tom went with them, moving along slower than most, struggling with the weight of his bags. He was sweating. A woman passed him at a dead run, looking ragged and near hysteria. The helicopter flew over again, loudspeakers blaring, warning the crowd to turn back.

  “Martial law!” a truck driver shouted down from the cab of his semi. A wall of people formed around the truck, trapping Tom in their midst. He was shoved up against the tractor’s rear wheel as the crowd pressed closer for news. “It just came over the CB,” the trucker said. “The motherfuckers have declared martial law. Not just the Holland Tunnel. They shut down everything, all the bridges, the tunnels, even the Staten Island ferry. No one’s getting off the island.”

  “Oh, god,” someone said behind Tom, a man’s voice, husky but raw with fear. “Oh, god, it’s the wild card.”

  “We’re all going to die,” an old woman said. “I seen it in ’46. They’re just gonna keep us here.”

  “It’s those jokers,” suggested a man in a three-piece suit. “Barnett is right, they shouldn’t be living with normal people, they spread disease.”

  “No,” Tom said. “The wild card isn’t contagious.”

  “Sez you. Oh, god, we probably all got it already.”

  “There’s a carrier,” the trucker shouted down. Tom could hear the crackle of his CB radio. “Some fucking joker. He’s spreading it wherever he goes.”

  “That’s not possible,” Tom said.

  “Goddamn joker-lover,” someone shouted at him.

  “I got to get home to my babies,” a young woman wailed.

  “Take it easy,” Tom started to say, but it was too late, way too late. He heard crying, screaming, shouted obscenities. The crowd seemed to explode as people ran off in a dozen directions. Somebody slammed into him hard. Tom staggered back, then fell as he was buffeted from the side. He almost lost his grip on the suitcase, but he hung on grimly, even when a boot stomped painfully on his calf. He rolled under the truck. Feet rushed past him. He crawled between the wheels of the semi, dragging his bags behind him, and got to his feet on the sidewalk, half-dazed. This is fucking crazy, he thought.

  Way down Canal, the helicopter began another pass. Tom watched it come, the crowd surging hysterically around him. The chopper will calm them down, he thought, it has to.

  When the first tear gas canisters began to rain down into the street, trailing yellow smoke, he turned and dodged into the nearest alley and began to run.

  The noise dwindled behind as Tom fled through alleys and side streets. He’d gone three blocks and was breathing hard when he noticed a cellar door ajar under a bookstore. He hesitated a moment, but when he heard the sound of running feet on the cross street, his mind was made up for him.

  It was cool and quiet inside. Tom gratefully dropped the suitcase and sat cross-legged on the cement floor. He leaned back against the wall and listened. The air raid sirens had finally quieted, but he heard horns and an ambulance and the distant, angry rumble of shouts.

  Off to his right he heard the scrape of a footstep.

  Tom’s head snapped around. “Who’s there?”

  There was only silence. The cellar was dark and gloomy. Tom got to his feet. He could swear he’d heard something. He took a step forward, froze, cocked his head. Then he was sure. Someone was back there, behind those boxes. He could hear the short, ragged sound of their breathing.

  Tom wasn’t going any closer. He backed toward the door and gave the boxes a hard telekinetic shove. The whole stack went over, cardboard ripping, and dozens of glossy paperback copies of More Disgusting Joker Jokes cascaded from a torn carton. There was a grunt of surprise and pain from behind the boxes.

  Tom edged forward and pushed the top boxes in the feebly moving pile off to the side, using his hands this time.

  “Don’t hurt me!” a voice pleaded from under the books.

  “No one’s going to hurt you,” Tom said. He shifted a torn box, spilling more paperbacks onto the floor. Half-buried underneath, a man curled in a fetal ball, arms locked protectively around his head. “Come on out of there.”

  “I wasn’t doing nothing,” the man on the floor said in a thin, whispery voice. “I just come in to hide.”

  “I was hiding, too,” Tom said. “It’s okay. Come on out.”

  The man stirred, unfolded, got warily to his feet. There was something dreadfully wrong with the way he moved. “I ain’t so good to look at,” he warned in that thin, rustling voice.

  “I don’t care,” said Tom.

  Walking in a painful crabbed sideways motion, the man edged forward into the light, and Tom got a good look at him. An instant of revulsion gave way to sudden, overwhelming pity. Even in the dim light in the back of the cellar, Tom could see how cruelly the joker’s body had been twisted. One of his legs was much longer than the other, triple-jointed, and attached backward, so the knee bent in the wrong direction. The other leg, the “normal” one, ended in a clubfoot. A cluster of tiny vestigial hands grew from the swollen flesh of his right forearm. His skin was glossy black, bone-white, chocolate-brown, and copper-red in patches all over his body; there was no way to tell what race he’d belonged to originally. Only his face was normal. It was a beautiful face; blue-eyed, blond, strong. A movie star’s face.

  “I’m Mishmash,” the joker whispered timidly.

  But the movie star lips hadn’t moved, and there was no life in those deep, clear blue eyes. Then Tom saw the second head, the hideous little monkey-face peeping cautiously out of the unbuttoned shirt. It sprouted crookedly from the joker’s ample gut, as purple as an old bruise.

  Tom felt nauseated. It must have showed on his face because Mishmash turned away. “Sorry,” he muttered, “sorry.”

  “What happened?” Tom forced himself to ask. “Why are you hiding here?”

  “I saw them,” the joker told him, his back to Tom. “These guys. Nats. They had this joker; they were beating the hell out of him. They would of done me, too, only I snuck away. They said it was all our fault. I got to get home.”

  “Where do you live?” Tom asked.

  Mishmash made a wet, muffled sound that might have been a laugh and half-turned. The little head twisted up to look at Tom. “Jokertown,” he said.

  “Yeah,” Tom said, feeling very stupid. Of course he lived in Jokertown, where the fuck else could he live? “That�
��s only a few blocks away. I’ll take you there.”

  “You got a car?”

  “No,” Tom said. “We’ll have to walk.”

  “I don’t walk so good.”

  “We’ll go slow,” Tom said.

  They went slow.

  Dusk was falling when Tom finally emerged, cautiously, from the cellar refuge. The street had been quiet for hours, but Mishmash was too frightened to venture out until dark. “They’ll hurt me,” he kept saying.

  Even when twilight began to gather, the joker was still reluctant to move. Tom went first to scout the block. There were lights in a few apartments, and he heard the sound of a television blaring from a third-story window, and more police sirens, far off in the distance. Otherwise the city seemed deathly quiet. He walked around the block slowly, moving from doorway to doorway like a GI in a war movie. There were no cars, no pedestrians, nothing. All the storefronts were dark, secured by accordion grills and steel shutters. Even the neighborhood bars were closed. Tom saw a few broken windows, and just around the corner the overturned, burned-out hulk of a police car sat square in the middle of the intersection. A huge Marlboro billboard had been defaced with red paint; KILL ALL JOKERS, it said. He decided not to take Mishmash down that street.

  When he returned, the joker was waiting. He’d moved the suitcase and shopping bag to the doorway. “I told you not to touch those,” Tom snapped in annoyance, and felt immediately guilty when he saw how Mishmash quailed under his voice.

  He picked up the bags. “C’mon,” he said, stepping back outside. Mishmash followed, his every step a hideous twisting dance. They went slowly. They went very slowly.

  They stayed mostly to alleys and side streets south of Canal, resting frequently. The damned suitcase seemed to get heavier with each passing block.

  They were catching their breath by a Dumpster just off Church Street when a tank rolled past the mouth of the alley, followed by a half dozen National Guardsmen on foot. One of them glanced to his left, saw Mishmash, and began to raise his rifle. Tom stood up, stepped in front of the joker. For an instant his eyes met the Guardsman’s. He was only a kid, Tom saw, no more than nineteen or twenty. The boy looked at Tom for a long moment, then lowered his gun, nodded, and walked on.

  Broadway was eerily deserted. A lone police paddy wagon wove its way through an obstacle course of abandoned cars. Tom watched it pass while Mishmash cringed back behind some garbage cans. “Let’s go,” Tom said.

  “They’ll see us,” Mishmash said. “They’ll hurt me.”

  “No they won’t,” Tom promised. “Look at how dark it is.”

  They were halfway across Broadway, moving from car to car, when the streetlights came on, sudden and silent. The shadows were gone. Mishmash gave a single sharp bark of fear. “Move it,” Tom told him urgently. They scrambled for the far side of the street.

  “Hold it right there!”

  The shout stopped them at the edge of the sidewalk. Almost, Tom thought, but almost only counts in horseshoes and grenades. He turned slowly.

  The cop wore a white gauze surgical mask that muffled his voice, but his tone was still all business. His holster was unbuttoned, his gun already in hand.

  “You don’t have to—” Tom started nervously.

  “Shut the fuck up,” the cop said. “You’re in violation of the curfew.”

  “Curfew?” Tom said.

  “You heard me. Don’t you listen to the radio?” He didn’t wait for the answer. “Lemme see some ID.”

  Tom carefully lowered his bags to the ground. “I’m from Jersey,” he said. “I was trying to get home, but they closed the tunnels.” He fished out his wallet and handed it to the cop.

  “Jersey,” the cop said, studying the driver’s license. He handed it back. “Why aren’t you at Port Authority?”

  “Port Authority?” Tom said, confused.

  “The clearance center.” The cop’s tone was still gruff and impatient, but he’d evidently decided they weren’t a threat. He holstered his gun. “Out-of-towners are supposed to report to Port Authority. You pass the medical, they’ll give you a blue card and send you home. If I was you, I’d head up there.”

  Port Authority Bus Terminal was a zoo under the best of circumstances. Tom tried to imagine what it would be like now. Every tourist, commuter, and visitor in the city would be there, along with a lot of frightened Manhattanites pretending to be from out of town, all of them waiting their turn for a medical or fighting for a seat on one of the buses leaving the city, with the police and National Guard trying to keep order. You didn’t need a lot of imagination to picture the kind of nightmare going on up at Forty-second Street. “I didn’t know. I’ll get right up there,” Tom lied, “as soon as I get my friend home.”

  The cop gave Mishmash a hard look. “You’re taking a big risk, buddy. The carrier’s supposed to be some kind of albino, and nobody said anything about any extra heads, but all jokers look alike in the dark, right? Those Guard boys are real jumpy, too. They see a pair like you, they might decide to shoot first and check your IDs later.”

  “What the fuck is going on?” Tom said. It sounded worse than he could have imagined. “What is all this?”

  “Do you good to turn on a radio once in a while,” the cop said. “Might stop you getting your head shot off.”

  “Who are you looking for?”

  “Some joker fuck, been spreading a new kind of wild card all over the city. He’s freaky strong, and crazy. Dangerous. And he’s got a friend with him, some new ace, looks normal but bullets bounce right off him. If I was you, I’d dump the geek and haul ass for Port Authority.”

  “I didn’t do nothing,” Mishmash whispered.

  His voice was low, barely audible, but it was the first time he’d dared to speak, and the cop heard him well enough. “Shut the fuck up. I’m not in the mood for any joker lip. I want to hear you talk, I’ll ask you a question.”

  Mishmash quailed. Tom was shocked by the loathing in the policeman’s voice. “You got no call to talk to him that way.”

  It was a mistake, a big mistake. Above the surgical mask the policeman’s eyes narrowed. “That so? What are you, one of those queers who likes to hump jokers?”

  No, you asshole, Tom thought furiously, I’m the Great and Powerful Turtle, and if I were in my shell right now, I’d pick you up and drop you in the garbage where you belong. But what he said was, “Sorry, Officer. I didn’t mean anything by it. It’s been a rough day for everyone, right? Maybe we should just get going?” He tried to smile as he picked up the suitcase and shopping bag. “C’mon, Mishmash,” he said.

  “What’s in those bags?” the cop said suddenly.

  Modular Man’s head and eighty thousand dollars in cash, Tom thought, but he didn’t say it. He didn’t think he’d broken any laws, but the truth would raise questions he wasn’t prepared to answer. “Nothing,” he told the cop. “Some clothes.” But he’d hesitated too long.

  “Why don’t we have a look,” the policeman replied.

  “No,” Tom blurted. “You can’t. I mean, don’t you need a search warrant or probable cause or something?”

  “I got your fucking probable cause right here,” the cop said, drawing his gun. “This is martial law, and we got authority to shoot looters on sight. Now lower the bags to the ground slowly and back off, asshole.”

  The moment seemed to last a long, long time. Then Tom did as he was told.

  “Further back,” the cop said. Tom retreated to the sidewalk. “You too, geek.” Mishmash moved back next to Tom.

  The policeman edged forward, bent over, and pulled one of the handles of the shopping bag to peer inside.

  Modular Man’s head flew up and smashed him in the face.

  Blood squirted from the cop’s nose with a sickening crunch to stain the white gauze of his mask. He gave a muffled screech and staggered back. The head bowled squarely into his gut, tumbling like a cannonball. The cop grunted as his feet went out from under him. He landed on his ass
in the street.

  The head swooped around him. The cop brought up his pistol with both hands and squeezed off a round. Glass shattered in a second-story window as the head came crashing into his temple. The cop swatted at it with the barrel of his pistol; then something jerked the gun right out his hand and sent it skittering off down a sewer.

  “Son-of-a-bitch,” the cop managed. He tried to struggle back to his feet, his eyes as glassy as Mod Man’s. His nose was still bleeding; the surgical mask had turned a vivid red.

  The head came at him again. This time he managed to grab it and hold it at bay, just inches from his face. The long cable dangling from the jagged neck took on a life of its own and snaked up into a bloody nostril. The cop screamed and grabbed for the cable. The head jumped forward; two foreheads cracked together hard. The cop went down. The head circled over him. The cop groaned and rolled over. He made no attempt to rise.

  Tom started breathing again.

  “Is he dead?” Mishmash asked in an eager whisper.

  Tom’s heart was still on adrenaline overdrive; it took a moment for the words to register. “Fuck,” he said. What the hell had he done? It had all gone down so quickly.

  Mod Man’s head fell out of the air, hit the gutter, and rolled. Tom knelt over the fallen cop and felt for a pulse. “He’s alive,” Tom said. “Breathing is shallow, though. He might have a concussion, maybe even a cracked skull.”

  Mishmash crowded close. “Kill him.”

  Tom’s head snapped back around and he stared at the joker in horror. “Are you crazy?”

  The hideous little purple monkey-face was straining forward through his shirtfront. Moisture glistened on the hard, thin lips. “He was going to kill us. You heard him, you heard what he called us. He had no right. Kill him.”

  “No way,” Tom said. He stood up, wiping his hands on his jeans compulsively. His high was gone now; he felt more than a little sick.

  “He knows who you are,” Mishmash whispered.

  Tom had somehow managed to forget that. “Fuck fuck fuck,” he swore. The cop had seen his driver’s license.