High Stakes: A Wild Cards Novel by George R. R. Martin
This she promised herself. The world is a big place—more wisdom from Ffodor, that—and even I haven’t seen it all. So Talas and its zombie flashmobs can fuck themselves all the way to hell and back.
Money. Get the money. Mollie returned to the safe. Her body went on autopilot while she finished cutting it from the wall. She didn’t see her work, only a man slavering over the remnants of his own ruined eyes while a mother slammed her baby—
No. NO. Don’t think about it. Don’t think about any of it. I’m safe. Don’t think about the baby. Don’t think about that chair in the corner. Don’t think about Ffodor. Don’t remember the iron fenceposts sticking through—
NO! Don’t think about any of that shit.
Mollie heaved on the cutter. Baba Yaga’s safe crashed to the floor amid crumbled drywall and fragments of hot steel. She was just about to drop it through the portal to Idaho when the shrieking started anew. And much closer.
The skin all over Mollie’s body prickled with gooseflesh. A sheen of cold sweat instantly dampened her forehead, armpits, under her breasts, and even the top of her ass crack. Her hands shook so violently she flung the cutter aside.
“Fuck fuck fuck oh fuck—”
Sporadic bursts of automatic gunfire punctuated the screaming. More gunfire. More screeching. An unintelligible chorus of screams. No language, just mindless expression of some raw red emotion that Mollie couldn’t hope to identify. The corridors echoed with incoherent rage.
The shriekers had forced their way inside the casino.
Marcus couldn’t tell which thing he hated most about being in the helicopter: the noise, which was enormous even with the sound-blocking earphones clamped over his head; or the vibrations, which made his scales tremble; or the motion of the thing, its weird, unnatural tilts and curves, changes in height that made his stomach lurch; or the frightening speed the land scrolled by beneath them; or the fact that his coils were jammed into the small cabin so tightly that he pressed against the legs of everyone in the group; or the eyes on him, staring, cold as a Ukrainian winter, Vasel the most frigid of all. He even hated the daunting array of dials and buttons and colorful electronic displays he could glimpse between the pilots in the cockpit. All those gadgets mattered, and he couldn’t make a bit of sense of them. Snakes, he thought, weren’t meant to fly.
Marcus had been all for driving back in the truck, but Vasel nixed that idea. It would take too long, especially fighting all the traffic fleeing Talas.
“I have a helicopter for a reason,” he’d said.
Marcus knew what it was; to scare him shitless.
Olena, sitting beside him, said, “Look, there are even more cars on the road now. Trucks. Buses. Donkeys. Carts. People on foot. Everything.”
Her voice came to Marcus not from her lips, but through the earphones. It was intimate, but strangely disembodied. He didn’t look, afraid he’d hurl if he did. “I’ll take your word for it,” he managed. “Am I the only one who thinks this is all a bad idea?”
Vasel answered with a sarcastic-sounding dribble of incomprehensible words.
“English, Papa,” Olena said.
Vasel sat across from them, staring at Marcus with undisguised disdain. He spoke, his lips moving and his voice appearing at Marcus’s ears. So much for the intimacy. “You are afraid. Blacks are not brave when it matters, are they?”
Well fuck you very much, Marcus thought. He said, “You don’t know anything about me.”
“I know enough. I know that my daughter will tire of you soon. Jungle fever. It always breaks before long.”
Olena said something that must have been a Ukrainian curse. She reached across and punched her father in the shoulder with a small, tight fist. It probably hurt, but the man’s face didn’t register the blow. The guards and soldiers smiled, reminding Marcus that they too could hear everything being said. He tried to change the subject. “Have you considered that anything valuable in the casino is gone by now? Place has been crazy for days now.”
“Looters want money, guns, jewels, electronics,” Vasel said. “Trinkets. Those things don’t interest me.”
“What does?”
“That is need to know only.” Vasel smiled. “You don’t need to know, do you?”
Marcus wished he didn’t need to know. He wished he wasn’t here, and that whatever future he was to have with Olena didn’t hinge on whatever it was this mission was about. He also felt uneasy about leaving the villagers alone. Just a couple days with them, but already they seemed like family. Leaving them didn’t sit right with him. He hoped that whatever was driving people from Talas wouldn’t touch them, especially Nurassyl.
One of the soldiers at a window said something. The others craned toward the windows to see whatever he was talking about. Marcus didn’t. For a time they chattered in Ukrainian. When she could, Olena explained. “The army has the road blockaded. It looks like they’re not letting anyone else leave the city. Not just the road. They have a whole perimeter set up, tanks and armored vehicles patrolling it.”
“They’re not letting people in?” Marcus asked. “But we’re going anyway? Great.”
“I can see Talas,” Olena said. “We’ll be there in a few minutes.”
That’s one thing the helicopter had going for it. The flight was going to be mercifully short. They could get in fast, which also meant they could get out fast. That, Marcus told himself, was what this was all about. Vasel could have whatever it was he wanted, and he and Olena might just get out of here together. Just a few more hours of this crap and—
The engines sputtered, a quick staccato barrage of sound and silence as the helicopter lurched to one side, corrected, and then tilted too far the other way. Marcus clutched Olena’s hand, and she his. “Oh, please don’t…”
The returned roar of the engines drowned out his voice, a sweet sound if ever he’d heard one.
It didn’t last. The pilot had just begun to say something when the engines cut out again, taking the pilot’s voice with them. For a few stunned seconds everyone shared the horror of the sudden, enormous quiet. Then the bottom fell out. The helicopter dipped forward and hurtled into a dive. Looking out the window, Marcus could see the rotors spinning, but not like before. They were going down. He looked at Olena. She stared right back at him. Beautiful. Terrified. Her face white like it had never been before. He said, “We’ll be okay. We’ll be okay.”
She said something back, but he couldn’t hear her.
The helicopter banked sickeningly to one side, and then jerked back the other way, spinning so fast the motion yanked everyone’s heads around. One of the soldiers vomited. Vasel was shouting, tapping on his earphones, turning and trying to speak directly to the pilots. They were frantically at work, one of them with an iron grip on what looked like a giant joystick, the other with hands flying over the dials and knobs and displays. They had all gone dark.
Marcus glimpsed the earth, seething up toward them as they dropped. He ripped off his earphones, and slipped Olena’s off her head as well. She said, “Marcus, I—” And he said, “Olena, I—”
The nose of the helicopter suddenly rose, the back end dropping, making the whole world tilt. They were going to crash. Marcus knew it. He so wanted to get the words he wanted to say out of his mouth, but they’d vanished. He still tried again, “Olena—”
The helicopter leveled, and landed hard. It bounced into the air again, but came down a moment later and steadied. Marcus stared into Olena’s face, breathing hard, only slowly letting himself believe they’d actually landed. “Olena—”
This time he got cut off by the sudden jostling of the soldiers and the bodyguards as they ripped their seat belts off, lunged for the door, and jostled their way out of it. Vasel, looking mildly annoyed, sat still until they were out. He watched Marcus. He slowly took off his earphones and said, “Exciting times, yes?” He exited the helicopter.
Olena and Marcus followed him. Marcus slid/tumbled out of the helicopter. Gasping, he slithered
“Damn,” Marcus said. He knew now which part of being in a helicopter he hated most. The emergency landing part.
The clinic was in a run-down storefront. Franny had given the desk clerk another two hundred dollars. The vet carried Baba Yaga to the van while Franny carried the satchel and the guns. The vet didn’t remark on the pistol in his waistband or the Uzi.
Once at the office the vet had told Franny to pull into the alley and wait. It was hot in the van, but if he rolled down the windows an effluvia of rotting garbage from the dumpsters wafted in and had his stomach rebelling. A few minutes later the vet emerged through a back door, and motioned to Franny. Grunting with pain he carried Baba Yaga into the office.
“I sent the receptionist home. Closed the office. We won’t be disturbed.”
There was a steel table in the middle of the back room surrounded by cages. A few of them contained unhappy occupants either mewing piteously or barking frenziedly. In one of them an iguana stared unblinking at Franny. The flat eye reminded him of Baba Yaga’s gaze. With a nod the vet indicated that Franny should place Baba Yaga on the cold metal surface.
The vet tossed him a green gown, mask, and gloves. The man, who was loading up a tray with various instruments and a stack of gauze squares, noticed the efficient way Franny pulled on the gloves. “You’re not a doctor or you wouldn’t need me and you mentioned autopsies. Policeman?”
“Yeah.” Franny thrust out his hand. “I’m Francis Bla—”
“No names. It’s better that way.” An IV was inserted. “Okay. We begin. If you faint I will step over you and go on. But if you faint she will probably die because I do need your help.”
“I won’t faint.”
“We need to expose the arm,” the vet ordered and returned to laying instruments on a tray.
Which left Franny to undress the old woman. He pulled her to a sitting position, and unzipped the dress. He pulled it down to reveal a wrinkled, age-spotted chest, an incongruous pink lace bra, and a medal hanging on a chain around her neck. It was a single gold star suspended beneath a red ribbon. On the back was a portrait of a handsome man in the oversaturated colors that typified Soviet era art.
The vet nudged Franny with an elbow and handed him a stack of gauze pads. “Be ready to blot.”
He took a scalpel and cut through the skin about three inches above the woman’s elbow. Oddly he cut on a vertical line before turning the blade. Franny was blotting and throwing blood-soaked squares onto the floor. When the vet was done cutting there was a large flap of skin hanging loose.
“Give me that kelly clamp,” the vet ordered and indicated the instrument with a jerk of his chin. Franny handed it over and the vet clamped off an artery that had been pumping small gouts of blood.
Next the vet fired up a small saw. The piercing whine filled the room and set the dogs to howling. That noise and the flash of white bone among the blood and viscera had the mutton pastry knocking at the back of Franny’s throat. He swallowed hard. Bone dust dusted the angry red edges of the wound and filled the air with a smell like burning hair as the saw gnawed through the arm. Baba Yaga’s arm fell with a dull thud onto the table.
“Almost done. You’re doing good.”
Franny nodded and continued to hold and hand as instructed while the vet folded the flap of skin over the stump and sutured it closed. Antiseptic was smeared across the stump and a bandage applied. He finished with a couple of injections.
“Antibiotics and painkiller,” he explained. “Now it’s up to how you care for her and her own resilience. But you need to leave so I can reopen.”
“I need some pain meds and could you look at this wound in my side?” Franny asked as he took off his shirt. “I think the stitches have torn loose.”
The vet ripped away the bandage, sucked at his teeth, and glanced up at Franny from beneath his brows. “That’s a bullet wound. As is that one.” He nodded toward his shoulder.
“I take it that’s going to make some kind of difference,” Franny said.
“Yes. It means I want more money. I want ten thousand.”
“We agreed on five.”
“That was before…” He gestured at Franny’s wounds. “Bullets.”
“Okay.”
The vet turned away and prepared an injection. Franny got into the satchel. Ten grand wiped out the stash of dollars. He noticed the vet craning to see what was in the bag. Franny realized that he had no idea what was in that syringe. He drew the pistol out of his waistband. He held the gun in one hand and the stack of wrapped bills in the other.
“It’s just lidocaine to numb the area,” the man said, but Franny hadn’t missed the flicker of anger in his dark eyes.
“No. Not shots.”
The vet carefully set aside the syringe. “All right, but it’s going to hurt.”
“I wouldn’t count on me passing out,” Franny said.
The vet worked quickly and none too gently to clean the wounds and stitch the hole in Franny side. There was one moment when Franny wondered if he could hang on and he realized the whimpering sounds were coming from him and not one of the dogs in the cages. Eventually it was done. Fresh bandages were in place and the vet thrust a bottle into Franny’s hands. He looked at the label and inwardly cursed because of course it wasn’t in English. The Cyrillic letters seemed to do a mocking dance.
“What the fuck is it?”
“Tramadol.”
Franny recognized the name. It had been given to their Lab Lady when she’d been hit by a car. “Reassure me that you wouldn’t lie to me, Doc.”
“Not when you have a gun … and I don’t have my money,” the vet said pointedly.
“Okay.” Franny tossed over the stack of bills. He picked up Baba Yaga and backed toward the door. “No calls to the police, right?”
“Of course not. They’d just take the money from me.”
“Nice police force you’ve got here,” Franny grunted, and he stepped back into the alley.
The casino reverberated with shrieks, gunfire, and a rhythmic thumping, like the sound track to a madman’s nightmare. Mollie shivered in the corner of Baba Yaga’s closet, knees to her chest. The harder she tried to block out the images from the street the deeper they etched themselves into her eyelids.
The thumping grew louder. More than just a thumping, it resolved into a fwump-fwump-fwump-fwump that shook the building like the world’s most obnoxious car stereo. Helicopters, she realized. She hadn’t recognized the noise because she’d never been so close to one before. And these were really close. Landing on the street close.
Thank God. Thank God. Somebody’s coming to restore some order. Did they have something like a National Guard in Kazakhstan?
Mollie hauled herself upright. She’d been curled in the corner a good while; her ass was numb. She went to the window, taking extra care to not look anywhere near the café and the wrought-iron fence with the—
No. No. It’s over now.
Sure enough, there was a helicopter in the wide intersection just down the street, blades pinwheeling to a stop. But it didn’t look military. It didn’t look official at all. Nor did the neckless thugs pouring out of it with submachine guns clutched to their chests. She’d seen enough mobsters hanging around the casino to recognize the type.
They were not the type to content themselves with petty cash. They knew what was what; they’d be coming for the vault, and the safes. Mollie reached through a hole in space to check the locks on Baba Yaga’s door. All solid, all secure.
She was about to turn back to the closet when movement caught her eye. Crouching in the window, she peered down toward the street just outside the entrance. She glimpsed the tail end of an enormous snake slithering under the marquee. She recognized the markings. Marcus something. He was one of the pit fighters, and
Was he here to help, or had he joined up with the psycho cannibal flashmob, as Vaporlock had done?
She didn’t want to find out. The greasy guy had nearly done her in. She’d have no chance against the snake guy if he decided to throw a couple coils around her.
The pilots could explain what happened, but not why. The engines failed, that was obvious. The electronics went out, too. But they couldn’t find any reason for it. Everything had been fine before the failure, all the gauges reading as they should, plenty of fuel left. They also couldn’t explain why nothing they tried could get the helicopter started again. They worked at it, but it was dead. A useless hunk of metal.
The landing itself, it turned out, was a textbook autorotation maneuver, whatever that meant. Vasel shrugged it off as standard procedure in the event of engine failure. Marcus kinda wanted to give the pilots high-fives and backslaps, but he kept control of his enthusiasm. There wasn’t time for it, really, as Vasel kept them on task. They were near enough to the city to approach it on foot. They left the pilots to get the helicopter working again, and the rest of them set off.
Sliding down the debris-cluttered road, Marcus took in the city as they approached it. The sun was high in a cloudless sky. It should have lit the scene with midday clarity. It didn’t. It was as if the daylight evaporated as it fell, leaving the city looking not exactly dark, but somehow unlit. Dead or undead or something he couldn’t put his finger on. A pall hung over it that just shouldn’t have been there. Smog? Maybe, but it looked weird.
“Where’s the casino?” Vasel asked them. “Quickest way.”
Olena took the lead. The armed guards formed a protective circle that Marcus was glad to have around them. They wore half-full packs, weighted with ammunition. There were still people around, ones who weren’t fleeing the place. From a distance Marcus had taken comfort in that. If not everyone was flipping out maybe things weren’t really so bad. But once inside the city limits that tenuous reassurance vanished. Yes, there were people still in the streets, but they weren’t acting normal.