High Stakes: A Wild Cards Novel by George R. R. Martin
Suddenly she couldn’t take the horror anymore. She ran out of the last tent she investigated, and despite her weariness and pain, hunger and thirst, sprang up into the sky, and went back down the road.
Buford was able to get him out of the public areas of the building and upstairs, but that seemed to be the extent of the ace’s clout. Franny was left in an outer office with a bland-looking male secretary who alternated answering the phone with scrolling on his iPad. His response to most of the callers was, “Ms. Baden is in a meeting and can’t be disturbed. She’ll get back to you as soon as she can.” A few of the calls went through.
Time ticked past. Outside the windows the skyline of Manhattan began to glow as the night came in. Franny lurched out of the overly low, deep chair and stalked to the receptionist’s desk. Resting his palm on the top he leaned across.
“Can I get you something? Cup of coffee?” the man said with the air of someone who had placated a lot of waiting dignitaries.
Franny pointed at the closed door. “You can get me in there.”
“Ms. Baden is—”
“In a meeting and can’t be disturbed,” Franny finished the sentence. “Would that meeting happen to be about Talas? Because if it is I know a little something about that, and I can connect her with somebody who knows a fuck lot more than I do. So, will you please get me in?”
“We have people on the ground. I’m sure Ms. Baden is well briefed on what—Hey!”
Franny reached the door and threw it open. There were a lot of people in the conference room. Some of them Franny recognized from American Hero. At the head of the table was a small dark-haired woman with shadows beneath her eyes and even deeper shadows haunting her dark eyes.
“What is the meaning—?”
“There’s someone who wants to see you. If you don’t come people are going to start dying. As a further incentive, she can tell you exactly what’s happening in Talas.” He paused, thought about it, and then added, “And probably how you’ve fucked everything up. She’s really good at that.”
“Where are we?” Tiago said to Ana. He’d dropped some of his armor, and trash littered the streets behind them like breadcrumbs in Hansel and Gretel.
“I have no idea,” Ana replied. “Our tracking equipment is dead. So are these hazmat masks.” She tossed hers aside.
The drizzling let up, but it didn’t make anything better. The mist was getting thicker. They were walking blind now that their coms, phones, and trackers had stopped working. And nothing looked like it had on the map for the tracker. They should have been near Bugsy’s last location, but the streets were all wrong.
Fuck him anyway, Michelle thought. Can’t do a simple reconnaissance mission. Idiot.
A low moan floated to them. They came to an intersection. There was a dry fountain in the center with a pillar in the center. The broken pieces of some Kazakh hero lay on one side of the fountain. Ringed around the fountain were cages.
The fog thinned, and Michelle saw people in large dog crates. Naked people. They drew closer, and from out of the gloom came a woman. She wore an antebellum gown with a bloody apron over it.
“Welcome,” she said with a smile. “I’ve been waiting for you. See what I’ve done. It’s so educational.”
She walked to the first cage and opened the wire door. Part of a body flopped out. It had stitches on its wrist where a hand from a different body had been attached.
They stared, fascinated as if they were in thrall by the scene before them. “This was my first attempt,” she said. There was pride in her voice. Pride and amusement. “The hand transplant didn’t work as well as I wanted it to. And the screaming. So much screaming. It didn’t bother me, but I was concerned about the neighbors.”
She moved on to the next cage. The person in this cage was alive, but his bones had been broken and had healed at unnatural angles.
“Kill me,” he said in a pleading voice. “Kill me. For the love of all that’s holy.”
Then he began to change, his body morphing into a slithering mass of grey tentacles. One baleful eye glared at them. He began to ooze through the mesh of the cage.
The woman smiled, and then she began to change as well. Her face melted into a pulpy mass. Only black eyes remained of what had once been human. A gaping maw opened. Some kind of sound erupted. Something inhuman and agonizing to hear.
Michelle clamped her hands over her ears and felt a hot wetness. She pulled her hands away and saw her own blood there. Earth Witch and Recycler did the same.
The creature slithered to another cage and pulled out a young girl.
The creature opened an orifice ringed in razor-sharp teeth. Then another mouth sprang from the gullet of the creature. That mouth was festooned with sharklike teeth. It neatly bit the girl’s head off even as the girl shrieked for her mother.
No, no, no!
Somewhere deep inside, Michelle recognized herself—her real self. Adesina. That girl could have been Adesina! But now she was almost entirely disconnected from her feelings for her daughter. It didn’t matter anyway. She wanted the blood. She wanted to see the blood. It was right. The blood was everything.
A trench opened, expanding until it consumed the cages, the fountain, and the obscenity that had once been a woman. Ana at work.
I swear I’m going to kill that bitch.
“I wanted to see the other cages!” Tiago yelled. “Didn’t you want to see? Didn’t you want to help? We could have helped. We’re supposed to help.” He began coming closer to Ana. “You aren’t helping.”
A crater opened up and swallowed him, too. Ana smiled beatifically.
A black rage swept over Michelle. Fuck the mission. The mission didn’t matter anyway. Bugsy deserved to die. His death was inevitable.
And Ana, well, Ana needed to die.
The red mist floated in Michelle’s vision. The pounding in her head was back, and it grew worse. The hissing voices she couldn’t understand were louder. She shook with bloodlust and rage.
She let a bubble fly. But before it hit Ana, a wall of earth rose from the ground, blocking its trajectory. So Michelle blasted the wall of dirt with a barrage of bubbles. It broke apart, but reassembled a moment later, larger, thicker, and taller. Then the earth flipped back—and like a fly swatter, smashed into Michelle and sent her flying.
She hit the building behind her and blasted out the other side. The pain knocked her out.
Introductions had been exchanged in the car, and now Franny and Baden were making their way through a phalanx of cop cars that surrounded the old building that housed the Jokertown Clinic. Spotlights glared off the windows of the hospital. A helicopter circled overhead. SWAT team members looking insectile in their helmets, goggles, and vests were positioned on rooftops and leveled high-powered rifles at the doors of the clinic.
An ambulance driver was remonstrating with Maseryk. “I gotta drop off this patient.”
Maseryk was firm. “Take them to Bellevue.”
“He’s a joker.”
“And the people inside the clinic have been taken hostage. You want to join them?”
“Uh … Oh. No.”
“That’s what I thought,” Maseryk muttered to himself. He spotted Franny and Babel. He walked over, his erect bearing and the cadence of his steps forcibly reminding Franny that Maseryk was ex-military.
“I’d like to have ears on what happens in there,” he said.
Franny shook his head. “They’re going to search me. Let’s not give them a reason to shoot me, okay? I’ll report back to you.”
“If they let you out.”
“I’m sure Baba Yaga will have another chore for her errand boy.” Babel gave him a sharp glance and he realized he’d probably revealed more than he wanted.
“What about her?” Maseryk jerked a thumb at Babel.
“I’m certain the lady didn’t insist on seeing me unless she wanted me to do something. She’ll have to let me leave if she wants that to happen,” the diplomat replied.
Maseryk nodded and stepped aside, but he didn’t look pleased. He spoke quickly into his radio, and waved Franny and Babel toward the front doors of the clinic.
Barbara glanced at the scowling Officer Black—Franny. His face was stern and angry as he leaned against the wall of the hospital room.
The room reeked, and it wasn’t just the usual hospital miasma. Much of it seemed to emanate from the foul-mouthed old women in the bed in the center of the heavily guarded room. Rheumy eyes glared at Barbara from the wrinkled face. Barbara stopped short of what she hoped was the woman’s spitting distance.
“So you’re in charge of the Committee?” the woman asked in a broken, husky voice. “You’re younger than I expected you to be. A mere puppy. So … tell me you haven’t already sent aces to Talas. Tell me that we can still decide who to send and where to send them in order to end this.”
Baba Yaga’s harsh gaze impaled Barbara, and even though she thought her face would betray nothing, the woman on the bed gave a sigh and closed her eyes, her head turning on the pillow. When Baba Yaga spoke again, it was in Russian this time, and Barbara closed her eyes momentarily to release the wild card ability within her, putting Franny within the bubble of understanding while leaving the guards outside, though she knew some of them obviously spoke the language. “Ah, they’ve already gone. You’re stupid as well as young, then. You’ve lost them, haven’t you?”
“Our contact with the team has become … erratic,” Barbara admitted, knowing that Baba Yaga would hear it as if she’d spoken fluent Russian. The old woman’s eyes widened slightly, as if she hadn’t expected Barbara to understand anything she’d said, then she laughed. Against the wall, Franny cocked his head, listening intently.
“You speak my language like a native,” Baba Yaga said. Barbara shrugged; she didn’t correct the woman’s misapprehension. “You’ve lost them, your team,” Baba Yaga repeated.
Barbara ignored that comment, though she felt the growing knot inside her stomach, her fear of what had happened with Klaus, the horror of what she’d seen and heard only a few hours before. “Officer Black tells me that you know this person called Hellraiser, and that he’s the one causing the disturbance in Talas.”
Now the old woman’s eyebrows climbed her forehead. “Disturbance, you call it? That’s what you would call the possible end of the world, eh? A fucking disturbance?”
“I’d call it hyperbole to be talking about the end of the world,” Barbara answered, and again the old woman cackled mockingly.
“Oh, you are an idiot,” Baba Yaga answered. “Believe me, it’s not hyperbole, just the raw truth.” Barbara shivered involuntarily, hearing that. She tried to read the old woman’s craggy face, tried to pretend that Baba Yaga was lying, but she found she couldn’t believe that. Those wrinkle-snared eyes stared at her, and through the scorn and derision, Barbara thought she saw a faint glimmer of sympathy. Klaus, what have I sent you into? Why didn’t you let me go with you? Why didn’t I insist? Please be alive. Please stay alive.
“Officer Black said—” Barbara began again, but Baba Yaga cut her off.
“Francis is afraid. He should be. We all should be afraid.” Baba Yaga sniffed. “I have something you must listen to. Cassette tapes.” Her rheumy gaze slid over to Franny. “Go bring us a cassette player, boy,” she spat.
Franny’s scowl deepened. “Give me the money to buy it, bitch,” he answered.
Baba Yaga motioned with her head to one of the Russian guards, who reached into his suit jacket and pulled out a wallet. The man silently handed Black a hundred-dollar bill. He stared at it for several seconds, then spun and left the room. Barbara cocked her head toward the old woman on the bed.
“He’s a pup, too—but a lucky one.”
“Tell me about this Hellraiser,” Barbara said, trying to bring the conversation back to something that might help Klaus, might give Barbara and the Committee something solid on which to hope and plan. The woman lifted her head a bit on the pillow.
“His name’s not Hellraiser. It’s Tolenka. He was my partner in the KGB: a good one. And Tolenka isn’t the one causing your ‘disturbance.’” She coughed as she stressed the word. “It’s the thing that is inside him doing that.”
“The thing inside him?” Barbara asked.
“We went on a mission many years ago to … well, you don’t need to know that. All you need to know is that it didn’t go well. Tolenka went to use his power, and realized that he’d taken in something he couldn’t control, something that had taken a foothold in his body and couldn’t be banished—and that’s why Talas has become what it is.”
“What are you talking about? What took him?”
“Wait,” Baba Yaga told her. “Be patient a little longer. When Black gets back, I will play the tape, and you will hear Tolenka. I would offer to translate, but…” She gave Barbara a mirthless smile. “You will understand the words, at least.”
Miles later, the Angel came upon the vehicles they’d arrived in that morning, but hovering above the scene, could see no one to greet her.
She was exhausted, hungry, and hurting. Her shoulder throbbed from the injuries she’d sustained in the battle with the bat-beast. She thought the bleeding had stopped some time ago, but her side was still wet and tacky from the blood she’d lost. She could feel the semidried blood pulling off her flesh when she turned certain ways and she wasn’t looking forward to removing the gore-soaked leather away from the wound.
She hovered for a moment, peering down at the vehicles. The foul-smelling, sticky green fog that had obscured her vision and made her nauseous and thickheaded as she moved through it had thinned and finally vanished as she’d moved down the road toward the airport they’d arrived in. But as far as she could see there was no activity on the ground below her.
She wondered if any of the Committee aces had made their way out of Talas. The Angel wondered if perhaps the army units had retreated as, as it seemed, the fog had advanced.
Suddenly, someone emerged from the front seat of one of the parked vehicles, holding a rifle and looking up at the sky. The figure waved vigorously and she finally recognized him in the leprous moonlight, more from the hat he wore than anything else. It was the Australian ace, Tinker. He gestured for her to land and she did so gratefully. She dropped tiredly to the ground, landing near the girl. Her wings vanished.
“You look like hammered shit,” Tinker exclaimed in his broad Aussie accent as the Angel limped on cramping legs toward him. The heat of the day still wafted up from the pavement in unrelenting waves.
“Water?” she croaked through parched lips. The ace unsnapped a canteen from the web-belt slung across his narrow hips, and flipped it to her. The Angel caught it, twisted its cap open, and put it to her mouth. The water was hot and metallic-tasting, but at least it was wet. She drunk off about half the canteen and then held it back.
Tinker shook his head. “You need it more than me. ’Sides, we got more back in the SUVs.” He frowned. “A little more, anyways.”
“Thanks.” The Angel took another gulp, swished it around her mouth, and spit it on the concrete. The water sizzled and after a very few moments was gone. She looked around the relative tranquility. “Where is everyone?”
“Gone,” Tinker said. “There’s just me ’n’ Bugsy and that worthless Lama bloke, and now you.”
“The army?” the Angel asked.
Tinker pulled a face. “They scarpered like ’roos when reports came back that the probing column Lohengrin took in got scragged. A few stayed on with me and Bugsy. Maybe figured it was safer. I tried to tinker together some listening equipment when the radios went out.” He shrugged massive shoulders. “Didn’t work. Getting some intermittent contact with Babel since we withdrew, but I dunno.” He scowled back into the city center. “Looks like the crap is following us.”
The Angel nodded. “Where’s Bugsy?”
Tinker jerked a thumb over her shoulder. “In the back of the SUV. Probably still curled up in
The Angel questioned him with a look.
“Been a cot case pretty much since you took off.”
“Did you get anything out of him?”
“Been jibbering like a hoon about this creepy shit he’s seein’ out there, stuff worse than the worst slasher movie you can ever imagine.”
“I can believe that,” the Angel muttered.
“Still small, too,” the Tinker added quietly.
“Where is he?”
“Come on.” Tinker headed over to the cars. “I got some tinnies in an ice chest. Guess you could use one.”
“Tinnies?”
“Cans of beer.”
“Guess I could,” the Angel said.
Much to her relief, her gear seemed intact in back of the SUV where a still-diminished Bugsy was sleeping in the backseat. He was wrapped up in a fetal position and he looked like a little boy. She wanted to reach out and smooth his tousled hair, even though she still remembered what an annoying twit he was.
She pulled her duffel bag out a little awkwardly with her left hand as Tinker approached with a beer can he’d taken from a cooler in the front seat. She reached for it automatically with her right hand, winced, then took it with her left.
“What’s the matter?” he asked.
“Dislocated right shoulder,” she said. “I think. And a wound in my side I’ve got to dress.”
“Ouch,” Tinker said. “What happened?”
“Had to fight some flying rat-bat thing. He got a hold of me at one point, clawed me. I hurt my shoulder pulling away.”
She decided not to mention the spiked red penis thing.
He handed her one of the beer cans he was carrying, watched her as she raised the can to her lips. It was magically cold. She drained the bitter liquid from it in a disappointingly few number of gulps, dropped it, and drew a sharp, wicked-looking knife from the belt around her hips. Slowly, carefully, and somewhat painfully she cut the top off her leather jumpsuit and pulled it down so that it hung at her waist. Under it she wore only a heavy sports bra. Both the bra and her torso were covered in blood. The slashing wound in her side had clotted, but she’d leaked more fluid than she’d realized. Her injured shoulder sagged.