High Stakes: A Wild Cards Novel by George R. R. Martin
Franny hastily rolled down his window, leaned out, and vomited. His puke was just about the best thing Mollie could hope to smell here. The zombies were a close second.
Ray clung to the running board flanking Bruckner’s window. He squinted, trying to peer into the fog. He had to speak loudly to be heard over the diesel engine and background noise of screams, gurgling, and mindless gibbering that ever pierced the fog.
“Is this the casino? I can’t see anything.”
The darkness, shadows, and the creepy fog that disregarded the wind obscured everything more than forty or fifty yards from the truck. Baba Yaga’s casino, if this was the casino, was a vaguely non-Euclidean silhouette glimpsed fleetingly through the shifting miasma. It took a heroic effort of imagination to see the shambling misshapen massifs and pulsing valleys as buildings and streets.
Mollie struggled to reconcile the landscape with her scant knowledge of the area around the casino. But that came mostly from glancing out the window from Baba Yaga’s personal apartments (—OH SHIT OH SHIT DON’T THINK ABOUT THE BABY DON’T THINK ABOUT IT DON’T THINK ABOUT A WROUGHT-IRON FENCE AND MADMEN FEASTING SHIT SHIT FUCK—) to see the source of the wild commotion …
They had to work fast. Faster than fast. Despite the injection, Mollie felt panicky, desperate, rushed. The madness would take her any moment.
Mollie pointed. “There! That’s where the entrance should be. We’re on the north side of the casino, facing west.”
“As if the bleedin’ compass rose has any meaning here,” muttered Bruckner.
Franny wiped a sleeve across his mouth. “The hospital—” He paused to make a strangled urking sound, but forced it back. “Should be to our east. Behind us.”
Bruckner put the truck in gear, cranked the wheel. The nightmare landscape pirouetted around them. The truck lurched on the squishy ground. Mollie gripped the windshield, thinking for a moment the whole thing was going to topple over. Michelle yelped; the zombies shambled to keep their balance. The truck lurched again, harder, and then the engine squealed.
Bruckner slammed his fist on the steering wheel. The short toot of the horn sounded incongruously mundane in the surreal hellscape. “Bugger! We’re stuck. Everyone get out and push. That includes the monster mash back there.”
“If you think I’m setting foot out there,” said Mollie, feeling the soft edges of her drug injection crumbling away, “you’re crazier than I am.”
Franny said, “Mollie. The sooner we get moving again the sooner we can get the hell out of here.” His voice fairly vibrated with strain; she knew it was from the effort to keep from screaming.
“Fine.”
She followed him out of the cab. Her shoes squelched when they hit the ground. She slipped. And then she saw why the truck was spinning its wheels: thousands of hairy, hissing, blood-colored millipede things were boiling out of the ground under the truck. They surged across the ground and over her legs like a blanket. Mollie screamed.
From somewhere nearby came the chittery shrieking of full-grown nightmarepedes.
“We can’t get you to Baikonur,” Jayewardene had told Barbara. “There’s no time, and travel would be too dangerous at this point, in any case. You’ll have to coordinate strategy from my office in Brussels…”
Once more, Barbara was sitting before an array of flat screens, this time in a conference room in Jayewardene’s UN offices in Brussels, and this time there were no individual faces looking back at her, only a series of views from security cameras around the Cosmodrome. Keyboards linked to each screen gave Barbara control over the cameras feeding the views, allowing her to swivel or zoom in. There was Gagarin’s Soyuz rocket on one screen, upright at the entrance to the complex near the Kazakh highway and the railroad station, and beyond it the rest of the Y-shaped complex spreading out into the distance over flat, tan earth, concrete buildings clustering like grey mushrooms here and there, and launch towers rising from the landscape like metal trees. Another showed Launch Complex 81, another the refugee encampments, and yet another the Area 95 buildings, and on and on as the other screens gave her the outside scenery around the Cosmodrome.
And the last screen, from a security camera at Krainy Airport looking east to the Kazakh highway: it was there that a dark fog bank lurked, and from under the green-black wings of the fog emerged what looked like an insect swarm of writhing creatures from a Boschian nightmare slithered and humped and wriggled forward toward the complex and the cameras, spilling over the highway on either side like a dark flood, an onrushing wave of deformed humankind. Babel was glad for the lack of audio on the screens; she could imagine the sound from the thousands of throats screaming as they rushed forward.
She wondered, terrified, if among the horde might be Klaus, but she saw no gleam of ghost steel and armor in the masses.
In her ears, from a set of headphones attached to an array of toggle switches, she could hear voices in several languages: Capitaine Lefévre, directing the NATO forces that had arrived the day before; Colonel Kutnesov, the Russian officer in charge of the troops stationed there; the feeds from Earth Witch, Bugsy, Glassteel, Wilma Mankiller, Toad Man, Tinker, the Lama, and Snow Blind, who were arrayed near Area 51, where the nukes were stored and where the joker refugees were encamped. “Artillery, commence firing!” she heard Kutnesov say over his command channel, and a moment later, Lefévre gave the same order to the NATO forces.
A few moments later, the screens overloaded with bursts of light as explosives tore into the ranks of the creatures, ripping into their disordered ranks. Babel was glad for the distance. She could see dark shapes hurled into the air from the force of the mortars and rockets, but the shapes were indistinct and blurred—like toy soldiers thrown about by the hands of children.
Not people. Not torn, severed limbs and gouts of blood. Not Klaus.
The flashes continued, but the mass of hell-creatures continued to advance, running now, and more emerged from the fog behind them. “Advance!” Kutnesov called to the troops stationed near the entrance, and from the bottom of the screen, Barbara saw a phalanx of tanks rumbling toward the invaders, and behind them, soldiers firing automatic weapons.
And above the hell-creatures, emerging from the fog, was a small figure in flight: a winged woman, with a sword of flame.
Bruckner gunned the engine, which sent more nightmarepedes sidewinding into the shadows. A pair of hulking shapes loomed out of the fog.
“There,” said Franny. “That looks familiar. Follow this between those buildings.”
Smaller figures coalesced from the fog, too. They stood to the sides as the truck blurred past them, alien limbs extended like hitchhikers thumbing a ride. Hitchhikers sculpted entirely from pulsating brain tissue, their arms replaced with gigantic dragonfly abdomens, each eyeless face nothing but a gaping maw filled with needle teeth long enough to curl back and pierce the head like a crown of thorns. One hurled itself at the truck.
Ray ripped it from the canopy, hurled it into the shadows. “I don’t like it here,” he said.
They neared the buildings Franny had pointed to. The fog parted. Mollie swore. They weren’t buildings any longer. They were mountainous piles of suppurating flesh. Pus cascaded down folds of quivering blubber from open wounds that used to be windows. Dark, hairy, segmented bristles like tarantula legs stippled the festering meat.
“I really don’t like it here,” said Michelle.
The mountain of rot on their right started to jiggle as Bruckner drove them closer. Suddenly it lurched back as if leaning to release a pent-up fart and unfurled a curtain of hook-tipped tentacles. They shot toward the truck, clacking and slavering. Franny and Mollie screamed in unison.
Fuck this, thought Mollie. I’m out of here.
She dropped the connection to the Cosmodrome and pictured a spacetime rift in the dashboard, just big enough for her to leap through and land on the soft warm sand of a beach outside Perth. Instead a hole opened in the space between the truck and the tendrils, then bli
The quivering mound of ex-building emitted a chorus of screams from a dozen hidden mouths as it yanked back the stumps of its tentacles. The severed appendages sprayed electric-blue ichor over the truck. Ray emitted an unintelligible sound something between a squeal and a groan. Bruckner flicked the lever for the windshield wipers and gunned the engine. They blurred past the whimpering massif of putrefying meat.
Oh, shit. I’m too fucked up to make a shortcut back home. I’m stuck here.
Bruckner glanced sideways at Mollie. Gave her an appreciative nod. As if she’d meant to protect the truck all along, and hadn’t been trying to abandon them.
She didn’t look at Franny. Instead she scrambled to reestablish the pinhole portal to Joey at the Cosmodrome before the toe tags became useless.
They had gotten away from the millepede things, and the octopus building after Mollie had chopped off its tentacles. Now the tires were bumping and the truck swaying as they drove over obstacles. Franny managed to discern that the speed bumps were in fact bodies. Lots of them. Some seemed normal. Others were figures out of a Hieronymus Bosch painting. Blank faces devoid of any features, legs fused into a single fleshy pillar, multiple arms lining a torso.
“Not all that different from Rwanda,” Bruckner grunted with forced bravado.
“Yeah, bullshit,” was Ray’s response.
“I hate macho bullshit,” was Bubbles’s response.
Mollie was whimpering. The small portal floating over the hood of the truck contracted, fluxed, and twisted. Franny reached back and grabbed her shoulder. “Don’t look.” He’d hoped to make it a firm order. Instead his voice wavered and broke. He coughed, trying to clear the obstruction in a throat made raw from vomiting, but fear was not so easily banished.
“Okay, Tonto, which way?” Bruckner grunted.
Fuck if I know, Franny thought, but instead he just gestured vaguely in front of them. “Just drive until I see something familiar.”
“Jesus Christ,” Bruckner said with an edge of hysteria in his voice. Under his arms, large sweat stains soaked through his shirt, and even over the smell of Joey’s zombies and the festering stench of the Talas corruption, he gave off the ripe odor of fear. “It just doesn’t end.”
Mollie giggled, and Franny blanched. But they were actually holding it together better than Michelle had expected. Wonder drugs, she thought. Magic cocktails of godonlyknewwhat. Probably Xanax, Thorazine, and a touch of good ol’ Valium. Now that she thought about it, none of them should still be standing, much less barreling through Dante’s last Ring of Hell, given the amount of drugs they’d been pumped full of.
She knew she’d been feeling the effects of Batshit Crazy Town for some time now. The drugs had muted them somewhat, but not enough. Something slimy was poking around in her head. Or it felt like it was. Maybe not. She wasn’t really sure, but she knew things were getting slippery for her mentally.
“Which way?” Bruckner asked Franny. “Tell me fast, you scared little rabbit man.”
“Lay off,” Michelle snapped. She’d hated him out the gate. It would be so easy to kill him. A tiny bubble formed in her hand.
“Nothing looks right,” Franny muttered, peering through the mist. Michelle closed her hand, and the bubble gave a soft crack and was gone.
“Don’t worry about it,” Michelle said, trying to comfort him. She was still having moments of being herself. The self she used to be. “Just take a deep breath and sort it out.”
Billy Ray glared at her. “We don’t have time for breathing exercises,” he said. The scars on his face, normally pale pink, were bright red now.
“That way,” Franny said, pointing to their right.
Bruckner jammed the truck into gear, swearing as it crunched and lurched. “Can’t take it any farther, you shiny dick weasels.”
There was nothing Michelle recognized as Talas left anymore. She was amazed that Franny could navigate at all. Everything was a mass of seething tentacles, pus-filled sacks of skin, dead-eyed creatures with hungering mouths covering their bodies, fetuses hanging from spiny silver trees, and an ever-evolving host of monstrosities.
“There it is!”
Michelle peered through the haze. Something that looked roughly like a building, but built out of meat, stood about two hundred meters ahead. Dead bodies surrounded the steps leading to what appeared to be the entrance. If a door that occasionally turned into a gaping maw ringed with knife-sized teeth was an entrance.
“Oh, fuck,” Michelle said as the mists parted.
Standing at the bottom of the steps leading into the meat palace were Lohengrin and Recycler. Recycler stood behind Lohengrin, a towering mass of rotting flesh encasing his body. And Lohengrin’s armor was no longer gleaming white. It glowed a hellish red.
And fire so hot—so hot Michelle could already feel it—encased Lohengrin’s sword. He towered over them all.
A phalanx of monstrosities surrounded the hospital. The sound of teeth snapping and spiders chittering greeted them. A wave of foul odor came off the horde. A combination of shit, blood, pus, and death. Michelle gagged.
“How’re we supposed to get past that?” Franny asked, choking on the smell.
“The way we always do,” Billy Ray growled. “The way we always do.” He leapt forward, pulling his pistols from their holsters. Joey’s zombies jumped out of the truck, shockingly nimble. They must have been really fresh, Michelle thought.
“Stay here,” Michelle said to Mollie, shoving her back into the truck cab.
“Are you fucking nuts?” Mollie yelled. Her stringy hair was sweat-plastered against her skull. She was panting, and Michelle knew the tranq shot was wearing off. “I didn’t come all the way back into the Psycho Cannibal Flashmob Evil Insanity Zone just to bail out.” Michelle was pretty sure that was bullshit. But she had to trust Mollie—it was the only choice.
“Then at least stay far enough back that you’re not straight in that line of … of whatever the hell this is.”
Michelle turned and started running toward the two aces who were now the defenders of the great perversion. Bubbles streamed out of her hands. Chunks of festering flesh flew off Recycler’s armor. She had to force herself to hold back because part of her—a growing part of her—wanted to make sure he didn’t live. After all, dead men tell no tales. And she certainly didn’t want Tiago telling hers.
Tiago. Oh, Jesus. She’d left him behind, and this was what had happened. And now she wanted to kill him. Oh, God.
She looked over and saw Billy Ray had started picking off the monsters.
She released a barrage of bubbles at them. They exploded and she watched with grim satisfaction as viscera, black ichor, and chunks of suppurating meat spewed into the air. Billy Ray’s perfectly white jumpsuit was covered in gore. She felt the spray of unspeakable fluids covering her. And she tried not to glory in it.
Lohengrin took a swing with his sword at Billy Ray, and Billy Ray neatly dodged it. Michelle threw some bubbles to distract Lohengrin. Mollie was using her portals to decapitate the horrors. Michelle didn’t want to speculate on how Mollie was managing to use her portals and still keep the pinpoint open for Joey without going mad.
But then a new wave of perversions was upon her, and she didn’t have time to think about it.
Mollie looked at the aces defending the hospital. One was unrecognizable, a mountain of corpseflesh. But the other, the one in the shining armor, had been a semipermanent fixture on magazines, billboards, and television for years: Lohengrin. She’d never seen him in person, but she’d recognize him anywhere. Except.
The images always depicted his gleaming ghost-steel sword a brilliant silver. It wasn’t. It shone the dark scarlet color of pitchfork tines shoved through a man’s gut.
Shit, shit, shit.
Franny stood by the passenger door, and desperately clutched the shotgun. Churning, fear-induced nausea filled his gut. His chest ached as he trie
Franny forced his legs to move.
Each stroke of Lohengrin’s sword cast a flashing incarnadine light over the surreal battle. In the pink half-light Mollie saw Franny sprint across the pustule field that passed for ground here. A shrieking nightmarepede saw him, too. It slithered across the battlefield. It was far faster than he was. Its slimy body barricaded the cop from the hospital entrance. He tried to dodge, but the ’pede was fifty feet long if it was an inch. Without thinking, Mollie opened a hole in space directly in front of Franny. He lunged for it, and emerged on the hospital stairs. He might have raised his fist, flashing a thumbs-up gesture over his shoulder as he disappeared inside the suppurating fleshpile that used to be a building. But Mollie was distracted by the cough of a diesel engine.
She turned just in time to see Bruckner in the truck cab, heaving on the shifter. The transmission clanked as the truck lurched into gear. Bruckner cranked the wheel. The empty truck squished a trio of spider-shamblers while inching through a tight circle.
Electric-blue ichor spurted from their ruptured bodies; it sizzled, steamed, and bubbled on everything it touched. The splash raised a line of smoking green-black blisters across a swath of the Recycler’s putrefying flesh. It howled.
A pair of zombies tottered before the truck. They raised their rotting arms as though to wave down a ride. Joey was trying to stop him from leaving.