Turn of the cards

Chapter Thirty-five

The villagers stood outside the bamboo fence that encircled their collection of hootches, a sad huddle beneath the guns of Second Squad. The morning mist of the valley wound about them like living gauze, shifting and twining, and detached the surrounding mountain peaks from the planet, so that they seemed to float on cloud. Mark felt a sense of strangeness as great as any he had known on Takis; it was as if the valley and village and the mountains were on another planet, remote from Earth.

The evidence lay on the damp earth before them: an ancient American M2 carbine with a skeleton stock that may have folded before it turned to rust. Decrepit as it was, sniff tests revealed the tang of burned powder and lubricant that betrayed it as the weapon – or one of them – that had been fired at the patrol on its approach. The villagers claimed not to know whose hand had held it.

Why were there no young men in the village? They had all been drafted into the People’s Army, of course. The villagers responded sullenly to the questions shrieked at them by Pham, strutting to and fro before them like a cock keeping an eye on his hens, but they answered.

It was just that no one believed their answers.

Crouching beside the weathered stone gate, Haskell looked up from the radio that Croyd had humped up here and shed. His pink mouth-tendrils quivered.

“Word is to waste ’em,” he said. “Comes right from the Man Himself.”

“All right!” Spoiler yelled, and pumped his fist in the air. “Payback!”

Mark felt an ice-ball the size of Takis form in his stomach. No! his mind yammered in several voices.

“Bullshit,” Sarge said.

Haskell looked mulish. “That’s what they say. I’m just passing the word along.” His expression said that word didn’t make him any too unhappy.

Black lips drawn back to show businesslike white canines, Sarge strode forward and grabbed the headset away from the younger joker. He turned his back on his squad to speak.

Mark glanced at Croyd. Croyd was propped on his tail, whistling “Mack the Knife,” which Mark thought was in pretty damned poor taste. He alternated whistling with talking to himself. At least he was being quiet about it. Mark had managed to impress upon him the importance of not raving out loud. Given Croyd’s state, it was quite a diplomatic feat.

A white T-shirt was still plastered to Croyd’s dorsal scales from the predawn rains. He had one four-fingered hand up inside it, scratching at those invisible bugs. Across the shirt’s front was written SLEEP IS FOR THE WEAK in jagged ink-slash letters. It was a tribute to that legendary outlaw, the Sleeper. Croyd had seen a fresh recruit walking around in it during that last downtime in Venceremos, the time Tabasco died. He had demanded it. After a quick consultation with his comrades the kid had peeled it off his back and handed it over, in deference to the witchy reputation that had earned Croyd the right to a bunker of his own, and to his increasingly savage unpredictability. Also, Croyd was the Sleeper.

Croyd caught Mark’s eye and gave him a weird lizard smile. Mark didn’t know how to read it.

Sarge threw down the headset and turned. “No,” he said. “No way.”

“What the fuck do you mean?” shrieked Spoiler. He racked the bolt of his M-16. The clack was shockingly loud in the echo chamber of mist and mountains. “We got our goddam orders!”

Sarge faced him squarely, hands down by his sides. “So did the Nazis at Nuremberg.”

“What does fucking cheese have to do with anything? You’re talking history again, old man. This ain’t fucking history. This is now.”

He turned to face the others. “Who’s with me? Who’s for jokers, who’s for payback for the Rox – and who’s with this nat-lover?”

The squad passed looks around like a red-hot iron bar. Haskell was grinning through his tendrils and caressing the humpbacked receiver of his M-60. The two newbies, Stewart and Ram, sidled over to stand near him, fingering the long black rifles they halfway knew how to use. Stewart’s thin face was flushed behind the constantly running sores that covered it. Ram let his head with the heavy horns curling from the sides tip forward. His wide nostrils flared.

Pham made a pistol of thumb and forefinger and pointed it at the villagers. “Bang,” he said. “You dead.”

Croyd pumped the charging handle of his own M-16. Mark turned to him, feeling his facial muscles go slack with shock. “Croyd! You’re not going along with this, man?”

“Rock and roll,” Croyd said. He held the rifle by its pistol grip while his left hand wandered back up his shirt in its endless quest for nonexistent vermin. “Rock ’n’ fucking roll. Nats are out to get us, and they’re everywhere. Hiding in the mist all around – can’t you feel ’em, Mark?”

He stared searchingly into Mark’s face. “Mark, man, you’re changing. Your face is flowing, all funny… are you turning into a joker too?”

“I’m still in command of this outfit,” Sarge said. “We’re not wasting anybody. Spoiler, put your piece on safety and hand it over to me until you settle down.”

“Hand it to you?” The young joker was so furious, he wheezed the words. “Hand it to you? You old fuck! You’re just a fucking nat-lover. A fucking nat-lover!”

“Hand me the piece.”

“You want it?” The words were doubling Spoiler like blows to the gut. “You want it? Well, fucking here!”

He swung up his M-16 and fired a burst into Sarge’s belly and chest. Blood and bits of tissue sprayed his face and soggy cammies. Sarge fell heavily, the front of his own blouse smoldering from the muzzle flash.

Spoiler held the weapon on the supine sergeant for a moment, muscles standing out on his forearms, until it became apparent Hamilton wasn’t getting up again under his own power. Then he spun around and held the weapon two-handed over his head in a parody of a boxer’s victory salute.

“Yeah! I laid some power on the fuck!”

Before he knew what he was doing, Mark had crossed the damp meters of intervening earth and plowed into Spoiler in a windmill of fists. He got in two good cracks on the face, rocking Spoiler’s streamlined skull left and right. Pain flashed through his knuckles; it was the first time in his life he had actually hit anyone.

It felt good. He tried to do it again.

Spoiler had fallen back under the initial fury of Mark’s assault, not to mention its unexpectedness. He had dropped his M-16. Now he stiffened the fingers of his right hand and drove them hard into Mark’s solar plexus.

Mark doubled. It felt as if he were out in space again, with the endless vacuum sucking all the air from him in a whoosh and still pulling, trying to pull his guts out his mouth.

Spoiler snap-kicked him in the face. His head whipped back. His long, lanky body started to straighten as bright lights ricocheted around his brain like pinballs. See what happens when you lose control, you moron! Cosmic Traveler screamed.

Spoiler turned, rammed a side-thrust kick into the middle of Mark. Mark jackknifed again. He was beginning to feel like some sort of flexing toy. Spoiler planted his kicking foot, pivoted around it to slam a fairly creditable spinning back kick into Mark’s temple.

As a general rule, you don’t go out when you’re hit in the head unless something is seriously broken. Mark didn’t go out now. It was just that the planet blindsided him, and none of his limbs wanted to work, and his stomach had decided his body was too dangerous to be in and was trying to get out, and his brain seemed to have come loose from its moorings and be rolling around in his skull. He wasn’t focusing well, so to speak.

As if from the next valley over, Spoiler’s voice came to him, bragging how he’d showed him. “You want we should make ’em dig like a big grave?” Haskell asked.

“Naw. Why fuck with that? Hey, I know – let’s play a little game. Pham, why don’t you tell that granny there to haul ass for the hills. I could use some moving-target practice.”

Mark stirred, groaned. For a time his being had diffused to the tops of the mountains. Now it was coalescing again. All the pain in his body gave it something to collect around, the way an oyster protects itself from an irritant by sheathing it in pearl.

“What about him?” he heard Haskell say. “What about the old nat?”

“Fuck him,” Spoiler said. “We’ll wax the nat cocksucker in our own sweet time. Right now it’s show-time – Pham.”

Mark heard the translator bark something in Vietnamese. Wails went up from the villagers like a flock of frightened gulls. He tried to move his hand. It felt like a lead spider. A raindrop struck the back of it. Mark knew he was about to trade the pain that was pounding him now for something infinitely worse. He kept willing that hand to move.

“Pham, tell her to move, or I’ll just start spraying the whole slant-eyed lot of ’em!”

“Hey – holy shit, Spoiler, the old nat’s on fire!”

Spoiler turned to see Mark’s body wreathed in orange flame. “Hey, so he torched himself somehow. Saves us the trouble”

The burning man stood.

Somebody screamed. The blazing figure was smaller than Mark by a head. As the squad and villagers watched, the flames seemed to be sucked into it.

Spoiler saw a flash of orange sweats and knew he’d been had. He made the worst mistake of his life.

He brought up his M-16.

The bolt of plasma struck his skinny chest dead center. The shriek that exploded from his mouth was the loudest sound anyone there had ever heard a human being make. Spoiler didn’t will it; all the water in his lungs flashed instantly into superheated steam and blew out the pipe of his throat, forcing his head back and blasting from his mouth in a visible steam-whistle cloud that melted his lips from his teeth.

For a moment he stood, head back, a neat round hole burned right through the middle of his chest. With a boom like a sheet hung on a windy laundry line his whole body burst into flame as air rushed back to replace that ionized in the plasma jet.

Spoiler collapsed, his burning body flopping to random impulses as his neurons took their final shots. He never felt the fire. The plasma jet had flash-boiled the fluid in his spine. The sudden, savage overpressure had imploded his brain.

Haskell screamed like a wounded horse and hauled up his M60, firing the huge weapon Rambo-style from the waist. Flash pirouetted, rolling his hand to show the burly joker his palm. Meta-flame slagged the barrel as a round detonated in the chamber. Back pressure blew out the receiver. Haskell shrieked as jets of high-velocity gas burst through the weapon’s sides and gashed his arms and ribs like razors. He dropped the weapon to roll on the ground, a kicking knot of agony.

The rain was falling heavily now. Each drop raised a red welt on Flash’s fine Jewish features. He held up his hands; they were beginning to blister.

“Anybody else?” he screamed. “You’re hot to do some killing – c’mon and let me show you what hot means!”

Pham’s hand dove inside his shirt for the ancient Tokarev he kept tucked into his pants, out of rain’s way. Flash grinned through blistered lips and gestured. The front of Pham’s shirt vanished in a puff of flame. Pham screamed, dropped the pistol to bat at his scorched chest as if to put out flames.

“Take off, you little commie scum-suck, or I’ll fucking melt you.” Pham lit out in a stumbling run across the bean-fields, falling every half dozen or so steps, picking himself up again to stagger on. He seemed very motivated.

“You villagers, clear out!” Flash shouted. “Go!” They stood and stared at him like so many sheep. They had no idea what was going on.

He blazed a line of fire at their feet. As one they turned and bolted for the hills, streaming around both sides of the village like a cattle stampede.

“Fire,” J. J. Flash said, grinning through cracked and swollen lips. “The universal language.”

Lying unattended on the ground, the radio was spitting out Lucius Gilbert’s voice from the next valley over, demanding to know what the fuck was going on. He wasn’t remembering much about proper radio discipline.

“Somebody grab that thing,” Flash said, no longer able to keep his pain from his words, “and tell that puke we are walking. Going over the hill.”

He looked around at the joker faces. “Or am I the only one?”

He looked at Croyd. “What about you, Crenson? Are you with me, or are we going to go ’round and ’round?”

Croyd threw up his rifle, grabbed Flash by the forearms, and waltzed him around in a frenzied circle. “It’s a gas-gas-gas!” Croyd shouted. “Rock ’n’ roll! Rock and fucking roll!”

“Yeah,” Flash said, disengaging himself. “Easy, there, bud, or the meat’s gonna start coming off in your hands. Who else?”

“I’m with you,” Slick said.

“Me too,” Studebaker Hawk said. “These assholes are too crazy for me. Anyway, I used to run with the Princes. Trips was always on their good-guy list for what you did for Doughboy. Seems to me you’ve done a lot more good for jokers than that loony dickwad Sobel is ever gonna do.”

“Yeah, hey, thanks for the testimonial.” He was swaying now, hugging his hands under his armpits to save them from further damage. ’Anybody else?”

The new boots Stewart and Ram had run at the sight of Spoiler going up in a blaze of glory. Haskell was rolling from side to side, and the hatred glaring from his tiny eyes was answer enough. One by one, the others stepped forward to join Flash’s impromptu mutiny.

“Great,” he nodded. “It’s, it’s a gas-gas-gas. Uh, Slick, can you take over for a little while? Make like you’re Louie – Louie I gotta go now.”

Not comprehending, Slick nodded.

Suddenly Flash stood at the center of a small hurricane. Dirt and debris and even rain were drawn to him in a swirling cloud. When the miniature tornado cleared, Mark Meadows stood there, swaying. His face and hands were still shockingly blistered, as J. J. Flash’s had been.

“Long live the revolution,” he croaked, and pitched forward, unconscious, at Croyd Crenson’s splayed feet.