Jokertown Shuffle

1.

Brennan woke suddenly, though the night was quiet and Jennifer was sleeping undisturbed beside him. He wondered what had woken him. Then he caught again a faint whiff of grease and gun oil, and sat up as the night was split by thunder and fire.

He pushed Jennifer off the right side of their futon and rolled to the left as a bullet seared his side and another ripped through his upper thigh. He gritted his teeth, ignoring the agony that lanced through his leg as he dove naked through the darkness. His first thought was to draw the fire away from Jennifer. His second was to get the bastard who was doing the shooting.

There was a problem with that. Brennan no longer kept weapons in the house. They were all locked away in the backyard shed as a repudiation of the life he'd once lived. He regretted this decision as a stream of bullets tracked him while he hurtled through the bedroom door into the interior of the house. There was the sound of smashing glass, and a stabbing winter wind struck Brennan as the assassin crashed through the bedroom window and followed him.

Brennan headed for the kitchen, stopped, and reversed his field as he heard a second hit man breaking down the front door. He turned for the door that led to the backyard. His only hope, he suddenly realized, was to get outside where he could use his hunting skills to neutralize the numerical superiority of his heavily armed opponents.

Brennan flung himself through the back door, dodging left and rolling on the ground. Another assassin was waiting for him, but Brennan went through the door too quickly for the killer to draw an accurate aim.

Brennan gritted his teeth against the pain lancing through his leg as he sprinted across his meticulously raked sand garden, ruining the serenity of the gravel-sculpted waves with footprints and bloodspatters. The assassin was too slow to track him, and a fusillade of shots ripped into the ground at Brennan's heels as he dove into the thick brush surrounding his isolated country home.

The cold night air frosted Brennan's breath as he stood naked on the frigid ground. His bare feet burned in the snow, and his thigh throbbed as it dripped blood, but he scarcely felt the pain as he crouched low in the snow-laden bushes. A second black-garbed figure joined the one who'd been lying in ambush in the backyard. They conversed in low unintelligible voices, and one of them gestured toward the forest in Brennan's general direction. Neither seemed eager to go into the darkness.

Brennan grimaced, forcing his mind into dispassionate rationality. His biggest problem was time. His assailants could afford to wait him out. He was crouched naked in a frigid winter night that was already sapping all the warmth from his bones. He had to get to the shed behind the greenhouse before he became an immobile hunk of frozen meat.

Just as Brennan convinced himself to move, the assassins were joined by a third figure, who thumbed on a powerful flashlight and aimed it into the woods just to Brennan*s left. Brennan's hopes sank even lower. Now it would be almost impossible to get away. The hit men could jacklight him and shoot him down the moment he moved. But if he stayed put, he'd freeze and save them the effort of pulling the triggers. He scrabbled through the snow with fingers stiffened by the cold and found a fist-size rock that was slick with ice. It was a poor excuse for a weapon, but it would have to do. He shifted silently as the beam from the flashlight swept closer. He stood to throw the rock; then suddenly something fell from the loft window overlooking the backyard.

A tiny figure, no more than ten inches high, landed on the shoulders of one of the assassins with a thin high-pitched scream. There was the gleam of metal flashing in the light of a slivered moon, and the figure screamed again and stuck what looked like a fork into the back of the assassin's neck. The hit man yelled in pain mixed with fear and swatted at the creature. It fell to the cold ground in a pitiful little heap and lay unmoving.

Brennan's heart fell as he realized that it was Pumpkinhead, one of the manikins he'd rescued from the tunnels under the Crystal Palace. There were about thirty of them, children of a strange joker they'd called Mother. They'd been Chrysalis's eyes and ears through the city, but with Chrysalis dead and the Palace destroyed, Brennan had brought them to the country to live with him and Jennifer.

And now they were supplying the diversion Brennan had prayed for. They leapt screaming from the loft window, falling upon the assassins like living rain. They were armed with whatever feeble weapons they could find about the houseforks, kitchen knives, even sharpened pencils. They outnumbered the assassins ten to one, but they were all small and weak. Brennan watched with horror as the killers got over their initial surprise and swatted them down like kittens.

Curly Joe was the first to follow Pumpkinhead out of the loft window, and quickly into oblivion. He'd missed his intended target, who stomped him into the ground with bone-crunching force, quickly silencing his thin reedy cries. Kitty Kat managed to sink a kitchen knife into her target's ankle before she was smashed by his flashlight. Lizardo jabbed his foe in the shoulder with a pencil but was too weak to do much more than break the hit man's skin before the thug broke his scaly neck.

Brennan clamped down on his anger and pity and moved as quickly as he could, ignoring the pain running through his injured leg, ignoring the stones, sticks, and sharp slivers of ice that tore at his bare feet.

He flitted through the snow-shrouded trees like a ghost, circling around the A-frame and the greenhouse beyond. He stopped at the shed behind the greenhouse and cursed. He'd forgotten the key. He drew himself back to try to batter down the door, but a small hissing voice stopped him before he could strike.

"Boss! Boss, the key!"

It was Brutus, a foot-tall manikin with leathery skin that sagged in puffy pouches about his gray, hairless face. Brutus had settled into the role of the tribe's chief. He was more intelligent than most of the homunculi, but even he was no brighter than a smart child. At the moment, however, he seemed to have assessed the situation with remarkable accuracy. He tossed the key to the shed's padlock to Brennan, who caught it with cold clumsy fingers and tried to fit it into the lock.

Brennan fumbled a few times before the key finally clicked into place. He threw open the door and took down the bow that hung in a bracket nearby, quickly stringing it with the line dangling from one of its tips. It was only a hardwood recurve with a sixty-pound pull, but it was powerful enough. He grabbed the quiver that hung from the bracket and stepped back into the night.

Brennan no longer felt naked or cold. His anger spread from his gut outward, warming him as he ran over the snow back to the house, Brutus following on his heels.

The scene in the backyard was worse than Brennan had imagined. Tiny broken bodies violated the calm serenity of his Zen garden. Crushed and pulped, the manikins had fought fiercely and hopelessly against giants who could kill them with a single blow.

Brennan cried out in sorrow and rage, freezing one of the assassins in the act of squashing Bigfoot with the butt of his assault rifle. As the hit man looked around with his rifle lifted, Brennan sank down to one knee, drew shaft to ear, and loosed. The razor-tipped hunting arrow cut silently through the night and struck the assassin high on his chest. He fell backward, slamming against the wall of the A-frame, then crumpled forward and dropped his weapon.

An eerie cry of triumph rose from the living homunculi as Brennan drew a second shaft, shifted aim, and fired before the other hit men could react. He gut-shot his second target, who was swarmed by the remaining manikins. The killer screamed wordlessly and tried desperately, futilely, to crawl away.

The third assassin clicked off the flashlight he'd been using as a club, turned, and ran back into the house. Brennan fired and saw his shaft strike home, but the assassin kept moving.

Brennan nocked another arrow to his string and stood, listening. The assassin being pummeled by the manikins had finally stopped screaming. The first one Brennan had shot was dead.

"See to your people," Brennan told Brutus, then limped over to the back door. He stood listening for a moment but could hear nothing move inside. He couldn't wait long, even if the assassin was lying in ambush. He had to go in.

He scooped up the assault rifle dropped by the first assassin, then went through the doorway low and fast. The house was still dark, still quiet. From the front Brennan could hear the sound of a receding car engine.

He flicked on the bedroom light. The room was a shambles. The window had been shattered, and glass lay all over the floor. Bullets had stitched the walls, smashing the framed Hokusai and Yoshitosi woodblocks hanging over the futon where Jennifer lay quiet and still as death, awash in a sea of blood.

Men liked his new body. It was young, had two functioning hands, and best of all had ace capabilities that he'd quickly gotten use to. He could see how Philip Cunningham had enjoyed being Fadeout. But there was one problem with the body. It was not of his race. Kien wondered if that was the cause of the dreams he'd been having lately.

His father had been visiting him, speaking softly of the good old days back in Vietnam when Kien had worked in the family's small store. He had always been a dutiful son, though the stifling life of a storekeeper in a small village had bored him unmercifully. But he had stayed on until his father had been murdered by the French in the last days of the Vietnamese rebellion against their European masters. Then, and only then, had Kien moved on to the city and joined the army of the fledgling Republic of Vietnam. Of course, he had had to change some things to blend in. There was no way he was going to have a successful military career with an ethnic Chinese name among the extremely prejudiced Vietnamese.

"Once again you have abandoned us," Old Dad told him, waving the cane that he often used to emphasize his arguments. "First you turned your back on your family when you pretended to be Vietnamese and took the name Kien Phuc. And now you go even further. You've become a white man."

It was difficult to argue with a dream, but Kien tried. "No, Father," he explained patiently, "I have abandoned no one. This is all part of my plan, a misdirection to finish off my enemies."

The spectre snorted, unconvinced. "You always were a tricky one, boy, I'll give you that."

"Tonight," Kien said, "Captain Brennan dies. And his bitch who'd taken half my hand." He smiled at his father. "That will be the second woman of his I've killed. Too bad he won't live to realize that."

"And after this Brennan?"

"After Brennan, then Tachyon. He knows too much, and he could easily discover my newest secret, that I still live in the body of Philip Cunningham. Tachyon has to die."

"When?" his father asked.

"Soon. Today. When the Egrets return with the heads of Brennan and his bitch."

Old Dad frowned. "It sounds like you're planning on keeping that body," he said.

Kien shook his new head. "Only until my enemies are dead."

"Have you ever run out of enemies, my son?" Kien smiled.