Suicide Kings

18

Sunday,

December 13

In the Jungle, Congo

People’s Paradise of Africa

Jerusha missed Rusty most of all.

The kids were both less and more of a problem than she’d expected. They were frightened, they were abused, and they tended to stay clustered around her as they moved through the jungle. A few of them, like Cesar, spoke French well enough to act as translators for her; a few were old enough and mature enough to serve as leaders for the ragged troop. Their names rattled in her head-Cesar, Abagbe (the finger-studded girl), Waikili (the nearly faceless boy), Eason (the fish-tailed joker), Naadir (the glowing skin child), Gamila, Dahia, Machelle, Rac, Saadi, Efia, Pendo, Pili, Wakiuri, Dajan, Idihi, Hafiz, Kafil, Chaga, and on and on… Jerusha despaired of ever matching all the names to faces.

None of them were aces as far as she knew, though the jokers were obvious enough, the ones that the PPA and Leopard Men of Ngobe had evidently decided to evaluate for possible uses before disposing of them as they had the rest. Since she’d left Rusty behind, she’d been shepherding the group steadily eastward-she’d made sure that Wally had the GPS unit, hoping that a compass would be sufficient for her needs.

All she needed to do was find a telephone and call Babs: the Committee could get her out. Jayewardene could send a fleet of UN helicopters, or meet them at the shore of Lake Tanganyika with boats, or… well, they would have a way. She only needed to head east. Head toward the lake and Tanzania.

And avoid being caught.

Simple.

A good half dozen of the children could not walk on their own, or barely so. Eason had to have his fish tail constantly moistened or he’d cry out in pain as the scales dried and cracked. Jerusha and the older children took turns carrying those who could not walk. Some of the older ones wielded machetes to cut down the worst of the brush. They spread out in a ragged hundred-yard line through the jungle, a line that without her constant attention would have grown so long that the children at the end would have been lost. She had to constantly urge the youngest and weakest to keep moving, had to constantly switch out those carrying the infirm, had to stop those at the front just as frequently so the stragglers could catch up.

She tried counting them frequently to make certain they were all there, but most of the time lost track of the count. Eventually, she abandoned that entirely, hoping that the kids would let her know if one of their own was missing. When they stopped to rest, the children would huddle around her as if they all wanted to press next to her, as if they craved the reassurance of her touch or her voice. For many years, Jerusha had wondered whether she’d ever be in a relationship stable enough that she would feel safe having her own children. Now she’d acquired over fifty of them-and she was alone.

Occasionally on those frequent rest breaks, Jerusha would use her wild card ability to restore the jungle growth along their trail in hopes that it would make them more difficult to follow. Hopefully, they weren’t being followed; hopefully, Rusty’s tactic would work and the Leopard Men would follow him instead.

It was the blind joker Waikili who made Jerusha wonder. He came up to her hours after they’d begun their march, tugging on her safari jacket. “They coming, Bibbi Jerusha,” he said to her in imperfect French, seeming almost to stare at her with the blank, dark skin of his face. “They coming after us.”

She could see the fear radiating out into the group at his words, all of them whispering to each other, a few breaking out into terrified wails and tears. “Shh…” she told them. “Cesar, tell them they must be quiet. Waikili, how can you know this?”

“I know,” he said. “I don’t have eyes, but I feel them here.” He tapped his forehead. “They find the camp. They following the steel man, but some of them follow us, too.”

“You’re just guessing, Waikili,” Jerusha said desperately. “You can’t know. It’s not possible.” Even as she said it, she worried that she was wrong, that the joker Waikili might have also been a hidden ace.

Waikili shook his head into her denial. “I know,” he repeated. “I am not wrong.”

Jerusha bit at her lower lip. They were all staring at her now. “All right,” she said. “If they’re following us, then we just need to move faster than they do. They won’t catch us. Come on, we’ve rested enough. Let’s go.”

The Santa Cruz Islands

Solomon Islands

“What’s that?” sprout asked.

They had come to a high point: a dinosaur-back hump of volcanic ash bedded on sandstone that showed through down by the beach. The island was forested and densely undergrown. Its nearest neighbor lay over sixty miles away and, key, it was uninhabited except for monkeys, tropical birds that were equally loud to ears and eyes, and a colony of wiry skittish goats. Nobody ever came here.

That was a vaguely cruciform mound grown over with tough native grass. Only the double-vaned tail betrayed its real nature. “A B-25 bomber, honey,” Tom said. The son of a successful, hard-charging Air Force general, his… predecessor… had been an avid warplane buff as a kid. And Tom had access to some of his memories, though not all. Especially the early ones.

“What’s that?” his daughter asked him.

My daughter, he thought, defying his tormentor of the night before. “A warplane for dropping bombs. They fought a lot of battles around here during World War II. This plane was probably based at Henderson Field on Guadalcanal, a few hundred miles from here. Must’ve been shot down.”

He hadn’t come here just to give the lie to the old hippie’s reproach. Sending those kids after the aces who had smashed Nyunzu had given him a pang. They were aces themselves, sure, and some of them were scary as shit, but they were still kids.

He needed to hear Sprout’s voice, feel her hand in his, see the pure and innocent love in her clear blue eyes.

“Will they bomb us?”

He laughed and led her away. “I don’t think so, sweetie. They better not, or Daddy’ll teach ’em better!”

“Which Daddy?” she asked, her eyes huge and solemn beneath the sun hat Mrs. Clark insisted she wear.

It took him a moment to register the question. Then it hit him like a punch in the nuts. “What do you mean, honey? I’m your daddy.”

Mulishly she shook her head, making her ponytail flap from shoulder to shoulder of her blue-and-white sundress. “My real daddy. I miss him. Why can’t I see him?”

“I’m your real daddy. The only daddy you got.”

“I want my real daddy! You made him go away! You’re mean. Ow-you’re hurting me!”

From orbit the island was invisible amid the ocean’s endless blue. The Radical screamed. No one could hear. He launched a sunbeam at a random angle into the atmosphere, saw it flare briefly as air turned incandescent.

Feeling the prickle of capillaries bursting under the skin and a tickle in his eyeballs he flashed down, drew a deep breath, and back. Then west, against the Earth’s rotation, crossing the terminator into darkness.

Hanging above North Africa he found the pale green blotch of the Sudd. He flashed to twenty thousand feet, scanning the Earth like a hungry eagle.

He found a Caliphate Multiple Launch Rocket System battery isolated from its main force. Bad move. Like Judgment he appeared among them, spread screams and fire and death and left fireworks lighting the sky behind him.

He felt much better then.

Somewhere in the Jungle

Vietnam

Aliyah lay beside him in the bed, tracing Ellen’s fingers across his bare chest. They were both naked, apart from the earring. The sun was pressing in at the window. Her body was warm and soft and comforting, curled against him. Ellen’s right breast lay exposed by the folds of blanket, the nipple reacting to the cold now instead of their play. He popped a wasp free, sent it looping through the still air, and then back down onto his belly and into the flesh. Up, loop, back. Up, loop, back.

“What are you thinking?” Aliyah asked.

“Nothing,” he said. “Just grooving on the postcoital bliss.”

“Did you have a fight?”

“You mean ever in my life?”

“I mean since we were together last.”

“Ah,” Bugsy said. “Well, yes. On the plane, Nick and I had a little slap-fight. I talked it over with Ellen last night.”

It was the nice way to put it. Talked it over sounded so much better than had a knock-down, drag-out, emotional dramafest. And still, Ellen had woken up this morning, put in the earring, and Aliyah had come to bed. And they’d fucked. Which was part of the problem.

I don’t have a girlfriend, he’d said at the height of the argument. A girlfriend is someone you spend time with. Me? I have a sex toy that you take out of the closet when you want to pretend you’re with Nick.

He didn’t remember now exactly what Ellen had said back. Something about Bugsy thinking with his dick. But now this. Aliyah. Maybe he should have gotten up, gotten dressed, shown her the bug-and-bicycle sights of rural Vietnam. The impulse had been there, but then she’d put her hand on his cock, and there had been a bunch of other impulses instead.

Or maybe Ellen had just wanted some time to pretend she was with Nick. And who the hell was he to tell her that was a bad thing?

“You’re angry with her,” Aliyah said.

“Nah. I’m just tired. Long plane rides always fuck me up for a couple days. And…”

“Is it me?”

He shifted to look at her. Ellen’s face took on a softness when Aliyah was wearing it. He tried to remember whether she’d been that vulnerable when she was alive. He didn’t think so. Something about being dead must make a girl less secure about herself.

“It’s not you,” he said. “You’re great. You’ve just got some lousy roommates.”

The knock on the door was gentle. Aliyah pulled the blankets up just as Billy’s skinned head poked through. Bugsy could feel the tension in her body and remembered that she’d never met the joker. That had been Ellen.

“Sorry, man. We’re running a little late. We’ll be down in a minute,” Bugsy said.

“No trouble,” Billy said. “But if we’re going to get there before the curator gets pissed off, we’d better get it swinging.”

“Five minutes,” Bugsy said, and the corpse monkey withdrew. Bugsy’s fellow joker. Aliyah leaned forward and kissed him slow. “I know I have to go,” she said. “But listen. Whatever’s bothering you? Don’t let it get you down, okay?”

“I’ll be fine,” he said.

“I love you,” Aliyah said.

Bugsy felt a presentiment of regret in his breast. Not the actual emotion, but its echo, bouncing back down to him from someplace still in the future. Would you have said that when you were alive? Or are you making do with me, because I’m the best you can do, what with being dead and all? “I love you, too,” he said. She smiled and took out the earring.

Ellen came back to her body and hitched the blanket tighter around herself. Bugsy looked away. “Billy is, ah, downstairs…” he began.

“I heard. Five minutes,” Ellen said, and walked to the bathroom. With the shower running again and him not invited, Bugsy did the quick-and-dirty alternative of bugging out, letting each wasp groom its neighbors, and re-forming. It wasn’t quite as good as a real bath, but it beat doing nothing.

It was closer to twenty minutes later, but they got on the road. An hour after that, they arrived at the archives. It was a squat concrete building with a sloped roof that looked more like a strip-mall restaurant than an official government museum. Billy loped up to the door and held it open for them.

Inside, the atmosphere was equal parts bureaucratic office and cheap roadside attraction. Gold foil surrounded maps and displays written in Vietnamese chronicled something, but Bugsy was damned if he could say what. Most out of place was a framed still from some kind of cheap horror-porn film. A huge, misshapen thing loomed over the jungle, lightning arcing from its improbably clawed hands to an exploding Vietnamese tank. Pure creature-feature schlock, except that this particular beast also had a disproportionately huge penis, fully erect and easily as threatening as its claws.

As the curator-a grey-haired man with thin lips and a surprising smile-carried on a fast, incomprehensible conversation with Billy, Ellen came up to Bugsy’s side and considered the movie still. “Cute,” she said.

“Vietnamese hentai,” Bugsy said. “Who knew?”

The curator went through a wide double door, talking seriously over his shoulder all the way. Billy said something in a high chitter that Bugsy guessed had more to do with playing up his simian looks than with the language itself. The joker ambled over. “Ah, yeah. The big fight,” he said. “That was back when Moonchild got taken captive. Vietnamese army sent an armored division to kill us all. Joker Brigade, Moonchild’s dissident faction. Fucking everyone. They didn’t care. Then that big son of a bitch showed up, trashed the whole place.”

“You mean, that’s real?” Ellen said, leaning in toward the image.

“That’s what this place is celebrating.” Billy sounded a little offended at their ignorance.

Bugsy considered the monster and tried to make it fit in with the theories about the Radical and Mark Meadows. If Moonchild had had something like that on the leash, she might have been able to stand up to Tom Weathers. Bugsy had the creeping sensation of looking at a clue that he just couldn’t quite interpret.

The curator came back with a robe and a framed picture. He spoke rapidly to Billy. Billy nodded back, saying something in turn. The curator made a satisfied sound and stood back, waiting.

The picture was Mark Meadows. He looked older, more tired, less carefree. But it was unmistakably the same guy Bugsy had seen in the pictures from the seventies back in New York. Only now, instead of the purple and yellow Uncle Sam outfit, he was wearing a robe of gold and green. The same one Billy was handing to Ellen. To Cameo.

“Okay,” Bugsy said. “Here we go.”

Ellen settled the robe on her shoulders, took a deep breath, and closed her eyes.

A moment later they opened, and Ellen was still looking out of them. Bugsy put down the picture of Meadows next to the still frame of the penis monster.

“What’s the matter?” he asked.

“I don’t… it’s not working.”

“Have we got the wrong robe?”

Billy turned to the curator, pointing and screeching. The curator took the question poorly and started screeching back. The two men gestured wildly, talking over each other. Ellen stepped up next to Bugsy. Her face was unreadable. “I think it’s the right robe,” she said.

“Then what?”

“Then Mark Meadows is alive.”

Khartoum, Sudan

The Caliphate of Arabia

All hospitals smell the same-alcohol, blood, feces, fading flowers, disinfectant, and sickness.

Prince Siraj held a handkerchief-liberally sprinkled with aftershave-to his nose. Noel had smelled worse. Since this hospital was in Khartoum, you had the added charm of cots lining the dingy concrete walls. Each cot held a moaning, crying patient. Some held two. “You know, we could have held this meeting in Paris again,” Noel said.

“I want you to see something.” Siraj’s tone was terse, despite being muffled by the square of linen. He pushed open the door to a room. There were only four beds inside. Whoever they were here to see clearly rated.

Noel followed Siraj to a bed near an open window. A desultory breeze filled with heat and the reek of camel dung floated through. A skeletal figure lay in the bed. His skin stretched over the bones in his face, and his eyes were so sunken that Noel thought they had been removed. His long beard looked like moss hanging from an ancient dead tree. The single sheet rose and fell as the man sucked in air in short, shallow gasps. An IV hung next to the bed. The man’s arms were purple and black from the needles. Noel tilted the IV bag toward the light and read, D5 half normal saline KCL20meq/multivits.

“This is how he looked ten days ago,” Siraj said.

Noel took the iPhone and inspected the image. The white robe strained over a vast belly and the cheeks above the beard were ruddy and fat, as if Santa had decided to holiday in warmer climes. He glanced again at the figure in the bed. There was enough in the shape of the brow and jaw for him to recognize it as the same man.

“You know what this means?”

“I won’t deny you the pleasure of telling me.”

Siraj shot him a venomous glance. “He’s starving to death. Starving! He’s lost 209 pounds in a week. Nothing helps. At first he stuffed himself, but then he became too weak to lift the food to his mouth. Now this.” The prince flicked the bag with a forefinger. “And it’s having no effect.” Siraj paced back and forth at the foot of the man’s bed. The sunken eyes flicked back and forth following his movements. Desperation gave some life to the dark irises. “When he could still talk he said he was bitten by a little boy. There were three of these monstrous children present at Khartoum. One of them could take down a building. The other reduced people to shriveled husks. Where are they coming from? How many more of these monsters does Weathers have?”

“I’ll be going back to the PPA in a day or two. I’ll see what I can discover.”

“In a day or two?” Siraj’s voice rose in outrage. “What the hell have you been doing?”

Noel tried to hang on to his own fraying temper. “Assembling my team. I’ll be putting them in place in Kongoville.”

“If you locate these monsters, kill them,” Siraj ordered.

“That will make the PPA even more paranoid, and make it that much harder for me to accomplish my goal. Also, I don’t kill children.”

“Scruples? From you? What a joke.” Siraj read the fury in Noel’s eyes. “You’d best keep your temper. Remember my little love notes.”

“Right now I have both you and Weathers threatening me. I kill you, I have only one threat.”

That logic seemed to back Siraj down. He looked away.

Noel let him mull on that, then asked, “And how are you coming on arranging a cease-fire?”

“Jayewardene is making arrangements. But once I land in Paris my location will be known. What’s to keep Weathers from just killing me? Or sending one of these child aces after me?”

“Request that the Committee provide security. Weathers is crazy, but he’s not a fool. He didn’t try to fight in New Orleans. He’s powerful, but numbers will always win out.”

“Remember, you only have to the end of the year.”

Noel tuned out the boring loop of threats and demands. He wondered how Niobe was feeling. How she was doing. Fourteen and a half weeks. A week and a half-ten days and they would be at that magic sixteen-week mark. Out of danger. On their way to a child.

“I may change the date. I need this done quickly-”

Noel interrupted. “Look, we can do this right or we can do this fast. You don’t get both. Oh, and we also can’t do it cheap. I need money. Enough to look like a credible first deposit at the bank.”

“I want it back.”

Noel just gave him a look. “Isn’t it a small price to pay for the Caliphate?”

On the Lukuga River, Congo

People’s Paradise of Africa

It wasn’t long after Wally stole the PPA patrol boat that he first noticed the itchy feeling between his shoulders, like he was being watched. He reminded himself that this was a good thing. That he wanted the PPA to watch him, keep tabs on him. Because more people following Wally meant fewer people following Jerusha and the rescued kids. The more the PPA watched him, the less it could watch her. Its soldiers couldn’t be everywhere at once.

All true. But it was a creepy feeling, all the same.

He paused for a lunch break only when he couldn’t ignore the growling of his stomach any longer. His canteen was empty, too, so it was time to pull aside. Wally went ashore in a shaded cove hidden by a bend in the river. He hauled his gear a few dozen yards into the jungle. After fishing out two more chlorination tablets, he returned to the river with his canteen. Chlorine made the water taste terrible-like he’d fallen into a swimming pool and accidentally taken a gulp-but he’d insisted that Jerusha and the kids take both biological filtration bottles. Wally was distracted, still thinking about Jerusha, when he returned to the spot where he’d stashed his gear.

A flash of something pale caught the corner of his eye while he packed his canteen away. He looked up, expecting to see a bird or maybe even a monkey.

And that was when he saw the ghostly little girl. She emerged from the jungle without making a sound.

“Holy cripes!” Wally dropped the canteen and scrambled backward on his hands and feet.

She looked to be eight or nine years old. She wore a pristine white dress, like something a little kid would wear to church. Incongruously, Wally wondered how she kept it so clean in the jungle. But then he noticed that her passage didn’t disturb the underbrush. She passed right through it, and she didn’t cast a shadow. Like a ghost.

The girl stared at him with wide eyes dark as a moonless night. She held her hands behind her back. The only sound was the gurgling of water from the canteen.

Wally’s heart hammered away at the bars of its iron cage. It felt like forever before the tightness in his throat receded enough for him to speak. He struggled to form a coherent thought. “Where the heck did you come from?” he managed.

The girl didn’t answer. If she heard him at all she showed no sign of it. All she did was stare at him with those cold, cold eyes. She didn’t even blink.

“Holy cow, kid. You scared the stuffing out of me.” Wally regained his feet. He took a step forward. She backed up. “Are you lost?” Another step. The girl backed up again, receding into the jungle. “Hungry?”

The last thing he noticed before she disappeared completely was that her feet didn’t touch the ground.

Wally’s appetite had fled. Like the rest of him wanted to do. He abandoned thoughts of lunch. Instead he picked up his gear and forced himself to walk back to the boat rather than run. The itch between his shoulder blades was painful now, like a hot nail in the back.

He put miles and miles between himself and the little girl before nightfall made it impossible to go any farther. And even though he knew it was silly, he was careful to pitch his tent on the opposite side of the river from where he’d stopped for lunch. He forced himself to eat, even though his appetite hadn’t returned.

Wally tossed and turned in his sleeping bag for what felt like hours. When he did manage to drift off, dark and disturbing dreams haunted him. He slept fitfully.

He snapped wide awake just before dawn, after a particularly vivid dream about somebody trying to slit his throat. But he was all alone in the jungle.

Mackenzie District

Northwest Territory, Canada

“You’re losing it, man,” the hippie asshole said. Behind the thick round lenses of his specs his eyes wavered like blue drops of ink refusing to quite dissolve in water. Tom longed to punch in that weak face, oddly ascetic as it was, with the gaunt cheeks and wispy goatee and an air of general sadness that infuriated him the more. “You can’t hide from it much longer.”

He and the other floated in a sort of fluffy Void in which only they had color and form. “So what? So fucking what? You think you can take your body back? That shit’s gone forever, Meadows. If I lose it we all die.”

“If that’s so,” his enemy-the only thing he feared-said calmly, “that wouldn’t be so bad. Because you’re losing control of your power, too.”

He laughed. “I’m the most powerful ace on fucking Earth. Who’s going to do anything to me?”

“It’s not what others do to you. It’s what you do to the world. The whole human race. You’re turning into an extinction-level threat.”

He laughed again, a bit more wildly. “If I wipe out humanity, who the fuck’ll miss us? All your hippie friends these days say humanity’s a plague.”

“What about the oppressed?” his gentle inquisitor said doggedly. “What about your Revolution?”

“Hey, maybe I fulfill the historic process by ending history. Shit happens, man.”

“But if people make shit happen,” Meadows said, “others can stop them doing it.”

“Ha! You and what army?”

Tom became aware of shapes seeming to swim around them. His eyes couldn’t resolve them as anything more than vaguely human-shaped blurs of color: grey; an orange that flickered like the reflections of flames; a disc half moon-silver and half black, with S-curved demarcation; a black infinitely deep, shot through with tiny parti-color points of light that did not illuminate the darkness.

“You forget whose friends they were to start with,” Mark said.

“They’re mine now. You got nothing, you weak, lame puke. You are nothing. And I’m tired of your shit.” With a force of will Tom drove himself upward and out.

Abruptly he was sitting upright in a bed, cold air pricking his skin where sheets and layers of heavy blankets had fallen away. A faint smoke smell and heat of banked coals emanated from the fireplace. Big snowflakes beat like giant moths against the window of the cabin in the Arctic pine forests of Mackenzie District in Canada’s Northwest Territory, almost as remote as the mid-Pacific.

He had come alone. He needed to try to get his head straight. Sun Heilian was starting to look at him funny. She was too damned smart, that woman. She’s just a woman, a voice told him. The world’s half full of them.

Tom shook his head and rubbed his face, where for some reason beard bristles never grew. “She loves Sprout,” he said, “she loves me .” And he thought, Who’s laughing? Who’s that I hear? And inside him was colder than outside the log walls of the cabin.