Turn of the Cards

Chapter Forty-eight

For the third time in ten minutes Belew checked his pocket watch. For the third time in ten minutes a whole hour had failed to pass. He grimaced and put the watch away.

I’ve been out of the bush too long, he chided himself. I’m turning into a Nervous Nellie.

From the southwest, where three kilometers away lay the temple in which Moonchild was to meet with Colonel Sobel, came the pop-pop-popping of gunfire, distance-faint. It rose to a crescendo, faded, came back strong, in irregular pulses. The rhythm of a firefight.

“Maybe I’m not so nervous after all,” he said. The jokers and Viet rebels who stood clustered before the main house of the derelict plantation turned nervous faces toward him, then looked back to the noise, as if by sheer concentration they could see through ten thousand feet of trees and brush.

Belew picked up the hand-mike of the radiotelephone resting on the ground by his feet. He spoke into it with the falling inflection of Cambodian.

Nothing. No reply, not even a hum to announce that the Khmer squad he’d sent to shadow Mark to the rendezvous were even on the air. Their radio might have malfunctioned — common enough even in the high-tech nineties, and the radio was more sixties — but his old-soldier’s gut told him they had joined their erstwhile victims in whatever lay Beyond.

“Ave atque vale, boys,” he murmured. They had been good troop and loyal comrades in their way, but he suspected the world would not much miss them. He put them from his mind, turned and walked toward a corner of the great. Peeling-whitewash villa.

There was somebody who could see across three klicks, or at least hear. Crenson insisted he needed isolation so that he could concentrate, so he had stashed himself away in a tool-shed behind the main house. Belew wondered if this incarnations olfactory senses were diminished to nothing as a minor balance to its unprecedented array of powers: a tribe of rock apes had inhabited the shed until the guerrillas had chased them off this afternoon. The stink was enough to stun a goat.

The gunfire was beginning to die away as Belew reached the door of the shed. It stood slightly ajar. I’ll miss the boy, f that was it for him, he realized. Remembering to breathe through his mouth, he stuck his head inside.

“Croyd? Crenson?”

A snore answered him.

“Holy shit!” He jumped inside, bringing up the penlight he carried in a pocket of his trousers.

Croyd the magnificent, in all probability the most multitalented and powerful ace the wild card world had known, lay curled in a ball on a pile of faded-out Playboys that the monkeys had shredded and shat upon, blissfully asleep.

“Hey, bitch! Do you like the taste of joker cock? It’s all-you-can-eat time coming up!”

Desperately Moonchild held her hands before her face, trying to escape the horrible blinding pressure of the flashlight beam. The tiny cage gave her nowhere to run, nowhere to hide. The light seemed to blister her palms.

The sweating jokers pressing in on the cage from all sides hooted and jeered. Their faces were twisted like modeling clay into reifications of hate. Their lusts washed over her unimpeded, like the glare of the flashlight.

Isis Moon was a creature of night, of shadow. To be exposed like this, helpless before a mob of jokers screaming for her body and her blood, was an agony as keen as having her arm dislocated.

“That’s enough, boys.” It was the voice of Colonel Charles Sobel, smooth and solid as hand-rubbed mahogany. “Don’t use her all up. We have to save something for later.”

“Fuck you, nat!” a joker snarled. Moonchild was shocked to see the hate-filled glares the New Brigaders turned upon their commander. But he shed the anger as a duck’s back sheds water. Seemingly unaware of it, he stood beaming by until the jokers fell back.

The cage was bamboo and black iron. Even after her captor, the green-eyed man with the peculiar uneven appearance, had roughly pulled her arm out and slid it back into its socket, she lacked the strength to break free. And the encircling torches kept the shadows well at bay.

She did not find it surprising that the Socialist Republic kept cages at hand.

She became aware of a low rumble like thunder, which seemed to come from all around. She had no idea what it might be. She had more pressing concerns.

Carnifex was pitching a fit just beyond the bars of the cage. “She’s my prisoner,” he raged. “My prisoner, dammit!”

Colonel Sobel showed him a smile, infuriatingly bland. “I appreciate your efforts in apprehending this criminal,” he said, “but our claim to her is senior to yours.”

“Want I should thunder on ’em” Crypt Kicker asked. Moonchild shivered. She remembered his touch with horror. He had held her still while Billy Ray relocated her shoulder. Even without the searing acid he could apparently exude at will, there was a quality to his touch, a hard immobility, like something … dead.

Billy Ray cast his green eyes around the clearing before the temple, taking in Moonchild in her cage, Sobel, and his retinue — Colonel Vo, a couple of PAVN officers in pith helmets, Casaday from the CIA, a big sloppy Aussie journalist with a crumpled linen suit and a drunkard’s nose — and the torches, and the screaming, sweating jokers with guns. Lots of jokers with guns.

“No,” he said. “Fuck it. Rick ’em all.” He turned and stalked off. A beat later Crypt Kicker followed.

“A hostile young man,” Colonel Vo said. “He bears watching.”

Sobel laughed. He was emcee of his own big show now, and feeling grand. “Not to worry Colonel,” he said. “His heart’s in the right place.”

The secret policeman looked dubious. “From the looks of him, it could be anywhere.”

Freddie Whitelaw mopped his brow with a handkerchief. It was already so soaked that all it did was redistribute sweat around his shining expanse of forehead.

“Colonel Sobel,” he said, “what are your intentions now in regard to your, ah, prisoner?”

“I’m having her tortured to death,” he said cheerfully. “Some of my boys are quite ingenious in that line, did you know?”

Freddie’s jaw dropped. “You’re joking, surely?”

The Colonel shook his head. “It will encourage the others, as the old saying goes. The rebels will see the penalty for their treachery firsthand. And of course they’ll see irrefutable proof that this Field Marshal of their counterrevolution is only too human, ace or not. We only await the arrival of the television crews to commence our little lesson.”

“Sir, you — you can’t be serious!” Whitelaw stammered.

Sobel dropped a comradely hand to his shoulder. “Have no fear, my friend. I promised you an exclusive on this story, and you shall have it. The TV news people will just have to wait until you publish to release their footage. Who better to break this story, after all, than a longstanding member of our socialist confraternity?”

He steered the journalist away from the cage. Looking over his shoulder, Whitelaw caught Moonchild’s dark eyes with his wildly rolling ones and gave his head a desperate shake.

She nodded back. No, there is nothing you can do. I understand. This is my karma. She wondered if he knew her for his old drinking buddy from Rick’s. Mark had never come out and blurted his powers to him, but it would not surprise her if he had done his research into the ace called Cap’n Trips.

Sobel and his official hangers-on had drifted over to the front of the temple, where the NJB commander was pointing to things and holding forth in his grand way. The jokers had for the moment grown tired of screaming abuse in her face, since Sobel had decreed death on the spot for anyone who went farther than that, and had mostly fallen away into little clumps to shoot the breeze and gamble and grumble about why the media types were taking so long and keeping the real fun from starting. For the moment she was alone with her misery.

— She felt the pressure of shadow. She looked up.

“Hi, hon,” said Eric Bell with a strange, sad grin. “I told you you’d come back to us.”

She pinned his eyes with hers. “Will you be first in line when they turn me out to rape me?”

He rocked back slightly, as if she’d slapped him. “We’re in storm season here. Desperate measures”

She turned away. “Save your rationalizations. The Brigade has become a pack of animals. They are everything the bigots paint the wild cards to be. They have given in to blood hunger. How soon before you begin to devour your own kind?”

He had no words. She looked at him sidelong. “What? No pretty pictures? Will you not fill my mind with images of the better world to be purchased by my degradation and death?”

He winced, squatted down beside the cage. His right hand was closed tight. Vein and bone stood out on its back as if to burst the skin.

“Look,” he said in a fevered half whisper, “we’re in the middle of a People’s Army armored division. It’s on the move even now. Can’t you hear it?”

The grumbling noise made sudden sense. She nodded.

“We have your rebel main force trapped in a pincers. By dawn it will be all over.”

She turned her face away. “Why do you tell me this? So you can taste my pain for the fate of those who follow me? Soul rape is much to your taste. Perhaps soul torture is as well.”

“Isis, please.” He grabbed the bamboo bar with his left hand. “Those dreams back in the temple — I had to distract you, don’t you see. So we could capture you without hurting you.”

“So I would be in good health for the torture.”

“That … that’s not my idea. I had no idea.”

“You attack me with tainted dreams. Yet you believe your greater Dream can somehow remain pure.” She looked at him. “Eric, I pity you. Truly I do.”

“Dammit, Isis, give it up! It’s not too late! You can join us. I can make Sobel accept it. He has to listen to me! I’m as much a leader as he is. And I’m a joker. He doesn’t seem to be aware of it, but the boys are right on the edge. They have a bellyful of taking orders from a nat. If he won’t do what I say, we’ll … make him listen.”

He thrust the ruin of his face right up against the bars. “Isis, please! Won’t you join us?”

She looked past him to the jokers of the Brigade, eyeing her like rabid dogs, tongues lolling.

“Mu,” she said. “That question is unasked.”

He half-rose from his crouch, waving his fist in despair. “You idiot! They’ll do it. You have no idea what they’re capable of.”

“I have every idea of what they are capable of. That is why I refuse to join them.”

“Isis, I beg you, I love you”

She shook her head. “That string is broken. Do not try to pull it anymore.”

She raised her hands to touch his face through the cool bamboo bars. “Eric, my beautiful boy. Eric whom I loved. Listen to me. Hear me. When I met you, we each had a dream, a beautiful dream. I have remained true to mine. I will die true to it.

“You have sold your dream, my love. Sold it for a feeling of power, sold it to feed your own lust for revenge. Sold it to assuage your terrible anger. You have polluted your dream, spewed filth on it like the factories you showed us in that vision the first time I saw you, after you showed us the death of the Rox.”

He frowned. “The first time you — but you weren’t there then. There was only that nat, the tall one —”

And a wind rose around the cage, drawing clumps of dirt, bits of grass, every stray piece of debris. Eric held up his hands to keep dust from his eyes.

When he lowered them, Isis Moon was gone. In her place was Mark Meadows, absurdly crouched in the tiny cage with his knees to either side of his head.

He gave Eric a sickly smile. “I guess this takes some of the fun out of gang rape, huh?” he said.

Eric dropped to his knees. “Oh, my God,” he gasped.

“I made love to … you”

“I don’t feel any better about it than you do, man,” Mark said. “But Moonchild is real while she’s around, if that makes any difference. It wasn’t really me.”

Eric turned away and vomited.

Then he was back, hanging one-handed on the bars like a monkey So far none of the others seemed to have noticed the change that had taken place. “If I talk to you, Moonchild hears me?”

“Yeah, man.”

“Very well. Isis, I love you. Please God, believe me. I know I used that as — as a weapon, but it’s true. I swear it.”

“Sure,” Mark said sternly.

“It’s true. I — never mind. I, I can’t bear to see you hurt, Isis.”

“I guess you’re lucky I turned back into me, man.”

“No, please. If Isis is … in there, they can’t hurt you without hurting her. That was never part of my plan. I won’t let that happen.”

Mark jerked his chin at the surrounding mob. It was about all the motion he could muster in the cramped space. “Just what were you planning to do about it? Your buddies have other ideas.”

“It’s too late for you to change what’s going to happen,” Eric said, “so what I do isn’t betrayal.”

He stuck his fist through the bars. “Take it,” he hissed to Mark.

Dubiously Mark opened a hand. Eric pressed something slender, cold, and hard into his palm.

“I didn’t know how Mark — how you summoned your ‘friends.’ I knew your drugs had something to do with it. Agent Ray took a pouch filled with little vials off of Isis when he captured her. I was able to steal one.”

Cautiously, hardly daring to breathe, Mark rolled his fingers open slightly. A tiny glass vial lay in his palm filled with orange powder. It had a brownish cast to it; doubtless a trick of the torchlight.

“I thought another of your friends might be better able to come and get Isis out. I hope that’s true.”

Mark nodded. His lips and throat were far too dry to let words past.

“Get her far away from here. And remember — remember that I love her.”

He grabbed Mark’s hand, pulled it to the bars, kissed it. Then he rose and began walking away.

He had not gotten twenty meters when a voice cried out, “Hey! He gave the prisoner something!”