Turn of the Cards

Chapter Fifty

Monster stood above his opponent’s pyre, raising triumphant arms to the sky.

Crypt Kicker stood for a moment, seeming to contemplate the creature. Then he put his head down and charged.

He struck the being’s shin and bounced. He didn’t have the mass to cut its leg from beneath it. Monster stopped his joyous bellowing and gazed curiously down.

Crypt Kicker braced his legs and heaved. With a squall of surprised fury the Monster toppled backward into the trees.

The earth shook. Crypt Kicker turned back to face the temple, dusting his hands together as if to say, “Now, that wasn’t so hard.”

“Don’t get carried away, you dumb son of a bitch!” Carnifex shouted. He pointed.

Monster was rising, vengeful, from the woods. His eyes blazed like yellow spotlights.

Crypt Kicker turned. A giant clawed foot was poised above him.

The foot came down. It slammed on the ground with jarring finality.

“Sweet Mother Mary,” Whitelaw breathed. “The poor sod.”

“What’s it matter?” Carnifex said. “He was dead anyway.” Whitelaw gaped at him in dismay.

Monster turned his blazing eyes toward the temple. The little group turned and bolted into the building, ricocheting off one another. Except Carnifex, who ran around the side.

Monster shrieked. It was a sound like the sky being split in two. He jumped aside, clutching the foot he’d dropped on Crypt Kicker. The sole was smoking.

Crypt Kicker rose from the redneck-shaped impression he had made in the earth. By the woods the soil was spongy with mulch.

Streaming smoke, he began to walk purposefully toward the giant creature. “‘The Lord is my shepherd,’” he intoned in his deep, dry voice. “‘I shall not want.’”

Slowly Monster lowered the foot Crypt Kicker’s acid had injured.

“‘Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,’” Crypt Kicker said, inexorably advancing, “‘I shall fear no evil: for thou art with me.’”

Monster raised a fist.

Crypt Kicker raised his in reply. “‘Thy rod and thy staff they comfort me!’” he screamed, and charged.

Lightning blasted him back twenty meters.

Monster came forward to gaze down at the sprawled body of his antagonist. Crypt Kicker didn’t move. He did smolder some.

Monster roared his victory cry and walked on. The night was alive with small, soft things. He longed to hurt them all.

Billy Ray had never run from a fight in his life. He wasn’t about to start for this oversized green puke-bag, no matter how horny he was.

Carnifex was reckless, but he wasn’t stupid. He just knew when to make a tactical withdrawal.

Monster strode by the temple. Carnifex launched himself from the pagoda roof in an ace-powered leap.

Monster felt a tiny impact on the back of his calf. He paid it no mind. Whatever it was was too small to hurt him. His mighty cock vibrated with the lust for pain.

Everywhere were tanks and soldiers. Monster looked, and it was good.

It was time to smash.

For all its troops the People’s Army had not been able to concentrate overwhelming numbers against the rebels. The country was too wracked by rebellion. The government could not pull many troops from any one area without simply writing it off. Hanoi was unwilling to surrender a square centimeter of Vietnamese soil to its foes.

That was a mistake.

PAVN had committed its finest armored troops to this fight. If they could claim a one-sided victory over the rebel main force, it would go a long way toward reestablishing its credibility as being in control, in the eyes of the world and, more importantly, in the eyes of Vietnam. It would not matter if rebel losses were insignificant compared with the rebellion as a whole. This is the world of Maya; appearance is all.

The PAVN soldiers were brave. Some of them ran; most of them didn’t. They hung in firing at the monster for all they were worth.

Unfortunately the energy of their shells only strengthened him. Their defiance just amused him. And whetted his appetite for destruction.

He smashed, and slew, and tore asunder. Loops of gut hung from his fangs, and blood ran down his claws.

Grunting, sweating, swearing beneath his breath, Carnifex scaled Monster’s back. The creature’s shark-like hide offered little by way of footholds. He was making his own, plunging his fingers and kicking his feet bodily into Monster. Monster obviously was not regarding him as a sufficient irritant to do anything about.

He wasn’t letting himself think about what that implied.

He had just reached the right shoulder blade when another fusillade of tank shells slammed against Monster’s chest. Carnifex hugged the reeking flesh. “Jesus!”

It was sheer luck he hadn’t been dislodged by the explosive impacts. Hell, I’m lucky nobody’s back-shot this big son of a bitch. But Monster wasn’t leaving anybody in his wake in any shape to fire him up from behind.

The vibrations stopped. Carnifex could feel the creature swell with power.

“I’m not getting paid enough for this,” he grunted. He resumed climbing.

The AT-6 Spiral missile streaked toward the T-72. Belew kept his eye on the target and willed the missile to it, his desire transmitted through the medium of UHF radio signals that guided the rocket. He could feel the missile slide through the heavy moist air with silky, sliding sexual friction. Could feel the impact, and then release as the tank exploded.

He did not pump his free fist and yell, “Yeah!” This was deeper than that.

Eight missiles in the Havoc’s load. Eight tanks shattered. He was batting 1,000.

He could see flashes lighting the sky to the southwest. It looked as if there was a major tank battle going on, with some Brobdignagian arc-welding thrown in. Belew had no idea what was happening; his team didn’t have the firepower to hold up one end of such a display.

Somebody was giving the PAVN spearhead a hard time. He had the radio turned off; the chatter distracted him, spoiled the purity of his fusion with the machine. For the moment he didn’t much care what was going down over there. He was loose in the enemy rear as an airborne killing machine. He was out of weapons that would bust their tanks, but his ship was still gravid with bombs and 57mm rocket pods, and he had plenty of ammunition for his four-barrel 12.7mm Gatling. A modern armored formation sucked fuel and resupply. And that meant … soft targets.

There, on a black ribbon of paved road: the shiny steel-dachshund shape of a fuel tank-truck. He banked and stooped like a heavy-metal falcon.

With a grunt of Gargantuan effort Monster raised the forty-two-tonne T-64 off the ground, then military-pressed it over his head.

And Carnifex leaned over the massif of his right brow. Stiffened to a blade, his fingers speared for the yellow slit-pupiled eye.

Reflexively Monster shut the eye. Despite the dizzying distance to the ground, Carnifex let himself fall. He grabbed a handful of lower eyelash, caught himself. Then he hauled himself up to try to pry the lid open.

Monster tossed the battle tank away. He took Carnifex’s hood between the clawed tips of thumb and forefinger and plucked him off.

Dangling mere meters before that vast, hideous face, in the full smokestack blast of his polluted breath, Carnifex shook his fists in defiance.

“Go ahead and swallow me, scumbag!” he yelled. “I’ll chimney up your throat, punch through the roof of your mouth, and eat your fucking brain!”

Monster studied him a moment more. Then he flipped him away.

His impertinent foe already forgotten, Monster surveyed the scene. There were broken and burning tanks everywhere. Nobody was shooting at him anymore. He was out of victims.

He raised his claws to the cloudy heavens and roared in disappointed rage. The lust in his loins had not been slaked. He had a world of hurt yet to inflict before he could find release.

Then something caught his yellow eye, a kilometer or so beyond the trees, in the midst of an expanse of cultivated fields. A tiny hamlet, dark, surrounded by its little bamboo fence.

Innocence. Helplessness. They drew him like a magnet. His cock pulsating with excitement and need, he lumbered toward the village.

He had almost reached it when a voice spoke in his head: “Wait.”

He stopped, growling resentment at the intrusion. The massive horned head swiveled left and right, looking for the source of the irritation. Fury beyond fury piled upon the anger that blazed within him. No one told him to wait.

“This isn’t you. I know it’s not.”

He raised clawed hands, roared a shattering wordless affirmation: IamIII!

“No. You aren’t. You’re an illusion, an aberration. I’m speaking to the real you. That which is buried deep inside. That which is … good.”

Monster shook his head, as if to cast forth the insistent voice. He hated the voice. He wanted to find where it came from, and smash, and kill. It said things that must never be said to him.

“Isis … Moonchild. It’s me, Eric. Your love.”

NO! Negation erupted from the molten core of him.

“Yes.” Images flooded his mind: Isis and Eric, holding hands by candlelight, walking out along the paddy dikes beneath the moon’s benevolent face. Gentle; loving.

Monster pummeled his face with the heels of his hands. He would not see these things. He must not.

“Isis. You’re still in there. Come out. Fight the evil. You can defeat it, send it back where it came from.”

Monster was out of control, reeling blindly in agony. In fear.

Fear fed the anger. As it always does. It was not right that he should fear. He was the mightiest of beings; His will be done, on Earth as it was in Hell.

He looked around, desperate. And there was the village, still dark, still silent, still virginal, nearby.

He would slay. He would rape. He would wade in horror to the sac of his gravid balls. And that awful voice would bother him no more.

“‘There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio,’” J. Robert Belew quoted aloud, not without relishing the taste of it, “’than are dreamt of in your philosophy.’”

Orbiting the looming horror at what he guessed was a safe distance, Belew drew a deep sigh. His ammunition cans were empty, his bombs and rockets spent. The monster had been acting crazy for a moment there, but it had pulled itself together. Now it was going to lay waste to the helpless village.

He couldn’t let that happen. At least, not without a fight.

J. Bob Belew considered himself a hard man, and generally lived up to his own expectations. But he had a weakness. He thought of himself as a white knight, sans peur et sans reproche. All of the things he had done — even the hard things, the repugnant things — had been done out of an unshakable sense of Right. And a white knight didn’t let dragons slaughter defenseless peasants.

Even if it cost him his life.

“‘Lord, what fools these mortals be,’” Belew said sadly, speaking of himself “And worse, what mortals be these fools.” He soared high, savoring a last moment of ecstasy, of flight and power. Then he nosed over and went at the creature’s back in a full-power dive.

Monster strode toward the village. His cock throbbed with need. There were women in the village, and children. He wanted to hear them scream as he plucked them to pieces.

The village showed no signs of life. The occupants were all hunkered down in the illegal bunkers beneath their hootches, waiting for the storm to pass. But this storm would not pass. Not until it had dug them out and devoured them all.

His feet were at the fence. Behind him he heard the scream of a tortured engine. He paid no attention; that wasn’t the kind of screaming he yearned to hear. He stretched out a hand.

An image burst like a bomb in his mind: himself, poised to give pain. And then, looming over him, a dozen times greater, a hundred, was Moonchild in her black and silver. And at her side stood Cap’n Trips, resplendent in his purple suit, and J. J. Flash, and Cosmic Traveler, and Aquarius — and, yes, the blond one, the dead one, and a legion of others the Monster did not know.

He raised his fists to defy them. It was a dream, a lie! The others weren’t bigger than he. They were weak, they were small. He was big. He was greater than anything.

“All you need,” the voice said, “is love.”

He roared his contempt. And the giant faces gazed down upon him, and love flowed out.

It burned him like napalm. Like Crypt Kicker’s acid. He screamed.

He tried to force the image from his mind. He failed. His dream self lashed out against all those other selves, the soft, self-righteous selves. They would not raise hands in return. They only … loved.

J. Robert Belew held the helicopter that was himself in its suicide dive. The green-black mass of corruption filled the flat windscreen. He braced for impact, and grinned at his own futility.

“So long, Ma,” he said. “You were right all along: I’m coming to no good end.”

And the monster blew up in his face.

The excess mass the Monster had drawn into himself in his moment of borning let go in a flash and mighty blast.

Then there was nothing but a village blown down above the heads of its inhabitants — terrified but safe in their bunkers — and a wounded helicopter auto-rotating to a hard landing back among the trees, and Mark Meadows lying in a fetal ball among bean plants, weeping and vomiting.

And then a great wave of calm passed over him. He rolled onto his back and gazed up at the skies.

The stars gazed back. Wouldn’t you know it, he thought. Yet they held no terror for him anymore. They were just … stars.

… He felt the presence of Starshine, joined with his comrades for the fight of all their lives, going away from him. He felt sorrow well up within him. “Wait!” he cried, “don’t go!”

“Don’t mourn,” Starshine’s voice said, “organize.” And he was gone, and Mark knew he’d never come again.

He blinked the tears from his eyes. The time would come when he would mourn that other self. And then he would be whole, and he would go on, to wherever it was he was heading.

And another voice in his head: “Isis. Is he — is it — did we win?”

“Eric!” It was his lips, but Moonchild’s voice.

“He’s still alive,” he said in his own voice. “We gotta help him!”

He picked himself up and headed back for the clearing at a stumbling run.