Wildcards

EPILOGUE: THIRD GENERATION

by Lewis Shiner

Jetboy dove out of the sky in his rocket-sleek plane, speed lines roarin off the swept-back wings. Twenty-millimeter cannons bared ragged calligraphy and the tyrannosaur staggered as the shells tore into him.

"Arnie? Arnie, turn out that light!"

"Yes, Mother," Arnie said. He slid the fifty-four-page special Jetboy on Dinosaur island back into its plastic bag. He switched of his reading light and carried the comic across the familiar darkness of his bedroom and put it away in the closet. He had a complete run of Jetboy Comics in one of the waxed cardboard boxes they used to ship chickens to grocery stores. On the shelf above it were stacked scrapbooks full of clippings about the Great and Powerful Turtle and the Howler and Jumpin' Jack Flash. And next to them stood the dinosaur books, not just the kid stuff with the crude drawings, but textbooks on paleontology and botany and zoology.

Hidden in the back of another box of comics was the Playboy that had Peregrine in it. Lately, looking at those pictures had made Arnie feel strange, kind of nervous and excited and guilty all at the same time.

His parents knew about his obsessions, all but the Playboy, anyway. It was only the wild card business that bothered them. Arnie's grandfather had been on the street that day, had seen it with his own eyes when Jetboy exploded into history. A year later Arnie's mother had been born with lowgrade telekinesis, just enough to move a coin a few inches across a plastic tablecloth. Sometimes Arnie wished she'd just been normal. Better that than to get a power that wasn't good for anything.

He'd made his grandfather tell him about it over and over. "He wanted to die," the old man would say. "He saw the future, and he wasn't in it. just wasn't any place for him anymore. "

"Hush, Grandpa," Arnie's mother would say. "Don't talk that way in front of Arnie."

"I know what I saw," the old man would say, and shake his head. "I was there."

Arnie crept quietly back to bed and lay on his stomach, pleasantly aware of the pressure on his groin. He thought about Dinosaur Island. There was no question in his mind that it was real. Aces were real. Aliens were real-they had brought the wild card to earth.

He turned on his side and pulled his knees up toward his chest. What would it be like? When he was eight he'd driven through Utah with his parents and he'd made them stop at Vernal. They'd gone on the Prehistoric Nature Trail, and Arnie had run ahead to be by himself with the life-sized dinosaur models. Dinosaur Island would look like that, he thought, the rugged brush-covered hills in the background, the diplodocus big enough that he could walk under its belly, the struthiomimus like a huge, scaly ostrich, the pteranodon crouched like it had just glided in for a landing.

His eyes closed and he could see them moving now, not just the crummy dinosaurs you could see on TV but the special ones: the tiny, vicious deinonychus, the "terrible claw. " Or the hideous, lumpy ankylosaur, a thirty-five-foot horned toad with a club on its tail that could dent steel plate.

And deep in his brain, inflamed by the rich, yeasty endocrine soup in which it floated, the wild card virus hovered over a cell, paused, then pumped out its alien message and died. And so, on and on it went, spiraling down through the years in a double helix of fear and ecstasy, mutilation and miraculous change…