George R.R. Martin - [Wild Cards 18] (57 page)

Michael crouched; the roadway was broken, and he snatched up a two-foot hunk of concrete curbing with his lower hands, and flipped it to his upper set of arms. Grunting, he heaved it overhead with all his considerable strength toward the soldiers. They went down hard as Michael dove for the ground, trying vainly to cover his head with all six arms. The gunfire stopped. When he glanced up, Rusty was looking down at him, nodding his riveted head and clutching at his wounded shoulder. “Thanks, fella. That would’ve been a bad deal.” Michael sat up: The grenade had rolled away from the crushed soldier’s hand, the pin still attached. He could see it on the pavement, not two feet away …

… people were running westward past Michael and Rustbelt, all of them jokers, some of them with weapons clutched in their hands, many of them bloodied and injured
. “What’s going on?” Michael shouted, catching one on them in his hands, but the man replied in fast, frightened Arabic, pushing at Michael’s arms to get away. “Djinn,” was the only word Michael caught. Rustbelt shrugged and pointed northward over the edge of the dam. There, maybe a mile down the river, Michael could see a large island. Bright girders glowed as a bridge between the island and the town of Syrene on the west bank, with the black dots of hundreds of people hurrying
across the improvised span. Then smoke obscured the scene again. “Hardhat. Good fella.” Rustbelt grunted and started walking eastward, and Michael followed behind him.

… it seemed like he’d been running along this road forever, dodging around the roadblocks and ducking behind any cover he could find whenever he heard gunfire
. He’d lost Rusty during one of those moments. Craters erupted in the edge of the roadway as an automatic weapon fired, and Michael flung himself behind a stack of burning tires. “You never hear the one that hits you,” he muttered to himself. He thought he’d heard that somewhere. He was close to the middle of the dam, the arrow-straight roadway stretching out in front of him. A hundred yards ahead of him there was another roadblock, this one piled high with the burning, motionless hulk of a caliphate tank perched atop the rubble, stretching entirely across the two-lane road. To the north, there was an eighty-foot sheer drop to the Nile; to the south there was water, only a few feet below the stone retaining wall.

And on this side of the improvised roadblock: Kate.

She wore a hodgepodge uniform: The helmet of a WWII German soldier, a bulky Kevlar vest over her T-shirt, camouflage pants tucked into heavy boots. Several joker soldiers were gathered around her. Ana, similarly attired, was with them, as was Rusty, Lohengrin clad in his shining ghost steel, and Holy Roller. Ahead of them all, prowling from side to side of the road, was Sekhmet, glowing brightly even in the sunlight. The huge lioness’s fur was spattered with blood, her claws were snagged with tatters of cloth and raw meat, and smoke coiled from her mouth as she roared defiance.

Michael wondered what Sekhmet was growling at. He wondered at the shuddering of the roadway under his feet. The answer to both came immediately. The Righteous Djinn loomed up behind the barricade—a scowling giant who looked to be three stories tall, a nightmare with black tendrils of smoke curling about him. Fear struck Michael at the sight, a mindless, unreasoning fear that stole the air from his lungs and clamped hands around his throat, a fear that sent his bowels grumbling and bile burning in his stomach, a fear that
made his muscles quiver. He shouted with alarm, the cry lost because it was echoed by them all. All but a few of the joker soldiers dropped their weapons and fled past Michael as he gaped up at the Djinn.

“All is lost,” Michael heard Lohengrin proclaim, his sword down. “We cannot stand against this.…”

Holy Roller shrieked. “It’s Satan himself!” he shrilled. “The devil walks the earth!” And he was gone, rolling westward and heedlessly bowling over fleeing soldiers in his rush. All of the rest of them except Fortune had backed up several paces. They looked ready to follow Holy Roller. Michael had to fight the compulsion to put his back to this horror.

“
Fear is his greatest weapon
,” Lohengrin had told them yesterday.
“He radiates terror, and his enemies often flee from him without fighting
.” Michael believed that now.

The Djinn glared down at them. His monstrous hands came down and plucked the tank from the barrier. He lifted it high, and Michael and the others scattered like roaches. There was no place to go—but the Djinn flung the tank effortlessly sideways over the side of the dam. They heard it hit the ground far below, as the Djinn flicked his massive hands as if brushing away crumbs, sweeping aside the rest of the barricade. Behind the Djinn, Michael could see troops in the uniform of the caliphate. One of the soldiers held a banner of red on which a crescent moon enclosed an eight-pointed star made of scimitar blades, both symbols yellow against the blood-hued backdrop: the Djinn’s personal banner. They were advancing at a walk, the Righteous Djinn behind them, the roadway shuddering under his step, the army behind him.

The lioness of Sekhmet stood her ground, her tail lashing furiously, her glow almost blinding.

Michael remembered Lohengrin’s other warning:
You can’t get near him. If he touches you, he will steal your power entirely away
.

Looming above ranks of his elite guard, the Djinn extended his huge hand, palm-up, toward Sekhmet, his fingers curling back toward him in unmistakable invitation. The elite guard pressed to either side of the roadway, leaving an open path to the Djinn. Michael could hear the sounds of the
army of the caliphate advancing relentlessly behind the Djinn and his guards—part shouts, part the chatter of tank treads and the growl of diesel engines, part stones tumbling and timbers cracking, part the varied barks of weaponry. All of it the sound of death.

“Kate!”

She glanced over to him. Her eyes widened slightly. He wondered what she was thinking, what he must look like—one arm hanging and bloody, his clothing torn and filthy with gore. He could not read her face. She looked quickly back to Sekhmet. “John!” she called loudly. “Don’t!”

The lioness roared, and searing flames erupted from her mouth. Some of the caliph’s soldiers, their uniforms afire, fled as the lioness bounded toward the Djinn, claws extended. She looked like a kitten attacking an adult. Sekhmet’s fire seemed not to affect the Djinn at all, her claws left red scratches on the hand the Djinn lifted to send Sekhmet tumbling back. The Djinn reached for the stunned lioness, but Sekhmet’s attack had broken the stasis of fear that held them. Kate was flinging rocks, making the Djinn bring his hand back as though it had been bee-stung. Lohengrin lifted his sword. “
Yield!
“ he shouted. “Yield, Righteous Djinn, and you may yet live!”

And Ana … she had dropped to the ground. On her hands and knees, her head down, she looked as if she were praying. A rumbling shivered Michael’s feet from the roadway beneath him.

Laughing, the Djinn made his gesture of invitation once more, as Sekhmet shook her head and stood once more. The lioness snarled, smoke curling around her snout. Her claws tore furrows in the concrete of the road, and Michael knew that Sekhmet would renew her attack in a moment. The rumbling under Michael’s feet grew, and the roadway lifted up and fell under him like a concrete wave. “Cripes,” Rusty grunted, nearly stumbling. Michael could see the ripple growing higher, as it knocked Kate and Lohengrin from their feet entirely, as it raced toward the Djinn.

The elite guard had responded to the attack on their leader also. Their weapons opened up—Lohengrin rolled in front of
Kate; Rusty moved to shield Michael. Tiny puffs of dust erupted all around; concrete chips flew. Sekhmet leaped toward the prone Ana. Most of the bullets struck the lioness as she roared and spat flame, but Ana gave a cry, rolling over and clutching her side below the short Kevlar vest.

Michael could see blood.

The low grumbling beneath them ceased. Ana’s wave stopped sluggishly, but there was enough of a slope under the Djinn’s feet that he fell backward. The impact of his body on the dam sent reverberations through the entire structure and sent clouds of dust skyward. The mound of Ana’s earth wave collapsed noisily, leaving a deep and jagged fissure separating the groups. Water rushed in to fill it, pouring over the north side of the dam. The Djinn’s guards continued to fire wildly over the gap as they moved back quickly from the breach, as the Djinn picked himself up.

“Ana!” Kate ran to her friend. Rusty and Michael ran to her also.

“I got her,” Michael told Kate, who was crying and trying to lift the young woman. “I can carry her.” He took Ana in his lower set of arms; she fought him, crying out in pain with her eyes closed, her flailing arms striking the tympanic rings on his chest, so that wild drumbeats sounded. He tried not to look at the wound that gaped just above her right hip or the blood that poured from it. He cradled Ana and ran, crouching low. Terror gave him speed. Sekhmet roared, the guns of the Living Gods’ people chattered. Several green wasps went zipping past Michael’s head. “We’ll stand at the western end,” Lohengrin shouted. “Simoon and Bubbles will meet us there.”

They retreated, Lohengrin, Rustbelt, and Sekhmet at the rear.

The Djinn’s mocking laughter pursued them.

Michael panted, carrying Ana, who had gone terribly still in his arms. To the north, Hardhat’s girdered bridge still gleamed, wreathed in greasy smoke and filled with refugees fleeing Sehel. On the island’s eastern shore, a fleet of landing boats clustered while helicopters hovered like carrion birds overhead. The tornado of Simoon was racing
south from Syrene on the western shore of the Nile, in their direction. A flotilla of bubbles was hurrying west to east across the river toward a squadron of WZ-10 attack helicopters, all with the black, green, and white insignia of the caliphate on them.

“Curveball!” Lohengrin shouted, gesturing with his sword. One of the WZ-10s emerged from the dust and smoke behind them, its black snout bristling. Its nose dipped and Michael waited for the guns to open up, or for a missile to gout fire and race toward them. But Kate had turned at Lohengrin’s shout, and, with that softball pitcher’s windup, she threw.

The stone shattered the windshield and buried itself in the pitot’s face. The chopper wailed like a wounded beast, its nose tilting straight up so that it seemed to be standing on its rear rotors, which sliced at the ground and shattered. Bits of rotor flew; Michael heard one of the followers of the Living Gods grunt and fall, his body nearly severed through. The chopper fell backward, the main rotors thrashing at the roadway. They all ran for cover. Michael heard the shrill scream of tortured metal and felt the heat of the explosion as the fuel tank went. The world was bright yellow and red, then black—the concussion sent him to his knees as he cradled Ana in all six arms.

A larger explosion came as he tried to rise; the ordnance on the craft exploding. Michael was flung down entirely, and he rolled to avoid going down on top of Ana. A series of smaller detonations followed.

He struggled up again, clinging to Ana with two arms and using the others to lever himself up. Bits of unidentifiable things were smoldering all around him. He couldn’t hear anything; the explosions still roared in his ears. Sekhmet was rising from where she had been flung. Kate was shouting something to Rusty and Lohengrin, both still on their feet. She was pointing. There was pure fright in her eyes.

A crater, twenty feet across and far deeper than that, was gouged in the dam where the chopper had been, ripping entirely through the two-lane road. The wound seemed to be widening as they watched, white foam lashing at the tumbled, broken lip. Lohengrin waved his sword, his mouth open
below the helm though Michael could hear no words. Lohengrin and Kate started running; gesturing at Michael. Sekhmet spat flame, but then she, too, turned. The followers of the Living Gods, those who could, ran with them.

The dam shuddered like a living thing.

They were within sight of the western end when the dam failed.

“
Scheisse
,” Lohengrin breathed. Michael heard the curse. He stopped and looked back, pressing Ana to his chest with four arms.

In the center of the long, straight span, the dam bulged, broken now in two places. Water boiled, spewing wildly from twin rents in the wall. As Michael watched, the bulge sagged entirely. The confined waters of the Nile burst free, tearing away concrete and earth, ripping away the tanks and trucks and soldiers of the caliphate caught on the roadway, and hurling it all northward in a tsunami of white water. The entire middle third of the dam was gone, and still the water poured through, tearing away more of the dam every second, an endless deluge. People were screaming on both sides of the river; feluccas and other river craft were tossed and tumbled under; houses crushed and ripped from their foundations on the islands and along either bank. The Nile, which after millennia of annual floods had been tamed since the first decade of the 1900s, flooded once more. A century’s worth of pent-up fury rushed downriver as the lake behind the dam emptied—toward Hardhat’s bridge, unstoppable.

The freed Nile reached Sehel Island and bore it under.

There was no sound, not from that distance. Michael saw Hardhat’s bright girders lift, black specks of people falling from them. The girders swayed and twirled, lifting higher and higher above the flood, as if Hardhat were trying to use them to rise above the water, to find something to hold onto and survive this watery assault.

They watched silent, helpless.

The girders vanished. They were present one moment, towering above the foaming torrent, a flickering hope. And in the next, they were gone, as if they had never been there at all.