George R.R. Martin - [Wild Cards 18] (7 page)

The joker Drummer Boy was over seven feet tall and had six arms. All of them were lean, powerful, and covered with tattoos, along with much of his torso—which contained a set of tympanic membranes. He really was his own drum set, and he usually went shirtless to show it off. He managed to stand with all six arms akimbo, hands lined up on his hips. With his shaved head, scowling expression, and firelight glinting off his skin, he seemed like a monster from legend.

Curveball, the pretty nineteen-year-old with a perfect
figure and blond ponytail, brimmed with energy. “Let’s stop bitching and do this thing.” She dashed forward, toward the blaze.

She’s crazy
, Ana thought, hanging back by the curb.

The others—Hardhat, Gardener, Hive, Wild Fox, and Drummer Boy—followed Curveball. No one got close before the heat drove them back. It came off the building in shimmering walls. The air itself seemed to burn.

Hardhat reached out, seeming for a moment to paint his hand across the air. Along the wall in front of him, a structure appeared: one by one, glowing yellow I beams morphed into existence. They stacked into a scaffold that climbed to a second-story window, where one of the victims leaned out. But he couldn’t convince the guy that the phantom I beams were real and would hold his weight if he climbed onto them.

“Come on, you fucking cock head! Get your sorry fucking ass down here! Jesus Christ!” he hollered. The victim kept shaking his head.

“I’ll get him.” Drummer Boy ran for the scaffold. Using all six arms, he made short work of climbing the beams, and once at the top, braced himself while reaching for the victim. He winced away from a blast of sparks that poured from the window. The sparks, if anything, encouraged the man to take Drummer Boy’s hand and allow himself to be coaxed from the window.

One down, at least. The flames seemed to be climbing higher, and the shouts from within continued. Drummer Boy helped a second victim climb from the window. Two rescued. Maybe this would turn out all right after all.

Ana’s heart was racing, and she was just standing there. She clenched her fists, watching, praying. It was all she could do.

From inside, sounding over the crackle and roar of flames, a baby started crying. The sound was piercing, and jacked the tension to a new level.

Gardener pulled a handful of something from the leather pouch at her belt and flung it toward the building. Seeds. They instantly took root in the concrete and grew at a terrific rate. In minutes, vines sprouted and climbed, sending out
leaves and tendrils, anchoring on the brick wall. Following Hardhat’s lead, she used living vines instead of conjured steel.

Before the vines reached the first window, however, they blackened and caught fire. The plants collapsed into ashes.

“Damn,” she muttered.

“You got anything in there that can shoot water?” Wild Fox asked.

“There aren’t any plants that shoot water,” she said, scowling at him.

Meanwhile, Hive rubbed his hands together in preparation of—something. His expression was uncertain, however. “Maybe I can do some scouting. Find out where the people are so we don’t waste any time searching.”

His outline fuzzed. Then, his shirt and pants collapsed, and in his place a swarm of tiny green wasplike insects hovered. The swarm maintained the outline of the man—a disturbing, wavering form, rather than anything with human features—and raised a nebulous, buzzing arm in salute. Then, he scattered. The swarm broke apart, zoomed to the building, and entered through three different windows.

“Is that bastard going to be okay?” Hardhat asked, staring. He’d built a second scaffold by another window and rescued a third victim.

In only a second, almost as quickly as they’d entered the building, the swarm returned, tendrils of insects shooting out of the windows and dropping to the ground. There, they coalesced, crawling together to form the shape of a man, kneeling and naked. “Bugs and smoke… don’t mix,” he managed, coughing.

Wild Fox pointed. “Dude, you know you’re naked?”

Regaining his feet, Hive glared. “Thanks very much. I might have missed that little fact.” With a bout of angry buzzing, his hip region snapped out of existence, to be replaced by a Speedo band of writhing insects. He went to retrieve his clothing.

“I bet the girls love that,” Curveball said, smirking.

He leered. “You could find out.”

“We don’t have time for this.” She drew a pair of marbles
out of the pocket of her shorts. Then she wound up for the pitch. She threw with that odd softballer’s pitch, the underhanded swing and snap. The marble flew, faster than a softball, faster than any thrown object had any right to fly. It burned through the air, glowing yellow, before impacting on the front door. The wood shattered with the force of an explosion. She threw the second one at a ground-floor window. The impact left a jagged hole in the side of the house.

“Great,” Hive said, deadpan. “Now we can see the fire even better.” She glared at him.

Exposure to more air only made the flames larger and more ferocious. The baby was still crying.

Curveball turned to Ana. “Earth Witch, you try something. We’ve got to do
something.
”

Ana shook her head. She wasn’t going to open a hole in the ground just for the sake of doing something and run the risk of undermining the whole building. They hadn’t been too successful so far, but that would take the cake of failures.

She said, “Maybe we could try the fire hose.” Stupid idea, yeah. That didn’t mean they had to stare at her like she was an idiot—like they were doing now.

Curveball and Drummer Boy glanced at each other, then ran to the hose and fire hydrant. They wrestled with it for a minute, without making progress. Buttoning up his shirt, Hive helpfully observed, “I don’t think you’re doing that right.”

“Then you do it, Bugsy!” Drummer Boy said. He dropped the hose, which he’d been hoisting with all six hands.

The heavy nozzle yanked out of Curveball’s grip. “Hey!”

“Shit,” Drummer Boy muttered. “Here, let me try.” Using brute force, he manhandled the nozzle into place and managed to wrench open the valve on the hydrant. The hose filled, writhed, and twisted out of their grip, spraying a sheet of water across the pavement.

“Watch it!” Hive shouted as a tail of the spray caught him.

“Stop standing there and help!” Curveball shot back.

Grabbing hold of the nozzle and pinning it down while Curveball attempted to wrestle with the hose, Drummer Boy muttered, “This is great. This is just great.”

The baby’s crying seemed to get louder.

They managed to maneuver the fire hose in place to spray water at the blazing windows, but by this time the flames were monstrous, engulfing the building. Shouting continued to emanate from within—more people needing rescue. They didn’t have much time, and the minutes dragged painfully.

Then Curveball said, “Oh my God.” She cupped her hands to her face and shouted, “Hardhat! He’s gonna jump! The guy’s jumping!”

From one of the third-story windows, a man was climbing over the sill. Hardhat came running. “Where?”

“To the right!”

Drummer Boy dropped the hose and made a dash for the window, as if he could actually catch a falling body, but it was too late. Hardhat only laid one of his I beams down before the victim landed.

“Motherfucker!” Hardhat shouted. Drummer Boy gave an angry shake of an arm.

They had no way of getting inside. They couldn’t pull anyone out.

“Would somebody
do
something?” Curveball yelled. She kept saying that.

Hardhat, sweat and soot smearing his face, turned on her. “What the fuck you want me to do? Blow pixie dust out my ass? I’ve
been
doing something!”

Gardener tried to step in. “Arguing isn’t going to help anything.”

“At least we’re good at
that,”
Hive said, and he actually smiled.

Then they all started shouting at each other.

Some team
, Ana thought.

“Maybe I can make it look like we’re doing a good job,” Wild Fox said, flicking his fox tail. Suddenly, another Wild Fox—a young Asian guy with floppy black hair and a quirky grin, fur-covered fox ears, and a luxurious fox tail poking out the back of his jeans, swishing like a banner behind him—ran from the building, carrying the latest teen pop star in his arms. She wrapped her arms around his neck and planted dozens of kisses on him.

Ana looked at him. “I thought your illusions don’t show up on camera. That isn’t going to help us.”

He frowned. “Crap.” The vision before them popped out of existence.

Then, an air horn blared. The flow of water from the fire hose slowed and stopped, cut off from another source. Floodlights snapped on, drowning the area in blazing white light. The seven Hearts squinted against the glare.

Inside the building, the fires died as the feeds from gas nozzles shut off. Four people walked from the building—perfectly safe, uninjured. They were stuntmen, wearing protective suits and helmets. A fifth climbed off the stunt mat set up at the side of the building. Hollywood magic at its finest. They removed their masks and smirked at the seven aces as they passed. The three who’d actually been rescued weren’t any less accusing.

From a side doorway leading into the Hollywood backlot, a woman emerged. She wore designer jeans and a fitted, cream-colored blouse. With her statuesque frame and long brunette hair, she was already stunning, but one feature stood out above all the others: her wings, mottled white and beige, spectacular even folded back.

Peregrine crossed her arms and regarded the seven would-be heroes, who avoided her gaze. “That was a little underwhelming. But I think I’ll save any more criticism for the judges. Go home and wait for your next call.”

A half-dozen cameras captured the failure from every angle.

Team Hearts had their own Humvee for use during the show, tricked out and painted with their logo. The marketing gurus had thought of everything.

Hardhat drove, and for a long time no one said a word.

Finally, Hive broke the silence. “Well. That could have gone better.”

Crammed into his seat in back, Drummer Boy snorted a laugh.

After that, the seven passengers glared silently out their own windows. The camera planted in the dashboard captured an image of profound disappointment, and it would play on millions of TV sets for all the world to see.

Ana Cortez—Earth Witch, so-called—thought through the scenario again and again, and wondered what she could have done. Dug a hole. Dug a ditch. Undermined the building. And what good would that have done? None. Now the team had lost, and one of them would get voted off.

Almost, she wished she’d get the boot so she could go home and forget about all this.

Team Hearts headquarters was a sprawling West Hollywood manor, with a gated driveway, stucco walls, a luscious lawn and flourishing garden—the kind of place that played well on television and promoted the fantasy of a Southern California paradise.

All of it was just a backdrop for the drama.

Curveball—Kate Brandt—stormed from the garage into the combined kitchen and dining area. In her, the stunned disappointment of their failure had changed to fury. Jaw set, she turned on her slower teammates.

“They should have given us some kind of warning. If we’d been able to plan—”

Hive laughed. “That’s the whole point. We’re not supposed to plan. We’re supposed to face the unknown. Battle the unexpected.” Arms raised, he flashed his hands to emphasize his sarcasm.

“I thought they’d start with something small,” Andrew Yamauchi, Wild Fox, said. His tail revealed his disappointment, hanging almost to the floor. “Rescuing kittens from trees or something.”

Hardhat—T.T. Taszycki—leaned against the counter. “Makes you wonder what the fuck is next, don’t it?”

Hive just wouldn’t let up. “Look at it this way—that farce back there was highly entertaining. It should get us a lot of air time.”

Curveball turned on him. “Would you shut up? There was nothing entertaining about that! We were awful!”

Curveball and Hive faced each other down across the too bright kitchen, and any friendly sparks that had lit between
them over the last week vanished. The others lurked around the edges of the room. Even Drummer Boy, all seven feet of him, managed to slink out of their way.

Jonathan Hive was too slick. He had a studied detachment, a journalistic objectivity that went a little too far—he was always an observer. He’d put himself on the outside, and he was used to commenting on everything.

He regarded Curveball and said with wry amazement, “You’re actually taking all this seriously, aren’t you? That’s kinda cute.”

He’d failed to observe that she’d already taken a marble out of her pocket and gripped it in her fist.

Ana spotted it. “Kate, no—”

Too late. Curveball wound up her pitch and threw the missile at him.

“Whoa!” His eyes went wide, and his shoulder—where the marble would have struck—disintegrated with the sound of buzzing. The cloth of his shirt collapsed as the flesh dissolved into a swarm of tiny green particles, which scattered before the marble as he flinched away. A second later, the hundred buzzing insects coalesced, crawling under his collar and merging back into his body. The marble didn’t touch him, but hit the wall behind him. A faint insect humming lingered.