Wild Cards V (50 page)

“I'm a reasonable man,” Gregg said as Chrysalis and Downs stared at the figure moaning on the floor. “All I ask is that you think about this. Remember that I
will
contest any evidence. Remember that I can and will produce that negative blood test. Think about the fact that I don't even want to hear the faintest whisper of a rumor. And realize that I leave the two of you alive because you're the best sources of information I know—you hear everything, or so you'd have me believe. Good. Use those sources. Because if I hear any rumors, if I see a piece in the papers or
Aces,
if I notice that people are asking strange questions, if I'm attacked or hurt or even feel vaguely threatened, I'll know where to come.”

Downs was staring slack-jawed at Misha; Chrysalis had sunk back against her desk. She tried to meet Gregg's eyes and failed. “You see, I intend to use
you
, not the reverse,” Gregg continued. “I hold the two of you responsible for silence and safety. You're both so damned good at what you do. So start learning who my enemies are and work at stopping them. I'm vindictive, and I'm dangerous. I'm everything Gimli and Misha were afraid I might be.

“And if anyone else ever learns that, I'll consider it
your
fault. You might damage my presidential campaign by being heroes, but that's all. You can't prove anything else. After all, I've never actually killed or hurt anyone
myself.
I'd still be on the streets, afterward. And I'd find you without any trouble at all. And then I'd do to you what I'd do to any enemy.”

Puppetman was chuckling in his mind, anticipating. Gregg smiled at Chrysalis, at Downs. He hugged Mackie, who was watching him eagerly. “Enjoy yourself,” Gregg told him. He gave Chrysalis a small nod that was chilling in its nonchalance and left the office. He shut the door behind him, leaning against it until he heard the whine of Mackie's ace.

He let Puppetman loose to ride with the youth's strange, brightly colored madness. He hardly had to nudge Mackie at all.

Inside, Mackie knelt and cradled Misha's head in his arms. Neither Chrysalis nor Downs moved. “Misha,” he crooned. The woman opened her eyes, and the pain he saw behind them made him sigh. “Such a good little martyr,” he told her. “She wouldn't talk no matter what I did, you know,” he said to the others admiringly, his eyes skittering, bright. His hands roamed over her lacerated body. “She could be a saint. Such silence in suffering. So frigging noble.” The smile he gave Misha was almost tender. “I took her like a boy first, before I cut her at all. Anything to say now, Misha?”

Her head rolled side to side, slowly.

Mackie was smiling fitfully, breathing hard and fast. “You couldn't really have hated the jokers,” he said, looking down at her face. “You couldn't, or you would have talked.” There was a strange sadness in the way he said it.

“
Shahid.
” The word was a whisper from swollen; blood-caked lips. Mackie leaned close to hear it.

“Arabic,” he told them. “I don't understand Arabic.” His hands were buzzing now, screaming. He ran his fingers around her breasts like a caress, and blood followed. Misha shrieked hoarsely; Downs gagged and threw up. Chrysalis remained stoic until Mackie slid his hand down Misha's stomach and let the coils of intestines spill wetly out over the carpet.

When he was done, he stood up and brushed away the gore covering the front of him. “The senator said you'd know how to take care of the mess,” he told them. “He said you knew everything and everybody.” Mackie chuckled, high and manic. He began to whistle: Brecht, the
Threepenny Opera.

With a casual wave he strolled through the wall and away.

Thursday, 7:35
P.M.

Sara stood on the corner of South across from the Jokertown Clinic. A cool front had moved in from Canada; low, scudding clouds spat wet circles on the pavement.

Sara glanced again at her watch. Misha was over an hour late. “
I'll be there. I promise you, Sara. If I'm not there, know it's because he stopped me
.”

Sara cursed under her breath, wishing she knew what to think, what to feel.

“You'll have to decide what to do then.”

“Can I help you, Ms. Morgenstern?” Tachyon's deep voice made her start. The scarlet-haired alien peered down at her with a look of intense concern on his face that she might have found comical at another time; during the recent junket, he'd more than once indicated he found her attractive. She laughed, hating the hysteria she heard in the sound.

“No. No, Doctor, I'm all right. I was … I was waiting for someone. We were supposed to meet here.…”

Tachyon nodded solemnly, his startling eyes refusing to let her go. “You seemed nervous. I watched you from the clinic. I thought perhaps there was something I could do. Are you sure there's nothing I can help you with?”

“No.” Her denial was too sharp, too loud. Sara was forced to smile to soften the effect. “Really. Thank you for asking. I was just about to leave, anyway. It doesn't look like she's going to show.”

He nodded. He stared. At last he shrugged. “Aah,” he said. “Well, it was good seeing you again. We don't need to be strangers now that the trip is over, Sara. Perhaps dinner one night?”

“Thank you, but…” Sara bit her lower lip in agitation, just wanting Tachyon to leave. She needed to think, needed to get away from here. “Maybe next time I'm in the city?”

“I'll hold you to that.” Tachyon inclined his head like a Victorian lord, staring at her strangely, then turned. Sara watched Tachyon make his way across the street to the clinic. The sky was beginning to let down a steady drizzle. Streetlights were flickering in the early dusk. Sara looked again up and down the street. A joker with oddly twisted legs and a carapace scuttled from the sidewalk to the cover of a porch. Rain began to pool in the trash-clogged gutters.

“We're sisters in this.”

Sara stepped from the curb and hailed a cab parked down the street. The nat driver stared at her through the rearview mirror. His gaze was rude and direct; Sara turned her face away. “Where you going?” he asked with a distinct Slavic accent.

“Head uptown,” she said. “Just get me out of here.”

“What he did to me, he would also do to you. Don't you notice how your feelings for him change when he's with you, and doesn't that also make you wonder?”

Aah, Andrea. I'm sorry, I'm so sorry.

Sara sat back and watched the rain smear the towers of Manhattan through the windows.

 

Blood Ties

III

A GRID MAP OF
Manhattan from Eighty-seventh down to Fifty-seventh Street glowed on the computer. Tachyon punched in a marker. Brought up another thirty-block section. Studied the two red dots. Wished he had a really big screen that could give him a full view of all of Manhattan. Decided that despite the growing crises at the clinic he would have to spend several hours aboard
Baby.
Her wetware and hardware were far superior to anything on Earth, and she could give him a full-screen view of this mysterious and elusive wild card source.

Victoria Queen, the clinic's chief of surgery, entered without knocking.

“Tachyon, you can't go on like this. Spending time with the joker patrols, working with patients, doing research, and racing around with your grandson trying to be superdad.”

He dug his thumbs into his gritty eyes, then rapped his knuckles against the CRT screen. “The answer is here somewhere. I just have to find it. Eighteen new cases of wild card in a four-day period. It's not rational, it shouldn't be happening. I had hoped it was something simple. A hitherto undisturbed cache of spores. But the dispersal of the cases makes that impossible. I put in a call to the National Weather Service, and they're up sending weather tapes covering the past two weeks. Perhaps that will be the key. Some climactic and seismic anomaly that has caused this outbreak.”

“Pointless and hopeless, and a waste of your already limited time.”

“GODDAMN IT!” He used the desk to lever himself out of his chair. “I've got the goddamn press breathing down my neck, demanding answers, demanding some reassurance for their readers. How long can I continue to make reassuring noises before this becomes a full-scale panic? And just think what Barnett will do with that!”

She gripped his wrists, pinning his hands to the desk. Leaned in until their noses were almost touching. “You
can't
be responsible for every damn thing that happens in the world! For gang wars in Jokertown, and right-wing cranks running for president! Or for wild card either.”

“I am bred to be responsible. By blood and bone. By a thousand generations. This is
my
town,
my
people, MY GRANDSON, AND MY CLINIC, AND YES, MY VIRUS!”

“DON'T BE SO FUCKING PROUD OF IT!”

“I'M NOT!” Snatching his hands away, he stormed across the room.

“YOU'RE ARROGANT AND IRRATIONAL!”

“SO WHAT DO YOU SUGGEST? TO WHOM DO I ABDICATE THIS RESPONSIBILITY? WHOM DO I CONDEMN TO BEAR THE GUILT AND THE HATE! MY PEOPLE, YES, AND AT BASE EVERYONE OF THEM HATES MY GUTS!” Laying his head against the wall, he burst into wild sobs.

The woman's face hardened. Filling a glass with water from the bathroom tap, she yanked him around by a shoulder and flung it full in his face.

“That's enough! Get hold of yourself!” She punctuated each word with a hard shake.

Coughing, he mopped his face, drew a shaky breath. “Thank you, I'm all right now.”

“Go home, get some sleep, accept some goddamn help. Get Meadows in here to help with the research, and let Chrysalis run the goddamn patrols.”

“And Blaise? What do I do with Blaise?” He scrubbed at his face. “He's the most important thing in my life, and I'm neglecting him.”

“The problem with you, Tachyon,” she said as she walked out of the office, “is that
everything
is the most important thing in your life.”

A routine appendectomy. He shouldn't have taken the time, but Tommy was Old Mr. Cricket's nephew, and you don't ignore old friends. Tach stripped out of the bilious green scrubs, brushed out his cropped hair, and made a face. He then took a turn through each of the clinic's four floors. The hospital had been dimmed for the evening. From various rooms he heard muted televisions, the low hum of conversation, and from one a sad, hopeless sobbing. For a moment he hesitated, then entered. Powerful mandibles and opaque oval eyes stared out framed by stringy gray hair. The emaciated body beneath the hospital gown revealed it to be a woman.

“Madam?” He lifted the chart. Mrs. Willma Banks. Age seventy-one. Cancer of the pancreas.

“Oh, Doctor, I'm so sorry. I didn't mean … I'm fine really. I don't mean to be a bother … that nurse was so sharp—”

“You're not a bother. And what nurse?”

“I don't mean to be a talebearer or unduly troublesome.”

It was obvious that she was, but Tachyon listened politely. No matter how tiresome a patient might be, he insisted upon courtesy and service from his staff. If someone had violated this most basic rule, he wanted to know.

“And my children never come to see me. I ask you, what's the good of children if they abandon you when you most need them? I worked every day for thirty years so they could have the advantages. Now my son, Reggie—he's a stockbroker with a big Wall Street firm—he has a house in Connecticut, and a wife who can't stand to look at me. I've only been to their house
once
when
she
was away with my grandchildren.”

There was nothing to say. He sat, her hand resting lightly in his, listening. Brought her a glass of cranberry juice from the nurses' station, and had a few rather sharp words with the floor staff. Moved on.