Wild Cards V (71 page)

The driver of the Chevy van came up behind Tom. “Where the fuck are the cops?” he demanded. He was grossly fat with a jowly, pockmarked face. He looked as if he wanted to hit something, but he had a point. The police were nowhere to be seen. Somewhere up ahead a child began to cry, her voice as high and shrill as the sirens, wordless. It gave Tom a shiver of fear. This wasn't just a traffic jam, he thought. Something was wrong. Something was very, very wrong.

He went back to his cab. The driver was slamming his fist into the steering wheel, but he was the only one this side of Broadway who wasn't honking. “Horn broke,” he explained.

“I'm getting out here,” Tom said.

“No refund.”

“Fuck you.” Tom had been going to let the man keep the hundred anyway, but his tone pissed him off. He pulled the suitcase and shopping bag out of the backseat and gave the cabbie a finger as he headed up Canal on foot.

A well-dressed fiftyish woman sat behind the wheel of the silver Jaguar. “Do you know what's going on?” she asked.

Tom shrugged.

A lot of people were out of their cars now. A man in a Mercedes 450 SL stood with one foot in his car and one on the street, his cellular phone in his hand. “Nine-one-one's still busy,” he told the people gathered around him.

“Fuckin' cops,” someone complained.

Tom had reached the intersection when he saw the helicopter sweeping down Canal just above rooftop level. Dust whirled and old newspapers shivered in the gutters. The rotors were so
loud
, even at a distance.
I never made so much fucking noise
, Tom thought; something about the helicopter reminded him weirdly of the Turtle. He heard the crackle of a loudspeaker, the words lost in the street noise.

A pimpled teenager leaned out of a white Ford pickup with Jersey plates. “The Guard,” he shouted. “That's a Guard chopper!” He waved at the helicopter.

The
whap-whap-whap
of the rotors mingled with the horns and sirens and shouting to drown out the loudspeakers. Horns began to fall silent. “…
your homes…”

Someone began shouting obscenities.

The chopper dipped lower, came on. Even Tom saw the military markings now, the National Guard insignia. The loudspeakers boomed. “…
closed … repeat: Holland Tunnel is closed. Return to your homes peacefully
.”

Huge gusts of wind kicked up all around him as the helicopter passed directly overhead. Tom dropped to one knee and covered his face against the dust and dirt.

“The tunnel is closed,”
he heard as the chopper receded.
“Do not attempt to leave Manhattan. Holland Tunnel is closed. Return to your homes peacefully.”

When the copter reached the end of stalled traffic, two blocks farther back, it peeled off and rose high in the air, a small black shape in the sky, then circled back for another loop. The people in the streets looked at each other.

“They can't mean me, I'm from Iowa,” a fat woman announced, as if it made a difference. Tom knew how she felt.

The cops had finally arrived. Two patrol cars edged down the sidewalk carefully, bypassing the worst of the congestion. A black policeman got out and started snapping orders. One or two people got back into their cars obediently. The rest surrounded the cop, all of them talking at once. Others, lots of them, had abandoned their vehicles. A stream of people headed up Canal Street, toward the entrance to the Holland Tunnel.

Tom went with them, moving along slower than most, struggling with the weight of his bags. He was sweating. A woman passed him at a dead run, looking ragged and near hysteria. The helicopter flew over again, loudspeakers blaring, warning the crowd to turn back.

“Martial law!” a truck driver shouted down from the cab of his semi. A wall of people formed around the truck, trapping Tom in their midst. He was shoved up against the tractor's rear wheel as the crowd pressed closer for news. “It just came over the CB,” the trucker said. “The motherfuckers have declared martial law. Not just the Holland Tunnel. They shut down everything, all the bridges, the tunnels, even the Staten Island ferry. No one's getting off the island.”

“Oh, god,” someone said behind Tom, a man's voice, husky but raw with fear. “Oh, god, it's the wild card.”

“We're all going to die,” an old woman said. “I seen it in '46. They're just gonna keep us here.”

“It's those jokers,” suggested a man in a three-piece suit. “Barnett is right, they shouldn't be living with normal people, they spread disease.”

“No,” Tom said. “The wild card isn't contagious.”

“Sez you. Oh, god, we probably all got it already.”

“There's a carrier,” the trucker shouted down. Tom could hear the crackle of his CB radio. “Some fucking joker. He's spreading it wherever he goes.”

“That's not possible,” Tom said.

“Goddamn joker-lover,” someone shouted at him.

“I got to get home to my
babies
,” a young woman wailed.

“Take it easy,” Tom started to say, but it was too late, way too late. He heard crying, screaming, shouted obscenities. The crowd seemed to explode as people ran off in a dozen directions. Somebody slammed into him hard. Tom staggered back, then fell as he was buffeted from the side. He almost lost his grip on the suitcase, but he hung on grimly, even when a boot stomped painfully on his calf. He rolled under the truck. Feet rushed past him. He crawled between the wheels of the semi, dragging his bags behind him, and got to his feet on the sidewalk, half-dazed.
This is fucking crazy
, he thought.

Way down Canal, the helicopter began another pass. Tom watched it come, the crowd surging hysterically around him.
The chopper will calm them down,
he thought,
it has to.

When the first tear gas canisters began to rain down into the street, trailing yellow smoke, he turned and dodged into the nearest alley and began to run.

The noise dwindled behind as Tom fled through alleys and side streets. He'd gone three blocks and was breathing hard when he noticed a cellar door ajar under a bookstore. He hesitated a moment, but when he heard the sound of running feet on the cross street, his mind was made up for him.

It was cool and quiet inside. Tom gratefully dropped the suitcase and sat cross-legged on the cement floor. He leaned back against the wall and listened. The air raid sirens had finally quieted, but he heard horns and an ambulance and the distant, angry rumble of shouts.

Off to his right he heard the scrape of a footstep.

Tom's head snapped around. “Who's there?”

There was only silence. The cellar was dark and gloomy. Tom got to his feet. He could swear he'd heard something. He took a step forward, froze, cocked his head. Then he was sure. Someone was back there, behind those boxes. He could hear the short, ragged sound of their breathing.

Tom wasn't going any closer. He backed toward the door and gave the boxes a hard telekinetic shove. The whole stack went over, cardboard ripping, and dozens of glossy paperback copies of
More Disgusting Joker Jokes
cascaded from a torn carton. There was a grunt of surprise and pain from behind the boxes.

Tom edged forward and pushed the top boxes in the feebly moving pile off to the side, using his hands this time.

“Don't hurt me!” a voice pleaded from under the books.

“No one's going to hurt you,” Tom said. He shifted a torn box, spilling more paperbacks onto the floor. Half-buried underneath, a man curled in a fetal ball, arms locked protectively around his head. “Come on out of there.”

“I wasn't doing nothing,” the man on the floor said in a thin, whispery voice. “I just come in to hide.”

“I was hiding, too,” Tom said. “It's okay. Come on out.”

The man stirred, unfolded, got warily to his feet. There was something dreadfully wrong with the way he moved. “I ain't so good to look at,” he warned in that thin, rustling voice.

“I don't care,” said Tom.

Walking in a painful crabbed sideways motion, the man edged forward into the light, and Tom got a good look at him. An instant of revulsion gave way to sudden, overwhelming pity. Even in the dim light in the back of the cellar, Tom could see how cruelly the joker's body had been twisted. One of his legs was much longer than the other, triple-jointed, and attached backward, so the knee bent in the wrong direction. The other leg, the “normal” one, ended in a clubfoot. A cluster of tiny vestigial hands grew from the swollen flesh of his right forearm. His skin was glossy black, bone-white, chocolate-brown, and copper-red in patches all over his body; there was no way to tell what race he'd belonged to originally. Only his face was normal. It was a beautiful face; blue-eyed, blond, strong. A movie star's face.

“I'm Mishmash,” the joker whispered timidly.

But the movie star lips hadn't moved, and there was no life in those deep, clear blue eyes. Then Tom saw the second head, the hideous little monkey-face peeping cautiously out of the unbuttoned shirt. It sprouted crookedly from the joker's ample gut, as purple as an old bruise.

Tom felt nauseated. It must have showed on his face because Mishmash turned away. “Sorry,” he muttered, “sorry.”

“What happened?” Tom forced himself to ask. “Why are you hiding here?”

“I saw them,” the joker told him, his back to Tom. “These guys. Nats. They had this joker; they were beating the hell out of him. They would of done me, too, only I snuck away. They said it was all our fault. I got to get home.”

“Where do you live?” Tom asked.

Mishmash made a wet, muffled sound that might have been a laugh and half-turned. The little head twisted up to look at Tom. “Jokertown,” he said.

“Yeah,” Tom said, feeling very stupid. Of course he lived in Jokertown, where the fuck else could he live? “That's only a few blocks away. I'll take you there.”

“You got a car?”

“No,” Tom said. “We'll have to walk.”

“I don't walk so good.”

“We'll go slow,” Tom said.

They went slow.

Dusk was falling when Tom finally emerged, cautiously, from the cellar refuge. The street had been quiet for hours, but Mishmash was too frightened to venture out until dark. “They'll hurt me,” he kept saying.

Even when twilight began to gather, the joker was still reluctant to move. Tom went first to scout the block. There were lights in a few apartments, and he heard the sound of a television blaring from a third-story window, and more police sirens, far off in the distance. Otherwise the city seemed deathly quiet. He walked around the block slowly, moving from doorway to doorway like a GI in a war movie. There were no cars, no pedestrians, nothing. All the storefronts were dark, secured by accordion grills and steel shutters. Even the neighborhood bars were closed. Tom saw a few broken windows, and just around the corner the overturned, burned-out hulk of a police car sat square in the middle of the intersection. A huge Marlboro billboard had been defaced with red paint;
KILL ALL JOKERS
, it said. He decided not to take Mishmash down that street.

When he returned, the joker was waiting. He'd moved the suitcase and shopping bag to the doorway. “I told you not to touch those,” Tom snapped in annoyance, and felt immediately guilty when he saw how Mishmash quailed under his voice.

He picked up the bags. “C'mon,” he said, stepping back outside. Mishmash followed, his every step a hideous twisting dance. They went slowly. They went very slowly.

They stayed mostly to alleys and side streets south of Canal, resting frequently. The damned suitcase seemed to get heavier with each passing block.

They were catching their breath by a Dumpster just off Church Street when a tank rolled past the mouth of the alley, followed by a half dozen National Guardsmen on foot. One of them glanced to his left, saw Mishmash, and began to raise his rifle. Tom stood up, stepped in front of the joker. For an instant his eyes met the Guardsman's. He was only a kid, Tom saw, no more than nineteen or twenty. The boy looked at Tom for a long moment, then lowered his gun, nodded, and walked on.