High Stakes: A Wild Cards Novel
“I’m not even sure I know what was happening because at some point, I didn’t know what was real and what wasn’t.” Don’t say anything about the people you killed, she thought, even as the desire to confess was rising up inside her. Never tell what you did. They don’t need to know. No one needs to know.
“People ate each other. They committed suicide. They murdered each other. It was carnage. Blood ran in the streets like water.” She was panting now. There was nothing she could do to stop her memories. Talking about it made it real. She would get the story out, then never talk about what had happened in Talas again.
“It’s okay, Michelle,” Billy Ray said. “We’ve been tranquilizing Mollie just to get her stable enough to use her portals without killing herself or anyone else. Anytime she opens one close to Talas, well, it goes badly.”
Joey started giggling. “Oh, fuck me,” she chortled. It was bordering on hysterical. “I’m giving you the award for Most Understated Assessment of a Fucking Insane Person, Billy Ray.”
Billy Ray’s eyebrows drew into a line and for a moment, Michelle thought there might actually be a fight.
“Can we please table the whole beat-the-crap-out-of-each-other thing right now?” Barbara asked. “Let’s get Mollie in here and figure out what our next move is.”
“I’m done,” said Mollie.
But Babel wasn’t paying attention to anything Mollie said. She just used Mollie to get what she wanted, to send her people around the world, like Mollie was some kind of charity taxi service, and then she couldn’t even have the courtesy to listen. What a fucking ungrateful bitch. She’d be a lot more respectful after Mollie opened her—
Oh, God.
She was doing it again. Giving over to rage. Mollie looked around to convince herself that Horrorshow’s malign influence hadn’t seeped through the portals. But the portals were closed and folks weren’t trying to nibble on each other’s eyeballs. No, it wasn’t so simple.
She was tainted. Repeated exposure to the madness had changed her. It was as though her brain had been rewired, lowering her threshold for anger—no, not just anger, but incandescent rage—until anything could set her off. It no longer took a nudge from supernatural evil to push her thoughts in wickedly violent directions. Her emotional barometer had been destroyed. Her emotional state had only two readings: teetering on the verge of becoming a useless blubbering heap, or fantasizing about tearing people apart in retaliation for the most minuscule of imagined slights.
Mollie shuddered again. She counted off the days on her fingers. Six. Had it really been less than a week ago when her biggest problem was dealing with a couple of trigger-happy Paris gendarmes? That couldn’t be true. That had been a million years ago. A different planet. A different Mollie.
“Did you hear what I said? I said—”
Babel’s phone rang. As the Committee leader lifted it to her ear, Mollie glimpsed the caller’s name on the glassy screen: Ink.
“Sorry. I have to take this,” Babel said.
“Sure. Whatever.”
Mollie checked her own phone. Nothing. Nobody from Idaho had called her back.
She thought about going to the hospital to see for herself how Dad and the boys were doing. She even started to call up a doorway to Idaho, but then she imagined the naked disdain on their faces when they saw her. The nascent portal disintegrated.
“Fuck this,” she said. And decided to distract herself with some shoplifting. She stepped around the corner and opened a doorway to Half Moon Bay.
The cold walls of the building in the Baikonur Cosmodrome surrounded them, adorned with peeling curls of green-grey, thick paint. Barbara wasn’t quite certain where in the huge, sprawling complex of buildings, launch pads, and mission control areas they were in; the building into which they’d been ushered looked to date back to the Soviet era and didn’t appear to have been updated since. The curtains of the meeting room where they were gathered were simple white cotton cloth unrolled from hangers along the top of the windows. The table in the room was thick oak ringed with the residue of a thousand coffee mugs. On the walls, posters in Cyrillic script overlaid images of serious, uniformed soldiers, reminding onlookers of the need for discipline. A row of ceiling fans twirled lazily overhead, and the room was lit by a phalanx of inset ceiling floodlights, the fan blades throwing sweeping shadows around the room.
To Barbara, it looked like a shot from a film noir set. That seemed apropos enough.
The only other person physically present in the room was Billy Ray, now in his white fighting suit, as if he were anticipating action. Two cameras had been set on tripods in the center of the table, one pointed toward where Barbara sat, another facing Billy Ray. Several flat screens, looking as if they’d just been unboxed a few hours before, faced them and trailed wires over the table to a server on the floor; in them, solemn faces were arrayed: Secretary-General Jayewardene, in Brussels; President van Rennsaeler in Washington; President Putin in Moscow; General Ruez of NATO; President Karimov of Kazakhstan.
“Thank you all for being here,” Jayewardene said. “Your cooperation is greatly appreciated in this crisis. We are facing critical decisions that must be made quickly, and it’s imperative that we all understand and realize the consequences of those decisions before we proceed.”
“It’s simple enough,” Putin said, his translator (unnecessarily for Barbara) relaying his words in English a few moments later. “We must take out the hospital and this Tolenka.”
President van Rennsaeler brushed greying hair back from her face, shaking her head. “Your own agent said that would only release the creature that is trying to come through Tolenka.”
Putin shrugged. “She and this Tolenka were associates. She is trying to protect him. We have no assurance that any of her claims are true. Are we to just wait? I say that we move now to take out the center in Talas. Now. Waiting any longer is foolishness.”
That started everyone talking at once.
“… not even possible. The drones we sent in all failed…”
“… my government absolutely would protest the use of nuclear weapons…”
“… no guarantee that bombing would take out the man…”
“… and if Baba Yaga is right, then what? We will have no other options…”
Bill Ray gave a sigh and leaned toward Barbara. “Bureaucrats,” he said. “Everyone trying to cover their own ass.”
Barbara managed a quick smile at that: it was something Klaus would have said. She waited for the furor to lessen, then spoke loudly into the opening.
“I appreciate your point of view, Mr. President,” Barbara answered. Which is not something Klaus would have said. “And yours may yet be a tactic we have to attempt, if there are no other options left to us. But Director Ray and I believe there’s another way, one that both he and I agree upon. If destroying Tolenka isn’t the answer—and I do believe Baba Yaga, as everything else she’s told us has been verified, and she has no reason to lie—then there’s another way. If we can’t simply kill Tolenka, then we must take him elsewhere.”
“To where?” Putin scoffed. “Assuming you can find and capture the man—and I would remind you that the Committee’s last attempt at that was a miserable failure, Ms. Baden—where would you take him? Where would you send him?”
“To hell itself,” Ray answered.
“Via the Highwayman,” Barbara hurried in to say. “John Bruckner.”
“I’ve ridden with the Highwayman,” Ray said. “I’ve seen the dimension that the man opens up, and everything about it says Talas: the twisted, deformed figures, the monsters, the fog. That’s where that beast inside Tolenka is from, and if we toss Tolenka back there and leave him, then…” Ray clapped his hands together dramatically. “Everything closes up. Let the beast come out of Tolenka—the passageway into our world would be gone, because Tolenka is that portal.”
“This is all just supposition,” President van Rennsaeler said.
“Yes, Madame President,
” Barbara told her, “but everything fits: what we’ve seen in Talas, and the dimension through which the Highwayman travels. It’s no worse a supposition than killing Tolenka or reducing Talas to radioactive rubble will also solve the problem. And if we fail…” Barbara shrugged. “Then the other option is still on the table. At least let us try.”
“Bruckner is in St. Gilles, serving out his sentence,” Jayewardene said. “We would have to contact the authorities in Brussels and work with them in order to release him.”
“Did you not hear what we’ve been saying?” Ray spat. “We don’t have time to waste.”
“There are protocols, rules, and legalities we still have to follow, Director Ray,” Jayewardene responded.
“Then do that, Mr. Secretary-General,” Barbara told him. “Now.”
Jayewardene’s solemn gaze seemed to traverse the screen in front of him, looking at each of them. “President Putin, President van Rennsaeler, President Karimov, General Ruez? Are we in agreement here?”
“Twenty-four hours,” Putin said immediately. “No more. And we need Committee aces to help defend Baikonur.”
“Done,” Barbara told him.
The others murmured agreement. Putin’s screen went to black; the others quickly followed. “I will contact Brussels now,” Jayewardene said before he broke contact. “I will do my best. You will have to do yours, Ms. Baden.” He said the last sentence with a strange emphasis, and Barbara nodded to him. With that, his screen flickered and went dark. The only sound in the room was the hum of the fans.
“They’ll never get it fucking done in time,” Ray said to Barbara. “Bureaucracies are like old dogs; they don’t like being pushed, and they bite when you do.”
Barbara carefully put her power around the two of them before she answered, suspecting that the room might have live microphones; if so, they would hear only gibberish.
“Jayewardene knows that,” Barbara told Ray. “We’ll give him eight hours. No more. And we’ll make our own plans based on him not getting Bruckner released. If he hasn’t given us Bruckner by tonight, we’ll get him ourselves.”
SUNDAY
IT TOOK SEVEN TRIES to get a portal into the cash register. Even when she was looking right at the damn thing from across the aisle, pretending to browse a rack of ugly-ass souvenir T-shirts intended for tourists with worse taste than a colorblind five-year-old with a kawaii fixation. Space refused to twist and fold to her whims like it used to. It used to be so easy. Now creating a pair of openings in space felt like trying to nail Jell-O to the wall. That she eventually succeeded offered little consolation. What was the point? Soon enough the money would be worthless, and there’d be nowhere to spend it. But she was bored and scared and didn’t know what else to do. Anything was better than sitting around with nothing but her own thoughts for company.
I guess at heart I really am just a petty thief, despite Ffodor’s insistence that I could be so much more.
Her phone rang just as she was wrist-deep in the cash drawer. It shattered her concentration. She yanked her hand free of the opening just as it blinked closed. She lost her balance and stumbled into a spin-rack of miniature vanity California license plates preprinted with boys’ and girls’ names. The rack toppled over with a resounding crash. Tammies, Quentins, Siennas, Ambers, Johns, and Dakotas skittered across the floor. Everybody in the store stopped to stare at Mollie.
“Hey!” The joker shopkeeper came trotting over on a pair of faun legs. “What’s the big idea?”
Mollie ignored her. Heart fluttering with relief, she instead looked at her phone, which was still buzzing. But it wasn’t a call from the farmhouse. It was a New York area code. Mollie sighed. Answered.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” said the shopkeeper.
Into the phone, Mollie said, “Whoever you are, you can kiss my ass, because your timing blows chunks.”
It was Ink. She didn’t bother with hello. “Mollie! Administrator Baden needs to see you immediately. Can you please go to Bai—”
Mollie didn’t hear the rest, because the shopkeeper chose that moment to reach for her elbow, which meant it was also the moment when the man started screaming at the top of his lungs. A portal pair blinked into existence, one side hovering just beyond her elbow, just large enough to accept his arm. The portal lasted just long enough for him to get elbow deep before she slammed it shut. A severed arm fell to the platform in a Tokyo train station.
Blood fountained across the T-shirts. It spewed from the severed shoulder like something in a Monty Python skit, except nobody was laughing. Instead, the other shoppers joined in the screaming. Several ran for the door.
Motherfuckers. Mollie stationed a new portal to intercept one of the stampeding shoppers, its twin inside another. An instant later viscera geysered across the display window as two bodies tried and failed to occupy the same space all at once. The wet explosion sounded like the world’s wettest fart. Teeth, vertebrae, and shattered ribs clattered against the walls, floor, and ceiling like so much hail. It was annoying as hell.
A tinny voice hollered, “Hello? Hello? Mollie, are you there?”
Mollie still held the phone to her ear. Irritated, she stepped from Half Moon Bay back to the Committee offices at the United Nations. Ink started, broke off in mid-sentence when Mollie emerged from empty space to stand next to her desk.
Mollie hung up. “I’m busy. What?”
Ink’s face twisted in a scowl. She covered her nose. “Oh, my God! What happened to you?”
“Nothing happened to me. I’m fine,” said Mollie. But then she caught a whiff of something nasty. She frowned. The residual shit smell of ruptured viscera had followed Mollie from California. And now the draft from the AC felt especially cold against her skin, as though she were damp. She looked down and realized she was drenched in blood. What the hell? A second ago she was swiping a handful of cash from—
Oh, Jesus. Oh, God, ohGodohGodohGodwhathaveIdone?
The phone fell from her nerveless fingers. It bounced under Ink’s desk.
“I … I … I need help. I’m not myself anymore. Even when I’m here, I’m not myself. The evil, it’s touched me too many times…” Mollie crumpled to the floor. Rolled into a fetal ball. “I think I just murdered three people. Oh, God, somebody help him.”
Ink practically vaulted her desk. She crouched beside Mollie, cradled her head. “Help who?”
Mollie tried to open a doorway to California. She couldn’t. “The rage, it took me again. I didn’t mean it,” she sobbed. “I didn’t mean it. I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry…”
Ink stood and slapped a button on her phone. “I need paramedics here, now! Administrator Baden’s office!”
“No, no, not here,” said Mollie. She tasted strangers’ blood, and worse, when the tears trickled into her mouth. “Help him instead. Please! You have to help him.”
“Who?”
“There’s a man with a severed arm bleeding out in a T-shirt shop in Half Moon Bay. He’s going to die. He needs help. His arm … I don’t know where I left it. And the others.” She tried to talk but somebody was wailing and sobbing with her voice and she could only speak in little gasps. “The others … oh, God, the others … I … I don’t know how I did that … Somebody help them!”
She tried again to fold space but it slipped through her fingers. She couldn’t get a grip on it. Couldn’t concentrate. Couldn’t breathe. The shame and horror were too heavy. Like elephants mating on her chest. They crushed the air from her lungs and didn’t stop. They squeezed and squeezed until everything went dark.
The Angel awoke, not quite sure where she was. Her head was buzzing with an almost subliminal noise, a buzzing like a herd of Bugsy’s wasps stirred up and angry, and it was making it difficult to think. The heat washed over her like a furnace.
She sat up, leaning on one elbow. She was in a small room, once an office. All the furniture in it—a desk, uncomfortable-looking plastic chairs, a cheap, worn sofa, and f
iling cabinets that had definitely seen better days—were pushed to the room’s edges, clearing an open space for the mattress she was lying on. It was fairly clean with only a couple of blood and some less identifiable stains on it and she’d been tired as a dog, so she’d fallen asleep immediately. Even the bad dreams she’d had all night hadn’t woken her, nor could she now remember their content. But they still bothered her, fragmented images from them still popping up disconnected in her mind.
The events of the last evening now flooded into her mind, of her coming into her kingdom and defending it from the mad interloper who thought only in terms of mathematics. He’d gotten only what he deserved from her hands. In fact, his death had been merciful. She was recalling it in intimate detail when the first explosion rocked the foundations of her headquarters.
The Angel sprang to her feet and ran into the great room of her headquarters. Her subjects were running in panic and crying out for help. The sight of her only seemed to increase their distress. They ran to her, imploring her aid, threatening to overwhelm her. Shrieking at them, she struck out with her fist, hurling them away with her superior strength. She knew that she didn’t need her sword to deal with this rabble. They fell to the floor, scrabbled aside, ran to escape her wrath.
The Angel made her way outdoors and climbed to the top of the earthen ridge Earth Witch had left when she’d scooped out the parking lot in front of the store. She turned, facing west from where she thought the initial explosion came, and lifted her face to the sky. The buzz of giant insects was in the air and she could see a group of half a dozen helicopters hovering over Talas, raining down death and destruction in the form of rockets and bombs.
She didn’t know where they came from, she didn’t know why they were attacking, but she was driven by some primal, previously unfelt need to protect the city. There was something precious at its heart, something that whispered an urgent demand and promised unutterable delights as a reward.