High Stakes: A Wild Cards Novel
The vapor hit them with a tangibly physical force. It was warm and rancid and horrible, a sickly touch that flooded Marcus with a whole host of nightmare memories. He fought back the desire to turn and flee. He told himself there was no escaping. Not anymore. They were here and now they had to do whatever they could to keep the monsters at bay. He hoped the aces had plans, but he wasn’t an ace. He was just himself, but he could and would fight.
That’s why he was there in the front ranks with the soldiers, all of them on the same side now, ready to defend the place if—when—the creatures got through the barricades. The sound from the host outside was tremendous, a discordant misery of howls and bellows and roars. There was fighting there, soldiers trapped outside and dying because of it. Machine guns mounted in towers strafed the whole scene indiscriminately. Marcus couldn’t blame them. He’d be doing the same in their place. The thought made him realize he didn’t have any weapons. Why hadn’t he asked for a bazooka or something?
The first creatures to scale the barricades and leap over were spiderlike climbers, things with hooks at the end of their long, many-jointed legs. None of them were quite the same. Each was a variation of a similarly grotesque form, with a hard plating over its front portions and on its legs. One of them landed not far from Marcus. Its mouth parts cackled its pleasure as it reached a leg out and pierced a nearby soldier. It shoved the man into its mouth, chomping into his legs and eating up his body as the man screamed and gibbered. Other soldiers opened fire on it, but their bullets thudded uselessly against the armor. The creature darted into them, eviscerating men even as it continued eating.
Marcus carved around behind it. There. Its bulbous backside was unprotected. Marcus slammed into it with all the force he could churn up. He pressed into its bristled skin and began pounding it with his fist. Once. Twice. Again and again. He kept squirming forward to keep it from turning, growing more enraged with each blow. And then one of his punches burst through the skin. His fist went deep into the thing, spraying him with a yellow gook fouler than anything he’d ever smelled. He pulled back, retching.
At least it was dead. But it wasn’t the only one. Others had dropped into the soldiers all around him, hooking and piercing and eating. Marcus grabbed one of the dead thing’s legs and twisted the joint until it snapped. A weapon. Holding it in a two-handed grip, he went to work. He killed three more by getting behind them and ripping them open with the hook. With another he slid up the wall and under its belly just as it came over. He sunk the hook in, sliced, and shoved the body away as its fluids gushed over him. This time, he didn’t even retch. He twisted around and looked over the wall.
God, there are so many of them! All shapes and sizes. Each one ghastly in its own way. Many of them were tangled in sections of barbed wire, but others used the dying bodies to climb over. One creature that looked like an elephant drawn by a child who had never actually seen an elephant used its trunk to pull down one of the towers, casting it sideways over a section of barbed wire. Instantly, others swarmed over it.
Marcus was about to intercept them when he caught sight of movement in the haze too large to pass over. The being he called the Harvester emerged through the rippling vapor, taking monstrous shape all too quickly, moving with its deceptively slow-looking speed. It was even more massive than before, with yet more legs, and a body pocked with hundreds of those torture chambers. One of the tanks shot at it. The shell tore a portion of the creature’s amorphous head away, but it reshaped immediately. It flipped the tank over with a leg and kept coming.
Marcus couldn’t tell if what happened next was planned, or if the other creatures just realized on their own that the walls and barricades and barbed wire would do nothing to stop the giant. Hordes of them rushed toward it. They leapt unto its body. They climbed up using the divots as foot and handholds. Some just grabbed its passing legs and clung on. The Harvester walked right through a section of the fortifications, impervious to the hail of gun and mortar fire it walked into. Its legs crushed portions of the wall, dragged barbed wire and beams forward, and churned through Ana’s earthworks. As soon as they were clearly inside, the hitchhikers began to leap off. And behind them, others swarmed to follow the newly cleared route in.
Jesus, Marcus thought. The “keeping them out” portion of this was over. Now, it was just the fight to survive. He had to keep those he cared about alive for as long as he could. No thought but that one. No action but things to make it so. Clutching his leg-hook, he peeled away from the wall and shifted it as fast as he could back toward the hangar. Toward the villagers and, mostly, toward Olena.
Barbara tapped frantically at the keyboards, trying to keep some sense of the action as it spread out chaotically all over the south end of the complex.
TAP: Near Gagarin’s Soyuz, Earth Witch opened yawning chasms in the midst of the frontal mass of the attackers. Barbara saw the creatures falling, flailing claws and tentacles and flapping wings as they cascaded into the long pit, which then closed over them.
TAP: The trio of massive, twenty-foot-tall robots were Tinker’s, cobbled together from spare military parts, derricks, gantries, and rockets, looking like an invading alien army from a fevered H. G. Wells novel. They strode into the ranks of the hell-creatures, fire spewing from nozzle-tipped, multiple arms, their massive feet crushing those beneath. They cut three burning, smoking, and gigantic swaths through the invaders.
TAP: Near the joker refugee camps, Toad Man’s tongue lashed out, grabbing creatures and pulling them into the maw of his mouth. As Barbara watched, the ace spat out his tongue once more, this time to a four-armed creature with a face like a squid and waving a Russian-made Kalashnikov. The tongue wrapped around its neck, and the great toad reeled it back quickly. The Kalashnikov went flying; the creature went flailing into Toad Man’s mouth. She saw the bulge moving down the Toad Man’s throat.
TAP: Wilma Mankiller’s black braids flew as she reached for the snarling bear-headed joker from the mob around her. Its claws slashed at her, but too late; she lifted the creature as if it weighed nothing and threw it back into the crowd of attackers.
TAP: Snow Blind’s magenta hair nearly glowed in the camera. Barbara’s camera caught her standing in the doorway of the Space Museum, confronting a wave of attackers led by a humans lizard whose skin was aflame and whose breath pulsed out gouts of blue fire. Where it walked, its footprints left behind puddles of fire. But Snow Blind’s power was already active, and as it approached the museum, the lizard and its followers went suddenly blind. They staggered, confused and lost, and the lizard’s flame-breath wheeled around, setting some of its own people afire. Snow Blind lifted an AK-47; she pressed the trigger …
TAP: Glassteel’s liquid form lurked by the gantries for the Saturn measurement post, with a squadron of NATO soldiers around him. On the screen, Barbara could see the gantries alive with dark movement, as if a swarm of red and black ants were overrunning the area. Glassteel looked impossibly small against the thousands, but Barbara saw the gantry suddenly melt under Glassteel’s ace, sending the swarm plummeting to the ground amid the steel girders. The NATO troops opened fire on the stunned creatures.
For a moment, Barbara felt a fleeting hope. Surely the Highwayman must have reached Talas by now; surely they must have snatched Tolenka—surely, or there was no hope at all. Surely between the aces and the troops guarding the Cosmodrome, they could hold off the assault: if not forever, at least long enough.
There was movement in the screen that drew Barbara’s eyes back: the Midnight Angel, swooping down from above, her sword aflame. “No!” Barbara screamed, fumbling with the toggles for her mic. “Glassteel! Above you!” In the screen, she saw Glassteel raise his head, but it was already too late. The Midnight Angel’s sword moved.
Headless, she saw him fall.
Marcus cursed himself for ever having left Olena and the villagers alone. He should’ve been there with them, locked away and protecting them. What mattered more than that? He refused to let
anything stop him from getting back to the hangar. He squirmed past creatures devouring people. He kept moving around and over bodies. He ignored anything that ignored him. Each passing second seemed too many, and the distance back to the hangar—and route to it—was longer and more confusing than he remembered.
Keep your mind clear, he told himself. He kept shaking his head, trying to focus. But in addition to all the hideousness around him, he had to fight back vile notions of his own: how sickeningly enticing the smell of viscera was, the way the sounds of a woman’s desperate screams stiffened his cock and made him want to stop and watch her being raped by the twisted men who were fighting over her. It’s not you, he thought. It’s fucking Horrorshow. Don’t give in to it. Just remember Olena.
He was still saying that, a mantra, when he came in sight of the hangar. What he saw took away all thoughts but one. Kill it.
The “it” was a creature similar to the canine pack animals that had followed him and Olena out of Talas. It perched on top of the hangar, clawing at the metal roofing. It had one piece bent back already. Marcus dropped his leg-hook and churned toward the canine. He rose and hit the rooftop. His coils zigzagged behind him, and he crashed into the creature full on, slamming it and careening over onto the far side of the roof with it. They rolled together. Marcus managed to get his hands around the creature’s neck and did his best to bash its head against the rusty metal. They just avoided a unit of piping protruding from the roof. And then they went over the edge. Marcus fell partway, but he managed to coil his tail around the piping. He strained to hold on to it as he tightened his grip on the canine’s neck. A moment of incredible pressure, his hands clenched and every muscle in his tail straining, and then he felt the creature’s neck snap as its weight broke it. He dropped it, dead, to the ground, and curved around to check on the damage done to the roof. It wasn’t that bad. Not yet, at least. He did what he could to bend the metal back into shape.
When he was as satisfied as he figured he would be, he looked up. The turmoil all around him went on. The place swarmed with invaders. He thought, Come on, you fuckers. Any of you, try to get in here. The moment he thought it he wanted it. He wanted someone to try it. He’d kill them. More than that, he’d fuck them as he killed them. Maybe he’d do more than that. He’d—
He caught sight of a figure swooping down from the sky. A woman. She dropped down into the center of the refugee camp. The moment she touched the ground, a sword of black fire appeared in her hand.
Marcus knew who she must be. The Midnight Angel. He’d heard she’d been lost in Talas when the first ace team went in. But there she was, still living. The flare of hope this gave him was enough to beat back his crazed thoughts. Maybe there were other aces alive also! He remembered that there was a mission in the works. There was a way to end this. Her being here seemed like proof of it.
Hope only lasted until the Angel swung her sword. She sliced down the people nearest her. She leapt, wings flapping, from one place to the next. Her blade lopped off heads. It severed arms and cut panicked refugees in half at the torso. She twirled and spun and struck again and again.
“No!” Marcus shouted. “You’re killing the wrong people! Those aren’t the monsters.” He hesitated a moment, but then he decided. The hangar was intact. The villagers were safe for now, and he couldn’t just stand watching as innocents got slaughtered. Hitting the ground, he retrieved his leg-hook. Then he went to meet the Midnight Angel.
… and before her, alone and hissing, was her adversary, the Great Snake. The Angel raced to meet him, leaving behind the honor guard of gaunts, werewolves, and thousand-legged armored centipedes the length of large dogs that had formed just behind her.
The snake demon was approaching quickly. He was a young black man from the waist up, otherwise a serpent that seemed to go on forever. There was a certain beauty in the brightly colored bands of his pebbly-textured tail, but the Angel knew that it was beauty that masked evil.
“Midnight Angel!” it called out. “Why are you doing this?”
But she had left words behind.
She snarled at him. He was an agent of the Father of Lies and she was determined not to let him snare her in a web of deceit. She charged, her hands clasped around the hilt of her black sword.
He was fast, she gave him that. She chopped at his tail and, snake quick, it flicked out of the way. He looked as if he wanted to say more, but knew her ears were closed to his entreaties. She did not deal with demons, she didn’t negotiate with them. She slew them.
He skimmed across the ground, the Angel chasing him, and slithered around an abandoned truck that had crashed and tipped over on its side. She pursued hotly, though her legs ached and her shoulder felt beyond pain. She wondered if it had partially slipped out of its socket again, but she could do nothing but clench her teeth, pursue the serpent, and send him back to hell, all for the glory of her dark lord.
She rounded the front of the truck and something lashed out like a whip, inches thick, caught her across her torso, and flung her against a wall. She smashed into it. Her vision blackened for a moment and she fought to regain her breath as her sword vanished. Her baby wailed and anger burned even deeper, if that were possible.
She could smell his snake odor somewhere nearby and she punched out, half blind, with her right hand clenched into a fist. It connected against a rough, pebbly hide, but it was her weakened left arm and she couldn’t put her whole strength into the blow. Nevertheless, she heard an agonized gasp and felt bones break under the rough hide.
Her lungs worked spasmodically, desperately trying to draw in oxygen.
For a few frantic moments as Marcus darted away, just barely escaping that black sword, he tried to reason with the Angel. She didn’t need to attack him, he said. They were on the same side. She had just been in the shit too long and wasn’t thinking right. Before long, he stopped trying. She had been in the shit too long. Way too long by the looks of her. She was supposed to be beautiful; this woman was monstrous. She was a gaunt, twisted version of herself, with crazed eyes and shriveled lips that she held in a perpetual snarl. Her teeth bit the air as she swung at him. Her wings were dark and leathery, lopsided and bat-like. They gave off a stench when they flapped that was almost as bad as the spider-thing’s guts. The worst thing was the baby jutting out of her chest. It hissed and gnashed its toothless mouth. It writhed against the flesh that contained it as if it was trying to break free and attack him itself.
No, whatever the Midnight Angel had been, this creature wasn’t her anymore.
That means one thing, Marcus thought. Kill it. Kill it, he repeated, in that voice that was his and not his inside his head. The voice of the arena, of the fury that had taken him over in proximity to Horrorshow. It was on him again, and he reveled in it.
The next time she landed near him, coming in with her sword slashing at him, he batted away the blow with the leg-hook. The Angel spun away with the deflected force of her attack. Marcus gripped his weapon in imitation of a Japanese swordsman. He could do this. He’d fucking kill her. He kept his tail seething beneath him. He made it a writhing, multicolored, and confusing mass of coils. From above it, he parried each strike of the sword. That just seemed to drive the Angel to greater fury. She screeched and attacked again and again. Her blows were powerful and savage, but also wild and sloppy.
Once, after she’d missed him with a downward strike, he got the hook behind one of her legs. He yanked it back. The point dug into her hamstring and pulled the leg out from under her. She spun in the air, wings flaring, and nearly took off his head. The black blade scorched by so close that his hair caught fire. For a moment he could only fight on, desperately, head on fire and the scent of burning hair and flesh in his nostrils.
He got a moment of reprieve thanks to a creature that looked like a giant, wingless fly. It attacked the Angel, its snout seemingly intent on sucking in the baby. The Angel sliced it in half horizontally, and then vertically just out of rage. The thing fell to the
ground, quartered.
Marcus had enough time to slam his hand frantically across his burned scalp, tamping out the flames. His head smoldered and some part of him felt the pain of it, but he was too filled with his own murderous anger to care. He hated her like he’d never hated anyone or anything. And he hated the thrashing baby in her chest. Staring into its tiny, murderous eyes, he acted before he even knew he was going to. His tongue exploded from his mouth. It thwacked the baby dead in its face. Marcus felt his venom splash all over it, into its eyes and nose and mouth. He lingered like that, loving that he was poisoning it.
Die, he thought. Die you little fucking monster from …
He lost the thought when the Angel’s sword flashed up and sliced off his tongue.
Marcus screamed. He screamed in pain and fear and misery, only he did so silently. He couldn’t make a sound other than the wet mumblings and moans his mouth managed. He dropped his leg-hook and probed his mouth with his fingers, desperately searching for his tongue. But it was gone. Only a raw mangle of flesh remained where it had been.
He couldn’t believe it. She’d cut off his tongue. His tongue! He shouted the affront of this at her in wordless, silent misery.
Somehow, she seemed to hear him. She looked up from her chest. Her eyes found him. They locked on his with a trembling malevolence that had a physical force to it. She started toward him, her sword suddenly in hand again. Marcus didn’t have time to bend for the leg-hook. Instead, he turned and fled.
He heard the Angel’s cry of rage following him, and it drove him all the faster. He scrambled to find something—anything—to fight her with. But he didn’t have anything. No tongue. No weapon. He snatched up a machine gun and squeezed the trigger. Nothing. He tossed it away.
He cut between two buildings, squirmed through an underpass, and came out at the edge of one of the runways. He turned, trying to get his bearings. He couldn’t tell where he was. This wasn’t the same set of runways as when he chased Vasel. Or maybe it was, but in the weird light and filled with chaos nothing looked the same. The scene across the flat expanse was even more hellish than ever. Everywhere men and women, monsters and beasts, were tearing each other apart. The dead had risen and fought as well, despite the injuries that killed them—crushed and broken limbs, body wounds and bites. Was that Joey’s doing? Probably, but at the moment it just looked a part of the madness.