Aces High

  He swallowed another slug of beer.

  Or maybe he should just clean out this filth. Everyone was always bitching about what a pesthole Times Square had become, but no one ever did anything about it. Fuck it, he’d do it for them. He’d show them how to clean out a bad neighborhood, if that’s what they wanted. Pull down those marquees one by one, herd the fucking whores and pimps and hustlers into the river, drive a few pimpmobiles through the windows of those third-floor photographic studios with the nude teenage models, rip up the goddamned sidewalks if he’d a mind to. It was about time somebody did it. Look at this place, just look at it, and barely spitting distance from Port Authority, so it was the first thing a kid would see after getting off the bus.

  Tom drained the beer. He chucked the can onto the floor, swiveled, and searched for another, but there was nothing left in his six-pack but the plastic holder. “Fuck it,” he said. Suddenly he was furious. He turned on his microphone, twisted the volume all the way. “FUCK IT,” he shouted, and the voice of the Turtle thundered over 42nd Street, distorted and amplified into a red roar. People stopped dead on the sidewalk, and eyes craned up at him. Tom smiled. He had their attention, it seemed. “FUCK IT ALL,” he said. “FUCK EVERY ONE OF YOU.”

  He paused, and was about to expand on that topic, when a police dispatcher’s voice, crackling over his monitor, caught his attention. She was repeating the code for an officer in trouble, repeating it over and over again.

  Tom left them gaping, while he listened carefully for details. Part of him felt sorry for the poor asshole who was about to get his head handed to him.

  His shell rose straight up, high above the streets and buildings, and shot south toward the Village.

  “I figured you were just slow,” Barbara said, when she had composed herself. “It always took you time to work up to anything. I don’t understand, Tom.”

  He couldn’t look into her eyes. He looked around her living room, his hands in his pockets. Over her desk she’d hung her diploma and teaching certificate. Around them were arrayed the photographs: pictures of Barbara grimacing as she changed the diaper on her four-month-old niece, pictures of Barbara and her three sisters, pictures of Barbara showing her class how to cut black witches and orange pumpkins out of posterboard for Halloween, supervising six dancing presidents for a school play, loading a projector to run cartoons. And reading a story. That was his favorite picture. Barbara with a tiny little black girl on her lap and another dozen kids ranged all around her, staring at her with rapt faces while she read aloud from The Wind in the Willows. Tom had taken that photograph himself.

  “There’s nothing to understand,” he’d snapped when he looked away from the pictures. “Its over, that’s all. Let’s break it off clean, okay?”

  “Is there someone else?” she said.

  It might have been kinder to lie to her, but he was a poor liar. “No,” he said.

  “Then, why?”

  She was baffled and hurt, but her face had never been lovelier, Tom thought. He couldn’t face her. “It’s just best,” he said, turning to look out her window. “We don’t want the same things, Barbara. You want to get married, right? Not me. Forget it, no way. You’re terrific, it’s not you, it’s … fuck it, it just isn’t working. Kids; every time I turn around there’s a mob of kids. How many does your sister have, three? Four? I’m tired of pretending. I hate kids.” His voice went up. “I despise kids, you understand?”

  “You can’t mean that, Tommy. I’ve seen you with the kids in my class. You took them to your house and showed them you comic collection. You helped Jenny build that model of Jetboy’s plane. You like kids.”

  Tom laughed. “Oh, fuck it, how naive can you get? I was just trying to impress you. I wanted to get into your pants. I don’t—” His voice broke. “Damn it,” he said. “If I like kids so fucking much, then how come I had a vasectomy? How come, huh? Tell me that?”

  When he turned, her face was as red as if he had hit her.

  The playground was surrounded by police cruisers, six of them, flashers strobing red and blue in the gathering dusk. Cops were crouched behind the cars with guns drawn. Beyond the high chain-link fence, two dark shapes sprawled under the basketball net, and a third was draped over one of the barrels. Someone was whimpering in pain.

  Tom spotted a detective he knew, holding the collar of a skinny young joker whose face was as soft and white as tapioca pudding, shaking him so hard his jowls bounced. The boy wore Demon Prince colors, Tom saw on a close-up shot. He drifted lower. “HEADS UP,” he boomed. “WHAT’S THE PROBLEM?”

  They told him.

  A gang dispute, that was all. Penny-ante shit. Some nat juvies operating around the fringes of Jokertown had trespassed onto Demon Prince turf. The Demon Princes had gotten together fifteen or twenty members and gone into the East Village to teach the interlopers some respect for territorial boundaries. It had gone down in the playground. Knives, chains, a few guns. Nasty.

  And then it had gotten weird.

  The nats had something, tapioca-face screamed.

  They’d come out of it as friends. He was proud of that. It was hardest when their wounds were still raw, and for the first eleven months they avoided each other. But Bayonne was a small town in its own way, and they knew too many people in common, and it was not something that could go on forever.

  Maybe that was the hardest eleven months Tom Tudbury ever lived through. Maybe.

  One night she called him out of the blue. He was glad. He had missed her desperately, but he knew he could never call her after what had happened between them. “I need to talk,” she’d said. She sounded as though she’d had a few beers. “You were my friend, Tom. Besides everything else, you were my friend, right? I need a friend tonight, okay? Can you come over?”

  He bought a six-pack and went over. Her youngest sister had been killed that afternoon in a motorcycle accident. There was nothing to be done or said, but Tom did and said all the usual useless things, and he was there for her, and he let her talk until the dawn broke, and afterward he put her to bed. He slept on the couch.

  He woke in late afternoon, with Barbara standing over him, wearing a terry-cloth robe, red-eyed from crying. “Thank you,” she said. She sat down at the foot of the couch and took his hand and held it for a long time in silence. “I want you in my life,” she said finally, with difficulty. “I don’t want us to lose each other again. Friends?”

  “Friends,” Tom said. He wanted to pull her down on top of him and smother her with kisses. Instead he squeezed her hand. “No matter what, Barbara. Always. Okay?”

  Barbara smiled. He faked a yawn, and buried his face in a pillow, to keep her from seeing the look in his eyes.

  “STAY DOWN,” the Turtle warned the policemen. They didn’t need to be told twice. The kid was hiding inside one of the cement barrels, and they’d seen what happened to the cop who had tried to go into the playground after him. Gone, gone as if he’d never existed, blinked out, engulfed in a sudden blackness and somehow … erased.

  “We were cutting the fuckers,” the Demon Prince said, “teaching ’em good, teaching them the price if they come bothering Jokertown, fuckin’ nat wimps, we had ’em dead, and then this spic come at us with a motherfuckin’ bowling ball, and we just laughed at the fucker, what’s he gonna do, try to bowl us down, stupid little prick, and then he held out the ball at Waxy and it grew, man, like it was alive. Some kind of black shit came out of it, real fast, black light or a big dark hand or something, I don’t know, only it moved real fast, and Waxy was just gone.” His voice got shrill. “He was gone, man, he just wasn’t there no more. And the nat fucker did the same to Razor and the Ghoul. That was when Heehaw shot him and he almost dropped the ball, got ’im in the shoulder I think, but then he did it to Heehaw. You can’t fight nothin’ like that. Even that motherfuckin’ cop couldn’t do shit.”

  The shell slid above the chain-link fence that surrounded the playground, silent and slow.

  “We
have something,” Barbara said. “We have something special.” Her finger traced patterns in the condensation on the outside of her glass. She looked up at him, her blue eyes bold and frank, as if she were challenging him. “He’s asked me to marry him, Tom.”

  “What did you say?” Tom asked her, trying to keep his voice calm and steady.

  “I said I’d think about it,” Barbara said. “That’s why I wanted to get together. I wanted to talk to you first.”

  Tom signaled for another beer. “It’s your decision,” he said. “I wish you’d let me meet this guy, but from everything you’ve told me he sounds pretty good.”

  “He’s divorced,” she said.

  “So’s half the world,” Tom said as his beer arrived.

  “Everyone but you and me,” Barbara said, smiling.

  “Yeah.” He frowned down at the head of his beer and sighed uncomfortably. “Does the mystery beau have kids?”

  “Two. His ex has custody. I’ve met them, though. They like me.”

  “Goes without saying,” Tom said.

  “He wants to have more. With me.”

  Tom looked her in the eye. “Do you love him?”

  Barbara met his gaze calmly. “I guess. Sometimes I’m not so sure these days. Maybe I’m not as romantic as I used to be.” She shrugged. “Sometimes I wonder what my life would have been like if things had worked out differently for you and me. We could be celebrating our tenth anniversary.”

  “Or maybe the ninth anniversary of our acrimonious divorce,” Tom said. He reached across the table and took Barbara’s hand. “Things haven’t turned out so badly, have they? It would never have worked the other way.”

  “The roads not chosen,” she said wistfully. “I’ve had too many might-have-beens in my life, Tom, too many regrets for things left undone and choices not made. My biological clock is ticking. If I wait any longer, I’ll wait forever.”

  “I just wish you’d known this guy longer,” Tom said.

  “Oh, I’ve known him a long time,” she said, tearing a corner off her cocktail napkin.

  Tom was confused. “I thought you said you met him last month at a party.”

  “Yes. But we knew each other before. In high school.” She looked at his face again. “That’s why I didn’t tell you his name. You would have been upset, and at first I didn’t know it would lead anywhere.”

  Tom didn’t have to be told. He and Barbara had been good friends for more than a decade. He looked into the blue depths of her eyes, and he knew. “Steve Bruder,” he said numbly.

  He hovered above the playground and floated the fallen warriors over the fence, one by one, to the police waiting outside. The two from the basketball court were dead meat. It would take a lot of scrubbing to wash the bloodstains from the cement. The boy draped over the barrel turned out to be a girl. She wimpered in pain when he lifted her with his teke, and from the way she was clutching herself it looked like her guts had been sliced open. He hoped they could do something for her.

  All three were nats. The battleground was free of fallen jokers. Either the Demon Princes had really been kicking ass, or their own dead were somewhere else. Or both.

  He touched a control on the arm of his chair, and all his floodlights came on, bathing the playground in a white-hot brilliance. “IT’S OVER,” he said, and his loudspeakers roared the words into the twilight. Over the years, he’d learned that sheer volume scared the hell out of punks. “COME ON OUT, KID. THIS IS THE TURTLE.”

  “Go away,” a hoarse thin voice screamed back at him from inside the cement barrel. “I’ll disintegrate you, you joker fuckface. I got the thing here with me.”

  All day Tom had been looking for someone to hurt; a monster to pull apart, a killer to pound on, a target for his rage, a sponge to soak up his pain. Now the moment was finally at hand, and he found he had no more anger in him. He was tired. He wanted to go home. Behind his bravado, the boy in the barrel was obviously young and scared. “YOU’RE REAL TOUGH,” Tom said. “YOU WANT TO PLAY THE SHELL GAME? GREAT.” He concentrated on the barrel to the left of the boy’s cover, held it in his mind, squeezed. It collapsed as suddenly as if a wrecking ball had smashed into it, shards and dust flying everywhere when the cement shattered. “NOT IN THAT ONE. GEE.” He did the same thing to the barrel on the other side of the kid. “NOT IN THAT ONE EITHER. GUESS I’LL TRY THE MIDDLE ONE.”

  The boy exited in such haste that he whacked his head on the overhang of the barrel as he stood up. The impact dazed him momentarily. The bowling ball he’d been clutching with both hands was suddenly whisked from his grip. It shot straight up. The boy screamed obscenities through shiny steel-capped teeth. He made a desperate leap for his weapon, but all he managed to do was brush the tips of his fingers against its underside. Then he came down hard, scraping his hands and knees along the concrete.

  By then the cops were already moving in. Tom watched as they surrounded him, yanked him to his feet, and read him his rights. He was nineteen, maybe younger, wearing gang colors and a studded dog collar, shaggy black hair teased out in spikes. They asked him where all the people were, and he snarled curses at them and screamed that he didn’t know.

  As they hustled him toward the waiting cruisers, Tom opened an armored portal and floated the bowling ball inside his shell for a closer look, shivering in the blast of cold air that came with it. It was a weird thing. Too light to be a bowling ball, he thought when he hefted it; four pounds, maybe five. No holes either. When he ran his hand over it, his fingers tingled, and colors glimmered briefly on its surface, like the rainbows on an oil slick. It made him uneasy. Maybe Tachyon would know what to make of it. He set it aside.

  Darkness was falling over the city. Tom pushed his shell higher and higher, until he floated up above even the distant tower of the Empire State Building. He stayed there for a long time, watching the lights go on all across the city, transforming Manhattan into an electric fairyland.

  From this high up, on a clear cold night like this, he could even see the lights of Jersey over across the frigid black water. One of those dots was the Top Hat Lounge, he knew.

  He shouldn’t just float here, he thought. He ought to take the bowling ball to the clinic; that was the next order of business. He didn’t move. He’d do it tomorrow, he thought. Tachyon wasn’t going anywhere, and neither was the bowling ball. Somehow Tom could not bring himself to face Tachyon tonight. Not tonight of all nights.

  In those days, his shell was a lot more primitive. No telephoto lenses, no zooms, no infrared cameras. Just a ring of hot spotlights, so bright that they left Tachyon squinting. But he needed them. It was dark on the roof on the clinic, where the shell had come to rest.

  The photographs that Tachyon held up were not the sort that Tom wanted to see in more detail anyway. He sat in darkness, staring into his screens, saying nothing, as Tachyon shuffled through them one by one. They had all been taken in the clinic’s maternity ward. One or two of the children had lived long enough to be moved to the nursery.

  Finally he found his voice. “Their mothers are jokers,” he said, his voice emphatic with false conviction. “Bar—She’s normal, I tell you. A nat. She got it when she was two, damn it; it’s like it never happened.”

  “It happened,” Tachyon said. “She may appear normal, but the virus is still there. Latent. Most likely, it will never manifest, and genetically it’s a recessive, but when you and she have—”

  “I know a lot of people think I’m a joker,” Tom interrupted, “but I’m not, believe me, I’m an ace. I’m an ace, damn it! So what if the kid carries the wild card gene, so he’ll have major-league teke. He’ll be an ace, like me.”

  “No,” Tachyon said. He slid the photographs back into the file folder, his eyes averted from the cameras. Deliberately? “I’m sorry, my friend. The odds against that are astronomical.”

  “Cyclone,” Tom had said, on the edge of hysteria. Cyclone was a West-Coast ace whose daughter had inherited his command of the winds.


  “No,” said Tachyon. “Mistral is a special case. We’re almost certain now that her father somehow subconsciously manipulated her germ plasm while she was still in the womb. On Takis … well, the process is not unknown to us, but it rarely succeeds. You’re the most powerful telekineticist I’ve ever seen, but something like that demands a fine control that is orders of magnitude beyond you, not to mention centuries of experience in microsurgery and gene splicing. And even if you had all of that, you’d probably fail. Cyclone had no idea what he was doing on any conscious level, and was freakishly lucky on top of it.” The Takisian shook his head. “Your case is entirely different. All that’s guaranteed is that you’ll be drawing a wild card, and the odds are just the same as if—”

  “I know the odds,” Tom said hoarsely. Of every hundred humans dealt the wild card, only one developed ace powers. There were ten hideously malformed jokers for every ace, and ten black-queen deaths for every joker.

  In his mind’s eyes, he saw Barbara sitting up in bed, the sheet tangled about her waist, her blond hair cascading softly around her shoulders, her face solemn and sweet as their child suckled at her breast. And then the infant looked up, and he saw its teeth and bulging eyes and monstrous, twisted features; and when it hissed at him, Barbara cried out in pain as the milk and blood flowed freely from her raw, torn nipple.

  “I’m sorry,” Dr. Tachyon repeated numbly.

  It was past midnight before Tom returned to his empty house on First Street.