Wild Cards V: Down and Dirty

  He’d never even realized that they’d napalmed him.

  But with the napalm the weakness came again. He lost it then; the shell began to tumble, plunging toward the river below. This time he did black out.

  Tom pushed the memories away and ran his fingers through his hair. His breathing had gone ragged again, and he was covered with a fine sheen of sweat that made his shirt cling to his chest. Face it, he told himself, you’re terrified.

  It was no use. The Turtle was dead, and Tom Tudbury, he could juggle bars of soap and robot heads with the best of them, but no way was he going to lift a couple of tons of armor plate into the air. Give it up. Call Joey, dump the old shells into the bay, write it off. Forget the money, what’s eighty thousand dollars? Not worth his life, that’s for sure, Steve Bruder was going to make him rich anyway. The waters of New York Bay were wide and dark and cold, and it was a long way to Manhattan. He’d lucked out once, the goddamned shell had exploded as it fell to the bottom of the river, must have been the napalm or the water pressure or something, a freak accident, and the shock of the cold water had somehow revived him, and he’d struggled to the surface and let the current take him, and somehow, somehow, he’d made it to the shore in Jersey City. He should have died.

  His breakfast moved in the pit of his stomach, and for a moment Tom thought he would gag. Beaten, he unbuckled his seat belt. His hand was shaking. He turned off the fans, the tracking motors, the cameras. The darkness closed in around him.

  The shell was supposed to make him invulnerable, but they’d turned it into a death trap. He couldn’t take it up again. Not even for one last trip. He couldn’t.

  The blackness trembled around him. He felt as though he were going to fall again. He had to get out of here, now, he was suffocating. He could have died.

  Only he hadn’t.

  The thought came out of nowhere, defiant. He could have died, but he hadn’t died. He couldn’t take the shell up again, but he had, that very night.

  This very shell. When he’d finally made his way back to the junkyard, he’d been half-drowned and exhausted and drunk with shock, but also strangely alive, exhilarated, high on the mere fact of his survival. He’d taken the shell out and crossed the bay and done loops over Jokertown, climbed right back on the horse that had thrown him, he’d showed them all, the Turtle was still alive, the Turtle had taken everything they could throw at him, they’d knocked him out and napalmed him and dropped him like a rock to the bottom of the fucking Hudson River, and he was still alive.

  They’d cheered him in the streets.

  Tom’s hands reached out, flicked a switch, a second. The screens lit up again. The fans began to whir.

  Don’t do it, his fear whispered within him. You can’t. You’d be dead now if the shell hadn’t blown—

  “It did blow,” Tom said. The napalm, the water pressure, something …

  The walls of his bedroom. Broken glass everywhere, his pillows ripped and torn, feathers floating in the air.

  The water made a sullen gurgling sound somewhere in the close, hot blackness. The world twisted and turned, sinking. He was too weak and dizzy to move. He felt icy fingers on his legs, creeping up higher and higher, and then sudden shock as the water reached his crotch, jolting him awake. He tore away his seat harness with numb fingers, but too late, the cold caressed his chest, he lurched up and the floor tumbled and he lost his footing, and then the water was over his head and he couldn’t breathe and everything was black, utterly black, as black as the grave, and he had to get out, he had to get out …

  Cracks on the wall of his bedroom, more every time the nightmare came. And pictures in a magazine, fragments of armor plate torn and twisted, welds shattered, bolts torn loose, the whole shell shattered like an egg. The armor bent outward.

  Fuck it all, he thought. It was me. I did it.

  He looked into the nearest screen, gripped the armrests, and pushed down with his mind.

  The shell rose smoothly up, through the bunker, through the garage door overhead, into the morning sky. Sunlight kissed the flaking green paint of its armor.

  He came out of the eastern sky, out of Brooklyn, with the sun behind him. The trip was longer that way, when he circled over Staten Island and the Narrows, but it disguised the angle of his approach, and twenty years of turtling had taught him all the tricks. He came in over the great stone ramparts of the Brooklyn Bridge, low and fast, and on his screens he saw the morning strollers below look up in astonishment as his shadows washed across them. It was a sight the city had never seen before and would never see again: three Turtles sweeping across the East River, three iron specters from yesterday’s headlines and the land of the dead, moving in tight formation, banking and turning as one, and sliding into a flamboyant double loop over the rooftops of Jokertown.

  For Tom, in the center shell, the reactions down in the streets made it all worthwhile. At least he was going out in style; he’d like to see the magazines blame this one on Venus.

  It’d been hell getting the other shells out of the bunker; gutted or not, their armor still lent them plenty of weight, and for a moment, hovering above the junkyard in Bayonne, he didn’t think he’d be able to juggle all three. Then he had a better idea. Instead of trying to take them individually, he pictured them welded to the points of a giant invisible triangle, and he lifted the triangle into the air. After that it was candy.

  Dutton had one camera crew on the Brooklyn Bridge, a second on the roof of the Famous Bowery Wild Card Dime Museum. With all the film they shot, there would be precious little question of authenticating the shells.

  “All right,” Tom announced through his loudspeakers after he had set the shells down on the wide, flat roof. “Show’s over. Cut.” Filming his approach and landing was one thing, but he wasn’t going to have any footage of him climbing out of the hatch. Mask or no mask, that was a risk he didn’t care to take.

  Dutton, tall and dark with his cowl drawn up over his features, made a peremptory gesture with a gloved hand, and the camera crew—all jokers—loaded up their equipment and left the roof. When the last of them vanished down the stairs, Tom took a deep breath, slipped on his rubber frogface, killed the power, and crawled out into the morning sun.

  After he’d emerged, he turned for one last look at what he was leaving behind. Out here, in daylight, they looked different than they had in the dimness of his bunker. Smaller, somehow. Shabbier. “Hard to walk away, isn’t it?” Dutton asked him.

  Tom turned. “Yes,” he said. Beneath the cowl Dutton was wearing a leather lion mask with long golden hair. “You bought that mask at Holbrook’s,” Tom said.

  “I own Holbrook’s,” Dutton replied. He studied the shells. “I wonder how we’re going to get these inside.”

  Tom shrugged. “They got a fucking whale into the Museum of Natural History; a few turtles ought to be easy.” He was not feeling nearly as nonchalant as he tried to sound. The Turtle had pissed off quite a few people over the years, everyone from street punks to Richard Milhous Nixon. If Dutton hadn’t been discreet, any or all of them could be out there waiting for him, and even if they weren’t, there was still the small matter of getting home with eighty thousand dollars in cash. “Let’s do it,” he said. “You got the money?”

  “In my office,” Dutton replied.

  They went downstairs, Dutton leading, Tom following, looking around cautiously at every landing. It was cool and dim inside the building. “Closed again?” Tom asked.

  “Business is off badly,” Dutton admitted. “The city is afraid. This new wild card outbreak has driven the tourists away, and even the jokers are beginning to avoid crowds and public places.”

  When they reached the basement and entered the gloomy, stone-walled workshop, Tom saw that the museum was not entirely deserted. “We’re preparing a number of new exhibits,” Dutton explained as Tom paused to admire a slender, boyish young woman who was dressing a wax replica of Senator Hartmann. She had just finished knotting his tie with lo
ng, deft fingers. “This is for our Syrian diorama,” Dutton said as the woman adjusted the senator’s gray-checked sports coat. There was a ragged tear at one shoulder where a bullet had ripped through, and the surrounding fabric was carefully stained with fake blood.

  “It looks very real,” Tom said.

  “Thank you,” the young woman replied. She turned, smiling and extending her hand. Something was wrong with her eyes. They were all iris, a deep shiny red-black, half again the size of normal eyes. Yet she did not move like a blind person. “I’m Cathy, and I’d love to do you in wax,” she said as Tom shook her hand. “Seated in one of your shells, maybe?” She tilted her head and pushed a strand of hair out of her strange dark eyes.

  “Uh,” said Tom, “I’d rather not.”

  “That’s wise of you,” Dutton said. “If Leo Barnett becomes president, some of your fellow aces may wish they’d kept a lower profile too. It doesn’t pay to be too flamboyant these days.”

  “Barnett won’t be elected,” Tom said with some heat. He nodded at the wax figure. “Hartmann will stop him.”

  “Another vote for Senator Gregg,” Cathy said, smiling. “If you ever change your mind about the statue, let me know.”

  “You’ll be the first,” Dutton told her. He took Tom by the arm. “Come,” he urged. They passed other elements of the Syrian diorama in various states of assembly: Dr. Tachyon in full Arabian regalia, curled slippers on his feet; the giant Sayyid done in wax ten feet high; Carnifex in his blinding-white fighting togs. In another part of the room a technician labored over the mechanical ears on a huge elephant head that sat on a wooden table. Dutton passed him with a curt nod.

  Then Tom saw something that stopped him dead. “Jesus fucking Christ,” he said loudly. “That’s…”

  “Tom Miller,” Dutton said. “But I believe he preferred to be called Gimli. Bound for our Hall of Infamy, I’m afraid.”

  The dwarf snarled up at them, one fist raised above his head as he harangued some crowd. His glass eyes, boiling with hate, seemed to follow them wherever they went. He wasn’t wax.

  “A brilliant piece of taxidermy,” Dutton said. “We had to move quickly before decay set in. The skin was cracked in a dozen places, and everything inside had just dissolved—bones, muscles, internal organs, everything. This new wild card can be as merciless as the old.”

  “His skin,” Tom said with revulsion.

  “They have John Dillinger’s penis in the Smithsonian,” Dutton said calmly. “This way, please.”

  This time, when they reached Dutton’s office, Tom accepted the offer of a drink.

  Dutton had the money carefully banded and packed in a nondescript, rather shabby, green suitcase. “Tens, twenties, and fifties, a few hundreds,” he said. “Would you like to count it?”

  Tom just stared at all the crisp green bills, his drink forgotten in his hand. “No,” he said softly after a long pause. “If it’s not all there, I know where you live.”

  Dutton chuckled politely, went behind his desk, and produced a brown paper shopping bag with the museum logo on the side.

  “What’s that?” Tom asked.

  “Why, the head. I was sure you’d want a bag.”

  Actually Tom had almost forgotten about Modular Man’s head. “Oh, yeah,” he said, taking the bag. “Sure.” He looked inside. Modular Man stared back up at him. Quickly he closed the bag. “This will be fine,” he said.

  It was almost noon when he emerged from the museum, the green suitcase in his right hand and the shopping bag in his left. He stood blinking in the sunlight, then set off up the Bowery at a brisk pace, keeping a careful eye out to make certain he wasn’t being followed. The streets were almost deserted, so he didn’t think it would be too difficult to spot a tail.

  By the third block Tom was pretty sure he was alone. What few people he’d seen were jokers wearing surgical masks or more elaborate face coverings, and they gave him, and each other, as wide a berth as possible. Still, he kept walking, just to be sure. The money was heavier than he had figured, and Modular Man surprisingly light, so he stopped twice to change hands.

  When he reached the Funhouse, he set the suitcase and bag down, looked around carefully, saw no one. He peeled off his frog mask and jammed it in the pocket of his windbreaker.

  The Funhouse was dark and padlocked. CLOSED UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE said the sign on the door. They’d shut their doors shortly after Xavier Desmond had been hospitalized, Tom knew. He’d read about it in the papers. It had saddened him immensely and made him feel even older than he felt already.

  Bare-faced and nervous, shifting from foot to foot, Tom waited for a cab.

  Traffic was very light, and the longer he waited, the more uneasy he grew. He gave fifty cents to a wino who stumbled up just to get rid of the man. Three punks in Demon Prince colors gave Tom and his suitcase a long, hard, speculative look. But his clothes were as shabby as the suitcase, and they must have decided that he wasn’t worth the sweat.

  Finally he got his cab.

  He slid into the backseat of the big yellow Checker with a sigh of relief, the shopping bag on the seat beside him, the suitcase across his lap. “I’m going to Journal Square,” he said. From there he could get another cab to take him back to Bayonne.

  “Oh no, oh no,” the cabbie said. He was dark-eyed, swarthy. Tom glanced at his hack’s license. Pakistani. “No Jersey,” the man said. “Oh no, do not go to Jersey.”

  Tom took a crumpled hundred from the pocket of his jeans. “Here,” he said. “Keep the change.”

  The cabbie looked at the bill and broke into a broad smile. “Very good,” he said. “Very good, New Jersey, oh yes, I am most pleasant.” He put the cab in gear.

  Tom was home free. He cranked down a window and settled back into his seat, enjoying the wind on his face and the pleasant heft of the suitcase on his lap.

  A distant wail floated across the rooftops outside; high, thin, urgent.

  “Oh, what is that?” the cabbie said, sounding puzzled.

  “An air raid siren,” Tom said. He leaned forward, alarmed. A second siren began to sound, nearer, loud and piercing. Cars were pulling over to the sidewalk. People in the streets stopped and looked up into bright, empty skies. Far off, Tom could hear other sirens joining the first two. The noise built and built. “Fuck,” Tom said. He was remembering history. They’d sounded the air raid sirens the day that Jetboy had died, when the wild card had been played on an unsuspecting city. “Turn on the radio,” he said.

  “Oh, pardon, sir, does not work, oh no.”

  “Damn it,” Tom swore. “Okay. Faster then. Get me to the Holland Tunnel.”

  The driver gunned it and ran a red light.

  They were on Canal Street, four blocks from the Holland Tunnel, when the traffic came to a standstill.

  The cab stopped behind a silver-gray Jaguar with its temporary license taped to the rear window. Nothing was moving. The cabbie hit his horn. Other horns sounded far up the street, mingling with the sound of the air raid sirens.

  Behind them a rust-eaten Chevy van screeched to a halt and began to honk impatiently, over and over. The cabbie stuck his head out the window and screamed something in a language Tom did not know, but his meaning was clear. More traffic was piling up behind the van.

  The cabdriver hit his horn again, then turned around long enough to tell Tom that it wasn’t his fault. Tom had already figured out that much for himself. “Wait here,” he said unnecessarily, since the traffic was locked bumper-to-bumper, none of it moving, and there wasn’t room for the cabbie to pull out even if he’d wanted to.

  Tom left the door open and stood on the center line, looking down Canal Street. Traffic was tied up as far as he could see, and the jam was growing rapidly behind them. Tom walked to the corner for a better look. The intersection was gridlocked, traffic lights cycling from red to green to yellow and back to red without anyone’s moving an inch. Music blared from open car windows, a cacophony of stations and songs, all of it c
ounterpointed by the horns and air raid sirens, but none of the radios were getting any news.

  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.