Wildcards - Down and Dirty Part 51

All the King's Horses

VI.

The big corrugated metal garage door rattled overhead as it slid back in its tracks. The opener was old and noisy, but it still did its job. Dust and daylight filtered into the underground bunker. Tom turned off the flashlight and hung it on a hook in the wooden beam supporting the hard- packed dirt wall. His palms were sweaty. He wiped them on his jeans and stood regarding the metal hulks before him.

The hatch gaped open on his oldest sh.e.l.l, the armored Beetle. He'd spent the last week replacing vacuum tubes, oiling the camera tracks, and checking the wiring. It was as ready as it would ever be.

"Me and my big f.u.c.king mouth," Tom said to himself. His words echoed through the bunker.

He could have rented a truck, a big semi maybe. Joey would have helped. Back it up to the edge of the bunker, load the sh.e.l.ls, get them over to Jokertown the easy way. But no, he had to go and tell Dutton he'd fly them over. No way the joker would ever believe him now if the d.a.m.n things got delivered by UPS.

He looked at the open hatch, tried to imagine crawling into that blackness and sealing the door behind him, locking himself into that metal coffin, and he could feel the bile rise in the back of his throat. He couldn't.

Only he had no choice, did he? The junkyard wasn't his anymore. A crew would be arriving in less than three weeks to start clearing away all the s.h.i.t that had acc.u.mulated here in the last forty years. If the sh.e.l.ls were still lying around when they showed up with their bulldozers, the jig was seriously up.

Tom forced himself to walk forward. No big deal, he told himself. The sh.e.l.l was okay, he could get it across the bay, he'd done it a thousand times. So he had to do it one more time, that's all. One more time and he was free.

All the kings horses and all the king's men ...

Tom bent at the knees, grasped the top edge of the hatch, and took a long, slow breath. The metal was cold between his fingers. He ducked his head and pulled himself inside, swinging the hatch closed behind him. The clang rang in his ears. It was pitch-dark inside the sh.e.l.l, and chilly. His mouth had gone dry, and he could feel his heart shuddering away in his chest.

He fumbled in the darkness for the seat, felt torn vinyl upholstery, squirmed toward it. He might as well be in a cave at the center of the earth, or dead and buried, it was so black. Faint lines of light leaked in around the outside of the hatch, but not enough to see by. Where the f.u.c.k was the power switch? The newer sh.e.l.ls all had fingertip controls built into the armrests of the seat, but not this old bucket, oh, no. Tom groped in the darkness over his head and jammed his fingers painfully on something metal. Panic stirred inside him like a frightened animal. It was so f.u.c.king black, where were the lights?

Then, suddenly, he was falling.

The vertigo crashed over him like a wave. Tom grabbed the armrests hard, tried to tell himself it wasn't happening, but he could feel it. The darkness tumbled end over end. His stomach roiled, and he bent forward, cracking his forehead sharply against the curving wall of the sh.e.l.l. "I'm not falling!" he screamed loudly. The words rang in his ears as he fell, helpless, locked in his armored casket. His hands thrashed madly, fumbling against the wall, sliding over gla.s.s and vinyl, throwing switches everywhere as he gasped for breath.

All around him the TV screens woke to dim life.

The world steadied. Tom's breathing slowed. He wasn't falling, no, look out there, that was the bunker, he was sitting in the sh.e.l.l, safe on the ground at the bottom of a hole, that was all, he wasn't falling.

Fuzzy black-and-white images crowded the screens. The sets were a mismatch of sizes and brand names, there were obvious blind spots, one picture was locked into a slow vertical roll. Tom didn't care. He could see. He wasn't falling.

He found the tracking controls and set his external cameras to moving. The images on the screen shifted slowly as he scanned all around him. The other two sh.e.l.ls, the empty husks, squatted a few feet away. He turned on the ventilation system, heard a fan begin to whir, felt fresh air wash over his face. Blood was dripping into his eyes. He'd cut himself in his panic. He wiped it away with the back of his hand, sagged back in the seat.

"Okay," he announced loudly. He'd gotten this far. The rest was candy. Up, up, and away. Out of the bunker, across New York Bay, one last flight, nothing simpler. He pushed up.

The sh.e.l.l rocked slowly from side to side, lifted maybe an inch off the ground, then settled back with a thump.

Tom grunted. All the king's horses and all the king's men, he thought. He summoned all his concentration, tried again to lift off. Nothing happened.

He sat there, grim-faced, staring unseeing at the washedout black-and-white shapes on his television screens, and finally he admitted the truth. The truth he'd hidden from Joey DiAngelis, Xavier Desmond, and even from himself.

His sh.e.l.l wasn't the only thing that was broken.

For twenty-odd years he'd thought himself invulnerable once behind his armor.

Tom Tudbury might have his doubts, his fears, his insecurities, but not the Turtle. His teke, nurtured by that sense of invincibility, had grown steadily greater, year after year after year, so long as he was inside his sh.e.l.l.

Until Wild Card Day.

They'd taken him out before he even knew what was happening.

He'd been high over the Hudson, answering a distress call, when some ace power had reached through his armor as if it didn't exist. Suddenly he'd felt sick, weak. He had to fight to keep from blacking out, and he could feel the ma.s.sive sh.e.l.l stagger in midflight as his concentration wavered. A moment before his vision blurred, he'd glimpsed the boy in the hang glider slicing down from above. Then there'd been a tremendous loud pop that hurt his eardrums, and the sh.e.l.l had died.

Everything went. Cameras, computers, tape deck, ventilation system, all of it burned out or seized up in the same split second. An electromagnetic pulse, he'd read later in the papers, but all he'd known then was that he'd gone blind and helpless. For a moment he was too shocked to be afraid, punching wildly at his fingertip controls in the darkness, frantic to get the power back on.

He'd never even realized that they'd napalmed him. But with the napalm the weakness came again. He lost it then; the sh.e.l.l 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 sh.e.l.ls 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 G.o.dd.a.m.ned sh.e.l.l 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 sh.o.r.e 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 sh.e.l.l 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 sh.e.l.l up again, but he had, that very night.

This very sh.e.l.l. 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 sh.e.l.l 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 f.u.c.king 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 sh.e.l.l hadn't blown-- "It did blow," Tom said. The napalm, the water pressure, something...

The walls of his bedroom. Broken gla.s.s 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 sh.e.l.l shattered like an egg. The armor bent outward. f.u.c.k 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 sh.e.l.l 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 sh.e.l.l, 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 h.e.l.l getting the other sh.e.l.ls 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 sh.e.l.ls.

"All right," Tom announced through his loudspeakers after he had set the sh.e.l.ls 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 sh.e.l.ls. " I wonder how we're going to get these inside." Tom shrugged. "They got a f.u.c.king 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 p.i.s.sed off quite a few people over the years, everyone from street punks to Richard Millions 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 bas.e.m.e.nt 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 long, 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 sh.e.l.ls, 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 pa.s.sed other elements of the Syrian diorama in various states of a.s.sembly: Dr. Tachyon in full Arabian regalia, curled slippers on his feet; the giant Sayyid done in wax ten feet high; Carnifex in his blindingwhite 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 pa.s.sed him with a curt nod.

Then Tom saw something that stopped him dead. "Jesus f.u.c.king 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 gla.s.s 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 p.e.n.i.s 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. "f.u.c.k," 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."

"d.a.m.n it," Tom swore. "Okay. Faster then. Get me to the Holland Tunnel."