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 shell, 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 fucking 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 shells, 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 damn 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 shit that had accumulated here in the last forty years. If the shells 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 shell 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 shell, 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 fuck was the power switch? The newer shells 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 fucking 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 shell. “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 glass 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 shell, 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 shells, 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 shell 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 washed-out 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 shell 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 shell.
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 massive shell 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 shell 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 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 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 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 counterpointed 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.
A pimpled teenager leaned out of a white Ford pickup with Jersey plates. “The Guard,” he shouted. “That’s a Guard chopper!” He waved at the helicopter.
The whap-whap-whap of the rotors mingled with the horns and sirens and shouting to drown out the loudspeakers. Horns began to fall silent. “… your homes…”
Someone began shouting obscenities.
The chopper dipped lower, came on. Even Tom saw the military markings now, the National Guard insignia. The loudspeakers boomed. “… closed … repeat: Holland Tunnel is closed. Return to your homes peacefully.”
Huge gusts of wind kicked up all around him as the helicopter passed directly overhead. Tom dropped to one knee and covered his face against the dust and dirt.
“The tunnel is closed,” he heard as the chopper receded. “Do not attempt to leave Manhattan. Holland Tunnel is closed. Return to your homes peacefully.”
When the copter reached the end of stalled traffic, two blocks farther back, it peeled off and rose high in the air, a small black shape in the sky, then circled back for another loop. The people in the streets looked at each other.
“They can’t mean me, I’m from Iowa,” a fat woman announced, as if it made a difference. Tom knew how she felt.
The cops had finally arrived. Two patrol cars edged down the sidewalk carefully, bypassing the worst of the congestion. A black policeman got out and started snapping orders. One or two people got back into their cars obediently. The rest surrounded the cop, all of them talking at once. Others, lots of them, had abandoned their vehicles. A stream of people headed up Canal Street, toward the entrance to the Holland Tunnel.
Tom went with them, moving along slower than most, struggling with the weight of his bags. He was sweating. A woman passed him at a dead run, looking ragged and near hysteria. The helicopter flew over again, loudspeakers blaring, warning the crowd to turn back.
“Martial law!” a truck driver shouted down from the cab of his semi. A wall of people formed around the truck, trapping Tom in their midst. He was shoved up against the tractor’s rear wheel as the crowd pressed closer for news. “It just came over the CB,” the trucker said. “The motherfuckers have declared martial law. Not just the Holland Tunnel. They shut down everything, all the bridges, the tunnels, even the Staten Island ferry. No one’s getting off the island.”
“Oh, god,” someone said behind Tom, a man’s voice, husky but raw with fear. “Oh, god, it’s the wild card.”
“We’re all going to die,” an old woman said. “I seen it in ’46. They’re just gonna keep us here.”
“It’s those jokers,” suggested a man in a three-piece suit. “Barnett is right, they shouldn’t be living with normal people, they spread disease.”
“No,” Tom said. “The wild card isn’t contagious.”
“Sez you. Oh, god, we probably all got it already.”
“There’s a carrier,” the trucker shouted down. Tom could hear the crackle of his CB radio. “Some fucking joker. He’s spreading it wherever he goes.”
“That’s not possible,” Tom said.
“Goddamn joker-lover,” someone shouted at him.
“I got to get home to my babies,” a young woman wailed.
“Take it easy,” Tom started to say, but it was too late, way too late. He heard crying, screaming, shouted obscenities. The crowd seemed to explode as people ran off in a dozen directions. Somebody slammed into him hard. Tom staggered back, then fell as he was buffeted from the side. He almost lost his grip on the suitcase, but he hung on grimly, even when a boot stomped painfully on his calf. He rolled under the truck. Feet rushed past him. He crawled between the wheels of the semi, dragging his bags behind him, and got to his feet on the sidewalk, half-dazed. This is fucking crazy, he thought.
Way down Canal, the helicopter began another pass. Tom watched it come, the crowd surging hysterically around him. The chopper will calm them down, he thought, it has to.
When the first tear gas canisters began to rain down into the street, trailing yellow smoke, he turned and dodged into the nearest alley and began to run.
The noise dwindled behind as Tom fled through alleys and side streets. He’d gone three blocks and was breathing hard when he noticed a cellar door ajar under a bookstore. He hesitated a moment, but when he heard the sound of running feet on the cross street, his mind was made up for him.
It was cool and quiet inside. Tom gratefully dropped the suitcase and sat cross-legged on the cement floor. He leaned back against the wall and listened. The air raid sirens had finally quieted, but he heard horns and an ambulance and the distant, angry rumble of shouts.
Off to his right he heard the scrape of a footstep.
Tom’s head snapped around. “Who’s there?”
There was only silence. The cellar was dark and gloomy. Tom got to his feet. He could swear he’d heard something. He took a step forward, froze, cocked his head. Then he was sure. Someone was back there, behind those boxes. He could hear the short, ragged sound of their breathing.
Tom wasn’t going any closer. He backed toward the door and gave the boxes a hard telekinetic shove. The whole stack went over, cardboard ripping, and dozens of glossy paperback copies of More Disgusting Joker Jokes cascaded from a torn carton. There was a grunt of surprise and pain from behind the boxes.
Tom edged forward and pushed the top boxes in the feebly moving pile off to the side, using his hands this time.
“Don’t hurt me!” a voice pleaded from under the books.
“No one’s going to hurt you,” Tom said. He shifted a torn box, spilling more paperbacks onto the floor. Half-buried underneath, a man curled in a fetal ball, arms locked protectively around his head. “Come on out of there.”
“I wasn’t doing nothing,” the man on the floor said in a thin, whispery voice. “I just come in to hide.”
“I was hiding, too,” Tom said. “It’s okay. Come on out.”
The man stirred, unfolded, got warily to his feet. There was something dreadfully wrong with the way he moved. “I ain’t so good to look at,” he warned in that thin, rustling voice.
“I don’t care,” said Tom.
Walking in a painful crabbed sideways motion, the man edged forward into the light, and Tom got a good look at him. An instant of revulsion gave way to sudden, overwhelming pity. Even in the dim light in the back of the cellar, Tom could see how cruelly the joker’s body had been twisted. One of his legs was much longer than the other, triple-jointed, and attached backward, so the knee bent in the wrong direction. The other leg, the “normal” one, ended in a clubfoot. A cluster of tiny vestigial hands grew from the swollen flesh of his right forearm. His skin was glossy black, bone-white, chocolate-brown, and copper-red in patches all over his body; there was no way to tell what race he’d belonged to originally. Only his face was normal. It was a beautiful face; blue-eyed, blond, strong. A movie star’s face.
“I’m Mishmash,” the joker whispered timidly.
But the movie star lips hadn’t moved, and there was no life in those deep, clear blue eyes. Then Tom saw the second head, the hideous little monkey-face peeping cautiously out of the unbuttoned shirt. It sprouted crookedly from the joker’s ample gut, as purple as an old bruise.
Tom felt nauseated. It must have showed on his face because Mishmash turned away. “Sorry,” he muttered, “sorry.”
“What happened?” Tom forced himself to ask. “Why are you hiding here?”
“I saw them,” the joker told him, his back to Tom. “These guys. Nats. They had this joker; they were beating the hell out of him. They would of done me, too, only I snuck away. They said it was all our fault. I got to get home.”
“Where do you live?” Tom asked.
Mishmash made a wet, muffled sound that might have been a laugh and half-turned. The little head twisted up to look at Tom. “Jokertown,” he said.
“Yeah,” Tom said, feeling very stupid. Of course he lived in Jokertown, where the fuck else could he live? “That’s only a few blocks away. I’ll take you there.”
“You got a car?”
“No,” Tom said. “We’ll have to walk.”
“I don’t walk so good.”
“We’ll go slow,” Tom said.
They went slow.
Dusk was falling when Tom finally emerged, cautiously, from the cellar refuge. The street had been quiet for hours, but Mishmash was too frightened to venture out until dark. “They’ll hurt me,” he kept saying.
Even when twilight began to gather, the joker was still reluctant to move. Tom went first to scout the block. There were lights in a few apartments, and he heard the sound of a television blaring from a third-story window, and more police sirens, far off in the distance. Otherwise the city seemed deathly quiet. He walked around the block slowly, moving from doorway to doorway like a GI in a war movie. There were no cars, no pedestrians, nothing. All the storefronts were dark, secured by accordion grills and steel shutters. Even the neighborhood bars were closed. Tom saw a few broken windows, and just around the corner the overturned, burned-out hulk of a police car sat square in the middle of the intersection. A huge Marlboro billboard had been defaced with red paint; KILL ALL JOKERS, it said. He decided not to take Mishmash down that street.
When he returned, the joker was waiting. He’d moved the suitcase and shopping bag to the doorway. “I told you not to touch those,” Tom snapped in annoyance, and felt immediately guilty when he saw how Mishmash quailed under his voice.
He picked up the bags. “C’mon,” he said, stepping back outside. Mishmash followed, his every step a hideous twisting dance. They went slowly. They went very slowly.
They stayed mostly to alleys and side streets south of Canal, resting frequently. The damned suitcase seemed to get heavier with each passing block.
They were catching their breath by a Dumpster just off Church Street when a tank rolled past the mouth of the alley, followed by a half dozen National Guardsmen on foot. One of them glanced to his left, saw Mishmash, and began to raise his rifle. Tom stood up, stepped in front of the joker. For an instant his eyes met the Guardsman’s. He was only a kid, Tom saw, no more than nineteen or twenty. The boy looked at Tom for a long moment, then lowered his gun, nodded, and walked on.
Broadway was eerily deserted. A lone police paddy wagon wove its way through an obstacle course of abandoned cars. Tom watched it pass while Mishmash cringed back behind some garbage cans. “Let’s go,” Tom said.
“They’ll see us,” Mishmash said. “They’ll hurt me.”
“No they won’t,” Tom promised. “Look at how dark it is.”
They were halfway across Broadway, moving from car to car, when the streetlights came on, sudden and silent. The shadows were gone. Mishmash gave a single sharp bark of fear. “Move it,” Tom told him urgently. They scrambled for the far side of the street.
“Hold it right there!”
The shout stopped them at the edge of the sidewalk. Almost, Tom thought, but almost only counts in horseshoes and grenades. He turned slowly.
The cop wore a white gauze surgical mask that muffled his voice, but his tone was still all business. His holster was unbuttoned, his gun already in hand.
“You don’t have to—” Tom started nervously.
“Shut the fuck up,” the cop said. “You’re in violation of the curfew.”
“Curfew?” Tom said.
“You heard me. Don’t you listen to the radio?” He didn’t wait for the answer. “Lemme see some ID.”
Tom carefully lowered his bags to the ground. “I’m from Jersey,” he said. “I was trying to get home, but they closed the tunnels.” He fished out his wallet and handed it to the cop.
“Jersey,” the cop said, studying the driver’s license. He handed it back. “Why aren’t you at Port Authority?”
“Port Authority?” Tom said, confused.
“The clearance center.” The cop’s tone was still gruff and impatient, but he’d evidently decided they weren’t a threat. He holstered his gun. “Out-of-towners are supposed to report to Port Authority. You pass the medical, they’ll give you a blue card and send you home. If I was you, I’d head up there.”
Port Authority Bus Terminal was a zoo under the best of circumstances. Tom tried to imagine what it would be like now. Every tourist, commuter, and visitor in the city would be there, along with a lot of frightened Manhattanites pretending to be from out of town, all of them waiting their turn for a medical or fighting for a seat on one of the buses leaving the city, with the police and National Guard trying to keep order. You didn’t need a lot of imagination to picture the kind of nightmare going on up at Forty-second Street. “I didn’t know. I’ll get right up there,” Tom lied, “as soon as I get my friend home.”
The cop gave Mishmash a hard look. “You’re taking a big risk, buddy. The carrier’s supposed to be some kind of albino, and nobody said anything about any extra heads, but all jokers look alike in the dark, right? Those Guard boys are real jumpy, too. They see a pair like you, they might decide to shoot first and check your IDs later.”
“What the fuck is going on?” Tom said. It sounded worse than he could have imagined. “What is all this?”
“Do you good to turn on a radio once in a while,” the cop said. “Might stop you getting your head shot off.”
“Who are you looking for?”
“Some joker fuck, been spreading a new kind of wild card all over the city. He’s freaky strong, and crazy. Dangerous. And he’s got a friend with him, some new ace, looks normal but bullets bounce right off him. If I was you, I’d dump the geek and haul ass for Port Authority.”
“I didn’t do nothing,” Mishmash whispered.
His voice was low, barely audible, but it was the first time he’d dared to speak, and the cop heard him well enough. “Shut the fuck up. I’m not in the mood for any joker lip. I want to hear you talk, I’ll ask you a question.”
Mishmash quailed. Tom was shocked by the loathing in the policeman’s voice. “You got no call to talk to him that way.”
It was a mistake, a big mistake. Above the surgical mask the policeman’s eyes narrowed. “That so? What are you, one of those queers who likes to hump jokers?”
No, you asshole, Tom thought furiously, I’m the Great and Powerful Turtle, and if I were in my shell right now, I’d pick you up and drop you in the garbage where you belong. But what he said was, “Sorry, Officer. I didn’t mean anything by it. It’s been a rough day for everyone, right? Maybe we should just get going?” He tried to smile as he picked up the suitcase and shopping bag. “C’mon, Mishmash,” he said.
“What’s in those bags?” the cop said suddenly.
Modular Man’s head and eighty thousand dollars in cash, Tom thought, but he didn’t say it. He didn’t think he’d broken any laws, but the truth would raise questions he wasn’t prepared to answer. “Nothing,” he told the cop. “Some clothes.” But he’d hesitated too long.
“Why don’t we have a look,” the policeman replied.
“No,” Tom blurted. “You can’t. I mean, don’t you need a search warrant or probable cause or something?”
“I got your fucking probable cause right here,” the cop said, drawing his gun. “This is martial law, and we got authority to shoot looters on sight. Now lower the bags to the ground slowly and back off, asshole.”
The moment seemed to last a long, long time. Then Tom did as he was told.
“Further back,” the cop said. Tom retreated to the sidewalk. “You too, geek.” Mishmash moved back next to Tom.
The policeman edged forward, bent over, and pulled one of the handles of the shopping bag to peer inside.
Modular Man’s head flew up and smashed him in the face.
Blood squirted from the cop’s nose with a sickening crunch to stain the white gauze of his mask. He gave a muffled screech and staggered back. The head bowled squarely into his gut, tumbling like a cannonball. The cop grunted as his feet went out from under him. He landed on his ass in the street.
The head swooped around him. The cop brought up his pistol with both hands and squeezed off a round. Glass shattered in a second-story window as the head came crashing into his temple. The cop swatted at it with the barrel of his pistol; then something jerked the gun right out his hand and sent it skittering off down a sewer.
“Son-of-a-bitch,” the cop managed. He tried to struggle back to his feet, his eyes as glassy as Mod Man’s. His nose was still bleeding; the surgical mask had turned a vivid red.
The head came at him again. This time he managed to grab it and hold it at bay, just inches from his face. The long cable dangling from the jagged neck took on a life of its own and snaked up into a bloody nostril. The cop screamed and grabbed for the cable. The head jumped forward; two foreheads cracked together hard. The cop went down. The head circled over him. The cop groaned and rolled over. He made no attempt to rise.
Tom started breathing again.
“Is he dead?” Mishmash asked in an eager whisper.
Tom’s heart was still on adrenaline overdrive; it took a moment for the words to register. “Fuck,” he said. What the hell had he done? It had all gone down so quickly.
Mod Man’s head fell out of the air, hit the gutter, and rolled. Tom knelt over the fallen cop and felt for a pulse. “He’s alive,” Tom said. “Breathing is shallow, though. He might have a concussion, maybe even a cracked skull.”
Mishmash crowded close. “Kill him.”
Tom’s head snapped back around and he stared at the joker in horror. “Are you crazy?”
The hideous little purple monkey-face was straining forward through his shirtfront. Moisture glistened on the hard, thin lips. “He was going to kill us. You heard him, you heard what he called us. He had no right. Kill him.”
“No way,” Tom said. He stood up, wiping his hands on his jeans compulsively. His high was gone now; he felt more than a little sick.
“He knows who you are,” Mishmash whispered.
Tom had somehow managed to forget that. “Fuck fuck fuck,” he swore. The cop had seen his driver’s license.
“They’ll come for you,” Mishmash suggested. “They’ll know you did it, and they’ll come. Kill him. Go on, I won’t tell.”
Tom backed away, shaking his head. “No.”
“Then I’ll do it,” Mishmash said. His lips peeled back over a mouthful of yellowed incisors, and the wrinkled face shot out and down, into the cop’s throat. Mishmash’s shirt sagged where his gut had been. The head worked at the soft flesh under the cop’s chin, bobbing at the end of three feet of glistening transparent tube connecting it to the joker’s torso. Tom heard wet, greedy sucking sounds. The cop’s feet began to thrash feebly. Blood spurted, Mishmash swallowed and sucked, and a thick red wash began to travel up through the thick glassy flesh of his neck.
“No!” Tom screamed. “Stop it!”
The monkey-face continued to feed, but on top of the joker’s body his second head, the movie-star head, turned to stare at Tom from clear blue eyes and smiled beatifically.
Tom reached out for Mishmash with his teke, or tried to, but there was nothing there. The fury that had filled him when the cop threatened them was gone; now there was only horror and fear, and his power had always deserted him when he was afraid. He stood helplessly, hands clenching and unclenching as Mishmash gnawed away with teeth as cruel and sharp as needles.
Then he leapt forward and grabbed the joker from behind, wrapping his arms around that twisted torso, pulling him back. For a moment they grappled. Tom was overweight and out of shape and had never been especially strong, but the joker’s body was as weak as it was misshapen. They stumbled backward, Mishmash thrashing feebly in Tom’s arms, until the head pulled free of the cop’s torn throat with a soft pop. The joker hissed in fury. His long glistening neck coiled around, snakelike, over his left shoulder, as pale eyes glared down, insane with frustration. Blood was smeared all over the shrunken purplish face. Wet red teeth snapped wildly, but his neck wasn’t long enough.
Tom spun him around and shoved him away. The joker’s mismatched legs tangled under him, and he tripped and fell heavily into the gutter. “Get out of here!” Tom screamed. “Get out of here now or I’ll give you the same thing I gave him.”
Mishmash hissed, his head weaving back and forth. Then, as suddenly as it had come, the bloodlust was gone, and once more the joker cringed in fear. “Don’t,” he whispered, “please don’t. I only wanted to help. Don’t hurt me, mister.” His neck shrunk slowly back into his shirt, a long, thick glass eel returning to its lair, until there was only the small scared face shivering between his buttons. By then Mishmash was back on his feet. He gave Tom one last pleading look, and then whirled and began to run, arms and legs working grotesquely.
Tom stopped the policeman’s bleeding with a handkerchief. There was still a pulse, but it felt weak to him, and the man had obviously lost a lot of blood. He hoped it wasn’t too late.
He looked around at the abandoned cars and headed toward a likely one. Joey had once shown him how to hot-wire an ignition; he sure as hell hoped he still remembered.
It was standing room only in the waiting room of the Jokertown Clinic. Tom pushed his suitcase up against a wall and sat on top of it. The shopping bag, with Modular Man’s bloodied head stuck inside it, he shoved between his legs. The room was hot and noisy. He ignored the frightened people all around him, the screams of pain from the next room, and stared dully at the tiles on the floor, trying not to think. Perspiration covered his face under the clinging frog mask.
He’d been waiting a half hour when a fat, tusked newsboy in a porkpie hat and Hawaiian shirt entered the waiting room with an armful of papers. Tom bought a copy of tomorrow’s Jokertown Cry, sat back on his suitcase, and began to read. He read every word in every story on every page, and then started all over again.
The headlines were full of martial law and the citywide manhunt for Croyd Crenson. Typhoid Croyd, the Cry called him; anyone coming in contact with the carrier risked drawing the wild card. No wonder everyone was so scared. Dr. Tachyon had told the authorities it was a mutant form, capable of reinfecting even stable aces and jokers.
The Turtle could bring him in, Tom thought. Anyone else, police or Guardsman or ace, risked infection and death if they tried to apprehend him, but the Turtle could take him in perfect safety, easy as candy. He didn’t have to get real close to teke someone, and his shell gave him plenty of protection.
Only there was no shell, and the Turtle was dead.
Sixty-three people had required medical treatment after the rioting around the Holland Tunnel, and property damage was estimated at more than a million dollars, he read.
The Turtle could have dissipated that crowd without anyone’s getting hurt. Just talk to them, dammit, take the time to quell their fears, and if things got out of hand, pry them apart with teke. You didn’t need guns or tear gas.
Sporadic outbreaks of anti-joker violence had been reported throughout the city. Two jokers were dead, a dozen more had been hospitalized after beatings or stonings.
There was widespread looting in Harlem.
Arson had destroyed the storefront headquarters of Jokers for Jesus, and firemen responding to the alarm had been pelted with bricks and dogshit.
Leo Barnett was praying for the souls of the afflicted and calling for quarantine in the name of public health.
A twenty-year-old coed from Columbia had been gang-raped on a pool table in Squisher’s Basement. More than a dozen jokers had watched from their barstools, and half of those had lined up to take their turns after the original rapists were done. Someone had told them they’d be cured of their deformities if they had sex with this woman.
The Turtle was dead, and Tom Tudbury sat on a battered old suitcase stuffed with eighty thousand dollars in cash as the world grew more and more insane.
All the king’s horses and all the king’s men, he thought.
He’d just finished his third pass through the newspaper when a shadow fell across him. Tom looked up and saw the hefty black nurse who had helped him carry the policeman in from the car. “Dr. Tachyon will see you now,” she said.
Tom followed her back to a small cubicle off the emergency room, where Tachyon sat wearily behind a steel desk.
“Well?” Tom asked after the nurse had left.
“He’ll live,” Tach said. Lilac eyes lingered on the green, rubbery features of Tom’s mask. “We are required by law to file a report on this sort of thing. The police will want to question you once the emergency has passed. We need a name.”
“Thomas Tudbury,” he said. He pulled off the mask and let it drop to the floor.
“Turtle,” Tach blurted, surprised. He stood up.
The Turtle is dead, Tom thought, but he didn’t say it.
Dr. Tachyon frowned. “Tom, what happened out there?”
“It’s a long, ugly story. You want it, go into my fucking brain and take it. I don’t want to talk about it.”
Tach looked at him thoughtfully. Then the alien winced and sat down again.
“At least with the fucking Astronomer I could tell the good guys from the bad guys,” Tom said.
“He has your name,” Tach said.
“One of my names,” Tom said. “Fuck it. I need your help.”
Tach was still linked with his mind; the alien looked up sharply. “I will not do that.”
Tom leaned forward across the desk, looming over the smaller man. “You will,” he said. “You owe me, Tachyon. And there’s no way I can kill myself without your help.”
