George R.R. Martin - [Wild Cards 18] (56 page)

“The Egyptians are staying out of it,” Jonathan Hive spat. A cloud of small green wasps detached from his cheeks and flittered around his head. One of them landed on Michael’s neck, and he felt a stabbing between two of his throat openings.

“Ow! Goddamn it,” he said, slapping at the thing. He looked at his hand and saw green goo on his palm. Crouching, he wiped his hand ostentatiously in the sand.

“Enough!” John Fortune’s voice cut through the rising hubbub under the canvas. Michael wondered who was really talking. “The Egyptian army no longer matters. The Caliph is our problem now. Him, and the Djinn. If any of you are having doubts …” He glanced at Michael. “… too bad. It’s too late to leave now.”

Lohengrin stepped up alongside Fortune. “Where they will attack first, we don’t yet know,” he said, his accent more pronounced than usual: “
vair zay vill…”

“Jonathan is watching them with his wasps. The Low Dam is most likely,
ja
, but some of us must remain here at the High Dam, if they come this way instead.”

Fortune nodded. “Sobek will be on Sehel and will handle things there; Hardhat, you’ll be with him. Taweret will cover Syrene and the river. Jonathan, DB, you’ll stay here at the High Dam with a full platoon of jokers—DB, you’ll prepare roadblocks every few hundred yards. Take anything you can find that’ll serve. The Living Gods and their people are doing the same right now on the Low Dam. All the rest of you, be ready to be in one of the trucks in an hour—on the west end of the dam, by the monument.” He turned.

“
Hey!
“ Michael shouted. “I didn’t come here to babysit a dam!”

Fortune scowled. “I told you what we need you to do. Are you telling us that you won’t do it?”

Michael could feel them all watching him. He could especially feel Kate’s gaze, and he wondered what she’d said to him. “I’m saying that I could be more help elsewhere. You want to keep an eye on me, fine. Then keep me with you.”

“I want you
here
,” Fortune said flatly. “We can’t afford mavericks, Drummer Boy.” He drew out the name, and Michael tried in vain to stop the scowl that twisted his face. “Everyone needs to cooperate. Everyone needs to do the job they’re asked to do, or we fail.” He stared at Michael.

At the side of his vision, Michael could see Kate standing next to Ana, both of them watching.
I can’t trust you. You’ve proven that
. He let out his breath through his nose. “Fine,” he said, his teeth pressed together.

Fortune nodded, and it was impossible to miss the look of smug satisfaction on his face. “Let’s go over things, then. There’s not much time. Lohengrin, if you’d give us what’s known about the Righteous Djinn.…”

War was simultaneously nerve-wracking and boring.

After Fortune and most of the aces left, Michael and the jokers spent several hours driving cars, trucks, and buses onto the four-lane road atop the High Dam, starting from the east side and working their way west. Once a vehicle was in position, Michael would turn it on its side. Michael wrapped metal bars around them while the jokers piled on truck tires and chunks of broken concrete and bricks.

Around noon, he and the others went back to the tents near the monument to rest and eat. Hive was there, in one of the gun emplacements built into the dam. Four guards armed with Russian Kalashnikov submachine guns were with Hive, all of them jokers of the Living Gods, all of them grim as they stared out over the dam’s spillway toward the north. Michael thought Hive was sitting on a ledge near the antiaircraft gun mounted there, but only the top third of Hive’s body was there. Below the chest, there was nothing at all.

The guards had set up a radio on a rickety card table, with the orange cord of an extension cord trailing off toward the tents around the monument. The voices were spattered with static and interference. In the distance, Michael could hear the faint rattle of gunfire, and once or twice the sound of explosions. In the air, there were a few dark specks hovering far downriver: helicopter gunships, perhaps.

“It’s started,” Hive said. “Doesn’t appear to be any end run from the town toward us yet, though. Thank god, ’cuz
we
ain’t got enough firepower here to stop four hillbillies in a pickup truck.”

“I’m wasted here, Hive. The action’s up north at Aswan. Goddamn Beetle Boy—”

“Did you ever consider why John put you here?” Hive interrupted before Michael could launch into a tirade. “Oh, that’s right, thinking isn’t your strong suit. Look, we already lost King Cobalt—and he was strong and fast and tough and always wanted to be in the middle of the fight, just like you. And, just like you, he couldn’t do anything about bullets. John was doing you a favor.”

“Yeah?” Michael snarled. “He’s just fucking looking out for me, huh? Seems to me that Kate can’t stop a bullet either, or Ana. Or Holy Roller, for that matter. Funny, I don’t see them here. Do you?”

Hive just shook his head. Wasps came and went from where his body met the ledge. “What are you seeing?” Michael asked him. “Tell me.”

Hive sniffed. “Well, the Caliph’s holed up in this damned mansion in Aswan, and I could tell you exactly what he’s got planned if I could speak Arabic. He’s got Bahir with him—and I’ll tell you, that fucker’s fast: he cut my wasp in half with that scimitar. Poor Abdul was badly stung, though—”

“The fighting, Bugsy.”

Hive sniffed again. He closed his eyes momentarily, as if resting. Wasps fluttered away from his sleeves, his hands gone. “There’s fighting on the east side of Sehel Island—the Caliph’s people are pumping mortar rounds onto the island from the east bank of the river, and they’re trying to cross
over the channel to the island in boats. Sobek, Taweret, and Hardhat are doing what they can.”

“And Kate?”

Hive’s eyes opened. “She’s with John, trying to hold the dam. They’ve pushed back one assault already, most of it, anyway. The Djinn hasn’t shown up yet, though—so far it’s just been the regular troops.”

“I should be there.”

“You should be building roadblocks. And sitting here chatting with me isn’t helping anyone at all, is it?” Hive smiled. “Just a suggestion.”

“Fuck you, Bugsy.” Michael drained his bottle of water. He stalked away, and for another half-hour assuaged unfocused anger by flinging cars into place. The jokers working with him whispered to each other in fast Arabic, pointing at him. The racket from the fighting northward continued to crackle over the water, growing louder and more intrusive by the minute. Michael kept looking that way, wondering at every plume of smoke. When a particularly loud explosion thundered in the north, he plunged his lower hand into the pocket of his jeans and found the piece of crumpled cardboard there. “Hey, any of you got a cell phone?” he asked his companions.

Ahmed chattered nonstop as they careened down the western Nile road behind a troop carrier laden with jokers. “I have no fear for myself, you understand, but my wife and my children, they would be lost if I were gone.…”

They were stopped as they approached the western terminus of the Low Dam. “I’m trying to get to the front,” Michael had shouted to the nervous, armed jokers at the checkpoint, followers of the Living Gods. “Fortune’s orders. Sobek has called for me. Sobek … ? Sekhmet… ?” Eventually, through Ahmed’s Arabic and the guards’ pidgin English, he’d made himself understood. Ahmed’s taxi had been commandeered, however. A jackal-headed joker with an automatic weapon sat in the passenger seat, with three more sitting on the trunk and two on the hood. Yet another duo held
onto the open rear doors, standing on the car’s frame. All the jokers were dressed in ragged uniform pants and shirts that didn’t match; most had animal heads or other body parts. They looked more like escapees from a zoo than soldiers, and they looked suspiciously untrained. Ahmed cursed and honked his horn endlessly.

As the noise of gunfire grew louder across the river, Michael heard the
thrup-thrup-thrup
of copter blades, followed by a low, sinister
whoomp
and an explosion of dirt and sand. A troop carrier two vehicles ahead of them lifted its front end high into the air and dropped back again on its side. Ahmed’s brakes squealed in protest and locked; the jokers clinging to his car went tumbling, as trucks lurched to one side or the other to avoid hitting anyone.

The air rained blood-spattered sand and truck parts. What had to be someone’s hand slapped dully against the windshield, a watch strapped to the wrist and the tattered dun camouflage remnants of a uniform around it. Ahmed stared, momentarily speechless. He made a warding motion toward the severed forearm on the hood. The chopper screamed overhead, heading north toward Syrene. A raging tornado of sand erupted from the ground ahead of it and bent its dark funnel—Simoon. The chopper turned sharply to avoid her vortex, but the rotors were caught in the swirling winds, flinging the craft down like an abandoned toy. They saw the flash as it exploded on the ground, then a second later came the shrieking howl of the crash.

Smoke poured from the wreckage ahead of them. Through the haze, Michael could see figures moving over the sand, rushing toward the dam. “No further! I go back now!” Ahmed’s mouth was opened wide, but Michael could barely hear him through the roaring in his ears.

“No further,” Michael agreed. Crawling from the rear compartment, he ripped bills from his wallet and tossed them to Ahmed. “Thanks, man. That was definitely over and above,” he said. “Go find your wife and kids and get the hell outa here.
Salam alekum
.”

“Peace to you” sounded like a stupid thing to say, in context, but it was the only Arabic salutation he knew. Ahmed
nodded furiously. He put the taxi into reverse, gears grinding, and fishtailed backward until the car was pointing south. The arm slid from the hood, smearing a line of blood over the rust-flecked paint. Ahmed, with a blare of his horn, spat sand from under the wheels, scattering running soldiers of the Living Gods as he fled.

Michael faced south.
You wanted to come here. You wanted to come because Kate was here
. The smoke made him cough and cover his mouth and nose with a hand. The sand was bitterly hot through the soles of his sneakers. He could barely see through the haze of dust and smoke. Armed jokers were running past him. He joined them, jogging past the fuming wreckage and trying not to look at the carnage inside the twisted steel.

A battle between armies, he discovered quickly, was no clean, discrete thing, but a whirl of individual scenes which made little sense.

… Michael ran through the smoke toward the dam and the sounds of struggle, slipping near the smoldering hulk of a bus, on its side at the western end of the dam
. There was the loud
tink
of a bullet striking metal not two inches from his head, and his shaved scalp was peppered with hot flecks of steel. He threw himself facedown onto the sand as a line of metallic craters dimpled the sheet metal where he’d just been. He felt warm blood running down one of his arms, and he realized he’d opened a long, deep slice in his middle left arm on a sharp corner of the wrecked vehicle. The pain hit him then, and he rolled on his side, clutching at the wound.

He stopped. Someone was staring at him from alongside the bus, no more than four inches away from his face: Masud, the Joker Plague fan. His eyes were wide in his hairless skull and his mouth was open in a soundless scream, his temple a gory red crater. Gray brain matter and blood were sliding thickly down the bus just above him. Masud’s earbuds had fallen from his earholes, the white cord trailing back to the pocket of his uniform, and Michael could hear Joker Plague’s music playing shrill and thin. Michael’s stomach lurched, unbidden, and he vomited loudly and explosively. His stomach still knotted, he ran again …

… he was on the dam itself, still running and trying to find any familiar faces in the chaos. Through the smoke, he saw Rustbelt as he came around another cluster of overturned vehicles barricading the roadway
. Three soldiers in the uniform of the caliphate were firing at the ace from point-blank range, and Michael could hear a metallic
ting-wheep
, as bullets bounced from Rustbelt’s body and ricocheted away. Rustbelt, shouting, reached out to touch the nearest weapon. The barrel crumpled to red dust. Rusty was bleeding as badly as Michael. His right shoulder displayed a sickening red crater; he might be immune to bullets, but something had punched through his natural armor. Michael saw the soldiers backpedaling as they continued to fire at Rusty, retreating and clustering together. The weaponless man reached for a canvas belt bandoliered around his shoulder and fumbled with a grenade there.