John Miller: Death Draws Five

Jerry had read all about it in Xavier Desmond’s book, which had chronicled the fateful journey that had changed so many lives—his included. The plane full of aces and jokers and reporters and politicians had also gone to Sri Lanka where Jerry was a cast member of King Pongo, the giant ape movie being filmed in the island’s jungles. You might say that Jerry was the biggest cast member, as he was playing the big monkey himself. Jerry was then still the mindless Great Ape, a form he’d been trapped in since the mid-1960’s. During the Sri Lanka adventure Tachyon had freed him from the ape body, using his mental powers to return Jerry to normalcy.

If, Jerry reflected, you could consider his post-Great Ape life normal. Not many would.

Thoth frowned.

“Where is your achtet?” he suddenly asked John Fortune.

“Ac—achtet?” the kid asked, stumbling over the unfamiliar word. He looked at Jerry, who shrugged.

“An amulet of red stone,” Thoth explained, “given to your mother for safe-keeping. For you to wear when old enough, to guide you in the use of your powers.”

John Fortune glanced at Jerry, who shrugged again.

“You got me on that one,” Jerry said. “Maybe,” he added diplomatically, “Peregrine thinks he’s not ready for it. After all, he, uh, hasn’t come into his powers yet.”

And, Jerry thought to himself, the odds of him ever doing so were extremely unlikely. Still, sometimes you beat the odds. Las Vegas, after all, was built on that theory. Or dream.

Thoth conferred with Osiris in Arabic. They looked at John Fortune and nodded.

“Yes,” he said. “But Osiris says that your time will come soon.” The old man smiled peculiarly with his stiletto beak, but Jerry could see warmth and benediction in his eyes. “The blessings of Ra upon you and yours,” Thoth said, bowing deeply. He gestured at the other members of the Living Gods, who bowed as well. “We must be off about our duties,” he said.

Jerry nodded. “It was nice to meet you all,” he said. “We have to go now, too.”

He glanced at John Fortune, catching his eye after a moment.

“Yeah. Um, nice to meet you,” the kid said.

They all smiled, bowed, and, murmuring their farewells in Arabic, drifted off to various quarters of the auditorium.

“Weird,” John Fortune said. “Why do you think Mom never mentioned this prediction to me, or never gave me that achtet thing?”

“Your mom has a busy life,” Jerry said as they made their way toward the runway. “Maybe she put it away and forgot about it. Or, maybe...”

“Yeah,” John Fortune said a few moments after Jerry had fallen silent. “Maybe she thought they were all just nuts.”

“Maybe. But I’ve seen a lot of apparently nutty things in this world actually come true.”

“The power of Ra,” the kid said musingly. “What do you think that is?”

Jerry shook his head. He did that a lot around the kid.

“I don’t know,” he said. “But I do know that it’s almost time for the show. We’d better hustle to our seats.”

As Jerry had feared, they were disconcertingly close to the action, which to his taste was loud, flashy, and somewhat nonsensical. John Fortune, however, loved it.

The show was Egyptian-themed, which explained the presence of the Living Gods, although there were also snarling white tigers jumping through hoops and a chorus line of babes tricked out in metallic bikini armor and Ralph transmorfigsising into a leopard and bevies of lions and Ralph getting crushed by a giant mechanical crocodile and prancing white stallions and Ralph getting spitted on a giant metal spear and almost- naked dancing muscular guys and almost-naked long-legged dancing girls and disappearing elephants and Ralph swinging ten feet above the audience on a wire and an evil queen sawn in half by a great electronic buzz-saw and endless costume changes involving flowing glittery capes and rhinestoned jumpsuits and thigh-high leather boots and puffy shirts with lace. And that was just on Siegfried and Ralph.

It was all so flashy and noisy and glittery and exciting. Jerry could see why the kid was into it. The white tigers were beautiful. Their apparent ferocity contributed to their magnificence. Siegfried and Ralph, though they wore a little too much makeup and a few too many spangles for Jerry’s taste, did have an authenticate rapport with and love for the beasts that they put through complicated routines. The big cats actually seemed to enjoy jumping through their hoops and leaping about like furry, four-legged acrobats.

That made it all the more terrifying when disaster struck like a lightning bolt from a clear summer sky.

Ralph was kissing a seven-hundred pound tiger on his nose pad when the tiger casually reached out, put his paw behind Ralph’s head, and drew him in closer. His massive jaws crunched together where Ralph’s neck met his shoulder. Then the tiger calmly walked back up the runway, dragging Ralph’s twitching body and leaving behind a smeared trail of blood. Jerry and John Fortune were so close to the action that a spatter of Ralph’s blood showered down at their feet.

John Fortune made a strange sound in his throat. Jerry tore his eyes away from the chaos on the stage and looked at the stricken expression on the kid’s face. At first Jerry assumed Fortune had been frightened by the horrific tiger attack, but then he realized that it was something more. Something terribly more.

“John—” He reached for the boy, cursing, as a man rushed by, bumped him, and knocked him to the floor. Jerry’s ankle twisted, the man stepped on it, and Jerry felt something give.

Shit, Jerry said to himself. He didn’t think it was broken, but it hurt like sudden Hell. The last thing he needed was a bad ankle as the crowd around them dissolved into crazed panic. He stood and swore again as he tried to put his weight on it. No go. He tried to ignore the awful pain. Something was wrong with John Fortune, and Jerry was afraid that he knew what that something was.

“John—” he repeated. When he took the kid in his arms, he knew for sure.

John Fortune’s eyes were glassy. His breath was rapid and harsh. His skin was flushed. Jerry put a hand on the kid’s forehead. He didn’t have to be a doctor to know that Fortune was running a temperature.

And was radiating a pleasant, orangish-yellow glow.

His skin hadn’t changed color. It was still the normal pinkish hue called “white,” if actually darker than usual, as if he were blushing all over. But the kid was projecting a dim aura, almost like glowing halos around his face and hands, that was clearly visible in the dark auditorium.

“Shit,” Jerry swore again.

The boy’s card had turned, and he was doomed.

The Wild Card virus, let loose on Earth almost sixty years previously by cold-hearted Takisian scientists to test its ability to turn ordinary people into super beings, worked after a fashion. It killed ninety percent of those it infected. Usually in horrific ways. In many cases, however, the dead were the lucky ones. Another nine percent of the virus’s living victims were twisted in body or mind, typically in terrible ways. A final one percent did receive some kind of ability, ranging from the ridiculously useless to the cosmically sublime. Jerry himself had turned over an ace. But he knew that the kid, who had inherited virus-tainted genes from his parents, was most likely a dead man. But only if he was lucky.

“W-w-what’s happening to me?” John Fortune stuttered through clenched teeth. He was sweating visibly now. His hair was plastered to his forehead and his shirt was already soaked as water ran out of his body in rivulets. “I feel so weak.”

Jerry couldn’t crouch over him anymore. His ankle was killing him and his thighs were beginning to ache. He kneeled on the floor, trying to ignore the tumult around them as the audience fled, Siegfried stood frozen in horror, and the company of performers stuttered around him in their bright costumes like a flock of frightened birds. Jerry put his arms around the kid, holding him close.