George Martin - Suicide Kings

It hadn’t worked out that way.

“That was another life. I’m different now. I’m married. I’m going to be a father. I do my shows. I don’t concern myself with politics.”

Noel felt a blaze of anger when Siraj’s lips curled into a smile. “You must be bored stiff,” the prince said, and Noel’s anger was swept away by a sudden cascade of laughter.

Suddenly they were whooping, struggling to catch their breaths. Siraj wiped away tears of laughter. “Well?” he asked.

“Oh, all right. One last adventure before staid middle age overtakes me. But remember, I can still kill you.”

“And I can still ruin you.”

Jackson Square

New Orleans, Louisiana

A flash of fire. The smell of bacon.

Not bacon-searing flesh. And it isn’t fire, either. It’s raw power right before it transforms into something else-something more specific.

And now there’s a bunny.

“Fuck the damn bunny.”

Michelle doesn’t need to look to know who it is.

“Hey there, Joey,” she says. “Are we going to have zombies, too? ’Cause you know I love me some zombies.”

Hoodoo Mama crouches down in front of her. “This is no way to run a fucking railroad, Bubbles. Cocksuckers out here want you gone, baby, gone. You can’t stay like this.”

Michelle can’t look at Joey. Not after what they did.

“What? After we fucked?” Joey says. A group of zombies appears behind her. Damn it, Michelle thinks. It’s my dream and there are still zombies.

“Shit, Bubbles, if you get like this every time you tear off a piece…”

“Okay, that is so not what happened!” Michelle yells. But she remembers what went on between them and feels ashamed and aroused.

“Don’t you understand?” Michelle wails. “I betrayed Juliet. Why did I do that? And I’m now the size of a elephant and, apparently, too large to move or be moved. Oh, and if I’m not mistaken, I think I have the power of a nuclear explosion in me.”

The zombies vanish. Joey stands alone on a blighted landscape. She’s frail, tiny, and anyone could hurt her.

Then Michelle is back in the pit. Adesina is there. Her face is obscured by her hair come undone from its braids. She isn’t wearing the faded dress anymore. Her body is barely covered by rags.

“Adesina,” she says softly. Michelle crawls to her. She tries not to think about the corpses. She brushes the hair from Adesina’s face. A dark bruise swells on the girl’s left cheek. There are half-healed cuts on her chin and on her forehead.

“Why are you in my dreams?” she asks. Michelle puts her hands on Adesina’s temples. She allows images to flow through her mind, trying to connect.

Adesina pulls away. It hurts. Dreams aren’t supposed to hurt. Nothing hurts Michelle. And dreams don’t smell. And there is a definite lack of bunnies here. If there aren’t bunnies, then this isn’t a dream. But if this isn’t a dream, then what is it?

There are bodies piled up in the pit. They’re in different stages of decomposition. And it reeks. A stench so bad she can barely keep from gagging.

“Adesina, are you really down here?”

And as she says it, a shriek explodes in her mind and Michelle runs to the only place far enough away that she can’t hear it anymore.

The Sudd, Sudan

The Caliphate of Arabia

The sudd was a stinking swamp.

The bloated bodies, already rotting in the sun, didn’t help. Siraj gasped, gagged, dug a handkerchief out of his pocket, but the rising vomit couldn’t be stopped. He turned aside and puked. The bile and chunks pattered in the standing water. A breeze hissed through the papyrus, carrying away the scent of vomit, but bringing more stench of death and blood, overlaid with cordite and gunpowder. Smells Noel knew well.

They picked their way through the reeds and papyrus, seeking reasonably dry ground. Bodies floated in the waters to either side. There were more on the solid ground. Noel paused over one corpse. The man’s face was gone. He squatted down, and inspected the raw wound at the top of the corpse’s skull and beneath his jaw. “No bullet did that,” Siraj said.

“No. His face has been bitten off.” Noel pointed at the raw edges. “Those are teeth marks.” He stood and looked around. Now that he knew what to look for he saw many more faceless corpses.

“What does that?” Siraj asked.

“Probably not your average soldier in the Simba Brigade.”

They broke through the reeds to a relatively open, dry patch of ground. Ruined tanks sat smoldering like Easter Island monuments to some forgotten war god. Several of the tanks were tossed aside, as if a giant’s child had thrown them in a fit of massive pique.

“I think we can safely assume that Tom Weathers was here.” Noel scanned the tank graveyard and spotted a human figure leaning against the shattered treads of one reasonably intact tank.

He and Siraj ran to the man. His face was smoke-blackened, and blood had turned his shirt into caked armor. He was in his early forties, and he recognized Siraj. “Mr. President. I’m sorry.” He coughed, a wet sound that Noel didn’t like. “We were winning. We outnumbered the Simbas. But then a darkness came. Unnatural, horrible. Our troops were blind, but somehow the blacks could see. They massacred us. There was something else in the darkness. Not human. A demon.” His head lolled forward onto his chest.

“Those are not among Weathers’s known powers,” Noel mused.

“We need to get this man to a hospital,” Siraj snapped.

“We’ll drop him in Cairo on our way to Paris.”

“Why are we going to Paris?” Siraj slid his arm beneath the soldier’s. He gave a grunt as he lifted him.

“Because you need a drink,” Noel said.

Offices of Aces Magazine

Manhattan, New York

“This,” bugsy said to himself, “is why print media is dead.”

The offices of Aces magazine had once been in the hippest, happeningest part of Manhattan. They hadn’t moved, but the neighborhood had changed. The tides of years had eroded all the cool out from under the fashion and finance, leaving the streets decent but unexceptional, and tacitly on its way down. Like the magazine.

Bugsy leaned against the door, squinting through thick security glass into the darkness beyond. He’d only met Digger Downs a few times before during Bugsy’s somewhat foreshortened run on American Hero. It seemed like a lifetime ago. Three years, it had been. The guy had seemed sort of an asshole, as much as you could tell when he was at the big desk and you were singing your heart out to make your big break in showbiz. But he’d been picked by the Hollywood types for exactly the reason Bugsy was there now. He was old school. He knew where the bodies were buried. In a lot of ways, Digger Downs was the history of the wild card.

But the history of the wild card clearly didn’t work weekends. So screw it.

Bugsy shrugged his laptop case back up onto his shoulder and checked the time on his phone: 2:30. Still at least three hours before Ellen would be back at her place. He had some time to kill, and there were about half a billion Starbucks to choose from within an eight-block radius. He picked the third one he came to because it had the free wireless sign up in the window and the barista smiled at him when he paused outside the window.

Double-shot tall dry cappuccino firmly in hand, he staked out a tall chair by the front window that afforded a view of the street, popped open the laptop, quietly cursed Windows Vista again, rebooted the laptop, and spent fifteen minutes checking e-mail and catching up on a couple news blogs. He cracked his knuckles and the joints in his neck, then pulled up Google and dug through the largest single machine ever built by humanity for traces of the Radical.