George Martin - Suicide Kings

“Oh, God, Juliet… don’t.”

Juliet just cried harder. Michelle glanced at Hoodoo Mama-she felt guilty doing so with Juliet’s hot tears dropping on her. She shoved her guilt away and a stab of anger rose up in her.

It was Tom Weathers’s fault that she was here and that she couldn’t bubble even though she’d spent the last couple of hours trying to. There was this insane power in her and she couldn’t figure out how to get rid of it.

And that scared her so much she thought she might lose her mind. And then none of it mattered because Adesina was still stuck in that pit and Michelle couldn’t help her as long as she was trapped in her fat.

Another of Juliet’s tears fell on Michelle’s head and brought her back to New Orleans. The last time she had seen Juliet, she’d gone corporate for her job with Billy Ray. Now her hair was short and spiky again. But her tats weren’t the pretty Mayan ones she’d favored in her punk days. Now they were black and tribal and aggressive.

And then Michelle noticed that Joey and Juliet were dressed alike: both of them wore Joker Plague T-shirts and ratty jeans. What had happened to change Juliet back into a punk chick, and what had made Joey a fan of Joker Plague? Michelle knew the signs of girls who had hung out too long together. They’d gone all hive-mind. “What’s happening, Joey?” she asked. It was getting easier to talk. “Where am I? This is still New Orleans, isn’t it?”

“Jackson Fucking Square,” said Joey. “After you ate that fucking nuke you got really big and really, really, really, really heavy. The cocksuckers couldn’t move you, so, for a while, they just put up a tent around you.”

Michelle shook her head. Or at least she tried to. “How long have I been here?”

“A year and change.”

Michelle was staggered. A year. A year. A YEAR? She was cold, then hot, and then cold again. Her hands started shaking. How was she even alive after a year?

“I know it sounds like a long time…” Juliet said.

Joey interrupted her. “You just missed Thanksgiving. The city erected this temple thing over you after they couldn’t keep the tourists and grateful citizens away from your massive ass. You’re a cocksucking saint to most of the dumbasses on this planet. Except your shit-stain parents, who got you taken off life support so they could get their hands on your money again.

“Oh, and fuck me sideways, but Tiffani’s been coming down here every chance she gets to read to you all night long. She told us you weren’t dead. Fuck me if she wasn’t right about that one.”

Michelle tried to take a deep breath, but it didn’t work. It felt like someone had punched her in the gut. Except that that usually felt pretty good. This felt horrible. Her parents had tried to kill her.

“You okay, Michelle?” Juliet asked. “You’re looking pale. Should we get the doctor?”

Joey threw up her arms. “Jesus H. Motherfucking Christ on a pogo stick, Ink. She’s not dying. She just heard that her dick-lickin’ parents tried to kill her to get at her money. No one would take that good.”

Michelle closed her eyes. She wanted to throw up. She wanted to run away. She wanted to scream. She wanted to cry. Was she just going to be some kind of freak for the rest of her life? A mound of flesh with so much power inside her that it hurt?

Tears stung her eyes. She hoped that Juliet wouldn’t notice. She hated being this repulsive and she hated being so helpless.

Sunday,

November 29

Paraguacu River

Bahia State, Brazil

Big crocs swam the muddy river around him. As the dolphin slid through the water with near effortless undulations of his sleek and powerful body, driven by his tail flukes, he sensed them with sonic sprays emitted from his jaw, processing the echoes with the liquid mass that gave the distinctive bulge to his forehead.

He felt no fear. For he was the baddest motherfucker in the Paraguacu River. A dolphin had a rostrum-a beak-capable of killing great white sharks. What were overgrown aquatic river lizards to him?

The warm fresh water had a land taste, an oleaginous feel. He reveled in it anyway. Almost reluctantly, he steered toward the island.

As he began to break water he saw the hut waiting among mangroves, the woman on its porch, as blurs in sundry shades. Greater detail emerged as he approached, but what were mere eyes, especially in the desiccating air, against the sensory richness of sound in water?

On his last arcing lunge he left the river’s embrace completely. The sandy silt of the bottom caressed his belly when he splashed down. It took an effort of will to will the change. When he emerged from the water, dripping water from his leanly muscled, naked bipedal form, he was Tom Weathers again.

“Hoo,” he said, shaking water from his golden hair. “And to think that just a moment ago I was thinking of this air as dry. There’s a perspective change.” To his human nostrils the air smelled so ripely of tannin-rich water and wet-leaved mangrove forest it almost made his head swim.

The woman laughed. His human eyes made her out clearly. Forty-something or not, a naked Sun Hei-lian was well worth seeing. “I can never get over that particular power of yours,” she called as he trudged up the gravel-paved trail from the water’s edge to the rough plank steps with the slanting late-afternoon spring sun stinging his skin from upriver. “How’d you ever get the ability to do something like that?”

The question made his nut-sac tense up as if to crawl back in his belly. “There’s no limit to what the power of world revolution can do,” he said. “You should know that, Shang Xiao.”

It meant “Colonel.” The world at large knew Hei-lian as an intrepid trouble telejournalist for Chinese Central Television’s English-language news service. The intelligence community knew her as a top agent of China’s well-feared Ministry of State Security: the Guojia Anquan Bu, or Guoanbu for short. Beijing had set her to seduce the PPA’s superpotent and mercurial Western ace.

She’d succeeded so well she was now the People’s Republic’s chief advisor to its ally Nshombo, the hard-core male chauvinism of her communist gerontocrat bosses notwithstanding. And in the process she’d fallen in love with her chief subject.

“If you say so,” she said.

As he clomped up the steps beneath the thatch overhang of the roof she handed him an open bottle of almost self-luminous green fluid. It chilled his palm, meaning it came straight from the cooler they’d brought with them from Salvador, capital of Brazil’s Bahia state, about thirty miles downstream where the river emptied into the Atlantic. The little shack had no electricity or running water or any modern conveniences.

Which didn’t seem to impair its popularity as a weekend retreat for urban baianos; getting it hadn’t been easy. Especially since Tom couldn’t exactly flash his ace powers to impress the booking agent. This was supposed to be a hideout, after all: he never spent the night in the same place twice running. That running-dog teleport Bahir was still on his case, too, and he had to sleep sometime.

More and more he was growing reluctant to let himself sleep at all, for reasons having nothing to do with the golden-eyed Arab ace.

Tom twisted off the cap and took a hit. The coolness suffusing outward from his throat was welcome relief after walking a mere thirty feet. Although it was “cool” only by comparison to the mind-blowing tropic heat.

Holding a half-full beer, Hei-lian leaned against the side of the doorway, an oblong cut through warped wood to the darkness of the interior. Her long black hair was pulled back in a ponytail. Her skin, normally ivory tinged pink, glowed gold in the angled light.