Wild Cards: Death Draws Five (19 page)

After a moment his eyes adjusted to the gloom, and he realized that he was in an abandoned building. Probably not in an interior room because light was filtering through holes in the walls and down through the floors above. It was artificial light, and it wasn’t abundant. The building was apparently located in an area with few functioning streetlights.

Fortunato wasn’t entirely unfamiliar with buildings that looked like they’d gone through the blitz and then been taken over by clans of cave-dwelling troglodytes who weren’t picky about personal sanitation or garbage disposal. When he was a kid he’d often played in similar ruins. Sometimes he and his friends would stumble across drunks and jokers while exploring derelict structures, but such creatures were usually more scared of him than he was of them. Though there had been exceptions.

He swiveled unto his hands and knees, grimacing in disgust at the urine, blood, and come stains on the mattress the Jokka Bruddas had dropped him on. At least, he thought, they didn’t just dump me on broken glass and nail-studded debris. But he wasn’t in the mood to be particularly forgiving to the thugs who’d ambushed, then kidnapped him. He was in the mood to hit back. Hard.

He pushed himself to his feet, swaying as a wave of nausea threatened to overwhelm him.

Concussion, damn it, he thought.

He clenched his teeth and staggered like a drunk, sending bits of building debris and a couple of empty liquor bottles skittering across the floor, eventually colliding against a wall mostly reduced to naked studs. The few wall panels that remained were covered with gang graffiti.

Not much has changed since I was a kid, Fortunato thought. This must be the Bruddas hangout. The center of their turf. The desire to get even with the joker punks was suddenly quenched by the realization that he was in danger. Potentially fatal danger. Got to get out of here.

He pushed away from the wall and stood straight, scowling darkly at nothing. He suddenly realized that he was thinking like the old Fortunato, not the Fortunato who had spent fifteen years trying to learn how to cloak himself in serenity. Worry about that later. Worry now about getting your ass out of here before those punks show up and finish you.

“Well look who’s awake,” a voice said from behind him. “That crazy old Fortunato.”

Too late, he told himself grimly.

Carlos and his gang of tormentors came from somewhere inside the abandoned structure where probably the rooms were intact and the garbage less ubiquitous. Their numbers had been augmented by an extra eight or ten other jokers. Fortunato squinted at them blearily. Some of the newcomers were possibly female.

Ricky, the giant, stooped low so he could get through the doorway into Fortunato’s room. His high voice squeaked something that Fortunato’s still-dazed brain couldn’t quite make out. Most of the others laughed.

“Careful, Ricky,” Carlos said in mock fear. “He’s Fortunato! He’s a mean old ace. Why, my Dad told me that he can fly. He can throw lightning with his hands. Watch out, hermano. All you can do is hit him. Like you done before.”

The girl (at least Fortunato assumed it was a girl) clinging to his arm tittered, and repeated, “Hit him, hit him, hit him!”

The rest of the Bruddas took up the chant. Ricky smiled as he approached, bowing at the waist so his face was almost level with Fortunato’s. Fortunato stood as straight as he could, even though his head whirled with vertigo and he felt like puking. He moved fast and was almost on target. His fist struck the joker in the cheek, and stuck there.

Ricky’s flesh was coated with a layer of slime with the consistency of thick mucilage. Fortunato pulled, and the joker’s skin stretched a good half foot until it was taut, but he couldn’t yank his fist free. Ricky laughed. He grabbed Fortunato around the waist with his titan-sized hands and lifted him high, smashing him against what was left of the room’s ceiling.

Fortunato grunted, absorbing the blow as best he could, though nausea-tinged pain washed through his system like a tidal wave.

“Don’t break him, Ricky,” Carlos said. “Let us play with ‘em, too. We wanna teach the old bastard a lesson. Let us show him who’s the power in J-town, now.”

His fellow gangbangers howled as Ricky tossed him contemptuously to the floor. Fortunato felt glass shards rip his clothes and score the flesh beneath as he skidded half a score of feet to right in front of the Bruddas. He looked up, groaning in pain. All he saw was a sea of horrific faces surrounding him. He knew they were eager for his blood.

“You know what’s funny, old man?” Carlos asked with a mocking smile. He reached into his back pocket and took out a rolled up magazine, an old issue of Aces! Digger, no doubt, Fortunato thought, would be pleased. The joker finally found the page he was looking for, opened the magazine and held it out for Fortunato to see. Fortunato squinted at it, but he couldn’t quite make out the photo. “You are Fortunato.” Carlos looked back and forth from the photo in the magazine to Fortunato, lying in the debris at his feet. “At least, you look like the old motherfucker. Well, whatever.”

Carlos tossed the magazine over his shoulder, where it landed on the floor with the other, less savory garbage.

“It don’ matter,” he said, explaining the situation to Fortunato. “We win, in any case. If you are Fortunato, we beat you until you nice and tender, then we cut you, we cook you, and we eat you.” Carlos smiled. “I get your liver. I hope you not a drinking man, because I like them nice and tender. It’s, like, a sacrament. Body and blood, man. Body and blood. If you not, if you just a crazy old man, we still get a nice meal. See, fucker, any way, we win.”

He drew a knife from a sheath he carried in the small of his back. It wasn’t a fighting knife. It was a filleting knife.

Fortunato tried to stand as they closed around him. He couldn’t rise. His head hurt like a beaten gong. His insides felt wrong where Ricky had squeezed him. All he could do was roll over on his stomach, pull his knees in and cover his head with his arms as the blows started to fall. Some of the jokers kicked him, some beat him with boards and pipes and other handy weapons. He quickly lost track of what was happening as he drowned in an ocean of sudden pain.

I’m Fortunato, he screamed silently. I’m Fortunato. It can’t end like this. Blood thundering in his ears, agony washed across him like a tidal wave. He screamed, “Help me, someone help me.”

As total blackness claimed him, he couldn’t even be sure that he had spoken aloud.

♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

New York City: St Dympna’s Home for the Mentally Deficient and Criminally Inclined

Jerry stood before the locked door, twisting his forefinger like a key in a lock. There was a click as the lock sprung, and he extricated his finger from the keyhole. A couple of inches of bone, shaped like a key, protruded from the tip of his bloody forefinger. A skeleton key, Jerry thought.

He rarely had the opportunity to use this aspect of his shape-shifting powers. Even though it kind of hurt when he extruded the bone through the meat of his fingertip, it pleased him when he had the chance to exercise this particular talent. As far as he knew, it was unique in the wild card world. He turned and waved a silent good-bye to his erstwhile companions. Their presence had been something of a pain in the butt, as he had to wait until he was sure they were all asleep before he made his escape, but they had also helped him in their own way. First, one of them had supplied Jerry’s current outfit. Jerry had waited until he was sure that they were all asleep before rummaging through their clothes to find something that fit, but it was better making his escape in the sweaty and bloodstained fatigues than in a hospital gown with his ass sticking out.

Second, they were all more severely wounded than Jerry was pretending to be, so he was able to wave most of the medical attention away from himself, insisting that the nurse check them out before turning to him. It would have been pretty embarrassing if they’d discovered that Jerry wasn’t really injured at all. In fact, one of his companions had been so badly hurt that they’d taken him to a real hospital. The medics hadn’t yet returned to the infirmary, which made Jerry’s escape all the easier.

He crossed the dark reception room and listened carefully, his ear against the door, but there was no sound in the corridor outside. He inserted his finger in the lockplate of the door to the corridor, hoping that he wouldn’t have to grow another key. It took time to mold the bone around the intricacies of a lock, and he wasn’t sure how much time he had before a guard might show up. He wasn’t sure if the corridors were guarded at all, but even if they weren’t there was always the chance of running into someone going to the kitchen for a snack. The last thing he wanted to do was raise an alarm. He was one against how many he couldn’t even began to guess. He could only trust to the efficacy of his Dagon impersonation, and to lessen the chance of someone penetrating it, move quietly and stealthily. Jerry was good at that, but he had a feeling he would need more than skill to spring John Fortune. He would need luck as well, and that was something he hadn’t been blessed with.

It could be worse, he thought. I could really be hurt as bad as Dagon had seemed to be.

The corridor was quiet and dimly lit by infrequent nightlights. Following the way he’d originally come, he found the staircase, and, as they did on the way up, by-passed whatever was on the second and first floors and went directly to the basement.

That area of the rambling old building was not quite as well appointed as the rest of the structure. The walls were rough-dressed stone blocks. The floors were actually flagstone. The basement reminded Jerry uncomfortably of every dungeon he’d seen in every medieval epic ever filmed. The rooms leading off the main corridor were dungeon-like cells with stout oaken doors that had tiny iron-barred windows set into them. All that was missing was the fat, hairy-stomached turnkey with a hunchback and black hood.

Jerry stopped to look down a corridor lit even more dimly than those on the floor above. His noise suddenly crinkled in disgust. “What’s that smell?” he asked himself quietly.

It was dampness compounded by a rank animal odor that was teasingly familiar. Jerry cat-footed by the first cell, heard an odd sound and stopped and looked in through the tiny window set in the cell door. In the dim light he could discern a twisted shape, human turned animal. He realized that this was also the source of the peculiar smell, as waves of it streamed through the window, gagging him.

It was the joker they’d led around by a leash, the one they called Blood. He was sleeping curled up in a pile of straw in one corner of the stone-floored room. Something about the very sight of the creature made Jerry shiver.

Then he woke up and looked right at Jerry. His lips curled back from his protruding teeth in a silent snarl.

Jerry froze. He didn’t want the joker to raise a ruckus and alert whatever guards may be lurking around the dungeon. He smiled. “Good boy,” he said lowly in as kindly a tone as he could muster. “Good do—good fellow.”

Blood cocked his head in an inquisitive manner, and got up from the pile of hay, stretching luxuriously. He went to a corner of the cell, lifted his leg and urinated on a pile of newspaper spread out evidently for that purpose while Jerry kept his feelings of disgust off his face. There was no telling how smart this creature was, and he didn’t want the thing pissed at him. Blood stretched again and ambled over to the door, looking up with what Jerry took to be a hopeful expression.

“What do you want?” Jerry looked around for something to placate the joker, and noticed a large can of Spam sitting on the floor near the cell door. He picked it up and held it in the window for Blood to see. Blood started to drool.

“Quiet now!” Jerry ordered as the joker showed signs of growing excitement. Somehow Jerry was certain that opening the can would be beyond the joker’s capabilities, so he detached the key and cranked the lid open himself. He slid the slab of glistening meat by-product from the can and tossed it through the barred window. Blood caught the slab in his mouth and capered back to his pile of hay where he carefully arranged himself and started to bolt it down as Jerry wiped his hand on his pants, fighting the queasy feeling in the pit of his stomach.

“I’ve got to get out of this place,” he told himself.

He went on down the corridor, glancing into every cell he passed, fighting the impulse to call out loud to John Fortune. Most of the cells were empty. A few were occupied by men who were either sleeping or gazed at Jerry with dull, lifeless eyes that seemed to be without a spark of intelligence. He moved past these rapidly, afraid that they might say something, might make a plea that he couldn’t answer.

He arrived at the next to last cell in the row. He still had the entire other side of the corridor to check, but he was getting fearful that something had gone wrong, that they’d already taken John Fortune somewhere, that they’d done something awful to him and he’d never get the kid back. When he looked in the cell he saw in the dim light a slim, youthful body standing half hidden in the darkness and hope again flared to life.

“John,” he whispered urgently, and the body moved, quick as a cat, running silently to grip the bars of the window set in the thick door, and he knew right away from the shape of it, from the long, flowing hair, that this was not John Fortune.

“Who are you?” she cried. “Did Nighthawk send you?”

“Nighthawk?” Jerry asked, confused.