George R.R. Martin - [Wild Cards 18] (35 page)

Noel hid a smile. Once again the human capacity to assume that everything was about
you
had kicked in and had the desired result.

“What are you saying about me?” Simoon asked.

“We weren’t talking about you,” Peregrine replied. Her tightly compressed lips allowed the wrinkles around her mouth to escape her careful makeup job. “And feeling the way I do about you right now, it would be better if you weren’t talking to me, either.”

“This is not my fault.”

“You told him about that damn thing!”

“And for all we know the amulet didn’t have anything to do with your house,” Simoon said. “That idiot Bugsy was there, and Lohengrin, and they’d all been drinking.”

“John was not drunk,” Peregrine gritted.

Simoon threw her hands up. “Okay. Fine. Have it your way. Ignore how he felt having to work for his mom, and having DB call him ‘Captain Cruller’ and everybody bossing him around. He was an ace. Now he’s just…ordinary.”

The girl started to walk away. “It was just a necklace. A piece of tourist trash,” Peregrine yelled after her.

Simoon turned around, but kept walking backwards as she yelled back, “If that’s the case, then why are you so pissed? Unless you really are afraid it was magical.”

The room, which had gone very quiet, erupted once again into frenzied conversations. Peregrine turned scarlet, and her eyes filled with tears. Noel pulled out a handkerchief and handed it to her. He murmured an apology and hurried out of the restaurant.

Oedipal issues didn’t interest Noel. What interested him was a magical amulet with an Egyptian connection.

He crossed the cracked marble foyer, out the doors and down the steps. Simoon sat slumped at one of the round concrete tables outside the studio cafeteria. Nothing exemplified the economic differences on a movie lot like these two restaurants. The one Noel had just left catered to the stars and the studio power brokers. The cafeteria fed everyone else. Noel
laid a hand on the girl’s shoulder and produced another handkerchief. She wiped her eyes. “Thanks. Sorry.”

“Not at all.” Noel pulled out his cigarette case. “Do you mind?” Simoon shook her head. He lit up.

“Turkish,” the girl said. “Uncle Osiris smokes them. I’ve never seen a white guy smoke one before.”

Noel tilted his hand and surveyed the cigarette. “My flat mate at Cambridge put me onto them.”

The girl stared back down at the cracked and weathered surface of the table. The Santa Ana wind whipped her dark hair around her face. A few strands caught on the lips of her generous mouth. She pulled them free and the motion lifted her bosom. She was short and stacked, and Noel felt a brief stirring in his trousers, but he knew the likely outcome, if he should disrobe.

Noel sat down next to her on the bench. “Would you tell me more about this amulet? You said it was magical, and I can’t help but be interested.” He gave her his most winning smile. “Call it professional curiosity.”

“I don’t know too much about it, but my mom called and started pushing me to tell John about it. It’s an
achet
, and Thoth gave it to Peregrine when she toured Egypt a million years ago. I guess she was pregnant, and the
achet
was supposed to be for her kid. But Peregrine never gave it to him. With everything that’s going on back in Egypt, my mom and Osiris and the other old folks were all twitching out about getting the necklace to John. Mom said to tell John that it gives the wearer the strength and power of Ra—blah, blah, blah. I thought it sounded just stupid, but Mom kept bugging me and bugging me, so I finally told him so she’d shut up about it and get off my back. I need to concentrate on what I’m doing here, and now I’ve pissed off Peregrine, and I’m just screwed.”

But Noel wasn’t really listening any longer.
Ra. The sun god in the ancient Egyptian pantheon. John Fortune seemed to have an affinity for light and fire. And Peregrine’s house did burn down
. His thoughts were spinning.
Of course this might all just be the maundering of desperate jokers looking for a miracle, and I may be seeing connections where none exist
.

Simoon stood up. “Well, I’m going to go back into the house. I think I’ve had as much fun as I can stand tonight.”

“Wait. You’re sure Bugsy and Lohengrin were with him?” Noel asked.

“Well, they’re missing, too.”

“You wouldn’t happen to have a cell number for any of them?”

He watched a series of complex emotions sweep across her face. She pulled out her phone. “I think I’ve got Bugsy’s. He kept calling me for a date.”

And obviously struck out
, Noel thought as he copied the number into his palm.

“Okay, I’m out of here. Thanks for the handkerchief.” She offered it back to him.

“Keep it.”

Noel watched her walk away, admiring the sway of her hips. Sparks arced through the dark as he flung away the cigarette. He dialed the number she had given him. A youthful, sleep-blurred voice answered.

“’Lo?”

Noel cut the connection, and checked. His phone, courtesy of the Order, contained a GPS tracker similar to those used by 911 operators. Bugsy hadn’t disabled the GPS feature on his phone. He was in the Nevada desert.

Noel called and arranged for a car to be delivered to his hotel.

Wakes the Lion

THE NIGHT WAS DARK
, the ground was cold, and John Fortune had no idea where he was.

Lying on his back, he looked up at a black, star-spangled sky. He seemed to be in the bottom of a shallow gully, hemmed in by rough-hewn rocks and boulders, without a taco stand, road, car, or streetlight in sight. When he held his hands in front of his face, he could barely see his fingers. His chest felt funny, his throat raw. His body hurt all over, as if he’d just run back-to-back-to-back marathons. Even more distressingly, he was totally naked.

He lurched to his feet, wincing in sudden pain as small, sharp stones on the floor of the arroyo dug into the bottoms of his feet. “What happened to my clothes?” he asked aloud.

There came no answer.

He lurched in a circle, dizzy and coughing. He remembered…he remembered the skittering thing crawling under his skin, like a rat burrowing into his body. The fear that had enveloped him. There had been a man, clad in shining white, who’d tried to kill him with a sword…
wallah!
Fire had danced all around him, and smoke blinded his eyes. Maybe the fire had taken his clothes—but no, that idea was ridiculous. He had no burn marks on skin or flesh.

Finally he remembered—he had run, bursting out of the house into the night. The feeling of freedom had been exhilarating, intoxicating. He had run for hours.
How many hours?

How many miles?
He did not know. In the end he had collapsed, exhausted.
Here
.

Wherever here was.

Fortune shivered. He couldn’t just sit here all night. He had to get back to Los Angeles. He was starving. He’d never been so hungry. He needed food, bad.
And clothes
. He couldn’t sit around butt naked in the middle of nowhere and wait for help. Help of any kind was unlikely to find him. He’d have to seek it out.

And if that thing was still in him, he really needed medical attention.

He remembered that the thing had been scuttling toward his head. Hesitantly, he put his hands on his jaw, gingerly felt his cheeks, up around his ears and across his forehead—where he felt a lump. The thing that had climbed into his body was still in his head.

John Fortune freaked and ran. Or tried to.

He clawed his way up the side of the arroyo, sliding back down several times in a rain of gravel and sand. Once he dislodged a rock near the edge of the dirt bank that would have crushed him if it had landed on him, but somehow, miraculously, it missed when they both tumbled back to the gully’s floor.

Somehow, he dragged himself up out of the arroyo. He glanced around wildly, desperately looking for something, anything that might hold a hope of aid. He was in wild, undeveloped foothills that dropped down to a plain dotted by clumps of stunted evergreens. The ground was sparsely covered by small shrubby bushes, tufts of grass and cactus, which he discovered when he brushed too near one and scratched his left leg from calf to ankle. The sudden pain acted like a pitcher of cold water thrown in his face. He tried to breathe easier. Aided by the light cast by the rising moon, he spotted a dark ribbon of what could be a road, or at least a path or trail of some kind, free of the stones that were tearing up his bare feet.

He started toward it, cautiously but quickly, eager to find some human contact, someone who could tell him what had happened to him and assure him that he’d be all right. …

He was thirsty, and his hunger was so great that his stomach cramped like it did before his monthly blood came. The moon rising above the foothills was gigantic in the night sky. The jackals who laired in the wadis greeted it, howling. Fortune’s head throbbed in rhythm with their cries. The hunger was bad, but he was used to it. He had often gone without food, when that meant that his children could be fed. Not that his sacrifices had helped much in the long run. He had lost them all, one by one. Jamal burning with fever, clutched hopelessly to his breast, nothing to feed him but the salt tears dripping from his cheeks
.

The road was more of a dirt track than a highway, but it was smooth and soft on his bruised feet. The jackals didn’t follow him on it, but the flies did. They weren’t as bad as the flies in the marketplace, but they bothered him as they buzzed around his head, whispering, leading him perhaps back to the temple where there was shade and water and blessed rest, and …

What was he thinking?!

These were not his thoughts, these memories of a life he’d never led. Jackals? Children? A temple? John Fortune’s hands rose to his forehead, then dropped down, afraid to touch that thing that had burrowed beneath his skin and climbed to his brain. These weird memories had to be coming from it, athough…they were human memories, and that thing had been…a
thing
. An amulet-size bug that had been nesting in his mother’s chest of drawers since before he’d been born. A scarab, a beetle, not…
not a person!

Fortune wandered down the path, not knowing what to think, not even wanting to think. Sometime later he stumbled upon a hardtop road.
This is more like it
.

His hopes rose higher when he saw a building settled in one corner of a lonely crossroads, unlit and seemingly deserted. Still, there was at least a chance that it might contain something useful. Some food to soothe his cramping stomach. Some water to cool his burning forehead. Maybe a phone to call his mother. Some clothes.
Some goddamn shoes
. His feet were killing him.

It was a gas station, existing somewhere in a state between
abandoned and decrepit. Its roof sagged badly. The dusty pumps in front of it had not been used for years. The chair by the front door, looking as if it had been used too much over the years, was half off its rocker. It was almost inviting enough to drop onto, but Fortune wasn’t sure if it would hold his weight, and the bamboo lattice seat would probably have been fairly uncomfortable on his bare ass.

The glass-windowed storefront was only slightly less dusty than the disused gasoline pumps. Encouragingly, however, of the three words—GAS FOOD DRINK—etched into its surface, only the word gas had been crudely crossed out by a couple of swatches of duct tape.

The front door was aluminum bars set between sagging screens to keep the flies out. It was locked, though it didn’t look very sturdy. Fortune considered it for a moment, then grabbed the handle and yanked at it with all his strength. A low rumble sounded deep in his throat, surprising him, and his legs, back, and arms knotted from sustained effort, as the door slowly peeled away from its warped wooden frame with complaining metallic screeches. It finally came mostly clear, hanging limply by its hinges. Fortune was breathing heavily when he stepped through the doorway, but he finally felt as if he’d accomplished something, even if the B & E made him feel mildly guilty. Still, he could pay back the storekeeper, once he’d recovered his black Amex card.