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.
Wikipedia gave a decent overview. Tom Weathers, the Radical, had first appeared in China in 1993. That was actually a lot more recent than he’d thought. He followed some of the reference links at the bottom of the entry. As long as the fascists, the capitalists, and the willing collaborators hold the reigns of power, it is the duty of the people to oppose them. When the last landlord in the world is strangled with the intestines of the last banker, the work of peace can begin. Until that, any discussion of peace is treason against the people.
Bugsy figured the guy probably meant “reins,” but whatever. He read on for another few sentences, muttered “yadda yadda blah blah blah” under his breath, and went to a different site. There were a long series of small wars, guerrilla resistances, police actions, and freedom-fighting brotherhoods that Weathers had gotten himself involved in over the years. Burma, Indonesia, Colombia, Turkmenistan, Afghanistan… Yadda yadda blah blah blah.
A wild cards discussion board had a thread on him. It hadn’t been updated in a couple of years, but the archived conversation painted the same picture. The Radical was against the Man in all His forms, fighting for whomever he was fighting for and against whatever he decided was fascist or oppressive. He had a bunch of powers, real charisma, and a bad habit of deciding his allies weren’t politically pure enough. There were half a dozen sites that sold T-shirts with his face, many with slogans in alphabets Bugsy didn’t recognize right off.
“Need anything?” the barista asked. She was maybe twenty-two, blond, with the black tips of a tattoo sneaking out from her shirt near her collarbone.
“Freedom from the oppressors,” he said cheerfully.
“Word,” she replied in the whitest, most middle-class voice imaginable.
It would have been funnier if Bugsy hadn’t thought the Radical would have killed both of them, just for joking about it.
The willing collaborators. It sounded like a garage band.
Tuileries Garden
Paris, France
“If weathers doesn’t have these powers, then what killed my soldiers?” Siraj gripped the stem of his champagne glass like a man hugging a life preserver.
“Other aces. Aces plural.” Noel sipped his Hendricks gin martini and savored the cool/hot smoothness on the back of his tongue.
Siraj knocked back his champagne in a single gulp and waved his glass at a passing waiter. He got the usual Gallic sniff, frown, and shrug, but the man did head toward the bar. Noel looked out the window at the Tuileries Garden across the street. He had wanted to sit outside, but the late November rain made that impossible. The furled umbrellas in the metal tables looked like hunched, skeletal men in dripping coats.
“Then the PPA has multiple aces.” Siraj’s voice was heavy with despair. “How can that be? The release of the virus was localized over New York. The preponderance of aces has always been in America. I had one… Bahir… you. Now I have none. Unless…?” The implicit question hung in the air between.
Noel held up a restraining hand. “Oh, no, no, no, no. Weathers has sworn to kill Bahir.”