Not until a joker covered all over with extrusions like fleshy leaves stepped up and twitched the .45 from his hand. Sobel frowned then. “What’s your name, soldier?” he demanded.
The joker flung himself forward and buried his teeth in his throat.
The Colonel reeled backward. And then the jokers were all over him, snarling and shrieking, darting in, clawing each other in their frenzy to get a piece of the action. Mark heard screaming, weird, unearthly. He saw blood arc, near-black by torchlight.
He saw the Colonel’s fine head raise up. And up, and up, until it was held overhead at the full extension of a pair of joker arms.
Mark threw up.
The two aces, the Vietnamese officers, and Casaday had trailed some distance behind Sobel when the Colonel walked over to investigate the disturbance by the cage. They were outside the lethal radius of the first explosion of joker rage.
No sooner had Sobel vanished beneath swarming bodies than a wave of jokers came for the little group. One reached taloned hands for Billy Ray.
His first reaction was to bat them away from his blood-spattered uniform. “Hey! Don’t touch the merchandise.”
The claws came back in a slash and laid open his cheek. That made everything different.
Carnifex smiled.
He caught the raking hand as it went past. With a mighty torque of his wrist he snapped the forearm. Then he shattered the joker’s snouted face with a vertical punch.
His own oddly matched assortment of features contorted in a triumphant Bruce Lee grimace. He let the joker drop.
He turned to the charging pack. An overhand right splintered teeth and snapped a joker head back so hard the neck vertebrae shattered like dropped plates. A sideways shuto snapped the arm of a second like a dead tree branch. Pivoting, Billy sank the fingers of his left hand into a joker’s belly with such force that the tips popped right through skin. He hoisted the howling joker above his head, the blood spattering his face and uniform like red rain, and threw him in the faces of his friends.
“I love a par—tay!” he cried.
Half a dozen jokers surrounded Crypt Kicker, standing silent and black to one side. They grabbed him, jostling each other for advantages of grip as they prepared to tear him apart as they had the Colonel.
Then they fell back shrieking, their hands and clothing smoking. The black shirt was melting away from the Kicker’s big chest and shoulders, revealing desiccated, discolored flesh beneath.
From inside the mask emerged a laugh that sounded like the tank army on the move around them.
O. K. Casaday had his Beretta M9 out. He stuck it in the multicolored face of a joker and fired. Eyes popped from sockets, brain and blood flew out in a mist.
He looked around. Vo and the two regulars had their sidearms out and were firing into the mob. The Aussie soak had his face covered with his hands, which was probably as constructive a thing as he could be doing.
“Let’s get back to the temple!” Casaday yelled. “We can fort up there.”
“It’s no good,” the junior PAVN officer sobbed. “They are too many!”
“Then fucking die here!”
“He’s right,” Carnifex said, momentarily out of foes. “Even the Alamo’s better than the parking lot.”
“Him! He’s the one! He got Eric offed!”
“Get the fuckin’ ace! Get him!”
With Sobel turned into organic confetti and Sobel’s entourage proving hard to swallow, the mob turned its attention on the cage. The occupant was supposed to be tonight’s feature performer, after all.
Of course the victim was supposed to be a beautiful, vulnerable young woman. That it wasn’t only pissed them off more.
Mark felt a pang as he twisted the plastic cap off the vial. It doesn’t look quite right, man.
You fool! the Traveler shrilled. What if it’s tainted?
With luck, J. J. Flash thought grimly, it kills us quicker than the mob will.
Mark slammed the contents.
He knew at once that he was fucked.
The earth began to shake. The jokers nearest the cage fell to the hard-packed ground.
A wind began to blow toward the cage from all directions. It scoured dust from the ground, raised it in a swirling, dense cloud that completely hid the cage from view. The jokers turned and scrabbled away, frantic lest they be sucked into the vortex of wind.
The ground kept shaking. The wind grew to a whistle, to a roar. The cloud mounted higher and higher, till it topped the peaked roof of the pagoda.
Lightning split the cloud. And then the whirling pillar of dust … vanished.
With one horrified voice the New Joker Brigade screamed.
Everyone has them inside, the little monsters. Creatures composite of all our repressed anger, all our pain, all our envy and jealousy and unspeakable desire. Like the sixties themselves, with their bright promise of peace and love and dope and hope that turned to shit in Altamont and the SLA, even gentle Mark, the Last Hippie, had his dark side.
He had been driving himself to exhaustion’s jagged edge, the last weeks — and beyond, to the all-too-brief interval in Holland, a halcyon interval of peace between Takis and flight. He had been slamming his Moonchild potion repeatedly, though it took a ferocious cumulative toll. He had been mixing his potions in the worst possible circumstances — on the run, under stress, under less than laboratory conditions. His component chemicals were of dubious provenance and purity.
When he took the unknown potion, he did not summon one of his friends. He opened the gate upon the Pit.
He rose from a crater his lust for substance had sucked from the side of mother Earth. He swelled until he stood a full seventy feet, a manlike figure, mighty with malice, his skin greenish-black, lustrous from a distance, up close rough and abrasive as the hide of a shark. His fingers were tipped with long black talons. Lightnings wreathed his head, which was huge and horned like a longhorn’s. His eyes were rattlesnake eyes, slit-pupiled, and they glowed with the yellow flame of Hell. His breath withered the forest where it blew.
Between his massive-muscled thighs he carried a gigantic hard-on for the world.
He was full of hate and pain. He was hate and pain. He tipped his enormous head back and roared with the awful joy of liberation. The flames of his gut lit his gullet like Moloch’s.
Mark’s alter egos took their names from sixties songs. Hair was overrepresented, with two, and the others came from King Crimson and Dave Mason and the Rolling Stones by way of Johnny Winter. Many of Mark’s favorite groups were totally neglected. There were no Beatles characters, no Dead, no Destiny, no Quicksilver Messenger Service. He had no potion to turn into the Crown of Creation or Mr. Skin or the Ramblin’ Man. But maybe now he had a persona for that other quintessential sixties group, Steppenwolf.
Call this one … Monster.
“What the fuck,” O. K. Casaday demanded, “is that?”
Standing on the temple steps, Carnifex rubbed his jaw, feeling the knobbed adhesions of countless healed breaks. “That,” he said, “is Cap’n Trips’ newest secret identity, unless I miss my goddam guess.”
Monster bent forward. A vast hand swooped down, caught up Rhino. The German joker squirmed, too terrified to try to defend himself with his powerful horn. For all the good it might have done him.
Monster held him up, studying him with yellow fire eyes. Then he tossed the joker down his throat. His fanged jaw slammed shut on a scream.
The New Joker Brigaders took off in all directions. Odds of several hundred to one didn’t look so attractive anymore.
With a squealing clatter like a steamer trunk thrown down a flight of stairs, a tank crashed into the clearing from the far side, shouldering aside young trees in sprays of splinters. “Thank God,” the junior PAVN officer breathed, and crossed himself