Tim Powers - Last Call (72 page)

Leon was pale. His hands were trembling, but he gripped the cards as if they were a lifeline and he were drowning.

The hot breeze through the ports was cold on Crane's sweaty forehead, and he remotely wondered what his mascara must look like. "Seven," he said stolidly.

Doctor Leaky was not speaking anymore, but shifted furiously in his fouled clothes against the restraint of the safety belt.

"Yours," said the pale young man, pushing his chair back from the table and getting up to go to the bar.

Leon flipped up the Six and Eight of Cups next to his showing Knight of Sticks and Seven of Swords and pushed the four cards over to Crane.

"Deliver our child healthy, Mother," said Leon as he, too, stood up and reeled away across the tilted red carpet, toward the wheelchair-bound figure of Doctor Leaky. Leon could be heard muttering in an urgently soothing tone to the very old man.

Crane hoped he would be able to deliver the healthy child in question. Two of the players had bought the wrong hands, and now one of them, Crane knew, held an Ace-high Flush in Coins, which would beat Crane's own King-high Flush in Swords if they both stayed in to the showdown.

Crane pointed at that player, who was showing two Aces. "Aces are the power," Crane said flatly.

The player, a haggard young man with a two-day beard, blinked when Crane spoke to him and then fumbled in his stack of bills.

"Aces are worth two," he said, tossing out two hundred-dollar bills.

Diana hopped back away from a pair of life-size faceless mannequins, and she lost her footing in the loose sand and sat down heavily; before she could scramble back up to her feet and limp to where Nardie was slashing right and left with the chip, the two figures had managed to burningly claw her shoulder and side.

The pair of mannequins were moving awkwardly, like newborn mechanical colts, and the eyeless fronts of their heads swept back and forth metronomically.

Diana clutched the back of Nardie's shirt and tried to take deep breaths of the stale, hot air and hold back the glittery haze of unconsciousness.

There was no way she and Nardie were going to be able to fight their way through these things down to the lake.

She wondered if they could even make it back to the highway now—the increasingly solid angular transparencies were crowding around on that side, too, so that the passing cars on the far side were just flickering blobs of refracted color in the incalculable distance—and she wondered bleakly if getting all the way back to that solid asphalt pavement would, in fact, help at all. What if the drivers of the cars proved to be just more hinged zombies?

From the corner of her eye she glimpsed a couple of figures.

"Behind you!" Diana yelled as the same two faceless mannequins came scissor-stepping across the sand.

But they
weren't
faceless anymore; their faces, though expressionless, were solid, and they were recognizably the faces of Nardie and Diana themselves.

Nardie flinched back from the things, and Diana had to skip aside to keep from being knocked down.

And Nardie hopped forward in a spasmodic lunge, sweeping the edge of the diminishing chip across the space where the mimic faces had been an instant before.

The Diana-thing and the Nardie-thing had gone flailing and scuffling away backward.

Then Nardie had turned her back on them and was slashing madly, gasping, and cutting a path through the phantasms as if the Moulin Rouge chip were a machete. She was crowding up, sliding her feet forward through the sand to claim every slack yard or foot or inch, away from the two figures and perhaps toward the water, and Diana limped along after her.

"They've started to …
digest
us," panted Diana.

An idea intruded itself into her mind, and she moaned hopelessly.

"We've got to do more," she said in a voice that shook with exhaustion.

"Like what?" panted Nardie.

"The goddamn
chip
is what they can't digest, what repels them," Diana called. "We've got to do more than just
cut
ourselves with it." She had to lash out and hit one of the Huck Finn boys from the riverboat facade of the Holiday Casino, and she shouted in pain as the grinning boy's teeth scored her wrist, but the figure did fall back. "Cutting our hands with the chip was a token, a gesture," she sobbed, shaking her burned hand. "This isn't about tokens. Look at the chip now."

Nardie feinted furiously, and then, in the bought second of the figures' retreat, she held up what was left of the Moulin Rouge chip. It was a flimsy white disk now, seeming as thin as paper.

"Break it," said Diana, "and we'll eat it." The gummy air whistled in her throat as she tried to take a vivifying breath. "Then, when the chip is part of each of us, it'll be
us
that they can't digest."

The giant ape, transparent as cellophane, made a rush at them across the sand and Diana and Nardie scrambled several yards back before a swipe of the disk drove the thing back. "It will kill us," Nardie said.

Nardie's words hung in the heat that surrounded them.

Will it kill us, Mother?
thought Diana.
Is it your will that your daughter, and her friend that you blessed, die by their own hands rather than at the hands of these things?

She sensed no answer.

"Give me half," she said despairingly.

"Christ." After a moment of hesitation Nardie broke the chip and reached over to hand half of it to Diana.

Again the big voice from across the lake boomed a couple of incomprehensible syllables.

The towering Vegas Vic cowboy from the roof of the Pioneer Casino, grinning with a mouth made of ghostly neon tubes under his giant phantasmagorical cowboy hat, bent down and swatted Diana with his open palm.

She tumbled away across the hot sand, but she held on to the half of the chip, and when she rolled to a stop, she put it into her mouth. It had sharp edges and cut her tongue and the roof of her mouth as she made her throat work and swallow it.

But suddenly she sensed something in her that partook of Scott and Oliver and Scat and Ozzie, and of something in the lake itself, and even of poor Hans, and she was sure that she was not too exhausted to stand up again.

Mavranos was certain he was going to have a stroke and cheat cancer.

He was tasting blood as he limped across the street, not knowing if the blood was his own or Pogue's, and his throat burned from having shouted,
Eat me
! in helpless tandem with Snayheever's ground-shaking voice a few moments ago.

And now, in a fast halo of swirling, fluttering bats, Snayheever had climbed up and was dancing on the coping of the far wall.

—The wall that fell away at a very steep slope for six hundred feet of empty air to the cement roof of the power plant on the downstream side of the dam.

Pogue was in the street, blundering among the stopped cars, and at one moment he seemed to be close enough for Mavranos to lunge to him and at the next seemed hundreds of feet away.

Mavranos was afraid that Pogue would knock Snayheever down into those yawning half-natural and half-engineered canyon depths and then, freed from Snayheever's induced insanity and blindness, make his way back across the street and dive into the lake, stopping the clock and ruining the water. If Pogue tried to do that, Mavranos probably would have to try shooting at him.

The air was hard to breathe—it was suddenly cloudy with hot, steamy, sticky mist, but it didn't seem to be Pogue's blood anymore; when Mavranos brushed his hand across his mouth, he felt his mustache slicked with something that smelled like algae. He tugged the .38 free of his belt and held it out in front of him as he bumped and stumbled among the cars after Pogue.

And though he was still half blinded by Snayheever's demanding pronouncements, he was sure that some of the things that he saw darting in circles around Snayheever's capering form were fish: bass, and carp, and catfish with sweeping tentacles. Some of the finny shapes seemed to be so tiny as to be circling in front of Mavranos's face, and others seemed to be huge, and moving around with astronomic speed somewhere as far away as the orbit of the moon.

The pavement under his boots was shifting, and when he looked down, he saw cracks in the concrete rapidly expanding and narrowing like pulsing arteries—was the dam breaking up?—and then he seemed to be hanging far above the earth, himself way out there in the moon's orbit, and what had seemed to be cracks or arteries below him were great river deltas changing in the violet-shifted radiation of unnaturally quick-passing centuries.

He made himself look up, and he saw the bats scatter away from Snayheever in ribby, fluttering clouds, for the crazy man had started roaring again: "
King and Queen of Caledon, how many miles to Babylon?
"

Snayheever was prancing along on the precipitous edge of the chest-high coping, kicking up his feet and tossing his arms, the tails of his threadbare coat flying in the wet wind. He seemed to Mavranos to be taller; in fact, it seemed for a moment that he towered over the mountains on either side of the dam, his joyfully upturned idiot face the closest thing to the sky.

"
Threescore miles and ten
," he sang harshly, his voice mirrored in the quaking of the bats and the flying fish. "
Can I get there by moonlight? Yes, and back again
."

The sky was dark, as if with a sudden overcast, but the full moon shone clearly over the mountains. The dam shook with turbulence and disorder in the penstocks and turbines that were its heart.

"I guess I make it more," said Crane as he tossed another couple of bills into the pot, trying to put a faint tone of theatrical reluctance in the statement, as would someone who holds a cinch hand and is trying to look weak to get a call.

Crane had promptly raised the original two-hundred-dollar bet, but the young man, after some thought, had raised it back to Crane.

He felt as though this hand had been in play for at least an hour.

The houseboat seemed to be turning in the water, and Crane had to force himself not to grip the edges of the table as several of the other players were doing.

Now the young man was facing another two-hundred-dollar raise, and he rubbed his stubbly chin dazedly and stared at Crane's six showing cards: the Six and Eight of Cups, the Knight of Clubs, and the Seven, Eight, and Nine of Swords.

Crane knew that his opponent held an Ace-high Flush in Coins; the young man was clearly wondering whether or not Crane's Seven, Eight, and Nine of Swords could possibly be part of a Straight Flush, which would beat him.

Crane saw the young man's pupils dilate and knew that his opponent was about to call the raise and end the betting for the showdown.

Crane was about to lose. And he had one urgent thought:
Ozzie, what can I do here?

Got it.

"What's your name, boy?" Crane said abruptly, flashing a wide and no doubt lipstick-stained toothy grin, and he prayed that his opponent had a one-syllable name.

"Uh," the young man muttered distractedly, moving his hand toward his stack of bills, "Bob."

"He called!" Crane shouted instantly, flipping over his two hole cards, which were the Ten and the King of Swords, but keeping his palm over the name printed at the bottom of the King, so that only the end of a sword could be seen on the card. "And I've got a Jack-high Straight Flush!"

"I didn't call!" yelled young Bob. "I just said 'Bob'! You all heard me!"

Crane instantly flipped the King back over, and then intentionally fumbled in turning over the Ten so that everyone could see it before it was again hidden.

Crane looked up then, trying to put a look of tight outrage on his made-up face. "I say he said, 'Call.' "

"You freak," said Newt, wiping his sweating old face. "He said, 'Bob.' "

The other players all nodded and mumbled assent.

Leon was staring at Crane. "You're awfully eager to get one more bet," he said, frowning in puzzlement. "But the boy said, clearly, 'Bob.' " Leon turned his unswollen eye on Crane's young opponent. "Do you
want
to call?"

"Against a Straight Flush?
No
, thank you." Young Bob turned his cards over and tossed them aside. "The Flying Nun can take a flying leap."

Crane shrugged in faked chagrin and reached out to rake in the pile of bills. Thank you, Ozzie, he thought.

"Ah ah!" said Leon, holding up one smooth brown hand. "I am a parent of that hand, remember." He turned on Crane a smile that was terrible under the bandage and behind the gray and purple swelling and the inflamed veins. "I'm claiming the Assumption." He pulled a billfold out of his white jacket and began fanning out hundred-dollar bills. "Newt, count the pot, would you?" Leon smiled at Crane again. "
I'll
make the last call—for
everything
."

Crane spread his hands and kept his head down to conceal the fast pulse in his throat. It was dark outside, and Crane was afraid to look out the ports; he thought he'd see solid brown lake water at each one, as if the boat had turned upside down and it were only some kind of centrifugal force that held the players in their chairs.

"Okay," Crane whispered, "though you—you
know
you've got a little bit of me
anyway
."

"
If your heels be nimble and light
," roared Snayheever, his voice shaking dust down from the mountainous slopes, "
you may get there by candlelight
!"

Ray-Joe Pogue was still trying to cross the street; one old woman had seen his hat and begun screaming, and he was blindly trying to grope his way around her. There were only a few other people, apparently injured, still visible along the top of the dam—everyone else seemed to have fled away on foot.

Mavranos had zig-zagged through the stalled and crashed cars, up over the curb to the sidewalk on the afterbay side of the highway, and he flung his arms over the coping a few yards from where Snayheever danced and for a breath-catching moment stared down past his .38, through the volumes of foggy air at the galleries of the power station far below, with the churning water of the disordered spillway overflow dimly visible below and beyond that—and then he straightened up hastily and stared at the cement coping he was leaning on and ran the calloused palm of his free hand along the edge of it.