Tom backed away, shaking his head. "No."
"Then I'll do it," Mishmash said. His lips peeled back over a mouthful of yellowed incisors, and the wrinkled face shot out and down, into the cop's throat. Mishmash's shirt sagged where his gut had been. The head worked at the soft flesh under the cop's chin, bobbing at the end of three feet of glistening transparent tube connecting it to the joker's torso. Tom heard wet, greedy sucking sounds. The cops feet began to thrash feebly. Blood spurted, Mishmash swallowed and sucked, and a thick red wash began to travel up through the thick glassy flesh of his neck.
"No!" Tom screamed. "Stop it!"
The monkey-face continued to feed, but on top of the joker's body his second head, the movie-star head, turned to stare at Tom from clear blue eyes and smiled beatifically.
Tom reached out for Mishmash with his teke, or tried to, but there was nothing there. The fury that had filled him when the cop threatened them was gone; now there was only horror and fear, and his power had always deserted him when he was afraid. He stood helplessly, hands clenching and unclenching as Mishmash gnawed away with teeth as cruel and sharp as needles.
Then he leapt forward and grabbed the joker from behind, wrapping his arms around that twisted torso, pulling him back. For a moment they grappled. Tom was overweight and out of shape and had never been especially strong, but the joker's body was as weak as it was misshapen. They stumbled backward, Mishmash thrashing feebly in Tom's arms, until the head pulled free of the cop's torn throat with a soft pop. The joker hissed in fury. His long glistening neck coiled around, snakelike, over his left shoulder, as pale eyes glared down, insane with frustration. Blood was smeared all over the shrunken purplish face. Wet red teeth snapped wildly, but his neck wasn't long enough.
Tom spun him around and shoved him away. The joker's mismatched legs tangled under him, and he tripped and fell heavily into the gutter. "Get out of here!" Tom screamed. "Get out of here now or I'll give you the same thing I gave him."
Mishmash hissed, his head weaving back and forth. Then, as suddenly as it had come, the bloodlust was gone, and once more the joker cringed in fear. "Don't," he whispered, "please don't. I only wanted to help. Don't hurt me, mister." His neck shrunk slowly back into his shirt, a long, thick glass eel returning to its lair, until there was only the small scared face shivering between his buttons. By then Mishmash was back on his feet. He gave Tom one last pleading look, and then whirled and began to run, arms and legs working grotesquely.
Tom stopped the policeman's bleeding with a handkerchief. There was still a pulse, but it felt weak to him, and the man had obviously lost a lot of blood. He hoped it wasn't too late.
He looked around at the abandoned cars and headed toward a likely one. Joey had once shown him how to hot-wire an ignition; he sure as hell hoped he still remembered.
It was standing room only in the waiting room of the Jokertown Clinic. Tom pushed his suitcase up against a wall and sat on top of it. The shopping bag, with Modular Man's bloodied head stuck inside it, he shoved between his legs. The room was hot and noisy. He ignored the frightened people all around him, the screams of pain from the next room, and stared dully at the tiles on the floor, trying not to think. Perspiration covered his face under the clinging frog mask.
He'd been waiting a half hour when a fat, tusked newsboy in a porkpie hat and Hawaiian shirt entered the waiting room with an armful of papers. Tom bought a copy of tomorrow's Jokertown Cry, sat back on his suitcase, and began to read. He read every word in every story on every page, and then started all over again.
The headlines were full of martial law and the citywide manhunt for Croyd Crenson. Typhoid Croyd, the Cry called him; anyone coming in contact with the carrier risked drawing the wild card. No wonder everyone was so scared. Dr. Tachyon had told the authorities it was a mutant form, capable of reinfecting even stable aces and jokers.
The Turtle could bring him in, Tom thought. Anyone else, police or Guardsman or ace, risked infection and death if they tried to apprehend him, but the Turtle could take him in perfect safety, easy as candy. He didn't have to get real close to teke someone, and his shell gave him plenty of protection. Only there was no shell, and the Turtle was dead.
Sixty-three people had required medical treatment after the rioting around the Holland Tunnel, and property damage was estimated at more than a million dollars, he read.
The Turtle could have dissipated that crowd without anyone's getting hurt. Just talk to them, dammit, take the time to quell their fears, and if things got out of hand, pry them apart with teke. You didn't need guns or tear gas.
Sporadic outbreaks of anti joker violence had been reported throughout the city. Two jokers were dead, a dozen more had been hospitalized after beatings or stonings.
There was widespread looting in Harlem.
Arson had destroyed the storefront headquarters of jokers for Jesus, and firemen responding to the alarm had been pelted with bricks and dogshit.
Leo Barnett was praying for the souls of the afflicted and calling for quarantine in the name of public health.
A twenty-year-old coed from Columbia had been gangraped on a pool table in Squisher's Basement. More than a dozen jokers had watched from their barstools, and half of those had lined up to take their turns after the original rapists were done. Someone had told them they'd be cured of their deformities if they had sex with this woman.
The Turtle was dead, and Tom Tudbury sat on a battered old suitcase stuffed with eighty thousand dollars in cash as the world grew more and more insane.
All the king's horses and all the king's men, he thought. He'd just finished his third pass through the newspaper when a shadow fell across him. Tom looked up and saw the hefty black nurse who had helped him carry the policeman in from the car. "Dr. Tachyon will see you now," she said.
Tom followed her back to a small cubicle off the emergency room, where Tachyon sat wearily behind a steel desk. "Well?" Tom asked after the nurse had left.
"He'll live," Tach said. Lilac eyes lingered on the green, rubbery features of Tom's mask. "We are required by law to file a report on this sort of thing. The police will want to question you once the emergency has passed. We need a name."
"Thomas Tudbury," he said. He pulled off the mask and let it drop to the floor.
"Turtle," Tach blurted, surprised. He stood up.
The Turtle is dead, Tom thought, but he didn't say it. Dr. Tachyon frowned. "Tom, what happened out there?"
"It's a long, ugly story. You want it, go into my fucking brain and take it. I don't want to talk about it."
Tach looked at him thoughtfully. Then the alien winced and sat down again.
"At least with the fucking Astronomer I could tell the good guys from the bad guys," Tom said.
"He has your name," Tach said.
"One of my names," Tom said. "Fuck it. I need your help."
Tach was still linked with his mind; the alien looked up sharply. "I will not do that."
Tom leaned forward across the desk, looming over the smaller man. "You will," he said. "You owe me, Tachyon. And there's no way I can kill myself without your help."
Mortality by Walter Jon Williams
Run.
Consciousness stitched a lightning path across his mind. It seemed to come in bursts, like lines of text from a very fast laserprinter
… but no, it was more complex than that. A master weaver was forming the largest and most intricate tapestry in the universe, all in a matter of seconds, and doing it all in his brain.
He opened his eyes. St. Elmo's fire shimmered before him like a polar aurora. A screaming noise assaulted his ears. Subsonics moved through his body like tidal waves.