Lowball: A Wild Cards Novel - Hardcover

Wild Cards Trust; Martin, George R. R.; Snodgrass, Melinda

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0765331950 ISBN 13: 9780765331953

Publisher: Tor Books, 2014

Synopsis

Now in development for TV: Rights to develop Wild Cards for TV have been acquired by Universal Cable Productions, the team that brought you The Magicians and Mr. Robot, with the co-editor of Wild Cards, Melinda Snodgrass as executive producer.

Decades after an alien virus changed the course of history, the surviving population of Manhattan still struggles to understand the new world left in its wake. Natural humans share the rough city with those given extraordinary―and sometimes terrifying―traits. While most manage to coexist in an uneasy peace, not everyone is willing to adapt. Down in the seedy underbelly of Jokertown, residents are going missing. The authorities are unwilling to investigate, except for a fresh lieutenant looking to prove himself and a collection of unlikely jokers forced to take matters into their own hands―or tentacles. The deeper into the kidnapping case these misfits and miscreants get, the higher the stakes are raised.

Edited by #1 New York Times bestselling author George R. R. Martin and acclaimed author Melinda M. Snodgrass, Lowball is the latest mosaic novel in the acclaimed Wild Cards universe, featuring original fiction by Carrie Vaughn, Ian Tregillis, David Anthony Durham, Melinda M. Snodgrass, Mary Anne Mohanraj, David D. Levine, Michael Cassutt, and Walter John Williams.

Perfect for old fans and new readers alike, Lowball delves deeper into the world of aces, jokers, and the hard-boiled men and women of the Fort Freak police precinct in a pulpy, page-turning novel of superheroics and mystery.

The Wild Cards Universe
The Original Triad
#1 Wild Cards
#2 Aces High
#3 Jokers Wild

The Puppetman Quartet
#4: Aces Abroad
#5: Down and Dirty
#6: Ace in the Hole
#7: Dead Man’s Hand

The Rox Triad
#8: One-Eyed Jacks
#9: Jokertown Shuffle
#10: Dealer’s Choice

#11: Double Solitaire
#12: Turn of the Cards

The Card Sharks Triad
#13: Card Sharks
#14: Marked Cards
#15: Black Trump

#16: Deuces Down
#17: Death Draws Five

The Committee Triad
#18: Inside Straight
#19: Busted Flush
#20: Suicide Kings

The Fort Freak Triad
#21: Fort Freak
#22: Lowball
#23: High Stakes

The American Triad
#24: Mississippi Roll
#25: Low Chicago
#26: Texas Hold 'Em

About this title

About the Author

GEORGE R. R. MARTIN is the author of the international bestselling Song of Ice and Fire, which has been adapted by HBO into the television phenomenon Game of Thrones. Martin has won the Hugo, Nebula, Bram Stoker, and World Fantasy Awards for his numerous novels and short stories.

MELINDA M. SNODGRASS has worked on staff on numerous shows in Hollywood, including Star Trek: The Next Generation, and she has written pilots and feature films. In addition to being coeditor of Wild Cards, she also writes urban fantasy under the name Phillipa Bornikova.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Lowball

A Wild Cards Mosaic Novel

By George R. R. Martin, Melinda M. Snodgrass

Tom Doherty Associates

Copyright © 2014 George R.R. Martin and the Wild Cards Trust
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-7653-3195-3

Contents

Title Page, 
Copyright Notice, 
Dedication, 
The Big Bleed: Part One, 
Those About to Die ...: Part One, 
The Big Bleed: Part Two, 
Galahad in Blue: Part One, 
Ties That Bind: Part One, 
The Big Bleed: Part Three, 
Cry Wolf, 
Galahad in Blue: Part Two, 
Road Kill, 
The Big Bleed: Part Four, 
Galahad in Blue: Part Three, 
The Big Bleed: Part Five, 
Those About to Die ...: Part Two, 
Ties That Bind: Part Two, 
The Big Bleed: Part Six, 
Galahad in Blue: Part Four, 
Those About to Die ...: Part Three, 
Once More, for Old Times' Sake, 
Galahad in Blue: Part Five, 
Those About to Die ...: Part Four, 
Ties That Bind: Part Three, 
Galahad in Blue: Part Six, 
Those About to Die ...: Part Five, 
The Big Bleed: Part Seven, 
Galahad in Blue: Part Seven, 
Ties That Bind: Part Four, 
The Big Bleed: Part Eight, 
No Parking ..., 
Galahad in Blue: Part Eight, 
The Big Bleed: Part Nine, 
Ties That Bind: Part Five, 
Those About to Die ...: Part Six, 
Galahad in Blue: Part Nine, 
Those About to Die ...: Part Seven, 
The Big Bleed: Part Ten, 
Galahad in Blue: Part Ten, 
Galahad in Blue: Part Eleven, 
The Wild Cards Series, 
About the Author, 
Copyright Acknowledgments, 
Copyright, 

CHAPTER 1

The Big Bleed

by Michael Cassutt

Part One

Prologue

SINCE HE WAS ELEVEN, when the terrible thing happened, he had been called Chahina instead of Hasan. Chahina was a most unusual name for a Berber boy, but fitting, translating loosely as "Wheels" or "Transport." At the age of eleven, Hasan had been brutally transformed into a joker who resembled a small motor truck.

His body had doubled in size and mass — during the feverish transformation he had eaten enough food for ten Hasans — becoming cube-like, with a swale on his back and a hunched, neckless formation where his head and shoulders used to be.

His hands and feet had become horny pistons with flat, circular "hands" that cracked off every few months — or, he learned, with wear — yet remained a part of him, like bracelets around a girl's wrist. Chahina learned that if he locked his four piston-like appendages just so, the free-rolling circular "hands" could act like ... well, like wheels.

Wheels that allowed him to move down a city street or a dusty Moroccan highway much like a truck, with one obvious difference.

Chahina used his back legs to propel himself forward, giving him the appearance of a truck with a broken suspension as he swayed from side to side —

"Ah," said one of his customers, a burly Dutch weapons smuggler named Kuipers, seeing Chahina in action for the first time, "you are like Hans Brinker!"

Chahina's lack of comprehension must have been clear, even on his grille-like face.

"A skater," Kuipers had said. And, looking like a demented clown, had mimed the side-to-side motion of a boy on blades on ice.

Hans Brinker? Chahina wasn't sure ... but from that day on he referred to his movements as "slip skating."

And, over the past eleven years, he had slip-skated his way to a decent career as a transporter of illegal substances, contraband, and, yes, weapons, from one point to another, usually at odd hours in great secrecy, frequently on less-traveled routes. His ability to combine stealthy movement with common sense won him many fans in the criminal underworld of northern Africa and southern Europe, so much so that when one of his primary customers expanded his operations to the United States, Chahina was "invited" to come along, traveling as — what else? — Deck ballast on a freighter.

Once he had adjusted to the rigors of life in New York and environs as an illegal joker immigrant, Chahina had grown to appreciate the relative ease of his new smuggler's life. Roads were better. Law enforcement was usually more predictable and honest (Chahina did not break speed limits, and so never got stopped).

And there were no hijackers! Chahina's time in America had been lucrative; the future was promising.

But on the evening of Monday, May 7, 2012, he made a mistake.

Chahina frequently looked down on human drivers and their vehicles, finding them an inferior breed, each half useless without the other. He, after all, was both brains and automotive brawn.

But there were times he wished he had a bit of navigation help, so he would have avoided that wrong turn coming north out of Tewksbury, where 519 and Old Turnpike overlapped: he had wasted ten minutes going west on OT when he should have continued north.

Normally this slight detour wouldn't have been a problem, but Chahina had a deadline: by eightP.M. he was to deliver his cargo to the customer on the edge of Stephens State Park. ... The address did not appear to be either a commercial property or a residential one, but rather an open field.

In order to make up lost time, Chahina broke his self-imposed rule about speed limits, a risky move because in order to go faster, he had to make more exaggerated slip skates.

He noted the startled reactions of a pair of oncoming drivers, but knew from experience they would simply assume he was some foreign-model truck with unusually sleek, rounded lines. And possibly an intoxicated operator.

(One thing that night trips forced on Chahina was the addition of "headlights," in his case, literally: he had to strap lamps to the outside rim of each eye for basic illumination, and to ensure that he looked like a truck to other vehicles. There was no quicker way to draw attention from highway patrol than to be racing down a rural road with no lights. ...)

What Chahina hated most was what he'd been driving through almost every day for the past two months ... and that was rain.

First of all, it was simply uncomfortable. Chahina's transformation to joker had left him looking like a vehicle — and naked, which was a shocking situation for a boy who had never worn any garment more revealing than a T-shirt and long pants in public. His older brother Tariq had helped him sew canvas "trousers" that covered his nether regions and looked, to other eyes, like the fabric enclosing the cargo beds of real trucks. Chahina had improved on this early solution, however, fabricating better-fitting and vari-colored "trousers" to suit any environment. Tonight's, for example, were plain gray.

But they weren't waterproof, and Chahina slip-skated along with the uncomfortable feeling that he had just sat in a puddle while rain spattered his neck and back.

Worse yet, the rain made it more difficult to see. And it almost destroyed traction. (His "hands" and "feet" had none of the radial grooving found in tires.)

The rain had started fifteen minutes after he'd left Staten Island, before he even crossed the Goethals Bridge from Staten Island into New Jersey.

It never got heavy — but it didn't take much to make things uncomfortable for Chahina.

Fortunately, his load was just two dozen plastic containers. A little moisture wouldn't hurt them.

Safely out of Hackettstown now, just passing Bilby, the developments gave way to old farms and woods.

What little traffic willing to brave the rain vanished with the loss of daylight. Wheels took a breath and skated harder. He knew he was pushing both speed limit and energy reserves — why hadn't he eaten more? His roommates were always teasing him about what he consumed, and how much. ...

Suddenly there was a man lying in the road —!

Wheels rode right over him. It was much like the impact on a suburban speed bump ... if the bump squished like a human body.

And it hurt. Calloused as they were, his wheels were essentially bare hands and feet. Hitting that body was like stubbing your toe on a curb.

He lost traction, lost control, skidding and sliding like a drunk on an icy sidewalk until he hit a left turn a hundred yards farther up the highway —

And slammed into a ditch backed by trees.

The impact flattened his nose. He had not felt such pain since the time — pre–wild card — that Tariq had punched him for stealing a candy bar.

He was so stunned he wasn't sure how long he sat there, head down, rear high, leaning to his right. With darkness, it was impossible for him to measure time. Had it been a few seconds? Minutes?

He sure hoped it wasn't an hour.

Extricating himself from the ditch took patience. He was like a football player with a cracked rib: every attempted movement was painful.

Eventually, however, he had himself upright ... and had used his good left front "hand" to push himself out of the ditch far enough to let his back "feet" find traction.

It was only when he was finally upright, on the highway surface, that he realized he had lost one of the containers he carried. He couldn't see it anywhere; even if he could, he was not capable of picking it up and replacing it.

It was like losing a tooth — but likely to be far more painful, once he met his customers.

Well, Wheels had lost items before ... had been beaten and otherwise mistreated. But he knew it was better to show up with nineteen of twenty items than to try to avoid the confrontation completely.

There was another matter, however.

Slowly, painfully, Wheels skated a dozen yards back down the highway, to where he had run over the body ... there was little he could do to help the victim, assuming he lived. And now time was truly critical.

But Wheels had been maltreated so many times in his short life. He couldn't bear to just ... skate away —

Suddenly there were lights far to the south ... another vehicle!

Wheels did not want to answer questions, nor did he want to be seen anywhere near a body in the middle of a road.

He turned and slip-skated into the rainy night.

CHAPTER 2

Those About to Die ...

by David Anthony Durham

Part One

MARCUS FLUNG ASIDE THE manhole cover. He pulled himself partway through and leaned back to check his cell phone. There. Finally. He had bars again! It wasn't the only problem with living in the tunnels and sewers below Jokertown, but the fact that cell phone service was spotty was one of the most annoying.

One voice mail. One text.

The message was from a girl who had been sweating him. He didn't know why he'd ever given her his phone number. She was a nat. Kind of average looking, with flat blond hair and too much smile for her face. She had approached him at Drakes in the Bowery last week. Grabbing his arm, she admitted out of nowhere that she had a snake fetish. "I just love serpents. Venomous ones the most." She had made him horny, but not exactly in a good way.

He pressed delete.

The text was from Father Squid. Marcus smiled. It always amused him to imagine the good father texting. It couldn't have been easy for him to hit the little buttons, considering that his fingers had suckers all over them. The text read: RMBR PRCNT. 5PM.

"I'll be there," Marcus said. "Not that it's going to do any good."

Marcus liked the priest well enough, but the old guy tended to get worked up about things. He'd roped Marcus into helping him look for so-called missing jokers. A few days into the search, Marcus was beginning to feel like there wasn't anything to it. Sure, some guys had gone awol, but they weren't the sort of guys anyone was too upset to see vanish. Why the priest cared so much Marcus couldn't fathom.

Flipping the phone shut and slipping it into his chest pocket, Marcus rose out of the sewer hole. He was normal enough from the waist up. A young African-American man, well built, with muscles that cut distinct lines beneath his fitted T-shirt. Hair trimmed nice, like someone who cared about their look, thick gold loops in his ears. Below the waist, however, he was one long stretch of scaled serpentine muscle, ringed down the twenty feet of tapering length to his tail. His garish yellow and red and black rings flexed in a hypnotic fashion as he carved a weaving course forward.

He didn't stay earthbound long. He surged up into a narrow gap at the alley mouth, curving from one brick wall to the other, creating a weave of tension between the two. Once out of the shadows of Jokertown's urban canyon lands, the spring sun shone down. The heat of it poured power into Marcus's tail. He pulled his shades out and slipped them on. He knew he looked fly. A couple years ago he thought his life was over. Now, things looked and felt a whole lot different.

As he skimmed along the edge of a roof, a voice called up from the street below. "IBT! Hey,IBT!"

Marcus peered down at a plump woman in a black T-shirt.

"I'm your number one fan, baby. Check it." She directed two stubby fingers at her chest. The bright pink letters IBT stretched taut across her T-shirt. She clearly had more than two breasts pressing against the fabric.

The guy beside her jabbed toward him with a finger. "You da man, T!" he said, stomping the ground with an oversized foot.

Marcus waved. He peeled back from the edge and carried on. "You da man, T," he mimicked. "What's the deal with shortening everything?" he grumbled aloud. "'T' means he's calling me Tongue but being too lazy to even say the whole word. The name is Infamous Black Tongue," he announced to the sky, then thought, And IBT's all right, I guess, if you're in a rush.

He found it a little strange that it wasn't his tail that gave him his moniker, but he had gotten a lot of early press for the concussive power of his tongue to deliver venom. Made an impression, apparently.

That reminded him of something.

He cut away from his intended route long enough to perch looking down on the graffiti-scarred wall of a building facing an abandoned lot-cum-urban garden. The wall had been repainted in one massive mural, a tribute to Oddity, whose cloaked and masked shape dominated the scene. IBTfeatured in it, too. Down by the far end, he rose up on powerful coils, half engulfed by licks of flame. One hand stretched out toward Oddity to accept the keys the vigilante legends were offering him. The other hand was smashing the dirty cop Lu Long across his dragon snout.

Marcus cocked his head. Squinted. They'd done some good work since last he saw it. They had his tail down pretty well. The color pattern of his stripes was mixed up, but he doubted anybody but himself would notice. The only thing he didn't really like was his face. He looked too angry, too full of teeth-gritting rage. Father Squid had warned him that when he became a public figure his image wouldn't be his own anymore. Here was proof, sprayed large.

* * *

He hit the street just down from the precinct. In the half block he nodded in response to several greetings, received an overly enthusiastic high five from a lobster-like claw, and autographed a furry little boy's Yankees baseball cap. He tried to protest that he was an Orioles fan, and not a baseball player in any event. The boy was insistent, though.

Father Squid waited for him on the precinct steps. Though it was warm, the tall, broad-shouldered priest wore his thick robes, as usual. He stood with his hands tented together on his chest, as if in prayer. He almost looked tranquil, except for the way his fingers tapped out his impatience. "Have you any news, son?" Marcus shook his head.

"No sightings?"

"Nope."

The priest leaned close, the scent of him salty and fishy. The tentacles that dangled from his face seemed to stretch toward Marcus, as if each of them was keen to touch good news. "What about that abandoned apartment?"

"I checked it out. No sign of Wartcake."

"Don't call him that. Simon Clarke is the name his parents gave him."

Marcus shrugged. "I know, but everybody calls him Wartcake. When I ask about Simon Clarke nobody knows who I'm talking about. So I always have to say Wartcake, and then they go, 'Oh, Wartcake, why didn't you say that in the first place?'" He met the priest's large, dark eyes. "I'm just saying."

Motion inside the precinct didn't exactly freeze when Marcus and Father Squid entered, but a hush fell across the room. One after another, pairs of eyes found Marcus and followed his progress toward the captain's office. Officer Napperson glared at him from behind his desk, looking like he was wishing him dead with just the force of his eyes. Another guy in uniform put his hand on his pistol, fingering the grip.

Father Squid strode with lumbering determination. Marcus kept his eyes on the priest's back. He tried to keep his slither cool, but the scrutiny made him nervous. He couldn't figure the cops out. Most of them treated him like a criminal they were itching to bust for something. That didn't stop them from using him, though. Officer Tang once gave him a tip about a guy the cops couldn't touch, some politician's brother who liked getting rough with joker hookers. Marcus had caught up with him one night and given him the scare of his life, enough to keep him out of Jokertown for good. He'd caught, venom tagged, and gift wrapped three perps who had been sparkling with Tinkerbill's pink aura. Ironic, considering that he'd spent a long evening tinkling like a fairy himself.

He'd even played dominoes in the park with Beastie a few Sundays.

None of that changed the chilly reception at the moment.

Deputy Inspector Thomas Jan Maseryk sat at his desk, head tilted down as he studied a stack of reports. He lined through something with a red pen, wrote a note.

Father Squid knocked on the doorjamb.

Without looking up, Maseryk said, "Hello, Father. The way you waft the scent of the seashore makes me hungry for cotton candy and foot-long hot dogs."

"There are two more missing," Father Squid said. "Two more, Captain. Do the disappearances merit your attention yet? If not, how many must vanish before you take notice?"

"We take all complaints serious —"

"You've yet to grasp that something is truly amiss here. Shall I name the vanished for you?"

The deputy inspector plucked up the page and deposited it in the tray at the corner of his desk. Exhaling, he leaned back and stretched. His deeply lined face was stern, his graying hair trimmed with military precision. "If you have anything to add to what you offered last time, see Detective Mc —"

"Khaled Mohamed," Father Squid cut in. He counted them on his suckered fingers. "Timepiece. Simon Clarke. Gregor. John the Pharaoh. These are not prominent people. They're loners, ruffians, users, abusers. All of them male. They may not be the pillars of our community, but they're still God's children. Maseryk, I won't allow you to ignore them."

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Lowball by George R. R. Martin, Melinda M. Snodgrass. Copyright © 2014 George R.R. Martin and the Wild Cards Trust. Excerpted by permission of Tom Doherty Associates.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

Edition details

• Publisher: Tor Books
• Publication date: 2014
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0765331950
• ISBN 13: 9780765331953
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 368
• Editor: Martin George R. R., Snodgrass Melinda