Inside Straight

He stopped. Someone was staring at him from alongside the bus, no more than four inches away from his face: Masud, the Joker Plague fan. His eyes were wide in his hairless skull and his mouth was open in a soundless scream, his temple a gory red crater. Gray brain matter and blood were sliding thickly down the bus just above him. Masud’s earbuds had fallen from his earholes, the white cord trailing back to the pocket of his uniform, and Michael could hear Joker Plague’s music playing shrill and thin. Michael’s stomach lurched, unbidden, and he vomited loudly and explosively. His stomach still knotted, he ran again …

… he was on the dam itself, still running and trying to find any familiar faces in the chaos. Through the smoke, he saw Rustbelt as he came around another cluster of overturned vehicles barricading the roadway. Three soldiers in the uniform of the caliphate were firing at the ace from point-blank range, and Michael could hear a metallic ting-wheep, as bullets bounced from Rustbelt’s body and ricocheted away. Rustbelt, shouting, reached out to touch the nearest weapon. The barrel crumpled to red dust. Rusty was bleeding as badly as Michael. His right shoulder displayed a sickening red crater; he might be immune to bullets, but something had punched through his natural armor. Michael saw the soldiers backpedaling as they continued to fire at Rusty, retreating and clustering together. The weaponless man reached for a canvas belt bandoliered around his shoulder and fumbled with a grenade there.

Michael crouched; the roadway was broken, and he snatched up a two-foot hunk of concrete curbing with his lower hands, and flipped it to his upper set of arms. Grunting, he heaved it overhead with all his considerable strength toward the soldiers. They went down hard as Michael dove for the ground, trying vainly to cover his head with all six arms. The gunfire stopped. When he glanced up, Rusty was looking down at him, nodding his riveted head and clutching at his wounded shoulder. “Thanks, fella. That would’ve been a bad deal.” Michael sat up: The grenade had rolled away from the crushed soldier’s hand, the pin still attached. He could see it on the pavement, not two feet away …

… people were running westward past Michael and Rustbelt, all of them jokers, some of them with weapons clutched in their hands, many of them bloodied and injured. “What’s going on?” Michael shouted, catching one on them in his hands, but the man replied in fast, frightened Arabic, pushing at Michael’s arms to get away. “Djinn,” was the only word Michael caught. Rustbelt shrugged and pointed northward over the edge of the dam. There, maybe a mile down the river, Michael could see a large island. Bright girders glowed as a bridge between the island and the town of Syrene on the west bank, with the black dots of hundreds of people hurrying across the improvised span. Then smoke obscured the scene again. “Hardhat. Good fella.” Rustbelt grunted and started walking eastward, and Michael followed behind him.

… it seemed like he’d been running along this road forever, dodging around the roadblocks and ducking behind any cover he could find whenever he heard gunfire. He’d lost Rusty during one of those moments. Craters erupted in the edge of the roadway as an automatic weapon fired, and Michael flung himself behind a stack of burning tires. “You never hear the one that hits you,” he muttered to himself. He thought he’d heard that somewhere. He was close to the middle of the dam, the arrow-straight roadway stretching out in front of him. A hundred yards ahead of him there was another roadblock, this one piled high with the burning, motionless hulk of a caliphate tank perched atop the rubble, stretching entirely across the two-lane road. To the north, there was an eighty-foot sheer drop to the Nile; to the south there was water, only a few feet below the stone retaining wall.

And on this side of the improvised roadblock: Kate.