Inside Straight

… and there wasn’t time to see more, as Rustbelt and Bubbles, with Michael close behind, were suddenly in the midst of fighting themselves. Rustbelt’s massive arms swung like pistons, as those nearest him retreated with curses in Arabic. Michael swung around Rustbelt’s left; a soldier fired at him, the burst hitting the center of his vest. The tremendous impact drove Michael to the ground. The soldier stood over him, and he was too dazed to react. He saw the muzzle pointed at his face …

… but a bubble the size of a orange wafted past above him, and the soldier went tumbling back in a spray of blood. Michael stared at the body for moment before pushing himself up, bruised and sore but intact, the vest hanging from a few shreds of bandages. “Thanks, Bubbles!” he shouted, but he couldn’t see her anywhere. The followers of the Living Gods were flowing past him, charging into the fray, and it was suddenly hand-to-hand combat. A bayonet-tipped rifle emerged from the crush, stabbing at him. It was all he saw, but Michael managed to grab the muzzle. He pulled with all his strength. A man came flying from the press around him, and Michael flung the man screaming back into his own people. There were weapons on the sand, and Michael picked up four of them with his lowest hands …

… “DB!” he heard Rustbelt call, and saw the ace swarmed with soldiers, like a praying mantis beset with fire ants. Michael ran toward him, firing his quartet of AK-47s without bothering to aim, feeling the furious kick of the automatic weapons as they bucked in his hands. Bullets sparked against Rustbelt’s body, and whined as they caromed away, but bodies were falling from him as well. Rustbelt rose with a groan and a cry and shook off the rest.

He pounded the last few of the soldiers heavily into the sand, leaving red craters. Michael looked away, trying to gain his bearings again.

They were in a valley between low dunes. The wind devil of Simoon scoured the top of the dune ahead of them. He didn’t know where Bubbles or the rest of the followers of the Living Gods had gone. “Come on, fella,” Rustbelt said, “we’re done here.” He lumbered up the dune with Michael struggling after him. The sand dragged at his feet and filled his sneakers, clinging to his sweating body and chafing at the belt of his jeans. He was bleeding; the bandages wrapped around his wounded arm were soaked, and there was a long, ugly gash on his right side between his top and middle arm, the blood mixed with gritty sand. Michael hadn’t felt the bayonet that had left that mark, but now he felt the pain and the stitch in his side.

Rustbelt reached the top of the dune. He stopped, and Michael heard the ace grunt.

“Shit.” Michael saw the issue as he scrambled up next to Rustbelt. For the moment, they were alone in an oasis of relative calm. The main force of the army was focused on the road snaking through the landscape a quarter mile to their left, on the east bank, north of the dam. There, smoke rose from the twisted hulks of personnel carriers and tanks. The troops of the caliphate and the armed jokers of the Living Gods were engaged in a fierce firefight. In the midst of it, in the smear of the tracer rounds and the explosions from mortars, the aces of both sides had come together.

The banner of the Djinn waved, bloody and threatening. Around him, the armies swarmed, but the Djinn stood untouched, a tower in the midst of the plain, his hands lifted to the sky as if in praise. The followers of the Living Gods were running away from him in wild retreat, firing their weapons over their shoulders to no effect. Even from this distance, Michael could feel the tinge of fear radiating from the ace. Uncertainty burned in his stomach. This would be a quick and brutal assault. The Caliph intended to take the High Dam and end this, and the Djinn was going to make certain that the job was accomplished swiftly.

Michael didn’t see any way to stop it. The Djinn dwarfed everyone, and the fear he produced was spreading outward in a wide crescent in front of him. Taweret was among those fleeing, running over her own people in her panic. Michael watched the Djinn reach down and pluck a trio of jokers from the running troops behind Taweret. His fist squeezed, and he flung the broken bodies at the Living God and her priests, chortling in his bass voice.

“If we only had Ana,” Bubbles said, and Michael started to see her standing next to him. “We’d see how that bastard likes being buried under a hundred feet of sand.” Rustbelt grunted in answer.

But they didn’t have Ana. They didn’t have King Cobalt or Hardhat or Holy Roller. They didn’t have the hundreds of jokers who had died yesterday. Those who were still standing were exhausted and injured, and there would be no Peregrine to call “Cut!” when it was obvious they had lost.