Wild Cards 15 - Black Trump Read Online Free PDF

between his bed and the glass wall that separated his cell from the rest of the room. He lay in a pool of black, coagulated blood. He wasn't moving. Two lay in their narrow beds. One was covered to his chin - Ray thought he was male, though he couldn't be sure - by a sheet stained with blotches of blood and other, less identifiable fluids. The man's eyes were open, but he stared at the ceiling as if he were sightless. He seemed to be crying tears of blood. The other joker lay on her side, naked, her sheet twisted into a stained lump around her feet. Her skin was covered with pulpy, purple bruises, her eyes were fixed with the classic thousand-year stare, looking off into eternity. The fourth stood in front of her cell's glass wall. She was just a kid, maybe twelve years old. Her face was that of a zombie with a fixed expression and sunken, staring eyes. Suddenly, though, she focused on Ray. She put the palms of her hands flat against the wall of glass. As Ray watched, the skin on both palms broke and blood oozed from the tears. She slowly sank to the floor, leaving two smears like bloody snail-ooze on the glass. Ray couldn't hear her because of the wall between them, but he could read her bruised and pulpy lips.
    "Help me," he thought he saw her say. Or perhaps it was, "Kill me."

    ♥ ♦ ♣ ♠

    Jay Ackroyd was making love to his wife when the hunchback appeared in his bedroom.
    Hastet was on top, rocking faster and faster as she built toward her climax, Jay was underneath, lost in her and the moment, watching her face, the way her breasts moved as she rode him, listening to the sounds she made, feeling her wetness as she slid up and down on him.
    Then her eyes opened wide and she screamed, and for a moment Jay thought she was coming, until she scrambled off him, clutching up a tangled sheet to hide herself. "Jay," she said in a choked voice, staring past him.
    Jay had been pretty close to coming himself; the sudden disengagement left him a little unsteady. It took him a moment to get his breath back and look over to where his wife was staring, and even then he couldn't believe what he was seeing. Street light filtered through the shades, but otherwise the room was dark, all shapes and shadows, and in that dimness it looked for all the world as if a headless hunchback was standing in the corner.
    Jay leaned over and turned on the bedside lamp.
    A headless hunchback was standing in the corner.
    "Oh, great," Jay said, disgusted. His erection was gone by then, and his balls hurt. "This is going to be one of those nights, isn't it?" he said to no one in particular.
    Hastet held the sheet against her breasts and looked at Jay suspiciously. "Another one of your friends?" She'd been on Earth long enough to realize that her husband knew some peculiar people.
    "Quasiman," Jay said. "Not exactly a friend, but I know him. He lives down at Our Lady of Perpetual Misery."
    "What's he doing in my bedroom?" Hastet hissed in annoyance.
    Jay shrugged. "Nothing much, at the moment." The hunchback was standing by the wall, his hands clenching and unclenching slowly with the rhythm of his breath. He didn't seem to have noticed that his head was gone. Or maybe he had, it was hard to tell.
    Jay got out of bed and pulled on his pants. Whatever the hell this was about, he didn't want to deal with it naked.
    Hastet took it all in stride, more or less. That was one of the things Jay loved about her. "Where's his head?" she asked.
    "It'll be along shortly," Jay assured her. "Parts of him drift off to other dimensions from time to time, but they usually drift back before too long."
    Hastet got to her feet with all the dignity she could muster, and started gathering up her underwear. "Next time, tell him to knock," she said as she padded off to the bathroom. A moment later, he heard the shower running.
    Jay pulled on an undershirt and sat on the bed to wait for Quasiman's head to show up and explain. He wondered how the hunchback had managed to