“Isis, please.” He grabbed the bamboo bar with his left hand. “Those dreams back in the temple – I had to distract you, don’t you see. So we could capture you without hurting you.”

“So I would be in good health for the torture.”

“That… that’s not my idea. I had no idea.”

“You attack me with tainted dreams. Yet you believe your greater Dream can somehow remain pure.” She looked at him. “Eric, I pity you. Truly I do.”

“Dammit, Isis, give it up! It’s not too late! You can join us. I can make Sobel accept it. He has to listen to me! I’m as much a leader as he is. And I’m a joker. He doesn’t seem to be aware of it, but the boys are right on the edge. They have a bellyful of taking orders from a nat. If he won’t do what I say, we’ll… make him listen.”

He thrust the ruin of his face right up against the bars. “Isis, please! Won’t you join us?”

She looked past him to the jokers of the Brigade, eyeing her like rabid dogs, tongues lolling.

“Mu,” she said. “That question is unasked.”

He half-rose from his crouch, waving his fist in despair. “You idiot! They’ll do it. You have no idea what they’re capable of.”

“I have every idea of what they are capable of. That is why I refuse to join them.”

“Isis, I beg you, I love you”

She shook her head. “That string is broken. Do not try to pull it anymore.”

She raised her hands to touch his face through the cool bamboo bars. “Eric, my beautiful boy. Eric whom I loved. Listen to me. Hear me. When I met you, we each had a dream, a beautiful dream. I have remained true to mine. I will die true to it.

“You have sold your dream, my love. Sold it for a feeling of power, sold it to feed your own lust for revenge. Sold it to assuage your terrible anger. You have polluted your dream, spewed filth on it like the factories you showed us in that vision the first time I saw you, after you showed us the death of the Rox.”

He frowned. “The first time you – but you weren’t there then. There was only that nat, the tall one -”

And a wind rose around the cage, drawing clumps of dirt, bits of grass, every stray piece of debris. Eric held up his hands to keep dust from his eyes.

When he lowered them, Isis Moon was gone. In her place was Mark Meadows, absurdly crouched in the tiny cage with his knees to either side of his head.

He gave Eric a sickly smile. “I guess this takes some of the fun out of gang rape, huh?” he said.

Eric dropped to his knees. “Oh, my God,” he gasped.

“I made love to… you”

“I don’t feel any better about it than you do, man,” Mark said. “But Moonchild is real while she’s around, if that makes any difference. It wasn’t really me.”

Eric turned away and vomited.

Then he was back, hanging one-handed on the bars like a monkey So far none of the others seemed to have noticed the change that had taken place. “If I talk to you, Moonchild hears me?”

“Yeah, man.”

“Very well. Isis, I love you. Please God, believe me. I know I used that as – as a weapon, but it’s true. I swear it.”

“Sure,” Mark said sternly.

“It’s true. I – never mind. I, I can’t bear to see you hurt, Isis.”

“I guess you’re lucky I turned back into me, man.”

“No, please. If Isis is… in there, they can’t hurt you without hurting her. That was never part of my plan. I won’t let that happen.”

Mark jerked his chin at the surrounding mob. It was about all the motion he could muster in the cramped space. “Just what were you planning to do about it? Your buddies have other ideas.”

“It’s too late for you to change what’s going to happen,” Eric said, “so what I do isn’t betrayal.”

He stuck his fist through the bars. “Take it,” he hissed to Mark.

Dubiously Mark opened a hand. Eric pressed something slender, cold, and hard into his palm.

“I didn’t know how Mark – how you summoned your ‘friends.’ I knew your drugs had something to do with it. Agent Ray took a pouch filled with little vials off of Isis when he captured her. I was able to steal one.”

Cautiously, hardly daring to breathe, Mark rolled his fingers open slightly. A tiny glass vial lay in his palm filled with orange powder. It had a brownish cast to it; doubtless a trick of the torchlight.

“I thought another of your friends might be better able to come and get Isis out. I hope that’s true.”

Mark nodded. His lips and throat were far too dry to let words past.

“Get her far away from here. And remember – remember that I love her.”

He grabbed Mark’s hand, pulled it to the bars, kissed it. Then he rose and began walking away.

He had not gotten twenty meters when a voice cried out, “Hey! He gave the prisoner something!”

Chapter Forty-nine

Eric froze. Faces turned toward Mark. “Hey, something happened to the goddam prisoner!” another voice roared.

Jokers crowded around the cage. They kept their distance, as if afraid Mark might be radioactive.

Colonel Sobel came striding up. “What seems to be the trouble here?” he asked, his voice a throb of wise forbearance.

The joker who had accused Eric thrust himself forward. It was Rhino, the German punk who hungered for acceptance from his cooler American comrades.

“He gave something to the prisoner,” he said, pointing at Eric.

Sobel glanced at the cage. He saw Mark and frowned. “Arranged for your little lady friend to make her escape, did you?” he said. Sadly he shook his head. “Eric, I thought better of you.”

Eric didn’t say anything. The Colonel drew his.45 and shot him.

The heavy jacketed slug knocked the light-framed boy sprawling on the tamped-down earth. “Holy shit!” a joker screamed. “He shot Eric! He murdered the Dream!”

Instantly the crowd transferred its anger at Eric to its nat commanding officer. To Mark, still huddled and helpless, it was as if something very palpable snapped.

Colonel Sobel missed it. Colonel Sobel had his Dream, too, and he couldn’t see anything beyond it.

Not until a joker covered all over with extrusions like fleshy leaves stepped up and twitched the.45 from his hand. Sobel frowned then. “What’s your name, soldier?” he demanded.

The joker flung himself forward and buried his teeth in his throat.

The Colonel reeled backward. And then the jokers were all over him, snarling and shrieking, darting in, clawing each other in their frenzy to get a piece of the action. Mark heard screaming, weird, unearthly. He saw blood arc, near-black by torchlight.

He saw the Colonel’s fine head raise up. And up, and up, until it was held overhead at the full extension of a pair of joker arms.

Mark threw up.

The two aces, the Vietnamese officers, and Casaday had trailed some distance behind Sobel when the Colonel walked over to investigate the disturbance by the cage. They were outside the lethal radius of the first explosion of joker rage.

No sooner had Sobel vanished beneath swarming bodies than a wave of jokers came for the little group. One reached taloned hands for Billy Ray.

His first reaction was to bat them away from his blood-spattered uniform. “Hey! Don’t touch the merchandise.”

The claws came back in a slash and laid open his cheek. That made everything different.

Carnifex smiled.

He caught the raking hand as it went past. With a mighty torque of his wrist he snapped the forearm. Then he shattered the joker’s snouted face with a vertical punch.

His own oddly matched assortment of features contorted in a triumphant Bruce Lee grimace. He let the joker drop.

He turned to the charging pack. An overhand right splintered teeth and snapped a joker head back so hard the neck vertebrae shattered like dropped plates. A sideways shuto snapped the arm of a second like a dead tree branch. Pivoting, Billy sank the fingers of his left hand into a joker’s belly with such force that the tips popped right through skin. He hoisted the howling joker above his head, the blood spattering his face and uniform like red rain, and threw him in the faces of his friends.