Busted Flush Read online

  “Well,” Bubbles said, “I’m certain the secretary-general has other sources.”

  “You and the Reverend be sure to mention that at the press conference. And when we get there, launch all the bubbles you can in the air, make a big show for the cameras. Remember, this here’s NOLA. If we want people to pay attention, what we need is li’l lagniappe. Before you go onstage, I’ll have a garbage truck ram you as many times as you want.”

  The Reverend Wintergreen gave her hand a gentle pat. “I can do it instead.”

  “What about me?” asked Aliyah. “I can help.” She stepped back, laughing defiantly, and raised her arms. “You can’t kill the wind!” Her fingers crumbled, blowing away into sand, the particles whipping around as the wind arose and she spun like a dervish as she drifted and shifted into the sandstorm of legend.

  Don’t drop the shirt! Ellen thought frantically. The earrings! If we can’t touch them, I can’t channel you! Perspective was odd and crazy, and it took Ellen a moment to realize that as a whirlwind, Simoon saw the world as a 360-degree circle, their eyes a band at the top of the cone. But Aliyah was an old hand at this, and Ellen became aware that all her things were whirling around in the funnel, a crazy Wizard of Oz swirl of haute couture and luggage, Jonathan’s joining hers as he dissolved, a cloud of green wasps taking their place in the eye. Ellen dimly remembered this trick from the “Crazy Ace Antics” bonus feature of the American Hero: Season I DVD.

  Simoon whirled over the city until Ellen perceived a portion of the lakeshore where a forest was popping up like time-lapse photography. They spun down, Jonathan Hive’s wasps swarming from the zephyr’s funnel, going to where a tall young black woman in blue overalls walked scattering acorns from Johnny Appleseed pouches at her hips. Farther on, a young Hispanic woman crouched, one hand on the ground, the other clutching her necklace as the muck and silt heaved themselves out of the water. The wasps buzzed around her then up, a living green marquee, one word swarming into the next: EARTH * WITCH * TIRED * GET * SAND.

  Ellen observed silently as the whirlwind scoured sandbars and silt from the lake and then the river. As the day’s work continued, Gardener and Earth Witch and Simoon raising the banks and embankments, Jonathan Hive’s wasps scouting for likely resources and scattering Gardener’s seeds. At last, light was fading and everyone was spent. Aliyah re-formed, swirling down into the skirt, spinning the funnel on into the shirt, and finally coalescing back into Ellen’s usual form . . . with both earrings in her left ear, her cameo off to the same side, and her slip hanging out. She squelched a few feet to where her shoes had landed in the muck.

  “Well, I think we’ve done some good work here today.” Gardener yawned as she got up from the base of one of her huge oaks. “Let’s hope it holds.” She smiled at Aliyah. “Nice work, but we better get you some different clothes. Those aren’t made for gardening.”

  Earth Witch looked troubled. “Your power . . . it’s the same as a girl I knew.”

  “It is the same.” Aliyah smiled hopefully. “I’m Ali. I’m back.”

  There was a long silence filled with uncomfortable glances.

  “I’m not a rotted corpse!” Aliyah yelled. “I’m just in the body of some flat-chested old lady!” She then burst into tears.

  Ellen let the dead girl have her cry. It had taken a lot out of her, Ellen realized, to control her wind that finely, to keep contact with the tokens that tied her to demi-life while at the same time moving mountains or at least tons and tons of sand. It probably didn’t help that Ana and Jerusha were similarly exhausted from the use of their powers.

  Jonathan put his arm around her shoulder, letting Aliyah sob into his jacket as they walked. By the time she’d cried Ellen dry, the smell of river mud and greenery had changed to sweat and alcohol. Jerusha and Ana had gone. Now college students in Loyola sweatshirts and other bon vivants walked by slurping daiquiris from yard-long plastic flutes.

  Bourbon Street.

  Jazz music floated out of clubs and revelers wandered by in masks, gorgeous with sequins and feathers, like old newsreel footage of Jokertown before the Wild Card Pride movement. Or maybe after—Aliyah noted that one of the Loyola students had cloven hooves. Nearby, a woman with a beehive of flamingo heads peddled cups of shrimp cocktail. And next door, under a green awning marked LAGNIAPPE: THE GENTLEMEN’S CLUB WITH SOMETHING EXTRA stood two men—one man—two men. Aliyah was having a hard time figuring it out, seeing two aging bodybuilders from the waist up, but from the waist down, one grotesquely wide joker with extra-wide black wingtips. Even more disconcerting were the twins’ T-shirts, the one on the right reading JESUS SAVES! and the one on the left SHOW ME YOUR TITS!

  “Good sir,” cried the Jesus freak twin, waving a Bible at Jonathan Hive, “do not go into this vile pit of depravity, this veritable Sodom! These joker Jezebels have sin in their hearts, and it would imperil your nat soul to even gaze upon them!”

  “Don’t listen to Momus here,” said the other twin, who affected a goatee. “Listen to Comus. Come right in! We’ve got chicks with extra tits! We’ve got chicks with dicks!”

  Oh, my God, thought Ellen as Aliyah looked at Comus and Momus. It’s Rick and Mick.

  “Huh?” said Aliyah, catching the eyes of the twins.

  The first paid no attention, but the second one pointed. “It is the Witch of Endor!”

  Rick or Mick—the one with the goatee anyway—rolled his eyes. “Excuse my brother for being a pussy. He got beat up by a mute hooker and now he thinks he screwed a zombie.”

  “Oh,” said Jonathan Hive drily. “Can we see that on YouTube?”

  “Yea, the dead shall rise to chastise the wicked, for Hoodoo Mama is their mother and the pigeons are her eyes!” Mick or Rick waved his Bible dramatically at some rather moth-eaten pigeons watching him from a nearby awning. “She’s older than grave dirt and comes riding a pale horse—a fucking dead one—but Jesus Christ Joker is my shepherd and I shall not want!”

  “Pussy,” added his brother.

  Jonathan began shepherding Aliyah away. “Lilith needs us at the Children’s Hospital by nightfall. She’s taking all the kids away, but she can only do a few at a time.”

  The pigeons cocked their heads, one of them fluttering off, and Aliyah nodded, drained emotionally as well as physically. She let herself be led through an arch to the Place D’Armes, a small preserve of historic homes, and upstairs in one to her own private room. And with great relief, Ellen observed her take off the T-shirt and then, hesitantly, one earring, then the other.

  Herself again, Ellen tuned the old Philco-style radio to soft jazz, then quickly and numbly took a shower, touching the fixtures as little as possible. Most were authentic eighteenth-century elegance, coming with a history. One Ellen was in no mood to relive.

  Instead, she dried her hair, did it up in a crown braid, and donned a man’s suit, cool white linen, summer weight and sixties style. A tie hid her cameo and choker, and an old fedora slipped neatly over the braid. Hey, Nickie . . .

  “Hey, Elle.” He took in the brick walls and spindly legged furniture. “Where are we?”

  New Orleans. There’s a hurricane coming. She paused. I’ve joined the Committee.

  “The Committee?” He chuckled. “Out of the sleeve and straight to the big league.”

  Who needs American Hero? There was a knock at the door. That’s Jonathan. Get the earrings and shirt over there by the radio—we may need them.

  “New look for you,” Jonathan remarked, surveying Nick’s suit. “Ellen?”

  “Nick, actually.” Nick put out a hand, which after a moment Jonathan shook.

  The cab ride to the hospital was unremarkable, as was the vending-machine coffee once they got there. Like all waiting rooms, the one at the New Orleans Children’s Hospital had pretensions to cheerfulness, with old kids’ issues of Aces! featuring a pre-teen Dragon Huntress on the cover. But the adults waiting silently were ashen, and even the children did not escape the pall. At the end of one row, a
skinny Creole teen stared out the window, her face sullen beneath a backward Saints cap, a blaze of red-dyed hair sticking out through the gap. Her stick-thin arms were crossed, framing a chest even flatter than Ellen’s and the all-too-appropriate logo for some jazz band named Lost Souls.

  Aren’t we all, thought Ellen as Nick read it.

  “Same crap as at the UN,” Jonathan remarked, surveying the vending machines. His phone rang. “Hey, Lilith.” He listened, turning to Nick, green eyes wide. “Trouble.”

  “Security to third-floor reception,” a voice from the intercom clarified. “We have a code white emergency. Repeat, code white.”

  Nick followed Jonathan up the stairs and through the door and took in the scene: Lilith, her black cloak flowing, was struggling with a little boy not more than ten with red hair and freckles and his fingers around her throat. “—fucking kill you, you vampire whore!” His voice was cracking, grating with rage as he snarled, “Bloodsucking motherfucking cunt!”

  Security stood in a circle, except the one guard lying on the floor. A few doctors and nurses and parents also stood stricken as Lilith and the boy struggled.

  “Cocksucker!” The boy’s elbow shot out like lightning, smashing another guard’s nose.

  Nick formed a will-o’-wisp, a tiny shocker, and tossed it across to ground into the neck of the enraged child. The boy spasmed but continued to strangle Lilith, so Nick sent another, and then a third, a larger one, enough to take down a grown man.

  His grip slackened. Lilith twisted, lithe as a snake, flinging the child to her feet with a sickening crunch. “You’re dead, you little bugger!”

  The boy snatched the hem of her cloak, clutching the fabric, pulling like he was ripping down an old shower curtain and choking Lilith with the laces as he pulled himself up. Green wasps landed on his cheek, stinging ineffectually, but a knife appeared in her hand then, a magician’s trick. Laces parted with a flash of steel, yards of black silk pooling to the floor. But the boy had his own trick and instead of tumbling down with the cloak, he grabbed Lilith’s long mane of raven locks, clambering like a monkey and whipping one around her neck to garrote her. Lilith’s knife was razor-sharp, but hair was strong, and like a cable, only cut strand by strand.

  Nick sent the fourth will-o’-wisp, the largest yet, dangerous to the border of deadly. With a crackle and a pop, the child spasmed, then collapsed to the linoleum, a lock of raven hair clutched in a death grip, a handful of wasps beside him like scattered peridots. Jonathan yelped.

  There was a brief silence, then a woman exclaimed, “He’s dead!”

  The boy lay stretched out atop Lilith’s cloak as if it were a rumpled coverlet—or a funeral pall. “It was only a shocker,” said Nick. “He should be awake in a while.”

  “No,” said the woman, “he’s really dead.”

  Nick felt a horrible lurch in the pit of his stomach. He turned back to the boy. The child’s ashen pallor was not the shade of unconsciousness, but of death. He caught his breath, praying the woman was wrong . . . then saw a twitch from the boy’s eyelids, a jerk of facial muscles, and he breathed a great sigh of relief.

  The child opened his eyes and began to sit up.

  “He died three hours ago!”

  A knife appeared in the dead boy’s chest, and then a second one, blood blossoming around them to soak his hospital pajamas. A third blade hissed through the air, catching him in the shoulder as he stood up. “That’s what I was trying to tell you!” snarled Lilith. “The little bugger’s dead!”

  The child removed a blade with one small hand. “So are you, you vampire whore!”

  Nick sent a fifth will-o’-wisp toward the boy. The ward stank with burnt hair and ozone as the corpse fell to the ground again, twitching spasmodically.

  The elevator doors opened then and more people came in. The child’s corpse began to twitch back to animation, and everyone took a step back . . . everyone except the people who’d just come from the elevator. Nick realized with dull horror that the boy wasn’t the only zombie present. Lilith had stepped back into the gray-faced parents from the waiting room. They caught her with merciless hands, gazing at her with glassy eyes. The dead boy pointed with the bloody dagger. “Make the bitch bleed! Make the fucking whore—”

  The dead boy gagged as a thousand wasps filled his pie hole, more covering his face, blinding him with sheer numbers if not their stings. Nick turned to the other zombies as they began to beat Lilith, tearing her hair and clubbing her with their clenched fists. He hurled a giant orb of foxfire at the crowd on the left, blasting them back against the elevators. Jonathan interposed himself, pulling Lilith away, presenting himself as a target instead. The zombies accepted, tearing him wasp from wasp until all they held was a torn sport jacket. Jewel-tone wasps swarmed their faces, and Nick rushed forward to where Lilith lay like a bloody rag doll, pulling her away from the zombies as patients and staff clogged the stairwell.

  Nick, Ellen thought quickly. Blast out the back window.

  “What, you can fly now?” Nick hissed, dragging Lilith away from the walking dead.

  No, but Aliyah can. Nick glanced to the back of the ward: no patients, but an oxygen tank. A single shocker and the blast took out the window, blowing the hat from Nick’s head.

  Ellen retrieved it, pulling off the jacket and pulling on the shirt and earrings. Aliyah, whirlwind, now! The thought was imperative and the dead girl didn’t even question. Get Lilith! Get Bugsy! Get Nick’s hat! The sandstorm blew, shards of glass mixed with its stinging particles, but the clothing came up, the wasps as well. The most difficult task was lifting Lilith, but she was slender and the wind was strong.

  They blew out the window and into the air.

  The New Orleans nightscape glittered, the Mississippi a glistening ribbon. Aliyah roared aloft, Jonathan’s wasps trailing behind like a chain of stars. The brightest beacon was the lights of the Quarter, and in that, shining brilliantly, a fountain of fire. Aliyah headed for that.

  Midcourse, Lilith simply vanished. Teleported, Ellen realized.

  Aliyah re-formed on the patio next to the fire fountain, half-dressed, which was more than could be said for Jonathan. Diners gawked, but without missing a beat, Jonathan said to the nearest waiter, “Table for two, two of your souvenir T-shirts, and what’s your special?”

  The waiter didn’t miss a beat, either. “That would be the Hurricane, sir.”

  “How appropriate,” Jonathan remarked as Aliyah looked to a sign lettered in green and white: PAT O’BRIEN’S—HOME OF THE HURRICANE. Next to that was the outline of a jauntily tilted cocktail glass in the shape of a hurricane lantern. “Two of those while you’re at it.”

  “Very good,” said the waiter, gesturing to a free table. Apparently in a city used to drunken hordes of Mardi Gras revelers, partially clothed aces didn’t raise many eyebrows.

  They donned what clothes they had, Jonathan adding the T-shirt when it came along with their menus and two brilliant red cocktails in the distinctive glassware.

  “I’m only sixteen,” Aliyah said, looking at hers, then paused.

  Go for it, Ali, thought Ellen. I could stand a drink myself.

  Aliyah took a sip. It tasted like high-octane Hawaiian Punch. “What happened?”

  “Zombies,” Jonathan said. “We’ll let Lilith explain it to Bubbles. And actually, that’s not a half-bad idea . . .” He ordered some Zombies to go with the Hurricanes, paired with jambalaya and crawfish étouffée. By the end of the evening, they were both pretty giddy.

  Aliyah squinted at Jonathan’s forehead and watched as a lump traveled down, moving under the skin, then down the bridge of his nose. The next moment a luminescent green wasp stuck its head out his right nostril. “Ew!” She giggled, pointing. “You’ve got a wasp booger!”

  Jonathan snorted, his whole nose dissolving into wasps that swirled around before settling back into a nose sans wasps. “Uh, sorry. It happens sometimes when I get drunk.”

  Aliyah giggled. “It’s ac
tually kind of cute once you get used to it.”

  “So are you.” Jonathan bought himself time by taking another drink. “Uh, well, Ellen’s pretty easy on the eyes, but I thought you were cute—though completely underage—when I first met you . . . before you, uh, died.” He looked uncomfortable, and not just because a trio of drunken wasps were trying to figure out how to turn themselves back into his left eyebrow.

  “How did I die?” Aliyah clutched her Hurricane. “I mean, how did the Djinn kill me? No one’s wanted to tell me. No one’s even wanted to talk to me much except you. . . .”

  “Uh . . . well . . . the Djinn had all sorts of powers. He’d turned himself into a giant and nothing could touch him, at least until you turned into a whirlwind and sand-blasted his hands.”

  “And . . . ?”

  “Um, he reached out kind of like this.” Jonathan grabbed a leftover alligator fritter, “And, uh . . .” The appetizer came apart in his hands and the broken pieces fell to the tablecloth.

  Aliyah gaped at the crumbles of wasted meat and began to tear up. “That’s horrible!”

  Jonathan moved his chair and put his arms around her. “It’s okay. You’re back.”

  “For how long?” She sobbed. “I never even got to have a real boyfriend!”

  Ellen felt like an awful voyeur, but knew it was best to hold her tongue. Jonathan Hive seemed to be a gentleman anyway, seeing to it that the bill was paid and giving Aliyah a shoulder to cry on as he escorted her back to her hotel room. “Um, we’re here. Got your key?”

  Aliyah opened her eyes, wiping at them. “Uh, yeah . . .” She opened the door, then looked at Jonathan, blinking, his sweet face and brilliant green eyes, and reached a snap decision.

  She stood on tiptoe, Ellen tall enough it didn’t take much to bridge the gap, and Jonathan’s lips parted almost immediately. Tongue met tongue. He tasted like nectar.

  Drunk on alcohol and sorrow, Aliyah finally came up for air. “You’re a good kisser.”

  He grinned his sweet grin. “Wasps know what to do with their tongues.”