kid looked around at all the suits and high heels as they offered Hartmann dignified, minimal applause. One side of his mouth turned up in disgust. Fortunato knew how the kid felt. Maybe once there'd been some sincere feeling in these ceremonies, but now it was a case of the bored leading the boring. Nobody came to self-serving political speeches except the people who needed to be seen there, the ones making some kind of political statement themselves by showing up. And those few who really did care. The starstruck kids who still had some illusions about personal power, who still believed in that sharp, clean line between good and evil and wanted to wage war across it.
Fortunato saw the wild card as a kind of Aladdin's lamp of the unconscious. The virus rewrote DNA to match what it read in the back of the mind. If your luck was bad it transcribed a nightmare, and if you lived through it you were a joker. But sometimes it hit a vein of the pure stuff, like Arnie's love for dinosaurs and comic books and aces. And even though it made a bit of a joke out of him, it let him live his dreams out on the street.
The joke was a law of nature, the conservation of mass. Arnie could turn into any dinosaur he could visualize, but his mass remained the same. If he was a tyrannosaur he was a three-foot-high tyrannosaur. Okay for a kid, but he was already thirteen or fourteen, full of adolescent juice and delusions of immortality.
"Hey," Fortunato shouted at him. "Hey, kid!" Arnie turned to look at him.
The kids arm came off.
It flopped like the muscles had grown their own brain, and then it was sailing through the air and bouncing across the pavement. Fortunato and the kid both stood there for an instant, not comprehending. And then blood began to fountain out of the ragged flap of flesh and the air smelled like a butcher shop.
The kid started to change. Even with an arm gone his instincts were good. His remaining arm shrank and grew scales. His thighs began to swell and his stomach shrank.
Fortunato reached out with his power and tried to stop time. The people around him slowed but the blood pumped undiminished from the kid's arm socket.
The Astronomer, Fortunato thought. Shielding the kid from the power that could save him.
Fortunato tried to run toward him. It was like running in a nightmare, the air thick as wet cement, draining his strength. The kid was losing too much blood. It puddled around his tennis shoes, soaked the cuffs of his jeans. He couldn't finish the change. His left hand had grown a huge, scythe-shaped claw and he slashed futilely in front of him with it. His face was still human except for a bulging lower jaw. The eyes flashed from shock to rage to fear and finally to helplessness.
A handful of flesh came out of the kid's throat. The blood from his shoulder slowed as his neck began to spurt.
The kid collapsed. His weirdly jointed legs and the beginnings of a long, stiff tail kept him from falling more than halfway. His chest opened and his heart fell out onto the concrete. The heart seemed to shiver in the sunlight, fibrillating spasmodically for no more than a second before it lay still.
And then there was a little man, maybe a couple of inches over five feet tall, standing next to the kid's distorted corpse. He had an ankle-length black robe that was soaked and spattered with blood. His head was too big for his body and he wore thick glasses.
Fortunato had seen him twice before. Once was inside an Egyptian Masonic temple in Jokertown, seven years before. Fortunato had been looking'out through the eyes of a woman he loved, a woman named Eileen who was now dead.
The second time was when Fortunato had led the attack on the Cloisters. Which had led to the Howler being dead, and to this death, right here in front of him.
"I waited for you," the Astronomer said. "I was beginning to think you wouldn't come and I'd have to start without you." His voice had an ugly singsong rhythm.
Fortunato couldn't get within twenty feet of him. "Why the kid? For Christ's sake, why the kid?"
"I wanted you to know," the Astronomer said. "I'm not fucking around any more." He sniffed his blood-drenched fingers. "You're all going to die. Between now and four A.M. Be sure