Mars is My Destination

by Frank Belknap Long

Why make him a present of the only card I was holding? Why be that charitable when ... God, how silly could you get? If I'd had my strength or there had been anyone within earshot to dispute his authority if I shouted for help—a one in fifty chance of it, even—I might have been holding at least a Jack or a Queen. But never an Ace, or four of a kind or a Royal Flush. About all I was holding was the joker. In some games the joker can be the highest card in the deck, but not in the kind of game the three of us were playing.

It was the third player who was holding all of the really high cards. He was hovering just behind Glacial Stare, with a shroud with my name embroidered on it draped over his arm. He could see my hand clearly, because he was looking straight at me out of eyes like holes in a skull.

That scythe-and-sickle round is almost unbeatable because of the way Death has of just quietly raising the ante until all hope is gone. Sometimes you've no choice but to let him call your bluff, lay your cards face up on the table, and wait for the blow to fall.

Sometimes ... but not always. Death is a weird-o who doesn't really want anyone to live to a crusty old age and that can anger you, and there are no limits to what a certain kind of resentment can do for you. You'll take desperate chances when you know the sands have just about run out.

I came up out of the bed so fast the electricity my body generated made the sheets crackle. It wasn't the helplessly weak body I'd thought it. Not at all. When I whipped back my arm I could feel a thrust of power and resilience in my shoulder muscles that amazed me, because it shouldn't have been there. There was no flabbiness or lack of muscle tone.

I crashed into him before my feet hit the floor, sinking my fist into his mid-section and sending the chair he was sitting in skidding half across the hospital room.

He clung to both arms of the chair, too jolted to straighten up and try to heave himself out of it before I shortened the distance between us by hurling myself directly at him again. I just missed fumbling that crucial follow-up, because my legs were deficient in muscle tone and they almost collapsed under me before I got to him.

I dragged him out of the chair and had him down on the floor and was banging his head against the floor before he could get any kind of grip on me. I wasn't in the least bit gentle about it. If I'd been banging him around for five or ten minutes without stopping I couldn't have heightened the look of shock and absolute horror in his eyes.

The best he could do was twist about under me and try desperately to raise himself a little, thrusting his head forward to keep me from bringing it so violently into contact with the floor. He seemed to be trying so hard to get out from under that I decided to help him. I lifted him clean off the floor and slammed him back against the wall—not once, but several times.

I don't know where my strength came from, but even my legs were doing all right now. They were still the weakest part of me, but they went right on supporting me until I'd finished clouting him with something that was just as good as a sledgehammer—the firm wall itself, completely stationary as it was. If I'd been standing behind it using it as a forward-thrusting shield his skull couldn't have cracked against it any harder.