Last Call (Last Call 1)

The player, a haggard young man with a two-day beard, blinked when Crane spoke to him and then fumbled in his stack of bills.

"Aces are worth two," he said, tossing out two hundred-dollar bills.

Diana hopped back away from a pair of life-size faceless mannequins, and she lost her footing in the loose sand and sat down heavily; before she could scramble back up to her feet and limp to where Nardie was slashing right and left with the chip, the two figures had managed to burningly claw her shoulder and side.

The pair of mannequins were moving awkwardly, like newborn mechanical colts, and the eyeless fronts of their heads swept back and forth metronomically.

Diana clutched the back of Nardie's shirt and tried to take deep breaths of the stale, hot air and hold back the glittery haze of unconsciousness.

There was no way she and Nardie were going to be able to fight their way through these things down to the lake.

She wondered if they could even make it back to the highway now—the increasingly solid angular transparencies were crowding around on that side, too, so that the passing cars on the far side were just flickering blobs of refracted color in the incalculable distance—and she wondered bleakly if getting all the way back to that solid asphalt pavement would, in fact, help at all. What if the drivers of the cars proved to be just more hinged zombies?

From the corner of her eye she glimpsed a couple of figures.

"Behind you!" Diana yelled as the same two faceless mannequins came scissor-stepping across the sand.

But they weren't faceless anymore; their faces, though expressionless, were solid, and they were recognizably the faces of Nardie and Diana themselves.

Nardie flinched back from the things, and Diana had to skip aside to keep from being knocked down.

And Nardie hopped forward in a spasmodic lunge, sweeping the edge of the diminishing chip across the space where the mimic faces had been an instant before.

The Diana-thing and the Nardie-thing had gone flailing and scuffling away backward.

Then Nardie had turned her back on them and was slashing madly, gasping, and cutting a path through the phantasms as if the Moulin Rouge chip were a machete. She was crowding up, sliding her feet forward through the sand to claim every slack yard or foot or inch, away from the two figures and perhaps toward the water, and Diana limped along after her.

"They've started to … digest us," panted Diana.

An idea intruded itself into her mind, and she moaned hopelessly.

"We've got to do more," she said in a voice that shook with exhaustion.

"Like what?" panted Nardie.

"The goddamn chip is what they can't digest, what repels them," Diana called. "We've got to do more than just cut ourselves with it." She had to lash out and hit one of the Huck Finn boys from the riverboat facade of the Holiday Casino, and she shouted in pain as the grinning boy's teeth scored her wrist, but the figure did fall back. "Cutting our hands with the chip was a token, a gesture," she sobbed, shaking her burned hand. "This isn't about tokens. Look at the chip now."

Nardie feinted furiously, and then, in the bought second of the figures' retreat, she held up what was left of the Moulin Rouge chip. It was a flimsy white disk now, seeming as thin as paper.

"Break it," said Diana, "and we'll eat it." The gummy air whistled in her throat as she tried to take a vivifying breath. "Then, when the chip is part of each of us, it'll be us that they can't digest."

The giant ape, transparent as cellophane, made a rush at them across the sand and Diana and Nardie scrambled several yards back before a swipe of the disk drove the thing back. "It will kill us," Nardie said.

Nardie's words hung in the heat that surrounded them.

Will it kill us, Mother? thought Diana. Is it your will that your daughter, and her friend that you blessed, die by their own hands rather than at the hands of these things?

She sensed no answer.

"Give me half," she said despairingly.

"Christ." After a moment of hesitation Nardie broke the chip and reached over to hand half of it to Diana.

Again the big voice from across the lake boomed a couple of incomprehensible syllables.

The towering Vegas Vic cowboy from the roof of the Pioneer Casino, grinning with a mouth made of ghostly neon tubes under his giant phantasmagorical cowboy hat, bent down and swatted Diana with his open palm.

She tumbled away across the hot sand, but she held on to the half of the chip, and when she rolled to a stop, she put it into her mouth. It had sharp edges and cut her tongue and the roof of her mouth as she made her throat work and swallow it.

But suddenly she sensed something in her that partook of Scott and Oliver and Scat and Ozzie, and of something in the lake itself, and even of poor Hans, and she was sure that she was not too exhausted to stand up again.