I opened the bottle and took a swig straight out of it.
“This early, Reese?” she scolded.
I drew my seat up to my corner table and clanked it down hard. “I’m nocturnal, remember? My whole body is out of whack.”
She set a plate down in front of me. Overcooked bacon, scrambled eggs and whiskey. The breakfast of champions.
“You haven’t been nocturnal for…. What is it… three years now?” she said, wearing a wicked grin.
“Rub it in why don’t you.”
“I’m just saying. You’re going to kill yourself.”
I chuckled at the private joke inside my head as she carried breakfast to Michelle in the living room. We’d given up trying to get her to sit down for a meal without things getting uncomfortable. Children that age have a sixth sense, I think. Like she could see through my wrinkly shell and into my rotting core. It terrified her. I wondered every morning I saw her what that felt like. Feeling fear.
“Are you going to eat anything, or just stare at it?” Laura asked when she returned and sat across from me.
I lifted a piece of the blackened bacon and stuck out my tongue. “Now I really regret not going through with it.”
“Through with what?”
“I tried to kill myself yesterday,” I said nonchalantly. Like it was a daily routine when truthfully that was the closest I’d ever come. Laura was midway through a sip of water and nearly choked.
“What?” she asked.
“I rolled down the harbor. Right to the edge. It was perfect, Laura. The sun on my face. Gulls cawing. Hearing the waves call to me. It was the first time in so long I felt like I could breathe.”
“Why would you do that?”
“Do you really need to ask that question?”
I watched a hundred different responses pass through her brain. Her pretty, brown eyes glinted from welling tears. “But you couldn’t do it?”
“Apparently, I’m too good at playing hero.”
“I… I don’t know what to say, Reese.”
I reached across the table and grasped her hand. Her fingers were soft like a women’s should be. Not like mine, hardened from so many times wrapped around the throats of wicked men.
“You’ve never had to say anything. You’ve never had to take care of me or keep checking in. Your father took care of that a long time ago. You don’t owe me anything. It’s time to stop wasting your time.”
She yanked her hand free and pushed away from the table. “You really think I’m wasting my time? I come every week because I care about you, Reese. I know who you are even if you’ve forgotten.”
All I could manage was a feeble laugh.
“What?” she bristled.
“Still so stubborn.”
“And you’re not? You spend so much time in here wallowing that you’ve forgotten about all the people you saved. You may not be the Roach anymore, but he was you.”
“So, you’re telling me I shouldn’t kill myself?”
She threw up her hands in exasperation. “You do whatever you think you need to, but I’m going to be here next Monday like I always am. I hope I see you.”
“Was it something I said?”
She stormed out of the kitchen. I followed at a distance. Our visits ended this way more often than I’d probably care to admit. I really could be an insufferable bastard sometimes, but more than anything I wanted her to be mad at me. To not care when I returned to that pier and finished what I should have. She only got to hear about all the people I saved. About the kids being beaten by their step-fathers or sold smack by gangbangers. I saw the dark side.
Eventually, after you wipe enough filth from the streets but it keeps bubbling back like a sickness, it’s all you can see in people. A roll down the street and I wonder which man in a prim suit struck his wife last night or is having an affair. Which harmless civilian doubled as a serial killer. The darkness of humanity clings to you like wet sand on the beach. And now all I could do was watch it fester and turn my city into a breeding ground for crime and villainy.
“Come on, Michelle,” Laura said, mustering her calm tone. “It’s time to go.”
“Okay,” Michelle replied with her tiny voice. She glanced over at me momentarily, hovering in the doorway with a bottle of Jack dangling from my grip. She immediately turned her gaze to the floor and grabbed her mother’s hand.
They went for the door, but a hard knock stopped them in their tracks.
“Laura Garrity, I know you’re in there!” someone shouted.
I raced over to my covered window and drew back the curtain just enough to peak outside. A skinny fellow wearing glasses and holding a notepad stood on my porch.
“Not this asshole again,” I grumbled. “Laura, go to the back. I’ll deal with him.”
“He’s harmless,” she said.
“So am I. Now go.”
She spent a long few seconds considering it before she finally listened and took her confused daughter with her. I rolled up to the door and stretched my fingers around the handle. That article in my basement about how the Roach might have attacked Laura Garrity? The man outside wrote it. Chuck Barnes. He used to write for the Times, but he had such a hard-on for revealing who the Roach was behind the mask that he destroyed his credibility. Stalking a young woman and her infant child will do that.
Now he was a pariah in the reporting industry, which meant he could bend rules and do whatever it took to try and prove what he’d pieced together without caring. In my prime, I would’ve broken into his house to get him to back off. But he lived in a walk-up across the city, and I couldn’t very well get up that high in a wheelchair and manage to remain intimidating.
I tossed my bottle of whiskey onto the couch and then swung the door open. “I know she’s in here Mr. Roberts,” he said and immediately tried to peek his head in. I blocked him with my chair.
“How many times do I have to tell you to keep off my damn property?” I said.
“Until you tell me why you’re hanging around a much younger woman who happens to be the daughter of our illustrious mayor.”
I gave him another nudge, this time pushing him down one step. “What can I tell you? We’re in love.” I stroked my ragged beard, straining out a few droplets of whiskey. “She can’t resist me.”
Footsteps echoed from my townhouse. “What was that?” He leaned over me again. I smacked the notepad out of his hand. It landed in a puddle and he quickly jumped down to retrieve it. Ink bled through the wet pages, rendering his mad scrawling illegible. He shook it off.
“Oh, real nice,” he said. “You know how much work was in there?”
“I did ask nicely, didn’t I?”
He stuck his finger out at me. “You know, one day the truth is going to come out! All the people you hurt. Taking the law into your own hands. I’ve looked into you, Reese Roberts. No hospital records of a paralysis case or anything. Sanitation says it’s confidential.”
“I’m self-healing.” I rolled back and tried to close the door, but he bolted back up my stoop and impeded me with his foot.
“Who’d you bribe to keep everyone quiet? Anytime I try to bring anything to the city council they boot me out like it’s all nonsense, but you’d have to be dense not to see all the pieces. The Roach used the sewers and subway lines to move around. You worked in them. I watched the last known person he saved step through your door earlier this morning. Every week.”
I grabbed his wrist and squeezed. I was in the right mind to snap it like I’d done to that chubby bully in the alley, but I controlled my temper. He was lucky I’d only just started drinking that morning. “I suggest you walk away.”
“I visited John Banks in prison, Roberts. You remember him?”
I bit my lip. “Can’t say I have.”
“He was the lowlife the Roach caught molesting Laura Garrity three years ago. Ring any bells? No? Well after the Roach made sure he could never rape a woman again, Banks said he saw him take a bullet in the bac
k from a cop. The kind of shot that might leave a man’s legs paralyzed.”
In every comic, the superhero has an arch-enemy. Batman has the Joker, Superman has Lex Luthor. I had Chuck Barnes since all the other options were dead or behind bars for good. He was a man so hell-bent on revealing the truth and redeeming his once-sterling reputation that he’d accept testimony from a piece of trash like John Banks. Except every part of what he’d said was true. The only reason my identity didn’t come out was because of who I saved. Laura’s dad got me the treatment I needed and kept everything quiet. From the Sanitation Department to the police chief in charge of the rookie who ended my vigilante career.
For about a year people asked what had happened to the Roach and why he disappeared. By the time her father was re-elected, nobody even cared. I was a memory. A name on some old newspaper clippings. Only Chuck Barnes kept searching, and I would’ve told him the truth just to shut him up if it weren’t for Laura and Michelle. I didn’t care if people knew. If old enemies came knocking on my door they could take as many swings as they wanted, but if they went knocking on Laura’s? No.
“Walk away, Chuck,” I whispered, squeezing his wrist tighter.
“Fine. Just tell me one thing first. Is that kid his, or yours?”
“I said walk away!” I burst through the door and shoved him with all of my might. He flew back off the stoop, sliced his hand on the rusty railing, and landed hard on the pavement.
“Well that’s just great!” he shouted, glancing at his bloody hand. “So that’s the kind of hero you are.”
“Exactly the kind.” I went to back into my house when a police cruiser turned the corner. They blurted their siren and flashed their lights once, then stopped in front of my townhouse. “You’ve got to be kidding me,” I groaned.
“Is everything all right?” Laura yelled from the kitchen.
“Fine!”
The officers stepped out of their car, gazes set on me. Chuck got to his feet.
“Did you see that?” he asked them. They walked right by him, and it took me all of two seconds to realize why. The chubby bully from the day before got out of the car too, arm in a sling.
“Is that him?” one of the officers asked the kid.
“Yeah,” he replied. “That’s the asshole who attacked me.”
“Is that what the punk told you?” I laughed. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”
The kid didn’t say a word. All he did was stare at me while wearing a shit-eating grin.
“Oh, this is even better,” Chuck said. He flipped to one of the dryer pages of his notepad and approached the kid. “I’m a reporter,” he addressed him. “Would you mind telling me exactly what this man did to you?”
“Sir,” the officer said to me. “I’m going to have to take you down to the precinct and ask you some questions.” The way he regarded made me sick to my stomach. Like I was completely useless. If I had my legs I bet he would’ve arrested me right then and there, but who would believe that a flimsy old cripple could do anything to healthy a young man?
“What if I say no?” I replied.
“I’m afraid that isn’t an option,” the officer said. “Now please, let me help you down.”
“You’re going away for a long time, asshole!” the kid shouted at me. If he was a legal adult and their victim spoke the truth, I would get a slap on the wrist. But I hadn’t taken the time to vet them like I used to when I was the Roach. If he was actually a minor and I broke his wrist. They’d hear the two bully’s stories, and then the ungrateful prick I’d saved. Who knew whether or not he’d back me or be bullied into lying. By the time they got to my story it wouldn’t matter what I said.
Is this really what I turned away from death for? I asked myself. Is this the way the Roach goes down?
The officer took my hand and guided my wheelchair down the narrow ramp tracks I’d built onto the stairs of my townhouse. He did it slowly like I was a delicate vase in an antique shop. The entire time I eyed the holstered pistol by his hip. I could grab it and finally end things. Quicker than drowning. It was less than I deserved, but there wasn’t time to be picky about justice being done.
“What’s going on, officer?” Laura asked.
My hand was halfway toward grabbing it when her voice made me freeze. I looked up at the door and saw her standing there, arms around her daughter.
“What’s going on mommy?” Michelle asked.
“Forget about it, Laura,” I said. Of course, she ignored me.
“Someone is making a mistake.” Laura hopped down the stairs and stopped the officer. “Where are you taking him?”
“Ms. Garrity,” the officer stammered. “He’s wanted for questioning in the assault of that boy. I’m just doing my job.”
“Well, I’m sure this is easily explainable. An accident.”
“There they go,” Chuck said. “Protecting this scumbag again. When are you two finally going to let him answer for his crimes?”
“When are you going to leave us alone and get back to your sorry life!”
The officer released my chair. “Look, Ms. Garrity. I don’t know what’s going on here, but I have to take him in. If the young man is lying we’ll get to the bottom of it, but I have no choice now. Assault of a minor is a serious accusation.”
“I’ll tell you what’s going on, officer,” Chuck chimed in. The Garrity’s have spent years protecting Reese Roberts to hide the fact that he’s the Roach! Was the Roach.”
“That’s insane!” Laura shouted.
I missed the rest of the argument. While everyone got riled up, little Michelle slipped away from her mother and was headed toward a baseball that had rolled into the street. Three years old, no sense of the world’s dangers, I saw it all happening it my head. A truck sped down the street, and when she stepped beyond the line of parked cars it would barrel right over her.
Michelle was the only person who saw me for what I really was anymore. Who saw the truth that Chuck Barnes so desperately wanted. That when you hunt monsters for so long, you become one yourself. But I wouldn’t die a monster in a cage.
I grabbed hold of my wheels and launched my chair forward. The officer blurted something and tried to catch me but was too slow. Laura saw where I was going and screamed her daughter’s name.
The wind blew through my hair as I raced across the sidewalk. I felt like I was leaping across rooftops again. My chair rumbled and had my legs bouncing as if I was running. Michelle didn’t turn around when she heard her mother. The truck couldn’t see her and wasn’t stopping.
How far is too far? I've been asking myself that question every second of every day for three years and it was time to finally find out. I went just far enough, grabbed Michelle and threw her back onto the sidewalk. The truck driver hit the brakes when he saw me and tried to turn but it was too late.
In the second before it plowed into me, my whole life flashed. All the fights. All the monsters slain. I was the Roach, the bane of New York’s criminal underworld, and at least I got to go out on my own terms…
A Word from Rhett C. Bruno
Thank you so much for taking the time to read "The Roach Rises." The story has been bouncing around in my head for years. First I wanted to try writing a TV Pilot script with the character, than a movie, and then Steve Beaulieu approached me with his idea for a Superhero themed anthology. It was just the right push I needed to get the story of the Roach down in any format. Like with most of my work, I wanted to craft a story that was simultaneously heart-wrenching and up-lifting. While the title was a play on Dark Knight Rises, the word 'rise' holds a special meaning in this story. This will also be the first story of any length I've published that can't be classified as hard science fiction.
Beyond this anthology, I'm an amazon bestselling science fiction author and architect living in Stamford Connecticut. I'm represented by Mike Hoogland with Dystel & Goderich. My published works include the Circuit series (Published by Diversion Books) and the Titanborn series (Publi
shed by Random House Hydra). I'm also one of the founders of the popular science fiction platform Sci-Fi Bridge.
I've been writing since before I can remember, but didn't really start to take it seriously until my early 20's. While studying Architecture at Syracuse University, it was tough to find time to write while dealing with a brutal curriculum, but I persevered. I dedicated myself to reading the works of classic sci-fi authors like Frank Herbert, Heinlein, Phillip K. Dick and Timothy Zahn, and decided to start writing my first full length science fiction novel, The Circuit: Executor Rising.
It's been a long journey since! When I'm not working as an architect during the day, you can find me at home with my fiancee and dog trying to find time to write. You can find out more about my work at www.rhettbruno.com. If you’d like exclusive access to updates and the opportunity to receive limited content, ARCs and more, please subscribe to my newsletter. I hope to hear from you soon!
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THE PALADIN
BY KEVIN G. SUMMERS
THE PALADIN
BY KEVIN G. SUMMERS
My name is Jared Weiss. I am the Paladin.
You may have read some newspaper stories last year about my war on crime. They’re exaggerations…mostly. Apparently, a masked vigilante in a Washington, D.C. suburb isn’t enough to sell newspapers. Well, let me set the record straight. I don’t have super-powers; I can’t fly or bend steel with my bare hands or move things with my mind. I’m not the bored son of a billionaire trying to make some excitement in my life, and I’m not doing this to try and market a new superhero concept to DC Comics.
Why am I doing this? Because somebody has to. Because gangs are moving into the suburbs, and kids are getting hooked on drugs every single day. Because what those kids really need is somebody to look up to. They need a hero, and that’s exactly what I want to be.
It's A Bird! It's A Plane! Page 7