Phthalo Blues: The Viper

by Will Wallner

  Simon reached the cold metal door at the top of the stairwell. He weakly tried to push it open, but it wouldn’t budge, so he shook the handle back and forth using both hands.

  "Come on you piece of shit!" He frantically screamed.

  Finally, he used his shoulder and drove all of his body weight into the door. It swung open so fast he fell through the opening and ended up on his hands and knees, crawling like a dog on the streets of Tech City. He managed to stand back on his feet and quickly surveyed the scene over at the piano bar. It was swarming with police officers collecting evidence and taking photos. Simon couldn’t afford to be seen by anyone from the police or from the press. If he was caught, he'd face a lifetime in jail or worse. The scene at the piano bar had drawn a large crowd of pedestrians and reporters watching from behind the area taped off by the police. In order to escape, Simon squeezed through the crowd and pushed everyone out of his way. It was like wadding through mud, a sea of stagnant people, between him and freedom. He kept his face lowered and just kept pushing.

  On the other side of the crowd, it was just a quick walk around a corner and then he could board the metro and ride the train to freedom out of the city. Driving the truck which was registered to the piano bar would have been too much of a risk, so he decided to return the truck and then leave on the train. It never occurred to Simon that he could have just abandoned the truck in a remote area of Tech City and then make his escape without having to return the piano bar. Perhaps it was out of a lingering sense of fear still had towards Alex, or perhaps it was just pure stupidity, but Simon felt the best plan was to return the truck to where it was normally housed, when it was being used by the Overlords. Regardless of what would have been the smartest way of escaping this situation, he had made his plan and decided to see it through, he was so close. Desperate to escape as fast as he could, he didn’t realize he was being followed by someone from the crowd who had recognized him. As he went around the corner and locked his eyes on the metro station, a hand reached out and grabbed him on the shoulder.

  "Excuse me, can I talk you for a second?"

  Simon spun around to face the man, he didn't recognize him, but it was Viper.

  "I'm sorry but I'm in a rush I don’t have time to talk to anyone." Simon stuttered. He could see that Viper wasn't a Tech City police officer. Simon feared who this person could be associated with and what he could want with him. The man leaned in close to Simon, then quietly spoke.

  "I recognize your face, you're one of the Overlords. I'm surprised you’re still alive after seeing what happened to the rest of your associates." Viper had received a file on Alex and the Overlords which contained mug shots of all of the members. He was genuinely shocked that of all of the members, Simon had managed to stay alive.

  "Who…Who are you?" Simon trembled as he spoke to Viper.

  "I'm a representative from the group in Capitol City that hired Alex. My name is Viper."

  "So, you’re from Nexus?" Simon's anxiety exploded as he feared what they could want with him. As much as Simon feared the police, he feared Nexus much more and prayed they didn’t think he'd betrayed them. Upon hearing those words Viper's demeaner changed from cool to aggressive. He grabbed Simon by the throat.

  "Are you fucking stupid!? That name shouldn't be said in public, understand?" Simon nodded his head with as much motion as he could from within Viper's grip. All of the tiredness and fatigue he had previously was washed away with adrenaline as his wide eyes looked directly into Viper's. Believing they had a mutual understanding, Viper released his grip from Simon's throat. "Good. Is there somewhere we can talk in private? I think we'd both like to avoid the police seeing us together."

  "Yes sir, absolutely! We can go to my place." By this point, Simon was like a lost puppy, desperately seeking anyone to offer his loyalty in return for their protection. Alex used to be his owner, but now he was left abandoned, caught between the police and an organization he didn’t understand. Simon hoped this stranger from Nexus would become his new master. Despite being a coward, he was obedient and loyal to anyone who looked after him.

  ~

  Viper sat in an old, worn out, arm chair in Simon's cheap apartment. Night was approaching. It had been an incredibly long day for Viper, who was starting to feel low on energy, tired, and irritated. Just hours ago, he had been aboard the crashed MAW vessel in Berlin, now he had another matter to deal with. There's a limit to how much any human could accomplish in a day. There's only so many calories that could be burned. Viper was nearing that limit. His gas tank was almost empty. Mentally he could tell he was slipping. There was only so much more he could hope to achieve before he would have to call it a day and get some rest. He'd hoped he could tie up both of his objectives within a single day, but it was becoming apparent the situation in Tech City would require more than he had left.

  Simon sat opposite to Viper, nervously running his fat fingers through his balding, greasy hair. He drank whisky from a small glass.

  "Are you sure I can't offer you something to drink?" Simon waved his glass towards Viper.

  "No, just start at the beginning. I need to know what happened to Alex's gang and our drivers." Viper held his left index finger to his temple, it was a way to center his focus.

  "I don’t even know where to begin. We were doing the job you guys hired us for, you know, picking up the cargo and making the shipments. A few months into it, this private investigator started sniffing around. He was looking for one of the missing kids." Simon took a sip of whisky. "He seemed to have some idea of what we were doing. Pretty soon we realized he was following our men and even came to the piano bar asking questions."

  "Who was he working for?" Viper asked.

  "At first Alex thought he'd just been hired by the kid's mother."

  "Wait, you were supposed to only target homeless orphans." Viper interrupted.

  "Yeah right, but you see, one our men fucked up and accidently took an orphan who'd just been adopted. They weren't supposed to have any families, so no one would come looking for them, but this kid's mother kept filing police reports. That wasn't so much of a problem, because we got men on the inside, but eventually she hired this guy, his name was Michael Paris. Like I said, at first, we thought he just working for the kid's mother, but Alex started suspecting he was working for someone else, so we took him out, quickly."

  "Who else was he working for?" Viper was trying process the information to make sense of what had happened in Tech City.

  "We never found out." Simon replied.

  "You should have interrogated him before killing him." Viper looked annoyed. Clearly, Alex and the Overlords were amateurs who should never have been approached for this job.

  "Right, absolutely." Simon squirmed in his chair, clearly scared of saying the wrong thing. "If I had been in charge we would have, but Alex ordered the boys to take him out, so what can you do? This is where things get a little strange." Viper rolled his eyes, listening to Simon. "Right after we took out Michael Paris, another guy just walks right into the piano bar, out of nowhere, and starts asking me questions about him. He said he was a friend of his, but I knew he was lying, so I immediately sent one of our toughest guys, Jake, right after him. Jake's the same guy that took out Michael Paris by the way. A few minutes later, we find Jake, lying in a puddle of his own blood, totally messed up. Jake said he stabbed the guy right in the stomach, but somehow, he managed to survive. Jake said the guy had like super human strength or something. Alex thought Jake was lying and was just trying to save face, because there's no way someone could survive getting stabbed in the stomach." Simon took another big sip of whisky. "Then two nights ago, the same guy shows up again at the Piano Bar, and…and that was that, we were wiped out."

  "Wait what? What do you mean 'that was that'?" Viper thought that in his tired state, he had missed something Simon had said.

  "I know it sounds crazy, but it was just like Jake said, this guy legit has super powers or something. I saw him kill Alex and
the rest of the Overlords all by himself."

  "You can’t be serious? One guy took out your entire gang?" Viper felt as if Simon wasn't telling the truth, or at least was holding back important information.

  "I'm telling you man, this guy is like nothing I've ever seen. He took out your drivers too, last night, in the desert."

  "Our drivers are some of the most highly trained soldiers in all of the MAW military. He might have been able to take down a bunch of untrained gang bangers, but not our men, it's just not possible." Now Viper really didn’t believe what he was hearing. "If he's such a badass how did you manage survive? Why did he let you live?"

  "He had other plans for me. I'll tell you exactly what happened." Simon knew there were a few things he would have to be careful to leave out if his story. The most important being, that he had betrayed Nexus. All he could think about was survival. He took a big sip from his Whisky then began to carefully explain to Viper what had happened last night.

  Flashback: Hunter Returns

  Tech City, Middle Continent

  Day 10 Month 4 Year 2037

  (Last Night)

  Simon lay in his bed, completely exhausted. He'd been awake for around 36 hours, a day and half. The previous night he didn’t get any sleep after witnessing what happened on the roof of the Tech City Piano Bar. He'd then spent the whole day hastily destroying evidence and records kept at the piano bar related the gang's illegal activities. His goal was to get rid of as much as he could which might implicate himself before the police arrived. He stole all the cash he could find from the gang's headquarters then planned to get out of Tech City as soon as possible. The night before he'd seen the total destruction of his fellow gang members. He was still in disbelief. As much as he would have preferred to get out of Tech City right then, he was completely wiped out and needed some rest. Simon turned off the light in his apartment and fell asleep.

  A few hours later, in the middle of the night, the light in his apartment came back on. As Simon hazily woke up, he saw a familiar figure standing over his bed. It must have been a dream, or rather, a nightmare. The dim light only outlined the figure, leaving most of the detail shrouded in mystery. As Simon's eyes adjusted, he began to see more clearly. The man standing in front of his bed had long hair and wore a black leather jacket, it was Hunter. Simon prayed he was just having a nightmare, but this was all too real.

  "Wake up Simon! It's time to make one last delivery." Hunter grabbed Simon by the neck and dragged him out of bed.

  "Wait, wait please!" Simon's body went limp as he pleaded with Hunter. "What do you want from me? I told you there wouldn’t be any more abductions. I kept my word! I told everyone connected who's still alive it's over!" Simon was so scared he probably would have wet his pants.

  "That's good, but we have one more important job to do. I need you to call your contacts, the ones you meet out in the desert. Tell them you have one more final delivery to make, but they have to meet us right now." Hunter looked into Simon's bloodshot eyes.

  Hunter had driven that night from Berlin back to Tech City. He had spent the whole day resting in Berlin and planning this out. Alex's gang would put the children in the back of a truck and deliver them to Nexus out in the desert. He knew if he was going to find Malcom and the other children, the next step would be to interrogate the Nexus drivers.

  "Oh man, you can't be serious. They'll kill me if they find out I betrayed them." Simon squirmed. "Those guys are on another level. They're from Capitol City. Compared to them, a gang like us in Tech City is like little fish in a tiny pond. They have the resources to kill me in an instant. They won’t hesitate."

  "I'll kill you if you don't." Hunter didn’t really want to kill Simon. He didn't want to kill anyone else if he didn’t have to. He just needed Simon to believe he would.

  "Please, I'm begging you. Just let me go! I'm not a bad guy, I just got caught with the wrong people. I knew what Alex was doing was wrong, but he forced me to help him. He was a total psycho, just ask Nakita. Let me go and I'll disappear, you'll never hear from me again." As Simon pleaded, Hunter remained silent, he just kept looking directly into his eyes with an intense gaze. Simon got the message.

  "Alright, alright, I'll do it, but only if you promise to protect me." Simon picked up his phone and called his contact. "Hey, it's me, we got one more shipment we need to get rid of." He paused as he listened to the person on the other end of the line. "I know but this is really urgent. We gotta do it tonight, the police are sniffing around. We’ll be there in an hour." Simon hung up the phone then spoke in despair. "It's done, I'm a dead man…the truck is parked in a garage near the piano bar. I'll get you the keys."

  "No Simon, you're going to drive the truck and meet them as planned."

  "What?! But why? Couldn’t you just drive out there yourself?" Simon had no idea what Hunter was planning.

  "You’re driving the truck, and Simon, don't try anything stupid. If you do what I say, I'll let you go."

  Simon drove the truck across the eastern bridge, out of Tech City, towards Tiberia. It was the dead of night. There was little traffic on the road, especially heading towards the east. Tiberia wasn't a place many people wanted visit. As the illuminated city scape of Tech City vanished into his rear-view mirror, Simon checked his satellite navigation system. He input the coordinates of the meeting point. It was far out in the desert, between Tech City and Tiberia. This part of Middle Continent was mostly flat, desert plains. There were small sand dunes with patches of dry vegetation. At night, the moon of Eros could be seen clearly in the sky, shinning with a pale shade of green.

  Sweat poured down his face as he focused on the road ahead of him. When Simon reached the meeting location, he slowed down and looked out in the darkness for the signal. He prayed they wouldn’t be there, that maybe there would be some reason that prevented them from meeting him. Something that Hunter would accept as a valid reason so Simon could escape the conflict. He wasn't that lucky. A quick flash from a head lamp nearby alerted him to their location. He let out a sigh of despair and steered the truck off the road in the direction where he had been signaled. After a short drive off the road, he pulled up in front of a high-tech military vehicle with metallic armor plates. Two MAW Corp military soldiers stepped out and approached the truck. Simon lowered the window so he could speak to them.

  "Thanks for coming at short notice, there was a rumor the Tech City police were about to raid our HQ." As Simon spoke, sweat poured down his face. His legs trembled and he gripped the steering wheel as hard as he could.

  "That's alright, but I thought you had the police in your pocket?" The soldier addressed Simon through the window while his partner stood in front of the truck highlighted by the headlamps.

  "Yeah, but we got a tip off that some younger agent was gonna try to make a name for himself." Simon's lies were actually believable, but he couldn't look at the officer while he spoke.

  "I understand. Is that why you're driving instead of the regular guy?" The soldier had made this exchange many times. He knew something seemed a little off.

  "Yeah exactly, that’s why I'm driving." It made sense, so Simon went along with it.

  "Alright, how large is the cargo?" The MAW soldier looked at the back of the tuck.

  "Um, there's twelve." Simon nervously thought of a number which would sound reasonable. He tried to act as normal as possible.

  "Hmm, that's a big delivery. Under our agreement you'll get fifty thousand satoshis per child. We'll load the cargo then transfer your payment, hang tight." The soldier signaled to his partner and walked around to the back of the truck. He lifted the latch off the rear door and pulled it opened. As he heard the screech of the truck's rear door being slowly opened, Simon's hands started to shake uncontrollably as he gripped the steering wheel. He watched in his side mirror as the rear door of the truck swung open.

  "What the fuck is this?" The soldier shined a flash light into the back of the truck. It was empty. All he saw was a shadow in t
he far corner of the compartment. "Hey! Where the hell is the cargo?!?" He yelled to Simon. Just then, a dark figure stepped out of the shadow. The second soldier noticed immediately and pointed his weapon at the figure.