Crab Town

by Carlton Mellick III

  They were basically snuff films. Even though her “actors” would be able to make appearances in several films before they died, she was killing them on camera nonetheless. A slow, erotic, painful death. Then she would toss their bodies out in the melt zone to be eaten by crabs. Nine thought they called the place Crab Town because in the end everyone who dies in Crab Town eventually becomes food for the crabs.

  The films that earned her a shit load of money were the ones shot just before her actors died. There were certain things her clients wanted to see, and one of the major ones was human skin sliding off appendages. One popular shot that she tried to get as much as possible was to have a man bite a woman’s nipple, then slide the skin off of her breast in one large sheet.

  Her clients also liked when teeth effortlessly fell out of the gums, so another popular shot was to get a close-up on a woman’s mouth as the guy’s erect cock casually knocked her teeth out. Once all of the teeth were gone, she would give him a blow job with her soft gums. The money shot was when the woman pulled the skin off of the man’s dick as if he was wearing a rubber, then jerked his raw skinless penis until he shot cum into her face. It would be an added bonus if the cum had blood in it.

  When the House of Cards decided they wanted to put an end to Nine’s porn ring, they sent Jack to do the job. They told him to stop her, even if he had to kill her. But that’s not Jack’s way. He decided to try and reason with her.

  Nine was immediately attracted to Jack the second she saw him. He had an arrogant confidence about him that she found so cute.

  When he asked her, “Will you please shut down your business?” she almost squealed with delight.

  He’s so adorable, she thought, and gave him a big smile.

  Of course, there was no way she was going to give up her business just because some cute guy asked her nicely. So she sent him off and admired his ass on its way out the door.

  But Jack wasn’t the kind of guy who would give up that easily, and Nine knew it. Even though she knew it was a waste, she sent her men out to have Jack killed. She couldn’t let her lust get in the way of her business. However, her men couldn’t kill him. Those who went after him wound up either dead or seriously wounded. There were even a few that Jack persuaded into joining the House of Cards.

  This only made her more attracted to the Jack of Spades. The guy was a hero. Nine was turned on by heroes. And when he started hijacking her shipments, cutting off her connections to the outside world, it only drove her more crazy with desire.

  The next time Jack paid Nine a visit, she was expecting him to bring an army of his House of Cards buddies. But it wasn’t an attack. He came to ask her out on a date. The audacity of his proposal was too much for her to refuse.

  Going on a date in Crab Town pretty much meant to go for a walk on the bay, which is what Jack had intended. But Nine wanted nothing to do with that. She took him out to eat at a nice downtown restaurant outside of Crab Town, spoiling him with mint cocktails and clam pasta. She even bought him some new clothes for the occasion, which made Jack feel a bit like a Ken doll.

  “This is a shocking turn of events,” Nine said. “Yesterday I was trying to have you killed and you were trying to put me out of business, today we’re having a romantic dinner together.”

  Jack just smiled.

  “You have yet to tell me why you asked me out on this date.”

  “As you said, I’m trying to put you out of business,” Jack said, then he took a sip of white wine.

  “And?”

  “And…” Jack shrugged. “Dropping everything to go out on a date with me meant that, for at least today, you’d be out of business.”

  Nine laughed out loud. “So that’s your scheme…”

  “It worked, didn’t it?”

  “Your strategy worked brilliantly. But, you know, tomorrow it’s business as usual.”

  “Not if we go on another date.”

  Nine laughed again. She took another sip of wine and looked him in the eyes.

  “Tell you what,” she said. “I’ll make you deal. Every day you go out with me I’ll shut my business down. No films will be shot, no movies will be sold, no actors will be recruited. I’ll consider it a day off.”

  “You’ve got a deal,” Jack said.

  Nine had no idea that Jack would take the offer so seriously. He decided to go on a date with her every single day from that point on. Originally she wasn’t actually serious about shutting her business down just because they went on a date, but she found herself honoring the agreement. The whole thing amused her so much she had to keep her end of the deal. She just wanted to see how far Jack was willing to go.

  After a month had gone by, Nine wondered if it was all a game anymore. She definitely had serious feelings about him, and she believed he had serious feelings about her even though he always said he was only dating her to keep her business shut down.

  “Why don’t you join me?” Nine asked him. “You could be a partner in my company. You know how much I make? Twenty thousand a month, tax free. Half of that could be yours. You wouldn’t even have to do any of the dirty work. You could just be my business associate and personal bodyguard. Think about it. I’m willing to share it with you 50/50. I’d never make that offer to anyone else.”

  “50/50 would be what? 10,000 a month?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Too low.”

  “Too low? How much does the House of Cards pay you per month? Nothing? Well, I’m offering you 10,000 times as much.”

  “I wouldn’t sell my soul for so cheap.”

  “Come on, you can live a life of luxury. So few people live in luxury these days.”

  “You live in Crab Town. What do you know about luxury? Your movie dungeon is probably the most scummy, toxic pit in town.”

  “But I’m able to go on vacation any time I want. Maybe you should come with me on vacation and see what I mean. I’ll show you what you’re missing.”

  Jack tapped his plate with his fork.

  “What do you say?” she asked.

  Jack agreed to go out of town with her for five days. They ate shellfish, swam in a radiation-free pool, they even made love a few times. Nine thought she had finally won him over, she had finally got the hero to come to her side. But on the morning of the sixth day, she woke to find him gone.

  When she got back to Crab Town, she learned that her film studio had been burned to the ground. Her actors had fled and her workers were missing. She could no longer contact her distributors and clients, many of which had been imprisoned. And to top it off, her bank account was empty. Jack was behind it all.

  “You probably could have convinced me to retire without robbing me blind,” Nine said to the Jack of Spades, as she watched him hammering shingles onto a rooftop.

  Jack continued hammering without even looking at her.

  “I actually fell in love with you, you know,” she said.

  When he didn’t respond, she grabbed his leg and pulled him off the ladder. He landed on his feet, right in front of her.

  “I fell in love with you, too,” he said.

  “And so you screwed me over…”

  “It had to be done at some point.” He walked away, toward his toolbox. “I couldn’t be in a serious relationship with anyone who profited from the misery of others.”

  She followed. “So that’s it? You tear down my business, tear out my heart, and now you’re just going to dump me?”

  “How can I dump you? We were never a couple?”

  “But you just said you were falling in love with me, too…”

  “That doesn’t mean I was your boyfriend.” He turned to her. “Now that you’ve gone clean and donated all of your wealth to atone for your crimes, I’m willing to forget the past and start over. That is, if you’d like.”

  Nine sneered at him. “After what you did to me? You can’t be serious.”

  “It’s the first time I’ve ever considered actually getting serious with you since we’ve met.
”

  Nine opened her mouth to speak, but hesitated. Jack pulled a card out of his pocket and held it in front of her face. It was the nine of hearts.

  “I’d like you to join the House of Cards,” Jack said.

  Nine took the card.

  Jack said, “My collaborators might not agree with me, but I think you would be excellent for the organization. Your business might have been morally appalling, but you were still able to create a successful empire out of nothing… and in Crab Town, of all places. If you were to use your skills to help the people, rather than just to help yourself, I think you could do great things.”

  Nine paused for a moment. Then burst into laughter.

  “So you’re seriously saying that you want me, a selfish murdering pornographer who’s tried to have you killed on numerous occasions, to join the House of Cards?”

  He nodded. “And continue dating, for real this time. If you’re interested.”

  Nine could tell that he was actually serious.

  She took a deep breath and said, “You’re such an ass-hole.” He smiled at her and she found herself blushing. “…I can’t believe I’m saying this, but yeah. I’m in. I’ll be your fucking Nine of Hearts.”

  And from that point on, Nine was a new woman. She was poor and hungry, but she was happy, truly happy for the first time in her life. She was also utterly, madly, desperately in love.

  Tears flow down Nine’s eyes as she looks at Jack’s cold, peaceful face. She curses herself for not protecting him.

  When she rolls her vision around the room, she sees Miss Doomsday standing over her. Most of the hostages have fled the building, except for a few still cowering in the corners. One lady is pressing on a bullet wound on her thigh. She must have gotten hit in the crossfire.

  Sailboat is on the far side of the room, pointing his shotgun in the balloon man’s permanently smiling face.

  “You fucking shot him,” Sailboat yells.

  “It wasn’t me,” Johnny waves his rubber hands.

  “I saw you. You were aiming at me, but you hit Jack.”

  “I was aiming at the guard,” Johnny says. “If you didn’t block my shot he wouldn’t be dead now.”

  Sailboat pumped his shotgun. “You trying to blame this on me?”

  “Enough,” Doomsday says to them.

  “But he shot Jack,” Sailboat says.

  Doomsday puts her Tommy Gun on her shoulder as she cat-walks over to them. “I saw it happen. A guard shot Jack. There was a second one in plain-clothes that we didn’t know about.”

  Sailboat kicks his boot through the counter. He hears the bank manager gasp at the noise on the other side.

  “We need to get out of here,” Doomsday tells the others, as Sailboat goes around the counter to the bank manager.

  “Not until he tells me where the rest of the money is.” Sailboat picks up the scrawny man.

  “You have all of it already,” says the bank manager. “The vault’s empty.”

  “I’ll believe it when I see it.”

  When the bank manager originally opened the vault for Nine, she couldn’t believe it either. The vault was practically empty.

  “This is it?” she asked him.

  The bank manager nodded. “You’re disappointed. I completely understand.”

  “You completely understand!”

  “Trust me, I’m even more unhappy to see it empty than you are. Filling a couple bags full of money for you wouldn’t have been a setback at all for this bank, had you come just a few days ago.”

  “What happened?”

  “The owners of Liberty Bank came yesterday and cleaned out the vault. The bank hasn’t been doing very well this past year, so I guess the owners decided to take the money and run.”

  “The fat cats knocked off their own bank?”

  The bank manager frowned. “Regrettably, that’s exactly what they did. They stole everyone’s money and took off, leaving only enough to keep the bank going for a few more days while they made their getaway.”

  Nine sighed and started packing up the measly leftovers. “Desperate times…”

  “Desperate, indeed.”

  When Sailboat returns from the vault with the bank manager, he has an irritated look on his face but he’s not accusing the scrawny guy of lying anymore.

  “Help Nine up,” Doomsday tells him. “Those escaped hostages surely called the cops now. They’ll be arriving any minute.” Sailboat nods and goes to the wounded girl.

  Doomsday looks over at Johnny Balloon, who is cuffing the unconscious security officer behind the counter. “You should go. You don’t want to be here when the cops show up.”

  Johnny gives her a thumbs up.

  When Sailboat tries to pick up Nine, she mumbles, “We’ve got to carry out Jack’s plan.”

  “He didn’t tell us his plan.” Sailboat says as he lifts her. The wounded woman has lost a lot of blood and can’t stand on her own feet without assistance.

  “We have to figure out what he wanted us to do,” Nine says, her eyes rolling back and forward. “He said that Doomsday is the key.”

  Sailboat shakes his head. “Forget about it.”

  Doomsday looks over at them as she takes the bags of money from Sailboat and tosses them onto her shoulder. “No, maybe she’s right. Maybe we can figure it out. He also said that he wouldn’t tell us the plan because if we knew we would never want to go through with it. What could he possibly have in mind that we would never want to go through with?”

  Sailboat assists Nine to the exit as she sways and staggers. “I have no idea. It could be anything.”

  “…that also requires me…” Doomsday mumbles, running it over in her head. Then she stops in her tracks. “No, it couldn’t be that…”

  “What?”

  “The bomb. There’s no way he wanted me to detonate the bomb…”

  Sailboat isn’t listening anymore.

  She contemplates out loud, “How would a plan involving the bomb fit in with the plan of robbing the bank… There’s no way.”

  They can hear the sound of police whistles coming from the distance.

  Her eyes light up. “Unless…”

  “Let’s move!” Sailboat yells, as he pulls Nine through the door.

  Miss Doomsday follows, her Tommy Gun leading the way.

  Outside the bank, Little Sister was acting as the lookout. This was the usual job for her. Being only fifteen years old, Jack didn’t want her getting involved if shooting broke out. She wasn’t even allowed to carry a gun.

  Jack had told her that this time he was going to take longer than usual, so besides lookout Little Sister had to prevent people from entering the bank. She dressed in a police uniform, her blue dreadlocks hidden under a hat. After the others went into the bank, she set up a barricade and directed cyclists and pedestrians around the block.

  It wasn’t uncommon for teenagers to work for the police department. Instead of going to school, many children had to get jobs by the time they turned ten years old. Children under the age of eighteen would work just as many hours as adults, but they would get only a third of the pay (or sometimes even less). And they would usually be assigned the most tedious jobs available. A lot of traffic cops were teenagers, as well as factory workers, janitors, dishwashers, even construction workers. Once child laborers turn eighteen they might be considered for fulltime positions, but more often than not their employers just fire them and hire a younger kid so that they don’t have to pay them adult wages.

  Little Sister was born and raised in Crab Town, so she has never had to work as a child laborer. But she can pull off posing as a child police officer well enough. As she directs cyclists away from the bank, nobody thinks twice about it. They see this kind of thing everyday. Even another police officer walking by her barricade didn’t suspect a thing.

  “Damn road work again?” the cop asked Little Sister.

  She just shrugged at him and waved him on.

  “Why do they even bother?”
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  When the cop saw a blue dreadlock pop out of her police hat, the man gave her a disapproving glance but didn’t think anything of it.

  Little Sister has always been smooth and confident. She knows how to act natural in any circumstance. Her motto is: just act like you own the place and nobody will question you. Even as a punk kid with dreadlocks, none of the passersby ever questioned her legitimacy.

  The only time Little Sister lost her poise was when she heard the gun shots coming from inside the bank. It happened while an old woman was bugging her to let her through the barricade, unwilling to take the detour.

  “Just let me through,” said the lady, holding two brown grocery bags full of meats and cereals. “I just need to go two blocks down.”

  “There’s been a radiation spill in the area, ma’am,” said Little Sister. “It’s for your own safety.”

  “I’m old. Walking the long way around would be more damaging than a little radiation. I made it through two nuclear blasts, so I think I can make it through a little spill.”

  “I can’t make an exception, not for anyone,” said Little Sister. “If I let you through I could lose my job.”

  “You could lose your job if you don’t let me through,” said the old lady. “I’ll let the police department know that you mistreated an old lady. I have friends in high places around here. You’ll be out of the job.”

  “Make a complaint if you must, but you are not getting through. Please move along.”

  The old lady pulled out a pen and ripped off a piece of a grocery bag to write on. “What is your name?”

  “Junior Officer Samantha Kensington.”

  “What is your boss’s name?”

  “John…”

  Then the gun shots rang out in the bank. Little Sister was taken aback. She looked around, she didn’t know what to do.