“Then she's being rude. Don't care. Has she earned your story, yet?”
He walked back a few steps, started pacing. Finally he looked out to sea. “Naw, I get it. Things getting worse, you need to make sure you can count on people to have your back. Shit, sure.” He took a deep breath. “What do you know about Icon's Southside?”
“Very little.”
“Awright. I was born in the Mews. Place was pretty bad before it got all gentrified and shit. Drugs and gangs and grinding fucking poverty. It was me and my bro Luther against the world, but we swore we'd get out. But you needed money for that. So along the way, we started selling for this shitty-ass little gang, the Stompers.”
He pulled his hands out of his pockets, looked at them. Held the left one up towards me. “Got this scar when an Eight-eighter caught me sellin' on their corner. Called ourselves the Stompers, he stomped my ass pretty damn good. If Luther hadn't shown up and lured him off, I wouldn't be here today.”
“Eight-eighter?”
“Shitty-ass skinhead gang. Eight Eight stood for HH which stood for Heil Hitler which stood for 'I'm a dumbass loser with closet homosexual tendencies.'” He snorted. “They're gone now. Devil's Due finished off the last of them.”
“Devil's Due?”
“One of the first big dark vigilante hero types. Ask me, he and folks like him were worse than the villains. Villains, at least you know they bad news. Dark heroes? Un-pre-fucking-dictable. Save your ass one day, shoot through you to kill bad guys the next. Yeah, Tomorrow Force brought his ass in back in '96. Good riddance, I say.”
“We're getting off track,” I said.
He laughed. “Sorry. Gonna get into some painful shit here. Guess I been delaying.”
Silence for a bit, and I wondered if he was going to continue. But finally he rubbed his eyes, and started talking again. “Me and Luther, we made money, but it was all going to the guys up top. We kept other gangs out, said we were protecting our hood, but the guys in charge ignored it when our boys fucked around with the locals. It was so fucking pointless, and it never got better. Never changed. That didn't sit well with Luther. Didn't sit well at all.”
“He was older than you?” I guessed.
“Yeah.” Tears threatened at the corners of his eyes, and I looked away.
After a bit, he continued. “So, with the state of affairs un-fucking conducive to a good retirement plan, we decided to shake things up. We decided to be the guys up top, instead of working for them.”
He knelt, picked up a stone, and skipped it out into the water. It crunched off a little ice, kept going into it slipped into the dark water beyond.
“Didn't go well?” I asked.
“Better than you'd think. Pretty good, at first. We had the connections. Luther was a badass. I was good at talking folks into seeing our way of things. We took over the Stompers, practically a non-violent coup. The more we did, the more people came to us. We were makin' a difference. We were doing business, targeting the worst gangs, actually protecting the hood like most gangs lie and say they do. He had a map, Luther did. He drew a circle 'round our turf. And every day, we'd go out and make it bigger. And the time came when we couldn't call ourselves Stompers no more, so we chose a different name. We were the Ess See Kay.”
SCK? “What's that stand for?”
“Stands for Stone-Cold-Killers. Also you could say it like 'Sick', which was a word that was like cool at the time. For a few years, man, we were rockin' the Southside. Got the Mews, cut deals with the local villains, grabbed up all the trade down there. Colombians, Cartels, Vory, everyone with shit to sell, they came to us.”
“Vory.” I frowned. That had come up in Minna's story, too.
“Scary Russian mafia motherfuckers. All the things I miss about my old life, I don't miss dealing with those motherfuckers one bit. Fuckers be vile.”
“So what happened?” I asked.
Tooms brought out part of his tape collection, and Martin knelt, sorting through them. “Shot to shit, shot to shit, shot to shit, intact. Oooh, intact?” He popped the case open. “Nope. Fuck a duck. Well, I hoped.” He tossed it aside, looked back to me. “What happens when you go from nothing to pretty much everything you could want in a year or so? And there ain't no one to tell you no, stop, slow down bitches?”
“You don't slow down, bitches,” I guessed. He laughed.
“Yeah. Bitches don't slow down. We were the biggest goddamn bitches. Coke every night, finest grade. Bed full of women, all sorts. Money enough for anything I felt like buying. Fucking mansion on the Hill that I shared with Luther. Eh, not in like the old part of the Hill, but for a couple of black guys in the late 90s, it was fucking impressive. I got used to it. I liked it. And we lost sight of shit, because things were awesome. Lost sight of how people were acting down below.”
“And how was that?”
“Back to the old ways. Stopped protecting the hood. Started feeding off of it. We'd gotten bigger, unified all the little gangs into the SCK, but people always gonna want more. So it was politics and shooting and beatings and turf wars all over again. We were just the guys on top this time.” He sighed. “I would've made my peace with that, I guess. Said eh, just all part of the game, son. Except for one thing. Luther.”
“He didn't like it?”
“I wish he didn't like it. I wish it had bothered him. But as time went on, he started hittin' the shit more and more. Coke wasn't enough. Weed wasn't enough. He started getting into the heavier shit. And it fucking destroyed him.” He sighed, picked up a broken tape, and tossed it out into the bay. “Had a guy helpin' us run shit, by the name of Coate. In the end, Coate showed up in the middle of the night with about twenty of the guys behind him. Dragged us out of bed at gunpoint, took us to the basement. Luther'd had that shit soundproofed, you see. For business.” He barked laughter, and rubbed his eyes again. “They offered us a deal. Out of respect for our past, he said. Get gone, or get an unmarked grave. Luther tried to fight.” His hands were shaking. “Dumbass. Fucking dumbass. He was flying so high must have thought he was Crusader. He was always into that costume shit. Think maybe he thought he'd get his power surge, then, in that fuckin' basement.”
When he lowered his hands, he looked me in the eye, challenging. I held my tongue, and finally he dropped his eyes. “I saw the writing on the wall, next to Luther's brains. I gave them the keys to the house and the cars and left. Weren't nothing for me there, no more.”
“And so you came here?”
“No degrees, no experience, no cash, no job that you can put on a tax form... shit, yeah. Thought about running like hell, but Coate don't play that way. It's business, he said. We were running things down, he said. Don't have to get off the board, but you can't stay here no more. But I still got contacts and shit, and I can still deal. Though honestly?” He frowned. “My moms is the only thing keeping me in city. She's old. Lived hard, her heart's bad. We got her set up okay in a good neighborhood way the fuck across town, but I don't know how much longer she got. Weren't for her I'd get out, try Baltimore, or New York. Get in with Dos Hermanos, or the Crays. Done too much shit to go straight. But I can't start over by myself. I ain't a leader. That was mostly Luther's deal.” He looked down. “I told you how that worked out.”
“You truly have no other options?” I asked.
He snorted. “Inform to the FBI and get my ass shot when witness protection fails. Try to do remedial adult stuff, get a degree of some sort, spend my life flippin' burgers. Assuming one of the warrants on me don't drop. Become a priest and— Heh. Heh, heh, heh. Yeah, I ain't seeing it neither. Not much for me in this country that's legal, and I ain't got ID to travel that won't get me arrested.”
“So why are there no options for people in your situation?” I asked. “It seems to Dire that society should always offer a way out for all but the worst. That's just common sense.”
He laughed, loud and long. “Oh shit man. You had me going for—” He took a closer look. “You mean that. S
hit. You got a weird naive streak, Dire lady. It's all part of the game, this shit. Born poor, die poor, rich get richer. Cops are there to protect the rich, everyone else can go to hell. Government? Assholes are all rich and on coke or worse. Heroes? Fuckers put on costumes and punch villains. If it ain't brightly-colored, monologuing, and punchable, they don't do shit. Don't even get me started on the war on drugs and that whole joke.”
He was actually making me angry. “It can't actually be that bad. How does this sort of society actually work?”
“The worst guys up top keep the guys down low distracted with shit, while the real business goes on behind closed doors. They buy the media so you only read what they want you to, they hype up television and movies and shit so you don't see how bad it gets. They buy the politicians, and make the laws they want. Nobody who ain't rich knows the score. Not until they're down in it.” He looked around the camp. “Now the whole city's down in it, for a while at least. Now they're poor too. Lost their shelter, lost their power, lost their security, and here they are. But if the power went on tomorrow? How many you think would care? Most of them would head back home, never give it no thought except 'oh thank god that's over.' And so it goes, pretty much damn near everywhere.”
“That is not right.” Fury was racing through me, heating the blood in my face, making my fists clench and unclench. “It should not be so.”
“Well, it is. Always will be. Can't change it. Human. Fucking. Nature.”
“There must be a way...” I muttered.
“You find one, let me know. I'll have your back. Until then, I'll keep selling product to rich yuppies, and enjoyin' my pay-per-view.”
I nodded. “Your deal is acceptable. Done.”
He laughed. “Well, you already done better than I thought. So you got my help for now, anyway. You need anything I got, or want anything I can do done, I'm your homey.”
“Homey?” I squinted in confusion.
He held up his hands. “I don't fuckin' make the slang, alright? Means like... ese. Or friend.”
“Friends.” I smiled, and offered him a hand. He took it, shook, then glanced back as Tooms came out with two heavy boxes, one of which was torn, and spilling magazines.
“Aw fuck, they shot the porn? Assholes!”
I chewed over what he'd told me, as I walked back to my armor. He was cynical. Bitter. It filled him, though he hid it well most of the time. And the things he had told me... how did a nation, a world, make the glorious buildings and inventions I saw around me, yet be so crude and uncaring at the core of it? How was technology so advanced, and culture so behind?
I growled. Plenty of frustration, no real answers. Well. No help for it, I had to get on to other matters.
A giggle ahead of me, and I paused. Anya and a couple of the other children were clustered around my armor. What the heck? That wasn't exactly safe, and I moved forward to disperse them... and stopped about thirty feet back as I saw what they were doing.
They had found some colored chalk, from who knows where. They were drawing on the armor. Hearts, and thank yous, and smiley faces, as far up as they could reach.
I leaned against the shack, and watched them work. And it felt good. Felt right in a way I couldn't quantify.
It was almost sad when Abernathy came around the corner, and shooed them off. She looked at the chalk, sighed, and went into the laundry. When she came out again with a wet rag, I was there. “Uh-uh.” I wagged a finger.
“You're not exactly gonna inspire much in the way of fear like this. It looks like a kindergarten art class exploded on you, there.”
“She'll sluice it off when she's out of sight of camp. But for now, it stays. It's good to be thanked. Good to feel needed.”
“You are one seriously weird supervillain, but hey, you're the boss.”
I shrugged, as I entered the armor.
“The more she learns about the world—” The shell hissed shut, and my mask settled into place. “—THE LESS SHE CARES ABOUT LABELS.”
CHAPTER 16: Enter the Steampunks
“Not all the villains went rampaging during the Y2K outage. Some of them actually helped out. Though mind you, most of them did it out of self-interest. It really cuts into your diabolical schemes when looters are trying to break into your secret lair to grab food, and roving gangs are re-enacting lord of the flies on your secret identity's lawn.”
--Excerpt from “Villains anonymous,” a short lived reality show that ran through 2001. The speaker has been identified as Vorpal, a mercenary villain currently at large.
It was time to retrieve the sealant for Guzman's plan. I flew across the city, weaving through the Brownstones without trouble. A brief stop by a broken water main rinsed the chalk from my armor. Sad as I was to destroy it, Abernathy had a point. Well, at least the children weren't around to see their efforts washed away.
After that, it was a straight flight. I went across the Brownstones, past about six tall residential towers, and towards what looked like a large industrial district beyond.
A rifle cracked as I flew past the southernmost tower, but if they were shooting at me they missed, and no shots followed that I heard. The forcefield could take a hit or two anyway, and I was going fast enough I doubted I was in any serious danger.
Then it was across the edge of the Industrial District, several square miles of factory complexes, most of which looked rusty and disused, falling apart, much like the piers near the camp. I had a good view of the highway below, at least. That was Route 120, according to Guzman. The first leg of it was choked with cars, but it looked like it had been cleared out a bit as it turned west, and most of the exits were emptied. There was one area where the guardrail was clearly broken, and the charred wrecks of cars littered the ground below. That gave me an idea... gravity, fire, tons of metal... I filed a wicked notion away for investigation later.
Eventually the long ribbon of highway turned into a cloverleaf. Interstate 3, I presumed. I headed down, glancing around during the descent. There were shops here, unlike most of the terrain I'd overflown thus far. Most of the factories and warehouses around the shops looked to be in good repair, or at the very least, they had been functional prior to Y2K. They would be again, once this was over. Circling lower, I moved around the cloverleaf. There should be a sign for the boat repair facility...
I passed a gas station, flew past the attached truckstop, paused at a used car lot, and finally located what I was looking for to the northwest of the Cloverleaf. It was back a ways, past a padlocked gate. The yard was a gravel road, with exposed grass and dirt where patches of it had been rubbed away. Scattered around the main complex were boats of all shapes and sizes. The largest was a garbage scow, and I had no idea how it had been transported here.
Most of them were sport boats, motorboats, and a few kayaks and canoes. They hung in racks or rusted loose on the ground. A long ramp lead up through an open loading dock, into the darkness of the main building. The sign on the roof above the fire-escape stairs to the main door read “Dry Dock”, and I landed, tried a knock.
Nothing. The handle refused to turn in my grasp, probably locked.
I was not surprised. Fortunately, someone had left an open loading dock.
Two steps toward it, I wondered just why someone had left an open loading dock. Might be wise to play it cautious. I adjusted the sights on the mask to compensate for the darker interior, peering around as I hovered in. Just because I hadn't seen any security to this point, didn't mean there wasn't any around.
It seemed deserted at first glance, and the odor of old grease filled my nostrils as I peered around. It was a large place that had probably been a warehouse at some point, with rails running off from the loading dock ramp. They led to various platforms and cradles. The largest vessel in the cradles was the lowest to the ground, a tugboat by the looks of it, all barnacle-encrusted hull and rubber bumpers. Up above, a hydrofoil's twin turbines jutted out near the roof as it hung suspended by chains. There was a cradle halfway-c
onstructed around it. Looked like they were swapping engines, before their task was interrupted. I eyed the exposed parts with envy for a second, before lowering my gaze. I wasn't here to steal mechanical components, as much as I could use the upgrade. The sealant would be kept low to the ground...
After about ten minutes or so, I found two large barrels labeled CL off to the side, among some other chemicals. Nothing else seemed to have similar lettering, so I gambled it was the substance I needed. Ah well, if it wasn't the right stuff I could always come back. I picked up the barrel and tested the weight of it... cumbersome, but not undoable. I started walking back to the entrance—
—And froze, as shadows fell across the Dry Dock's floor, cast by people moving outside.
“Well well well...” An unfamiliar voice. A man peered in. He was wearing a top hat, a short red-trimmed black cape, and a tuxedo. He had waxed mustaches, and he was carrying a cane that seemed to have a ton of gears on it. “A looter? In some sort of power armor?”
“ARE YOU THE OWNER OF THIS FACILITY?”
He jumped back at my voice, raised his cane and pointed the end at me. Hollow, like the business end of a gun.
I put the barrel down.
“Ha... Uh. No. No, my dear... person, I am not the owner. However, you are trespassing, and I fear that cannot be tolerated. Simply not cricket!”
He strode out to the center of the room, snapped his fingers, and two more figures flew in. One had some sort of jetpack that rode on great gouts of vapor, creating a small fog cloud as it went. He had straps and buckles all over his jodhpurs and jacket, and held a large gun with multiple winking tube lights on it, and a miniature tesla coil on the end. Jetpack guy wore goggles and a cowl, with black hair sticking out from his head at odd angles.
The second figure seemed to dance through the air, running in place on some sort of fantastical spinning contraption of gears that ranged from manhole-cover-sized to pocket watch-sized. They ground and spun through the air with no visible power source or center mass to them, and nothing I could see holding them in place. Finally he stopped, for certain definitions of the word... the gears never stopped turning. He wasn't much to look at himself, wearing a short dress jacket over leather coveralls, topped by a bowler hat over fluffy blonde curls. He grinned, and I noted a gear tattoo over one eye. He had goggles, but they were up on his hat, for no reason that I could tell. Seemed kind of pointless.
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