Capes

by Drabble, Matt

  The Fontaine family had sent out their tentacles throughout the British Empire, ruthless men all forged in the fire of Alexis and all burnt in his image.

  The Fontaine empire had grown exponentially right up until Wilson’s father, Alexander. It is often said that talent can skip a generation, and in Alexander’s case, that was certainly true. The trouble was that in its place had been a self-destructive streak a mile wide and two miles deep.

  Alexander had set about destroying his family’s name and his part of the Fontaine legacy: bad choice after bad choice, speculations that fell apart, sure-fire deals that inexplicably imploded.

  He’d lost almost everything that his ancestors had built, and just before he took his own life in disgrace, the Fontaine name had already been excommunicated from British high society. No matter how old their money was, they were still new money in the eyes of the elite.

  It had been down to Wilson to rebuild an empire, only he wasn’t just here to rebuild his own name. He was here to destroy the names of others, those who had shown their true colours when abandoning the Fontaines.

  He knew that Alexis’ blood pumped through his heart and his veins. That power and iron will was undeniable, and he used it to crawl his way back up the mountain again.

  His media empire now ruled the country. He had used the very advent of social media, recognising its potential at birth and investing heavily in its development.

  He had built an army of spies capable of revealing the most intimate and delicate secrets, a database of cyber spiders embedded into a network of systems all sending their information back to him along technological web strands, all feeding the Black Widower.

  He now owned every national media outlet. Most were not in his name, as the government’s competition regulations were set up to prevent such a monopoly, but in reality, they all worked for him and they all spread the messages that he wanted spread.

  Once he owned the message, once he owned the flow of information, he was able to smite those who had wanted the Fontaine name to fail.

  He ruined public careers as he saw fit, he took money and influence from those he deemed unfit, and he bestowed gifts to those he deemed useful. He took down family names until they were sent back to the shadows in disgrace, and he sewed his own name back into the stars until it was the brightest.

  Now, he rarely left his territory and then only on special occasions for special people. The rest of the world now had to come to him if they so desired a personal audience with the king – King Fontaine, the first of his name.

  The outer door to his inner office opened, and he suddenly spun his head to check one of the monitors.

  He knew his schedule down to the millisecond, and he knew that his next appointment wasn’t until 6pm with his doctor, and he didn’t need to check his watch to know that it wasn’t that time yet.

  He pressed a comms button on the desk.

  “Barnes?” he demanded irritably. “Who the hell did you just let in?”

  There was no answer from the guard outside.

  “Barnes? Dammit, come in if you want to keep your job!”

  Not surprisingly, he’d already decided to fire the man; he’d had to ask twice, and that would not stand in his world. The moment the king spoke, everyone had bloody well better jump or else they were gone.

  There were multiple layers of security on every floor of the apartment block, and he’d paid a very large fortune to make it the most secure building in the country, or so he’d thought.

  He flicked through the security screens in front of him and found that everything seemed normal. His men were patrolling in place as usual, large beefy men all chosen for their effectively violent skill set and moral ambiguity.

  “Simmons!” he barked into the radio as he zoomed in on a large man on the 23rd floor, but the Simmons on the screen didn’t respond to the radio mounted on his shoulder.

  Fontaine ran a quick diagnostic check through the system in front of him and couldn’t find anything amiss with the control station.

  “Cabal? Williams? Cooney?” he spat with an increasing twisting in his gut.

  All of the men on the screen – God knows, he’d never hire a woman for such work – were going about their duties without hearing him. He wondered if his comms might be jammed somehow, maybe someone had hacked into the control centre, but Link had assured him that the system was bulletproof and the man had never been wrong before.

  Fontaine took a deep breath and fought quickly through the fog of fear that had started to gnaw at his senses. His empire building had obviously earned him an ocean of enemies, but he kept a close eye on anyone he deemed a threat, and nothing had spooked him lately.

  He made a conscious effort to control the slight tremor in his hand as he reached out to the keyboard and controls on the desk. He meticulously started to scan all of the monitors, looking for something to give him an answer.

  The screens all showed him live images, men busying themselves about their day, worker bees who all knew that they were being monitored but were paid well enough to put up with it.

  A security guard sat behind a reception desk in the main lobby. The man wasn’t as well groomed and muscled as the guards beyond, a carefully maintained façade to belie the illegally armed army beyond.

  The desk guard was a shabby man with a gut straining his uniform. He was sitting with a newspaper on the table in front of him and something tugged at Fontaine’s senses. He zoomed in on the man and couldn’t find anything of note, just Carl Gibbons, a 54-year-old ex-taxi driver with an arthritic left knee and a wife who was sleeping with a window cleaner.

  Fontaine started to pull out from the man’s face when the reason for his undisputed champion gut tug was revealed.

  The newspaper was the Daily Beacon, a red-top tabloid that was designed for the working-class male market who only wanted to check the latest sports results and look at an endless variety of female celebrities in and out of revealing clothing.

  While the paper print was too small to read on the screen, Fontaine instantly recognised the front page, a story exposing a young children’s presenter whose phone had been hacked to reveal a sex tape. It was the usual sort of grubby story that the paper carried, but the trouble was that it was yesterday’s front cover.

  There was a red button on the far side of the desk, a button under a plastic cover to make sure that it was never hit by accident, an alarm-raising button that would send an army of hired guns to come in force. Fontaine reached for it now, but it was already too late.

  A knife slipped around his throat from behind. He hadn’t heard the person enter his room, and he had no idea just how they’d managed such a feat. He also knew that it didn’t matter – he was dead.

  His body may have aged beyond the abilities of modern medicine to keep it fit and healthy, but his mind had compensated by staying sharper than ever.

  “Whatever you’re being paid, I’ll double it,” he said quickly, searching for a delaying tactic as his fingers scrambled under the desk until he found the switch he was looking for.

  “What makes you think I want money?” came a muffled reply.

  “Whatever it is that you do want, I can get it for you. There is nothing beyond my grasp, I can assure you: power, influence, access, anything. Anything you need, I can get!”

  “Anything?” the voice mused.

  “How about fame?”

  “Fame? Why would I want to be famous?”

  “Well you’re going to be,” Fontaine said triumphantly as the room lights around them suddenly burst onto their brightest setting, illuminating them both.

  “Every inch of this room is now being recorded and scanned,” he continued, even as the grip on his neck tightened and the blade pressed closer. “There will be no place to hide for you now. You will be filmed and tracked now matter where you go in this building and the city beyond.”

  “Turn it off,” the voice snarled, and now he knew that his assailant was a woman.

 
“Sorry, my dear, but I’m afraid not. We are now at a stalemate. Yes, by all means you may kill me, but then you will be hunted to the ends of the earth, I can promise you.”

  Fontaine now relaxed. He knew that he’d won the day again; brains beat brawn every time in his book.

  It was no bluff. The equipment in the building was already locked onto the intruder, and she would indeed be tracked throughout the building and then out onto the streets as his surveillance equipment piggybacked the multitude of CCTV cameras of shop premises, traffic cams, dashboard cams and every other screen that this woman walked in front of.

  “The instructions in the event of my murder are as precise as they are brutal,” he continued smugly. “My killer, in this case – you, well, you go down, of course, followed by your entire family. Everyone that you’re related to, every person that you call a friend, every acquaintance, until your very name is erased. So you see, killing me now would really accomplish nothing.” He smiled as he relaxed, ignoring the blade at his throat.

  “You’re so sure of that?”

  “Oh, absolutely.”

  “You shouldn’t be.”

  Two things happened almost simultaneously: the blade pressed hard enough to draw a thin line of blood, and Fontaine screamed. He flailed as he felt death rise up to take him, and then as suddenly as it had come, the pressure was gone and his assailant stepped around in front of him.

  The masked woman was athletically built with soft curves that could not be totally hidden beneath the black combat clothing she wore. She still kept the blade pointed at his throat with one hand, and with the other, she slowly took off her ski mask and they stared at each other in pregnant silence for a few moments.

  “Jesus Christ!” Fontaine exclaimed as his senses veered between relief and anger as he stared at his fiancée. “I suppose you think this is funny,” he finally growled.

  “Just a little bit, baby,” she said, smiling and blowing him a kiss. “Besides, you deserved it.”

  “I deserved it?” he asked, touching a finger to his neck and wiping away the thin trail of fresh blood.

  “Your little reporter friend?”

  “I did what you told me to do,” he replied quickly if a little guiltily. “I ended things with her and set her up with Link, just as you wanted, my sweet.”

  “Not before a final roll in the hay though.”

  Fontaine opened his mouth to deny it, but he knew better. He knew better than to argue with a woman who, since the very moment they’d met, seemed to have all the answers. It was why he had been so drawn to her. It was he who had taken the seemingly unimaginable step of asking her to marry him. For some reason, when she wasn’t around, he felt free of her gravitational pull, but once she stood in front of him, he felt helpless before her.

  “I wanted to let her down gently?” he tried, shrugging his shoulders hopefully.

  She threw her mask off to one side and crossed the room to pour herself a stiff drink. She had fine taste in brandy, another thing that he liked about her. In truth, she had fine taste in everything.

  She brought a second glass back for him and he took a hard swig

  “What have they found?” she asked as she savoured the exquisite liquor.

  “Nothing of note as yet, but Link is the best out there. Whatever there is to find, he’ll get to it,” Fontaine said as he drained the rest of his expensive crystal glass, feeling pleasantly warm and fuzzy, even after such a comparatively small amount.

  “If this is his security, then I’m not impressed,” she said coldly.

  “And what exactly was the point of your incursion? Could you not have simply used the front door?”

  “I wanted to make sure that you were safe, my love,” she replied softly and seemingly genuinely.

  “But how did you… how could you…?”

  Fontaine struggled to make his mind work clearly as a fog settled over him. It was always the way when she was close.

  She refilled his drink and stood before him like some kind of warrior princess, his own personal Amazonian queen.

  “We have to be ready, my love, and you know better than to ask me questions,” she said as she leaned down to his seated position and kissed him gently on the lips.

  The contact was soft and gentle and left him breathless. He wanted to rage at her, he wanted to physically dominate, to strike out and see her cower the same way that he had made so many women do in the past, but for some reason, she simply robbed him of his famed iron will, and he melted in front of her. Right now, all he wanted was to please her and for her to be pleased with him.

  “I’m sorry,” he said sheepishly in a voice that no one else on the planet would ever recognise as coming out of his mouth.

  “Then come make it up to me,” she said as she shucked off her clothing with an expert’s elegance and stood before him in glorious nakedness.

  Despite the small voice in the back of his mind telling him to take back some kind of control, Wilson Fontaine stumbled up out of his chair and stumbled across the room to her like he was a nervous 16-year-old again.

  “Yes, my sweet,” he stammered as he clawed at her.

  “Oh, and one more thing. From now on, call me Number One. I do so much prefer it,” Cynthia Arrow’s daughter said with a smile.

  ----------

  The matron’s office inside the ruined care home was deathly silent as the group stared at Crimson.

  “Should have known you wouldn’t be dead. I guess I’m just not that lucky,” Jesus said in a low dangerous voice.

  “Guess not,” Crimson replied, and even though he was still wearing his mask, they could all guess that he was grinning underneath.

  Of the group, he was the only one still wearing his costume from their hero days, but now the leather was dull and patchy and the colours faded. The stitching on the mask was frayed and split in places and didn’t quite seem to hug his face as it once had.

  “Why are you here?” Doc asked for the rest of them.

  “Why do you think, Doc?”

  “I think you shit your pants in South America and came running back here thinking we could save your ass,” Jesus said.

  “You really think I need a snot-nosed little punk like you for that? For anything?” Crimson replied with the same cheery voice.

  “Take it easy,” Jamie-Lyn said to the two of them as the temperature in the room seemed to drop severely. “We’ve got enough problems here without pissing contests, don’t you think?”

  “Hey, ain’t no contest here,” Crimson said, raising his arms high in mock surrender with a grin.

  He took off his mask, the thin leather sliding off his head revealing the aged features underneath. His skin was wrinkled and there were several old scars matted across his face. His hair and goatee beard were snowy white and he looked like an old man.

  “I know, I’m still so pretty,” he said to the group as they stared at a man they hadn’t seen in around a decade, but now looking at him it seemed a lot longer.

  “I see that your chosen profession took its toll,” CJ announced, voicing what they were all thinking.

  “It’s a living.” Crimson shrugged, still with his customary grin. “And a pretty damn good one even if I do say so my damn self.”

  “You’re some kind of warlord in the jungle?” Jamie-Lyn asked.

  “Something like that. You been keeping tabs on me, Jesus?” Crimson grinned. “I’m touched.”

  “Don’t be,” the government man replied. “Needed to know where you were in case you needed to be put down.”

  “It came after you,” Doc interjected. “In the jungle. This thing – it came after you?”

  “Nearly got me too.”

  “What can you tell us?” Jamie-Lyn pressed.

  “What can you tell me?” he answered as he took a seat and put his boots up on the desk.

  “Oh no, we’re not here for your benefit, Langston…,” Jesus started.

  “Langston’s dead, died a long time ago. There’
s only Crimson now,” Crimson said, staring at and gently touching his mask as he spoke. “Only Crimson.”

  “Great, so you went all Colonel Kurtz in the jungle,” Jamie-Lyn said under her breath.

  “Get out of my mind, Doc. I don’t like visitors there,” Crimson said suddenly, his voice laced with menace.

  The others quickly turned towards the doc whose fingers had risen to her temple in an automatic gesture.

  “For someone who does not like her abilities and had sworn off them, you are awfully eager to use them again,” CJ said towards her.

  “I just want this over with,” she snapped back. “The sooner this is sorted, then the sooner I can get the hell out of here and away from you!”

  “Well now, this really is just like old times.” Crimson laughed.

  “What did you see, Langston…? Apologies… Crimson,” CJ asked politely.

  “Teeth and claws, claws and teeth, sharp buggers too; that’s what got Six-Shooter and Bull?”

  “Yes. What else?” CJ pressed.

  “Some kind of red fur, red with white patches, I think. Maybe. I don’t know; it was bloody fast I know that much.”

  “How did you get away?” Jesus demanded to know.

  “Guess I’m just better. Guess I always was.” Crimson winked.

  “You were always an asshole, I know that,” Jesus retorted.

  The two men stared at each other hard and the whole room crackled with electric tension.

  “Really?” Jamie-Lyn exclaimed. “Is this really how it’s going to be? Marshall is dead. Bull, too. Something came for them and now they’re both dead. Is that sinking in for any of you? They’re dead. We’re all next, and right now, we don’t know a goddamn thing!”

  “Well, the big man does,” Crimson said, his face returning to its default grinning mode. “The alien here made himself some slave miners and now one of them’s here for a little payback.”

  “You heard that?” Doc asked.

  “Yeah. You folks aren’t exactly great on the whole stealth thing. So how about it, my reptilian friend? You on the level about that? Because quite frankly, I have my doubts.”