Pinnacle City

by Matt Carter

  I charge my hand to a bright, threatening glow, and he turns around.

  Oh god, oh god, oh god, when I said I missed real heroing, I didn’t mean this.

  I flit back and forth for a moment, trying to figure out where to start. Nothing this horrible ever happened on the Juniors, and whenever anything came close, Cory would already be transporting survivors directly to the hospital and Mason and Derek would take care of recording and preserving the crime scene while Leah and I fought off any bad guys in the area … but there’s nothing here to fight, just that little glass-jawed prick in the corner, and no one to help with the rest.

  There’s only me.

  But I’m Solar Flare, and that’ll have to do.

  I take the unconscious woman by the hands and pull her the rest of the way onto the couch, rolling her to the side so she won’t drown, and carefully adjust her skirt, trying to preserve as much of her dignity and the evidence as I can at the same time.

  “Stupid mudak,” Sergei mutters as he and Jacob follow me in, closing the door behind them.

  I pull out my phone and find the Superdirectline app.

  “What are you doing?” Jacob asks sharply.

  “What’s it look like? Calling for backup.”

  “From the cops?”

  “No, the Easter bunny. Yes, from the cops!” I snap. “We’ve got an unconscious victim and a violent criminal in custody. We need an ambulance and a squad car, unless one of you wants to wait with her while I take him in myself, and—put those down, that’s evidence!”

  I pocket the phone to grab Sergei’s arm and make him put down the two glasses on the table next to the couch. One of them probably has residue of whatever Ace drugged her with.

  In the instant I’m busy prying the glasses from Sergei’s hands, Jacob reaches into my pocket and throws my phone into a melted ice bucket.

  “What the hell is wrong with you two?” I crack a light energy blast at each of them, knocking them to opposite sides of the room.

  “Kimmy, baby, just listen,” says Jacob, bobbing up and down on his feet with the jitters of whatever he’s been snorting on his break. “Ace is dating a Runway Races finalist.”

  “So?”

  “So, no one’s going to believe he’d throw that away over one of them.” He gestures at the server’s exposed scales.

  “He’s left his DNA all over her, and he was caught in the act by three eyewitnesses!”

  “Kimmy, look at her.”

  “I am looking at her!” I shove Jacob two paces to his right so he can better see the stain of blood-tinted fluids on the armrest. “Are you?”

  “Yes, yes, it’s tragic,” says Jacob, “but people won’t accept it. That’s not how the story goes.”

  “Ace raped someone! Do you even get that?”

  “You see how she’s dressed, she was advertising it!” Ace protests from the corner. “I offered her a drink! She said yes! Everyone knows what those signals mean!”

  “Face the wall!”

  He grumbles into it inaudibly.

  “In the Cards is over,” I tell Jacob. “At least it is for him, and if you two don’t help me help her, it will be for you too, because I will personally make sure you’re both charged as accessories.”

  “We are helping her,” says Sergei, removing his suit jacket and draping it over her. “Ace isn’t the only one who needs this all to go away.”

  “Yeah!” says Jacob. “Anna won’t thank you for—”

  “Ella!” I shout. “Her name is Ella! She has a five-year-old daughter named Liza, and she dances in the 59th Street masked ballet in the winter season!”

  “That’s a neat party trick you do, isn’t it?” says Sergei. “Always knowing everyone’s names. Collecting their lives like trading cards in a hundred and forty characters or less. Do you think it means you know them? Does it make you an expert on what she’d want us to do?”

  “I don’t have to be her friend to send him to jail for her!”

  “He’s not going to jail,” says Sergei simply. “Boys like Ace never do. It’s not an option.”

  “But the story can go two ways from here,” says Jacob. “The Cards can either pay Collingwraith and the rest of their army of lawyers to clear Ace in court by annihilating Anna’s—”

  “Ella!”

  “… Ella’s credibility, and making sure she spends the rest of her life remembered as that ugly gene-job slut who tried to blackmail Ace for a slice of the family fortune,” Jacob continues without missing a beat. “Or, they can put that same money toward … What did you say the kid’s name was again?”

  “Liza,” I repeat through my teeth.

  “Right, a nice college fund for Liza, plus enough to make sure her mom can dance all the ballet she wants and never has to serve another drink, in exchange for her signature on a tiny little nondisclosure agreement. They’re going to want to go with option B. It’s quieter, less fuss, but the moment this becomes a headline, or a criminal case file, that storyline gets a whole lot harder to play out.”

  My own fingernails are digging into my palms, and I can’t seem to make them stop, or douse the purple heat radiating off my fists.

  “That’s sick.”

  “The sick part’s already happened,” says Jacob. “We can’t change that.”

  “Which would you choose?” asks Sergei. “If it were you?”

  I want to punch him right in his calm, creepily understanding expression.

  He already knows what I’d choose, what I chose, given the chance to stake my career and reputation on my word versus a Card’s. He was there.

  I didn’t even need a payoff to make me want that whole humiliating instant of my life to just go away.

  “If she doesn’t get every penny she—”

  “It won’t be a problem if you don’t make it one,” says Sergei, picking up the glasses again and heading for the wet bar sink.

  “I … I’m not doing this.”

  “Who said you had to?” says Jacob, clapping me tentatively on the shoulder, wary of my glowing parts. “You think the rest of us are just here to look pretty?”

  “Consider the situation handled,” says Sergei. “Go put in an expense report for your phone, and take an early night. You’ll feel better in the morning.”

  I can’t go home—any of my homes.

  I can’t go to Juniors Ranch and ruin Cory’s meet-the-girlfriend dinner with the way I’m feeling now. I can’t go to my mom’s house and get into another discussion about why I can’t just try harder to get along with the Card family, and I can’t go to Guardian Tower, not even to change my clothes.

  I don’t know if the Guardians would blame me more for letting this happen in the first place or for not helping Sergei and Jacob clean up, and I don’t even know if I can ask them without jeopardizing Ella’s option B.

  But I can’t go flying around in my Solar Flare outfit, either. Screw the headlines, I can’t.

  If I did what Solar Flare is supposed to do tonight, if this is what it meant when I pledged myself to protect the people of this city, then I can’t be Solar Flare, because I can’t ever do that again.

  And if I didn’t do what Solar Flare is supposed to do, then I don’t deserve to be Solar Flare anyway.

  Eventually, I end up flying down to the beach and wrapping myself in an abandoned towel so I don’t have to see the circles of red and gold on my chest while I’m puking the rest of my bar snack dinner into the sea.

  I don’t know if Sergei was right or wrong about the rest of it, but he was wrong about one thing: I will not feel better in the morning.

  This is never, ever going to feel better.

  CHAPTER 13: THE DETECTIVE

  Red and blue lights behind me.

  Instinct tells me to run.

  Common sense and newsfeeds of people who tried to run getting shot tell me to stay put.

  So, standing in the rain, I turn to face the DSA van as it pulls up to the curb and the agents step out.

  I
know the steps to this dance better than I’d like to admit.

  “Pleasant evening, officers. What can I do you for?”

  “Hands where we can see ’em,” the one nearest me says, a hand on his piece.

  They know the opening steps to this one too; they know they’ve got the lead, and are hoping I don’t know how to follow.

  The one on the driver’s side shines a floodlight in my face to blind me, while the one closest to me approaches.

  We exchange the pleasantries one always does in situations like this.

  Who are you? Edgar Enriquez, I’m a private investigator following a lead.

  What are you doing in West Pinnacle City? Like I said, following a lead.

  Do you have your documentation? Why yes, officer, of course I do.

  This stuff looks fake. It’s real. Phone it in if you want.

  You showing us attitude, boy? No, just stating facts.

  What else you got in that coat? A baseball bat, my medicine, and about ten dollars in small bills and change.

  What’s with the bat? Have you noticed I’m taking a stroll in West Pinnacle City?

  Hands on the hood.

  They’re not the gentlest friskers in the world, but they’re not the worst, either. I get a read on the guy frisking me, the one who doesn’t want to take his hand off his gun, and I know that he wanted to check me out to up their arrest numbers.

  A shady-looking non-white guy walking the streets of WPC at night, in a storm, on his own?

  Must be guilty of something.

  They confiscate my pills for looking suspicious (which, being stored in an unlabeled pill bottle, they kinda do). Irritating, since they weren’t cheap, but since I dry-chewed a couple about an hour ago, I’m pretty mellow and just go with the flow.

  They’re itching to bring me in for something, anything, and when they get the call on the radio that all my paperwork checks out, you might as well’ve told them that Santa won’t be coming around this year.

  They debate back and forth in their car, trying to figure if the pills are enough to haul me in (or, perhaps, if I’m about to “resist arrest”), but it sounds like it’s not gonna be worth the paperwork for them.

  Soon enough, I’m on my way, sans an almost empty bottle of my pills and more than ever wanting this night to be over.

  The gene-job didn’t give me a lot of details except for claiming he was both innocent and guilty of killing Quentin Julian. He was desperate and scared, and that was probably the only reason I decided to meet with him on his terms in one of the worst parts of WPC.

  I don’t dare drive here, as while my car is in pieces I’d rather it not be stolen (or worse), so I took a bus that stopped within half a mile of the meeting spot, and I’ve hoofed it from there. Working street lights are few and far between, so I’m mostly navigating with my phone’s light and hoping the batteries hold out. With the rain this bad, I can only see a few feet in front of me.

  All told, even that’s probably more than I want to see of WPC.

  I don’t know what this part of the city held before, but right now all I see are ancient storefronts with boarded-up or smashed-in windows on the few intact buildings, and piles of rubble everywhere else. The streets are lifeless but, unlike the Crescent, I think this area’s usually like this.

  It doesn’t take long to find where I’m supposed to go. It’d be hard to miss it, really.

  Mission Camp 31 stands in an abandoned grocery store parking lot. It was one of several set up by FEMA in a time when the government tried to step in and fix things up after Killtron’s attack. They abandoned it after about six months and left their assets in place. Now it’s a shantytown of old FEMA trailers, tents, and a bunch of hovels improvised from scrap wood, cardboard, and sheet metal. They’ve got some electricity, but there’s also a lot of fires and stoves keeping the place lit.

  Spray painted on the outside of the nearest trailer is GENE FREAKS F, with a trail of paint leading off after the final F. Whoever tried to paint it left in a hurry.

  Or was made to leave.

  I walk down the aisles of the camp, seeing no one and feeling every eye on me. Save the paint, this place is untouched by the violence of the past days, but I get the impression it isn’t for a lack of trying. These are people who’ve learned to protect themselves, and I’m a stranger here. I have to tread lightly if I don’t—

  “Are you the detective?”

  A little girl appears in front of me, wearing a well-worn, probably second-hand hoodie with some cartoon cat on the front. Maybe ten, eleven years old at the most, her twin braids are dirty blonde and reach past her shoulders, but she does everything she can to hide her face from me.

  “Depends on who’s asking.”

  “My papi called for you. He said you were the one who’s supposed to help him even though you made everyone hate us. You have to follow me,” she says, running off.

  This feels like a trap, but lately everything does, so I follow her.

  She leads me to a particularly rundown trailer, flush up against one of the former grocery store’s crumbling walls, and knocks a few times, then once, then twice.

  The door opens a crack.

  “This him?” a woman’s voice asks.

  “Yeah,” the girl says.

  A long, clawed hand swings the door wide open, ushering the girl and myself inside.

  The trailer is small and cramped, lit mostly with candles and with rooms made from sheets hung from the ceiling. The woman’s a gene-job with blonde hair, the left half of her body twisted with sharp, reptilian features and an unnaturally long arm with clawed fingers that almost reach the floor. In her right arm, she holds a misshapen baby to her breast, who feeds eagerly.

  “So you’re the piece of shit who brought this hell down on us?” she hisses with contempt.

  “Mama, please,” the little girl pulls at her mother’s sweater.

  “No, sweetie, this man deserves a piece of my mind. We didn’t have it good before all this, but at least we had a life! It wasn’t a good life, but it was a life, and now—”

  “Honey, love, mi amor, he may be the only one who can save us. Can we at least save the yelling at him for when we need it?”

  A man comes from behind one of the hanging sheets. His face is one of the most horrible things I’ve ever seen. His skin, if he has any, is transparent and waxy, showing off white bone and bits of muscle connecting his angular, asymmetrical head. His teeth are sharp fangs and his eyes are large, yellow, and thick with green veins. What little hair he has is long, black, and greasy, hanging around his shoulders in clumps. He is an ugly monster of a gene-job that every natural instinct tells me to look away from.

  I’ve seen his face on the news.

  I should know, since I put it there.

  He strides toward me, a bit awkwardly, and holds out a clawed, three-fingered hand.

  “Max Mendoza. Thank you for coming. You’ve already met my wife, Jeanine. The parasite sucking on her tit is our youngest, John, and Kaley here’s the one who brought you in. Say hi to the detective.”

  Shyly, Kaley turns to me, still hiding her face in the hoodie. Now, though, enough light shows the lower half of her face that I can see she takes most after her dad.

  “Hi.”

  “Hello.”

  Slowly, like a Polaroid developing in reverse, she becomes invisible. One of the sheet walls then pulls itself aside, and I hear footsteps running behind it.

  Mendoza shrugs. “Raising kids is a challenge. Raising super kids …”

  “I’m sure.”

  His hand’s still out.

  “You know what I can do if I shake with you, right?”

  “Yeah,” he says.

  I take that as informed consent. I shake his hand and get a read off the man. I hold on for a while, but I see little new, mostly him hanging around the trailer, talking with his wife, playing with his kids, worriedly talking with neighbors wondering if anyone else was looking for him, finally getting a
burner cell phone from someone to call me with. Nothing illegal, nothing more than what a guy normally hiding from the law would do.

  He takes his hand back. “You willing to talk with me?”

  “Sure.”

  “Good.” He motions me to a nearby couch, or the fraying remains of one. Jeanine looks at us disapprovingly, but says nothing, disappearing behind the sheets with Kaley.

  “So you’re the guy who retro-filmed the murder?” he says.

  “That’s right. And you’re one of the guys who killed Quentin Julian.”

  “That’s right. But I bet I can tell you something you don’t know about it. A whole lot of things, actually.”

  “Like?”

  “That I’m the only one who did it that’s still alive.”

  He’s right, that is news. Or, more appropriately, it’s news that it isn’t news. This is the sort of thing they’d be all over.

  “You know there’s not much I can do about this, right? I just recorded what happened. I don’t got any sway with the cops or heroes or anything like that.”

  “No, but you look into things for money, right? Well, I got some money. It ain’t much, but I can pay you. Pay you to help me clear my name. What do you say?”

  I could say a lot of things to this.

  That he should save the world a lot of trouble and tell his story to the police.

  That I’m not worth his time.

  That I don’t want to get any more involved with this than I am.

  I could even say sorry.

  “Tell me what you gotta say,” is instead what comes outta my mouth.

  “Then you’ll help me?”

  “That all depends on what you gotta say.”

  “You brought this down on us! You can do a lot more than see!” Jeanine calls from behind one of the sheets.

  “Please, honey, I’m trying to fix this!”

  He stands up, hands held behind his back.

  “I believe in the American dream. Having a family, a job, a good home. That’s why my folks moved us here after the gene bombs in El Paso made them like this. They thought things’d be better here. They both died when I was a kid, but WPC here’s been otherwise good to me. I met my wife, had my kids. This place is my home. I work hard, when I can, manual shit mostly, building, gardening, and I provide. But I still always wanted that American dream. And that’s why I went to Mr. Julian.”