Liquid Cool (Liquid Cool, Book 1)

by Austin Dragon

  But then, the gang got greedy and it all went wrong. They started to believe their own hype and tried to extend their territory way beyond the French quarters. Posh gangs never do well in direct confrontation with feral gangs of chaos or long-game, Moriarty-planning, brainiac gangs. It was like the Fall of Old Paris all over again. Les Enfants Terribles, The Terrible Children gang, was decimated in mere days by rival (real) gangs in one show of unity. The gang war left many parts of Neo-Paris burning and most of the Les Enfants Terribles dead.

  Punch Judy was crazy, even then, when it came to loyalty. She could not let it go and went to war with all of them by herself, tracking key leaders outside of the country. A murderous chase through the streets of Metropolis in her self-made death-mobile led to a horrific accident, pinning her body in a burning wreck, as enemy gang members stood and laughed nearby. Then Cruz happened.

  Even if she wasn't an ex-felon, there would be very few jobs available to an ex-gang member, like her, with psych problems. Her days were spent mostly like today—smoking on the stoop, wasting her life away, while watching people walk by, the hovercars fly above, the rain fall from the sky, and counting the raindrops.

  "Punch!" She heard the man's voice, but didn't see him.

  She lethargically looked up with her mirrored, wet shades to the first apartment window above her. A pudgy man looked down at her from a large, open window. She stared back without a word; she liked to sit in the rain. The feel of the drops made her feel content.

  "Are you not going to answer me?" he shouted.

  She took a draw from her cigarette.

  "No wonder you have no friends."

  "I have no friends," she answered in a contemptuous French accent, "because they were all killed."

  "How long ago was that? Why do you sit under my window? I'd pay good money to switch with my neighbors not to see you under my window."

  "You say the same things every time I see you, you stupid man. What do you want?"

  "Don't you carry a mobile?"

  "Stop asking me stupid questions you know the answer to, you stupid man."

  "Turn it on! People are calling me, like I'm your personal secretary."

  "Who is it?"

  "I'm not your personal secretary! Turn on your mobile and find out for yourself!"

  The man disappeared back into his apartment and slammed the window shut.

  She placed her cigarette in the corner of her mouth as she reached into her jacket pocket. As soon as she flipped it on, it rang. She looked at the outside display screen, but didn't recognize the number.

  She answered it and saw the tiny face of China Doll on the display.

  "How did you get my number?"

  "Where's Cruz?"

  "Why are you asking me?"

  "Maybe, because you're the sidewalk sally who sits in front of his building all day long."

  "I am not a sidewalk sally!"

  "Where's Cruz?"

  "I don't know, and I don't care, and I wouldn't tell you if I did know and care."

  "Tell him I'm looking for him."

  "No, I won't."

  "And call me immediately."

  "No."

  "As soon as you see him."

  "No."

  "Now you can go back to doing whatever nothing you were doing, you sidewalk sally."

  "I am not a sidewalk sally! I live in this building!"

  "Whatever."

  "I am—"

  It clicked before she could finish. She cursed in French and crushed the mobile phone to pieces with her bionic hand. "Chinese donkey, I hate you!" She threw the pieces of the mobile into the air, showering the steps with fragments everywhere.

  "Hey!"

  Four of the local sidewalk johnnies watched her.

  "I'm sorry," she said to them.

  "I thought you were one of us, Punch," one of them said.

  One could see the men were dressed decently under their gray slicker coats. It must have been a multi-buy sale, because the slickers were identical and all had their hoods covering their heads. Their faces were another matter. Weathered faces with scraggly mustaches, beards, and heads of hair. This particular crew of sidewalk johnnies wore subtle yellow shades.

  "I am one of you," she answered, standing to her feet.

  "That's not how it sounded when you were talking on the mobile, Punch. It's like you're ashamed of us," another man said.

  "No, that's not true. She was disrespecting you, not me. I'm an adopted sidewalk sally. You know that. I have problems. You know that."

  "We all got problems, Punch. Every last person in this city has problems, even the ones who pretend they don't."

  "Absolutely true." She walked down the steps towards them and could see in their expressions that they were not happy with her. "No hard feelings. I'm always here with you. We look out for each other. Isn't that true?"

  "Yeah, but if you don't want to associate with us anymore—"

  "No! I won't hear any more about it. We are the guardians of the streets. We know better than anybody what the street is capable of. We must stay united because the street can get angry. We're the line of defense against that. Besides, you know I say all kinds of things. That's why I try to keep from talking. When I talk, fifty percent of what comes out of mouth will be stupid. Isn't that true?"

  The men smiled.

  "Okay, Punch. Everyone deserves another chance," one of them answered.

  "Exactly. Now help me do something. I need the eyes and ears of the street. Do you know where Cruz is now?"

  "I thought you told the person on the mobile you weren't going to look for him."

  "I'm not. I'm using my connections to do it, but not for her. It's for me."

  The men looked at each other. "We haven't seen Cruz."

  "Me, neither."

  The other two men shook their heads, too.

  "I saw him pull out the place early this morning in his ride, headed east, but that's it," one of them added.

  "He goes out. He has to come back," Punch Judy said. "We'll just wait for him."

  "Do you think we can get some money out that person on the mobile?" one of the men asked.

  She gave him an askance look. "Doubtful. His girl wants to know where he is."

  "Oh, China Doll."

  "We like her," said another man.

  "I hate her. I hate him."

  "That's no way to talk, Punch. Cruz is cool."

  "He is not cool."

  The men laughed.

  "Since it's for China Doll, we'll put the word out on the street to find him," one of them said. "Should we bring the 411 to you?"

  "No, I don't care."

  "We'll get it to China Doll, then."

  "We like China Doll," another man said.

  "No, tell me too, then."

  "Why?"

  Punch Judy thought for a moment. "I don't know, but I want to know, too. I'll think of a reason later."

  "Okay."

  The four sidewalk johnnies scuttled away into the drizzling rain. She turned to walk back up the mega-steps to her sitting spot.

  She hated that everyone liked Cruz. But she liked that someone else didn't like Cruz either—Cruz, himself.

  PART THREE

  I'm Cruz. Whatcha Want?

  Chapter 6

  I, Cruz

  "I'M CRUZ. WHATCHA WANT?" That's how I greeted strangers. Though, I had to admit that it was somewhat of a rude and snarky response, but, hey, I didn't like strangers. I liked my friends, my frenemies, and even my enemies—all of them I knew, but strangers, I had no regard for. My girlfriend, frequently, scolded me on my bad manners, saying "a stranger is a friend you haven't met yet." I had a far less charitable definition of them. Social scientists predicted that the bigger a city gets, the higher the anti-sociability of its people. There was no city bigger than Metropolis, and I was born and raised here, and most of my waking thoughts were about how to get out of here, so I wouldn't die here.

  My name is Cruz. My first name is
unimportant, because no one ever calls me by it, not even my parents.

  Calling Metropolis a city was like calling me a molecule. True, but what exactly did that even mean? Demographers and assorted eggheads had semi-decided on its official classification—supercity, beating out less popular terms, such as omni-city, over-city, and ultra-city. At least everyone agreed that mega-city was inadequate. That's what it was called when it was ten times smaller than it was today. Fifty million people living, breathing, and dying in a rainy supercity in a world of super-skyscrapers.

  Metropolis wasn't a bad place, but it wasn't a good one, either.

  Here, I sat in my vehicle with my face almost pressed against the driver's side window, looking out at the downpour and watching the rain roll down the glass. Astronomers said it rained diamonds on Jupiter and Saturn. Well, this wasn't there, and even the ladies would tire of a constant diamond downpour; probably would cut every living and inanimate thing to shreds, too. This was Metropolis, where it was always raining or about to rain. The only seasons were variations of the perpetual rain—light rain, heavy rain, or the storm season. There was one month of a break during the year, which would be fine if the year had only two months, but it had twelve.

  People said the sky was black, but that wasn't true. The dark clouds above that encased the city only pretended uniformity. If you stared at them long enough, they would let you peek through their facade. It was like gray people on the streets—everyone looked the same from afar in their dark slickers, but they all managed individuality, somehow. I saw the sky's dark blues, purples, dark greens, mustard yellows, and grays, too.

  Besides the pitter-patter of the rain hitting my vehicle, the only other sounds were from the old monorail line about thirty feet above me. I could hear its hissing rumble every fifteen minutes. I wanted to be left alone to rain-watch and meditate, or whatever I was doing in my head. My vehicle was parked on the ground in an alley and the only people around were the scarce few who walked past the entrance to another alleyway, fifteen feet from me. Other than that, there was no one to bother me—no sidewalk johnnies, no troll moles, no passing garbage hovertrucks, and no juvenile delinquents, skipping school and looking to do crimes.

  My mobile phone had been off since last night. Who knows how many messages I had waiting? But I didn't care. I needed my alone time.

  Twenty-four hours, seven days, three-hundred-sixty-five or fifty-two weeks or twelve months. The endlessness of it all.

  I had been in a funk for the last few days. It happened every year before, on, around, and after my birthday. I was always especially morose during this time. An evil day invented to force you to take stock of the thing called life. I wouldn't want to be around myself, which is why I segregated myself from friend and foe for as long as possible, until the spell passed.

  I felt trapped, like a bug in a spider's web. Everybody followed this system of life, from the littlest guy shuffling to and from his nine-to-five, all the way to those god-like guys, living above us all, consumed by their own power and fortune. We all had the same basic concerns, but in the end, we all ended up at the same place—meat at the morgue. The masses did a lot in that in-between time to go about life in the rain with style—designer Goodwill wet-wear clothes and colored neon shades—to blot from the mind the fundamental drudgery of it all. To survive to your ultimate destination, you had to know your place, not upset the order of things. You either worked for the international, multinational megacorps, or you worked for uber-government, the "state," and, though you'd never get Up-Top, you could retire free-and-clear for your last decade or two of life. It was the unsaid, universal contract that most accepted.

  But I had tried to make my futile mark on the cosmos with my contrarian self. I avoided umbrellas; instead, I wore my tan fedora. I didn't wear neon shades, and I didn't wear dark-colored slickers; instead, I wore my favorite tan coat. Everyone had dark colored hovercars; I drove a bright red, classic Ford Pony. That's what I did to separate myself from the masses—pathetic and pointless, but did it anyway and could do no different.

  What the hell have I even accomplished? If I clocked out of life, what exactly would be my legacy? I hated my birthdays. My parents told me I hated them, even as a kid, the time you're supposed to be the most optimistic in life, even despite all the sweet birthday cakes and presents from every known relative on the planet. My girlfriend said I needed to stop my annual "morose period." "There are people in the world with no food to eat or born with no eyes or limbs or born mentally retarded. What is your complaint?" she'd say to me. "An innocent kid was shot in the head today and will be brain-dead for the rest of his life, or a woman had her kid crushed by a drunk driver in a hovercar," she'd add.

  True, I had no serious tragedies to complain about. No great losses. No disabilities. I had all my fingers, toes, limbs, and other natural organs—not a bionic part anywhere. Metropolis hadn't been bad to me.

  Everyone simply had to accept it all. I did. But this was an especially bad year of reflection for me, which is why I was here sitting in my red Ford Pony, hiding out on a street I've never been, far from any part of the city I had ever been, so I could just sit, stare at the falling rain, and simmer in my own perennial moroseness and not be bothered by the girlfriend, friends, enemies, frenemies, sidewalk johnnies, hustlers, or any strangers.

  The only interruption to the steady rain was the ubiquitous flashing neon and video signs. I paid no attention to the specific ads or messages they were peddling. It was always the same. The corporate ads wanted you to buy something, and the government ads wanted you to do something. The average citizen, in a normal day, was supposedly bombarded by no less than 50 thousand messages in the city. No wonder people were stupid. All those subliminal messages were taking up all the free space in a person's brain—the universe's ultimate disk hardware.

  My hiding spot was one of the few less bombarded parts of the neon jungle. The neon signs, video ads, flashing street lights, flashing beacons for sky traffic, and building side lights should have been overwhelming, but we were all born into it—the visual madness. Most even thrived on it. Without the artificial light, all there would be was the dark, rainy, griminess of the city's urban landscape. That's what the colored eyewear that everyone always wore outside was really for—mitigation, being a must-have piece of technology was an after-thought.

  I had found a damn good hiding spot. I had set down in the residential alley, in the early morning hours, between two monolith buildings in Silver City—the center of the city's robotic production. I was lucky, because such spaces between super-skyscrapers were not by design, but evidence of a building oversight. Buildings pushed up into the dark sky and sprawled out vertically to cover every inch. With people stacked on top of each other, building by building, space was one of the most important commodities. And here I was, lounging around in the unplanned alleyway, the hovercar equivalent of a sidewalk johnny, staring up at the rain. It was a good hiding spot, and I planned to use it often.

  I saw it. The hovertaxicab descended from the uppermost part of the alleyway, on the left, about twenty-five feet or so in the air.

  "Damn," I said to myself. It was one of Run-Time's.

  I chose Silver City because, since it was so automated, there were far fewer workers here than the rest of the City. Less people meant less public transportation, less hovercars, and less hovertaxis. But they found me anyway.

  The hovercab rose back in the air and did a one-eighty to fly away, back the way it must have come.

  The cabbie would call dispatch, and dispatch would call Run-Time. If Run-Time was looking for someone, and you were in Metropolis, consider yourself found, unless you were hiding down in the sewers with water rats, "un-killable" jumbo roaches, and whatever roly-poly isopods were lurking and swimming around in the filth. No one did that. I didn't need to check my mobile. I knew people were looking for me. For a nobody, I sure was treated like a somebody.

  All I had to do was push a button to start the engi
ne of my classic Ford Pony. High-performance, super-charged, advanced nitro-acceleration hydrogen engine. A sleek, bright red muscle-vehicle coupe to make the average person gawk and the mouths of the genuine hovercar enthusiast and collector hang open.

  I had found the shell in a junkyard over fifteen years ago, when I was in middle school and it took me a few years to build and restore it, spare part by spare part. I had been upgrading it ever since. No one believed that I found and built such an expensive muscle hovercar from scratch, but it was true, and I drove it every day. It was considered a true classic and got me solid offers to part with it almost every week, but you don't sell a classic Ford Pony; it's a purchase for life—like a legacy house. My Pony had been featured (without my permission) in so many hovercar magazines that I lost count.

  I coasted out of the alleyway without revving the engine. I wanted no more than a purr out of it. If "they" were coming for me, I had to make my getaway quietly. That's what I did. Not even turning on my car lights, I flew out of the alley, waited for my chance, and drove into the empty sky-lane. I'd stay under the monorail line bridge, as long as I could, to avoid Run-Time's taxis. Big Brother government had nothing on Run-Time's civilian surveillance of cabbies throughout the city. They were better than any drone army.

  I thought to myself that the refrigerator at home was empty, so I might as well do some grocery shopping. Yes, I had the upcoming Great first dinner with Dot's folks, which probably was the other contributing factor to my post-birthday blues.

  At the time, I had no idea that an operator, named Easy Chair Charlie, who had sold me my semi-illegal, nitro-accelerator for my Pony years ago, got himself killed the night before.