by Al Ewing
The young man blinked, the scowl still on his face. Then - without a word - he simply reached, took the sandwich from Johann's grasp, and bit into it.
"S'a good sammich." he grinned, in between chews.
Johann simply stared.
"You get out now! You get out of my shop!" screeched Alma, purple with fury. The futurehead smirked through a mouthful of the Rabbi's bread and beef, and moved to the door. He'd won the battle. He'd walked in and taken what he wanted, and now he would leave.
"Wait." said Johann, softly.
The young man turned, looked at him, and bit into the sandwich again.
"You can have my sandwich."
The young man narrowed his eyes.
"No, you can have it. You can come in here and cause trouble and spit on a clean floor, if that's what you enjoy. You can steal from an old man, take what you haven't earned. You can do what you like." Johann felt the blood rushing to his cheeks and heard the anger in his own voice. "You can! You can dress like you're in the Hidden Empire, like good people never fought and bled and died to make you safe from them! You can do all of that, because you're taller than we are. It's just a matter of height. You're taller than we are, and stronger than we are, and you look more threatening than we do! And in your world that is the only thing that matters! That, I understand! That is the path you have chosen for yourself - good luck to you! Mazel tov!"
He paused, gathering his fury, his fists clenched. Then he reached out and grabbed a hold of the upside-down lightning bolt, the safety pins popping away as he pulled and the ragged patch of blue cloth came away in his hands. "But you will not disgrace this while you do it!"
The boy blinked, shock written over his face. Johann's fist shook. "Now get out. Get out of here."
The futurehead threw Johann's sandwich onto the floor, spat, and left, the door slamming violently behind him.
The bell rang furiously for a second, then came to a stop.
"Oy..." Johann breathed. He felt drained. He hadn't meant to lose his temper that way.
"Give me that." Alma smiled, taking the square of cloth from his hands, then pinning it up behind the counter. "It'll make a good conversation piece. You want me to call the cops?"
Johann shook his head. "No... no, I just lost my temper with him." He let out a sigh, feeling his heart hammering in his chest. "I'm too old for such nonsense. For a three-dollar sandwich! And what have I achieved? For you, a conversation piece and a dirty floor. For me, almost a heart attack, maybe worse if that schmuck had taken a swing at me... ah, let me help you clean this up."
Alma smiled. "I won't hear of such a thing, Rabbi. You sit yourself down and catch your breath and I'll make you up a fresh one."
"No, no..." Johann sighed. "I couldn't eat it now. I'll head back to my apartment and take some soup when my stomach is settled."
"Then take your three dollars back, at least."
"Three extra dollars would throw my whole budget off. I'd become extravagant. You keep it, or give it away to a hungry orphan." He shuffled towards the door, swinging it open and listening to the sound. "Wait, wait - promise me one thing, Alma, if you think you owe me something for acting like an old fool."
Alma raised an eyebrow.
"Don't ever change that bell."
Four blocks later, Johann found himself chuckling over the incident. The look on the young man's face! He'd think twice in the future, perhaps, about bullying old men. And perhaps he wouldn't. Still, it was nice to dream.
Johann's eyes flicked up to the solitary gas lamp that lit the dark alley, his little shortcut home. Someone had cut little stars and moons from coloured paper and stuck them on the glass, so that they threw great coloured shapes onto the ground below. The effect was quite charming. A square of cardboard propped against the wall told the rest of the story. Breakers had, sometime the night before, made the alley an impromptu dancehall, at least until the residents had run them off.
Breakers and bikers, futureheads and Warhol-girls. And that lightning bolt on blue cloth watching over them all. Manhattan was a strange place, and yet occasionally it threw up little wonders, pink stars cast in light on the concrete floor of an alleyway. A small thing, but representative of all the strangeness and charm of this unique place, this City Of Tomorrow...
Johann took pleasure in small things.
At that moment, he became aware of footsteps behind him. A cold chill seized his chest, and he swallowed hard, that terrible certainty of who those footsteps might belong to racing through his mind. No, surely not, he told himself. I'm an old man.
There was a low, mean chuckle from behind. He steeled himself. He would look around, and he'd see a group of young men, and he'd recognise none of them. And they'd walk right by him, never thinking to bother an old Rabbi. It was a story he'd played out a dozen times in this alley. A good story.
So Johann turned his head, and found himself looking at three stripes of hair coloured red, white and blue, and a t-shirt with a square torn out of the front and a couple of safety pins hanging from that ragged edge, and a pair of eyes with hate and humiliation in them.
It was the boy from earlier. And not alone. Two others, the same age, walked either side of him, one black, one white, both of them in the same mish-mash of ragged clothes held together by safety pins and charged symbols. The other young black man's face was a mass of steel piercings and studs that made the handsome features alien and ugly.
The white boy wore a swastika.
It was beginning to rain.
Johann sped up, walking faster, as the spattering raindrops hit his cheeks like tears, trickling down. Behind him, the footsteps sped up to match. The rain intensified, suddenly coming down in sheets, the filthy alley lit bright white for a split-second before a crash of thunder formally announced the storm. Why didn't I bring my umbrella? Johann thought, madly, and then he found himself running, feet splashing in the growing puddles.
He ran, and they ran after him. It was a race now. At the end of the long, dark alley, he could see trotting horses, smell hotdogs, see bright lights, a finish line. If he could just get to the lights, he might be safe-
And then he tripped.
He landed face-down on the wet, dirty floor of the alley, knocking the wind from his lungs. He lay there a moment in the wet and the dirt, coughing weakly, and then a heavy boot pressed down on his back, pinning him.
He heard the quiet click of a switchblade springing from its casing.
Then another. Then a third.
"Gimme my bolt back, old man." The voice was flat, emotionless, as it had been in the Deli. Another voice beside snickered softly, barely audible over the sound of the rain coming down.
"Yeah," said the new voice. "Old man. Give him it before we cut you."
Johann tried to croak out a response - something, anything - and then the boot on his back stamped down harder. Why were they doing this? He was an old man - but then, that was the reason, of course. He was an old man who had humiliated a younger one. With a sudden cold clarity, he understood that they would kill him. They would murder him in this filthy alley and then the three of them would go back to the deli, and see what they were looking for, what Alma had tacked to the wall, and they would want it back, and Alma would stand up for herself and they would kill her too. If they had to, they would kill her quickly, but if they could get away with it, they would kill her slowly. Because they could, and that was all the justification they needed.
But they would kill him slowly first.
The boot pressed down on his back. He tried to say a prayer, but he had no breath to say it. At the end of the alley, he could see the lights, and the horses, and the people passing by, rain dripping off their umbrellas.
Not one of them looked at him.
"Gimme my bolt." the futurehead growled, in his dead, emotionless monotone.
Johann could not speak. His lips moved, but no sound came.
There was only the sound of the rain.
And then the sound
of a bullet.
A bloody rose bloomed at the back of the young man's head, opposite the hole that had suddenly appeared just below the white strip of hair. His eyes bulged, lost focus, and then he toppled backwards, dead.
Johann flinched, feeling the weight of the boy's boot come off his back, then heard the splash of the heavy corpse hitting the puddles of the grimy alley floor.
For a moment, there was no sound at all, bar a kind of high-pitched squeak, an animal whimper that crawled out of the throat of the boy with the swastika shirt, as if he was some small burrowing thing caught in a wire trap.
Then there was laughter.
A terrible, echoing laugh, of a kind one might find in the pits of Hell, a laugh that bounced and rolled off the brick and steel and seemed to echo from every corner at once, booming, roaring, growing louder and louder. Johann felt ice in his chest, and once more his wrinkled lips began to stumble through the Kaddish, eyes shutting tight, as if warding off imaginary monsters in the way he had as a child.
When he opened them again, the monster stood in front of him.
He was close to six foot in height, and the long coat of black leather he wore gave him the appearance of being half shadow, a silhouette picked out against the gaslight of the street beyond. Johann blinked the raindrops from his eyes - or were they tears? - and tried to make out further detail, but there was none, only a sea of black, a black hole in space in the shape of a man. Black suit and shirt, black gloves with an odd texture to them, holding a pair of automatic pistols. And a black slouch hat that covered his face-
-oh God, his face!
Johann gasped, and behind him the boy in the swastika made another strangled cry, as though the wire around the struggling animal had tightened.
His face! That terrible mask!
As the monster tilted his head to stare at his persecutors, Johann could see the whole of it. A head of black leather, with a mask of shining metal, and that metal mask coloured a burnished bloody red, featureless but for the eight lenses that shone in the half-light like the eyes of some terrible spider, hiding all evidence of humanity. The effect was terrifying, an emotionless blank visage that spoke of remorseless, unstoppable vengeance for unimaginable crimes. Behind him, Johann heard the boy in the swastika shirt scream.
"What are you? You ain't human!"
The man in the blood-red mask hissed, like escaping steam, and then the hiss turned into a laugh, that devil's laugh, mocking, sneering, rolling across the wet stone.
Then he raised his twin pistols.
The boy with the piercings -- the one who'd remained silent up until now - let out a yell and hurled himself towards the figure in black, switchblade gleaming. In response, there was the roar of automatic fire as shot after shot slammed into his bare chest and burst from his back in fountains of blood and bone. His face twisted in an agonised rictus as he took two more steps forward, propelled by the momentum of his charge, and then dropped to the alley floor, a foot from the Rabbi's trembling, prone form.
Johann felt the warmth as the young man's blood pooled against him.
The boy in the swastika shirt took a stumbling step backward, his face deathly pale and slick with sweat. His own blade slid from his grasp to clatter on the ground at his feet, and his hands slowly jerked upwards, as if on puppet strings. "Please." he croaked, tears streaming down his face. "Please. Please."
The man in the mask stopped laughing.
He stepped over Johann's shaking body, walking towards the boy, gazing down on him with those eight expressionless glass eyes. Again, there was a hiss, like steam escaping from some dreadful engine of death.
Then he spoke.
"You... surrender."
The boy blinked, slowly shaking his head. The crotch of the ripped denim jeans he wore darkened as a stream of piss trickled down his leg to mix with the rainwater and the blood.
Gently, the man in the mask pressed the barrel of one of his twin automatics into the centre of the Nazi emblem on the boy's chest.
"For show?"
The boy let out another whimper, eyes wide and wet. He tried to find any sign of mercy in that cold, red metal mask, any humanity shining back at him from those eight monstrous lenses.
He saw nothing at all.
The masked man hissed again, softly.
"You should start mixing with a better class of people."
Then he turned his back. The boy stood for a moment, face white, hands still raised, swaying gently in the air like balloons on strings. Then the spell was broken, and he ran back the way he came, sobbing like a child.
The man in the mask bent down and began to help Johann to his feet. The Rabbi flinched at his touch, surprised by the gentleness of it. He swallowed, and spoke softly: "Thank you. I think they would have killed me."
He stood, the adrenaline making him quiver, unsteady on his feet. His clothes were sticky with blood. He looked down at the two dead young men - boys, children - and then up at the blank mask. "Please. I am grateful, you saved my life, but..." He swallowed. "Was there no other way?"
There was a chuckle from behind the mask, dry as kindling.
"Not for them."
Johann swallowed, and nodded, feeling like a coward. He wanted to go home and wash the blood from himself, to be far away from this terrible creature that had saved his life. He wanted to be sick, to sleep for a hundred years, to feel something besides the cold weight of horror coiling in his gut.
"Well. Thank you again." he said, quietly, and turned away. He wondered whether he should call the police.
The man in the mask laid a hand on his shoulder.
"A moment."
Johann's blood froze.
The man's grip on his shoulder was soft, almost gentle. "Did you think you could escape me, Rabbi Labinowicz?"
"What? What are you talking about?" Johann swallowed, feeling a cold trickle of sweat at the base of his neck. Helplessly, he tried to jerk away from the hand, but the grip on his shoulder was suddenly like a steel vice.
The other hand still held a squat, smoking automatic pistol.
"Did you think I came here by accident? That I don't know every detail about you?" The laughter came again, and the eight blank lenses reflected the terrified, sweating face of the Rabbi back at him. "You take a special interest in the children of the neighbourhood, don't you, Johann?"
Johann licked dry lips. "What of it? The schooling here - they need to learn! I teach them!" His voice sounded hollow in his ears, like a murderer pleading for clemency. Oh God, how had it come to this? "Mathematics, and sciences..."
The masked man hissed slowly, dangerously, like a snake about to strike. The blank, emotionless lenses seemed to bore into Johann's soul, uncovering his every secret.
"I know exactly what you teach them." The voice was cold, mocking, deadly. "You take pleasure in small things, don't you, Rabbi Labinowicz?"
Johann cried out as if he'd been struck, trying to struggle free again. "Please," he begged, his voice hoarse, "whatever I've... whatever you think I've done, please. You don't have to do this. I'll do what you want, I'll, I'll go to the police-"
The man in the mask laughed again, a low, throaty cackle, redolent of cobwebs and deep graves. He raised his pistol to Johann's face. "I have a surer way of dealing with your kind. Open your mouth, Rabbi. I have another small thing for you, but this time I doubt you will take much pleasure in it at all."
"Please-" begged Johann, but he got no further. The bullet entered his mouth and blew the back of his head out across the brickwork. He slumped to the floor and the man in the mask put another into his head for good measure.
In the street beyond, the men and women still walked to and fro. They paid no heed to the sound of gunfire, nor did they notice the trickle of blood running from the alley across the sidewalk and into the gutter. They knew better.
In the alley, Johann's corpse, and the others, began to stiffen, the pouring rain pooling in the bullet-wounds and the sockets of their eyes. Sitting
atop each of them was a small white business card with a red spider motif on the back, and a short haiku on the front:
Where all inhuman
Devils revel in their sins -
The Blood-Spider spins!
Of the Blood-Spider himself, there was no sign.
Chapter Two
Doc Thunder and The Queen of the Leopard Men
As a rule, Maya Zor-Tura woke late.
Each morning, she floated slowly to awareness like a bubble of air rising up from some bottomless ocean trench, the half-remembered fancies of her dream breaking apart and dissipating into the morning sun as it poured through the skylight and splashed onto the silk sheets. Her eyes fluttered open, blinking away the last crumbs of sleep, and she stretched like a cat, arching her back and opening her mouth into a wide, luxurious yawn. And straight after that, on most mornings, she went back to a light doze, finally deigning to grace the household with her presence at eleven, or noon, or perhaps a little after lunch.
At the appointed hour, she'd appear in a gown of translucent yellow silk, or a sharply-cut suit, or her 'adventuring clothes' - black leather corset, boots and coat, with a royal purple skirt in a ragged style on the cutting edge of current fashion - or, quite often, nothing at all. On Maya, nudity seemed as elegant and refined as the evening clothes of British royalty.
She was tall, with flowing dark hair, skin the colour of rich, dark coffee and cat-like green eyes that seemed to constantly radiate a kind of amused superiority, and none of these traits had faded in several thousand years of existence.
For Maya Zor-Tura, time was something that happened to other people.
This morning, she paused in mid-stretch and for just the smallest moment she tried to recall exactly what the dream had been about. Dreams were important, despite Doc's occasional and somewhat half-hearted insistence that they were only a natural function of the brain. He'd learned a more unscientific and unpalatable truth in their time together - that dreams, and especially Maya Zor-Tura's, contained messages. Soundings from the past, and the future, and places beyond human understanding, often all at once. Warnings that should not be ignored.