“You want a gate?” he asks.
“Maybe. I’m looking for the Hyena. Is that his actual handle?”
“Yeah.”
“Kinda stupid.”
“Why?”
“It’s the sort of name someone else gives you and you don’t fucking like,” I snap back. “I thought that’d be obvious.”
Izzy trembles, then sniffles to make himself brave.
“If you want the Hyena, you can leave the Lyceum out of it,” the old man says. “The . . . academy has a new Regent. And a new base. They’re laying low and want to stay that while a while longer yet. You let ‘em?”
I eyeball the wily old bastard and sniff my consent for him to explain.
He can set me up with a meeting, so long as I provide the ambush.
Except like everything in my life, it’s never as simple as all that.
* * *
IZZY DIRECTS ME to an abandoned soap factory on the outskirts of Atlantic City’s rust belt, in what used to be the Hudson’s upper waterfront before 1984 and the botched “colours out of space” Kirlian Invasion. I don’t have any nifty super senses beyond the barometric intuition linked to my powers, and it’s not enough to warn me if I am walking into a trap—or should I say flying into a trap, as I appear out of the mysteriously piss-coloured, pollution-heavy cloudbanks roiling over old Connecticut as I zero in on the erstwhile hideout.
I know enough to know the soap factory is rigged with hidden surveillance. This is a villain’s lair after all, one way or the other, or so Izzy sold it to me in his devil’s bargain to keep the Lyceum out of my latest rampage. If this Hyena crank is hired muscle with a permanent deformity—though Izzy assured me the guy was no mutant, so I don’t know how that works—then he needs places like this to hole up away from the prying eyes of the ordinary world.
With my usual subtlety, I come down feet first into the main warehouse roof, smashing down and through to land in a cinematic rain shower of dust and debris, a good portion of which is century-old pigeon guano, judging by the smell.
For all my grand entrance, the dying light exposes nothing but a big empty abandoned factory complex, ancient scaffolding and conveyer belts caked in spider-webs, old oil and crap, upper windows roseate with the sunset filtered through layer upon layer of built-up grime.
The last few bits of the roof clatter down, and as their echoes die away I start to move through the complex, trying to do what I do in lieu of the Zen calm that has escaped me my entire life, trying to send out gentle electro-magnetic feelers so I can detect any advanced tech hiding within. The electrical sense is a very flaky extension of my abilities and I am about as subtle with it as a kid trying to eat Chinese with a spoon, so it is no surprise that I’m almost on top of the motion detectors before feeling the tiny pinprick tingle of their charge ahead of me in the support beams of the middle of the warehouse.
And with a subtle grin, I deliberately trigger them and wait.
* * *
HYENA COMES OUT for a sniff in the same way a starving man attacks bacon. All I get is a blur, a slight whiff of wet dog, and then the snarling, clawing chaos is on me.
I’m prepared for the attack and when he gets a paw on me, he connects instead with my electrical field, sending Hyena into an interpretive dance routine that drama teachers the world over would recognise as the “bacon in the pan” exercise. There’s an unpleasant smell I guess is inevitable in frying a dude covered in hair, but to Hyena’s credit, he throws off the effects of the Taser field and leaps up, wide eyes ablaze and claws extended as he seeks to resume his rampage.
He’s got a couple of inches on me and plenty of bulk. I put my boot into his solar plexus, but he blocks with a hairy forearm and swings a bedevilled haymaker that I barely escape.
“What are you doing here?” he roars. “What do you want with the Hyena?”
“All these questions,” I say right back as I tap aside another fist and counter with a lightning jab.
Hyena snarls and goes at me two-handed, but again I am good for the deflect, elbowing him upside the skull and planting a knee into his bread basket. Unseen, one of those loopy long arms of his grabs me around the back of the neck and he tosses me judo-style into a few dusty old metal carts which I kick away in disgust as I free myself from their entanglement, turning to unleash hell on him with my electrical attack only to see a pair of hairy clawed feet launching straight at me.
He kicks me back and through the next conveyer belt array, machinery crunching as I trip back trying to retain my balance and basically failing as I flail and the bastard runs after me, leaping and kicking again, only this time I divert him with a jiu-jitsu defence, throwing on a burst of speed to lance a dozen punches up his torso and then finishing with a delicious left cross.
Hyena crashes to the ground under the baleful light of a row of disused factory windows, a storm building outside nothing to do with my hard-breathing glower. I pull off my cloak in frustration and cast it aside as I take a few moments in relief at having defeated my target, already clicking through how I am going to extract the information I want from this creep to find the real pervert at the end of this tunnel. “Zephyr?”
There’s a slight movement behind me and I turn at the voice on my guard.
“Yes,” I stupidly reply.
The man standing there is about fifty. The word “wizened” was invented possibly just for him. He wears a brown magician’s cloak and weird, cylindrical head gear patterned with the same concentric mustard yellow lines that make it look like Venn diagrams have been having babies all over his costume.
The Storyteller slowly lifts a conversational hand and gestures before I really parse the movement as he speaks again.
“Have you ever thought about how strange it is, what you do?”
* * *
I AM BASICALLY fucked.
There’s a deep, sonorous quality to the older man’s voice that roots my feet firmly to the spot as I drink in every possible connotation and denotation of what he’s saying, turning it over in my ape’s mind like tiny universes of thought cartwheeling between birth and extinction within my cerebral cortex, a weird timelessness to my contemplation as the Storyteller advances in the least threatening old man shuffle any villain has ever adopted.
“Think about it,” he says almost kindly, advancing further, every cell in my body screaming for me to lightning blast the old fucker even as those cries are suffocated beneath a wave of endorphins linked directly to hanging on every word of the old man’s speech.
“Think about it,” he says again. “And think—consider carefully—whether you really believe it.”
“Wh-a-a-at?” I reply, an expression of punch drunk surprise bestilling my natural inclination to layer any response with heavy doses of sarcasm.
“I think that if you think about it like I have, Zephyr, you will find the facts of your existence rather . . . far-fetched,” he says.
“I don’t get it.”
“I’m sure you don’t,” he says in that fucked up kindly perverse uncle way of his, moving closer to me without, you know, actually getting too close to me.
“You are designed like any other fiction not to question the essence of your own creation—the very conditions of your existence that make you what you are.”
“And what’s that?”
“I don’t want to upset you, Zephyr,” the Storyteller says calmly. “You know, I respect you . . . No, I admire you enormously, however much we find ourselves on opposite sides and opposite fences.”
“You’re the one who—”
“Listen,” he says, and like a pussy-whipped halfwit, I do.
“I want you to really drill down on the facts as you know them so that you can understand—and so you can be free,” he says.
“Free?”
“Knowledge is the ultimate act of liberation, isn’t it?”
“I don’t know,” I say, floundering around, bewitched by whatever ability of his compels me to remain in the
discussion instead of starting with the Biff! Crack! Ka-pow! already. And yet whatever ability I have to reason back at him is likely undercut by his talent.
After gaping for a moment, the best I can manage is, “Knowledge can be a kind of trap, can’t it?”
“A trap for the ignorant only, my dear Zephyr,” he says. “Do as I do and question everything about our world and you will reach the same conclusion—or I believe you have that power within you—and then you can join me in being free of these . . . conventions.”
“Conventions?” I gasp back. “What, like . . . respecting women’s rights not to be abused by—”
“You mount a spirited defence,” the Storyteller says with a touch of snark, brown eyes beneath that weird helm glinting as if with enjoyment of the joust. “See how strongly you stick to your script?”
“Script?”
“Yes Zephyr. Look around you.”
“What?”
And the Storyteller only laughs as he turns his back to me, completely defenceless as he motions—the gesture taking in not just the room, but I understand at once he means the very world in which we live.
“None of this is real.”
* * *
I PAUSE DESPITE my inner shrieking monologue braying for blood. I find myself not so much intrigued as captivated, in the most literal sense of the word, and in that pause that follows, I do nothing more than take several laboured breaths waiting for the Storyteller to expound upon his thesis.
“You must have had an inkling of it before, Zephyr,” he says and slowly turns back, including me in with that fraternising grin. “You are a clever man. Or clever enough. Super powers? Lightning bolts? Flying? Men and women dressing up in these ridiculous outfits and doing what? Fighting crime? Preposterous.”
“What are you talking about, you—?”
“Don’t see how ridiculous this proposition is?” Again he motions. “This world and everything in it, it is a fiction. We are not real. None of it is. We are some child’s imaginings. Some fairy tale of the latter age. We are a glimmer in the eye of some mad child-god who imagines such things. Your life, Zephyr. Mine. It is just a comic book, don’t you see?”
I stammer my spirited defence so hard I think I might puke up my teeth.
“Th-they say the universe has different levels of reality and they are plastic—”
“Oh really, Zephyr. Don’t you tire of maintaining the illogic?”
I stare at him and he stares at me, a kindly benefactor wondering how much is that doggie in the window. I hang my head as I can palpably feel my universe crashing down around me.
“What are you saying?” I say as much to grab a life raft as to actually make sense of anything—because I have already glimpsed the awful truth he wishes on me.
“You are a fiction, Zephyr. You are not real. No more than am I. We are merely characters. Poorly-scripted ones at that. Frivolous. B-grade. Nonsensical. The product of some immature mind. We are a momentary distraction outside of a greater truth—and one we can never aspire to for ourselves, for it exists outside of us. Beyond us.”
I believe everything he says, and it seems not because he wields some kind of dominating psionic power over me, but because somewhere in the intersection between the utter conviction with which he utters the lines and the inescapable, irrefutable logic of what he’s mapped out, there is not a snowball’s chance in Hell that his argument is flawed, that there is some logic he’s overlooked, or that a sceptic might thwart his vision in the same way an atheist might triumph over God.
He is right and, in that instant, sweeps away everything that gives my life meaning—as well as the platform on which that meaning takes place.
“Th-then, what you . . . what are you saying . . . are you . . . you’re saying. . . ?”
Storyteller gently laughs. Now I am cozened, he moves into whispering distance, every line of his sinewy body poised with anticipation.
“Do you know what you should do?” he asks.
The proposal blossoms in my mind’s eye like a cosmological sculpture of suicide hewn out of the bleak fabric of the universe as great crashing black waves of futility smash against me.
I am so consumed with my own mourning for myself and my ridiculous life that I very nearly don’t hear the gunshot.
At the second and third shots, my head whips up as I take in the sight of Tiffany Le Garnier marching forward, dressed to the nines wielding a chrome 9mm and flanked by two brooding hulks in Armani overcoats.
* * *
STORYTELLER DIES AND takes his vicious fantasy with him, slumping in shocked surprise to his knees as Miss Le Garnier continues forward, eyes brimming with hate as she empties the rest of the seven-shot automatic into the villain’s increasingly frail body.
Despite her aura of tragic fragility, the young woman hands the gun to the goon on her left, and he calmly reloads the weapon and steps right over the Storyteller and snuffs out the candle with a further two gunshots point blank to the old guy’s head.
“You . . . you killed him,” I manage to say after the shots have finally stopped ringing in my ears.
“He would’ve killed you,” Tiffany says. “You walked right into his spider’s web—just like I did.”
“But you killed him.”
“No, Ralph killed him. Right Ralph?”
The goon holding the gun doesn’t look capable of speech. He gives a hooded nod.
“But it was you,” I say, admittedly nonsensically. “You killed him.”
“That’s what justice looks like, Zephyr.”
“Not in my world.”
“Your world very nearly became whatever he told you it was,” she says. “That’s what he does. He would’ve convinced you to kill yourself or do something else perhaps even more vile in his name.”
I nod, unable to dodge the bullet on that one—not unlike the Storyteller, though with less spectacularly fatal results.
“What about you?” I ask her.
“What about me?”
“You just killed someone,” I say.
“No, my bodyguard did it.”
“Is that fair to him?”
The young woman shrugs and looks at the behemoth that is Ralph, who gives me a dry-eyed look and mimics his employer’s indifference.
“If Ralph serves more than ten years he gets a bonus on top of the million dollars that I’ve put in an account that will be accruing interest between now and the day he walks free,” she says. “That’s a better salary then I bet you make, fighting crime out here.”
“I’m not sure you can draw a comparison,” I say.
“Look at you,” she scoffs. “Two minutes ago you were struggling to explain you’re not a cartoon character. Now you’re going to debate justice?”
“It’s not justice if only the rich can afford it.”
The barb cuts her and the quick glint in Miss Le Garnier’s eyes show it—and I wonder if this is the first time she has used money and influence to grease the pan of her life experience.
Her heavily lacquered lashes flick over me one more time, any eroticism turned to disdain for my thwarting her by daring to have a will of my own. I think for a moment about shitting in her nicely made little garden by reminding her I’m an eyewitness to her high society execution, but the truth is the perverted old bastard deserved what he got and the spoilt little rich girl probably saved my life.
Ralph walks over to the unconscious Hyena and executes him with the same measured indifference he shows to everything, including his own fate, then looks back at me with a challenging shrug.
“I’ll leave you to the glory, then,” I say as I retrieve my cloak and muscle past the other goon who towers over me.
Halfway across the warehouse I stop and look back. Tiffany swivels at her designer waist and lifts the brow of the expensive hat she wears.
“What is it?”
“Next time you’re in the mood for justice, leave me out of it, OK?”
She doesn’t nod or say anything,
but the slight relaxation of her gaze conveys consent and I give her a wink I don’t feel and move outside and do the crouch thing and vanish into the approaching storm.
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Out of Mind
Drew Hayes
Drew Hayes is the author of the long-running web-serial Super Powereds, as well as its spin-off, Corpies. He has also written several standalone novels including Pears and Perils, NPCs, and the upcoming Unadventurous and Uninteresting Tale of Fred, The Vampire Accountant.
Drew graduated from Texas Tech with a B.A. in English, because evidently he’s not familiar with what the term “employable” means. You can read more of his growing work at his website, DrewHayesNovels.com, send him mail and movie offers at [email protected], or just follow his twitter: DrewHayesNovels. Drew has been called one of the most profound, prolific, and talented authors of his generation, but a table full of drunks will say almost anything when offered a round of free shots. Drew feels kind of like a D-bag writing about himself in the third person like this. He does appreciate that you’re still reading, though.
Drew would like to sit down and have a beer with you. Or a cocktail. He’s not here to judge your preferences. Drew is terrible at being serious, and has no real idea what a snippet biography is meant to convey anyway. Drew thinks you are awesome just the way you are. That part, he meant. Drew is off to go high-five random people, because who doesn’t love a good high-five? No one, that’s who.
* * *
“I’ll have the usual.” The man at Karen’s booth hadn’t bothered to pick up a menu. He sat there staring up at her, narrow frame and curiously wide shoulders, dressed in an uninteresting outfit of dark slacks, a grey shirt, and a black tie. Ordinarily, she’d have assumed she waited on him recently and simply forgot; neither his face nor his style were the sort of thing to leave an impression. The exception to all this mediocrity was his eyes: the irises were pale lavender, not the sort of thing that was likely to slip her memory.
The Good Fight Page 6