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Catwalk: Messiah

Page 9

by Nick Kelly


  Cat tapped into his cop days and began drawing up motive scenarios. Midas kept Hitch around as an example, but didn’t approve or finance the sidekick’s underage habit. Cat had learned that from the source who sent him the recording. Hitch was paying for innocent flesh on the side, and when those payments dried up, his source went right after Midas. It was a desperate move, the kind committed by panicked amateurs or raving lunatics. Of course, Hitch was both.

  Cat knew insanity like a boyhood chum. He’d fought it at arms’ length since his surgery, countered it with booze, chemicals and violence during his police years, and distanced himself from it since going freelance. In the end, it would find him, but for now, he maintained control and separation. Still, the signs were as legible as the neon advertisements that graced Nitro City’s skyline.

  He picked up the desk line and dialed a number from memory.

  “Will’s Meats, you can beat our prices but you can’t beat our…”

  “Will, I need a favor,” he said calmly. “Get yer boys, an’ do a search on the followin’ account.” Without another word, he uploaded Hitch’s account number. He’d followed it secretly for so long he could recite it in his sleep. “If you see any trends, lemme know…an’ if you see anythin’ more than four times, poison it.”

  Will’s chuckle on the other end was an acceptance and an invoice all wrapped into one. Cat didn’t have the disposable income to pay the coroner’s highly talented phreaks. Then again, tearing at the foundation of the pederast’s trustees was enough to make him take up a few extracurricular jobs to pay for their services. He shook his head in an effort to focus again, and to break from the tempting picture of tracking and disemboweling Hitch’s business partners. Instead, Cat slipped from the precipice of reason, if only for the slightest moment, as the past, present and projected future overcame him.

  10 May 2022

  The dark-haired girl who enters his plain room is a bundle of cheerfulness. Her smile is wide, and there is a bounce to her step despite her simple shoes in the dusty doorway. She holds a metal tray in her hands. Each compartment bares a serving of something claiming to resemble an edible material, smoked or steamed. Leon looks up from the rainbow of synthetic chow and catches the girl’s eyes. She is Asian, with straight, eclipse-black hair that touches her collar. Her eyes are bright, matching her smile.

  “Morning, rookie. Here’s breakfast!”

  Leon sits up, feeling the muscle soreness and a resistance he’d never been accustomed to. It’s as if his legs had been replaced by those of a statue, cold, stone limbs as dead as his ancestors. The wave of reality rises above him, crashing down with more than enough gravity to crush his hope. He hadn’t dreamed of his accident at all. The Security Force Hovertank really had flown so closely overhead that he’d felt the heat. He really had ducked under the overturned car. The stone building that had once been Tank’s Armory really was destroyed in the crossfire.

  His legs were crushed and mangled as a result of some rich stranger needing his own emergency rescue. He went through the hours and hours of surgery. He watched the doctors banter about his future. With no money, cybernetics are not an option. Human organ replacement, natural or synthetic, is expensive. It requires wealth, money he’s never had. He has been fixed up, healed to the minimum requirements set forth by the government. He has been wheeled into St. Patrick’s Orphanage. The drugs and disorientation have expired.

  He is a paraplegic, with a pair of useless extremities currently buried beneath a neatly quilted blanket. His response is torn between two combating forces inside his head. One voice wants to reach to the dark-haired angel, beg her to hold him and allow him to show his vulnerability and grief at suddenly realizing what he’s become. That voice, the passive one, loses out. Instead, the aggressor takes hold. Anger at the world, hatred of his physical condition and venom at having no one else to blame combines, reaching his lips in the most chaotic and violent manner he can gather.

  Leon isn’t even certain of the words he screams. He doesn’t know the exact vocabulary he spits at the girl. By the third or fourth sentence, he is short of breath, coughing and struggling for air. He collapses backward, the victim of his own hatred. He struggles to draw oxygen back into his lungs.

  With an unchanged smile, the girl approaches, reaching Leon’s gaze, blurred through the tears he is unaware he’s shed. She touches his cheek softly, her hand warm and soft. “It’s okay, rookie. I understand.”

  Leon’s field of vision decreases, disappearing entirely. The last thing he remembers is the warm touch on his cheek, and the feeling that hope is not entirely gone after all.

  “Alright, Catwalk, let’s have it. What’s the sudden shocking development?”

  Delambre’s frozen words sliced through the solace of Cat’s inviting memory. The combination of exhaustion and cheap liquor had steered him directly to his first encounter with Mi-Young, just another instance where he wished he’d behaved differently. Time was up on remorse. Now came the time for a much more direct type of interaction.

  Cat didn’t even open his cybernetic eyes. “What did you bring me?”

  “I didn’t. Sobriety should be a welcome change for you.”

  “You’re fired.”

  “That would mark the third time this week you said that, Catwalk. Now, let’s get to business.” Delambre spoke with an edge, a clear ‘tell’ that his concern for his daughter overcame the more objective path of scientific reasoning.

  Cat smiled. That was exactly his goal. With an exaggerated motion, he clicked the digital feed onto the screen.

  The image was a still shot, pristine and perfect. The face in the screen was a light-skinned African-American woman with high cheekbones and slightly pursed lips. Her black hair framed her face with ideal symmetry, drawing out the best of her features. Her eyes would have been normal if not for the slight glow to her blood-red iris. The face was a very similar, yet obviously imperfect, portrait of Angela.

  There was an audible ‘clunk’ as Delambre dropped the bottle in his hand. Protected by the store’s budget paper sack, the bottle survived the fall and rolled in Cat’s direction. With a smirk, the hitman leaned down and lifted it, removing the paper. His face widened in a sudden, overstated gratitude. “Blevins’ Blend…12 years….this musta’ cost you.”

  Delambre didn’t answer. For all Cat knew, the medtech was no longer aware he was even in the room. He’d expected as much. If his newfound partner was faking, he’d know exactly how to act. Instead, the concerned father was magnifying every pixel on the screen. The hitman released the hammer on the pistol he held in his right hand under a synthetic goose-down pillow, holstering it again.

  Cat stared a few extra moments before stretching and flipping backward out of the comfortable chair. His gaze returned instantly to Delambre. “I’m gonna get a glass before I explain what it is yer seein’.”

  The geneticist turned his gaze, meeting Catwalk’s artificial eyes. The pale light from the screen made him appear older and more fragile than any other time Cat had seen him, exaggerating every wrinkle and crease in the process.

  Delambre’s voiced cracked slightly when he spoke. “Better make that two.”

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  The bottle was drained past the name on the label by the time Delambre gathered the strength to explain. “Have you ever witnessed a person driven past reasoning and moral comprehension? Someone driven to the point where all they comprehend is madness?”

  His eyes weren’t on Catwalk at all. Instead, he stared at the inhuman image burning in the monitor.

  Cat chuckled into his glass, wondering if Delambre had completely forgotten his background. Before his freelance work, Cat was a detective in the DCPD, on the unit responsible for putting down any being who became so obsessed with cybernetics that it effectively burned out empathic reasoning. He had spent nearly half a decade retiring formerly human individuals or robotic creations gone wrong. He was accustomed to the exact type of threat Delambre referenced.
It was his bread-and-butter before his contract expired, and he headed west.

  Some might say he’d become one himself. They were wrong…so far. “Try me,” he replied.

  “I’ve had many colleagues in the field of bio-genetics and MetaHuman development in my time, Catwalk. There have been dozens, hundreds, who have attended my classes and lectures or have worked by my side in developing cybernetic enhancements. I’ve mentored students who displayed every level of aptitude. I’ve shared offices with professors willing to offer their own opinion, distant or devoted. I’ve resided over test subjects, prognosticators, even those outside of the education field who have felt they had greater expertise on a subject. In truth, MetaHumans remain a recently developed and somewhat undecipherable field of research. They, you, are a young science.”

  Delambre continued, entranced in his own words, without the need for recognition or acknowledgement. “I was younger then, just graying at my temples when my path crossed with a man who, at the time, I considered a visionary. That is not to say he saw the empowerment of mankind, the expansion of technology as the means to the greater good. Instead, he wove two very separate theologies to work for his own intent. MetaHumans exist outside of the realm of traditional human beliefs, wouldn’t you agree? Men combined with machine have no place in the doctrine of our past generations?”

  “Meta’s are uncharted waters when it comes ta prophecy, I’ll give ya that.” Cat tipped his glass in agreement. Religion meant as much to him as fanaticism. In his experience, they were often one in the same.

  “Suppose then that the very inhuman creations borne of our testing and experimentation became the deliverers of religious penance.”

  “Um...sorry, D, ya lost me.” Cat slugged the rest of the Scotch, eyeing the bottle for a refill.

  For the first time, Delambre leveled his gaze to the artificial eyes of the hitman. “Suppose that form you’d just escaped was designed by her maker to serve a single purpose. A single role defines her creation.”

  Cat blinked again. The pale light from the vid feed enhanced every crease of age and worry on Delambre’s face as he stared down his partner.

  “Imagine you just escaped the Angel of Death.”

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Cat escaped the congestion of Downtown and headed northwest on I5 under the welcome acceptance of moonlight. Meditation was one way he fought off the chaotic and violent tendencies, which resulted from his cybersurgery. The other was to find open road. The feel of the engine beneath him and the twist of his wrist brought him a sense of peace. Instead of a microscopic introspection, riding provided a greater focus on everything around him. It was as if he could drink in every detail, in light or darkness, while every other being on the planet moved in slow motion.

  When he was living on the streets as a teenager, he’d never found a place he could call home. Once he was dumped in St. Patrick’s, it became his shelter and center of care for years, but it was a home, which had been forced upon him. Even the loft he occupied now was more functional than personal. If Cat knew anything he’d call home, it was here, the pure adrenaline and addictive feeling of absolute peace.

  His comm sounded demanding his attention and shattering his tenuous peace.

  “Catwalk.”

  “How’s it feel to be one of the city’s leading, uncredited civil servants, m’man?” Will’s voice bit through the comm so strongly Cat could practically taste the black coffee and smell the formalin.

  “Other than that part where I don’t get paid, it ain’t bad. What’s the good word from the morgue?”

  “Pick a number.”

  “You bein’ all mysterious fer a reason, Will?”

  “Pick a number.”

  “What are you askin’, Will?”

  “Ok, Cat, the number of missing kids cases you just solved by runnin’ old pegleg into an airline hangar.”

  Cat questioned himself. He’d issued the inspection on Hitch’s account to find one particular supplier. He wasn’t thinking about the total number of interactions the pederast had in a week, or a month, or ever. He had no idea how deep or for how long Hitch had been preying upon children in Nitro City, protected under the watchful, golden gaze of his recently beheaded master.

  “Shockit, Will, I dunno. Ten?” He asked.

  “Eighteen and countin’, cleaner.”

  The number caught Cat off guard. If he’d still been able to consider hope an asset he could muster at Will, that number would have surpassed his optimism. He wouldn’t have imagined closing six cases. Closing eighteen brought a bittersweet image of murdered children. At least this might bring closure to their concerned parents. To hope for a higher count was to extend optimism and misery equally. Cat fell mute while he digested the situation.

  Will brought him back to the present by clearing his throat loudly. “So, before you getting’ all guilty or heroic, dependin’ on your mood, let me drop the following on you.”

  “So much for my award ceremony.”

  “You weren’t celebrating, Cat, you were killing yourself. You haven’t seen a silver lining in your entire life.”

  “Back on topic, Will. Before I make it personal and add a few more blowholes to your skull.”

  Cat’s slight insult succeeded in anchoring the mortician to the matter at hand. “Here’s the story in a nutshell, Cat. There were 24 total transactions recorded by my network from Hitch to the same account. So far, eighteen have matched up within 24 hours of a missing child report through the NCPD. You want to wait for the results on the last six, you can, but I think you’re just as willing to play the numbers as I am.”

  Cat nearly broiled on the newfound information. “What can you tell me on the destination accounts?”

  “Account.”

  “What are you sayin’?”

  “The first pass indicates the other six payments were all to the same account.”

  Cat hissed between his teeth. “Can you get me info on that account?”

  “Not without a deposit.”

  Cat nearly choked on the sudden collar back to business-as-usual that Will implied. If the mortician and his network knew anything else, they expected payment, big payment, for the delivery of that information. He nodded to himself, upping the ante’ again as he spoke.

  “Confirm the last six transactions for me to that destination account. Then, block all transactions from that account to anything from Hitch’s last known digits, and those from Midas. If I can cut this maniac off from getting’ into ol’ golden’ boy’s dollar bills, it might be enough ta draw him out. God knows there are enough other sources goin’ after Midas’ coffers.”

  Cat could practically hear Will smile across the comm. “Bill you the usual?”

  “Yeah, the usual.”

  The comm went dead, and Cat allowed himself a slight smile. The person in charge of killing Midas might not have the courage to challenge him face-to-face, but he would at least send his latest and greatest MetaHuman. That would mean a chance at redemption, and one more slap in the face of his adversary. It may also mean another excursion to the brink of death, and most likely one that wouldn’t pay him a dime. He was going to need to raise some funds and to do so quickly if he was going to keep the trail as hot as Will’s network had made it.

  Cat pulled up the positioning interface and programmed a route to the next exit from the freeway. He’d need to check his motorcycle, armor and weapons. Things were about to ramp up, exactly as he wanted.

  4 June 2022

  ‘I testify to everyone who hears the words of the prophecy of this book, if anyone adds to them, may God add to him the plagues which are written in this book.

  ‘If anyone takes away from the words of the book of this prophecy, may God take away his part from the tree of life, and out of the holy city, which are written in this book.

  ‘He who testifies these things says, "Yes, I come quickly." Amen! Yes, come, Lord Jesus.

  ‘The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ be with all the s
aints. Amen.’

  Sister Mary Cassandra turns to her class, finding the universal response of disinterest. “Questions, class?”

  No hands are raised, only eyes to the clock. “Angie, can you tell the class the fate of the false prophet?”

  The blonde responds with a practice of feigned innocence. “Umm, I’m sorry, Mother, I left my notes in my room.”

  The nun shakes her head in disapproval. “Do you at least remember how many horsemen there were?”

  “Four!”

  “Yes, dear. Though I imagine you’d be hard pressed to name them.”

  Angie’s eyes drop to her desk with the admonishing statement. Sister Cassandra moves across the orphans before speaking, “How about you, Leon?”

  The dark-haired, wheelchair-bound orphan never even faces the orphanage matriarch. His eyes stare out across the rain, through the courtyard outside. “Pestilence, War, Famine, and Death, in no particular order.”

  His last comment gets a chuckle from his classmates. The nun manages to smile slightly. “Correct. And since the group has provided such disinterest in what may very well mean the end of all mankind, there will be an essay assignment.”

  The class groans as one as she turns and begins to write on the board. The children aren’t interested in the potential entities that may descend from the heavens and destroy all humanity. They’re interested in the weather outside, and when a hopeful set of parents might come for them. Instead, they get a writing assignment.

  Leon is no different. His thoughts are far away from the classroom, back to the computer. He’s long since killed any hopes of being adopted. He simply wants to load up the motorcycle simulator again and fall in love with the feeling of riding fast and hard on the open road.

  The chime of the comm was alien and unfamiliar, a piercing siren’s scream that flashed a white light inside of his eyes to nearly drive Cat off of the road. He gripped the handlebars tighter than he’d intended, leaning in counter-position to the sudden turn in the freeway. With the motorcycle nearly parallel to the asphalt, he managed to regain control, even as sparks from the pegs, and the exterior of his armored kneecap, erupted behind him. Within seconds he was upright. It took several more for him to exhale.

 

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