She shook her head, though. “No, I think someone like that is a danger to others and should be dealt with. It’s a shame the system we have doesn’t, but I don’t know if taking it into your own hands is right.”
I smiled then, and nodded. “Yeah, I agree. I would have preferred not to have had to, but no one would help me, so I had to do it myself. Same with this new situation. Who do you think would have stepped in to help that girl? The bouncers ignored them as the rapist dragged her out of the club, probably didn’t want to get involved, told themselves that his girlfriend had had one too many. I had to act or something awful would have happened. What happened was kind of awful, but at least it didn’t get any worse than the groping a lot of us get on a daily basis. You could have that happen on the metro, really.”
Shaking my head, I looked at the drink in front of me and realized I hadn’t paid for it. “Oh, hey, sorry about that, I got caught up in my story,” I said, fumbling with my purse. “How much do I owe you for this?”
The bartender shook her head then. “That one’s on me. I sort of forced you to tell me your story, and I know it wasn’t easy.”
I gave her a close look then, and I could feel my eyebrows knitting together as I did. “You’re not pitying me or anything, are you? Because if you are, we’re going to have some more words.”
To my surprise, she grinned at that and gave a soft laugh. “Pity you? You’re not the sort of woman that would make me think about pity.”
“Oh, is that so?” I asked, grinning back as I raised my eyebrows. “So what would you think about someone like me?”
She raised an eyebrow in return before replying. “I’d think you’re a little dangerous.”
Before I could answer, she got called away to help a couple who’d just arrived. Glancing over my shoulder, I saw that she’d been right and I could see the place starting to fill up. As I took another sip of my drink, I let out a sigh at how perfect it tasted, in sharp contrast to the rest of the fucked up night I’d had. I started thinking about bugging out back home, when to my surprise, the bartender came back after giving the new couple their drinks.
“So, what other stories do you have?” she asked, and she smiled again. I couldn’t help but grin myself at the sweet curve of her mouth and shrugged.
“I have a million of them. What do you want to hear about?” I asked, settling back on to my bar stool.
She looked back down the bar and sighed as she saw a person joining the couple she just served. “Something funnier this time, but I’m going to have to wait to hear most of it. We’re getting busy again.”
“What time do you get off, then?” I asked, feeling my smile get wider.
Raising an eyebrow at me, I thought she might shake her head, but she said, “At three. I’ll need to clean up after, too, so three-thirty, probably.”
I laughed then. “All right, I’ll have some of my best ones ready, and I’ll tell you stories until the stars get shone out of the sky.”
I’m going to leave all of you horny bastards right there. I’ve got a date in about an hour, and I need to get my best stories polished up for it. She was right, things have gotten busy in here, but I still catch her looking at me out of the corner of her eye now and again. Maybe I can think of a few ways to salvage tonight, after all.
* * *
I dedicate this piece to Emily Doe, who presented her victim impact statement during the rape trial against Brock Turner. Without her searing words, I do not think this piece would have come to be. Please read her statement if you don’t understand the abject humiliation, trauma, and pain that’s involved in being a rape victim, or how it changes your life forever: https://is.gd/Vb1Q6Y
-~o~-
Palladian is the pen name of a woman who toils in a generically colored cubicle world by day, and writes fiction by night. Needing to keep her real name a secret due to those who might frown upon such endeavors, she looks forward to one day being able to reveal her true identity to the world. She's been writing since she was old enough to pick up a crayon, and looks forward to writing long into the future, so stay tuned! If you liked this story, please check out Palladian's series, in which Serena is one of the characters. The story is available online: https://www.wattpad.com/9430224-super-author%27s-notes ...or in e-book format: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B078GSX4TB/
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Love Vigilantes
Stephen T. Brophy
“She asked for my love and I gave her a dangerous mind . . .”
—David Bowie, Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps)
DALLAS, TEXAS 2000
I am not the guy you call for stealth jobs. First of all, I’m about as small and quiet as a semi truck, and second of all, I’ve only got the one good hand for grabbing things, while the other hand spends most of its time as a mini-gun. I’m more the guy you call when you need a wall blown open, or a lot of enemies subdued at four thousand rounds per minute. Nonetheless, I’m the guy that my immortal Middle Eastern warlord boss at the time, Thela Hun Jinjeet, tapped to run ops on the Blue Scarab job back in Y2K. And when my designated sneak-thief, Churchmouse, was a no-show because she decided to choose that night to accidentally OD on klonopin and Hennessy, I told my driver, Slip Kid, to wait in the car while I did some recon and tried to figure out an angle on getting this done quiet-like.
Thela Hun Jinjeet is a not a man you want to disappoint.
I circle my way around the back of the Dallas Museum of Art, looking for an in. Trying to force myself to think like Churchmouse, a female less than one-third my own weight who barely comes up to my belt buckle. How would she access this place? The skylight on the roof is the obvious in, and she could easily scurry up the side of the building like it was a climbing gym wall, laser-cut her way in, float down on wires like a pigeon feather and have the hunk of ancient Egyptian rock we’re after in no time flat, all without triggering any alarms. Me, I can’t even figure how I’m going to make it to the skylight without a jetpack.
Then I remember the grappling hand. I’d left it in my arsenal pack since the last job—busting Heatsource and PowerCell out of a World Order blacksite holding facility outside Beaumont. The extension’s made of a pretty strong malleable steel cable, but just because it could pluck a gemstone from its resting place as deftly as a magician palming a coin, that doesn’t mean it’ll hold my weight in a 90-degree climb. It’s designed more for pulling things towards me, not so much me towards them. Still, it’s worth a shot, so I switch out the prosthetics on my right arm stump and fire the grappler at the roof. I feel it in my nerveports as the metal hand lands on top of the building and slides across the flat cement surface, seeking a handhold. The fingers make contact with a metal pipe. I give it a tug to test its stability and I don’t feel any give. I tighten the grip with a thought and retract the extender, feeling it strain against my 350-lb. bulk as my boot soles lift up from the pavement.
This is what it’s like to be Nightguard, I think, but of course it’s a piss-poor comparison. Nightguard’s proprietary grapplers let him practically fly from one downtown skyscraper to the next faster than a hippie on a zipline over an Oregon gorge. For me it’s a game of inches, hoisted off the ground in slow motion, like watching Nightguard in frame-by-frame replay. The extender cable and the arm mechanism squeak and my nerveports are stinging from the strain. If anyone happened by—a security guard, a hooker, a hobo, some old lady out walking her dog—I’d make such a preposterous sight it’d maybe buy me a few seconds while they tried to suss out if what they were seeing was real before calling in the law.
* * *
I make it to the roof miraculously without incident, and as I hunker over the skylight I can’t help but wonder why they always put these valuable gemstones and other priceless artifacts right there in plain, irresistibly tempting sight. I mean, I’m sure the dramatic daytime lighting effect of the sun streaming down on that cobalt-colored Egyptian artifact is pretty stunning to behold, but it’s also cat-burglar catnip, l
ike putting a freshly-forfeited vintage ‘54 Stratocaster in a pawn shop window at closing time and expecting it to still be there in the AM. So yeah, they’re pretty much asking for this.
I temporarily change out the grappler for a laser cutter prosthetic and am about to go to work on the skylight when I hear the unmistakable click of a clucking tongue, followed by the even more unmistakable click of a CZ-75.
“Ah-ah-ah,” says a female voice, dry and rustly as a corn husk in summer. “Do that and you’ll have the entire HPD here inside of five minutes, and that’s if you’re lucky, because the private security specialists that show up four minutes quicker will not be interested in handcuffing you.”
I feel the barrel of the pistol poking gently against my scalp, but I risk a sidewise glance regardless. Whoever she is, she’s a casual pro, dressed in rugged knee-high lace-up black leather boots, black skinny jeans held in place by a low-riding hip-slung tool belt, a black wifebeater crisscrossed with shoulder holsters beneath a black bomber jacket, and topped off with a face-obscuring charcoal balaclava from which she stares into my soul with the darkest, most beautiful eyes I’ve ever seen.
* * *
HOUSTON, TEXAS 2001
Nightguard’s got me dead-to-rights, his Nightcopter’s mini-guns aimed at me through the blown-out windows on the 35th floor of the Pennzoil building’s South tower. My own weapon is spent, barrels still spinning, smoke and shell casings everywhere. The armoring on that chopper is some next-level shit. Didn’t even chip the windscreen. The look in the stiff-dick hero’s eyes is all give me a reason, while his sidekick Twiliter perches beside him looking for all the world like the lost little girl she is, wide-eyed awe and hunched shoulders, still shrinking from every bullet that just rattled into her life and bounced away. Obviously running away is my best option, in spite of whichever other Houston do-gooders might be somewhere in the building with me. But I’m in that spittle-flecked adrenaline-rage mode where I’m more inclined to make the short but lethal vertical leap and take my chances riding bareback on that ‘copter while I figure out how to tear it out of the sky. Suicide takedown. Death from above.
I’m still standing there waffling when I spot the shadow, descending from what must be the high-angled peak of the tower and neatly sliding between the rotating blades to land on the roof of the Nightcopter. My baby goes to work gremlin-style, with a plasma saw and a power drill, getting at the mechanics the old fashioned way where the bullets failed. Nightguard makes a couple of half-hearted dips as a feint toward shaking her off but he’s looking at me while he does and I can tell behind his lockjawed expression that he feels kinda guilty about it. I’ve always thought heroes with hard and fast no-kill rules paint themselves into ridiculously constrictive and dangerous corners, but right now I’m grateful for it.
Soon enough there’s a terrible grinding noise and a cough of black smoke as the Dame holds up a fistful of copter guts in triumph, then tosses them into the whirring blades for good measure. From there it’s just a spry little cat leap across the few yards distance and into my arms as Nightguard and co. spin off out of control over the twinkling midnight skyline.
I plant a wet one on her and when she pulls back I can’t help reading her fiery heat signatures with my infrared eye for a deeper glimpse of how turned on she really is right now.
“Marry me?” she asks, and who knows, maybe she’s just being funny.
“Sure,” I say, dead serious myself.
* * *
DALLAS, TEXAS 2000
“I can’t let you take that rock,” I tell her, figuring my best bet is to intimidate this woman who can’t be more than 5’6” with my obvious size advantage, never mind that I’m squatting at the bad end of her silenced handgun; topping from the bottom, as Killer Queen, the Transsassin, would refer to it.
“So you’ve said,” she says, and I can almost see her smirk behind her balaclava. “Your big bad immortal boss is going to suck down your lifeforce through a straw if you don’t come back to him with his mystic Egyptian treasure.”
I give her a nod and shrug that says Pretty much the size of it, yeah.
“Well, I’ve got it worse, because if I don’t bring that beautiful blue stone back to my big bad but very mortal boss—you’ve heard of Motherfinger, I’m guessing?—she will not pay me fifty fucking grand. I mean, this is my nut for the month right here. Between the two of us, I don’t come home with this, I’d rather be you. Because if I’m broke, I might as well be dead, right?”
“You’d let a man die over a payday? Lady, you are one heartless . . .”
“Do. Not. Say. That. Word.”
“Dame. I was gonna say dame.”
“Who the fuck says dame anymore? I mean, don’t get me wrong, it’s kinda charming that you do. But it’s not 1940 and it hasn’t been for over half a century. As for letting you die or me starve? Well . . . duh. I mean, look, see my gun? I am totally prepared to kill you myself over this.”
“So why haven’t you?”
“Do I need to?”
“You might.”
“Okay, hotshot. Make your move. I’m rea—”
But she’s not. She’s really not. She’s totally distracted, bantering, flirting, whatever this is we’re doing. So I snap out and grab her by the ankle, bringing her ass-flat onto the tarpaper and smacking the gun with my prosthetic hard enough to send it flying over the edge of the roof.
* * *
THE INDIAN OCEAN 2002
The wedding takes place on Isla de la Maquina, the artificial island/sovereign nation built by Liza’s uncle, the international (and probably interdimensional) smuggler and pirate lord Damien Fate. I meet my in-laws for the first time there and am surprised and a little thrilled to learn that her old man is none other than Nathan Fate, the old school venture terrorist who once held the entire city of Madrid hostage from a blimp. And if that’s not intimidating enough, her mom is Emily Chills, the second Madame Damnation, the one from the ‘60s with the heavy anti-organized religion angle, who unleashed demonic cherubim on Vatican City in ‘71 and may have had something to do with the death of at least three popes. I’m not sure Liza’s folks were ever actually married, but the frosty menace between the two of them makes it clear they aren’t exactly bang buddies anymore.
“How come you never told me?” I ask Liza during one of the nanominutes we get to ourselves over the course of the day. “I mean you’re the product of legends. That’s a lot to live up to right there.”
“What’d you think I was? Some mousy little suburban girl-gone-bad from North Dallas?”
“Aah . . . kinda?” Though now that I’m forced to think about it, the resemblance between the Dame and her mother is uncanny, right down to a perfectly placed natural beauty mark high on each of their right cheeks; the wild dark eyes I fell in love with at first glance, on the other hand? Straight from the old man.
“Whatever. You aren’t obligated to impress them. They’re just people. Ordinary folks like anyone else here.” She gestures around without looking, and I don’t bother pointing out that about a third of the attendees aren’t even classifiably human. Just as an example, out of my six groomsmen, two are robots and one’s a sentient mud formation who claims to be one-quarter Venusian but is more likely just the hapless result of a toxic incident. “Flawed, bitter, aging, way-past-their-glory-days ordinary citizens. You have no reason to feel intimidated. Even in their prime, my folks were never in the shit. They were desk-jockeying shot-callers who managed to avoid serious retribution, incarceration or immolation by refusing to get any blood on their own hands. I think you henches have a name for them, but I’d rather you not . . .”
“Pussies?”
“. . . say it.”
* * *
An old family friend of theirs, the Right Reverend Insidious X of the Church of the Imminent End, presides over the ceremony. I hadn’t wanted anything overtly religious, but her father insisted that if he was going to pay, that’s the way it had to be.
“The only thing my father withholds more than his fortune is his affection,” Liza says with that brush it off smirk I’ve come to recognize—but never out loud—as a mask for a lot of leftover adolescent angst and emotional pain. We don’t discuss those kinds of things, me and Liza, the messy emotional stuff, because it’s a buzzkill, and we really prefer to stay as buzzed as possible.
The only one here from my gene pool is my sister Caroline and her common-law husband Merk. Merk is a trailer-trash tough guy whose macho bluster probably gets him mad respect at the foosball table in his best friend’s basement man-cave, so naturally he spends the bulk of his time at the wedding and reception looking like he wants to piss himself in terror every time he so much as brushes elbows with a tuxedo-clad supervillain, then drinking enough that he finally does it. Caroline does her level best to take it all in stride; these people and this world don’t even register on her personal radar, so she treats the whole thing as much as she can like a cross between a wild costume party and a star-studded celebrity event where she recognizes the faces but can’t recall the names. For whatever reason, she and Liza click, probably over some giggly conversation about what a big oaf I am and how it’s hilarious so many people genuinely fear me.
* * *
Our vows are about as close to mushy as either of us has ever been with the other, but still manage to include words and phrases like “seek and destroy mission” (hers), “personal apocalypse” (mine), “suicide pact” (hers) “God’s balls” (mine) and “fuck you ‘til the meat falls off our bones” (guess). There’s not a dry eye in the house, but there are a couple of dry heaves. Mostly from Merk, half in the bag already.
* * *
I pick the first song we dance to, my sole contribution to the planning of this elaborate occasion. “Into My Arms,” from Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. Chosen in part because it’s slow enough I can fake my way through the motions without breaking any of Liza’s toes, and more so because the first line sums us up so perfectly.
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