#Justice

by Leon, Mike

  Then Mary Sue drives a van into the house and makes things easier. The grill of the GMC utility van smashes through the wall, sending brick and foam insulation avalanching into the kitchen. The werewolf vanishes under the front bumper like a swimmer chomped down by megalodon.

  Bruce pokes his head through the passenger’s side window as the vehicle comes to a stop. “I’ll huff and I’ll puff and I’ll blow your house down, asshole.”

  “You know he’s not dead right?” Sid dryly explains, spoiling the fun of Bruce’s moment. He can’t be sure if Bruce knows these things. Supernatural creatures were not his focus in the CIA. “Not unless that van has a silver bumper.”

  Bruce only smirks in sheer disregard for any threat the monster might pose. “Whatever. Get in, loser,” he yells. He tears back the sliding van door, knocking loose some debris from the debris pile, and Sid hops up into the vehicle to meet Jamie.

  INT. UTILITY VAN - DAY

  Jamie is a small Asian person on the floor of Sid’s van. Jamie skids around the hard plastic floor as Mary Sue guns the engine and reverses the van out of the broken house.

  “Watch for Fleabag. We don’t want to take another super monster for a ride.” Bruce is of course referring to the time a member of the collective sentience known as Red Scare hitched a ride in the trunk of his car, possessed the Ghoul, and nearly killed Sid in an old farmhouse. Bruce points out the writhing form of the werewolf in the rubble they left behind and declares “We’re good. Go!”

  “Everybody hold on!” Mary Sue shrieks, pounding down the gas and whipping the van around onto the street in front of the crumbling rental house in a perfect Rockford turn. Jamie screams like a schoolgirl as the vehicle spins.

  “Head downtown,” Bruce says, climbing into the front of the van to sit in the passenger’s seat again as the van accelerates on the straightaway ahead of them. “It’s the middle of the day. Graveyard isn’t gonna do shit in front of all them eyes.”

  “Are you sure it was Graveyard?” Mary Sue asks, screeching the van around a corner. She almost immediately jerks the wheel again and takes them around another corner. She’s doing a textbook maneuver to lose anyone who might be tailing them, especially in a city grid like this one. Turn down a street, move laterally, repeat.

  “With that kinda hardware and a werewolf right here in Chi-town? Bet your ass.” This is a logical assumption. Not many organizations have access to gear like that and creatures of the night and can get them both into the country.

  Sid studies the strange visual enigma known as Jamie silently as he processes the details of their situation. Determining his business with the werewolf and the house has concluded, and that they have a planned destination, he then devotes the full focus of his mental faculties to the person on the floor.

  Sid can’t decipher if Jamie’s eastern, and therefore unfamiliar, features are somehow hampering his sense for human forms, or if Jamie is actually not a normal human in a way that is observable to everyone. The little person is clothed in baggy cargo pants and a tight-fitting t-shirt that covers a waifish figure. If Jamie is something truly alien, that would explain a lot about why such powerful forces are looking for him.

  “What are you?” Sid says, leaning in for a closer look. He observes the lack of whiskers on Jamie’s baby-smooth face, the crisp lines of Jamie’s ultra-short haircut—unusually clean for the circumstances.

  “What do you mean?” Jamie whines. “Who are you people? Where are you taking me?”

  “I think he wants to know if you’re a dude or a chick,” Bruce cuts in over the seatback. “Or trans or something.”

  “I’m non-binary.”

  “Shit, that wasn’t A or B or C.”

  “A shapeshifter,” Sid concludes. “I’ve met one of these before. They’re extremely dangerous.” He plants a palm on the grip of an FNX.

  “Huh?” Jamie worriedly squeaks.

  “It ain’t like that, Sid,” Bruce says. “This is just some weird liberal gay shit, not weird space alien from another dimension shit.”

  “I think you guys are being mean to Jamie,” Mary Sue chirps back at them. “Not everyone identifies as strictly male or strictly female. Some people have fluid concepts of their gender.”

  “The whole world’s gone crazy,” Bruce mutters. None of these answers are satisfactory to Sid, who still cannot determine the sex of this strange being. He rises up over Jamie, raising the dread gauntlets with outstretched fingers and grim determination as a look of fear spreads across the sexless creature’s face.

  “I need to see if it has a penis or a vagina,” Sid says.

  Bruce reacts with a panicky quickness, reaching over the seatback and grabbing hold of Sid’s left bicep to prevent any forceful examinations. “No-no-no-no-no! Don’t do that! I already got enough shit I wish I could erase from my brain ’cause of you. I don’t need that!”

  Sid rests back against the wall of the van and snorts angrily at Bruce. “Fine, but if this thing turns into a giant amorphous blob and asphyxiates us all, it’s on you.”

  “What do we do if we run into that werewolf again?” Mary Sue asks.

  “We’re gonna get some silver,” Sid says.

  “How do we do that?”

  INT. TIFFANY & CO - DAY

  Sid yanks open the front door with a vengeance and stomps into Tiffany & Co like he’s entering a professional wrestling ring. He glances left, to a counter display of diamond necklaces and two well-dressed women inspecting them, right to another counter containing hundreds of diamond rings, then straight ahead to a woman in a skirt suit who is eyeballing him with an apprehension markedly above what he normally draws from store clerks (and it should be noted that Sid commonly inspires exceptional apprehension in store clerks).

  “Silver bullets,” Sid barks. He is still wearing the dread suit, although Bruce convinced him to cover it up with some baggy sweatpants and an old bomber jacket he had stashed in the back of the van. He left the helmet in the van. Otherwise this place would already be erupting in panic.

  The clerk, to her credit, doesn’t even stutter. She’s a rosy cheeked thing, short, blond, big-breasted by Sid’s estimate, although her fuzzy sweater hardly accentuates that feature. She skips the usual pleasantries and goes right to answering his question with a high pitch and drawn out annunciation of uncertainty. “Silver bullets? Like for vampires?”

  “Werewolves,” Sid says. “Vampires aren’t real.”

  “We don’t sell bullets here. Sorry.” She purses her lips to the left side in a gesture of apology that is ambiguously genuine or facetious.

  “Then I just need whatever silver stuff you have.”

  “Okay. Are you looking for rings? Necklaces?”

  “Whatever has the most silver,” Sid says.

  “Oh, right.” The jewelry girl laughs. “Okay. Well, there are some bracelets over here. They would have the most actual silver, I guess.” She directs Sid to a display case containing rows of bracelets cast in silver and gold, with a variety of gemstones inlaid in diverse patterns.

  “Great.” Sid eyes the bracelets and points to several that have few or no stones attached, as those will just get in the way later. “I want that one, that one, that one, and that one. Bag them up.” He reaches into the side pocket of the bomber jacket and makes a withdrawal of a crisp new hundred dollar bill, which he slaps down on the glass countertop confidently. “Keep the change.”

  Now the jewelry girl does stutter. “I . . .um . . . I don’t think that will quite cover it.”

  “That’s a hundred dollars,” Sid reestablishes, jabbing curiously at the bill with his index finger.

  “Yes. And just this one bracelet is five hundred dollars.”

  “What!?” Sid shouts, loud enough to turn heads around the store. A man sitting by the diamond ring display pays him a particularly nasty look. “Seriously?”

  Silence stretches for a few seconds before the jewelry girl decides his question was posed in sincerity, at least enough to warr
ant an answer. “Yes,” she says.

  “But it doesn’t do anything.”

  “It’s pretty.”

  The jewelry girl is very pretty. The jewelry is functionless metal. Sid can assign only a cursory value to it for its use as a decoration. It is worth as much as a napkin used to scribble on out of boredom, or a sign advertising some entertainment product, but not a sign conveying any sort of useful information like directions or a warning. Those types of signs have value. These trinkets do not. They are beneath toilet paper in the hierarchy of Sid’s values, because toilet paper can be used to wipe his ass, while a bracelet cannot.

  “Well,” Sid grumbles as he stretches open his wallet and yanks the rest of the money from inside. He slaps it down on the counter and fans out the bills. Eight hundred dollars. “Just give me whatever this will buy.”

  “Okay.” Jewelry girl starts ringing up bracelets while Sid leans on the counter.

  “You know where I can get a butane torch, a graphite crucible, and a bag of sand?”

  The question compels the jewelry girl to look at Sid like he’s a talking dog made of cheese. She shakes her head.

  “Power tools,” he simplifies. “Where can I get power tools?”

  “Um . . . there’s a Home Depot behind the Best Buy on Roosevelt.”

  INT. BLACK VAN - DAY

  Sid returns to the boxy black utility van to find Bruce has switched places with Mary Sue. The spy hunter is now at the steering wheel holding a massive hot dog, one smothered in relish, tomatoes, mustard, and pickles. He practically has to unhinge his jaw to fit the end of the monstrosity into his mouth. He stuffs his face with the thing and then says something nearly incomprehensible over Mary Sue and Jamie’s heads as Sid climbs into the rear of the van.

  “Hey, tell him what you just told us,” Bruce says. Only it comes out more like Te hi o wu ja tow us. Jamie doesn’t seem to understand. Sid pulls the van doors closed behind him after getting a good look around for prying eyes. The streets are busy with foot traffic, and a good spy will blend in, but not all spies are good ones, so it’s always worth a look.

  “This is very interesting,” Mary Sue explains. She sits with her legs crossed on the floor notably close to Jamie. Their cozy positioning is the beginning of Sid’s mental pile of context clues meant to solve the mystery of Jamie’s sex. Of course, Mary Sue is a virgin and doesn’t seem to express much interest in sex, so maybe there’s nothing going on there. This evidence is inconclusive. “Jamie has been filling us in on their situation.”

  “Whose situation?” Sid asks.

  “Theirs,” Mary Sue responds very matter-of-factly, as though it was a proper answer and not just a repetition of what prompted the question.

  “Who are they?”

  “Jamie.”

  “Right. Who are the other people though?”

  “We don’t know.”

  “That’s informative.” It is not. Sid is no longer sure who they’re talking about at all now. Jamie? Him? Graveyard?

  “I got us all char dogs,” Bruce manages after finally woofing down that walloping mouthful of hot dog. He extends a paper bag to Sid at the end of one arm over the seatback. “There’s extra ’cause Mary Sue don’t want any.”

  “Do you know what they put in those things?” Mary Sue questions, though the inflection implies her line is rhetorical. Bruce answers anyway.

  “One hundred percent beef, baby. Jews run the Chicago hot dog market. They won’t have it no other way.” Sid takes the paper bag and begins routing through a pile of crinkle cut fries inside to dig out a foil wrapped hot dog. “Now tell him what you just told us,” Bruce says again.

  “Kill Team One has tried to kill Jamie twice already in the last two days,” Mary Sue says.

  “That seems unlikely,” Sid reasons. He knows it to be impossible because he has been pounding out a wicked hot milf two states away for the last two days. He didn’t try to kill anybody.

  “It’s true!” Jamie proclaims in a perturbed tone. “He can find me no matter where I go! There’s nowhere to hide! He can kill a man just by touching him! Everything they say about him is true!”

  “Who says this stuff?” Sid says while peeling back the hot dog foil.

  “Conspiracy guys. People on the Data Battles forums. I thought they were just lonely people making up stories for attention. I never heard about any of this until the BuzzWorthy thing and then I did an internet search and it’s like the floodgates just opened. I might be the only person who has ever seen Kill Team One and lived to talk about it.”

  Sid laughs. The implications of that statement, which he has heard before, are staggering. For it to be true he would have to either live in a cave without ever leaving, or just murder every living person he encounters. He would leave a trail of corpses everywhere he goes: big box cashiers, fast food employees, definitely car rental guys, probably some hospital staff, hookers—so many hookers. It would never end. Sid wouldn’t have enough bullets for them all.

  “But what’s he look like?” Bruce says. He smiles, hardly able to contain his amusement. “This is the good part.”

  “It’s not funny!” Jamie shouts. “I know what I saw and I’m not crazy!”

  “I didn’t say you were.” Bruce backs off in his seat, his hands raised in surrender, the hot dog still in one of them. “Just tell him.”

  Jamie sighs. “Kill Team One is a tall naked man with weird skin and no eyes. He just has empty black spaces where they should be.” Jamie pauses briefly before spitting out the next part. “And he can walk through walls.”

  Sid can’t help but shoot a look of skepticism over to Bruce, who shakes his head laughingly. Mary Sue frowns and looks down at the floor as Sid sweeps his eyes over her. He gets the sense she expects him to react badly to this news for some reason, but he can’t see why.

  “Okay. . .” Sid prods. “Like a ghost?”

  “Right through them.”

  “It explains how all the doors were still locked,” Bruce concludes, chuckling quietly.

  “I don’t think it’s possible to phase through solid matter,” Mary Sue whispers delicately.

  “Ain’t possible to turn into a werewolf either.”

  “It’s more complicated than that. I don’t think even fringe physics models permit those kinds of interactions.”

  “I know what I saw,” Jamie insists.

  Sid has nothing to add regarding the likelihood of a wall-phasing assassin. It has never been his job to understand the hard science behind hostile metahuman abominations or supernatural monsters—only to kill them. “Why does he want you dead?” Sid asks.

  “Everyone he . . . killed . . . contributed to the new news division at BuzzWorthy.”

  Bruce snorts. “That stupid website always pops up on Facebook with Fourteen Things That Prove You Didn’t Die Ten Years Ago, or Twenty-Six Celebrities Who Eat Bread?”

  “That’s the one,” Jamie confirms.

  “I still can’t believe J-Law likes bread!” Mary Sue says. “She’s just like us!”

  Sid is confused by this development. “They want to kill you because a movie star likes bread?” he says.

  “The new news division is strongly social justice oriented.” That clears up nothing. “At first I thought we were being targeted by alt-right extremists. We’ve been doxxed so many times.”

  “Docked? Docked what now?”

  “Doxxed. It’s when your real name and address get shared online.”

  “Because of bread?” Nobody else in the conversation bothers to stop to let Sid catch up.

  “No, not for that. We’ve been doxxed by mostly a bunch of bigots and transphobic white nationalists.”

  “Can you name anyone specific?” Mary Sue says, already prepared to jot down names in a little notepad.

  “Sure. You can start with Rubbernecker. It’s a tabloid site we had a spat with a few months ago. They posted nude photos of Brittany Perkins that her ex sold them and they refused to take them down when she asked
, so Izzy called them rapists in an editorial and doxxed their editors. Now they’re suing the site.”

  “Oh, that’s a good lead,” Mary Sue affirms.

  “And there’s that wrestler Colossal Corey. We posted a sex tape that his mistress sold us and he demanded we take it down. Izzy told him to fuck off. Apparently he never heard of the First Amendment. He’s suing the site.”

  “Okay. That’s worth looking at too.”

  “Who’s Izzy?” Bruce asks.

  “Izumi Saito,” Jamie explains. “My boss. Well, used to be. She started BuzzWorthy straight out of art school with nothing. I mean, her parents gave her a ten million dollar loan, but they expected her to pay it back.”

  “Damn. Pulled herself up by the bootstraps,” Bruce remarks with an eye roll.

  “She was really something.”

  “Did you say something before about white nationalists?” Mary Sue prods.

  “Lots. The biggest assholes are PGN. Prestige Global News. It’s one of those alt-right fake news sites owned by rich republican fascists. Their main talking head is this miscreant Angus McDougal. He’s literally Hitler. He sics his vile fans on us whenever he can.”

  “Hmmm,” Mary Sue sets down her notepad and slides a laptop from under the passenger’s seat.

  “Don’t forget Gamergaters. Nobody is more toxic.”

  “What kind of toxins do these Gamergaters have?” This could be pertinent later if Sid has to fight them. Poisonous skin can be a tricky exotic weapon, but isn’t much more than a speed bump. Nerve gas, or toxic projectiles could be a bigger challenge.

  Mary lets out a discouraged squeak. “The comments section on the BuzzWorthy site has a lot of death threats.”

  “How many death threats?” Bruce says, snickering quietly.

  “Um, on this article alone there are four thousand seven hundred sixty two comments, and it looks like most of them are death threats.”