#Justice

by Leon, Mike

  “Sorry!” she squeaks, hopping up the curb and past a glass bus stop shelter featuring a prominent ad for Le Zob cologne. “Sumimasen!”

  Jamie whips open the left hand glass double door of a building Mary has been too preoccupied to identify and shoves past a woman and a small girl. Mary darts through the doorway in pursuit, but then halts in terror as she gets a look around the inside of the structure and takes inventory of the clientele.

  The pink and burgundy colors in her peripheral vision are the first hint to Mary Sue that she has taken a horribly wrong turn. The brownish red carpets base a veritable labyrinth of tasteful woodgrain cabinets and glass display cases with muted pink backings featuring dozens of very humdrum scenes of daily life—all depicted by poseable, 18-inch tall, baby-faced dolls.

  “Oh no,” Mary gasps. “No. Not here. We can’t be in here!”

  This place is packed with parents and small children, most of them young girls. To Mary’s left, a woman with a kindergarten aged child in tow flips through a thin paperback book from a display table. “Look honey,” she says in a fawning tone. “It’s Kit Kittredge.”

  They are in American Girl Place, the flagship retail location for the iconic brand of historically accurate dolls, doll accessories, and tie-in novels.

  “We have to leave now!” Mary Sue says. “We can’t be here! He’ll tear this place to shreds! Everyone will die!” She isn’t sure if she means the transient or the kill team, and it doesn’t matter. Mary doesn’t need the blood of a hundred children on her hands either way. She turns back toward the door, but is met by the visage of floating death they spent the last several minutes running from in blind panic. She turns back toward the innards of the store and a sea of petrified faces. Their attention starts on her because of what she said, but it quickly shifts to the creature that comes floating through the storefront. Silent, unstoppable, appearing like the destroyer aspect of a god, a living personification of death, it is the absolute last thing that should ever be in this place. In the fraction of a second it takes most of those within sight to recognize this thing, the room falls to chaos.

  Women pull young girls away screaming and blubbering. The smart ones flee deeper into the store. Those with less wit go for the nearest corner to cower.

  “These children will not shield you! Too much is at stake!” the transient roars. “Tell me, Mary Sue, when the desolate winds are all that moves through this hollow shell of a metropolis, when the nuclear fire has scorched the Earth free of everything we once were, and the scarred survivors feast on the young for sustenance, will little girls still play with dolls?”

  The question is insane. The timing is insane. The whole situation is insane. Mary Sue takes the only path there is. She runs deeper into the store. Jamie is already doing the same. Looking ahead, the American Girl store appears to be a cavernous place, divided into sections by large shelving units and temporary walls, with many side rooms and alcoves. It’s actually a great place for them to get lost in—excluding the obvious downside of an incidental child massacre.

  “You can’t escape from me, degenerate!” the transient shouts from behind them. Then he’s in front of them. It happens in a blink, so fast that Mary glances back to make sure there aren’t two of those monsters. Jamie smacks into the transient full throttle and is flung back against the tile, falling next to a display filled with dolls named Jenny, and nearly tripping Mary Sue in the process.

  The transient swipes at the Jenny display with his grey and shriveled hand. The case gives way and broken shards scatter to the floor in a shotgun spread. He snaps a jagged triangle from the frame and wields it like a dagger, raising it over his head to bring it down on Jamie. “Die!” he screams.

  Mary Sue reaches out for the closest item of appropriate size and heft, a tin Addy Walker lunch box, which she swings mightily at the transient’s makeshift weapon. The box smacks against the glass with a loud crack, and the brittle shard splits into smaller chips in the transient’s hands.

  “You’re a very bad man!” Mary Sue shrieks.

  INT. AMERICAN GIRL PLACE - DAY

  Sid does not understand dolls. He never had dolls as a child, or any toys for that matter. He had select fire rifles then, and he has a select fire rifle now. He brings the gun up to his shoulder and trains the red dot of the reflex sight on the transient as the creature takes a swing at Mary Sue. She weaves under it like a golden gloves champ. Behind them, Jamie rises from the floor and runs right through the monster, heading for the back of the store.

  The transient is quick to shift his attention from Mary Sue back to the pursuit of his target. He pounces like a jungle cat, bounding past two tables of tiny clothes and tackling Jamie next to a cupboard display of Rebecca dolls with a tablet computer that runs a looping interactive video about the character. The transient pounds Jamie in the back of the head with his flaking fists.

  “I’ll kill you with my bare hands if I have to!” he shouts, punching Jamie again. Mary Sue dashes to help Jamie, blocking Sid’s line of fire in the process—not that it makes much difference. His bullets are apparently useless anyway. He still would like to shoot at the thing more. It may have some solid part which can be harmed, or it may not be incorporeal all the time. It may be that shooting through it is actually hurting it to some miniscule degree. The only way to find out is to blast it to hell and back with zillions of bullets. Unfortunately, this isn’t the place for that.

  When Sid catches up to the others, Mary Sue is doing her best to grapple with the transient. The monster sits atop Jamie, raining punches down while the terrified blogger tries to slap them away without much success. Mary Sue slaps at the creature’s neck and body, trying to get some kind of hold so she can pull him off of Jamie, but her hands just go right through him. In Sid’s mind, the interesting bit is that the creature seems to be able to be both solid and incorporeal at the same time, punching Jamie, holding Jamie down, but totally intangible to Mary Sue. He saw the same earlier, when the spectre was impervious to bullets, but holding a gun. Sid aims for the spot where one of the creature’s knees is contacting the floor and fires a shot down through its thigh into the carpet. That does nothing.

  Sid gets a better idea. He lets the rifle hang from its strap and picks an M84 flashbang grenade from the MOLLE webbing on his armor. He plucks the pin with his thumb and counts as he draws his knife with the other hand. 3 . . . 2 . . . 1 . . . He tosses the grenade only a few feet, sending it on a gentle path through the spectre’s head. It explodes midway through those empty black eye sockets.

  “Yeow! Yeeagh!” the spectre screams. It tumbles backwards, clawing at its face and yelping until it crab walks into a stack of Kaya dolls. This is very interesting. It can’t be shot or stabbed, but it can be blinded. This opens up a large tree of possibilities for Sid to explore. He’ll need more flashbangs, and he wonders if he can get anything along the same lines but stronger. Maybe he can permanently blind it with a nuclear weapon. He should also consider damaging the creature’s hearing. Some kind of sonic area denial weapon might be effective, and the guys the army leaves to guard those things will be a pushover compared to all the trouble of stealing a nuke. Germ warfare also remains completely unexplored. There’s a chemical weapons disposal facility only a few states away. . .

  “Go!” Sid commands Jamie and Mary Sue, pointing to the rear of the store. He doesn’t have to tell them twice. Jamie is up and running at a shocking pace for someone who just played the part of training dummy in a ground-and-pound demonstration. The others are around the corner from the historical girls display and out of sight in seconds.

  The spectre crawls out of the stack of doll boxes, his head emerging from the undisturbed cardboard grid in a disoriented bobbing fashion as he struggles to look up at Sid over the amorphous blobs in his vision. “You’re standing on the wrong side of history.”

  “At least I’m standing,” Sid says, looking down on the crawling enemy.

  The spectre groans as he rises to his feet.
“They told me you would have a terrible sense of humor.”

  “They should have told you about proper skin care. You look like you were tarred and corn-flaked.”

  “You’ve already lost. But it doesn’t have to be that way. You can still side with me.”

  “You look like a used sandpaper condom.”

  “This isn’t funny. Help me kill that abomination and destroy their codification mainframe.”

  “Are elephant tampons a thing? Because I think that might be the best comparison. You know? Like you’re all brown and crusty.”

  “You’re insufferable!”

  “You look like a flame broiled booger.”

  “I’ll see you again soon, Kill Team.” The spectre vanishes in a blink. Sid lurches backward in surprise and scans the store for any sign of the creature. He notes only the terrified faces of little girls huddled in corners and under tables. Even with the transient gone, they’re no less frightened. They’re afraid of Sid. It takes him a second to recall he’s wearing a combat mask that makes him look like a skull-faced demon ninja. He leans closer to the nearest heap of crying women. They cry harder. Excellent. That means the skull mask is effective.

  “Police!” comes a call from the front of the store. Sid leans around a toy display to see two uniformed cops with handguns drawn making their way from the entrance toward his position. The Player hassles him a lot about not killing cops. He tosses a flashbang over the partition into the front room with the cops. He can hear them panicking as he leaves through the back door.

  EXT. HOME DEPOT - UTILITY VAN - DAY

  Sid climbs into the rickety utility van and throws his helmet down on the floor. He lost the Chicago P.D. by running down the Red Line subway tunnel to State and Grand, where he aggressively traded clothes with a homeless man and boarded a southbound car with his helmet stashed under a ratty flannel shirt. He rode the train to the Roosevelt station and then walked along the expressway to Home Depot, where Bruce and the others were already waiting with the van on the store’s rooftop parking lot.

  “Somebody fucked up,” Sid says, pulling off the hobo’s foul smelling jacket and tossing it out the open van doors onto the ground behind them.

  “What do you mean?” Mary Sue says, pressing an ice pack against Jamie’s battered forehead as they sit side-by-side in the back of the van.

  “That thing had to have followed us from the Graveyard safe house.”

  Mary Sue shakes her head in vehement denial. “I was sure I lost them!”

  “You weren’t sure enough.”

  “I’m sorry,” Mary Sue whimpers. “I’ll try harder next time.”

  “We took a lot of turns, Sid,” Bruce reasons. “No way that guy followed us from South Side all the way to Streeterville on foot. That’s got to be five miles.”

  “Then how did that ghost-thing, whatever it is-”

  “The transient,” Mary Sue says.

  “Huh?”

  “The transient. That’s what I call it.”

  Sid doesn’t have time to debate the name, even if it is stupid. “There’s no other way the transient could have found us, unless he has a spy satellite.”

  “We have a spy satellite.” Mary Sue cocks her head sheepishly as if the comparison is somehow pertinent-as if the fact that they happen to have a spy satellite somehow means anybody else might just as easily have one.

  “I got a better theory,” Bruce says. He glares disapprovingly at Jamie Chan. “I think the he-she knows more than we been told.”

  “You think it gave away our position?”

  “They!” Mary Sue says. “You’re supposed to say they!”

  “That shit’s too confusing!” Bruce snorts. “I’m gonna say it! And I think it knows what it wants!”

  That isn’t any less confusing. “Wait,” Sid interjects. “Which it? The he-she it, or the monster it?”

  “Motherfucker.” Bruce rolls his eyes. “This soy boy motherfucker right here knows what the monster thing wants!”

  “I do not!” Jamie insists.

  “Probably made a phone call or some shit and gave away the position at least.”

  Sid snaps his attention straight through Jamie like a bullet. “You have a cell phone?” he snarls. He’s tired of warning people about cell phones. The fucking things are practically just tracking devices to anyone with the proper equipment and know-how.

  “No.” Jamie raises both hands to signify their emptiness, but that obviously means nothing definitive.

  “Strip,” Sid commands. It looks like he’s going to see what Jamie really is after all.

  “Nah,” Bruce cranks, already averting his eyes. “Just wand the little bitch.” Bruce always keeps an RF signal sweeper between the cushions of the van’s front seat. He picks it up and holds it out for Sid to take. The sweeper looks like a foot long black plastic wand with a row of light-up LED indicators along the side. Sid takes the wand and begins sweeping and patting Jamie’s body despite the journalist’s annoyed objections. “How about you tell us more about BuzzWorthy? Who did you people piss off for a scoop? What did you steal? Documents from Groom Lake? You blow the lid off some secret super weapon?”

  “We didn’t do anything like that!”

  “Well you got a motherfucking X-Men-phase-through-walls-motherfucker on your ass. That ain’t exactly normal, Kim Jong!”

  “Nothing here,” Sid declares, finishing his bug sweep.

  “I told you,” Jamie squeals. “He just finds me wherever I go.”

  “That don’t make sense. Sweeper would have picked up a tracking device, wires, cell phones, any of that.”

  “He can walk through walls!” Jamie shouts. “Is it so far-fetched that he just knows where I am somehow?”

  “Not at all,” Mary Sue says. “He could be following some kind of trail, an isotope, a smell, pheromones. It’s actually a lot easier to explain than phasing through solid matter. That’s completely impossible.”

  “Welcome to my world,” Sid grumbles.

  “Hmmm, this is different,” Mary Sue says. “The science of intangibility is just, well, junk science. It isn’t possible. Even if you find a way to ignore electromagnetism and strong interactions to move through what we perceive as solid matter without damaging any of the particles, that opens up a lot of other considerations.”

  “You saw him do it,” Sid counters. He can’t stand when people remain in denial about the ridiculous garbage he deals with on a regular basis, even when it’s right in front of their eyes. “Obviously it’s not impossible.”

  “I know! And that’s why it won’t stop bothering me!”

  “I don’t get what’s such a big deal. He used some kind of super science and made himself walk through walls. Whatever. A guy in a wheelchair once turned into a thirty foot tall dragon and tried to eat me. That was a lot more fucked up.”

  “But if he’s completely intangible, why doesn’t he fall through the ground? Like, all the way to the center of the Earth?”

  Sid shrugs. “Maybe gravity doesn’t affect him either.”

  “No, silly. The Earth revolves around the sun at a speed a little over eighteen miles per second. Anything that isn’t anchored to the planet by gravity gets left behind at an incomprehensible speed. In effect, you would be shot into space instantly.”

  “But he can fly. We all saw him do that. So maybe he just flies along with us all the time.”

  “That would be like piloting a drone to keep a laser pointer aimed at a honeybee from exactly a predefined number of micrometers away. It’s not technically impossible, I guess. It’s just more difficult than the most difficult thing any human has ever done, by several orders of magnitude.”

  “He ain’t all the way intangible then,” Bruce says. “His feet are still solid so they’re holding him up.” It’s the simplest explanation, and one that Sid already explored by way of violence.

  “I already thought of that.” Sid shakes his head. “He gives zero fucks if you shoot him where he should be supp
orted.”

  “Exactly!” Mary Sue squeaks excitedly. “And even if that were true it would cause even more problems. If only parts of your body are intangible then, in effect, they’re cut off. If just your arm phases out, what happens to all that blood flow? Where does it go?”

  “It would fly out your shoulder.”

  “Precisely.”

  “What about hot dogs?” Bruce asks.

  “Huh?” Both Mary Sue and Jamie look peculiarly to Bruce, eyeballing him for a better explanation.

  “I mean if he eats a hot dog, then he phases, does that shit just fall out? Or does it phase with him?”

  “Not likely. Not unless whatever process made him that way was also applied to the hot dog. It seems like a reasonable assumption that he would discard his entire colon contents too.”

  “Yummy,” Sid interjects.

  “That’s only the tip of the iceberg. What about lungs that can’t interact with oxygen? Neurons potentially firing into nothing? He should be blind because light isn’t reflected off his retinas and deaf because percussion doesn’t affect his eardrums.”

  “But we know none of that stuff is accurate. And we’ve even seen him pick up things.”

  “I saw him punch through glass,” Mary Sue says.

  “I saw him punch me in the face a whole bunch,” Jamie says, lowering the ice pack to give the others a very nonplussed glare.

  “Right. And the whole time he was punching Jamie in the face you were shooting him, so we know for sure he can interact with one object while ignoring another, even though we just established that flies in the face of every natural law.”

  “Alright.” Sid is getting fed up with this. “If he’s not an intangible man, then what the hell is he?”

  Mary Sue’s glossy pink lips form a wavy frown. “I don’t know. He could be something really weird. He could be from another universe where electrons and protons are both negative and the laws of physics are all wrong.”

  “No. He didn’t just drift into this reality and start a rampage because of a website. This is personal,” Sid says. “He called Jamie a monster. He was angry. He knew my name.”