#Justice

by Leon, Mike

  Obviously this guy has zero experience dealing with covert operator types, because that behavior just makes everyone think they’re being led into a trap, and ten seconds later Dr. Santa Claus is face down on the ground wearing a lovely zip tie bracelet. Helen identifies him from his dossier photo while they’re waiting for the fireteam to sweep the facility.

  “That’s Dr. Nolan Sartorius,” she says. “He’s the one we’re looking for.”

  “I could have just told you that,” the doctor grumps into the chilly grass while a black-clad commando pins a knee into his shoulder blades.

  “Shut up!” the operator shouts.

  “How did you know we were coming?” Helen asks.

  “It’s not like we were real subtle,” Bruce snarks and points toward the drumming helicopter that waits for them nearby.

  “One of the patients saw it happening,” Sartorius says. “He’s quite gifted.”

  “What the hell kind of experiments are you running in there, doc?”

  “I’d be glad to show you. Perhaps you can order your jackbooted hooligan to release me and we’ll go inside? I can put some tea on.”

  “We’re going to take a raincheck on the tea party, Sartorious,” Helen says. “My team is sweeping your horror house right now.”

  “This is all some kind of misunderstanding!”

  “Shut up!” interrupts the jackbooted hooligan again.

  A few minutes later, Fleabag emerges from the facility with another operator. The werewolf is hauling his M60 machine gun by its carry handle and he looks quite puzzled as he approaches the spot where Helen and Bruce have the good doctor detained.

  “How bad is it?” Bruce says. “They got half human mutants floating in tubes with all kinda wires and shit connected to ’em?”

  “No,” Fleabag shakes his head.

  “Mind control collars? Robot security guards?”

  “No.” Fleabag’s reaction turns annoyed.

  “Velociraptors with rocket launchers for arms?”

  “No. And where would we ever see that?”

  “I dunno.” Bruce shrugs.

  “Director,” Fleabag addresses Helen in what Bruce reads as an attempt to brush aside his entire line of questioning. “I don’t think this is the kind of place we thought it was when we flew in here.”

  INT. THE VEIDT INSTITUTE - DAY

  The first room inside the Veidt Institute is a long waiting room, exactly like a doctor’s office waiting room, with the weird additional detail that there are even some large toys for young children strewn around the carpet among the variety of colored chairs that line the walls. An operator holding a CZ Scorpion with laser aiming module and suppressor stands guard over a terrified looking 20-something with her small child clutching an Elmo toy nearby. Another operator with a thick horseshoe mustache leans in the opposite corner, his eyes glued to a frozen middle-aged secretary, her hands high over her head as she stands behind the reception counter near the door.

  Helen groans loudly as she enters the room and witnesses this spectacle. “Jesus Christ, Ned. I think we can safely assume Elmo isn’t wearing a suicide vest.”

  “It’s just you never know,” the operator objects. “We’ve got Kill Team One involved in this, and it all gets so weird so fast when he comes around.”

  “That’s exactly what he says about you guys,” Bruce observes. “Y’all got to learn to communicate better.” Bruce approaches the people in the waiting room with his hand out. “How you doin’ bud?” he asks the little boy on the floor. The kid is quiet, and maybe a little uneasy, but not scared the way his mother is. Kids are like that. They can cry like the dickens over a spilled ice cream but put them in a room full of armed soldiers with questionable intentions and they just don’t know what to make of it. “You good? How’s Elmo?”

  “Okay,” the little boy sheepishly replies.

  “Good, good. What’s your name, buddy?”

  The boy doesn’t say anything, instead looking to his mother, a svelte sunken cheeked woman Bruce would probably hit with a pickup line under other circumstances.

  “His name is Harper,” she says, her voice wavering. “He has nightmares. We’re just here to see the doctor.”

  “It’s all good,” Bruce assures her. “Harper, you like superheroes?”

  Harper nods his head up and down after a queue of approval from his mother.

  “Ok, buddy,” Bruce says. “Me and my friends here are from Shield, and we’re just here to find some bad guys. So you just sit tight and we’ll be out of here in no time.”

  “Okay.”

  “Cute kid, lady,” Bruce says.

  Fleabag brings Dr. Sartorius in behind them, hands still zip tied and looking disheveled from being tackled by five large men. His mop of grey hair hangs in his face adding a wild aspect to his appearance that is probably unbefitting of the potbellied middle-aged doctor.

  “Doctor!” screeches the secretary when she sees him.

  “It’s alright, Debbie,” he assures her with impossible confidence. For all that guy knows they’re going to shoot everybody here in the face and set the building on fire. “This is all just some kind of mix-up.”

  “Did you find anything deeper in?” Helen asks Fleabag.

  The werewolf tilts his head with some uncertainty. “Some locked up crackpots, some not so locked up crackpots, a bunch of orderlies we rounded up in a side room. Not anything from the realm of science fiction. The prisoners have the serial code tattoos we’re looking for though.”

  “Prisoners?” the doctor objects. “No one is a prisoner here.”

  “Alright. Cut the doctor loose,” Helen orders. “But I’m warning you now, Sartorius. You go for any weapons and we will ventilate you.”

  “Like an HVAC technician,” Fleabag menacingly assures, adding an awkward cap to a metaphor that already wasn’t the greatest. He cuts the zip tie with a little pig sticker from a holster on his suspenders.

  “We don’t have any weapons,” Sartorius says, wringing his hands after having them loosed. “What did they tell you we do here?”

  “Nobody told us what you do here,” Helen answers. “Nobody told us there was a here at all.”

  “One of your sideshow freaks is on a killing spree south of the border,” Bruce says.

  “Mexico?” Sartorius pats down his unruly hair.

  “No, dope. The U.S.”

  “Oh, right. I’m originally from Texas. You never really get used to that whole northern southern thing. It doesn’t feel like a different country up here. I think it’s because the language doesn’t change. Everyone is so much nicer here though, so there are those subtle things.”

  “Okay great,” Helen cuts the doctor off. “Tell us about your human experiments.”

  “That’s not how I would characterize what I do.”

  “No one ever does.” Helen rolls her eyes.

  “Do you want to meet some of the patients?” Sartorius says. “Come on back.”

  The group follows Sartorius through a set of double doors displaying a shiny silver placard which commands Do Not Enter Without Desk Attendant’s Approval. Another identical set of doors immediately greets them at the other side of a very short blank hallway. “You probably scared some of these people half to death,” the doctor says as he pushes his way into the next room. Fleabag sticks to him like glue, clogging the doorway. His eyes stay fixed on Sartorius like he’s just barely holding back from making a lunch of the doctor.

  Bruce steps into the next room and is again taken by surprise. It’s a large open recreational room, the kind he would expect to see in an old folks home. There are some couches surrounding a large patterned rug on the white tile floor and a television. A dumpy man in a bathrobe is playing solitaire on a flimsy looking card table and a frail woman on one of the couches is writing on a spiral bound notepad in complete ignorance of the television nearby.

  “This looks like the place where we put my mother-in-law,” Helen says.

  “Our cli
nic is a lot like what you might encounter at an assisted living community, with certain important differences, of course.” Sartorius moves to the man at the card table and gently nudges his shoulder. “Randy? Randy? Cyan, two, nine, three, blue.”

  Randy springs to life as if a loud noise just awakened him from a grain-alcohol induced coma. “Huh-huh?” His eyes dart around the room, taking in the presence of the commandos. “Oh, there are people here.”

  “Randy, we have some unexpected visitors and some of the others might be scared. Can you go around and tell everyone that everything is okay?”

  “Yeah.” Randy nods way too affirmatively. His eyes refuse to focus on anything at all. “I won’t let you down, doc.” He stands up from the table and pushes in his chair before hurrying off through a finished woodgrain door to some other part of the building. The door is too homey looking for a hospital. Most of the decor here is warm in that way. The couches appear newer and the walls are painted with a leafy print instead of the sterile white of some death clinic.

  Bruce looks over the shoulder of the woman on the couch, down into her lap, where her boney hands move across lines of notebook paper, recording a long list of what appear to be serial or model numbers, because they include letters with the numbers.

  “You working on a project there?” he asks, but she never looks up or acknowledges his presence. Bruce notes the tattoo on the underside of her forearm, which reads Burgundy 1 1 7 Red.

  “Doris never speaks, and we’re not certain she can hear you either. We bring her around to use the bathroom every few hours and that’s it.”

  “What’s she doing with the notepad?” Bruce asks, following along as Doris writes another long alphanumeric on the next line of paper.

  “She’s trainspotting.”

  “Where?” Helen asks.

  The doctor throws his hands up. “Who knows?”

  INT. F4PL0RD’S APARTMENT - DAY

  F4pl0rd’s building is in Lincoln Park. It is well-lit and well-kept, and there is an elevator which Sid refuses to take. After a very brief disagreement about that, Jamie ends up explaining about F4pl0rd on the way up the stairs.

  “He’s a literal Nazi,” Jamie rasps, on the third flight of stairs. “He’s conducted raids, abuse, targeted harassment campaigns. He’s a rapist. He’s the worst kind of scum there is.”

  “Why hasn’t anyone killed him?”

  “We can’t just kill him.”

  “He’s that powerful?”

  “It’s complicated.”

  “How do you know him?”

  “He initiated a mass rape attack on SparklyLips87, the Twitch streamer, that went on for days. Hundreds of trolls were involved. They were using sock puppets. There was nothing anybody could do to stop it. We tried de-platforming, and I doxxed him, which is why I know where he lives, but nothing worked. He still has seven hundred thousand followers.”

  Apparently, in addition to his computer hacking skills, this F4pl0rd is a formidable warlord with a vicious penchant for sexual atrocities. Sid is uncertain whether that makes him more or less relatable.

  Jamie points out F4pl0rd’s apartment door quietly when they reach the seventh floor of the building and Sid notes the unusual bright yellow doormat placed below the peephole, which features an S shaped squiggle of black marker intended to depict a snake, but clearly drawn by a small talentless child or invalid. Below the squiggle is a warning: No step on snek.

  He knocks on the door, steps to the side, and waits beside the door frame. He never waits in front of a door, especially if it has a peephole. The space immediately outside a door is the death zone, where all the bullets will go if somebody inside decides to shoot through the relatively flimsy wood paneling with a fully automatic rifle. Sid never stands in the death zone.

  He holds up a finger to shush Jamie as they wait. After a few moments of silence, he hears a slight creak from the other side, probably the hacker or one of his soldiers checking the peephole. Sid waits for an additional fifteen seconds, then knocks again from beside the door. A moment later, the opening of the door is first announced by the sliding of a chain bolt and deadbolt. The picosecond the knob turns, Sid whips around the jamb and forces his way inside the apartment with an FNX pistol shoved into the teeth of whomever happened to be looking outside.

  The apartment is hardly what Sid expected from a vicious thug of the caliber Jamie described. The walls are covered by dozens of colorful anime posters, most of them sporting giant-eyed, scantily clad, impossibly huge breasted, impossibly tiny-waisted, caricatures of human females with unnaturally bright colors of hair. Come to think of it, they all look a lot like Mary Sue.

  F4pl0rd screams something that becomes incomprehensible as Sid jams the barrel of the FNX into the hacker’s mouth. Sid forces the pudgy man backward over the arm of a lint laden couch, and then leans to look down an adjoining hallway for additional threats. The hallway is empty except for a few open doorways.

  “Make any noise and I blow your fucking brains out,” Sid growls. “Who else is here with you?” He pulls the FNX suppressor from F4pl0rd’s mouth so the hacker can answer. F4pl0rd dry-heaves loudly as Sid presses a combat boot down on his pot belly, just below a worn image of a green cartoon frog with bright red lips.

  “No-nobody,” Ptrkpt sputters. “Who are you?”

  “I am death incarnate. You are boot scum. You are also lying. Where are your sentries, warlord?”

  “What? What are you talking about? Wh-” F4pl0rd sees Jamie enter the apartment behind Sid and his revulsion is both spontaneous and severe. “You! What the fuck are you doing here?!”

  Jamie winces in equal parts disgust and embarrassment. “I really don’t think all of this is necessary, Sid.”

  Sid applies some further scrutiny to his surroundings, which include a display of cheap ornamental Japanese swords, numerous painted statues of anime characters, and a five foot tall pillow featuring a life-size print of a purple-haired anime girl with goat horns spreading her dripping cartoon labia wide open in lascivious anticipation. No pillaging badass would ever desire to own such a pathetic artifact of sexual desperation. Sid’s own self-styled rape god of a brother would have cackled about that pillow all the way through brutally ravaging the next suitable female he encountered.

  “This guy isn’t actually a warlord, is he?” Sid questions, looking back incredulously to Jamie.

  “Not exactly,” Jamie wavers. “I think we’ve had a miscommunication.”

  “You said he led an army that raped some girl to death with sock puppets and made thousands of people watch.”

  “You fucking third wave feminazi cunts!” F4pl0rd shrieks. “Everything is rape with you idiots!”

  “Rape culture is real, douchebag,” Jamie fires back.

  Sid wipes hacker drool from the FNX suppressor onto the weird anime sex girl pillow and then holsters the gun.

  “Did you just SWAT me because I made fun of some retard online?” F4pl0rd calls out. “Is that what this is about?”

  “No! This has nothing to do with that!”

  “You’re fucking crazy! I’m calling the cops!”

  “You’re not calling the cops,” Sid assures him. “Just calm down. We came here because I need a computer hacker and you’re the only one Jamie knows.”

  “That stupid trap doesn’t know me! I almost lost everything because it got me suspended from Twitter!”

  “For making rape threats!” Jamie says.

  “All I said was she could turn the game off if she didn’t like it!”

  “That’s victim blaming!”

  “She had more views on that stream than she ever had before! She got ten grand in donations overnight! She was loving it!”

  “She was crying and telling you to stop!”

  “Are you two talking about a video game? Is that what’s happening here?”

  “Yeah. SparklyLips87 did a stream for Call of Honor: Comfort Battalion and she was terribad at it, like she couldn’t even strafe and tur
n at the same time, so I posted a link on 4chan and we raided her server with avatars that all looked like Staff Sergeant Lincoln Osiris and everybody did hump emotes on top of her character while spamming ‘Never go full retard’ and she started crying. It was funny, so we just kept doing it.”

  “It was sexual violence!” Jamie shrieks.

  “That’s not violence,” Sid says. “No bodies. No violence.”

  “Thank you! That’s what these SJW nitwits can’t get through their heads. Now get the fuck out of my apartment!”

  “No. I need you to do some hacking for me or there’s going to be violence. The real kind.”

  “Hacking? I don’t know anything about hacking.”

  “You’re full of it,” Jamie squeaks. “I know you defaced Renita Snarcheesian’s site.”

  “I had nothing to do with that, but whoever was responsible is an unparalleled genius.”

  “Violence. Real violence.” Sid whips the FNX back out of its holster and pokes the muzzle into F4pl0rd’s forehead to remind him of the very tangible threat he poses.

  “Okay, I may have some modest Javascript experience.”

  “I have an IP address. I need to know who it belongs to.”

  “The best computer hacker in the world could only get you a physical address. No guarantees about who actually used it to do whatever it is you guys are angry about. If it’s a public terminal like a library or a cyber cafe or something it could have been anybody.”

  “Just get me a street number and I’ll find the fucker from there.”

  “Damn. What did this guy do?”

  “He framed BuzzWorthy for building an evil supercomputer and now a ghost monster is trying to kill Jamie.”

  “I see.” The blank look in the hacker’s eyes indicates that Sid’s explanation was either maddening or inadequate, but he doesn’t care to explain things any further. He’s been through it too many times already today.

  “I don’t have time for this,” Sid grumbles, writing the IP address on a Burger King bag he found on the floor near the couch. He tears the scrap with the number from the bag and holds it out to F4pl0rd. “Get hacking.”