by Mat Nastos
Nodding, Mal agreed, “Good point. I’ll head out of here right now and call her from a payphone uptown.”
Mal could almost hear Zuz’s eyebrows raise questioningly at his statement.
“Wait…what happened to the phone I gave you? It was wired to change carriers and mobile identification numbers once an hour. It should have been totally untraceable and safe. ”
Mal sighed, frustrated with himself over the whole incident. “I must have dropped it down in the subway when I was saving the kid. I didn’t have time to go back and look for it before every flash in New York went off in my face. It was a real mess down there.”
“Get yourself another burner phone and call her at the following number,” said Zuz before he rattled off a ten-digit number with a midtown Manhattan prefix. “And make sure not to lose it this time, okay?”
“Yeah, yeah,” said Mal as the two friends exchanged goodbyes and disconnected.
The pain in Mal’s head spiked up into the stratosphere, giving the cyborg a wave of nausea strong enough he almost lost his balance. The intense vertigo and strange fogging of his vision that went along with it took Mal a few moments to recover from.
Whatever was happening in the dark recesses of his shattered mind was getting worse. With a line of determination forming a deep crag between his thick brows, Mal decided there was no better time than the present to contact Amy Jensen. The sooner she could help him arrange a meeting with Congressman McGuinness, the sooner he could figure out what was wrong with his cybernetic systems. Until then he’d just have to suck up the pain and keep moving forward. As long as he kept his forward momentum going he knew he’d be just fine.
Mal took a quick second to appreciate the comparison of his situation with that of a shark…and then sobered quickly when he remembered that a lot of people ate sharks.
He wasn’t ready to be eaten.
Grabbing the half shredded remains of the black leather motorcycle-style jacket that had been his only constant companion during the long bus trip across the United States, Mal took a quick look around the tiny, now darkened, motel room to make sure he wasn’t leaving anything important behind. Not that the Houston-born former Army Ranger had much at all in the way of possessions at this point: the clothes on his back, a faded photograph of his deceased fiancée, and whatever change he had left in his pocket was all that remained of his former life.
Mal willed his hands to shrink back down to more human size so he could wiggle them down into the small pockets of the tight faded jeans he’d worn exclusively for the past week. A quick search revealed the entirety of his bankroll was $16.54 in small bills and a subway transit card Zuz had hacked unlimited passage onto.
“Fuck fuck fuck.”
Staring intently at the crumbled bills and dented change in the palm of his cybernetic hands, Mal knew it wasn’t going to be enough cash to pay for his room, get food, get a new mobile phone, or anything else. He couldn’t show up to meet Amy Jensen looking like he’d just been hit by a train…even if he had…it would attract way too much attention.
Realization smacked Mal between the eyes as he watched the living circuitry making up his arms twist and shift. He knew what he’d have to do even if he didn’t like it.
Stuffing the last of his funds back into his pants and easing open the thin plywood door that led out of his room, Mal ordered his internal computer system to call up the locations of the nearest auto-teller machine.
Hacking into a cash machine with the cybernetics wired to his nervous system wasn’t something that sat well with the honest Southern-raised boy, but Mal’s back was up against the wall and there were no other options open to him. He couldn’t go to friends or family for money because, sure as heck, the government would be staking them out and waiting for the renegade cyborg to show his face. Pulling his jacket back on over his large shoulders, being careful not to catch its inner lining on the constantly moving ridges that formed on the surface of his bionics, Mal headed out his door and out into the dimly lit halls of the Friendly Garden Inn, promising to himself that he’d pay back whatever he had to steal.
Taking the rickety back stairs two at a time, Mal reached the motel’s rear exit in less than a minute, ducked past a pair of transsexual hookers loudly competing for the attention of a John, and exited out into the midday sun shining down on a commuter-infested Bleecker Street.
A five minute cab ride, and the last of his money, took Mal to a bank he hoped was far enough away from his new base of operations to be safe. The dumbest thing the cyborg could do was choose a spot to rob that was too close to home base and wind up followed back by the police. Involving the police was something Mal hoped to avoid at all costs. Too many innocents had already been caught in the crossfire between he and the government, and he wanted no more blood on his hands.
The subject of his search was easy enough for Mal to locate. Situated between the blazing yellow arches of a MacDonald’s on one side and the even more garishly bright sign announcing the location of ‘Ray’s Original Pizza’ on the other was a mismatched group of New York City citizens standing in a queue outside of the midtown Citibank.
“Eureka!”
All he had to do now was rob a bank and get away with it. Not the most difficult of things the escaped government super-soldier had done lately as he moved to join the mass of humanity huddled in front of the tiny blue and gray machine, like hamsters waiting their turn at a feeding tube.
Waiting in line for the ATM mounted into a wall just off Broadway and 43rd at Time’s Square while wearing the hood of his dull-red USC sweatshirt pulled up over his head made Mal feel more than a tad conspicuous. If he had been in charge of security for the bank, the sight of a tall man in a leather jacket whose head and face were partially obscured would have been an immediate red flag.
Of course, one look at the parade of oddities who made their way up to the cash machine reassured Mal that he probably wasn’t the most unusual or most suspicious individual the bank guards would encounter on even the most average of days in Manhattan.
“Thank God for weirdos,” thought Mal as he eased forward for his turn at the automated teller.
Keeping his face in the shadows of the college hoodie as much as possible, the big man quickly slid his arm up to the access port for debit cards on the machine, allowing the first two fingers of his right hand to flow together, merging into a metallic probe that snaked its way through the slot and into the heart of the dispenser. Mal’s eyes glazed over as his onboard computer hacked into the bank’s systems. Within a few seconds the ATM was happily spitting out a stack of twenty-dollar bills large enough to choke a horse.
Mal rounded the corner away from the scene of his crime counting his money—twenty-two hundred twenty, twenty-two hundred forty…just under twenty-three hundred dollars!—assuming he was home free. A gruff voice called from a few steps behind the fleeing cyborg, causing all hope of an easy escape to vanish from his mind.
“Hey, Fucko…drop the cash!”
CHAPTER 3
Working out of a minuscule office hidden within the heart of the Robert M. Morales Financial Building, Mike Salcido had been the sole security officer on duty at the Times’ Square branch of Citibank for nearly seven hours. It had been an exceptionally long, exceptionally boring shift with little in the way of excitement to break up the monotony of the far too quiet day, and the man’s patience tank was running on empty.
Things had been so tedious during the day he had even jumped in to help the janitors out for an especially disturbing incident in the single-stall bathroom situated near the rear of the bank’s main lobby involving what appeared to have been a homeless man with an overabundance of fiber in his diet. It was the sort of mess Mike would have punched a baby in the head to get away from on any other day. Still, it was better than being stuck in the tiny windowless room twenty-feet underground without anything at all to do for hours on end. That was just the sort of inaction that would drive the thirty-one year old man insane.
Standing at just over five foot eight in height and as stocky as a defensive lineman, Mike had been itching for some kind action all day. The entire reason he fought and pushed to get himself reassigned to one of the roughest locations in the five boroughs was so he could knock a few heads together every day and take out some of the pent up frustration he had from dating a girl who agreed with far too many of the sexual limitations placed on her by four years under the nuns of Aquinas All-Girls High School. The whole point of dating a Catholic school girl was because they were supposed to be freaks in the sack, right?
If the burly rent-a-cop didn’t get some action soon—either from his woman or from a physical altercation on the job—he was going to go nuts.
From his point of view, sitting in a rickety old wooden office chair and confined to a six-by-six concrete room in a rat-infested bank basement, catching sight of a dirty redneck type jamming something into the card reader of the outside ATM was an absolutely perfect opportunity to release some of that frustration.
It didn’t hurt that Mike had a borderline neurotic dislike for guys who looked like they had just stepped out of an episode of ‘Sons of Anarchy.’ There was just something about a biker wannabe in a leather jacket that caused his blood to boil.
Hopping up from his position behind the bank of grainy, black and white security monitors—including the one he rewired so he could watch ancient episodes of ‘Law and Order’ during his breaks—the beefy Bronx native hiked his pants up, adjusted his clip-on tie, and did a quick rundown of his equipment: handcuffs, pepper spray, radio, telescopic steel baton (just in case the creepy biker decided he wanted to do things the hard way). Check, check, check AND check.
He was good to go.
Catching up to the thief turned out to be much more of a chore than the out of shape security guard had planned. Taking the locked emergency exit on the south side of the building, he’d hoped to get a jump on the tall man wearing the latest in white trash gang member gear, but the man’s long legs and fast stride had taken him well out of range.
Mike finally caught up with the man in the red hoodie nearly two blocks away from the bank. The perp was still counting his ill-gotten gains and woefully unaware that he was about to have the smack laid down on him by an angry Hispanic man with a badge when Mike barked out to him.
“Hey, Fucko…drop the cash!”
They were some of the last words Mike Salcido would speak before his world was turned inside out.
*****
Mal turned towards the rough heavily Bronx-accented voice calling out to him from behind and chuckled to himself. The owner of the voice was trying way too hard at his impression of Christian Bale’s Batman to be taken seriously. Really, no tough guy in the world would ever speak like that…not without getting his ass kicked four ways to Sunday.
“It must be a Yankee thing,” thought Mal as he spun on his heels to face the man calling him out, jamming the stack of appropriated bills as far down into his pockets as he could manage.
The sight of a thick-waisted, spiky-haired mall cop dressed in a faded black uniform half a size too large in the shirt and half too small in the pants, calmed Mal’s built-in fight-or-flight instincts considerably. He’d have been much more concerned if it had been a highly trained and armed member of the New York City police department. With a bank guard things weren’t as likely to get out of hand. In Mal’s experience, firearms tended to complicate matters.
“Pardon me, Officer…” Mal squinted down at the dull-gray tin badge fastened cockeyed onto a shirt stained with the remnants of what the cyborg could only assume had been a rather large, fully loaded hot dog from Gray’s Papaya. The washed out letters scrolled across the security guard’s name-tag were just barely clear enough for Mal to make out, even at their close proximity to one another. “…Salcido? I’m not sure I understand.”
Hands hovering within reach of the belt holster containing his collapsed twenty-one inch ASP expandable baton, the winded guard leaned forward and pounded his thick sausage-like index finger into Mal’s chest.
“Tampering with an automated teller machine is a Class-C Felony, asshat.”
The tapping on Mal’s chest, while not physically painful, tweaked his already frayed nerves more than it should have. Making the matter worse was the way the stubby officer’s vocalization had taken on a staccato, almost Shatner-esque cadence. Being referred to as an ‘asshat’ didn’t help improve matters any. The resulting effect grated roughly against the cyborg’s patience and re-ignited a pulsating migraine at the base of his skull.
An unyielding steel grip caught the guard’s offending finger, nearly crushing it with superhuman strength bestowed upon the renegade super-solider by the scientist at Project Hardwired. Mal’s icy blue eyes locked onto the smaller man’s brown ones, attempting to cow the man through sheer force of will.
“You’ve got the wrong guy, Officer Salcido…and I’ve got somewhere important to be. Now…Back…Off!”
Refusing to back down, Mike yanked his hand away from Mal with a growl.
“Sir, you’re going to need to come back to the bank with me.” The bank guard spoke even more slowly and loudly than before, as if he assumed Mal were either deaf or didn’t understand English. “I have a few questions for you.”
The cyborg was getting annoyed, both by the security guard’s continued pressing and by the gathering congregation of New Yorkers attracted by the man’s now-booming voice. There was little the citizens of Manhattan loved more than a good show, especially if it was one that promised a violent climax. Regrettably for all involved, Mal didn’t have the time or patience for the delay and pushed past the uniformed bank employee with a solid shove to his right shoulder.
“I don’t have time for this shit,” hissed Mal, heading for the mob of onlookers in an attempt to leave the annoying diminutive man behind and get on with more pressing matters.
For the second time in just under a minute the short bank employee took Mal by surprise, shrieking out the phrase “Citizen’s arrest!” at the top of his lungs and lashing out with a fully-extended baton, pulled skillfully from its sheath on the right side of his belt. Mike had practiced the move for months in front of the six-foot mirror mounted behind the bathroom door in his tiny studio apartment and was exceptionally proud he’d been able to pull it off in the heat of combat.
The stiff enamel-blackened shaft of the telescopic weapon slammed into the side of Mal’s skull with a sickening crack. In the split second of pain that followed, Mal lost his battle for control. Where Malcolm Weir had stood, bloodied from the hammering blow, Cestus turned to face the startled security guard, flashing a smile with less warmth than an iceberg.
To his credit, Officer Mike immediately realized he was in trouble, even before seeing Cestus’s hands morph into nine-inch long, razor-sharp talons. Normal men didn’t stand up to a blow like that or a face full of pepper-spray and laugh it off.
“Must be meth…it’s always meth,” thought Mike, dropping the now-chilled aerosol can in order to get a solid two-handed grip upon his weapon. “Nothing worse than a tweeker.”
When questioned about the sequence of events by the first NYPD officers on the scene, none of the fifty or so Manhattanites watching the confrontation could agree upon what happened next. All would confirm that the strange man in the torn leather jacket moved with an unearthly speed.
The first blow by Cestus, an open-fisted knife-hand strike, shattered the steel alloy baton with enough force that the EMTs administering to the guard’s nearly fatal wounds spent nearly ten minutes removing its splinters from his face and neck.
Spinning on the heel of his foot, Cestus then released a devastating sidekick into his opponent’s chest, breaking six ribs and pulverizing the man’s sternum. A pair of straight punches to Mike’s face turned his jaw into paste and catapulted him to the ground.
The entire attack was over in less than a pair of heartbeats.
“Wha—what are you?!” The words
dropped out of Mike’s mouth, along with a cupful of blood coughed up from his damaged lungs and a pair of teeth that had been knocked out by the cyborg’s unforgiving metal fists.
Trapped somewhere deep in his own mind, Mal screamed silently as his right arm formed into a devastating scythe of living metal and slashed into the unprotected belly of the security guard with the speed of a striking snake. A wave of blood dropped down along the guard’s legs, released from his stomach by a razor sharp blade, and splashed to the ground in a sickening thud. Mike’s whimpers of terror were cut short by the cyborg’s arm, upraised to take his life with one final stroke.
A woman’s scream from nearby snapped Mal back to his senses, causing the bionic being to drop the bloodied, barely breathing form of Mike Salcido to the ground at his feet.
“It happened again,” thought Mal as he bolted from the scene. The Cestus protocol had taken over his mind and controlled his actions. “Just like back in L.A.”
In his mind’s eye, Mal saw flashes of the death and destruction his ‘other self’ had caused when he had lost control during his attack on the Project Hardwired headquarters in Los Angeles. During his raid on the skyscraper containing the men responsible for turning him into a veritable angel of death, Mal had been forced to watch from the sidelines as the computer-driven personality of Designate Cestus had gained dominance and proceeded to maim and murder scores of soldiers and government agents.
Sure, it had helped him to break free from Project Hardwired and its megalomaniacal director, Gordon Kiesling, but the cost to Mal’s conscience had been high and he had brooded over the death and despair he had caused over the course of the long weeks that had followed. As a soldier he had become accustomed to the toll war took in the name of doing his duty to the country he loved, but it was different when you could see the faces of men as their lives were ended by your own hands. And it was even more troubling because Mal knew the men he killed were only there because they had a job to do. The faceless soldiers weren’t his real enemy, they were just pawns thrown in his way—mere cannon fodder sent to slow him down.