Metro

by Stephen Romano

  It all comes easier than breathing.

  The cop tries to fire again, but his finger freezes as Mark’s three shots chew the guy to hell, the modified rounds playing pinball with vital organs before chumming everything inside him into a living paste. The cop is gutted in this moment, and two of the bullets ricochet off metal and rubber when they leave him. As he falls forward, just one goddamn foot from the open door of his squad car, the cop opens his mouth, and what’s left of his stomach evacuates up his throat in a meaty splatter, right into the concrete at his feet. The guy actually pukes up his own guts as he dies.

  Mark scans the lawn for Jackie’s Chevy Impala.

  Turns out it’s blocked in by the cop’s ride—and one of the Impala’s front tires is blown out too. What are the odds? Mark hears the air still hissing and sees the bullet holes stitched across the wheel well and driver’s door: what’s left of the barrage that killed the last cop. And other unfortunate law enforcement officers have already been summoned. Red lights are blowing up on panic boards all across the goddamn city.

  Mark’s got three or four seconds to make his call.

  It’s the squad car or nothing.

  Fuck.

  He suddenly looks up and sees two of his neighbors staring at him from across the street, standing just in front of their open front door. It’s the ancient hippie couple who always walk over in pajamas and buy his dirt weed—the non-hydro stash he keeps aside for the old-schoolers living off food stamps. Their names are Franklin and Toni. They are good people.

  They are looking at him like he is the devil right now.

  “Go back inside,” he says to them. “You want none of this.”

  • • •

  Jollie hears footfalls coming back in their direction.

  She shifts her great weight in the enclosed space, and Andy grabs her tighter, pulling her farther back. She resists him, feels trapped, naked in the dark. Because she is. Everything coming down so fast, so brutal. She wants to scream.

  “Jollie? Andy?”

  Mark’s voice.

  She breaks free of Andy and scrambles out from under the bed, the air on her bare skin a chilling horror. She sees Mark slamming a long steel box closed. She smells the gunpowder and blood. And she sees the gory body of Spider-Girl. It doesn’t really register—like silly gross-out makeup and fake fangs on Halloween night. None of it seems real.

  Mark throws her clothes at her.

  “We have thirty seconds to get the hell out of here.”

  Andy sticks his head out. “What the fuck just happened?”

  Mark looks at both of them, more seriously than he’s ever been about anything.

  “It’s the end of the world,” he says.

  He grabs the Black Box by its long metal handle and grabs Jollie’s hand with the other. She gets dressed as he yanks her out the door and down the hall, Andy right behind them, the whole world a blur now, moving faster and faster. She never even has time to scream at the bodies in the living room—only clocks the pooling blood and the dead eyes and the smell of gunfire in tiny dreamlike bursts. It still doesn’t seem real at all.

  Andy sure as hell gets a damn good look at those bodies.

  He doesn’t scream either.

  • • •

  Police cars don’t have backseat safety belts for some insane reason, and Jollie thinks that’s just fucking absurd.

  Somewhere just outside of everything that is happening now, the screaming-activist reactionary that lives in even the most panicked version of her brilliant, overworked mind starts composing a long open letter to the mayor’s office about such dangers, which she plans to post at Wildcat River, STAT—and then she’s trying to untangle herself from Andy, caught up in his reeking clothes and beating heart and cursing voice as they are bounced around in the back seat of the police car, sealed off from Mark behind bulletproof glass, the Black Box on the floor at their feet. Sirens blare and the radio squawks. It’s all complete chaos. Mark hits the cherries, lighting up the world in a red-and-blue disco inferno, screeching down South Lamar, just missing a woman in a restored 1979 Ford Pinto and three college kids in a frat-slob megatruck. The lights of the main city street almost blind him, long traces of the storefronts and restaurants on either side making a hyperspace blur—Maria’s Taco Xpress streaking into a Walgreens streaking into an intersection with red lights, and everybody gets out of his way because he’s the Law, by God, and he’s coming right at them with full cherries spinning, shrill noise flooding the world, and Andy is frozen in a near-fetal knot against the seat, Jollie starting to get her shit together in just one instant before she realizes again—

  —that they’re in traffic now and going really, really fast.

  Three other cop cars come blasting in the other direction.

  They don’t slow down or figure out that they may have just passed the bad guys—but in a matter of just minutes, somebody will figure it out, and they’ll be all over the problem like super-ripe stink on a big-ass ape. State-owned vehicles are worker bees in a giant screaming hive, all tagged back to HQ on a very high-tech series of computerized switchboards—Jollie knows all about it. She screams the words “Slow the fuck down!” And then she screams it again because Mark clearly isn’t listening.

  She’s right about that.

  He’s closing out everything but his own train of thought.

  First order of business is escape and survival, and there’s a big red target painted on them right now. Have to change cars. Have to get hidden.

  The world is ending as the seconds tick off the clock.

  He swerves fast off Lamar and into a dark series of side streets, finally killing the sirens and the cherries. He tells Jollie and Andy to calm down and they just get louder back there. Mark floors the accelerator, ignoring the bad noise. It all happens so fast for them. It’s all just an incredible series of blurs, coming on and on.

  • • •

  And then the car stops.

  They are deep inside a nice-looking neighborhood when that happens, about six blocks between Lamar and South Congress, near the Saint Edward’s University campus.

  Sirens in the distance, where the Kingdom is still being invaded.

  Jollie has stopped being hysterical. The ecstasy in her system is almost gone, and she rides the last strange waves, wondering if Peanut Williams and his crew aren’t also running for their lives in Philly. She burns through what she knows, what she’s seen and heard—the gunshots, the cop cars, the dead bodies back there in the room (if they really were dead bodies)—and puts together scenario after scenario, connecting the dots:

  Mark is a multiple-personality psychopath with some weird death wish, he has been all along, and he’s been operating for years just under my radar—like some self-styled Dexter wannabe masquerading as a small-time dealer with big dreams.

  No. Too grim. Too Hollywood.

  Mark is an undercover cop with friends in low places, and it all went bad somehow, all in just ten minutes, all while I was asleep, and it only happened because I’m on drugs and have been on drugs for years, and it’s all been so fun.

  No. Too obvious. And drugs are fun.

  Mark has gone and pissed off the wrong people and we’re all doomed because of it, landed in some insane half-assed getaway from evil drug dealers, doomed to go down in history at the wrong end of a murder gig, because evil men with evil agendas find you, and then they separate you from your privates and throw what’s left in the river.

  No. Who wants to die like that?

  Mark has finally lost his mind and gone postal in the worst possible way, and this is the result—the three of us sitting in a car with half the cops in this city scratching their heads about what happened to us, and wondering what the hell happens next.

  No. No. NO.

  But she feels she may be onto something with all the above.r />
  She runs down the list, keeps spinning through variations.

  This all happens in the space of about fifteen seconds.

  Jollie can type and text really fast too.

  • • •

  “You guys okay back there?”

  Andy says something smart: “What’s okay, Mark?”

  “Are you injured? Are either of you shot?”

  Andy has no idea what to say, other than No, I’m not shot and thanks for asking, buddy—but the sound wrecks in his throat when he tries to get the words out. And then he notices his bloody stump for the first time in a while—the knot of T-shirt that was once white, pulled hard around his throbbing fist and soaked through with slow ooze. Jollie seems like she’s turned into a statue, not speaking a syllable, her eyes getting smaller, then bigger, than smaller again, her lips almost moving as her thoughts come quickly.

  Andy thinks that’s damn scary.

  She looks insane.

  He’s never seen Jollie look that way.

  “Come on, guys, don’t make me play twenty questions,” Mark says.

  “We’re okay,” Jollie suddenly says out loud. “What the hell is happening?”

  “We’re about to take another ride. Sit tight.”

  He gets out of the car and opens the back door on Jollie’s side. Sees the Black Box on the floor. Sees the two of them sitting there, grimy and flushed with tears, sees Jollie staring straight into a black ocean of possible futures and scenarios, her mouth moving silently.

  Mark has seen Jollie like that before.

  He’s watched her at her word machine, well into the wee hours of dawn, sensing the awesome shape of her mind as it made sense of the amazing, maddening, self-destructing earth under her feet. She even clutches the air with her hands now in a strange series of reflex actions, wanting a keyboard or a smartphone there, so she can write it all out—she is naked without her weapon of choice.

  Mark loves her more than ever in this moment.

  “Jollie . . . I can see your gears working. How about it?”

  He leans into the compartment and brings his hand to her face, very gently. She recoils from him, almost shivering. “Don’t touch me, Mark.”

  “I know this is crazy. I know you—”

  “Know me what? You don’t know anything! This is not okay, Mark!”

  “Calm down. We’re in a quiet neighborhood. People are sleeping.”

  “Maybe I should wake them up. Maybe you’re a goddamn maniac and you’re kidnapping your friends and I should just scream bloody fucking murder at the top of my lungs.”

  “You think I’m kidnapping you?”

  “I don’t know what I think.”

  He reaches for her again and she recoils again.

  She looks right in his eyes, says nothing.

  He sighs again. “Come on, Jollie, this is Mark. Whatever you think of what’s happening now, this is Mark—the same man I was an hour ago.”

  “I don’t know who that man is.”

  “I saved your life. I’m not gonna let anything bad happen to you. But you have to calm down. You can’t get crazy on me. Please.”

  “Where are you taking us?”

  “Someplace safe.”

  “How do I know that’s true?”

  “Because this is Mark, Jollie.”

  He looks in her eyes, then sizes the Boy Prince up.

  “Andy? Are you okay?”

  “What’s okay, man?”

  “How’s your hand?”

  “I think it’s stopped bleeding . . . but . . .”

  “I’ll stitch you up later. Hang in there. Just hang in there, both of you.”

  Please.

  He takes a look around before he makes his move, scans the area hard and quick. The street snakes through a series of nice houses that look like they belong mostly to renters—one-story flats, duplexes with two and three units. There’s a dark-red Lexus Hybrid real close, and it looks brand new—maybe a graduation present from Daddy.

  “Mark . . . please talk to me.”

  That’s Jollie, much calmer now, moving toward Mark, using her come-hither voice, the one she always defaults to when she needs something and knows just flatly asking for it won’t work. Her breath freezes in the chill morning, and she looks like a concerned china doll, round and pondering, with desperate eyes that give her game away.

  Mark loves her for that too.

  He puts his hands on either side of her face again, looking right in her eyes. “It’s going to be okay. We’re gonna be fine. Wait here.”

  “Mark . . . this is just nuts . . .”

  “Yes, Jollie. Yes, it is. But I promise it’ll be okay. Just trust me.”

  • • •

  He gets into the Black Box, opening it carefully on the sidewalk curb next to the car, finds the two Markos 6G smartphones, and activates one of them. Dedicated satellite uplink. A new one of these comes in the mail every three months, FedExed to a secure address—they have to keep him up on the latest technology—along with the updates on what to do with it. Those instructions come from secure Internet links. You memorize code numbers and operational directives and then you forget about them. You go back to being Joe Stoner with the ordinary slacker life. You adapt and survive. The first order in situations like this is to come straight in. And kill anything that gets in your way.

  He sees Jackie’s face when he thinks that.

  He erases the image and it comes back again and he erases it again.

  Damn it all.

  He punches a series of numbers into the smartphone and talks to the satellite, and it tells him the shiny red Lexus is all his.

  • • •

  The drive that happens next is a lot calmer.

  No blurs, no tracers, no sirens chasing after them.

  They are three ghosts now, quiet and invisible.

  Mark heads for the address that blips in over the Markos—a safe place to land, it says. He tells Jollie and Andy again that everything will be okay, and they say nothing back there, silent as the grave of Elvis.

  Jollie is still making lists of possible scenarios.

  She makes Mark into the boogeyman over and over, then makes excuses and dismisses the reasons why—because, at the end of it all, she just wants to survive this night.

  And still she wonders:

  Is this when it happens?

  Is this how they finally break me?

  II

  THE MAN FROM METRO

  3

  rainmaker

  The bad lieutenant walks back to Jackie-Boy’s room and sits with him for a few minutes. The kid’s still passed out and the nurse on duty still says it’s touch-and-go. He’s not in a coma or anything—just really messed up and drugged out. The bad lieutenant checks his watch again. 5:30, almost dawn. Just a few hours since he made the call, and he’s still waiting. Damn, man.

  He thinks about lighting a smoke—what are they gonna do, arrest him?—but he thinks better of it and sits down with a sigh.

  He’s thinking about his great-great-grandfather.

  Sam Mudd, the conspirator, the asshole.

  The reason for the expression Your name is Mud.

  That always makes him smile, but it usually comes with a chill, because it’s a grim marker of how screwed up things in the world really are—as if he needs another reminder. He thinks maybe he does. Maybe just needs to punish himself for being what he is. He thinks his death may be very near.

  And he thinks that might be A-OK.

  His father once explained to him that great-great-grandpappy Samuel Mudd was just an ordinary medical doctor who happened to draw the short straw the night John Wilkes Booth unloaded his derringer at the opera and made a sloppy getaway and ended up with a broken leg—and, well, son, you know how those family pr
actitioners are with their Hippocratic oaths and all, particularly when a lone gunman bangs on their door in the dead of night.

  The history books still disagree over whether old Doc Sam was actually a conspirator or just some random guy.

  Jake Mudd knows the truth.

  Knows that his great-great-grandpappy was the victim of something bigger than all of them—even the great and mighty Abraham Lincoln. (Especially bigger than that dumb old fuck, come to think of it.) Something like an all-crushing, all-enveloping black hand that scoops up everything in its path. The hand of fate, the hand of justice. For wise guys and nice guys. Something like a storm, set loose on the face of time to curse us all, down through history, until even the people who know the real names of those shadow murderers are snuffed. Because here’s the thing: Nobody believes in any of it anyway. Nobody wants to know about conspiracies or corrupt systems or ghosts in the machine. And everybody is doomed to die in the storm eventually.

  That’s how they get us. That’s how they rule us.

  Nobody wants to know.

  And I’m the rainmaker.

  Mudd senses that terrible black hand reaching down for him now.

  It’s like the sick thrill of anticipation he got when he strapped on his gun for the first time. Or the awful, sinful, paralyzing rush of exhilaration that came with the first child he ever murdered.

  • • •

  Six men walk through the rear ER entrance of Saint Apollonia’s Medical Center. Nobody tells them to turn around and walk the other way because nobody is guarding the door. That’s the tragic thing about hospitals. You can walk right in, even just before dawn, so long as you look like you’re a normal guy.

  The six men all look like normal guys.

  Except for the man in front.

  That one has a big scar running down the middle of his face, just off-center. It angles weirdly and splits his eye socket at an awkward degree, zigzagging part of his lips into a mismatched jigsaw shape so it looks almost like someone cut him in half and glued him back together wrong. You’d notice it from a hundred feet away.

  He’s an apparition split in two—almost handsome, almost horrifying—wearing a very expensive black suit.