“Woop-ditty-woop! The law is here, my niggas! See, the thing is, the Judges? These muh-fuckas think they somethin’ speshal. They just you, though, feel? They just on some IR Roth shit while we out here—Y’all hear me out there? We. Out. Here! On some majority high-risk shit, my niggas!”
The warehouse obliged with a bull-penned, rancorous applause.
He looked them over again with a hand scratching under his thin beard, as if pondering, as if he or Ezekiel would be surprised when he ultimately decided to start by blowing away the Black dude. He tore away Judge Jones’s helmet, kicking it aside and letting it rattle and roll a few feet from them.
Well, at least there’s that, Ezekiel thought, staring at his own worn, piss-filled, sleep-deprived form in the reflection of the black visor.
“Y’all thought y’all was so slick, didn’t you? Y’all fuckin’ Rambo-ass niggas in here tryna fuck tha game up for us hard-workin’ folk ’cause Gurney signed a piece of paper, my nigga? How that paper hollin’ up now, hm? Yo people ain’t get you ready for this, did they? Ain’t get you prepped for this Viet Cong shit you done stumbled yo bitch ass into.” Catastrophe paused for the laughter, the sky-scathing gunshots, the Cheddar Chips leader finally shuffling back to his feet.
“First thing we go’n do is show you what we can do here…” With that, Marisa scooped up Judge Jones’s helmet, tucked it under her arm, and took a few steps back to let Catastrophe through. Judge Jones almost sighed in relief seeing the helmet in Marisa’s hold.
Carl’s teeth, studded with steel, glittered harshly against Jones’s eyes when he grinned. Catastrophe clasped a hand beneath Jones’s chin and spat a long, stringy clump of phlegm in his face, watching it run down his nose.
“See, you are just another nigga under siege. Their siege. You think you know that this is just an issue of order, but this shit life and def, my nigga. Your life, our life, anyone that ain’t what they want this world to be. How many of us gon’ exist if we ain’t taking care ah us, if we ain’t—?”
Carl paused for a moment, and Ezekiel saw in the flinch in his eye that the truth in black bodies had returned to him. He wasn’t just speaking to Ezekiel, but the massive swell of the Brotherhood that his Thurgood had enlisted, and those yet to be swayed. He’d excluded every non-black body in his declaration of pain, of the things that had been taken, of a fire in rise.
“You see,” Carl started after spinning to the rest of them. “By nigga, I refer to all my niggas. I refer to the nigga in you, Terry, and you, Jared, and you Kevin, and you! Yes—yes, you, Chadwick. You all are in this, with this. We Brotherhood, we brothas, we niggas are all, in the end, in some shit if we do not unify as a niggahood.”
There was silence, and then, as Ezekiel readied for Carl’s swansong to fall flat, there was an encore from the crowd.
“This nigga is soundin’ real lit!” screamed Sean Smith, a former tennis player from Ohio.
“Thank you, thank you so much, my nigga,” Carl said, before turning back to Ezekiel with a grin.
Shit, he’s good, Ezekiel conceded. Judge Jones hadn’t expected the sloppy play to work, but trading off the word nigga proved to be a hell of a play.
“So!” Carl started, taking a few steps back and pulling his gold-plated pistol, courtesy of Thurgood, from his back waist. “What do y’all want to see? Y’all wanna see him melt? Y’all wanna see him bleed out? Or y’all want to see him electrify like a cartoon in this muh’ fucka?” His adoring audience filled the room with laughter, shouting out suggestions.
Jones had never been one for ruining a good time—mostly because he didn’t know much about them to begin with—but he knew, as Marisa moved the helmet into one hand and pulled a small, round grenade out of a pocket with the other, that the show was soon to be at an end.
Sleep now, sweet boy, know the fruit will fall in time.
It’s been an honour, Judge; know your sacrifice won’t be in vain.
Before Catastrophe could fire the winning munitions, Marisa dropped the helmet and threw the grenade as hard as she could through the warehouse. The explosion roared, sending the bodies of the belligerent and brash scattering.
Carl eventually climbed to his feet, shaking off the thin sparkles of light and fuzz swimming across his eyes from the jarring spell of utter catastrophe. He cast about for Jones, hoping to find some solace in taking his life, but saw Marisa freeing both Judges. One more thing the law had taken from him that day.
The masses, armed with weapons they could barely begin to understand, began to shoot at will at the sparse targets of Poet, Jones and Marisa. The booms reverberated throughout the building, as Catastrophe hid beneath his podium from the haze of hell.
“Y’all niggas need to calm this—fuckin’—fuck!” Catastrophe couldn’t so much as finish a sentence. The podium gradually crumbled under the onslaught.
JUDGE JONES KNEW what had to be done as soon as the first fire blazed. It was messy, it was a titan of paperwork, but if it’d ever been necessary, it’d been then.
“ARE YOU FUCKING NUTS?”
Judge Poet, it’d seemed, wasn’t so keen on the idea.
“We have another plan? You know how important this is, how fucked we are if we don’t. He knew we were here, he has more information than us, his technology is more advanced than ours, this became—cover!” Judge Jones threw himself back as a bright line of fire came at them from above. They split, Marisa falling away from the two Judges.
“This became,” Judge Jones started, as he and Judge Poet crouched behind a conveyor belt in the warehouse, “more important than a couple of militant thugs as soon as that happened. We can’t risk—”
“Okay, just—just fucking do it, then!” Judge Poet spat.
“We’ll need to get to the centre of the room,” Jones grunted.
Poet spat out a string of obscenities, but finally found something inside, something insidious within to temper him back to form. “Well, let’s go show these fuckers some Rambo shit, Judge Jones.”
Poet laughed, and Ezekiel nodded back. Then Poet reached into one of his pockets, took out a smoke ball and squeezed it in his hand to activate it. He hurled it forward and began his attack, Jones following behind.
“Raven Georgia,” Poet said, reaching out to Judge Jones, who implemented the manoeuver—drilled into them in the Academy—without so much as a blink. They clasped wrists and fell backwards, catching themselves before they hit the ground, guns drawn and ready. The bullets meant for their heads missed, even as they dispatched the targets behind each other’s backs.
They pulled each other to their feet, and threw themselves back into the battle.
His hands grew weary of the pull of the trigger, of the hammer, of the things that broke through skulls while he fought through the smoke. He and Poet kept tossing them out, as they worked towards the centre of the room. When they arrived, Judge Jones at least was relieved to see Marisa jogging up to meet them.
“Initiate the LBRAD!” Marisa shouted, only a few feet away but pressed by the ongoing rage of fire and bullets and everything the maggots of mire and street life threw against peaceful justice.
The LBRAD system was developed a year or so after the Judges program was founded. It was one of a few crowd-control tools the Judges had at their disposal, an enhancement on the previous LRAD system, which weaponised sound to halt unruly protesters, now shrunk to pocket-size and heightened from annoying to paralysing.
“Initiating,” Judge Jones screamed, waiting for death. He knew the risks without his helmet, but it was necessary.
He and Poet pulled palm-sized disks from their belts, slapped them on the ground and dived as far away as they could before the machines began their culling song.
Screams echoed through the warehouse. Judge Jones sprawled on his back, trying to wrap his hands over his ears but feeling the sticky blood popping out of it, seeing Pellegrino doing the same. He watched, in the distance, as some began to hemorrhage blood from every available orifice, as if
trying to escape their own bodies.
Judge Poet lasted a little longer thanks to his helmet, but as close as he was to the devices, the noise pierced even him.
Ezekiel’s eyes, while waiting for sweet death to arrive, finally fell over Catastrophe, who seemed more resistant than some of his cohorts. The gangster was still on one knee, with what little wits the death noise left him. He tore the shirt off, ripping one of the sleeves free and wrapping it around his ears, knotted at his forehead to keep his line of sight clear. A few others tried, like Catastrophe to fight back, though with less thought, still firing their weapons indiscriminately. It didn’t take long for a stream of flame to reach Catastrophe’s podium, igniting the hastily applied varnish. The fire roared and raged, leaping through the dusty air to the stacked boxes littered throughout, tickling against everything, licking its lips and hungry to sate itself.
In the heat and the haze, Jones felt his body breaking down in the sound, until, suddenly, it wasn’t any longer. The first thing he heard that wasn’t from a vortex of eldritch terror was the crunch of Catastrophe’s foot over the shattered LBRAD tools.
Catastrophe clutched Ezekiel by the throat, dragging him around to meet his gaze.
“You niggas think you winnin’ this shit, my nigga? You think we ain’t already won? You ain’t fuckin ready for what about to happen, for us to take this shit over! Hm? Oh, you can’t breathe, muh’fucka? The fuckin law can’t breathe, ain’t that jus—”
Catastrophe, with at least two paragraphs left of monotonous grandstanding, suddenly stopped short. He dropped Judge Jones and turned, looking down to see the slim, serrated glee over Jimmy ‘Shank-A-Nigga-In-Tha-Back’ Brown’s face.
“You… shady-ass nigga,” Catastrophe spat, scrabbling for the knife wedged deep into his back.
“Talkin’ stick, bitch!” Jimmy shouted, darting as fast as he could to the exit.
Judge Jones struggled to stand, throat raw from the smoke and the strangle. Pellegrino shoved him to his feet from behind.
“Ma’am,” Judge Jones croaked as Poet helped from the other side.
“Judge Jones,” she returned.
Ezekiel eventually took his arms as he found his own strength to move again. The gauntlet of gang-banging vermin proved harder to cut through amongst an engulfing flame. However many were foolhardy enough to delay their escape found the Judges were just as tenacious. They pushed, they fought, they judged.
Poet stumbled as a bullet clacked into his helmet, but he rolled and sprawled himself out, weapon aimed, and fired a single shot at one of the hooded figures towering over him.
The twenty-one-year-old pit bull shelter worker’s head exploded. The splatter distracted the surrounding thugs long enough for Poet to steal the sawed-off from the fallen corpse, spinning upwards from the ground. He made quick work of the thirty-two-year-old mother of two, and the local mailman who once found your dog when you left the door open.
“We have to get the hell out of here, Poet!” screamed Jones, grabbing the older man and shoving him through the door ahead of him.
It was nearly the last thing he said, as a burning slab collapsed towards him. But before it made impact, Jones was shoved forward by Pellegrino. He stumbled and turned to the suddenly flame-filled doorway.
“She’s gone! Go! GO! FUCKING GO!” Poet hollered, yanking Judge Jones away. Jones followed him out the building. But before they reached the night, a wayward explosive detonated in the hall behind them, launching them through one of the frosted glass panels lining the entrance.
AS THE FIRE fell, Carl ‘Catastrophe’ Patterson contemplated the potential oversight in not keeping a tighter eye on Jimmy ‘Shank-A-Nigga-In-Tha-Back’ Brown. He crawled in search of life, coughing and screaming “Nigga!” as loud as he could, nearly two thousand times, one for every time they’d reduced him or his brethren to that word in the place he’d been born, year by year. It was fitting though, and his laughter filled ever corner, echoing across every corpse the proud were no longer burdened with.
The truth of life and death, those things, the only things he’d ever seen truly separate-but-equal, had style to them. Maybe it was that Old Testament, that part he should have feared, but damn if it wasn’t poetry. As the last of the fire washed over his prone body, melting away the sin to leave the beauty, Carl ‘Catastrophe’ Patterson left this mortal coil as anything but a cold motherfucker.
AALIYAH
A HOUSE FILLED to its tits by mayhem—and the means to produce it—is not a home. It’s what we had, though.
Thurgood made good on his promise. He let me hold my boy, our boy, as if it was a gift for him to give. I wasn’t sure which one of us was the child as I held Elijah. I told him I loved him. I gave him kisses and I gave him lies.
I ate the food they brought to the room they promised I wouldn’t stay in forever; eventually they realised I skipped on the bullshit that’d come on the side. Elijah did what Elijah does, and made everyone fall in love with him. I wanted to forget their humanity, though, to bleed them of it, but as is probably evident from most of the things I’ve touched on, I will ultimately fail.
I held out for a decent amount of time. The first week, I would snatch Elijah away by the arm, dragging him off if one of Colin’s hooded ‘Brotherhood’ members so much as breathed in his direction. This was, admittedly, ill-conceived; the preoccupation of pre-teens is to find all the ways their mothers are monsters. I eventually relented, slightly, knowing if one of them so much as spoke about Thurgood’s weapons, his quote-un-fucking-quote ‘mission,’ that I would show them the terror of a mother loaded up on a lifetime of punk music and three free Jiu-Jutsu classes.
They—Thurgood’s in-and-out associates—seemed to get the message. It was another week before I ventured past monosyllabic responses to their questions. While I stewed in a petty piss mood, Elijah was making new friends. The closest was Feng, who I minded the least as she rarely bothered with that ridiculous monkish robe. She wore a smock most days, when I’d watch out the window of my room in the garden out front of the house.
I’d forgotten the light for a time. I would wilt away in a room not my own, glad for the reprieve when Elijah insisted on helping Feng outside. In the moments he spent away I could stop pretending, if only for a while, to have any idea how I could protect him from the world.
Colin would come by, but his visits slowed around the second molar I relieved him of. His lackeys would try to play sweet, butter me up, to no avail. I decided if they wanted me here, they’d have me on my terms or not at all.
That was, until I heard Elijah screaming from the garden.
I bolted out the room, down the stairs, unaware of the footsoldiers trailing me for fear I was attempting my fifth escape. I didn’t even realise they were behind me until I reached the garden.
Feng had been letting a caterpillar scoot along her palm while Elijah watched in disgust. She’d smiled, but that soon faded as she saw me standing there with a knife in my hand I must have snatched on the way out from the kitchen.
“I see you’re awake, Professor Monroe,” she said, lightly dropping the caterpillar as Elijah came over to hug me tight. I watched Feng give a nod to the men who’d chased me out the house, signalling them to leave. Elijah leaned back, told me I stunk like Billy ‘Pee Pants’ Jordan, bringing one of those moments of truth when a laugh is hard to bite back.
I let my gaze weigh on her for a moment as she approached us, as if it had any power in that place.
No one had called me professor since I taught two semesters at Harlond Washington as an adjunct. More than one student commented on the vanity hire of the famed Bullet Bitch. Of course, the little shits could have been right; I fucked up too early on to say one way or another, though.
“Professor… so he has you aspiring youths doing your research on us, I see,” I said sweetly as Elijah tore away from me, remembering someone else was around to see him hugging his mom.
“Yes, although we’ve met before, professor,” s
he said, with a smile for a friend I wasn’t interested in being. “I took your class once—well, for two weeks. Realised it wouldn’t count towards my history credit, so I dropped.” As she mentioned it, I did remember her face, the crescent-shaped birthmark over her right eyebrow. I felt crummy for staring at it for a few seconds too long, the first day she popped into my class.
“Fei…?” I asked.
“Well, Feng, but I’m surprised you remembered me at all, ma’am.”
“I’m good for remembering faces. Comes in handy for attendance during lectures, police line-ups, not much else,” I returned with a diabetic sweetness.
She only smiled and nodded, looking back to her garden.
“We are growing one of our research projects here in the garden—one of mine anyway. Elijah was helping me until we came across our little friend.” She laughed, and glanced in ’Lijah’s direction. She knelt down then, to a group of lumpy tomatoes, gingerly snapping one free from the vine and bringing it to me. She dug her nails into it, red pulp staining her fingers as she bit off one half and handed me the other.
I looked down to the pulpy mess and raised a brow at her way, and she urged me on with a flutter of her eyebrows.
“You all unearthed the 23,000-year-old art of food production. What the hell was someone like you doing at a community college, Feng?” I asked, less innocently than my tone suggested as I rolled the vegetable in my hand for a moment. She smirked, waiting in silence as I took a bite. I felt everything tighten in my throat for a moment before it went down; I hadn’t eaten much since I’d arrived, just enough to stay strong, just enough to not tempt Elijah to starve himself.
It settled down through my stomach and I felt everything inside snatch at it in wanting. It only took a couple of moments to feel the effects: I felt calm, but not in a way that robbed me of myself, just the clarity of dopamine.
Feng recognised the wonder on my face and chuckled a bit.
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