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“So, this is how they got to be the way they are,” said Doublestash, still recording Shadow and Shadowee in the hangar. There was a buzzing sound. “Oh, sorry kids, one sec.” Doublestash took the banana-phone tucked in his apron-belt and pressed “the button.”
“Yeah?”
“Hey, Serge, I’m all the way in the back, and even from here I can tell you’re ugly as hell! Hahaha!”
“Why, you...” He got a close shot of Serverboy standing in the back, smirking and waving. “Tch... Wait till I get ya...” He pulled out a whistle (which he wore on a lanyard tucked below his apron) and blew into it. “Alright kids, time to have our first lesson.” He signaled the others to come.
The whole scene gave you the impression of leaving a school gym. What you could see through the hand-held shakiness of Doublestash’s camera work was them leaving the hangar, test area, or whatever the hell you want to call it, and entering a narrow hallway with thick yellow stripes with number-letter combos like “A2” and arrows pointing here and there. Now it was much more like a lab or a military base.
“Fun time is over,” said Doublestash, panning the cam on the students following in his footsteps like ducklings. “If that was ‘fun time,’ I don’t wanna know what time is next,” said Serverboy.
Doublestash opened a door and walked in. It was a classroom. It looked like one anyway. “Deja-vu,” said Shadow and Shadowee as they filed in. “You know,” said Serverboy, “I didn’t drop out of school just so I can be in one again... That was kinda the point.”
“Kid,” said Doublestash, “you’re not a delinquent anymore... You’re a delinquent hunter! And to be a delinquent hunter, you gotta learn how to do it!”
“School has done me more damage than all delinquents combined.”
“Come on, don’t say that... I need this job.” Doublestash saw that Shadow and Shadowee had not taken their seats. Serverboy had plopped down on the seat nearest to the door, in the front. Shadow and Shadowee started for the back. “Hey!” said Doublestash. “No sitting in the back! I need your full attention here.” They came to the front, and stood before the middle desk.
“My brother wants to sit in the back, Serge,” they said.
“Shadow... If your brother jumps into a lake, will you jump in too?”
They gave him the death stare. “AHAHAHAHA!” Doublestash zoomed in on their faces. “Now, why the long face?” He paused. “Or, should I say, faces?! Ohohohoho!”
“I’m sorry,” consoled Serverboy. “You’re in for a lifetime supply of shadow jokes... He will never stop.”
The victims sighed. “We figured.”
Doublestash finally put the camera down and began scribbling things on the whiteboard. “You already know that delinquent hunters are former delinquents themselves... That’s how you got to be here.” He smiled and gestured at them. He was a very gesticulate speaker. And he spoke in an enthusiastic, reassuring manner. “And here is where you get to make it right... Atone for your sins, that sort of thing. That’s why as former delinquents, your job is one thing and one thing only: to stop current delinquents from being like you used to be... No offense.”
“None taken,” said Serverboy.
“Delinquent hunters work in 16 different details, strewn all across the city. These we call ... ‘squads.’ And every squad has their own ‘stable.’ Now a stable ... is where we hang out, train, wait for jobs to roll in, that sort of thing... Think of it like, uhm, a club house! Can even crash on the sofa if you like... No one’s gripe.”
“Can we order pizza?” asked Serverboy.
“Kid, you can order the Eiffel tower for all I care. Now...”
He was hard at work drawing up a rough map of the city: the four squares, and the four squares within the squares, the Greek letters in the squares, the directions, the Equator, the four tower-like structures encircling the middle, the circle around the origin, the pink dots, the whole nine yards.
“Perfect City is broken down into 16 squares, or quadrants. This thick line right here is what we call ‘The Equator.’" He drew his black sharpie across the Equator.
"Now, here’s some human geography for ya. Rich fucks live above the Equator, while poor fucks live below the Equator. Rich fucks, poor fucks. Get it?” He gave a visual with his sharpie to make it easier to follow where the rich fucks and the poor fucks were. “And look, I know you learned this stuff in school, but just in case all the dope got to Serverboy’s already faltering brain...”
“Pfft. Just because we’re ... we used to be delinquents, don’t mean we messed with drugs,” said Serverboy. Shadow and Shadowee nodded. “Thank you!” he said.
“Well ... did you?” asked Doublestash.
Serverboy took the fifth for a while. Then he groaned and said, “L-let’s move on... Come on, don’t you have some things to explain?” Shadow and Shadowee sighed.
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“Now, for each of these directions, North-West, South-West, North-East, South-East, there are 4 squares. You see?” He circled over the four squares of each direction. “16 squares in total, 16 squads. Go figure... Now, what do we call 4 of these squares taken together?” Shadow and Shadowee raised their hands. “Yes?”
“Districts!”
“That’s right! For example, this is the North-West district.” He circled the sharpie over North-West. “And what about each individual square?”
“A town!”
“Yes. You can also call them neighborhoods or sub-districts, though.”
“So we are responsible for one neighborhood.”
“Exactly. Speaking of which, who wants to tell me which neighborhood we’ll be responsible for?” Shadow and Shadowee had their hands up. “Mmmm...” Doublestash scanned the room and swept it with his hand. He passed right over Shadow and Shadowee. “Mmmmmmm—Serverboy!”
“Tch.” Serverboy walked out to the board and circled around North-West beta.
“Correct! We’ll be stationed at Second Best.”
“By the way, why the hell is it called ‘Second Best?’”
“Because it’s the second richest and most successful town in the city ... after Old Hope.” He tapped on North-West alpha. Old Hope made you think of the giant golden goldfish water-spitter fountain stationed on the square before the entrance doors of Different High.
“Isn’t that where that school is?” He began snapping his fingers to help remember. “Like, the one for delinquents?”
“Yeah, for green-collars. High schoolers, to be specific.”
“Green-collars?”
“We’ll get to it.”
“And what’s with the weird scribbly things?”
“Greek letters. Alpha, beta, delta, gamma.” He tapped the letters in N-W. “They’re the same four letters in every district. They’re basically just military code...” He picked up two A4 papers off the table, and handed one to Serverboy. “We’re gonna role-play ADM communication. Here, your cue.”
Serverboy cleared his throat and got to reading the script. “North-West platoon, squad beta to North-West, do you copy?”
“Let me stop you right there.” He went to the blackboard. “See these pink dots?” He tapped on each of the pink dots over the origin of each district, where the lines of each districts met. “These are the four main bases of the ADM. Now each squad belongs to one of the four platoons. And each platoon has one main base.” He put up fingers to communicate that.
“So one platoon has four squads, the squads in that district,” said the siblings, and tapped the four letters in N-W, the boy tapping beta and delta, the girl alpha and gamma.
“Exactly! You guys are quick on the uptake!”
“Yo! Can I get some credit here too?”
The credit expired from Doublestash’s face. “You keep reading.”
“Asshole,” Serverboy whispered and kept reading. “North-West platoon, squad beta to North-West, do you copy?”
“North-West, yes we copy. We need you for an emergency!”
“What’s the emergency?”
“It’s Serverboy! He’s been peeling his banana for much too long, and it’s going brown! We need you to get him a girlfriend!”
“It’s not brown!” It took him a sec to recuperate. “Hey! This is not even in the script!”
“I improvised.” Doublestash collected the paper from Serverboy as the siblings laughed.
“I’ll get you, old man!”
“Those four towers,” said the siblings, “they’re the 4 Legs of Power, right?” They meant the four tower-like structures encircling the origin of the whole map.
“What the hell are those anyway?”
Doublestash sighed. “You really wanna get serious?”
“Always am.”
Doublestash took the fifth for a few seconds, then talked. “What is power?” He paused, dramatically. “Power is the weight we carry on our shoulders every second of every day, every day of every month, and every month of every year... We carry all that society has foisted on us.” He paused again. “Have you ever convinced yourself that something was true ... a conviction you thought was rock solid ... impenetrable ... but then you found that society disapproved of it ... and then thought you were crazy?” Again he paused. “Don’t you find it strange ... that no state has ever hung a criminal because they agreed with him? That they hung him even if he was right?!” He sighed. “And for the stupidest reasons...” Pause. “It doesn’t matter... If you gotta have faith, you gotta have sin.” Pause. “And what is a criminal but somebody who disagrees with society? A sane person, somebody who watches the world through the eyes of society?” Pause. “Because your eyes are not your own ... they’re like the eyes of a snail when a nasty, brutish parasite bores through its slimy skin... Then, the eyes watch but don’t see.” Pause. “Because they don’t carry their own weight... They carry the weight of the parasite.” Pause. “And the parasite wears ‘em down till they give in to the pressure... The cumulative weight ... of the parasite.”
Now the room was silent as the hills. Doublestash came to and resumed the 101, now in high spirits. “Oh, yeah, the 4 Legs... The Board of Education, the Church, The Monarchy, and the ADM Headquarters...” He first pointed, now with his finger, at the structure in S-W beta, then at N-E gamma, then at N-W delta, then at S-E alpha. He cut himself short and turned around. “Shadow ... you follow?” The siblings had their palms in their faces.
Doublestash had the teacher’s desk shoved to the window side, and the kids were gathered in the front, leaning against their tables, like there was a campfire between them and Doublestash. They were like glue already, the four of them.
“And what about the Origin?” Doublestash shuddered at the thought. “This one.” He took the sharpie and whirled it over the circle at the origin of the whole map, where the lines of the four districts met.
“We know it’s the circle. What we don’t know is what it does.”
“Isn’t that where they play those games every year? Like, when they go up a tower, and they gotta clear each level? It’s pretty gnarly.”
Doublestash flitted in. “That’s a conspiracy theory! It’s nothing more than a stupid game show played up for TV. That’s all that it is.”
“I don’t know, chief, looks pretty real to me... People die... Apparently, the government’s gnarly hand is behind it... They kidnap people, delinquents, and force their friends or family to save them. It’s like a human sacrifice thing.”
“Shut your trap!” Doublestash slammed the whiteboard. The sound reverberated. The kids winced.
“Nobody knows what happens in that tower except for the folks who work in that tower... What makes you think you know better?”
Something had gotten into Doublestash... A dark aura hovered about him, and his eyes glowed in white. Serverboy swallowed. He was being mad-dogged to hell. Then Doublestash came to, and got to sandpapering the side of his forehead. Then he smiled like nothing had just happened.
“Listen ... what I said about society, I didn’t mean it... I ... ignited your imaginations, that’s all. Heh... I’m sure nothing happens in that tower. Society is fine, it’s just all we hear are bad news... Well, sorry I went off on you.” He wasn’t very convincing. He was bobbing his head left and right, sucking in his lower lip, grasping for straws as he stammered through his speech. The kids just stood there, watching him incredulously. There was an awful silence.
Doublestash bobbed his head and sucked in his lower lip for some extra painful seconds, then spoke with a sigh. “All right... I think it’s about time we wrap this up.” He clapped his hands. “No point going too deep with a shard. I don’t wanna have to explain everything again.”
“A shard?” asked the siblings.
“A full squad is made of 12 soldiers. When we have less than 12, we call that a shard.”
“So we need more members,” said Serverboy, now in high spirits.
Doublestash smirked. “Let’s go recruit them!”