Hiro neared the{Beacon} that he had once set near the building that Juan and his siblings had stayed in. He moved to the highest roof he could find, his eyes scanning the area for conflict. Once again, it was eerily quiet, like the city itself was preparing for the Spectators to join the fray.
“Maybe they all got portaled somewhere,” Bianca suggested, the shield warm against Hiro’s back. “Like you.”
“I wish there was a way for me to communicate with them.”
“You mean like hit them up on Insta? Yeah, that would be cool. But no, your phone only works as a countdown timer and for the Doom System—cough—I mean, Companion, to contact you. You didn’t get my phone, did you?”
“Why would I?”
“I don’t know. What about my hammer?”
“It vanished.” Hiro watched as Hashi sniffed at a dumpster below.
A health bar appeared and the dumpster came alive. Hashi jumped back; by this point, Hiro was already going for one of his pill bottles. He leaped down to the streets as the mimic tried to snap at Hashi.
“Get behind me!” Hiro told the demonic dog as he readied the pill bottle.
The mimic opened its big mouth and he chucked the bottle of medicine into its waiting maw.
Bianca burst out laughing. “Did you just drug a mimic?”
“Watch.” Hiro stepped back again as the mimic started to lose steam. Its jaw still snapped as it grew confused, the mimic lunging for something that wasn’t there and colliding with a street lamp. This caused the lamp to fall, its top half striking an overturned bus.
The mimic expired and Soul Essence rushed into Hiro.
“Where did you get that idea?” Bianca asked.
“I had a buddy who used to get high on pills at the warehouse I worked at,” he told her as he moved back to a smaller rooftop. “I found some pills in an apartment that hadn’t been looted and figured I’d give it a try. It worked. Later, I made some custom pill bottles with an Australian named Samuel that I partnered with. I also bought a few bottles,” he said, recalling how Love had used a microwave to 3-D print more.
“An Australian? This is the first I’m hearing of someone from Down Under.”
Hiro was just about to say something when he felt his muscles spasm. He looked down to see his hands shaking.
“You good, bro?” Bianca asked.
He immediately sat, just as Samuel had shown him. In through the nose, out through the mouth, mate, came Samuel’s voice in Hiro’s head.
Bianca spoke to him again, yet Hiro was too focused on controlling his rage to hear her. It was several minutes before he finally felt like he could retain control. “Sorry,” he said as he opened his eyes, “a side effect of my Roulette Skill.”
“You hyperventilate? That succccks.”
“No, I randomly experience rage.”
“Really? You sound like my dad. I’m kidding. He wasn’t an angry guy, or, he was when he lost money. It’s crazy how pissed off he would get over something like twenty-thousand dollars.”
Hiro’s eyes bulged a bit. He couldn’t imagine losing that much.
“Especially with several million in the bank,” Bianca added. “I know; I saw the accounts before the Doom System switched them.”
“I remember that,” Hiro told her.
As part of the Doom System’s tinkering with humanity, it attempted to solve the rich-poor divide by swapping banking and brokerage accounts, making millionaires and billionaires poor and the impoverished rich beyond their wildest dreams. As usual with the system, there was no rhyme or reason to its madness. And as usual, disaster followed.
“You never checked your account?”
“Nah,” Hiro said.
“You really were in survival mode, weren’t you?”
“I didn’t know what to make of any of it. I guess my response was to wait and see, and as the cards fell I just grew more and more accustomed to waiting.”
“But then you were forced into action once the Doom System killed all the supers and gave you a countdown timer.”
“And a katana. Yes. At that point, I really had nothing to lose.”
“And you didn’t want to die.”
“I guess not. I want… I want to make it to the end of this.” Hiro glanced up at the rowboats floating in the reddish gray sky over Manhattan. “We should go.”
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“Where?”
“I know a place,” was all he said as he whistled down to Hachi, who followed Hiro back to the Financial District, to the parking garage where his fallout shelter was located. Hopefully, Val and the others will rendezvous around here, he thought as he opened the hatch and turned to Hachi. “You can’t climb a ladder, can you, boy?”
Hachi tilted his head a little, his tail giving a little wag. The shiba inu would have looked cute had it not been for his sinewy muscles and patched fur.
“You should just climb down and see if he follows after you.”
“It’s worth a shot,” Hiro told Bianca as he took the ladder down into the shelter. He looked up to see Hachi watching him. “He could stay up there as—”
Hachi jumped into the hole, and was able to reach some of the rungs before he ultimately smacked against the ground of the fallout shelter.
“Holy shit!” Bianca said.
“You good, Hachi?” Hiro asked, mere seconds away from rushing to the dog when he remembered that Hachi wasn’t exactly friendly. Instead, he flicked on the floodlights and saw that Hachi was fine, the dog already sniffing around. “I’ll bet you like peanut butter.”
“Um, what is this place exactly?”
“It’s where I’ve been living,” Hiro told Bianca as he got some of the Survivor Tenders and covered them in peanut butter. He ate one and gave one to Hachi, who immediately took it from his hand.
“And it’s what exactly?”
“A fallout shelter.” Hiro climbed the ladder back to the top and closed the hatch. “They’re all over New York City. From the Cold War.”
“Which one was that?”
“In the 1950s. America was afraid Russians would use nuclear weapons, so fallout shelters were built across the city. You see the signs for them sometimes. They’re black and yellow, and have a strange symbol on them.”
“Those? I think I’ve seen it before.”
“You probably have without even looking for them.” Hiro prepared another Survivor Tender, which he gave to Hachi, the dog happily wolfing it down.
“And so you’ve made it your home.”
“I have.” Hiro swept his hand to the map he’d pieced together on the walls and his family shrine. “Sort of like a Ninja Turtle, I guess.”
“Hachi sort of looks like Splinter if Splinter was a rabid demon dog.”
“You saw Ninja Turtles?”
“Duh.”
“I thought you’d be too young.”
“What the fuck, Hiro? Ninja Turtles are for people of all ages, colors, shapes, and sizes. Although I always thought that last part was redundant. Don’t either shapes and/or sizes determine each other? Why do we say it like that?”
“I never thought of it that way.” He removed the shield and propped it up against a crate so he could sit across from Bianca. Hiro set his backpack down, took off what was left of his shirt, and was doing the same with his pants when he stopped. “I’m going to turn you around for a moment.”
“Of all this shit, that is what you’re worried about? I’ve seen a dude naked before.”
“TMI.”
“I’m sixteen, or was, Hiro. You act like I’m a child.”
“You technically are, even though you’re a shield now. Just hang on a second.” Hiro turned her around and Bianca laughed.
“I can still see your little butt, you know.”
Hiro changed what he could and then started to pick at what was left of the duct-tape armor, which hurt every time he pulled it off his arm hairs. I should probably wrap it around a jacket or something…
After making a mental note to get a jacket—all he had were hoodies—Hiro sat across from Bianca.
“Look at you, so cozy,” she said as he brought a blanket around his shoulders. “Your shelter reminds me of one of those super small apartments that social media realtors show people on TikTok.”
“Yeah?” Hiro was familiar with this style of content, but he didn’t know who she was referring to.
“And there’s even a shrine in here honoring your family. I had a shrine to a K-Pop band once, but it didn’t look like yours.”
Hiro glanced over to the shrine he’d made, which consisted of a few photos arranged on a piece of wood he sourced from a broken cupboard.
“What happened to your family?” she asked. “Wait, I think you told me. You don’t know.”
“I don’t.”
“And they weren’t here in New York?”
“My dad was in Kansas City; my mom in Kyoto. Grandfather too.”
“And no brothers.”
“No.”
“Okay, Mr. Quiet Pants,” Bianca said after a minute of silence had passed. “So you’re here and they’re there, or were. And you mentioned your grandfather. You two must have been close.”
“I grew up in Japan and here in America. For the first twelve years of my life I was there. Then I moved here, to Kansas City.”
“In Kansas?”
“Missouri.”
“And then you came here?”
“I did.”
“Why? I mean, sure, who doesn’t want to visit New York City, but really, it’s not that great. So why? If I were you, I just would have returned to Tokyo.”
“Kyoto, but I spent time in Tokyo as well.”
“Why here?”
“I had a friend who got accepted to NYU. I moved in with him once his roommate moved out.”
“Okay, you still haven’t answered why.”
“That’s a complicated question. For one, I felt stuck. Because of my move, I wasn’t really used to living in America. It took me several years, and by then I was in high school, and I just never really found my way. I guess. I was always too apprehensive to take risks, something I learned, I guess, from my time in Japan. So I took the strangest risk of my life up until that point. I moved here on a whim, as in, I gave less than three days’ notice to everyone I knew.”
“You? Risk averse? Says the same man who recently jumped off a building and tossed a bottle of pills into a dumpster mimic’s mouth.”
“The Doom System has changed all of us.”
“I feel like there’s a bit more to your story…”
“Isn’t there always?”
“Ugh, such a copout answer, Big Brother.”
“It’s the truth. I think I’m going to sleep now. Good night. Or good morning, I have no idea.” Hiro glanced over to Hachi, who had found a place in a corner. “Good night, Hachi.”
Bianca laughed once Hachi got up and casually approached Hiro.
“Yes, you can sleep near me,” he told the dog as the exhaustion hit him. He had felt this before after a bout of rage. As Hachi got comfortable next to him, Hiro brought himself into a ball, ready to disappear from the world for a few hours. “Don’t wake me up,” he told Bianca. “Not unless we’re being attacked.”