I kept thinking about asking Meagan, my old nurse, out for that egg creme. Then I’d remember how even though I looked half my age now, half my age was still nearly twice hers. Still, a man can dream…
Then I remembered the dream. The dream I’d just had about our best heist ever. The one where we’d gotten ourselves a good, cool mil, and frozen The One literally in his tracks as we made our getaway.
I looked at my reflection in the mirror. My hair was black again, only a couple of gray hairs visible. I’d never been a large man, but after seeing myself as a crippled little wizened old gnome for the better part of the last decade, having my back straight again with pulled-back shoulders made me look [to me] like Charles atlas, the guy in all the bodybuilder ads in the comics way back when.
I looked at myself in the mirror until I got tired of it and then quietly left the bathroom. The clock said it was 5:13 a.m. You wake up earlier and earlier on your own when you get old. But now I wasn’t just waking up- I was getting up full of vim and vigor. I was waking up feeling like I could take on the Alliance of Virtue- the Airman, the Champion, Aces & Eights and BlackJack, and whoever else was going through the revolving door that week.
Heck, I felt like I could paste one on The One himself and come out alive. It'd turned out that poor little Mitch hadn't killed off The One after all; the big green goofball'd fine after he'd thawed out, so the caped world hadn't gone all Wrath 'O' God on us in the end. His alleged kid, Primus, was doing the rounds of Earth now that his dad had gone home, or something like it. Maybe I could give kiddo a sock on the jaw too an' see what happened!
I went back to the room I’d been given. I could hear others rustling, and I wanted to show I could be first. First to breakfast, first to the meetings, first to get the job done, whatever the job was and however it needed to be done.
I was feeling so good, in fact, that I even opened up and read the little prayer book someone had thoughtfully put at my bedside table. After a couple minutes of that I went down to the kitchen where I could already hear pans, plates, glasses and spatulas softly clinking against each other.
I crept past quietly. Jane was in there, an apron on as she mixed flour and whatnot into bowls, laid bacon out on pans to broil in the oven and began boiling water for grits in bowls.
I’ll eat the bacon- I’m not that Jewish, - but I’m sorry, I just can’t choke down grits, cream of wheat, or oatmeal. Stuff like that was something Ma made on the rare occasions I’d made her super-pissed at me for about a week on end.
I made my way to the living room. The couches are wide and soft, but the room was kept very, very cool to ensure that we didn’t fall asleep when we had our meetings here. We’ve had three since Jane gathered almost all of us here, now two days ago.
I flopped down and looked at the wall. Jane or someone else had bolted a great, big whiteboard to it. A projector sat nearby, set up in the perfect position to light up the board. Sweet…
#
The night wind howled at this height, covering up the screams of his captive.
“Are you ready to communicate now?” he asked, the vocal distorter on his jaw dropping his voice by an octave and making sound like he was speaking through a jar of mud.
“I can’t! I can’t! He’ll know it’s me, and he’ll kill me and everyone I care about!”
“Chuckie, I’ve been watching you for weeks now. Following you as you drive around the bus stations, combing the meat market district, looking for victims you say you’ll help but then exploit. You try to engage my sympathies, Chuckie. But I don’t have any. Not for someone who sells children to predators like they were tacos to hungry factory workers.”
He hung over the lip of the roof, looking at his victim, tied by his hands and feet hanging upside down.
“The name of your boss, Chuckie. And I let you go. You get out of the city, and you can start over.”
“You know what happens to snitches? To capes who go against these guys? I saw him take some asshole like you, had a mask and a gun. He got stabbed, tazed, and fed to a bunch of pigs. They ate him alive, man! I still can hear the bones crunching!”
“I’ll worry about that. Feel that pressure on your head, Chuckie? Last guy I did this to was dead in twenty minutes. After ten, it really didn’t matter. He was screaming, and no one heard him. Just like no one will hear you now. You’ve got maybe two minutes left before your vessels burst, and you’ll spend the last minutes of your worthless, miserable life with immeasurable pain, worse than the worst hangover you’ve ever had. But I can make it stop, Chuckie. Just give me my next lead.”
Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.
“Warehouse, 5th and Edison. Has some ad outside for some vegetable company. That’s where we took the kids every week after they got cleaned up and fed. Guy who took them in was Asian. Never talked. Red leather jacket and dark sunglasses. Gave me the money, took the kids and I left.”
“See? That wasn’t so hard, was it Chuckie?”
Chuckie felt the cords on his feet tug as he was pulled up onto the roof. He screamed more as the concrete lip of the roof dug into his bloated, cheeseburger-fed belly.
Chuckie felt another tug as the cords were cut. He gasped and began rubbing his wrists and ankles to restore the circulation to them.
“Jesus fucking Christ,” he mubled, “there’s a thousand guys like me in the whole goddam city, and I’ve gotta be the one that The Dark has to go after. Shit.”
He stood up and looked around, his considerable bulk twitching as he jumped at every minor noise and scuttling sound.
Shit. Now he had to get home and find some way of getting out of town before sunrise. There was an ATM that would give out four or five hundred bucks at a time. It was a ways away, and he didn’t have money for a taxi or anything. But maybe he could hike it? No, not with the kind of strain his body put on his legs. He looked out over the rooftops of the city. Maybe if he-
The kick in his back came out of nowhere. He fell forward, and over the lip of the concrete ledge. Screaming louder than ever before, he dropped the twenty-five stories to the street. The drop took less than five seconds. If he’d hit the ground, he’d have splattered outwards like an overripe pumpkin.
But he didn’t finish the drop. A streak of blue and white blitzed out the night, snatching the overweight goon. The blurr slowed slightly as its new burden weighed it down, but only for a moment. In less than a second it was flying at full speed again, up and out to one of the more lit up buildings.
After maybe thirty seconds, the blurr emerged from the lit building and charged towards the building Chuckie had fallen/been pushed from. Chuckie’s former interrogator, almost his executioner, stood on the edge of the building and looked down at where his latest victim had almost met his end. Out of the corner of his eye he saw the approaching streak of light as it zipped high above the cityscape. Within seconds he heard the familiar sound of a pair of booted feet touch down softly on the roof a dozen feet behind him.
“You’re still a showoff, Jason,” The Dark said.
“You could try interrogating one of these lowlifes and letting him live after you get what you’re after, Henry. I know you drop them just to get me frustrated when I have to save them.”
“He was trafficking kids. Even a red-white-and-blue boy scout like the great Primus must get tempted to pop one of these sleezeballs off a roof now and again.
“Tempted, yes. But I don’t do it.”
“No. You don’t want to get your hands dirty. So you drop them off in a police station, even though you know every little County jail skell is gonna put a shiv in between his ribs inside of a week of him getting locked up.”
“That’s on the skells then, Dark. Not on me.”
“What do you want, Jason?”
“Just checking in to see how the city’s terror of lowlife criminals is getting on. Even The Dark has to open up sometime.”
The Dark turned away from the edge and glared at his unwanted teammate. Jason had been Primus [long ‘i’, don’t forget] for over a decade, zipping around the city in a red-white-and-blue striped skintight costume while he grabbed purse snatchers, beat up giant robots and helped kittens out of trees.
The Dark did things differently.
“I don’t need you checking up on me, boy scout. Why don’t you go try on a set of gladiator sandals with your girlfriend?”
“Henry . . .”
“Don’t call me that! I am The D-”
“Henry! Look, I have enough to do keeping this city safe from scum like fat Chuckie. I know Flavia doesn’t much care if these lowlifes take a long walk off a building’s edge after you’re finished with them, and the cops don’t care either. I mean, look at what Flavia does to those serial rapists she catches these days, and she says it’s all under Juno’s orders.
“But aside of the legal fallout, the people will cheer us today for doing that, but they might kill us tomorrow for the same thing. Henry, we run around playing dress-up and doing civilian arrests. We’re different and we know it. But both Flavia and I are worried you may overstep your boundaries and do this to someone who doesn’t deserve a highdive. You come anywhere near that, and one of us is going to truss you up and hang you out to dry. Understood?”
“Are you threatening me, Jason?”
“Is it working? You just just keep your nose clean, wherever you hide it under that mask of yours.”
“You know, Jason, just because your daddy was The One doesn’t mean you get to run the world. He figured out that the world’s got a habit of eating its heroes these days.”
“You’re trying to bait me into doing something. It’s not gonna work. Leave my dad out of this. Yeah, I have daddy issues. Flavia has Mommy issues, and you? Well-”
“I’m done, Jason.”
“Fine. Meeting tomorrow, at seven. Be there or Flavia or I will find you and drag you to it.”
Primus flew up and away without giving The Dark a chance to answer.
“Stupid, Flag-waving...” The Dark mumbled under his breath, finishing with a number of other epithets designed to question Primus' masculinity. He waited for a few seconds after, knowing Jason had heard him. mildly upset that he'd chosen to ignore the comment, Henry unfolded his cape and took a long glide off the building back to his vehicle.
It was going to be a long night.
#