Delinquent
2 weeks had passed since the last meeting. I was sitting down on a nice couch in the fairly luxurious midtown apartment, Leader was in front of me, with a rollable whiteboard, and was wearing glasses, for some reason. I absolutely didn’t love the man, as I had apparently said after Patience took me out drinking, but I could admit he had earned my respect. That didn’t change how weird he could be sometimes.
He took a piece of chalk out and wrote at the top of the board. “Plotting and scheming 101” Guard was standing next to him as always. It seemed like the rest of the group was a little freaked out by Guard, but I liked em. The imposing man was consistent, only talked if he needed to, and was generally a chill guy. Leader spoke up looking at me.
“All right Delinquent. Since you’re going to be running on your own, I intend to teach you the general methods of planning.” Leader wrote down the names of the members of the Theatre of Pain on the board, himself included. “The first step is to know your tools.” He then wrote “abilities” under each name. “Now, you’ve run with everyone in missions, can you tell me everyone’s abilities?” He pointed to Guard first.
I’ve seen Guard use his ability, but it was weird, he wasn’t sure what it did exactly. “Uhm, I know he can manipulate the materials he touched to make walls and cover, but I think it has a limitation I don’t know what though.” Leader nodded before writing down what he had said in bullet points under Guard's name. He then pointed to Tech.
“She’s a bit confusing, and also a bit of a jerk, but I’m pretty sure it has something to do with the way she thinks about things like she’s always thinking about blueprints and designs no matter what.” Leader nodded once more and wrote it down once more, moving on to Patience.
I’ve spent the most time with Patience, due to his weird connection with me, and I end up dragging him from place to place to get out of the house every now and again. I liked him, he was weird though. “His power relates to perception for sure, I remember having to be his spotter only to have him keep pointing out things he shouldn’t have been able to see before giving me crap about not telling him. Given the fact his eyes go completely black when he does it, I’m assuming he loses his ability to see normally when he uses it.”
“Great job! One left now.” As Leader pointed to his name on the board. Ah, that was a lot harder. I had been looking, I’ve been genuinely trying to figure it out since the first moment we met. But I’ve got genuinely no clue. I gave it my best guess though.
“Some sort of intelligence boosting effect? Or something like aim assisting?” Leader made a buzzing noise with his mouth.
“Incorrect! The right answer was.” Leader stopped and wrote under his name, his body blocking me from being able to see what he had written until he turned back to me. “Nothing!”
“What?! Y-you? B-but you’re so good at all this stuff?”
“I am! But I’m good because I use my head, not because I was born with power. I know it can be hard to remember, especially in this day and age where almost everyone can do some weird voodoo stuff but powerless doesn’t mean weak, even now not a lot of people are bulletproof, it really doesn’t take much to end a life, and I’m plenty good with a gun. This is also an important lesson. It’s easy to get trapped in answering the wrong questions. You became convinced I had a power and tried to answer that question instead of first proving I had one.” I shrunk in on myself a little. Aaagh! I was so dumb! “But! Your way of doing things was also intelligent, you worked under the worst-case assumption that had you been facing me, that my power makes me smarter or makes me a good shot, both of which would make me a hard fight to win. You're a smart kid Delinquent, and in the event, something happens to all of us, I want you to be able to handle yourself.”
“I won’t let that happen! If something goes wrong I’m sinking with the ship!” Despite my declaration of loyalty, Leader walked over and smacked me on the head. “Hey!”
“Don’t be dumb. If you think you have a chance of freeing us, I won’t argue with that, but don’t die for the sake of dying. We as an organization, don’t stand for anything, in particular, there’s no grand message for you to die over, so don”t bother. Just survive, keep living.”
“This speech is setting up so many death flags for the next mission.” Leader let out a chuckle before walking back to the board.
“You’ll find that everything you say before a mission sounds like a death flag. Now then, if you were going to run this next mission, what would you do with the tools you have in hand, yourself included.” I felt a bit uncomfortable referring to them as tools, but I got the point.
“The base is underground, so realistically Patience won’t be that much help if he remains on sniper duty, and he’d be left out to fight any cops or Powered on his own. I think giving him a different weapon, if we can ever pry Snippy from his hands, and bringing him to watch our backs would be the best plan. Especially considering how good he is at checking corners.” Leader nodded and wrote “rear guard.” Under Patience.
“Tech should obviously remain at base, I won’t pretend I know how hacking and stuff works but if she could just remain on call to help us out with any technical stuff that would be great.” Tech, “support”
“You, are a bit weird, but having you pull some kind of detraction for the upper floors so they don’t notice anything wrong would be good, play like you’re a bigwig from the security company and inform them that you’d be running a few security tests and not to worry if they heard any strange sounds or alarms. Though if an alarm triggers, you should get out fast, because that probably means reinforcements are coming.” Leader, "distraction"
“Guard would let us in thanks to how much he looks like a typical security guard. He’d just need me in a trash bag then we can pretend we got another one, ideally, we can have Patience track down the van and take them out before jacking it and returning with it.” Guard “The in” And Delinquent “pretend to be captured (classic)”
“How was that!” I yelled out. I thought my plan was pretty good.
“A good first take! But with a few flaws. First, if I were to talk to the people on the upper floors it would run the risk of them being able to profile us as a group or even just me. We’ve survived in part due to the fact no one can pin our crimes on our group. Next, regarding the van, patience is fast, but he can’t outrun a car, and since we don’t know where the people are going we won”t be able to intercept them. And finally, Guard working in a disguise relies on a lot of assumptions, the foremost one being that there isn’t a way of identifying or just them remembering the group that went in the van.”
I opened my mouth to argue but no words came out. Everything he had said was true after all. “Then how would you do it?”
“Patience works with Tech and hits the van with a tracking device. From there, I and Guard follow them in our car, find where they stop, then take them out while figuring out exactly what it is they’re doing. Then we can do the same swap with you, with me, Guard, and Patience all acting as the crew. A bit of help regarding facial prosthetics from Tech will be needed, and Patience is, unfortunately, going to need to spend a few more days on that roof surveying the situation, putting together profiles on the underground workers, and figuring out what’s going on. Then we can put together a more coherent plan.”
I let out an annoyed huff. “If we needed more info, what was the point of asking me!” Leader gave me another small whack on the head.
“The point was for you to realize we need more info. Patrol patterns, check-in codes, methods of identification, frequency of the van, whatever that thing is actually doing or taking, the internal composition of the base. We don’t know all of these things. The base of your plan is good, and if we only had a few days to pull it off then it would be the best, but we have time to kill and we should take it. Take a cue from Patience, and wait.”
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I let out a low growl, not wanting to admit I was wrong despite knowing I was. It was just so frustrating, I knew I was lacking in info but didn’t even realize asking to wait was an option. “That’s cheating!” Leader let out a laugh.
“No such thing as playing fair in this business kid. You either think outside the box or find yourself sentenced to life in a cell. Calm down, for your age it’s a really good plan.” A flair of anger ran through me.
“But I’m better than my age! I need to be better than my age!”
“You need to survive.”
“No! I want more than just living! That’s what I did in the lab, was survive. I want to have something.” Frustrated tears started running down my face. Damn my emotions and loose tear ducts. “You guys have finally offered me something to have! A place! A people! I-I’m not going to lose it all just because I want a few more years to kick around and mope!” I calmed down from my outburst as Leader looked down calmly at me, face even but gentle, reminding me of the first time we met.
“I understand that feeling. We all do. Have I ever told you why I formed this group?” I shook my head, not wanting to speak as tears were still streaming despite my attempts at willing them to stop. “The Theatre of Pain, it’s a phrase to describe a type
Of storytelling, a story in which the characters, in an attempt to connect them to the audience, go through an immense amount of pain and suffering. I was left on the streets as a child, had nothing, no one, and didn’t trust foster care. Eventually, I helped out Guard.” Leader nodded to the stoic man, who had since placed a hand on my shoulder. I forgot he was even here.
“Then I helped Patience, then Tech, then you. We are all here because we had nothing. But you need to remember that there is more out there than what you have now. It’s ok to be content, it’s not ok to die for the things you have at the moment.”
“S-so what? I should just leave you all for dead if the situation arrives?”
“Yes. You should.”
“Would you leave me behind? Or Guard? Or Patience?”
“Err, well, that’s a little, different…” I rubbed my red eyes laughing.
“No, it isn’t. Admit it! You’re a hypocrite.” Leader let out another sigh.
“I’m an old man.”
“You’re like 27!”
“Ancient. I’ve got no time left, my future is set to be stuck with these guys. You can have more, should have more, Than just us old-timers.”
“Nope! I like all, you old people!” Leader let out a chuckle.
“Let’s move on, all this talk about death will leave a bad taste in my mouth.”
Leader
The morgue. It had to be the morgue, didn’t it? Because why wouldn’t the shadowy organization head to the morgue to pick up dead bodies? Running the various bodies through different simulations led to the discovery that all of the people dug up were people who reportedly had no ability, which, for me, was mildly concerning.
I was standing on the outside of the facility, the van seemed to come roughly every week and it was scheduled to come today as well. And predictably it did so today as well. I watched as the sketchy van pulled into the driveway of the facility and two obviously military personnel walked out in casual clothes.
It wasn’t hard to read military, too focused on protocol, no regular person shines a shoe that much, or wears a ridiculous haircut that short. And the constant glancing at exits was obvious enough to make Delinquent look like a master con artist. I rolled my eyes watching them before making my way to the van as the two walked into the morgue. Chances were someone was left to guard the van, from the inside of course.
I walked past pretending that I was merely passing by when I saw movement in the rearview mirror. 2 people, each doing something on a computer. I didn’t stop my step as I touched a spot in the car where one of the people was.
I watched a red laser appear in the exact place I pointed and pull a silenced pistol of my own, walking up to the van's backdoor. “Fire.” I knocked on the door waiting a few moments for it to open, as my already leveled gun aimed and shot the man I saw in front of me, feeling the familiar recoil of a pistol and the light but not truly silent thunk sound that the silenced pistol made. The second man's eyes widened, still seated where he was, before the metal of the van’s exterior was pierced and a bullet ripped through his head at the same time. I clicked my earpiece.
“Confirmed. Good shooting.”
“I try.”
I picked up the bloodied laptop from the lap of the man Patience killed. It was a list of names, I took a picture and sent it to the secured chat the team used to talk. Then I tiptoed over to the body of the man I killed, looting his belongings, a keycard, and a badge, right where they should be.
“Guard, come on in. We’re waiting for two to come back but they’ll be easy work.” And like clockwork, my loyal companion was sitting in the blood-soaked interior of the van with me.
After a few minutes of waiting, we heard grumbling from the outside and a voice shouted at us. “A little help out here?” I nodded to Guard and he placed his hand on the exterior of the van. We could vaguely make out the image of two people carrying a body that was wrapped in a trash bag. They got close enough that they were both waiting just outside the car when without warning Guard activated his power, the van’s door shifting from its previous shape to now include two sharp metal spikes sticking out where two people’s heads used to be.
“Brutal.” I clicked my comm. “Patience, Delinquent. The van is clear, head on in. I’ll start cleaning.” Guard walked out and got into the driver's seat as we started heading to a preset meeting point as I started to spray a special chemical cleaner onto the van’s interior. It cost a pretty penny on the black market but it worked like a charm. We stopped to toss the bodies into a dumpster at the end of the street. They’d be found but we keep our fingerprints off.
It was infiltration time. Patience had remained scouting the building for around a week straight now. The checkpoints were guarded by two uniformed individuals who had keycards specific to the individuals. With the 4 we killed granting us 4 cards to use, which should get us deeper than Patience had been able to scout through, the plan from there was improvisation.
The van skidded to a stop and I threw the doors open to allow the remainder of our raiding party into the van. Delinquent looked to be hyping himself up but was jittering with anxiety. Patience walked in with his regular tired but smug face before taking a seat down on the side of the van.
We rode in silence for a period before Patience spoke up.
“Hey… You ever think we go a little far with the killing? Like, we don’t really know if those guards deserved to die.” That was strange. Patience rarely had doubts like that. I looked over at him and noticed him staring at the bullet hole his round left in the side of the van. I spoke as a leader should to dissuade him from pursuing that line of thought.
“They might not have, it’s not our place to judge or condemn. We aren’t a vigilante crew, we just need to survive. Those guys needed to die so we could survive, simple as that.”
“I-Yeah, yeah I guess so.” I leveled him with a curious look.
“What's gotten into you all of a sudden?”
“I guess it's just, I don’t know man. How much blood is too much you know? Like, how many people do we need to kill before we can guarantee we’re safe, or was there another way all along we missed?”
“No point wondering now. Anyone who could catch us would be a millionaire, safe to say I don’t think there’s a peaceful way out now.”
“Sure, but remember all that stuff you told me earlier? About the past catching up? Isn’t that what we’re doing now, setting up a past that’ll bite us in the ass.”
“What's the alternative? If we don’t succeed in this mission then Del won’t be able to use his power without shredding his hands. If Del can’t properly use his power then he’s in danger of dying in a serious firefight. We need the data and materials this place has, they don’t want us to have it, simple as that.”
“Guess you’re right. Just a shame, I mean, I’ve got more blood on my hands than I can remember.” Patience shot a side-eye at Delinquent at that, only for a second but enough that I could catch it. I let out a sigh.
“We’ll avoid killing if we can but sometimes it's a necessity. That was a lesson we all learned the hard way.” Even Guard grimaced at that thought. A first kill is something no one can forget, It’s something all of us have ingrained in our minds and dreams. It’s easy to exist in a constant, animalistic fight for survival when you’re a criminal. That state keeps you from remembering everything, it moves the unnecessary out of the way so you can focus on the present. But every now and again, something will slip through the cracks. A face, a bloodied photograph, a red-stained lab coat. I know I’m not the only one with that problem.
“Yeah. Yeah ok. So, did I really have to leave Snippy behind for this?” I let out a small laugh.
“Yes, yes you did.”