Volume 2: Prophase

Issue 2: Cleanup

Jannette Adrian Churchwell

By Nova

“Stitch!” a gravelly voice shouted, shaking me from my thoughts. I turned and saw a familiar face; a copper-toned man of average height, with short, almost buzzed, black hair. He wore a distinctive long-coat—with a new blue tie—though I knew he’d discard the coat once summer came around. Inspector Ramirez, one of my few… contacts on the SFPD. “Funny seeing you here,” he said.

“Ramirez, h-hi!” I said, a little surprised. Most officers didn’t know me personally, only by reputation, which made interacting with them a little easier. Ramirez though… we’d worked together for four years now, though it had been months since I’d seen him last. Nonetheless, he was probably the only cop who knew what I was like under the mask. Maybe not my identity, but the “real” me all the same.

Which was deeply embarrassing, of course.

Ramirez surveyed the battlefield. “What the hell happened here?” he asked. “Three shooters, four victims… did you run into a mugging gone wrong or what?”

“I don’t know,” I quietly admitted, shuffling over to one of the gangsters I hadn’t healed yet. It wasn’t difficult to fix the damage I had done and, as an additional measure, I replaced the cells that had died without the flowing oxygen. I still had to act fast, cops were slapping cuffs on them all and I wanted to make sure I healed them before they got hauled off. “I got here after the fighting ended, tried to patch up the losers but…”

“Fighting?” Ramirez said.

“Yeah… this wasn’t a mugging, o-or at least I don’t think so?”

“Well, what was it then?” Ramirez asked, a note of irritation in his voice.

“I think it was an ambush,” I said.

“Why? Who are these guys?”

I ran over to the nearest one, who laid face down in a pool of his own blood. A cop stood over him, taking pictures. After I squeezed past the cameraman, I crouched next to the body. I grabbed his wrist and rotated it upwards, revealing a tattoo; a small pine tree. “First Way,” I said to Ramirez, “S-sorry, by the way…” I said to the other cop.

The cop raised his eyebrow at me and I quickly retreated away from the body and back toward Ramirez. “Did you see that on all of them?” he asked me.

I nodded. “Once I knew what to look for…”

“Any survivors?”

“One,” I said, a little ashamed. “Not my best work…”

“Maybe not,” Ramirez said with a shrug. “But you bagged some living perps on both sides, doesn’t always turn out that way, you know?”

“I guess…” The cops hauled off the last gangster—his body mangled by my power—into the back seat of one of the cop cars. I ran over and, with a touch, his body shifted back into place, mending his muscles and undoing the damages.

“Anything else you can tell us?” Ramirez asked.

“I don’t thin- oh, wait!” I suddenly remembered the escapee. “In the fight one scrambled away.” I went red and pointed in the direction he had run. “Sorry… but I really needed to make sure the First Way guys weren’t dead…”

Ramirez frowned. “How long ago was this?”

“A-about a minute or two or three?”

Ramirez pulled out his radio. “Put an APB out for a Los Reales gangster.” He looked at me expectantly.

“Uh, uh, oh, uh, early twenties… Hispanic… five foot seven-ish? Wearing what these guys are wearing.”

Ramirez parroted that back into the radio. “And he might be close, last seen leaving York to travel west on Eighteenth.” He clipped the radio back down. “Anything else I should know?”

“They… they were looking for something,” I said, softly.

“What?”

“I don’t know…” I said. “They weren’t in the mood to talk to me.”

Ramirez nodded and turned to talk to some of his men. I looked back towards the crime scene. The cops were beginning to tape it off and an ambulance and a few more police cars had arrived. Three dead, one escapee, and no answers? My shoulders sagged… this really wasn’t my best work.

I heard footsteps behind me. “Hey, Stitch,” Ramirez said. “How you doing?”

I sighed. “I-I…” I started, then stopped.

Ramirez waited for a moment for me to continue, before shrugging. “Long night?”

“Yeah…”

“Tell me about it.” He paced idly around the crime scene in front of me. “I’ve been up all night, and it wasn’t even my shift. One thing after another… I mean, you know how it is.”

I nodded. Ramirez seemed to take that as permission to continue. “Still though… it’s good to see you again, even though,” he glanced down at the corpses below him, “I wish it was under, ah, better circumstances.”

I couldn’t help but crack a slight smile from the remark, not that he could see it under my mask. “Not the best intro to Mission I gotta say,” I said.

We shared a slight, awkward chuckle that devolved into a few moments of silence. “So,” Ramirez said, breaking the silence, “what brings you to Mission? Last I heard you were sticking to San Jose… you two… back together?”

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My eyes widened, my heart racing. “N-no, it’s just-” I gulped. “It’s complicated…”

Ramirez sidled over to me and lit a cigarette. “Tell me about it?” he said as he took a drag from it.

“No… or at least, not right now.” I glanced his way as he puffed out a cloud of smoke. He was only about a foot away, close enough that my power—automatically tracing weakly through the air—began to feed me data on his anatomy. While it happened far slower than it did through a physical connection, I could see, with each breath, the cigarette smoke depositing carcinogens onto his alveoli. I saw his overcaffeinated bloodstream and felt the rumbling from his empty stomach. I saw the damage that nearly constant stress had done to his neurons; to his cardiovascular tissue. The data was in a constant stream, only silenceable with distance. I took a slight step to the side and the stream of data faded away. I glanced again at his direction as he took another drag from his cigarette. “That’ll kill you.”

“Not with you around,” he said with a wink. “But you didn’t answer my question, why are you in Mission these days?”

In all the chaos of the night I had forgotten why I was originally here. “Ripple… she asked me to look into the disappearances of a couple of homeless guys,” I said. “But I could ask the same of you, I didn’t think Power Crimes was a first responder.”

“We aren’t, but I was out on patrol looking for something else.”

“Something else? I guess it’s not related to the guys I’m looking for?”

“No, something crazy happened at the high school, I’m just making sure the rest of the neighborhood is safe.”

“Something crazy?”

“Yeah, weird monster. Probably killed a teacher and at least a couple of others.”

My heart sped up. “Oh my God, really? D-do you need help?” I asked.

“Nah, someone else got it.”

“Who?”

Ramirez was silent for a moment as he took a deep drag from his cigarette. “Not sure yet,” he said finally. “I think it’s someone new in town. New hero, maybe. Whoever they are, no one’s claimed credit yet.”

“I-I haven’t heard anything,” I said.

“Figured as much, but let me know if you do, ok?”

I glanced down at my feet. Figured as much? I thought. Ramirez clearly didn’t think highly of my social life. “Sure.” I said, a little more bitter than I intended.

We stood in silence for another minute. “I think the monster might have gotten your missing people,” he said.

I honestly didn’t have a lot to go off of for “my” missing people. Ripple had more or less dropped it on me, told me it might be something worth following up on because there were no big leads; especially since the cops and bigger-name heroes weren’t going to waste their time looking into it. “You might be right…” I sighed. Ramirez’s conclusion made a lot of sense.

“So… you’re working with Ripple now? She’s worried about these missing homeless guys?”

I nodded.

“Yeah, that sounds like her,” Ramirez said with a chuckle. “But if you want to help us look into the monster…”

I slowly nodded. “I’ll ask her, but you might be onto something…”

“You need her approval? This another Seraph situation?” Ramirez asked, the question cutting deeper into me than he probably intended. I didn’t say anything and kept my gaze locked square ahead of me.

“Sorry,” Ramirez said after a few moments. “Well, it just looks like this whole missing person thing connects well with the monster.”

“I guess so,” I admitted. The idea of a man-eating monster stalking the Mission District did explain the missing people.

“So my question is whether or not you’ve actually found anything that could help explain where this thing came from.”

We didn’t have anything, and I had spent all tonight just getting acquainted with this part of town. “Ripple’s the one who brought me in,” I said. “I’ve only just started tonight…”

“Hmmph, well I don’t have much more than what I’ve already told you,” Ramirez said. “The thing might have been a freak lab experiment, though some of my guys think it might have been someone who lost themselves to a weird morphing power.” He took another drag from his cigarette. “You’ve been doing this for a couple years now, right?”

“Four,” I said.

“Yeah, you’ve ever seen something like this?” He took out his phone and pulled up a picture of a creature I had never seen before. While the body was damaged—and it looked like it had been crushed by something massive—it clearly would have been bizarre even when alive. It looked almost like a tiger but with blue fur, spines all over its back, and teeth more at home in an angler fish than a mammal.

I shook my head. “Never,” I said. “Thankfully,” I quietly added.

Ramirez nodded. “That’s what I figured, but I had to ask.”

“At least it’s dead now…”

Ramirez shrugged. “Yeah, but we still don’t know where it came from. What if there’s more of ‘em?”

“We would have heard about it,” I said.

“Maybe,” he said. He took another drag from his cigarette before dropping it to the ground and stamping it out. “At least your mystery’s solved.”

I fidgeted slightly. “I-I don’t know… I guess so…”

“Something else bothering you?”

“I’m not from the Mission District, but I know the First Way doesn’t usually run here.”

“They don’t usually run anywhere in the city, except when they want to blow something up or kill someone,” Ramirez said. “But they’re a bunch of anti-civilization weirdos anyways, so don’t think too hard about ‘turf’ or whatever when it comes to them.”

“I guess… but Los Reales was looting them when I arrived… didn’t stop when I started fighting them either… at least not until it was too late.”

Ramirez raised an eyebrow. “You think that this was more than a gang war? A deal gone bad? Ambush?”

I hugged myself, trying to think of an explanation. “I don’t know… it just feels weird,” I eventually said.

“Look, Stitch, you’re smart but some First Way gangsters probably just got lost. They’re not the type to use GPS anyways,” Ramirez sighed. “I’ll tell you if any of them squeal, but I bet it’s nothing.”

“But what if it’s not!” I said, surprised at my boldness. “What if they were moving… drugs, counterfeits, powerchems, something illegal and valuable!”

Ramirez sighed. “I’ll tell you if I hear anything, but I’m just not convinced. Why’d they not have any villains with them if that was the case? Sasquatch too busy?”

I held back a slight shudder at the mention of Sasquatch. I’d fought him before, won every time, but… well, I didn’t want to think about that right now. I shook my head, “Who knows… but what if that monster is connected to them… maybe it was the villain that was supposed to be with their people?”

Ramirez raised an eyebrow. “I’m not sure even the First Way would make the jump from smuggling to cannibalism. That’s crazy, even for them.”

“They’re all about tearing down civilization, returning to… a-an animalistic state! It fits their MO!”

“None of ‘em have ever gone that far before.”

“Look, I’m not saying it’s perfe-”

Ramirez cut me off. “And I’m not saying you’re wrong, but don’t go picking a fight with the First Way until we have a bigger picture.”

A flash of movement caught my eye as a news van pulled up. PowerWatch, by the look of it. Ramirez glanced in its direction and turned back to me. “We can talk later, I know how much you hate cameras. I’ll get in touch with you ASAP, as soon as I learn anything, just don’t do anything stupid until I learn more.”

I sighed. “Alright,” I said.

Ramirez nodded and started walking in the direction of the news crew, who had begun setting up cameras and microphones. “Good,” Ramirez said. “See ya around, kid.”

I saw a few cameramen making a beeline for me. Ramirez intercepted them before they could reach me. Just seeing them, however, was enough to get my heart racing. I trembled slightly as I made my way to my bike before they could break away. Without looking behind me, I quietly got on board. I turned the key, the electric motor springing to life with a sharp hum, and I sped off into the night. The bustle of the crime scene faded into a buzz, then disappeared into the soft muzak of the city night.

I rounded a corner as I sped off home, suddenly remembering the blood on my face, on my costume. Cleaning up would take a while, and it was already 2 AM…

But hey, I was good at cleaning up.