“Perhaps this is a bad time,” the automaton said over the constant pinging of bullets across its chassis. Flynn just nodded, from his crouch behind the cover of his bullet-riddled car “I’ll go then. Please excuse the-”
“No! No, uh…” Flynn said, grabbing the automaton’s ankle and placing it and the car between him and the Skullface gang’s outpouring of bullets “just stick close to me, will you?”
“Very well. You have been chosen, after all,” the automaton said, voice booming in the reloading lull, as the gangers reached for fresh magazine drums. The sound of it was almost deafening inside the warehouse where he and the rookie had chased them into, after the brief shoot-out in front of the bank.
They hadn't counted into it being an ambush, so they didn't bother calling for reinforcements, until after they'd popped out of cover, Thompson guns at the ready. Greenhorn move.
Flynn checked his service pistol and spare bullets: barely a dozen rounds to go. He rifled through the pockets of Charlie the rookie, still laid out awkwardly where he’d lain after that stray round had caught him between the eyes. The kid had another clip on him. It wasn't anywhere near enough, but it would have to do.
“I don’t remember signing up for a raffle,” Flynn said, poking out of cover to shoot twice at the gangers, getting one in the shoulder. He fell onto the ground, howling in pain.
“You are Charlie Doherty, yes?” the automaton asked. Flynn smiled and was about to speak, as a fresh burst of bullets punched through the car’s siding and pinged off the automaton. Bits of shattered glass rained onto his shoulder and the back of his neck.
“Damn right,” Flynn said, crawling his way to the automaton, then leaning bodily against it “just…stick around, will you?”
“I will remain by your side until the end of your trial,” the automaton said, producing the sky blue unitard and golden belt out of nowhere. Flynn blinked slowly, trying to take it in, even as the bullets kept rattling off the automaton’s back and he was stepping through drying rookie blood and spilled gasoline. He tried to mumble something, then another thing, and finally said:
“Took you long enough,” before taking both items and diving back behind the patrol car, as the Skullfaces broke cover, Thomson repeaters raised, aimed at the blue-eyed metal man that hovered idly, its eyes tracking their movements, its perfect stillness was broken by a tiny, barely noticeable jitter in its eye and a twitch in its jaw.
“Are we gonna have a problem?” the lead ganger asked, his Thomson leveled at the automaton’s face.
“I am not programmed for confrontation outside my operating parameters,” the automaton offered. The ganger blinked slowly, then said:
“What the hell does that mean?”
“Means you mooks don’t bother him, he don’t bother you,” Flynn’s voice boomed from behind the patrol car as he flew into view, his body wreathed in the shimmer of an anti-ballistics shield. At once, the gangers opened fire, a hail of bullets streaking through the air, stopped dead barely an inch away from Flynn’s body. He let them hover there, accumulating like so many bugs squashed against a windshield, as he waded through a sea of menus, submenus, and options, before picking something at random with a passing thought. The shield around him exploded outward, sending the bullets back to the gangers in a single, explosive wave. He flinched, as the bodies of the men around him exploded into a cloud of red, sticky mist.
“I see you found the Kinetic Reversal feature,” the automaton said. Flynn simply screamed, then hurled, as the collected stench of a dozen exploded dead men hit his nostrils “I will give you a moment.”
“So Stardust just…gives his powers away?” Flynn asked the automaton sometime later. By then, the SWAT teams had come in (fashionably late as usual) and the meat wagon had carried Charlie the rookie off to the chiller. The automaton had made itself scarce at his command, fading out of view like a mirage as soon as the armored cars came screaming into the scene. Thankfully, no one bothered to ask about Flynn’s crumpled uniform and clumsily buttoned-up shirt he’d barely had time to pull over the suit and belt, on account of all the dead men around him. They’d given him the rest of the week off and a date with the station’s shrink on account of it and Flynn took it.
“Only to contest applicants,” the automaton said as if that explained anything. Flynn nodded, thinking back to Charlie and his stacks of funny books that would come spilling out of his locker every end of the month after he’d made his run to the drugstore. He’d leafed through one of them once when he was a kid; even sent out a coupon and 75 cents for the chance to win a pair of X-ray goggles but it had never paid off.
“And what happens if I make it past the 14-day mark? Do I just get to keep it forever?” Flynn asked.
“There’s a culling process in place,” the automaton said. There was no special inflection in its voice and its tone didn’t shift one little bit, but it still sent a shiver down Flynn’s spine. He nodded as he fumbled for his keys, dropped them, willed them into his hand, then stepped into his apartment building’s lobby.
“Okay I need you to keep shtum now, you hear? My landlady is kind of a hardass and-” Flynn began when Ms. Studemyer’s voice echoed shrilly from behind the ground floor tenement door:
“Is that a solicitor, officer?”
“No, ma’am, just a friend,” Flynn lied. On cue, the door opened halfway and Ms. Studemyer stuck her head out to look at Flynn and the automaton hovering behind him.
“Looks like a solicitor to me. Tell him to wait outside,” Ms. Studemyer barked.
“There is an inception function,” the automaton said, “though I might recommend a paralytic ray, or-”
“Just go, will you? Fly around, take in the sights. I’ll meet you later,” Flynn said. The Automaton simply hovered out the door and flew up and out of sight.
“Thought they sent all the tights off to Orsonville,” Ms. Studemyer said, “does he have a daylight permit?”
“Left it in his other suit. Good evening, Ms. Studemyer,” Flynn said, trying the elevator and finding it busted “of course.”
Flynn walked up the first couple flights of stairs, checking to make sure Ms. Studemyer had retreated back into her den. When he was sure she was gone, he flew the rest of the way up to apartment 1015 and phased through the door.
***
“How come Stardust isn’t doing the deliveries himself?” Flynn asked the automaton as it flew in through his living room window, after he was done with his Michelin star-rated steak dinner he’d conjured out of thin air.
“Stardust is occupied with other matters. He has chosen to automate this process instead,” the automaton said.
“Not much point automating if there’s just you with a single suit and belt out every fourteen days. How many people are in the raffle even? It would take you forever,” Flynn said, conjuring an expensive German beer out of thin air.
“Time is of no consequence. And most candidates do not make it through the entire trial period,” the automaton said.
“Really?” Flynn said, thinking back to Charlie, all splayed out against the patrol car, his brains splattered on the warehouse wall “what’s the turnover rate?”
“Ninety-nine percent,” the automaton said, then added, when Flynn was done choking on his beer “this is mostly due to user error.”
Flynn nodded, thinking about the automaton’s statement. Ninety-nine percent of people that tried this crazy suit and belt business ended up “opting out” one way or another and, going by what it could do and the trouble it could get them in, they probably didn’t go gently into that good night.
That was without accounting for people that…happened to get it as Flynn had. And when they were found lacking and their powers were taken from them, where did that leave them?
Flynn thought of the Skullface gangers that he’d gotten killed this morning. The payback that was coming. If the automaton took the suit away, he’d be helpless against every hard bastard in the city. He was going to have to move fast and take them apart before then. Every single one. Hew only had 14 days’ worth of omnipotence, so they’d have to do.
“Well goddamn then I best get cracking,” Flynn said, as he brought up the suit’s crime locator, switching the view to a live, grid-based feed of all illegal activity in the city. After filtering out the jaywalkers, litterers, public urinators, and every other petty crime he could think of, Flynn was left with a few pockets of highly concentrated criminal activity, each of them bristling with tendrils that tangled themselves all across the city.
Changing the tag colors, Flynn highlighted the Skullfaces in white, the Clipps in black, the Ripps in yellow. He watched them move like a wasp swarm in a snowstorm against the city’s backdrop for a while, then put up pointers, tracking the greatest hubs of activity. Naturally, the Skullfaces congregated around the old airfields around the city, abandoned since the Big War.
“Wonder what those low lives are doing around those places,” Flynn said, taking another sip of his beer “it’s not like they know how to use the things.”
“Tradition. Skullface’s gang was, traditionally, airborne,” the automaton offered “it was how they destroyed New York, sixty years ago.”
The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.
“No. That can’t be right,” Flynn said, staring at the automaton before he started digging around for his portable computer. Trailing the compu-cord to its wall socket, he furiously typed out the name of the gang, only for the screen to ding back with no results “see? There’s nothing on them! You’ve got it all wrong.”
“You wouldn’t find out anything about the Skullfaces. You wouldn’t know it was the Clipps who were behind the Big Lift or that the Ripps tried to destroy human civilization by triggering a third Big War,” the automaton said.
“Third Big War? We never even had a second one. You sure there wasn’t anything knocked loose in there, when you were getting shot at?” Flynn said, dismissively. The automaton said nothing, as Flynn began to rifle through menus, searching through the suit’s available options, before settling on his loadout.
“If you will be going after the Skullfaces, I might recommend opting for the Grounder ray, followed by an Exsanguination Wave,” the automaton offered. Flynn just shook his head.
“No, none of that messy stuff. Just…anything that makes it clean. Preferably something that leaves nothing behind to tie me to it, like…” Flynn said, pausing mid-scroll across the arsenal menu “...microwave ray. That doesn’t sound too bad, does it?”
“It is not bad. But it is accurate,” the automaton said. Flynn just nodded, then formed another tubular spacial around his body, before checking out the window. When he was sure that no patrol planes were flying around his area, he and the automaton slipped silently out into the night.
***
Flynn searched through his viewing modes as they hovered above the old airfield, from sonar to ultraviolet, briefly flicking into ghost-sight (only to bite his lip from screaming as his field of vision filled with the specters of billions of dead birds and the hordes of the dead below), before settling for infra-red vision. From this vantage point, the entire airfield almost faded into view, leaving nothing behind just the small pools of light where the Skullfaces burned refuse in barrels to keep warm at night and the few lone gunmen on watch. After scanning the area with a casual sweep, Flynn finally settled for the huge thermal blob out by the main hangar, where the bombers used to be. Hovering silently above it, he laid down against its roof and pressed his ear into the metal, the cacophony from inside almost deafening.
“I’d recommend filtering the sound through Stardust’s clari-field,” the automaton recommended. Flynn switched it on, eliminating the cacophony, echo, and rattling of the hangar until there was nothing but the speaker’s voice:
“...Clubber and Gum Bleed and Knuckle Crack! they were my brothers like all of you are. An I mourn them as you all do. But is it’s Stardust what killed ‘em…” the voice said, gravelly and weathered, like granite. All at once, the cacophony started up again as the Skullfaces booed the speaker, then cut off as one of them raised a comically large gavel and struck it against a gong made out of a B-52’s hull. Flynn switched his vision to X-Ray, then toned down the intensity the crowd of skeletons faded into the monochrome figures of gangers, sat across the bleachers. When they were all quiet, the speaker resumed:
“If Stardust is back, there is nothing we can do, save hide. Hide and pray to Kurd almighty that another thing will come up and he won’t finish the job this time.”
“Thank you, Old Wound. You have done well to warn us, but Stardust is gone,” the huge bastard that had rung the gong said. Flynn turned his gaze at him, trying to make out what it was about him that made his way of speaking sound so strange: his every word sounded clipped, his breathing strained. Bringing him closer to his field of view, Flynn made out his mangled face: the ring of ragged skin, where his lips had been, revealing only a grin; the perpetually staring eyes, sticking out behind his torn eyelids. A pair of holes where his ears should be. “And our dead must be avenged if this city will submit to us. Such is the will of Skull Mug.”
“Skull Mug! Skull Mug! Skull Mug!” the gangers chanted, Skull Mug let them bang their feet and rattle their chains against the bleachers, drowning out Old Wound’s protests entirely, before silencing them with a wave of his hands.
“Our work has finally paid off. The Flying Reaper has been restored, according to the sacred specifications of the Kurd, its belly filled with the same phlogiston bomb that destroyed New York. Tonight, it will fly for the first time and visit our wrath on the city, leaving nothing but a burning ruin!” Skull Mug said, raising himself up from his chair, raising his club to smash against the gong “And from the ruins, we will raise the city of New Kurd!”
“Skull Mug! Skull Mug! Skull Mug!” the gangers chanted again. Flynn simply hovered himself up and began to shuffle through his menus, searching for his rays.
“You won’t announce yourself?” the automaton asked “It would be a courtesy.”
“Maybe after we’re done. Will 30 do it, do you think?” Flynn asked, then said “Best go for 50. It’s the GHz that is the smaller one, right?”
The automaton was about to let out its answer, when Flynn unleashed his microwave ray, showering the interior of the hangar with its radiation. There was a brief moment of tense silence, as it seeped in through the metal walls and flooded the room inside, immediately followed by the collected screams of hundreds of people that howled in agony, as the radiation began to bounce across the walls, heating up the air inside the hangar until it almost caught on fire.
“No, no no no!” Flynn shouted, turning off the ray. The stream of radiation stopped immediately, but the screams didn’t. Clamping his ears shut, Flynn grit his teeth and hummed Minnie the Moocher, while the howling turned into a low moan and finally into a whimper. When the worst of it was over, he turned to the automaton and asked:
“Are they dead?”
“Mostly,” the automaton answered.
Flynn turned around and hovered near the ceiling window. There, the glass had fallen apart as the frame melted after the sudden rush of heat that filled the hangar. The smell caught him first: like over-done pork left too long in the pot, scum and all. Clenching his teeth and pinching his nose shut, he glanced down, only to see a sea of dry white meat, sticking out among the burnt fabric and the sea of burnt, blistered skin. Parts of it still moved, sloshing against the wet cement floor. Flynn felt sick at the sight of it but didn’t puke this time. Strange, what a man could get used to.
“Elevated life signs. There,” the automaton said, pointing at a blistered mess in the shape of a man that struggled to pull itself up by the burning rungs of a tool rack. It sizzled with every touch, but it still kept going. Flynn didn’t have to guess who that hard bastard could have been.
“That’s enough, Skull Mug,” Flynn called out, as he hovered down from the ceiling window “you can still be saved. Just call off the Flying Reaper and I’ll-”
Skull Mug loosed a gob of spit at Flynn, mixed with blood. He stared at him, even if the eyes had melted out of his sockets and had dripped down his cheeks and chin to stain his blistered, flaking chest.
“Go to Hell, Stardust. I don’t need your mercy. This city will burn as we’ve burned. And you’ll watch,” Skull Mug said, then lunged at Flynn, screaming “for the Kurd!”
Skull Mug’s scream had barely left his lips, before Flynn’s fist connected with his face. There was a sharp, cracking sound, then the ganger fell down, his neck broken, the back of his head laid completely flat against his back.
“I just…I just wanted to…” he muttered, staring at the way Skull Mug’s neck bones poked against his blistered, tearing skin. Shooting out of the ceiling window, Flynn shot himself up in the clouds and screamed, not noticing that the automaton had failed to follow him, its already rattled electronics reacting slowly as they bathed in the overpowering residual radiation inside the hangar. It took it a good half-minute before it caught up. By then, Flynn had pretty much screamed himself hoarse.
“The Flying Reaper remains,” the automaton said, matter-of-factly. Flynn stared at it in silence for a while, before saying:
“I almost took a man’s head clean off. With a punch. I cooked a hangar full of people alive.”
“This power takes some getting used to,” the automaton said.
“What kind of man would give himself this kind of power?” Flynn asked, trying to gauge the automaton’s reaction “What sort of crime-buster needs this Old Testament God shit?”
“Stardust does,” the automaton said. In the darkness above the clouds, Flynn didn’t notice the way its head twitched, as a series of micronic switchboards inside its skull misfired “the Flying Reaper remains.”
Flynn closed his eyes, gasping for air, steadying himself. When he had finally managed to push the memory of the smell that came from the hanger to the back of his head, he searched through the menus, finding the scanner function, then added the tag PHLOGISTON. He sent a pulse out into the city. It came back with a series of pings, a trail that stretched across the east river bank.
“No!” Flynn screamed, flying toward the source of the pings, just as the first half dozen incendiary bombs crashed across the bank, showering skid row’s rickety tenements buildings in white-hot flames. It had burned so hotly and so fast that the people inside them had barely had the chance to scream before they were reduced to ash. Flynn fumbled for an anti-phlogiston measure, then settled for a fire-destroying ray that he used to suppress the worst of it, before flying after the plane.
“Recommend clipping its wings with a concentrated gamma-” the automaton began.
“No more killing. Not tonight,” Flynn said, dousing the burning borough of the city with his ray before launching himself at the Flying Reaper, just as it climbed up into the air, seeking refuge in the cloud cover. Flynn didn’t know much about planes, but he could tell, just from the size of it, that the old bomber had to have been outfitted with some serious horsepower if it could move that fast, even with a still-full belly.
Searching through the options in the suit, he located the functions he was looking for, then sent another locator pulse, finding the Flying Reaper as it came down again, ready to unleash its payload in the west residential district. Moving at the speed of thought, he sped over the drab-looking neighborhoods and projects he called home. Putting himself in the bomber’s path, he unleashed twin particle beams that sheared its wings clean off, making sure to catch the engines and wings in an inertia containment field.
Flynn had just enough time to bring up his momentum-destroying bubble, as the gangers inside the Flying Reaper brought the crippled bomber screaming down toward the district. It popped the first bubble, its speed barely contained, then the second one, then the third. Flynn screamed as the metal giant, now little more than a hundred metric ton projectile continued to scream across the sky until he finally wreathed himself in the field and smashed against its nose.
They twisted as they fell, Flynn and the Flying Reaper, a metal torpedo that corkscrewed, screaming, in the air, the momentum-destroying bubble barely holding against the crumpling metal. Flynn howled as the metal in his grip crumbled, cracked, and finally splintered into pieces that tore through the skin of his palms but still held on, even as the front of his apartment building rose up to meet him…
…stopping dead in the air just as he felt the railing of the tiny first-floor balcony give behind him. There was a moment of absolute silence, as Flynn looked up, just in time to see the entire Flying Reaper hanging in the air, defying physics and reason, caught at the very moment before it bring about its final, disastrous explosion. Inside the cockpit, the two Skullface Gangers struggled against the controls, uselessly pulling levers and fiddling with dials, trying to take everyone with them despite everything.
“It appears you have contained the Flying Reaper with its crew intact. An impressive feat,” the automaton said, hovering into view.
“Thanks,” Flynn barely had time to mutter, his panting breath turning into a peal of laughter until Ms. Studemyer burst out of the apartment building.
“You best have some gosh dang good reason for keeping this bomber hovering in front of my gosh dang building, Flynn Willis!”
Flynn’s laughter died in his throat, as the automaton swiveled its head to look at him. Something inside its metallic skull whirred, clicked, and finally went DINNNGGG before it said:
“Your trial period has ended”
***
Behind the automaton, the city burned, as the Flying Reaper’s phlogiston payload was unleashed all at once. It spread across the water, liquefying cement, asphalt, and steel as it went, annihilating the entire borough within an hour. No longer suspended in their bubbles, the Flying Reaper’s experimental engines smashed into the business district and were lost in the ensuing chaos.
No one noticed the automaton that flew silently among the great columns of smoke, impervious to the clouds of heat and ash that filled the skies for miles around, its sky-blue unitard and golden belt payload clutched in its hand, already headed for the next person on its list.
And in the damaged interior of its skull, where it considered the extent and implications of its mistake, the barest outline of an idea began to form…