Ship Of Theseus: A Novel - Written & illustrated by Jeremiah Strickland

“We are the hands and eyes and ears, the sensitive probing feelers through which the emergent, intelligent universe comes to know its own form and purpose. We bring the thunderbolt of meaning and significance to unconscious matter, blank paper, the night sky. We are already divine magicians, already supergods. Why shouldn't we use all our brilliance to leap in as many single bounds as it takes to a world beyond ours, threatened by overpopulation, mass species extinction, environmental degradation, hunger, and exploitation? Superman and his pals would figure a way out of any stupid cul-de-sac we could find ourselves in - and we made Superman, after all. All it takes is that one magic word.” 

― Grant Morrison, Supergods: What Masked Vigilantes, Miraculous Mutants, and a Sun God from Smallville Can Teach Us About Being Human

***

“So you hate your life, and you want it to change;

The fun of Lincoln Logs, they’re easy to rearrange.”

— For Algernon, “Lincoln Logs,” from Orange Watches and Lost Loves

PART 1:

WHEN WE ARE INHUMAN

“Either to die the death or to abjure 

For ever the society of men....” 

— Theseus; from A Midsummer Night’s Dream by William Shakespeare 

I.

I remember it like a dream. In the winter of 2006, my college sweetheart, Sally, died from a heroin overdose. At the time, I was house sitting for Dorothy, my best friend Bruce’s girlfriend, while she was away on business. It was a long walk from Dorothy's apartment to Bruce's. I walked it once and couldn't bring myself to exert the effort again.  Her apartment was a third floor walk-up, so there was no way Bruce could get his wheelchair up there to visit me.

You should know that I was not alone in Dorothy's apartment.

Soon after Sally’s death, my brother, Frank, showed up with my old friend, Terry, to check on me. It was good to have them there. Two nights into their stay, Terry had passed out in the hall by the bathroom. My brother and I shared a pint of gin on Dorothy's black leather couch, surrounded by her collection of Bruce’s self portraits. Stroking Dorothy's purring cat in his lap, Frank said, "I never really liked VD." VD had been my pet name for Sally. She loved the films of Vin Diesel. She did not, however, appreciate my nickname for her.

I laughed. Our mother had not liked Sally either. I had brought her over to meet Mom one Sunday afternoon. Sally said hello, face red, hand extended. Mom's stare was a stabbing dagger. Her words were cordial, but her tone was an assault. She said, "Hello." Stab. Stab. "Sally." Her antagonism set the tone for an awkward visit. VD made an excuse for us to leave as soon as the opportunity presented itself. 

When I called Mom to tell her about Sally's death, she said, "There was something about her, Wayne. There was something wrong with her, and I knew it as soon as she walked in my door."

Mom was a good judge of character. When I was twelve, my third cousin, Annie, married a man whom my mother was leery of from the get go. Without any knowledge about him, Mom told us, "Don't go around him. Don't talk to him. Don't trust him." Later, Dad found out that the man had once been incarcerated for raping and robbing a seventy year old woman.

Mom’s psychic abilities extended beyond her sense for character. She and Dad would entertain guests by having her call out cards before Dad flipped them from the top of the deck. She was also infamous for making us pull over for ambulances that weren't there.

Yet.

My siblings and I have all laid claim, at one time or another, to possessing similar abilities, albeit in a lesser form. Our claims have all involved dreaming of events that later transpired. For instance, I remember being little and dreaming of the death of a soap opera character while napping. When I woke, I watched that episode with Mom and Grandma, insisting that I had already seen it. At twelve, I remember dreaming of cheating at a board game while playing with my cousin Annie’s family, and two days later, finding myself living the dream.

You should know that I never have prophetic dreams of any use. They're always inconsequential and usually end violently. The scariest example I can recall happened when I was seven and dreamt of getting up in the middle of the night to use the restroom. Frank stood by the open door to our parents' room, the bathroom door perpendicular to it closed. He said, "Mom's in there, and I'm next." A golden light emanated from our parents' room, and a ghost floated toward us, through the open doorway, all flowing sheet of gold with cut-out eye holes, brandishing a knife. It said, "I am the ghost of the Golden Knife Stabber!” I woke up, sweating, shaking. I had to pee. I found Frank standing at the end of the hall, the door to our parents' room open, the bathroom door shut. He said, "Mom's in there, and I'm next."

During the week of their stay with me at Dorothy’s apartment, Frank and I made Terry watch the Nevada Smith and Cosmic Conflict film trilogies. We watched American Gorgeous. Frank had bought me a live Meat Curtain DVD called What The Third Eye Sees, and we watched it again and again. Everlasting Sunlight of the Stainless Brain twice. Texas Teeth twice. We listened to Blue Eyes, Bliss, and The Scarabs. Frank introduced me to “Tales of the Skyrat,” a superhero video game he had brought with his game console.

Terry was a trooper, never complaining about the indie films and rock music we knew he was hating. Mostly, he sat in silence, smoking or chewing tobacco, wearing his Carolina blue pants, his hat on sideways, sometimes a shirt. This was a typical visit with Terry. After our game of "remember-the-time" had expired, we had nothing to talk about. In his backpack, along with his one other change of clothes, Terry had psychedelic mushrooms.

On the fourth night of their visit, I was surprised by a knock at the door at two AM. It was Dorothy's neighbor from the first floor, who I recognized from the computer lab at the university where I used to work part-time. She was one of the kids who spent hours in the lab every afternoon playing an online role playing game about vampires. She used to complain about me listening to that Larissa Linn comeback album that Johnny Black produced back in 2004. She said, “Wayne, it’s so fucking loud up here, we can hear you downstairs, through the second floor. You're lucky they moved out. Mary Catherine is getting pissed, though."

I couldn't remember her name. I searched my brain for it. I had always thought she was cute, though she had put on weight. I was drunk. She said, "Jasmine. You remember me, right? From the lab?"

Jasmine. Of course. Jasmine must have weighed three hundred pounds. Still, she had one of those faces, caramel skin, big brown eyes, lips. I said, "Do you want to come in?"

"No," she said. "Keep it down, okay?"

I agreed.

"When's Dorothy coming back?" 

"In a month.” 

"Who is it?" asked Frank from the sofa, under the four foot by four foot extreme close up painting of Bruce's bearded, long-haired head, like some European Jesus in black wraparound sunglasses.

"Jasmine, from downstairs," she called to him. To me, she said, "Does she know you have company?" She peeked around the dimly lit apartment from the doorway. Her hair was coarse and black at her shoulders. I wondered what it felt like.  “You’ve been busy as bees. You should clean this place up.” There were four days worth of mail and a stack of pizza boxes on the table, the garbage overflowing in the kitchen, dishes, blankets, dirty clothes, bottles, the cat box full. Her skin was milk chocolate. Her breasts threatened to burst out of her shirt.

I said, "Do you want a beer?"

She said, "Goodnight, Larissa Linn," and waddled down the hall to the steps. 

***

Frank has the superpower to master any video game. I do not. I quickly become frustrated at the jumps I can't make and foes I can't best. Frank, on the other hand, spent hours in front of the TV when we were growing up, cursing and throwing shit, vowing revenge, staying up all night exacting said revenge. It was a surprise to me that he wanted to leave me his game console.

"I just don't want you to get bored. You get to thinking too much. Your mind is like a labyrinth, complete with a minotaur," he said.

"My mind is a flushing toilet.”

We were sitting on the floor around a Ouija board in the guest bedroom, watched over by Bruce's grayscale paintings of bug-eyed zombies and surreal alien animal portraits set amid other-worldly flora. Frank insisted that the room was haunted by something sinister because the cat refused to enter. I was refusing to play Tales of the Skyrat anymore because I couldn't beat the Berserker level.

"I hate that cat," I said. "Here, kitty kitty kitty."

"I'm telling you, man, she won't come in here," insisted Frank. "That cat has been in my lap or at my feet. Unless I'm in here." I hadn't even seen the cat until Frank and Terry had arrived. "Check this out, man. Here, kitty. Here, kitty kitty."

The cat appeared in the doorway. It sat in the hall and meowed at Frank. "Come here," he said.

"Here, kitty," said Terry.

"Here, kitty," I said. The cat stared at us for a moment, yawned, and wandered away. 

Terry said, "I'm afraid of Ouija boards." In his lap was a bible. In his hand was his fifth whiskey and cola.

"Ah, come on," I said. "You’re being flakes. This is important to me."

"I just think it's a bad idea to try and contact Sally," said Frank. "You never meet who you want to meet on these things." 

"Come on.” I placed my right hand on the plastic cursor. Frank sighed and followed suit. "You have to believe or it won't work," I told him.

"I believe," he sighed.

"Is there anyone there?" I asked the dead air. 

The cursor moved to the "Yes.”

Terry said, "Which one of you did that?"

In the bathroom, the faucet turned on all by itself. My heart quickened. I said, "What’s your name?" 

The cursor moved over "S." The cursor moved over "A." I removed my hand.

Terry said, "What?"

”It's lying. I'm done.” I turned off the faucet in the bathroom and went back to the dining room to finish off the pizza. Frank followed me out and laid on the couch.

He said, "Want to try that Berserker level again?"

I said, "Fuck off." 

***

When they left, I was overwhelmed. I watched them drive away from the sidewalk in front of the building, considering my options. I thought about walking to Bruce's and telling him that I couldn't watch Dorothy's place anymore. I could check up on the cat periodically. Or maybe I could call Frank before he got too far away and tell him that I wanted to go with him. I could let Jasmine check on the cat.

Back on the third floor, I smoked pot and drank, staring blankly at the painting of the hippie stringing his guitar next to the TV, my mind swirling, narrowing, darkening. 

***

My first love was comic books. From the beginning, there was Strongman, sole survivor of planet Xenon, whose emblem I let my drunken skinhead cousin, Joey, tattoo to my left arm when I was seventeen, utilizing a sewing needle wrapped in thread and dipped in an old jar of India ink. It was the second time I had been scarred by my love for Strongman, the first occurring when I was three and tried to jump over the coffee table from the couch, clad in my Strongman pajamas. I smacked my chin against one of the coffee table corners. The scar is still there, complete with tiny pock marks where the stitches had been.

Strongman always put others first, forever sacrificing himself for the greater good of Megalopolis and humanity. Between Strongman, Sunday School, and my responsibilities at home, looking after my siblings, I developed my own moral code and used it to further alienate myself from my peers. Dad oftentimes said that I had no sense of adventure, but that wasn't true. I just preferred mythological adventure to the real thing.

As a teenager, I related more to Skyrat. I liked the fallibility of that character and could see something of myself in his nerdy secret identity, Scott Turner. Like Strongman, Skyrat also sacrificed his personal life for the greater good, but it was easier to relate with Scott Turner, who also looked after his kid brother. Unlike Strongman, Skyrat regularly got his ass kicked, his costume fucked up, and in one famous issue, failed to save his two-dimensional love, Samantha, from death at the hands of Berserker.

You should know that I couldn't fucking defeat Berserker either.

In the old school comics, Berserker was a musclebound thug, Orson Mayfield, a paranoid schizophrenic bank robber who wore a silly purple mask and lobbed purple grenades. The game, Tales of the Skyrat, however, portrays him vastly different. Berserker resembles a massive inhuman monster in this incarnation, complete with scales and a demonic face. The goal at his stage in the game is to chase down the villain as he rampages within the walls of Green City and to dodge the grenades he lobs at you. This was nigh impossible for me. I became confused anytime I made a wrong turn or got hit by an explosion. "Video games are all repetition," Frank had told me. "You just have to figure out the patterns and learn from them." 

I was busying myself with the chase for the eighth time or so one day, when Jasmine showed up at the door. She said, "What's up, Larissa Linn? Dorothy just called. She wanted me to come over and check on you. Why aren't you answering the phone?"

"I'm not comfortable answering someone else's phone.” I had turned the ringer off. My own cell phone had been cancelled for nonpayment.

"Yeah, but if you don't answer the phone, people will think you've died up here," she said, moving around me to stand in the center of the living room. "I thought someone was going to clean this place up? It stinks in here."

I shrugged. "I've been writing.” I was lying. I hadn't written a thing. "Everything will be fine when Dorothy gets back home."

She started opening windows and picking up bottles. "Get me a trash can," she ordered. "You can't let this shit pile up for two and a half weeks." I did as I was told. I picked up my dirty clothes and took them to the hamper in the bathroom, under the nude portrait of Dorothy as a Goddess, Bruce's masterpiece. She was leaning in a doorway, right forearm across her belly, looking away with a sublime smile. There were two other smaller portraits of her in her bathroom as well, the only paintings hanging in her apartment that actually belonged to her. The others in her collection came and went as Bruce rotated them in and out of galleries.

Jasmine came in behind me and took the overfilled bag from the bathroom's trash can. From my angle, I couldn't see her reflection in the bathroom mirror. She was in jeans and a bright yellow tank top over a black bra, cleavage. 

She said, "Come on, tell me the truth: Do you jerk off to that painting?"

Yes.

"No, of course not," I said, hoping my face wasn't red.

She laughed. "Why's your face turning red, Larrisa Linn?" 

    

***

Later, at the Ouija board in the guest room, she asked me, "How often have you had to turn off the faucet in the bathroom?"

“Twice a day, sometimes more.”

"Aren't you afraid?"

I said, "Sometimes. I don't know. I get afraid when I'm coming up the steps. For some reason, I get this terrible sense of dread every time I climb the stairs, like something's behind me. This shit has always followed me, though. I'm kind of used to it." I told her about my childhood apartment where our dog wouldn't go into the laundry room. I told her about the ghostly storyteller who visited me when I was a kid and about dead relatives visiting live ones. I told her the story my parents told me, about the time the Ouija board fell from Dad's teenaged hands and stuck in the ground like Arthur's sword after it suggested that he murder his family.

"I don't believe in Ouija boards," she said.

"You don't believe in Ouija boards?" This was disparaging news. "It won't work if you don't believe.”

She touched the fingers of her right hand to the cursor and warned me, "I don't think it's going to work."

I placed my own fingers next to hers and said, "Is anyone there?" No response. I asked again. Nothing. Jasmine pushed the cursor over the "No" response and said, "You got anything to eat?"

She offered to buy us a pizza, and we waited for it on the couch, under the extreme close-up self portrait of Bruce. I taught her to play Tales of the Skyrat, and it absorbed us for the next forty five minutes, swinging through Green City with glee as Skyrat, eating pedestrians to fulfill our never ending hunger and tossing cars at helicopters as Rat’s playable nemesis, Chupacabra.

We had just begun an attempt to best the times on the various Time Trials found throughout the game when the pizza arrived. Plating up, she asked me, "You play a lot of video games?"

"No," I answered. "Not usually. I just like Skyrat, you know? I used to love comic books when I was a kid.” I didn't bother telling her that the first time I saw the Skyrat movie in theaters, while the opening credits were rolling, I was fighting back tears, hoping that Frank wouldn't notice.

"I was more into role playing games.”

"I like the mythology of comics,” I told her. "Plus, I think it would be cool to have a superpower."

She asked me, "What would yours be?"

"I'd be able to alter probabilities. That way, I could do anything if the dice rolled in my favor."

"Would you actually use dice to determine whether or not you could do something?" The dungeon master inside her was excited by that prospect.

"I hadn't considered that, but probably not. What would yours be?"

Without hesitation, she said, "Most vampires can transform into wolves or wild dogs or a bat or something, but I'd like to be able to transform into other people. Flying would also be cool." On her neck, above her aorta, was a little tattoo of a vampire bite.

I asked her, "Do you still play that vampire game?”

She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand and said, "Dorothy is the queen of our Hive."

"Your Hive?"

"That's right, our Hive. Downstairs. We can only come out at night, but because Dorothy is our Queen, she can roam freely in the daylight. She protects us from those who would do us harm while we sleep."

I laughed. "She says she’s my Muse. You should know I’m a writer, but I’ve been blocked. Dorothy said I’m supposed to use my time here for writing.”

”Do you know her boyfriend, Bruce? He says she's his Succubus."

"Oh, yeah, I know Bruce. He's my best friend; that's how I know Dorothy. I didn't even think she was real until I met her, which was an accident." 

It occurred to me that I was in a position to learn something about them until Jasmine said, "When you figure those two out, you let me know. Would you say they compliment each other? He scares me kind of... I think he's crazy. I guess that's why she loves him so much; she's just as crazy, in her own way.”

"She's amazing," I blurted out. Jasmine smiled but didn't reply. We ate pizza until it was gone, and then I said, "Do you really think Bruce is crazy?"

"Absolutely fucking insane," she answered.

II.

Superficially, I can hit it off with anyone. Small talk is fine. I'll tell you that I'm a writer, tell you what I'm listening to, tell you what movie I just saw, hands moving, voice steadily pitching upwards. Then, there is silence. In my mind, I search in vain for something to talk about, something funny to say. God forbid that I disagree with someone or they are ignorant about something that I hold dear.

You should know that if you can't talk Cosmic Conflict movies, Skyrat comics, or Meat Curtain albums, I won't talk to you.

I can't.

Jasmine sat with me on the couch playing Tales of the Skyrat, the two of us trading the controller back and forth, taking turns racing the titular character across Green City, from giant green bubble to giant green bubble, the checkpoints in the game's Time Trials. My thumbs were sore. Our bellies were full of Jasmine's vodka. Our knees were touching. Jasmine made an effort to engage conversation, telling me something about her roommates, the legendary Mary Catherine, the Hive. Upon wrong turns, I shouted obscenities.

There was a Time Trial giving me shit. From the top of a building, the goal was to simply move in a long, straight line across Green City to the final destination bubble atop a small water tower near the Five Points Bridge. I could zip from rooftop to rooftop with relative ease and finesse, hitting the bubbles along the way, but at the water tower, I would over jump or under jump at the bubble, this glowing red orb, and end up at the feet of the tower, scrambling to get back on top, and then run out of time.

"Fuck!" I said, accidentally swinging under the bridge. My right and left hand operated the controller, oblivious of each other. "Mother fucker!" I said, Skyrat leaping just high and left of his target.

Jasmine said, "Jesus, Wayne, learn from your mistakes. You keep doing the same things over and over again."

I dropped the controller on the floor in front of me. "You want to try a Combat Tour?" Fighting the gangs in the Combat Tours was my other favorite option in the game, in lieu of chasing Berserker and advancing the story. 

Jasmine answered, "Not really. It's kind of late, and I'm drunk. I'm going downstairs."

I said, "Okay," and walked her to the door. She swayed a little. I asked, "Can I kiss you?"

She was expressionless, tired eyed. She said, "I'm not quite feeling that right now," said "Goodnight, Larissa Linn," and stumbled away to what I hoped was a coffin downstairs. I watched, yellow over blue, thick black hair to where her neck ends, drunken swagger like a penguin. I wanted to masturbate.

On Dorothy's bed, I fantasized about Jasmine, but my mind wandered to the Goddess portrait in the bathroom; Dorothy with her bellybutton pierced, her pubic hair trimmed. I pulled the covers aside and crossed the hall. I left the door open and sat on the floor, on the rug, door ajar, a dim yellow light casting itself from outside, just enough.

You should know I was coming when the bathroom faucet came on. 

Back in Dorothy's bed, I fell asleep to the thought of impregnating timespace, then dreamt I was in The Formidable Friends, Superb Comics' kids cartoon supergroup that I watched after school every day when I was five. My dream pitted Strongman, Dark Specter, Queen Concord, and Oceanian against a never ending barrage of monsters in what appeared to be a warehouse. We were losing. Their costumes were torn and dirty, but brightly colored despite the darkness, which casted no shadows on any of them. I did not have the ability to alter probabilities. Somewhere, Strongman was being pummeled. I think Dark Spector was dead. Oceanian and Queen Concord were certainly dead. A monster was behind me and hell-bent, but I don't think I ever saw him. I ran up stairs of ancient, crumbling stone, wrapping up a never-ending brick tunnel. My father ran with me, calling me useless, telling me to visit my sick grandmother, encouraging me to go back to school. He yelled at me and said things I remember. The monster closed in on us.

I shot awake, sweating. I could see the soft yellow light from outside across the polished wood of the hall. I was alone but not alone, feeling the dread of the stairs. I turned on all the lights in the house before trying sleep again. 

***

I could hear the faucet, but I could not move. I could feel the sweat, but I could not pull the blankets. Scream, my brain said, but my lips were still. I was not alone in the room. Fucking scream, my brain said, screaming. Twitch your fingers, you useless piece of shit.

Scream.

Don't panic.

Twitch your fingers, you worthless...

What if I stop breathing?

I could hear the faucet.

I was not alone.

What if it was the hag.

SCREAM.

FUCKING MOVE.

I did not move. Eventually, I must have relented, because blissfully ignorant sleep pulled me back under. 

***

There were two weeks left before Dorothy returned. I had barely left the couch in days; the front rooms of the house the only ones I trusted. The cat was afraid of the guest room; I was afraid of Dorothy's room. I had read that other people suffering from sleep paralysis will sometimes claim that there is a hag that sits on their chest, suffocating them when they wake in their minds and find themselves immobile. I had never experienced this, and decided it would be best if I never did. Someone had been in Dorothy's room last night. Maybe it was Sally. Maybe it was a hag. Maybe it was the ghost of a former tenant.

Downstairs, on the first floor, was a Hive of vampires.

The last time Jasmine visited, she brought a bottle of tequila and some hamburger casserole. On the couch, in front of my eighth viewing of Undead Texas, she said, "I met a real vampire once. I was thirteen and staying the night with my aunt, sleeping on the couch, and the next thing I know, I'm standing in the front doorway, with the door open, about to unlatch the screen door and let this man in."

"Was he wearing a black cape?" I asked, disbelieving.

"No, I couldn't see him, he was like a silhouette. But don't you understand the significance here? He could have broken in, just pulled that screen door and ripped the hook out, but he didn't. He was waiting to be invited in, you see?"

"It's just like Dracula, lulling Lucy out of bed to let him in.”

She was impressed. "Exactly! Only I woke up and saw him and slammed the door in his face. I was so shaken up by it that I couldn't even talk to my aunt about it for a day. I slept with her whenever I visited again."

"Do you really believe in vampires, Jasmine?"

"Of course," she said, "There have been vampire legends in every culture since the dawn of time. The Egyptians had them. In some places in Europe, they would exhume the bodies of alcoholics so that they could put a stake through their heart, considering the likes of them to be obvious candidates for vampiric activity." She poured us another drink. "Don't even get me started on the Romanians. Those were some crazy, superstitious fuckers.” She took a sip, then asked, “What do you believe in? Do you believe in God, Wayne?"

"I was a Sunday School teacher when I was in High School," I admitted. “One day, I'm riding home with my Preacher and his wife from this swanky restaurant. They had taken me out for this amazing, expensive lunch buffet, right? Dude kept asking the waiter very specifically for fresh squeezed orange juice, and refused juice when the fresh squeezed ran dry. They knew each other. 

“Anyway, so we leave the restaurant, and he and his wife are driving me home, and he tells me that he knows our waiter was gay, and that I should know that he was going to Hell because of it. And then he told me my gay aunt would go to Hell and so would my gay uncle."

Jasmine asked, "Are you kidding me?"

"No way. And these were people I loved and respected. So, I couldn't believe that God would be so..."

“Contemptible of his own creation…”

"Right!" I told her about the time the Preacher's Wife broke down in tears in front of the church, thick streams of mascara flooding onto the lace at her neck. She told the congregation about angels  lifting the roof off the church and showing her God’s light. Her husband wrapped his arms around her to offer comfort, knocking her big blue hat onto the floor. He gave her a tissue. She blew her nose and told us that God had spoken to her.

"He told her, 'Pass the collection plate, honey,'" laughed Jasmine in her best deep, southern accent. "I hate those people. Still, I believe in a mother Goddess. Earth is so finely tuned for us. How else do you explain it?"

"It's all an accident."

"A miracle."

"Fuck that. We’re here because Earth is finely tuned, not the other way around. We’re a cosmic fluke, probably not the only one but still an anomaly.”

"You believe your dead girlfriend may be haunting you. You believe in something."

"I believe in the power of the human mind. It's corny, but I do. It's a powerful thing. I believe that it can persist after death… I don’t know. Maybe we can create our own heaven or hell. Or we all probably just hang out on Earth or whatever when we're dead; at least until the sun starts to die or a meteor takes it all away from us."

"Takes it in one continuum, not all of them. Maybe the human mind can transcend those kinds of barriers, and when we die we can all go someplace else, in some other time or place, not necessarily Heaven or Hell.”

"You sound like Bruce,” I said. I told her about my sleep problems and the hag. I told her that I had had the thought, when I felt the presence of the old hag, that it could be vampiric.

"See, it's true. Vampires are real, Wayne. I've seen one. He lulled me from my sleep so I would invite him in and offer him my neck, but my will was too strong."

"Was there a dice roll involved in determining your willpower?" She laughed at me, and I warmed all over. My hand went to her knee, and I felt hers. Our lips came together, but she didn't accept my tongue. My mouth moved over the tattoo on her neck. The entire world was fuzzy. She moaned a little. I said, "Take me downstairs with you."

She smiled, amused. "I can't sleep… I can't just have…”

"Have sex with me?"

"Right."

Things are fuzzier after that. Memories are like the dull yellow light on the painting in the bathroom at night. I have a vague recollection of touring Bruce’s art with her. Stumbling. Another attempt at her in the hall. And then I am awake, and it’s afternoon. I was on the bathroom floor. I had wet myself. The toilet was full and my stomach was empty. The tequila bottle appeared to have died in the sink. The faucet was running.

That was the day that Terry came back.

He had taken a bus and said, "I can stay with you until Dorothy gets back, and then we can get an apartment." I did not want to live with him, but he had some money and pot.

I said, "Sounds good, man."

He told me to check Dorothy's answering machine. He told me to call my mom right away. 

Into the phone, my mom said, "Why won't you talk to anyone? Dorothy has been calling everyday. Bruce has called too. Wayne, I'm really worried about you being all alone in that house. You should come home."

I said, "I'm not coming home, Mom. I don't want to talk to anyone," and added, "but I'm okay; Terry is here."

"He's with you?" 

"Why is that so surprising?"

"Did Terry tell you why he came back? Did he tell you why he didn't go back to work?" Terry was a roofer. Sometimes.

"No, I didn't ask. He said he was thinking of moving here." He was on the couch, shirtless, red bandana tied at his forehead. I watched him spit tobacco into the beer can he had carried with him. In the kitchen, I said, "I don't think Terry and I have too much in common anymore, Mom."

"You always say that, Wayne, every time you hang out with him. I have to tell you something. Hold on. Dad wants you." I heard their voices and the phone trading hands.

Dad said, "Hey, buddy, you doing alright?

"I'm fine, Dad."

"How's Dorothy's apartment?" In between the refrigerator and the cabinet was an ink drawing of Dorothy and Bruce having a meal at a table under an umbrella. The sun cast deep black shadows on the left side of everything.

"It's a nice place," I said.

"Sucks that Bruce can't visit you. I talked to him on the phone the other day. I can't believe that crazy fucker got a Lexus."

"A Lexus?"

"You haven't talked to him at all? He's made a shit load of money with Dorothy selling his paintings."

"That's awesome." In the living room, the theme from Tales of the Skyrat came on. I said, "Dad I have to go."

"I love you, Wayne," he said. "Come home if you need to."

"I love you too. I'm fine here, though. I'll talk to you later." With that, it was off to marijuana and Skyrat. 

***

I could hear a woman calling, "What's your major?" Another says "My portfolio is smelly." There is bass guitar and the mashing of buttons. I try to speak but can't. Terry spits. The Flaming Fellow challenges Skyrat to a race, a rematch. My fingers and toes don't belong to me. My tongue is lame. If I could talk, I would scream. If I could scream, my throat would bleed.

I felt a hand on my arm and came awake instantly. Terry said, "You always did sleep funny. You still have to change your sheets every morning?"

"Only when I've been drinking.” I rolled over and went back to sleep. 

I awoke in the wee hours of the morning. My head hurt. There was confusion. I was not alone. A voice said, "Dude, wake up," and I realized Terry was in the living room with me.

"What... what's going on?" I asked.

"This place is fucked up, man! It's fucking haunted. There's someone in Dorothy's room." 

"Did you see her?" I asked, sitting up.

"No, man, but the paintings are moved around, and I could hear it, it fucking woke me up." I turned the lights on. In place of the four foot by four foot self portrait over the couch, there was the watercolor of the zombies from the guest room. One of the abstracts from the hall replaced the hippie that was on the wall to the left of the TV. Terry said, “I ain't going back in that room."

I got up to look around. Every painting in the apartment had been moved to another room and replaced. In Dorothy's room were her portraits, the one's from the bathroom, the ink drawing of her and Bruce eating together. Bruce's masterpiece hung over the bed. I said, "Let's get the Ouija Board."

Terry was not into that idea. He sat in the easy chair, clutching the Bible, praying, eyes closed, pleading, "Lord, please protect us from the evil spirits in this house. Help them to find peace so that we can... we can..."

"Sleep," I finished for him. "Amen. Let's get the Ouija Board. We'll ask if we're in any danger. Here, wait." From the kitchen, I grabbed Terry's half empty bottle of bourbon. I poured two shots and brought them back into the living room. I said, "Courage," and we drank together. I poured again and assured him, "Dorothy has lived here for a while, man. She doesn't seem scared at all."

Terry relented, and we sat with the Ouija Board on the guest room floor. On the walls, in place of the animals were landscapes and flowers. Terry's right hand quivered on the cursor, his left a death grip on salvation. My palms were moist. I asked the air, "Sally?"

The Ouija Board said, "Yes."

Terry said, "No fucking way."

I asked, "Why did you move the paintings?"

The cursor slowly glided from letter to letter, spelling "Terry."

"What about me?" The whiskey was working.

The cursor spelled, "Get out." Terry became hysterical. He jumped up from our spot on the floor at the foot of the bed, tripping on the carpet and falling backwards, knocking a lamp into the window. A large chunk of fractured glass hit the floor and exploded, spreading shards under the bed, across the Persian rug we had been sitting cross-legged on. He ignored the mess and bolted for the living room, his shoes.

"It's four in the morning, Terry, where are you going?" I asked him.

"It said get out, so I'm getting out. Fucking come with me, Wayne. Dorothy won't mind. She'll understand." He stood at the door, Tarheels jacket in hand.

My first thought was to do it, to leave with Terry and go back to Indiana, maybe my parents' house. "I can't do it, Terry; I promised her I’d stay. Besides, I'm more afraid of the vampires downstairs than I am of Sally's ghost." The words dropped my heart into my stomach like the glass, spreading electric tingles like shards. Sally's ghost.

"I don't care, man, I'm leaving." He sat on the couch next to me. His eyes were wet. "Please come with me."

"I can't, man. I have to talk to her."

"You don't know that it's Sally. It's probably lying. It's probably evil."

I could hear the bathroom faucet. I said, "It's not evil. Terry, you're such a pussy. Where are you going to go?"

Now the tears were coming. He buried his face in his hands and cried, "I don't know." He looked at me and said, "I'm in trouble." He told me that the police were after him. He told me that he was a suspect in an armed robbery.

"Did you fucking rob someone, Terry?" His sobs made most of his answer unintelligible, but it was clear that he was denying guilt and was terrified of going back to prison.

He wiped his eyes, regained his composure. He went to the door and said, "Just come with me. We'll take a bus to California and get jobs. I have a couple hundred dollars."

I asked him, "Terry, are you more afraid of this apartment or jail?"

"Come with me," he pleaded.

"I'm not coming with you.”

Without his backpack, a goodbye, or an offer to clean up the glass, he left, and I was alone again.

You should know that I was not alone in Dorothy's apartment.

III.

1.

“My thoughts are bees/ on the blue lotus of my divine mother’s feet.”

-- Daniel Dooley

2.

The problem with sitting is the stillness. The floor comes at me in waves and thoughts. In the darkness is something I'm curious about, but I'm not that curious. The problem with standing is the pacing. The tracing. The racing. That's my mind, you understand, moving not in a linear path but exploring it. The curtain over the broken glass holds a demon, but you already knew this about me. You should have been more honest with me. The folds form his eyes. The folds form that evil smile and they form each and every one of those teeth, like razors, like an outlet. I asked him his name, but he's not talking. Yet. But Bruce is. He's talking from every god damn one of those paintings. Rotting flesh. A train loaded with coal. And the tracks are fucked up too.

3.

When my Great Grandmother died, Grandma was married and living in Texas, where Grandpa was stationed before the war. She was too heartbroken to go home for the funeral. Instead, she avoided the whole mess and stayed in Texas with Grandpa.

4.

The distractions were thinning, and there was a week left before Dorothy came home. I wanted so badly to make it, to do what I said I would do and stick it out, watch over her place while she was away. Feed the cat. It seemed like such a simple prospect before hand, but I was afraid now. I felt something old and terrible.

       

Tales of the Skyrat had lost its hold on me. I was no longer content to simply explore the buildings surrounding the Triumph Tower, waiting for my psychic powers to alert me of a citizen in danger, someone to save. I had earned a Blue Ribbon on all of the Time Trials. The Combat Tours were now cake walks.

       

Berserker tossed exploding grenades at me, laying waste, losing me in Midtown again.

       

My notebooks were empty. I wasn't even drunk.

5.

One message from Bruce says, "Dude, I'm going to ace every fucking one of my finals. Carry me up to those stairs, and we'll celebrate with some scotch before I sled back down all three flights on a cardboard box. Call me."

6.

For some unexplained reason, it seemed like a good idea to cut myself. I found a razor, took off my shirt and had a seat. I slashed the soft underside of my forearm, an inch above the angle. You should know that this was for entertainment, not for murder. I did it again, just above the last one. The bleeding was profuse. I could see muscle mass. It was everything I could have hoped for. I did it again and again, alternating forearms.

There was a knock at the door. My mother said, "Wayne, you have company, dear."

My heart dropped. I uttered an, "Okay, Mom," panicking. My blood flowed. I was white. 

7.

I wanted to see Jasmine again. I imagined scenarios in which I would knock on her door at night to meet Mary Catherine and the rest of the Hive. My seduction would be smooth as a count’s. I edited the scenario in my mind. I hadn't been in Dorothy's room in days.

Mostly, I tried to sleep the time away on the couch, dreaming my fucked up dreams, because I could not operate the Ouija Board on my own. The last time I had tried was the afternoon after Terry left, sitting on Dorothy's bed with both hands on the cursor, repeating, "Sally, are you there? Sally, are you there?" If she was, I couldn't tell.

You should know that someone was there.

The faucet in the bathroom came on at random times, but the best ones were the well timed ones. Turn off the TV, faucet comes on. Walk out of the bathroom, faucet comes on. Walk out of the bedroom, faucet comes on. It was more annoying than anything else, but there was one incident that terrified me. It was some awful hour of the morning when I was awoken by Dorothy's stereo. The speakers said, "What are you doing?"

I didn't speak because my heart wanted out. Finally, I said, "Who said that?"

The speakers replied with a chuckle, "You know who this is," and the stereo shut off.

I didn't leave because I felt so guilty about all of the mess. I hadn't even cleaned up the glass from the window Terry had broken or the remnants of the busted lamp. I considered cleaning it up whenever I walked by, but this urge was curbed by hanging a blanket like a curtain over the window so I couldn't see its state. As the days went by, the folds in the makeshift curtain began to transmogrify. Its eyes were long and slanted, its teeth were gnarly, and its tongue could surely reach out for me. Sometime later, I closed the door on the curtain demon altogether.

8.

"Oh, all you demons and spirits/ I offer this food to you/ Eat/ Eat/ Share it with me”

-- Daniel Dooley

9.

I'm in my Grandmother's kitchen, eating apple slices with sugar and cinnamon. I'm a little kid. The table top was eye level. On the television was a commercial with someone playing guitar and singing a song that I liked. Grandma kept saying, "You like this song?" and laughing at me. It was my favorite song, but it must have been a jingle.

Anyways, my aunts and cousins were asking me questions like, "What does he look like?" and "What's his name?" and I was bored with it. I had to talk about it every day. I wished my mom would stop telling people about my nightly visits from the storytelling ghost. 

10.

A message from my mom says, "Wayne, are you there? Hey, I need to talk to you; give me a call. Okay? Call your sister, okay? And your brothers. Wayne, are you there? Wayne, are you there?"

11.

I'm stupid for liking her, but there's bite marks on her neck, the coffee, the meat. She can't like me because I am a sick boy. Sick boy, with the floor coming in waves and abandon. The winged insects are swarming the floor, but I swear it’s okay. They seem to be avoiding my feet. Are those my feet? Why, yes they are. Those aren't insects, stupid, they’re shards of glass. I wonder what's happening with those. Besides, she's with someone. I saw them at his car from the window last night, getting out, the three of us swaying from our own devices as he walked her to the door. But the glass, useless, and that thing in the dark is making me laugh. If I knew what it was, I would call it to me. I'm sure the curtain demon saw them too. That's why he's been smiling at me like that.

12.

One night, Grandma’s mother came to her in a dream to reveal her final resting place to her daughter. She took her by the hand and led her to the headstone in the cemetery grass.

13.

One of Dorothy's later messages says, "Wayne, this is ridiculous. Answer the god damned phone, alright? Jasmine says she can smell my place from the first floor. I'd be terrified you're dead and call the cops, but she says she knows you're there because she can hear you yelling at video games. Why don’t you answer the door when she knocks? Wayne, you have to call me, honey. Please. Oh, and if Mary moves the paintings, don't worry about it, she does that all the time. She’s one of the more mischievous ghosts there."

14.

One of my favorite things to do when I'm Skyrat is to locate a person hanging from a building and save them. People end up hanging from ledges for a variety of reasons. Sometimes, they nearly fall from their window washing platform. Other times, they fall out of a window. Others are not so easily explained, but apparently Skyrat is oft-times needed to rescue clumsy people who enjoy the view from the roof.

Going about the day to day Rat stuff is fun as hell too. See, if you just spend some time roof jumping in the neighborhood of the Federal Building, you'll find trouble popping up all of the time. Mostly, when you chase after the trouble, you just have to duke it out with some thugs, trash you recognize from Combat Tours, yelling things like, "Tonight I make my name!" or "Only cowards wear masks!" They're always way easier than the Combat Tours, so these aren't too much fun.

What's fun is rescuing someone from a high up ledge, and then taking them on a crazy roof hopping spree across the peaks of the city’s skyline while they scream in fear, diving from the Empirical Building and watching the traffic getting bigger.

15.

The way our house was situated, was you walked in through the living room, and the kitchen would be off to your right. A hallway ran down from your left, and that's where our rooms were. My mother always tucked me in so that I faced away from my bedroom door. If I had faced my door, I would have been able to see through it to the couch in the living room. One morning, she found me tucked in perfectly, facing the couch.

You should know that I told her it was because an old man came, tucked me in on the other side of the bed, sat on the couch, and told me a war story.

16.

Desperately trying to stop or hide the bleeding, I wrapped my slashed arms up in the best thing I could find. White dress shirts. For some reason, all of my clothes were white, my dresser full of white shirts, pants, everything. I looked out of the window to see who was visiting me, and the parking lot was fucking full. People were still coming, and I knew them all. Every goddamned person I knew was there. All of them dressed in white.

17.

I am sitting in a field, next to two aqua-green porta potties on an awkward slope. There are trees in the distance all around. I am afraid. “Red sky at night, sailor’s delight,” I remember thinking.

From inside one of the porta potties, Bruce says, "Wayne, there's no fucking toilet paper in here, can you believe this?" He was laughing, though.

The best idea, I thought, was to push it over. I walked around behind it, and said, "Bruce?"

He said, "Get in that other porta potty and get me some paper, man."

So I pushed it over, onto the door.

I sat down and admired the mess. After I had breath, I said, "Bruce, I'm sorry," but there was no answer. I'm not sure if it was because his neck was broke or because he had drowned.

18.

I thought about Sally a lot. I wanted to see Jasmine again. Mostly, I thought about moving in with my parents. Being homeless. Trying not to step in the cat shit, as the cat avoided its own litter box like it avoided the guest room. 

All of my CDs, books, and movies were in the guest room, but I didn't care about anything but the old Daniel Dooley EP called “Friend Like Fire, “some solo project he had released after Meat Curtain broke up. I listened to it over and over again every night, lying awake, considering Terry's mushrooms.

I wanted something new, but Dorothy had brought all of her CDs with her in books. Her bookshelves were lined with social science books and romance novels. She had movies like "14 Going On Forty," “Fireworks Day," and an assortment of Matthew Ferry vehicles.

I knew that I should have been taking her advice, spending my alone time writing, but the things I wanted to write down were too terrible to share.

19.

“They were the worst kind/ when I was a kid / (wrong side of the map)/ traded with traitors/ made war with our neighbors/ (wrong side of the map)/ they were the drunk ones/ they saved all their shells / for weekday vacations/ so we could raise hell”

-- Daniel Dooley

20.

One of Bruce's later messages says, "Wayne, so what's the deal, man? I'm hearing strange shit from Dorothy, and she's a little freaked out about you. Wayne. Don't make me come over there."

21.

Grandma woke up from the dream of her mother and wasted no time going back home to find her grave. And there it was, in the cemetery grass, right where mother said it would be.

22.

The sitting was weird, but I could deal with that, of course, but I could see past that barn, and I didn't like what I saw, my new memories there, but they were old. The bed was expanding and retracting, alive, breathing. It tickled me, I guess. I have a stupid, high pitched laugh, and it's no wonder Jasmine hates me, thinks I'm so strange.

"Sally, are you there?"

I can't tell if it's moving or fucking with me. I tell it, Stop fucking with me. Did i say that out loud? How did the shards get in here? Did you follow me? The bed breathes so slow, it must be sleeping, with my ear on its ear; I can almost hear its heart. I sing it a little jingle and tell it all about tiger milk, old times.

"Who lives here? What's your name?"

He's not such a bad guy once you get to know him.

23.

"The world is an empty sky/ The lotus does not adhere to water/ Our minds/ Surpassing that in purity/ We bow in veneration to thee/ Most Exalted One"

-- Daniel Dooley

24.

If someone gets out of control on the roads of Green City, you chase them down and bash in the hood of their hover car until it breaks down. It's pretty hilarious when they get out and cry or yell at you, but what are they going to do?

Sometimes you find a broken down ambulance, some poor victim inside who needs to get to the hospital. They carry the burden of a timer. Still, this is pretty easy, and gets you life once you've dropped them off with a nurse at the hospital.

And then I'm off to climb the Empirical Building again. Skyrat complains about needing to turn in his homework at school, about how he has to work afterwards (as a bike courier, which made for a fun level early in the game), but I ignore his bitching. Going to Green City High School meant Berserker.

25.

Another story like the one about Grandma, is the one about my Uncle Wayne, my mom’s brother. The morning he died, Mom said she woke up early because she felt like something was wrong. She was sitting at the kitchen table, having her first cup of coffee, when he came through the door, greeting our dog and petting him. Uncle Wayne told Mom that he had died last night. He had been sick for a long time and was sorry for not having told her. He loved her and had to go now.

Twenty minutes after he’d gone, when the phone rang, Mom already knew that Wayne’s liver had ruptured in the middle of the night while he slept next to Uncle Jerry.

26.

One of my Dad's messages says, "Wayne, did you know they are making a new Nevada Smith movie? Did you watch the Chuck Tulip interview with Lennon Fjord that I told you about? Wayne? It was pretty good, and he said they finally have the script for the next movie. It's like, the third draft or something. Anyways, I knew you liked all of that Joseph Campbell Heroe’s Journey stuff, and I thought you would have watched the Lennon Fjord one the other night. Or was that Bill Moyers?” His drunken tongue and teeth were an obstacle course. "You remember when 'The Final Crusade' came out? I made your mother promise me she wouldn't tell you we were going to see it, but she did, at the goddamn restaurant." In the background, Mom yelled at him for saying "God Damn." He cursed her and continued, "No, she told you before the restaurant; you told me you knew at the restaurant. You remember seeing that movie? We must have gone and seen it four more times after that, remember? Wayne? I love you. Call me. Call your mom."

27.

Mom told everyone about my nightly visits from the ghostly storyteller, how I repeated stories about Normandy Beach and the time he accidentally sat on a landmine. Mom’s sister was terrified for me. When Aunt Junie had lived in Ohio, she lived in a house where a young man’s ghost would sometimes be found hanging out in the kitchen. They dealt with it until one day, upon returning from the bathroom, she found him feeding the baby in his high chair.

It was obvious that I wasn't making this shit up. How else would I know about the SS and Panzers? I was only three.

Mom finally stayed up one night to see for herself. Dad had fallen asleep. She heard me speak and move around. She heard a man’s voice, deep and low. At her door, she could smell the pipe smoke. From the hall, she saw him sitting on the couch, just as I said he would be. Then he wasn't. I cried and was angry with her for scaring him off. 

He visited me almost every night for as long as we lived in that apartment, maybe a year.

28.

"Just let me be/ is all I can utter/ when what I posses/ isn’t enough to move me from my nest / a yellowjacket buzzed her / she admonishes me/ why be something other/ and not an example like me/ as so many bumbles/ as so many wasps/ as so many honeys/ who sting at great cost/ like the wings of that yellow/ who needs not a map/ if we set no examples/ we may as well nap"

-- Daniel Dooley

29.

Sleep. Sleep. Don't laugh, useless. Sleep. It should be over soon, buddy. It's pretty much the same either way, so I leave them open, to watch it crawl. It's funny because my hands look the same on either side. Sleep, stupid. The black spots are everywhere. I hate you.

30.

Everyone I had ever known was in my home, visiting with my mother, dressed in bright white. There were my brothers with my Preacher from when I was teaching Sunday School. My morbidly obese aunt. My cousin Chad and his Mom and Sister. VD. Annie. Her mom. Chan Marshall. My loud uncle. My skinhead cousin. Bruce. Dorothy. Jason. Dale. Jasmine. Terry. Fucking everyone I've ever known, man.

The blood wasn't stopping, but the worst part was the shame. I was so ashamed, man, I can't even tell you.

This is where it gets funny. Are you ready for this? I mingled and hugged everyone with those red soaked white shirts tied to my forearms, staining red their whites, leaking life onto the floor and Grandma's Sunday Best. And no one noticed. Not a god damned one of them noticed.

31.

At Wayne's funeral, Grandma sat with his dead hand in her lap. She said, "Didn't they do a wonderful job?" I wanted to say no. She said, "Can I tell you something? You can't tell your mother or anyone else, Wayne, they already think I'm crazy. The morning he died, I woke up, and I knew, Wayne. I simply knew that something was wrong. I hurt so bad I could barely make it to sit at my spot at the kitchen table. Usually I make coffee, but my back hurt so badly that morning I could barely walk, I tell you. I hurt so bad... 

“And here walks in Wayne, petting the dog, telling me goodbye, that he had died, saying that he was sorry he hadn't told me how sick he was.”

32.

One of Bruce's last messages says, "She's in lots of books, Wayne, I saw it at the library, lots of pictures, but that's not what bothers me. What bothers me is that she is coming to you in your dreams. She's bringing it with her, Wayne, and you have to use what you see. Do you hear me? Call me back."

33.

I'm not sure what time it was, but it must have been late afternoon. I was on Dorothy's bed and could feel the Ouija board under my back, the cursor under my leg. I tried to move. I wasn't alone in the room. Scream, useless, but I didn't. I tried to breathe, tried my fingers. What if I stopped breathing? She was standing to the right of the bed, that's all I knew. Sally. The hag. A vampire. The curtain demon. Berserker. I fought against the inevitable, the climb on my chest, the suffocation.

The touch on my forearm was warm. I came awake with a scream, flipped left and flopped off of Dorothy’s bed and onto the floor. She giggled and put her hand to her mouth. Her hair flopped into her eyes and she brushed it away. She must have been eleven or twelve. She said, "I'm Sally, what's your name?" and started to come around the bed. I lost sight of her for a moment, and she was gone.

34.

Some switch in my brain was flipped. My tour of duty as an embattled house sitter was coming to a close. Dorothy would be home in two days. I dumped the cat box into the garbage bag and went on a fecal treasure hunt. I set to quiet work, picking up the bottles, sweeping up the ashes, dumping the juice bottles full of piss next to the couch in the toilet. The plan was to deep clean from room to room, finish by the end of the day, and write down my old family ghost stories and nightmares. I had to write something before Dorothy came home.

Finishing the living room found me hungry, so I doctored up some tomato soup with garlic powder and parmesan cheese and watched TV. When the soup had been devoured, I decided to play Tales of the Skyrat. I roof hopped across the rooftops to Green City High School to set the story mode into motion, pitting me once again against Berserker.

I avoided his attacks and chased him until he relented for battle. The pattern was easy. I knew when to attack.

I saved my game and picked up my dishes. When I turned the kitchen faucet off, I could hear the bathroom faucet come on. I turned it off and considered the portrait of the dreadlocked man in the bathroom, tuning his guitar on the porch swing, where Bruce's masterpiece had hung before Mary moved it. 

I thought that I should put the paintings back.

I stared at Dorothy’s nude portrait above her bed. Next to her bed, on the nightstand next to the phone with the ringer off. The answering machine light blinked incessantly. The display blinked the red word, "FULL."

Most of the calls were Mom, Dad, and Dorothy. Mostly Dorothy. She filled me in on the goings ons of long lectures and high dollar sales of paintings. She said, "Wayne, what if I can quit my job and live off of selling Bruce's paintings? There’s a real hunger for outsider art." I skipped through most of the messages.

One of my mom's messages from the middle of the pile said, "Wayne, I wanted to tell you something before you hung up, but your Dad just hung up without giving me the phone. Listen, Wayne, the police called. They're looking for Terry." There was a message from Sergeant Grayson too, telling me that if I had any information about Terry's whereabouts, it would be in my best interest to call him. Mom said, "He's wanted for breaking into a family's home while they were sleeping and robbing them, Wayne. He told his mom he's innocent, but... that boy... And, Wayne, I also wanted to tell you that it's not your Sally’s ghost there, it's a little girl."

Bruce's messages began as reports on school and life. He claimed that he was almost rich from selling paintings. Then they were worried, and then they became angry and random, crazy even, telling me hair-brained conspiracy theories, telling me about a skull-faced time traveler named Gabriella, theorizing about the nature of my dreams. He questioned Dorothy's loyalty to him.

His last message said, "It's time, Wayne. You can’t stop it. But you’ll help"

35.

I couldn't imagine Terry in an armed robbery in the home of a sleeping family, but it didn’t matter. He was going to jail if he was caught. I kind of hoped I would never hear from him again.

When he and Frank were visiting, Terry would not let us take the mushrooms he had brought with him in his backpack. “Taking mushrooms is all about being in a safe environment if you want to have a good trip,” he said, "Not in this place, Wayne," clutching the bible to his bare chest.

I said, "Whatever's going on here, I don't think it can hurt us. Dorothy said it wouldn't."

"Yeah, but who trusts a Succubus? I don’t want to flip that switch here, no thanks," said Frank. He had had a bad trip himself recently, involving a lengthy conversation with a dancing house about suicide. Myself, I had enjoyed my last experience with psychedelic drugs and found it healing and creatively inspiring. I liked the way the experience ebbed and flowed and seemed to fracture reality like glass.

36.

We were living in that haunted apartment on 10th street, the one where that drill up on that shelf had come on by itself, the rocking chair rocked on it's own in the kitchen, and the lamp in my parent's room would come on randomly, even when it wasn't plugged in. My Aunt was over with her two little kids. We were at the kitchen table. Her boy, Chad, was four. He was standing on the brink of the dark void that was the living room, oblivious to us. 

He spoke to someone in there. 

Aunt Rose said, "Who are you talking to, Chad?" but he didn't answer.

After a moment, he screamed and ran to his mother, sobbing violently, terrified. We were all terrified, even after Mom and Aunt Rose walked around and turned all the lights on for us. There was no one else in the house. The deadbolts were locked in place. It was just us. We were alone but not alone. 

Chad never talked about it. He couldn’t.

37.

"Well before sunrise/ you broke free of your dream/ to look down on my nest/ where I slept on the floor/ an unwelcome guest / you're as that yellowjacket/ you're as that black wasp/ you’re a honey making hive/ trading stingers for eyes/ for the love of a queen/ who’s never known love/ if we’re no example/ no wonder we’re buzzed"

-- Daniel Dooley

38.

I had one day left. The living room remained the only clean room of the house, despite my dishes and socks. It was four thirty when I started, just before the knock at the door. I hoped it was Jasmine, but instead, in the hall, lying on the unfinished hardwood floor, was Bruce, soaked in sweat, gasping, trying to catch his breath. He had shaved his head and face completely. He was in camouflage shorts, the sweat making his Meat Curtain tour t-shirt cling to his ribs. He looked himself over, then looked back to me with a knowing smile, saying, "Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds." His sunglasses hid his eyes. There were cuts and dried blood on his head. The bottle of scotch was but a third of what it once was. “Break down a box, Wayne. Let me show you how sledding is done.”

39.

“Oh, to live and breathe/ With death our dream/ Oh, to live and breathe/ With death our dream”

-- Daniel Dooley

PART 2:

GANGS OF GREEN CITY

“Say, what abridgement have you for this evening? 

What masque? what music? How shall we beguile....” 

— Theseus; from A Midsummer Night’s Dream by William Shakespeare 

Episode 1: The Lost Encampment

Scott’s mother had given him a machete, and he walked twenty paces in front of her, hacking and slashing at the edges of the trail. He was unselfconscious in a way that a boy can only be when alone with his mother, singing and talking to himself, pretending, forgetting that he was a teenager, numerically obligated to put away the childish things. Occasionally, he called her over to check out a bug or a mushroom or the corpse of some decomposing Janusian fauna. This was an adventure for him.

The treetops choked down the sun into the gut of the Earth. Both of them were uneasy about it. They pretended that the sounds of the forest at night were worth little consideration, but they both felt the primal fear of nature. Every rustle of leaves was a stalking predator. Every unnamable screech was the last utterance of an innocent creature murdered for food. 

They lay in the grass, wrapped in their sleeping bags, admiring the unpolluted night sky, the weather as fair as ever. Why bother with the tent? What protection was a tent from a mountain lion or swarm of nocturnal lightning wasps anyway? Both of them had come equipped with a bolt action antimatter beam rifle, which they kept in arms reach, just in case.

“Trick question,” the boy was saying. “It’s the big dipper, but the big dipper is part of Ursa Major, the big bear.”

“The mother bear,” Callie said. “What about her son?”

“His name was Arcas. Ursa minor, over there,” he pointed. “The little dipper.”

“Okay, smart guy, you know your star constellations, but do you know your stars?” She pulled her sleeping bag up to her chin. “Tell me this, for a cash prize and an exotic vacation to Red City, what’s the closest star to our own?”

“Another trick question,” he said. “It’s Alpha Centauri, but it’s not one star, it’s a binary.”

“And our winner, ladies and gentleman, with $200,000 and a trip to Red City…” His father would be proud.  “Scott Turner!”

“The crowd goes wild!” He applauded himself and made a poor attempt at audience noises. “Ratings soar! The network orders a second season!”

“The boy genius gets his third PHD!”

“I’d like to thank the mosquitos for keeping me humble.”

They went on like that for a long time. Pretending.

***

They had granola and dried fruit for breakfast, strapped on their packs, and were back on the trail before five in the morning. “Why so early?” Scott groaned, dragging his feet behind his mother, who had woken with fire in her belly.

She stopped, turned around, and threw a strained smiled at her son. “Confession time,” she said, dropping her pack at her feet. “Pull up a log.”

Scott went down into a cross-legged position as if his knees had vaporized, searching his own pack for a snack before his butt hit the dirt. “Oh, yeah?”

She sat on a fallen chimera maple. “This camping trip isn’t all fun.”

Scott lined up two little plastic packets of dried cranberries so that he could tear the corners of both open simultaneously. “What do you mean?”

Callie kicked at the dirt. “Scott, you’ve never left Green City before, so you don’t...”

The boy dumped cranberries into his mouth. Some of them spelunked down his chin and into his shirt. 

“We’re currently in the northernmost territory of the Surgeons of the Evil East, just south of Iago. 

The boy stopped chewing. “The Evil East?”

“Border is less than five miles from here.”

“Whoa.” Like so many other boys, he had spent hours with his friends, speculating, repeating the latest rumor, putting on a brave face when asked if he would dare venture to the Evil East, given the opportunity. “Wait, did you bring me along for work?”

“I’ve been promising, right?” A viberaptor sang/barked somewhere in the woods. She had been promising for years but always found an excuse to put it off. She wished she still could.

***

From a clearing at the top of a particularly steep and rocky hill, they could see the vastness of the refugee camp, an undulating sea of canvas tents in the valley below. They stopped to catch their breath and take in the sight. Callie said, “These people…” 

The boy looked to his mother, excited and nervous. “You still haven’t said… What are we delivering, Mom? Vaccine? A cure for something? Blood substitute?”

A cloud traipsed between the sun and Earth, and its ominous shadow followed suit across the landscape. She ignored her son’s question.  “Used to be, if you wanted to live in Green City, you’d come to any number of camps along the coast to apply for asylum or citizenship. Now we’ve just got the one official camp, which I’m sure makes things easier from an administrative point of view, but -“

“These folks…” interrupted Scott, nodding toward the refugee camp. “They’ve been forgotten.”

“Ignored.” Callie gave a solemn nod. “Because they’re sandwiched between the Evil East and Iago, a Green City gangster - a terrorist, Scott - named Tony Poseidon, is exploiting the refugees here. You remember that awful gang that used to terrorize our own neighborhood, yeah? Poseidon’s their leader.”

“The Tonys.” Scott knew the gang well. “Always in threes. Triads. I heard Skyrat ran them all off.” 

She scratched her nose. “Poseidon’s moving in on the bliss trade, meaning he’s actively recruiting new Tonys, and he’s having a hard time finding volunteers.”

“Who’d want to link their brain to a bunch of criminals?” 

“Not much different than joining the military, is it? Listen, I’m not saying that I’d be really proud if you came home and announced the Tonys as your career choice, but it’d make sound financial sense and keep you at home in Green City too. Instead of being shipped off overseas, interstellar space, or to another dimension to pillage in the name of the federal government, you get to do it at home in the name of a homegrown businessman. Tony pays better than the Army and the ET Corps combined. Better benefits too. Join the hive mind for a couple of years, get out with a small fortune, a civilian job at one of Tony’s legit businesses, and a place in the city. Unlike the military, where you make a conscious choice to pull the trigger every time, the Tonys offer you a blissfully ignorant solution... Maybe you can even convince yourself that you’re not really responsible for your crimes since you were acting on behalf of the hive with literally no will of your own. ”

“Yeah, right!” Scott guffawed.

“You’d be surprised what story someone desperate enough would tell themselves... What they’d sacrifice… Who’d they’d partner with...” She sighed. “Anyway, there aren’t enough desperate people left in Green City - or here for that matter - to get Poseidon the numbers he needs to be competitive, so he’s blockading the camp again. Nobody in, nobody out. No food, no medicine, nothing. Until it gives up another 37 young men.” 

“37 sounds arbitrary.”

“Down from a hundred. Aerial vehicles are being shot at when they get too close, and the mouth of the valley is the only way to get supplies in by land. I flew in with a skid of nitrile gloves and antimicrobial a year or so ago, in between blockades. It was ugly, even then. I...” She stood up and shouldered her rifle. “We’re here to set them free.”

Scott jumped to his feet. He couldn’t believe this was happening. “How? You’re just a courier.”

“A courier who goes the extra mile for her clients. Come on.” They began hiking again, pace quickened by anticipation. “We’re delivering the means to mitigate the Tonys without a fight, but we’ll have to leave that to the campers. The extra mile does run out.” 

They hiked into the woods, quiet as possible, and stopped at the edge of the trees, fifty yards or so accrossed a field of tall grass from the encampment’s edge. “Move quick, stay low. We’ve gotten a few scouts in and out this way, and we’ll be safe enough once we get out of the open. The patrols around the perimeter back here are few and far between.” 

Her son was so excited he could barely contain himself.

She started to move forward, then paused. “Scott, maybe it was irresponsible for me to bring you along, but as a parent, I feel I owe it to you to show you... Some things aren’t understood until they’re experienced. Like your first kiss or the first time you kill your own food. Understand? Telling you about some stuff isn’t enough. I mean, you have to see this kind of suffering with your own eyes. You have to see it so that you’ll want to do something about it.” She began fooling with a clasp on her pack, opening it and closing it. “Most parents would be horrified… Horrified to bring their child into this situation. Who am I kidding, I am horrified. I mean, this is essentially a war zone... But isn’t Green City a war zone too? There’s been a turf war in our own neighborhood. We’ve had kids kill each other over a street corner a stone’s throw from the front door of our apartment building.”

She had put the lid on his enthusiasm. “Oh. I…”

“Don’t think about it. Come on.” They crouched and made a beeline through the tall grass, hearts racing, stopping behind a tent. “Tell me the plan again.”

“Don’t make eye contact, don’t talk to anybody. Don’t stop for anything until we get to your contact, Dr. Juno.” 

“Exactly. Tuck your shirt in.”

“Okay, Mom.” He sensed regret in her. “I’m glad you brought me,” he said. 

She smiled another weak smile at him, believing deep in her heart that he’d be a better man for this experience. “I’m not,” she said. 

His mother had not prepared him for the smell. It attacked without mercy as they made their way through the crowded encampment; first the sinuses, then the stomach and lungs. Scott could hardly breathe. People appeared at the entrances and in the spaces between the worn and soiled canvas shelters, quiet but for their painful shuffling; so quiet you could hear them blink. Their eyes were sunken into their skulls. Their ribs. Their distended bellies. The flies. The tattered rags they wore. Their children. That smell. The boy and his mother were interlopers in purgatory. He was ashamed of being healthy in their unhealthy presence. He was ashamed of the weapons they carried (“Tools,” the memory of his father’s voice repeated inside his skull). He was ashamed of his own disgust for them. 

It took an awkward eternity to march through the crowd to the massive canvas hospital tent. Inside were a dozen cots.  Boxes and shelves which had once been stocked with medical supplies were barren. Nurses attended emaciated bodies, adjusting the thin plastic lines running in and out of them, wiping brows and whispering soothing promises they knew they couldn’t keep. At a table in a corner, three young girls were cutting strips of canvas, old clothes, and blankets to make bandages.

Two of the cots held bodies with sheets pulled over their heads. A lifeless hand draped out from under one of the sheets, the pale digits grazing the dirt floor beneath it. In his mind’s eye, Scott saw Ezra’s hand, Ezra’s blood crusted at the edges of those fingernails. A single fly was landing, orbiting, and landing again. He thought of Ezra’s mom at the funeral, leaving her son’s casket and then rushing back to it, sobbing, refusing to let him go.

“You people can’t be here!” 

A bearded doctor was approaching them. Following the doctor were three well fed young men with greased-back hair and goatees, each wearing a dirty, short-sleeved, blue-collar workmen's uniform. A gold chain adorned each of their necks. Their sunglasses were mirrored. On the left breast of each shirt was a patch that said, “Tony.” A stylized trident was tattooed to each of their right forearms.

The doctor stopped when he recognized Scott’s mother. He adjusted the white coat on his wire frame. She said, “Hello, Juno.”

“Callie…” The doctor was pale. “What are you doing here?”

“You’re expecting me. I’m the courier. This is my son, Scott.” She motioned to the boy and said to him, “Scott, this is Juno. He’s the friend of your father’s I was telling you about.”

He shook Scott’s hand with a nervous fury, looked to the Tony Triad behind him, back to Scott. “This is a curious arrival time, as I’m sure you can see.”

“What did…” started the first Tony.

The second continued, “...you bring…”

“...for him?” the third finished. The sentence came out fluidly, one brain speaking through three mouths.

Plasmite pistols were holstered at each of their sides. Scott was afraid for his Mom, but she didn’t look the least bit shaken. Actually, she looked amused. Mischievous even.

“Papers,” she answered, removing her backpack.

Their sidearms were unholstered. The second Tony in the Triad was left handed, a rare individualistic phenomenon Scott hadn’t seen in a Triad before. “Slowly,” said the first. He was their Alpha Tony. The Alpha always spoke first.

The second said, “Slowly.”

“Slowly,” the third one said.

Scott tensed. He looked around, sized the place up, noting the civilians. He would fight the Triad if he had to. 

“This place…”

“...is restricted.”

“You should not…”

“...be here…”

“...without authorization...”

“...from Tony Poseidon.”

She moved slowly, kneeling to the floor, reaching into her backpack. “We’re authorized. It’s in the papers, fellas.” 

Pistols were primed, and they hummed in D minor. Scott stepped in between his mother and the Triad, palms up, saying, “You don’t want to do this.” He forgot about his own gun. He didn’t need it.

Their pistols went toward him. 

“Don’t…”

“...be…”

“...stupid.”

Juno shifted his weight. The nurses had stopped tending to their patients, watching this scene unfold instead. Callie removed a clipboard and pointed it at Juno. “See?” she asked the Tonys. Someone coughed.

Juno coughed out, “I need to sign for a medical supply shipment, that’s all.”

Simultaneously, each Tony raised an eyebrow. 

“Shipment?”

“What...”

“...shipment?”

“Vaccinations,” Callie answered. She carefully set her rifle aside. “There are nearly thirteen hundred people crammed into this camp, do you know what one single solar-pox infection would mean for your potential new recruits?”

These guys aren’t decision makers, Mom, Scott thought to himself. 

Juno took the clipboard from Callie, sweating. “I need a pen.” He had no idea what was happening.

Callie removed a pen from her bag. 

“We don’t…”

“...know anything…”

“...about this.”

“We need…”

“...To run it by…”

“...The boss.”

Callie smiled at them, not bothering to mask her disdain. “Boys, I don’t think you have one brain between you,” she said, clicking the pen, activating the device hidden within.

The Tonys dropped their guns. Their hands shot to their heads, and they fell to their knees, mouths wide in silent screams. Scott’s mother leaned into the face of the Alpha. “Welcome back to individuality,” she told him. The three of them collapsed. 

***

The nurses went back to work on their patients. Outside of the tent, Callie unpacked more Tony-disabling pens onto a small table. Refugees gathered around, watching, whispering. Juno waited quietly on the other side of the table, dumbfounded, cleaning his glasses for something to do with his hands. Scott stood next to his Mom.

“What was that?” Juno asked.

Callie smiled up at him. “Hypersonic signal jammer.” 

“It broke the Triad's connection to the Hive mind,” Scott said.

Callie finished unpacking and slung her pack over her shoulders. “The pens only jam them within twenty yards, but if you get enough volunteers to march on the blockade, you’ll take them all out quietly, likely without much of a fight.”

“Callie, my people are sick and starving, they’re too weak to fight for themselves. There’s no one else from the city to do this? To meet us on the other side?” Juno asked.

“We’ve made arrangements for supplies to begin arriving at the camp again tomorrow morning.” She looked at her feet, kicking at the dirt. “You’re on your own with the Tony’s from here, though. I’m sorry.”

Juno looked disgusted. “Politics, I’m sure.”

“Politics,” Callie agreed. “There’s no police jurisdiction here, and the military won’t risk breaking the Bird Treaty and inciting the Left Hand.”

Juno picked up one of the pens to look it over. “And your people, Callie? Hmm? Louisa?”

Callie bit her lip. “My people have done what they can.”

“I’m sure,” he said, spitting. To the crowd of refugees that had gathered around, Juno called out, “Here they are then!” He pointed to the tent where the downed Triad lay. “It begins with these three!” A guttural sound echoed through the ranks of the crowd, as if they too were of one mind. “How many of us suffered because of these three alone?” The crowd inched forward. 

Callie took hold of her son’s arm. 

“It’s up to us to free ourselves and make the Tonys pay for what they’ve done to us.” The crowd was transitioning from their acquiescence to a grim fate, awakening with rage. The mass of people ebbed and flowed, a living sea of sickness and anger.

“Mom, wait…” Panic overtook Scott. Aghast, he said to Juno, “All you have to do is get within range and click the pens. Done! Nobody has to hurt anybody.”

Juno ignored him. He growled his words at the mob. “Now is our time!” The quiet which had permeated the encampment when they had arrived had evolved into a snarling. The refugees had become a beast with many heads; many hands for tearing apart the enemy. 

 “Come on,” Callie said, tugging Scott away. “We’ve done our part.”

***

Callie led Scott back to the hill and up into the forest again. After some miles were behind them, Callie said, “Your father and I were seventeen when we applied to live in Green City. We met in a camp not unlike that one, you know, only with four times as many people.”

Scott had the machete out again, but he was unenthusiastic about the chore of clearing the trail. He said nothing to his mother, internalizing.

She went on, “There was a lottery; the winners were granted conditional citizenship. We won. A lot of other folks didn’t.”

The echo of gunshots from the distance stopped them in their tracks. 

“Mom?”

Callie put her hand on her son’s back and pushed him forward. “Those of us lucky enough to get on the boat for Green City, we had to push past those folks who weren’t so lucky. I couldn’t… It was impossible to look them in the eye. They hated us for going. I hated myself for going.”

The boy carelessly swung the machete at a vine, doing little damage to it. “Where did the rest of them go? Iago?”

“Some of them, those who were discouraged with waiting and crazy enough,” she said. “After your dad and I were on the boat, a riot broke out on the shore. People were swarming the ramp before we had even taken on all of our passengers. Things got ugly. Violent. I saw it all, Scott, from the deck. They were shooting them, using hoses, electricity…” She stopped. “It was barbaric. We had friends in that crowd. Family. I’d never see any of those people again.”

Scott stopped walking and turned to his mother. 

“Civilization is a mask we wear,” she said. “No matter what we tell ourselves, we’re just animals, like any dog or snake.” 

Scott didn’t like that. “The difference is that we can choose to be better.” 

***

Callie and Scott met a small black helicopter with police insignia at an extraction point seventeen miles from the refugee camp. Scott didn’t have to be told that it wasn’t really the police. The pilot had sandwiches and bottled water for them. He explained that he had secured clearance to fly them over the wall and land them in the commercial district where the company Callie worked for was headquartered. 

By “secured,” Scott knew he meant “bribed.” That’s how things in Green City worked. Even for honest folks. Especially for the honest folks. 

Everyone else used fire and violence.

***

A mile west of the coastline was the circled island of Green City, a six hundred square mile Neo-Atlantis rising from the sea like a spaceship peeking its nose through a portal from another dimension. Callie and Scott’s home, the home to nearly twenty five million other folks, glistened inside its four story walls; a safe haven and prison alike. Scott had never seen it from the air before. To see the enormity of it like this was to be shot between the eyes with its perfect, unnatural, technological marvel. Boats and drones were moving toward and away from it en masse like bugs skating on the surface of the water. Jets, helicopters, and spaceships, the winged creatures of this ecosystem, dipped in and out of the skyline, racing off and slowing in. Near the center of the southeast side of the island were the towering skyscrapers of the commercial district’s downtown. The tallest building was Minister Prime’s, the Empirical building, with its needle-like protrusion injecting commerce into the blue dome of Earth’s lower atmosphere. 

Scott and Callie wore headsets to talk with each other, but he was barely listening to her. He was enthralled by the view. She was saying, “Ezra was a fun kid; I know you loved him.” 

This was a line of conversation he would rather avoid. “Uh huh.”

She took a sip of water. “It was hard to watch you go through losing him.” 

He wondered how they got a whole city to stay above the water like that. He took a bite of a sandwich; turkey and cheese on wheat. Was the city just floating on the surface of the ocean? 

“Don't ignore me, Scott.”

He didn’t look at her. “I’m not.” Did it extend all the way down to the sea floor? 

“You’re upset about what happened at the camp.”

“It’s no big deal, Mom.” He had always been curious about the architecture of the city as a whole, but now that he was seeing it like this, he felt as if he had to know how it was built. Espie probably knew. He’d have to ask her.

Callie grabbed his shoulder, forcing him to look at her. “No big deal, you say? Scott Turner, that starving mob was going to kill those Tonys. They were going to tear that Triad to pieces, and then go do the same to the Tonys at the blockade. You know that, right?” 

He wore a mask of ambivalence. It didn’t fit.

“That was unexpected, and I’m sorry, Scott.”

He looked away from her, but she grabbed him again. “I’m sorry that I led you into that mess.“

He broke. His eyes burned from fighting back the tears. A salty drop escaped as he managed to squeak out, “Why do people have to hurt each other like that?”

“Because we’re animals.” She sighed, hugging him hard. “We get hurt, and then we hurt back in retaliation. It’s a vicious circle. It’s shocking, I know.” She sat back in her seat. “Listen, I wanted you to be shocked, Scott. I wanted to shock you. I wanted you to see for yourself what’s happening out there, what’s still happening out there even twenty years since your father and I came to the city.”

They were approaching the wall now. Some of the dock gates were open. Trucks drove through them and out onto the piers to load and unload cargo from the smaller vessels while cranes worked the larger ones.

“I know Ezra was your friend, Scott, but he wasn’t exactly a good influence. Grades dropping. Sneaking out. Stealing. Putting a brick through cop car windows. You never did anything like that before Ezra” 

“That cop was crooked, Mom.”

She waved him off. “Living where we live, going to school where you go to school, it’s a sacred opportunity. We made so many sacrifices for you, Scott. I saw that crowd moving in for blood back there, and all I could think of were the sacrifices we made for you, how grateful I was that you were born in the city instead of the mainland.”

Scott said, “Ezra was like those Tonys, Mom. He was desperate.”

She petted her boy's hair. “I know.”

“I wanted to help him...” The tears were coming now. “I tried to help him…”

She leaned into him. “Do you want to talk about it? The night it happened?”

He sat up and wiped his tears, looked her in the eyes. “No.”

The helicopter began its descent to Evolution Inc.’s building’s rooftop. “Tell me or don’t, but tell someone.” Callie straightened, wiped her own eyes, preparing to meet with her bosses. “Tell your dad or Espie or someone. Stop keeping it in, Scott Turner. You may think you’re tough, but you’re no superhero, you know.”

He chuckled at his mother, and looked back out the window.

He was a superhero.

Scott Turner was the Skyrat. 

Episode 2: Go Berserk

From the rooftop of the abandoned brewery building next to the JC Maxwell Plant, Skyrat watched Henry creep down the alley to the beat of an approaching lady’s footsteps. It was oddly quiet for the Industrial District, even for three in the morning. This was Tony territory, but there wasn’t a Tony to be seen.

The Rat dropped from the roof just as Henry reached from the shadows for the lady’s purse. Our hero landed on him, breaking the poor guy’s thumb. This was an accident. What Skyrat meant to do was to land right in between  Henry and the woman in a crouch, with one hand touching the pavement in front of him for balance, and the other drawn back into a fist. You know, like superheroes do in comic books. The thing is, jumping from a four story building and directing your landing in such a precise way is tough. It was pure luck that he didn’t land on the woman instead of Henry. 

The two of them scrambled back to their feet, Henry holding his hand, Skyrat pulling his hood up over his head, trying to exude confidence and menace in the face of this villain and the pretty lady he was protecting. The lady stood there watching, her hands on her head. She had dropped the purse. 

“I told you to stay out of this neighborhood, Henry!” said Skyrat, stern as he could manage. His mask was the severed sleeve of a red t-shirt. Triangular eye holes and a large opening for his nose and mouth had been cut out of it, and it was tied off under his chin to keep it tight. The rest of his costume consisted of a black t-shirt, a maroon zip-up hoodie, blue jeans, and a pair of old red canvas basketball shoes. 

Henry didn’t say anything. He just stood there, hunched over at the entrance to the alley, clutching his injured digit to his belly, swaying like a canoe in a lake. He was drunk. 

Without warning, the Rat lunged at him, grabbed him by his army coat, dragged him down the alley, scooped him up, and tossed him into an open dumpster with a thud that brought the lid down. “Don’t you dare come out of there until I’m gone,” Skyrat warned. “And if I catch you purse snatching again, I’ll sell you to the Surgeons of the Evil East!”

Henry kicked the inside of the dumpster in response.

Skyrat strutted back up the alley toward the pretty lady with his hands in the pockets of his hoodie, saying, “Sorry if I scared you, jumping out of nowhere like that, Miss. In situations like this, I have to act quick.”

She plucked her purse off of the sidewalk and struck a pose under the streetlight, arms crossed, quite reminiscent of the billboard behind her on the building across the street. 

Our hero was oblivious to the similarity. “Are you okay?” 

She looked him over as he stepped into the light. The hood cast his face in shadow.

She responded, “What are you, a jerk?”

“I’m the Skyrat!” he said, lowering his hood. He was a young African American man of sixteen. His mask was soaked in sweat and had some food stains on it. His hair, which had grown out since it was closely cropped at the beginning of the summer, was gross from all the rooftop patrolling he’d been doing that night. His smile was ear to ear. His eyes twinkled. An acute observer might have accused him of being smitten by the dark haired beauty in front of him.

“You’re a bully,” she said.

“But…” He straightened up, looking around for an observer to back him up. “He was going to mug you.” There was no one around to corroborate this story.  Actually, besides a few random third shifters, drunks, and a couple of Brot cultists, there were very few people here. 

“I wasn’t!” Henry’s voice echoed from inside the dumpster as he kicked it again.

Skyrat was flustered. He shifted his weight to one foot and then the other. Rain had begun falling lightly. “Henry takes purses all the time,” he assured her. “I’ve seen him do it. Twice.”

“I wouldn’t have let him take my purse, Skyman.” She glared at him. “I can take care of myself. I certainly don’t need some little boy to save me.” She wasn’t much older than him, a few years at most. She wore jeans and a black pea coat. Her face was kind of sparkly.

Lightning struck in Skyrat’s brain. “You look like Samantha Cyber!” he proclaimed, his smile returning.

He was a dumb kid, but she kind of liked him. “You think?” She looked up at the billboard behind her, then back to the Skyrat. On the billboard, the model sold diamonds with a look of mild disdain on her face. It was the same mask she was wearing now.

“Oh, my god,” he gasped. “You are Samantha Cyber!” She had cybernetic enhancements, sleek ribbons of complex metallic hardware slithering down her right arm. It was a medical necessity to mitigate nerve damage, but it gave her a unique, striking, commercially viable look.

Samantha sighed, turned, and walked away from the boy, knowing he would follow. 

He did. “I just saved Samantha Cyber from a purse snatching!” His voice was pitched about an octave above normal. “So weird to see you human sized. I mean, because you’re so big on the billboard. Not that you're big. You’re small. You’re a teeny tiny little girl. Lady. Woman. I mean...”

“Stop following me.”

He didn’t. “I’ll walk you home. The Industrial District isn’t safe at night.”

“This is Green City. No place is safe at night in this toilet.”

“Yeah, but… You’re famous.” He stopped. “Why are you out here all by yourself so late?”

She stopped, calculating her response. “You’re famous too.” Somewhere, a cat in heat began screaming like a baby. Samantha could smell urine. “Why are you out here all by yourself?”

“I’m, uh, I’m not famous.” Skyrat blushed. “I’m infamous. There’s a difference.” 

His smile was one of those contagious types. She fought the urge to show that she’d been infected by it. “No difference. Infamous sounds bad, but it can work out pretty well for you if you know how to use it.”

“Well, I mean, this is my, uh, this is my job. Being here is what I do.” 

Something popped and echoed in the distance; maybe a gunshot, maybe a vehicle backfire. A Brot jaywalked just east of them. There was no one else around but the yelping cat and a vagrant, vomiting in a gutter. The rain was coming down harder now. “Let me walk you home. I don’t mind.” He put his hood back up. 

She thought the boy was sweet and allowed him a smile. “I mind, Skyman.” 

“Skyrat.”

“Whatever. You can’t walk me home. I don’t like the idea of some kid knowing where my apartment is. You might tell your buddies, and then I’m gonna have a bunch of little boys swarming my apartment building, hounding the attendant for autographs and trying to peek at me in my underwear.”

He looked around again. Still no one helpful to be seen. “I would never…!” 

“Of course you wouldn’t.”

In the distance, car tires squealed, stealing their attention from each other. Back to Samantha, Skyrat said, “Really. You can trust me. I’m a superhero.”

“I’ll tell you what.” She dug his sincerity. “Give me your phone number, and I’ll text you if I ever need a superhero.”

His eyes lit up. “Okay!” He started going through his pockets, pulling out mobile phones. She counted seven of them. “Here,” he said when he found the one he wanted. A vehicle was approaching; a poorly running gas-powered vehicle, coming fast by the sound of it. “Take this number.”

“You’re sure?” She took her own phone from her purse. “That’s the one?”

“Yeah,” he said. “I think I’ll put some music on it. You like For Algernon? Oh, and Star Biker has to go on here too. You ever play that?”

“What’s the number, Ratboy?”

“Skyrat.” He told her the number. She called it. “I can’t believe I have Samantha Cyber’s kwothing phone number!”

Her phone was returned to her purse. “Don’t call me, I’ll call you.”

Headlights illuminated them as an old black full-sized van screeched around the corner and barreled past them, roaring like an injured brachiosaurus with a diesel engine. Swerving out of control, it became suddenly acquainted with the unyielding metal pole of a streetlight. The pole leaned in on the van in disapproval. Sparks spat from a busted light fixture. A hubcap went rolling off down the street. The cat made a demon noise. Samantha and Skyrat watched in disbelief as the truck backed up, beeping in warning. 

Thudding, running footsteps like a kick drum drew their attention back to the corner from whence the van had appeared. The perpetrator of the drumming was impossibly big, nearly as big as the van. He wore a tight fitting muscle shirt, jeans, and a green luchador mask with two intertwining snakes on it. Bulging veins pulsed in his biceps and shoulders, and he was snarling like an animal.

Samantha stepped behind the Rat to hide, terrified, clutching onto the back of his hoodie. “What the kwot is that?”

Skyrat whispered, “Berserker.” He was terrified too.

Berserker slowed as he approached the van. It stopped backing up, and the transmission clunked as it was thrown in drive. Bullets pinged through the back windows. The brute just swatted at them like annoying flies. He kicked the back driver’s side tire, and it popped. Sparks flew as the wheels spun for a getaway but to no avail. Berserker smacked the side of the van and it toppled over.

Samantha jumped. 

Skyrat said, “I hate this guy.”

“Go get him!” she urged, pushing him toward the scene.

“Huh?”

Berserker climbed on top of the van, ripping the driver’s side door off as if it were a page from a magazine.

“Go be a superhero!”

“I will, don’t rush me!” Skyrat took a deep breath and then a step toward the van. 

The masked giant stood on the side of the overturned van, holding the driver above him by the lapels. He was saying, “Tell Geronimo that if he wants him back, he can buy him back from Berserker.” His accent was more European than Mexican, as far as Skyrat could tell. The driver’s head was bleeding. He threw up on Berserker’s shoulder. The monster just laughed.

Skyrat drew one more deep breath into his lungs and said to Samantha, “You should probably run,”  then ran full force in the van’s direction,  jumped, and launched himself at Berserker. He bounced off the villain’s back as a tennis ball would from a wall, falling onto the upturned side of the van and then rolling off onto the street.

Berserker dropped the driver and stepped off of the vehicle. “Skyrat,” he said. “The Theseus to my Minotaur. I have been missing you.”

Rat scurried back to his feet. “How’s your head?”

Berserker took a casual swat at Skyrat. The blow connected and sent the boy through the air and into the burned-out warehouse across the street. He smacked against it and plopped down onto the sidewalk. 

“Last time we met, you hit me from behind with a street sign,” he growled at the boy. “That was cowardly.”

“Call it what you want, tiny.” Our hero took to his unsteady feet, shaking. “I stopped you from killing that poor bank manager’s shih tzu, though, didn’t I.”

“For now.” Berserker swung his fist, but the Rat dodged it. The punch exploded the bricks of the building and buried the brute’s arm in the wall up to his shoulder. Skyrat grabbed onto his opponent’s belt, braced his foot against the wall, and flung the villain with everything he had. Berserker flew without grace back across the street, crashing into the underside of the toppled van. The impact rolled it backwards onto its roof. Berserker rolled off onto the street behind it.

Skyrat smiled amidst the cloud of mortar dust, proud of himself. Still, he didn’t dare take on Berserker directly. “Whatever you’re after, I won’t let you take it!” He really needed to escape, preferably with his skull intact. A plan began to formulate.

Berserker came around the upturned vehicle. “Like a mouse braving the kitchen while the cat prowls the house...” His footsteps echoed off of the buildings as he marched forward. “I will play with your helpless form until I am ready to eat you alive, little pigeon.”

Sirens blared in the distance. Samantha had called the police. They would be equipped with weapons designed to take down the likes of Berserker. Skyrat too, for that matter. The monster stopped in his tracks. “The corrupt master of the house awakes as well.” He shifted his attention back to the van. “Fly back to your nest, little pigeon. We will have to continue our game another time.” 

Another vehicle turned a corner onto the scene, not the police but a white television news van. Skyrat figured that the driver must have been nearby listening to his police scanner and was now determined to catch the story before the police arrived. 

Berserker tipped the black van from its roof back to its side.

Skyrat raced to the news van, waving his hands at it, yelling, “Stop!” It screeched to a halt in front of him, and the driver opened the door. The headlights nearly blinded the Rat.

“What do you think you’re doing, kid?” I yelled at him. You should know that it was me driving the van. My wife and I owned a local independent news station, WGCN, Channel 4, where she was the director and had a morning show called “Early Bird.” Lucretia had had me pick the van up from the shop before going to work. She wasn’t going to be happy about this. 

“I need to borrow your van, please and thank you.” To exhibit that this was not a request but a commandeering, he took a cue from Berserker, and ripped the driver’s side door off the news van like a coupon, flipping it off into the air behind him, letting me know he meant business.

Our eyes met. He recognized me. The door crashed down onto the street a half a block behind him. The sirens grew louder.

After a split second of hesitation, he yanked me out of the van and onto the street, careful not to injure my fragile old frame. He climbed into the driver’s seat and put the vehicle in gear, took one more worried glance in my direction, said, “Smells like skunk in here,” and put the pedal to the metal. 

Berserker went around to the rear of the black van, opening the doors. Before he could peak at the cargo inside, Skyrat hit him with my news van at about sixty five miles per hour. Glass and metal sprayed the air. The back end of the news van lurched up off of the street and smacked into the black van while the front end wrapped itself around the big guy, who just kind of stood there and took it even better than the streetlight had. Skyrat had not buckled his seatbelt. He was thrown through the windshield by the impact, and I kid you not, he soared over Berserker, did a flip and landed in a perfect superhero pose thirty feet ahead of the collision. He crouched there for a moment, one hand in front for balance, the other drawn back behind him in a fist. 

Berserker stumbled at the boy hero, stunned. He reached up to his sternum and took a handful of flesh. It tore with an awful sound. He pulled and ripped, squirming like a snake shedding it’s skin, his flesh wet and red on the inside, making sucking sounds as he stepped free from it, fully dressed, looking clean and bright in his fresh new clothes and mask. 

Skyrat stumbled back in disgust and horror, then stood straight to face his enemy, ready for what might be next. That’s when the three police cruisers arrived on the scene, sirens blaring, swerving to a stop in a triangular pattern around the combatants. Four officers from two of the cruisers jumped out with service pistols drawn. Cops in the third car were arming their electron pulse cannons. 

“On your knees with your hands behind your head!” one of them ordered. 

Berserker smiled at Skyrat, then charged him. The Rat wasn’t ready after all. He took a shoulder to the chest and was sent spinning off into the air. Berserker kept going towards the closest cruiser. The police opened fire, the bullets ricocheting from the masked behemoth. He shouldered the cruiser, swatting it out of his way while the cops pulled their triggers to no avail, and began sprinting southeast, in the direction of Center Park. Two of the other cops jumped back in their own cruiser to give chase.

The Rat was dazed, but he saw the window of opportunity while the police were preoccupied with Berserker. He escaped without being noticed, getting back to the top of the old brewery, where he hid in the shadows of its water tower before the fuzz even thought to look for him.

From his perch up there, he watched the aftermath. The four remaining officers conferenced for a moment, then split. One of them called in an ambulance, one of them approached me, and the other two checked out the black van’s driver. I later learned that the driver was a known lieutenant of the Left Hand and had died from a head injury he suffered when Berserker pulled him out of the van and bounced his noggin off of the door frame.

The officers opened up the back of the dead fellow’s van and called over their colleagues to share the discovery. A couple of the officers, the ones with the appropriate medical training, I’d imagine, climbed into the back of the van where they cut the duct tape off of the man who was bound and gagged back there. Skyrat leapt onto an adjacent rooftop to get a better view. When the ambulances arrived, the paramedics helped the man from the back of the van out onto a stretcher. He was morbidly obese in his dirty boxer shorts and undershirt. One of his socks was missing, the other had a crusty brown hole where his big toe had been on better days. Half his balding head was covered with a complex homemade cybernetic enhancement.

Skyrat whispered, “Tony Poseidon…”

***

Salome saw her daughter every other weekend, per the judgement, beginning when Espie was two. The last time they were together for a weekend, they had frozen yogurt at Apple Crush. Espie was riding the Earth for her eighth time around the sun, and Salome had recently been given a terminal diagnosis of Rapid Hypothalmic Partitioning Disorder, so these weekends took on an aura of special import. With creamy pink goop all over her mouth, Espie told her, “I like school this year.”

“I’m so glad to hear you say that,” her mom said. She was still wearing her gregarious prescription sunglasses with the jeweled frames. “Mrs Zhang is a better teacher than Miss Vaisuovich?”

“She’s nicer,” said Espie. “She lets me play with Aamir Khan. Every. Day.”

Salome scraped the bottom of her dish with her spoon, rounding up every possible last drop. “Aamir Khan, Esperanza?” She leaned forward with a devious smile, and in her best baritone sing-song voice, she said, “Is that your booooyfriend?”

“Nooooooooo, Mom!”screeched Espie, snatching the attention of the entire pastel painted place. It was full to capacity, as usual. “Aamir Khan is a guinea pig!”

“Oh, your class pet! They make terrible boyfriends,” she snorted. “So you get to play with Aamir Khan every day? You sure must love guinea pigs.”

Espie was finished with her frozen yogurt now, and given the chance to talk about her passion for skittish rodents, she became animated. “I LOVE guinea pigs. Every morning, I feed him, and give him water, and once a week, I help Mrs Zhang clean out his cage.” She started twirling around the braids in her hair. “If I get all of my math homework done all week, I even get to sit at his table on Friday!”

Her mom feigned a look of vast and unmeasurable impressment. “Oh, wow, that’s so cool, Espie. Why’s it cost you math homework to sit with him on Friday?”

Espie slumped in her molded plastic seat. Looking at the ceiling, she whined, “I hate math so much, Mom. Everyone hates math. It’s too hard.”

Halfway to her mouth with her last morsel of melted vanilla bean, her mother stopped, aghast. “Strawberry,” she lamented, “You need math for everything! We couldn’t even build our chairs at work without math.”

Espie waved her off, calling her mom’s bluff, saying, “You don’t need math to make a chair, Mom!”

“It’s true! Some people think even me or you can be described by a math problem.”

The little girl’s disbelief grew exponentially at this idea. “No way! That’s a lie. You need words to describe me.”

“Only if I wanna describe how cute you are!” Salome stood up, leaned over to the waste bin with her paper bowl and spoon, then sat back down. “Ready to go, Strawberry?”

“Ready,” said Espie.

Before their next scheduled weekend, Salome would gain more than sixty pounds, lose control of her bladder, and become a danger to her children. Espie would never see her outside of the hospital again.

***

“Good afternoon, class, and welcome to fourth period creative writing,” I said, standing up from my desk. “For those new to my class, I’ll clear up some rumors you’ve likely heard.” I was wearing my favorite corduroy suit that day. Old fashioned, maybe. Out of style, certainly. My favorite nonetheless. The right arm of the jacket was pinned in a neat fold at the elbow to accommodate my truncated limb. “Yes, I come from another dimension’s Earth. No, I did not come from Janus. Yes, Geronimo cut my arm off before he signed the Bird Treaty. No, I have never had my brain connected to the internet, so no, I have never had the bug-eye virus.” I walked with a limp and a cane, the result of an older injury within that same brutal time-period of my life (although the doctors in Green City were able to repair the leg cybernetically). To my wife’s chagrin, I had stopped cutting my hair and shaving some years ago. I restrained the long gray growth on both sides of my head with rubber bands. “Yes, I did write a book which is currently banned from this school’s library. No, I won’t give you a copy. Any questions?”

Six or seven hands went up. “Who doesn’t love a good mystery,” I said, turning my back on them and going into an impassioned lecture on the Oxford comma at the chalkboard.

Near the end of class, I decided it was time to make Scott sweat. “When I was a young man, I worked at a hotel,” I told my students. “A travelling theater group stayed there one winter, and they were putting on a rendition of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol at our community theater.” I paused, wondering how the students pictured me as a young man. “The actor playing Scrooge was, appropriately, the biggest curmudgeon you could imagine.” I stopped dead in my tracks, pointing my cane at Bao in the second row of desks. “What is a curmudgeon, Nguyen?”

Bao Nguyen was a deer in headlights. It’s why I loved to call on him at unexpected moments. “Uh…” he creaked like the rusted hinges of a door. “Is it a disease?”

“It is,” I said, continuing my pacing. “A curmudgeon, children, is a human being who is infected with a particularly sour disposition. This Scrooge sulked in a corner of the lobby with a Burrough's novel while his fellow thespians socialized in the hotel bar. What a Debbie Downer he was.”

There was a Debbie in my class, sitting next to Scott’s friend, Espie Vasquez. I saw her squirm out of the corner of my eye. “No offense, Deborah,” I said without looking at her.

“Anyway, you should know that the actor was unpleasant. I didn’t like him. But the next evening, I went to their play, and by Orion’s belt, that guy could act! He was the best actor in the play, way better than that unbearable Ghost of Christmas Present.”  Again I stopped in my tracks to make a point. “Mr. Turner!” I called out to Scott with my cane pointing. “Am I boring you?”

His head had been dropping and jerking back to attention over and over again as he battled the dreaded monster Sleep. He stammered, “N-n-no, sir.” 

“Good.” I gave him a hard stare, the kind that might wake the comatose. Pacing again, I continued, “So, Scrooge was a fantastic stage actor, and after the play ended, he and the girl who played Tiny Tim posted themselves at the exits to shake hands with the audience. When I came to him at the theater doors, he shook my hand like an old friend. I couldn’t believe how warm he was when he thanked me for coming to see the play. I thought, man, I was so wrong about this dude!” For a third time, I stopped. This time, I faced the entire class, making eye contact with them, one by one. I was an actor too, and the classroom was my stage. “But do you know what happened the next afternoon as I checked Scrooge out of the hotel?”

The class stared back at me, waiting for the point to all of this.

“He complained to me about the towels, the stiff bed, the three hour drive to the next town that they were performing in…” I began pacing again. “What cumbersome company he must have made for his fellow actors. He was a curmudgeon. Why, do you think, was I convinced otherwise of his true nature the previous night?”

Espie raised her hand. I pointed my cane at the girl. She said, “He was acting.”

“He was acting!” I smiled at her, and she smiled back. “He was acting like an affable fellow after the performance, but he wasn’t an affable fellow, children. Affability was a mask he wore, just as Scrooge was a mask he wore.” The bell would be ringing soon. “In this moment, I wear the mask of a teacher while you wear the student’s mask. We all wear masks. You are not the same you with your friend Jill as you are with your friend Jack; one part of you is hidden when another is exposed.” I took a moment to let this sink in, stopping to watch the blue tifforbs at the feeder outside of the window, then continued. “Your assignment this week is to write about one of the times in which you wore a mask. Tell me about the situation, why you think that you behaved as you did, and how you felt. And children, at least try and make it interesting to read.” I sat at my desk. “Begin now, and write until the bell rings. I want a three-page draft from each of you by Friday.”

***

Espie had managed to make it through Algebra 2 sophomore year by giving up on the “why” of the problems. If she just let the process be, she could solve her way through the class with an A. No problem. Contemplating the “why” just complicated the issue, so she didn’t bother with it. In physics and chemistry, however, her teachers insisted the “why” was quite important to understand, and that led her on a frustrating path to a “D” in both classes. Maybe she should have listened to the guidance counselor and not taken the two sciences in one semester, but she was determined to hit the ground running when college started with two years worth of credits under her belt.

She was in her room, perched in a nest of pillows on the floor at the foot of her bed, working a particularly nasty pre-calculus problem one afternoon when a pebble struck her window, shocking her out of the solitary landscape of her mind. There was no question who or what the hell it was. It was Ezra. For kwot’s sake. See, this is why she cut down the branch that reached to her window from the candlewax tree in the front yard. Sure, it was romantic when he climbed out on the limb to chat with her, but romance is fleeting. Again and again, night after night, he was out there wanting to talk, wanting to sneak in, wanting to touch her boobs. No way, Jose! She refused to let some boy knock her up before college. When the babies came, it would be on her schedule, well after she had begun teaching molecular biology at GCU or working in South America to cure the Baphomet Virus.

She poked her head out into the cold. “I’m studying for finals this week, Ezra! How many languages do I have to say it in before you get it?” This was sophomore year, so at this point, she could say it in at least two and a half languages.

He scratched his head. He wasn’t even that great at English. “Um… Can we talk?”

“I’m busy.”

“Listen, I’m failing Mrs. Walker’s class, girl,” he pleaded. “I can’t get an F on that paper, you know what my dad will do to me if I fail again. Please. Will you help me?” Ah, the homework help plea, a classic. Paired with the threat of a beating from his father and those cute yellow puppy dog eyes, she was helpless against him. 

She relented. “The door’s open. Meet me at the dining room table. You have one hour before my mom gets home from work and kicks you out.”

One hour was all he needed. 

***

With the class filing out, I stopped Scott, asking him to wait with me. When the other students were gone, I closed the door and locked it. He said, “I’m supposed to help my mom after school.”

“You should be getting some sleep, it would seem.” 

He shrugged. “Probably.”

“Mr. Turing tells me you didn’t turn your math homework in this morning.”

He scratched his head. “Yeah, I, uh… I forgot it.” He looked around the class for help, but he was alone with me.

“You wear the mask of a burdened boy. Something you want to talk to me about, Scott?”

“Not really.” He appeared mesmerized by my desktop calendar.

“Go berserk,” I said. “You can tell me anything.” 

He shook his head, sweating.

“Okay, Skyrat, I’ll go first then.” His eyes jumped up to mine. “Here’s the deal. You and I are going to get on the subway, have an awkward train ride, and then we’re going to have a talk with Mrs. Bird at our home.”

He stared at me. Blinked. “What? Why? Are you going to… Are you going to out me on TV?”

“No, nothing like that,” I assured him. “It’s…” I started. “You see…” I tried again. How to say this? I reached down to my left pant leg and hiked it to my knee. There was an old tattoo on the right side of my calf, amateur and faded, but unmistakable. “I was seventeen when my cousin gave me this tattoo. That was 191 years ago.”

“Is that…” he stammered. “Is that me?”

***

When she was nine, just months after her mother passed, Espie’s father came home from work with a new doll for her. Instead of wearing a tiara and a ball gown like Espie’s other dolls, this doll wore scrubs and a surgical mask like he did. He said to her, “Every little girl wants to be a princess, and every daddy wants to treat his daughter like one.” Picking her up, he continued, “But I’m no king, sweetheart. I’m a regular guy.” To her, he was a mountain; unmovable, ancient, and everlasting. “You’ll have to work for your heart’s desires, Espie. I can’t give them to you.” He lifted her up above his snow capped peak and put her on his shoulders for the journey through their cramped apartment. “One day, you’ll stop playing with dolls, and you’ll make a fine life for yourself, knowing that you are entitled to nothing but your labors.” It was one of the last times she saw him. “Be content with what you have,” he told her in the kitchen as he scooped ice cream for them. “While you have it.” Two days later, he was called out to the mainland to treat a woman with an infection from a c-section gone wrong at the hands of the Surgeons of the Evil East. He never returned.

***

Like most other folks in Green City, my wife and I lived in a cramped space, but unlike most folks, we were fortunate enough to own a home. “Take your shoes off, will ya?” I asked Scott on our stoop. He peeled off his tattered footwear and stepped inside, looking around the place, no doubt admiring the juxtaposition of style: my knack for collecting and Lucretia’s competing knack for order and hospital grade sanitation. “You want some tea?”

“Um…” he said. 

“Lucretia? Lucretia, honey, can you put the teapot on?”

“Sure,” she answered from the kitchen in front of them. “How are you, Scott?”

He coughed. “Nervous.”

She laughed. “Don’t be.”

“This Earth is like mine with some notable differences,” I said as I led him to our table. “For example, what year is it?”

Scott blinked, looked to Lucretia, back to me. “1995.”

“It was 2016 on my Earth when I came here. The geography is off too. And history. For instance, Lincoln punched John Wilkes-Booth before a Secret Service agent accidentally shot the president. Where I’m from, Booth assassinated the president. Have a seat.”

Scott sat. “I don’t follow.”

“Ancient American history,” I sighed. “Know why I don’t lend out copies of my banned books to students? Because I didn’t write them. Wayne Bird did, yes, and they are 90% the same as the books I wrote, but they’re different. Not mine. That Wayne died twenty years before I arrived here. And speaking of here, another thing: time flows funny here. Different from my Earth, I mean. Scott, I’m 187 years old. How the kwot can that even be possible?!?” 

“Wayne, language!” Lucretia snapped at me. To Scott, she smiled. “He’s a modern Methuselah.”

The boy looked at me as if we were speaking Greek. Hell, Greece wasn’t even a country on this Earth anymore. “How… Why do you have that tattoo?”

I cleared my throat. The kettle was beginning to whistle. “I made up the Skyrat when I was seven years old, Scott. And Berserker. Green City... And much more.” The kettle began screaming. Lucretia went back to the kitchen. “Your story is different from the one I wrote, like this dimension’s Wayne’s books are different than mine. I may have drawn you as a blonde white kid like that looked like I did, but there’s no doubt about it. You’re my childhood superhero made flesh.” The whistling stopped.

As you might imagine, Scott didn’t know what to do with this information. “So…  What, like, you created me from another dimension like some kind of a… Some kind of a god or something?”

Lucretia laughed so hard, she nearly lost the teacups she was carrying. “Don’t say that kind of stuff to him, Scott, he’s got a big enough ego as it is.”

I sat up straight and said, “I don’t think I created you at all. My physicist friend at GCU tells me that the math in physics describes time more like a sphere than a straight line, but for whatever reason, we humans only see it ticking into the future... At least consciously. Maybe I created you from a subconscious memory I had of the future.”

Lucretia groaned and took a seat next to her husband. “Or maybe, if there are infinite Earths, it may have been a statistical inevitability that someone sat down and wrote a story resembling yours, Scott. I mean, there’s only so many kinds of matter. Given infinite spacetime and a limited supply of matter, it’ll shuffle like cards and deal the same hands again and again and again. Infinitely. Does that make sense?” She put her hand on Scott’s. “Sometimes, something feels significant, but when you step back and look at the big picture, you can see how all the lines connect in quite mundane ways.”

The boy sipped his tea. “You’re saying that if the number of Earths is big enough, everything that can happen, will.”

“Infinitely,” I said. “You should know that I’m as open to this being a coincidence as my wife, but doesn't it seem strange that I made you up, travelled to another dimension where you actually exist, and then I waited around 150 years for you to show up?”

“It’s really, really weird, Mr Bird.” He looked to Lucretia, but she only looked back.

“I’m an old man, no action hero or guru, I’m afraid. I think I’m here to tell your story, Scott. Skyrat’s story.”

“Careful where you put your faith, gentlemen,” my wife warned us.

I ignored her. “I have a mission for you.”

***

A collection of unblinking professional women (an archaeologist, a lawyer, a scientist, a policewoman, and the surgeon doll her father had given her), some still in their boxes,  lived on a shelf above Espie’s bed. Scott lay in it, watching a zombie movie on channel 4. 

From the desk crammed into the corner between her bed, her overstuffed bookshelf, and three stacked guinea pig cages, Espie looked up from her homework, asking, “Did you study for the Calculus test last night?” Her other pet, a forty pound Janusian psy-fly named Jasper, buzzed around the ceiling above her.

He shrugged. “Um, yeah.” Reconsidering the lie, he said, “Not really. You?”

“Until, like, eleven thirty, but it didn’t go so well. I’ll be lucky if I get a C. My mom would be so disappointed in me if she were here.” She wore a pastel green sweater with a puppy on it, her long black hair in a ponytail. Her apartment always had a sweet stink to it. She must have owned a thousand paperback books. “No, Jasper, you’ve had enough sugar today,” she said to her psy-fly. The insect must have been psychically pestering her again.

“If you weren’t studying, you must have been out playing superhero all night again.” 

Scott shrugged. “Not really,” he lied.

“I said no, Jasper!” She yelled, sending the pay-fly buzzing away from her personal airspace in retreat. To Scott, she asked, “Did you at least write your paper for Mr. Bird?”

He actually had worked on it. “I‘m writing about the time I wore that werewolf mask to Dad’s halloween party, and I wouldn’t talk to anybody. I growled, howled, snarled, and whimpered at Dad’s friends and their kids all night. Dad went along with it until I started acting like I was going to drink out of the toilet.”

Espie said, “I don’t think he meant for us to write about wearing a literal mask, Scott.”  

“Oh, I think he did,” Scott informed her. “See, I had a… We ran into each other early this morning while I was fighting Berserker.”

“Oh, no.”

“And he recognized me.” 

“Oh, no, Scott.” She came and sat next to her friend on the bed. Jasper landed next to her, and she placed her hand on his back. It’s purring sounded like an exhaust fan.

“No, it’s cool,” he assured her. “It’s crazy, though, you’re not going to believe this. I don’t believe it.”

“What?!?” 

“Espie, he has a tattoo of me on his leg from when he was a teenager.”

“That doesn’t make any sense.”

“On his Earth, he made me up. He said he thinks he’s here now because he’s supposed to write about me or something.” He leaned back against the For Algernon poster on her wall. Espie was incredulous. “He told me that some of Tony Poseidon’s stolen hive-mind tech is arriving by boat tonight in the WD. I’m supposed to take it from the Louies and then bring it to the Temple of the Divine Geometry.”

“The cultists?”

“Weird, right?”

Espie punched Scott’s knee, scaring Jasper, who buzzed off back to Espie’s desk area. “You were out super late last night, you can’t go out again tonight. Your rule.”

“I know, but -“

“Your rule! Yeah, it’s weird about Birdman, but he’s got to be going senile to send a sixteen year old boy out to pick a fight in the middle of the night and steal from gangbangers. Does that not strike you as, like, something Dickens would have written about? Next thing you know, Mr. Bird is going to have you in his army of child pickpockets.”

“Come on, now.”

“Seriously, Scott. You’re not a kwothing superhero. I’m sorry. You're a kid with some strange abilities, yeah, but you’ve also got a whole lot of grief and frustration and nowhere healthy to put it.”

He began fooling with a button on the cuff of his shirt.

“I loved him too. So much. But you’re never going to punch Ezra back into existence.”

Silence. Then, “That’s not fair, Espie.”

“Life’s not fair,” she said, climbing out of the bed. “I’ve got homework to do. Do whatever you want.”

Episode 3: We Gotta Go Now

Skyrat was on the rooftop of a Lee Choi’s building, sitting on the antimatter containment unit, doing his homework. Lee Choi’s was one of those commercial teleporter joints you go to so you can grossly over-pay to send your Grandma in Purple City her birthday present since you forgot to mail it last week. This particular location specialized in teleporting goods fresh off the boat and was significantly larger than any of the city’s other locations. The containment unit hummed under our hero, supplying more power to this one franchise than the entire planet could produce back where and when I came from. Math equations filled the notebook page on his lap. His backpack was open next to him. On the street in front of the Lee Choi’s, just inside the wall at the open dock gate, four Louies gathered next to a beaten-up old green pickup truck, talking loudly, smoking cigarettes. People wandered by them on the street; dock workers, robed and hooded cultists, vagrants, blissed-out space cadets... Other Louies who went by yelled greetings and curses at their comrades. 

“No, his sister gave me that one,” a voice from below said. The others laughed.

On the top floor of the neighboring building was Bog. He stood at the window of a darkened room wearing a tailored black suit, black shirt and tie. A pair of binoculars was pressed into his eyes. A radio headset was wrapped over his long black hair, with a mouthpiece curving around his right cheek. Into his radio, he was saying, “I don’t know, man, it looks like he’s doing his homework or something.”

Laser was in the Lee Choi’s stairwell, making his way up the three flights to the roof where Skyrat sat. He was sweating profusely inside of his own wrinkled, ill-fitting black suit. He had to stop and catch his breath. He loosened his tie, unbuttoned the top button of his sweat stained collar, and hunched over. Sweat dripped from his nose and eyebrow. “You should have done this, man,” he told his headset with a cough. “I can’t… I don’t do steps.”

“Pull yourself together, fat man.” Bog lit another cigarette, then looked out at the ocean beyond the city wall. “The boat’s coming. Get up there.”

“I’m kwothing going,” Bog’s partner groaned. “But let me go on record saying that if this kid is as powerful as they say, we’re not going to bring him in against his will.” 

“Then we’ll just have to make friends with him,” Bog told him. “Aren’t people your specialty? If we play our cards right tonight, we could bag Skyrat before that nimrod, Patel, can you imagine? If we get him AND Louie Louie in one fell swoop, our careers will be made. Unless you screw it up, like with our gig over at inter-dimensional crime.”

“I always appreciate when you bring that up.”

Skyrat couldn’t see the boat from his vantage point, the city wall blocked his view. Somehow, some daredevil graffiti artist had managed to tag the top of the wall opposite him with his signature, perhaps in Cuneiform or hieroglyphics. It was impressive, maybe saying “Dog Tiger” or “Bag Tripper.” 

Laser burst out of the rooftop door, flashing his badge and proclaiming, “Department of Piracy! Drop the pencil, and put your hands where I can see them!”

Skyrat was not intimidated by the frumpy, overweight dude with a badge and a smoker’s cough. He remained seated, his pencil still at the page. He smiled at the guy. The poor fellow was struggling for oxygen. Rat said, “Too many steps, huh?”

The guy waved it off. “No, it’s fine.” He was in his late twenties maybe. “I’m all good.”

“Did you say you’re with the Department of Piracy?” 

Laser was too busy coughing to answer. His deodorant was useless.

Below, someone was saying, “...but those aren’t meant to go in your ear.”

Skyrat said, “Come on, dude, you made that up, right?” An answer occurred to him, and he scrawled down Y’s equivalent in his notebook. “There’s no such thing as the Department of Piracy.”

“Sure there is.” Laser pointed to his ID, right below the plastic badge in the imitation leather wallet he was using to display them. “See? I’m Codename: Laser, and you’re threatening our investigation.”

Skyrat had seen his fair share of police badges. He threw his head back with laughter. “Codename: Laser?” he cackled. “Really?”

Laser stood up straight. “That’s right. We use codenames in the DOP.” He glared at the seated kid in the makeshift superhero costume. “Skyrat.” 

“Oh, I didn’t choose my stupid name.” He closed his notebook. “I wanted to be called Red Ronin, but after I stomped some Louie for pickpocketing this dude who looked like he was ninety, he told a news lady that I was like a rat who fell from the sky. So, the news started calling me Skyrat, and it stuck.” He started putting his things into his backpack. “You, my friend, made a conscious choice to be called Codename: Laser.” 

“The people we’re after are dangerous and have too many cops on their payrolls. Our code names are like… Like wearing a mask.” Laser was getting flustered. “What’s wrong with Laser?”

“Focused beam of light is not the first thing I think of when I look at you.”

“For kwot’s sake!” shouted Bog into Laser’s ear. “That boat is about to pull up!”

Below them, the Louies were driving their truck through the wall’s gate out onto the dock to meet the approaching boat. Laser pocketed his ID wallet. “Skyrat, you have no authority here,” he said in his best cop voice. “Do not, and let me repeat myself, do not intervene.”

The Rat stood up, tossed his bookbag aside, and got in Laser’s face. “Or what?” He had gotten pretty good at acting tough.

Laser put his hands on the kid’s chest and gently pushed him back. “Listen, I shouldn’t be telling you this, but there’s something important coming in on that boat. We have an inside guy, see. That shipment’s important to Louie Louie herself, and it’s imperative to the nature of our investigation that we let it get through to her.”

“Louie Louie herself?” Again, the Skyrat laughed at him. “You’re clueless, man. Look, if you are a cop, we both know the only reason you’d let these guys go without seizing their cargo is because you stand to make a couple bucks off it. Someone has to keep these kwotholes from having their way with our city. Someone has to lay down the law. You cops won't.“ He put his palms up, stopping Laser from correcting him. “You Department of Piracy types won’t do it, so it’s up to me.” In a terrible cockney accent, he added, “And good day to you, sir!” sprinted to the edge of the building, and dove off.

“He’s going for it,” Laser breathed into his radio.

***

With their truck loaded with three unmarked wooden boxes, the gangbangers rolled back down the pier to the gate where Skyrat blocked their exit, bathed in the red light of the truck’s one working brake-light. He posed with his fists on his hips, saying in his best superhero voice, “Not so fast, blast monkeys.” As usual, the Louies were game for a scuffle with him. On the passenger side was the biggest guy, so Rat dove past the two in the truck bed for him first, slamming the passengers’ side door on his foot and then his hand before reaching in, grabbing him by his jean jacket, and pulling him out and into the ocean. 

Skyrat knew Ramone, the shirtless dude with the tattoos in the truck bed, from previous encounters. Ramone climbed over the boxes to come at the Rat with a knife. He was quick, stabbing at Skyrat’s head, breaking his blade on the kid’s skull as if he’d stabbed the sidewalk with a dry twig. Rat’s gloved hand went to his head. No blood. He snatched the assailant’s knife-hand and broke his wrist with a twist of his own. Ramone dropped the knife and hugging his hand against his chest, as the shrimp driver with orange braids came around to get his own licks in. Rat pushed Ramone hard, rolling him backwards and sideways over the boxes in the bed of the truck into Braids. They collided and fell off into the drink.

The fourth and final Louie stood on the back of the truck with a mass-repulsor rifle pointed at Skyrat. He was bald, accessorized with red suspenders and shoelaces in his combat boots. Skyrat knew this guy too. He had caught him breaking out storefront windows with a baseball bat last year. “Get out of the way, Rat!” he spit.

Skyrat said, “Kennedy, gimme a break.”

From behind him, Bog said, “Put the gun down, and step off the truck.”

“Blast him, Kennedy!” splashed one of the guys in the water. 

“Yes, do,” said Laser. “I hear all manner of projectiles bounce off of our boy here. I wanna see.”

Skyrat shrugged. Stuff had bounced off him before. Not always, though. He had a wicked scar on his right thigh to prove it. 

Bog ignited his sidearm, a modified Duster 663, and it began purring in his hand.

Kennedy lowered the rifle and tossed it away. “Louie Louie isn’t going to like this, Bog. She’s going to blame me. This wasn’t our deal!”

“Deal?” splashed a Louie. “Kwothing traitor!”

Bog said, “Blame the Rat, Kennedy. I didn’t expect him anymore than you. Get out of the truck.” He approached the truck like a cop would, but Skyrat still didn’t buy the whole Department of Piracy thing. Kennedy climbed out of the truck and faced Bog at the tailgate. “Sorry, man,” Bog said, holstering his sidearm under his suit jacket. He shoved the Louie off the dock into the water.

Tattoos was climbing a ladder from the water. Laser kicked him in the head, positing him back into the waves. “We better go, dude,” he said to his partner.

“Right,” said Bog.

Skyrat put his palms up. “Wait a minute, DOP. I’m taking these boxes.”

Bog pointed at the truck bed. “Nothing of interest here for you, Skyboy. See for yourself.”

“Skyrat.” He climbed into the back of the truck. One of the three boxes of the shipment was open, so he reached for it. Suddenly, there was a jarring lurch, and the truck began moving as the doors slammed shut. Rat was knocked off balance and went down onto the rusted-out truck bed. “Hey!” he yelled. The truck’s tires screeched as they drove through the wall’s gate.

As they raced away from the docks, Skyrat inspected the boxes. Inside the open one were copies of a mail-order lingerie catalogue for a company based out of Blue City. Skyrat pulled the padlock off of the second box. It was full of Janusian cigarette cartons and Jamaican rum. The third box had more lingerie catalogues, but on closer inspection, a black plastic case packed in styrofoam packing peanuts was hidden underneath. He flipped the clasps, opening it. Pill sized devices lined the foam interior. There were dozens of them. Tiny fibers were coming off of either side of each, giving them the look of a questionable insect. Exactly what I had sent him for.

He banged on the cab’s back window. “Stop the truck!” he ordered. 

The truck turned left on Inner Circle Blvd, beeping. Bog was driving in the wrong lane. He swerved to miss a couple of pedestrians and made a hard left, peeling the tires again. 

“We could sell it back to her,” Laser said.

“We shouldn’t have taken it in the first place,” Bog admonished.

“Wasn’t my idea, man.”

Skyrat struggled with the window, forced it open with a series of grunts and ignored pleas for help, then squeezed in through the opening head first. He wedged himself between the two so-called Department Of Piracy agents. They were amicable enough about it, making room for him. “Stop the truck,” Skyrat said.

“Or what?” Bog asked without looking at him.

Laser asked, “Is that a shirt sleeve on your head?”

“No,” Rat lied. “I mean, yeah. So what?”

“I’m just asking, dude.” He removed a pack of Twin Breezes from his breast pocket and put a cigarette between his lips.

Disgusted, Skyrat said, “At least open a window. Geeze, dude!”

As the window went down, sounds of the city filled the cab; voices, honks, electrical vibrations, conversations in Portuguese, snippets of Bossa Nova. They were in Little Brazil. Police wore mechanized, armored suits out front of a donut shop.

Bog looked Skyrat over. “Not exactly a classic superhero costume, my man.” 

“He usually digs a man in uniform,” added Laser.

Skyrat defended himself, saying, “I can’t sew, and I feel stupid in tights.”

The truck went right. They seemed to be heading to the westside of the island. Somewhere a woman screamed obscenities.

Skyrat said, “I know what you two are doing. You’re black market opportunists. Too good for the Louies, too bad for an honest day’s work, am I right?”

Bog guffawed. “You’re no better! What’s this?” He patted Skyrat’s belly. “Looks like a lingerie catalogue.”

Skyrat squirmed. “Evidence!”

“Evidence,” Laser guffawed, reaching for Rat’s hoodie pocket and removing a couple of mobile phones from it. “Why do you need two phones?”

“Those are mine!” 

Laser held them out of Skyrat’s reach, flipping through the contacts list on one of them. “Hey, Bog, all of these people are Louies.”

Bog smiled in realization. “You’re a kwothing thief, aren’t you?!?”

“Am not!”

“You’re just like us. It’s cool.” Bog merged onto Inner Circle Highway. For the average Green City driver, traffic laws were viewed as suggestions.

They drove in silence for a bit. Skyrat said, “Louie Louie is not a she.”

This struck Bog as being particularly hilarious. “Is that so?”

“His name is Louie Louie,” Skyrat said. “Of course it’s a dude.”

Laser’s smile was a smug one. “She looks like your hot boss at the office.”

“She’s dangerous,” spat Bog.

Skyrat asked, “Why’s that shipment so important?” He wondered what they knew about the hive-mind tech.

“Rum and cigarettes,” Laser answered. “She loves the hooch, but her brand isn’t available stateside. She has it shipped from the Caribbean. Gives the cigarettes out to her gang. The lingerie catalogues are some kind of scam. That company doesn’t even exist.”

“And the electronics?” Skyrat asked.

Bog turned to him. “What electronics?”

“Boys,” Laser interrupted, adjusting the passenger side mirror to look behind the truck. “We’ve got company.” An ancient brown Chrysler was fast approaching, bobbing and weaving through traffic, catching up to them. 

It rear ended them. Bog swerved, taking out a couple of orange construction cones. “Kwot!” cursed Laser. Another four Louies were in the car. Traffic was merging into a single lane ahead, slowing, bottlenecking, creating eager idiots in a hurry. No room for any kind of evasive maneuvers.

“They must really want to order some lingerie,” Skyrat quipped.

Laser pulled his photon pulser out from under his suit jacket. The Rat pushed the barrel down under the dash. “Are you stupid? There are people all around us!”

Laser glared at him. 

Bog said, “I’d just lose them in the blissed blocks, but I can’t get over to exit.” He met eyes with the superhero. “Skyrat, go out there and get them.”

“And do what?” He shook his head. “Besides, I’m not doing you kwotholes any favors.”

Laser said, “Things are about to get interesting now that the Tonys are gone. You wanna keep up your kwothing about or would you rather step into the ring with the big dogs?”

“You’re an ameteur. Stick with us, we’ll take you pro.”

“Wait, so…” Skyrat shook his head. “What do you mean the Tonys are gone?”

“Totally vanished. Gone,” said Laser. The Louies rammed the back of the truck again. One of them, some wiry dude with blue hair, was climbing out onto the roof of their vehicle. A projectile pinged through the windshield. “Kwot!” Laser pointed, calling out, “You’re open on the right, Matt, get over!”

Bog swung into the lane’s opening and made a hard right onto Minister Prime St, just on time, saying, “Have you seen any Triads lately, Skyrat?” Another blast went through the cab, this time from something hot. A glowing orange-rimmed hole smoked in the windshield. The Louies remained hot on their tale.

“Take the exit for 18th street!”

“Right!” said Bog. Skidding around the exit and bouncing off a guard rail, he continued, “Geronimo was set to buy Poseidon Foods. We think the Louies took the Tonys out to stop the sale.”

“Why?”

Their truck bounced. Blue Hair had jumped into the truck bed. The Chrysler tried to get around to the side of the truck, but oncoming traffic stopped them, honking. “With Poseidon out of the picture, she’s got a monopoly on the Bliss trade,” said Laser.

“And the clout to negotiate with Geronimo,” Bog added, veering hard to the right, bouncing the truck off of a newish gray hovercar and knocking Blue Hair down in the truck bed. His gun went off, the hot blast piercing the side of the truck. The hovercar veered off onto the sidewalk, crashing into a parked car and a mailbox. Some guy was going nuts about it, running out into the street in a futile attempt to chase after them. The Chrysler was still hot on their tail. Blue hair started fiddling with the window at the back of the cab.

“Fine!” Rat acquiesced. “I’ll deal with him, just get us the kwot out of this neighborhood.” They were in the Industrial District, near the Forest Glen projects where hundreds of families, countless numbers of those family members being Louies, lived in squalid efficiencies and one bedroom apartments. They were deep behind enemy lines, no place for an open fight. “Make a left and head to the underpass.” He turned in his seat and punched through the glass of the back window, hitting Blue Hair in the teeth, plopping him back down into the truck bed.

“Swerve!”

Bog jerked the wheel, narrowly avoiding a lady on her bicycle. 

Skyrat secured the evidence in the front of his jeans, brushed away the remaining glass in the window frame, and squeezed out into the back. He got to his feet, steadying himself against the cab of the speeding clunker. The blue-haired Louie took a knee, pointing his TD3, firing one off just as the truck hit a bump, missing again. Skyrat pounced on him, socked him in the nose, knocking him out cold. Behind them, the three remaining Louies in the Chrysler were still giving chase. The two passengers raised their sidearms. Rat dropped to his belly. Gunfire rang out.

Inside the cab, Laser yelled, “There! On the right!” 

The truck swung right into the next lane, cutting off another truck at the entrance to the Poseidon Processing Plant. Skyrat shifted up to the cab, reached through the window, and smacked Laser in the back of the head. “Here! Let them catch up!” 

The truck veered left, slowing as the Chrysler approached. Skyrat leapt, belly flopping onto the hood and grabbing ahold of the crevices of the windshield for dear life. The driver cut the wheel, and they spun around 180 degrees to a tire squealing stop, the suddenness of which catapulted Skyrat off twenty yards or so. The gangbangers filed out, ignoring Rat and went straight for Bog, Laser, and the green truck, guns blazing. Bog swung around, hit the gas and the pick-up peeled away, leaving Skyrat behind. The Louies turned back to their car for another chase but Rat was standing on their roof.

“How many holes do I have in me?” he asked them. He immediately recognized the soggy one with red suspenders as Kennedy.

They just stared.

“None? Yeah, that’s because you’re all awful shots. Terrible!”  

They raised their pistols to correct their mistake, but the Rat was too fast. He leapt into the air and came down feet first into the driver. A spin kick took the guy with the nose ring off his feet, and an uppercut took down Kennedy. 

“That’s right!” Skyrat shouted, celebrating his near instantaneous victory over three opponents. In the distance, he heard tires squeal, snapping him from his reverie. He couldn’t believe Bog and Laser had left him behind, outnumbered in hostile territory.

From the blacktop, Nose Ring snorted, lurched forward, and grabbed Rat’s ankle with both hands. He had quite a grip. Skyrat looked down. “More, Mr. Louie?” 

Kennedy’s tackle caught Skyrat off guard. He went down hard, cracking his head on the pavement, filling it with constellations. Kennedy clambered on top of him, punched him in the eye. Blind from pain, Rat reached out, grabbed onto his suspenders and slung him away. That’s when Nose Ring kicked the Rat in the side. “Gah!” he called out. Now the driver was back on his feet too, attempting a roundhouse kick. Pivoting from his left knee, Skyrat caught the Louie’s jeans at the calf and swung him off him in the direction of Nose Ring. They collided with an “Oomph!” and collapsed on the asphalt. Rat scurried up as fast as he could, his rib broken from Nosering’s cheap shot. He clutched his side, breathing into the pain, giving the three Louies a stare down as they got back on their own feet. 

The driver said, “My brother is in jail because of you.”

Nose Ring said, “So’s my stepmom.” 

Kennedy added, “You’re a kwothing dead man, Skyrat.”

The driver swung his right hook, Rat dodged it, caught his arm, and fractured it at the elbow over his knee with a sick crack, popping bone out of skin. It would never heal right.

Espie’s face struck like lightning in Skyrat’s mind’s eye. “Stay and do your homework,” he could hear her voice echoing from earlier that afternoon. “You’ll never punch Ezra back to life.” 

The driver collapsed, crying. Nosering rushed Skyrat blindly, growling. The Rat kicked him in the face, hard enough to flip him backwards, landing him on his belly, stealing his wind.

To Kennedy, Skyrat asked, “Hey, friend, can we talk?”

Kennedy ran. Skyrat gave chase, and regrettably, tackled him. His rib sang an angry tune inside his hoodie. He climbed on the guy’s back, pinning Kennedy’s arms with his knees, holding his head down to the sticky tar of the parking lot. He demanded to know, “What deal did you make with Bog and Laser?”

The Louie grunted, “I just told them stuff, that’s all!” 

Skyrat pushed harder, grinded the guy’s ear. “What do you know about that shipment they just drove off with?”

“Nothing! All I knew was that Louie Louie wanted me to pick up her liquor, and I had to bring help. Those cops were just there to watch and take pictures, they weren’t even supposed to bother us!”

Rat let go of his head and stood up. From inside of his maroon hoodie, he removed the evidence tucked into his jeans and opened the black plastic case. “What does he want with this?”

“Who?” Asked Kennedy. “The cops?”

“Louie Louie!”

“I don’t even know what that is,“ spat Kennedy. 

Skyrat took a step back and looked around the scene. Shift change must have been happening, and the fight had drawn a small crowd without Rat even noticing. It was growing exponentially. Suddenly, he realized how young the driver with the mangled arm was; maybe twelve or thirteen. He was on his knees, sobbing over his busted limb.  “Everybody, just get back, okay?” Our hero backed up, his palms up towards the factory workers on either side of him. “I’m sorry,” he offered the kid. “I’m really, really sorry.”

To Kennedy, he asked, “You have one of those cops’ numbers in your phone?” 

There was a subway station a block or two away, around the corner and up the street. Skyrat stole the Louies’ phones from them and hobbled off across the parking lot, taking off his mask, jacket, and gloves off along the way. Plenty of factory workers were around, but no one paid him any mind once it was clear that the fight was over. It was dark, and in a city as crowded as this one, people were practiced and professional apathetics.

 

He hugged the black plastic case against his belly. At the corner, he dropped his Skyrat costume into a garbage can and went down into the subway terminal. Scott searched his pockets for his passcard but couldn’t find it. Nor his wallet. He leaned back against the concrete wall. He had left his backpack on the roof of that roof near the docking gate, and everything was in it: the subway pass, his wallet, his homework, his books… Even the phone with Samantha Cyber’s number in it! “Kwothing DOP distracted me,” he seethed to himself, but he knew it was his own mindless mistake.

After a moment of lamentation, a train pulled up to the platform. He jumped the turnstile and slipped into a train car just as the doors were closing and the protesting attendant was about to catch him. There was a lurch, then the train shot into the tunnels. Scott sat down across from a little boy and his mother. The boy was about seven, drumming the beat of his song on his knees. “Four little monkeys, jumping on the bed. One fell off and broke his head.” He went on like that, singing quietly.

Scott relaxed as much as he could against the cold plastic seat and fell asleep to the lullaby and clickety clack of the steel wheels on the track. 

Episode 4: Showdown At Louie’s Pawn

The fortified cabin was built into a shallow cave in a rock face, deep into the Evil East. An acre of front yard was fenced with the gargantuan trunks of ringed Saturn trees, and just beyond the fence lay a vast, coniferous forest. Spotlights illuminated the perimeter. Above the cabin, dug into the rocks, was a sniper in a bird’s nest. 

Akil had built the cabin for his family in secret, preparing a clandestine retirement from the Left Hand. After a thirty two year military career, he wanted nothing more than to leave his brutal existence in service of Iago behind him. There were seven of them at the cabin; all but one deserters, all but one a traitor to the Left Hand.

Carolyn climbed out of the hatch on the cabin’s roof and approached the ladder to the bird’s nest. “Akil!” She called up to her husband. “Akil, it’s nearly two in the morning. You rest.”

From the darkness above, she heard her husband’s voice. “If the baby comes…”

“Send Jeb to get me if the baby is coming. He can take a shift so we can both be in the room the moment our granddaughter arrives.”

Akil considered this for a moment. “Jebediah has his own responsibilities.”

“We went dark inside to conserve power for the spotlights hours ago. Repairs will have to wait until the morning.”

“The morning?” Anger welled up in him, then passed like the tide. Geronimo had been a dangerous man to show anger to, so he had learned to control his own. Control was the running theme of his life, and as much as he wanted control of this situation, Carolyn was right, he’d be useless to his little girl exhausted. Relenting, he put the rifle down and descended the ladder. 

His wife embraced him. “We’ll get her through this. With any luck, we’ll be travelling to safer parts by tomorrow afternoon.”

Akil knew better, and Geronimo knew they were here. The Left Hand would be dispatched, and no matter how fortified the cabin was, his family would be, at best, recaptured.

It was more likely that they would all be dead by sunrise.

***

When his Mom came out of her room in the morning, she found Scott at the dining room table, dressed for school, hunched over his notebook, writing furiously. An empty cereal bowl and coffee cup sat off to his right side. He wasn’t due to leave for school with Espie until 7:45, so he usually slept until about 7:35, making breakfast a rare meal for the boy. Not that she didn’t try to impart the importance of first-meal upon him. Oh, she had him commit to a nutritious breakfast every morning for years, but then he turned thirteen. Getting this guy out of bed became a Sisyphean task she’d given up on by now. He was such a stubborn young bull. She’d have had more luck roping Taurus out of the night sky than getting him up early enough for breakfast. Yet, here he was. She went to the coffee pot and filled her favorite mug, the one that said, “Complaint Department: Now Open.” She stood behind him for a moment, wearing her fuzzy pink robe, sipping her coffee, reading his essay for Mr Bird over his shoulder. “I love that story,” she cackled, then sat down next to him at the table, picked up the remote, and powered on the TV to watch “Early Bird.”

“Good morning, Mom,” Scott said.

“Hello, Hemingway,” Callie replied.  “Hey, before you go, I need all of your laundry.  I refuse to enter your room for anything until it’s clean. It’s abominable right now.”

“Okay, Mom.” On TV, Lucretia Bird was wearing a yellow floral blouse with purple eyeshadow. Did she clash her colors on purpose? (Answer: Yes.) And those bracelets… Why? She loved seeing a strong black woman like herself on television, but critiquing the news woman’s fashion failures was half the fun of watching the show for Callie. 

Lucretia was interviewing a police spokesman with a mustache in a pink polo shirt. He was saying, “Look, if you cause over a half million dollars in property damage, you have to be held accountable for your actions.”

Lucretia nodded. “There’s recent security footage from a pyramid drone as well as cell phone video from WGCN’s own Wayne Bird that appear to back the claim that Skyrat has… That he has what can only be called... Superpowers. How is the task force preparing to address this?”

Polo shirt took a moment, shifted in his seat. He said, “We cannot allow urban myths perpetuated by juvenile delinquents to influence law enforcement. Period. That video is out of context. Listen, the gangs provide the GCPD with enough challenges; we don’t need this Skyrat character getting into street fights and car chases with them. He’s not helping anyone.”

Scott groaned. “Mom, can we turn this off? I’m trying to do my homework.”

She sipped her coffee. “Should have done it last night.”

Lucretia went on, “Green City police lieutenant Kristjan Rafnkelsson on the vigilante known as Skyrat, who stands accused of massive property damage in the Warehouse and Industrial Districts in the past six months. A task force has been assigned in an effort to capture the vigilante.”

Scott’s heart skipped. He shook off the interview, and glared at his mother. “I did my math homework at Espie’s last night, Mom, but I left my backpack on the subway,” he lied. He would have to leave for school early if he wanted a chance of getting the book bag back from that warehouse roof before the first bell rang.

“Espie lives three blocks from here. Why in the world would you take the subway?” 

He was a deer in headlights before saying, “I, uh, I went to hang out with Brian afterwards. We watched a zombie movie.”

“Who’s Brian?”

“Some dude from school. A friend. ” He was making Brian up right there on the spot. “He likes zombie movies.”

Callie raised an eyebrow. “Is that so?” she questioned him. “Well, I’m glad you have a new friend.” She could smell his fibs from thirty yards on a windless day, but she was one to choose her battles. If he was getting his work done, and she wasn’t getting any calls from his teachers, then she was winning the war.

“Yeah. A new friend.”

“Too bad about your backpack, though.”

“You have no idea.”

By the time he got to the warehouse rooftop, it was gone.

***

Laser was in the middle of lunch at his desk when his mobile phone rang. ”Don’t waste my time, Kennedy,” he said with his mouth full of noodles.

“It’s Skyrat.” He should have been in the cafeteria with his friends, but instead, Scott was out back behind the school, crouching beside a dumpster in the alley.

“Skyrat! So glad you called, you’re saving us a lot of trouble this afternoon.” Laser sat forward and waved frantically to get Bog’s attention from across the office. “Skyrat, Skyrat, Skyrat,” he chuckled. “Skyrat as in…” Bog rushed over and handed him the school ID from the backpack. “You mean Scott Turner? Lives at Round Town Apartments with his mother, Callie Tsitak? Full scholarship to Green City High School? That Skyrat?”

He was caught.

“Hey, is that the real Samantha Cyber calling you?”

Scott lost all hope. “Oh, my god,” he squeaked.

Bog took the phone from his partner. “We don’t want you, kid,” he said. “But someone does. There’s actually a Skyrat task force, believe it or not. My man Detective Patel is on the job.”

“I don’t know how they’re considering one guy a task force, but Patel’s pretty good for a total kwothole,” Scott heard Laser say in the background.

“What do you want from me?”

“A distraction,” said Bog. “Tonight, Laser and I are leading a raid on one of the Louies’ bliss fronts. A big one. With Poseidon gone, they’ve got a monopoly on the bliss market, and we’re fighting to keep our heads above water. Now, if Louie Louie gets wind of our raid, one of two things are going to happen. She’s going to call up the big guns, someone like Berserker, and they’re going to come and give us one hell of a fight.”

“Or?”

“Or she’s going to make some phone calls and all of the bliss and cash we seize will mysteriously disappear from the evidence locker.”

Laser yelled, adding, “And everyone we arrest will go free on technicalities or post bail and disappear.”

Scott rocked back and forth against the dumpster.

“You’re going to bust into Louie’s Pawn tonight at exactly midnight. Make a big noise. Bust some teeth in. Let Louie Louie know you really mean business. She’ll be working at her desk upstairs, having a double rum on ice with lime.”

“Get some cops to do it.”

“The police, Skyrat, require due process and warrants. Besides, the only cops we trust are already on our team, and I can’t spare them.”

“What am I supposed to say to her?”

“You’ll figure it out. Make it memorable, though, kid, and loud as hell. We need all the time you can buy us. We’ll be in touch.” Click. Scott didn’t even get a chance to ask if he could get his math homework back before fifth period.

***

Despite his anxiety over Bog and Laser, sleep may have swallowed Scott whole right in the middle of interstellar history class if not for the pain in his side. It was deeply perplexing to him that at one moment he could have some Louie break a knife blade over his head, leaving him without a scratch to show for it; then later, his fight with those other Louies in that parking lot left him really kwothing messed up. His powers were so weird. It was as if there was a switch that turned them on and off, but he wasn’t the one flipping it. 

One small victory was that his face wasn’t banged up, so he didn’t have to make up any excuses for looking like a punching bag. One time, he got hit in the nose with a shovel by a vagrant robbing a garden supply store. Explaining to his teachers that he tripped and fell face first into his dresser when he got up in the middle of the night to pee was one thing, but having to look his mom in the eyes and tell her that lie was another. 

Espie and Scott were walking to their subway stop from school together. Espie was saying, “So if you don’t recognize an ingredient on the label, it’s safe to assume it’s corn. History repeats itself, I guess.”

Scott wasn’t listening. He was distracted by his rib. “That’s good,” he said. 

Annoyed, Espie shoved him. “Wake up!”

He called out in pain. “What the kwot was that for?”

“You weren’t listening to me!” She called back in defense. Softening, she said, “Geeze, I’m sorry.”

For a second, he gave her the icepick look, but then he too softened. “It’s okay.”

“So, what… You’re hurt?”

“Yeah.”

They walked in silence for a bit. Espie hugged her books. “What happened?”

“Got in a fight.”

There was a time when he would tell her every stupid detail of his exploits as Skyrat. Not anymore. Particularly in this case where he had not only gotten hurt but compromised his secret identity as well. Espie was fine without the details. “Well, I think you should take a break tonight. Come hang out with me. Something tells me the city can go a night without you.”

He was exhausted, but I had given him an important mission, and he had a midnight date with Louie Louie courtesy of Bog and Laser. “A night off sounds awesome, but I can’t.”

Espie gave her friend the side eye. “What do you mean you can’t? Can’t or won’t?”

He shrugged. “I can’t.”

She sighed. “I have to do some shopping before going home. Can you at least take a walk with me?”

A compromise occurred to him. “Yeah, actually, I can, but I have to run that little errand for Mr. Bird over in the WD. Can you do your shopping there? We can stop for a slice at Vincenzo’s.”

“Errand for Mr. Bird?” She sighed even deeper. “The cultists! You want me to go with you to the temple.”

He had the black case of insectoid hive-mind tech in his shoulder bag. “No Skyrat action,” he insisted. “I promise. Just a train ride, a walk through the park, and a hand off, I think. I’ll keep my mask in my pocket until we get there, promise.” 

She relented, saying that there was an organic grocery store on the WD side of Sunset Park that she wanted to check out, not far from the temple. Espie had been to the doctor recently and learned that the reason she was always sick were her allergies; corn, wheat, pollen, grass; it sounded as if she was allergic to the world. Apparently, in the old days, corn crops were bountiful, and corn was used in food products across the board as well as in everything from sunblock to gasoline. Espie wanted to research her options for corn free, wheat free foods, blaming society’s return to old mass agriculture methods for her ailment.

Pizza was off the menu. 

***

Dawn’s light had arrived when the hatch at the top of the cabin opened. Jebediah climbed out onto the roof, still wearing the tattered uniform of a captain in the Left Hand. He called out to Carolyn, “It’s time.” He took the bird’s nest, and she went down to the makeshift maternity room where her daughter’s screaming had momentarily subsided. “My girl,”  Carolyn said, petting her daughter’s hair. Akil sat on the other side of their daughter, holding her hand. His dress was civilian. After shedding his own uniform, he had burned it. 

The non-traitor in the cabin was Callie. She had arrived at sunset with supplies and began preparing for the birth. She was next to the girl, pulling blue nitrile gloves onto her hands, telling her about her own little boy.

On seeing her mother, the girl stopped listening and cried out, “I can’t.” She began sobbing. “I can’t do it, mom. Please...” 

Her mother took her other hand, kissed her cheek, said quiet words into her girl’s ear.

“Let’s see where we’re at,” said Callie. She examined the girl for a moment, then told her,  “Any time now, sweetheart. You’re doing great.” She wiped her head and helped the young mother into a more comfortable position. To Akil and Carolyn, she said, “Come with me,” and led him into the hall, closing the door behind them. She confided, “I’m not trained to do this.”

“C-section?” He asked. 

Callie nodded. 

Akil’s wife’s face betrayed a nuclear meltdown warning to her husband. “No, Akil! The antibiotics have been used up, and no one has the training, we can’t cut her.”

Callie put a hand on Carolyn’s shoulder. “The baby is breeched. It’s the only way.”

“Carolyn, you can do it, my love. You must.” He took his wife’s hand. “You’ve delivered livestock.”

“That muskbull died, Akil!”

Above their heads, shots rang out from the crow’s nest. “Jebediah…” Akil croaked. The Left Hand had grasped them.

***

Between Simpatico Plaza and the Heights was Sunset Park, three square miles of lush green reprise from city life on the border of the Residential and Warehouse Districts. Joggers, families, and lovers in the grass soaked in the sunshine and the kind of natural beauty that the city’s walls normally separated them from. Cultists in groups of five dotted the landscape, levitating in quiet, seated meditation. The chemical scented cumulus trees were in full bloom, all covered in white fluff which broke away and floated like snow in the warm breeze. Museum row flanked the southernmost edge of the park, there were some decent schools in the neighborhood, and several relatively spacious apartment buildings. One could almost stretch out here, almost feel as if they had some space for themselves. Almost. 

“My dad’s allergic to neurobees,” Scott was telling Espie as they passed a pair of robed and hooded cultists levitating in meditation off the stone walking path. “He keeps one of those shots in case he’s stung. What are they called?”

“Epinephrine.” A holographic map was being projected from her palm. She was trying to figure out where the grocery was. “An epipen.” She nearly tripped over a rock.

A labrador ran in front of them, chasing a frisbee. A couple of little kids with afros chased their spotted anubis. “He says it could kill him if he’s stung, and he didn’t have an epipen on him.” Scott plucked one of those blue flowers whose stem sings a brief note in C sharp when you pick it. He held it out it to his friend. “Terrible way to go too. Separates the hemispheres of your brain, then it’s all downhill from there.”

She said, “Well, my brain would be fine but I might swell up like a tiff orb and stop breathing. They gave me one of those shots to keep with me just in case.” She closed down the map and eyed the flower in disdain. “I have a couple of inhalers too.”

Scott reconsidered the flower, tossed it behind him. “Cutting through the park was a bad idea, wasn’t it,” he said. White light pulsed through the blue skin of two levitating Brots to the beat of their hearts.

“Probably.” They maneuvered around another group of meditating cultists to the other side of the park where glitching, corporeal, holographic food vendors were making and selling hot dogs and tacos from their carts. The two friends stepped out of the stone arch gateway to the park and onto the sidewalk. 

Two young dudes were pushing their broken down car up the street, parallel to the park. One of them had an injured arm and only had one arm to push with. Some jerk in an antique Honda honked at them and nearly caused an accident going around them. The young dudes yelled curses after it. 

Scott said, “I’m going to help them.”

Espie grabbed his arm. “What about your side?”

Walking and chatting with Espie had taken his mind off it. “I’m fine.” He removed his shoulder bag and handed it to her. “Someone should help them.” He broke into a jog and caught up with the car. Both doors were open like wings with the two Louies from inside pushing the vehicle from outside of their doors. Scott took his position at the trunk behind the two dudes. A shot of pain went through his side the moment he exerted force. 

The driver’s side dude looked back, smiling with his incomplete set of teeth. He was older than Scott, but not much. He had long, greasy brown hair and was in need of a shave. He smelled like booze. “Hey, thanks, man,” he slurred.

The passenger on Scott’s right concurred. “Yeah, thanks,” he said. It was Ramone, his wrist in an enhanced cast.

Scott said, “No problem,” hoping his reaction to Ramone’s face wasn’t an obvious one. “Where are we going?”

The driver said, “There’s a garage on that corner, just a half block down on the right. See it? With the marquee?”

“Sal’s Auto?”

“That’s the one.”

Another jerk, this one in a sleek green magnarail car, came up fast behind them, getting uncomfortably close to Scott. He honked his horn at them, and after the oncoming traffic passed, so did he. Ramone called a few expletives after him. 

Yet another car pulled up behind them, this one a black and chrome hot rod hover. The driver stuck his head out of the window. “I’ll follow you guys; make sure no one else sneaks up on you like that.” It was Springsteen, another Louie Scott knew. He was surrounded by Louies, helping them no less, injured and in civilian garb. 

They were approaching the intersection. A group of a dozen cultists or so had left the park after their meditations and were beginning to cross the street at the corner. 

“Ramone, have you been bowling yet?” called Springsteen from his car.

“Oh, baby, I smell an initiation,” said the greaseball.

Scott shook his head. “No no no no no…”

Ramone smiled ear to ear at the greaseball. “Bowling for Brots!’ he yelled, and the two Louies began to jog the car. Scott stopped in his tracks, however, and Springsteen hit him with the front end of his hot rod, tossing him over the hood and onto the street. He groaned in pain, on all fours. 

“Sorry, kid,” Springsteen called back to him from the drivers’ side window, not sounding at all remorseful. He stopped his vehicle right in the middle of the road to go take Scott’s place in between his comrades’ at their car, leaving his car to block traffic.

Espie ran up to her friend, asking, “Are you okay?” as she struggled to help him to his feet.

“No,” said Scott. 

He ran back up to Springsteen, and punched him in the back of the head. The guy stumbled forward onto the trunk, tripped over his own feet, and dropped. Like a linebacker, Scott went shoulder first into the greaseball, bouncing him off the crux of the door and frame, and they both tumbled to the blacktop. An oncoming car swerved to miss them. Without Scott and the greaseball to help push, Ramone couldn’t hack it with his one hand. The group of cultists, now aware of what was going down, quickened their pace. 

Scott and the greaseball clambered to their feet. The Louie pulled an electro-knife from his pocket and engaged the blade. He took a swipe at Scott, but Scott sidestepped him and put a knee into the assailant’s jaw, causing the guy to bite off the tip of his tongue. Blood sputtered from his mouth as he went down on the street. Ramone came around the car, and Scott wasted no time, throwing a kick into the side of Ramone’s left knee. It cracked, and the young (?) Louie went down with a scream. 

A fist smacked against the back of Scott’s skull, sending him down on his right knee, his head full of fireworks, pain erupting from his side and spreading like magma through his abdomen. Springsteen had snuck up behind him to take his revenge.

“Scott!” Espie called out, running to her friend’s aid. She went straight for Springsteen and decked him, catching him by surprise. A crowd was gathering, traffic had stopped at the intersection, and people were screaming complaints and curses, honking. Sirens began blaring in the distance.

Scott swung his left leg and swept Springsteen from his feet. He went up and then backwards, smacking his head against the street. 

Another group of five cultists swept in between the vehicles and swarmed Scott.

“What the...?” They engulfed him, taking hold of him and pulling like a tide toward the sidewalk. “What are you doing?”

The one on his right said, “Come, before the others arrive.”

Espie was running up behind them, shouting, “Let him go, you weirdos!”

“I can’t leave her!” Scott told them. He was a little fish trying to swim upstream. He didn’t want to hurt them.

“Come along, girl,” one of them said, breaking free of the swarm to take Espie’s hand. 

The Brots, Espie, and Scott pushed through the crowd and turned right at the intersection, in the direction of the Temple of Divine Geometry. Scott said, ”We need to see whoever’s in charge at the temple.”

Again, the one on his right spoke, “She’ll be glad to see you, Skyrat.”

***

The sheer numbers of the advancement overwhelmed them. From the sniper position, Jebediah had taken out six or eight of the Left Hand fighters, but he did not have the sure and steady hand of his mentor, the General. When the grenade landed next to him, his thoughts were of how he had failed his friend. He had given his life to Geronimo and the Left Hand until Akil had brought him under his wing. He was the only man to ever show him kindness.

Geronimo was never kind.

Lukas was the second one to die. He had been kneeling in the doorway with his machine gun in his shoulder when the first bullet tore his left forearm apart, followed closely by the second which entered his head through the right eye. The third casualty of the little band of revolutionaries was Jeb’s wife, Kerubo. She was arming her crossbow at the back of the living room when the militants burst in. 

The General waited patiently in his daughter’s makeshift maternity ward, ready to face the advancement at the door of the room while Callie stitched the new mother’s incision. Carolyn stood at her daughter’s side, holding her hand. Her daughter bobbing the waves of consciousness. Her mother was telling her, “Your father will hold them off while we escape through the fireplace. There’s a ladder inside, it’s an escape route, and there are three two-seater tactical jumpers on the roof for us.”

Akil appeared as calm as ever, attempting to joke, “Good thing we didn’t light a fire.” Inside, it was his heart that was on fire. ”Callie, you go first, Carolyn, you follow with the baby.”

“You…” Carolyn started.

“I’ll be right behind you,” he lied. “Don’t worry,” he told his crying daughter in her makeshift hospital bed. “That monster has laid hands on you for the last time.”

Downstairs, there was no one left to defend them.

***

The Brots hurried Espie and Scott to the next corner and made a left. It was a dead end. Scott wasn’t about to get trapped there, especially with Espie. Scott warned them, “I don’t know what the plan is here, you guys, but those Louies are going to be right behind us.” They continued to pull him toward the dead end with Espie trailing right behind.

The one who had done the talking before said, “This is where we make our escape.”

Scottt and Espie shared a look.

“Never fear, child,” the woman holding Espie’s hand said just as a pink lightning bolt flashed by, exploding bricks in the wall behind them, missing Espie’s head by inches.

“They’re coming!” shouted Espie. 

“This way!” At the end of the alley, a Brot stepped into the solid brick wall as if it were water and disappeared, leaving the wall rippling.

Espie drew back in shock. “What the...?”

Another stepped through the brick wall, then another.

“Wormhole,” said the talker. “Go before it closes!”

***

Razor rounds tore through the makeshift maternity room door, riddling the forms of the new mother’s family. Akil was the first to fall at the front of the room, then Carolyn and the newborn hit the floor with a dull thud by the fireplace. Callie was several rungs up the ladder, shaking violently, still not sure if she had taken any hits. She heard no cries coming from the baby. The baby’s mother, also unscathed by the attack, struggled to get out of her bed but only managed to roll off onto the floor. Her baby was down there too, still wet and red, lifeless.

***

Blinding neon lights swirled around Espie and Scott, passing beyond them at nauseating speed; a vortex of color, throwing off red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, then violet firework displays with tracers stretching infinitely. Their sinuses clogged. The sound was a hunting knife on a beer bottle, and they tasted copper and rosemary in their mouths. The wormhole opened up into a library. Bookshelves reached up twelve feet to the ceiling. Antique furniture and lamps with green stained glass shades filled the corners. Long tables filled with seated cultists lined the room’s center; some of them reading while others worked equations. They had entered the windowless room at the only part of the wall that wasn’t filled with a bookshelf. Instead, there was a floor to ceiling oval mirror with an ornate gold frame. Their reflection stared back at them.

Espie got woozy. “I need… To sit down,” she told her hand-holding cultist. The woman helped Scott’s friend to a chair beside a mathematician. Espie coughed into her elbow, noting that the library Brots seemed disinterested in their arrival. 

Scott said, “What is this place?”

“Welcome to the Temple of Divine Geometry,” said an approaching woman. “I’m Gabriella, but my friends call me Factor.” She was garbed in what might be described as cultist casual. Her skin was a paler blue than most Janusians, and her face was deformed by Khwarizmi’s Melting Sickness. All the muscle mass on the left side of her face was missing, and the skin was stretched over that side of her skull like canvas stretched across a wooden frame. 

He had been warned, but Scott couldn’t help wincing upon seeing her the first time. “No way,” Scott shook his head. “We’re a half mile from the temple, at least.”

Factor took a fold of her robe and stretched it tight between her fists, creating a flat plane between them. “We were a half mile away. If my left hand has a hold of the temple and my right hand has the park, the wormhole does this…” She brought her fists together.

Espie sneezed and asked the mathematician for a glass of water, telling him, “Sorry. Allergies.”

Factor continued, “Do you understand, Skyrat?”

Scott looked her over. “You think I’m… Skyrat?” He wore a mask of denial. “I’m just a kid.”

The cultist ignored him, asking again, “Do you understand the wormhole?”

Scott nodded. “It brings two points in space together.”

“And time.”

“Same difference,” said the mathematician as Espie accepted a bottle of water from him. She took a sip, then put an inhaler in her mouth.

Espie looked at his math. “Is that fractal geometry?”

“As are all things,” answered the mathematician as he retook his seat beside her.

“There’s no solution, it feeds into itself infinitely. You need a computer to do that equation and graph it; you won’t get anywhere with it on paper. What’s the point?”

“Meditation,” answered the mathematician. “Three hundred years ago, our founder discovered the Grand Unifying Theory, the mathematical description of everything... From the universe to the individual consciousnesses of the fundamental particles and the vibrating strings that comprise them. This is that equation. We work the equation to ponder the deep mysteries that arise from it.”

“You believe a math equation is God?”

“Not God but the language she speaks,” said Factor. “Follow me.” Scott took Espie’s hand and followed the robed woman out into a long hallway. “I’m the senior monk in Green City, and I run this temple, although technically, we’re not in the temple, we’re under it.”

“How do you know who I am?” Scott asked.

“Anyone who’s been paying attention would know who you are, Skyrat.” Numbered doors lined both sides of the hall. “Lucky for you, few have had this focus.” The carpet was a colorful hodgepodge of geometric patterns and scribbles, looking like a cubist painting of vomit. 

We’re in an old hotel, thought Scott.

It suddenly occurred to Espie that Scott was holding her hand. She withdrew it and put her hands in her pockets. Her face went red, and so did his. Breaking the awkwardness of the moment, she asked Factor, “Can I get a book or something in your gift shop to teach me that equation?”

“No.” Factor answered, continuing to lead them down the hall. “That requires at least a decade of Brot training and meditation.”

Espie looked at Scott with her brow furrowed. “I’ve got to join your cult to learn the math? That’s not very democratic.”

“Espie…”

“Can you imagine if Newton or Einstein kept secrets? We’d still be in the kwothing dark ages!” 

They turned a corner, leading down another hall toward an elevator. “You’re right, of course,” admitted Factor. She stopped for a moment to face Espie. “But Newton’s equations won’t drive an untrained mind to madness. Einstein’s best work won’t spiritually unravel spacetime. We are no cult. We’re the guardians of sacred knowledge.”

Factor’s disfigurement uneased Espie, and she couldn’t maintain eye contact. 

The Brot turned and continued toward the elevator. “Last night, you intercepted a shipment from the Louies. Within those boxes was the key to Tony Poseidon’s hive mind.”

“Wait.” Scott opened his mouth to speak, but Espie put her hand over it. “Scott, you have to ask more questions,” she said. She didn’t trust this Factor character or her cult or her secret math. “For example, what do you get out of this? Why help the Tonys?”

“We are the Fraternity of the Formula,” she said with pride. “We are from the A, the B, and the C… All the way to the X, the Y, and Z, child. We are all points on the grid.”

“Well, that’s kwothing convenient.”

“Espie…”

“You didn’t answer my question.”

Factor stopped at the elevator door and pressed the down button. “You, me, the Tonys, the Louies, the planet Mars… We’re all connected; arbitrary points in a spacetime field. Show compassion for one point, you show compassion for all. Everyone benefits.” She led them into the elevator. “I have something to show you.”

They stepped out of the elevator into an Art Deco convention room filled wall to wall with cots. On the cots were comatose Tonys; at least a couple hundred of them. Brots went about the duty of nursing the unconscious men and the few women in the room. 

In his mind’s eye, Scott’s mother clicked a pen. “You don’t have a brain between the three of you,” she said.

Factor said, “When the Hive was disabled, it left the Tonys like this. Our temples are sheltering them; those that have survived anyway.”

Scott asked, “Why aren’t they in the hospitals?”

“The Louies were killing them the moment they dropped… In some cases, worse. Whoever could be saved was brought to us for refuge. We have a system of sealed spaces such as this one. The only way in is by wormhole.” 

Espie was watching as blood was drawn from a Tony arm. The needle combined with the familiar site of the trident tattoos sent a shiver down her spine. “Why haven’t I heard about this? Why haven’t I seen this on the news?”

Scott knew. “The media’s protecting them. It’s Mrs and Mr Bird.” 

Factor nodded. “And their people in city government; the few that are left.”

“The Louies would kill all of these guys if they knew about this,” Scott continued.  

“They’d be lambs for the slaughter,” realized Espie.

“Ducks in a barrell,” said Scott. 

“Now, you brought the case, yes?”

Scott handed it over. Factor opened it to spy the contents. “We can’t remove the tech from the Tonys without killing them, but we can reverse engineer it with these.” She closed the case. 

“You’re saving countless lives, Mr. Turner.” 

Back in the elevator, Factor hit the up button. “Louie Louie is an agent of chaos. She has no interest in hive technology, not for herself. If she wanted it, her interest was in selling it, and the only buyer for something like that…” 

“Geronimo,” Scott interrupted.

Factor concurred. “Geronimo.”

***

Geronimo wore the simple garb of the Iago priests. He entered the makeshift maternity ward alone, stepped over Akil’s body, and knelt beside the sobbing new mother. He lifted her head by her hair. “Hello, fifth wife,” he said to her. 

Tears flooded her cheeks. He let go of her hair, and her head dropped back to the floor with a thump. In the chimney, Callie struggled to compose herself, to not utter a cry and give herself away.

“Your father Akil was my most trusted General.” He surveyed the bodies on the floor, and the state of the room, all shredded to pieces. “All it took was for me to lay eyes on you, fifth wife, to bring that great chapter of Iago’s military history to a close.” His hand went to her head. “I knew you didn’t love me, Louisa, but I really did believe this baby could be what we needed.” 

Louisa cried, “Muh buhhh…. Muh buhh…”

Geronimo said, “Don’t be sad for our baby. He was mercy killed... Out of a father’s love. I will not raise a motherless son.” Petting her hair, he continued, “Or the son and grandson of traitors.” He stepped back from her and crossed his arms. “Louie Louie, consider this our divorce.” He stood, blew her a kiss, and left her on the makeshift maternity room floor with the mutilated bodies of her parents and newborn child. There was no doubt in his mind that she would die there.

In so many ways, she did.

***

The blackness gave way to something like consciousness.

Scott found himself on a cot in a refugee hospital tent, deep into the Evil East, unable to move. His side hurt so bad, as if his rib had given up on life inside of his skin and was attempting to move out to find a place of its own. He could see his abdomen pulse with each wave of pain. Tony Triads were acting as nurses to patients on surrounding cots. Somehow, he knew that they were being euthanized, one by one, and the Triads were slowly making their way to him.

Then, standing over him, were the three Tonys his mother had disabled with the click of a pen. They said, “Now, Skyrat…”

“...You are…”

“...Breaking apart.”

The three of them leaned over him with scalpels. He tried to stop them, tried to call for help, but he could do neither. They cut the broken rib out of him, but it was not a rib, it was a lizard, a chameleon. It changed from green to blue to red. It’s tongue was made of fire, and it jabbed at the air, and then at him, screaming, “Burn, pigeon, burn!” 

Scott opened his eyes, blinked, and sat up. He was sweating profusely, his clothes and couch cushions wet. There was no more pain in his side. The clock on the wall said that it was eleven minutes after eleven, only a couple of hours since he had come home, showered, and plopped down on the couch to watch cartoons. He hadn’t meant to conk out, but the sleep that had threatened him in school that afternoon ambushed him the moment he was comfortable at home. 

He removed his maroon hoodie and red mask from the hiding spot at the top of his closet next to a box (the contents of which being mobile phones, unopened candies, knives, a green hoodie and mask combo, and a lingerie catalogue from a company in Yellow City that didn’t really exist). He dressed, slipped out of his bedroom window, and ran across the rooftops of Sunset Park’s apartment buildings. At the corner with his regular stop, he briefly considered taking the subway. No. He needed to wake up, to limber up, to construct a psychological mask in the shape of something resembling courage. Thirty two minutes later, Skyrat bounded from the Hotel Brahmagupta rooftop down onto the roof of a long closed floral arrangement shop in a small residential neighborhood on the west side of Center Park, where Louie’s Pawn Shop occupied a corner. 

It was dark inside the shop, closed now, but the lights were on upstairs. Our hero kicked in th front door, spraying glass. Guitars, electronics, swords, and a variety of Janusian sidearms were secured to a display in the storefront window. He pushed the display through the window glass, where it toppled over onto the sidewalk, breaking the frame of the display. Sounds from upstairs indicated that he had someone’s attention. A spinner of cheap sterling silver jewelry was toppled into a sparkling case of diamond engagement rings. 

At the back of the shop was a door. He was set to kick it when it opened. A blonde haired Louie chick in a jean jacket brandished a K76 on the other side. Skyrat swatted the sidearm away with a backhand. It went off, vaporizing a home food-printer for sale in a corner. They looked at the black spot where the machine had been and then at each other. “Cool!” said Skyrat before punching the Louie square in the nose, knocking her back into the stairwell wall behind her.

On the stairs, Rat heard more footsteps scrambling. He tore the bannister out of the wall, breaking it in half, freeing plaster chunks and dust, then charged the top of the stairs. A girl in sunglasses with a crowbar in her hand appeared in the doorway of the stairs’ landing as he reached the three-quarter mark of the stairs. He swiped at her feet with the half bannister, which she managed to avoid with an awkwardly landed jump that stumbled her forward. Instinctively, Skyrat caught her before she could fall down the stairs, and set her down to move on. He turned and began climbing to the top of the stairs again. Crowbar lunged for him, grabbed onto his legs as he passed the threshold, toppling him face first into the wooden floorboards of the hallway on the other side of the door. He kicked blindly at her, felt a target, hopefully a face, and kicked again. Up on his feet, he was met by some green dude in a black studded jacket with his hair in pink liberty spikes. Skyrat planted his sneaker into the guy’s chest, kicking him several feet down the hall and through the door to Louie Louie’s office. 

Her ample office walls were hung nearly floor to ceiling with framed photos, hung salon style. Most were of Louies, several of which Skyrat recognized. The superhero strutted the room to his nemesis’ desk like a brooding wrestler entering a ring. Louie Louie was sitting behind it. Kennedy sat in a chair off to the side against a wall by a bookshelf.

“Louie Louie!” roared Skyrat. A series of possible follow-up retorts went through his mind. “This ends tonight!” was one of them. He also thought to say, “Your reign of terror ends now!” As bad as that was, what came out of his mouth was, “Business hours are over!”

She leaned back in her seat, coughed politely into her inner elbow. Under her reading glasses on her left eye, she wore heavy make-up in the fashion of the Egyptian God Ra, and her lips were painted blood red. A brown leather jacket covered a revealing white blouse, open halfway down her chest. She motioned to the chair in front of her desk with ringed fingers. “Sit down, please.”

Skyrat approached her desk. “I’ll stand,” he growled. He had no idea what he was doing. Whatever ideas he had while en route had drifted off like a dream. He couldn’t help but stare at her cleavage. Laser was right, she wore the mask of your sexy boss at the office.

Louie Louie lit a cigar, took a drag, let the smoke leak upwards from her lips and nostrils. “What can I do for you?” Suddenly, she sat forward and pointed to the door. “Out!” she hissed.

Behind him, Sunglasses and Liberty Spikes had been rallying for a sneak attack. Sunglasses said, “But Louie!”

“Get out of my building,” she said, leaning back into her chair. “Both of you. Take Sinatra with you. Cancel the alarm, I won’t need any help with this after all. Tell Feynman to stay.” Kennedy got up from his seat. He was milk white. “No, no, Kennedy. You stay.” The muscled henchman did as he was told.

Skyrat issued the first demand that popped into his head. “Tell your gang that the Brots are off limits. Anyone who hurts them answers personally to me.” 

She looked her cigar up and down. “Here’s the thing, Skyrat.” Her dirty bare feet went up on her desk. The cuffs of her grey pin-striped suit pants were worn to shreds. “Here’s the thing, man: I never ordered those stupid initiations, that’s a game the children came up with on their own, and it’s sacred to them. I don’t enforce initiations. I don’t encourage them. I don’t give a kwot about the Brots. They can live or die or assign math homework to half the island on Tuesday, and I don’t care, you know?”

The Rat glared at her. 

“I don’t like to micromanage. Besides, I’m not Tony Poseidon, and my children are not Tonys.  My Louies get to think for themselves. If I tell them not to beat up Brots, I may as well tell them not to throw bricks at cop cars, and if I tell them not to throw bricks at cop cars, I may as well tell them to just hand over my shipments to any kid wearing a mask, pretending to be a superhero.”

Kennedy squirmed in his chair.

Skyrat said, “You don’t want me to come back here.” 

Her legs swung off of the desk, and she leaned forward, smiling, her hands dropping out of sight. “Or what will happen, young man?” She asked.

Honestly, he had no idea. “Test me.”

“Okay.” She stood up, holding her cigar in one hand and a roto-plasma cannon in the other. She came around the desk, saying, “This is going to be hard for you to hear, dear, but seeking justice in Green City is naive. It’s chaos this city needs, enough chaos to keep anyone in power from getting too firm of a grasp. We’ve got to make this city slippery, dig? Slick with chaos. Listen, you and I have the same goal. You want to save Green City, right? Hey!” She threw her hands up in the air in celebration. “So do I. I want to save this city from the hostile warlord whose militia sits a couple of miles across the ocean from us. I want to save it from that blue alien chick who’s managed to… To essentially rule our planet for a century.” She sat back against the front of her desk, arms length from Skyrat. “You know, centuries of science fiction writers had convinced us that when the aliens invaded, they’d do it with space lasers and planetary genocide. Why? To steal our precious planet’s resources. Well, it didn’t happen like that, did it? When the aliens invaded, it was with a corporate hand outstretched, and we took that hand, made a lucrative deal for Earth’s resources, shook it good and hard, and called it good for business.” 

She went to her open window and watched the city go by the front of her building for a moment. The mess on the sidewalk was being cleaned up by a couple of brown-nosing gangbangers. 

Skyrat felt like it was his turn to speak, but he didn’t know what to say. 

“Not much anyone can do about Minister Prime. Geronimo, however,” she said with a dramatic turn, “Geronimo…” She reconsidered this line of thought and said, “I don’t take threats lightly, Skyrat. When I was thirteen, the Left Hand murdered my family. Geronimo took everything away from me.” She stopped in front of her desk again, face to face with Skyrat. “I have wrestled control of this city from crooked politicians, greedy cops, and Tony Poseidon’s fat kwot. The Louies are my family. My children. I will be damned if I let you threaten them.” She cocked the hand cannon. 

Hoping that it was true tonight, Skyrat said, “That won’t hurt me.”

“I’ve heard that,” she said, then shot Kennedy in the chest.

Skyrat nearly jumped out of his shirt sleeve. Kennedy rolled on the floor, clutching his chest, writhing, groaning, bleeding. The Rat felt powerless. He took a step back, gasping, “You… You kwothing shot him…”

Louie Louie went back to her desk, puffed her cigar, put her feet back up. “You took something that is mine. Something very important. You care about the Brots? Then you have twenty four hours to give me what is mine before I unleash hell on them. My children will storm every cultist temple in this city with blunt instruments and beat to death every Brot and snoozing Tony we find. All of the blood running in the gutters will be on your hands, Skyrat.”

He stood there, speechless. 

She knew.

“That’s right, I know all about the Tonys and the Brots. Secrets are fleeting creatures, my friend.” She tossed the remainder of her cigar out the window. “Twenty four hours, Skyrat.”

And like a coward, like the little boy that he was, Skyrat retreated from Louie’s Pawn in defeat.

Louie Louie dropped her sidearm on her desk and leaned back in her chair with a sigh. 

“Feynman!” she called out. 

A moment later, her assistant, a fresh-faced nineteen year old college student from GCU, appeared in the doorway. She was a fresh-faced, nineteen year old.

“Lou,” she said, shifting her weight from foot to foot. “Just got a call from Detective Patel. The DOP raided our spot on 106th. They’re there now. Says he didn’t know anything about it. He says nobody at his precinct knew.”

Louie Louie rocked in her chair, staring at nothing in particular outside of her office window, ruminating. 

On the floor, Kennedy groaned. 

“Feynman,” she said.

“Yeah, Louie Louie?”

She motioned toward Kennedy. “Have someone get this kwothing rapist out of my office.” 

Episode 5: The Skyrat

Despite the adventure that led me to the room in that house, I was skeptical. Still, I had nothing to lose, so I stepped through the door and shut it behind me. Nothing happened. Sunlight shown through the spaces between the boards nailed over the window. Dust slow-danced in the beams. The dead rat which lay on the unfinished hardwood in the corner of the otherwise empty room continued being dead. There was no sound.

“Now what?” I called out to my friend on the other side of the door. There was no answer. 

“Bruce?”

I sighed and stepped out of the room and into the hall. My friend was gone. The house too was empty. Outside, there was no trace of the skirmish which had just occurred. I was alone on the porch of the house, alone in the woods. Everyone was gone, even the bodies. It was as if nothing had happened.

“Hello?” I called out. “Hello!” No answer. In my stomach, I felt a feeling like the one I had on the morning, some years before, I admitted to myself that I’m an alcoholic. I was determined and terrified. Proud of myself and aloof. My eyes burned with tears, and I thought I might vomit.

I didn't believe it when I stepped inside that room, but it was true. You should know that Bruce had been right. That room had provided me a one way ticket to another reality.

***

 

“Wayne, honey,” Lucretia said with her hand on my chest. I was dreaming. “Scott Turner is here.”

I sat up, groaning, and coughed up some goo. “What time is it?”

“After two.”

I found Scott at our table. I sat next to him, saying to my wife, “Lucretia, love, will you hand me my cookie tin, please?”

In the kitchen, Lucretia groaned, “You have a student over, Mr. Bird.”

I waved her off. “Lucretia, this is my home, and I am 182 years old! I’ll do as I please, thank you. Besides, he doesn’t care, do you?” I didn’t bother to get an answer from him. “Please. My leg is killing me, honey.”

She brought the cookie tin to me, dropped it like a hot rock in front of me, and said tothe boy, “He’s senile, Scott.” To me she said, “Yesterday, you were 203, Methuselah, so lucky you, you’re aging in reverse.” 

She marched back into the kitchen. I leaned toward Scott and whispered, “Did you see that look she gave me? That’s what my father would have called an ice-pick look.” I smiled at him. “Meaning, it’s a look so mean, you’d rather stab yourself in the eye with an ice pick than to have it fall on you.” I opened my tin, putting herb in my one-handed grinder. “How did it go with Gabriella?”

The boy was in his Skyrat costume sans mask. He looked awful. His eyes were swollen from crying. “Mr. Bird, I think I messed up bad.”

Lucretia joined us at the table with tea. Grinding, I reassured him. “It’s okay, son. Tell me what happened.”

He recounted the events since we last saw him. “Kwot’s sake,” I said, bringing my pipe from my lips. “I’m so sorry you went through that, Scott.” I squeezed his shoulder and patted his arm. “What an awful thing to have seen.”

Lucretia said, “Scott, there’s no way you could have expected that.” She put a hand on his other shoulder. “That boy’s death is not your fault.” 

“I…” He wiped his eyes. “Who could have seen that coming? She shot one of her own point blank. Point blank! How do you resist someone like that?”

“Factor’s people are smart. That’s why the comatose Tony’s are hidden away from anyone unable to tunnel through space time,” I assured him. “They’ll get those Tonys awake.”

“In the next twenty two hours? Louie Louie is ruthless, she’ll find a way to…” Tears were forming in his eyes again. “She had a point, Mr. Bird, there are worse problems in Green City, problems way bigger than me. I don’t think I can…” He looked away, then to Lucretia, he said, “I don’t think I can do this anymore. I want to help people, to be like my mom, but not if my so-called help just hurts more people.”

My wife and I shared a look. Lucretia said, “Sometimes, you… Scott, you’re right. We live in a corrupt city, in a fractured country, in a broken world… Man, it’s bigger than you, you’re right. But every life saved makes your struggles worthwhile, even Tony lives. To save the lives of your enemies is one of the most noble, righteous acts I can think of.”

“But if you want to hang up your shirt sleeve? Your choice. No one would hold it against you. I wouldn’t. Lucretia wouldn’t.”

“Nope.”

“I don’t know,” said Scott.

“You don’t have to,” said Lucretia. “Not now. Go home. Get some rest, yeah? Leave this burden on Factor and us; you don’t have to carry it, okay? Come back first thing in the morning. We’ll have everything figured out.”

“I’m going to make some calls as soon as you leave, my boy. We won’t let those people die.” I showed him to the door. Before I closed it behind him, I called out as he walked away. “Skyrat,” I said.

He stopped; turned his head toward me.

“I believe in you,” I told him. For some reason, I felt my eyes well with tears. “I’ve believed in you for 191 years.”

Scott walked back to my door. “The version of me that you made up or whatever... What were my powers exactly?”

“You know…” I looked up at the waning moon. “As near and dear as my Skyrat was to my heart, I wrote those stories lifetimes ago,” I admitted. “Your powers changed and evolved over the years. I never published any of your adventures, so I never had to settle on it.” 

He put his hands in his pockets and shuffled a step in my direction. “Okay, so, what’s your best guess?”

I closed my eyes and took a deep breath, slipping the tendrils gray matter into the murky waters of the past. After a moment, an epiphany: “There’s a superpower I wrote about having for myself in my first biography. You were in it, but I wrote you into a video game I was playing at the time. It makes sense in this context, I think.”

Scott took another step toward me. “Yeah?”

Lucretia slinked up behind me, wrapped her arm around my fragile waist. “I remember that disturbing little story,” she told us. “The power is to alter probabilities. Say, for example, you want to bench-press a skyscraper…” 

“Or survive a bullet?”

“Or a nuclear meltdown. Chances are pretty low that I could personally do any of that, but maybe your superpower puts the statistics in your favor.”

This struck him as humorously ironic, and he chuckled despite himself. “Statistics? My power is math?!?” 

“You should know that the only limit to your powers, Skyrat,” Lucretia said, lifting her head from my shoulder, “may be yourself.”

***

Matthew was alone in the apartment, wearing his old GCU t-shirt and boxer shorts on the couch, listening to a For Algernon album. In his right hand, he held a small device resembling a glue gun, only with more blinking lights and needles. He pressed the bliss applicator to his right temple, pulled the trigger, and was instantly awash with the most divine pain. Light. Joy. Orgasm. Sustenance. Completeness. Oneness. The room swirled blue, white, yellow, pink, and the individual consciousnesses of the fundamental particles in the room, numbering ten to an unfathomable power, all competed for his attention, for the chance to say, “I too, am.” Then, the light cast the shadow of a tsunami directly upon him, and in that instant, awash in the dark, he was enlightened.

He wouldn’t remember any of it, of course, not directly. When Robert woke him up, he had the typical disorientation, as if he were operating his body remotely. The aftertaste of copper and rosemary were in his mouth. He was drooling profusely. Wait, his mind asked him, am I really this sweaty skin and hair? Do I really have to be this accumulation of matter again? 

Matt was all too practiced in the art of bliss to mention the psychic hangover he was feeling to his roommate. Instead, he asked, “Who’s she?”

A tall, dark woman stood in the hallway wearing Robbie’s vintage Daniel Dooley Friend Like Fire Tour T-Shirt. “Matt Villarreal, Sandretta O’Connor; Sandretta, Matt.”

“Pleasure,” said Matt, sitting up. 

“You were really messed up when we got here last night,” said Sandretta. She couldn’t help but to notice his breasts and hairless face. He’s got better legs than I do, she thought.

“That so?” asked Matt, searching the mess on the coffee table for his smokes. There were at least a dozen bliss applicators there. More on the floor. A few more boxes of the stuff stacked in the corner. The rest of the apartment was immaculate.

“Yeah… Matt’s my partner,” Robbie said, disappearing into his bedroom again for clothes. Louder, so Sandretta would hear him, he went on. “He broke up with his boyfriend recently. Very sad. Heartbreaking, really.” 

Matt sighed, scratched his greasy head.

“...So he’s crashing here for a couple of weeks until he finds a new flat.” He came back out of the bedroom and kissed her cheek. “Listen, Sandretta, it’s been fun, but…”

She ignored him. “You’re injecting nanotechnology into your kwothing brain, Matt. Forget the question of sanitation, how about the neural pathways you’re carving? It’ll forever change you, man.”

Matt stood up, saying, “Escucha, culicagado-“

Before his partner could take that line of thought further, Robbie blurted out, “Louie Louie shot Kennedy last night. He’s in the hospital, and he’s asking for us.”

After giving Sandretta the ice pick look, he turned to his partner. “Well, alright, Codename: Laser,” he said, lighting a smoke. “After you.”

Forty five minutes later, Bog and Laser arrived at the hospital in t-shirts, jeans, and blazers. Both of them stank. The guard at the door waved them into Kennedy’s room just as a nurse was stepping out. “Louie Louie kwothing shot me!” he shouted at them, moving as if he might get up. Instead, he winced and rested back into the raised bed. “She was trying to make a point to that Skyrat kid, and she did it by shooting me.”

“Skyrat, eh?” asked Bog.

“What else did you do to make her shoot you, Kennedy?” asked Laser.

“I didn’t do nothing,” he lied. “I’ve been a good little Louie; I didn’t deserve that. A half inch southeast, and I would have been a goner.”

Bog sat on the end of Kennedy’s bed, and Laser stepped close to his torso to have a look at his bloodied bandages. “Nice,” he said. “Does it hurt?”

“She put a kwothing hole in me!”

Laser put his thumb down into Kennedy’s wound. Hard. He screamed and writhed in pain. Letting up, Laser said, “Yup. Hurts.” He removed his thumb from Kennedy’s wound, looked at it, and wiped the blood on his jeans with a disgusted look occupying his mug. “I’ve seen your rap sheet. The world would have been better off with a half inch southeast.”

“That’s enough,” Bog said. “What do you want from us?”

Kennedy composed himself, gave the evil eye to both of them individually. Finally, he said, “You can’t send me back to jail if I talk to you,” he bargained. “And I won’t testify in court. She’ll find me, and I’ll be a dead man.”

Laser weighed the prospect. “Dead is a good state for you, I think,” he said. “But I’ll tell you what: give us something we can use, and we’ll see what we can do for you.”

Trepidatious, Kennedy stopped, started, then stopped again. “Louie Louie made a bogus deal with the Left Hand, and Skyrat messed it up.” 

“Oh, yeah?”

“Don’t leave out any of the details.”

***

Scott had met Espie on the same corner at the same time every school day morning since they were in Junior High School. That morning, he wasn't there. He wasn't answering his phone either. None of them. Panic hit her stomach like light hits a room. Maybe he was hurt playing Superhero. Maybe killed. Maybe he's still out there somewhere, in trouble…

She made a b-line to her friend’s apartment building, a block away. It was a brown, sixty-story rectangular box, like the building she lived in, like hundreds of other apartment buildings in Green City. The bottom floor was windowless. Decades worth of graffiti artists had circled the building’s first level in a swirl of color, like unhinged motion lines on a comic book splash page. Windows up to the fifth floor were barred. All of the apartments above had small balconies.

 

At the building’s entrance, a small orange, flying pyramid, the building’s security drone, scanned her for identity and weapons, inciting the familiar taste of cabbage.

“Good morning, Carmen. Have you seen Scott?”

“Welcome back, Espie,” the pyramid said. “Scott is home.” It allowed her access to the vestibule where she could buzz Scott's fourteenth floor apartment. No one answered, but she had a key.

She made her way through the crowded lobby to an elevator, which had the usual long wait time. People hurried past her on their way out to work, others checked their mailboxes. A lady in sunglasses and a dingy jean jacket was having an intense conversation into her cell phone, smoking near the lounge furniture in the middle of the room, ignoring the No Smoking signs heaped by the dozen on every public space in the building. Nearby, some guy was sleeping on the lobby couch, wrapped in a green blanket, on his side in a fetal position. The elevator beeped, and after it cleared, she got in, and pressed the “up” button. 

Upstairs at Scott’s door, she knocked and waited. After a few moments, the door opened, and Scott stood behind it in his boxer shorts, his body covered in cuts, scrapes, and bruises. He was way too skinny to be the kind of guy who could throw a car through a building. He looked exhausted. “Hey,” he said.

“What the kwot, Scott?” she said, pushing past him.

“I overslept, Espie! Sorry!” It was not a sincere apology.

She stood in the middle of his living room, taking in the sight. “This place is a mess.” She opened the double doors to the laundry closet to grab a basket.

“Mom’s working on the mainland.” He smelled a shirt he found on the floor. She snatched it from him, and he snatched it back. “It’s fine,” he snapped at her, heading towards his room. I’ll be ready in five.”

He re-emerged in the t-shirt that had passed his smell-check and the same jeans he had worn the previous night, a bit of fluff stuck to his hair, his left shoe untied, a phone to his ear. “Mr. Bird, what’s the good news?” I didn’t have any but assured him we were working on it. “Okay,” he told me. “I think I know someone who can maybe help,” and he hung up and tossed the phone onto the living room floor before I could insist that he not involve anyone else.

“What are you looking for?” Espie asked.

“My mask,” he said. “I have something to do.”

Espie was exasperated. “You don’t get to skip school to play superhero, Scott. No. Look at you. This is going too far! Who am I kidding, this went too far last year.”

The mask was located in the couch cushions. He pulled it over his head and tied it off under his chin. “We gave the hive-mind tech to the Brots, and now Louie Louie is threatening to raid the Brot temples and kill everyone, including the Tonys, unless I give it back to her. I’m going to, I don’t know, I guess I’m going to call Bog and Laser for help.”

Clothes were being hampered with unnecessary force. “It wasn’t enough for you to get Ezra killed?”

Scott snapped. He kicked the coffee table hard enough to send it into the wall. “That’s not fair!” He shouted. “Kwot you, Espie. Ezra was my best friend, but I didn’t control him. I didn’t tell him to go and start a gang. I hate the gangs! I hate that they took him from us. If you wanna go and point fingers, point them at yourself, it was your own kwothing Louie cousin who put him on that path.”

She got in his face. “Kwot you, jerk.” She snarled. “You can’t blame me for my family. He started that gang because he wanted to be a superhero like you but needed numbers to feel powerful. By the way, you’re the one who got into street fights with him, not me. You’re the one who got arrested with him.” Espie turned away to pick up the table. “You broke your mom’s picture frame and dented the drywall, moron.”

Scott sat on the floor to put his shoes on. “I don’t need you to clean up after me.”

“Fine,” she said. “You put that kwothing mask on, and go and get some more people killed.”

“Fine. I will.”

Espie opened her mouth to add something else but changed her mind, zipped her jacket, and slammed the apartment door behind her as she left.

 

***

There were fourteen hours left on Louie Louie’s clock when Skyrat met Bog and Laser on a rooftop near the Industrial District. “We’ve got to talk about your mom,” said Bog.

“What?!?” 

Laser and Bog shared a look. Laser said, “Look, there’s no way to tell you this other than to just tell you.”

“Spit it out then.”

“Your mom’s a Louie,” said Laser. 

Skyrat gave a chuckle. “Look, you guys, I don’t have a lot of time here…”

Bog unshouldered his backpack and removed a file folder. He gave it to Skyrat. “I can get locked up for showing you this.” The boy opened it. “Callie Tsitak has been on a GCPD watch list for years.”

“But…” He flipped through the folder’s contents: phone transcripts, delivery timelines, known accomplices, photos… It was a photo that stopped him.

“She’s a courier working for Evolution, yeah?”

Scott stared at the photo.

“You know who Evolution’s biggest client is?”

The photo showed his mom having coffee with Louie Louie under an umbrella in an outdoor cafe on a sunny day, both of them in sunglasses, laughing together. “Louie Louie,” he creaked.

“Welcome back to individuality,” Scott heard his mother’s voice say with the click of a pen.

The disappearance of the Tonys made perfect sense now, but he felt betrayed and confused. All of a sudden, his mother had been pulled down from her pedestal, and his greatest enemy had been pulled up from the putrid mud she wallowed in. Now they both existed in some grey nexus that even Schrodinger’s cat would struggle to describe. “Until last summer, I thought my mom flew med supplies to mainland field hospitals for work, but then I went with her on a delivery,” he said. “She had us carrying guns and sneaking past a Tony blockade at this refugee camp near Iago; I couldn’t believe it. We delivered these pens that could jam the hive mind and disconnect a triad from it.”

“You were at the Lost Encampment? Thirteen Tonys were killed when the refugees broke the blockade.”

That was news to Scott, news that punched him in the gut. “So the pens came from Louie Louie.”

“Or at least she commissioned them,” said Bog. “Apparently didn’t take much longer to make the device work on a larger scale.”

“Too bad it didn’t work like that at the blockade,” Laser editorialized.

Scott rubbed his eyes, adjusted his mask. “Too bad.”

“Listen, it doesn’t mean your mom’s a Louie,” Bog reassured him. “In a city this corrupt, even the good guys need some bad guys for friends.”

“Speaking of which…” Skyrat closed the folder. “The Brots have what’s left of the Tony’s, comatose and sheltered beneath their temples.”

Laser and Bog shared a look. “We know,” said Laser. “Our team helped make that happen. How do you know about it?”

“Wayne Bird is my creative writing teacher. He sent me to steal a small case of Poseidon’s hive-mind tech from that shipment that night I met you guys.”

In his memory's echo chamber, Bog heard Skyrat ask, And the electronics? It hadn’t been a lingerie catalogue tucked under his jacket in the front of his jeans after all. Sneaky. “Old man Bird,” he groaned at his partner.

“I delivered it to the Brots, and when I went to Louie’s Pawn for you, she told me she knows all about the Brots and the Tonys. She’s going to have her gang attack and kill them all in twenty hours if I don’t give the tech back to her.”

Bog took the file folder back from Skyrat. “You’ve really gotten yourself in over your head, kid.” 

Laser lit a Twin Breeze. “It was a double cross that you stumbled on that night you fought Berserker. Poseidon was in the back of that van was after, yeah? The Louies abducted him the same time they took his gang offline. Seems that Iago’s scientists have been experimenting with their own hive-mind, but they haven’t had any success. Louie Louie kidnapped Poseidon to sell him to Geronimo for his expertise.“ 

“Then she hired Berserker to make sure Poseidon never actually left the island,” added Bog. “We think he was probably supposed to kill him, but you managed to mess that up too, didn’t you, Skyrat?”

“Louie Louie knows the Brots have the Tonys,” Skyrat repeated, avoiding the question. “She’s going to have them all killed if we don’t do something. Look, If you know all of this about Louie Louie, why not go and arrest her right now? She shot a guy, right? Why are we even having this conversation?”

“We can’t just pick her up,” answered Bog. “Kennedy won’t testify, so we need physical evidence, something tangible we can build an airtight narrative around. She owns too many cops, too many lawyers, too many judges. We have to make a case that would be career suicide not to pursue and convict.”

“Besides,” added Laser. “Taking her into custody would likely exacerbate the situation. Her kiddos would storm the city lock-up the same time they stormed the temples.”

“Okay,” Skyrat sighed. “So, what exactly do you propose we do?”

Suddenly, an explosion to the south. It was the Forest Glen projects, two neighboring fifty story buildings, both on fire, blazing from the lower levels, making escape impossible.

“Oh, my, god, all of those people!” Skyrat squeaked at the cops. “We’ve got to help them!” 

“You’re not helping anyone, Skyrat,” Bog said, drawing his Duster from its shoulder holster. “This is a Higgs boson pistol. Something tells me even you’re going to struggle with having your mass increased five fold.”

“What the kwot are you doing, Matt?” asked Laser.

“He’s a minor civilian, Rob, and there are professionals on the way. Hear them? Coming from every direction. Stay out of the way, kid. Your part is done; you’ve done enough damage.”

There was a brief infinity between them before another explosion resounded from the middle of the left Glen. Laser took advantage of the moment and snatched the pistol from his partner.

“What the - !”

“He’s got superpowers, dude. Do you?” Laser tossed aside the gun and looked to Skyrat. “What are you waiting for? Go! Be a superhero.”

***

Skyrat ran at top speed, hopping rooftops until he found himself across the street from a seventh floor balcony on the right Glen. The heat was intense. The Rat backed up a few steps, prepared himself for the leap, blasted as if from a cannon towards the edge of the building, and jumped. He was just about to come down on the balcony when he was bludgeoned from his right by something massive, which tossed him up the block and down all seven stories onto the roof of a car. 

He flopped off the crushed roof and onto the asphalt and glass. “Uh… Ah…” he groaned, spitting blood. His side was screaming again. A car screeched past him and crashed into the corner of a building. People rushed by him, over him, on him, panicking. He fought against the tide to stand up.

“Little pigeon, little pigeon,” bellowed Berserker. “Don’t concern yourself with that fire. Let’s you and I play a game.”

Skyrat staggered into the street as the giant closed in on him. He held his palm up to him, pleading, “Berserker, wait, there’s gotta be a thousand people living in those buildings! I know you work for Louie Louie, you can’t just let them die!” People were scattering like ants everywhere he looked. Somewhere nearby, there was another car crash. An argument between multiple people was getting out of control on the other side of the sidewalk. Gunblasts echoed in the distance. It was chaos.

Berserker ignored Rat’s pleas and continued to charge him. His right boot got to the our hero first and Skyrat into a storefront butcher’s shop window near the corner. “My pay directly correlates with the body count,” he announced with pride, striding down the road towards the butcher shop like the eye of a storm. “So, yes, I will let them all die.” Before Skyrat could pull himself out of the slabs of meat and glass, Berserker had him by the front of his hoodie. “Burn, baby, burn,” he said, tossing Skyrat up a few feet into the air before battering him with a devastating right cross that would shatter a steel beam. He soared two blocks south and then through another storefront window.

The Rat hadn’t shattered, but he hurt like he’d never hurt before. Machines and light fixtures spit sparks and made cracking noises around him. Berserker was taking his time as he approached Skyrat’s crash site. “Little pigeon, little pigeon,” he sang as a swat truck skidded to a stop in front of him and vomited up her heavily armed passengers. 

Consciousness was tenuous at best for Skyrat. He took advantage of the police distraction to lean against the sales counter and catch his breath. There was a red button on a panel next to the cash register, which bore the Lee Choi’s logo. The world seemed made of gunshots and screams, sirens and honks. Skyrat thought, The teleporters in one of these places are too small to shove Berserker into, but…

He charged out of the building. Berserker was crushing the last member of the swat team in his left hand. As the lifeless body slipped from his glove, he turned toward our hero. “Apologies for the interruption, little pigeon,” he said. “Let us return to your slow and painful demise.” He lunged at Skyrat, but the Rat managed to dodge, grab ahold of one of those massive hands, and use the momentum to swing the big villain around and crash him through the wall and into Lee Choi’s. Wasting no time, Skyrat picked up the front door from where it lay in the rubble on the sidewalk out front, scurried back inside, and bashed the big B in the back of his skull with the bottom edge six times before Berserker managed to swing around and smack it away. Now facing him, Skyrat headbutted him in the nose. It hurt bad, but it put the Goliath down on his butt, with his head precariously close to the store’s largest teleporter. Skyrat leapt up to a hanging light fixture, swung both of his feet, and drop-kicked the big man right in the luchador mask, knocking his head into the machine’s open door. Skyrat landed by the sales desk and hit the red button, causing the machine to flash and make a sound like a handful of bubble wrap being popped. The room immediately filled with the smell of copper and rosemary.

He looked up, prepared to see Berserker’s decapitated corpse. Instead, he saw the monster standing up, smiling. “You should have brought a tape measure, little pigeon.”

“Kwot.” 

Berserker swung. Skyrat dodged. The punch broke open a power-pipe which ran down from the anti-matter chamber on the roof. Skyrat grabbed the bottom section of pipe and planted the busted end into Berserker’s midsection. There was an explosion, and the big B was rocketed through the front of the Lee Choi’s and disappeared over the rooftops.

Running. Fighting. An explosion. Also shocked quite badly by the electrical surge when he jammed the pipe into his nemesis, Skyrat clambered through the remnants of the Lee Choi’s, drunk-walked out into the street, and went down on all fours, overwhelmed. Gunshots. Lights. Smoke. He coughed, spit blood onto the asphalt, his respiratory system burning. Wood. Chemicals. Flesh? Civilization is a mask we wear, his mother said. Lights. Screaming. Gunshots. The fires were roaring up the Forest Glen buildings. Gunshots. Chemical. Another explosion.  He rolled over onto his back, reality dimming. 

Get up, he told himself. Get the kwot up. 

An unfamiliar alarm, growing ever closer, snapped his eyes open. Ominous black clouds of smoke rolled across the blue California sky above him. That’s no alarm he thought to himself as he watched a spot in the sky above him growing bigger, growing bigger, growing bigger. Berserker was falling from the sky, howling continuously without stopping for air. Skyrat had no time for any reaction other than the futile reflexive one of throwing his arms up over his face.

A new sound, like roaring flames coupled with screeching tires. A flash of orange and yellow light. The howling stopped. BOOM! An explosion to Rat’s right followed by the raining of debris.

Skyrat jerked up into a seated position. There was a brand new crater in the street, smoking. A fat man was flying towards him from the left. Unaided. Rotating, pulsing orbs of liquid light, throwing off yellow tracers, emanated from both fists. His left fist was in front of him, pointing the way, and the right was drawn back, battle ready. He wore a sleek black helmet with an orange arrow running from the back of his neck, over his head, and pointing down to his visor. His t-shirt was an old Daniel Dooley tour shirt.

Skyrat stood as the fat man landed in front of him. The power from his hands switched off, and yellow smoke trailed off them, throwing off a scent of not unlike the severed stalk of a budding Corinthian Flower.

“Laser,” Scott coughed. “Now the name makes sense.” 

“The Left Hand,” Laser warned, removing his helmet. “They’ve -“ Berserker’s shed skin flew past Skyrat, smacking against Laser, swallowing him whole, the force of which carrying him a half block away into a parked car. 

From the edge of the crater, the monster said, “Your friend is the one who should be called Skyrat, little pigeon.” He looked different now, darker, as if his entire being, clothes and all, had had their vibrancy dimmed.

Skyrat backed up a couple of steps. “We didn’t really get the chance to hash that out before all this.”

Suddenly, a cloud of smoke billowed from a small explosion at Berserker’s feet. It enveloped him completely, and earth-shaking coughs began immediately. Inside the cloud, the behemoth went down on his knees with his hands at his throat. A wheeless motorcycle skidded to a stop just above the street’s surface, ten feet from the Rat. Bog was driving, now wearing a gas mask. “There’s enough neuro-toxin in that cloud to kill him three times over. Everyone else should be unaffected. I brewed it up after studying one of his shed skins.”

Berserker’s cough’s grew so loud, they winced and doubled over, their hands racing to cover their ears. 

Six loud, consecutive electric whooshes went off behind Bog and to his left. Gravity waves hit Berserker, putting him down a few feet back, completely silencing him.

Skyrat and Bog looked to the source of the gunblasts. Espie stood in the street with Jasper buzzing over her right shoulder, her left hand holding Jasper’s leash, and her right still aiming a graviton pistol, her weapon set so high that each blast was akin to being hit by Mr. Bird’s news van at 165 miles per hour. A cloud of dust rose from Berserker’s still and quiet form.

“Jasper told me you were in trouble,” she said. 

Skyrat said, “If I’d of known it was that easy, I’d have borrowed that kwothing gun from you ages ago.”

It wasn’t that easy. A terrible howl began growing from the crater, then Berserker jumped up out of it, straight up into the sky. His mouth was open unnaturally wide, his jaws unhinged by more than a foot, and he vomited a projectile, aimed for Espie. The act of throwing up deflated the monster, and his wet blanket skin dropped down into the crater as the complete contents of his body came barreling out of his mouth and at Scott’s friend like a missle with two hearts, lungs, massive muscles, intestines and tentacles trailing behind it. The monster’s eyes led the charge.

Skyrat’s heart dropped at Espie’s peril, and time slowed as he launched himself into the path of the oncoming bulge of Berserker goop. He punched it as hard as he had ever hit anything. On impact, the blow broke open organs filled with the beast’s true neon blue blood. What was left of Berserker sailed over the buildings across the street and off into the distance, clear across the island and into the ocean.

Espie ran to her friend, hugging him hard. “I’m so glad you’re okay,” she said into his chest. “I couldn’t just sit back and lose you. I’ve already lost everyone else.”

Stepping back from him, she began wiping at the glowing blood that had transferred over to her, asking, “Why does it smell like baby farts?”

Suddenly, a nearby officer screamed and fell to the street. Then another. “Sniper!” Yelled a third as they all ran for cover.

“It’s the Left Hand,” cried Laser from a dozen feet over their heads, dripping Berserker blood from his shoes. “They’re retaliating against the Louies, trying to wipe them all out in one fell swoop. They’re sniping first responders to maximize casualties. Bog and I will go for the snipers, but you’ve -“

“The fire,” Skyrat said, stepping back from his friend. “I have to get in there.”

“What exactly do you think you’re going to do?” asked Bog. It wasn’t a challenge but a sincere ask.

As if in response, one Skyrat became three, became six, became twelve, each in their own color mask and hoodie; a spectrum of Skyrats. Together, they said, “Kwot if I know,” then ran in the direction of the fire.

***

Episode 6: With Death Our Dream

Open. Fractalization. Polyopia. Closed. Breath. No burning. Eyes open. Kaleidoscopic noise. Eyes shut. Another breath. Eyes open. Triplopia now. Three posters for a vampire movie called “Texas Teeth”. Three open closets in disarray. Music through walls. Eyes closed. 

“My thoughts are bees on the blue lotus of my divine mother’s feet.” sang For Algernon.  

Are we lying down? 

No. 

“The world is an empty sky,” sang For Algernon.

I. I am lying down. 

“The lotus does not adhere to water,” sang For Algernon. His mother’s favorite album. 

Eyes open. Double vision. Two ceiling fans on low. Two bookshelves, comic books stacked on top. Two photos of himself with Espie and Ezra. Two mirrors reflecting two closets in disarray. Eyes closed. This is my room, he told himself. I’m in my own bed. He rolled over, pulled the blankets to his chin.

For Algernon sang, “Our minds, surpassing that in purity…” 

Bacon. He could smell bacon. In the kitchen, something dropped. “Kwot!” Callie cursed.

For Algernon sang, “We bow in veneration to thee, Most Exalted One."

“Mom,” he said. It took several moments for him to gather the strength, but finally he managed the wherewithal to call out, “Mom!”

Callie came into the room not four seconds later. “Good morning, Arcas,” she  said, sitting next to him on his bed. “My love, my boy,” she added, stroking his hair before kissing his forehead. “How do you feel?”

“Thirsty,” he said. She handed him the glass of water from his nightstand. He took a long, slow drink, breathed, then said, “I’m really sore, but I… wait, what are all of these bandages?” he asked, noticing the red and brown stained white wraps encircling his wrists and traveling up his arms. His heart skipped a beat. 

“Brace yourself.” She put a gentle hand on his chest. “You were pretty badly burned, Scott. You don’t remember the hospital?”

“Hospital?” Now his heart was in his stomach.

“Don’t worry,” Callie comforted. “Your healing has been superhuman, and your superhero secret is safe. You were in the hospital over in the ID for three days, but your cop friends checked you into the ER under an alias. Strange guys. Anyway, the doctors were amazed by your recovery, they’d never seen anything like it. I’m sure they put two and two together by the third morning when your eye wasn’t fused shut anymore, but who knows, the hospital was overwhelmed. There were so many victims, the halls were clogged with gurneys.”

He blinked, felt his eye, got out of bed while stripping his bandages, and looked in the mirror over his dresser. 

“Hey, wait!”

Instant relief. “My eye was fused shut?” He looked perfectly fine besides the crusties at the corners of his eyes. No burns on his hands, arms, chest, or neck. The bandages on the floor were stained with the evidence of a probable outcome in a probable timeline with a probability of being his own. Maybe he had altered that probability. Math, he heard himself say in his mind’s theater. Math is my power? He smiled ear to ear.

“It was awful.” She cocked her head, amused at her son’s amusement. “I thought I was going to lose you, Scott. Watching you heal has been incredible, though. You still had seeping wounds when I changed your bandages last night.” As he climbed back under the covers, Callie helped,  asking, “You don’t remember coming home either?”

He shook his head. “Nothing after my fight with Berserker.” 

“I saw some footage of that,” Callie said. “You punched that monster off over the island and into the ocean… pretty impressive.” His right eye twitched. For two years, he had managed to hide his double life as Skyrat from her. Sometimes it was harder than fighting bad guys. “Mr. & Mrs. Bird have caught me up to speed, but… you and I have a lot to talk about, don’t we.” It wasn’t a question.

“Yeah,” he sighed. “The fire… did I…” His voice cracked. “Did I save some of those families, Mom?”

“You saved so many people, Scott. So many.” She took his hand. “I am so proud of you.”

He closed his eyes and began crying. She held his hand tight, watching his chest heave, no longer regretting their journey to the Lost Encampment, the choices she had made to get him here to this moment. “It’s okay, Scott. Let it out.” She had wanted her son to become the kind of man who, when faced with the suffering of others, did something about it, and here he was. 

“The lotus does not adhere to, does not adhere to the water,” For Algernon sang. “My divine, my divine…”

When the moment had passed into the next, she asked, “Can you eat?”

“Yeah,” he said, wiping his eyes. “I’m sorry. Um…” He was starving. “Do I smell breakfast?”

“I’ll get you some.” Callie got up, adjusted her son’s blankets and pillows, kissed his forehead once more, and headed for the kitchen.

Scott stopped her at the door. “Mom?”

She turned. “Yes, son?”

What’s the deal with you and Louie Louie? The words were right on the tip of his tongue.

He hesitated. “I love you,” he said. 

“I love you too.”

***

Louie Louie’s yacht, “The Sekhmet”, was anchored within the Bliss Barges’ cluster, southeast of the Green City island. The barges comprised this Earth's only bliss manufacturing operation, and it was no secret, but it didn’t have to be; too many people, at all levels within and without Green City’s walls, profited from it. For Tony Tony, acquiring bliss had been a matter of shady interstellar trade. Louisa Tag Yara, however, procured local connections with expendable cash and a devoutly shared philosophy. Scientists and doctors with specialized education worked together in hyper-clean laboratories within the bellies of the Bliss Barges to manufacture the nano-mechanical “drug” bliss. The sensitive laboratories were stabilized by an alien technology that kept them as still as a Brot monk’s mind despite the weather and waves outside. Blatantly parked in between the city’s Port Of Entry and the customs/immigration complex on the mainland, it would be a violation of the Bird Treaty for Geronimo to get anywhere close. With the attack on the Forest Glen Projects, however, all bets were off. The treaty would no longer be the shield it had been. Armed guards, not Louies but professionals, stalked the perimeter of each barge. 

It was a professional on the back deck of the yacht with Louie Louie. He sat opposite her deck lounger at a table under an umbrella, his body language suggesting boredom. He was overdressed in his yellow trimmed blue wool blazer, gloves, jeans, cowboy boots and hat. His mask had a tight fitting blue cowl around the back of his head and neck as well as a simple but stylized gold face plate with angular horns that peaked above his eyes on his forehead, just under the brim of his hat. There was no mouth, and it was expressionless. Battle and poor care had dulled and dented its once sleek splendor. It was the same for the whole of his being. Everything he wore had holes in it and was dirty enough to suggest he owned nothing else. His katana was placed across the table from him, but his sidearm was holstered at his right thigh.

Feynman stepped out onto the deck from the cabin behind Louie Louie and served the sunbathing gangster a mojito with a lime wedge, keeping an anxious eye on the masked mercenary who had been introduced to her as The Unknown. He made her nervous because, oh, my goddess, that voice. Her boss was laying out in a black bikini and sunglasses, a biography of the rock star Daniel Dooley on her belly. An old Meat Curtain album was playing on the Sekhmet’s stereo, the volume low. For Feynman, the slow and heavy proto-metal of the early work gave the scene a sinister vibe that put her on edge. 

“Thank you, Feynman,” Louie Louie said, accepting the drink. On the deck, to her right, was a bliss applicator. 

“You okay with this guy?” Feynman whispered. Her boss threw her a mischievous grin, then took a sip from her straw. Louder, Feynman said,  “If it’s okay with you, Lou…” She cast another nervous glance at The Unknown, then back to Louie Louie, said, “I need to get back to help my Mom with her new place.”

“Last chance for a drink before we lose our bartender,” Louie Louie informed her guest.

The Unknown gave no response. He continued to admire the view of the barge parked next door to the yacht, taking note of the changing of the guard going down on the upper deck. The barge’s deck was twenty feet higher than that of the yacht, and its expanse dwarfed Louie Louie’s boat. The deck was fenced off with ornate antique wrought iron, and the windowed Bridge occupied three quarters of the center area, offset towards the back on a raised platform with wrought iron steps leading to entrances on either side. A series of complex antennae, satellite dishes, metal boxes, tubes, and cylinders rose from the Bridge’s roof. All of the Bliss Barges were the same, and the yacht was surrounded by them.

Louie Louie took another sip through the straw and waved Feynman off. “Take your mother a carton of cigarettes,” she said. “And tell her if she needs anything else - more money, a ride, someone to play cards with - you make sure she doesn’t hesitate to call me.”

“Thanks, Louie Louie,” she said, then wasted no time, making a hurried b-line back into the cabin door behind and to the left of her boss. At each corner of the cabin was an ancient statue of the seated goddess Sekhmet, her head that of a fierce lioness. 

Louie Louie said, “Mission report.”

The Unknown continued to watch the guards on the barge. There were two black-uniformed men on deck with their sleeves rolled up, gloved hands holding custom Q-30 Blast Rifles. Sidearms were holstered at their hips, and they wore combat knives on their right boots. They were going their separate ways after a briefing. “A success.” His voice was low and raspy with an unnatural reverb to it. “Your intelligence was… correct. The outpost…” Pauses between sentences were punctuated with painful sounding gulping noises. “Was a stop along a human trafficking route. Forty or so… prisoners… all destined for sale in Green City… were held in the basement, most under twenty… some as young as twelve…  all malnourished. Five special agents of the Left Hand… manned the base. I killed them… and turned the building over to the prisoners. Evolution… has been contacted to dispatch… a med-evac team.”

“Excellent work,” Louie Louie said. “I’ll call my lady there and expedite it.” She took a large gulp of mojito from her glass, ignoring the straw. “I see that you’ve traded up. You’re wearing the mask of Bloodlust.”

Unknown turned his head and met Louie Louie’s eyes with his own covered by the white lenses of his faceplate. “As well as his jacket and sword,” he informed her. “I came upon him… as he was torturing pilgrims in the… Evil East… with the intent to harvest… their kidneys, hearts, and livers… after he’d had his fun. I beat him to death… with a rock.”

She coughed politely into her elbow. “I appreciate your violent brand of altruism, Unknown. Just like you, I want to help people, and I know that in this environment, one must be brutal in their expression of compassion for their fellow human beings. You’re human, right?”

“Close enough…” he said. Feynman could be heard speeding off in her hovercar. “The point.”

“The point,” Louie Louie said, “is that your next mission will be to recruit Skyrat. For a minute there, I’d have prefered to be served his masked head with my grapefruit and toast for breakfast, but I’ve developed a soft spot for the boy. Geronimo murdered my children and their families in their homes…” Her voice cracked, but she composed herself immediately. “…but it would have been much worse without the Rat and his doppelgängers there.”

“More than one… act as Skyrat?”

She sat forward, knocking her book aside, and put her drink down on the deck on her right by the bliss applicator. “That’s the thing. I saw them… what’s the word?” She took her sunglasses off, revealing her Eye Of Ra make-up, a call back to her family’s origins. “Reassemble? Amalgamate? I saw it with my own eyes, and I still hardly believe it. Skyrat can divide himself like a cell.” She relaxed back into her lounge chair again, returning her sunglasses to her face. “He was there with a couple of cops and his girlfriend. When he was one again, he was burned to a crisp. Smoldering. Couldn’t walk on his own. His jacket looked like it had melted into his chest… he was crying for his mother. Embarrassing.” She finished her mojito. “After all the stories I’ve heard from my children, the sick kwot they’ve said the Skyrat has survived, I don’t expect we’ve heard the last from him. Find out who he is. Put a slow squeeze on him. Cut off his oxygen. Turn him against those cops. Teach him the pain of working with anyone in Green City but Louie Louie. Show him he has no option but to come to me. I want to give him a job. Pay him for his troubles.”

“Take advantage… of his abilities,” The Unknown finished for her as he stood up. He retrieved his sword, removed his hat, then slung the weapon across his back. Before returning his worn out warbonnet to his head, a large hole in the top of the mask’s cowl was exposed, revealing the tangled scarring on his bald head underneath. “It will take time.”

“Have fun with it.”

He strode as if to pass her without acknowledgment but stopped just beyond her eyesight. He offered a koan: “When the many are reduced to one, what is the one reduced to?”

“Don’t forget that… one… beat the ever loving kwot out of Berserker.” The koan reminded her of that solo EP Daniel Dooley recorded after Meat Curtain broke up. What was it called? Friend Like Fire? How apropos. She retrieved her book from the deck and began looking for her page. “Get out of here, you creepy kwot, you stink.”

With a single sick note that resembled a chuckle, he did as he was told, leaving through the cabin door.

Louie Louie dropped her book beside her and picked up the bliss applicator, then primed the device before sighing and tossing it aside, breaking it. Bad idea, she thought. She pulled her knees up toward the sky and put her hands on her thighs. Her left rested on her only tattoo, a geisha brandishing a bloody samurai sword, in the style of a traditional Japanese watercolor. Today would be the last day of her retreat. Tomorrow, she was resolved to begin a new phase of leadership. No more playing things fast and loose. It was time to organize, to militarize, to plan. Geronimo had once again attacked her and her family, and had once again taken those she loved. Now she would declare war.

Movement on the barge up on her right caught her attention. It was the Unknown, running along the inside of the wrought iron fencing towards a lone guard with his back turned. Unknown’s sword was out and orange-hot along the sliver of its razor’s edge. The mercenary stopped short of the man in black, saying, “Hey.” The guard turned and Unknown's sword flashed, severing his arm at the forearm side of his right elbow. The gloved hand, which was holding onto his custom Q-30, took to the air. Unknown kicked the guard in the face, launching him off his feet, then caught the forearm before the guard’s back hit the deck. The rifle fell from the limp hand, and Unknown kicked it off under the wrought iron and off the side of the barge.

It happened so fast, Louie Louie hadn’t time enough to process the scene, let alone call out. She unholstered her roto-plasma cannon from under her lounger, jumped up, and yelled out, “WHAT THE KWOT WAS THAT?!?” 

The Unknown tossed the severed forearm across the chasm between the boats, and 

it landed in front of Louie Louie, gloved palm up, as he’d intended. There was no blood, only a charred black stump. The logo of the Left Hand was tattooed on the forearm. She put her left fist on her hip. Her hand cannon in her right hand was pointed down at the deck, and her trigger finger was running circles around the trigger guard.  She glared daggers at the severed limb. How could such an obvious detail have slipped past her team? “Kwotters!” she said, kicking it under the guard rails and off into the ocean. 

The Unknown disarmed the unconscious man, hog-tied his remaining hand to his feet, then leapt from the barge to the yacht. The crime boss was distracted, ruminating on the severed limb. Unknown landed from his jump in front of her, and she reflexively raised her weapon and fired. His reflex was faster, and he rotated his body just as the plasma bolt passed him by. He sheathed his now cold sword and fixed his jacket. “That guard… is a Left Handed assassin. He may not be… alone. I will stay with you… for now.”

“Interrogate him. No, wait.” She lowered her weapon, turned around, walked to the cabin door, and pushed a button on the control panel. “Yes, Louie Louie?” a gruff voice said through the intercom. The music had shut off.

“Send me the Captain Of The Barge Guard. In the meantime, I need Detective Patel on the line. Now, Adebamgbe. Post haste. Code red.”

“Yes, Louie Louie.” 

The music began again, the drumming tribal, the guitar amplifiers feeding back. The crime boss returned to her deck-lounger and holstered her weapon underneath. She retrieved her fallen book, then tried unsuccessfully to take another drink of mojito. She put the glass of ice and mint leaves back down and shoved it hard, like a puck, across the deck and off under the guard rail, into the sea. “Cheers, Leftie.” The Unknown watched her silently with his arms crossed. “I love it when you’re in town,” she said.

***

Matt and Rob stepped down from the cab of the rented moving truck outside of Matt’s new place in the Res D, each of them flicking away their Twin Breezes butts. Matt had been driving. They were both hungover after having tied one on at the bar the night before and exhausted from carrying boxes all morning. Bog’s new digs were a couple of blocks east of Center Park on a tree-lined street. Parking was nearly impossible. They had circled the block six times before finally finding a large enough space open, a block and a half away from the three story walk-up. It was early Sunday afternoon, so there was no traffic to speak of. Kids were playing soccer in the street. Behind the moving truck, Rob opened the gate, revealing the last bunch of boxes inside; too much for the last haul from storage, too little to fill the van’s floor space. He took off his jacket, revealing his navy blue West Coast Police Academy t-shirt underneath, and tossed it into the back of the truck. He said, “I knew we wouldn’t get as lucky as we did this morning.”

Matt took his own jacket off and tossed it next to Rob’s, saying, “Please complain about the parking some more. You haven’t said enough about it, and I just love it, dude. Can’t get enough of it. It fuels me, your whining.” He was wearing a new yellow Tony’s Corner Office Pub t-shirt. It had been a much different experience than usual there last night. Matt wondered who had ownership and how they had kept it going so seamlessly after Poseidon’s disappearance. He had worn his detective’s glasses all evening and saw nothing suspicious. Devoid of the usual suspects, it was a banal place. No Tony Triad  bouncers or bus boys. Tony Poseidon wasn’t freaking out in the kitchen because of some tiny mistake the Assistant Chef had made. No shady characters at the bar, waiting for an audience with the big man. 

“All the fun and personality’s been drained out of the place,” Rob had said while peeing next to the dumpster behind the pub.

In the hallway outside of the new apartment, feeling awful and oblivious to the world around him, Matt put his box down at his feet so he could get the keys from his jeans’ pocket. The boxes for this last load had been taken from the bar the previous evening. They bore the logo of Pi-Rate’s Piss, a session IPA from a brewpub on the eastern docks called Pi-Rate’s Plank. It was a Left Handed joint, but the beer was pretty good if you liked IPAs.

Rob quickly put his own box down, saying, “Hold up, dude,” reaching for the little antique revolver holstered under his jeans at his ankle. The door’s lock was busted.

“Kwot sake, man, already?!?” Matt took the gun from his partner. Laser lit up his fists with glowing, swirling, orange and yellow liquid light, illuminating the hall around them. “Ready?”

“Do it.”

Matthew kicked the door in, rushing forward, gun pointed, his partner flying in behind him. On the couch up against the wall under the window, surrounded by a mess of turned-out and emptied boxes, sat a uniformed cop wearing an orange Sikh turban. His manicured black beard was epic; his posture was perfect. On the couch next to him was a large, armored, robotic cat, modeled after a lynx. It lowered its front end and raised its hind quarters, preparing to pounce, its tail slowly wagging in the air with flashing red and blue lights on its tip. The cat hissed, showing its teeth, and its eyes fired high-beam headlights at the DOP partners. Matt shielded his eyes, saying, “Breaking and entering is a crime I can shoot you for, Samir.”

“Do it,” said Rob, landing next to his partner, shutting off his powers. “Burglary is also shootable, I think.”

With a wave of a hand in front of the robot, the high-beams shut off. Otherwise, the cat remained in position, tail going like a casual metronome, police lights flashing. “Haven’t taken a thing, Codename: Laser,” Detective Patel said in his dignified Indian baritone. Rob and Matt shared a look. If he knew about the code names, their cover had been blown. They’d known it wouldn’t take long. “Only helped your partner, Ms. Matthew here, unpack a bit.”

Rob squeezed his partner’s shoulder as the hammer of the revolver in Matthew’s hand was pulled back. “Don’t let this kwothole provoke you,” said Rob.

The intruder smiled. “Copcat’s recording of the murder would be enough to convict you. Assuming you survived her retaliation. She wouldn’t be gentle, I assure you.” She continued to wag her tail next to Detective Patel, ready to pounce. 

Matt lowered the gun, disarmed it, and gave it back to his partner. “Say your piece and get out. We’ve got work to do.”

“I see. You know, this classy building in this charming neighborhood would lead one to believe that this would be more than the glorified efficiency that it is. You should have had the property manager paint and clean the carpet before you moved in.”

“A cop’s salary doesn't go so far when you don’t take side work from Louie Louie.”

Patel smiled. “Your little raid was quite impressive. You got your warrant and kept it secret from my contemporaries and I. Bravo! That deserves particular accommodation. However, I know exactly how much bliss was confiscated by your team, so I know exactly how much of it is not in the evidence locker. I imagine the rest of the bliss you confiscated is on the moving truck, yes? You saved your most precious possessions to move last, didn’t you, Codename: Bog? Or did you shoot it all, you junkie?”

“Not hearing a kwothing point,” Rob spat.

Detective Patel stood, and Copcat hopped down to the carpet next to him, purring at his boots, shutting down the tail lights. “Skyrat’s attack on Louie’s Pawn happened simultaneously with your raid. No coincidence. There’s footage of the two of you working with Skyrat after the Forest Glen attack. Turn him over to me now, and I’ll neglect to charge you as his accomplices.”

Matt guffawed. “Accomplices to what?”

Patel walked past them towards the door, saying, “I’d just hate to see you end your careers in such pathetic fashion after your embarrassment back in Interdimensional Crimes. Skyrat is not worth it, I assure you.” Outside of the door, in the hall, he knelt, petting his mammoth feline robot as she purred past him. “Tell me his name.”

“He’s some rich kid!” Rob blurted out before his partner could even think. “Lives with his Dad in one of those swanky armored condos built right into the westside wall. That family’s got more money than you’ve ever seen, Patel. Connections in government too. Skyrat’s bulletproof in more ways than one.”

Standing, Patel said, “All that money and he’s running around in a mask made from a t-shirt sleeve? No, I think not. He’s not bulletproof. And he’s not safe from us. Good day, officers.”

After he’d left, they brought in the two boxes from the hall and sat them on the breakfast bar that separated the kitchen from the living/bedroom area. Matt sat back on the left hand corner of the couch, and Rob got them both a can of Piss from the fridge. He popped the top for his friend, and passed it to him, saying, “Hair of the dog,” then opened his own as he flopped down into the opposite corner of the couch. “Kwot that guy,” he told Matt.

“Yeah.” Matt took a slug of citrus flavored IPA. “And his little robot cat too.” He burped, then said, “Thanks for the help, Rob. Honestly, I don’t know what I’d do without your support and friendship through all this. And listen, I’m sorry for going off on your new girlfriend like that last night. I didn’t mean to make her leave. I don’t know what I was thinking.”

“You weren’t,” Rob responded. “Like that kwot you pulled with Skyrat when the Left Hand attacked. And Sandretta is not my girlfriend yet.” Pointing to the boxes on the bar, he asked, “That’s the last of that kwot?” It was the remainder of the bliss they had seized, what Detective Patel had been looking for. “Ironic that kwothole was kneeling right beside it out there and didn’t even notice.”

Matt glared. “Look,” he said, desperate to change the subject again. “You were… I know I said so last night, but uh… this is me sober, saying you were a real hero back there at the fire. It was pretty incredible what you did. I’m proud to be your partner. You did good.” 

“You too, man. That anti-Berserker gas you cooked up was something else. That cough, right?!?” He gave his friend a light punch on the arm. “You’re always so sentimental when you’re hungover. You gonna be alright?”

“Psychic hangover is worse than the Piss hangover.” Matt regretted admitting it as soon as it escaped his lips. He stood up slowly. “As soon as we get the rest of my kwot in here and fix the lock, I’ll be fine.” He polished off his beer can. “Ready?”

“They were the worst kind, when I was a kid,” sang Robert. 

Matthew grinned and sang the response, “Wrong side of the map.” 

Codename: Laser drained the rest of his own beer and slapped Codename: Bog on the back, singing, “Traded with traitors, made war with our neighbors.” 

“Wrong side of the map.” 

Together, they headed out of the apartment to finish moving, harmonizing, “They were the drunk ones, they saved all their shells, for weekday vacations, so we could raise hell!” 

Meanwhile, in his cruiser around the corner, Detective Samir Patel was putting his seatbelt on. Copcat sat in the passenger seat, watching him. As he reached the keys up to the ignition, the robot dropped a bliss applicator into his lap from its mouth like a tabby coughing up a hair-ball. “It’s used,” she purred. “DNA on the needles is a match for Officer Matthew Villarreal, GCPD. Trace remnants of bliss remaining in the applicator bear the serial number of the raided batch.”

Detective Patel patted Copcat’s neck with a satisfied smile. “Good kitty.”

***

Like the Brots in Sunset Park, the Temple of Divine Geometry levitated in still repose, five stories above its famous Golden Ratio Garden below. Red, yellow, and blue stained glass windows with fractal patterns radiated from the flickering firelight within the temple’s stark, majestic architecture. Immense granite statues of sainted Brots, as tall as the building itself, rose from the structure’s base in symbolic pose, circling it, from one side of the building’s decorative stone staircase to the other. Granite steps, cascading down from the building’s arched entrance to the structure’s base, posed no utility. Dense, lush Lunar Ivy grew from the temple’s underside, leaking down several stories, swaying gently in the breeze between the three buildings which blocked the temple grounds in. The ivy’s countless, enormous bioluminescent flowers grew from the thick cables of ivy and bathed the garden’s spiraling green tendrils of trimmed hedges with a soft blue glow. A dozen or so folks were on contemplative strolls along the garden’s path. Off the path, others took shelter from the perpetual gentle rainfall produced by the thick mass of ivy above them, seated on benches under umbrellas at stone tables. In the garden’s open grass field, several professional photographers took pictures from tripods, their cameras pointed up to capture the wildlife above. Hundreds of Tiff Orbs, attracted by the moisture, darted in and out of the glowing canopy of Lunar Ivy, playing with each other and feeding on the actinomycetes.

Several stories underneath the Golden Ratio Garden, in the remains of the old Grand City Green Hotel’s convention spaces, an auditorium had been converted into a field hospital for the Tonys. They were awake now, some clad in hospital gowns and others in their civies; no work uniforms to be seen. Most of the men, as well as the handful of women among their ranks, were still in bed, but some were up and about. A few of them stood near Factor and Espie, attempting conversation, speaking in unsure, staccato sentences, unsuccessfully attempting to finish one another’s thoughts. The Senior Brot Monk was demonstrating proper shot-giving technique in a trident tattooed arm. She and her new student were clad in gray scrubs and surgical masks, their hair pulled back into ponytails. “Poseidon’s tech allowed for an easy transition out of the hive mind for retiring Tonys, but these gentlemen were forcibly ejected from the hive in an instant. Quite a shock, waking up to your own thoughts after years of sharing the hive’s. Makes it difficult for them to pull together their own sentences.” She withdrew her needle, and put her left hand on the patient’s right shoulder. “You have to watch for syncope. They have a habit of fainting.” To the former Tony, she asked, “Any dissociation? Feeling as if you are not in your own body?”

Thinking looked painful for him. He was middle aged, his curly red hair balding, his skin freckled uniformly across all visible skin surfaces. A pair of reading glasses rested on his nose and an entertainment magazine was face down next to him. On the back cover was an advertisement for diamonds featuring Samantha Cyber. His name tag said that his name was Antonio. There were a handful of others who were also trying on different versions of the name Tony instead of resuming their civilian monikers. Antonio. Anthony. Antony. T-Bone.  “Yes,” Antonio said. He blinked, opened his mouth to speak, then closed it.

“Lie down,” Factor advised with a gentle touch and a rearrangement of the man’s pillows. “It will pass. Your brain is relearning autonomy. Self control. Sleep is the only therapy.” She helped him under the covers, asking, “What did your mother call you, Antonio?”

He looked to Espie for help, as if she’d know. Factor had advised her to give them time to answer questions, no matter how awkward the silent waiting felt. Thirty two seconds after the question was asked, the man answered, “Sean. Seany. She got the bug-eyes in Glasgow when I was a little boy.” 

“What a nice name. Seany. How sweet.” Factor smiled at Espie. “Isn’t that sweet, Espie?”

Espie nodded against her will. “Sweet. Yes.”

“I’ll check on you tomorrow, Antonio. Sleep well.” She took Espie by the arm, asking, “Ready to move on?”

“Yes,” Espie nodded. “To be honest, I’m a bit overwhelmed,” she said as they stepped away from Sean turned Seany turned Tony turned Antonio. 

“You’re doing great.” Factor led her through the crowded auditorium towards an exit. With their hair and beards growing out, the former Tonys no longer resembled one another, but many were socializing as conditioned, in triads. “They share a connection deeper than we can imagine,” Factor told Espie as they navigated around a former Triad playing cards on the floor. “Like triplets born to the same mother, they will feel… not empathy but the actual emotional and sometimes physical experience of their brothers, no matter how far apart they may be. Forever.”

“Spooky action at a distance,” Espie paraphrased Einstein. “Entanglement. My psy-fly, Jasper, and I practice a version of that trick too. He uses it to pester me while I’m at school because he wants me to come home and give him sugar cubes.”

They pushed through heavy double doors and into the hall. Two Brots pushing lunch carts full of dirty dishes moved swiftly past them, hurrying off to their right. Factor and Espie headed off in the opposite direction. As they made their way down the hall, Factor asked, “What do your parents do?”

“Dad was a field doctor for Evolution and Mom was on an assembly line putting wheels on desk chairs by day and a mathematician by night. Besides one conversation we had when I was little, I didn’t really know it was her thing. After she died, I found notebook after notebook of equations in this tiny writing with these perfect diagrams…” She talked with her hands. “First one was in the drawer at the hospital she died in. Tons more in her room at the home she lived in. I wonder what she was trying to figure out, you know? I guess I’ve been thinking about her… them… Quite a bit since I first met you. They passed away. I had foster parents, but… well, I’m on my own now.”

“I’m sorry for your loss, Espie. Perhaps I can help solve your mystery and tell you what she was figuring out in her notebooks.” 

“Really? Maybe I’ll take you up on that.”

A moment of silence, then Factor stopped at a pair of double doors, and they stepped inside into another massive auditorium lit by nightlights along the floor. “Shortcut,” said the monk. The auditorium was empty, a perpetual plane of lights on the floor, uniformly patterned and stretching out into the darkness around them. A pair of double doors, appearing as a small square of light suspended above the place where the patterned floor lights merged with the void, were the only other objects to be seen. As they headed to the double doors on the opposite side of the room, Factor said, “I was surprised to hear from you.”

“I was surprised I called,” Espie admitted. “I’m always preaching to Scott about how he can’t punch the city into submission, so I guess I thought it was time I set an example, did something to help Green City that didn’t involve busting my knuckles.”

“Most excellent,” Factor chuckled. The floor lights lit her as she walked over them before she faded into the shadows, then revealed her again as she approached the next light. The Brot’s deformity still uneased the girl. Espie wondered if she could ever get over Factor’s half-skull face. They walked in silence.

“I never liked the Tonys,” Espie admitted after a time. “I was always creeped out by them, but I came to hate them. My boyfriend was killed by a Triad right outside of his apartment building, the same one Scott and his mom live in.” 

Factor stopped walking. With her good side in the light, she said, “I’m sorry, Espie. What was his name?”

“Ezra. He was Janusian like you. He formed a gang to fight them because Skyrat fought off one Triad, and then this other one came to take their place.” They began walking again. “Ezra looked up to Scott, you know? So, he and some of his boys started policing the neighborhood, wearing these stupid green bandannas and talking tough to everybody. Called themselves the Ezras, dumb as that sounds. But Ezra and his buddies weren’t superheroes like Scott. There were five of them, so they had the numbers advantage, but this Tony Triad they went after was brutal. Particularly to Ezra because he was blue. They, um…” Espie and Factor stopped at the double doors. “They skinned him. They literally cut his face off.”

Factor winced. “Oh, Espie…” she said, taking her hands.

Espie withdrew and began waving her hands, fanning off any pity Factor may be feeling. She wiped the tears from her eyes and sniffled, looked at the monk, looked away.

Factor said, “On Janus, centuries ago, blue children were a sign of wealth and privilege. Blue skin wasn’t natural selection, it was human selection. Embryos were coded with a gene that made them blue to show off they’d been curated by their parents, designed in a hospital laboratory to be what their mothers and fathers envisioned when they pictured human perfection. The practice went out of fashion generations ago, but the gene lived on.” They pushed through the double doors and into another long, brightly lit hall, and turned right. “On this dimension’s Earth, blue-skinned Janusians are thought of as the other, unnatural, so evolutionarily inferior, unworthy of the same kindness and justice afforded Earthlings. Most blue skinned folks in Green City, however, are natural born citizens, a hundred years separate from the immigrant Janusians that came to help build this amazing walled island city.”

“Yeah, well… so, I’ve hated the Tonys, but I’m tired. I don’t have the energy to hate them anymore. They’re just… I feel sorry for them. They’re all so pitiful now.”

Factor asked, “Do you blame him, Espie? Scott? Skyrat? For what happened to Ezra?”

Espie considered the question carefully. “I resent him sometimes. He goes out there, night after night, doing the same stupid kwot that got Ezra killed, and I wonder, how much good does he actually do, rampaging through the city, laying waste every night? Does he really make a difference? Or is he stuck in some unhealthy pattern of self destruction instead of grieving? I mean, Ezra was his best friend, see.”

“We Brots know patterns,” Factor said, “So I can see your point. He’s hurt and obsessed. Bad combination. I think there’s an auditorium full of people who would say he did good by them, though. So would all of those Louies who survived the Left Hand’s attack because Skyrat selflessly ran into those burning buildings. Unfortunately, Espie, there are, and I hate the word because it’s subjectively human, but there are evil people in the world, so we need soldiers and healers alike. Perhaps saving his enemies, the Tonys and then the Louies, gave him some closure.” They stopped in front of an unmarked door. “I think you’ll like this. Watch your step. The first one’s a doozy.” 

Factor unlocked and opened the door and stepped into the dark, disappearing as if the room had eaten her. Espie followed suit, and the moment she felt her foot touch the floor on the other side of the threshold, her very being was grabbed by some unseen, all consuming force which whisked her away at breakneck speed before bringing her to a complete, shocking halt. It was pitch black, then there were stars all around them. “Welcome to space,” said Factor. 

Espie couldn’t feel the floor underneath her anymore. Below her was more space. It disoriented her. How could there be a “below” if there was no “above” relative to it? She suddenly felt upside down. “Factor…”

“It’s okay. Don’t panic. Take a moment to adjust, Espie. We’re astral projections. You’ve left your physical form behind, but you still feel physical sensations just like an amputee feels his missing foot.” They did not move, but space did. It turned 180 degrees, and the two of them were facing the planet Janus, who’s continents were roughly shaped the same as the Earth Espie knew. The entire land surface of Janus, however, had been settled by their technologically advanced civilizations centuries ago. The entire planet was a thriving city; the moon a satellite city. The airspace around the planet was crowded with satellites, space stations, and ships. “Welcome to Janus, Espie, where it all began. When we first met, you said you wanted to learn the Divine Geometry. Is that still true?”

Espie was incredulous. “You.. my body?!?”

“Your physical form is in deep, dreamless sleep on the padded floor of the room we stepped into, right next to mine. The door closed and locked behind us. Only a very trusted few know about that room or my Astral Trebuchet. You’re perfectly safe. Do you trust me?”

Espie was realizing she could control her flight. “I don’t trust anyone,” she said, stopping to look Factor in the eye. She turned away, then forced herself to turn back. It occurred to her that she was going through the motions of breathing without inhaling or exhaling anything. “Everyone I’ve ever loved has left or hurt me. And you just launched me from an Astral Trebuchet, whatever the kwot that is, without my consent.”

“And now I know your psyche can handle the stress of the equation’s study, similar to the stress the Astral Trebuchet exerts. If you couldn’t handle it, your astral self would have snapped right back to your body as if you wore an elastic tether. Again, perfectly safe. I apologize for the unfortunately necessary ruse.”

“Necessary,” Espie repeated.

“Of course.” Factor continued, “Listen. You’re a special girl, Espie. Brilliant. I see it in you. I feel it. I want to personally share the Sacred Knowledge with you, to be your teacher in the Brot Arts, the Divine Geometry.”

Espie hesitated. “I don’t know…”

“There’s community for you at our temple, Espie. Support. Family, when you’re ready for that. But you have to trust me.”

The teenager admired the view of Janus, her anxiety overshadowed by her growing curiosity. “I want to go, I just…”

Outstretching her hand for Espie, Factor asked, “Will you trust me?”

Espie took her hand.

***

Funny how you can be blind to something right before your eyes. Or in Bruce’s eyes, as far as his four foot by four foot close-up self portrait was concerned. It was Lucretia who pointed it out, after The Unknown had recovered it for me in the Evil East. Age had dulled the painting’s once bright color palette. The canvas was scarred in the bottom left corner from being dragged, and someone had put a cigarette out in one of Bruce’s nostrils, leaving a singed hole. I had hung the portrait of my old friend above my desk in my cramped home office, where Scott and I were admiring it now, listening to a late-period Scarabs album. The office was dusty and cluttered but tidy and staged. There were no windows, and the only light was the one illuminating Bruce’s painting, my desktop, and an antique black and gold Persian rug under our feet. It was a gold fringed, six by five with fractal patterns, occupying the entirety of the room’s open space, tucked under bookshelves in some spots and popping out from underneath in others.  All of the wall space at the floor was occupied by bookshelves except for the corner where the heating vent lived, where I had a reading chair and small table with lamp. “Do you see it?” I asked him. “The hidden detail?”

“Well, um…” The boy looked to me, back to the painting of Bruce, back to me. “I’m not sure exactly what I’m supposed to be looking for, Mr. Bird.” 

I smiled at him. “In my home, you may call me Wayne, son. You should know there’s something hiding in the reflection bouncing off of those wraparound sunglasses,” I said, pointing with my cane.

Leaning in, he gasped in realization. “Holy kwot... is that you?”

“It is,” I coughed. “Not as Bruce knew me on our Earth, all those years ago, but as I am now. An old man sharing your Earth, a different timeline. Nearly 200 years later.” A cold chill shook me. “I often wonder if this detail was also in the version of the painting by my Earth’s Bruce.”

Realization was like lightning to a kite, and Scott said, “You’re wearing the same sweater vest!” 

“Pretty close,” I agreed. “I have one of Bruce’s other paintings too,” I said. I flipped a lightswitch on the wall by the door, then pointed with my cane at the wall opposite the self portrait. “That was my very modest friend, Dorothy.”

Scott became embarrassed at the sight of Bruce’s masterpiece. He put his hands in his hoodie pockets, smiled, blushed, then looked around the room. Above the bookshelves, the walls were hung with more framed art, photos of friends and family, and posters for Strongman Returns and Meat Curtain’s film, “What The Third Eye Sees”. Models and toys lived in front of the books on some of the shelves. An abused red and blue Gibson Les Paul leaned into the bookshelf next to where the turntable lived. I had Scott listening to the Scarabs with the volume likely a few decibels too high for my wife’s tastes, the music playing through the haunted speakers hung in the upper corners of the room. Previously, I had been trying to convince Scott that the Scarabs were the best rock band in the multiverse, ever. Back to the nude portrait of Bruce’s lover as a goddess, Scott said, “She was really pretty.” 

“You wouldn’t believe what I’ve been through to keep that painting safe over the years. Notice the bullet hole in the bottom left corner.” I motioned toward the reading chair. “Please, sit,” I said, pulling the desk chair out for myself. The Scarabs were singing a song about love being your only necessity. I said, “I once believed in what this song says with all my naive little heart. I no longer share that youthful sentiment. Oxygen. Water. Food. Shelter. Occupation… Maybe then love. Still a great kwothing song, though. Can’t beat that horn section on the chorus.”

Scott picked up the only book on the table by my reading chair, an ancient oversized mass market tome about vampires. The publication dates were different, of course, but the book was otherwise the same as the one I owned when I was about Scott’s age. The years had yellowed its pages and frayed its edges, but it had once been a sleek production, chronicling the history of vampires in various cultures, with an exhaustive section on vampires in cinema. This was a subject I would have expected to be alien to Scott, so I was pleasantly shocked when he showed me a black and white photo of Count Orlock in the book and said, “I love Nosferatu!” 

“Really?!?” I coughed. Surprise, surprise.

Settling back into the chair, slowly turning to the next page, he said, “It’s Dracula without the names. Nosferatu, I mean.  Bram Stoker’s widow wouldn’t green light a movie adaptation, but the director, this German guy named F. W. Murnau, he changed all the names in the script and made the movie anyway.“

I knew the story because it was in the book. “Diabolical.” 

“Yeah! Mrs. Stoker sued him, right? And she won, but it was too late; by the time the judge ordered all of the prints to be destroyed, they’d already shipped to theaters. It was a masterpiece, so some of the theaters couldn’t bring themselves to destroy their copies, and the movie lived on, even after being killed, like a vampire.” He turned the page again, then showed me another photo, an iconic shot of the famous silent film vampire rising from his coffin at an impossible angle. “This part. The part where he’s in the hold of the ship. That’s my favorite.”

“Mine too.” I loved this kid. “How are you feeling, son?”

He closed the book and returned it to the table, then cast his gaze at a model Bronze Age boat encased in glass on the shelf above the record player. It’s plaque said “Argo”. He wondered how many oars there were. They were so tiny. Sixty? Eighty maybe? “Um…” The Scarabs were playing a heavy rock tune with nonsense lyrics and a killer chorus, imploring us to gather ourselves. I could hear Lucretia messing about in the kitchen. “The burns all healed before I woke up.” He looked at the top of his hands, then his palms. “My powers are back, whatever that means.”

“Sounds like good news to me.”

“I still don’t remember anything from the fire. My friends said I split into multiple versions of myself. Half ran into one burning building, half into the other.” He leaned forward onto his knees with an intense desperation in his eyes, saying, “And not all of them survived. Not all of me came back to be… me again.”

“Are you… you again? Or do you feel as if you’re…” I looked him in the eye. “…missing something?”

He shrugged. “Only memories, I guess. I don’t know.” The Scarabs were trading guitar and piano licks.

“Give the memories time,” I said with a gentle quiet. “I can only imagine your brain is still processing the information from all of those disparate sources. Building a cohesive narrative. There’s a puzzle dwelling in your skull, and you’ll have to piece it together over time, with help.” 

As if on cue, Lucretia entered the room with a silver serving tray between her hands. On it were three steaming cups of tea on saucers. “That music’s so loud, I can’t hear myself think in the kitchen. Are you two enjoying yourselves?”

“Even more so now, my love,” I smiled at her, taking my tea from the tray. “Turn down the volume, will you, son?”

Scott did as I asked. Lucretia served him, then placed the tray on top of the bookshelf by the door, just above her head, before taking her own teacup into hand. The action caused a litter of dust bunnies to slow dance off the top of the bookshelf, prompting her to wince and give me a side-eyed look that asked when I’d last dusted my office. She leaned against the doorframe next to me, her right hand holding her teacup across her belly, smiling a sly smile at me for a reason I couldn’t determine. “You are gorgeous,” I told her. “My muse.” Even in her eighties, she was gifted with a youthful appearance relative to her time spent circling the sun. In response to my compliment, she gave me a disapproving look, so I course-corrected. “You’re also brilliant, a journalist so sharp I’m lucky I haven’t cut myself on you.”

“I love you.” She waved me off with a smile and took a sip of her tea. “But Scott doesn’t want to picture that, I’m sure.”

He was admiring the boat again, sipping his own tea, ignoring my moment with Lucretia. I leaned in towards him. “That’s the Argo, the ship Theseus went adventuring in.” 

“Oh, yeah?” 

“You know Theseus, right?” 

“The Minotaur guy?”

“Good. Sure. You like mythology?”

He shrugged. “Berserker mentioned it once.”

“Berserker? That’s okay. Philosophy?”

Lucretia groaned. “Goddess help you, Scott.” She went off on her own adventure down the hall. 

“I was just wondering how many oars there are, is all,” Scott told me.

“My lovely wife’s too grounded for this sort of thing, but there’s an interesting story that sails with that old boat.” I turned toward my desk, opened my cookie tin, and started to pack my pipe. “So, Theseus was this seafaring hero who sailed the Argo there into many legendary adventures, lots of battles. After he retired from hero work, he donated his ship to a museum, so they could preserve it as a monument to his triumphs. These Greek heroes were real modest types, right?”

Scott scratched his recently buzzed head. “What’s Greek mean?” 

“Stay with me.” I took a long draw from my pipe, activating the heating element within, sat back, and exhaled into the air. Turning back to my student, I continued, “As the ship sat in the museum over the years, it began to need work. Planks were rotting and had to be replaced. The mast got infested with termites. Eventually, after many, many years, the whole boat had been replaced, little bit by little bit, like your body replacing cells.” I took a smaller hit, then put the pipe back on the desk behind me. We could hear the toilet flush. A new song was beginning, this one a bouncy number. “The question becomes, if all of the repairs over the years replaced every last scrap of wood and sail and metal from the original ship, is the boat in the museum still the ship of Theseus?”

Scott was perplexed. Lucretia returned to the doorway. He looked at her, then back to me, smiling. He said, “Really, who gives a kwot, Wayne?”

Lucretia and I both laughed. “I think I prefer ‘Mr. Bird’ after all,” I quipped.

“Pointless navel gazing, I say,” Lucretia said. “No one has time for that bullkwot. The dishes need to be done, and the grocery list needs to be written.”

After enjoying the evening’s visit for another twenty minutes or so, I packed another pipe and walked the boy to our front door to say goodnight. On my stoop, as he put on his shoes, I looked over our yard, considering our digital mushroom problem. The fungi had a dull neon pink glow and were beginning to climb the corner of the northwest side of our house, programming the wood to grow more mushrooms. 

“Mr. Bird,” Scott said. “What Geronimo did… setting those buildings on fire, trapping all those people inside, shooting those first responders… that won’t be forgiven. Louie Louie will want revenge.”

I stood up straight. “John… Geronimo... he violated our treaty.” In my mind’s eye, I saw John, the little boy, squealing, laughing hysterically, running into the golden field near our farm. “It was a bold attack, and not just on the Louies. Word is coming down from my people in city government. Minister Prime is discussing military retaliation.”

Scott pulled his mask down over his head, tied it off under his chin, and put his hood up. His hands went into his maroon hoodie’s pockets. “Do you think I’m going to have to fight the Left Hand?” 

“It feels inevitable, doesn’t it.” I took a long draw from my pipe. Exhaling, I said, “Hey, my man, don’t dwell on it. That’s for the future, and when that time comes, I’ll be your Plutarch. I never wrote down the Skyrat stories from my youth, but instead, I’ll write your true story. Isn’t life weird?”

“Sure is, Mr. Bird,” he said.

“I’m proud of you, my boy,” I told him.

“Thanks, Mr. Bird.”

“But the final draft of your personal narrative is still due next week.”

“Right,” he said, wearing the mask of a panicked student.

“Still seeing Samantha Cyber Friday night?” 

He turned as red as his hoodie. “She told me to wear my best mask.”

“Kinky,” I said.

He did that awkward look around for help that he does. Help came in the form of Lucretia, joining me on our stoop, saying, “Tell your mom to call me, Scott.”

“I will,” he said. “Goodnight, Mrs. Bird. Mr. Bird.”

“Good night, Scott,” smiled Lucretia. In my ear, she whispered, “Did you ask him if he took that twenty off the counter?”

At first, I played old-man and pretended not to hear her. Finally, I said. “Some other time.” She patted my butt and went back inside.

Then Skyrat, the superhero I invented a century before I had him in my classroom, walked off with his hands in his pockets, singing a For Algernon tune to himself. I recognized it as a cover of an old Daniel Dooley song, written after Meat Curtain broke up. “Oh, to live and breathe, with death our dream,” Skyrat crooned to himself.

“Oh, to live and breathe, with death our dream,” I quietly sang back to him. 

I took a long draw from my pipe. Orion, one of the few constellations visible under the glow of Green City’s collective output of light, hunted above me. Deep inside, I became determined to draw a conclusion to the mother of all my questions: Did some unseen intelligence bring Skyrat and I together with a purpose? My mind swirled, expanded, illuminated the folds and wrinkles inside my old brain. I explored time and space in the vehicle of my imagination. Parallel realities. Infinite multiverses in orbit around one another. The weirdness of my long, strange life. Skyrat’s very existence. Spiral arms of galaxies and self-repeating fractal patterns. The consciousness of fundamental particles. The power of plastic statistical probabilities.

“I’m too fucking high for this shit,” I sighed, then went back to the business of enjoying the mystery.

THE END.