Crab Town

by Carlton Mellick III

  Little Sister hits down hard, but she doesn’t fall. Johnny Balloon looks down, amazed that the girl actually caught him up there. But when she doesn’t pull him down, realizing he’ll be stuck up in the air for the rest of the escape, he panics at the thought of how vulnerable he’ll be… there are a lot of sharp objects he could slam into, not to mention he’s an easy shot for the cops up there.

  The second Little Sister enters the intersection, she’s cut off by an enormous police street boat.

  Because the police don’t have the funding for gas-powered cars—only the most wealthy citizens can get their hands on fossil fuels—the cops use either tandem bikes or sometime they call in the street ships. With a dozen cops pedaling inside, it is a ship-sized bicycle with armor plating. The cops within fire at Little Sister through tiny windows as they pedal toward her.

  Little Sister whips around the ship as bullets pass through her sail. The street boat might be large and armored like a bicycle-powered tank, but it still can’t keep up with Little Sister’s sail-bike. She takes a path through the alley, one that the boat can’t get through, and forces the tank-like vehicle to turn itself around to go after her.

  Miss Doomsday showers the windows of the street boat with a blast from her Tommy Gun, as she catches up to Little Sister. The street ship turns furiously around to go after them, slamming into a police tandem bike that was on Doomsday’s trail. While parasailing through the air, Johnny fires the last of his bullets down on the police to cover the girls’ backs as they make their escape.

  “Follow me,” Little Sister tells Doomsday. “I can lose them.”

  Doomsday shakes her head. “I don’t want to lose them. We need to lead them to Crab Town.”

  “Why the hell would we do that?”

  “I think this was Jack’s plan,” Doomsday says. “We want them to follow us.”

  Little Sister doesn’t understand it, but she nods anyway. They speed up, out of the range of fire, but make sure the cops follow them all the way into Crab Town.

  Miss Doomsday always thought they called it Crab Town because in the middle of Crab Town, in the center of the old town square, there sits a 200 megaton Crab-Bomb that never detonated.

  During the war, Crab Bombs weren’t dropped by airplane. They were launched via submarine, and had six mechanical legs attached to them that crawled out of the ocean across the land, into the center of a city before detonating. But the bomb standing in the middle of Crab Town was one that never detonated. Somehow, when it got to its location, it never went off. It just stood there. The citizens in the area cleared out, they thought it would go off at any minute. But after a day, it was still standing. Then a week went by, then years, still fully capable of taking out the city, but it never happened.

  The city wanted to disarm the device, but every specialist they sent in to do the job was too worried they would set off the bomb. They said even if it were moved the thing would detonate. So they just left it where it was. At first, they had soldiers guarding the bomb so that nobody would mess with it, but eventually the guards pulled out. The city council decided to ignore it, forget about it. But the bomb still stands in the center of Crab Town, ready to explode at any given moment.

  Miss Doomsday’s husband was the King of Spades. He was the last of the specialists who was sent in to disarm the bomb. But unlike the previous specialists, he wouldn’t give up. Even after they cut his funding, even after he lost his job with the military, he wouldn’t give up on the bomb. He became a permanent citizen of Crab Town and married his assistant, a young Italian girl with long raven-black hair. They became known as Mr. and Mrs. Doomsday, because most people believed they would one day blow up the entire city.

  Being two of the few educated people in Crab Town, they were recruited into the House of Cards. The King of Spades spent a lot of his time helping the Queen of Spades with radiation treatments at the clinic. Her job was to help treat the radiation, whereas his job was to help prevent it. He tested which areas of town were the most radioactive and set up warning signs to keep people out. He taught the citizens how to protect themselves from radiation poisoning and how to survive in case the Crab-Bomb was ever set off.

  But in his free time, he worked on figuring out a way to disarm the bomb. All he cared about was saving the city from another explosion. The government had abandoned the project. It was all up to him. But he never succeeded. Before he could finish his work, he was dead and gone. His wife changed her name to Miss Doomsday, and the House of Cards lost their most brilliant member.

  When Miss Doomsday and Little Sister lead the police through Crab Town to the town square, Sailboat is waiting for them with a look of shock on his face.

  “What the hell?” he says.

  “This was Jack’s plan,” she tells him, jumping from her sail-bike. “The point of robbing the bank wasn’t to get the money. It was to lead the cops here. To the bomb.”

  “Lead them to the bomb?”

  “We’re going to take the entire city hostage,” she says, removing the gas mask from her face brushing her long black hair behind her shoulders. “This is how we are going to get those assholes to finally listen to us.”

  “That’s what Jack had in mind?” Sailboat says. “Are you sure? The Four Aces would never approve of this.”

  Miss Doomsday doesn’t reply. In all honesty, she knows she could be wrong and Jack could have had a completely different plan in mind. This plan sounds crazy, not at all something Jack would want them to do. But it is the only thing she could think of that would require Miss Doomsday, robbing a bank, and would be something that none of them would want to have anything to do with. The only way Jack could have gotten them to go with this plan would be to spring it on them when it was already too late to back out.

  Little Sister brings Johnny back to his feet as the police close in on them, surrounding the area.

  “Where’s Nine?” Doomsday asks.

  “Inside,” says Sailboat.

  “Let’s get in there,” Doomsday says. “We need to fortify the place. It’s going to be a long day.”

  The King of Spades wasn’t able to disarm the bomb, but he was able to protect it from crazy people who might decide to blow it up. He built a structure around it, a fortress that only members of the House of Cards could enter and leave. He also built a steel cage around the bomb that only himself and Miss Doomsday had the key to. If anybody outside of Miss Doomsday wanted to blow up the Crab-Bomb, they would have a hell of a time of it.

  When they enter the fort, Sailboat locks the gate behind them. The cops surround the building.

  “We need lookouts upstairs on all sides,” Doomsday says. “I’ll meet you up there in a minute.”

  Sailboat, Little Sister, and Johnny Balloon agree and charge up the stairs. Miss Doomsday goes into the back room to check on the Nine of Hearts.

  “Are you okay?” she asks the woman lying on the concrete floor with a bloody pillow against her stomach.

  “I’m losing feeling in my legs,” Nine says.

  “We’ll get you to the Queen of Spades as soon as we can,” says Doomsday, strapping the Thompson Gun to her back with an old cowboy belt. “Just hang in there.”

  Nine just blinks at the ceiling.

  “Don’t worry,” Doomsday says. “I figured out what Jack wanted us to do. He’s not going to have died in vain.”

  “You know Jack’s plan?”

  Doomsday nods. “I believe so. There will be no way they’ll be able to ignore us after this.”

  Nine smiles. “I knew Jack would do it. I knew someday he’d have a plan that would save us all.”

  Doomsday watches her head swaying back against the wall, then decides she doesn’t have the time to worry about her dying friend anymore. On the way out of the storage room, Miss Doomsday steps on a black crab crawling out of the storm drain, crushing it beneath her leather combat boot.

  Then she goes into the central room, opens up the steel cage, and takes a look at the enormous
Crab-Bomb. She cat-walks toward it, rubbing her finger along the metal casing. A radioactive gas pours out of the bomb and encircles her. She rubs her body as the gas surrounds her, breathing it into her body.

  “We’re going to save the world together, my love,” she tells the bomb, rubbing her breasts through her latex radiation suit, purring within the glowing gas.

  A lot of people in the House of Cards believe that Miss Doomsday is in love with the Crab-Bomb. Ever since her husband died, she started acting a little strange. She seemed to get lonely, eccentric, and then she started making love to the bomb.

  They say that every once in a while a House of Cards member will go to the bomb fort, and find Miss Doomsday naked on top of the bomb, straddling its casing. They’d hear her moaning, masturbating against the bomb, while surrounded by a radioactive gas.

  But what they didn’t know was that Miss Doomsday wasn’t in love with the bomb, she was still in love with her husband. The reason she would masturbate on top of the Crab Bomb was because it was the closest thing she had to having sex with her husband.

  The thing is, Miss Doomsday’s husband didn’t die. He was living in gaseous form. Like Johnny Balloon, the King of Spades went through the same operation in order to sell his organs and make money for the equipment he needed to finally disarm the bomb and safely transport it out of the city. Miss Doomsday was angry that he had the operation without consulting her, but he assumed the operation was reversible. She thought it would ruin their marriage, she thought she could never love a balloon, but she to accept it and try to make their marriage work.

  The first time she made love to her balloon husband, Miss Doomsday popped him. When she came against his rubber body, she put too much pressure on his balloon penis, squeezing it tightly with her vaginal muscles until it popped. His entire body deflated beneath her. There was no longer life behind his expressionless face painted on the limp balloon.

  Most of the time, when a balloon person pops their sentient gas rises and dissipates in the atmosphere. But when her husband died, Miss Doomsday believed his gas did not rise. His gas stayed with the Crab-Bomb. From that point on, she continued to make love with her husband against the bomb, in the only way she knew how. When she told her husband’s closest friend, the Jack of Spades, that the gas flowing from the bomb was really her husband he believed she had gone crazy. He told her that the gas wasn’t her husband and that she should stay away from it. But she didn’t believe him. It was all she had left to remember him by.

  When Miss Doomsday went upstairs, Sailboat was in the middle of a gunfight with the rest of the cops. He was firing his shotgun from the window, even though the cops were too far out of range.

  “Get down,” she tells Sailboat, crouching next to Johnny and Little Sister. “We don’t want to fight them. We just want to talk.”

  Sailboat gets down and looks over at her. “They started shooting at me first. It’s like they don’t give a shit that we have a bomb big enough to blow up the entire city.”

  “They probably don’t realize we’ve got it,” she says. “It’s been ages since Freedom City even acknowledged the bomb’s existence.”

  Sailboat lets her take over.

  She goes to the window, taking cover behind the wall, and shouts down to the police. “Stop shooting. We’ve got the Crab-Bomb in here. It’s still fully operational.”

  Miss Doomsday has to repeat herself several times before they listen. The police cease their fire. A senior officer probably had to verify the story before they would believe her.

  “It’ll take less than one minute to detonate this thing,” says Miss Doomsday. “It has the power to level the entire city.”

  The police remain silent. Several reinforcements come into the area every minute.

  “I don’t want to detonate the bomb if I don’t have to,” she says. “All I want to do is talk.”

  The police seem too busy ordering each other around, getting all of their men in key points around the building. After there are over a hundred men outside, they finally decide to speak.

  In a megaphone, an officer calls out, “We have the place surrounded. Surrender now and you won’t get hurt.”

  “Listen to what I’m saying,” shouts Miss Doomsday. “There is a Crab-Bomb in this place. Talk to the Mayor. He’ll confirm this information. He surely knows that the bomb can still be detonated.”

  The cops don’t respond for a while. Sailboat watches them through a crack in the wall. The cops in charge seem to be arguing with each other. One cop is furious with the cop in charge, yelling at him and pacing back and forth. The cop in charge isn’t listening to him. He pulls rank.

  The ranking officer says into the megaphone, “You’ve got five minutes to leave the building or I’m sending my men in there after you.”

  Miss Doomsday punches the wall.

  “If you approach this building we will detonate the bomb,” says Miss Doomsday. “We’re not asking for money. All we want is to talk. You can at least hear us out.”

  The cops argue amongst themselves.

  “Go ahead, talk,” says the cop in charge.

  “We want to speak to the mayor,” she says. “I want to see the mayor here within the hour. He needs to hear our demands.”

  “The mayor is being evacuated from the city,” says the cop. “You’ll have to speak to me. You’ve got four minutes before we go in.”

  “I told you we will detonate the bomb if you try to come in!” Miss Doomsday says.

  “What the fuck is wrong with these people?” Sailboat says to her.

  Doomsday shakes her head, then continues.

  “All we ask for is to let the people of Crab Town work,” she tells the cop. “All we want are jobs. We don’t want money, we don’t want support. We just want the opportunity to work and get back on our feet.”

  “You’re going to jail for the rest of your lives,” the cop says. “They’ve got plenty of jobs in there for you.”

  “We’re not talking about ourselves. We’re doing this for all Crab Town citizens. We want them to have the opportunity to work.”

  “The citizens of Crab Town do have the opportunity to work just as much as anyone else. If they can’t get jobs it’s because they don’t have the skills and experience needed.”

  “That’s not true,” says Miss Doomsday. “Plenty of people here have the skills needed to get jobs. You’ve made it illegal for companies to hire Crab Town residents.”

  “There’s no law that states companies are not allowed to hire Crab Town citizens.”

  “It’s an unwritten law! You know it’s true. Talk to any resident of Crab Town. You’ll learn that not a single person here is able to get a job, no matter how educated. Those that did have jobs were fired for no good reason.”

  “It’s not the city’s fault. We can’t force companies to hire you people.”

  “We don’t want you to force them to hire us. We just want a fair chance.”

  “You need to come out of there now. This is your final warning.”

  Miss Doomsday grips her Tommy Gun. She wishes Jack was there with them. He would have been better at convincing them to listen. She’s just not convincing enough. She can’t find the right words.

  “You listen to me!” says Miss Doomsday. “I want to speak to the mayor. You get him back into town. You get him here. If you don’t listen to me I will detonate the bomb and then you, me, this entire city, it will be reduced to a pile of ash. Is that what you want? Is that what you’re trying to make me do?”

  “One minute,” the cops say.

  “Fuck you!” says Miss Doomsday.

  “What are we going to do now?” says Sailboat. “Set off the bomb? Blow up the whole city, all of our friends, all the people in Crab Town?”

  “No, of course not,” says Doomsday. “Even if we fail, we can’t destroy the city. The rest of the House of Cards might find another solution to help the residents of Crab Town. The Four Aces will figure something out, eventually.”


  “Those assholes are going to break in here shooting,” Sailboat says. “They’re going to end up detonating the bomb themselves if they’re not careful.”

  When Miss Doomsday looks out of the window, she sees a squad of officers charging the building. They have a battering ram with them. “They’re coming.”

  “What do we do?” Sailboat asks, pumping his shotgun.

  Little Sister says, “We can still escape on the sail-bikes. I’m sure we can.”

  “We’re surrounded,” Sailboat says. “There’s no way out.”

  “No,” she says, pointing out of the window. “Look out by the edge of the square. If we can get there we can take the tunnel out to the bay. We can lose them, I know we can.”

  “We’ll never make it to the tunnel,” says Sailboat. “Do you see how many guns are out there?”

  Little Sister grinds her fists. “No, I swear we can get there. You just have to trust me.”

  Johnny Balloon sees a glowing red dot on the girl’s chest as she speaks. At first, he thinks it’s a trick of the light, but then he recognizes it as a laser sight.

  “Get down!” Johnny yells.

  He jumps in front of Little Sister just as the sniper fires the weapon. Johnny acts before he thinks, forgetting for a brief moment that he isn’t solid anymore. He pops as the bullet passes through his back and hits Little Sister square in the heart.

  Miss Doomsday jumps as the balloon man pops. She has no idea what has just happened until she sees his balloon skin spraying through the air like confetti, his gaseous form dissipating like rising dust in the sunlight. Then Miss Doomsday sees the teenaged girl fall to the ground with a bullet wound on her chest. The girl dies instantly. Her blue dreadlocks lie across the floor like a dead squid on the beach.