by James Maxey
“She inherited the estate of Ruby Major-Moore. I wanted to ask about the fate of a few items from the mansion.”
“She lost the estate in lawsuits,” I said as we drove through the deck. It looked like we were nearing the ground level. “She really got no money at all out of it.”
“I don’t care about money,” said Flowers, or Rifle, or whatever his name was. “I want to find out what happened to the collection of antique rifles.”
“Why?”
“Sentimental reasons,” he said. “You see, I’m Ruby’s son.”
This news took me by surprise, but I didn’t have time to ask about it. We’d turned the corner to see the exit of the parking deck. As we reached the gate, a SWAT van screeched to a halt in front of us, swiftly followed by two more.
Reverend Rifle let out a heavy sigh. “Lord, forgive me,” he said, pressing a button on the dashboard. There was a loud thump from the front of the Jeep. The cops vanished behind a wall of thick blue smoke.
Reverend Rifle jammed the Jeep into reverse and spun around. “I hate using that stuff on lawmen. It’s the best knockout gas you can buy on the black market, but it’s a teensy bit carcinogenic. Still, it beats shooting our way out.”
“Um, we aren’t heading out,” I said. The tires squealed loudly as we turned sharply at the corners, racing up through the floors of the deck.
“Not to street level, no,” said Reverend Rifle. “When we hit the roof, we’ll use the rockets to escape.”
“This thing can fly?”
“Do you know how much thrust you’d need to lift an armored Jeep? I mean we’ll use personal rockets.”
“Like jet packs?”
“More like big roman candles.”
From his tone, I could tell he wasn’t joking. “You sure they’ll pick me up?”
“Maybe,” he said. “They won’t get you far, with your mass. But we can get a couple of roofs away, hopefully before they’ve got choppers in the sky to see which building we land on. We’ll break in and get back to street level where we’ll commandeer a van or a truck. Get to the airfield where I’ve left the Rifle-Plane and get out of the state.”
“So the plan is one felony after another.” I grabbed the dashboard to steady myself as he took a corner so swiftly I was sure we were going to flip.
“If you want to turn yourself in, it’s not too late. Tell the truth. A crazy vigilante sprung you, you’ve never met him before, you ditched him the second you realized what was going on. You’re a Lawful Legionnaire. You’ve got faith in the system, right?”
Before I could answer, we reached the top deck. He screeched to a halt and jumped out. I joined him as he dropped the tailgate to reveal an imposing arsenal. Before grabbing a gun, however, he shed his suit jacket and reached for a long black coat and a matching cowboy hat. From the pockets of the coat he pulled out a white clerical collar and snapped it on, then a black mask that adhered around his eyes.
“You look more like a bandit than a sheriff,” I said.
He slipped a rifle over each shoulder, then grabbed the rockets. They looked like pogo sticks designed by Jack Kirby, just a mess of intertwining tubes with handholds and footholds at each end.
“You weigh six hundred pounds?” he guessed, eyeing me, flipping open a panel on one of the rockets.
“More like eight.”
He frowned as he punched some numbers into a keypad on the side of the pogo stick. Handing me the rocket, he pointed toward a tall building maybe half a mile away. It was one of those office buildings with walls of glass. At this hour, most of the lights were off.
“Not enough fuel to get you to the roof,” he said. “When I see what floor you’re going to crash into, I’ll shoot out the window. Coordinates are keyed in. Hop on and press the launch button.”
I climbed on. Some sort of internal gyros kept it steady even with my weight. There was a single button under my left thumb. “If you’ve been sent here to kill me, I admire the effort you’ve put into this.”
“Go!” he said as sirens wailed through the deck directly beneath us.
I pressed the button. The rush of air forced my eyes closed. I pried them open two seconds later as the pogo stick lurched and sputtered. My upward arc quickly became a downward plunge. It was a long way to the pavement below. Why couldn’t I have gotten a fortune cookie warning me not to trust the rocket programming skills of crazy cowboys?
Chapter Three
Robotic Hat Adjuster
BEFORE THE ROCKET sputtered out, it had carried me a few hundred feet from the roof. I had enough momentum that I was falling forward as well as down. The floors of the office building I’d been aimed at flashed by and I realized I was going to crash into it before I hit the ground. I wondered if there would be anything to grab onto to break my fall, but the glass looked smooth and featureless.
A fraction of a second before impact, the window before me shattered into a billion shards, revealing a maze of tan cubicles under dim florescent lighting. I flew through the raining glass and slammed into a cubicle wall. It collapsed and I wound up sprawled in a mess of monitors and phone cords with sheets of paper flying all around me. The ringing in my ears nearly deafened me. It took me a second to realize that the ringing wasn’t internal, but some kind of alarm. I looked back toward the shattered window, where Reverend Rifle’s rocket set him down gently on the ledge. He had a rifle in one hand—apparently he’d shot out the window in mid-flight. I guess he really did have Rose Rifle’s DNA. He looked back toward the police station. The roof we left behind flashed blue with what must have been a whole battalion of SWAT vans.
“You okay?” he asked.
“Any landing you can walk away from…” I said, untangling myself from the debris as I stood. “Seriously, if this vigilante stuff doesn’t work out for you, you could make a living selling those rocket-powered pogo sticks. Do you know what people would pay to ride those things?”
“Not enough,” he said. “They cost about half a million each and they’re good for one flight. Kracker violates about a hundred different patents to build them.”
“Kracker?” I said. “You know him?”
“He’s the reason I can afford to toss away a million bucks worth of rockets to rescue a stranger,” said the reverend. “Mother cut me out of her will but Kracker knew the passwords to all the foreign accounts where she hid assets. I never wanted her money, but he convinced me that if I didn’t spend it, the government would eventually seize it and use it in their war against people like me.”
“Vigilantes?”
“Christians,” said Reverend Rifle, kneeling among the broken glass and putting the longest bullet I’d ever seen into his rifle.
Kracker had never struck me as a Christian. But, his politics leaned paranoiac right wing, and he did have a track record of pairing up with rifle-wielding vigilantes.
“You know Kracker’s insane, right?” I asked. “He’s a racist, and he turned my best friend into an involuntary porn star, and, oh, yeah, he also helped one of the world’s most dangerous supervillains escape prison.”
“He’s a little rough around the edges,” said the reverend, aiming his rifle out the window. “Trust me, I’m not blind to his faults, but I’m a man who believes in redemption. Let’s talk about mutual friends once we’re safely back on the Rifle Plane. Right now, we need to put some distance between us and the cops.”
Reverend Rifle fired his giant bullet, which sounded like a clap of thunder. In the aftermath, there was a slender braided cable vibrating tautly from the end of his barrel. Moving beside him, I saw the cable vanish into the night. In the distance, I spotted a tiny green light flashing on the roof of a two story building several blocks away.
He used a small pistol to plant a bolt in the concrete floor and wrapped the cable around it. “Grapplebot’s secure. We’ll use the zip line to get closer to street level,” he said. “We lucked out with the alarm. The cops will think we’re inside the building. With their attention f
ixed here, we can grab a car and get to the airfield.”
“How the fuck did you fit this line into a bullet?”
“Do you have to do that?”
“Do what?”
“Cuss like that,” he said.
“You gave cops cancer and you’re worried about my language?”
“Any harm I do is in pursuit of a greater good,” he said. “What greater good do you serve by spitting out profanity?”
“You’re surprisingly uptight for a guy who’s planning to steal a car for a getaway,” I said. “But, whatever. I’ll watch my bleeping tongue.”
Reverend Rifle handed me a small wheel with a handle hanging from it. “Braided carbon nano-fibers will slice right through your fingers without this,” he said. “You can compress a long line into tiny package if you have access to a ten ton press. The fibers spring back to full length when freed from their casing. The grapplebot cinches them up. Ready to ride?”
“Fuck yeah,” I said. “Sorry. Just yes.” I frowned. Maybe I did cuss too much.
He jumped into open space, his wheel catching on the cable as he fell past it. He swooped across the sky, his black coat spreading open like a low-budget Batman. I waited until he reached the distant roof then followed, my heart pounding, expecting snipers to open fire on us. I heard the sound of helicopters getting closer, but never heard any bullets whiz past. We were both dressed in black suits. Maybe they didn’t see us.
I reached the roof safely. Reverend Rifle released the line from the grapplebot and stuck the small robot into his pocket. “What a rush,” I said, my heart pounding “Whoever owns the patent on that grapplebot can get even richer than the rocket stick guys.”
“Nope,” said the reverend. “The company that patented this was sued into bankruptcy before their product even hit the market. They loaned a beta model out to an investor. His teenage daughter fell to her death. But, again, Kracker can steal the plans to pretty much anything.”
We set off on the ever familiar roof race. I could have easily lapped him but I let him take the lead as we leapt across five, six, seven streets. Finally, he came to an abrupt stop on the edge of a roof and pointed at a U-Haul truck parked across the street.
“Found our ride,” he said.
I expected him to have some kind of high-tech robo-key to use on the truck, but instead he smashed the driver side window with the butt of his rifle. The only witness was a homeless dude sitting on the sidewalk about twenty yards away. He stared at me with dull eyes and took a long drink from whatever he had in his brown paper bag. The rev had the truck hotwired inside of thirty seconds. I climbed into the passenger seat and we were off.
“So,” I said. “Ruby’s son?”
“From your tone, I take it she didn’t talk about me very much.”
“I’d say never isn’t very much.”
He nodded. “My mother and I didn’t see eye to eye on a lot of stuff.”
“You really a preacher?” I asked.
He nodded. “Pentecostal. Name’s Stacey Majors.”
“Stacey’s not a name I’d associate with a guy in a cowboy hat,” I said. “How the hell did you keep your hat on during the escape, by the way?”
“Robotic hat adjuster,” he said with a grin. He lifted his chin and tugged the thin leather cord cinched tightly beneath his throat. “Also, saying ‘hell’ in that context is blasphemy. And my real first name is Eustacius. Stacey sound more cowboy now?”
“Anyone ever tell you look kinda like Clint Eastwood?”
“Occasionally.”
“I guess I see a little of Ruby in you too,” I said. “I can’t believe I didn’t know she had a son. I mean, she had family pictures around her house and—”
“I’m not in them,” he said as we pulled up to a stop sign. He looked both ways before making the turn. This early in the morning, the streets were pretty empty. “My mother tried to raise me with her values. Unfortunately, her values were those of a libertine. I grew up thinking there were no rules. By the time I was fifteen, I was either drunk or high all the time. Mother paid for several abortions for girls I’d gotten knocked up. To get out of a drunk driving charge at the age of fifteen, I agreed to enroll in military school.”
“You had a driver’s license at fifteen?”
“Of course not,” he said.
“I don’t have one either,” I said.
“Okay,” he said.
I looked out the window. “I mean, I can drive. I used to drive all the time when I was with the Red Line. I even have my own car, a Jaguar. It’s really nice. But I never got a license.”
“You’re telling me this why?”
I shrugged. “Getting a license is a right of passage for most people. Sometimes, it’s the little things that remind me of how strange my life is.”
He nodded. “I’m sure it’s tough,” he said. “Probably a lonely life. It’s not like you have a lot of other ape-men to talk with.”
I swallowed hard, a lump suddenly in my throat. I actually hadn’t felt lonely in years. Val was the main reason. I thought about all the times we got together late at night in a Chinese restaurant to blow off steam about our crazy lives. Now, she was gone. I quickly shoved down the wave of grief and said, “I’m not lonely. I still have Jenny.”
“Screaming Jenny?” he said. “Your teammate?”
“My girlfriend,” I said.
He kept his eyes on the road but I saw something change in his face, a slight twitch down around his lips.
“I’m worried about her,” I said. “She avoided the cops, but fuck if I know… sorry, I mean, I don’t know where she’s at now, or if she’s safe.”
“Kracker can track her down.”
I stared out the window as we idled at a light. I’d been expecting a high speed getaway, but we were driving at a sensible speed, obeying lights and signs. This wasn’t very exciting but seemed like a solid strategy for actually getting away.
“You didn’t finish your story,” I said.
“What story?”
“How you and your mother fell apart.”
“Right,” he said. “Military school. My drill sergeant was a good role model. A devout Christian. He helped me see where my life had gone wrong. Made me realize that my mother was living a life that was leading straight to hell. She wasn’t happy to hear this when I tried to explain it to her. We used to fight a lot, at least when I was home. I served honorably as a sniper in the Army for several years. Then I went to seminary and wound up as an assistant pastor at a church in Dallas. Mother seemed to think I was going through some kind of phase. Kept thinking I’d grow out of it. Then, I started using family money for causes I believed in, like opposing abortion. She threatened to cut me off. I told her the love of money was the root of all evil, and I’d be better off without her wealth. A little while after that, I got a letter from her attorney explaining I was no longer a beneficiary in her will, but could be restored to the will if I agreed not to use the family fortune for a long list of prohibited causes. Not just abortion. I couldn’t work against the homosexual agenda, or in opposition to the teaching of evolution. I resented this clumsy attempt at blackmail. Figured if I went a year of two without speaking to her, she’d miss me, and want me back in her life. I wanted to be her son again, not for her fortune, but to have another chance to turn her eyes toward heaven.” He sighed and shook his head. “That was twenty-five years ago. We never spoke again.”
“But you followed in her footsteps as a vigilante.”
He nodded. “Mother was misguided but had a good heart. The Lord had given her the gift of a good eye and a steady hand. When the Lord gives you a talent, it’s a sin to waste it. She did some good in the world, fighting crime as Rose Rifle. In some of the Texas border towns I ministered to, I saw the harm being done by criminals who moved freely across the border. The border patrol’s hamstrung by a million legal restrictions. They catch drug smugglers and human traffickers red-handed and some judge releases them the following da
y on technicalities. When I catch them, there’s no judge but the final judge for them to answer to.”
I stared at my reflection in the window. Of course my car-jacking, jail-breaking, cop-gassing new buddy was also a murderer. I wanted to ask how this fit into his theology but decided I didn’t need to know. I’ve associated with vigilantes for a long time. Once you decide that you’re the only thing left to save the world from genuine evil, pretty much any crime you commit can be rationalized. If someone on the Lawful Legion really had decided to put a hit on me, they had the same rationalizations in mind. Exposing the Butterfly House could cause the public to turn against the Legion. If the Legion were disbanded or outlawed, who would be there the next time aliens invaded, or the Prime Mover unleashed his Horsemen? Killing a girl with a drinking problem and an ape with identity issues was a small price to pay if it meant the future safety of the world.
We reached a private airfield next to a highway and pulled up to a hanger. The reverend waved a badge in front of a hanger door and it rose, revealing a small, non-descript jet.
“This is the Rifle Plane?”
He chuckled. “You were expecting an AK-47 with wings?”
“At least a custom paint job. Maybe a camouflage pattern?”
“At public airfields, the factory paint job is camouflage.”
“Makes perfect sense,” I admitted, but was still a little let down that the plane wasn’t as cool as it had sounded in my imagination. On the other hand, the fact that he called it the Rifle Plane earned him a few points in my book. He might be a religious nut who gunned down people in the middle of the desert, but at least he allowed himself to have fun while doing it.
“Next stop, Texas,” he said, heading into the hanger.
As I stepped forward the world turned completely white. My lungs burned as the air caught fire. I found myself flying, tumbling, bouncing across the pavement, shoved by a blast of wind hot as a furnace. I shook my head as I came to a stop on my back, blinking to clear the bright lights dancing before my eyes. I sat up, spotting a crater punched in the concrete in front of the plane. Reverend Rifle was lying face down beside the plane a few yards away, completely still.
