Corrupts Absolutely?

by Peter Clines

  “Why do you say that, K-san?” she said in response to my statement about Farnon.

  I sat at the edge of the bed as she began working her magic creams into various muscles. The creams burned at first then slowly stole away the low-grade agony snaking venomously through my back and shoulders. It was perhaps her touch more than anything else that helped, that eased the pain. It felt good to be touched with something other than bald-faced violence.

  “Farnon knew I would suspect him of being behind this Morningstar business. He almost seemed annoyed by it all.” I grunted as she examined the gaping, mouth-like wound in my side where a shard of glass had ripped into my flesh. My genetics were struggling to mend the hole but not succeeding very well. Suzaku opened the case that contained trauma needles and sutures and went to work on it while I lay on the sheets, bleeding and grunting with every stitch.

  “You do not think he is inclined to such subterfuge, K-san?” Suzaku asked. I was acutely aware of the soft press of her breasts as she worked over me. It made the experience that much more pleasurable, I have to admit.

  “I think he finds such things beneath him. He seems almost…reluctant, like he’s only doing this on advisement from someone else. He has that board of investors, doesn’t he?”

  “I recall you saying something to that effect, K-san, yes,” Suzaku answered, cutting a suture wire with her delicate, sharp teeth.

  “I wonder if his investors are forcing him to run the stories, hoping to increase circulation.”

  “Perhaps you ought to run the stories as well.”

  “I like to think my readership is more interested in terrorists and the Scorpion than in some idiot in tights and a cape.” I glanced down where Suzaku’s hair blanketed my lower half like a silken, blue-black shawl as she finished trimming the last stitch with her teeth. Eighty-three stitches—something of a record for me.

  Suzaku massaged her healing creams into my wound then climbed back up my body and lowered her face so her long, perfumed reams of hair tented us in together. “Perhaps an opinion piece about the possible identity of the vigilante,” she suggested demurely. “It might draw him out.”

  “It might make him want to kill Kurt Reinhardt.”

  “If there is a mind behind all this, it may force that person to show their hand. Either way, K-san may unsettle the party involved.”

  “You may be onto something,” I agreed. The pain was edging away, leaving me aching and sore and empty. Our lips were mere centimeters apart. I looked deep into Suzaku’s eyes and saw darkness, flames, chaos. Hell. If I looked closely enough, I could see her rising up from a nest of phoenix fire, eternal, un-killable, unlike myself. It made me want to mourn. I wished she was real as I lay there on my pillow, touching her hair, which felt delightfully soft to my callused hand. I wished she were a real woman.

  But the one creature drawn to me was only female on the outside. Inside, she was a shikigami, a guardian beast, older than rocks or trees or earth. Just a raw force of nature made flesh. Making love to Suzaku is like being drenched in a lightning storm: exhilarating, overwhelming, sad, unreal. It’s all I want at the time, but when it’s over, the loneliness and doubt are redoubled, reminding me of how impossible it is to carry on a relationship with a real human woman. The Reich who manufactured me poisoned my body and blood with their chemical venom; there is no fluid in my body not caustic on contact with human flesh.

  Suzaku came unto me, covering me in her light, fragrant, lily-soft body. She opened her obi belt to me, and I slid my hands beneath the silken material, stroking her breasts until she arched her back and sang the sweetest song in a voice not human at all. Her entire body flushed, and I could feel her skin warming under my touch. When she looked again at me, her eyes weren’t human at all. They looked like portals into Hell, that place I had sent dozens of criminals over the years. Suzaku smiled as if sharing some intimate knowledge with him. Not for the first time, I wondered if I wasn’t simply a tool of the gods, here to dole out the punishments they were apparently too busy or too damned lazy to take care of themselves. I wondered if I wasn’t food for Suzaku, feeding her souls and chaos to fill her eternally empty soul like the victim of some hungry, eternal vampire.

  Suzaku kissed me, and all my doubts vanished for the moment. “My little K-san,” she said sweetly, like a mother rewarding a child for an act of obedience. She stroked my cheek. She kissed my throat then moved steadily downward, the imprint of her rose-red lips lifting my body like a puppet on strings, writhing to the will of a greater force. The wound in my side didn’t hurt at all. Nothing hurt so long as I stayed within the circle of her arms.

  #

  The following day, I had Miss Emily, our opinion columnist, run a small article speculating on the possible origins of Morningstar. Letters immediately began flooding the office, thousands of people trying to guess at the identity of our masked local superhero. Some expressed doubts that he was real, claiming he was nothing more than a collection of special effects. There were even people proposing a duel between Morningstar and the Scorpion and theories as to who would win in a fair fight. No one bothered to mention that the Scorpion seldom bothered to fight fairly.

  Suzaku had been right. The exercise did in fact propel Morningstar, or whoever was behind him, to act more boldly because the following night, the caped vigilante intercepted an armed bank robbery, taking three direct gunshots in the chest before flying off—or so various witnesses claimed. His flying had been erratic, but he had flown off. Obviously, he was stepping up his game in a way he was unprepared for.

  The Scorpion gathered blood samples that I then examined under the high-powered electron microscope in my private lab at home. I was a child of the Reich. The Reich had created me, educated me. I knew mutated cells when I saw them. Morningstar’s cells were similar to mine, the only difference being that they had been mutated at some later point in his development. My own mutation was induced on an embryonic level; I never had normal cells. These cells were forcibly altered. Morningstar’s cell mutation was random rather than uniform as in my case—the hallmark of forced mutation.

  The cells also looked self-regenerative, which explained how Morningstar could take three direct shots in the chest and still fly off. I sat back on my lab stool and thought about that a moment. I knew that sooner or later, the Scorpion and Morningstar were going to have to meet, and it would likely be in the Scorpion’s best interest to be careful. The Scorpion wasn’t nearly as durable or regenerative as his caped rival seemed to be.

  It came as little surprise to me that a week later, during the NFL playoff at The Steeltown Stadium, halftime was interrupted by a message on the digital scoreboard that read:

  SCORPION MEET ME NOW

  Suffice to say the missive, wedged between a wedding proposal and a get-well greeting, upstaged the show, which was something of a shame because the Steelers were leading Baltimore by 6-4.

  It was a Sunday afternoon, and I was home in my office, the television on in one corner. I was poring over a number of files that a man who owed me a favor had retrieved. They contained Farnon’s various bank statements, including all the off-shores no one else knew anything about, even the IRS. I was looking for a withdrawal of a large sum of money, or even a series of large sums that might indicate a payroll, but most of the activity on his statements belonged to his wife. Belinda was bleeding him dry. And—to my utmost glee, I admit—his paper wasn’t doing nearly as well as I’d thought.

  I looked up when I heard the announcer talking about a showdown between the Scorpion and the city’s newest vigilante, Morningstar. Two and half minutes later, I was upstairs in my bedroom, changing into my gear. Suzaku swept forward, virtually floating in her blood-red kimono, bearing piece after piece of body armor, various recent injuries aching from the pressure of the Kevlar I was sporting under my trench coat. Never say I’m not prepared.

  “Do you think it will be enough, K-san?” she asked. She sounded concerned as alway
s.

  I slipped on the veiled Fedora. The Scorpion chambered the Sting and sank more ammunition into his pockets than he probably needed. “It better be,” he said.

  He left the estate and cut across the city. He knew every hidey-hole, every shortcut, and every dead-end alley. In less than ten minutes, he’d reached Steeltown Stadium. The game-watchers were likely expecting a bloody match to the death in the end zone, but the Scorpion had no desire to make this a spectacle.

  He moved stealthily around to the back of the stadium building, keeping to the shadows and out of the sallow, yellow pools of security lights. He reached up to the brownstone wall behind the concessions stands and placed his gloved hand upon it, the diamond-tipped fingers digging deep into the rough brick, then reached up again, kicking against the bricks, climbing steadily up the face of the building until he’d reached a window ledge. Balancing on the ledge, the Scorpion caught the bottom rung of a fire escape and swung himself over. The next four stories were easy climbing as the crowd roared its approval down in the Coliseum-sized field. The Steelers must have made another touchdown.

  “You came,” said a voice as the Scorpion reached the top of the concession building.

  He already had the .50 caliber Sting out, which made climbing over the edge of the building awkward but not impossible. He wasn’t about to approach Morningstar unarmed.

  The man who was Steeltown’s newest sentinel was tall, taller than the Scorpion, and perhaps twice as wide. Body armor and/or biological mutation had granted him a towering, wrestler-type physique further emphasized by the dark, midnight blue suit trimmed in places with white. It wasn’t a very good suit for the purposes of stealth in the Scorpion’s opinion. Then again, Morningstar wasn’t especially fond of stealth. His face was half-masked with a hood, and he trailed a long cape behind him. The first thing the Scorpion did was calculate all the things that could go wrong with a costume like that. The second thing he did was cock the Sting and take a bead.

  “Who are you working for?” he asked the man.

  Morningstar looked briefly taken aback. “That’s not much of a greeting, friend.”

  “I’m hardly a friend,” the Scorpion answered, leveling the gun with the bridge of Morningstar’s nose. “Answer the question, or I’ll shoot your brains out the back of your fucking head, asshole.”

  Morningstar looked appalled. The eyes in the hood were much younger than the Scorpion had expected. Morningstar raised his hands to show he was unarmed. The Scorpion knew that already. There was no way he could carry weapons on such a spotty outfit, which made it just another bad idea. “I just wanted to talk to you!”

  “Really.” The Scorpion smiled grimly behind the veil.

  “Really,” Morningstar confirmed. He had no German accent that the Scorpion could detect, but that meant nothing. Kurt Reinhardt could hide his accent very well when he needed to. “I’m new to all this,” he said, indicating the city without moving too much. “I thought I might benefit from speaking to you, learning from you.”

  “You summoned me here because you want to chat with me?” the Scorpion asked.

  Morningstar flinched. “I know I can learn a lot from you. I know you have great wisdom to impart.”

  “You must be fucking joking.” The Scorpion charged forward and side-kicked Morningstar in the breadbasket. The man went down surprisingly easy. The Scorpion was disappointed. While he was still down, the Scorpion pistol-whipped him across the face. Blood and teeth spattered across the concrete like red dice.

  Morningstar groaned.

  “Who sent you?” the Scorpion demanded to know, jabbing the nose of the gun into the soft pouch of flesh under Morningstar’s chin. “What’s his name, asshole?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about! Are you fucking nuts?” Morningstar screamed through blood, loose teeth, and terror.

  The Scorpion shifted the gun exactly five inches to the right and jerked the trigger. The shot exploded into the asphalt roof in the tiny space between Morningstar’s neck and shoulder, filling the night with hot ozone. The whole thing made the young man scream and wet the front of his outfit, which further disappointed the Scorpion. He waited until the deafening rapport faded, and the young man lay there limp, shaking like an electric wire carrying a charge, tears filling his eyes and spilling over his cheeks. He was making small gasping noises like a man fighting badly not to hyperventilate on the spot. The Scorpion stood back though he kept a bead on Morningstar’s forehead. The Sting could turn the young man’s head into a Hula Hoop. It might even be interesting.

  “I’ll ask you again,” the Scorpion said, his voice dead, emotionless. “Who are you working for? Is it the Reich?”

  Morningstar shook his head. “I told you! I don’t know what you mean!”

  The boy sounded hysterical, in no state to lie. The Scorpion lowered his gun but kept it close at hand.

  Slowly, Morningstar sat up, wiping at his bloodied mouth with his sleeve. If the Scorpion hadn’t known any better, he would have said new, shiny teeth had already replaced the broken ones in his mouth. That was interesting too.

  “How did you come to be this way?” the Scorpion asked, genuinely curious.

  “I don’t know!” the boy sobbed as he fought to get his composure back.

  “You don’t know? I find that hard to believe.” The Scorpion started raising the gun again.

  “I’m telling you the truth! I don’t know! I answered an ad in the newspaper for a modeling position. That’s what I am, you see…what I used to be.” He gasped for breath and smeared away the rest of the blood. “It was an address downtown, at some warehouse. I should have known better I guess. The moment I was in the door, someone hit me. The next thing I knew, I woke up in a lab. I was there a long time…months at least.”

  The Scorpion watched him carefully. “And what went on at this lab?”

  Morningstar shook his head. “They never told me anything. It was all so painful, and it went on and on. They kept injecting me with this stuff that burned. It hurt so badly, but it also made me stronger. It made me survive all the things they did to me.” He stopped, and his eyes turned inward as he seemed to relive the memory, not a pleasant one. He looked genuinely shaken. “Then, one day, I was able to break the straps they used to hold me down. Even the bars on the windows of the lab were no problem for me. I wanted to go home, you see. I wanted to see my girl, my parents. I fell from the window and into the sea. I think I was being held on some remote island somewhere.”

  Assuming the boy was telling the truth, he could easily be talking about a Reich-run lab. The Scorpion knew there were still many in operation, labs secreted away in remote Costa Rica and on Polynesian islands, places owned by private investors, places almost no one visited.

  He’d go with the boy’s story…for now. “And what happened after you fell into the sea?”

  “I drifted a while until this fishing boat found me. After I got home, I thought everything would be all right, but then things started to happen. I started to change…”

  “Mutate.”

  “What?”

  “I’ve examined your blood, boy. Whatever those scientists shot you up with, it mutated your DNA at a core level.”

  The boy looked interested. “That’s why I can fly? Why I can’t be hurt?”

  The Scorpion studied the boy’s tear-and-blood-streaked face under the hood. If he was lying, acting, he was doing a damned fine job of it. He felt a twinge. “Why this?” he asked, indicating the costume with the gun. “Why become Morningstar…whoever you are.”

  “Mark. My real name is Mark.”

  “Why become Morningstar, Mark?”

  The boy climbed shakily to his feet. “I…I don’t know. I guess I didn’t want what happened to me to happen to anyone else.”

  The Scorpion laughed. It just burst out of him like staccato gunfire from the muzzle of an automatic. Laughter nearly doubled him over. “So altruistic! So naïve! I th
ink I’m going to be sick!”

  Mark looked wounded. His eyes darkened, becoming broody pits into an unknowable hell. “I thought you would understand, but you’re just as messed up as I am! I guess what they say about you is true.” He looked at the blood on his hand and clenched it.

  “What do they say about me?”

  “That you’re insane. That you’re worse than the criminals you kill.”

  The Scorpion laughed that off as well. The sound was bitter and nearly hysterical as he jumped up and down and aimed the Sting at pale, round mother moon hanging high overhead. Play a little hardball with the criminal underworld, and everyone thinks you’ve taken the bend! Suddenly, you’re the villain, you’re the menace, even though crime was down 60 percent in the city since the Scorpion had laid claim to it. The Scorpion knew that because Kurt Reinhardt had done the research for an exposé years earlier. Fucking ingrates. The Scorpion wanted to shoot them all—and he would have except that would make readership deteriorate, and he couldn’t let Kurt Reinhardt’s business fall to pieces. They worked too well together.

  “It’s true, though, isn’t it?” Mark said, sounding disappointed. “You’re not a hero. You’re just some evil shit with a gun a head full of loose parts.”

  “Boy,” said the Scorpion, his laughter dying along with his little dance, “you don’t know what evil is.” He flung himself at Mark, and the two of them went right over the edge of the building. It was a surprisingly long drop; in the course of it, somehow, Mark got on top. The impact felt like a sledgehammer to the Scorpion’s spine though the Kevlar probably saved his life. He felt the vibration of the impact in his teeth and a sharp pain cut down one hip, probably a hairline fracture. Mark landing atop him further drove the breath from his lungs.