“Thank you. For saving me, I mean.”
“Add me to that sentiment,” Asher said, barely getting the words out through the pain.
“I . . . wasn’t thinking. I just . . . I just did it.” Earl lowered his head, pushing away all the thoughts that were trying to get past the numbness that had descended upon him.
“Well, I’m glad you did. My name is . . . everyone calls me Slag,” said the woman.
“I’m Asher, and he’s Earl. We don’t have fun code names or anything.”
“Maybe you should get some. Especially if you’re going to go around punching Heroes,” Slag suggested.
Earl said nothing. He just lowered his head and tried with all his might not to think.
* * *
There was a blinking light when Earl walked into his apartment. The answering machine, of course. It was the only piece of technology Earl owned that lit up, unless someone had left a bomb by his couch. He flipped on the lights and was a bit disappointed to see that there was no bomb, only the answering machine letting him know he’d missed a call.
He wondered if it was Asher, telling him that the patch-up had gone over fine. That man in the suit had promised to bring Asher to a healer as thanks for them managing to bring half the cargo back. Hopefully they used the kind who could erase injury entirely. It wouldn’t do for a speedster to have a bum leg.
Maybe it was his landlord, reminding him that rent was due. That, at least, would be no problem. Earl had been given more than promised. The man in the suit said it was for work well done. Earl suspected it was because so many of the others had been brought down there was less need for splitting up the pay.
Deep down, a part of Earl expected it to be the police, telling him that they knew he was the one on the scene today who’d assaulted a Hero and that they’d be sending by a platoon of people in capes to drag him to court. Then again, if Earl had actually killed that guy in green then he’d probably never see the inside of a cell. Heroes were protective of their own.
Giving up on speculation, Earl reached over and pressed the play button on his worn out machine.
“Evening Earl, this is Edwin Mayflower over at Mayflower construction. You interviewed with me a couple of days ago. Well, looks like that flu bug that’s been going around has taken out a big chunk of my workers, so if you still want the shot to prove yourself it’s yours. Call me first thing tomorrow and I’ll get you the address. Come ready to work.”
Earl listened to message once, then twice, then once more before finally accepting that this call had actually come in. That done, he walked into his kitchen and pulled out the last of his cheap TV dinners and set in the microwave. As he watched the cellophane wrapped dish spin around and around in the small metal box, Earl leaned against the dirty wall in his hovel of a kitchen. Slowly, inch by inch, he sank to the floor.
By the time Earl was done weeping, his food was cold again.
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Components
A Just Cause Universe Tale
By Ian Thomas Healy
Ian Thomas Healy is the author behind the Just Cause Universe, a series of superhero fiction novels spanning more than seventy years of history in a world very similar to ours, but with superheroes. Centered primarily around three generations of speedsters—Colt, Pony Girl, and Mustang Sally—the heroes of Just Cause are always at the forefront of the most dangerous challenges to the safety and order of the world.
The first six novels of the JCU are Just Cause, The Archmage, Day of the Destroyer, Deep Six, Jackrabbit, and Champion, with Castles releasing in April 2015. All JCU books are available in print and ebook format from online retailers as well as from Local Hero Press, LLC.
Ian can be found online at www.ianthealy.com, on Twitter as @ianthealy, on Facebook as Author Ian Thomas Healy, and all over the Pen & Cape Society forums.
* * *
Some men might have returned to their hometown to great fanfare, like a victorious warrior celebrating an overthrown tyrant. There would be ticker tape falling from the high rises, brass bands, and soldiers kissing nurses in the streets. When Harlan Washington returned to New York City from Philadelphia, he did so under the cover of darkness, with his collar turned up and his hat pulled down low, and that was good enough for him. In his mind, he was the victorious warrior, but the tyrants hadn’t yet been overthrown. They were still there in the World Trade Center, looking down upon all the little people supposedly under their protection.
Harlan knew better. Just Cause was full of assholes, like Javelin and Pony Girl. Even Harlan’s older sister Irlene was part of that team who thought they were so much better than everyone else. She had played just as much a role as the others in taking him down, ruining his Destroyer suit, and sending him off to juvie hall because of all the damage he’d caused and the lives he’d taken.
It wasn’t like Harlem hadn’t been about to burn down anyway from all the firetrap tenements. He’d just helped them with a little urban renewal. And as for all the jerks who’d been in the wrong place at the wrong time? You can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs, as Harlan was wont to say, and there had been plenty of bad eggs in his neighborhood that he hadn’t minded breaking; not even the bitch who’d once called herself his mother.
The next suit was going to be incredible. Much stronger. Much faster. And it would be able to fly. The machinery sang to Harlan in his sleep, telling him its secrets, and when he awoke it was with plans and schematics dancing in his eyes.
“Yo, man, we’re here,” said Bay, the giant man with a baritone voice that could frighten Darth Vader. Harlan looked up from where he was doodling a circuit design for the Destroyer Mark II suit. The U-Haul’s headlights made two bright spots up against the rolling vertical door of a Manhattan warehouse. Bay was Harlan’s go-to guy, who solved problems and dealt with people so Harlan didn’t have to.
Bay had been a guest of the New York Juvenile Corrections System, like Harlan, who had been almost fourteen when he was remanded into custody of the state. Bay was three years older and serving time for burglary and arson, and based upon his behavior in the clink, wouldn’t be an adult long before graduating to assault and murder. Harlan had shared a cell with Bay. At first, Bay had been disinterested in the slight, smelly thirteen-year-old, but then Harlan had put together an electric shock stick out of some parts he scrounged up and used it to stop the heart of a much larger boy who’d been amusing himself by fucking younger boys in their asses in the middle of the night. He’d come for Harlan and left in a body bag, and after that Bay showed him great respect, even stepping up to protect Harlan when someone started hassling him. Harlan learned a very important lesson during his time in juvie: respect wasn’t only about who had the biggest muscles. Intelligence was a clenched fist or a shiv in the dark, and Harlan had brains to spare.
When he made his escape on the eve of his fifteenth birthday, he brought Bay with him. The two boys lugged Harlan’s steam-knife, built from parts he cannibalized from laundry and kitchen machinery, through the sublevels of the juvenile facility, cutting through wall after wall until they found freedom. A few carefully-timed gas grenades in their wake prevented any pursuit from the hapless assholes tasked with guarding children, and the boys had a few moments to savor their freedom.
“We go to Philadelphia,” said Harlan. “Just Cause is still here. They’re going to be looking for me.”
“But I don’t know nobody in Philly,” said Bay.
“All the better. Gives us a place to start fresh.”
“What we gonna do?”
Harlan smiled at the bigger boy. “Whatever we want.”
What they had done, in fact, was to get connected with an up-and-coming organization in Philadelphia known as the Black Mafia. They were looking for good street soldiers, people who could follow orders, like Bay, and people who could give them, like Harlan. The two of them took charge first of a block, then a street, and eventually an entire neighborhood. Between the drugs a
nd skin trade, the protection racket and the smuggling, Harlan and his group were taking in the money hand over fist.
But then the nightmares started. Bullies and rapists who looked like the superheroes of Just Cause ran rampant through them, chasing him through darkened alleys where he had no escape, no suit to protect him from their fists and worse. He found only tinkering could alleviate them, so he left Bay to run the business and Harlan became the threat in the background, the person in the shadows no one wanted to piss off.
The sound of another engine shook Harlan from his own thoughts back to the present. He looked out the window to see the one-eyed monster of a Pontiac that belonged to Barry, one of the young toughs Bay had recruited to Harlan’s New York crew. The other three dark heads in the car’s interior would be Darrell, James, and Troy. His time in the Black Mafia had taught him the usefulness of having local talent handy when one needed to hit the ground running, and he was determined to get his big project underway.
Just Cause had peeled him out of his first suit like someone picking a scab off his knee. They would find that a lot more difficult in the Mark II, and someday he would use it to get back at them for the humiliation he suffered the night of the Blackout, the night he’d cut his whore of a mother’s throat as she slept in her chair and escaped into the riotous darkness with only his little sister Reggie to keep him company. If there was one person in the world Harlan could say he cared about, it would be Reggie. She had always respected him when they were growing up together in that roach-infested rathole of a Harlem apartment. She gave him space when he needed it, she kept secrets for him, and she had a sense about when he truly needed help.
Being being a fugitive meant he couldn’t risk getting caught for a few minutes of face time with Reggie, so instead he had to monitor her from afar. Coming back to New York made him feel strangely moody about her. She was thirteen now, in middle school, and living with Irlene and Irlene’s boyfriend, that Puerto Rican scumbag Javelin. In a moment of weakness, Harlan had picked out a postcard from a service station at the edge of Pennsylvania. It was an African veldt, with a herd of gray elephants basking in the bright sunlight. Harlan’s strongest memory of Reggie was her dragging around that stupid, filthy stuffed elephant. He didn’t even remember what she’d named it, but she’d loved that toy. He mailed the postcard to her blank, unsigned, nothing to show it had come from him. Maybe she would know he was thinking of her, and that made him almost feel something, although he didn’t have the vocabulary to put it into words.
He stepped out of the truck and looked up at the building. It was a run-down, nondescript warehouse like so many in New York. The windows were caked over with dust, the paint peeling from the wood after years of coastal weather and neglect. It wasn’t nearly as nice as the place he and Bay had left behind in Philly, but appearances weren’t everything. Like Yoda had said, “Judge me by my size, do you?” Harlan wasn’t imposing to look at, but people feared him just the same, and that was exactly how he liked it. “Pay the boys,” he told Bay.
Bay handed each of the young men a bundle of singles. It was only a hundred dollars for each of them, and they knew that was all they were getting, but a stack of dollars felt like a lot of money, and it was easy to spend, unlike trying to unload a c-note at the nearest bodega. “Get the truck unloaded,” said Bay. “We’ll get settled in and then you can help us with the setup.”
Over the next few hours, Harlan’s workspace took shape once more. He and Bay set up the security system while the other four fellows unloaded crates full of tools, equipment, and components for the next Destroyer suit. They didn’t ask about what they were moving; they’d been paid not to ask questions. When Harlan snapped at them because they weren’t being careful enough in his eyes, or were putting things down in the wrong spot, they shined him off and let Bay smooth things over.
The Eggbreaker railguns Harlan set up to guard the warehouse entrances were his fifth iteration. They used motion sensors calibrated for human-sized targets and fired machined steel needles. His speakers and warning lights were less lethal, but had proven their effectiveness time and time again when vagrants and other undesirables found their way in, usually looking for something they could steal and sell. And if the warnings didn’t drive them away, well, that was what the Eggbreakers were for, and Harlan’s incinerator had seen plenty of use in eliminating bodies.
At last, the lab was set up the way he wanted it. The half-completed Destroyer Mark II suit hung from its frame, lurking like the skeleton of some monster from an engineer’s nightmare. The basic design was smaller than the first Destroyer suit, and unlike that one, this was being built with all new, state-of-the-art technology.
Harlan could barely wait for the first time he could try it on.
He looked around the workshop, fingers itching to hold tools, to weld and solder, to wrench and create. “Bay, pay them the bonus.”
Bay handed each of the young men another bundle of fifty singles. “Thanks for your help tonight, guys.”
The young man named Barry tucked away his money. “Hey man, you gonna need any help again tomorrow?”
“Yeah, we ain’t doin’ nothin’,” said Troy.
“’Cept shakin’ down old ladies in the subway for their Social Security checks,” said Darrell, and the others laughed.
“Yes,” said Harlan. “I’ve got some work for you. Guy who knows electrical components named Goetz. He should be taking a train into Manhattan to get some items I need. If he won’t do it . . .” Harlan managed a smile. “Convince him.” He turned away from them to start rummaging through his tools. He had an idea screaming in the back of his mind and it wouldn’t let him sleep until he acted upon it. “Torque converter,” he mumbled.
“You gonna need anything else tonight?” asked Bay. “There’s an all-night diner a mile up the road. Bring back some coffee and a sammich?”
Harlan didn’t answer. He was already deeply engrossed in his tinkering. Bay knew to leave well enough alone, and he departed after the other young men.
Harlan worked.
* * *
It must have been many hours later when Bay burst into the workshop, his face pale and his eyes bulging with fear. Harlan jumped at the sudden intrusion, hands automatically reaching for the nearest lethal device before he recognized Bay. “What is it?”
“They got shot up. All of them,” said Bay, sounding like he was holding down his gorge. “Cops everywhere. I was gonna meet them before they talked to Goetz. Kinda smooth things over. But somebody done shot ‘em all up and he run. I saw them on the stretchers.”
“Who got shot, Bay? What are you talking about?”
“The boys, man. Barry, Darrell, James and Troy. They been shot up. All of them by some dude in the subway.”
“Did they get the components from Goetz?” Harlan felt irritated. He didn’t need this kind of delay.
“Did they . . . Man, are you even hearin’ me? Naw, they didn’t get no components. They got shot!” Bay stomped his foot in frustration.
“Who shot them?” Harlan had been trying to work on redirecting his exasperation at Bay’s suggestion, so he got up from his work and went over to investigate the sandwich and coffee that had been fresh hours ago.
“I dunno,” said Bay. “I been askin’ around. Don’t nobody know. They said the dude ran into the subway tunnel.”
“So they didn’t get him.” Harlan bit through the stale bread to the congealed filling beneath, not really tasting it. He didn’t much care about eating, found it a waste of effort, and rarely bothered to taste anything. Food was fuel, like the electricity that powered his Mark II. “Anyone see him?”
Bay nodded. “A couple of passengers. The conductor even talked to him before he ran. Asked if he was a cop. Dude said no, of course. Just a white man with a piece, lookin’ to shoot hisself some niggers. We seen plenty of those types in Philly.”
Harlan drank the coffee. “What did he look like?”
“Skinny ass cracker. Goofy
hair. Big square glasses.”
Harlan looked up. “Square?” He went to the mishmash stack of papers that served as his files and dug through it until he found a ragged-edge newsprint clipping. “Like this guy?”
Bay looked at the picture Harlan was waving at him. “Mebbe. I didn’t see him. I’m just sayin’ what I heard.”
Harlan looked at the paper himself. It was an advertisement for a store that dealt in custom electrical components. The picture was of the owner, Bernie Goetz. “It was you, wasn’t it? You son of a bitch,” whispered Harlan. “I’m gonna find you.”
Bay stepped up beside him, always the faithful soldier. “What you need me to do, Harlan?”
“Charge up the suit batteries,” said Harlan. “Then we’re gonna go find Goetz ourselves.”
“Doin’ the cops’ jobs for ‘em?” asked Bay.
“No. I don’t care about cops. But he threw off my whole schedule. I was going to use those components in the new targeting array and missile lock system. Now I’m going to have to go get them from him myself. And he’s going to be sorry he messed with me and mine.” He paused, and then lowered his voice to a dangerous growl. “I’m Destroyer, and this is my town now.”
* * *
The suit wasn’t ready to fly yet. It wasn’t even armored, and not quite weatherproof, as evidenced by the persistent leak of icy air that played across the back of his neck as he stepped out of the truck. He and Bay had driven past Goetz’s house and seen the car with plainclothes officers parked out front. Harlan needed to get into the house where he could run a full sensor sweep with the advanced equipment he’d installed right before they left Philly. If Goetz had left any evidence behind of where he might have gone, Harlan would find it.
“Okay, give me a five minute head start to draw ‘em off and then go,” said Bay out the truck’s window, revving the engine as if it were a high-performance racing car.
The Good Fight 2: Villains Page 8
