Nothing to Lose

by Vernon, Steve

  NOTHING TO LOSE

  By Steve Vernon

  First Digital Edition published by Crossroad Press & Macabre Ink Digital

  Copyright 2011 by Steve Vernon

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  Thanks to the two Daves

  David Niall Wilson and David Dodd

  of Crossroad Press

  for allowing me the opportunity

  to let these tough tales

  step into the twenty-first century

  of e-Book formatting.

  Thanks to The Batman and The Spirit

  and The Lone Ranger and The Shadow

  for lurking in the shadows

  and back alleys of my imagination.

  Thanks to my Uncle Glen

  who introduced me to Don Pendleton's The Executioner.

  Thanks to my Grampa Hanlan

  who always kept a stack of tough guy books next to his bed.

  And thanks forever to my wife Belinda,

  the toughest lady I'll ever know.

  Steve Vernon

  January 2011

  THE GLINT OF MOONLIGHT ON BROKEN GLASS

  It is midnight in the hard part of town. The mask is itching like it always does. The ragged end of my cape is soaking in a puddle of something I don’t want to guess about. I’m crouched behind a kicked-in aluminum trash can. It stinks of rotted meat and drunkard’s piss.

  And I feel right at home.

  I watch as the two of them drag the woman into the alley. I wait until They have got her dress hoisted up, her panties squirmed down. I wait until I am certain that one of them has his pants unbuckled and is firmly into her, bearing down hard.

  Hey, I may wear a cape, but that doesn’t make me a hero.

  So I come up behind the one who is standing and watching. He’s the easiest to take. The smaller of the two, he has to wait his turn. I don’t keep him waiting, and he doesn’t hear me coming. He’s too busy filling his eyes with the sight of her tits and his buddy’s ass slapping up and down, too busy filling his ears full of her screams.

  I am glad she is screaming. It makes it easier for me to sneak up on the three of them. There isn’t much danger of her screams bringing anyone else. Not in this part of town, where people mostly keep to their own misery, too busy to bother with anyone else’s.

  I can see her face, sharp in the moonlight and the filter of alley dreams. I can see the anger and fear, transforming and transfiguring her from a housewife hurrying home from shopping to a harridan of hatred and hunger. She wants to be larger; she wants to turn herself into a She-Kong, no matter what the price, just long enough to shred these pissants into puddles of lukewarm gravy.

  So I pop the peeper with a half a brick, hard enough to open the back of his skull and let the wet stuff out. The peeper drops like he isn’t getting up on this side of forever. The other guy sees me now, because the peeper has fallen face first onto the other guy’s ass. The other guy gets busy trying to pull himself free from the woman and the peeper’s dead weight.

  I have to give her credit. She is hanging onto the other guy like he was a long lost lover. She’s showing him the tiger hiding behind the pussy, keeping him tied down, counting on me to finish him off. She’s still screaming, only the screams have turned into something else. They’re painted with the sound of revenge, like she knows she’s going to get him, like she’d rip his throat open with her teeth if she gets the chance.

  I’m a gentleman, so I don’t make her wait for that. I clout him hard, while he’s turning. I catch him with the half a brick on his lower jaw, leaving it angling open like a switch-bladed bike tire. So now he’s making some really interesting sounds through that half-flattened mouth of his. It makes a nice counterpoint to the woman’s screams. I finish him off with a couple more swings. It takes a few, because I can’t get a square crack at him. She’s jiggling him way too fast.

  Then she’s up and on him, ripping at him with her fingernails, kicking him, and biting his ear and nose and anything else that’s hanging loose. He’s way past dead, but she isn’t done with him yet. I let her go at it for another minute or two. Call it catharsis. It is a better medicine than a thousand rosaries worth of prayer.

  Then finally I tell her, “That’s enough.”

  But she keeps tearing at him, her face twisting like nothing I’ve ever seen before. I grab at her. It’s like grabbing an armload of electric eels. This is what it does to you, sometimes. It’s a hunger, something that needs to be fed.

  A lot.

  “Kill him,” she says. “I want to kill him.”

  “He’s dead, lady. He’s dead. They’re both dead. Dead, done and gone.”

  “Kill them again,” she shouts, yanking herself free from me. It should have been funny, but it wasn’t.

  I give her another minute to tire herself out, but I could be wasting my time. She’s tearing at him like she wants to undress him from his bones. There’s not much left of him that isn’t cut, torn or bruised.

  Finally I drag her off of him.

  “Look lady, they’re dead. Both of them.”

  And they deserved it.

  They’d raped three other women in the last month.

  Those were the ones I knew about. There might have been others. They weren’t too polite about leaving any open mouths behind them.

  “Who the hell are you? What’s with the cape?”

  “Hey, I’m a superhero,” I say, planting my fists on my hips and throwing my chest out with my best heroic smile. “You can call me Captain Nothing.”

  Okay.

  So Captain Nothing isn’t really my real name. It’s just another mask I wear. I figure it beats the hell out of The Human Flytrap or The Amazing Wonder Bra. Sometimes a little nothing is better than nothing at all.

  She straightens her dress. I do my best to look away. Nobody likes to have their secrets stared at. Her panties are torn and bloodied. She tears the panties off like they were part of a bad memory, and then she flings them aside. They drop unceremoniously across her rapist’s dead face, like a dirty veil.

  Nice.

  “I heard you screaming,” I continue. “I got here as quick as I could.”

  It’s a bit of a lie, but sometimes the truth just begs to be stretched. Only she isn’t listening. She’s still making that face, eyes darting left and right, like she’s looking for a scalping knife or a rock.

  I grab the half-a-brick and discretely tuck it into my pocket. Wouldn’t want her to get any ideas. Besides, it’s a handy tool to have in your pocket.

  I know.

  I know.

  Batman’s got a utility belt. Me, I’ve just got pockets. Black denim. Denim for the toughness, black for the mystery. Besides, it doesn’t show stains.

  Only she isn’t finished, though. She throws herself back down on the corpse. Now she’s trying to choke him out. There’s a soft spot in the human throat. She finds it. It takes some doing, but she digs at it until she’s poked one of her thumbs through it. Then she starts rooting around. There’s an ugly wet socketing sound, like she’s fucking his throat.

>   I drag her off him a second time. “He’s dead, he’s dead, they’re both dead.”

  It isn’t exactly classical elocution, but it’s all I can think to say. She keeps on struggling, her eyes rolling around in her sockets like they’re trying to escape from her face.

  Then she pulls free and makes a run for it. I grab for her, but all I manage to snag is her purse; one of those long strappy things that hangs across her shoulder. I stare at the purse in my hands, wondering what the hell I ought to do with it.

  Then she’s gone into the darkness. She’ll probably be okay. She will probably find herself some cop and they’ll check her into the hospital to sleep it off.

  That’s when I hear the scream.

  Actually, it is more than a scream. It is more like something being pulled out of her, yanked and uprooted.

  I’ve got a bad feeling about this.

  So I run like my feet have suddenly grown anvils; the purse rattling against my side like a bag full of hammers. In the moonlight, I must look like the world’s ugliest drag queen, cape, purse and all.

  I don’t care what I look like.

  She needs saving.

  By the time I get there the screaming has stopped. She’s lying in the mouth of the alleyway, wreathed in the halo of a sodium lamp, something dark that is pooling around her, moonlight glinting on a fresco of broken glass.

  There are pieces of her – there and there and there. Her face looks like it was skinned alive, like something had torn its way through her and out of her.

  I turn and puke. It sops into the thirsty concrete. As I look up, I catch a movement in the shadow.

  I swallow, my mouth still reeking of puke and pure piss-off, I run towards the movement, trying to catch a better look, and that’s when I see what did it to her. What cut her up so quick and so bad. Moving like it was folding itself into itself. I see what it is, only I don’t have a name for what I see.

  I throw the half-a-brick, but I might as well be throwing a spitball. Shattering glass shouts into the night.

  Shit, I’ve broken someone’s window.

  Then I hear a laugh, like barber’s scissors dancing with wet scalpels; the kind of laugh a straight razor might make whickering through a soft young throat. It wasn’t a window I broke.

  It was something else.

  Something I broke that didn’t stop moving.

  I’m after whatever the hell it is like a greyhound after an electric jackrabbit. Now it’s climbing a fire escape, shimmering in the moonlight. I keep running. I am not going to let it get away that easily.

  I jump and grab the first rung, afraid I’m going to tangle my cape or her purse.

  Shit. My hands slice open on the rung. Blood steaming down my palm, mixing with the dirt and the rust. It is as if the rusty iron has been powdered with double-sharp glass. I try to hang in there and pull myself up, but whatever it is on the rungs starts eating and burning into my cuts like I’m hanging onto a handful of piranha blood, galloping leprosy and raw sulfuric acid.

  So I drop.

  I hit the pavement on my knees. It’s lucky I don’t break them.

  I wonder if the Batman wears kneepads.

  Nah.

  His butler probably runs around with a tiny bat-net to catch him when he falls.

  I look up but all I can see is the trickle of my blood slickering down over the rusty iron fire escape rung. There’s glass all around me, and blood on the glass. It’s mine, but not all of it. I don’t know how I can tell but I know it’s not all mine.

  So I get up. I want to hit something but I know it wouldn’t do any good. I could go into any bar in town and knock somebody down.

  Anybody.

  I could do it.

  I’m big. I make a living knocking people down, but it wouldn’t do any good. It wouldn’t bring her back.

  I open her purse and I fumble through it. There’s some money. I cram that in my pocket with the half-a-brick. The superhero business pays less than a lifetime of squeegeeing broken car windows.

  There’s also a business card.

  It figures. There has to be a business card. Women like her don’t leave home without them. It’s their stamp of authenticity, their personal sense of identity, just like the leather of my mask.

  So I pull out the card and have a long look at it.

  She was a psychiatrist, and her name was Sharon.

  The blood on the card is mostly mine.

  ~ * ~

  Spiderman’s got a Soho loft. Superman’s got a condo in the Arctic. Me, I’ve got a one-room apartment where cockroaches scuttle along the walls like an army of vagrant hieroglyphics.

  I stare out the window, the only view I’ve got. Sometimes I get the jukebox of a wino singing off-key; sometimes a concert of three or four. There are also the inevitable alley cats screeching for cheap sex, and rats that hardly make a sound at all.

  My reflection is looking back at me from the window. The reflection taints the color of the glass that hasn’t been cleaned since Satan first pushed the apple.

  A cobweb trails messily in the window’s corner. It makes a neat little fuzzy pup tent. The coffins of small flies are bound softly in the web. There has to be a spider there, but I never see him.

  Maybe he’s got a day job.

  “Tell me who did it?” I ask the invisible spider. “Who killed her?”

  Only spiders can’t talk. Not even the invisible kind. And besides, I already know who did it.

  I know what did it.

  So I stare at my reflection, filtered through the cobwebs and dirty glass. I don’t like what I see. That’s one of the reasons I learned to wear a mask. Forget about secret identity. After a while you don’t have any identity at all.

  I’m Captain Nothing, and nothing more than that.

  I’m wearing the mask, even now. It itches and smells, because I wear it all the time these days. I’ve got a secret hidden under it. Not just a secret identity. Hell, if anyone knew who I was they probably wouldn’t care.

  No.

  This is a secret like nobody else has got, right under my mask.

  I stare at my reflection. How the hell did I wind up like this? Wearing a mask and a cape in a room that even the cockroaches are afraid to settle down in? Were my parents killed by a criminal? Was I the last son of a dying planet? Buggered by a trio of randied out space dorks with a radioactive anal probe?

  None of these things.

  I just had a temper, was all.

  And seeing what was wrong with this world pissed me off even worse.

  Call it job preference. I didn’t have the temperament to be a cop. Too damn much temper to make it through the academy. I belted my police instructor halfway through the first week.

  They sent me to a counselor.

  I belted her, too.

  I tried to make it as a private eye, but I didn’t like bourbon and I never cared for guns. I also had no patience for snooping so I figured I’d give the superhero business a try. Call it a lateral career move.

  What the hell.

  I like the hours.

  So what if I don’t have any super powers. You don’t really need a super power. That’s just so much window-dressing. All you need for this gig is a judgmental nature and an attitude the size of Godzilla’s pancreas.

  I slide her business card behind the tenting of the cobweb.

  “Eat that,” I say.

  Then I lie down on my cot and I call it a night.

  ~ * ~

  The next morning I call the number on her card. I use a pay phone six blocks from where I live. Mine has never been connected. I’ve already checked the newspaper. There wasn’t much said about a mutilated body, or even the two rapists. A bulldog that placed third in a dog show took the front page.

  Slow news day, I guess.

  So I stood there, framed within the glass of the phone booth. The morning sun turns the booth into an Easy Bake Oven, so I keep the door kicked open with my foot.

  Somebody picks up on th
e third ring, but doesn’t answer.

  I wait.

  Nothing. Not even breathing.

  I think about screaming into the phone receiver; maybe asking if their fridge is running, or if they’ve got Prince Albert in a can.

  Finally, I speak.

  “Is Sharon there?”

  A voice, too sharp to be human, answers.

  “Speaking.”

  Then I hear it, starting slow and building like an air hammer in a radiator. I hear the laughter, the scalpels dancing with razor blades, all neat and icy and steady like it isn’t going to stop.

  Whatever’s on the other end of the line sure isn’t Sharon Carter.

  “Listen,” I say.

  Then I smash the receiver through the telephone booth glass. It hits hard, and for a moment I stand there, pieces of glass falling like slow-motion frozen rain.

  I leave before someone thinks to call the cops.

  I could wait for one to arrive, I suppose. Maybe I should make a report to them, but what would I say?

  Sharon Carter answered her phone?

  I might as well report a missing newspaper.

  ~ * ~

  The Green Hornet had Black Beauty.

  The Lone Ranger had Silver.

  I have a yellow cab. It is a good cab. It hasn’t been barfed in and the driver doesn’t smoke.

  I think he evens speaks English.

  Not that I can be choosy. It’s pretty hard to flag down anything in a mask and a cape.

  So I give the cabbie the address from the business card. It takes him less than ten minutes to get there. The traffic is good, and I don’t look like I can afford any scenic detours.

  Her office is in the plush side of town. The doorman doesn’t want to let me in, but when I tell him that I’m here for Sharon Carter, he steps aside. I guess he figures I am one of her patients.

  I take the elevator up. It’s nice not having to climb stairs or fire escapes. She has a receptionist. She must have been doing really well, or perhaps she just wanted folks to think that she was.