Pox Americana 3

by Zack Archer

  “Big” Jim Bridges

  Maria Sexton

  David Denison

  “The Mighty” Leo Roars

  Irwin M. Fletcher

  This is a work of fiction (shame on you if you didn’t already know that) and all rights are reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the copyright owner, Quincy Xavier Fletcher, and/or the Shadow Catchers.

  FIASCO HEIGHTS Book 1 Chapter 1

  The sky over Fiasco Heights was streaked with psychedelic colors the afternoon that I killed my third supervillain.

  I was strapped in the passenger seat of an acoustic transport machine, a “wave sled,” cruising a hundred miles an hour over a strip of bitumen that bisected a plain of pumice dotted with rocky outcroppings.

  My eyes were everywhere, scanning left and right, peering forward and back, searching for the man who was hunting us, a thick-necked brute nicknamed the Barrister, who wielded a powerful, oversized gavel made from a mysterious, intergalactic alloy.

  “Do you see him?” a female voice asked.

  I turned to my left and swapped looks with the woman piloting the sled, an achingly beautiful shit-kicker in a skintight singlet who called herself Aurora. I shook my head and smiled, watching Aurora’s ample breasts strain against the black-green nanomesh garb, her long, coffee-colored hair whipping in the wind. “I think we’re in the clear,” I said.

  “What makes you think that?” she replied.

  “I’ve got a sixth sense about these things,” I answered, tapping a finger to my head. “We are gonna be platinum.”

  BOOM!

  A rocky outcropping, down and to our right, vanished in a blast that fragmented the rock, sending shards of it in every direction.

  Turning, I watched the gavel snap back into the mallet-sized hand of the Barrister, who was running across the ash faster than a cheetah. He was clad in a silver singlet that was partially hidden under a short, oil duster that came down to his waist and featured a full shoulder cape and brass buttons that glimmered in the half-light. His long, blond hair was bound behind his head, and the sharp angles of his face were screwed up in a look of agony or ecstasy (I couldn’t tell which).

  The Barrister waved his gavel at our sled, and we vroomed forward. If you’ve ever seen the old movie “Star Wars” you probably remember what an X-34 Landspeeder looks like. Our sled resembled Skywalker’s ride, although it was thinner, more compact, and instead of the air-cooled thrust turbines that powered the Landspeeder, our machine was juiced by twelve tiny machines that produced the acoustic vortices that propelled us eight feet off the ground.

  The big villain mounted another hillock of gravel and grabbed his sex while making an obscene gesture at us.

  “Did he just do what I think he did?” I asked.

  Aurora didn’t answer, she was too busy firing up the wave sled, throttling the accelerator, increasing the intensity of the ultrasonic waves that rocketed us forward. My head snapped back as Aurora deftly maneuvered the sled up and over the outcroppings and a monstrous knot of bleached bones.

  BOOM! BOOM!

  The stone formations all around us vanished in percussive blasts, obliterated by the Barrister’s gavel. Looking over the rear seat, I saw the bastard ducking under a stone arch then hurdling a ribbon of boulders, arms and legs chopping the air.

  “That sonofabitch is incredibly persistent!” I shouted. “And he’s got serious anger issues!”

  “Do your thing!” Aurora screamed back.

  “You want me to bust some moves?!”

  She smiled as if she didn’t have a care in the world. “No, Quincy, I want you to use your powers to defeat him!”

  I sucked in a breath and heaved myself up at the same moment that the Barrister flung his gavel directly at us.

  The gavel spun forward as time and sound seemed to slow.

  This happened all the time when I was “summoning” by the way, when I was reaching way down deep inside myself to call upon whatever strange and powerful forces I’d been blessed with (or cursed with, depending on your POV).

  Sounds muted, but the colors all around me suddenly became brighter. The air shimmered with iridescent color and then assumed a glassy, almost liquid-like quality. My line of sight was fringed with chromatic aberrations, and then I held up my arms as the air caught fire and—

  Wait!

  Hold on a second.

  At this point, you likely have a shitload of questions, starting with who I am,

  how did I come to find myself next to a smoking-hot chick like Aurora, and did I just set the friggin’ air on fire? I mean … seriously?

  In the interest of clarity, it’s probably best if I take a step back and explain how it all started. I realize almost all of what I’m going to tell you is hard to believe, but if I were you, I’d follow along anyway.

  For starters, it’s a pretty righteous story, but more importantly, as crazy as it sounds, your life might depend on it.

  Life is a helluva lot easier to live when your eyes are closed. Okay, I’m paraphrasing a line from the old classic rock song “Strawberry Fields,” but that doesn’t make it any less true. In my experience, the vast majority of people stumble around, consumed with their crappy everyday lives, never realizing that most of the world is beyond their perception.

  What I mean is, there’s a whole other world of sights and sounds and smells that most living things, particularly humans, simply can’t sense. For instance, animals can see ultraviolet light that people can’t, plants and insects can smell complex odors that they use to communicate, and powerful electromagnetic fields exist that only a handful of creatures know about and use for energy and guidance. The inability to perceive the wonders of the real world means most of us are figuratively deaf and blind, feeling an occasional rumble or a gust of wind and that’s about it.

  I say ‘most’ because there are certain people who are aware of these unseen things.

  Some of these people are good.

  Some of them are very bad.

  I should know because I’m one of them.

  One of the good ones that is.

  Now is probably the right time to introduce myself. My name is Quincy Xavier Fletcher and until three days ago, I was a few years shy of my twenty-sixth birthday, a mild, unassuming security guard—which I know is a little disconcerting, because it sounds like the thing you hear after they catch a serial killer and they interview the killer’s neighbor on the news (“he was such a mild, unassuming young man!”)

  I might occasionally be a little off, but I’m totally not a serial killer, and I used to be mild and unassuming (I swear!) until the day Aurora showed up.

  It’s a cliché, but the day she entered my life had started off like any other…

  FIASCO HEIGHTS Book 1 Chapter 2

  I woke a little after two in the afternoon, roused by the sounds of my two roommates, Harker and Renfro, hooting and hollering as they prepared to throw their usual mid-day bash in the crappy little den of inequity we called home.

  I rolled off the cot in my room and stared at my four metal walls. I suppose you could’ve called the place an “apartment,” but that would be seriously misleading, because the four-room flophouse we shared was actually two metal boxes grafted together, a pair of cargo containers plopped down between hundreds of others in the middle of a new kind of urban housing development called a “CHU Farm.”

  A CHU Farm is a cluster of climate-controlled containerized housing units, hundreds, sometimes thousands of them yoked together horizontally and vertically, that became popular ten years back, around the late 2030s, when an urban housing shortage coincided with the introduction of the UBI, universal basic income.

  The quick and dirty on UBI is that the rise in automation (machines, artificial intelligence, etc.) meant that shitloads of workers, b
lue-collar, white-collar, upturned collar, whatever fucking collar you had, were out on their asses. We’re talking upwards of ninety-percent of the working-age population was without work. When faced with this crisis, what did the government do? Did it roll up its ginormous sleeves and try and discover new sources of employment?

  Hells no.

  Not even close.

  It simply conjured up a new way to pay people off.

  A monthly payment (“net-value stipend” was the preferred euphemism), that ranged between $1300 and $2089, depending on a number of factors.

  Here’s the kicker though.

  You were still required to submit responses to a government employment test. If you scored high enough, you had a shot at securing a plum job stacking boxes at an Amazon fulfillment center or greasing down the friggin’ ‘bots that took all the jobs in the first place.

  My roomies, Harker and Renfro, intentionally flunked the test because they, like most folks, preferred UBI over real work.

  Wouldn’t you know that my dumb ass took the test after sniffing some glue and shotgunning several beers. I ended up getting such a high score (no pun intended) that I was given a job on the early night shift at a tech company called Pythia.

  Guess what my pay was?

  About five hundred bucks a month less than what Harker and Renfro were getting for sitting on their asses.

  A fist pounded on my bedroom door. “You still alive in there, Quincy?” Harker shouted.

  “I’m up,” I yelled back.

  “Good,” Harker replied. “Cause the ladies want you to do your thang.”

  I groaned and grabbed my Pythia security guard uniform off a nearby chair, blue slacks and a blue, short-sleeved shirt with a nameplate (which read “Quincy X. Fletch”) pinned to the front, along with my security card, and a pair of earbuds.

  My reflection greeted me from a mirror pinned to the back of the door. Yawning, I ran a hand through my dark, unruly locks, and massaged a face that hadn’t had a good shave in several days. I did a “most muscular” pose which only served to accentuate how perfectly ordinary I was. Sighing, I eased my five-foot ten-inch, hundred and eighty-pound body into the slacks and shirt, and exited the room.

  Harker and Renfro were waiting for me in what passed for our living room. A TV was on in the background showing a live-feed from a top-rated reality show called “Snuffed,” a program that involved people hunting other people in real time.

  The guys were seated on the floor in front of a glass table, their girlfriends Jen and Molly flanking them. There were four shots of booze lined up on the table, along with a huge battery that was connected to the wall by a long, white cord.

  Jen, the long-limbed, prettier of the two ladies, clapped her hands as I strode forward. “It’s the energizer!” she shouted.

  “Battery Man!” Harker bellowed, pumping a fist. “Battery Man is in the house!”

  Renfro grinned hugely and flipped a switch on the battery.

  A red light flashed green and the battery hummed.

  My gaze hopped from the battery to Renfro. “Seriously?”

  “C’mon, Quincy. One quickie. The girls dig it and besides, this is what you do,” he said.

  I shook my head. “There is no way in hell I’m doing this.”

  “Pretty please, Q-man,” Jen said, leaning up so that I could snatch a peek at her beautifully augmented breasts which were visible inside her tight, low-necked shirt.

  I peered into Jen’s unnervingly blue eyes and studied her bright, passionate mouth. Her eyelids batted like the wings on a moth, and for a moment, at least in my mind’s eye, we were whisked away from the shitty little cargo container.

  We were at another place, at another time, alone at the edge of a beach with bone-white sand. Jen was running up into one of those resort huts with the thatched roofs, and I was chasing after her. I made it through the front door of the hut to find some old-school R&B music thumping, Jen ready to greet me in nothing more than a black G-string.

  Before I knew what was happening, our tanned, toned bodies were joined. Jen’s tangled hair swept across my chest and we kissed hungrily as the music throbbed and she slid her hand down my thigh.

  Moving to the sound of the music, I felt ecstatic and free, really free for the first time in my life. There was no time or concerns or fears, there was just the two of us, my hands exploring the contours of her body, tasting the hint of salt water around her swollen nipples. She moaned and pulled my shorts down and took me in her mouth.

  I smacked her round ass as I pulled her back to her feet, and she rocked back and forth against me before we retreated to a nearby couch. She bit my ear and told me she needed me inside of her. I leaned back and she straddled me and then and I went to work, thrusting rhythmically into her, listening to the slap of flesh against flesh, fucking at a furious pace, nearly reaching a climax before—

  My vision, my dream, my delusion, whatever the hell you want to call it, ended.

  Just like that.

  Only I was still caught up in the moment which meant, yep, I was thrusting at the air.

  “Holy–what the fuck is that, Quincy?” Harker asked.

  I shook off my shock and tried to hide my erection as the girls sniggered, and I tried to play it off. “Sorry, guys, I zoned there for a sec.”

  “You’re losing it, bro,” Renfro said, tapping a finger to his head. “Pretty soon you’re gonna be in a rubber room putting puzzles together.”

  Jen swatted at Renfro, and I realized I needed to do something to change the vibe in the room. Quick as a reflex, I stuck my finger into an opening on the battery. This got everyone’s attention.

  My body jolted.

  A warm current snaked through my finger and up my arm, causing the tiny hairs on the back of my neck to stand at attention.

  It was enough electricity to kill the average guy.

  The others gasped.

  I yawned again.

  I probably forgot to mention this before, but I’m not entirely an average guy (and not only because of my periodic, vivid sexual daydreams). Besides a name, the one thing my old man apparently gifted me was a genetic disorder (thanks, pops!) the ability to be a “conductor,” a “heater,” an accumulator of electricity.

  You know how I knew I had the “gift?”

  I was struck by lightning.

  I was ten years old, playing right field for my baseball team when I spotted the first spoke of lightning in the distance. The team scattered and me being a certified dumbass, took shelter under a tree. Suffice to say, things got hot really quickly. I’m talking fifty-thousand degrees hot, which is five times hotter than the surface of the sun. That’s the temperature of the surrounding air after it’s been heated by a lightning strike.

  Anyway, a bolt crashed down, tracing the trunk of the tree like water coursing down a gutter. I looked up and I was kissed by a cone of white light. Ninety-percent of people struck by lightning survive, but they’re physically fucked up. Some lose limbs, others get badly burned, and still more are forever tattooed with a pattern of tree branch-like scars that trace the path the electricity took as it traveled over their bodies.

  I didn’t suffer physically at all.

  Nope, my shoes didn’t even get blown off because somehow, some way, I was able to harness the energy and expel it out of my hands like some kind of twisted magician.

  I did piss my pants as a result of the whole thing, but otherwise, I was no worse for wear.

  There are others out there like me, and you’ve probably seen some of them performing all kinds of crazy tricks on the internet. There’s the dude in India who can power up light bulbs and blenders by grabbing live wires, and another whack-job in Serbia who cooks food by redirecting energy from an electrical box into his stove-top. What would cause the organs and hearts of most people to fail, doesn’t faze me. Basically, I’ve got the ability to store electricity in my body and then release it.

  But here’s the thing. I can’t really control
the electricity which just seems to get sucked down into my body and then vomited back out.

  I squinted and swung my hand down and ran it over the top of the four shots of booze, little wisps of electricity shooting from my fingertips as—

  The shots caught fire!

  The girls squealed with delight, and then the four of them smothered the flames and downed the shots. Jen shot to her feet again and kissed me on the cheek, which was a tad surprising since I’d been fucking the air moments earlier. “You’re so awesome, Quincy,” she whispered. “You’re so…super cute.”

  My guts seized at the word “cute.”

  Argh!

  I would’ve preferred a kick to the nuts or an ice pick to the neck.

  “Cute,” a word that I’d heard far too many times in my short life, was a puppy dog, or your kid brother, or the little old man with the high-waisted pants that you see waving at you from the bus stop. Cute was absolutely, positively, not the thing you wanted to hear from a woman who possessed many of the qualities prized by the superficial male of the species.

  I summoned up a smile for Jen. “Thanks.”

  Harker rose and threw a hand around me, mussing my hair. “Our boy Quincy here sure has some serious, mystical powers, don’t he?”

  “Too bad they haven’t done him any good!” Renfro said, barking a nasty laugh.

  I wanted to respond.

  If truth be told, I wanted to go Drew Barrymore on Renfro and set him on fire, but I didn’t.

  I just grabbed my shit and waved goodbye to the slackers and headed outside.

  FIASCO HEIGHTS Book 1 Chapter 3

  Our “apartment” was on the fifth story of a ten-story CHU Farm on the eastern edge of Baltimore that appeared to have been constructed from a madman’s blueprint. All of the ladders and walkways were fixed unevenly to the right side of the construct, causing the whole thing to sag toward the ground. It was only a matter of time until the entire development crashed to the ground.