[Terrorfexx]

Symphony of the Iron Underbelly, Movement No. XVII – Fisher-Price Blues
 
[The Past– South Ossetia Avenue, Atlantic City, New Jersey, USA]

I know from the way he bites his lip, he’s stalling for time.

Not time to get away, because he’s cornered. The only door is right behind me, and I’ve got him angled up in the corner. No, he’s stalling time so he can decide on the best way of trying to get past me.

“Can’t we be reasonable men?” He half-laughs, eyes darting wildly back and forth.

Slowly I remove the fedora from my head, setting the hat down on a nearby table. Calmly, I unbutton my suit jacket, slip it off my shoulders and hang it on a chair. Tugging at it, my tie loosens and then ends up coiled on the desktop like a snake.

I begin to roll up my sleeves, “The time for reasoning passed when you tried to cut me, Clive.”

“You were trying to take me in!”

“You were trying to get away with murder,” I shrug. “Literally.”

He shifts his weight. It’s almost time for him to make his move. “You ain’t a cop. Not anymore. Why do you care?”

He launches himself out of the corner before I have a chance to answer. Dropping to the floor, he tries to scramble between my legs but I’ve got just enough time to take a sharp hop back and give some clearance. Caught in No-Man’s Land, Clive doesn’t have the time to think, let alone react before my Oxford Patent Leather shoe is driven into the side of his head.

He lets out a scream, rolling onto his back and clutching his temple. Poor old Clive here never meant to kill anyone, he just got nervous and combined with a poor understanding of how to use a pistol safely, he wound up putting a round through that poor girl’s eye. That’s why he doesn’t have the constitution of a stone-cold killer. It’s why he’s overacting now. It’s why I don’t buy it.

Following up with a swift boot to his ribs, I roughly shove Clive onto his front with the flicked toe of my shoe. He coughs, spluttering and wheezing. Suddenly he’s still, concentrating on his breathing. Now I know he’s not faking.

“ … Because I get paid,” I answer eventually. “I do a job, I get paid. That’s the way of the world. Unless you take short cuts …”

Reaching down, I haul Clive to his feat. “And look where taking shortcuts got you.”

“Fexxfield, Come on!” He whines. “It was an accident! This State will put me on the gurney for sure! I don’t want to flop around like some dying fish! Take me over the State Line at least!”

Tears start to stream from his eyes. “I don’t want to die!”

“We all die, Clive,” I shrug without a trace of emotion in my voice. “The only variable is how you choose to go.”

~*~*~*~*~

The overhead spotlight makes her skin shine with a pearlescent sheen that seems unearthly – as if the flesh is dusted with diamond. Stripped of context, to the untrained, she might be some intricately carved work of a woman; carefully hewn from polished marble and painstakingly shaped. She might have been mistaken for something made, not born, were it not for the ugly wound punching a congealed hole straight through the front of her skull. The blood has long thickened to molasses, leaving a lumpen star-shaped stain that leaks all around the ruined remains of her eye socket.

Lines are still pressed into the folds around her mouth, courtesy of the oxygen mask pointlessly strapped into place. The remains of a crumpled intravenous bag swings limply over the edge of the gurney, suspended on kinked plastic tubing stubbornly hooked into her sunken arm. Evidently, at some point, her body had taken a nine millimetre round to the skull and gambled that life might still find a way. The heart had continued beating, lungs filling with air because they were incapable of truly understanding. Life, at its most basic, fundamental level, was simply concerned with existing.

All the truly useful components; sentience, consciousness – they were the first trinkets dropped whenever something or someone faced true annihilation. An irresistible urge to survive overrode all other considerations. And so this young woman, apparently shot accidentally in a store hold-up gone bad, gone catastrophically, died twice with an hour’s grace in-between mortalities. Once, as everything she truly ever had been was puréed into a fine, pink paste and again when her autonomic nervous system accepted the overwhelming odds and gave in.

But of course, it did not simply give in. It just died. There was no capacity to understand the absurdity of trying to continue to live with a large window permanently installed into the front of your face. And so she lies here, while bureaucracy takes hours to reconfirm what is obvious by a cursory examination from up to thirty metres away.

“Doctor DeLune?”

I do not bother turning around. Instead, I simply swirl my signature across the grease-stained clipboard which reconfirms the cause of death and set it down on the nearby table with a clatter of rumbling, hollow steel.

“Terribly sorry to bother you …”

“I do not think you are.”

There is a long pause, and what sounds like half a chuckle. Stepping around and into the overhead light, I recognise the threadbare fedora and creased suit of one of the city’s numerous homicide specialists. Morgues are the favoured haunt of many Detectives and – where staff shortages force a shift or two in one – it is inevitable the same haggard faced reappear looking to bypass State laws on privacy and glean some critical insight to solve a case that will bring no-one back to life or make any material difference to the suffering inflicted.

This one, however, seems different.

There are lines, yes. A cut or two permanently etched into his stubbled chin but nothing made by the blade of world-weariness. Instead, his demeanour seems altogether chipper. Perhaps he has mistakenly stumbled down here looking for Pediatrics …

“Suppose not,” He shrugged. “Name’s Terryl. Atlantic City Police Department–”

“Obviously,” I interrupt. “How can I help you, Detective?”

He looks down and whatever carefreeness survived our initial exchange drains away in one of the dozen grates lining the lime-green tiled floor. “Here about Claire …”

“Claire?”

Terryl dips his head, the brim of his fedora dropping towards the gurney. “This unlucky lady.”

I did not know her name. Craning my neck, I check the clipboard. “Claire Kalvin.”

He nods. “Yeah.”

The response is automatic, ingrained. Easier to allow it to spill out than to bother to refrain. “Sorry for your loss.”

“Didn’t know her much,” Terryl shrugs. “She could have helped a lot of people though with what she knew.”

“She was an informant.”

His eyes widened only momentarily, the surprise quickly passing over. “Sharp, Doc. Didn’t think you paid that kind of attention.”

“I do not. But it is obvious.”

For a few moments he stares down at the body, arms folded across his chest, chewing on his bottom lip. Every few moments he seems to start to speak, before some other thought suddenly and hurriedly arrives to take priority.

“Got herself involved in some business that wasn’t hers,” He says, finally. “Did the right thing for the wrong reasons, ended up all turned around with nowhere to go except down.”

That makes me pause for a moment, hand halfway stretched out to retrieve the rubber gloves folded over a nearby table edge and eyes narrowed from behind the surgical mask stretched across my face. “People make poor decisions as easily as they find ways to make those decisions their last.”

Terryl nods. “Surely do.” After another long pause, he sighs. “She had a kid.”

“Perhaps she should not have gotten involved in … Business that was not hers?”

Drumming his fingers against the hollow steel table nearby, the Detective pushed out the inside of his cheek with the tip of his tongue. “Think that’s how she got involved in it to begin with. Got cajoled, antagonised. Wasn’t thinking clearly.”

Snapping the plastic down across my wrist, it is my turn to shrug as I pick up a shining silver saw and bring it to whirring, momentary life with a teeth-grinding, ear-splitting screech until the motor relaxes and the cutting disc slows to a lazy spin. “She is not thinking at all, anymore. Is there anything else I can help you with, Detective?”

Terryl looks at me for several long moments, before shaking his head and tugging down on the brim of that threadworn fedora. “Thank you, Ma’am. Just wanted to see it with my own eyes.”

“See what?”

He turns away. “See what happens when you start something on someone else’s behalf  you can’t finish.”

[The Rapture]

You are the wrong Miss Johnson, but that is okay.

It is a difficult thing to face down a superhero. Not simply because of their fantastical powers, which makes direct physical confrontation foolish – I have already learned that to my painful cost. No, they are made mighty not by their strength of body but by their strength of will. Towering resilience and titanic robustness which makes them impervious to the trifling concerns and worries that afflict mere mortals.

They endure with the kind of mental fortitude few others possess. It is what makes them mighty. It is why your wife, Keira, has become the only individual to (think they) have stopped me. Contrary to the belief of the wider Bombshells’ Division, that was not my first mistake. After all, it was a close-run thing, I think. Perhaps if the vagaries of fate had shifted subtly to either side, I would be the one looking down on your domestic bliss from a position of Champion.

No. My first mistake was not in striking your wife. It was in not striking you.

Laying siege to something imperious is a waste of blood and treasure. Instead, I should have worked to undermine the foundations. File away the mortar between blockwork until the structure sagged and struggled. Hollow the bones, make cancer in the blood. Sicken and enfeeble, until the way is weak and a brutal hole can be blown through the fragile mess.

You are that weakness, Keira. While you waste time with delusions of relevancy, desperately snatching slithers of success brought to you on a plate in a pinion from the kitchen by the World Champion, reality comes threatening to call. You matter because of the second component of your hyphenated surname and nothing else. While Roxi stands untouchable, you are barely noticeable. Indeed, that is why I have taken such a keen interest in you and your baby boy …

It astounds me that not being content with extant weakness, you would develop new ways to make you and your wife vulnerable. A family? Such a curious investment in a line of work hardly famous for making such units viable. While you make-believe a story that does not end in you being forgotten, you do my work on my behalf.

Why should I strike Roxi head-on? Why not look to slip a subtle blade between her ribs when her attention is elsewhere?

Your boy means nothing to me. Another slack-jawed imbecile waiting for scheduled indoctrination into a valueless, meaningless society. You treat progeny as if they are some wonderful miracle, rather than a base biological instinct. Please forgive the disrespect if I do not personally congratulate you for rutting. He means nothing to me.

But he means everything to you.

And now, through him, I have you. At Climax Control, every choice misery I inflict on you is gifted to your wife, our World Champion, by proxy. Regardless of her incredible strength, fortitude and bearing there is no armour of faith that can repel the gut-churning agony of watching someone you love suffer … And I promise you will suffer so very greatly. This is not some Machivallian scheme to distract or confuse. I am simply going to hurt the wife of my upcoming opponent and through that, weaken her. Poison her.

All it took to make such a thing possible was to exploit your pointless desire for relevancy. To be front and centre, to be noticed. To be seen. In this singular aspect, I have gifted you what it is you most want.
Have you thought about what it would be like to be the Johnson of interest? Of primacy? How many times have you watched your own reflection in the shining metal visage of the Bombshells’ Title and wondered, idly what if that were me? Tantalising, forbidden. Sinful, but of course it cannot. It can never be, not while Roxi holds such gold.

Unless, of course, she did no longer.

Does the thought not excite you? That through no direct fault of your own, your wife might simply come off second-best. You could still go home together, have another fat child, grow slow and feeble and old together and then – when the lights were off and the bedframe rattles to her baritone warbling – you could dream about pursuing the Championship.

If I take it from her, I promise to give you such an opportunity. Would you like that? The chance to become someone again?

All possibilities lay through me, Keira. I am not asking for something as crass as betrayal. I am not sure what love is, but I know it is a powerful, toxic thing and there is nothing I could offer you, directly, to persuade you to do anything that would hurt your wife’s chances. No, not directly.

But I did not have to offer you anything, directly. I simply had to create the possibility. The chance that Keira Fisher-Johnson would once again be a name synonymous with excellence and not as a superhero’s sidekick. It must be so tiring, to have all your hopes and dreams, wants and desires, fears and dreads boiled down to something simplistic against the towering presence of Roxi.

It must be very draining. At Climax Control, I will help you on this first step towards rediscovery. To remember who you are. 

Your boy means nothing to me. Of much more interest is a simple number. SIxty-nine days. That is the transitory, fleeting period of your sole time as Champion. Barely two months’ worth of relevancy, within which you were the first name on smiling and snarling lips alike. It must be a powerful drug to remember as you pack your fat child’s rucksack for school, or step over scattered toys. To remember a time when you stood mighty, like Roxi. But apart. Strong and independent instead of mewling and weak.

Your desperation radiates from you in palpable, furious waves. It slips between gritted teeth, and all the world and its people can see you are anything but content. Domestic bliss by any other name, painted in bright colours but a nightmare nonetheless. This is not what you dreamt of; this is not where you want to be. But you pretend so, because to do anything else is to admit to the undeniable truth that you are simply not content to act as a doting, supportive wife.

You hunger for glory. It makes you swoon to think about such success – makes your knees tremble at the thought. Perhaps now, as I think more fully, I am not the masterful tactician I believed myself to be. Perhaps it is not me playing some complex strategic game … But you.

How hard did you pursue me, Keira? Or was our matchup one of random chance or smart corporate planning? Is this simply some stunningly complex way of carefully manoeuvring yourself back into prime-time competition? The idea is certainly alluring. That you would risk your family for the opportunity to be someone again. To recover the identity that remained yours for only sixty nine days.

To put your own son at risk as a tool to further your own success is an act so brazen I cannot help but respect it. Understand it. They are such a burden, children. Why not make them work to your advantage? Use them as a weapon to get what it is you want, even if you cannot quite bring yourself to admit that truth aloud.

Keeping such truth inside must be difficult. The urge to share the burden with your dearest, though they take the form of your trouble and strife is a twisted irony. Have you talked this through? Perhaps during one of your inane gym sessions where fresh meat is prepared for consumption by those who would not hesitate to do what needs to be done? Perhaps the next World Champion that succeeds where you failed will emerge from your doe-like collection.

Still, I wonder how Roxi feels about all of this. Did you consult her? Did you ask her permission? Do you need her permission? Is it difficult to obtain sufficient time in-between her moonlighting crimefighting, and title defences? When you are struggling with homework and temper-tantrums, is she throwing flailing ne’er-do-wells through breezeblock walls and saving the poor, huddled masses? Does that make you feel worthless? Forgotten?

What does it feel like to have forgotten how to be someone? Is it gradual loss of self, marked by confusion and irritation or a singular collapse of everything which makes you … You? When you bent over to retrieve the pieces of lego cutting into your foot, did you catch a glance at your reflection and struggle to recognise the person staring back?

On Sunday, I will face the wrong Miss Johnson, but that is okay because through your foolishness, your tempestuousness – your desperation – I will have access to the only one which matters. The one with the gold. The one with the relevancy. The one who managed far more than sixty nine days.

Do not try to band the wound to staunch the flow of poison, or reach for some anti-venom. Jealousy is a toxin so potent there is nothing which can dilute its power. It wears away the strongest bonds; undermines the mightiest foundations. Already it manifests in furtive glances, subtle disagreements. Outright and willful disobedience. I think it has already started. Hollowing out the bones of your relationship, making it thick and turgid. Bloated by a desire to be an equal partner in a pyramid that only grants one person room to stand at its summit.

The simple reality is, of course, that you have never been good enough. Your record is an effective summary of that, coupled with brand recognition taken from our resident superhero and masqueraded as your own. Even if you could have such a chance as to reach a cumulative seventy days, it would only end in disappointment. Divorce.

But that is not how jealousy works through the blood. It whispers sweetness, not reality. There will come a time when it finishes burning through your livelihood and in the shattered remnants of all the terrible mistakes you have made … You will see that truth. But by then, it will be far too late and everything you have ever loved will be lost.

In the meantime, however, I want you to be furious Keira. I want you to be wrathful, and vengeful, because while you are raging you are not thinking. While you look to hurt me, you are not focused on who you hurt in turn. You are nothing but an attack vector by which the impassable gates that mark your wife’s title reign can be bypassed. Black iron will stand and resist even while the flames lick between the grates from the inside. Everything she has built will burn courtesy of the dissident, the saboteur working from that safe and secure inside.

Did you ever conceive it would be you who would bring her down? While the rest of the world winds up for another classic superhero vs supervillain, they will ultimately come down disappointed at the manner in which the right Miss Johnson will finally, mercifully fall.

I am still going to face the wrong Miss Johnson, but that is okay. I am so very much looking forward to meeting you.

Welcome to the Rapture. There is a special place inside it reserved for those who betray the ones they love for their own selfish trysts with gold and diamond.

[The Past– Atlantic City PD Headquarters, Atlantic City, New Jersey, USA]

My mouth works open and closed, but I can’t push out the words. Mostly because my mind isn’t sure my ears heard correctly.

I suck in a breath and force my voice to the surface. “Chief, you can’t be serious.”

“Does this look like something to joke about?” He snaps. A powerful man, he folds his arms over his broad chest. The thick, wiry moustache over his top lip quivers in displeasure.

“He’s a fiddler!” I shout, forgetting my place. “At least two kids, maybe three! What do we need to do to put him away? Catch him with his d--”

“Watch your mouth Fexxfield!” The Chief roars, cutting me off. “I’ve been doing this twice as long as you and if you think I’ll sit and listen to some wet-behind-the-ears, badge-polishing, shirt-starching newbie dictate to me the morality of the Law then you best put your gun on the table so I can shoot some sense into you!”

I turn away in frustration, tearing the fedora from my head and throwing it down onto the tabletop.

Running a hand down my face, I stretch out the skin. “But … Why?”

“David Steel is one of the biggest philanthropists this city has ever known,” The Chief begins. “He gives millions of dollars every year to a whole heap of charities, and to the city. His name is above at least three of the largest orphanages in the downtown area, and the brand new radiology ward at the City Hospital. He’s one of the Mayor’s biggest campaign donors and if that wasn’t enough for you, he’s majority shareholder and CEO of Steel Industries. That’s the biggest employer in the tri-state area. Headquartered here.”

The Chief sighs.  “Let me spell this out for you, Fexxfield. Let’s say we put Steel away. Immediately, we freeze his personal assets and every cent of those millions of dollars that would almost certainly have gone to any number of good causes goes bye-bye. He’s replaced as head of Steel Industries by someone who isn’t from this city, isn’t a champion of the area or its people and all of a sudden, we’re looking at major restructuring and job losses.”

“The Major loses a critical financial sponsor and suddenly, can’t compete with the slick opposition campaign funded by big businesses that are a whole hell of a lot less interested in this City and what happens to it beyond lining their own pockets.”

“All this upheaval,” The Chief grunts. “Even if the City could cope with a huge rise in unemployment and a pro-business Mayor who doesn’t care for much in the way of food stamps, which it can’t, it certainly doesn’t have a few tens of millions of dollars lying around to take over orphanages, or pay for the upkeep of new hospital wards.”

I shake my head. The inside of my mouth feels dry. “So we’re saying the well-being of a few kids, their livelihoods, that they’re not being …” I can’t even bring myself to say it. “ … That they’re not being abused, is secondary to everything you’ve just said?”

The Chief slams his fist down on the tabletop, his chin quaking with rage. “Of course it is! Open your eyes and play the percentages! Are you genuinely asking me if three, four, six, maybe ten kids are worth turfing thousands of them out onto the streets? Firing untold numbers of blue-collar workers? Closing hospital wards? Where do I stop?”

“You don’t need to like it,” He barks. “You just need to accept it. I don’t need you to do anything--”

“Just need me to do nothing? Let evil triumph. Right?”

He shakes his head, the anger draining away. I can see he’s just as conflicted as I am. maybe more so. The Chief chews the inside of his cheek, before turning away. His voice waivers.

“We’re helping tens of thousands of people here, Terryl, they just don’t know it. The only price we’re being asked to pay is our own integrity, self-respect and morality. I think it’s a price worth paying? Don’t you?”

I don’t answer, but my silence condemns me to agreement. At least for now.[i/]

~*~*~*~*~

"I can’t lie ..." Cassie said eventually, a long silence finally broken as she ran a thumb across the smooth metal she held in her palm. "I’ve thought about this more than once; I even dreamed it. Stepping out from behind a desk, doing something more than just making appointments and herding cats that like to hurt each other for money. Something better …”

She closed her palm around the platinum band, features rising up to lock with the man opposite, who reached out to take her hands in his. "But not like this," She sighed, expression pained. "Never like this."

Cassie rested her weight against the edge of that same desk. "I suppose I don’t need to ask your opinion? The disapproval is just about cut into your face with a breadknife. Guess you’d like us to take your kids, go home and never speak of any of this stuff again?"

Folding her arms across her chest, the blonde shook her head. "I don’t think I can just walk away from any of this; how can I look at this opportunity, wish it well, let it go and then somehow look at myself in the mirror? How are we supposed to look those kids in their eyes, teach them any kind of principles – the same one we’ve just betrayed – and still look at myself in a mirror?”

“I’m not saying it's simple, but chrissakes, woman. Why you?” He asked, his expression twisting up. “Surely they’ve got plenty of people with the qualifications. And if this all starts now, before they’ve got that bastard locked down and hard? Why should you have to take that chance?”

“David Steel owns half this town!” She snapped, lips baring. “When he comes calling with an opportunity, you don’t just walk away. Nobody does – not if they want to ever accomplish anything of value ever again. I’m just sick of all of this, Clive. I want more. I need more. This is killing me.”

Cassie flexed her fingers. “It doesn’t matter; it only matters that our choices are limited and sometimes, there’s one option regardless of how much we might wish there to be another. Besides … I’ve not forgotten what that son of a bitch did to my reputation. I’ve not forgotten how he orchestrated my firing, my professional legacy tarnished. Just left to rot.”

“No amount of wringing our hands is going to make this go away. You can’t toss David Steel into a river or just make him disappear,” She shrugged. “He won’t be “locked down” or persuaded as it feels like you think he should be. Irrespective of what you think of him, he wields extraordinary power and he can’t be dealt with just by exchanging his thousand-dollar loafers for concrete proxies.”

“Well it’s a damn shame he can’t, because I can’t think of a person offhand more deserving of it,” He muttered, crossing his arms over his chest, and leaning up against the nearest wall. A mighty frown grew strong across his stubbled face. “So it’s like that? He says jump, you say ‘how high’, and that’s all there is to it? You get to throw yourself right back full into the one situation I’ve been trying to keep you safe from, and to hell with everything else? Because you don’t think they can use someone else, or you aren’t willing to let someone else take the hits on account of being told to do it first? Or is this on account of her? Abigayle? None of these people did a damn thing for you when she almost made you–”

He stopped there, not wanting to look any more petulant than he already was. He had done something. He’d done the only thing he was aware he could at the time, and done it without her knowing or understanding. Hadn’t told a soul. He’d taken the hits, taken the abuse, shrugged off the questions and damage to his own reputation and livelihood, and he hadn’t blamed her for it. Yes, there were those opportunities, but right now he was more concerned with the one he cared most about. Her.

A scowl passed over her features as she pushed away from the desk. “You’re being dramatic. This isn’t some pet-project, or out of hours freelance work. This could change everything for us. Finally let me stand on my own, be successful on my own. I’m so sick of being in everyone else’s orbit, reacting. Being pushed, pulled. Prodded. I’m so tired, Clive.”

At the mention of Abigayle, the scowl became something altogether angrier. Stepping forwards, Cassie brought her hand upwards, fingers forming an angry point. “You don’t have a fucking clue what you’re talking about. I’ve told you before not to mention her name and yet every single time I start to stir on the idea of doing something because it might just help me …”

She took a deep breath. “You don’t understand what happened, with Masque–with Abigayle. With everything. She’s unique. It’s tough to explain if you weren’t there.”

She could just about understand his reluctance; hadn’t Clive worked as hard as possible to provide what he could? Support her where possible, and do as any father should for his children? And still, though he understood the damage all this bullshit had caused – and she was just one person after all -- he seemed unable, or unwilling, to consider the damage that could still come to pass if they did nothing. If they just treaded water.

She couldn’t let it stand … Surely he could see that, even if he couldn’t accept it.

“Look,” He started, raising his hands in a placating manner. “I didn’t mean to insult her, I just was saying maybe, given … You know, your past and all … And how she’s … That maybe you were feeling guilty or something and with her asking, you’re more willing.”

It sounded as awkward as it felt, and he scrubbed a hand through his hair, uncomfortably trying to somehow make it better. Which of course, he couldn’t. Sure, he’d been around the block a couple turns, in a position of some influence at one time, but even that he felt was a fluke, and he’d never been comfortable with it. He wasn’t prepared for a sudden shift like this, wasn’t sure what all it would entail other than ‘likely ending horribly’ and however strong his lovely lady was, he was under no illusions of what the pressures of a man like David Steel could do to someone.

“You’re going to do this whatever I say about it, aren’t you?” he asked more quietly, looking over at her and trying to envision how this could go anywhere good.

It didn’t.

Cassie looked up and nodded. “ … Yeah.”