Peter Clines: Ex-Heroes

I gunned the throttle and pulled away. They picked up speed. Their car swerved a bit and I could hear them howling and laughing. Drunk or stoned to work up their courage.

A little more speed from the bike. A lot more from the Caddy. They were gaining fast. My timing needed to be pretty good for my next trick to work, but they were so wired I didn’t think I needed to be perfect.

I let my speed drop and swung the bike to the left, heading for an alley a bit up ahead. The sedan swerved to cut me off, gunning its engine again, and I clamped hard on the brakes. The bike shrieked to a halt and spun around.

They oversteered and rushed past me. The guy in the window fired off a blast from the shotgun while one in the back seat shot a few rounds from a pistol. They were barely aiming and none of them came close.

They slammed into the corner of the building, right where the alley began.

Fifty mile an hour impact with no airbags.

I pulled the bike up and let the goggles snap open. Didn’t want to drain too much—-all these idiots had hospital time ahead of them. Especially the shotgunner. He’d been thrown out and made a good-sized dent in a blue mailbox. I checked his pulse. His collarbone and left arm were shattered, but he was still alive, lucky fucker.

The driver moaned as I dragged him out the window. The steering wheel had slammed him pretty hard, fractured some ribs, and his face was cut up a bit from pieces of windshield. He cried and cursed in Spanish until the third time his head hit the trunk of the car. “I don’t know nothing, bro,” he spit out. “Leave me alone.”

“You don’t know nothing?” I repeated, denting the hood with his skull again. “You were looking for me, weren’t you?”

“No, man, I swear.” He tried to spin and knock my hand away, but he’d already seen my eyes. He was as strong as a ten-year old and I had the energy of four people. I twisted him back and pressed his head against the trunk.

“Any second now I’m gonna get bored hitting your face on this car and we’re gonna move to the sidewalk. You were looking for me?”

“Yeah,” he nodded. “Yeah, we were.”

“Was it Rodney? He still too chickenshit to fight me again?”

If my life as Gorgon was a comic book, Rodney Casares would be my archenemy. He would’ve been exposed to gamma rays, found an alien artifact, maybe teleported with a housefly or something. Then he’d get a costume, rob a few banks, try to take over the city once or twice. We’d fight a lot, he’d be foiled and get away at the last minute, all that nonsense.

Instead, here in the real world, he was what you’d think of as the top enforcer of the SS. They had some stupid title for him, but I made a point of not using it. He’d been in court once on murder charges, four or five on assault and battery. He hated my guts for draining his little brother while the stupid kid was out trying to earn his way into the gang with some smalltime robbery and vandalism. Once his brother got out, the two of them came after me with a few other boys and I took out all of them. Rodney’s tough, but he can’t fight with his eyes shut. And there’s not much better insult in that community than making someone look weak in front of family and friends.

The Seventeen’s face shifted at the name and he grinned. “You don’t know?”

“What?”

“Rodney’s fuckin’ out, bro. In the hospital. Probably dead already.”

“Who was it?”

The driver shook his head. “Weren’t no one, just some crazy bitch. Jumped on him outside the movies Friday night. She was all biting and shit. Ripped up his neck, chewed off one of his ears. Loco Tommy said she swallowed it.”

“What happened to her?”

“What you think happened, man?” A weak hand came up and wiped away the blood pooling in his eyes. “Shot the bitch fuckin’ stone cold. Word is she was so hopped up she took almost twenty rounds.”

There’d been a piece on the news a few days ago of a woman with multiple gunshot wounds. Gang related. I never followed up on it until now.

One of the Seventeens in the back of the car groaned and fumbled his door open. I kicked it shut, slamming his head on the frame. He slumped back in his seat. The idiot on the trunk tried to leap up again, and this time I let the goggles stay open.

“So who sent you after me?”

He whimpered and his wide-open eyes watered up. I let the lenses close and shook him.

“Everyone,” he whined.

“What?”

“Everyone’s gunnin’ to score on you.” He managed a weak smile. “You’re the guy who shamed Rodney. Take you out, that makes someone new top dog now that he’s gone.”

I flipped him over and pulled his wallet. We went thorough the spiel, I pocketed his license and the cash, and then knocked him out against the trunk. Ten minutes later him and his two buddies were zip-tied together in a ring, arms to feet. I fastened the shotgunner’s unbroken arm to the mailbox and threw down a flare.

In the sudden burst of light, I saw something across the street. A woman up on the roof. Watching me.

My first thought was club girls. The hot, borderline-slutty ones who make a career out of being the girl everyone wants to dance with, buy drinks for, and take home—-or at least out to your car. Some of them used to paint themselves with latex rather than wearing clothes.

The woman on the roof, her outfit was that tight and showed off that much. And she had a lot to show off. I say this as someone who deals with some of the hottest women on Earth every week as part of my day job. Black straps and belts crisscrossed her body, accenting her curves, a lot like the utility harness I wore. But mine was store-bought and I don’t think there was a quarter-inch of material in hers that didn’t need to be there. Pushed back over her shoulders was a dusty, Middle Eastern–looking cloak with a wide, layered cowl. The black and gray stripes were urban camouflage.

The dominatrix-ninja.

One of the Seventeens moaned and I glanced away, just for a second. She was gone when I looked back.

I was tier three or so, enough that a two-story jump was just possible with a little effort. I took a running start, hit the center line of the street, and leaped.

I landed on the bleached tar paper of the roof. The goggles were open, draining anyone who caught sight of me, but there was no one. I looked behind some air vents and an access door. She’d vanished like some little ninja-stealth adept.

No big deal. All of the hero types must have been hearing about each other. I knew I was curious about the monster in Venice. The dominatrix had probably come down to this part of town looking for me. Maybe hoping she could be a sidekick or something.

My coat flapped in the wind as I dropped back down to street level. No time to play cat and mouse with another hero. If the fucking kid was right and there was a power vacuum in the SS, this part of LA was going to be hell on earth by the end of the week.

Los Feliz was northeast of Hollywood proper. With the trees, brick shops, and the two-screen movie marquee, it wasn’t hard to pretend this section of the city was part of a small town somewhere.

Big Red trundled to a stop under the trees. The scavengers hopped off the truck and spread out to a practiced perimeter. The lift gate hissed down and Cerberus lumbered off onto the pavement. Lady Bee slid off the cab, landing with a “clack” of hard soles. She opened the jockey box under the truck and pulled out a bundle of canvas grocery bags.

“Everyone listening?” asked St. George. He nodded at Lynne. “Okay, for those who haven’t done this often, and the rest of you who’ve heard them thirty or forty times—-here are the rules. Groups of three. We check in every half hour. No one goes off alone. No one does anything alone, no matter what. You see something, you tell the rest of the group. You want to go look at something, go with the rest of your group. You need to piss, I hope you like company.”