"I'm not keeping our partnership a secret, Renee." His tone was unapolo-getic. "He just wanted to know how it was going with you, that's all."
She winced at the word partner. Her last partner was currently pushing up daisies back in Gotham. "And how is it going with me?"
"You still have no idea who you are/' he said, "but other than that, fine." He paused to haggle with a fruit vendor over a bag of figs. Currency was exchanged. "Fig?"
"You keep saying that," she complained. "I have no idea what it means."
He offered her the bag. "It means, you know, 'fig.' An oblong fruit of the genus ficus..."
"That bit about me not knowing who I am, smart-ass." She ignored the figs and took another drag on her cigarette instead.
He took back the bag. "Well, that's the question, isn't it?"
"You're a jerk." Sometimes his cryptic evasions really ticked her off. "You know that, right?"
He shrugged. "It's been noted before."
Finishing off the figs, he consulted his map once more before leading her through the winding streets of the capital. Cobblestone paths passed beneath towering horseshoe gateways. Palm trees sprouted from stone pots placed outside the open doors of the shops. Street signs in Arabic might as well have been written in Kryptonese as far as Renee was concerned. The exotic sights and sounds were like something out of a movie. Casablanca maybe, or an Indiana Jones flick. Renee half expected to see a snake charmer at any minute.
"Okay, that was the Old Quarter we just left," Vic murmured to himself. "So the Temple District should be ... uh ... that way, I think."
In Gotham, Renee knew the city. She could read the streets and the people. Here in Shiruta, she felt uncomfortably out of her element. Gradually, though, she got the distinct impression that they were heading into a bad neighborhood. Busy boulevards shrank down to a confusing maze of narrow alleys and passageways. Weeds sprouted from the cracked pavement. The joyous crowds and music disappeared, replaced by empty streets populated only by the occasional drunk or beggar. Paint peeled from the porches and doors. Plaster crumbled from the walls, exposing the bare masonry underneath. Abandoned buildings were boarded up. Wilted palms looked on the edge of death. Apparently, not all of Kahndaq was in a rapture over the royal couple's impending nuptials.
Renee felt eyes at the back of her neck. Uncertain of her instincts in this foreign environment, she kept glancing back over her shoulder. Once or twice, she thought she glimpsed a shadowy figure darting out of sight before she could get a good look at him or her. Was she just imagining things, or ... ?
Vic noted her distracted state. He looked up from his map. "What?"
"Laugh at me and I'll kill you, Charlie, but I think we're being followed."
"Oh that." He went back to examining the map. "Yeah, he's been on us since we left the airport. C'mon, it's this way." He turned right at a squalid intersection. "At least I think it's this way."
I swear before this is over I'm gonna hold his dead body in my hands. Seething, she clenched her fists. "You didn't think that maybe that info was worth sharing with me?"
"I didn't want you to worry." He glanced up at the sun, barely visible from the cramped alley. "Can you tell which way's east?"
They approached a low one-story building that had definitely seen better days. Empty crates and barrels were stacked haphazardly outside the entrance. Shuttered windows hid whatever might be going on inside. A faded sign, in both English and Arabic, identified the place as Hni Hnak Shipping. Renee thought it looked like the Kahndaqi cousin of that rundown warehouse on Kane Street. ,
"So who is it?" she asked. "Who's following us?"
Vic responded casually. "Abbot, I think."
"The wolf-man?" She glanced behind her again, but didn't see anyone, human or otherwise. She reached instinctively for her ray gun, then remembered that she had left it behind in Gotham. No way would she have been able to get that gun past airport security. "Just great."
Vic stepped beneath the overhang of the doorway. A plume of smoke enveloped him, and when he turned to address her, his face had completely disappeared. "Shall we?"
"Are you crazy?" His apparent lack of concern over the fact that they were being stalked by a werewolf drove Renee nuts. She pointed to her own skull and twirled her finger. "Is that your problem?"
"There's nO such thing as crazy, Renee." He tried the door and found it locked. "Just behavior that society has deemed unacceptable."
Tell that to the Joker, she thought. "Speaking of which, isn't Intergang taking a huge chance setting up in Black Adam's territory? I hear he performs public executions downtown every Wednesday. Draws a huge crowd." She had seen footage of him ripping apart malefactors on the evening news. "Sounds awful risky to me."
The Question kicked in the door. The flimsy doorframe splintered easily. "Unless he's in on it with them."
"There's a lovely thought," she cracked, before following him inside the building.
The smell hit her first, before her eyes could adjust to the murky lighting: the coppery scent of fresh blood, so thick in the air that she could taste it at the back of her throat. An adult male in good health had roughly six quarts of blood in his body. She counted five bodies, which added up to almost eight gallons of blood, most of it splattered over the floors and walls.
"Abbot," Vic whispered. "You son of a bitch."
The shipping office had been thoroughly trashed. Papers were scattered everywhere, spilling out of ransacked cabinets and desks. Overturned furniture and lamps created an obstacle course across the floor. A ceiling fan rotated slowly above the carnage, churning the noxious atmosphere. Crimson droplets spattered against the floor like water from a leaky faucet.
The bodies of the victims weren't in any better shape. They were strewn across the floor and furniture, lying in pools of their own blood. Most of the men had been disemboweled, their guts torn out by the voracious werewolf. The luckier ones had simply had their necks broken. A dead man's face stared up at Renee. His features were frozen in an expression of utter horror.
She removed her sunglasses and took a hard look at the crime scene. It was ugly, but she had seen some pretty brutal stuff in Gotham as well. Killer Croc's last rampage, for example, or the Man-Bat Murders. "What do you think?"
“I think someone didn't want these guys talking to us," Vic said.
"Yeah. Me too." She suspected that the "someone" in question had serpentine eyes and a forked tongue. "If we're going to look around, we'd better do it fast."
The cop inside her screamed at her not to touch anything, but Renee was finding that nagging inner voice easier and easier to ignore. She and Vic picked their way amidst the spreading red puddles. They poked delicately through the scattered papers and other debris. "Any idea what we're looking for?"
He lifted some shipping invoices by their dry edges. "You'll know it when you find it." ■
"That your way of saying 'I don't know'?" She stepped over a pile of bloody viscera.
"Yeah," he admitted, "but my way is more poetic____"
She noted a pile of cardboard boxes, about the size of cereal boxes, on the floor behind a toppled desk. She crouched to inspect them. The labels were in Arabic, but a visual graphic on the boxes seemed clear enough: a silhouette of a dead rat lying on its back, exed out by a heavy black line. There were at least a dozen boxes of poison, but only three were empty.
"Hmm. Must have had a hell of a rat problem." She stood up and tossed one of the empty boxes aside. "Anything?"
Vic shook his head. "No, nothing." He sounded tired. Renee guessed that the jet lag was finally catching up with him. "Let's get out of here."
"No argument from me," she said. Thanks to Abbot, their one lead had turned into a dead end. She hoped that they hadn't flown six thousand miles for nothing. That would suck, big-time.
They stepped outside into the afternoon glare. She reached for her sunglasses. .
"Yaqif!" .
A harsh voice shouted at them. Renee t
urned to see a pair of uniformed police officers rushing toward them from the far end of the street. The cops reached for their sidearms as they yelled forcefully at the two Americans. Renee didn't need her Arabic-to-English pocket dictionary to get the gist of the command.
"Halt! Stop or we'll shoot!"
She realized instantly how bad this looked. Two foreign devils, one of them masked, leaving the site of a gruesome mass murder. No way was this going to end well. Images from Midnight Express flashed through her brain. .
"Run!" she hollered at Vic, who seemed to have already reached the same conclusion. They sprinted down the street, away from the oncoming gendarmes. Angry shouts pursued. Gunshots rang out. Plaster from a nearby building exploded in their faces.
"Charlie?" she gasped as they fled madly through the maze of alleys.
She could hear him breathing hard behind his mask. "What?"
"Please tell me this isn't Wednesday."
WEEK 15
METROPOLIS.
The dingy decor of the East Hope Hotel belied its name. Languishing in the filthy shadows of Suicide Slum, the rundown hotel was a glorified flophouse catering mostly to transients with a few bucks in their pockets. A garish neon sign flickered outside Booster's room, shining through the moth-eaten curtains as he sat on the edge of a lumpy mattress, eating baked beans cold from a can. Unpaid bills littered the top of a bedside table, along with a notice of "Contract Termination" from Ferris Airlines, who had invoked a morals clause in their sponsorship agreement to cut Booster loose. Like rats deserting a sinking ship, he thought sourly. Bunch of fair-weather flyboys. Gold-tinted spray paint covered the Ferris logo on his uniform.
The latest issue of NewsTime rested on the bed next to him. A cover photo of Supernova ("The New Champion of the Metropolis") had been vandalized with a heavy black marker: the hero's hooded face now sported a mustache, buck teeth, and a dagger through the skull. Doodled blood droplets sprayed from the knife.
A laptop computer, primitive by the standards of Booster's native century, balanced upon his knees. On the screen, the Daily Planet’s website rubbed his face in his sinking popularity. "SUPERNOVA OUTSHINES FORMER HERO" read the headline above side-by-side head shots of Booster and Supernova. "BOOSTER APPROVAL RATINGS PLUMMET."
On an impulse, he grabbed a bottle of water from the nightstand and poured it over the laptop. Sparks erupted from the keyboard as the computer shorted out. The screen went blank, taking the offending website with it. Skeets, hovering above the bed, let out a startled burst of static. No doubt he found such wanton computer abuse disturbing.
Booster ignored the electronic outburst. " 'Former hero he muttered
beneath his breath. Golden goggles dangled from his neck, revealing pissed-off blue eyes. "I need something big tonight, Skeets. Big and showy to put me back on the map." He looked up at the robot. "What's in the files?"
“I’LL SCAN, SIR. ON THIS DATE IN METROPOLIS HISTORY: A CARJACKING ON THIRTY-THIRD . .
"Yeah, that looks like a job for Booster Gold," he said sarcastically. "Please. Next?"
“A POWER BLACKOUT IN THE BAKERLINE AREA . .
Booster sighed impatiently. "Skeets, can we get away from the purse-snatchings-and-lost-dog blotter. Give me a comeback mission." He threw up his hands in exasperation. "This is Metropolis! It's a city Brainiac tries to shrink to bottle-sized every second Thursday. Don't tell me nothing is on tonight!"
“AND, FINALLY, A NUCLEAR SUBMARINE CRASH IN MIDTDWN.”
"Great ... if I'm Aquaman!" He rolled his eyes. "A sub accident! Who's gonna notice me at night underwat—" Then it hit him. "Wait. Midtown. How the hell does a submarine end up in midtown Metropolis?"
The Curry-class nuclear submarine was embedded in the slimy flesh of the giant aquatic beast rampaging through the heart of the city. Throbbing blue veins, the size of oil pipelines, bulged beneath the monster's scaly purple skin. A mane of pulsating tendrils, like the fronds of some enormous sea anemone, surrounded a voracious maw large enough to swallow a city bus in a single gulp. Rows of ivory fangs jutted from the creature's jaws. Gigantic tentacles whipped out at the surrounding buildings, knocking loose great chunks of masonry, which plunged down onto the chaotic streets below. Panicked men and women ran away from the beast like extras in a Japanese monster movie. Dense clouds of dust and pulverized cement rose several stories into the air, mixing with the smoke from dozens of uncontrolled fires. An angry tentacle flung a moving van through the ground floor of a ritzy hotel. Terrified screams and moans were drowned out by the horrendous wail of the monster itself, which sounded like the world's loudest foghorn.
"This looks like a job'for Supernova," Clark Kent said as he grimly watched the devastation from the top floor of the Daily Planet Building. According to eyewitness reports on the Internet, the sea monster had crawled out of the harbor only minutes ago and was now creating a trail of destruction through Metropolis. The captured submarine was glued to the back of the creature like a prosthetic spine; its breached hull offered little hope that the vessel's crew had survived whatever had befallen them beneath the sea. Clark regretted every life lost, even as he hoped that Metropolis' newest hero would arrive in time to prevent any further fatalities. I just hope he's up to the task.
One of the Planet's summer interns sat in front of a computer terminal a few feet away, pulling what info he could off the Web. "The sub's an American SSBN that was attacked in the mid-Atlantic," he reported. "But, Mr. Kent, what is that frigly thing carrying it?"
"I'm counting on you to tell me that, Sanjay!" Clark said urgently. "Try cross-referencing Atlantis and Aquaman." He knew that Aquaman himself was unlikely to make an appearance; from what he'd heard, Arthur had his hands full under the ocean these days.
Sanjay hastily typed the key words into the search engine. "Wow, that was a good guess," he said as a sketch resembling the monster appeared on his monitor. Instead of a submarine, an old-fashioned sailing ship was entangled within the pictured creature. "Here we go! 'Ballostro: a mythic protocrustacean beast rumored to attach itself to seacraft in search of land prey.'" He looked up from the screen. "I suppose we can wiki out the word 'rumored,' right, Mr. Kent?"
Clark glanced at the screen as he rushed past Sanjay into the corridor outside. The antique illustration certainly seemed to match the behemoth at loose in the streets below. As he hurried to cover the story firsthand, he couldn't help casting a wistful look at the closed door of a little-used storeroom. In days past, he would have used the room to change into his Superman costume. "Ah, storeroom, my old friend. I miss you already."
Clouds of dust and smoke obscured the stars, making the fearful night all that much darker. Slithering its way down Fifth Avenue, the sea monster rained destruction down on the city. A gargantuan tentacle grabbed onto a monorail zooming along an elevated track, bringing the streamlined bullet train to a jarring halt. Bodies went flying inside the train, while shrieking citizens stampeded through the streets and sidewalks one story below. Immense muscles flexed beneath the tentacle's leathery hide. Tortured metal screeched loudly as the tentacle tried to wrench the train from the track. Trapped commuters screamed for help.
Looks like I got here none too soon, Booster thought as he swooped down from the sky. He zipped beneath the tentacle and shoved upward, forcibly lifting the pulpy limb off the endangered monorail. He pressed the tentacle above his head like a weight lifter as he hovered in the air high above the street. The smell of raw calamari filled his lungs, nearly making him gag. The monster's reverberating wail pounded against his ear. He strained to keep the tentacle up, up, and away from the stalled train. I may never eat seafood again, he mused.
“he lax, friends!” Skeets' amplified voice addressed the fleeing crowds.
“IT’S BOOSTER HOLD TO THE RESCUE! HERO OF THE PEOPLE. CHAMPION OF METROPOL—”
A second tentacle lashed out, whacking Booster with the force of a battering ram. He went flying through the air, right into a mammoth bronze statue of Superman, on
e of many erected throughout Metropolis. Booster smashed through the statue's neck, dislodging its head, before crashing to earth at the base of the decapitated monument. "Look out!" a frantic pedestrian shrieked as chunks of cracked pavement were thrown about from the impact of the hero's hard landing, which left a shallow crater in the middle of a landscaped traffic island. Water spouted from a shattered fire hydrant.
Skeets darted down to assist Booster, “head up, sir:”
" 'Heads up,' you flying anachronism!" Booster corrected him irritably. He sat up at the center of the crater, taking a moment to catch his breath. Despite the protective force field generated by his suit, his head was ringing. "The saying is 'Heads-—'" A shadow fell over him, blotting out the light from the streetlamps. He looked up quickly, just in time to spot the statue's colossal bronze head falling from the sky. He scooted out of the way only an instant before the larger-than-life bust hit the pavement with a resounding crash. The ground shook beneath his butt. "Oh. I get it. Sorry."
Scrambling to his feet, he ran back toward the rampaging monster. The redwood-sized tentacle had knocked him all the way down to Thirty-Third Street, at least a block away from the oncoming creature. "Any more advice?" he asked Skeets.
The robot kept pace with Booster, “maintain your force field, sir.”
"Let me rephrase the question," Booster said acidly. "Any more advice I wouldn't have thought of on my own?" Looking around for a weapon, he spotted a 1986 Keystone Rambler parked at the curb. An overweight black woman was squeezed behind the wheel of the decrepit car, trying in vain to ignite a faltering engine. The uncooperative car lay directly in the monster's path; no way was she going to get away in time. Fortunately, Booster had another use for the rusty automobile.
" 'Scuse me, ma'am." He yanked open the door and physically dragged the heavysetjvoman out from behind the wheel. "Gonna need this vehicle!"
The squirming woman didn't seem to appreciate the urgency of the situation. She fought him every inch of the way, hanging onto the door of the car as if her life depended on it. "Getcher hands off me, ya perv!" she bellowed at the top of her lungs. "HAAAALP!"