Gypsie-Ann Stellar was somewhat happier.
She’d spent several hours of the afternoon up in the newspaper archive, and finally tracked down Southern Cross’s John Doe.
There was a dossier, misfiled under ‘E’ with the name SEKRINE, L. on it, behind another misfiled report for ROGERS, Sarah and Joseph.
The Sekrine portfolio was unusually complete. It told of a fatality in a fight between Funk Gadget and Prima Ballerina, one of several deaths, thanks to a stray sonic musical blast — Funk Gadget’s signature mojo.
But the signature on the report, while indecipherable, was also one the reporter didn’t recognise. She knew the handwriting of all the cadets she assigned to do the menial, thankless task. This writing did not match theirs. The question was, who filled in the report, and why had it been completed with such care?
There were omissions — no coroner’s report, no police-artist sketch of the corpse — so how had a fresh newspaper recruit compiled this much information at a time when the twenty-four-hour Reset window still existed?
Gypsie-Ann flipped through the details.
Height, weight, address, age, hair colour, driver’s licence number, criminal record (none): all the information was present and accounted for.
Next of kin: a spouse, Louise Sekrine née Starkwell, and a father named Abe J. Sekrine.
Funnily enough, they’d forgotten to write in the actual victim’s first name or middle moniker — there was only that lonesome ‘L-full stop’.
Misfiled under ‘E’. Next to a report recording the deaths of Sarah and Joseph Rogers.
The reporter thought about that, and then she started reassembling the characters of SEKRINE, making one of the ‘E’s the first letter:
EKRINES/EREINSK/ESKINER/ERSKINE/ERKSIEN/EINSKER
One of these stood out —Erskine.
Gypsie-Ann underlined it. Could be an anagrammatic coincidence, but she didn’t believe in those. The dad’s name was the clincher.
Abe. Abraham.
An hour later, some time around four, she hopped out of a cab on the corner of Burnside and Monroe, in Hymie Heights.
The address was on the second storey of a nearby brownstone, above an antique store.
Gypsie-Ann looked at the windows. Late afternoon, a Thursday, and the blinds were drawn — nothing strange about that if the people who lived there were out to work.
The security door, sitting above a small flight of brick stairs, wouldn’t budge. An easy matter to pick the lock, but the reporter preferred not to resort to such tactics in broad daylight, on a main thoroughfare like this one.
She decided instead to head into the antique shop.
A bell rang overhead, and as she weaved through various kinds of junk, a pocket-sized old man stuck his noggin — boasting a shock of white hair — above the edge of a cedar desk in the corner.
“Good morning, madam. Are you looking for anything in particular?”
“Just browsing,” Gypsie-Ann said as she ran her finger over dusty books on the shelf.
“Then enjoy yourself, and let me know if you need anything.”
The owner had started to turn away when the woman spoke again.
“You wouldn’t happen to know Abe or Louise Sekrine, who live on the second floor of this building?”
He stopped straight away and glanced over his shoulder.
“Why do you ask?”
“The name is Sigerson. An old family friend.” The man’s eyes further told her he didn’t believe a word, so Gypsie-Ann decided to ditch the ruse. “Actually, that’s not true.”
“I was not inclined to believe so.”
“I’m a reporter—”
“A reporter?”
“Working with the Port Phillip Patriot.”
She held out her right hand but the man didn’t move. Not the first time the gesture had been refused. Out of practice, she dropped her arm and placed the hand on her hip.
“My name is Gypsie-Ann Stellar, and I’m working on a story that may or may not involve Louise Sekrine’s husband.”
“Are you now?” The old man’s voice sounded flat as a proverbial tack.
“Possibly. I’m looking into the details. So, would you know either party upstairs?”
“I would. I am Professor Sekrine. Perhaps you should come with me, Miss Stellar. We can talk privately in the back room.”
The reporter followed her elderly tour-guide through a minor maze of boxes to an office, where they settled into the same two chairs Jack and the Professor had shared only days before.
While he surprisingly retrieved a pouch of tobacco from the toe end of a Persian slipper, Gypsie-Ann leaned forward with notebook and pen.
“Do you mind if I ask you some questions, Mister Sekrine?”
“By all means.”
“How long have you and your family lived in this building?”
“A very, very long time. My son was born here.”
Gypsie-Ann looked sharply over. “Really?”
“As was I, my dear.”
“I see.” The reporter wrote nothing — this was nonsense. “Could you please tell me your son’s name?”
“I don’t remember.”
The old man studied the tips of his fingers. A hostile witness, then. The reporter smiled to herself. Hanging on the wall behind the man was a large oil painting of a young lady with a lamb.
“Nice picture,” she said, with a nod in that direction.
“An original, by Jean-Baptiste Greuze. La jeune fille à l’agneau. Beautiful, is it not? I plan to give it to someone special for her birthday.”
“Your daughter-in-law.”
“Yes.”
“Does she still live here with you? Or did she move on, after the accident?”
“Louise continues to reside here. But it was no accident.”
“Are you saying your son was deliberately killed? Murdered?”
“I’m not sure. I forget things. I’m an old man.”
“Oh, you seem to me sufficiently on the ball.” Gypsie-Ann sat back and crossed her legs. “Correct me if I’m wrong, but your real name is Erskine.”
The Professor lost interest in the fingers and one of his arms poked behind while he sat up straight, looking at the reporter.
“A final problem, for which I must apologize,” he said.
“I don’t understand. For what?”
“For this.” A weapon had appeared in the old man’s hand, a snub-nosed .450 Webley Metropolitan Police revolver — compact in most people’s grip, but exceptionally large in his tiny fist. “Believe me, I am so sorry.”
Before the woman could think to move, this gun-toting pensioner shot her in the stomach, from a distance of only six feet.
The impact knocked both her and the heavy divan backwards, where she lay amidst a mess of books, knick-knacks and her own blood.
Trying desperately to rise, Gypsie-Ann railed at the pain ripping through her as much as the stupidity of blundering into this. She somehow got to her feet, the room spinning, gut gushing, flashes of O and his flickering smile now entering her head.
“Lee,” she gasped, as she fell back to the floor.
#150
Psyborg-9 had well and truly had enough of Heropa, what with the recent spate of murders. He’d decided to pack his bags and leave, but neither the open sesame nor a flurry of ill-conceived swearwords had opened the door for departure.
This, before him, was the final straw.
The Cape scanned the crowd, his inbuilt abacus counting out one hundred and twelve individuals: eighty-two adult men, nineteen women, and eleven adolescents.
Who brought children to this kind of rally?
The mob in the plaza looked on edge, with zero police officers in sight, and there were placards made to varying degrees of professionalism. One had ‘Give a Bop the Chop!’, another ‘Down With Fascist Capes’; the most inventive, so far as Psyborg-9 was concerned, read ‘Once You Bop, the Fun Does Stop’.
At the back of the
crowd he spied two young boys setting fire to an imitation Equalizers banner.
While he might’ve been unceremoniously evicted from that group, along with two-dozen others, enough was enough.
“Citizens,” Psyborg-9 announced on his automated loudhailer, as he stepped up to a plinth in front of one of Heropa’s supposed founding fathers, a statue of Joseph Kubert, “disperse this place in orderly fashion or there will be…trouble.”
“More trouble than you know, mister,” hissed a nearby individual in a red hat. This man also jumped onto the podium to shove at the Cape.
“Stand down,” warned Psyborg-9.
“Make me.”
The man unexpectedly tossed into the Cape’s face the contents of a paper cup of coffee, short-circuiting his electronic vision. Straight after, the coffee-thrower turned back to the mob.
“Oi! Everyone! — I know this guy! This is the Bop that massacred all those innocent people the other day, the ones near Harvey’s Gems!”
The throng hushed while Psyborg-9 struggled to clear his eyes — and then they surged forward, all hell breaking loose and spinning asunder.
#151
The Brick glared at the images spilling across his portable Meteor black-and-white television, over on its tripod stand; listened to the commentary with repressed anger.
“…Scenes of bedlam at the Simonson Centre today [cue: hand-held, panning visual of abandoned placards in an empty public space], where a freelance Cape was attacked by a wild mob of civilians, over one hundred in number. By the time the police intervened to break up the crowd [this time stable footage of uniformed cops picking about], the part-android Psyborg-9 had been irreparably damaged and passed away shortly before ambulances arrived [a long-shot of blood-drenched pavement and an ambulance]. Mayor William Brown [Big Bill, looking flustered and irritated] made this brief statement: ‘Citizens, remain calm. That’s all I have to say at this juncture — get that camera out of my face!’ [And a dissolve to the male announcer in the studio, simple cardboard cut-out backdrop behind him] There were no arrests made by police, and we’ll have further updates for you as they come to hand.”
The Equalizer reached over to pull the button on the telly, watching the image shrink to a white dot in the middle of the screen. He sighed, long and loud. Then he walked out of the room, the weight of the known world on his shoulders.
If only she were here.
Prima Ballerina had disappeared, not so much as a farewell my lovely. His reaction slayed the Brick more than her absence — made him feel like his heart was in his mouth, that he could spit the thing out in the sink. He could taste the loss, and infused that with the brewing rage inside.
Meanwhile, the kid’d suffered, and good people like Psyborg and Kindle were being slain out there on the streets.
Disgusted with himself, the Brick kicked a hole in a wall and went back to his room.
#152
The Professor?
He sat in his armchair, the warm gun on his lap, while he studied the body decorating the floor on the other side of the small, cluttered office.
He wasn’t certain, but it looked like she was still breathing. One foot shifted. It would be courteous to put the poor woman out of her misery, but he found he could not move.
He’d broken his trust, done something very foolish. The sound of the shot was bound to attract attention this time of day, and in fact he could hear the whine of approaching sirens.
Still, there was one thing to draw out of all the brouhaha — he’d been reacquainted with his first name.
GUN HAPPY
#153
The colours lined up in polite order for presentation first: vague washes of purple, orange and yellow that blurred into one another, with shadows diplomatically hanging back, moving somewhere behind. A stronger, more shocking smell came next, the unmistakable scent of ammonia and a second fragrance, pleasantly floral in nature.
The first kosher thing he saw was fuzz, insubstantial and wandering.
Light drifting above, glare from some window to his right. He could hear blipping nearby, and the distant sound of strange traffic.
Once his vision cleared, he understood he was lying on a bed in a hospital room. The walls and the ceiling were white, as were the curtains.
When Jack fully awoke and managed to turn his head, he found Gypsie-Ann Stellar sitting in the next bed, also all in white, less makeup than usual, and she was peering back.
“A bit of an empty house we share here, so I’m glad you’re awake. Hello, stranger,” she said.
“I…didn’t know…we were rooming together,” the Equalizer fought to squeeze out. His throat felt like sandpaper and there was a dull pain throughout his body. Having tried to get up, he realized he couldn’t.
“We’ve been bedfellows since you passed on your ticklish lead and I hit pay dirt,” Gypsie-Ann was saying. “Better to lay still, Jack. We have matching bandages, but I’m in better shape.” The reporter raised the hospital gown she was wearing so he could see the wrap looping her torso. “The Brick told me you had a chunk of Bulkhead embedded in your abdomen — you really don’t want to know which part.”
“Bulkhead. He’s dead…?”
“In little pieces.”
“The explosion.”
“Something like that. I don’t know the full details.”
“Crap.” Jack felt like he was on fire. “I need water.”
“No need for subtlety.”
Gypsie-Ann climbed out of her cot, grabbed a tumbler off a small table, poured from the plastic jug there, and walked it over to her pyjama partner.
“Thanks,” he said, after completely finishing the glass. Swallowing had become marginally easier, but it still hurt like hell. “What happened to you?”
“Someone shot me in the stomach.”
“Jeez. Did that hurt?”
“What do you reckon? I thought I was going to die.” Obviously tired of standing, the reporter settled down on the end of the other patient’s bed.
“Me too,” Jack muttered, and then he stopped to think. “How long’ve I been out of it? I mean, since the explosion.”
“Pretty Amazonia says three days.”
“Then when did you get shot?”
“Yesterday arvo.”
The Equalizer stared at her as she sat there. “And you said you got shot in the stomach?”
“I did.”
“In that case, you look remarkably peachy.”
Gypsie-Ann laughed. “I do, don’t I? When it came to choosing baggage before downloading into Heropa, I was smart.”
“You’re invulnerable.”
“No, no. Since we can’t have the option of invulnerability — believe me, I harried them — I thought I’d go with the next best option.”
“Which was…?”
“Wolverine’s healing factor.”
“Ah-hah.”
“I have no idea why no one else here has chosen it — if you look at Wolverine in comicbooks, he’s been on death’s door dozens of times, yet always recovers. I know it’s not the most realistic mojo to have, but this whole place is make-believe.”
“Isn’t that cheating? It makes you virtually invulnerable.”
“Not really — since I go through all the pain before my body decides to heal itself. You have no idea how excruciating it is to get shot. Still, I’m alive.”
“Wish I’d thought of that, but the ’60s’re more my speciality.”
“Meh, I’m more of a bronze-age-comic fan. It’s what I grew up with, thanks to my dad — who had a great collection of the stuff.”
“Some good yarns tucked away in there,” Jack admitted, “though the Avengers, from the late ’70s, had this rabid policy of superhero overpopulation.”
“That so? I hadn’t noticed, since I was more into the X-Men. How many are we talking?”
“Eighteen members of the team, along with respective spouses and nemeses.”
“Yep,” the woman agreed, “that is a spot of
overpopulation. Kind of kills the idea of ‘the more the merrier’, right?”
“Probably because you don’t care a single iota about anyone since the individual protagonists’re watered down.”
“It’s tricky, when you have so many characters.”
Gypsie-Ann mulled over the geeky concept, surprisingly without objection. Jack had expected to be slapped down but all he got was a vague glance.
“To be honest,” the reporter continued, “the Wolverine thing always made me scratch my head.”
“Why’s that?”
“Well, if you think about it seriously, in order to fix the point-blank bullet wound in my tummy the surrounding cells would have to multiply themselves at an insane rate, causing a form of hypermitosis. Instead, there’s a trigger mechanism somewhere here inside me that tells the cells to play ball, and thereby make up for any loss of structure, dividing at extreme speed when needed — giving rise to the creation of new blood vessels and neurons, et voilà. Look,” she unwrapped and revealed her stomach, “not even any scarring. I never road-tested this before. Thank Christ, it works. I was beginning to wonder, since — and this really annoys me — the knack only kicks in with major injuries. Trivial things like blisters from new shoes take the old-fashioned route. In the good old days, they’d heal inside twenty-four hours because of the Reset, but now no such luck. Remember this?”
The reporter held up a finger wrapped with a white plastic patch that had little anime girl characters dancing across it. They looked like Pretty Amazonia.
“PreCure?” Jack guessed.
“Not the Band-Aid, the finger — the Band-Aid is PA’s, and beside the point.”
“Ahh, that paper cut.”
“Yep. Same one I showed you the other day. The thing got infected, meaning it’s taken longer to fix than a gunshot wound to the stomach. The buggers who gave me the unbalanced self-healing power told me this was its Achilles’ heel, but I think they did it as a twisted joke.”
“I thought your power was to be a super-snoop. The Brick told me.”
“Everyone believes that, but the Brick also isn’t the sharpest knife in the drawer. Doesn’t take any special skill to be a journalist, or a hack detective. Shame is, I didn’t end up with Wolverine’s retractable claws — they’d make great letter openers.”