The sarge looked at the unconscious, muttering men, rolled his eyes, and folded. “Meet Officers Freddie Wertham and Carey Kefauver. Usually they have more to say.”
“I’ll bet.”
“It’s Crosshairs again, drunk and disorderly — by all reports he’s injured six patrons in there. Now add two fine police officers to the list. These Capes are outta control.”
“Good Cape or bad?”
“Does it matter, bud?”
“Nope — you’re right. Let’s see what I can do to help.”
“You’re kidding me. What, you and that crutch? Swell.”
Jack actually grinned, something he would have thought impossible only a day before. “Forgot my costume. I’m Southern Cross.”
“The hell you are.” Then the sergeant thawed, a glint of recognition on his face. “I’ll be — it is you, isn’t it? Seen your mug before. You did good yesterday, helping all those bystanders in the Cape War.”
“Just doing our job — like you.”
The police sergeant smiled widely. “You’re all right.”
“Guess I have my minor moments. Can you and the boys hold your fire? Unless this Crosshairs bastardo trounces me, of course.”
“You okay?” The cop glanced at the crutch.
“Luckily my power comes out of my arm, not my leg.”
“Then we’re right behind you.
“Counting on it.”
“Southern Cross, right?”
“Got it.”
“I’ll remember this. Thanks.”
Jack left the police sergeant’s company and hopped closer to the bar with its gaping, broken window. Difficult to see inside, and he had no idea what to expect. This left the Equalizer wondering when he’d learn to brush up on a Cape’s powers before trying to take him or her down.
“Hey, Crosshairs!” he called. “Drinks on the house out here. Short-time offer only.”
There was much commotion inside the building, and then a shadowy figure pushed through the door out into the police spotlights, where he became crystal-clear.
This individual was at least ten feet tall — despite bowlegs — with a barrel chest and brawny arms dangling down to the knees. His entire body was covered with downy fur that reminded Jack of a chinchilla, but round the neck was a coarser lion’s mane. ‘Crosshairs’. Ahh.
The simian-feline-rodentia staggered a couple of steps, banged back against the doorframe, and laughed in slurred fashion.
“Well, well, if it ain’t Mister Southern Cross, the Red Skull know-it-all,” he chortled. “You brought along your snazzy pink purse to shout me some rounds?”
That comment caught Jack off guard. No way — this was the Rat, from back in Melbourne? He stared at the ape-like character for a few seconds, and then spoke again.
“Give it up, okay? You’ve done enough damage.”
“Damage…? Whoa! Why so serious, man? This is all — everything, y’know — a joke, you know that, don’t you?” The giant staggered out a few steps. “Lighten up! So where’re these freakin’ free drinks you promis—”
An extra eye, a bright red one, suddenly appeared between his other two.
Crosshairs froze, frowned, and then reeled backwards onto the cement with a dull thud. Half his grey matter was spattered over the glowing girl and her stockings.
Jack stared, aghast.
“Fuck—!”
MARVELL0US MELB0URNE
#173
“—it easy there.”
He found himself sitting up, tottering anyway, dizzy, violently shaking, and a fevered perspiration covering most of his naked form.
Naked —What kind of hateful gag was this?
Not only trapped inside a room the size of the closet, but no suit, no costume, just wiring and electrodes aplenty — scattered all over a tiny, skinny white body with freckles and very little in the way of muscles. This was like being Steve Rogers in reverse. Of course he started to panic.
“Take deep breaths,” the same voice commanded in his right ear. “Come on. Calm down. You’re hyperventilating. Breathe…breathe. Steady, now. There’s a lad.”
“I…What—? Bloody hell, what is this shit?” shouted out Jacob, in a higher pitch than he was used to, while he yanked at the wires and his fingers became entangled in their net.
“Take it easy! Stop that! You’ll break them.”
Strong hands grabbed his wrists. Then again, maybe they weren’t so strong — more likely he was now weak. Jacob found himself looking at Gonzo with the long green hair, wearing another of his Ralph Steadman tees and a bent pair of thick-frame glasses.
The man had started to tenderly remove each and every electrode from his charge’s body.
“Thataboy. We need this gear,” he was saying, focused on the task, “combined with amino acid therapy, a proteolytic inhibiter and the standard iconometric-frammistat, so your muscles don’t atrophy. For every person here we use an eight-channel FES device that cultivates hundreds of these little surface electrodes and cables, two interconnected four-channel stimulators, and a reconfigured Mitt-Mate for stimulator programming and processing compliance data. They don’t come cheap or grow on trees. Automated and extensive training of eight muscle groups of the upper and lower extremities is performed six hours a day, with one second on and two off tetanic contractions, at twenty to thirty percent of maximum tetanic muscle force. We need to take loving care of these things.”
Jacob blinked several times, his thoughts confused and his eyes partly out of focus. No amount of waffling was ever going to get this information to make sense, but the boy got the feeling it wasn’t intended to — Gonzo was more trying to bring him back to the here and now, perhaps by boring him stupid with outlandish jargon.
“What…reeks?” the boy asked.
“You do. Pfew!” Gonzo grinned, as first he fanned himself, and then wiped Jacob’s brow with a filthy rag. “I’m used to it, but otherwise you gave me a scare. Had enough of those lately. Now I’m all done with the electrodes, I’ll just unhook the colostomy bag — let’s keep the drip in for a bit.”
There was a rusted steel pole beside the cot, dangling a half-empty IV pouch.
“Reckon you can stand, Jacob?”
“I think so.” His voice sounded shrill, distant. “Don’t know. I feel dizzy.”
“That’s normal, agonize not. You should see how people react after months of downtime — you were in Heropa only two weeks. C’mon. Try it.”
With Gonzo’s assistance, Jacob pushed up and, while he found his body lighter than expected, the legs felt like jelly. Once on his feet, he tottered, but Gonzo gave additional support.
“Problem with standing, or are you playing drunk?”
“Not drunk. Someone shot me.”
“Ow! What the hell is going on down there?” Gonzo appraised things anew. “It takes time to get used to the fact this all happened in your noggin, that in actual fact you have no injury at all. Give it twenty-four hours, more or less. Incidentally — how’d you get out of Heropa?”
Thinking took effort. “I swore,” recalled the boy.
“No kidding? Cool. Glad to hear the cuss-words work again, though it means an auto two-day penalization — not that you’ll care.”
“Where am I?”
“Safe. Back in Melbourne, of course.”
“Safe?”
“As houses.”
While Gonzo proceeded to chuckle away at some unshared joke, Jacob shook his head, attempting to clear the cobwebs.
“Fuck,” he whispered. Nothing happened.
“Come with me,” Gonzo said, giving Jacob his arm. “You need to start walking this off, get the circulation flowing. You can carry the IV.”
The two of them moved out of that miniature, ill-lit room into a familiar hallway, filthy-looking, with broken floorboards and mildewed, peeling wallpaper that had Victorian illustrations of angel’s trumpets or moonflowers. The atmosphere felt heavy, humid, and the sound of torrential rain was somewhere cl
ose by.
“You joined Heropa at a bad time,” Gonzo disclosed. “We’ve been having no end of hassle with the mainframe — thing went rogue on us. We use old gear, hand-me-downs and complete junk, so I’m hardly surprised — William Gibson would roll in his grave. Hitting reset doesn’t seem to work anymore. I’m sure we’ll get the glitches ironed out, but meanwhile there’ve been some…complica-tions.”
“People dying.”
“Hell, no! Nothing that serious. Not exactly — but, well, complications.”
“Like the Rat?”
Gonzo stopped assisting and looked down, eyebrows knotted, as he wiped hair from his face. “Are you talking about Tom?”
“Kid my age, resembling a rat? We met when I came here, and he was with you when I showed my picture of Southern Cross.”
“Tom. What do you know?”
“Pretty sure he doubles-up under the name of Crosshairs in Heropa, right?”
“I’m not supposed to say.”
“Well. Looks like some sniper killed Crosshairs — using their own crosshairs.”
Staring up at the distant ceiling, Gonzo chewed his lower lip at the same time he rubbed his chin. The man needed a facial. “Shit, so that’s it. Sometimes you get a day like this when nothing goes right.”
“Let me guess — this isn’t the first ‘complication’.”
“No. Dammit!”
Gonzo helped Jacob to the next room along, another tiny, parti-tioned-off cubicle. A familiar figure with terrible skin laid prostate on a camp bed, a blanket pulled up to his neck. The Rat/Tom/Crosshairs. This teenager appeared to be alive, eyes half open, but there was nothing behind them — dead without being clinically proclaimed thus.
“How long?” Jacob asked.
“About ten minutes before you woke up. I know the symptoms. Seen them far too often lately.”
“Ten minutes? There was only a second or so between his…demise…and me accidentally hitting eject.”
Gonzo shrugged. “For some reason, it takes longer to revive naturally than via unnatural means. Can’t account for the glitch.”
“Will he recover?”
“I doubt it. No one else has. We now have twenty people like this — what the fuck is happening down there?”
Still looking at the Rat, Jacob murmured, “Someone was killing off the great Capes of Heropa.”
“Jesus H. Christ…Murder? — In Heropa? Is that possible?”
“What were you thinking? That twenty people copped fatal accidents at the same time?”
“No!” The man acted sheepish. “Then we need to shut down the system.”
“Don’t do that.” Jacob held onto the other man’s shoulder, still frail, and looked him in the eye. “Listen to me — not yet. I don’t think it’s appropriate. There’s a lot at stake.”
“Why the hell not? People are dropping like flies out here!”
“I think we nailed the culprit. But I need to be sure.”
“You? You’re out.”
“No, I’m going back in.”
“Are you crazy?”
“Working on it. But we need time to sort out what’s going on. Can I return to Heropa early?
“Server won’t let you — you need to pay the piper for the swearing misdemeanour, even if every other online system’s gone snafu.”
“Can’t you override it?”
“I’m not a magician. The only way would be a complete shutdown.”
“Crap.” Jacob blew out benumbed cheeks, trying to get some sort of feeling happening there. “Okay, I’ll have to wait. Is the Reset working again?”
“Offline, like the passwords. Then again, I thought swearing was out, too.” Gonzo eased Jacob down to a wooden box on which to sit.
“I need to see the Big O.”
“Me too. He’s still in Heropa — right?”
Jacob looked up, checking the man’s face for some sense of sarcasm, but saw only confusion. “You do know he was the second victim, not long after the Aerialist?”
“Huh. Her too?”
Flirting with full disclosure — that she was further still a Blando — Jacob realized he didn’t have the strength to go into it, not now. “Yeah,” he muttered. “But why isn’t the Big O here, if he was killed off in Heropa? Where’s his real self?”
Gonzo cocked his baffled head to one side. “In Melbourne?”
“Obviously — but where?”
“Same place as the Aerialist?”
“Now you’re confusing me.”
“Welcome to the club.” From out of the back pocket of his jeans, the man produced a hipflask, took a long swig of something, and then dragged over a milkcrate to sit. “The original developers of Heropa have their own access points into the place — only the plebs that came later, like us, use this dump.” Gonzo waved around him. “We have no idea where those people really are. I always figured the Aerialist was one of them, since she was there pretty much from the beginning and I never met her here.”
The two gazed at the still-life Rat on the camper bed.
“A swell kid. Could be downright annoying, but he cared about people. Worked with me for months looking after the place — this was his first trip to Heropa, same as you. I told him not to go. Now look at him. Self-indulgent madness. Knew there was a reason I stayed out of there.”
Jacob looked at his companion anew in that moment. The ragged pants, the Docs, his choice of seating, the coat he wore the day the boy first arrived. “You were Milkcrate Man, weren’t you?”
“Ancient history, mate. But how’d you figure that out?”
“Didn’t exactly alter yourself much for Heropa, or so I hear. The affinity for milkcrates and alcohol helped.”
Holding aloft his hipflask, Gonzo bowed while seated. “Happy with who, and what, I am.”
“So you knew Major Patriot.”
“Major Pain, you mean.”
“Original.”
“Don’t be sarcastic, kid — it doesn’t suit.”
“Sorry.”
“Water off a duck’s back. Anyway, Major Patriot and the Great White Hope were in a competition to be the biggest pseudo-intel-lectual ball-breaker, though MP was more smarmy about it.”
“You didn’t like him.”
“Like him? He’s the major reason I left — pun again intended.”
“What was his power?”
“Outside his own head? The despot could duplicate himself — six or seven times. I don’t remember. Six or seven times too many of this bastard, that I do recall. Him and Sir Omphalos had some serious issues — there was definitely a power play going down when I arrived, about a year after they launched Heropa. A bizarre triangle between the Big O, the Major and Bullet Gal.”
“Triangle?”
“They were both obviously smitten with her.”
“Why’d you leave?”
“You have to ask? I spent two years in Heropa, trying to make the place better — a losing cause when you think of all the egos prancing about in tights.”
#174
Gonzo closeted himself away with a litre of synth-brandy, two bags of grass and a salt-shaker half full of ground Clodualdo. Said he was depressed and wanted to be left alone —“Screw Heropa!” — but, prior to locking the door, assured Jacob that someone named Midori would monitor the dozen remaining downloaders.
Having briefly wondered which of these sleeping beauties were the Brick, PA and Gypsy-Ann, or even Saint Y, Jacob decided against snooping about the small rooms amongst people still plugged in. Seemed too personal and far too weird, even if he could win the next round of Whaddaya Reckon This Person is Really Like Out There?
The other thing he skipped out on visiting, like a plague virus, was the back room. His host had warned that’s where the catatonic ones were placed, most recently the Rat.
So, after Gonzo slammed his door, the boy borrowed some of the Rat’s clothes — a disturbing habit he’d acquired, nicking accessories from dead and/or incapacitated types — and head
ed out into the rain, in the direction of the Tower of the Elephant in Thornbury. Jacob had a busted-up orange umbrella that offered minimal protection, and after five minutes he was drenched. Half an hour of walking later, the itching began.
But Jacob had purpose, something to focus on other than the black hole in his chest. This purpose involved an old school-chum who owned a computer and, given the time of afternoon, he knew where the boy would most likely be.
While it was true that idInteract venues peppered Melbourne, the more famous one in Jacob’s neighbourhood was the Tower of the Elephant, inside Beet Street Arcade, where most kids — aged eight to eighty — hung out. There was a permanent queue spilling from the arcade onto the footpath, and then circumnavigated the block. The owners had installed flashing neon signage and screens everywhere surrounding the building, along with a set of diabolical fifteen-inch, 1800-watt speakers booming out classic rock like the number that roared and echoed along the street as Jacob neared — AC/DC’s ‘Jailbreak’ — above the sound of the downpour.
Running across the road in front of an archaic, speeding double-decker bus wasn’t an impulse of great genius as his leg still played up, and the boy almost fell beneath the vehicle’s wheels. At any rate, he was further swamped with a wave of muddy water. Dripping, Jacob began to inspect the hundreds of usual suspects in the idI lineup.
John wasn’t there, but on a corner nearby, beneath an awning, he spotted three pre-teen kids he did recognize: Roy, Sal and Barry.
Twelve-year-old Roy wore a t-shirt with ‘Alter-Ego’ splashed on it, and he had a blond, jagged-cut fringe hanging over misshapen glasses. Barry, the youngest at about ten, was the son of English émigrés, clung to his Britishness — even though he was born in Melbourne — and had an obligatory scowl framed by long black hair that’d possibly never been introduced to a brush. While Barry bossed his elders round, Roy was the brains of the outfit. Easier-going Sal, who had slicked-back dark hair and ears that stuck out quite a distance, was John’s younger brother. Bingo.
A girl with a blue ‘do, a banged-up bowler hat and a single set of false eyelashes hanging from her left peeper was busy cajoling the boys, flaunting a disc in her hand.