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AN OLD "SUPER HERO" STORY OF MINE, PRESENTED EPISODICALLY. -NEW SECTION UP 7-30
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Killer Wolf
1235
Killer Wolf
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Close His name was not Johnny, but that was what everyone called him. Not Johnny didn’t like it, but there wasn’t much he could do. It seemed he was surrounded by people with horrible memories and bad manners. To Not Johnny, it felt just like home.
Not Johnny had never been quite right, and that is somewhat of an understatement. He did bad things in his youth, and tried to make up for them by being a kind of super Samaritan. Not Johnny helped others at his own expense, and when he got sick, all of his money was already gone.
The term sickness is actually misapplied. Not Johnny wasn’t sick, he was broken. An aborted attempt at heroics around the age of sixteen left him with a spine that was just a couple steps up the ladder from broken glass. He’d gotten into the car with a friend of his when she had been drinking, severely. Not Johnny was being a good guy and driving her home so that none of the other Not Johnny’s of the world could take advantage of her. His heroism was somewhat selfish, he’d wanted her for himself…but even he wasn’t about to try and take her in that state. There would have been no challenge, and Not Johnny didn’t like things that came easily…with the life he’d had, he couldn’t even understand them.
Some people become more and more despondent as they drink, and that was how Not Johnny’s friend was. The memory is crystal clear. One moment, he looked over to smile at her as she appeared to sleep with her head against the window, a shared favorite song on the radio. The next, all hell broke loose.
With a shriek, the girl came bolt awake and snatched at the steering wheel. Not Johnny over corrected and went off the road in the opposite direction. The bridge abutment was less then forgiving. When the dust settled and the horn finally died out, Not Johnny’s friend was dead and he was paralyzed, unable to get away from her blood as it pooled and dripped down. It was hell on earth, and Not Johnny wanted to die.
Ten years later, Not Johnny had regained, somewhat, the use of his body and kicked the booze habit. It was somewhat ironic that what was in a roundabout way responsible for his predicament was also the only thing that could numb his mangled body and let him get to sleep at night.
Life had not gotten any easier, but it had not gotten any worse. That was until the first tremor. Not Johnny didn’t know what it meant, but he knew that it as not good. When he finally knuckled under and went to the doctor, he was referred to a specialist. The specialist used words like “unforeseen” and “inoperable” to describe Not Johnny’s condition.
The young man who’s name was not Johnny was also not a doctor, so talk of bone shards, fusing vertebrae, dying nerves and an electrical problem in his brain went over his head. It was beside the point really. He was a walking time bomb…but with varied methods of detonation. He could survive for years, slowly losing control of his body a piece at a time until there was nothing left capable of feeling…or one of the tiny bone spears inside of him could shift, killing him before he even knew anything had changed.
He left the specialist’s office with a garbage bag full of pain pills, in four to a pack free sample blisters, and a referral for end of life counseling. He folded it into a small paper airplane and sailed it away from the top level of the hospital’s parking garage.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Behind him, where they could be seen between the stands of trees, the distant lights looked like a flickering fire from the speeding car on the interstate. Terrence Coates kept flicking his eyes up to the mirror and having to turn slightly behind the wheel to keep checking just to make sure it was only a trick conjured up by the interaction between the input and what his brain was doing with it. He’d had entirely too much fire in his life, and the thought of it chasing him was very disquieting.
He twisted a knob on the old car’s radio and it snapped off. The radio was now locked in the on position, but all it reported was a dull hiss of static that, at random intervals, allowed a little bleed over from a different station. It was like being wheeled down a long hallway and hearing little bits of what was going on in each room as you went past.
His cellular phone rang again, the upbeat little piece of digitized music seeming sharply at odds with the content he was expecting. He flipped the phone open and held it to his ear with one hand, again scanning his mirrors almost absently.
“Coates.” He said. This was how he always answered his phone. He was having trouble making it out over the static. “Hold on a minute.” He said, setting the phone in his lap so he had a free hand to scout the dash for something he could kill the radio with.
He’d been sharing the car with his daughter, reluctantly. She’d left the car adapter for her mp3 player. Actually, it was designed back in the days of the Sony CD player, but it worked just as well. Hell, it was so utilitarian that even Coates could find a use for it. He slammed the dead tape into the deck and, with a click, the static died off into a high pitched whine.
“Okay, lets try it again.” He said into the phone.
The voice on the other end belonged to a nervous young officer on site at the worst crime scene of his, admittedly short, career. This wasn’t so much an official channels thing as it was a matter of fraternity. It was a big time case unfolding in a back woods venue. In some ways, it could have been considered a big break. If the call had come down in some other place, a place where someone that Terrence, sometimes called Terry, but usually only by women or people older then himself, knew wasn’t running the show, this would not be happening.
As it was, the middle aged cop, now a single father of two, was closing in on a fresh lead in a case that had been nagging him for six years. He had no illusions that closing this case would make it easier to get along with his kids, or help him get to sleep at night, or to tell the truth, even make the smallest dent in his nightly alcohol consumption. No, Terrence Coates was not a man who hoped for the best.
All he wanted was that one piece of evidence that would put him closer to the son of a bitch who murdered his wife.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Not Johnny drifted along like that for a while, and then there was the sudden upturn in his daily events. Despite the fact he’d previously applied on at least three occasions, which is bad memory short hand for six times, he had finally been approved for disability. It seemed strange, but fitting in a way, that they had declined to take care of him while he was alive…now that his clock was running down, they seemed much less reticent to put his name on a check.
That is why Not Johnny was in the bank that day. There had been a problem with his direct deposit, and he’d had to come down to sort it out. He was stuck in line, and two days off his medicine. At the time, it was little more then a pronounced inconvenience to him, the fact he felt like he had to walk in slow motion to keep from screaming every so many steps, but it would turn out to be more important later.
A young woman slid by him in line, excusing her self and promising “It’ll only be a minute.” She was attractive, cold, and could lie without pause. If he wasn’t partially convinced that a good roll in the hay would kill him, he would have tried asking her out. As it was, he just took note of how her ass looked in that skirt.
He was still looking at it when the first gunshot went off. The involuntary jump made it feel as if two ropes of something had been torn apart in his back. Not Johnny was close to the gunmen. He had some flecks of plaster from the fresh hole in the ceiling on his head and shoulders. His ears were ringing.
There were two of them. One with a pistol, the other a shotgun. The first shot had gone into the roof, a good place for it. Fairly safe, what with this being a one story building. They wore masks and angrily swept their weapons back and forth across the crowd.
“Get down on the ground, all of you.” Pistol said.
“NOW!” Shotgun added with a shout, jabbing the shotgun in the crowd’s general direction.
Not Johnny could hear the other people making their quick descents. Not Johnny was not moving.
“What the hell’s the matter with you?” Pistol demanded, gesturing towards him, “You deaf?”
“Not quite, but you came close firing that thing in here.” Not Johnny said, not caring. Perhaps this was a better way to go out then waiting for some shard of bone or short circuit in his brain to do him in.
“Are you stupid?” Pistol asked.
“You’re the one robbing a bank that is literally down the street from the cop shop.” Not Johnny said.
“Oh, funny guy.” Pistol said. “Lets see how funny you think…”
And he stopped. Pistol was right there, gun hand cocked up and behind his shoulder to come down on this asshole’s head and knock him to the ground, but he stopped. He was not still though, a slight tremor was shaking his entire body.
Soon, it seemed to spread around the room, in varying degrees. Shotgun was caught up in the fringe of it. A couple of the computers, and the main surveillance camera as the police would later discover, reported nothing but static or white noise.
Not Johnny stood there in what seemed to be the eye of a hurricane of a kind of palsy or seizure disorder. It was then that he realized he was, somehow, responsible for it. Just coming to this realization seemed to break the spell, or whatever it was, long enough for Pistol to fall to the ground with a nosebleed.
Shotgun regained control of his legs and took off running. Not Johnny was not sure why, but he felt compelled to give chase. Once they made it outside, he had to stop. One of his legs was going numb and cold, and running would do him no favors. He put his hand to the railing to steady himself.
It was quite by luck that he made contact at the exact time Shotgun was trying to vault the same railing further down the walkway. Whatever it was that Not Johnny could do to a person just by standing next to them was made even worse by conduction. Shotgun jerked in midair like someone laid a livewire down on his spine. He collapsed onto a heap next to the bank manager’s new car.
Not Johnny staggered off. This was the sort of event that would bring a lot of questions, and he was not in the mood to answer any of them. Hell, as far as he knew he might end up inadvertently killing whoever came round to ask them. He’d have to try to fix the checks some other way, he realized. He would also need to open a new bank account.
This was partially because he wanted to avoid any potential recognition, and the ensuing questions, but also largely because the service at this place was just horrible. He made it to his car and drove off.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Some explanation provided-
Not Johnny had never been quite right, and that is somewhat of an understatement. He did bad things in his youth, and tried to make up for them by being a kind of super Samaritan. Not Johnny helped others at his own expense, and when he got sick, all of his money was already gone.
The term sickness is actually misapplied. Not Johnny wasn’t sick, he was broken. An aborted attempt at heroics around the age of sixteen left him with a spine that was just a couple steps up the ladder from broken glass. He’d gotten into the car with a friend of his when she had been drinking, severely. Not Johnny was being a good guy and driving her home so that none of the other Not Johnny’s of the world could take advantage of her. His heroism was somewhat selfish, he’d wanted her for himself…but even he wasn’t about to try and take her in that state. There would have been no challenge, and Not Johnny didn’t like things that came easily…with the life he’d had, he couldn’t even understand them.
Some people become more and more despondent as they drink, and that was how Not Johnny’s friend was. The memory is crystal clear. One moment, he looked over to smile at her as she appeared to sleep with her head against the window, a shared favorite song on the radio. The next, all hell broke loose.
With a shriek, the girl came bolt awake and snatched at the steering wheel. Not Johnny over corrected and went off the road in the opposite direction. The bridge abutment was less then forgiving. When the dust settled and the horn finally died out, Not Johnny’s friend was dead and he was paralyzed, unable to get away from her blood as it pooled and dripped down. It was hell on earth, and Not Johnny wanted to die.
Ten years later, Not Johnny had regained, somewhat, the use of his body and kicked the booze habit. It was somewhat ironic that what was in a roundabout way responsible for his predicament was also the only thing that could numb his mangled body and let him get to sleep at night.
Life had not gotten any easier, but it had not gotten any worse. That was until the first tremor. Not Johnny didn’t know what it meant, but he knew that it as not good. When he finally knuckled under and went to the doctor, he was referred to a specialist. The specialist used words like “unforeseen” and “inoperable” to describe Not Johnny’s condition.
The young man who’s name was not Johnny was also not a doctor, so talk of bone shards, fusing vertebrae, dying nerves and an electrical problem in his brain went over his head. It was beside the point really. He was a walking time bomb…but with varied methods of detonation. He could survive for years, slowly losing control of his body a piece at a time until there was nothing left capable of feeling…or one of the tiny bone spears inside of him could shift, killing him before he even knew anything had changed.
He left the specialist’s office with a garbage bag full of pain pills, in four to a pack free sample blisters, and a referral for end of life counseling. He folded it into a small paper airplane and sailed it away from the top level of the hospital’s parking garage.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Behind him, where they could be seen between the stands of trees, the distant lights looked like a flickering fire from the speeding car on the interstate. Terrence Coates kept flicking his eyes up to the mirror and having to turn slightly behind the wheel to keep checking just to make sure it was only a trick conjured up by the interaction between the input and what his brain was doing with it. He’d had entirely too much fire in his life, and the thought of it chasing him was very disquieting.
He twisted a knob on the old car’s radio and it snapped off. The radio was now locked in the on position, but all it reported was a dull hiss of static that, at random intervals, allowed a little bleed over from a different station. It was like being wheeled down a long hallway and hearing little bits of what was going on in each room as you went past.
His cellular phone rang again, the upbeat little piece of digitized music seeming sharply at odds with the content he was expecting. He flipped the phone open and held it to his ear with one hand, again scanning his mirrors almost absently.
“Coates.” He said. This was how he always answered his phone. He was having trouble making it out over the static. “Hold on a minute.” He said, setting the phone in his lap so he had a free hand to scout the dash for something he could kill the radio with.
He’d been sharing the car with his daughter, reluctantly. She’d left the car adapter for her mp3 player. Actually, it was designed back in the days of the Sony CD player, but it worked just as well. Hell, it was so utilitarian that even Coates could find a use for it. He slammed the dead tape into the deck and, with a click, the static died off into a high pitched whine.
“Okay, lets try it again.” He said into the phone.
The voice on the other end belonged to a nervous young officer on site at the worst crime scene of his, admittedly short, career. This wasn’t so much an official channels thing as it was a matter of fraternity. It was a big time case unfolding in a back woods venue. In some ways, it could have been considered a big break. If the call had come down in some other place, a place where someone that Terrence, sometimes called Terry, but usually only by women or people older then himself, knew wasn’t running the show, this would not be happening.
As it was, the middle aged cop, now a single father of two, was closing in on a fresh lead in a case that had been nagging him for six years. He had no illusions that closing this case would make it easier to get along with his kids, or help him get to sleep at night, or to tell the truth, even make the smallest dent in his nightly alcohol consumption. No, Terrence Coates was not a man who hoped for the best.
All he wanted was that one piece of evidence that would put him closer to the son of a bitch who murdered his wife.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Not Johnny drifted along like that for a while, and then there was the sudden upturn in his daily events. Despite the fact he’d previously applied on at least three occasions, which is bad memory short hand for six times, he had finally been approved for disability. It seemed strange, but fitting in a way, that they had declined to take care of him while he was alive…now that his clock was running down, they seemed much less reticent to put his name on a check.
That is why Not Johnny was in the bank that day. There had been a problem with his direct deposit, and he’d had to come down to sort it out. He was stuck in line, and two days off his medicine. At the time, it was little more then a pronounced inconvenience to him, the fact he felt like he had to walk in slow motion to keep from screaming every so many steps, but it would turn out to be more important later.
A young woman slid by him in line, excusing her self and promising “It’ll only be a minute.” She was attractive, cold, and could lie without pause. If he wasn’t partially convinced that a good roll in the hay would kill him, he would have tried asking her out. As it was, he just took note of how her ass looked in that skirt.
He was still looking at it when the first gunshot went off. The involuntary jump made it feel as if two ropes of something had been torn apart in his back. Not Johnny was close to the gunmen. He had some flecks of plaster from the fresh hole in the ceiling on his head and shoulders. His ears were ringing.
There were two of them. One with a pistol, the other a shotgun. The first shot had gone into the roof, a good place for it. Fairly safe, what with this being a one story building. They wore masks and angrily swept their weapons back and forth across the crowd.
“Get down on the ground, all of you.” Pistol said.
“NOW!” Shotgun added with a shout, jabbing the shotgun in the crowd’s general direction.
Not Johnny could hear the other people making their quick descents. Not Johnny was not moving.
“What the hell’s the matter with you?” Pistol demanded, gesturing towards him, “You deaf?”
“Not quite, but you came close firing that thing in here.” Not Johnny said, not caring. Perhaps this was a better way to go out then waiting for some shard of bone or short circuit in his brain to do him in.
“Are you stupid?” Pistol asked.
“You’re the one robbing a bank that is literally down the street from the cop shop.” Not Johnny said.
“Oh, funny guy.” Pistol said. “Lets see how funny you think…”
And he stopped. Pistol was right there, gun hand cocked up and behind his shoulder to come down on this asshole’s head and knock him to the ground, but he stopped. He was not still though, a slight tremor was shaking his entire body.
Soon, it seemed to spread around the room, in varying degrees. Shotgun was caught up in the fringe of it. A couple of the computers, and the main surveillance camera as the police would later discover, reported nothing but static or white noise.
Not Johnny stood there in what seemed to be the eye of a hurricane of a kind of palsy or seizure disorder. It was then that he realized he was, somehow, responsible for it. Just coming to this realization seemed to break the spell, or whatever it was, long enough for Pistol to fall to the ground with a nosebleed.
Shotgun regained control of his legs and took off running. Not Johnny was not sure why, but he felt compelled to give chase. Once they made it outside, he had to stop. One of his legs was going numb and cold, and running would do him no favors. He put his hand to the railing to steady himself.
It was quite by luck that he made contact at the exact time Shotgun was trying to vault the same railing further down the walkway. Whatever it was that Not Johnny could do to a person just by standing next to them was made even worse by conduction. Shotgun jerked in midair like someone laid a livewire down on his spine. He collapsed onto a heap next to the bank manager’s new car.
Not Johnny staggered off. This was the sort of event that would bring a lot of questions, and he was not in the mood to answer any of them. Hell, as far as he knew he might end up inadvertently killing whoever came round to ask them. He’d have to try to fix the checks some other way, he realized. He would also need to open a new bank account.
This was partially because he wanted to avoid any potential recognition, and the ensuing questions, but also largely because the service at this place was just horrible. He made it to his car and drove off.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Some explanation provided-
Yeah, this is kind of a blatant author insert with respect to NJ's character. The whole idea for his name came from a disturbing trend a few of years ago where everyone thought my name was Johnny for some reason.
The initial concept played in my head a few times as like a serial semi-recurring dream. Of course, by the time I got around to writing it down, a friend had clued me into Darker Than Black.
Originally, NJ's power was supposed to be electricity, pure and simple. He could generate a huge charge, but couldn't arc it to distant targets like a disciple of the Emperor or anything, so he had to use conductive cables and blades. It was entirely too similar (read: identical) to what the protagonist of DTB did that I decided to revise NJ's method some.
It was also a weird exercise in writing for me. Besides the initial idea of "guy with a fucked up body fights back with the time he has left", I wanted to try writing a story that just grew organically out of the characters interactions with each other.
As I moved on with it, I started thinking of how current media coverage would effect a costumed vigilante type, and I wrote some of that in for later chapters.
The initial concept played in my head a few times as like a serial semi-recurring dream. Of course, by the time I got around to writing it down, a friend had clued me into Darker Than Black.
Originally, NJ's power was supposed to be electricity, pure and simple. He could generate a huge charge, but couldn't arc it to distant targets like a disciple of the Emperor or anything, so he had to use conductive cables and blades. It was entirely too similar (read: identical) to what the protagonist of DTB did that I decided to revise NJ's method some.
It was also a weird exercise in writing for me. Besides the initial idea of "guy with a fucked up body fights back with the time he has left", I wanted to try writing a story that just grew organically out of the characters interactions with each other.
As I moved on with it, I started thinking of how current media coverage would effect a costumed vigilante type, and I wrote some of that in for later chapters.
I really enjoyed reading that. There are a couple of spelling/grammar errors, but you didn't say you were looking for feedback on that so it doesn't matter.
I did a superhero story for NaNoWriMo a couple of years ago called Superzeroes, where the characters all had powers that were seemingly useless that ended up being pivotal to the success of a mission.
I had a guy who could make people fall asleep by talking (including himself), a girl with a sonic scream just powerful enough to make small objects wobble slightly, a guy who could levitate 2 inches off the ground, a guy who was invisible but only when people weren't watching, and a guy who could fire spaghetti from his fingers.
I did a superhero story for NaNoWriMo a couple of years ago called Superzeroes, where the characters all had powers that were seemingly useless that ended up being pivotal to the success of a mission.
I had a guy who could make people fall asleep by talking (including himself), a girl with a sonic scream just powerful enough to make small objects wobble slightly, a guy who could levitate 2 inches off the ground, a guy who was invisible but only when people weren't watching, and a guy who could fire spaghetti from his fingers.
Killer Wolf
1235
Even though the story has been "finished" for a long time, I'm still open to any feedback. As I said in my explanation, it was a new experiment for me. Instead of having a plot from the beginning, I just had the characters. Once they started bouncing off of each other, I got a picture of where the story was going to go.
I'll be putting up subsequent episodes every day or so until it is all posted. I was thinking of just throwing a PDF up, but 44,000+ words of superhero angst is probably a tough pill to swallow!
Also, the guy from your story who can only be invisible when no one is watching reminds me of one of the guys in Mystery Men. I finally got to see that movie earlier this year. I usually don't like Stiller films, but I had to watch it just for the Tom Waits parts, and ended up really enjoying it.
I've also tried to do this character as part of a more typical comic-book team in the past. I may post that story after this one ends.
I'll be putting up subsequent episodes every day or so until it is all posted. I was thinking of just throwing a PDF up, but 44,000+ words of superhero angst is probably a tough pill to swallow!
Also, the guy from your story who can only be invisible when no one is watching reminds me of one of the guys in Mystery Men. I finally got to see that movie earlier this year. I usually don't like Stiller films, but I had to watch it just for the Tom Waits parts, and ended up really enjoying it.
I've also tried to do this character as part of a more typical comic-book team in the past. I may post that story after this one ends.
Killer Wolf
1235
Candice, better known as Candy to her friends and the group of guys who, less then altruistically, concerned themselves with her every move, took another drag on the spliff and lazily adjusted the drape of her oversized sweater. She would have been a pretty girl, in fact she still was in many ways, but she looked tired and drawn out. It wasn’t just the spliff talking.
Her normally sharp eyes were dreamy and star strewn, she watched the smoke dancing both in and out of her mind as something vaguely reminiscent of Pink Floyd wafted out of one of the rooms down the hall. It seemed, ironically, to bring reality in with it. Candy passed the spliff off to a friend of hers with dishwater blonde hair and reclined against the shoddily patched upholstery.
“He’s leaving me.” She said, matter of factly. She was about to become the thing she dreaded most. A bring down. “After two years. He’s going to go…just because…”
Her friend is laughing, not at what Candy said, but at whatever fired in her brain as she inhaled the chemical laden smoke. She meant to ask what Candice was talking about, but it was lost in the haze that soon enveloped her, reducing her thoughts to a swirl of sound bites from philosophy lectures and clips from music videos.
Candy had to pee. She got up, carefully unfolding her shapely legs from beneath her and again adjusted the sweater. It was her only concession to modesty, well, that and the pink cotton panties she wore underneath. She itched at the back of her head and started, with a slight tilt, heading down the hallway towards the bathroom.
She stopped at the wrong door, but it was on purpose. She turned the knob and looked into an empty room with a naked bulb in the center. She flipped the switch by the door killing the light. The marijuana was playing with her understanding of time and space. He wasn’t leaving her. He’d already left.
She sucked back a sob and made for the bathroom.
---------------------------------------
Not Johnny was wearing gloves when he got his prescription filled at his new drug store. Since the day in the bank, he hadn’t gone anywhere without some sort of protection. He was still trying to work it all out, trying to figure out what it was he could do, and how it happened. He was scared. It was strange that he was more scared of what he could do now then of dying.
It had happened again, what he could do, that is. A couple of times when he was out, if things started going wrong and he started to get upset, it started to happen. It began, he noted, with a little bit of a buzz in his own head and a tingle somewhere up between his shoulders. Next, his right eye would twitch, ever so slightly, and that meant that the people around him were pretty much fucked.
He seemed to broadcast something which induced either a stiff headache in the luckiest or a full seizure in the most susceptible. But there was a key. He discovered he could get as angry as he wanted while he was on his medication. It worked against him the first time he made the correlation, actually.
Not Johnny was dealing with a store clerk who had apparently gone to idiot school and graduated with flying colors. Not Johnny heard the buzz. He felt the tingle between his shoulders, hell, he even smiled a little bit as he waited for the right eye to twitch. The clerk looked like a bleeder. Not Johnny started to characterize the people he interacted with based on how he felt they would react to one of his episodes. Bleeders were rare. Pistol had been a bleeder, from the nose. This guy looked like a bleeder.
But his right eye wouldn’t twitch, no matter how angry and pissed off he could make himself. Not Johnny eventually gave up and went home, fuming. In a way, it kind of made sense. The one time he wanted that terrible whatever it was to come on, it wouldn’t give him the satisfaction.
Then later that night, he got sloppy, forgot a dose of his medication, and promptly blew up his microwave. Whatever he was doing, it had to be electrically based. If it had to do with electricity, Not Johnny knew exactly the man to see.
---------------------------------------
Jack Dunn was like a latter day re-incarnation of Nikola Tesla when it came to dealing with anything even remotely electrical in nature. If the problem of his peculiarly short attention span could be addressed, the world would have to watch out. As it was, he’d already designed and tested a Rail Gun which, to pardon the pun, blew the Navy’s project right out of the water. His famously bad memory and knack for writing project notes in an illegible scrawl prevented him from replicating his results once he burned out the original. It was a somewhat sore subject, and best not to comment on.
Not Johnny’s proposition was sufficient to lock down even Dunn’s rabbit on a hot griddle attention span for a while. A bit of a masochist, his first insistence was that he get to experience “the full burn” as he termed it. He told Not Johnny to come back when he was three days off his medicine and totally pissed off.
Despite his propensity for doing the exact opposite of what he was told, Not Johnny followed instructions and returned when properly primed. Dunn, not content to wait for any sort of lengthy build up, began agitating Not Johnny immediately. When it happened, and it felt almost reflexive, almost like he was using a new muscle that he was just learning to access, “the full burn” knocked Dunn straight off his feet and left him twitching for about a minute, even after Not Johnny hastily exited the room.
When, with a dose of his medicine fifteen minutes into his system, Not Johnny returned, he found Dunn, sitting on the floor, scribbling out notes. This was not unusual, but the notes were actually legible, which was entirely unprecedented.
“I have an idea.” He said, with a somewhat manic glee.
---------------------------------------
Coates was in the car again. That blasted piece of shit car, with more of it falling apart every day. If he had a better head for money, and if he wasn’t putting both of his kids through school…he had to stop himself there. It was never good to start a day off by lying to yourself. He knew exactly where most of his money had been going. He was buying private investigators and consultants off for years. Any scrap of information about his wife’s murderer drew him like whiskey draws a priest. That was actually a quote he’d gotten from some book he read in College. He was so broke, even his wit was borrowed.
Then, when the time came and he actually had something pressing that needed to be paid for, he kept coming up short. Looking back on it, he’d made a lot of mistakes. That is why it had to come out right this time. This couldn’t be another dead end. He wouldn’t let it.
The files were there on the passenger seat. They weren’t much, but they were something. He grumbled at the rain on his windshield for as long as he could, but when he lost the ability to see through the glass, he had to palm the wiper control. This left streaks and scratches, yet another aspect of the car’s upkeep he had neglected to attend to. He’d never been much for them in the first place. Just something that gets you from point a to point b. Well, sometimes.
“Bullshit.” He said to himself. He had better things to be doing, more on his mind, then the bullshit case he had been assigned to. He was part of a task force. This was good and bad, but it made no impact on his ride into the station first thing in the morning.
Terrence’s superiors were wonderfully short sighted. Closing a forgotten murder didn’t bring in that much good press, but tracking down the news maker of the day, well, there’s something to squander one hundred man hours a week on.
He shook his head at the quarter of his face he caught in the mirror. No wonder she left.
---------------------------------------
Not Johnny was on his way to back to Dunn’s for the unveiling of his findings, the final report. Well, it probably wasn’t meant to be the final report, but two weeks of inane “testing” had been quite enough. Not Johnny didn’t know how much time he had left, but he did know he was not about to spend all of it getting poked, prodded, shocked, and scanned in a cold warehouse by the waterfront.
Especially not with the weather turning like it was. Not Johnny’s bones were no fans of cold like that.
The car was old, but in good condition, which is to say the heater worked and worked well. It pulled a little to the right, and thanks to that fact Not Johnny almost creamed a pedestrian when a particularly vicious pain spike, as he referred to them, shot up his spine to lodge somewhere in his nervous system. It felt like he’d been stabbed by a white hot piece of rebar. He vaguely wondered if Dunn was testing the rail gun again, but the thought vanished as he jerked the wheel back the other way and stood up on his breaks.
“You stupid jerk!” A young woman shouted, pounding on the hood with her fists. She was really upset. Really upset, as in, stomping up to the driver’s side and banging on the window. She was wearing rings on various fingers of both hands and they made a staggered clickety clack when she drummed her palms against the glass.
The window didn’t roll down reliably, so, with some concern for both his and her continued safety, Not Johnny put the car in park, killed the ignition and opened the door. It was beginning to rain.
“I’m really sorry.” He said, meaning it. “I didn’t see you and the car is a little messed up. I’m really sorry.”
“I’m really sorry,” she mocked him, “What does that do? What are you sorry about, that you almost hit me or that I’m not happy about it.” She was cute, in a bitchy sort of way. The rain, rolling down her face, was a nice effect.
“Where are you going?” He asked.
“None of your business. No where with you.” She said, drawing the collar of her jacket up as the rain continued to steadily increase.
“Fine.” Not Johnny said, pulling his door shut. He turned the key in the ignition, and then there she was, banging her rings against his window again. He left the engine running but opened the door again, this time with a smile. “Where can I drop you off?”
She was about to argue some more, but thought better of it and made her way around to the passenger seat. She pulled the door open and slid in, her backpack of a purse came off her shoulder and settled into her lap. She held a small canister, the contents of which Not Johnny could guess, in her right hand and studied him cautiously with her eyes.
“Here.” Not Johnny said, turning the heater up and diverting some of the middle vents towards his passenger.
“Thanks.” She said, as if it were one of the top three things in life she’d vowed never to say. She was pretty in a darkly, angry, sort of way. Not Johnny had to modify his earlier estimation slightly. She looked college girled out, in a coffee house sort of way, but at the same time older, though, somehow, not in a bad way.
“I’m Candice,” She said, offering a dainty handshake “the girl you almost ran over and killed.”
To that there was only one reply. “I’m not Johnny.”
--------------------------
More to come...
Her normally sharp eyes were dreamy and star strewn, she watched the smoke dancing both in and out of her mind as something vaguely reminiscent of Pink Floyd wafted out of one of the rooms down the hall. It seemed, ironically, to bring reality in with it. Candy passed the spliff off to a friend of hers with dishwater blonde hair and reclined against the shoddily patched upholstery.
“He’s leaving me.” She said, matter of factly. She was about to become the thing she dreaded most. A bring down. “After two years. He’s going to go…just because…”
Her friend is laughing, not at what Candy said, but at whatever fired in her brain as she inhaled the chemical laden smoke. She meant to ask what Candice was talking about, but it was lost in the haze that soon enveloped her, reducing her thoughts to a swirl of sound bites from philosophy lectures and clips from music videos.
Candy had to pee. She got up, carefully unfolding her shapely legs from beneath her and again adjusted the sweater. It was her only concession to modesty, well, that and the pink cotton panties she wore underneath. She itched at the back of her head and started, with a slight tilt, heading down the hallway towards the bathroom.
She stopped at the wrong door, but it was on purpose. She turned the knob and looked into an empty room with a naked bulb in the center. She flipped the switch by the door killing the light. The marijuana was playing with her understanding of time and space. He wasn’t leaving her. He’d already left.
She sucked back a sob and made for the bathroom.
---------------------------------------
Not Johnny was wearing gloves when he got his prescription filled at his new drug store. Since the day in the bank, he hadn’t gone anywhere without some sort of protection. He was still trying to work it all out, trying to figure out what it was he could do, and how it happened. He was scared. It was strange that he was more scared of what he could do now then of dying.
It had happened again, what he could do, that is. A couple of times when he was out, if things started going wrong and he started to get upset, it started to happen. It began, he noted, with a little bit of a buzz in his own head and a tingle somewhere up between his shoulders. Next, his right eye would twitch, ever so slightly, and that meant that the people around him were pretty much fucked.
He seemed to broadcast something which induced either a stiff headache in the luckiest or a full seizure in the most susceptible. But there was a key. He discovered he could get as angry as he wanted while he was on his medication. It worked against him the first time he made the correlation, actually.
Not Johnny was dealing with a store clerk who had apparently gone to idiot school and graduated with flying colors. Not Johnny heard the buzz. He felt the tingle between his shoulders, hell, he even smiled a little bit as he waited for the right eye to twitch. The clerk looked like a bleeder. Not Johnny started to characterize the people he interacted with based on how he felt they would react to one of his episodes. Bleeders were rare. Pistol had been a bleeder, from the nose. This guy looked like a bleeder.
But his right eye wouldn’t twitch, no matter how angry and pissed off he could make himself. Not Johnny eventually gave up and went home, fuming. In a way, it kind of made sense. The one time he wanted that terrible whatever it was to come on, it wouldn’t give him the satisfaction.
Then later that night, he got sloppy, forgot a dose of his medication, and promptly blew up his microwave. Whatever he was doing, it had to be electrically based. If it had to do with electricity, Not Johnny knew exactly the man to see.
---------------------------------------
Jack Dunn was like a latter day re-incarnation of Nikola Tesla when it came to dealing with anything even remotely electrical in nature. If the problem of his peculiarly short attention span could be addressed, the world would have to watch out. As it was, he’d already designed and tested a Rail Gun which, to pardon the pun, blew the Navy’s project right out of the water. His famously bad memory and knack for writing project notes in an illegible scrawl prevented him from replicating his results once he burned out the original. It was a somewhat sore subject, and best not to comment on.
Not Johnny’s proposition was sufficient to lock down even Dunn’s rabbit on a hot griddle attention span for a while. A bit of a masochist, his first insistence was that he get to experience “the full burn” as he termed it. He told Not Johnny to come back when he was three days off his medicine and totally pissed off.
Despite his propensity for doing the exact opposite of what he was told, Not Johnny followed instructions and returned when properly primed. Dunn, not content to wait for any sort of lengthy build up, began agitating Not Johnny immediately. When it happened, and it felt almost reflexive, almost like he was using a new muscle that he was just learning to access, “the full burn” knocked Dunn straight off his feet and left him twitching for about a minute, even after Not Johnny hastily exited the room.
When, with a dose of his medicine fifteen minutes into his system, Not Johnny returned, he found Dunn, sitting on the floor, scribbling out notes. This was not unusual, but the notes were actually legible, which was entirely unprecedented.
“I have an idea.” He said, with a somewhat manic glee.
---------------------------------------
Coates was in the car again. That blasted piece of shit car, with more of it falling apart every day. If he had a better head for money, and if he wasn’t putting both of his kids through school…he had to stop himself there. It was never good to start a day off by lying to yourself. He knew exactly where most of his money had been going. He was buying private investigators and consultants off for years. Any scrap of information about his wife’s murderer drew him like whiskey draws a priest. That was actually a quote he’d gotten from some book he read in College. He was so broke, even his wit was borrowed.
Then, when the time came and he actually had something pressing that needed to be paid for, he kept coming up short. Looking back on it, he’d made a lot of mistakes. That is why it had to come out right this time. This couldn’t be another dead end. He wouldn’t let it.
The files were there on the passenger seat. They weren’t much, but they were something. He grumbled at the rain on his windshield for as long as he could, but when he lost the ability to see through the glass, he had to palm the wiper control. This left streaks and scratches, yet another aspect of the car’s upkeep he had neglected to attend to. He’d never been much for them in the first place. Just something that gets you from point a to point b. Well, sometimes.
“Bullshit.” He said to himself. He had better things to be doing, more on his mind, then the bullshit case he had been assigned to. He was part of a task force. This was good and bad, but it made no impact on his ride into the station first thing in the morning.
Terrence’s superiors were wonderfully short sighted. Closing a forgotten murder didn’t bring in that much good press, but tracking down the news maker of the day, well, there’s something to squander one hundred man hours a week on.
He shook his head at the quarter of his face he caught in the mirror. No wonder she left.
---------------------------------------
Not Johnny was on his way to back to Dunn’s for the unveiling of his findings, the final report. Well, it probably wasn’t meant to be the final report, but two weeks of inane “testing” had been quite enough. Not Johnny didn’t know how much time he had left, but he did know he was not about to spend all of it getting poked, prodded, shocked, and scanned in a cold warehouse by the waterfront.
Especially not with the weather turning like it was. Not Johnny’s bones were no fans of cold like that.
The car was old, but in good condition, which is to say the heater worked and worked well. It pulled a little to the right, and thanks to that fact Not Johnny almost creamed a pedestrian when a particularly vicious pain spike, as he referred to them, shot up his spine to lodge somewhere in his nervous system. It felt like he’d been stabbed by a white hot piece of rebar. He vaguely wondered if Dunn was testing the rail gun again, but the thought vanished as he jerked the wheel back the other way and stood up on his breaks.
“You stupid jerk!” A young woman shouted, pounding on the hood with her fists. She was really upset. Really upset, as in, stomping up to the driver’s side and banging on the window. She was wearing rings on various fingers of both hands and they made a staggered clickety clack when she drummed her palms against the glass.
The window didn’t roll down reliably, so, with some concern for both his and her continued safety, Not Johnny put the car in park, killed the ignition and opened the door. It was beginning to rain.
“I’m really sorry.” He said, meaning it. “I didn’t see you and the car is a little messed up. I’m really sorry.”
“I’m really sorry,” she mocked him, “What does that do? What are you sorry about, that you almost hit me or that I’m not happy about it.” She was cute, in a bitchy sort of way. The rain, rolling down her face, was a nice effect.
“Where are you going?” He asked.
“None of your business. No where with you.” She said, drawing the collar of her jacket up as the rain continued to steadily increase.
“Fine.” Not Johnny said, pulling his door shut. He turned the key in the ignition, and then there she was, banging her rings against his window again. He left the engine running but opened the door again, this time with a smile. “Where can I drop you off?”
She was about to argue some more, but thought better of it and made her way around to the passenger seat. She pulled the door open and slid in, her backpack of a purse came off her shoulder and settled into her lap. She held a small canister, the contents of which Not Johnny could guess, in her right hand and studied him cautiously with her eyes.
“Here.” Not Johnny said, turning the heater up and diverting some of the middle vents towards his passenger.
“Thanks.” She said, as if it were one of the top three things in life she’d vowed never to say. She was pretty in a darkly, angry, sort of way. Not Johnny had to modify his earlier estimation slightly. She looked college girled out, in a coffee house sort of way, but at the same time older, though, somehow, not in a bad way.
“I’m Candice,” She said, offering a dainty handshake “the girl you almost ran over and killed.”
To that there was only one reply. “I’m not Johnny.”
--------------------------
More to come...
Killer Wolf
1235
The drive was quiet, and it took Not Johnny quite a bit out of his way. Candice had gone for a long walk, she’d never tried walking through that neighborhood before and decided now was as good a time as any. It made a kind of anti-sense, but Not Johnny didn’t get hung up on it. He had an attractive girl in his car, and she didn’t seem to be drunk, or inclined to try and kill him. It was rare. He didn’t exactly trust it.
“So what’s up with you and this Not Johnny stuff?” She asked, playing with the fraying hem of the sweater under her coat. She had significantly more clothes on this time then she had back in her house. “People don’t get to know your real name? Don’t get to know you at all?”
“Everyone gets it wrong, or maybe all my friends are just inconsiderate as shit.” Not Johnny notes that Candice doesn’t seem to like profanity, she stiffens and looks at him when he says it. “What?”
“Nothing.” She lies, goes back to the hem of her sweater. She pulls it up some and Not Johnny glimpses a blue shirt underneath. He also becomes aware that the laces of her shoes are blue.
“Well, this street goes both ways. What’s up with you, blue girl?” Not Johnny asks.
Candice goes to smile, someone else used to call her ‘little blue girl’, and the memory is a happy one. She doesn’t quite make it though, because it has happened again. She tries to cover, and would have fooled most people, but Not Johnny recognizes the look on her face, the sudden state of her body. Everything has changed. He knows it like he knows the back of his own hand.
“Me too.” He says, looking away from her, knowing she’s pleading with him to do just that in her mind. She doesn’t like people to see it any more then he does. She’s in agony. “Open the glove box. Make yourself at home.”
Candice is a little confused by this, but does as she was invited too. She finds the bottles for two of Not Johnny’s medications. The bottles have no prescription data on them, but she recognizes the pills by shape and color. Her eyes light up like she’s that little girl again, getting her first puppy on Christmas morning.
Her large dark eyes search Not Johnny’s face, as if pleading him for something. He nods, knowing that the lump suddenly residing in his throat isn’t going to let him get any words out. He watches her snap the top off and pop one of the pills into her mouth. She clips it back shut and folds the door back into place.
“Thanks,” she says. “My doctor won’t write these for me anymore, and they’re the only things that really help.”
It is only then, when it is too late, that she realizes this could be a massive tactical error. What if…what if this guy is some creep and he just drugged her with something other then what she thought she was taking? What if he’s got some sick fetish and he breaks all his stuff open and comes in them or something. But these thoughts fade, because for some reason, Candice likes this guy. Strange as he is. She keeps searching his face with her eyes.
They get to her house without her changing her mind and leading him to a decoy place. Oh well, she thought. He knows where I live now.
“Take a couple more,” Not Johnny says, meaning the pills in the glove compartment, “I’ve got enough to get by.”
“No, I can’t…” She says, but she wants too, “I have some money in the house, I could buy some maybe?”
“I don’t need money.” Not Johnny said, “I’ve got more then I can take in a month as it is.”
A moment passes, Candice is standing there leaning her head into the car. It is still raining and her back isn’t getting any dryer. It seems the guy is content to sit there and try to out stubborn her, which would usually be a fools game.
“I’ll make you dinner then,” she says with a smile, “How about that for a trade?”
“Sounds good,” Not Johnny smiles, “But not tonight. I’m already running late.”
“You can come over tomorrow.” She says, opening the glove box and emptying some more pills into the palm of her right hand. She puts the bottle away and secures the pills in one of her pants pockets.
“Sounds like a plan. I’ll see you then.” Not Johnny said.
Candice smiled and closed the door. She sort of jogged up the walk to the front of her house, Not Johnny stayed there watching her to be polite and make sure she got inside alright, but also because she looked good when she moved.
With one last glance, their eyes meeting somehow across the distance and through a rain spattered window, as Candice smiled from her front door, Not Johnny put the car in drive and edged back into the street.
--------------------
It is often said that great genius and madness go hand in hand, and are sometimes, if not usually, either interchangeable or indistinguishable. It is a quote that offers little comfort to Not Johnny as arrives in Dunn’s workspace. The place looked like a bomb had gone off, a black, carbon fiber, bomb. Dunn had been fabricating all sorts of things. Not Johnny’s first estimation, that Dunn was designing some sort of protective apparatus to aid in further testing, which would not be occurring, was close to the mark but for the wrong reasons. When he saw the customized knee brace and what looked like a corset of some kind, he got a vaguely unsettling feeling in his stomach.
“All we have to do is come up with a name for you.” Dunn says from his workbench, busy tinkering with some other piece of equipment Not Johnny cannot quite make out from this angle. “And maybe even a symbol.”
“What,” Not Johnny stops talking as he gingerly steps over a mass of something hard and mangled on the floor. A discarded prototype of something. “are you talking about, Jack? I’m not even sure you’re speaking English.”
Dunn spin’s around on his stool. The headpiece is another custom job of his with various lenses for magnification and other uses Not Johnny cannot quite come to place. He flips up the assembly and stares at his friend.
“You’re more then man, my friend.” He said, the sentiment and his expression as he conveyed it lending a slightly unwholesome aspect to the thing. “For once in your life, you’re going to give people a reason to know your name. To get it right.”
“What are you talking about?” Not Johnny demanded.
Dunn hooked his thumbs under the straps for the headpiece and pulled it off. He popped up from the stool and led Not Johnny off to the side. There was a blackboard with random notations scribbled in chalk, computer printouts were taped up around the borders.
“I’m not sure how, or why, but you seem to broadcast the frequency of pain.” He tapped a point on one of the printouts as if it was supposed to mean something to Not Johnny, “You’re brain is like a radio station, and you’re sending out some bad vibes. That’s how you do it, how you hurt people without touching them. How you can give them seizures.”
“What about these?” Not Johnny asked, holding his, still gloved, hands up.
“Not sure.” Dunn shrugged, “I’m having to guess here. For some reason you’re hyper conductive. Your output is low, but it seems enough to interfere with certain electronics. It seems you can put the signal out two ways, one of them somehow you do with brain waves…I don’t have quite the right equipment to be sure or to gauge it though. The other, you do by touch…you send out a charge and somehow it carries the signal direct. From what you told me, how the second guy at the bank got the worst of it…that’s what I think is going on.”
“Okay, two questions.” Not Johnny said, the sides of his head pestering him with a dull throb. He’d made sure not to miss his last dose of pills. “How do we turn it off, and what is all this shit,” he waves his arms to indicate the span of Dunn’s warehouse, meaning the new constellation of clutter, “for?”
“That is not two questions.” Dunn says, “It is the same question.”
“So what’s the answer?” Not Johnny asked.
“You don’t turn it off, you use it.” Dunn said, “And all of this shit, as you call it, and I’ll let that slide right now because I haven’t explained it to you yet, is to keep you from getting killed while you do.”
“I don’t understand,” Not Johnny said, although he was fairly afraid he did understand exactly what Dunn was getting at.
“It’s put up or shut up time, NJ. You said you wanted to help people, later tonight I’m going to give you the chance.”
--------------------------------
The stalker crouched low, trying to use the bushes for cover from the street. There wasn’t much he could do about the house next to his target, and the fact that it had an annoying propensity for facing his hunting ground with a number of windows. Luckily, there were no lights here. He’d have to be careful in his timing.
He pulled the hood of his sweatshirt back just a little and looked up at the sky. His cycle was not dictated by the moon, at least not in the normal way, how some lesser beings feel they have to do their ritual and whatever else that goes along with the true act under the light of a waxing, waning, or full moon. No, he just needed lunar cooperation. It had to be a new moon, a night when there was no extra light from the sky.
Everything else he could handle.
He dropped low as movement inside his target’s house drew his attention. The victim was home, was less then ten feet away from him and had no idea. He smiled a cold smile. There were some things he would have liked to have changed. The place was not exactly ideal.
The stalker realized he was starting to get greedy. He should let this one go and get another, get one who fit the pattern perfectly. This one was a bit too young for him, but then again it wasn’t even about her at this point. He chuckled to himself dryly. It was just a test then, a test to see if he could expand his craft…work without a net.
This will keep me sharp, he thought to himself. He liked things that were sharp.
“So what’s up with you and this Not Johnny stuff?” She asked, playing with the fraying hem of the sweater under her coat. She had significantly more clothes on this time then she had back in her house. “People don’t get to know your real name? Don’t get to know you at all?”
“Everyone gets it wrong, or maybe all my friends are just inconsiderate as shit.” Not Johnny notes that Candice doesn’t seem to like profanity, she stiffens and looks at him when he says it. “What?”
“Nothing.” She lies, goes back to the hem of her sweater. She pulls it up some and Not Johnny glimpses a blue shirt underneath. He also becomes aware that the laces of her shoes are blue.
“Well, this street goes both ways. What’s up with you, blue girl?” Not Johnny asks.
Candice goes to smile, someone else used to call her ‘little blue girl’, and the memory is a happy one. She doesn’t quite make it though, because it has happened again. She tries to cover, and would have fooled most people, but Not Johnny recognizes the look on her face, the sudden state of her body. Everything has changed. He knows it like he knows the back of his own hand.
“Me too.” He says, looking away from her, knowing she’s pleading with him to do just that in her mind. She doesn’t like people to see it any more then he does. She’s in agony. “Open the glove box. Make yourself at home.”
Candice is a little confused by this, but does as she was invited too. She finds the bottles for two of Not Johnny’s medications. The bottles have no prescription data on them, but she recognizes the pills by shape and color. Her eyes light up like she’s that little girl again, getting her first puppy on Christmas morning.
Her large dark eyes search Not Johnny’s face, as if pleading him for something. He nods, knowing that the lump suddenly residing in his throat isn’t going to let him get any words out. He watches her snap the top off and pop one of the pills into her mouth. She clips it back shut and folds the door back into place.
“Thanks,” she says. “My doctor won’t write these for me anymore, and they’re the only things that really help.”
It is only then, when it is too late, that she realizes this could be a massive tactical error. What if…what if this guy is some creep and he just drugged her with something other then what she thought she was taking? What if he’s got some sick fetish and he breaks all his stuff open and comes in them or something. But these thoughts fade, because for some reason, Candice likes this guy. Strange as he is. She keeps searching his face with her eyes.
They get to her house without her changing her mind and leading him to a decoy place. Oh well, she thought. He knows where I live now.
“Take a couple more,” Not Johnny says, meaning the pills in the glove compartment, “I’ve got enough to get by.”
“No, I can’t…” She says, but she wants too, “I have some money in the house, I could buy some maybe?”
“I don’t need money.” Not Johnny said, “I’ve got more then I can take in a month as it is.”
A moment passes, Candice is standing there leaning her head into the car. It is still raining and her back isn’t getting any dryer. It seems the guy is content to sit there and try to out stubborn her, which would usually be a fools game.
“I’ll make you dinner then,” she says with a smile, “How about that for a trade?”
“Sounds good,” Not Johnny smiles, “But not tonight. I’m already running late.”
“You can come over tomorrow.” She says, opening the glove box and emptying some more pills into the palm of her right hand. She puts the bottle away and secures the pills in one of her pants pockets.
“Sounds like a plan. I’ll see you then.” Not Johnny said.
Candice smiled and closed the door. She sort of jogged up the walk to the front of her house, Not Johnny stayed there watching her to be polite and make sure she got inside alright, but also because she looked good when she moved.
With one last glance, their eyes meeting somehow across the distance and through a rain spattered window, as Candice smiled from her front door, Not Johnny put the car in drive and edged back into the street.
--------------------
It is often said that great genius and madness go hand in hand, and are sometimes, if not usually, either interchangeable or indistinguishable. It is a quote that offers little comfort to Not Johnny as arrives in Dunn’s workspace. The place looked like a bomb had gone off, a black, carbon fiber, bomb. Dunn had been fabricating all sorts of things. Not Johnny’s first estimation, that Dunn was designing some sort of protective apparatus to aid in further testing, which would not be occurring, was close to the mark but for the wrong reasons. When he saw the customized knee brace and what looked like a corset of some kind, he got a vaguely unsettling feeling in his stomach.
“All we have to do is come up with a name for you.” Dunn says from his workbench, busy tinkering with some other piece of equipment Not Johnny cannot quite make out from this angle. “And maybe even a symbol.”
“What,” Not Johnny stops talking as he gingerly steps over a mass of something hard and mangled on the floor. A discarded prototype of something. “are you talking about, Jack? I’m not even sure you’re speaking English.”
Dunn spin’s around on his stool. The headpiece is another custom job of his with various lenses for magnification and other uses Not Johnny cannot quite come to place. He flips up the assembly and stares at his friend.
“You’re more then man, my friend.” He said, the sentiment and his expression as he conveyed it lending a slightly unwholesome aspect to the thing. “For once in your life, you’re going to give people a reason to know your name. To get it right.”
“What are you talking about?” Not Johnny demanded.
Dunn hooked his thumbs under the straps for the headpiece and pulled it off. He popped up from the stool and led Not Johnny off to the side. There was a blackboard with random notations scribbled in chalk, computer printouts were taped up around the borders.
“I’m not sure how, or why, but you seem to broadcast the frequency of pain.” He tapped a point on one of the printouts as if it was supposed to mean something to Not Johnny, “You’re brain is like a radio station, and you’re sending out some bad vibes. That’s how you do it, how you hurt people without touching them. How you can give them seizures.”
“What about these?” Not Johnny asked, holding his, still gloved, hands up.
“Not sure.” Dunn shrugged, “I’m having to guess here. For some reason you’re hyper conductive. Your output is low, but it seems enough to interfere with certain electronics. It seems you can put the signal out two ways, one of them somehow you do with brain waves…I don’t have quite the right equipment to be sure or to gauge it though. The other, you do by touch…you send out a charge and somehow it carries the signal direct. From what you told me, how the second guy at the bank got the worst of it…that’s what I think is going on.”
“Okay, two questions.” Not Johnny said, the sides of his head pestering him with a dull throb. He’d made sure not to miss his last dose of pills. “How do we turn it off, and what is all this shit,” he waves his arms to indicate the span of Dunn’s warehouse, meaning the new constellation of clutter, “for?”
“That is not two questions.” Dunn says, “It is the same question.”
“So what’s the answer?” Not Johnny asked.
“You don’t turn it off, you use it.” Dunn said, “And all of this shit, as you call it, and I’ll let that slide right now because I haven’t explained it to you yet, is to keep you from getting killed while you do.”
“I don’t understand,” Not Johnny said, although he was fairly afraid he did understand exactly what Dunn was getting at.
“It’s put up or shut up time, NJ. You said you wanted to help people, later tonight I’m going to give you the chance.”
--------------------------------
The stalker crouched low, trying to use the bushes for cover from the street. There wasn’t much he could do about the house next to his target, and the fact that it had an annoying propensity for facing his hunting ground with a number of windows. Luckily, there were no lights here. He’d have to be careful in his timing.
He pulled the hood of his sweatshirt back just a little and looked up at the sky. His cycle was not dictated by the moon, at least not in the normal way, how some lesser beings feel they have to do their ritual and whatever else that goes along with the true act under the light of a waxing, waning, or full moon. No, he just needed lunar cooperation. It had to be a new moon, a night when there was no extra light from the sky.
Everything else he could handle.
He dropped low as movement inside his target’s house drew his attention. The victim was home, was less then ten feet away from him and had no idea. He smiled a cold smile. There were some things he would have liked to have changed. The place was not exactly ideal.
The stalker realized he was starting to get greedy. He should let this one go and get another, get one who fit the pattern perfectly. This one was a bit too young for him, but then again it wasn’t even about her at this point. He chuckled to himself dryly. It was just a test then, a test to see if he could expand his craft…work without a net.
This will keep me sharp, he thought to himself. He liked things that were sharp.
Killer Wolf
1235
After meeting up again around midnight, Not Johnny and Dunn prowled around in the latter’s beaten up old van. Not Johnny felt fairly stupid, sitting there in the uncomfortable mess of an outfit Dunn had fashioned for him.
The fact that so much of the raw components that had gone into making it were just laying around gave some credence to Dunn’s offhand claim that he was still doing private contracts for certain security agencies. He was either being purposefully vague in his descriptions, or he simply did not recall who the voices on the other end of the line were.
Watching Dunn drive, a procedure which evidently served as a source of great inspiration, if the number of notations he scrawled out on a pair of dash mounted notebooks was any indication, did not instill a sense of confidence in Not Johnny, so instead, he studied his new gloves.
His eyes had sort of glassed over as Dunn explained it. It drew its power from Not Johnny’s signal, whatever the hell that was. There were capacitors and stuff. Striking the palm of the glove against something made a connection between the two probes there and the board and let the capacitors discharge…or something. All Not Johnny really needed to know was that he’d better not slap himself on the thigh during a particularly funny joke, unless he wanted to be on the receiving end of what Dunn referred to as “a taser on crack.”
Not Johnny didn’t mind the knee brace so much. Hopefully when Dunn crashed the van into something while writing out a diagram for whatever the hell jumped into his head, the brace would allow him to walk briskly away before spilled gasoline could ignite. The back brace was less thrilling for him.
“You know, this is like the thing they say got Kennedy killed.” Not Johnny said, a fragment from a video they showed in history class looping. “He couldn’t get down after the first shot was fired…This could get me killed.”
“So don’t run for president.” Dunn said as he let the van idle in place, “We’re here.”
Not Johnny looked out the windows. Here seemed to be nowhere in particular, at least nowhere that he wanted to be.
“What is here?” Not Johnny asked.
“You said it yourself earlier. Do you have any idea how hard it is to just be riding by and find a crime underway when you’re prepared for it? You probably used up even your bad luck just by being in that bank. So we’re trying a more direct approach. This is a bad neighborhood.”
“Yeah, no kidding.” Not Johnny said. He suddenly felt nostalgic for the days when he had no concept of a bad neighborhood. He was also nostalgic for a seatbelt, having made the trip thus far without one.
“I’ll come back for you in a half hour.” Dunn said, reaching across to open the passenger door. He’d shifted into park.
“You can’t be…” but he was serious, Not Johnny realized, as his friend…or at least the person whom up to the last five seconds he thought was his friend, shoved him out of the van.
By the time Not Johnny was back on his feet, Dunn had pulled the door shut and peeled out. Already, the curious were gathering.
--------------------------
“What the fuck is this?” The words snapped Not Johnny’s current status and set of problems sharply into focus. Here he was with an encroaching semi-circle of what did not appear to be the glee club, though one of them did happen to be smiling.
“Its not even close to Halloween.” The one who’d spoken before asked. “Shit, what you been smoking, man? Can I get some?”
Not Johnny could see it from their point of view. He looked like a cross between a ten year old playing at Batman, and the gimp from that Trantino film. He wasn’t exactly the picture of health and sanity in either case. At least they couldn’t see his face, though his goggles were not opaque, due to the night time theater of operations, as Dunn had called it, so they could still see his eyes.
He remembered something, maybe from a nature program when he was fourteen years old and watching porn. Adult supervision loomed right on the other side of what was, by all accounts, a flimsy door. As the door began to yawn open to him, he’d clicked to another channel. Any channel. It seemed luck was with him that day, he hadn’t gotten his pants down yet…so it didn’t look strange at all for him to be sitting there watching a nature program when the door finally opened. Anyway, Not Johnny chided himself for getting drawn off topic, the memory was supposed to be about the content of the program and not how he’d come to see it.
One of the young men shoved him over onto his back and they all started kicking him. That, strangely enough, was when he recalled the point his subconscious had been trying to make with the memory about the nature program. They could see his eyes. His eyes did not portray confidence and dominance, and so they took him to be the weakest in the area and pounced.
Everybody had to go to school sometime.
Without even a conscious attempt, Not Johnny ran through his precursors. His right eye twitched, and then the kicking stopped. One of the young men was already down, the fingers of one hand bending backwards in what someone with a sufficient medical vocabulary would have identified as dystonia. Another seemed content to stagger around with his hands clutching at his head. The third one was the one that concerned Not Johnny.
This young man only had one hand pressed to his head. Despite the nosebleed, he was fumbling behind his back for something. Not Johnny scrambled for the first time in years and made it off the ground in time to shove him in the chest with both gloved hands as the man’s pistol came free.
The man’s body recoiled from the charge, but that might just have been the skeletal muscles all spasming at once. The firearm discharged, but once the man holding it had fallen to the ground and the convulsions began, it was easy enough for Not Johnny to slide it away with the tip of one boot.
His first battle as a superhero was somewhat of a cluster fuck, but he’d managed to survive, so far. It was then he realized the building that the young men had been guarding must be some sort of illegal establishment, because they weren’t the only ones intent on coming to its rescue. Again, making the conscious decision he’d rather die on his feet then wake up one morning to find out all he could move were his eyelids, he pressed on.
----------------------------
Terrence Coates stood in the anesthetic hallway as the doctor explained the particulars of the condition that afflicted the patients who had recently been dropped off by a cadre of unusually dedicated ambulance drivers. He was only halfway paying attention, a wait and see game just in case any trigger words came up. His mind worked better like that. His mind worked funny. Thinking ‘trigger word’ brought up the concept of being shot, which brought up the concept of his detective’s ‘shield’.
The word shield conjured something you wore on your arm or held in your hand, something that could protect you. It was something to hide behind when the shit started hitting the fan. Coates had never viewed his shield in this way. As he wore it, perhaps it could function as its namesake. It could very well protect his heart from an assassin’s bullet, were it fired from a particular set of angles, and should the bullet itself be of a particularly underpowered variety. Coates weighed the odds of running across a criminal minded trigonometry freak with a bb gun and felt re-assured in his original choice to trust instead a Kevlar vest underneath his jacket.
Wait, there had been something, his mind called him back to what the doctor was saying.
“..is that none of them has any family history of seizure.” The doctor paused for a moment, “While it makes little sense, it seems like this was done to them. Just like the other two.”
Coates felt his hand stop writing and flipped the pad closed. That was another trick that had served him well, he could write down what he heard and be off on a completely different tangent independently.
“So, we’re dealing with what…a serial who gives people seizures?” Terrence thinks this but does not say it. His verbal center goes up a more logical avenue. “It was some kind of crack house or something, but we could never get there without it clearing out. Any chance this is from some new drug?”
The doctor looked at him, a confused expression pinching his face. “Doubtful, although if it was, I don’t think it would sell too well.”
Coates leaned forward with the doctor as one of the patients, about to be further sedated, began shouting. The doctor waved the nurse off and Terrence followed him into the room.
“Looks like we’ve got a talker.” Coates said, flipping his pad open again as he advanced on the stricken gang member’s hospital bed. “What happened to you and your pals?” the detective asked.
“The black man.” The youth says, he shakes his head sideways, which seems to nauseate him. This is not what he meant. “The man in black.”
“You were attacked by Johnny Cash?” Coates heard himself ask before he could get it stopped. It made absolutely no sense. Johnny Cash had been dead for a few years, a damn shame too considering how the last couple discs sounded.
The youth started thrashing around again, and the doctor gave a curt nod to the nurse as she waited there, a loaded hypo poised to spring into action. As the needle made love to the young man’s IV, Coates heard him repeat it one more time, “The man…in…black.”
The fact that so much of the raw components that had gone into making it were just laying around gave some credence to Dunn’s offhand claim that he was still doing private contracts for certain security agencies. He was either being purposefully vague in his descriptions, or he simply did not recall who the voices on the other end of the line were.
Watching Dunn drive, a procedure which evidently served as a source of great inspiration, if the number of notations he scrawled out on a pair of dash mounted notebooks was any indication, did not instill a sense of confidence in Not Johnny, so instead, he studied his new gloves.
His eyes had sort of glassed over as Dunn explained it. It drew its power from Not Johnny’s signal, whatever the hell that was. There were capacitors and stuff. Striking the palm of the glove against something made a connection between the two probes there and the board and let the capacitors discharge…or something. All Not Johnny really needed to know was that he’d better not slap himself on the thigh during a particularly funny joke, unless he wanted to be on the receiving end of what Dunn referred to as “a taser on crack.”
Not Johnny didn’t mind the knee brace so much. Hopefully when Dunn crashed the van into something while writing out a diagram for whatever the hell jumped into his head, the brace would allow him to walk briskly away before spilled gasoline could ignite. The back brace was less thrilling for him.
“You know, this is like the thing they say got Kennedy killed.” Not Johnny said, a fragment from a video they showed in history class looping. “He couldn’t get down after the first shot was fired…This could get me killed.”
“So don’t run for president.” Dunn said as he let the van idle in place, “We’re here.”
Not Johnny looked out the windows. Here seemed to be nowhere in particular, at least nowhere that he wanted to be.
“What is here?” Not Johnny asked.
“You said it yourself earlier. Do you have any idea how hard it is to just be riding by and find a crime underway when you’re prepared for it? You probably used up even your bad luck just by being in that bank. So we’re trying a more direct approach. This is a bad neighborhood.”
“Yeah, no kidding.” Not Johnny said. He suddenly felt nostalgic for the days when he had no concept of a bad neighborhood. He was also nostalgic for a seatbelt, having made the trip thus far without one.
“I’ll come back for you in a half hour.” Dunn said, reaching across to open the passenger door. He’d shifted into park.
“You can’t be…” but he was serious, Not Johnny realized, as his friend…or at least the person whom up to the last five seconds he thought was his friend, shoved him out of the van.
By the time Not Johnny was back on his feet, Dunn had pulled the door shut and peeled out. Already, the curious were gathering.
--------------------------
“What the fuck is this?” The words snapped Not Johnny’s current status and set of problems sharply into focus. Here he was with an encroaching semi-circle of what did not appear to be the glee club, though one of them did happen to be smiling.
“Its not even close to Halloween.” The one who’d spoken before asked. “Shit, what you been smoking, man? Can I get some?”
Not Johnny could see it from their point of view. He looked like a cross between a ten year old playing at Batman, and the gimp from that Trantino film. He wasn’t exactly the picture of health and sanity in either case. At least they couldn’t see his face, though his goggles were not opaque, due to the night time theater of operations, as Dunn had called it, so they could still see his eyes.
He remembered something, maybe from a nature program when he was fourteen years old and watching porn. Adult supervision loomed right on the other side of what was, by all accounts, a flimsy door. As the door began to yawn open to him, he’d clicked to another channel. Any channel. It seemed luck was with him that day, he hadn’t gotten his pants down yet…so it didn’t look strange at all for him to be sitting there watching a nature program when the door finally opened. Anyway, Not Johnny chided himself for getting drawn off topic, the memory was supposed to be about the content of the program and not how he’d come to see it.
One of the young men shoved him over onto his back and they all started kicking him. That, strangely enough, was when he recalled the point his subconscious had been trying to make with the memory about the nature program. They could see his eyes. His eyes did not portray confidence and dominance, and so they took him to be the weakest in the area and pounced.
Everybody had to go to school sometime.
Without even a conscious attempt, Not Johnny ran through his precursors. His right eye twitched, and then the kicking stopped. One of the young men was already down, the fingers of one hand bending backwards in what someone with a sufficient medical vocabulary would have identified as dystonia. Another seemed content to stagger around with his hands clutching at his head. The third one was the one that concerned Not Johnny.
This young man only had one hand pressed to his head. Despite the nosebleed, he was fumbling behind his back for something. Not Johnny scrambled for the first time in years and made it off the ground in time to shove him in the chest with both gloved hands as the man’s pistol came free.
The man’s body recoiled from the charge, but that might just have been the skeletal muscles all spasming at once. The firearm discharged, but once the man holding it had fallen to the ground and the convulsions began, it was easy enough for Not Johnny to slide it away with the tip of one boot.
His first battle as a superhero was somewhat of a cluster fuck, but he’d managed to survive, so far. It was then he realized the building that the young men had been guarding must be some sort of illegal establishment, because they weren’t the only ones intent on coming to its rescue. Again, making the conscious decision he’d rather die on his feet then wake up one morning to find out all he could move were his eyelids, he pressed on.
----------------------------
Terrence Coates stood in the anesthetic hallway as the doctor explained the particulars of the condition that afflicted the patients who had recently been dropped off by a cadre of unusually dedicated ambulance drivers. He was only halfway paying attention, a wait and see game just in case any trigger words came up. His mind worked better like that. His mind worked funny. Thinking ‘trigger word’ brought up the concept of being shot, which brought up the concept of his detective’s ‘shield’.
The word shield conjured something you wore on your arm or held in your hand, something that could protect you. It was something to hide behind when the shit started hitting the fan. Coates had never viewed his shield in this way. As he wore it, perhaps it could function as its namesake. It could very well protect his heart from an assassin’s bullet, were it fired from a particular set of angles, and should the bullet itself be of a particularly underpowered variety. Coates weighed the odds of running across a criminal minded trigonometry freak with a bb gun and felt re-assured in his original choice to trust instead a Kevlar vest underneath his jacket.
Wait, there had been something, his mind called him back to what the doctor was saying.
“..is that none of them has any family history of seizure.” The doctor paused for a moment, “While it makes little sense, it seems like this was done to them. Just like the other two.”
Coates felt his hand stop writing and flipped the pad closed. That was another trick that had served him well, he could write down what he heard and be off on a completely different tangent independently.
“So, we’re dealing with what…a serial who gives people seizures?” Terrence thinks this but does not say it. His verbal center goes up a more logical avenue. “It was some kind of crack house or something, but we could never get there without it clearing out. Any chance this is from some new drug?”
The doctor looked at him, a confused expression pinching his face. “Doubtful, although if it was, I don’t think it would sell too well.”
Coates leaned forward with the doctor as one of the patients, about to be further sedated, began shouting. The doctor waved the nurse off and Terrence followed him into the room.
“Looks like we’ve got a talker.” Coates said, flipping his pad open again as he advanced on the stricken gang member’s hospital bed. “What happened to you and your pals?” the detective asked.
“The black man.” The youth says, he shakes his head sideways, which seems to nauseate him. This is not what he meant. “The man in black.”
“You were attacked by Johnny Cash?” Coates heard himself ask before he could get it stopped. It made absolutely no sense. Johnny Cash had been dead for a few years, a damn shame too considering how the last couple discs sounded.
The youth started thrashing around again, and the doctor gave a curt nod to the nurse as she waited there, a loaded hypo poised to spring into action. As the needle made love to the young man’s IV, Coates heard him repeat it one more time, “The man…in…black.”
Killer Wolf
1235
Not Johnny, dressed considerably more presentably for his dinner at Candice’s place than he had been for his activities the previous night, tried not to wince as he settled in behind the wheel. He was riding his medication a bit harder then usual, and was plainly aware of the swelling in his back and his knee. He wanted to see the young woman again though. He would have made the trip, even if it were raining razor blades.
As he waited at her front door, a single press of the call button to do the trick, he settled on a one night on, three nights off schedule for his nocturnal vigilante activities. It gave him time to heal up, to whatever degree he could, between sojourns into the violent criminal underworld…he almost wanted to work it into either his opening line with Candice, or maybe later as an amusing anecdote.
“What did you do last night?” He could ask. She’d tell him something interesting, and he could counter with, “Well, I was busy closing down a crack house. Want to see my bruises to prove it?” He thought better of this before the door opened.
Candice looked very good, wearing clean dry clothes and just the right amount of makeup. She smelled vaguely of something Not Johnny couldn’t place, either something she had been cooking or a perfume of some sort. He couldn’t help but smile.
“Hi.” He said.
“Hi.” She responded with a smile of her own, “Come in.”
---------------------
Coates was going to get home late, another wonderful day on the vigilante task force put to good use. He’d honestly hoped it would just go away, after that mess at the bank. It seemed to be fading out, and then bam. That shit last night.
He grumbled about it for a while, mulling it over from various angles, as he drove. Turning onto his street, he saw it almost immediately. Something was wrong. The chimney for his house was belching out a steady stream of smoke. It was a cold night, so it could almost have been passed over, except for the fact that no one was supposed to be home. His youngest was away at a friend’s place, his oldest was god knows where, but damn sure not under his roof.
Even if one or both of them HAD managed to anchor themselves in the house, they knew that he didn’t want them lighting fires. The place had a renovated electric heating system that worked just fine. He already had his pistol in hand as he parked the car.
Up the stairs, in through the front door, Terrence followed his service pistol’s lead. He cleared the house room by room before locking it up tight again. This was not somebody’s first probative glance into the world of breaking and entering, nor was it some random act.
He put all the lights on and made another series of sweeps. To the best of his ability to discern, the place was untouched. Nothing was missing. His wife’s jewelry box was right where she’d left it the last night she’d spent with him, and the clasp was still well dusted over.
Terrence went to the kitchen and set his pistol on the counter. Soon, he provided a shot glass to keep it company while he fished around for a bottle of something to drink. He found it, tucked away under the sink behind the pots and pans. He tried to tell himself he was hiding it from his youngest, but he knew he was only trying to slow himself down. If he had to get down on his hands and knees and rummage through a dark cubby, terrorizing spiders and the occasional lizard, to find his booze, he was less likely to have a drink of opportunity.
He poured a shot, tossed it back and poured another before managing to carry the bottle, the shot glass, and his pistol into the living room with him. He deposited his assembly of small burdens on the coffee table and watched the fire as he sipped at his second shot.
This was not a burglary, he knew that much the second he stepped over the threshold. It felt all wrong for that. This had nothing to do with the vigilante case either. This had been about delivering a message to him regarding that other case he was working, and he realized with a sort of hollow feeling that he hoped the liquor would soon insulate him against, that he was looking right at it.
--------------------
Not Johnny’s dinner with Candice was not going well. It seemed like she based her responses to what he said and did on an imaginary coin that she flipped in her head. Heads up. She laughed and thought he was charming. Tails up. She looked at him as if he were an escaped serial rapist. Heads up. They cleared the table together and laughed in the kitchen as he helped her wash the dishes. Tails up. She did not appreciate him getting soapy water on her, despite the fact she’d just splashed him a couple of times, clearly on purpose.
There were two heads up in a row, they sat down on Candice’s couch to watch some TV, and she didn’t seem to mind him being close to her, but then there were about four tail tosses in a row. Not Johnny couldn’t say the right thing to save his soul.
He tried to sound smarter then he was, failed, and was promptly called on it. This put him on the defensive and so he reverted to playground antics. If you don’t know what to do, generally involving a girl, you start making fun of her. He tried to be flirty about it, because it was supposed to work. Heads up. She smiled at first, because it seemed like he was being charming.
He pushed his luck with a second attempt at a humorous observation and failed miserably…but maybe it was just because he’d worked profanity into it. Okay, that was a clear message, he tried to remind himself. She doesn’t go for that.
With a feeling not entirely dissimilar to a motorcycle crash in slow motion he realized what was going on. She seemed to be tolerating him, but only so far as her own interest required. Dinner was nice, he was okay to talk to, but that was it. The rest of it, she’d just kind of put up with or ignore. This was a service, plain and simple.
She was paying him back for the pills by feeding him, and letting him sit there and make an ass out of himself. Anything else, any interest that seemed to bubble up to the surface…hell, that was just in his mind. Or at least, it seemed that way to Not Johnny.
“Well,” he said, drawing his preamble out in the hopes she’d head him off, “I’ve got to get going.” He waited, she made no move to try and change his mind, “Thanks for dinner, Candice. It was really good.”
Candice smiled and walked with him to the door. “I’m glad you liked it. I was trying something new out.” She pulled something up from the table by the door, “Here.”
She drew one of Not Johnny’s hands to her, palm up, and scribbled something out. On closer inspection, it turned out to be her number. Maybe he wasn’t doing as badly as he had thought.
“Come by tomorrow, if you can…if you want.” She smiled, “But call first, okay?”
He smiled and nodded and was then politely on his way. He tried not to skip as he headed towards his car. Maybe he’d read her wrong, or right…depending on which reading he was referring to. For the first time in a long time, Not Johnny began to wonder if his battered body could hold up to a good night in someone else’s bed.
-------------
“You need to forget about her.” Dunn said, watching Not Johnny dial the number again. “Do you see the flaw here?”
Not Johnny left his second message of the day and hung up. He turned back to see Dunn’s accusing stare and was somewhat thankful that the table full of the pieces of his ‘outfit’ stood between them. He closed the cell phone.
“What?”
“You don’t get the hypocrisy of it?” Dunn prodded, “For almost as long as I’ve known you, you’ve been bitching about how you always put other people first. Now, for the first time in your life you’re actually in a position to do some good and you’re going to fuck it up by being selfish.” He shakes his head, “You don’t get it. There is a reason you could do this, N.J. You had nothing to lose.”
“What are you talking about?” Not Johnny asked, adorned with the sort of perpetual shrug only Dunn could bring out. Nothing had changed, as far as he was concerned.
“Think about it. In all the books, the comics, the movies, whatever…when the guy goes after the bad guys, what happens? Invariably, the bad guys end up going after him through the people around him. See, that is where you fucked up. You’re a dying man, NJ. You had nothing to lose. They couldn’t hurt you, couldn’t get to you. If you start something with this girl, you know what she becomes?” A pause, “She becomes the biggest weapon that the world has against you.”
“But it isn’t like that.” Not Johnny pawed around for an argument that made his declaration sound slightly less feeble. “I wear a mask.”
“Okay, maybe that’s enough.” Dunn said in a tone of voice which indicated it wasn’t even close, “But think about it another way. You don’t know how long you’ve got, and if things go bad for you now it could be even less. Do you want to do that to this girl?”
“You’re jumping to conclusions.” Not Johnny affirmed. “Its just a car ride and one dinner so far. She might just be using me for pills anyways.”
“This is going to be nothing but trouble for you NJ, one way or another.”
As he waited at her front door, a single press of the call button to do the trick, he settled on a one night on, three nights off schedule for his nocturnal vigilante activities. It gave him time to heal up, to whatever degree he could, between sojourns into the violent criminal underworld…he almost wanted to work it into either his opening line with Candice, or maybe later as an amusing anecdote.
“What did you do last night?” He could ask. She’d tell him something interesting, and he could counter with, “Well, I was busy closing down a crack house. Want to see my bruises to prove it?” He thought better of this before the door opened.
Candice looked very good, wearing clean dry clothes and just the right amount of makeup. She smelled vaguely of something Not Johnny couldn’t place, either something she had been cooking or a perfume of some sort. He couldn’t help but smile.
“Hi.” He said.
“Hi.” She responded with a smile of her own, “Come in.”
---------------------
Coates was going to get home late, another wonderful day on the vigilante task force put to good use. He’d honestly hoped it would just go away, after that mess at the bank. It seemed to be fading out, and then bam. That shit last night.
He grumbled about it for a while, mulling it over from various angles, as he drove. Turning onto his street, he saw it almost immediately. Something was wrong. The chimney for his house was belching out a steady stream of smoke. It was a cold night, so it could almost have been passed over, except for the fact that no one was supposed to be home. His youngest was away at a friend’s place, his oldest was god knows where, but damn sure not under his roof.
Even if one or both of them HAD managed to anchor themselves in the house, they knew that he didn’t want them lighting fires. The place had a renovated electric heating system that worked just fine. He already had his pistol in hand as he parked the car.
Up the stairs, in through the front door, Terrence followed his service pistol’s lead. He cleared the house room by room before locking it up tight again. This was not somebody’s first probative glance into the world of breaking and entering, nor was it some random act.
He put all the lights on and made another series of sweeps. To the best of his ability to discern, the place was untouched. Nothing was missing. His wife’s jewelry box was right where she’d left it the last night she’d spent with him, and the clasp was still well dusted over.
Terrence went to the kitchen and set his pistol on the counter. Soon, he provided a shot glass to keep it company while he fished around for a bottle of something to drink. He found it, tucked away under the sink behind the pots and pans. He tried to tell himself he was hiding it from his youngest, but he knew he was only trying to slow himself down. If he had to get down on his hands and knees and rummage through a dark cubby, terrorizing spiders and the occasional lizard, to find his booze, he was less likely to have a drink of opportunity.
He poured a shot, tossed it back and poured another before managing to carry the bottle, the shot glass, and his pistol into the living room with him. He deposited his assembly of small burdens on the coffee table and watched the fire as he sipped at his second shot.
This was not a burglary, he knew that much the second he stepped over the threshold. It felt all wrong for that. This had nothing to do with the vigilante case either. This had been about delivering a message to him regarding that other case he was working, and he realized with a sort of hollow feeling that he hoped the liquor would soon insulate him against, that he was looking right at it.
--------------------
Not Johnny’s dinner with Candice was not going well. It seemed like she based her responses to what he said and did on an imaginary coin that she flipped in her head. Heads up. She laughed and thought he was charming. Tails up. She looked at him as if he were an escaped serial rapist. Heads up. They cleared the table together and laughed in the kitchen as he helped her wash the dishes. Tails up. She did not appreciate him getting soapy water on her, despite the fact she’d just splashed him a couple of times, clearly on purpose.
There were two heads up in a row, they sat down on Candice’s couch to watch some TV, and she didn’t seem to mind him being close to her, but then there were about four tail tosses in a row. Not Johnny couldn’t say the right thing to save his soul.
He tried to sound smarter then he was, failed, and was promptly called on it. This put him on the defensive and so he reverted to playground antics. If you don’t know what to do, generally involving a girl, you start making fun of her. He tried to be flirty about it, because it was supposed to work. Heads up. She smiled at first, because it seemed like he was being charming.
He pushed his luck with a second attempt at a humorous observation and failed miserably…but maybe it was just because he’d worked profanity into it. Okay, that was a clear message, he tried to remind himself. She doesn’t go for that.
With a feeling not entirely dissimilar to a motorcycle crash in slow motion he realized what was going on. She seemed to be tolerating him, but only so far as her own interest required. Dinner was nice, he was okay to talk to, but that was it. The rest of it, she’d just kind of put up with or ignore. This was a service, plain and simple.
She was paying him back for the pills by feeding him, and letting him sit there and make an ass out of himself. Anything else, any interest that seemed to bubble up to the surface…hell, that was just in his mind. Or at least, it seemed that way to Not Johnny.
“Well,” he said, drawing his preamble out in the hopes she’d head him off, “I’ve got to get going.” He waited, she made no move to try and change his mind, “Thanks for dinner, Candice. It was really good.”
Candice smiled and walked with him to the door. “I’m glad you liked it. I was trying something new out.” She pulled something up from the table by the door, “Here.”
She drew one of Not Johnny’s hands to her, palm up, and scribbled something out. On closer inspection, it turned out to be her number. Maybe he wasn’t doing as badly as he had thought.
“Come by tomorrow, if you can…if you want.” She smiled, “But call first, okay?”
He smiled and nodded and was then politely on his way. He tried not to skip as he headed towards his car. Maybe he’d read her wrong, or right…depending on which reading he was referring to. For the first time in a long time, Not Johnny began to wonder if his battered body could hold up to a good night in someone else’s bed.
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“You need to forget about her.” Dunn said, watching Not Johnny dial the number again. “Do you see the flaw here?”
Not Johnny left his second message of the day and hung up. He turned back to see Dunn’s accusing stare and was somewhat thankful that the table full of the pieces of his ‘outfit’ stood between them. He closed the cell phone.
“What?”
“You don’t get the hypocrisy of it?” Dunn prodded, “For almost as long as I’ve known you, you’ve been bitching about how you always put other people first. Now, for the first time in your life you’re actually in a position to do some good and you’re going to fuck it up by being selfish.” He shakes his head, “You don’t get it. There is a reason you could do this, N.J. You had nothing to lose.”
“What are you talking about?” Not Johnny asked, adorned with the sort of perpetual shrug only Dunn could bring out. Nothing had changed, as far as he was concerned.
“Think about it. In all the books, the comics, the movies, whatever…when the guy goes after the bad guys, what happens? Invariably, the bad guys end up going after him through the people around him. See, that is where you fucked up. You’re a dying man, NJ. You had nothing to lose. They couldn’t hurt you, couldn’t get to you. If you start something with this girl, you know what she becomes?” A pause, “She becomes the biggest weapon that the world has against you.”
“But it isn’t like that.” Not Johnny pawed around for an argument that made his declaration sound slightly less feeble. “I wear a mask.”
“Okay, maybe that’s enough.” Dunn said in a tone of voice which indicated it wasn’t even close, “But think about it another way. You don’t know how long you’ve got, and if things go bad for you now it could be even less. Do you want to do that to this girl?”
“You’re jumping to conclusions.” Not Johnny affirmed. “Its just a car ride and one dinner so far. She might just be using me for pills anyways.”
“This is going to be nothing but trouble for you NJ, one way or another.”
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