Unknown

Enlightened by Sin

Jason M. Tucker

“I know the bad things you’ve done. I know the horrible things you are going to do. Your fear betrays you. I can smell the blackness on your soul, and I see your inhumanity flash in my mind’s eye. You can’t hide your corruption. No one can. And that’s why you have to die,” Victor Ives said.

He’d said those words in the same order and with the same inflection a hundred times over. It was ritual. The incantation of death was a staple of the funerary rites he’d developed. The words provided him with peace when nothing else would.

Through all the years of using his dark Aberrant power to root out the worst humanity offered, he clung to those words as a form of salvation. The words didn’t mean anything. They simply helped him sleep unburdened. He didn’t know what his victims thought about it. He’d never asked. He doubted they were fans. Especially when the cutting began.

Victor squatted down in front of his latest catch.

Sweat slithered off the man who lay bound and gagged near the drain on the sloping, concrete floor. He strained against the far-too-tight plastic zip ties around his bloodied wrists and ankles. He was a large man, heavily muscled and thoroughly pierced with nose rings, lip rings, eyebrow rings, and every other ring known to humankind. His name was Xavier Ford, and he was rotten from the top of his bald, tattooed pate to the bottom of his fake snakeskin boots.

Ford had worked for Doctor Z, a drug dealer who also happened to be an Aberrant. Z had the ability to manipulate the minds of those around him, effectively turning them into zombies. Doctor Z also had a penchant for little kids, and Ford was the non-powered human gopher who would find them and bring them to the not-so-good doctor.

Victor had made Z disappear last month.

Now, it was Ford’s turn.

Victor grabbed several skewers and a cleaver from his worktable. “I want you to know this is going to hurt.”

Victor didn’t revel in Ford’s final breath. He found no joy in the act of murder. Yet the power within him seemed to need those deaths. It was necessary.

He turned on his computer and found his favorite internet radio station. He listened while he went about the grisly task of dealing with Ford’s remains. Making a body vanish was no magic trick. It involved cutting, burning, dissolving, and a terrible amount of time spent cleaning the walls and floor of the Chamber in the sub-subbasement of his home.

Music helped. He loved oldies and the innocence so many of those songs possessed. Billie Holiday sang “Night and Day” followed by Patsy Cline’s “I Fall to Pieces,” which gave Victor a laugh as he continued to saw into Ford. Good working music.

Patsy’s voice faded from the speakers and Miss Olivia, the late-night DJ, cut in with her voice of silk and honey. He smiled when he heard her. Unbeknownst to Miss Olivia, she’d accompanied him on his nighttime hunts via the radio in his car and spoke to him during the dismemberments in the Chamber for nearly five years now.

Only this time, her words set him on edge.

Victor stopped sawing and listened to the buttery-voiced DJ read from the newswire. Apparently, Red Dahlia had once again issued a cryptic threat. Dahlia was already responsible for the murders of at least thirty-eight men and women as well as vicious assaults on at least twice that many. All of the victims were wealthy. They were politicians, executives, celebrities. Their wealth and influence seemed to be the only connection they shared. Red Dahlia was dangerous, and she always followed through with her threats. More people were going to die.

Victor would give anything to get Red Dahlia into his Chamber.

“Not to worry, my insomniac zombies, the valorous Captain Justice has vowed to unmask Red Dahlia and put an end to her ‘reign of blood,’ as he calls it,” Miss Olivia said to her audience. “Justice announced this at a ribbon-cutting ceremony of his corporate sponsor, Bishop Security. It looks like we can all rest easy with one of the nation’s top heroes on the job.”

Victor detected several gallons of sarcasm dripping from Miss Olivia’s words. He couldn’t blame her for feeling that way. Hell, he felt the same thing toward Justice and the parade of Aberrants in their four-color tights and unwieldy capes.

Most of the “heroes” were media whores, useless puppets tap dancing for dollars, doing whatever it took to enhance their own brand and align with the company that could pay the most. Just because a man could fly or bat missiles out of the sky didn’t mean that Victor wanted to buy cereal from him. Just because a woman could shoot fire from her palms or call down lighting from the sky didn’t mean Victor trusted her advice on choosing a cell phone plan. Even politicians courted Aberrant heroes now, trotting them out on their campaign trails. What could go wrong there?

In Africa, entire villages could fall to a warlord’s tyranny. Monks in Tibet could have their heads lopped off simply because they defied their government. Rapists, murderers, and molesters all walked free while Aberrant shills smiled and showed off for the cameras and their corporate masters. The sad part was that the underwear-on-the-outside league and their supporters actually thought they made a difference.

Fuck them. Hero was a subjective term. Victor was doing the real work, the dirty work of keeping the streets clean.

He went back to cutting with renewed vigor.

“Why the sudden interest in Red Dahlia?” Margie Greer asked, tilting her head as though she were trying to understand the ravings of a toddler on a sugar high. She was the editor of Angel City Beat, the small newspaper where Victor worked.

“It’s important,” Victor said. He took a seat in the editor’s cramped office. Tall columns of old magazines, yellowing issues of the paper, and other detritus threatened to topple if he breathed too hard. He hated to think what would happen to Margie in the event of an earthquake. “I think a new angle on Dahlia would help since she’s back in the news.”

Margie Greer was a pleasant enough woman. A bit like a graying toad with her wide lips and watery, oversized eyes that seemed even larger behind her thick glasses. She’d never done anything bad enough to warrant attention from Victor’s nighttime pursuits. She’d cut people off in traffic with glee, and she lied about sneaking Metamucil into her husband’s orange juice, but other than that, her bad deeds were minor. He couldn’t see any major sins in her future either. She was one of the few people he trusted. He even liked her, which was more than he could say about most.

“You write local flavor,” she said, adjusting her glasses. She leaned away from her ancient, wooden desk. Her chair groaned, and she matched it’s timbre with her own sigh. “Dahlia is the crime desk territory.”

“That’s only because people go with the crime angle,” Victor said. He had a feeling she would say this, so he’d prepared his counterargument when he was putting the final touches on making Ford’s body disappear. “People spend time looking at the criminal aspect, focusing on Red Dahlia. I want to learn more about her victims and their families. I want to see how they are coping now.”

Margie sighed once again, a bit louder than Victor thought necessary. “You’re right. I think that’s a good angle. But I can’t promise we’ll run it. I really don’t know how much you can find. Write the piece, and we’ll go from there. I just don’t want it to look like the paper is…”

“Profiting off the misery of others now that Dahlia made a new threat? The media would never do that,” Victor said. When he saw the disapproving look on Margie’s face, he quickly added, “I’ll be very tactful. The last thing I would want to do is to cause those people more pain.”

“Exactly,” Margie said. “You might find something of use in the online archives, but from what I understand, most of the ones lucky enough to survive an assault by Red Dahlia went into hiding or are in protective custody under heavy security. It’s going to take some digging.”

“I’m a reporter. I like digging,” Victor said, smiling. He didn’t care about getting a story for the paper. He only wanted firsthand information on Red Dahlia.

One victim didn’t fit the pattern. He was neither wealthy nor famous. The good news was that he wasn’t dead, and it didn’t take an extraordinary amount of digging for Victor to find him. It was only a short drive to the victim’s current location.

Victor stepped into the lobby of Golden Acres, an upscale, convalescent home on the outskirts of Angel City. The interior of the massive, three-story stone building was clean and antiseptic with an overpowering smell of fresh Band-Aids and more than a hint of despair. Convalescent was a misnomer. No one was recuperating here; this was where people came to wait out their deaths. It didn’t matter how nice the place looked.

His shoes squeaked on the black and white tile as he made his way across to the desk, where he found a bored-looking man hunched over a computer monitor. His plastic nametag denoted him as Lonnie. His hair was tidy if a bit long, but his eyebrows had the look of untamed wildness about them. The razor had missed a few hairs on Lonnie’s face, and they made Victor think of solitary cacti spread across a desert of flesh. Victor concluded that the man didn’t really like grooming and the only reason he did so was to keep his job.

“What’s up?” Lonnie asked.

Very professional too, Victor noted. “I called this morning. I’m here to see Tobias Clay.”

“Which guy are you?” Lonnie spun slightly in his chair to face his monitor and keyboard, hands poised over the keys.

“Victor Ives from the Angel City Beat,” he said, wondering at Lonnie’s words. As far as Victor knew, Clay didn’t have any living family. He pulled out his ID and showed it to Lonnie. “Someone else supposed to see Mr. Clay today?”

“Yeah,” Lonnie said. He pressed a key and then grabbed a guest pass from a drawer. “Mr. Clay’s got a busy schedule today.”

“Any idea of who might be coming for a visit?”

“He doesn’t get many people who come to see him. Only reason I remember at all is because it’s so rare for anyone to visit him,” Lonnie said.

“What do you remember?” He hoped Lonnie wouldn’t want a bribe. Victor was already down to eating Top Ramen for dinner. Cleaning supplies didn’t pay for themselves.

“Guy called himself Arby on the phone. Said he’d be by around noon. Mean anything to you?” Lonnie asked.

“Not at all,” Victor said, snatching the guest pass and smiling. Even if it did, he wouldn’t share that information. And what the hell kind of name was Arby? “Thanks.”

“Hey, be careful that you don't stare,” Lonnie said in a conspiratorial whisper. “I don’t think he likes it when people stare.”

“Most people don’t, Lonnie,” Victor said.

“I presume you are the newspaperman. I thought they got rid of newspapers now that everyone is reading everything on their phones,” Tobias Clay said without a trace of humor. He was sitting in a tan recliner in the corner of his large, brightly lit room.

Clay was a small man, and he looked at least forty years older than his actual age of thirty-three. Wisps of white hair, neglected and uncombed, jutted up in random patches around his head. His blue polo shirt hung limply off his skeletal body. The surname of Clay was unfortunately apt. He looked as though a mad sculptor had tried to rework him. Angry, white scars covered his body. His blue eyes were barely visible beneath the rough tissue. One ear was missing, replaced by puckered flesh that looked strangely like a withered, peach-colored rose. Not staring proved to be more difficult that Victor had thought.

“We have a website now,” Victor offered. “Well, we have one when it’s working properly.”

“Good for you,” Clay said. He gestured for Victor to take a seat opposite him. Victor’s chair seemed newer, and the color was quite a bit darker.

Victor sat and scanned the room. Clay’s quarters were large, at least three times the size of Victor’s own little house. It featured all of the modern conveniences: wall-sized television, sound system, plush furnishings, and a wet bar. It was more a penthouse than a convalescent’s room.

“I’m glad you agreed to meet with me. I know that you must not like talking about what happened with Red Dahlia. I can only imagine how horrible it must have been,” Victor said.

“You have no idea,” Clay said. His eyes, already little slits with bright blue peeking out, narrowed further.

“I’m here to learn your story and how you've been coping with—” Victor began to say. Clay cut him off.

“You are an Aberrant,” Clay said.

Victor opened his mouth to protest the ridiculousness of such a statement even though it was entirely accurate. Clay raised a hand to stop him.

“I know an Aberrant when I see one. That is my gift. It is the thing that got me into this mess,” Clay said. He shook his head. “No need to worry. Secrets are sacred. I know that all too well.”

“I’m just here to talk about what happened with Red Dahlia,” Victor said. “You don’t fit the typical profile of her other victims. You were an accountant. The others were high profile. What made her target you?”

“What makes you care?”

“I just want to know what happened,” Victor said. He didn’t like how Clay seemed to be looking into him.

“She is not the source,” Clay said. “Even if you could find her, and I know that’s what you want, she is deadly and quicker than most.”

“How did you survive?”

“She did not want to kill me,” Clay said. He turned his head to gaze out the window and onto the large lawn at the front of the property. “Dahlia is bloodthirsty. But she was just teaching me a lesson about keeping secrets.”

“What was your relationship with Dahlia?”

“I suppose we will get to that soon enough,” Clay said. “Tell me your true intentions first.”

“I’m going to stop her,” Victor said.

Clay’s mouth curved into a semblance of a grin. He got up from his chair slowly, and to Victor, it looked as though Clay was in pain. He limped toward the wet bar. “Can I fix you a drink?”

“No,” Victor said. “I just want to know about Dahlia.” He thought about just reaching out with his power and reading Clay. It would be easy. Readings took only a few seconds. But if he weren’t careful, a reading could render a person, even an Aberrant, unconscious.

“That is the reason I agreed to meet you, Newspaperman,” Clay said. He grabbed a tumbler and filled it with an amber liquid. “I have decided to divulge some of the secrets I was sworn to keep, sacred or not. And I have to do it before he shows up.”

“Who are you talking about?” Victor asked. He thought it must be the man called Arby and wondered if he had something to do with Dahlia.

“The man who pays for this place and who pays for my silence. An ex-accountant could not pay for this. Don’t worry. It’ll all become clear. And you won’t even have to use any powers on me,” Clay said. He winked. Or at least Victor thought he winked. Clay’s scars made it difficult to tell.

“Will this lead me to Red Dahlia?”

“You focus on the wrong monster. She is just the blade. You need to take down the hand that wields it.”

“The man who bought you,” Victor said.

Clay nodded and downed the shot of whiskey. He licked his cracked, scarred lips. “You ready for a story?”

Clay leaned against the bar with the empty glass in his hand. He stared out the window and seemed to be elsewhere.

“I worked for Bishop, but I was more than an accountant. I worked as a seeker using my ability to find others with powers. He wanted me to find him an Aberrant he could mold, someone he could buy to do some unseemly things.”

“You’re saying Bishop is the one paying for all of this? Bishop has something to do with Red Dahlia?” Victor asked, gesturing to the room. Then it hit him. Arby wasn’t a name. It was R.B., the initials of one Reginald Bishop, CEO of Bishop Industries. That’s who was coming to see Clay later. “He’s coming here today?”

“Do you want to hear the story, or do you want to interrupt?” Clay asked. “As I was saying, he was looking for someone to do his dirty deeds. We found her and came up with an agreeable financial arrangement. He hired Red Dahlia although that wasn’t her name at the time. She is a sociopath although she masks it better than most. She strikes at high-profile targets given her by Bishop. He tells her when and where to kill. It was a good arrangement for her. He even helped her find a regular job.”

“Unbelievable,” Victor whispered. “People trust Bishop and his company.”

“Of course they do. Dahlia targets the wealthy. People see this, and they decide to install the high-tech security bots from Bishop. Dahlia has never killed anyone who has a Bishop Security Bot. He makes countless millions on sales, upgrades, and upkeep. Every time Dahlia strikes, demand for the security bots rises, and he makes more money. Not only that, but his bots act as spies, funneling him information on his clients that he can sell.”

“Why would he do that?”

“The same reason men and women do anything in this world. They want to control and dominate. They want power and money. It has always been this way, and it always will be. I’m just tired of keeping it all in. It has to stop.”

“Why didn’t he kill you?”

“He thought he might still need me at some point. Not many people can spot Aberrants in a crowd and know the extent of their abilities.”

“So you know my power?” His stomach roiled at the thought of someone knowing what he was and what he did. His heartbeat quickened, and he felt heat rise in his face.

“I know your power, and I know how it works. You are the red right hand of God.”

“I think I probably work for the guy who lives a bit further south.”

Clay laughed and poured himself another drink. “I do not believe that. You cull this world of rot.”

“Doesn’t change the fact that I’m a murderer, does it? It doesn’t change the fact that my power compels me to do these things. It needs to be let out, and this is the only way I know how.”

“It is the struggle of right and wrong that everyone feels. It is a shame I did not find you instead of Dahlia back then. You might have been able to stop us a long time ago,” said Clay, a wistful tone in his voice. “Are you going to kill me now for the secrets I’ve kept?”

“You don’t seem frightened,” Victor said.

Clay shrugged.

“I’m not going to kill you,” Victor said. Clay was nothing more than Bishop’s research tool. Reginald Bishop was the mastermind, and Dahlia was the murderer.

“Bishop monitors my calls and visitors. He knows you are here and that you are a reporter. He always travels with at least two of his security bots. You might be able to render a person unconscious when you read them, but your power is not going to be able to do much to the bots. And even then, there is the matter of the—”

“How do I get around them?” Victor asked more to himself than to Clay.

“You would not be able to.”

“I have to,” Victor said. His mind spun trying to come up with ruses to let him at Bishop.

“You will. I will send him after you. He may kill me. Maybe make it look like an accident. Or he will send Dahlia to finish the job,” Clay said. “I deserve no better.”

“You said he’s always with bots.”

“Bishop always has bots with him. Captain Justice does not. Justice is the one who will find you.”

“What’s Captain Justice got to do with anything?”

“Come on,” Clay said. “How often have you seen Bishop and Captain Justice in the same place?”

“Bishop is Captain Justice? He’s an Aberrant?”

Clay laughed. “He might be Captain Justice, but his powers are not of the Aberrant sort. An off-world biomechanical rig fused to his body lets him fly, gives him his strength and his other powers. It bonds with the wearer and rebuilds itself when damaged. It even repairs the wearer with some type of nanotechnology.”

“Off-world,” Victor whispered. “You mean alien?”

“Maybe,” Clay said, shrugging. “It could be something he took from another dimension. All I know is that it is not his tech, and he has not been able to replicate it.”

“Christ, this is weird,” said Victor. This morning, he’d just wanted to find a serial killer. Now, he was worrying about a madman with a cape and nanotechnology.

“This is the big leagues,” Clay said. “If I know Bishop, he will come after you in the guise of Captain Justice when you are alone. He will try to take you out quickly. You have to be ready.”

“I can do that,” Victor said although he wondered if he really could. Clay was right when he said this was the big leagues, and Captain Justice was definitely one of the heavy hitters.

“If you succeed and people find out it was you that killed Captain Justice, they’ll brand you a villain. You realize that, do you not?”

“Yeah, I understand.” As much as he hated the way Captain Justice was a part of corporate and pop culture and as much as he now hated Bishop, a part of Victor felt hollow. Justice was a symbol that people loved and revered. Killing him would have unintended consequences.

But Justice was no hero.

“Before I go,” Victor said as he left his seat, “tell me Red Dahlia’s name.”

Victor nursed a bottle of cheap beer and watched the drowning sun. Silver flashes of light sparkled against the deep orange as the great orb dipped into the Pacific.

The view from the kitchen of his small, inherited house atop a hill overlooking Angel City was quite beautiful most days. He hardly noticed now. Night was on its way, and Victor waited for one of the world’s most powerful heroes to come and kill him over money and power of all things. Maybe Clay was right. Maybe they were the only things that mattered.

Against the backdrop of the multihued sky, a small, silhouetted shape streaked toward the house. The shape grew larger as it came closer. It was time.

Victor opened the sliding glass door that led from the kitchen to the back patio. No reason to let Captain Justice break an expensive piece of glass.

The flying man slowed as he neared. He landed gracefully on the patio, his crimson cape billowing slightly as he did. The rest of his costume was a mixture of red, white, and blue stripes. His square jaw jutted out from the star-spangled mask. The suit was snug on his muscular frame, and Victor suddenly realized that he hadn’t known just how large Captain Justice was. Justice strode through the opened door and into the kitchen.

“Hello, Mr. Bishop. I wanted to tell you that Captain Justice is a horribly clichéd name, and it isn’t even accurate in your case. Also, the initials of your company are BS. Did you even think about that?” Victor asked.

The caped hero didn’t seem bothered that Victor knew his identity, so Victor continued. “Are you going to start some long-winded speech now? That’s what the villains in all of the old comic books would—”

Something crashed into Victor’s left shoulder, and he quickly realized it was one of Justice’s fists. The blow happened so quickly he didn’t have time to register that Captain Justice had bridged the distance and was getting ready to kill him. He could barely move his numbed arm.

Captain Justice’s other hand snatched Victor’s throat.

“Do not speak,” Justice said, his voice deep and commanding. He began to squeeze. “I’ve laid waste to the world’s most powerful Aberrants. What could you possibly do?”

Victor clawed at the vice-like fingers around his neck with his good hand. The grip was unbreakable. Trying to match strength with Justice was impossible. The world seemed to darken. If he didn’t act, he would die.

Victor reached out with his power. Tendrils of inky black smoke leaped from Victor’s chest and wrapped around Captain Justice’s face.

The strength of the grip faded. He continued to focus on Captain Justice, whose eyes began to roll up into the back of his head. Then the visions, the worst things the man had done in his life, came rushing into Victor’s mind.

As a child, Bishop pushed his twin brother off a cliff. Victor heard Bishop’s brother scream as he fell. Victor saw Bishop twisting a phone cord around the neck of a man caught trying to steal information from his databases. Victor listened to the man’s dying gasps. A hundred such atrocities rushed at Victor from the past and the future. They were there and gone in a flash. Then he saw Bishop and Clay standing before a woman dressed in tight, blood-dark leather. A similarly hued mask covered all but her lips, pale and delicate chin, and hazel eyes. Red Dahlia. She spoke in a silky voice, agreeing to Bishop’s terms for murder.

The visions ended. He’d seen enough to feel justification in what was to come.

Victor didn’t know how long Captain Justice would be unconscious. It varied from person to person. Humans could be out for as much as five or ten minutes. Invasion into the most private and horrible thoughts was not something that the mind or the body took well. Aberrants were usually only out for less than a minute. Even though Bishop was human, the otherworldly rig he supposedly wore might mean that he would regain consciousness sooner.

There would be no time to take Justice into the Chamber. Victor grabbed the sharpest knife from the block on the kitchen countertop. He knelt over the fallen man and began to cut away the red, white and blue suit. It was difficult with his numb arm, and the suit was not a normal fabric. It seemed to emanate from the rig beneath. It tried to grow back until he started in on the rig.

With the suit gone, it was no longer Captain Justice on the floor. It was just Bishop.

The rig was a thin membrane of connected, pulsing, luminescent wires and nodes on Bishop’s chest. It almost seemed a living thing. He began slowly unfastening the rig. It was delicate work, but he was able to remove it. He set the rig aside and focused on Bishop.

He returned to the kitchen drawer and grabbed plastic zip ties to bind Bishop’s hands and feet. He’d just finished zipping the ties when Bishop started to come around.

“What did you do to me?” Bishop asked.

Victor picked up the knife from where it lay among the tattered remains of the Captain Justice uniform. “I saw you for what you are. And really, it’s more about what I’m going to do to you now.”

“We can work something out,” Bishop said. He struggled against the ties, but he seemed to realize very quickly that his power was gone. “I’m a very wealthy man.”

Victor leaned over him, the knife poised to strike. He definitely wasn’t going to write about this in Angel City Beat.

Victor didn’t know why, but he tried the rig. Something within him, perhaps the darkness of his Aberrant nature, told him that he must.

The rig adjusted to fit him. Microscopic filaments burrowed into his tissue, sending electrical surges to every cell in his body. The pain quickly gave way to pleasure as the rig’s unnatural power shot through him.

A bodysuit made of similar material to the one he’d cut off Captain Justice began to spread out from the rig and cover his body. No trace of red, white or blue. Victor’s suit was a shimmering, liquid black. The suit looked similar to the ebony tendrils of his natural Aberrant power. He was happy to see there was no cape.

Power was a damned thing. He could be a dark god or a shining hero. He did not know where he would fall.

He did know one thing.

Miss Olivia, with her silky smooth voice and murderous crimson ways, was going to spend one more evening with him.

He knew the bad things she’d done…