Past Imperfect: A Scorpion Story

Warren Stockholm

 

“Herr Kurt, we should do an editorial on superheroes,” Benny Herzog suggested, popping his head into my private office.

I looked up from the proof copy of the latest edition of The Inquisitor, Benny all fuzzy because I was wearing my reading glasses, and said, “Superheroes? Why?”

Benny stepped fully into the room, the milk-glassed insert door with my name on it hitting him on the rump as it closed behind him, cutting off the frantic sounds of my secretary Olga’s typing and the other clattering office noises of the bullpen at eight o’clock on a Monday morning. There were days when I propped the door open with my rubber plant just to let it all in. There’s something very soothing about the noises of a busy and successful newspaper office. But this morning, I’d needed some privacy or I was never going to get the issues worked out of the latest edition. I’d had a long, busy night and no sleep.

Benny held up several grainy photostats, delivered via one of my correspondents in the city. I could just make out a humanoid figure hanging suspended over a busy line of traffic. If I hadn’t known it to be impossible, I’d have said the figure in the photostats was flying. Benny smiled broadly, showing off his nicotine-stained grin, the grin that always said money shot. “It looks like Steeltown finally has one. Its very own superhero.”

So that’s how it started. A little adventure that nearly cost me my life, not that such things were unusual, considering my history and line of work. There are people out there who dislike me, who want to kill me. I take great offense to that. This city is American through and through from its tallest spires to its lowliest slums. This city is not Germany under the iron fist of the Reich. This is not the America held hostage for almost sixty years by the Axis Powers. Germany nearly destroyed a third of the world before it was brought low by the most embarrassing of circumstances: financial depression. People do not live in fear here. They have freedom. And when someone—anyone—threatens that freedom, when they threaten me, they answer to the Scorpion.

Steeltown is his territory. His city. And here, there be monsters.

I set the proof aside and started going over the photostats one by one. If forgeries of some kind, they were so damned good even I couldn’t find the wires and special effects using my special magnifying monocular.

I was still examining them, Benny hovering excitedly at my elbow, when Olga tapped on my door. She had the morning edition of The World, my number one newspaper competitor in the city.

The World is run by real estate mogul Farnon Pendrick, who owns more properties in Steeltown than anyone else, myself included. The World is merely a hobby of his, or so he’s been known to state in public. But then, seven years ago, when I’d finally made The Inquisitor the number one paper in town, I’d learned through various channels that Farnon was pouring nearly all his assets into The World. The price of a wounded ego, I suppose. It had since become a white elephant that Farnon couldn’t let go. Call it a cold war if you will—or maybe Farnon is just a poor loser—but I have to keep an eye on him every minute. As such, one of Olga’s duties is to fetch me The World the moment it hits the newsstands.

“Your paper, sir,” Olga said cheerily, depositing it on my desk. It was an inside joke between us that she gives me the world every day. But today, I wasn’t laughing.

I glanced at Farnon’s paper, looked back at the photostat I was trying to authenticate, then looked back at the paper. A very similar photograph graced the front page of The World, a man in dark blue, skin-tight body armor and an honest-to-God cape was apparently flying free-style over Jump Bridge, only a few miles from this very building. I dropped the monocular to my desktop and grabbed up the paper. Farnon had gotten the drop on me today.

I was both angry and impressed. Yes, it’s possible to be both. I disliked Farnon, but I also admired his chutzpah at running such an absurd story. So for the next two weeks, I had my best correspondents in the city covering the many sightings of the vigilante who called himself Morningstar.

The reason I say vigilante is that he seemed to be bent on insinuating himself into the nightly activities of Steeltown. The chump had the misguided belief that by preventing crimes from happening, it somehow made him a hero worth celebrating. I had my doubts. I had long ago lost my faith in God, government, and superheroes. I was a big boy now, my youth and ignorance far behind me—long since buried in a prisoner-of-war trench in Nazi Germany. No one did anything without expecting something in return. It went against human nature.

The truth would come out. In time.

All I had to do…all the Scorpion had to do…was watch and wait.

#

For the next two weeks, I had my people watch and report on Morningstar’s many nocturnal activities though I didn’t print any of his stories. Or, if I did, I cut Morningstar’s part in the fiasco out. Farnon did the same thing anytime there was a Scorpion sighting. It was a longtime joke between us. Only The Inquisitor reported on Scorpion activity. The World, up until a few days ago, reported so-called “real” news—car wrecks, gangbangings, murders, rapes, and the occasional terrorist act.

I’m nothing if not a patient man. I waited and watched. It was little things at first. Morningstar was sighted stopping a pair of youths from assaulting a cab driver. Later that same day, he collared a purse-snatcher. Small beans, crimes almost laughable in their insignificance. Then again, those were the types of crimes that the Scorpion had cut his teeth on. If anything, it seemed Morningstar was more of a showman than a hero. He certainly enjoyed being photographed as he went about his nightly duties committing acts of Boy Scout heroism. The Scorpion, on the other hand, usually took pains to avoid publicity—unless he knew that publicity would raise readership of my paper. In that way, he and I often work together.

Two weeks to the date of the first sighting, I got my chance to talk to Farnon. We were part of the same gentleman’s club, and we did our teeing on Lakeside Greens. We met up on Saturdays twice a month, but I had missed the last game. I had been recovering from a slug I’d taken in the shoulder when the Scorpion put one of mobbie Gil “Black Fingers” Blackman’s lackeys through a plate glass window. He’d gone over the edge backwards, pulling his manstopper as he did so. He was an amazingly accurate shot up until the moment he died, splashed across the fresh concrete outside Gil’s new high-rise apartment complex.

“Hallo there, old boy. You’re looking fit as usual,” Farnon said as he came up the hill, towing a valet, two security personnel, and his teeing partner and fourth wife Belinda, a bottle blonde who was young enough to be his granddaughter. Farnon greeted me the same way every time. He hated me, but he was a gentleman about it and preferred to launch his assaults at me in true passive-aggressive editorial style.

Belinda Pendrick smiled insouciantly at me, her golf slacks indecently tight. The one and only time we’d been alone, Belinda had climbed into my lap and tried to dry hump me. Since then, Farnon only let her out of his sight fully chaperoned by one of his heavies. The guy standing on Farnon’s left was for his security. The one on the right, nervously picking his nose, was there to keep Belinda out of trouble. I smiled and kissed Belinda’s hand.

Farnon did not reciprocate the gesture with my own teeing partner, Suzaku. Despite being the most stunning thing on the green in her flowing white kimono full of flocking red cranes, her hair bound up in a bounty of small braids and her face painted as exquisitely as a fine porcelain doll, Farnon treated my Suzaku as if he might catch a communicable disease. Farnon believed in the science of eugenics. He thought it scandalous that I should be keeping a Geisha. That was another point we disagreed on.

Suzaku was my sensei, not my Geisha.

We’d only just teed off when he said, “I know what you’re thinking, old thing, and you’re completely off base, as usual.”

“What am I thinking, old thing?” I asked as we hefted our bags and started down the hill where our balls waited. Well, I hefted my bag. Ironically, Farnon had his wife carry his. I figured she’d done something wrong and was being punished.

“I know what you’re thinking, but I didn’t hire him, the chap with the cape. Awful melodramatic, wouldn’t you agree?” Farnon wrinkled up his tanned face like a Pekinese.

“Yet you insist on running stories on him.”

“I’m considering it an experiment.”

“Oh?”

“I wanted to see if this theory of yours is right, if all this vigilante humbug is capable of selling papers.”

“Paper not selling, old thing?” I raised my eyebrows at Farnon, but he wouldn’t answer me.

Belinda sashayed past us, giggling.

Later that evening, as I prepared for bed, I told Suzaku, “I’m not entirely certain old Farnon’s behind it.”

I stood in the lavishly tiled, Byzantine-inspired bathroom off my bedroom, peeling off the Scorpion’s bloody clothes bit by bit while trying not to stare at myself in the mirror. It had become something of a ritual. Obviously, I needed the mirror to shave in the morning, but I resented it bitterly and avoided it when possible. The man in the glass was tall and gaunt, almost stoop-shouldered tonight. He looked sallow and unwell and sported dark, haunted rings under his pale, gray eyes. I did not like my eyes of late, the way they flickered uncertainly around a room like silver bugs. The way they never rested—never looked rested—anymore. It made me want to put the Scorpion’s veiled fedora back on.

After the hat and long leather coat had come off, I went to work on the bloodstained gauntlets and various bits of body armor. I pared the Scorpion down until he was only Herr Kurt Reinhardt again, a man, a German ex-patriot, and a newspaper mogul, someone most people in the city figured was dirty but only in terms of sex and money. They did not know about the blood. No one knew about the blood except Suzaku.

It had been a rough night. The brother of Black Finger’s dead mob lackey had called a challenge, threatening to blow the top portion off a bank building if the Scorpion didn’t arrive and turn himself over for execution. The Scorpion had arrived on time but not in the manner the man, a nervous little fellow, had expected. Instead of walking into the trap, the Scorpion had rappelled down the side of the building and shot out the plate-glass office window. The glass had shattered and knifed into the man. He’d been little more than a bloody heap by the time the Scorpion had put a mercy bullet in his brain.

Dressed only in my trousers, I pulled the band from my hair so it fell in long, tired strands against my cheeks and the back of my neck. Even my hair hurt tonight.

I went out into the adjacent room, where Suzaku had prepared my bed. She stood by my bedside with a collection of small pots of creams she herself had made from ingredients she did not divulge to anyone. On nights like these, she applied those creams to my shredded muscles and ligaments then went about the distasteful work of sewing up any wounds that had not healed of their own accord. They would be manageable in the morning, I knew, the Frankenstein stitches all gone. But whether this is due to Suzaku’s exotic salves or my own inner queer clone anatomy, I’ve never discovered.

“Why do you say that, K-san?” she said in response to my statement about Farnon.

I sat at the edge of the bed as she began working her magic creams into various muscles. The creams burned at first then slowly stole away the low-grade agony snaking venomously through my back and shoulders. It was perhaps her touch more than anything else that helped, that eased the pain. It felt good to be touched with something other than bald-faced violence.

“Farnon knew I would suspect him of being behind this Morningstar business. He almost seemed annoyed by it all.” I grunted as she examined the gaping, mouth-like wound in my side where a shard of glass had ripped into my flesh. My genetics were struggling to mend the hole but not succeeding very well. Suzaku opened the case that contained trauma needles and sutures and went to work on it while I lay on the sheets, bleeding and grunting with every stitch.

“You do not think he is inclined to such subterfuge, K-san?” Suzaku asked. I was acutely aware of the soft press of her breasts as she worked over me. It made the experience that much more pleasurable, I have to admit.

“I think he finds such things beneath him. He seems almost…reluctant, like he’s only doing this on advisement from someone else. He has that board of investors, doesn’t he?”

“I recall you saying something to that effect, K-san, yes,” Suzaku answered, cutting a suture wire with her delicate, sharp teeth.

“I wonder if his investors are forcing him to run the stories, hoping to increase circulation.”

“Perhaps you ought to run the stories as well.”

“I like to think my readership is more interested in terrorists and the Scorpion than in some idiot in tights and a cape.” I glanced down where Suzaku’s hair blanketed my lower half like a silken, blue-black shawl as she finished trimming the last stitch with her teeth. Eighty-three stitches—something of a record for me.

Suzaku massaged her healing creams into my wound then climbed back up my body and lowered her face so her long, perfumed reams of hair tented us in together. “Perhaps an opinion piece about the possible identity of the vigilante,” she suggested demurely. “It might draw him out.”

“It might make him want to kill Kurt Reinhardt.”

“If there is a mind behind all this, it may force that person to show their hand. Either way, K-san may unsettle the party involved.”

“You may be onto something,” I agreed. The pain was edging away, leaving me aching and sore and empty. Our lips were mere centimeters apart. I looked deep into Suzaku’s eyes and saw darkness, flames, chaos. Hell. If I looked closely enough, I could see her rising up from a nest of phoenix fire, eternal, un-killable, unlike myself. It made me want to mourn. I wished she was real as I lay there on my pillow, touching her hair, which felt delightfully soft to my callused hand. I wished she were a real woman.

But the one creature drawn to me was only female on the outside. Inside, she was a shikigami, a guardian beast, older than rocks or trees or earth. Just a raw force of nature made flesh. Making love to Suzaku is like being drenched in a lightning storm: exhilarating, overwhelming, sad, unreal. It’s all I want at the time, but when it’s over, the loneliness and doubt are redoubled, reminding me of how impossible it is to carry on a relationship with a real human woman. The Reich who manufactured me poisoned my body and blood with their chemical venom; there is no fluid in my body not caustic on contact with human flesh.

Suzaku came unto me, covering me in her light, fragrant, lily-soft body. She opened her obi belt to me, and I slid my hands beneath the silken material, stroking her breasts until she arched her back and sang the sweetest song in a voice not human at all. Her entire body flushed, and I could feel her skin warming under my touch. When she looked again at me, her eyes weren’t human at all. They looked like portals into Hell, that place I had sent dozens of criminals over the years. Suzaku smiled as if sharing some intimate knowledge with him. Not for the first time, I wondered if I wasn’t simply a tool of the gods, here to dole out the punishments they were apparently too busy or too damned lazy to take care of themselves. I wondered if I wasn’t food for Suzaku, feeding her souls and chaos to fill her eternally empty soul like the victim of some hungry, eternal vampire.

Suzaku kissed me, and all my doubts vanished for the moment. “My little K-san,” she said sweetly, like a mother rewarding a child for an act of obedience. She stroked my cheek. She kissed my throat then moved steadily downward, the imprint of her rose-red lips lifting my body like a puppet on strings, writhing to the will of a greater force. The wound in my side didn’t hurt at all. Nothing hurt so long as I stayed within the circle of her arms.

#

The following day, I had Miss Emily, our opinion columnist, run a small article speculating on the possible origins of Morningstar. Letters immediately began flooding the office, thousands of people trying to guess at the identity of our masked local superhero. Some expressed doubts that he was real, claiming he was nothing more than a collection of special effects. There were even people proposing a duel between Morningstar and the Scorpion and theories as to who would win in a fair fight. No one bothered to mention that the Scorpion seldom bothered to fight fairly.

Suzaku had been right. The exercise did in fact propel Morningstar, or whoever was behind him, to act more boldly because the following night, the caped vigilante intercepted an armed bank robbery, taking three direct gunshots in the chest before flying off—or so various witnesses claimed. His flying had been erratic, but he had flown off. Obviously, he was stepping up his game in a way he was unprepared for.

The Scorpion gathered blood samples that I then examined under the high-powered electron microscope in my private lab at home. I was a child of the Reich. The Reich had created me, educated me. I knew mutated cells when I saw them. Morningstar’s cells were similar to mine, the only difference being that they had been mutated at some later point in his development. My own mutation was induced on an embryonic level; I never had normal cells. These cells were forcibly altered. Morningstar’s cell mutation was random rather than uniform as in my case—the hallmark of forced mutation.

The cells also looked self-regenerative, which explained how Morningstar could take three direct shots in the chest and still fly off. I sat back on my lab stool and thought about that a moment. I knew that sooner or later, the Scorpion and Morningstar were going to have to meet, and it would likely be in the Scorpion’s best interest to be careful. The Scorpion wasn’t nearly as durable or regenerative as his caped rival seemed to be.

It came as little surprise to me that a week later, during the NFL playoff at The Steeltown Stadium, halftime was interrupted by a message on the digital scoreboard that read:

SCORPION MEET ME NOW

Suffice to say the missive, wedged between a wedding proposal and a get-well greeting, upstaged the show, which was something of a shame because the Steelers were leading Baltimore by 6-4.

It was a Sunday afternoon, and I was home in my office, the television on in one corner. I was poring over a number of files that a man who owed me a favor had retrieved. They contained Farnon’s various bank statements, including all the off-shores no one else knew anything about, even the IRS. I was looking for a withdrawal of a large sum of money, or even a series of large sums that might indicate a payroll, but most of the activity on his statements belonged to his wife. Belinda was bleeding him dry. And—to my utmost glee, I admit—his paper wasn’t doing nearly as well as I’d thought.

I looked up when I heard the announcer talking about a showdown between the Scorpion and the city’s newest vigilante, Morningstar. Two and half minutes later, I was upstairs in my bedroom, changing into my gear. Suzaku swept forward, virtually floating in her blood-red kimono, bearing piece after piece of body armor, various recent injuries aching from the pressure of the Kevlar I was sporting under my trench coat. Never say I’m not prepared.

“Do you think it will be enough, K-san?” she asked. She sounded concerned as always.

I slipped on the veiled Fedora. The Scorpion chambered the Sting and sank more ammunition into his pockets than he probably needed. “It better be,” he said.

He left the estate and cut across the city. He knew every hidey-hole, every shortcut, and every dead-end alley. In less than ten minutes, he’d reached Steeltown Stadium. The game-watchers were likely expecting a bloody match to the death in the end zone, but the Scorpion had no desire to make this a spectacle.

He moved stealthily around to the back of the stadium building, keeping to the shadows and out of the sallow, yellow pools of security lights. He reached up to the brownstone wall behind the concessions stands and placed his gloved hand upon it, the diamond-tipped fingers digging deep into the rough brick, then reached up again, kicking against the bricks, climbing steadily up the face of the building until he’d reached a window ledge. Balancing on the ledge, the Scorpion caught the bottom rung of a fire escape and swung himself over. The next four stories were easy climbing as the crowd roared its approval down in the Coliseum-sized field. The Steelers must have made another touchdown.

“You came,” said a voice as the Scorpion reached the top of the concession building.

He already had the .50 caliber Sting out, which made climbing over the edge of the building awkward but not impossible. He wasn’t about to approach Morningstar unarmed.

The man who was Steeltown’s newest sentinel was tall, taller than the Scorpion, and perhaps twice as wide. Body armor and/or biological mutation had granted him a towering, wrestler-type physique further emphasized by the dark, midnight blue suit trimmed in places with white. It wasn’t a very good suit for the purposes of stealth in the Scorpion’s opinion. Then again, Morningstar wasn’t especially fond of stealth. His face was half-masked with a hood, and he trailed a long cape behind him. The first thing the Scorpion did was calculate all the things that could go wrong with a costume like that. The second thing he did was cock the Sting and take a bead.

“Who are you working for?” he asked the man.

Morningstar looked briefly taken aback. “That’s not much of a greeting, friend.”

“I’m hardly a friend,” the Scorpion answered, leveling the gun with the bridge of Morningstar’s nose. “Answer the question, or I’ll shoot your brains out the back of your fucking head, asshole.”

Morningstar looked appalled. The eyes in the hood were much younger than the Scorpion had expected. Morningstar raised his hands to show he was unarmed. The Scorpion knew that already. There was no way he could carry weapons on such a spotty outfit, which made it just another bad idea. “I just wanted to talk to you!”

“Really.” The Scorpion smiled grimly behind the veil.

“Really,” Morningstar confirmed. He had no German accent that the Scorpion could detect, but that meant nothing. Kurt Reinhardt could hide his accent very well when he needed to. “I’m new to all this,” he said, indicating the city without moving too much. “I thought I might benefit from speaking to you, learning from you.”

“You summoned me here because you want to chat with me?” the Scorpion asked.

Morningstar flinched. “I know I can learn a lot from you. I know you have great wisdom to impart.”

“You must be fucking joking.” The Scorpion charged forward and side-kicked Morningstar in the breadbasket. The man went down surprisingly easy. The Scorpion was disappointed. While he was still down, the Scorpion pistol-whipped him across the face. Blood and teeth spattered across the concrete like red dice.

Morningstar groaned.

“Who sent you?” the Scorpion demanded to know, jabbing the nose of the gun into the soft pouch of flesh under Morningstar’s chin. “What’s his name, asshole?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about! Are you fucking nuts?” Morningstar screamed through blood, loose teeth, and terror.

The Scorpion shifted the gun exactly five inches to the right and jerked the trigger. The shot exploded into the asphalt roof in the tiny space between Morningstar’s neck and shoulder, filling the night with hot ozone. The whole thing made the young man scream and wet the front of his outfit, which further disappointed the Scorpion. He waited until the deafening rapport faded, and the young man lay there limp, shaking like an electric wire carrying a charge, tears filling his eyes and spilling over his cheeks. He was making small gasping noises like a man fighting badly not to hyperventilate on the spot. The Scorpion stood back though he kept a bead on Morningstar’s forehead. The Sting could turn the young man’s head into a Hula Hoop. It might even be interesting.

“I’ll ask you again,” the Scorpion said, his voice dead, emotionless. “Who are you working for? Is it the Reich?”

Morningstar shook his head. “I told you! I don’t know what you mean!”

The boy sounded hysterical, in no state to lie. The Scorpion lowered his gun but kept it close at hand.

Slowly, Morningstar sat up, wiping at his bloodied mouth with his sleeve. If the Scorpion hadn’t known any better, he would have said new, shiny teeth had already replaced the broken ones in his mouth. That was interesting too.

“How did you come to be this way?” the Scorpion asked, genuinely curious.

“I don’t know!” the boy sobbed as he fought to get his composure back.

“You don’t know? I find that hard to believe.” The Scorpion started raising the gun again.

“I’m telling you the truth! I don’t know! I answered an ad in the newspaper for a modeling position. That’s what I am, you see…what I used to be.” He gasped for breath and smeared away the rest of the blood. “It was an address downtown, at some warehouse. I should have known better I guess. The moment I was in the door, someone hit me. The next thing I knew, I woke up in a lab. I was there a long time…months at least.”

The Scorpion watched him carefully. “And what went on at this lab?”

Morningstar shook his head. “They never told me anything. It was all so painful, and it went on and on. They kept injecting me with this stuff that burned. It hurt so badly, but it also made me stronger. It made me survive all the things they did to me.” He stopped, and his eyes turned inward as he seemed to relive the memory, not a pleasant one. He looked genuinely shaken. “Then, one day, I was able to break the straps they used to hold me down. Even the bars on the windows of the lab were no problem for me. I wanted to go home, you see. I wanted to see my girl, my parents. I fell from the window and into the sea. I think I was being held on some remote island somewhere.”

Assuming the boy was telling the truth, he could easily be talking about a Reich-run lab. The Scorpion knew there were still many in operation, labs secreted away in remote Costa Rica and on Polynesian islands, places owned by private investors, places almost no one visited.

He’d go with the boy’s story…for now. “And what happened after you fell into the sea?”

“I drifted a while until this fishing boat found me. After I got home, I thought everything would be all right, but then things started to happen. I started to change…”

“Mutate.”

“What?”

“I’ve examined your blood, boy. Whatever those scientists shot you up with, it mutated your DNA at a core level.”

The boy looked interested. “That’s why I can fly? Why I can’t be hurt?”

The Scorpion studied the boy’s tear-and-blood-streaked face under the hood. If he was lying, acting, he was doing a damned fine job of it. He felt a twinge. “Why this?” he asked, indicating the costume with the gun. “Why become Morningstar…whoever you are.”

“Mark. My real name is Mark.”

“Why become Morningstar, Mark?”

The boy climbed shakily to his feet. “I…I don’t know. I guess I didn’t want what happened to me to happen to anyone else.”

The Scorpion laughed. It just burst out of him like staccato gunfire from the muzzle of an automatic. Laughter nearly doubled him over. “So altruistic! So naïve! I think I’m going to be sick!”

Mark looked wounded. His eyes darkened, becoming broody pits into an unknowable hell. “I thought you would understand, but you’re just as messed up as I am! I guess what they say about you is true.” He looked at the blood on his hand and clenched it.

“What do they say about me?”

“That you’re insane. That you’re worse than the criminals you kill.”

The Scorpion laughed that off as well. The sound was bitter and nearly hysterical as he jumped up and down and aimed the Sting at pale, round mother moon hanging high overhead. Play a little hardball with the criminal underworld, and everyone thinks you’ve taken the bend! Suddenly, you’re the villain, you’re the menace, even though crime was down 60 percent in the city since the Scorpion had laid claim to it. The Scorpion knew that because Kurt Reinhardt had done the research for an exposé years earlier. Fucking ingrates. The Scorpion wanted to shoot them all—and he would have except that would make readership deteriorate, and he couldn’t let Kurt Reinhardt’s business fall to pieces. They worked too well together.

“It’s true, though, isn’t it?” Mark said, sounding disappointed. “You’re not a hero. You’re just some evil shit with a gun a head full of loose parts.”

“Boy,” said the Scorpion, his laughter dying along with his little dance, “you don’t know what evil is.” He flung himself at Mark, and the two of them went right over the edge of the building. It was a surprisingly long drop; in the course of it, somehow, Mark got on top. The impact felt like a sledgehammer to the Scorpion’s spine though the Kevlar probably saved his life. He felt the vibration of the impact in his teeth and a sharp pain cut down one hip, probably a hairline fracture. Mark landing atop him further drove the breath from his lungs.

Mark’s face was twisted, not young at all. He slammed his fist into the Scorpion’s shoulder like a kid having a temper tantrum. The Scorpion grunted and heard the distinct snap of his shoulder dislocating on impact. A bolt of pain jigged through his body, but the pain felt so good!

The Scorpion giggled, brought his knee up, fully intending to drive it into Mark’s groin, but Mark launched himself into the air and hung suspended above him like a man on invisible wires. The Scorpion took a moment to admire the feat before rolling away and rising shakily to his feet. He tottered like a broken toy. Seconds later, Mark slammed his big fist into the ground, breaking the concrete.

Mark screamed.

The Scorpion laughed, snapped his shoulder back into place like a Lego toy, and brought his gun up. But before he could find his target, Mark flew right into him, driving him into the wall of the building behind them. The Scorpion heard other bones crackle, and the sweetness of nearly unendurable pain swept over him, making him groan in appreciation. Now this…this was a good conversation!

Mark held him effortlessly against the wall. His strength was enormous. He gut-punched the Scorpion so he sagged against the wall, coughing and spitting up gobs of blood. Mark pushed his face close, so close that the Scorpion could smell the blood from his once-broken teeth on his breath. “You’re not so tough now, tough guy. Just another lowlife piece of shit to clean up…”

The Scorpion lunged at him, snarling and biting off the tip of his nose. Mark hadn’t expected that. He screamed and yanked his head back, letting his enemy go and retreating as blood gusted over them both from the bloody hole in Mark’s face. “I know they sent you!” the Scorpion laughed hysterically as he savored all the blood in his mouth. In the back of his mind, he knew he sounded like a hyena, like his clone brother Wolf, a man so evil and erratic even the Reich would have nothing to do with him. “I know who they are!” He tried to lift the heavy Sting, but with his injured shoulder, he could find no purchase.

“You are one fucking crazy motherfucker!” said a man who had suddenly appeared beside the two of them. He put a gun, cocked sideways, to the Scorpion’s cheek.

The Scorpion stopped and moved his eyes analytically in the direction of the gun. The man standing beside him was dressed in a security uniform, but he recognized him easily enough. It was Gil “Black Fingers” Blackman. The chickens always came home to roost at the oddest of times!

“And what do you want?” the Scorpion asked coolly, his laughter dying.

The gun barrel nudged the Scorpion’s cheek behind the veil. “What everyone wants. I want your fucking skin on my wall for taking out my boys, freakshow.”

“You’ll have to get in line for that, chump.”

In that moment, Morningstar flew at the two of them, roaring. The Scorpion moved aside. Blackman squeezed off two direct rounds. Morningstar sucked up the slugs like a sponge, barely reacting. The two wound up on the ground with Blackman on top at first, then Morningstar as he delivered a number of stunning blows that reduced Blackman’s ugly face to ugly face soup.

“You kill me, and I’ll have my boys blow this whole stadium, kid!” Blackman gargled. He grinned brokenly through his facemask of blood. “The whole place is wired with plastic explosives. That’s ten thousand lives on your head, kid!”

The Scorpion struggled to sit up with all his broken parts, wondering what Morningstar planned to do.

Morningstar drifted back, eyeing the man as if he only half-believed him. He was used to petty thieves, not terrorists. Blackman was the big time. The mobbie climbed unsteadily to his feet, weaving but not down for the count. He was a big man, a former dockworker and heavyweight boxer who’d never lost a match even after he’d turned to organized crime. He smiled at Morningstar and mumbled out of his crooked, mushed-up mouth, “Now you’re gonna do exactly what I tell you, big boy.” He turned and pointed one bloody finger at the Scorpion. “Kill that freak of nature, or everyone here dies.”

Morningstar thought about that but only for a moment. He turned, eyed the Scorpion, and lunged.

The Scorpion shot Mark through the brain. It cleaved off the part of his head that was hooded and bathed Blackman in bloody gray matter. Blackman hopped back as the body fell toward him like a downed tree. Blackman looked at the Scorpion and blinked as if confused.

The Scorpion shifted the gun to track Blackman. His hip was mending. His arm was good enough to put another bullet in another brain.

“You shoot me, I’ll have my gunmen take you down, freak,” Blackman said, raising his hand to point erratically at the bleachers high above them both. “I have snipers. I have…”

“I hate it when a guy can’t keep his bluff straight,” the Scorpion said. He shot Blackman through the head too.

#

Later, at home, I sat listening to the newscaster on TV as he recapped the events at Steeltown Stadium, Suzaku sewing up the sizeable fifteen-inch tear down my back. With the game going strong and the Steelers in the lead, no one had noticed what was going on until halftime. That was America for you. After that, it was all a muddled confusion though police investigators and medical examiners were struggling to piece the story together.

“They can’t identify the boy, Mark,” I told her. “If that was even his real name. No one knows who he was or where he came from. There’s no record of him anywhere.”

Suzaku started rubbing her special creams into my stitches and various contusions. It was pretty obvious I wouldn’t be playing the green with Farnon this coming Saturday. More’s the pity.

“He was, in fact, a mutant, but they can’t identify him,” I further explained “He wasn’t on Farnon’s payroll. He was probably one of them. One of the Reich. They always are.”

Suzaku’s painted fingertips stroked my shoulders and down over my chest, soft and persistent.

“It’s always the past that gets you, Suzaku. Always.”

She leaned down to kiss my shoulder softly.

“I did the right thing, didn’t I? Killing Mark…or whoever he was?”

Suzaku’s hair brushed my cheek like a perfumed cloud, and her voice purred in my ear. “K-san, let’s go to bed.”