Just Cause Universe 3: Day of the Destroyer (9 page)

#

Shane smoked cigarette after cigarette as he drove the service truck through the streets of Harlem. He’d explained that if he didn’t have specific job duties, he was supposed to monitor the local power grid for any trouble or potential repairs. “They train us to watch for loose power lines or to recognize the sound of a transformer blowing or whatever.”

“I always thought power guys just hung around drinking coffee and eating donuts until something went wrong,” said Gretchen.

Shane laughed. “When we can. But I’m trying to give you a better impression of New Yorkers. How am I doing so far?”

“Not bad.”

“Hey, you hear that? Under the sound of the traffic?”

Gretchen cocked her head and listened. Just barely, she could hear a humming, hissing sound. It reminded her of something from a mad scientist’s lab in an old black and white movie. “I think so,” she said.

“That’s a dying transformer.” Shane checked his mirrors and then cut across two lanes of traffic onto a side street. “Any second now…” Gretchen heard a loud bang like a gunshot and saw a puff of black smoke rise a block away. “There it goes,” said Shane. “Now I get to play hero, because I’ll be Johnny-on-the-spot.”

“Shane on the spot,” said Gretchen.

He got on his radio and called in the blown transformer, repeating a bunch of numbers and information to the Con Ed dispatcher. Shane parked the truck in front of a small auto mechanic’s shop. “You want to get out or wait here?” he asked.

Gretchen looked out at the street full of unfamiliar dark faces. She didn’t think of herself as racist, but she felt completely out of her element. “I’ll wait.”

“No problem,” said Shane. “I’ve got a thermos of Coke under the dash. You’re welcome to it. We’ll grab some lunch after I’m done here.”

The word
lunch
made Gretchen’s stomach growl. She hadn’t eaten since the day before. Her stomach grumbled again, this time loud enough to make Shane look back at her as he climbed out of the cab. She bent her head forward to let her hair fall across her face, obscuring the blush she could feel crawling up her cheeks.

She watched in the side mirror as Shane pulled tools and equipment from the side of the truck and then jammed a hardhat on his head.

“It just hummed and then blew,” said an old Hispanic man with oil-stained hands. “You got here just in time.”

“I’ll take care of it, mister.” Shane grinned from ear to ear. “I’ll need access to your back lot. You don’t have a dog back there, do you?”

“No, no dogs.” The man led Shane behind the shop.

Gretchen reached down, found the thermos, and poured herself a cup of soda. A few people glanced at her riding shotgun in the Con Ed truck, but most of them went about their business or watched as Shane climbed up the telephone pole toward the now-quiet transformer. She sipped at the Coke and then heard the sound of parts and tools rustling around. She looked in the mirror and saw a kid was rummaging through the side-mounted toolbox on the truck. Shane was already up the pole, and nobody else seemed to notice. She’d have to be the one to do something.

She leaned out the window and looked back at the kid. He was scrawny, in his early teens, and filthy. He had the furtive, haunted look about him of someone who’d been persecuted pretty much every day of his life. In his own way, he was as much a victim as Gretchen was. She felt a little sorry for him, but she couldn’t let him steal something from Shane’s truck. She cleared her throat. “Can I help you?”

He jumped back from the truck as if he’d been scalded by a hot stove. His eyes widened as he realized he’d been caught red-handed. His face betrayed the terror of someone who knew a far worse fate lay ahead.

“Easy, kid. I’m not going to do anything. Just leave the tools and stuff alone, okay? My friend needs them to fix the power.”

The kid narrowed his eyes. “You’re not going to turn me in?”

Gretchen smiled at him. “No, you’re not hurting anything. Just leave the stuff alone and we’ll call it even, okay?”

He wavered, uncertain what to do. Maybe he wasn’t used to anyone being nice to him, Gretchen thought. She knew a couple kids like him back in Dyersville; kids whose fathers liked to drink and got violent when they did; kids who showed up to school with bruises and haunted expressions.

“What’s your name?” asked Gretchen.

The boy looked around as if seeking an escape, and Gretchen had just decided he was probably going to run away when he replied, “Harlan.”

“Hi, Harlan. I’m Gretchen.” She stepped from the truck and extended her hand in greeting.

Harlan looked her up and down, from her Keds to jean cutoffs to blue t-shirt. His eyes lingered on her chest before he shook her proffered hand. “Nice to meet you,” he mumbled, as if the words were unfamiliar.

“Harlan, are you messing with that truck?” The older Hispanic man who’d first talked to Shane hurried up. Harlan’s face tensed up.

“No, it’s fine,” said Gretchen. “We were just talking.”

“If you say so.” The man turned to watch Shane work atop the telephone pole.

“What were you looking for?” Gretchen asked Harlan.

“Just stuff,” he said. “I build stuff, and I need parts sometimes.” He bowed his head like he was embarrassed.

“What kind of stuff do you build?”

“Maybe I can show you sometime.” Harlan glanced up at her to see if she was looking.

Gretchen realized in surprise that the boy had developed a sudden crush on her. She felt flattered and a little embarrassed—she was much too old for him, but she didn’t see any harm in letting him imagine.

It was refreshing to have innocent attention for once.

Chapter Five

July 13, 1977 1:00 PM

“At first we thought a bomb went off in it,” said the fleet service manager at the bus station, whose embroidered name tag read
Dwayne
. The air inside the shop was smoky and made Faith’s throat sore. A fine black film of sooty grime covered everything in the building, and Faith made every effort not to brush against any of it. Dwayne’s hands and face were smudged with it, and decades-old oil was ground into his pores, giving all his exposed skin a stippled appearance. He gave Faith and Irlene a tour of the bus in question. “But there’s no sign of fire or explosion. The seats aren’t even damaged. Whatever it was just blew in the windows.”

“Excuse me,” interrupted Faith. “Blew them
in
?”

“Yeah. We didn’t find any glass on the street at all. I’d have suspected kids with rocks, except there isn’t anything inside that looks like it was thrown.” He shrugged. “I heard when it happened. Sounded like thunder. I thought maybe the heat was going to break and we’d finally get a little rain.”

“Maybe it was like those Memorex commercials,” said Irlene. “Some kind of loud noise busted all the windows.”

“The problem with that is that it affected the bus on both sides,” said Faith, deep in thought. “A loud noise would have only caught one side of the bus, and probably damaged other things on the street too.”

Dwayne motioned for Faith and Irlene to look inside the bus. Irlene shrank herself back down to doll-sized and zipped in past Faith’s head like an eager sparrow. The manager jerked in surprise but then managed to keep his cool. “We already started to clean it up. We didn’t know Just Cause would want to see it.”

Faith saw a pile of broken glass swept into the middle of the aisle. She marveled that every single side window was shattered. Cracks marred the windshield in a radial pattern, which intrigued her. The way the safety glass had cracked made it look like someone had hurled a bowling ball at it from outside. “Everything was pulled inside,” she said. “What could do that?”

“And ‘phyx-u-ate someone’s lungs, if it’s the same person,” said Irlene.

Faith snapped her fingers. “Vacuum!”

“What?” Irlene landed as softly as a butterfly on Faith’s shoulder and perched there.

“This girl can create vacuums. She created one in that boy’s lungs and killed him. She created one inside this bus and blew in all the windows.” Faith turned to Dwayne. “You said all the tires on one side were flat?”

“Yeah. That made me think it was pranksters or something, but when we filled them back up we didn’t find any signs of leaks.”

“Like the air inside them had just vanished,” said Faith. “Is the driver who brought it in still here?” She felt growing concern nipping at her heels. A new, unknown parahuman was always a danger, and this one seemed powerful and had already killed someone. “We need to see if we can get any more information about this girl.”

Dwayne shook his head. “He’s deadheading back to Chicago. Law says he can’t drive for at least eight hours. They’re a good hour away already. Want me to call the bus and hold it somewhere?” He looked eager at the idea of getting to do the kind of thing reserved for prime time cop dramas.

He’d have to play
Starsky & Hutch
some other time.
“No, I don’t want to inconvenience any other passengers,” said Faith. “But do tell him we’re on our way. We’ll catch him en route.”

“But they’re thirty or forty miles away!”

Faith grinned. “Fastest girl in the world here, remember? I’ll be there in no time.” She turned her head to look at Irlene, perched on her shoulder. “How fast can you fly?”

Irlene shrugged. “Fast enough. If I can’t keep up, I’ll shrink myself down enough to ride in your pocket.”

“Better do that now,” said Faith. “I’m planning on hitting three hundred.”

“Three hundred miles per hour?” spluttered Dwayne as Irlene slipped into the pouch beside Faith’s radio. “What’s that like?”

Faith winked at him. “It’s fast.”

#

Harlan stared wide-eyed at the pretty girl beside the Con Ed truck. She was a real fox, as some of the older boys in the neighborhood would have said. He could see a fading bruise beside one of her eyes that she’d tried to cover by makeup and sunglasses. Harlan felt they must have a lot in common; he’d been punched in the face lots of times.

At thirteen, he’d never spent any time with girls. Other boys his age, or even younger, had girlfriends in the neighborhood, but Harlan didn’t like being around other people to learn what they really did with each other. He just knew what he’d seen on the television, which struck him as odd and contrived. One thing was certain, though, and that was he wanted to impress Gretchen.

“Want to see my bike? I built a bunch of things onto it.”

“Sure,” said Gretchen, not really looking at Harlan. She seemed distracted, like something was bothering her. He figured that at the very least he could give her something else to think about.

“I’ll go get it.” He scampered across the street and ducked back into Gonsalvo’s shop.

As Harlan entered the darkened shop, a glint of stray sunlight from a shelf caught his eye. Curious, he went to see what was there; perhaps it would interest Gretchen so she would talk to him more.

It was a tin box with a fine patina of rust on its surface. A shiny stainless steel crank emerged from one side. That was what had gleamed at him in such an enticing way. Harlan picked it up in wonder, and memories flooded into him.

When he was only eight, he’d stolen Reggie’s wind-up jack-in-the-box toy and taken it apart to see how it worked. He’d found the clever spring-powered mechanism fascinating and decided to build something else with it. He’d felt a little bad about taking one of Reggie’s favorite toys, so he built a replacement for her. When he turned the crank, the box unfolded like a flower opening to display an intricate carousel that spun, with horses that went up and down on their wire-thin poles. He’d been so proud of it that he couldn’t give it away. Reggie wouldn’t have been impressed by Harlan’s arrangement of gears, springs, hinges, and pushrods. She’d probably just have broken it playing with it.

So Harlan had kept it, and showed it to Gonsalvo, who’d delighted in the craftsmanship. Now he was beyond such primitive engineering; instead of springs, he used motors and hydraulics, electricity and combustion to power his creations. He turned the crank. The box squeaked and clattered, but still unfolded the way he’d designed it to. Surely, Gretchen would be impressed. Surely, she’d stick around to talk more with him. He set it in his bike basket and wheeled it back outside.

The Con Ed man was down from the pole and rummaging through the back of his truck when Harlan came out of the shop. Gretchen was chatting with him about lunch of all things. Harlan’s stomach rumbled to remind him he was also due for a meal. As he had many times before, he pushed thoughts of food out of his head to focus on the task at hand. “This is my bike, Gretchen.” He raised his voice so she’d be sure to hear. “I built it myself. It has a lot of cool features.”

“Does it? That’s nice, Harold.”

“Harlan. I’m Harlan.”

“I’m sorry.” Gretchen looked at the Con Ed man, who shrugged and said he needed probably another ten or fifteen minutes.

“So do you want to see it?” pressed Harlan.

“Sure, I’d love to see your bicycle,” said Gretchen.