Where There's Fire (Panopolis Book 2) (7 page)

“Aaand . . . we’re good.”

“Finally. It’s fucking hot right here.” She dropped her mic and looked at the flames. “Jesus. Poor bastards, I hope no one was in there.”

“The warehouse was listed as a chemical storage facility,” her cameraman said. “There was a secondary structure below, apparently, but no one’s gonna be getting in there for a while, even though the investigators are champing at the bit. It’s all toast.”

“No kidding.”

Numb, I turned around and walked half a block, then sat on the filthy curb and put my head in my hands. Our house was gone. Our house, the one we’d found together, the place we’d made into a home once my nice apartment downtown was no longer an option. Our house, with all of our stuff in it, the dorky T-shirts I bought for Raul and the tiny kitchen he filled with my favorite foods, the warehouse where he did his experiments and fabrication and the new bed we’d barely had a chance to break in. Our shower with its stupid, tiny water heater that meant we had to share, the medicine cabinet where my fresh bottle of pills had burned to ash. My head throbbed just thinking about it, but I didn’t have time for the breakdown I so desperately wanted. I had to pull myself together for Raul’s sake.

Okay. Whoever was behind kidnapping Raul—it had to be a kidnapping, I wouldn’t let myself even think that he might be dead—they’d known where we lived. They’d known I was pulling a job today, or at least had followed us and inferred. And for some reason, they wanted me alive.

I finally made my blistered fingers reach into my pocket for the envelope. It was plain white, but the card inside was thick and felt expensive.

You are cordially invited

To a meeting with

MAGGOT

At noon sharp.

No weapons but your own capacities.

Lateness will result in bodily harm.

Below it was an address that I recognized. Anybody would have recognized it: #5, Zosimos Street. It was the beginning of Z Street, the heart of the reddest red zone, which used to be the Spartan’s and then Burning Man’s mansion before it was blown to hell back in the fifties by a suicidal Villain named Fallout. I’d never been there. Lower Z Street was the place where you found Villains who lived as Villains 24/7, people who weren’t even people anymore. It held people like the Necromancer, Mother Monster, and Corvid, the ones so vile and frightening that the best the city hoped was to contain them and encourage them to kill each other. I’d never heard of Maggot before, but he had to be—

No, wait. I had heard of him. From the guy yesterday, Pinky with the glowing eyes. Maggot was his boss. Maggot, whoever he was, was the guy calling the shots. Vibro had to be working for him too. I didn’t know what Pinky’s power had been, exactly, but Vibro’s was impressive. Whoever Maggot was, he was tough enough to keep someone like Vibro in line, and tough enough to grab Raul.

Fuck, I couldn’t let myself think about Raul right now; it would drive me crazy. I had to prepare myself to head down Z Street, and all I had was . . . I took stock: A briefcase with foreign cash I couldn’t use, passports I didn’t have time to examine, and a gold watch that belonged on a much larger wrist. Rainbow gemstones, which were only helpful if I could find the right fence. My Chap stick tube of jelly fire. My mostly tapped-out cane, only useful as a cattle prod at this point thanks to the taser in the handle. And my broken phone.

Shit, in other words.

I put the watch on my wrist, put the gemstones and tube in my pocket, and left the paperwork in the briefcase, then pushed both down the nearest storm drain. I gripped the cane tight, pushed myself to my feet, and headed back to my scooter. I’d need it if I was going to get to Z Street on time.

Has anybody else noticed how ubiquitous our Heroes are becoming lately? You can’t go one aisle in the local supermarket without seeing Mr. Fabulous’s face plastered on something, and big businesses have been changing their models to Heroes for selling products in Panopolis, and only Panopolis. That’s a lot of time and investment on their parts. What spurred this new and innovative method of shoving our faultless Heroes in our faces?

Oh, I don’t know, maybe . . . tax incentives? Our new mayor has offered up over a hundred million dollars in tax incentives to businesses who want to settle in Panopolis. Through a series of dense, obscure, and honestly Machiavellian behind-the-scenes maneuvers, part of those incentives include the use of our city’s Heroes in their marketing. How do they get away with this? Why don’t our Heroes stand up for themselves?

It’s a merchandising black hole, folks, and it all comes down to exploitation.

Driving down Z Street wasn’t for the faint of heart, or the unstable of hand. It smelled alternately of sewage and smoke, and for a place that looked so abandoned, with derelict buildings slowly slouching into each other and potholes that were more like sinkholes, it was loud with catcallers. I kept my head down and kept driving through the ruined core of the city.

Lower Z Street used to be the place to live in Panopolis, with a beautiful theater and a shopping district and some of the most outrageously huge mansions anyone could ever want. After Fallout nuked the place, though—a very small, tightly focused nuke that hardly left behind any radiation at all, honest—it became a ghost town. First it was designated a hot zone, and then a place where the undesirables could be shuttled off to, while other places in the city were given new infrastructure and investment. Z Street mansions were gutted, posh apartment buildings were made into tenement housing, then mostly torn down during the seventies when both Villain and normal crime were on the rise. The supermarkets were replaced with liquor stores, and even those were eventually driven out.

Lower Z Street had become ten square blocks of living Hell, and no one, not even the Heroes, dared to pick a fight there by themselves. That wasn’t to say that people didn’t find ways to get by, though. You could barely go a block without tripping over someone trying to sell you something. Pimps, drug dealers, black-market gun runners, even fortune tellers: Z Street had a place for them. Raul had told me that a lawyer actually set up shop there once, trying to get Villains to sign on to a class action lawsuit against the city. He disappeared after about a week.

Before today, you couldn’t have paid me to go to Lower Z Street. Literally, if someone had walked up and offered me a million dollars to ride my scooter to #5, I would have laughed in their face. You don’t go down there unless you’re a predator, and even then, odds are good that there’s going to be someone bigger and badder than you waiting in the dark, ready to snatch you off your feet the moment your back is turned. Raul could walk there, although he’d never stayed for long when he went to trade information, find out about new jobs, and share what he knew for a price with the rare brokers who facilitated deals between Villains.

The going was slow, bad enough that I had to leave my scooter behind—most likely for good—six blocks out and walk the rest of the way. There were piles of trash in the streets, the sidewalk was nonexistent, and there was the occasional need to dodge people who didn’t step aside to share their space, who kept their heads down and bulled through like you weren’t even there. Not to mention, the eyes. I felt them tracking me, peering from broken walls and out tinted car windows. I probably looked hopeless. That was okay, as long as nobody tried to mess with me.

Naturally, someone messed with me. Several someones, a few blocks out from #5. I saw them step out and a frisson of fear, heavily tempered with anger, fizzled down my spine. The ridiculous gold watch on my wrist read 11:45. There was very little leeway, and I couldn’t afford to be late.

“You,” one of them said. I recognized him alone of the gang. He was Lizard, a recent escapee from the Abattoir, with green, pebbly skin, no hair, and black hourglass pupils. His Villain name must have been a cinch. “What are you doing down here, Smoky?” He smiled, revealing surprisingly plain white teeth. “Searching for your bear? Your big daddy?” His gang snickered along with him; none of them appeared to be much beyond their teens. Two were so covered by silky gray hair that I could have been wrong, but I doubted it.

I braced myself, one hand on the cane, the other fisted in my pocket. “You need to get out of my way.”

The kid next to Lizard appeared pretty normal, except for the fact that he had four eyes, two in front and two set in the sides of his bald head, and four arms. He smirked at me. “I don’t think we need to do that. If anything, I think you need to explain why you’re walking on the wild side without a care in the world. Don’t you think we merit more respect?”

“I think we do,” mused Lizard. “How about you monkeys?” The gray-furred pair nodded enthusiastically.

Faster than I could track, Four-Arms pulled a gun on me. “How about you get down on your knees and explain yourself?”

Oh fuck, oh fuck. If I ran, I’d get shot. There wasn’t time for this, though. Dropping the cane, I lifted my hands, then carefully got down onto my knees. “Hey, I’m not here to cause any trouble,” I said softly. The guy with the gun grinned and came closer, not holstering it but not firing either. “I have an invitation from Maggot.”

“Easy to say. Let me see it.”

And let him take it from me and destroy it, maybe? That wasn’t happening, not if I could help it. “Here.” I reached into my pocket, very slowly, and held it up. “This is it.” Come closer, c’mon, you know you want to. What did he have to fear from me, after all? I kept Outside Me calm while Inside Me started cranking up the paranoia. I knew what it felt like to have a target on my back, and this situation was ten times worse than being confronted by Pinky yesterday. It was a frenzy of anxiety and frantic aggression, akin to the sensation being strapped down in a chair, held completely immobile while someone shaved my head bald and jabbed me with huge needles full of life-changing green goo. It was the freewheeling panic I’d done my damnedest to train myself out of feeling, because I hated to hurt Raul if he touched me at the wrong time.

Right now, though? I was fine with sharing that anguish and fear. Four-Arms reached out to take the card, and as his fingers made contact I grabbed his wrist. The muzzle of his gun swung around to get a bead on me, but I’d already started to overtake his id, and what I wanted more than anything was him shooting everyone but me. I wanted it with every ounce of energy I had, and he responded. He aimed his gun behind himself and shot Lizard square in the chest. The monkeys scrambled away but he got them as well, one in the back, one in the leg. They howled in agonized unison, but they were still alive.

Four-Arms was shaking with adrenaline, all eyes casting around for more threats. I pulled myself to my feet and clung to his waist, tempering the strength of my influence slightly.

“We’ll walk there together,” I whispered in his ear. “Nice and easy. If someone tries to attack us, shoot them. Don’t hesitate.”

“Yeah—yuh, yeah, okay—”

“We’ll get through this.” I guided us around Lizard’s twitching body, resolutely not looking at it head on. I’d just killed this man. I hadn’t pulled the trigger, but I’d killed him, I was responsible for this. I was a murderer.

No, no. I couldn’t think about that now, I didn’t have the time for remorse or guilt. My mind had had about all the shocks it could handle, and I had to stay focused. I had to get to Raul. It was hard to hold back my self-loathing when I ended up stepping in a puddle of the man’s blood, though.

Getting distracted was bad for keeping Four-Arms in line. One minute we were moving along just fine, and the next Four-Arms shuddered in my grasp, like he’d just woken up from a nightmare. He swung the gun toward my head again, and my sudden panic brought down the wall between Inside Me and Outside Me. It was all just me, desperate that he not shoot, and his finger paused, the trigger half-pulled.

“No,” I whispered to him. “Not me. Not me.” I have to get to Raul, I have to. “We’re in this together now. You’ll be fine as long as you stay focused, okay? Focus on keeping us safe.”

Four-Arms shuddered but turned his gun away from me again. “O—okay.”