My knee was killing me, but as I walked it began to ache less and less. I found a newsstand. "The Paragon Times". The date, October 15, 2011. I felt a moment of shock, but if you had asked me, I couldn't have told you what I'd expected the date to be. Something told me I might have been out of commission for a good while.
The headline on the paper read, "Hellions Torch Another King's Row Apartment Block". Flashes of men in masks with baseball bats and pipe wrenches. Worthless animals and nothing more, thugs whose only goal in life was to waste the time and resources of better people. Who were these Hellions? What made them tick? Who was in charge? The best place to find answers like that is usually someplace where booze is flowing.
After a while I arrived at the back of an old delivery truck. Every few minutes someone would step in or step out. Vague flashes of memory - bright lights, neon, loud voices. This was what I had been looking for. I stepped into the back of the truck and emerged into a hive of activity.
People in all kinds of get-up, moving this way and that. Masks, capes, sequins. The city was overrun with heroes. I almost felt bad crashing their little party - almost. Except for all their glitz and glimmer, not a damned one of them was there when...
...when what? The empty hole in my memory tore at my mind. There was nothing to be done for it.
I put one fit in front of the other, leaving wet puddles of brown, fetid water on the floor behind me. Dirty looks be damned, I needed answers. The club was filled with people, all catering to their own base desires. These filthy, writhing bodies. These drunken hordes. These were the heroes of Paragon, defenders of righteousness. Meanwhile the smoke plume from King's Row was blotting out the moon.
I swiped an abandoned drink and leaned onto the bar for a minute. I took a sip - mostly melted ice. Perfect. I needed to keep my mind sharp, but I didn't want to stand out too much.
Just then I caught a glance from one of the capes in the room. A mix of concern and revulsion, as I judged it. I moved my tongue around inside my mouth, running it over the jagged crags, feeling needles and spikes of pain as my tongue grazed over raw, exposed roots. The taste of copper heavy in the back of my throat. In the first few minutes I'd had in a while to rest and think about my situation, it was beginning to dawn on me that I might be standing out more than I'd hoped.
A glance into the mirror behind the bar confirmed it. Gazing back was a meshwork of criss-crossing soiled bandages. They'd once been white, but the sewage and the water had turned them a sallow yellowish-green. Whatever wounds were on my face had bled through, turning sections of the wrapping a sticky-looking reddish brown. The edges of the bandaging frayed away, revealing blank and empty seeming holes where the eyes and mouth ought to be - my eyes obscured as they were by the brim of the fedora. A hideous, bandaged skull was gazing back from the mirror, aping my movements. My stomach turned a little.
Some of the patrons were having a discussion about the nature of good and evil. A dull ache had begun to creep in, exacerbated by the music. I needed to get my business taken care of and get out of there.
"I hear a lotta talk of evil in here...", I said. My voice croaked out of my throat in that guttural, medical-patient sort of way. It sounded like I hadn't spoken for a long time.
"..I need to know about the Hellions."
The lady who had glanced before spoke up, her accent thick and suggesting Europe - most likely Ireland. Her bright red hair and interlocking tattoos confirmed it. She carried herself well - it looked to me like she'd been in a scrape or two.
"Plenty of them in Atlas Park. King's Row, too," she said.
Her companion wore a strange getup - some sort of headband, cape, feather boa combination. She looked like martian royalty - especially with her skin an off shade, looking more like a gemstone than like human skin. The Irish cape introduced herself as "Honor", and the lady in the indigo queen garb gave her name as "Sally". For lack of a name I knew, I introduced myself as "Nick".
 |
| Celtic Honor and Sally. |
"I tried to get an apartment in King's Row a while back", Honor said, "But there was a good deal of crime."
Buildings burning flashed through my mind. "Criminals? Like, hellions?"
"Them, and other gangs. And the thorns."
I scribbled these things down in my notebook. I didn't want to look like too much of an outsider. I pretended I knew who the 'other gangs' and the 'thorns' were, figuring I'd follow up later.
"There's been a lot of arson. I need to know about every case of arson and attempted murder over the past six months," I said. I figured guys don't just turn up lying in retention ponds. Maybe I had come up missing. If I was lucky, my disappearance might have been speculatively connected to one of these torch jobs.
"Sounds like you want the Paragon Times," said Sally, in a mechanical rumble.
Indeed it did.
I said goodbye to my new drinking companions. It was time for me to hit King's Row and paint the town red.
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