First Blood

I spent the first day sleeping underneath an overpass.  Recent experience had taught me moving around in the day was unwise - people react poorly to a face like mine.  They'll live on top of a heap of scum and filth and murder, but put something in front of them that really makes them look at the world they live in and they get queasy.

When the sun went down, I went up to a rooftop to survey the landscape.  Miles of glass, steel, and concrete.  Miraculous feats of human engineering - and here we were beating each others' heads in in the streets.

Yesterday, Honor had mentioned something about Hellions in King's Row.  They shouldn't be hard to find.  You couldn't throw a rock in Paragon city without hitting a dirtbag.

Sure enough, I rounded a corner and there they were.  Three scumbags trying to snatch a purse from some lady.  She was making a racket - screaming and crying out in terror while they tried to wrench the bag away.  People were just walking by like nothing was going on.  Didn't want to get involved.  Didn't want to interfere. Willing to let this lady die in front of them, if that's what it took.  The muscles in my jaw began to ache.

What if someone did step in?  What if someone said something to them?  Would they skitter away like the cockroaches they were?

"Hey,"  I called out, strolling up as casually as a guy that looks and smells like a recent tenant of the local morgue possibly can.  "What's the problem here?"   The three turned toward me.  They smelled like sulfur and sweat - the pentagrams on their T-shirts that glaring blood red color, matching the fury in their eyes.  Something familiar about them - something that made knots in my stomach.  There were three of them - the leader of the crew had a sledgehammer strapped to his back.  His compatriot was a dim-witted looking schlub clutching a revolver, and the third guy was wearing a mask that looked like it came from the Halloween bargain shelf of the local party store.

The leader put a hand into my chest and gave me a good shove, reaching up behind his back for the sixteen pound sledge he had strapped there.  "Looks like we got ourselves a contestant, boys," he growled from beneath the bandana that obscured the lower half of his face, "Let's show him what he's won." 

Things happened quickly then.  I don't know what my plan of action had been.  Maybe I hadn't thought that far ahead.  Maybe I was just angry seeing this lady getting picked on, and hadn't thought deeper than that.  But I was in it now - I was outnumbered and outgunned.

As sledgehammer shoved me, I grabbed his wrist and turned to my left, drawing him off balance.  My left palm came smashing into his elbow as my right arm cranked back on his wrist, and I felt his elbow snap and invert.  A bloody howl came up from his throat.  Revolver raised his pistol, and I yanked on sledgehammer's broken arm, spinning him around in time to soak up three or four bullets.  With a solid kick to the ribs that gave a healthy crunch, I sent sledgehammer tumbling into Revolver and both of them went to the ground.  I was right behind, landing on the dog pile on all fours. 

Revolver was trapped under the lifeless body of his boss - so I started jackhammering my fist into his face, the back of his head rhythmically bouncing off the concrete with every blow.  All of the rage and confusion of the past few days came boiling up.  I kept pounding, the popping and crunching sounds turning into wet smacking noises.  Streaks of red were spread several feet across the pavement.  The sounds echoed off the buildings.  Somewhere, someone was screaming.

I got to my feet, my chest heaving.  Red liquid was streaked up my arm, dripping off of my fingertips onto the ground.  The hellion in the mask was at a dead run, a quarter of a mile away by now.  The woman was standing there, clutching her purse, her mouth open in a silent 'O', tears standing in her eyes.  

I looked at her.  Then down at the bloody mess at my feet.

"Yeah, well..."  I muttered.   There didn't seem to be anything to say.

I turned and walked off into the darkness to the sound of approaching sirens.

Gathering Intelligence

Not entirely sure where my feet were carrying me, I made my way through the back alleys of King's Row.  Something in my instinct told me to avoid being out in the open and to keep myself out of the light.  I walked paths that were familiar and yet alien, my muscle memory carrying me where my conscious mind could not.  I snagged an old, battered fedora out of dumpster and pulled it down low over my face, hoping it might offer some additional discretion.

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.

Awakening

Deep blackness.  The kind you lose yourself in.  A darkness that doesn't end.  Flows in and out of you, filling up your lungs and your guts, dragging you down and consuming you.  Then piercing white light and all-consuming pain.  Confusion and terror.

Where was I?  I pushed my hands down through the darkness, felt it swirling through my fingers like a tangible thing.  My fingers dug in, through a thin layer of silt and god knows what else, scraping across the rough surface of concrete.  Raw pain from exposed nail-beds scrabbling on concrete.  Then I pushed, and my head broke the surface.

I could feel the grit and the sand in my mouth - could feel dirty water flowing up and ought of my lungs.  Someone was coughing out what sounded like a wheezing death rattle and trying to choke out a scream.  It took me a while to realize it was me.

I knelt in the shallow water wretching for a while.  My mouth was full of something gritty and bitter.  Sewer-smell everwhere.  I rose to my knees, rolling my tongue around in my mouth to try to get the grit out.  Felt a jagged landscape of shattered bone where my teeth ought to be.  Tasted a little blood.  Someone had ruined the inside of my mouth.  The rest of me felt like hell, too.  My clothes were a sopping wet torn wreck of stained rags.

I staggered to my feet.  Patted my pockets, hoping to find some clue as to what was going on.  My fingers came across an edge - I traced it and felt a rectangular shape.  I pulled a thin moleskine notebook out, eagerly flipping it open.  My eyes were accommodated to the dark.  The first few pages were written on, but the muddy water had soaked them, turning the ink into unrecognizable blotches.  There was some fresh, blank paper toward the middle that has escaped most of the water.  It was empty, like my mind.  The thing that was troubling me was that basic information like my own name wasn't coming back to me yet.  Back to the pockets.  No keys, no pocket knife.  Most importantly, no wallet, no cash, and no identification.  Looks like I picked a bad time to be a minimalist.

I took a look around.  It was dark, and I was standing in the shallow end of a retention pond in King's Row.  Waste and detritus were floating around everywhere.  Looks like the kind of place a scumbag gang might try to dump a body.  I felt a fury welling up inside me - a slow burn at first, but building steam like a freight train.  Gangs.  The PPD were a piss-poor excuse for a bunch of hall monitors the way things were going in this city.  I might not be able to remember my own name, but at least I could remember what I thought of bottom-feeders. Pain shot through my hands - without realizing it I'd starting cracking my knuckles, and apparently they were sore.  At least I put up a fight.

I walked up the embankment toward the chain-link fence surrounding the retention pond at the top of the rise.  I grabbed on, and with practiced ease swung my body over the fence, coming to a smooth and quiet landing.  Apparently I'd done this before.

I walked into the night time streets of King's Row, determined to find some answers.