Crab Town (12 page)

Jack was praying that Little Sister wouldn’t be one of the unlucky patients that day. As Queen gave her blood (most of which she knew was radioactive) and closed up the wound, he watched Little Sister gazing up at the balloon people hovering above her as if they were angels coming to take her away.

When there was nothing else Queen could do, she said, “As long as she can fight the infection, she’s going to pull through.”

Jack was relieved.

When Little Sister awoke near dawn, she was surprised to see Jack standing above her. For a second, she had forgot what had happened. But once she tried to stand up and cringed at the wound, she remembered.

“You’re going to be alright,” Jack said.

She wouldn’t look him in the eyes. After a long silence, Little Sister said, “You made a mistake.”

“What mistake?”

“You should have let me die.”

“You would prefer to be dead?”

Little Sister squeezed her fist open and closed. “I might as well be dead. By asking for your help, the King Crabs will never take me back. They’ll think I’m too weak.”

“Weren’t you their leader? Don’t you tell them what is weak and what isn’t? Maybe all of you should change the way you think.”

She shook her head. “They surely already chose a new leader. If I went back to them, the new leader would treat me as an enemy and a traitor.” She was almost crying with her words. She had to pause for a moment in order to compose herself. “Without the King Crabs, I’m not going to last long. I’ll be dead by the end of the month.”

Jack handed her a card, the two of diamonds. “Not necessarily.”

She took the two of diamonds.

“Join the House of Cards,” he said. “You’ll get a new lease on life. And maybe, one day, we’ll create a better life for the people of Crab Town.”

Little Sister joined. At first, she did because she didn’t have anywhere else to go, but she quickly grew to love the job. She hated being treated like a kid by the rest of the Cards, but she had a lot of fun robbing banks and breaking into the homes of the rich.

Because she was the expert on building/repairing sail-bikes, the King Crabs eventually lost their advantage over other gangs. When they found out Little Sister was still alive, they tried to get her back. They didn’t care that she had betrayed their rules. But she refused them. She had a better life with the House of Cards. Once her old gang threatened to kill her if she didn’t go back to them, she had the King of Clubs and his thug-like army take them all out. Now the only people using sail-bikes in Crab Town are the House of Cards.

Little Sister is a master of the sail-bike. As the police charge after them on their tandem bikes, they have no way of catching up to her. She peddles fast and can take turns even faster. There are four tandem bikes coming after Doomsday and Little Sister. Each of them have a driver at the front of the bike, with a shooter in the back of the bike firing over their partner’s head.

Miss Doomsday pedals up to Johnny Balloon as he runs through the street.

“Break off,” she tells him. “We’ll lead them away from you.”

Johnny nods his head, but before he can turn into an alleyway, his knapsack breaks. The pieces of concrete weighing him down spill out into the street and Johnny loses his gravity. He floats up into the air, thrashing his limbs, crying for help.

Miss Doomsday goes for his string, but it slips through her fingers. The wind blows him up the street, completely out of her reach.

“Help!” Johnny screams as he goes tumbling through the air, but there’s nothing Doomsday can do to catch him.

Johnny points his revolver in the sky above him and fires, sending him back toward the ground. Doomsday tries to speed up to catch his string, but before she can reach he floats back up into the air. He fires again.

The cops assume that Johnny is aiming at them, and focus their gunfire at him instead of the robbers on the bikes. Instead of going for his string, Doomsday has to return fire with her Tommy Gun. She shreds the tires of one of the tandem bikes, sending the cops into the sidewalk. By the time Doomsday turns around, a gust of wind sends Johnny further up the road.

“I’ll get him!” says Little Sister, blowing past Doomsday at top speed.

Miss Doomsday lays down some cover fire, as Little Sister sails through the street toward Johnny. Citizens try to run out of the way, getting caught up in the gun fight. Little Sister weaves through them effortlessly, trying to catch up to the balloon man before it’s too late. He goes further down the street, higher and higher up into the sky.

Little Sister leaves the street and jumps over a row of steps, entering a building, she crosses the lobby of a dilapidated hotel, riding up the handicap ramp to the second floor. She rides to the back of the building, knocking hotel guests aside, then jumps from the balcony to the balcony on the other side of the street. Pedaling up to the rooftop, she sees Johnny at face level flying over the street beside her.

Keeping up with him, Little Sister jumps from rooftop to rooftop, sailing over alleys. Little Sister has been doing these kinds of stunts ever since she could ride, and knows these rooftops well. She set up half the ramps enabling her to make the jumps over the alleys. As a thief, she’s created escape routes for herself that the cops could never possibly follow. She’s had no problems losing the cops in the past and getting back to Crab Town without a trace. But she never thought she’d be using these rooftops to save a balloon man from floating away.

At the end of the block, the buildings end at a busy intersection. Little Sister has to make her move now if she ever wants to save Johnny. She takes a jump, into the street toward the balloon man. Just as she leaps a gust of wind hits, launching her sail further up into the air, but the wind also sends Johnny higher. She catches the last inch of string and pulls, wrapping the string around her handle bar. Then the two of them descend into the street.

Little Sister hits down hard, but she doesn’t fall. Johnny Balloon looks down, amazed that the girl actually caught him up there. But when she doesn’t pull him down, realizing he’ll be stuck up in the air for the rest of the escape, he panics at the thought of how vulnerable he’ll be… there are a lot of sharp objects he could slam into, not to mention he’s an easy shot for the cops up there.

The second Little Sister enters the intersection, she’s cut off by an enormous police street boat.

Because the police don’t have the funding for gas-powered cars—only the most wealthy citizens can get their hands on fossil fuels—the cops use either tandem bikes or sometime they call in the street ships. With a dozen cops pedaling inside, it is a ship-sized bicycle with armor plating. The cops within fire at Little Sister through tiny windows as they pedal toward her.

Little Sister whips around the ship as bullets pass through her sail. The street boat might be large and armored like a bicycle-powered tank, but it still can’t keep up with Little Sister’s sail-bike. She takes a path through the alley, one that the boat can’t get through, and forces the tank-like vehicle to turn itself around to go after her.

Miss Doomsday showers the windows of the street boat with a blast from her Tommy Gun, as she catches up to Little Sister. The street ship turns furiously around to go after them, slamming into a police tandem bike that was on Doomsday’s trail. While parasailing through the air, Johnny fires the last of his bullets down on the police to cover the girls’ backs as they make their escape.

“Follow me,” Little Sister tells Doomsday. “I can lose them.”

Doomsday shakes her head. “I don’t want to lose them. We need to lead them to Crab Town.”

“Why the hell would we do that?”

“I think this was Jack’s plan,” Doomsday says. “We want them to follow us.”

Little Sister doesn’t understand it, but she nods anyway. They speed up, out of the range of fire, but make sure the cops follow them all the way into Crab Town.

Miss Doomsday always thought they called it Crab Town because in the middle of Crab Town, in the center of the old town square, there sits a 200 megaton Crab-Bomb that never detonated.

During the war, Crab Bombs weren’t dropped by airplane. They were launched via submarine, and had six mechanical legs attached to them that crawled out of the ocean across the land, into the center of a city before detonating. But the bomb standing in the middle of Crab Town was one that never detonated. Somehow, when it got to its location, it never went off. It just stood there. The citizens in the area cleared out, they thought it would go off at any minute. But after a day, it was still standing. Then a week went by, then years, still fully capable of taking out the city, but it never happened.

The city wanted to disarm the device, but every specialist they sent in to do the job was too worried they would set off the bomb. They said even if it were moved the thing would detonate. So they just left it where it was. At first, they had soldiers guarding the bomb so that nobody would mess with it, but eventually the guards pulled out. The city council decided to ignore it, forget about it. But the bomb still stands in the center of Crab Town, ready to explode at any given moment.

Miss Doomsday’s husband was the King of Spades. He was the last of the specialists who was sent in to disarm the bomb. But unlike the previous specialists, he wouldn’t give up. Even after they cut his funding, even after he lost his job with the military, he wouldn’t give up on the bomb. He became a permanent citizen of Crab Town and married his assistant, a young Italian girl with long raven-black hair. They became known as Mr. and Mrs. Doomsday, because most people believed they would one day blow up the entire city.

Being two of the few educated people in Crab Town, they were recruited into the House of Cards. The King of Spades spent a lot of his time helping the Queen of Spades with radiation treatments at the clinic. Her job was to help treat the radiation, whereas his job was to help prevent it. He tested which areas of town were the most radioactive and set up warning signs to keep people out. He taught the citizens how to protect themselves from radiation poisoning and how to survive in case the Crab-Bomb was ever set off.

But in his free time, he worked on figuring out a way to disarm the bomb. All he cared about was saving the city from another explosion. The government had abandoned the project. It was all up to him. But he never succeeded. Before he could finish his work, he was dead and gone. His wife changed her name to
Miss
Doomsday, and the House of Cards lost their most brilliant member.