Crab Town (13 page)

When Miss Doomsday and Little Sister lead the police through Crab Town to the town square, Sailboat is waiting for them with a look of shock on his face.

“What the hell?” he says.

“This was Jack’s plan,” she tells him, jumping from her sail-bike. “The point of robbing the bank wasn’t to get the money. It was to lead the cops here. To the bomb.”

“Lead them to the bomb?”

“We’re going to take the entire city hostage,” she says, removing the gas mask from her face brushing her long black hair behind her shoulders. “This is how we are going to get those assholes to finally listen to us.”

“That’s what Jack had in mind?” Sailboat says. “Are you sure? The Four Aces would never approve of this.”

Miss Doomsday doesn’t reply. In all honesty, she knows she could be wrong and Jack could have had a completely different plan in mind. This plan sounds crazy, not at all something Jack would want them to do. But it is the only thing she could think of that would require Miss Doomsday, robbing a bank, and would be something that none of them would want to have anything to do with. The only way Jack could have gotten them to go with this plan would be to spring it on them when it was already too late to back out.

Little Sister brings Johnny back to his feet as the police close in on them, surrounding the area.

“Where’s Nine?” Doomsday asks.

“Inside,” says Sailboat.

“Let’s get in there,” Doomsday says. “We need to fortify the place. It’s going to be a long day.”

The King of Spades wasn’t able to disarm the bomb, but he was able to protect it from crazy people who might decide to blow it up. He built a structure around it, a fortress that only members of the House of Cards could enter and leave. He also built a steel cage around the bomb that only himself and Miss Doomsday had the key to. If anybody outside of Miss Doomsday wanted to blow up the Crab-Bomb, they would have a hell of a time of it.

When they enter the fort, Sailboat locks the gate behind them. The cops surround the building.

“We need lookouts upstairs on all sides,” Doomsday says. “I’ll meet you up there in a minute.”

Sailboat, Little Sister, and Johnny Balloon agree and charge up the stairs. Miss Doomsday goes into the back room to check on the Nine of Hearts.

“Are you okay?” she asks the woman lying on the concrete floor with a bloody pillow against her stomach.

“I’m losing feeling in my legs,” Nine says.

“We’ll get you to the Queen of Spades as soon as we can,” says Doomsday, strapping the Thompson Gun to her back with an old cowboy belt. “Just hang in there.”

Nine just blinks at the ceiling.

“Don’t worry,” Doomsday says. “I figured out what Jack wanted us to do. He’s not going to have died in vain.”

“You know Jack’s plan?”

Doomsday nods. “I believe so. There will be no way they’ll be able to ignore us after this.”

Nine smiles. “I knew Jack would do it. I knew someday he’d have a plan that would save us all.”

Doomsday watches her head swaying back against the wall, then decides she doesn’t have the time to worry about her dying friend anymore. On the way out of the storage room, Miss Doomsday steps on a black crab crawling out of the storm drain, crushing it beneath her leather combat boot.

Then she goes into the central room, opens up the steel cage, and takes a look at the enormous Crab-Bomb. She cat-walks toward it, rubbing her finger along the metal casing. A radioactive gas pours out of the bomb and encircles her. She rubs her body as the gas surrounds her, breathing it into her body.

“We’re going to save the world together, my love,” she tells the bomb, rubbing her breasts through her latex radiation suit, purring within the glowing gas.

A lot of people in the House of Cards believe that Miss Doomsday is in love with the Crab-Bomb. Ever since her husband died, she started acting a little strange. She seemed to get lonely, eccentric, and then she started making love to the bomb.

They say that every once in a while a House of Cards member will go to the bomb fort, and find Miss Doomsday naked on top of the bomb, straddling its casing. They’d hear her moaning, masturbating against the bomb, while surrounded by a radioactive gas.

But what they didn’t know was that Miss Doomsday wasn’t in love with the bomb, she was still in love with her husband. The reason she would masturbate on top of the Crab Bomb was because it was the closest thing she had to having sex with her husband.

The thing is, Miss Doomsday’s husband didn’t die. He was living in gaseous form. Like Johnny Balloon, the King of Spades went through the same operation in order to sell his organs and make money for the equipment he needed to finally disarm the bomb and safely transport it out of the city. Miss Doomsday was angry that he had the operation without consulting her, but he assumed the operation was reversible. She thought it would ruin their marriage, she thought she could never love a balloon, but she to accept it and try to make their marriage work.

The first time she made love to her balloon husband, Miss Doomsday popped him. When she came against his rubber body, she put too much pressure on his balloon penis, squeezing it tightly with her vaginal muscles until it popped. His entire body deflated beneath her. There was no longer life behind his expressionless face painted on the limp balloon.

Most of the time, when a balloon person pops their sentient gas rises and dissipates in the atmosphere. But when her husband died, Miss Doomsday believed his gas did not rise. His gas stayed with the Crab-Bomb. From that point on, she continued to make love with her husband against the bomb, in the only way she knew how. When she told her husband’s closest friend, the Jack of Spades, that the gas flowing from the bomb was really her husband he believed she had gone crazy. He told her that the gas wasn’t her husband and that she should stay away from it. But she didn’t believe him. It was all she had left to remember him by.

When Miss Doomsday went upstairs, Sailboat was in the middle of a gunfight with the rest of the cops. He was firing his shotgun from the window, even though the cops were too far out of range.

“Get down,” she tells Sailboat, crouching next to Johnny and Little Sister. “We don’t want to fight them. We just want to talk.”

Sailboat gets down and looks over at her. “They started shooting at me first. It’s like they don’t give a shit that we have a bomb big enough to blow up the entire city.”

“They probably don’t realize we’ve got it,” she says. “It’s been ages since Freedom City even acknowledged the bomb’s existence.”

Sailboat lets her take over.

She goes to the window, taking cover behind the wall, and shouts down to the police. “Stop shooting. We’ve got the Crab-Bomb in here. It’s still fully operational.”

Miss Doomsday has to repeat herself several times before they listen. The police cease their fire. A senior officer probably had to verify the story before they would believe her.

“It’ll take less than one minute to detonate this thing,” says Miss Doomsday. “It has the power to level the entire city.”

The police remain silent. Several reinforcements come into the area every minute.

“I don’t want to detonate the bomb if I don’t have to,” she says. “All I want to do is talk.”

The police seem too busy ordering each other around, getting all of their men in key points around the building. After there are over a hundred men outside, they finally decide to speak.

In a megaphone, an officer calls out, “We have the place surrounded. Surrender now and you won’t get hurt.”

“Listen to what I’m saying,” shouts Miss Doomsday. “There is a Crab-Bomb in this place. Talk to the Mayor. He’ll confirm this information. He surely knows that the bomb can still be detonated.”

The cops don’t respond for a while. Sailboat watches them through a crack in the wall. The cops in charge seem to be arguing with each other. One cop is furious with the cop in charge, yelling at him and pacing back and forth. The cop in charge isn’t listening to him. He pulls rank.

The ranking officer says into the megaphone, “You’ve got five minutes to leave the building or I’m sending my men in there after you.”

Miss Doomsday punches the wall.

“If you approach this building we
will
detonate the bomb,” says Miss Doomsday. “We’re not asking for money. All we want is to talk. You can at least hear us out.”

The cops argue amongst themselves.

“Go ahead, talk,” says the cop in charge.

“We want to speak to the mayor,” she says. “I want to see the mayor here within the hour. He needs to hear our demands.”

“The mayor is being evacuated from the city,” says the cop. “You’ll have to speak to me. You’ve got four minutes before we go in.”

“I told you we will detonate the bomb if you try to come in!” Miss Doomsday says.

“What the fuck is wrong with these people?” Sailboat says to her.

Doomsday shakes her head, then continues.

“All we ask for is to let the people of Crab Town work,” she tells the cop. “All we want are jobs. We don’t want money, we don’t want support. We just want the opportunity to work and get back on our feet.”

“You’re going to jail for the rest of your lives,” the cop says. “They’ve got plenty of jobs in there for you.”

“We’re not talking about ourselves. We’re doing this for all Crab Town citizens. We want them to have the opportunity to work.”

“The citizens of Crab Town do have the opportunity to work just as much as anyone else. If they can’t get jobs it’s because they don’t have the skills and experience needed.”

“That’s not true,” says Miss Doomsday. “Plenty of people here have the skills needed to get jobs. You’ve made it illegal for companies to hire Crab Town residents.”