Crab Town (6 page)

“Daddy, read me a story,” his daughter asked him, lying in bed.

Jack smiled at her. “Of course, sweety. Which one?”

“The one about the prince and the garden.”

“That’s the one mommy has been teaching you to read, isn’t it?”

She nodded.

“Then why don’t you read it to me.”

She shook her head.

“Why not?”

“I only know a few words. Mommy said she can’t teach me anymore until she can see again.”

Jack looked at the scar on his ring finger. The ring was stolen a long time ago, so the scar he received when it was ripped off is all that he has left to symbolize his love for her.

“What’s wrong with her eyes, Daddy?”

Jack shook his head. “Don’t worry about it, honey. She just needs glasses is all.”

“She doesn’t play with me much anymore either.”

Jack brought the book to his daughter and sat next to her on the bed he had constructed out of particleboard and other scavenged wood. He pulled his feet out of the water puddle that covered most of his daughter’s floor and lay down next to her. No matter how well he patched up the walls and ceilings, the water still managed to find its way in.

“Why don’t we try to read it together,” Jack said.

She nodded and laid her head on his shoulder. He kissed her on the bald spot in her hair.

“One day things will get better,” he said. “Then you’ll be able to go to a school. Eventually you’ll be able to read stories to yourself.”

She smiled up at him. “If I knew how to read I’d read every single day.”

“Someday you will, honey. I promise someday you will.”

Before the end of the year, both Jack’s wife and daughter died of radiation poisoning. He isn’t sure how they got it. When he still had an income, he paid inspectors who told him the water in the building was drinkable. He never fed them sewer crabs or any food that might have been contaminated. But they both died nonetheless, leaving him all alone.

When he learned about a group of people trying to get organized in Crab Town, he signed up right away. At first, they were just trying to help out their fellow citizens. They fixed up buildings, organized gardening projects, set up a clinic, tried to convince companies to give their people work. Their deeds were somewhat successful, but it was never enough. That’s when the organization took things in a more aggressive direction. They decided to become the House of Cards.

His real name was Oliver, but once in the House of Cards he became the Jack of Spades. Each Jack in the organization is responsible for a squad of soldiers, one from each suit. The suits are divided up by specialty: spades are for those with book smarts, hearts are for those with street smarts and people skills, clubs are the muscle of the organization, and the diamonds are for the cunning and agile.

Jack immediately added the Six of Spades, aka Miss Doomsday, to his team. Her deceased husband, the King of Spades, was a close friend of his, so he knew she was the perfect choice for his team. But he had to recruit new people outside of the organization to fill his other three positions. Members of the House of Cards often get themselves killed, put in prison, disappear, or just plain quit, so there’s always openings. There actually has never been a total of 52 members at one time since the organization began.

Sailboat was the second member he added to his team. Of all places, he found him out in the melt zone, where no one
ever
goes. The melt zone is where the bomb hit, leveling the entire area. Not a single structure was left standing. It’s just a mile-wide crater of hot concrete slabs baking in the sun. It’s the most radioactive area in town, so nobody steps foot there. The only thing you can find out there is an army of black crabs.

Some people say the melt zone is where all the sewer crabs come from. There are hundreds of them out there, crawling across the concrete, eating the red slime that grows in the acid rain puddles. Some of the crabs are enormous out there, the size of dogs or even bigger. They’re vicious, too. You get too close to one of them and they’ll take a chunk out of your thigh for breakfast.

Jack was out in the melt zone that day to drop off some money. He didn’t trust banks and couldn’t keep the money in his apartment or on his person. Muggings and break-ins are a weekly or daily occurrence in Crab Town. Even someone as tough as Jack could not protect his food and money. So he hid it out in the melt zone, where he knew nobody would ever go looking. It might eventually give him radiation sickness, but he didn’t really care about that anymore. If death meant that he could be with his wife and little girl again he would welcome it.

After pocketing twenty dollars and returning his chest to its hiding spot beneath a flattened school bus, Jack heard someone shouting. He went deeper into the melt zone until he saw a muscular white guy running through the crater with a baseball bat, chasing after crabs. Jack assumed he was some crazed shitter.

A shitter is someone who gets high off of the drug called crab shit. It’s not actually crab shit, but it is a mossy green substance that grows on the bellies of black sewer crabs. If you smoke it or consume it you’re going to go on one hell of a trip. You’ll go from euphoric to cosmic to violent to bat shit crazy all within the course of an hour. Then you’ll need to do more. The stuff is radioactive and deadly as all hell, but most kids in Crab Town don’t really give a fuck anymore. To them, just a tiny taste of happiness, even chemically-induced happiness, is worth dying for.

“Die bitches!” Sailboat yelled as he chased down a big black dog-sized crab.

Some of those bigger crabs aren’t just the
size
of dogs, they can also run as
fast
as dogs. But they run sideways. Sailboat chased after it across slabs of sun-burnt asphalt. When he caught up to it, he broke two of its legs first, crippling it. Then he smashed down on its black shell until its sludgy guts were covering him.

There were hundreds of crabs crawling through the debris, all sizes. Most of them were deformed; some had extra pinchers, others had extra long legs, some shells were lumpy or lopsided, some were conjoined together into a black spidery mass. Sailboat went from crab to crab, stomping on the small ones, cracking open the big ones. If he slipped and fell, the crabs would turn on him, ganging up on him to get him while he’s down. Crabs usually only go after the wounded or the dead, so whenever Sailboat’s leg fell through a hole in the rubble they thought he was injured and no longer able to walk. Some of them would get him, claw slices into his arms and back. But once his leg was free, he would continue smashing them to a soupy pulp.

Then Jack realized Sailboat wasn’t after crab shit. You only have to kill one crab to get enough crab shit to last several days. Sailboat was in the melt zone just so he could kill crabs. Jack smiled at the strange young man, fascinated by him. He just sat there and watched, to see how long the kid could keep it up.

But when Sailboat ran across a black plate the size of a basketball court, Jack realized he had to intervene.

“Get out of there!” Jack called.

Sailboat turned and looked up at him.

“Under your feet!” Jack pointed at the black ground beneath Sailboat. “Get off of there!”

But it was too late. The ground rumbled, knocking Sailboat on his ass. He found himself being lifted two stories out of the rubble. When he rolled off of the black shell and slammed down on a bed of concrete, he found himself looking up at a monster. It was one of the giant mutant crabs that are usually only found deep in the bay.

Jack pulled a repeater out of his coat and ran down into the crater, shooting at the massive crustacean to draw its attention. But Sailboat didn’t use the opportunity to get away. Once the crab turned toward Jack, Sailboat attacked the thing with his bat. He swung at one of its legs as hard as he could, but the bat just bounced off. It was like trying to chop down an olive tree with a two-by-four.

The crab roared like an angry elephant as it went for Sailboat. A crane-like pincher came down on him, crashing through a brick wall above his head. The other pincher cut a charred Buick in half as Sailboat ran between its legs.

Jack aimed for its head and fired a few rounds, planting one of them in the soft spot above its mouth. The crab roared again, turning to Jack. It scuttled like a threshing machine up the hill, pulverizing the asphalt beneath its feet. Jack fired as it came closer, several hitting right in the thing’s face, but it didn’t slow it down. Then his gun clicked empty, just as it hovered over him with a claw snapping in his direction.

Jack turned to run, but his foot broke through a rusted sheet of metal, pinning him to the ground. As he tried to free himself, he could hear the pinchers thundering behind him, exploding against the earth below as the creature attacked.

By the time his foot was liberated, the crab was shrieking ferociously. Jack couldn’t tell why the creature was thrashing and roaring, until he saw Sailboat standing on top of the crab’s shell. The large man had climbed the crab’s back and was now hacking at its head, using a jagged old stop sign like an axe. Green sludge sprayed from its face, its eyes mutilated on the stalks. When Sailboat used the pointed edge at the bottom of the sign’s pole like a spear, piercing through its face deep into its brain matter, the crab dropped to the ground.

Jack rolled out of way, barely escaping the impact as it fell. Then he stared at the monster as its legs curled slowly against its abdomen.

When they were sure it was dead, Sailboat and Jack leaned against its mossy shell and caught their breath. Jack smiled over at the large white guy and shook his head at him.

He said, “Why the hell are you picking fights with crabs all the way out here in the melt zone?”

Sailboat looked over at him. “Crabs piss me off.”

“You come all the way out to the melt zone just to take out your aggression on crustaceans?”

The big guy chuckled. “Maybe not.”

Then he looked up at the red sun and wiped blood from his forehead. “As long as these sewer crabs are breeding out here, kids are going to be dying from doing too much crab shit. Maybe I figured somebody should do something about that.”

“You were planning on bringing the crabs to extinction, single-handedly, one bat-swing at a time?”

“Something like that.”

Jack laughed.

After a short pause, Jack asked, “Ever hear of the House of Cards?”

“Sure.”

“How would you like to join?”

Sailboat shook his head. “I don’t see myself as the revolutionary type.”

“Neither did I, before I joined. We need to work together if we plan to ever get out of Crab Town. We need to show the rest of the world that we are human beings, who deserve respect and equal rights. No matter how much they want us to, we will not just lie down and die quietly in this toxic dump they’ve locked us in.”

“If joining will get me out of this place and back on my feet, count me in.”

“I can’t promise you that, but I can say that you’ll do more good for yourself and our people than killing crabs in the melt zone.”

Sailboat snickered. “Well, if you put it that way… Okay, I’m in.”

“Good. I need some muscle for my squad and I know you’ll be perfect. Not many clubs in the House of Cards can say they’ve slain a monster crab before.”

Jack pulled a card out of his pocket, the four of clubs, and held it up to him. “This is who you are from now on. This is your new name and rank.”

“I’m a sailboat?”

Jack eyeballed him. “What do you mean?”

“There,” the big guy pointed at the number four on the card. “It looks like a sailboat.”

“It’s a four. The four of clubs.”

Jack handed him the card. The new recruit looked it over, then put it in his pants.

“I’ve always called them sailboats.”

Jack laughed. “Well, then. I guess we’ll have to call you the Sailboat of Clubs, then.”

“Fine with me.”

Jack stood up and held out his hand to his new friend.

“Welcome to the team, Sailboat.”

After he had his Sailboat of Clubs, he recruited Little Sister, also known as the Two of Diamonds. Then he got the Nine of Hearts, his lover. When his team was formed, they became legendary in the House of Cards. A powerhouse quintet. One that has yet to be equaled within the organization.