Crab Town (8 page)

As the big guy goes for the balloon man, Sam pulls his handgun out of its holster on his chest, then pulls out the backup pistol from the holster on his ankle, keeping both guns beneath his coat. The wounded guard looks over at his handgun in the corner of the room. The other guard watches Miss Doomsday’s Tommy Gun hovering above him.

When the security officer with the yellow hat nods at him, Sam places his backup pistol slowly on the ground. With his left hand shielded from the robbers’ view, Yellow Hat’s fingers signal a count down to his fellow guards.

3…2…

“He gets what is owed to him and that’s final,” says the Jack of Spades. “Now let’s go.”

1…

Sam slides the pistol across the floor to Yellow Hat and stands up. Johnny Balloon sees the guard aiming his gun at Jack. He raises his revolver, points it at him, but Sailboat gets in his line of fire.

Sam shoots a round, hitting Jack in the center of his chest. The other robbers freeze up. They watch as their leader falls to the ground.

A guard grabs Miss Doomsday’s Tommy Gun and it fires wildly across the floor. The hostages scream and crawl for cover. When Sailboat jumps to the ground, dodging bullets coming at him from Yellow Hat’s pistol, Johnny finally has a shot at Sam.

Johnny fires. The balloon man obviously has never fired a gun since his transformation, because he’s not prepared for the kickback. The blast sends his balloon body flying into the air, spinning up toward the ceiling. The bullet misses the guard by seven feet.

Nine doesn’t react or move from her position by the exit. She just stares at Jack’s lifeless body. She can’t believe her leader, her lover, is actually dead. She didn’t even know it was possible for a man like that to die.

When she snaps out of it, she lowers the barrel of her shotgun to the guard grabbing Doomsday’s Tommy Gun and blows his skull into a spaghetti-like mess.

Covered in gore, Miss Doomsday kicks the officer’s corpse to the ground and fires her machine gun at the guards. She cuts down the other uniformed guard, splitting him in half at the waist, and the bullet-shower forces Sam Smith to leap over the bank counter to get cover.

A bullet grazes Sailboat’s shoulder and he drops his shotgun.

“Mother fucker!” Sailboat says, clutching at his arm.

As Yellow Hat aims for the big guy’s head, he doesn’t see the Nine of Hearts coming up behind him. Nine pumps her shotgun and blows Yellow Hat’s left leg in half at the kneecap. The security officer doesn’t realize what’s happened until he hits the ground and sees his shredded leg sliding across the tile floor. He’s in so much shock he hardly feels a thing.

As Nine pumps again and aims for his head, Yellow Hat rolls over and fires two slugs into her belly. She squeezes the trigger as she falls. The guard’s brain looks like scrambled eggs in red snot as they explode out the top of his hat.

When Sam peeks out from behind the counter, he sees his three fellow guards are all dead, but there’s only one of the thieves still standing. He aims for Doomsday’s chest as she reloads her Tommy Gun. If he takes her out he might still be able to prevent the robbers from getting away with the cash, even though he’s the only guard left. But before Sam can fire, Johnny Balloon slams his knapsack full of concrete down on his forehead.

Sam goes out cold. His face slides down the counter and lands in the orange-haired teller’s lap as she cowers under her work station.

When Johnny looks up, he sees all of the hostages making a run for the exit. Sailboat picks up his shotgun with his good arm and staggers toward the duffel bag of cash. Miss Doomsday is standing over Nine with her Tommy Gun pointed in the air.

“Fuckfuckfuck,” Nine cries, rolling on the tile floor with her arms hugging tightly to her stomach wounds.

As she cries, she stares at Jack’s body lying in the center of the room. She still can’t believe he’s dead. He meant everything to her. He’s the only reason she joined the House of Cards in the first place.

Nine was never a very caring person. She only gave a damn about one thing. Herself. If somebody would have asked her to join the House of Cards a few years ago and she would have told them “What’s in it for me?”

Ask her to risk her ass to help other people and she would just laugh at you until you walked away. But when Jack asked her, she wasn’t laughing. She signed on as the Nine of Hearts without the slightest hesitation.

Nine used to run Crab Town’s
radiation fetish
porn ring. After the last nuclear attack, a lot of people in the country developed a fetish for radiation. Nine couldn’t explain why some people found radiation sexually stimulating. She’s not even sure the people who have the fetish understand it. But she did know that some people would pay a shit load of money to get their hands on masturbation material that could satisfy this urge.

Nine needed money. She worked in the corporate office of a printing company, but had been fired because she had an STD. These days, employers regularly enforce their ethics onto their employees. It started with drug testing. Then, employees were not allowed to smoke or drink alcohol, even outside of work in their free time. Now, employers have taken things in an even bigger direction. They require employees to attend church every week. And the latest trend is for employers to test for STDs, because they don’t want sexually promiscuous employees representing their company.

When Nine tested positive for MC (molluscum contagiosum), she couldn’t believe it. She didn’t have any of the symptoms and she had not had sex with anyone since her first husband died three years prior. Yet there was no way around it, she definitely had the STD. When she went to the doctor, she learned that the virus can also be spread via toilet seats. In her apartment building, there was only one bathroom per floor that all the tenants shared, so she could have picked it up from anyone. Her company didn’t believe her excuse, though. She lost her job and became no longer employable in Freedom City.

But Nine wasn’t one to give up. If she couldn’t find a company to employ her she would just start her own company. The first thing that popped into her head: radiation porn. She knew lots of people with the fetish and there wasn’t anyone creating masturbation material for them. So Nine moved to Crab Town and started her own radiation fetish business. And it quickly became an empire.

Since radiation was intangible and couldn’t actually be filmed, Nine instead filmed the effects of radiation. She would find beautiful, young, desperate, starving Crab Town residents, give them a warm place to live, feed them hot food and make sure they had a steady intake of crab shit. Once radiation sickness set in, she would film them having sex.

They were basically snuff films. Even though her “actors” would be able to make appearances in several films before they died, she was killing them on camera nonetheless. A slow, erotic, painful death. Then she would toss their bodies out in the melt zone to be eaten by crabs. Nine thought they called the place Crab Town because in the end everyone who dies in Crab Town eventually becomes food for the crabs.

The films that earned her a shit load of money were the ones shot just before her actors died. There were certain things her clients wanted to see, and one of the major ones was human skin sliding off appendages. One popular shot that she tried to get as much as possible was to have a man bite a woman’s nipple, then slide the skin off of her breast in one large sheet.

Her clients also liked when teeth effortlessly fell out of the gums, so another popular shot was to get a close-up on a woman’s mouth as the guy’s erect cock casually knocked her teeth out. Once all of the teeth were gone, she would give him a blow job with her soft gums. The money shot was when the woman pulled the skin off of the man’s dick as if he was wearing a rubber, then jerked his raw skinless penis until he shot cum into her face. It would be an added bonus if the cum had blood in it.

When the House of Cards decided they wanted to put an end to Nine’s porn ring, they sent Jack to do the job. They told him to stop her, even if he had to kill her. But that’s not Jack’s way. He decided to try and reason with her.

Nine was immediately attracted to Jack the second she saw him. He had an arrogant confidence about him that she found so cute.

When he asked her, “Will you please shut down your business?” she almost squealed with delight.

He’s so adorable
, she thought, and gave him a big smile.

Of course, there was no way she was going to give up her business just because some cute guy asked her nicely. So she sent him off and admired his ass on its way out the door.

But Jack wasn’t the kind of guy who would give up that easily, and Nine knew it. Even though she knew it was a waste, she sent her men out to have Jack killed. She couldn’t let her lust get in the way of her business. However, her men couldn’t kill him. Those who went after him wound up either dead or seriously wounded. There were even a few that Jack persuaded into joining the House of Cards.

This only made her more attracted to the Jack of Spades. The guy was a hero. Nine was turned on by heroes. And when he started hijacking her shipments, cutting off her connections to the outside world, it only drove her more crazy with desire.

The next time Jack paid Nine a visit, she was expecting him to bring an army of his House of Cards buddies. But it wasn’t an attack. He came to ask her out on a date. The audacity of his proposal was too much for her to refuse.