DIRE : BORN (The Dire Saga Book 1) (9 page)

Martin grinned. “Jus' keep watching.”

I did so, and found myself actually getting upset. “Okay, that one that just showed up wasn't even in the match to start! He just ran up and started beating on the cute one with a chair. A chair! She doesn't know the rules of this sport, but she's fairly certain that's a violation of them!”

“Yup.”

“Why has the match not been stopped, and the cheaters disqualified?”

“Because the cheaters are bad guys.”

“That makes no sense.”

“Jus' keep watching.”

I did, and the fight became more and more ludicrous as time went on. Finally, he turned it off, and I turned on him.

“How in the hell does any of this apply to heroes and villains?”

“It doesn't. Not precisely. But sometimes it applies. Listen.” Martin pulled over a cushion, sat on it. “That guy who played by the rules, he was who you wanted to see win, yeah?”

I blinked. “Well, yes. He played fair, he fought well; he clearly deserved to win.”

“Right. He was the hero. And the horrible guy who cheated, and called in his friends, and broke the rules over and over again, what's that make him?”

“The villain. But it makes no sense, that he would manage to do those things, succeed in doing those things.”

“Uh-huh. So, did he beat the hero?”

“You saw the outcome as well as she did. He failed, despite his tricks, despite stacking the odds in his favor. Which was good, otherwise Dire would have been strongly tempted to throw something through your television.”

He grinned. “And if you felt that, how you think that crowd of drunk assholes watchin' the shit ringside felt?”

I nodded. “Makes sense that they would be... worked up. Emotionally invested, as well. After all, they know the competitors better than Dire, and...” Pieces fit together. “Ah. It's fake. Entirely staged.” I felt... disappointment? Why? Seen through that lens, the whole spectacle was almost silly. And yet...

“And that, is the miracle of kayfabe.” Martin smiled, and pulled out a can from a pile of stuff, popping it open and taking a full sip. He offered another can to Simms, who took it gratefully, then smiled at me. “You want a beer too?”

“No, thank you. Still haven't answered her primary question. What
is
kayfabe?”

“It's the power of telling a story. No,
selling
a story so well that people get invested, even though they know it's all bullshit. And that's what heroes and villains are all about. The ones that are smart, anyway. The stupid ones believe their own hype.”

I considered him. “Go on.”

“These guys? They come in two varieties, heels and faces. Villains and heroes, pretty much. And they don't always stay one or the other, they swap back'n forth if they think it'll make for an awesome story. Each of them has an image. They build it up, and when they go into that ring, it's not two people fighting. It's the images they sold the audience of going to war, in a fucking huge battle that puts butts in seats. It's more than them, it's the hype, it's the bad guys cheating, it's the good guys winning despite the odds. It's some fake and a little real but it works and it stays awesome because they make you believe. Even when you know better, you believe because believing is more fun.
That
is why heroes and villains are the same deep down. All those fights no one gets really hurt in? People tossin' around fire and lightning and shit without causing huge death tolls? Heroes catching some villain on Thursday and him breaking out before the weekend? Yeah. No way all that shit is real. It's kayfabe.”

I sat back, impressed as he ranted. Finally he wound down, and took a long pull of beer.

“Let her get this straight,” I said, shifting to get my legs more comfortable. “You're talking about building a narrative, and controlling it so that people see the image that most appeals.”

“More or less, yeah.” He grinned. “Ain't no different than selling anything else. Give people a dream and make it flashy enough, they'll shell out top dollar for pay-per-view. In Dolby fucking surround sound.”

I tilted my head to the side. “Hm. So where do, say, the Black Bloods fit into this sort of kayfabe? Into the cape scene?”

His smile faded, disappeared. “Yeah, that's the problem. They don't. See, not everyone plays the game. There's rules that come up, with this costume shit. Stuff like don't kill other costumes, don't kill civvies, don't touch families. Shit the MRB promotes, tries to keep the field from getting too vicious, you know? But assholes like the Bloods, they don't play. They got shit lets them take on heroes or villains or anyone that messes with them, and they don't usually win, but it's never a clean loss. Someone always ends up dead or wrecked or shit. And they're smart enough to back off before they get too badly wrecked.”

“So heroes can't stop them?” I frowned.

He shook his head. “Heroes can win fights, but you go up against the Bloods, you gotta come ready to win a war. Last guy who tried that was a costume named Scrapper. Big ass suit of armor made out of junk, frickin' sonic blasters on his arms and shit like that. Didn't do him no good. He went out into the worst parts of their turf, and never came out. If he's lucky, he's dead.”

I frowned. “So they're not... heels, by your definition of kayfabe.”

“Shit, no. They ain't even in the audience.”

I sat back and thought about it. “She doesn't really have enough experience to tell whether that's a valid view of the heroic and villainous situation. If that's true, it sounds... fake.”

He shrugged. “Naw. Not quite, anyways. Crusader? He saved the damn world at least three times I know. Aquatica? Bitch really does want to sink all the land up here down under the ocean. It's just... They play by rules. And they use kayfabe to make sure that if they lose, the story keeps going. That the stakes ain't always life or death.”

I nodded.

“You may have a point. Going to need to think on this.”

He yawned. “S'all good. Well. If you ain't staying, best be going. I got heat thanks to you, so I'm gonna turn it on and enjoy that shit.”

I nodded again, rose, and pulled the tent flap back to leave. But before I could, he spoke up again.

“Hey, Dire?”

“Yes?”

“Watch yourself. Bloods got a long memory, and not everyone around here likes you.”

I nodded one last time and left without a word.

CHAPTER 5: The Mad and Merciless March of Time

“I don't know what it was in the eighties. It was like someone had flipped a switch among the villainous psychos, and suddenly it was evil clown time. The Jester's Grin came out of nowhere to torment Nighthaunt, and Jesus, it still hurts to remember that Mister Fun jackass. And don't even get me started on Great Clown Pagliacci... you ask me, all of this was a delayed reaction to John Wayne Gacy, a serial killer famous back in the seventies. He used to dress up as a clown, you know. He used to make boys laugh. Then he raped and killed them. I swear, I'm glad I got out of the business before this trend hit. A lot of the heroes who were stuck up against these psychos, they went mad or they went dark. Or both.”

--Leaked part of a MRB interview recorded in 1995 with Pistonfist, retired hero formerly active in Pittsburgh.

The next morning gave me the opportunity to charge my devices. Sparky's current was stable. So long as it was limited to the vicinity of the camp, there was more than enough to handle my gear. It felt better having a fully charged toolkit. Between the plasma cutter, the arc miniwelder, and the magnetic manipulator I could now work on advanced technology, if I had to. And I might have to, if Martin's warning about the Black Bloods was correct.

Venturing outside, I tended to my toilet, and decided to go to the showerhouse. I found I wasn't the only one there, and avoided looking overlong at the others as I got into one of the active stalls, pulling the curtain closed behind me and putting the backpack and my clothes on a high shelf. The air was frigid but the water was steaming hot, and it refreshed me as I scrubbed away the grime. Someone had thoughtfully cleared away the trash and a night of running water had sluiced away the mud. I wasn't sure how long the water would stay active with the city's power off, but while it lasted it would be nice. I drank some of the water while I was there. It was rust-flavored but seemed potable.

Drying as best I could, I reclothed and left, bundling up against the chill. It was still January, and the temperature was hovering near freezing, but in the early morning light it was tolerable. So long as you didn't stop moving, anyway.

“That you, Dire lady?” I looked over to the sickbay shack, to see Sparky easing himself into his wheelchair. I waited until he was seated to wave, so he could wave back without toppling. He had a large smile across his face, and he'd covered the collar I'd given him with a scarf. “You got time to help me out?”

“Quite possibly,” I replied.

“Good. I need you to help me check a place. It's called Funland, and it should be that way.”

He pointed to the shut down amusement park to the north. I raised an eyebrow at him, then let it drop when I realized that his cataracts probably didn't let him read my face too well. “All right. May she ask why?”

He eased back into the chair, pulling a blanket around him. “I'll tell ya on the way.”

I nodded, moved around to grab the chair. Reached over to adjust his collar as I did so, cranking up the distribution range as we started to roll out. We'd be going out of the camp after all, so it wouldn't do to cut off the power unexpectedly. We went past the laundry shack, past the smattering of tents where four or five children ran around giggling and scrambling away from us as we went. Past Martin's tent, the flap now open and Simms waving to us as we moved by. Then it was up the beach a ways, past more old boats that were drowning in a carpet of rotting seaweed, with chunks of ice floating on a scrim of dark water. After about ten minutes we passed Martin, standing alone on the edge of the beach nearest the road, talking with someone in a car. He handed something through the window, and received something for his troubles, tucking it into a pocket. The car rolled back onto the street, joining what little traffic there was along the beachside road before accelerating and vanishing to the south. Martin glanced back at us, nodded, then tucked his hands in his pockets and waited again.

“So,” Sparky chirped. “I need to thank you, young lady. This here yoke is working great. I can think straight again.”

“You couldn't before?” I asked. Roy had said something about that, I recalled.

“Oh no. I can feel the current, y'see. When I let my mind wander anymore it rises, and I can lose hours just feeling it go. Don't need to eat, don't need to sleep, it just kinda happens. Just can't think straight unless I dial it down. But this little gewgaw?” He flapped a hand at his neck. “The current's there, but it's gone before it can suck me in. Hell, I had a big dump last night, for the first time in forever. Didn't know how bad I was feeling until it was done and damn did I ever feel better after.”

“Er, that's good, she supposes.” Seriously, what was one supposed to say to that sort of comment? Perhaps it was time to change the topic. “So where is Roy?”

Sparky shifted in his chair. “He ain't doing so good. Coughed most of last night, and it kept him up. He's sleeping now, but it's ragged. Figure you're younger, cold air won't ruck your lungs up so bad.”

I nodded. “Fair enough. So why are we going to Funland?”

The gates were drawing closer, old chain link fences sagging against the sand, posts worked loose or sagging from the weight of age and the friction of winds off the bay. Beyond it boarded-up ticket booths advertised specials that were old before I had been born. Well, maybe, assuming I was the twenty-something I appeared to be. Couldn't be certain, there.

“Great Clown Pagliacci.” The whisper was so soft that I barely heard it. And I wasn't even sure I'd heard it right, that last part was no word I recognized.

“Hm?”

“Back in the day. Back after Korea and that clusterfuck. Never should have enlisted back up but never mind that... back in the day Great Clown Pagliacci was the villain that other villains told scary stories about. Didn't sound like much at first. Just a guy in sad clown makeup with a knife. But whenever he turned up in a city, the bodies started piling up until he was done. Then he'd paint in blood somewhere it would be found, always the same thing... 'La Commedia e finita.' The comedy is finished.”

“Sounds like one of those outside the kayfabe.”

“Huh?”

“Martin told Dire about faces, heels, the secret of Kayfabe in professional wrestling. Compared it to heroes and villains.”

“Ha. He's got some funny ideas. Told me about that too, and I laughed my ass off. I went hero a few decades after Korea when times got really bad, joined up with a few local youngsters. We had ourselves a group... Boilerplate, Lucy Goosey, Mister Sandman and me. We had the notion we'd help clean up the city,  and go from there. We did some good, but...”

He fell silent, and I pushed him through the gates. Litter and sand on the old boardwalk crunched underneath his wheels, and I was acutely aware of the groaning of the old wood.

“Cops and robbers,” he muttered.

“Say what?”

“It's less wrasslin' and more cops and robbers. At least it was in my day. The villains would knock you out and tie you up, maybe gloat a bit, then skedaddle. Or you'd capture them and turn them over to the authorities. They'd do some time then bust out or get sprung by their buddies. Bank robberies and stuff, art thefts, maybe a political demonstration or stuff like that. Hell, when Reverend King called for the march to Washington I ended up traveling alongside one of the biggest smash and grab guys in the city, name a' Concrete Jackson, and we laughed our asses off about it all the way up to Maryland. We ended up fightin' off the Hooded Riders together, put their punk asses down before they could lynch a single soul in our group. Jackson got out of the game in seventy-nine and good on him, but I'm saying it was different then. And in eighty-two it changed when that goddamn clown came to town.”

We were moving down the remnants of a large central area now. A sign at the end of it proclaimed it “Midway”. Old booths and carousels sat, boarded-up or with tarps thrown over them. Here and there gulls pecked at garbage that had probably blown here from off of the mainland. We were alone, and as I was forced to maneuver the chair around holes in the boardwalk, I could see why. The place was a wreck.

“What happened?” The wind out here was fiercer than it was on shore, and I envied Sparky his scarf.

“Blood happened,” he sighed. “Blood and death. Every time we thought we had a lead, it just turned into more dead bodies. He was a step ahead of us all the way. Devilish traps to wear us down, expendable mooks recruited at gunpoint, strapped with explosives and the promise that their families would pay if they didn't take us down with them. Oh, it wasn't just the Harbor Watch he targeted, it was the other groups, too. The bastard... he mowed through the Torchbearers like...” He fell silent for a while. “We were Harbor Watch, don't know if I told you that. Worked mainly in the wharves, took on smugglers and gangsters. The Torchbearers were kids. They were a local program set up by the Liberty Brigade vets who came back home after the war. To teach and help young metas come to grips with their powers, show them how to be heroes if that's what they wanted. Pagliacci took offense to the idea, I guess. They disappeared early on. We found them three days later.” He fell silent again, and I snuck a look at his face. It had gone pale and solemn, and had a terrible weight to it.

For a few moments there was nothing but the soft crash of the waves chopping against the pilings under us.

“Does she want to know?” I whispered.

“I bambini devono essere visto e udito,” he whispered back. “Those were the words on the note we found at the scene of the crime.”

I shook my head, and he elaborated.

“Children should be seen, and not heard. What do you think he did with their tongues after he got done torturing them to death? Because whatever you might think, what we found was way more horrible then you can imagine. I ain't going into details. That was the day we stopped treating it like cops and robbers with him. That was the day we set out to kill that evil fucker.”

I swallowed, sickened. He put out a liver-spotted hand, pointed to the left. “Turn here.”

Silence again, as we rolled past a groaning Ferris wheel, rust holding it up more than any remnants of structural integrity. We started to move out among the arching skeletons of rollercoaster tracks. Some of them had collapsed, leaving the odd stretch of wood and metal twisting down from the pylons that were still standing, here and there. Others were mostly intact, though I certainly wouldn't trust my safety to them.

And at the end of the boardwalk loomed the ruin of the funhouse. Charred, fallen in, garish-but-faded paint turning the entrance from a laughing clown's mouth to a frenzied scream of red. Old stains, old blood.

“This is where it ended,” he said, his eyes faraway and his face still as the ice below. “This is where he died... Maybe.”

“Maybe?”

“We knew he was here. He'd left clues, and we were nearest the scene when the shooting and the screams started. His goons had blocked the entrance, mowed down anyone who tried to leave. We'd waded through them, and past the panicked crowd, to get here. All save Lucy... she could fly, y'see. We found her on the roof later, unconscious. Beartrap had taken her foot off and she'd bled out before we could get her back to a doctor.”

I looked at the funhouse again, and couldn't suppress a shudder. He'd called me Lucy the first time he'd seen me.

I asked the foremost question on my mind. “Why are we here, Sparky? It sounds horrible. Why put yourself through this again?”

He gnawed at his lip. “You see where the roof is broken there? With the grating right below it?”

I did. The metal was leaning ladder-like on the wall, with the sagging roof at its lowest point, a mere seven feet above it. “Yes.”

“I need you to climb it, and feel in the gap between the roof and the wall. Shouldn't be hard to find.”

I eyed it, shucked my backpack, then moved forward to the grating and started climbing. It twisted under my feet, and took a worrisome amount of balance to keep it from dumping me off. Once I could get a hand off of it and on the wall, the way got a little easier. But the grating compressed as I moved up it, and I scowled up at the gap. I'd need to stretch to my fullest reach to get to it. Took a few tries, a few false starts, but I managed to get a hand on the lip, and another hand in there, poking around.

But I felt nothing.

“Sparky? Dire can't seem to find—”

A hum behind me. Sparky's voice rose, calm and barely audible over it. “Don't move.”

“What's wrong?”

“Oh, you know what's wrong.”

And a cold dread started to seep over me. I glanced down, saw the jagged metal that awaited me if I fell. Glanced up, and saw the lip of the roof above me preventing me from going up and over. The gap I'd put an arm into was too small for the rest of my body. And I had a crazy man who could throw lightning bolts behind me.

“You planned this. You trapped her.”

“Ayep. So what did he tell you?”

“Who?”

KABLAM!

The lightning bolt impacted perhaps six feet to my left, and I jerked. Almost lost my balance.

I shot a glance back at him, saw him sitting resolute, his collar off and beside him on the ground. He was glaring at me, lightning flaring between his cupped hands. “That was a warning shot, kid. Next one won't miss.”