Used to Be: The Kid Rapscallion Story (13 page)

9/11

continued

16

“You don’t think I killed her, do you?” Jason asks, backing away from the bed.

Belle Flower knows she is done with all of this. She wants to be a Hero. To do Good Things. To Make A Difference. But time and again she is confronted by the dark things done by good people, and as she kneels by the severed head of Duplication Girl on a day when the world has gone mad, she wants to take her costume off and never put it on, again.

She thinks of the decisions made by Winton, by Rapscallion, by Eagle ’62, and Striped Star and knows she wants nothing to do with it.

“I’m done,” she says, standing up.

Belle knows she should call the cops because that is exactly what she was mad at the others for not doing, but here, confronted by the horror of a murder she doesn’t honestly think Jason could have done, she hesitates.

Why?

If she believes in the system, she calls this in and lets the local police deal with it. They’ll kick it up to the FBI’s Cape Division, or maybe the United Nations given that Duplication Girl was technically built in a lab in Copenhagen. She could call the Revolutionaries, but they’re off stopping an alien invasion, and any other heroes are dealing with the attacks in New York and Washington.

Her eyes look at DG’s lifeless face and the blood-soaked spot of bed and rug. She looks to Jason’s stunned, horrified face. She guesses there is cocaine in his system and his semen inside of DG. Even if he’s innocent, he’ll be wrung through the ringer of the press.

“What do we do?” Becca asks.

Belle Flower looks to Jason. She wants so badly to call the cops, but she doesn’t know if she wants to do it because she hates him or herself. Not calling the cops crosses a line that she swore she would never cross.

And yet, she does.

“We handle this in-house,” she says.

17

The Fort is empty.

The Revolutionaries are somewhere between the Earth and Mars, fighting the interstellar army of the Loshow K civilization. Mars, apparently, is burning from their failed attempt to stop the warrior race.

Belle is glad they wouldn’t let her go with them.

She moves quickly, teleporting Jason’s entire bedroom to a secure evidence lab here on the moon. Becca puts her skills to the test, hacking into the Grand Vegas’ security system, looking for clues. As for Jason … he tries to step in and help but he just gets in the way, and so both Belle and Becca push him away.

18

“What’s going on down on Earth?” Vincent Vogelsung asks as Kid Rapscallion wanders into his cell unit.

“Terrorists have hit New York,” he says, sitting against the wall of the igloo and staring across the short, white floor to the glass cube that contains the former Five of Clubs/Penthouse Man.

“The subway?” Vincent asks, coming out of his chair to move to the wall, as if being a few feet closer to the bad news will get it to him quicker.

Kid shakes his head. “The World Trade Center,” he explains, his eyes on the floor.

“A bomb?”

“A plane,” Jason shakes his head, having just seen a quick recap after Becca shooed him away. “One for each tower.”

“What …?”

“They hijacked planes and … the towers have collapsed.”

“No …”

“Both of them,” Jason says, taping the floor between his legs with his index finger. “On the ground. Thousands dead, they figure. The Pentagon was hit, too.”

“With a plane?”

“Yes.”

“God fucking damn,” the old criminal says and pounds a fist on the glass wall. “What the fuck are we going to do about it?

19

Excerpt from
Dual Lives: The True Story of How The Five of Clubs Became The Penthouse Man

Written by Vincent Vogelsung and Michael Sil

Published 2005, Atomic Anxiety Press

Winner of the A’noia Prize for Best Memoir

The only time I ever really regretted playing both sides of the superhero fence was on 9/11. I knew something was going on because Fake Out had left a monitor on in another room and I could make out just enough to know something serious was occurring in New York. Then Kid Rapscallion wandered into my igloo unit with a look of disbelief on his face. In hindsight, of course, I realized some of that (probably most of it, the selfish prick) was about the murder of Duplication Girl, but I didn’t know that then and when I asked him what was going on down on Earth, he told me about the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

I couldn’t believe it. No one could, at first. But as we sat there in silence, I got really pissed at him for just sitting there.

“Why are you sitting there?” I asked him. “Go get the fucking bastards responsible.”

“What do you care?” he asked.

“Fuck you,” I said to him. “Fuck you right up your selfish dick with a horse cock.”

If I’d been anywhere but prison, I’d be on a plane to New York or DC, ready to fuck someone up. I still wanted to do it. I told him to let me out if he was just gonna sit there and be a fucking baby about it.

“I’ll kill those fuckers,” I said.

“You’re a criminal,” he said.

“I’m a goddamn American first.”

20

Nancy Cathall drives in her car to the outskirts of town. She knows it is stupid to be in a car with a criminal driving to meet another criminal, but she wants this story. Already, she regrets calling Jason to ask for his help. He can find out with everyone else — on the news.

Not that he watches except when it’s about him. And even then …

“Turn right up here,” Andres orders in the passenger seat.

Nancy turns right, and then left when they reach a very normal looking one-story house with a Ford Taurus parked out front and a too-racist-for-2001 black lawn jockey by the front door. She parks her own Taurus and her mind momentarily wonders if these two cars were produced in the same factory and sent to the same city and now one of them works for one of the good guys and one works for the bad guys.

She follows Andres inside, and he introduces her to #11, a housewife sitting at the kitchen table and wearing a black t-shirt that reads, “SPACED,” but Nancy doesn’t know what that means.

“Lisa Rallins,” Andres says, introducing them.

Lisa’s hair is wet, her Buddy Holly glasses are next to her on the kitchen table, and she is knuckle deep in a bag of kale chips. “This is a bad idea, Andy,” she says, shaking her head and tapping her foot. “This is a really bad idea.”

“We’ve got to tell someone,” he says. “Christ, #10 is dead. You don’t want to be next, do you? We talked about this last night, remember? I don’t mind stealing credit cards from old ladies but I’m not going down for this terrorist shit.”

Nancy sits down, takes a pad of paper out of her purse, and places it on the table. She has a recorder that’s been running since she got in the car with Andres back at the Grand Vegas. Now that she’s here and she sees how nervous Andres and Lisa are, she starts to feel confident. Reporters get stories by leverage is what Carol had said in New York (good God, she realizes, we had coffee three blocks from the World Trade Center!), and for the first time Nancy feels like she knows what Carol meant by that. With Jason, it’s also less about leverage as it is exchange, but here, sitting with two people who are scared out of their minds and knowing she has the power to make their lives better or worse depending on not only what they tell her, but how she spins it …

Leverage.

21

Nancy feels good for less than five minutes.

She had visions of a Pulitzer coming her way that she could shove in Jason’s face, but these two lowlifes aren’t connected to the terrorist attacks, at all.

“Joey Vamps,” Lisa explains, her hands twitching in ways that tell Nancy she used to be a smoker and now wishes she had a pack on hand. “That was his name. Some guy that used to work for the Penthouse Man. He was on Flight 11, bringing a package with him that we were gonna grab.”

“Andres indicated you were going to collect it, not grab it,” Nancy says.

Lisa shakes her head. “Number 10—”

“Does she have a name?”

“I’m sure she fucking does,” Lisa snaps, “but I didn’t know it.”

“Please continue,” Nancy says politely, deciding she’s gonna make Lisa look really stupid in her story.

“Joey Vamps used to work for the Penthouse Man,” Lisa repeats, “and he’s still in the game. The cops have never caught him.”

“And why do you think that is?” Nancy asks.

“I dunno,” Lisa says, shoving the bag of kale chips across the table, where they drop to the floor. No one picks them up.

“Can you offer an opinion?” Nancy asks, pressing her, wanting to make Lisa crack.

“Well,” Lisa says, holding her arms out wide, “I guess it’s because he’s a fucking vampire. Jesus,” she says to Andres, “where did you find this whore?”

Andres shrugs apologetically. “She used to fuck one of my teammates.”

“Which one?”

“Lazlo.”

Nancy coughs. “Let’s stay focused. What did Joey Vamps have that you were going to grab from him?”

Lisa shakes her head. “That’s just it, man. He didn’t have anything.” She regrets having shoved the kale chips aside. “Do you know how 20SD works? We sit at a table with masks on and our leader — #1, of course, before you fucking ask — comes up with a plan and then rolls out a die. Whichever number comes up is the person tasked with that mission.”

“That sounds very random,” Nancy suggests.

“Well, now you know how fucking dice work. Congratulations. So #1 rolls the die, we get our missions, and then he comes to us later on the side and gives us more details. Number 10 thinks she’s grabbing a package, but I’m told Joey Vamps is the package. It’s not the best run organization,” Lisa admits.

“It’s really not,” Andres adds. “I mean, I’m a college dropout, ex-baseball player. Lisa here is an accountant. I just don’t get how we’re supposed to be any good.”

22

“Do you know what the problem with you is?” Vincent asks Kid Rapscallion. “No fucking sense of the big picture.”

23

Nancy leaves the ordinary house with the ordinary people posing as silly super villains and on the drive back to work, tries to figure out how to salvage this story.

24

Her producer sends her home. The networks have taken control of the airwaves and the station’s 30 minutes are going to be devoted to local faces recapping what national faces have spent the past twelve hours telling the American people: two towers down, the Pentagon hit, a plane crashed in a Pennsylvania field.

Nancy pulls her Taurus into her apartment complex and heads inside. She has only just moved into this place and there are still boxes everywhere.

“Hello, Nancy.”

Her body freezes. There are three women sitting on her couch. They were different clothes but their faces are the same.

“Duplication Girl?” she asks.

“It depends how you define that,” one of them answers.

“What do you want?” Nancy asks.

“It’s what you want,” the DG on the left says. “Do you wan to get high?”

“Do you want to get fucked?” the one in the middle asks.

“Or do you want to win a Pulitzer?”

25

“What have you got?” Belle Flower asks as she leads Jason into the monitor room where Becca was going through the Grand Vegas’ security feeds.

“Thirty-seven,” she says, pointing at the wide array of images sub-divided across the room’s three large monitors. Each small box has a picture from a security camera of Duplication Girl exiting the Grand Vegas from a multitude of locations.

“Thirty-seven what?” Jason asks.

“Thirty-seven different Duplication Girls,” Becca explains, shaking her head. “I didn’t know she could extend that far.”

Jason moves directly in front of the monitors, looking carefully at one of the duplicates before moving to the next one.

“Did you know she could do that?” Becca asks.

He shakes his head. “The most I’ve seen is twenty or so. Are you sure they’re all different?”

“Reasonably so,” Becca nods, pointing to the corner of one screen. “They all left your suite at roughly the same time so any witnesses inside the casino would likely only have seen one. They — or someone, but given what happened and how fast it happened, I’m guessing it was just one of them — erased the Grand’s security feed. I was only able to recapture this by using some of the Revo’s time loop technology.”

“Geez,” Belle says. “If Eagle finds out …”

“We’ll worry about that when we get to it,” Becca answers, turning to Jason. “Do you have a tape of what happened inside the room?”