Vigilante (6 page)

W
hy does this look like a gun when you made so much noise about being opposed to weapons?” he’d asked Arjay several days ago, examining the all-important device that Arjay called the grappler. The younger man had produced the grappler with great flourish and fanfare, and assured Nolan that it would save his life and make his work easier, many times over.

It was jet black with a handle, barrel, and trigger much like a pistol, only it was quite a bit larger than a typical handgun, and it had a spearlike silver tip at the end of the barrel. It was heavier than a gun, too, by two or three pounds. It felt solid and powerful in Nolan’s hand.

“It is not a gun,” Arjay replied, “it is something better. As I would have you to be.”

Arjay took the device in his own hand and pointed it at the far wall, a good two hundred feet on the opposite end of the subway platform, and tapped a small red button right where his thumb rested. Four spikes expanded outward in north, south, east, and west positions from the silver tip, forming a grappling hook. When Arjay pulled the trigger, the silver hook shot out as fast as a bullet, if not faster, and instantly found purchase on the lever that served as the handle to the men’s restroom. Arjay handed Nolan the grappler and told him to pull.

Although Nolan could see no wire, he knew one had to be there because the grappler held fast in his hand, refusing to move back even an inch away from the door that was so far away. When he pressed the trigger down about halfway, the line loosened and he could move with it. When he mashed the trigger down tight, the line not only strengthened but started to recoil, and he was forced to let go of the thing lest it rip his unprepared shoulder off, winding its invisible wire back inside itself and traveling like lightning back toward the silver hook.

“Wow,” he said, massaging his shoulder.

“Apologies,” said Arjay, retrieving the grappler from where it had shot out of Nolan’s hands. “I neglected to tell you to release the hook. Pushing that red button expands the four spikes; it also brings the spikes back in and lets you retract the entire rig in seconds.”

“Got some serious velocity to it,” Nolan remarked.

Arjay nodded. “Strong too. The hook will penetrate wood, brick, even concrete up to three inches thick. But be cautious. I would not have you aim it toward anything living.”

“I can’t see the wire. . . .” said Nolan.

“The wire is an improvement on the same fiber filament that illusionists employ when appearing to fly on stage. Less than one millimeter in thickness, yet it should support about twice your weight without strain. You have nearly a full kilometer coiled inside.”

“Huh,” Nolan said. “What would happen if my fingers got caught in the wire?”

Arjay eyed him sideways. “Exactly what you think would happen. Always wear your gloves.”

Nolan was already thinking of the tactical uses for such a device. “Say I’m in a hurry . . . Can I use it to zip from rooftop to rooftop?”

“If you are suicidal,” Arjay shot back. “Imagine holding a rope tethered to the back of a bullet train. Use the grappler horizontally and you will not have gravity to assist in controlling your trajectory. Assuming you even survived the impacts you would suffer along the way, you would acquire bruises and broken bones all over your body. It is for going up and down. Nothing else.”

Nolan smiled at the memory, his thoughts lasering in on the gangs and the innocents far below, and how he was about to do everything he could to keep anyone from getting hurt, or worse. It all came down to this moment.

Nolan jumped.

Falling fast, he twisted and shot the grappler toward the very spot where he’d been standing only seconds ago. The grappler hooked instantly onto the ledge and he executed a fast but controlled descent. Finally, when he’d reached about two stories off of the ground, he mashed the red button at the back of the grappler while holding down the trigger to both release the hook and recoil the wire. Before landing, he’d already replaced the grappler to its resting place on his right hip.

His special boots absorbed most of the impact, just as Arjay had promised they would. Arjay had built shock dampeners into the boots’ soles, assuring Nolan that the boots were designed to disperse the shock of a landing from even three stories up. They could handle no more than three stories, though. And they offered a kind of kinetic optimization, giving Nolan a little extra momentum in his step, so while practicing, he’d found he could actually run marginally faster while wearing them. Best of all they were lithe—light and flexible—despite their bulky appearance, lacing up to several inches above his ankles.

Arjay prided himself on thinking of everything, and the boots were no exception. The tread design, for instance, was based on the sole of a popular work boot, so anyone trying to trace Nolan would find nothing distinctive about his shoeprint.

Even though the boots absorbed the landing beautifully, Nolan let himself fall to one knee, his training taking over. He heard a handful of screams from the vast crowds on either side of the block. And then there was a cacophony of chatter, rising fast as excitement overtook the pedestrians who assumed that this was the reason they were there.

Nolan’s attire no doubt helped with that assessment. Clad in loose-fitting military fatigues that were outfitted with his custom-made equipment, Nolan found it hard
not
to feel as bad to the bone as he appeared. He wore a black army-style flak jacket over black cargoes that were tucked into his black boots. At Nolan’s request, Arjay had added an oversized white hood to the jacket that he could flip up to conceal his head. His special glasses removed any chance that his eyes might be visible. Only his mouth might be seen from beneath the hood, but that was a grotesque mess thanks to Branford’s precision handiwork with a pistol. A single emblem marked his chest: a large white hand, matching the hand used on the billboards. His black gloves completed the ensemble.

Nolan stood and glanced both ways, finding himself exactly where he’d wanted to be: standing precisely between the rival gangs. Arjay’s ingenious equipment couldn’t have functioned better.

The gang members on the front lines on either side of him took a sharp step backward at his dramatic, unexpected drop from the sky. He calculated that six men could currently strike at him after taking approximately four paces toward him.

He took the first few seconds of shock on their parts to scan the crowd from behind his goggles. The zoom had been turned off, but now, swamped by so many faces, he almost wished it was still on. Thousands, maybe tens of thousands, watched him.

Nolan swallowed the rising bile in his throat. The only other time in his life when he’d been in a crowd this size was upon his return home from the war, where a ticker-tape parade was held in honor of the escaped POWs from his unit. But that was in the open-air historic streets of D.C. Here, skyscrapers boxed him in with this vast sea of people, and every single eye was fixed on him.

He took a deep breath, using calming techniques he’d been practicing for months. Placing a gloved hand inside his jacket, he gripped his sole weapon tightly and let out a slow huff of air.

B
ranford had convinced Arjay to make one defensive weapon for Nolan; Arjay had fought the idea from the beginning, but eventually the general had worn him down with concerns over Nolan’s safety. Arjay agreed only on the condition that it be a nonlethal instrument. Nolan didn’t let the young man know that in the right hands, even a paper clip could be lethal.

Arjay’s invention was a slender metal tube, like a pipe, about a foot and a half long. There was a seam in the center that separated it into two distinct rods.

“Twist it,” Arjay had explained to him, mimicking the proper motion with his hands. He twisted one hand forward and the other back, like wringing out a wash cloth.

Nolan copied the motion, and the dual tubes turned in opposite directions until they clicked and stopped. From each end shot out more metal tubes of nearly the same size, only narrower, and then another set followed, until the stick had grown to over six feet long.

Nolan whistled. “I’ve seen retractable staffs before, but they couldn’t hold their shape in a fight. They always bent at the seams.”

Arjay was unmoved by this concern. “This one will not.”

Nolan held the staff in one hand, at its center, and it remained perfectly balanced, still and threatening. Impressed yet again by Arjay’s skill and ingenuity, he took several steps back and sprang into action, twirling the staff in his hand like a baton. Raising it over his head, he continued twirling until he spun and jabbed the air with it. Next he swept it through the empty space around him, as if taking down multiple enemies using both ends of the staff, and then twirled it again until it landed neatly beneath one arm, tucked under his armpit.

More than satisfied, Nolan stood at ease and twisted the center rods again until it retracted down to its original length.

“Amazing,” he said with sincerity. This thing was beyond flawless. It was a precision work of art.

Striding the median in Times Square, Nolan saw that everyone’s attention had shifted to him. From the Irish and Russian gangs closing in on both sides to the scores of pedestrians, they all had to be wondering who he was and how he had managed to fall out of the sky right between these two warring factions.

With the full attention of the crowd, he twisted the staff until it expanded, right before their eyes. He held it under his arm and spread his legs apart in a defensive posture.

It was a very obvious threat. An unspoken invitation to attack.

“Who are you supposed to be?” spat one of them.

Nolan stood perfectly still, but his mind was whirling, his eyes quickly taking in the weapons and numbers of both gangs. He leveled his focus on the teenager near the front of the Broadway gang who’d spoken up—a pale-skinned blond boy sporting short sleeves that molded to sizable biceps underneath.

Nolan considered what his response might be to the young man’s question, but it was an exercise, nothing more. He’d decided months ago that he wasn’t going to speak while in his vigilante guise. For too long, people relied on empty, pointless words. And what would he say? That he was there to fix the city, eradicate immorality on her streets, and see her citizens live by their consciences? There was no explaining such things in cynical times. His billboards promised action. He needed to
show
the better way.

And yet he didn’t want to come across as the cold, detached, all-business automaton either. In his bones, he had to do this. Doing nothing was making him sick. The world was a nasty place and somebody needed to take a stand, draw a line, and push back against the darkness. He couldn’t afford to not let himself
feel
things like compassion and empathy for those who were suffering. Allowing emotional responses to assimilate into his actions had been trained out of him long ago. Yet now he knew he had to find a way to integrate those feelings into his actions, or all of this was for nothing.

It was a work in progress.

Instead of speaking, he held up a single black glove with fingers stretched out wide. Chatter from the onlookers rose in volume, and Nolan knew the gesture had had the desired effect: it was the outstretched hand, just like the one on the billboards. Just like the one on his chest.

He glanced at the buildings on either side of the street and noted that at least two major networks already had cameramen who were hurriedly positioning themselves with tripods to capture what was happening.

A gunshot went off, and Nolan felt a slight thud against his rib cage, but the bullet bounced off his graphene fabric and fell to the ground. He didn’t even lose his footing.

Thank you, Arjay.

As fast as he could, he rounded on the one who’d hastily pulled out the pistol and grabbed the gun by the barrel. After triggering the manual release so that the gun came apart in the gang member’s hand, he knelt and swept his staff across to knock the kid’s feet out from under him.

Two others rushed in from the opposite gang, but Nolan spun at the last second and whacked his staff hard enough against one’s head to knock him out. Continuing the same motion, he swung around and jabbed straight into the other man’s stomach, sending him to the ground, cradling his abdomen. The two men went down so fast they almost hit the ground simultaneously, ultimately toppling into each other in a heap upon the double yellow lines at the center of Seventh Street.

Nolan rose to his feet again like a bullfighter, ready and waiting to take on whoever would step up next. But he could tell something had changed in the electricity of the moment. It was worry, fear, the subtle sense that the dynamic on the battlefield had been drastically altered.

These gang members were sizing him up, knowing now that he wasn’t some clown in a black combat suit. Several of them seemed to have registered that he was the source of the “better way” billboards, and were probably wondering if he was there to make an object lesson out of them.

And he was.

Another man charged him like a hungry shark, and he sidestepped the attack at the last second. He pulled up behind the burly man and yanked his wrist until it was pinned against his back. With another spin, he was kneeling on the ground in front of the man, and sending him flying over his shoulder.

The attacks didn’t stop; one after another, and sometimes in pairs or more, they came at him. Again and again. Most bore knives or guns, but he disarmed each and tossed the weapons aside. He took down every last one of them, and made it look incredibly easy.

He thought his work was done when from the crowd there was a piercing scream. He looked up just as a gang member who had been hiding among the pedestrians stepped out with an AK-47 drawn and pointed at him.

Nolan raised his right hand and touched his thumb to his pinky. Another device built into his glove was activated by this gesture—a high-powered electromagnet that Arjay had somehow focused like a prism. Nolan aimed it square at the rifle, and the semi-automatic weapon was yanked violently from the gang member’s hands. In a blink, Nolan was holding it up with one hand. Just like the rest, he tossed this one aside onto the small pile of weapons he’d made in front of the tiny police station.

The disarmed man was stunned but did his fellows proud by refusing to flee. Instead, he followed their example and ran straight at him, this time with a bowie knife that Nolan estimated to be at least six inches long.

Nolan stood his ground, but this time when he spun out of the way, his attacker was expecting the move and jabbed to the side with his knife. Nolan felt the knife stab at his side, yet his jacket was untouched, impenetrable to the metal blade.

He grabbed the wrist holding the knife and twisted it well beyond the average person’s tolerance for pain. But still the man fought, punching at Nolan across the face and the abdomen.

Nolan hated to do it, but this guy was different, likely military trained, and wasn’t going to go down easily, so he twisted the man’s wrist sharply, until it snapped.

The man screamed obscenities at the sky and clutched his broken wrist, but still he fought, launching another barrage of fisticuffs with his one good hand, but it was over before it began. Nolan deflected the blows easily and then elbowed the man in the face. He joined his friends on the asphalt.

From the moment he had leapt from the top of the tower until this last man had hit the ground, less than three minutes had passed. Now he stood alone, king of the hill next to a mound of unconscious men. Like a gladiator in the Roman arena, thousands of eyes followed him, watching hungrily to see if he would kill or be merciful. The news crews were filming every second of this, and he noticed for the first time that he was being displayed on the big video screen above.

For a few seconds, nothing happened. He merely stood in a coiled silence, scanning the crowd and ready for any more late entries to come forward. If more gang members were out there, they were showing the good sense to stay away.

Then the audience seemed to realize that it was over, because as one, applause and cheers broke out. Those on the front lines of the crowd broke into a run to rush up closer to him, no doubt with endless questions on their tongues.

Nolan pulled out the grappler and fired it at the top of the Paramount Building to his left, which was taller than the Times Tower by eight stories. The hook solidified somewhere on the roof and he jumped into the air, retracting the grappler as he flew off the ground. When he approached the side of the building, he stuck out his feet and ran across the surface of it, holding onto the grappler all the way, and then he followed through on the motion by retracting the grappler at full blast until he had cleared the far corner of the building in mere seconds, and was out of sight.