Crab Town (11 page)

“Where is he?” Little Sister asks as they come into the alley.

“Jack’s dead,” says Doomsday, helping Nine onto the back of Sailboat’s bike.

“What?” Little Sister giggles nervously at the thought. “He can’t be…”

“He’s fucking dead!” Sailboat yells at her.

Little Sister flinches at his words.

They see Johnny Balloon running past the alley, with gunshots trailing behind him. The cops have arrived on the scene and have already opened fire on the first guy they see carrying a gun. Bullets whiz past his head. He screams in a panic, knowing that he’ll pop at the slightest graze.

“We’ve got to save him,” says Miss Doomsday.

“Leave him,” says Sailboat. “We’ll be able to get away as he draws the fire.”

“I’m going for him,” Doomsday says.

“But you don’t even know him.”

“Let’s split up. Meet back in Crab Town, in the square.”

“You can’t be serious. He’s a fucking balloon!”

As she dismisses him and peddles out into the street, Sailboat kicks the wall. Going after her would be stupid, especially with Nine to look after. The Nine of Hearts is sitting on the bike, shivering from the loss of blood. He can’t worry about Doomsday right now. He has to get Nine back to Crab Town, to the doctor, the Queen of Spades.

As Sailboat gets on the back of the bike with Nine, Little Sister passes him, peddling into the street after Miss Doomsday.

“Where are you going?” he yells.

“She needs me.” Little Sister doesn’t look back. “I’m the Two of Diamonds. Escaping from the police is my department.”

The big guy doesn’t argue. He looks down at Nine and peddles off, in the other direction.

When Little Sister enters the street, the cops stop firing. They see a teenager in a police uniform and think she’s on their side for a brief moment, until she rides up next to Miss Doomsday with a matching bike.

Little Sister was the leader of one of Crab Town’s most violent street gangs,
The King Crabs
. Being a kid in Crab Town with dead parents you have pretty much only one option if you want to survive: you join a gang. And once you’re in a gang, it’s kill or be killed.

The King Crabs were a bicycle gang that claimed about forty percent of Crab Town, including the House of Cards’ area of operation. Now that gas-powered vehicles are as rare as clean water, most people use either pedal-powered or sail-powered transportation. The King Crabs use both. They created sail-bikes, which are kind of like a combination of sailboard and BMX bike. Little Sister was building them since she could walk and by the time she was old enough to crack a shitter’s head open with a brick, she had a gang of street warriors riding her sail-bikes and taking her commands.

On their sail-bikes, the King Crabs are the fastest people on the road. Not even the cops in their giant street boats can catch them. They ride onto their enemy turf with spears and axes, slicing through them and sailing away before they know what hit them. Although they are not the biggest gang in Crab Town, they are the most dangerous, and most feared.

The King Crabs and other Crab Town gangs have a different kind of existence than anyone else in the city. They aren’t interested in rebuilding or returning to civilization. Instead, they embrace the wasteland. They live like road warriors of the post-apocalypse out in the ruins. Only, instead of vehicles, they use wind-powered bicycles. Instead of guns, they use javelins and arrows. They are returning to a more primitive, tribal life. And anyone who isn’t one of them is considered their enemy.

The House of Cards decided they had to do something about these punks causing havoc in Crab Town. After shutting down the radiation porn ring, the House of Cards thought Jack would be the right person for the job. But he wasn’t. Jack had a respect for the King Crabs. Instead of getting rid of them, Jack wanted to join forces with them. He thought they were well-organized and damn near invincible. If only their moral compass was in the right place.

The first time Jack tried to communicate with the King Crabs, they beat him nearly to death with bike chains. He explained that they were on the same side, that Crab Town citizens were their family, and that they should work together against the fat cats of Freedom City.

“Someday you won’t have to live like wild animals anymore,” Jack said.

It was the wrong thing for him to say.

“We
want
to live like wild animals,” said Little Sister. “The rest of you live like sick, dying, caged animals. At least we’re free.”

“If we work together we can have a better life,” Jack said.

But these kids have never known the old world. They grew up in Crab Town. They only know two ways of living: hard and fast or waiting to die. They love living like wild animals in the ruins of Crab Town, taking whatever they want, doing crab shit, and waging war against rival gangs. They thought the place was called Crab Town because the King Crabs owned it.

Jack couldn’t get through to them. But he wouldn’t give up. They beat him bloody, but once his wounds healed he came right back. Then they beat him again.

The fourth time Jack visited them, one of the younger kids in the King Crabs gang was suffering from a head wound after crashing into a brick wall while high on crab shit. The kid was jerking on the ground, hemorrhaging blood, part of his skull broken wide open. Jack tried to go to the boy, to see if he could help, but Little Sister’s friends got in his way.

“Don’t touch him,” Little Sister said, two of the bigger kids were at her side.

“I have a friend who could help him,” Jack said. “If we get him to her she might be able to save his life.”

“A King Crab doesn’t need help from anybody,” she said. “If he’s tough he’ll survive on his own. If he’s weak he deserves to die.”

“So you’re just going to sit around and watch him die?”

“It’s our way,” she said.

“Bullshit,” Jack said. “It’s a waste.”

Jack tried to go for the boy, but the King Crabs held him back. They punched him in the stomach, then knocked him to the ground. They took out lead pipes and threatened to beat him worse than the previous beatings combined.

“Let him go,” Little Sister said, before they could break his face.

The others were surprised at her mercy.

“I’m sick of looking at his face. Get him out of here.”

While he was being dragged away, Jack made eye contact with Little Sister. He could tell she was confused by him. Nobody had ever offered to help a King Crab before. She thought the rule of Crab Town was that you only look out for yourself. Part of her was angry that Jack offered to help. He was breaking the rules of the land by doing that. He was offering the kind of compassion and aid that she had been longing for as a child after her parents died of radiation sickness. She was always wishing somebody would help her find food or give her medicine or help her build shelter, but nobody ever gave a shit about her. She resented him for showing compassion. She hated him for it. But she showed him mercy. There was a part of her, deep down inside, that was grateful to him. Even though she couldn’t allow him to actually save the kid and destroy their way of life, she was grateful that someone actually cared enough to try.

Two weeks later, the tables were turned. It wasn’t Jack who came to the King Crabs. Little Sister had come to him. He woke to find her standing in his doorway, holding her stomach, bleeding on the floor. She was weak and could barely speak. During a gang fight, Little Sister had been stabbed in the stomach. Her friends wouldn’t help her. They left her to die. She didn’t know what else to do. She came looking for Jack.

The Jack of Spades was surprised she was able to track him down, figure out his location in the middle of the night, with a six-inch gash in her guts.

All she said was, “Help me,” before collapsing onto the floor.

Jack scooped her up and took her to the Crab Town clinic run by the Queen of Spades. The clinic was a grubby old hospital that was falling apart worse than any other building in the area, but it was the best Crab Town had.

When Jack entered the lobby, the place was littered with balloon people floating in the air, their strings attached to the floor. They stuck around the clinic, hoping the impossible hope that someday the Queen might be able to restore them to human form.

“What happened?” the Queen asked Jack as she looked at him with bloodshot eyes. She always had bloodshot eyes from lack of sleep and nourishment. She was so focused on helping other people that she never had time to take care of herself.

“Stab wound,” Jack said, putting her on an operating table. “She’s lost a lot of blood.”

“I’ll see what I can do,” said the Queen, getting straight to work.

Queen was a doctor who quit her job at the hospital in downtown Freedom City. She was morally opposed to how the hospital was treating patients. They only cared about making money off of the sick and wounded, and cared very little about helping them. The balloon people scam was one reason why she had to quit. It was a way for them to get free organ donation and then charge the rich out their ass for their desperately needed transplants. The hospital also regularly diagnosed their patients with bogus ailments in order to give them expensive, unnecessary operations. Many of these operations only harmed the patients and sometimes they would have to return to the hospital a week later to fix the damage the doctors had done. Then they would prescribe them expensive medication that they didn’t even need, promising them that they risk serious health issues, including death, if they don’t take the pills regularly, for the rest of their lives.

The Queen and a couple of her colleagues quit the hospital and set up the clinic in Crab Town, using her own savings to help the unfortunate people living there. She offered her services for free, but it only took a couple of weeks before her lack of funding prevented her from helping most of the patients who came to her. It wasn’t until she joined the House of Cards, who donated a large percentage of their earnings to her cause, that the clinic actually became operational enough to help the Crab Town citizens. But it was never enough. People still died in her care everyday.