Meta Zero One (11 page)

Strangely, within it's own community there was very little crime. That old lady you are robbing might just have the power to turn your legs to jelly, literally, she might not, but why take the risk?

And when the self elected chief of police could give you crabs at a glance it really wasn't worth crossing him.

So most of Lowtown's residents lived side by side and muddled along without getting in each others way.

But if you were human, all bets were off.

Come on an organised tour to take in the sights, the museum, art gallery and of course the obligatory strip club, where one of the girls can apparently strip herself down to the bones, and you were pretty safe.

Wander in unannounced and you were easy meat.

It had become a no go area for most people.

  But not for Elroy.

As he crossed town, the nature of the city changed, the buildings became grubbier, less well maintained, the shops started selling a lower value range of goods.

Pawn and porn shops grew in number, loan sharks, set up stalls on the street corners.

Then crossing a street, dodging between passing traffic he was in Lowtown proper.

The distinction was sudden, as if he had stepped through a curtain, through a magic wardrobe to another world it even smelled different.

Elroy was only cutting across one small corner of Lowtown, so he had just a few streets to cross before he would reemerge, but still his senses pricked up as he walked. He assessed the risks, reviewed the potential of everyone he saw.

When he saw a threat he avoided it, even at one point crossing the street to avoid a large homeless man with grey skin and a single rhino like horn in the middle of his forehead.

Elroy recognised him as a low level villain, The White Rhino, who had been relatively big in the late 80's. He had served 20 years for robbery, ironically being caught by the Arachnid, and when released he had disappeared from sight.

Now judging by the bottle clasped in his hand, the pool of urine he was sitting in and the blurred confused noise he was making he had turned to cheap booze to drown his sorrows.

Still Elroy noted the name of the street and decided that he would have him picked up. An alcoholic rhino horned superhuman who could lift a small truck with one hand was not something he wanted loose on the street, even a Lowtown street.

The White Rhino would be picked up and would disappear again this time permanently.

Walking passed a cheap porn shop,  Elroy slowed down his pace as he noticed a group of Lowtown youths ahead. They had the rolling swagger of young bloods everywhere but what made him slow down was that they were wearing gang colours.

The red bands which they wore around their arms declared their allegiance to MAH. Mutant Against Humans were a low level gang, who to Elroy's knowledge rarely achieved more than shouting abuse at passing tourists.

At one time but they had been suspected of involvement in the kidnap, ransom and subsequent death of the daughter of a prominent business man.

No link was ever conclusively proved, but they had been flagged up to be watched more closely.

There were three of them ahead of Elroy, walking in the same direction as he was, so they had not seen him, but they had seen someone. Walking to one side of the street Elroy could see a man,  who was clearly very drunk ahead of them, swaying from side to side across the pavement.

He was clearly drunk, and clearly human.

The three MAH thugs had also clearly picked him out for something more substantial than a good telling off.

Elroy watched them follow the man, they were looking for an opening, and opportunity, which came when he turned, or more rightly stumbled, into an alley in between two buildings.

The three followed him in, one, Elroy saw, drawing a knife from their back pocket.

Elroy increased his pace, so that he reached the alley seconds later, and glanced down. The man was on the ground in a pool of foul water, and the three thugs were standing around him taking turns to kick him in the guts.

For a second Elroy considered turning away and leaving him to his own problems. He had better things to do and three to one odds could present some degree of risk.

The thing that stopped him was not a sense of civic duty, nor even a sense of right and wrong, no it was that even in the dark, even lying on the floor with his hands over his head, protecting himself, Elroy recognised the man.

The man being beaten up was Stanley,  the man who had bought him a cranberry juice in the bar.

And that made him deserve better than a kicking.

"Time to stop your fun boys," Elroy said loudly, perhaps they could be talked down, perhaps they would see sense.

The three stopped and turned to face him.

Elroy grinned, they were obviously low level thugs, and unlikely to have any significant powers, but you could never tell.

One had a long red beard with pointed ears, one had green scaled skin and looked like he struggled to breathe and the third, who went up a notch in terms of threat assessment was a girl with pale blue skin.

In gangs, girls were usually more dangerous than boys. Additionally she was armed, she held a knife in one pale blue hand.

"Go away zero," she said, with a voice which was soft and melodic, a voice like syrup dripping over a warm cake, like an iced beer at the end of the day. Elroy felt himself twitch in response,  he felt the urge to leave, to walk away and leave Cranberry Juice man to his own problems.

"Walk away and don't look back," she said, smiling now, she was surprisingly pretty even with her pale blue skin. 

  Elroy wanted so much to please her, he wanted to do just what she said. He felt himself turning away.

The girl watched and smiled at him, a smile which rapidly faded as Elroy grinned evilly back, turned to face her and took a step forwards.

"Girl," he said, "I've had freaks like you trying to tell me what to do all my life. The other week Mental Man tried to get me to forget that he had just murdered and raped a teenage girl, and do you know where he is now?"

Pale Blue girl just looked at him.

"Do you know where he is now?" Elroy shouted, "no, you don't. And you never will, because he's locked away at the bottom of a very deep dark pit. He is locked away playing hunt the arsehole with all the other crazy fuckers who thought they could make me do anything I didn't want to do."

Elroy stepped forwards, Pale Blue stayed were she was, Red Beard took a step to his left and Green Scales a step to the right.

Cranberry Juice  stayed on the floor where they had left him.

 "I'm going to give you a chance to walk away from this," Elroy said calmly staring at each of them in turn, "one chance, and one chance only. And that's just because I have somewhere to be in ten minutes and I really, really need to be there. So if the three of you walk away, if you leave now, I won't break your legs and leave you for dead in this alley."

They weren't going to go for it, Elroy knew it, they knew it, they could not see the very real threat he posed for them.

Red Beard was trying to circle him with Green Scales, they were boxing him in, cutting of his escape.

But Elroy did not want to escape

"Ok," Elroy smiled, "let's play it your way."

He watched the girl's face closely, she was in charge of the group and she would want Red Beard and Green Scales to attack at the same time. To make this happen they would both look to her for the signal.

So he ignored them and watched her instead.

There was always a tell, always a signal, always a message when three people tried to fight together. Elroy had been in enough fights to know what to look for.

As Pale Blue's eyes flickered from side to side she nodded fractionally, and Elroy moved.

Taking one long step forwards his right arm shot out and he punched her in the throat as hard as he could.

She was completely and utterly unprepared for the brutality of his assault. Every instructor he'd ever had had taught him, if you are going to hit someone them hit them hard. You make damn sure that they go down and don't get up, you might not get another chance.

So he hit her in the throat, on a normal human it was a fight ending strike and he wanted to make sure that she was unable to speak for a long time. He didn't want her attempts to control him to distract him when he was dealing with the other two thugs. From the feel of the impact, and the way she collapsed to the floor he knew straight away that she was out of the fight

Green Scales and Red Beard were now behind him, still attacking where he had been, not were he was now.

Elroy spun, stepped right and grabbed Red Beard by his red beard, pulling down sharply so that his head shot downwards to meet Elroy's knee as it moved up. The chin is actually remarkably easy to break if you hit it in the right place with the right force. Elroy felt it shatter and shift as his knee followed through, flinging the man shrieking backwards.

Green Scales tried to land a clumsy punch, but Elroy grabbed his fist easily. He then held it, while he punched him repeatedly in the face four times, before letting him go, allowing the youth to fall unconscious to the floor.

The entire incident had taken less than three seconds, and Elroy was not even breathing hard.

Not bad, he thought, the old skills were still there, he still had it.

Now, turning to Cranberry Juice, Stanley he reminded himself, he helped him get to his feet. Giving him the once over he could see that Stan was bruised, and shocked,  but not really badly hurt. The MAH had not had time to really go to town on him before Elroy had intervened.

"You'll be ok," he said, holding Stan up by his elbow.

"Thanks," Stan looked up, he vaguely recognised the man who had saved him from somewhere, but his alcohol befuddled brain could not quite place from where. "Have we met before?"

Elroy laughed, "Only the once, and we won't again I think. I suggest you go home now, you are not in any condition to be stumbling blindly through Lowtown."

Elroy dragged Stanley back to the main street, vaguely satisfied that none of the thee assailants were moving, he suspected that Pale Blue Girl might not even be breathing. Their problem he thought, I did warn them. Elroy flagged down a taxi, paid the driver a wad of money,  and said "Drive him around until he can tell you where he lives, then take him there."

With that he shoved Stanley in the back of the cab, closed the door and turned to continue on his way.

He didn't see the taxi drive off, or see it stop at the next junction, where Stanley got out and stumbled off down the road.

Ten minutes later Elroy had cut out of Lowtown and was at the office of the Superhuman Liaison Office pathologist. Well he as sitting in the reception of  the Superhuman Liaison Office pathologist reading this months copy of Cosmopolitan. He had just finished an article on 'why women loved shoes', and was about to learn the '20 ways to guarantee an orgasm, when the receptionist indicated he could go through.

Elroy had been here many times before, far too many to be honest. He knew his was around the labs better than he did around his own apartment. So he went straight to the stairs and climbed the 10 floors to the main lab.

Out of habit he never took the lift, he didn't like to be trapped in any metal box either alone or with someone.

Elroy smiled at the armed guard outside the main lab door, who he knew from previous investigations and pushed his way through the door and stepped into another world.

Dr Taggert's lab was a shrine to cleanliness. If, as his long dead mother had told him every day, cleanliness was indeed next to godliness, then Dr Taggert must have sat on the right hand side of the Lord himself.

Everything was in the right place, everything shined if it should, gleamed of it could and glowed with an inanimate "look at me" satisfaction.

And that included Dr Taggert.

She always made Elroy feel slightly dirty, and not in a good way.

Dr Taggert wore a white, spotless lab coat, was tall and willowy with long red hair tied back in an almost perfect plait. Her skin had the paleness of someone who spent most of her time working under fluorescent light and he would swear that even the freckles which crossed her cheeks and nose were carefully and precisely placed.

If you had watched any CSi, crime scene related drama on television, then you would have recognised Dr Martha Taggert. She was almost a cliche in her visual suitability for the job.

She looked up as Elroy entered, "There's been a murder," she said in a broad Scottish drawl.

"A murder," he replied in the same accent. They had once spent an evening watching The British drama series Taggart, on Elroy's huge hd television. Ever since they had mimicked the broad Glasgow accents of the main characters, particularly the way they said murder.

The evening had almost, but not quite ended with them in bed together, almost enough to be vaguely embarrassing, and not quite enough to mean that they had seen each other naked. They had never discussed it since and now they were firm friends.