Crab Town (14 page)

“There’s no law that states companies are not allowed to hire Crab Town citizens.”

“It’s an unwritten law! You know it’s true. Talk to any resident of Crab Town. You’ll learn that not a single person here is able to get a job, no matter how educated. Those that did have jobs were fired for no good reason.”

“It’s not the city’s fault. We can’t force companies to hire you people.”

“We don’t want you to force them to hire us. We just want a fair chance.”

“You need to come out of there now. This is your final warning.”

Miss Doomsday grips her Tommy Gun. She wishes Jack was there with them. He would have been better at convincing them to listen. She’s just not convincing enough. She can’t find the right words.

“You listen to me!” says Miss Doomsday. “I want to speak to the mayor. You get him back into town. You get him here. If you don’t listen to me I will detonate the bomb and then you, me, this entire city, it will be reduced to a pile of ash. Is that what you want? Is that what you’re trying to make me do?”

“One minute,” the cops say.

“Fuck you!” says Miss Doomsday.

“What are we going to do now?” says Sailboat. “Set off the bomb? Blow up the whole city, all of our friends, all the people in Crab Town?”

“No, of course not,” says Doomsday. “Even if we fail, we can’t destroy the city. The rest of the House of Cards might find another solution to help the residents of Crab Town. The Four Aces will figure something out, eventually.”

“Those assholes are going to break in here shooting,” Sailboat says. “They’re going to end up detonating the bomb themselves if they’re not careful.”

When Miss Doomsday looks out of the window, she sees a squad of officers charging the building. They have a battering ram with them. “They’re coming.”

“What do we do?” Sailboat asks, pumping his shotgun.

Little Sister says, “We can still escape on the sail-bikes. I’m sure we can.”

“We’re surrounded,” Sailboat says. “There’s no way out.”

“No,” she says, pointing out of the window. “Look out by the edge of the square. If we can get there we can take the tunnel out to the bay. We can lose them, I know we can.”

“We’ll never make it to the tunnel,” says Sailboat. “Do you see how many guns are out there?”

Little Sister grinds her fists. “No, I swear we can get there. You just have to trust me.”

Johnny Balloon sees a glowing red dot on the girl’s chest as she speaks. At first, he thinks it’s a trick of the light, but then he recognizes it as a laser sight.

“Get down!” Johnny yells.

He jumps in front of Little Sister just as the sniper fires the weapon. Johnny acts before he thinks, forgetting for a brief moment that he isn’t solid anymore. He pops as the bullet passes through his back and hits Little Sister square in the heart.

Miss Doomsday jumps as the balloon man pops. She has no idea what has just happened until she sees his balloon skin spraying through the air like confetti, his gaseous form dissipating like rising dust in the sunlight. Then Miss Doomsday sees the teenaged girl fall to the ground with a bullet wound on her chest. The girl dies instantly. Her blue dreadlocks lie across the floor like a dead squid on the beach.

When Sailboat sees her body on the ground, his eyes fill with rage.

“You motherfuckers!” he screams.

He rips Doomsday’s Tommy Gun out of her arms, and fires at the cops out of the window. He tears down a line of them as they charge the building.

Miss Doomsday takes Sailboat’s shotgun and runs down the stairs. She can hear the gate splinter open as they break it down with the battering ram.

When she gets downstairs, she goes into the back room with Nine, aiming at the gate from the doorway, ready to fire at the cops who enter.

“Nine, do you think you can fire a weapon?” Miss Doomsday says, without looking at her.

The Nine of Hearts doesn’t respond.

“Nine?”

Doomsday turns around to see a cluster of black sewer crabs where Nine had been lying. The crabs are ripping apart her flesh, crawling inside her torso and pulling out her insides. Half of her face is missing. A small crab snaps at an eyeball dangling from its socket. Her pink rib bones can be seen through the mass of black spidery limbs.

She sees that there are more crabs coming out of the storm drain toward Nine, like a row of ants. Doomsday isn’t sure if the crabs started eating Nine while she was still alive, but she sure hopes that wasn’t the case. She hopes she bled to death long before the crabs got to her.

When the cops break through the gate, Miss Doomsday opens fire. She blasts through the first cop, pumps her shotgun, and blows off the next one’s elbow before he can find cover. They shoot back at her, tearing through her abdomen with machinegun fire, knocking her to the ground.

She kicks the door closed.

As she holds in her wounds, lying back on the concrete floor, she stairs up at the ceiling. She can hear Sailboat stomping around up there, firing the Tommy Gun, yelling at the cops below, calling them evil bastards for killing Little Sister. She was just a fifteen-year-old kid. He doesn’t understand how they could intentionally do such a thing.

Doomsday hears feet scuttling across the floor in the main room.

“Get the bomb out of here!” shouts one of the cops. “Quickly.”

Miss Doomsday’s eyes widen. “What?”

She hears some kind of forklift being wheeled into the front room, heading toward the Crab-Bomb.

“No,” Miss Doomsday calls out. “You’ll detonate the bomb…”

But with a bullet in her lungs, her voice isn’t loud enough to be heard. She tries to get up, tries crawling toward the door to stop them.

“Don’t do it…” she says.

She can’t get off the ground, she can’t move.

“We never wanted to blow it up,” she says. “Even if we failed there would still be hope.”

With one more effort to get off the ground, she realizes that it’s not just her wounds that are keeping her down. There are black sewer crabs clawing her flesh, holding her to the ground.

“All we wanted to do was talk,” she says, as the crabs crawl across her body.

Upstairs, Sailboat runs out of bullets and begins throwing furniture out the windows at the cops.

“Be careful,” says the cops behind the door. “That thing could explode.”

“All we wanted was a chance,” Miss Doomsday says to the crabs as they tear into her flesh.

The sound of bullets piercing through Sailboat’s face can be heard all the way downstairs.

“Just a fair chance, like everyone else.”

A cop yells out, “Not like that! It’s going to explode!”

Just before the bomb goes off, Miss Doomsday cries out one last time, with all of her strength, hoping to be heard. But before she can get out even a single word, a black crab tears out her tongue like a child being violently separated from its womb.

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