A Walk Among the Tombstones (1/2)

‘Nothing good happens in this city after two in the morning!' Fausse’ words were ringing in his ears still but he had decided to venture out anyway, even though the clock had already struck four in the morning a few moments before this. A quick phone-call to the shrinking group of people in his life that were not simple-minded, synthetic builds of Frank Patrick Venable revealed that Wright wasn’t answering his phone; a fact that already worried David considering the events as of late. Fausse too had decided not join him on this excursion; perhaps because she had her hands full de-baptizing a city with a rich Catholic history or perhaps because she was still a little fragile after being force-fed tacks by Andre Holmes on Sunday. Really taking that suffragette thing too seriously thought David in regards to the man who called himself Relentless. Perhaps sooner or later he would have to address this man and his ridiculous beard that made his face resemble an early-eighties vagina. Fausse had dropped the ball and David hated his associates failing, it made him look bad but at least she had went down fighting.

#Beachmania was still a fresh memory for David as he sat alone in the back seat of vehicle number seven in his seemingly endless fleet of BMW X5’s, the one-way glass allowing him to gaze out at Chicago’s war-torn suburbs and main streets ablaze with burning effigies of himself, of Fausse and of the idols they had once reckoned would save them from such events as had been unleashed last months. It was true, God was dead in Chicago and this was his funeral; a pretty shit attendance for a deity by any measure but alas, the world keeps turning.

“Any idea where we’re heading boss?”

Frank’s voice had startled him from his train of thought. With little wasted breath he muttered an instruction and then pressed the little button on the door panel he had modified so that another one-way glass partition now separated the driver from the passenger. The beautiful thing about Frank was that he was just a mindless drone, David didn’t have to worry about bruising his morale or denting his ego.

“Just drive until I say otherwise.”

He had been needing to escape from City Hollow, and more importantly the Sanctuary for quite some time now; everything about that place was becoming depressing. Knowing that she was there had taken it’s toll on him to the point that he couldn’t sleep there. Like Trump in his tower, David had his nerve-center for all things Syndicate related, yet he he was finding it difficult to be there in the penthouse while she was kept six floors below the basement. It was the only way he could keep her around though; trapped and drugged in a glorified prison so as to keep her from remembering… that night.

He was doing it again, and dwelling on said evening himself. In truth he had been for almost a week now; ever since he won the Updegraff Invitational Tournament and ultimately realized that he didn’t want money or glory if he didn’t have her to share it with. A double-edged sword of emotion had pierced his icy exterior and severed his sub-zero arteries; now he was just a guy in a car being driven around a town he owned, staring at people, his own constituents who would stab him in the neck were they aware of his presence in the back of this automobile.

”Next on 156.7 Chicago Classic Rock, we have a song by Def Leppard about love, loss and the pain it causes.”

With a click, he extinguished the sound of the radio. ‘Fuck you Leppard.’ he thought before the opening lyrics to ‘Love Bites’ escaped the airwaves. Songs almost meant more to him when they talked of situations with which he was familiar, oh shit would you look at that; he was human after-all. The streets outside were beginning to calm a little, it had been a few weeks. Honestly he had hoped that by now, everybody who was previously affiliated with a religion would have succumbed to their desperate need to be validated by some mythical being but then again, he didn’t claim to understand the minds of these sheep in search of a shepherd.

“... Love bleeeeeeeeeeeeeeeds, it’s bringing me down on my knees. Love liveeeeeeeees, love dieeeeeeees! It’s no surprise.”

He could still hear Frank singing in the front seat, through the partition. That was fine though, he wasn’t exactly Joe Elliott, but he was making a fine job of hitting those notes like they owed him money. It was almost enough to make David lower the glass and make it a duet, but fate it would seem had other plans for the less than musical mayor.

“Frankie! Stop the car!”

With a screech of Leppard’s lead guitarist Phil Collen and then a similar screech of the brakes, the car was stationary, having been brought to a halt right outside of what used to be a trifecta of industrial companies occupying the small, and previously un-named stretch of commercial property in-between East Oakland Drive and East Pershing Road. He had seen her, out of the corner of his eye; he was sure of it. His peripheral vision was second to none. Fiddling with the lock, he swung open the door and let his black Timberland boots hit the sidewalk, leaving Frankie in the car as he hastily jogged down the alleyway he was sure she had fled. Debris from the derelict and crumbling bottling plant still occupied the left-hand side, whilst the right was relatively unscathed. It had been the large warehouse used by Cleaner & Cleaner; a company that made themselves a national sensation by offering to clean any property, regardless of condition for a flat hourly rate, and as such; it had grown effortlessly in pre-Wave Chicago, having only been closed down when the Sanchez administration starting snatching up commercial and industrial property throughout the city. The site had been bought for cents on the dollar in relation to what previous owner; Chris Torquay had paid back in two-thousand and three, a sale which ultimately caused the entrepreneur to take his own life on the eighth of March, earlier this year. With the echo of a shotgun, and the stain of blood and brain fragments on the wall behind his office desk; Chris Torquay hadn’t left much of a legacy… Or at least not at the time.

David continued down the alleyway, watching as the woman turned into the Cleaner & cleaner premises before following in her footsteps and repeating the same course. As he turned the corner though she was nowhere to be seen, instead what was in front of him was almost enough to bring the mayor to his knees. Hundreds of rows, hundreds of columns. An endless see of knee-height crosses sticking out of the freshly turned soil, each with a name carved into the scrap wood that had most likely been ripped out of the dilapidated building next door. The silence was almost deafening as David took a few steps forward into the makeshift graveyard, reading a few names aloud as he walked among the dead, being careful so as not to stand directly above where their bodies had been laid to rest.

“I wouldn’t worry about where you step, it’s just a mass-grave. Your little regime of domestic terrorists made sure of that.”

Turning, he seen her outline against the fence, standing on one side of the opening he had just passed through before having his attention magnetically pulled to the graveyard. It was her, it had to be. Her long, black hair and pale skin framing those unforgettably green eyes.

“Sam?”

He had to be seeing things; she was being kept under lock and key. There was no other possible explanation. Yet as he looked at this shadowy figure that had adopted the very features which had made him fall in love with his wife, he feared that it was all too real to be an oasis of memory in this depressing desert of death. Stepping out of the shadows, she was everything that Sam had been, until she wasn’t; her face scarred beyond recognition, the parts of her flesh not being covered by an attire that his wife would have been comfortable in bruised and grazed to the point that she looked like she had been the victim of a vicious gang-beating.

“You should be so lucky.”

Her voice was cold and unforgiving, until it became confident upon the next action. A small knife was visible at the end of her sleeve, clutched in her right hand. The blade shimmered under the streetlights as he gulped in the darkness, surrounded by the field of corpses under-foot. Fear was awash at the forefront of his emotions as this woman; half-his weight and twice his malice stood blocking the only exit, her eyes fixated on his.

“What is this place?”

He asked the only thing he wanted to know. Death wasn’t the thing that scared him, nor did this woman herself. Instead it was the thought of dying alone, here in this mass-grave with no legacy, no comfort and no mourners coming to lay a shawdy crucifix bearing his namesake. This place, this horrible place would be the unmarked grave of David Sanchez.

“Welcome to the Boneyard. The final resting place of those killed in the Chicago riots, the riots you caused when you closed the churches, the mosques and the synagogues.”

A chill was creeping up his spine as he became overwhelmed by the guilt of responsibility. Had he really been responsible for so much pain and suffering? So much loss and despair? Or was this woman just a vagrant that wanted to be the one to plunge the proverbial Sword of Damocles into his neck and watch him bleed out in the early morning hours while the city slept? Where he would have no court-flatterers to sing of his life’s work, no obedient servants to carry his body to the hallowed grave he had selected for himself, and most worrying - nobody to hear him repent in his final breaths.



It started with a whisper. From a whisper it had progressed into endless background noise, and sooner or later it had started to scream bloody murder in her subconscious from morning until night. Those doubts were deafening to the point that she could barely sleep at all on normal night, much less so after a loss. Was it a new thing? Or had somebody simply turned the volume up? Whatever was happening, it was graduating from little more than a thorn in her side into a metaphorical tumor of sorts, once malignant but now showing signs of spreading. It was the fear of not living up to all that she was meant to be, but what was she meant to be? Johnny Reb hadn’t exactly left an instructions manual.

Bonnie was seated in the locker-room, disheartened over her first round loss in the Updegraff Tournament. She was trying her hardest to watch the match that was currently happening in the ring between her tag-team partner; the Polar Phantasm and fellow Guardian; Alex Richards. In truth though she was just staring through the television monitor, through the veil and into her own eyes through those of another. Would he be disappointed? It was a haunting thought that everybody suffers at one point in their life but not everybody has such big shoes to fill and such dainty little feet.

“Miss Blue? A package for you.”

A package being delivered to her locker room, at seven o’clock at night was worrying enough, so when she glanced up at the teenage courier with his braces glimmering under the strip-lights and brow perspiring in the heat of the arena to see the moniker on his nametag, “David Sanchez” it immediately snapped her from thought back into action. Her tired arms reached into his and she accepted the parcel; a briefcase, black as night and locked with a numerical combination.

“Thank you… David?”

The boy looked just as confused as she did upon being called this but he decided to simply go along with it. Having just been defeated by his namesake earlier in the evening she was having visions of stuffing this teenager into a locker and leaving him there, but instead she just smiled up at him, biting her bottom lip as the thoughts danced a del muerte’ in her mind.

“Oh, there’s also this. The guy said I should give it directly to you but I think it stopped working.”

He pulled a small timepiece from his pocket; steampunk in style, fucked in functionality. It was older than the style would suggest, some minor rusting on the steel chain from which it was hanging was enough to identify this. Again with a smile she accepted the parcel, fairly positive that it wasn’t an improvised explosive device; had David wanted her dead he’d not be acting in the light of day or in a public place, he’d probably have one his Frank impersonators abduct her as she slept or something to that effect. This was way too direct to be a mayoral attempt on her life.

“Seven minutes ‘til midnight, that can’t be right?”

The teenager just shrugged and stuffed his hands into his pockets as he made to leave the room, a distraught and now confused Bonnie Blue the only thing to be left in his wake. As he grabbed for the door handle though he didn’t offer her a parting greeting. Instead it had came across as more of a riddle, a simple riddle but a riddle nonetheless.

“The time is the key.”

“Uh, thanks?”

It was an unusual encounter to say the least but now it was in past, the briefcase was resting on her knees and the thrift-store pocketwatch in her hand as she sat in a formed plastic chair, still half-trying to watch her friends’ match. Eventually though her curiosity had peaked and as she stares down at the face of the tiny clock she began to roll the four-digit combination lock into place.

‘2353’

“Seven minutes ‘til midnight”

She said it again as the lock disabled and the case now sat in her lap, slightly ajar and begging to be torn open like a Christmas present to a child. Battling with the thought of what might be inside she found herself torn between the idea of this being some kind of literary salt to sprinkle on her open proverbial wounds and the thought that it could be much more sinister; a body part of someone close to her perhaps? Anything was possible. As she opened it however it was much less daunting than she had expected. An A4 sheet of paper with David’s official stamped marking at the footer and his handwriting across it was removed initially to reveal ten identical stacks of one-hundred dollar bills. A quick flick through one of these bundles led her to believe that there was close to, if not exactly one-hundred thousand dollars on her lap. A sum equal to that which she could have won had her luck been better in the tournament.

Her eyes filled with joy for a fleeting second; this was a lot of money regardless of where it had came from or how it had been earned, although she was sure that whatever means Sanchez had used to acquire this hard cash were not within the guidelines of her moral compass. Setting the case down she began to read the letter that was attatched:



It wasn’t anything like she’d thought it would be: no jabs taken at her expense, no severed limbs of Guardians past or present and no explosives sewn into the interior of the case. It was an offer, or an olive branch? A direct attempt at communication, with no strings and no underlying vibe of evil. Just some words she needed to hear and some money she wanted to win.

Blood money though, and an offer of a meeting that in truth she already knew was appealing not to her charming personality, gorgeous appearance or sterling sense of moral righteousness. This was a message from David’s need to surround himself with those he deemed worthy, to her need to be known to be worthy. It was a hundred-thousand carrots, on a hundred thousand strings, leading a hundred-thousand donkeys up a steep hill.

Where was the sudden drop though? The free-fall? The catch? As far as she could tell, the money was real, the note seemed sincere and the praise and promise was something she had longed for since back in the other place. He was watching though? Okay so that part was a little creepy but they already knew that David had erected a super-computer in City Hollow, a grouping of every close-circuit camera in the city that was monitored from his office. She just didn’t know they were being trained on her.

With a sigh she began to weigh the positives and negatives. Was this to be her fork in the road? If so, how would she break the news to the other Guardians? Surely they would urge her not to meet with this man, or at least not to do so alone. To take someone with her though would be to let them see that she was actually listening to whatever he had to say, to let them know that she liked being rewarded, praised and acknowledged. This wasn’t selfless, this wasn’t Bonnie Blue and this certainly wasn’t the Guardians. Were she to go, she would have to go alone; but what if that was the plan? A trap. This money and those words acting as a scattering of leaves to mask a pit below.

She was torn. She was Bonnie, but at this point she was no longer Blue.







“Polar Phantasm… a hero? Or just another empowered piece of shit with his finger on the trigger?”

The scene is snow, so much snow in fact that it brings the fear of nuclear window to the forefront of the reader’s mind. It isn’t American snow, not by any measure. This is the snow of an Arctic climate. Falling from the sky, it cascades down onto blankets of it’s brothers below; each snowflake an addition to the white-washed ground below as the blizzard grows heavier and heavier while David’s voice talks over the winter winds.

“If you were anything, anything else in this little world of ours but what you are right now, what would you be? You want to be the hero, but you need to see the world as we do before you can save it. It’s not as big as you seem to think it is. To each person, the world is only as small as their relationships, their experiences and to some extent their imagine. To me it’s Chicago, Chicago and maybe a few memories of Colombia, and California but even then I wouldn’t say that Colombia being wiped off the face of earth would really bother me all too much. Not because I’m a heartless monster, but because it will survive in my dormant brain. Those memories are scarred onto my medial temporal lobe as deep as the wounds on my flesh. Are you going to save me from them too? From my own memories and dated flesh-wounds?”

“This is a man who wants to save us by battling in space and time to prevent alien invasions and airborne parasites from the planet Dankopolis Four. He doesn’t care about you; the Polar Phantasm is above us lowly humans on mother earth. He thinks that he is a saviour to us but really, what is it that he’s saving? He certainly didn’t save my wife when our car veered into a tree, he couldn’t save any of us from the Wave, and he wasn’t even able to save Frankie from becoming Frankies. What good are you as a hero if you can’t even save your friends? I could have made an army of Frank Venables into an army of Frank-N-Furters and you would be powerless to stop me. Why? Well that’s simple, because you don’t care about Frankie, just like you didn’t care about Jay, you don’t care about Bonnie or Alex and you’re recruiting a whole Injustice League of other weirdos to take under your wing and then drop from a great height.”

The snow continues to fall, be swept in every which direction imaginable by the sharp winds, soon the window is beginning to become more like a portion of plasterboard than an opening to the outside world. Inside the Cabins David sits in front of a desk, his left hand resting stop a globe that he spins from time to time before stopping it with one finger and repeating the process. He doesn’t shiver, the fireplace crackling in the background makes sure of that as the flames flicker and roar, giving off enough heat to warm this little wooden cabin in the endless snowfields of Northern Siberia.

“So, what? Are we supposed to take you seriously now that you have a championship? Am i supposed to be shaking at the thought of stepping into the ring with you and Miss Blue? You have to know me better than that Cameron; for that is something I welcome with warmth and open arms. Come dance with the wolves, my friend. I think you’ll find that your little party tricks, smoke and mirrors… They mean nothing inside of that ring, just like you mean nothing outside of it. You got lucky the last time we faced, lucky that I prefered the idea of teaching Jayden Thunder a lesson in abandonment to teaching you the true weight of your worth. What is that weight you might ask? It’s weightless. You are to this industry what driftwood is to water. The bi-product of a once great tree being swept any which way the water drags you.”

“That’s not enough though is it? It’s not enough that you just come to work everyday and accept your place at the middle of the pack. An average contender for an average championship, having average matches for average pay. No, you’re like a virus. You need to pass your ideas and opinions to as many human hosts as possible in order to survive, but that’s okay. I can understand that. I was once called a plague of sorts, but even I never left my victims completely lost and desperate to work out where it all went wrong. You are what you have always been; the brains of an operation greater than the grasp of this world you have. You are the guy who sits at his desk calling a drone strike while your friends are all out on the frontlines, getting their respective asses bagged up and sold back to them for a marginal profit.”

“In every group of individuals there is somebody like you, it’s just not normally as obvious as to who that person is, but while Bonnie tries to find her feet, Alex fights to contend for championships and Jay basks in his former glory somewhere in space…. You just kinda linger around, soaking in some of their glory like the proverbial sponge, or gyro that allows this globe to spin. You are universally considered to be one of the most under-appreciated talents, but there’s that word again… ’Universal... Who cares about the rest of the universe? Certainly not me, not Taylor nor anybody else at the Syndicate table. Certainly not UCI or the members of the audience who carry on with their mundane lives in the wake of tragedy after tragedy.; all the while aware of their positions as pawns in the chessboard of life”

His hand still on the globe, David stops the world turning one final time before getting to his feet and placing another log on the fire. He rubs his hands together for warmth before completing the last of his comments on Polar Phantasm.

“You can’t be a hero to these people Polar, you can’t even be a hero to your own people, whoever they are. You can’t keep fighting an uphill battle and you can’t conquer the rising. You’re not Kid Phantasm anymore, you’re ageing just like the rest of us. The world you know and love is over, this is a brave new world and I am it’s ruler. It started with Chicago, but it only ends when every man, woman and child on this green planet call me King David. This broken, bruised and beaten world we have come to call home needs me Cameron, it doesn’t even know you anymore.”

“You’re just a dated memory of when the world wasn’t so fucked up, to a time when people could find solace in knowing that the palest man on earth was off somewhere on Jupiter shooting icicles out of his hands at giant killer penguins, or squid or whatever the fuck it is you think is a genuine threat to us this week. I’m not saying that there’s not a place for you; the world will always need fantasists and dreamers, but it doesn’t need you to be one, it needs you to guide the ones it does need.”

“On Sunday I will do what I should have done the first time we met and choke you the fuck out. Then, when it’s over and you brush it off without any real concern, I’m going to come back and do it again, only next time; I’ll take those tag-titles with me when I step over your fallen body. It’s a shame really, there’s plenty of young talent on this roster that doesn’t have any real direction, you could save them all - that is how you be a hero, but you’d rather be off in space and time, cavorting with Tesla and smoking weed in derelict bars. You’re not a hero Cameron, you’re a disappointment; a has-been who never quite was anything to begin with.”