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Post By The Hooded Hood's belated Hallowe'en horror movie Sat Nov 04, 2006 at 08:35:05 am EST |
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Deadeyes #1 | |
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| Deadeyes #1 Jack Corgan nearly coughed his lungs out just making the shallow climb up to the old part of All Saints Cemetery. Too many cigarettes. Too many years. He looked like what he was: a bitter old man a shabby worn suit drenched by the pouring rain. Most of the mausoleum doors were kicked in these days. It gave the punk gang kids somewhere to hide out of the downpour while they were waiting for their drugs drop. But the GothMet Rippers were bored enough to roll the bum just to hear him squeal. “Hand it over, pops,” Pop-Rock Essenden told the old man. A generation ago he’d have shown a blade. Now he had a semi-automatic MP5 pointed at his victim’s head. “Guns,” sneered the wheezing old man. He threw away the rolled up remains of his filterless cigarette. The rain had doused it anyway. “Punks today, they always gotta have guns. When we ruled these streets a man didn’t need a gun to be tough.” He held up a bony liver-spotted hand. “Fists. Dusters, sometimes. Knives if it was over a dame. We lived hard, boy. We lived hard.” Ellison popped a bullet through the old man’s kneecap. Nobody was going to come and help him this late on Halloween Night in Gothametropolis York. “Keep talking big, gramps,” Pop-Rock sneered. “Any more stories of the good old days for us?” Corgan grimaced at the pain and hauled himself over the sodden mud towards an old grave marker. “Only one, you worthless turd,” he grimaced through his pain. “One last story.” “Jeez, Pop-Rock. What’re you doing?” Ice-Z asked, peering out from the mausoleum’s dry interior. “You tryin’ to tell the DEA where we are?” “We paid off Klein,” E-Razor pointed out. “Ain’t nobody cares if Pop-Rock does some old fart.” “This stone,” Corgan wheezed, coughing blood onto the dirtied granite, “this stone lays over a guy who’d make you wet your pants. Back when I was a kid, this guy ruled GMY. This guy spat out punks like you for breakfast.” Pop-Rock looked down at the faded grave marker. “Antony Vendredi,” he read. “1891-1933. Big whoo.” He pointed the sub-machine gun and sprayed bullets at the headstone till it shattered. “And now he’s gone.” Jack Corgan laughed so much he almost choked. His life’s blood oozed down onto the grave soil. “Gone, you think? You punks know nothing. Squat. Think you’re tough, with your guns and your drugs? You ain’t born.” He laid a red-smeared hand on the remains of the tombstone. “Guess you’ll learn the hard way.” And he died. “Check his pockets, then,” Ice-Z prompted. “No point wasting good bullets without a score.” Pop-Rock was coming down off the high now. “He’s all muddy,” he complained. “I ain’t going to get my pants all messed.” “Pop-Rock’s already messing his pants, cause he’s popped an old fart,” E-Razor mocked. That got a low chuckle from most of the Rippers. “Okay, fine, I’ll roll him,” Pop-Rock snapped angrily. He reached over and turned Corgan on his back to check his jacket. Corgan’s rictus face was smiling. Tony Vendredi reached up through the grave mud and wrapped his hand round Essenden’s wrist. The gang kid screamed and tried to pull away. As he did he dragged the corpse with him out of the grave. “No! No f-ing way!” Ice-Z shouted, reaching for his gun. “This has got to be a bad trip!” Vendredi climbed to his feet. He released Pop-Rock’s wrist and the boy fell dead. “Shoot him!” E-Razor screamed, fumbling with the safety on his own MP5. “Shoot that thing!” Vendredi slapped him backhand and took the gun from him. He tossed it aside and caught Ice-Z as he began to run. Every time he touched somebody they fell down dead. The last couple of Rippers had the time to level their guns at the revenant. “Well boys, looks like you got the drop on me,” Vendredi declared. “Shoot and see what happens.” E-Razor sobbed in the corner. He’d been touched but he wasn’t dead. He fell backward and realised he’d tripped over Ice-Z’s corpse. The last Razors thought better of it. Vendredi stepped aside and let them run. He stepped back to block E-Razor’s escape. “Not you, kid,” the revenant declared. “We got business.” “It wasn’t me,” E-Razor trembled. “It was Pop-Rock what capped the old guy. Not me.” “Jack? Jack was a good soldier. Jack did what was right. He brought me back at last.” “What… how…?” Vendredi pointed down at the dead old man bleeding into the sundered grave. “Made a deal a long while back. Jack paid the marker off. Now I’m awake again.” E-Razor realised that he’d wet his pants. “I touched you,” Vendredi told him. “That makes you mine. Now you work for me.” “I don’t understand,” E-Razor sobbed. “What are you? What do you want?” Tony Vendredi told him. What does a man returning from the grave desire? In Tony Vendredi’s case it was a cold bath, a good tailor, and an old-fashioned barber. Two hours after his resurrection he was dressed in a conservative-cut Italian pinstripe and a thick wool overcoat with matching fedora, and his chin was clean and smooth. He found a late-night pawn shop and used the drugs money he’d taken of the Razors to buy a diamond tie pin. He’d get something better later. “Good start,” he judged, turning to look at E-Razor next to him. The kid had also been shaved, and he’d stripped off the nose and ear rings and put on a brown two-piece suit. “Now take me where the action is.” “The action?” “The games. The talk. The dames. Where the deals get done. Take me there.” E-Razor thought fast. “There’s Gino’s,” he suggested. “But they have a door policy.” “And I got money. Get a cab.” E-Razor thought about running. Then he thought about the warning his new employer had given him. Then he hailed a taxi. Gino’s Bar moved around. Right now it was a cellar off Mazuchelli Alley in Hogan. Vendredi walked down the cobbled steps and flicked banknotes at the doorman till he got inside. He didn’t look like a man who’d crawled out of a muddy grave earlier that night, E-Razor had to admit. He looked like a man who ruled the city. Vendredi walked to the bar, ordered a whiskey sour, and looked around. The wet night had kept the customers away but there were still a couple of dozen people in the dark alcoves, drinking and whispering. The music was kept loud so the conversations could be private. A couple of working girls propped up the end of the bar. “What’s a good tip these days?” Vendredi asked E-Razor. “What does it cost for a really great bunch of flowers?” E-Razor had never bought flowers in his life. “I dunno,” he shrugged. “Fifty bucks maybe?” Vendredi folded a crisp fifty dollar bill into a beermat and slid it down the bar to the smiling ladies. “Maybe later,” he told them. Then he looked spotted something. “Well look at this,” he told E-Razor. “C’mere.” He jabbed his finger at a set of faded old sepia-tint photographs framed on the wall. They showed Old Gothametropolis as it had been back in the prohibition days. A bunch of guys in baggy suits lounged in front of a big black Sedan. “Danny Capelli. Dick London. Frankie. Big Joe Buscemi. Flat Gabe Carson,” Vendredi identified. “We dropped Gabe right over there in the Parodiopolis Sound.” The barman noticed the interest the picture was drawing and drifted over. “You know about those guys?” Gino Toricini asked. “Not many customers know their crime history these days.” “Yeah, I knew ‘em,” the revenant answered. “And those Irish guys on that photo there. The Bailey mob. Nasty shits the every one of ‘em.” Gino brightened. “I got more photos,” he offered. “Over by the pool tables.” Vendredi and E-Razor followed him to the dim alcove where a couple of leather-jacketed bangers were shooting pool. Gino pointed to a row of smoke-stained lithographs. “These are from the 20s. Some from before that,” he said. “Yeah. There’s Harry Grover,” Vendredi recognised. “Got hisself shot by the Midnight Detective. And Tom Vallance. Got too familiar with another guy’s dame and ended up feeding the pigs. And old Jimmy Warburton that first pulled together the protection rackets on First and Third.” Gino was impressed. “You do know your stuff.” He looked at the visitor more closely. “Have I seen you before? You’re not a regular, but I seem to know your face.” Vendredi chuckled. He moved to the photo at the end and tapped a fingernail on the glass. “Try again.” Gino and E-Razor looked at the black and white photo of the brutal gangster, and then at the man in the Italian suit next to it. The label read Antony “Deadeyes” Vendredi 1891-1933. Gino went pale. “Boss Deadeyes,” he said. Gothametropolis Mayor Velma Klein took her security very seriously these days. Security meant half a dozen strength-enhanced thugs from her police force armed with weapons that could cut a hole in a superhero, backed by a state of the art surveillance system run from a fortified guardhouse in the grounds of her mansion. Vendredi killed everybody in the guardhouse first, then had E-Razor use the radio to call back the other roving guards one by one so Boss Deadeyes could use his death touch on them as well. Only then did he proceed into the mansion to speak to the Mayor. Velma Klein was in a meeting. Boss Deadeyes knew that. When he’d slaughtered the metahuman guards outside he opened the door and let himself in. There were eight men around the table as well as Klein. Vendredi recognised most of them from his research. “What is this?” Velma Klein demanded, half-rising from her chair as the revenant entered. “Guards!” “Dead,” Boss Deadeyes told her. “Every last one. What else do you got?” Nobody had weapons. They’d been frisked at the door. Deadeyes had a Magnum .45 and he knew how to use it. “This ain’t a hit,” he told the people round the table. “So you can relax. This is just an introduction.” “Who the hell do you think you are?” Oliver Scranton of the Scranton Waste Recycling Company demanded. A word from Scranton could recycle anybody. “I’m Tony Vendredi,” the intruder answered, holding out his arm to shake hands with the businessman. “They call me Boss Deadeyes.” “Boss Deadeyes,” snorted Michael Van Der Luce, running the flesh trade for GMY. “Why not Al Capone?” Vendredi smacked him across the mouth. “Shut your lip,” he snarled. “When I’m talking, you zip, capeesh?” “You’re a dead man is who you are,” Rupert Joad threatened. The plump magnate handled the protection rackets north of Sixways. “You don’t know who you’re messing with.” “Sure I do,” Boss Vendredi told them. “I’m messing with little fish. Little fish trying to pretend they’re big. Little fish trying to take over when the big fish is gone.” Velma Klein secretly eased the Technopolitan flesh compressor from the seam of her jacket. “Tell us why you’re here, Mr… Vendredi, and then let us get on.” Boss Deadeyes walked round the room. He made certain he’d had flesh contact with every single one of them. “Sure, I’ll tell you. I’m here cause an old guy of mine called Jack Corgan spilled his life’s blood on my grave. That brought me back. Old business, the oldest. And I’m here because I’ve looked round your city and I don’t like what I see.” “You’re a lunatic!” Van Der Luce accused, dabbing his split lip. Boss Deadeyes pointed at him and he died. “I’m the guy what can kill you all with a look. Without even that, just by thinking about it.” He glared round the room at their shocked faces. “Yeah, that Boss Deadeyes. Just like I hope it says in the history books. I ruled this town. I’m gonna rule it again.” Velma Klein pointed the compressor at him. “We’ve just got rid of one Lynchpin,” she noted. “We don’t want another.” Vendredi snorted. “But you need another, sweetheart. Without the fat man, word is you’re falling to pieces. Disorganised, warring, plotting, backstabbing. Losing.” “It’s the war,” Joad argued. “The heroes and the feds aren’t playing by the rules.” “It’s you,” Deadeyes countered. “Soft, flabby, cowardly, weak. You don’t have it in you to rule. Any of you. You need a Boss.” “And you’re volunteering?” Klein levelled the tissue compressor. “I don’t think so.” Vendredi shrugged. “There’s something you need to know,” he told her, “about my power. I can kill with a touch. Everyone knows that. But once I’ve touched you, just once, I can always kill you, anytime I like.” A ripple of fear ran round the room. “When Boss Deadeyes was gunned down,” Scranton remembered, “a whole bunch of people fell over dead. Gangsters, cops, judges, politicians, lawyers…” “Sure,” agreed the Boss. “When I go everybody I’ve death-touched dies as well. Call it an insurance policy.” He glanced over at Klein. “Still want to use that pop-gun sweetheart?” Klein considered the odds of this being a bluff. “No,” she said at last. Vendredi gestured with his fingertips. “No what>” he asked the Mayor of Gothametropolis York. “No, Boss,” she replied. Boss Deadeyes looked round the room at the most powerful men in the city, fallen before him. “I’m back,” he told them. “Either you work for me or you die. You double-cross me you die. Maybe your family as well. You do well by me and I’ll do well by you.” He walked around the room, remembering how long it was since he stalked the corridors of power. “Wars don’t matter. They don’t last forever. Then there’s opportunities. Wealth. Power. It’s just a matter of organisation.” He smiled at last, but it never reached his eyes. “Just a matter of the right Boss.” Original concepts, characters, and situations copyright © 2006 reserved by Ian Watson. The right of Ian Watson to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. |
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