No, following the sirens was for the men in blue, and I wore shit-brown. I lurked in the darkness, watching the drunks and the junkies file by. Ear to the streets, I listened for the kind of horrors nobody wanted to know about. Or the stuff cops were only fast enough to clean up after the fact. The stuff people hear about the next morning, and it makes them cringe because they wonder if, maybe, that depth of evil could possibly exist in them too.
I promise. With the right push, it does.
So, I trudged through the sewer lines, knee-deep in human excrement. If it wasn’t for my gas mask, I’d have probably died a long time ago from inhaling the toxic fumes. It’d grown worse since the city’s vacancy rose, and the homeless multiplied.
The way it clung to my body armor was how I got my name from the press. The Roach. Occasionally, somebody would snap a picture of me in the night. A blur racing by in a twin-tubed, custom gas mask, looking awfully like a giant cockroach before disappearing through a grate.
That night, I came up for air at the edge of Harborside and Downtown. After what had happened when I busted the Bratva sex trade and those girls got killed, I was on the prowl for someone to save. Or, if I’m being honest, somebody to beat to a pulp. Somebody who deserved it.
I remember the night—every excruciating detail—The way the constant smog blurred out an oversized full moon. I remember the 1972 Impala slamming on its horn when a drunkard darted in front of it on Harris Street.
And I remember the scream. Oh, do I remember it. Shrill for a second before being forcefully muffled. It was a flash in the pan. Nothing anyone out after dark might hear. Not in Iron City, where learning to sleep around car horns and belligerent shouts was a carefully groomed skill.
I was out from under the sewer cap so fast, I think I blew the cardboard box off a sleeping bum. The scream could’ve been nothing, but I’d been doing this long enough to trust my hunches.
My feet pounded on the pavement, through alleys, around trash. I used the side of a wall to skip up over a fence blocking a back street. That was when I heard the scream again, followed by a meaty thump.
I bolted around a corner and saw a man with a young woman bent over a dumpster in an alley between Dalton Street and 4th. Vinny Statman, that was his name. Nothing extraordinary. You’d expect something like Vinny Darkh, or some crazy moniker like Vinny the Vandal—but no. As normal sounding as could be. An architect from downtown Iron City, a far cry from the Big Apple. He was the type of scumbag that makes me wonder if humankind deserves to live at all. I knew right away he had a decent job downtown judging by his suit. Everything going for him. But he liked to get hopped up on coke and show young women how much power he deserved.
His victim’s dress was hiked up, her purse spilled all over the pavement. He had one hand over her mouth, the other with an expensive, silver embellished pocket-knife to her throat.
In a city with every imaginable option for a man to get his rocks off, this hair-gelled crotch-stain chose rape. In my city. I didn’t warn him to get off her. That wasn’t my style. I wasn’t some speedster like the Flash, racing up to a bad guy only to stop short and make sure everyone knew he was there. Those fucking prima donnas.
My steps were soft, silent, bringing me right up to them unnoticed. I stared straight at the side of the asshole’s face while he bit his lip, eyes rolled back, enjoying every second of his perversion. Before he knew what hit him, I wrenched the knife out of his hand, breaking it, and yanked him away from his victim.
Vinny flew back against a brick wall, howling in pain as his suit jacket tore. His victim remained folded over the dumpster, crying, terrified, mascara running down her cheeks.
As I moved beside her, it was more like she stared straight through me. Like I was a ghost, and she was in hell.
Woman… she was still a girl. Couldn’t have been far into her twenties. Whole life ahead of her. Probably was on her way to party with friends downtown, trying to be a normal youngster when she found herself in a spot no girl wants to imagine exists.
I took her by the shoulders. She shrank away, and I let her. Then, after a moment—when I felt like she might’ve realized I wasn’t one of the bad guys—I tried again. This time, she allowed it, and I gently lowered her to the ground. I’m sure looking through the lenses of my mask didn’t put her at ease. She shook, or I shook, I’m not sure. Maybe both of us. What happened with the Bratva and the dead girls the night before loomed heavy on my thoughts in a way my nightly activities rarely did. I kept picturing Chuck’s headline, blaming me.
Murderers, gangbangers, corrupt… I could handle them all. But not this. Overpowering someone physically weaker than him simply because he could. He didn’t deserve a second chance. Guys like Vinny couldn’t change.
“Reese,” she said, her voice soft and warm. I dropped her and staggered away, shocked that she knew me. I searched from side to side, only now there was blackness.
“Reese, can you hear me?”
I opened my mouth to answer, but my throat burned. It was dry. Impossibly dry. And the itch… I wanted to claw out my own trachea.
“Reese!”
My eyes blinked open slowly. White light blinded me from every direction. For a moment, it felt like I’d woken in heaven, but c’mon, I’m a realist. When I go, it’ll be the devil that greets me with a pitchfork and a beer. Too much blood on these hands, deserved or not, and angels have their rules.
“Reese,” a woman whispered. A pretty, heart-shaped face took shape above me. The same face of that helpless girl in the alley who I’d tried to save, all grown up now.
I wanted to answer, but I wore a different sort of mask than back then, one stuffed into my mouth and forcing oxygen down my throat.
More of my surroundings took shape behind Laura. White walls, white floor, white ceiling. Gizmos and gadgets galore, and me at their center hooked up to machines to be kept alive. For what?
“Oh my God,” Laura said, her eyes going wide. “Nurse. Nurse!” she screamed, nearly slipping on the tile floor on her way to the door. “His eyes opened.”
She ran back to me and gripped my hand. I had pins and needles all over, but I could feel her touch. The scars on her palms from scraping against that dumpster as her abuser took her had left them rough. Though, maybe that was my own imagination, pissed at me because I didn’t get to her sooner before that filthy pile of shit could pull out his tiny little pecker.
“You’re alive,” she said, voice trembling.
My expression must have informed Laura that I wasn’t quite sure. She squeezed harder and smiled. That ugly kind of smile, forced through tears, blowing spit bubbles. Doctors and nurses rushed in behind her. Heroes wearing white and masks of their own.
“I told them all,” she whispered into my ear. “You can’t kill a cockroach.”
Laura paced nervously while a nurse poked and prodded me. Employees from all over whatever-the-hell-hospital I was in watched me like I was a carnival show, explaining little beyond the fact that I’d been out for a while.
I couldn’t ask anything.
I could barely talk.
I just wished they’d leave me alone and stop staring.
It was a nightmare on repeat, and I could barely remember what put me in the bed. Only shouting, screeching tires, and a bouncing ball.