“I must have missed something,” said Sebastian Pereira as he tightened the strap of his goggles and tugged his mask into place. The pair of vigilantes stood in sparse woodland alongside the railroad tracks, beneath a deep dip in the land that hid the lights of Pittsburgh and left them in deepening shadow beneath the vernal stars. Sebastian, now in the guise of Torrent, continued: “I thought you said he had chemical burns?”
Alex Shepherd, his mouth shrouded beneath a red scarf, the disguise of the hero called The Mysterious X, nodded his head as he replied. “All over his chest and arms. He was treated at the decon facility at the Pitt medical campus.”
“But they didn’t find any trace of chemicals?” asked Torrent.
“Well, that’s what they said. The paper said they tested the clothes and had some kind of chemical sensor sniff the air and they both turned up nothing. But that can’t be true, now can it?”
“Unless the guy was a nutcase and he burned himself a long time before then.”
“How does that explain the paramedic who passed out from the fumes?”
“Mass hysteria?” suggested Torrent.
“I thought you didn’t believe in mass hysteria?”
Torrent grinned. “I don’t.”
“This is as blatant a cover-up as any we’ve seen. Nobody wants to touch the case; they’ve been passing the buck like a hot potato for two days. The fire marshal said his investigation is over because there were no chemicals; the city cops said they had no jurisdiction and it was up to the railroad security; the Pinkertons said the hobo couldn’t have been riding one of the C&K trains and there were no chemicals on the trains anyway, so it’s not their problem. Not one of them even interviewed the guy! Somebody, probably all of them, knows what really happened, but they’re sweeping it under the rug.”
Torrent couldn’t find much room for disagreement with that assessment. “It is weird,” he said. “But it sounds like one of those random, one-off events that my uncle writes about. Like a rain of frogs: it’ll never happen again, and I don’t think we’ll find any clues.”
Paul Pereira, or “your crazy Uncle Paul” as Sebastian’s father usually referred to him, was a freelance journalist who found his niche reporting on forteana and other tales of the bizarre and seemingly inexplicable. His wire stories were circulated by about two dozen major outlets and his online journal, The Magic Casement, was a popular resource for enthusiasts of the weird. Though a black sheep in his family, Uncle Paul was, in some ways, an inspiration for Sebastian.
The Mysterious X threw up his hands exasperatedly. “What are you talking about? Your uncle did write about this! The Tribune only mentioned it in passing, but your uncle was all over it. And I already said that this is the second time this week that a transient reported exposure to chemicals. How do you not know any of this? I thought you read his blog every day?”
Torrent shrugged. “I’ve had other things on my mind lately. Do you know what MetaFriends is?”
“Nope,” said X.
“It’s a social network for talents,” Torrent explained. “It allows anonymous profiles for people who, for whatever reason, don’t want to out themselves.”
“And? You may recall that I don’t have the crutch of superpowers.”
Sebastian rolled his eyes under his goggles. He felt sure that Alex was the only vigilante who ever condescended about not being a talent. “Suppose someone had an anonymous profile — it didn’t have their real name or picture or any sort of obviously identifying information, but they shared it with you. I mean, they shared it with you in person…”
“By bumping mobis?” X interrupted.
“Yes, exactly,” Torrent replied. “Do you think it was something that person would do intentionally, like they wanted to discreetly let you in on their secret, or do you think it was an accident?”
X let out a low whistle as he considered the question. “I have to believe it was a major screw-up. If you want someone to know something like that, you tell them face to face, you don’t give away the keys to the house, so to speak.”
Sebastian thought about it. He had come to more or less the same conclusion as Alex. He’d been struggling over how to approach Evangeline ever since he’d discovered that she’d shared her MetaFriends profile link with him when they exchanged contact info. He couldn’t decide how to respond to it: if he told her about it and she hadn’t intended to share it with him, she would probably panic, and their relationship was already strained. On the other hand, if she had intended to share it with him and he just ignored it, how would that make her feel?
“So who was it? I know you’re not dumb enough to make that mistake, and you wouldn’t be asking that question if you had.”
The question broke Sebastian out of his reverie. He looked across at Alex, uncertain how, or if, he should answer. Even if Eva had shared the profile intentionally with him, she definitely hadn’t shared it with Alex. It wasn’t his place to spill her secret.
“Just somebody I met, nobody you know,” he answered.
“My ass,” X replied immediately. “Since you’re making me guess, I’m going to say it’s Eva, and that’s why you’ve been avoiding her at school.”
“I haven’t been avoiding her, she’s been avoiding me.” Torrent replied through nearly clenched teeth.
“So it’s her then? Don’t worry, you know I won’t say anything about it. It’s none of my business,” X said. “I don’t see what the problem is, though.”
“I’ll hold you to that,” Torrent replied, but he knew Alex could be trusted. “Anyway, she thinks I hate metas.”
“Why?”
Sebastian explained about last week’s politics workshop and his own poorly received opinion about “metahuman rights,” Magnetrix, and the Global Parahuman Revolutionary Army. “She seemed determined to misunderstand me,” Sebastian finished. No doubt Eva took it personally, especially since she had no clue that he was, himself, a talent; that explained why her reaction was so overwrought, so uncharacteristically Eva.
“Well, she’s a chick.” The Mysterious X shrugged. “You have to expect that kind of reaction.”
“I want to put her at ease, but I don’t want to tell her about me. Not yet.”
“Don't even think about it!” X said. “We don’t know her well enough to tell her about this.”
“She probably wouldn’t approve, anyway,” Torrent offered.
“You never know. She might want to put on a costume.” X paused thoughtfully and looked at Torrent. “She might already have a costume.”
Torrent snorted at the suggestion. "Speaking of costumes, where's your brother?"
X waved his hand dismissively. "Meh... he ain't coming. I told him about our little adventure on the bridge and how you almost splattered yourself and he turned white as a sheet. It's made him give up on the vigilante idea; not that the little wimp would ever 'fess up to it."
"Come on!" Torrent chuckled. "It's not like we're fighting on skyscrapers. I'm sure that'll never happen again."
"You know Ben. He's even more of a pussy about heights than you are."
"I'm a pussy? You piss your pants if a spider drops on your shoulder."
"Spiders are no joke, you pussy-whipped race-traitor."
"Whatever you say, Miss Muffet."
"Dick-eater," X jabbed.
"Catamite," riposted Torrent.
"What the hell is a catamite?"
"A dick-eater, but Greek. Ever read a book, shithead?"
"I don't go to Greek school," the Mysterious X answered decisively.
"Yeah, you kinda do," Torrent said. "Anyway, Ben will still keep this quiet, won't he?"
"Don't sweat it," X said. "He's less likely to let it slip than your girlfriend."
Sebastian let the subject drop. On they marched in quiet beneath the swaying pines, following the railroad spur into the deeper darkness of the cleft called Panther Hollow and their eventual destination in the scattered hobo encampments of the Blight.
“Watch out, there’s something in the path,” said X, noticing something in the red light of his headlamp.
“I see it,” remarked Torrent. The obstruction was a sheet of metal tied to two slanting wooden railroad ties sunk into the rock ballast of the railbed. “There’s writing on it.”
“More urban art,” X quipped.
“No. Hoboglyphs,” said Torrent. He switched his own headlamp from the red beam to the white and studied it. “It says: Do not Enter, essentially. There’s a glyph for a safe campground and it’s been crossed out,” Torrent explained.
“You’re bullshitting me. You can read ‘hoboglyphs’ now? Any pretty young girls ask you to tutor them in that?”
Torrent looked up into the red light of Alex’s headlamp, smirking. “Not as of yet. But that’s what it says.” He stood up, spun around and searched the embankment. The light illuminated a little hollow, maybe only five or six feet wide, but deep enough that they couldn’t see the end of it.
“I’m guessing there was a little camp spot back there. The arrow on the marker pointed this way.”
“That sounds promising,” X said. “We should go check it out. But I wonder how long it’s been abandoned. The paint looks fresh.”
Torrent kneeled and tapped a button on the side of his goggles, the wireless link to his mobi. “We might be able to get a firm date. Most transients travel with some sort of electronics today, and they also use GPS tags to back up the glyphs. There’s a Geocaching node I visit that has a listing.”
“It’s encouraging that even penniless drifters have mobis nowadays,” X said.
“The nice thing about the site, besides the timestamp, is that there’s usually some longer commentary about the markers. Oh, here we go,” Sebastian said as text scrolled past his eye on the inner surface of his goggles. He read it aloud: “Crazy motherfucker dressed like a bird stormed in on us, ranting and raving. ‘Better run, better run!’ Awful reek, worse than sewage, burned my eyes like crazy.”
“Seriously?” Alex asked. “And you said we wouldn’t find anything. When did this happen?”
“Three days ago. Gee, you’d think the cops and the Pinks would’ve picked up on a little tidbit like this, wouldn’t you? Nice detective work, gents,” Torrent remarked sarcastically.
“Not everybody can sit around school all day, accumulating useless knowledge from obscure Grid nodes,” X needled him.
Torrent stood up, unholstered his stun baton. “What are you snarking about? It came in handy, didn’t it?” He cocked his head toward the abandoned camp site. “Want to check this out?”
X held out his hand graciously. “After you.”
If the two vigilantes actually expected to find a demented criminal in a bird costume, they were disappointed. There was little to be seen but a few benches made of logs and sheets of metal propped on cinder blocks, a tarp half-buried in deadfall and dirt, and a lot of litter. An old rusted steel drum showed evidence of fire, but the ash inside was cold and wet, and it hadn’t rained since last week. If the fellow who posted the warning had actually set up camp there, either he returned later to collect his belongings or someone else had. Torrent wondered aloud if this might have been done to cover up evidence of a chemical attack.
“Well, there’s nothing here now,” X said. He had a thoughtful look about him and soon gave voice to those thoughts. “I wonder what that ‘dressed like a bird’ stuff was about. There are a lot of weirdos in the city, but I think it’s too big a coincidence for this not to be connected with the chemical attack. Assuming it’s the same guy, what does the costume tell us? A bird mask doesn’t really look like a gas mask.”
“No,” Torrent agreed. “It doesn’t.”
“Did the hobo say how he was dressed like a bird?”
“Nope, only what I read to you and nothing more. He could’ve had feathers on his arms for all we know. Maybe he’s one of us, only a flashier dresser.”
“And a lunatic,” X added.
“You know, you wondered about a gas mask, but the chemical could be mainly liquid or even a powder,” Torrent mused. “I kind of hope that’s the case, or that we don’t run into this guy tonight at all. I sure as hell didn’t bring a gas mask.”
The Mysterious X hummed and unslung his pack. He pulled out something bulky, a vinyl sack closed with a drawstring. Out of this he retrieved a big bug-eyed mask with a large canister hanging down from where the mouth should be. “Well, what do you know. I did.”
“Semper paratus!” said Torrent, laughing. “That thing’s a relic.”
“Pre-Pan American War. The guy at the surplus store said it was the 1965 model. But gas masks don’t change much, plus it’s made in Kalamazoo. If anybody knows about gassing people, it’s the Union of the Great Lakes.”
“How do you know it still works?”
“I bought a new filter for it, but…” X shrugged his broad shoulders. “I don’t.”
Their patrol continued into the Blight and to the margins of the switching yard and then they turned around, ready to call it a night. They hadn’t seen a soul, nor any more clues to the mystery. But then, as they approached Panther Hollow from the south, just north of the highway overpass, they both noted a peculiar scent. At first it was faint and only a little unpleasant, like a whiff of old mothballs, but then a strong breeze funneled down the hollow, and the odor was noxious.
X rubbed his watering eyes with his fists and turned his head athwart the breeze. “Phew! What is that?”
Torrent gagged and spat and cupped his hands over his nose and mouth. The acrid, chemical odor burned the back of his throat and stung his nostrils until they swelled almost shut. “I think,” he rasped, “you’d better put that mask on.”
While Alex stopped to don the gas mask, Sebastian tried to discover the source of the stink. It was obviously coming from the north, the direction they were now headed and the direction they had originally come from, but he couldn’t see anything in the distance. Wherever and whatever it came from, the strong smell was abating, and he was thankful for it. When the scent faded completely, he breathed deeply to clear his nose and lungs. He tapped Alex on the shoulder.
“It’s gone.”
“That’s nice.” Alex’s voice was muffled and distant-sounding through the mask. He still fumbled with the straps. “But I’m leaving the damn thing on, now.”
The pair scuttled off the railroad tracks and sought cover in the low brush that lined the margin of the railbed.
“Take the lead,” said X.
“What? You have the mask!”
“I can’t see worth a damn in this thing!”
Torrent groaned and crept ahead. His head bobbed continually, first surveying the ground in the red light of his headlamp, carefully choosing his footing to minimize the noise of his steps, then peering straight ahead, looking for movement. ‘This is nothing. A leaking gas truck on the highway or a backed up culvert,’ he told himself.
Torrent was not really convinced there was a psychopathic gasser at all. It was easy to imagine how a leaking train car, a coincidental encounter with a nut in a bird costume, and ample panic could precipitate such a confabulation. The explanation for all this, if they ever found it, was bound to be much less interesting than Alex imagined. At least, this is what Sebastian told himself he believed, because he did not relish the thought of facing such a villain if he existed. He wasn’t prepared for it, and, arguably functional gas mask aside, neither was his partner. Another stiff breeze rushed down the hollow, carrying only the faintest trace of that toxic smell. It was encouraging.
Then he heard a muffled whimpering and a burst of short, ragged coughs directly ahead of him, and that encouragement evaporated.
Torrent signaled to X, who nodded. He had heard it, too.
Torrent unholstered his shock stick. “We’ll go together,” he whispered. “I’ll be your eyes until I get gassed, then…” But the nervous flopping in his stomach belied his smirk and joking demeanor.
“Let’s do it!” X said. He sprang up with one of his lead-weighted batons in his fist. X toggled his headlamp to the brightest setting, valuing range and clarity of vision over escaping notice, but Torrent left his red-filtered torch on. They moved quickly, each searching ahead and to the side for the source of the sounds.
“Over there!” X cried. The beam of his headlamp illuminated the foot of the embankment about ten yards away where two human forms, gagged and hog-tied, wriggled helplessly in the mud. The pair of vigilantes ran toward them at once.
X stopped at the nearest one. It was a man, his skin pale and clammy, in a coat with a huge, wet stain that reeked of the same noxious, burning odor they’d smelled before. X pulled the gag out of his mouth, and with it came a pool of chunky vomit. X held his jaw open and swept the inside of his mouth with his fingers to clear the airway. The man’s eyeballs bulged from the force of his hacking, but he was breathing.
Behind him now, knife in hand, X tried to reassure him as he worked to cut through the rope that bound his limbs. “Take a deep breath. I’ll have you loose in a minute.” But the victim thrashed like a pinned beast and screamed.
X rolled him over and clamped his hand down forcefully over his mouth, lest their attacker still linger in the area and be alerted. “Calm down, damn it,” he hissed.
With hysterical strength the man snapped the few frayed strands of nylon that still bound his wrists and clobbered Alex with the side of his fist.
X scrambled backwards and roared with indignation. “You jackass! I’m trying to help you!”
The other man didn’t care; he only wanted to get away. He aimed frantic, but clumsy blows at X and even a few at himself, raving and screaming the whole time. When X put some distance between them, the guy bolted.
The rapid crunch of boots on rocks sounded behind him. X turned too late.
Torrent had just finished sawing through the rope that bound the wrists of the other captive when he glimpsed the huge, leering menace that suddenly materialized in the sweep of X’s headlamp. Here was the bird-man; no colorful popinjay, but the corpse-fattened crow mask of the medieval plague doctor.
Torrent watched it as if in slow motion. Wide, lidless eyes shone like mirrors. A long beak, curving like a scimitar, seemed to open hungrily, a trick of the light as the head swiveled with the body, a heavy wooden pole sweeping out that same arc until it crashed into and bounced off of X’s head. X went down without a sound, and the headlamp went spinning off wildly into the night, leaving the specter in darkness.
Torrent bent low and whispered to the prisoner, a teenage girl frozen with cold and terror, as he pressed the handle of his knife into her hand and closed her fingers around it. “If he comes in range, don’t hesitate. Do you understand?” Soundlessly, she nodded.
He crouched quietly, feeling for his stun baton. He’d dropped it in his hurry to free the girl, and now he couldn’t find it. Still he dared not take his eyes off of where he’d last seen the crow-masked man. At last, the wide and limbless outline of that shrouded figure shifted. The gasser lurched forward, hitting that heavy stick against his gloved hand.
“Better run! I’m coming for you!”
“Yeah? Then you better bring more than that stick, shitbird!” Torrent yelled back. Still he groped futilely for the stun baton, knowing that, far away from any source of water, his hydrokinesis wasn’t going to help.
His opponent laughed, a deep, barking laughter that Torrent thought oddly theatrical. The gasser strode forward ponderously, his breaths labored and whistling eerily through the beak in his mask. He stopped, planted the pole in the dirt, and drew something from the inside of his cloak. It was a slender wand with a trigger grip on one end. In the dim red light, Torrent barely noticed the thick tube that trailed from it and coiled behind his enemy’s back.
Now it was Torrent’s turn to laugh. “A squirt gun? What are you going to do, weed me?”
“You’re dumber than you look, boy.”
Behind Torrent, the captive girl cried out in warning.
“Don’t worry, baby. Nothing he’s got in there can hurt me,” Torrent assured her. His cocky tone was no act. Somewhere at the base of his skull, he could feel the pressurized liquid in the psycho's backpack.
“Yes it can! It’s loaded with some kind of chem — ” She stopped short as the bird-man raised his weapon, then immediately rolled over in the dirt, clamping her eyes and mouth shut.
The gasser aimed for Torrent’s chest, squeezed the trigger, and then howled in surprise as the wand exploded into a cloud of plastic shrapnel and hissing, foul-smelling vapor. Liquid erupted from the whipping feed tube, soaking his chest and splashing his face. In a mad panic to keep the noxious fluid off his skin, he tore off the plague mask. His gloved hands slapped at his chest and then something heavy and bulky fell off his back and crashed to the ground: the reservoir for his pump-gun, still sloshing with whatever foul-smelling poison he'd bathed the male vagabond with.
Torrent barely managed to dodge the stampeding villain as he darted past, wheezing and retching. Behind Torrent, the captive girl rolled over just in time. Maybe from defensive instinct, maybe from a furious desire to hurt her captor in any way possible, she reached out with one hand and grabbed hold of his ankle.
There was a crisp snap, the kind you hear when you step on a dry twig in August. The plague doctor tumbled shrieking into the weeds.
Torrent's stomach lurched as he pulled the girl back from the howling maniac. A new reek filled the air vying with the caustic haze from the squirt gun, something cloying and putrid, the smell of advanced decay, like a carcass swollen up in the summer heat. The stench seemed concentrated around the sickly, twisted foot of the plague doctor.
"God, that's awful," Torrent said nasally, holding his breath to fight off the nausea. He looked the girl over. "Nice grab, kid. Keep working on those ankle ties, I have to check on my buddy.”
Alex was woozy, but conscious. He had a split lip, a big welt on his cheek, and bloody scratches where the mask buckles bit into his skin, but the filter apparatus of the mask had taken the worst of the blow. The first time he tried to stand up, he immediately toppled sideways so that Torrent had to catch him.
“You better sit down,” Torrent said. “I’ll zip-tie Miasma while you get your bearings.”
“I’m fine. Who?”
“The guy who kicked your ass.”
“Bullshit.” X spat out some blood. He rolled his head sideways, cracking his neck. “That’s his name?”
“That’s what I’m calling him. These creeps don’t name themselves,” Torrent replied.
On his way back to the crippled villain, he spied the handle of his stun baton sticking out from the loose gravel. He reholstered it, then made his way over to Miasma. Breathing through his mouth the whole time, Torrent patted him down and zip-tied his hands behind his back. He thought about tying his ankles, too, but considering how his right foot was bent out at a 90 degree angle, Torrent didn't see much point in that. Besides, he didn't want to touch whatever was making that smell.
Torrent tried to lift him, but found that he couldn’t — at least, not without the creep screaming in pain. Beneath the crow mask and the leather cloak, their psycho gasser was hugely corpulent, with overlapping jowls instead of a neck and beady eyes that seemed to be drowning in the flab of his cheeks. Sebastian guessed that he weighed an easy 350. It was no wonder his ankle was totally pulped under that weight.
“What’s in the tank, lardass?” Torrent demanded.
Miasma shouted something slanderous about Torrent’s mother. The young vigilante fought the temptation to lean on the wounded captive with the shock baton, or better yet, give him a bath in his own chemicals: that was bound to induce a spirit of civility and cooperation. But Torrent’s more humane tendencies prevailed.
“Don’t move,” Torrent warned him.
“I can’t feel my leg!” The criminal’s voice was fearful and urgent.
“Good. That’ll make it easy not to move.”
Torrent turned round to see the young girl eying him nervously. It was the first time he really got a good look at her. She was skinny, even frail. Her long brown hair was matted and dirty, and she stunk, not with the revolting scent of chemicals, but the natural odors of sweat and damp clothes that had gone too long between washes. Her jeans were ripped up and her tattered brown flannel shirt was covered in old stains. There were still tight loops of rope around her wrists and ankles, but they were no longer tied together.
Torrent smiled easily. “It’s OK. You’ve just been rescued by Torrent and the Mysterious X, Pittsburgh’s newest superheroes.” He cocked his head toward Miasma. “Don’t worry, he’s not getting up anytime soon. What's your name?”
Still she didn’t say anything, nor take her eyes off him. She looked like a rabbit ready to leap, or a cat ready to claw. He belatedly noticed that she still held his knife in her hand.
“Who sent you?” The words were almost hissed through her teeth.
“No one. Are you all right?”
She looked at him sidelong; her voice was tinged with suspicion. “You didn’t come looking for me?”
“Uh, not in particular, no.”
The vagabond let out a deep sigh of relief. “OK then. I guess you can have your knife back.” She stood up and took a step toward him, then paused as if she thought better of it. Instead, she laid the knife on the ground and flashed an exhausted, but genuine smile as she took a step backward.
Torrent narrowed his eyes, wondering at all this. “Hang onto it. It might come in handy.”
She raised an eyebrow at him, but didn’t hesitate to bend down, fold the knife closed, and slip it into her pocket. “Thanks, chief! I appreciate your help. Really appreciate it. But I have to go.” She waved once before turning. “Good luck!”
“Wait! What about your friend — ”
“I don’t even know him,” she called over her shoulder.
“OK, but don’t you want to see a doctor?”
“Nope, I’m good. Thanks again!” She took off running down the railroad tracks, and then she was gone.
‘This has been a weird week,’ he thought.
~*~
X sat massaging his head when Torrent reappeared. “How’s the girl?”
Torrent wiped the dirt and mud from his hands onto his pant legs. “I guess she’s all right. She’s gone already.”
“You got the easy one.” There was no trace of the second victim but some tatters of rope and an abandoned sneaker. “This is a thankless job,” he added.
Torrent gave a low whistle. “You bet.”
“Any idea what he was spraying?”
“He wouldn’t say. Did your guy have any blisters or burns on him?”
“Not that I could notice.”
“Well, there’s that,” Torrent replied.
“If I had to guess,” ventured X, “I’d say it was some sort of psychotic. He sure acted like one.”
“DMSO and LSD or something,” Torrent mused. He wondered if maybe it was just the rotten smell that had driven him nuts. He’d heard of old women going crazy from mothball fumes. A smile touched his lips. “Maybe he was just afraid of your goofy mask.”
“What are we going to do with Miasma?”
That simple question froze Torrent. Of all the things he’d planned for and worried over, that wasn’t one of them. “I don’t know,” he said, sounding surprised. “I’ve never taken a prisoner before.”
“We should take that psycho gassing son of a bitch’s wallet,” X suggested. “You know, for compensation.”
Torrent shook his head. “No wallet, no mobi. No names or addresses, either,” said Torrent. “But I’m sure his fat ass didn’t waddle all the way out here with that heavy tank on his back.”“Then he’s got to have a vehicle around here,” X said.
“We can always ask him.”
~*~
“What the fuck do you want to know that for? You run a chop shop in the day time, you delinquent bastards?” Miasma slobbered with rage.
“So we can find out which asylum turned you loose, you cartoon character,” Torrent riposted.
“And for purposes of restitution. You owe me a gas mask,” X felt the need to add.
Miasma grunted in understanding, and suddenly his face and demeanor changed. “All right, now we understand each other. Now we can resolve this. I’ll give you both $500 to cut me loose. You go home and forget about this, and I get myself to a hospital. How’s that?”
“Or we can just take it,” Torrent said.
Miasma laughed. “Give me a little credit. I wouldn’t bargain with something you can just rob from me. I’ll authorize a deposit — cryptographic, not bank scrip. Real, solid money. That’s five hundred a piece, not total!”
Torrent and X silently looked at one another. Each was seriously considering the offer, but neither wanted to be the first to say so.
Torrent tapped his partner on the shoulder as he turned away. “We’ll discuss this. Privately.”
When they put enough distance between them for Miasma’s growls to fade into the background, X turned to Torrent. “You want to take the money.”
“What? No!” he lied.
“Good. Me neither,” X said stiffly.
“It is a lot of money though,” Torrent said. “It’d help us enormously. We could even buy working gas masks.”
“Sure could,” X muttered. “You know, we could smash all of his equipment first. It’s not like we’d be giving him a free pass to pull this sick shit again.”
A sour look crossed Torrent’s face, but it was the chagrin of being reminded what that $1000 was purchasing rather than any disapproval at his friend’s mercenary inclination, an inclination that, right now at least, he shared. But his conscience and a well cultivated prudence sounded klaxons of warning. “I’m sure he could make more. He’d be back out when his leg healed.”
Abruptly, Torrent decided on something. “I want to find out who he is before we cut any deals with him. Let’s look for that car.”
The search took about ten minutes to turn up a hopper parked in a rocky clearing on the edge of the railway. It was hastily covered in a black tarp and there was a trace of that familiar, stinging chemical odor around it.
“I guess it’s his,” X said, sniffing the air. “What do you think? I don’t know why anyone would park here.”
“Let’s look,” Torrent said. They flung off the metal weights that held the tarp down and pulled it off the chassis to reveal a faded and weathered dual prop channel-wing in pusher configuration, wings turned up for vertical landing.
“An Aladdin Spindrift,” X noted. “This thing’s almost as old as I am.”
“Does Aladdin even exist anymore?” Torrent wondered.
“Nope, they went under about six years ago. My mom used to work at the dealership, remember? Well, it’s a beater, but I guess you don’t dirty up a flashy luxury flitter with your hobo-gassing equipment.”
“I daresay,” said Torrent. “Now, here's something interesting.” He crouched, examining the transponder attached to the underside of the empennage. Aggravatingly, the city of Pittsburgh required all personal aircraft to fly in established air corridors and pay for an expensive permit/transponder. It was the reason that most people who lived in the city had ground cars, even the ones with hoppers, since they generally kept them parked outside the city limits at the heliports and had to drive to get to them. But it was not just the presence of the transponder that Torrent found curious, but the markings on it.
“It’s a municipal tag,” he said.
X raised his eyebrows. “What is he, a cop?”
They pried open the unlocked side hatch and went inside the cramped cabin. There was an insurance registration certificate from the ABC made out to a Rodney Jerningham of Zelienople, Pennsylvania. On the seat was a stamped metal case containing a wallet with a state constable’s badge.
X swore and punched the roof. “He is a cop!”
“Maybe that’s why nobody seemed interested in investigating,” Torrent suggested. “Maybe he called in a favor, or maybe somebody knew and was covering for him.”
“I’ll be damned if I take his money and let him get away, now. He’s an even lower class of scumbag than I thought.”
Torrent nodded his head in agreement. “Maybe it won’t do any good to turn him in, but with all that evidence around it’ll be hard to sweep under the rug.”
“We should take pictures of all this so it can’t be covered up,” said X.
Torrent slapped his forehead in frustration. “No kidding! Too bad I didn’t bring a camera!” He always used the one on his glasses.
“That’s OK,” said X, staring at the insurance certificate. “I’m memorizing that name. Shouldn’t be hard to look up.”
They put in the call to the railroad instead of the Pittsburgh police on the hope that they might actually get some traction on an arrest and investigation, but not before letting Miasma know that they’d come to a decision.
“Good choice, gentlemen,” he rasped. “I knew, as men of the mask like me, we’d work it out. No hard feelings, now.”
X answered him with a short kick to the ribs. “No hard feelings, tax-feeder.”
Torrent dropped the badge on the back of Miasma’s head. “You hold onto that money, constable. Maybe you can bribe the Pinkertons when they get here.”