The Zahl Sisters
It was a cold and rainy night in October. Johnny Drake was alone, walking back to his home in a down-market part of the city. It was late enough that the streets were mostly deserted except for people like himself, too bloody-minded to be content to sit in front of their televisions on a dreary, cold and wet night.
Before entering the building, Johnny paused on the step outside the apartment block and finished off his cigarette. He inhaled deeply before flicking the stub into the darkness outside. As he did so, a female voice sounded behind him catching him unawares. It was a very pleasant voice, foreign to Johnny's ears, possibly French.
"Excuse me, mon chere," said the voice.
Johnny turned to see an attractive woman aged around thirty, expensively dressed in white shirt, dark business jacket and matching skirt. The skirt was cut short - several inches above the knee - enough to show off her legs and expensive high-heeled shoes. Johnny smiled appreciatively. He could smell her scent even from a distance and stepped down the steps to be that much closer to her. She definitely wasn't the sort of woman that Johnny normally spoke to and he wanted to fully appreciate the experience with as many senses as possible.
"Hi. Can I help you?" He moved as close as he dared towards her.
She took notice of his closeness and smiled, clearly not fearful of the possible threat he could have posed to her safety. "I am looking for an old acquaintance who I believe lives in this building. I was wondering if, perhaps, you know him, his name is Larry Trainor?"
"I know Trainor," Johnny replied. "Room 4:04. I can walk up with you and point it out. I live along the corridor from him."
"That is very kind. It is sometime since I have seen dear Larry …"
"He's not expecting you?" Johnny asked holding open the door for her to pass through before adding: "There's no elevator, we'll have to take the stairs." He then enjoyed the view of her behind as he followed her up the flights of stairs.
"No, he is not expecting me. So it will be a surprise."
"He doesn't get out much so if you need someone to show you round, you can give me a call. As I said, I live along the corridor … Room 4:01."
"That is very kind. I may just do that."
"What sort of accent is that?" Johnny asked.
"My accent?" she laughed. "It is French, though my father was German and my family name is Zahl and that is German. I am Simone."
"Well Simone, it's been a pleasure meeting you. You can call me Johnny."
They reached the landing for the fourth floor. "This must be it, I think," Simone replied.
"Yeah. Trainor's over there," he said nonchalantly indicating Larry's apartment door.
"Thank you, Johnny."
"Don't forget to call me," he replied.
"I won't forget." She then turned away and approached the door to Trainor's apartment.
Johnny watched while she knocked on Larry's door and called out to her one more time: "He's bound to be there. He hardly ever goes out."
Simone smiled back at Johnny. "I can hear him coming now," she said.
The door opened and Johnny could see Trainor, swathed in bandages. As was his habit, Larry was wearing his old dressing gown, pulled and tied at the waist. Johnny noticed Trainor back away from the doorway allowing Simone to enter. Once she had done so, the door was quickly pulled shut.
"Lucky #5&? …." Johnny's voice trailed away to nothing as he reflected on the gorgeous woman wanting to meet with Trainor. He shook his head in disbelief, entered his own apartment and closed the door.
Meanwhile, Trainor was standing stock-still as he carefully watched the woman standing in front of him. She was smiling as she pointed the pistol (complete with silencer) at his stomach. "If you're an old girlfriend, whatever it was that I did … I'm sorry," he said.
"No, I am not an old girl-friend. It would be very surprising if someone like you ever had a girl-friend."
"Sticks and stones," Larry replied, "sticks and stones. So, who are you and what did I do?"
"My name is Simone Zahl."
"Zahl? Oh, I see. You must be his … daughter?"
"That is correct. He killed you once, and now I will kill you. You will not escape from death's grasp a second time."
She squeezed the trigger of the pistol and emptied the clip of bullets into Trainor's body. She dropped the weapon and calmly turned and left the building.
Meanwhile, on the other side of town, someone else was knocking on the door of Rita Farr's apartment. The door was opened by Rita and she too was faced by an attractive woman aged in her early thirties who was holding a pistol pointed directly at her.
"Miss Farr, please back away from the door."
"What do you want?" Rita asked as she backed into her room.
"What do I want? My name is Sophia Zahl and I want you to be dead."
Sophia Zahl was exactly like her sister in appearance and behaviour. She emptied the contents of the pistol at point blank range into Rita's body. Zahl then dropped her weapon and quietly and calmly left the building.
Johnny and Enid gave their statements to the Police and watched as Trainor's body was bagged and carried out to the vehicle ready for transportation to the morgue.
"Is there any news about Rita Farr?" Johnny asked.
"The police say there's no answer from her cell-phone," Enid replied.
"That's not good, not good at all."
"Do you think that whoever did this has also got to Rita?"
Johnny shrugged his shoulders: he wasn't optimistic that Rita was safe. And then the TV news confirmed that Rita too had been shot dead by an unknown assassin at her door.
"What are we gonna do?" Enid asked.
"We? What do you mean 'we'? We're not costume-types!"
"No but we have to do something."
"I don't think we have to do anything!" Johnny replied. "That's why we have a Police Force."
As they spoke, two large men, both well-armed police-officers walked past Enid and Johnny as they stood fretting over Larry and Rita's fate.
"Those two look far more capable of doing something than we ever could," he observed.
The Police soon started their door-to-door enquiries at Trainor's apartment block. They even went as far as to check out the warren of unused rooms in the building's basement.
Two uniformed officers went down into the basement. They found the old corridor and tried each of the doors without finding anything until they came to the door at the furthest end of the corridor, that being the one that was rented by Trainor. As they stood outside they were instantly alarmed by a noise from within and drew their weapons. One stood in readiness as the other quickly thrust open the door. It was pitch black inside the room and one of the officers carefully felt for the light switch on the inside wall. As the lights flickered on they were astonished to see a gorilla [Monsieur Mallah] lunge towards them and with considerable ease, knock them both to the ground. With both policemen totally incapacitated, the gorilla returned to the room, picked up a large coffin-shaped crate pausing only to switch off the light before sauntering casually along the corridor with the 'coffin' balanced carefully on its shoulder. It was then an easy task for the gorilla to pass into the foyer of the building and burst through the astonished crowd and out into the street.
Across the street, a van was waiting and the gorilla opened the back doors pushing the coffin into the back before he jumped in. The van was then driven off at speed.
The police took off with sirens blaring in pursuit of the van. The men in the lead police-car watched in amazement as the back door of the van were pushed open to reveal the gorilla, now armed with a machine-gun, and pointing it in their direction. It unleashed a volley of shots, quickly emptying the magazine as the two leading police-cars smashed into parked and stationary traffic.
The gorilla then pulled shut the rear doors of the van as the driver turned into a narrow side-street and stopped. The driver then opened the door and jumped down out of the van. He was a dwarf named Rudolfo Valentino and he went round to the rear of the van and banged on the doors. The gorilla, Mallah, opened them up.
"Is everything satisfactory?" Valentino asked.
"It is," Mallah replied.
Valentino nodded. "It's time to change vans." He then went back to the cab and pressed a switch on a small box attached to the dashboard. The van then morphed from a white General Motors van into a black Ford van (etc.) Valentino then started the van up and drove away at an uneventful and unremarkable speed.
In the morgue, meanwhile, Rita was beginning to feel uncomfortable. She did not know where she was except that she seemed to be lying in a restrictive bag and that she felt inexplicably cold.
Such was her frustration at being so confined that she yelled out: "Larry?" The bag material was surprisingly resilient and her initial efforts at breaking out were in vain. But after the initial surprise at the restriction on her movements she began to calm down and reasoned that by shrinking to a tiny size that she would then be small enough to pass through a tiny gap that she could glimpse in her prison. All anyone watching would be able to see is that the bag inexplicably deflated as its contents suddenly disappeared. Rita was now in such a shrunken and tiny form that she was able to step between the open teeth of a zip and emerge onto a flat metallic surface.
As she increased her size towards normality she was able to make sense of her surroundings and realize that she had just escaped from a body-bag and was on the dissection table of a morgue. None of the morgue's staff were in sight so her miraculous escape was unobserved.
Rita could remember the Zahl woman and how she had fired at her. She even remembered the feeling of the bullets entering her body. With some trepidation, Rita looked with interest at her body. Her shirt was ripped and blooded with clear indication of where she had been shot. Her body however, was completely unblemished.
A woman's scream and a crash of metal falling to the ground gave the game away that one of the morticians had returned to the room. Rita turned to see a youngish fair-haired woman wide-eyed with alarm and backing away towards the door.
"It's alright," Rita explained. "I'm not dead. And I'm not a ghost either: I'm just difficult to kill."
"The police said you were super-human," the mortician said, still petrified by Rita's appearance.
"That's right."
"What about the other one?"
"What other one?" Rita asked.
The mortician pointed at another body-bag on another trolley. With an enormous sense of foreboding Rita took a step towards this other body.
"Would you … open it for me, please?" she asked.
The young mortician did as she was asked to reveal the bandaged head of Larry Trainor.
"Larry?" Rita said as she looked on with concern.
"He also has numerous bullet wounds to the chest. It would be … impossible ... for … him … to … survive …" Her voice trailed away as the bandaged head of Larry Trainor twitched and his shoulder jerked.
A voice from the darkness announced: "I was having a pleasant sleep until you yelled and woke me!" The Negative Man stepped forward from a shadowy far corner of the poorly lit room.
"How long have you been standing there?" Rita demanded.
"Long enough. And I must say that it was very entertaining watching you trying to get out of that bag. I wondered whether or not you'd be dressed."
"Dressed, as you can plainly see. I'm so sorry to have disappointed you."
"Ah well."
The Negative Man then merged with his bandaged body and Trainor sat up in the bag and swung his legs over the side of the trolley.
"It was Zahl's daughter who did it for me," he continued.
"And me," Rita added. "Sophia Zahl."
"That's interesting. The Zahl girl that shot me aid her name was Simone."
"Sisters?" Rita wondered.
"Twins?" Larry added.
The taxi carrying Larry and Rita pulled up outside Larry's apartment block. Rita paid the taxi-driver and stepped out onto the sidewalk. The entire place was crawling with uniformed police and the whole area was cordoned off. Rita and Larry exchanged glances and approached the Detective in charge of the crime-scene. Before they could get any closer, their way was blocked by two uniformed police.
"I live here," Larry explained.
The officer looked perplexed at Larry's bandaged appearance but was insistent that he would not let Larry enter the building.
"There's been a homicide here. You'll have to find somewhere else to stay for a short while."
"Homicide? Who? Are you referring to Larry Trainor?"
The Detective in charge of the crime-scene stepped forward as Larry added: "I'm Larry Trainor and I'm not dead!"
The Detective took charge of the situation: "Trainor? You're Larry Trainor?" he queried. And then with more insistence: "You were sent to the morgue."
"That's right, but I'm not dead."
"Well … You look like Trainor … well, what I mean is … you're bandaged like him … But how do I know that you are Trainor?"
Rita stepped forward. "I can vouch for him. He is Larry Trainor, and I am Rita Farr."
"Rita Farr was also reported as being murdered!" the Detective added.
"Yes. We are very difficult to kill," Rita explained. "I can assure you, we are who we say we are."
"Yeah; let me in." Larry tried to push his way through. "Has anyone else been hurt? Is Enid okay?"
Rita bristled at the thought of Larry's concern for his young neighbour.
"You can't go in while we investigate," the Detective said. "No-one else has been hurt although we have witnesses saying that a gorilla was seen …"
Larry bristled at the mention of a gorilla; "What did you say?"
"A gorilla was reported to have been seen leaving the building carrying a suit of armour. It sped away in the back of a truck while firing an automatic weapon at police vehicles that were in pursuit."
The Detective paused as Rita and Larry exchanged worried looks.
"We have to go in," Larry said.
"You don't seem surprised that I mentioned the gorilla?"
"No," Rita replied. "It was Monsieur Mallah. We know him."
"You know a gorilla?"
"Yes and he's not a 'nice' gorilla either!" Larry added. "Let us in. I have to see if Mallah has stolen something that belongs to us!"
"Please?" Rita added. "We have to check."
"Okay, you can pass … Only try not to disturb any evidence!"
The Detective had to shout after Larry and Rita as they had already hurried into the building.
Rita and Larry quickly made their way to the storeroom-cellar. The door into the room was shattered and their hearts both sank as they surveyed the damage. They looked at the space where Cliff Steele's Robotman body had once been stored.
"Gone," Rita said gloomily.
"I'll see if Negative Man can find it," Larry said and slumped to the ground as the Negative Man left his body.
The Negative Man sped through the air at almost impossible speed looking for any indication of the stolen robot man body. As it did so, Rita looked around the storeroom at the relics of her past. Many of the memories were fifty years old now. She picked up a framed photograph of herself with Larry and Cliff. The picture was dated March 1965 and neither Larry nor she had aged a day since that photograph was taken. But what of Cliff: where was he now? He had disappeared off everybody's radar many years ago and no-one knew whether he was alive or dead. But like Larry and she, he too could never grow old. No wonder they were known as the Doom Patrol. Rita smiled wistfully and replaced the picture on its narrow shelf. Her gaze wandered along the rest of the objects on the shelf until it rested on a small cube approximately one inch in diameter on one side of which was an image of an eye. She picked it up and looked at it for a moment before replacing it on the shelf. She did not have any idea as to what it might be.
An image of Rita and the ruined storeroom crackled on a monitor screen as Rita replaced the eye on its shelf. The monitor was one of several arranged on one wall of a dark room. The Brain 'sat' in its motionless case facing the screens. Bubbles of air rose from the brain and rose to the top of the liquid in which it was suspended.
A synthetic, mechanical voice broke the silence: "So … after all these years … I knew those Zahl brats would not be able to kill you!"