So chapter 29 of my Flash origin story is finished and I started on chapter 30 yesterday. Fingers crossed it won't take two weeks to write. I think the writing pace might pick up a little. I'm through whatever bit of writer's block was dragging me down, so now I just need to nail myself to the wagon. Hold me accountable, guys; I'm saying it here. The goal is to finish the Flash origin story by the end of May, middle of June.
Chapter Three: Code Veitch
Detectives Leslie "Lee" Marzan and Greg Pittarese were the best kind of partners. They had clicked instantly, gelled quickly, and had a strong rapport that enabled them to have entire conversations with just their eyebrows.
So well they worked together that it surprised people to learn that they had only known each other for a few years.
The downside of having such a strong bond was that it was hard for them to work with anyone else. They did try, but they never operated as well or as efficiently as they did with each other. Not when they could interpret one another's intentions in less than a heartbeat and move with such fluid teamwork that they accidentally made the rest of the SCU look like beached manatees.
Marzan was formerly from Gotham, born there and raised there until she was seven, but she had never been a child of the city. Children of the city didn't think of Gotham as loud and dirty and crime-soaked. Children of the city spoke with irritated fondness for their home -- that even thought they thought ill of it and complained about it all the time, they could never bring themselves to leave. Detective Marzan had always wrinkled her nose in disgust when she commented on Gotham in more than passing terms and she couldn't have been more pleased the day she learned they would be moving.
That day had come when she was seven, for a laundry list of reasons that mostly ended in "crime rates" and "angry metahuman related protests". Her father had put in an application to transfer and they had uprooted to go live with some cousins for a while. She had grown up in Green Bay, Wisconsin after that. Metropolis hadn't been much of a leap to make from there.
Detective Pittarese hadn't come from much further afield. He had grown up in a small Minnesota town on the backwater roads, living the skull-crushingly boring kind of small town life where you looked back on your childhood and wondered how you hadn't died from lack of stimulation. The kind of town where the only thing to do on a Saturday night was to pace the streets with the other neighborhood kids you weren't really friends with (but it was better than being by yourself), hang around the all-night convenience store until the sheriff's deputy came by to shoo you away, and maybe give cow-tipping a try because you were just that desperate.
They had both come to Metropolis for the same reason -- or perhaps it was the reason that everyone had for moving to a city like Metropolis. It was a city of opportunity. A city of dreams. Of fresh starts and new chances and a high standard of living at half the price. A good college, a stable housing market, plenty of jobs to be found, and the promise of a life to be lived in the City of Tomorrow. The Midwest's answer to New York City.
Marzan and Pittarese had met in the police academy and they had been two peas in a pod from then on. They had exhibited a relentless work ethic and tireless persistence in getting the job done, earning them a few good notches in the belt that they could be proud of. They had been diligent with their patrols and thorough with their paperwork, but what they lacked, according to their commander, was ambition. Ambition to move upwards and out of the traffic department. To do more and give more and become more.
Ambition had been everything to Commander Hardison. He had always believed it was the very thing that separated a good cop from a great cop. Good cops did what they were told when they were told and never questioned things, but great cops desired more. The ones who had the push and the drive to rise above and beyond.
Because Marzan and Pittarese lacked the ambition that Hardison had craved from his subordinates, he had never wasted his time on them. He hadn't even made a token argument when Lieutenant Sawyer had come sniffing around for recruits to add to the SCU.
Lieutenant Sawyer had different expectations altogether. There was little room for ambition in the SCU, if only because there was nowhere to rise and getting a big head might be what got you killed. When the job was to find, track, and sometimes arrest the weird that happened in Metropolis, it was diligence, thorough-ness, and hard work that netted the best results. There wasn't a race to win and if a headstrong officer tried to treat it like that, then being severely hospitalized was the least of their worries.
There was a reason that Maggie Sawyer was thus far the longest-lasting commander of the SCU.
"And no chance they'd try replacing her." Marzan commented, for it was the exact topic they had been muttering about.
Pittarese made a humming noise. "You positive they wouldn't follow through?"
"Why would they? I mean, they're a little thick-headed, but they're not dumb enough to pull some power upset right now." Marzan pointed out, shrugging. "The weird shit's coming out of the seams all over the city and then you've got Superman running around or flying around or getting around or whatever. Look Greg, I'm saying that if the big cheese upstairs expects us to get through this without losing our heads, they're not gonna give us a new lieutenant that we don't know and set us back to square one. That's insane."
"Wouldn't be nothing they haven't done before. What if they think Lieutenant Sawyer isn't doing such a good job keeping all this under control?" Pittarese countered, waving a hand in a broad gesture that was meant to encompass the city. It was mostly behind them now; they were so far north into Metrodale they were nearly outside of it. Out of patrol, keeping an eye open for their particular brand of trouble. "They've replaced other commanders for less. Remember what happened to Captain Eckhaus? Fast road to the top, that man, but he was riding a flying carpet, but then they just--"
He made a shushing noise and mimed whipping away an invisible sheet.
"I know. Everybody knows. Poor bastard." Marzan said softly, while her partner hummed in agreement. Captain Eckhaus had taken a fall so hard it was difficult not to suspect it had been orchestrated.
"But they'd be shootin' themselves in the foot if they try and replace Lieutenant Sawyer right now." she went on, firm in her opinion. "We're doing good. Good as you can expect. Nothing will kill that faster than changing command right in the middle."
"Lee, you're not hearing what I'm saying." Pittarese started entreatingly. "We haven't got this metahuman thing figured out. What if--"
"No, no, I hear what you're sayin' Greg, I do, but no one's got this metahuman thing figured out! Least of all the brass!" Marzan pointed out, a little shrilly. "It's old territory, but there's no damn map anymore! They buried everything after the Scare. All of the records and procedures and whatnot. All of that is stuck under lock and key in some dusty old storage facility -- probably under Vegas. Lord knows the mountains of paperwork we'd have to chisel through to get what we need out of storage and we can't wait as long as it takes! What I'm saying is that they're not going to replace Lieutenant Sawyer while she's still writing the new handbook."
"Yeah, no, they'll wait 'til she's done." Pittarese commented.
"Greg..." Marzan started in a weary tone, but she didn't have anything fresh to say. This wasn't the first time they had tread this ground.
Pittarese made a 'harrumph' noise that indicated he wasn't as confident about the assessment as she was, but he didn't know how to frame his half of the argument. He knew what Marzan was saying, but he had seen the superiors pull some really petty power-play bullshit whenever it suited them.
The way he saw it, one of two things were going to happen. One: the commanders would look at Lieutenant Sawyer's record and declare that she had done such a good job at whipping the SCU into shape that they were going to reward her by giving her a better command. Or two: they would declare that the lack of immediate success was a sign of her incompetence and have her shuffled off down the chain until she was stuck behind a desk in a dark hole.
It would happen because the commanders would see her as a threat and the goal would be to either get her out of the way or put her into a position where she didn't have nearly the leeway that the SCU granted her.
Regardless of the reasoning, the SCU would get stuck with someone who wouldn't be able to remotely emulate what their lieutenant could do.
That was what Pittarese was worried about. He just wasn't articulate enough to make it a well-framed argument.
Instead, he asked:
"So, what do you think of Superman?"
Marzan shrugged and drummed her hands on the steering wheel.
"C'mon, you gotta have some opinion."
"I don't have one. I don't really care." Marzan admitted, shrugging again. "Until he's got something to do with me, why should I care?"
She might have left the city a long time ago, but some of Gotham's influence still clung to her.
"Lee, come on, this is the biggest thing to happen in twenty years! Right in the middle of our backyard, no less!" Pittarese stressed, turning in the passenger's seat to better face her. "Metropolis has got itself a superhero now!"
"That's nice, but really, what's he got to do with me?" Marzan asked.
"Well, you're no fun." Pittarese grumbled, shaking his head at her total lack of enthusiasm. "You really got nothing on him?"
"Not until he saves my life."
"He saved the entire city! You saying that doesn't count as saving your life by default?"
Marzan just smiled.
"Well, I don't need him to save my life personally just to think highly of him." Pittarese said, crossing his arms like he was expecting a challenge. "He saved the city, twice. That's good enough for me."
"You're gonna fanboy on me, aren't you."
"I see nothing wrong with enthusiastic appreciation."
"Is there even a difference between enthusiastic appreciation and hero worship?"
"There is absolutely a difference."
"Oh really? Then enlighten me."
"Aha, prepare to be schooled." Pittarese straightened his shirt collar absently. "Appreciation is an understanding. When you understand, you're able to recognize the good and the bad. Hero worship, however, is blind. It happens when you refuse to see them in anything but the best possible light, deny that they have flaws and are human-"
"Superman isn't human." Marzan interrupted, a shiver in her voice as she said it.
And there was the rub, she felt. Superman was many things, including human-shaped, but he wasn't human. He was a refugee from a destroyed planet somewhere deep in space and good god y'all if there hadn't been serious panic after the interview had gone public.
There hadn't been exactly chaos in the streets and doomsday signs being held aloft (meaning the whole reaction hadn't met even Clark's best-case scenario), but the buzz had been deafening. It had been all anyone had talked about for a week until they had exhausted every possible question. Fears had been assuaged, more or less, when the Daily Planet released a second interview (courtesy of Lois Lane) that pointedly addressed what people were most worried about and General Sam Lane did exactly as he had offered, publically sticking his neck out to back Superman up.
With that, people returned to their daily lives without feeling like they needed to glance to the sky for any sign of the mothership.
There was still an undercurrent of tension and nervousness, because just like that, humankind had learned they were no longer alone in the universe. There may have been others from the planet, those who had survived as well.
And if there had been just one planet full of sentient alien life, there must have been other planets.
There was still a general sense of 'Now what?'
"He's not going to kill us, Lee." Pittarese said, confident enough in that opinion, at least. "He's not going to kill any of us. He was pretty clear on that in both interviews."
Marzan made a "harrumph" noise similar to his own, one that meant the same thing. She wanted to argue, but she couldn't come up with the words that would frame the argument eloquently. Rather than attempt to argue, she guided the car through a left turn and took them into the next patrol zone.
There was an industrial warehouse belt stretching up the west side of Metrodale and outwards to the train depot. Its presence did nothing to bolster Metrodale's flagging economy because the people who worked in those warehouses lived and spent their paychecks somewhere else.
Close to the river front and the train depot, everything was pretty modern and well-trafficked and occupied most hours of the day and night. But the further north you went from the river-front, the seedier and emptier it got until many of the lots were abandoned and derelict. The city had yet to pull down any of the empty buildings. This made them prime real estate for anyone with shady intentions and so it was on the two detectives' patrol route.
"We still getting any calls from this area?" Marzan wondered, peering cautiously at the dilapidated buildings.
"Not to my knowledge." Pittarese answered, feeling a little nervous himself. This wasn't a very good side of town for cops and with the increasing visibility of metahumans, it was more than a little dangerous.
"Then why do we still patrol it?" Marzan wondered.
"Gotta keep up a presence. Let 'em know we're around. Cuts down the funny business."
"I don't think any metas are going to stop their funny business just because they see a squad car."
Marzan tried not to slow down or speed up, though the urge to do both was certainly there. They had to patrol the area at a pace that was both slow enough to see if there was anything going on, yet fast enough to arrive in time in case there was something going on. It was tough to find that balance.
It was a good thing she was only going thirty because someone scrambled nearly right in front of the car and the only thing Marzan could think to do was stomp on the brakes and hope for the best. The tires squealed, Pittarese yelped and braced himself on the dashboard, and the girl (identifiable even in a split second) froze in the middle of the street like a deer and flung her hands out. Marzan saw the faintest shimmer of blue-ish light before--
*CRUNCH*
And the front fender impacted with something as hard and solid as a brick wall, kicking the car back and setting off the siren in a brief warbling whistle. Braced as they were, the two detectives' heads didn't bounce on the steering wheel or the dashboard, but the rebound was certainly going to leave them with whiplash.
"What the hell?!" Pittarese bellowed, more out of reflex than anything.
Both detectives looked up to see what they had hit-- which, as far as they knew, shouldn't have been anything at all. This road was straight and wide and not given to having unexpected obstacles in the middle of it.
But apparently, the unexpected had decided to start happening in even more unanticipated ways.
Directly in front of the car was a semi-translucent wall made entirely of blue-ish light. Thin wispy strands of the same color connected the wall back to the girl who had dashed into the road. She was black, her hair in wild disarray, and her eyes wide with fright. Blood streaked her forehead and dribbled down the side of her face, her spread palms scraped and skinned, and her hoodie torn open along the sleeves like she had ripped herself free from someone holding her.
"Meta? Is that a meta?" Pittarese whispered.
"Force fields!" Marzan whispered back excitedly. "Look at that! She can generate force fields!"
Pittarese whistled, nodding.
The girl clearly didn't share their delight or enthusiasm. When it finally registered that she was seeing a police car, she yelped and shoved the car back several feet. The locked tires skidded on the asphalt, but it gave the girl the cushion of space she wanted and then she bolted. Took off down road, arms and legs churning furiously. She moved with something of a limp, like she had turned an ankle once already. The forcefield dissapated with her absence.
"Wait!" Marzan shouted suddenly, fighting with the door catch. "Wait! Wait a minute!"
She threw the door open and tried to jump out, but in her haste, she forgot that she was still buckled in.
"Ow! Dammit!" The detective yanked off the seatbelt and scrambled out of the squad car. "Greg, c'mon! C'mon, we need to see what's going on with her!"
And she took off after the girl without waiting to see if her partner would follow.
"I'm coming, I'm coming."
Pittarese undid his seatbelt and got out of the car, sighing heavily. So much for the uneventful patrol he had been hoping for. So much for not exerting himself anymore than necessary. But he set off in Marzan's footsteps anyways. Pittarese might have lacked ambition, according to his former commander, but he took his job seriously. He honored his badge with a commendable dedication. No one was above the law, but certainly no one was exempt from its protection.
Within seconds, Marzan had hit a brisk sprint that Pittarese fought to catch up with. Of the two of them, Marzan was by far the superior runner. Lean and whipcord thin and carrying far less weight than her partner's cannonball physique.
"Catch up!" she shouted over her shoulder.
"I'm going as fast as I can!" Pittarese shot back, though he endeavored to move his legs a little faster. It was embarrassing, really, he should have been in better shape than this.
It still wasn't fast enough to catch up with the black girl, who was ten yards ahead and gaining ground. Marzan rolled her eyes and pushed ahead. If she hung back and let Pittarese keep pace, they would lose the girl. It wasn't just that she was a meta, but she was also in some sort of trouble. Marzan took her badge as seriously as her partner did.
Protect and serve.
Marzan lengthened her stride, poured on the speed, and started to close the gap.
"Hey!" she called out, when she was sure that she was close enough to be heard. "Wait, we're not going to hurt you! We're here to help! You can stop running! We're not going to hurt you!"
"When does that ever work?" Pittarese shouted from behind his partner. "Ye gods woman, look at her! She's a black girl and we're the cops! Of course she's running!"
"And she's all bloody! I'm concerned!"
However, the foot-chase ended not long after it had started. The black girl was already worn down from her previous frantic scramble that had taken her into the middle of the street and she didn't have the stamina to out-run the much fresher police detective. The limp becoming more pronounced and her breathing reduced to gasps, she veered out of the middle of the road and onto the mud-and-grass median. She staggered a little, bending over at the waist and coughing.
Marzan caught up a few moments later, stopping at least ten feet away at the curb. She had been thoroughly drilled on the art of approaching uncooperative or agitated individuals. The main tenant was to give them space so they didn't feel threatened and otherwise close the gap slowly if possible. The girl was bound to be both a little uncooperative and agitated. Those force fields of hers would make this situation a little trickier than most.
She on the high side of fourteen. State of her hair and clothes and shoes suggested that she had been living rough for a little while now. Not homeless -- she didn't display that particular form of desperation that came with belly-pinching hunger and thirst, nor did she have that rangy semi-feral look Marzan had seen on street kids. There was a line of neat stitches holding the hems of her jeans together and the rest of her clothes were in decent condition despite the recently inflicted damage. It seemed there was someone looking after her.
But definitely living rougher than one person oughta.
Probably a Metrodale kid, which was an assumption that anyone could have made with a long enough glance. Metrodale was among the poorest neighborhoods in the city. In particular, Metrodale had the highest rate of poverty among people of color and the neighborhood itself looked like a clone of Camden, New Jersey. All cracked pavement and dilapidated housing that no one should have to live in.
The girl was probably a scavenger, trawling through the warehouses for left-over wiring and metal that could be sold and re-purposed. Good scrap metal was worth something on Metropolis's underground market. No time to go to school -- that was for people who weren't on the edge of being evicted. This was the sort of girl looking to scrap together a few bucks here and there through semi-honest means to help her parents with the bills.
It wasn't exactly a blind guessing game.
Marzan's foot crunched on gravel. The black girl's head snapped up and so did an arm. Blue-ish light flashed around her, forming a protective bubble.
"Don't even think about that gun, copper! I seen thing make bullets bounce off!" the girl warned in between heaving breaths, waving her hand to indicate the bubble.
"My hands are up here." Marzan said, raising them. Her SIG Sauer was visible on her thigh. In reflection, she probably should have left it in the car, but she had barely remembered to get her seat belt off.
"Whaddya want? Why you chasin' me?!" the black girl demanded. Her voice echoed slightly from underneath the energy field.
"Just want to see if you're okay. I'm Lee, that's Greg." Marzan said, gesturing to Pittarese still coming up the road. "We're with the SCU-- That's Special Crimes Unit. We were just on patrol--"
"You go after metas or somethin'?" the girl snapped. She looked triumphant. "Yeah, I heard it! All that talk, you SCU pigs round up metas whether we done something or not! I done nothing!"
"We're not here to arrest you. The SCU isn't in the business of rounding up metahumans like it's the Third Reich." Marzan said calmly. "We're the good kind of police. We only arrest those who are actually breaking the law."
The teenage girl shifted from one foot to the other. Indecision flitted across her face and she glanced from Marzan over to Pittarese who had just huffed up to the curb. He stopped over, hands on his knees, shoulders heaving with every breath.
"Am I bein' detained?" the teenager asked.
"No, of course not. You're free to leave at any time." Marzan assured her. "If it's alright, we would like to ask you a few questions. What's your name?"
The teenager's hand dropped a little and the force field retreated a few inches. She shifted again and then said: "Violet."
"Hullo, Violet." Pittarese straightened up, beaming his non-threatening Jolly Green Giant smile. "Detectives Marzan and Pittarese, from the Met P.D. Special Crimes Unit. But you've been told that already, I bet."
"We'd just like to ask you a few questions." Marzan repeated gently. "You look like you've been attacked." she added, nodding to the scraped forehead and ripped-up hoodie sleeves.
Violet made a hesitant shrug. Her protective force field retreated another couple of inches.
"There was a thing." she said, touching her forehead.
"Are you all right? Would you like us to get a doctor out here first?" Marzan inquired.
"No! No, I'm okay! I'm okay, really." Violet insisted, looking more alarmed by the idea of an ambulance than of the two cops standing in front of her. "There was just this-- I got scared more than anything. I got away!"
"Can you describe your attacker? Age, gender, height, weight?" Pittarese asked, feeling around his pockets. "I've got a notepad in here somewhere, just a minute..."
"It wasn't a man! It was a thing!" Violet burst out, throwing her hands up. The action caused her force field to drop completely. "It was this big, ugly-- centipede! Like six seven feet long with a billion legs and these nasty pincers on both ends--!"
"Whoa, whoa, slow down!" Marzan flapped a hand until the girl subsided into silence. "What do you mean a centipede attacked you?"
"It was a fuckin' centipede. Or-- Or it looked like one." Violet said with the air of one who was elaborating. "Look, it weren't no man who got the drop on me. It was some big-ass nasty bug the size of a car."
Pittarese and Marzan shared a long look, their eyebrows alone communicating their mutual disbelief. Science had proven that it was no longer biologically possible for insects to grow to any such monstrous sizes. The oxygen content of the atmosphere had thinned out since those days and couldn't support that sort of growth. Any talk of seven-foot long centipedes was surely a bogus claim.
But who were they to decide what was bogus anymore? 'Weird' had been the name of the game for Metropolis these past few weeks. And anything seemed up for grabs. Superman was from outer space. Three months ago, a dimensional portal had opened up over their very own city. In Central and Keystone Cities was Zoom, who could run at the speed of sound and faster. History was full of seemingly impossible people and occurrences. The Justice Society and everything they had gotten up to, in war-time and out of it. A multitude of things that defied what was accepted as normal.
So a giant centipede?
Couldn't have been that far off the map.
"Are you sure?" Pittarese asked Violet.
"Yes." The black girl nodded emphatically. She shook her arms, the ripped sleeves flapping. "I didn't do this to myself. You don't believe me!"
"Hang on, we never said anything like that." Marzan said, shaking her head. "This is new to us too, all this about aliens and metahumans. We're still trying to get used to it ourselves."
"Just your luck, though, we're the SCU." Pittarese said proudly, pointing a thumb at his chest. "Our job is to investigate the weird stuff. Like giant centipedes. And then we take care of it."
"Can you show us where you saw it?" Marzan asked.
"You sure you wanna check out this kind of weird-ass bullshit?" Violet wondered, eyeing the two detectives askance. Her gaze flitted particularly over Pittarese's rotund belly. "I mean, I'd barely believe me if I were in your shoes."
"Yeah, well..." Pittarese shrugged, holding his hands out like what can you do. "We have to investigate every claim or rumor we receive, no matter how crazy or off the wall it sounds. It's in our job handbook. So you say 'giant centipede', we say 'where'."
Violet bit her lip and for a moment, it looked like she might run the other way rather than show them anything. Too many sour encounters with past cops. She was used to getting dropped like a hot potato, dismissed for being black. And the content. If someone had run up to her and started babbling about giant centipedes, she wouldn't believe them either.
But these were the good kind of cops. Maybe they didn't believe her, but they were listening.
The moment passed and she visibly gathered herself together.
"Okay." She nodded. "Okay, it's back this way."
She led them back up the road to where they had left the squad car -- Pittarese swept an eye over the front of the car; there was some damage to the fender, but nothing that couldn't be banged out -- and to the side-street she had sprinted out of.
"It was down that way, in that one." Violet said, pointing to the second warehouse on the right. The side-door was still hanging open. "I was-- uh... doin' stuff. Minding my own business when I started hearin' this tapping, like a bird walking on metal or something. Thought it was all my imagination and then I heard this other sound like skittering."
"Skittering... Like?..." Marzan prompted.
Violet shrugged. "I dunno, I guess like a bird runnin' on metal. This shuffling noise, like what feathers do." she explained, or made an effort to. "Started to freak me out anyways, so I was going to leave and I saw that ugly mother. It grabbed me b'fore I could make it to the door and tried to drag me off, but I pushed it away and bolted and then...!"
"And then here we are." Pittarese finished. "Where did you see it?"
"I guess about twenty, thirty feet in, straight from the door. I dropped my bag when it grabbed me." Violet said. "D'you think you could get it for me?"
"We'll grab it." Pittarese said. He looked up at his partner. "Think it's still in there?"
Marzan shrugged. "Could be."
They eyed the open doorway for a long moment. The door was old, partially rusted, and swinging in the gentle breeze. These buildings had been empty and abandoned for coming up fifteen years now and they were old red brick structures dating back to the fifties. The windows that hadn't been shattered were cracked and clouded over, thick with grime. Metropolis experienced some terrific weather, especially during the winter when the snow was measured in feet, not inches. After a decade of winters with no maintenance, there was no telling what condition the roof was in.
"We'll check it out." Marzan decided. She started to loosen the holster straps on her gun. "We're going to do a quick sweep, in and out. Shouldn't be more than five minutes. Violet?"
"Yeah, what?"
"I want you to go wait by the car. Or in it, if you'd like. If we're not back within ten minutes, get on the horn, give the dispatcher your name and location, and then tell them it's a ten seventy-eight, possible ten zero-zero."
"Okay." Violet nodded. "What do those mean?"
"Officer needs assistance, and officer down, respectively." Pittarese informed her, unstrapping his SIG as well. "If what almost got you doesn't get to us, it'll be the roof caving in that does it."
"That's comforting." the teenager muttered.
"Just go wait by the car, please." Marzan said.
Violet made a grumbling noise like she wholly disagreed with the proposed course of action (she did) and further expressed her dislike for the situation by stomping off exactly like any teenager would. Marzan and Pittarese unhooked their flashlights from their belts and ventured up to the open door.
The warehouse interior was about what one could expect. The ceiling soared to a vaulted point forty feet above their heads and the other end was nearly a quarter of a mile away, where Marzan could just make out the main doors in between the still-upright load bearing pillars. The concrete floor was chipped and cracked, littered with debris that included glass bottles, condom wrappers, and chunks of crumbly brick. There was actually an entire level below the ground -- an open-cut sub-basement that gaped more like a hole in the floor than anything. The stairs that had accessed it had collapsed.
A lot had been left behind, most of it just too big and too heavily bolted in to walk off with. There were tall cylindrical structures that may have been old blast furnaces. Smelting furnaces burned nearly black from years of use were set into the floor. Enormous graphite crucibles still hung from the sturdy gantry cranes, and they creaked and swayed though there wasn't a breeze. Great long troughs ran from end to end and back again. And other big machines that they couldn't have possibly guessed the name or function of -- many of which had been broken open and stripped of whatever useful material a scavenger could find.
"What did they used to do here?" Marzan wondered, shining the flashlight across the closest row of smelting furnaces.
"Steel production, I think." Pittarese answered. His knowledge of the city's industrial history was very spotty, but it looked like an old steel mill. "They must have taken down the cooling towers after it was shut down."
"Uh, how far in do you want to go?" Marzan asked.
They would never be able to sweep the entire building inside their ten-minute window; it would have taken that long just to jog to the other end without stopping to look. As it was, there were too many dark corners for someone to hide in. For two people to thoroughly sweep the building would be a several-hour job.
"Let's go to where Violet dropped her bag and see what we've got." Pittarese suggested.
A twenty to thirty foot walk in straight from the door, as Violet had said. Marzan had to admit that there wasn't much to see. There wasn't much natural light coming in through the windows, leaving great swathes of shadow across the floor. Eerie lighting distorted the outlines and made innocuous things like a tad more ominous than they oughta.
It might have been interesting to someone else, to walk in between the troughs and the blast furnaces and to look up at the huge crucibles big enough for several men and just marvel at it all. But Marzan had never really been one for urban exploration. She had no idea how steel mills operated and the rusting metal hulks didn't illuminate the process. All she saw was a whole lot of rusting equipment that could get someone killed.
Why didn't they chain the doors up? She wondered. Or maybe they did and someone took a pair of bolt cutters to it.
That was always the way it was, no matter what city you lived in. Chain up a door and it was like inviting someone to come at it with bolt cutters and lock-picks just to prove that nothing was impervious.
Something went *click*click*click*
Like little claws tapping on metal.
Marzan whipped around, bringing her gun and the flashlight to bear. The beam bounced between two furnaces, but there was nothing there except for another row of troughs and furnaces.
"Lee?" Pittarese nudged her.
"Did you hear that? I heard something." Marzan said.
The man shrugged. "I didn't hear anything."
"It came from over there." she said, starting for the gap between the furnaces.
"Hey, let's not split up. Do you know how easy it would be to get lost in here?" Pittarese made a motion for his partner to come back, but Marzan's attention was locked on the dark patch on the other side. "Lee!"
"I'll just be a minute." Marzan informed him, stepping between the furnaces. "I'm going to take a quick look over here and then I'll meet you on the other side, okay?"
"Okay, just watch yourself. Stay within earshot." Pittarese instructed. Marzan nodded and disappeared behind the huge bulk of the furnace without a word.
Honestly, though, he would much prefer that they stay within line of sight with each other. It would be much too easy to get lost in a place like this, dark like it was. And with the state of things around here, injuries caused by something collapsing was much too likely.
He spotted a lumpy something laying under one of the troughs another few meters up and he shone the flashlight on it. It was a faded floral backpack that had seen better days. The top flap hadn't quite closed over and there were bits of metal and wire poking out.
"Hey Lee, I found that girl's bag." Pittarese said loudly, his voice echoing. He went over to pick it up. "Come back over here, we'll check around--"
*click*click*click*
He straightened up with a jolt. The sound of clicking didn't fade, but echoed from every direction. Hard nails tapping off metal and concrete, circling around his position. It was accompanied by a shuffling noise like insect wings brushing together.
Then it stopped.
Silence descended.
"What the hell?..." Pittarese whispered.
The sounds had come and gone so quickly he wasn't entirely sure he had heard it. He waved the flashlight around, the beam dancing over the furnaces and the troughs and the casting molds. But he only illuminated dust and cobwebs, and a few roaches skittered away from the light.
"Lee?" Pittarese called out softly, not daring to raise his voice very high. "Did you hear that? Lee?"
There was no reply.
"Lee?"
Pittarese shuffled away from the bag and around to the other side of the furnaces where Marzan should have emerged. He brought his gun to bear, just in case, and eased around the far side of the furnace.
"Hey, Lee, you there?"
He peered around the rusted metal hulk, lighting up the dusty murk on the other side. Particles of dust and who knew what else floated in and out of the flashlight beam. But there was no trace of Marzan. Where she oughta have been was nothing at all.
Not her gun.
Not her flashlight
Not a single thing from her belt.
She was just...
Gone.
"Oh... fuck..."
Fear and adrenaline trickled into Pittarese's limbs. The bad kind of adrenaline that would make him freeze in place. The kind that wouldn't let him react quickly. The kind that slowed down everything, for even as he told himself that he needed to leave, to turn around and run back to the car and declare an emergency, his legs just wouldn't move.
The gantry chains creaked, the crucibles swayed, and something skittered down from a catwalk above him. The dry shuffling *click*click*click* came again. This time, Pittarese saw a long, many-legged form descending across the furnaces towards him. Something with pincers half as long as his arm and glittering ruby red eyes, and a incisor-filled maw that dripped with a liquid he could only hope was just saliva.
"Oh fuck! Oh fuck!"
The detective raised his gun and fired.
-0-
alternatively, this chapter could be called "Death to the Redshirts"