Chapter Fourteen
Ronnie and Vivian both had puffy, red cheeks because Jessica had told him the bad news: all the residents of the Fifth Street Sewer were dead. Distraught, he fell against the concrete wall of the basement, placed his head in his hands, and sobbed. The images of his poor Momma raced through his mind, but he didn't know how to deal with the loss. For some reason, Ronnie took the news harder than Vivian, and he had a horrible scowl on his face. When Vivian tried to hug him, he pulled away, and said, "I'm going to kill the people responsible."
Thoughts of killing Dennis raced through his adolescent mind, because he felt like the Jokers gave the order. Sometimes Ronnie thought Dennis ran the Jokers, because Dennis often told the boy that he was the true leader, the true face of the underbelly. He often referred to the urchins as his kids, and Ronnie sometimes assumed Dennis made all the decisions. Dennis knew about the Jokers better than anybody because he entered the organization when he prostituted for the elites. He had been in the Jokers' lair, but never knew about any other leader except Dennis. Dennis entered the building, took off his hat, and told the people around him what he needed. They served him like a king; and when he donned a white, hideous looking mask with an ominous smile, he grabbed his scepter, sat in the big chair, and gave commands to his minions. He might look like a frail twig, Ronnie thought, but when Dennis put on the mask, he became that one thing all children feared: the boogie man.
Jessica left abruptly when the two teens started to cry uncontrollably, and then Ronnie ran out of the house into the streets, and disappeared. He left Vivian behind; and in more ways than one, he regretted trying to save Vivian. He didn't know why he harbored so much rage for her, because he did love the girl. The thought of leaving her to face the wrath of the elites pained his soul; but at the same time, stopping Dennis from becoming king of the underbelly was paramount. A day didn't go by that he didn't think about Vivian, and he pulled his journal from his cargo pocket in order to write her a letter. Her beautiful almond shaped eyes saddened by the deaths played repeatedly in his mind as he wrote her an apology. Unfortunately, he knew she wouldn't be able to read the letter, but he thought she'd find somebody to read it to her.
The emergency crews bagged hundreds of bodies on Fifth Street, and Ronnie watched them from the woman's clinic. The news' helicopters swarmed overhead in order to tell the biggest lie about the situation; because at the end of the day, they'd call the horrible tragedy a gang war. Many of the emergency personnel donned yellow hazmat suits, and none of them thought about going into the sewer. It frustrated Ronnie because they had to know about the subsurface community that fueled the Gotham sex trade. The emergency personnel handled the bodies like bags of trash, and he felt a rage growing inside of him. Nobody cared about the people above or below ground on Fifth Street. The workers pulled an entire family out of a vehicle that crashed into an Asian restaurant. It was highly possible that they took in a whiff of the toxic fumes, and died before the car ever crashed into the restaurant. Surprisingly, it didn't catch fire, but it ruined the entire building. The emergency crews pulled the bodies out of the car one by one, and they all had green slime oozing from every orifice.
Seething, Ronnie ran over to the manhole, looked at the workers, and screamed, "Hey, what about the people in the sewer?"
"The sewer?" One of the emergency workers screamed. He walked over to Ronnie, and then asked, "How many down there?"
"Maybe two hundred," he replied.
The emergency worker grabbed a group of workers, headed into the sewer, and Ronnie ran back across the street to the woman's clinic. The thought of Dennis continued to fill every thought process. Since Dennis was the liaison between the sewer urchins and the tricks, he was the man that he wanted to kill. The crews of workers went into the sewer, and then quickly returned to the top. "We need more people. Bodies are everywhere. It's an underground city of dead people." The crews of workers headed into the manhole in teams of two, and within minutes, they brought the bodies to the surface one by one.
A flood of reporters descended on the area with their cameras, microphones, and media trucks, and Ronnie backed up closer to the woman's clinic. Gotham's Jessica Bunch, a major player in the media arena walked into the area with her elite media crew, and started reporting on the tragedy. She said the deaths were gang-related according to the cops, and that disturbed Ronnie. It wasn't necessarily a lie, but more than one gang existed in Gotham, and Ronnie knew only one gang with the ability to cause hundreds of deaths: the Jokers.
In Ronnie's mind, Dennis was the monster that lured Vivian, Markus, and himself into the arms of the predators that unleashed the noxious gas into the air. Ronnie didn't know the delivery method, but he knew Dennis had something to do with it. As far as he knew, Dennis unleashed the plague of death on the people of the sewer, and he needed to die for his misdeeds. He seemed like a nice guy on the surface, but the man had a darkness about him, an evil. When Markus died, Dennis simply told the boy, "It happens. Kids die all the time."
Before Ronnie left the area, he grabbed the handgun out of his tattered pants, and checked the wheel. He turned away from the crowd so the emergency workers and media crews couldn't see what he was doing. The gun had one round in it, and he knew he needed more bullets if he wanted to take out his revenge on Dennis. Placing the weapon back in his pants, he watched the emergency crew pull several more bodies out of the manhole. There were more people walking around than he could count, but it didn't matter. Everybody he cared about except for Vivian was dead. Angered, he thought deeply where he could find some bullets for his gun. The government had passed several laws that made it almost impossible to buy large quantities of bullets. But when he thought about his predicament, he only needed enough to ensure the death of Dennis, and the other one for himself.
The thought of panhandling on the corner crossed his mind several times. All he needed was a sign, a cup, and the sympathetic citizens of Gotham would give him money. He grabbed several tin cans off the street, tore them apart, and then formed them into a bowl. From living down in the sewer, he learned how to make tons of useful items from discarded soda cans, including a portable stove to cook.
The woman in the female clinic peered out at him, and he had seen her a million times, when he walked past the place. Her emaciated face gave him the chills. Her eyes were black and cold—and narrow. There was something about her that he didn't like, but he didn't know what caused his discomfort for the woman with the red hair. She walked up to the glass door, and then gave him a forced, half smile. Bewildered, he slowly backed away from the place, and then took off down the street with his newly made tin bowl.
The majority of the sewer people resorted to nefarious deeds to make a little money, and Ronnie knew exactly what needed to be done. For thirty minutes, he paced diligently on the corner of Harvey with his pop tin cup hoping for a few people to give him a little change. The cars pulled up beside him, but the occupants pretended like he didn't exist. The majority of people in Gotham had a cruel, selfish nature about them, and he felt panhandling wouldn't yield much of anything. He looked down at his empty tin collection cup, and felt he needed to move on down the road a bit. But when he stepped away from the curb, a sports utility vehicle pulled up to him.
Ronnie, not unfamiliar with street walking, looked inside the vehicle at a hefty white man in his late thirties or early forties holding up two, one-hundred dollar bills. Without saying a word, he hopped inside of the car, and the man sped off down the street. The young kid immediately noticed that the man had a floor of trash, and he probably didn't have that much money to his name. His Momma had once told him that the pervs often looked for strays that they could abuse, or even worse … kill! Not that the grimy man before his eyes was that kind of perv, but Ronnie didn't want to take any chances. In one pocket he had the gun with one, solitary round in it, and in another pocket, he had his knife that he stole in order to protect himself against the shady types of the underbelly.
"Where we going?" Ronnie asked. He had a knack for being inquisitive, but the man didn't say anything, but a few inaudible grunts. It wasn't necessarily a grunt of frustration or anything like that, but he took it to mean don't worry about it. Ronnie looked over at the guy with grayish black hair, receding hairline, and a scar over his right eye for a slender moment. His scar was a subtle scar, the kind of scar that was hardly noticeable; but under certain lights, it was very noticeable. "How did you get that scar?"
The man looked over at Ronnie for a split second, and replied, "Gulf War! I went over when I was eighteen." Amazingly, he spoke in a quiet, almost harmonious tone. Even though he was a large man, he didn't have a threatening voice; so, that allowed Ronnie to relax a bit. The old man placed his hand on the scar, and rubbed it back and forth. "One bullet to the face changed everything." The man drove the car onto State Street, an area of town owned by the Africans. The majority of residents that lived on State Street immigrated from the United States of Africa. The entire continent became one country in the year twenty-twenty, and the people who helped the United States try to stop the deal had to flee the continent.
Ronnie pulled a condom out of his jacket, and the man sighed. "I don't want anything like that, kid."
Confused, Ronnie put the prophylactic back in his pocket. He stuffed the sexual device deep into his right side pocket, and gave the man a long, penetrating stare because he didn't understand his actions. Was he crazy? Was he going to kill him? His Momma always told him that some men wanted to vent, wanted somebody to listen to their pains; and when it came to men like that, they still needed to pay for time used. Ronnie wiped his sweaty palms on his pants, and then said, "Okay. But my time is worth money, you know?" The man's car heater pushed out an extreme amount of heat, and it didn't help with the raunchy smell of the car. He felt uncomfortable sitting in the stranger's SUV, because these guys normally wanted some kind of sexual favor. Several of the men from the upper crest of the community preyed on the kids of the sewer. At work, they looked like righteous people, gave reverence to their Lord, and then came to the underbelly of Gotham to sin in every way imaginable, including murdering recalcitrant sewer urchins.
"What's your name, son?" He asked with a slight lisp in his voice. Lumps of sweat poured off his head, raced down his pasty cheeks, and he had an appearance of a man with an enormous burden on his shoulders. He wasn't groomed like the Gotham elite with the bushes of hair sprouting from his ears, knuckles, and the upper portion of his shirt. The higher class of Gotham's citizenry kept a groomed appearance and lavished in the best of clothes.
"Ronnie," he said, "Ronnie Suay."
"Benny Baker," the man said softly. Dried saliva stuck to the corners of his mouth, and his arm pits smelled of smothered funk.
"Something wrong?" Ronnie asked in a soft, but inquisitive tone. He noticed the passenger door was locked; and if the man had a nefarious purpose on his mind, he wouldn't be able to escape easily.
Benny had a blank stare on his face, but he didn't say anything immediately. The lights brightened up the alleyway, which allowed Ronnie to see street walkers work their tricks. The majority of the women immigrated from Africa, and prostituted in order to work off some overblown debt.
"My days are numbered," he said in a quiet tone. He rubbed his forehead with his monstrously big, hairy hands, and let out a suspicious sounding laugh that morphed into a slobbery cry. "Shoot. I was the big man at Wayne Construction," he lamented, "But my child-porn addiction got the best of me." Tears streamed out the far corner of his eyes, and he wiped his face with a dingy white cloth he pulled from his shirt pocket. Reaching into the glove compartment, he pulled out a small handgun, and placed it on his lap. He tapped his right foot on the floor in a nervous manner, and then said, "Wife found my stash of porn, and turned me in." With the right sleeve of his shirt, he wiped the tears off his fat cheeks. "My pleads for her to put the phone down didn't work," he screeched. His demeanor wasn't right, and he looked like a man about to snap. "She dialed the cops, but I warned her. I said, 'Put the phone down, Marcy.'" He started to sob loudly. "She wouldn't put down the phone." He picked the gun off his lap, pointed it to his head, and then set it down again. "Next thing I know the gun fires. She's dead. She's dead on the kitchen floor."
"Maybe she's not dead," Ronnie said.
The man laughed insidiously, and then tilted his head on the back seat. He realized a body wrapped in a white sheet lay on the back seat, but he didn't have a grasp of how long Benny had been riding around with the body.
"She's dead," Benny said in a throaty voice. He grabbed his gun, stuck it in his mouth, and pulled the trigger. The pop of the gun startled Ronnie, and he tried to open the door, but Benny had it locked. He pulled the handle repeatedly before he realized he had the power to unlock it. He sighed, unlocked the door, and then turned to look at Benny. When he looked at the fat man's head, it had a large hole in it. It wasn't the first suicide he experienced, but it was the first done with a gun that he witnessed. The money the man brandished in Ronnie's face stuck out of his right breast pocket, and he grabbed it. In addition, he used his skills to remove the gun from Benny's dead grip. Once he acquired the weapon and the money, he checked the glove compartment, and found an entire box of ammo.