This is what I call a "chess piece" chapter, since it's mostly about maneuvering everything into position for endgame.
It introduces a lot of future plot threads for the sake of seeding them in now so I won't have to later. It dives a little into the depths of the Superman mythos, so this chapter is mostly full of minor characters. I'm working on a long-term plot arc that won't actually wrap to a full conclusion until Stories 8 and 9. Bear with me folks.
Story 3 is finished. Completed. It's over. I don't have to worry about it for a while. Yay.
Chapter Twenty-Six: Nowhere Kids
Try enthusiastically one might, but there was no way someone could get the actual measure of the city-wide reaction. For some people, their first instinct was not to jump online and Chirp about their opinion.
Even with thirty years of experience and a nose for gauging the mood of the people, Perry White couldn't have predicted the full effects the event of November 7th.
It started small, but shit-quakes always did.
There had never been a superhero in Metropolis before.
They seemed to produce quite a few of them, though. Though he had operated around New York City, Alan Scott the Green Lantern had been born in Metropolis. So had Commander Steel of the All-Star Squadron and he had returned to the city upon retirement. Guardian from the mid-eighties had admitted to growing up in the Suicide Slums. Prior to their disappearance in 1929, superhero duo TNT and Dyna-mite of the Seven Soldiers had talked quite a bit about the city and had admitted to being from there, though they refused to confirm whether or not they had been born there.
But whatever the reason was, Metropolis just wasn't a city with a hero of its own.
And that had been just fine, the criminal element had all agreed. They didn't need some lousy do-gooder poking his over-large nose into their business and wrecking their shit and their fundamental rights. They didn't need fleet-footed speedsters or hard-light projections or super-strong individuals with flight making a day to day living harder than it already was. The police were bad enough all by themselves, the persistent and incorruptible buggers that they were. They couldn't even be bribed because the city just doubled the amount as long as the bribed officer spilled the beans.
Imagine if they had a superhero on their side!
Unfortunately for the criminal element, the days of imagining that just might be over. The days of that being a reality just might be upon them.
And they got nervous.
It didn't manifest in any ways that made the headlines, though (not yet). Quite the opposite, they ducked their heads, lowered their profiles, and gathered in their favorite watering holes to worry over the impact this would have on their operations. The cautious wouldn't move until they were sure of which way the wind was blowing, even if that meant sacrificing a few loyal pawns to the lion that was the Met. P.D.
"So I gots five of my own suppliers cuttin' me loose! They says'n with this superhero 'round, they don't wanna be lettin' the product get busted!" Joey Toledo, drug dealer, complained. "Man, I got unsatisfied customers gettin' shirty with me 'cause I don'ts have the goods to give an' they be pissin' like it's my fault! An' you know what's worse 'bout it? By the time they all get themselves sorted an' product hits the streets again, I ain't gonna have too many customers left!"
He paused to gulp his beer, feeling a little more motivated to complain with the fire going down to his belly.
"It's like they don'ts know I gotta pay my dues, keep my boys and girls piped up! I can't deliver if I ain't got anything to deliver! They can't dry up the lines like that an' still expect there to be customers left in a week!"
Across from him at the table, Frank "Two-Bits" Tanner nodded in sympathy.
"I feel it, m'man, I feel it hard. My kids, y'know, they been freakin' their shit all across the Slums. Had Cut-Mouth and his crew go off at me the other day. They be itchin' for a fight." he said, shaking his head at the impatience of a misspent youth. "If it's gonna be this bad for business, hope it's just short-term or we gonna be lookin' at serious losses."
"Hope it blows over b'fore the end of the month..." Joey mumbled.
Both of them slumped a little lower over their bottles of beer, all too aware that this might not pass the city by in a month. They were both old enough to recall the last days of the age of superheroes. To recall the split between the people who wanted the heroes to retire, and those who didn't. How each side had vehemently laid out their arguments on either why superheroes were good for society, or why they weren't.
No matter how this was going to play out, one thing was for certain. Superheroes were never going to vanish from the world entirely.
Joey had been dealing drugs for most of his life. Mired in poverty as a child and desperate to make a little bit of money to help his parents keep a roof over their heads, he'd started dealing pre-rolled marijuana joints to younger teens. Though a day's profits were split between himself and the supplier, he'd made enough money in a week to put a dent in the debt they'd owed to their landlord. By the time he had turned eighteen, Joey had seen no sense in looking for a "legitimate" job when a few grams of crack went for a hundred bucks or more.
Frank had started off in a similar, but not as bad situation. Living low on the poverty line and searching for a way out. Employment had been gainful enough working as a contact for a jewel fence, but for a while, he had tried to go straight. He had found some slightly more legitimate employment running numbers for a mob restaurant. He had even become a husband and father. But his employers weren't something the wife could just reconcile with and situations has justifiably led to her fearing for the safety of their children and her younger brother who had lived with them.
For Frank, divorce was coming. But he was breathing a sigh of relief and meeting the court dates with a light heart. It wasn't that he didn't love Connie, it wasn't that he didn't think Alvin and Joanna weren't the cutest little buttons in the world, it wasn't that he didn't think Jefferson was a damn good kid, but if there was a time to accept that he wasn't good material as a husband or a father or a brother-in-law, it was now. They deserved someone better than him.
Joey and Frank had both rolled with the same gang in their youth (the Cold Crusaders), placed in the same crew, and they had remained friendly enough to this day to meet at their favorite watering hole to have a beer, share a basket of chicken wings, and compare woes.
"Still." Frank started, biting into a wing thoughtfully. "Might not hurt to lay low for a little while. Get out on the lake for the night. Go ice fishin' or somethin'."
Joey's eyes narrowed. Frank still worked with the Cold Crusaders as a crew contact. He knew the gang's movements better than anyone on the outside and if he thought laying low was a good idea, then something was probably going to happen.
"Why?" the dealer asked.
"'Cause it ain't just Cut-Mouth an' his crew scratchin' for a fight. It's the other crews too." Frank answered, looking serious. "They been knockin' over doors an' taggin' in the Kings' territory, know what I'm sayin'?"
"They gonna bust up?"
"Tonight, if I'm readin' the vibes right."
Of the five gangs that walked the streets of the Suicide Slums, two were the most dangerous. The Cold Crusaders and the Suicide Kings, who often worked at odds and wound up on opposite sides of the line so often the rivalry was practically traditional. These two gangs threw themselves at each other with a bloodthirsty viciousness that was all over the streets by the end of the night. When they fought, it didn't really matter who got in the way. More than one civilian had been taken down in the middle of one of their block-busting battles.
The Suicide Kings and the Cold Crusaders didn't really need an excuse to start a fight, but the idea of a new superhero was good enough for them.
And when those two gangs met with knives and guns, the entirety of the Suicide Slums would feel the vibrations for days to come.
"Y'know, I gots some friends I can drop in on, way across of the other side of St. Martin's." Joey commented. "Think they's gonna be puttin' up some poker tonight with the lads. You interested?"
"Nah I wish, but I gotta take care of other plans." Frank said, shaking his head, albeit regretfully. It had been some months since he'd last gone a few rounds of poker with Joey's other friends and they were sharp players, all of them. "I gotta swing up to Metrodale an' make my usuals."
"Ah, Her Majesty's gots you on the leash tonight. My condolences." Joey said gravely, tipping his glass of beer slightly in Frank's direction, as though he was drinking to the black man's continued good health.
They laughed heartily and comradely and clinked their glasses together in good humor. They might have been a pair of low men on the totem pole, grudgingly beholden to the whims and orders of the others, but they knew the benefit of sticking together.
Guys like them needed to stick together in a world slowly going mad.
The watering hole was the quay-side bar, the Queen of Broken Hearts, on the western-most side of the Slums. Only forty years earlier, it would have been the primary source of meals and news and entertainment for the longshoremen who had worked the wharfs, moving the processed copper from the backs of trucks to the bellies of cargo ships. That particular golden age was long behind the establishment and now she truly was a queen of broken hearts.
One day in the future, Bibbo Bibbowski would buy the deed from its aging owner with the proceeds of a winning lottery ticket and re-christen it the Ace O' Clubs, but that day was a ways to come yet.
For today, Bibbo sat at the bar with a mug of something bitter and sharp, and listened to the conversation between Joey and Frank. They weren't the only ones in the bar having aneurysms over the appearance of a possible superhero, but they were the only two who really seemed to have something to say.
News that the Suicide Kings and the Cold Crusaders were going to go at each other tonight at the earliest was concerning, to say that least. They wouldn't start busting heads until after nightfall, however. It was a small consolation, but it would give Bibbo more than enough time to get the word out.
When the conversation between Joey and Frank drifted off into less relevant topics, Bibbo stopped listening and redirected his attention to his phone, where he pulled up the video of the "Superman" sighting on Broadway street. "Superman" was what the city were starting to call him. Or, that's what Lois Lane was starting to call him and everyone else was picking up on it because half of Metropolis read her weekly blog.
Bibbo kept the sound muted because he didn't want to hear about dead children again and just watched the video play out. The big black man who looked like he was twice the size of the Superman slammed the latter into the ground over and over. The impacts had actually shaken the street, as the camera wobbled for more reasons than just the jittery nerves of the person holding it. In the background, the cars parked on the curb jumped a little on their wheels.
Bibbo didn't want to imagine how strong or how invulnerable a person had to be to make two-ton cars do that.
The boat captain winced every time the Superman hit the ground and the ninth time watching the video didn't change that. He had been a boxer back in the day, until a broken hand had put him out of the ring for good. He still had the fighting form, winning more bar brawls than he lost. He just couldn't go five rounds anymore with young dumb punks who thought they were the hot shit.
Not that he needed five rounds anymore. Thirty seconds was more than ample to hand their asses to them.
All the same, Bibbo knew very well that hitting the mat always hurt. Hitting concrete hurt a lot more. And no matter how indestructible a body was, being driven into concrete like that several times was going to leave a mark.
Still, it was impressive that the Superman was able to get back up in spite of the pounding his shoulders had received. The lasers from his eyes had helped in that regard. But Bibbo knew an amateur when he saw one. This was someone who hadn't gone in looking for a fight and had gotten one anyways and his ass would have been served to him on a platter if he hadn't taken advantage of a split-second to get the upper hand.
He's strong, tough. The boat captain thought admiringly, pausing the video to examine the crater that was still in the street even today. Gotta admire a guy who can take a beating like that and get back up.
"Bibbowski, 'nother round?" croaked Marv, the elderly proprietor, as he creaked past on the other side of the bar. He was well into his seventies, arthritis slowly crippling his joints. A doctor had prescribed him painkillers and as much daily activity as he could handle to try and stay limber, but he was slowing down a little more every day.
"Naw, gots work to do m'self." Bibbo said, ending the video and putting his phone in his pocket. He pushed the empty glass to where Marv could scoop it up easy and then laid down a five. "Keep the change."
"Take care o' youself out there, Bibbowski. Startin' to get dodgy what with all that superhero nonsense." the elderly man advised, creaking forward to retrieve the glass and the bill.
Bibbo saluted with three fingers and then got off his stool at the bar. He passed by Joey and Frank on his way to the door, his permanently squinted eye giving them a cursory glance. They had slipped into conversation about their weekend plans, once all was said and done, and it didn't seem they'd be getting back to anything of importance.
But they had said what Bibbo needed to hear, the information he needed to pass on.
People talked around him because they didn't think he was listening.
But he was. He always was.
Bibbo Bibbowski was a snitch and proud of it. The people of the Suicide Slums really didn't have anyone looking out for them; the police were stretched thin around these parts (maybe if the Superman stuck around, that would change). The Slums was a different sort of animal compared to the West River and Metrodale. What set it apart from those neighborhoods was hard to gauge; the Slums looked no less dilapidated and forlorn than the other two. Bibbo always attributed it to the circumstances regarding the birth of the Slums. If you looked hard enough at some of the paving stones, you could still see the old spatters of dried blood. If you stood in the right spot when the sun was at high summer noon and the day was hot, you could still faintly smell something that was like day-old spoiled meat.
In short, the neighborhood was small and badly looked after. The police avoided it for the most part, likening it to an overgrown garden that they could get lost in too easily. Officer Harper tried his best, but he was all by himself and he could only do so much.
So Bibbo had taken it upon himself to do his part for the Slums. He covertly spied on the movements of every criminal syndicate and gang in the Slums and stayed abreast of what they were doing. He turned that information over to the street kids who didn't belong to any of the gangs and they, in turn, warned the good normal folk of the neighborhood of whatever was about to go down.
Half the things he heard also went straight to Lois Lane. She liked staying aware of the movements of her old crew.
Tucking his coat around him against the cold, Bibbo headed up the quay, turning north towards the unfinished Bronze Bridge. Proposed about fifteen years earlier to connect the Slums directly to St. Martin's Island, the bridge had come into existence after a series of complaints that the people who commuted to and from St. Martin's had to double around across the Schuster Bridge and they were always getting caught in the traffic snarl. At the time, the Schuster Bridge had been the only bridge connecting New Troy to St. Martin's. To this day, it still was.
The project had been proposed, outlined, and accepted within a matter of weeks. The anchors towers had been constructed on either side of the strait and they had started work on the eastern span when several someones disappeared with the entire budget, leaving the project to founder and sink, and nobody looked twice at it ever again.
The little bit of the Bronze Bridge that had been completed was still there, jutting out across the water in a manner most described as forlorn and searching. It had been the centerpiece of a Pulitzer-winning photo aptly titled "The Bridge to Nowhere". It had become the symbol for Metropolis's urban degradation and something of a rallying point for those trying to reverse it.
Over time, its presence had given rise to the Bronze Bridge Brothers, the smallest of the gangs in the Suicide Slums. But they were not a fighting gang. No, the members of Triple B (the short-hand version of their name) had banded together for mutual protection. They were the lost and forgotten children of the Slums, who had found each other amid a wash of poverty and an absence of hope. They were the children who were overlooked by the Cold Crusaders and the Suicide Kings because they weren't ruthless or violent enough. Too weak, too small, too afraid. The ones not even worth paying attention to.
They were the kids that Bibbo could count on the most. When the small and the weak banded together, they knew how to become strong. Strong enough to protect those who otherwise wouldn't have someone to fall back on.
That what why Triple B existed.
A few streets away from the unfinished bridge, Bibbo ducked into the bodega tucked into the corner and bought several packs of gum before he continued on his way. When the bridge had failed, someone with a vision had tried to build something under the Guastavino tile vaults, perhaps a market to match the one then being constructed under the Queensboro in Manhattan. The walls had gone up and then inspiration or funding had run out. Whatever the reason, the space lay abandoned to this day, so Triple B had promptly made use of it as their base.
Bibbo sucked in his gut as much as he could and squeezed his way through the narrow gap in the wooden fence that had been constructed around the bridge for the purpose of keeping the vagabonds out. It was always a tight fit, but there wasn't a moment yet where he had gotten stuck. Triple B had their own ways in and out, but all those ways were too small for the man.
He straightened his coat and went up to what would have been the main entrance.
"Knock knock!" he called, thumping his knuckles on the wood.
There was a murmur of voices from the other side of the make-shift door that stopped as soon as he spoke. Bibbo knew from experience that the kids were scattering right now, diving into their designated hiding places. Many of the kids in Triple B sought protection from adults. The majority of those adults were often the parents, but just to be sure, they avoided pretty much anyone over the age of eighteen.
Being a little over forty with permanent squint in one eye and a burgeoning pot-belly that he needed to do something about, Bibbo was pretty sure he was a nightmare for some of them.
The little squeakers could hide from him if it made them feel safe. He wasn't going to begrudge them for that.
He waited patiently as a knothole rattled and there was a glint of an eye through the small hole. Bibbo smiled as friendly as he could and touched the brim of his cap in greeting. The knothole rattled again and the door opened immediately after. Peering out beside the frame was the face of a boy who was just on the cusp of adolescence, old enough to tip right over the edge of it, yet still young enough that he didn't seem anywhere near to growing up yet. He had always looked like that, for the twenty years that Bibbo had known him.
"Howdy-do Tommy." Bibbo said, holding out the gum packets as a peace offering.
"Bo, you don't have to bribe us with gum every time you come by." Tommy said. He had a look on his face that seemed permanently unimpressed, even despite the smile that stretched across it.
"Eh, it's what's polite-like, y'know." Bibbo said with a shrug.
Tommy accepted the gum from him all the same. The kids under the protection of Triple B didn't get very many nice things in their lives. Never really had the money to buy things for themselves and when they did, they rarely blew that money of junk food and chocolate. Tommy couldn't deny them the treat of gum.
"What's going on?" he asked, because the boat captain never came by without news.
"There's gonna be hot trouble in the old town tonight is what, Tommy. Youse lot better gets everyone indoors b'fore sundown." Bibbo said. "Kings an' Crusaders are pickin' on each other again. They's gonna smash it off by dark."
The way too old twelve-year old rolled his eyes in annoyance. "Of course they're going to smash each other to bits. They do nothin' but smash each other to bits." he grumbled. He was sure that not a month could go by without those two gangs getting in each other's faces and leaving the other bloody. "I'll make sure the word gets spread. Thanks for the heads up, Bo."
"Bibbo." the boat captain corrected, though he wasn't sure why. It never got through. It was just that no one called him 'Bo' anymore and those who still did, he was rather estranged from them.
Bibbo nodded once in a sort of affirmation and Tommy returned it before they went their separate ways. Bibbo squeezed his way back through the fence and Tommy turned around back inside to the cavernous interior of the hide-out. It was dim, illuminated only by what light came in through the high windows covered in grime. One day, Tommy was going to look into getting the electricity hooked up in this place.
Children, some as young as five, started to peer out from their hiding places. The not-twelve-year old spotted his crew leaning out from behind the load-bearing columns with knowing expressions and Tommy nodded minutely at them before he turned to address the rest of Triple B.
"All right, listen up!"
His full name was Tommy Thompkins and despite how he looked, he wasn't twelve years old. He wasn't entirely sure of his age; there were at least a year and a half there of no coherent memory at all. His first clear impression of the world was talk of the Great War, later to be known as World War I. At some point in the late fifties, he had decided 'Fuck it, I'll go with 1914 as my birth-year.'
So he was ninety-two and he couldn't exactly tell that to people.
Because he still looked twelve.
Except for Jim, they all did.
Tommy had been among the first of many children to have been birthed from Project M, founded back in 1910. It had been a government-funded program to research and implant meta-powers in human tissue. The research had quickly progressed to growing humans in test tubes, to implant meta-powers while they were still the earliest stages of fetal development.
Though all the science had been spiritedly ahead of its time, Tommy was also among the first of many failures. Project M had been highly ambitious and not all of the technology had existed for the bio-engineers to accomplish what they had set out to do.
Fortunately, he and his test-tube brethren had escaped euthanization, living between various cities for the past ninety years. Since then, they had brought Project M to shut-down, ensuring that no more children would be grown in bottles and engineered into weapons.
Project M had left them with hyper-accelerated cellular regeneration that kept them young and mostly immortal. They could be killed, but it was going to take nothing short of rapid disintegration to pull it off. The implantation of meta-powers had been shaky, at best. Perhaps if they had all grown to full adult maturity, their powers might have been stronger.
Jim Harper was the best example of that. With super-strength and superior senses to augment the healing factor, he was the only member of the first batch to be considered a success. He had grown to a full adult in a matter of months. These days, he was the only one of them who could really hold down a job, so he ensured that his test-tube siblings were cared for.
Tommy led the group, for the most part; Jim couldn't be there all the time. He thought his power might have been tychokinesis (or the manipulation of probability), but in its stunted form, it just looked like he had exceptional good luck.
Roberta Harper, or 'Bobbi' as she preferred, was Jim's gender-flipped clone. Her meta-power was some kind of memory disruption. At most, she could induce temporary confusion. When they had been coming up with code-names, they jokingly decided to call her 'Famous' because no one could really remember her.
Anthony Rodriguez had a propensity for using big words, so he had been dubbed as such. He had eidetic memory and more time on his hands than he rightly knew what to do with. Much of it was spent with his nose buried in articles on the latest advances in everything. He had been created out of a genetic soup of Hispanic individuals.
Johnny Gabrielli had a black-hole for a stomach, due to the fact that Project M had tried to stick super-speed in him. His metabolism was heightened, not to the level of the Flash, but he certainly ate a lot more than the rest of them. He could still zip along at a brisk forty miles an hour if he was going flat-out and... Well, they called him 'Gabby' for a reason.
Patrick McGuire would have been a super-strength bruiser to outstrip Jim, if he had matured. It was Jim who had come up with 'Scrapper' whilst trying to lecture him on not starting fights. Too many hot-blooded Irishmen had been a part of his genetic mixture.
Suzi was the only other girl, a combination of Japanese, Chinese, and Korean DNA. She could mimic any voice she heard, regardless of the original gender. She had been the first to get a code-name; Hollywood.
And then Walter Johnson Junior, code-named Flip. He must have had some marine DNA in him, as he could hold his breath for nearly twenty minutes at a time and was a highly capable swimmer. Unlike the others who had come from a genetic soup, he was a direct clone of a Project M scientist, Walter Johnson Senior.
That was what had backfired on Project M and had eventually led to their downfall nearly fifty years later. Walter Sr. and his wife had had no children of their own, not for lack of trying. Medical science hadn't advanced far enough to pinpoint the actual cause of their infertility. But seeing his baby clone had revved his parental instincts into drive and anyways, he had signed on to push the boundaries of science, not be an accessory to the murders of small children. After learning that Subjects B-2 through H-8 were failed experiments and scheduled to be euthanized, Walter Sr. had sacrificed his job and nearly his freedom to release them just hours before their six a.m. death sentence.
They still brought flowers to his grave every year.
Every twenty years, they alternated between the streets of Metropolis to the boroughs of New York city, and to the back-alleys of Gotham in order to prevent anyone from getting too suspicious over the fact that none of them ever aged beyond what a careful application of make-up could grant them. Sometimes they would buy gray-hair wigs and "old man" clothes and carry canes and hobble about and pretend that they were just shrunken old people. Big Words knew more about ageing make-up than any of them and Jim was getting too good at faking his own death.
In ninety years, they had seen it all. They had lived through the Great Depression and watched the second World War through the papers and radios. They had witnessed the rise and the fall of the age of superheroes. In ninety more years, the events that would pass would be nothing they had imagined.
Tommy Thompkins and his brethren didn't consider themselves heroes. The law didn't consider them heroes. But they had organized Triple B for the kids who had nowhere to go. They worked to defuse tensions in the Suicide Slums; tried to make living there a little safer for the people who didn't want to leave or couldn't. They quietly did what they could for Metropolis and its citizens.
They were the Newsboys of Nowhere Street.
Scrapper usually tried not to let anyone see him smoke. It was a bad habit, though his own healing factor negated long-term damage. But if the moral guardians of the Slums saw what they thought was an eleven-year old puffing a cigarette, they'd raise almighty hell. Addiction was a bit of a devil to shake, but he was working on it.
Running footsteps sounded around the corner and Scrapper reflexively dropped the cigarette, stamping it out as just Suzi and Big Words rounded the corner into the alley where he was. There was no time to try and disperse the stench or the ashes that had littered the ground at his feet. Suzi pulled up short, sniffed the air, and crossed her arms.
"Scrapper! I thought you were quitting!" she accused.
"Damn, I can't up and quit cold turkey!" Scrapper complained. He had tried, but a fifteen-year nicotine addiction didn't die overnight.
"Stop purchasing new packs." Big Words ordered, adjusting his glasses. He looked disappointed. "It should be easier for you to quit if you aren't tempting yourself."
"I tell you like I tell Tommy! I'm workin' on it!" Scrapper insisted, giving the cigarette another stomp.
"Then put your back into it!" Tommy snapped, coming up the other side of the alley with the rest of the Newsboys behind him -- save for Gabby who was keeping watch further down the street.
"And give me the pack!" he ordered, thrusting out a hand.
"Yeah, yeah..." Scrapper muttered, a tad mutinously, but he dug the nearly brand-new pack of Marble Lights out of his baggy pockets and slapped it into Tommy's outstretched palm. "Why do you take them? You don't even throw them away."
"They're a good bribe." Tommy reminded him, stowing the case in his back pocket. On these mean streets, it was amazing how far a cigarette would go. "Did we get the warnings out?" he asked, looking around at his crew.
"Yep! Everything's locked up, shutters are closed, and everyone's bunked down!" Flip assured him, brandishing a double thumbs-up. "Just in time too, 'cause I think the Kings and Crusaders are on the move."
"Gabby'll tell us." Tommy said. "Did someone warn the Dingbats?"
Almost as soon as the question left his mouth, he predicted the slightly guilty silence and the searching looks that the others passed around, as if saying 'I didn't, did you?'
"Guys... Really?"
"Ugh, do we actually have to?" Bobbi groaned, throwing up her hands. "It's not like they can't tell when there's gonna be trouble. We don't have to walk on their turf every single time."
"Yeah, they'll be fine without us saying anything!" Scrapper agreed, putting an arm around Bobbi's shoulders in an 'us vs the leader' solidarity. "Anyways, they don't like us. They think we're too adult."
"We don't have to put up with that sort of treatment!" Flip complained while Big Words and Suzi nodded furiously.
Tommy tried not to grind his teeth or say anything that would imply the Dingbats were family, since that was never well-received. Good Looks, Krunch, Non-Fat, and Bananas were part of the very last batch of Project M children, and the only four the Newsboys had been able to get out alive. Tommy had tried to make sure they were looked after, but the Dingbats were determined to have none of it. They distrusted adults -- after their treatment at the hands of Project M, it was hardly a surprise -- and considered the Newsboys much too adult to be trusted.
There was probably no closing that rift.
"Guys, the Dingbats don't always know when to keep their heads down and you know it." Tommy started reasonably. More aggressive genetics; those four were constantly looking for a fight. "So one of us has to--"
"They'recomingthey'recoming!"
He was interrupted by Gabby's arrival. The speedster's shoes squeaked on the damp pavement as he nearly toppled to a halt, arms flailing for balance.
"They'recoming! Kingsthatway! Crusadersthatway! They'llmeetinthemiddle!" Gabby said, pointing this way and that up and down the street."Fullbattlionseverysingleoneofthem! Packingheavyandhot! It'sgonnabethefightofthedecade!"
Nine decades of practice meant they understood every word coming out of Gabby's mouth. And there was no getting to the Dingbats now, not if the Crusaders and the Kings were on their way to meet in the middle.
"Up! Now!" Tommy instructed.
They scurried up the fire escape attached to the side of the old apartment building. It would put them thirty feet above the action, but that was plenty enough room. The buildings were usually occupied by squatters if it was occupied by anyone at all. No one liked to live on these blocks if they could help it. Not when the Crusaders and the Kings met so often on the corner of Danger and Nowhere streets.
Settled at the roof ledge, the Newsboys heard the gangs coming before they actually saw them; opposing chants spiraling up from the hordes in low voices. They were punctuated by the bash of steel pipes and rattle of chains in a coordinated display of intimidation. The gangs would do this for a good five minutes, each trying to out-nerve the other before they actually started to attack.
The Suicide Kings marched out of the east, with the bulk of New Troy at their backs. Their singular leader marched at the head of the column with his crew leaders behind him like hulking pillars. They had come out en masse, about two hundred strong.
The Cold Crusaders came up out of the west, with the unfinished structure of the Bronze Bridge in their wake. They were only a little smaller, but even a disparity of fifty individuals could make a difference in the outcome. They had taken different approach to leadership. They had divided the responsibility between five of their most intelligent and strategically-minded, so if they lost a leader, there wouldn't be a mad scramble of power-grabbing. They were a smaller gang, yes, but they were infinitely more stable.
The Suicide Kings danced on the strings of the Gigante crime family.
The Crusaders and the Kings met at the intersection. They stopped at the crosswalks like there was a fence stretching from corner to corner, champing at the proverbial bit and stamping their feet. Their voices rang out at discordant odds, the pipes still bashing, the chains still rattling in opposing beats. The war songs grew louder and louder until they could surely be heard all the way across the city and the Newsboys felt a tension grow in their chests until the noise suddenly cut out, leaving a silence that was just as heavy and ringing.
Impulsively, Big Words grabbed Tommy by the shoulder as though he was steadying himself. A little further down, Suzi looked a bit faint around the edges. There was a sort of edginess, a nervousness swelling through the air like a noxious fog, seeping into every crack and crevice, into every chink in the armor. It was like a controlled panic, the feeling. Where total loss of control was only inches away, if you simply spiraled too far in one direction. The neighborhood had the bad feeling it was gripping sanity with its fingernails.
"Steady on, old beans." Tommy whispered.
For a good ten seconds, the two gangs faced off from opposite crosswalks, the hatred and anger palpable in the wintry air. Then, from the middle of the Kings, there came a crackling noise like electricity and blue-white sparks jumped out from a set of raised hands. The Kings started to shuffle aside, forming a ring around the spark-thrower, a skinny twig of a girl who had the crazy-eyed strung out look of someone who was going sober for the night. She strode out from the middle of the crowd, shaking her arms and rolling her shoulders and dislodging sparks from her sleeves. Her fingers flexed and curled, producing tendrils of electricity that slowly grew in thickness.
"Electricity meta." Bobbi whispered in awed horror. "Oh my stars, they're going to use a meta..."
"This'll be over quick." Scrapper opined.
The girl existed the crowd of her gang-members, the leader giving her a confident, proud look as she passed. The electricity had spiraled up her arms now, the coils twisting around them like snakes. As soon as she was in the intersection, a length of metal cable fell out of each sleeve and into her hands. The electricity jumped up through the cables as she started swinging them around like whips. The Crusaders flinched, but didn't shuffle back, as the first strike landed just shy of the crosswalk.
"Gabby, get Guardian." Tommy instructed.
The speedster frowned. "But Jim said--"
"I don't care, Gabby. I don't care what Jim said. They're bringing out metahumans. We need Guardian out here now." Tommy stressed.
"But he still said--" Gabby started, not about to disobey Jim's rules, but a teeth-rattling buzz of energy interrupted him and they looked down in time to see a blast of plasma issue from the front of the Crusaders' mob.
Its producer jumped out of anonymity not a second later, his raised fist still glowing with a residue of reddish energy. He pointed to the Kings' electricity meta and though the Newsboys couldn't quite hear what he was saying, it was clear that he was issuing a one-on-one challenge.
Gabby nodded. "Yeah, I'll go get Jim." he said. Then he sped away in a gust of air.
The electricity meta cracked her cable-whips again, her face a savage rictus of delight. The energy blaster charged up another ball of red plasma and they moved to meet each other head on.
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