—

unFamous 2: Aftershock

Chapter 2 – We’ve All Got Our Raisins (wagor, for short)

Cole knew the city like the back of his hand, but he had to admit, he was completely lost. He’d been in a lot of stupid situations since getting these powers, and sadly being rolled through the back alleys inside a hotdog trolley, caught by two idiot cops, didn’t quite make the top five. To keep himself from reliving those too-recent moments, he tried knocking on the wall.

***

“Congratulations, guys,” came a muffled voice from the trolley. “You got me. That’s no mean feat. But I’m starting to get pissed, here. This goes any further and I might not be able to let it pass with just a slap on the wrist. Who put you up to this? Was it Walters? Is Brad Walters hazing the new guys? You can tell me. I punch him in the face all the time, he’d never guess it was because of this.”

Sanders leaned in closer to the box. “Sorry for the unorthodox treatment, sir,” he said to the hot dog door, “But we’re not playing around here. You’ve got a lot to answer for. You must have known this was coming.”

“No. I did not see this coming. Where’s the SWAT team? The helicopters? The demands that I ‘turn myself in’ coming in over a loud-speaker?”

Sanders had asked himself the same thing just two days ago. But you couldn’t argue with results. All they had to do was get to the car and they were practically home free. You couldn’t walk a block in this town without hearing a ridiculous story of how Cole had dominated army-grade artillery in the hands of a hundred crazed psychos, and not all the cops had forgotten about what happened on the bridge the day Cole decided to try a quarantine break. I’m sure SWAT would have no problems at all, he thought.

“I guess it was stupid of me to think clearing out the ruffians and saving just about everyone in the city from mind-controlling tar, junk monsters, and terminal power outages would be enough to clear up that little understanding with the bomb in the package.” The voice was bitter, and a little defeated. Being crammed in a small space could do that to you.

“Right. A bomb that gave you super powers and led to you practically running this town.  You came out of this looking pretty good.”

“Fuck you. Amy’s dead. Trish is dead. My best friend backstabbed me so hard I can still feel the knife wedged between my ribs. I sleep in the park. I can’t take baths anymore. Did you know that? Do you honestly think this was all according to some master plan of mine? Do I look like a schemer to you?”

“You look like a guy stuck in a hotdog stand to me.”

A low, gravelly growl emanated from the trolley. Mitch couched awkwardly.

Another minute and they had reached the car. They’d been able to pick it up from a local station. With some minor modifications, it was deemed lightning-proof. Once Cole was in the back, no one would ask questions until they got to the city limits. The quarantine was lifted, but the border was still monitored. The government was well aware of the sort of insanity that was still lurking in the dark corners of the city. Guys with powers like Cole’s were a dime a dozen, despite claims that Cole himself had personally thinned the herd considerably. As long as they didn’t spread, everyone else could still feel safe.

Mitch opened the back door and helped Sanders slide the dog cage out of the trolley. Sanders slid a pair of cuffs into the cage and waited for Cole to put them on. He kept his gun trained on the man’s head as he undid the latch. “I appreciate your cooperation so far. So if you would be so good as to get in the car without a fuss, I’m sure it’s more comfortable than where you are now.”

Cole lurched out of the crate ungracefully. He glared at Mitch, who couldn’t help quelling a little. At this his face softened. “I’m not going to fight you guys. You’re not my enemies.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“If you were enemies, there’d be two red dots next to me on my GPS. The GPS doesn’t lie. Speaking of, there’s what I’m going to guess is a Reaper on that roof over there. Oh! And a blast shard! I don’t suppose you’d let me go get it?”
“The car, Cole.”

Cole grimaced again and slid into the back of the car. Sanders and Mitch got in the front and they were off. At this time of night there was not a lot of traffic. They’d be out of this city in no time, and then Sanders could finally breathe easy. This could have easily gone so wrong. How could he face Mitch’s parents and tell them their son was dead because he’d brought him into a vigilante hunt after only a few months on the job?

“The police station was back there, you just missed it,” Cole said, putting on his concerned citizen face. It looked a lot like his grimace. The people of the city could usually tell the difference by now.

Sanders let out a gruff laugh. “And you’ll just walk out five minutes later. The higher-ups knew what they were doing when they asked NYPD to do the job. We’re about to leave the city, so you can say goodbye to your concentrated fan club.”

Cole slammed his fists against the pane in front of him. Or he would have, if his hands were not cuffed behind his back. “Stop talking like you know me! Outsiders? Your news can’t be much better than the propaganda bullshit that fox lady spews at us every day, her smile beaming down on the city while it fell into chaos. Yeah, I took over the city. No one else was doing shit about it. The cops hid in their stations and let it happen! The one guy with any balls out of 1.5 million people was the Voice of Survival. He encouraged them to solve their own problems. I only wish he’d survived long enough to teach them how to use guns. Left to their own devices, the fighters in this town would be shot dead before the rocks left their hands!”

There was a long pause. Mitch whistled tunelessly. As a young cop, he had a lot of ideas about good and evil, but he wasn’t any good with gray areas. He respected Sanders, who had a reputation for his sense of justice and keeping a cool head in tough situations. Mitch would follow his lead.

Finally, Sanders said, “You can destroy an entire block in a second before anyone can so much as blink. Maybe it saved this city. But where do you fit in in a civilized society? What do you want us to do, Cole? Trust you implicitly?”

“Well, yeah. That’d be nice, actually.” Cole thought for a second. “Anyway, I don’t think I’m out of a job just yet. I don’t suppose you’ve heard of the First Sons? Or Kessler?”

“First Sons… no. Kessler was that cult leader you destroyed about a month ago, at the site of the original blast. They said on the news that he was running most of the crime in the Historic District, right?”

“On the surface, yeah. That ‘cult’ is the First Sons, and old fraternity like the types always involved in conspiracy theories on TV. Which is about where I’m going with this. I met an NSA agent when I was still trying to get at Kessler, and he thought something was going on outside Empire City, an inside job in one or more of the federal agencies. According to Alden, Kessler was the First Sons’ top man, but I get the feeling he was leading them on for his own purposes, and now that he’s gone they’re moving ahead with Plan B. I can’t imagine it’d be anything good.”

They reached the checkpoint. It was nearly deserted, the trickle of travelers slowing down to nothing near midnight. Sanders showed his ID to the guard and was shortly waved on.

***

Not a minute past the checkpoint and Cole was already feeling the decrease in available energy. Amazing how much he depended on the sprawling city center for his powers. Maybe after all of this was over, if it was ever really over, he’d move to the country and lose his powers, and then people would leave him alone. Maybe this ache was just initial withdraw and he’d get used to it. Maybe he’d get to take a shower again. He wanted to be there for his city and nothing felt better than grinding the train rail, soaking up the juice, but he knew they wouldn’t always want him. He imagined a mother sobbing into her handkerchief as her little boy graduated college and left the house to make his own way in the world. Cole gagged a little.

“So what if it’s true?” said Sanders, “This whole conspiracy thing. You think you can be James Bond, too? Think you’re the solution to every crime? You’re not exactly inconspicuous. You’ve gotten some screen time on the national news as the terrorist who set off the bomb, and electricity is not stealthy.”

“Oh. Bike courier gone nationally infamous. I’ve pretty much given up on a normal life by now. That’s just how selfless I am. But if you don’t think I’m the right man for the job, how about giving me a hand?”

“Right.”

“You know I have none of your training, or your credentials. I barely know my rights. I wouldn’t recognize my own governor if I saw him. I’m just some do-nothing guy who got put on the wrong assignment and opened the wrong package.” Some guy whose future self got time traveling powers and didn’t seem to mind being a total dick to himself for what he called the Greater Good, Cole thought. “I bet you’d do a lot better at this sort of thing. Hell, you got me good. Who would think of carting a superpowered badass like me out of the city in a hotdog trolley? The sheer ballsiness.”

“Stop it. You’re making me blush.” Sanders squinted at the next road sign. “Oh good, we’re almost there. Well, it’s been a real honor getting to chat with a celebrity of your caliber, Cole, but here’s where we part ways. The NYPD was only asked to play the delivery boys. Next street’s your stop.”

“Wait, what? We’re in the middle of nowhere!” A little panic was slipping into his voice. He’d gone into the blacked-out areas of the Empire City before, and those were dark, but there were at least some generators on the roofs and cars sprinkled generously along the streets, and he’d always kept the glow of the city within sight. Here, the powerlines were buried deep underground, the closest streetlamps were only at intersections, and everywhere else was pitch black. He had a mammoth headache right now.

“You noticed, huh? Apparently this building up here is a little FBI outpost.”

They turned onto a short drive in front of a squat, dark building. The landscaping was almost suspiciously sparse, and though Cole was able to spot the street address, he couldn’t find and other signs indicating the building’s purpose. That could be an FBI building, sure, Cole thought. Some figures could be seen milling by a truck drop-off door to the side, outlined in the lone floodlight nearby, and that was where Sanders directed the car.

Cole half-heartedly glanced at his GPS to see what the electricity situation was like here, and then quickly looked out the car window again. Then back to his GPS. Then back out the window. Shiiiit. “Shit!” he said.

There were at least twenty people outside who he couldn’t see. Including the guys by the loading dock, they were all marked as enemies. “Shit!”

He was stuck handcuffed in the backseat of an allegedly “lightning proof” car, far away from his electric monster of a home town, and he was utterly surrounded. He could not remember a time before now when he’d felt such extreme animal panic.

They’d eased to a stop. Sanders and Mitch were looking back at him nervously, realizing they had managed to forget the sort of trouble they’d been carting around and had let their guard down. Sanders indicated to Mitch that he should get his gun out. A second later Cole was kicking at the door like his very soul was at stake. The two in the front starting yelling cop things at him, but they stopped when a voice interrupted via loudspeaker, “Thank you, Detective Sanders, Officer Midgely. We’ll take it from here. Cole McGrath, we’ll be opening the door shortly so please stop kicking it.”

Cole stopped kicking the door.

“Thank y-“

SLAM! Cole threw his whole body at the door. The hinges creaked, the whole car shook. Encouraged, Cole did it again. The door was definitely coming lose.

“Now really, we were going to open it, so just-”

SLAM!

“-calm-“

SLAM!

“-down-“

SLA-KRRRICH! SMASH! BANG! The door ripped from its hinges and tumbled into the gloom outside the reach of the floodlight. There was a sound like something solid hitting something soft with considerable force, accompanied by a short scream. Cole fell out of the car after the door, face first. Before he could pick himself up, he felt a large number of individual impacts, chiefly on his back and arms but a few on his head and legs, too. The stinging pain was quickly replaced with a feeling like he’d suddenly gained hundreds of pounds. Cole shook his head a little. He thought his headache might be easing. That was nice…

***

Sanders pointedly lifted the latch on his own car door and stepped out, Mitch following his lead. Their guns were still out, but lowered. They could see figures moving in the dark, and three men stepped into range of the light, walking toward them. Cole giggled a little. It sounded a little like a bear snarling. One of the approaching men flinched, and another five darts landed in Cole’s back.

The one in front, the flincher, was wearing a nice suit and looked like he spent an hour on his hair in the morning. The two flanking him looked like SWAT. “You could have done that back in the city!” Sanders yelled at the men indignantly.

The flincher smirked. “Are you nuts? That place is crazy. We would know. We send all our crazy members there. And we don’t give them tranq guns, that would be irresponsible.”

“HA,” Cole mumbled from the ground. “Machine guns, though…”

“And a lot of good those do. By the way, I don’t know if you recover from tranqs like you do from bullets, so I’m just going to keep shooting you till you stop moving, alright?”

“Furrrr. Ghhhhh…” said Cole.

Sanders was still a little shaken from seeing a door fly off of his car like it was shot from a cannon. He gave the flincher a dumbfounded look. “I don’t think it works like that.”

“Look, Detective. I saw X-Men 2, okay? Wolverine eats tranqs for breakfast. I think I know what I’m doing.” He turned to the two next to him, who started picking the darts out of Cole’s back, then grabbed him under the arms and dragged him towards a door next to the loading dock. Sanders spared some concern for Cole’s safety. Wolverine or not, that much sedative could not be healthy.

Flincher followed the men. Sanders did some quick thinking and jogged after them, putting his gun away as he closed the distance. Mitch hesitated, and decided he should keep a lookout from the car, in case a quick getaway was in order. Most of the men who had been hiding in the shadows where heading toward an entrance closer to the back of the building, exchanging high fives and fist pounds, while the others were picking up regular patrol rounds.

Sanders caught up to Flincher at the door. Cole was disappearing down a hallway, but it looked like he’d managed to pick up a wheelchair. “Wait,” he said. “This doesn’t feel right.”

The flincher paused to think. He nodded. “Okay.”

“Aren’t you going to try to assuage my concerns?”

“Hmmm. Nope!” He stepped inside and closed the door in a manner that was just short of what could be considered “slamming in your face”.

I’m looking for a new last name for the main character. Sanders? Seriously, it’s bad. Mitch needs a last name, too.

unFamous 2: Aftershock

Chapter 1 – Lightning Trap (ah hahaha, get it? Lightning trap? Hahaha.)

Detective Sanders lit another cigarette. He was aware that there were less disgusting ways to ensure an “early retirement”, but damned if he didn’t look good smoking.  At least he liked to think so. He was not a PI, so nix the brown trench coat plus fedora ensemble you were picturing. Nor was he dressed for business. He was wearing an old black leather jacket and beat-up jeans, the definition of inconspicuous, with his detective’s badge tucked inside his shirt.

This city loved cops. Or at least, they loved and hated them in the typical proportions. And this wasn’t really a bad part of town, either. There weren’t any bad parts of town, from what he’d heard. No, what Sanders was worried about was the little “NYPD” inscribed on his shield. That freak had this whole town on his side, had convinced them that outsiders could not be trusted. It really said something about the city that even though the quarantine had been lifted a week ago, there had barely been any movement in or out of it. Empire City was a world apart, and it all started with that Lightning Man.

Sanders took a long drag and sighed. There’s worse ways to die, certainly, he thought, remembering the little bits of that cult leader Kessler they’d found all over the blast site.

Mitch was coming around the corner now, a bright yellow bundle under one arm. The higher-ups had requested a focus on experience for this assignment; trusted, reliable cops who wouldn’t piss their pants if things got crazy (and knowing Empire City, they would), but after reading the file, Sanders had insisted on bringing Mitch. He was acutely aware of the inverse relationship between experience and youth, and he personally had a lot of experience.

“I’m 48! I can’t go chasing some weirdo over rooftops!” he’d told his boss, who replied that there was no way even Mitch was about to chase a guy like Cole McGrath over rooftops. They’d have to lure him to a trap.

With this in mind Sanders examined Mitch’s find.

“Who manufactures this stuff?”

“Don’t know. Found this one in an alley. I think it’ll work. I mean, I can’t see what else it’d be good for.”

It was a bright yellow circle a little bigger than a manhole cover, with an exclamation point inside. Hanging from the bottom of it was what appeared to be about six feet of sheer yellow shower curtain. Sanders briefly thought of Vegas showgirls.

“We wear this, and Cole just shows up?”

Mitch nodded eagerly. “That’s what that guy at the newsstand said. I guess you just… You put it over your head, and eventually he’ll show up. That’s a better chance than just wandering around hoping to bump into him. I heard he favors the rooftops, anyway. And a parkour fan.”

“How are you with rooftops, anyway, Mitch?” Sanders asked, dubiously eyeing the outlandish getup. What was it about superpowers and dumb costumes?

“You’re joking, right?”

“Sorry.” He glanced around. The sun was getting low but the night was still young. The pedestrians were starting to thin. “Let’s get into position, then.”

“What, now?”

“No time like the present, Mitch.” He threw his spent cigarette in a puddle. “Give me that thing. You got the bucket, right?”

***

There was no helping it, Sanders felt like an idiot. He’d been standing out here for a long two hours, surprisingly ignored by passerby and thug alike, and now that the sun was down it was revealed that the outfit was not just a ghastly bright yellow, it was luminescent. This city needs to invest in a proper bat signal, he thought sourly.

A few minutes later he picked up a crackling noise fading in over the usual city hum of cars and generators. He looked up and couldn’t keep his jaw from sagging a little. A man was slowly gliding down from a nearby roof, apparently using the lightning spitting around his hands to combat gravity. Sanders was not a man of science, but he knew bullshit when he saw it. Lightning could not be his only specialty.

As he floated closer, Sanders realized he looked exactly like that guy in that one movie, The Transporter. Probably modeled after him or something. He was wearing clothes meant to protect a man during motorcycle accidents. Sanders snatched the exclamation point off his head and threw it in the alley behind him, quickly deducing the reason it had been found in an alley in the first place. “’Bout time,” he grumbled. He was determined to leave this encounter with both his underwear and pride intact.

Cole McGrath, the Lightning Man, frowned and dropped the last few feet slightly harder than necessary. He glared at Sanders and in a voice so gravelly you could hear the individual rocks he said, “I’m going to let that one go this time, because I only made the announcement yesterday. I do this shit out of the goodness of my angry heart, and this is a big city, so you’ll just hold your horses while I save people from a burning building or, gods willing, catch up on sleep, and if you give me flack about not solving your problem immediately, I don’t care if you’re the cops, I’m out.”

“Sorry.” Ha, he thought, Human after all.

“So what do you want? My GPS said you need help with an ambush?”

“Oh, uh, yeah.” Shit! He’s got some kind of magical mind-reading GPS! Damn superpowers! “Uh, yes. We think we found a drug ring nearby and, uh, we were going to bust them tonight.” He flashed his badge then tucked it back in before the other man could recognize it.

Cole gave him an expectant look.

“Oh, and they’re heavily armed. Got guns and things. Rocket launchers…” He waved his hand vaguely.

“I hate rocket launchers,” Cole snapped, suddenly vehement. “Alright. Lead the way. It’s not like my GPS knows where it is you’re talking about.”

Here goes nothing, thought Sanders.

***

What a day, though Cole. It had rained last night so he couldn’t sleep next to Trish in the park like he usually did. All the puddles everywhere meant he had to stay off the sidewalk to avoid mass murder. The rain itself was the worst, though. It made his bones ache and his skin fizz. A day like this he preferred if everyone would just follow his lead and stay indoors and out of trouble. And they never did. There was a mathematical equation relating population and violence: a steady upward curve. Having a super-powered  watchdog hardly put a dent in it. Now this old fart thought he’d found drug dealers in the Neon District. Whoopee doo.

He squinted at the man walking in front of him, but could not remember his face. “Do I know you? I thought I knew all the cops in this area.”

“Oh, ah, I’m new.”

“And a detective already? I wasn’t aware we were so short handed.” No way that could be true, they’d just expect him to pick up the slack instead.

“No, I mean, I used to be on the force. But I quit. You, uh, inspired me to take up the badge again.”

“Little late for the party, huh?” The detective said nothing, but Cole let it go. The guy seemed really tense. Cole glanced at his own limbs to check that he wasn’t leaking sparks or anything. That tended to make people nervous.

They turned another corner, into yet another famous city alleyway. “Soo…” said Cole, “When are we getting there—“

“NOW!” said Sanders, throwing himself to the side.

“Oh, good. My favorite Chinese place is right around here—“

“Now, Mitch, NOW!”

“Sorry, Al! Here it is!” Cole felt a presence come up from behind. He whirled around fast enough to get a bucket full of water right in the face.

“Son of a bitch!” he screamed. He fell to the ground in uncontrollable seizures as his own electricity turned against him. “Water! My one weakness!” he spat through clenched teeth.

“Quick, get him in the cage!” he heard the old cop yell at his assailant. Lightning was jumping all over his body and the stupidly deep puddle he’d managed to land in. “No, don’t touch him! Use a broom or something! Didn’t you learn anything in science lab?”

Cole barely felt the sharp jabs to his back as he writhed. Slowly he left the vicinity of the puddle and realized he was now in an oversized dog cage, the kind that was metal all around. “God damnit!” he panted, shaking out the soreness in his limbs. “Faraday cage! My other one weakness!”

He went for the latch, famously impossible for a dog to operate, but no match for opposable thumbs, when he heard the familiar click of a gun being cocked. He turned his glare on the detective. “Who are you?” he hissed with more gravel in his voice than ever before.

“Don’t worry, I’m not going to say ‘You’re arch nemesis,’ or anything corny like that,” said the man.

“Ohh, can I say it, Al?” The young attacker. Another cop. “I haven’t gotten to do this part in the field yet.”

“Uh, yeah. Sure, Mitch.”

“Cole McGrath, we have a warrant for your arrest. You have the right to remain—“

Oh boy, thought Cole. The perfect end to the perfect day.