A Glitch in Reality - Chapter 0048

Chapter 48

The cold of that night had teeth.

It descended from the Pacific along with the fog and entered the abandoned industrial district of eastern San Diego as it entered everywhere now, without asking permission, through broken windows that no one repaired and gates that no one locked because there was nothing behind them worth a padlock. The building had once been a refrigeration parts warehouse. All that remained was its skeleton: peeling concrete columns, a mezzanine with rusty railings, puddles of stagnant water that reflected, here and there, the only source of light in the entire place.

A barrel on fire.

Five men surrounded him, all dressed in dark clothes and heavy coats, their hands outstretched over the fire in the ancient and involuntary choreography of all men who have ever waited for something in the cold. Flames rose from the metal and painted the five faces orange underneath and shadowed above, and the wind that swept through the warehouse ripped sparks from the barrel and carried them into the darkness, where they died before touching the ground.

The tallest of them broke the silence first. He was a broad-shouldered fellow with a short temper, and he had been shifting his weight from one foot to the other for the past ten minutes.

“Will it take long?”

“They said they’re almost there.” The man with the sparse beard standing on the other side of the barrel replied, his eyes fixed on the iron gate at the entrance. “Relax.”

“Relax,” the tall man repeated, sourly. “Easy to say. It’s not your name on the roll call list if the police decide to patrol this area today.”

“The police don’t patrol here, not even during the day.”

The tall man grumbled something and stretched his hands over the fire again. For a while, all that could be heard was the crackling of old wood burning inside the barrel and, far in the distance, the groan of a freighter entering the port.

It was the youngest of the five who spoke next. He had been staring at the flames for quite some time, his brow furrowed as if chewing over a thought that wouldn’t go down, and when he opened his mouth his voice came out lower than he had intended.

“Did you see the latest news? From San Diego?” He hesitated, corrected his course. “Apparently there’s a metahuman working with the city hall and the police. I mean, two. Two metahumans.”

“Everyone saw it, you idiot,” the tall man snapped, without even looking at him. “It was on every channel. There was a big screen in front of the city hall. The mayor gave a speech. If you thought you were bringing something new, my friend, you’re about three days too late.”

The little man frowned. The insult stung, and for a second the reply rose to his throat, ready. But he was the smallest of the group, and the weakest, and seven years in that life had taught him with arithmetic precision how much each word spoken upwards in the hierarchy of muscles cost. He swallowed the reply, felt its taste go down, and chose the path that the small always learn to choose: that of being useful.

“What I’ve heard,” he continued, turning to the group, “and this wasn’t on any channel, is that the other gangs in the city have backed down. All of them. The guys from the port, the people from the north, even the crazy guys from the South Zone who aren’t afraid of anything. Everyone’s holed up. Nobody wants to be next in line until they find out what those two are capable of.”

That, indeed, caught the attention of the group. The tall one turned his face towards him. The bearded one took his eyes off the gate.

“I saw the bank recordings,” said the fourth man, a fellow in a worn military jacket who had been listening until then, chewing on an unlit toothpick in the corner of his mouth. “The ones from inside, the ones that leaked. Not the edited crap from the newspaper.” He took the toothpick out of his mouth and pointed it at the fire, as if pointing at an invisible screen. “And I’ll tell you something: it’s truly impressive. The blond guy has an agility that’s out of this world. It’s not the speed of a trained person, it’s something else, his body solves things before the camera even understands what happened. And he was the one who held the meta-human from the robbery. All by himself. He held the guy in place, occupied him the whole time, while the pig-headed brute dismantled the rest of the men like someone dismantling scaffolding.”

“Brad,” said the bearded one quietly.

The word fell into the middle of the wheel and stayed there, burning along with the barrel.

Because all five knew who Brad was. Everyone in that world knew. In recent weeks, his name had been the final argument in every conversation in every underworld bar in the city: the bullet-stopper, living proof that times had changed, that the age of guns was over and the age of others had begun. And the two from television had dubbed the final argument on a park stone and handed over what was left to the police, booked as a common thief.

The five of them frowned simultaneously, each in their own way, and none needed to explain the reason to the others. The situation wasn’t good before. The entire market was sitting on a barn, gangs were fighting over neighborhood borders, everyone was waiting for the first shot in the war that the older ones swore was a matter of weeks. And now, on top of all that, the city hall and the police had found allies who could bend bulletproof men to their will.

“Our good fortune,” the tall man said after a while, in a lower voice than he had been using all night, “is that we have one too.”

No one answered immediately. The fifth man, the oldest in the group, a gray-haired fellow who until then hadn’t uttered a word, looked up from the fire for the first time.

“Which the boss is keeping hidden,” he said. “And if the boss is keeping it hidden, it’s because he has a reason. And if he has a reason, it’s not a matter for gossip.” He let his eyes slowly pass over each of the four, one at a time, without haste. “Do we understand each other?”

They were. The silence that followed confirmed it.

It was at that moment that the light swept through the gate.

Two spotlights lit up outside, white and low, piercing through the cracks in the iron and drawing long bars of light on the warehouse floor. The short man was the first to move, of course. He ran to the gate, peeked through the crack, and what he saw on the other side made him unlock the chain and push the iron sheets, which opened with a groan on the tracks.

A black van pulled in. No markings, no front license plates, the rear windows tinted with film. It crossed the warehouse slowly, its tires screeching on old debris, and stopped about ten meters from the barrel, its engine still running for a second before dying. The front doors opened. Then the side door, sliding on its track with a metallic thud.

Three men descended. All tall, all dressed in dark, moving with the economy of those who have done this so many times that their bodies no longer need to pay attention. The one in front wore a cap pulled down to his eyebrows, and on his neck, rising from the collar towards his jaw, was a tattoo of black lines that the firelight revealed and concealed as he walked.

“Good evening,” he ventured, sounding high on five. “Everything alright?”

The three approached. The one with the tattoo nodded, a short, professional movement, and glanced around the group, counting without disguising that he was counting.

“Good. I see you’re all here.” He stopped two steps from the barrel, the heat of the fire reaching him from the side. “I’m not going to waste anyone’s time with idle chatter, so let’s get straight to the point. First, the payment.”

There was a collective rustling of coats. One by one, the five pulled thick, brown paper pouches, tied with elastic bands, from their inside pockets and passed them along. The one with the tattoo received them all, weighed the bundle in his hand with the deceptive nonchalance of someone who knows how to weigh money without counting, and passed the wad to the man on his right, who crossed back to the van and disappeared into the darkness of the side door.

“Excellent.”

The man returned from the van carrying five brick-sized packages, sealed in plastic and tape, and handed one to each outstretched hand. The packages disappeared into the coats as quickly as the bags had left.

That’s when the guy with the tattoo glanced around the group once more and added, in the same tone as someone giving a weather forecast:

“The price went up.”

The five faces frowned in unison.

“What do you mean, it went up?” The tall one took a half step forward. “Go up by how much? Why did it go up? We closed the price last month.”

“Suppliers are becoming scarce.” The one with the tattoo didn’t move, didn’t raise his voice, didn’t give the other half-step the honor of noting it. “Apparently, some gang has been eliminating them. One by one, clean, without leaving a trace and without taking the merchandise, which is the interesting detail of the story. Our supplier remains untouched. But scarcity is scarcity. Those who still produce now charge whatever they want. And what goes up there, comes down here.”

“That’s it…”

“There’s nothing to discuss.” For the first time, something hardened in his voice, a steely edge emerging beneath his businesslike tone. “Those are orders from the boss.”

And there the conversation died, because those four words were, in that world, the end of all conversations. The five of them swallowed the raise like one swallows glass, in silence, each one mentally recalculating their weekly budget. When the boss ordered, the boss ordered.

The one with the tattoo was already turning around when he stopped, as if remembering something, and spun around half his body.

“And there’s something else. Be prepared, and stick together. Some gangs have already started to really clash; there was a shootout the day before yesterday near the port, and that’s just the beginning. At any moment you could become targets in the middle of the street, and the boss would hate to lose resources.” He left the word “resources” hanging in the air so that no one there would be under any illusions about their own standing in someone else’s accounting. “Do you understand?”

Five heads nodded.

“Great. Next shipment, next week. Have the money ready.”

He turned around and walked back to the van, the two men closing in behind him. There were still deliveries to make that night, and the route was long.

It was when he reached the driver’s door that the night ceased to make sense.

The van was lower. That’s what his body perceived before his mind, this slight unevenness in the vehicle’s silhouette, and his eyes drifted down on their own to the front tire, finding it flat against the concrete, the worn-out rubber spread across the base like melted wax. He took a step back and looked at the entire side. The rear tire, the same. He circled the front of the van in three quick steps and checked the other side. All four. All four flat tires, in a junkyard where no one had heard anything, in a time when the van hadn’t been left alone for a single minute.

The chill that ran down his spine had nothing to do with the night.

And it was then, following the ancient instinct of every hunted man, that he looked up.

There was a man standing on the roof of the van.

He stood there with the impossible naturalness of someone who had always been there, his hands in the pockets of his overcoat, his weight distributed with the tranquil balance of someone posing for a portrait. And the worst, the very worst thing, was that the man with the tattoo recognized him instantly, because there was no way he couldn’t recognize him anymore: that face hadn’t left the television for three days, it hadn’t left the radio, the magazine covers, the conversations. Tall, blond, with the bearing of a catalog model, his impeccable formal suit beneath the beige overcoat, his thin-lensed glasses reflecting the gleam of fire.

The Knight of San Diego smiled down at him from above.

“Good evening everyone.”

Eight men froze at the same time, and in all eight heads, with minimal variations in vocabulary, the exact same thought passed: shit.

The man with the tattoo drew first. The pistol came out of his waistband in a practiced movement and rose, pointed at the chest of the man on top of the van, and the hammer cocked with a click that sounded too loud in the silence of the warehouse.

The Knight raised his hands. Slowly, without startling, in the cadence of someone calming a frightened horse, and his smile didn’t budge an inch.

“Calm down. You don’t want anyone to get hurt, do you? After all, what you’re holding is dangerous.”

There was something profoundly wrong with the phrase, and everyone there felt it without knowing how to name it: the tone wasn’t that of someone who was being targeted. It was that of someone watching a child holding a pair of scissors.

But raised hands were raised hands, and the rest of the depot did what they knew how to do. In a rustling of coats and metal, the other seven drew their weapons too, and in the blink of an eye the man on the van had eight barrels pointed at him from eight different angles, the fire from the barrel sparking in eight bolts.

He gazed at them from above, one by one, and something almost affectionate crossed his face. The look of a collector before a stubborn species.

“Look at that. You’re really tenacious. You refuse to give up under any circumstances.” He lowered his hands slowly, completely ignoring the eight weapons, as if they had ceased to be relevant the moment they were pointed at him. “And I respect that, truly. But know that this is exactly what will be your downfall.”

That’s when everyone heard the noise.

A faint, metallic sound came from the darkness behind the group: a can thrown, bouncing on the concrete once, twice, three times, each bounce shorter than the last, rolling between their legs until it stopped right in the middle of the circle, two hand spans from the burning barrel.

Eight pairs of eyes descended to the object at the same time, in a reflex stronger than any training. And in the half-second it took for everyone to look, everyone understood, and the understanding came too late.

The explosion engulfed the entire warehouse. A dry, physical thunderclap that struck each man in the chest like a jolt, and along with it an absolute white flash, a brightness without form or direction that extinguished the world. The fire, the van, the concrete, the faces, everything vanished into a painful white, and eight men staggered at the same time, their hands rising to their eyes, blinded, their ears ringing a single, infinite note.

Seven men, actually.

Because, above the van, the thin lenses had darkened the instant of the flash, faster than any eyelid, filtering the light until it was reduced to a harmless blur. And behind them, two green eyes remained open, calm, perfectly seeing every staggering silhouette below.

Jack’s hands emerged from his overcoat, already armed.

What happened next lasted less than three seconds, and none of those present saw it. The two pistols danced, one in each hand, their barrels leaping from target to target with the millimeter precision of a Western duelist, and the shots came out so seamlessly that they sounded almost like a single, torn burst. But there was nothing of a burst there. Each bullet had a target. One by one, the eight weapons exploded in the blind hands of their owners, bolts ripped off, frames broken, pieces of metal and polymer flying and raining down on the concrete, and the hands that held them opened by pure reflex of the vibration, releasing what was left, which was no longer a weapon at all. It was scrap metal.

He’d done it once before. The maneuver was even cleaner the second time.

Vision gradually returned to the eight of them, the world reappearing in washed-out blotches, and the first thing each of them did, all of them without exception, was to look at their own hands. To find their fingers numb, tingling from the kick, and on the ground around them the unrecognizable remains of what they had been holding. And then, one by one, the eight faces rose, trembling, to the man standing on the van, which hadn’t moved, and who was putting the pistols back under his overcoat with the serenity of someone closing an umbrella.

“Everyone on your knees,” he said, in a calm, master-of-ceremonies tone, “and with your hands on your head.”

Eight throats swallowed hard. And eight pairs of knees, one behind the other, met the cold concrete.

It was then that, from the same darkness from which the grenade had come, another sound arrived. A drumming of short, quick footsteps hitting the concrete, dozens of them, many and tiny, growing faster toward the group, and the eight kneeling men tensed, not knowing where to look, because that noise didn’t belong to anything their experience could categorize. The thing crossed the patch of light from the barrel in a low, dark blur and braked in a skid beside the van, its tiny feet digging into the ground.

It was a trunk.

An old travel trunk, made of dark wood and worn hardware, stood on four stubby legs. The lid was ajar, revealing a wide grin of pale, crooked teeth, and a long, pink tongue hung out from between them, panting, while the back of the piece of furniture swayed from side to side with the unmistakable enthusiasm of a dog that had come running back to its owner.

Jack smiled down at him from up there.

“Very good, boy.”

After all, he was the one who had given the order. The stun grenade, thrown at the exact angle, at the exact second, had come from that mouth. The trunk drummed its feet on the ground, proud, and at a small gesture from Jack’s hand, the lid swung open and the creature began to spit out, in short, precise arcs, one metallic object after another, which Jack, jumping out of the van in a soundless leap, caught in mid-air.

Handcuffs.

“Really,” he said, in a light, elevator-talk tone, as he walked over to the first kneeling man and fastened the steel handcuffs around his wrists, “you made the right choice.” Click. He moved on to the second. “You must have realized by now that I’m not exactly an ordinary human being.” Click. Third. “And, to be quite honest with you, lately I haven’t been very patient with holding my own hand.” Click. Fourth, fifth. “Now that I work with the police, you know how it is, I have a little more… autonomy. Let’s just say the paperwork gets a lot simpler when I decide not to care so much about your lives.” Sixth, seventh. He reached the man with the neck tattoo last, and crouched down before him to fasten the last handcuff, looking him in the eyes, his smile a meter away. “So I thank you, from the bottom of my heart, for making my night easier by surrendering in this way. Because I really wasn’t interested in getting my hands dirty by hitting you. I’d much rather, if it ever becomes necessary, put a bullet in each of your heads.”

Click.

The silence that followed was absolute. Eight men knelt, handcuffed, without a single intact weapon within a ten-meter radius, and none of them with the slightest doubt that every word spoken in that friendly tone was literal.

Jack stood up and clapped his hands together, brushing away imaginary dust.

“Good. The police are already on their way, and they have enough evidence here to arrest you for a generous amount of time. My job is done.” He turned to the kneeling audience one last time and bowed his head in a host’s greeting. “Have a good night, everyone. And reconsider your attitudes.”

He walked to the van.

The side door was still open, and the dim, yellowish light inside revealed what he already expected: rows of sealed packages stacked in a false-bottom compartment, and the five brown paper bags on top, bulging with money. Jack contemplated the scene for a moment, and his smile changed in quality, losing its public veneer, becoming more mature.

He knew he couldn’t take everything. This was the new part of his life, the part with the contract and the press conference: the police needed the evidence, and the evidence needed to be substantial. But no clause in any of the contracts stated that he couldn’t take anything.

He glanced over his shoulder. The eight of them were kneeling with their backs to the van, facing the barrel, and from their angle there was no possible geometry that would allow them to see inside the vehicle. Perfect.

“Come here, boy.”

The trunk trotted toward him, its tongue wagging. Jack began to work with the silent efficiency of a longshoreman: one bag, then two, an armful of sealed packages, and the crooked-toothed mouth received everything and swallowed with visible pleasure, the lid slamming softly with each bite, the unfathomable depths of the creature devouring drugs and money without altering the weight or size of the furniture in the slightest. Jack kept his own honest math: he took a good amount, and left an even better amount. Enough, with room to spare, to support an accusation, denied bail, and a few years in prison for each of those kneeling.

In the distance, through the crack in the open gate, the darkness of the street began to pulse with red and blue. Sirens were still inaudible, but the lights were already doubling around the block. Five minutes, he estimated. Maybe less.

Jack carefully closed the van’s compartment, making everything presentable for the forensic photographers, and clapped his hands again, this time ending his shift. He looked down at the trunk, which returned the gaze with its lid slightly open and its tongue sticking out, in the eternal anticipation of the dogs.

He smiled.

“Let’s go home, kid.”

The lid swung open. Jack jumped inside.

And the trunk was gone.

The tiny feet pounded the concrete with a furious drumming, the creature crossed the warehouse, squeezed through the gate’s crack onto the dark street, and sped off. The speed was absurd for anything, let alone a vehicle: abandoned city blocks blurring past, puddles exploding beneath the small feet, corners bent in skids that sent sparks flying from the old ironwork, and the sleeping city rushing by faster and faster on both sides.

Inside, nestled in a darkness that was greater on the inside than on the outside, Jack leaned forward and put his head through the opening in the hood, peering out at the street through the creature’s pale teeth as one peers through a bumper grille. The icy night wind lashed his face, the asphalt rushed beneath him, lampposts streaked across his vision one after another, and somewhere between one corner and the next, Jack found himself laughing to himself.

Because it was impossible not to find it funny. He had faced monsters, signed a contract with a city hall, become the face of the news. And in the midst of all that, without planning, without asking, he had also ended up winning a vehicle. Possibly the most unusual in all of San Diego.

The trunk rounded another corner, sparkling, and plunged with its owner into the dark city streets, heading home.