Those About to Die …

by David Anthony Durham

Part One

MARCUS FLUNG ASIDE THE manhole cover. He pulled himself partway through and leaned back to check his cell phone. There. Finally. He had bars again! It wasn’t the only problem with living in the tunnels and sewers below Jokertown, but the fact that cell phone service was spotty was one of the most annoying.

One voice mail. One text.

The message was from a girl who had been sweating him. He didn’t know why he’d ever given her his phone number. She was a nat. Kind of average looking, with flat blond hair and too much smile for her face. She had approached him at Drakes in the Bowery last week. Grabbing his arm, she admitted out of nowhere that she had a snake fetish. “I just love serpents. Venomous ones the most.” She had made him horny, but not exactly in a good way.

He pressed delete.

The text was from Father Squid. Marcus smiled. It always amused him to imagine the good father texting. It couldn’t have been easy for him to hit the little buttons, considering that his fingers had suckers all over them. The text read: RMBR PRCNT. 5PM.

“I’ll be there,” Marcus said. “Not that it’s going to do any good.”

Marcus liked the priest well enough, but the old guy tended to get worked up about things. He’d roped Marcus into helping him look for so-called missing jokers. A few days into the search, Marcus was beginning to feel like there wasn’t anything to it. Sure, some guys had gone awol, but they weren’t the sort of guys anyone was too upset to see vanish. Why the priest cared so much Marcus couldn’t fathom.

Flipping the phone shut and slipping it into his chest pocket, Marcus rose out of the sewer hole. He was normal enough from the waist up. A young African-American man, well built, with muscles that cut distinct lines beneath his fitted T-shirt. Hair trimmed nice, like someone who cared about their look, thick gold loops in his ears. Below the waist, however, he was one long stretch of scaled serpentine muscle, ringed down the twenty feet of tapering length to his tail. His garish yellow and red and black rings flexed in a hypnotic fashion as he carved a weaving course forward.

He didn’t stay earthbound long. He surged up into a narrow gap at the alley mouth, curving from one brick wall to the other, creating a weave of tension between the two. Once out of the shadows of Jokertown’s urban canyon lands, the spring sun shone down. The heat of it poured power into Marcus’s tail. He pulled his shades out and slipped them on. He knew he looked fly. A couple years ago he thought his life was over. Now, things looked and felt a whole lot different.

As he skimmed along the edge of a roof, a voice called up from the street below. “IBT! Hey, IBT!”

Marcus peered down at a plump woman in a black T-shirt.

“I’m your number one fan, baby. Check it.” She directed two stubby fingers at her chest. The bright pink letters IBT stretched taut across her T-shirt. She clearly had more than two breasts pressing against the fabric.

The guy beside her jabbed toward him with a finger. “You da man, T!” he said, stomping the ground with an oversized foot.

Marcus waved. He peeled back from the edge and carried on. “You da man, T,” he mimicked. “What’s the deal with shortening everything?” he grumbled aloud. “‘T’ means he’s calling me Tongue but being too lazy to even say the whole word. The name is Infamous Black Tongue,” he announced to the sky, then thought, And IBT’s all right, I guess, if you’re in a rush.

He found it a little strange that it wasn’t his tail that gave him his moniker, but he had gotten a lot of early press for the concussive power of his tongue to deliver venom. Made an impression, apparently.

That reminded him of something.

He cut away from his intended route long enough to perch looking down on the graffiti-scarred wall of a building facing an abandoned lot-cum-urban garden. The wall had been repainted in one massive mural, a tribute to Oddity, whose cloaked and masked shape dominated the scene. IBT featured in it, too. Down by the far end, he rose up on powerful coils, half engulfed by licks of flame. One hand stretched out toward Oddity to accept the keys the vigilante legends were offering him. The other hand was smashing the dirty cop Lu Long across his dragon snout.

Marcus cocked his head. Squinted. They’d done some good work since last he saw it. They had his tail down pretty well. The color pattern of his stripes was mixed up, but he doubted anybody but himself would notice. The only thing he didn’t really like was his face. He looked too angry, too full of teeth-gritting rage. Father Squid had warned him that when he became a public figure his image wouldn’t be his own anymore. Here was proof, sprayed large.

He hit the street just down from the precinct. In the half block he nodded in response to several greetings, received an overly enthusiastic high five from a lobster-like claw, and autographed a furry little boy’s Yankees baseball cap. He tried to protest that he was an Orioles fan, and not a baseball player in any event. The boy was insistent, though.

Father Squid waited for him on the precinct steps. Though it was warm, the tall, broad-shouldered priest wore his thick robes, as usual. He stood with his hands tented together on his chest, as if in prayer. He almost looked tranquil, except for the way his fingers tapped out his impatience. “Have you any news, son?”

Marcus shook his head.

“No sightings?”

“Nope.”

The priest leaned close, the scent of him salty and fishy. The tentacles that dangled from his face seemed to stretch toward Marcus, as if each of them was keen to touch good news. “What about that abandoned apartment?”

“I checked it out. No sign of Wartcake.”

“Don’t call him that. Simon Clarke is the name his parents gave him.”

Marcus shrugged. “I know, but everybody calls him Wartcake. When I ask about Simon Clarke nobody knows who I’m talking about. So I always have to say Wartcake, and then they go, ‘Oh, Wartcake, why didn’t you say that in the first place?’” He met the priest’s large, dark eyes. “I’m just saying.”

Motion inside the precinct didn’t exactly freeze when Marcus and Father Squid entered, but a hush fell across the room. One after another, pairs of eyes found Marcus and followed his progress toward the captain’s office. Officer Napperson glared at him from behind his desk, looking like he was wishing him dead with just the force of his eyes. Another guy in uniform put his hand on his pistol, fingering the grip.

Father Squid strode with lumbering determination. Marcus kept his eyes on the priest’s back. He tried to keep his slither cool, but the scrutiny made him nervous. He couldn’t figure the cops out. Most of them treated him like a criminal they were itching to bust for something. That didn’t stop them from using him, though. Officer Tang once gave him a tip about a guy the cops...