Chapter Twenty-Three

Fury opened the bathroom door to see a beautiful sight. A nude woman was in the shower. The glass doors didn’t do much to hide Natasha’s curvy figure as she ran soapy hands over her body.

It had been hot to see Natasha on the couch with cum sprayed all over her body. She had spent enough time trying to figure out what she wanted from him. Fury just helped her make the decision. Natasha belonged to him, and he had proven it to her.

“I’m going to take a walk,” he said to the steamy figure in the shower. Now more than ever, he needed to get out of those walls. Natasha said she would trust him.

Her arms had been up shampooing her hair. Now they dropped to her sides. “Oh. Okay.” Fury heard the disappointment in Natasha’s voice, but she didn’t argue with him.

It was completely dark when Fury stepped outside and locked the door behind him. The evening breeze rippled through his short hair, and he paused to breathe it in. A couple of short trips out into the back-yard had been nothing compared to total freedom, and Fury had barely begun to taste it. He shouldn’t have waited so long to take over his life.

The suburban neighborhood had few street lamps, and the shadows provided ample camouflage. The cyborg turned his head from side to side as he got farther from Natasha’s house, memorizing the location of each house. If he were to come out the next morning, he would remember that the green two-story house at the end of the cul-de-sac needed someone to mow the lawn. The biochip could still handle manual visual processing.

Fury had mapped the area through the windows of Natasha’s house, but he found the Internet was useful to augment his internal maps. Perhaps that was part of the becoming human journey Natasha was excited about, but it was also inconvenient. Spending some time with her computer had allowed him to memorize satellite images of the entire town.

The area was quiet now. Families were at home, watching television or talking about their plans for the rest of the week. Children were in bed texting their friends. It was odd to realize that he knew the usual behavior for humans. From his memories, he was aware that he had lived that kind of life before he ever saw the inside of a lab. The mundane reality of existence was familiar to him even though he couldn’t recall his name or what he had done for a living.

As he turned the corner and headed up the next street, the cyborg heard a faint scream. He brought up his computer interface, analyzing the scene around him. Infrared scanners showed two figures in a dark alleyway near a tall apartment building. Fury amplified the sound, but his ears only caught muffled curses and feet shuffling in the gravel.

The soldier moved toward the alley while making as little noise as possible. When Fury was at the entrance, he paused to let his vision adjust to the light again. He could clearly see the scene before him.

A man had pushed a young girl up against a dumpster. Tears streamed down her face and dirty clothes. She pleaded miserably, but her words were garbled by fear. Her assailant wore a sweatshirt with the hood pulled up over his face. One of his hands held the girl by the throat, and the other wielded a sharp knife. The alley was closed off at the other end, providing no escape route. Pieces of trash fluttered along the ground in the breeze.

“Quit squirming, you little bitch,” the man said. He held the point of the knife to the hem of the girl’s short dress. “If you would just shut up we could finish this.”

“Please, don’t!” the girl screamed. The girl was in her late teens — just old enough to be desirable but too young to be on the streets in the middle of the night. “I won’t tell anyone if you just let me go.”

The man was determined to get what he had come for. He took a step closer to the girl and moved the knife to her throat.

It didn’t take a computer for Fury to know that this was not the same situation he had with Natasha.

“Leave her alone.” Though the cyborg had not been particularly loud, his words echoed off the walls of the alleyway until they boomed. The man with the knife jumped and turned toward the street.

“Who the fuck are you?”

Fury seemed to get that question a lot. “It doesn’t matter. Let her go.”

The man slid the knife up his sleeve and wrapped an arm around the girl’s waist. She shied away from him, but the motion only caused the man to yank her closer to his side. “Maybe she’s my date. Beat it, pal.”

In all the time that he had lived in Natasha’s house, Fury had never felt the urge to use a weapon. He had raw physical power, and that was enough. The man’s actions were infuriating. Without his bidding, the squeal of the plasma gun in his hand pierced the night air.

“What was that?”

Fury didn’t bother answering. He advanced into the alley, moving slowly but with determination as he imagined all the ways he could incapacitate his enemy. A thin shaft of light from the moon made its way down into the narrow passage between the buildings, illuminating the fear on the man’s face as the cyborg approached.

“I told you to leave her alone,” Fury threatened. His gun was powered up, but maybe a quick death was too good for this piece of shit. The plasma would burst through him and kill him instantly at this range. He deserved to suffer.

The man pulled his hand away from the girl, and she slumped to the ground. One of her shoes was missing, and she had ruined her hair and makeup. She was a pitiful creature.

“Go home,” Fury ordered. “You don’t want to see this.”

The girl wanted to leave but didn’t want to approach either her assailant or rescuer. She had no choice if she wanted to exit the alley. She squirmed past both of them, hands brushing the brick wall of the apartment building for support as she limped by the men. She vanished once she reached the street.

Fury turned back toward the man with the knife. The weapon was out of his sleeve again and pointed at the cyborg. “What the fuck do you think you’re doing, man? That girl owed me. It was time for me to get what was mine.” He took a few steps forward, thinking he could intimidate the man who had stopped him.

“I know what you deserve,” Fury said. “It isn’t anything she could give you.” His fists moved swiftly. The man’s face bounced off of Fury’s knuckles, head flying back and body flailing to catch up with it. His skull clipped the dumpster on the way down, but he scrambled quickly back to his feet.

“You think you’re a vigilante or something? There’s no room in this town for that sort of shit. A man has to be able to hold his own with all these fucking cyborgs wandering around. The last thing I need is some strange dude cockblocking me.” He launched himself at Fury, but his body was no match for the cyborg’s bulky body. He bounced right off and hit the ground again.

Fury flipped the thin body over with his foot. Bracing it in the middle of the man’s back, he yanked the man’s sleeves down over his hands and tied them in a solid knot.

“Hey! Let me go!” the man protested, but Fury wasn’t going to obey his command. He was no longer in a dark alleyway a few blocks from Natasha’s house. He was on the side of a road under the midday sun, arresting a young man found during a routine traffic stop with a trunk full of drugs. He was at a state fair on a Saturday evening, slapping handcuffs on a vagrant who kept breaking into booths and stealing cash. He was in the antiseptic whiteness of an interrogation room, serving as a witness while a detective interrogated a woman accused of beating up her husband.

With a rush of adrenaline that went straight to his head, Fury came back to the present. The memories had taken years to make but appeared in his head instantly. He had been a police officer before. He had spent long hours in a squad car on patrol, saved lives, and made a difference.

The cyborg landed a swift kick in the man’s ribs, making him curl into a ball in the dirty gravel. Perhaps he should have called the authorities, but he had no phone. If he showed up at someone’s house to report the incident they might turn him in as a fugitive cyborg, if they bothered answering the door at all.

Now that he had found himself, Fury had his own mission. He didn’t need a commander. The cyborg set off down the street in search of more criminals, intending to bring justice.