“JACKIE’S STORY”
by Justina Ireland
EVERYONE KNEW THAT there was nothing beyond the Alderus asteroid belt. It was the kind of thing kids learned in their first year at school: how to avoid space sickness and that beyond the Alderus asteroid belt was nothing but Void, an edge of space so dark that nothing could exist beyond that edge.
It was the perfect place for the Williamson brothers to hide out.
Sean Williamson piloted his beloved spacecraft through the rocks, swearing anytime one came too close. They’d nearly run out of fuel by the time the ship had reached the rock field, and even though he had a back-up tank of Ore to power the craft, there was no use for it. The goal was to drift through the rock field long enough to confuse the Leviathan ships chasing them. Using all his fuel now would only put the second half of the plan in danger.
Daniel Williamson, Sean’s younger brother, cleared his throat. “Maybe you should swing her around a little to the left—” A hollow boom echoed through the ship as another boulder bumped off the hull.
“Dammit, Danny! I don’t need your help crashing. I’ve got this all taken care of myself. Why don’t you see if you can raise Cass on the secure channel? Surely she’s heard something by now. And maybe change out of those coveralls while you’re at it.”
Danny gave his brother one last withering look before moving through the ship to the communications console. They’d been waiting for a ping from Cass on their private channel for days, waiting for the one last piece of information that would help them accomplish their lifelong mission to destroy Dr. Mags, the woman who had torn them from their family and changed them forever into monsters.
Danny brushed his dark, disheveled hair from his eyes and began searching for Cass’s frequency. Both of the Williamson brothers were incredibly good-looking, but while Danny was tall and rugged, Sean was shorter with spiky blond hair. They didn’t share much beyond their chiseled jaws, steely gazes, and the occasional willing partner. Their temperaments as different as night and day.
* * *
“Hey, is this fan fiction? Fan fiction doesn’t count as a real story,” said David.
Jackie rolled her eyes. “Yes, it does. This is a totally original story that I wrote.”
She continued.
* * *
Danny found Cass after a couple of tries, connecting to her frequency with little trouble. He was the brother that could fix any technical issue. It was Sean who could fly them out of a tight situation, though. However, the asteroid belt was giving even him trouble.
“Danny! Where are you guys?”
“Alderus asteroid belt. Outrunning a pack of the Corporation’s Leviathan cruisers. You got any news for us?”
“I do. Big news. There’s something going down with the Corporation. Can you and Sean meet me on Finicus Prime in two days?”
Another asteroid scraped across the hull, causing the ship to lurch and Sean to curse loudly. Danny cleared his throat. “That might be difficult, but we’ll do our best.”
“Great! See you then. Oh, and Danny?”
“Yeah, Cass?”
“Tell Sean that we have unfinished business,” Cass said, her voice getting husky. “Of course, you’re welcome to join us as well. I know you’re a fan of teamwork,” she said before signing off.
Danny signed off as well before yelling to Sean in the front of the ship. “Cass has something. You think you can get us to Finicus Prime in two days?” He didn’t mention Cass’s very welcome invitation. No need to distract Sean any further.
“Oh, sure! Because it’s not like I don’t already have enough miracles to work,” Sean said.
Danny took that as a yes and headed to the engine room to make sure that the ship would actually get them there.
* * *
Finicus Prime wasn’t the kind of station anyone ended up on by choice. A backwater satellite light-years away from shipping lanes and proper technology, it was the kind of place smugglers and freaks landed to grab supplies or sell hot merchandise or find a quick hookup.
It was the kind of place the Williamson brothers loved.
“I’ll have a bacon cheeseburger and a berry pie,” Sean said, leaning back in his chair.
“Um, tossed salad and vegetable protein loaf, thanks,” Danny told the order droid. The bot trundled off, and Sean snickered.
“What?” Danny asked.
“It isn’t alive. You don’t have to be polite.”
“No one knows exactly how much they know. There’s no reason to be rude,” Danny said.
Cass slid into an empty chair without a word, laying a clear diskette on the table. “Danny is right. Studies have shown that bots are twenty-three percent more accurate when they’re treated like a person.”
Sean sighed heavily. “Cass.”
“Sean. Danny. Story is that the Corporation is up to something new. Something bad. This disk outlines everything I know.” Cass flipped her dark hair over her shoulder and looked around the food counter. “It isn’t looking good, though. There’s something afoot. Something bad.”
“We got it, Cass. We’ll take care of it,” Sean said just as his food arrived.
Danny nodded. “It’s what we do.”
Cass leaned forward, her breasts heaving, nearly escaping the top of her shirt. “So when are you boys going to take care of me?”
* * *
“This is literally the plot of a Space Howl episode. I saw this one. They end up going to some planet and stealing a vial they think is the antidote to their werewolf disease, but it’s really a serum to help farmers grow crops on some small planet. They end up giving the serum to the scientist working for the farmers so they can grow crops,” said David.
“It’s sort of like that, but different,” Jackie said, chewing at a thumbnail until it bled.
Tino rolled his eyes. “No way she gets to win for something she stole from TV.”
“Really?”
Several folks nodded.
“Okay, fine.” Jackie took her hair down and readjusted her ponytail as she spoke. “So, since no one wants to listen to my Space Howl story here’s another one. This is a story my dad told me when I was a kid. It was always my favorite tale.”
* * *
The city?
The city. Well, it changes you.
When my brothers and I went there we were just a bunch of kids, fresh-faced and full of dreams. We had no clue how the world worked, and no way we ever thought we’d end up how we did.
Mostly, I never thought I’d end up like this. Broken and broke, not a penny to my name. I’ve done terrible things. Things I’m not proud of. I’ve hurt people and ruined lives. And I did it all for them.
My brothers.
The three of us were all born on the same day. Triplets. Maybe that’s why we were always so close. We were united by blood and a birthdate.
More on the blood later.
Phillip was first, and he came into the world squealing at the top of his lungs. Wee, wee, wee. They say he didn’t shut up until our mother put her teat into his mouth.
Next was Peter, who was so big that our mother labored for over an hour just to push him out. He didn’t say a word as he lay there in the straw, waiting for Ma to tend to him. He just looked around, taking everything in, silent and stupid. More than one man would underestimate him because of his big, lumbering quiet.
I was last. Paul the Runt, smallest of the litter. I didn’t squeal, and I wasn’t large enough to remark upon. I was completely unmemorable, an afterthought to the birth of my brothers.
And so it went. The three of us grew up in a small town, and we each gained a peculiar sort of notoriety. Phillip was the talker, the guy who could charm a girl out of her bloomers or a friend out of his pocket money. Peter was big, and those who messed with him quickly discovered that it was a bad idea. And me? I was the thinker. I could sit back and find a solution to any problem. Chances are I could have been a scientist or something else prestigious. Maybe a doctor.
Maybe. If Peter and Phillip hadn’t been my brothers.
When we were barely on the cusp of adulthood, Phillip had the bad luck to fool around with a woman who was spoken for. When the husband found out, he came sniffing around the farm, looking for my brother. The cuckold found Peter instead of Phillip, much to the jilted man’s dismay. Peter lay a beating down on him, but the damage had already been done.
“It’s time you boys got a move on,” my mother said, hauling her girth from one side of the barn to another. “I can’t have you boys fighting and carrying on like that. It draws too much attention. ’Sides, it’s time you boys made your way in the world. It’s unseemly for boys to live with their mama for too long.”
So we left.
That night, after tying our meager possessions up into a bindle, we jumped a train to the city.
* * *
New Pork was nothing like any place we’d ever been before.
The city was a terrifying and exhausting place. Cars raced along the streets, horns honking incessantly. Buses threatened to mow down unwary pedestrians, and there were people everywhere, clogging the sidewalk, flowing in and out of the buildings like a trail of ants to an overturned soda can. And underneath it all was a current of desperation and urgency that made me anxious.
Phillip, of course, loved it.
“This is it, boys! This is where we’ll make our mark on the world.” His snout wiggled with excitement. “We will make this city bow to our demands. She’ll be our mistress; she’ll cradle us to her bosom, and we’ll make her scream out our name.”
I winced at Phillip’s melodramatic speech, but he didn’t notice. He looked around, adjusting his bow tie and cocking his hat at a jaunty angle, the tip of his pug nose wiggling in excitement. Peter said nothing, just stood on the sidewalk and watched as people tried to inch around him.
I scratched my chin as I considered Phillip’s words. “I dunno, Phil. It doesn’t seem safe here. Maybe we should make a bid for the next town. We aren’t used to city life.” I hated the way my voice sounded: whiny, weak. But I missed our safe, small-town life already. All I wanted was a reasonable facsimile of it, and something told me the city wouldn’t provide that.
Phillip threw his arm across my shoulders and wheezed a laugh. “Come on, Pauly. Give it a go. I bet you’ll love it in no time.”
I looked around, and a girl passing caught my eye. She saw me looking, her cheeks pink and round. But she didn’t look away shyly like the girls back home did. She met my stare dead-on, raising her chin a little in defiance.
I shrugged. “Well, okay. A month. I’ll give it a month.”
Phillip squeezed my shoulders and gave me a grin. “A month. Sounds like a plan.”
* * *
Our first month in the city was miserable.
We lived in a flat with two other guys, both of them hogs. They drank too much and passed out in the living room, snoring loudly. They frequently left their stuff all over the place and ate all the food in the icebox whether or not it was theirs. It was a terrible place to live, but we didn’t have much choice. It was the only place we could afford.
Phillip had a job as a waiter in one of them buffet-type places called the Trough, but no one ever left him much in the way of a tip. Peter got work down at the wharf, and although he made a decent wage, most of his paycheck went to cover the shortfall from Phillip and me. As for me . . .
I got a job as a bookkeeper in a sketchy office building. It was there that I first got the idea for the straw purchase.
Would that I’d never thought of it.
Firearms were highly regulated in the city. Only certain folks could get licensed, and it all rested on an intelligence test. This had the effect of driving the price of the guns up, even those that were available for sale illegally.
A man in my office, Mr. Crenshaw, began talking wistfully about how he’d like to buy a gun. “I’ve been saving every last grunt I’ve made for the past year. A hundred grunts just to take the test, and another hundred for the gun. But I keep failing the damn thing. I’m almost a thousand grunts into buying a gun, and I still don’t have one.”
That gave me an idea.
“Mr. Crenshaw, why don’t you give me three hundred grunts, and I’ll give you a gun.”
Mr. Crenshaw was an elderly sort, and his eyes watered as he peered at me. “Say what?”
“Well, if I take the test and pass, I can buy a gun. I can buy as many as I’d like, right?”
He considered me. “Well, I s’pose.”
“No one knows who the gun belongs to once it’s bought. No one cares. So if I buy the gun and give it to you, you get a gun and I get enough money to take my girl out somewhere nice.” There was no girl, and the money would go to the rent, but the old man was so happy that he forked over the dough lickety-split.
When I got back to the flat I told my brothers my scheme in a low voice, so our roommates wouldn’t hear us. Peter gave me a slow nod; his way of agreeing it was a good idea. But Phillip had bigger ideas.
“Pauly, why stop at one old man? Why not buy a hundred guns?”
I blinked at him. “What?”
Phillip began to pace. “There have to be dozens of suckers like him in the city, just aching for a chance to get their grubby mitts on a gun. A gun means protection; it means power. Every girl wants to be with a fella who can keep her safe, and every man wants a gun. Nothing makes a man more foolish than a loaded gun.” Here Phillip paused and elbowed me to make sure I caught his double meaning. “And a fool and his money are soon parted. So why not make some grunts? I can chat these guys up, and you take the test and get them their merchandise. It’ll be brilliant.”
I looked at Peter, who was now doing his slow nod for Phillip.
“What’s Peter going to do?” I asked.
Phillip grinned, showing his teeth. “Peter is going to keep everyone honest.”
* * *
For the next year we lived a life of leisure. The straw purchase racket was pure genius, and all three of us quit our jobs and moved out on our own. Phillip moved to the north end of town, near the poker clubs and bars he loved. Peter met a nice girl and moved with her into a small house on the outskirts of the city.
I moved into a nice high-rise building with a security guard. Although I’d been in the city for a while, it still made me nervous. Especially with our less-than-legal enterprises.
Phillip had big plans for us, and the straw purchase soon grew into a full-fledged criminal empire. I came up with the ideas, and Phillip and Peter implemented them. Prostitution, racketeering, illegal gambling, moneylending. If it paid well and it was illegal, we dealt in it.
And we were good at it.
Phillip was the mouth of the operation, using his gift of gab to cement alliances with other rackets and to smooth the way with the local cops. Peter was the muscle, and whenever a payee was late or someone didn’t want to play nice, he broke into their house and hurt their feelings.
And I was the background guy, the idea man. Phillip looked like he was in charge of things, but I was the one running the show from the shadows. I kept my ear to the ground and applied the rumors and gossip I heard to our business, moving poker parlors before they were raided, paying off minor nuisances, and ending those who were thinking about talking to the feds. We cut a bloody swath through the city, taking what we wanted, killing anyone who got in our way.
The three of us were unstoppable.
That’s when I started to hear the whispers about the Wolf.
* * *
In the old days the Wolf had owned this city. He was big and he was bad, but no one had seen or heard from him in years. There were rumors that he took a chunk of the pie from every operation, and those that weren’t willing to play nice risked having their houses blown in, so to speak.
Phillip tsk-tsked away my worry when I mentioned the rumors I’d been hearing; stories of a bushy-haired fella kicking in the doors of some of our smaller operations. We were in the back room of the bar my brother owned, the liquor sales and good-time girls up front a cover for the games in the back. Those days, Phillip spent more of his time playing cards than running things, so more and more of the day-to-day operations fell to me.
“There’s no such thing as the Wolf, Pauly,” Phillip said, throwing a card down on the table. “We would’ve met him long before now if he was a real thing. Quit worrying,” he said. “You’re gonna give yourself wrinkles.” Then he did that thing where he grabbed the back of my neck and shook me a bit.
I pulled free and gave him a nod as he went back to his card game, his hat cocked at a jaunty angle and a girl on his knee, that fearless grin I’d come to hate plastered across his face.
The next morning Peter found Phillip dead, his eyes staring wide and surprised. He’d been closing up, restocking, when someone had come in and iced him. No one knows what was said, and the drink straws scattered across the bar floor weren’t talking.
Peter and I gave Phillip the best funeral money could buy, and at the wake afterward, I pulled my brother aside.
“We need to look into this Wolf thing, Pete. You and I both know he offed Phil, and the last thing I want is this guy huffing and puffing all over us.”
My brother shook his big dumb head and drained the beer from the bottle in his giant mitt. “Never you mind, Pauly,” he said, his voice deep and rusty from disuse. “I’ll get him. The boys and I are gonna go out and rattle a few cages, see what shakes loose. You just keep everything running smooth like. Phillip woulda wanted it that way.” Then Peter went off to comfort his girl, who was standing in a corner crying pretty tears for a man she didn’t know.
I shook my head, feeling a dark sense of déjà vu. Phillip hadn’t listened to me either, and look where it had gotten him. But I knew better than to argue with big dumb Peter, and I let him do what he wanted.
Peter took out his grief on the city. Shopkeepers trembled in fear at the sound of his heavy boot steps, and the women in the markets whispered about whose husband had taken a beating recently. Peter worked his knuckles bloody trying to get answers, but he came up with nothing.
“Maybe it was an inside job,” he said one night as he sat on the couch in Phillip’s old office. It had been two months since Phillip’s murder, and I sat behind his big fancy desk, going through the day’s take. With my brother gone I had started meeting with the cops on our payroll and the bosses who ran some of our smaller operations. Although I wasn’t as good at it as Phillip had been, I was holding my own.
“It wasn’t an inside job, it was the Wolf,” I told Peter. “We need to find this guy and offer him a deal; otherwise we’re going to be next.”
My brother just shook his big dumb head and sighed. “I told you, there ain’t no such thing as the Wolf. It’s just an old rumor. Phillip was axed by someone in the organization. We just need to find out who.” My brother stood and put on his flat cap. “I’m goin’ home. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
But I never saw my brother again.
* * *
They said it was a bomb, and that someone had snuck into Peter’s house during the day while his girl was out and planted it in the kitchen. When the thing went off it completely devastated his house and part of the neighbor’s. The cops never really found all of Peter’s body, just bits and pieces of it mixed in with the sticks of his destroyed house. Peter’s girl wasn’t home at the time, and for a little while the cops tried to pin it on her, but she wasn’t a killer. When she came home from her bridge game and saw the condition of the house, she broke down. The only damning bit of information the cops got out of her was that she’d been seeing Phillip on the side before he bit it. The poor girl was destroyed. Here she’d lost the two greatest loves of her life within a span of a couple months.
I paid for her to go upstate for some relaxation in a facility and thanked my lucky stars I was smart enough to leave the skirts alone.
But now I was all by myself, and I knew that the Wolf was real. Any day now he’d be coming for me, and I’d be ready.
I bought the building I lived in and evicted all the other residents. I fired the guard downstairs, giving him a nice bonus so he wouldn’t be too out of sorts, and I put my own boys in the front. I installed bars on all the windows and bricked up all the entrances except for the main lobby. Now there was only one way in and one way out, and you had to get past my boys to see me.
I was ready.
The bosses and dirty cops who reported to me thought I was losing it, that it had been an inside job, both Peter’s and Phillip’s murders. I took out hits on all of them. Then I found new guys, ones I could trust. I let them move up through the organization. I rebuilt my enterprise from the ground up.
And I waited.
Six, seven, eight months passed, and no sign of the Wolf. I relaxed my guard a little, started going out more. Dinner once a week. A show every once in a while. My enterprise flourished, and I was rich. I deserved to enjoy a little bit of that.
The Wolf found me one night while I was out at dinner.
I sat in the center of the restaurant, the only patron. I had taken to buying out the entire establishment when I dined so that I could eat alone, since people made me jumpy. I was less paranoid, but the Wolf could still be out there, waiting for his chance. I was enjoying a bowl of slop, the specialty of the house, when a bushy-haired man walked in. Both of my boys stood up, ready to escort him out, but he mowed them down without a word.
I jumped up from the table and ran, through the kitchen and out the back alley. I could hear the Wolf’s shoes pounding as he chased me down, and I gasped for breath, squealing as I ran. I was soft and large from too much food and too little movement, and there was no way I could outrun the monster I’d glimpsed back in the restaurant.
I skidded down an alley, coming up on a dead end. I searched around for an exit, but the only thing there was a pile of bricks and a few overflowing trash bins. I grabbed a brick and ducked down behind the garbage can, trying to quiet my breathing and hoping the Wolf hadn’t seen me.
Footsteps paused at the end of the alley and then began to approach. “Little pig, little pig,” a gravelly voice called, and chills ran down my spine. “You owe me.”
“I don’t owe you nothing!” I yelled.
The Wolf chuckled, voice low. “Just because you already paid me to do the job don’t mean you ain’t gotta pay me again. What would your associates say if they knew you were the one who had your brothers snuffed out? Your own flesh and blood. That you killed all your old boys just to cover your tracks. Nothing but a parade of death and sorrow all the way home.”
I squeezed my eyes shut, and thought about my brothers. I thought about the way we’d played together in the mud when we were small and how hard our first month here in the city had been. But mostly I thought about how they were always there for me, fighting my battles, talking on my behalf. And how, later, they’d always taken the bigger cut, how I’d done all the hard work, but they’d kept most of the gains.
And now here was the Wolf, trying to do the same thing.
It wasn’t about the money anymore. It was about the principle.
I opened my eyes just as the Wolf walked by. I gripped the brick with my mitts and brought it down on the back of his head. He fell to the ground, but I didn’t stop. I brought the brick down again and again until the Wolf stopped moving, his bushy tail limp.
I’d killed the Wolf, me and my brick. And I felt no better for it.
I stumbled home and washed the blood off me. I felt so old and so drained. I was sick of the city and tired of my life. I’d had my brothers killed and killed the Wolf, but there would always be more of his kind, scavengers looking for a taste of blood. The city had broken me. It had turned me into a murderer, a criminal, a parasite on society. I couldn’t even stand to look at myself in the mirror.
So I fled.
I took all the blood money I’d accumulated and left the city. I bought a small brick house out in the country and found a girl who didn’t mind when I got quiet and stared off into space, thinking about the old times. It was a good life.
But every once in a while, in the dark of night, when the wind would blow through the rafters of the attic, I’d think I heard footsteps and a voice crying, “Little pig, little pig, you owe me.” And now, as an old boar with nothing to occupy his days, I think I hear that voice calling to me more and more.
I know it’s all in my head. The Wolf is dead, and I killed him. It still scares the bejeezus out of me.
So if you’ve got your heart set on going to the city, kid, go. You can find success there, even though hopefully, you travel a more honorable path than I did. Just remember this one thing:
Beware the wolf inside your heart.