Fredrich Antione Zauberer was a busy man. He had his various companies to run, his charitable organizations, social engagements with his wife, events at his children’s school, politicians to visit who owed him favors or vice versa, fellow business leaders with whom to broker deals, and surprise inspections of his sundry construction projects around town. Rex found it a wonder that the man even had the energy to meet his mistress for dinner and drinks after such a busy schedule, let alone take her to a five-star hotel for a brief tryst only to leave her slumbering amid satin sheets and champagne bottles while he headed off to the illegal casinos and brothels of the city’s west side.
Rex had developed a deep and abiding taste for vice and the pleasures of the flesh over the years, but he was finding the edge of his appetites dulled by middle-age. Fred Zauberer apparently suffered no such loss. The fiftyish tycoon traveled from one dive to another in a Mercedes limo, gambling with a tall drink in his hand at all times. Before leaving each location, took at least one young lady upstairs for a few minutes or into the alley behind the building for a few seconds. At midnight, he reached the smallest club so far, in the most desolate neighborhood of all.
The building itself was shuttered and boarded up. The front doors had been covered with an immense sheet of plywood, and a makeshift door had been cut into that complete with a little sliding plywood panel so the doorman could see who was knocking. Limos lined both sides of the street and wrapped around the block, while drivers and bodyguards milled around smoking cigarettes and reading the racing form by streetlight. Based on the number of cars, either the rich swells of Archway City were packed in shoulder-to-shoulder like Scottish soccer hooligans or the building had subterranean levels not evident from the exterior.
Rex had to suppress the urge to draw the brass twelve-gauge Navy flare pistol from his shoulder rig and use it to light the gas tank of the first car, thus turning the whole line into the world’s biggest string of Mexican firecrackers. He had hardly ever met a person of immense wealth who was worth knowing, and this impression was reinforced time and again by the proliferation of millionaires associated with organized crime operations. Working men's money may have been the life blood of the mob's operations, but it was these oligarchs that allowed those operations to continue unmolested by the law. They also ensured that the mob's activities remained illegal and hence more profitable (their only significant failure being the repeal of Prohibition), and that the poor remained addicted or at least irresistibly drawn to those same activities. They made all of life into a rigged game in which there were the written rules, and the unwritten rules, and then another set of rules for the people running the game.
Easy now, Rex told himself. He had come for information, not class warfare. It looked like it was time for some real superhuman power, but first Rex checked his “conventional” weapons. The front door would be heavily guarded, possibly even armored against direct assault, and there were no exposed windows. The rear entrance (and there would have to be one, for employees and deliveries) would have a lighter guard, possibly even an unlocked door; he could bypass it with a minimum of fuss and try to blend in with the crowd or the hired help. He might even make it in under false pretense without confrontation, if he slipped a little cash across the right palms.
That would be the path of least resistance, Rex thought. That would be the plan with the least risk to himself and the surrounding neighborhood, the least risk of injury or capture by the underworld. There were also those less-than-honest representatives of the authorities who would gladly call the forces of the law down on him. He could just as easily get himself arrested as shot. His contacts on the force had mostly dried up over the years; he knew a couple of beat cops and an old detective who had left the streets for the archives office. Who knew if he'd even survive the trip to lockup, depending on which officers picked him up; he'd be no better off with the cops than the mob's bully boys. This wasn't the old days, after all. A masked marvel couldn't just burst through the door wherever and whenever he pleased inflicting ice-cold terror into the hearts of evildoers. Prohibition was over, the bank robber gangs of the Depression were gone, and even the mighty Axis powers were fallen.
Rex himself wasn't even the same man who had left for the war; a Nazi doctor had seen to that by sewing a dead man's left arm in place of Rex's (blown off by a landmine) under the instructions to restore him to full health before interrogation. The arm had become like a natural part of him despite the ugly purple scars from the ragged twine stitches that had originally held it in place. He often wondered about the man to whom the arm had originally belonged, supposedly just another prisoner of war who had died of the privations of imprisonment. Rex flexed the arm's muscles as he considered his position, his approach of the casino. The complexion of the skin had eventually come to match his own closely enough the no one else could tell the difference, although it had been cadaverously pale and clammy for the first few months. It had also been prone to uncontrollably clench its fist at seemingly random moments, which Rex eventually traced to the proximity of calliope music and subsequently overcame.
Besides, it was impossible to be a masked marvel without the mask and he had given his up while overseas. There hadn't seemed a point to it thousands of miles from home, on a battlefield or behind enemy lines. Upon returning home and finding that his years of combat and intrigue had left him with no friends or private life waiting for him, hiding his face and identity seemed contrived at best. With his hood to add that air of mystery to his bare face, and most of his waking hours spent after dark he found that the effect was more or less the same. Now, however as he sat in the dark and looked at the long line of limos up and down the street, outside of a building full of very unafraid evildoers, a building that he was thinking of entering through the rear or possibly by bribery...
The Reaper pulled off one of his gloves and reached down behind him. Nosheratu had been parked long enough for the tailpipes to cool and he ran his fingertip around the inside of the end of the pipe, collecting soot. Closing his eyes, he blackened his eyelids and then painted dark circles from his brow to his cheekbones, like empty sockets in his face. Slowing his breathing and pulse he used a yogic technique to control the blood flow to his face, rendering it almost corpse-white behind the soot mask. Checking himself in one of the motorcycle's mirrors, he saw a familiar death's head.
“Maybe just this once, for old time's sake,” he said.
The sliding panel in the door opened at his knock. Before the doorman could ask him his business, The Reaper locked eyes with him and seized his mind. It was a trick that Rex had almost forgotten how to do properly, like holding a bar of wet soap in your hands: you had to do it very carefully, or it would slip away.
“Unlock and open this door,” The Reaper said in a horrific monotone. The doorman obeyed, his face paralyzed with shock at the fact that he could not stop himself, could not even cry out in warning. Slowly and with great difficulty, Rex extracted a sterling silver straight razor from his coat and placed it at the doorman's throat. Letting out the breath he'd been holding under the strain of gripping another mind, Rex released his hold on the man. The razor's cold edge and the look in The Reaper's eyes kept the man silent. Then Rex smashed him in the temple with the butt of the .45 automatic in his other hand.
The entry hall was empty except for the doorman; two sentries just beyond the next doorway were supposed to keep an eye out for trouble. Accustomed as they were to the steady traffic of people all night, they were off their guard until they heard the impact of steel on human bone. By then, of course, it was too late. The Reaper spoke to them through the bark of a pistol report and the ring of shell casings on the floor; they were fodder, there to do no more than stoke his rage for those who followed them, those they protected. The Reaper did not wait for the inevitable wave of guards to pour out through the doors, but instead stepped to the doors and kicked them wide open.
Relying where he could on his razor and a Marine Corps fighting knife, The Reaper spared his ammunition. His own knuckles, his fingertips, and the callused edges of his hands accounted for several men's lives. Any who came within reach risked their windpipes being crushed, their spines snapped, or their sternums split by leaden blows. No elevators served the lower levels of the building. Instead, a series of doors and corridors acted like locks on a canal to control ingress to the building itself; once past these and the attending brute squad guarding them, the hallway open up and curved around to the top of an immense and theatrical grand staircase to the casino floor. The various layers of the building and Rex's conservative shooting style had caused little enough noise that no one in the casino proper had been alerted to his presence.
An assistant DA and a mayor's aide, each accompanied by very expensive call girls looked up at the same time to see a man at the top of the marble staircase with one bloody hand resting on the gleaming brass handrail. The Reaper's hood was thrown back defiantly, and his eyes swam in black pools on the bloodied white wasteland of his grinning face. One of the call girls started a scream that set the whole room in motion. Rex's eyes had already taken in the crowd and picked out who looked armed, and of those which ones seemed alert. Of his top two candidates for first to draw, the winner was a burly fellow in a black suit and crew cut. The bruiser almost had his gun all the way out of his shoulder holster when The Reaper made an example of him and silenced the room. An immense .577 caliber British Tranter revolver, known as a “tiger-stopper” thundered in The Reaper's grasp. The bruiser lost his gun hand at the wrist before the bullet continued into his heart and then exploded. His hand, still gripping his weapon, pinwheeled through the air amidst a truly apocalyptic splatter of blood and gore.
Rex's flare gun appeared in his other hand and put a payload of flaming magnesium and phosphorous into the open mouth of the next man to reach for a weapon. He fell to the ground, trying to scream in the brief seconds before his brain was cooked to death. The flare gun went back on the shoulder harness, replaced by a second Tranter.
“There will be no more foolishness tonight,” The Reaper commanded. “Most of you know who I am and what I am called. Apparently in the years since myself and others like me first appeared, you have all become quite reckless. This sort of gathering would never have been tolerated.”
“Who do you think..!?” said a Taiwanese shipping magnate and opium warlord, before an explosive bullet sprayed his brains across the crowd.
“NO... more... foolishness,” The Reaper intoned. “You're all very lucky tonight. I'm only here after one of you, although I'm more than happy to dispatch as many as would care to volunteer.” He gestured towards the corpses with a massive, smoking gun. “Like your colleagues there. Bring me Fred Zauberer and I shall leave you all in peace to lick your wounds and plot your revenge.” His eyes scanned the room again, steadily from one side to the other. The guns trailed whisps of cordite smoke as the muzzles tracked back and forth with his vision. He opened his mind to the tidal bore of surface thoughts in the room and tuned his vision upwards until auras and chakras became visible to him. It was a suffocating torrent of information all at once, but he stood against the flood and searched for clues. He felt the threads of time tickle his skin with pinpricks as the immediate future became the present, over and over and over again with each second that passed.
The Reaper saw and heard and felt all of these things. He read lips at random as people around the room tried to whisper to each other. He watched pulses race, not only in the throbbing flesh at the base of throats, but in the flashing red tinge of spiritual luminescence around people's bodies. He was open to the physical and the spirit world at once, all of his senses opened to the point that he was like a single, living exposed nerve. Then guilt, recognition, and accusation flared dark purple and black and ultraviolet from somewhere near the back of the room. The Reaper quickly reviewed visions of the coming events of the next several fractions of a second and saw no one attempt to attack him yet.
“There!” he said, gesturing towards the psychic disturbance. “He's back there! Send him to me now, or I'll burn this building and douse the flames with all of your blood!” Zauberer was pushed and pulled forward by the crowd. A slender girl in a revealing evening gown was plucked from his grasp, but he maintained his hold on his martini glass. By the time he was forced to the base of the stairs, his hair and clothes were disarrayed by the process.
“I don't know who you think you are...” Zuberer began. Rex closed his senses, even at the risk of being caught by surprise; the man's hostility was blinding and deafening at those enhanced levels. He took a deep breath while Fred Zauberer was still in mid-sentence, fixed his gaze and reached out with his mind. With the added fatigue and a sharper mind thrown into the bargain, the trick was even harder. He held Zauberer's conscious mind just tightly enough to stop him talking, but let it swirl madly otherwise. Instead, Rex focused his thoughts on Fred's spine and marched him up the stairs like a marionette with hemorrhoids. Knowing he could barely maintain control and certainly couldn't be seen showing weakness before the crowd, Rex brought Zauberer within arm's reach and pistol-whipped him unconscious just as he had with the doorman.
Most of the assemblage turned their backs or pretended to look somewhere else as The Reaper holstered his weapons and picked up the comatose body at his feet. When they looked back he was gone. A few circles of conversation formed around the idea of retaliation, but quite a few others formed around thoughts of early retirement.
