PRIDE OF THE PULPS
By Phil Bledsoe
The silent alarm had been intercepted by the microcircuit switchboard hidden in the wall of Chad’s apartment. Chad Taylor set down his glass of orange juice and stepped to the secret panel where he kept his uniform and weapons. The champion biathlete had taken to the habit of relaxing in the nude to more readily suit up for action. His smooth, well-muscled body slid into the form-fitting jumpsuit, his feet into hover boots, and the 360-degree radar helmet sealed itself to his head. The microwave pulse gun whirred as its battery charged from the electromagnetic plate on his back, and the miniature ramjets in his hand-held thrusters hissed as he primed them.
In seconds, Chad was “skiing” on waves of compressed air from his boots and prodding the air with ramjet “ski poles” as he raced towards the scene of another bank robbery. Ideally, he wanted to arrive ahead of the police, but it would look even better for him if the police were already in pursuit of a getaway car and he passed them at two-hundred miles per hour. Soft pings of warning sounded in his headphones as his helmet’s radar bounced off of nearby objects. The bank loomed up ahead, a towering concrete edifice built by the city fathers under the auspices of the WPA during the war.
“Damn it anyway,” Chad whispered, seeing the robbers exiting the building in a confused retreat. They were amateurs, dropping bags of money and firing wild pistol shots as they ran for a car too far from the door. A confrontation inside the building would have been good enough for Chad’s crime-fighting reputation. A high-speed chase would be better, as he could showcase his acceleration and maneuverability while ending the pursuit at will with a few well-placed microwave pulse shots to disable the vehicle and destroy the robbers’ weapons. A standoff in the parking lot allowed for little to no use of his speed (who wants to see the valiant hero rapidly circling a frightened cluster of felons?), and close-range shooting not only failed to demonstrate his marksmanship, it put him at greater risk.
One man’s ski-masked face swiveled towards The Biathlete and went goggle-eyed.
“Boys! We got trouble! BIG trouble!” he announced. Chad smiled to himself and went into a lower stance to increase his speed and lower his profile as a target for bullets. His suit could repel a certain amount of small arms fire, but not without a lot of pain and bruising and making him very un-photogenic for the newspapers. A quick three-hundred-miles-per sprint brought him close enough to touch them before they could fire, and a carefully triggered spurt of fire from a ramjet disarmed and discouraged two of the five men.
Momentum carried Chad far past the robbers, who were now running around in panic. Their getaway vehicle was forgotten in the heat of the moment. Almost a quarter-mile away, Chad made a hairpin turn that he swore made his stomach rub against his spine. He decelerated as he neared the bank’s parking lot again. His ramjet thrusters dropped from his hands and locked themselves into magnetic clamps on his wrist-bands.
“Time to shine, Chadwick,” he told himself. His right hand grasped the textured plastic handle protruding just above his shoulder and pulled his pulse gun loose. The charge in the batteries warmed his fingers to the point of sweating uncomfortably as the spidery wire stock extended into position. He skidded to a halt (if you can call halting yourself mid-air with a blast of wind “skidding”), braced the stock into the hollow of his shoulder and put his face to the collapsible cheek-plate to aim. He was at least fifty yards away, hardly the perfect distance to issue verbal challenges, but his banter was really more for the benefit of the viewing public than to actually warn the perpetrators of imminent death. Chad was sharply aware of the total absence of onlookers as his right eye peered through the peep sight and he took a theatrical breath to steady his aim and project his booming baritone voice.
“Surrender, criminal scum!” The Biathlete demanded. “My aim is more than precise enough to kill every last one of you before you can squeeze off a single round! Throw yourself on the mercy of the courts and I’ll see to it that you receive lenient treatment!” Actually, his relationship with the authorities wasn’t quite good enough to keep that promise, but it certainly helped keep the perps in line most of the time. In truth, most cops and judges would gladly see The Biathlete off of the streets of their city if they thought that they could weather the resultant publicity backlash. The voters loved the gravity-defying antics and sharp-shooting vigilantism that former Olympian Chad Taylor had brought to the streets of Archway. War rationing and the privations of the Depression had readied people for a bright, new era of peace and perfection. A man who moved in clean lines of speed and shot down the enemies of society where they stood was perfectly placed to win the hearts of John Q. Public and family.
At the very least, Chad thought, a couple clean kills in this case should be worth an “exclusive interview” blowjob from that brunette gossip columnist with the perky ass and the Bettie Page hairdo. Half of a football field away, three armed robbers stood alongside their two colleagues who nursed second- or third-degree burns on their gun hands. One of the burned men was pale and breathing the shallow breaths of one deep in shock. The Biathlete’s space-age weaponry would have been well-suited to the battlefields of Korea, or even covert missions deep inside the Soviet Union, if not the exploration and conquest of space itself. Using it to defeat common bank robbers was like breaking up a heroin ring with a division of tanks.
“Charlie? We didn’t plan on this,” one of the robbers said, fingering his battered Colt automatic. “This guy cooks people to death with that ray gun of his. He cooks them, for no more cause than what we just done in that bank. What’re we gonna’ do?”
“Well, I got the bomb in this brief case,” replied Charlie, the “brains” of the robbery. “But on my best day, I could never chuck it that far. Man, that fucker is confident if he’s gonna’ shoot us from clear back there. What’s he yellin’ about anyhow, Marty?”
“Dunno,” answered Marty, the first man to speak. “Prob’ly wants us to surrender. Think we should?”
“Ain’t no way we can shoot back. Gimme a Springfield rifle an’ maybe – maybe - I could get `im from here. But with a pistol? Or Goose’s scattergun? Forget it. Goose?”
“Huh?”
“Any thoughts here? Suggestions? A man on flying skis is about to burn us with a ray gun from outer space.”
“Well…” Goose ventured. “There’s the carny feller in the car.”
Chad Taylor, The Biathlete, had failed to notice the hunched form in the dark coat in the back seat of the rusty Packard. He hadn’t seen the telltale sheen of sunlight of the bald scalp below the edge of a rummage sale Homburg hat. Charlie, Marty, Goose, and the others hadn’t known why “Curly the Carny” had drifted into their circle of acquaintance. First as a fixture at various floating craps games and poker nights among the formerly incarcerated, then as a messenger and numbers runner who graduated into low-level dope connection. Somehow he had moved from those menial criminal functions into an on-the-job tagalong of sorts. The lower bosses and middlemen had somehow determined that a former carnival barker who had moved up from mesmerism and mentalism, and to there from professional chicken-head-biting geek, was a safe bet to ride along on robberies and protection racket collection runs.
Curly kept a journal of some kind. Everyone assumed it was a log book of the jobs that he supervised, or a ledger of the money collected. What nobody seemed to realize was that the dark, rich buttery leather of the cover was not kidskin or Moroccan leather, but rather the skin off the broad, muscular thigh of a Nigerian gunrunner who had once welshed on a two-dollar bet with Curly over a single roll of the dice. Curly had also made the man’s knuckle bones into a new set of dice, but that was another story for another time. The pages in Curly’s “journal” were papyrus, made from reeds that grew only in certain regions of Egypt, places sacred to a long-lost pre-Pharohnic culture, reeds fertilized in soil rich with nutrients from the bodies of human sacrifices. He only wrote in it using a special quill that extended from an odd gold ring that he wore; no one realized that this was because the ring drew blood from his own finger through a hollow needle into a small reservoir in a hollow inside the false gemstone. No one noticed that Curly only wrote in a strange foreign script, and only after entering some kind of trance in which his eyes rolled back in his head and he whispered to himself incomprehensibly.
Curly was one of the last great black magicians practicing, and his journal was merely a portable notebook for transcribing dark secrets he learned in his frequent, involuntary visions. These notes were later copied into a much larger, more sinister book in the basement of his home. He had gained the gift of these visions by descending into an animal-like state for six years. In this state he had been picked up and caged as a performing freak but upon reawakening as a man he had quickly asserted his ability to manipulate people to his will. His situation had been improving ever since, but from the look of this costumed buffoon with the electronic carbine Curly had a new obstacle in his path to ultimate knowledge and power.
“Freeze!” The Biathlete ordered as he saw the stooped, homely man open the door of the getaway car and step out slowly. The microwave pulse gun swung away from the robbers and towards this new threat. “Don’t move or I’ll burn you down!” An uncharacteristic panic had entered Chad’s voice. Gone was the cool demeanor of the practiced marksman; gone was the polished tone of the professional celebrity. Something about this man froze Chad Taylor’s spinal fluid cold. No one that conspicuously ugly should walk with that kind of confidence, that surety of purpose. A man whose face looked like it was trying to eat itself and getting sick in the process should not grin self-indulgently as he faced down a world-class athlete armed with technology decades ahead of its time.
Chad’s finger cramped as he prepared to squeeze the trigger. The ugly man was raising a book. A small, leather-bound book. Its pages looked very delicate, and the words were in a dark reddish brown ink. Chad knew this because as the man approached him, the book was held open facing outwards towards Chad. I could incinerate that book, Chad thought. As easy as anything I could just turn it into ashes. All I have to do is move my finger.
But I can’t.
Chad’s tendons and muscles, unbeknownst to him, were rapidly approaching a state very much like rigor mortis. Mummification of one still living was a rare and particularly horrific punishment in ancient Egypt, but Curly felt that it was suitable for one so obviously enamored with his own speed of movement. Chad’s skin became dry, almost papery. The process would not have time to be completed, however, because Curly had also infected Chad’s optic nerves with a very nasty breed of carnivorous beetle. As thousands of their eggs burst inside Chad’s eye sockets and the tiny insects devoured his rapidly hardening eyeballs on their way to engulf the rest of his body Curly’s compatriots looked on in disbelief and stark, childlike terror.
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