57’ 50' W; 38° 34’ 30' N City:
Los Gatos, California
The graphic window displayed a map of the area. Los Gatos was just south of San Jose.
“Half an hour from here,” Rock said. “Should we check it out?”
“Where’s Cap?” Leila asked, reaching past Flash to change screens on the terminal. He slapped her wrist away lightly.
“I’ve already tried. He’s undercover and switched off the homer. We’re on our own.”
Leila looked at Rock with a grim expression. “Scramble the jets.”
Chapter Three
Proselytizer
The grizzled old man shuffled along the smog-drenched boulevard, muttering to himself and the world at large. His tattered tweed jacket hung loosely over faded and worn-through denim jeans, held up by a length of dirty clothesline. A torn and repulsively-stained shirt that had at one time been white oxford cloth fitted him poorly. Running shoes—no doubt pulled from a trash bin—slid along the crumbling pavement on feet without socks. Salt and pepper matted greying hair stuck out from under a grimy baseball cap worn backward on his head. A beard crusted with a week’s worth of soup-kitchen overflow looked as stiff as steel wool. His face bore the scars of years of neglect and unremitting exposure to the elements.
The most striking feature about the man was his nose. Bright red and scabby, it seemed to spread over nearly half his face. Pitted, large-pored, and covered with broken capillaries, it had obviously been the recipient of too much sun, too much liquor, and too many fists.
He dragged his feet in a scuffing manner as he pushed the shopping cart full of dirty beer cans and squashed plastic bottles. He stank, but his cargo stank worse. A hideous liquid dribbled continuously from the mess to leave a dotted trail on the sidewalk.
“Damn’ foreign investors,” he muttered loudly. “Damn’ greenmailin’ leveraged buyoutin’ bank slimeballs!” He ambled slowly toward the corner where a young man stood handing out pamphlets.
“Stinkin’ banksters stole my job!” he cried to the pamphleteer.
The young man, dressed in tan slacks and white long-sleeved business shirt, glanced at the street dweller with a short look of contempt, then
turned his attention to other passersby. The little booklets he handed out were printed on crisp white paper with red and black illustrations on the cover.
The bum stopped his shopping cart in front of the man. “Gimme one,” he said, looking everywhere but directly at the man he addressed.
The proselytizer—short haired, clean, and trim—gazed again at the scrungy piece of scarcely human debris before him. “Butt out,” he said sharply in a voice higher than one might expect. He cleared his throat and it lowered an octave. “Get lost.”
“Gimme one!” The old man reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a thick wad of grimy, crumpled bills. Peeling a single off slowly, he offered it to the younger man. “Fer a donation?”
It being the first proffer of money he had received all morning, the young man swapped a pamphlet for the dollar. It stuck to the old man’s fingers for a second. The other gingerly slid it into his pocket, then wiped his hand against his pants before passing his propaganda to the bum. He eyed the wad of money as it disappeared back into the stained tweed jacket.
“Thankee, boy,” the geezer said, then stopped to gaze at the cover. It read
The Banker’s Conspiracy to Loot America!How Easy Credit Enslaves Us AH. And What YOU Can Do To Fight Back!
“Banksters!” he cried out. “Banksters stole my job!”
The young man feigned sudden interest. “Did they? Why, they stole mine, too, sir.” His eyes glanced unconsciously at the man’s money pocket. “Others like us have banded together to battle them. To restore our country’s former glory.”
The derelict turned the pamphlet over to read the address on the back. “The Order of the Lance and Falcon,” he muttered. “They accept donations?”
“Always,” the young man quickly offered.
“They need people?”
“Always,” he said again, a little warily.
“To hand out this stuff?”
“There is all manner of work to be done.”
“Okay,” the old man said. “Thankee.” He started to wheel his squeaky shopping cart away.
A moment of quick thought and the young man swallowed his initial disgust. “Wait, sir. Perhaps you’d like to hear more about us?”
Hundreds of miles north, Detective R. J. Fleming stood impatiently in front of the news cameras.
“We don’t know. The EPA is running a check on the substance.” He turned away from one reporter to face the question of another. They clustered about him in front of the police line cordoning off the abandoned diner.
“What about the second man?”
“He’s resting comf—”
An officer shouted to the detective. Fleming turned and strode over to the paramedic van. A line of police kept the reporters behind the barriers.
“Hey! Come back! What’s happening to him?”
Fleming stood beside the horrified paramedics. “Didn’t I tell you to cut off his arm?” he shouted.
The construction worker jerked about in agony as he watched his arm liquefy into a silvery, mercurial rivulet running down the brace on which it had been elevated. Then the brace collapsed as if eaten away by acid.
There were no fumes, though, just the surrealistic appearance of metal melting in the warm California sun. The liquid splashed against his torso and ran over his waist and leg. They were eaten away layer by layer, exposing flesh, muscle, and finally bone. The man screamed until his chest cavity opened up under the relentless assault. A rattling hiss of air escaped from the hole, then silence, followed by the sloshing sound of his body dropping into the pool of death.
The paramedics stepped back from the dying man, staring in gape-mouthed horror at the scene. The glistening puddle spread rapidly across the floor of the van, eating into the metal with ease.
“Get out of there!” Fleming cried at the driver. “Everybody get back!”
The hazardous material team rushed to the van in their white, baggy outfits. One of them dumped a sack full of acid-neutralizing
super-absorbent granules on the dissolving body. The pile disappeared almost instantly.
“All right!” the detective shouted. “Now we have two danger zones!” He turned to the paramedics. “Get your clothes off and throw them into the van. We’ve got to quarantine the block.” He looked at the HazMat team. “The whole block, right?”
One of them nodded, then the other said through the muffling barrier of her breathing mask, “We’d better
