Marcia Joan Lewis/Vectors
From Unofficial Handbook of the Virtue Universe
Warning: This story contains violence, nastiness, and a highly offensive racial slur.
There is another prison in Paragon City. Less famous than the Zig, it also predates it by several decades. Once it housed all the criminals of the city; after it became clear that special measures were needed for some, and the Ziggursky complex was completed, it was relegated to housing the merely human lawbreakers. Despite their lack of flashy powers and outlandish costumes, these men and women required no less diligent attention, and demanded no less wariness and respect. Some of them even earned nicknames no less colorful than their grander peers.
The one numbered 403818B, they called Crake.
The name's origins had been lost to the collective memory of guards and inmates, although an agglutination of "crane" and "snake" seemed likely. Certainly she bore resemblance to both: tall, thin, hunched and awkward as the great bird, possessed of a hypnotically fixed, serpentine stare. "Crank" and "rake" could also have been contributors, and there was indeed something about her that suggested a tightly wound ratchet or a scraping tool.
In any case, the name survived its own formation and was now tightly affixed to the pale, spindly, taciturn woman. It was used by the inmates, furtively, and more openly by the guards - although never to her face. And it was used often in conversation, because there was often something to be said about Crake - if not facts then plentiful rumors. The story, for instance, of her sentence - said to stretch into the hundreds, perhaps even thousands of years, due to innumerable and lurid crimes. The story of her arrest, which was believed to have come at the end of a firefight involving (variously) three to ten SWAT teams, a high-speed chase, a tank "borrowed" from the National Guard, and possibly a cape or two. The story of her missing right eye, of which endless permutations fought for dominance.
The guards had no need for such rumors, having access to her file. Instead, they shared stories of her behavior under their auspices: her keen eye for opportunity, her deceptively lethargic movements, her arbitrary and unexpected viciousness. No guard dared deal with her without the backing of at least four of his peers, and a thick and ever-expanding binder detailed the minutiae of safely and correctly dealing with her - knowledge paid for in bruises, blood, and stitches.
Among the many rules was this: if you wanted an inmate to live, you did not make her Crake's cellmate. Nobody knew how she did it, but every woman unfortunate enough to share Crake's state-issued accommodations would eventually be found dead, apparently by their own hand. Some hung themselves with their uniforms, some slit their wrists with bits of sharp metal pried off their cots. One had drowned herself in the toilet, and one memorable case had dashed her own brains out against the wall. When the guards entered to restrain Crake and retrieve the corpse, they invariably found her sitting hunched over in her top bunk, staring coldly at the mortal remains with a look that might be satisfaction and might be disdain and might be no human emotion at all.
The inevitable corollary, that if you wanted to dispose of a troublesome inmate, you might effect this by placing her with Crake - this was never written, never spoken, but implicitly understood and occasionally exploited. One such case was that of 785345Q - Chantelle Cooke.
Ms. Cooke was not the same kind of kernel for rumor that Crake was, not because she made a less striking impression, but because unlike Crake she was more than willing to tell her own story in her own words to anyone who was willing to listen, and indeed anyone at all. Big, heavyset, and black, she quickly gained a reputation as a brawler, an arguer, a troublemaker, and a seed of agitation and riot. As she had outside of prison, she brought those around her into line with her wishes with a combination of promises of reward and threats of harm - both of which she was amply capable of delivering on. As the weeks of her sentence wore on, and she showed no signs of aligning herself with the order of things, the guards entered into a silent, implicit pact to do away with her.
Prisons being tightly packed echo chambers, it did not take long for news of the impending collision to reach every inmate in the facility. Cooke v. Crake became the hot topic of discussion. The population split on the question of who, if anyone, would survive, with some laying wagers on how long Cooke would last against Crake's legendary "suicide field", and others insisting that it would be Cooke who would defeat Crake as she had defeated the lesser thugs and bullies of the institution. Cooke for her part engaged freely in Ali-esque banter and braggadocio whenever the subject came up; Crake kept her customary silence and did not even betray any knowledge of the coming meeting.
And so on the day of the transfer, the population held its collective breath as Cooke was retrieved, manacled, searched, and marched down the oppressive halls to Crake's domain. Cooke made the trip in high style, with a vicious grin on her face, flashing signs to her various supporters as she passed. Upon their arrival, Crake was, as usual, folded up into the small space between the upper bunk and the ceiling. In her usual slow and awkward fashion, she climbed down to the door and presented her wrists for shackling, as was required by both official and learned procedure prior to opening her cell. With this accomplished, she retreated to the center of the room as the door opened and Cooke was introduced. The door closed behind her, and each in turn had their shackles removed. The guards made their exit.
The two women, left alone in their newly shared cell, stood and stared at each other - Cooke with a defiant sneer, Crake with a blank and almost vacant expression. As the seconds ticked by, the silence grew more and more oppressive. Cooke in particular was unused to such a silence, riding as she did on a constant wave of blustering verbiage. Just at the moment when Cooke feared she would have to break first and say something, anything, to bring things back into more familiar territory - Crake unfolded her arms and stuck her open right hand out and down in a ridiculous parody of the "shake" gesture. With her eyebrows high and a dopey grin stretching her thin lips, she spoke in an exaggeratedly cheerful lilt.
"What's up, my nigger?"
The warden was a numbers man. It was a necessity of his job - he was given a certain number of humans, a certain number of dollars, and a mandate to keep the former alive and securely contained using a minimum of the latter. Thus his eye skipped across the words of the incident report, catching the relevant numbers: seven guards to pull Cooke and Crake apart, four of whom would be taking leave for treatment of injuries for a total of one hundred and sixty man hours over the next two weeks; four thousand seven hundred dollars in repairs, including twenty three hundred dollars in flood damage when the toilet had been snapped off the wall and water had poured out of the broken pipe; twenty three thousand dollars in medical care for the two inmates, both of whom had somehow survived the altercation, requiring two hundred twenty three and one hundred eighty seven stitches respectively to close their wounds. That the treating physicians had noted that each woman had bled profusely into the wounds of the other, and that any blood-borne pathogens had therefore almost surely been transmitted from each to the other, he noted only as it pertained to the possibility of an expensive lawsuit from family members if either had managed to infect the other with some horrible disease. The warden was therefore relieved to discover that neither inmate had any living relatives who cared enough about their well-being to file such a lawsuit.
In the aftermath of the battle, Cooke and Crake spent ten weeks in the prison hospital recovering from their injuries. Five weeks after her return to the general population, Crake collapsed into her creamed corn and was pronounced dead on the scene of a massive stroke. A subsequent autopsy, required by the state in such cases, discovered that in addition to the stroke Crake was also suffering from a large tumor of the right forebrain, which had gone embarrassingly undetected in previous screenings and which may have contributed to her untimely death. Had this occurred under other circumstances, a civil suit may well have been brought against the prison, but the warden was once again saved this trouble by the absence of persons interested in Crake's fate. As for Cooke, her behavior improved remarkably after the incident. In this light, it was decided not to add time for the assault on Crake to her sentence, and she was duly released after five years of uneventful imprisonment.
Her current whereabouts are unknown.
There were those veteran fighters of whom it might be said that their face looked like it had taken a few punches. Of Magrid Danforth, it was said that her face looked like it had been used to smash knuckles - and, in fact, this impression was entirely correct. Although the more popular bloodsports in the Rogue Isles were the exclusive province of the metahuman gladiators who flocked to their death or glory at the decadent Giza complex, there existed an audience for - and a circuit of - ordinary human beings who stepped into an enclosure and proceeded to beat the living shit out of each other. And on this circuit, Magrid was, if not the champion, then by far the most feared combatant.
Her sheer bloody-minded destructiveness, in fact, kept her from the highest levels of competition. No sane manager would pit a prized and talented fighter against Magrid the Crippler - win or lose, she was almost guaranteed to inflict debilitating and costly injuries. However, she did not lack for matches - there was no shortage of deluded young fools who saw a fast track to glory through Magrid, and no venue would refuse to host such a duel and collect a tidy profit from the spectators eager to watch Magrid transform such a young fool into an ugly mess. Whether these matches satisfied Magrid's competitive instincts was anyone's guess, but they kept food on the table.
It was just after such a demolition that Magrid Danforth met Chantelle Cooke for the first and last time. Lounging in an overstuffed leather chair and surrounded by her peculiar fans, Danforth was performing her customary post-match ritual: alternately drinking from and holding to her bruises a bottle of beer with one hand, while signing autographs with the other. On this particular occasion she was also carefully picking fragments of her opponent's teeth from her shin - her signature Jawbreaker Roundhouse having gone slightly awry - when Cooke stepped forward from the crowd and, inadvertently, into her light.
Magrid began to mumble a dire threat, entirely by reflex, as she looked up to see who had so inconvenienced her. The threat trailed out to nothing as she caught Cooke's eye. What she saw there, perhaps not even she could say. A lifetime of facing every variation of humanity in bitter combat had, perhaps, given her some unconscious skill in measuring people at a glance. Whatever the reason, Magrid did not lash out at the intruder, and when Cooke offered her hand, she took it with a crooked grin on her crooked face.
Their exchange was brief - Cooke congratulated Danforth on her victory, and Magrid accepted the compliment - but when their hands parted, Magrid tucked something into her pocket. Cooke retired to the bar, and an hour or so later, after the crowds had dispersed, Danforth joined her. They were soon engaged in intense conversation, of which very little was overheard. Eventually, however, they came to some kind of agreement. They shook hands a second time, and Cooke made her exit. Before she left, however, Danforth called after her:
"So, when does it happen?"
To which Cooke replied:
"An hour ago, when I shook your hand."
Onlookers who reported this exchange and its aftermath to their associates after the fact were generally disbelieved on this point, but they all swear that at this Magrid Danforth stared at her own palm, apparently in astonishment - then broke into a raucous laughter which lasted several minutes. She was still snickering sporadically when she made her own exit, along with her entourage.
It is generally agreed that Danforth proceeded to her residence, and that the last confirmed sighting of her occurred at that residence, by her manager as he left her there. When she failed to appear for training the next morning, an increasingly wide-ranging search for her was conducted, to no avail. This being the Rogue Isles, foul play was immediately suspected, but all available evidence indicates that she simply walked away from her home and possessions, never to return.
The persistent rumors that the metahuman gladiator known as the Black Crippler is actually Magrid Danforth have, of course, been repeatedly and thoroughly debunked.
The most horrible thing about the dealer was that there was nothing at all horrible about him.
One wanted to see something in his appearance, in his dress, in his manner which revealed him to be the sort of human being who buys and sells other human beings. In fact, he looked like a well-fed former frat brother. He wore a mid-priced, slightly ill-fitting suit. And he conducted himself as if he were trading used cars or furniture, rather than lives.
The tableau, for all its banal horror, would have been more comprehensible had the woman sitting before his bland Swedish-designed desk been sitting behind it instead. Clad in austere, black, and ridiculously expensive winterwear, she silently radiated hatred as she paged through a catalog of pictures and data sheets. The salesman understood the message but chose, as salesmen do, to ignore it in favor of providing a running commentary as his customer perused his wares.
"Hm, yeah, you're getting to the eastern Europeans now - healthy, good bone structure, not so good with English. That can be handy, though, depending on what you're looking for. We've got a glut in the market on those recently, so I can give you a good price. They're going to be pretty raw, though - we haven't had a lot of time to process them, so don't be expecting a lot right away. Now, if you're interested in a product who's already, ah, prepared, well, depending on your specific requirements we can put together a plan that'll get you what you need.
"If you'll note the tabs on the side, ah, yes, there, the right side, you can see where we've gone ahead and pre-trained some products with some, ah, skill sets that we tend to find our customers are interested in. Then again, we're also aware that some customers prefer products who have, ah, some resistance to training - you'll find those separated out into the fourth tab there, and we have those broken down into the incompetents, who have, ah, some trouble picking up skills, and the resistors, who refuse to learn due to personality conflicts, and then, ah, there's a third category who fail to comply because they prefer negative reinforcement... ah, so you're interested in the resistor category?
"We have a fair number of these, and, ah, I think you'll be pleased to note that we take care to identify these products relatively early in the process and thereby minimize damage from negative reinforcement so that customers get a relatively fresh canvas to work with, you know, as it were.
"Now, the one you're looking at there, that product has a particularly interesting history, as I think you can tell from the file. She actually came to us from some of our associates in the high-risk loan industry - it seems she was turned over as an asset by one of their debtors as part of a repayment plan, and they passed her on to us. Now we originally flagged her for an advanced training course right off the bat, as, ah, she'd already had some service experience - but, you can see in the file there, she had some attitude issues and the training stalled out, so we moved her into the resistor category. So, ah, what you'd be getting there is really something of a two-for-one deal depending on how you look at it, because she has the skill set of one of our trained products, but, ah, you're going to also be dealing with a certain degree of resistance initially, we'd guess. Not a product for every customer, but, ah, might be right for you... yes?
"All right. We'll just get the paperwork sorted out quick, and if you have somebody we can transfer custody of her to we can get her under your control by the end of the business day. So let me just go grab the papers for her here - and sign here, and here, and initial here - and authorize the wire transfer by entering your password on the pad, please - congratulations, you are now the proud owner of a Lucy Edwards."
The dealer offered his hand and smiled, but the woman merely brushed her fingers against it before rising from her chair and sweeping out of the room. The salesman was left leaning against his desk, arm out, like a toppled wooden Indian. A single drop of blood fell from his hand onto the still-open catalog, splashing on the photograph of Lucy Edwards and blotting out her right eye.
On Monday he had a bit of a headache. He took aspirin and turned in early.
On Tuesday the headache had not improved, and he felt a bit under the weather. He made it in to the office, but his heart wasn't in it and he left early.
On Wednesday he called in sick. He considered calling the doctor, but assumed it would pass in a few days. He stayed in bed and drank chicken broth. It tasted odd.
On Thursday he was significantly worse. He didn't realize by how much until he tried to reach for the phone, and his arm didn't move. Nothing moved below his neck. His headache was blinding, and he could see that his limbs were swollen and red. He stared at the ceiling and hoped somebody would come by to check on him. Nobody did.
On Friday he woke to a horrible smell and realized it was himself. He couldn't even lift his head - just roll his eyes inside their dry sockets. His skin felt like it was on fire. His chest was being crushed by a heavy weight, and every breath was a struggle. In the afternoon, his vision went black in his right eye. Something wet and sticky ran down the right side of his face.
On Saturday the headache was much better, and the pain in his skin was gone. His arm was even moving, flopping back and forth on the bed. But it wasn't him moving the arm - it was convulsing by itself, and he could not direct it. Soon his other limbs joined in. Eventually, his left arm flopped into view. It was gray and green, and the skin was sloughing off. It stank like a corpse. He screamed, but his mouth did not move. The convulsions continued through the night.
On Sunday morning, his limbs stopped twitching. For an hour or so he lay still, just breathing, a prisoner in his own body. Then his left hand reached across and took his right hand - and pulled. The skin of the hand pulled away in ragged chunks like a rotten glove, dribbling black blood. Underneath the swollen, dead hand was another hand: smaller, black-coated, thin-fingered, taloned.
That new right hand tore away the skin on his left hand to reveal a similar new left hand. The two hands took turns shredding away the skin on his arms, pulling them away like jacket sleeves to reveal his new, slender, black-stained arms. Then the two hands reached for his throat. Something was pulled up over his face - he realized that it was the skin of his old face, and that some new face must be underneath. Then the hands reached down again, and ran from his neck to his waist, just like unzipping a jacket. And the creature that had been growing inside his body, as it imprisoned him inside his own mind, pulled itself free of his husk as easily as shedding a jumpsuit.
He screamed, and screamed, and screamed, silently, uselessly, as the creature rose out of the rotting filth that had been him, sat up, turned, placed tender new feet on the floor, and padded carefully, unsteadily, toward the bathroom. He threw every ounce of the strength he no longer controlled into working the muscles of his left eyelid, struggling to close it before he would be forced to see his new face - but it was no use, and he stared out, through the eye that was no longer his eye, into the eye that was no longer his eye, in the face that was no longer his face, upon the body that was no longer his body.
The last thought he had, that was anything besides a scream, was that she looked so much like her mother.
They found her rooting through the garbage.
"Nothing", she said, and they all knew it was a lie.
"Sally", she said, and that was a lie too, although it didn't matter.
"Fifteen", she said, but they could tell that she wasn't more than twelve.
"Ain't got any", she said, and that was true.
They took her in, the four of them: the dark heavy one and the rough tall one and the quiet pale one and the clumsy one with pink baby skin. They stripped her and cleaned her and clothed her and fed her. They did not speak because they did not need to. Everybody knew there would be a price. She knew, but she did not care. When they came with the needle, she did not run, or struggle, or cry. She did not even flinch.
The next morning, there were five of them.
