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Posted by Strega on November 7, 2009, 1:10 pm
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Savage
by Strega
It was The Rat who finally said what everyone was thinking. “But what are we going to do with them?”
Stature, who was still trying to staunch the bleeding from the cuts in his stony hide, replied instantly. “Turn them over to the cops.”
The fires were mostly out. Chill had dropped a thick blanket of frost on the burning factory, then another, and another. By the time the fire engines had showed he had it down to an occasional spurt of flame from the fuel tanks at the back of the building. He was still conferring with the emergency crews, an icy figure glittering in the spotlights. Even from the rooftop a block away they could see him gesture, an animated glass figurine.
Doomknight tilted his head to activate his communicator. The spreading horns on his helmet almost tangled with the spikes protruding from his shoulders, just like always. “Chill, have you told them what caused the fire?”
The whisper of a voice came back on all their communicators. Chill's voice even sounded cold. “I was about to, why?”
“Tell them we don't know how it started.”
“But why...OK.” Chill had heard Doomknight suck in a breath. No one wanted to piss off Doom. He wasn't the most powerful hero out there, perhaps not even the most powerful in the Four, but he was the most intimidating.
The Rat hadn't taken his eyes off the prisoners. They had stripped the power gauntlets off Merc, but the huge augmented muscles in the villain's biceps writhed as he tried to free himself. Sidle was unconscious and would stay that way, a gadget of Doomknight's invention keeping her in a deep REM sleep. Without that she would have melted into the shadows; previously they had tried flares or spotlights, but she could sink even into the puddles of shadow beneath her own feet. A glass cell was the only way, and there wasn't one of those this side of the super-supermax at Denver. A strip of rebar was wrapped around her; Stature had started to tie her up like the others before remembering.
The really dangerous one was the Professor. Thin, in a flamboyant blue and gold costume and eye-hurtingly bright indigo cape, he smiled around his gag. They had learned from hard experience not to let him talk. A dozen strips of rebar wrapped him up, his hands up in front of him as though he was praying. Even without his gadget belt they wanted to be able to see his hands at all times. He was the one Rat was really watching. Sidle was annoying, Merc was dangerous, but the Professor had escaped from jail a twelfth time just last month and it was a minor miracle they had caught him at all. They had expected to next hear about him on CNN as he announced his latest plan to conquer the world. This time they had got him before he built a device to pull down the moon, or some damn thing.
Chill was still gesturing in the distance. A light snow fell even on their rooftop as the iceman pulled moisture out of the air. The smoldering factory turned into a white blur as a blizzard descended on it. The fire chief must have worried about hot spots re-igniting.
“How many people were in that factory when it went up?” Doomknight's voice, pitch-altered and distorted, hissed out of his helmet.
“Maybe a dozen. Some of them got out.” Rat's nose twitched. In this form his nose was as good as a real rat's. He could smell burnt flesh. “Some didn't.” He twisted his left arm forward and back to make sure the tendons and muscle were healed. Merc had almost torn it off, but Weres were hard to kill. His tail was still regenerating, halfway back from a stump. He lost his tail in fights a lot.
“So what are we going to do with them?” Statue had packed brick dust into his wounds. Stopping the bleeding was all he really needed to do; there wasn't that much flesh in his statue of a body.
“What's this week's code to call Savage?”
*****
He lay stretched out on the circular roof of a water tank, peering over the edge while, twenty feet away, the tip of his tail just hung over the opposite rim. Savage was in full tiger form tonight. Orange with black stripes is not suited to city work, so tonight his pelt was a patchwork of grays and browns. The stripes that normally encircled his eyes and ran across his forehead had repositioned themselves into vertical columns, the better to blend in with the skyline should someone catch a glimpse of his face atop the tank.
He was watching a drug deal go down. Small time stuff, just a Mercedes stopped so the driver could talk to the shabby man on the corner. Savage's vision was suited to seeing in the dark, not picking out fine details, but his ears were cupped to pick up every sound. It was not the dealer he wanted. He was waiting for the dealer's boss to show, or for the dealer to head home. Then he would following, slinking along the rooftops, knowing perfectly which would support his ton and a half of muscle. He had been watching this particular corner for three nights, now, and he had a sense that he would learn something useful soon.
His stomach rumbled, but Savage ignored it. He had eaten a nest of rats and a mangy feral dog earlier, but it'd been just a snack. He felt a bit bad about the dog. He knew the homeless man living in the cardboard box two alleys over liked it, but there hadn't been time to stop by the meat packing plant and hope they'd left him a nice barrel of meaty bones. He'd had an understanding with the workers there since he put an end to the protection racket the local gang had set up. Then there was the time the plant foreman had let him know about a drug deal going down in the local playground. In return for such favors he often got fine meals from the plant's leavings. In a sense, he considered, he had his own protection racket going.
Dogs howled, Savage's ear swiveled and he stopped thinking about his stomach. A whine audible only to animals, certain superhumans, and of course him sounded. Three long blasts, then a pause, then two short ones. He waited. Ten seconds later, another long whistle.
The dealer below was still haggling with his mark as Savage stood up. He stood five feet tall at the shoulder in this form, and as he stood he pulled back from the edge of the tank. Movement might attract someone's eye. He had just gotten the asphalt top of the tank nice and warm to lie on, but it couldn't be helped. With an easy leap he cleared the twenty feet to a nearby rooftop, the top of a WW2-era prefabricated concrete warehouse. The trail of his scent was strong in his nostrils as he moved from carefully chosen roof to carefully chosen roof. “His” part of the city was crisscrossed with these trails, the product of years of stalking the criminal element. He could close his eyes and by scent alone navigate through the city, and had, when blinded by supervillains. One time had to do it by hearing alone.
The whistle sounded once more, but he did not need to correct his course. He had smelled the factory fire and assigned it as the most likely location for his fellow heroes.
*****
Chill had joined them and was arguing heatedly with Doomknight. Stature and Rat stayed out of it, keeping their eyes firmly on the Professor and, secondarily, Merc. They listened, though. Doom was talking about breaking the law.
“What else are we going to do with them?” Even set at a low volume, the tech-knight's voice boomed. “The Professor checks in and out of jail like it has a revolving door. You know what he did to Paragon!”
“They'll figure out how to hold him eventually, and what about the other two?” Chill's voice had never risen above the whisper. Rat hasn't sure it could.
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