( continues...) to the face during the Dwarf Invasion of Iceland in 2004. I shave my head ever since half my scalp got burned away during the Second Hell Incursion of 1999. Various other maulings, shootings, stabbings, burnings, etc. have made me, frankly, one stone ugly son of a bitch.
But, as I said, I’m tough and strong; strong enough to heave a sedan about thirty feet. I’m a 12 or 13 on the Evans Scale, which doesn’t put me anywhere near the big 50s up in The Tower, but I can hold my own okay on the mean streets.
So that’s what I did for most of my adult life. Bad guy needed a heavy hand, I provided it. Need a safe yanked out of a wall? Okay. Go toe-to-toe with the Silver Spear or Straight Shooter, I’m your man. Even tangled with Hawkshade once and did okay, though the fucker nerve-gassed me in the end and I ended up in St. Lawrence for my troubles.
But in 2003, I shifted sides.
The Questionnaire wasn’t a “rogue”, in the usual sense. Fact was, he just didn’t rate. Hawkshade had handled him a few times, Maximan once. He’d gone up against Flashbang and escaped, gotten away from Leonine. He was a third-rater, but he’d gotten enough money to hire me and a couple of real lowlifes, outfit the lowlifes with AKs and we were holding an orphanage hostage.
I wasn’t real comfortable with the gig in the first place. I like kids. Kids aren’t usually afraid of me, or repulsed. Kids just take shit as it comes.
I didn’t really expect Questionnaire to pull this one off. His thought was that the city’d pay rather than call a cape because kids were involved and that would make them scared. I was of the opinion that holding kids was guaranteed to generate cape interest and the plan would be fucked from go. But I had my own escape worked out that the Questionnaire didn’t know about and I’d got my full fee up front, though I was due a share of any ransom. It was under control.
But I didn’t know the Questionnaire had snapped.
I knew things weren’t going to go well when, right off the bat, the Questionnaire throws open his coat and revealed the C4 strapped to his body.
“Hey, man,” I said. “This was not in the plan we discussed.”
“Shut up,” he snapped. “I’ll increase your share.”
“Share of what?” I asked. “Share of getting my organs splattered all over the street?”
“It won’t happen,” he answered. I caught a tone in his voice that made me shiver. He wasn’t really there anymore.
Three hours of negotiation later, though, I had almost forgotten about the C4 and the tone. I was entertaining the kids, showing off my scars and telling them the gruesome stories of how I got them. Kids love that.
There was one little girl, Irene, who was really into it. She was about four or five. She sat in my lap and kept pointing to scars, some of which I had almost forgotten about.
“What’s that long one on the back of your neck?” she’d say.
“Oh, that. The Templar Knight tried to chop my head off.”
She looked skeptical. “Really?”
“Yep.”
“But he’s a good guy.”
“Yeah, well. He was really trying to chop up a parking meter I was trying to hit him with. I jumped at the wrong time, he caught me in the back of the neck.” Which was kind of true. Templar was something of a prick in reality.
“And this one?” She pointed to my lips where a line ran vertically across them. Have a notch missing from my top lip.
“Knife fight in Vancouver.”
“With a superhero?”
“Nope. With just a guy.”
Questionnaire was pacing and muttering to himself. His two low-lifes just sat and stared. I think they were drunk or stoned. Useless when the hammer came down.
And then there were footsteps on the roof.
“Fuck!” Questionnaire screamed. He ran to the window, brandishing his dead-man switch and his stupid question-mark shaped gun. I have no idea where he got the thing. He bashed out a pane of the window and started screaming at the cops on the street.
“You cocksuckers! You fucking cocksuckers! I (continued...)

( continues...) told you! I told you no capes!”
The SWAT captain said something through his bullhorn, but I couldn’t make out what it was. I set Irene down. “’scuse me, honey. You kids stay here, okay?”
Something in me knew this was getting bad. Bad bad. I started thinking about my escape plan and wondering how to get the kids out too. There were about a dozen or so…
“Gotta take a leak,” I told one of the low-lifes. He shrugged in his zoot-style jacket. The thing was plastered with interrobangs: “?!” all over the thing. It was orange and purple and looked like shit. Questionnaire had tried to get me to wear one, but I’d refused.
I headed out of the room and down the hall to the bathroom. I found a stall, closed the door and opened my phone.
See, I’d worked with third-raters before and I was tired of getting caught. I’d taken it upon myself in the last couple years to always have an alternate escape route for a gig. I had an arrangement with Spacebender. He was somewhere nearby with a pair of binoculars and a cell-phone.
He answered on the second ring. “What’s up? Doesn’t look too bad yet.”
“It’s getting there,” I answered. “Q’s gone spitting mad.”
He sighed. “Not surprised. I heard he was off his meds.”
“Meds?” I asked. “What meds?”
“His head meds. His last stint was in Mallory’s.”
The asylum. I shook my head. “No, it wasn’t. He was in St. Lawrence.”
“Yeah, at first. He got transferred when they found him walking into walls. Got diagnosed as totally schizo, voices in his head, hallucinations, the whole nine.”
“Oh, shit.”
“You didn’t know?”
“No! I wouldn’t have…oh, shit.”
“You want me to exit you?”
“Yeah. No. Not yet. Look, there’s kids here.”
“Well, yeah, orphanage and all…”
“We gotta take them too.”
“That’s not what we…”
“I’ll pay, man. Can you do it?”
“How many kids?”
“Like, a dozen.”
“I can’t do ‘like’ a dozen. I need to know how many precisely.”
“Okay. Okay. I’m gonna leave the line open, okay? I’ll go back in there and give you a count. When I say the number, you get us out.”
“You have to get them near the window. I can’t see you…”
“Yeah, okay.”
I slipped the phone in my back pocket, mic out. I went back in the room.
Questionnaire was standing baldly in front of the window. He had Irene with him, holding her up clumsily with one arm looped around her, his dead-man switch in his hand. His other hand held that damn Q-gun to her head.
“…show you all!” he was saying. There was a soft pop, a spray and Irene went limp.
I didn’t yell. I couldn’t. I didn’t even realize I was moving.
By the time I reached him, he’d dropped the body and was turning. Probably to get another kid. I grabbed his left hand, the one with the dead-man switch, and shoved him as hard as I could.
The explosion knocked me back. Glass and dust were everywhere. I lost my bearings for a second.
When I got them back, I saw one of the low-lifes lying next to me. He was bleeding a lot from a vicious wound in his neck. I think he was already dead.
Low-life #2 was still standing and he pointed his gun at me.
I grabbed at the dead one’s gun and swung it up. I pulled the trigger and nothing happened. Safety was on. I could hear kids crying behind me.
I rolled and came up charging. #2 fired, and he hit me with the full burst, but I was past all that. I swung my gun like a baseball bat and he went down.
I swung some more anyway.
When I stopped I could hear Spacebender’s tinny voice from my back pocket. “Grim?” he was saying. “Grim, what’s up? You want out? How many kids?”
I took the phone out of my pocket and hung it up. I tossed it away.
I turned and knelt on the floor, opening my arms. “C’mere kids. It’s gonna be okay. It’s over, all right? It’s gonna be okay.”
When the cops burst in, there I was, on the floor, surrounded by kids hugging me. (continued...)

( continues...) They were bawling and sniffling and so was I. And when the Raptoress came in, I just held my hands up. “I surrender,” I told her. “Call the Feds. I want to rehab.”

Just one little thing to consider -- It's really hard to read something that long here, especially because it loses formatting, and looks like there are no paragraph breaks.

Okay, I'll stop.

You don't have to stop -- that's not what I said. But if you could format it so it reads like regular text, and maybe post shorter bits in separate chunks, it would help. Me, anyway.

No, silly, don't stop. Email it as a doc to those you want to read it. Better yet, put it up as a locked entry in your LJ and create a filter for readers.

If you format it as a text document, or a manuscript, it will be easier to A. read, and B. sell.

I didn't mean I'd stop writing, I meant I'd stop posting like that.

I'll work something out. But for now...the weekend!

I'm hooked. Very hooked. I absolutely would want to read more.

Oh me too! I've always wanted somebody to put comics in text so I could read them. I have a problem reading graphic novels and comics, but text would be awesome.