He checked the GPS. Somewhere in Ventnor City. The information came scrolling down the HUD for the asking. A working class neighbourhood that gangs and drugs were slowly claiming, thanks to the Double Dip Recession. He couldn’t remember ever having been here before but the girl definitely seemed to recognise him.
He was stood in some trees out the back of a series of panel board houses that might have been nice places to live, once. The wooded area was scattered with old bottles, tins, needles and other drug paraphernalia. There was the remains of fire in a dip in the ground.
‘I’ve been reading my bible.’ The girl was talking again. ‘Momma was always said it was a good thing to do. A righteous thing. Before they took her away.’ The girl swallowed hard. She looked like she was about to start crying.
Prophet hadn’t had much interaction with kids. He’d been good with them when he had to be, when his friends started pairing off and starting families, maybe a little too strict but that was the military in him. They’d liked him, though, he knew cool stuff and could do cool things. But he had no idea how to handle this.
He remembered her. Alice, his little sister. His parents had had children way too late. He remembered being surprised that his dad hadn’t been shooting blanks at that age. He remembered how young Alice had been when Mom had been diagnosed with early on-set Alzheimer’s. He’d wondered if she’d been suffering, undiagnosed, when she’d gotten pregnant in her forties. Maybe even earlier, when they’d had him.
The religious stuff had always been there. As an adult he’d become convinced that half of it was fear and half of it was his mother’s need to look down on and judge others. When the Alzheimer’s kicked in, well, then the real fun and games had started. He’d known it was the disease, but that didn’t matter much when you were just a kid, getting beaten on and screamed at about how you were going to hell. In comparison the Marines had seemed like a pleasant alternative.
No! That never happened! My name is Laurence Barnes, I grew up in San Diego. They call me Prophet! Prophet knew these to be false memories. They were someone else’s. Red warning signs were appearing on the HUD as the suit tried to understand what was going on in his head. He’d been in fire fights in over a dozen countries and here, in Jersey, confronted by a ten-year-old girl, who at some level he knew was his little sister even though he didn’t have one, he was having a panic attack.
‘Momma said that the bible had the answers. That’s armour you’re wearing, isn’t it, mister?’
Prophet forced himself to calm down. The pain in the dead flesh of his skull was nearly overwhelming. He could see white lights and wanted to scream.
‘You’re an angel, aren’t you, mister?’ He almost laughed and thought he felt like throwing up, if only he still could. The things he’d done made that question seem like an obscenity. ‘You’ve lost your wings. Is god angry at you?’
No, it just feels that way sometimes.
‘Alice!’ the harsh voice cut through the humid night air. ‘Where are you, you little bitch?! Get over here now or you’ll feel the back of my hand.’
Prophet didn’t like the sound of the voice. He stepped back and engaged the stealth mode. It was only then he saw how frightened Alice was.
Alcatraz had always tried to be hard where his mother was concerned. He’d had no problems about cutting her off after she’d been institutionalised. He’d always told himself that there’d been no guilt about never going to see her. Despite how she’d terrorised him growing up, Prophet knew this to be a lie.
When she’d ended up in the psych ward his, no, Alcatraz’s, dad had basically wasted away. He’d gone out with a whimper, not a bang. Alice had ended up in a foster home. There had been tear-filled conversations, with her older brother promising her that as soon as he was back home she could come and live with him.
‘Then I just went and died in New York. Sucks, huh?’ Prophet whipped around, looking for the source of the voice and seeing nothing. The weasel-faced man in the wifebeater, pyjama bottoms and, oddly, spats, must have heard something because he looked around to where Prophet was hidden. Deciding it was nothing he turned back to Alice. His bloodshot eyes full of anger. The girl was shaking with fear.
‘What’d I tell you?’ he demanded.
‘Which time?’ she asked, confused and terrified.
‘Are you trying to get fresh with me?’ He lifted his hand up as if to backhand her. She shrank away from it in a way that told Prophet she’d been hit plenty of times before.
‘Hey,’ Prophet said softly. The man froze. ‘Turn around.’ The man managed to control his fear long enough to do as he was told. He couldn’t see anything. He looked around and, still finding nothing, his fear was replaced with anger as he started to turn back towards Alice. Prophet made sure that the man saw him appear out of nowhere. The man let out a high-pitched scream. The scream was choked off as Prophet grabbed him by his chin and lifted him off the ground. The man soiled himself.
This I understand, this situation I can handle, the proper and correct application of fear and violence.
He could feel the man’s jaw crack and then splinter under his power-assisted fingers. The man was somehow still making whimpering and squealing noises as he drooled blood.
‘I could be anywhere and you’d never know,’ he whispered to the man. ‘You’re going to look after Alice and all the other children in your care to the best of your abilities. You will never raise a hand to them, or even an angry word. You will treat them with as much kindness as your resources will allow and you will stop drinking or doing whatever it is that turns you into a foul smelling, evil, little worm, because I will be checking. I will be checking frequently, and if I don’t like what I see I will remove limbs and solder the wounds shut. Do you understand me?’ The man didn’t answer. ‘I said, do you understand me?’
‘I don’t think he can talk,’ Alice managed through the terror. At the sound of her voice Prophet felt the guilt wash over him. He’d forgotten she was there. This was just another bit of violence for her to witness. He dropped the man, who curled up into a ball and made whimpering noises.
‘Get out of here,’ Prophet said quietly. The man didn’t move, he just whimpered. Prophet took a step towards him and the man made a run for it, scrambling away on all fours.
Prophet looked down on Alice.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said.
‘God will forgive him for his sins, and you.’
He felt like crying. He knew that this frightened young girl was concocting an elaborate fantasy around this strange figure she’d been confronted with. That he was an angel fallen from grace and that to earn his redemption he would watch over her and keep her safe. The awful knowledge that under the carboplatinum-reinforced coltan-titanium exoskeleton was the animated corpse of her older brother somehow made it all the more horrifying.
‘Did you mean what you said? Will you be watching over me?’
Prophet thought long and hard about lying. He desperately wanted to. He just wanted to tell her what she wanted to hear, but he couldn’t. She was far too nice, forgiving and naïve to survive in the situation she had found herself in.
‘No,’ he told her. ‘What I said was to frighten him into looking after you. It might work but probably only for a little while. You’ve got to be smart, keep your head down, keep out of his way and look for a safe way out as soon as you’re old enough, and I mean school not the streets, and Alice, you’ve got to learn to look after yourself, stand up to people. You don’t want to get in a fight if you can help it, but if they hit you, hit them back, harder. You understand me? God will understand.’ Or fuck him, quite frankly.