See those cops? I think they're wondering who !@#$ on the Boy Scout Memorial. The real question is why don't more people do exactly that? God-awful !@#$ thing...
You okay, son? No? Yeah, well, sit down over here on the bench. Been a long day. Not quite over yet.
We're still on the hunt for someone, after all. Someone's going to die, soon. Just have to wait for the right moment.
That's 9/10s of this !@#$ job, you know. Waiting. Just sitting down on your !@#$ and reloading your gun over and over and !@#$ over until it's time to snap to and use it.
They say it's a good thing, because the longer you wait the longer you plan, and the longer you plan the better that plan is. I've never really bought that. I think there's something to be said for just being ready to do the obvious thing, or the non obvious thing, anyway.
Either that or having three plans ready to go at once so that, if one fails, your fine gay !@#$ is covered several times over. Worked on GORGON that one time, anyway.
Worked for the Legion, too. All that waiting, all that planning, all that maneuvering their people into the right places at the right time.
It's actually pretty admirable, until you know who's behind it, and what they're doing it for.
* * *
So, the plan.
Smoke? No? Probably just as well. You're looking a little green, there, son.
So, it's like I said, son. Strange things happen in wartime. There's stuff the Wehrmacht threw at us that was never recovered from the battlefield. There's secret weapons they rolled out that never came back. There's scientists and technicians of theirs that were supposed to be assassinated or repatriated that just vanished and were never found.
And that's just the Axis. We had loads of things go missing as well. !@#$ boatloads of the stuff, just gone.
Now, after any war, there's a lot of hand-wringing, weeping, wailing, and gnashing of teeth about missing ordinance. People get yelled at and heads roll, and sometimes careers even come to a !@#$ halt if they prove you were responsible. But it's all pretty much for show. You can't unfire a gun full of stolen bullets, after all.
And in the fog of war, well, lots of crazy, !@#$ up things happen. It happens in any war, really. But it happened a lot more in The War.
Ever wonder where it all went? I'll tell you. It went from this hand, here, into this hand, over here. Just like this cigarette.
Who was responsible? The Left Handed Legion. They had a chain of repatriation taking things from Europe and the Pacific all the way back to Canada and Mexico, and then back into the US of A. From there the items went into one of several warehouses, located all over the Continental.
And they waited there for years, until the War was over and the masquerade was done with it. And then they got busy getting nasty, and might have gotten away with it for a long time if it hadn't been for one !@#$ bomb.
Which bomb? Some crazy !@#$ super-thing that was supposed to be dropped on Dresden just vanished out of its crate at its hangar. No idea what happened, so we blame German saboteurs. A couple spies get taken out back and shot in retaliation, and the firebombing of Dresden happens as planned, minus one massive mother!@#$ piece of ordinance.
People die, more people live, Kurt Vonnegut lucks out, life goes on.
Then one day in 1966 we get a phone call telling us that there's a bomb in a truck parked in downtown Chicago. And when we get there, and start trying to defuse the !@#% thing, we find out it's a near-exact copy of that missing bomb.
And then we find out that there's another one just like it halfway across town, and another one in Queens, and another one in !@#$ LA, and yet another one in mother !@#$ Miami, all primed to go off five minutes after the other.
And then, after dealing with that !@#$ emergency, we find out that it was the handiwork of someone named Firebug. I guess the ransom note that didn't get delivered until it was too late due to a post office !@#$up put a crimp in that plan.
Come to find out Firebug was a villain back in the 30's who strangely vanished just before we started sneaking aid over to Europe before The War. Also come to find out that while we found out who he was, the first time he got arrested, we had no idea how he might have died. It was like he just turned a corner and poof, gone.
But then this is us, and you know us. No body, no death. And even then you can't take it for granted. Look at The Big Man.
So the COMPANY gets on the case. We start rousting likely hideouts for a grade-A explosives expert who's got access to blueprints for a top secret bomb that went missing during The War. And when we finally find the !@#$, three months and two more nationwide bomb threats later, we find out that it's the exact same person who was the Firebug back in the 30's, just older.
We also find out he's been living under an assumed name, with new ID and credentials, since the end of The War. He's even got a handful of fake birth certificates.
Fortunately, his attempt to commit suicide by mechanically assisted self combustion only half-works, which makes interrogating him a lot easier. After a few days he gives up the goods, if only to make us stop putting him in front of a wall of open flame.
(I'm sure you've noticed that hurts like unholy !@#$ when you've got a bad burn.)
So what does Marty K. Eisner, aka Gerald C. Samson, aka Firebug, have to say for himself?
Well, turns out The Big Man called him and a bunch of other supervillains together in 1939, maybe six months before he sent Roosevelt that letter. He gave them the option of getting on the ground floor of the greatest American criminal enterprise in history. Not only were they all going to walk out of where they were, now, smelling like roses, but they'd be poised to get back into the limelight from a position of strength that they couldn't even conceive of, now.
The best part of it all? The American Government was going to help them. As long as they did what he told them, how and when he told them, and were willing to pretend to go legit for a little less than ten years, they'd be better off than they could imagine.
Not everyone agreed, obviously. They were told they could leave. They didn't make it out of the building, though, and everyone else got the point. If they'd come to listen, they'd come to play. No exceptions.
So after doing some cleanups for The Big Man, most of which were fellow villains who weren't playing along, or were too unstable to have on the team, Firebug and some allies got in a van, went off to Oregon, and got turned into the best, most patriotic heroes you'd never heard of. They got the same kind of training that people like myself did at Camp Rogers, minus the genetic monkeyshines, and were sent off to go fight the Axis alongside us.
Of course, I wasn't believing a word of this !@#$. But then he started naming names, and a suddenly a lot of things that happened during the war made a lot of !@#$ sense.
Maybe too many.
But then he drops one more big one on us. Turns out he was just moonlighting with the bombs for extra cash. It turns out he's still been doing work for America, since the war, as part of his agreement to stay on the right side of the law while managing to break it on alternate weekends.
And you're just gonna !@#$ when I tell you who was involved.
No, we're done moving. We don't have to go any further than this, son. You just rest.
(SPYGOD is listening to All Cats Are Grey (The Cure) and having something else)
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