Three weeks and change had gotten him used to the motion of the whole thing. Four or five days out of the week, he’d be breaking through walls and beating in heads the same way he had been since the start of September.He'd stopped counting the way you count things when you're keeping score. They all kinda blended into each other.
Used to be he'd case a spot for two days. Rooftops, timing rotations, all that… Now, though?Now, it was different.
All he needed was who, how, and what; who ran the spot, how many they got, and what kind of weapons they had on them? Nothing more than that was necessary for the kind of bullshit he was up to.No plan to it, not really, not the kind of plan anybody with a brain would’ve considered decent or thought-out or even smart, but plans took time. He didn’t really have time. If anything the old blind psycho had said was true, the more time you gave these guys, the less prepared you were when they finally did jump you.So, until further notice, the plan was as follows: hit a place, break every body with a body, and ask some questions. If nobody answered, then somebody in that building was gonna call somebody else in another building and say a kid came through here asking about the Hand, and eventually enough of those calls would stack up that the right ears caught it.Didn’t matter if they were Yakuza, Triad, Mafia, Bratva, or just the plain old mob, word was gonna travel anyway.
That was it. That was the whole strategy.
Ain't the worst thing I ever came up with.
– o – o – o – o – o – o – o –
There was a Yakuza safehouse over in Sunset Park, and not even a good one.For one, it was pretty much a second-floor apartment above a laundromat that was definitely not a laundromat ‘cause the dryers didn’t even seem to work. Hell, Zain wasn’t even sure they had hookups behind them.Not like it mattered anyway, considering he wasn’t here to fold clothes.Nah, just bodies. “WHO’S THE HAND?!” The sound of shattering glass was enough to almost drown out his shout at 1 AM, Zain’s body flying through the window with a kick that sent one unlucky and unaware guy through a rice-paper wall-thing they had set up, the whole frame folding around him like a taco.
"WHERE’S THE HAND—"
Somebody swung a bat at his head.
He rolled his shoulder under it, the thing grazing his shoulder before his hook kissed a set of unprotected ribs. For the fourth time that week, Zain had the joy of watching a man’s side cave in as the Yakuza landed back-first on the coffee table.It did not survive.
"—TALK ABOUT THE HAND!"
– o – o – o – o – o – o – o –
Albanians in Astoria kept a spot two blocks off the Boulevard, and Zain took the stairwell down instead of the door 'cause the door had two guys on it and the stairwell had one.
Concrete stairs, iron railing, one swinging bulb.
The one guy got a shot off that went wide off into the wall. His aim wasn’t that bad, but Zain figured it had to be hard to shoot at something that blurred with blue and was already halfway across the room before you blinked. Random Eastern European curses flew as fast as bullets by the time Zain kicked off the railing and landed behind the shooter. Before the barrel could twist around, Zain already had the chain around the neck of its holder and wrenched. The gun hit the floor, clattering somewhere down in the dark as the Albanian thug came towards the kid with a gurgle of a scream.
Two steps took Zain up the wall, the teenager rebounding off the cinderblock. One hand gripped the railing overhead as he swung his whole weight through before putting both Foamposites into the guy's chest.
The man folded over the railing backward and went down the stairwell headfirst.Zain dropped down again, chain in hand and peered over the edge.
...that's a lot of stairs.
– o – o – o – o – o – o – o –
"NINJAS. N-I-N-J-A-S. Y'all keep saying you don't know about ninjas. Somebody in this city knows about the ninjas."
"P-please—"
"And thank you. Now, talk.”
– o – o – o – o – o – o – o –
A two-by-four splintered over the back of his head, Zain grunting from surprise more than pain as he rolled with it. One knee slid across scaffolding planks before he popped right back up to face the guy who swung, the man already coming right back around for another.
"You know what's crazy?" An arm snapped up quick enough to blur, the second swing caught dead in his left hand as he stared the thug down. “Like…” He tore the plank straight out of the man's hands, a grin on his face. "This used to work on me."
His right leg snapped out in a teep, the quick kick into the man’s chest sending him off the scaffolding completely. All that broke his fall was the stack of plywood sheeting up against the far wall of the half-built third floor.
Four more of them rushed his way as he snapped to the side; one with a pipe, one with a gun, and one with a sword.
A full-on European sword, which… Sure, why not?
Zain came off the planks in a burst, crossing the gap with a hook that snapped a forearm in the same instant it landed. The pipe went scattering as sword guy came in over his friend, already slashing down to hit a body that wasn’t even there anymore. Zain spun, roundhouse snapping into the outside of the man’s thigh. A leg quit and the gangster dropped to a knee, the back of Zain’s hand slapping him hard enough across the face his jaw quit too.
Gun guy was smart, though.He tried to run.
The chain got his ankle at twenty feet, the man still screaming and begging and trying to crawl forward for his gun as Zain hauled him across the floor on his stomach.It only took a couple seconds before he had another fistful of collar as he held up the man, his meat map already flickering as the world went between red and normal. He had a couple names for it, all of them equally… bad.
Meat-map, meat-vision, kill-mode… He'd come into a room and it just laid itself all out for him clean, clean in a way the body wasn’t. Things like which knee had already been messed up before tonight, 'cause it sat different.
All the soft parts. Throat, floating rib, that spot behind the ear.
Eh, not like it mattered, anyway.
He was just trying to figure out how to be normal about how everybody looked when he got a little too heated; a whole diagram in front of him… larynx, spine, lungs, liver, jugular, subclavian artery, kidneys, heart —
He fought off a flinch, an old quote turning into real life as all of it lit up in front of him like normal people came with instructions printed on them now.
Shaking his head, Zain went for a classic and picked the femur. The loud break came with a louder scream.
"The Hand." He leaned down close as the man grabbed at his leg, mouth still open. "I know you know. So here's what's gonna happen. You crawl out of here, and you gonna tell somebody, and that somebody gonna tell somebody."
The man was screaming into the plank.
"Tell 'em Striker’s lookin’ for ‘em."
– o – o – o – o – o – o – o –
“I d-don’t know! I swear, I swear, I don—!”One in the morning on Elizabeth street, Zain stood on a rooftop with a guy twice his age gripping tight on his arm. He was also babbling and rambling and halfway to crying but that was mostly because he was being dangled off the edge, five fingers gripping the front of his shirt tight.There was also a chain looped twice around his wrist as backup so he wasn’t really in danger for real. Zain wasn’t actually trying to drop anybody like that, at least.
Well… not tonight anyway.
"Say it again."
"I don't know! I don't know what you—"
"Nah, ' see, your boy inside said the word before he fucked up and shot himself." Zain shook him once, getting another terrified babble of halfway English for his trouble. "He said dora. That's hand. I Googled it. So don't sit here and tell m—"
"That's not—” A confused face stared back at him, a grown man snotty from the nose and blinking like he was discovering the world for the first time. “That's a hand, that's like, a hand of cards, it's a—"
Zain tilted his head to the side. "...you serious?"
The man just started crying again, Zain only taking a second before he let him lie back on the roof. The kid stood there for a second with his hands on his knees.
Great. He allowed himself a sigh. Now I'm the dumbass who don't know Albanian.
– o – o – o – o – o – o – o –
By the end of the third week, he didn’t even have to say it anymore.
He'd come through a door, the whole thing flying off the hinges and crashing down in front of his blue Foams. Like always, there'd be that half second where the whole room got a look at a five-four kid in a blue windbreaker with a chain in his fist.
Only now, instead of laughing, instead of a ‘check out this little’ — nah, instead of any of what used to happedn, somebody would say the name first.
Somebody would say it before he did.‘Striker.’