The Showdown, pt 1
Things come to a head on the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway
Previously: Astra travels with the Heathens to “Lenny’s party” happening on the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. Meanwhile, Crowley overhears that Alexei is also heading toward the Expressway to intercept targets. He hops in a cab.
○ Opening Era: Spring, 2026, Brooklyn
Crowley saw the cabbie’s eyebrow’s rise in the rear view mirror. Then they furrowed down. “Whaaat. What the fuck is this.”
Crowley looked where the driver was looking. Up ahead, the highway curved over the streets of Queens. A mass of people assembled just around the curve.
Frustration percolated in Crowley’s forehead and jaw. Ah, it wasn’t his own. It was the cabbie’s: the man was already honking his horn despite being a few hundred feet away from the traffic jam.
The cabbie turned back to him. “Goddamn it, I thought were done with these crazy protests. Where the fuck are the drones? Ya know, after the Opening? I couldn’t do a single goddamn ride from A to B without some riot or protest blocking my route. Say what you want about the riot drones, but they fixed that…even if they’re no replacement for the boys in blue.” He looked at Crowley as if Crowley ought to agree.
Crowley gripped the cake on his lap.
—
Astra and Devi were staring at one another in silence when the cab came to a stop. Devi’s breath hitched. Astra watched as a spiderweb of tension grew across her now-maskless face, which, just a moment ago, had been vulnerable and open. The young woman glanced out the window. “We’re here.”
“Devi…” Astra started. There was still a window to transform this woman’s mind. A narrow window to intervene before it got eaten up again by psychofauna.
“What?” Devi whispered, as if to herself, staring at the floor of the cab.
Astra focused every bit of herself on what happened next. Eyes: she held Devi’s gaze in a way that was intent, so as to invite Devi’s awareness, but not demanding, so as to avoid her defense mechanisms. Larynx: she relaxed her voice box so that her next sentence would be animated by the full richness of her voice, by the subtle meanings of tone. Heart: she called on the help of the Girl within, and for the first time in a long while, she let the heart center swell – it expanded across mindspace until it included Devi’s trembling form. Then Astra spoke the passkey she’d crafted to jailbreak Devi specifically: “When you return to the dreamworld, look for the dreamer.”
Devi’s trembling stopped. She looked up at Astra with uncharacteristically clear eyes. Her mouth opened.
Then there was the honking of horns in the distance.
It was as if a trance had broken – or the opposite of one. “We’re here,” said Devi. In an instant, her eyes had changed. Their centers gained a different type of stillness, now like barren centers of twin hurricanes: whenever presence accumulated, it pitched itself out the edges. Her eyes’ surfaces shined even brighter, yet the sheen was one born of desperate conviction rather than its release – it was a frenetic gleam, a polish over pupils that had become faraway, and now, darting. When they found Astra’s gaze again, they narrowed, as if to cut into her. “Let’s go.”
Devi reasserted her devil mask and stepped out onto the highway. Decisively, she walked toward the two other cars crammed with Heathens.
Astra got out to follow.
“Hey! Where are you both going? Misses! My fare!” yelled the cabbie. “She-devils! The both of you! Devils!”
Before Astra knew it, her arm was extended through the window, pinning the cabbie to his seat. He looked up at her in naked terror. She caught a flash of what he beheld: Tattooed woman with matted hair, muscles wiry and bulging out from her filthy white tank top. In this man’s eyes, she was no messiah-to-be, the product of years and years of refinement, an elegant statue cut from rough rock. No, she was more beast than woman – a lioness ready to thrust her teeth into his neck.
She withdrew her hand from the driver. “I’m sorry,” she said. “It wasn’t supposed to be this way.”
She turned to make after Devi.
—
As their cab came around the curve, Crowley let out a breath. There were quite a lot of them, the protestors. A couple hundred at least. They blocked the elevated roadway completely.
Crowley’s cab slowed to a stop behind an pickup truck, which, like the cabbie, was honking continuously.
Crowley suddenly remembered that he had no money to pay the driver. He started thinking about what to do about that.
“Hey, can read what those say?” asked the cabbie, interrupting his thought train. ”My eyes ain’t so good these days––at distances. Distances. But only at night. Don’t worry, I can still see the road heh.”
“Er,” Crowley squinted to find a sign lit by a street lamp. “All Cops Are Bastards.”
“All cops are bastards?
“That’s what it says.”
“You fuckin’ kidding’ me?”
Crowley suddenly noticed his breathing had gotten heavy. The cabbie’s had too. A pressure was building in his sternum. Crowley felt that he must choose, right then and there, where he stood: Were all cops bastards?
Well surely not all cops.
Crowley nodded conclusively. “Frankly, it seems like an overstatement to me.”
The cabbie turned back again to glare at him. Would Crowley really take such a weak position? Was he not going to stand up for the men and women putting their lives on the line for him and his?
More cars showed up behind their cab, boxing them in. They too began to beep. People rolled down their windows to shout at the protesters. “It’s my daughter’s birthday! Let us through!”
(Did Crowley just yell that? No it was someone else.)
In response rage seemed to ripple amongst the protestors ahead, as if a school of piranhas had just been provoked.
Crowley thought back to the videos of police beatings that one of his students had shown him at Berkeley. He remembered, too, the man he saw napping on a bench some years ago, and how he’d thought, If only I could sleep so peacefully, before a couple cops jostled the napper with characteristic roughness. He thought about the ubiquity of cops around every corner of Manhattan, so different than the New York he knew in the 80s, as if the city had become a police state. And these riot drones the cabbie had mentioned…weren’t they just another way to suppress the will of the people? Fucking fascists— Blimey, what?
Crowley plucked out the invasive thought loop. Using his training, he severed the mental connection to the protestors ahead.
What had he been doing? Right, wondering what to do about the cab fare. Hm, although the cabbie was not in the driver’s seat anymore.
The cabbie had stepped outside. He was shaking his pointer finger at the protestors. “My father was a cop! My brother’s a cop! You don’t know them! They would die protecting you people. Show some fuckin’ respect, you MOTHERFUCKERS!” The last word the cabbie had screamed like a woman in labor. His face was red. Spittle was flying from his mouth.
“Hello, excuse me?” Crowley tried to get the cabbie’s attention. “I’m sorry, I’ve realized I lack the proper fare, but surely we can figure something out…”
At that moment, the door to the pickup truck in front of them opened. A man wearing a denim shirt and sunglasses stepped out. He had a metal wrench in his hand. The cabbie walked away from the cab, until he was walking astride the man with the wrench. In fact, other people had also streamed out of cars to walk deliberately toward the protesters. One man held a black and white flag with a single blue stripe clutched in one hand. And in the other he held a hunting rifle.
Next release: XXXXX