Extremely belated Cohost-era writing prompt: Assassin who keeps making you the bait
On Monday, Joy gets up, doomscrolls on the toilet, and limps to the kitchen while poking at the wicked bruises on her hip and thigh. High-profile tussle with Herr Professor Dangerous and Bangarang the Cyber Buffalo; she’d taken a hit and been slammed into a parked car. Never a quiet day on the Crime Crackdown Squad.
She carries on doomscolling while the coffee machine hisses and sputters, and finally pours some into her favourite mug with a cat on it; adds milk and a spoonful of sugar, and leans against the counter in her pajama top and saggy underpants to take her first sip.
It tastes faintly weird, in a way she can’t quite pin down. She scowls into the cup. Detergent residue, maybe? A broken fucking dishwasher is all she needs. She switches her scowl to the appliance, takes another ginger sip. Yep, just-noticeably weird.
She can’t quite bring herself to tip it away; too many years scraping pennies together to eat, it’s waste. Grimly drinks it, on the silent promise to herself she’ll rinse the mug out thoroughly before her second cup.
When she starts having to squint and re-read social media posts through blurry eyes, she just assumes she’s tired and feels alarmed, if at all, only at the prospect of ageing. When she nearly drops her cup trying to put it down, she says aloud, “Fuck, maybe I’d better get some more sleep before work.”
When she slowly slides down the kitchen doorframe, room spinning, she finally thinks: some asshole drugged my coffee? But that’s a little late.
She wakes sluggishly, from sticky-feeling sleep it’s hard to drag herself from, handcuffed in the back of a box truck, driving.
Yelling doesn’t do her any appreciable good, nor struggling. Her hands are behind her, attached to some kind of ring in the floor. Kicking against the floor, or the wall she can reach, doesn’t get any reaction.
It feels like they drive for a long time before eventually jouncing to a stop. When the back opens, Joy can see a slice of rural gas station, behind her captor. The woman is short and chubby and tired-looking, goth in a bedraggled just-getting-home-in-the-morning way.
“Let’s skip shouting Who are you and what do you want,” she says. “You’re probably thirsty. You’re cuffed to the floor. Basic needs in exchange for cooperation, Joy.”
“I’m a superhero,” Joy says, with as much bluster as she can manage.
“You’re powered by the mystic energies of the Stone Lion Talisman,” her captor says tiredly. “And that’s exactly where you left it this morning — in your gun safe, at your house.”
Joy looks at her, and she looks at Joy. Joy thinks dismally about screaming for help.
“I’ll kick you in the face if you come near me,” she threatens.
Her captor nods slowly. Shows off the sweating, refrigerated can she has in her hand. And then, maintaining eye contact, she cracks it open and takes a long, long drink, throat working.
“Uh-huh,” she says finally, slightly breathless, wiping the back of her hand across her mouth, and slams the door.
They drive for a while longer. Long enough to fully make the point; and then the truck stops again, on a rougher surface. Side of the road somewhere, Joy thinks, and sure enough, there’s no slice of anything much when the door opens this time.
“Need the bathroom yet?” her captor says sweetly.
“Who are you and what do you want?” Joy says obstinately, then at the rolled eyes and move to slam the door again, “wait, wait—”
The woman has a taser, which she pointedly shows to Joy before climbing in with her. Opens another can of soda and puts it safely to one side before uncuffing one of Joy’s hands and letting her have it. Afterwards, she cuffs Joy’s hands back together behind her, but uncuffed from the truck; stands back, tilts her head towards the open door.
Joy hesitates.
“We’re driving again after this,” the woman says, sounding coolly amused. “You can pee now, or hold it indefinitely, or wet yourself and lie in it. Whatever.”
Joy awkwardly clambers out. Cooperation until she sees an opportunity, she reminds herself, is how she gets out of this. The truck is pulled over on a backroad somewhere; nothing meaningful in sight to run toward, no other vehicles.
“There was a gas station bathroom, last time,” the woman says. “Guess this time you can go behind a tree.”
“Not worried I’ll run?” Joy says, and the woman hefts the taser.
“Try, if you like,” she says.
Joy swallows.
“How am I supposed to—” she says finally, and rattles the cuffs.
“Are you gonna have trouble getting undressed?” The woman raises an eyebrow at her still-bare legs.
If she had the talisman, Joy thinks, if she had anything — but of course she doesn’t. She shuffles away from the truck, towards the tree. Her captor follows, a couple steps back.
“I don’t get to pee in peace?”
“Already threatened to run,” the woman says placidly. “And your hands are cuffed behind you, so I thought I’d carry these for you.”
Joy looks over her shoulder; the woman hefts a pack of wet wipes, eyebrow raised, smirking.
“Plus, if you do need your pants pulled up....”
“Oh, screw you,” Joy mutters.
They drive for a long time, after that. Joy, in the dark of the back of the truck, sullenly dead reckons how long it’s been by how hungry she is.
She dozes off, restless and uncomfortable, after a while.
The third time the doors open, waking her, they’re in some kind of built-up area; a grimy nighttime backstreet.
“Yell and I’ll tase you,” the woman says. “Run and I’ll tase you. Fuck with me and I’ll tase you. Do as you’re told and I won’t; it’s that easy.”
Joy goes quietly and sulkily, is herded into the back entrance of what seems to be a residential building, then a freight elevator, then finally finds herself pressed face-first into a wall, taser jabbed in her back, while the woman unlocks a door. She’s shoved into an apparently unoccupied apartment, and the woman fiddles with her cuffs again, attaching one wrist to a pipe in the spartan kitchenette.
“Here,” her captor says, unslinging a sleek black backpack and producing from it a paper-wrapped something that smells like food. She slides it along the counter into reach, produces and opens another can of soda, then slides that along too. “I’m going out for a little. We’ll sort out bathroom and sleeping arrangements when I’m back.”
Joy looks at the package. “You drugged my coffee,” she observes.
“Yeah,” the woman says, and shrugs. “You can stay hungry, if you prefer.”
Joy thinks about it, then unwraps a still slightly warm panini and, projecting as much suspicious resentment as possible, starts to eat it. The suspicious resentment may get lost slightly in how hungry she is, and is wasted effort anyway; her captor checks her phone — an ancient flip thing — before putting it in the backpack, and the backpack conspicuously out of reach on the far end of the tiny table, then leaves without bothering to look at her.
Joy eats the panini, drinks the soda, then stretches across the kitchenette until the handcuff makes her wrist bleed to get her hands on the handle of a crusty dried-out mop propped against the wall. With that, she painstakingly drags the table closer, an inch at a time, until she can stretch out and grab it herself, pulling the bag into reach.
There’s not much in it; a handful of loose change, a fast food receipt (two paninis, the soda, and a coffee), and the priceless prize of the phone. Still-warm food means the paninis were bought nearby; she checks the receipt for a business address and phone number, and then flips the phone open and dials a number from memory, straight through to the Crime Crackdown Squad’s internal emergency line.
“CCS,” Hoplite gravels.
“It’s me,” Joy says, and hears the hurried scramble on the other end of the line.
“What’s your status? Where are you?”
“Drugged and kidnapped,” Joy says. “I don’t know exactly; somewhere near this business—” and reads the details off the receipt. “I don’t know who this woman is, and I don’t know how long I’ve got before she comes back. She’s been alone so far, but—”
“I will be there,” Hoplite says, in a heavy growl. “Don’t hang up; I have the system triangulating you now.”
“Hurry,” Joy says.
It feels like an eternity until the air whines with the pilot wave of a spacegate forming; Joy cradles the phone to her chest, nervously watching the door until the rectangular portal pops open. Hoplite steps through, bristling with weapons, scanning the room; satisfied, he takes a long step towards her.
The gunshot though the wall behind her takes him straight in the face. Joy jerks and screams; he goes down hard. Her captor opens the door and strolls in only seconds later, some kind of sensor visor covering the top half of her face, rifle in hand.
“He’s going to get back up and fucking kill you,” Joy says, reedy with shock.
Hoplite’s capacity to heal from massive injury is well-known. Even as she says it, Joy’s stomach is sinking; the woman must have more of a plan than this, this — ambush. In which, Joy realises, she played her allotted part perfectly.
“Hoplite has a pretty short time window, and needs relatively delicate conditions, to accurately reassemble brain,” the woman says tonelessly, looking down at him, and slings her rifle on her shoulder. Joy gets her first look at what’s in her other hand: a pristine auger bit for putting holes in lawns. “What’s he worth if he’s not him?”
She stoops over him. Pauses.
“You don’t need to watch this,” she warns, setting the tip of the bit to the gunshot wound in Hoplite’s head, and Joy stares at her for long, appalled seconds, then wrenches her head sideways to stare at the wall.
She can still hear it happen. Vomits halfway through; it doesn’t make the woman pause again at all.
“They’re going to come for you,” Joy says, numbly, halfway through being unresistingly hustled back to the box truck.
“Uh-huh,” the woman says, sounding detached, almost bored.
She’d heaved Hoplite, cored and skewered head and all, onto the kitchenette counter, draping him on top of a duct taped bundle of — Joy’s pretty sure they’re some kind of grenades. Explosives ziptied to the pipes, pins all in another loop to Hoplite’s endless crisscross of MOLLE webbing; all disguised under his urgently wounded bulk, ready for someone to notice he’s gone charging out alone and left the spacegate open. To charge through after him, grab him—
“You won’t get away with this,” Joy says, though it’s more an apotropaic prayer than because she believes it. She’s already calculating who’s most likely to stumble on the grisly scene. Who’s next.
“If you were on my list you’d be dead already,” the woman says. “All before your time, Joy. But trust me when I say: the Crackdown Squad did get away with it, for a long, long time, and this is exactly what not getting away with it looks like.”
And there’s really nothing to say to that, because the Squad’s been around for years, and guys like Hoplite are — well. Guys who’ve been around for years. Institutional power is deployed as privilege’s shield from consequence, from even examination; Joy wishes she could say she doesn’t believe they did anything wrong, or that there’s any real recourse if they did — whatever they did. Whatever this assassin says they might have done.
She might throw up again.
“You can’t just use me as bait,” she whispers.
“Honey,” the woman says, briskly checking her rifle over before the elevator reaches ground level, “I’ll keep doing it for as long as it works.”
