I've asked people before - random people on the street, regular folk, a hundred of them - what's the worst city in the country? Worst, remember. Sixty-two said Gotham. Twenty-two told me to fuck off. The last sixteen said Hub City, and they're right. Ten million people died in Gotham last year. Twelve and a half million were killed by Hub City last year.
The government is dirty. The cops are a squadron of incompetents who work for the highest bidder and city hall has an infestation problem. If you were to run a finger down the mayor's back, it'd come away black. Who's gonna do anything about it? Not the president. Certainly not the Justice League, playing Mickey Mouse Fuckhouse while the nation crumbles. Who has the strength to do what needs to be done? It's not me. But I'm sure as hell trying. I can handle the streets - I do it every night. But there's a bigger problem at hand. It's the millionaires, the titans of industry, the bastards. One of these boys is named Alexander Polys, and he's been wreaking havoc on my city for quite some time. I'd been meaning to ask him some questions about that. So I decided to pay him a visit.
Polys lived in his very own penthouse at the top of his company's tower. In any other city, someone'd call him out on misuse of company funds, but nobody did in the Hub, so he lived in luxury. The lobby alone was nicer than the mayor's office. I would know. I'd been in Cruz's pad a couple times. For fun. Polys' place was spacious - wide and sprawling, with furniture that looked like it'd been half melted. It reminded me of pictures I'd seen of Pompeii's inhabitants, twisted, deformed, mouths open in eternal screams.
I scrounged around the unit, found nothing of import, as expected, and took a wide-legged seat in one of the Pompeii corpse chairs. He entered his apartment fifteen minutes later, an expensive hooker in one arm and a bottle of booze in the other. He aimed at the light switch with the booze hand, missed, and called it quits, giggling off to the bedroom with the prostitute. He hadn't noticed me. I was a little offended, in all honesty, because it was a waste of a good setup. Could've made a hell of a first impression, but it didn't matter.
I rose silently and crept behind the drunken duo, moving from cover to cover. I needn't have bothered. Polys stumbled into the bed with his best impression of a wounded boar, and his companion asked "bathroom?" in a nasal voice. Polys flicked his hand out the bedroom, and the lady of the night tramped right past me. This struck me as a wonderful opportunity, and a few seconds later, she was unconscious on the floor. I slipped into the bedroom, hands in pockets.
"Polys. I have a question."
The inebriated moron jumped, before rolling over and sticking his hand into his nightstand, fumbling in the drawer. I stepped forward, kicked it shut, catching his wrist with a loud crack, and he screamed.
"GOD! My wrist!"
"Your jaw,"
I corrected him, before nearly breaking it with a whiplike haymaker. His head flopped back and forth, putting it in the perfect position for me to snap it back with a wholly unnecessary straight. He sat down, eyes glassy. Jaw flaccid. In his defense, it was cold out. I pulled open the drawer and extricated the weapon he had been going for, pouring the shells into his lap. It was odd-looking, a transparent pistol. I'd seen this several times before in the last few weeks. I'd pulled one off a kid who was trying to stick up a Blockbuster, and I'd put one into a guy who'd pulled it on me in a warehouse. My experiences had taught me a nice little lesson about the structural integrity of these mysterious weapons.
I got my left tight around the barrel and fingered the trigger guard with my right and pushed down. The gun splintered and cracked loudly. I ejected the magazine, let the useless body of the weapon fall to the floor, and looney-tuned the bullets out of the magazine one by one as Polys struggled his drunken way back to the promised land of consciousness. When he was finally lucid enough to get both eyes pointing in the same direction, I crushed the empty plastic magazine in one hand.
