EXT. BURNING SKYSCRAPER ROOF—DAY
A FIREMAN, pushed back by a fireball, almost falls off the ledge, but another FIREMAN grabs his hand at the last moment and pulls him up.
NARRATOR (V.O.)
Of the helmet.
MONTAGE, of changing helmet styles through time.
NARRATOR (V.O.)
Of the hose.
MONTAGE, of changing hose styles through time.
NARRATOR (V.O.)
The brotherhood. Of heroes.
MONTAGE, of sepia, black-and-white, and colorized faces of diverse FIREMEN through time.
NARRATOR (V.O.)
Nothing in this fair city is braver than a firefighter. And it’s a good thing too, because nothing else stands between civilization…
EXT. CITY SKYLINE, PRE-DRAGONS—DAY
NARRATOR (V.O.)
And destruction.
CUT TO BLACK.
NARRATOR (V.O.)
Be brave. Be very brave. Be firefighter brave.
TITLE CARD: A McGuffin-Stork production. Paid for by the Metropolitan Fire Department.
* * *
“It’s cool there’s still pizza delivery around here,” says Ripple, though his mind isn’t really on the food. After watching the edutainment special upstairs, blasted by surround sound in the Hall of Heroes’ Ida Lowry Theater, he was so blown away that for a good thirty seconds he couldn’t remember where he was. This happens to Ripple sometimes: the show ends but in his brain it keeps going, with himself in the leading role. A holdover from the days of his Toob series, maybe, when he would watch the last week’s episode and then jump right back into living out its arc.
What would this series be called? Late Capitalism’s Royalty: Enlistment Edition? Or something new—City Savior? Fear Fighter? Whoa That Pro Is Brave?
Only the promise of dinner brought Ripple mostly back to tonight’s reality: turns out dousing a fire and walking half the length of the city works up a major appetite. Trank called in the order, which was delivered in less than thirty minutes by a disaffected youth in a Nomex bomber jacket and a trucker hat labeled BRICK OVEN.
“No charge,” the delivery guy said at the door, refusing Ripple’s currency. “Leather Lungs and me, we have a deal. He doesn’t conscript me, he gets free pizza for life.” Then he was back on his HowScoot, gone into the night.
Now Ripple, Trank, and Abby are down in the Fire Museum cafeteria. Behind sneeze screens, furniture-sized stainless-steel appliances stand cold and unused. Trash cans shaped like fire hydrants stand in the room’s corners. The floor is concrete. The only light comes from flat fluorescent boxes, suspended on chains from the ceiling. They’re chowing down on a pie loaded up with all possible toppings just the way Ripple likes it: pepperoni and crab, pickles and marshmallows. Gutbuster.
“Of course there are still pizzas. People still live here, a few, and I know in my heart the rest will return. A city like this one doesn’t just fade away, not on my watch. We’re fighting a battle for the soul of the place.” Trank eats his piece crust-first, jaw clenching and unclenching in a way that seems both mechanical and pained. “Pizzas or no, I’m here for the duration.”
“Right.” The movie left Ripple pumped, stoked for his new boss and job, but now that they’ve shunned its epic slow-mo dreamscapes for this harsher light, his sense of unease toward Trank is returning. He looks over at Abby, who’s warily poking the Gutbuster with a fork the same way he once saw her prod a dead jellyfish on the beach. “You OK, fem?”
“It tastes funny.”
“Try to eat a little, OK? You need to keep your strength up.”
Grudgingly, she lifts a dripping slice; an anchovy slip-slides to the plate. “I have a family, Dunk. You said. When are we going to find them?”
“She got kidnapped or abandoned or something when she was just little,” Ripple explains to Trank. “But she’s chipped so, you know. Breeding.”
Ripple and Trank look over simultaneously. Somehow Abby’s already managed to get tomato paste in her hair and is in the process of slurping it out.
“We have a BeanReader upstairs,” Trank reports. “In an exhibit case, in the Hall of Ultimate Sacrifice. Battle scarred, but it still works—IDed a lot of remains, back in the day. If her folks are still in the city, you can drop her off at home and get right back to your training. No place for a woman on a fire squad anyway. Save that for weekends.”
Ripple doesn’t want his clam-ramming privileges revoked Monday through Friday, but the thought of off-loading Abby to somebody else’s part-time care is a surprising relief. Ever since they left the trash, she’s been so needy. “Hear that, Abby? He’s going to help you.”
“I don’t like the metal man,” she repeats to herself, wiping grease from her mouth with her sleeve.
Trank takes another bite, but he’s struggling to chew; it’s like the food is gumming up his mouth somehow. He sets his paper plate aside, and, mouth a little ajar, takes out a packet of cotton swabs and an ashtray from a cargo pocket of his turnout pants. “Do you mind?” he asks them.
Ripple shrugs. Abby freezes.
Trank reaches behind his head with two hands. Ripple hears snaps popping free, and Trank’s face—his rubber skin—his second mask—crumples as he peels it off.
Beneath, his face is an elaborate construction of titanium implants and hydraulic tubes, which hiss and whirr as his expression reconfigures itself. The rods in his forehead click together when he furrows his brow.
“Even after all the time I’ve had to heal,” he says ruefully.
He doesn’t have to finish the sentence. The flesh below the titanium implants is red and swollen in places, oozy in others. Trank’s sweat and sebum collect in the ridges of the screws. His salty tears calcify on the zoom lenses of his glass eyes. Mucus clots on his steely nose wedge. He loosens a pin on one side of his jaw and pulls an errant clump of mozzarella free from the hinge.
“Wow. You’re like…” Ripple searches for the word, but the visual sectors of his brain are overwhelming the verbal: this is the grossest thing he’s ever seen. “Like…”
“People Machine,” Abby whispers.
“A cyborg.” Trank’s face is so gross, it’s actually kind of awesome. A spectacle, that’s what Ripple’s videographers would say. What kind of pro can take that kind of damage and then go back out there again, to dominate another day? “How did it happen?”
Trank takes a cotton swab from the box, looks at it, and sighs. He slides it under his metallic replacement cheekbone and roots around pensively. The cotton swab emerges, unimaginably changed, glistening with orange-yellow discharge. He deposits it in the ashtray and takes up another. As he tells his tale, Trank uses the entire box of cotton swabs to clean the machinery of his face.