Remember that woman that threw me out of a plane two years ago? Well, apparently she’d kept a better eye on me than I had on her. Interview #2 had gone well, but the guy was offering a fraction of what Naomi was to publicly die, and he needed it to be messy enough that it would have impacted my current opportunity. After her offer of ten grand to fail to babysit a bomb just wasn’t that attractive. If it’s going to take me a month to regenerate, and possibly wind up with me fighting my way out of a casket, tomb, or medlab, I tend to charge 20 grand minimum… It often takes me two months or more to get back up to speed.

Interview #3 was in the old sawmill, and amounted to the Fruitbat (I am not joking, that was her supervillain nom de guerre) who had just gotten out of prison, handing me an Amazog box full of small bills that came to somewhere around eight grand, and a thinly veiled offer to sleep with her, I suppose to buy my silence.

I was not really interested, she was kind of cute for an older woman, but Gadgeteers, especially the magical ones, pretty much always weirded me out. You never knew what you would find, but I assured her that her secrets were safe with me.

Have you ever tootled into your bank branch with a big box full of loose cash of all different denominations? It was actually a lot of fun since it wasn’t that much cash, I literally wadded a couple of handfuls into my wallet of random bills. The rest I explained came from busking.

That was not actually far-fetched. I could play a couple of instruments, and you could actually pull down a solid grand on a busy weekend at a park or festival. It was not enough to keep me solvent, but in the summertime, I would sometimes head to Boone park or even Lewisville to the state fair.

Believe it or not, I actually had a car. A 1966 dodge dart that Mickey kept ‘safe’ for me. I gave it to him, which was sort of how we first met, under the condition that he let me use it when I needed to, and kept it serviced. He had a knack with cars, and it looked better now than when I had bought it in ‘75, back when I was still tooling around looking for someplace to lay low for a while.

The manager came out, a small Asian guy named Paul Nakamura, and helped the teller load up the cash counter, a fun little machine that actually separated and counted the different bills.

Six thousand and change later, plus two counterfeit twenties and a fake fifty with a picture of Donald Trump on it, and whatever I had stuffed in my wallet. I figured Fruitbat probably still owed me, but I honestly didn’t feel like taking her up on her interest payments.

Like most metas, she was in great shape, for a woman in her forties, but her schemes were almost always way out in left field. She was smart enough that they mostly worked, like holding the classic cars at the car shows hostage with a giant electromagnet until their owners or the showrunner paid her one hundred grand, but you know what you are not supposed to do with crazy.

And to be fair, robbing ten semis filled with circle-me toys, the big Christmas retail blitz that was all the rage two years ago, and then hawking them at a tenth the retail value to underprivileged sectors of West Virginia, which was a lot of it, had been FUN. I might not want to wind up in Fruitbat’s bed, but she was definitely the kind of cowl I preferred to work with. I was pretty sure that her last stint was the proverbial straw, though, as she was not suggesting any new schemes, she just wanted to make sure I was okay and pay me back. Like a grandmother with wandering hands.

Interview number 4 never showed up, even though I waited in the Old Mueller mine for almost an hour, drinking a 6 pack and watching the bats flit through the lights of my electric lantern after the moths it called. Ah well. I had fun.

One thing about living for a long time. You learned to find things fun. Whether it be a concert or just watching the bug zapper and drinking a beer, you had to learn to live in the moment, or you would never leave the past. ‘What if’ was a garbage question, pointless and useless, that could nevertheless consume a night’s sleep with ease.

Some day I’d like to meet another long-lifer and have a talk about how they dealt with the crappy ‘what if’ nights. I knew there were some out there… Heck, even the premier Commander Freedom was supposedly one, but mostly they were impossible to get ahold of or they just didn’t want to associate with someone like me.

The only exception was Doctor Ectoplasm, or Doc Ec to his enemies, that wizard that thought I was dead. Then again, his brain was pretty much fried from trying to talk to elder gods, chaos beasts, and demons, and I was glad when he checked out into the Nth realm one evening, stiffing my paycheck.

That’s the problem with working for cowls. They tended to stiff you a lot.

Interview 5 was entirely unexpected. Let’s just say that he thought I was offering immortality in exchange for endless sexual favors and leave it at that. I grinned and took him to Radie’s for a couple of beers, and left it at that. Fun guy, but not my type. After a rather weird conversation, he did wind up leaving me with a couple of useful tips about modeling I would never have guessed. He worked for the DMA as a greeter, dressed as a Hero, but had no chance of ever becoming powered, but becoming unkillable would have been more than enough.

A couple of beers later and he broke down and admitted he’d been diagnosed with like… Aids or something. He had money, but no hope. So I gave him Doctor Memetic’s number and put him in a taxi back to his hotel.

Doctor Memetic would probably charge him a couple of pints for his services, literally, the guy had to drink blood due to a weird kind of metahuman anemia. He was definitely a cowl since hospitals don’t exactly sell blood for human consumption purposes, but if there was a blood-borne disease, he could cure it. I was pretty sure he had whipped HIV back in the eighties, but since it was considered meta-tech and not reproducible by common science, it was labeled as kook bullshit and thrown away, as usual.

Supposedly he had even gotten ahold of some sort of drug from South America that could turn humans into metas or make metas even stronger, but that sounded like bullshit to me. The CIA had experimented with that crap a couple of years ago, and it apparently turned humans into screaming piles of goo for a while before they finally died. A bad end.

Interview 6… well… It started as I walked back home from interview #5.

They were professional, I will give them that. I’d been hooded and dumped into a trunk LOTS of times, but these guys were careful to have the handcuffs on without badly bruising my wrists, in the trunk without much banging, and the hood was even clean and smelled a little bit like Downy.

It was pretty roomy in the trunk, compared to some, and I managed to wiggle around enough to speak against the back seat, “Hey guys, thanks for the careful abduction, but could I ride in the back seat instead?”

I heard a voice coming from the seat, “Naww Jim, boss’s orders. He wants you in the trunk to be in the proper submissive mindset or something like that.”

“Ben? Is that you? Shit, I thought you were dead!”

“Likewise, man… I mean, I swear, I thought that tracer mine totally got you. Imagine my surprise! I mean, you totally saved the whole team jumping on that thing. That’s why I told the boys to treat you like a VIP.”

“Oh, Hey, Ross is here too,” Ben said. “No one else from the old crew, but Nickie, when she heard we were going after you, got all butthurt when the Consumer didn’t send her on the team.”

“Nickie? Nick E Demos?” I asked.

“That’s her.”

“But she’s got power. I used to work for her as a full-on cowl.”

“Not anymore, Jim. The Consumer straightened out her little possession problems, and she lost the demon summoning thing, but she’s still hot, both figuratively and literally. She’s playing the full-on minion thing, and a few of us are considering moving away from being mooks. The Consumer is stupid rich, and only plays the metagame, so most of us are just here for show and tell and stuff like this.”

“Oh, Heya Ross! Long time no see!”

A grunt was the only reply to my greeting, which informed me that it was, indeed, Ross. He only talked when he had to or when he was drunk, and then you couldn’t get him to shut up.

“Hey, guys?” I asked. “I don’t mean to sound like a spoilsport, but is this going to take very long? I got a job set up already, and I have a photo shoot lined up for it tomorrow. If I miss the shoot, I might not get the job. Also, is there a chance we can avoid damaging the face? It took me a lot of work to get the beard right, and I don’t want to have to regrow and try again.”

“Oh yeah, I noticed the beard. That was really good advice. It turns your look from a serial killer into a 300 extra. Uhh, we don’t have any orders to rough you up or anything, but the boss sometimes plays a little rough. He might make you miss your photo thing.”

I sighed. The car was going pretty well, and the landing would be a bit rough, but I would survive. At least I was wearing work coveralls instead of my ‘good’ jacket. “Well, alright, but could you let the Consumer know that I am a lot more amenable to talking over a beer? I am going to escape now, this job involves a very cute girl and I have high hopes. It’s been great talking to you.”

I carefully pulled the trunk release wire. That’s why you don’t send mooks to kidnap mooks. We know each other, and sometimes even have each other’s backs. In general, we don’t do things like disable auto trunk releases because, in general, kidnapping one of us is sorta pointless. If some really nasty cowl starts killing mooks, even the ones working for competitors, we tend to desert or do things like leave handcuff keys in easy-to-reach places.

There was a handcuff key in the trunk. The auto trunk release was still hooked up, and the car was taking back roads with a top speed of about 30 miles an hour. That meant that whatever this ‘Consumer’ had in mind, it wasn’t good for a friendly neighborhood mook.

With a name like ‘the consumer’, my bet was some kind of cowl that eats people, powers, or energy, or someone that would force me to watch a week-long Marathon of “The View’ with Whoopi and Sharon. I had never been eaten before, ironically enough, although I had gotten chewed up pretty badly, they’d have to swallow my whole body to eat me. Biting parts off wouldn’t work well.

But the Marathon, I wasn’t sure if I could survive that with my sanity intact. The idea of listening to Whoopi Goldberg and Sharon Osbourne trying to act intelligent and informed made my skin crawl and my anus pucker.

So I popped open the trunk, waited until I had a clear section, and then rolled out.

There’s a trick to surviving getting thrown from a moving automobile. In the end, you are basically an unprotected human falling at car speeds onto a hard surface. It was a lot like surviving a jump from a 3rd story window. The important thing is, know that you are going to keep going in the same direction the car is going.

Jump sideways, if you can, trying to hit the side of the road or something soft. Make sure that there are no big rocks along the side of the road for a good 50 feet ahead of the car. Tuck your head down to your chest, get ready to wrap your arms around your knees, and then do your sideways jump, making sure that you aren’t going to hit the trunk lid to screw up your momentum.

In West Virginia, the whole ‘no rocks on the side of the road’ rule was very very difficult to deal with. Also, a lot of roads were sheer cliff face on one side and drop-off on the other, and on a narrow road, you have to add ‘not hitting trees’ into the mix. I was less concerned about breaking bones or cracking my head open than a lot of people, but road rash sucks, wrecks your clothes, and trees could wind up sticking into me and take a longer time to heal.

I planned on showing off a lot of body tomorrow, so I had to be careful that anything I did to myself would likely heal. We weren’t up in the hills, which was good, but there were a lot of small rocks… I could handle nasty bruises and scrapes. Most of them would likely be gone by tomorrow if I was lucky.

Look, when you hit the ground at 30 miles an hour, you are always going to get a concussion. You just aren’t strong enough to keep your head from taking any kind of impact, and squishing your brain against the inside of your skull at 30 miles an hour would normally knock you out like a light. So when I hit, I tried to hit shoulder-first, with my arms around my knees. Yes, you roll like a ball and take a lot more general bruising, but that’s going to happen anyway. You can heal a dislocated shoulder or bad muscle bruises, especially if you have to jump up afterward and run like hell as I did.

But if you are knocked unconscious, the people that put you in the car in the first place can stop, leisurely walk to where you are lying, and tuck you back into the vehicle in much worse shape than you left it.

Running like hell actually gave you a lot of time to think things like ‘what could I have done differently?’ or ‘was it really necessary to treat my body like one too many melons on top of a Mexican produce truck?’ On the plus side, it had happened often enough that the answer, in this case, was easy... Nothing, and yes.

Well, okay, maybe I could have been a little more watchful for cars full of guys waiting to put a bag over my head, but to be honest, I was a lot more used to being the one doing the bagging, rather than the one being bagged. If I had been in uniform I probably would have been on better guard, but having a dude break down on your shoulder and tell you he’s dying of some sort of wasting disease tends to take your mind off important things like kidnappers.

No, I wasn’t particularly sympathetic towards strangers, in general, but a guy you have had five beers with isn’t a stranger anymore.

The thing was, Charleston was my town, and when I got hurt, I worked out to get rid of the extra power I felt. I had pretty much run all over this place, which is why I seldom needed a car. Not to mention, my look was my greatest selling point as a mook. Sure, looking like a plumber with about a hundred extra pounds of fat over pure muscle was intimidating, but looking like you spent your spare time juggling barbells tended to add an extra layer of intimidation that could be helpful in keeping civilians from being too brave and getting themselves hurt.

Hitting the ground as I had, rather than landing flat, actually tended to make me have more extra energy to burn than just taking the hits, but while I was bruised and scratched to hell, I could feel myself healing, and I sprinted down towards Charlotte. Every once in a great while a cowl had to be dealt with harshly, and I was pretty sure that the Consumer might be one of those game-breakers, and until I could work the extra energy off, I was running at speeds that would make a deer blanch.