Seventeen
Pablo Espinoza was just like your average, run-of-the-mill child living in the slums of San Diego. Like most of the other families that lived around the block, the Espinozas were illegal aliens, having jumped the border in order to seek out the American Dream. Unfortunately the family of seven and the majority of their neighbors, they encountered nothing but racism and bigotry during their tenure in the self-purported ‘land of the free.’ For almost a decade, the Espinozas managed to barely dreg out a living from the family’s terrible income.
At the age of fifteen, Pablo’s family became the victims of one of the largest INS raids of the year. In a night of fire and bloodshed, a company of National Guard soldiers raided the San Diego ghetto—tearing almost thirteen families from their homes and throwing them into the backs of dingy old vans like trash or runaway dogs. Amidst the struggle, nearly twenty men, women, and children lost their lives when they refused to be deported back to Mexico. Pablo’s own father was gunned down when he stood up for himself against a group of armed soldiers.
Unfortunately for one Pablo Espinoza, the death of his father was only the beginning of a night that would forever change the course of his young life. At around three o’clock in the morning, the convoy transporting the young man and his neighbors back to the American-Mexican border found itself just inside the blast radius of a nearby radiation bomb being tested in the Arizona desert. From later reports, it was concluded that the officer in charge of the operation had failed to listen to earlier messages of nuclear testing that morning.
Caught inside the blast, the deportees and their transporters were killed instantaneously by the neutron radiation—reduced to charred masses before they even had the slightest idea what had happened. As the bomb was designed to destroy organic tissue and not inorganic materials, the vans and jeeps that comprised the military convoy were merely sent tumbling across the desert like two-thousand pound metal tumbleweeds.
For two days, those seven blackened, dented vehicles were left to smolder beneath the unyielding heat of the Sonoran Desert. When an army taskforce finally combed over the region after the convoy failed the check in, they found 42 corpses spread within the ruined vehicles. Only one scared, teenaged boy had survived the blast, and it was from that day forth that Pablo Espinozas life was never the same.
***
It was the year 2030, and for the greater part of the last thirty years, the world hadn’t changed. Sure, there were nearly ten billion people crammed into a place that wasn’t getting any bigger and natural sources of fuel were slowly shrinking, but at the end of the day, it was still the same humdrum, ‘same shit, different day’ type of lifestyle that people had been living for the last seventy or eighty years.
In this lackluster era of human development, crime became the prevalent recreational sport. Gangs, mafias, and all sorts of wonderful institutions came to formation as competition for fuel and other natural resources started to become more and more heated. As they had done for the last fifty years, world leaders ignored the majority of their internal problems, instead opting to place the blame elsewhere. The result was an increasingly grimmer global outlook where atheism and nihilism were the most popular philosophies.
It was in this impersonal society that Pablo Espinoza matured—growing from the lucky boy who had survived a neutron bomb to an introverted, unspoken man with nothing no reason to live and no way to die. For unbeknownst to himself of the military who salvaged him from the wreckage and let him live with an American foster family out of pity, the neutron radiation had done far more to the child than make him an orphan. It had radically altered his DNA, causing every molecule in his body to random destabilize.
The mutation had lain dormant for nearly seven years, until it began to randomly surface, causing parts of the young man’s body to collapse into a gelatinous sludge. As if the trauma of having his parents and siblings slaughtered wasn’t enough, he now had to deal with the stress of having body parts spontaneously collapse and reform. During an interview with one of the most relatively successful business firms in the southern part of San Francisco, his head melted clean off his shoulders. It goes without saying that the man was rejected by his potential employers.
When he was nineteen, Pablo had tried to kill himself by jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge. Much to his chagrin, his entire body melted apart a few stories above the water, saving him from his intended death upon impact with the water’s surface. After the incident on the bridge, the man tried about a half dozen other methods with which to end his life, including poison, a gunshot to the head, a knife to the heart, walking into oncoming traffic, and drowning. Each and every time, his efforts failed miserably—his irradiated physique managed to find some means to circumvent his attempts. Although his self-loathing and desire to end his life never went away, he eventually lost the willpower to try and find a way that would work.
But that was almost half a lifetime ago, and since then, Pablo had since accepted the curse that had been bestowed upon him. Despite his efforts, Pablo was never able to control when his molecules would destabilize. He did manage, however, to learn to sense and fix the collapses before they happened, although it seemed that anytime he got overly emotional his body would promptly melt. It was that fact that ruined any relationship the man had ever had. After all, a woman tends to become a tad bit disappointed when she realizes that she has eight inches of melted flesh in her mouth.
Now a lonely, introverted man of his late thirties, Pablo Espinoza found himself working at the bank the very day that the biggest gang-related crime of the last twenties years was planned.
“Hello ma’am,” Pablo replied, his Mexican accent thick as he swiveled in his chair to face the portly woman standing on the other side of the counter. Her scraggly hair was wound up in an oversized, unsettling mound that rested atop a face adorned with way too many cosmetics to allow her to pass as anything other then a circus clown. But despite his wanton desire to laugh, the bank teller swallowed down the urge and leaned forward in his leather chair. “Is there anything we can do for you here at Bank of California?”
“Oi!” The woman shouted, her throaty voice prompting Pablo to cringe just a wee bit as he reclined away from the customer. “I want to make a withdrawal from my bank account,” she grunted, frowning heavily for seemingly no apparent reason as she dug her pudgy fingers into her overly flamboyant handbag. After a moment or two, she produced a faded green debit card and smacked it down on the marble countertop. Still trying to feign a smile, Pablo plucked the plastic card up and slid it through the device in front of him.
“How much would you like to take out today, Ms. Satterfield?” Pablo inquired, reading the name off the card as he slid it toward the woman. “Please enter your PIN into the little device to your left,” he added, pointing to the small numerical keypad on the countertop between the two. With a disgusted sigh, the woman grabbed up her card and punched her identification number into the apparatus.
“Sixty dollars,” the woman snorted, her tone of voice causing Pablo’s right eye to twitch as he turned to his monitor and waited for the woman’s account summary to pop up. Once it did a moment later, he frowned slightly and pivoted to face the woman.
“I’m sorry, Ms. Satterfield, but your account only has
six dollars in it,” he replied, causing the woman to let out a hoarse sigh and roll her eyes.
“Now listen here, Achmed,” she demanded—her voice a gurgled, corpulent hiss—as she leaned over the countertop toward Pablo. “I don’t know how they do things in your motherland, but my husband deposited a hundred dollars in that account this morning. So either you produce my money or I’m going to have to find you manager and get you deported back to whatever third-world shithole you were born in…do you under—”
Before the hideous, overbearing woman had a chance to finish her shallow threat, a gunshot caused the crowded lobby of the bank to fall deadly silent. With a melodramatic gasp, Ms. Satterfield collapsed against the counter and slid down to the ground. As the overbearing woman’s girth slid out of his point of view, Pablo was able to get a clear view of the front door of the bank, where a group of heavily armed men in ski masks had taken position.
“All right,” screamed the man in the front of the contingent, lowering his handgun as he stepped away from his group and toward the horde of frightened citizens. “Welcome to the last day of your lives,” he snarled, leveling his gun with the head of a balding man in a suit and tie who was huddled behind a plastic palm tree.
“Please, no!” The man wailed—his eyes widening as he tried to push himself closer to the marbled wall of the bank. Instead of waiting around for the whole ‘don’t kill me…I have a wife and kids’ shtick, the foreman of the group put a bullet through the man’s head and painted the white marble wall with a thin coat of ruby-colored blood. A wailing chorus filled the lobby as the bank customers scattered in a panic toward the two other exits.
Grimacing in horror as those who fled were gunned down by groups of armed men stationed at the other exits; Pablo fought back the urge to piss himself and ducked underneath the counter that separated him and his coworkers from the lobby. Slowly but surely, the gunfire subsided and those who had opted to not flee settled back into their fetal positions as the group of armed men marched across the bloodstained lobby toward Pablo and his coworkers.
“I don’t want to die,” the timid voice caused Pablo to glance out from behind his station. Looking down the line of teller stations, he noticed that it was Johnny Paul who was whimpering from behind a filing cabinet. The kid was barely twenty, and in unfortunately for him, this was his first day at the job.
“Get up,” the man at the front of the group shouted, pointing his gun at young Johnny’s head. With a whimper, the college student made it off his feet and shuffled over toward the killer. “You know what happens next,” the man snickered, poking his gun into the boy’s Adam’s apple. “This is where you open the vault, so my boys and I can get the cash and not have to kill any more of your innocent customers.”
“Wuh-who are you?” Johnny whimpered, his eyes welling up with tears as the man behind the black ski mask started to chuckle.
“We’re the Dark Eternals,” he replied, poking the warm barrel of the nine-millimeter gun into the student’s throat. “I’m sure you’ve heard of our little exploits across the nation. We’re quite the popular little organization these days,” he snickered as Johnny’s eyes widened with horror. Pablo, meanwhile, shifted uncomfortably as he tried to ensure that his location wouldn’t be compromised. Despite his lack of compassion toward the world around him, the man had heard enough news reports about the Dark Eternals and their terrorist exploits across the globe.
“Why are t-t-terrorists robbing a bank?” The college boy asked, his eyes glancing all around him…as if he was looking for someone to lend a hand or capitalize on the diverted attention of the robbers. Unfortunately for Johnny Paul, this was inner city America, and the stone cold truth was that nobody gives two shits about anything unless it’s staring them in the face. And for the thirty people still trapped in the bank, they were willing to throw one boy to the wolves if it meant they’d walk out alive.
“Not just one bank,” the leader of the group laughed. “Across the nation, we’re robbing every major bank in every major city. By the end of the day, this country’s economy will be crippled. At least you’ll have the pleasure of not having to live in the hell that this day shall unleash upon America,” on that note, the man pulled the trigger and splattered Johnny Paul’s throat against the lovely pictures of downtown San Francisco that adorned the wall behind his station.
“Now then,” the man growled, glancing around the room at the whimpering hostages. “Would one of you other fine workers like to open the vault for us? Or should my comrades and I just shot all these unlucky bastards who picked the wrong day to do their banking?” After a dead silence that lasted almost half a minute, the leader of the group let out a sigh and casually killed eight people before his gun clicked empty. With another callow snicker, the man ejected the clip and slammed a fresh one into place. As he moved to resume his senseless slaughter, someone stood up from behind the line of bank stations.
“Stop!” Pablo let out a sigh as he look out to see Rosetta standing up a few stations down—her hands held as she tried to get the man to stop murdering the hostages. “I’ll let you into the vault,” she whimpered, her eyes watering as she stared out at the bodies that filled the lobby. “Just don’t kill any more people,” she pleaded as the man in charge of the group glanced over his shoulder at the small Caucasian woman.
“Are you ordering me around?” The man laughed—a deep, booming declaration that caused Pablo to twitch just a little as he huddled underneath the counter. “Dumb bitch,” just like that, the leader of the little terrorist group put a bullet in Rosetta’s forehead. With a dull thud, the woman’s dead body collapsed against a water fountain, inadvertently putting enough weight on the button to cause a stream of liquid to shoot out from the nozzle onto her lifeless corpse. Retching softly, Pablo turned his attention toward the lobby, his eyes narrowing as he squinted through a small slit in the counter.
“Next?” The terrorist inquired as he pivoted and fired a pair of bullets into the chest of a woman running for an open window. A scream escaped her throat as she spit up a thick mist of blood and fell to the ground, her trembling fingers just inches from the window frame that now loomed above her dying body. “My comrades and I have enough bullets to kill everyone in this room ten times over,” he sighed as he put down another of the frightened hostages like an old dog.
“Let them into the vault, Espinoza,” the command prompted Pablo to pivot his head to the right, where he noticed that his manager, the illustrious Martin Capricorn, was hiding behind the counter as well. Despite the situation at hand, the man had managed to maintain his cold, heartless tact.
“I’m not dying for a bunch of ignorant customers,” Pablo replied, frowning as he glanced through the slit in the marble counter. “If you care so much, you can go right ahead and step out into that slaughter,” the man continued, pulling his knees closer to his chest as he huddled up next to the machine behind him.
“Piece of shit,” Martin spat as he slid out from beneath his hiding spot and rose to a fully vertical position. “I’ll let you into the vault,” he decreed just as three new gunshots rang out in the lobby. At this point, there were only twelve or thirteen hostages still alive—including Pablo and Martin, who were the only other two workers who hadn’t be gunned down by the bank robbers.
“Excellent,” the leader replied, gesturing with his gun toward the large vault door near the back of the bank. “Come now,” he snickered as Martin slowly shuffled passed Pablo. With a gasp, Martin feigned a trip, and as the Mexican bank teller watched, his supervisor let a small key slip off his belt. Upon composing himself, the gruff old man continued down the long counter, leaving Pablo to scoot forward on his hands and knees. The man furrowed his brow as he scooped up the tiny key, and after a moment or two, he read the label and noticed that it was to the small lockbox beneath the manager station. Figuring that his manager had dropped the key for a reason, Pablo shuffled his way behind the counter and found the archaic metal box.
Sliding the key into the lock, the man twisted the little metal rod and flipped up the lid of the box. For whatever reason, there was a small pistol nestled within the gray box, resting atop a few stacks of the hundred dollar bills. A faint smile spread across Pablo’s face as he pondered if his illustrious, hardass of a supervisor had planned to run out with what seemed to be around a hundred thousand dollars. That explained the cash, but why was there a gun?
“I hope you get what’s coming to you,” Martin scowled as the leader of the terrorist group jabbed him in the spine with his gun. “You don’t deserve the money in this vault...” Pablo raised an eyebrow when he noticed that the old codger was purposely talking in an unnecessarily loud and almost boisterous tone. Realizing that he was being given a chance to do something almost worthwhile with his life, Pablo snatched up the gun and stood up from behind the counter.
Bang bang!
A gasp escaped the chapped lips of Martin Capricorn as two gunshot wounds opened up on his chest—staining his expensive suit with warm blood. A heartbeat later, the man’s dead corpse collapsed in front of the giant vault door, leaving the leader of the terrorist group trembling in rage. With a growl, he spun around and squeezed off nearly five shots before his clip ran dry.
Oh, shit. Pablo thought as the bullets whizzed through the air. Before the bank teller had a chance to react, five holes opened up across his torso and he collapsed against the back wall of the bank.
“Fuck this,” the leader snarled as he quickly reloaded his gun and finished off the rest of the hostages. “Bring in the C4…if these pricks don’t want to do this the old fashioned way we’ll have to leave a bigger mess,” as the man barked orders, the very dead body of Pablo Espinoza began to emit pillars of steam as it started to bubble and twitch. With a final sighing whoosh of air, the man’s corpse collapsed into a steaming pile of flesh-colored goop.
“What the fuck?” The terrorist rasped—lowering his gun as his ears caught the sound of the body falling apart. “One moment,” he added as he holstered the firearm and strode toward the marble counter. With the utmost ease, he vaulted over the four foot barrier and landed in front of the pile of sludge. Kneeling down, he lifted a brow as he poked at the viscous liquid with a gloved hand.
In that instant, the sludge sprung off the floor of the bank and began to force itself down the man’s throat. A gurgled scream escaped his throat as he clawed at the flesh-colored goop, which was now moving like a cohesive entity instead of the fluid that it originally appeared to be. Taken aback by their leader’s frantic shouts, the five other terrorists dashed forward and tried to help as the last vestiges of the fluid vanished into the man’s trembling lips.
“Oh god,” the bank robber mumbled as his eyes widened in horror. With a groan, he put his hands over his stomach and stumbled backwards—his back hitting against the counter as his eyes rolled up into the back of his head. A moment later, a foreign scream escaped the terrorist’s throat and then his body exploded outward in a vibrant display of blood and gore. At the epicenter of the explosion, Pablo stood drenched in blood, his hands hoisted into the air as he slowly drew fresh breaths.
“Fuck this!” One of the terrorists screamed, dropping his rifle as he hopped over the countertop and sprinted toward the entrance of the bank. As he pushed through the revolving glass doors, he was reduced to Swiss cheese by the cadre of police officers that had formed outside the bank. Within a few moments, the rest of the terrorists were dispatched—leaving a rather ensanguined Pablo the only survivor of the attempted bank robbery.
***
Through Pablo’s actions, the San Francisco branch of the Bank of California was the only instance where the Dark Eternal’s were stopped. In almost ten thousand other banks across the United States, the terrorist organization was successful to some degree with their insidious plot to deal a serious blow to the American economy. Although he had saved his hometown, Pablo was forced to flee San Francisco or be indicted on charges of murder (for gunning down his supervisor).
At the end of the day, Pablo Espinoza managed to, in a way, come to terms with his damaged DNA. Although he had saved the city millions of dollars, they’d touted him as a criminal and ostracized him. From that day forth, Pablo lost any semblance of control he had over his body’s tendency to randomly melt. He lost the mental soundness to fix the random instances of melting, and it became so severe that some incidents would leave him a puddle of sludge for weeks at a time.
It is better to live a coward than sacrifice yourself for a society that doesn’t care. The moment you show a hint of selflessness or compassion for your fellow men is the same moment where he devours you whole. Such is the fate of those heroes in a world ruled by cynicism and quarterly reports.
![[Image: siggy2.jpg]](http://storm.novahost.org/mysigs/kazprofile/siggy2.jpg)