——Three Miles Away. Syndicate Hub.
The basement room was thick with cigarette smoke. An exhaust fan droned somewhere in the ceiling.
Briggs, a mid-level crew boss, stood frozen in front of a bank of glowing monitors. The ash on his cigarette grew long, finally snapping and falling onto his shoes. He didn't notice.
On screen four, the grainy, black-and-white feed from the pawn shop's hidden camera replayed the last sixty seconds.
A giant in a trench coat and a rubber rooster mask. A shotgun blast at point-blank range. The giant didn't go down. Didn't even slow. He crossed the room and killed the shooter with his own gun.
Briggs hit pause. The screen froze. The rooster mask stared back at him.
Behind Briggs, a young enforcer swallowed hard. His hands were shaking.
"Boss," the kid whispered, his voice cracking. "What the fuck is that? Do we... do we call the cops?"
Briggs slowly turned his head to look at the kid. "Call the cops?" he repeated. "You want to call a couple of beat cops with nine-millimeters to handle a thing that eats buckshot for breakfast?"
Briggs looked back at the screen. He reached up and rubbed the back of his neck. His hand came away damp.
"Get this footage to the estate," Briggs ordered, crushing his cigarette into the paper cup. "Right now. They need to see this. If this is what the Sinclairs are running now, we are all dead."
——4th and Elm. Alleyway.
Red and blue strobe lights bounced off the wet brick walls.
Daniel backed into the dead end. Freezing rain soaked through his hoodie.
At the mouth of the alley, three police cruisers formed a barricade.
"Put your hands on your head and get on the ground! Now!" a voice roared.
Daniel looked at his hands. They were covered in blood. Not his.
"I said get on the ground!" The metallic clack of six service weapons being racked echoed off the walls. "Last warning!"
He couldn't let them take him.
Daniel clenched his fists and prepared to rush the line.
THUD.
Something heavy dropped from the rooftop behind the police line, landing directly on the hood of the center cruiser.
The cops spun around.
A seven-foot silhouette stood on the crushed metal hood, freezing rain whipping around his long black trench coat. A rubber rooster mask stared back at them.
"Get down from there! Hands where—"
Kai didn't let him finish. He launched off the hood, clearing twenty feet in a single bound, and crashed directly into the police line.
Kai landed on the first officer, his boot driving the man into the asphalt with a heavy crunch. Before the others could pull their triggers, Kai spun. His massive hand caught a second officer by the face, lifting him off his feet and slamming his skull through the cruiser's windshield.
"Martinez!" a woman's voice screamed. "Officer down! Officer down!"
For a half second, nobody moved. Then the remaining four raised their weapons and opened fire.
Gunfire erupted. Bullets sparked off the brick walls and tore through Kai's coat.
Empty casings rained onto the wet asphalt.
"It's not going down!" someone shouted. "Why the fuck isn't it going down?!"
"Keep shooting! Keep shooting!"
Two rounds caught Kai square in the side of the head. His head snapped sideways.
He straightened.
The rubber rooster mask had a ragged hole punched through the forehead. Dark blood seeped out through the torn rubber and ran down the beak in a thin, steady stream.
The shooting stopped.
Nobody said anything for a full second.
"What the fuck." Someone's voice had dropped to almost nothing. "What the fuck is that thing? Is that even— is that a person?"
"Dispatch, this is Unit 4—" The officer's voice cracked. "We need immediate backup at 4th and Elm, officer down, suspect is—" A pause. "Suspect is not— fuck, suspect is not responding to gunfire. Repeat, not responding to gunfire—"
"Wong! The trunk! Get the goddamn rifle!"
"I'm on it, I'm on it—"
The sound of a cruiser trunk popping open.
Then the camera lurched. A massive shape filled the frame. The footage tilted sideways, hit the ground, and went still.
The camera lurched violently. The footage tilted sideways, hit the wet asphalt, and went dead still. A pair of ash-white hands entered the edge of the frame, grabbed the kid in the hoodie, and dragged him out of frame.
Then, static.
——Downtown Precinct.
"Back it up. The head shot part."
The briefing room was packed. Nobody had sat down.
The footage played on the projector screen for the third time. Someone hit pause. The rooster mask filled the screen, the bullet hole in the forehead clearly visible, dried blood running down the beak.
The footage rewound. They watched it again.
"Two rounds," someone said. "Right in the head."
"I can see that."
"And it just—"
"I know what it did."
Silence.
"So what the hell are we dealing with?" a younger officer asked. "Like, is there a vest that covers the head? Some kind of—"
"It bled." A veteran near the front hadn't moved. "You see the mask. It bled."
"So it's not a robot."
"Obviously it's not a fucking robot, Davis."
Someone shifted their weight. The projector hummed.
The sergeant by the door looked at the frozen frame for a long moment. Then he looked at the floor.
"Who do we call about something like this?" he said. Not to anyone in particular.
Nobody answered right away.