Wonder City Stories

Can't Get Good Help Nohow These Days

The Copperhead was lounging in Captain Zip's office chair when they returned from their afternoon run.

He was a long, lanky, raw-boned man with nondescript brown hair graying in patches and wrinkled skin tanned cosmetically orange. He affected a Stetson cowboy hat (black, of course), a leather vest with copper fittings over a blue dress shirt, a string tie in the shape of a copper snake, stonewashed blue jeans, and stiff, shiny cowboy boots. He had small, pale eyes behind tinted glasses, and the worst teeth Megan had seen in years.

His bodyguard, a muscular black woman nearly as tall as Megan, stood nearby, arms crossed. She was dressed in clothing that was clearly put together by some person's Victorian-anthropologist-meets-Hollywood idea of "African savage"-wear, complete with leopard skin, spear, and grass skirt. Judging by her expression, that person was probably the man sitting in Captain Zip's chair. Megan suspected that she'd put her foot down about her hair, which was done in perfectly reasonable braids.

"Weeeeell, Captain," the Copperhead drawled. "Fayncy meetin' you-uh heear."

Captain Zip snarled wordlessly. Megan decided to fade to one side.

Finally, the apoplectic Captain said, "Get outta my chair, you two-bit cowboy wannbe."

"Now, now, Cap'n," Copperhead said, dropping most of his fake drawl. "I'm here to talk business, since you're not answering your voicemail lately."

Megan sidled up to the bodyguard. "Hey," she said out of the corner of her mouth.

"Hey," said the bodyguard.

They watched the two men squabble for a moment. Megan finally said, "Come here often?"

The bodyguard snorted. Megan looked at her sidewise and saw a quirk at the corner of her mouth.

"Should I ask what your sign is?" the bodyguard said after a minute.

"How about, 'I'm not being paid enough for this shit'?"

The bodyguard snorted again. "You're telling me." She had a perfect BBC accent.

"I'm Megan."

"Zenobia the Congo Queen, at your service."

"That's never your real name."

"Well, no, but I'm paid to introduce myself that way."

"Paid enough?"

Zenobia eyed the Copperhead, who was brick-red in the face, tendons in his throat straining, as he bellowed about money that Captain Zip had owed him for several years now. "Probably not," she admitted.

They watched for a while longer. As far as Megan could tell, the Copperhead had loaned Captain Zip a rather large sum of money, apparently to keep up the business and maintain the truck, and possibly to renovate parts of the garage that were falling in. However, the Captain had failed to continue to make the Copperhead's rather exorbitant payments. The Copperhead was proposing an even more exorbitant payment schedule, which mostly consisted of some of the Captain's body parts.

"Why is he making these threats himself?" Megan asked Zenobia. "I mean, I thought mob bosses had mooks to do their dirty work for them."

Zenobia pursed her lips. "I believe that his mooks all told him to shove his 'heap big wampum' up his 'heap big ass'."

Megan facepalmed.

"He takes his theme a little too far," Zenobia added unnecessarily.

"Well, Zip, we'll just see what you have to say," boomed the Copperhead, "to the WRATH of ZENOBIA THE CONGO QUEEN!"

The two men looked over expectantly.

Zenobia the Congo Queen sighed and rattled her spear. "Rar," she said.

"Oh, come on, girl!" the Copperhead said, hands on hips. "I hired you to be scary. You're about as scary as a chipmunk!"

"Chipmunks get to dress better," Megan said.

"You keep a civil tongue in your head, girlie!" he said to Megan with a poisonous glare.

"Look," Megan said with as much of her mother's infuriating reasonableness as she could muster, "let's just talk this through, shall we? You order Zenobia to attack Captain Zip. I may not be his hired bodyguard, but my mother would have my hide if I just walked away. Zenobia, are you para?"

"Me?" Zenobia said. "I should bloody well say not."

"Right," Megan said, cutting off the Copperhead and Captain Zip, who both attempted to say something. "I am, however. Superstrong AND invulnerable. A fight would result in Zenobia getting hurt, my clothes getting ripped, and Mr. Coppertone there getting a black eye as my final word on the subject."

"CopperHEAD," he and the Captain both corrected.

"So I propose that you two gentlemen sit down with a pencil and a calculator," Megan said, moving a chair over to the desk and excavating the Captain's ancient calculator. "You work out some sort of payment plan that doesn't ruin the Captain, but provides the Copperhead with sufficient cash flow to attempt to hire more underemployed people of color to humiliate with racist stereotypes. I'll take Zenobia out for dinner and a drink. Everyone's happy, and no one gets hurt."

The Copperhead and Captain Zip glowered at her, then eyed each other. Finally, the Captain shrugged. "She's the Amazon's daughter."

"Oh, HELL," the Copperhead said, throwing himself into a chair and jabbing the "on" button of the calculator. "Hire a consarned boy next time, will you? Then we'd get a proper throwdown."

Crate and Pallet

Captain Zip was as good as his word -- work started at "5 ayem sharp." Megan was glad she'd thought to stop into the Stars n' Garters for coffee that morning, even if she couldn't bring herself to eat anything. It enabled her to be bright-eyed and cheerful in taking Zip's gruff and often incomprehensibly muttered orders.

She lifted and hauled and wrangled any number of awkward loads that needed to be packed into the back of the truck, efficient of both space and offloading order. It took her three tries to pack the truck correctly. She was apologetic.

Zip champed briefly on his unlit cigar, then said, "Took the boy more'n ten tries to get it right," and swung himself into the driver's seat.

Megan fit into the passenger seat -- just barely. The fact that she was wedged into place worked for her as she discovered that Zip was an utterly unprincipled and untalented driver. When they reached their first destination, she was awestruck that the truck hadn't disintegrated around her from the sheer physical forces at work on it during transit. There were several new scratches and paint streaks on the bumpers, however.

Contents may have shifted during flight, Megan thought as she carefully opened the rear doors.

It wasn't hard work, and besides the pulse-pounding intervals between deliveries, it didn't occupy too much of her conscious thought. Her boss was undemanding. Zip crouched over the wheel, chewing on the cigar, scowling at the road, wrestling the big truck around as if he were trying to get a grip on its throat -- if he could only find its throat. He never got out of the truck, but left the paperwork to Megan and the receiving person at each destination. Megan had a lot of time for thinking.

Foremost in her mind was what to do about that phone number. The relevant side of "the vat" was folded neatly in her back pocket even now.

When they stopped for lunch, Zip paid for her food. He waved off her not-very-energetic protests. "Job perk," he said. "I know the pay's shit, sunshine. Least I can do."

Of course, the food wasn't very expensive, or even good. The Gold Stars fast food chain was pretty extensive here on the east coast. Megan's mother had complained about it, but never complained about the monthly trademark checks that had been coming for the past ten years. The Amazonburger was one of the best-sellers on the menu.

Megan ordered the Jane Liberty chicken nuggets.

As she was finishing her Bombshell shake, Zip looked at her over the edge of his newspaper. His eyes were quintessentially dark and beady, and a bit menacing when one couldn't see the rest of his face. Then he folded back the newspaper and shoved it over to her. "I thought you said you weren't in spandex."

She looked down at the headline: "The New Amazon? Meteor Hits City!" The small photo was clearly taken by one of the ace photogs at the Wonder City Reflector: color telephoto action shot of a woman lifting some sort of armored goon over her head with one hand while holding up some broken part of a building with the other. She had pale skin, long red hair streaming photogenically in the breeze, and a green tanksuit-style costume with thigh-high boots. Megan, who was used to seeing photos of herself in scale, suspected that Meteor was even taller than she was. The article, however, described Meteor as "around 8 feet tall."

Megan shoved the paper back at Captain Zip. She took a last drink from her shake and stood up. "You're just going to have to believe me when I say that it's not me. Also? I'm a few shades darker than Meteor."

Zip looked at the photo, then back at Megan. "Oh. Ah. Didn't really look at the photo. And, well, your mom's white, and you look like her, so I thought you just got a good tan out there in the desert..."

Megan ground her teeth. "I assure you it's congenital."

Zip stood up. "Huh. Everyone's been wondering who your dad was for years. Your mom didn't tell anyone."

"She didn't tell me either." She gestured to the door. "Can we get going now? Still got half the truck to do."

He tossed the paper in the trashcan with the scraps of lunch, following her.