[Fiction] Murder in Cairo

[Metropolis]

Contrary to popular belief, the witching is not midnight but instead the hour after. One a.m. In Cairo is a very sleepy time. Only the vice merchants and the retiring club goers commune about this ancient dying city when Apep slides from the shadows onto the streets. Her senses sharply attuned to the vast smells, sounds and feel of the place that seems like the only home she can remember. She searches the quantum flow feeling for that needle in the haystack. Big Poppa Metropolis is going to die this night. Sure as she knows anything, she can feel her life long trained instincts alive within her. It is as if she has been given another target by her former masters, another file of a person that is not to see the light of morning. A chill runs down her spine as she wonders if she will ever see the light herself. Then she finds him. He is singing the song, "Seasons In The Sun"

With a thought she has stepped sideways into the shadow of a streetlamp riding into the umbra highways of darkness, finding her target of exit into the light. She emerges and there is pain filled scream. It is not Apep who screams. The shadow of exit she had chosen was one that was cast by the concrete overhang of Metropolis’ shoulder from his arm, which now lay on the street bleeding oil and sewage. Apep felt the smile of pride in her work cross her face as she turned to face her tormenter. Big Poppa Metropolis stood his ground shaping the city stuff around him to close his wound.

“Hey, Whaasssup snakey?" Metropolis hissed through his pain.

“Why? WHY?” was all she could say as Apep crossed 10 meters in a single leap bringing a fist onto his temple, cracking stone and releasing smog. “Why?”

Metropolis just stood there and began to laugh that hideous inanimate laugh of his. His voice was that of the cacophony of traffic and the scraping of stone. In a way the sheer noise of this man had always discomforted Apep, and now his laughing stirred the killer inside her.

“You were my friend, Lucious. Why have started to trash my name?”

“Ya’ll shouldn’t be so ashamed of your booty time. It looks bad on your boyfriends. How do you think ol’ Leo is feeling about you getting so mad about this, he is probably crying his eyeless head off right now, thinking his lady love is ashamed of him.”

Apep strikes again this time letting loose her poison claws, tearing the masonry from Metropolis’ chest. “Don’t you dare!” She hisses more like a snake than human speech.

“MY AFFAIRS ARE MINE ALONE!”

“No they aint. You are something more now than some private person living their dull existence to themselves. You are an icon now. Your life is example now. And you whine about it like those damned celebrities crying about their privacy. Don’t step up to the plate if you can’t pay the piper.”

“What do you know about the price I have paid?”

“I know more about you, Nicole, than you would suspect. After all I have given to you.”

“You have given me nothing but grief, I owe you nothing. How dare you accuse me of being still in league with Proteus. How exactly did you escape them? Maybe you should change your name to Judas Clay.”

“Heh, good one, but it wasn’t them who had me locked down. All this time it was the Directive. Totally different story.”

“Is it?”

The quiet tension in the air gained certain vibrancy between them as Big Poppa Metropolis reformed his arm into a deadly jackhammer. He could see the look in Apep’s eyes were primal. Like an animal of cold blood, he knew it was time and nothing was going to change the course of the coming events. She circled him silently, taking in his measure of the man whom she had beaten twice before without him as much as landing a single blow on her lithe form.

“So let’s do this thing!” Luscious said breaking the silence with a strobe of heavy bass sound track that began to play havoc on Apep’s hearing.

“Now you die, Lucious Clay!” Apep said as she sprung into the air, A flurry of snake school kung fu, as she lit into Metropolis like a juggernaut, staggering his 8 foot, 1000lb form. She finished her attack with a kick directly through his torso, blowing a hole in him that was accompanied by the sound of a building exploding. Yet, Big Poppa Metropolis did not fall. The jackhammer that was his arm swung through empty space as Apep moved in a blur spinning away from his attack. He was in slow motion compared to her. It was as it always was. Lucious was not a poor or unskilled fighter, but he simply was not in league with Apep. Whenever they had fought before they had both held back. A friendly bought or mere posturing but this time it was clear that the stakes were far higher. It was also clear that Lucious was about to die.

Then he let a cry of rage that sounded like a workmen’s lunch bell and began to grow. Swiftly his form filled the area as he began to tower up to 50 meters. This sudden and unexpected move caught Apep unaware as she was buffeted by his enlarging mass. The sheer force of which shattered her left leg, which began to mend almost instantly. He had changed the scope of this battle and she would adapt. Shadows raised from the ground around her, propelling her upwards to his eye level, the shadow resembling a giant cobra of which Apep was the forked tongue. She struck like a snake strikes for his throat, claws piercing steel and stone, oil spewed forth unto her arm burning like an acid pollutant. He had hurt her twice. That would be his last shot.

Apep felt the monster within her call out for blood. All the rage and humiliation boiled in her node as she felt the quantum surge of power. The giant snake shadow around her began to harden and solidify. Apep began to change. She had taken her name from the Egyptian myth of the snake, which swallowed the sun, and now she had never been closer to that myth than ever before. Apep stood 100 meters tall with shadows moving like tendrils across her skin that blacked out the stars. She struck with open palm and Metropolis was sent flying across the city to come crashing down in the shadow of Ghiza. Apep rose like a terrifying spectre from the ground around his fallen body. As Luscious Clay staggered to his knees to face the horror before him, a salty tear dropped from his Plexiglas eye and all he could utter was “Oh mamma…” The darkness danced up her arm shaping into a giant blade of obsidian steel. It came down at indescribable speed and sundered his head from his neck with a popping sound as toxic waste was sent spewing forth from the stump of his body, spraying over the desert sands in torrent of gore. Metropolis had fallen.

As Apep began to return to her familiar near human form She could hear the echoing laughter of Thetis from within her mind. Apep broke down sinking into the shadows, crying tears of darkness.