Early morning.
Gotham.
Below the towering skyscrapers lay the slums.
This shantytown was a place where even the police wouldn’t patrol alone.
Corrugated tin roofs pieced together like scabs on a mangy dog’s head, strung between clotheslines, discarded mattresses, and someone’s broken couch, its fabric stained with a dark brown splotch that didn’t look like coffee.
The air was thick with a mixture of mildew, spoiled food, cheap cigarettes, and a sickeningly sweet stench—the smell of something quietly rotting away.
Cole squatted atop the highest abandoned water tower.
The tower’s iron frame was rusted down to its skeleton.
Wind whistled through the gap with a low, bottle-blowing wail.
He unzipped the first bag of cash.
Crisp hundred-dollar bills, neatly stacked, giving off the rich scent of fresh ink.
In Gotham’s shantytowns, that smell was sweeter than fresh bread, sweeter than a woman, sweeter than anything in the world.
Because it could buy all of those things.
Cole didn’t dump the whole bag at once.
He reached in, took a handful, and flicked his wrist like tossing fish food.
The bills scattered into a flutter of green snow, drifting west.
Another handful cast to the east.
Another to the north.
He climbed down the water tower and glided across the corrugated tin roofs, tossing a handful every few steps, raining money down silently and evenly over the district.
Below lay the wretched masses.
In the easternmost corner, a homeless man curled in the crack between a tin shed and a brick wall.
The original color of his clothes was long gone, worn so endlessly that the dye had been ground away, leaving only the dull off-white of raw fiber.
A small fire crackled beside him, burning scrap wood and old newspapers scavenged from trash heaps.
The flame was tiny, flickering on the brink of dying, shivering in the wind.
His eyes were unfocused, pupils blown wide like empty wells.
Fresh off a hit, a discarded syringe lay by his feet, a dried, dark-red droplet clinging to the needle.
He slouched against the wall, limp as a ragdoll tossed aside.
A faint smile played on his lips—a blank, empty grin born of a mind washed completely white with bleach, free of all thought.
A green slip of paper floated down from above, drifting right past his eyes.
His gaze tracked the paper for a moment, as though it took an eternity to register that the object was real.
Then he reached out, pinched the edge of the bill between two fingers, and held it up to the firelight.
A tongue of flame licked the paper.
The edge curled instantly, shifting from green to brown, then to black.
The flame slithered up the border like a thin, bright-red snake.
He smiled—a gentle, faint laugh, as if seeing something meant only for his eyes.
Hallucinations.
He’d seen plenty.
Once, he had seen his veins erupt from his arms like vines, winding around a streetlight and dangling his body in midair.
Another time, he had watched a cat covered in eyes crawl out of a storm drain; every eye wept tears of gasoline before the creature lit itself on fire.
So he was used to it.
He rolled the burning hundred-dollar bill slowly, meticulously, as if rolling a hand-crafted cigar, then casually tossed it into the fire.
The fire flared up.
The green paper hissed softly in the heat as it curled into a ball.
Carbonization crept inward from the edges.
Benjamin Franklin’s face on the hundred-dollar note puckered, blackened, and shattered into dust.
Two meters away, another homeless man leaned against the wall, wrapped in a tattered down jacket pulled from a dumpster.
The jacket had a rip across the shoulder, grey stuffing bursting out like a festering wound. Get faster updates on g.com.
He had been dozing, but the sudden flare of the fire woke him.
Opening his eyes, his pupils caught the flash of green rapidly vanishing in the flame.
He froze for a second.
Then his eyes bulged, nearly popping out of their sockets.
“Holy shit!
That’s fucking money!”
He leaped off the ground like a dog kicked in the tail and threw himself at the fire.
He thrust his hand straight into the flames, fingers clutching the edge of the burning paper.
Fire licked his knuckles; his arm hair singed away instantly, and his skin turned from red to a sickly, translucent white oozing fluid.
He felt no pain.
He pinched the charred edge and fished the fragment out of the ashes.
Two-thirds of the bill was gone, the remainder still sputtering sparks.
He slapped at it with his other palm, hot embers burning into his skin, fusing paper ash and raw flesh together.
The fire died out.
He held the scrap up, staring at it.
A blackened, curling mass of ash that barely retained the outline of a bill.
With the lightest touch of his fingers, the charred paper crumbled, falling in gray powder through his fingers.
It landed on muddy puddles, floating on top like a paper-thin layer of soot ready to blow away with the wind.
On the back of his hand, blisters had already risen where he was burned—clear pockets of pale yellow fluid encircled by unhealthy red skin.
He didn’t look at his hand.
He stared at the remaining ash for a long time, then wiped his palm on his pant leg, smearing ash and peeled skin together onto the fabric.
He leaned back against the wall and closed his eyes, acting as if nothing had happened.
The high vagrant still slouched nearby, that blank smile still pinned to his face.
The fire crackled on as the scrap wood popped.
He didn’t remember what had just burned.
He wouldn’t remember tomorrow.
By the day after, he might not even remember where he was today.
And that was fine.
In a place like this, memory was a luxury.
The clearer you remembered, the more agonizing life became.
In another direction, in an alley across from a convenience store.
A man squatted against the base of a wall.
The cuffs of his shirt were frayed and the collar fuzzy, but it was clear it had once been decent attire.
Light blue Oxford cotton, with a small cluster of pinholes on the left breast where a brand tag had been ripped off.
He squatted there, knees pressed against his chest, hands jammed into his pockets.
In his right pocket was a steel pipe picked up from a construction site, roughly forty centimeters long.
One end had been sawed off, jagged and rusted.
He gripped it tightly, his palm drenched in sweat.
Sweat mixed with rust, creating a sour, metallic taste like licking a battery.
He stared at the convenience store door—glass, automatic, stuck with a printed sign reading “NO CREDIT,” its corners peeling up.
He was calculating.
Go in.
Grab bread, grab water, grab anything he could shove into his mouth.
He recognized the clerk behind the counter.
Last week, back when he still held a decent job and his credit hadn’t tanked, he had nodded to the guy every day on his way past.
The clerk had nodded back.
Neither knew the other’s name, but they swapped nods twice a day, morning and evening.
Now he was going to rob someone he “knew.” The clerk would hit the silent alarm under the counter.
How long until the cops arrived?
They wouldn’t come.
Cops in this sector didn’t respond to convenience store robberies.
But the clerk had a gun of his own.
The shotgun under the register—he’d seen it.
Last time a vagrant caused trouble outside, the clerk just set the gun on the counter without saying a word, and the guy walked off.
So he had to hit the clerk before he could reach for that gun.
Steel pipe to the arm reaching for the weapon.
Grab the stuff and run.
If he couldn’t run, fight for his life.
Risking his life, that was all.
His life wasn’t worth anything anyway.
A hundred-dollar bill drifted down, landing in the muddy puddle by his feet.
He looked down at the bill.
Benjamin Franklin faced up, half-submerged in the muddy water, which slowly seeped along the paper’s edge, turning the green ink a dirty dark green.
He stared at the face.
Stared for a long time—long enough for the streetlight nearby to flicker three times.
He let go of the steel pipe in his pocket.
His fingers uncurled one by one, letting the pipe slip down against his thigh.
He bent down and picked the bill out of the mud.
Water dripped from its edge onto his frayed sleeve.
He wiped at the mud on Franklin’s face with his thumb, but couldn’t get it clean; dirt was ground deep into the paper fibers.
He held the bill up to the streetlight.
Watermark present.
Security thread intact.
Real.
He folded the note once and slipped it into his shirt pocket, right against his chest.
Then he stood up, his knees cracking.
He stepped into the convenience store.
The automatic door slid open with a short electronic chime.
The clerk behind the counter looked up—the man who exchanged two nods with him every day.
The man walked over to the shelf and picked up a bag of sliced bread and a bottle of mineral water.
The cheapest kind.
He stepped to the register, took the bill from his shirt pocket, and laid it on the counter.
The note was damp, stained with mud, sticking to the surface with its edges curled.
The clerk looked down at the bill, then up at the man’s face.
After a long pause, he popped the register open and counted out change.
Coins, a few crumpled dollar bills.
He pushed the change, bread, and water toward the man.
Neither said a word.
The man gathered his items and walked out of the store.
He sat down on a concrete barrier at the mouth of the alley, tore open the bread wrapper, and took out a slice.
The crust was dry, chewing like paper in his mouth.
He chewed slowly.
Not because he wasn’t hungry, but because he’d gone hungry for so long that his stomach had shriveled to the size of a fist.
Eating too fast would make him throw up.