Episode 1: The Five Chambers

Featuring music by Wu-Tang Clan producer, “Cilvaringz”, comes the scripted podcast, "Five Deadly Rebels", that is the kung fu cult classic film, "Five Deadly Venoms", meets the Gangster genre, meets Science Fiction, written by Goodreads acclaimed author, Ian Tuason, winner of a 2016 Watty Award, the world’s largest online writing competition. 

From the five boroughs come five rebels of society—the gangster, the hustler, the raider, the gambler, the corrupt—each gifted with superhuman powers, each mastering an ancient martial art discipline—judo, kendo, muay Thai, karate, kung fu—through a mysterious being from another reality, known only as “The Master”, who launches the five into a dangerous hunt for a golden crypto ledger hidden within the criminal underworld of New York City—a ledger holding wealth that can not only change each of their hard-boiled lives, but the order of the world.

Enter the "the five chambers outside of time," and into a war against reality–if there is such a thing.

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Transcript

Five Deadly Rebels, a Kung Fu Sci-Fi Scripted Podcast. Hosted by Ian Tuason. Music by Wu-Tang Clan producer, Cilvaringz. This is Episode 1, The Five Chambers.


“And that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name. Here is wisdom. Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast: for it is the number of a man; and his number is 666.”

The Book of Revelations 13:17-18



Chapter 1: The King of Manhattan

The Slugger pinches the pink bill of his baseball cap and pulls it down lower over the pink-plated iron mask hiding his face, lined with horizontal slits, yet, no one in the packed night club is giving him a second look—or rather, no one’s daring to. They only sneak quick glances from the corner of their eyes as he pours Moet and Cristal down the throats of barely covered college girls and Instagram models filling up his VIP booth, tilting their heads back with mouths wide open like baby birds waiting to be fed every time he raises a bottle. 

The Slugger surveys the club from the edge of the booth as if measuring the place up to his standards. His pink alpaca wool overshirt hangs open, exposing a dark-silver chain encrusted with pink diamonds, drooping heavy over a pink silk t-shirt stretching across his massive chest. Dangling from the chain swings a crypto ledger thinly plated with twenty-four carat pure gold—gold that isn’t even a fraction of a fraction of the wealth that the ledger itself could unlock—life-changing wealth, not for one life, but for billions. This is the kind of outlandish wealth that dangles casually around his thick neck, and only four others know this. 

The Rollin’ 10s Harlem Crips have their own booth on the other side of the club, trying not to mad dog in the Slugger’s direction, showing him respect, even though he gunned down seven of their members two weeks before in broad daylight, just for selling blow in Greenwich Village where he runs things now. 

Everyone who is anyone knows that the Slugger was shot eighty-nine times in eleven different incidents, and he didn’t die. He didn’t even bleed. Word got around Manhattan that taking a shot at the Slugger meant death, and since then, no one has ever tried. 

Even the huge bouncers at the club didn’t dare frisk him when he first entered, despite noticing his rose gold-plated Desert Eagle pistol tucked heavy in his front waistband for all to see. 

But the Slugger wasn’t always this feared—this known. He was a young baseball prodigy in the Dominican Republic just a few years ago when an American scout sponsored him on a student visa to live with his family in SoHo while he attended and played ball for one of the top private high schools in Manhattan. He left his small rural town at the edge of a jungle and got his first taste of America and its promises. Colleges like Duke and Stanford courted him. Even some big league teams mailed him offers to play in their farm system.

But during a standard practice with his high school team, the ligaments in his shoulder were torn to shreds on a routine throw to first base, and in that split second of unbearable pain, all his dreams were torn, too. When recalling that day, he wasn’t sure what hurt worse—his shoulder or his hopes. After that, the scout who discovered him focused more on other kids, and the Slugger moved in with his teammate, Cesar, also Dominican but American-born, living in a humble two-bedroom apartment on the Lower East Side with his immigrant parents and two younger sisters.

The Slugger rode the bench for the rest of the school year, his shoulder still aching and wrapped in tension bands. The offers from colleges stopped coming, but he was happy just watching Cesar from the bench, cheering for him, rooting for him. Cesar had a decent chance to make it to the big leagues one day, the Slugger would always tell him.    

On the second last day of school, a week away from graduation, the Slugger and Cesar walked home wearing their blue team jerseys and debated which of the colleges that offered him scholarships had the prettiest girls. This is when a black Nissan filled with four members of the Nine Trey Bloods sprayed bullets at them from a fully automatic Uzi, just because they were wearing blue. Cesar was hit twice in the back, but none hit the Slugger. Cesar died lying face down on the sidewalk as the screeching of tires faded off into the distance, the Slugger crouching over Cesar’s body, shaking him to wake up. 

“Come here, papi,” a petite blonde in a skin-tight vinyl dress creeps in front of the Slugger and grinds her Brazilian butt lift on his crotch, twerking, bumping against the hard nozzle of his Desert Eagle bulging out from under his white denim jeans. She turns around and kisses the Slugger’s mask, leaving a red lipstick stamp on pink iron. Under the mask, a white balaclava of Egyptian cotton littered with black embroidered five-tally symbols hugs his wide head and neck. 

Standing there in the pounding bass from the speaker towers guarding every corner of the club, sending pulses of reverb through the sweat-damp air and clouds of dry ice, he pauses to wonder if Cesar’s parents made use of the fifty grand in cash he had delivered to their apartment in an unmarked box with no return address, or whether they just gave the money away to some charity or their church. The last time he knocked on their door and offered them eleven grand in a wad of hundreds, they refused it, knowing who he was now—who he’d become. 

But the Slugger could never get them out of his mind—how the hard-working immigrant couple let him live with them for months after Cesar died, as he took the time to figure out what to do with the rest of his life. That summer, while living with them, he would walk the streets to his part-time job at a bodega around the corner, strolling past Trinitarios loitering the streets repping green, Grape Street Crips repping purple, Hoovers repping orange, and so many others he couldn’t remember, and so he only wore pink that summer—day after day, only pink.   

He was a ghost in the neighborhood. A ghost to the baseball scouts that once showered him with promises of fame. And every day he watched the gangbangers with iced-up chains driving by in their BMWs and Benzes, and saw how everyone respected them, even civilians. The owner of the Jewish deli down the street let one Vice Lord gangster cut to the front of the line while he waited at the back of it, his hands clasping tight into fists inside the pouch of his pink hoodie, so tight that his knuckles turned white. 

But that’s in the past now. Now, he’s a Lower East Side legend. He’s the Slugger from 10th Street who can’t be killed. No one fucks with him now. It was only a matter of time that the other four boroughs got word that the Slugger ran things in Manhattan. It was only a matter of time that the other four rebels would get word of him. He knows that wearing the mask that makes him impervious to bullets and blades also exposes him to dangers far greater. But he doesn’t care. He's the King of Manhattan now. He’s somebody. He’s gang now. One gang. And his anonymity—his true anonymity—is the price he paid for it. 

­-----

Lambos, Raris, and other luxury whips line both sides of the long lane in the deep underground parking lot. The Slugger struts down the center of the lane with two bottle service girls from the club, one under each arm, their short minidresses riding up their bare butt cheeks, laughing at everything the Slugger says. 

They pass under rows and rows of fluorescent lights, some of them flickering, all of them barely lighting the dark expansive space. Every little sound they make, like their footsteps and laughter, echoes loudly off the cement walls and ceilings enclosing them like a vast cavern.

Their laughter stops short when a lone figure steps out from between two Audis and blocks the path ahead of them. The figure stands a full foot shorter than the Slugger, wearing a black leather vest over a flowing blue hakama, cloaking the figure’s slender frame. A pointed metallic jingasa hangs low on the figure’s head, its broad blue and black strap fastened firmly under the figure’s mouth, running up the sides of the figure’s cheeks and ears. A black skin-tight cowl, embroidered with tiny white insect designs, shrouds the figure’s entire head—eyes hidden behind tinted shades. The Slugger recognizes the figure instantly—the Samurai. Number Two. 

The Slugger stops in his tracks and the girls stop with him. An eerie silence washes over everything. 

The long black hilt of Over Dark, the Samurai’s katana, points menacingly upwards at the Samurai’s side, its curved blade sheathed in a scabbard painted with black and white Japanese-style clouds swirling up and down its wood. 

“You chicas best fly,” the Slugger says, patting the girls on their butts. They take each other’s hands and scanter away, glancing sideways at the Samurai as the clamping of their stilettos echo even louder in the now silent garage. 

“Number Two, eh? Wouldn’t have guessed it’d be you,” the Slugger lowers his head. He pulls open one side of his overshirt, unveiling the handle of his Desert Eagle peeking out over his waistband.  

The headlights of the cars lining each side of the wide lane seem to stare at the pair of them like spectators of a medieval joust about to happen.

“Better time than any, I guess,” he whispers, more to himself than to the Samurai.
 
 

In a flash, the Slugger draws the four pound pistol with one hand. And like a synchronized dance, the Samurai draws Over Dark at the same instant, jagged electric bolts crackling up and down its shiny blade. Two cars on opposite sides of the lane start sliding slowly towards the Samurai, tires screeching. 

The Slugger unloads all nine rounds at the Samurai, his bulky arm never budging from the gun’s strong kickback, but all nine slugs curve in the air towards Over Dark’s blade, collecting the slugs like pellets on a magnet. The Samurai swipes the sword downwards and the slugs clatter on the pavement like marbles.

Tossing the Desert Eagle aside, the Slugger charges at the Samurai with a speed impossible for his large frame, and throws an overhead haymaker down at the Samurai who leaps over the deadly blow. The Slugger’s fist plummets into the pavement where the Samurai once stood just a split second earlier, shattering the pavement like a pile driver, asphalt exploding into chunks, big and small. The impact blasts a wave of reverberation, setting off all the car alarms in the garage, horns honking and headlights flashing all around them.

Still airborne, the Samurai swings Over Dark down onto the Slugger’s shoulder. Steel cuts through wool and silk but halts dead on unbreakable skin, sending a jolt up through the Samurai’s arms. The Slugger catches the Samurai midair with one hooked arm, and with a technically perfect judo hip throw, he sends the Samurai crashing into the back of a Lincoln SUV, shattering its back windshield. The Samurai slides down the dented tailgate and slinks onto the ground, dazed, still gripping Over Dark with one shaky hand.

“I don’t know what Master told you, chico. But I ain’t got no weak spot.” The Slugger bends down to take hold of the Samurai who thrusts Over Dark straight into his belly, penetrating through nothing, as if stabbing into a brick wall. And then the Samurai is airborne again, thrashing into the front of a Land Rover, bending its grill in half, loose screws scattering everywhere.  

The Slugger charges again, but the Samurai springs up and brings Over Dark down in a wide arch at the Slugger’s face who blocks the strike with crossed forearms. Razor-edged steel stops short just inches from his iron mask. But the sword’s electric bolts reach out from its blade and crackle around the Slugger’s mask like jagged blue fingers. The electricity rips the mask from his face and clashes onto Over Dark with a loud metallic clank, unveiling the Slugger’s dark eyes, mocha skin, and thick nose through the round opening in his white balaclava. The Samurai yanks Over Dark back, the iron mask still stuck to its steel, and sweeps the sword wide, aiming for the side of the Slugger’s head. The Slugger dodges backwards, blindingly quick, but not quick enough. 

“No!” the Slugger shrieks as the razor tip of Over Dark slices the bridge of his nose, opening up skin and cartilage, exposing its whiteness. 

The Slugger stumbles backwards, his posture softening. The injury itself isn’t serious, a flesh wound, but the implications are grave—and both the Slugger and the Samurai know what it truly means.

Dragging one leg back into a wide kendo stance, the Samurai jerks Over Dark to the side and the iron mask clatters and slides across asphalt.

In a blinding spark, the Samurai darts forward with a dizzying array of strikes, downwards, upwards, side to side, lightning fast, and the Slugger, no longer willing to block the blows, dips and dodges the blade, backpedaling faster and faster, until he’s cornered at the front end of his own pink Bugatti. The Samurai thrusts Over Dark straight at the Slugger who parries to the side, but the steel catches his shoulder, slicing through wool, skin, and muscle. Blood pours down his limp arm, dripping from the tips of his fingers and onto the pavement like drops of red paint. 

With his good arm, the Slugger fires a wild left hook at the Samurai’s head, but the Samurai drops under it, legs spread wide into a half-split, and runs the katana blade across the Slugger’s belly, cutting through his t-shirt, his skin, his abdominal muscles, his guts, from one side of his stomach to the other. Black bile and blood pour out of his open belly, intestines fall out, hanging like curtains. 

“Hmm,” the Slugger stops. The Samurai, legs still open wide, one hand flat on the pavement, the other holding Over Dark parallel to the ground, head lowered, unmoving—not even looking up at the damage done. 

The Slugger pauses as if there was nothing else to do. Taking two steps back, he sits on the hood of his Bugatti, his weight compressing the front wheel shocks, lowering its fender until it touches the ground. He digs out a long pre-rolled blunt and a two-dollar disposable lighter from the front pocket of his overshirt and lights the blunt, drawing in a deep drag of smoke, his guts still hanging out. He drops the lighter back into his pocket as if he was going to use it again later, as if there would be a later. A pool of blood forms at his feet. 

“It ain’t never gonna be enough for us, will it?” the Slugger says. 

The shorter Samurai rises up, now eye-level with the Slugger sitting down. He doesn’t even react when the Samurai rips off his chain, tearing the collar of his t-shirt open, exposing his hairy chest. The gold-plated crypto ledger hangs from one link of the chain. The Samurai eyes the ledger for a few moments, mesmerized. 

The Slugger starts to sing an old Spanish folk song offbeat to the honking of car alarms. The Samurai looks down at the Slugger’s bare chest and the two words tattooed on it—one word under each collar bone. 

Iron

Fame

The Slugger tries to raise his blunt to his lips, but the strength drains from his arm. He lowers his chin to his chest and closes his eyes.

The Samurai is gone now. The Slugger sits alone, his singing fading into mumbling. Only the blaring car alarms filling the air keep him company as he lets the life inside him drain away. 

 

Chapter 2: The Five Chambers

 Straggling along the narrow girder beam running across the underside of George Washington Bridge, Mickey keeps his arms spread out like wings for balance, suspended over the dark waters of Hudson River twenty-five stories below. He’d only bring one hand in every now and then to take a swig from the bottle of Jamaican rum in his grip, not his preference of booze, but all that he could find that afternoon. 

Cars rumble overhead, shaking the steel beam at his feet, forcing him to look down at the river so far underneath him that the roar of its waves are silenced by the distance. The seagulls flying close to the water look like passing specks of dust. Mickey knows he’s just a misstep, a slip, or a stumble away from certain death—if the impact doesn’t kill him, he knows that drowning will—yet he feels no fear. He never does when he’s drunk. 

He's wearing all black—black Air Forces, black cargo pants, black hoodie, and a black newsboy cap covering his blonde stubbled head, its short bill tilted low over his different colored eyes—one gray and one blue. 

This is his first time outside the boundaries of New York City. Looking back at the city’s skyline, he thinks it’s the biggest thing he’s ever seen in his life. He chugs what’s left of the rum and lets the empty bottle fall from his fingers, watching the bottle shrink smaller and smaller into the distance, and then disappear, too far to spot, lost within the expansive backdrop of the vast waters below, as if vanishing from existence.

Or maybe it did vanish, Mickey thinks to himself—not shatter on the surface of the waves, or plunge into the dark water, but simply vanish. And who can know for sure, he wonders. There are no boats below to witness its demise, no seagulls that have since flown away. The only way to be sure, really, he thinks, is to step off the steel beam and let gravity take him, and then, maybe, he’ll know what it’d feel like to be free—free from the daily grind of stealing to survive, free from the memories of his mom, and from the broken dreams she left behind. He wonders, calmly, his curiosity overpowering his senses, and then he understands for the first time what that phrase he had always heard, but never gave much thought to, actually meant: Curiosity killed the cat. 

And so, he steps closer over the edge of the beam, his toes and the arches of his feet hanging over it, only his heels gripping steel as a passing rig above shakes the beam violently.

He wouldn’t mind, really, he thinks to himself, but then he remembers why he’s there, and where he’s going, and so he steels himself for what’s to come. And after all, he’s got more drinking to do.

-----

The quiet streets of Bergen County, New Jersey, make Mickey feel uneasy. He’s so used to the city sounds in the Bronx with its cars honking, garbage trucks beeping, people yelling, even in the late hours of the night. Here, there’s only the humming of insects and rustling of leaves from the trees that line the clean, empty streets. The streetlights cast a warm glow over freshly cut lawns and manicured hedges of the houses there, all polished and pristine, a sharp contrast to the water stained, rundown buildings in South Bronx. The occasional car would drive by slicing through the silence, forcing Mickey to jump behind a tree, but then the silence would return and hang around even longer. 

Too quiet, Mickey thinks to himself. In the Bronx, he would squat low on fire escape platforms, peeking into apartment windows with no lights on, waiting for a screaming fire truck or ambulance to blare by before shattering a window. Mickey would steal jewellery, laptops, baseball cards encased in glass, anything he could sell to buy booze and food. On lucky days, there was already booze in the apartments he broke into. And on the luckiest of days, that booze would be Jameson Irish Whiskey beside a bucket of fried chicken or a box of half-eaten pepperoni pizza left out on the kitchen counter like some kind of bonus that God owed him.

Mickey never really enjoyed breaking into homes. Just a means to an end, really. Mickey was a simple young man. A good buzz and a full belly were enough to keep him content. But his joy, his true joy, what he really loved to do, was smacking his knuckles into the smug faces of the rich yuppies from Riverdale or the frat boys from Fordham University, the ones who would grimace at, snicker at, and at times even step over street kids like him sleeping on top of subway grates for warmth.

“Oi! The fook you laughin’ at, broski?” Mickey yelled in his thick Irish accent at the three university football players throwing quarters at Carl asleep on the sidewalk under a folded sheet of carboard. Mickey lost the fight that day, like he almost always does, too drunk to see what his fists are aiming for. But he did get one lucky punch in before crumpling onto the sidewalk from a kick to his gut. It was a clean punch that broke the university kid’s nose, and he laughed through his bloody teeth while the two other friends stomped on his ribs, but it was all worth it to Mickey. Just recalling the feeling of the kid’s nose crunch and go soft under his fist gave him shivers of satisfaction. 

When a douchebag was smaller than him, though, he would just let them go with a little scare, like the scrawny businessman in his pressed suit who had the balls to tell Wassy to get a job. The little man didn’t even hesitate to run away when Mickey rose up to march at him.

Fighting wasn’t anything new for Mickey. It wasn’t a curse forced upon him by poverty or hard times.  In middle school, when everything was good, when him and his mom were taken care of, he was expelled five times for fighting with classmates. “He made fun of me accent,” he told his mom one of those times, and she forgave him, as she always did. But then there were more fights, and more reasons. Eventually, Mickey’s mom decided to homeschool him, which thickened his Irish accent, making it even heavier, year after year. 

Mickey’s mom was born and raised in the Belfast ghetto of Northern Ireland. She ran away from her abusive father and couldn’t-give-a-shit mother when she was fifteen, not much younger than Mickey is now. His mom’s hair was naturally red, not ginger, but red, like blood. She found work webcamming in a house in Dublin shared by thirteen other teenage girls. That’s where she met a man who lived in New Jersey. He tipped her more than the other men she’d met on webcam. He sponsored her to the States and set her up in an apartment in the Bronx. She was only sixteen when the man got her pregnant with Mickey. 

His earliest memories of his mom were of her smiling and laughing all the time.  She told Mickey in a thick Irish accent that this was the land of opportunity, a Christian nation devoted to Jesus just as much as she was, and that one day, Mickey was going to be rich, too, like his father, and help the poor as Jesus had. She told this to Mickey often, as if to remind him of a truth that he should never forget. 

Mickey and his mom were taken care of well in those days—an apartment, an allowance, TV dinners, shopping sprees, comic books, even a massage chair. The man would visit and spend nights in his mom’s room while Mickey watched movies in the living room with the volume turned up. But as years went by, the man visited less. He had a family in New Jersey that his mom knew about, but she didn’t care, believing his lies that he would one day leave them for her. He visited less and less, then one day, he never came back at all. 

A couple of months after that, the landlord said she would be evicted unless she covered the two months of missed rent. Mickey was furious and almost slapped the landlord into giving him the man’s address and phone number, but the name and numbers the man gave them all—his mom and the landlord—were all fake. Lies on top of lies. 

Now, walking the quiet streets of the rich neighborhood, Mickey isn’t completely sure if he chose Bergen County to find nicer houses to steal from, or to fulfil his dream of one day breaking into a New Jersey home only to see, by chance or destiny, the fat face of his birth father in a family portrait hanging on the wall, and then finding him asleep in his king-size bed, or waiting in the shadows for him to return home, and then maybe he would feel better about what he did to his mom. 

But that’s an old dream, one he had given up on a long time ago. No, he’s there now for the big score. Big enough to share with his pals in the Buckner shelter or in tent town over at Devanney Park. Big enough to stuff cash into the donation box at the hospital that cared for his mom.

And then he finds it, the biggest house he’s ever seen—a mansion, he once heard they were called. Mickey studies the proud structure through the bars of a tall fence guarding its grounds. 

This is the house; Mickey feels in his heart. And relief washes over him, believing for certain he’ll walk away guiltfree this night. Guilt was the only casualty Mickey risked with every break in. It wasn’t getting shot, or arrested, but feeling shitty afterwards. Like the night he stole a digital camera from a townhouse whose owners left the backdoor unlocked. Mickey later turned the camera on to see photos of a boy no more than ten years old. Then by pure chance, or perhaps serendipity, when he was walking to a pawnshop to sell the camera, he saw a sheet of paper taped to a light post with a photo printout of a little boy—the same boy from the camera. Under the photo was a message that read,  To whomever has my camera, please keep it, but please return the memory card inside. It holds the last photos I have of my son, Justin, who passed away last year. You know where I live. May God lead you. 

That same day, Mickey left a plastic grocery bag on the doorstep of the townhouse—the camera, the memory card, an iPad, a thin gold necklace, and thirty-one dollars in cash inside it, then rang the doorbell and strolled away casually. 

After that day, Mickey swore to himself that he’d quit stealing after just one more break in, just to settle a small debt he owed to a friend from the shelter, but on that break in, he snuck into a bedroom to see a large man’s back facing him. Mickey squared up to protect himself, but when the man turned around, Mickey saw he was wearing virtual reality goggles over his eyes, clunky headphones covering his ears, and punching the air with sweaty fists gripping game controllers.  Mickey stole everything in the man’s room except for the computer he was toggled to, and chuckled to himself while making his getaway, imagining the shocked look on the man’s face when he takes off the goggles to see his bedroom empty, wondering if he’s in the right reality. And then he forgot all about the promise he made to himself earlier that day.

Now, walking along the barred fence around the mansion, looking for the easiest way in, he sees an old elm with one long branch hanging close enough to the top of the fence to jump over it. It doesn’t take much time for him to climb the tree and tight walk down the long branch, leaping over the fence and tumbling over wet grass.

Rising up, he surveys the sprawling estate with its sculpted bushes and trimmed flower beds, lit by spotlights half buried into the ground. He makes his way through a small orchard patch filled with fruit trees, lush red apples and green pears hanging over him. The closer he gets to the mansion, the more he’s struck by the size of it.

He pauses, scanning the mansion for a window with a light, listening for any sounds inside, but nothing. Even the long driveway running in a circle in front of the mansion is empty of cars or visible tire tracks.

Mickey draws in a deep breath and climbs the wide stone steps leading up to the mansion’s double doors of polished wood and brass fixtures that gleam from the lawn lights. He turns the knob and pushes, testing for an alarm, and is dumbfounded when the heavy door swings open. 

He peeks his head inside, listening, before carefully stepping in and closing the door behind him ever so gently. He digs out a small flashlight from the pouch of his hoodie. The small thing barely lights the grand foyer he finds himself standing in. A sweeping staircase winds up to the second floor. The marble floor at his feet gleams from the rays of his flashlight. Raising the light, Mickey sees walls adorned with traditional Japanese tapestries and paintings. To his left, he sees a conversation pit filled with large pillows and bean bags, surrounded by hanging shelves filled with rows upon rows of books. To his right is a dining room with a long table by a fireplace.

Mickey runs his light across the walls, looking for an alarm system box, or something, anything, that would ease his nagging suspicious that this is all happening too easily. 

He pushes forward, the rubber bottoms of his shoes only making soft noises on the hard marble. When a sound startles him, he spins around to see a black cat wearing a red collar sitting by his heels, peeking up at him. 

“Fookin’ thing,” he whispers sharply through his teeth, and for an instant, he’s oddly jealous of the cat’s stealth and silent steps.

Suddenly, his small flashlight dims, then brightens as he rattles the batteries inside it, then dims again, and he curses the darkness with a scoff. 

Mickey treads towards the stairs but the cat scurries ahead of him, blocking his way, meowing louder. Mickey shushes the cat who only cries even louder as Mickey glances up at the staircase, listening for people. 

“Fookin’ snitch.” Mickey turns and decides to scope out more of the main floor. 

In the dining room, he sees a painting of an old Japanese couple in kimonos hanging above the fireplace. The man in the painting is skin-bald, sporting a thin gray mustache, a solemn look in his green eyes. Odd for a Japanese man, Mickey thinks to himself. In the painting, the man stands stoically beside a much shorter woman, chubby, her smile so big that her eyes are squinting into the shapes of rainbows.

Mickey scans the room for a wet bar, a liquor cabinet, even a bar cart. Nothing.

“Fookin’ weirdos,” he whispers to himself.

In the kitchen now, he looks for a wine rack, but still nothing. His buzz is starting to dissipate and he can feel the cold sweats creeping up. Even his stomach seems to sober, growling at Mickey for some food.

Creeping towards the huge metal fridge, he dreams of sliced roast beef, corn, mashed potatoes, mac and cheese. Pulling the handle of the fridge door, Mickey’s mouth begins to water so much he’s forced to swallow. In the fridge sits a cake box on the middle shelf, an open can of cat food covered with a rubber seal in the shape of a paw, and a whole frozen turkey still vacuum sealed in white plastic. And then Mickey’s mind shoots back into a memory when he was twelve, digging through the dumpsters behind grocery stores for expired food, finding a frozen turkey, vacuum sealed in white plastic, and only half thawed out. That night, Mickey and his mom stuffed themselves with roast turkey, using only their hands, tearing off pieces of meat directly from the roast pan, laughing at each other with greasy hands and faces. 

In those days, his mom could only take jobs under the table or risk being deported. Jobs like cleaning toilets and floors at an Irish bar. Or her factory job that paid her in small bills. Or the job that sent her riding on an old, retired school bus, rusted and painted over gray, driving her and other immigrants out into an open field at five in the morning to dig out worms from the mud, collecting them for their boss to sell as fish bait. But all that work wasn’t enough to cover their rent, so Mickey started breaking into homes at thirteen to steal anything he could sell to help his mom keep the apartment. When selling his stolen watches and jewellery to pawn shops, he never gave his real name if ever they asked, which they rarely did, but when they did, he’d just say John or Jim, and that the watches and jewellery were gifts from his mom. Lies came easy to him. Even the world around him was a lie in his eyes, the land of opportunities, a Christian nation that didn’t give a shit about the poor. For Mickey, it really didn’t matter where he lived, really, but he did it all for his mom. 

When Mickey was fourteen, his mom began repeating the same questions only minutes apart. Soon, the minutes between the repetitive questions became seconds, and Mickey knew something was wrong. They didn’t have enough money to see a doctor, but a neighbor had told Mickey that his mom most likely had something she said was early onset Alzheimer’s Disease. The neighbor also said it rarely happened to women as young as his mom, but it does happen sometimes. And it did.  

His mom started to ask for Mickey’s father, and Mickey would tell the truth, that he left them years ago, and then she’d remember, and Mickey would see her heart break all over again. Eventually, Mickey would just lie, telling her that the man is out doing groceries, and would be back soon. And then she’d smile, believing it for a moment until she would ask Mickey again, and then again Mickey would lie, and then again, she’d believe it. She always believed Mickey—her little boy who could do no wrong. 

But her Alzheimer’s got worse, as if her body was also forgetting how to work. When he carried her into the hospital one night, the nurses took her in and some charity covered her care. Mickey lived with her in the hospital for months, but only during visiting hours. He’d sleep by her side in the day, share her hospital food, and at night, he’d sleep in abandoned houses and in the nooks of store entrances. From the first day his mom was admitted to the hospital, Mickey never returned to their apartment again. 

Within months, his mom began forgetting how to swallow. She lost weight, and her immune system shut down. She died of a common flu, but the doctors called it pneumonia. 

Social workers from the hospital tried to force him into a foster home but he preferred the streets he had gotten used to. He would break into homes for food and money and anything he could sell. Then one day, he stole a bottle of Irish whiskey from an East Bronx apartment and guzzled it all down while sitting under a schoolyard slide, and for the first time, he stopped thinking about his mom, and all his memories emptied from his brain, and for a short time, he felt happy.

Mickey shakes the memories from his head now, and turns his attention to the cake box. Opening it, his mouth waters again at the sight of a chocolate cake smothered with chocolate icing and the words Happy Birthday My Love written in red icing. And suddenly, another memory flashes into his mind—the glow in his mom’s eyes blowing out the candles of her last birthday cake, there in the hospital, so happy, oblivious to her sickness. 

“Ah, fook it,” he says to himself, fighting the urge to scoop a handful of cake, and instead, runs a finger across the icing just for a little taste, and places the box back onto its shelf in the fridge, his stomach protesting with a loud growl.

A meow startles Mickey again, the cat sitting next to his shoe, looking up at him. 

“The fook you lookin’ at?” he whispers.

Its head tilts up at Mickey, forcing him into a stare down.

“Okay, fine. Fook,” Mickey peels open the seal of the can of cat food and lays it on the floor. The cat sniffs the food for a moment before burying its face in it, nibbling.

Mickey closes the fridge door and notices that the power cord of the fridge is plugged to a wall outlet a few feet away. He pauses, staring at the fridge, then pulls it away from the wall.

Peeking behind the fridge, he sees a wooden door held closed by a chunky metal latch, its surface rough and textured, with cracks and grooves that seemed to have deepened over centuries. And then his curiosity takes over, and his desire for finding valuables or riches flies from his mind, replaced by something else—something he can’t explain. 

Mickey pulls the fridge out further and squeezes behind it, facing the door now. He grabs onto its latch and slides the heavy bolt into place with a satisfying thud. Mickey pushes the heavy thing open and it creeks on its rusted hinges, revealing the mouth of a spiral stone staircase descending down into the earth. 

Without a second thought, he takes the first step, and then the other, until he’s winding down the staircase, round and round in a tight coil, deeper and deeper, until the minutes begin to feel like hours, and then his sense of time begins to blur. He’s unsure if hours have passed, or days, but he doesn’t care, and pushes on as if by a will that was not his own.

He stops when he sees an orange glow on the steps below. Now he has to use his own will and a little bit of courage to take the next steps down, slowly, one foot after the other, until his toes leave the final step of the staircase. He finds himself standing at the edge of a circular room, its stone walls wet and cold, the air musty and dense. The room is dimly lit by a large lantern burning an orange flame, hanging from a chain bolted to the low ceiling, its faint light stretching out in all directions, revealing five wooden doors evenly spaced around the circular wall. 

Each door is carved with a cryptic symbol. 

The first door is marked with a shield, pointed at its bottom and wide at its top. Rows of horizontal lines slant down and inwards from its sides and meet at the center of the shield.

The second door is marked with a katana, its blade pointing upwards and piercing through what looks to be a storm cloud. 

The third door is marked with a pair of cat eyes, slanting inwards, its pupils two thin vertical slits. 

The fourth door is marked with a pair of six-sided dice, each rolled at a one—snake eyes.

And the fifth door is marked with the outline of a devil head with many horns, its two longest horns on each opposite side.  

Mickey presses his ear to the wood of the first door, listening for any sound within, but there is only empty silence. He pushes the door open easily and sees a vast chamber beyond it. It’s dimly lit by candlelight lanterns mounted on its tall walls that stretch up to a high stone ceiling. Steel pipes bolted to the floor stand seven feet tall throughout the chamber, all of them bent in different spots. A bank safe the size of a van sits in the center of the chamber, large dents on its sides as if cannonballs were fired at it. The door of the safe has been ripped open. It’s now hanging from one broken hinge, revealing nothing inside.

Mickey makes his way into the second chamber, identical to the first, but empty, save for a wooden dummy standing upright near the backwall, wearing a blue hakama and a metallic jingasa. Hundreds of footprints mark the stone floor pointing in every direction. 

Mickey pushes open the third chamber’s door only to see a darkness stretching out into a black void. 

In the fourth chamber stands a number of stickmen that Mickey recognizes from the karate dojo down the street from his mom’s old apartment. But in that dojo, the stickmen were only mounted on the floor. In here, they’re mounted on the walls and high ceiling, almost all their limbs broken or snapped completely off, wooden shards scattered all around.

Dozens of crossbows hang on the walls of the fifth chamber. Crossbow bolts litter the ground, some embedded into the stone floor, and others laying on their side, broken in half. 

Suddenly, Mickey hears heavy footsteps descending the staircase, echoing louder and louder with each step. Mickey darts into the third chamber and closes the wooden door, leaving it slightly ajar to peek through it. 

He waits, swallowing, then swallowing again, and then he sees him—a figure of a man wearing a loud three-piece suit showing off intricate designs of purple, gray and black. But his head—Mickey draws in a sharp breath—his head looks as if it were made of solid turquoise, faceless, and polished like a statue. 

Mickey’s heart beats faster, disbelieving his own eyes, but the figure couldn’t see him, that would be impossible, Mickey thinks, shrouded in the darkness of the chamber, peeking only through a sliver of an opening.

The figure turns his head slowly, as if scanning the room without eyes, then pauses before turning back towards the staircase. Mickey can feel his breathing begin to slow. 

But then the figure stops again and jerks his head directly at Mickey. Mickey jolts to the side and presses his back against the chamber wall. He listens for footsteps but only hears a long silence broken by a single droplet of water falling from the chamber’s damp ceiling onto the stone floor, its sound echoing softly off the walls.

More silence passes. Mickey musters up the courage to peek through the opening again, and a wave of relief washes over him seeing the circular room empty, the figure gone.  

Mickey presses his back against the wall again, gathering himself. Staring into the pitch blackness ahead of him, he takes in long deep breaths and exhales slowly. He wishes he had a bottle a whiskey to chug right now, but tequila or vodka or anything would do, really. 

And then he hears the gentle boom of so many candle flames igniting inside the lanterns lining the walls of the chamber, lighting the darkness, revealing the figure standing at the center of the chamber. 

Adrenaline surges through Mickey’s veins and he charges at the figure with clenched fists, compelled by the survival instinct instilled in him from years of living on the streets.

The figure stands firmly as Mickey rushes at him, and when finally in striking distance, Mickey throws a straight right punch at the figure, still standing calmly, like a statue.

Only when Mickey’s fist reaches two inches away from the figure’s featureless face, the figure raise his leather gloved hand, lightning quick, and catches Mickey’s fist. He bends it back with impossible strength, forcing Mickey to his knees to save his wrist from snapping. The pain is unbearable, but Mickey doesn’t scream or grimace. He never did in all his fights before, even the ones he lost, which were many. Mickey’s body quivers, beads of sweat forming over his upper lip, the only indications of his pain.

“What’s your name, child?” the figure’s voice echoes from everywhere and nowhere at the same time.

“Mickey!” he yells, trying to say John but the truth is forced from his mouth.

“If I let you go, will you calm yourself?” 

“No!” he yells, trying to say yes, but the truth is forced from his mouth.

For a moment, Mickey is dumbstricken by his inability to speak a lie, but then the excruciating pain in his wrist distracts him from thinking anything else. 

“Is it your wish to have this kind of power, child?”

“Yes!” he grunts through clenched teeth, speaking the truth with intention, finally.

“There is a price you have to pay for this kind of power. Are you willing to pay it?”

“Yes!” he says.

The figure places his other gloved hand on the top of Mickey’s head, and then he faints into a faint within a faint within a faint. 


To be continued next Wednesday in Five Deadly Rebels, Episode 2: The Third Chamber, anywhere you get your podcasts. To learn more about the podcast, visit our website at five deadly rebels dot com. This has been a DimensionGate production.