The Night Pavers

The smell of tar was thick in the night air and the white floodlight cut harsh wedges of darkness on everything; the machines, the people, the curbs. Dave Porterfield sighed, planted his shovel on the ground and tried to wipe the sweat off his face with a hand that was already grimy. He looked at the half a mile of wrecked asphalt, ripped up benches, and crumbled masonry in front of them. He had a kind face, a lump of a nose and eyes that usually looked on the world with mild approbation. Currently his mouth was in an unhappy line and his expression was peeved.

“This is worse than normal. What was it this time? Invading space bugs? Keegan, give me the scoop, I know you’re about to anyway.”

A young black man stood beside him. His hi-vis vest flapped around his skinny frame like sheets on a laundry line. He grinned and pulled his phone out of his pocket. “Oh man, didn’t you see it? It was wild! Lemme show you.”

They leaned in over the phone. The video showed a streak of red pummeling into some kind of mechanized vehicle, shoving it backwards so hard that the asphalt ripped up beneath it, sending chunks flying. Dave winced.

“Kapow!” Whispered Keegan, fist pumping.

“We just paved this six months ago,” Dave muttered.

But his coworker ignored him, pointing at the screen. “And then, see—” the video blurred showing flashes of pavement and sky, “The guy got up close, see? Which is crazy stupid, but people do it, right? And he heard The Amazeman say—”  

The video suddenly righted, canted sideways, but clearly showing a man in futuristic armor crawling out of the wreckage of his tank. In the corner was a red-suited leg, and a deep voice boomed, “No more tinker toys for you, Evil Engineer!”

The young man gave a delighted giggle. “He’s so bad at witty banter. He tries. He really does.”

The leg shifted, shot out—and the Evil Engineer, who had just got to his feet, went tumbling end over end, letting out a garbled wail as he went. The young coworker bent double with laughter. “Yeah, everybody loved that. Looky this.” He flipped to another social media account and scrolled down half a second. “Okay, yeah, here—”

The still shot showed Evil Engineer’s backside, midair, his legs flung over his head, and a line of text read “WAAAOOAAHH!”

“Oh, that’s—that’s what he said when Amazeman kicked him.” Dave glanced at his coworker in mild perplexion, looking for social cues. “Ohh, I get it. Funny. Funny.”

Keegan grinned at him, patted him on the shoulder. “It’s okay old man. You don’t get it, s’alright. I got you.”

“What’d I do without you Keegan? Now, let’s get started repairing this brand-new pavement that was destroyed in the name of safety and public defense.”

“C’mon man,” Keegan said, as the two them walked over to the equipment. “Don’t you think the supers are necessary? I mean, what’d you and I do if Evil Engineer showed up and decided to bulldoze the town? You and me, we’re supposed to stop crazy like that? I mean the guy has mechs for everything!”

“If Amazeman wasn’t shooting around in spandex I doubt Evil Engineer—really, that’s an awful name—would bother to show up. These guys, they get followers and they just want the views.” He gestured at the pavement. “I mean, this was brand new! Thousands of taxpayer dollars crunched up for forty seconds of video and a meme!”

Keegan sighed and rolled his eyes. “Okay boomer. Listen, Imma get the zipper fired up.” And he strolled over to a machine half hidden in the dark. Dave chuckled and shouted after him, “I’m Gen X!” before heading off to find the backhoe driver to settle where he’d begin.

Fifteen minutes later, Dave was sitting in the rumbling roar of the zipper, the machine that crunched up broken asphalt, and he wouldn’t have heard anything if he hadn’t looked up and saw at the exact right moment, something large and metallic slither out of the storm drain.

 It moved so fast he couldn’t even process what it was before it scuttled up onto the sidewalk and latched on to a person walking by. He saw the scream before he heard it, caught the flash of panic on the boy’s face as the metallic thing sank into him, dropping him to the ground instantly.

Dave shouted himself, hurrying to flip the switches and turn the key to turn off the machine. There were others behind him, blocking the noise. The harsh black and white of the floodlights made everything look unreal, but it seemed to him that the metallic thing was scuttling around the boy on the ground, tugging at him and biting at him.

Stumbling, he jumped down from the machine, and sprinted for the boy, thinking at the last minute to grab a heavy wrench lying in the back of a pickup as he went. He and Keegan nearly collided at the edge of the pavement. The rest were further behind, or hadn’t even realized something was going on past the shutting down of the zipper.

The boy was spread out on the ground, some kind of metal brackets punched into his arms and legs, screaming in panic. Some of the brackets seemed to have snagged his clothes, baggy jeans and a t-shirt, but others had bitten into his flesh, and blood seeped onto the ground beneath him. He stared up at them, the whites of his eyes shining in the dark. “Ayúdame! Ayúdame!”

Keegan pulled his phone out, hands shaking. “I’ll call Amazeman!”

Dave dropped to his knees beside the boy. “It’s okay, it’s okay.” He said, “We’re going to get you out of here!”

“Are you kidding?” Hissed Keegan from above him. “This is Evil Mechanic’s work! We can’t do anything! This is out of our pay grade!”

By this time enough of the construction workers realized that something was going on that more of the machines had stopped and others were running over. Fortunately, it meant that Dave could hear the mechanized thing when it started coming back. The boy on the ground shouted out pitifully in fear, and Dave whipped around just in time to see the thing clearly.

It was the size of a small dog, covered in metal plating like a pill bug, and it moved along the ground in a ripple of thousands of legs. Fear numbed his limbs for a moment, stopped his breath. It moved so fast. But it was heading straight for the boy, whining as miniature saw blades kicked on. Saw blades?! His inner self said, disapprovingly. But he had to do something, to act. There was no time to wait around for Amazeman.

Dave clenched the wrench in his hand and he smashed it across the thing’s back. It kept going. He whipped it around again and crashed the wrench across its front, where there was a small glass panel, hoping to destroy any guidance system. The mech hesitated, zapping and crackling as its machinery malfunctioned. The buzz saws spluttered. Dave scrambled to his feet and brought the wrench crashing down again. This time it stiffened—and stopped. 

The boy began weeping, the exhausted sound of relief. In the distance they heard ambulance sirens, and Dave patted him on the shoulder, “Um,” he said, accessing eighth grade Spanish class with difficulty, “Venir…ayudar tu.”

The boy parsed this garbled mess for a moment and nodded. “Thank you,” he managed through the pain, the expression on his face so grateful that Dave, embarrassed, turned back to the machine, catching as he did, the sight of Keegan, with his phone out, recording.

“Put that away!” He barked. “This kid would be fine if it wasn’t for all you people doing stupid stuff to get views!”

But Keegan had a grim look on his face Dave had never seen before. “I spotted something.” He said, through gritted teeth, and kicked at the wreckage of the bug. “Look at that. Look at the brand.”

The two of them moved away as the EMTs clustered around the boy. In the flashing red and white lights, Dave began to clear some of the wreckage away. As his hand flipped over a metal plate, it revealed, embossed on the top, the letter A, with a thunderbolt through it. He looked up at Keegan. The younger man's face was half obscured by his phone, but his eyes were lit with fury. Keegan nodded at the branded metal on the ground. “Are you seein’ what I’m seein’? That’s Evil Mechanic’s bug, I seen it on I don’t know how many videos—”

“But Amazeman owns it.” Dave completed.

They looked at each other and then they looked at the destroyed pavement stretching before them, the sharp angles and crumbled edges of destruction.

“Forty seconds of video and a meme.” Keegan muttered. “And they’ve got special powers and all, they deserve to be famous, right?”

“And the city cleans up the messes free of charge.” Dave said.

“You notice how there’s always this one brave guy with a camera who gets great shots?” Keegan murmured.

“Are they really so dumb as to brand their machines, though?”

Keegan snorted. “Huh, yeah. I mean, they ain’t modest.”  He crouched down and looked at Dave with a gleam in his eye. “Whatcha say to you and I doing some filming ourselves? Like a, a,” he snapped his fingers, “tell-all docu-style type thing. I got some great footage to start with. How about it?”

Dave looked back at the boy, now speaking tremulously with an EMT, the blood staining his shirt showing black in the chaos of white and red lights. “Yes. I could get behind some filmmaking I think.”  

Two days later, the local news announced that Amazeman, in a stunning display of civic responsibility, had heroically tracked Evil Engineer to his lair and forced him to join him in repairing the damages their combined battling had done to the city.

The news report cut to Amazeman standing on the steps of City Hall, in full costume, surrounded by the press, cameras up, lights flashing. Too long had he, Amazeman, not done enough for his city. “Oh no,” the mayor murmured by his side. “Not so.”

In the future, announced Amazeman, he would personally see that if Evil Engineer did not pay for the destruction of their fair city, he, Amazeman would do it himself!  A roar of appreciation from the crowd.

During all this civic duty and responsibility, something else was happening across the city that Amazeman neglected to mention to the press. Mateo Santiago, still a little stiff and sore from the cuts that outlined his body, was beginning his first day at a prestigious local private school. He had been gifted an anonymous scholarship. It was, perhaps, the cuts and bruises all over him that prevented Amazeman from taking the opportunity to milk his generosity for its worth in PR gold, but Mateo didn’t mind the lack of press coverage.

He got out of his parent’s car, grinning nervously and looking neat and tidy in his blue polo and khakis. The three of them, he and his parents stood clustered together looking around. They were waiting for a ceremony so diametrically opposed to the ceremony happening across the city that most wouldn’t even recognize it for the celebration it was.

Mateo pointed as a pickup drove into the parking lot and raised a hand in welcome as Dave pulled into the parking lot beside them. Keegan hopped out the passenger side, said, “My man!” and fist bumped Mateo. Dave nodded and smiled, shook Mateo’s dad’s hand and Mateo’s hand, nodded to his mother again, and stuck his hands in his pockets, shifting his feet awkwardly. “You ready?” He asked Mateo.

“Yes,” Mateo said, beaming. “I am on the engineering track. I have my first CAD class today!” He grinned. “Maybe I can make one of those mechs that got me.”

All four adults shuttered and said, “No, please!”

Dave thumped him on the shoulder. “But you enjoy those classes! Keep it up; you may be my boss someday!”

“So it was Amazeman, all along?” Mateo asked the two of them. “Making all of Evil Engineer’s stuff?”

Keegan shook his head, disgusted. “The guy cracked as soon as we showed him the footage. The Evil Engineer is just his college buddy. Amazeman makes the mechs and everything in his basement—crazy rich. Never occurred to him to pay for the public property he trashed. Never occurred to him his AI-powered mechs would escape and keep doing what he told 'em to do.” Keegan shook his head. “Guy is a fool. Stupid-genius fool.”

Dave added, “And the city let him do it because he hikes up the tourism industry.”

Mateo's father squeezed his shoulder. "Classes start soon." Mateo gathered up his bag, kissed his mother, and walked towards the school.

The two men turned and headed back towards the construction truck they’d driven off site. Dave’s brow was furrowed, thinking of his own kids. “Do you think we let that creep buy us off?” He asked. “I mean, the kid has a great chance in life now, but…what if those fools get sloppy and hurt someone else getting views?”

Keegan stuck his hands in his pockets and shrugged, his grin sly. “I only implied I was giving him the only copy, you notice. Never actually did say straight out that he had the only one. He just wanted to believe it.”

Dave narrowed his eyes. “So you didn’t give him the only one?”

“Heck no!” Keegan snorted. “I backed that stuff up on every Cloud storage I own! Dude steps a foot out of line, we got him.”

Surprised, Dave blinked and smiled. “Alright.” The smile broadened to a grin and he thumped Keegan on the shoulder. “Alright.”

And they walked back to work, one broad, one skinny, one in a t-shirt, one in flannel. No spandex, no masks, no likes, no followers. Nothing special at all.