A chapter from Isaiah Jones versus the Sea (A 21st Century Odyssey)

“Not Like Us,” Kendrick Lamar
“Wop, wop, wop, wop, wop, Dot, fuck ’em up.
Wop, wop, wop, wop, wop, I’ma do my stuff.
Why you trollin’ like a bitch? Ain’t you tired?
Tryna strike a chord and it’s probably A-Minor.”  

My brother is a good man. Sybil said, sitting behind the passenger’s seat of the stolen car as she examined her cellphone. Dominick put the car in park in front of the small house in the center of Inglewood. She fumbled with the back of the phone case as she spoke. “It’s stuck; can I use that screwdriver?” Dominick pulled the flat-head screwdriver from the hotwired car’s ignition and passed it back to the dark-skinned, green-eyed girl with bubblegum-pink Bantu knots in the backseat. She continued to tinker with the phone while talking.

“Even after I found out you attempted to rob my family, I was willing to let you go. After all, if my brother and my grandfather can forgive you, I have no choice but to do as they ask.” She sighed, resigned, as Dominick, Vincent, and Marvin sat in the parked car, confusion growing as she continued. “I admit that I was prepared to let you all go unmolested until I found DNA matches in the files of seven sexual assaults of minors over the last three years.”

Sybil put her lavender bedazzled phone away. “I’m what you would call a bit of a hacker,” she said with a toothy grin. “Two out of the three of you are a 99.7 percent match to the evidence gathered at the ICU of the hospitals where the children were treated after you two attacked them. I promised my brother I would make sure you all arrived home alive.”

I chose my words carefully. Sybil turned her head, addressing the boy sitting beside her in the backseat. “Marvin, you’re an idiot; pick a better class of friends, dumbass. As for you two, let me show you a magic trick.”

“You’re psycho, bitch!” Dominick shouted as he sat in the driver’s seat, fumbling to get the clip back into the 9mm pistol.

“Do you know much about human anatomy?” Sybil asked the trio. “That’s a rhetorical question, you see, because I personally find the subject fascinating. For example, did you know that if you crush the tenth vertebra like this—” Sybil said as she reached over the passenger seat. She placed the screwdriver on the back of Vincent’s neck and crushed his tenth vertebra with no more effort than if she were opening a Coke can. “The medical term,” she said over his cries of agony and confusion as his body stopped working, toppling over onto the passenger door headfirst, “for your new condition is ‘quadriplegic,’” she explained as the other two boys attempted to escape the vehicle in vain while she controlled the car’s computerized systems.

Sybil climbed over the seats, ignoring the ragdoll slumping Chucky in the passenger seat. He could only control his body from the neck up and stared impotently as she swung her right leg over the driver’s seat where Dominick sat. His pistol reloaded, he pressed the gun to her head as she sat in her 5-foot-5-inch, slender, diminutive, 314-pound titanium-plated, carbon fiber-reinforced cybernetic chassis. She gracefully straddled his lap, facing the rear of the car and looking into his eyes. She stuck out her tongue, wrapped her lips around the barrel, and slid the length of his weapon slowly into her mouth as he pulled the trigger.

The noise of the gunshot was followed instantly by the unmistakable sound of metal striking metal. Sybil bit down on the barrel, her tungsten carbide teeth easily tearing through the 9mm pistol. She spat the metal out, then grabbed him by the neck as tendrils of gray-white gun smoke slowly curled out of her nostrils in the darkness. She shoved the flat-head screwdriver beneath his eyelid, scraping his cerebral cortex’s prefrontal lobe. There was minor blood vessel damage to his left eye. Other than the transorbital lobotomy, he was in good health.

Sybil looked at the boys, satisfied she had done well. “I warn you, if you tell anyone what I did here tonight, I will hunt you down, and I will bite you,” she said, making ridiculous chomping sounds. She gnawed her bared teeth as amber sparks glowed in the darkness, flying from her mouth. The doors clicked as she released the locks and exited the vehicle. “Goodbye, Marvin.”

In the darkness, with a haunting voice, she began to sing “Criminal” as she started the long walk across Inglewood back to the marina in Long Beach.

“I’ve been a bad, bad girl
I’ve been careless with a delicate man
And it’s a sad, sad world
When a girl will break a boy just because she can.”  

– Fiona Apple