Free Crab Town by Iii Carlton Mellick

help her find food or give her medicine or help her build shelter, but nobody ever gave a shit about her. She resented him for showing compassion. She hated him for it. But she showed him mercy. There was a part of her, deep down inside, that was grateful to him. Even though she couldn’t allow him to actually save the kid and destroy their way of life, she was grateful that someone actually cared enough to try.

    Two weeks later, the tables were turned. It wasn’t Jack who came to the King Crabs. Little Sister had come to him. He woke to find her standing in his doorway, holding her stomach, bleeding on the floor. She was weak and could barely speak. During a gang fight, Little Sister had been stabbed in the stomach. Her friends wouldn’t help her. They left her to die. She didn’t know what else to do. She came looking for Jack.
    The Jack of Spades was surprised she was able to track him down, figure out his location in the middle of the night, with a six-inch gash in her guts.
    All she said was, “Help me,” before collapsing onto the floor.
    Jack scooped her up and took her to the Crab Town clinic run by the Queen of Spades. The clinic was a grubby old hospital that was falling apart worse than any other building in the area, but it was the best Crab Town had.
    When Jack entered the lobby, the place was littered with balloon people floating in the air, their strings attached to the floor. They stuck around the clinic, hoping the impossible hope that someday the Queen might be able to restore them to human form.
    “What happened?” the Queen asked Jack as she looked at him with bloodshot eyes. She always had bloodshot eyes from lack of sleep and nourishment. She was so focused on helping other people that she never had time to take care of herself.
    “Stab wound,” Jack said, putting her on an operating table. “She’s lost a lot of blood.”
    “I’ll see what I can do,” said the Queen, getting straight to work.
    Queen was a doctor who quit her job at the hospital in downtown Freedom City. She was morally opposed to how the hospital was treating patients. They only cared about making money off of the sick and wounded, and cared very little about helping them. The balloon people scam was one reason why she had to quit. It was a way for them to get free organ donation and then charge the rich out their ass for their desperately needed transplants. The hospital also regularly diagnosed their patients with bogus ailments in order to give them expensive, unnecessary operations. Many of these operations only harmed the patients and sometimes they would have to return to the hospital a week later to fix the damage the doctors had done. Then they would prescribe them expensive medication that they didn’t even need, promising them that they risk serious health issues, including death, if they don’t take the pills regularly, for the rest of their lives.
    The Queen and a couple of her colleagues quit the hospital and set up the clinic in Crab Town, using her own savings to help the unfortunate people living there. She offered her services for free, but it only took a couple of weeks before her lack of funding prevented her from helping most of the patients who came to her. It wasn’t until she joined the House of Cards, who donated a large percentage of their earnings to her cause, that the clinic actually became operational enough to help the Crab Town citizens. But it was never enough. People still died in her care everyday.
    Jack was praying that Little Sister wouldn’t be one of the unlucky patients that day. As Queen gave her blood (most of which she knew was radioactive) and closed up the wound, he watched Little Sister gazing up at the balloon people hovering above her as if they were angels coming to take her away.
    When there was nothing else Queen could do, she said, “As long as she can fight the infection, she’s going to pull through.”
    Jack was relieved.

    When Little Sister awoke near dawn, she