Free Crab Town by Iii Carlton Mellick Page B

fight. Little Sister weaves through them effortlessly, trying to catch up to the balloon man before it’s too late. He goes further down the street, higher and higher up into the sky.
    Little Sister leaves the street and jumps over a row of steps, entering a building, she crosses the lobby of a dilapidated hotel, riding up the handicap ramp to the second floor. She rides to the back of the building, knocking hotel guests aside, then jumps from the balcony to the balcony on the other side of the street. Pedaling up to the rooftop, she sees Johnny at face level flying over the street beside her.
    Keeping up with him, Little Sister jumps from rooftop to rooftop, sailing over alleys. Little Sister has been doing these kinds of stunts ever since she could ride, and knows these rooftops well. She set up half the ramps enabling her to make the jumps over the alleys. As a thief, she’s created escape routes for herself that the cops could never possibly follow. She’s had no problems losing the cops in the past and getting back to Crab Town without a trace. But she never thought she’d be using these rooftops to save a balloon man from floating away.
    At the end of the block, the buildings end at a busy intersection. Little Sister has to make her move now if she ever wants to save Johnny. She takes a jump, into the street toward the balloon man. Just as she leaps a gust of wind hits, launching her sail further up into the air, but the wind also sends Johnny higher. She catches the last inch of string and pulls, wrapping the string around her handle bar. Then the two of them descend into the street.

    Little Sister hits down hard, but she doesn’t fall. Johnny Balloon looks down, amazed that the girl actually caught him up there. But when she doesn’t pull him down, realizing he’ll be stuck up in the air for the rest of the escape, he panics at the thought of how vulnerable he’ll be… there are a lot of sharp objects he could slam into, not to mention he’s an easy shot for the cops up there.
    The second Little Sister enters the intersection, she’s cut off by an enormous police street boat.
    Because the police don’t have the funding for gas-powered cars—only the most wealthy citizens can get their hands on fossil fuels—the cops use either tandem bikes or sometime they call in the street ships. With a dozen cops pedaling inside, it is a ship-sized bicycle with armor plating. The cops within fire at Little Sister through tiny windows as they pedal toward her.
    Little Sister whips around the ship as bullets pass through her sail. The street boat might be large and armored like a bicycle-powered tank, but it still can’t keep up with Little Sister’s sail-bike. She takes a path through the alley, one that the boat can’t get through, and forces the tank-like vehicle to turn itself around to go after her.
    Miss Doomsday showers the windows of the street boat with a blast from her Tommy Gun, as she catches up to Little Sister. The street ship turns furiously around to go after them, slamming into a police tandem bike that was on Doomsday’s trail. While parasailing through the air, Johnny fires the last of his bullets down on the police to cover the girls’ backs as they make their escape.
    “Follow me,” Little Sister tells Doomsday. “I can lose them.”
    Doomsday shakes her head. “I don’t want to lose them. We need to lead them to Crab Town.”
    “Why the hell would we do that?”
    “I think this was Jack’s plan,” Doomsday says. “We want them to follow us.”
    Little Sister doesn’t understand it, but she nods anyway. They speed up, out of the range of fire, but make sure the cops follow them all the way into Crab Town.

Miss Doomsday always thought they called it Crab Town because in the middle of Crab Town, in the center of the old town square, there sits a 200 megaton Crab-Bomb that never detonated.
    During the war, Crab Bombs weren’t dropped by airplane. They were launched via submarine, and