Title: One time, Frank Castle shot me in the face. It was awesome!
Fandom: All-New Ghost Rider (comics)
Length: 6k
Rating: R for violence
Warnings: graphic descriptions of violence, cursing
Notes: written for fan_flashworks challenge #290: Crush
Summary: Robbie Reyes gives an Uber passenger five stars. Eli meets his hero.

Written in my Uber!verse where Robbie has a side hustle and still lives in East LA and never joined the Avengers. Frank is based off the '90s comics.
This fic also contains RPF. Google Joseph "Rambo" Hunter and Paul LeRoux (basically IRL Microchip, but evil). I figure if you actually murder actual people, you're fair game for unflattering depictions in a comics fanfic.

Eleven o'clock on a Thursday night, and Robbie was Ubering a passenger to a Comfort Inn from LAX. The Hell Charger wasn’t meant for the work; its supercharged five liter engine filled the cabin with ominous noises, its gear-box was built for drag-racing rather than for city traffic and gave it a tendency to lurch forward alarmingly unless Robbie concentrated very hard on feathering the clutch pedal, and, typical of its age, it had neither airbags nor air conditioning. Robbie’s Uber profile claimed he drove a 2010 Charger, not a 1969 model. Most pax were delighted to see the car, until they actually got in and started moving, and then Robbie would feel their entire body tense up against his passenger seat, maybe they'd dig their fingernails into the leather or brace their palm on his side window, and he would resign himself to a long drive of tip-toeing through the city. But some pax appreciated the car for what it was, weren’t put off by the drone of the engine and the rising and falling whine of the supercharger, and then Robbie got to show off.

Tonight Robbie was heading northwest on Sunset Boulevard, showing off. He had an ulterior motive; driving was one of Robbie’s few marketable skills at this time in his life, and Uber didn’t pay all that well after taxes. This pax was getting a front-seat view of how well Roberto Reyes could really drive.

“Whoa, hey, can we stop at that dispensary?” the pax asked, pointing across the five-lane road, and Robbie grabbed the handbrake and heaved the wheel around, breaking traction and sending them skidding into a hard ninety-degree turn. He gunned the motor again, making the tires squeal and smoke, and they bumped across the street into the dispensary parking lot. Robbie managed to skid them around again so he landed the Charger perfectly in a parking space, facing out.

“Meter's running,” Robbie said with a little grin.

“Holy shit,” the pax chuckled. He was a big guy, forties or so, shaved head, wearing a gray T-Shirt with a fat cartoon man sleeping on a couch and the words “Springfield Unathletic Department.” The pax himself looked like he spent most days at the gym. He wasn't the kind of pax Robbie would normally try to impress, reminded him of a cop he'd picked up last year who'd turned unpleasant halfway through the ride, but this guy...well, he was friendlier, to start. “Be right back. Man, I can never get used to the prices whenever I'm back Stateside.” The pax swung himself out of the passenger seat and gave the Charger a rough pat on the roof with his callused hand.

Robbie thumped his steering wheel with his thumbs as he idled in the parking space—watched a black van make its own left-hand turn into a neighboring shopping complex, waited for the pax to exit with his cannabis products, waited for Eli to make some unsolicited comment. Finally he thought, Well?

...You just do the opposite of anything I tell you to do. What do you want me to say?

Robbie snorted, shrugged. Eli had a point.

Five minutes later, the pax returned, clutching a paper bag in his meaty fist. He crashed into the passenger seat, and Robbie revved his motor while he strapped in, then popped the clutch and screamed off, slamming them both back into the seat backs. “Whoo!” the pax exclaimed. “Hell of a car you got, kid.”

“Thanks,” they said. Robbie cleared his throat and centered himself in his body, pushed Eli further into the car. “You get benefits?”

“Me?” the pax said. “No. Some of the guys, sure. It's not something you get into when you got a lot of obligations, right. Buncha bachelors, at least until you pick up some Philipino chick—the pay's good, but when the boss man whistles, you come, yanno? That's why we're having this conversation. Boss man whistled. Here I am. No idea why he wants me in the States, but I don't ask the questions.”

“What's entry level pay?” Robbie asked.

The pax shrugged. “Depends. Depends what you can do, what you know, whether you've got brains and balls or just balls. You need both, and that's a rare combination. That's what got me where I am.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Robbie said. He knew he had brains, and he knew he had balls—not that he used them, preoccupied as he was with survival and providing for Gabe and now his whole possession situation with the ghost of his Uncle Eli the serial killer. “What's entry-level pay?” He had a thought. “Do you have to be a Vet, or do you just need to be ready to work?”

The pax cut a glance at him. “You're serious.”

Did he think Robbie was asking about benefits and hard numbers out of idle curiosity? “Yeah.”

“No, you don't have to be a Vet, but it helps,” the pax said. “Really helps if you're a Specialist, that's what we need. Like me, I used to be a Ranger, then I taught tabs—baby Rangers—at sniper school. We need those skills. But sometimes you just need some bodies with good heads on their shoulders. A good leader can run an interdiction op with a pack of Girl Scouts.”

“But you're not doing anything wrong, right?” Robbie asked. Legal...he could take or leave legal, as long as he didn't get caught, but wrong was different. “You're just...keeping people safe.”

The pax shrugged. “Yeah, sure, we're keeping the boss's interests safe. Bodyguard stuff, protecting the mining equipment, watching out for his interests, anyone who might interfere with him. You know. Security.”

“What's entry-level pay?”

“Bout seventy grand.”

Robbie hissed involuntarily. That was a life-changing amount of money. “How many days a week?”

“I told you, it's not the days you work, its showing up when the boss calls. You're always on call. But practically? Maybe...” The pax tilted his big domed head. “Maybe a day, maybe a week a month.”

Holy shit, Robbie thought. Eli was suspiciously, deliberately silent. Probably didn't want to scare Robbie off of this. Well, Robbie wasn't about to be scared off seventy grand a year to sit around waiting for the phone to ring, reading comics with Gabe and taking Gabe to the park and studying automotive engineering. “How can I get in touch with your boss?”

The pax chuckled. He looked a little white around the eyes for a moment. “That's not how he works. He's a computer guy. I mean, he's really good with computers. I give him your name and show him my Uber account, he'll probably be calling you on your landline in the middle of the night sometime next month.”

Robbie bit his lip. “It's a fake name,” he said.

“Huh?”

“My Uber ID, it's a fake name.” It was one of Eli's old aliases, a retired accountant from New Mexico named Eliot Miller. Robbie hadn't had enough licensed driving experience to register for Uber under his own name last year; his last foster family hadn't let him get his driver's license while he lived with them because it would have raised their insurance rates.

“Huh,” the pax said again, contemplative.

Robbie glanced down at his phone, resting in his lap, and pulled into a left turn lane, waited for the light. A big black van pulled into the lane behind him, crowding his bumper. The light changed, and he turned onto the cross-street between parking garages and fast food restaurants, and at last pulled in to the horse-shoe driveway of the Comfort Inn. Raised garden beds full of palms and cycads gave the place a sheltered, upscale feel.

The pax got out and Robbie popped the trunk and exited with him to help him with his luggage. Robbie hated having pax touch the Charger more than absolutely necessary. He opened the trunk himself and lifted out the small duffel bag the pax had brought.

“It's Reyes,” Robbie said at last, as the pax slung the bag around his broad shoulders.

“Your real name?” The pax tilted his slab-shaped head, his shaved skull gleaming in the streetlights.

“Yeah.” Robbie swallowed. “Roberto Reyes. Tell your boss I'm...ready to work. I can travel wherever he wants. US citizen. Clean record.” Got my Marksman badge in pistol, got halfway to qualifying for rifle when I quit the Army.

The Army let you in?

A mental scoff from Eli. Not that hard to fool a recruiter. But it was bullshit, kid. I'm not doing that again.

“Huh,” said the pax for the last time. “Roberto Reyes. You know, you might just get that call.”

“I'd appreciate it,” Robbie said, and reached out to shake the pax's hand.

The pax smiled a bit as he reached out. Then his head tipped back. Robbie heard a crack, gunshot echoing, and the pax crumpled to the ground in a spatter of blood and brains, whole body twitching and jerking, grinding the shattered back of his skull into the pavement. Robbie felt a mist on his face, like rain. His tongue darted out, Eli taking advantage of his shock, and he tasted blood on his lips. His whole body shivered.

What the fuck, Robbie demanded, shoving his way back. He wiped his face on his sleeve, but his entire jacket was also bloody. The Charger was covered in tiny splatter-drops. There was blood in his eyelashes. The metallic meaty scent of it filled his lungs.

Somebody shot this guy in the head! Eli crowed. Robbie got a flash-image from the car, Eli drawing his attention to the view out one of the rear-view mirrors. Kitty-corner from the Comfort Inn, a big black van was rolling up its driver's side window and pulling away. They got a hazy glimpse of something long and narrow in the driver's hands before the glare of streetlights on the window hid the cabin from view.

He shot my pax, Robbie thought, clenching his teeth. He shot my pax, we were just talking, he was a nice guy, anybody could've got in the way, we're right in front of a hotel, what the fuck. Robbie was covered in blood. If he'd been standing a foot to the left, he would've been shot, too. He braced for the cold and the phantom pains and the sound of a helicopter filling his ears, the flashbacks he got now whenever he was around dead people, but he was still clear-headed. And furious.

He stretched his mind into the car and revved the motor, reached for the echo of its engine rumbling through his lungs, fanned his anger as Eli flooded his hindbrain with aggression. He dashed back to the driver's seat, threw the car into gear, and peeled out of the hotel lot after the black van. He sucked down deep, heaving breaths as he slammed the car into second. The tachometer was reading in the nine-thousands, the engine was roaring, the blower was screaming; Robbie needed the torque from the low gear as he wove his way through traffic, jerking and braking, and whenever the engine overheated his lungs heated, too.

The van was really moving. Delivery vans were heavy and their center of gravity and aerodynamics were a nightmare, but this black van had to have had an engine swap and some serious suspension upgrades. Robbie could barely make it out at the end of the block as he screeched into the main arterial, narrowly avoiding a head-on collision with a Ford Escape with his currently solid car and human body. He fishtailed into the right lane and goosed the accelerator, hauling the wheel right and left around slower cars, panting through his teeth as he gazed at the faint red light that marked the back of the van's roofline. The change was coming slow, he was concentrating too hard on catching the van, not on heightening his emotions—he'd only just met the dead pax, he didn't care about him, Robbie was a terrible person—but whenever he pushed the Charger, the Charger eventually pushed back. Soon he tasted exhaust fumes on his breath, felt his lungs burning in his chest. He watched the van as he pulled at the change, and at last fire poured out from the cabin vents and he burned and died and his body blew away in a cloud of ash. Now he was the Rider, steel skull and leather skin, blazing with the same fire that wreathed the car. He opened his jaws and screamed the metallic hyiiiiiir of the Charger's blower, slammed the accelerator and passed right through a Volvo.

Now he was pulling up on the van. A half a block ahead, the van took a screeching left turn into oncoming traffic, just made it down a narrow street between a warehouse and a strip mall. The Rider followed, skidding the rear wheels to kick himself around. The van took a hard right. As the Rider began to close on it, one of the back doors swung open, and then someone started firing at the Charger.

Big bullets. They hurt. Some bounced off the metal, but a few lucky shots got through the grille, injured his radiator. The Rider coughed and gritted his teeth when a bullet made it through the engine block, spat up hot lead all over his chest. Fuck this guy. He stood on the accelerator and rolled down the driver's side window, a long knife in his left fist. He leaned his head and torso out, steering one-handed as he closed on the van. New bullets punched through his skin and lodged in the grooves of his faceplates, but better that than the car getting shot; he wanted to see this guy, he wanted to watch his face as he ripped him limb from limb—

Wait, really?

He shot my pax, he wasn't doing anything wrong and he shot him, he shot my pax right in front of me, Eli!

I'm not arguing!

In the back of the van, a hulking dark figure ducked out of sight. The bullets stopped, then something huge and heavy struck the Rider right through the eye, punched through the metal in the back of his skull. He felt the fire stream out the hole, the pressure at his vents dropping suddenly. A shotgun slug. Armor-piercing? I want some.

Robbie had a thought and the Rider poured his chains back into the steel of the Charger and let off the gas a bit, keeping pace just six feet behind the van. If the driver shot my pax, who's shooting at me now?

You think too much.

Fuck off. The Rider ducked back inside the car, melted into the driver's seat a little until he felt his skull patch itself up. He pressed the gas again and they shot forward. He rammed into the back bumper of the van, let his momentum fling his body through the windshield like water. Tucked and rolled into the van.

He crashed onto a cot bolted to the floor, his head setting the blankets aflame, and fetched up against a heavy steel rack full of guns. He caught his balance against a weapon that Eli instantly identified as a giant fuck-off howitzer or a rocket launcher or something, I want this! The Rider seized the big metal tube and snapped it over his knee. No! Bullets punched through his chest from behind, pinged off the walls of the van and the rack of weapons right in front of him. He threw the fragments in his hands over his shoulder and shifted through the shadows of the van and into the passenger seat.

There was no one in the driver's seat. The van was a newer model, electronic steering and throttle, and its dashboard appeared to have been chopped up with a hacksaw so someone could zip-tie a big touch-screen into it. There was a front-facing camera at each side of the windshield. Improvised self-driving setup. There was only one man in the van, and he had to be the shooter.

More bullets punched through him as he bent double and shook his head, flinging melted drops of lead and copper out from between his teeth. Horrible. He spun around to face the van's dark cargo area and saw a huge middle-aged man with a splash of white paint on his black body armor standing braced against one rear door, a pistol in one hand and and his other arm behind his back.

Fuck him. He'd killed Robbie's passenger right in front of him, he could have shot Robbie, he could have shot anyone walking past to get in or out of the hotel, he'd brought all this military hardware onto the Rider’s streets; he thought he could play god and snipe a man who'd just offered Robbie a desperately needed job, but the Rider was the only judge, jury, and executioner Los Angeles needed. Robbie had killed very few people, but he'd never caught anyone in the act of murder until tonight.

It was a split second between spotting the man and leaping across the van to grab him by the throat, and in that split second, the man pulled a fire extinguisher out from behind his back, jammed the nozzle between the Rider's teeth, and squeezed the lever.

Everything went dark.

The Rider kicked and struck out blindly, even as his world grew cold and his limbs grew weak. He could hear the Charger just behind the van, feel it speeding over the street, but the heat of his engine didn't reach his skin. He could barely feel his head except for the weight of his steel skull, he didn't know if he'd managed to spit the nozzle out or if it was still pumping chemicals into him—class B extinguisher, probably CO2 and ABC powder—so he gaped his jaws as wide as he could and shook his head, lashing out wildly. He was hurt, he was poisoned, he had to get back to the Charger before he snuffed out. He stretched his mind out to it, tried to sink through the shadows under his feet, but the dark wouldn't open, he was too cold to melt his way through, and then the floor dropped away and he was kicking in the air. A hand around his throat, squeezing, compressing the leather where it sealed into the nape of his neck. He pawed at the muscled arm that held him. His fingers wouldn't latch. He heard the Charger's engine stumble, the throttle closing, the car dropping away behind them, and he felt his human flesh begin to bubble out of his marrow and sizzle against his hot bones.

He gritted his teeth and reached for his anger. Robbie Reyes probably wouldn't survive inhaling a pound of ABC powder. He revved his engine, felt his fires spring up grudgingly. The unwanted flesh under his skin boiled instead of burning, but his vision cleared, and the Charger snarled through his throat.

The big man in the body armor gazed at him steadily. The Rider saw his own skull-face reflected in his eyes. When he spoke, his voice was quiet and gravelly, like he'd torn his vocal cords to shreds long ago screaming at New York City traffic. “You're gonna tell me about Joseph Hunter's network in Los Angeles.”

The Rider shrieked and swiped at him. The man raised the fire extinguisher with his free hand and blinded him again with a blast of cold air and chemical dust.

The man spoke again, calm, like none of the Rider's blows had landed. “Maybe you knew him as 'Rambo'.”

The Rider pushed his mind through the cold haze and into the car, ripped open the throttle, and slammed into the back of the van. They both stumbled against the van's door. “You killed my passenger,” the Rider wheezed. “He didn't deserve to die!”

“So you didn't know Rambo,” the man said, and he shot the Rider in the face with the fire extinguisher one last time, icy powder flying through his eyesockets and deep into his skull and chest. “Stay out of my way.” Then he flung him out the door, and the Rider was flying, falling, rolling and bouncing over the asphalt.

Through the Charger's headlights, he saw the van's back door close as it sped away and made a turn. He should follow. But he was cold and weak. He hadn't paid attention to their surroundings while his body had been inside the van, and now they were past the warehouses and back onto a four-lane road. A Fiesta honked and swerved around the Charger where it had stopped twenty yards from his body, and an Escalade ran right over his legs.

Something crunched. It hurt. When he pushed himself up from his hands and knees, his shins buckled under him. He was fading. Don’t snuff out. Don’t snuff out. He revved his engine, desperate for heat and power, and crawled toward the Charger. A Leaf whined to a stop just behind it, the driver hopping out and ghosting cool damp hands over the leather that hung on his bones, yelling something he didn’t bother to pay attention to. He shrugged the hands away, reversed the Charger until it bumped into the Leaf. Revved his engine again and again, leaned down to rest his faceplates on the pavement, and pounded on his chest with his fist, ribs heaving, until ABC powder rattled out of him, a grainy crystalline smear under his jaws. His chest warmed again. He shoved his hand into his mouth and scraped around the hollows where his tongue wasn't, all the tubes and diaphragms and crevices in the steel, loosened up more powder. Smacked himself in the head and felt powder rattle down the inside of his skull and out his eyes and nose. Don’t snuff out.

When he could finally see again, he looked up at the car, four feet away but it might as well be a thousand miles. He dragged himself forward, ignoring the footsteps and hovering hands beside him, slapped his glove against his bumper, and dissolved into the car where he was safe, where there was no danger of his human flesh filling up the hollows between his bones to congeal around an entire fire extinguisher's worth of dry chemical.

He took stock, revved the engine to keep the car burning while he collected himself.

That sucked.

Yeah.

I think we almost died.

The Rider oozed cautiously up out of the driver's seat, reconstructing his chromed skull from the metals of the car, his leather skin from its upholstery, the car's fires filling him from his boots to the tips of his gloves and venting out the back of his head, hot and thick with sulfur and gasoline fumes. He stretched out his arms and wrapped his hands around his wheel, revved his engine experimentally. Flames blasted out between his teeth.

He shifted to first, then paused, left boot heavy on the clutch. Kid, I said we almost died, how about we cool off for the night. There's plenty other psychos out there, without fire extinguishers.

The Rider snarled. ¿Es una maldita broma?

The Rider's head jerked, his foot lifted off the clutch, and the Charger lurched forward, leaving smears of burning rubber on the pavement in front of the Leaf and its concerned driver. Then his right foot lifted off the gas and the engine lugged, slowed. His head darted from side to side, uncertain. I don't want to die. You don't want to die. When you almost die, you're supposed to step back and think about what you did. Otherwise we might actually die, and that's bad.

He killed my pax, Eli! Now he's getting away! And that fire extinguisher's gotta be almost empty, what're the odds he's got two?

The Rider puttered down the road, idling in first. The driver of the Leaf ran back to his car and crept along behind him in the other lane to avoid the burning tire tracks, steering with one hand while filming on his phone with the other.

We can do it, but we gotta do it now, Eli! Robbie thought about the pax writhing on the pavement, the entire back of his head blown out. The way he'd braced himself in his passenger seat using his legs and back while Robbie put the Charger through its paces, without getting handprints anywhere. The way he'd been ready to offer Robbie a job when the New Yorker in the black van had murdered him.

The Rider burned and Eli bathed in the heat. Holy shit. Wow. Okay. He stomped the gas, left the Leaf far behind, zig-zagged around an Amazon delivery truck. Let's do this.

He burned a ragged streak of fire onto Western Avenue, wove through traffic and blasted past red lights, cut a hard right and then screamed back and forth through side-streets through Koreatown. He spotted a black van parked on the side of the road, rammed into it, ripped the back door off its hinges—plumbing supplies. He sank back into the car and took off again. You just ruined this decent hardworking person's week.

We're chasing a murderer.

No, it's good! You're starting to loosen up!

Port me somewhere high. I can't see him anywhere! He's getting away! He was lost, filled with Robbie's frustration and Eli's mounting glee, hauling his wheel around to take a quick left turn onto Western Avenue against oncoming traffic. Engine noise boomed through his chest and the flames venting from his skull filled his cabin.

High where? None of the nearby buildings rose higher than two stories. If I were him, I'd be on the freeway. He passed Melrose Avenue, locked up his rear tires and hauled on the wheel to skid into a one-eighty turn in the middle of the street. Almost got rear-ended by a Suburban before he got back up to speed.

North or South?

South. Rent a cabin in Ensenada a couple months.

No good, what about border security?

How'm I supposed to know, Future Boy? You asked what I'd do!

He missed the freeway onramp, spun around again, and shot the car up the southbound onramp in the wrong direction. Let's try North.

A semi-truck stared him down, airhorn blaring. The Rider honked back, softened himself and the car, and passed through the truck. He made it the rest of the way onto the freeway, swerved rapidly between a minivan and a row of passenger cars toward the inside lane, concentrated, and phased himself through the concrete barrier onto the 101 Northbound. Ten minutes and twenty miles later, it fed into I-5, crime corridor of the Pacific Coast, and he was halfway to Santa Clarita. No black van. Maldito sea. He drove through the median barrier again, heading South this time. Merged onto the 110 heading North East where the freeways met in a spider-web snarl in Downtown LA, then circled back up north on the main branch of I-5. The Rider gave a woman driving a delivery van a heart attack as he pulled up beside her and then launched himself through his roof to cling to her vehicle's hood, but she wasn't his target, he rolled off and back into the Charger the moment he got a good look at her, and he never did find the right black van.

At last he ported back to his favorite alley in East Los, stopped the car, and snuffed out. Robbie's vision went gray for a moment and he folded over in the driver's seat, resting his forehead on the warm hub of his steering wheel. He waited a minute, clutching his stomach, to see if he needed to vomit or not. Then he got a gluey power bar out of the glove box, choked it down, followed it with two of the tiny water bottles he kept under his seat for Uber pax.

Shit, he thought as his guts cramped.

We'll get him.

...That was so fuckin' sweet when the back of that guy's head exploded outta nowhere. I love our hands-on shit, don't get me wrong, but that was magical.

Eli, a man died right in front of us and the killer got away. Stop talking. He dug his phone out of his pocket, saw the Uber app still running. He gave his dead passenger five stars.

 

At three in the morning, back at the apartment, after Robbie had brushed the soot off his teeth and made it half-way through praying the Rosary to settle his nerves, Eli did something horrible to the blood vessels in his sinuses that gave him the worst pressure headache of his life so far. Robbie threw the Rosary across his room and dug his palms into his eyesockets as though he could knead away the pain. Fuck. What?

Did you see what he had painted on his chest?

The killer?

Yeah. Was it a skull?

Maybe?

Boot up your laptop, I wanna look something up.

I have to sleep. I have work.

Yes. You have to sleep. I have to look something up on the Internet.

Later.

Robbie's head twinged, and he groaned.

Later. Fuck off. Wait one fucking day and I'll let you use the laptop. Otherwise I'm walking out to the car and slashing our tires.

You can't afford new tires.

I can afford to take the bus for a week before we ghost up again.

Mm, Eli said. He vanished from Robbie's head, his absence leaving a hollow where his thoughts and impulses usually intruded on Robbie's mind. The headache remained. Robbie scowled at his rosary where it lay crumpled on the floor next to his closet.

 

The following night at ten, when Gabe was in bed and Robbie would usually be Ubering or sleeping, he fired up the laptop and then peeled himself loose from his nerves to let Eli drive his body. He let his awareness drift into the car, parked under a guttering streetlamp in the breezy night, great engine cool and still. He'd know if Eli stood his body up from the table, and he didn't need to supervise him surfing the web. It was disturbing to feel his hands move without his permission and watch the world through eyes that shifted around the screen according to someone else's reading pattern; anyway, he figured the longer he spent hovering over his shoulder and fighting Eli for control, the more practice Eli could get at shoving Robbie back. Robbie was stronger than Eli, but Eli had nothing better to do with his afterlife than try new tricks.

Better to sit in the car, let his agitation fade away into the peace of being an inanimate object, and then tackle Eli's consciousness out of the body he least expected it. It was a good system.

Robbie listened to the distant roar of traffic on I-5, remembered the last glimpse he'd had of the black van before it disappeared into the Hollywood back-streets. Then he thought about his payroll taxes for his Uber earnings, which were coming due in less than a month and he'd only found out about three weeks ago. He hadn't known he had to save up to pay taxes, and he had no idea what he was going to do. Maybe see if anyone was up for a race, someone who hadn't heard about how Colin Stockman had run off the road and died after beating Robbie Reyes on a point-to-point race worth ten grand the year before last. If he were in his body while thinking about these things, his heart would be pounding, and he'd feel guilty and sick, but instead he was in two tons of cooling steel that felt nothing. This was nice.

Kid, get over here.

Robbie winced, mentally, and pushed himself out of the car and into his body. Eli's presence smothered him in static. He found himself bent close to the laptop, eyes less than a foot from the screen, and grinning. What?

His chest shook with a giddy, unfamiliar laugh. Look at the screen! Eli had opened a news article, the Ohio Tribune. There was a picture in the center of the screen, a mug-shot of a craggy, middle-aged white man with dark hair and empty blue eyes. Italian, maybe. Is that him?

Dim the lights and it could, possibly, be the killer with the van. Sure?

It is. It's him! Frank Castle!

Who?

The Punisher! It's really him! That madman's still alive! Eli's gaze skipped up and down the article too rapidly for Robbie to read any of it, and then he scrolled all the way up and down and back-spaced out to the search page. He hit the Image search, and suddenly Robbie's laptop screen was tiled with thumbnails of Frank Castle's face and shadowy scenes festooned with crime scene tape. Eli laughed again, a rising cackle ending in a shrill whoop, and slammed his fist on Robbie's salvaged desk.

Keep it down.

“Frank Castle shot me in the face! That's awesome!”

Of course he shot us in the face, we were trying to kill him. Why—

“He's the greatest serial killer who ever lived! He's killed hundreds! Maybe a thousand!”

Robbie tensed under his skin. We let him get away.

Eli clicked on another picture. “What's the date on this—holy shit that was this year. How does he look so good? He's older than I am! And still walking around in his own skin!”

Eli, Robbie said, digging deep to find some gentleness he could offer the man who had tried to kill his mother and given his brother brain damage and murdered dozens of innocent people and who he knew would jump at the chance to steal his body permanently, I understand he's important to you. But he murdered my pax and he deserves to die for that.

“Are you kidding?” Eli demanded, making Robbie's voice tight with glee. “We're gonna kill the Punisher! He's gonna look me in the eyes as he chokes on his own blood! This is the greatest thing that's ever happened to me!”

Coiled deep within his body, Robbie became a sentient mass of resignation.

Eli clicked on article after article, opening twenty tabs in as many seconds. Of course he sniped our pax. He was Marine Recon in Vietnam! Couldn't get enough, so he took up hunting after the war! His victims? All gang members! The most dangerous game! Nothing else to scratch this man's itch, he's a top predator!

Weren't you a gangster? Or, Mafia? He'd kill you, too.

Yes, he would, Eli replied, licking Robbie's lips. Nothing like knowing the Punisher is in a cell in the next block to spice up a stay at Rikers. Talk about ships in the night. But all these years, and here we are! He shot me in the face! He shot me fifty times! We gotta hunt him down, kid. He's an animal. He's worse than me.

...Yeah, maybe.

I know when I'm outclassed. We gotta kill him! And we gotta take his teeth!

Robbie shifted under his skin. What?

His teeth!

Robbie had heard it right.

So nobody can ID the body!

He's an internationally wanted serial killer, and we can just send his body to Hell. No.

Eli clenched Robbie's jaws. I want. The Punisher's teeth. C'mon, kid, a pair of pliers and ten minutes, that's all I need. C'mon.

No!

You're already down for murder. You don't even have to watch!

Why do you want his teeth?

'Cause!

Could you stop being so fucking creepy. He's a serial killer, he's your white whale for whatever reason, and if we ever get wind of him again we're hunting him down. That should be enough. What, are you just gonna keep a bunch of human teeth in a jar in my closet?

After all I've done for you, it's a very small favor to ask.

What the actual fuck, Eli. And with that, Robbie hardened his soul and shoved Eli out of his body, closed the web browser and turned off his laptop.

The Punisher had to die. He had killed a truly astounding number of people, and every day he continued to live, more people were in danger—criminals, sure, but there was a difference between killing people because they deserved it and killing people because it was fun. Robbie was fully onboard with hunting down the Punisher, even if that took them porting across the country the next time he popped up on the news. He and Eli could have been on the same page for once.

But Eli had to go and make it weird.

.