Read The Machinist: Making Time for Free Online

Scott Patton was dying—and he knew it.  The disease ravaging his body had confounded medical professionals for some time, and the only science that came close to explaining his condition was purely theoretical.  That woeful confusion prompted the judge who had presided over Patton’s case to commute the super-criminal’s sentence after only a few years.
    Patton was just under thirty years old when he first stepped foot into Blackiron Federal Penitentiary, a specially-designed prison for superpowered criminals and psychopaths who could not be held in regular facilities.  Yeah, he recalled, he had a few gallons left in the tank back then.  For a while, at least, he had been able to stand up to the cyborg neo-fascists and mutant gang-bangers that wanted to fuck with him—or just fuck him.
    But then the changes started : His bones weakened and his lungs hardened.  His skin dried up and became like leather stretched over bone.  Scott Patton’s body aged seven decades in a handful of years.  He hobbled out of the prison a decrepit, ancient husk of a man.
    Patton had made arrangements to keep his illicit income safe long before he got put away .  He had never counted the sum of his savings from the dozens of bank jobs he’d pulled, or the commissions he’d earned from doing gigs for less talented crooks.  But he knew it was quite the bounty. After getting off the bus from upstate New York, Patton bought a throwaway cellphone and began making calls as he walked down Manhattan’s cracked old streets.
    Patton leaned against a mailbox after ending the last of his phone conversations to catch his breath.  A sheet of newsprint carried by the hot afternoon breeze fluttered by on the pavement and Patton stabbed at it with his cane to halt it.  He rolled his eyes after reading the newspaper’s hyped-up headline about the superhero squad called the Titans of Liberty.  As the limousine he’d ordered pulled up to the curb in front of him, Patton wondered if the average American taxpayer knew how much of their income streamed into the pockets of these so-called heroes.  Patton’s joints creaked when he leaned down and got into the car.
    That evening the skeletal ex-con—now clad in the finest three-piece black suit that money could buy—sipped red wine in the back of that same vehicle as it journeyed southeast through the city.  He grinned as the outskirts of the East Village flashed by the limo’s windows.  The car was nearing the end of its voyage to the outer edge of the ravaged portion of New York City called The Fortress—a safe haven for perpetrators of illegal acts carved out of the city by superpowered villains during the late eighties, formerly known as Stuyvesant Village.
    Patton’s conveyance stopped outside of a dilapidated, condemned building.  The half-man, half-lion thug that Patton had hired helped him out of the vehicle and up on to the curb.  Patton knew that rolling into the city’s de facto supervillain territory in a fancy car and a penguin suit was an invitation for trouble, but he also knew that this day was his last on Earth.  He’d seen it in the mirror that morning.  He had decided to treat himself, and he was more than confident that his gargantuan bodyguard’s fierce visage would make most assholes think twice about making a move against them.
    He stood on the sidewalk for a moment, leaning on his cane as he stared up at the tenement.  He took it all in , a picture forming in his mind of what the building had been like years before.  A piece of plywood covering one of the windows groaned as the wind blew under it, breaking his reverie.  The only reason the building was still standing was because the cowards at the city’s Department of Public Works never came within two blocks of The Fortress’ walls.
    “They delivered my equipment?” Patton asked his bodyguard .  The chimera grunted in acknowledgement.
    “Good,” said the old man, pointing at the boarded-over door.