Neon Assemble

Screenplay draft

Brick Harlan’s shoulder pads caught the pink wash of Ocean Drive neon as he slammed the door of his black Trans Am. Mullet damp from the humidity, leather vest creaking, he scanned the line of pastel convertibles and heard the first synth sting rise from a boombox on the sidewalk. The squad was already rolling up behind him: Scarlett Vesper in a crimson leather catsuit that doubled as evening wear, her red hair pinned under a white headband; Gunnar Stone swinging a twelve-pound sledgehammer wrapped in chrome tape; Morgana Shade trailing a black cape lined with circuit boards that glowed faint blue; and Kip Riley, baby-faced and grinning, springing from a low wall with wrist-mounted grapples still smoking. They called themselves the Iron Glove. Tonight the glove was closing around something that had just torn a hole in the Vizcaya Museum roof.

The inciting breach came at 11:47 p.m. when three matte-black pods the size of delivery vans punched through the museum skylight and spilled iridescent crab-things that spat plasma across marble floors. Brick’s first one-liner—“Time to redecorate”—was punctuated by the roar of his wrist-mounted mini-gun chewing the creatures into smoking chitin. Scarlett slipped a data spike into a pod’s exposed core while Gunnar’s hammer crushed exoskeletons in slow motion, each impact synced to a descending bass note from a distant yacht party. Morgana’s cape flared as she traced glowing runes that shorted alien optics; Kip ricocheted between columns, tagging weak points with adhesive charges that detonated in strobing orange. By the time Metro-Dade units arrived, the pods were slag and the squad was already speeding toward the next warehouse district on Biscayne.

The escalation arrived at dawn in the form of a larger vessel that hovered above the abandoned Port of Miami cold-storage complex. The aliens had learned. Their boarding parties now carried refractive shields that turned the squad’s bullets into harmless light shows. Scarlett infiltrated the lower gantry in a stolen cigarette boat, her one-liner—“Boys, they brought mirrors”—delivered over the comms seconds before she planted a shaped charge that peeled the shield array open. Gunnar leapt from a stacking-crane catwalk, hammer arcing through the gap to cave in a command node, but the counterstrike caught him: a plasma lance sheared his left pauldron and sent him crashing through a crate of frozen shrimp. Brick dragged him clear while Morgana’s cape projected a holographic decoy that bought them thirty seconds. Kip’s grapples finally latched the node’s core; he whooped as the whole assembly went critical and the vessel listed, vomiting smaller drones into the dawn sky.

Midpoint reversal hit at the safe house above a South Beach laundromat. While Gunnar’s burns were packed with quick-clot gauze, satellite footage revealed the true target: the alien mothership was not overhead but beneath the city, anchored to the old subway tunnels under the Miami River. The squad’s own armory—shoulder pads, leather, even Morgana’s cape circuitry—had been broadcasting their locations through an infected radio beacon planted days earlier. Brick smashed the beacon with a gloved fist; the betrayal was internal. Scarlett’s earlier data spike had carried a Trojan that the aliens had turned. She met his stare across the folding table and said only, “I buried the override in the museum pod. We go back or we die loud.”

The dark night unfolded in the flooded tunnels at 3:15 a.m. Water up to their chests, the squad moved by the glow of Morgana’s cape while alien patrols clicked along the ceiling. Gunnar, one-armed, still swung the hammer to collapse a bulkhead and trap a boarding party; the slow-motion spray of water and sparks looked almost beautiful until the ceiling gave and a tentacled overseer dropped among them. Kip’s quip—“Big guy needs a hug”—ended when the creature’s limb wrapped his torso and began to squeeze. Scarlett reached the override console first, fingers flying across alien glyphs that burned her gloves, but the cost was immediate: the console’s feedback arc caught her across the ribs and dropped her into the water. Brick caught her, armor steaming, and roared the final order: “Light it.”

Act Three resolution came at sunrise on the river’s surface. The mothership’s core detonated in a pillar of violet fire that climbed between the high-rises like a second neon sign. Brick surfaced last, hauling Scarlett’s unconscious form onto a drifting pontoon while Gunnar and Morgana supported Kip’s limp body. The city’s morning traffic already honked around them; a passing cigarette boat slowed, its driver raising a boombox in silent salute. Brick’s mullet dripped river water across his ruined shoulder pads. He looked at the rising smoke, then at the team still breathing, and spoke the last line into the salt air: “We’re keeping the pads.” The synth sting that answered came not from a radio but from the city itself—car horns, distant sirens, the ordinary pulse of Miami returning—while the Iron Glove floated on, four silhouettes against the pastel dawn, leather and chrome still gleaming.