Evil Genius 5

by Jacobs, Logan

  Hyena staggered away, but he still had one hand pressed against his bleeding mouth, so he wasn’t able to move very fast. He glanced over his shoulder at Mira, but even though the silver-haired supervillain tried to send one hologram after another to distract me, she must have known that they were pointless.

  I was locked onto my target now, and I wouldn’t let him escape.

  “Let’s switch,” Aileen hissed into the comms. “To confuse them and so I can try my hand against Hyena.”

  “Yeah, we can do that,” I said.

  Hyena suddenly dropped down into a squat and then used his powerful feet to a back-flip right over my head. He must’ve been trying to

  get back to his partner, but two could play that game.

  When he was directly above me, I propelled myself up into the air and slammed my fists into his kidneys like they were little punching bags.

  Then as Hyena crumpled and started to drop down on top of me, I grabbed him around his wiry waist and then flung him across the rooftop toward Aileen and Mira.

  “Incoming,” I growled into the comms.

  Aileen gave the silver-haired supervillain one final uppercut before she twisted around to face the flying Hyena. As the android reached out her arms to catch him or maybe just to crush him, I sprinted toward them to take out Mira before she could recover from Aileen’s last blow.

  Mira raised her gun with a shaky arm to fire at the android, but before she could pull the trigger, I was on top of her. I slammed my left shoulder into the center of her chest, so she immediately gasped for air and then fell backward off the roof and into a clump of tiny white flowers below with a thud.

  I followed her down to the ground, caught her hand when she tried to twist her gun around to shoot me, and then bent her wrist back until her gun was pointed at her own head. Her wrist snapped from the pressure, but even though she cried out, she just snarled at me with her next breath.

  “You think any of this will bring back those idiots that we killed?”

  Mira laughed. “You think we won’t do the same thing the moment that we break out of prison? It took me less than a day to fool the guards last time.”

  “Maybe you haven’t heard,” I said as I pinned my knee into the middle of her chest to keep her still. “We aren’t like the Shadow Knight.”

  “Then who--” Mira started.

  “We’re with the Evil Genius,” Aileen said behind me, and then something crunched behind me like half a dozen bones all broken at once.

  I didn’t pause long enough to look back and see what had happened to Hyena. Instead, I pushed Mira’s wrist back a little bit further until the barrel of her gun was pressed up against her temple, and then I slipped my hand up and pulled the trigger for her.

  Her brains exploded out the other side of her skull and painted all the tiny white flowers a dark shade of red. As the little chunks of her blood-stained gray brains settled into the flowerbed, I wiped her blood off from my face and glanced back at Aileen.

  The android was coated in an even thicker spray of blood than I was, and it only took one look to figure out why. Hyena’s corpse, or at least what was left of it, was sprawled in a heap on the ground at Aileen’s feet, but in the android’s hand was the supervillain’s fucking spinal column.

  She had ripped it right out of his back.

  “Holy fuck!” I gasped. “Aileen, how did you… fuck me!”

  “I already did that last night,” the beautiful android replied as she blinked her blue eyes at me, “but if you would like to have another threesome with my Creator, then I would be happy to participate.”

  “I meant, how the fuck did you rip out his spine?” I asked.

  “I inserted my fingers into his skin at the base of his cervical vertebrae,” Aileen said, “and then I dug in until I had them wrapped around his spine. After that, I just had to twist and pull hard enough to snap it, and it came out quite cleanly after that.”

  “That is impressive,” I said.

  “It is also impressive that you forced Mira to shoot herself,” Aileen said. “She would have shot you if she had the chance.”

  “I know,” I sighed as I glanced down at the supervillain’s broken skull. “It’s not like they didn’t have it coming.”

  “If there’s nothing else, we can leave now before the police show up, and we have to explain anything,” Aileen said.

  “We can’t just leave their bodies up here,” I said. “The police won’t know where to look, and then they’ll just rot.”

  “We can drop them down onto the street,” the android said.

  “Yeah, I guess so,” I replied. “The cops can figure it out from there, and I really don’t feel like having to talk to them about anything.”

  “The police are usually on our side, but not always,” Aileen said as she bent down to pick up Hyena’s corpse in her free hand. “So yes, it would be easier if we just left now.”

  Aileen started to carry the corpse and the spinal cord over to the edge of the roof, so I picked up Mira and her gun before I followed the android.

  Once we reached the side of the roof, I tossed the silver-haired supervillain over the side at the same time Aileen dropped her armful, so then both bastards landed on the street below with a heavy thud.

  As little pools of blood started to spill out across the street underneath them, I turned back to the android and nodded.

  “That’s our cue,” I said.

  “No regrets?” Aileen asked with a curious tilt of her head. “You appear to be a bit quieter than usual.”

  “I know they’re supervillains, and they deserve to die,” I said. “At least, I know that now. But I still just killed someone, so… I don’t know. It just takes me a minute to process things, you know?”

  “I do not understand that,” Aileen replied. “They were our targets, and we killed them. Isn’t that a good thing?”

  “Oh, it is a good thing,” I said. “Sometimes, humans just need a moment to think about something that they’ve done. Like killing someone.”

  “Miles does not need a moment to think after he kills a supervillain,”

  the android responded.

  “That’s because Miles is different,” I said with a smile. “Nothing affects him quite the same way that it affects other people.”

  “I have certainly observed that to be true,” Aileen said. “Have you processed enough for us to return to the car, or should we continue to just stand here together?”

  “No, it’s fine,” I laughed. “We can go now. I’ll let you drive, and I can process on the way.”

  We hurried down from the roof and headed back to the armored car.

  By the time we reached it, a few brave civilians had come out of their storefronts to see what was going on, so I just waved and told them they were safe now, but to wait inside until the cops showed up.

  As soon as Aileen slid behind the wheel, I hopped into the passenger seat, shut and locked the door, and buckled my seatbelt. I looked over to see that the android had also buckled her seatbelt, and I smiled at the gesture.

  She was just about goddamn indestructible, but she was also clearly

  protective of her new skin, so I guessed that she wanted to take every reasonable precaution to keep it in one piece.

  The android cranked the armored car and immediately shifted forward, so we flew down the road and zigzagged to avoid any people who appeared in our path.

  “I will say one thing,” I sighed as I leaned back into my seat. “It is a lot fucking easier to deal with villains when we just kill them. Ironically, it’s actually less clean-up.”

  “Why is that ironic?” Aileen asked. “That’s just a fact.”

  “Hm,” I said with a glance over at the android, “maybe I should ask Miles to program you with a little bit of sarcasm.”

  “My Creator likes me the way I am,” the beautiful android responded.

  “Sorry, that was also sarcasm,” I chuckled. “So how did you like your first experien
ce on a mission in physical form?”

  “Oh, I would very much like to do it again,” Aileen said as she slowly blinked her long eyelashes again. “I would like to hunt down every single supervillain in Grayville.”

  “And after we finish with them?” I asked.

  “Then I would like to return to Pinnacle City,” the android replied,

  “and hunt down every single Warden who follows Optimo, until we finally hunt down Optimo himself.”

  “Yeah,” I said and flexed my fists in my lap. “I’d like that, too.”

  Chapter 8

  I slid out from behind the wheel of the car, glanced up and down the street, and then tapped the roof of the car to let Norma know it was safe to get out. We had just taken one of my everyday cars tonight, since I had let Aileen and Elizabeth take the armored car. They would be more in danger from their two targets than Norma and I were in danger from Honeybee.

  After all, Honeybee didn’t exactly use force to accomplish what she wanted. Instead, she used the giant stinger on her plump ass to create mind-controlled drones out of unsuspecting civilians, and then she made them do her dirty work. In that way, she worked similarly to Mayhem, but instead of using nanobots to control her victims’ actions, Honeybee just used whatever toxin was in her stinger.

  But even though on the one hand, it was smart to use drones to do her dirty work, it also made it really fucking easy to track her down. All we had to do was follow the trail of destruction that her little worker bees left in their wake, and then we would eventually catch up to her.

  “So where are we going, exactly?” Norma asked as she shut the car door.

  “Just around the corner,” I said with a grin. “You’ll see the place. I heard it on the police scanner.”

  “Well, I’m sure as fuck ready,” Norma said. “We’ve been tracking her all day.”

  “Eh, but we knew she wasn’t gonna really get going until the sun went down,” I said as I started to lead the way toward the next cross-street.

  “She’s a bit of a night owl, so she prefers to go out when it’s dark.”

  “Only because that’s when all the bars open for business,” my mousy assistant muttered. “Honeybee might be a night owl, but she’s also a heavy fucking drinker.”

  “At least it makes her predictable,” I said. “We know she likes to go after bar patrons, especially men.”

  “Especially men who fall for her pretty face and ignore the fact that there’s a giant stinger sticking out of her ass,” Norma said as she pulled her hooded mask down over her face.

  “I don’t know if it’s that giant,” I laughed. “I think it might be a little more subtle than that, so she can just slide up next to a man and sting him before he even knows what happened.”

  “Still,” Norma said, “half of the chaos that we’ve seen tonight could have been avoided if men just kept their heads on straight.”

  “Not everyone can flirt and keep an eye out for danger at the same time,” I said.

  “You mean that not everyone is you,” my mousy assistant said with a roll of her eyes.

  “Well, yeah,” I said with a smirk. “Am I wrong?”

  “No,” Norma sighed. “I’ve been around long enough to know how much of a multi-tasker you are. You can damn near multitask as well as Aileen.”

  “I don’t know if I’d go that far,” I said as we approached our turn,

  “but it is rather close. So… does that mean you’ve been watching me flirt with other girls, Norma?”

  “W-what?” my nerdy assistant stammered, but she shook her head.

  “No, it’s not like… I mean, it’s just that--”

  “You’re not jealous, are you?” I grinned.

  “No!” Norma said immediately, even though I could see enough of her skin through her mask to tell how pink she had just blushed.

  “Oh, I’m only teasing,” I said. “After all, why would you care enough to notice how I flirt with other women? You’re above all that kind of shit, aren’t you?”

  “Uhh… yes?” Norma replied.

  But when my mousy assistant immediately grew quiet, I knew that I had struck a nerve. She probably didn’t think that I was aware of how deeply she was in love with me, but that would have been obvious to a blind man.

  Of course, I pretended not to notice so I wouldn’t make her feel awkward around me. I didn’t want to do anything that would take away from what a good team we were together, and besides, I figured that it was only a matter of time before she was comfortable enough to tell me how she felt.

  In fact, it would probably be right about the same time that she figured out how powerful she really was.

  “Ready?” I asked.

  “For what?” Norma glanced at me and then pushed her glasses up inside her mask.

  I just grinned beneath my helmet and gestured for her to lead the way around the corner to Honeybee’s last known location. As soon as Norma stepped forward, I followed right behind her, so we both spotted the supervillain’s most recent trail of destruction at the same time.

  Honeybee had last been spotted at a bar on High Street, but the moment we turned around the corner, I saw that she had set the whole place

  on fire when she left it. Firefighters had just managed to extinguish the tallest flames, but there were still a few smaller fires inside the burned-out shell of a building, and from the looks of it, the restaurant next door to the bar had also received a lot of damage from the blaze.

  Firefighters continued to spray down what was left of the fire, while paramedics clustered around a dozen bar patrons who looked like they had inhaled more than their fair share of smoke. But since there was no sign of anyone who looked like they weren’t quite in their right mind, I figured that Honeybee and her drones must have moved on to another spot in town.

  I wasn’t surprised that they weren’t here. Based on when the report about the fire had come in, I had known that by the time we got here, we would be too late to catch her, but it was the closest that we had gotten to her yet, so I would take it.

  After all, Honeybee was a kind of seductress, just like Arachne had been, so I knew that she enjoyed the thrill of the chase, just like I was willing to bet that she also enjoyed being chased instead of always having to do the chasing herself.

  I was certain that she knew we were on her trail, especially since the destruction she left behind kept getting grander and bigger, and that meant eventually, she wanted us to catch up to her. Sure, she thought it was all just

  some big game of seduction that she would ultimately win, but that was only because she didn’t know one very important secret.

  Norma and I were immune to her stinger.

  We might not have been completely immune to her charms, of course, but I had made some improvements to our suits during the last week with the hope that we would get to go up against Honeybee sooner or later.

  After I killed the Shadow Knight, I had known it would only be a matter of time before Honeybee came out to play, especially since Dan Slade had been such a drag to play with.

  No, Honeybee needed a real man to take her down, not some asexual feather-caped wannabe hero, and I was just the man for the fucking job. She would be desperate to make me one of her drones, naturally, but by the time she figured out that our suits protected us from her stinger and from her pheromones, it would be too late for her.

  “Fuck,” Norma said with a little whistle. “That’s some next-level shit.”

  “I think she might be getting excited,” I snickered. “She must have had her drones set at least half a dozen fires to make the building go up in flames so fast.”

  “So does that mean at least six drones?” my assistant asked. “Or do you think there are more?”

  “Probably more,” I said. “She’s been very active today, and she’s been moving from bar to bar for the last two hours.”

  “Drones are the worst,” Norma said. “I know we can’t really kill them since they’re actual civilians and al
l of that, who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time and blah blah blah, but it sure would make things fucking easier.”

  “Trust me, I know,” I replied. “But they can’t really help that they’re controlled by a supervillain’s toxic venom, basically, so they don’t deserve to die. Not for that reason, anyway.”

  “They might be controlled by her venom, but I still think they should just be able to keep it in their pants,” Norma muttered. “So what do we do now? Move on to her next location?”

  “No, she clearly did this for show,” I said. “She wants us to admire it, and that means she can’t be far from here.”

  “So…” my assistant trailed off.

  “So, we admire it,” I said with a grin. “We walk around, take a look at the damage, ask a few questions to see if anybody saw anything, and then we should have enough clues to find her next target.”

  “Well, if this is the closest that we’ve gotten to her so far, I’m sure it won’t be that long before we catch up,” Norma sighed.

  We headed toward the closest group of paramedics and victims. This cluster wasn’t badly enough off that they had to be carted off to the hospital, but two of them sat on the back of the ambulance and took turns inhaling extra oxygen into their smoky lungs.

  “Hey, back up, this is a crime scene,” one of the firefighters said when he saw us approach. “We can’t have--”

  “Can it, Jake!” a second firefighter said. “Haven’t you ever turned on your damn television? That’s the fucking Evil Genius.”

  “The who?” the first firefighter asked.

  “Don’t worry about him, sir,” the second firefighter told me. “You and your lady friend go right ahead and do whatever it is you need to.”

  “Thanks,” I said with a nod.

  After Norma and I moved past him, my assistant turned to glare at me.

  “Your lady friend?” she growled. “You know that’s insulting, right?”

  “To be fair, you don’t actually have a superhero name yet,” I pointed out. “I couldn’t just say ‘oh, this is Norma, now please go look up all of her personal information,’ you know?”

  “I guess so,” my mousy assistant sighed.