by J. A. Dauber
Especially, you know, since you were hiding inside a mountain.
The same mountain where I dropped off the money after my first robbery, it turns out.
I remember being confused about how you got there, since there weren’t any roads anywhere nearby. Well, I guess—how did you put it in those training sessions of ours?—I had to stop thinking so two-dimensionally. What I should have said was that there weren’t any roads on the exterior of the mountain. Inside it was another matter.
Here’s one thing I’ve wondered: Don’t a lot of your projects need construction crews? And for someone who’s all about supersecrecy, isn’t that a big problem? I mean, I only got a quick look as I was busy destroying everything I could on my way into the center of the mountain, but it did seem like the kind of place that took a long time to build.
I’d say I’m sorry about the mess, but, you know, I’m not.
My guess is, Leonard, that you didn’t build it. You don’t do things you can get other people to do for you, and with your government contacts, maybe…maybe it was one of those abandoned Cold War places, like where the top brass were supposed to hide if the Russians started bombing. And since you’re a comic-book guy, the idea of a secret underground mountain lair was too tempting to pass up. Am I getting warm? And then—this feels like you, too—you somehow arranged to have it disappear from the government’s records.
Or, on the other hand, maybe they know exactly where it is. They’re just too scared of you to do anything about it.
Dad? Is that you?
NOW. SATURDAY. 10:23 P.M.
That was Dad calling me.
Dad. Calling me. From down the hall.
Just saying those words…
He was letting me know we were going to have dinner soon. It’s later than we usually eat, but you can look at it another way—we’re already six years late for family dinner.
We’re ordering in, obviously. I don’t think anyone’s in emotional shape to cook. Even figuring out where to order from—the fact that we’re juggling three voices, three opinions, rather than two—that in itself made Mom sniffle and Dad’s voice get all hoarse and throaty.
Sushi. We haven’t had it since the night Dad disappeared. Symbolic or something.
Apparently, it’s my dad’s favorite. I never knew.
I’ll have time to get to know him again, I guess.
I can’t wait.
But I made them promise that I could finish this first, before we ate.
I earned it.
FOUR HOURS AGO
So. Mr. Jones. In case you haven’t yet been able to review your security footage, here’s what happened.
I should have known better than to doubt Mom. But when the homing signal brought me to the side of a mountain in the middle of nowhere…I have to admit, I started having dark thoughts. Had something gone wrong with the electronics? Had you found the device—I didn’t even want to think about how—and sent me off on a wild goose chase?
It almost worked, by the way. The camouflage. Mom was at least twenty minutes ahead of me, and I kept hearing this voice in my head: She’s getting farther away, she could be anywhere, anywhere at all.
And then I saw it. Or the thermal scanners did. I don’t think it was visible to the naked eye. That tiny bit of metal, warm metal, poking up out of the mountain.
It could have been an exhaust vent, or a wireless antenna, or just a mistake in construction. But I knew it meant that something was there, underneath. And then I realized that the mountain looked…familiar. From our earlier encounter. And that was all I needed.
Had you just been so eager to get your hands on the loot from that first robbery that you arranged to meet close to home? Or were you so confident I wouldn’t suspect anything that you didn’t care? I think probably it was the second. Which was understandable since you had been leading me around by the nose the whole time, and I hadn’t suspected a thing. Well, that’s not true. I had some suspicions, you have to give me credit for those.
Not that I need you to give me credit for anything. I don’t care what you think….
The point is, you would have been right, if it wasn’t for the homing signal. And the suit’s instruments. And then, a minute later, the antiaircraft missile launchers and machine-gun embankments that popped out of the ground.
Those were good indicators I was on the right track, too.
We had prepared for this, Mom and I. Or at least talked through the possibility. You were confident, we knew, but also paranoid. Wherever you were stationed was going to be stocked with sensors and crammed with defenses. But what you didn’t have was the Mayhem technology. Without my mom, you’d never been able to get it right.
But Mayhem was never yours. It was Mom’s. And now mine.
Still, for all your lies, there was at least one thing you told me that was true. Something you said at the beginning. This rescue-mission thing—it couldn’t be done with a drone. It needed a person. An alert, experienced, committed person.
Funny how that came back to bite you, huh?
I understand I may sound like I’m bragging here. But you know what? I don’t care. Because after mess-ups and mistakes and losing someone I loved, I. Rocked. This.
I fried the antiaircraft missiles before they could get anywhere near me. Well, I fried their targeting circuitry, which meant they spiraled and fritzed all over the place and then exploded against the side of the mountain. Which, on the one hand, looked enormously cool. On the other hand, it started a fire. As someone who cares about the environment, I felt bad about that, seeing the trees and brush smolder and go up. But it made your getaway a lot, lot harder, I’m sure. Which helps, more than a little.
It was the missile explosions that knocked out the machine guns. Which looks like genius on my part, but I have to admit it was a coincidence. Either way, those big explosions opened up the small machine-gun ports, turning them into medium-size jagged holes. With a little bit of Mayhem-ing, they got ripped open into big jagged holes. Big enough to crawl in through.
I burned myself against the still-cooling metal on the way in. Not seriously, I’m sure you’ll be disappointed to hear, but enough to remind me that this wasn’t the real Mayhem suit. I was significantly more vulnerable.
Which had been the last thing Mom had said, before she got into the real suit. And it hadn’t just been about the suit. It was about getting overconfident. Being cocky.
Which she was right about, I guess. I mean, I almost took care of you for good, didn’t I? If it wasn’t for that one stupid mistake….
But I’m not going to focus on that now. This is a good night. We won. Thanks to good decisions I made. And I’m just a kid, right?
Forget I said that. I’m not asking you for approval. That’s ridiculous.
Let me get back to the story of how I saved Mom and Dad and set your plan, whatever it is, back years. At least.
The maintenance tunnel servicing the machine guns connected to a slightly larger hallway, and that hallway led to the main access corridor. I knew I had to hurry. You were clearly on red alert, and even if the fires and explosions had knocked out any external cameras—and there was no way I was going to bet on that—I could see other cameras, up and down the halls, swiveling in my direction as I passed. You knew I was coming.
So I didn’t take the scenic route. I bashed as direct a line as possible from my entry point to the location of the homing signal, according to the map my suit was drawing for me on the monitors. Wherever the direct line didn’t involve a door, I made one. With fists and grenades.
I was keeping an eye out for goons and henchmen to disarm—remember, no killing—but there weren’t any. In fact, there wasn’t anyone. Miles of rooms, it seemed like, and just you and your prisoners. Is that who you are? Is that how you live?
I don’t pity you. Considering everything you put my family th
rough. Everything you’ve done to the world, to innocent people. But I imagine you, month after month, year after year, wandering the halls there…
Sympathy for the devil. Huh. None of that.
Then it was time for the next trick up my mechanical sleeve. Distraction, my mom had told me. Once you’ve lost the element of surprise, keep him off-balance.
You don’t get the rumble and roar with Mayhem Jr. that you get with the original, but there’s an impressive amplification. I’m pretty sure you heard me, not just through the screens, not just through the speakers, but through the walls. I’m coming for you, Mr. Jones. In the unlikely case that you missed that, I know you heard what came next: a personal, curated Bailey playlist of pure 100 percent rock and roll, guaranteed to raise…well, maybe not a smile, like Sgt. Pepper and the band, but hopefully something.
Especially since I was playing it at earsplitting volume.
You get some awfully good acoustics inside a mountain. Lots of echoes. I was hoping that the music, along with the feedback distortion from computers in rooms up and down the halls, would make it hard for anyone not inside an armored suit—like, say, you—to think rationally.
And so maybe you’d even try to turn off the computers.
Because—don’t ask me the details—as computers cycle down, they’re more susceptible to the virus Mom had created. The one my suit was broadcasting in every direction as I flew through the halls. Crunching through any server I could find, gobbling up your data, transmitting it back to the drives Mom had hooked up in the May-cave…
Yeah, the scientist’s precious hard drive got cooked by the drones at Kaz’s place. But that doesn’t matter anymore. We’ve got it all. Petabytes of it. Everything you had, we sucked it dry. Whatever your plans are, we’ll know. And we’ll figure out how to stop them.
Did you realize that? I think you did. Judging from how freaked out you were when I finally found you.
I mean, I get it. A good chunk of your hideout was on fire. There was music blasting all over the place. And that tablet you always carried around was probably flashing zillions of warnings about data loss and security breaches and who knows what else.
I should have been happy, seeing that. Triumphant. I should have said something like, Who’s the boss, now? The Mayhem Jr. suit doesn’t have the volume of the original, but it would have been pretty epic.
But I didn’t have time to gloat. I didn’t even think about it, then.
Seeing someone holding a gun to your father’s head drives those snappy comments right out of your mind.
* * *
It took me a second to register what was happening.
The door I’d smashed through was disintegrating around me, and even though I knew the suit’s visor would block out wooden splinters or pieces of shrapnel, I had the bad habit of closing my eyes as I went through something solid.
But then I blinked, and the dust settled, and what I saw…
Well, the first thing I saw, actually, was the pizza.
Boxes and boxes of it, open along a long table. Every topping combination imaginable, even—gross—Hawaiian. You could have fed two dozen people, easily.
But that’s not what you were doing. I recognized the boxes. They were from Strombolini’s, this place Mom talked about loving when she was in college. When the two of you knew each other.
You know, a long time ago, when I was a kid and saw snow—in our part of the country, it doesn’t snow often, so it was cool to see it—Mom used to tell me this story about college. At midnight the night of the first snowfall of the school year, she would go with a friend of hers to Strombolini’s and share a whole pizza. Each year meant different toppings, and they had to be kind of bizarre. The first year was pepperoni and anchovies, the next was, I don’t remember, something cheesy, but with, maybe, salad dressing. And senior year was Hawaiian. I remember that.
Was that friend you, Mr. Jones? Yuck.
I guess this was your psycho way of having a special romantic moment.
Look. I don’t know much about women. But here’s something I can teach you, Leonard. If you literally have to nail the woman you’re interested in to the floor by armorizing her giant robot boots so that they weigh hundreds of pounds, and then refuse to let her control them, pizza is not going to do the trick. Especially when you are holding a gun to the head of her husband.
I understand that was not originally part of the pizza plan. Still.
Maybe I sound calm about this now. Maybe. But that’s because I know how it ends. And if I wasn’t trying, with every bit of me, to stay calm—to tell this straight, and cool—I would be shouting and screaming and cursing all over the place. Like, I mean, you actually held a gun to my dad’s head. And then what? You would have shot him? In front of me? YOU WOULD HAVE—
All right. It’s over now. It’s over.
Back to me winning. And you losing.
It looked like Mom had been trying to talk to you when I burst in. It also looked like she hadn’t been having much success. You were holding the gun to Dad’s head with one hand and tapping at your tablet with the other.
I’m guessing that had something to do with the drones that came up behind me. No big deal—radar, auto-targeting, and thermal bursts took them down as quickly as they came. Which was good. Because I was not concentrating, in that moment. I had lost focus.
I was seeing my dad.
I was seeing him look at me, and look so happy. There was a bullet about six inches from his brain and it did not seem to concern him in the least.
But no one was going to die. Nobody.
My mom looked at the two of us and she smiled, and she said loudly, “I love you both so much. Forever and ever.”
And it worked.
I mean, it’s not that she didn’t mean it. But it was also a calculated move. She was thinking that hearing that, on top of everything else, might make you…sloppy. Send you over the edge.
And it did.
I’d never seen it before, but I guess they call it pistol-whipping. You took the gun, and you cold-cocked my dad on the head, just whapped him. It was…
I thought I hated you before. But I could almost see my hatred at that point, streaming out of me. It was clear and cold and green and I wanted to take it and strangle you with it. To forget about everything else and fly for your throat.
I think it must have been reflex for you. Right? After all those years of not being able to kill my dad. Knowing that no matter how much you wanted to, that was the one thing you couldn’t do, because you needed him alive to get Mom.
Or maybe you were so obsessed with your idea of being a supervillain, right out of a comic, that you felt, somewhere, subconsciously, that as the bad guy, no matter how much of a genius you are, you’re supposed to make a stupid mistake at the end.
I don’t know. But one thing’s for sure. It was a stupid mistake.
Because as my dad slumped to the floor, bleeding from his scalp, unconscious, you gave me a clear shot.
* * *
Which I should have taken. But I didn’t.
I’d like to tell you it was because I’m better than you. Because I had made this deal with myself—no killing—and no matter how much someone might deserve it, I was going to live up to my promise. I should probably say that.
But I guess maybe I’m not talking to you after all. I’m talking to myself, too, and I have to be honest. Honestly? I’d’ve been fine blowing your head off. And it would have been easy, too. Flexing one finger, that was it.
The real truth, the honest truth, is that I just didn’t think of it.
I wanted to hit you. Plain and pure and simple. And as I’m sure you remember, that is exactly what I did.
I flew across the room and smashed into you with a tackle that would have made Logan proud. I felt your ribs break, and that made me happy. I yanked you clear of my
dad. Turned your gun into scrap metal. And then I held you high in the air and flipped up Mayhem Jr.’s visor and looked you right in the face. Eye to eye.
And it was terrible.
I mean, it should have been a moment of triumph, right? The big heroic thing to do? But you were so angry, and hateful, and in pain, too, all sorts, that I couldn’t do the regular comic-book thing. I couldn’t just toss off some clever line, even if I’d been able to think of one. I couldn’t say something moral and righteous and good guy–ish.
I mean, given everything, I didn’t have the right, did I?
So instead I threw you across the room.
I saw you bounce off the wall and land in a heap, and I think I might have heard something crack, but I wasn’t paying much attention. I was picking up my dad.
He was unconscious—you had hit him hard—so I scooped him up the same way I would grab the neighbor’s toddler, back when I used to babysit, when it was time to take her to the changing table and she didn’t want to go.
I looked down at him in my arms, bearded and thin, and all I wanted to do was give him a kiss.
So I did.
And then I dropped him.
When Mayhem practically took the back of my head off.
* * *
Overconfident.
Overconfident, overconfident, overconfident.
I should have checked that you were unconscious. I should have tied you up. I definitely should have smashed your tablet.
But I didn’t do any of those things. And while I was having a mini-reunion with my unconscious father, you had scrambled back to the tablet—like the insect you are—and activated your final weapon. The Mayhem suit, which was still under your control.