by Baron Sord
“Wait, for real?”
Arnold rolled his eyes, “Yes, for real.” He pushed the door open and went inside.
We ordered food, and sure enough, they gave Arnold a discount on his carnitas burrito, but not me.
“See?” he smirked.
“I’ll wear my mask next time,” I said.
While eating amongst the dinner crowd, we enjoyed the Lucha Libre decor on the walls (colorful masks, signed photos of wrestlers, and championship belts). The TV played a Lucha wrestling show. It inspired Arnold and I to brainstorm Mexican wrestling names for the two of us. Since neither of us knew much Spanish, we didn’t come up with anything good.
El Fuego for me, El Gordo for him.
The Fire and The Fatty.
Yeah, no.
After dinner, we drove all over San Diego and helped twenty or more people in distress. When the sun peaked over the eastern horizon on Tuesday morning, we called it a night and rolled toward home. Arnold snored the entire way there. It was the only sleep he got that night.
I didn’t get any.
Back in Arnold’s kitchen, he brewed fresh coffee with his eyes closed while I sat at the kitchen table with my forehead resting on the tabletop. I hadn’t had this little sleep since finals week my last term in college.
Arnold joined me at the table and also put his head down. Both of us fell instantly asleep. Some time later, the smell of fresh coffee woke us. We pounded several cups and filled thermoses.
First stop, dropping him off at SPAWAR.
Second stop, Donut Star.
Third stop, me helping whoever needed it.
Could you see a pattern forming?
I wasn’t complaining.
Sadly, my good deeds would only last as long as I had sick days remaining. By this time next week, the dungeoneers at YouDoIt would be cracking the whips and demanding my return to servitude.
I had to pay for a new phone somehow.
—: Chapter 16 :—
BOOM!
BOOM!
BOOM!
“I’m gonna kill you, Lady Liberty!” Borky Pig shouted as his motorcycle’s rear guns roared.
The muscled mutant pig man straddled his tricked-out Barely Driveson as it blazed down the top level of the twenty-lane and six-level mega-highway somewhere in the smoggy concrete maze of Megapolis. The bike’s rumbling engine farted loudly as it went.
FART-FART-FART!
Borky’s big bike bristled with big guns and bigger blades, a steel porcupine of high-speed death. Borky wore his usual white wife-beater, jeans, and boots. He had a mohawk on his pig head and wore wrap-around sunglasses that rested on his pig snout.
He shouted over his muscly shoulder, “This is the day you die, Lady Liberty!”
“Keep dreaming,” Lady Liberty said with a confident smirk.
Chasing behind Borky was none other than the masked feminine face of justice herself. Lady Liberty was hunched over her ultrafast red, white, and blue Ninjette superbike. It was as sleek as she.
Lady Liberty’d been fighting Borky for the last hour. First at the bank he’d robbed. There, before Lady Liberty’d arrived, Borky’d killed two security guards and several customers, one a pregnant mother, and another her toddler son. The little boy’d been holding Mommy’s hand and innocently licking a lollipop when he’d been shot heartlessly in the head from behind by stupid Borky Pig. Because Borky thought it’d be funny to take out the kid’s head and his lollipop with one shot. He had. And laughed.
That was Borky for you.
Stupid mutant pig-man.
When Lady Liberty had finally arrived, there’d been a big brawl. She’d punched Borky around like he was the little sniveling piglet he was, knocking him through walls and windows, but Borky’d escaped by jumping on his Barely Driveson and speeding onto the Megapolis freeway.
Now it was just Borky and the Lady on Level 6, the “No Speed Limit, Enter At Your Own Risk” level.
The beast and the beauty.
Lucky for Lady Liberty, Megapolis PD had closed Level 6 for the safety of its citizens.
Nobody innocent would die, but Borky might.
As the speed lines flickered around him and his speeding Barely, he grimaced and thumbed the trigger for his rear-facing mortars.
Poomph!
Poomph!
Poomph!
When the spiraling mortars landed—
KOOM!
KOOM!
KOOM!
The Ninjette whipped around the explosions on the freeway wherever they struck. Every time Lady Liberty leaned the agile bike so far over to evade the big blasts, it was scraping pegs and driving on the tire sidewalls. After dodging the shots, Lady Liberty flashed a wicked grin and twisted the throttle. The front wheel of the Ninjette lifted up as it bucked forward and the engine screamed fiercely. It raced ahead to catch Borky, trailing a spray of flickering speed lines.
“Pull it over!” Lady Liberty shouted as she slowed on Borky’s left.
“Screw you!” he replied and whipped out an assault rifle that he rested on his left arm to aim.
Lady Liberty was on the brakes before he fired.
KUKKA! KUKKA! KUKKA!
She was long gone when the bullets rattled from the barrel, swerving behind him before coming around on Borky’s right. She straightened the bike and turned on the auto-pilot. Stood gracefully on the seat as the bike raced along at 90mph, the top speed of Brock’s overloaded Barely Driveson.
Didn’t he realize that many guns were a liability?
Obviously not.
When Borky’s assault rifle came around in a spitting arc of automatic bullet death, Lady Liberty jumped high off her superbike. The Ninjette adjusted its internal gyro to produce a counter-force in addition to the steering servos turning the front forks slightly. This compensated for the force of Lady Liberty’s jump, and the superbike stayed glued to the road.
Lady Liberty forward-flipped in the air like an Olympic diver and landed with her feet balanced on Borky’s muscled shoulders.
Before he could react, she pistoned a downward fist into the top of his mohawk.
WHAM!
Borky lolled in his seat, and his arms flew out loosely. He dropped his assault rifle clattering onto the whizzing asphalt. It bounced behind and disappeared in the distance with the flickering speed lines.
Lady Liberty hopped down in front of Borky and straddled the gas tank so she could grab the handlebars and keep this big boat going. Meanwhile, her Ninjette was speeding along calmly to the side and behind, ready if she needed it.
Working the clutch and the brakes, Lady Liberty slowed Borky’s monstrosity of metal to a stop on the empty twenty-lane freeway. The Ninjette also came to a stop, engine idling. It remained balanced, the fork servos, gyro, and motor working in tandem to keep the superbike balanced perfectly vertically while standing still without a stand.
Still sitting on Brock’s Barely with him behind her, Lady Liberty kicked down the side stand of the monstrosity and leaned the big beast onto it. When she went to kick her leg over the gas stank, Borky wrapped his muscled arms around her neck from behind in a savage choke. She stabbed her pointed fingers into the nerve channels of both his elbows (his not-so-funny bones), followed immediately by bashing him in the pig snout with the back of her super-hard head.
Borky’s head whipped back and snout blood sprayed out.
Lady Liberty jumped up and forward, front-flipping in the air in a straight-legged pike and rotating 180 degrees. She landed arms out, ready to fight.
Borky fell of his monstrosity and landed on all fours, sniffing back the blood dripping from his pig snout with audible oinks.
“Looking for dinner?” Lady Liberty smirked. “I saw a pig trough back a few miles if you’re hungry.”
“I’m gonna kill you for that,” he oinked.
“Do your worst,” Lady Liberty grinned.
Borky pulled a curved cleaver and a hooked sword from scabbards on his monstrosity.
; Lady Liberty’s only weapons were her deadly feminine hands.
She and he circled.
The pig-man taunted, “First I’m gonna cut your tits off…”
“Start with yours,” she retorted.
“I ain’t got no tits.”
“Look again,” she grinned.
He did.
Crack, crack!
In a fluid flash, she came around his hooked sword, fired her fingers into his forearm, and his flexor muscles popped in response. At the exact same time, she used her free hand to slap the flat of the blade with her palm and spiral it out of his hand. The sword went twirling over his other arm before skidding across the asphalt.
Lady Liberty was all about precision.
Borky was all about battering things. He came around with his curved cleaver, preparing to chop her in half, but Lady Liberty was already behind him and she ducked under the whirling blade. Borky followed with a hammering fist, smashing it across the side of Lady Liberty’s face, bashing her right in the eye.
She went down and rolled away. Crouching on one knee, she brushed sweat from her luscious lips.
“Ain’t so tough now, are you?” Borky taunted as he stalked forward, leading with his cleaver. “I’m gonna cut you open from top to bottom, from your face to your lady parts.”
Lady Liberty cowered on the asphalt, still on her knees.
Borky raised the big blade in both hands.
Lady Liberty lifted her hips and snapped a kick where it counted.
Borky dropped the cleaver clanging behind him and grabbed his busted nuts.
Lady Liberty spun up to her feet and smirked, “I call that kick the Nutcracker. Obviously. You shouldn’t’ve left yourself open like that, Bork-breath.”
Borky groaned and folded over, landed on his knees, then fell to the pavement face-first, still clutching his recently punished pighood.
“Oink!” he squeaked when his snout hit the ground.
At that point, Lady Liberty tapped the comm button on her masquerade mask and informed Megapolis PD they could come in and haul Borky Pig off to jail. Then she climbed on her waiting Ninjette and rode off on top of Level 6 and into the sunset, fully intending to fight crime another day—
—only to be attacked from behind by her shapeshifting cat nemesis, Miss Mischief!
Claws tore at Lady Liberty’s shoulders and ripped her off the seat of her Ninjette. The superbike shot ahead while Lady Liberty smashed onto the road and went rolling, her shape-shifting werecat nemesis tearing away at her as they tumbled in a violent tussle…
—: o o o :—
“Missy!” Kristy Crawford laughed.
Wade’s girl-kitty Mischief had just jumped onto Kristy’s shoulder.
Mischief was looking at what Kristy was drawing on her slanted Wacom Cintiq Pro 24 drawing computer and whipping her fluffy tail. Kristy put the drawing stylus in its holder so she could pet the cat.
“Do you wanna be in my comic, Missy?” Kristy giggled, scratching Mischief under the chin, which got the little kitty’s motor purring.
Mischief was an outdoor kitty and she often wandered into Kristy’s apartment to visit. Her place didn’t have air-conditioning, so during summer like now, Kristy always left the windows and front door open, and the front screen door too, so Missy could come and go whenever she wanted. Kristy always had a water dish and food bowl in her kitchen in case Mischief wanted a snack.
Sometimes it seemed like Kristy was more of Missy’s Kitty Mommy than Wade was her Kitty Daddy. Okay, technically she was only Missy’s Kitty Auntie. Wade did love Mischief and took good care of her when he was in town. Whenever Wade left town on surf trips around the world, Kristy always cat sat for him. When she did, Missy always slept on Kristy’s bed.
They had a thing.
“Do you want some dinner, Missy?” Kristy asked.
Purrrrr, purrrrr, purrrrr.
“Me too.” Kristy stood up with a satisfied smile on her face and stretched her arms over her head.
It was 7:00pm Tuesday evening.
She walked from her drawing table in the living room area to the attached kitchen area and cracked open a can of food on a clean plate, which Mischief glommed onto the second Kristy set it on the floor.
Lick, lick, lick, lick, nibble, nibble, nibble, head shake!
Kristy changed the water in the bowl.
You wouldn’t know from looking at the apartment that Kristy was a huge comic fan because nothing in it suggested it. All her comics and toys and posters from her childhood were boxed up in a storage garage on the outskirts of town. That garage was the only stable thing in her life. She’d moved so many times in recent years, she never decorated anyplace she lived anymore. She was surprised she’d been here in Oceanside this long.
Today, she’d been working on the art for issue #2 of Lady Liberty since bright and early this morning. For a dancer like her, 11:00am was bright and early, especially after she’d been up late helping people as Lady Liberty last night and the night before. And fixing her costume, which kept getting ripped, which meant more time sewing, which meant less time to work on her comic, which meant less time working at Flashbacks, which meant less money and less time for everything else, yadda, yadda, yadda.
So annoying.
Kristy really needed a seamstress and a personal assistant. She’d made a bunch of money from the Con, which was amazing, and could probably afford to hire both for a few months, but Kristy’d never had much cash to spare. On the rare occasions she did, she hoarded it for a rainy day. Growing up in her family, it’d always been rainy. Old habits.
The other thing was, she had tons of work left to do on issue #2, but only a few days left before she had to finalize everything and send it to Jeff to proofread the speech balloons and set up everything for press. They had a strict schedule to keep if they didn’t wanna miss the print deadline, and the last thing they wanted to do was fall behind on publication after only one issue. That’d turn off fans faster than anything.
Anyway, eight straight hours of drawing was more than enough for the day.
Plus, she was starting to sense snippets of people in upcoming trouble.
She wasn’t sure if she’d been getting any trouble visions earlier today because she’d been so engrossed in working on the Borky Pig fight in her comic. When Kristy got in the zone on drawing, everything else disappeared except the fantasy in her imagination.
Now, real visions of trouble, no actual disasters, were starting to flicker to life in her mind.
Before she went out to help people, she did need to eat.
She was starving.
Dozens of open pizza boxes from Knockout Pizza covered the counters. Kristy’d never been much of a cook. A different Pizza Guy brought today’s and yesterday’s pizzas than the one on the weekend who’d met Brock. She was kind of embarrassed by the idea of seeing Weekend Pizza Guy again.
Anyway, Weekday Pizza Guy had brought her ten pizzas yesterday morning and today. Both days she’d told him she was having a pizza party later.
“Two days in a row?” he’d asked.
“Two days in a row,” Kristy’d winked before tipping him and taking the pizzas.
The only thing she did know how to make was salad, and she’d be eating lots of that. She’d lost count of how many heads of lettuce, tomatoes, avocados, carrots, bottles of ranch dressing, and everything else she’d bought and poured into her big salad bowl, which actually was big enough for parties. She wouldn’t admit it to anyone, but she was eating like a literal horse. Except for the pizzas. Horses didn’t eat pizza, did they? But they ate salad for sure.
After gobbling down the last of the cold pizza, emptying the party salad bowl, and throwing all her pizza boxes in the dumpster out back in the alley, it was time for Kristy to take a break and get out of her apartment.
The real Lady Liberty had work to do.
—: o o o :—
The storage garage door rolled up with a rattle.
Inside wi
th the rest of Kristy’s crap (boxes and boxes of clothes, old comics from her mom, action figures from her dad, and countless worthless but sentimental family heirlooms) was a motorcycle covered by a black custom-fit cover. It was the only thing she had of any real value.
Kristy closed the rollup door and turned on a battery-powered work light inside the garage. Unzipped the motorcycle cover and pulled it off, revealing her dad’s old supercharged Kawasaki Ninja H2R.
It was a racing bike.
Track-only and not even close to street legal.
It wasn’t registered either, which was perfect.
Before her dad’d passed away from lung cancer a few years ago, he’d told her it was hers.
She’d never ridden it on the road.
She’d been too scared of it, despite having grown up on motorcycles.
Her dad’d taught her to ride on a minibike when she was 5, and she’d been jetting around on a 125cc with 15 horsepower by the time she was 11. When she was a teenager, she’d been quite the hellion at the track on a 400cc with 49hp. The biggest bike she’d ever ridden was a race-ready 600cc with 125hp that had a top speed of 160mph. She’d only ridden it once. It’d been a bit much for her. Not just the weight of the 430 pound (195 kg) bike, which was almost too heavy for her to manage as a teenager, especially in the turns, but also the power and speed. It was dangerously fast.
Her dad’s Ninja had six times that much power.
Six.
310 base horsepower with a claimed top speed of 250mph (402kph).
If you didn’t know how to ride, it was literally deadly.
She wasn’t scared of it now.
She was Lady Liberty.
For real.
Kristy smiled at her dad’s old motorcycle.
The Ninja’d been in storage for several years. Kristy knew bike maintenance, and had cleaned and lubed the chain before putting it into cold storage after her dad passed away. She’d also changed the oil and filter herself, prepped the fuel system, removed the battery, and put the Ninja on a service stand so the tires didn’t get ruined with permanent flat spots.