Somebody, Save Me!

by Steve Beaulieu

  I dug the comm out of my ear and lobbed it towards Cybersteele. “Concussion grenade!” I lied, hoping the momentary distraction would work.

  SHOOM! He fired a blast that obliterated the comm. Metal fragments and fried circuitry rained on both of us. My bluff worked. His cannon arm was raised towards the ceiling, already clicking and buzzing as it reloaded.

  I was already sprinting towards the giant. The Slayer Sword dug into the floor behind me. Sparks, the roar of sharpening a shank echoed through Deck One. Cybersteele’s blaster was lowering. This was my last chance.

  I used my momentum to parkour leap onto the cannon, propelling myself above his body. I hoisted the Slayer Sword as high above my head as my straining muscles would allow. My momentum, partnered with the saber, would violently slice him into halves.

  “Nnng!” I was jolted mid-air, my movement suspended. It felt like I’d been frozen in time. I lowered my eyes, the rest of my body dormant. Pangra’s waist and legs were intangible, phasing through Cybersteele’s frame. Above her abdomen, she was solid, organic. Her right hand gripped the front of my costume, her left hand held my wrists. She had intercepted the sword before its deadly blow.

  “You passed,” she said. Her half-smile looked fake, but I knew it was real. “Bazinga!”

  I wiped my drenched face and tossed the towel on the conference room table, next to my goggles. Pangra had always intended to fly the Jinn Jet just far enough away to be out of sight, then circle back to the satellite to check on my progress.

  She had also restored lighting and secured Cybersteele in the robotics lab. I had battled a replica used for combat training. The real Cybersteele was stashed away in a secret location, being rebuilt, or rebuilding himself.

  A couple of cooling units had been shut off to trigger warning lights. There was never a reboot. The entire exercise was all designed as part of my training.

  She didn’t answer when I asked if I could’ve been killed.

  “Your shuttle is here,” Pangra said. “Xodrilla Prime will arrive momentarily to resume monitoring duty.” She levitated in front of me, arms folded yet relaxed, her cape slightly waving in the artificial gravity.

  “No more tricks or tests?” I asked, not convinced the surprises were over.

  “Not during this solar day,“ she said.

  She reached out and touched my shoulder. “I never doubted you could handle the situation. You are destined to do well on this team, Scour.”

  Hearing her say that felt so good. A spark of accomplishment inside me triggered a grin. Maybe I was ready to push myself harder than ever—to be a part of something bigger.

  “I’m glad you think I, like, belong on a team, Pangra.”

  “Not any team...on ours,” she said. Her slender yolk-colored thumb pointed towards the shuttle bay, signaling it was time to go home. “Now let’s hug it out, bitch!”

  A Word From Bret Bernal

  I could tell you about the time my wife asked me if I loved her more than comic books and I replied, "Marvel or DC?"

  Or I could mention that somewhere in my fourth grade teacher's attic is a VHS mini-movie starring yours truly, dressed as Superman, flying from a treehouse.

  Maybe you'd be interested in how (before the internet) I used to track down my favorite comics creators and quiz them on the phone or visit them at their studios. These days it's called "stalking."

  But those are anecdotes for another day. Superhero, Super-Hero, Hero. However you wanna spell it, these costumed champions have been my constant companions most of my life. I've collected their powerful, mesmerizing adventures for decades, always wondering, what happens next? As a child, my bedroom floor was smothered in comics—who needs carpet? In middle school, my two best buds and I spent countless hours watching Saturday morning cartoons, swapping comics and writing and drawing our very own—stapling those copy paper issues were a pain. That story creation lifestyle carried on through high school, then adulthood. And, as the hourglass dripped more sand, I never gave up the dream of one day sharing the superhero exploits bouncing around in my brain with others. These days, I still make that weekly trek to my local comic book shop to find out what trouble Spider-Man, Nightwing, and the Justice League are tangled up in. I've also been fortunate enough to have some of my own tales published online and in various comics anthologies, working with some amazing artists along the way. You can find my sci-fi/fantasy comic book mini-series TAO-BOY & ENGINE on Amazon. I hope you enjoy my story for this special anthology.

  That Which Does Not Kill

  By C.Steven Manley

  Sometimes I still dream about the Wave, that wall of golden light that swept across the world and changed everything. I dream about watching it dance across the desert night toward me, filling the sky from horizon to horizon and lighting the dark as surely as any desert sun. I dream about the way it swept over and through me and how it left me on my knees, feeling like I’d just run a marathon with a boulder on my back.

  Then, inevitably, something wakes me, and I roll over in my bed to slap at my alarm clock in hopes of spending a few more minutes sleeping away the reality of the Post-Wave world. In truth, it doesn’t look all that different than it did before the Wave. The Wave had swept across the world and left the buildings and the machines and all the pretty little flowers just as it had found them. People, though… well, not all of us were so lucky.

  It was the phone that woke me this time, and I fumbled with it for a moment before I got it to my ear. “Yeah,” I said, “hello.”

  “I need you.” Even through the sleep induced fog I felt, I connected the deep voice with a name: Karl Griffin. Detective Karl Griffin.

  “Riley! Wake up, man! This is happening!”

  “Yeah,” I said, “What’s going on?”

  Karl said something to someone in the background, and then came back to the line. “We’re making a move on the Hardiman case. I want you to meet us there.”

  It took a second for the name to register. Scotty Hardiman was the ten-year-old son of a wealthy software designer. He’d been kidnapped three days ago in a very public and very hostile attack on the boy’s private school. Two people had died.

  I untangled my legs from the sheets and sat up. “What do you want me to do?”

  “Meet me.” He quickly gave me an address. “I’ll give you the details on site but, basically, I want you to get between the kid and the bad guys and stay there.”

  I thought about it for a moment. “That’s risky for the kid,” I said.

  “Look, if I was the bulletproof one, I’d do it. Just get your ass down here.”

  I hung up and reached for my pants.

  My business card reads Riley Hanks, Security and Protection Services. For the most part, that’s accurate, and I manage to make a decent living providing security consulting and bodyguard services for a variety of clients ranging from paranoid bankers to visiting celebrities. What the card doesn’t say, however, is that one of the reasons I got into this line of work was because I’m one of the thousands of people worldwide that were altered by the Wave. Normal people have a lot of names for us; Wavers, Waveweirds, and just plain Freak among them. Scientists call us Advanced Humans or Meta-Humans which is all well and good but for the fact that they have no idea what the Wave was, where it came from, or why it changed some of us.

  Not that we’re all the same. The changes the Wave worked were different for all the affected. A week after the Wave hit, there were people flying for God’s sake, some of them with their very own sets of wings. Not in my case, though.

  Since the night of the Wave, I’ve been shot, stabbed, bludgeoned, blown up, run over, poisoned, drowned, thrown out of a helicopter, set on fire, doused with acid, infected, crushed, electrocuted, and called some really hurtful names. I walked away from all of it. My flesh doesn’t cut. My bones don’t break. I am, so far, indestructible.

  Sounds cool, right? Yeah, well, don’t start patting me on the back just yet. Like most things in life, there's a do
wnside. See, I might be indestructible, but my nerve endings and pain receptors work just fine. Bullets may not pierce my skin but getting shot feels a lot like getting stung by the largest, angriest hornet in the world. Getting run over by a truck may not break my bones, but I feel every ounce of pressure on my skull and every groove in the asphalt. They say ‘that which does not kill us makes us stronger.’ I say that which does not kill me just freaking hurts.

  This was paramount on my mind as I approached the address Karl had given me and flashed my consultant ID to a uniform manning the perimeter. Fortunately, the kid recognized me and waved me through without delay. I found Karl leaning over the hood of a police cruiser with three other guys all dressed in heavy assault gear. They looked up as I approached.

  The three assault types studied me like I was something that had just crawled out of a dumpster. I grinned at them and said, “Hi, guys! What’s new?”

  They stared back at me and sort of nodded with a mix of curiosity and revulsion on their faces. Karl muttered something to them, and they wandered off.

  “Okay, see ya later, guys! Nice talking to you!” I let the grin slip and looked at Karl. “I think those guys skipped their mandatory sensitivity training.”

  “You’re a smart-ass,” he said.

  “Olympic class,” I replied. “So what’s up?”

  Karl gestured me over to the hood of the car. He had a set of blueprints spread out with spare ammo clips holding down the corners. The schematics looked like they belonged to a large, multilevel warehouse of some kind.

  “This is where they’re holding the kid,” he said, tapping the blueprints. “It’s about three blocks away.”

  “How do you know that?” I asked.

  “Anonymous tip led us to the building. Then the kid’s dad called in some favors from his military contacts and got us, get this, infra-red spy satellite confirmation. There are definitely seven adults holding an isolated child in that building.”

  I gave a low whistle. “Daddy’s got some clout.”

  Karl nodded. “Apparently he wrote big chunks of whatever software runs those satellites.”

  “Cool. Why am I here?”

  Karl pointed to a small square on the blueprints. “As of fifteen minutes ago, that’s where they were holding the kid with a stationary guard not ten feet away. Our breach points are here, here, here, and here,” he said, indicating spots on the map at all four walls.

  I saw the problem immediately. There was no way to get to Scotty before the kidnappers could shoot him. The doors and the streets outside were bound to be watched, so the moment the police came in, all the guard next to Scotty had to do was pull a trigger. The warehouse was just too big.

  “Are you sure they’ll kill him?” I asked.

  “After the mess they left at the school just getting him? Yeah, I’m pretty sure.”

  I sighed. “Okay, it’s a crappy situation. What am I supposed to do?”

  Karl smiled wickedly. “Oh, don’t worry. I have a plan.”

  The plan sucked.

  Okay, to be fair, the plan was actually a pretty decent one. My part of the plan, however, sucked. It turns out there was an oversized drainage pipe that ran into the warehouse from the sewers underneath. It was just barely large enough for one man to wiggle through so long as he wasn’t encumbered by body armor, tactical vests, and weapons like most of the cops were. Karl said he’d had plenty of volunteers to do the pipe crawl, but he didn’t want to send any of his guys in unprotected. So, naturally, he thought of me.

  I simply must remember to send him a thank you card.

  Anyway, that’s how I found myself at the end of a very long, very narrow and very dirty drainage pipe. I still smelled ripe from my trek through the sewers, so that combined with the rust and dust of the pipe made keeping my lack of breakfast down difficult. Thankfully, though, after a few more pulls with my elbows, I found myself at the floor grate that would serve as my entrance into the warehouse.

  After wriggling onto my back as silently as possible, I grabbed the grate and pulled myself into a slightly larger space. I could see up through the grate at the warehouse ceiling and the dark metal struts that crisscrossed it. There wasn’t much else to see, but I laid there for a few minutes listening hard for any indication that the room above was occupied. Satisfied that I was in the clear, I reached up and pushed at the grate.

  Some people who find out about my invulnerability seem to equate my being tough with my being strong. This is not the case. I’m really no stronger than the average man with my build and fitness level, which is pretty good. What I can do, though, is apply my strength without fear of injury. So pushing on a metal grate held in place by three very old and rusty screws was not a big deal. It took a minute, but the grate came free with a minimum of noise.

  After pausing again to make sure I hadn’t attracted any attention, I eased the grate to one side and pulled myself out of the hole. I emerged into a large bay of some kind with thick hoses attached to each of the three walls. The place looked large enough to park a big rig in, but currently, it was empty.

  I moved to one side and hugged the wall, hoping I was out of sight of any bad guys. I had my smartphone in my back pocket and a Glock 22 that Karl had loaned me in the front of my pants. I pulled out the phone. The first thing I noticed was that I had cracked the screen during the pipe crawl. I silently cursed and then texted Karl.

  I’m in. U owe me a nu phone.

  At this, he was supposed to start moving his men into assault positions. My job was to make my way through the warehouse and find the room where they were holding the kid. Once I was in position, I was supposed to text Karl again and the cops would move in. After that, all I had to do was protect the kid until they secured the building.

  I pulled up the picture I had taken of the schematics with my phone and zoomed in on the area I was interested in. After a moment of getting my bearings, I headed in the direction that I thought I needed to go. I stuck close to the meager shadows and moved slowly. It was less than a minute before I rounded a corner and found my target.

  The office was unusual in that it was elevated. I suppose whoever had been in charge of the place in years past had wanted to keep an eye on things. They had put their office in the middle of the warehouse and raised it up about thirty feet on legs of steel. The four columns that supported the corners were crosshatched with smaller steel bands and tied together with steel cross supports that made a large X on every side. The office itself was situated atop it with a small walkway of the same heavy steel circling it. Windows were set into every office wall, but they were covered in paint.

  I heard a light cough and looked up in time to see a man wearing an armored vest and carrying an assault rifle come around the walkway corner from the front of the office. I immediately hunched down behind the corner and cringed, waiting for him to raise an alarm. If he’d seen me, there was no way I could get to him before he could kill the kid.

  No alarm came. After a breathless moment, I peeked around the corner and saw him return the way he had come.

  I looked around and then rushed toward the nearest column. There were plenty of handholds among the crisscrossing bands of steel, and I ascended quickly, trying to keep my movements as smooth and as quiet as I could. I reached the railing, hauled myself over, pulled out my phone and tapped out a message to Karl.

  They have armor and assault weapons. Move in.

  With the phone back in my pocket, I turned around just in time to see the guard come around the corner with his rifle barrel leveled at me. “Don’t you freaking move,” he hissed.

  Sure, I could have drawn my pistol, maybe taken a hit from his weapon, and shot the guy but that would have alerted his buddies and possibly made things harder for Karl and his team. Besides, I try to avoid shooting people, even scumbag kidnappers. So, in the interest of a bloodless resolution, I did as he said, standing very still with my hands held low and away from my body.

  “What gave me away?”
I asked.

  The guard grinned crookedly. “Shoulda turned off the keyboard clicks on your phone,” he said. “Who did you text?”

  “Just the cops who are about to descend on this place like the hammer of God,” I said. “How about you drop the rifle and I’ll put in a good word for you.”

  The guy spit a curse without dropping the muzzle an inch. “We warned you,” he said, “we warned you what would happen.”

  From somewhere farther back in the building there was a crash and a flurry of shouts. Gunfire suddenly started echoing through the cavernous space.

  “Now, the kid dies,” he said, “right after you.”

  I was reaching for my Glock when he opened up on me. If getting shot by your average handgun is like getting stung by the world’s angriest hornet then getting shot with a military grade rifle is like getting stung by a giant hornet with a stinger that hits like a white-hot jackhammer. Imagine that and then imagine that happening all over your torso twenty or thirty times in a second.

  Pain exploded through my chest and belly. It was so intense and piercing that I staggered backward, tripped over my own feet and fell onto my side. I was blinded and nauseated by the sheer agony but still managed to keep my wits about me enough that I got a grip on the Glock.

  The guy cursed and hit me with another volley of jackhammer stings all along my side. I screamed incoherently at him and rolled onto my back, bringing the Glock to bear.

  He was gone.

  I could hear booted feet pounding on the metal walkway as he ran back the way he had come. He was headed for the front of the office and the boy within. Even through the agony crawling up my nerves and churning my thoughts, I knew what would come next.

  I got my feet under me as the blanket of pain that was smothering me started to turn to an aching numbness. I ran as best I could and rounded the corner for the front of the office just as the guard’s boot impacted with the door and sent out a shower of splinters.