by Oblimo
"Hopefully, it won't come to that," Yves said. He tried to stand with the lavender girl in his arms but his legs kept folding up under him, or the road kept slipping around beneath his feet. He could not tell which.
Raspberry managed a small laugh—"Ha"—but her eyes were wild and worried. Dee shoved the Jeep out from under the overpass' shadow. "Yves. Get up," Raspberry said. The humps on CeeCee's back thinned and stretched, first into discs, then webbed wings. "Get up, Yves." Dee pushed until the Jeep listed against far side of the on-ramp, well clear of the overpass. "Get up, babe," Raspberry pled, her arms trapped inside the overshirt tourniquet holding her together. "We gotta go."
Yves hung his head. "I'm so tired, Raz. There are things you don't know about me, either."
CeeCee's eyelids flittered up. The polished coal buttons of her eyes were too small for her round, wide face, fixing her visage in a silent but perpetual scream. "Dee," she said, arms searching blind. "Master. I. Black Cherry." She fought to hiss out each word. "I'm lying. She's lying. Black Cherry. About Galatea."
Yves sat up fast. Raspberry sloshed against his lap. Dee whirled around. Come on, Dee, Yves thought. Keep it together, don't fuck this up. He watched Dee watch CeeCee struggle for control of her own mouth. If there was ever a time for one of your hallmark flashes of intuition, it's now. Yves realized he was holding his breath.
CeeCee spluttered and coughed out words. "I didn't…she…"
Dee's open palm shot up. "That's enough, CeeCee. You're running out of nanomek and I need you to do something else."
"But she never—"
Dee's new voice crackled in the air. "Enough!" The yellow SUV's car alarm blared, hazard lights flashing before the alarm wound down. The three sorority sisters, a half-naked pile of tangled limbs and lips, cried out in lusty chorus. CeeCee quailed and fell silent.
Yves exhaled, slumping. Raspberry, bound by Yves' overshirt, flopped over to peer up at him. Yves shook his head. Dee can't know Black Cherry's secrets until she's ready to tell him, he thought, but only whispered, "Later." If she decides CeeCee's spoiled her fun, it's all over. She'll stop playing the supervillain game and any advantage we have will be lost. "After I get you out of here."
"CeeCee," Dee said, pointing to the moist three-way on the SUV's roof, "Can you control them? Through Black Cherry? You've got to get them out of here."
Nascent claws, little red nubs, hooked out from the raw scarlet wings stretching from CeeCee's back. The wings battered the air, powerful but uncoordinated, each attempting flight independent of the other. CeeCee lurched, arms raised.
The three coeds floundered their slippy way down to the ground. Only the brunette had retained her panties. The greasy silk underwear looked like she had worn it for weeks on end. The three sorority sisters collected their clothes in silence and shambled down the road, extras from a Romero movie.
The embryonic wing-claws grew long and sharp. One wing stabbed down, its claw piercing the pavement. The whorls of crimson and black sucked inward, gradually draining from CeeCee's turbulent surface, leaving behind a sallow yellow. Dee paced around her, keeping out of striking distance of the free wing, walking in a careful semi-circle until he stood with the purple-stained pylon directly behind him.
"Aw, shit," Raspberry quavered as Dee backed up a step, then two. "We've gotta go right fucking now."
Yves hoisted the lavender girl in his arms and rose to one knee. His vision danced with silvered sparks of snow and fire. Oh God, he thought, sagging his weight against his leg, not an aura. Not now. He blinked but the colorless pyrotechnics persisted. At least that explains the way I've been feeling; I'm not cracking up. The world filled with silent video static. I'm pre-migraine.
The lavender girl stretched to plant a soothing kiss on his neck. "What are the eight forces that sustain creation, Yves? I forgot."
Yves set his jaw. "Movement," he said, and stood straight.
"And stillness," Raspberry said, nestled against his chest.
CeeCee's free wing flopped in a wide circle before slamming into the pavement. Licks of red and black whipped around the amber woman's surface and vanished inward. Dee took another step backward.
"Extension," Yves called, striding forward.
"And contraction," Raspberry answered, hugging herself tight until she fit perfectly in his arms.
The red wings clawed at the pavement. CeeCee rocked forward to stay on her feet. Her black button eyes sunk into her head before she squeezed them shut. A red bolus rose up on her back between her wings. Dee stepped backward again. The pavement beneath his feet inclined to join the pylon behind him.
"Unification," Yves said, and broke into a run.
"And division," Raspberry whispered, gazing over his shoulder as the distance between them and the amber woman grew. "I love you, CeeCee. Run. Run."
CeeCee burst like a water balloon. Black Cherry fell away, fully formed and furious, sweating blood-nectar from every pore. CeeCee's shapeless remnants slithered over the pavement in honeyed waves. Black Cherry sprang to her feet, howling in rage, wings swooping in for the kill.
"Cherry," Dee's voice reverberated and the scarlet girl staggered.
Yves cleared the mouth of the overpass. The mid-morning sun overwhelmed the fading aural sparks. "Solidity," he said, and turned about.
Dee stood with his back to the tall, ferroconcrete pylon. Black Cherry swiveled to face him. Sanguine honey dripped from her quivering wing claws, her arms, her pouting mouth and flush sex. "Master."
Dee raised his arms high, left hand curled around his right fist. He poured every ounce of his strength into a backswing. His fist smashed into the pylon, blasting off chunks of cement spiked with shorn rebar. Yves ears rang in the roar. There was an instant of quiet.
"And fluidity," Raspberry said. CeeCee flowed away from the overpass in a creamy gush.
A jagged crack raced up the side of the pylon with a ripple of sharp noise, overlapping pistol shots. The pylon split along its length. A half-column of concrete ripped free of rebar and thumped down onto the road hard enough to bounce Yves off the ground and knock the silver Jeep an inch forward. The bridging highway above rocked on its foundations.
Black Cherry gazed upward, worry melting into wonder and delight, as the pylon began its slow topple toward her. Her lips curled in a lazy smile, heavy lidded eyes sliding shut. "Oh, Master."
"Splat," Dee said, and several hundred tons of concrete pylon crashed down upon them both.
Superman never made any money
For saving the world from Solomon Grundy,
And sometimes I despair
The world will never see
Another man…like him.
—Crash Test Dummies, Superman's Song
Chapter Two: Whatever May Come
Concrete fractured into ragged slabs as it fell and struck the ground. Dee and Black Cherry disappeared in an acrid storm of grit and pulverized rock. The noise was deafening, a rolling thunderclap. Ears ringing, Yves huddled on the pavement drawing himself around Raspberry as best he could.
Raspberry soliloquized at him, tone harsh but smile warm: "I'm made out of Jell-O, dumb-fuck. A little jiggle like this can't hurt me. Good thing I'm too scared to cum, though. All this hugging and sappy bullshit's got my cooze so creamy I’d frig away my last nanomek if I could." She looked away, sighing. "Black Cherry's right. I wanna stuff Dee's cock up my cunt so bad I get cross-eyed just thinking about it, but to tell you the truth, babe." The lavender girl shook her head. Concrete fines and dust nucleated in her hair, turning orchid petals into gray sandpaper. "You've made me a fag-hag. If you're looking for a beard, I'm your bitch. We could get a little apartment, you could do all your fudge-packing at home, and I'd felch all the jizz I'd ever need out of your ass."
"Alright, alright," Yves said, loosening his hold on the leering goo girl. "I can hear again. Now would you please shut your filthy fucking mouth. Where's CeeCee?"
Raspberry nodded to the left. CeeCee hulloed, "Over here,
honey." CeeCee sprawled on the asphalt a few paces down the road, a heap of yellow, cream domes, as if someone had carved a reclining Buddha out of the world's biggest butter pat and left it melting on the pavement. "I'm just going to lie here awhile, if you don't mind."
Yves asked her, "Are you okay?"
"No."
"Are you going to be okay?"
"I'm not sure. I've never had so little nanomek to keep me going before. Honey, what happened? What on Earth was Dee thinking?"
Yves surveyed the wreckage. He saw no sign of Dee. A crimson puddle spread out from under the rubble, too thick and too fast to be Dee's blood unless nanomek had changed Dee in ways Yves did not want to think about. "Same as you," Yves told CeeCee, "to buy time. Time for Eurydice to put herself back together." He turned to the Jeep tucked beside the onramp. "Time for Nyx and Ursula to…" He squinted but could glean no clues from the sideways vehicle. "…to do whatever the Hell it is they've been doing in there. Time for us to retreat." One of the largest broken slabs of concrete thumped and shivered, raising a cloud of fines. Yves added, "Time for Dee to go mano y psicópata with Cherry."
Raspberry still dangled in Yves' arms. "But you're not going anywhere, are you?"
Yves clucked his tongue, watching the puddle ripple and wax into a pool, incarnadine and shadow entwined. "Nope."
She turned and glared at the growing pool, her eyes hard as true amethyst. "Then neither am I."
"You couldn't drag me away with wild horses," CeeCee said, staring up at the sky before admitting, "You'd need a bucket."
The thumping stopped. The slab grated over the pavement, a stone sarcophagus groaning open. Pale fingers reached up from beneath, found purchase, tensed, and pushed. The slab progressed another few inches. The bottom of the slab abraded into gravel. Fingers splayed and scrabbled but disappeared downward. Dee's muted swearing floated up. "Fucking physics!"
"Dee," Yves called out, amazed, relieved, but somehow, utterly unsurprised. "We're okay."
"Yves?" Dee's fingers reappeared from beneath the slab, their hunt for a handhold growing frantic. "Christ, Yves. How many times do I have to say, 'Get out of here' today before you actually get the Hell out of here?"
The ruby pool drew in on itself, doming in the middle. "I've got a few minutes," Yves lied. Dee's fingers danced around the perimeter of the slab where the crumbing concrete met the pavement. "Listen; are you squashed flat under there or something?"
"No, dammit, I'm harder than ferroconcrete, but ferro-fucking-concrete is harder than asphalt."
"You didn't lie down?" Yves asked.
"No, I didn't think of it. In comic books you don't have to worry about this kind of shit!"
"What the fuck are you two dickweeds talking about?" Raspberry demanded.
Yves stood up. "Our man of steel's been driven into the ground like a steel railroad spike." His elbows and shoulders burned from carrying Raspberry. "He's buried alive in the hardpan." The ruby dome rose into a ball. We may have to run after all.
"Bedrock," Dee corrected, annoyed, from a Dee-sized hole in the road. "Granite, I think."
"Who gives a shit?" Raspberry bounced in impatience. "Just punch your way out and kick psycho-twat's ass summore."
"I'm working on it," Dee said. Yves heard the crump of crumbling rock. "This isn't easy. I'm no Uma Thurman. How much time have I got left, Yves?"
"Master." Black Cherry unfurled, a rose blooming wet with morning dew. Her wings drooped, glistening and unformed. Her movements were twitchy and insectile. "You hurt me, Master." She paced in a little circle then folded up over a broken slab. "You hurt me so much." She rolled onto her back, luxuriating in a post-coital daze. "So much."
Dee was silent for a moment. "Thanks a bunch, Yves." The sounds of an avalanche in miniature spilled out from the hole.
Black Cherry glanced around. Her coy smile upended into a confused frown. "Master? Where are you?" Her head wings pulsed, glued to her pageboy haircut. She lazed onto her tummy and scooched to the end of the slab, streaking the concrete in a florid swath of fluid. She peeped over the edge. "Master?" She giggled down. "Oh, there you are. My noviluninium is waning, Master. Are you ready for me now? Or do you want me to play with Yves again? It's your choice, Master. Just as before." Her sly gaze flicked over Yves before she spoke to the hole in the pavement. "Is it time?"
Raspberry snorted, a guttural ch-hock! noise bubbling in her throat. She stuck her violet tongue out from between her lips, aiming carefully. The purple stains on the overshirt wrapped around her welled and spread. Raspberry grew cold in Yves' arms. Yves pinched her as hard as he could on the neck. She coughed and swallowed. Yves felt the soft, radiant warmth rekindle in her core and he relaxed his grip on her neck.
Something clanked inside the silver Jeep. Black Cherry pivoted on her ripe bottom, scissor-kicking to sit up, legs folding. She prized her diminutive wings away from her hair, angling them at the Jeep. Strings and filaments of gel drifted, lighter than air, in a hazy halo around her head.
"What did you do that for?" Raspberry wheezed at Yves.
"Don't you dare die for me or Dee," he told her.
A slim, lustrous black arm sprouted skyward from the driver's side window of the sideways vehicle. Its smooth, conical fingers and thumb fluxed into raptorial claws before hooking down into the canvas top.
"Ah," Black Cherry sighed, "of course. Just in the nick of time, too, imagine that." A second arm followed the first, fist clutching a torn book page and raising it high. "Our little heroine." Black Cherry peered at the nonsensical, spiraling scrawls of arcane formulae scribbled in black fountain pen ink across the crinkled paper. She shrugged. "She's the one I came for, Master. She helped you get away. She needs to die for that." The clawed hand flexed as the newcomer hauled herself into view. "She needs to die today…Wait." Black Cherry bounded to her feet, her head wings pricked up like the ears of a startled cat. "Who the fuck are you?"
Wide, red, oval-rimmed glasses, lenses chipped into splinters and flakes, sat askew on the newcomer's pert little nose. Long, plaited pigtails framed a porcelain white, china doll face and arced down into the Jeep in ropey licorice braids. Ebony glossed her liquid lips. A burnished onyx choker ringed her ivory neck above a cashmere poncho. A narrow but deep laceration slashed across a high, angular cheekbone. A single bead of jet black blood rolled down a cheek as pale as milk. The obsidian goth stared down in silence.
Wings of webby ink unfolded in sharp planes and geodesic formations from her back, holding her in place. She razored the poncho apart with a single slash of her clawed fingers. Strips of soft cloth fell away to reveal an iridescent, second skin, a living glaze of black volcanic glass, accentuating every curve of bone and swell of flesh,.
Black Cherry was the first to blink and step back. "What are you?"
The obsidian goth whipped off her useless glasses. She closed her eyes, daubed two gloved fingers against them. A perfect mask of black mascara coated her eyelids. Her eyes flicked open, their whites filling with starless night.
"We—are—U—Nyx," she breathed, and took flight.
"Oh, come on," Yves said. Unyx sailed high into the air on billowing, membranous wings. "Everyone's a superhero but me."
Black Cherry hunched, hands curled into fists, glaring up at Unyx through her eyelashes. Unyx dipped and dove, kite-tail braids whipping high and back. Red wing claws snapped up, aiming for the tender flesh below Unyx's ribs. Crimson struck lacquered black.
Yves flinched in the agonized noise, worse than fingernails across a blackboard. Needle-sharp claw-tips skittered over the Unyx's second skin. Black Cherry shrieked, threw her wings wide. Unyx bore down unhindered, her black talons ripping a gash between scarlet breasts. Black Cherry's single shriek stretched long without a stop for breath.
Unyx's thick-soled go-go boots smacked into the pavement. She wrenched one arm back, drawing out an arc of sanguine gel. She punched out with the other hand and thwacked the torn page over Black Cherry's jagged wound. The scr
ibbled equations and gridline charts were lost as red nectar seeped into the cheap paper. Black Cherry's inner gel, swirling red-and-black, sucked the page inward.
Unyx rocked her hips. She sprung high and away, wings whomp-whomp-whomping and thrashing the air. Her braids flew before her face as she soared backward. Black Cherry lashed out with both hands, seized the ends of Unyx's trailing braids and hauled. Unyx's neck jerked down as her braids drew taut. The snarling scarlet girl smashed her fists into the pavement and Unyx slammed into the ground headfirst.
Unyx's thick choker collar nictitated into a shell over her face an instant before colliding with the ground. Unyx twitched. Her wings settled to the ground in drifts of black silk.
Black Cherry stepped astride Unyx's form. She wound the obsidian goth's braids around both her fists. The slash in Black Cherry's chest zippered shut and her snarl melted into a befuddled frown. Goosebumps dimpled her scarlet gel-flesh, making her shiver. "What's going on?"
The filigree of shadow, the dark skeins and spirals permeating Black Cherry's red gel, trembled and whirled just below her skin. Beneath the fading scar between her breasts, the threading veins bent and twisted into angular shapes and mad loops before snapping into focus as numbers and symbols in a dozen languages, modern and ancient. Gibberish equations invaded her gel-flesh like a mathematical virus. Tunneling worms of code crept up the curves of her breasts, encircled her dark nipples in even darker lines of sums and symbols before swarming outward. In moments her stomach and neck swam with a motile tattoo inked by a demented algebra student. "What did you do to me?"
Unyx pawed the road but said nothing. Equations scrolled up Black Cherry's arms and legs. The scarlet girl yanked on Unyx's braids, swung her up and over and back down hard, spraying chunks of asphalt into the air. Black wings wilted and collapsed into lumps.
Black Cherry hoisted Unyx up by the hair and screeched in her face. "I said what did you do to me?"
The black candy shell protecting Unyx's head peeled away to reveal Ursula, pale and unconscious. The wings on Unyx's shoulders melted and molded into a second pair of reedy arms, spindle neck and blank, egg-shaped head.