by Ben Bequer
Anura was within arms reach of Ruby. Ricochet was tapping my chest with his interlocked hands, begging for speed. We were only a few feet away, so I tried something risky. Grinding my huge boots into the floor, I created footholds. I could feel them crumbling beneath me, and even with Anura blocking my path, the force of Ruby’s powers would make it impossible to get any kind of leverage.
Ricochet was still thumping me on the chest, and it took me a second to realize he was screaming at me. My ear canals were full of congealed plastic, and what sound did penetrate consisted mostly of rushing wind and a punishing mix of sonic frequencies. I turned my ear toward him until his hot breath washed across it, and his frantic voice cut through everything. “Ping-pong, goddammit! Ping-pong! Look up, goddammit!”
I looked out past the ruined ceiling at open sky. Flying supers and the flash of energy beams peppered the cloudless evening. Right above us, a section of roof jutted out, and I got it. Drawing an imaginary line between the roof section, and the bottom of the globe of sound encasing Ruby, I made my calculation. Grabbing Ricochet by the back of his suit, I waited. Untwining his arms, Ricochet patted my shoulder, shouting, “Go, go, go!”
I whipped my arm forward, letting him go at the apex of my motion. Ricochet tucked into a tight ball creating a little spin as he collided with the high ceiling. I didn’t realize I was holding my breath until the kid bounced off the edge and smacked Ruby square in the chest. I managed to drop him right on top of her. The impact knocked her flat, but not before the force or her sonic waves, combined with the momentum he already carried, drove Ricochet into Anura. It was like dislodging a stuck nail with a shotgun.
They came to a rest inches from Battle still protected in Templar’s bubble. Ricochet uncurled from Anura’s chest, both hands in the air triumphantly, stumbling around until Moe steadied him. Templar laid a hand on Anura, the tattoos on his arm twining down over the villain, and they were both gone. I ran over to Ruby and gently dug for a pulse. She had taught me how to do this, probing both her neck and wrist. Steady and strong, but she was unconscious. I turned to Focus, but Superdynamic was there. He turned towards Primal’s staircase and said, “Go.”
CHAPTER FOUR
Why do They Always Run?
I ran in the direction of Primal’s stairs. The pounding of armored feet followed me, and I saw Lady Armada, one of Epic’s team, following me. I didn’t realize she had joined us until I looked back and saw Templar had returned through a huge portal. Dozens of heroes stepped through, more than I could count.
I hit the stairs and descended, hoping she would stay behind. We had history, none of it good. I built a castle from scratch as a trap to capture the insane A.I. Mr. Haha 2000. Epic’s team felt a certain way about that and had picked a fight with me, on my home court. They lost. It was easy to call these thing misunderstandings, later, when we're all kind of cool, and less focused on murdering each other, but I had humbled all of them. In the end, Epic and I ended up with a mutual respect that bordered on friendship.
I didn’t know if Armada carried a grudge, and there was no time to find out – Primal had a good minute’s head start on me. I pounded down stairs that seemed to go on forever, reaching a landing that tunneled away into a much larger cavern that was open to the elements. A crude ship, crafted out of raw magma, sat cooling on a huge outcrop of rock. Rivulets of magma dripped along the hull, drying into small clumps of rock.
Primal stood before it, arms wide. The cavern opened out over the ocean, and heavy winds whipped at his clothing. He saw me coming and stopped his work. The ship cooled to a gleaming silver. It gave the thing a ‘60’s NASA look. “Come,” he offered, waving me closer. “I’ll explain everything on the way.”
“On the way to where?” I asked, just as Armada joined me. She leveled her spear at Primal, but from her posture, and the angle of her shield, she was ready to fight either of us.
“Enlightenment, Blackjack,” Primal said. “Aren’t you tired of good and bad, of the constant fighting? There’s something else, my friend. Something beautiful.”
“You sound like a shitty 80’s movie,” I said, stepping forward.
“Don’t move closer,” Armada said, shifting her spear to me. The weapon was tipped in the tears of angels, or the urine of Apollo, or something ridiculous that could actually harm me. I had also seen her use the weapon first hand. She was a surgeon with the thing.
“I’m on your side, stupid.”
Primal laughed, “Are you?”
“Come’re and I’ll show you,” I taunted, stepping closer, but Armada slid the spear through my right hamstring. The weapon pierced my skin, biting through flesh and scraping the femur, coming out the other side.
“Are you crazy?” I screamed. My hands went to the bleeding wound, but she thrust the spear further in, the tip digging into the stone floor, pinning me on the spot. I was stronger than her, strong enough to tear her to pieces, but the pain was agonizing, and I was losing a lot of blood.
“Don’t move, villain,” she roared at Primal. I batted her away, measuring my strength so she went reeling without killing her. I ripped the spear out of my leg and fell to the ground, screaming in pain.
“Reach out to me and I will help you, Blackjack,” Primal said. “You have to want it, my friend, but when you do, I will show you things you’ve never imagined in your wildest dreams.”
“Go fuck yourself,” I said and hurled Armada’s spear at the villain. The force and speed of my throw caught him by surprise, but he just extended an arm, turned it to molten plasma and destroyed the spear.
“Noo!” Armada wailed from the ground as others gathered around me. Apogee knelt to check my wound. Superdynamic and Vector were the only others fast enough to keep up with the speedster.
“He’s bleeding bad!” Apogee said, trying to staunch the bleeding on both the entry and exit wounds.
Superdynamic gave me a once over and looked back at Primal. The villain was stepping calmly into the ship. Shaking his head, he started tending to me, solid light forming over both ends of the wound. The blood stopped, the pain and pressure grew much worse. “Templar, get down here,” he said.
Primal had boarded his ship and the ramp had closed. The thing rose into the air and soared off without a sound. It didn’t seem to have an engine or power source, but it was quickly out of sight.
“What’d he do to you?” Apogee said.
Lady Armada was on her feet, moving closer. She looked woozy, and blood dripped from a broken nose and mouth. Vector came to her aid as she stumbled to her knees. She looked at me, afraid and embarrassed. “He hit me with a rock lance,” I said, not wanting to start a fight. Armada looked away in shame, and that was enough for me.
“It’s still curious how much he wanted you,” Superdynamic said. He tapped the power dampeners on my wrists, “Looks like the secrets out.”
“Yeah,” I said.
Templar popped out of the air, “You called, boss?” He didn’t take long to understand why, leaning down and putting both of his hands around my leg. A white glow followed his motions, surrounding my wounds.
“That should hold until we can get you to the Cicada,” Superdynamic said. “How’s she?”
“Broken nose, jaw and a couple of loose teeth,” Vector said, his voice coming through an over modulated speaker on his helmet. “Also a probable concussion.”
“Primal?” Superdynamic asked and Armada nodded, not bothering to look in my direction.
“Well, we have most of the rest. Templar, take them to the Cicada, then come back, there are a few villains injured upstairs.
“I’m coming too,” Apogee said, coming closer to Templar.
The young hero reached his hand out. Apogee, Armada and I touched him and the world blinked. Moments later, we were inside Superdynamic’s transport ship, the Cicada. This ship was several generations past the one I had been in after the events in Romania, and almost a dozen versions from the one we’d used in the Battle of Washington D.C.<
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“Come on,” Apogee said, helping me to one of the med bays. Armada got to her feet slowly and followed us. I sat on the bed as Apogee helped me lift the wounded leg. Once I was settled, she closed down a device that would analyze the damage and set it to run. No sooner had the diagnostic started that she turned and grabbed Armada by the neck, pressing her hard against the side of the Cicada.
“Listen to me, you bitch,” Apogee said. “That there is my fucking man. You hear me? You ever, EVER, fucking put your hands on him again, I will fucking tear out your lungs.”
Lady Armada wept, tears mixing with blood and snot gathering around her broken nose.
“There’s no need for that, Apogee,” I said, but she waved me off.
“Do you understand me?”
Lady Armada nodded.
Apogee released her and turned back to me. “You shut the fuck up,” she snapped at me, returning to the healing systems. “This doesn’t have anything to do with you.”
I obeyed, watching Armada out of the corner of my eye as she scraped herself off the side of the ship and scampered into the other med bay.
CHAPTER FIVE
Crazy Women
I slept.
I mean, what the hell else is there to do when you’re cooking in an incubation chamber for a six-hour flight. No movies, nothing to do but sit and do nothing. Adding to my fun, once we took off, the healing pods retracted into safety positions for the flight, locking Armada and me right next to each other. Not what I’d call comfortable – the bitch did spear me like a tuna.
She seemed as content to ignore me as I was her, and it wasn’t hard to drift off. Some people thought the pods were uncomfortable, but I had spent months recuperating in one after my fight with Brutal, the pod debriding scorched flesh and encouraging new skin growth. Flamestrike’s wall of fire hadn’t done near as much damage, and a lot less than Armada’s damn spear. There was an ambient coolness within the pod that set me right to sleep.
An insistent tapping dragged me back to the world. Should have known it wouldn’t last. “What?”
Her otherwise pretty face was marred by a big bruise that covered the whole left side. It was garish – the usual result of fucking with me. Ruby reset her nose, and the pod’s healing properties would fix the broken jaw without requiring it to be wired shut. It was unfortunate, really. I wanted to see her eat through a tube for a couple of weeks. It sucks, and I say that from a place of knowledge. She grimaced, leaning up in her pod. “Can you try not to snore so loudly?”
“No,” I said, rolling over.
She slammed her fist against the side of my pod.
“You want a fresh one?” I said. “All I have to do is call Apogee and…” I looked around the flight deck. Ruby sat at the helm, with Moe beside her. The big guy toyed with a Nintendo DS that nearly disappeared into his meaty hands.
“Never mind,” I said, rolling back to sleep.
I settled into a killer dream, Apogee and her three naughty twins, when Lady Armada, interrupted. “I’m not sorry, you know,” she said.
I turned over to find her hovering over the glass door of my pod, palms pressed flat against it. She leaned in close enough that her breasts brushed the glass. Loose hair from the long braid she wore in combat dangled over her shoulder. “I don’t care,” I said.
“I love that movie,” she said after a moment.
“Huh?”
“The Fugitive,” she said. “I love Tommy Lee Jones. Remember it? ‘I’m innocent,’ is Harrison Ford’s line. ‘I don’t care,’ says Tommy Lee.”
“Huh.”
“You haven’t seen it?”
I had, and I knew what she was talking about, but I didn’t want to give her the pleasure. My leg still ached. “Whatever. Can I sleep now?”
“No, sorry,” she said. “If you’re going to snore like that, I’m going to talk. If it keeps you up, so be it.”
“Let me guess, you don’t have a lot of friends.”
She seemed surprised at that but gave it serious consideration. “When you’re the Chosen of the Gods, there is little common ground to find with normal humans.”
“You sound like Primal.”
She pounded a fist against the glass, the whole pod shaking. “I will not be mocked, Dale McKeown. Not by filth like you.”
“I’m filth?”
She nodded.
“So, because I’m filth, you get to skewer me?” I said, gesturing to my bandaged leg.
There was a crack in her facade, a moment’s hesitation. “That was a misunderstanding,” she said. “I stabbed you because I saw you betray us. I have the…I can see things, sometimes. The distant future. I saw you turning against us in our moment of most dire need.”
I laughed, “Lady, the only reason the world is still spinning is because I’ve been there in your moment of most dire need.”
“You do not understand.”
“Let me repeat my previous statement, only more emphatically this time; I don’t care.”
She shook her head. “You betray her,” she said.
I sat up, “Can you just stop talking?”
“No.”
“Fuck me,” I said. “Hey, Moe. You guys have any sleeping pills?”
He looked back at me, his eyes glazed from intense concentration on the game. It took him a moment to register what I said, then he laughed, “Bitch, there ain’t shit’ll work on your big ass.”
“Whiskey?”
“On this motherfucker?” He shrugged and returned to this game.
“It’s strange,” she said. “I actually enjoy talking to you. It does make things simpler. I’ve had a vision of us.”
“Us?”
She nodded again, her face suddenly a mixture of curiosity and disgust.
“You and me?”
“It struck me when we confronted Primal – that’s why I attacked you, in part.”
I looked around for the manual override that would put the pods in active mode and separate them. I wanted to crawl off the damned bed, walk to the flight deck and sleep there. Anywhere but near this crazy woman.
“Mostly because of what I saw about your future,” she said. “But yes, in large part because I am horrified about the prospect of sleeping with you.”
“What the fuckity hell are you talking about?”
She smiled, “I won’t have you curse, Dale McKeown.”
“Are you saying you and I are going to bone?”
“That word is foreign to me, but if it means sex, then yes.”
“So, what you’re saying is, in your dreams, I’m fucking you.”
She thought a moment before responding, “You aren’t doing anything. The Fates have determined that we are to have sex, for some reason. And what the Fates have decreed cannot be denied.” She sized me up in a way that left me clutching for dignity. “There are worse specimens, I suppose.”
I stared, dumbfounded.
“What?”
“You’re batshit, you know that?”
“Batshit?”
“Crazy,” I said. “Batshit crazy. Like a loon.” I looked around in vain, desperate for the reset button. I kicked the door off its hinges with a two-legged thrust. It splintered without shattering, the oblong frame bending as it tore loose. I instantly regretted using my bad leg.
“Are you okay?” she said, leaning over to hit a switch on the wall. The pods deployed into active mode. She walked over to me. “You’re bleeding again.”
“Dude, just leave me alone, will you?”
“I’m sorry,” she said. ‘I was too forward.”
“Too crazy,” I said, rolling over and trying to get up.
“You should lay down,” she said, putting one hand on my chest and the over my shoulder against the cushioned padding of the pod. I tried to get up, but the hand against my chest was firm. She had me pinned. I was stronger than her, but I didn’t want to hurt her again. Beating up heroes didn’t have the same verve as it used to.
She put one booted
foot along the rounded edge of the pod, blocking my view of the outside. The walls felt claustrophobic as she leaned in, her lips parted. I leaned away flattening the padded backing of the pod but stopped when I heard creaking metal as the frame warped to accommodate my escape. The hand on my chest drifted lower, light fingers tracing down my abdomen. I grabbed it and her smile was feral, her eyes hungry. “Not gonna happen,” I said, pushing her off and climbing out of the pod.
“You’re bleeding,” she said, but I left her behind, not giving a damn about the slight trickle of blood seeping from the bandage. I limped to the flight deck and sat behind Ruby.
“I was going to rat you out if you buggered her,” she said.
“Fuck you, too.”
She turned back, “You kiss your mother with that mouth?”
I wanted to say, ‘My mother’s dead,’ but I didn’t want to be a dick to Ruby. Well, no more than I already was. She might call me on all my shit, but she was good people, and she had a rough day. Not like the crazy bitch in the medbay.
“Don’t mind her, man,” Moe said, his attention never wavering from the game. “She’s just hormonal.”
“Fuck you, Moe,” Ruby said.
“I mean the other hormonal bitch on the plane,” he said, gesturing to Armada.
“Oh,” Ruby said.
“You’re bleeding, by the way,” Moe said, and Ruby turned her chair to face me.
“Well fuckssakes,” she said, putting the bird on auto and standing. “Come on, you’re getting back into the,” Ruby stopped, taking a look at the damaged pod. “What did you do?”
I shrugged.
“Wanker! Superdynamic’s going to have my arse for breaking his shiny new ship.”
“Bill me,” I said.
She laughed, “Fucking destitute you are. You even have a job? You know, a real, make money type of job?”