Blackjack Messiah

by Ben Bequer

  "Not like anyone's gonna care," I said and turned myself over.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  Taken

  Invictus and Nina sprung to action, corralling the hostages and spurring them away from the villains. I waded through the small crowd as they walked, ran, and stumbled from the scene. I tried to keep my distance, but if I did stray too close to a person, they shifted out of my orbit like prey in the forest.

  The raw power I radiated was awesome, lighting up the park like a small sun. If any of the women in the crowd were carrying babies, those kids would be born with powers - or stillborn. Then again, that was the legend, there was no science. Only a theory of how the Original Seven spread their powers to the rest of humanity so that a few thousand supers were now spread across the globe. To me, the danger of my power was never more evident, and there was no way to mitigate it. Free of Superdynamic's dampening bracers the emissions were translucent waves flowing from a burst dam, a torrent escaping through my pores, each one stronger than the last.

  It felt good.

  The villains were equally affected. Olympia kept within her circle of boy toys, but her eyes were wide as I passed them. Psionicler’s mouth was open big enough for me to put my fist through. The rank and file supers bore expressions that ranged from apprehension to dismay to near panic. I drank it in, relishing their dread. Harcore and Flamestrike's machismo were swallowed up in shock, awe, and fear

  As I passed the last couple of civilians, one of them, an older man in his seventies or eighties, regarded me with tearful reverence. "Are you He?"

  I knew what he meant.

  "Go," I told him, putting my hand gently on his shoulder. "Get to safety."

  I looked around at the others near me. "Go with the All-Stars," I said. "You'll be safe now."

  The old man stood, surprising himself by the spring in his step. "He...he healed me!" he said, reaching out for another helpless person. "It's Him, and He has healed me."

  "I feel different, too," the woman he approached said. She was far younger but thin, almost anorexic - definitely unhealthy. Like the old man, she moved with sudden vigor. "It's like I'm on crack," she said.

  That was the effect of my emissions, and seeing that, I finally understood Superdynamic's fear. I wasn't a god like the old man hoped - whatever ailed him was still coursing through his system. I was a monster. I was a danger to everyone. The villains noticed too, and it did little to ease their worries. The entire bunch was blank faced, all of them except Primal, who stared at me through slits, a sly grin on his face.

  As I came closer, he spoke, "You're no god."

  Then the ground itself reached up and struck me. Hard. I tumbled back, knocking the old man and woman down.

  "You said no one would be harmed!" I said, coming to my feet, ready to kill. I was in a position of weakness, and my usual reaction was unbridled violence. But the old man was hurt, rolling on the ground in pain as he clutched his hip. The woman was unconscious, bleeding from her nose.

  Invictus grabbed the woman, while Dixie helped the old man to his feet and supported his weight as they escaped. I was about to cut loose when the ground swelled beneath me. I flew into the air, past the villains, over the roller coasters behind them before colliding with the large shape in the distance we couldn’t identify, the armored carriage of Baron Blitzkrieg’s blimp. Sliding along the side of it, I fell towards the ground.

  Where arms of earth waited for me. Primal was a puppet master, animating the earth, tearing through the grass and concrete, except Primal himself wasn't moving. His gaze was on me, but his hands were still in the pockets of his trench coat - he didn't need to exert physical energy to beat me.

  Massive hands quartered me, one on each leg and arm. Primal smiled as they pulled me in opposite directions. My light was still bright, and I got ready to tear free, but I caught Primal’s expression and stopped. His head was tilted, eyes tight on me, a little smile on his face. He was waiting. If I fought, it would be on, the villains would hunt down the civilians, the All-Stars, maybe the whole city. This was the price of shaming Primal and his people.

  The part of me that wouldn’t be satisfied until my rage swallowed the whole planet howled at the idea of surrender. I ignored it, thinking about the barbecue, the training exercises, the breakdown sessions, playing Dynasty with Baj, the lunches and dinners, the hours on monitor duty chatting it up with the cops, the friendly jabs, and all the shared laughter. I thought about the people I had met. Kansas City was my town, and if taking a beating kept them safe? Well, taking a beating was my specialty.

  I heard myself scream as every bone quivered, and for a moment I was reminded of the fight with Lord Mighty, how helpless I felt as he shattered my body. Lord Mighty had eventually tired out, but Primal was only getting started. Unable to rip me apart, he summoned a long tendril of lava from deep within the earth that coiled around me. I smelled myself cooking, like bad barbecue and I panicked, tearing my bindings apart, falling to the ground as lava splashed around me like a thousand gallons of boiling oil.

  "My zeppelin, damn you!" Psionicler screamed.

  I don't know why, but that struck me. I was surrounded by a rolling sea of boiling lava, villains all around me gathering their courage, waiting on Primal’s word to rescind the deal we made and kill everyone they could see. But for some reason, Psionicler complaining about "his" zeppelin caught my attention. It wasn't actually his at all, it was Blitzkrieg’s, but the big guy said nothing, either not realizing the slight, or not caring one way or the other.

  And that got me thinking again, what the hell was the Baron doing playing second fiddle to Primal? The next thought never reached my brain, as two fists of lava drenched granite came out of the ground and double-slammed me, pounding me into the earth without mercy. Again and again, they struck me, until I swung out at one, smashing it with my fists.

  I was rewarded by a small chuckle from Primal as two more formed and joined in the punishment. I destroyed another and another, but there was no end to them. Losing count, I rolled into a defensive ball, and the assault grew more intense, pounding me to the ground, then into the ground as a crater formed around me. I felt my glow fade, coinciding with a wave of blows that left me dazed and bloodied. The lights faded as a wave of rock surrounded me in a perfect circle. It rose slowly and descended.

  Then I felt nothing.

  My mouth tasted like blood, and when I tried to open my eyes, only one complied. The world was an uneven blur, and the sun had disappeared over the horizon. The asphalt was warm against my cheek, but a cool breeze kissed my exposed skin. Persistent hands dragged me to my knees. For a second, I couldn’t remember what happened, but I saw a pool of cooling magma adding lumpy additions to the Kansas City fair’s midway, and Primal’s beating came back to me.

  The area around me was empty, except Primal’s people, Powermaster, Nina, and Dixie. They weren’t that far away, but even all beat to hell, I sensed an invisible line of demarcation. If they moved past it, the deal was off and who knows how bad that would get. They were deep in shadow, but I knew it was them because I could see the green aura around Dixie’s eyes. That explained why I wasn’t in utter agony.

  I groaned as my vision pulled towards them, the muscles around my eyes contracting as the pupils dilated. Instead of seeing them from yards away, I was now feet from them, at least as far as the vision centers of my brain were concerned. Dixie’s power was beautiful, a gift. If she lasted in the hero game, she was going to help a lot of people. She was deep in concentration, the strain obvious, but fat tears rolled down her cheeks. Nina’s eyes were dry and hard, but mascara smudged her face in dark splotches. Powermaster pulled off his mask, indifferent to the villains still strolling casually about the fairgrounds. There were no tears there, he was furious. I’d never seen him like that. Without a word, I understood that they weren’t giving up on me.

  A voice behind me boomed and two strong pairs of hands dragged me away. My vision snapped back to normal with g
ut-churning speed. Scraping along the craggy asphalt, I had a front-row view of the stars above, dazzled smudges streaking by, replaced by reinforced steel as I crested the ramp of Baron Blitzkrieg’s zeppelin. One of the guys was talking to me but gazing at him was like staring into the sun. I knew the voice.

  "Thought you were some sort of badass, Blackjack," Flamestrike said. "Kind of a disappointment to see you get punked like a little bitch."

  I tried to say something but instead of actual speech it was more like a grinding mumble, painful as hell and accompanied by a bloody stream of saliva down the side of my face.

  "Say that to your face?" Flamestrike said leaning in. "Is that what you said to me?"

  I nodded.

  He came closer, his thumb pressing into my forehead. I tried to pull away, but it was little more than the flop of a dying fish. I felt the heat as a low ebb that became instantly unbearable. I caught a slim trail of smoke, smelled cooking flesh, and choked out a wet scream that turned into hacking coughs. A small crowd had gathered around us, and they found my pain hilarious.

  The heat subsided, and though the pain remained, it was diminished. Flamestrike leaned in close enough that his breath splashed across my face. It smelled like sulfur and smoke, and I swallowed another cough. Seeing my discomfort, he lingered for a moment, then whispered, "Bitch."

  I slipped his buddy’s grip and grabbed his at his long red hair, earning a hard slap across the face. I hit the floor hard, my cheekbone grinding into the metal floor. The first kick caught me right in the kidney and was lost in the flurry that came after it. I couldn’t tell who was involved, but there was more laughter. One thing villains coveted was the chance to knock goodie-two-shoe heroes down to size. Epic was a friend, but I still fondly remember putting him on his ass.

  Flamestrike and his buddies were getting their fill, but after the first few shots, I stopped feeling them. It was an odd sensation, but it seemed like I was mending as they assaulted me. I felt stronger, my face didn’t hurt anymore, nor did Flamestrike’s burn. I curled into a ball, my fists clenched, but just under the nail beds, I saw the dimmest flicker of light and realized the dampening bracers were lying back on the fairground somewhere.

  My “inner light” was back and working overtime. No teammates to scare, no civilians or collateral damage, I thought for a second it might be time to kill some people. A steel boot cracked me in the jaw, and I almost popped up, but I didn’t want to break the deal. There were still too many people at risk down there, so I grunted and groaned in the appropriate places, trying not to laugh.

  “All right, all right,” Flamestrike said, and the pelting tapered off. They opened some space around me, congratulating each other on how well they kicked a defenseless person. And I used to be one of these assholes. Flamestrike glared down at me, then with a throaty grunt, spit. The glob flew at me, wispy smoke trailing back to his mouth, and struck just next to my head. It sizzled on contact but didn’t melt the floor. This caused another wave of laughter as the villains went back to whatever it was they did. As they cleared out, my attention was drawn to an archaic looking readout panel.

  It blinked "LOL" in Morse code.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  Time to Take A Beating

  Flamestrike stayed along with the other guy who had dragged me into the blimp. He was a bodybuilder’s power fantasy, all muscle piled atop muscle. Flipping me over, he tugged at his waistband. "We should piss on the dude," he said, both men laughing, but Flamestrike shook his head and headed off.

  "Do whatever," he said. "But take him to Whisper when you're done."

  Left alone, the goon gave it deep thought but said, "You're lucky I don't wanna have to carry you covered in piss."

  He picked me up in a fireman's carry and led me deeper into the zeppelin's gondola. Nazi propaganda was all over, some of it vintage from the war. It was like being unstuck in time, trapped in a ship in a bottle, with tech that was almost a hundred years old. Here and there you'd find something relatively new, but only in comparison. The elevator was something out of the 1950s.

  Once inside the elevator, he unslung me and held me against a wall with one arm. I tried to stand on my own, but I felt weak and the leg Armada had speared twitched when I settled any kind of weight on it. My captor saw me studying him and smiled, "If you're thinking of trying something, now that Flame's gone, feel free."

  "You got a name?"

  "Doctor Destroy," he said, chin jutting with pride. The name wasn't familiar to me.

  "Never heard of you. Class-C? Class-B?" I said, and he drove the air out of my lungs with a gut punch that pressed me against the elevator wall. I doubled over his fist and he ground it into my guts before allowing me to slide to the floor.

  "You got jokes, huh?" He said, standing over me. "I like jokes."

  I laughed, "Class-C."

  He picked me up and slammed me back against the elevator, smashing the wall as the door slid open. Standing there was Whisper. "What the fuck are you doing?"

  He released me and I landed on wobbly legs. I slung an arm around Dr. Destroy's shoulders and he flinched, "Us? We’re buds."

  "Get the fuck off me," he said, shrugging me off. Without his support, I slid down the wall to a sitting position.

  "Don't mind the Doctor," I said. "He's worried he'll never make it big."

  She ignored me, staring at him. "We need him, idiot."

  Doctor Destroy gave Whisper a lot of room as she moved in and checked me out. “You guys can’t even follow simple orders. Have fun, mess him up, but don’t kill him. Not yet.”

  "I didn't do all that," Destroy said. "You saw the boss going nuts on him."

  Whisper grabbed my face, "This is from a punch, you moron. Fucks sake!" She got up and jabbed his big chest with her index finger. "Hit him again and I'll fucking cut you. Now pick him up - gently - and bring him to the medlab."

  Hefting me to a standing position, he pushed me through the elevator doors, then grabbed me with both arms and led me after her. "Told you," I said, earning a murderous glare. "Now you're in trouble."

  The hallways were narrow and dangerous, the sharp edges of worn rivets and old welding begging to snag a bit of flesh. The air was stale and smelled like crushed piles of pencil lead. Using my wobbly gait as an excuse to let Whisper pull further ahead, I waited for Doctor Destroy to herd me with a little push. "Why are you scared of her?" I said.

  "Shut up."

  "She's got no powers," I went on. "Just a knife, and a stupid belt that teleports her around."

  He gave me a look, then made a point of staring through me.

  "Oh shit, I get it now. You're one of those guys that's strong as hell, but can't take a punch."

  "Dude..."

  "Like, she could really cut you with that silly little dagger," I said, laughing.

  Whisper stopped.

  "Let go of him," she said without turning around. I hadn’t realized how much Doctor Destroy’s support was doing for me until it was withdrawn. Stumbling to the wall, I leaned against it. So I wasn’t quite one hundred percent. Good to know. "Go back downstairs and see if they need anything heavy moved."

  "Deep down inside, he's a good guy," I said, once he was gone.

  "Now you get to walk the rest of the way by yourself, asshole," she said, walking away. She paused a few yards away, "Coming?"

  "I'd rather not," I said.

  She cocked her head and sauntered back towards me. "I don't think you understand."

  I smiled, "Unlike Doctor Dipshit back there, I'm not afraid of you. Even fucked up like this, I could kill you with my eyelashes."

  She smiled back, "Oh, my. You are something, aren't you? Big, bad Blackjack." Whisper traced a finger down the side of my face. "Of course you could kill me, silly. If you got your hands on me, I wouldn't last ten seconds. Dr. Dumbass would too. But...and there’s always a but...I've got something on you. Something to make you compliant."

  "There's only so far you can push me before I snap and
start breaking shit," I said, spitting a wad of blood across the deck. “And I’m frankly concerned with the structural integrity of this airship.”

  "You might," she said. "Which is why I'm only going to pull on this string a tiny little bit. Here, follow me. I'll show you."

  She took me to a medical bay that looked like something the Marquis de Sade would use to design his version of the Frankenstein monster. The equipment was a nightmare, deadly and pointless. But...in one corner was a perfect replica of Superdynamic's medical pod. I'd been in and out of one much like it for the better part of a year.

  "Yes, we borrowed some of your friend's better ideas." She deployed the pod, lowering it and opening the cover. "Go on, get inside. You bloody need it."

  Whisper turned her back on me, as I crawled in, going to a large monitor on the wall that looked like Sony Trinitron out of the mid-eighties. She turned it on and an ancient DOS-like interface appeared. Using a keyboard that reminded me of an old Commodore 64, she brought up a video.

  It was my brother, in his house, with his family. Jason was on one knee, talking to one of the girls, who was crying. There was no audio, but whatever was filming them was inside the house. "There're a few others," she said. "Each camera is fitted with a small bomb and there's an assload of them all over the house, in their cars, at work, even at the girl's schools. You don't play nice, they die."

  She turned around, leaning back against the wall, "Any questions?"

  No, no questions from me, thank you very much. She left me in the pod and gathered equipment. I followed her around the room with my eyes, and when she noticed, she got close to the windowed cover of the medical pod and looked down at me with a playful, questioning expression on her face. She was trying to bait me, and while I could hold her gaze easy enough, I couldn’t bring myself to taunt her.

  She pressed a button alongside the pod and there was a hiss of escaping air as the cover opened. I lay still while she laced probes to my chest, arms, and legs. I was basically naked, bare-chested, one pant leg completely gone, the other shredded. My boots still existed in theory but were closer to what a Depression-era hobo might wear. Most of my gear was trashed, but the boots had enough salvageable material buried in their steel reinforced frames to get something done.