Blackjack Messiah

by Ben Bequer

  But did I even want to do that? Apogee radiated the same energy I did, even if it was at lower levels. Capturing me could be a ploy to lure her here. They would certainly be ready for her, and even with all her power, she wouldn’t present much of a challenge for Primal, much less the combined strength of the other monsters he was fielding. And none of this accounted for the threat Jason faced. Before I did anything, I had to figure out how to help him. They could detonate those bombs from anywhere.

  God, just thinking about it made me sick to my stomach.

  I really had no out.

  So I had to endure, lull them into complacency, wait for my chance, and hope, because getting to Jason and his family before they blew those bombs was going to take a miracle.

  "What are you doing?" I figured she might be willing to dialogue. Most villains do when they have you under their thumb, but Whisper ignored me. Once she was done attaching a good two dozen probes, she returned to her station and sat there, studying the readings. She came back and made a couple of adjustments, then left me alone again.

  I felt the hum of the engines resounding through the blimp and a moment later the whole thing shifted, signaling that Primal was done in Kansas City. One thing I did have going for me was that tracking a zeppelin through U.S. airspace wasn’t going to present much of a challenge. Being easy to find was half the problem solved.

  Superdynamic's healing pods were a marvel of modern science, but they required monitoring to work at optimum efficiency. Last time I sat in one, Ruby watched over me for hours on end. Whisper was busy with the results of her tests and didn't care to check the pod settings. But I knew something was wrong. The device wasn't healing me so much as it was starting to cause me pain.

  It presented as ambient warmth, and I paid it no mind, worrying instead about my last remaining family members. After five minutes, it grew unpleasant. Like standing out in the sun on a really hot day. I started sweating and thought to ask for water or to tell Whisper that something was wrong when a man joined her at the control station. It was the same wormy lab-coat guy from Point Nemo. He glanced over at me for a few moments then talked to Whisper. It was only then that I noticed the thrum that made it impossible to overhear them. It started slight, like the rising temperature, but by the time Dr. Creepy entered the room, it was a persistent buzz that amplified my discomfort

  Discomfort became pain, both on my body and my ears, as the decibels and degrees rose in parallel. I knew full well how the healing pod was supposed to work, and what was happening wasn't a function of those devices. They could monitor a patient’s vitals, take samples for lab testing, as well as perform X-Rays, CAT scans, and MRI’s. They could also manage critical patients who needed transfusions, hyperbaric therapy or live-saving measures, I’d experienced most of those functions firsthand, but what made the pod a marvel was that Superdynamic had managed to replicate the energy wavelength retired Battle member Mirage used to heal people. The pod emitted that energy, and though it didn’t work as fast as Mirage doing it himself, the results were pretty spectacular.

  These fuckers had taken this beautiful piece of tech and twisted it. My first thought was torture device, but there were more efficient ways to do that. This was something else, and I didn’t have time to workshop it. I tried reaching for the edge of the pod, but my limbs didn’t move. It was murderously hot now, and the machine was booming as if I were at the center of an explosion. I tried to scream, but my throat wasn't functioning, and it was then, as every nerve ending in my body immolated simultaneously, that I realized my eyes weren't blinking, my lips were still.

  I was paralyzed, and they were killing me.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  Meet Dr. Snyder

  I've been on fire a few times. It's part of the gig, and the fire didn’t care if you were a hero or a villain. I’ve been shot with lightning and weird energy powers, every hair on my body has been burnt off, I’ve been beaten to death. None of that came close to the agony of sitting in the healing pod. Every cell cried out, the pain grew incrementally worse until I thought it would drive me insane.

  Then it ended.

  It lasted not much more than five seconds, maybe ten at most, and it was over. I was still paralyzed, but the pain dissipated so fast that I felt washed over as if they had dipped me into frigid waters. The old guy in the lab coat came over, Whisper in tow, his face torn with disappointment and as he spoke, I did my best to read his lips.

  "Doctor Snyder, is he alive?" Whisper asked.

  The doctor’s surprise was evident, but he quickly composed himself. "I doubt he'll make it through the larger device."

  My ears were still ringing, but I saw him struggle with his gear, some of which was sparking and on fire. Smoke filled the room. Whisper ran outside and returned with a fire extinguisher but the doctor held her back. He yelled, but I couldn't form the words in my head. The room was still spinning, my body on fire and I felt my muscles convulsing with the sudden temperature change. My skin was hot and cold at the same time, and sweaty as if I had been running a couple of marathons back to back.

  Doctor Snyder studied me as if I were alien, undefinable. "I don't understand," he said. For the first time, I heard a sound other than the whirring of the machines around me, and the thrumming din in my head.

  "We have to figure something..." I lost the doctor a second. He reached down and blocked my sight with his sleeve as he did something on my upper chest. "...not exactly sure it's the kind of news Primal will want to hear," he went on as he moved to my torso and lower body.

  I couldn't tell what he was doing. Hell, I couldn't move my eyeballs - what I could see was from my peripheral vision. She said something I didn't catch and he responded, "You're lucky you don't have my job. Look, he filled the largest container we have in just a few seconds," Snyder said, pointing at a large glass cylinder filled with a golden-hued gel. The stuff was electric, phosphorescent and seemed to flow as if with a current.

  "Primal's going to be pissed," Whisper said.

  "Maybe not. This device is far cruder than the larger ones we've devised, less efficient, but the results are off the charts. Maybe Blitzkrieg was right, we can milk him for more than the others."

  "You said this thing was going to kill him and he's not dead," she snapped. "Primal wanted him dead."

  "Sorry to disappoint," I said, my voice still weak.

  Feeling returned to my limbs over the course of ten minutes as they poured over whatever data their probes were reading off me. I was free, and my first instinct was to get out and snap their necks, but I felt worn, exhausted. I tried sitting up but Whisper pushed me down effortlessly. “Sit still if you know what's good for you," she said.

  "What are you doing to me?" I asked, but my mouth was a mess of tongue and teeth. I had to repeat myself twice before she understood.

  Whisper leaned over me, "Better if you don't ask, love. Best to just let it happen."

  Doctor Snyder worked at the control station, the outdated computer and interface equipment loud in the suddenly quiet room. I saw him hunched over a monitor past Whisper’s shoulder. She saw my interest and shook her head as I ignored her advice. “That’s enough for now,” he said. “I don’t think the portable one can take another test at this point.”

  "Come on," Whisper said, coaxing me out of bed. "Time to clean you up and feed you."

  "Make sure he has at least one hundred and fifty grams of Protein," Snyder said, speaking about me as one would a lab rat destined to be euthanized. "Protein is the key."

  I sat up at the waist, resting my arms on the sides of the pod, but couldn’t swing my leg over the edge to climb out. Whisper took one look at me and called Doctor Destroy. He came into the room, saw my broken form and smiled with genuine happiness. "Bitch-ass," he said, picking me up, and following her through the innards of the blimp.

  "There's fine," she said, as we reached the zeppelin’s flight deck, rows of parasitic planes mounted nose forward and ready to launch. Destroy dum
ped me on the floor and Whisper hosed me down like a muddy hog, spraying me with hard water. Thankfully, it was cold, which after my recent experience in the "healing" pod, was a welcome thing.

  "Strip him," she said. “Pull those ridiculous boots off. Incinerate all of it.” Doctor Destroy ripped away what remained of my singed clothes, giving me a warning stare as he tore the boots off my feet. "That’s better.”

  I turned away from the water, feeling it drip down my body, and even though it shot out hard enough to hurt, it was a relief. It pooled around me, and I angled my lower back so the water hit it. Doctor Destroy loomed over me, the water stopped, and he looked over at Whisper for permission. She nodded and he kicked me in the head. I rolled with it, letting the force drive me back to the deck. It hurt, but I realized he hadn’t unloaded on me, a concession to Whisper, maybe? The weird thing was - it kind of shook me out of the ill-feeling.

  “One more time, big guy,” I said, egging him on. “Let’s see what you got.”

  Again, he looked to her for permission - which she gave. He cracked me another shot. This one harder than the first. I slammed back into the hard metal wall with a resounding thud.

  “Yeah, Class-C,” I said, laughing.

  I lay there as the water hit me again. I was about to sit up when the glint of metal caught my eye. Rolling in the growing puddle of water, I turned my head to see a stack of large white pods lashed to the zeppelin’s wall. Two dozen of them and in the corner next to them was the same device Cyclonic and Wither had set up in the warehouse in Kansas City. Matter transporter. I knew it. I held on to the small victory as the bath ended and Doctor Destroy stepped into the puddle of water around flowing around me, "Fucking faggot."

  Instead of carrying me, as he had on the way to the flight deck, he grabbed my arms and dragged me to my feet. I was unsteady, so he grabbed my shoulders.

  What the hell had they done to me?

  "Sucks to be helpless, doesn't it?" she said. "Just carry him."

  "Naked and wet?" Destroy said. "Fuck that. I'm not carrying his ass anywhere."

  She cocked her head at him in frustration but said nothing. "Come on, can you walk or what? I'm hungry here."

  We left the flight deck, Doctor Destroy half carrying, half dragging me through the zeppelin’s narrow hallways. I wanted to memorize the path we were taking, it didn’t seem that complicated, but my thoughts were slippery. I gave up as we got to the elevator and realized we had passed dozens of superhumans on the way there. They had made me take the perp walk.

  Doctor Destroy seemed very pleased with himself as the elevator hummed around us, but Whisper’s heart didn’t seem into it. She wore a domino mask that didn’t really hide much, and based on the lines tugging at her mouth and eyes, something was on her mind. The elevator doors opened to a long hallway, doors lining either side. Doctor Destroy pushed me towards a door, giving me impatient shoves as Whisper opened one of the doors. He finished with a hard, two-handed shove through the door. "Wait!" I said as she closed the door. "What was that?"

  Whisper sighed deep before answering, "Sounds like you've forgotten what it means to be a villain."

  "Just tell me."

  "Look, darling, I don’t care about you or your stupid family. I don’t really care about any of it, I’m here for the money. Do yourself a favor and don’t waste the little time you have left appealing to my humanity, okay? I’m not here to coddle you, and I sure as hell am not here to answer your questions. You’ll find out what’s going on soon enough.”

  She slammed the door, her footsteps tapping on the metal floors as she walked away. Just as she was out of earshot, she said. “And when you do, you’re going to beg me to kill you.”

  I slumped where Doctor Destroy tossed me for a long while, not bothering to adjust for comfort. The coolness of the metal floor and the thrumming of the engines reverberating throughout the superstructure were soothing. Normally, with some rest and a couple of good meals, I would have been back to normal, but something was different this time. Usually, I took a beating and it hurt and I was tired and I needed organs put back inside my body, but my body still worked. Whatever the machine had done left me feeling weak, drained.

  Doctor Snyder intended to plug me into that healing pod’s big brother, and he was not inclined to wait. He said I filled up the largest container in one short burst, and I had no doubt the next go-round would kill me. Primal intended for me to die in the medical bay, which meant every second of pain they squeezed out of me in the near future was gravy. I had to think the whole thing through in my present condition, I couldn't afford to rest or sleep.

  Okay, so maybe it was best to go back to the beginning, to Point Nemo when I first encountered Doctor Snyder. I couldn't remember what he said exactly, but he was testing me, checking for the emissions I produced with some device, which he used to discover Apogee's trick. That meant he knew enough about the emissions to devise a way to harness them.

  Fast forward to the blimp, to the healing pod, and there was strong evidence that they had some sort of access to the Tower. Superdynamic guarded his technology with obsessive-compulsive zeal, which meant they had a mole or hacked into his drives. Either way, I had to assume they had exabytes of data, schematics, and blueprints, plus all of Superdynamic's ongoing data on my condition.

  The healing pod wasn't a close replica or some sort of dupe - it was exact - meaning they had stolen it from the tower itself. That didn't narrow it down, though, they could get access to something like that with a simple bribe, or even with a super with teleportation powers, like Whisper. But the data was another matter. The tower's network was one of the securest in the world and I had only seen it cracked once before. That had to be it.

  Haha.

  The rabid A.I. hadn't been heard from since I had the chance to kill him. I had him imprisoned in a dead hard drive. All I had to do was smash it and Mr. Haha would no longer be a threat. I let him go instead. Now it looked like he was back, and helping a bunch of psychos with information and technology they didn't understand.

  There was only one reason to go through all this trouble. They were draining the emissions for themselves. Everyone knew the legend, the emissions came from the Seven, they inadvertently imbued people with powers. What would happen to a guy like Primal if he started juicing on my energy? He could already crack the planet in half, how much more power could he possibly want?

  Okay, so how to solve the puzzle? I had a lot of obstacles in my way, most important was finding a way to let my brother know he was in danger without warning Whisper and the rest of Primal's people.

  Whisper was an interesting challenge. That little speech she gave before tossing me in the cell had me thinking - I've noticed how sometimes people will say the opposite thing that they really want you to believe. She enjoyed humiliating me, not a surprise given her past with Apogee, but there were cracks in the facade. The idea that she was in it only for the money made a ton of sense. She was older, like Apogee, and had been gone from the scene for a long time. It was a common theme: one last score.

  I didn’t doubt this one was paying well, but I could probably buy her off. Apogee would be livid, but it was the easiest solution besides killing her which was looking more unlikely by the minute. Steering her in that direction was going to be hard, and subtlety had never been my strong suit, but I had to try.

  Feeling 1% better, I turned on my back, looking up at the roof and noticed the most peculiar thing; a light fixture on the ceiling. You didn't see those in a prison cell. It was too easy for the prisoner to hang himself with the wiring. I sat up and gave the room a once over and saw that it wasn't a prison cell. It was like a cabin on a cruise ship. Small and cramped with a door that led to an even smaller and more cramped bathroom. A metal bed bolted to the floor dominated the room, the mattress covered by a threadbare sheet tucked deep the way they taught you in the military.

  Curioser and curioser. I sat up and forced myself onto the bed, fighting the urge to roll over and s
leep. There was a desk and on it sat a keyboard and mouse, the cables tucked into a small hole, showing that whoever had designed this setup had a mind for cable management. This had to be a joke, right? I leaned forward and managed to get onto my feet. Shuffling over to the door, I opened it, revealing Doctor Destroy outside.

  "What?" he said.

  "Nothing," was my startled response at finding the door unlocked. There was no locking mechanism, hence the need for a guard.

  "Bet you thought you were gonna just sneak out, huh?"

  "Not at all," I said. "I was actually hoping to get a quick ride home so I could grab some underwear that fit me."

  He redistributed his weight with a shift of his feet, and it was clear I was seconds from receiving a beating that I might not be able to take. I welcomed it. Maybe the dumb motherfucker could take a punch, maybe he couldn’t, either way, it would be fun to find out. But Jason and his family would die, and if that happened, I would let them throw me in a thousand machines and pray for them to kill me.

  "I promise I'll be right back,” I said.

  "Fuck off," he sneered, slamming the door in my face.

  "Nice chat," I said, moving to the chair and flipping the monitor's on/off switch. Could they be so stupid as to leave me in a room with a functional computer? I could bring down the whole fucking blimp given access.

  Windows Vista loaded and I stifled a chuckle. If their software was that old, then imagine their network. I tested a key on the keyboard, satisfied that it was sufficiently silent. Firing up the internet browser window, I hesitated a moment. Did I bother logging in to my email or Facebook? They could be monitoring me, but what could they possibly get with access to my accounts? I wasn't going to go into my bank and start transferring money. My online accounts held few secrets, just a bunch of emails with Bubu and Moe - stuff like that. The Facebook held even less. I barely used it, and only to post major announcements - I just never read what people posted.