Blackjack Messiah

by Ben Bequer

  "Fuck it," I said, logging into all my social media accounts. I also opened up a couple of news pages, including Le Monde, London Times, Washington Post and The Kansas City Star. They should have been loading slow, but the zeppelin’s network was pretty nice. I went to the last one first, looking for a story of the business at the fair, but there was no mention of me being captured.

  That was either a good thing or a bad thing, and I couldn't decide which one made more sense. Hell, the front page was about some businessman dropping out of the governor's race. Mention of the incident at the KC Fair was limited to the Crime section of the News tab. The narrative they were peddling was that there was an accident and some people were hurt. No mention of the dead whatsoever.

  It occurred to me that you never read about the bad guys winning. When news covered super battles, it was always about how the hero protected people and property from the bad guys, and then in a pitched fight, prevailed. Bad guy goes to jail, good guy gets a blowie, everyone is happy. That did happen a lot, there were plenty of power-mad villains who thought armored cars were rolling ATM’s, but crime did pay, and there were plenty of villains who were successful.

  I could imagine Kansas City’s local government spiking the fair story because the bad guys won. People wouldn’t feel safe if a small army of superpowered psychopaths could pop in whenever they wanted, commit mass murder, and escape. That wasn’t supposed to happen away from the coasts where supers were plentiful and vigilant. And you certainly didn’t run a story where one of the heroes gets kidnapped. The only way that would look worse was if I were female. People would lose their minds.

  My mind drifted to a room in the Tower, big enough to fit dozens of people. They called it the War Room, and last time I was there, the best heroes in the world laughed at my deductions and tossed me out on my ass. I was right, and I saved them along with half the Eastern seaboard, but I don’t think even that would convince them to come for me. Not in the numbers they needed to actually take on Primal and his people.

  I sneered at the screen but managed to derail those thoughts. I didn’t need a therapist to tell me that I self-sabotaged, and this was not the time for it. They were coming for me, and my job was to get Jason and his family safe before they did. The most direct way would be an email, but they had surveillance on Jason. I doubt they’d miss the family packing up and leaving, and that assumed they weren’t monitoring my activity.

  My fight with Brutal had been very public, cell phone footage of it existed from every angle on the ground, there were blurry photos of us in the air, taken as we flew into the exosphere, and the international space station had captured a breathtaking image of Brutal’s explosion from orbit. The result of this had been an exponential growth both in popularity and people who saw new reasons to hate me. I was seen as some kind of cult figure among the people, and there were half a dozen petitions calling for a full pardon.

  I knew there would be a bajillion messages waiting for me as I opened Facebook. I rarely checked it, much to Moe’s chagrin. According to him, I was neglecting my brand, but when Bubu set it up, he left the option to post open, so along with an inbox full of crazy messages, I had a public wall that ranged from merciless to obsessed. It was stupid to log into such an obvious site when there could be an IT person monitoring my every move, but the chances the old zeppelin had decent network architecture were slim.

  Posting was an even bigger chance, but Jason sometimes checked in on the page, texting me to laugh about some ridiculous thing a person had posted. He found special pleasure in how uncomfortable the attention made me, especially the female attention. He delighted in watching me squirm with the singular glee siblings took from torturing each other. I crossed my fingers and started typing.

  “Taken captive aboard Baron Blitzkrieg’s blimp. Yes, he’s still alive. Everything sucks, especially the food. #Noinflightmovie.”

  As a symbol of defiance, it was a small thing, but grand gestures were rarely more effective than the press they generated. I propped my arms on the desk, resting my head in cupped palms and waited. My eyelids scraped across the dry surface of my eyes, and I rubbed at the bridge of my nose, hoping it would generate some tears. The Facebook page was open in front of me, over three hundred responses populating under my post.

  "Good, I hope you learn your lesson."

  "Fuck that NAZI fucker so fucking bad!"

  "So do the mighty fall."

  "Oh, no! Tell me where to come save you! I'll do anything for you!"

  "If I wasn't so fucked up I'd try to care."

  "Vengeance comes not slowly either upon you or any other wicked man, but steals silently and imperceptibly, placing its foot on the bad."

  I stopped at that one and read it twice, trying to place it. It was from Revelations or Euripides or Machiavelli about vengeance coming to me once and for all. There were more than a few posts along these lines. Jason never said anything about it, but I knew it pissed him off when he read them. I wasn’t. People will hate and the net gives them an anonymous venue to spew their venom. And I had earned some of it. I spun the mouse wheel to keep scrolling, but the cursor clicked on the user who posted the quotes. The old mouse must have been buggy, and I gave it a shake, as the site loaded. I left the cursor hovering over the back button as I took it in.

  It was a church, called The House of Light.

  The page was a shrine of hate dedicated to me. Every public photo ever snapped was there. None of them were nice, not that I did photo shoots, but even the digital photos were blurry and off center. A bunch of them were memes and mockups using my image to show some proverb or adage - usually something about greed and excess. They had my mugshot with word “MURDERER” slapped across it in giant red letters. I scrolled the page, skimming through about a year’s worth of posts bashing me, and crossed into what seemed like an entirely different page about a family who ran a church located in a tiny hamlet in Maine.

  Their primary goal was raising money and gathering non-perishables to fill up a charter plane headed to the war-torn regions of Central America. One of the pastor’s sons was a pilot and would fly the plane. His family would help distribute the goods at the mission they had established there.

  The pastor wasn’t pictured, as if someone had deleted the pictures, which made no sense. I had yet to meet a pastor who didn’t want his face plastered on any surface that could hold it. It took some digging, but I found one. There was an itch behind my right eye as my muddled brain sent an old image through the chutes that led to my frontal lobe. I knew that face, just more gaunt and full of sadness. I had met this guy.

  Outside Graydon Chase's building. He was the guy in the wheelchair.

  He went by Father Mike, but his real name was Neal Michael Janson. It didn't take long to find a story in the New York Times that explained everything. When Brutal went nuclear, I wasn't the only guy near the affected area. His eruption was massive, and affected planes and boats within hundreds of miles of the event. One plane went down. His plane. I scrolled back through the many posts about their humanitarian efforts, the plane full of food, medicine, clothes, and buried my head in my hands. Father Mike survived. His three sons, their wives and six grandchildren died in the crash.

  No wonder he was stalking me.

  I spent an hour or so studying every post and saw a deterioration after the Brutal incident. It wasn’t just the words, but the tenor of the posts that were frightening. Despair and vitriol in equal doses, all of it aimed at me. I could relate. I hadn’t lost a quarter of what Father Mike had, and it had left me a bitter, angry mess of a human being. Scarier still was that the guy had a following. The numbers fluctuated and eventually diminished, but there was a hardcore base of people who replied to his worst posts with even more awful suggestions. I knew people hated me, blamed me for some terrible things, but seeing it writ out overwhelmed my usual indifference.

  The more recent posts were optimistic, though, and cryptic, with mention of "new friends" and a new directio
n for his flock. Any new posts after that one were questions about where to send donations, where the ministry was set up, what day they did services. I closed the window and shook the cobwebs out of my head. The guy almost made me hate myself.

  I had been at the desk a long time, but no way to warn Jason came to mind. I had to assume they were monitoring all the usual channels. E-mail, social media, Skype, if this dinosaur could even run it, were all too easy to track. It had to be discrete. I looked at the old computer, wishing I had some tools. Hell at that moment I would have taken a gun. Not even a big gun, a pistol, something I could whip a villain with.

  A gun.

  Nascent wisps of an idea coalesced in my head, solidifying into a plan so satisfying I almost giggled. The Dynasty website laid out the hardware requirements and I cringed a little. My computer was an insult to modern games everywhere, but barely fit the lowest tier of specs. I set the software package to download, expecting 2400 baud-rate internet speeds but the game installed surprisingly fast. When Bajeera bought me the game, I accepted it, appreciating his generosity, quietly sure I would never play. I opened the account as a show of good faith but had yet to log in.

  It was going to come in handy now, as I created a character and hit play. The game dropped me in a space station where all the initial quests began. I tried to move my avatar, and the game froze for two minutes, catching up in a stuttered collection of movements that ended with me running against a wall. The other players must have been laughing their asses off.

  I checked for Ricochet and Templar first, searching their usernames and emails, and came up empty. There were multiple in-game tools for communicating with other players, but no way to make anyone believe me. That left one option.

  "Ah, fuck," I said. "Might as well." I typed "/who bajeera" and found him online.

  I opened up with, “Hey.”

  Instantly, he replied, "Who dis?"

  "Tall, white hair. Remember me?"

  A long pause followed.

  "It's me, dude. I'm on the Baron's blimp."

  "Get on voice, bitch," he said.

  "Can't. Need to meet in game."

  "WTF?"

  "Come to starting space station. Don't have too much time."

  "Okay, I'm coming. Where are you?"

  "Can't talk," I said.

  A small window popped up denoting a group invite from Tetsubot and I accepted. An orange blip appeared on my map, and I watched him coming to me, a distance counter coming into view once he was on the space station. Even with the shit graphics card, his avatar looked awesome. He ran up to me and used the /hug emote to wrap imaginary arms around my avatar.

  “We lost the blimp,” he said. “It’s got some kind of stealth tech. Tell me where you are, and we’ll airstrike it.”

  I had no idea where we were. The room had no windows, and none of the villains were dumb enough to let it slip. I missed stupid villains. How could they track me? I thought of Doctor Snyder and it came to me.

  "Watch," I said, then started shooting the floor with my machine gun. I maneuvered my aim so as to write words on the virtual metal deck, but the bullets faded after a couple of words.

  "The words will fade if you do it on NPC stuff," he said. "Here, do it on my ship." He ran and I followed. Watching the screen gave me a headache, but at least it didn’t freeze. We went inside the ship, the game rendering it blurry and non-descript. I’d seen it on a more advanced rig, and it had been gorgeous. Maybe I did need to play. Picking a flat surface, I went to work, the message persisting.

  "Got it?" I said.

  "Got it," he said. "Broskie, just so you know, we're code-redding this motherfucker. All hands, if you know what I mean."

  "Thanks," I said, hearing sounds down the hall. "Gotta go," I typed and flipped the power button behind the desktop, unplugging the power cord from the monitor. A second later the door slid open without warning.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  Omega Rays

  Dr. Destroy came in and gave the room a once-over, his bulk making to cabin claustrophobic. Whisper snuck past him, waving him out as one would an unruly mutt. He left and Doctor Snyder entered, along with a young guy who was also wearing a lab coat. Whisper joined him, and they seemed to be mid-conversation. She saw me watching and took a couple steps away from the young guy.

  "Y’all holler if he gets stupid," Doctor Destroy said, taking his post outside the door. "I'll come thump his skull."

  Whisper ignored him, sitting on the bed and staying out of the way as the doctor and his aide pushed a cart into the room. The metal frame was laden with equipment, including a traditional pulse measuring device, an EKG with probes spilling all over the place. The doctor slipped on a pair of gloves as the aide started laying out equipment on the table.

  "What you doing on the computer?" Whisper asked.

  "Calling for help," I said.

  “Bet that lack of internet really put the brakes on that plan.”

  “I ended up playing Minesweeper all afternoon,” I said, trying to hide my surprise.

  “I prefer solitaire, which is all these old computers are good for.”

  “Yeah, how do you guys survive without Wi-Fi,” I said.

  “A good data plan,” the tech said, and Whisper smiled in his direction. I decided right there that his name was Leverage, and filed him away as useful for later.

  “You get ahold of anyone?” Whisper said.

  “Oh yeah, Epic and Superdynamic are going to blow this thing out of the sky from space.”

  “Well, those are some good friends you got there,” she said, her eyes drifting to Leverage as she spoke.

  “I can take the hit,” I said, giving Leverage a sideways glance. “I wonder how many people on this relic can say the same.”

  She didn’t move, but the point was mine and we both knew it. Small victories, laying the groundwork for something bigger. She had given me new information, and though she held all the cards when it came to Jason, our dynamic had taken a slight shift in my favor. She stood as Leverage opened adhesive strips on the EKG leads.

  "Come to get more juice?" I said. "I haven’t had any protein yet, but I’m feeling better."

  The doctor didn't speak to me. His bedside manner left a lot to be desired. He was like a mortician with a corpse. Leverage was pleasant enough as if he were ignorant to what was happening. Whisper and Snyder dehumanized me so it would be easier to kill me. I did the same when the shit hit the fan. Ask Nevski. Ask Lord Mighty. Leverage was oblivious, more concerned with doing a good job than anything. He politely told me to raise my arms so he could attach all the probes to me. What I thought was an EKG machine was a modified Geiger counter that went berserk as soon as they turned it on.

  "No, no," Snyder chided Leverage, diving for the settings and reducing the sensitivity. "Like this, or it will overload the input sensors." I leaned over and saw the numbers. Even with the sensitivity turned down, the readings were at max. After a bit of tweaking, the needles settled down. The kid was staring at me in awe.

  "Doctor Snyder," he said. "These numbers are like nothing we’ve seen, certainly not from anyone who's gone through the machine."

  "Don't speak," Snyder said, jutting a bony finger into the gap between them.

  Others, he said. That meant I wasn't the only guinea pig on the blimp. I thought of the pods in the hangar bay. They were trafficking in supers to drain in their torture machines. It wouldn’t take much convincing to get them on my side. A small army of supers would make my life a lot easier.

  "Don't go getting any ideas, Blackjack," Whisper said. "Remember your family."

  "Only so far you can go with that, sweetie," I said.

  She sat up. "Oh? Do I have to kill one of the little girls to prove my point?"

  I shrugged, "Be the stupidest thing you could do, really."

  Her interest was piqued, she really was a psycho. We were discussing the cold-blooded murder of a teenage girl, and she was almost orgasmic. "Which one do you like
the least? The oldest or the youngest? I can make it random if you don't want to decide. I just love Sophie's Choice. I never thought I'd be in the same position."

  "You realize you're the Nazis in this scenario, right?"

  If it bothered her, it didn’t show.

  "Anyway, if you actually do it, if you hurt one of my family, then that's it. See, the machine drained the shit out of me. You saw I could barely walk, but already I'm feeling better. Topped off as it were, and I'm not wearing the dampening bracers."

  She leaned in a little bit, coming closer to the bed, showing me the screen of her cell phone. The image was of Jason, seen from the driver’s side of his car. There was no audio, but he was obviously singing along to whatever the car audio was playing. He tapped a beat on the steering wheel and bobbed his head in time.

  “Great thing about the bombs is that I can trigger them from here, the bathroom, the kitchen, pretty much anywhere. And they’re so small, the one in the car may just blow his arm off. I’m sure the crash would finish the job, but it would be messy.”

  “And then what, darling?” I said, sitting up at the waist. Leverage and Doctor Snyder took a step away at the same time as if I had pushed them, but Whisper held her ground. “You can teleport, but where you gonna go? The blimp isn’t that big. Eventually, I will get my hands on you, and then you’re going to see messy.”

  The smile remained, but I saw a tiny crack - the realization that she was in the same room as a monster. Doctor Destroy might come in and wipe the floor with me - I was better, not back to normal - but by then I would have decorated the walls with their innards.

  "You kill me, they'll kill your family," she said.

  "You kill one, and they'll have to," I said. "And you won't be around to relish my grief. It'll hurt, sure. I'll probably kill myself because of it, but...and I'm only going to say this once to you...if you do it, get ready. Be ready. Because I won't stop until everyone’s dead."