Blackjack Messiah

by Ben Bequer

  "Ten are here," he said. "But you’ll find there are more, and with the best parts of you collected in a bottle, their ranks will grow."

  Brad was standing next to me, and I could tell that something was itching his pants. He leaned over to Snyder and whispered in his ear. "Do we tell him that some of the collected materials are missing?"

  "Hmm?" Primal also noticed the tech. "Is something wrong."

  "No," Snyder said, casting daggers at Brad from the corners of his eye. "Nothing you need to be bothered by."

  "Collected materials" were missing? Did that mean the stuff they'd gotten out of me? I still couldn't bring myself to think of the emissions as "Omega-Rays." It sounded like something from a 50s movie, "THEY CAME FROM BENEATH THE EARTH!"

  "Well, I want in, Primal. Do I call you Primal? No one really knows your name."

  "Primal is fine."

  "Because if your name is Billy, I'd be cool with that."

  Primal leaned in, "All of this," he said waving a hand around my head. “Your words, your attitude? They don’t matter. Nobody here is fooled by your weak sarcasm.”

  "Hey," I said. "Insult me all you want - I'm still valuable to you, right? I mean, these bad haircut guys - do they have a leader? Imagine me in that suit. I'd look pretty sleek."

  Primal waved me away, "I'm done with this."

  Brad spun me around, but not before I saw Primal take a step in Whisper's direction and ask her to stay. The rest of us left the bridge. As we headed to the elevator shaft, I noticed a commotion among the crew.

  "Wait!" Father Mike said, "I want him to see this."

  Brad brought me about as the blimp broke through a large bank of clouds, revealing a mass of rocks floating out in the distance. I recognized it instantly.

  It was Hashima.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  Back to Hashima

  I wanted to move closer to the big windows. I hadn't seen the place in years. The last time I left in power dampeners, under arrest and reeling from a beating that rivaled Primal’s. And there it was, different, larger, with several adjunct rock formations doubling, perhaps tripling its overall mass. As we rose higher, I had a bird's eye view of the island. The original structures had been scoured from the surface, including the amazing building Dr. Retcon had used to conduct his experiments.

  In its place was the entire structure from Point Nemo, ripped from the ocean and dropped atop the island, fused together by Primal’s power. He'd been busy, too, adding pod-like additions surrounding the main island. I counted at least twenty, each one about a hundred yards in diameter, wedged tight against the original as if someone was adding to the main using balls of clay. Balls that weighed a hundreds of millions of pounds a pop. I didn't have a chance to see more, as Primal made a gesture and Brad wheeled me away. Before we slipped into the elevator, Flamestrike gave me a thumbs up. "Looking good, bitch," he joked. "Looking good."

  "No point in taking him to the portable lab," Whisper said as we reached the elevator. Doctor Snyder seemed to consider it but said nothing. "The main lab is more efficient anyway, right?"

  That seemed kind of interesting, Whisper’s delay. Had our little chat about money made a dent? I would have to wait until the next time we were alone to have a little talk. After some thought, Snyder nodded and gestured impatiently at Brad, who wheeled me back to my room. "Think he'll survive it?" Whisper asked, but the doctor seemed lost in thought. "The main lab."

  "It's more efficient, as you said. We'll be able to manage the process much more closely," he leaned down and patted me on the shoulder. "Milk you dry, you said. I'm grateful for the idea."

  "Anytime, Doctor Psycho," I said.

  "Snyder," he corrected. "The numbers show that the Omega-Ray levels have returned quite optimally. Not to previous levels, but enough that a re-harvest every twenty-four hours will prove fruitful."

  "See that, Blacks?" Destroy said, trailing the group. "They're milking you like a cow."

  "I'm just doing my part, buddy," I said. "Thought your boss meant to kill me, Psycho."

  "Eventually, I'm sure," the doctor said. "For now he'll be happy with the large stores of Omega-Rays we're reaping. And it's Snyder."

  We reached the room and Whisper held the door open for Brad to roll me in. "Gather all the sensor equipment and bring it back to the lab. Oh, and upload the new data to the main database on Utopia," the doctor said, headed off. Leaving all the grunt work to the lab assistant - typical.

  Brad brought me into the same room I had been staying in, accompanied by Whisper, and started disconnecting me from the main sensors on the chair. I stood and made it easy for him to take all the gear off me and he reconfigured the chair back into the bed. "You know, I'm still naked. I've kind of been naked this whole time."

  Whisper grinned, "And that's how you're going to stay."

  "Hey, I don't mind how you get your rocks off, darling. I'm just a little bit cold."

  I could tell from her expression that she was unswayed by my argument. It was a tactical move more than anything. People didn’t like to fight naked. Its when we are most vulnerable, and that creates a lack of focus. Also, a million years of evolution and genetics made us more cognizant of the dangly bits when they just hung free.

  "Alright, I just apologize in advance if I get...excited at all. You understand, right, Brad?"

  He stopped working, joining the conversation for the first time. "Huh?"

  "So what's the deal with the 'lost' stuff?" I said.

  He shook his head, returning to his work. Whisper leaned in a little but said nothing. She was interested in the answer too, so she wasn’t in on it. Maybe there was more at stake here than money, paltry a sum as it was. Ninja skills and a teleport belt were ok, but a shot at getting some real powers? That might be worth taking a pay cut.

  "Oh, come on, Brad. Give the dying man one last request. What do you say?"

  "I'm not supposed to talk to you," he said, nervously eyeing Whisper.

  "She doesn't care," I said. "Are they scared you'll become emotionally attached to the test subject? Is that what Doctor Creepy told you?"

  He gave me this queasy look as if I had hit the nail on the head.

  "Well, you don't have to worry about me," I said. "I'm compliant, you see? Ask her. I'm being a good boy. And I'll go into the machine willingly. What can it do to me that you already haven't?"

  From his expression, a lot. That told me what I needed to know. The machine was for "juicing" supers of their power. That's why they wanted me, so they could get a big dose to give to their little army so once the big hitters arrived, they'd have something to stop them with. Then juice them, too, and make more super soldier drones. Insidious plan. It almost made me wish I had thought of something like that in Romania. I wouldn't have killed anyone, but maybe a draining room, where the hero comes in, gets stuck inside a chamber and his powers get ripped out. Not fully, say, 95% or so. Then grab that juice and give it to someone...I don't know...someone like Bubu. The kid would rock it with powers.

  "That bad, huh?" I said, and Brad nodded slowly. "How many people have you..." I made as if my hand was exploding, with a pulping sound.

  He couldn’t hide his shame.

  "That many, huh?" I said. I did notice that Primal had fewer supers this time around. A ton of villains got away during the Point Nemo battle. A couple of hundred easily, and now I knew where they ended up. Better to take the juice and use it on people he could indoctrinate - his Chosen - than trying to get a bunch of chaotic miscreants to behave.

  Primal called it Utopia, but what he really wanted was his own private despotic island, with a bunch zealots to run the place. Invites were open to all, of course, but if you didn't play ball, or if it struck his fancy, you got thrown into the machine for pulp to make other, more compliant supers.

  "And the stolen juice?"

  “The what?” he said.

  “You’ll never get me to call them Omega Rays. That has got to be the dumbest shit I ever heard. Y
ou couldn’t come up with a better name?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Brad said.

  "What are you using for containment?"

  "I don't think you'd understand," he said.

  "Kid, I could build all of this stuff with a Radio Shack and ten minutes," I said. "You know about me, right?"

  He nodded.

  "Don't be scared, dude."

  Brad took a long pause, trying to control his breathing. "I made a big mistake coming here, and now..." He gave Whisper a conspiratorial glance. "Now I think I'm screwed."

  "Where'd you come from?"

  "The Tower," he said. "With the doctor."

  Defectors from the Tower? That explains where Primal got all the tech. Did Jeff even know? If he did, did he tell anyone? Certainly not me, but he had a security and an IT department almost as large as the rest of the staff put together. The healing pods were a wonder, but no more than the tip of the iceberg when it came to the Tower’s secrets. Weapons, schematics, software of all shapes and sizes. Personnel files, they had information on all of us. “How many people did Snyder bring with him?”

  He looked at Whisper again, and I realized that he had never been leverage. He was terrified of her and she just stared through him, as if he were a temporary blip on her radar. He didn’t mean more to her than a chair, and the chair might have been useful. It wouldn’t bleed if she stabbed it. "Listen, Whisper," I said. "Remember when I said I would turn everyone into goo if they touched my family?"

  "How could I forget?"

  I still had some weird, heavy hat on my head, and Brad reached up to take it off. It made a slight pop as it left my head, and a buzz that I didn’t even realize was there quieted. The room grew brighter, my voice crisper in my ears, and I had to stop and shake my head to clear it. "I extend that threat to encompass Brad here," I said. "Anyone hurts him and I go berserk and start collecting scalps. Deal?"

  She didn't even blink, "Whatever."

  "See," I said, patting Brad's shoulder. "You're good to go. Nothing to be afraid of."

  Brad gave me a wan smile, fully understanding my threat was neutered. He continued stacking equipment in small, organized piles. "We use a magnetic induction process," he said.

  I didn't have to ask. It was technology stolen from another project in the Tower. If I recalled the working documents correctly, they weren't prone to spills or leaks. The process was similar to compressing music onto a zip drive, but with energy instead of data. I didn’t know more about it than that, but at least I got him talking. "And it's leaking?"

  He shook his head.

  "Alright, enough chatter," Doctor Destroy said. "Let's go, you," he said to Brad. "I gotta prep this dude for transfer to the island. We got some proper cells there."

  Whisper raised her eyebrows as if she knew what was coming and it wasn't good. Brad rolled the cart away, stopping at the door. "Not leaking," he said. "Just stolen." The poor guy wheeled the card down the hall and left me and the two villains alone.

  "What's the plan now?" I said. “We gonna tussle?" I beckoned Doctor Destroy like Bruce Lee, but Whisper stood and occupied the space between us.

  "You promised you were going to behave," she said.

  "I thought girls like you liked the bad guy."

  "Play nice and we don't have to break anything." Whisper pulled a thick collar off her belt. I must have been more zonked than I thought because I hadn’t noticed it earlier and it was bulky. “It’s like the manacles, but smaller,” she said. “Another gem we stole from your butt-buddy. With an added wrinkle, of course. Anyone fucks with it, and boom.”

  And it hit me like a ton of bricks. I’d been beaten, burned, and tortured, but I never passed out. It had been in the back of my mind since we left the bridge, processing in overtime despite my exhaustion and the crap Snyder had been doing to me. My brain finally found the solution and spat if forward. I disconnected from my other senses as it dawned on me, and I barely noticed Whisper slipping the collar around my neck. The drain was immediate and global, not only sapping my strength but making it impossible to focus my thoughts. I kept that final image in my mind, fingertips gripping the ledge overlooking an endless chasm. It was too important to fall away, it dominated me, swallowed me whole, as suddenly I realized the chilling monstrosity of Primal's plan.

  When Hashima was ripped out of the sea bottom by Nostromo, he brought it up to the sky roughly in the same spot where it had been near Japan. To the best of my knowledge, that was where it remained, but there was no way a zeppelin had flown halfway across the world in the time I had been aboard. I’d seen it in the distance, but we’d been in the air no more than an hour, maybe two.

  Primal must have moved it. He must have shifted it with his powers.

  Over the middle of the United States.

  The dampening collar made it hard to concentrate, and the air swam around me as I fell into a chair. Keeping that one thought in my head was near impossible. It was crazy beyond anything I’d ever witnessed. Primal's message to anyone who would threaten him was obvious: fuck with us and I drop the big-ass rock on your city. What he probably lacked was a thorough understanding of physics and science. I knew full well the implications of his threat.

  That much mass would end all life on the planet. Oh, some of the basest of life might survive, single-celled stuff, small planarians, but even then the Earth would have more in common with Venus. The seas would boil, the temperature would rise, the air would grow toxic as silt and ash overwhelmed the elements required to sustain life.

  No, even unicellulars would be wiped from the planet.

  The narrow pinpoint that was my horror widened until other thoughts found some room. Fear, grief, and a wide gulf of despair smashed around in my mind. It still felt like trying to wake up from the world’s worst hangover, but at least I could think. I turned my attention towards Whisper, who was tapping at a small control dongle. "Better?"

  I nodded, afraid of opening my mouth in fear of drooling - I've worn these before.

  "Hang here," she said. "I'll try to scavenge you some pants. Nice as it is to look at, I'm not sure the other girls will be able to handle it."

  Once she was gone, I felt a warmth next to me and a faint glow drew my attention. It was the computer monitor, oscillating between too bright and so dim, I thought it shut down. Was that a power fluctuation in this old blimp, or were my eyes lying to me? I've had that happen, too.

  I stared down at the keyboard, trying to blink the funk out of my eyes. The letters on the keys seemed to dance one upon the other, toying with me. One thing was for sure, these dampeners were worse than anything I'd ever been fitted with, and as far as I could tell, Whisper had toned down the effect.

  I had to find a way to tell the others. I opened a web browser, but a white error screen greeted me. I thought they were wise to my previous activity and froze. Panic bled into the drunken jumble of my thoughts when I read the error screen. “Connection error,” I said to myself, ignoring the slur in my voice. “No active internet?”

  Just as the words registered in my mind, the error screen reloaded and a web browser appeared. It took my eyes a second to adjust, and I did a slight double take as the bright colors of the browser page streaked across my vision. “Wake up, Dale,” I said aloud, whacking myself in the head softly.

  I tried to access my email. The time for tricks and cleverness was over. There was more at risk than just my family. As I typed out the address for my email server, I had to do another double take. Where the URL should have been in the address bar, there was: “Not yet, but soon, be ready.” I deleted the sentence, retyped it, and got the same thing. I was going to try again but stopped.

  From one moment to the next, I felt better. Much better. My mind swirled with thought and color, I could form solid ideas without instantly losing them. Grasping the edge of the metal desk, I found a spot I thought nobody would notice and squeezed. The metal gave easily under my grip, crimping with a squeaky groan.
/>   The collar was deactivated. I pawed at it, ready to tear it off when the door opened with the scrape of ungreased hinges. I swiveled in the chair, managing to turn the monitor off before Whisper came into the room. "Alright, stand up," she said. She carried a folded bundle under one arm, the dongle was clipped to her belt. The room was dark enough that I could see a red light blinking as she approached. Did she do it? Did red blinking light mean on or off?

  I forced myself up, slow and deliberate as if the manacles were still messing me up. I had a droll look on my face, loosening up the cheek muscles. I'm sure it was a bad performance, but it played into her expectations. Whisper, though took a long look with a little smile on her face. I stumbled on purpose, making her steady me. Her hands were cold on my waist, but there was a little spark of electric discharge when she touched me. "Oops, sorry about that."

  I gave her a slack smile, "It's okay."

  She maneuvered me over to the bed, wrapping her arms around my waist. Her hands were cold, but the rest of her radiated heat. Her leather costume absorbed it and I could feel every point of contact as she eased me down onto the bed. "You're pretty," I said. It was true.

  She tossed the clothes onto the bed next to me. “You have five minutes,” she said. I reached out for the pants. I got one leg through but pretended to get my foot stuck in the other one. I made an exaggerated gesture at trying to fix it. From where I was, I could kill her. One kick would crush her chest, but then I'd have to fight Doctor Destroy. I wasn't sure where I was, power-wise. I could easily blow the guy up in my full form, but I had no way to gauge my strength and I couldn't trust my feelings alone.

  "You have really nice legs," she said, At first I thought she was staring at my crotch, but her eyes were focused on my midsection, somewhere above my belly button. I have a crazy physique as a result of my powers, but she had to have seen a six-pack before, right?

  "I know what you're thinking," she said, without moving. I noticed how she was talking low enough that Doctor Destroy, just a few feet away, couldn't hear us. "How could I do this, how could I go villain?"