“Mmm. Pretty good.”
Glenn tossed one in his mouth and immediately spit it back out.
“Criminy! That’s hot!”
“Oh yeah,” said Stella. “That cheese can burn you.”
They both laughed.
“So what’s it like being a bomb disposal guy?” she asked.
“Weeks of boredom punctuated by minutes of sheer terror.”
“Oh, so it’s a lot like my love life.”
“Please. You’re the most desirable woman in America.” He smiled sheepishly. “I have to admit, I was really kind of a superhero fan-boy when I was younger.”
“How old are you?”
“Twenty-seven.”
“Twenty-seven? You don’t look that old.”
“It’s not like I’m ready for Social Security…”
“No, it’s just that you’re older than anyone I’ve ever dated.
“And you said you dated one guy?”
“Yes, well I dated Perry for two years, but I’ve been on a couple of first dates.”
“One with that guy from the Backstreet Boys?”
“He was in ‘N Synch, but yeah.”
“Wow, no pressure for me.”
“Don’t worry about it,” she smiled. “Nobody ever cooked dinner for me, so you’re one up there. Oh, look, the appetizers are all gone.”
“That’s okay.”
He stood up, and offering her his hand, led her to the dining room table. There were two place settings laid out, and the rest of the table was filled with bowls of corn, peas, green beans, white rice, and cauliflower. Glenn held her chair and she sat down.
“I think I’ve timed all this right. I’ve got steaks and chicken ready to go on the grill. The summer sausages are ready to eat, and the turkey should be ready to come out of the oven.”
“Fantastic,” said Stella. “I’m starv… I’m… I could eat.”
Stella ate and Glenn kept filling her plate. He did it so casually that she hardly noticed and he kept the conversation flowing so that she never stopped to feel self conscious about the four steaks, six chicken breasts and pretty much the entire twenty pound turkey. Afterwards, she felt far more relaxed, and they talked until almost midnight.
“Well, I suppose you should be going,” Glenn said. “I have to be up in six hours and it’s not like I’m not sure that there are going to be bombs to defuse tomorrow.”
“Yeah,” said Stella. “I guess you should get at least a few hours sleep.”
She let herself be led to the door, and then stopped and waited. For the first time, she was conscious that Glenn was taller than she was. Not by a lot, but at least a few inches. That was good. He leaned forward and kissed her gently on the mouth. Nice form. No tongue. Not too much saliva.
“Goodnight,” she said.
“You won’t have any trouble getting home safely?” he asked.
She just smiled and launched herself into the sky. Reaching down with one hand, she pulled her skirt tight around her legs. Glenn had been a perfect gentleman. No sense tempting fate by giving him a free up the skirt shot.
* * * * *
The next day was far brighter than the previous days, both figuratively and literally. The sun was shining down and it was warm even though the winds had picked up. There were still clean-up operations going on, but they were more about clearing rubble than finding victims. The shops had even started to reopen, first among them Stella was happy to see, the eateries.
After a quick tour of the city in the morning, during which she had moved quite a bit of rubble herself, Stella dropped down to her favorite donut shop for breakfast. With one dozen mixed donuts and a pint of milk, she sat down at an outside table to enjoy the morning. She smiled and waved at people stopping to take photographs and signed a few autographs too. She was just finishing the last of the glazed, when her cell phone rang.
“Hello?”
“Hey, uh… Stella, baby.”
“Irving?”
“Yeah, it’s me.”
“You don’t sound like yourself. You just referred to yourself in the first person.”
“I’m in trouble!” Irving wailed. “I’m tied to a chair and I’ve got a bomb duck-taped to my lap! My lap is my favorite part of me!”
“Alright, Irving. Take it easy,” she said. “Where are you?”
“I’m in the parking garage under the Whitaker Building.”
The Whitaker Building, just south of downtown, had taken more damage from the alien invasion than any other large structure in Chicago. There wasn’t a lot holding it up and it had been left abandoned, with a wide area around it blocked off, until it could be evaluated for possible demolition.
“But you’ve got your hands free, right?” asked Stella.
“What?”
“You’re tied up, but they left your hands free?”
“Yes…”
“Why don’t you untie yourself?”
“There’s a bomb duck-taped to my lap!”
“Okay, okay,” said Stella. “I’ll be there in three minutes.”
Three minutes later, Stella burst through the ceiling of the under-building garage and landed next to her agent.
“Couldn’t you find the door?” asked Irving. “This whole place could come right down on us.”
“It wasn’t a load-bearing… unlike that pillar you’re tied to. Oooo, and look at that. It’s that new Israeli explosive. It could probably hurt even me. If this bomb goes off the whole building probably will come down.”
“If that bomb goes off, I don’t care,” Irving sobbed.
“And do you have something under your chair, Irving?”
The agent leaned his head over to the left and then the right, trying to see what was placed under him.
“It’s a bucket?” he guessed.
“It’s a canister,” said Stella. “It’s a canister of radioactive waste.”
Irving gulped. “This is so bad!”
“That reminds me,” said Stella. “I’m still pissed at you for that message on my answering machine. Do you know that Skygirl heard that? You’re going to have to apologize.”
“I’m going to die!” wailed Irving.
“Buck up man,” replied Stella. “The way I see it, we can do one of three things. I can untie you and fly you and the bomb away from the radioactive stuff. The bomb will probably go off, killing you and messing up my costume. Alternately, I could try to untape you, in which case the bomb will probably go off, killing both of us—you from the blast and me from the radiation. Or lastly, I could just start yanking out some wires. I don’t know anything about how detonators are wired, but I’d say we have a fifty-fifty chance that the bomb won’t blow—maybe thirty-seventy.”
“Why don’t we just wait for the bomb squad?” said Irving.
“Did you call them?”
“Right after I called you.”
“Irving, right now it’s just you and me. There’s nobody in the building. If the bomb squad gets here it’ll just put more people in danger. Besides, there’s this bomb squad guy I like and I don’t want him to get hurt.”
“What about me?”
“You’re my agent, Irving. This all comes with the territory. Come on. What do you say? Let’s yank a few wires.”
“No!”
* * * * *
Glenn King and his partner Cole Harris drove toward the Whitaker Building. They had been just down the street when the call had come in. They didn’t even need to turn the truck around. Glenn turned into the parking lot for the structure and stopped two hundred yards away from the base of the building.
“There goes your girlfriend,” said Harris. “Wonder what she’s doing here.”
Glenn looked up to see All American Girl fly like a missile right into the base of the building. He was a little disappointed that she apparently didn’t notice him.
“Same thing we are. We’ll make this the base of operations. Have the uniforms set up a perimeter stretching out over there and over there.”
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Glenn had just stepped around to the back of the truck to begin donning his protective gear, when a massive blast shook the area. The windows on the driver’s side shattered and a rolling wave moving through the earth tossed the bomb tech to the ground. Scrambling back to his feet he rounded the vehicle to watch all sixty stories of the Whitaker Building falling toward the ground.
“Get in the truck!” called Harris. “The radiation alarm just spiked! We’ve got to get the hell out of here!”
* * * * *
Skygirl landed on the balcony and stepped into the apartment she hadn’t laid eyes on for days. She was tired and couldn’t think of anything she wanted in the world more than a shower and a nap. Dragging herself into her bathroom, her eyes caught sight of her bathtub and all thoughts of a shower went away. She started the water running, poured in some bubble bath, peeled off her costume, and went to the kitchen for a tall glass of Fresca and to the living room for a magazine. Setting the magazine and the Fresca on the side of the tub, she stepped in and lowered herself in to the soothing warm water, and then lit a couple of decorative candles with her heat vision.
An hour later, wrapped in her fluffy robe, Linda Ford, fresh from the bathtub and complete with mousy brown wig, curled up on the sofa, reading the last story in Modern Protector. It was a piece all about the likelihood of Perihelion and Omega Woman getting married. Having spent the last few days with Omega Woman, Linda could only hope that marriage wasn’t in the future. Stella was right. Perihelion was a nice guy, but that Omega Woman could be a real witch. Tossing the magazine to the coffee table, she flipped on the TV. The image of Clint Eastwood pointing a .44 Magnum flashed on the screen, but was quickly replaced by a close-up of a bald man with a scar across his face. The camera zoomed out to show the high-tech battle armor that he was wearing.
“Don’t adjust you sets. It won’t do you any good. I’ve taken over all the broadcast and cable channels in the Chicago area. I, as you should all know, am Professor Thaddeus Destruction, and I own this town, this state, and everything in it… including you. Even as I speak, ten nuclear warheads sit armed, awaiting my order for detonation. The devastation left by the aliens from 61 Cygni will look like child’s play, if I don’t get exactly what I want.
“Don’t worry. You won’t have long to wait for my list of demands—my very, very long list of demands. I’ll deliver it over all the television and radio channels tomorrow at this same time. In the meantime, I would get together a few hundred truckloads of gold. I’m just saying. See you soon. And now back to your regularly scheduled program.”
* * * * *
Professor Destruction stared at the large button on his control panel. It was calling him. He was so tempted to push it now. But he would wait. He would wait for them to give him all the gold and the treasury bonds, to release all the prisoners he asked for, and to hand over everything else he could think of. Then he would push it.
Suddenly the wall exploded inward and a woman stepped through the blasted hole. She wore a silver and black cuirass, torso armor, molded into the shape of a muscular woman’s body; silver pteryges, armored shin protectors, and sandals. The Greek helmet covered her hair and cheeks, but there was enough of her face exposed to show who it was—All American Girl.
Professor Destruction slammed his hand down on the button.
“Wow,” said All American Girl. “You did it. You pressed the button. You just cost me a dollar. I bet you wouldn’t really do it.”
Destruction glanced quickly around, but there was no sign of the nuclear explosions that he expected to hear in the distance.
“Skygirl can fly several times the speed of sound and she has super-vision, x-ray vision, and all kinds of other vision. She had all your warheads disabled within fifteen minutes of your broadcast. And who hides missiles in old subway tunnels, like that wasn’t the first place she was going to look. Now I get the more satisfying job of kicking your ass.”
“You’re supposed to be dead,” he said. “Blown up.”
“Yeah, well, at the last minute my agent convinced me to untape him instead of trying to disarm the bomb myself. Turns out, it was a good thing. Now are we going to talk all day or what, cause I’m losing my wood here.”
“One moment,” said Destruction, turning to look at his assembled henchmen.
He raised his arm, a machine gun popping up from a hidden compartment in the forearm of his armor, and shot Steve through the head. Then he turned and launched himself at the armored superhero.
They flew out of the hole in the wall and up into the air, trading punches as they went. Finally Destruction shoved her away and activated his air to air missiles, but she had vanished. There was nothing on his target location radar.
“Nice, huh? The magical armor turns me invisible. Gift from my Dad. Pretty cool.” Then she blinked back to visibility. “Of course, I want you to see me, when I really pound you.”
He fired the missiles. She simply swatted them away, sending one back toward him. He barely evaded it. Firing his foot thrusters, he shot toward her. She grabbed him by the collar of his battlesuit, and ripped it down the middle. Electrical wires sparked and gyros wound down and then the battlesuit armor was dead. As his final act, professor destruction opened a compartment in the chest of his battlesuit, pulling out a glowing object and pressing it into All American Girl’s chest.
“What the hell?” she asked.
“Feeling week?” Destruction grinned at her.
Stella looked down at the object he held in his hand. It looked a lot like a… pumpkin?
“What did you do?”
“I got rid of the worthless parts of the Atomic Jack-o-Lantern and kept just what I needed.”
“You killed him. You killed him and that guy…”
“Steve.”
“You killed him and Steve and you pressed the button. You are one sick, twisted, evil…”
“Don’t forget victorious,” Destruction added.
“Yeah, I don’t think so.” Stella yanked the Jack-o-Lantern’s head from his hands, throwing it down to the ground, and then peeled what was left of his battlesuit off of him like the skin off a banana. “You see, Thad? You don’t mind if I call you Thad? My armor protects me from radiation too.”
The pieces or robot armor and weaponry dropped to the ground below, as Stella took Professor Destruction by the collar.
“You know what’s sad, Thad?” she asked. “The Atomic Jack-o-Lantern had way more promise than you ever will. You think you’re the big villain in the story, but you’re just a footnote.”
“What are you talking about, you dimwit?”
“My magazine,” she replied. “Of course if you smile really big when I hand you off to the cops, you might make the cover. Now this is my favorite part…”
She stretched her arm back and punched him in the face and everything went black.
* * * * *
Stella sat at a table, laden with sandwiches and fruit bowls, at the sidewalk café. Skygirl sat directly across from her, sipping a cup of tea. They were enjoying a nice lunch after their morning patrol of the city.
“I like it here in Chicago when the first cool nip hits the air,” said Linda. “It makes me feel all nostalgic.”
“I can’t get over it,” said Stella. She reached down below her seat and pulled out the magazine for the fifth time. “Look at it—All American Girl Magazine issue number one. It’s just too cool.”
“It’s very nice,” agreed Linda.
“You know what the best part is?”
“Yes,” replied Linda, who had already been told what the best part was four times.
“If you look really close at Professor Destruction’s unconscious face, you can see a little bit of drool in the corner of his mouth.”
“Yes, and you look very nice in your armor.”
“Well, I had to wear it once, or my Dad would be all, ‘I brought you that armor to wear, not to gather dust in your armory’.”
“Well, I’
m very proud of you and your magazine.”
“You’re not still mad at me, are you?” asked Stella.
“About what?”
“You know the whole thing with the phone call.”
“No, of course not,” replied Linda. “Irving called me and explained how it was all just a big misunderstanding.”
“And I would never call you a Kansas City Rube.”
“Of course not.”
“Well good,” said Stella. “Say, Glenn is taking me out to see that new Matt Damon movie tonight—you know, the one with the time-traveling Nazis. Why don’t you come along?”
“I can’t. Linda is going to see Dennis.”
“Alright, just one more time. You do remember that you are Linda, right?”
“Of course.”
“And who is this Dennis guy?”
“Dennis… you know… Behemoth. Thanks to helping save the Earth, he can get probation if Linda sponsors him.”
“And Linda’s going to… you’re going to sponsor a supervillain?”
“I think he could be a good guy if he just has half a chance, and did you know he has a picture of me hanging in his cell?”
Stella’s reply was interrupted by her cell phone going off. Pulling it out of her cleavage, she slid it open.
“Hello.”
“Stella, baby! How’s my All American Girl?”
“I’m happy, Irving.”
“And why wouldn’t you be happy? And when Stella’s happy, Irving is happy too.”
“Don’t you love the cover?”
“Irving loves the cover.”
“Don’t you love the drool?”
“Irving loves the drool.”
“This is a great day,” said Stella.
“It’s a great day for anybody sitting at number 61 on the New York Times list.”
“Sixty one? That’s fricking awesome!”
“Of course it is, my star-spangled mega-babe! Now don’t forget; you have an All American Girl energy drink commercial to shoot—bright and early tomorrow at 8:00.”
Women of Power Page 11