Painkiller

by Robert J. Crane

  45.

  “Dammit, Veronika,” I said, rolling my eyes at her like it was no big deal that she’d just smashed her way into the Chicago Police Department Headquarters, “I’m in the middle of something here.”

  She looked amused, hands aglow, standing off in front of me, like she was calling me out on my bullshit attempt to push her off balance without beating her ass. “Don’t try to play me, kid. I’m a lot older than you.”

  “You said it, not me,” I fired back lightly, and saw a glimmer of amusement in her eyes. “I thought you were very well preserved for your age—”

  She came at me, fast, not so much furious as cold and calculating, which was way more dangerous than some unhinged nut. I’d fought my share of unhinged nuts, and they usually screwed up in the heat of passion. Veronika took a swipe at me with her other hand held back for defense, and I could feel the air heat up as her blue, glowing hand passed within inches of my arm, which was up to defend me.

  Gavrikov, I said, and drew him forth, flaring both my hands into orange flame, mostly as a test.

  “Put those away before you hurt yourself,” Veronika said with a smirk, pulling a hand toward herself and snuffing my flames just like that, on command. The fires went out, leaving nothing but smoke to drift off my sleeves where the heat had started to burn my clothes.

  Damn. I had no gun on me at the moment, thanks to the speedster causing me to lose Shadow in the flight from the river. In hindsight, I should have taken Reed’s, because we both knew it was of way more use to me than him, but I had a problem with taking it away and leaving him nearly defenseless. I mean, his gusts are strong and all, but they weren’t exactly intimidating to me. Don’t tell him I said that.

  “I don’t need to hurt myself,” I said, “I’ve got a veritable clown car full of you assholes doing it for me. I hurt your friend Phinneus, by the way. He left his rifle behind—”

  “Out in Naperville at that college?” Veronika asked, lurking just out of reach, smiling smugly. So she’d been following my movements, too.

  “Yeah, there,” I said, ready to take a poke at her defenses. “By the way … while you’re here and interrupting me … does the name ‘Graves’ mean anything to you?”

  She reacted to that one with a hard frown. “Graves? Harry Graves?”

  “Dresses years out of style,” I said. “Likes to gamble—”

  “Yeah, that’s Harry Graves,” she said, blowing me off as she came in hard with a punch, “not that it’ll do you any g—”

  I clipped her in the jaw as I dropped hard left, finally getting the better of her in an exchange. She smashed into a cubicle behind me, blue hands burning through the plastic and metal like they weren’t even there. She spun in a second, her cheeks even redder now, her amusement mingling with anger. I’d stung her pride. “Nice move,” she said.

  “I’ve got a few of them,” I shot back. “Any chance you want to tell me more about Harry Graves?”

  “I’d rather send you to your own,” she said, coming at me again, hard. I fell back, cooler than I’d been a few minutes earlier when Zollers had talked me down off the edge of rage-induced madness. I dodged, ducked, dipped, and generally avoided the thrown wrenches that were Veronika’s steaming blue plasma punches. The air shimmered with her every attack, the heat coming off her hands becoming a stifling presence in the room.

  “Yeah, that’s not really a trip I’m looking to make at the moment,” I said, going completely non-offensive. Her hands would hurt, I knew, and that’d provide a moment’s distraction which might allow her to slip in another pummeling blow when I least needed it. One error would practically beget another, like a normal person in a knife fight, and the compounding pain would send me right to my death. Though I hadn’t seen her do it, I could imagine Veronika putting her glowing fist right through my chest and destroying my heart in an instant. Or, possibly worse, my brain. She could set my blood to boiling with a directed burst, if she could direct her plasma the way I could shoot fire—the possibilities were endless.

  I was racing to try and figure out a plan of action. I doubted very much that flashy moves would work, but I wasn’t averse to trying them if I had the foot space to do it. Unfortunately, I was in a very long, narrow row of cubicles packed so tightly together that I knew the fire marshal must have given this place a pass because it was the cops. Veronika came at me with relentless fury, forcing me to back up.

  The one lucky stroke, if you could call it that, was that the cops had taken off. I didn’t see Reed, either, which meant he’d probably been the one driving the evacuation, making himself and the others scarce in order to give me room to fight. I didn’t know a ton about Veronika, but if she was like me with even less of a moral compass, taking hostages wasn’t out of the realm of possibility for her. She’d take any advantage to get the job done.

  I retreated steadily backward under her constant physical assault, never letting her land a punch. I was under no illusions; there was no bell to save me, and I doubted Veronika would just politely stop coming to kill me when my back came up against the wall, as it inevitably would. “So,” I said, glancing back to see how much more space I had out of the corner of my eye, “Harry Graves didn’t hire you?”

  Veronika laughed as she threw the next punch. It looked a little weaker, maybe because she was snickering. “Graves isn’t the kind to hire anyone, not even a barber, clearly.”

  I thought about his hair and nodded. “So … who did hire you?”

  Veronika snorted, shortening her punches after swinging wide a few too many times. If I had a speed edge on her, it was a very narrow one. “That’s not how it works.”

  “Oh, come on,” I said, “they’re trying to have me killed. Fair’s fair.”

  “If you don’t stop running and stand your ground,” she growled, “I’m going to stop chasing you and just burn you out.”

  “Well, go on, then,” I said, still stepping back. “Have at it.”

  She paused, narrowed her eyes, and started to concentrate. Her eyes glowed blue, like her hands, like a fluorescent light tinged with otherworldly cerulean, and they started to smoke.

  “Uh oh,” I said, more than mildly concerned.

  She did the full Supergirl, blasting beams out of her eyes as I leapt through the air and into flight. I could almost feel her attack following me a hair behind as I flew around the room. The smell of burning was intense, and when I looked back as I hooked around her like a ball on a chain with her at my center, I could see her energy dissolving the walls where it hit, burning through and consuming everything in its path like corrosive acid.

  I doubted she’d had anyone flee like I had for a while, and I had a sudden, uneasy realization about where this was going. I hoped Reed had gotten everyone out, because—

  I hooked back around to where I’d started from as I heard the shifting of the ceiling above. I found the nearest window and dove for it, her blasting along, eyebeams ripping behind me right on my tail.

  I shot through the window, which she’d already helpfully dissolved with her power, and I zoomed toward the street level below. Cops were filling the avenue, milling around and looking up. Veronika’s power was lasering out after my exit in a very imprecise manner. It stopped a couple seconds after I dipped, and I halted, hovering a few feet above the street, waiting to see if—

  Yep. That did it.

  The fourth floor of the police headquarters came collapsing in on itself. I’d been a little busy when I was flying around, what with rampant, superhot plasma flying in a hard trail just behind me, but I’d seen her destroy more than a few load-bearing columns in her race to kill me. My guess was that Veronika hadn’t had to pull out the old eye-beams in a while, and never against a flying target like me, indoors and circling her rather than getting the hell away as fast as possible. In the heat (ha ha) of the moment, I guess she’d forgotten about what happens if you destroy all the walls around you while indoors.

  The fourth floor crashed down and a
wave of dust and debris came billowing out as the roof dropped. I waited, wondering if the next floor would follow, but it didn’t. It held strong, which meant Veronika only had a couple tons of debris on her. Maybe it stopped her, maybe it didn’t. I wasn’t too thrilled at the prospect of sifting through the mess to find out.

  “Why.” Detective Maclean was standing a few feet below me, covering his face with both hands, his skin covered with dust from the wreck of his headquarters. He didn’t even ask a question, and the desperation was audible in his tone. “Why me.”

  “Sorry,” I said, drifting down to him, keeping a wary eye on the building. Reed came staggering out the front entrance, caked in white from head to toe, and started toward me immediately.

  “You …” Maclean said, just shaking his head. I seemed to cause this reaction in people a lot.

  “Is she dead?” Reed asked as he trotted up.

  “I doubt it,” I said. “My luck’s not been that good lately.”

  “Who was that?” Maclean asked, finally showing his face. It was dust-covered, too, though less so than his hands.

  “One of the assassins,” I said. I did feel calmer now, calm enough to ask my most pressing question without blood-spitting rage. “So … did you hire them to kill me?”

  Maclean looked at me with his lips slightly parted as he tried to make sense of what I said. I think he got it pretty quick. “I wish,” he said. “Because then, if I had, I would have told them not to do so RIGHT AT MY DAMNED DESK.”

  “That’s … a reasonable point,” I said, my anger pretty much gone. I was splitting my attention between the building, where Veronika had been buried, and Maclean, who was somewhere between the seething anger I’d seen in him moments earlier and utter surrender.

  “Why would you even think I hired people to kill you?” he asked.

  “Well,” I said, suddenly feeling a little embarrassed, “one of the assassins showed up right after I told you where I was last time. And the next went to where I told you we’d be. And …” I gestured at the swelling look of indignation on his face. “Well, you know.”

  “Know … what?” he asked me, barely keeping his lid from blowing off. “You think I want to kill you?” He looked at the wreckage of police headquarters and deflated slightly. “Yeah, okay. I want to kill you a little bit right now. But I wouldn’t pay good money to have it done—” He looked back at headquarters. “Well, I wouldn’t pay my money to have it done, anyway.” He gave me a nasty look. “What’s my motive, in your view?”

  “I dunno,” I said, still feeling foolish for having said it now. “Corruption, maybe?” Maclean went red. “What? I know, it’s not like cops in Chicago ever go bad …”

  “I … am … not … dirty,” Maclean said, his face wavering with rage again. “Though I am now finding some motive within myself. And you can go screw yourself for suggesting it.”

  “Everyone keeps saying that to me,” I said, feeling pretty mild. The rubble hadn’t moved, suggesting to me that maybe Veronika was out of the fight for a little bit. “Like I wouldn’t rather be doing that instead of getting shot at, drowned, smacked around, burned—”

  I felt a wave of heat behind me and threw myself forward blindly, knocking Reed to the side as I rolled back to my feet. I came up in a defensive stance and saw Veronika waiting right there, her beautiful suit covered in dust. “Burned,” she said, really definitive. “I like that. I think that’s how we end you.” She came at me again, eyes glowing, ready to kill me for good.

  “Yeah, well I think—” I started, but something zipped behind me in a rush of air, and I felt a strong hand grab me by the back of the neck. The world launched into a blur of speed before my eyes, and Veronika disappeared as the speedster took hold of me, carrying me away from the ruin of police headquarters.

  46.

  I got thrown hard and landed on solid dirt, kicked again for good measure by the speedster as he turned me loose. I hit wet turf and ripped it up as I scrambled to halt the momentum of my speedy abduction. I didn’t know exactly how fast I’d just been carried along, but it had been so quick that I was hitting the ground before I really had a full idea of what was going on. The disorientation washed over me as I rolled, and I yelled for Gavrikov out loud and he answered before I even fully had control of myself. I spun to a stop in the air, hovering with my feet off the ground and looking into the face of the bastard who had just manhandled me like I was a sack of sugar he was taking home from the grocery store.

  “This is the crappiest tag team ever,” I said, spitting dirt out of my mouth. I glanced from the speedster, who was standing there on the grass wearing a flannel shirt and jeans, leering at me with a smile too wide for his face, to my surroundings, which were a dark sky and stadium seats that rose hundreds of feet above me on the three sides I could see without turning my back on my enemy. “What the … did you bring me to a football stadium?”

  He tossed a speedy shrug and stared at me. It took me a second to realize why he wasn’t making a move. He thought he’d killed me with the throw, and my neck ached enough for me to easily believe he might have if I hadn’t used Gavrikov to stop my roll. I was probably about to plant myself in the dirt headfirst when the power of flight kept my momentum from breaking me in two.

  Now he was standing off because … what? He figured I’d fly off? That was a probably a real danger, actually.

  “So … a-hole,” I said, staring him down, ready to zoom skyward, “what’s your name?”

  “Colin,” he said, really soft-spoken. He had a feeling of danger about him, though, that told me I wasn’t his first kill.

  “So, Colin … do you know Harry Graves?” I fished. “Or who’s trying to kill me?”

  He smirked. Shoulda known he wasn’t stupid enough to go for that. He was just watching me hover, and I could see his muscles tense. Could I get up in the sky faster than he could jump up and drag me down? I doubted it.

  Gavrikov, I said in my mind. The speedster twitched, and I wondered if he could read the subtle motion of my muscles as I prepared to make my move. “Let me show you something,” I said. “Nothing dangerous, I swear. Just watch, and if I make a move you don’t like, well … you know.”

  He stared at me, immediately cautious. “What?”

  “Kill me, of course,” I said.

  He gave me a suspicious look, then nodded. Natural curiosity had overcome his caution. Stupidity is not the exclusive province of the young, of course, but Veronika never would have fallen for this one.

  I reached into my pocket slowly, bringing out my cell phone. He frowned at it, looking at me a little pityingly. “That’s not going to help you,” he said with a shake of the head.

  “I didn’t take it out to help me,” I said, and I glanced around us. “This is Soldier Field, right? Home of da Bears?”

  He kept both eyes on me as he answered. “Yeah. I guess so. Why?”

  “Because they suck, of course,” I said, keeping my phone clutched in my hand. Wolfe, I said, and felt him nod in my mind. He’d been up front all along. “Also, because it’s the offseason, so … no one here.” I took in the whole place with a sweep of my hand.

  “What does that have to do with your phone?” Colin asked, just waiting for me to deliver the punch line.

  “Not a damned thing,” I said, and I threw my phone straight up into the air as hard as I could. It flew into the night sky and disappeared. I figured I had twenty, thirty seconds before it came back down. “I just really didn’t want to have to replace another phone, and I didn’t want anyone else to die.”

  He made a scoffing noise. “The only one who’s going to die here is y—”

  I exploded in a blast of unrestrained fire that traveled roughly as fast as the speed of light. I saw Colin the speedster disappear behind the leading wave of flame as I went nuclear, Gavrikov-style, my flame and heat blasting the home of the Bears and turning the grass into ash and dust in less than a second. The world went white around me with the heat, with th
e intensity, with the sheer power of my just-below-atomic blast, and I funneled the energy out hard in every direction.

  The sound was the loudest thunder I’d ever heard; the feeling of the flames exiting every pore made the air white-hot around me. My clothes burned off, unfortunately, as they always did, and I cratered the ground beneath me and turned the dirt to glass from the heat.

  The explosion faded in seconds, leaving nothing but a scorched field turned to shining glass beneath me, and the stands smoking, infernos burning on the terraced stadium seating above.

  My eyes swept the field. I didn’t see a smoking corpse, but then, I might not have, even if I had caught him flat-footed. I sank back down to the earth, my skin absorbing the white-hot glass’s searing warmth as my feet touched down. I stuck out a hand and my phone plopped hard into it, right on schedule.

  “Smoke you, asshole,” I said, looking over the wasteland I’d created in Soldier Field. I didn’t even care anymore.

  Reed was right. I didn’t know much about the NFL, but I knew the Bears could probably play just as well in the parking lot.

  Suck it, Bears.

  47.

  Colin

  Colin had barely made it away in time, his clothes fried off, his skin badly burned. The air in his lungs had been sucked out and consumed, and he was choking hard, tasting his own blood as he staggered away. He wasn’t running but a hundred miles an hour, at best, and he was careening off of objects in the streets because he couldn’t fully see.