by Logan Jacobs
“Pretty sure they know where we’re going, sugar,” Aurora pointed out from beneath an Escalade with blinged-out rims.
“I’ll draw them off,” Tempest offered. She stayed under her car, but another Tempest popped up. This Tempest didn’t look like her current Earthling disguise, with its chestnut hair and light brown skin, but like the real Tempest with her blue-green skin and brilliant red hair.
The real, disguised Tempest handed her clone her rifle and winked. “Welcome to the party, pal. Give ‘em a good show.”
“Sure will!” The faux Tempest bounced out into the aisle of the parking garage with her rifle slung low and sexy. I heard her rifle chatter in bursts, and then the thud of bodies hitting the floor.
Once the real Tempest got a few cars away, I crawled after her and the rest of my team.
Bullets pinged off the concrete floor around me and dug craters in the smooth surface of the parking garage floor. Skalle boots stomped past me, and their black waffle soles left faint alien patterns against the concrete floor.
The cars were packed thick, and I could crawl from bumper to bumper without much difficulty. The Skalle Furia must have packed the cars in thinking that we’d be caught in the close crush, but now they were providing our cover. Or maybe it was just a really packed parking garage. I wondered if the Skalle Furia used the valet service. A picture flashed across my mind of a Skalle Furia trying to parallel park while his friends waved him into a close space and warned him not to ding the bumper of the car behind him.
The clone of Tempest whooped and howled in the background. Her rifle chattered away as she mowed down Skalle Furia. Her war cries blended with the singing of the alarms and the ka-pwing of the bullets around us. I was just getting into the rhythm of the whole thing when I heard a deep crump that was starting to become all too familiar. It was the sound of a detonated explosion, the moment when the air is pushed out of the way of the oncoming wall of fire, just before it washes right over you in a warm blanket of incineration. I couldn’t put on my shades and walk away because I was still flat on my belly under a souped-up minivan, so I let the mommy mobile do the cool thing for me and take the brunt of the explosion.
Waves of orange light washed past the car. Flickering tongues of flame reached up into the undercarriage and licked at the tires. One tire popped. The minivan sank, but it was a slow, controlled sink, like a soccer mom getting into a bubble bath with a glass of wine at the end of a long day. I never understood why the cliche was soccer moms instead of football moms or baseball moms, since nobody I knew ever played on a soccer team growing up. We just played it occasionally in gym class, and it usually devolved into everyone giving themselves brain damage trying to head the ball while the coach yelled at us to stop goofing around and play. But nobody knew the rules, or cared to learn.
The fire was beginning to die down, and I could hear more car alarms were going off. I listened for the ring of bullets on the concrete floor, but I didn’t hear any mixed in with the alarms. They could have been lost in the metallic clicking and popping of the flambee’d cars.
The boots had stopped moving, too. I poked at one boot with the barrel of my Glock. It didn’t give much resistance. In fact, it fell over slowly, the soles separating from the concrete floor in black gooey strands, like the first slice of a fresh deep-dish pizza baked in the ovens of Hell.
I crawled out from under the minivan and surveyed the parking garage, or at least what was left of it.
Where the Pacific Courier truck had been, there was now a huge hole in the arrangement of SUVs, and the ones left were pitted with heat scars. Black scorch marks revealed the tracks of the explosion along the concrete floor, ceiling, and pillars that supported the parking garage.
Some of the bulky cars had rolled and crushed other cars, and I could tell by the wake of fuschia skidmarks that they’d crushed a lot of Skalle Furia as well. The garage was strewn with the charred bodies of Skalle.
I winced. I didn’t want to smell the stomach-churning, sickly pork aroma that I knew would come from the Skalle’s bodies.
“Anyone hurt?” I called to my team. I counted the bodies that rose around me.
Aurora looked a little unsteady on her feet. “No...not as such.”
“You don’t look so hot, though,” PoLarr remarked. She reached out to catch Aurora’s elbow.
“I’ve just expended a whole lotta dark matter, sugar,” Aurora replied, “I’m not all that worried about looking pretty right now.”
Nova brushed concrete chips from her black bra and patted out a small flame that had caught on the hem of her shirt. By now, that shirt was an absolute goner. It was scorched and filled with rips and holes, but it made Nova look even more bad-ass than she had before.
Tempest saluted in the direction her clone had run. “Tempest Two died doing what she loved,” she remarked. “Shooting things that explode.”
Olivia and Thomas staggered to their feet as they leaned on each other. It looked like they’d tried to shield each other from the blast with their bodies.
I couldn’t help but laugh to myself a little as I imagined the honorable police captain and the hardened soldier insisting on protecting each other in an Alphonse and Gaston routine as the blast raged around them. I knew it had probably been a little more harrowing than that, but every time I saw them alive after something that might have killed someone without our team’s regenerative mods, it was a special kind of relief.
“Tempest Two looks like the only casualty on our side,” Tempest said. “I haven’t seen the movie nearly as many times as you have, because I sure wouldn’t have noticed that reference if you hadn’t pointed it out. I mean, I remembered the bad guys hiding in the truck, but the logo? Damn, Marc, how many times have you watched that movie?”
“It’s definitely more than a hundred,” I replied. “But I also have a shirt with that logo.” I hadn’t worn that shirt in a while. It was stored with my other tees that sported logos from fiction companies, like my Omnicorp shirt and my Yoyodyne Propulsion Systems shirt and my many Weyland-Yutani Corporation shirts. I’d never been much for retail therapy except for nerdy T-shirts. Somehow, putting on a Planet Express T-shirt and pretending I was trucking through space instead of through New Hampshire always made me feel better about my life when I was really down or when it was a bad drive. I definitely had a more satisfactory life and better coping mechanisms for when the stress got to me by now, but I still sort of wanted those T-shirts back. Maybe Hot Topic would open a branch in Valiance City eventually, and then I could stock up.
“So, you saw me notice it and you figured it was a trap, and just waited for the right time to blow it up?” I continued. “Good thinking. Or should I be complimenting Tempest Two?”
“Tell you what,” Tempest said, “if one of the clones does something right, you can complement me. If one of them fucks up, you can blame the clone.” She handed me another walkie-talkie. “One for me, one for you.”
I studied the device. Up close, it looked like one of the featureless fake walkie-talkies you get in the toy bin at a dollar store. There were two buttons on the side. “Which button for the ray gun?” I asked.
“The top one,” Tempest answered. “The bottom one probably leads to the party line.”
“Where the neighbors have itchy trigger fingers,” PoLarr said. “So we don’t use that one to keep in touch if we get separated, okay?”
“Yeah,” I muttered. I pointed the antenna of the walkie-raygun at a car with its windows smashed in and pressed down on the top button. An orange ray shot out and made a neat little crater in the paint job. The ray disappeared after a beat, even though I kept my thumb on the button. I didn’t like the idea of being separated from my team, but there were a lot of us, and it was likely to happen at some point. I swallowed down my worry. “We’re all going to the same place anyway.”
“Top floor, President’s daughter, everybody out,” Thomas intoned in imitation of an old-fashioned elevator operator.
I grinned. It was good to have proof that the tendency to break the tension with a slightly inappropriate joke ran in the family.
I turned to Nova as we made our way to the staircase at the end of the parking garage. “Nova, did my eyes deceive me, or did you and Aurora do ‘Get help’?” I asked. “If you’re snagging tricks from Marvel movies, I have to say that I’m proud of you.”
“We absolutely did,” Nova said proudly. “To be honest, I’ve been waiting to use that. It’s unlikely to be of much use in most Crucible matches, but I thought it would work with guards. They’re usually trained to offer help to those who need it, not to take advantage of weakness as a warrior on the battlefield would.” She glanced at Olivia. “Which is not to say that they aren’t warriors as well, of course.”
“No offense taken,” Olivia said. “That’s what I train my officers to do. We serve and protect first. It’s not a battlefield out there. Most days.” She sighed. “Just a few really, really bad days.”
“Well, it was a good choice,” Aurora said. “Feel free to slap me onto some sap again if I get too wobbly, sugar. Those Skalle Furia sure are filling.”
The walkie-talkie vibrated slightly in my hand as a voice came out of the speaker. “Status check in the parking garage, please.” The voice was deep enough to sound male, but soft and cultured, with an accent that sounded like it had been to expensive schools. “May I have a status check in the parking garage? That was an awfully loud noise. Did a car backfire, or did a tire pop?”
We kept quiet and moved towards the door that led to the stairwell.
I checked the burned bodies of the Skalle Furia for extra walkie-rayguns as we passed, but most of their gadgets except for the gun had been melted into Salvador Dali shapes by the explosion.
PoLarr made it to the door first and slapped the sign in a “tag” gesture. “All right, who wants to help me clear this thing?” she asked.
“I’m on it!” Tempest called as she raised her hand.
“I love your appetite for destruction,” I told Tempest as I raised my own hand. My hand was only halfway to my shoulder when Nova’s arm shot up.
“You’ll need cover, of course,” Nova said.
“Okay, I think we’re good,” PoLarr said. “Nova, cover Tempest. I’ll come in behind you. Everyone else just be ready.”
PoLarr checked through the little glass window in the door and drew her pistol. “I don’t see anybody, but that doesn’t mean much.” She moved to the side and opened the door.
Voices floated out in a conversational babble, but so many voices were layered on top of each other that it was impossible to make out what they were saying.
Nova went in first, pistol held close to her chest at an angle. She moved to the foot of the stairs and nodded to Tempest.
Tempest dropped into a crouch, her pistol in her right hand and the walkie-raygun in her left, and she went in after Nova.
PoLarr went in after her with her pistol aimed up at the stairwell.
I held my gun ready and watched the three women move up the staircase. Nova walked slowly and placed her feet deliberately so she wouldn’t make any noise. Tempest followed her inch by inch, her pistol aimed ahead of Nova, walkie-raygun aimed above Nova.
At the landing, Nova turned and faced the next leg of the stairs. Tempest turned her body as she held her weapons steady. She settled behind Nova again and faced up the stairwell. PoLarr waited until Nova had taken the first few stairs to change her position so she could cover Tempest and Nova’s side as they moved up the stairs. Soon they were out of sight.
I listened for the sounds of shooting and bullets rebounding that would tell me if my warrior women needed help, but the only thing I heard was still the dull roar of panicked conversation.
It wasn’t long before they returned. PoLarr’s gait was more casual, even though she still held her pistol at the ready. Tempest crept backwards down the stairs in the same crouch, but the relaxed lines of her body made it look more like she was doing it to practice and less because there was an immediate threat. Nova took the steps down backwards as well, eyes still on the rear.
“Good news, there aren’t any obvious hostiles,” PoLarr reported. “Bad news, it’s seriously packed with civilians.”
“Well, let’s try to blend in and not panic anyone,” Olivia said, and stepped through the door.
We followed Nova upward.
Everyone else in the stairwell was coming from the floors above us, and they were all streaming into the lobby. It looked like we were the only ones who had been coming from the parking garage.
“I’m not looking forward to getting through that crush,” Olivia muttered. “If this building was actually on fire, everyone in here would be dead right now. Absolutely everyone.”
“Be prepared to throw a few elbows,” I advised everyone.
“Oh, I’ll throw more than just some elbows,” Aurora said as she winked at me, and I stuck out my tongue playfully.
The door had just closed behind us when the walkie-talkie came to life again. It was a different voice this time, male as well, but higher, nasally, and more Midwestern. “I haven’t heard anything from our guys downstairs, so everything must be going okay.”
“Yes, a sudden lack of contact from one’s largest concentration of foot soldiers usually means that everything is proceeding according to plan,” the first voice drawled. “What clever thinking. I’m so glad I decided to throw in on this little caper with you.”
“Remind me again why I don’t like you?” the second voice asked.
“Because you think I’m an arsehole,” the first voice answered. “And I’m not, really. I’m just British, and, well…” The pause was uncomfortably long. “You’re not.”
“Thanks, very illuminating,” said the second voice sarcastically. But the exchange had been illuminating for me.
It sounded like our villain wasn’t a fuschia-skinned alien from the Trillbuorne galaxy. He was from a small island on Earth, just like the Luwak cat that pooped overpriced coffee. That meant some humans were working with the Skalle Furia, too. My head whirled, but I needed to ignore the political implications right now and focus on saving the girl, since that was my job right now.
“Anyway, I’m sending some guys down the back stairs in a second to see what’s up in the garage, maybe see if we got any survivors,” said the second voice.
“Don’t bother with the survivors unless whatever’s wrong with them can be fixed with a bandage and a candy bar,” the British voice advised. “We’ve got plenty of both and not much of anything else.”
I nearly squealed in glee. They were dropping so much intel, and with our connection to the party line, we might make it up Nakatomi Plaza after all.
I jerked my thumb upwards. “One floor,” I mouthed to my team, “then we hit the lobby.”
Chapter Thirteen
It took a few thrown elbows, but we got into the lobby with everyone else. I’d stuffed my walkie-raygun into my shirt so I could hear whatever was going on over Radio Free Skalle Furia without anyone else hearing that I had the device.
The fire alarms were still going off, but I didn’t see any flashing lights coming from outside the lobby. No police cars, no fire trucks.
Most of the people milling around were dressed in an incongruous mix of high office fashion and the jankiest hobo clothes possible. Ripped Ramones T-shirts over pencil skirts, pantyhose with clunky hiking boots, ripped denim vests over little black dresses. It was hard to tell whether I was seeing hordes of Skalle impersonators who hadn’t quite gotten Earth fashion right, or if this was just how movers and shakers in Hollywood were dressing these days. I knew I could put together a decent outfit for myself as well as for my ladies, so it wasn’t like I had absolutely no eye for style, but it was impossible to keep up with the latest fashion trends on Earth when I had been millions of light years away for months.
I decided to make things easier on myself and assume that everyone was either a Skalle in disguise
or a human affiliated with the Skalle. It was likely that not all of them were, but it had proven to be the case so far with everyone we’d come across.
“Next time you have a chance to kill someone, don’t hesitate,” I said under my breath to my crew.
“Hey,” barked a security guard. “No killing on my watch.”
Tempest laughed a fake, nervous laugh and slipped her arm through mine. “I’m so sorry, Officer, my husband likes his little jokes,” she explained. “It’s ‘cause it’s from that movie they shot here, y’know?”
“Oh,” the guard nodded, his hand on his walkie-talkie. “You mean that Brendan Fraser flick, Airheads. Right?”
“Yes, that is absolutely the most famous movie to exploit the architecture of this building,” PoLarr agreed before I could say anything. “We’re all super big Brendan Fraser fans here.”
“Good to hear it,” the guard said. “Listen, I know that you folks are probably a little scared right now, but we’re going through an emergency situation and I’m going to have to ask you to evacuate in an orderly fashion with everyone else.” He pointed towards the front doors of the lobby. A few security guards hung out by the entrance, but they didn’t seem to be letting anyone out.
Aurora slid her hand over the guard’s arm. “Excuse me, Officer,” she purred, “but there are such an awful lot of people out there. I get anxiety something terrible around crowds, and this emergency situation sure ain’t making it any better.”
“So what do you want me to do about it?” the guard breathed. He was already spellbound by Aurora’s flirtations. It was fun to see how fast she could work on people sometimes.
“I was thinking you could take us somewhere a little more private to evacuate,” Aurora suggested. She batted her eyes and snuggled up against the guard.
“Mm-hm, sounds good,” the guard said.
He started to lead Aurora back towards the area where all the elevators were. Aurora went along with him, and I followed them with my hand on the opening of my shirt, ready to draw my walkie-talkie if I needed to protect Aurora or the rest of my squad.