Capes

by Drabble, Matt

  The automatic rifles spat fire, but Crimson was already well out of harm’s way and taking cover. Six-Shooter, however, had already evaluated the men holding the weapons. Of the three, only one held the rifle with anything like a marksman’s confidence; the other two looked nervous and were gripping their weapons too tightly, thus affecting their aim.

  His own revolvers spat purple energy blasts, twin beams that targeted the real threat. The man in the doorway was hit expertly twice in the chest, the powerful energy weapon punching holes through his fragile flesh and dropping him instantly.

  Regular bullets punched holes in the wall behind Six-Shooter as the other two men fired their weapons but fired them wildly. Six-Shooter rolled out of the way before coming up to his knees, one revolver in each hand aimed in sideways directions at the two men standing some 12 feet or so apart. He pulled the revolver triggers at the same time and dropped the two men with two headshots that both landed with expert precision.

  The roll movement had been executed flawlessly, but Six-Shooter had a little more trouble rising from a kneeling position to a standing one as his ageing bones complained angrily.

  “So much for the element of surprise,” he said, turning towards Crimson, but the man had already slipped away.

  ----------

  Bull broke into a run as the driver in the truck looked up at the sounds of gunfire and grabbed a pistol out of his jacket. The man’s eyes bulged as he spotted Bull running towards him, and he opened fire with a speed that Bull hadn’t expected.

  The truck’s side window exploded out as a rain of bullets flew. Bull felt them fly past his head, and now that he was just a few feet away from the truck, he worried that a headshot might actually do him some serious damage.

  As a result, he ran faster, ducking low. Just as he reached the vehicle, he raised his right foot, and with a jabbing motion, kicked the side of the truck with the flat of his foot with an adrenaline-fuelled motion.

  The blow caused an instant huge dent and sent the large vehicle spinning away, crashing into the second and then third trucks, smashing them together and no doubt killing the driver.

  Bull walked over and looked at the crushed wreckage to make sure.

  “Neutralised.” He nodded to himself before heading inwards towards the gunfire.

  ----------

  Dr Quantum stared at Cynthia Arrow. The woman’s murderous hatred flowed out towards her, and Doc sent it back in spades.

  Her sudden appearance had startled the two clean-up men to such a degree that they had instantly dropped the body of Cynthia’s husband, but the man known as Number Three was already reaching for a weapon from inside his coat.

  Doc had to move fast and think faster. With two fingers to her temple, she sent out a wave of psychic energy, and in the minds of the men in the room, the dead body of Krueger Stone suddenly moved and started to stand.

  The two workers exclaimed in shock and horror as the body rose, its face deathly white matching its eyes, its throat slit open, and dry crusty blood staining its shirt.

  Number Three saw it too and turned his weapon instinctively towards Cynthia’s recently departed husband who was now standing between the three men.

  He fired wildly at the body and as it wasn’t actually moving, his bullets flew through empty air until they hit one of his two colleagues.

  “STOP!” Cynthia roared. “What are you doing?” she demanded.

  Doc turned to the woman in surprise. For some reason, she was the only one who didn’t see her husband returning to life in a zombie state.

  She intensified the power of her vision, her face burning red and sweating with the effort as she tried to focus four minds at once into seeing what she wanted them to see. The trouble was that it was becoming increasingly clear she was only succeeding with three of them.

  She made the dead man bigger and more aggressive. Now, Number Three was seeing the zombified remains moving towards him with murderous intent, and the terrorist started to back away while still firing. The second of the clean-up workers was hit full in the face, blowing the back of his head clean out.

  Everything that Doc knew about Cynthia Arrow told her that while the woman was extremely dangerous, she was a planner and a thinker, not a doer. As a result, Doc turned her attention full onto Number Three who now saw the corpse charge at him.

  The man backed away clumsily at pace until he was out of the office. He collided with the railings, and in his blind panic, pitched himself over the side and plummeted some 40 feet to the hard ground below before landing with a splat.

  Doc turned back to Cynthia, but by now, the woman had already fled. Doc gave chase.

  ----------

  Six-Shooter was now pinned down in the canteen as several more of the SOUL soldiers appeared, armed with various firearms, forcing him to take shelter behind an upturned metal table. He knew that this whole thing was going to hell and all against his better judgement.

  Crimson was currently picking off stragglers as he moved through the shadows, killing anyone he could find with an expert blade and a merciless intent.

  Bull was making his way in through the rear of the building in his own inimitable style, namely by charging shoulder first at the large metal shutters and trying to batter his way through them, bending the steel by sheer brute force.

  Doc was chasing Cynthia Arrow down through the darkened levels of the factory. She was sending her mind out ahead of her, and as a result, she knew that the woman was running and not lying in wait around any of the sharp corners.

  She pushed herself to sprint faster, closing the distance; she could now feel the woman’s mind within reach.

  Doc sent out a pulse to take the ground away and make Cynthia Arrow feel that she was about to run off the edge of a cliff, but for some strange reason, she couldn’t make the image land. While in the past Doc had been able to glean enough of Cynthia’s thoughts to know the woman’s true face, for some unknown reason, the SOUL leader appeared to be impervious to a direct psychic attack.

  Stripped of her power, Doc had no alternative other than to take a more direct approach. She sprinted hard as they reached the factory floor.

  Cynthia Arrow stopped suddenly in her tracks, and Doc came up behind her, wondering at first why the woman had stopped running, then seeing that Crimson was blocking her path forwards, and now she, in turn, was blocking the woman’s retreat.

  Inside the canteen, Six-Shooter had the advantage over his adversaries in that his weapons never needed reloading; plus, he was a marksman who never missed.

  He had already taken down six of the SOUL soldiers, but now he was pinned. The upturned table was riddled with bullet dents, and the sheer volume of shots landing on it meant that they would start breaking through any second. Added to this was the fact that the men and women firing at him had quickly learned to fire out of the kitchen area without exposing themselves.

  Six-Shooter looked around for an escape route, but there wasn’t one. He was cut off, and if he broke cover, he’d be quickly cut down.

  His salvation came in the short rotund shape of Bull as the human battering ram suddenly exploded through the rear kitchen wall and just kept on running.

  The SOUL soldiers didn’t have time to fully turn to face this new threat, but Bull didn’t stop and simply ran through and over the gathered terrorists, smashing them through the wall and dragging several bloody bodies into the canteen area.

  “THERE!” Six-Shooter yelled, pointing at the wall to his left, and Bull took the order, changing direction and smashing his way back out into the factory area.

  Six-Shooter followed and they found themselves viewing the standoff. Cynthia Arrow was standing in the middle of the factory floor with Crimson in front of her and the doc behind. The SOUL leader was looking back and forth between her two adversaries now like a rat in a cage.

  “There’s nowhere to go,” Six-Shooter called out as he and Bull drew up on either side of the woman. “It’s over.”

  �
��You got that right,” Crimson said with a cold smile as he stepped forwards with a customary blade in his hand.

  “Stow that, soldier!” Six-Shooter ordered.

  “You’ve got to be shitting me?” Crimson exclaimed. “She’s done and she deserves what’s coming to her.”

  “She deserves a trial and a prison cell,” Six-Shooter countered. “That’s why we’re here… we’re taking her in.”

  “THE HELL WE ARE!” Crimson announced, taking another step forwards.

  “C’mon, man,” Bull said unhappily to Crimson. “There’s no need for us to fight anymore. She’s done – they’re done.”

  “She’s done when she’s dead,” Crimson said and took another step.

  The energy blast from Six-Shooter’s revolver hit the ground in front of Crimson’s feet with expert aim, stopping the man in his tracks.

  “You get one warning,” Six-Shooter said in a low growl. “Just one.”

  “Easy,” Doc said to the two men.

  “You wanna help me out here a little, Doc?” Six-Shooter asked. “Put Crimson to sleep or something?”

  “I’m not going to attack a teammate… No matter who it is,” she added.

  “This is bullshit,” Crimson cried out in annoyance. “We can just end this now. Why the hell should we give this bitch a show trial to peddle more of her garbage? You know she’d kill every last one of us if she had the chance. Right, Doc?”

  Doc didn’t answer. She didn’t need to; they all knew that Cynthia Arrow would do just that.

  “He’s got a point,” Bull offered.

  “This could be over right here, right now,” Doc said. “Crimson’s right. There’s nothing she’d love more than a big public trial, a chance to further spread her poison and paint herself as the martyr. Why shouldn’t we end this now?”

  “Because we don’t sink to their level!” Six-Shooter countered. “Our standards are our standards. We don’t drop them to suit the opposition. I don’t give a damn what she and her people would do, I care what we would do. I care about what separates us from them! Don’t you?” he asked the group.

  A silence fell over them, one that was only broken by the sound of running footsteps as the remaining SOUL members emerged out of a hidden basement area where they had been waiting. Cynthia Arrow had scarified multiple troops in order to draw the Queen’s Guard in close, and Six-Shooter should have known better.

  Several of the soldiers now stood on the balcony that ran in a square shape above them, while more came from the ground level, and all of them were carrying high-powered firearms.

  Cynthia remained in the centre of the group, but the team had now turned at least half of their attention to their surrounding assailants.

  “Such children,” Cynthia scoffed. “This is what happens when the godless try to forge a path. You are all just servants of the serpent and you can’t even see it.”

  “Shut the hell up, lady,” Six-Shooter warned her as he took in a quick assessment of the SOUL soldiers surrounding them.

  “My father taught me about your kind from an early age. You are The Legion, an army of hell sent to Earth to await your dark overlord. But there is a reason you will never win – why you can never win – because we have something that you do not,” Cynthia said, looking around at her troops.

  “Batshit craziness?” Crimson asked unhelpfully.

  “We have faith. We are the righteous, we are the light, and we can never be defeated.” Cynthia smiled. “We are chosen by the lord above; we are his soldiers and we are all happy to die for our cause.”

  “Sounds like an invitation to me.” Crimson grinned and tensed to throw his blade, but Six-Shooter felt him.

  “Don’t do it!” he ordered as he watched multiple automatic rifles raise to shoulders above and around them.

  “Ah, we can take them,” Crimson scoffed.

  Bull looked up and around nervously. While he was largely bulletproof, the others weren’t, and even he wasn’t so sure at this range with this amount of firepower.

  Doc was equally nervous. Her power was strong, but there were just too many minds here to control at once, and she most definitely wasn’t bulletproof. She was mentally kicking herself now for not seeing that Cynthia Arrow had led her here. Whatever the reason was for Doc being unable to read Cynthia’s mind, it might have now got them all killed.

  “Such arrogance.” Cynthia smiled. “Did you really believe that you have the power? That the almighty wouldn’t have a plan? That I wouldn’t? Today is indeed the end, the end of all of you and a glorious new dawn for the believers.”

  She raised her hand and closed her fist. The team all tensed themselves for what would most likely be the end, but they would go down fighting.

  They were all suddenly aware of the charge of electricity in the air around them, a purple coloured one.

  CJ appeared with a crackle and a flash. One second he wasn’t there, the next he was. Standing close to seven feet tall and with his green scaly skin glistening, he was a sight that shocked all of them – all except Cynthia Arrow, who had been waiting for him.

  “And there you are,” she welcomed CJ. “Fashionably late, but I knew you’d come when your precious disciples were in mortal danger.”

  “This is over,” CJ announced to the whole factory. “DO YOU HEAR ME?” His voice echoed off the walls. “You are all done now, and you’re coming with me to face justice,” he said, turning back to Cynthia and taking a step towards her.

  Six-Shooter suddenly got a bad feeling in his gut, a gut that could even rival the doc’s senses from time to time.

  “WAIT!” he called out to CJ.

  His feeling was right as the SOUL leader suddenly produced a small trigger device in her hand and held it up for them all to see. Six-Shooter recognised the device as a dead man’s switch, meaning if Cynthia released the pressure on the button, it would detonate.

  “Ah, demon, fear not. I shall bring the light to you all and take you closer to the Lord to face your judgement for your blasphemous crimes.” Cynthia smiled graciously. “C4 is a little inelegant for my tastes, but combined with the chemical weapons in here, it will make a large enough grave for you all. Even you, Satan,” she said directly to CJ.

  “You’d all die too,” CJ said puzzled.

  “We go to our maker with full hearts,” Cynthia responded as though talking to a child. “Would you?”

  A deathly silence fell over the large open space as the team and the fanatics all seemed to hold their breath, not one daring to move or make a single sound in case the world shattered around them.

  “Everybody just take a breath,” CJ said loudly.

  “Take her,” Crimson ordered. “Take her before she kills us all!”

  “CJ, you need to do something,” Bull whispered.

  “Such a lack of clarity.” Cynthia tutted.

  “She’s not bluffing; you know that as much as I do,” Doc added.

  “Quiet,” CJ responded. “Let me think.”

  “CJ, we don’t have time,” Six-Shooter said as he started to raise his weapon.

  “QUIET!” CJ hissed.

  The others all looked towards their leader with uncomfortable nervousness in their eyes. They had never witnessed him be anything other than in complete control before, and now he was starting to panic.

  Six-Shooter knew that the crazy woman was going to do it. She was going to blow both sides to hell, her own people included, and he knew that someone had to do something, before it was too late.

  He was sure that he could take the shot, blast the woman’s hand, separating the trigger from her body. He looked towards Crimson and the man read his mind. Crimson was quick enough to reach the trigger before it hit the ground and before the woman’s fingers released and set the charge off.

  He looked to Bull to try and indicate for the man to charge through the struts holding the armed men above them, but CJ seemed to read his thoughts.

  “No,” CJ said, and with a wave of his hand, the e
nergy revolvers died in Six-Shooter’s hand.

  He turned the weapons over in puzzlement before looking to Crimson who shook his head back. The doc’s face was creased in confusion as her own mind seemed to power down and Bull was looking down while clenching and unclenching his fists, obviously depowered as well.

  “I shall not allow anymore death,” CJ announced. “No more, not for anyone… not even you, Cynthia. No one else dies. This has all gone on for far too long. Too many people have suffered; too many sons and daughters have been buried before their time. I have tried to end this war, but for all of my power, I cannot seem to make you all see the futile nature of this conflict. You are all human. This is your earth, your world, your home; you should be bonded by your common ground, not set apart by it. If I am the problem, then I will leave. If that’s what it takes, I will leave this planet. I will go. I will go if it saves you all.”

  The words were sincere as was the intention behind it, but Six-Shooter could see that it was a fatal mistake. CJ had always seen the best in humanity, but Cynthia Arrow was not human: she was a black-hearted poisonous woman and all she saw now was the perfect opportunity.

  He saw her thumb start to lift off the dead man’s switch while CJ was pleading and he reached for the old-fashioned pistol tucked into the rear holster on his waistband. Everything else seemed to happen in slow motion.

  The gun was in Six-Shooter’s hand and he aimed, but even as he did, he wondered about the accuracy of his aim given that CJ had just somehow apparently flicked the off switch on their abilities.

  Everyone else seemed to have the same thought about the detonator switch and rushed towards Cynthia. Reaching her should have been child’s play for Crimson, but now, he seemed to almost stumble under his own feet. Bull ran in as best he could and so did Doc.

  The bullet struck home in Cynthia’s wrist, and Six-Shooter thanked the heavens that the distance was short and that he had been an expert marksman long before he’d ever met any space aliens.

  They all converged towards Cynthia at the same time but no one was quick enough – not even CJ, who seemed to be taken by surprise at the actions taken independently of him – as the detonator fell from her grasp.