The Indestructibles (Book 2): Breakout
Page 19
Titus changed tactics, using the blunt sides of his spear to strike at the sentry's helmeted head. He was hoping if he could addle the man enough he might find some weak point in the armor, but even the helmet seemed to be absorbing the blows, though at least the sentry seemed unable to resist the reflex to protect his face, which Titus used to his advantage to at least get a breather from the man's counterattacks.
Then Titus felt himself rocked off his feet as Bedlam collided with him, the cyborg completely airborne when her attacker threw her bodily into the werewolf. The pair of heroes tangled and rolled together across the puddle-drenched pavement.
The male sentry pointed his wrist weapon at Titus to tranquilize him, but the movement was thwarted by a blast of blue-white light knocking his arm aside. Another blast sent the man sprawling across the courtyard.
Kate lanced out of the sky, a streak of blue-white energy, and slammed down mid-courtyard.
"They're wearing Distribution suits, Titus — hitting them is making them stronger," Kate yelled.
"This is no longer fun," Bedlam said, laughing as she slammed into the male sentry and threw him back at his female counterpart.
Titus shook himself off, projecting a spray of rainwater from his shoulders and joined Bedlam in pursuit of the sentries. On the upside, he thought, at least he didn't have to pull his punches for fear of hurting them.
Kate fired off two light-blasts at their attackers, the bolts flying easily over Bedlam's shoulders to strike each sentry square in the chest. She caught Titus's eye when he ran by and Kate whispered one word: "Time," before joining them in the fray.
Chapter 43:
The December Man
Jane, Billy, and Emily ran down the now red-lit corridor, trying to shout over the shrieking alarms.
"I thought you were kidding about opening up cell doors," Jane said.
"Why would I joke about something like that?" Emily said. She kept her fingers in her ears to block out the noise.
"What?" Billy said.
Jane ignored him.
"How many cells did you unlock?" Jane said.
"I don't know. Five, six? Nine?" Emily said.
"What?" Billy said.
Jane almost wanted to ask why Billy couldn't hear her when Emily could understand everything she'd said despite having a finger in each ear almost to the first knuckle, but she decided against it.
"How do you not know how many cells you unlocked?" she asked Emily instead.
"Do you know how hard it is to open a locked cell door with your brain while singing Elvis songs?" Emily said. "No, you don't, because you can't open a locked cell door with your brain."
"Really? You're going to sass me now?"
"Is there ever an inappropriate time for sass?" Emily said. "I think not, frankly."
Jane was about to tell Emily she was considering sassing her brain with her fist, but she was interrupted when they turned the corner and saw what appeared to be a giant ice sculpture working its way down the hall, leaving a trail of frost-bitten walls and floors behind him.
"Holy carp," Emily said.
"What? Oh!" Billy said. "Oh no."
Jane didn't wait for the others. She ran headlong into him, knowing he had to be one of the escaped inmates. It's our responsibility to put them back, she thought, as she swung a knockout punch at his face.
The man batted her aside and sent her sliding along the floor.
"Time for a bubble of — " Emily started, but then Jane's tobogganing body took her legs out from under her and both girls landed in a tangled mess on the floor. She threw her hands up in defeat. "I suppose this is what karma feels like."
Jane climbed back up to her feet and prepared for another attack, but Billy was charging in ahead of her, wielding a fire extinguisher he'd pulled from the wall, holding it over his head like a bludgeoning weapon. He smashed it into the ice man's forearm, who batted the weapon away, then grabbed Billy by the front of his clothes with his other hand. The ice creature lifted Billy so they were face to face, Billy's skin almost pressed against the larger mans' icicle beard.
"Brave little mouse," the man says. "But you need more than courage to stop the December Man."
"Are you talking about someone else?" Billy said, squirming. "Or are you another one of those crazy people who talks about himself in the third person?"
Jane could see Billy fussing with the device Winter had given him, the ice-blasting wrist weapon. It didn't seem like a particularly useful tool against a man made of ice, but she figured he must have been thinking of something, so she picked up the fire extinguisher Billy dropped and flung it like a missile at December Man's face. Her throw connected perfectly, smashing into his nose and splintering icicles from his beard completely. Strange, jagged gaps remained where beard particles once hung.
December Man threw Billy across the room with enough force that Jane heard him gasping for air after the wind was knocked out of him.
Jane punched December Man in the stomach, sending chips of ice flying. It didn't hurt to punch him despite his casing of ice, but she could sensed the lack of strength behind each blow. I have to get into the sun soon, she thought.
December Man tried to smash her with an over-handed slam, but she bounced out of the way, too fast for him to hit. She attempted a move Kate taught her, kicking him on the side of the knee to try to knock him off balance, and while it generated another storm of ice chips, December Man seemed otherwise completely unfazed. He backhanded her ferociously and Jane skittered across the floor again, only this time Emily caught her in a gentle bubble of float and cushioned the fall before she went crashing into anything.
December Man closed in on them, stomping with slow menace toward Jane and Emily while ignoring Billy, who was still struggling to breathe. Billy, not to be left out, pushed off the wall with his feet and scooted along the slick, icy floor, between December Man's legs toward the girls. Unfortunately, he didn't propel himself with enough force and came to a stop just underfoot. December Man raised one massive, ice-encased foot and moved to crush Billy. Emily employed a bubble of float to yank Billy out of the way just before a vicious stomp splintered the ice where he was a moment before.
The force from Emily's bubble sent Billy sliding quickly toward her, and Jane grabbed Billy by the scruff of the neck to keep him from slipping further down the hall.
"I have a plan," Billy said.
"Now I know we're in trouble," Emily said.
"How much do you have left in the tank, Jane?"
"Enough," Jane said. She felt weaker than she had in years, but she wouldn't let the others know, not now. "Full steam ahead."
"Can you expel one of your flame blasts, with your hands?" Billy said.
"I can," she said, not sure how much it would take out of her.
"Okay," Billy said.
December Man still plodded towards them, as if he had all the time in the world. Given how well the fight had been going for him, Jane thought, he had no reason to think otherwise.
"Em, see that spigot in the ceiling up there?"
"Spigot?" Emily said. "Did you really just use spigot in a sentence?"
"The spout, the thing, the sprinkler thing!" Billy said.
"I see it, I know what a spigot is, and there's no need to yell at me," Emily said.
"When Jane blasts December Man in the face with her fire, you yank that sprinkler with your bubble of float, get the water blasting."
"So your plan is to try to set him on fire, then extinguish that fire, and hope that wins us brownie points?" Emily said.
"Trust me."
"Our relationship has never been built on a foundation of trust, Billy," Emily said.
"Jane?" Billy said. "You good?"
"Ready," she said.
"Go," Billy said.
Jane jumped onto her feet and reached back as if she were throwing a fastball, even following through with a swinging leg and the full rotation of her shoulders the way that her adoptive father taught her when sh
e was a kid on his farm. Old John Hawkins would have been proud of his daughter's form, she thought, and despite everything happening just then, Jane found herself terribly, terribly homesick.
Her throw hit home, splashing a melon-sized ball of flames into December Man's bearded face. He roared as his head exploded in a massive cloud of mist and condensation, the room suddenly steamy and fogged over.
Emily popped some part of the mechanism of the sprinkler, sending a heavy stream of water pouring over December Man like a bursting rain cloud. He hunched over as if the sprinklers were causing him physical pain, and that's when Billy made his move.
He aimed Winter's wrist-device at December Man and fired full blast, sending a shocking wave of arctic cold through the pouring sprinklers. Everything froze instantly — the room turned into a block of ice, the sprinklers themselves an umbrella of flash-frozen water. And encased in the middle of this in a solid block of lumpy ice was December Man, trapped by his own temperature control abilities trying to recover from Jane's fireball.
They heard the groan of ice moving as December Man struggled to reach for them, but the ice monster was frozen solid, unable to move, only able to stare at them with palpable hate.
"Well that was terrible," Billy said, flopping down on the ground.
Jane held out a hand to help pull him to his feet, and he accepted.
"One down, three, four, or possibly eight more to go?" Emily said.
"You couldn't have kept count?" Jane said.
"Just because I'm the smartest Indestructible doesn't mean I can sing and count at the same time. You try it."
Billy interrupted the back and forth with an exhausted sigh.
"What next, boss?" Billy said.
Jane put her hand on his shoulder as if to steady him, but found herself leaning on him for support rather than the other way around.
"You okay?" he asked.
"We have got to find Sam and get out of here," Jane said.
"Won't argue with that," Billy said. He gestured to the solid block of ice taking up most of the hallway in front of them. "But I think we need to try another elevator."
Chapter 44:
Old enemies
The Alley Hawk had to admit — he'd missed having access to Neal and the AI's supercomputer brain.
Hawk had known for years that there were communication relays deep under the Labyrinth acting as backup gateways in the event something happened on the surface, but the vigilante's own computer talents — which were not inconsiderable, despite his reputation as a fists-first thug of a fighter — would never have been enough to hack into the prison's security system. He would have had to fight his way twenty or more stories to a control center somewhere in the higher levels to patch in and unlock the front doors for Kate and her strike team.
Instead, with a small handheld device Neal had created by following the Alley Hawk's instructions, he was able to essentially hotwire his way into the security controls. It took him hours to get into the building, and another hour to reach one of the armored cables running underground, but cutting through the metal jacket protecting that cabling was easy enough, and after that, it was a matter of connecting the right wires to the paperback-book sized device Neal created.
Then came the part that required a human touch. Neal could develop the best code-cracking software on the planet, but once inside, the Alley Hawk had to navigate that security system, making sure he only opened the doors he wanted to, and ensuring that opening was timed to Kate's plan. This used to be the part of the job Hawk hated when he was young. He wanted to get right to the action, right to the fight and finale, but now, there was a sort of Zen feeling to finessing a lock like this.
So focused on finding the command to release the front gates, Alley Hawk hadn't realized he was no longer alone until a familiar voice spoke.
"You're awfully far underground for a bird," a taunting, near-laughing voice said, echoing down the long, amber-lit corridor. The words caused every hair on Hawk's body to stand on end. This was the voice of a maniac he knew all too well.
Alley Hawk knelt down, gently placed the device on the ground, then stood up, equally as slow, and took a cautious, wide step away from it.
Standing casually ten feet away was a man who had tried to kill him more times than he could remember.
"Hello, Roy," the Alley Hawk said to the Vermin King. "I see someone let you out of your cage."
"Were you coming to visit me? You don't visit me much anymore," the Vermin King said.
"You had plenty of company inside," Hawk said, loosening his shoulders, preparing for a fight.
"But you're my special friend," the Vermin King said. Eyes glistening and wet, his pointed teeth gleamed white in the shadows. "I don't exist without you."
"Why don't we walk back to your cell and talk about that?" Alley Hawk said.
"Why don't I eat your liver instead?" the Vermin King said, before leaping with animal speed at the Alley Hawk.
The two fell to the ground, rolling on the tile and kicking up years of old dust. Hawk grabbed a clawed hand and held it away from his face, the taloned fingers reaching for his eyes. The Vermin King snapped at him, his inhumanly wide mouth clamping down on Hawk's armored gauntlet, trying to chew through to the flesh. The Alley Hawk slammed his knee into the creature's skinny ribs, two, three times, until the Vermin King opened his mouth in pain. Hawk threw the Vermin King across the floor, but the creature dragged his claws across the tiles, righting himself back up and charging again.
Dammit, he's fast, Hawk thought to himself, countering bites and scratches, throwing punches when he could. Was I ever this fast? Was I really quick enough to keep up with him? Hawk was struggling, amazed at how his old nemesis seemed to be even quicker than he was when the Alley Hawk had finally captured him years before and put an end to decades of murder and horrific acts.
The Vermin King saw an opening and lacerated Hawk's face with his claws, sending blood running into the Alley Hawk's eye, into his mouth. More scars, Hawk thought, just more scars, and he landed a hard left hook on the Vermin King's jaw, felt teeth cracking underneath his armored knuckles. The creature knocked the Alley Hawk back off his feet, but Hawk took Vermin King with him to the ground, one hand around the monster's scrawny neck.
"You should have killed me when you had the chance!" Vermin King said.
Why hadn't he killed him? Hawk thought, trying to get his fingers around the Vermin King's neck, wondering if he had the strength to crush his larynx. The creature snapped at him with that freakishly wide mouth, all those teeth so close to Hawk's face, stinking saliva flying everywhere. This man, this monster, he killed so many people, did so much harm for so long, and all I did was lock him away, saving him for some nightmare rainy day . . .
Something smashed into Hawk's side and he grabbed it with his free hand. The Vermin King's ratlike tail, slashing around like a whip. Hawk twisted, hard, felt little bones crack like popcorn, and the Vermin King howled to wake the dead.
"You should have killed me!" the Vermin King said, and the Alley Hawk felt those clawed fingers find a weak point in his armored suit, slipping like knives into the flesh below Hawk's ribs; fiery pain lanced up into his brain. Now it was Hawk's turn to cry out, a huffing grunt of agony as he fought back the screams.
This was enough, though, enough to give him that last burst of adrenaline, and the Alley Hawk climbed to his feet, with the Vermin King thrashing like a cat held by the scruff of his neck. Mercilessly, Hawk slammed the Vermin King into the concrete wall, felt a grim satisfaction when that bald, monstrous head bounced off the surface, as his enemy went slack in his arms. He tossed the unconscious villain aside like a rag doll, watched those spindly, grotesque limbs flail.
Hawk put a hand to his side where the Vermin King had clawed him. Dark blood stained his armor from ribs to belt. It hurt to breathe. He fell to one knee, exhausted.
This would be how it ends, wouldn't it, he thought, crawling over to Neal's device. Killed by my w
orst enemy in a long-lost hole in the ground, where no one would ever find us.
Alley Hawk looked back to where he'd tossed the Vermin King's unconscious body, wondering if he'd really killed him. He never wanted to kill him. He couldn't. In a lot of ways, the monster was the Alley Hawk's fault. This is how it's always been, isn't it, he thought. We just keep escalating. We keep inspiring the worst in people. This is why we all quit. We saw ourselves in our enemies much more than we saw ourselves in the people we saved.
Hawk closed his eyes for a moment, hoping to clear his head, to make the room stop spinning long enough to let Neal's device work its magic and unlock the prison's front doors. When he opened his eyes, the Vermin King's body was gone.
"Dammit," he said.
He peered down the corridor where he'd come from, back toward the cyclopean tunnels leading back the City. He was almost sure he could see the Vermin King's ferret-like body scrambling away in the dark. He wanted to pursue him. He wanted to put an end to this. It would be a good way to die. A death they both deserved.
Instead, he finished his task, launching Neal's program, grunting with satisfaction as he saw a green light flicker indicating the command had been sent to open up the front gates. Revenge could wait, he thought. And when he got the signal from the Tower's AI that his job was done, the Alley Hawk dragged himself to his feet as he'd always done, as he would do until he finally ran out of willpower. He shuffled down the corridor, in the opposite direction his old enemy escaped. There were other ways to the surface, and old scores could be settled later. Right now, there were more important wrongs to right.
Chapter 45:
One door closes
The fight outside, Kate noted, was beginning to look like a cartoon version of Rock'em, Sock'em Robots.
Once Kate and Dude had joined the fray, she, Titus, and Bedlam had worked their way into a rhythm, giving each other a moment to catch their breath while the other two each engaged one of the sentries. The problem, Kate noted, was that even if they were able to ping-pong their opponents back and forth between each other, the suits the sentries were wearing were simply storing up the kinetic energy Kate and the others were throwing at them. For every punch the good guys threw, the bad guys tossed back something stronger.