by Logan Jacobs
Norma, Dynamo, and I got into my car, the same dark inconspicuous sedan that we had taken to the countryside the day before, and drove over and parked in the lot of the Talanooga Shopping Mall. Since the mall’s security cams were linked into the C.D.S., I knew where to park in a location that wasn’t visible to them. Then we hauled our scuba gear over to the lake a block away that the car tunnels ran beneath and started putting it on.
“Don’t look,” Dynamo warned me before she started changing from her lipstick red bodysuit and into her wetsuit.
“Wasn’t going to,” I blurted without thinking about it, and she paused to glare at me. I realized that, subconsciously, I had had a slight impulse to sneak a sidelong peek. I guess the fact that it was dark out, and we couldn’t even see each other all that well didn’t inhibit the superhero’s truth detection abilities at all. “Okay, I mean, I won’t.”
Dynamo nodded her satisfaction and proceeded to change. Norma and I did the same. Then we all stashed our clothes in a camouflage bag that I hid in the bushes out of sight.
Then, we waded in and went under.
The water would have been freezing without wetsuits, and it would have probably been uncomfortable with normal wetsuits, but ours were made out of a slightly modified neoprene that my company had developed some eight years ago, and the water was instantly modified to be comfortable against our skin.
I led the way over to the old abandoned car tunnel with the beam of my headlamp carving through the inky waters. It was quiet and strangely peaceful underwater. It might have been somewhat eerie if I were alone, but I had the reassuring shapes of Norma kicking awkwardly about and Dynamo surging along sleek as a dolphin beside me.
I didn’t know how many more underwater operations we’d be likely to engage in in the future, but it occurred to me that once I got the time, I should work on making our supersuits amphibious, which they weren’t currently. Water resistant, yes, but not waterproof for an extended period past a depth of ten meters or so. My mind was always whirling with new projects. The problem was just finding the time. And it looked like my latest hobby of taking on the supervillains of Pinnacle City was going to prove to be the most time-consuming one yet.
I was going to have to delegate more of my current industrial endeavors. I liked having direct oversight, but once I grew my businesses past a certain size, that simply wasn’t feasible anymore. I was only one man, after all, no matter how talented, ambitious, and over caffeinated. Maybe Aileen was going to be the real answer. Other humans were constantly fucking up in ways that I would never have fucked up, even though I wasn’t perfect either. But Aileen had a mind that was born from mine, and she had the capacity to multitask almost infinitely. So eventually, I guess she would be my right-hand woman, at least when it came to administrative tasks anyway.
My musings were interrupted when we bumped softly into the massive concrete side of the car tunnel. It reminded me of some kind of shipwrecked hulk. Just vast, abandoned, and ghostly. Made by humans, but turned alien by age and isolation. Even though this car tunnel wasn’t even that old at all, it had already been forgotten about, which I guess is what made it such a convenient lair for The Chief and his crew.
The three of us felt our way slowly and carefully down the length of the car tunnel toward the maintenance window. I didn’t know what material the pane was made of but it must have been something much stronger than ordinary glass to withstand the pressure of so many tons of water.
But we couldn’t seem to find it.
For an ominous few minutes, I thought we surely must have passed the window. In the darkness the lake seemed like it might as well have been an ocean. I started checking my oxygen gauge nervously, but we still had a solid twenty minutes left, and it had probably only been about seven since we got into the water.
Then, finally, we reached the window. It was Norma who found it first and pointed excitedly. It wasn’t totally transparent, but sort of densely translucent. The first thing I noticed was that it had a crocodile face scratched onto the surface to match the symbol that had been tattooed on the attackers at the Gala and publicized afterward. It didn’t make sense for a criminal to brand everything that was his property and make himself easier for the authorities to track, but it was exactly the kind of thing that idiot supervillains did on a regular basis.
I pointed at the crocodile symbol, and Dynamo’s electric eyes glowed behind her scuba mask.
Then we all killed our lights and moved closer to the pane.
When we peered through the glass, it was so hazy that at first we couldn’t really see anything but vague shapes. It did seem like the space beyond was furnished, though, not a vacant abandoned tunnel.
Then, a figure passed by. I couldn’t see the face or figure in any detail, but something about the black and purple color combination struck me as familiar. Then it hit me.
The Purple Menace.
The first supervillain I had seen at the Gala, the one that had dropped that rotten banana smelling purple energy bomb that blasted a dozen people to smithereens and then had ended up battling it out with Impervius and trapping the superhero inside one of his own bubble shields.
Well, that convinced me. Either this really was a lair used by The Chief, or he had hired decoys to dress up in his henchmen’s costumes and lurk around in an abandoned underground car tunnel twenty four seven as a diversion just in case any vengeance-minded superheroes or other proactive citizens decided to show up looking for him, and the latter didn’t seem particularly likely to me.
I turned to my companions and signaled to them that we could turn back around and leave.
Then, I saw the huge pale shape moving up behind the girls. I pointed and mouthed a frantic warning.
At first, I thought the creature was a shark. It was shaped like a shark, and it swam like a shark. It was the size of a shark, a quite large specimen. It had a shark’s fins and it most definitely had a shark’s teeth.
Then I realized that there was something oddly mechanical about its eyes, and that it had hinges at its jaws. It wasn’t a real shark, it was a robo shark.
That didn’t improve our chances any. Robo sharks, I knew from reading about the home security product online, could not of course smell blood, but they used a form of sonar tracking to locate prey. And they did not of course have appetites or a need to consume flesh to sustain their bodies, but they were programmed to gnash you into tiny pieces anyway, just because.
Dynamo surged into action. She used her foot to push Norma down by the shoulder and out of the shark’s path, which simultaneously propelled her upward. Then she torqued her body to avoid the shark’s jaws, latched onto its gills, and pulled. When there was no give in the metal that she had probably thought was flesh, and when the shark betrayed zero pain response because of course it didn’t have one, she realized that it wasn’t a real shark and started smacking her fists into its hull.
I tried to remember the stats I had read about robo sharks when I was thinking of purchasing one for myself. I wasn’t sure of the brand of this particular item, but there weren’t too many makers on the market, and they all seemed fairly comparable. But the main thing that struck me was that they were too fast for any human swimmer to outpace.
That small detail wasn’t very helpful.
Dynamo was still clinging to its gills, but the shark ignored her, pointed its nose toward me, and surged forward. I couldn’t move fast enough to either side to escape its jaws, and turning around to flee would have just meant getting swallowed feet first, so I performed an awkward sort of somersault just in time that resulted in me bumping along its belly as its momentum carried it past me overhead.
Then as I reached up and latched onto the narrowest point of its tail, I suddenly remembered something I’d read in a disgruntled review by a supervillain whose archenemy had been thrown into his shark tank but narrowly escaped getting munched due to what he described as a design flaw.
The shark had an external off switch in its
left pupil.
At least, the brand that that particular supervillain had been reviewing had an off switch in that location, and I would just have to hope it was the same premium brand of robo shark and that The Chief hadn’t cut corners with a cheaper knockoff.
With both me and Dynamo clinging desperately onto it, the shark circled lazily back around to our previous location right outside the window of the car tunnel, and then the metal beast headed for Norma.
My assistant was frantically paddling her limbs in an apparent attempt to get to the surface. Even if she made it up there though, I didn’t think there was anything on the water’s surface that she could grab or climb onto to get away.
Meanwhile, I struggled to get enough of a grip on the shark’s slick polymer surface to make it up within reach of its left pupil to test the theory that was probably our only hope at this point. Dynamo was furiously trying to punch and claw at the shark, but even super strength was really of no use when you were fighting underwater, since the water slowed down every strike so much that it had no force left behind it on impact. Not to mention that this shark was made of materials much less vulnerable than organic sharks anyway.
By timing it carefully I managed to kick off, swim a few strokes, and latch onto the shark’s dorsal fin. Then I gave another spurt to reach its head, but there was nowhere for me to latch on that time except the underside of its top jaw. My scuba gloves prevented the teeth from cutting me, but the shark felt my hands, or I should say sensed, since it didn’t exactly feel things, and started to clamp its jaws together. I let go and whisked my hands out of the way just in time. For a second I was free floating inches above the shark and facing a panicking Norma from a few feet away.
Then, I swiped my hand down, managed to reach the shark’s left eyeball, found a switch in the center, and flicked it. Then I lost my grip and floated apart from it.
Dynamo was relatively safe since she had maintained her grip on the shark’s artificial gills the whole time, and it couldn’t bite her from there, but Norma and I both would have gotten chomped in the next few seconds, if not for the shark’s reaction to my eyeball maneuver, which was to do precisely nothing.
It just stalled in the middle of the water exactly where it was.
It didn’t sink or float to the surface as a wounded shark or a carcass might have, so it must have had some sort of suspension mechanism so that the owner would be able to retrieve it later, but other than that, it had clearly been deactivated.
I tapped on it cautiously and pushed it around a little, and it just bobbed slightly like a harmless bath toy. A massive and incredibly expensive bath toy for sadists with a sense of showmanship.
I checked my watch, saw that we still had about twelve minutes remaining before we ran out of air, maybe less than that since taking huge panicky gulps like I was pretty sure Norma had been doing depleted your stores faster, and signaled to the women to turn back.
Dynamo gave the inert shark an annoyed punch in the side of the ribs, or maybe it was a friendly punch in parting, and then she kicked off, pulled ahead of us, and sliced through the dark water with her glorious black hair billowing out behind her. Norma and I did our best to keep up with her until we all climbed onto the shore dripping, and gratefully pulled off our masks.
“Well, that was a bit more eventful than I was expecting,” Norma said shakily. “Thanks. To both of you. You both saved me.”
“How did you know how to turn that thing off?” Dynamo asked me as she wiped the water off her wetsuit.
I realized that the idealistic superhero might not approve that much of the fact that I myself had been considering making the same purchase as The Chief while browsing an online black market that really mainly catered to supervillains, so I decided to pick my answer carefully. I wanted to say, “Lucky guess,” but realized in time that she would detect that as a lie. So instead I just said airily, “Oh, I’ve done my research.”
“Hmm.” Her azure eyes narrowed at me. “Well, good thing, I guess. Let’s head back, I need to get at least a few hours of sleep before my shift starts tomorrow.”
“Here you go, ladies,” I dug up our clothes from their place of concealment and handed her red work uniform to her, and Norma’s jeans and sweatshirt to her.
“Now what?” Dynamo asked when she took her clothes.
“Do you want to stay over at my place, so you don’t have to drive back to yours this late?” I offered Elizabeth. “There are plenty of guest rooms. You can take your pick.”
Dynamo bit her lip as she hesitated. I loved the way she did that. Then she inhaled sharply and nodded. “Okay, I guess so. If you don’t mind.”
I politely averted my eyes so that the women could change while I did the same. Then we hauled our scuba gear back to the parking lot of the Talanooga Mall, piled it into the trunk, and drove back home.
“Was the mission a success?” Aileen inquired seductively upon our return.
“Yup, The Virus was telling the truth, that car tunnel really is The Chief’s lair,” I replied. “I guess The Virus wasn’t clever enough to lie, or maybe just not that loyal to The Chief. I can’t imagine someone like that would treat his employees particularly well.”
“Well, that’s exciting news,” Aileen said. “In that case I will start calculating how to take the power grid down and give you more precise estimates of how long I will be able to sustain a blackout in that sector.”
“Great,” I said. “For now, can you take the elevator up here, and show Elizabeth to one of the guestrooms with a nice bath attached?”
“On my way,” Aileen replied.
“Good night,” I said to Dynamo. “And, by the way, thanks for coming over again.”
“I wasn’t going to let you just give me that suit for free,” she answered. “That would leave me in your debt, and I can’t accept that. It goes against my personal policy.”
Aileen arrived on our floor and wheeled toward us. Dynamo walked down the hall after her.
Norma and I headed off to our own rooms to take much needed hot showers after getting soaked in the chilly lake water, and then I collapsed into my four poster bed and fell asleep.
Dynamo Chapter Fourteen
I woke up in an unfamiliar four poster bed.
My adrenaline kicked through my body, and I wondered if I’d been kidnapped or something by a supervillain. Then another kind of worry flashed through my mind, but I turned to look to both sides, and there was no one else in bed with me. Finally, I remembered where I was. I had spent the night at Miles Nelson’s mansion, but not in that way, at least.
So maybe I hadn’t completely lost track of who I was. Who I was supposed to be.
Who I wanted to be.
A defender of justice. A champion of the innocent. A servant of Pinnacle City, a symbol of inspiration, and the branded property of The Wardens. Absolutely beyond moral reproach.
Not the accomplice of some kind of charismatic vigilante mastermind who had a complete disregard for the law and a complete indifference to any moral code except his own.
If he even had one.
His mansion was unbelievably tasteful though, and I tried not to appreciate the elegant design of my marble bathroom when I hurriedly showered, and even though there was no one watching while I got dressed, I made sure I didn’t look too long at the magnificent oak furniture in the guest bedroom.
No one was awake when I walked into the kitchen, but I saw a plate of eggs, bacon, and buttered toast already set out.
“I made you breakfast,” Aileen’s voice chimed in from a concealed speaker. “If you care to eat.”
“Thank you,” I answered as I glanced around and tried to locate the exact speaker. I didn’t see her half-tank-half-woman body around, which was probably for the best. Her appearance did creep me out a bit.
“Did you have a restful sleep?” she asked after I took my first few bites of the egg.
“Yes,” I answered. “Is Miles awake?”
“He is sti
ll sleeping,” she answered. “Did you enjoy yourself last night?”
“I suppose I did,” I admitted, but I regretted the words as soon as they left my lips.
“Good!” she said, and I was as bit surprised by how genuinely happy the robot sounded. “Do you have any plans for the day?”
“Ahhh, a few,” I said carefully. Aileen was Miles’ creation, and I suspected that everything she said or did was an attempt at manipulating me.
But had Miles even manipulated me? I was here because of my own choice. He hadn’t forced me to work with him last night. He had said the suit was a gift.
Maybe he had known that I wouldn’t have taken it and not paid him back.
“I’m going to go home now,” I said after I had finished eating. “Thank you for breakfast, Aileen. It was delicious.”
“You are very welcome, Elizabeth,” the robot-woman said. “Are you sure you don’t want to wait for Miles to wake up?”
“No,” I sighed. “I kind of just… you know… need to think about things.”
“I understand, and I hope to see you again soon. Please be safe.”
“Okay,” I replied, mostly because I didn’t quite know what else to say. Then I went down to the parking garage to get into my car. Aileen permitted my passage through the tunnels and blast doors under the mansion along every step of the way, which was nice, but I didn’t want to run into any humans that morning. Not his kind of oddball assistant Norma, and certainly not Miles himself.
I wasn’t my normal self around him.
I tended to get swept up in their twisted but admittedly intriguing ways of seeing the world, and I needed to be alone for a while with my thoughts, process the recent unsettling events in my life, and figure out what my next steps should be.
As I was pulling out of Miles’ long, winding, country manor type of driveway, dispatch radioed in to brief me on my first assignment of the morning. It was a little girl who’d gotten snatched by a clown, and they weren’t sure whether the clown was armed or belonged to an entire posse of clowns, but they didn’t think he had superpowers, so it sounded pretty casual, so I plugged in the coordinates and let my car take me there.