by Logan Jacobs
Elizabeth panted with exhaustion, and her bright turquoise eyes met mine for a second, and I could still see in her eyes her agonize over her decision.
What would she do next?
Fighting supervillains was nothing new to Dynamo, but it was hardwired in her to take them prisoner after subduing them. Choosing to do anything else had been unthinkable in the context of her career as a superhero so far. She wanted to be a hero, not a villain, but she knew that my way was superior.
Then, she looked back down at Turbo Torch, seized his head in both hands, and cracked his neck with one twist. The flames that covered his body died out so that it just became a smoldering husk.
Good girl.
“Are you okay?” I asked as I ran over to her.
She cocked her head as she stood, considered my question, and replied, “Yeah, I’m fine. Better than fine. Great, actually.”
I liked the gleam in her eyes. I liked it a lot. I wanted to tell her something like “Welcome to the dark side,” but I knew it wasn’t the correct words. She had just evolved into a higher being. She was an angel of vengeance now, and our futures were now intertwined.
So I told her what she needed to hear.
“You did well,” I said as I nodded at his corpse. “He will never kill again, and you have saved countless lives.”
We were standing exceptionally close, probably the closest we had ever been, and I could feel the heat coming off Dynamo’s suit that it had absorbed from Turbo Torch. Part of that was probably her body heat too. I had never witnessed the always-composed superhero work up a sweat before, but now I could see it glisten on her skin and smell the slightly salty, pleasant scent of it. Her luscious lips parted slightly, her tropical sea-water colored eyes stared into mine, and I knew that she felt the spark of desire turn into flames between us.
“Ahem, we still have a job to do, don’t we?” Norma appeared beside us, and both Elizabeth and I blinked and looked away from each other.
I ignored Norma’s pointed tone and said, “Yeah, probably not all of them came out since some of them would’ve been immune to the gas, so we’ll go in there and clean up the scraps as soon as it’s safe. And get a body count. Figure out who’s who. How long do we have until the gas has dissipated to a safe level, Norma?”
She checked her watch and said, “Thirty seconds ago. The thirty seconds that you two just spent gazing into each other’s--”
“Excellent,” I interrupted. “Let’s get a move on then.”
Miles Chapter Seventeen
The three of us cautiously entered The Chief’s lair through the hatch that his fleeing henchmen had left open, with Dynamo in the lead, me diagonally behind her to the left, and Norma parallel with me to the right.
It was pitch dark inside the tunnel, since Aileen still had the power down. It occurred to me to wonder how it had gone unnoticed by municipal authorities that this old supposedly abandoned car tunnel was still drawing so much power from the city grid, whether it was negligence, or if the corrupt collusion that Jonah Clark had claimed existed between the supervillains and superheroes of Pinnacle City extended to the city authorities as well.
But either way, thanks to our contact lenses that could adjust to any light setting, the three of us could see every detail clearly.
I noticed that the entrance was fortified with sensors and elaborate traps both electrical and physical such as spikes and retractable barriers, not unlike what I’d had set up at my mansion, but with the power cut, none of it was operational anymore beyond a simple set of locked steel doors. That in itself probably would have stopped a group of humans unless they had an explosive charge or maybe a battering ram, but when Dynamo body checked it with her super strength amplified by her super suit, the doors ripped open as if they were made out of silver painted cardboard.
Then we progressed into the inner part of the lair that was used by The Chief’s crew as their headquarters. It was sort of an odd cross between a primitive version of my own Cellar, with computers and diagrams and weaponry, and a grimy spiderwebbed haunted house. Clearly the non-super servants’ duties hadn’t included housekeeping. Or maybe they had even added the touches like the bloodstains, the mildew, and the insect- and rat-infested corners as decorations because they thought it was the appropriate ambiance to cultivate.
“Smells like death,” Norma whispered when we stepped into their lair.
“Excellent.” I could see the corpses of several supervillains heaped on the floor. Venom, tentacles, weird skin conditions, mutant levels of musculature, and just straight up lethally ugly mugs-- clearly, none of it had done them any good when it came to surviving invisible poison gas. There was blood leaking from their eyes and noses, and pink froth bubbling out of their mouths, and all of their skin had a faintly bluish tint to it, no matter what their complexions had been like originally.
I recognized a few of the dead supervillains from Aileen’s briefing, but it was Norma who had studied up yesterday and made sure to learn as much as she was capable of remembering about each of them, which was to say, a moderate amount, while Dynamo and I had been testing the various capabilities of our suits for the umpteenth time.
At one point as we approached what I thought was just a shallow puddle of swampy brackish water, which probably contained some percentage of sewage matter, but that was true of the majority of the tunnel floor, Norma yelled, “Stop!”
I stopped right before I stepped in it and asked, “What’s wrong?”
She pointed at the puddle and said, “That’s The Disease. Used to be, anyway.”
“Uh… any relation to The Virus?” I asked with a grimace.
“Well, they have an employer in common, but let’s just say The Disease’s supervillain name is much more literal than The Virus’,” Norma replied.
We all filed off and went the long way around to avoid coming in contact with his liquid remains.
A few minutes later, she pointed at a greenish corpse with pointed ears and said excitedly, “Hey look, that’s Lurker! Miles, you should cut off his ears.”
“Brilliant,” I said.
“Cut off his ears?” Dynamo repeated disapprovingly. “You mean take body part trophies like some kind of savages?”
“No,” I said. “She means that I should collect these sound-amplifying organs for research purposes so that I can potentially recreate the mechanism artificially and equip us all with super hearing.”
I knelt and took out a blade to do just that. Dynamo didn’t object further, although I hadn’t explained to her that I would definitely find some place to mount these ears for display in The Cellar once I had learned everything I could from them.
In total I counted seven bodies inside the lair, and there had been the three-- the evil robot, red and bumpy, and Turbo Torch-- that we had dispatched outside. So, if our intel had been correct, then there were probably at least another one or two still lurking around.
Including The Chief himself.
We progressed farther down the tunnel with our firearms at the ready. The space was a good fifteen yards across, so we spread out a bit on both sides to make sure we weren’t missing any supervillains. Most of the lair wasn’t laid out defensively with barriers or doors because presumably the occupants hadn’t expected anyone to be able to penetrate past the booby-trapped fortified parlor, so to speak. The space was just piled with trash and rotting carcasses here and there, some of which might have been human at some point. Honestly after seeing the interior of the lair up close I was surprised that all The Chief’s henchmen hadn’t developed constitutional immunity to all forms of poison by then since they were living in a biohazard zone.
“I need to make a breathing filter,” I commented, and then a dozen different micro gas mask ideas spiraled through my head before I could squelch them.
Then, behind a trash pile with a rib cage jutting out from it, I glimpsed a flash of movement as we approached.
“There, at your two o’clock!” I yelled to Dynamo.
She fired at the trash pile. Something horrible scuttled out from behind it, and it was moving so fast in such an erratic path that she couldn’t hit it. The horrible insect like pale shape skittered toward us, sprang on the side of the tunnel, and then pounced on Norma as she attempted to shoot it.
It was Creepycrawler, and Norma let out a frantic scream when the disgusting creature knocked her to the ground.
Since I remembered from discussions with Aileen and Dynamo that Creepycrawler preferred the dark and was mainly nocturnal, I did the only thing that I could think to do and detonated a flash grenade. Our contact lenses shielded us from its effect, but the insect like shape recoiled and thrashed around, which allowed Norma to escape from underneath it, and Dynamo yanked her out of the way so hard that she practically flew into the opposite wall of the tunnel.
The creature got back up and scuttled toward us, but I was ready, and I feathered the trigger of my rifle as I fixed my holo-sight on his body.
Creepycrawler was probably fast enough to dodge my shots, but the flash grenade had really fucked him up, and he didn’t seem to even notice I was aiming at him. The armor-piercing bullets from my rifle tore through his disoriented body easily, and then he collapsed and spasmed on the floor in a spreading pool of inky blood.
Then, he got back up and lunged for Norma again. I wasn’t quite sure why or how he went for her, since she was the farthest one from him, and I’d just turned his body into bloody swiss cheese. The only rationale that made sense to me was that she seemed like the weakest target to him, and he wanted to take at least one of us with him now that he was mortally wounded.
But I wasn’t going to let that happen.
I tackled him as he crossed in front of me, and my suit-enhanced punch made his head snap back on his neck like an opened Pez dispenser. I remembered that his killing method was some kind of venomous bite, so as we hit the ground together, I landed on top of him and I wrapped my gloved hands around his throat so I could control his mouth. Then I squeezed, and I could feel tendons pop and bones snap under my power gloves. I stared into his eyes to relish the look of sheer helpless panic and agony that flooded them until a few seconds later when they just froze that way, like a photograph that captured my victory.
After he went still, I realized that he was actually a lot more human shaped than I had thought, just like Dynamo had said. He moved like a spider with the way his limbs were crooked, yet he actually only had four of them, two arms and two legs of weird lengths. His face was vaguely human, but the eyes were too large and too black, and the teeth just a little too long. He looked like the kind of nightmarish creature that haunted the dreams of children.
“That was for you, Raptor,” Elizabeth hissed under her breath as she reloaded. “And you, Huntress. And you, Jolly Roger.”
“Are you okay?” I asked Norma as I helped her up.
“Yeah,” she said, a little out of breath. “Sorry I wasn’t more useful. I wasn’t… expecting that. He-- he almost bit me.”
“But he didn’t, that’s the important thing,” Dynamo said.
“And now he’ll never sneak up on anyone and bite them ever again,” I added.
“Are we approaching the end of the tunnel now?” Norma asked.
“Yeah, based on the diagrams,” I said. “Expect a crocodile. An angry mutant one.”
“Typical,” Norma said. “Do I get hazard pay for this?”
“Nope, I said you could stay in the car, but you asked to be here,” I replied.
She shrugged. “Okay, that’s fine, just thought I might as well ask.”
“What’s that door?” Dynamo asked as she pointed off to the left side of the tunnel.
“Ah, according to the original blueprints, there was a maintenance room there,” I said. “But the door… doesn’t look original. It looks more like the kind of door you’d use for a bank vault than for a maintenance room in a car tunnel.”
“I bet that’s The Chief’s safe room, for emergencies just like this,” Dynamo grunted.
“How do we get in?” Norma asked.
Dynamo flung herself against the door just like she’d done with the steel ones by the entrance, but this time she didn’t even make a dent.
“… Without using explosives?” Norma winced.
Explosives did sound tempting, but I looked up at the ceiling which faintly rumbled from time to time as a car passed overhead through the new tunnel and sighed.
Then I had an idea.
“Guard the door, and also keep alert for anyone coming from the other end of the tunnel,” I told my two teammates. Then I walked back over to Creepycrawler’s corpse and carved it open with my utility knife until I managed to locate what I hoped was the venom gland, since most of his organs correlated to what I knew about human anatomy, except for that one. Unfortunately, it was placed a lot closer to the rectum than I would have preferred, similarly to the placement of the venom gland in a bee, but I’d come this far and I wasn’t going to allow a little squeamishness to stand between me and The Chief.
I walked back over to the girls who were still standing outside the door and apparently hadn’t been disturbed in my absence. I was pretty sure the tunnel was empty of supervillains by then, except for whatever lay beyond that out-of-place bank vault door.
“Ew, what is that?” Norma asked and scrunched her nose as she saw the slimy unpleasant object that I was carrying in my hands.
“I don’t know, but I hope it’s a key,” I replied. “Norma, stay away from it, since you’re not wearing a super suit like we are. According to Aileen’s profile on Creepycrawler, this stuff is supposed to corrode pretty much any material, including human flesh. So we’re going to test it out.”
“That’s where he stored his venom?” Dynamo asked.
“Well, I hope so,” I said. “I have studied human biology, but uh, that guy wasn’t exactly human.”
Dynamo scoffed, “You can say that again. Well, not that I’m exactly human either. But I don’t have one of those inside me.”
“Glad to hear it,” I said. I squeezed the venom sac into place atop the lower one of the door’s two hinges. Then, I drew a knife and punctured it so that a greenish fluid leaked out onto the hinge. Then I moved it up and repeated the process with the top hinge. After that I flung the blobby deflated organ aside onto the nearest trash heap.
“How long will it take to work?” Norma asked.
“I don’t know,” I said as I checked my watch. “Let’s give it two minutes and then--”
Dynamo crashed into the door with so much force that I realized she must have taken a running start. The hinges cracked open and the door slammed down onto the floor. Then Elizabeth leapt into the safe room on top of the door she had just busted down with her weapon raised in front of her.
Our vision flickered for a split second as the lenses adjusted to the sudden influx of light. Although the rest of the tunnel was pitch black, this little room was fully lit, so it must have been powered by some kind of backup generators.
I jumped in after Dynamo and scanned the room to the left while Norma scanned the room to the right. It was actually a fairly small, cozy, and innocuous room, nicely decorated, with filing cabinets, drinkware cabinets, couches, a television, and a mini fridge. Sort of like a compact lounge area. None of the horror show that was the rest of the lair.
“I’ve been expecting you.” A large red armchair at the far end of the room swiveled around to face us, and an elegantly suited figure was seated cross-legged in the armchair.
He had and unnervingly realistic crocodile mask that was strapped to his face, but the jaws didn’t move when he spoke, so I guessed that his face must be concealed somewhere behind. Also, I could see his well-groomed medium length wavy brown hair behind the mask. But if not for that, it really would have looked like he had the head of a crocodile on the body of a human.
Before any of us could respond The Chief continued, “Dynamo. Not a surprise to see you here. One of The W
ardens’ most promising new stars, but who are you? You look a little like Iceman, but the uniform’s not right. And the mousy little librarian? I don’t recognize either of you.”
“Miles Nelson,” I said. “A pleasure to have you in my sights.”
“Miles Nelson, the inventor?” he gasped through the mask. “A tech guy? A fucking nerd? You aren’t a superhero. And the chick? She doesn’t look like a Warden, doesn’t really fit their hiring profile.”
“Damn right I’m not a Warden,” Norma replied with a bit of indignation in her voice at the rude way The Chief was addressing her.
“Well, this is some bullshit,” The Chief spat. “Some white collar desk job loser, a random female nobody, and just one Warden? An amateur Warden too. No offense. But I rate higher profile opposition than this. I wanna talk to somebody.”
“Well, that’s not going to happen,” I said. “No more cutting deals. No more publicity fights. And no more strikes like at the Gala. Your career is over.”
“Oh, yeah, the gala for the C.D.S. launch, that went off damn beautifully,” The Chief reminisced. “Even better than I’d expected. Oh hey, I guess that’s why they sent you, cause you’re the guy that invented the C.D.S., aren’t you? Hmm, I guess I see the poetic justice in that. But it doesn’t mean that you can just put on a suit and suddenly become a worthy adversary to someone like me.”
I tried to squeeze the trigger of the rifle that I had leveled at his false face. But he must have detected that tiny little movement, which I guess was the most relevant movement to him at the moment, because all three of our weapons were suddenly yanked out of our grip as if by invisible strings and flew across the room to clatter down at The Chief’s feet.
“See what I mean?” the crocodile-masked man asked calmly. “Besides… Miles Nelson… hmmm, you’re not the kind of guy that I’d expect to get caught up in this kind of thing. I’ve read a few of your profiles in magazines, you know. I don’t usually keep up with that sort of thing, but you’ve always struck me as an interesting fellow. Smart in a sort of sociopathic way. From your comments, it’s always seemed like you didn’t have much respect for most of your fellow humans. You see them as the weak and worthless beings that they are. So transparent to read, so easy to manipulate and exploit for your own ends. And your main motivation so far in your inventing career has seemed to be making a profit so you could fuck super models. You’ve never claimed to be trying to cure cancer or solve poverty or any of that bullshit.”