by Logan Jacobs
“No, I’m not trying to be any kind of hero,” I agreed. “But you know what really pisses me off? Incompetence and inefficiency. And those both seem to be systemic to the whole Warden organization. Intentionally incorporated, even. That’s the only reason scum like you are allowed to live so long.”
“The Wardens couldn’t kill me if they tried,” The Chief sneered, which did sound like an unconscious admission that they weren’t giving it the honest effort that it deserved. “And I’m not going to let them outsource the fight to some random unqualified contractors. Frankly, it’s insulting. So you three will just have to be casualties of their poor judgment in this instance, so that they’ll send someone better next time. After the Gala, I thought for sure I’d get Optimo.”
As I looked around the room for some kind of weapon to replace my rifle, Norma screamed. I looked over and saw her levitating in the air below the ceiling like some kind of victim of possession in a horror movie. So, I guessed The Chief’s telekinetic abilities extended to human bodies, not just to metal weapons.
“If you only think Wardens are worth your time, then fight me,” Dynamo said. “Leave the two of them alone.”
“Nah, I’m annoyed that they even showed their faces here, so now I may as well kill them,” The Chief replied.
Norma went flying and crashed into the wall and then to the ground for the second time in the past half hour. I hoped she hadn’t sustained any serious injuries. Even if her particular superpower made it impossible to enhance her physical abilities via tech, the events of the day were making me think that I should build her a version of my suit.
As I tried to run over to check on her, The Chief turned his snout toward me and blasted me backward halfway out the door. It was like getting yanked by someone bigger and stronger than you, although there weren’t any pressure points from gripping hands or strings. It was just the same sense of physical helplessness.
But then Dynamo sprinted toward me and grabbed my wrist and braced herself as if she were trying to pull me up from the edge of a cliff or something. She gritted her teeth and screamed with the effort. It was clear that she wouldn’t be able to hang on for much longer.
I couldn’t move my arms or legs, it was like there was too much wind resistance, and the only thing I had strength to do was grip Dynamo’s wrist, so I yelled to her, “Press the blue button! On my ribcage.”
The blue button was the one that activated and deactivated the weight reduction mechanism that enabled me to wear and move around in something as dense as a spacesuit that was designed for zero gravity conditions.
“What?” she yelled back, but then my words seemed to register. With a sudden explosive movement she brought her free arm forward and managed to jam the blue button so hard that it kind of hurt my ribs.
Instantly the strain lessened on my arm that Dynamo was gripping me by. My feet touched down on the ground again. I still felt like I was being pulled backward, but significantly less powerfully, and most of the bulging tension went out of Dynamo’s muscles. Then the pull ceased altogether, and I collapsed on the ground under the weight of four hundred pounds. At least the suit was structured so as not to crush the wearer though, so all I had to do was heft one sleeve over far enough to reach the blue button and activate the weight reducing function again.
“Interesting,” The Chief said as I stood up. Then he picked up the closest rifle, which thankfully happened to be mine rather than the really powerful anti-supervillain one I had given Elizabeth, and I barely had time to cross my arms in front of my head to shield myself before he sprayed me. I stood still and just let him take his shots since moving would have exposed my unarmored head more.
The bullets in that rifle were my special armor piercing ones, but my suit was crafted with my latest technology, and I knew it could withstand at least a magazine’s worth of them before the armor would fail.
Or so I hoped.
I raised my arms over my face, ducked low, and held my breath as the bullets slammed into me. They still hurt like hell, even with my armor, and I guessed that the short spray of metal that slammed into me would leave a few dozen bruises on my chest. When the magazine was apparently empty, I heard the rifle clatter to the floor as The Chief tossed it aside.
“You think my own weapons could hurt me?” I lowered my arms to look at him again. Although, of course, I couldn’t read his expression through the stationary crocodile mask.
“Even more interesting,” he remarked. “Is this a demo for Warden buyers or something? Are you trying to land a contract as their official suit manufacturer?”
“Er, no, actually, I’m trying to kill you,” I groaned, but I suppose the answer seemed a bit ridiculous to him, since he’d taken all three of our weapons.
“Hmm, let’s see what the hot rookie’s got.” He shrugged and turned his attention to Dynamo.
As she dashed toward him, he flung her into the air, and she landed behind a couch. Then he slammed the couch down backward to crush her, and she caught the couch on her outstretched hands and feet as if it weighed no more than foam and hurled it back at him. The couch swerved out of the way before it smashed into him and thudded onto the ground.
Dynamo started dashing around, grabbing more furniture, and throwing it at him, all of which he lazily flicked aside easily by using his telekinetic powers. Sometimes he would retaliate by throwing Dynamo across the room, and she would simply hit the ground rolling, dive behind the nearest piece of furniture, and use that as her next missile. Sometimes he would also throw things back at her. I saw a plate hit her in the face once and shatter, which gashed open her forehead, but by the time she wiped away the blood that came sheeting down so that she could see the cut itself was already starting to heal.
Meanwhile, I ran over to check on Norma, who was unconscious, and to make sure that she still had a steady pulse, which she did. Then I started trying to sneak over to where our rifles still lay at The Chief’s feet, but every time I started getting close to him, he would notice me and casually fling me out of the way. He seemed more interested in toying with Dynamo than with me, though, whether that was because she was a more formidable opponent, or because he thought wrongly that she was the only official Warden among us. It also could have been because she was an extremely, in fact unrealistically, attractive female, and he just didn’t know how else to express his interest besides telekinetically battering her around.
This continued until the rest of the room became mostly barren of furniture, electronics, dishware, and so on and so forth, and the back quarter of it where The Chief was sitting casually in his armchair looked like an overstocked furniture store that had been torn up by a tornado, except for the small untouched radius around the armchair.
But what I noticed that was interesting was that The Chief only seemed to pick Dynamo up when he had an unobstructed line of sight to her, just like The Virus had only been able to use his mental control power when he could see Norma or me. In this case, concealment was cover.
That gave me an idea.
“You know why The Wardens wouldn’t waste someone like Optimo on you?” I yelled as he sent a table hurtling toward Dynamo.
She grabbed it out of the air, carried it in front of her by two legs like a shield since she’d evidently made the same observation I had about The Chief needing to see her to be able to move her, and started sprinting toward him.
“Maybe they couldn’t afford to risk losing him,” the Chief answered me as he wrenched the table itself out of Dynamo’s hands. It hovered over her near the ceiling for a split second, then he brought it slamming down so hard that it probably would have broken her back if she hadn’t rolled out of the way just in time.
I didn’t think I would have been anything but a distraction to Dynamo at this point, so I just stayed out of her way, near Norma, so that I could be a human shield from errant furniture for my unconscious assistant. From there I yelled to The Chief, “Because you’re a fucking lame supervillain! Your lair looks l
ike some kind of crack house, your henchmen are fucking idiots who don’t know how to work together as a team, and you’re a coward who just hid out in your little safe room when you realized that the heroes had come knocking and didn’t even lead a counterattack.”
“If they can’t even take some kind of tech dweeb, they are of no use to me, I’ll just get new henchmen,” the Chief replied defensively, but his Italian leather loafer clad foot started tapping on the floor in agitation, and he took an intermission from beating up on Dynamo to fling a television set at me.
I crossed my arms like an X, ducked my head behind them, and planted one foot in front of the other to make my stance more stable right before the television struck me, and the screen shattered.
“And your mask is fucking stupid!” I continued. “Worst animal to pick. You can’t even walk through a door sideways with that thing on. Everyone who sees it is probably trying not to laugh. Do you just wear a long snout to make up for a short--”
That was the last straw.
I found myself flying wildly through the air, but this time as my arc brought my head nearly into contact with the ceiling tiles, I reached up and punched through one of them with the power of my glove. Then I rapidly pulled myself through the gap. There was a lot of dark, empty space up there in the gap between the old tunnel and the new, where there were only the structural supports, and the space was rumbling slightly with the vibrations from the cars just yards above my head.
As soon as I had pulled my feet up behind me, the force that The Chief was exerting on my body released completely. Then I crawled across the rafters toward the section of the room where his armchair was. Random tiles started ripping down out of the roof and letting light punch through into the unused in-between space where I was as The Chief evidently tried to get to me, and I hoped that Dynamo would make sure Norma didn’t get hurt by the falling tiles.
I knew I would only get one chance. If I had miscalculated the position of the chair or The Chief had moved out of his chair since I crawled into the ceiling, and I just fell down somewhere else in the room, then he would make damn sure he didn’t let me get up there again.
I waited until I heard a crash of shattering furniture, and then I quickly punched a small hole through the ceiling with a gloved finger. Cracks splintered off from the hole, but luckily the whole tile didn’t give way, since I was careful not to put my weight on it.
Then I leaned over and peered through the peephole I had just made.
The Chief’s red armchair was directly below me, and it was empty. The Chief himself was standing a few yards away, head tilted up at the ceiling as he tried to figure out where I was while simultaneously holding off Dynamo’s relentless attacks.
I scrambled over to place myself directly above the crocodile-masked man, raised my power gloves in the air, and then punched two corners of the same tile at once. The effect was dramatic, and I cannon-balled through the tile with a shower of rock, dust, and debris.
Then I landed right on top of the asshole.
For half a moment, I thought I heard his neck crack when his body went limp, but then I checked his neck for a pulse and found that he was still alive. I considered breaking his neck now, but then I decided to keep him alive for just another hour or so to see what kind of information I could get out of him about other planned terrorist operations and other supervillain conspirators.
“You did it,” Dynamo exhaled when I stood up.
“Of course,” I laughed as I reached for his mask.
I fully expected that he would be somehow hideously disfigured or look inhuman, but in fact he had a pleasant, forgettably good-looking face, and could have been any thirty-year-old on Wall Street. I guess maybe that’s why he insisted on constantly wearing the mask, not to hide anything that was wrong with his face, but in order to style himself as the kind of physical freak that he wasn’t at all and look more the part of a supervillain.
“He looks… normal,” Elizabeth said.
“Not anymore,” I said.
Then I gouged out both of his pleasant brown eyes so that they turned into globules of pulpy flesh trailing gory tendons.
“What are you--” she gasped.
“So, that he wouldn’t be able to start flinging us around like rag dolls again when he wakes up.”
“Yeah, I noticed that his power was line of sight, but maybe there could have been ano--”
“I’m going to kill him after I interrogate him,” I said as I flicked a bit of his eyeball off my gloved fingers. “We’ll use the info to find and kill more supervillains. I don’t give a fuck about tearing out his eyes. I’m going to rip more pieces of his body off to get the information we need to save people. Do you understand? I’ll do whatever I need to win. These fuckers would have done exactly the same to us.”
I stared into Elizabeth’s turqouise eyes for a few moments, and I almost wondered if she was going to break here. I never understood why people had more of a problem with torture than killing, especially when it was for a good cause, but hey, I didn’t understand a lot of emotions people had.
“You are correct, of course,” she finally whispered. “Sorry, I’m just still wrapping my head around your methods.”
“Good,” I said. “Can you grab Norma? Let’s get out of here. I bet someone must have seen the dead bodies up top. We need to leave before the cops or some heroes show up.”
“Yeah,” Dynamo said as she walked over to my assistant. “By the way, that was good thinking, busting through the ceiling like that. I didn’t know there was a hollow space up there.”
“I am still sloppy,” I sighed as I picked up our three rifles. “I should have had a better offense prepared for The Chief.”
“You didn’t know anything about his powers,” Elizabeth said as she knelt next to Norma. “We all did the best we could.”
“I need to get better,” I sighed. “More upgrades to our suits, but also more upgrades to our equipment and battle strategies. He shouldn’t have been able to fire my own weapon against me, and if I had put a--”
“Look, Miles,” Elizabeth said as she rubbed Norma’s neck and temples. “You are amazing. You are a normal human, and you just took out a powerful supervillain. This is just the start, and I’m really impressed by what you have--”
“What happened?” Norma groaned. “Did we beat him?”
“Yes,” I chuckled. “Yes we did.”
Norma attempted to stand up, said, “Ouch,” and wobbled. Before she could fall, Dynamo silently caught her and slung her over her shoulders.
“This isn’t very dignified,” Norma muttered.
Dynamo and I couldn’t exactly argue with that, so we didn’t say anything.
Then Dynamo took her anti-supervillain gun from me, which was really too heavy for me to hold up in a firing position, and with her carrying Norma and me carrying the unconscious Chief, we proceeded all the way to the end of the car tunnel to ensure that there were no more living villains still lurking around anywhere in the lair. Then, when we were satisfied that it was clear, we turned back around and retraced our steps to the hidden hatch.
When I opened it in order to crawl out, there was something unexpected intruding on my field of vision. Two things, actually: A pair of extremely muscular blue spandex-clad legs, and I looked up to see my least favorite superhero standing there.
Miles Chapter Eighteen
“Move,” I grunted, and Optimo stepped back in surprise when I climbed out.
“Er, hey, aren’t you…” He ran his hand through his tousled blond hair, squinted his impossibly, artificially blue eyes at me and furrowed his brow like I was vaguely familiar to him but he couldn’t remember my name. “Elson Giles? … The guy that wanted me to… the thing with your wife?”
I decided not to respond to that, but it probably didn’t matter what my response would have been, since he turned toward Dynamo when she climbed out of the hatch.
“The rumors are true then?” He stared at her in shock
for a moment and stammered. “Y-y-you’re throwing away your career for this guy? Look, Dynamo, I know he’s a billionaire, and he’s decent-looking in a scrawny, mean-looking sort of way, but you’re making a huge mistake. Can I tell you something, just between us? Out of all the rookies, you’re my favorite.”
“You’ve said that to literally every single rookie who’s joined The Wardens since you,” Dynamo groaned. “But anyway. I’m not some kind of gold digger. I’ve decided to join forces with Miles because I believe that he has a vision for a revolution in the way we fight crime that would make Pinnacle City a better place. I’m not throwing away my career as a superhero. The Wardens just don’t own me anymore.”
“You mean, you’ve broken faith with the brotherhood that you pledged your allegiance to.” Optimo scowled.
“I didn’t make that decision lightly,” Dynamo acknowledged. “But, my first allegiance is and always will be to the people of Pinnacle City. The ordinary people who rely on supers like you and me to do every fucking thing that’s in our power to keep them safe from harm. And even though that was the Warden organization’s mission statement, I think we as Wardens broke faith with the citizens that we serve when we started letting so many supervillains slip out of our grasp and go on to cause more murder and mayhem. We lost sight of who we were meant to be when we became more focused on audience approval ratings than casualty statistics. ”
“Oh yeah,” Optimo scoffed and then pointed at me, “and this is the guy that’s going to offer you... what? Moral clarity?”