The muscular man swung his fists, and Helena zipped to the left, kicking him in the back of the head as Zoe went to work on the other guy, which was a lot easier for her than it would have been in the past due to her heightened agility and her claws.
It only took her a moment to take him down, bloodied stripes whipping across his face as he tried to get Zoe off.
“Find the other one!” Zoe shouted over her shoulder at Sam, who turned down the hallway, his wrist guard held before him, ready to fire at a moment’s notice.
Ozella called out, “We know you’re in there; come out with your hands up.”
A sonic blast knocked Sam sideways as it swept through the hallway and grabbed hold of Ozella.
A form appeared out of nowhere, a woman, her hands wrapped around Ozella’s neck, a sinister smile on her face.
She slammed Ozella into the wall again, Dinah materializing in an instant, latching onto the woman, exhaling deeply as the woman started to lose strength and fell to one knee.
“Mom!” one of the mobsters cried from the living room area. This was the one that Helena had been taking on; the one Zoe had first engaged was already down, bleeding profusely, wheezing.
“Don’t kill her!” Sam told Dinah.
Ozella was on the ground now, her hands around her throat, a large red mark covering her pale skin.
“Stop, Dinah,” the team’s statkeeper whispered.
Dinah let up, and the woman just lay there, barely breathing.
By this point, Helena and Zoe had gotten control of the muscled guy, who just so happened to be the man they were looking for.
“Don’t do anything to her! I’ll do whatever you want,” the man said.
Sam moved into the living room to find the big man with his back against the wall, sitting on the ground, a couple of scratch marks across his face, blood dripping onto his shirt.
“If you try anything, I will personally see to it that your mother dies,” Zoe growled.
“No,” Sam started to correct her, but Zoe cut him off with a look that told him she was bluffing, to go along with it.
“I mean, that’s right!” Sam said, doubling down. “We need information, and we need it now. Give us the information we want, and we’ll make sure your friend here is healed up, your mom too.”
“Who the hell are you guys?” the big mobster asked, looking up at Sam with fear in his eyes.
Damn if Sam didn’t wish he had a good comeback on the tip of his tongue for this question.
He should have known that eventually, some criminal would ask him this, and he would need to be able to say something that struck fear into the criminal’s eyes.
Or at the very least, something witty.
He paused, thinking of the meeting he planned to attend later today, once all this was over.
“Heroes Anonymous,” Sam finally told the man. “We’re Heroes Anonymous.”
“That is totally not our name,” Zoe shot back.
“Works for me,” said Helena. “Well, until we get a better name.”
***
“Heroes Anonymous?” The mobster had a unibrow, a five o’clock shadow, beady little eyes, cauliflower ears, and a well-punched face well past its prime.
“Tell us who you work for, and then tell us where we can find them,” Helena said calmly, and in that moment, Sam noticed that one of her eyes had started to resemble a bullseye, a spinning one at that, which he took to mean she was in full hypnosis mode.
The man grunted, a murky glaze coming over his visage.
“Did I miss anything?” Ozella stepped into the room, an apprehensive look on her face. She touched the front of her dress as if she had pockets, clearly hoping to just blend in with the background.
“We were just getting started,” Sam said, his wrist guard aimed at the floor.
“I don’t know much,” the man finally said, “but I can tell you who does know. His name is Donovan. He’s an exemplar from the Southern Alliance. Real tough guy. Works with kinetic energy, and I think he has some telepathic capabilities too. Pretty goddamn sure.”
“Does he have a mohawk?” Sam asked on a whim, remembering the guy who had attacked them previously.
The thug looked at Sam for a moment, confusion coming across his face, before he answered. “Yeah, that’s him. Mohawk, red eyes, smears black paint across his face sometimes, like a damn drama queen. That’s the guy. A real whack job if you ask me, but that’s anyone from the Southern Alliance, which I like to call Centralia’s asshole.”
“Watch it,” Zoe said. “Not everyone from the Southern Alliance is crazy.”
“Looks like we got a second generation here, folks,” the man said with a cackle.
“Easy,” Sam told Zoe as he exchanged glances with Helena. They didn’t need to share a mental message to know that they were thinking the same thing, that Donovan was the guy that had attacked them during their mission to rescue Zoe.
He was also the fucker who tied them to the wind turbine.
“Do you know where we can find Donovan?” Helena asked, her voice hardening.
“He went south, but he’s coming back tomorrow, I think he’s bringing another shipment. If you find him, maybe you can find out where that shipment is going before it gets there. I don’t know, I’m just the muscle. But he will have backup with him, precious cargo and whatnot. They’re using one of those private shipping and distribution centers on the border between Centralia and the Southern Alliance. It’s a pretty big operation. Big space too. Around 100th and 50th street, I believe, a place called Knight Holdings.”
The air was sucked out of the room for a moment as the three would-be heroes turned to Helena.
“Wait a goddamn minute. Did he just say Knight Holdings?” Zoe asked. “That’s part of your family’s shit, right?”
“We have loads of sub companies and contractors that work for us that use our name, license it out, but…” Helena brought her hand to her mouth for a moment, considering the possibilities.
“Well, that’s another piece of this puzzle that we’re going to have to figure out,” Zoe finally said. “But why children?”
“Wait a minute, you’re the one that attacked us a day back,” the man told Zoe, a look of realization coming across his face. “I heard about that!”
“That’s right,” Zoe said, her claws extending.
“Focus on me,” Helena told the man, her right pupil starting to spin again. Whatever she was going through just a moment ago was gone now, the masked heiress focused again on the interrogation.
“Yeah, vampires,” the thug finally said. “At least that’s what I heard. I never asked, but like anyone, I was curious as to why they were transporting children. Donovan mentioned something about ‘young blood.’ That’s all I heard, I swear. I’ve read the papers; I know about that infestation in the West, the Western Plague. Whatever. I don’t want those fuckers to come here, but the money is good, and I’ve been on a few shipments now. These guys don’t seem to be spreading the infection. So just let them do what they want, that’s my train of thought.”
“But they’re feeding on innocent children,” Zoe said, narrowing her eyes at him.
“They don’t stay innocent for long!” he barked, and as he said this, Zoe whipped forward, bringing her claws across his chest.
“Ah, goddammit!”
“Enough, Zoe,” Helena said, again taking control. “We’re not here to change his mind; we’re here to get information.”
“It stings. Someone get this crazy tiger bitch under control!”
“Scum like this needs to be locked up, or worse,” Zoe started to say, bringing her claws back.
“I don’t disagree.” Helena stepped in front of Zoe, calm as ever. “But we have other plans for this guy. You’re going to help us get closer to Donovan.”
“Me?” he snorted. “Like I said, lady, I hardly know the guy.”
“But he will probably hire some muscle when he comes back to town, isn’t that right?�
�
“Yeah.”
“And are you one of the people he’s going to hire?”
“Yeah,” he finally said.
“Then you are going to be the one that lets us in,” Helena told him, her eye starting to turn into a spinning bullseye again.
This was new, likely the continued aftereffect of the exposure to the chemicals. Sam watched her for a moment, feeling bad for her since it sounded like her family was somehow involved in this, not quite sure of the corporate structure of the Knight Corporation.
“Sure,” the man said, a glassy look to his eyes. “Anything you want. I’ll make sure you get in, no problem.”
“How will we know how to reach him?” asked Ozella, always one to pay attention to the details.
“That’ll be easy,” said the man. “I’m the type that they usually place somewhere at the front, a guard of sorts. I’m not like the exemplars they use for the heavy lifting, if you get my drift. Just hired muscle. So if I am hired for this, which I probably will be, you’ll find me somewhere around the perimeter.”
“Dinah,” Helena said, and as she spoke the woman’s name her form took shape, “heal everyone in the room. I will come with you, hypnotizing them as they wake up.”
Chapter Thirty-Seven: Paralyzed
(Dr. Hamza is still part of this story, dammit!)
It wasn’t pleasant, but shitting yourself never is.
Dr. Hamza Grumio was a stubborn bastard, one who would rather crawl over broken glass than call someone to help him, especially in a shameful position like this.
But every man had his breaking point, and after getting literally nowhere over the past several hours, mostly because he was hungry, weak, and delirious from the pain of having his legs snapped, Dr. Hamza finally reached out to a friend.
The friend in question was a teleporter named Scarlett, a brunette fond of wearing black.
He had given her some of his various medicines a few years back, a good amount actually, which she was able to sell to get back on her feet once she moved to Centralia from the border.
He’d always thought she was hot, and there had been somewhat of a spark between them, but he had never pursued it, realizing that having a teleporter owe you favors was better than getting a blow job.
And looking down at his lower half, Dr. Hamza was afraid that he would never get one of those again.
Not unless he found a healer anyway.
He was also aware that the healers in this world had gone missing, most of them anyway, which would complicate things. The Centralian government was trying to do something about it, but he didn’t have much hope of them discovering the reason for the lack of healers, or finding a cure.
If only they would hire him to figure it out... That was something Dr. Hamza could sink his teeth into.
He could see the chemicals he would need now—omnimon hydroxymen, gonoate, kenamide, halomontroxide. The chemicals were impossibly hard to come by, which was why he wouldn’t be able to find them and simply heal himself.
Then again, if he could get his serum going again, he could find someone who had healing as a dormant power...
It was worth a shot, and rather than lie in his backyard any longer, he mentally fired off a message to his friend Scarlett, who appeared a few minutes later, a troubled look on the teleporter’s face.
“It’s not as bad as it seems,” he told her with a grunt.
“What the hell happened here?” Scarlett asked.
He gave her a brief explanation, mostly involving Mia breaking out of his lab and tearing everything up.
Dr. Hamza didn’t mention the four kids who had been the real catalyst for this, and he also didn’t mention the fact that he and Mia were fighting before it all went down, or that he had used mind control serum on her, or that he had permanently fixed her exemplar status.
Those were details that Scarlett didn’t need to know.
“Well, let’s at least get you to your bedroom.” Scarlett lifted her hand to her nose, pinching her nostrils.
“I’ve been out here a while,” Dr. Hamza admitted.
“We’ll get you cleaned up…”
Dr. Hamza was taken off guard by her generosity, not expecting her to actually volunteer for this task.
So he kept quiet as Scarlett dragged his haggard ass into his home through a back door, to his bedroom, where she took off his tattered and scorched lab coat and his shirt, hesitating as she moved to his pants.
“I think as long as I’m in my bedroom I’ll be able to take care of myself,” Dr. Hamza told her. “I’m hungry too. Really hungry.”
While he was fully aware of what was going on, he had noticed that there were tendrils along the edges of his vision. The lack of food really was getting to him. The damn cells in his stomach were working overtime producing ghrelin, the hormone that triggered feelings of hunger.
“I’m going to lift your legs now,” Scarlett said as she did exactly that, pulling his pants off, and cringing as she turned him around to remove his boxers.
“This is humiliating,” he said, his face now on the floor. “Really shitty.”
“You so owe me for this,” Scarlett said, trying not to gag. “And no puns or I’m leaving your ass here.”
Scarlett left for a moment and returned with a bucket of water, and a couple of hand towels. She began to clean Dr. Hamza, something that he would have liked for her to do before, but in this setting was just about the most embarrassing thing he had ever experienced.
“You can’t feel anything?” she asked him after she’d cleaned up his shitty ass and had turned him over, bringing a clean washcloth onto his penis.
“You would know if I could,” he told her, hardly able to make eye contact now. “I always thought you were beautiful.”
“And now you’re trying to hit on me?” Scarlett asked, a sad smile spreading across her face that she seemed to reserve for pathetic male creatures. “You know, the things that they ask us teleporters to do sometimes would surprise even you.”
“What do you mean?”
“Having a friend that’s a teleporter, or having a teleporter owe you something is pretty common here in Centralia. I’m glad I’m not a non-exemplar like you,” she said matter-of-factly, “but if I had to pick a power, it definitely wouldn’t have been teleportation. Everyone wants something from you when you’re a teleporter. Everyone. We take care of people’s dirty laundry, sometimes in the most literal sense possible.”
“I see what you mean,” Dr. Hamza said, still on his back and looking at her as best he could without sitting up. From what he could tell, everything from his waist up was operational, everything waist down gimp city.
“What are you going to do now?” she asked as she finished cleaning his legs, Dr. Hamza wishing he could feel it.
Scarlett put his soiled clothing, some of the rags, and his socks in the same bucket she had brought water in. She stood, disappeared in a flash, and returned a few moments later.
“Where did you go?” he asked.
“I appeared over a landfill and dropped it there. Remember what I said about dirty laundry?” she asked. “And you never answered my question. What are you going to do now?”
“Now?” Dr. Hamza used his hands and upper arms to move his lower half, his naked ass smacking against the floor as he used the wall to sit himself up. “Now, I’m going to eat. After that I’m going to work on a cure. Hopefully, I’ll find a healer in the meantime.”
“A healer, huh?” One of Scarlett’s eyebrows rose. “You know, I may be able to help you with that in the future, but it’s going to be another couple days.”
“Well, as you can see, I need all the help I can get over here,” Dr. Hamza said, forcing a grin. “Speaking of which, I don’t feel like crawling my ass to the kitchen, so can you make me a sandwich. I promise I won’t bother you for at least another day.”
“The things they ask us teleporters to do…” Scarlett said as she turned to leave the room. “You’re going to
need to get this place cleaned up too. It’s a disaster zone in here.”
“I’ll add it to my to-do list,” he called after her.
Chapter Thirty-Eight: Suiting Up and Suiting Down
(It’s baby-making time! Wait, that’s the next chapter...)
“I need to get a sense of what you want, what you’re going for, and what you need before I can just create a uniform for you.” The female costume maker was of average size, wearing a pair of round spectacles that made her eyes look bigger than they naturally were.
True to her nature as a costume designer, she wore a custom one-piece exemplar outfit made of a sleek material, no bra, shoulder pads with golden lining, and a gunmetal gray necklace that matched the rims of her glasses.
“Thanks for coming again, Marie,” Helena told her. “We need something that is functional, above all. We’re going to be doing some…”
“Adventuring,” said Zoe, who sat in a chair at the back of the living room, her legs resting on a coffee table.
Sam couldn’t say for sure, but it seemed like Zoe was starting to embrace her feline side, relaxing in strange positions now, a little lankier than she used to be, and he supposed that, like Helena, the transformation was continuing, which could mean that her face would be full-on tiger in another week.
For her sake he hoped not, mostly because it had become a focus of her conversation, his ex lamenting the way her face looked at least once an hour.
Sam actually found her to be kind of sexy in this form, well, he always thought she was sexy, but this made her look unique, different, and he wished she would just accept it.
But Sam knew Zoe would be Zoe, and he hoped that once she got used to being this way, she would stop beating herself up over it.
“Something functional, yet well-designed,” said Marie. “I would say that this describes the costumes I’m capable of making. Now, when you say adventuring,” Marie said, her eyes focusing on Zoe, “I am assuming that you want it to allow you to move rather rapidly, a flexible uniform.”
“I kind of like what I wear already,” Ozella said, referring to her schoolgirl uniform.
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