by Ben Bequer
I had five trains to take. Milan to Verona – if only to get the fake passport, it was the same train – then Verona to Vienna, Vienna to Budapest, Budapest to Belgrade, Belgrade to Sophia, and finally, Sophia to Bucharest. I was going to visit some of the oldest and most beautiful cities in all of Europe, and I wasn’t going to leave the train stations. But then again, this wasn’t a sightseeing trip. I had to travel incognito. Annit gave me her scarf and glasses and I bought a wool beaner cap that matched my black coat. The passport picture we had taken in Milan was with the same glasses, so the conductors wouldn’t have my full face to look at. All the tickets were bought ahead of time, so I just had to arrive with my Italian passport and pretend to be Giancarlo Del Pierro, my name for the rest of the trip.
I picked up a cheapie laptop with a 3G connection at a loud electronics store in Verona and started my preparations. The initial work would be done on paper, drawing rough-draft schematics. After my first go at it, the cabin was littered with paper filled with engineering designs, the beginnings of the software code, and a growing concern about space. The type of computer server I wanted to build would locate every remote version of Haha, spread around his botnet, in order to crash him all at once. I was probably going to need something in the neighborhood of ten thousand separate computers, each running my special software 24/7 to ferret out each instance of Haha’s code. It was tricky; I had to find every instance of his code without him knowing, then when I was ready, I could drop the hammer, killing the whole thing at once. I had to be thorough, as much as careful or he would escape through a backdoor, rendering the whole exercise useless. Haha was clever, but in the end, he was just a piece of software – designed by someone to fulfill a purpose. The original builder was probably Dr. Retcon, though that was an unsubstantiated hypothesis, and it wasn’t like Haha and I were still on speaking terms. What little code I had looked at didn’t have a signature, or identifying comments for me to trace it back to the old man.
It was strange that he hadn’t tried anything before ambushing the plane. He was nothing if not persistent, and would relish proving his superiority by hounding me, showing that escape was impossible. His promises in the aftermath of the Battle of D.C. aside, I hadn’t heard anything from or about him until his boy attacked the plane. I was supposed to be his star, his muse, but it looked like he had changed his tune. It made sense that he would take the pragmatic route; Blackjack 2.0 was the perfect example of that. If I wouldn’t star in his show; find someone else who would, but to come after me like that? It dripped with resentment, and he didn’t even send anyone back for my body. The sloppiness was equal parts insulting and perplexing. It indicated an evolution in Haha’s code that I would have to account for in a plan that was already a tornado I could barely lasso.
I checked the news on the long journey to Vienna, a clean, plush ride that had all the amenities, including onboard Wi-Fi, but I never saw any mention of the attack on my plane, or any news about my escape. They were keeping it under wraps, probably while they conducted search operations, in hopes of finding survivors. But also in part to keep people from worrying about the big bad that might be loose on the southern coast of Europe.
The loudest bad guy, the one all the news reports were talking about was the fake me. He and his team were making a mess of things all over the world, attacking a pipeline through Kazakhstan, a British oil tanker coming out of Gulf of Aden, and a series of banks in places as widespread as Brasilia, Karachi and Melbourne, Australia. They struck all over the map, but I saw a method to Haha’s madness. He was going after oil and banking interests, attacking those he saw secretly in power – and it was all getting blamed on me.
There were plenty of other villains causing havoc. A conglomerate had formed in the Nordic countries numbering almost fifty, and they were robbing banks and jewelry stores all across France and Belgium. Another smaller group was making trouble on the British Isles. Primal had awoken from one of his decade-long naps and decided he was going to take over the island of Madagascar – with the excuse of protecting the country from deforestation and industrialization. There were others, too, but the news was all about me.
What few heroes were left in Western Europe had gone into hiding, and there was talk of a joint British – French – German project, working with the United Nations to stop the rampant villains. From the news reports, it looked like they were forming a special anti-super unit, with members wearing specialized armor suits that enhanced their strength ten-fold, and made them near invulnerable.
The U.S. had become the Wild West. The list of dead heroes was long, but that wasn’t the worst. A list of secret identities had been made public, resulting in attacks on homes, schools, businesses. The list of casualties numbered in the hundreds, and some heroes had started following their European counterpart’s lead and going into hiding. Others had formed hit squads, and quite a few villains had been killed as well, though none of the heavy hitters were named. In places, the state governor mobilized the National Guard, and the tenor of the articles I read all echoed the same idea: People were terrified. Not that I could blame them. It was one thing to suit up, fight, and die. It was another to see some animal tear your family apart, giggling the whole time, or worse still to see someone you love die as collateral damage. My gut clenched at the idea of being lumped in the same category as those lunatics, but I had done my part earning it.
Africa was relatively safe thanks to Superdynamic’s team, Battle, who roamed the continent and struck with impunity, but the Far East was lost territory. Several countries were now under the despotic rule of villains, including Bangladesh and Thailand, and other nations were under siege, barely holding off the inevitable.
And I was on the shelf.
After the first leg to Vienna, I had to shut off the news, growing more frustrated with the whole situation. They should have given me a shiny new jet, five or six support heroes, and a list. Then I could take care of business, and in a few months we’d have to build a brand new Utopia. Instead they wanted me to be the first inmate.
The irony would have been hilarious if not for the people out there suffering. I had beaten both Epic and Lord Mighty single-handedly. Few villains reached that level, and the rest were fodder. I didn’t need a team, just a pilot and a fancy plane. The streets would be clean in a month, maybe two.
The train pulled into Vienna’s Wien Westbahnhof station, and I gathered my scattered notes and belongings, stuffing them into my duffel bag as the train squeaked to a stop. I was about to leave the cabin when I heard a man barking orders outside of the train. Without understanding a word of German, I knew the guy was a cop. He spoke with authority, the arrogant knowledge that, at least in the moment, his word was law.
Splitting the drapes with my fingers, I looked out and saw my fellow passengers debarking into a rail station immersed in chaos. The man speaking was not a cop, but a soldier wearing a suit of polished black armor, his voice modulated and amplified by his helmet. Not quite the massive suit of powered armor the United Nations was cooking up, but probably a more advanced version of what I had seen on an oil rig a few years ago. Those German commandos had been some tough bastards. I only won that fight because I gave in to rage and desperation. I was lucky this was Austria, though. The Germans would’ve had a proper welcoming committee.
He was armed with a gun that I couldn’t have held in two hands, and flanked by two more armored soldiers who watched impassive as local police led the passengers through roped cordons and off the platform. I jumped at a sudden knock at my door, the muffled voice of a porter speaking in Italian. Again, I didn’t need a translator to understand what he was saying. It was time to get off the train, and they were waiting for me.
“Just a minute,” I said, still peering out the window. The armored soldiers had their backs to me, and were no more than twenty feet away. It would be nothing to rip through the train and hit them before they could recover. There were still dozens of people on the platform, more than enough
to sow some disorder once I had dealt with the soldiers. My palms lay flat against the train wall, the thin wooden veneer denting at the slightest flexion of my fingers. Their armor would be thick, but I could kill one before the other two could react. Punch through one, bludgeon the others to death with the corpse.
The knock at my cabin door became more insistent, cutting through the thrum of my coursing blood as it pounded my eardrums. I inhaled through my nose, long and slow, then murmured a curse, donning my flimsy disguise and opened the door. The porter took a step back, and I realized tension was probably bleeding off of me. I took a small step back and said, “I’m sorry, it was a mess in here.”
The porter was quiet a second before saying, “I can help you with your bags?”
His English was accented, but he held his hands out to take my duffel bag. I waved him off and said, “What’s going on out there.” I jerked a thumb over my shoulder, and he put words and motion together quickly.
“Trouble,” he said, and I could see him trying to find the words. “Criminals to rob people, superuomo”
I chewed on that last word for second, connecting the dots. “Super criminals?”
He nodded at that, and our little game of charades seemed to put him at ease. “Yes, the army sent bigger men,” he said, hunching his shoulders and bending his arms in a pretend flex. “My boss says they catch them, but are staying to make sure we are safe.”
Well that was kind, and inconvenient. At least they weren’t here for me. They were just standing right by the train, armed and alert. All I had were a scarf and glasses. Again, I thought about tearing through the train and improvising, but there were still a lot of people milling about, both on the train and in the station. No telling how much collateral damage a fight in the confined train station would generate. If I didn’t want to be confused with the monsters and the animals, it was time to act like it.
The porter had leaned in at the waist, his hands laced formally behind his back. “Signore, can I show you off the train?”
I had no choice but to follow. He offered an outstretched hand for my bag, but I shook my head. He stepped into the hallway with trained grace and held one arm out in guidance. I stepped into a hallway that felt claustrophobic. I steadied my breathing, deep in through the nose, out through the mouth. Annit’s perfume clung to the scarf, a flowery scent that suited her and calmed me. The ever narrowing hallway led to the exit door much faster than it should have. The porter had stayed a professional step behind as we left the cabin, but as the exit came into view, he took a quick step around me.
I almost drilled him, but instead fished a couple of Euro out of my pocket, not bothering to look at the amount and slapped it solidly into his hand. He lurched a little with the impact, and I froze, afraid I had hurt him, but he looked at the wadded bills in his hand and laughed. “Thank you, Signore,” he said with a canting tip of his head. “Enjoy Vienna.”
Acrid fumes chewed at my nares as I stepped onto the platform. The soldiers were less than twenty feet from me, but they were facing away, their attention on the two main entry ways onto the platform. Each were guarded by pair of Vienna police in tactical armor and helmets, rifles held low. Other officers, clad in dark blue uniforms, were calling out firm directions I didn’t understand, beckoning towards their cordon.
My delays on the train cost me any chance of getting lost in the crowd. Few people were left on the train, and what should have been a busy platform was nearly empty. The remaining passengers trickled towards the police cordon in loose packs, and for the second time in as many weeks, I was stranded alone, except this time, I was the island. I wanted to hunch my shoulders and stare at the floor as I started my own exit, but those were tells as old as crime. My next instinct was to slip through with the other passengers, but I towered over the next tallest person in the room who wasn’t wearing powered armor. After scuttling a few steps, I held my head up, tried to aim my eyes away from the soldiers who were scanning the platform behind heavily tinted faceplates, and tried to keep an easy pace.
Maybe it was the extra burst of adrenalin, lighting me up like the world’s most potent hit of cocaine, or the constant sitting in train cars. It was probably my impromptu skydiving. Whatever it was, sharp pain edged its way up and down my hips, starting at my coccyx and radiating down the joints through my legs and into my knees. I had to slow my step, my molars grinding as I tried to focus on keeping one foot in front of the other.
Sweat dimpled on the insides of my thighs and under my arms, the winter coat a tanning bed set to full power, the duffel bag I could have tossed into the sun weighed more than the plane I had thrown myself out of. I worked to smooth my features as I came within a few feet of the officer who was herding the crowd off the platform. Young, her hair in a tight bun that never bobbed as her head swiveled about; her voice hoarse from what must have been a solid twenty minutes of naturally projecting her voice into a space rife with artifact.
Her eyes were lasers though, and they locked on me as I approached the line of yellow police tape. I was barely shuffling, and each step was costly. I could hear my teeth grinding like a saw reverberating in my skull and bit down on the inside of my cheek to stop it. People were lining up behind me, but I saw the young officer focus on me, concern on her face. Part of me wanted to reach out and ask for help. My joints were on fire, the pain dashing down my legs and infecting my feet so that each footfall landed in a bucket of shattered glass.
I was almost past her when she held a hand out. I froze, glad for the respite, and though I knew it was stupid and amateurish, I looked around at the soldiers. The middle one had noticed what was happening, and alerted the other two. Their rifles were still slung low, but who knew what tech was running behind those faceplates. Facial recognition, information databases, microarray laser scanners, and those were the just the apps I could build with a laptop and a rainy afternoon.
I looked down at the officer who was asking me pointed questions in German, none of which I understood. I shrugged and hoped she would get the message, and then she said “English?”
I nodded and she said, “Do you need medical care?” Her English was good, though she enunciated with care, dwarfing the eighteen words of German I learned that basically amounted to “Where can I buy beer and sleep off a hangover?”
I took a moment to breathe, letting my face sag as I shook my head. “No thank you,” I said, my voice strained, but solid. “My tendinitis is flaring up. I have my prescription with me.” I shook the duffel bag, hoping that she didn’t want to check it.
She wasn’t barring my way anymore, but she still hadn’t allowed me to pass. I could feel the soldiers behind me, but dare not look their way. I could see she was puzzled, and I was about repeat my sentence when one of other officers, this guy in tactical gear, sidled up next to her and said a couple of words in German, flexing his arm at the elbow as he spoke. She smiled, and what would have been an otherwise aggressively plain face lit up into something quite attractive.
The smiled muted, her lips thinning into a compassionate grimace. “My brother suffers from this,” she said. “From playing tennis.” She waved me through and ignoring the shredding pain, I moved into the train station. Casting a final look over my shoulder, I saw the armored soldiers still looking in my direction, but holding their places near the train.
The first thing I noticed was a giant hole in the train station’s ceiling. Roughly the size of a compact car, it was near the center of the building, and large planks of wood, stone, and insulation littered the floor around it. The sun poured in, a stark contrast to the muted lighting indoors, and it added to my pain, so I stumbled away from it. I found a bench a few feet from the huge board that listed the train schedules and tried not to plop into it. Pratfalls were a bad way to keep a low profile. There were more police in the station, along with men and women milling about in dark olive uniforms with some nasty looking rifles that had to be Austrian army. Movement within the station was orderly, except in the
area right where I had exited, where a huge area around the ticket counter was trashed.
The counter itself had been torn from the ground and thrown into the floor, much like what I had done in the hotel room in Milan. The air smelled like melted plastic, with a tinge of sulfur, and I found the source in the charred wreckage of a section of uncomfortable looking chairs, the seatbacks warped. Rows of chairs were strewn throughout the area, some snapped in half. One lay askew on its side, the rent metal giving the ten foot long row of chairs an L-shape, the short, mangled serif dangling at an odd angle. There were splotches of copper drying on the tiled floor.
I peeled my eyes away from scene, cradling my head in my palm and waiting.
The pain subsided after an inimitable amount of time. It wasn’t all at once or the tapering ebbs that cramps faded away to. It was more like when Atmosphero had electrocuted me, burning me to a cinder that left second degree burns as an aftertaste. The low burn stuck with me as I tested my legs. No stabbing pain, just an aftertaste I could deal with. Averting my gaze from the destruction, I found my train on the big board. It was delayed, along with every other train set to depart.
Grateful for the extra time, I got a plate of schnitzel and potatoes from a little food cart. I felt better the instant the food hit my gut, the burn in my legs and knees easing up as I meandered around the station. I returned to the food counter and had two more plates, and the pain subsided. I kept a careful distance from anything wearing a uniform, but they were content holding a perimeter, which made sense. I didn’t want to open my duffel and risk anyone seeing my designs, so I bought a coffee, found a small table, and watched people in the station.
Sitting alone among the moving throng, I noticed that what I had taken as orderly movement was actually shell-shock. There a shuffling quality to the way they walked and a vacant, zombie-like stare. It left me wondering what had happened. I didn’t try to step out of the train station for fear of being questioned, but I could tell the difference between people who, like me had debarked a train, and those who had come from outside by the way they moved.