by Ben Bequer
I tugged with all my strength, but succeeded only in pulling him closer to me. He wasn’t even resisting.
I looked down and saw his eyes through the goggles. He didn’t seem afraid at all. Something had shifted in our fight and I was ignorant to it. It wasn’t the pain that clued me in. I had been ignoring that constant buzz for a long while. It was the sense of being drained. I could feel my strength ebbing, and not in a natural way. This had nothing to do with lactic acid buildup in my muscles, nor Brutal’s attack. I felt Blackjack 2.0 reversing my hold on his arms.
I was about to say something when he tossed me off him, but I managed to keep my feet. He leapt up with an acrobatic grace I could never have managed; following up with a spinning kick so fast I never saw it.
The kick sent me hurtling through the air, but I was able to twist my lower body and engage my rocket boots, slowing my fall. I readjusted midair with the intent of getting some altitude when I saw the thruster burn of his rocket boots as he powered at me. He tackled me, his shoulder digging deep into my guts, engaging the boots in a flash of speed that sent us crashing through the window of a nearby office building.
He kept his tight hold as we hit the floor, using me to absorb the impact, propelling us across the room, my back digging up floor tiles and concrete until we collided with the wall. My muscles were on fire and I felt so weak. He stood up and I tried to match him, but couldn’t. He hefted me with ease and lobbed me through the roof of the building.
I spun awkwardly through the air as I reached the zenith of my ascent. I tried to bring my rocket boots to bear again, but my doppelganger was there. He had flown above me, but all I saw was the heel of his boot as he dropped from above. I barely had time to register the exploding pain in my face and chest as the axe heel kick drove me downwards, through one of Amsterdam’s dozens of stone bridges and into the canal.
Inky black water encompassed me, but I didn’t stop falling until my back hit the canal’s rough stone bottom. The shift in pressure played havoc with my ears, and my lungs burned from lack of oxygen. The water was foul, pushing up my nose and sneaking into my mouth. I’m not going to lie, I panicked, toggling the rocket boots and riding along the canal bed for a few feet before I angled my thrust and shot out of the water. I landed in a pile, gasping for air while sputtering to expel the water I had swallowed.
I felt the push from his boots as he landed next to me. I stood to meet him, and he fired a series of powerful kicks that caught me flush in the stomach and chest. I lifted my hands to block, but he adjusted with a snap kick to my knee that dropped my guard. He followed with a kick to my stomach that drove me to a knee, dry heaving.
“Why?” I managed, but he lashed out with a full-bodied kick that sent me skipping like a rock across a pond. I tumbled into a park warping a small metal gate and trampling grass, until I smacked into a statue. Robbed of my momentum, I lay there unable to move. My legs weren’t following commands, my muscles were twitching in disparate rhythm, my breath was coming in hitches, and I was tasting blood mixed with silt and scallops. I saw him flying towards me, growing larger in my vision, and tried to stand again. He landed a few steps from me, and I couldn’t even hold my arms up as he approached.
“I’m going to-” I started, but he didn’t let me finish, kicking me in the face, his shin landing squarely across the bridge on my nose, rocking me against the statue. The sound of stone cracking was a dull firecracker, and he took a step back at it toppled over onto me. It broke into another couple of pieces as it smashed onto my limp form.
He came up to me, and with his fists clasped tight drove an overhead punch into hunk of stone that lay over my face, cracking it into shards. Clods of dirt and grass swallowed me as the blow drove me into the soft earth. He dug me out and pressed me back against the base of the statue with his left hand and lined up a spinning kick that swiveled my head almost clean off my shoulders.
“Who are you?” I roared, but he didn’t respond, picking me up. My dead weight was nothing to him.
I thought he would answer his own question, but instead, he slugged me once, twice, three times. Each shot was a jackhammer, and I could feel my face warping under the pressure. One eye was swollen shut, but through the slit of the other, I could see blood coating his glove.
He let me go and I crumpled to the soft grass.
I wanted to say something, but my jaw felt like it was dislocated and a mouthful of congealed blood dribbled out.
He grabbed a piece of broken statue the size of a boulder, holding it overhead. I looked up and saw an open flap on his tactical rig. One thought mobilized in my addled, concussed brain, shining with the clarity of a lighthouse at midnight.
Incendiary.
With my last bit of remaining energy, I reached up, my hand slipping into that pocket with a familiarity earned through repetition. He swung the boulder at me, but my move disrupted his aim and I took the shot on my hip and back. It was excruciating, but I wasn’t dead and the rubble lay around me in harmless pebbles.
He stepped back, unaware of what I was doing. I turned to him and smiled the grenade in hand. His expression turned, and riding the last of my adrenaline, I closed the distance between us, driving my shoulder deep into his stomach. He braced and did not move, so with my left hand I grabbed his belt and pulled, creating a small gap in his waistband, and with the other, I engaged the grenade and dropped it down his shorts.
I hadn’t let go of him when it exploded in Thermate-TH3 fury, bathing both of us in flames. The wisps of my remaining clothing caught fire, but most of the blast caught his bare skin, searing it an angry, pulsating red. Blackjack 2.0 howled in pain, every inch of skin from nipple to knee a charred black wasteland.
“Oh, so you can speak,” I said, as he fell into a quivering heap. I didn’t wait to see if he recovered. Activating my rocket boots, I flew away, and did not look back.
The landscape zipped by as I flew away from my doppelganger, but I had no idea where I was. The phone and its GPS app were fragments in what was left of my last pair of decent jeans, and while my instinct was to ascend high enough to gather my bearings, the inconsistent flow of thrust coming from my right boot made that a dicey option at best. Flying and falling were normally not a chore for me, but it was taking an immense amount of effort, physically and mentally, to navigate in a straight line.
I found a tall building and eased into the landing, but my legs and knees burned as they absorbed the jolt. I bent at the waist; a light breeze causing sweat I didn’t even know was there to tingle. It was a balm to my aching body, but I couldn’t lose myself in the comfort. I was pretty sure my doppelganger was dead, but he had friends who were no doubt looking for me. Rising to my full height, I looked over the building’s edge and found a charnel house.
Hotel Sofitel was gone, swallowed in a crater that was no less than a thousand feet in diameter at the outside edges. It was all gone, and the crater was deep enough that water was leaking into it, resulting in a newborn lake right in the center of Amsterdam. That wasn’t the worst of it. Turning my gaze to the street, I found a small line of cars piled atop each other at odd angles. More than one had run through a building, and thick smoke made it hard to see, but they were there.
The bodies.
I jumped off the edge of the building, using the boots to slow my fall. I hit the ground, ignoring the pain, my gut clenching as I tried to keep the last of its contents from spilling onto the street. Smoke poured out of buildings up and down the street, the fires that birthed them raging unabated. I walked over to the first body I saw, a thin, older man wearing a suit that had rumpled from his awkward position. It looked like he had been mid-step when he died; his right leg was bent at an unnatural angle. I turned him over gently, straightening him into a less painful looking pose, though pain meant nothing to the guy anymore. Hazel eyes stared blankly at the sky, the pupils unreactive as I checked his throat for a pulse, knowing it was futile.
Pinching the bridge of my nose, one hand still
resting on the dead man, I wanted to fly away, back to Romania, anywhere else, really. But I made myself look. I stood and took in the scene, imprinting it on a memory that too often overlooked or ignored consequences. Dozens, probably hundreds of bodies littered the street, dead without trauma, their lives snuffed out in a flash of green, indiscriminate of criteria. I was responsible for this. Brutal was a bomb left out in the open, and given the chance to defuse it, I had pressed his buttons. It wasn’t bad enough that I antagonized him during our meeting, with no understanding of his abilities or temperament, but I had, in essence, attacked him.
Jason.
There was no chance he didn’t go after Jason. The hotel had been an hour away from the airport by cab, but I could cover it in less than ten minutes with the boots. I still had no idea where the airport was, though. I emptied my pockets, the cellphone coming out in three big chunks of useless glass and plastic. Desperation was starting to set in, and I was about to take off and find my own way when I looked down at the dead man. Without hesitation, I went through his pockets, finding the phone in his coat. It wasn’t even damaged. I entered the name of the airport and was rewarded with driving direction. All I needed was a direction.
It was so quiet on the streets that I heard the first sirens as a fleeting whine on the horizon as I lifted off. Orienting so that the helpful blue arrow was pointed the right way, I opened up, tearing across the sky. It took a full five minutes of flying before I saw the first emergency vehicle driving towards the carnage. There weren’t many, and I couldn’t imagine how they would deal with what they found. I saw the street in my mind’s eye, trying to pretend the burning in my eyes was from the wind.
The airport was spread below me, but it didn’t take much looking to find the small airstrip where the jet was parked. Stellian’s mouth hung agape as I landed next to the plane, clods of asphalt tearing up as I settled. “We’re going home,” I said, barely looking at him as I climbed the stairs.
Enjoying the palliative effect the plush leather seat had on my myriad of aches and pains, I checked the dead man’s phone, found the email app, and sent Bubu a quick message to let him know I was alright. My laptop was still open on the seat next to mine, though reaching for it felt like high level resistance training. Opening the web browser, I took the first steps towards finding my brother.
I found the first sign of him in an article from the Modesto Bee, just after he returned from the second Gulf War. He had earned the Purple Heart during a skirmish. The next sniff was on a tech blog linking him to a group of investors, which led to the founding of his first company, Falstaff-tech.
It was a call out to our dad, of nights long ago when he’d sit at the table after dinner, crack open the big Riverside Shakespeare and read to us. “The whole meaning of life is in here, boys,” he’d say. “One day I’ll find it.” Then he’d take us through the tales of old Hal, King of England, or the bloodshed of Coriolanus, or the madness of Macbeth. Jason and I would sit there, entranced as he brought the characters to life, altering his voice to differentiate between them, even feminizing his voice to portray the Ophelias and Desdemonas, wielding his fork like a sword when the protagonists fought.
Jason’s first company had focused on telephony, hardware for meeting rooms in particular, and he’d been bought out for a handsome amount; almost two billion dollars. He fell off the grid for a few years after that, marrying some woman, an Ohio girl named Luanne Andersson. An image popped up announcing the birth of a baby girl, and I found more pics on a Facebook page of what looked like a gender reveal party for a second child, also a girl.
He went dark again, probably enjoying his wealth and family. While I was testing arrows in the California desert, and subsequently getting thrown in prison, Jason was reentering the tech world with his battery initiative, working in conjunction with some of the Korean carmakers. I found him living in Connecticut with his main base of operations in Manhattan.
It was early afternoon in the Netherlands, which I think translated to sunrise on the East Coast. His home phone rang once, twice, before a female voice answered.
“I need to speak to Jason,” I said.
“He’s unavailable,” the woman said. She had an elegant voice, not what you’d expect from a housekeeper. It had to be his wife.
“It’s important,” I said.
I could sense her on the verge of hanging up, her frustration palpable across the miles between us.
“How did you get this number?”
“This is his brother,” I said. “I need to talk to Jason.”
The woman was silent.
“I know, you don’t believe me. How about you just humor me and put him on. Just for a second so he can tell me to go to Hell himself?”
“This is Dale?”
I realized I was nodding, though I didn’t know why.
“Yes,” I said and suddenly my voice broke. “Please, let me talk to my brother.”
As I fought off the tears, someone walked up to her. It was Jason, asking her who was calling.
“Please,” I said, but she was off the phone.
“Talk to him,” I heard her say in the distance.
I heard the phone change hands, suddenly terrified.
“Hullo?”
He sounded tired, nervous.
“Jason?”
He breathed as response.
“Jason, is that you?”
“Dale.”
I hung my head low, putting the phone on my lap a moment, unsure where to start.
“Dale?”
“Yeah, I’m here. Jason, you’re in troub-“
“They told me you were dead,” he said, his voice calmer than it should have been. “They said you tried to escape and a plane crashed.”
So that was the narrative. Big Bad Blackjack tried to escape and got all those good people killed. I wondered what they’d say about Amsterdam. Blackjack made a perfectly good villain all mad and made him kill a bunch of innocents.
“Then they came back and said you joined another group of villains. They said you were out there committing random acts of destruction.”
Scratch that, I hadn’t coerced Brutal into attacking those people. I used a high explosive arrow to try and murder him resulting in the loss of a city block and who knows how many lives. Goddamn you to Hell, Haha.
“It’s not true,” I said.
“Well, of course not,” he said. “Jesus, what a relief. Where are you? You know, they’re looking for you.”
“In more trouble,” I said.
I heard him cuff the phone and speak to someone in a muffled voice.
“Who is that?”
“Huh?”
“Who were you talking to?”
“That’s Luli,” he said. “She’s chastising me for giving you the third degree.”
I laughed, “I like her already.”
“You would,” he said. “She’s a good girl,” he added, for her favor. “Anyway, are you okay?”
“No,” I said. “And neither are you.”
Jason held the line a moment, muffling the phone while talking to someone.
“What happened,” he said.
I wanted to tell him everything, from the beginning, from the first day he had left, but there was no time. If Brutal was moving on him, it would happen fast.
“You’ll read about it in the morning papers. Basically, a psychopath threatened to kill you and your family if I didn’t meet him and-“
“Jesus,” he said.
“Yeah, it’s bad. I went to see this guy and then another...see, the guy they told you is me is actually another guy out there pretending to be me. There was this big fight, and the first guy – the one that threatened you, he kind of went postal. And the other guy…” I paused, realizing I sounded like a crazy person.
“What kind of crazy shit are you involved with, man?”
“It’s bad,” I repeated. “Have you heard of Brutal?”
He kept talking offline to his wife. I heard
him tell her to go upstairs and wake the girls, and to get the bag. I could tell he was walking through the house because after a moment the phone call got fuzzy and almost dropped. The only sounds for a long couple of seconds were his footsteps on wooden stairs.
“You still there?” he asked.
“Yeah.”
“Sorry, going to the safe real quick, and reception’s shitty in the basement. Keep talking, though.”
“You have a safe place to go?”
He reached the bottom of the stairs and I heard him flip a light switch.
“I do,” he said and was about to continue.
“No, don’t tell me,” I said. “Don’t tell anyone that you don’t absolutely have to. And don’t bring your phones.”
“No phones?”
“They might track you,” I said.
“Geez, man. What the hell have you gotten us into?”
I swallowed hard, knowing that my stupidity was what started all of this, and now my brother’s innocent family was paying the price.
“Dale?”
“Yeah,” I said.
“Are you okay?”
“No,” I said.
He paused a moment and I heard him working on the safe tumblers and cracking the thing open.
“Why don’t you come to Connecticut? Let me help you, man.”
“Wherever I go, this craziness will follow. I don’t want you and your girls hurt.”
“Abby and Susy,” he said.
“Susy?”
He laughed, “After mom. Abby is Lu’s mother’s name.”
“Wow,” I said. “I can’t see you with kids.”
“I’m good at it,” he said. “Least that’s what my wife says. I basically think what dad would do and go with that. Or what Emmet wouldn’t do,” he said and we both laughed.
“Last I heard that fucker’s still alive,” I said.
“No, he died while you were away. She did too. I went back and bought our old house, plan on fixing it back up, maybe finding a nice couple to sell it to.”