by Ben Bequer
I didn’t have much time in preparation for this fight, so I overcompensated in both ways. I never figured to have an emergency burn like this, so I made the control surfaces large and stable and the throttle touchy.
At full throttle, I broke Mach in a second, according to the onboard computer, tearing through Tiny on my way to the back wall. It was good that the walls were mountain rock; otherwise I might have broken through, my chaotic flight doing more damage. Instead, I bounced off the thick stone and crashed hard into the floor.
The T-Rex wasn’t designed to be friendly. I figured I could have enabled a relay transmission from my suit, and programmed it to ignore that signal, but it would have taken time I didn’t have. It turned, revealing the cave-like hole I had made in its chest, with dozens of wires sparking from the damage.
It crossed the room in two giant steps, relying less on speed than on length. I tensed as the shadow of its foot eclipsed the light around it and then stomped me. The clawed foot was large enough to engulf, as the impact drove me deep into the soft, wet earth. I felt it bear down with all of its weight, and the air was driven from my lungs as the foot ground into me, creating little swirling pools of water as I was mashed deeper into the dirt.
Thick mud clogged my ears, and all I could hear was the sound of my rushing pulse and the creak of my bones as they strained under Tiny’s weight. When it felt like my frame had been compressed to it maximum, the pressure relented. Light bled back into my world as Tiny ran towards the others, his tail swaying in stride.
Superdynamic’s bones passed the test, but I fought for air as I got to my knees, feeling the pain wearing across my chest and legs. Tiny opened and closed its gaping maw, like a pelican does to adjust a fish in its mouth, positioning it for an easy swallow. Inside the T-Rex’s mouth I saw a small figure, fighting against the creature’s tongue.
It was Epic.
He had the tongue, a massive bulbous thing, pinned under one arm, and I watched him pull it taut and chop down on it with his free hand. Blood and slime –Tiny’s hydraulic fluid- drenched him, and though the beast could feel no pain, its roar was a throaty keen. Dipping its snout, Tiny’s spindly arms clawed inside its mouth, but failed to dislodge Epic, who hurled the severed tongue away and flailed away inside the creature’s mouth. Tiny’s head shook from the beating, giving the other heroes gathered in the room a needed respite.
Gryphonette was the only one standing, checking on the unconscious Miss Starlight, The Peacekeeper’s partner also clad in patriotic red and white regalia, and a bare chested black man with a musculature so defined it ceased being human and slipped into caricature. Neither moved, but I read their heartbeats with a quick switch through the infrared spectrum.
“Bubu, divert some tubes this way,” I said. “Get them out of here.”
“I’m offline bro, almost everything is down while the system reboots.”
Tiny was shaking his head in wide, vicious arcs still trying to shake Epic loose.
“I don’t know why,” he said, apparently monitoring the Cretaceous room.
“Damn,” I said and threw myself at the monster.
Tiny was busy trying to eat Epic, and I figured grabbing the tail was a good place to start. Of course, I built and programmed the monster so naturally it was ready for that tactic, spinning in a quick half circle. It connected with a meaty whap and I was sent across the room, splashing into the marsh and skipping like a stone.
“Bubu, I need your help here,” I said.
I flew back to the fracas, hovering over Tiny to get a better angle of attack, and saw Epic’s herculean struggle inside the T Rex’s mouth. Few teeth remained intact, and the maw consisted mostly of empty sockets leaking fluid in a greasy waterfall. I didn’t see the punch, but part of Tiny’s lower jaw shattered, buckling outward. The shift in footing left Epic off balance and he slipped. Tiny spread his jaws wide and canted his head, ready to swallow him.
I felt someone near me and turned in time to avoid Gryphonette’s attack, her claws slicing the air I had just occupied as I cut thrust and fell. Her gryphon form was beautiful and terrifying, hovering on the occasional sweep of massive feathered wings. Slitted yellow eyes stared at me with merciless intent.
Those wings were good for flying, but she didn’t look that maneuverable. Diving short, I kicked in the thrusters, she tried to match me, and left her belly open for my abrupt acceleration. Leading with my fists, I speared her in the guts, the flesh of her altered shape rippling with the impact. Her screech pierced the cavernous chamber, halting even Tiny’s attack for a moment. She fell to the ground in a heap, reverting to human form as she did. I stayed airborne as she stirred, clutching at her midsection. She tried to stand, managing to find a sitting position before taking a deep breath. Her eyes turned to me, but her head perked away, listening to something I couldn’t hear. Her face twisted in pain as she shifted to her gryphon form, and I readied for another go at her, but she scooped the fallen heroes into her huge talons and took off, flying up through the hole Bamma had used me to punch in the ceiling.
I watched her go, then opened the throttle and accelerated into Tiny’s mouth, knocking the monster back on his haunches. I thought he might go down, but I felt his backwards arc stop suddenly and realized he had used the tail to keep balanced. The maw was wider than I could spread my arms, so I grabbed one ruined side of Tiny’s jaw and planted my feet shoulder width, holding the mouth open. The T-Rex arched his back in rage, but I managed to hold, feeling the structure giving way around me. Servos and motors ratcheted above, the smell of smoke joining the other acrid stenches inside the mouth, but I held firm. Tiny’s roar filled the hollow chamber, a lungless cry projected by a speaker grill, and I matched it with a defiant challenge.
There was a tug on my rig as Epic got to his feet. His expression was skeptical, but he could easily have laid into me and didn’t. Steadying himself, he opened his mouth to speak when our world jerked as Tiny’s head started whipping from side to side. Epic was thrown loose, his enormous hand tangled in my rig, holding his own mass in a firm grip.
“What are you doing?” he said, his calm tone belied the fact that he hung twenty feet off the ground, his only handhold a villain’s costume.
“Trying to stop this thing,” I managed pressing hard against the joint. The maw was starting to hyper extend, and I edged along the jaw line, forcing it wider still.
“What?” Epic said, letting go of me as the T-Rex stopped trying to shake us out. Tiny backpedaled and reached into the mouth with one of its legs, balancing its bulk on one leg and tail while it raked at us with its huge curved talons. Epic was covered in dirt, mud and hydraulic fluid, but he looked unharmed. Even his suit, while dirty, was undamaged.
“We’ve lost control of the castle,” I said as a giant talon hooked me. While not sharp enough to cut me, the force was immense and I dug finger holds into the metal frame of Tiny’s jaw. I had built Tiny to be as simple as we theorized actual dinosaurs to be, the idea of a giant, intelligent carnivore unleashed on the world was too radical, even for me. This saved me because even as he was trying to force me out, Tiny was still trying to eat me. Though I held his jaws at bay, the downward pressure kept me braced, making it nearly impossible for the talon to eject me.
“What’re you talking about?” he said, throwing a giant fist at the toe, cracking the joint and sending the whole foot flying at an awkward angle.
“I told you,” I said as he came along side me, “This place was designed to fight Mr. Haha and his team.”
He nodded, helping me press upward.
“They’re here,” I said, hearing the jaw joints grinding and about to snap.
Tiny wasn’t going to go down without a fight, though, reaching at us with his clawed foot again. The first try knocked Epic on the mouth’s bottom.
“Damn,” he said, and, before he could stand, Tiny swiped him out and sent him flopping down to the marsh.
With Epic my task would have been simple, peel the
jaw far back enough to reveal Tiny’s processor core. Destroy that and the T. Rex becomes a very sophisticated pile of trash. I tried to conjure another plan, and couldn’t come up with one, so I bore down hard on the jaw and flexed every muscle like a body builder in competition. Nothing happened. My limbs, legs, and trunk were as stretched as far as I could manage. I cursed under my breath, then heard an arrow strike the roof of Tiny’s mouth. I didn’t need to look to know what it was.
The Nuke.
I almost laughed as it erupted, bathing me in fire.
* * * *
The last person I expected to find helping me up was Epic. Yet, there he was brushing clumps of muddy sand off my shoulders. Tiny no longer existed, the synthetics used to animate him reduced to ash and cinder that floated through the room like grey snow.
“Who are they?” he said, gesturing to the quintet that approached us through the marsh.
“The real enemy,” I said in a concussed mumble, disoriented and nauseous. My whole body felt baked, my bare skin had taken on a red leathery texture that I didn’t have a good feeling about. My gear was gone, even the contacts had burnt out of my eyes, though they were useless without the wrist computer, and its corpse clung stubbornly to my wrist by a threaded strap. I tore it off and realized that Superdynamic’s suit remained untouched beneath. Maybe not every inch of skin had been tanned. “Where are the rest of your people?”
“I had them pull back. They were ambushed while dealing with your funhouse, and there were a lot of casualties.”
“I warned you.”
“Don’t be an I-told-you-so.”
“Do I still have my hair?” I asked, and Epic laughed.
“That was a hell of a blast,” he said. “How do you do it?”
"He’s a sponge for pain, the worse the beating, the stronger he is when he recovers," said a voice from the past, a shadowy image filling the remaining screens, cracked from the blast. But amid the chaos, I didn't need to see the big stupid rabbit head on the monitors to know that Haha had found me.
They came through a swirling darkness that dominated the Cretaceous room. Haha had chosen the worst types for his new team. Volatile, powerful, bloodthirsty, they were exactly the kind of people Haha thought represented the median of the super community. Most of them had been incarcerated at Utopia, freed when Zundergrub broke in to murder me. What the robot had sold them, how he convinced them to set aside their differences and co-exist as a team might serve to create a new branch of psychology.
Leading them was another version of me. We were about the same height and our frames were disconcertingly similar. It shouldn’t have surprised me that Haha had more than one person filling my role. I was the star after all. His gear was different than what his dead friend had worn in Amsterdam. It followed my basic style, black on black with the hood and half cowl, but where mine was built from basic things you could find out in the world, this guy was sporting high tech armor. Light reflected off of micromesh plates that kept the suit from being too bulky, but thicker plates lay just beneath, taking the place of the tactical rig, a foundation that would reinforce the whole. His bow was a work of art, handmade yew, the bow I wanted to make for this fight, and his quiver bristled with shafts.
To his right was Alacrity, known for her tear through Europe’s major banks during the late 2000s. Apogee had put an end to her wanton violence and sent her straight to Utopia in a fight that was caught on video and made the both of them famous. Even slowing down the footage, though, it was hard to see more than raging blurs edging into each other. Alacrity was a petite girl, blonde with blue eyes of Scandinavian origins if memory served. She shuffled a couple of steps ahead, then fell back in line with her mates, and it took me a second to realize that it was all happening at super speed. She was literally blurring into and out of the moment, as if her speed was uncontainable.
Pity Apogee wasn’t here. Their mutual hatred for one another was intense. They couldn’t help but peel off and wage their own war between heartbeats and blinking eyes. In the moments where she was slow enough to see, she smiled with dark glee. She was confident. They all were and with reason.
The shadows seemed to coalesce around them for a moment, before racing away in thoroughbred streaks that swirled around, playing havoc with my vision. At the center of the phenomenon was Stygian Black, carried by an amorphous collection of darkness that drew from shadows around it, inky wisps burning off of it like engine exhaust. He’d cut a swath through Middle America, destroying property and murdering innocents at random. Paladin caught up to him and, after a battle that had left indelible scars along miles of arable farmland, killed him. Well he had been reported dead, but I was living evidence that those reports could be inaccurate. He could animate shadows, control darkness, and based on the gooseflesh springing up on my bare, scorched skin, screw with the temperature.
Silverback occupied his own space, and not even Stygian Black’s shadows touched him. No one knew if he was a gorilla imparted with human intellect or a human that had been turned into an ape, but few beings could match his strength or stamina. The only thing he wore was a thick leather baldric looped across his impossibly wide chest, a pair of naked swords slung through the metal rings across his back, scraping against each other as he walked. They were sized for him, fifteen feet long, and four feet wide, the hilts long enough to be baseball bats. Nicked and battered, the blades could easily be mistaken as rusty, but I knew that blood dried into a similar color. They looked dull, but with his strength, they didn’t need to be sharp.
Rounding out Haha’s team was the horror known as Bloodstrike. Tall and beautiful with ebony skin and long lashed dark eyes, she could grace the cover any magazine, but it was all a lie. She was an elemental entity who possessed the bodies of those she killed. The skin she was wearing could have belonged to anyone. A cipher, she was the only villain in the room who had never done time in Utopia. She had never been caught, and her body count included many prominent and powerful heroes.
* * * *
I heard the whisper of leather pulled taut, and realized Epic had clenched his huge hands into fists. He caught my eye, and I understood why all the heroes fell over themselves to work with him. He, of course, knew all of the villains, save my doppelganger. Their combined list of crimes dwarfed anything I had ever done, and individually, they were each at least as powerful as either of us. He was in danger, and worry creased his face, but remorse and understanding were etched just below the surface.
“Why are you here?” he said, stepping just in front of me. He put a barring arm between Haha’s team and I, herding me slightly behind him. “Let’s talk this through.”
“I want to solo the pretty boy,” Silverback said, his gravelly English a lot better than you’d expect out of a twelve-foot tall ape.
“We don’t want you,” my doppelganger said, as he stepped forward, bow drawn. His voice was heavily modulated, but awful similar to mine. “If you want to live, you can go.”
Epic turned back to me, his brow furrowed.
I shrugged, “I’d do what the man says. They’re doing your job for you.”
“Why do you look like him?” Epic asked, pointing at my copycat, unimpressed by the arrow aimed at his face.
“It’s simple,” I said, stepping around him. “This guy is copy of me, and the others are analogues of my old group. Mr. Haha is nothing if not sentimental. Stygian Black is supposed to represent Dr. Zundergrub, Alacrity is Cool Hand Luke. Silverback is Mr. Haha, of course. Pity he didn’t have the courage to show up to the party.”
“And Bloodstrike,” Epic said.
I stared at her lifeless face, “She’s Influx.”
Epic put it all together and nodded. I suppose he wasn’t as daft as I had given him credit for. He stepped forward again, undaunted. “Goddamn, you were right.”
I shrugged.
“You’re making a huge mistake,” he said to the villains.
Blackjack held the arrow back, his expression hidden behi
nd the hood and half cowl.
“See, this guy’s coming with me and that’s that,” Epic continued.
“You’re overmatched,” Blackjack 2.0 said.
“I’m Epic,” he said. “I’m never overmatched.”
“Go, man,” I told him, but he shook his head.
“It doesn’t matter what you say, I’m not leaving without Blackjack,” he said. “As far as you, I’ve never seen you, but think hard and fast. I’m Epic, kid, and in a second I’m going to be in your face.”
“That’s not bad,” I said. “Famous last words by Epic; ‘I’m going to be in your face’. Mine will probably be a loud, bloody squeal as they rip me apart.”
“Please tell me you’re not with them,” he said, his expression flat.
I didn’t have the chance to answer as a thunderclap shook the room, followed by a hurricane force gust of wind that swept the villains back a few steps. Only Silverback stood his ground, plumes of smoke and dirt washing over him. He weathered it without expression.
Once the smoke cleared, Apogee stood beside me.
“Sorry for being late,” she said. “I was tied up.”
She was breathing heavy, dragging an unconscious figure swathed in black.
Underworld.
She had beaten him in his own netherworld. I took her in, sweaty, dirty, disheveled, and felt my heart swell. For the first time, I felt like there was a chance, like I could do anything. She cocked an eyebrow in my direction and I favored her with my most feral smile. She returned it in kind and let Underworld slip from her grasp.