By the fall of 1991, six months after we had confessed our love for each other, she wanted out.
No. I don’t want to see this. Please…
She had tried to talk herself into staying, because she did love me. I knew that. But it wasn’t enough, and in the end I couldn’t be the hero she needed me to be. There were extremes that I would go to, to fight the bastards that ran organized crime. And I’m not talking about bravery. I’m talking about brutality. We had been fighting a losing war with the local mobs. Anytime we felt we were close to busting them, to exposing them, someone we needed would die. An informant, or a witness, the mob saw them dead by morning. I was determined to stop it. So I targeted the bosses. I made their lives hell. When that didn’t work, I resorted to beating them senseless. In a few cases, I overdid it a little. The last boss I killed, Vic caught me in the act. It didn’t matter that he had committed murders a hundred times worse. When Vic walked in on that, she saw me as one of them. A murderer. She was scared of me.
No…no…
But leaving me was complicated. We were expecting, the two of us. We had just learned of it. A child. Our child. But on that day, she came to me, deathly pale, and told me she couldn’t do it. She knew how I felt, that I would never consent, could never stay away from my own child, and so she had made the decision alone. The abortion clinic…
That’s ENOUGH!
Enough? No, not enough. Not nearly enough. I still blamed her, a big part of me hated her, wanted to hurt her. You see it, Red? You see what you did? You did it. Everything you tried to protect her from, you did it to her yourself.
Now go tell her, and pray it isn’t too late.
* * *
Amidst shouts and the exchange of energy blasts and explosions, I came to. Rolling over, I looked down and saw the riddled holes in my chest and the blood seeping out. But Jack’s bullets, designed to puncture skin and tear through flesh, hadn’t quite done their job. Like I said, I’d kept it secret even from my team. My skin wasn’t just skin-deep. It made sense to wear a bulletproof vest, sure. But Jack and the rest knew that I wouldn’t, because I needed my skin under no more than, say, a shirt, to use my extra senses. So I pulled a trick they never suspected: I grew my body armor under my skin.
Out of some deep reservoir I didn’t know I had, I shoved the pain aside, concentrated, focused in a way I had only tried once or twice and with an intensity I’d never felt before. Because this was new. While my skin had kept the entry wounds shallow, I was still in real danger from bleeding out.
I started growing the tissue that would push the bullets out ahead of it. Skin, but…well it was my skin. My skin, whatever the hell it is. I stopped bleeding, and one by one, sixteen bullets squeezed out of my torso like a kid popping zits, to clatter down onto the concrete. All the while, out there, explosions, the whine of energy weapons, screaming and shouting and cursing, the metallic taste of blood and the smell of hot metal and burning plastic.
I lay there for just a second. I was tired in a way you just can’t imagine, but I didn’t have time to be tired. You can rest when you’re dead. Oh. Too late. Out there the woman I had loved, the woman I still loved, was fighting for her life. I knew it had to be that dire, or she would never, ever have joined forces with my crew.
I grabbed the first thing that looked big, mean, and nasty, flipped a switch on the butt of it, and as it powered up, dashed out the door to throw myself down between Vic and Jack behind what was left of the barrier.
“We gotta stop meetin’ like this, darlin’,” I said, as Vic’s eyes jerked over to her right, saw me, widened with shock, and then went alight with joy. Even now I couldn’t resist a smart-ass quip.
Jack’s eyes flickered to me, and back to the fight. “I should have known,” he muttered.
Everyone you ask is going to tell you that they just weren’t prepared for their first sight of those Nazi armored troopers. Everyone is right. Nothing could have prepared us for this: Hitler’s wet dream. Serious. Everything that crazed housepainter could have thought up, everything any of his mad scientists could have thought up, all packaged into chromed and enameled, unstoppable, death machines. Now, after terrabytes of video and millions of photographs, hours of analysis and a phalanx of Eminent Experts, people are used to seeing them. But that first sight? It was more than a jolt to the gut. It was a kidney punch, a brick to the head and a karate kick to the face, all at once.
This is Evil and it has come to kill us all.
And damned if I was going to let it.
I aimed whatever it was that I was carrying at the Nazis, and pulled the trigger.
And nothing happened. I mean, it made a whoompf noise like a dragon farting—and yeah, I do know what that sounds like—but that was about it.
I cursed and was about to throw it away, when my skin told me that whatever my eyes said, there was something going on. Something…building. Pressure. There was a pressure wave, out in front of us. And the Nazis started to take a step.
And couldn’t.
It was like an obscene version of a street mime in the classic “walking against the wind.” They tried to move, and it was in slow motion, shoving against something, a wind that wasn’t there. They even leaned into it, as Vic and the rest sent a hell of incendiary and explosive rockets into their midst.
But my toy was only slowing them down. It wasn’t doing a thing about their arm cannons. And they let loose with those, forcing us to duck behind an increasingly smaller barrier, forcing me to move my gun out of harm’s way,
They got Duff; he was just a fraction of a second too late. One of the energy blasts took his head right off, vaporized it, and the headless body flopped down next to Jon.
I tried to get Vic’s attention, then—this might be the last time, the only time I’d be able to tell her how sorry I was, how sorry for everything, but there wasn’t any time, and she couldn’t have heard me over the blasts, the scream of the energy cannons, and Jon’s stream of curses.
We weren’t stopping them. We could slow them, but we couldn’t stop them. And if they hadn’t known about the Vault before, if they had only followed Vic and her crew in by accident, they surely knew what it was by now. They’d have everything that was in the Vault, of which the Inferno was only one part, and probably not even the most important.
The Inferno—
That was when I knew, I knew that the Inferno bomb was the key. We needed to let them in, let them past us, and blow the Vault with the Inferno—
I made a dive for Duff’s body, scrambling through his clothing, his pockets, trying to find the damn thing. My hand felt it in his vest and I looked up to see every Nazi trooper had his energy cannon trained on me. They’d blasted away the last of the barrier over Duff’s body, and now I was in the open. I heard the whine as the weapons all ramped up.
My skin wasn’t going to stop that.
You know how they say, in moments like this, everything moves in slow motion? It does. Just like some cheesy special effect—I watched as Vic launched herself at me. I felt myself falling over as she hit me. I slid sideways, behind more of the barrier, out of harm’s way.
I watched her glow white, then vanish in the crossfire of a dozen energy beams, taking the blasts meant for me.
The world stopped. She was gone. Forty-five heists, thirty-two meaningless trysts, six Nazi troopers and fifteen years too late, I had finally found peace with us, but I would never get to tell her. I would never get to hold her again, or see that winsome smile meant just for me. All the good that was Victoria Summers was gone in a flash of light, and my world crumbled in the wake of that blast.
I lost it.
I didn’t care anymore. I know I must have been screaming something, and it must have been coherent, because Jack, Jon, and the three OpOnes went wide and around, letting the troopers shoot their way past us and into the Vault itself, dodging blasts as they ran. I screamed at them, taunting them, moving, always moving, getting them to chase me deeper in. I saw Jon go down,
then two of the OpOnes. I didn’t care. All I cared about was living long enough, just long enough, to take those bastards out. Once they were well into the Vault, I turned and dove for the tunnel, somersaulting and rolling, coming to my feet and dropping the Inferno to the ground.
Jack and the last OpOne and I ran up the tunnel, through the delivery bay and made for the outside. The troopers were a lot slower. They turned as one, and started their slow march toward us. And I waited until they were right on top of that bomb.
“Ignition!” I screamed. And I hit the remote trigger and turned to watch as the other two hit the dirt.
They were right to call it “Inferno.” The Vault glowed a magnesium-flare white. The columns holding up the ceiling collapsed, and the whole building above fell down, down onto the troopers. An enormous cloud of rubble spewed out of the tunnel doors, slamming into us, throwing us back to land in battered heaps on the ground.
I blacked out again.
It couldn’t have been long.
When I came to, and crawled to my feet, the only sounds were the ticking bits of falling rubble, explosions in the far distance, and Jack’s feet hitting the pavement as he booked out of there.
Vic’s last OpOne and I stared at each other through the settling dust. I could tell what was on his mind. This was the infamous Red Djinni. And any other day, if I hadn’t been on the Ten Most Wanted List before, after blowing into the Vault I would have been.
On the other hand, compared to what had been in here with us, and what was plainly still out there now, I was a pretty pitiful minnow among the piranha. The world as we both knew it had just done a complete one-eighty. And I knew what Vic would have done…would have asked me to do.
“Look,” I said hoarsely. “Let me help you save whoever we can. Arrest me after. Okay?”
Wordlessly, he nodded, got to his feet, and offered me a hand up.
Chapter Four:
The End Of The Beginning
Mercedes Lackey, Steve Libbey, Cody Martin, Dennis Lee
Everywhere it was the same. The Nazis had miscalculated. We weren’t sheep. We weren’t going to bare our necks to the knife. If we went down, we would go down fighting.
Mind you, I say “we” in the larger sense, because I personally was groveling and shaking in a closet, too afraid to crack the door. I’m not proud of that. But in the larger sense…we were far from out for the count.
Echo Headquarters, Atlanta, Georgia, USA
Dull explosions cut through the roaring in Alex Tesla’s ears. Under the influence of Doppelgaenger’s injection, he lapsed in and out of a dreamlike torpor, but beneath the disorientation, his mind raced and tossed ideas into his addled consciousness.
Uncle Nikola. Echo. A ring of fire. His dead secretary. Eisenfaust. Doppelgaenger’s shifting features.
Lying on his side, facing the window, he watched a figure with a winged helmet dash through the sky, twisting and turning to avoid stabbing blue beams of destruction.
Mercurye: a part of his mind recognized the OpOne. Mercurye, the messenger.
A ring of fire, dissected by a Y. It seemed so familiar to him. He rubbed his eyes to wake himself.
Surprised, Alex stared at his hands. He could move! He levered himself up to sit in his chair. From the vantage point, he could see armored men spread in squads across the lawn of the Echo campus, directing their weapons at buildings and scattered flying metahumans. Mercurye drew a large part of the fire; he danced between the beams as if running through a forest.
He forced his hand to move across the desk and tap the buttons of the intercom for a line out. Static hissed out of the speaker. He thought he’d pressed the wrong button, but no channel gave him a signal. Mercurye zoomed past his window, a spry blur. The beams followed him; they tore at the masonry of the building. The window exploded inwards. Shards of glass rained on Alex. Adrenaline overcame his paralysis: he dove under the desk.
The sounds of battle were no longer muted. Cries, screams, gunfire and detonations reached his ears. Papers littered the floor from his earlier fall. A letter on Echo stationary lay inches from his face. Echo Corporate Headquarters, it read. 100 Echo Way, Atlanta, Georgia.
Atlanta. The intersection of I-75 and I-85 formed the Y in the ring: I-285, the Perimeter. His unconscious mind had already processed what Doppelgaenger hinted at: Better for you to live as we burn your little army and your city in a ring of cleansing fire.
It wasn’t merely an attack on the Echo facility. The Nazis had far greater designs.
He needed a messenger.
* * *
The last of the Nazi troopers had vanished through the hole in the cellblock wall, in pursuit of the prisoner who called himself Slycke. The Commandant and Valkyria had taken their squad—and the unconscious Doppelgaenger—back the way they came, towards the administrative wing of the facility. Ramona counted ten painful breaths and rose to her feet.
In order for the Commandant to stroll in as casually as a red-carpet celebrity, he must have brought a massive force to engage the Echo metahumans.
The guards around her were dead. Yankee Pride still had a weak pulse but looked like the ingredients for sausage. He would be of no use to her.
Her options were not encouraging: follow Slycke and his hunters out of the building, or trail the Commandant and that evil bitch.
This is where we earn our hazard pay, she concluded, making for the cellblock door.
The armored Nazi contingent was easy to follow. Ramona could have kicked over a table without being heard over the din of metal-shod feet and cannon shots.
Once they had cleared the cellblock and the checkpoints—each one a gruesome scene of bloody, broken guards—they turned to the left, the direction of the administration building. The majority of the metahumans present on the Echo campus would be in that building, filling out paperwork in their offices, researching leads, or eating a late lunch.
The only reason to march an army towards metahuman center, Ramona thought grimly, is if you’re looking for a knock-down, drag-out fight. She stooped to retrieve a pistol and her ribs sang a song of pain. She gritted her teeth against it.
The sounds of battle grew in volume until they drowned out the stomping soldiers. Peeking around the corner, she saw that the Commandant’s party had joined up with a contingent of troopers. Dozens. Her stomach flopped. She ducked back behind the corner and tried to calm herself.
A few stray bullets hit the wall behind the Commandant. The troopers returned fire with their shrieking arm cannons. The air shuddered with the blasts. Ramona forced herself to remember the layout of the administration building. The gunfire could only have come from one direction: south. Thus there had to be a group of Echo personnel in that direction. She could bypass the main corridor by cutting through the secretary pool.
But to do so, she would have to cross the corridor in plain sight of the Commandant and Valkyria.
There’s no hope for it, she decided. She screwed up her courage—what little she had left—and bolted for the door.
It stood half open, a relief. She slowed herself so that she could push it without making noise…and heard a woman’s voice bark at her in German.
“Aw, hell.” She dove into the roomful of cubicles.
Discarding stealth for speed, she sprinted between the cubicles and their Post-it notes, Dilbert cartoons and memos. Valkyria flung the door open behind her and unleashed a barrage of bullets over the cubes. The maze of cubes led Ramona into a dead end filled with copy machines and printers.
“Come back, damn you!” the German shouted.
She could hear the creak of leather as the woman drew close. Ramona unplugged the Ethernet cable from the printer. It would have made a good garrote…but she couldn’t find the terminus; it passed into the wall. She settled for the AC power cord and hid in a nook created by an overlong divider.
Valkyria entered the printing cubicle pistol first. “Come out, liebchen,” she said. “I will make it painless.”
Ramona lunged at her with the power cord in her fists. Valkyria squeezed off a shot so close to Ramona’s ear that it deafened her—but she got the cord around Valkyria’s neck.
Wrestling was where Ramona’s extra pounds worked to her advantage. She put a knee in the German’s back and leaned away. The woman tried to wedge her fingers under the rubber cord while flailing with her pistol. Ramona slammed her against the divider and then against the wall, but the metahuman bucked like a bronco.
“Hold still, damn you,” Ramona panted. The effort to keep the cord taut made her ribs feel as though they were cracking further.
Valkyria found her footing and lashed out at Ramona. Her strength broke and she staggered back. The metahuman clawed at her throat, gasping for air, but her eyes promised death to the detective.
Ramona grabbed the laser printer—a nice, heavy, outdated model—and threw it at Valkyria’s head with an enormous crash. The impact knocked the metahuman down. Ramona ran for it, digging the gun out of her pocket.
A wide, thin-fingered hand threw the door open in front of her. Her face collided with someone’s stomach.
Panic took over. She snatched the gun up to fire at the giant. The gun floated out of her hand and hovered in the air.
“Easy there,” a voice said above her. Ramona craned her neck. The speaker, whose stomach was in her face, was Southwind, one of the freakishly tall metahuman Four Winds. His large eyes with their oversized pupils made her feel as though the flying saucers had landed.
“Get her,” she managed to say.
With flawless timing, Valkyria leapt onto the top of a cubicle, pistol in hand. Ramona had a priceless glimpse of the German’s look of shock before Southwind sent forth a blast of telekinetic force that dashed her up into the dropped ceiling. Her legs dangled from the punctured drywall, twitching.
“You make it look so simple,” Ramona said.
“It’s not, believe me.” Southwind’s tone was dark. “We’re trying to flank the Nazis in the building. You know where they are?”
“I think so. Back that way.” She pointed with her chin. “At least twenty of ’em.”
Invasion: Book One of the Secret World Chronicle-ARC Page 12