Kingdom of Heroes

by Jay Phillips

  The Detective looked down at his blood covered shoulder and the new wound he had received the last time he had let someone live after they had tried to kill him. It wasn’t a mistake he would repeat anytime soon.

  “What’s the code to her door?” The Detective asked as he looked at the electronic keypad that opened and closed the cell doors.

  “Please don’t kill me,” the helpless guard begged.

  “The code.”

  The guard tried to free his hands one last time, but he was still trapped beneath the girth of the dead body on top of him. Eugene, The Detective couldn’t help but notice, continued to come in handy. The Detective bent down next to them; he reached across and ripped the helmet off of the large guard’s head. He placed his own gun against the guard’s bulbous forehead and asked one last time.

  “The code.”

  The guard swallowed hard. “Zero, nine, nineteen, eighty-six.”

  “Thanks,” The Detective said in return just before he pulled the trigger, blowing the large guards brains out the back of his head.

  The Detective stood up, silently satisfied with the large amount of carnage he had managed to create in such a short amount of time. This wasn’t his fault, he reminded himself. He gave them every chance to just make a nice simple trade, and everyone walk away the better for it. It could have been a whole lot easier.

  He held up his left hand and inspected the new found opening he had in it. The bullet had passed cleanly through, leaving an almost perfectly round, bullet shaped hole in its wake. Blood poured from the edges and ran down his arm, soaking his coat sleeves in crimson. Didn’t matter, he thought. It just matched the rest of his blood soaked clothes.

  With Peterson’s gun still held firmly in his right hand, he walked over to the keypad and began typing in the code the large dead guy in the floor had just given him.

  Zero.

  Nine.

  One.

  Nine.

  Eight.

  Six.

  With a swoosh sound straight from an old episode of some crappy sci-fi television show, the door slid open. Emily looked up from her chair. “What in the hell took you so long?” she asked as a huge smile covered her beautifully disheveled face.

  _______________________________________________

  “Sorry about that,” The Detective said in return. “I got a little distracted with the whole shooting people thing. It happens.”

  She looked up at him and smiled. Her expression seemed to light up the whole room, making everything he had gone through to get here more than worth it. She was just as beautiful as she was the last time he had seen her, some twelve hours or so earlier, but she looked as if she’d been put through the ringer. Her face was stained with the tears she’d obviously been crying, and the front of her white dress was stained with blood, presumably from the nose bleeds she had told him about after she had helped him with his little encounter with Light and Dark. But despite the blood, despite the tear stained face and the disheveled hair, at that exact moment, she was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen.

  She sat in the middle of the room in a straight back chair. Both her hands and feet were free; she didn’t appear to be restrained in any way. Not that he thought she would be, not with armed guards outside of her door and all. She was wearing the same clothes she had worn earlier that day; not that he could say anything; he hadn’t changed clothes since getting involved in this whole fucked up mess. With the gun still in his right, he walked over to her and held out his bloody left hand for her.

  “Well,” he began as he looked down at her. “Are we staying here all night or are we leaving?”

  She smiled again. “I didn’t want to be presumptuous and just assume you were going to take me with you.”

  She reached up and took his hand, and he pulled her out of the chair. She leapt to her feet, landing against him with her arms wrapped around his neck. She squeezed him as hard as Fire had when they first met some twenty-four hours before. Hugging, he assumed, must run in the family.

  As she squeezed him, her delicate arms wrapped around his neck, she playfully inserted one hand into his hair just below his hat; he leaned in close to smell her. She still smelled like honey. And then he caught it: another scent in the air, just past them, located a few feet past the chair where she had been sitting. It smelled like sweat and male pheromones, with the slightest hint of metal and a slight twinge of gunpowder.

  Without thinking, he brought his right hand up and quickly aimed at a point just past the chair, to the exact spot where he smelled the telltale signs of a man holding a gun. He pulled the trigger.

  Emily let out a little scream as the gun went off next to her head, looking up at him before turning to see what he had just fired at. They both watched in silence as a man suddenly appeared from behind the chair, a fresh bullet hole in the center of his forehead and a pistol in his hand, a hand that slowly fell to his side. He dropped straight back, landing hard on the white floor.

  With both of her arms draped around his left one, the two of them walked over to the chair and looked down at the now dead man who hadn’t been there before. Emily turned herself ever so slightly, seemingly to get a better view at her previous company.

  “What the hell just happened?” she asked, staring down at the man in disbelief.

  “Invisible man,” The Detective answered as he too stared down and silently congratulated himself on his own excellent aim. This guy, this invisible man, wasn’t dressed like the rest of the guards in the building with the whole storm trooper swat team get up; he had been wearing a nice suit, marking him as a higher level employee than Peterson and Eugene. Probably, The Detective thought, another one of The Agent’s private stash of assassins.

  Emily looked up at The Detective. Without her shoes, he was almost a good eight or ten inches taller than her. “That’s the fucker who brought me here, the one who took me at the hospital. How long had he been in here with me?”

  The Detective broke free of her embrace for a moment, placing the gun inside of his coat as he bent down next to the dead man. He turned the body’s head to the side and looked behind the ear; there was a small metallic patch, just like the one Barren had been wearing. “He had probably been in here the entire time you were. Look.” He pointed out the patch.

  “Telepathic inhibiting patch,” she replied. “Figures. Pammy always wears them when she doesn’t want me to know what’s going on. So how did you know he was here?”

  The Detective stood back up. “I smelled him.”

  “Handy talent you have there.”

  “Tends to be.”

  “What was he doing? Just standing here waiting on you?”

  The Detective sniffed the air around them, just to make sure there were no other unnoticed visitors. “Well, he was waiting on me to get here, but I doubt I was his target. The Agent has made it clear he wants to see me in person. He was probably here for you.”

  “Me?”

  He nodded. “He was probably here just in case I made a run to rescue you. The Agent made the path in here as easy as he could, just three inept guards, but he kept this guy here for when I made it. I’m pretty sure invisible boy was here to keep you from leaving with me.”

  “He was here just to kill me?” she asked, a look of disbelief covering her pretty face.

  “Seems that way. If you were killed while I stood here helplessly and watched, The Agent knows I wouldn’t even think twice about coming up there.”

  “You’re in the building. Why didn’t he just have you taken up by the guards?”

  The Detective shook his head from side-to-side. “I don’t know. But for some reason, it seems like he needs my coming for this confrontation to be of my own free will. I have to come unforced.”

  “There has to be a reason,” she replied.

  “It’s The Agent,” he said in return. “There’s always a reason.”

  “So,” she began while nervously looking around the room, “anybody else in he
re or is it just us?”

  He stepped next to her and looked down into her eyes. They were a rich brown, almost a milky color, deep and intoxicating. He liked them. “Just us.”

  She put her arms around him and pulled him against her. “Here I am,” she said as she looked up, “waiting on you all day, patiently sitting in that chair, just hoping you were going to show up. You finally get here, and you spend all of your time walking around shooting people. I am feeling horribly neglected.”

  “What can I do to make it up to you?” he asked with a smile.

  “This.” She reached up and grabbed each side of his face, pulling his lips to hers. She tasted like honey and tears. She passionately kissed him, not stopping until they both had to come up for air. “Damn,” she said, a huge smile on her face as she looked into his eyes. “I have been wanting to do that all day.”

  “You know we have to get out of here,” he said reluctantly, knowing the words would break the spell of the moment.

  She audibly sighed. “I know. Do you have a plan to get us out of here?”

  “Nope,” he answered as he reached down and grabbed her hand.

  “Then what are we going to do?”

  He smiled his trademark crooked smirk. “We’re going upstairs to pay the Supreme Chancellor a visit.”

  _______________________________________________

  Emily looked at him, a look of complete confusion covering her pretty face. “We’re going to see The Agent? Are you insane?”

  “Yes and probably,” The Detective answered, his smirk still firmly in place.

  “Why would you think this is a good idea?” She looked him up and down, just then seeming to notice the new hole in his left hand. She picked it up and looked it over, turning his hand from side to side as a stream of blood dripped from his palm. “My god, man, how much blood have you lost?”

  “A lot,” he answered, watching her as she examined his hand. She let it go and pushed his coat away from his shoulder, seemingly to get a closer look at the wound there.

  She looked up at him, her face suddenly filled with fear and concern. “You need a doctor.”

  “It’s not going to happen,” he said with a smile.

  “You are going to bleed to death if we don’t do something.” The look on her face changed ever so subtly from fear to anger.

  “Where are we going to find a doctor?”

  She turned away from him and walked back towards the once invisible assassin. She bent down and began running her hands through the dead man’s pockets. “We have to get out of here,” she said as she pulled a handkerchief from the inside of the corpse’s coat. She turned and walked back towards him. “Give me your hand,” she commanded, her voice full of a fire he didn’t realize her capable of. He held out his hand for her, and she began wrapping the cloth around his wound.

  “Where are we going to go” he asked as she worked. “There are only two ways out of this place. The elevator only goes up or down. If we go down, we have about two hundred heavily armed guards waiting on us, and I guarantee they’ll be a lot more efficient than the three you had outside of this room.”

  “And up?” she asked without looking away from his hand, trying her best to tie the handkerchief around the still bleeding hole. “What does up give us? The Agent is waiting on you. It seems like this whole damn thing, me, Adam, Pammy, Ice, everything, was just to get you to come here. You’re just going to walk right into that, knowing it’s exactly what he wants? You‘re willing to let him kill you just to get answers?”

  He smiled at her, trying his best to look as reassuring as possible. He doubted it would make a difference. “I know it’s a trap; I know it’s what he wants, but what choice do we have? All those guards downstairs have one purpose, and that’s to keep me from leaving. I have ten bullets and a keen sense of smell; it’s not going to do us much good against that many. If we go up and your buddy actually shows up with a way to kill Rogers, we are at least giving ourselves some slight semblance of a fighting chance.”

  She finished tying the cloth around his hand, and she looked up at him and smiled. “You’re quite cute when you’re attempting to be reassuring.”

  “I try.”

  “I know,” she said as she looked closer at his shoulder before pulling the coat back over the wound, as if she was silently saying there was nothing she could do about it. “So you’re basically telling me that downstairs is a quick death and upstairs is a slow one. Not much of a choice, is it?”

  He reached up and stroked her hair with his uninjured right hand. “No, not really.”

  She grabbed his hand and pulled it to her mouth, placing it against her cheek before bringing it to her lips and kissing his palm. “Then I guess it’s decided,” she said as she brought his hand down to her side, her own hand locked firmly around his fingers. “But if the walk to the elevator is our one and only stroll together, I at least get to take my time.”

  “Absolutely,” he replied as they began walking toward the door of her cell. “For the next five minutes or so, I’m all yours.”

  She squeezed his hand and looked up at him. “What more could a girl ask for?”

  “A proper date?”

  “Oh, I’m getting that date,” she added with a smile. “That is one promise you are not getting out of.“

  They walked out of the cell and into the area where he had encountered the guards. All three bodies still laid where he had left them; blood and bits of brain covered the rest of the floor along with parts of the walls. She stopped to readjust her footing, trying her best to walk through the carrion without getting any on her bare feet.

  “So,” she began to ask, “do you leave a mess like this everywhere you go, or has this just been a special occasion?”

  He sighed. “I’ve just been having a bad day. Everywhere I’ve gone today, someone has tried to kill me. I’m beginning to take it personally.”

  “Maybe you rub people the wrong way.” She pulled his hand up and kissed the back of it as they passed the guard station where he had made Eugene his human shield. The smell of ham still filled the air. “I hear that you can be a bit of a jackass.”

  “I’ve heard that too, but I never believed it.”

  She laughed lightly as she reached over with her free hand and took his left one. The blood had soaked through the cloth and was dripping on the floor, leaving a trail behind them. “Did it hurt?” she asked.

  “When I fell from Heaven?” he answered as they walked, his smirk firmly in place.

  “You wish,” she said in return. “It’s a good thing you’re handsome. No, jackass, when the bullet passed through your hand.”

  “Didn’t feel a thing,” he answered. “Still don’t, and I won’t until my adrenaline subsides.”

  “No chance of that happening anytime soon.”

  “Nope,” he said in return. He thought about telling her how all of the extreme amounts of adrenaline pumping through his system was going to burn out every organ in his body, killing him slowly every time he got overly excited, but he remembered she had been in his head for most of the day. He doubted he had any secrets left to tell.

  “You don’t,” she added with a smile.

  He shook his head from side-to-side. “You really have to stop doing that. We can talk in person now; we don’t have to do the whole poking around in my head trick anymore.”

  “Sorry,” she said, though it was obvious she found it amusing. “Like I told you earlier today, proximity makes it worse, almost uncontrollable. Pammy always wears one of those patches behind her ears.”

  He looked down at her as they walked, and he was awash with a sudden feeling of how right it felt, walking hand-in-hand with this beautiful woman, knowing that this was most likely the only time they would be able to do this. As he stared at her, he was reminded of the fact that he had just met her this morning, and this was officially just the second time they had actually laid eyes on each other.

  Yet inside, within his mind, in hi
s emotions, it felt as if they had known each other for a lifetime, as if they had been together, like this, as two people connected at the hip, for years, not the mere moments it had been in reality.

  “It’s the psychic connection I made with you today,” she said without looking up. “I was inside of your mind longer than I’ve ever been in anyone’s. What we feel right now is what’s leftover from that link; it left us connected in ways other people could never understand.”

  He looked down at her as they walked. “So it’s not real? It’s just residue?”

  “No, it’s real.” She smiled up at him, the same sweet but tragic smile he had seen in the truck earlier when she had been nothing but a figment in his thoughts. “We were in each other’s minds in ways that defy imagination. I know things about you I would bet no one else knows, and the effect works both ways. You were a part of my mind as much as I was a part of yours. What we feel is real; it’s just been amplified and taken to an extreme.”

  “That’s good,” he replied with a slight chuckle. “I was afraid that you were still just my argumentative imaginary friend. Maybe all of this is just in my head, and I’m still locked up in that containment unit; perhaps all of this is just one last fever dream before I die.”

  She looked up at him, staring at his face with her big brown eyes. “You could only be so lucky. Well, now that I think about it, a dream might be the only way you could land a hot girl like me.”

  “Now that hurts,” he said as he shook his head in disbelief. “Maybe I should just leave you here, then go upstairs and get killed all by myself. That would teach you a lesson I won’t soon forget.”

  She laughed seemingly as hard as she could, squeezing his hand tighter with every breath. “I like you. You’re funny. And no, you’re not leaving me anywhere. We’re in this together now, so Mister Detective, you are stuck with me.”

  He looked up in time to see the elevator in front of them. Their one and only stroll together had gone by way too fast, leaving them standing in silence in front of the closed doors, neither of them wanting to be the one to push the button. They didn’t have to. The doors slid open on their own.