by Logan Jacobs
What they did have, however, were an axe, a hammer, and two long knives, respectively.
As the first one with the axe reached Elizabeth, he swung at her, and she dropped and slid between his legs. Then she reached back to grab one of his ankles and yanked, which caused him to fall on his face. I quickly planted my foot on top of his wrist and yanked the axe out of his grip. Then I swung and cleaved his skull open. The bone fractured widely enough that the blade didn’t even get stuck, and then I yanked it out easily and slick gray coils of brain matter slithered out awash in blood.
Meanwhile, Elizabeth reached the guy with the hammer who seemed to be faster and more coordinated than the first thug. As the two of them danced around each other, the third thug at the end of the hallway suddenly pulled out a knife and made as if he was going to throw it at my lover.
My suit would stop the blade if it hit her in the torso, but there was always a risk he could hit her in the head, so I fired a laser shot that seared a hole straight through his forehead and out the other side.
The hammer guy saw what happened to his friend and took off running down the hallway, and I was in hot pursuit. The guy was short, a bit smaller than me, but fast as hell and clearly trained.
So I raised my arm and pointed it at him to power up the laser that would drill a neat hole straight through his head just like his buddy. I knew from the plans that there were no rooms past the end of the hallway, they were all located along the sides of the hallway, and there were no SWAT team members posted there either since there weren’t any exits or entrances there. And unlike a bullet, the laser couldn’t ricochet and was much easier to aim with greater precision, so I didn’t think I was endangering anyone except the one person that I wanted dead. But just as the red beam streaked out, he ducked, and it zipped over his head all the way down the hallway until it vanished through the wall.
I shut off the laser. It traveled at the speed of light, so there was no possible way that the guy could have seen the red flash in time and ducked. He must instead have correctly anticipated some kind of projectile from my gesture of raising my arm. Which made him much smarter than the average supervillain’s henchman. And now he knew about the laser.
His reaction to that was to jump over right up against the wall. There were several doors along the left side of the hallway where he was, so he must have guessed that I wouldn’t risk using the laser again in that direction, since I could end up accidentally hitting hostages if there were any in the left side rooms.
Instead, I swung at him with the axe that I had taken off the first dude. He ducked, and my axe wedged itself into the plaster of the wall while my opponent wound up to smash me with the hammer. I twisted aside just in time, and the hammerhead still touched me, but it glanced harmlessly off my ribs instead of crushing them. Then I came in with a right hook that connected juicily with the right side of his skull.
If I hadn’t been wearing my turbo-charged force-amplifying gloves, it might have been a dazing blow. But since I was wearing my turbo-charged force-amplifying gloves, the thug’s skull crunched inward like a meringue that someone took a bite out of and brain matter oozed out of his ear as his limp body crashed to the floor.
“My hero,” Elizabeth purred.
I looked over at her. She was standing upright again and no longer wincing with pain.
“You didn’t feel like helping with MC Hammer?” I smirked.
“You didn’t need it,” she replied and leaned against the wall with her hand on her hip.
“Well… I’m not a super, so I’ll take any help you can give,” I laughed.
“But you are,” she replied unexpectedly.
“Elizabeth, you know I’m not--”
“Not genetically,” she interrupted. “But look at what you just did to that guy. A normal human couldn’t have done that. A normal human would’ve gotten beaten to death by his hammer. But your suit saved you and enabled you to crush his skull. And what is your suit? It’s the physical manifestation of your ingenuity and hard work and determination to achieve whatever you set your mind to. You weren’t born a super, but you built yourself into one. That’s way more impressive than what I have.”
“Fuck, you’re gonna make me blush,” I said.
“I’m gonna make you do more than that,” she replied with a smirk, “but for now we’ve got some kids to rescue.”
We started working our way down the hallway and took turns kicking down one door at a time so that we could both be prepared to face whoever or whatever was waiting behind it. The first one was a nursery with cribs, the second one was an administrative office, the third one was a bathroom, and they were all empty.
Then we entered the fourth room, and it was filled with a circle of humans, two big ones and twelve little ones, all sitting in chairs with their hands tied behind their backs, their ankles tied to the chair legs, and their mouths duct taped shut. They all had puffy eyes and tear-stained faces, not just the toddlers but also the two daycare workers.
And in the middle of the circle, stood a pasty-faced, blue-haired, twig-thin man in a black trench coat glinting with metal chains and buckles. His face was the only dry-eyed one, his only expression was a delighted grin, and in his hands he was holding up a grenade for Elizabeth and me to see.
“No!” Elizabeth shouted as she ran toward the grenade.
“Wait!” I screamed as I ran to grab her, even though I knew it was too late for either of us, for any of us. Meanwhile, a cackling Mayhem threw himself out the window in a shower of glass. The idea of that worthless supervillain scum being the sole survivor filled me with an incandescent rage.
Then Elizabeth said sheepishly, “Erm. It’s… not real.”
“What’s not real?” I asked. It occurred to me that we shouldn’t have been having this conversation. We shouldn’t have had time to say anything before the world imploded around us.
Elizabeth sat up and lobbed the grenade at me. Reflexively, I caught it.
It was made of rubber.
“Well, fuck me,” I muttered.
“There are kids in the room,” Elizabeth said reproachfully.
“I think they’ll be more traumatized by what Mayhem did to them than by me cursing in front of them, don’t you?” I asked. “Come on, let’s go after him before he gets away.”
“No,” she said as she ran over to the shattered window. “I’ll go after him. You stay here, somebody needs to protect the kids in case there are more supervillains.”
I groaned. What she said about one of us staying to stand guard made sense, but I really wanted our roles to be reversed. I enjoyed battling homicidal maniacs a hell of a lot more than babysitting snot-nosed crybabies. Not that I’d ever actually done the latter once in my life.
But I couldn’t argue with Elizabeth because, firstly, she was faster than me, almost though not quite fast enough to qualify as having superspeed, so she had a much better chance of catching Mayhem, and, secondly, because she was already halfway out the window and clearly had no interest in further discussion.
“Okay,” I muttered to myself. How did you take care of kids anyway? Well, I decided that maybe getting the duct tape off their mouths would be a good start. Although I might quickly come to regret that decision, and I bet putting the duct tape back on if I changed my mind would be frowned upon by society. Or, alternately, I could untie their hands and their ankles. But if I freed them from the chairs, then they might run off, and what if I accidentally lost one? Or I could start with the adult daycare workers, but, they’d probably be overflowing with questions about Elizabeth and me that I just couldn’t afford to answer, especially if they had recognized either one of us. The less they knew, the better.
Finally, I decided to untie everyone’s hands first. That way I’d look like I was doing something to improve their situation, but no one that I didn’t want to talk to would be able to talk to me, and no one would be able to leave the room and get themselves into more trouble.
I worked my w
ay around the room doing exactly that, while everyone stared blankly at me. It was hard to avoid noticing that pretty much every one of them had sticky hands. That was one of the things I hated about kids. Their hands were perpetually sticky.
After that, I still didn’t have any word from Elizabeth over the radio, and there still weren’t any more supervillains showing up to attack us so that I would have a great excuse to go back to ignoring Mayhem’s hostages. So I reluctantly started working my way around the circle carefully peeling the duct tape off the kids’ sticky little mouths. Gross.
But I very quickly realized something unsettling. The first kid was my favorite for a brief moment because after I pulled the duct tape off, instead of complaining that it hurt or whining that he was scared or anything like that, he just gazed at me silently. Stoic little bastard, I thought with approval.
Then I un-duct taped the kid to his right, and the same exact thing happened. What were the chances of getting two kids in a row that were mute? At this age? After what they’d just been through? Also, all the tearstained faces made it clear that this wasn’t just some crowd of miniature toughs.
I kept going with the untapping process and the creepiness factor just amplified. Especially when I reached the two adults, and they proved equally silent.
“What’s up with the silent treatment, guys?” I asked the room at large as my spine prickled. “Was it something I said?”
“Goo goo ga ga,” replied a lone voice. It was the kid I had untaped first. I didn’t know much about the science of child development and at what age you could expect them to stop saying stuff like that, but first off he seemed a bit old for that to me, and secondly, the way he said it was so crisp and monotone it was like a bad actor delivering a scripted line.
“You creepy little fuckers,” I muttered. “Anyone else have anything more enlightening to say?”
“Mary had a little lamb,” a little girl sang out in a shrill, warbling voice.
“Its fleece was white as snow,” the boy next to her joined in.
All twelve of the kids in unison chorused, “Everywhere the child went, the little lamb was sure to go.”
As I stared in disbelief, they proceeded to sing their way through the entire nursery rhyme. Their pitch was far from perfect, but every single child seemed to remember every single word correctly without hesitation.
I wasn’t sure what had been worse, the silence or the singing, but I didn’t get a choice after that. No matter what I said to them or what questions I asked, they completely ignored me. Instead, as soon as they had sung the last word of “Mary had a little lamb,” they launched immediately into “Little Bo Peep” with her lost sheep, and then after that it was, “Little Miss Muffet” getting frightened by a spider.
Then Elizabeth jumped back through the window in all her billowing black-haired, bright turquoise-eyed glory, a living, vibrant superhuman being instead of a mindless miniature automaton. I didn’t think I’d ever been so relieved to see someone in my life.
“The Shadow Knight got Mayhem,” she announced grimly. “I finally found him, chased him down, and was about to grab him, but then the Shadow Knight rolled up in his fucking tank, extended this giant pincer thing, and it grabbed Mayhem by the coat like a toy and sort of deposited him inside. Then the Shadow Knight just rolled away. So, I guess he’ll end up in prison again. Sorry, I know you wanted him dead.”
“Elizabeth, something’s wrong with the kids,” I said urgently.
“What?” she asked in surprise. “I didn’t think they were hurt.”
“Nothing’s wrong with us!” a little girl shrilled. “You’re a mean man.”
“Are you fucking kidding me?” I muttered.
“Language!” Elizabeth hissed.
A little boy burst into tears, and several of the other children followed suit.
“I want my mommy,” I heard one of them wail.
“It’s okay, Billy, everything’s going to be okay now,” the female daycare worker said in a soothing voice. “Mayhem is gone, and soon the police are going to come, and you’ll all be reunited with your families.”
“They’re faking it,” I said in a low voice to Elizabeth. “They’re faking being normal. This isn’t how it was just a minute ago, before you arrived. They were all like tiny robots. And then they started signing nursery rhymes--”
Elizabeth sighed. “I know you’re not really used to being around small children--”
“That’s not what it is,” I groaned. “Trust me. You trust me, don’t you? There is something profoundly wrong with them, and I need to figure out what it is. I bet Mayhem did something.”
“We need to go, right now,” Elizabeth said. “As soon as they get word from the Shadow Knight that Mayhem has been captured, the SWAT teams will move in. You don’t want to be around for questioning, do you?”
“No, but we need to take at least one of these kids with us,” I said. “For examination. I’m telling you, something is very fucked up about them, and we need to figure out what it is. Some researchers in my medical lab have expertise in human behavioral--”
“Are you crazy?” Elizabeth exclaimed. “You can’t seriously be proposing kidnapping a child and sticking it in a lab like a medical specimen?”
“The police are closing in, I advise you to leave now,” Aileen’s sultry voice murmured in my earpiece. I knew that she must have said the same thing at the same time in Elizabeth’s earpiece from the way the beautiful superhero’s expression shifted, and then she met my eyes and raised an eyebrow.
“Fuck,” I relented. “Let’s go.”
We leapt out the broken window.
“Hey, stop right there!” bellowed one of the SWAT team members. “Put your hands up! Drop your weapons!”
We both sprinted for the nearest building as rounds started whizzing around our feet. I felt a bullet ping harmlessly off my suit-clad calf. I didn’t blame them. They didn’t know who we were, and we’d just come out of the building where Mayhem had kept his hostages trapped. They probably thought we were supervillains or henchmen involved in the whole thing.
Of course, none of the law enforcement officers could keep up with us though, and we quickly ran out of their sight. They continued to pursue, but Aileen tracked their movements and started giving us directions in our earpieces on how to evade them.
Then we turned down an alley according to my AI assistant’s instructions and ran smack into Norma.
“Fancy meeting you here,” I said.
“Aileen told me where to go,” my bespectacled little assistant explained as she held up two briefcases. “Normal clothes. Now I’ll look away, and you two change.”
“Norma, you’re a godsend,” I said, and I saw her flush happily before she turned around.
We hurriedly stripped off the suits, threw on the plain clothes that Norma had brought from the car, and stuffed our suits back into the briefcases. Then we emerged from the alley and started casually strolling along just as we heard whirring rotors and looked up to see a search helicopter in the sky.
It was right above us so it must have seen us, but after a moment it puttered away, the crew evidently having decided that we did not match the description of the suspects they were pursuing.
After that we returned home.
Chapter Seven
The next morning over a delicious breakfast of quail eggs and French toast, Aileen announced suddenly,
“I’m afraid I have bad news.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“Well, I meant ‘afraid’ in a figurative sense,” Aileen clarified. “As you know, I am incapable of feeling fear, but I was using a conventional formulation to convey empathy for the probable negative feelings that will be elicited by the statement that I am about to deliver.”
“I meant, what is the bad news?” I clarified. “Has Mayhem escaped custody already?”
“No,” Aileen said. “But the toddlers from the daycare, as well as the daycare workers, were reunited
with their families after they were medically cleared. And as it turns out, there is something that the doctors missed during exams.”
“What’s that?” Norma asked.
“They still haven’t determined that, but it’s some kind of brain abnormality or interference that is influencing their actions,” Aileen replied.
“What did they do?” I asked, even though I suspected the answer.
“Murdered their families,” Aileen answered.
Norma gasped.
“What?” Dynamo exclaimed. “How? They’re toddlers!”
“Well, the two daycare workers that were present are adults, one of them living with a domestic partner and the other with two roommates,” Aileen said, “and they both murdered all the members of their households. There were twelve toddlers, and eight out of twelve succeeded in killing at least one family member. Four attempted to and were stopped. Most of them accomplished this by poisoning their family members with household cleaning agents mixed into food or drink. Some of them used household implements or power tools. One boy attempted to load a shotgun which his father then wrestled away from him. But the common trend is that the children had to have been acting under outside influence, not only because they did not demonstrate any murderous impulses previously, but because they combined chemicals or assembled and activated electric tools in ways that they would not have known how to do on their own, as if someone else had just taken control of their tiny bodies.”
“Where are the kids now?” I asked. “What are they doing?”
“It sounds as though the majority of them have been captured by now,” Aileen said. “Fortunately, even if they are not behaving like children, they still have the physical limitations of toddlers and that has made them easy targets for law enforcement.”
“Well, have they been questioned?” I asked. “How did they explain themselves?”
“Those reports aren’t being released to the public yet,” Aileen said, “but a few articles are describing them as ‘incoherent’ or ‘nonverbal.’ To be fair, some of them were already basically nonverbal before Mayhem ever showed up. But anyway, I don’t think that anyone has been able to obtain useful information about what happened to them from the kids themselves.”