All their preparations would be useless against what was about to befall them, though.
Mel wanted to go in right away, but Kyle insisted on waiting for Face-Off and Christine. She didn’t argue; when it came to work she usually followed his lead, unless she had good reasons to disagree. And while they waited, hidden in the shadows, she thought of a way to help pass the time.
Melanie grinned at him as he pulled his tights back on. “That was nice,” he whispered to her in the dark.
“Next time it’s your turn.”
“We might just have time now…” His wrist-comp flashed twice with a UV light his helmet goggles picked up but which were invisible to anybody else. “They’re here already. Dammit.”
“Next time, then,” Mel repeated, putting her helmet back on. Just minutes before, Kyle had held on to her hair while she pleasured him, but he was already craving more of her. Later. Later her thighs would be pressing on either side of his head while he tasted her, and he’d strap her down and… Later.
He carefully moved to the other side of the building and saw Face-Off and Christine down below. Kyle quickly lowered a plastic and metal-wire ladder down to them while Mel kept watch on the Russians across the street. Face-Off arrived first and offered Christine a hand as she came up behind him.
“Thanks, but I can do it,” she said, a smile on her face as she pulled herself up. “It’s amazing how much more fun P.E. stuff is, when you have muscles and coordination and stuff.”
Christine Dark wasn’t beautiful as Kyle judged such things, but she was cute, very smart and enormously endearing. Before Mel, he would have cheerfully tried to pick her up. He’d have gotten bored with her in short order, but it would have been fun while it lasted. Even now, he wouldn’t mind having her join him and Mel for some games, but he knew the girl was too straitlaced for that kind of thing. And of course, Face had laid a claim on her, which made her off-limits. Too bad.
Kestrel watched Kyle watching Christine out of the corner of her eye. The little redhead was certainly appealing, much more so now that she’d toughened up a bit. At first the girl had been pathetically weak and Kestrel had enjoyed keeping her intimidated and off-balance. From the start, she’d known Face-Off was attracted to Christine. He loved to save people, the heroic idiot, and the girl had needed a lot of help. Face had even tried to save Kestrel once, and found out the hard way that she didn’t need saving. Kestrel had pushed the girl around to see if she was worthy of Face-Off’s time. The jury was still out. Christine was tougher than she first appeared to be, but she was still a sheltered girl who hadn’t seen much of the real world. Kestrel guessed she would end up running back home as soon as she could. Face would be hurt, but he’d deal. He’d dealt with worse stuff.
Of course, all of them could get killed in the next few minutes. The universe didn’t give two shits about romance or the plans people made.
“What’s the situation?” Face-Off asked.
“I got some news about the Legion first,” Kyle said. He’d been trying not to think about that while he and Melanie went about their business, but his buddies needed to know. “It’s been confirmed. Ultimate was captured yesterday, but not before he allegedly murdered Doc Slaughter. Janus was with Ultimate, and he managed to escape. They kept the news under wraps until about an hour ago. Hyperia just gave a press conference spilling the beans.”
“Fuck. Doc Slaughter’s dead?”
“John wouldn’t kill someone, would he?” Christine said. “Unless maybe he was the traitor?”
Kyle shrugged. “Damfino. I only met Doc briefly a few times, but he always struck me as the real deal; I’d never have pegged him as the traitor. Who knows, though? In any case, Ultimate is down, and they’re still looking for you, Christine.”
“We have to rescue Ultimate, you guys! They are going to execute him, aren’t they?”
“He’s being held at Freedom Island,” Kyle told Christine. “We don’t have a prayer of getting in there and getting back out.”
“If we can unmask the assholes, it doesn’t matter,” Face-Off added. “If the truth comes out, Ultimate will come out of this mess smelling like roses, as usual. So let’s get it done, okay?”
Christine looked unhappy, but she nodded. “Okay. Let’s get the Big Bads and save everybody.”
Face-Off turned back to Kyle. “What’s the situation?” he repeated.
“We’ve got four guys by the front door, about two dozen inside, and two on the roof with .50 caliber sniper rifles,” Kyle reported. “Haven’t seen any of the power disruptors, but I bet they’ve got some inside. There’s no easy way to get in the building. Unless,” he added, looking hopefully at Christine. “Unless you can fly us there.”
“I’d love to,” she replied. “But since somebody, cough, you guys, cough, neglected to give me any flying lessons, I’m as likely to land us in Queens as on top of that building.”
“In all fairness, we didn’t have a lot of time to figure out what you were capable of,” Kyle protested weakly. “Are you sure you can’t get us there?”
“I can fly in a pretty straight line. I guess I could just fly us all through a window. Would that work?”
Kyle smiled. “Yes, that would work just fine.”
“Okay. Let me take a look, make sure I pick a spot without innocent people, or people in general. We’re not going to go all Tarentino and kill every mother-frakker in the building, are we?”
Lucky thing you weren’t around to see Melanie in action, Kyle thought as he helped her find a place she could use to watch the building without getting spotted by the snipers. “We should be able to disable most of them without doing permanent harm. But if any of them have disruptors, we’ll have to take them down quickly. We’re talking about two dozen heavily armed gang members. There’s bound to be some fatalities.”
She grimaced. “That sucks. Please try, okay?” She peered at the building. “Okay, there’s… uh, twenty-nine people. Three of them are Neos.”
“Neos?”
“Yeah. They aren’t very strong. All three of them are… searching, I guess. It’s hard to describe, but I can see them sending out something like radar waves, trying to find something. Trying to find me, I think, but they can’t see me, not even now, when I’m just across the street from them. Those guys aren’t exactly the Eye of Sauron.”
“Snoops. Clairvoyants, telepaths, finders. They probably won’t be worth much in a stand-up fight, but you never know. Where are they?”
“They are on the top floor.”
“Can you get us there?”
“I think so. You guys will need to get pretty close together so I can move us as a unit. If I try to grab each of us individually, I’d probably scatter you all over the place. Plus we’re gonna hit the building pretty hard, so staying behind my shield would be a good idea.”
“Sounds like a plan,” Face-Off said. “We’ll make a Christine sandwich.” Christine smiled at him. “Just watch where you put your hands, Condor. You too, Kestrel.”
They made a comical picture, a short girl surrounded by three taller people holding tightly onto her. Kestrel thought of several choice comments to make about the situation, but held her tongue. Things were about to get serious now. She licked her lips, thinking about the pain and fear she was about to inflict. Things were about to get serious, sure, but a girl could still have her fun.
“Here goes nothing,” Christine said. A second later they exploded from the rooftop as if shot from a cannon. Christine was supposedly aiming for a window, but they hit a wall instead. The brick and mortar caved in under the impact. Burst pipes began spraying water everywhere, and Kyle found himself kneeling over the remains of a toilet bowl. They’d smashed their way into a public restroom, a none-too clean public restroom at that. The smells of stale urine and cheap disinfectant made that pretty obvious.
“Oh, gross!” Christine exclaimed as she tried to avoid the water sprays, her face twisted in disgust.
“Shit happens,” F
ace-Off commented. “Be thankful nobody was taking a crap when we came in. No time to wash your hands, let’s move!”
Kyle went first, out the restroom and into a hallway. His helmet projected a 3D digital overlay of the building onto his helmet viewer. They’d made it to the top floor, at least, and the main office was to his left. A couple of Russians standing guard by the office door were beginning to react to their loud arrival. He sent two Taser darts their way just as they started to level their guns in his direction. It was close, but the darts hit before they could open fire. Kyle rushed past their twitching bodies and smashed through the office door, closely followed by Kestrel. He threw a flash-bang grenade into the middle of the room, stunning everyone there. Kyle and Melanie were unaffected: their helmets filtered out the sound and the flash of the explosion. They moved in opposite directions, looking for targets.
Two men and a woman were sitting on three sofas in the center of the room, watched by four gunmen, two of them armed with power disruptors. One of the gunners managed to pull the trigger on his disruptor, but the sneaking beam of darkness came nowhere near close to them. Kestrel’s whip battered the shooter unconscious before he recovered from the blinding flash-bang, and Kyle took down the other disruptor wielder with a Taser dart as he closed in on the other gunmen. Two blows delivered with judiciously calculated strength took care of the last two guards.
“Don’t fucking move!” Face-Off yelled at the snoops, aiming a gun their way. Christine punctuated the warning with a kinetic blast that tore a hole in a wall. A snoop who had risen to his feet sat back down; the rest stayed put.
“You got this?” Kyle asked Face-Off; he nodded. “We’ll cover you, then.” Kyle and Melanie headed out, leaving Christine and Face-Off to the task of interrogating the snoops.
There were shouts coming from below; he heard rushing footsteps as a dozen mobsters ran up the stairs. Kyle dropped two more flash-bang grenades on the oncoming Russians, followed by Taser darts and Condor Claws. The charge broke apart. Unconscious and wounded men rolled down the stairs while those hale enough to move ran back the way they’d come. Mel laughed at the sight and added to the chaos by using her whip on a few of the slower Russians to encourage their retreat.
Four of the men had been armed with disruptors. Kyle made sure they were unconscious with a second volley of Taser darts. Mel jumped down a flight of stairs, grabbed one of the disruptors, and used her whip to launch herself back upstairs. “Here you go, lover,” she said, offering him the weapon. She turned around and destroyed the other disruptors with three sharp whip lashes.
Kyle examined the disruptor eagerly. He’d been itching to get his hands on one of those things since he first saw them in Chicago. The Lurker had destroyed them all, unfortunately, so this was his first chance to take a good look at them. The disruptor consisted of a backpack power supply, a connecting metal cable as thick around as a garden hose, and a handheld rifle-shaped projector. The projector was made of metal and wood and looked much like an ordinary gun, with a barrel, stock, trigger and pistol grip; the only difference was that there was no magazine or ammo receptacle. He turned his attention to the backpack device. It consisted of a canister held in a metal cage, all in a dull black matte finish. He ran a finger lightly over its surface – and jerked it away sharply when a painful tingling coursed through every nerve in his hand.
Whatever the canister held was intrinsically inimical to parahumans. Handling the device was going to be challenging; studying it would be difficult. He looked forward to it, however. Dispensing justice was his obsession, rough sex was his addiction, but learning new things was his beloved hobby. The disruptor wasn’t like any other gadget or artifact he’d seen, and he’d seen – and built – quite a few. Once he got the weapon in his lab, he would…
Mel looked up and moved, knocking Kyle to the ground; a burst of automatic fire barely missed him. The rooftop snipers had come down through a service stair, armed with assault rifles. Kyle rolled away from their carefully-aimed bursts, cursing himself for getting distracted. The hallway had nowhere he could use for cover. Despite his attempts to dodge, he got hit. The high-powered bullets punched through the light armor of his bodysuit; he dully felt the impacts as the bullets smashed through his body. His legs stopped working, and he fell down on his face.
Kestrel heard Kyle’s grunt of pain in between the gunshots. She was on the move, covering the distance between her and the snipers in a series of acrobatic leaps. One of the shooters caught her with a point-blank burst. Four bullets punched through her, shattering ribs and collapsing a lung. They missed her spine, though, and her arms and legs, and that was all that mattered; as long as she could move, she could kill. One of her hands darted forth and her target jerked back, blood spurting from the torn hole where his larynx used to be. The second gunman was the one who shot Kyle. He tried to turn the gun on her but she griped it by the barrel and twisted it away, ignoring the way the hot metal burned her fingers through her gloves. The pain was just another sensation to savor. The man’s scream as the fingers of her other hand stabbed into his eyes was music to her ears. She wished she could make his death last, but she needed to see to Kyle and he would not approve anyway, so she ended the man’s scream and his life quickly, if not really mercifully.
Little Christine will be sad, she thought as she went to check on Kyle. He was struggling to his knees, hurt but alive. He’d be fine, she decided after taking a quick look at his injuries. She had other things to deal with. The Russians down below were rushing up again, hoping to take advantage of the sniper’s attack. If they’d coordinated a little better, they might have caught them in a crossfire, but their timing was a few seconds off, and a few seconds was all she needed. Her whip lashed out and its tip drove clear through a Russian’s skull.
Kyle forced himself to stand up and join in the fight. He threw another flash-bang and followed that up with a couple of gas grenades. Kyle didn’t like using the sleeping gas devices – the chemicals could be lethal in some cases – but he knew that unless he intervened Mel was going to kill all of them.
“It’s done, Kestrel,” he called out, snapping her out of her murderous haze. They’d hurt Kyle, and for that she wanted to make them bleed, all of them, but she stopped herself. If she upset him, he would sulk tonight instead of hurting her the way she liked.
“Anything you say, lover,” she whispered to him. He put a hand around the back of her neck, first caressing, then squeezing it.
“You shouldn’t have killed them,” he whispered back. “But we’ll deal with that later.”
She shuddered. She knew just what he’d got in mind. “Yes, we will. I’ve been so very bad, and poor Christine will be so upset.”
“Never mind that,” Kyle said. “We should clear the rest of the building, just to be safe.”
Mel started to nod, but froze in mid-motion, her eyes widening as she saw something behind him. Kyle started turning around just in time to see a huge flying figure crash through a window, sending shards of glass flying everywhere.
The new arrival landed in a graceful tumble and vaulted to his feet, facing them. They recognized him immediately. The massive musculature, the lion-head helmet and the fur-and-chainmail costume would have been unmistakable even if Kyle didn’t know the man personally.
“Hey, Herc.”
“Condor, Kestrel,” Hercules-8 said in a pleasant baritone that didn’t match his rough exterior. The Empire State Guardian took a look around and paused when he saw the snipers’ dead bodies. “This is some mess.”
“Yeah, guess it is.”
“You’re under arrest.”
A small black cat jumped through the window Hercules-8 shattered. It rubbed itself against the Guardian’s leg and meowed loudly.
“Evening, Cat Lady,” Kyle said to the pseudo-feline, who nodded in return. He turned back to Hercules-8. “No can do, Herc. We are on urgent business. You know my track record. You can’t detain us. I’ll be happy to explain why.”
The information hit Kyle like a physical blow, although he didn’t react visibly to it. “It’s all bullshit, Herc. Listen to me…”
“No,” Hercules-8 cut him off. “You listen to me. Vigilantes like you give us all a bad name. You’re coming uptown with us, and you can tell your story to the Feds and the Legion rep. And don’t call me Herc.”
The Empire State Guardians were stand-up guys. They’d been willing to work with Kyle before, even if he wasn’t an officially sanctioned hero. Things were different now. Ultimate’s fall from grace must have shaken them to their core, and now he and his friends had been implicated in it. Kyle coldly realized he wasn’t going to talk his way out of this. Hercules-8 had been a friendly acquaintance before, but the angry glint in his eyes made it clear that was no longer the case.
“Nice kitty,” Melanie said loudly to Cat Lady. Hercules-8 turned his head slightly in her direction, and Condor threw a flash-bang at the feet of the two Guardians. Hercules-8 was blinking furiously to clear his vision when Condor slammed an elbow against his throat, followed by a knee to the groin. The double blow staggered the strongman, and he barely struggled when Kyle grabbed him by one arm and flung him out the same window he used to come in.
“Nasty kitty,” Melanie hissed. The Cat Lady avoided her whip’s strikes and sprang into action. The little cat became a black panther of prehistoric proportions, and Kyle leaped away to avoid being clawed to ribbons. The panther landed and rebounded with unnatural speed, and its second pounce bowled Kestrel over; the two struggling figures rolled on the floor in a tangle of trashing limbs and slashing paws. Kyle hit the panther with four Taser darts. Their electrical charges were too weak to do much more than slow it down, but they distracted it enough for Melanie to kick it off her. She struggled to her feet, favoring her left side. She was bleeding from several deep lacerations. “Really nasty kitty.”
New Olympus Saga (Book 2): Doomsday Duet Page 20