“Looks like he’s beefing himself up,” said Anna.
“What does that involve?” Sam wondered. “Does he, like, absorb it or something?”
“No idea, but if we’re going to take him out, now’s the perfect time,” Anna said. “Let’s think. What do we know about this guy?”
Randy raised a hand.
“You don’t have to put your hand up, Randy. Go.”
“He’s called the Beef Chief,” Randy growled.
Anna didn’t respond for a moment, then tutted. “OK, you do have to put your hand up, I changed my mind. But only you. What else? He’s big. He’s crazy strong. He’s covering himself in meat. It might be a sexual thing.”
“God, I hope not,” Sam muttered.
“He has a horse,” Randy said.
“Hand up, Randy,” Anna told him.
Randy raised his hand. Anna ignored it.
“Weaknesses. Come on. There has to be something. What would a meat guy be scared of?”
“Veganism!” said Sam, sounding a little too excited about the suggestion.
“OK. OK, what would that translate to?” Anna asked.
Sam hesitated. “What do you mean?”
“How would we use veganism as a weapon against him?”
“Oh. I have no idea,” said Sam.
Anna sighed. “How do you beat meat?” She gasped. “Oh! We could use that in a quip. Something about beating his meat!”
“Let’s not,” Sam replied.
“I’ve got it!” Randy growled. “We could eat him.”
“Shut the fuck up, Randy,” Anna sighed. “Come on. He has to have some weak spot. He keeps saying this is our fault. Why is that?”
“Because he’s a lying criminal scumbag,” Randy snarled. “They’re all the same.”
“No, but… Anna’s right,” Sam realized.
“Allergy Girl,” Randy corrected.
“He keeps blaming us. Or blaming someone else, at least. He says he just wanted to be left alone. Why would he say that?”
“Because he’s a lying—”
“Apart from that,” said Sam. “And what was it he said earlier? Something about how they were even going to let him see her?”
“Her who?” asked Anna.
The truth of it crept up on Sam slowly, like a thief in the night, stealing away the final shreds of his faith in humanity.
“Oh… shit,” he whispered. “I think… I think I worked it out.”
“Worked what out?” asked Anna.
“How we stop him,” said Sam.
“We kick his ass!” Randy growled, punching a fist into the opposite palm.
All three of them screamed in fright as the car was smashed aside, revealing them all crouching in the street. The Beef Chief towered above them, his hands completely encased in enormous fist-shaped lumps of ground beef.
“Fist meat!” Randy spat. He grinned hopefully at the others.
“Still not a pun,” Anna was able to eject before the Beef Chief brought both fists down. The sidekicks scattered. The ground where they had been crouching shattered with the impact of his beef-fists.
Anna was up first. She threw out a hand and a rash tore across the Beef Chief’s face before he could get a fist up to block it. He swung a wild haymaker with the other fist, and it was only the enhanced reactions of the supersuit that saved Anna from having her head punched clean off her shoulders.
“Sam, whatever you’re going to do, do it quickly,” she urged.
“OK. Right,” Sam nodded. “Keep him busy.”
He spun on his heels and ran away.
“Wait, what?” Anna yelped, but then a giant meat-fist slammed into her lower back. The next second-and-a-half was comprised of pain, movement, then a sudden impact as the punch launched her into the side of the car they’d been hiding behind a few moments ago.
Glass splintered and metal crumpled around her. The battery-level indicator in her visor began to flash on and off as she struggled to extricate herself from the tangle of steel.
“That’s not good,” she fretted. What was even less good was the shadow she saw falling upon her, and the whiff of raw meat that filled her nostrils as a hand caught her by the back of the neck.
“Hey! Pick on someone your own size!” growled Randy.
Anna didn’t need to see him to be able to picture him standing behind the Beef Chief, hands on his hips, cape fluttering in the wind, too stupid or noble or—no, probably just stupid, actually—to go for the cheap shot when the bad guy’s back was turned.
The hand released its grip on Anna’s neck, and the Beef Chief turned away.
“What did you say?” the villain demanded.
Randy spat the words out in his Batman-like growl again, really ramping it up for the villain’s benefit. “I said pick on someone your own size.”
A frown troubled the Beef Chief’s face. “Something about a disguise?” he guessed. “What are you talking about?”
“What are you talking about?” Randy said, the growl becoming so deep it was practically a gargle. “I said you should pick on someone your own size.”
Recognition lit up the Beef Chief’s face. “Oh, pick on someone my own size?”
“That’s what I said, yes,” spat Randy.
The Beef Chief looked around them. “I don’t see anyone here my own size,” he sneered.
“Well, maybe you just aren’t looking hard enough,” said Randy.
The villain hesitated. “What do you mean?”
“You mean what do you mean?”
“Huh?”
Randy’s eyes narrowed. “Touché,” he said. “Well played.”
The Beef Chief towered there, staring down at him for a while. “What are you even talking about?” he demanded, his anger temporarily replaced by a sort of confused exasperation.
Only temporarily, though. It returned in a sudden flash, twisting his features and propelling him into action.
A meaty fist grabbed Randy, completely encasing his head and blocking all his airways. Randy drove a solid uppercut into the ground beef, but his hand sunk into the mass of processed meat and got stuck there.
This didn’t stop him trying the same technique with the other fist. Predictably, the result was the same.
Having successfully extracted herself from the wreckage of the car, Anna wrenched one of its buckled doors off. The battery display in her visor dropped another few percent. Whatever Sam was doing, he’d better do it fast.
Anna didn’t share Randy’s aversion to the cheap shot. It was probably her favorite type of shot, in fact, if you excluded the alcoholic variety. She smashed the door across the Beef Chief’s back, staggering him.
“I’m steaking out your boundaries, Beef Chief!” she announced. She whanged him with the door again. “OK, that was terrible,” she admitted. “But it was off the cuff, so—”
The other beef-fist grabbed her. Anna tried to swing the door again, but the grip on her head made it impossible to get enough leverage. She gulped down a last desperate breath before the meat fully covered her face, and her world became one of wet, greasy darkness.
“You made me do this!” the Beef Chief roared. “This isn’t my fault. It isn’t my fault!”
“I know,” said Sam, appearing in front of him. “It isn’t.”
The Beef Chief glowered down at him through red-ringed eyes. Anna and Randy both struggled in the grip of his mighty meat-fists, but the villain seemed to barely even notice.
“Disengage Battle Mode,” said Sam.
The suit slithered and changed, returning to its non-enhanced version and revealing Sam’s face, aside from the number-eight-shaped blue eye mask.
“You didn’t rob that bank, did you?” Sam said. “You didn’t kill those people.”
The Beef Chief’s Adam’s apple bobbed up and down as he swallowed. “It was on the news,” he said. “I saw it. But that wasn’t me. I just wanted to be left alone. Why wouldn’t they leave me alone?”
“I
know. I know,” said Sam, raising a hand in a calming gesture. “You wanted to put everything behind you, didn’t you? You wanted to leave all this in the past?”
He produced a framed photo from behind his back. “For her sake.”
The Beef Chief’s eyes shimmered when he saw the girl in the sun hat. The lower half of his jaw tightened as he fought to keep it from trembling.
“Your… daughter?” Sam guessed.
“Granddaughter,” the Beef Chief corrected, his voice barely a whisper. “They said… They said I could see her, if I stopped doing… If I stopped being…”
Sam nodded. “You can still stop,” he said. “We can help you.”
The Beef Chief’s face became harder. From the way Anna and Randy both jerked, his meat-fists tightened their grip. “No! No one will believe me! No one ever believes me!”
“I believe you,” said Sam. “And we’ll make them believe us.”
He gestured to the watching crowds and cameras. “We’ll tell them what happened. In front of the cameras. We’ll tell them the truth. We’ll tell them it wasn’t you. We’ll make them listen.”
He held the photograph out. “For her sake.”
A battle raged on the villain’s face. The struggle of it filled his eyes with tears and made his impossibly broad shoulders shake.
“Gah!” he barked, and there were gasps from Randy and Anna as they both fell to the ground. The meat fists plopped onto the asphalt in greasy blobs as the Beef Chief relinquished his control and snatched the photograph out of Sam’s hands.
“Thank you,” Sam told him. “I meant what I said. We’ll help you.”
“Help him?” Randy wheezed. “I’m going to snap his spine in six places. Just give me, like, five to eight minutes.”
Sam held a hand out to the Beef Chief. “It’s OK, guys,” he said. “He’s not the bad guy.”
The Beef Chief regarded Sam’s hand with suspicion, then met his eye. “You mean it? You’ll really help me?”
“I do,” said Sam. “And we will.”
Slowly, tentatively, the Beef Chief reached out a hand. Sam tried not to show his terror as fingers that could crush steel wrapped around his own.
“Thank you,” the Beef Chief whispered. “I don’t… And I’m…” He looked down at his feet, composing himself. “Sorry, I’m not very good at…”
Sam smiled. “It’s fine. I get it.”
The villain smiled back, relief pushing the final furrows of anger from his face. He pumped Sam’s hand enthusiastically, almost wrenching the arm from its socket.
“Thank you,” he said again. “Thank you so much. You have no idea how—”
He exploded in a ball of fire and guts. A shockwave of sizzling innards hit Sam in the face, launching him several feet through the air and painting him in shades of purple and red.
Sam blinked through the blood and gore, the sound of the blast still ringing in his ears. It took him a moment to realize he was lying on the ground, and a moment longer to notice that he was still holding the Beef Chief’s hand, the arm having been blasted off at the elbow.
“Yeurgh!” he yelped, dropping the smoldering limb. “What the fuck? What the hell just happened?!”
“You blew him up!” Randy growled. “You tricked him into shaking your hand, then you blew his ass to pieces.”
Randy held up two thumbs. “Great job!”
“No, I… That wasn’t me. That wasn’t me!” Sam protested.
“Uh, no shit,” said Anna. Her neck was craned back, her eyes pointed to the sky as she heaved herself back to her feet. “Call me crazy, but I think it was probably that guy...”
Chapter Twenty-Two
A dark-clad figure descended slowly from the heavens. The air shimmered beneath him, and spots of dust flared bright and brief as they ignited in the column of heat. The smell of sulfur snagged at the back of Sam’s throat and nipped at his eyes.
“Who the hell is this now?” Anna wondered, before the cushion of heat forced her back.
A circle of road surface, just a little wider than the length of a car, became a melting gloopy mass. The flying figure glided above it, then dropped onto the more solid ground just beyond the circle’s edge.
He was shorter than he’d looked during his descent, although he made up for the lack of height with an abundance of presence. He imposed himself upon the world around him, like he was the star of the show and everyone else alive merely his background players.
His wardrobe was straight from the Fantasy Dark Lord catalog, all armor plating and spikes, with skull-shaped trimmings on the bulky metal shoulder pads to which his flowing burgundy cape was attached. None of the skulls looked human, but they didn’t look like any animal Sam had ever seen, either.
He wore a helmet that had a suggestion of dragons about it, although Sam couldn’t quite explain why. It was a flat, matte black headpiece, made up of several interlocking layers that rose in swooping curves to form four rows of three points, spaced evenly from the front of his head to the back.
His hands were uncovered. The skin was a dark red, the fingers lined with irregular spots of browns and blacks. Heat crackled and sparked in the air around him, mingling with the general air of menace that seeped from his every pore.
“Is he on our side?” Randy asked.
“I doubt it,” said Anna. “I’m going out on a limb here, but I think this might be you know who.”
Randy blinked behind his goggles. “Who?”
“You know,” Anna said.
“I don’t. Who?”
“The guy,” Anna hissed. She pointed up. “The space bastard.”
Randy clenched both fists. “You mean the guy who killed Doc Mighty and the rest of the Justice Platoon?”
Gasps went up from the gathered crowds. Anna glared at Randy, then gestured to the onlookers with her eyes.
“What? What’s wrong with your face?” he asked her. “Why are you looking at me like that?”
“The Justice Platoon is dead?” came a cry from the crowd.
“Did he… Did he say this guy killed Doc Mighty?” yelped another.
“Oh God! Oh God, no!”
Anna and Sam both raised their arms, calling for calm. “It’s fine. Relax,” said Anna. “Nobody killed anyone.”
“He just killed that guy!” said a woman in the crowd, pointing to the gelatinous stain on the ground that had, until recently, been the Beef Chief.
“OK, yes, he killed him,” Anna conceded. “But not the Justice Platoon. He, uh…”
“Billed Doc Mighty and the Justice Platoon. He sent them a bill. That’s all.”
“Jesus,” Anna whispered. “Is that the best you could come up with?”
“I was going to say he’d drilled them,” Sam whispered back. “But thought that might actually sound worse.”
“Be quiet.”
The voice rolled out of the space bastard in a wave of heat that physically shoved the sidekicks back a few steps. This was the final straw for Anna’s suit, and with a disappointing bleep it disengaged Battle Armor mode. The faint buzzing Anna only now realized the suit had been emitting since she’d first put it on fell silent, as the costume’s enhancements became dormant.
“Your ‘Justice Platoon’ is dead,” the new arrival confirmed. His voice was deep, but his words were slightly slurred, tainted by the faintest suggestion of a lisp. It was as if he had overcome some major speech impediment in the past, but the tiniest hint of it had hung around. “I killed them myself.”
Sobs and cries and shouts of, “No!” rose up from the stunned crowd. The space bastard’s gaze swept across them all, his bloodshot eyes staring out through the oval holes in his helmet.
“It was quick and painless,” he continued. “For the most part. More than they deserved.”
“Who are you?” Randy demanded. “What do you want?”
The space bastard turned and regarded Randy for a while. To his credit—or possibly to his detriment—Randy stood his ground, fists c
lenched, cape lightly fluttering in the rolling waves of heat.
“To help,” the new guy replied. He stepped past Randy and raised his voice, addressing the crowd and the watching cameras. The battle with the Beef Chief would’ve made a pre-recorded segment in the news, Sam knew, but this would almost certainly be going out live.
“You have been exploited for too long,” announced the space bastard, and the air around him crackled with heat. “Your ‘heroes’ took advantage of your weakness. Of your frailty. They used their strengths to further their own ends, not yours. I stopped this, and as such, you may call me… Savior.”
“Bullshit!” spat a middle-aged cop with a paunch and a mustache. He stood at the front of the crowd, his sidearm drawn but not yet raised. “They were on our side!”
“How many times did they catch villains, only for them to escape? Fight, capture, escape. Fight, capture, escape. Round and around and around,” said Savior. “How many innocent people died in this cycle? How many families grieved? And yet, no one ever stopped to ask themselves… why? Why, with all their power, couldn’t your Justice Platoon deal with these criminals properly?”
Sam realized Anna was glaring at him. Her eyes darted to Savior’s back, then she gave a faint, almost imperceptible nod of her head. Sam urgently shook his own head, mouthed a definitive, “Don’t,” then went back to watching the show.
“They let you die so they could look good for the cameras,” Savior explained. “How else would they sell their branded clothing, or their energy drinks, or their movies? A hero needs a villain, or the public loses interest, and so they allowed those criminals to escape—facilitated those escapes, perhaps—again and again and again.”
There were a few jeers and boos from the crowd. Savior appeared to take note of the people responsible, but otherwise didn’t react.
“And you bought into it. All of you. You cheered when they saved you from disasters of their own making. You applauded when they avenged the deaths they themselves had caused. And why? Because you are children. Because you are fools.”
His voice became harder. The heat rolling off him became a furnace blast.
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