“Holy shit, it does! I never noticed that before,” Sam muttered. He considered all those times when Doc Mighty had ‘let’ him stand in front during a supervillain takedown. “Man, that guy was a dick.”
Savior laughed. It was a harsh scraping sound, like sandpaper on stone. “You know I’m right, Sam. They never cared about us. They made us their wards—adopted us, in some cases—but did you even once feel like they gave a damn? Like they actually gave the faintest shit if you lived or died? We were there to appeal to a younger audience demographic and to take the occasional bullet.”
“Bullshit!” Randy snarled.
“He… He has a point,” Sam said.
“You bet I do,” Savior spat. “Remember Acrobattle? After the Golden Skull killed her, Brown Thunder went on his big dark revenge kick. You know how many comics he sold? Millions. That mini-series still stands as one of the biggest-selling runs of the Nineties. He got a publishing award for it. A fucking award!”
“No one’s arguing that the Justice Platoon weren’t a bunch of selfish dicks,” said Anna.
Randy opened his mouth.
“Except Randy, obviously, but he’s… We don’t listen to him. The point is,” she continued, “hating the Justice Platoon and killing a bunch of people for failing to properly dispose of their recycling, or whatever, is not the same thing.”
Chuck, who had been trying with zero success to put his gun back together, limped around Savior and joined the others. He was clutching his side, and breathing was clearly proving more difficult than it should have been, but considering what he’d been through, he’d fared pretty well.
“So, you’re Jim Flammable?” he grunted. “I’ve been looking for you.”
Savior’s eyes crept toward him. “Have you?”
Chuck nodded. “I thought we might work together. I hoped—”
The fireball struck him in the center of the chest, and the air was filled with the smell of sizzling flesh. Chuck tumbled backward like a ragdoll, his legs flopping over his head as he first flew, then rolled across the room.
“Chuck!” Anna turned to run to him, but a wall of heat blocked her path.
“Don’t.”
She turned back. Savior lowered the hand he had raised and tucked it behind his back. “When will people like that stop trying to tell us what to do?” he asked. Then, with a tilt of his head toward the ruined wall, he said, “So, are you guys coming, or what?”
Chapter Thirty
Sam swallowed. He’d felt vulnerable enough in the supersuit, but standing there before Savior in his thin spandex, he felt practically naked. He might even have felt less exposed if he were naked. One gesture from Savior would kill him. One wave of his hand, that’s all it would take.
Standing up to this guy like this was madness. It was insane.
Still, he’d made a promise. To his son.
Damn it.
“We can’t go with you, Jim,” Sam said. “I’m afraid we just can’t do that.”
Savior became impeccably still.
“And… Well, we can’t let you do it, either,” Sam continued. “You know, ideally. We’d like you to stop killing people, is what we’re saying.”
Anna gave him an encouraging bump on the shoulder. “That told him. Great work there, Sam.”
Savior still hadn’t moved, but the air above him rippled with rising heat.
“Stop?” he said. “You’d like me to ‘stop’?”
Sam looked around at the others, then nodded. “Yes, please.”
Savior fell silent again for a few moments, considering his response. When it came, it wasn’t the one Sam had been hoping for.
“That’s too bad,” he said, then he raised an arm and Sam felt an inferno whoosh toward him.
Anna shouldered him aside, then hissed as the full force of Savior’s fire blast hit her. The suit insulated her from the worst of the damage, but her eyes stung, her lungs burned and the worrying whiff of burning hair filled her nostrils.
She thrust both hands forward before Savior could get off another shot. His head jerked back as he sneezed, and he was forced to grab the dragon helmet to stop it falling off.
Seizing his chance, Randy raced in close and delivered a flurry of punches to Savior’s ribcage, just as another sneeze wracked the villain’s body.
“Float like a butterfly,” growled Randy, driving a hook into Savior’s right kidney. “Sting like another much larger butterfly.”
Savior made a shrugging motion that knocked Randy backward off his feet with a blast of hot air. He sneezed again before he could follow up, and the inside of his mask filled with fire. Coughing, he held onto the helmet with one hand, then launched a fireball at the floor by his feet.
Sam’s eyes went wide when he saw the explosion come racing toward him. “Oh shit,” he squeaked in a small, quiet voice. The shape in his head thrashed, but then Anna was on him, her arms wrapping around his body, her back taking the brunt of the attack.
“Thanks,” Sam wheezed.
“No problem,” Anna said, her voice short and abrupt. “Now, you want to maybe stop this guy before he—?”
There was a whoosh as Savior took to the air. The cushion of heat pushed down on the sidekicks, forcing Sam to cower beneath Anna as best he could.
“Now you’ve done it!” Savior roared from on high. “Now you’ve gone and done it! You were supposed to be my friends!”
Any traces of a booming supervillain voice were gone. Instead, his words came out as a petulant babble, like a five-year-old embarking on a tantrum.
“Well, I don’t like you guys anymore!” he told them, raising a hand above his head. “This friendship is officially over! And thanks to you, this whole stupid city is going to pay!”
He snapped the hand down, igniting the air around it. The shape in Sam’s head bloomed into life.
For a moment, Sam was cocooned in a cold, slightly damp, and vaguely smelly darkness that squirmed and moved on top of him. Then the fireball hit, and the darkness became a sudden sizzling brilliance that scorched Sam through his flimsy spandex suit.
And then, like that, it passed. Sam and Anna both stared at each other, their faces just inches apart in the dim light. The smell of barbecued meat snagged in their throat, but neither of them made any attempt to move quite yet.
“Are we alive?” Anna whispered.
Sam gave this due consideration, then nodded. “I think so.”
They untangled themselves from each other, and their movements were accompanied by dozens of hollow-sounding clacks and clatters.
When they eventually stood, they found themselves standing in the center of a large pile of blackened bowls. After looking up and finding Savior gone, Anna picked up one of the several thousand bowls and turned it over in her hand. Chunks of crispy charred meat clung to the inside.
“This might sound like an odd question,” she said. “But did you cover us in turtles?”
Sam looked around at all the smoking shells, remembering the sensation of movement he’d felt right before they’d first appeared. He also remembered the cold and wet crawling sensation he’d felt right after they’d appeared. “Possibly,” he admitted.
“That is dark,” Anna said. She dropped the shell, then rubbed her hands on her legs, cleaning them off. “And fucking weird. But, you know, good job, I guess. Guess you’re getting better at the whole concentrating thing.”
“No, it’s not like that,” Sam began. “It’s actually—”
“SAVIOR!” roared Randy, erupting out from within another mound of turtle shells. He posed dramatically as he scanned the ceiling and the sky just beyond the hole. With a tut, he let his arms drop to his sides. “Damn. Is he gone? I was totally about to kick his ass.”
“He’s gone,” Anna confirmed.
“What’s all this?” Randy asked, wading through a pile of shells.
“Sam saved us from the fireball by covering us in live turtles,” Anna said.
“Ah, yes!” said Randy.
“Oldest trick in the book.”
Anna laughed. “Yeah, it’s a classic all—” Her face fell. “Oh, shit, Chuck!”
It took almost a full minute of kicking through turtle shells before they found him. He was folded up over by the back wall, his face pressed against the dirty linoleum floor.
Randy dropped to his haunches and pressed two fingers to Chuck’s throat. He squatted there for several seconds, peering down through his steamed-up goggles.
“Well?” Sam asked.
Randy shook his head. “He’s dead.”
Chuck inhaled sharply, his eyes flicking open.
“Wait, no,” said Randy, his fingers still on Chuck’s pulse. “I’m getting something.”
“Get out of the way,” Anna snapped, catching him by the arm and pulling him aside. She kicked aside some turtle shells and knelt beside Chuck. “Hey. You still with us?”
Chuck coughed out a bloody wad, then managed a nod. With a groan of effort, he flopped over onto his back, crunching several shells beneath his weight. The buttons of his jacket and shirt both popped as he pulled on them, revealing a black rubber suit below.
“Prototype,” he wheezed. “Still hurts like hell.”
With Sam and Anna’s help, he got himself up onto his elbows. The movement took a lot out of him, and he spent several seconds remembering how to breathe before he could speak again.
“Savior?” was all he said.
“Gone,” said Sam.
Most of Chuck’s eyebrows had been burned off. He raised what was left of them. “Dead?”
Sam shook his head. “He flew away. I think we scared him off.”
Chuck’s partial eyebrows remained raised. “You ‘scared him off’? The guy who single-handedly murdered the Justice Platoon? You scared him off?”
“It’s the helmet,” said Sam. “I’m sure of it. When he sneezed, it almost fell off and he panicked.”
Anna let out a sudden, “Oh!” that echoed through the empty turtle shells. “The helmet! I remember the helmet! Memetzo had it in his vault. He took it from…” She clicked her fingers. “Shit. Who was that guy with the alligators?”
“Mr. Alligators?” Sam said.
“Yes! Him! OK, so he was, like, a total Z-Lister in supervillain terms. Like, some of his own henchmen had a better name for themselves than he did,” Anna said. “He had two baby alligators that he kept on leashes. That was his whole schtick.”
“Right, I remember,” said Sam. “What about him?”
“So, he’s hopeless, but then one day he leads a whole army of alligators into the city and starts tearing the place up. There were thousands of them, remember?”
Sam shook his head. “No. I mean, yeah, I heard about it, but we were on Neptune, so I didn’t see. I still don’t see your point.”
“His schtick got supercharged. That’s my point,” said Anna.
“Like Jim Flammable,” growled Randy.
“And that’s not the only thing they have in common,” said Anna. She tapped herself on the side of the head. “Guess what Mr. Alligators was wearing.”
“Crocodile pants!” Randy spat, punching his palm.
Anna side-eyed him. “Uh, no. The helmet. He was wearing the helmet. Also, why would Mr. Alligators be wearing… Forget it.”
“It’s boosting his power,” Sam realized. “That’s why he’s so much stronger.”
“We get the helmet off him, we stop him,” Anna said. “But there was something else, too. Afterward, Mr. Alligators said the helmet had been controlling him. He’d said it had told him to attack the city.”
“So, maybe Jim doesn’t want to be doing this?” said Sam.
Anna sniffed and shrugged. “Well, Memetzo figured that was bullshit, so… I doubt it.”
A shadow passed briefly across the hole in the roof, catching Randy’s eye. He stood, slowly, and squinted through the opening.
Chuck grimaced as he tried to sit up further. “We should go catch him,” he said.
“Uh, no. You’re in no state to go anywhere,” Sam said. “We’ll do it.”
Chuck seemed unsure. “Just you three? I don’t know. Maybe we should wait. Regroup and take stock before you go running in.”
Anna shifted awkwardly. “Uh, yeah. While you were unconscious, he kind of said he was going to go destroy the whole city. So… there’s that.”
Chuck stared blankly back at her for a while. Finally, he blinked.
“No, you’re right. You three should go stop him.”
“Guys,” whispered Randy, his eyes glued to the hole in the ceiling. The light spilling in through the gap had dimmed, suggesting the sky had become overcast.
“Can we salvage the Sidekicksmobile?” Anna asked. She, Sam, and Chuck looked over to the up-ended tank, half-submerged in turtle shells and partially on fire.
“I doubt it,” Sam said.
Chuck groaned. “God damn, I hope they don’t take that out of my paycheck.”
“Guys!” Randy hissed.
“Give us a minute, OK?” Anna sighed. “We’re trying to figure out the transport situation here.”
Randy turned to her, a grin splitting his face. “That’s not going to be a problem,” he said. “They’re here. It took them a little longer than I expected, but they’re finally here.”
“Who’s here?” Sam asked. “What are you…?”
His voice trailed off as a heaving rainbow of fluttering colors poured in through the hole in the asylum roof. The sound of a hundred million fluttering wings rippled like polite applause that reverberated around the entrance hallway and across the sea of turtle shells.
Anna’s jaw dropped open. “Ho-lee shit, he isn’t delusional.”
Randy’s grin was still fixed in place as he pressed his fingertips to his temples. The vast cloud of butterflies changed direction in a single undulating shift, moving like a single living organism. Sam and Anna both gasped as they were suddenly lost in a cloud of fluttering wings.
“You want transport?” Randy’s voice called to them through the butterfly storm. The floor fell away as they were each lifted off their feet. “How’s this for transport? Fly, my butterfly brethren. Fly!”
Chuck lay on his back, surrounded by burned out turtle shells, watching as the cloud of fluttering insects carried the sidekicks up, up and away.
With a grunt, he let his head fall back onto the floor. “Wow,” he muttered, clutching his ribs to keep them in place. “What a day.”
Chapter Thirty-One
The city spread out like a map far below, visible in glimpses and snatches between the gaps in the three butterfly clouds.
It had been a mildly terrifying sensation to begin with, being hoisted aloft on millions of fragile wings. Now, though, hundreds of feet above the streets of Cityopolis—which, despite the distance, somehow seemed more solid and imposing than ever—it was all the way terrifying.
Seriously. What the hell were they doing?
“This is suicide,” Sam croaked, his stomach lurching as the mass of insects pootled him along in an irregular bobbing motion through the air. “We’re going to die.”
“Relax,” called Randy from inside another butterfly swarm just eight or nine feet ahead. “What could be safer than this?”
“Everything!” Sam yelped. “Birds! Bees! A big kite! Anything would be safer than butterflies!”
“You might want to keep your voice down there, Kid Random,” Randy growled. “These guys have feelings, you know? Now’s probably not the time to make them upset.”
Sam promptly shut up. Anna’s voice came from somewhere just behind him.
“Could they go a little faster, do you think?” she asked. She had deactivated the Battle Mode of her suit, despite Sam’s insistence that this was a mistake. A bird passed her from behind, eyeing them quizzically as it drifted along on its wide-open wings. “It feels like we’re going quite slowly.”
“They’re butterflies, not jet-engine-flies,” Randy spat. “They’re going as fast as they can.
”
Anna peered down through a gap in the fluttering cloud, ignoring the knot of panic that formed in her stomach. “Right. It’s just… I can see people walking faster than this.” She squinted. “Actually, I think I see people standing faster than this.”
That wasn’t all she could see, either. A hand emerged from her butterfly cloud as she pointed. “Wait. Look down there.”
“Fuck off!” Sam spat. “I’m not looking down.”
“Oh, don’t be such a baby,” Anna scolded.
“It’s alright for you, you’ve both got supersuits. If we fall, you’ll probably bounce,” Sam pointed out.
Anna sighed. “Such a baby. Randy. You see it?”
“You’re goddamn right I see it,” Randy growled. “And it’s incredible.”
“What is?” asked Sam. “What is it?”
“I’ve never seen anything like it,” Randy continued.
“What is it? What are you looking at?” Sam demanded.
“I can’t… I don’t really know how to describe it,” said Anna. “You have to look.”
Sam shook his head emphatically. “I’m not looking.”
“Just look at the damn ground, Sam,” Anna told him.
A series of sighs and groans emerged from the fluttering cloud, followed by some quite uncomplimentary remarks about butterflies.
Summoning what scant courage he had left, Sam looked in the direction Anna had pointed. “It’s fire,” he snapped. “How could you not describe fire? Look, I just did it then. ‘It’s fire,’ see?”
“But it isn’t just fire though, is it?” said Anna. “Look.”
Begrudgingly, Sam looked again. At first, all he saw was the fire. It surrounded Memetzo’s cathedral in the center of town. But, as he studied it more closely and his fear of plunging to the ground subsided enough to let him pay attention, Sam noticed the way the flames were moving. They moved like ripples in a pool of water, rolling outward from the cathedral and lapping against the buildings that lined the square.
“I mean… that’s weird, right?” said Anna. “That’s not normal?”
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