Collateral Damage

by Steve Beaulieu

  “That was easy,” Kyle breathed.

  “Three more. Brainy? Who’s next?”

  “Two blocks up and one block over. I’ll vector you in.”

  The next captures passed in a blur. Kyle had to suppress the urge to giggle as he launched himself up stairs three at a time, climbed up fire escapes in only a few minutes, and bounded down city streets without getting winded. The second capture was a girl who had wedged herself into an alley between two pre-war walkups. There was no mistaking the violin case she carried for an instrument. The girl acted instantly, popping the case apart and was able to pull the automatic weapon’s action back before Psy-Block fried her. The girl crumpled where she stood.

  The third capture was more difficult. She was sequestered in a hotel room immediately opposite the hotel the Vice President was meeting in. Psy-Block covered herself and Kyle, ensuring that none of the building staff obstructed them on their way upstairs. The good news was that they located the girl’s room easily enough. The bad news was that the third girl was augmented as well as Rabbit. After forcing the lock, Kyle found himself pulled into the room and pummeled repeatedly, thrown into a wall, and collapsed. The next sound he heard was the electric Zzap! Of Psy-Block’s stunner immobilizing the assassin.

  Psy-Block tapped her com. “Three down, one to go.” She paused, then tapped the com again. “Should I tell her you’re down?” she asked.

  “I’m good. Maybe you guys should have taught me to actually fight when I was still on the team.”

  “Believe me, we tried.”

  Braintrust’s voice spoke in their ears. “The last one is across the street. Looks like the fifth floor. Third room from the left. And…wait, there’s one more now. Same room. But that’s that. Take those last two out and we’re free and clear.”

  “I’d bet Rabbit is one of them,” Kyle said. “So she’ll be stuck in my body. That should be an easy clobber, even for me. Get ready with your zap-gun for whichever augmented girl is backing her up.”

  “Got it.”

  Down the elevator. Across the street. The same misdirection gimmick as before, even though Kyle could see droplets of sweat breaking out across Psy-Block’s brow. They stood outside the door for a moment, psyching themselves up. There were so many ways this could go wrong. Finally, Kyle kicked the door open and they burst through. Kyle pivoted, trying to check his danger space as a burst of light flashed across the room.

  Psy-Block crumpled, gagging and gargling as a seizure overtook her.

  Kyle forced himself to concentrate on the action. Kyle’s body…his body…stood across the room, a zap-gun of his own held in one hand, his expression one of confidence. Three feet away, Arch-Angel stood askew as if limping., holding himself up by the wall.

  Kyle made a snap decision: rush his own body. He launched Rabbit’s augmented frame at himself, felt the power of her cyborg muscles and limbs as her feet left the floor…

  …and dropped the zap-gun as his feet left the floor. Kyle’s disorientation worsened as he felt the wind knocked out of him and took the brunt of the blow to the back of his head and back. He struggled to stand, coughing and sputtering as he connected the dots.

  Back in her own body. Damnit!

  Rabbit, now herself, snatched the zap-gun off the hotel room floor and pointed the weapon at him. Kyle fought to get his breathing back in order before trying to speak. Why is she hesitating? Why doesn’t she shoot?

  Then he remembered. Two signatures. And only two people in the room besides himself and Psy-Block. He looked down and saw the SCYTHE gadget in Arch-Angel’s hand.

  “So. How much money have you actually taken from them, boss?” he asked.

  “It’s more complicated than you could possibly understand, Crypto.”

  “Is it? At best you’re a mercenary.”

  “I’m not going to spend an hour explaining the big picture to you. I just needed you to stay out of my way for a few days.” He turned and spoke to Rabbit. “Aluminum belfry malted tomorrow.” She frowned, but adjusted the power on the gun to full and pointed it at Kyle.

  Kyle noticed her hand shaking. Not much but it meant something was going on. Something he might be able to push to his advantage. “Hello, Rabbit. Is it me you’re looking for?”

  She gave him a look of distilled unhappiness, but her hand shook more noticeably now. He recited the lyrics one line at a time, her concentration waning with each verse.

  “Oh for god’s sake!” Arch-Angel yelled and swept Rabbit’s upper body with one of his wings. He followed up with a hook to her jaw and Rabbit lay on the floor, unmoving.

  He picked up the zap-gun. “I’m sorry, son. But I can’t have you—”

  “Dude!” a new voice cried out from behind. All Kyle saw was a blue and yellow outfit reach out, twirl Arch-Angel around and deck him in a powerful blow to the jaw.

  Strongarm folded his arms. “Want to tell me what’s going on?”

  Kyle coughed, then dry heaved. No more getting kicked in the stomach, especially when he was the one who threw the kick. Forget it. It was too unsettling. “You’re saving my ass is what’s going on.”

  “Yeah, when Braintrust broke in on my com and demanded I get my ass over here. What happened?”

  “It’s a long story and I’m not quite sure of the details. But both of these need to be picked up by SCRAM. Braintrust can direct you to a few others as well. In the meantime, I think you can take up the job of being in charge of the New Angels. Me, I’m going back to the Pentagon. At least that’s one job I’m almost good at.” He made his way to Psy-Block who had gotten past the seizure and was now blinking herself awake. “You good?” he asked.

  She coughed. “No more guns,” she said.

  He nodded. “No more guns. Come on, dear. Let’s get you home.”

  She stood groggily. “You know, you did pretty well out there,” she admitted. “It was almost fun.”

  “It was, almost. I can live without it. Hello, desk work.”

  “You’ll come visit, right?”

  “Will you keep smiling at me if I do?”

  She chuckled; it came out as a cough and wheeze. “Totally. You’re actually kind of fun when you’re hitting people.”

  “Nice. HQ is five blocks that way. And if you take my arm, I think we can both make it.”

  A Word from Jon Frater

  TUESDAY AFTERNOON MAYHEM

  BY J.D. BRINK

  TUESDAY AFTERNOON MAYHEM

  BY J.D. BRINK

  1

  “Screaming commuters ran in every direction, dressed in business suits, briefcases clutched desperately over their heads like shields. They ducked into convenience marts and hid in the concrete alcove of a bank entrance. As far as they were concerned, the sky was falling. Another monster was on the rampage. It was the end of the world—again!

  “And yet, it was just another day at the office for outlaw superhero and internet celebrity, Spitball!”

  Luke (Spitball) adjusted his night-black cowl—the eye holes were slightly askew—and lowered his amber-colored goggles back into place. He stood on the second-story stone overhang of the bank, which you would think would be a hard-to-get-to locale, but he was about to be joined by two other people.

  A platinum blonde in a black Miracle Mesh bodysuit swung up onto the landing with an old man in her arms. Her hair had grown longer since the Kansas incident, sweeping in from behind her and cloaking her face as she landed. Rather than the traditional superhero mask, she had adopted the practice of airbrushing an irregular black stripe across her eyes. Her costume now covered her entire body in shadowy black, collar to boots. Only her head and fingers were exposed, the latter to allow her to cast the webs that were her namesake.

  Silk Spider made sure the man she’d rescued was steady on top of the overhang before letting go of him; his walker, after all, had been left on the street below. He lowered himself to the roof and sat on his butt, both hands beneath him and smiling up with gaps in his teeth at the superheroine
who had just pulled him from peril.

  Once he was safe, Spider’s hands were free to slap Spitball on the back of the head.

  “Ow!”

  “Stop your damn narrating and get your ass down there!”

  “I’m working on it,” Spitball cried. “Last time I faced a ten-foot tall monstrosity, there wasn’t much for super-speedy to do.”

  “And what’s with that outfit?” Spider demanded.

  Spitball gestured to himself like a QVC model and spun around in a quick, demonstrative pirouette. He was wearing his original black and yellow Miracle Mesh outfit, the costume that emulated the true Phenomenal Five. Before the near-zombie-apocalypse that devastated the small town of Sunset, Kansas, the Five’s uniforms had been black with hero-specific piping: red for Silk Spider, purple for Stormfront, etcetera. Post-Kansas, he and the remaining heroes—the Phen Four?—had been wearing solid black. He supposed it could be taken as a gesture of mourning; Stormfront, Flamer, Dollman, and Gargoyle had all died there, after all. But the all-black look had grown too Navy SEAL for Luke, too anti-hero for his tastes.

  “I’m bringing sexy back, baby!” he exclaimed. “We need to put the color back into our tights. The public needs to know there are still heroes out here. We’re not ninjas, for God’s sake. We’re capes! In these dark times, where the government sets loose zombies and nukes its own Midwestern towns, people need to rely on the old symbols. Straight black is depressing—”

  She slugged him again, this time square in the chest. It nearly knocked the wind from him and robbed him of his next line of superheroic inspiration.

  “I can’t understand a word you’re saying,” she said. “You’re talking too fast again. All I caught was you calling me ‘baby,’ for which I’ll punish you later. Right now…” She seized him by the wrist and the scruff of his spandex-like neck in order to point him down toward the pandemonium on the streets below. “Get. Your ass. In gear!”

  Rather than leaving him some option to disobey, Spider simply flung said ass right off the overhang.

  For a panicky instant, Spitball thought he would crash hard into the middle of the street, break half of the bones in his body, and then be run over by a bus. But his superheroic den mother wasn’t quite that cruel. Near-invisible strands of silk webbing went taught at his wrist, neck, and back, swinging him downward like a discarded marionette. He instead bounced feet-first off the side of a white van and then gently landed in the street.

  “That’s what I call teamwork!” he shouted back at her, flashing a thumbs-up.

  Spider watched from above with a satisfied smirk.

  Ah, she loves me, he thought. I’m like the annoying little brother she never had.

  Then: On second thought, no, she doesn’t. I better stay away from headquarters for the next few days.

  Brakes screeched behind him. In a blink, Spitball had pulled a Duke Boys’ slide across the hood of the van and was standing on the other side of it, bracing himself against the fender in case of impact.

  A yellow-checkered cab jerked to a stop. Its open passenger window was even with where Spitball now stood. Had he still been standing where he’d landed, that taxi would be parked on top of him.

  The driver stared with gaping mouth down the block, then snapped his head toward the speedster.

  “Yes,” Spitball assured him. “It’s a giant slime monster. I suggest you go another way.”

  A gravelly voice buzzed in his ear: “Did I hear someone mention team work? Because I could use some.”

  It was Miracle Worker.

  “On my way, W,” Spitball replied.

  Two blocks and as many seconds down the street was the slime monster in question. It was more than ten feet tall now. (Had it been so big before?) A glistening black giant born from a tar pit—that’s what it looked like to him. And that’s what it smelled like too: the petroleum stink of hot roadwork and sun-cooked garbage radiated from its amorphic form. The thing was only roughly man-like in shape with one curving hump for shoulders and flowing limbs like sludge geysers in slow-mo. The black volcanic goo it called skin was in constant motion, leaving tar-like footprints and residual hand marks everywhere they touched. Its head was little more than an expanding bubble at the top of its body with shadowy pits for eyes and an irregular mouth that drooped down past where its neck should be.

  The thing gurgled a terrible elephant roar and shook its blunt hands at the heavens.

  A woman in a red miniskirt darted out from her hiding spot and ducked into the 7-11 on the corner. The glass double-doors sealed shut behind her, but it was too late. The creature had seen her.

  Another wet curse at God issued from the beast’s goo-choked throat. The giant stomped two stride-lengths toward the convenience store and shoved itself through the glass. The whole storefront shattered and collapsed in on itself. The only thing louder than the crash of glass were the screams coming from inside.

  Spitball hurtled toward the monster at speeds too fast to follow. He had learned to build momentum more quickly now over shorter sprints, and on the opposite corner from the convenience store was a coin-operated newspaper machine. Luckily the heavy box was only a few hyper-velocity strides away from where the creature had poured itself into the storefront; if he’d had to propel it any further, he’d have dropped it and tripped over it. But with the momentum he had built in just two blocks, Spitball had the temporary strength necessary to grab it by the handles, spin himself around like a whirling dervish, and hammer throw the thing right into the monster’s flank. The newspaper box impacted the thick sludge and sunk deep into the beast’s trunk.

  Spitball himself stumbled away upon releasing the heavy box, still turning in circles and somewhat out of control. He danced right through the back end of the creature, stomping ankle-deep into what served as its heels and residual footprints. A few yards later, he was standing in the middle of Market Street.

  And there he stopped.

  “Uh-oh.” He pumped his legs and tried to raise his knees, but his feet held fast, tarred to the spot.

  “Um, little help here?” he said meekly.

  The slime monster’s arms poured against the metal cube stuck in its side, then flowed backward. It yanked the obstruction from its body and tossed it aside like a huge toy block.

  Then it turned around to find the little bastard who had dared to distract it from the pretty girl it likely wanted to eat (along with some Slim Jims and a Slushy).

  “Ah, crap…” Spitball tapped on the comm link in his ear twenty times in a second. “Is this thing on? Didn’t someone just mention teamwork a minute ago?”

  Arcs of blue and white electricity crackled and snapped onto the sludge giant from Spitball’s right. It moaned with elemental agony so loud Spitball expected nearby windows to shatter in response.

  An African-American man stepped into view: circular, mirrored goggles; thick Santa Claus beard; bundled dreadlocks; and a neck-to-toe Miracle Mesh ninja uniform. The rifle-like, silvery device in his arms continued to channel electricity into the monster. Thick wires linked the gun to Miracle Worker’s bulky backpack, with more cables running from it to the lamp post behind him.

  “I tapped into the power grid,” Miracle Worker said, the voice coming in more clearly through Spitball’s ear piece than across the mere yards between them. The thunderclap sound of lightning flowing from him and crashing into the monster was frightening, and Spitball could feel both the power and noise of it on his skin, even through his costume.

  “I appreciate the rescue,” he said, continuing to pull at his own feet, “a thousand-thousand fold, I really do. But please don’t fry me along with the bad guy.”

  “That’s gratitude for you,” came a cocky reply. It wasn’t W who said it, though. (It might have surprised Spitball more if it had been—sarcasm just wasn’t the Miracle Worker’s style.)

  Someone else came up from Spitball’s left. He was the muscular, dreamboat firefighter type, with dirty-blond hair in a military buzz cut and
an airbrushed black stripe for a mask, obviously modeled after Silk Spider’s own style. And his outfit was a trademark lawsuit in the making, too. All black and obviously salvaged from various articles found at a military surplus store. It looked pretty good, though. The man wore it like he knew what he was doing.

  The stranger gave him a rather suspicious smile, then pulled a very long knife from a sheath on his thigh.

  “Hey now—”

  Before he could object too strenuously, the man wrapped one arm around Spitball’s leg and pulled, sawing the goo shoe from the street with his blade. He had both feet cut free in short order.

  Spitball backtracked a few steps, testing them out and finding that they were only as sticky now as having stepped in a lot of gum.

  “Well, thanks, Crocodile Dundee. But I think we can handle this from—Hey, wait a minute!” He could now see the bow and quiver on the man’s back. “I know you. You’re that walking cliché, Wrong Bow.”

  “That’s Longbow,” the man said. He slipped his knife back in its sheath and flipped the recurve bow off of his back. “And you’re welcome.”

  He pulled and fired three arrows in quick succession. All three instantly sunk themselves into the creature’s unstable form.

  Spitball waited for what seemed a long moment (though his sense of time was skewed a bit.) “Well? Aren’t they going to explode or something?”

  “You watch too much TV, kid.”

  “So they don’t do anything?” Spitball demanded. “They’re not filled with pink anti-slime foam or, or… anything? Do those skinny wooden splinters look like they actually hurt the monster to you?”