by Mia Archer
I leaned down over him. Grabbed what was left of the other two thirds of that trifecta. Leaned in nice and close so he could hear me.
“You’re going to tell me more about what your operation is doing and…”
I blinked. I was covered in something warm and gooey. I looked down. Something red, warm, and gooey. And the guy in front of me was missing a good chunk of his face.
Gross!
4
Criminal Ring
I wiped the gunk off of me as best I could. It was difficult considering there was human muck all over my face and all over the clothes I’d just put on. Like I was going to have to go back to that store and see about getting something else because these clothes just wouldn’t do now that they were covered in human remains.
I missed my suit. What the hell had happened to my suit?
I heard something moving in the darkness out there and pointedly didn’t look in that direction. I figured if there was anyone or anything moving around out there then it was whoever had just pulled off the shot.
There was another sound. A moment later something slammed into my side. I looked down and threw myself to the side when I realized what had just hit me.
Whoever was out there was firing live ammunition, and I figured that meant it was time for me to play dead. Maybe they’d come in and have a little look around, and maybe then I could surprise them.
It wasn’t the best plan in the world, but whatever. I wasn’t Natalie. I couldn’t come up with good plans on the fly like that. All I could do was the one thing she always told me to avoid: rely on my strength to get me through this.
I fell to the ground and cried out, then went silent. Thankfully it was dark enough at this point that I didn’t have to worry about my breathing being too obvious. The last thing I wanted was to tip off whatever asshole had just taken a shot at me.
It took a little while for that person to move in on me. That was a surprise. Whoever was out there was using a hell of a lot more caution than the first three guys.
Finally I heard the sound of rubble crunching underfoot nearby. Someone appeared over me. I could hear them and feel them, but I didn’t dare open my eyes. I’d be tempted to blink as all the dust that’d been kicked up by the explosion that took out SCU got into my eyes.
It was a reflex even though that dust didn’t have a chance of hurting me. A holdover from the days before I had the whole strength and invulnerability thing going for me.
“Damn it Reg,” a rough male voice said. “I told you this shit was going to get you in trouble someday.”
I opened my eyes. The guy wore goggles that glowed faintly in the night. That looked an awful lot like the kind of tech Natalie used. Sure this guy’s stuff was a little bulkier than the stuff she used, but it wasn’t nearly as bulky as some of the stuff the military or law enforcement used.
Basically whatever he was wearing was a knockoff of something Natalie had put together, and I figured that meant he was using something that was a design Dr. Lana had stolen. I figured anyone wearing Dr. Lana’s stuff was no friend of mine.
Finally he turned to me. I couldn’t see his eyes hidden behind those goggles, but I could see his body language. He was clearly surprised that I was still alive down here.
“What the…”
He brought his rifle up. It was an old fashioned model, which is to say it was a model that used bullets rather than one of the plasma weapons Natalie preferred.
The jerk had probably scrounged his whole setup from somewhere. Then again given the current situation in Starlight City I guess it shouldn’t have been much of a surprise that criminals were scavenging whatever they could find.
“Fuck you!” the guy said, firing off a couple of shots at point blank range.
I sighed. Those shots weren’t going to do anything against me, but they were definitely enough to really fuck up my shirt. It was already covered in blood, and now it was in bloody tatters.
I floated up and hovered a couple of feet above the ground.
The guy didn’t get the point I was trying to make. No, he kept firing until he ran out of ammo. That was one of the problems with relying on an old fashioned weapon like that. They eventually ran out of ammo. As far as I could tell Natalie didn’t have to worry about her wrist blaster running out of power as long as one of her reactors was working.
Though there had been a couple of times when we were first fighting each other when she’d run out of juice, come to think of it. Something told me a petty criminal like this wouldn’t ever have to worry about that sort of thing though.
I arched an eyebrow. “Are you done, or would it make you feel better if you reloaded and tried again?”
The asshole’s fingers shook as he reached into his pocket. The dude seriously had a sort of post-apocalyptic Old West vibe going. Though that whole gunslinger vibe was slightly ruined by the way his fingers shook and rattled as he tried to reload. It took him a couple of tries to even get the bit that has the ammo to go into the bit that presumably fed the stuff into the weapon.
Honestly I didn’t know what any of it was called. I’d never been all that concerned with how weapons worked in the real world. All I had to know was the things couldn’t hurt me.
“Ready to go?” I asked when it looked like he was done.
I floated there with my arms crossed in front of me. The guy looked at me with the kind of resignation that said he knew this wasn’t going to work, but he still had to try. I could respect the guy his hustle, even if I knew it wasn’t going to matter a damn bit what he did.
“Fuck you,” he said, pulling the trigger over and over again. “This is for destroying the world! And for Reg, I guess…”
Bullets slammed into me. It felt sort of like when Natalie hit me with a spitball back when I’d been relieved of my powers. Which is to say I knew it was happening, but it didn’t hurt all that much.
Finally he finished and the gun clicked a couple of times as he kept pulling the trigger. I rolled my eyes.
“Are we done now?” I asked.
It looked like we weren’t done. His face contorted in rage and he came at me. He swung the gun like he thought using it as a club was going to work where using it for its actual intended purpose hadn’t. I caught the thing and tried to yank it out of his hands, but he kept a surprisingly tenacious grip which meant he went flying as well. He did let go when he was overhead, at least.
He landed in some rubble, and from the grunt he made the wind had been knocked out of him. Meanwhile I held the gun up and bent it down the middle so there was no chance this thing would be used to round up any more girls.
Then I whirled on my new friend. Smiled.
“Right,” I said. “You had your chance, so now it’s my turn. You’re going to tell me everything you know about attempts to capture girls in this city, and if I like some of the answers you give me then I might just let you live.”
“Fuck you,” the guy spat, some blood and a tooth flying out of his mouth.
“Right,” I said with a sigh. “I thought you might say something like that, so why don’t we go for a little flight?”
“What?” he asked.
I grabbed him and flew up. This was something I’d always loved. The freedom of knowing I could fly wherever the hell I wanted and I didn’t have to wait to get into a fixed wing aircraft. The rush of the wind whipping all around me.
I could understand why so many people fantasized about being able to do this, and I was one of the lucky sons-of-bitches blessed with powers that let me do it. Plus I didn’t have to learn how to use antigrav like Natalie did.
We flew high over the city. The place looked a lot different than the last time I remembered flying over the place. The only lights were from flying saucers off in the distance as they fired on the city below.
I frowned. I was going to have to do about that, but considering I’d just woken up in the middle of a giant crater and I wasn’t sure how I got there I figured it’d be a good idea to t
ake a breather and figure out how the hell I got in that crater before I did something stupid like take on the flying saucers that might’ve put me there.
Not to mention there was something going on here on a far smaller scale that looked like it needed to be taken care of before I got around to fixing the city’s big issues.
“Have you ever felt the sensation of flying without an airplane around you?” I asked, turning back to the dude.
“No!” he said. “And it’s not something I want to experience thank you very much!”
“Too late,” I said. “Are you going to give up where you’re taking girls before you sell them off, or are we going to have to do this the fun way?”
Oh my. The fun way? That didn’t sound like something I’d say, and yet as I said it there was something about it that felt right. Which should’ve been wrong, but whatever.
The guy snorted up something from the back of his throat, then spit whatever he’d gathered back there at me. I closed my eyes, but that didn’t stop the mixture of blood and snot from hitting me full on in the face.
I reached down with my free hand and wiped the unfortunate mixture away with the tattered shirt that’d already been reduced to a mess of rags. And I smiled again. I might be surprised that I was thinking of this as the fun way of doing things, but that didn’t change the fact that it was going to be fun.
I figured I should take my fun where I could get it in a world where it was clear aliens had overthrown at least my little corner of the world, and they’d done it despite what had probably been my best efforts to fight them off with Natalie at my side.
So I didn’t feel all that bad as I let the guy go and he went hurtling down into the darkness below, screaming the entire way as his arms flailed in a pathetic attempt to suddenly gain the ability to fly.
Not that it was going to work.
I let him freefall for the space of a breath before I shot after him. I was going to get answers out of this asshole, damn it, even if I had to make him think he was going to die to get those answers.
Heck, with the mood I was in and these new thoughts running through my mind it was possible he was going to die before I got those answers. Maybe even after.
I’d play it by ear. See how things went with the questioning and how frustrated I got.
5
Knock Knock
I knocked on the door. It was an indistinct sort of door in a run down neighborhood around the edges of the gentrified ring that circled downtown Starlight City. The kind of place the cops wouldn’t ever pay much mind to as long as the criminal elements here didn’t wander into those aforementioned gentrified areas.
Assuming we were even in a world where there were cops. I hadn’t seen much in the way of cops at all since I’d come back. Which made sense. If the city was being invaded by the kind of enemies that would give the US military trouble then it stood to reason that the boys in blue would be keeping on the down low.
It was kind of hard to stop and frisk an alien who was tooling around in a flying saucer wielding rayguns that could reduce an entire building to so much rubble in a matter of moments.
There was a long pause where I worried that maybe I’d gotten the wrong building. The guy had been pretty detailed in his description of the place, but then again he’d also been more than a little terrified as he went flying up and down over Starlight City.
Oddly none of those flying saucers had come to have a closer look at what we were doing. Which was good. I’d take care of them later. Right now I was more concerned with taking care of whatever girls might’ve been captured by this underworld scum.
I could save the city all I wanted, and it wouldn’t necessarily save these girls. They could be smuggled out of the place before I had a chance to do anything to save them, and I didn’t like the idea of leaving any of them to their fate now that I had a pretty good idea what these asshole criminal scum pricks were doing.
“I swear, if you lied to me,” I growled in the darkness.
My companion didn’t say anything. Well then. After the experience he’d just had it’s not like I expected him to say anything. He hadn’t been a great conversationalist to begin with. No, he sat slumped on the dirty alley floor sleeping the long sleep of the damned.
Finally there was banging on the other side of the door, and a small slit opened in the door. Eyes stared out, though it’s not like staring out into the darkness of this alleyway was going to do much good. Not unless they had…
Night vision. I saw the small glow of an old school infrared illuminator as whoever was on the other side of that door put on some night vision goggles. I wasn’t sure where a petty criminal got something like that, but it was putting a serious cramp in my plans.
I thought fast. I pulled up my friend. The person on the other end of the door seemed to regard the dude for a moment, and all I could hope was there was so little light that they wouldn’t be able to make out much in the way of details.
Even if they had on a pair of goggles, there was a good chance they were good old fashioned Gen 1 goggles that used starlight and moonlight to illuminate things. Even with that IR illuminator they might not be able to see much if I stood off to the side and held my friend up.
“That you Carl?” the person on the other side of the door asked.
“Uh yeah,” I said, shaking the limp body so it looked like he was moving.
I wasn’t sure that I did a very good job of it, but whatever. I hadn’t had much time to think this plan through. I wasn’t even sure why I was doing it this way, other than there was a sadistic streak running through me right now that enjoyed the idea of using my new friend as a puppet.
Weird, I didn’t know where it came from, but I was going with it.
“So let me in!”
“Carl, you sure you’re okay?” the voice on the other end said.
“Yeah!” I said, talking in a deep voice which didn’t sound at all like this asshole had when I was chatting with him.
Then again the last time I’d talked to him he’d been falling from a pretty high height screaming at the top of his lungs, so whatever. It’s not like I could remember what his voice sounded like to begin with under all those screams.
“I don’t like this,” the guy said. “I don’t know what your game is, but whoever you are fuck off before you get vaporized.”
I sighed and threw Carl’s limp lifeless body down in the alley. It’s not like he would need it anymore. Hell, it’s not like I had any way of knowing that he had an underlying heart condition or something that made getting repeatedly raised into the thin upper atmosphere and dropped down the sort of terrifying experience that made his old ticker seize up and stop working.
Then again considering what he’d been up to before I pulled that routine on him it’s not like I cared that he had a bad ticker that’d seized up when he refused to tell me where he’d been coming from at first. Sure the ten or so times I did it after he gave me all the right information so I could make sure he wasn’t lying probably hadn’t been strictly necessary, but what the fuck ever.
Clearly this puppet routine wasn’t working, and it was time to try something else.
“Fuck it,” I said, stepping in front of the door.
“Carl?” the guy asked.
I couldn’t see his eyes, but I could tell the moment he’d realized there was someone else out here in the alley, because the dull IR glow of his goggles’ illuminator disappeared. Of course he’d still be standing on the other side of the door, he hadn’t had enough time to get away, which meant this next bit was going to hurt.
“Tough shit,” I growled as I punched the door.
The thing looked like it’d been reinforced, but that didn’t matter. Not with me trying to get through the thing, at least. I hit it with enough force that there wasn’t a chance the thing was going to stay in place, no matter how much they’d reinforced the motherfucker.
I heard a cry of pain on the other side as the door slammed into the poor
bastard who’d been standing on the other side. When I stepped inside the guy who’d been guarding the door was twitching under it, but I couldn’t bring myself to be all that put out by the idea that one of these assholes was suffering before he went on to meet whatever eternal reward was waiting for him.
I could only hope it was warm and toasty considering what he’d been doing before he met his end.
I floated into the room and had a look around. There was a pile of weapons in one corner, so clearly whoever had been running the place had been prepared for something like this.
Though there was something odd about those weapons. Like they were rayguns from some of the older movies Natalie had shown me from the ‘50s and ‘60s that had always made me feel weird when I was younger because those tight silver suits on those sexy women made me think things that…
I stopped. Shook my head. Okay. That was really weird. Because I was pretty sure I’d never watched old movies from the ‘50s and ‘60s when I was younger. Sure there’d been movies that made me feel all weird and tingly when I looked at a pretty girl, but we’re talking I got a weird feeling when I looked at Ariel in her seashell bra, not when I looked at Ann Francis swimming around in front of Leslie Nielson revealing a surprising amount of skin for a ‘50s sci-fi movie and…
I shook my head again. How the fuck did I even know who Ann Francis was? Or that Leslie Nielson had starred in anything before he showed up with white hair in the first Airplane? And why was I thinking about a big pair of red lips singing about her for some reason?
There was something seriously wrong with me. Something that’d gotten into my head, only when I thought about that something getting into my head it was like there was a gaping hole there that was keeping me from realizing what the fuck was going on.
“Hey lady!” someone shouted, pulling me out of my funk.
I looked up. Saw a dude with a bitchin’ goatee standing in front of me holding one of those weird rayguns that looked like something straight out of a movie I remembered watching as a kid even though I’d never watched anything of the sort as far as I could remember.If that makes sense.