by Mia Archer
As soon as I looked up a cruel smile passed across his face and he fired.
I stood tall and let it hit me head on. Sure it knocked me back a few steps, but I dug my heels into the ground. The hard concrete beneath my feet crunched as I sank into it. That blast was nothing if not impressive, but when the guy finished pulling the trigger I was still standing and he looked utterly confused at my continued existence.
I smiled. “My turn, asshole.”
I flew across the room and grabbed the weapon. I’m not going to go into the gory details of exactly what happened in that little entry room that was clearly supposed to keep people like me from doing exactly what I was doing, but long story short the guy had something that would’ve made for a very interesting “stuff up the wrong hole” X-ray if there was still a functioning medical infrastructure in Starlight City to take that kind of picture.
Unfortunately for this dude it didn’t look like that was the case. I was struck with how his cries of pain probably should’ve stopped me before I even got started, or at the very least I should’ve felt bad as he was shouting at the top of his lungs about how he was going to kill me as soon as he figured out how to remove that thing from his colon and fire it at me, but I honestly couldn’t be bothered to give a shit about the dude.
The asshole had been facilitating trafficking women, and it was time for me to kick some ass on behalf of the downtrodden who couldn’t defend themselves.
So I floated deeper into the place, smiling to myself as an alarm started to sound all around me letting everyone know there was something scary coming down the tunnel for them.
6
Freedom
I grabbed the bars and pulled. I’d been expecting them to bend. Sort of like what you see in the movies. Only as with so many things in this profession, it became immediately apparent that the whole “bending bars on a jail cell” thing was something that’d been invented prop designers to add a touch of drama to the movies.
The point is as soon as I started trying to bend the bars they shattered in my hands. Not that I was complaining since it accomplished pretty much the same fucking thing.
I looked at the girl inside. She was a pretty redhead, though she looked far too young to be in a place like this. That was the story of every girl I’d found since I moseyed into this place and started dealing out a little bit of truth and justice, vigilante style.
The girl whimpered and tried to move further back into her cell. Which wasn’t really possible considering there wasn’t all that much room in the thing to begin with. I called it a cell, but it was really bars on four sides of a small container that were barely big enough to walk around in. There was a bucket in the corner where she was clearly meant to do her business, and the whole setup disgusted me.
“I’m not going to hurt you,” I said, reaching out for her.
She flinched and pulled away. I sighed. So far every girl I’d broke free had pulled away from me in terror. It really said something about the number these fucking traffickers had pulled on these girls that they were terrified of me.
I was supposed to be the good guy, after all. Good girl. The hero, is what I’m getting at.
“Listen,” I said, feeling some of the same irritation that’d hit me while I was dealing with those assholes up top coming to me, and then pushing down on it because the last thing I needed was to get pissed off at this poor girl whose only sin was to be caught in the wrong place at the wrong time where she got picked up by a bunch of scum of the earth slavers.
She didn’t look like she was in the mood to listen. No, she retreated deeper into the small cell. Not that there was very far for her to retreat to begin with. It made me want to rip the cell apart. I’d like to see her try to crawl into the back of the thing if there was no cell to begin with!
Only I didn’t do it. I counted to ten and thought about how much easier this would all be if I had Natalie here. She always had the perfect way of both making someone feel at ease around super powers while also being willing to threaten them in just the right way to get them to do whatever it was she wanted them to do.
I couldn’t do that. I just wanted to smash stuff.
“I’ll never go with you,” she whispered, so low that a regular human wouldn’t have been able to hear it.
I was far from a regular human, of course.
“What are you talking about?” I asked, both feeling bad for her and feeling just a touch impatient that we weren’t getting on with this whole rescue thing already.
“You know what you did,” she whispered. “You killed him! You killed him you bitch! You and your aliens!”
I got another unpleasant surprise. Which was saying something considering it’d been nothing but unpleasant surprises ever since I woke up to this hell on earth that was Starlight City.
The girl threw herself at me. Like one moment she was screeching, and the next she was climbing all over me like some sort of demented monkey, clawing and kicking and biting and doing her best to cause me as much physical harm as she possibly could.
It was a surprise, to be sure, and not exactly a welcome one. It’s not like she was hurting me with the way she was trying to claw my eyes out, but it’s not like it was exactly a pleasant experience trying to fight her off, either. I was trying to keep her from doing too much damage to herself, more than anything.
“What the hell are you talking about?” I said, and immediately regretted it as she took the opportunity to stuff one of her fingers down my mouth. Gross.
I resisted the urge to bite down. It wouldn’t take all that much in the way of bite pressure to remove those fingers. I was pretty sure I didn’t care about this girl losing her fingers, but I did care about how disgusting that’d be.
Besides. Given the current state of the city, I was pretty sure I’d have a hard time finding a hospital willing to sew those fingers back on. Hell, forget a hospital that was willing to take her case. I didn’t think it was likely there were any hospitals in the city that were more than piles of rubble.
“Would you please stop?” I growled. “I’m trying to help you damn it!”
It didn’t help that all the women in cells around us had also gone crazy. They all started shouting at the top of their lungs. Some of them were throwing things at me, and from the smells that suddenly assaulted my nose I was pretty sure they were throwing the closest most offensive thing they had access too, if you catch my drift.
My eyes started to water from the smell. Things already weren’t great here considering the assholes running the place didn’t seem to believe in indoor plumbing for their cages, and it was really bad now that some of those buckets were being raided for ammunition!
“What the hell is your problem?” I shouted again, and this time I really got grossed out.
Let’s just say some of that ammunition hit and splattered into my mouth. I was pretty sure my immune system could handle it. If I could take blows from giant monsters without missing a beat then I didn’t think I was going to get trapped in a War of the Worlds sort of situation or…
Where the hell had that thought come from? I’d never fought giant monsters as far as I could remember. I’d never read War of the Worlds for that matter. Sure I’d seen the Tom Cruise movie, at least part of it, but I hadn’t been paying attention since that was yet another Natalie makeout special. Yet as I thought about it now I could clearly remember reading the book!
Someone trying to dig her fingernails into my eyes brought me away from that memory that wasn’t a memory. More girls were shouting at me as they flung their waste at me.
“Get the fuck out of here bitch!”
“You killed my boyfriend!”
“You killed my girlfriend!”
“I don’t know where my parents are because of you!”
“My houseplant got smashed because of you!”
“We don’t need your fucking aliens coming after us!”
“Yeah! At least here we’re with humans! I don’t want any blueski
ns coming after me!”
I shook my head. It was all so confusing, and it was drawing the kind of attention I really didn’t need. I’d managed to make it down through the tunnels without raising the alarm, but I knew it wasn’t going to be long before bad things started happening if this kept up. There were bound to be more of those traffickers down here, and they didn’t seem like the kinds of guys who’d be all that happy about someone coming along and trying to free the merchandise.
Sure enough I could hear shouting in the distance, followed by the familiar cracking sound of weapons going off. There were more screams, but this time around it wasn’t the screams of women flinging abuse, and other things, at someone who was trying to save them. No, those were the screams of people who suddenly found themselves in the middle of a bunch of guns going off.
Only in this case none of them had any way to escape.
There was a wet thud and the girl who was on top of me doing her best to claw my eyes out, she probably would’ve succeeded if it wasn’t for the whole invulnerability thing, suddenly went limp as something warm and sticky dripped onto me.
I pulled her away from me. She still stared down at me, and for a moment there was recognition there. Recognition and hatred. Pure hatred. That was the only way to describe it. She was looking at me and the last thing she did was spit in my face.
“Fuck you, Fialux,” she whispered, blood coming out of her mouth as she said it.
Then she was gone. Her eyes went glassy and there was no more angry girl trying her best to claw my eyes out. No, there was merely a corpse bleeding out.
I let her drop. I mean sure it sucked that she was dead and everything, sure there’d been a part of me, once upon a time, who would’ve wanted to treat the dead with respect.
That moment had sort of gone out the window when she started clawing at my eyes and putting me in a position where I was getting poo flung at me. Besides, there were still assholes shooting at me, and I figured that meant it was time to take care of those assholes before they could hit any more living women trapped here.
They might be flinging their own waste at me, but that didn’t meant they deserved to be trapped down here where they couldn’t even run from the assholes shooting at them. Plus, I really wanted to get some alone time with one of these girls so I could figure out what the hell had happened while I was blacked out that would have them flinging their crap at me instead of being overjoyed at getting rescued.
I flew up over the cages. Blessedly those cages all had solid tops, the better to stack them in this underground warehouse, so that meant it was a little more difficult for the ladies down below to fling stuff at me.
“Idiots,” I growled as I looked down at them. “Who the fuck starts throwing shit at someone who’s obviously come along to fucking rescue you?”
I didn’t have the answer to that question, but I could see the assholes who were firing indiscriminately. There was a ramp on the other end of the room, obviously for loading and unloading, and they were streaming in from there.
I frowned. There were an awful lot of them, and it struck me that it was time to do something about all of them.
Maybe I couldn’t convince these girls to come with me, but I could take care of these pricks once and for all and then maybe leave the girls to take care of themselves and make an escape.
It wasn’t the ideal solution, but Natalie had always been big on saying you took on the world as it was, and not how you wanted it to be. Well it was time to take on these assholes where they were, and I had a feeling they weren’t going to like it when I was done with them!
7
Ass Kicking
I flew down behind the pricks. They didn’t even realize I was there. No, they were still firing at the spot where I’d been a moment ago, and some of them seemed to think they were actually winning.
I had trouble wiping the huge grin off my face as they started talking about what they’d just pulled off.
“I told you we could take her out!” one of them said. “They fly around like that for a little while, but eventually they start to lose steam and then we get a hell of a payday!”
“Yeah, I know,” another other one said. “That one looked like she was really strong though.”
“You know they have different levels of power. Not sure why, but that’s how it works.”
I shook my head. If these assholes meant what I thought they did then I was good and pissed off. I couldn’t believe they’d dare kidnap the brave heroines who kept Starlight City safe! I flexed my fingers into fists a couple of times and then couldn’t help myself.
One moment one of the assholes was standing there looking at the spot where I’d been floating and gloating about killing me, and the next moment he wasn’t thinking much of anything because his brains and all the other stuff that let him rub two thoughts together from time to time were mush in my hand.
I stared at the gunk. It should’ve horrified me. I’d just killed another human. I’d had his life in my hands, literally, and I’d used my strength to end it.
But I couldn’t bring myself to care. These men were human scum. They were kidnapping and selling women, and I wanted to kill all of them.
Several of them seemed to notice something was wrong. I wasn’t sure if it was the cracking sound of their friend’s skull caving in, the wet sound as those bits of skull moved in on what little brains he had, or if it was the splorch of his brains exploding out all over them in a warm sticky wet mass.
That last bit had to be pretty difficult to ignore.
Whatever it was, they all turned and faced me, and they all went wide-eyed as they realized they were staring at their certain doom.
I smiled. Waved. They started firing as the women in the cages behind them screamed.
Honestly? The fight wasn’t even all that difficult. They did most of the work for me. It turns out firing indiscriminately while being terrified of the superpowered heroine in your midst isn’t a good battle strategy, but then again it’s not like I’d ever expect much in the way of good strategy from a bunch of assholes who thought the best thing to do when they were in the middle of a potentially civilization ending attack on the city was profit on that death and destruction by adding to the sum total of human misery.
There was a time when I might’ve lectured them about that. I remembered all the times I’d given Natalie similar lectures about her tendency to vaporize her problems rather than trying to talk things out, but the time for talking was over with these pricks.
I waded among them. I was death incarnate, and that felt good. One guy shot another as he was foolish enough to step in front of me. He took a blast to the back, and then I had the weapon that’d been used to kill the guy in hand. I flipped it around and pulled the trigger a couple of times as I emptied it into my attacker’s stomach.
Shots rang out all around me. Some men screamed as those shots bounced off me and back into them. Others screamed as their buddy’s aim was clearly off and there was no saving them once they had a bullet in them.
And through it all I kept walking, calm as could be. I was going to end these men, and make sure they never did anything like this again.
I reached out for one who was trying to get away. I meant to grab at the back of his shirt, but instead my hand thrust into his back and when I pulled it out some of his spine came with me. I looked at it with an odd disconnect, wondering why the hell I wasn’t more horrified by this, then shrugged and tossed it to the side as he fell to the ground twitching as the information superhighway of his body ceased working.
I was deliberate. Methodical. I didn’t want passion to take over. Passion fueled me, but I was well aware that the moment I started letting that passion into my fighting would be the moment I made a mistake and let one of these assholes break free.
Finally it was over. I stood in a pile of bodies. At least half the wounds had been self-inflicted, but there were others I’d clearly gotten to in my cold rage.
I sighed a
nd took in a couple of deep breaths. Waited until my pulse was under control.
I didn’t know where this cold rage came from, but it was slightly terrifying the way this kept playing out. I wasn’t sure what to do with this sudden disregard for human life, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to stop.
Even as I knew there was something terribly wrong with me. Something that’d changed inside me since I woke up from whatever blow I took.
I looked around the warehouse. Looked at all the cages that’d been stacked high. Sighed. I was going to have to go through and bust all of these locks, an I really had better things to be doing than rescuing caged women one by one as they flung their crap at me.
So I decided to take a different route. I searched the remains of the assholes who’d been firing on me until I found one who had an obvious key. Then I went and tried it on a couple of the cages to satisfy myself that they’d been using a master lock.
I floated down to the closest cage I could find. Only the girl there was cowering away for me. That wouldn't do. I needed someone who hadn't had her spirit broken by these assholes.
Though my fist clenched and I had to watch that I didn't accidentally twist the key in my hand or anything like that. The last thing I needed was to give myself more work because I bent the only key to these cells out of shape.
I continued floating down the line. Most of the girls flinched away from me when I got close enough. What the hell was going on here? What the hell had happened to them that they were so afraid of me?
"I'm supposed to be the hero!" I shouted. "I'm rescuing you! What the fuck is wrong with all of you?"
"What the fuck do you think is wrong with us?" a voice called out from the darkness.