“I can’t believe, like, what a bunch of pathetic, fossilized old geezers I’m stuck with,” complained public-persona Syndi, perhaps having forgotten that her comm was active (or perhaps not forgetting).
“Cut the chatter, Red Two,” snapped the Spook.
“Quit calling me that, Sanford! My name is Power Grrrl!”
The Spook: “Red Squad, lock weapons and prime powers in attack readiness.”
Kid Kombat Sr.: “Red Three, standing by.”
Saber-Tooth Beaver: “Red Four, standing by.”
Smithing Wesson: “Red Five, standing by.”
King’s English: “I say, old chap, Red Six, standing by.”
The Rock Breaker: “Yessuh, Red Seven hyah, stannin by-anby.”
Super Bastard: “Red Eight, frickin ready to rawk an ro-o-oll, good buddy!” (Pause) “Stanning by.”
(Pause)
The Spook: “Red Two, confirm readiness!”
Power Grrrl (sighing): “Whatever.”
Still monitoring visuals only, I watched as the Spook, suddenly lit by red and blue lights stroking him and the buildings around him, stood to address those bunkered inside the QRIB.
“ATTENTION, PHILIP K. EDGERTON AND OTHER L*A*B MILITANTS!” boomed the amplified voice of Red Squad Leader. “SURRENDER IMMEDIATELY. WE HAVE YOU SURROUNDED! COME OUT WITH YOUR HANDS UP AND YOU WILL NOT BE HARMED.”
Seconds gouged into everyone’s nerves. There was no response.
After forty-six seconds, Saber-Tooth Beaver asked, “Are we even sure they’re in there?”
“Yes of course we’re sure!” said the Spook. “Hold your positions, and your tongues!”
On the honeycomb hexagons haloing the combat theater, video unfurled from the helicopters of the local and national news stations. Reporters explained that they were “live at the Stun-Glas standoff” (seconded by onscreen titles proclaiming the location as “KRIB Headquarters” [sic]) where “black L*A*B cult militants are under the command of disgraced F*O*O*Jster the X-Man”; PNN’s story proclaimed Kareem an “antiwhite fanatic turned terrorist and superpredator” against whom the “dusk raid has been launched following a terrorist attack on the Fortress of Freedom where assembled F*O*O*Jsters are presumed dead…”
Once sixty seconds at full alert had expired, the Spook ordered Syndi to deploy her HEAT Ray against the L*A*B to “dance them out.” Syndi reminded the field commander that her beam worked only on line-of-sight, useless against the L*A*Bsters trapped inside.
The Spook: “Then hit the music, Red Two!”
Instantly: BUHM-BUHM-BUHM-BUHM…BUHM-BUHM-BUHMti-BUHM…
Ripping her bustier speakers up to full volume, Syndi opened her mouth to unleash a sonic tsunami upon the neighborhood, a herd of auditory woolly mammoths trampling over tepees:
“I wanna SHOCK you, BABY
ROCK you, BABY
TALK you MAYBE
Into GOING
DOWN, DOWN, DOWN, DOWN
DOWN on ME-E-E-E…”
Rushing to their windows, ghetto dwellers leaned out, screaming inaudibly against the aural assault; soon they disappeared only to return to their sills throwing bottles, forks, and burning trash—
The Spook: “Take ’em out, Red Two!”
Syndi’s HEAT Ray bathed the tenements in intense swirls of disco light, and instantly the dozen window terrorists were transmuted into twelve individual Power Grrrls, all of them harmonizing with her choral invitation to cunnilingual fury. When other residents emerged to pelt the Syndis in their own building with garbage, they too were flash-HEATed into singing submission.
When five minutes had passed and still no one had emerged from the QRIB, the Spook patched into Syndi’s sound system to declare his ultimatum:
“ATTENTION MILITANTS! THIS IS YOUR FINAL WARNING! IF YOU DO NOT SURRENDER WITHIN THE NEXT SIXTY SECONDS WE WILL OPEN FIRE! YOU WILL MOVE OUT OF THAT HOUSE OR YOU WILL FACE THE CONSEQUENCES!”
QRIB Deaths
When the sixty seconds ended, the Spook ordered in the Rock Breaker.
With remarkable speed for such a massive sixty-four-year-old man, the Rock Breaker leapt over the barrier and sprinted across the street, his mystic hammer John Henry in front of him like a sword.
At the final second before his strike could rip out the corner of the QRIB temple, dark tentacles tore out of the soil and tripped up the elderly black man, knocking him to the ground and seizing the fallen John Henry. Rising from the soil with his tentacles like a giant black daddy longlegs spider, the Dreadlocker closed on the Rock Breaker to rip him to stumps.
And then a twenty-foot battering ram of an arm smashed the Dreadlocker into a smear on the sidewalk.
Super Bastard, piloting his giant “Transformer” suit of linked robotic trailers, stood to his full six-story height, scraping the gore and dreadlocks from his arm before displaying evidence of his kill for the Spook.
“HOW’S SHE LOOKIN, PARTNERS?” he boomed, before the QRIB’s roof exploded from the emergence of a six-story-tall Arnold Drummond, Esq.
For terrifying seconds it was giant lawyer against giant lawyer, prosecutor against defense, locked in lethal litigatory combat, until Arnold Drummond got the upper hand and knocked Super Bastard down with one swing of his massive supersubpoena. The trailer-Transformer fell, crushing the Rock Breaker into the potholed street. Drummond jeered, “Whatchu talkin about, Bast’d?”
The Spook: “Red Five, take him out!”
Kid Kombat Sr. knelt, bowing his head for clearance, and smoke trails streamed six hundred feet diagonally upward from his back to sear Arnold Drummond’s face, turning the left side of his giant skull into a cratered ruin of ravaged, sagging, burning flesh. An abattoir’s worth of meat and bone pelted the ground like human hail.
Roaring in his death throes, Drummond charged the line before another tendril of smoke exploded through his midsection, dumping him dead overtop the struggling megaskeleton of Super Bastard.
Seconds before Kid Kombat could fire into the QRIB temple itself, his backpack exploded. Aflame, he fell to the ground screaming and flailing, dying like a crab dropped into a pot of boiling fat.
The Spook: “What the hell—”
I switched angles on the monitors. Charging across the street was Aunt Ester of the Supa Soul Sistas, who must have aimed her chemotrophic powers into the unarmed missiles on Kid Kombat’s back. Still advancing, she transmuted five of Smithing Wesson’s bullets into blossoms of steam before the sixth one punched a hole through her sternum big enough to reach through.
The scene devolved into chaos: Onyx Fox, another Supa Soul Sista, executed a hundred-foot arcing wire-work sidekick into Smithing Wesson’s back—the King’s English hurled his bobby hat, which transmuted midtumble into a vicious, scrabbling badger that chomped on to Onyx Fox’s leg—the Diva emerged, shooting her Look, and everyone in range dropped to their knees in worship until she and Syndi locked eyes and powers in diva-to-Diva combat—Saber-Tooth Beaver dashed across the smoking, flaming attack zone to start gnawing a new entrance into the QRIB—Anita Hill waded through strafing fire, her shield-law protecting her while she inched ever closer into range to unleash her power of discovery—
And then three giant silver-black wedges flew screaming overhead and dropped incendiary “eggs” on the QRIB.
The temple roared flame into the sky like Vesuvius.
Arcing out of their first bombing run, the Spook’s terror-dactyls circled wide, aligning for their second attack vector.
Having leapt all over the surrounding tenements, the fire transformed the entire block into a massive, multistory bonfire. The QRIB’s walls fissured and burst, and what remained of the roof crumbled and shattered through the four lower stories until all that remained was a rubble inferno.
For just a moment I activated Syndi’s OM Meter, seeking an empathic survey of the situation. Beyond her horror, what I felt from her was a hammering heart, a throat raw from singing and screaming, and a nose scorching with the stench of smo
ke and burning meat.
The Spook: “Attention all units. This is Red Squad Leader. The target has been pacified. Repeat: The target has been pacified.”
Regardless of what the adrenaline addiction of superheroism may afford you, if you’re serious about “pacifying” yourself, you’ll need to look past such easy solutions as immolating those who spin you into a shame spiral or body-check you into belligerence. Remember: No one can “make” you “feel” anything.
The power is yours—and yours alone—to actualize yourself, to create your own reality, to free yourself of the illusions that imprison you more completely than could any malevolent mastermind. Had either X-Man or the Spook remembered such basic truths for achieving psychemotional equilibrium, they could have saved themselves not only lethal, destructive combat but substantial consternation.
Final Lessons at the Alma Mater
By the time I scan-switched over to Sunhawk Island, Blue Squad had engaged its enemies. In the inky indigo dusk over the Blue Pyramid, orange flares and sparks lit up the combatants. But otherwise beyond those light sources I was blind, so I patched my OM Meter into Wally’s cognistream:
~~What is all this crazy junk in m’face? M’team’s gettin clobbered an I caint hardly see nuthin—better comm Festus. He’ll know what t’do…
“Mission C’mmand, this here’s Wally—”
“Copy, Blue Squad Leader. Over.”
“MC, I’m getting blindeded out here—some kinda black cloud fulla lil ol squares is followin me—”
“Look carefully, Blue Leader—are the squares tiny words? Over.”
“Uh, well now that y’mention it, yes, yes they is—”
“All right, then—they’re logoids! Have you seen Edgerton anywhere? Over.”
“No, not yet—”
“Blue Leader, White Squad’s engaged his word-creatures at the Hyper-Potentiality Clinic! He’s overextended—there’s no way he can keep manifesting so many apparitions at once for long without completely draining himself. Hang in, Blue Leader! Over and out!”
“Over and out!”
~~Cain’t keep this up f’ever. Better spit on em. Now that’s a sight! Fry, you stupid lil words! Golly, I always loved that smell—like burnin hair. That’s better—now I c’n get me a clearer look-see. Golldangit! Lookit the size a them boys, them whatchacallem—Ka-Sentinels? Like a football team of tar black Goliaths with hawk faces. And who’s that fightin alongside em? Whoever it is, they’s beatin the stuffin outta Ivory Giant!
~~My gosh, it sure is a lovely night; stars all a-twanklin. Sunhawk Island’d be a nice place t’go campin sometime. Think maybe when we’re done t’night I should grab me some dinner at th’Olive Garden. They give ya extra breadsticks gratis if y’ask for ’em kindly. Maybe I should get me that collie dog I been thankin about for a spell. They shed suh’m fierce, though…Hm…Is they reruns of Rockford Files on tonight? Always like that there Jim Rockford…
“Blue Leader! Blue Leader! This is Cathode Girl, do you copy?”
“Cathode Girl, this is Omnipotent Man, the Blue Leader. Over.”
“Blue Leader, we need your assis—”
“Say, Cathode Girl, who’s that fella leadin alla them Ka-Sentinels—the one wearin the golden skirt and whippin around that scepter? Over.”
“Blue Leader, that’s the L*A*Bster, Grimhotep the Living Ka! Blue Leader, please engage! We are currently having the sweet shit kicked out of us! Over!”
“Cathode Girl, this is Blue Leader—please keep th’profanity off this here channel! Over!”
“Blue Leader, Eldritch Cleaver has cut off Atomic Giraffe’s legs, Ivory Giant’s being kicked to death on the ground, and it’s all Zed and I can do to shatter these Sentinels! We need your help, Blue Leader!”
“Don’ get y’drawers in a knot, lil lady, I’m a-comin!”
~~Gotta plow through another cloud a these word-dealies. Worse’n Mexican skeeters. Lookit alla them animals runnin around down there—so dark out, it’s tough to…what’re them, crocodiles? An hippos! An a elk or suh’m? Hawk King shore had hisself a fine preserve here. Okay, let’s deal with these Sentinels.
~~Hm—skin feels like marble, cool and smooth. Still—uhn—they aint so tough. Just like crumblin crackers in yer soup. Ten-foot-tall black crackers with golden beaks, anyhow. How many left—okay, got those two. Get them over there—done and done. Spit down these six. Where’s Grimhotep? Fightin Cathode and Zed the Livin Phoneme. They’ll be fine. Okay, smash this one. Crack them two. Spit these five down to—
~~DMMMF! M’dadblamed skull feels like I jess been quarterback-sacked in a minefield! Where am I? Up to m’neck in th’water—Sunhawk Island’s way in the heck over there an I’m a-bobbin in th’Bay—
“Who sucker punched me? C’mon, show y’self, unless yer yella! Don’make me smoke ya out!”
~~NFFF! Like takin a missile in m’midsection—an whoever’s plowin into me is shootin us up outta th’water now—
~~Kick him away—watch that crumb-bum spinning end-over-coffeepot. “Who are ya, y’no-good sucker-puncher?”
“You don’t know me, Argonian?”
~~Somebody’s hovering out there with his back to th’moon, all shadowed an I cain’t see ’im fer squat—’cept he’s got a cape an he’s holdin some kinda oversized double-sided ax or suh’m.
“Sorry, buddy? Could y’all turn on a light or suh’m? I’m guessin y’all don’get many offers t’play basketball at night.”
“Taunt all you like, Impotent Man! For I, Shango, will be the orisha of your doom!”
~~OW! Betty Crocker, that smarts! Put his lil ol ax right in my turnstiled kneecap! Let’s see how he likes a little spit-shine! That’s better, son—now I can see ya, lit up like a ’lectric Santy Claus on Bustle Avenue at Christmas!
“How ya like that, Shangy-Man? You talk tough for somebody wearin such a funny little tiara!”
~~UHFF! Tough sumbitch, all right! Better shock him some more—still keeps on coming—burnt off most of his hair an clothes, an he’s still swangin, grabbin me, wrastlin me like a Florida king gator hopped up on funny-beans—hokay, gots to choke im—gon be tough—his neck’s tougher’n m’thigh—practically huggin im he’s so close—
~~Now, there she goes, throat’s finally crackin—
~~DAMN, he up an smoked me in th’eye with a head butt—
~~What’s all this sand or dust or whatever—hey, smells like—
~~Everything’s foggy an spinnin…World’s gone blue an black an blue an black an blue—like I’m swimmin in Windex and crude oil, all hot an cold at the same time, I’m all tinglin an singin an laughin an m’heart’s a-throbbin…Why’s the water rushin t’ward me like that? Okey-dokey, I’ll take a little soaky…Nice a Shangy to go fer a dip with me, even if he’s lyin facedown an all. Looks powerful peaceful. Think I’ll try it—
I deselected my OM Meter link into Wally’s mind and checked the honeycomb for a visual scan of what was happening, but I could see nothing except darkness interrupted by flashes. And if a night-vision setting existed, I didn’t know how to activate it.
I dialed up an audio link. “Anyone, anyone, can you hear me?”
“Miss Brain! This is the Flying Squirrel! Get the hell off this mission channel!”
“I’m sorry to interrupt, Festus, and I’m sure you’re busy, but Wally’s been incapacited somehow—he may be drowning—”
“I was OM Metering the whole affair! He’s been hit by an A-bomb!”
“An atomic bomb? Are you sure?”
“Argonium, you nitwit! Probably laced with Edgerton’s shadow-synthetic version. And I seriously doubt Wally’ll drown…his brain can survive without oxygen for decades—hadn’t you noticed? Now get the hell off this line and stay off!”
I hung up and spoke to the computer directly. “Where is Philip Kareem Edgerton, HKA the X-Man?”
The honeycomb flitted through thousands of camera-sights on Los Ditkos—the mainland, the Bird Island borough, and Sunhawk Islan
d—sorting and filtering until dozens of urban angles lit up on the same image: a black car streaking at what must have been more than 140 miles an hour, racing from Ellison Heights over the Rubicon Bridge and the Mantlo River, bypassing the clogged traffic of Bustle Avenue and ripping along River Drive beside the elite Bechtburton district, burning straight toward the northern plateau of the island—
But why was X-Man headed there? And why had the rest of his confederates thrown away their lives elsewhere? What had they been protecting? Or had it all been nothing but a diversion?
Flying Squirrel: “White Squad and all remaining units, this is Mission Command. Converge on Tachyon Tower! Repeat: Converge on Tachyon Tower!”
When We Lose Our Delusions, We Must Not Lose the Lesson
Zooming every available city security camera I could, I tracked the shadow car as it rocketed up the hills to the plateau and then—astonishingly—straight up the side of the Tachyon Tower.
The black blot further silhouetted itself against the scoreboard-style full-color advertisements coursing the tapering heights of Tachyon Tower. Decelerating rapidly, slowing to a crawl just before it reached the tower’s apex, the car braved an upside-down ascent from the bottom of the giant faux-plasma globe, then inched up along the curvature until finally at the globe’s equator…
Switching angles to an interior camera, I gazed upon a vast window, on the other side of which the X-Racer stuck to the glass like the world’s largest refrigerator magnet.
Something extended from the underbelly of the vehicle, and then a neat circle etched itself in the glass, popping out a hole through which slid the cloaked L*A*Bster the Dark Fantastic, Chip Monk (in an altered version of his original costume—black tights instead of scaly green briefs), and the ever white-shirted, black-tied, and black-suited X-Man.
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