I led the way down the stairs to the first floor and immediately pushed open the door into a large dining hall below. Penumbra and Elizabeth were nowhere in sight, so I reminded myself to install some thermal imaging capabilities into my helmet later, and then I contacted them through the comms.
“Location?” I demanded.
“Last door on your right when you come down the hall,” Dynamo murmured.
I glanced around and saw the door that must lead to the hallway, so we pushed our way through it and saw that the kitchen was just on the left.
We kept going all the way to the end of the hall and entered through the open door on the right, but as soon as we were inside, I realized why both Penumbra and Dynamo had grown so quiet.
There had been a fucking massacre in here.
It was a private cabin, so the room itself wasn’t that big, but it was filled with corpses. There had to be at least twenty bodies stacked up all around the room, and half of them had been positioned on the bed so it looked like they were all in the middle of an orgy, except for the fact that their heads were missing or their chests were ripped open.
The rest of the bodies had been placed in similarly grotesque positions with each other, but it was like each one had been part of an experiment to see how much more painful their deaths could be compared to the last victim. A few of the corpses even had their skin missing, either in huge chunks or tiny slivers, and the male closest to me on the floor had both his eyeballs ripped out of his skull.
I didn’t need anyone to tell me that the Maniac had been responsible for these people’s deaths himself. He might not be here now, and he might have hired other villains and thugs to carry out the rest of his dirty work, but the Maniac had definitely been the one to kill all these people.
No one else would have been that cruel or that grotesque.
When Elizabeth turned toward me, there were tears in her turquoise eyes, but she shook her head and tried to ignore them. She moved toward
me without a word, and I rested my hand on her back as she leaned up against me.
“They were just kids, Miles,” my girlfriend murmured. “Just a bunch of college kids who wanted to have a good time.”
“I know,” I said. “They didn’t deserve this. They were just in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
“This was only part of what we found,” Penumbra said as she floated toward me with a tape recorder in one hand. “Like, this would definitely be enough if it was all we found, but, uh… well, we started to listen to this and thought you should hear it.”
The blonde heroine seemed particularly pale in her short black dress, but she kept her gaze focused on me instead of the carnage around her. As soon as she handed over the tape recorder, Penumbra floated right past me toward the exit of the room.
“If you don’t mind…” the blonde trailed off.
“Go keep a lookout at the stairs,” I told her. “Norma, you go with her.
Make sure the pool-boy doesn’t come back to life and that nobody else joins him.”
“On it, boss,” my assistant said as she adjusted the brown hair underneath her hooded mask.
Once Norma and Penumbra were gone, I turned to face Elizabeth head-on.
“You can go, too, you know,” I said, “if this is too much for you.”
“I’m fine,” Dynamo said as she stood up a little straighter. “I want to listen to the recording just as much as you do.”
I nodded, pressed play on the tape recorder, and felt my lip curl as soon as the Maniac began to speak. It was a little fuzzy since he’d chosen to use some decades-old recorder, but after a little bit of a crackle at the start, the recording squealed and then became understandable.
“Miles, Miles, Miles,” the Maniac cackled on the recorder. “Do you like my present?”
“Sick motherfucker,” Elizabeth growled.
“I’m sure the lovely Dynamo is with you, of course,” the Maniac continued, “so please do give her my love. I thought she might especially like my present. Think of it as a promise of things to come.”
Elizabeth shivered but didn’t say anything, so we just kept listening.
“This is just the beginning, you know,” the Maniac said. “I’m so pleased that you’ve decided to play my game, since otherwise, you wouldn’t be listening to me right now. But I know what you’re thinking…
how can you play the game if you don’t know the rules?”
“He really likes to drag things out, doesn’t he?” I rolled my eyes.
“I’ll give you a hint,” the voice continued. “There is no scenario, no version of this game, where I don’t win. I made the rules, you see? And that means I control every move. I designed the game, so I know exactly what you’ll do before you do, and that means I win. Sooo sorrrrryyy! Ha!”
“Do you think he’s actually gonna say anything useful?” Elizabeth asked.
“He just wants to gloat first,” I said. “It’s like ‘dumbass villain’ rule number one. I think he’ll get to something useful in a minute.”
“You won’t be able to stop me,” the Maniac said, “but my dear Miles, I would very much like to see you try, so I’ll give you a hint. Go back to the beginning of our little game. Not the very beginning, perhaps, but the beginning, nonetheless.”
“What the fuck is that supposed to mean?” Elizabeth demanded.
“And until we meet again, all my love to your women, Miles,” the Maniac cackled. “Or should I say, to my women? Now, go enjoy the rest of your present.”
The recording shut off.
“Well, that was certainly vague,” I said.
“His women?” Elizabeth looked ready to punch a hole in the floor of the yacht and sink us all to the bottom. “Who the fuck does he think he is?”
“He just wants us to think that he’s completely in control, that’s all,”
I said. “He wants me to know that he’s been watching us and that he knows all about you three, but guess who he doesn’t know about.”
“Aileen,” my girlfriend whispered.
“Absolutely,” I replied. “She’ll be our secret weapon, so if--”
“We’ve got company,” Norma called into the comms. “Like… a lot of it. Right now.”
“Get up the stairs,” I said as I tucked the tape recorder into a pocket of my suit. “Try to get back up to the top deck. We’re on our way.”
I turned toward the door, but Elizabeth was already one step ahead of me. She slammed the door open with such force that the top hinge came loose, and as the door went lopsided, she stormed out of the dining hall to go help Norma and Penumbra.
Neither woman was on the staircase up to the second deck, so we sprinted up the steps and followed the sounds of fighting from the bar above us. The moment we came up onto the second deck, I realized what the Maniac had meant when he said to enjoy the rest of his present.
The deck was filled with a whole swarm of fucking assholes.
I managed to glance over the side of the yacht to see that several smaller boats had come up beside us, so the Maniac must have had them wait until we all headed to the bottom of the yacht, and then he’d told them to come attack us. The bastards that Norma and I had already fought had just been a distraction.
“Aileen, get that plane back to our location,” I said. “We’re gonna need it ASAP.”
“It is on its way,” my robotic assistant replied.
“We’ve gotta get to the top deck,” I called, and then I flung myself into the fight alongside the three women.
My palm blasters had recharged by now, so I fired them at the first two assholes I ran into, and as their guts spilled out of the sudden holes in their abdomens, I glanced at my superpowered women to check on them.
Dynamo had started to deck men left and right the moment that we had come up to the second floor of the yacht, so every other second, another body flew across the deck and crashed into the bar or straight over the side of the ship. The black-haired woman’s mouth was
set into a grim smile, and every time she slammed some poor fucker to the ground, her turquoise eyes glittered a little more with battle-fever.
As I jammed my elbow back into another thug, I tried to deploy the taser, but it took a little longer to recharge than my palm blasters, so nothing happened. Instead, I just rammed my elbow backward again until I felt something crunch against my joint, and when I spun back around, I saw that I had broken the thug’s nose, so now he stumbled right back into Norma.
If he’d thought that he might be able to beg for mercy from my nerdy assistant, he was in for a nasty surprise. Norma slashed open his stomach with her machete, and then before he could fall down, she ripped a pin out of a grenade, stuffed it in his abdomen, and pushed him toward a thick cluster of assholes by the bar.
“Down!” the mousy brunette shouted.
The four of us jumped as far out of the way as we could, just before the grenade detonated inside the man. The explosion tore through the man’s insides, blasted through the couple of thugs around him, and then sent blood and body parts in every direction, so it rained blood down on the deck and all over our suits.
When I hopped back up to my feet, I grinned at Norma across the deck, and she blushed behind her mask. I was just about to tell her what a good job she’d done when the assholes all around us finally recovered from their surprise and ran back into the fight.
There were easily still twenty motherfuckers on the ship with us, and even though most of them seemed to just be regular henchmen instead of supervillains, we still needed to get the fuck out of here before we made one wrong move and it was too late. I didn’t intend to end up as some nobody thug’s victim, and I sure as hell didn’t intend to let the Maniac win his stupid little game.
I rammed my fist into some motherfucker’s kidney, and he stumbled toward Penumbra at the side of the ship. The blonde had set up her station right at the edge of the deck, so as this thug staggered toward her and tried to straighten up, the levitation specialist locked onto him, reduced his mass, floated him up into the air and over the side of the ship, and then condensed his mass until he was so heavy that he just dropped like a stone into the lake waters below.
I watched as Dynamo sent another thug toward the blonde heroine, so Penumbra could do the same thing again, but then another asshole charged me. I triggered the wrist blades in my suit so when he barreled into me, I slammed my forearm into his chest and felt the blades sink into his flesh.
It wasn’t enough to kill him, but it slowed him down long enough that I could grab him by the hair with one hand and use my other arm to press my recharged elbow taser into his eye socket. As soon as I fired the
taser, I let go of him so the electric current wouldn’t jump to me, too, and when he jerked and shuddered in every direction, I stepped back and turned my attention to another opponent.
We were making good progress against the thugs, but there were still a lot of them left, and I knew that after all the fights that we’d been in today, we were all tired, and not only could tired people get sloppy, but sloppy people had a tendency to end up dead.
“Dynamo, clear a path to the stairs!” I shouted.
As my girlfriend started to move through the crowd, I fired off a blast of sticky webbing at two assholes who were trying to sneak up on Norma.
Once it stuck to their backs, I jerked back on the thick webs and brought them both to the ground before I released my grip.
“I’ve got them!” Penumbra called, and then she locked her focus onto the two sticky thugs.
As the levitation specialist started to float them both up and away, I moved toward the stairs to follow Elizabeth. I knew that Penumbra would be able to follow easily and just float her way to the top of the yacht, so now we just needed to get Norma out from the thickest part of the fighting.
“The plane is in position,” Aileen said. “You will have to jump, but Penumbra should be able to help you if you don’t make it.”
“That’s encouraging,” I muttered. “Be there in just a minute.”
Norma’s average martial arts skills were more than these low-lifes were prepared to deal with, but they still had the advantage of numbers on their side. Every time she injured one, another one jumped forward to replace him, and her reaction time looked like it had started to get a little slower with each hit.
“Norma!” I shouted. “Come on!”
As my mousy assistant glanced over her shoulder at me, I fired my palm blaster at the thug to her right and burned a crater-shaped hole right through his neck. I started toward the stairs again, and this time, Norma did a back-flip toward me, and as she flipped, she kicked her foot up into the chin of one of our opponents to rock his jaw back into his skull.
I hoped Maniac offered him dental insurance.
Then Norma sprinted after me, and we both raced after Elizabeth toward the stairs that led to the top deck. Penumbra disappeared over the side of the ship, so I knew she would meet us up top, and now all we had to do was get the fuck out of here before these assholes all caught up to us.
My superpowered girlfriend had cleared the path to the stairs, so we hurried up them as quickly as our aching legs could carry us. The moment that we came out onto the top deck of the yacht, I saw the four-person plane
right above us. The doors were open underneath the plane, so we could technically jump up, grab the handles that I had designed for us to latch onto, and then hold ourselves up until the doors and seats closed themselves into place.
But with a horde of the Maniac’s goons right behind us, I didn’t want to take any chances.
“Penumbra, I need you to float us up into the plane,” I said, as the four of us all moved into a circular formation with our backs to each other.
“Do it one at a time if you need to. Can you do that?”
“I can do it,” the blonde heroine said with a serious nod. “Dynamo, you’re up first.”
As Penumbra started to float my girlfriend up toward her open seat in the plane, a movement caught my eye from the stairs, so I glanced back in that direction.
Only one of the thugs had followed us up to the top deck, but the asshole hadn’t started toward us yet. Instead, he knelt down at the top of the stairs and raised a grenade launcher to his shoulder.
“Boss said not to let you leave,” the man grunted, and then he fired straight at us.
Chapter 4
Norma and I immediately dove in opposite directions as the grenade sailed through the air past us, but just as soon as we dropped to the deck and got our bearings, the Maniac’s goon fired again.
I tried to roll out of the way, but it was too fast. I had just enough time to wonder if my suit’s armor was sufficient to withstand the hot shrapnel, but then the grenade suddenly crumpled in on itself before it reached me, and it just exploded in a little half-assed puff of smoke.
I looked up to see Penumbra’s pale blue eyes fixed in concentration, and I realized that she must have gotten back in time to condense the explosive down to something harmless. I hadn’t even had to coach her on how to do that, so even though there was at least a seventy-five or maybe even eighty percent chance that my suit would have saved me, it was good to see that the blonde superheroine really seemed to be getting more comfortable and expanding the capabilities of her amazing powers.
While the goon with the grenade launcher tried to figure out what the fuck had just happened, Penumbra turned her attention toward Norma and me. The levitation specialist instantly started to raise us both into the air toward our seats in the middle of the plane, but the movement seemed to
pull the thug out of his surprise, so he readjusted the weapon on his shoulder and prepared to fire again.
“A little faster!” I called out.
Penumbra shot us both up into the main cockpit so fast that the only reason we didn’t slam our heads on the ceiling of the plane was because we threw our arms up to stop ourselves. As soon as we were inside the cockpit, our legs still dangled down below us, but I g
rabbed the lever and yanked it so the door would close on us.
As the door below us closed, it moved our seats into place below us, so once we were fully in our seats, Penumbra released her hold on us and floated toward her own seat on the other wing. Elizabeth was already securely strapped in, so as soon as the blonde was in position, Aileen could take us out of here.
I glanced down to see that the thug now aimed his grenade launcher up at the plane, but I wanted to be sure that Penumbra was safe before I told Aileen to move us. After the levitation specialist floated herself up fully into the small seat, I started to close her door.
At the same time, the goon below launched another grenade, and this time, it headed straight for the plane itself.
“Move us!” I shouted to Aileen.
My perfect AI system rocked the whole plane up onto its side at a ninety degree angle to the ground. Norma, Elizabeth, and I were all secure in our seats, but I looked over to see Penumbra’s legs kick against the air for a minute before the door finally closed into place to lock her in.
“Get us out of here,” I commanded.
Aileen didn’t hesitate. Instead, she let the plane drop back down until its wings were parallel with the deck below, and then she sent us forward and away from the Maniac’s yacht ambush. There was another blast from the grenade launcher below, but the projectile didn’t even come close to us, so Aileen just continued to pilot us remotely until we left the lake and started back toward our Grayville mansion.
“I can take over, if you want,” Norma said when we were close to the mansion.
“Nah, just let Aileen do it,” I told her. “We’re tired, and Aileen…
well, she doesn’t get tired.”
“It is one of my best qualities,” my robotic assistant agreed. “It allows me to do whatever Miles wants at any time of day or night.”
“Ooh, kinky,” Penumbra laughed through the comms.
“You are in a good mood,” Norma snickered.
“We kicked their asses, and I stopped a grenade!” the blonde cheered.
“It was awesome!”
“True,” Norma laughed. “We are awesome.”
Evil Genius 5 Page 6
