Evil Genius 5

by Jacobs, Logan

  “Besides, at least the first firefighter didn’t recognize either of us, not just you,” I said. “Although I did find that a little bit insulting.”

  “Oh, it’s good for your ego,” Norma snickered. “It helps keep you grounded.”

  “Isn’t that what you’re supposed to do?” I grinned.

  “Oh!” Norma said. “Well, I--”

  “Sorry you’re all having such a rough night,” I cut her off when we reached the first group of victims and paramedics. “I’d like to just ask you all a couple questions to try to track down who did this to you.”

  “It was Honeybee,” one of the paramedics said. “She tried to burn this whole street down, and she would have, too, if the firefighters hadn’t shown up when they did.”

  “That’s nice,” I said as I rolled my eyes inside my helmet, “but maybe I could hear it from someone who was actually there, instead of someone who just showed up after everything was said and done.”

  “Watch it!” the paramedic snapped. “We’re out here saving lives and-

  -”

  “Yes, yes, I know,” I said. “But do you want me to catch up to this woman or not?”

  “Yes,” one of the victims said as he lowered the oxygen mask from his slightly wrinkled face. “What do you want to know?”

  “Tell us what happened,” Norma said.

  “So Honeybee walks into the bar, and at first, everyone’s kinda nervous,” the man said and then inhaled another gulp of oxygen. “But she puts some music on and starts to sway her hips all sexy and everything, and pretty soon, everybody falls under her spell, right?”

  “But not you?” I asked.

  “Oh, I’m gay,” the man chuckled, “so that shit doesn’t affect me quite the same way, you know? Anyway, so after a few minutes, it’s pretty easy to see how many people are falling for her, but by the time I start moving toward the door, she’s got people blocking the doors.”

  “So she was trying to trap you all inside?” Norma whistled. “You’re lucky you got out, then.”

  “How exactly did you get out?” I asked.

  “Well,” the man said after he swallowed another mouthful of oxygen,

  “she had some more of her little mind-controlled people attack the bartender and take all the vodka. She said she wanted to buy everybody a round, but obviously that was bullshit.”

  “Let me guess,” I said. “Honeybee used the vodka as a quick fire-starter and then left just as the place went up into flames.”

  “That’s about the gist of it,” the man said with a nod. “She took most of her mind-controlled saps with her, but a few of them, uh… well, they didn’t make it out in time.”

  “That’s fucked up,” Norma said. “So she uses her stinger or her pheromones to make them all crazy for her, so they’ll do anything for her, but then she just leaves them to die like that?”

  “They don’t call her a supervillain for no reason,” I said with a shrug.

  “She just uses them, and then the moment they’re no longer useful to her, she ditches them.”

  “Ugh, I’ll be glad to get rid of her,” my mousy assistant said.

  “So did you see where she went?” I asked and then glanced at the other people who had drifted over to join us. “Or did she say anything about where she was headed next?”

  “I think she was headed to some hotel on the other side of town,” one of the paramedics said. “One of the victims over there kept saying something about bees at the Holiday Hotel, right before she lost consciousness.”

  “That sounds more like a smoke-induced hallucination than a clue,”

  Norma muttered.

  “No, no, she went to try her hand at some pool,” someone else said.

  “There’s a pool joint two blocks over from here, and I heard her talk about it before she left.”

  “I think she just wanted to hit another bar,” a firefighter said. “I wish we had some way to track her so we could stop her before she sets fire to a whole city block.”

  “But nobody actually saw her leave?” I asked. “Or saw her head in any particular direction?”

  The small crowd around us all shook their heads or murmured ‘no’

  like they had just been caught with their hands in the cookie jar, so I rolled my eyes inside my helmet and then finally nodded.

  “Well, you’ve all been… helpful,” I said and started to push through the crowd.

  “Will you stop her?” one of the paramedics called after us.

  “Oh, the Evil Genius always gets his target,” Norma said, and then she took my arm and hurried me away from the crowd.

  “What are you, my personal hypewoman?” I smirked once we were out of earshot.

  “Oh!” My mousy assistant dropped my arm and put her head down as she continued to move forward. “No, it’s just… you know how people are. They would have kept pestering you with questions, and I know we don’t have time for that shit.”

  “You’re always looking after me, aren’t you?” I laughed.

  “I know you can look after yourself,” Norma huffed. “It’s not like that. I just wanted to be… I don’t know.”

  “Helpful?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” my assistant sighed. “Anyway, can we please talk about something else?”

  “Yeah, we can talk about something else,” I said. “Like maybe the way that you grabbed my arm just now and pulled me close enough that I could smell your perfume? Is that the new scent I gave you for your last birthday?”

  “What?” Norma stopped mid-stride but then put her head down and kept going. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. Maybe. Okay, yes.”

  “It’s a good scent for you,” I said, because it really was.

  Norma usually bought whatever cheap watered-down spray was on sale at the retail counter beside the frumpy skirts that she bought, so she always ended up smelling like the stale air of an indoor mall. So for her last

  birthday, I had given her an actual real perfume that made her smell like lavender and honey, and I had noticed that my assistant had slowly started to wear it more and more as she got more comfortable with the idea that someone might notice her, or that if she did something to bring attention to herself, that wasn’t such a bad thing.

  “Yeah…” Norma swallowed. “I actually meant that maybe we can talk about something like how we’re going to track down Honeybee since apparently, nobody fucking saw anything? Or, uh, something along those lines.”

  “Don’t worry, I’m only teasing,” I snickered, “and I’ve got Honeybee covered. Oh, Aileen?”

  “Yes, Creator?” my AI assistant immediately responded into my earpiece.

  “I need you to scan Grayville’s CCTV footage,” I said. “We’re at a bar on High Street, and I don’t think Honeybee is far away, but I need you to get eyes on her.”

  “Of course,” Aileen said.

  “Limit your search to a five block radius at first,” I said, “and then if you don’t find anything, you can expand out from there.”

  “Have you found Hyena and Mira?” Norma asked.

  “Yes, they are dead,” my robotic assistant said. “I am driving Dynamo and myself back to the mansion.”

  “Nicely done,” I said. “I assume there were no problems?”

  “Not at all,” Elizabeth chimed in. “Aileen was amazing. You should have seen her, Miles. She really is perfect.”

  “Of course, she is,” I said with a smirk. “I designed her, didn’t I?”

  “I found Honeybee,” Aileen announced. “She seems to want to be found.”

  “Why do you say that?” Norma asked.

  “Because she is standing in front of the security camera outside a bar and waving at it,” my robotic assistant replied.

  “Which bar?” I asked.

  “Patch’s,” Aileen said. “It is on Chestnut Street.”

  “That’s only two blocks from here,” I chuckled. “I knew that she wanted us to catch up to her.”

 
“Do you need any help, Miles?” Elizabeth asked.

  “No, you two go ahead back to the mansion,” I said. “I want you to keep an eye on things there in case the Maniac throws any other surprises our way.”

  “We will,” my girlfriend replied. “You two be careful.”

  As soon as our comms went silent, I took the next left down a narrow alley. Norma followed right along after me, and after we took one more side road as a shortcut, we came out onto Chestnut Street itself.

  I poked my head around the corner before we just started to walk down the middle of the street, and I instantly ducked back into the alley.

  The bar was two dozen yards down the road, and Honeybee was still outside it as she gazed up at the CCTV.

  “So what’s the plan?” Norma whispered.

  “Our suits will keep her stinger from affecting us,” I said, “and I made sure to modify my helmet and your mask, so they should filter out her pheromones. I’m sure she’ll go inside as soon as she sees us coming, because she’ll want to be completely surrounded by her drones.”

  “So we knock all her drones unconscious or get them out of the way somehow,” Norma said, “and then we just have to take her on alone?”

  “Exactly,” I said. “The files on her all said that she was strong, but she doesn’t have a lot of speed on her side, so we should be able to eliminate her pretty quickly.”

  “What about the drones?” my assistant asked. “Once we kill her, will they, uh, die or something?”

  “No, they should go back to normal once she’s dead,” I replied. “Her mind control doesn’t work like the nanobots worked for Mayhem. She has to actually be alive to continue sending signals to their brains, so if she’s dead, then they’ll be free. Theoretically, anyway.”

  “Sounds good to me,” Norma said.

  “Then let’s go kick some ass,” I said with a grin.

  We turned around the corner and immediately started toward Patch’s.

  As soon as Honeybee heard us coming, she pivoted to face us and then smiled like we were bringing her a present.

  Once I saw her fully, I knew it was a damn good thing that I had modified my helmet to filter out her pheromones, because Honeybee was a fucking knockout.

  She was dressed fully on theme with her name, so she wore a black and yellow striped leotard, along with black, thigh-high stockings and yellow stiletto heels. Her blonde hair was carefully coiffed in little waves, and there was a stinger attached to the back of her costume, right in the middle of her thick ass.

  Honeybee gave us both a little wave, and then she darted inside the dive bar.

  Of course, I knew that the seedy bar would be goddamn full of her little mind-controlled worker bees, but that didn’t stop me from following after her. She might want us to follow her because she thought that she could surprise and trap us, but for me, it just meant that we could keep her confined to one area, and that would make it a little easier to bring her down.

  “I wish she didn’t seem so confident,” Norma sighed as we approached the door of the bar.

  “Eh, she’s only confident because she doesn’t know who she’s dealing with,” I said. “Just give her a minute, and she’ll start to sing a different tune.”

  “You mean hum a different tune,” Norma said. “Uh, you know… like how bees hum?”

  “Oh, Norma,” I groaned. “Next thing I know, you’ll run in and tell our target to buzz off.”

  “Okay, fine,” my assistant said. “I’ll take it all back to the drawing board. Happy now?”

  “I will be once we take care of Honeybee,” I said. “Do you have a grenade ready?”

  Norma smiled and raised her left hand to show me the grenade that she had already pulled out from one of the pouches on her vest. She wiggled it back and forth, reached her right hand to pull the trigger out, and then stepped forward as I flung open the door of the bar for her.

  Before we even looked to see what was inside, Norma threw the flashbang inside, and I immediately slammed the door shut again to protect us from the blast. I held up my fingers for the countdown, and three seconds later, the grenade detonated.

  Light flashed from underneath the door, and there was a loud crack like thunder from inside the bar, but then everything fell silent.

  The grenade was just a flashbang, so even though it might cause somebody a concussion or a little bit of hearing loss, it shouldn’t be enough to kill any of the mind-controlled drones inside. Instead, it should be just enough to make them go blind for at least five seconds, plus the noise of it should make them temporarily deaf and definitely disoriented.

  And that meant it was the perfect time for us to strike.

  “Now!” I shouted.

  Norma and I burst through the door and assessed the scene as quickly as we could. The lights were still on inside Patch’s, but from the way that

  everyone staggered and reeled about, it seemed like the whole bar was pitch dark.

  There were a few people behind the bar counter, and as they stumbled about, they knocked one bottle of alcohol after another off the shelf. There were about a dozen people scattered around the rest of the bar, but since everyone was so disoriented, it was impossible to tell who was mind-controlled and who just had some shitty fucking luck.

  At first, I didn’t see Honeybee anywhere, so I glanced at Norma to see if she had caught sight of our target. But Norma didn’t meet my gaze, since instead, she was too busy looking up at the rickety chandelier just above our heads.

  As soon as I followed her gaze, of course, I saw why.

  Honeybee must have launched herself into the air the moment that the grenade rolled through the door, so now she clung to the chandelier as it swayed back and forth under her weight. Her once perfectly coiffed hair was a mess, and she had a slight smear of red lipstick at the corner of her mouth.

  “That wasn’t very fair, was it?” Honeybee demanded as she glared down at us.

  “Oh, I don’t play fair, sweetheart,” I laughed. “I just play to win.”

  “How did that flashbang not affect her?” Norma hissed.

  “It did,” the supervillain replied, “but unlike my poor little drones, I can recover from such tricks quite quickly.”

  “Let’s see if you can recover from this,” Norma said as she flung a shuriken up toward the bee-themed supervillain.

  Honeybee didn’t jump off the chandelier to avoid the flying blade like I thought she might. Instead, she just threw all of her weight against the cable that suspended it from the ceiling, so she made it rock forward out of the path of the shuriken.

  Then as the chandelier swung back in the other direction, the blonde supervillain jerked on the cable a little harder until it ripped right out of the ceiling and then started to crash down toward Norma.

  I pushed my mousy assistant out of the way, and as she dove into a roll to get completely clear of the chandelier, I used the thrusters in my boots to propel me up toward Honeybee. If she thought that she could use the chandelier as a distraction to get away, then she clearly hadn’t counted on the fact that I could jump damn near all the way up to the ceiling with my super suit.

  As soon as I reached the same height as Honeybee, I grabbed a handful of her coiffed blonde hair and then let both of us crash down to the

  floor on the other side of the falling chandelier. The light fixture smashed against the floor of the bar a second later, but I ignored the spray of shattered glass and focused all my attention on the curvy blonde that I had just brought to the ground.

  She instantly started to wiggle her ass up against me where we laid on the floor, but I just grinned at the fact that she didn’t know her stinger wouldn’t be able to penetrate through my suit. I started to bring my palm blaster up toward her head, but before I could fire it, she jammed her elbow back into my throat armor with a surprising amount of force, so I had to roll away to recover.

  I felt a stab of pain in my throat, but it didn’t feel like she had done any permanent damage,
so I rolled to my feet at the same time she did. At first, we circled each other like wild animals who were about to either fuck or kill each other, but then Norma hopped to her feet again behind Honeybee, so we started to close in on the supervillain from both sides.

  But just as I was about to give Norma the signal, the drones all around the bar began to recover from the effects of the flashbang. They all staggered toward us like zombies, but as they took a few more steps forward, their footing grew more solid.

  “Kill them!” Honeybee growled at her worker bee drones.

  The mind-controlled humans snarled and grabbed whatever kind of weapons they could find, so some of them grabbed beer bottles and broke them open, while others ripped off chair legs or lifted whole bar stools into the air to come after us.

  Her pheromones must have been even stronger than I thought.

  “You take the drones,” I called to Norma. “I’ll deal with Honeybee.”

  “You got it, boss,” my assistant replied, and then she spun away with one of her collapsible batons in hand.

  Norma would definitely be able to break some bones with that baton if she needed to, but she probably wouldn’t kill anybody, so it was a good weapon choice. As she began to herd the drones away from me, I trusted that she could handle herself, so I turned back to figure out Honeybee’s weakness.

  The blonde supervillain smiled at me, but with the long smear of lipstick at the corner of her mouth, it made her look creepy instead of sexy.

  She tried to sway her hips as she walked back toward me, as if that would suddenly make me forget why I was here, but when all the drones started to moan, I realized that she was also sending another wave of pheromones into the air.

  “You’re gonna have to move a little faster,” I told Norma as I eyed the people behind the bar. “Looks like she’s infected just about everybody in here.”

  “Except for you two,” Honeybee purred. “Now tell me, why would that be? What makes you so special?”

  “Maybe if you come a little closer, then I can show you,” I said.

  “Oh, but that would ruin all the fun foreplay that we’re about to have,” the blonde supervillain giggled. “Did you like the trail of chaos that I left for you?”