by Baron Sord
“Gay, Doug! Guh—!” He slipped and fell. Oofed when I caught him.
I set him down.
“Thanks,” he said sincerely, his eyes locked on mine. “Do me a favor?”
“What?”
“Never ever catch me again when you’re buck naked.”
I smirked, “Start looking for your Glock.”
We trudged around in the wet sand. Arnold got down on his hands and knees and searched with his hands. The first pistol he picked up wasn’t his. He tossed it aside and said, “So much for hiding these.”
I saw the two assault rifles straight away. At least we wouldn’t have trouble finding his Glock.
“There it is!” He grabbed his Glock and picked it up. It was dripping and glinting in the moonlight.
“Thank fuck,” I grunted. “We need to go.”
Arnold climbed onto the rim of the tank near the railing on the first platform level. From there, he was able to grab the top rail of the grated walkway and swing over. He jogged across the metal platform grating and made his way down the steep staircase.
I simply jumped out of the tank and landed on the ground 15 feet below.
Then I threw Arnold over my shoulder and started running.
“What are you doing?!” he demanded. “This is so gay! Your ass is in my face!”
“Would you rather stare at the front?!”
“No! But I don’t want to stare at your ass either!”
“Do you want to ride piggyback?”
“With you naked?! No way! That’s even gayer!”
“Why?! You’re wearing pants!”
“I don’t care! I’m not doing it!”
“Okay,” I huffed, highly irritated and still running with him bouncing over my shoulder. “How about I cradle you?”
“No baby cradling!”
“Fuck, Arnold! You either look at my ass or I cradle you!”
“Don’t say fuck when my face is this close to your ass!”
“Make up your fricking mind, Arnold! Cradle or piggyback?!”
“Fine!” he whined. “Just cradle me already!”
With a chuckle, I swung him around into my arms and vaulted up the side of the nearest 40-foot cone of gravel in long strides. Even with Arnold’s added weight, it was fairly easy. Would’ve been even easier if the gravel wasn’t so loose.
At the peak, I stopped and set Arnold down.
We waited to see if more emergency vehicles arrived.
Nobody was coming.
“Let’s go.” I cradled Arnold again and bounded down the gravel cone and up the next one. We went over several more until we reached the road that led out of the quarry proper. Once on flat ground, I ran at least 25mph while holding Arnold in my arms.
“This is crazy,” he chuckled quietly, his voice jiggling like the rest of him.
Seconds later, we arrived at my rented Ford Fusion where it was parked by the rusty-roofed buildings and cargo containers. We hopped inside the dark car. Both of us stank of silty water. We waited for any sign we’d been spotted or followed. While we did, I peeled the melted rubber soles of my shoes off from where they were stuck to the soles of my feet. Thank goodness they hadn’t fallen off already. I didn’t want any evidence left here at the quarry. They literally had my exact footprints melted into them. Not that my footprints were on file anywhere I knew of, but I would hate to have left them.
After five minutes of quiet, Arnold said, “We should go.”
I said, “What if more cops drive in when we’re driving out? They’ll stop us for sure.”
“You’re right,” he hissed. “We could wait until they leave.”
“We could.”
He asked, “How long does it usually take cops to investigate a crime scene?”
“Hours at least. But one like this? With burn victims and Vince tied up? It could take until morning or later.”
“Then we should go now. The coast isn’t gonna get any clearer than this.”
“It’s risky,” I said. “If anyone spots my rental car, it’ll be easy to track it back to me.”
“Oh, I know. What if you run ahead like a naked ninja, sneak past all the construction businesses between here and the 67, then keep on eye on it for cops and firetrucks. Once the coast is clear, send me some ESP—”
“You mean telepathy,” I corrected.
“Whatever. When the coast is clear, I’ll drive out in stealth mode. Once I’m driving, if you see somebody coming on the 67, ESP me and I’ll pull over by one of the businesses, kill the engine, and duck under the dash. Then you catch up.”
Already stepping out of the car, I nodded, “Let’s do it.”
Dangling in the wind, I snuck naked up the road. Hardly noticed the gravel under my bare feet. To me, running on gravel was as comfortable as indoor carpeting.
When I had a clear view of the 67, I sent a telepathic message to Arnold. I’m here. Hold tight while I watch the road for a gap.
A minute or two later, when the road was free of visible cars, and I didn’t hear any wind sounds of more approaching, I thought, Okay, now. Drive up now.
The dark Ford crept up the road with the lights off.
I jumped in and we merged onto the 67. Once we were on the freeway going 65mph, Arnold turned the headlights on.
Just in time, too.
A second later, two more police cars rounded a bend in the dark desert hills and sped past us with red and blue lights flashing. They never noticed us. They turned onto Slaughterhouse Canyon Road and were gone, heading toward the quarry.
Arnold and I let out a huge sigh of relief.
“This is why we need a Hero Force Helicopter,” Arnold said quietly. “Something unique. Something badass. Something that screams Hero Force United.”
I smirked, “Like that’ll be less conspicuous.”
“But it would be hella cool.”
“Neither of us knows how to fly a helicopter.”
“I thought you flew helis in your flight simulators.”
“Yeah. Digital Combat Simulator. And a little in X-Plane, but DCS is better. That said, those are just simulators. It isn’t the real thing.”
“So start taking real lessons.” He was serious.
“How am I going to pay for it? I’m broke, remember? The Bank Breaker has a stranglehold on my bank accounts.”
“The who?”
“The Bank Breaker. He’s a metaphor for being broke. A super-villain. He can be Shartman’s arch-nemesis.”
“Ahhhh, Shartman,” Arnold snickered. “What ever happened to him?”
“Shartman? I drew one comic strip before I had to set it aside. I’m too busy helping people while working full-time at YouDoIt.”
“You need to quit that place.”
“I need a paycheck,” I said sourly.
“You need to get paid to be a superhero.”
“Like that’ll ever happen,” I sighed morosely.
“You gotta set the intention, Doug. Set it. Want it. Want it so bad you get it. That shit works.”
“I don’t know, Arn.”
“Trust me, it works. Set the intention you’ll make money helping people. Once you’re rich, buy a Hero Force Helicopter.”
I sighed, “Really learning to fly a chopper will require thousands of hours of flight time before I’m certified and qualified to handle emergency missions. The cost of fuel and maintenance alone is ridiculously prohibitive. And, it will take years for me to learn. I think it’s a non-starter.”
“So we hire an expert pilot.”
“With what money?” I smirked.
He shook his head with finality, “Set the intention, Doug. That’s all I know. Set the intention.”
I tried not to roll my eyes too conspicuously.
We drove in silence for a while.
Eventually, I said, “You almost died back there.”
“Which is exactly why we need a helicopter.”
I chuckled, “How is that supposed to stop you from getting your brai
ns blown out?” I could still see the image of Gray Eyes pushing his suppressed pistol against Arnold’s forehead. That was one morbid memory that might never go away.
“Would you stop?” Arnold groused. “Nobody is blowing my brains out.”
I wanted to argue my point, but he clearly had no intention of conceding, so I sighed to myself.
He said, “And do me a favor?”
“Yeah?”
“Cover that,” he pointed at my lap without taking his eyes off the road.
I looked down at my naked crotch. “Oh. Sorry. With what?”
“Use this.” Arnold reached into the door pocket to his left and tossed me the old folded paper map of San Diego I had put there after renting the Fusion. I kept the map in the car in case I ever lost my Robot phone while on a distress run and couldn’t use iSearch Maps to find the quickest way to the next distress call.
Now, I unfolded the map and laid it over my legs. It rested in such a way that an unintentional paper peak formed in the middle of the map, right over the middle of my lap.
“Oh, look,” Arnold mused. “It’s Cowles Mountain.”
“Yeah,” I chuckled.
Cowles was a scenic peak the locals loved to hike, but I doubted they’d be interested in mine.
More importantly, Arnold wasn’t dead.
What a fricking relief.
—: Chapter 4 :—
Kristy Crawford dragged herself through the door of her Oceanside apartment with an immense sense of relief. That night, while Doug and Arnold were risking their lives at the rock quarry, Kristy’d been risking her sanity dancing at Flashbacks. After being a superheroine for all of a month, dancing had definitely lost its luster.
Couldn’t they pay her to save lives?
They hadn’t yet.
Kristy thought with a smirk, Come on, they! Pay me already!
Sadly, they weren’t, so Kristy had to pay her own bills somehow.
Now that she was home, she needed to sleep and recharge.
Literally.
She’d been meaning to try charging herself with juice from the outlet at night for days. Between work, her comic, and stopping Disaster Vision before it started, she kept forgetting to try it. A girl could only do so much.
After dropping her work bag on the kitchen table, she opened her refrigerator and pulled out a tub of cold pizza. She’d learned she couldn’t order pizza on nights she was dancing at Flashbacks because she got home too late and the pizza places were closed.
And, every single Pizza Guy was starting to ask suspicious questions.
Ten pizzas a day every day did that.
Now Kristy bought frozen pizzas by the pallet from Costco almost daily. Okay, not really by the pallet, but close enough to stuff her freezer to bursting. She had to cook them in her oven during the day while drawing on her Lady Liberty comic. She also bought enough salad fixings from Costco to feed an OWAC, a One Woman Army Corps, respect to Jack Kirby. In Kristy’s mind, he’d always be the King of Comics. If she tried hard enough, she might be queen some day.
Such was her life now:
Eat constantly.
Work, work, work.
Stop Disaster Vision.
Sleep briefly.
Do it all again and again the next day and the next.
Something had to give at some point, but it hadn’t yet. Only her super-powers were keeping her going night after night, day after grueling day. Only a month into this and it seemed like forever.
She zombied her way through a shower. Skipped washing her hair. Didn’t wanna deal with it tonight. Pulled on a pair of panties and walked into her bedroom. She didn’t usually sleep this naked, but tonight it felt like the smart thing to do.
Her queen bed was covered in two overlapping black rubber floor mats. The 3mm mats were 4x8 feet and covered her entire bed.
Two 50-foot orange extension cords were coiled on the bed. Earlier, she’d stripped one plug from the ends of both, exposing the three wires.
Black for hot.
White for neutral.
Green for ground.
She’d also used her ever-sharp screwdriver fingernails to slice the orange rubber shielding down on the plug-less end of both cords quite a bit, exposing about 4 feet of the internal wires. And she’d clipped the ground wire down to where the orange rubber shielding started, leaving only the black and white wires exposed. The ground wire was really a safety valve meant to trip the breaker or blow a fuse instead of electrocuting someone if there was a short. Kristy didn’t want safety. Tripping her apartment’s breakers would defeat the whole purpose.
Beside the cords on the black rubber bed were two zip-ties. Both ties had already been closed into large loops. She put one over each wrist. Fed the white neutral wire of one cord inside the loop on her left wrist, wrapped it around the zip-tie a few times, then around her palm a few times until the bare end of the wire was centered where she could squeeze it. Did the same with the second white wire. Last, she tightened the zip-tie down.
Repeated the process with the two black hot wires on her right hand, but left them positioned so they weren’t touching her skin or each other.
Next, she carried the cords into the kitchen. Her small one-bedroom apartment had only two 20-amp circuit breakers. The outlet in the kitchen was on a different circuit than the one in her bedroom.
She plugged one cord into the wall outlet over the kitchen counter. Walked back to her bedroom, careful not to touch either black wire with her skin until she was ready.
In her bedroom, she squeezed her knees together and knelt down by the bedside outlet. Holding her right hand up and away, her bare boobs pressed together against her naked thighs as she leaned forward and plugged in the second cord with her left hand.
Then she got up and sat on the edge of the bed.
Looked at the innocent black wires wrapped around her right wrist and palm.
Didn’t look like much.
But she knew they were hot.
The other night, she’d already tried this with a 12-volt car battery. It had taken mere minutes to drain it dry. Obviously, car batteries weren’t the best way to charge herself up. But they were way safer than what she was doing now.
Going to sleep holding two plugged-in electrical cords stripped to the bare wire?
She could easily start a fire.
With any luck, her precautions would prevent that.
With her white-wired hand, she reached over to turn off the bedside lamp and laid back to relax in the dark bedroom.
She closed her fingers around the two black wires.
Instantly felt the sizzle.
It wasn’t painful.
This was nothing compared to a downed power line.
She closed her eyes and concentrated.
She’d already learned that DC (Direct Current from a car battery) had a forward flow. A steady pressure.
AC was different.
Alternating Current vibrated back and forth.
60 cycles per second.
Almost like holding a vibrator.
“Ha!” she laughed out loud.
The extension cord wires ran right up between her legs on the bed.
Some vibrator.
The AC juice did tingle, but it wasn’t a turn on because she was still worried something might go wrong when she fell asleep. What if her black wire hand rolled off the bed and touched the carpet or something? Would it start a fire? It might not burn her, but it might burn the building down. Kristy didn’t want that. She’d hate to wake up Wade and Mrs. Brewer and everyone else at two in the morning and drag them out to the street to wait for the fire trucks to show because she’d started an effing fire.
Smirking, she thought, if Doug was here sleeping in her bed, and a fire started, he could just drink the heat like she’d seen him do at San Diego Comic Con.
Doug in her bed?
Please.
They wouldn’t be sleeping!
Shut up, K-Cray!
I’m no
t doing anything with Doug!
Not yet, girlfriend. Not yet.
Kristy sighed to herself and put thoughts of Doug’s luscious abs out of her mind.
Will you stop, K-Cray?!
Kristy rolled her closed eyes and tried to focus on her inner vortex.
The AC power from the wall was agitating it nicely. Not as strong as those downed power lines on the Ortega Highway, but it created a steadily intensifying buzz.
Would she be able to sleep if it buzzed too much?
Would it be like drinking twenty cups of coffee before bed?
She hoped not!
She needed to sleep!
After tonight at Flashbacks, she really needed to rest.
Kristy yawned and tried not to think about the buzz.
Just think about Doug’s abs…
No! Think about nothing!
Think about sleeping.
Kristy yawned again.
Think about waking up to the house burning down.
No!
Sleep!
Think about sleeping.
Like a princess castle full of cute kittens lounging everywhere and cat-napping.
Think about that.
Think about fluffy kittens taking naps.
Fluffy kittens…
Kittens…
Kit…
—: Chapter 5 :—
On Friday morning, I sat at my desk in my cubicle at YouDoIt, Inc. I did my best to not think about the rock quarry. It was difficult because I’d been doing my job testing tax software for so long it required almost zero attention on my part.
“Doug!” Clifton Yu hissed from the cubicle where he sat across from me.
“Yeah?” I mumbled without looking.
“Stazia is coming!”
That got my attention.
Every man at YouDoIt knew the clacking sound of Stunning Stazia’s high heels on the hardwood floors of the main corridors.
Like a pack of horny lemmings, every male head in our wing of the building popped up over their cubicle walls, sniffing the air, some of them drooling.
Men like Rene Dominguez, my other partner in shenanigans (along with Clifton) here at YouDoIt. Rene kicked his shoes against the carpet, thereby wheeling his office chair backward until he was in position to sneak a peek at Stazia from around the wall of his cubicle.
