by A. J. Markam
“Hunter fuckin’ McNeil!”
Shit.
I knew that voice.
Out of the swirls of smoke strode Spike, Antimatter’s righthand man.
Except he looked even uglier than usual.
The explosion had burned off a good portion of his hide. Raw, red patches of muscle peeked out from charred, cracked, blackened skin.
But with every step he took towards me, I could see the grey skin slowly growing back over his flesh – and pushing up dozens more vicious, two-inch spikes.
His hands seemed to have recovered faster than the rest of him, because his stubby fingers were bristling with needle-sharp spurs.
He fixed me with his black eyes and white pupils, and grinned with yellowed teeth. “The Aussies warned us about you. I can understand you fuckin’ ‘em over in Karkarin, but I didn’t think you’d be stupid enough to cross us.”
So it was the Australians who’d tipped Antimatter off.
Thank GOD. I was worried Harding might have a mole in the SPCC.
I released the forcefield around Yuki and held up my hand. “Let’s go.”
She reached out. Only her fingers came out of phase – not the rest of her. She grabbed my hand, and suddenly I felt that eerie electrical buzz that let me know I was no longer solid.
“RRAAARRRR!” Spike roared and ran straight for me, his hands flashing out like thorn-studded boxing gloves.
They passed right through my head.
“Too bad,” I taunted him. “Try again later.”
That was when we heard a dozen Yakuza storming the hallway behind Spike.
They all raised their guns, but hesitated when they saw their boss standing next to us.
Spike didn’t give a shit about that.
“SHOOT THEM!” he roared.
The Yakuza opened fire.
I could actually feel the heat from the bullets passing through my body like hot coals popping out of a fire.
Spike got hit about 20 times. I saw bullets rip through his grey skin, saw blood spatter from his charred and still-raw flesh.
He seemed more pissed that we weren’t getting hit, though.
Yuki dropped down to the floor beside me. It took more concentration to ‘swim’ upwards against gravity than to move laterally, and the gunfire wasn’t helping her concentration any, so instead she pulled me through the wall into the next room over.
There was an odd sensation like cool water passing through me, and then we were out of the smoky, bullet-filled hallway and inside someone’s windowless office.
Suddenly the wall exploded next to me and Spike came charging through in a cloud of dust, his thorny hands punching through the drywall.
“AAAH!” Yuki screamed in terror.
She yanked my hand and we took off, running through walls from office to office.
Spike kept following us, bashing his way through walls, timber, and glass.
Finally we got far enough ahead of him that Yuki was able to concentrate, and we began to float upwards towards the ceiling.
I could hear Spike’s muffled voice yell, “THEY’RE GOING UP THROUGH THE SIXTH FLOOR – GAS ‘EM!”
Phasers have several weaknesses. Electricity and forcefields are two of them.
Any type of harmful gas – tear gas, knockout gas, poison gas, carbon monoxide, smoke – is another.
Phasers can still breathe when they ‘ghost.’ For whatever reason, air molecules are able to jump the divide from our world to the phaser’s immaterial form.
So if the phaser gets hit with cyanide gas, they’re going to die like anybody else.
And if they get a faceful of halothane vapor, they’re probably going to get woozy, pass out, and come out of phase. Hopefully they’re not halfway inside a wall when they pass out – otherwise they’ll die, too, in a particularly excruciating way.
Of course, Spike had inadvertently warned us what was coming. He might have been a bloodthirsty psycho, but he wasn’t exactly the sharpest tool in the shed.
We passed through the sixth floor as Yakuza lobbed tear gas grenades at us. Smoke spewed everywhere.
“Hunter-san, shut your eyes and don’t breathe!” Yuki yelled.
I did as she said, and felt myself floating upwards as the gas hissed all around us. Another flurry of bullets passed like sparks through my body, but then we were past all the ruckus and up into the seventh floor. I still didn’t breathe or open my eyes for 20 seconds, just to be safe.
We kept on going until we reached one of the very top floors of the building, where two Japanese guys not dressed like Yakuza were next to a big power grid in a service corridor. One of the guys held two severed power cables in each hand as electricity danced over his skin. The other guy had glowing red eyes.
They both looked over at Yuki in elation – then at me in shock.
“Who the fuck is this?” Red-Eye shouted in Japanese.
“Don’t worry, I know him, it’s cool,” Yuki answered in her native tongue.
“WE don’t know him! What the fuck’s he DOING here?!”
As Red-Eye and Yuki argued, I spoked into my commlink. “Nova, I need you here ASAP.”
“On it,” she answered in my ear.
To pacify Red-Eye, Yuki held out the canvas bag. “Look, I got it – eight cannisters of – ”
She didn’t get a chance to finish before the elevator door opened and Spike appeared, looking even angrier than before.
“You fucktards pissed off the wrong guy!” he snarled.
Red-Eye fired a laser from his eye sockets, which blasted a hole clean through Spike’s shoulder.
Unfortunately for Red-Eye, Spike was already speeding right towards him.
“RRAAARRRRR!” he roared as he punched Red-Eye.
It was like watching somebody take a Cuisinart to the head.
Blood went everywhere as half of Red-Eye’s face came off on Spike’s fist.
Red-Eye screamed. He raked another laser beam across Spike’s body, but it only left a streak of charred skin that immediately began to regenerate.
Spike’s second punch was to Red-Eye’s throat – which not only crushed his voice box, it ripped his jugular to shreds.
Red-Eye slammed to the ground spraying gouts of blood, his legs kicking spastically as he bled out.
Spike turned his blood-spattered face towards us and grinned evilly. “Who’s next?”
The second member of Yuki’s crew attacked. Holding onto the power cables with one hand, he extended his other arm and sent a blast of electricity arcing through the air.
Spike screamed in rage as the voltage seared his skin. The stench of burning flesh filled the air.
But a little electricity wasn’t enough to stop him.
Three seconds later, the guy was a red smear on the wall.
The good news was that as long as Yuki held onto me, there was nothing Spike could do to us, short of a tear gas grenade.
Bad news was, he had a tear gas grenade.
He grinned as he ripped it off his belt and popped the pin.
Shit.
If Yuki breathed it in, not only would she lose concentration and fall out of phase, she’d be blinded and useless in a fight.
The problem was, it took her more than twice as much effort to phase me and her than just herself alone. So right now, I was a liability to her survival – and I needed her alive.
I made my decision.
“Run!” I yelled at Yuki as I ripped my hand out of hers.
I immediately felt my body return to normal as I phased back into the material world.
“But – ”
“RUN!” I screamed.
She ran as I turned to face Spike.
He slung the grenade straight at her, but I threw up a forcefield.
The tear gas cannister bounced off my shield and clattered back onto the floor. As soon as it started spewing gas, I raked it across the linoleum with another forcefield and got it as far away as I could.
Of course, that gave Sp
ike an opening to come after me.
He swung for my head. I threw up another forcefield to stop him.
His fist hit it with the force of a sledgehammer.
Before my yearlong vacation in Karkarin, I wouldn’t have even felt it.
At the moment it was excruciating.
“AAAGH!” I yelled as I stumbled backwards.
The forcefield collapsed, and Spike strode right for me.
“What happened, ya little pussy?” he sneered. “You go soft in prison?”
“Just squash him!” Yuki screamed, her head poking out of the wall right before she disappeared.
“It’s not that simple!” I yelled.
Spike swung at me again.
I dodged, but he still kept coming.
Unfortunately, it wasn’t like I could hit him back. Not if I wanted to keep all the skin, muscle, and tendons in my fist instead of leaving them on his face.
His next punch was headed straight for my nose –
And then a ghostly hand reached out of the wall, grabbed my arm, and suddenly I was immaterial again.
I rose up through the air and into the ceiling.
The last thing I saw before I disappeared was Spike’s enraged face.
Seconds later, Yuki and I surfaced through the gravel of the building’s roof.
There was one last guy, dressed in a flashy white and blue spandex bodysuit.
“Where’s Kaneto and Mutsuo?” he yelled in Japanese.
“Dead!” Yuki shouted back.
“How the fuck were you planning to get out of here?” I asked Yuki.
“He’s an aerokinetic.”
Well, at least the white and blue bodysuit made sense now.
I stared at her in disbelief. “Are you INSANE?! Do you know who you’re dealing with?!”
“Yes!” she pouted.
“You DO know he FLIES, right?!”
Before she could answer, engines roared above us.
The sparkjet came swooping down, transitioning to VTOL mode until it hovered a hundred feet above the building.
“Come on,” I yelled at the aerokinetic in Japanese. “We’ve got to get out of here before – ”
I was interrupted by another roar – but this one sounded like a flamethrower turned up to 11.
And then, just beyond the edge of the building’s roof, Antimatter rose into view atop a blast of flaming energy.
14
Antimatter wore a bodysuit that covered every inch of him, including his entire face. The suit itself looked sculpted from rubber, and emphasized his pecs and washboard abs.
The design of the suit was stark black and white, with the mask divided down the center line, black on one side, white on the other, with mirrored glass lenses over the eyes. They were angled downwards so he looked like he was perpetually scowling.
The rest of the suit was similarly divided into black and white halves, although geometrical shapes of black intruded into the white half, and blocks of white overlapped the black.
His gloves and boots were thicker and bulkier than the rest of the suit, and for a good reason: that’s where 99% of the magic happened.
At the moment, the soles of his boots looked like they were rockets. They spewed plumes of energy like a stream of jet fuel on fire. That’s what propelled him into the air and what let him hover there, watching us, daring us to make a move.
The aerokinetic made a move.
He threw out his hands, and suddenly a Category 5 hurricane slammed into Antimatter from the side. I even felt a little of the edges of it as 150-mile-an-hour winds blew me backwards. Yuki instinctively grabbed me and phased me, at which point the winds passed harmlessly through us.
Antimatter went tumbling through the air, but he quickly righted himself and fired off his boot thrusters even harder as he flew directly into the face of the powerful winds. Then he raised one heavy, gloved hand and shot a bolt of pure ionized energy directly at the aerokinetic.
The guy’s skull was incinerated on the spot, and his headless body fell backwards.
Of course, the effect that had was to immediately stop the 200-mph winds. Since Antimatter had been overcompensating to stay in one place, he suddenly shot hundreds of feet to the right, tumbling wildly out of control.
We only had a few seconds before he was back in control.
“Nova, open the cargo door NOW!” I yelled into the commlink. “Yuki, stop phasing us!”
Yuki knew me well enough to obey immediately.
I formed a forcefield beneath our feet and lifted us in less than two seconds to the sparkjet a hundred feet overhead. The sudden acceleration was disorienting – and brutally painful for my brain – but I managed to slow down at the very end so we could dive into the open cargo door. Yuki’s canvas bag of Ephemera vials clattered across the metal floor of the cargo bay.
“Grab onto something!” I yelled at Yuki as I latched onto some of the black netting used to secure cargo during flight. Then I yelled over the commlink, “Nova, keep the bay door open and PUNCH IT!”
Unfortunately, Nova didn’t know me well enough to obey immediately.
“Are you su– ”
“YES!”
The cargo door stayed open as the plane took off.
The sparkjet went from 0 to 60 in one second flat. Thank God Yuki and I were holding onto netting bolted to the plane, or we would have gone tumbling out of the cargo door.
In second number two, we went from 60 to 250. I was literally parallel with the floor as I held onto the netting, my body suspended three feet above the floor.
The plane kept accelerating even faster after that.
It wasn’t enough.
I could see the skyscrapers of Tokyo racing away beneath us, and then we were out over the bay.
Unfortunately, a black-and-white dot at the head of a plume of yellow fire rose up out of the skyscrapers and headed right for us.
He was gaining fast. Five more seconds and he’d be right outside the cargo door.
“Fuck,” I muttered.
I knew what I had to do, but it was going to hurt.
I threw up a forcefield 30 feet by 30 feet right in Antimatter’s path, then concentrated with all my might to keep it intact.
Wasn’t enough.
Antimatter slammed into the forcefield. It held for about a millisecond, then collapsed.
I grunted from the pain, which felt like somebody had slammed my head with a ballpeen hammer. I knew a helluva lot worse was coming unless my little gambit had worked.
I looked out the cargo door, hoping that the shield had managed to do what I wanted: break Antimatter’s neck, or at least knock him out.
It had slowed him down – he was a good thousand feet behind where he had been – but the fiery plume was still going, so it must not have knocked him out.
For him, it had probably been like flying through a thick piece of plate glass: painful and disorienting, but not much else.
Back in the day I could have held the shield no problem. Antimatter would have splattered like a bug on a windshield.
Unfortunately, this wasn’t back in the day.
He also obviously knew he’d run into something, so now he was flying with one arm outstretched, a crackling ball of antimatter in the palm of his hand to run interference for him. It would do a lot more effective job of wiping out my shields than his head, that was for sure.
Then the ball of energy grew in size and brightness –
He was going to fire at us.
“Nova, bank right!” I yelled, and threw up the biggest forcefield I could directly behind the jet.
Antimatter’s blast exploded from his palm into – and through – the forcefield.
It felt like somebody had jabbed a red-hot poker four inches into my skull. I screamed in agony.
The good news was, Antimatter’s shot was dissipated and slowed down as the sparkjet roared out of the way just in time.
The bad news was, that was Antimatter’s first shot. And he had a
n unlimited number of them.
Yuki saw me writhing in pain. I knew she was shocked that I hadn’t taken care of one little SPC by now.
“What’s wrong?!” she yelled over the roaring winds from the open cargo door.
“My powers got fucked up in prison… Nova, close it up!” Then I gestured to Yuki. “Come on!”
I used a forcefield to backstop me and Yuki and propel us right up to the cockpit, where we clawed our way into the cockpit. Then I shut the bulkhead behind us.
Nova looked freaked out.
Not a good time to lose it.
“How am I supposed to outrun him?!” Nova cried out.
“You’re not going to,” I growled.
Suddenly the entire sparkjet shuddered as an explosion rocked the rear of the plane.
Flashing lights and alarms erupted from the cockpit console, and the readout showed that the left engine was gone. The sparkjet slowed to half its previous speed.
“Case in point,” I said.
“He’s going to shoot us down!” Nova shrieked.
“No he’s not. He wants his Ephemera.” I turned to Yuki. “Give me one of your cannisters.”
“Why?”
“We’re leaving it.”
Nova whipped her head around to stare at me. “What do you mean, ‘leaving it’?”
Yuki didn’t even hear that part; she only cared about the money. “WHAT?! No – just one of them is worth a billion yen!”
I unzipped her bag, grabbed one of the cannisters, and dropped it into the copilot’s seat.
Yuki reached out to take it back, but I put a forcefield around the seat to block her. Her fingers stubbed into it and she yelped.
“You’re not going to be able to spend it if you’re dead!” I barked.
Nova repeated, “What do you mean, ‘LEAVING it’?”
I pointed at the cannister. “Hit it with a concentrated blast of your fire and burn the chair.”
Both Yuki and Nova screamed “WHAT?!” at the same time.
“Are you insane?!” Nova yelled.
“You’ll blow it up!” Yuki shrieked.
“That’s the idea,” I snapped.
Ephemera was incredibly unstable – and highly energetic. A couple ounces wouldn’t equal a nuclear bomb by any means, but they could blow up a small house.
Or a sparkjet.
“WHY?!” Nova screamed.
