by Victor Koman
“Leila! Take out that thing with a missile!”
“You’re all within the blast radius. I’ll use the rail gun.”
“Aim for the head.” Shrugging Dandridge off his back, Cap freed up his hands for the fight. From his many-pocketed shirt, he withdrew a sphere the size of a golf ball, colored white and dimpled the same as a golf ball. This object, however, had two red stripes slightly off axis from each other. With his powerful hands, he twisted the two hemispheres of the ball until the red lines met at the equator. Something inside chirped electronically. Planting his feet on the unyielding shoreline, he took aim and pitched the ball in a high arc toward the advancing macrobot. Bullets ricocheted around and behind him like electric raindrops.
Rock and Sun Ra saw the sphere rise upward toward its target.
“Duck!” Ra cried, turning his back to what he knew came next. Rock belly-flopped to shore, slipping across the wet Penrose tile pattern and nose-diving into the briny foam.
An ear-pounding explosion lit up the gloaming sky, briefly outlining the three men and the towering machine in its white, angry glare. The shock wave roiled across their flesh like waves on water.
Inside the head of the colossal creature, Campbell clapped hands over his ears and stared overhead in agony. Released from his grip, the joysticks fell dead and the machine halted in its tracks. In a burst of furious rage, the undeniably mad scientist seized the controls and fired the machine gun into the growing darkness, peppering the seaside with near misses.
Suddenly, from hundreds of yards over the water lanced an eerie white line of blinding light. The stream curved to shore and slammed into the spidery monster with the force of a god’s fist. The battle ended in less than five seconds. The trail of ionized air glowed for an instant or two after the rail gun ceased its deadly roar. In the fading glare, Captain Anger saw the dripping mass of slag that had seconds before been the head of the killing machine. The rest of the macrobot remained standing on its five of its six legs, the right front lifted up as if slain in mid-stride.
Sun Ra joined Cap’s side. Looking up at the damage wrought by the Seamaster’s mighty superweapon, he smiled and said. “I guess Campbell just lost his head.”
From behind them, they heard Tex shout “Need some help here!”
Turning around, Cap saw the doctor at the mouth of the artificial cavern, the secretary general-head wrapped with bandages as if turbaned-cradled in his long arms. Cap also saw that Dandridge had vanished.
“Rock! Help Tex. Sun Ra-find us a boat that can get us to the plane. Then round up the zombies and prisoners for evacuation. I’ll find Dandridge. Leila!”
“Here, boss.”
“Preflight the plane and prepare to take on passengers. We’ll need zipcuffs if any of them get violent.”
“Roger.”
Just before he vanished into the cavern, he added, “If I’m not out in six minutes, drop the canister.”
“But Cap-!”
They heard nothing more from Captain Anger.
Chapter Twenty-One
The Vanishing Island
The gunmetal grey of the corridor merged with darkness as Dandridge cut power to the rest of the island. Cap produced a contact lens case from another pocket. With deft, practiced motions, he inserted the lenses, blinked twice, and put the case away.
Near-darkness blazed into visibility as if a torch had been lit. The lenses consisted of three ultra-thin layers. The first, outer layer gathered every photon of light falling on it; the second layer amplified the light by releasing a hundred photons for every one incoming; the third layer, closest to the eye, projected the amplified image onto the retina. With these, Cap and his crew saw in darkness even better than jungle cats. Now Captain Anger used the lenses to hunt down Dandridge.
He had five minutes.
Racing through the huge inner chamber, Cap scanned the area for any sign of movement. As he expected, his quarry was nowhere to be seen. Then he glanced at each of the doors that rimmed the cavern. From beyond one of them lanced the barest glimmer of a slice of light. Undetectable by normal eyesight, the beam emanated from a torn gasket around the hatch.
He eased to a stop and listened at the door. Nothing. He withdrew his second-and last-shock grenade and palmed it in his hand. One mighty shove from his muscled shoulder sent the door slamming open.
The corridor lay empty, lit only by the dim glow of an emergency lamp. A hundred yards further in stood another door. Within seconds, Cap crouched at the threshold, listening once more. This time, he heard the voice of Dandridge maniacally rambling.
“Think some steroidal sailor can get the better of me? You’ve got another think-he killed Campbell! And my plans for the UN. Ruined! I’ll show him some deconstructionism!”
Cap rammed through the door and slammed to a halt in front of Dandridge. Scraped and bloodied, the man looked less like a mad doctor and more like a stir-crazy refugee. His lab coat hung in dirty tatters and the white shirt beneath it revealed two bloody wounds from direct bullet hits. Cap realized that Campbell’s aim may not have been so random after all.
“You!” the crazed man shrieked upon seeing his arch-nemesis. In a blur of frenetic speed, Dandridge leapt behind a lab table, seizing a remote unit as he slid out of view.
“You think I’m some sort of extortionist, don’t you?” he cried.
Cap heard electronic sounds issue from behind the bench. With a single kick of his powerful legs, he jumped up and over it to crash down on his foe. Dandridge croaked out something that sounded like “Foomp!” and curled up into a groaning ball of pain. Still he clutched the remote in his fear-clenched fingers. A thumb pressed down on a red stud.
“I didn’t want to blackmail the world. I wanted to pacify it! Drop my bugs into a war zone and they’d eat all the weapons!”
Cap snorted as he wrenched the device from Dandridge’s hand. “And if men continue to fight like men? Hand-to-hand, tooth and nail? You’d have your other bugs attack their flesh and tear them apart!”
“Convert useless human trash into useful building blocks,” Dandridge gasped as Cap once more threw him over his shoulders. “The ultimate recycling!”
Something on the lab bench snickked open. Looking down at the tabletop, Cap saw a globe the size of a baseball open up at the top like an eye’s iris.
“What is it, Dandridge?” One hand, muscled like a Roman god’s, clamped down on the wounded man’s throat.
“My next stage of development,” he gurgled. “A scavenger with wings! You may have destroyed the swarm I released against your plane, but I’m sending these straight toward the mainland, where they’ll begin to devour the world!”
Without any further deliberation, Cap twisted the halves of his grenade, activating it, and tossed the bomb inside the small containment vessel. Turning swiftly, he headed to the door with Dandridge his captive.
Dandridge laughed in wild triumph. “How do you like that, Madsen? You had the idea, but I put it to the most notorious use possible!”
Cap gazed about the room until he saw a small man shackled in a dark corner.
“Cover your ears!” he shouted, clapping his hands over his own an instant before the grenade exploded, sending a hammer-blow shock wave through the lab. Glassware everywhere shattered. Chairs flew away from ground zero, as did everything else not bolted to the floor.
Cap shielded his eyes from the detonation, too. Even though he had designed his contact lenses not to over-amplify bright lighting, they would cease to function after such a dazzling photon blast, and he needed them for his escape.
Glass and metal shards ripped into his skin. Dandridge cried out in further pain and the man in the corner simply whimpered through the ringing in Cap’s ears. He threw Dandridge to the floor hard enough to knock the maniac’s wind out, incapacitating him. Running to the prisoner’s side, Cap grasped the manacles and pulled with all the force of his arms, legs, and back.
On one, a chain link deformed and broke free with a c
link. The bolt that held the other to the wall protested under the unbelievable strain, only to shear its threads with a crack like a gunshot. Cap gave the goateed man the preferred perch across his broad shoulders; Dandridge-gasping for air-had to settle for being dragged by the back of his blood-drenched lab coat.
Cap’s sea legs rammed against the metal floor like twin pistons, propelling him and his human cargo down the dim corridor toward the beachhead. In the distance he heard the sound of the Seamaster roaring to life. From behind, fainter, a curious buzzing like angry locusts gained on him.
“It’s all over now,” Dandridge muttered weakly as Cap hauled him through the arching central chamber toward the outside. “The scavengers fly all night and use their solar cells to charge up during the day. They will reach the mainland. From there they can spread anywhere. And they replicate.”
Captain Anger said nothing as they pounded out of the artificial cavern into the night. Rock stood at the ocean’s edge, holding a longboat in place with one muscular arm while signaling with the other.
“Paidyom!” he called out. “You were almost late!”
“In America, we call that ‘on time,’” Sun Ra shouted. He strode toward the boat with a dozen troops and half as many prisoners behind him. “Watch this!” Speaking into a headset boom mike, he barked out the command “¡Derecha!” and all the electric zombies turned right as one. “¡Sube al barco!” he said, and they marched single file into the water and dutifully climbed into the boat. The freed prisoners followed, elbowing and kicking their former tormentors into position. Dandridge’s unaltered cohorts had fled the island already, no doubt racing toward the Mexican shore.
Gazing at Tex, already sitting in the boat with Secretary General Arafshi, Sun Ra nodded toward the zombies and said, “Looks as if you have some surgery to schedule.”
“To the plane!” Cap shouted, placing the small man gently in the boat and tossing Dandridge in like luggage. The errant scientist hit the gunwale with the sound of a sack of potatoes dropped from a speeding truck and slipped silently to the wet strakes. With a pantherish leap, Cap jumped from shore to ship and landed lightly by the tiller.
Throwing full power to the engine, he guided it toward the Seamaster. Beyond the glare of its spotlight, he saw Leila in the cockpit running through her checklist. Johnny Madsen shone the light in their direction, illuminating the choppy water ahead of the longboat. The slap-slap-slap of hull against waves soothed the captain, though his thoughts never strayed from his mission.
“Leila,” he radioed. “Is the countermeasure ready?”
“Ready to drop as soon as we’re airborne,” she replied.
She turned the massive aircraft around in the water and powered it up to move toward the advancing boat. At fifty yards and closing, she throttled back and turned the plane’s bay to face them. Jonathan cycled the hatch open and helped the refugees inside.
In less than a minute, everyone clambered aboard and he sealed the hatch shut. Sun Ra guided the freed captives to their seats-really nothing more than one-foot-square pieces of stamped metal that folded down from the fuselage. He ordered the zombies-in Spanish-to seat themselves. Leila helped Tex strap the UN Secretary General into a rescue basket.
Captain Anger made his way to the cockpit and slipped into the pilot’s seat. Without a word of warning, he slid the four throttle levers forward and gunned the engines to full power, the four Pratt & Whitney J75-P-2 turbojets each providing 17,500 pounds of thrust. Anything not bolted or strapped down slid to the nearest rear bulkhead. With a minimum of water-taxiing, the Martin P6M Seamaster rose up on its hull and leapt out of the water.
The ride instantly smoothed out as Cap’s deft hands controlled the wheel. Turning and banking steeply yet gracefully to the right, he saw the island below as a dark abomination in the night-shrouded water. A short distance beyond stood its unaltered sister island. As he maneuvered the aircraft into position for a bombing run, he radioed the Anger Institute.
“Flash, dispatch Falcon III to monitor the mainland closest to Escollos Alijos. Dandridge tried to release a flying scavenger and a few may have escaped the percussion grenade I set off in the lab.”
“Roger.” The Falcons-unmanned autonomous aircraft-flew at up to sixty thousand feet altitude and could circle for months or years at a time over a selected site, sending back real-time images of the ground below with a resolution far better than satellite photos. This one-the third in the series of solar-powered, ultra-lightweight spycraft that the Anger Institute had in the air, monitoring danger zones around the world-would watch the mainland for any signs of destruction caused by any winged scavengers that made landfall. Until Captain Anger could devise and release his own flying reprogrammers.
“Heads up back there,” Cap said over the intercom. “Rotating the bomb bay door!”
The black titanium rack on the center deck of the bomb bay held only one weapon: a gunmetal grey cylinder four feet long with stubby red vanes on one end. Machinery whirred into life and the entire rack rotated downward as a large section of hull rotated upward. For a few seconds the cool evening air blew into the compartment like a mini-hurricane. Then only the sound of the jet engines and a faint clunk as the bomb dropped toward the island.
Cap glanced out the starboard window as he banked to the right over the island Dandridge engineered. He smiled with satisfaction to see the bomb hit squarely in the mouth of the elemental mountain.
Instead of exploding, though, the bomb burst open to release an inky black cloud into the cavern. Cap maintained a two-minute circle and watched as the stark columns and pillars and patterns of the artificial island lost their luster. The chambers of Dandridge’s laboratory collapsed in on themselves as Cap’s own scavenger microbots stripped the foul island apart. Within minutes, the towering monument to madness turned fluid and ran into the sea like a melting ice cube.
Just then a scream of unstoppable rage erupted from amidships.
Chapter Twenty-Two
The Last Resort
Captain Anger’s meditation on one man’s folly ceased the instant he heard the commotion in back. Engaging the plane’s powerful artificial intelligence computers, he left the plane flying itself toward California to make his way back to the cargo bay. He had one more fight to break up.
Johnny Madsen squeezed Dandridge’s throat with one hand while the other formed a fist that pounded the man’s temple with unrestrained fury. Rock wrapped an arm around the boy’s waist, trying to separate assailant from target.
Captain Anger clasped Jonathan’s wrist in his powerful grip, freezing the boy’s arm in mid-swing. His other hand released its grip on Dandridge, who curled up into a fetal ball, whimpering and speaking to himself in a disturbing sing-song whisper.
Cap said, “I think there’s someone onboard more deserving of your attention.” Cap led a stunned Jonathan Madsen to the small man sitting dazed in one of the folding flight seats.
“Gramps?” he said, staring at the old man with eyes wide in grateful amazement. “Julie?”
Julius Madsen gazed up at his grandson and started to weep uncontrollably. He reached out to hug the young man and whispered in a hoarse, parched voice, “Johnny boy-you found me.”
His grandson crouched down to look the old man straight in the eyes. “I thought you were dead. The man the scavengers killed first-they said it was you!”
The elder Madsen shook his head weakly. “Dandridge and Campbell replaced several key world figures with imposters in the hope it would give them time to perform the surgery on the real people they‘ve kidnapped. Then real people would switch places with the imposters and be high-level zombies under Dandridge’s control. I was his first captive, but he wanted my knowledge, so no implant for me.”
Tex tapped on Cap’s shoulder. “I’ve patched up Dandridge’s bullet holes; do y’all think we could put the spurs to this filly? Mr. Arafshi’s got to get some critical care within a couple of hours or his brain won’t be worth a plugged nickel.�
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“Sure,” Rock interjected. “With your ten thumbs in his head, it’s wonder he can lie flat on his back without falling over!”
Tex slowly turned his head toward his stocky antagonist, saying, “At least I didn’t get caught with my pants down, robot bait.”
Tex and Rock traded barbs all the way back to Long Beach. Sun Ra used one of the onboard computers in the rear compartment to study in depth the medical/legal ethics of surgical personality alteration. Cap and Tex might need his advice when it came time to dezombify Dandridge’s victims. Leila Weir-after Tex treated her bullet wound-spent the time in the co-pilot’s seat, watching the moon shimmer on the sea and imagining great floating cities resistant to wind, water, sun, and rust. She occasionally conversed with Flash, whom she filled in on the details of their recent exploits.
Jonathan and Julius Madsen simply held each other, grandfather and grandson, happy that a mysterious red-bearded enigma named Captain Anger had saved their lives and vanquished a madman. The freed prisoners conversed among one another, wondering what would happen next.
What happened next was a night landing in Long Beach Harbor followed by disembarkation. The Seamaster was left to its ground crew and everyone took refuge in a dockside hangar. Cap dispersed the crowd with a few quick directions.
“Rock-take anyone with implants back to the institute. Leila- the same goes for the Madsens. Put them up in the guest quarters. Tex-you’ve got your work quite literally cut out for you. Sun Ra-handle all the legal problems for our prisoners and find out how to remove quietly that imposter at the United Nations.
“As for our visiting professor…” He turned toward the huddled mass that had once been the arrogant and self-possessed William Arthur Dandridge. In a mock TV announcer’s voice, he said, “Well, Bill, you didn’t win the world this time around, but you did come in second. Wait till you see the lovely parting gift you’ve earned.”
