Blackjack Dead or Alive (The Blackjack Series Book 3)

by Ben Bequer

  I lost sight of Silverback and Epic, though they were only a few yards away from each other as the ground rose, the roof dropped, toxic dust scoured my vision.

  And Haha brought the mountain down.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  I fought the falling tide as the roof crumbled on me. Massive boulders smashed the floor; the marsh water splashing even as larger fissures opened around us, the water draining deeper into the dying mountain. Everything went black as the roof collapsed on us, brought down with great fury by the falling material above it, the crumpled reinforcements unable to hold so much dirt and rock. I helped the larger pieces along with a couple of punches, trying my best to carve out an open space.

  In the end, it was too much, even for my formidable strength, a massive surge of earth rode through me, slamming me against the ground. Trying to stand was near impossible, but I managed to get my hands up, pushing against the tidal wave and grasped a huge shard of rock as it slid across, ready to fall on me. I eased it onto my shoulders, then, putting everything I had into the move, I stood. I roared and coughed, but the big rock against my shoulders was holding, despite an avalanche of sand and dirt pouring around it and to my feet.

  “Blackjack,” I heard Epic scream in the darkness, not too far from me, and imagined him doing the same as me. If that was the case, Silverback wasn’t too far.

  “Here,” I said, fighting against the shifting rock and everything wedged above it.

  “I need help,” Epic said, and from his voice, I could tell he was frantic, losing the fight against the sliding mountain.

  I tried twisting the rock, but it would have been easier to juggle a tank. Instead, I turned myself in the direction where I had heard his voice, and shifted beneath the big rock, angling it away from me. The dark was omnipresent, impossible to penetrate. Without the artificial light, we were entombed within the heart of a mountain, deeper than men were supposed to be without technology to aid us.

  A pinprick of light flitted across my eye line, emanating from a small crevasse. As I moved towards it, I saw a pair of stiff legs sticking from beneath a pile of rubble. My double sat there motionless, mauled by the falling rubble. I shook my head bitterly and slunk away from him, toward Epic, who was straining against a fallen support beam holding our small cavern in place.

  The light I followed was emitting from Epic’s uniform, shifting from red to blue to yellow like police lights. I guess everyone got a tracker, for all the good it would do. The rock I held scraped against the beam, my efforts making things harder for him, so I pushed it off and it slid behind me, the rubble burying the remains of Blackjack 2.0.

  I inched into the small pocket of air. Epic kept it patent with raw strength, his muscles quivering; his face a sweaty mask of determination, curly hair matted and dirty against his face. The support he held was 3D printed, bearing a load measured in the hundreds of tons. I didn’t tamp down the spark of pride, letting its tiny light bolster my waning energy. His legs strained and popped, threatening to give, but shook his head when I approached, motioning to the upper torso of an unconscious Silverback.

  “Forget him,” I said, but he shifted, spreading his legs slightly and I felt the raw tonnage above us give slightly.

  “Get him up,” Epic managed, each word punctuated with heavy groan and sucking of air. He had little left, but he wanted me to check on the villain – who was probably already dead.

  I slunk through the available space, moving to the corner where Silverback lay and grabbed the big gorilla. Pulling his shoulders, I dragged him out of the detritus that covered his legs and torso. Laying him down on the ground, I saw that he was breathing from the bubbles of blood popping in his mangled face.

  “Silverback, wake up,” I said and struggled with his bulk to sit him so he could sit somewhat upright. His head was the size of my whole body, and I was frankly afraid that he would wake, see me and go on a rampage, but a look at Epic told me I had to try. I shook him hard, diffident to any further harm I might be causing. I was no veterinarian, but he looked rough. “Come on man, wake the fuck up!”

  He shuddered in my arms, thin streams of blood sucking into his flat maw, dripping out again when the inspiration ceased. His eyes shot open, red and angry, burst blood vessels drowning the sclera. His muscles tensed in my grip and I let go, taking a large step back.

  “Before you attack,” I said, my hands upraised and placating. “Look around and think.”

  He followed my advice and said, “Fuck.”

  “Help,” Epic said and I went to spell him, if only for a minute, but he shook his head and gestured to Silverback. “Him.”

  “He’s all fucked up,” I said, but the big guy got more frustrated, his already red face lighting up with anger.

  “No, dammit,” he managed. “Him.”

  “I can help too,” I said.

  Epic shook his head slowly.

  “Him! I need you…to figure out…how to…get out.”

  “Can you walk?” I said. The gorilla was as tall sitting as I was standing, but he was no idiot, allowing me to approach without hostility. I offered a hand that he refused as he tested his arms and legs. Other than the superficial damage, which was considerable, everything seemed to work.

  “Help him,” I said, pointing at Epic.

  Silverback glanced over his shoulder, the wheels turning. I couldn’t blame him. There was a time, not long ago, that my survival trumped everything. Realizing there was no escape, he found a sturdy place along the beam and dug his shoulder into it, extending his frame enough that both hero and villain bore equal shares of the load. Epic still strained under the totality of all I had built, but the deep lines etched in his face smoothed a little.

  “Now it’s up to you,” he said, a faint smile crossing his face.

  I walked over to Epic, his smile thinned out into a question. I grabbed the tracker, still phasing from one color to the next and tore it from the fabric of his suit. The texture was similar to what Superdynamic had given to me, flexible to the point where I almost had to tear the whole thing off to rip it.

  “You really don’t like those things do you,” he said.

  “I didn’t until I realized they doubled as flashlights. Now I’m going to build them into everything I wear.”

  Moving to Silverback, I took hold of the leather strap crisscrossed over his broad chest, resisting the urge to rip it away dramatically, unlatching the heavy metal buckle, careful not to disrupt the gorilla’s burden.

  Spreading everything I had to work with in front of me, it amounted to an eight foot leather strap, a flashlight/homing device, and my Asskickers, which despite being scuffed and dented, probably still had working thrusters.

  “How far down do you think we are?” I said.

  Epic laughed, “I’m not a geologist.”

  “One, two hundred feet of rock above us,” Silverback said, sniffing the air.

  “You can tell?” I asked.

  The gorilla stared at me, “Can’t you?”

  “As a matter of fact, I can’t,” I said. “What’s the shortest way out.”

  He looked around, finally gesturing off to his left, almost level with our little cavern. “About eighty feet that way.”

  I pulled the boots off, the socks with them, and dumped everything in a pile. Taking one of the boots in hand, I inspected it in a way only a creator can. I knew every rivet, every stitch, and every surface intimately. Undoing the laces, I dug into the dank, musty toe of the boot, moist leather scraping against the back of my hand as I ran a finger over the toggle. There was a resistance there that indicated it was working as intended. Forget the arrows, castles, all of it. These boots were my greatest achievement.

  “Enough?” Epic asked, and it looked like he was bowing under the weight.

  I stood, “You okay?”

  “Fine,” he shot back.

  “What’s he going to do with all that junk?” Silverback said, frustrated. “We’re buried under a million tons of rock! N
o trinket is going to get us out of here.”

  “You saw the castle above us” Epic said, clearly straining again. “Saw it?”

  The gorilla shrugged, nonplussed.

  “This guy built all of that and all these caverns down here in a day. Isn’t that right?”

  I smiled, “How long were you tracking her?”

  “Since she ran to Italy to check on you.”

  Laughing, I sifted through the small pile, and didn’t like what I saw. I longed for my gear, especially the quiver. Several of my arrows would have been helpful, including the Nukes. I didn’t think the massive explosion would get us out, but maybe if the charges were properly placed I could open up more space.

  No, that would just shake loose the rocks above us, bringing it all down. The Cretaceous room was the deepest, and that meant the bulk of the mountain was above us. Explosives weren’t going to get us out of here. If anything, they’d make it worse. I had to find a way to get us out without impacting the walls. Any vibration would threaten our small haven. That meant I had to dig without digging. I had to find a way to move earth and rock without shifting the bulk of stones that had settled above us.

  Epic smiled watching me work, “There he goes,” he said. “He’s figuring it out.”

  Silverback snarled, “What’s he going to figure out? I can dig us out of here in no time and-“

  “Silverback,” Epic snapped. “Focus on holding up your share.”

  The big gorilla growled but braced, taking half the load from Epic.

  “Do your thing, Blackjack,” the hero prompted.

  I didn’t want to tell him I was coming up blank. I knew what not to do, no explosions, no displaced rock, if I fired the rocket boots and tried to bore my way out, the flames would eat up all of our oxygen and our problems would be solved with asphyxiation.

  But small plasma reactors powered the latest incarnation of my boots. I tore them apart with my teeth, revealing the raw power source. They were each the size of a small watch and if modified properly, the explosion would be a sight to behold. But I had already gone over that. Explosions were bad down here. I had to use them for what they were.

  I held them in my dusty hands, knowing I had the first step of the solution; a power supply. Next, I had to figure out how to put that raw energy to use.

  The boots were partially 3D printed, partially hand-cut leather, and looking at them, ripped into pieces made me wish that some of the drones would have made it, that something of my grand creation had survived the falling mountain. Apogee was right, I had to take the whole concept and turn it into a bonafide business. Put Bubu in charge of the whole thing and make us both rich beyond avarice.

  That’s assuming he had made it out alive.

  The control center was high on the mountain, and deep into it – the only deeper item I had dug were the holding rooms – so Bubu and the people in the stasis cells had a chance to make it out of this alive. The guy had a wife and kid, and while he was a bit of a thief and bastard, he had followed me. He was my friend.

  I also worried about the heroes I had captured, Bamma, Slamma, Coach and the rest. I didn’t want them hurt – not seriously – and I knew if any of them were dead, it was on me. Epic’s mood would change dramatically, and I was in no condition to fight the big guy.

  “You okay?” Epic said, noting the change in my mood.

  “Fine,” I said.

  “Have a plan?”

  The rock shifted above, helped by Silverback’s nonchalant effort, and we were rewarded with streams of rocks and sand coming down on our heads.

  “Quit moving,” Epic snapped at Silverback, but the big ape wasn’t taking him seriously.

  “Silverback,” I said, using a calm tone.

  “What?”

  “You got anyone out there? Anyone special?”

  “What do you care?”

  “I don’t,” I said, wedging my fingers into the heel of the boot and pulling it off, revealing the thrust nozzle, surrounded by a neat braid of wires I was careful not to damage. “The fact is I don’t know your story. Are you a big ape that is suddenly smart, or are you a dude that got turned into a huge gorilla?”

  He stared at me for almost ten seconds, expressionless. “You don’t care.”

  “For now, let’s pretend I do. So what is it?”

  Silverback fidgeted, more uncomfortable delving into his life than bearing tons of rock on his back.

  “I was a man before this happened,” he said. “Someone experimented on me. I don’t remember anything, except waking like this.”

  I paused, the heel of my other boot half off the sole.

  “I’m sorry, man.”

  He shook his head and angled away from me. “Just get us out of here.”

  “So you have people out there, huh?”

  Silverback nodded.

  “What, a wife? Some kids?”

  He sighed and looked away. “I’m not that old, dude.”

  “Mother, father?”

  He nodded, “Moms.”

  “She knows about you?”

  Silverback smiled, “I tried to approach her once.”

  “She must’ve freaked,” I said, trying to keep it light.

  “Well, we get out of here,” Epic said, looking over Silverback’s shoulder at me with a smile. “I’ll make sure she gets the whole story.”

  They both went silent as I worked, tossing the heels away and gently bending the screw housings around the thruster nozzle built into the boot. I had one nearly out when I saw the boot dangling from my arm and got another idea.

  “Like you care, man,” Silverback said finally.

  “We’re in this together, big guy,” Epic said.

  “This is stupid,” he said. “We’re not getting out of here. Better to let this shit fall and end it quick.”

  I took the metal buckle from Silverback’s baldric, freeing it with a sharp tug that split the leather. It was huge, but rather simple, a generic belt buckle similar to what you’d find in a store. Turning it in my fingers, the steel felt thick, with small ridges limning the surfaces. The metal was supple enough to work with, strong enough to take a pounding. Probably not the pounding I had in mind, but maybe enough.

  “If you want to end it quick,” I said, feeling a wide smile cracking my face. “Then do it back over there.” I gestured to the small corner where I had found him.

  “You figured it out,” Epic said.

  “I figured it out.”

  * * * *

  As I worked, I thought of how Haha had outsmarted me.

  His software would have poured over all my work and discovered the drone system fast. Most of them were small, no bigger than a few inches – designed to work as a swarm to build almost anything. While I was busy fighting my doppelganger, and the rest of his team, Haha taken control and attacked the support structures of the castle using the drone swarm, leaving the place vulnerable. It would have been easy for him to write a new code and task them to damage the supports enough to weaken them. Like a colony of termites chewing away the foundations of a house. Enough support beams failed from higher up, the rest of the job was left to gravity.

  Tweezing the buckle’s loop between my fingers, I felt the metal compress. Using one hand as a vice, I used the other to snap the whole buckle in two, purging my mind of worry and doubt. The swivel and prong fell away, bereft of a frame to hold them, leaving me with a pair of metal brackets, each the length of my hand. I thought about straightening them out for a second, but a wider surface area would be better, using my thumb to flatten the top edges as thin as I could make them. Much like Silverback’s huge swords, which would also have come in handy, I didn’t need them sharp, just edged.

  The only problem now was making a device that would function. I knew what I needed to build, how it would work, but getting the job done with what little I had was another matter altogether. Engineering doesn’t work that way. When you build things, there are inevitable errors that made you start again, so
metimes going all the way back to the drawing board. The problem now was that I was limited in supplies. I scavenged everything I could find, but lacked material to build new parts or solder metal together. I had to design something, and put it together from the junk I had in front of me, and I had to do it on the first try.

  The first thing I had to do was modulate the thrust on the boots. I didn’t need a full burn, and it would kill us, but small continuous pulses would provide the vibrations I needed. Ironically, that meant breaking the only piece of equipment that had endured all of my travails. Pulling the sole off my boot, I found the thrust toggle, a plate large enough to fit comfortably enough under my first and second toes. I stripped them down with raw force, until all that remained was the toggle and the cables and wires leading to the thrust units.

  Calibrating the amount of energy fed to the thrusters was something I needed equipment for, and almost impossible to do manually. I settled for using the discarded prong from the belt the physically manipulate the trigger mechanism until I got the vibrating thrum I was looking for. It would still be hot, but the reduced thrust output would not burn the precious oxygen away as quickly.

  I replicated the process with the other thrust unit with similar success, the result a pair of vibro units. The heat would be extreme; the exposed wires would need insulation, as would my hands. I found Silverback’s leather strap, but there was no way it would hold for more than a few seconds. My fingers brushed against the slice Stygian Black had torn in Superdynamic’s suit, and I smiled.

  Tearing the suit in strips, I wrapped the braided wires and larger cables thick, lining them all between the toggle and thrust nozzle, then secured my makeshift blades to the whole thing. They would be the focal point of the vibrations, cutting into the rock as they vibrated. Power wouldn’t be a problem, hell, there was too much, which would be the actual problem. The toggle mechanism hadn’t been working right before I repurposed it, and I had no way to regulate the raw force of the things when I engaged the power supply.