Blackjack Villain

by Ben Bequer

  We rushed out of the elevator and took cover as one of the heavy gunners sprayed in our direction, alerting the other commando of our position.

  They finished off most of the black imps, leaving them lying on the deck, dead or dying, and none of Haha’s drones remained functional. There was something curious about Zundergrub’s demonic horde because usually it was much larger. Only a fraction of his creations were on this deck, maybe only a quarter of them all, and only a scant few remained alive.

  I looked over at Haha about to warn him that Zundergrub was up to something when I saw a red dot on his chest, a laser designator. A second later, his chest erupted from the bullet impact and he flew backwards like a rag doll. Trying to spot his attacker, I only caught a glimpse of the sniper as he melded into the shadows utilizing some sort of stealth suit.

  With no one else to worry about, the entire commando team fired in my direction and the area exploded with gunfire. I had a few rounds bounce off my body before diving to cover, but the pilot wasn’t so lucky. Stitched with ricocheting 7.62mm bullets, he was dead before his body hit the floor.

  I looked over and tried to determine how damaged Haha was, but the robot was still. Another shot from the sniper almost decapitated me, and I was forced to crouch low behind a large generator. A fusillade of minigun rounds exploded around me, keeping me pinned and unable to return fire with my bow. Suppressed as I was, it would only be a few moments before the remaining commandos would encircle and finish me.

  I had first seen the sniper up on a catwalk across the room, parting it approximately in the middle about twenty feet in the air. It led to the ledge that circled around the second floor of the room, where lay all sorts of control equipment. If I was the sniper, with that stealth suit, that’s where I would go - around the second floor ledge to a good flanking position for the kill shot. Once he was set up I had only a split second between the moment his reticule was on me (and the origin point of the laser was somewhat visible) and the next second when he’d squeeze the trigger and fire. I’d see the flash of his gun, then not much more.

  I didn’t want to use deadly force, especially on some normal guys doing their jobs, but these soldiers were trying to kill us. They had already killed an unarmed pilot, and destroyed Haha. God knew what had happened to Zundergrub in the decks below. They were using deadly force with impunity and if I didn’t respond in kind I was dead.

  Across the room, the commando leader shouted orders to his team in German. I stole a peek and saw he was effective, sending the majority of his force around the opposite flank where the sniper was about to set up. With my attention diverted to the six assault commandos approaching from my right, the sniper would get a clean shot from behind me. I also saw another man behind their commander, wearing a strange rig on his back that had two additional mechanical arms, which were helping him build a crawling device much like a mini tank.

  The sniper was probably close to position because the suppressing fire built up to a crescendo. I leaned back against the large generator that was my cover and readied an arrow on the bow, focusing on my peripheral vision.

  Then I saw a red flash as the sniper aimed the target designator at my chest. I turned as fast as I could and fired, not even bothering to aim. The arrow crossed the distance between me and the sniper in a split second, impaling his forehead and throwing him back into some pipes. His damaged stealth suit revealed him as he slumped down, dead.

  I used that to my advantage -- there was a momentary pause in the action as the commando saw their companion fall dead on the second floor. I rose around the cover, firing an arrow at the commando leader. It hit him square in the chest, killing him instantly. Another arrow followed that one as fast as I could reload, and the commando with the mechanical arms took an arrow in the head, dropping dead and leaving the robot mini tank incomplete.

  They didn’t like seeing their boss getting killed, and renewed their assault, following their leader’s last orders without fail. The heavy gunners continued their suppressive fire, while the others moved from cover to cover towards me. I shot back a glance for a sign of help from Mr. Haha, but he was no longer lying where he had fallen.

  The commandos were flanking me fast and I would soon get overwhelmed. I glanced into my arrow bag and saw two arrows left, a regular broad head, and the Nuke, which would bring down the whole rig and everyone in it.

  I popped out and saw one of the commandos rushing to an enfilade position to my right. I shot him in the leg and fell back behind cover as his friends opened fire on me. They were moments away from having a clean shot.

  “Zundergrub!” I yelled, but I knew it was useless. We had left him floors below, and while I could hear the whine of the elevator headed back down, by the time he made it to me, he’d be in time to identify my body.

  “Hell with this.” I attached the bow to the special holster on my belt and turned to face the generator that I was using as cover. I got a good hold and strained every muscle in my body, ripping it off the support brackets and lifting it over my head. The commandos hesitated, amazed at the Herculean effort, and their pause gave me enough time to hurl it at them.

  The huge machinery flew from my hands like it weighed nothing, rolling hard across the floor, bowling over everything in its wake and finally indenting itself in the wall on the other side of the room. I spotted at least three commando dead, with a few others seriously hurt, and the remainder sticking hard behind cover.

  Before I could celebrate, two heavy gunners on the far side of the room tracked me through the haze and opened fire. Two dozen bullets peppered my torso and chest, driving me to my knees. Seeing their opportunity, they continued firing at me, a hailstorm of 7.62mm lead raining on me and tearing into the deck. I had thrown my only cover within twenty feet of me, so I put my arm covering my face and took the punishment.

  The bullets couldn’t pierce my skin, but I could feel the pain of every shot, like a thousand hammers banging into my face, chest and arms. One of the concealed commandos saw me reeling from the minigun fire and left his cover and opened fire with a nasty looking rifle. Blue plasma arced from his weapon and tore into my belly. The pain was agonizing and I dropped prone, helpless. Only three Germans remained uninjured, the two heavy gunners and the commando with the plasma gun that had hurt me. But with me on the ground, writhing in pain, they saw their opening and continued their assault. The two heavy gunners tore into me, but the burning pain in my stomach was so intense that I could barely feel the impact of their bullets. The commando with the plasma weapon circled around and moved in for the killing blow.

  The world around me was alight in a thousand flashes as bullets slammed into me and the area around me. Lying almost prone on the ground, I could only see the grating of the deck below me, but it gave me an idea. I ripped the floor apart, raising it up to give me a bit of cover. The minigun bullets clanged into the metal, and still could ricochet through the deck plates into me, but the plasma gunner couldn’t fire through, and for the moment I was safe.

  Fighting the agonizing pain in my stomach, I reached into a pouch in my left boot and pulled out a flash/bang grenade. Maybe it would distract them long enough for me to charge them. Though I couldn’t figure out how I was going to reach them across the room when I could barely stand.

  Suddenly, the gunners fire stopped. I shot them a glance and saw Mr. Haha standing between them, tendrils from his arms enveloping their armor. The men screamed as the robot ripped them haphazardly from their protective gear, tearing each plate of armor and absorbing it into his form. When he was done, the two men wore jumper suits, weaponless. Each of the two miniguns now jutted out from under Mr. Haha’s kimono, like extensions of his arms. Haha swung his arms back, knocking both of the minigunners out on the floor.

  “Verzicht arschloch,” the remaining commando said. He had rushed around my makeshift cover and was threatening me with his plasma gun. Smoke from my burning flesh enveloped me from the damage of his first shot, and I knew, another o
ne and I was dead.

  “I don’t speak pig Latin,” I said, helpless.

  “He said ‘surrender asshole,’ meaning that you and I should capitulate,” Mr. Haha translated.

  “Ich bin nicht Spaß!” the commando yelled, side-stepping so that he could face Mr. Haha as well.

  Mr. Haha aimed his twin miniguns at the commando, “Sie töten ihm, ich wird Ihr Gesicht Essen.” He looked at me. “I have properly threatened him, I think. After he kills you, I will protect your honor.”

  “Thanks for that,” I said, noticing another of the commando come to his feet. He held a strange assault rifle that looked part rocket launcher, part nuclear device.

  “Er sagte verzicht,” the second German said aiming his monstrous weapon at Mr. Haha. “Drop your weapons and assume the position,” he added in good English.

  “Fuck you,” I snapped, but the pain in my midsection was almost too much to bear. My hand came off my stomach sticky with blood.

  The standoff didn’t promise to go well. The rocket launcher that the other commando was holding seemed enough to pulp Mr. Haha (and half the room). But they were nervous too; Mr. Haha would certainly kill them both. They checked the grips of their weapons, and shifted nervously.

  “So this guy is banging a girl,” Mr. Haha started suddenly, “And the girl asks, ‘You haven’t got AIDS have you?’ He replies, ‘Nope.’ She responds, ‘Oh, thank fuck for that! I don’t want to get that again!’”

  Haha roared in laughter, and I even managed a slight chuckle through the pain. After a few moments, the English speaking commando actually smiled.

  I took my turn, “A guy comes home from work, walks into his bedroom, and finds a stranger fucking his wife. He says, ‘What the hell are you two doing?’ His wife turns to the stranger and says, ‘I told you he was stupid.’”

  We laughed again, and the German chuckled a bit.

  Haha stepped forward, “A guy is walking past a bus stop and says to a woman ‘Can I smell your cunt?’ ‘Fuck off, no you can’t smell my cunt!’ the woman yells back at him, ‘Oh’ he replies, looking slightly confused, ‘it must be your feet then’”.

  We all laughed at that one and even the non-English speaking commando grudgingly snickered.

  “Tell you what boys,” Mr. Haha said. “How about you surrender, instead of us?”

  The two commando got serious, “No way. You surrender.”

  “No you,” Haha said, half teasing.

  “You are villains,” the German said. “You are under arrest for violation of German airspace and…“ The commando trailed off, pausing mid-sentence, a glazed look coming over his face. The other man, while helmeted, also changed in posture, and both dropped their weapons on the floor.

  I looked back and saw Dr. Zundergrub enter the room with his left hand outstretched in the direction of our enemies. Haha didn’t hesitate, moving in and taking the special weapons away from the commandos. He absorbed the new weapons into his hands and rotated them back up his kimono, revealing his regular mannequin hands. Zundergrub released his hold on the men and they were disoriented and shocked at being disarmed.

  Zundergrub was nervous, almost frantic, and I noticed a heavy spattering blood on his filthy lab coat, and in the slathering mouths of his army of black imps, but the pain so intense I couldn’t give it another thought.

  “Where the fuck were you, man?”

  “I was occupied,” he answered me. “Help him,” he commanded the Germans and they helped me get up.

  “Hurry!” Zundergrub said hurrying towards an elevator that led up to the helipad. The Germans dragged me after Zundergrub and Haha.

  * * *

  Coming out onto the helipad, Mr. Haha sprinted out first to cover us against any further opposition. His hands contorted from one weapon to another in nervous expectation as he swept the deck. With two miniguns, a rocket launcher and plasma cannon and the combined armor from both heavies incorporated into his frame, he was now a walking instrument of destruction, yet he looked no different, no more massive.

  But standing beside the German dropship was Dr. Retcon’s gleaming silver rocket, like something out of Flash Gordon, straight out of a 20s pulp comic. A long ramp led down from the rocket, and standing at the base was Cool Hand Luke. He wore a heavy bandage on his leg, and used a walking stick to give him balance.

  “Sheesh, guys.” He ambled toward us noticing my wounds. “I leave for a bit and you go get your panties all in a bunch. Hey, where’s Influx?”

  Chapter 10

  “She’s dead,” I told Cool as the Germans carried me in the stretcher, following Mr. Haha to the medical bay. He paused, as if hit by a jolt of electricity and had to engage his speed powers to catch up to us as they dropped me off on a stretcher.

  “Say that again?” he said, with the most serious expression I had ever seen cross his face.

  “What part of she’s dead don’t you understand?” I shouted, noticing that the rocket wasn’t as advanced as the one in Retcon’s lair, but it was still something out of a 50s sci-fi movie, with hundreds of buttons and readouts flashing. “You guys get the hell out of here!” I yelled to the two Germans and they ran off, hopefully with enough sense to leave the ship altogether.

  “Is he serious?” Cool asked Mr. Haha.

  “The irrationality of a thing is no argument against its existence, rather a condition of it,” Haha said. “As in, irrational for you to deny her death.”

  “Talk to me, man. Haha’s going on about some gibberish,” Cool said turning his attention back to me.

  At the same time, Mr. Haha engaged the robotic medic, who popped out of a wall and went to work on me. The medbot cut my shirt off, finally revealing the wound, it was a mess of coagulated blood and melted skin. It hurt like hell as the shirt, partially congealed to the blood came off. In my pain, I thought I saw Atmosphero on a bank of TV’s across the room. They weren’t new HD 1080p models, but old cathode ray tubes, big ones, with artifacting and snow marring their displays. There were nine of them, in Brady Bunch formation, displaying a scene from the White House Rose Garden.

  “Not gibberish,” Haha interjected. “I was quoting Friedrich Nietzsche.”

  “Fuck off, rabbit face. I’m talking to the homeboy here. You’re not fucking with me, right? Influx is gone?”

  I nodded and tried to move around Haha, who was partially blocking my view of the TVs once he came in, but could only hear the reporter faintly over the two arguing.

  “In a rare Oval office press conference, President Matthew Huntington introduced a newly formed super group, dubbed “Superb Seven” whose sole task will be to find and bring to justice the band of super villains that are thought responsible for the assault on the U.S. Bank Tower in Los Angeles two days ago, and the murder of our revered hero, Pulsewave.”

  “Holy shit,” Cool Hand said. “She’s really dead?”

  “I think he’s already affirmed that.”

  “Guys, let me hear!” I roared motioning to the bank of televisions.

  “It is with the upmost sense of duty and with the most serious and sober determination,” Pres. Huntington began, flanked by an acclaimed array of caped and spandex-wearing supers, “that I’ve asked some the finest superheroes to band together with the sole and express purpose of finding this new villainous group, and putting an end to their nefarious ways.”

  “R-O-F-L at ‘nefarious’,” Cool Hand said.

  “Among the distinguished supers,” continued the reporter, “are legendary heroes Epic and Superdynamic. Joining them are former members of The Revolution, Apogee and Mirage, as well as newcomers Gamma Demon and FTL. Rounding out The Superb Seven is Atmosphero, former member of Rising Force, who was at the U.S. Bank Tower fight.

  “Needless to say,” Epic said, the camera in a tight close-up, “we’re bringing some heavy hitters to the table.”

  “That dude Epic is an asshole,” Cool hand shot in. “I know him from back in New York.”

  “Me and Epic alone coul
d drop those punks ourselves,” Superdynamic added. “But we’re gonna pile it on, as payback for Pulsewave.”

  As the report wore on, I noticed Haha cycling through his new weapons and Cool Hand was, for once, quiet.

  “Indeed, by sheer firepower, it seems like going duck hunting with a howitzer,” the reporter continued. “But according to William Braxton, Director of the National Super Administration, ‘We want to play it safe with this bunch. If they managed to take down a full super group, they’re a force to be reckoned with.’”

  “A force of nature, baby,” Cool Hand said softly, repeating his old line, but lacking the conviction he’d had back in Retcon’s study.

  The report went on showing images of the Super Seven came on the screen, one at a time.

  “They had better be up for the challenge, as Braxton purports, for it’s rumored that each of these superheroes that now comprise The Superb Seven will receive a weekly salary of one million dollars, and a completion bonus of over ten million dollars. What does that mean to John Q. Taxpayer? The Seven had best be “superb” for what their services are costing us. This is Adam Richter, for CBC news.”

  “This is more than I agreed to,” Dr. Zundergrub said from the door. “Doctor Retcon will have to kindly accept my resignation.”

  “Yeah, fuck this.” Cool Hand’s bravado went only so far as his company’s, it seemed. “Those guys will wipe the floor with us.”

  “At times one remains faithful to a cause only because its opponents do not cease to be insipid,” Haha said, still in Nietzsche mode.