The Prospects (Book 2): Nothing Poorer Than Gods

by Daniel Halayko

  “You are one strange bug-man.”

  Gary pulled out his wallet. “I’m going to show you something. Look at it. Please.”

  A small faded photo slid under the door. Cautiously, Emily touched it with her foot and brought it closer.

  The picture showed a smiling man and woman, both well dressed. Between them was a skinny black-haired boy in a yarmulke and a tallit. It took Emily a second to notice he had the same nose and mouth as Gary.

  “That’s from my bar mitzvah a few years ago,” said Gary. “I've changed a lot since then and every day I change a little more. I don’t know when I’m going to stop mutating, but no matter what I look like I will remember who I am.”

  “You’re just a kid,” said Emily.

  “When I grow up, I want to be alive. Please, trust me to take you to the bunker. You can bring the gun. We’ll all be safer if you do.”

  Emily slowly opened the door. The AR-15’s barrel poked out of the gap.

  Gary peeked up. “The bolt release button is right over the magazine. Press that and it’ll load the first round.”

  She put the safety back on, slung the rifle over her shoulder, and picked up Calvin. “Where is the bunker?”

  “Past the elevators. We’ll follow the LED lights on the ceiling. Can I get that picture back? It means a lot to me.”

  Lou sat next to Joey when Gale Force let out a battle cry and created her howling gust of wind.

  Ujimushi grabbed a pen next to the notepad on the tray near his bed with his uncuffed hand. He snapped the clip off and shoved it between the cuff’s teeth and locking mechanism. After a click, the clip held the locking mechanism down enough for him to pull his hand free.

  Lou growled when Ujimushi rolled out of the bed. He bared his fangs and snapped when Ujimushi got to his feet.

  “Bad doggie,” Ujimushi said as he sprang past Lou and spun around. When it was clear Lou wasn’t chasing him, he ran for the elevator.

  The doors to the elevator shaft were still open. Ujimushi heard Gale Force say, “I need to catch my breath. That’s the most wind I’ve ever made.”

  Bosillos’s teeth chattered. “It’s freakin’ freezing. I can see my breath. That ain’t right.”

  “Side effect of my powers. I didn’t count on freezing the spilled blood, but it sure helped. Why aren’t they coming in?”

  “You beat ‘em, I guess.”

  “But they're just standing outside like zombies.”

  “Maybe you ain’t got enough brains to make ‘em hungry.’”

  “You’re really annoying, Bosillos.”

  “But you’re stuck with me, gorda.”

  “I told you to stop calling me that. I know what it means.”

  “How? You’re Japanese or something.”

  “I’m third-generation Taiwanese-American. I took Spanish in high school.”

  Ujimushi ran down the stairs. If he could get past the elevator, he could make it back to the emergency exit - which was probably blocked by a wall of steel, like every other door and window. Well, except for the front door, but that was crowded by attackers crazy enough to run into machine gun fire.

  He kept going, with no plan of escape in mind.

  Junkyard Kat’s hand trembled. She couldn't stop herself from pushing the bomb against the border of a steel slab. The counter flashed zero-zero-two.

  Beads of sweat weighed down her teased mane. Her teeth chattered. She had rebelled against authority her whole life, but she couldn't overcome the stimoceiver. The microcircuitry inside that small square of silicon bombarded her brain with electricity.

  The counter read zero-zero-one when her claws slipped out of the mortar. She landed in a dumpster.

  The bomb stayed on the top rim of the steel sheet. It exploded right after she fell into an open dumpster.

  Flayer ran around the corner. He dug his whips around the ripped top of the top of the steel sheet and coiled them. When the hole was wide enough, he pulled himself through it.

  He ran to the second-story elevator doors and ripped them open. Jenny had nowhere to go when he swung a chain at her.

  Gale Force’s terrified scream, Bosillos’s Spanish curses, and the zing of metal whipping against metal echoed through the basement.

  Over the noise they heard Flayer yell, “Charge,” followed by footsteps.

  Gary stopped. “They’ll kill her. I have to help.”

  Emily unslung the rifle and handed it to him. “Good luck.”

  Gary pressed the bolt release button, turned off the safety, and half-flew up the stairs.

  His huge compound eyes collected many images simultaneously. Everything moved in in discrete images from the past to the future. He didn’t need the rifle’s site because he could establish distance without losing clarity. He shot the kneecaps out from the woman with a bone-spike mohawk, and then the woman with metallic dreadlocks' feet, and crippled three more villains before his rifle’s hammer clicked against nothing.

  “Only a ten-round clip?”

  Flayer wrapped his chain around Gale Force’s arm. Her sleeve ripped as he constricted to keep from flying away. He put the microphone to his mouth. “Kill the shooter.”

  Gale Force created a burst of wind strong enough to tear the microphone from his chilled fingers.

  Bosillos crouched in a corner. The microphone flew up, hit a beam, and landed on his head.

  Ujimushi ran down the stairs. He crept along lobby's wall toward the front entrance.

  Gary walked backwards down the stairs. He almost crumpled his wings when he backed into Emily.

  “Here.” She handed him a magazine.

  Gary loaded the new magazine and kept shooting.

  Bosillos grabbed the microphone and shouted, “Fuck off!”

  Every villain who could still walk did an about-face and ran. The crippled ones crawled as fast as they could.

  Ujimushi dashed for the front entrance, where the villains formed a writhing mob as they wrestled to be the first out. All-Beef Patty threw everyone aside with no trouble. Ujimushi jump-kicked her in the spine and dove for an opening. He would’ve made it if All-Beef Patty didn’t grab his ankle and fling him back into the lobby.

  Flayer shot his second chain at Bosillos. Gale Force rubbed her free arm on the elevator cable and then rubbed the grease on the chain around her other arm. She slid her arm out and use her power to turn the elevator into a wind tunnel.

  Flayer rose several stories before he passed the open door to the medical ward. He caught the open door with his chain and pulled himself in.

  Billy Two rammed into his lower back. He turned in time to see Lou charging at him with his claws and fangs bared.

  Lou was in mid-air when Griffin Tower shook hard enough to knock Flayer off his feet.

  Outside, Magna landed with enough force to leave a crater in front of the lobby.

  Blisters covered Pinwheel’s hands. They hurt too much to hold any more energy for another flash. Marigold buried her face in his leg.

  Kayleigh’s gloves stopped crackling. The capsaicin capsules in her bracers were empty and there were none left in her belt. Cantrip shivered at her feet.

  The villains moved in for the kill.

  “This is our final scene,” said Pinwheel.

  “No one’s going to kill me and live,” said Knockout Rose.

  The villains rushed forward. Knockout Rose punched furiously. Pinwheel kicked but lost his balance and fell next to Marigold, who clung to him.

  Then came the dry cracks of pistols and the loud bang of a shotgun. The villains between them and the hospital scattered. Behind them were the four MAB agents who were guarding Noah.

  “The cavalry has arrived,” said Pinwheel.

  One agent fired Alex’s shotgun. “Get down!”

  Pinwheel and Knockout Rose ducked as the agents opened fire.

  “Over here,” shouted the second agent.

  The villains scattered. Pinwheel helped Marigold to her feet. Knockout Rose carried Cantrip.<
br />
  “Back to the hospital,” said the third agent.

  The forth agent looked up. “Is that Stormhead?”

  Streaks of lightning rained down on the remaining villains.

  The Handler wiped blood from his nose and watched the news. He ignored the pain and focused on where each truck was and how much longer it would be until the superheroes started storming his shell companies.

  That took so much time he didn’t keep up on the incoming reports from his spyware network. It was too much for one man to coordinate at once. He needed an assistant. He wished Portia had accepted his offer. Or maybe he should’ve kept Flayer for his problem-solving skills to be useful. But the first casualty of any war is always the plan. As long as he stayed true to his strategy, he’d win.

  One monitor showed Magna standing in a crater outside of Griffin Tower. Another showed Stormhead throwing lightning at the scattering villains.

  “But they were supposed to come here.” He tapped his keyboard. No new information came in from Griffin Industries. No desperate phone calls. No incoming messages. Not even any internet browsing.

  He grabbed his phone and sent a message to everyone in the second wave: MOVE.

  His monitors showed Malone standing in front of his men outside of Boston. He didn’t check his phone. The ones near Philadelphia bickered. The ones in Baltimore fought among themselves.

  “Why aren’t you going?” The Handler studied the New York hideout’s image. No one moved even slightly. The picture was frozen. He didn’t see the joint-strike team of MAB and FBI agents that arrested everyone.

  The lights went out in Boston. There were a few flashes of gunfire that showed the outline of a long coat.

  The lights came back on. Midnight Rider stood in a cloud of smoke. All around him were defeated mercenaries. Malone himself stood with his back to the camera and his hands held in surrender.

  “But how?” The Handler checked the Boston news. Wayne Penobscot was still trapped at the charity banquet at the Langham Hotel. A reporter said, Midnight Rider has not appeared in Boston, but Liberty Boy, Minute-Girl, and other associates of his have the situation under control.”

  The Handler looked at the monitor for the mercenaries’ hideout. He read Midnight Rider’s lips: “Your employer won’t pay you another cent. Work for me, you will be compensated.”

  Malone nodded.

  The Handler punched the keyboard. “Machiavelli was right about mercenaries. They really are useless and dangerous.”

  A screen showed the Lords of Baltimore land in the Inner Harbor. The next screen showed the Philly Freedom Fighters sweep through Broad Street. The next screen showed the DC Defenders standing on the National Mall, apparently disappointed because they had nothing to do.

  “It’s over,” said familiar voice behind him.

  The Handler froze. “Deputy Director Knapp. You recognized me.”

  “I had to find the only person I couldn’t.”

  “How long has it been?”

  “Since I told you to shut down Project Cold Warrior.”

  “I promised to preempt threats to this nation. Everything I’ve done is to that end.”

  “I believe that you believe that.”

  “Don’t patronize me. I’m not a cackling megalomaniac.”

  “You’re bleeding. Your spyware network is in pieces. Your army is destroyed. Whatever you tried to do, you failed.”

  The Handler put a bloody hand on his forehead. “Artists are never understood in their lifetimes.”

  “Come with me.”

  “Why? To be a sacrifice to the future?”

  “I have no idea what you mean.”

  “Of course you don’t. Let me share my vision.”

  The Handler pressed a few buttons. The monitors cut away from the television and closed-circuit feeds. They showed images of cold angular metropolises where men flew over streets so clean they looked abandoned, of barren landscapes interrupted by the ruins of famous landmarks, of robots standing among piles of bones, of barb-wire encircled camps where humans shuffled with their heads down below the gaze of mutant guards, of broken buildings covered with graffiti and bullet holes where deformed people with missing limbs scurried from shadow to shadow, and of ravaged skyscrapers covered by foliage and fungus.

  “I did what I was meant to do,” said the Handler. “I collected information from thousands of sources to predict the future. Make no mistake, you normal humans are at war with metahumans, and you didn’t start it. They’ve taken control of your freedom under the guise of protection. They use your cities as their battlefields. They set themselves above you to be worshipped as gods and won’t be held accountable for the innocent casualties from their skirmishes.

  “Every war ends. What will happen when the victors emerge? Will Americans live under the eternal control of self-appointed heroes who brutally enforce order? Or timeless chaos, where the villains dominate us? Or endless anarchy, where there's nothing left to defend? Or a future where mutants outnumber normal humans and eradicate them to force evolution? Or will an artificial intelligence find a way to kill every living …”

  “Enough.”

  “I tried to make the villains and heroes kill each other. The winner would be the common people. I don’t care about good or evil, I care about humanity. I truly want to help everyone, not only us Americans. But you near-sighted fools can’t understand …”

  “I said enough. Do you have any ideas how many doomsday projections we've already lived through? There were so many times we came to the brink of nuclear annihilation through mistakes we can't blame the metahumans for. We always found a way to survive.”

  “I've done the math enough to know the danger of a second-guessing. Technology is advancing faster than we can comprehend it. The rate of mutation is progressing far too rapidly for our species to survive. We stand at Armageddon. I'm trying to save the world from its self-proclaimed defenders.”

  “And you're doing that by proclaiming yourself as its defender.”

  “Again, you don't get it.”

  “You've become an insult to everything we stand for.”

  The Handler spread his arms in a cross pose in front of the images of bleak futures. The backlighting hid his perpetually anonymous face. “Do what you will with me. Turn me over to the superheroes, let the villains tear me apart, let the state I dedicated my life to save execute me.”

  Knapp drew his pistol. “The CIA handles its own problems.”

  The Handler lowered his arms. “Of course it does.”

  “We sealed off the exits. Let’s get this over with.”

  The Handler walked past Knapp to the room with the cloning tanks. He swept his hands towards the undeveloped clones in glass cylinders. “Do you imagine I should hate life, flee to the desert, because not every flowering dream bloomed? Here I sit, forming humans in my image, a people to be like me, to suffer, to weep, to enjoy and to delight themselves, and to not attend to you – as I.”

  “Did you write that yourself?”

  “It’s the end to Goethe’s poem, Prometheus. The story of a titan who fought the gods for the good of man and was punished for it.”

  “I'm not a fan of German poetry. Anything else you want to say?”

  “I know what futures await the living. I don’t pity the dead.”

  Knapp put his pistol away. “Come back to Langley for a full debriefing.”

  “What?”

  “There may come a time when we are at war with the superheroes or facing a villain they can't defeat or we're invaded by another country's metahuman army. Your time will come again.”

  The Handler wiped his bloody nose on his sleeve. “Perhaps I underestimated you.”

  Knapp pulled out his smartphone. “Of course, there’s no reason to let the MAB know about our arrangement.” He pressed the call button.

  Alex answered his smartphone before the first ring ended. “Agent O’Farrell.”

  Alex nodded as he watched the television in Noah
’s half of the room. “Good work, Mister Knapp. Seal everything up and post a guard. I’ll have Doctor Von Dyme inspect the facility in the morning.” He hung up. “It’s over.”

  Noah asked, “Is the Handler under arrest?”

  “The CIA asked to handle him their way. In return, we get the cloning facility.”

  “That’s your idea of justice?”

  “Lady Amazing is dying. We need the cloning facility to save her.”

  “He massacred my people.”

  “We couldn't have apprehended the Handler. We don’t even know what he looks like.”

  Alex’s smartphone buzzed. He checked the text message: PW & KO IN ER.

  “Pinwheel and Knockout Rose are safe.” He flipped through his smartphone’s contacts until he found Gale Force’s number.

  Bosillos pulled a pack of Marlboro Lights from his vest.

  “Seriously?” asked Gale Force.

  “You gonna give me a hard time about this?”

  “Not if you give me one.”

  Bosillos chuckled. He put a cigarette between her lips and lit it with an electric lighter embedded in his cybernetic hand.

  P!nk’s “Raise Your Glass” echoed through the elevator shaft.

  Bosillos said, “Where’s that coming from?”

  “It’s my phone.” Gale Force reached her for her belt but winced before touching it. “My shoulder hurts like hell.”

  “Probably dislocated. That guy with the whips yanked it hard.”

  Gale Force took a deep drag. “Fuck it.”

  “She didn’t pick up.” Alex flipped through his contacts and called Emily.

  Her phone rang until it went into voicemail.

  “Oh, no.” Alex flipped through his contacts. “Maybe Arbalest made it there.” The number wasn’t in service. “Damn it! Why can’t he keep a phone?”

  Alex’s phone rang. The screen showed Emily’s picture. He pressed the button to accept and said, “Are you okay?”

  “We’re fine.”

  “How’s Calvin?”