She breathes a huge sigh, before resorting to a threat. “You better not be lying.”
I bring over the breakfast cart and start feeding her. “Just get your strength back. You won’t be any use to your masters like this.”
After finishing one waffle and a few spoonfuls of dried banana chips covered in syrup, she shakes her head and can’t eat anymore. She stares at me for a second, “Why are you in that prehistoric relic?”
“I’m upgrading the other suit, for the next time I have to fight.”
Stacy laughs, a sad, bitter sound, “You still think you have a chance. We were sent out to collect any people with creative talent. Honestly, you were pretty far down that list. What are you going to do? Upgrade your stealth suite? Increase the power output of your blasters? No matter how hard you try, you’re not going to out-create the rest of the world. You should just give up.”
I stare at her. She can’t see my jaw hanging open in disbelief. “Are you able to read my mind through this helmet?”
“No, I just know you brainy types. It’s exactly what Lazarus does every time someone manages to beat him. He’d ignore me for days on end, huddle with his staff, and they’d brainstorm how to make the suit better. I’m just telling it like it is. If you could have made a better suit before, you would have. Do whatever you want, but I can tell you that you aren’t going to win.”
Her eyes don’t have that malicious gleam like during her earlier taunts. There’s just resignation. I storm out of the room, knowing she’s right. Sealing the door, I stand in the hallway, uncertain of what to do next. The only real difference between me and Stacy is that my cell is bigger than hers.
#
Afternoon finds her in better spirits. Stacy seems to be getting her appetite back. I release her from the gurney and she doesn’t try to attack me. When she asks for a fresh set of clothes and heads behind the partition to take a shower, I get my hopes up.
She looks much better, so I ask, “Are you feeling better?”
“Yeah, I can deal.”
Inside my suit, I smile. Stacy is turning a corner. “I’m glad to hear that.”
“Well, it’s only a week. I can get through it. I’ve made it this far.”
The grin fades. She’s delusional. I have a super nut-job on my hands. I search the main computer on anything I can find about dealing with addicts. Not surprisingly, I have lots of bootleg software, plans for all kinds of stolen technology, thousands of illegal movies and music files, but my self-improvement section is pretty . . . lame.
Yeah, I’ve known a few addicts in my life, but I didn’t say that I cured any. Generally, I’d say, “Hey, you’ve got some serious problems. You should get some help.” I fix gadgets, not people.
Lacking any other resources, I go with my gut instinct. I set the clock in her cell to count only three seconds for every four. Her days just got six hours longer. I might not be able to out-create the entire world, but cheating can narrow the gap.
I try to take advantage of her suddenly good nature. “Anything you’re willing to tell me about the world outside would be nice. What are the bugs making everyone do?”
“They’re organizing themselves into work-groups and building factories.”
“What are they making in the factories?”
“I don’t think they’re making anything yet.”
“Yeah, that sounds like the Overlord’s Modus Operandi. Draft an endless supply of labor and put them to work. All the creative people are probably doing all kinds of designs. The only problem is that there is no one to give the orders to start production. That’s the problem with megalomaniacs, what do they do when they enslave the world? They want more and better weapons. Who would they use them against?” I snap my fingers. “Hey, I just thought of something, how do those bugs get through your skin? You Olympians aren’t exactly fragile.”
“It’s just absorbed through the skin, I think.”
“What about Andydroid, the Cyber Dudes, and the Silicon Sisterhood?”
She pauses for a moment before answering, a hint of guilt in her voice, “They were captured and deactivated, or ....”
I finish it for her, “... or they got the Humpty Dumpty treatment, but somehow you can justify this.”
“It’s ... regrettable.”
I bite my tongue and cut the intercom off. Regrettable is a word for it, alright. I don’t know why I’m letting this get to me. It’s not like I’m a big fan of any of those clowns. Hearing her casually say that sends a jolt of disappointment through me, though. Maybe I’d expected more from her. I stare uselessly at the pair of powersuits on my work tables. I’m not in a league with people like Lazarus Patterson. Compared to him, I’m practically a rube, just like Hillbilly Bobby.
Wait just a damn second! That might be it.
#
Stacy was right. I can’t out think all of them. All of my designs have gotten progressively more complicated as I looked for ways to improve and add new features. But this suit won’t be used for crimes. That means no stealth suites, countermeasures, or niceties like cargo space. It has only one purpose – to fight.
I remove the force blaster from the right arm. The left will be my sole built-in weapon and the extra space allows me to install more synth-muscle. I start modifying a pulse cannon for a rifle grip. My main weapon will be external and powered independently from my suit. The force field generator from Bobby’s useless wooden club gets attached to a fifteen pound sledgehammer. The beauty of it is the simplicity of the design. The Mark III is going to be a crude tank, and I like it!
The good news is tempered with the bad. Stacy is still counting down the hours until I let her go. There are regular withdrawal symptoms and she still degenerates into a foaming at the mouth lunatic at least three times during her thirty hour “day.”
After the latest bout I opted to give her “Da Biz.”
As the song ends, she screams, “You miserable lying bastard!”
“Beg pardon?”
“I know exactly how long that blasted song is. You messed with the damn clock. You’re not going to let me go!”
Shit! It’s yet another instance of me missing the obvious. So much for our somewhat amicable relationship. “Well, I am a criminal. Lying isn’t exactly beneath me.”
Her psi-bolts smash into the cell door and wall. She’s really pissed and I’m kicking myself in the ass for insisting Stacy try to regain her strength. I divert auxiliary power to the fields around the cell block and struggle getting the Mark I’s gauntlets back on.
“Don’t make me hurt you Stacy,” I warn.
“In that tin can you’re wearing? I’d like to see you try.”
I cut her lights off and plunge the cell into darkness. If she can’t see, her blasts will be less concentrated. I slip around to the backside access panel and interface with the main computer. I fire up some of the loudest stuff in my audio library and turn the lights back on at maximum brightness. I snap off Taser pulses. Her instincts are good and she dodges the first two. On the third one, I use the access panel that I send her food tray in on. She didn’t suspect that.
With her physiology, she won’t be out long, ten minutes at the most. I run back upstairs and grab the gutted Mark II helmet. I make a few hurried adjustments to it and go back and stun her again.
Later, she comes to. “What the hell is this?”
“It’s the hottie in the iron mask. Sorry about the haircut. You’d be even more upset if you could see it. Food tube is the one on the left. Water tube is the one on the right.”
“I’ll rip it off.”
“Probably not. It’s on you pretty tight – you don’t have the leverage. Wouldn’t try your psi-bolts either, they’re liable to rebound. That’d hurt.”
“I hate you!”
Over her rant, I mock her. “You’ll thank me later. I’m just trying to get you cleaned out. Be glad that you still have the free will to hate. If you had one of those things on you, you wouldn’t give a rat’s a
ss about hating me. I’m going to cut you off in a second. I’ll check back with you in a bit, but I’ve got work to do. I do believe that this ‘third-rate Ultrawannabe’ took you out in my ‘ancient relic’ of a powersuit. Know something? This calls for some celebratory music. Do you like Biz Markie?”
#
Things have been quiet for the last five days. She hasn’t said a word to me. I keep telling her what’s going on, but I’m guessing that Stacy’s probably a little bitter. My time is consumed in the workshop on the Mark III. I’ve been obsessing over it and the project is really coming together.
Over the intercom, I say, “It’s almost done. I’m putting on the finishing touches now.”
She looks in the direction of the speakers and surprisingly, utters her first words, “Whoopee flipping do.”
I cut the music off and say, “Do try and contain your excitement.”
“It’s not going to matter, Cal. You’re just too stupid to realize that.”
“So Stacy, to what do I owe this honor? Still want to leave and go get your fix?”
“If I said ‘no,’ would you believe me?”
“Probably not.”
“Then I won’t bother lying. I’m sure your new suit is just spiffy, congratulations,” she deadpans.
“I think I liked you better when you were quiet.”
“Set me free and you won’t have to listen to me. You’ve got your brand new suit. Everyone will be quaking in fear. So, what happens to me when you go out in your new suit and they still beat you?”
“You might have given up, but I haven’t. Someone out there can beat this even if you’re too weak to even try. Maybe there’s a resistance out there somewhere. If so, they might need me.”
“If that’s the lie you want to tell yourself, Cal, by all means, cling to it. I can tell you that anyone worth a damn was captured a long time ago. Wanna hear how it went down? Most of them came running to our Headquarters, because we said we weren’t infected and we sent out notifications to everyone useful. Your invite must have gotten lost in the mail. Heroes kept coming and we were waiting for them.”
I stop midway through dressing in the new suit as she goes into lengthy detail about the subjugation of the planet’s heroes. It’s sickening. I button the suit up and start the power up sequence. Grabbing the power hammer and pulse rifle, I storm down into the block area.
I check her cell feed and open the door. “How about I take that helmet off of you and give you a chance to fight your way out.”
She isn’t terribly impressed. “Bring it on, Calvin. This is your masterpiece? This? You’ve got to be kidding me.”
Before I know it, I’m triggering the unlatching mechanism on her helmet. It falls to the ground with a clatter and once again, I’m staring at her. Even with a horrible haircut and days of not being able to wash her face, she’s gorgeous. Her psi-bolts hit my shields and knock me around a little bit. A blast from my pulse rifle narrowly misses, but in such a confined space it batters her into the wall. Stacy staggers back to her feet. I absorb her next four blasts, and my pulse rifle blows her into the adjacent cell. She’s bruised and beaten, barely able to stand.
I drop the rifle and grab Stacy with both hands as she tries to flee out the opening into the cellblock. Somewhere in all this, she became a symbol of all my failures and all the people who’ve beaten me.
I push her into the wall face-first and hold her there for a minute, unsure of what to do next.
“Just finish me,” I pick up from my external microphones. “What are you waiting for?”
It’s a good question.
Do I have anything left to prove?
The answer is no, at least not to myself. I look back at the cell block. Both are ruined, I either have to kill her or let her go.
She struggles in vain. I keep her face turned away. Her psi-bolts can’t get to me. Time ticks away and Stacy stops, waiting for me to reach a decision.
I set her down on the ground and keep her from falling. “Can you stand?”
“What are you doing?”
“Setting you free. Time to go rejoin your masters.”
Stacy clearly doesn’t understand. “What?”
“Go up the steps, through the main control room. There’s another set of steps. The exit keycode is 8675309 – Tommy Tutone's song. You’ll have to climb sixty feet up a ladder after that, but you’ll be on the surface. I’m sure you’ll have a bug on you within the hour if you get a move on.”
She immediately starts to head up to the control room, but pauses on the steps. “What about you?”
“I’ll set the self-destruct.”
“In that case, you should just stun me and use this time to grab whatever you’re going to take with you to your next base. I won’t be able to keep anything from them.”
“There’s no next base. I’m not leaving.”
Either her injuries are worse than I thought, or my words get the better of her.
She shakes her head in disbelief. “They aren’t going to buy it. You have another base. They won’t believe you faked your death twice.”
“No faking this time.”
“You’re just giving up?”
“You’ve been here seventeen days, Stacy. You used to be one of the most powerful heroes on the planet and you can’t beat this. If you couldn’t, then no one else is going to be able to. I can’t save the human race. I’m tired of all this.”
Her confusion draws a sigh and I continue, “You said it yourself, Stacy. The bugs have a limited set of orders. They start with capturing everyone, building factories, and designing weapons. When people start dying, are they going to make babies for replacement workers, or is the human race going to die off?”
She stammers, “I don’t ... I don’t know.”
“My guess is no – they don’t have that programming. And going up there means I’ll end up in a big old fight with any available heroes and villains they send my way. This armor should let me beat the first few, but eventually ... I’ll lose. Thing is, I’m not into painful last stands, where I’m surrounded by a bunch of people when I trigger my armor’s self-destruct. That’s the way people like you and Patterson always want to go out.”
“If you’re not going to fight, then come with me ... you’ll be so happy.”
“No thanks, Stacy. Just because I don’t want to go out in a blaze of glory doesn’t mean I want to sell myself into slavery. I may be a petty two-bit criminal, but I plan on dying a free man. I’ll at least go to my grave knowing that I didn’t join up with the side that’s ending human life as we know it.”
“Stop it! You’re not making any sense.”
“...says the hero ready to run back to her supercrack. You’re wasting valuable time, Stacy. You could be halfway up the escape ladder by now. Eternal bliss is just a few short steps away.”
I start walking and she moves out of my way. Reaching the main control room, I interface with the computer and start going through the checklist to activate the base self-destruct. I see Stacy’s reflection in the plasma monitor. “If you want to get back quicker, I think I can scare up a jetpack for you. The controls are pretty standard.”
She continues to stare at my backside and starts limping towards the exit. Pausing, she says, “Are you sure you won’t come?”
“Have a nice life, Stacy. Fair warning, I’ll be playing Biz Markie shortly. I figure, a few more times for the road.”
She gets to the keypad and punches in the first three numbers of Tommy Tutone’s most famous song and stops. I follow her progress as she makes it back down the steps and sits down next to me.
“Do you need help getting to the surface?”
“Aphrodite ... the real one, pulled me aside on the day before we were leaving to come back from Olympus. She told me about all the things she did and the ones that she most regretted, cheating on her husband, warping, torturing, and sometimes killing people to satisfy her own vanity. She warned me not to follow in her path and hoped that
I would bring honor and a measure of redemption to her name. I climb that ladder right now, and I’ll know, deep down, I’m not living up to the one thing she asked of me.”
“So you’re going to stay?”
“Unless you can’t cancel the self-destruct.”
“That would be ironic, wouldn’t it? But we’re good. I was waiting until you got to the surface.”
She gives me a weak smile, “My other condition for staying is that you don’t play that damn song again – ever.”
“If it means saving the world, I’m sure Biz would understand.”
I go get the first aid kit. She pops four pain relievers while I tend to her scrapes and injuries.
Horror, Humor, and Heroes Page 15
