by Lucas Flint
“Keep telling yourself that,” said Holes. “Perhaps you will prove superior to your grandfather and will defeat me once and for all. Personally, I doubt it. You are significantly weaker than he is, younger and greener, with all of the inexperience that that implies. Taking you down will be child’s play.”
“You haven’t beaten me yet,” I said. “But you can keep talking like the big bad supervillain you are. Maybe I’ll come down with a case of the stupid and end up running away.”
“I don’t want you to run, Trickshot,” said Holes. “I want you to die.”
Holes spread his hands. As he did so, two holes appeared on either side of my body. Before I could react, the holes suddenly start sucking me toward them with equal force. It kind of felt like the time I accidentally put the vacuum cleaner hose on my nose when I was six, but this was much worse. I slammed my feet into the floor in an attempt to keep myself from being sucked into the portals, but I could tell that it wouldn’t last forever and that soon I would either be torn apart by the suction force of the portals or end up getting sucked into one or the other and end up who-knows-where.
“Surprised?” said Holes. “You shouldn’t be. I don’t just make portals that you can hop into. I can also make portals with enough power to suck in anything in their general vicinity. I won’t tell you where these portals will take you, but I can tell you it won’t be anywhere you like.”
I would have had a snappy comeback to that, but the sucking portals made it impossible for me to talk. As a matter of fact, I couldn’t breathe at all. The suction portals were not merely trying to suck me in, but they were also sucking the air out of the area around me. I didn’t have much time before I ran out of air, and once I did, I would be toast.
But there was nothing I could do to save myself. If I tried to fly, I would definitely get sucked into the portals, but sooner or later I would run out of air and die that way. And I couldn’t throw my disks at Holes, either, because they would probably just end up getting sucked into the portals as well. It didn’t help that I was still suffering from the pain I’d taken from the truck, either, which had left me weaker than I had been before.
All in all, this situation looked really bad for me, if not entirely hopeless. I wished I could see Holes’ face, because even though I figured he was smirking at me, I still preferred to see the face of my killer. That would be better than dying at the hands of someone whose face I would never see.
Already, I could feel my feet starting to be tugged out of the floor. My ankles were straining and the lack of air was starting to cloud my mind. My cape whipped around behind me uncontrollably. I wished I could stop it, but I was too dazed from the lack of air to care about my cape at the moment.
“It’s over, Trickshot,” said Holes, raising his voice to be heard over the howling of the sucking sounds. “Today is the day you die. Tonight, the Trickshot line finally ends, and with it, my quest for revenge. Let the last thing you see be my faceless head as you gaze into its never-ending empty—”
A gunshot suddenly rang throughout the warehouse. I thought at first that Holes had shot at me for some reason, but that was when I noticed that Holes had gone strangely quiet. He took one step forward and then collapsed onto the floor. As soon as he did, the portals on either side of me vanished and air flooded my lungs, making me gasp as hard as I could. Panting hard and taking in great, big gulps of air, I looked to see who had saved me.
It was Dad. He stood holding a gun in his hand—the same gun Holes had thrown away a few minutes prior—with an unshakable aim. I looked down at Holes and noticed a gunshot hole in his back, in one of the few spots on his body that wasn’t covered in portals. Blood was leaking out of the wound, staining Holes’ white costume, though some of the blood went into the holes on his body and disappeared like everything else.
“Dad?” I said, staring at Dad in surprise. “What are you doing here? I thought I told you to take Mom and leave.”
“Mary is safe out in the car,” said Dad. He lowered the gun. “But when I heard the sound of that truck crashing on top of you, I knew I couldn’t just abandon you. I wanted to help you. I want to shoot the man who threatened my wife and tried to kill my son.” He cracked a grin. “Looks like I got my wish.”
I rubbed my throat, which still ached from the lack of air, but said, “Thanks, Dad. You didn’t need to do this, but—”
“Actually, I did,” said Dad. “I’m your dad. Dads protect their kids. Of course I needed to do this. I’d be a pretty terrible father if I didn’t.”
I couldn’t help but smile. I also felt a bit silly now for keeping my identity secret from Dad for so long. I should have known right from the start that he would have supported me, and Mom would have, too, probably. It felt kind of nice to have allies aside from TW, if only because it would make me feel a lot less lonely than I did before.
“Now,” said Dad. He held out a hand toward me. “Let’s go home, son. The police will be here any minute and I think you need to leave, given how you’re an illegal superhero and everything. I’ll answer the questions they’ll inevitably have about all of this.”
“Right,” I said.
A loud groaning sound from the floor made Dad and I look down at Holes. The supervillain was not, as I previously thought, dead. He was moaning softly, leaving no doubt at all that he had survived being shot in the back, though given how much he moaned, I figured he was probably in a ton of pain.
“No …” Holes raised his head to look up at me. The hole on his face had faded slightly, allowing me to see two brown eyes peering out from the other side. “I will get my revenge … he will get his revenge … this is not over yet …”
“What are you talking about?” I said. “It is over. You’ve been shot. Unless you want me to beat you into submission, this fight is definitely over.”
“The fight … the fight might be over …” Holes breathed heavily. “But my revenge isn’t.”
Holes held out a hand toward me and squeezed his fist.
Without warning, a portal appeared under my feet and I fell into it before I could react. The last thing I heard before I disappeared into the portal was Dad calling out my name in surprise.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
I fell through what seemed like endless darkness for hours on end. I could see nothing, feel nothing, hear nothing. The only thing I felt was the sensation of falling, like I was hurtling down a cliff, but even that was vague and uncertain. The only thing I knew for sure in here was that I had been tricked and that Holes might very well get his revenge after all, depending on where he sent me. Knowing Holes, I bet he sent me into the heart of a volcano, though now that I thought about it, there weren’t any volcanoes in Texas at all from what I knew, not even dormant ones. Still, I doubted Holes had sent me to a tropical island with plenty of pretty hula girls to wait on my every need.
Suddenly, I landed on what seemed like hard, metal floor. Blinking hard, it took my eyes a while to adjust to the change in lighting. It didn’t help that the fall had jarred my senses, making it hard for me to tell where I was. The best I could figure was that I had fallen into some kind of laboratory, based on the metal floor and antiseptic I smelled. I thought it might be Bug Bite’s lab in the Hive at first, but as my vision cleared, I realized I was definitely not in the Hive.
Under the fluorescent lights on the ceiling, I saw robotic arms hanging above me. The robotic arms were tipped with tools of every kind, from screwdrivers to hammers to surgical knives and everything in between. They looked like they might help a worker build something, though what they were used for building, I didn’t know.
Sitting up, I looked around at the laboratory in which I found myself. A few desks topped with large desktop computers stood here and there, while workbenches with machines in various states of completion stood along the desks. That explained the robotic arms. They obviously aided in the creation of these machines, machines whose purpose I could not quite get but which looked rather ominous. I wonde
red if I had somehow ended up in some kind of factory rather than a pure lab.
“Hello?” I called out, rising to my feet and using a nearby table for support. “Anybody here? Hello?”
“Hello, Trickshot,” said a familiar monotone voice behind me. “Nice of you to drop in. I wasn’t expecting a visitor today.”
I turned around to see someone I had not expected to see here: Jim ‘Techno’ Albert. He was no longer sitting on his hover chair, however. Instead, he stood on his robotic legs, his arms folded in front of his chest. Standing up, I realized that he was about a foot taller than me, mostly thanks to his legs, though he had a surprisingly lanky body. I had not realized, the first time I saw him, just how tall Techno really was. I wondered if he had always been that tall or if he had increased his height after he lost his original legs.
Regardless, I said, “Techno? What are you doing here? Is this your lab?”
Techno nodded. “Yes. The better question is, what are you doing here?”
“Um …” I rubbed the back of my head. “I was fighting Holes and nearly defeated him, but then he opened a portal underneath me and sent me here. Not sure why he sent me here specifically, but maybe he didn’t have a specific destination in mind and just wanted to send me as far away from him as possible.”
Techno turned and began working on a small, odd-looking device on a nearby workbench. The device resembled a screwdriver, although the actual screwdriver portion was replaced with a tiny gun barrel, though I doubted the device shot bullets. “He didn’t send you very far away, though, now did he? We’re still in Rumsfeld, after all.”
“Right,” I said. “But I need to get back to the warehouse where we were fighting, because I left him alone with my parents and I’m afraid what he’ll do to them without me being nearby. He was pretty badly wounded the last time I saw him, but—”
“Your parents will be fine,” said Techno, again without looking at me. “Just fine. There’s no need for you to worry about them.”
“What?” I said. “Techno, I’d think that you of all people would understand how dangerous Holes is, especially because my parents aren’t even superheroes. The longer I’m away from them, the more time Holes has to kill them.”
“Oh, I’m well aware of how dangerous Holes is,” said Techno. He put down the tiny monkey wrench he had been using to tighten a bolt on his device and then lifted up the device itself. “After all, I wouldn’t have gone to all of this trouble to break him out of prison if he wasn’t dangerous.”
My mouth fell open. “Wait, what?”
Techno lowered the device, seemingly satisfied with its design. He looked over at me, but he looked far less friendly than he did before. His red optic was glowing dangerously, while a mad smile crossed his lips. “You were asking why Holes sent you here. You thought he just sent you to a random place. I suppose it never occurred to you that he sent you here deliberately, on my command, now did it?”
Before I could say anything, something sharp pierced my back. I cried out in pain and fell to my knees as my muscles turned to mush underneath me. I tried to stand, but my muscles became so soft and relaxed that it felt like I was wearing a heavy chain around my neck.
I heard footsteps before me and then Techno forced my head up to look at him. His smile had become even crazier, to the point where I was now genuinely afraid of him, even though he wasn’t anywhere nearly as strong as I was.
“What … what did you do to me?” I said, my voice weaker than normal.
“One of my robotic arms injected you with a fast-acting sedative,” said Techno, “a sedative you should be familiar with, I think, because it’s the same one Holes injected into you during your first fight with him.”
Techno kicked me in the gut suddenly. I cried out in pain and fell over onto the floor. My eyes watered from the pain and I could barely think straight.
“Oh, you don’t know how long I’ve waited to do this to Trickshot,” said Techno. He took a deep breath. “Man, that kick felt good. But it’s only the beginning of the world of pain I’m going to inflict on you. You think you know the meaning of pain now? Trust me, you’re going to experience far worse before I give you permission to die.”
“But … why …” I said. I was trying to fight off the effects of the sedative, but it was too potent for me to fight off entirely. “Why are you doing this …?”
Techno squatted next to me, his crazed smile never leaving his lips. “Isn’t it obvious? I want my revenge. Revenge against your grandfather for ruining my life. You’re not your grandfather, perhaps, but you are close enough for my purposes.”
My eyes widened. “So you are the one who freed Holes?”
Techno nodded. “That’s right. For years, I’ve been nursing a grudge against Greg, waiting for the right day to strike. It seemed like all of my waiting would be in vain, however, when Greg disappeared ten years ago. That’s why I put my focus on developing my wealth, because I had no other purpose for living other than that.”
Techno patted me on the cheek. “Then you came along out of the blue. I knew from the start that you weren’t Greg—you’re too young—but I didn’t care. You may not be your grandfather, but killing you would get me the revenge I sought just as if I killed Greg himself. Therefore, I put together a plan to take you out, though of course I had to do it subtly in order to make sure that you didn’t realize what I was doing until it was too late.”
“Why didn’t you just kill me yourself?” I said. My lips were not quite numb, but it was getting harder to talk nonetheless. “I was in your apartment. Your disintegration rays—”
Techno slapped me in the face. “Do I look like someone who wants to go to jail for murder? If I had killed you then, your parents would have realized you were missing and there would have been a citywide manhunt for you, one that might have eventually linked back to me. I didn’t want to risk going to jail just to sate my own desire for revenge. Hence why I worked with Holes. If Holes killed you, then it would be considered tragic, but no one would ever link him back to me, especially after I killed him myself to ensure he didn’t snitch on me.”
Breathing hard, I said, “How did Holes get his powers back? Was that your doing, too?”
“Yep,” said Techno, nodding. “I managed to get a hold of some of that Depower stuff which Gregory originally used to defeat Holes all those years ago. Then I reverse engineered it so that it would have the opposite effect of restoring a super’s powers. It was an experimental drug, I’ll admit, but it worked fabulously, as you have no doubt noticed.”
“You’re crazy,” I said. “With his powers back, there’s no stopping Holes.”
“Oh, I don’t intend to let him live forever,” said Techno. “He’s just another tool, like the screwdrivers I use to create my devices. Once he outlives his usefulness, I will end his life. I told him I would let him do whatever he wanted after he killed you, but in truth my hatred for him burns as brightly as ever. After you are out of the picture, I’ll get rid of him, and he won’t even see it coming.”
“Are you going to kill me now?” I said with a slightly numb lower lip. “I thought you didn’t want to be wanted for murder.”
“Different circumstances,” said Techno. “You see, no one knows where Holes sent you. I suppose they probably will still search for you, but without any clues leading to your current location, I sincerely doubt they will even come close to finding you. And because I plan to dispose of your body in the cleanest way possible, they will never even think to look here in my lab. I hope you agree that it is quite clever.”
“Clever? It’s mad,” I said. “You’re going to murder a teenager just because you had a falling out with my grandfather a long time ago. You’re crazy.”
“Lots of people have told me that,” said Techno. “Crazy though I may be, I am also very intelligent and clever. Besides, this isn’t my first rodeo. I’ve killed other people in the past using similar methods. You’re just the latest of a long line of victims I’ve elimin
ated after determining that they were a threat to my plans.”
“You jerk,” I said. I struggled to get up, but the sedative made my muscles feel like mush. “You monster. You—”
“Yes, yes, call me whatever you want,” said Techno, waving a hand at me dismissively. “I don’t care. But if you would like a bit of good news, I’m not going to kill you right away. You have something I want.”
Techno reached over and removed the Trickshot Watch from my wrist. As soon as he did, my entire costume turned into blue energy and vanished, leaving me in my street clothes, lying nearly paralyzed on the cool metal floor of Techno’s lab.
“Here,” said Techno, looking the Watch over. “The Trickshot Watch. Just what I always wanted.”
“Give it back,” I said, though my voice was weaker than ever. “Give it back to me. That was my grandfather’s. It belongs to my family.”
Techno chuckled. “Oh, so you think this is just a family heirloom? Please. You and I both know what kind of power this weapon—which is what it is—really holds. In the wrong hands, it could be used for great evil and destruction. In the right hands … it could be used for profit.”
“Profit?” I said. “I don’t understand. What are you talking about?”
“Isn’t it obvious?” said Techno. He leaned closer toward me, his crazy grin growing wider with each passing second. “I’m going to mass produce the Trickshot Watch and make a fortune off it. Unfortunately, you will not live long enough to see it yourself.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
“Mass produce the Watch?” I repeated. “You mean, like, in a factory?”
Techno nodded. “Sure. It will sell like hotcakes, because everyone wants to be a superhero but not everyone wants to pass the Superhero Exam. With their very own Trickshot Watch, however, anyone will be able to put on a costume and fight evil. It will be even more popular than Power, especially because it will be legal.”
“How could this be legal?” I said. “Superheroes who don’t have their licenses are considered criminals. Mass producing the Watch won’t change that.”
