by Logan Jacobs
“Would you rescue her if she got kidnapped by a supervillain?” I asked curiously.
“I guess so,” Norma said unenthusiastically.
“I know that any of my brothers would rescue me,” Elizabeth said. “Well, if they could anyway. They’re all athletic by human standards, but I was the only one in the family born with superpowers. And I was the only girl.”
“So you were spoiled, is what you were saying,” I teased her.
“I got a lot of attention,” she conceded.
“Well, that hasn’t exactly changed in your adult life,” I said. Men drooled over Elizabeth wherever she went, even when she wasn’t in her red catsuit and even when they didn’t realize that there was just as much strength in her personality as in her abs and glutes.
“Nope,” she agreed with a smirk. Her turquoise eyes glittered. “But you said you were an only child. You must have been spoiled too.”
“I was valued for my extraordinary precocity and wit, charm, and my irresistible dimples, not due to my parents’ lack of competing objects of affection,” I said haughtily.
“I think my parents preferred my sister,” Norma said glumly.
“I’m sure that’s not true,” Dynamo said.
I thought that would explain some of Norma’s insecurities, and that it probably was true, but I decided to change the subject.
“So, we stick together, all four of us,” I reminded everyone, “and if we need to split up, then we stay in teams of two at the least. And Norma, you only go for the normal humans, the control chipped ones. Do your best to subdue them without harming them, but if your life is threatened, then don’t hesitate to do what you have to do. They might be as good as dead anyway, if no safe way to remove those chips exists. The most powerful supervillains will go to you, Aileen. Like Hazard and Reaper, if they end up being there.”
“I have not fought since my legs were installed,” my creation remarked. “This will provide me with lots of useful data about my movement patterns and inefficiencies.”
Even without legs, Aileen had been a force to be reckoned with. Before she had been built below the torso, she had had to wheel herself around all the time and couldn’t even climb up stairs. But I would never forget the one time when she had managed to dislocate her arms to extend them to drag herself up a set of spiked stairs in order to come to my and Norma’s rescue in our hour of greatest need.
Norma held up her tranquilizer gun and nodded to confirm her acceptance of my plan.
“And Mayhem will be mine,” Elizabeth purred.
“What would you do with the two million?” I asked her curiously.
“Donate it to the Grayville Children’s Center and the Grayville Opera House,” she answered immediately. “And the hospitals that have been caring for Mayhem’s victims.”
“Damn, I really haven’t corrupted you nearly as much as they say,” I said.
“In some ways, no, in some ways, yes,” she replied mischievously.
“I’ll just have to keep trying then,” I said.
“You do that,” Elizabeth replied.
“Ahem,” Norma said.
“ETA five minutes,” Aileen informed us.
When we reached the park at the point of the fence where we had decided we would be least likely to be observed from within, we climbed over. Elizabeth, Norma, and I were all wearing our suits, which protected us from the barbed wire, and it would have taken something with the hardness of a diamond to put so much as a scratch on Aileen.
Then we spread out a little in a zigzag pattern and started creeping through the amusement park, heading for Munchkinville by the route we had planned, which avoided passing under most of the taller rides. It was kind of eerie to see a giant playground that was supposed to be bright and shiny and full of life and laughter so deserted and decayed. It looked like the death of childhood or something. And all the painted characters or statues of characters, even the animals on the carousel, looked a bit sinister, whether that was from the darkness or from their signs of age and neglect.
But no actual living creature threatened us until we had almost reached Munchkinville. Then, the doors of a gift shop slid open and a row of six or seven people waving chainsaws and axes ran straight for us, like something out of a B horror movie. Or a really boring nightmare.
I took aim, but Elizabeth shouted, “Hold your fire! They’re just humans.”
It was true that none of them were decked out in supervillain gear, and also they weren’t using any powers on us, they just looked like they intended to cut us to pieces. I wondered if the fact that they were coming for us meant that Mayhem had seen us and knew we were there, or if they had just been instructed to attack anyone unfamiliar who approached.
I looked at Norma, and she started spraying the row with tranquilizer darts until all but one of the attackers had fallen over. The last one reached Aileen, but the android reached out with one hand, grabbed him by the neck, casually lifted him off the ground, and let him dangle until the ax fell out of his hand, and his body went limp. Then she dropped him. He was lucky that my robot assistant had been using the hand option at the end of her arms and not the scissors.
“The automatic doors opened,” Norma said. “That means they must have power in at least some parts of the park.”
“Yup,” I said. “Could be a generator, but some supervillains’ bodies generate electricity, so it could even be that.”
Then I motioned, and we continued on to Munchkinville. There weren’t any guards posted at the entrance, just a sign indicating that we needed to be at least four feet tall to participate in the ride. I was pretty sure we all qualified, so I stepped onto the track where the booth shaped cars had once carried park visitors and started to walk down it while my teammates followed.
Everything was dark inside the ride, but our contact lenses enabled us to see our surroundings. The first village scene that we encountered had bales of hay and farmers with pitchforks. At first I smiled a little because the hay reminded me of the hay that the Shadow Knight and his apprentice were currently sleeping in. Or more likely, angrily lying awake upon.
Then, shooters started popping out from behind the bales of hay. A bullet struck my suited stomach and knocked the wind out of me. I managed to wheeze out, “Take cover!” as I dove behind the nearest carriage and returned fire.
Half of the shooters were costumed in ways that suggested they were supervillains. The other half were wearing prison security guard uniforms or costumes from The Demon’s Delight, so I tried not to hit them and hoped that Norma would get them with her darts.
Dynamo and Norma were crouched down with me, but since Aileen couldn’t be hurt by bullets, she strolled casually among the bales of hay and gunned down any surviving supervillains with her nipple cannons. She also paused to choke out a surviving non-supervillain. Then she returned to my position and announced, “All clear.”
“They know we’re here,” Dynamo said grimly. “So we better move fast before Mayhem escapes.”
We collected some ammo from the fallen shooters, then proceeded cautiously along the track. The next scene we came to was a garden one. Apparently, the plants featured had been real. Now, they were totally overgrown into a wild thicket of bushes and weeds that buried the gardener figures up to their necks.
There wasn’t any gunfire this time, but I suddenly started to feel very sleepy. I looked over to see Norma collapse onto the ground, and Elizabeth staggered and then caught herself with a hand on one of the carriages.
“Aileen, keep us awake!” I yelled. Since her “sleep” mode could only be activated through a programming command, I didn’t think she’d be affected by whatever was happening to us now.
Aileen grabbed Norma and shook her awake while she started blasting heavy metal at an eardrum damaging volume.
I used the lighter function on my suit to torch the thicket of overgrown greenery in several places. After the flames started to spread, there was a rustling from the center of the le
aves and a small gray ghoulish looking figure with bloodshot hooded eyes and a face that looked like melting wax emerged. Before I could do anything one of Norma’s tranquilizer darts sprang out between his eyebrows, and he toppled over. The fog of exhaustion cleared, and I felt alert again.
Then I walked over to him, put the barrel of my rifle against his sleeping head, and pulled the trigger.
“Another super villain that won’t hurt anyone ever again,” I snickered as his brains and blood pooled on the concrete under his body.
“Agreed,” Norma said, but Elizabeth just nodded at me.
Then we continued into the next area of the ride.
This scene was full of barnyard animals, sheep, pigs, and chickens all being supervised by watchful plastic caretakers. Then, two creatures that had been lurking among the herd shot out and lunged at us.
Neither of them looked human. One of them was bald and sort of slimy with a reptilian build, and the other was like a giant wolf, but since we hadn’t been expecting them, they both got too close right away for us to use guns. The wolf pounced on Elizabeth, and she started wrestling it while the bald pink-skinned creature attacked me.
Its lack of hair or fur made it look underdeveloped, like a naked mole rat or a fetus or something, but its head was almost human and fully developed but with wider set eyes and too many teeth. I punched it in the face, but it just opened its mouth to try to bite my hand off. It probably could have succeeded except that my suit sleeve protected me. Instead of yanking my hand out I shoved it further down the creature’s throat and activated the taser on my suit.
“Brrrrwwwwwwwww!” The creature’s eyes rolled up into its head, and it flopped over. Then I yanked my arm out, unholstered my pistol, and put a bullet in the monster’s head.
I looked over to see that Dynamo had torn the wolf-creature’s head off.
“Shapeshifters,” she said as she flung the head aside. “Those weren’t animals.”
I decided not to be pedantic and point out that superhumans were animals too, since I knew what she meant.
“Well, let’s keep going,” I said.
We continued along the track and passed the May pole scene, which didn’t seem to be manned by any enemies, probably because its props didn’t afford any concealment.
Then we got to a cluster of huts with merrily waving Munchkins, and people started pouring out of the huts at us. A lot of them were just relatively helpless humans, but one was levitating, another was throwing lightning, and another clearly possessed superstrength.
The levitating one zoomed at Elizabeth like some kind of possessed demon, but my rifle was ready, so I shot him out of the air. The bullet hit him in the stomach, and he toppled over as he emitted a high-pitched screech.
The lightning villain was a blonde girl in a yellow bodysuit, and I could feel the heat and see the scorch marks as her strikes fried objects near me, like one of the carriages. I saw her focus on Norma, who was too far away for me to reach in time.
“Norma, watch out!” I yelled as I pointed.
Norma looked away from her stun gun target to see the yellow-clad lightning supervillain and dove behind the nearest control chipped human. The lightning enveloped that human, a large male, and he immediately seized and collapsed.
Dynamo was busy wrestling with the superstrong villain, a hulking male in a blue suit that looked like the ugly evil version of Optimo. She pounded his head into the floor so hard that it shook beneath us, but his only reaction was to fling her against a carriage so hard that the plastic cracked.
I fired at the lightning girl, but each of the bullets seemed to bounce off some sort of magnetic field surrounding her.
Then the blonde woman turned to me, smiled, and raised her hands to point.
“Well, well, well, if it isn’t the handsome Miles Nelson and--”
I pulled the trigger of my rifle in rapid succession as I aimed right at her face, and a burst of bullets smacked into whatever magnetic shield she had. The first two bullets seemed to get diverted to the side at the last second, but the third bounced lower and smacked her right between her fake boobs. She flew back like she was attached to a pully someone just yanked, but I didn’t see any blood, so I figured she must have been wearing armor under her tight uniform.
I glanced over to Norma and saw that she’d almost taken out all the citizens that had been chipped, so I kept my rifle up and pointed toward the body of the electric woman. She looked like she might have been dead, but I guessed she was playing possum. At any rate, I didn’t have a good target on her skull, so I began to creep forward cautiously so that I could end her.
“Die!” she screamed as she suddenly raised her hands toward me.
I moved to dive, but Aileen stepped out in front of me and lit up like a lightning rod as the electricity wrapped itself around her metal frame. The sight was so dazzling that I probably would have been blinded if not for my instantly light adjusting contact lenses that enabled me to see past Aileen and put a bullet right between the blonde woman’s eyes. Her head snapped back, and I saw a spray of blood and brains cone out behind her, so I figured that she couldn’t use her offensive lightning powers at the same time as her defensive magnetic shields.
“Thanks,” I said to my android woman. “Your circuits okay?”
“Yup, but don’t touch me,” she warned, and then her metal parts remained aglow for a second after that as if she were made out of sunlight.
“Wasn’t going to,” I replied.
We turned our attention back to Elizabeth’s fight with the last surviving enemy in the room, the huge blue one. He seemed to have thrown her to the top of one of the huts, which was about six feet tall, the perfect size for the miniature denizens. She backed up and took a running jump to land on his shoulders and attempt to smash in his face with her hands. She seemed to have lost hold of her gun during their fight, and I didn’t dare shoot at him for fear of hitting her.
The blue giant threw himself backward onto his back and squashed Dynamo beneath him. She gasped for air, and I immediately ran up, jumped on top of his stomach, and jammed my rifle muzzle into his belly button. But before I could pull the trigger, he flipped himself up and knocked me flying.
Then Aileen ran between me and Dynamo to tackle the blue supervillain, and as soon as her metal hands made contact with him, he convulsed and stumbled. A pretty serious electric charge must have gone through him, but after a second he recovered, grabbed Aileen around her slender waist, and flung her straight at me like a missile.
I ducked just in time, and I heard the sound of a structure smashing as Aileen tore through a bunch of walls.
Then Dynamo got back on her feet, and she and I charged the giant at the same time.
The blue-asshole swung at her first, but she ducked while I punched his exposed ribcage with my turbo-charged glove. I felt one of the ribs crack upon impact, and he groaned and lunged at me. I ducked under it, threw a devastating uppercut under his jaw, and heard the crack of teeth shattering. But even these bone-breaking injuries didn’t seem to faze him much, so I guessed that he probably had some kind of regenerative ability in addition to his superstrength.
I didn’t have a ton of time to ponder it because he grabbed me by the waist and raised me over his head like he was about to throw me, but before he could, Elizabeth kicked him in the knee as hard as she could, and he crashed down as his leg bent the wrong way. Then her fists repeatedly pummeled his nose for good measure, and his face turned into a bloody pulp.
I didn’t wait around to see whether his features would reconfigure themselves into their previous ugly shape. I grabbed the anti-supervillain gun that I had dropped nearby, and while Elizabeth struggled wildly to hold the giant down, I emptied the rest of the magazine into his face.
“Fucking hell, he was strong,” Elizabeth groaned. “If someone like him is following someone like Mayhem, well, I guess he must be dumb as a bucket of rocks.”
“You good?” I asked Norma and Aileen.
<
br /> Norma nodded. She was a sweaty mess and seemed to have acquired a second black eye, but she was grinning just as broadly and almost as demonically as one of the plastic Munchkins. It was a cute look on her.
“Almost out of tranquilizer darts though,” my assistant said.
“I am now safe to touch,” Aileen announced serenely. “Functions: normal. Structural integrity: ninety nine point nine percent.”
“What’s the point zero one percent?” I asked her.
“I have a screw loose,” she explained.
“I don’t think you’re the only one of us,” Dynamo said wryly as she looked around the group.
“The best people do,” I said.
“I do not under--” Aileen began.
“I know,” I interrupted. “Let’s move, I bet Mayhem is around here somewhere.”
Aileen led the way into the next chamber of the ride. It was the one that was supposed to have a waterfall, but the waterfall was no longer running, there were just rusty fountainheads, an irrigated empty pool where it was supposed to be, and a sort of alcove behind it.
Machine gun fire hammered out as Aileen took the lead, and I heard the faint metallic clinks as the rounds bounced off her. One of them ricocheted and hit my thigh with bruising force as Elizabeth, Norma, and I flung ourselves behind the ride carriages.
“You’ll never take me alive!” Mayhem screeched from inside the artificial waterfall alcove.
“I wasn’t planning on it,” I snickered, but I doubt he heard me over the sound of his machine gun.
The next time he paused to reload, Elizabeth and I both popped up from behind neighboring carriages, fired off bursts, and ducked back down.
We waited, but there was no answering fire.
“Mayhem?” I called out, with the thought that he probably was stupid enough to answer if he were still alive.
“… Shadow Knight?” a very small voice croaked out. “I-- I’ve been shot. I surrender. Arrest me and take me to the hospital! … Shadow Knight?”
“No such luck,” I chuckled.
I ran up to the alcove to find the scrawny bald supervillain crumpled against the wall clutching his middle, which was soaked in blood. As soon as he saw me, he reached toward his gun, but I kicked it out of reach.
