To be fair, who hasn’t wished to bitch-slap from a distance? I still remember when that one president was getting sworn in and had to keep ducking while all the Secret Service scrambled around to find her. Considering I was watching from jail, that brightened my day. I promised I’d thank her for the laugh if I ever saw her. In a perfect world, I could hire her to harass that imposter who is pretending to be me.
“Please get the canister attached to his suit,” Mangler orders Rhino in a calm voice that leaves no room for argument. “I must finish transferring the remaining data off the servers so we can depart. Mr. Harrell, the timetable for your field test has been abruptly moved up due to circumstances beyond our control.”
I spare a glance at José. He is up and pacing nervously. Too bad I can’t tell him how anxious I am right now.
Raising my arms, I let White Rhino attach the cylinder to the back of my suit. “How are you planning to get out of the base? Word is that there’s only one way out and that’s where the welcoming committee is.”
“The less you know about our plans the better,” Mangler answers. “I would concentrate on your own part in the battle, if I were you.”
There’s a grinding sound and the sprayer line pressurizes. I check the reading on the tiny digital gauge wired into my helmet. Locked and loaded. “What about him?” I gesture to José. “Bargaining chip?”
“And you care, why?” Rhino demands.
“I owe him for my transformation,” I answer. “Wouldn’t mind doing him in myself.”
“Our heroic friend has made a valuable contribution to science, but I fear he is of no more use to us. He will be here when the equipment is destroyed. I hope this will satisfy your need for revenge. Regardless, it’s time for you to depart.”
That’s what I figured! OK, play it off and head toward the door. I need a bit of space between me and White Rhino if I want to fight.
The suit is still hard to handle at low speeds and I stumble about fifteen feet away before I turn around and open my plasma vents and start lobbing plasma balls at Rhino, sending the woman and the withered husk of a scientist diving for cover.
Rhino and his outfit are on fire, but he screams and wastes no time pulling the rifle off his back. But I’m already accelerating toward him, firing more plasma bolts from the right arm and powering up the field around my left claw. Bitchslap’s panicked blows start raining down on the suit, but they’re useless.
The shield I installed eats most of Rhino’s first shot, but I still feel the impact and stagger, lobbing a stream of plasma fire in his direction. It keeps Rhino pinned down behind one of the work tables. Even the thick skin of a Rhino is susceptible to plasma burns, and his screams of pain definitely aren’t faked.
“I was worried that Praetorius would be here and I’d have to fight him,” I say, bringing my powerclaw on the side room where they transformed and killed the clone. “Get ready to bounce, José!”
That’s when one of my errant plasma discharges sets off an explosion in the room. The walls of the cell I just entered protect both me and the Gulf Coaster from the blast, but I suddenly start worrying about Mangler’s toxins.
The inner door takes at least ten painfully slow seconds to hack through. “Keep your mouth covered and grab on,” I shout.
José clearly has questions, but understands the seriousness of the situation. As soon as I feel him clamber onto my back, I take off toward the exit, hoping he won’t end up a Mangler after all of this.
But it beats being dead.
I don’t bother looking for the others. If there is any justice, Doctor Mangler will finally get a taste of his own medicine, and since the Rhino was involved in that ambush in Central America—screw him! The woman—well, that happens when you’re a villain. The warbling alarms and fire suppression foam accompany our exit from the laboratory.
Bursting into the guard room, I see the guy named Yurkas fumbling with an emergency breathing hood and frantically pushing the call button. I yell for José to jump off because both of the Type-A robots grab me. More time ticks away as I slash away at the first robot. My Guardian pal slips by my wrestling match and sprints to the elevator.
A pair of lights on my HUD illuminates as I struggle with the pair of robots. Systems are being damaged, but all I worry about is whether my seal is intact or not.
After driving one of my whirling claws into the robot on my left and letting it wreak mechanical havoc throughout the bot’s systems, I turn my attention to the other one. The arms on this unit aren’t much stronger than my opponent’s. However, I’m bolstered by the strength of my hybrid form, and that lets me turn the tables on it. I just slash away at it until it is no longer hindering me and push it away, willing the armor to get to the elevator.
There’s an awkward pause as the three of us wait for the elevator. I can see Yurkas staring at his pistol belt, on the ground by his overturned chair. If it had just been José here, I’d lay even odds that the guard would try for it.
Further speculation is unnecessary because Yurkas collapses and starts having some type of seizure.
Shit! He’s changing!
The door opens and thankfully, no one is in there. I’d half expected a damage control team or that the initial detonation would cause the elevator to stop running. Then again, everyone upstairs is preparing to repel the folks attacking the base. That should lower the quality of our opposition, but I’m not ready to do any kind of victory dance just yet.
“Let’s go!”
“No! The guard!” José says, and grabs the man’s legs. It takes a few more seconds before the twitching body is inside the doors and they are finally closing.
“Bad time to be doing the hero thing, Sixy!” I’d forgotten how heroes can abandon common sense at a moment’s notice. It’s like a disease—
maybe herpes, considering the way it shows up at awkward times and makes even the simple things, like escaping, more complicated.
“What floor?”
Good question. All the fighting will be at the first floor and going out into the ground floor.
“Three,” I say and point at the guy transforming right next to us. “We’ll have to figure out what might be blocking our way out. Are you OK? You don’t feel any…”
“No! I seem to be fine, so far. Who are you, really?”
“Matt Harrell. I’m a U.S. government agent and I’m here to rescue you,” I reply. The lie has worked pretty well up to this point.
He stares at me, and I start to wonder what’s going through his head. “You called me ‘Sixy’ just a second ago. There’s only one person who used to call me that.”
Shit! Shit! And double shit!
“No, I didn’t.”
“I believe you did,” he accuses. “This other person also was known for wearing armor.”
I point a claw up at the elevator’s ceiling and shoot the camera with a plasma ball. “Let’s save it for later. OK, Sixy?”
Yurkas seems to be growing fur, and I wonder if he’ll be predator or prey. If Mangler’s theories about fear during exposure were true, it should be prey. I keep looking at my former team member to see if he shows any indication of changing. It’d be the peak of Mount Crapness if I rescued him only for him to change.
The door opens at level five instead of where we intended. There just happens to be a group of armed guards waiting there.
There’s another awkward pause. This one includes weaponry.
A couple of them start to aim their guns.
I plow right into them and all hell breaks loose.
Chapter Twelve
When Four Heads Aren’t Better Than One
Without a full head of steam, the armor struggles as I push my way through the guards. Omar designed this thing to be lightweight, and even though I have almost doubled the weight, it doesn’t quite have the heft of any of my other suits, even Mana-CALes with the jetpack.
But I more than make up for the shortcomings of the VZ suit with my hybrid form’s stre
ngth. I’m not facing any people with powers at the moment, so I start pushing my way through. I raise my left arm and activate the whirring claw blades while popping out plasma discharges.
“Who wants to die right now?” I shout. I’m sure I’m a terrifying sight. I’m also sure I’m kind of terrified currently, too.
Amazingly enough, they have the sense to fall over themselves trying to get away from me. I feel the rush of people being scared of me. It isn’t something that I usually indulge in, but since it’s a base full of villains and underlings, I don’t really mind.
I’m slightly afraid of the turret unfolding from the wall. I bring the force-field-encased battle claw down on the center of it before the barrels finish lowering.
“Intruders on level five! Intruders on level five! Internal security, move to eliminate!”
José drags Yurkas’s quivering form halfway out of the elevator and leaves him to keep it stuck on this floor. Next, he scoops up a couple of weapons from the ground and follows me. If there were more time, I’d tell him to swap out those white coveralls for some guard’s clothing, but we need to lose these creeps and get to either the other elevator bank or a stairwell. If we make it to my workshop or some other defendable place, he can change there and we can barricade ourselves in until help arrives. I vent my plasma weapons at the cameras as I accelerate down the corridor. I stop and backpedal, returning to the man I freed.
“There’s a stairwell left after the next junction and straight down the hall. We can try for that. I’ll clear the way.”
I sprint ahead and continue destroying the cameras on the path to the stairwell. A second turret extending out of the wall in front of the exit makes me reconsider my plan. We bolt back around the corner as it spins and starts firing much bigger bolts of plasma in my direction.
It’s too far away for me to try and knock it out with my own weapons.
“In there,” the Gulf Coaster says and points one of his pistols at a bathroom.
“Why?”
“No cameras. I’ve got enough strength to make a couple of clones. Four beats two, or we can use them for a distraction.”
People underestimate José. I stopped doing that a long time ago. Like the Bugler, he works hard to be a hero. If there were more people like Bo and José, there’d probably be fewer resentful people like me around.
The bathroom is unisex with two normal stalls and one enlarged one for either handicapped access or a Mangler. Kudos to the designers for being up to code, but considering the woman in charge is a telekinetic paraplegic, it makes sense. One of the problems with remaining in my hybrid form for so long is that I did actually figure out how difficult it is to use the bathroom with reverse knee joints and a tiny tail that is just big enough to really get in the way when you’re trying to take a dump.
Yeah, first world supervillain problems. I know.
Normally, it takes a couple of minutes for him to spawn a clone. Back in my Gulf Coast days, I’d seen him do it in about a minute.
I keep the door covered while he sets the two pistols on the sink and unzips the front of his coveralls.
As José’s back begins to swell, I keep my eyes on the corridor and give him a modicum of privacy. A security team will be here soon, but they will be hampered by the attack going on outside.
“Warning! The emergency bulkheads are being sealed on level four and five.”
That’s going to slow me down, I think. The claws on this suit will be able to cut through, but it’s going to take a whole bunch of time.
“Hurry up, José! They’re going to try and keep us bottled up. We need to move!”
My ears catch the agonizing screams, letting me know something is most decidedly wrong with my Latino friend. Unlike most who have only ever seen videos uploaded to the internet about how José makes the six-pack, I have seen it in person, and it’s never sounded excessively painful before. To my disbelief, José is lying on the white-tiled floor pounding his fist on the surface as a much-larger-than-normal fleshy cocoon continues to swell from his back. Something is definitely wrong!
There’s a ripping sound as the cocoon is torn open. Stumbling out of the deflating mass is a fur-and-mucus-covered creature.
I can see confusion on the faces of both of them. Stepping closer, I see that the creature looks like a cross between José and a brown bear.
“José?” I ask. “Is that you?”
The hybrid nods and pulls the clone sac away from the human version of José, who is still staring in disbelief.
“I must have been exposed to the gas,” the two of them say in unison.
“Sorry. I was prepared to just stay with you down there until they decided they were going to kill you. I know that might sound like a lame ass excuse, but it’s the truth. Do you think all your clones are going to be Manglermals now?”
“It’s possible. I can’t really say,” the human answers as the bear helps him stand. “We will just have to see what happens with the next one, but we need to get out of here first.”
“Do you think your new buddy is strong enough to pick me up? I can use my power claws to break through to the level above us. It’s probably easier than trying to cut through the safety doors. I don’t think they’d be expecting that.”
“Cut down instead,” José says. “They only sealed this level in the one above us. They didn’t seal the one below. The security guards will just assume my bear is another Mangler running about. He can clear a pathway to the stairs.”
I have to admit that his plan is better than mine is, and probably more effective. Most of my ideas are the seat-of-the-pants kind, and like an old pair of jeans you pull out of the closet, they don’t always fit like you think they should.
“Doing something is always better than doing nothing,” I reply. “Better slide over into one of those stalls while I cut up the floor.”
The bear version of José rips a stall door off with casual ease. He holds it behind him like a shield and puts his weight on the door. His voice is a ragged growl. “I will keep anyone from entering.”
As I suspected, the floor is just concrete and natural stone. They do not provide the same challenge as the reinforced barricade. Still, I kick up a pretty large dust cloud and cause both of the Josés to break into a fit of coughing. With my reversed knee joints, I can get much lower to the ground than I thought. Even so, it takes some getting used to. The blaring alarms sort of cover the sounds of my cutting, and it takes roughly two minutes of the blades tearing away at the floor before I have a human-sized hole for us to go through.
“Hey Pooh Bear,” I yell. “Pick me up and drop me down through the hole. It looks like another bathroom below us.”
The human/bear hybrid rakes his claws along the tiles and digs a shallow trench in the floor. He jams the metal door into it and forces the other end underneath the handle, effectively sealing the room off.
“Perhaps I could get used to this,” he says.
I am rather glad there are no cameras in here. Picture a bear picking up a lizard man in an armored speed suit in the middle of a dust-covered bathroom while a human watches. There’s probably some fetish site that would pay good money to stream this.
My three-meter drop is surprisingly a rough one. I stagger when landing on the ground and bend the metal frames of the stalls. So you could say I didn’t quite stick the landing. But as long as the point deduction doesn’t result in one of us dying, I’ll take it. Considering this is the first time I have used the suit, I’m actually shocked I’m not doing worse.
The Mangler follows me down after I stumble out of the twisted wreckage and holds his furry arms wide to catch the original José.
“Okay, head out into the hallway, turn right and try and get close enough to the turret to rip it out of the wall. Hopefully they’ll mistake you for a plain old Mangler.”
“Give me a ten-second head start and then come running!”
“Stay close to me and cover our backs with those pistols,” I say to th
e human José.
“I can do that,” he replies, coughing up some of the dust he’d gotten into his lungs one level up. He pauses and grins widely at me. “At some point, though, we have to have a discussion about who you really are, my old friend.”
“Come on compadre, you know the old saying; unless you find the body, never assume someone is actually dead. It’s the same with heroes, villains, and sarcastic assholes with a thing for powered armor. Much like the great Mark Twain, rumors of my death have been greatly exaggerated. Just do me a big favor and keep this between you and me.”
He nods and slaps the shoulder of my armor. “If I must be truthful, old friend, what really gave it away is this shitty rescue.”
“Any shitty rescue attempt you walk away from counts. Let’s go!”
The entire facility shakes as we exit the sixth-floor bathroom, and I begin to wonder if all the fighting above is going to bring down the base on top of us.
A new series of alarms sound. A panic cry follows over the intercom system, stating, “There has been an explosion on level thirteen and we are detecting contaminants entering the ventilation system on level twelve! We can’t shut down the system! Grab any breathing gear and hazmat suits you can before it’s too fucking late!”
I take a quick, nervous glance at my suit pressure gauge, worried if it’s going to hold now that Doctor Mangler’s latest protocol is running around the ventilation system.
“Well, this rescue keeps getting better and better,” José says with a bitter laugh. “Is the power plant on this level? Maybe you can activate the self-destruct while you’re at it?”
“We’re still not dead yet, so quit your damn complaining!”
Nothing impedes our progress to the stairwell. Once we get in there, it’s my suit design that causes a fresh set of problems. The feet are slightly larger than the steps.
Rise of a D-List Supervillain Page 15
