The Infinite League

by John Jr. Yeo

  "Seriously? We're stopping a train robbery?" I couldn't even believe the words that were coming out of my mouth.

  "It's not a joke to Silver Talon, or the Twilight Terror, or four of the federal officers who were escorting the train to Fort Knox," he informed me. "They were murdered just a few minutes before we finally established contact with D.S.A. headquarters."

  The Ambassador never joked, especially not when it came to other costumed heroes. I've seen fellow officers fall in the line of duty before, and some of them were longtime friends. I never thought about what the Spark must go through when one of their own drops. But since I really wasn't one of them, and I didn't think I'd ever feel like I was one of them, I kept my big mouth shut.

  "Do we know who they are?" Necromancer asked.

  "The suspects stopped the train by materializing a small iceberg on the tracks, so it's a good bet that Arctic Annie is with them. If she's there, then Adrenaline won't be far behind. Army Rangers and United States Mint Police officers were on the train. These fellows are trying to defend the gold, but they're outgunned by Annie, Napalm and at least one other colleague."

  "So what's the game plan, boss?" asked Submission. She was snapping the bracelets with the long chains connected to them to her wrists, and I was still confused as to how she fought so well when she looked like a woman prepping herself for some bondage play. She fought better with those chains than most people did with their hands fully free.

  "I'll hit the iceberg first and smash it apart, then we'll get that train moving again," Ambassador said. "DeathTek will join the soldiers still fighting and defend the shipment. Everyone else, find a target and apprehend if possible, put them down if necessary. They've killed a lot of people, and that stops now."

  “Okay, I’m dressed,” I announced after getting the tight black boots slid over my legs. “How much time before we get there?”

  In answer to my question, the cargo hold door of the jet opened up, and I saw that we were hovering over the stopped train of fifteen cars. A barrier made of shimmering ice was blocking the tracks, and the train was probably lucky to have stopped in time before it struck the wall, which would have caused a massive derailment. On the roof of the train were soldiers, firing their weapons into the sky towards a flying female in a silver bodysuit.

  She had a silver jacket over a white bustier, a tight black bodysuit and a pair of silver ankle-length boots. Her white hair was a short mess of frozen locks, as if she’d drenched her hair and let it freeze for a few hours. As she flew through the air, she was firing icy blue blasts at the soldiers who were attempting to knock her out of the air.

  “That’d be Arctic Annie,” Submission told me. “She could freeze you solid if she manages to nail you with her powers, so use your abilities to counter her attacks.”

  There was another woman on the scene, and this one wore a red bodysuit with black lightning bolts going up and down the sides of her body. She was running fast, up the sides of the train cars, over the roofs, and back down again. Every soldier that got in her way got slashed by the blades that she gripped in her hands.

  “She calls herself Adreneline,” Necromancer informed me. “Stay in the air, she can’t hurt you at a distance. But she’s fast, and she has no qualms about cutting your throat as she runs past you.”

  It was a super powered war, waged by insane people in costumes. Right here in front of me. I felt sick seeing it.

  The Ambassador was already flying away, carrying Submission in his arms. Necromancer jumped from the hovering aircraft, some fifty feet off the ground, but something in his cape allowed him to glide gracefully towards the train. DeathTek put the Event Horizon into a hovering mode, and pointed me towards the exit.

  “You heard the big man,” he reminded me. “Pick a target, and kick her ass. I want to get home in time to see the game.”

  And just like that, I was officially thrown into my first official super hero fight. On a remote and isolated stretch of tracks in the middle of West Virginia, I was going to stop a bunch of masked lunatics from robbing a train of gold.

  “Am I the only one who finds this whole thing completely insane?” I wondered out loud. I stepped off the Event Horizon and carefully and slowly flew through the air towards the train. I suddenly felt like a rookie cop on her first situational operation. I watched carefully to see who made the first move, ready to assist with whoever needed my help the most.

  The Ambassador did exactly as he said he would. When he got close to the train, he dropped Submission on the roof of one of the cars. Arctic Annie immediately began firing ice bullets towards him, but he didn’t stay in place. He angled in the air and flew towards the front of the train, circling high above the engine, and finally piercing the ice barrier three times like a wrecking ball. After the third pass, he jumped into the engine and started barking commands to the engineer.

  The bad guys moved towards Ambassador to intercept, but they were cut off as the Event Horizon positioned itself between them and the engine. DeathTek was still piloting the vehicle, and he started firing live rounds of ammunition towards the ice girl. I wasn’t sure if he was just trying to kill them, or simply scare them, but Annie responded by hitting the turbine of the vehicle with an arctic blast.

  The Event Horizon wobbled awkwardly in the air, struggling with the sabotage of iced-over engines. It didn’t destroy the aircraft, or the hero who was piloting the vehicle, but it did land hard on the ground with a deafening impact. Just like that, we had lost our ride.

  The train began to move again, and I struggled to take stock of all the variables. Necromancer and Submission couldn’t fly, and DeathTek was still in the downed jet. As the train started moving, the situation became much more hazardous for our non-flyers.

  Submission and Necromancer were on top of the third car, carefully trying to keep stable as the train began to get back up to speed. Flanking them was a couple of soldiers, both of them targeting the criminals but having no luck in hitting them. I snuck a glance back at the Event Horizon, and I saw DeathTek finally disembark and begin running towards the accelerating train. He’d easily catch up to us before the train was moving too fast, so I turned my attention back towards the immediate threat.

  Adrenaline was racing towards the heroes on the car, preparing to cut them with her blades. Arctic Annie was flying towards the front of the train, and I suspected that she was going to try to bring the train to a stop again with another ice shield.

  I had to trust that the other experienced heroes could handle the speedster. Besides, my powers were tailor made for fighting an ice princess. So I made my choice and flew towards Annie.

  With her punker hairstyle and a costume that looked like something found in the dumpster behind an Olympic skating rink, she barely looked like a threat. She saw me coming, gave me a smirk, and slapped her fists through the air towards me.

  Appearing out of nothing came twin daggers forged of solid ice, and they were coming right for my head. I swiped my hands through the air in response, countering with an intense wave of heated air that vaporized the projectiles into what amounted to a bucket’s worth of lukewarm water. It hit me in the face with a harmless but annoying splash.

  For a split second, the water in my eyes made me blind. It was all the time she needed to fly over to me and get her hands on the fabric of my costume.

  “Hello, Andromeda,” she purred in my ear. “Nice to see you again.”

  I was about to say something like bitch, we do not know each other when I remembered for the twentieth time that the world at large didn’t know I was a replacement, and my future depended on keeping it that way.

  “You do know how much a single bar of gold weighs, right?” I finally told her. “How the hell are you two planning to fly away with enough to make it even worth your time?”

  “I’ll let my partner worry about that,” she responded, before hammering me with a brutal head butt that had me seeing stars and unpleasant lights. “I still owe you for the last tim
e we ran into each other, you frigid bitch.”

  “Look who’s talking, frosty,” I responded. Actually, after being on the receiving end of her mild concussion, my words came out as an indecipherable combination of consonants and drool. Once again, I was painfully paying for the deeds of the previous Andromeda. While I was reeling, she wrapped her arms around me and flew up into the air.

  “These girls are a decoy. I’m picking up movement in the fifth car.”

  The unexpected statement rang in my ears, and it took me a second to realize the voice belonged to DeathTek. He was speaking to me over my wireless earpiece. Between the throbbing pain in my forehead, the constant barrage of taunts from Arctic Annie, and the information from my teammate, it was getting tough to separate the competing sources of input.

  It was right there, as Arctic Annie held me in an embrace as we hovered fifteen feet off the ground, I could feel my blood starting to chill. Her fingertips were pressing into the ribs, and she was beginning to funnel frigid ice into my veins. She was trying to freeze me solid!

  She had her arms wrapped around me, pointing my hands straight down to the ground. My first reaction was to fight ice with fire once again, but she was already beginning to affect me. A few streams of fire rolled out of my fingertips, but they were impotent and weak and shot harmlessly towards the ground and away from us both. The gauntlets might have made me a living furnace of power, but her abilities were dousing it. Soon, I wouldn’t even be able to fly anymore. I hated to think what would happen if she froze me solid and I fell from the ground at this height.

  So I kissed her.

  I don’t know how the idea came to me. I had never kissed a girl before, and this icy freak wouldn’t be my first choice for getting experimental, and it was definitely dirty fighting, but the tactic worked. She might have pinned my arms down, but I could still fly. She was so stunned by my move that while our lips were locked, she didn’t realize that I had changed our directions and began flying straight down to the ground. By the time she realized that her head was flying straight towards a handy rock on the ground, it was all over. I heard a satisfying crack as her head hit the stone and her body disentangled from mine, while I soared back towards the train. Moving away from Annie, I could feel the warmth slowly returning to my skin.

  The train was starting to pick up speed now, which could only be an advantage. Whatever vehicle they were counting on to upload the stolen gold into would be left behind as the train continued moving.

  By the time I got back to the train, the situation had gotten further out of hand. Submission and Necromancer were on top of the fourth car now, trying to avoid being cut by Adrenaline while moving to the fifth car. Necromancer could kill her just by touching her, but she was moving too fast for him to touch. If she were a dude, then Submission could just use her mind control powers. As it stood, it was a bit of a stand-off.

  On the fifth car, Ambassador had landed, and he peeled open the roof of the car like a tinfoil package. DeathTek was behind him, aiming his handy rocket fists towards the inside of the car. By the time I joined them, I could see for myself what DeathTek’s infrared scanners had revealed.

  It was a heavily armored storage car, and it contained cages filled with glimmering stacks of solid gold bars. There were wooden crates lined against the wall that were unmarked, but I had to assume contained cargo just as valuable as the gold. My first thought was the Ambassador had made a surprisingly ridiculous tactical error. Why in the world would he rip open the top of the train car, exposing the gold to the bad guys? Once I got a good look inside, I finally realized what was going on.

  I’m just a regular cop at heart, you know. I’m used to seeing regular people doing normal things, and I live in a world of cell phones, coffee shops and traffic jams. I’m still not used to seeing people toss fire from their hands, or electricity from guns, or doing whatever these guys were doing.

  There were three men down there. One was a naked man with green, reptilian skin and a long tail. He hissed angrily when he saw the three of us looking down at him. Inside one of the storage cages was a handsome man wearing a purple and green jumpsuit, and purple-tinted goggles. He was tossing gold bars through the air into a glowing circle of energy hanging in the air. Once the gold bars hit the energy, they vanished. Teleportation, perhaps?

  Between them was a middle-aged man with a full thick bushy beard. Unlike the colorful characters that we were fighting, he was wearing an exquisitely tailored suit with a midnight blue paisley print. I didn’t even have to guess who this guy was. He was currently number nine on the FBI’s most wanted list, and there had been many rumors that he was currently inside the United States.

  “Ubaidullah Zahr,” Ambassador said with an almost disappointed fatherly tone. “To think that Habindaque’s most notorious arms dealer has been reduced to robbing trains.”

  “Slither and Wormhole,” DeathTek told me, identifying the other two. “Let’s put them down before they make off with any more of the gold.”

  So that’s why we didn’t locate any sort of getaway vehicle, I realized. I’d heard about Wormhole, even before joining this circus. He could teleport himself and others over hundreds of miles by opening up holes in the air. It made it very handy for him to just warp into a closed room, office or train, pluck out whatever he wanted, and then escape undetected. Zahr was using him as a safecracker, in a matter of speaking.

  Things weren’t going to get out of hand, I told myself. DeathTek stood on the edge of what used to be the roof of this car, and he was aiming his fist directly at the three of them. Surrounding his fist were a dozen tiny stinger missiles, each of them trained directly at the three crooks. I found the bright red laser dots that covered their chests to be a very comforting visual. Even if they somehow dodged his attack, they still had the alien superhuman floating right behind me. And if that failed, the rest of us stood ready. The entire Infinite League was here, and that should have been enough to make even the most dangerous spark put his arms up in surrender.

  “There’s no shame in saying you’re beaten, Zahr,” Ambassador offered peacefully. “Let’s not make this messier than it has to be.”

  Gunshots could be heard in the distance, even over the roar of the train, and a man could be heard screaming. It made us all flinch, and Zahr used the distraction to withdraw a small device from his belt. With a press of the button, I saw all the lights and displays on DeathTek’s body illuminate brightly, and then he went dark. He went unnaturally still and fell down into the car like a rigid statue, landing quiet and still by Zahr’s feet.

  “EMP pulse,” Necromancer said angrily. “Sneaky bastard.”

  “Some of the Marines are exchanging fire with Adrenaline and Arctic Annie,” Ambassador told us, looking in the direction of the gunfire. “I’ll assist them, the three of you deal with this trio of scoundrels.”

  “It’s hard to take him seriously when he talks like that,” I mentioned to Submission as I pointed my fists at the punks below us. “You want me to light them up?”

  “No need,” Submission promised me. She looked at the large reptilian bodyguard and worked her magic on him. “Slither, smack those two around until they stop moving.”

  In response, he jumped right at Submission with claws spread and fangs bared. “¡Voy a mear en su cráneo!”

  She jumped backwards, and she would have toppled over the side of the moving train if Necromancer hadn’t grabbed her. Desperately, she screamed again. “Slither, jump off the train!”

  The creature snarled again and slashed at her shoulder, nicking her just above the elbow.

  “Are they blocking our powers?” I asked fearfully.

  Submission kicked out, catching the lizard-man in the chest and knocking him back a few feet. “He doesn’t speak English, he can’t understand what I’m saying to him!”

  The creature was reacting like the wild animal he resembled, and he made a move towards me. He nearly slashed me across the face with his clawed fingers, but I
dodged the attack by floating slightly to the right and off of the moving train. I found myself a little disoriented when I saw Slither moving quickly away from me. I had forgotten that I was on a moving train, and although I was hovering stationary in mid-air, the vehicle was still moving away, taking Slither and the others with it.

  I flew back, racing the accelerating train, just in time to see a purplish disturbance appear in the air. Zahr and Wormhole jumped out it, landing on the roof of the train right next to Necromancer and Submission. Operating like the experienced warriors they were, they all immediately became entangled in a violent fight on the roof of a moving train. Unfortunately for my friends, Slither seemed faster and stronger than either of them.

  Near the engine, Ambassador and the three remaining soldiers were taking shots at Adrenaline. They had her pinned between the first and second cars, where she avoided being shot. It looked like they were about to apprehend her, so I decided to lend my help to the others.

  Behind me, Zahr had wrapped his arms around Necromancer’s body, and Wormhole was repeatedly punching him in the stomach. Submission herself was trading blows with Slither, but she was barely holding her own. I decided I’d have more luck fighting the lizard-man, so I landed between her and the creature with my hands burning brightly.

  Submission took the opportunity to take on Wormhole before he could do any more damage. She blocked one of his punches with a downward swipe of her fists, and screamed at the top of her lungs a direct command. “Okay, you jump off the train, baby!”

  He evidently spoke English just fine, and he obeyed her orders. The problem was, he latched on to her arm and pulled! I saw them both fall off the train and tumble painfully on the dirt ridge as the train continued moving.

  With Wormhole and Submission temporarily taken out of the fight, Necromancer turned his attention on Zahr. That left Slither to me, and I started hurling burning orbs of plasma and fire at his face. He ducked and dodged like the venomous reptile he resembled, jumping and leaping higher than I expected. He managed to put a two-inch gash across my outer thigh, and I can’t even begin to describe how much that hurt.