Superheroes Anonymous (Book 2): Supervillains Anonymous

by Dunne, Lexie

  This was definitely not a Davenport facility.

  Cooper scribbled something on the clipboard the guard held out. “Name of Doe, Jane, for an examination.”

  I tensed without meaning to. Jane Doe? There was no way that could lead to anything good.

  “Davenport policy,” Cooper said easily as he handed the clipboard back. “We don’t log real names here, right, John?”

  “Right, Mr. Smith.” The guard winked at him as Cooper ushered me out of the foyer and into a hall that could have been in any office building anywhere on the planet.

  None of the doors were marked, and everything felt quiet and still. My gut said this building belonged to the Lodi Corporation, I saw no clues for that, either. All I knew was that none of my friends knew where I was, I knew where none of my friends were, and I’d just officially had my name stripped away from me. Singularly, these were all terrible signs. Together, they spelled my doom. The skin on the back of my neck prickled as we walked farther and farther into the facility.

  “Ah, here we are,” Cooper said, stopping at an unmarked door. “After you.”

  I stepped into an examination room and lifted my chin, mostly so I could swallow the panic. The eye chart on the wall, the blood pressure cuff, the little cabinet that held swabs and needles, all of it felt like any hospital room. Cooper closed the door behind us. With one of his long arms, he reached out and patted the crinkly tissue-paper-covered examination table. “Have a seat.”

  I did so though I stayed tense. What if I took off right now, while his back was turned, and he was sitting down to log data into the computer? He was stronger than me, but was he faster? Could I get out of the facility before any of the guards caught me?

  All signs pointed to no. Especially with my hands still in the cuffs.

  “So how have you felt lately?” he asked as he picked up a clipboard. “Any issues with the Mobium or the cancer?”

  “I—I got dizzy a little,” I said, as the best lies were wrapped in truth. “A couple nights ago. It was probably because I didn’t eat. Do you really have to send me back to prison? I didn’t do it, you know. I’d never work with Chelsea.”

  Oh god, I’d almost used her real name.

  “I don’t make the rules. I just follow them.” Cooper scribbled a note and looked up with a genial smile. He asked the expected follow-up questions about the dizzy spell. I’d been through the checklist so many times that I answered almost on autopilot. My brain scrambled to come up with some kind of escape plan.

  “I’m going to take your blood pressure and check your pulse,” he said. I coughed to hide my instinctive flinch when he stood up. He frowned anyway when he laid his fingers on the pulse point at my wrist. “Your heart is racing. You doing okay?”

  “Just—really don’t want to go back to prison,” I said weakly. “Do you know how many enemies I’ve made in there?”

  “Oh, come on. We both know you never did anything of note to them. That was all your boyfriend.”

  “Yeah, I don’t think they’re all that wrapped up in the technicalities, thanks,” I said, thinking of my enemies in Detmer.

  “Well, if you’re innocent, I’m sure they’ll get you out of there as soon as they clear matters up. Shame we lost Angélica. She was one of the best.”

  Yeah, I bet you think it’s a damn shame since you’re the one who actually killed Angélica, I thought. The rage that rose up was so sharp and potent it nearly made me dizzy, and I struggled to keep it inside. Hopefully, none of the sudden malevolence showed up on my face. I didn’t need that kind of trouble until I found a way to escape. If I found a way.

  “I miss her,” I said. “I didn’t know her long, but she was the best.”

  “Mm. Hold still.” He held a device like a hole punch over my arm. I tensed. Should I fight him off? I could kick him pretty easily, though standing over me like that, he had me at a crazy disadvantage. The device bit into my arm, eliciting a yelp.

  I looked at the bleeding puncture in my forearm. “A little warning might have been nice.”

  “It hurts more if you know it’s coming.” He turned away to shove an actual piece of my skin into a test tube. I eyed it uneasily. He was collecting samples. I had officially become a specimen to study, like Brooke.

  Just one more way we were alike.

  “If you’re taking pieces of me,” I said, wiping the blood on my pants, “I’m entitled to a warning. And shouldn’t you have used a local or something?”

  “You heal fast.” He rifled through a drawer. When he pulled out a syringe with a giant needle attached, I had to swallow hard several times. “Ten minutes from now, it won’t even hurt. That Mobium of yours is pretty great.”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Right now it just feels like more trouble than it’s worth.”

  “Mm. Well, now that we’re done with the formalities . . .” Cooper waved a distracted hand at the wall, and the door burst open.

  I didn’t have time to shout when the men rushed in, crowding the space and reaching for me. Every survival instinct kicked in at once. I fell back on my elbows and kicked out, catching the first man in the chin with the blade of my foot. As he careened to the side, a second man tried to grab me. I twisted left and ducked under his arm, smashing the back of my fist into his ear. I blocked a strike from the third man. He lunged for me. I tried to scramble away, but there was nowhere for me to go. They pinned me to the wall, all three of them holding me down. Even with my enhanced strength, there were too many of them for me to wrestle off. That didn’t stop me from trying or from turning the air blue once I failed.

  “Told you she’s a fighter,” Cooper said.

  I panted hard. The men holding me down were all giants, but they grunted at the effort. I wasn’t going to make any of this easy for them. “What the hell is going on? I thought you said this was a checkup!”

  Cooper ignored me and palmed a button on the wall. It slid away with a whisper of noise, revealing a doorway. Beyond it, I saw a surgical operating room that made all of the blood in my body turn to ice. No amount of struggling seemed to help; the men picked me up and carried me inside.

  “Just running some tests,” Cooper said, as I was strapped onto the operating table on my side, my wrists and ankles locked into place. In a flash, I was back on Dr. Mobius’s table with his ugly mug leaning over me. I’d been on my back then, stretched out and staring up at a lightbulb in a dirty basement. Now I was in a polished operating room, and I was on my side with my knees locked into place against my chest. Other than that, it was essentially the same.

  I squeezed my eyes shut and strained against the cuffs as a tear broke free.

  Cooper wiped it up with a piece of gauze. I flinched away.

  “Don’t worry,” he said, flicking the gauze toward a trash can. “With your pain tolerance, this will hardly register at all. Some quick tests, and we’ll have you right on your way back to prison.”

  “You’re lying,” I said, since the clueless act was starting to get a little thin. “This isn’t a Davenport facility at all, is it?”

  “Oh, Gail.” He nodded at the men, who all pushed down on my side to keep me still. I felt their breath on my skin and tried to fight harder, but they were rapidly draining my strength, and I was getting nowhere. When Cooper pushed the needle into my arm, I screamed.

  It echoed off the walls of the operating theater around me. A feeling of weightlessness began to flood through me.

  Cooper tucked his tongue in his cheek as he bent over so that our faces were level. “I won’t lie to you. If that hurt, you’re in real trouble. We haven’t even started on the real pain.”

  “Get fucked,” I said.

  He tsked. “Language.”

  “You sound like a bad Saturday morning cartoon villain.” The room began to shift around me. Everything stopped feeling permanent or solid, and my eyes had a h
ard time focusing on anything in the liquid aftermath. All sense of up and down became incomprehensible. Instead, I drifted vaguely sideways.

  “She’ll shake off the drugs quickly, so I’d better get to work,” Cooper told the men as he stood.

  Telling him off again didn’t seem like a worthy expenditure of my remaining strength, so I rested my forehead against the cold metal and let another tear leak across the bridge of my nose. At least we had confirmation that Kiki had been telling the truth, my brain pointed out, though I hadn’t really doubted her.

  It was just depressing to note that I’d finally faced a true bastion of evil, and I’d gone down with barely a fight.

  Story of my life, really.

  Something cold slithered up my back. Cooper cut off my tank top, leaving me in my jeans and bra. “Really?” I asked, my voice slurred. “Must we?”

  When he swabbed on some kind of liquid up my spine, I closed my eyes against the familiar yellow smell of iodine.

  “Little pinch,” Cooper said, and stabbed me in the back.

  I screamed as the needle went into my spine, punching through my skin. The pain hit in waves. It radiated from my back and raced all the way to my toes. Even high as a kite, I felt my mouth drop open. Cooper chuckled and did something that made my vision go white. When I screamed again, it echoed.

  An eternity later, he pulled the needle out. “That’s that,” he said.

  “So we’re done?” My voice was barely a whisper. I was sweating and overheated, and my back throbbed so hard I could feel it in my teeth. I tried to raise my head, but I couldn’t even do that. Everything hurt too much. “This was fun. Let’s never do it again.”

  “Such a little optimist. Let’s move her onto her back, gentlemen.”

  I don’t know how long it took to do all the tests. All I knew was that by the time Cooper had finished, he didn’t even need the drugs to subdue me anymore. I was so out of it from the agony that they were able to unchain me from the table, wrap my wrists in a length of rope that chafed at my skin, and drag me down the hall while I was too weak to protest. My feet dragged behind me on the linoleum as they pulled me through the facility.

  I was covered in sweat and shaky. They hadn’t replaced my shirt or given me shoes. My lower back actively throbbed in time with my midsection (which he’d also punctured). It made me ill to know that there were bits of me sitting in little specimen jars in his minifridge, but I was too weak to fight for my life, let alone mete out punishment for that.

  “Is she going in one of the cages, boss?” one of the men asked as they hauled me along.

  “I’d love to keep her. A perfect specimen, and I’ve never seen such a stable reaction to the Mobium before. The good doctor must have altered his formula. But unfortunately,” Cooper went on, sounding more and more like far too many mad scientists I’d had the displeasure of meeting, “I’ve learned a thing or two watching this girl.”

  “Yeah?”

  “She has an unbroken streak of getting rescued, usually by that idiot savant in green.”

  I still couldn’t raise my head, but my fists clenched a little. He would pay for the torture he’d just inflicted on me, sure, but insulting Guy? I’d happily strangle him for that alone.

  “So this one, I can’t keep,” Cooper said. “I’ve probably pushed my luck as it is. Time to dispose of the body.”

  This really was not my day. I jerked my head when we passed through a door, and I felt sunlight on the back of my neck.

  “Ah, here we go. This way, gents.”

  When they stopped walking, I gritted my teeth and picked my head up. They’d dragged me to some sort of loading area behind the complex. It was empty, save for a beat-up old clunker and a black van, both of them horribly ominous. The clunker had its trunk open. A man leaned against the open driver’s door, wearing a ball cap and sunglasses.

  I really did not want to be shoved into that trunk. It was an irrational dislike, but if I was going to die in a car trunk, the car should not be older than me.

  “Hold her arm out,” Cooper said as he pulled on a fresh pair of latex gloves. He’d avoided touching me, I realized. He didn’t want the Mobium absorbing his abilities. When the men raised my cuffed arms, he pulled out his pocket knife and flicked the blade open. “Sorry to damage the goods, but we need the decoy to be convincing.”

  I stared at the edge of the blade, the way it glinted evilly in the light. “That’s a lie. You’re not sorry at all.”

  When he dug the knife into my forearm, squeezing so that blood dripped into the trunk of the car, I didn’t give him the satisfaction of screaming. I clenched my jaw and sucked air through my teeth, shallow breaths that didn’t hold off the sparks at the edges of my sight. My knees buckled.

  I didn’t scream, though I did spit at him when he yanked out a hank of my hair. “Asshole. I’ll kill you for that.”

  “I sincerely doubt you could, Gail.” He sprinkled the hair over the trunk and jerked his head at the men holding me. “Put her in the van.”

  My arm, stomach, and back all bled as they dragged me off, but I kept my head up. I looked back over my shoulder in time to see Cooper pass over a wad of cash to the man in the ball cap. The gun the man handed back was unmistakable. He climbed into the clunker and started the engine, driving off right away.

  So that was how Cooper was going to kill me.

  How utterly and boringly pedestrian.

  They threw me in the van, which had one of those partitions between the driver’s seat and the cargo area. Dust geysered as I landed on a rolled-up carpet, making me cough and hack as I lay there. I fell sideways off the carpet and lay on my side, curled up as though that could stop everything from hurting so badly. When they slammed the doors closed behind me, it left me alone in the semidarkness, looking up at the metal shelves that lined the van.

  Bleeding, tied up, and in the back of an unmarked van. I’d faced greater odds, but not that often.

  When the engine started up, I moaned. The vibrations sang through my injuries so that everything throbbed in great detail, from my teeth to my toenails. When I lifted my head, I could see several airtight containers near the back of the van, held down with bungee cords. The skull and crossbones on the jars made me do a double take. Was that acid? Great. So not only was he going to shoot me in the head, he was going to dissolve my body, and none of my friends or Guy would ever know what had happened to me. They’d find the car with my hair and blood in it in some junkyard somewhere, but I’d always be a mystery.

  I rested my head back against the carpet and closed my eyes. Everything smelled like dust, making my nose itch. To make matters worse, the universe seemed to be laughing at me because something was poking into my side. Frustrated, I wiggled around until I could pull it free. I nearly tossed it away before I realized what I had in my hand.

  A gas mask.

  With a Raptor logo on the front.

  A post-it note was taped to the back: BRACE YOURSELF.

  I fumbled to put it on, pulling the straps as snug as I could around my head. It wasn’t easy with my hands tied. Then I wiggled until I was under one of the shelves, pulled the rolled-up carpet in to serve as a cushion, and waited, not even daring to hope.

  Ten seconds later, all hell broke loose.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  By now, the shattering glass and the pop-hiss of a smoke grenade going off was old hat to me, but I still shrieked when the canister bounced into the back of the van. It hit the floor and ricocheted onto the shelf opposite, spewing clouds of bright blue gas into the air. Cooper’s ripe curse followed a split second later, and the van began to swerve. I gritted my teeth and held on to one of the posts holding the shelving up with what remained of my strength. Agony sang through my battered body as I bounced from the carpet to the outer wall of the van. Through it all, I could hear something sloshing around near my feet.

/>   I held on as hard as I could, squeezing my eyes shut behind the mask. Cooper began to cough, deep, hacking noises that led to gagging. From around the van, I heard pops, like firecrackers going off.

  An explosion shook the ground under the van, briefly tilting my entire world to the side. Somehow, though, Cooper must have regained control, for the van slammed back onto the ground, juddering hard enough that I hit the front of my mask against the bottom of the shelf and saw stars. My brain helpfully chose that moment to inform me what the sloshing noise was: the acid. A second later, it reminded me that when the skull and crossbones was red, that meant Lazarus acid.

  “Oh, shit,” I said, my vision going briefly white with sheer terror. It was enough to inspire at least a little strength, enough to pull me out from under the shelf, at least. Cooper must have really wanted me gone. Lazarus acid could eat through a battleship hull in under a minute. A disgruntled chemistry-professor-turned-supervillain who’d kidnapped me two years before had been all too happy to provide multiple demonstrations.

  And now I was stuck in the back of a van with three large containers of it. A van driven by the most evil man I knew and under siege by the Raptor. Just great.

  I fought my way out into the open, grunted when a particularly nasty bit of swerving threw my back into the shelf, and pounced on the sliding door. I needed to get out of the van before Raptor did something like hit it with a missile, as I didn’t particularly fancy having my life saved, then being subsequently melted.

  I looked around frantically until I spotted a jagged bit of metal on the underside of one of the shelves. I sawed away at the rope as fast as I could, which wasn’t easy with Cooper’s driving like we were on an obstacle course. My terror amplified every swish of the acid against the sides of the containers. When the rope snapped, I pushed myself to my feet. Unfortunately, Cooper chose that moment to slam hard on the brakes.

  I hit the partition between the driver’s seat and the rest of the van and saw stars. When I reached out to steady myself, my hand landed on something rubbery: a HAZMAT suit. Cooper really had come prepared. That sort of foresight might have been admirable—provided I might have admired his foresight if he weren’t currently using it to kill me. He jumped out of the van and slammed the door behind him.