Pointing at the cops and the guardsmen, I continue, “Maybe if you all weren’t here, they’d be somewhere else fixing other problems around this city instead of wasting their time with you dipshits.”
“Where’s the damn food?” self-appointed bullhorn guy yells. “People are starving here!”
The bugs would have given old Charlie Darwin something to smile about. If figures were to be believed, world population was down about half a billion. Those that couldn’t work were allowed to die off and did so with a smile on their faces. Those who were overweight got on an involuntary weight loss program. Statistically the world is now a much healthier, but not terribly happier place.
As evidenced by the crowd below.
I try the nice guy approach. Yeah, that’s a bit unusual for me, but I’m open to suggestions. “Look. Things will get better. Keep rationing what you have and stop burning shit to the ground.”
“When are they lifting Martial Law? What about our freedoms?”
“Do I look like a guy who knows when that’s going to happen? No, I’m on my way to another riot in Columbia, South Carolina and got diverted to your little pep rally here. Maybe the governor will consider lifting martial law when you stop rioting? Ever think about that, genius?”
After a few more exchanges with the idiot with the bullhorn and the crowd completely agreeing with him, I had my fill of being a nice guy. A quick check on wind direction and speed and I fire a spread of tear gas grenades. Four quick thump thumps from the forty millimeter and I had a nice little cloud of gas spreading across the group of rioters.
I suppose settling an argument with tear gas is poor sportsmanship, but Athena and her ilk consider me a warm body, good for shit like this. That’s not a very high bar to meet, and I’m not really trying to exceed their expectations. Besides, the way I look at it, I gave the guy a good five minutes of my time and now it’s time to pay up.
Of course, picking up one of the overturned vehicles and threatening to throw it at the guy might have been excessive and I’ll probably have to try and hack whatever footage might show up online, but the crowd is now officially scattering. As a former president might say, “Mission Accomplished!”
I stick around long enough to move the overturned cars and let the fire engines get in there before flying south of the city to Interstate 85. The one functioning police helicopter is reporting another one of those “toll booths” has cropped up. Entrepreneurs or modern day highwaymen – probably a bit of both, but since they have guns and are bent on terrorizing the people trying to get into the city that puts them in the way of what the current ringmaster at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue is calling The Great Recovery.
From my perspective I’m going to get a clean start, a paycheck, and at least for the moment, I can rough up a few idiots without pissing anyone off that much. It’s a win-win scenario. Most scatter when I land, but a young mother and her maybe eight-year old kid fire once at me and immediately drop their weapons. The kid’s looks like a pellet pistol. They want to be arrested.
“What exactly are you two doing?”
“I heard there is food at the jail,” the woman says. “You can leave me, but please take him.”
“They’re in as bad a shape as everywhere else. Sorry.” I try not to look at their faces. “Just try and hang on.” I hope they straighten the food transportation problem out soon. There haven’t been any reports of cannibalism yet, but it is only a matter of time. The milk of human kindness is a bit curdled these days.
“Please, you must have something … anything.”
“Mechanical? Are you still in Charlotte?” A female voice cuts in on the priority frequency. I don’t recognize it and she doesn’t get my name right.
“Hold on a sec,” I say to the woman next to me and cut my external mike. “Yeah, I know I’m supposed to be halfway to Columbia, but there were some complications. Who is this anyway?”
“It’s Wendy. No, I’m actually glad you’re still in the area. I need backup over near the basketball arena. There are reports of a super in that area who is still infected with the bugs and causing problems.”
Here I was expecting to get jumped on about being behind schedule. This is a pleasant surprise. WhirlWendy – the teenage tornado maker – well technically, she’s out of her teens now, but that’s beside the point. Since she ran with the New York City crowd and I mainly operated in the south, our paths didn’t cross much and I don’t really know her except from what I see in the media.
She’s pretty, if a petite, Italian American, B-cup, brunette with a pixie cut is what you’re looking for. I generally like women that are more substantial, but that’s just me. Anyway, Wendy La Guardia - a distant relation to the guy they named the airport after - has been in the superhero and acting gigs since she was a preteen, and that makes her an “old hand” at twenty-one. Her mother runs Wendy’s vast merchandising empire and her father is the senior Senator from New York and chairs the Senate Superpowers Oversight Committee. As one of the most popular heroes in the world with all kinds of powerful friends and family, it’s a bad idea to make an enemy out of her.
“Any idea who it is?”
“No, that’s why I called in for backup and Andydroid said you were nearby and on this frequency.”
“Okay, I’ll head over that way in a couple of minutes. Let me finish up here.”
“Understood. See you in a few.”
I look back through my visor at the hungry mother and her kid. Yeah, I’m kind of a lowlife with no qualms about tear gassing a crowd over being on the losing side of an argument, even if I was right. Turning on my external mike, I send the command to pop my side access panel and march her back to a battered SUV where she’s out of everyone’s line of sight.
“Look! I’m sick and tired of people asking me for food. I don’t care. I don’t have any either. I’m not going to arrest you either, so you’ll just have to take care of yourself and your kid. Do you understand?”
At the same time that I’m reading her the riot act. I point toward the open panel and make an unscrewing gesture with my gauntleted fingers. She gets the hint and reaches inside and unhooks the food tube and slides the item into her large, but mostly empty purse. It’s got two pounds of chicken dumpling paste inside. Not exactly scrumptious, but if I just gave it to her, any thug watching would confiscate it and possibly kill her. Maybe I’m getting soft, but I push it off as I’m not that hungry right now.
Besides, I like the beef stew better anyway. Yeah, that’s it.
• • •
My onboard sensors start acting funny as I close on Wendy’s position. She’s darting around in the air and it looks like something is chasing her. All the interference is making it hard to lock on. I magnify and see some humanoid shapes leaping at her.
Swiveling my six barrel pulse mini-gun around, I accelerate. Without solid targeting information, I have to eyeball it and make certain to avoid hitting WhirlWendy. My first burst knocks a couple backwards, but doesn’t seem to cause any injury. That’s not supposed to happen.
The first one I can get a clean look at appears to be some kind of phantom punk princess with her hair in a Mohawk, along with spiked wristbands, and dog collar. She’s flying at me with no visible form of propulsion and I see no point in trying to talk to them. Wendy is probably much better at that and they attacked her anyway. I zap her with my helmet mounted force blaster. She takes it right in the kisser and goes flying back about twenty feet … but that’s it!
A second one, this time it’s a nerdish looking youth with an equally phantom laptop in his hands rams into my side and checks me like we’re in a hockey game. Whatever they are, they’re solid. I throw an elbow and brush him off.
“I thought you were going to wait for me?” I yell at Wendy.
“I thought I was too! We’ve got to get through these and down to him before it’s too late!” She points down at the ground.
“Who is that?” I ask while fending off a jock in a letterman�
�s jacket with a baseball bat.
“I think its Imaginary Larry,” she replies scattering three others attacking her with a gale force wind. “These things are telekinetic constructs.”
I’d heard of this guy, but never thought I’d run into him. He’s not really a hero or a villain, just a force of nature with multiple personality disorder. The onset of his massive powers screwed with the kid’s mind. He’s been going to his imaginary high school inside his mind for a little over the last two decades. All these constructs we’re fighting are his pretend schoolmates, the stereotypes and clichés of every drama and sitcom imaginable.
“Any idea how to stop him?”
Wendy says, “The Olympians wore him down by beating these things until he passed out from the exertion, but that took hours and they had the whole team.”
I dig around in my mind for an idea. Reinforcements aren’t anywhere around. Actually come to think of it, they’re just a phone call away. “I’ll keep his friends busy. Try to get outside the range of all this interference and have whoever’s in the chair saturate this area. Maybe they can stop him.”
“Alright,” she says and rockets upwards a thousand feet. I drop down to the ground and fire my remaining tear gas grenades at the real person. My plasma mini-gun spits out energy, but what must be Larry’s glee club appears to shield him, while the cloud of gas starts to envelope him.
They’re singing a pretty good cover of the Bee Gee’s Staying Alive interrupted by the barking of the mini-gun. Larry starts coughing and his constructs imitate him, but the cloud is dissipated by a wall of force that knocks my suit back twenty feet and I land in a heap. His burst knocked my shields down to sixty percent and he wasn’t even really aiming at me.
Yeah, I didn’t think it was going to be that easy either. Finally, I get a good look at Larry. He’s got at least four bugs on him! Maybe he’ll burn out even faster. I crank up my cannon and augment it with my force blaster. Larry counters with sending his school’s marching band into my burst. The glee club switches to Oh When the Saints Come Marching In. I feel like the universe is screwing with me.
Something smashes into my back. I spin and find the track team. It was the shot putter and it hurt. My jetpack is damaged … can’t risk going airborne.
Dodge the discus. Watch out for the javelin. Keep an eye on the mini-gun’s energy levels … half depleted.
I try to cut through to the source of the problem, but he keeps generating a never ending wall of constructs in front of him. If they were real, I’d have mowed down an entire graduating class at this point. They just keep coming! Can’t seem to make any headway either.
Where the hell is Wendy? I could use some effin’ help here.
Thirty seconds later, my main weapon is out of juice and I’m left with just the blaster in the helmet and my force field encased sledgehammer. That’s not good. On some level, Larry senses it too. The Glee club starts a rendition of Hammer’s U Can’t Touch This.
As if on cue, the sky darkens. Swinging away, I can’t follow WhirlWendy’s progress. They’re swarming me under. The sledge is knocked away from my suit’s hands. With a high voltage burst, I blow them off of me at the cost of more of the armor’s diminishing power supply.
There’s a momentary opening, and I make use of it. Scooping up the sledgehammer, I smash through the concrete wall of the arena and get inside. For a minute, I wonder if Larry out there can just make new constructs without a line of sight. Maybe he could if he was sane, but he’s not and that’s the point. The Mechani-Cal sized hole I left limits the number that can attack me to a manageable number.
Plus with a busted jetpack, I don’t want to be sucked up into the air by Wendy’s assault. Believe me when I say that long, hard falls aren’t really much fun and should be avoided whenever possible.
The constructs continue fighting, but with a little breathing room, I can see Wendy at the end of the street. She’s hovering, eight stories up, in the middle of a growing funnel cloud, and looking to bring the pain. Part of me is jealous; Larry and Wendy can tap into a ridiculous amount of power with hardly any effort. Me? I have to spend hours working on the suit, hours charging powercells, and even more hours repairing the suit after a short fight.
I remember a couple of years ago, they had one of those specials on cable where they took Wendy down into the Texas and Oklahoma area and let her slug it out against Mother Nature in Tornado Alley. It was all one big publicity stunt to promote her first action/adventure/romance movie – Blow Me Away. Not surprisingly, after she saved a few trailer parks and used a counter vortex to sap the strength out of a nasty looking F3 that had Tulsa in its crosshairs, her movie did rather well. The engineering geek in me actually calculated how much energy that stunt required.
Yeah, things like that really impressed the girls. Then again, I’m now dating the sexiest woman on the planet, so who is laughing now? Assuming I live through this mess, can fix my jetpack, make a token appearance down in Columbia, and make it back to Mount Olympus, Virginia by eight tonight, I’m supposed to have my first public outing as Stacy’s newest boyfriend. That seems unlikely at the moment.
Knocking a Goth girl and a cafeteria lunch lady back through the wall widens the gap and now, three of them can get through. The howl of the wind picks up announcing Wendy’s approach. Her maelstrom tosses most of the constructs aside like toy soldiers. Some scatter, but many of them just disappear. My attention focuses on Larry, who is beginning to glow with a bright light as he senses the threat.
It’s going to get ugly fast, but the real question in this super powered game of chicken is who is going to blink first. Wendy has set herself up as the unstoppable force and – despite my best efforts – Larry is still one helluva immovable object.
Brushing off a group of slow moving attackers, I lumber down the corridor toward the main entrance as veritable rain storm of broken glass showers me. The two titanic forces collide right as I reach the broken windows and start through them. I get thrown right back inside by the backlash and bounce off a support column. It’s a struggle to get upright. Master alarm. Shields are down. My hammer is missing. I’ll find it later! Main power is at forty percent and either my heads up display has double vision or I do. The armor is going to need some serious down time. For that matter, I probably will as well.
The next thing I notice is the synth-muscle damage in the left leg makes me stumble like an armored wino. The good news is, I don’t have to look very hard for a hole to get back outside. There are several options to choose from. I pick the one with the least amount of debris and work my way out into the dust cloud outside.
Making best speed, I head for the center of the cloud. When it begins clearing, I see the two of them. At first I think Wendy pulled it off because she’s hovering off the ground. But then I realize that Larry has both hands around her neck and is holding her up like a rag doll. Her legs are kicking and flailing.
Shit! He’s choking her. Shit! Shit! Shit!
The force blaster on my helmet still works, but the targeting system is out. My sonic screamer is more likely to hurt WhirlWendy than it is Larry. It looks like going mano on mano – or is that mano on psycho – is my only choice. I try to build up a head of steam and do my best to stay pointed at him.
He spots me when I’m about fifteen feet away and more of his telekinetic constructs start to form. I dive onto the ground and trigger my damaged jetpack. The thrust propels me forward as I smash through the constructs and take Imaginary Larry out at the knees. Wendy gets thrown clear and it’s just the two of us.
Okay, I’ve got him now what?
I’m so close that I can see the four bugs attached to his neck. Rearing back I try a punch with my right hand, but his powers just leave it hanging in the air. There’s that damn Master Alarm again. I really do need to change it to something less obnoxious. I turn on the sonic generator and let him share my audible discomfort. That’s not working either. Hands from his constructs are trying to pull me off. I’
ve got one hand still wrapped around his waist.
What the hell? Why not? Mass release on the way. Charging!
My left hand pulses with high voltage electrical power and I turn into a giant defibrillator or bug zapper – take your pick. The first jolt makes him arch and release a gusher of energy. I get thrown clear. The sonic generator cut out and so did the Master Alarm. No readings on the power meter. I can still move, so I crawl back to him. He’s still glowing and it looks like the bugs survived. I smack my right hand down on his chest and vent whatever I have left in the suit. The second eruption is every bit as violent as the first and is compounded by the new damage to my armor. Exposed synth-muscle must’ve caught some of the burst as my suit does its best impression of an epileptic seizure.
There’s absolutely nothing left for a third jolt. Hell, I can’t even move. I can see Larry’s limp form out of the side of my faceplate. He’s not moving either. At the moment, it’s a draw. Wendy steps into view and she kneels down over Larry, checking on his condition. A couple of systems are coming online. Neural commands aren’t working. The backup verbal ones are. It takes three attempts, but the faceplate finally opens and I get a few gulps of fresh air … well not exactly fresh air. It’s more like ozone and burnt hair.
“Is he alive?” I ask.
“Still breathing,” Wendy responds in a raspy voice. “The bugs are toast. Nice move there. Thanks for the assist. How are you?”
“Good question. I think I’m okay. I’m not having problems breathing and it doesn’t feel like I’m bleeding anywhere. That said I feel like I got my ass kicked a dozen times over and I’m betting my armor looks like hell.”
She laughs and makes a painful face. “If you can still gripe about it, you’re probably okay. Darn it! I thought I had him with that twister. Hey, what are you mumbling about over there?”
“My neural gear is still down. I have to make do with voice commands. If I can bypass enough damage, I should be able to move again.”
Confessions of a D-List Supervillain Page 9
