The Sidekicks Initiative

by Barry J. Hutchison

  “No,” boomed the voice from within.

  Anna tutted. “Well, so much for that.”

  “That was your plan? Shout ‘come out,’ at him?” Sam asked.

  “Well, I didn’t see you coming up with anything better,” Anna pointed out. She set off for the door. “Fine. We’ll have to go in.”

  “We can’t just go in!” Sam yelped.

  “Well, he isn’t coming out, so what do you suggest?” she asked. She was looking back at Sam as she reached the door, and so didn’t see the shape appearing in the doorway, or the makeshift weapon swinging toward her.

  “Look out!” Sam cried, but the warning came too late. The impact was solid, yet oddly moist sounding. It sent Anna hurtling backward through the air, arms and legs flailing.

  “Fu—” she managed to eject before she smashed into one of the few remaining sturdy parts of the bull-trampled fence. She slid to the ground, wheezing. Sam stared at her in shock, his mouth hanging open. Anna nodded frantically and pointed to the door.

  A giant emerged, ducking through the gap in the wall. He was larger than Sam had been expecting, although this was partly thanks to the bull skull helmet he wore, with its two long horns that stabbed angrily at the sky.

  His torso was clad in thick black leather and encaged by armor fashioned from the ribs of a large animal. Over his shoulders was a red leather cape that hung down almost all the way to the floor. Clutched in one hand was a large chunk of raw meat. He held the protruding bone like a handle as he swished it menacingly at his side.

  “Dude, did you just hit me with a leg of lamb?” Anna coughed, struggling to her feet.

  “I didn’t want to do this. I didn’t want any of this,” the giant insisted. His voice was low and gravelly, but with higher cracks that suggested he was on the brink of breaking down. “I just wanted to put it all behind me. They were even going to let me see her.”

  “Uh, what’s he talking about?” Sam asked.

  The villain’s face twisted in rage. “And now it’s ruined. It’s all ruined!” His hand tightened on the lump of meat’s bone handle. “I’m sorry. I am. But this isn’t my fault. I don’t have any choice.”

  “Don’t know. But it doesn’t sound good,” said Anna.

  “I am the Baron of Bovine,” the giant muttered. “The Prince of Pork. The Master of Meat.”

  Sam danced anxiously from foot to foot. “OK, look, let’s talk about this.”

  “I am the Beef Chief!” he roared. His eyes narrowed, becoming slits. His voice came as a menacing whisper. “Hear me moo.”

  He lunged at Sam, moving surprisingly quickly for a man his size. Sam barely had time to bark out a frantic, “Battle Mode!” before the chunk of meat clipped him on the chin, lifting him off his feet and sending him into a fully unintentional backflip.

  His landing left a lot to be desired. His face played more of a role in it than he’d ideally have liked, and had it not been for the suit’s Battle Mode functionality cushioning his head, he’d almost certainly have lost several teeth.

  Sam lay there for a moment, getting his bearings. He knew which direction down was, but the others were currently escaping him.

  A hand the size of a whole flank steak caught him by the back of the neck and helpfully showed him which direction was up.

  Sam screamed as he hurtled into the air, spinning and flipping, his arms flapping wildly in the hope the suit would suddenly develop the ability to fly.

  It didn’t. He drew level with the meat shop’s roof before gravity took hold. As he fell, he saw the Beef Chief lining up a swing. He had exactly enough time to babble out two different expletives before the lamb leg connected with him, propelling him through the meat shop wall in an explosion of bricks, plaster, and dust.

  He hit the wooden floor of a dimly lit room, bounced awkwardly, then slid ass-first into an interior wall, punching two round holes in the plasterboard with the suit’s armored butt-cheeks and coming to a sudden, bone-rattling stop.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Sam lay motionless on the floor, waiting to find out which parts of him hurt. The suit seemed to have protected him from the worst of the damage, but he’d still felt the impact. All the impacts, in fact, starting with the Beef Chief’s crunching blow, and ending with the moment his ass cheeks met the wall.

  “Shake it off, Sam,” he whispered, trying to use the wall to pull himself up. His fingers tore through the plasterboard like it was tissue paper, forcing him to stagger upright without any support. The suit was heavier in this mode, but he could feel its strength surrounding him, making him stronger and more resilient.

  “OK. OK. Let’s do this,” he said, bouncing from foot to foot and psyching himself up. As he did, he briefly regarded the room he’d landed in. There was a blanket in the corner with some empty noodle cups stacked up beside it, a dirty fork poking out of one.

  Several bottles of water stood in the corner, half of them empty. Beside them was a framed photograph of a girl, maybe nine or ten years old. She wore a sunhat and was blowing on the white puffball head of a dandelion, sending the seeds scattering into the air.

  Sam was in the process of wondering what it all meant when he heard Anna shout to him from out back.

  “If you’re still alive, will you please hurry up and get out—Jesus Christ!”

  There was a thunderous crash that shook the whole building. Sam launched himself like a sprinter off the starting blocks. He felt the suit hum with power, and screamed as he was propelled forward at blinding speed with barely enough time to throw his hands in front of his face before his body punched another hole in the brickwork.

  He stumbled out into the backyard to find the Beef Chief holding the now partially crumpled dumpster above his head. The villain swung it down at Anna, who dodged aside, narrowly avoiding being pancaked by its weight.

  “Stay still!” the Beef Chief commanded. “Stay still so I can squash you!”

  “You make it sound so tempting,” said Anna. “But, no thanks.”

  “Raaaaargh!” The villain brought the dumpster up again and lunged toward her.

  “Hey! Leave her alone,” said a voice.

  Sam looked around in surprise, before realizing, to his horror, that the voice had been his.

  The Beef Chief spun and tossed the dumpster. It slammed into Sam like a battering ram, driving him through two fences before coming to a stop on top of him.

  Its immense weight pressed down on Sam’s chest. His breathing came in short. Sharp. Gulps.

  Static flickered briefly across the inside of his visor, distorting the battery charge display. Pain surged through… well, everywhere, really.

  With a grunt, Sam attempted to push the dumpster off him. For a moment, it seemed to move, but then it came pressing down harder on him, forcing the last of his breath out in one agonizing gasp.

  The Beef Chief loomed over him, leaning a hand on the crumpled metal container and driving it down with his weight.

  “I didn’t want to do this,” the villain said, and something about the way he said it made Sam believe him. “You should’ve left me alone.”

  Sam wanted to say he was in full agreement, but he didn’t have the air left in him to form the necessary syllables.

  The weight and the pain both became immense. An exclamation point flashed up on his visor in one of the more urgent shades of red. The Beef Chief was saying something, but Sam couldn’t hear anything but the rushing blood in his ears, and the frantic desperation of his own silent screams.

  He saw his life flash before his eyes. It started miserably, became briefly exciting, then crumbled into a sense of lingering disappointment. There was one notable bright spot. The best thing he’d ever done. Perhaps the only thing he’d ever done.

  Corey.

  The highlights showreel spooled into darkness. Sam heard something inside the suit go crack. Possibly himself.

  And then the pressure on him suddenly eased, and sweet, precious oxygen came freely into his lungs,
snapping him back to the here and now.

  The Beef Chief clawed at himself through his leather armor, dancing around frantically, his face a grimace of discomfort. Red blotches bloomed up the sides of his neck and up both cheeks. Sam watched as they met across his nose, before continuing up onto his forehead.

  Pustules grew like tiny flowers. The Beef Chief tore at them with his gloved hands, scraping their pus-filled heads off and making them bleed.

  “Well, I’ve heard of pork scratchings, but not beef scratchings,” said Anna. She had a hand raised in the villain’s direction, and the air rippled like a heat haze between them. “Boom! Witty quip!”

  With her free hand, she helped Sam heave the dumpster aside. He gasped as it rolled away, then lay still for a moment, terrified he’d discover he was crippled.

  He wriggled his toes.

  “Oh, thank God,” he whispered.

  Anna helped him up. “In case you don’t know, a pork scratching is a snack they have in England. It’s made of crispy fat, or skin, or some shit. I mean, as quips go, it’s niche, but it counts.”

  “Totally counts,” Sam grunted. He was bent over, his hands on his thighs as his lungs desperately made up for their recent lack of oxygen.

  “You OK?”

  Sam nodded. “Surprisingly. Thought I was done for there.”

  “It’ll take more than that to…”

  She stopped talking when the Beef Chief’s hand clamped over her head, completely encasing it.

  “You did this!” he sobbed through lips that were becoming more and more bloated. The whites of his eyes were a fiery red and blurred by tears that streamed down over his pustule-encrusted cheeks.

  With a roar, he launched her upward, several times higher and faster than he’d thrown Sam. She sailed up over the top of the meat shop, then was hidden from Sam’s view by the angle of the roof. He heard her scream a frantic, “Battle Mode! Battle Mode!” before a thunderous right hook sent him spinning, filling his head with a high-pitched whine, considerable pain, and a sense of impending doom.

  The suit shook it off before he did, and Sam found himself twisting, his right hand swinging to deliver a return punch. The movement felt fast. Strong. Excitement churned his stomach.

  OK. Let’s see how you like it!

  The Beef Chief’s colossal hand caught his fist and held it. The villain regarded Sam like that weird kid in school might regard a fly whose wings he was about to tear off.

  “Oh, shi—” Sam started to scream, before a sudden impact to his chest—possibly a punch, possibly a kick, it all happened too quickly for him to be able to tell—launched him backward.

  Sam found himself in the meat shop again, albeit quite briefly. It flashed past him as one long blur, punctuated by the occasional crash as he hurtled through one of the store’s thin interior walls.

  “—iiiiit!” he concluded, as he erupted through one of the boarded-up windows, taking the plywood board with him.

  The board hit the road first, and Sam went skimming across the asphalt like a stone across a still lake. Horns blared. Brakes squealed. Drivers cursed. Sam clung on, his top half riding the board, his legs trailing out behind him.

  The scraping of his boots on the road surface eventually slowed him down. He opened his eyes to see the front wheel of a car thundering straight for his head.

  Life did its flashy thing before his eyes again, but was interrupted by the high-pitched protests of the tire as it skidded to a stop with inches to spare.

  “You idiot! What are you doing?” screeched the female driver as she jumped out. “You almost wrecked my car!”

  “Sorry! Sorry. But you almost wrecked my head,” Sam pointed out, using the vehicle’s front bumper to pull himself up.

  “What are you doing?” the woman demanded. She was shrill and angry, and dressed for some high-powered office job. A well-paid one, too, judging by the car. “Don’t you scratch my paintwork, you asshole!”

  Sam raised his hands in surrender. “It’s fine. It’s fine. I’m not going to hurt your car,” he wheezed.

  Something heavy smashed into the car’s roof, collapsing it and exploding the windows out. Sam and the woman both ducked. One of them screamed, and Sam chose to believe that it wasn’t him.

  “What the shit?” the woman demanded.

  Anna lay on her back on the roof of the car, her limbs spread in a sort of deformed X-shape.

  “Ow,” she mumbled, then she slid off the wreckage and thumped onto the road.

  “My car! Look at my car!” the woman shrieked. “Look what you did to my—ATCHOO!”

  The sneeze took her by surprise. The eleven that followed in immediate rapid succession, even more so. Sam saw the air rippling between the woman and Anna, and enjoyed a short but satisfying smile.

  “Uh, you should back off, ma’am,” said Sam, gesturing over to the sidewalk. “I think we’re about to have trouble.”

  “Oh, you—ATCHOO!—already have—AAATCHOO!—trouble. Tru—CHOO!—st me!”

  The door to the meat shop became a cloud of splinters as the Beef Chief shoulder-barged through it.

  “Shit. Here he comes,” said Anna, dragging herself to her feet. She stared down at her suit, admiring the Battle Mode armor. Or most of it, at least. “Seriously?” she groaned. She pointed to the green metal breastplate. “Still with the nipples?”

  “He looks angry,” said Sam, as the Beef Chief broke into a lumbering run. He realized, to his horror, that the villain hadn’t looked angry until now. Irritated, yes. Disappointed, maybe. But this was the first time his face was quite so twisted up in raw fury. “I think we’re in trouble.”

  A horn blared. The Beef Chief was illuminated up one side by the sudden glare of headlights. His head snapped around just as a large refrigerated cargo truck plowed into him.

  “Or maybe not,” said Anna.

  The truck continued for a few dozen feet before the driver recovered from his shock enough to slam on the brakes. The front wheels skidded. The cargo section of the truck swung around, jackknifing the vehicle, but its momentum carried it on.

  There was more honking and squealing, followed immediately by the sound of several decisive and probably quite painful impacts. Cars swerved to avoid the out of control truck. A handful of early morning pedestrians dived for cover as it rumbled by, front wheels weaving, back wheels squealing sideways across the asphalt.

  At last, it stopped. Sam and Anna stood at one end of a line of chaos, taking it all in. The jackknifed cargo truck marked the other end of the destruction. Between them and it were half a dozen cars, many of them no longer the shape they had been when they’d set off that morning.

  Two street lights had been uprooted. Electricity crackled from their exposed wires and licked the ground around them.

  A little further along the street, a fire hydrant was gushing water into the air like a geyser. Luckily, the water and the electricity were too far apart to cause any problems.

  Not that they didn’t have their fair share of problems.

  “We’ve completely destroyed this street,” Sam whimpered. “We’re in so much trouble.”

  “We didn’t destroy anything,” Anna said. “It was the Beef Chief.”

  “What about my car?” demanded the woman in the business suit.

  Anna scowled at her and shoved her in the direction of the sidewalk on the far side of the street. “Lady, for your own safety, please go stand over there.”

  The woman snorted. “My own safety? He’s been hit by a truck. He can’t hurt me.”

  “I wasn’t talking about him,” Anna said, cracking her knuckles for emphasis.

  A small semi-circle of early risers was cautiously forming around Sam and Anna. Three of them had their phones out, their cameras capturing events as they unfolded.

  “What the hell was that?” someone demanded.

  “Are you superheroes?”

  “Did you kill that guy?”

  “Has anyone called the cops?”

&
nbsp; Sam looked to Anna for guidance, but she just shrugged and gestured to the small but vocal crowd. Sam drew himself up to his full height. It was easier to pretend behind the mask, and he could almost convince himself he felt confident as he addressed them.

  “Have no fear, uh, good citizens,” he said, deepening his voice and channeling his inner Doc Mighty. “The villain has been taken care of. You’re safe now. We stopped him.” He almost laughed at that. “We stopped him. We actually stopped him! Can you believe that?” he said to Anna. She nodded, then flicked her eyes back to the crowd, instructing him to get on with it.

  Sam cleared his throat. “Sorry. But… what was I…? Oh, yes. The Beef Chief is no longer a threat. We have restrained him.”

  “He got hit by a truck,” said one man.

  “While racing toward us,” said Anna. “So, that kind of counts.”

  “Are you with the Justice Platoon?” asked a woman with her phone out. Sam sucked in his stomach, suddenly aware that this was the moment that would end up on the news and doing the rounds on social media. This was his moment to make an impact.

  “Uh, no,” he said. “We’re not with the Justice Platoon.”

  He adopted the best superhero pose he could muster, thrusting out his chest and spreading his feet what felt like a suitably heroic number of inches. “We were their sidekicks!”

  There was some murmuring from the group, which quickly rose to become a worried rabble. As one, everyone turned and fled, leaving Sam and Anna alone in the middle of the street.

  Anna cupped both hands around her mouth and shouted after the feeling crowd. “Thanks for the vote of confidence!”

  She lowered her hands and tutted. “Rude.”

  “That was weird,” said Sam. “I wonder why… Oh, shit!”

  Sam spun just as a three-thousand-pound mutant bull bore down on them, horns lowered, breath rolling from its nostrils as clouds of angry steam.

  He emitted a panicky squeal he hoped no one would ever mention again. Even with the suit’s enhanced reactions, there was no time to get out of the monster’s path. No way to possibly get clear before—