The shape in his head flicked. A jolt of power buzzed through him. The bull changed direction and rocketed straight upward for nine or ten feet, then vanished as if swallowed by some invisible hole in reality.
Anna crouched a little, getting ready to leap back as she sidled up to the spot where the bull had vanished and peered up at it. There was no sign of the bull anywhere. There wasn’t even any suggestion that a bull had been anywhere in the area, beyond the cracks its hooves had made in the surface of the road, and the grimace of terror still imprinted on Sam’s face.
“Where did it go?” Anna asked.
Sam studied the spot in the air, like the answer might be written there somewhere. “I don’t… I have no idea,” he admitted.
“But you did that, right?”
Sam nodded. Slowly. Dumbly. “Uh, yeah. Yeah, I think… Yeah.”
“But you don’t know where it went?”
Sam shook his head.
Anna snorted with mirth. “Wouldn’t it be hilarious if it appeared in, like, a daycare in France, or somewhere?”
Sam considered this. “Not really.”
“No,” Anna admitted. Her amusement faded. “No, I guess not.”
“It’d actually be pretty horrible,” Sam said.
“Yeah. Yeah, you’re right,” Anna agreed. “All those little kids. Doesn’t bear thinking about.”
They both gazed up at the spot again. “I’m sure it won’t happen,” Anna said. “I mean, what are the chances? Right?”
She clicked her tongue against the roof of her mouth and winced, just a little. “Nah. I’m sure it won’t.”
There was a clatter of footsteps from nearby. Sam and Anna both turned, fists raised, just as a breathless, red-faced Randy clattered to a stop beside them.
“Oh, it’s you. Hey,” said Anna, lowering her hands.
Randy held up a finger to indicate that he needed a moment. He gulped down great lungfuls of air, rasping and wheezing, his sweat condensing on the inside of his goggles.
“I think… I think I lost it,” he finally managed to say. He grimaced in pain and bent double like he might be about to throw up. Somehow, he summoned the strength to hold it in. “Wow. That was… wow. Who knew horses could run fast?”
“OK, one, everyone,” said Anna, counting on her finger. “And two, not a horse.”
Randy put his hands on his hips and looked around. Morning was creeping across the sky above the city’s towers. The noise caused by the vehicle pile-up had brought several more onlookers out onto the street. Cars were starting to back-up on either side of the accident, and drivers appeared inquisitively from inside a few.
Horns blasted. Lights flashed. Patience wore thin. The wailing of distant police sirens drew closer.
“Feels like this could be our cue to leave,” Sam said.
“What about the Beef Chief? We need to stop him!” Randy reminded them.
“He’s pretty definitively stopped,” Anna explained.
“Oh. Well… great,” growled Randy. “Good job.”
He gave Anna a congratulatory thump on the upper arm, then looked back at the meat shop.
“Is he still in there?”
“No, he’s under the truck.”
Randy looked from the store to the truck. He looked from the truck to Sam and Anna. “You dropped a truck on him?”
“More or less,” said Anna. “The important thing is that…”
The sentence fizzled out as, from the corner of her eye, she saw the truck tilt. It tipped sideways, creaking and groaning in protest, before crashing down with a hollow boom that echoed along the street and silenced the blaring car horns.
The back doors of the vehicle’s cargo trailer fell open, and several boxes tumbled out. For a while, nothing else seemed to happen, but then…
“You have got to be kidding me,” Anna muttered.
A figure stood in the spot where the truck’s front wheels had been, silhouetted against the vehicle’s headlight beams. His cape was ragged and torn at the bottom, and one of his helmet’s horns had been snapped off, but there was no mistaking who it was.
“Who’s that guy?” Randy asked.
“That’s him,” replied Sam in a throaty, panicked whisper.
“Oh. Damn!” Randy growled. He nodded continuously for a few seconds, before turning to Sam. “Him who?”
“The Beef Chief!” Anna snapped. “The guy we came here to stop.”
“I thought you said you had stopped him?”
“Well, now he’s unstopped,” said Anna.
Randy skipped forward into a run. “He’s dazed. We need to strike now. Hard and fast!”
“You might want to activate Battle Mode,” Sam called after him.
“I don’t think so, Kid Random,” Randy snapped back. “I can handle this just fine as I—”
Something small and disk-shaped exploded from inside one of the spilled boxes, whistled through the air, then struck Randy on the forehead. The clunk it made could be heard from where Sam and Anna were standing and, judging by the intakes of breath from the regathering crowds, even further than that.
Randy became horizontal in the air. As his head bent back, his eyes briefly met Sam’s. He wore an expression that somehow aimed to suggest, ‘I totally meant this,’ then he crunched to the ground and lay there, wheezing.
“Totally should’ve activated Battle Mode,” Anna muttered.
“What the hell was that?” Sam wondered.
The cardboard box jumped again, as another of the disks came whizzing out. This one sliced toward Sam, but the suit’s reactions moved his hand to intercept. He caught it as if it were a Frisbee and turned it over in his hands as he examined it.
“It’s a frozen beef patty,” he realized.
“Well, of course it is,” said Anna.
Another of the patties clanked off her armored chest plate, right between the nipples. It didn’t hurt her, but was enough to nudge her back a half-step. “This guy just doesn’t give up, does he?” she said. “This seems kind of ridiculous, though.”
Sam shrugged. “I’d rather he tosses burgers at us than tear our guts out like he did to those people on TV.”
“Fair point, well made,” Anna conceded. “I’ll take ‘faintly ridiculous’ over ‘violently disemboweled’ any day.”
Both the box with the holes in it and the one beside it were torn apart as a hundred frozen patties took to the air. They hovered just above the ground, the Beef Chief gesturing to them with a hand as if holding them back.
“Oh, give it up, already!” Anna hollered to him. “They don’t hurt us.”
She glanced at Randy, still lying on the ground.
“Well, they hurt him, but not us. You’re wasting your time, Beefy. Give it up.”
“They don’t hurt you, maybe,” roared the Beef Chief. “But who says they’re for you?”
Sam saw the first of the patties swish through the air. He heard the murmuring of the crowd behind him.
“Oh no. No,” he groaned.
His feet kicked, propelling him sideways. One arm flew out like a soccer goalkeeper stretching for a ball. With a grunt of effort, he got his fingertips to the flying burger, knocking it off course. The frozen meat disk whanged against a mailbox, leaving a deep dent in the blue-painted side.
Sam’s outstretched arm came down, found the ground, then flipped him over in a one-handed cartwheel. He landed expertly, to both his surprise and delight. It had mostly been the suit, of course, but some decades-old muscle memory had kicked in there for a moment, too, he was sure.
From behind him came a few gasps and impressed oohs. Sam turned, smiled and waved at them, then staggered as a patty cracked him on the back of the head.
“Sam!” Anna yelped.
He turned back to see the burgers start carving their way through the air, one by one. Anna bounded to her right and kicked one of the solid meat disks, stopping its momentum and flopping it to the ground.
Another hurtled toward th
e crowd of spectators. Sam lunged, bringing up an arm just in time to block its flight. It deflected off his wrist and bounced harmlessly away, flipping like a coin.
“Everyone get down!” Sam warned, as the next few meat missiles were launched toward the crowd. Sam and Anna both dived into action, blocking, catching, punching and kicking as many of the flying patties as they could.
“Ow! Will you quit it?” Anna barked, as one of the burgers slammed into her lower back, stinging her even through the suit. Another caught her on the thigh. “Right, fuck this,” she hissed. “I’m taking him down.”
She broke into a run, ducking and dodging as the frozen projectiles whistled toward her, blocking any she could get a hand to.
“Oh God, what is she doing?” Sam fretted. Groaning, he set off after her, cheered on by a handful of voices in the crowd.
Anna raised her hands as she approached the Beef Chief, unleashing an Anaphylactic Shockwave. With a jerk of a fist, another box ripped open. Several packs of ground beef exploded, sailed through the air toward him, then clumped together, forming a meat shield that absorbed the worst of Anna’s blast. Boils and buboes blemished its fat-marbled surface, then the shield became a beach ball-sized sphere that took off toward Anna at blinding speed.
“Oh shi—” she managed, throwing herself aside just a fraction of a second too late. The beef ball clipped her shoulder, spinning her around like a clumsy ballerina.
The ground-beef changed shape, becoming a multi-limbed mass of meat tentacles that wrapped around her shoulders, arms, and throat. She clamped her mouth shut as the meat fought to find a way in. It pressed insistently against her lips, tightening around her throat in an attempt to force her to open wide.
“Fmmk uff!” she protested, wrenching her head away.
She felt the meat squirm and wriggle as it tried to sneak up inside her suit. She tried to claw it away, but the tenderloin tentacles held her arms pinned and she realized to her dismay that this was it. She was going to be murdered by semi-sentient meat, in full view of the general public and—yes, a news team—while dressed in a costume with artificial nipples.
Well, wasn’t this just perfect?
Chapter Twenty
Chuck stood in the shower, head lowered, letting the hot water cascade over him. He’d hit the gym hard that morning, purging his hangover before it could even begin.
He’d devised a new training regime for the sidekicks during his workout. They had to start upping their game if the project’s funding was going to continue. Getting a few lucky punches in on a couple of gangbangers was one thing. Fighting supervillains was something else.
The suits gave them an edge, of course, but the suits alone weren’t enough. If they were, he’d have picked three Special Forces guys and had them play dress-up with the outfits. Maybe kitted them out with some of the weapons and gadgets the government retrieval teams had collected from the sites of all those superhero battles over the years.
He closed his eyes and looked up into the spray. Using Special Forces guys was still an option, of course. It was his contingency plan if the sidekicks didn’t work out, but he wanted to give them another week or so before writing them off. He would be surprised if they got it together enough to head into battle, but then he’d been surprised before.
Once. Maybe twice.
His third ever surprise came a moment later when he opened his eyes to find Mari standing on the other side of the shower’s glass screen, watching him.
“Jesus, Mari!” he yelped, instinctively shielding his genitals with both hands. “What are you doing? I’m in the shower here.”
“I noticed,” said Mari. “And relax, Chuck. It’s not like I haven’t seen you naked before.”
“No, I… Wait. You have? When?” Chuck demanded.
“That is unimportant,” Mari told him. “Have you seen the news?”
“No. What news?” asked Chuck, suddenly paying attention. “What’s happened?”
“You might want to sit down,” Mari warned.
“Still in the shower,” Chuck pointed out. “Show me.”
Mari’s screen changed. The face disappeared and was replaced by footage of what looked like some sort of road accident. Chuck wiped condensation off the inside of the glass and peered more closely at the footage.
His eyes widened. His jaw dropped.
“Aw,” he groaned, “shit.”
The door to Kapitän Nazi’s room flew open with a bang. Nazi, who sat in the Lotus position on the end of his bed, opened one eye to see a semi-naked Chuck barge in, water pattering onto the linoleum tiles beneath him.
“John! Did you know about this?” Chuck demanded.
Kapitän Nazi opened his other eye. “About what?”
Chuck regarded him for a moment, his face darkening. “You know damn well what. You helped them, didn’t you? No way they did this on their own. Damn it, John, I trusted you.”
Nazi unfolded his legs and stood up. “It had to be done, Chuck. He needed to be stopped. More importantly, they needed a win. A real win, I mean.” He smiled confidently. “They’re ready. To be honest, I think they’ve always been ready. They just haven’t realized.”
“Oh, they’re ready?” Chuck barked. “Mari!”
Mari trundled into the room, her face-screen showing some shaky hand-held news footage.
“Do they look ready, John?” Chuck asked.
It was hard to tell for sure, but the footage certainly implied that no, they weren’t. Randy lay in the middle of the street, arms and legs spread in an X-shape, cape wrapped around his face.
Sam and Anna were wrestling with some kind of creature that had entangled itself around Anna. They heaved on its many tentacles, but the limbs collapsed in their hands before resprouting from another part of the thing’s flailing body.
“Is this live?” Nazi asked.
“Yes, it’s live. But any minute now, they won’t be!” Chuck said. He inhaled sharply through his nose, swallowing back his rising temper. “You have no idea what you’ve done, John. You don’t have the first clue how badly you’ve screwed the pooch on this one.”
“We have a problem,” Mari chimed.
Chuck scowled. “I think we established that we have a problem, Mari,” he spat. “I don’t think there’s anyone in this room who doesn’t now appreciate that a problem is what we have.”
“No, not that,” said Mari. “I mean, we have another problem.”
“Well, I doubt it’s as big as this one,” Chuck said.
Mari’s screen changed. For a moment, Chuck wasn’t sure what he was looking at, exactly. Data of some kind. Quite a lot of data.
When it eventually hit him, it did so like a horse-kick to the stomach.
Kapitän Nazi realized at almost the same time Chuck did. “Is that what I think it is?” he asked.
“Oh God,” Chuck whispered. “Oh God, no.”
Chapter Twenty-One
“Look out!”
Anna barely managed to eject the words through a mouthful of minced animal flesh before the Beef Chief’s slab of a hand caught Sam by the back of his neck and wrenched him away. Half of what Anna had come to think of as ‘the meat squid’ was ripped away with him, giving Anna the breathing space she needed to fight back against the remaining tentacles.
Sam’s legs bicycled wildly as the Beef Chief hoisted him aloft, one-handed. “Look what you’ve done,” the villain hissed through his still-swollen lips. “Look what you made me do. You’ve ruined everything.”
Anna tried to stand, but the meat squid fought back against her, tightening its multitude of grips around her arms, head, and throat. Thinned out as it was, though, she and the suit were quickly able to gain the upper hand. She tore it off in greasy handfuls, which she quickly hurled over the roof of the meat shop, hopefully beyond the reach of the Beef Chief’s powers.
The impact of the truck had shattered several of the bones in the villain’s armor. Anna let fly with a flurry of jabs, pounding his leather cost
ume and the Beef Chief’s own ribs below.
Hissing in pain, the Beef Chief swung Sam like a bat, smashing him into Anna with explosive force. Both sidekicks went rolling and tumbling across the ground in a tangle of arms, legs, and embarrassment. They flopped to a stop against Randy, who immediately sat up like a vampire rising from its coffin.
Randy swayed slightly as he peered in the Beef Chief’s direction. “Wow,” he said, his voice slurred from what was almost certainly a full-blown concussion. “Since when were there two of him?”
Untangling themselves, Sam and Anna caught Randy by the arms, dragged him into cover behind an abandoned car, and took stock of the situation.
The front of the buildings were illuminated by flashing blue lights at both ends of the street, and a helicopter whummed in the sky overhead. It was too far away to be able to tell if it was a police or a press chopper, the pilot having presumably lived through enough superhero battles to understand the dangers of getting too close to one.
The fingers of daylight were creeping across the sky, casting long shadows across the ground. The city was waking, and the crowd of bystanders was growing by the minute.
“Why are they just standing there?” Anna asked. “Are they nuts? They should be running.”
“Why would you run from a bad guy in Cityopolis?” Sam asked. He gestured to the crowd. Most of them were scanning the sky, phones in hand, camera apps active. “They think Doc Mighty is going to swoop in at any second and take this guy down, like he always does. They’re so used to being rescued they’ve stopped noticing when they’re even in danger.”
“That’s some deep shit,” said Anna.
“We need to take this scumbag down,” Randy growled. “Hard and fast. Ideally painfully.”
He placed his fingers to his temples. “Come to me, my butterfly breth—”
Anna pulled his hands away. “Let’s not call in the big guns quite yet,” she said.
They peeked over the hood of the car. The Beef Chief stood at the back of the toppled truck, surrounded by empty boxes and torn packets. Long strands of ground beef slithered along the road toward him. He rolled his head back in pleasure as the greasy meat-snakes began winding their way up his tree trunk-like legs.
The Sidekicks Initiative Page 21
