Gauntlet Run: Birth of a Superhero

by Andre Jute, Dakota Franklin, & Andrew McCoy

  “Yes, this chopper.”

  “You close the throttles slowly and with the same control alter the pitch and—”

  “Which is the throttle and pitch control?” Henty asked with a sinking heart.

  “It is situated between the seats.”

  “It is broken off.”

  “It that’s true, it’s malfunctioning severely.”

  “How can I repair it?”

  “Take it back to base and send it for service complete with the required number of copies of Form 318SV.”

  “ Thanks!” Henty said bitterly. “Is there anything else I can do to save my life?”

  CHAPTER 25

  “Look out for water and jump.”

  “You’re almost human,” Henty told the many dials in front of her.

  “I am,” said the voice. “I’m a ham radio operator and your Fist is broadcasting your whereabouts so you'd better switch off.”

  “Hey, don’t go away. How do I switch the Fist off?”

  “You can’t. But its range isn’t more than a couple of miles. It’s using the chopper radio to broadcast. You switch the chopper radios off above your head.”

  “I meant. How can I switch the power of the Fist off. It’s already hurt several people.”

  “Sister, are you stupid? You need all the help you can get and I got a thousand credits that say you make it LWC.”

  “Level with Chicago?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Cover yourself with a bet I make it all the way to the Mint. Thanks for your help.”

  “Hey, now I know you’re stupid!” Click!

  Henty thoughtfully turned the row of switches above her head off to stop the Fist broadcasting through the chopper’s systems. She peered through the bubble but could see nothing. On the radar screen there were three dots dosing fast with her chopper.

  Henty punched up I on the console keyboard. “1 Phantom jet, private, armament rockets,” it told her. And, “1 Starfighter jet, private, armament rockets”, and, “1 P51 piston-prop fighter, private, armament .50 machine guns”.

  There could be no doubt the bounty hunters had found her.

  Even if the chopper wasn’t out of control, and even if she could fly it, she'd never get away from three fighter planes.

  “Curse the government’s surplus equipment sales program,” Henty said.

  Then one of the jets came into view and there could be no doubt that the wisps of smoke under the wings were made by rockets accelerating towards Henty’s stricken chopper. She could actually see the rockets themselves.

  Frantically she pushed pedals and pulled every handle she could see, including a big heavy one at her side. The chopper dropped upside down and fell alarmingly towards the earth. The rockets merely changed course and continued closing with the chopper. Above her Henty saw a second jet appearing and below her she saw blue.

  Blue? Blue!

  Without giving it any further thought, Henty rolled across the canopy and kicked at the hatch. It wouldn’t open. The rockets were now heading straight for her, coming obscenely head on, seemingly only feet away and accelerating blindingly. Henty screamed and scathed the Fist through the plexiglass of the hatch. Her body followed her arm through the hole as chopper tumbled over again. For a moment she was stuck and wriggled like a fish in a net. Already she could see the markings on the rocket: a rough stencil saying “US Government Surplus'. She punched upwards with the Fist.

  Henty fell free.

  She daren’t look down to see if she was still over the water. From on high it had been only a speck of blue. She was probably long past it now. Instead she looked up to see if the rockets were following her. But they headed straight for the pilotless chopper, which was still tumbling over and over. With the chopper still appallingly near her, both rockets lit at once.

  The blast rocked Henty And set her body tumbling. She spread her arms to steady herself. She ended up spread-eagled, floating face down, or so it seemed for a second. Then she realized she was falling, and falling faster every second.

  There was the water she had seen! But it was away underneath her, on her left. Henty whirled with her arms but that only sent her tumbling straight down to the streets of the city now underneath her. She stopped the awful whirling by spreading her arms and legs again.

  “Stop and think what you’re doing,” she told herself but didn’t think it was funny. But it gave her a moment of respite from the panic.

  Henty grabbed the skirts of her jacket and held them wide. Her weight and speed was too great for the small area to serve as much of an air-brake but she could at least direct her body nearer the water, the blessed water...

  Nearer but not quite. She was still accelerating with terrifying g-force and she was going to crash into the streets of the city below her. She hoped she didn’t fall on anyone.

  “I’m sorry. Petey,” Henty said aloud as the top of building rushed up at her.

  CHAPTER 26

  Assemble a mob of men and women previously conditioned (by drugs, propaganda, alienation etc.), treat them to amplified music, bright lights, and the oratory of a demagogue who (as demagogues always are) is simultaneously the exploiter and the victim of herd intoxication, and in next to no time you can reduce them to a state of almost mindless inhumanity. — Aldous Huxley

  The man from the Syndicate, the one with the green lizard skin shoes, was called Jimmy Twoshoes. He had been christened James Baldwin Shoosmith by his father, a noted liberal judge, and his mother, who was noted for her charities. They were both still alive and thought he was a wheel in insurance: in a way, he was — he insured that the Syndicate couldn’t lose. Jimmy Twoshoes was indulging in charity now.

  The pink supervisor of The Caring Society stood in the passage, transfixed by her awe of this man and his rough looking minions. He took her hand from her side and pressed a slip of paper into it. Her hand closed convulsively.

  “I’m all paid up,” she said, her voice rising hysterically.

  “Open it,” he ordered.

  She opened the slip of paper. “But— but I didn’t take any ten thousand credit bet on that woman Runner. I haven’t got ten thousand credits!”

  “Look again,” he said soothingly. “It’s all paid up.”

  She looked. “What do you want?” she asked hoarsely. Then she looked at the slip of paper again. Her awe and fear and greed turned to shrill anger. “Look here, this bet is for her to get zapped in Nevada. I know her, she’s marshmallow right through. She’ll never make it to Nevada.”

  “She got out of New York and across New Jersey and right now she’s in the air over Pennsylvania.”

  “How do you know?...Stupid question. Okay, but she still won’t make it to Nevada.”

  “We’re going to give her an inducement. That’s where you come in.”

  “Anything I can do to help,” the pink woman said eagerly.

  “In which room is her son?”

  “Come. I’ll show you.”

  CHAPTER 27

  Petey was watching The Nation’s News on CBS and the anchorman was just saying— “And here’s the latest flash from the Gauntlet Run. This week’s Runner, a lady chicken farmer from Texas, was heavily tipped not even to make it out of New York. But we can reveal to you exclusively that already she has arrived in Akron, Ohio. Here’s where The Caring Society Public Safety Watcheyes picked her up in the air over Akron.”

  Then the pink supervisor marched in and planted her back firmly to the fisheye lens built into the vidi so that the staff could keep a twenty-four hour watch on the patients. In the process she also blocked half the picture so that Petey could just see his mother falling, falling, falling—

  —as Jimmy Twoshoes’ henchmen grabbed him and carried him out, trailing life support tubes.

  He craned his neck to look around the pink witch. The last he saw was his mother falling.

  Petey screamed—

  CHAPTER 28

  —Henty screamed, though she didn’t know it. She
was heading straight for a roof of many glass panels. She didn’t want to be cut up but the deadly fascination of the glass was such that she couldn’t fling her body around to crash through back first. Either way, she thought, she would be dead.

  At the very last moment she straightened her left arm to lead through the glass with the Fist. It was just as well because she would otherwise have cracked her head on one of the crossbeams. But the Fist sliced right through without any effort, though it jarred her all the way up the bone of her arm so that her teeth gritted.

  “This one’s our perpetual honeymoon bed,” the salesman was saying to the young couple. He bent to bounce the waterbed and got a faceful of water for his trouble as Henty crashed straight through. For a long moment he stood looking stupidly at the hole in the floor through which the waterbed was being sucked. Then the bride-to-be started screaming.

  That was when Henty, the aim of Fist deflected by the floor and therefore on her back, hit the trampoline on the floor below and came through the furniture floor again with the Fist leading. The salesman started screaming too and led the rush for the elevators and fire stairs. They just made it to the floor below when Henty bounced a last few times, lay still for a moment, patted the trampoline in grateful affection, and swung herself over the side.

  “Hi,” Henty said to the open-mouthed staring crowd.

  The bride-to-be started screaming again and the salesman joined her and the rush was on. Henty looked after them wonderingly, then sniffed her armpit suspiciously. Smelling nothing more than a little honest exertion, she shrugged and trotted to the elevators.

  But at the elevators she stopped. She didn’t really want to be locked up in another metal cage. As she turned to head for the stairs, her attention was caught by a display arranged to catch the customer’s eye as he came out of the elevator. The thing looked like a bathtub on eight fat balloon-tied wheels. The sign said. “ARGOCAT The ultimate cross country 8-wheel-drive amphibian.

  Henty glanced at the sign next to her. “9th Floor: Sporting Goods.”

  “Never did like walking down too many stairs,” Henty said as she hopped into the Argocat, turned the key and grabbed the two levers. She pushed them both forward and the thing jumped forward. She pulled them both back and it reversed with startling rapidity. One lever forwards and the other back and it would turn right around in its own length. While Henty was getting the hang of it, she demolished several other large displays but that couldn’t be helped. When she felt sure of the controls, she headed for the stairs and set the Argocat whizzing down them.

  “Whoopee!” Henty shouted as she took the first landing with satisfying precision. She pressed both handles forward as far as they would go for the tumultuous descent of the next flight. Almost immediately she caught up with the fleeing crowd.

  “She’s following us!” the bride-to-be screamed and pulled the prospective bridegroom down and stepped on him in her hurry to get away. That started a panic and the crowd disappeared like candyfloss at Disneyland, some onto other floors, and some merely over the railings, just in their mindless panic.

  “What funny people,” Henty said wonderingly and whizzed on down the stairs. She didn’t even even notice the security guards zapping at her with their zipguns but their aim wasn’t very good.

  At the door of the store, the manager stood with outstretched arms. “Stop! You haven’t paid!”

  “Charge it to me care of The Caring Society,” Henty shouted and pushed the levers further forward.

  “You gotta wait to sign the docket,” the manager screamed but Henty wasn’t stopping and, at the last moment, he jumped for his life. Then Henty was free and out on the street.

  And into an angry crowd.

  A woman ranted from the back of a pickup... “It’s not just the price going up. We know that’s why they put aspirin on prescription, to put the price up, to give the medicos an extra cut. What is worse is that you can’t get as much as you want. Sisters, we've heard some terrible, heart wrenching stories of withdrawal symptoms from persons who couldn’t get their regular dose of analgesics. Are we going to stand for this invasion of our privacy? They say housewives pop analgesics from pure boredom. Well, so what? It’s our right!”

  The women roared their agreement.

  Henty felt very sorry for them. But, all the same, they were blocking her way and behind her, she had just seen in the mirror of the little Argocat, the store security guards were setting up some kind of a weapon on a tripod. Henty edged the Argocat into the crowd and at first they parted for her. It was an ugly crowd and its mood was not improved by being pushed apart and packed denser still by the passage of the Argocat.

  “Hey, can’t you look where you’re going,” a woman with the haggard face of the professional neurotic screamed at Henty, spraying her with spittle.

  Henty raised her hand to wipe the spittle from her face and the Argocat, with only one hand one the controls, turned in its own length, crashing lustily into the protesters just as their leader was shouting hoarsely into the microphone, “...and the only thing they notice is the destruction of property, so, Sisters, let’s wreck a little!”

  It was hardly surprising that those bruised by the Argocat should decide to wreck Henty’s vehicle and her first.

  “She’s not one of us!” another haggard woman shouted and that was patently obvious, for Henty, despite what she had been through, was a shining, fresh faced, smiling person, very unlike this collection of harridans.

  “You’re probably very nice people to meet in the daytime,” Henty said. But now darkness had fallen and the torches they carried to aid their wrecking work cast evil shadows upon their ravaged faces.

  She wasn’t like them.

  Henty felt them jerk at her to get her out of the Argocat. Long, blood red fingernails tore at her face. Henty screamed but there was so much noise, they probably didn’t even hear her.

  CHAPTER 29

  In desperation Henty, even as they lifted her bodily out of the Argocat, kicked both levers straight ahead for full forward. The Argocat roared and. since she was off balance and not pushing equally with both legs, swung around. It knocked her assailants flying and then roared off into the crowd, knocking witches this way and that, rolling over them with those soft chunky tires — but it did them no harm except to their dignity, for they rose again after its passage to curse and scream and rush after Henty with vengeance in their hearts.

  Henty was on the back of the seat, her feet bracing her by kicking the levers as far forward as they would go. She didn’t have any time for anything except trying to keep her balance and not fall out of the Argocat into that witches’ cauldron of analgesic junkies.

  Henty windmilled her arms for momentum and finally managed to fling herself back in the seat and get her hands on the levers. She was out of the crowd of crazed females. But, when she looked back anxiously to make sure she had hurt no one, a whole pack of the harridans were on her trail, baying like Baskervilles.

  Henty pushed the levers forward again. She wondered how much fuel there was in the Argocat and looked anxiously over her shoulder.

  She should have paid attention instead to where she was going because just then she came to a T-junction and the Argocat mounted the sidewalk and shot through the open door of a supermarket and straight down the aisle and through a plate glass window at the back almost before most of the customers had time to let their mouths drop open and before any of them had time to jump clear, including those who landed under piles of cans tipped by the Argocat. Henty deftly caught a two-pound barbell of cheese and started eating it the minute she took the Fist back from the duty of protecting her face from the glass.

  She was racing through the parking lot when she saw the other crowd. The first thing she saw was a sign saying, “Militant Minorities Unite!” Then she saw the other signs, most of which said things like, “Equal Rights for Rapists” and she noticed that the whole crowd was composed of men, some of the men had seen her and were shouting and the
whole crowd turned towards Henty. Just then she had to jerk both levers sharply back as she was coming up against a fence. She turned right and there was a stream.

  And at that moment, to add to her troubles, the Women’s Anti-Prescription League came through the supermarket, still racing after her.

  But the Argocat was amphibious, so Henty set it straight at the stream. The problem was, it was nowhere near as fast on water as it was on land and both groups of assailants closed on her before she could get to the other side. They splashed into the water behind her, some swimming strongly towards her. Henty jumped out of the Argocat for the far bank.

  When she landed, she turned for a moment to see how close her pursuers were. Very close. The “Rapists’ Rights” boys were reaching for her. Henty had an idea. “Look! Women!” she shouted, pointing at the Anti –Prescription Leaguers. “Go unite with them!”

  The “Rapists’ Righters” paused to look at the women and in that moment Henty was off and away and when she looked back, the women had transferred their hatred of her to the men and were latching into them with great enthusiasm.

  “Everybody gets what he deserves,” Henty said and turned to trot away at an easy pace. “Those boys deserve those girls.” Contentedly she munched her cheese. It was the first food she'd had since the suicidal truck driver’s left-over sausage.

  Around a corner she ran into the Anti-Prescription League again. The authorities had finally called out the Pacifiers and the women were battling them in the street and getting the worst of it. They were no match for the men with their glass shields, protective clothing, truncheons, electric prods and teargas canisters and had made no preparation to fight them though they must have known that they couldn’t start wrecking downtown without the Pacifiers being called out by The Caring Society. Perhaps they are masochists, Henty thought. Then, Of course they’re masochists, otherwise why should they hook themselves on aspirin?

  Henty stood in a doorway, munching her cheese, waiting for the battle to be over so she could go on her peaceful way. Off to one side The Caring Society’s medics had set up in their portable emergency center and were bandaging up hurt Anti-Prescription Leaguers and Pacifiers alike — in the ratio of about ten Leaguers to everyone Pacifier — and sending them out to do battle again. Ambulances were carting off those too badly hurt to fight on.