Fiasco Heights

by Zack Archer

  The ball of energy impacted against my face and body and then broke apart.

  A thousand tiny shards of energy rolled over me like a wave.

  The energy, the electricity, whatever the hell it was, coalesced into a stream. A section of the stream hit the metal gate with the retina scanner and blew it apart. The other part of the energy stream roller-coastered down my throat.

  The effect was instantaneous.

  My balls sucked up into my stomach, and the taste of metal was on my tongue. I imagine what I was feeling then was similar to what people experience when they’re struck by lightning.

  But the strangest thing was that I wasn’t afraid.

  Even though I’d ingested a stream of plasma, an overwhelming sense of tranquility came over me. The kind of thing you feel when you realize you’re somehow in the right place at the right time.

  I looked left to right and saw blue flames on the tips of my fingers.

  My gaze ratcheted back to the red-whiskered man.

  There was a look stamped on his face.

  The “why the fuck isn’t the guy I just blasted with a plasma ball dead?” kinda look.

  He opened his mouth, and my arms drew back. I couldn’t control whatever force had taken over my body. My arms whipped forward like I was a giant bird flapping its wings, fighting to take flight.

  I struggled to control my body and the energy that was coursing through it, but I couldn’t.

  All of the electricity, all of the energy that I’d absorbed, exploded uncontrollably from my fingertips and scythed into the red-whiskered man’s chest.

  I’d expected him to get knocked backward, but instead, he became engulfed in a pillar of flame that turned his body to ash.

  The ash hit the floor along with a single object, what appeared to be a ring that he’d been wearing. The ring rolled in a circle before coming to a stop.

  “Holy shit,” I whispered to myself. “Holy…shit.”

  “Quincy,” somebody croaked.

  My gaze swung to the right. Leon had elbowed himself up and was staring at me, his eyes as wide as saucers. “What the fuck did you just do?”

  Before I could respond, another, female voice said: “He might’ve just saved the galaxy.”

  Something moved peripherally.

  I turned, and that’s the first time I saw her.

  The woman I’d come to know as Aurora.

  She seemed less like an actual person and more like a shadow, a dark cutout, that had come to life. She moved menacingly toward me, and I knew, deep down in my marrow, that nothing from that moment forward would ever be the same again.

  5

  Of course, at the time I didn’t know Aurora’s name.

  All I knew was that she had a look that could stop a clock and a body that would, as a famous writer once said, make a bishop kick a hole in a stained-glass window.

  What precisely does that mean?

  It means she had a face and frame that would be equally at home on a catwalk or a battlefield. Tall and lithe, yet strong of thigh, with a well-proportioned physique that, defying the laws of physics, had somehow been snugged into a black compression outfit crisscrossed with orange slash-marks that looked painted on. Yeah, I realize the aforementioned description might be perceived as a little juvenile or sexist by some, but it’s entirely accurate so there.

  A black armband wrapped snugly around her right wrist, just above what looked like a silver cube that she carried in her right hand. In her left hand was what appeared to be a fob, the kind of thing that people used to use to “chirp” automobiles back in the days when my old man was a kid.

  Leon passed out from shock.

  Aurora stooped and picked up the ring, the only thing that remained of the red-whiskered man. She blew his ashes away and tossed the ring to me. “Do you know what that ring is made of?”

  “No,” I said, shaking my head, drawing a finger back and forth across the ring.

  “Akash. The crust from a neutron star. Billions of times stronger than graphene or steel, it’s the hardest material in the universe.” She pointed at the mound of ash. “He had a protective suit made out of it that he wasn’t wearing today. Count your blessings.”

  “Who was he?” I asked.

  “His name was Damnation Man, Quincy.’”

  “You know my name?

  She nodded. “My name’s Aurora, and we know all about you. We’ve been watching you for a long time.”

  “Why?”

  She grinned. “Because you’re special.”

  I was in a daze as Aurora moved past me, through the obliterated gate toward the section of the building that held the R&D labs.

  “Hey! Wait!” I shouted, waving my arm. “You can’t go back there!”

  She looked at me over her shoulder. “We both have to go right now.”

  “‘We’?”

  She nodded and pointed to the ash, what was left of Damnation Man. “He had two brothers. Madcap and The Showstopper. They’ll be coming soon for the trap bottle, and I imagine they’ll be angry that you murdered him.”

  “M-mur-murder?! It was self-defense!”

  “There is no self-defense where I come from. As for villains, it’s kill or be killed.”

  “Where do you come from?”

  Her gaze smoked into mine. “A place called Fiasco Heights.”

  Against the shriek of the smoke detectors and alarms, I made sure that Leon was safe, and then followed Aurora as she galloped down the hallway into the inner sanctum of Pythia. Along the way, we took in the awed stares of the scientist-types in their smocks, who stood at the outer edges of the hallway, gaping at us. I mustered up a smile and waved at them, including one particularly attractive engineer who’d never given me the time of day. I angled a thumb at Aurora as if to say I was with her and the engineer blushed.

  We hustled down the corridor as I struggled to keep pace with Aurora. “He was the one who was doing it, wasn’t he? All the explosions at the other tech buildings. The guy with the red beard, right?” I asked.

  She nodded. “Him and his gang.”

  “What are they?”

  “Villains of course.”

  “What does that make you?”

  “Take a wild guess.”

  “You mean, you’re…a hero? A…superhero?”

  She shot a sly smile in my direction. “On my good days, I like to think I am.”

  We moved left to right, angling down the corridors. My eyes were on Aurora’s back, moving down from her rear delts to the outline of her ass. I’m more of a breast guy, but her posterior was a thing of unparalleled beauty, carved from granite, the kind of high and tight, muscular backside that only comes after you’ve had a close, personal relationship with a stair-stepper. That said, Aurora wasn’t your typical lollipop-headed gym bunny. Nope, she was downright thick, weighing an easy one-fifty or more…with about four percent body fat.

  She suddenly stopped dead in her tracks.

  My eyes were still glued to her ass, so I rammed into her back and it was like hitting a brick wall.

  I fell to the ground and looked up to see her pry a metal security door from its hinges.

  More alarms sounded, but she was unfazed.

  I bolted upright and stared into the room where Aurora stood before a glass case. In the middle of the case was a black metal object in the shape of a water bottle that was the size of a suitcase. “This is what Damnation Man was coming for.”

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “A device the company you work for makes. A trap bottle.”

  “I don’t know what that means,” I replied, which was true. I had no clue what Pythia actually did, other than knowing the company was involved in research and technology.

  Aurora punched the case, shattering the glass. She reached in and grabbed the black trap bottle.

  “A magnetic bottle that can hold billions of antiprotons,” Aurora replied.

  “Is that a sports drink or something?”

&
nbsp; “No, Quincy. It’s the antiparticle of the proton. Antiprotons are antimatter particles. This containment vessel suspends them in a magnetic and electrical field, a vacuum that’s like the vacuum of space.”

  I had a vague recollection of what antimatter was, and it wasn’t good.

  Aurora tossed the trap bottle to me.

  “Don’t let it break,” she said. “If it does, it’ll destroy the world.”

  I cursed, juggling the bottle, dropping to my knees, managing to secure it before it hit the ground. She looked down at me. “I was just joking by the way. There’s nothing in it…yet.”

  Clutching the bottle tight to my chest like a football, I rose, and that’s when I noticed it.

  The disturbance in the air, a nearly imperceptible thrumming sound that overwhelmed the noise of the building’s air handlers. The kind of metallic vibration you might hear when you stand under electrical wires. It was similar to the sounds I’d heard ever since I was a child, the ones that caused me to wear the earbuds.

  I was shocked to see that Aurora could hear it too.

  “THEY’RE COMING!” she screamed.

  She windmilled her arm and signaled for me to follow her.

  I did and we dashed past anterooms and across inner corridors. We neared a dead end and Aurora held up a trembling hand. Her eyes rolled back until just the whites were showing as she summoned a ball of blue light out of thin air and flung it like a baseball—

  BAROOM!

  The light struck a wall and gouged a hole through it.

  We ducked through the hole and out onto the streets.

  Sirens and screams echoed from all around, and I knew it was only a matter of time before the cops arrived. And not the kindly “protect and serve” ones in cars or on foot, by the way. Oh no, I’m talking about the airborne police, the hive-kickers who buzzed around on their militarized hoversurfs.

  I looked up into the sky and spotted several forms angling toward us.

  Shit!

  The cops were definitely on the way!

  6

  I blinked and looked up again and sure enough, overhead there appeared the unmistakable outline of several law enforcement hoversurfs.

  I waved my arms and screamed at Aurora, but she was already slingshotting across the road.

  “Where the hell are you going?!” I shouted.

  “I’m heading to the sled!” she replied without looking back.

  “There’s no snow!”

  “It’s not that kind of sled!” she screamed.

  “But the cops are right behind us!”

  “They’ll never be able to catch us!”

  We ran headlong down through a darkened alley that spooled between two sagging tenement buildings.

  Keeping to the shadows, we made ourselves small. Aurora was following a path only she could see, and I struggled to keep up.

  She moved briskly and with the practiced grace of a dancer, bobbing to her right, then sliding to her left, entering through a hole in one of the tenement buildings as a voice boomed from somewhere outside the building: “STAY WHERE YOU ARE!”

  We skidded to a stop.

  I looked at Aurora.

  “What happened to them not being able to catch us?”

  She shrugged. “They’re faster than I thought.”

  I winced. Some great superhero she was.

  Aurora combat-ran toward a cluster of rusted industrial equipment. I followed and we crept behind it, searching for any sign of the law enforcement hoversurfs.

  “We’re busted,” I said. “We are totally going to jail.”

  “Relax. People like us don’t go to jail,” she replied.

  “Yeah, well, speak for yourself,” I said. “I’m not a superhero.”

  Her gaze swung to mine. “You don’t know what you are yet, Quincy. That’s why I came to meet you.”

  Before I could ask one of the thousands of questions that were on the tip of my tongue, Aurora pulled out the silver cube and began unfolding it like a piece of origami, before rolling it up like a joint.

  In seconds, the cube looked like a roll of tinfoil.

  Only it wasn’t tinfoil at all.

  It was a paper-thin, flexible screen that she held out like one of those old-time pirate maps.

  “What the hell is that?” I asked.

  “A metascreen,” she replied.

  I leaned over her shoulder to see that the screen was full of information, data, and what looked like real-time images, including shots of the police hoversurfs circling our hiding spot.

  She drew her finger on the screen, able to sift through windows and sub-windows of information until she’d pulled up an incredibly detailed, three-dimensional map of the city. Tapping her finger, she was able to zoom down into the map and trace an orange route that led from our position to another spot in the city that was circled and blinking red.

  “That’s it,” she whispered. “That’s the portal. For security purposes, it changes locations, but there it is.”

  “What is it?”

  “The only way back.”

  She rolled up the metascreen and raced toward a warped door at the back of the tenement building. Realizing it was either follow her or give myself up to the cops and take the rap for blowing up the Pythia building, I followed her.

  We blasted through the door, out into the daylight.

  One of the cop hoversurfs spotted us and vroomed into action.

  Aurora held up the fob I’d seen her carrying and clicked it.

  An object rose up out of the shell of a rowhouse two blocks down the street, what looked a toboggan with wings which was being kept aloft by a series of engines mounted on its underside.

  “That’s the wave sled!” she screamed.

  I looked back and spotted one of the cops aiming a non-lethal stun gun at us.

  There was a burst of light from the gun, and two electrodes exploded from its barrel.

  I held up my hand as the electrodes slammed into my right palm and—

  BOOM!

  They exploded, vaporized in a shower of what looked like friction sparks.

  The cop’s jaw dropped, and his hoversurf broke off its pursuit for a moment, buying us enough time to zigzag across an open lot.

  The wave sled was flying toward us, seemingly on autopilot.

  It touched down in the lot, and Aurora grabbed me and hauled me onto the sled.

  She extended the metascreen and jammed it down onto a glittering metal cube anchored to the floor near the nose of the sled. I was shocked to see that the screen could function as a kind of dashboard for the vessel.

  The sled vibrated and lifted up, swinging hard to the left before shooting down over the deserted city streets.

  The whole thing seemed like a dream, and then I peered back to see the police hoversurf tailing us.

  The cop was holding something else this time.

  An enormous electromagnetic pulse weapon, an EMP pistol, that I’d seen the cops use on TV to short-circuit electrical devices, including machines driven by suspects.

  The officer in the hoversurf was getting ready to blow us out of the sky.

  “WE’VE GOT COMPANY!” I yelled.

  “HOLD ON!” Aurora replied.

  I gripped the edge of the wave sled as Aurora pushed a red button that instantly accelerated the wave sled.

  The force of the acceleration peeled my mouth back as we shot down toward the ground, whooshing forward like a rocket on a collision course with a huge, metal warehouse.

  The warehouse’s twisted metal skeleton sprang into view as Aurora flicked a tiny joystick left, then right, expertly piloting the machine toward the structure.

  “What the hell?!” I screamed. “What the hell are you doing?!”

  “Trust me!” she replied.

  She didn’t let up, instead, causing the wave sled to blast forward as the police hoversurf rocketed after us. Heart in my throat, I glanced back to see the cop clutching the EMP pistol with two hands.

>   We knifed down toward the warehouse as the cop fired the EMP pistol at the very instant that we shot forward into a swirling vortex of blue light, a nebulous rectangle that seemed barely large enough to absorb the wave sled.

  The energized round from the EMP pistol, which was shaped like a bullet and glowed bright red, flew like a rocket toward us and then disappeared, the vortex closing up behind us, blocking the bullet from striking us.

  Aurora let loose with a battle cry as we slipped through the vortex, spinning like a top into the cosmic ether.

  7

  What appeared to be lightning flashed overhead, and suddenly I was able to see through my hand as it dematerialized.

  I wiggled my fingers in front of my face, and they appeared to be made of dust, dripping away like sand through an hourglass.

  Time and sound slowed, and then everything around us disintegrated like a dandelion head blown by the wind.

  We rematerialized and were shotgunned down into a darkened tunnel, the wave sled coasting on a ribbon of pure energy, walls of blue light forming to my right and left.

  We picked up speed, and the walls fell away, and in seconds we were dive-bombing down into the blackness, knifing into a roiling vortex that resembled a tornado turned on its side.

  My stomach did somersaults as we flew through the twister, skysurfing through the murkiness at an incredible rate.

  We were assaulted by black stars, teal vortexes, all the secrets of the universe seemingly revealing themselves at once. Everything appeared to be expanding and contracting and rising and falling. For what seemed like an eternity, we plunged straight down into the darkest space I’d ever seen before. A wall of blue light suddenly appeared, and we were catapulted toward it—

  Fired through some kind of galactic hole.

  I looked through the hole and darkness upon darkness peered back. We bombed down into the nothingness until my field of vision compressed into a tiny, obsidian bead. This was followed by a sudden, violent burst of angelic light and then—