Fiasco Heights

by Zack Archer

  The tallest of the buildings defied gravity, seeming to sprout at odd angles from the upper reaches of the trees which had to be hundreds of feet in circumference. A raised subway ran through the middle of them.

  The Petal Building looked exactly as it had been described to me. A cluster of different structures constructed of a copper material in such a way that they eerily resembled the drooping petals of a massive flower.

  The entire form had nine sides and in the center of it, rising up like the stem on a colossal flower, was a corkscrew-shaped spire of what looked like steel and glass.

  Below the spire was a compound, a circular space filled with gardens, fountains, and a wide apron of stone or concrete that was filled with a security detail made up of two or three dozen Snouts that appeared to be standing watch.

  “Why do you think they’re there?” Kree asked.

  “I was hoping you’d know.”

  Her tail flicked back at me like a snake as we ambled down the road, the sky overhead filled with dozens of wave sleds and other flying machines. I shot a look up and it didn’t appear that any of the machines were militarized or being operated by law enforcement.

  “What happens if they discover it’s us?” she asked.

  “We do our best to take them all down. Two against thirty.”

  “I faced worse odds on Halja,” she replied.

  I clenched the empty pistol, trying to figure out how many seconds we had left. The closer we drew to the security detail the more my breath came in short and sharp gasps.

  In seconds, we were padding across a row of stone lozenges, headed toward the security detail. I began growing more fearful when I noticed a small congregation of Snouts in mechanized fighting machines off to the right. They were loitering near a fountain and didn’t seem to notice us, and for that I was grateful.

  One of the Snouts suddenly stepped over to me and I soundlessly grunted, then jammed the pistol in Kree’s back.

  “Where’d you find her?” the Snout asked.

  “Two levels down,” I said, deepening my voice.

  “The bitch certainly looks tasty,” the Snout said, appraising Kree, glancing at the spiderweb marking on my visor caused by the round from the wave sled.

  “There are more where she came from. Right back up there,” I said, wagging my gun in the direction we’d just come from.

  The Snout whistled to some of his comrades who moved back up the road. I watched them go, sweat burning my eyes inside the helmet.

  We were twenty feet away from a set of sliding glass doors that led into the Petal Building.

  I nudged Kree and she took a step and we were really doing it, cutting a path directly through the heart of the security detail.

  Twelve feet.

  That’s how close we were to those godsdamned glass doors.

  I could feel the air on the inside of the building, we were going to—

  “STOP!” somebody shouted from behind.

  I froze.

  So did Kree.

  Slowly, very slowly, I turned around to see another Snout, a hulking bruiser, gaping at me.

  “Where the hell are you going with her?” the cop asked.

  “Inside.”

  “On whose orders?”

  “The man himself,” I heard myself reply even though I had no idea what the hell that meant.

  The Snout didn’t respond but instead advanced on the two of us. He stopped and cocked his head. “Take off your helmet.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it’s damaged and I want to see your godsdamned eyes, that’s why,” the Snout snarled.

  Instinctively, I tightened my grip on the pistol, getting ready to use it when—

  BOOM!

  Our planned explosion rocked the street, sending the Snouts running for cover.

  The blast echoed off the nearby building walls with great sound and fury. People screamed and a siren started wailing.

  In the resulting chaos, I was able to grab Kree and lead her through the glass doors, guiding her down a hallway. Those on the inside scurried past us to see what the commotion was, which allowed us unfettered access to the ground floor of the building, at least for a few moments.

  We ducked down a corridor and ran to the end of a hallway whose walls were made of a manufactured product that resembled those old Corian countertops people used to have in their kitchens. At the very end of the hall were two silver doors and a touchpad.

  Kree moved toward the pad, held her hand over it and tapped the arrow pointing up. The silver doors slid open.

  We entered the interior of the elevator which was composed of translucent material on all sides (including the floor). The doors closed and I noticed a gold panel off to the right side with a screen filled with strange icons.

  “Ninth floor,” I said.

  Kree tapped one of the icons.

  “I’ve never seen an elevator like this before.”

  “What’s an elevator?” she asked.

  “Something that moves slowly through a building, moving you from place to place.”

  “Oh, this is what they call a loop,” Kree corrected me. “A magnetic levitation sled.”

  “Levitation meaning it moves slowly?”

  She shook her head. “Not exactly.”

  The loop suddenly rocketed straight up.

  I could hear Kree chuckling as my stomach lurched.

  I forced myself to look down and saw the ground disappearing under our feet.

  “We had the same thing back on my world. It uses magnets and slings to move in almost any direction,” Kree explained as we did indeed move up and down and then shunted to the right, following the building’s corkscrew shape like a rollercoaster. For a moment, looking down through the glass floor at the ground a hundred feet below, I felt like I was going to vomit.

  “I can hold your hand if you want me to.”

  Removing my helmet, I shook my head as the elevator zipped hard to the left and came to a stop inside in the middle portion of the spire, its exposed walls giving it the appearance of an industrial loft back on Earth.

  We exited the elevator and walked briskly down the hallway, the surroundings growing more luxurious. Soon the walls were trimmed in what looked like gold and precious stones.

  “Not a bad place to call home,” I commented.

  Kree stopped, taking in the apartments and the city that was visible through a nearby window. The way she stood in profile, silhouetted against the light from the window, made me realize just how beautiful she was. She swept out her hands. “This is what you get when you live off the labor of others. This is what the Harbinger has wrought as he’s made himself into some kind of…emperor.”

  I registered the truth of this. “There’s a song back on Earth by a singer whose nickname was ‘The Boss’ that talks about how the poor want to be rich, the rich want to be kings, and the kings aren’t satisfied until they rule everything.”

  “There is much truth in that,” she replied.

  “What will you do when all this is over, Kree?”

  “I want what everyone wants: that my people should be set free and allowed to live their lives in full measure. Is that too much to hope for?

  I shook my head. “I’m going to help you make sure that happens, Kree.”

  She smiled as we stopped in front of a door marked “921.”

  I entered the code, one, two, three, four, and waited. A plate on the door glowed green and then there was a pneumatic hiss inside the door, which opened.

  We entered the space and I called out to Atlas and the others, but nobody responded. Supremely on edge, we tiptoed in, not knowing what to expect.

  We locked the front door and then edged through the foyer. I immediately noticed that the walls were rounded. There were what looked like tubes lining the ceiling that snapped on as we advanced, providing enough illumination for us to see that the hideout was comprised of two bedrooms, a fully equipped kitchen, and a large living room with a sweet balcony
that looked over downtown Fiasco Heights.

  Even though the apartment was spacious, I was a little bummed. I guess I was expecting something sexier, more dangerous. Something befitting a group of badass superheroes.

  I set my helmet down and moved over and glanced through the transparent doors that fronted the balcony. Pulling it open, Kree moved onto the balcony and snatched looks at the city below.

  “What happens if they didn’t make it, Quincy?” she asked. “What happens if the rest of your colleagues never made it across the city?”

  “They made it.”

  “But…what if?”

  I set my jaw in a look of grim determination. “Then I’ll go after Aurora myself.”

  60

  We reentered the hideout and sat across from each other on two large rectangular objects made of a rubber-like material that resembled couches. I removed the yellow metal shell I’d pocketed down in the underground and ran my fingers over it, taking stock of the hideout.

  “This place…surprises me,” Kree said.

  “Not what you expected?”

  She shook her head. “I thought it might be…grander.”

  I nodded at the truth of this, then, after repocketing the shell, looked down to see a touch-pad fixed to the side of my couch. I tapped the pad and an icon appeared. The icon resembled a button. I ran a finger across the button and the entire room jolted, then began reconfiguring itself.

  Kree grabbed my arm. “What did you do?”

  “I don’t know!”

  Sections of thick, rugged metal dropped down from the roof, covering the front door, the windows, the balcony. A futuristic console that looked like it came from a jet fighter rose up out of the floor. It contained a bank of computer equipment, including a monitor that showed a live feed of the outside, along with a metal locker filled with several weapons.

  The room stopped reconfiguring, and Kree and I sat there in stunned silence for several seconds.

  “Now that’s what I’m talking about!” I stood up, perusing the metal sheets which I realized were probably blast barriers or ballistic shields designed to protect the space from anybody who might want to break inside.

  We marveled at the gear and moved over and stood before one of the metal lockers. She reached out a hand and lifted a machine-pistol and ran a long finger down the barrel. “I always wanted to see what it felt like to hold one of these.”

  “And?”

  “And it feels like the pistols I had before,” she said in a subdued tone, setting the weapon back down. “It feels like death.”

  “Something changes inside you when you kill another living thing,” I said.

  “Have you destroyed anything besides the Snouts back there, Quincy?”

  “I’ve killed three supervillains.”

  “Gods,” she said, her jaw dropping. “What was it like?”

  “The first time it happened, it was so quick I didn’t know what to feel. I thought it would get easier the second or third time, but it didn’t. It’s almost as if a little piece of you dies every time you take another life.”

  Silence stretched between us. I fished in a pocket and pulled out the gizmo I’d taken off the Snout. I set it down on the couch.

  “Do you know what that is?” Kree asked.

  I shook my head.

  “A tracking device. I saw them on the guards that accompanied us into the mines. They’re synched to a kind of beacon embedded in your uniform.”

  She picked up the gizmo and pressed several buttons until the device blinked green and something buried deep down in my Snout uniform gently vibrated. She smiled. “Now I can track you at all times.”

  “Wonderful.”

  I turned from her, trying to come up with a plan. Part of me panicked at the thought that we might be alone. That Atlas and the others weren’t ever going to show up because they’d been killed or taken prisoner. I banished those evil thoughts and focused on how lucky we’d been to make it this far. We likely didn’t have much time, but the smartest thing still seemed to involve waiting for the others to arrive. Once they arrived, we’d be able to swap stories and devise a strategy for taking the fight to the bad guys and finding a way to recover the trap bottle.

  Then I realized that we had to make sure Atlas and the others had access to the room if and when they showed up, which meant it wouldn’t make sense to keep the hideout’s defensive assets in place, so I tapped the icon on the touch-pad again and the room reconfigured itself again.

  The metal barriers withdrew, as did the console, bank of computer equipment, weapons (aside from the machine-pistol Kree had handled), and everything else. I tapped a yellow button and a burst of air filled the room that was suffused with the heady scent of spices and freshly cut flowers. My body began to relax and a sense of euphoria gripped me, not unlike the first time I’d smoked weed as a teenager.

  Kree moved over and sat next to me, a loopy grin on her face. “We don’t need those things anyway,” she said, flicking her wrist toward where the barriers and weapons were. “You have enough energy inside to defeat whatever might attack us.”

  I took this in but didn’t respond. She placed a hand on my wrist. “Tell true. How do you do it? How do you summon your powers?”

  “It’s a long story.”

  “We have time, Quincy.”

  I turned my hands over and studied them. “I guess the easiest way to explain it is there’s energy all around us. Some of it’s natural, and some generated by people. Only a few can recognize and harness it.”

  “You’re one of them?”

  I nodded. “Ever since I was a kid, I just felt different, y’know? I felt like a freak back on Earth, but now that I’ve come here, I realize what I have is more of a blessing than a curse. At least most of the time.”

  She smiled and nodded as if she understood it. “When you’ve been given a great gift, you have an obligation to use it.”

  I peered up and she pinned me with a look. “I need you to help me,” she said. “I need you to help me free our children from the Harbinger when the time comes. Will you do that for me?”

  Her eyes changed color, sparkling with a bewitching, soft-blue light. She was wide-eyed and gorgeous, the kind of breathtaking creature that you reflexively want to shield from all of the evils of the world. At that moment I would have done almost anything she asked me to do.

  “I’ll do all that I can to help you,” I replied.

  Her tail whipped back and forth and she smiled warmly, her teeth as white as the tops on a mushroom. “I was wrong about you, Quincy. I can see that now. You are different from the others.”

  “Please don’t say I’m nice.”

  “Why not?”

  ‘Cause then I have to live up to that.”

  She smiled. “I was going to say you’re…softer.”

  “Not exactly the compliment I was looking for, Kree,” I said, smirking.

  “More…flaccid?”

  “Nope, still not the one.”

  She laughed and before I knew what was happening, we were kissing. There was a nearly imperceptible fuzz around her mouth which was warm and tasted briny like the ocean, but it seemed to melt like honey the moment my lips touched hers.

  Kree pushed me down on the couch and straddled my chest. “It’s been a long time since I’ve been with anyone, Quincy.”

  My hands explored her body, my fingers running down the muscles of her back. One of my hands pulled back her beautiful hair while the other squeezed her ass. She moaned and then beckoned me to stand and I did.

  She stripped out of her clothes and then helped me out of mine. We embraced and I

  marveled at her naked body, which looked as if it had been ripped from the pages of a men’s magazine. Her breasts and hips were full, her golden flesh glistening with sensual sweat.

  I dropped to my knees and kissed her body, working my way up from her legs which she spread so that I could taste her.

  I eased her back onto the couch. She leaned
back as my tongue darted over an increasingly swollen nub of flesh at the top of her vagina. She grabbed the back of my head and forced my tongue in deeper, and I felt her legs spasm when I gently rubbed my finger over the warm, moist nub of flesh.

  Then she forced my head up and kissed me hungrily before pushing me back. She assumed a half-crouch and closed her beautiful lips around my member, deep-throating it, sliding it in and out as I quickly stiffened and swelled.

  I could feel the swollen head pressing against the back of her throat and then she fell back and I on top of her. I eased gently into her and then she grabbed my ass, the suction discs on the palms of her hands keeping me close to her. She forced me in deeper, telling me to thrust harder and harder.

  In seconds, we were fucking with wild abandon. I prayed that the others wouldn’t unexpectedly show up before we could finish. I told her we didn’t have much time, but she answered by rubbing a finger on my lips as I sucked it.

  Shoving me back, Kree mounted and rode me as I smacked her ass. She screamed so loudly I was worried the Snouts (or the other residents in the building) might soon come to investigate.

  She was riding me so violently, I began to gasp for breath. I urged her to slow down. She did, and that’s when I noticed it.

  Noticed that she was having trouble breathing as well.

  She coughed and covered her mouth. “There…there’s something wrong, Quincy.”

  I sat up.

  The air had grown cold.

  I could see my breath and there was a stirring, a vibration in the air.

  I was just about to tell Kree to run when the windows and balcony doors exploded.

  61

  I dove on top of Kree, shielding her from the fragments of glass-like material that filled the air.

  We rolled over the couch and Kree shrugged on her clothes as I made for the edge of the couch, hunting for the touch-pad so that I could redeploy the hideout’s defensive assets.

  “What’s going on?” Kree asked.