Fiasco Heights

by Zack Archer

  The Harbinger’s face fell.

  He turned sideways and reacted, shocked to see her.

  Aurora.

  She was standing near the entrance to the room.

  Her face set in a look of grim determination.

  Oh, and a gigantic rocket launcher was sitting on her shoulder.

  The Harbinger raised a hand and Aurora fired her weapon.

  75

  I blinked and the rocket flew from Aurora’s launcher, and frankly, I’m not sure what happened next. All I know is there was a flare of light, then an explosion and a blast of hot air.

  I was flung sideways by the blast but managed to roll over, cradling the trap bottle like a newborn baby.

  “WATCH THE ANTIMATTER!” I screamed.

  Pushing myself up, I dodged the Harbinger who was lying on the ground in a heap, on fire. He stirred and I realized he was down, but definitely not out. I wanted to destroy his pulse cannon once and for all, but the damned thing was loaded with the containment vial and I couldn’t take the risk.

  I drew near to Aurora and our eyes met through the smoky light. She engineered a slight smile. “I had a feeling you might need some assistance.”

  “Couldn’t have come at a better time,” I replied. “Thanks for coming back for me, although I’m pretty sure it wasn’t because you had a change of heart.”

  “I came back for that,” she replied, pointing at the trap bottle.

  Before I could respond, there came a roar from the Harbinger who was staggering to his feet. His hands flashed and bolts of cold blue light filled the air.

  “Do not hit his weapon!” I shouted. “Some of the antimatter’s inside!”

  Aurora and I dodged to the left, barely missing the light that slammed into a wall of computers, showering the room in sparks and acrid smoke.

  Whistles followed, coming from outside the room along with the echo of footfalls. We both knew that the Harbinger had called for his security detail. Sure enough, I looked back and spotted a dozen Snouts glaring at us.

  We ran right at the Snouts, firing energy balls that atomized them. Two of them fired back at us, but we quickly put them down.

  I glanced back a final time to see the Harbinger powering his pulse cannon up. The device was trembling and glowing as a section of the roof opened.

  Aurora aimed at the villain with the launcher, but I pushed the weapon down. “Jesus, Aurora, we can’t risk it!”

  “So what then?”

  “We wait and see what happens.”

  This wasn’t what she wanted to hear, but there was nothing else we could do. If we could make it out of the building, there was a chance we could meet up with the others and find a way to confront the Harbinger collectively.

  Turning, we bolted across the ground floor of the Harbinger’s keep, making for the hole I’d blasted in the wall earlier, the one that Kree and the children escaped through.

  We fled through the hole and found ourselves on a side street. Hundreds of people were gathered, staring up at the sky.

  I followed their gaze and what I saw chilled me to the bone.

  There was a pulse of destructive light issuing from somewhere inside the Harbinger’s keep.

  It was beaming into the sky.

  People in the crowd were crying out, asking what was happening, but it was obvious. The Harbinger was doing exactly what he said he would do. He’d harnessed the small portion of antimatter from me to use as ammunition for his weapon.

  “He’s destroying the fucking Caul,” a man said from somewhere behind me.

  Turning, the crowd parted to reveal Atlas, Splinter, Kaptain Khaos, Liberty, Lyric, and Kree. Atlas was holding a short-barreled rifle which was aimed at Aurora.

  “Get away from her, Quincy,” Atlas said.

  “No,” I replied, placing myself in front of Aurora who was aiming her rocket launcher at him. “She came back. She saved me.”

  “She fucked all of us!” Splinter snarled. “She betrayed us and the Harbinger got what he needed to destroy Fiasco Heights!”

  I shook my head as some in the crowd began to disburse, seeking shelter. “We don’t know that yet. We still have time and I’ve got the trap bottle,” I said, holding it up for all to see.

  “What do you propose we do?” Kaptain Khaos asked.

  “We need to go back inside the building and take the Harbinger down before he’s able to destroy the Caul.”

  Suddenly, from high above us came a flash of light.

  People cried out and dropped to the ground as a wave of pressure crashed over everything.

  I closed my eyes but then cast a look to the heavens as the flash was followed by a soul-shattering—

  BOOM!

  Those that remained around us, gasped and pointed to the sky.

  “What’s going on?” one of them asked.

  “It’s happening,” said another.

  Someone pointed and that’s when I saw them. What looked like immense panes of glass tumbling down through the airless sky, shattering all over the city.

  I knew at that moment that we were too late.

  We were fucked.

  The Harbinger had used the antimatter in the vial to carve a hole in the planet’s protective shield and now the sky was falling.

  76

  “It’s the Caul!” somebody in the crowd cried. “It’s been destroyed!”

  The hole in the Caul appeared like a speck to me, but that was simply because of the distance.

  The speck widened as did my eyes as the panes of glasslike material, what Liberty said were the Caul’s protective panels, grew in size as they neared the ground. The panels, which were visible only over certain sections of the city, were immense, infinitely larger than the screens I’d seen in New York’s Times Square when I was a child.

  “BACK!” I said. “GET BACK!”

  The remaining city-dwellers panicked. Screams cries and shouts filled the air as the debris from the Caul began crashing to the ground.

  The panes of glasslike material ripped through the nearby buildings as if they were made of papier-maché.

  This set off a chain-reaction as the buildings, some nearly shorn in half, began collapsing.

  A terrifying sound roared down the street as metal beams, slabs of concrete, and alien-alloyed struts, the innards of the buildings, slammed to the ground.

  I ran with Atlas, Aurora, and the others, trying our best to dodge the debris, but people were being struck down in all directions.

  I saw a woman cleaved in half by a section of falling glass, a man crushed by a building strut, and an entire family flattened by a slab of stone.

  There was nothing I could do about any of it.

  I spotted Aurora running down the sidewalk, clutching the trap bottle, her rocket launcher still slung over one shoulder. She ducked and dived, barely evading the rain of debris.

  I threw up both hands, waving at her. “OVER HERE!”

  She ran to me and I grabbed her hand, turning to see Atlas and the others regrouping at the end of the street.

  We moved toward them only to have the path forward blocked by a forest of struts and umbrella-like metal ribs, pried loose from an adjacent fifteen-story building that slammed to the ground before us.

  The blast mushroomed grit and dust into the air, obscuring our visibility. More objects rained down, shards of metal and fragments of the Caul itself.

  Hordes of people were obliterated by the waterfall of structural materials, cut down mid-sprint out across the city.

  “You know what we need to do,” I said, clutching Aurora by the shoulders.

  “Try to find a way to survive this disaster?”

  “Besides that.”

  “There is no ‘besides that,’ Quincy.”

  I held her gaze. “We need to go back and take him out. He fired his weapon and probably used up all the antimatter he had. It wasn’t enough to bring the entire Caul down.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  “I’m wo
rking on assumptions here, Aurora.”

  “Assumptions have a way of getting people killed.”

  The city continued to collapse all around us as I leaned in close to her. “I’m not strong enough to take him on by myself, but with you…the two of us…we’ve got a chance.”

  “What do I get in return?”

  “You get my respect and this…”

  I kissed her on the lips and was shocked that she didn’t pull back. In fact, she kissed me right back and then slapped me on the cheek. “Now is not the time.”

  “Actually, now seems like the perfect time since we probably won’t live another five minutes.”

  “I’ll go with you too,” somebody said.

  I peered through the smoke and there she was.

  Kree.

  She clutched a rifle and wiped a smear of blood from a gash near her forehead.

  “Your lady friend is back,” Aurora said.

  I nodded. “She’s loyal. Unlike a certain someone, she didn’t leave me when the going got tough...”

  Aurora muttered and I stepped over to Kree. “The children?”

  “Safe for now,” Kree answered.

  “They won’t be for long unless we stop the Harbinger.”

  Kree nodded. “You lead and I will follow, Quincy.”

  I turned back to Aurora who slowly nodded. “I’ll go,” she said. “I’ll stand and fight with you.”

  “What about the trap bottle?”

  “It stays with me,” she said.

  “But what about—”

  “You heard what I said, Quincy,” Aurora replied, her eyes pinching to focus on me.

  I reluctantly nodded and without uttering another word, turned sharply on my heels and led Aurora and Kree on a ragged run back toward the Harbinger’s fortress.

  We picked our way across the landscape of destruction, slashing through the curling smoke, listening to the sounds of mayhem.

  The sky was no longer filled with the falling sections of the Caul, but the damage had been done and several buildings continued to totter and fall sideways as fires broke out all around us.

  The ground shook as structures collapsed and we could hear the moans of the dying off in the distance, the air heavy with the funk of blood, piss, and what smelled like burning rubber.

  We neared the Harbinger’s fortress which had remained relatively unscathed.

  “What happened to her, Quincy?” Aurora asked. “What happened to Big Dread?”

  “Well, for a while she was caged up inside the Harbinger’s fortress,” I replied.

  “Why for a while?”

  “Because I released her from her prison cell.”

  Aurora stopped and grabbed my wrists. “You did…what?”

  “I set her free.”

  “Why?”

  “It was the right thing to do at the time,” Kree offered.

  Aurora glared at her. “If I wanted your opinion, I’d ask for it.”

  “I don’t need your permission to speak.”

  A scornful expression gripped Aurora’s face and she stepped closer to Kree as I stepped in between the two. “Ladies, ladies, we need a ceasefire here.”

  “This is between us,” Aurora said.

  I shook my head. “That is between us.”

  I pointed to the building and it was obvious something was happening inside. Something big, very big.

  The entire structure seemed to be vibrating, pulsing with life as if something enormous was on the inside trying to break out.

  We moved through the hole in the building and the interior looked like a war zone.

  There were bodies everywhere.

  Some humanoid, others alien, and still more that were synthetic.

  They lay in all attitudes of death, covered in the rubble from a hole that had been burned through the center of the building, presumably by the Harbinger’s pulse cannon.

  We crept forward, silent as thieves stealing through a temple, tiptoeing down the stairs into the Harbinger’s mad scientist lab.

  The air was sparking wildly, ropes of sulfurous white light whipping around in the air like caged birds. The Harbinger was visible down below us.

  He was hovering in the air which wavered like a heat mirage, wrapped in a cone of light that was beaming down from what I could see was the hole in the Caul.

  His body thrummed as if it was being jolted with electricity, sparks showering him even as the smile etched across his face suggested he was in the throes of pure ecstasy.

  I knew then that we were too late.

  He’d been bathed in the radiation that the Caul had blocked.

  The very same radiation that purportedly magnified a superhero’s powers.

  77

  Aurora brought her hands up and without warning fired a plasma ball at the Harbinger. The sphere struck the cone of light and was immediately extinguished. She summoned up another plasma ball and I shook my head. “Save your energy.”

  The Harbinger was laughing now.

  Standing down below us, the air shimmering all around him.

  Here’s the kicker.

  He wasn’t alone.

  He was surrounded by three of the terrible beasts that had previously been locked up in his zoo. Yep, the ones I’d released.

  One of the things, a mass of tangled limbs sprouting from a multi-segmented body with the elongated head of a crocodile, turned and howled at us.

  The beast next to it, a cross between a lobster and an elephant, swung its pincer-like hands in a circular pattern as the third monster, a great alien bird of prey with the body of a pterodactyl and the head of a lizard, flicked an impossibly long yellow tongue at us.

  The three monsters were similarly enveloped in the cone of radiation.

  Kree fired her rifle at the Harbinger and the creatures, but the villain swatted her bullets away as if they were gnats. He turned and strode forward and that’s when I noticed it.

  He was taller.

  More than ten feet in height.

  With every stride, he seemed to sprout up another few inches. By the time he’d reached twelve feet tall his outerwear had split and he was standing before us naked as the day he was born. It was a gruesome sight to see as he continued to grow in size. His appendages extended, his muscles inflated, and his jaw lengthened to twice its normal size.

  I watched teeth tumble from his mouth in a pile of saliva and blood as new larger, fanglike choppers took their place. It was obvious—painfully obvious—that we were too late to stop his transformation.

  “I think we’re in serious trouble,” Aurora said.

  “What gave it away?” I asked, my mouth as dry as the desert as I fought to muster some courage in light of the supercharged villain (and monsters) lumbering toward us.

  “Should we keep firing at them?” Kree asked.

  I shook my head. “I don’t think it’ll do any good.”

  When the Harbinger reached twenty feet tall, he no longer resembled the humanoid he once was. His face was bulbous and misshapen, and his body was so muscle-quilted that it looked like the backside of a dinosaur had been grafted onto his torso. He stepped forward and the ground shuddered and the roof began to collapse.

  “GET BACK!” I screamed at the others.

  I fired a flurry of plasma balls that the Harbinger smacked away as if they were mosquitoes.

  We turned and retreated back through the hole in the hall as the building began to break apart behind us.

  I looked back to see the Harbinger punching his way through the fortress’s outer wall. He had swelled to superhuman proportions, easily twenty-five feet tall, and resembled the bloated, muscle-striated love child of a cartoon superhero and Godzilla, just getting ready to flatten Tokyo.

  He loosed a roar that was so loud, it shattered the glass in the nearby windows and nearly collapsed my eardrums.

  “Are you seeing this?” I asked.

  Aurora nodded. “But I’m not believing it.”

  “What is that thing?”
Kree asked.

  I shuddered inwardly. “The Harbinger two point oh.”

  Stomping through the smoking ruins of the street with enough force to crush stone into powder, I heard the Harbinger laugh.

  It was the deep, harsh laugh of something that no longer fears anything.

  He grabbed a light pole and swung it like a baseball bat just because he could. In so doing, he battered a five-story building, bringing it down in one fell swoop. Then he swung his hands wildly, dashing more buildings, turning them to matchsticks, before punching an overpass that collapsed in a symphony of sound and fury. The air grew thick with choking dust and powder.

  To make matters worse (if that was even possible), the three alien creatures had also grown to impressive heights. The lobster beast was twenty-feet tall, the crocodile was even larger, and the fucking giganto-bird had a thirty-foot wingspan which I was able to measure as it swooped down over our heads like a jet fighter.

  The Harbinger watched his beasties run amok and raised his mighty hands up in the air like a prizefighter. He peered at us from thirty yards down the street.

  “And so it’s come to this!” he shouted, his voice so loud it sounded like an approaching locomotive.

  “Are you ready to give up?” I shouted back.

  He threw the light pole at us. It whipped past our head and took out the ground floor of an office building, cleaving the structure in two.

  “Guess not,” I whispered to Aurora and Kree.

  “GIVE ME THE GODSDAMNED ANTIMATTER!” the Harbinger bellowed.

  I raised my hands. “Come and take it!”

  Looking back, I probably shouldn’t have said that, but frankly, I was trying to look cool in front of the ladies. The Harbinger was not pleased and crossed his arms in front of his bulbous chest, his fingers trailing glowing colors that dripped to the ground.

  He pulled his arms back and pointed a finger at us.

  Tendrils of blue ice blitzed from his fingers as we ran for cover.

  The ice crashed to the ground and froze anything it came in contact with, including a few unlucky city dwellers who’d just emerged from the underside of a damaged domed structure. I ducked behind a small mountain of refuse, crouching near Kree and Aurora.