Blackjack Wayward

Chapter Twenty-Three

I don’t know how long I was out, but when I came to and saw the devastation that Gris-gris’ voodoo powers gone awry had unleashed, I almost cried. The landscape had changed for miles, as if a meteor had scoured the ground from space. The ground was black, desolate, and the air was exhausted and burned. A red mist hung low, mixed with ash and dust, carried along the lingering breeze. Strewn about the charred ground were bones and body parts, pieces of armor and abandoned weapons. Little was identifiable. No one had survived the ruination.

Nearby lay the corpse of the beautiful Athene, her goddess armor pristine despite the horrible injuries to her body. Next to her was Demolition’s upper torso, his burned skin welted and cracked and his innards spilling onto the blackened ground.

The magic bag had exploded like an atom bomb, razing the army of villains from the face of the earth. Only Odyssey stood, but it was still and silent, its power source extinguished by the cataclysm. A glance at Major Aussie’s cabin told me what I already knew: Gris-gris’ power had scourged the land and nothing of the beautiful house remained. Even the vast lake had been evaporated in the explosion.

It took me a few moments to realize that I was naked; my clothes had burned off and I steamed like a potato pulled straight from the oven. The only article of clothing that remained was my boots, though they were charred and blistered. My skin tingled as I felt my enhanced healing kicking in, meshing the damaged flesh back together. But in the meantime, my flesh was split and raw, blackened like a burnt steak. I touched the top of my head and heard the distinctive hissing of burning flesh from my fingertips. I expected my head to be as bald as Major Aussie’s, but my hair was undamaged for some reason.

My face was swollen and sore, so much that I felt the blood thrumming through my forehead and neck as I tried to account for all the pounding injuries. I looked at my hands and saw them covered with red gore that was a mixture of grit, gristle, and blood. In fact, I was caked with the stuff from head to toe, and it was because of it that I couldn’t fully gauge my injuries.

I looked far into the horizon, trying to see how extensive the damage had been, when I realized that I had won, against insurmountable odds. I had lived. I had made it, despite Zundergrub’s terrible machinations. I had survived banishment and devastation and carnage, and if I had made it through all that, if I had lived through the unthinkable, then it was for a reason.

I had to find the doctor and put an end to him. I had to spare Apogee and the world from the harm he would undoubtedly bring upon them.

I thought of her for the first time in a while, remembering her lying beneath me, so near death. I don’t know why I recalled her at that moment, drained of blood, when she was almost gone and I had felt so helpless. I saw her eyes looking up at me, pleading, loving. I remembered my desperation, my frantic attempts to break down the indestructible walls of Dr. Retcon’s fortress to get Apogee out. Looking over at my right hand, I still wore the web-work of scars on the back of my palm from the dozens of compound fractures and the surgeries that had fixed me. But the mangled tissue would never be whole. The scar would mar my skin, a reminder of what kind of man I could be. Scanning the hellish landscape, I could only think of the kind of man I had let myself become.

I felt a pair of tears stream down my face, thinking that I should be back at Utopia, paying my debt to society, but my failure had put an end to that as well. I wiped my face, streaking more filth into my eyes.

“God....” I whimpered, feeling a deep welling in my heart. So much death and destruction, and it was all my fault. It was my fault because I hadn’t finished the doctor right. I hadn’t ended his threat.

It was up to me. I had to find a way back to the world, find Zundergrub, and do what no one else had the courage to do.

And thanks to the doctor, I now had the tools to accomplish it all. I walked over to Odyssey, the slumped multi-ton mech. I heaved on one of the thick legs, knocking the robot down on its back, and walked over to the cockpit. Still tied to their command chairs were the two dead pilots. But I wasn’t trying to save them. The big machine was a walking Radio Shack with everything I needed to get out of this hellhole and back to civilization. I had built a particle-accelerator in a far-off world out of raw components, basing it on a design I had studied for just a few moments, and with it I’d brought our whole party back to Earth. Surely I could make something happen with the remains of Odyssey.

But I was exhausted and pummeled like beef fresh from the grinder. Standing took every ounce of remaining energy, and a flurry of pinprick motes danced at the edge of my vision as I almost passed out. I took a full step forward and almost lost my balance, and I had to steady myself against Odyssey’s leg.

I tore off a plate of heavy armor near the boot and studied the servos and controls that lay beneath. With these materials, I could build almost anything. I shook one of my boots off and placed it atop the open compartment.

“Yeah,” I said. “I can do this.”

Rocket boots.

I’d built them before, and the vestiges of the old system were still part of my damaged boots. I actually got the idea from studying Odyssey’s leg thrusters once I got the whole thing taken apart. I had no tools, and I must’ve looked like a crazy person, sitting on the blackened sand, naked, tearing pieces of metal apart. I didn’t care, though, and the project was sound. Odyssey’s thrusters were set up in clusters of five, with twelve clusters in all ringing the heel of the boots. If sixty thrusters could lift Odyssey off the ground, then two could probably lift me.

It wasn’t the prettiest work, attaching the gutted parts to my boots, mangling them down with twisted raw metal. I had both boots ready up to that stage in thirty minutes. It took longer to scavenge the parts I had needed. Attaching the power source, though, was another thing. The thrusters worked on a heavy kerosene mixture and I had to modify the large reservoirs in each of Odyssey’s damaged legs into something smaller and easier for me to carry strapped to my back.

Another problem was the control surface. Odyssey’s flaps and controls were huge, designed to challenge the onrushing air and allow the heavy mecha to turn on command. I normally weigh in the two-fifty to two-sixty range, when I haven’t been tied down to a machine for a year, fed by a tube, then left alone in the desert for a month to starve. I must have been down to two-twenty, maybe even less, so I had to create new control surfaces to allow me to adjust my direction during flight.

I decided to also add some slow flaps to help slow me down when I wanted to land. All these were controlled by external servos I attached to the boot, using wires to anchor everything down. It was a total rig, but I didn’t even have a screwdriver, much less a soldering iron. By the time I was done, approximately two hours had passed since I’d woken from the Gris-gris explosion. There was nothing left to do but to try on my new rocket boots. I scavenged a jumpsuit that was close to my size from one of the dead Odyssey pilots and walked out onto an open area of the field.

“Here goes no–” I started to say, but the rocket boots fired off and I shot into the sky like a bullet. I must’ve flinched on the throttle lever beside my fat right toe. The two boots were telemetrically connected via a cable that I had run through the inseam of the pants, so when I twitched the toe, even slightly, the boots fired off, and soaring I went.

But flying was not something I was used to. My previous rocket boots were a modest attempt to give me a tool to reposition myself during a fight. I had first used them in Los Angeles during our initial mission for Dr. Retcon. In the fight on the flat top of the U.S Bank Tower, I’d used the boots as heavy thrust, which when coupled with the rigid frame of my old cape had allowed me to glide around the tower to escape the first rush of enemies. Later on, I had used the thrusters as a weapon against Spitfire, a flame-breathing hero who was intending to kill me.

These boots where thousands of times more powerful. Moments after liftoff, I shook and felt an explosion as I broke the sound barrier.

At first, I was saved by the fact that there was a two- or three-second delay between my input into the system I had rigged along my feet and the response of the control surfaces. Instead of totally loosing attitude, I just swayed from side to side trying to overcorrect. I raced forward at tear-streaming velocity, locking my legs at the knees and keeping my arms slightly out to help me adjust with each hard tack.

A weaker man would have lost the strength in his legs, and the boots would have overtaken his upper torso, collapsing this body into a circular spin and a quick fall to the deck.

I reached down and grabbed the two major lateral controls, four-inch flaps that straked from the outer edge of my boots, bending them inward along their hinges to make their effect less pronounced. It seemed to make each sideward sway less aggressive and help me get my flight model under control

When I pressed the throttle over further, it powered me faster and faster, straightening out my vector somewhat and allowing me to exert further control on my direction with my arms alone.

The flames streaking from the jet outputs were like howling volcanoes, pouring raw fire that I half-expected to quench suddenly from a lack of fuel and send me falling to a slow, painful drop. Trailing me was a column of smoke as if I were a miniature Atlas 5 rocket, an icky black and gray column of smoke that marred the sky for all to see. Below was the vast empty landscape of Australia’s Northwest Territories, racing past toward a jagged, broken coast to the end of the continent and start of a long, endless sea.

I didn’t know how long the charge would last as its life was contingent on a miniaturized power generator strapped to my waist, bouncing gently on my buttocks with every pulse of my see-sawing motion. So I gunned the throttle, rising higher into the atmosphere, the roar of the engines at my boots now becoming but a din whisper in the howling blast of wind that pounded my body, as the air struggled to part in my headlong path.

The damned boots spat a billowing plume of smoke many miles long due to a poorly designed carburetor and a mixture that was too rich. The control surfaces were off, slow to respond and instead of flying in a straight line, I jerked from side to side, overcorrecting like some like an old lady playing Ridge Racer.

Another thing that worried me was the intense thrust the boots were generating, and I only dared open up the throttle a half an inch with my toe controls. Though I had reduced the size of the engine of Odyssey’s power boots – by scrapping the “extraneous” control surfaces – it was apparent that the thrusters were too powerful for my weight, better designed for the huge mech.

It was poor construction, as far as my usual toys went, but I had lacked a proper lab and equipment. I’d basically just ripped off the working components from the interior of Odyssey’s feet and attached them to a hastily constructed frame around my boots. Even now, the crudely wrapped steel was warping and twisting around my leather boots.

The cloud cover below raced past as I felt a sudden shudder, a slight shake that made me panic and throw my arms out in a braking motion; I quickly stabilized and brought them back in, minimizing my profile for maximum velocity. I found that with only slight twitches from the boot flaps and minor adjustments with my hands sitting down my outstretched arms along my waist, I was able to make slow and gradual maneuvers, even at this high speed.

I dipped below the cloud cover, not realizing how high I was nor how far I had gone, to take a quick look at the landscape of the terrain below. I could make a large island off the west coast of Africa quickly moving by as I now came nearer to the dark continent. It was Madagascar, and in an instant it was behind me in the horizon and the east coast of Africa was visible.

How fast was I going? At least Mach 1, which was 770 miles per hour at sea level, and more likely twice that amount. Breathing was almost impossible unless I cupped my hand over my mouth and let the air flow in. But at the rate I was moving, having cleared Australia and the Indian Ocean in under ten minutes, I had to be going nearer to Mach 5.

Every maneuver at this low altitude was a dangerous proposition, threatening to send me careening to Earth, so I rose again, far over the cloud cover, and angled northeast a bit, hoping I had enough fuel to get me across the Atlantic.

And back home.